Author JL Peridot publishes One Nice Thing, a beautiful Monday email with one nice quote or picture and it often ends with a small question or thought for personal contemplation. Previously I’ve used them for prompts in my journal and she recently she posed the following:
How would you describe your sense of style?
It’s something I’ve been thinking about recently, because I’ve always wished for my personal style to be:
Goth, cyberpunk, a bit weird.
Goth
I’ve been sporting a mohawk for 7 years now, but I’ve always felt like I’m still not “goth enough” in my own eyes. But last week I took a look around our living room and noted:
- 5x skulls.
- A sword.
- A dagger.
- Creeping Devil’s Ivy over all our bookcases.
- A lot of really strange books.
- Dried plants.
- An apothecary.
Okay, so maybe there’s a few goth elements to our house.
In my wardrobe I have:
- 6 identical black v-neck shirts.
- 3 pairs of black jeans.
- Demonia platform boots.
- Two mesh singlets.
- Fishnet dress.
- Leather harness.
- Spell book shoulder bag.
- A decent amount of dark lipstick.
- A few collars and wrist cuffs.
- A messenger bag bedecked with pins, including 6 separate skulls.
- Various silver necklaces and pendants with strange charms.
Alright, when I actually reflect on what I own, maybe I am a bit more goth than I realise.
Cyberpunk
Here I found a definite natural fit.
While the mohawk counts here too, going for the wardrobe first I’ve got:
- Combat boots.
- A few pairs of cargo pants, including some fancy fitted Verillas ones.
- A series of very dystopian graphic tees and crop tops from Dustrial.
- 2 sets of leather fingerless gloves.
- Flourescent sneakers.
- A balaclava.
I also always carry a zippo lighter and a Swiss army knife because of the everyday utility they provide. So maybe my daily wear does also tend towards both the function and form of cyberpunk.
Where I really shine on the cyberpunk side is probably my tech.
I’ve got:
- A modern gaming rig in my 14 year old PC case, outputting to 3 monitors.
- A NAS that is over 10 years old.
- A virtualisation server running 10 different VMs with various functions.
- An N40L microserver.
- 8x Raspberry Pis including:
- A 4B 4GB media server.
- A 3B+ handling HAProxy for all my servers/VMs.
- 5x 4B 8GB in a cluster.
- 2x slowly aging Macbook Pros that still get a lot of use.
- 2x old LCD screens displaying weird things.
- Two funky keyboards (OLKB Planck and Preonic).
Alright, I think that fits the bill for pretty cyberpunk. I self-host a bunch of stuff too so I have more control over function and data, including:
- GitLab.
- CI/CD nodes.
- RSS reader.
- Mastodon.
- 2x Gopher sites[1][2].
- Mail server.
- Funkwhale.
- A personal wiki for notes and recipes.
A Bit Weird
I think I’ve got this one down without further explanation needed.
Conclusion
I think it’s interesting to take note of what I wish I had as a personal style, and then taking the time to reflect on what I have and wear and do I can see that I am already there. In this I find some level of contentment and satisfaction.