A Post About a Post: I Wanted to Be Like Peter Parker Too

Peter Parker life lessons? Spider-Man is one of the most popular superheroes. Almost everyone can see themselves as Peter Parker. I’m no different; Watching Sam Raimi’s original Spider-Man film in the Galaxy 8 Theatres in 2008 was peak 90s child behavior. After the credits rolled, I started spider crawling on anything that looked remotely like a wall. Perhaps this was a precursor to my Mirror’s Edge and Parkour phase? From then on, the world was filled with objects to scale and 3-meter drops to roll out of. My imagination still goes wild with the possibilities of navigating the world if I inherited Spider-Man’s physical prowess, acrobatic skill, and web-shooters.

Like Miles Morales, I’ve since realized trying to be Spider-Man is like being crushed in the shadow of an unrealistic ideal. I would be better off pursuing my own path. I’m still proud of the aspects I share with the friendly neighborhood hero. Awkward, nerdy, intelligent (hopefully), slim-framed, hopeless romantic, down-on-my-luck, dry-humor-cracking young adult, living life behind a lens. A part of me wishes I had that “normal” life path of college>career>marriage>family. Spider-Man couldn’t have those things because he’s a hero: “great power, great responsibility.” I don’t because I’m a weird loser. Some of the Peter Parker life lessons I absorbed as a kid followed me surprisingly far into adulthood.

Webslinger

Spider-Man and I both sling webs, only mine are much more mundane and less exciting. While Spider-Man uses his silk to navigate around the city, capture criminals, and serve as a multi-purpose tool, my webs are composed of webpages and links. Weaving a digital web, establishing a home base (homepage) in cyberspace using blogs and SNS feeds. While I’d like to think I’m doing some Super Leet fight against the system cyberpunk hacking like Neo, what I do is more mundane.

Instead of uploading my projects and content in a vacuum,  I like to think of it as adding another small node on an ever-expanding web. Every piece of creative work I do or blog I write is investing in a little LaidbackMarco stock. It takes time to develop a proper site structure with SEO-optimized pages. I’m hoping this will allow my site to break through the noise and get discovered.

I still try to utilize Gary Vee’s content pyramid, adapting content to fit a variety of relevant platforms. Different platforms carry different levels of investment and optimal posting strategies, but I just need to start posting more in general.

Post to a Post

With all that context, making a blog post, LinkedIn article, and Facebook promo post for a three-minute video I’ve made doesn’t sound too crazy or over the top. If people find the three-minute video interesting, they might click on a link to the more detailed and in-depth written account. Each piece should support the other in a larger marketing strategy.

Friendly Neighborhood

Instead of EDC Marco, it’s more Like Desk Marco

In Spider-Man: Brand New Day, Peter’s friendly neighborhood phase is largely off-screen. Bringing him down to friendly neighborhood status brought the webslinger closer to his roots. Instead of dealing with heavy hitters like Thor, Iron Man, and Doctor Strange, he’s fighting bank robbers, petty thieves, and sticking up for the little guy. It’s similar to the time when Tony is ready to make him an official Avenger, but he makes the mature choice to turn it down and stay at a friendly Queens level. One of the Peter Parker life lessons I appreciate more as an adult is that being useful doesn’t require being important on a global scale

I had gripes with the MCU version of Spider-Man until I saw the full picture. In the beginning, he had it all: friends, powers, family, a mentor, and a host of Stark Tech to work with and bail him out if things went wrong, I.E., the ferry scene. I thought it neutered the character’s relatability.

But that’s what made the loss in Spider-Man: No Way Home even more crushing than losing Uncle Ben’s death. Both versions of the character needed to exist, but this one hits in a way the original couldn’t. Everyone can relate to losing a romantic partner, family member, and support network in a way.

I remember when I was young and had the safety net and opportunities available to me as well; while I didn’t tragically lose them, I still mourn their loss. I’ve taken the small neighborhood approach into my life as well. I’ve realized I’ll never be a big DJ or visual artist, but I can make the small things in my life more aesthetically pleasing. I can also put on music for my sister’s parties or my tenants in the building lobby.

