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<h1>The Honkpill</h1>
<p>published: 2019-04-11</p>
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<p>Outside of the text-only internet, you might have seen a meme of a squished Pepe with a clown costume on floating around. A rainbow afro and a red nose, which he honks in unabated glee at the chaos unfolding around him. And as much as I dislike centering my worldview on what some memesters in the darkest reaches of the internet have brewed up, Clown Pepe seems an apt mascot for this weird and wild timeline we've seemed to split ourselves into and the utter inanity that has become the new normal.</p>
<p>From the same places that gave birth to Clown Pepe are the concept of the "pills", which represent various outlooks one could adopt to attempt to keep themselves sane:</p>
<ul>
<li>the "red pill", favorite of MGTOWites and generally right-leaning men and origin of the chad-virgin dichotomy.</li>
<li>the blue pill, widely considered the opposite of the red pill and either used as <a href="https://archive.md/20200821212438/https://www.reddit.com/r/thebluepill">purposeful satire</a> to critique red pill views or as an insult by red-pillers towards anyone who's a "beta cuck nu-male".</li>
<li>the <a href="https://archive.md/20200821212709/https://www.reddit.com/r/PunchingMorpheus">purple pill</a>, which seeks a peace and understanding between the two major genders as opposed to the red pill's stance of women meaning to be submissive and men being locked into an eternal fight of proving their "chadness".</li>
<li>the blackpill, often peddled by "doomers" and ultra-nihilists, which claims that everything sucks, nothing is okay, and nothing will ever get better again- humanity is already doomed.</li>
</ul>
<p>These aren't the only pills that exist, but they're the ones I know of off the top of my head, and since there are only so many colors to choose from and people have resorted to just using any old nouns for their nounpills now, I don't want to waste your time.</p>
<p>Here is where the honkpill comes in. Take the bleak outlook of the blackpill, with all its hopelessness and despair at the disintegration of the surrounding world- but instead of lying down and dying, you choose to continue to live. You choose to be happy, in spite of the news and the Onion becoming one and the same, in spite of the increasing polarization in the political sphere, in spite of the impending societal collapse. Things are weird, and maybe you don't have the mental energy or capacity to fully untangle what's going on around you, but you're going to have a good time in the midst of it all nonetheless.</p>
<p>So instead of putting a pistol in your mouth, you put a red honker on your nose, and you embrace the chaos with a grin on your face.</p>
<p>The honkpill is happiness. The honkpill is hope.</p>
<p>Honk honk!</p>
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<h1>run every day</h1>
<p>published: 2019-04-20</p>
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<p>There will never be a good intro to this post. There will never be an opening statement I can put here that will make me sound any less crazy than I already am.</p>
<p>But that's okay.</p>
<p>Two summers ago, I fell in love with a genre of music I'd like to call &quot;gardenpunk&quot;. Generally calm yet raw, punctuated with riffs trailing off into the distance and screaming about being lonely and not happy anymore. Most of the indie songs I had downloaded that fit that, I've long since lost, but <a href="https://archive.md/20200821212905/https://fistbenders.bandcamp.com/">Fist Benders</a> is the only one that seems to have stayed, endured the test of time and my shitty memory. Lying sprawled out on the carpet in my room at my grandma's house, light spilling in from the blinded windows, curtains drawn back and restrained with lacy skirt-like things like two angels in one-shouldered dresses.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sometimes life is fun,<br /> I am upside down,<br /> you are far away,<br /> everyone's selfish,<br /> we all want someone<br /> to share our story with.</p>
<p>- Fist Benders, &quot;Understanding&quot;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Really, the only reason I happened to remember them on this particular day was because of a deep-seated restlessness coming to a head. A pervading sense that there was <em>something</em> before this life, chopped up into bite-sized segments and by my subconscious and sprinkled into my dreams without abandon.</p>
