Sometimes I'll mention struggling with brain fog to people and they'll respond something like "ugh, I know right, I hate when that happens 🙄" as if I told them someone cut in front of me at the grocery store. I don't know how to make them understand that this isn't a minor inconvenience to me, it's debilitating. There are certain days where it's so bad, that I straight up can't get anything done. Where doing basic tasks or holding a basic conversation is a challenge for me.
It's come to a point recently where it's not just impacting stuff like chores or work, even just trying to engage in hobbies feels like too much sometimes. Blogging should be so easy for me. It's literally just typing into a box. It should be so. Damn. Easy. And yet, every time I sit down to do it, I feel like I can't think clearly.
I've seen a few different people talk about the uprise of the "zero-click internet". For those unfamiliar, in a nutshell the "zero-click internet" refers to how search engines now use AI summaries to answer questions, so users don't actually have to click on links or visit sites anymore.
There are obviously a lot of problems with this. AI overviews are notoriously buggy. They often get stuff wrong and the sources for said info is often missing or misattributed, but you probably already knew that. Smarter people than me have already pointed all of this out and analyzed it in depth.
Something I haven't seen as many talk about, however, is that even if you turn AI summaries off, the search results still suck.
I have a few guides/tutorials saved in my drafts. Most of them start with a tangentially related preamble about this subject. I thought it'd be smart to just trim the fat; cut straight to the point for those posts, and share the preamble here separately for those who really care.
I recently started and then promptly gave up on trying to list every single small/independent webring and web directory I could find. Was it worth it? I don't know, but now that I've seen and catalogued so many of them, I wanted to share some observations.