Spider-Boy to Spider-Man

In Gunma, I had one of the hardest periods of my life, struggling with mental/physical health, low pay, car breakdown, but I’m glad I had the experience and grew from it. I miss it in a way!

When I was young, people still believed in my potential; high schools, colleges, and workplaces made internships, resources, and guidance available. When you fucked up, there was plenty of forgiveness. If I dropped the ball, someone would catch it for me. As a young adult, those invisible luxuries are stripped. I’m largely on my own. Part of growing up is realizing that even though my mom and dad still help me, they can’t do everything. Hell, there are some cases like technology where the help goes the other way. When our heroes like Peter Parker grow up and experience adult life alone, it creates a striking analogy for adulthood. In Brand New Day, Peter goes from Spider-Boy to Spider-Man.

Scrappy Survivor

The Peter Parker life lesson that sticks with me most is simple: get back up.

Brand New Day showcases Spider-Man’s scrappy resourcefulness. Even when down on his luck, poor, injured, or outmatched, our slim hero still puts on that mask every day and tries. In Into the Spider-Verse, Peter B. Parker shows that part of being a hero is getting up even when you don’t want to. Heroes don’t give up because they can’t.

I like to think of myself as a scrappy survivor too. Website, strategy, creative, capture, and learning are things I’m doing all on my own. Even when I was depressed, poor, and unmotivated, I made the effort to make something. . . That has to count for something, right?

I’ve seen so many ups and downs in life; every time life kicks me down, getting up the next time becomes easier. Harsher punishments, like almost crashing an EVO 4, burn experiences into memory. The more I fuck-up, the more I learn. As long as I keep my mind open to growth, I can progress. Lessons learned from losses can turn past experiences into future wins.

Gym Membership Sorted

I plan to apply for UW’s international business MBA program in a few years. Part of that stems from my desire to bridge Japanese and PNW culture. Another subconscious motivator is my frustration with international business practices. . . Why was it so hard to transfer my membership from Okazucho Yokohama to Federal Way, Washington? I made an ass of myself and assumed it would be as easy as using my membership enough at the new location… nope.

After months, my Gym membership was sorted out. Yay, back to working out at 0300!! I do have to leave a positive review for the Anytime location in Federal Way as the owner, Mindy, was super helpful in facilitating the process and gave me my Japanese membership rate. It also helps that she’s a WSU alum, has lived in Japan, and likes basketball.

Why Does Maintaining Friendships Feel Like a Job?

Something I find difficult is maintaining social connections. Am I bad at it, or is maintaining contact with people a full-time job?? It’s not like friendships come with a document that says “this friend likes to be texted at a frequency of x times per week.” Leave cookies at this connection’s workplace, and they’ll work with you more.

There was a YouTube video that described a neurodivergent person who made a spreadsheet of their network. The document listed rules, dos, and don’ts of each friendship. They were able to have good social connections, but a spreadsheet to keep track of something that’s supposed to be fulfilling just feels wrong. Is that something I should do?

I have some couches to move, but finding a friend willing to help me move a couch in their free time is difficult. Moving furniture is not why I want to have a friend network, but having a squad to help me when life sends another third party is reassuring.

Cutting the Olive Branch

Fuck extending an olive branch, some of them you gotta cut off.

Similar to pruning a bonsai tree, I’m also okay with snipping some of those connections. Like my acquaintance who was a finance manager at a dealership. If he’s not willing to risk an ounce of social currency to help me land a lot boy job. He’s not someone you call a friend.

Yeah fucking right… .fuck you too, buddy.

I know holding grudges is bad, but I will call him on his bullshit if life brings us together again. Authenticity also means calling people out on their bullshit.One thing I’ve learned over the years is being nice doesn’t mean I need to become a doormat.

Hi, How Are You

Sometimes just making an effort to say hello is difficult for me. As an insignificant nobody, would anyone even want to bother typing out a response? Still, I reached out.