<p>There's a beginning, and there's certainly a middle, but there's no end. Just a blank space, a blot in the book of history where the words trail off into nothing. Ohio State University published a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20161228160444/http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/exptaking.htm">study in 2012</a> stating that, &quot;when you 'lose yourself' inside the world of a fictional character while reading a story, you may actually end up changing your own behavior and thoughts to match that of the character...&quot; Which would explain the itch in my chest, since these stories never show the end of the character's life, just the middle part where all the <em>good</em> stuff happens. Nobody ever wants to see, or even cares to see, their famed hero live out the rest of their lives happy and content and growing old in the world they've created.</p>
<p>And yet...</p>
<p>And yet.</p>
<p>In a different sort of light, I- and multiple other people here in the gophersphere- have expressed a similar sort of deep-seated restlessness, discontent, dissatisfaction with life here. <a href="https://archive.md/20200821213128/https://proxy.vulpes.one/gopher/baud.baby/0/phlog/fs20190414.txt">Cat's boredom with the constant tech talk</a>, <a href="https://archive.md/20200821213302/https://gopher.tildeverse.org/1436.ninja/0/Phlog/20190414.post">the person behind RPoD's desire for the end of the world, if only to burn down all that is fake and surrounds us</a>. There is something wrong with this world around us, and much like a caged animal pacing around in its own confines, we are painfully aware that there is little you or I can do about it. Like we each want to escape to our own personal Rennicas, a world where the decisions of people half the world away don't affect us, a world without tyrranical governmental surveillance and abusive technology.</p>
<p>The anxiety's been pouring into my dreams. It's the same script over and over: my parents break some treasured possession of mine, furious at some indistinct slight my brain is too terrified to give a coherent shape to. They give preferential treatment to my brothers, who are allowed to laze around and take whatever they like from me without recourse. I get fed up and take flight with only what I can fit in my backpack, and they give unrelenting chase, a fatal jailbreak that always ends in me waking up pissed as hell.</p>
<p>I can't move out because I have little to no money, and I can't pay back the college debts I've been forced by my father to accrue because I have little to no money, and I can't get a job to earn money because I'm stuck instead in a place that sucks in money and spits out nothing of value in return. So, much like the Windows user that's read over all the instructions to install Linux but finds themselves mortified at the thought of accidentally deleting all their data and breaking their computer, I sit here, a boat needing to leave the shore but unable to leave the dock.</p>
<p>So this stress, at least for me, materializes in minimalism. An incessant desire to make oneself as small as possible. Maybe in the hopes of becoming <em>so</em> small that, when the boot comes down to crush me, I'll just fall in the cracks instead. If I'm small, and I don't make noise, and I don't <em>feel</em> anything, don't take up any space, nobody will be angry at me, right?</p>
<p>But the problem with minimalism is that the logical conclusion for it is for one to cease to exist. <a href="../../../poetry/p/prepari.txt">To cleave the night and leave the world unseen.</a> Comfort and happiness and pleasure are not inherently bad things! It's when these things come at the expense of other people or one's own well-being that they need to be reined in. Art, like bacteria and microbes, do not flourish in a sterile environment like the extremes of minimalism require, and they're both necessary for life.</p>
<p>I'll be an ardent minimalist when I'm dead and gone and don't require anything anymore!</p>
<p>To summarize, here's a reply I saw on 8chan one day, dug up out of my screenshots folder:</p>
<blockquote>
&gt;&gt;1038589<br /> Don't try to be a minimalist. Minimalism is pure mental illness, depression to be specific. Don't fall for it. Instead you should aim to use the best tool for the job. If it turns out some tiny image viewer is the best then use that but make sure that's true. Don't start using some gimped piece of ass because some guy with a 16gb RAM 500gb SSD Ryzen 7 or some shit is installing gentoo and talking about how st is way more minimal than xterm.
</blockquote>
<p>While I don't agree with the extremism of the post, and the inverse- purposely using as bloated as possible software- isn't a good situation either, it's the core idea I like. Use the right tools for the job. Minimalism can be a fun experiment, or a way to squeeze as much life as possible out of old and aging hardware, or a strategy to leave one as little exposed as possible security-wise, but pursuing it for purely its own sake, it can leave one feeling rather... empty inside.</p>
<p>So to Cat and the RPoD writer, I'd say: it's okay if you want to take a break. Moving on to something that leaves you feeling more fulfilled at the end of the day is a perfectly valid strategy. Hell, I should probably cut back on my own rampant Gopher usage as well. Four holes, one of which I don't even update anymore, all of which give me massive anxiety whenever it comes time to publish a post since I have to remember to keep everything the same on each and every one of them.</p>
<p>What I wouldn't give for my own server...</p>
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<h1>Weest In Peace</h1>
<p>published: 2019-04-01</p>
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<p>There exists a species of person on the internet I'd like to describe as a "Discord bro". Their native habitat is, as their name suggests, the proprietary chat service Discord, wherein they join (or perhaps create) dozens of servers in which to spam ironic memes and discuss how this makes them so much better than "those normies", all while completely ignoring the <a href="https://archive.md/20200821213424/https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/discord.html">completely unethical</a> <a href="https://archive.md/20200821213643/https://stallman.org/discord.html">nature of Discord.</a> They're almost exclusively male and avid video game fans- although, I should note as to avoid sounding like a third-wave feminist harpy screeching, these two things, whether alone or apart, aren't necessarily good or bad either way. But when paired with Discord, you generally get a person who desperately wants to stand apart from the crowd, but just ends up being another cookie-cutter shape.</p>
<p>In short, being a user of a corporate proprietary chat service is not a replacement for a personality.</p>
<p>Generally, I can ignore these kinds of people. But Weest, one of the people I <em>was</em> subscribed to on the Big Red, recently put out a <a href="https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=_c2Oui8DtyM">new video</a> in which he baits a scammer pretending to be a would-be sponsor into sponsoring a dedicated video to his shitty Pokemon-Go-meets-Monopoly game, only to completely shit on the game. Which is all fine and dandy and interesting, despite being a "Discord bro".</p>
<p>What set me off in this instance was the intro, in which he explains why sponsors flood his business email. He spends a few moments (about three minutes in) describing the demographics of his audience: young gamer men who use Discord, essentially. And immediately after, he remarks how this makes him "valuable" and how his manager "uses those numbers" when he reaches out to people.</p>
<p>Am I nothing but a number to you, Weest? Am I just a pair of eyes you and your handler uses when trying to decide who will sponsor your bread and circuses today?</p>
<p>I know it's a lot of "much ado about nothing", double since the "unsubscribe and get on with your life" button exists, but <em>god damn</em>, do I hate being dehumanized in the name of money, in the name of someone else's ego!</p>
<p>But it's not just overweight boys with a weird sense of humor (that I actually somewhat overlap with on occasion) that are the problem here; it's the entire industry of "internet influencers" rampant on the HTTP. You are just a number; your body is not your own; your mind belongs to us. Submit to advertising. Download this shitty mobile game so that I can go on not contributing much of anything to society, make things that will be forgotten about by next week, much less next century or the rest of eternity. Who cares about questions of existence, of mortality, of art and beauty and what it means to be a human on this wretched and divine piece of rock? Let's talk about the petty drama of the week. Let's talk about sad people doing sad things in their sad homes.</p>
<p>Let's talk about memes.</p>
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<h1>Consumption</h1>
<p>published: 2019-08-14</p>
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<p>Out to ages yonder, people I shall never meet ever again in this lifetime, to what some may call a fancier age. &quot;She's taken with <a href="https://archive.md/20200821213941/http://logicmgmt.com/1876/overview/medicine/diseases.htm">consumption</a>.&quot; Isolated in a hospital somewhere, sick, deathly ill. Wasting away. Men like skinnier girls, you know? Men like corpses, dolls, playthings. Men like helpless creatures. But they're afraid of this corpse, for if it takes them, it may take their life as well. Something else is consuming the woman this time.</p>