• Volunteer Coordinator Greentrike
• Tour Leader Senior
• Professional Driver and Mechanic
• Local Seattle Friends
• Highschool/College Friends|Various

I don’t want my relationships to be transactional, so I reach out to people that I value even when nothing important is going on. For the volunteer coordinator, I left some doughnuts at her office. My internship at the Children’s Museum of Tacoma was a massive growth opportunity. I genuinely want to thank her and ask about volunteer opportunities.

AdSense

Sorry about the ads on my website. While not a necessary evil, I’m trying to register Laidback Lifestyle as a business within Washington. Understanding cashflow at a small level can help me when the numbers get larger. Proper accounting and budgeting are useful in every business. I don’t expect to get rich, considering that over 30 days I’ve made a sick $0.50, which doesn’t even come close to covering my time or web hosting fees, but I just want to get used to managing cashflow if the business ever does scale; the difficulty of managing cashflow scales with it.

I’m not predicting that I’ll have multiple revenue sources for my digital media Patreon, sponsors, ads, etc. But if I’m able to scale to that point, it would also be smart to hire freelance SEO, ads, and editors to start to make the process more efficient.

Don’t Get Your Business Finance Plan From MOBAs

This reminds me of how in League of Legends you buy better items to win harder and accelerate power scaling. The difference is that in League you want to spend all your money when you recall to a shop; in real life it’s better to allocate money into different buckets. I.E., savings, taxes, reinvestment, research, etc. As complex as League is, real life is the most abstract, obtuse, and complex game I’ve played thus far.
 

Government Job

At my other work building, I had a conversation with the head of residents. He disclosed that he also works for the Federal Government at a GS-14 level after retiring from the military. I did the math in my head to estimate his monthly take-home and grew a tad jealous. Government service jobs sometimes bundle tax-free allowances into their pay plans as well. I didn’t realize how important some of the people in my building are. During our talks, I believe he recognized that I was more capable than the position I was occupying.

We talked about his military service history and my flawed plan to get a GS position overseas in Japan. A SOFA visa and getting paid USD while living in Japan was a dream. . . wait, I’ve had dreams before. . . better stamp it out. A pension with great benefits was enough to make most people jealous.

The Government Loves Rules, Regulations, and Procedure

There are books written about how to get government service jobs. Interview tips, resume tips, insider knowledge, and a great reference would make most applications stand out. It’s obvious to me now, but the Government has a lot of rules and regulations for a reason. A large organization requires strict adherence to parse a granular cost breakdown of things. Which printers or office supply companies offer the best long-term value? Good luck knowing without an asset management system; more important is getting employees to input the data accurately. I digress, but going through one of those books and putting some applications in wouldn’t hurt anyone.

Speaking of organized, I need to get more organized.

“If you ever need advice, someone to go through your resume, or a reference, don’t be shy”

The man said before leaving to go to the Gym. . . I might take him up on that offer.

Appreciation

Recently, I’ve been getting a lot of appreciation for being myself. Instead of conditional care like my last position, people are genuinely happy to have me around. My employers, residents, and vendors remind me that I’m professional, I do a good job, and they’re happy to have me around. I even get complimented on my new aesthetic a lot. I don’t let it get to my head, however; The compliments help to stave off low self-esteem. It also gives me the confidence to keep experimenting with new looks and trying new things.

A Month Later

I finally finished editing and uploading a video for the Uwajimaya Natsu Matsuri. Not exactly one post a day like Phlox Labs, but it’s closer than no posts in a given amount of time. There were some parts of the production that I was forced to take shortcuts or chose to take mental shortcuts due to energy and time constraints. Sometimes I reused a shot, didn’t have the shot or delivery I wanted, or used prebaked effects in CapCut.