<p>I stand in my kitchen as scattered light plays on the hardwood floor, reflections of the tree branches waving outside. <em>I should like to be a tree one day,</em> I think. And I think, and I think, and I think of anything other than the fridge which holds food to be consumed. Nothing much more than some cheese and an apple- an apple, which came from an apple tree somewhere I will probably never see. It was an apple which supposedly condemned humanity to sin and despair and death. A story I don't subscribe to, but one which surrounds me nonetheless. Lilith and Eve, lovers separated by the whims of an angry god. Here is an apple tree. Do not consume its fruits, partake of the rapture of knowledge of oneself.</p>
<p>Deep in the small of the night, wading through despair, wailing for a life I'm not even sure I ever lived, a place I'm still not completely convinced exists. Everything in the world is <a href="https://archive.md/20200821214115/https://gopher.tildeverse.org/zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/asceticism-or-something-like-it.txt">bloat</a>. Your beloved games? Bloat. Your eye candy desktop? Bloat. Graphical browsers? Bloat. This sync program is bloat; use this different one. Oh, it has less features to the point of being useless? I don't care. <a href="../april/run-every-day.html">Bloat, bloat, bloat.</a> You slam your laptop shut in frustration, but there is no escape. What of media? The things you surround yourself offline, online, in the weird space between with the constant connectivity of today? Breaks aren't allowed. You have to constantly be creating, creating more than you consume.</p>
<p>Growing plants without soil or water, trying to fish in a manmade lake, living without food.</p>
<p>Do not consume.</p>
<p>Do not consume.</p>
<p>Do not consume.</p>
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<p><h1>Death Of A Gopher</h1></p>
<p>published: 2019-12-14</p>
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<p>The wire bars of the <a href="../../../poetry/g/the-golden-cage.txt">golden cage</a> bend open just a little farther, enough for me to stick my head out: I have a job now! A part-time job, I should clarify, so I won't be able to move out anytime soon, but the tiny sprout of <em>something</em> is better than the black hole of <em>nothing</em>.</p>
<p>The new revenue stream means that, unless something catastrophic happens like a mass deplatforming or getting fired, MayVaneDay can stay on its own stable VPS indefinitely.</p>
<p>Thanks to college payments, my bank balance dropped below a comfortable amount sometime in October, so I moved everything to the Raspberry Pi on my desk in my room for the following two months since it would be free. Surprisingly enough, even though IPv4 was blocked to hell, IPv6 was completely open, so I could run whatever the hell I wanted!</p>
<p>Except for pygopherd. Because pygopherd only supported IPv4. So my Gopher mirror was shot to hell, and because there's no point in updating a mirror that nobody can use, I let the whole thing fall into disrepair. Everything else I struggled to keep online since the router at home likes to periodically disconnect every device and refuse to let them back on for hours on end, so I put a line in the crontab to reboot the Pi at midnight every night to force it to reconnect and crossed my fingers that the ZeroNet mirror would finally get some seeders.</p>
<p>Which it did, thanks to <a href="https://archive.md/20200821214932/http://misc-stuff.terraaeon.com/articles/miss-old-internet.html">a little exposure</a>! And it was easier to maintain than Gopher, since all I had to do was change all the absolute links to relative links, as opposed to Gopher where I had to also strip out all the images and CSS (since most everyone views Gopher in a terminal, and what would be the point of transmitting things they couldn't see?) That would be "bloat". And everyone hates <a href="../august/consumption.html">"bloat"</a>.</p>
<p>Why? Why should I care about bloat? Who even defines "bloat", anyway? Some <a href="https://archive.md/20200821215101/https://regularflolloping.com/posts/slow-down/">authoritarian jerk who can't even be fucked to use proper grammar</a>? Is "bloat" defined by lines of code, or megabytes of RAM used, or the mental strain required to remember how to use the program? Sure, most of us can agree that Windows 10 with all the spyware options enabled with five browsers and seventeen autostart-on-boot programs <del>and one of those unironically being Discord</del> is bloat, but where do we draw the line from there? Where does the red side of the spectrum line officially turn blue? At the beginning, where it's no longer pure #FF0000? Only when it's pure #0000FF, and we've devolved into cavemen using stick figure pictures to communicate with each other? But aren't pictures bloat? Or is it language? Speaking? Writing? <em>Thinking?</em></p>
<p>It can't be <a href="../april/run-every-day.html">being dead</a>, for part of decomposing is <a href="https://archive.md/20200821215250/https://sciencing.com/the-stages-of-the-human-decomposition-process-12757794.html">intestinal bacteria producing gases</a>, which makes one rather... bloated.</p>
<p>Maybe I want decadence! Maybe I want lavish websites with pleasing color schemes and little image icons as buttons! (Given that the buttons have alt text, of course.) Maybe I want reflowable text and custom fonts that won't break the UI! Maybe I want <a href="https://weirdiverse.mayvaneday.art">pages with a thousand faces</a> that reinvent themselves every page load! Maybe I want websites that I can zip up in a single archive and throw wherever I damn please, instead of asking permission from some purposely convoluted database!</p>
<p>Maybe I want the crazy and macabre, the <a href="../../../poetry/l/lumo-en-vivo.html">spirited and alive</a>!</p>
<p>And maybe I want transport security too, which Gopher seems to have a <a href="https://archive.md/20200821215459/https://gopher.tildeverse.org/zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/why-gopher-needs-crypto.txt">little problem with</a>. And the <a href="https://archive.md/20200821215625/https://gopher.tildeverse.org/zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/1/~solderpunk/gemini">proposed fix</a>, which I must admit is the best fix to Gopher possible without scrapping the whole thing and reinventing HTTP, can't be easily implemented because of all those ancient machines bogging everyone else down. And heaven forbid we leave <em>them</em> out. Seriously, a protocol with <em>absolutely no transport security</em>- what kind of a braindead idea is Gopher? Are you okay with having every word thrown down the pipe accessible to your ISP to log and peer into and inject whatever they want into it? And signing every post with PGP won't help, since your key would also be transmitted in plaintext: if your government <em>really</em> wanted to fuck you over, they could just make your ISP reroute all requests to that particular Gopher server to their own and substitute their own PGP keys, and you'd be none the wiser. There would be no possible trust that a specific post was written by a specific person, unless you'd received their keys through a different, more secure channel. In which case: what's the point?</p>
<p>Security through obscurity is no security at all, and I've lived enough of my life as an insecure sniffling little imitation of a human being.</p>
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<p>In tangentially related news, I'm deleting my Github and Keybase accounts.</p>
<p>I've already known of the <a href="https://archive.md/20200821215750/https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/26/17954714/microsoft-github-deal-acquisition-complete">Microsoft acquisition</a> for some time now. But the main problem with Github is the network effect: without an account, one can't easily submit bug reports or pull requests. My Github page has mainly sat abandoned since that one Python class I took last year at college, the exception being the aforementioned bug reports.</p>
<p>I signed up for Keybase at the start of <a href="../../../poetry/o/october-7-2018.txt">October of 2018</a>, right after the explosive aftermath of the Lucine saga, where I was worried that one of the Tumblrites I'd pissed off would start impersonating me in attempts to get me in trouble with the law. My line of thought was that, if I had some kind of centralized official service where I could prove exactly what websites and social media accounts I was in control of, the likelihood of someone else to successfully put on my personage like a meat puppet would be effectively zero.</p>
<p>So why leave now?</p>
<p>Long story short:</p>
<ul>
<li>Keybase made a big deal about their <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190915210946/https://keybase.io/a/i/r/d/r/o/p/spacedrop2019">Stellar airdrop</a>. Woo! Everyone gets up to $500 in free cryptocurrency! I wake up one morning, and suddenly I'm $20 richer.</li>
<li>A shitton of spam bots sign up for Keybase, Github, and Hacker News. The latter two complain to Keybase, who <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20191009002412/https://keybase.io/a/i/r/d/r/o/p/spacedrop2019">cancels the October airdrop</a> and changes the requirements to receiving an SMS from a relatively short list of countries, notable for essentially saying "fuck you" to anyone living in Canada.</li>
<li>Stellar, the cryptocurrency they were giving out, peaks for a few days (around $0.08) and then plummets (to $0.05).</li>
<li>The spam bots <a href="https://archive.md/20200821220001/https://www.whiskey-tango.org/2019/11/keybase-weve-got-privacy-problem.html">get</a> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200408155300/https://github.com/keybase/keybase-issues/issues/3546">worse</a>, sending unsolicited messages and requests for payment. Yours truly got a few spam followers, but no weird messages.</li>
<li>Keybase, feeling the heat, says "fuck it" and <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20191213195655/https://keybase.io/a/i/r/d/r/o/p/spacedrop2019">cancels the whole airdrop</a> so nobody gets anything after 2019 ends.</li>
</ul>
<p>Which would be all fine and dandy if Keybase had <em>asked</em> users if they had wanted to participate first, instead of automatically adding a Stellar wallet to every account the first month of the airdrop. <b>Keybase took the private keys of its users and <a href="https://archive.md/20200821220224/https://sneak.berlin/20190929/keybase-backdoor/">automatically signed a payment address onto their profiles without their consent</a>, which <i>they themselves</i> <a href="https://archive.md/20200821220516/https://keybase.io/blog/2014-10-08/the-horror-of-a-secure-golden-key">define as a backdoor</a>. And <a href="https://archive.md/20200821220646/https://github.com/keybase/client/issues/15555">there is currently no way to remove the Stellar wallet from one's profile</a>.</b></p>
<p>And while Keybase technically lets you have the secret keys to the Stellar wallet, meaning one could theoretically use a different wallet app, the issue remains that none of this should have happened without the users' consent- and that Keybase violated it for a glorified promotion.</p>