I Posted A Short Every Day For A Year, Here’s What Happened

These are things that I would never want to do if I had infinite amounts of time like Ekko, but I don’t. I’m proud that these are my custom colors from Canon Log 3 footage. Now I fucked up with the settings; it should have been at ISO 800 for maximum dynamic range, but the shots look salvageable despite the terrible lighting. In the videos following this, I was able to correct that mistake.

Videos Currently Shot but Not Edited

Editor Marco By the Time this blog came out I managed to edit these yay for putting in the work**

• German-Japanese Fusion Robata Chane
• We Have Panda Express at Home
• Bite of Seattle
• Bloom Thai

WordPress Beginner Course

I’m following through with doing the beginner course on WordPress’s official learning platform. A lot of the content is review rather than new knowledge, but I would rather be comprehensive. If one piece of advice can save me time or level me up even slightly, I’ll take that compounding gain. A lot of the vocabulary, like CMS, content management system, domains, hosting, makes sense to me. Maybe it’s because I grew up at the tail end of the MySpace and Tumblr generation, but themes also make sense.

Hosting Rabbit hole

The hosting side of running a website can be a server in your house, an online service, or, in my case, my friend’s cloud software. I wanted to support a small business, and he’s been great, especially because I owe him for the 2026-2027 season. Now that I live in the U.S., would it be better to switch to a server based here? Perhaps I could host the website at home? Learning about home labbing has been on my to-do list for a while. I also want to look into my own optical internet connection, so hosting could be a good opportunity for me to learn networking fundamentals.

Optimization was an actionable item to reduce page load times. In the ten years since starting my blog in college, I’d developed a lot. The photos on my website were too bloated with high resolutions and inefficient bitrates and formats. Shrinking and changing the file extension could save me gigabytes of storage space on the server. Swift loading times help pages rank higher in Google’s almighty algorithms.  WebP is really something. Some images went from 60 megabytes to around 300 kilobytes. That’s less than one percent of the old space.

Batching

I had to refresh my memory on Photoshop actions. Also known as a tech tard’s way of scripting. Instead of opening every single file and hitting “save as” ad nauseum, I could simply hit batch and perform the process on an entire folder of files. Automation is awesome!

For uploading to WordPress, I had to download and install a plugin on WordPress that allows me to change the file without messing up the articles and links to a particular image. I also took the opportunity to rename those files into something a search engine might actually see.

Nostalgia

Maybe the most useful Peter Parker life lesson was never about becoming Spider-Man at all.

Looking through the sparse photos from my irregular documentation made me wish I had blogged more. Memories I had long forgotten flashed to the front of my mind. I realized that regular blogging could have been the most detailed account of my life, just for my own sake. A Chronological layout with thoughts surrounded by mixed media would have been a way for me to learn about myself. In some ways, the controlled content would be much better than a book or SNS platform. Content can be linked like neurons in a brain or a web. . .

As long as I had money for server space, I didn’t have to worry about my memories being deleted. . .RIP Classic MySpace. Moving forward, I won’t make the mistake of trusting a third party to hold my memories. Alsoit was a mistake to undervalue the personal power of a blog.

I’m trying to log everything. Not for fame, but for me and anyone who finds the story entertaining. For archiving, for history, and as a big fuck you to the god of time or the universe. My name is Marco Harris. I write my own story; I left my mark on this world, on this universe, even if it’s for a minuscule amount of time, space, or significance.

Editing a Cooking Video

I finally finished editing one of my cooking videos. I have two in the works. While not as cinematic as some of the cooking videos I’ve seen online. I’m not proud of it from a production standpoint. I’m happy from a productivity standpoint, however. Something I’ve been procrastinating because of perceived workload was finished in less than 20 minutes. Honestly, I feel like I’ve done a lot today, but I know this is just one of those cycles of ADHD that means at some point a crash will come, and I’ll get nothing done in one of the upcoming days.