<p>If they have the ability to do <em>this</em>, even if it's for (disputably) benevolent purposes, what's to stop them from getting malicious in the future?</p>
<p>There are smaller issues with Keybase as well. The desktop app doesn't work on Tails, for one. The FUSE filesystem mounts automatically and doesn't seem to be removable, which can mess up <code>df -h</code> counts, even though technically Ubuntu's Snap system has the same problem. And, the most egregious one in my eyes, is that <em>it's centralized</em>.</p>
<p>There is no further reason for me to be using Keybase or Github, and the upcoming new decade is the perfect excuse to do some <del>spring</del> winter cleaning.</p>
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<h1>The fediverse will not save us.</h1>
<p>published: 2019-01-03</p>
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<p>Welcome to 2019. The "year of Vane Vander", as I called it in a post whose name I don't remember off the top of my head right now, is three days, almost four, past us. The past few months have been an avalanche of ever-more-chaotic events- what would one expect from a year that started with the Tide pod challenge? (Yeah, that was a whole year ago, even though it feels like only yesterday.)</p>
<p>Something's changed in me in those twelve months. And yet... I can't seem to put my finger on it. My political stances don't seem to be any different: I'm still an agorist, and I still believe in freedom of association (or disassociation from; remember we're talking about groups and not mental illness here), and I still feel icky around people whose <em>entire</em> identities revolve around seemingly immutable characteristics of themselves. I still write books. I still don't believe in the Abrahamic god, and I'm still working on untangling myself from the spiritual delusions I seem to have picked up seemingly out of nowhere around last April. Or was it May? I can't remember.</p>
<p>Maybe it was... the social media? I'm not on WordPress anymore- <em>there's</em> a change I can put my finger on! Neither am I on Neocities. Or Facebook. Or... Tumblr.</p>
<p>But I still keep making a complete ass of myself, no matter the platform, spurred on by the incessant need for external validation- so maybe that's not a real change at all.</p>
<p>I opened this post today to talk to you about the fediverse. Mastodon and Pleroma, specifically, since I've never been an Instagram-type person (as Pixelfed would replace) and I haven't tried Misskey. Although Friendica <a href="https://archive.md/20200821221124/https://friendi.ca/2018/11/18/activitypub-support-in-friendica/">recently got support for ActivityPub</a>, the protocol that Mastodon and Pleroma speak, it sits closer to the "federation", which consists of diaspora*, Hubzilla, and GNU Social. The federation and the fediverse, despite sounding similar, are two <i>completely different</i> universes. Not the best genius who came up with those names, I think.</p>
<p>Mastodon and Pleroma, for the unaware, are two competing microblogging services on the fediverse. Their userbases have always been more or less at each other's throats, probably encouraged by the fact that the main developers of each are two polar opposites: <a href="https://archive.md/20200821221251/https://mastodon.social/@Gargron">Eugen</a>, the developer of Mastodon, is just a "normal" middle-aged white dude who rakes in thousands of dollars each month from Patreon, whereas <a href="https://archive.md/20200821221507/https://pleroma.soykaf.com/users/lain">Lain</a> is, as far as I know, completely pseudonymous.</p>
<p>Pleroma users' main complaints against Mastodon:</p>
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<li>It's bloated and resource-heavy, costing much more to host each month. At the very least, if you don't want to host at home, $3 for Pleroma, &gt;$9 for Mastodon- although Vultr and masto.host's low-tier prices might change at any time. I've hosted a Pleroma instance on my shitty Raspberry Pi at home for a few days as a test, and I was still able to use it for other blogging-related tasks; Mastodon wouldn't run on my device, but I've heard horror stories of someone managing to get it running on FOUR of them interlinked together.</li>
<li><a href="https://fediverse.network/pleroma.site/federation">Pleroma instances can automatically advertise their MRF, or defederation, policies.</a> This helps in administration transparency, because when admins decide to make the potentially catastrophic decision to mute or wholesale block an instance, the affected users need to know so that they can move to a different instance if they disagree with the decision. Mastodon admins can also make a list of domains they block, but unlike Pleroma, there is no easy way to verify that they're being truthful.</li>
<li>The three-paned Mastodon default interface dumps an overwhelming amount of information on the user, and it doesn't scale nicely on screens of different sizes, which means a lot of horizontal scrolling if you click on a post to try to view the full thread. The default Pleroma interface has only one pane, and it doesn't autoscroll with new posts, which means a lot more control over the amount of information thrown at the viewer at once.</li>