The video is around 4 minutes and 22 seconds long. I don’t know what the retention will look like because there aren’t as many exciting cuts, pacing, shots, etc. to keep the TikTok brainers watching. I will have to start thinking about hooks and posting strategy for this video as well. I’m thinking the full thing on Facebook/YouTube/Twitter/Bluesky in addition, cut the video up into shorter segments and release them chronologically on TikTok, IG, and YT Shorts to see if I can pull some engagement metrics and viewership.  Reddit might be a good place but I’ll consult ChatGPT and Gemini to see what platforms would work well for the content.

German-Japanese Fusion

I have the German/Japanese Fusion episode where I can use King of the Hill’s new season and Robata Chain as a hook.

Slightly Furry Beverage Company

The Stranger is Seattle’s admittedly extremely liberal and left-leaning newspaper and blog outlet. I consider myself politically moderate with a left-leaning bias. While I don’t agree with all the views that the paper pushes out, there’s a lot of fun articles and features highlighting local sights, businesses, and cultures. Slightly Furry Beverage Company was featured in the paper nearly two months ago.

I want to set this straight: although I make the cyborg cat girl joke all the time, I don’t consider myself a furry. Even though I would jump into that body if it were made possible, according to the Shroud Furry test. . .I’m not a furry. But that doesn’t mean I can’t go to this cider place and drink a nice alcoholic beverage.

A lot of the sub-culture communities I run in overlap with the furry community. There’s no shortage of furries in the anime, cosplay, GNC, tech, and music-making community. Especially in Seattle, where our Pride Parade had a record-breaking furry gathering.

Sippin By Myself

Like me, not everyone there was a furry. I showed up wearing my new favorite denim outfit. The simple look is comprised of three main pieces: overalls, a jacket, and platform sandals. The outfit is flexible because it can be paired with any T-shirt, shoes, or accessories, and it would still be cohesive.

Wearing that outfit gave me the one bit of social interaction I had the entire evening. At the entrance, someone complimented my look. What followed was a small, insignificant exchange. I imagined I looked like a stray cat walking around as I felt lost. The day I showed up was apparently a puppy meet-up, and this cougar alum was surrounded by dawgs.

I sheepishly approached the counter and ordered a drink. The bartender was the only other person I talked to that night. I spent the night observing and watching the various people around me. There was something freeing about being surrounded by people who couldn’t care less about social norms, conventions, or shaving parts of their personality off to appease the culture gods. It was like the opposite of LinkedIn. No doubt the community was expressive, creative, and free-spirited. The space was covered by sketches, stickers, and various forms of art. Although not all of it was for me, I could appreciate the craftsmanship and care.

I Still Miss Drinking in Japan

As the night wound down, I found myself craving that Shinjuku or Yokohama nightlife. Golden Gai, a place I had thought was overrated, had a rose-tinted charm. What I found was that in Japanese bars and izakayas, you were never really drinking alone. The kitchens always closed late, so there was always food, usually chicken skewers, to eat with nama beer. As part of Japanese culture, the Mama-san or Masutaa would always make sure the drink was topped off or would try to carry a conversation.

A fond memory I have of my first two years in Matsumoto is when I shyly walked into an izakaya where I couldn’t read the menu. In traditional places, the menu is vertical kanji planks with the prices below them. I remember sharing my dreams of becoming an animator and sketching the two owners. Despite my terrible Japanese, the other patrons and I shared stories, laughs, and the night ended with me wearing a dirty-blonde rockabilly wig, sunglasses, and an oversized leather jacket.

The owner took a photo of me, but that data has been lost. It was one of the cooler looks I’ve sported, but apparently I looked like a ’90s Japanese Rockabilly Gangster. My square jaw, tan skin, and Asian nose made me look like a Japanese biker or car gang member. Max Orido, Shinji Minowa, and other classic car drivers would sport that look, as it was on the punk fringes of Japanese society.

How did those two owners make me feel more at home in a foreign country than I felt here in the bar tonight? Perhaps I’m not giving Seattle’s drinking scene a college try; maybe is the rose-tinted nostalgia, or perhaps that’s the magic of Japan that keeps pulling people back.

Much Love 💗🦥🩵💖,
LaidbackMarco