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<p>Mastodon users' main complaints against Pleroma:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li>It doesn't have an easy way to user-side mute words and phrases and block whole domains from being able to follow oneself. I'd block the infantilizing baby words "cofe", "smol"/"tol", and "pee pee poo poo" (among others) in a heartbeat if I could, but because Mastalab (the fediverse app I use on Android) relies on the server handling mutes instead of the app itself, I can only mute these things on the few Mastodon instances I'm on. And if I need to clean out my followers, I have to do it manually.</li>
<li>Because the cost to host it is much lower, it attracts more bad actors. Whether this is from uninspired trolls making throwaway instances to harass people, or stereotypical basement-dwellers with little disposable income who want places to fester in their hatred, shitty instances seem to invariably run Pleroma more often than not.</li>
<li>Compounding the issue with bad actors, because Mastodon doesn't give external instances an easy way to see if they're blocked or not, Pleroma instances often still retrieve posts from other instances they're blocked from. And because the default Pleroma frontpage is the Whole Known Network, a collection of all the posts from all the instances that particular instance can see, if Instance A blocks Instance C, but Instance B blocks neither A nor B, a person on Instance C could use Instance B's Whole Known Network to circumvent Instance A's blocks.</li>
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<p>Both sides have valid points. And yet, the little discussion I see always devolves into petty discourse where both sides feel like they've been personally wronged.</p>
<p>Which brings me to my main point: just because you are on the fediverse, that does not automatically make you better than whatever hellsites you came from. Being on a FLOSS social media platform that purports to have learned from the ethical mistakes of proprietary social media silos does not mean that you have a free excuse to act just as toxic as the people who probably pushed you off of those sites to begin with.</p>
<p>My time on the fediverse started off very chill. I ran an angel aesthetics bot on an instance recommended by an anon on a Lainchan thread, and occasionally I'd dip into the local and federated timelines to see what community I'd set up shop in. It seemed idyllic: lots of inside jokes I didn't really get, tolerable banter, little discourse. But now I've seen clout-chasing internet celebrities, and witchhunts against people I now consider friends for minor slipups that could have been rectified in direct messages, and literal cults start their own instances. Callout culture runs rampant, and in this place where I thought I'd finally be safe, I just have to watch my words even more in order to keep the mobs away. I left 8chan to get away from the constant slurs and hateful rhetoric: and yet, one could take a walk down any "free speech" or "loli" instance and get a compressed version of the same vitriol. And on most of the queer-friendly instances, I'd get skinned alive for even daring to suggest that maybe, just <em>maybe</em>, big-scale socialism isn't the best solution to corporatism's countless problems.</p>
<p>I wonder what happened to make the fediverse so sour. Or maybe it was always like this, and the more I hop among instances, a migrant of my own making, the more shit that mars my soul, renders me resentful, makes me blind to the few things on this network worth saving.</p>
<p>Or maybe every place on the internet is like this, has these same problems, and no amount of instance hopping and MRF policies will save us. A social site is useless without the people that are supposed to inhabit it, after all.</p>
<p>Maybe the few of us unhappy need to burn everything down and start new again.</p>
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<h1>Second-Class Citizens</h1>
<p>published: 2019-06-20</p>
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<p><h2>Webkinz, eleven years on</h2></p>
<p>April 26, 2008. The birthday party mere days before my eighth birthday. First grade- or maybe second; I can’t keep track of time- girls sitting in my living room upstairs, opening presents, having a good time.</p>
<p>One of them gave me a little blue hippo for some online game I’d never heard of before. And when all the girls left and the dread of writing all those thank-you notes settled into my chest, I sat down with my parents and signed up with the little code in the tag affixed to the hippo’s paw.</p>
<p>Webkinz is a standard game geared for little kids where you can adopt a pet and decorate a house and play shoddy Flash games to earn in-game currency. What separated it from the other dime-a-dozen MMORPGs for kids at the time I joined, however, was the fact that you <em>had</em> to buy a physical stuffed animal in order to receive a code to join, and that you <em>had</em> to keep buying these at least once a year to keep your account alive. If you couldn't afford to buy one in time, or simply forgot, then your account was deactivated and placed in a short waiting period before it was permanently deleted. Because of the forced paywall, the servers could afford to stay open, and so there was only one tier of membership. A few years in, and the company introduced “Deluxe” accounts, which at the time only meant a fancy gold hat you could put on your virtual pet and access to a separate store and a few extra social features. Not that it mattered much to me, since I could play all the games I wanted, and whatever exclusive items I wanted I could scam out of the Deluxe players in the trading rooms with a little bit of effort. Some of those items, like a kimono and a tornado in a pot and a few vehicles, still sit scattered around my inventory and my house to this day.</p>
<p>Somewhere along the way, probably with my transition into middle school, I forgot about the whole place. Desperately sought to make my own online game with my nonexistent coding skills, and failed every time. My stuffed animals got packed away into a storage box when we moved houses, and stayed forgotten. It must have been the summer after I graduated from high school, then, that I remembered that Webkinz existed, and logged in to find that I had been demoted to a free tier.</p>
<p>Oh yeah, there was a free tier! And the “normal” tier was now a standard membership, and Deluxe members still got to strut around with their exclusive items and unwarranted self-importance like they always had. And half of the wallpapers in my house were gone, deleted long after they were “retired” to make space in the shop for the new Deluxe-only items along with most of the items in those rooms. And a good two-thirds of the arcade games I used to spend hours upon hours playing were paywalled, and my privileges to KinzChat Plus, which was the free-for-all typing mode in the social areas instead of stringing together pre-made sentences, were revoked. My house, once a thematic wonderland with a little school and a massive kitchen and bedrooms for each pet sorted by species and theme, was a barren wasteland.</p>
<p>And there were more changes that had happened in my absence. There was a mayor now where once it had been a lawless and free land, a creepy chipmunk lady whose eyes drilled into my soul. The old “Things To Do” menu with its purple tab and eye-blinding golden text was now a grid of icons a la an iPad home screen. The hamster maze section, which was notable for requiring Unity instead of the standard Flash Player that the rest of the site used, had long since been shuttered. Badges for quests littered the left side of the screen. There was <em>always</em> another damn quest to do.</p>
<p>But my pets seemed no worse for the wait, and they had removed the obnoxious logout games that always plagued us children when we needed to quickly exit for whatever our parents were yelling at us to do, so it wasn't all doom and gloom.</p>
<p>Given that I now had my credit card on me, I caved in and bought a year of Deluxe. I put the golden hat on my pet. I booted Ferin Live (because my current distro, Devuan, doesn’t play well with Flash Player) and played all the arcade games I had played as a child and rolled into KinzChat Plus to see who I could scam rare items out of next.</p>
<p>It wasn’t nearly as satisfying as I’d hoped. Everything ran as if I were playing on a potato, despite the fact that I <em>vividly</em> remember everything being fast as hell back when I played on my grandma’s old computer running Windows ME. All my brothers and cousins were still stuck on the free tier, if they could even remember their logins at all. I couldn’t invite anybody over to my house like in days of old, and I couldn’t play the multiplayer arcade games behind a Deluxe paywall with them. I had become the first-class citizen I had resented so harshly as a child.</p>
<p>But 360 days remain in my subscription, since it’s billed yearly, so while my time remains, I’ll probably be working on FOSS clones of the games with what little Python and GB Studio experience I know. Using my privilege of financial freedom for other’s benefit, for no altruistic reason than it makes me feel good inside.</p>
<p>And it'll save <em>me</em> money too, when my subscription runs out.</p>
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<p><h2>The fediverse is burning down</h2></p>
<p><i><a href="https://tusky.app/">Tusky</a> banned Gab! The sky is falling!</i></p>
<p>In all seriousness, the drama roiling through the fediverse at the time of writing is <a href="https://gab.com/gab/posts/VnZRendFcDM1alBhNm9QeWV4d0xidz09">Gab’s announcement to switch to the Mastodon backend</a> for sustainability purposes and to enable federation. Tusky, one of the popular fediverse apps, decided to take the initiative of removing the in-app capability to sign in to several instances arbitrarily deemed as “white nationalist” havens and rickrolling whose who still attempted to do so. While their intentions are noble- <em>I</em> certainly don’t want to make it easier on hateful identitarians- what gets blocked and what stays available to use in the app was seized by the developer instead of staying in the hands of the instance admins like it has always been before now.</p>
<p>But in both instances, there has been little an individual user can do. The average user doesn't know how to operate Git, or compile an Android app. If their admin defederates from a certain instance, and a significant enough portion of their friends were on said instance, they have little recourse but to jump ship onto another instance with a more lenient federation policy. Or if an instance goes down, whether without warning or with, or if said user gets banned with no opportunity to appeal… If you don’t have your own instance on the fediverse, you’re essentially a second-class citizen. And to get into the first-class requires jumping two walls: the inherent paywall of renting a VPS or buying a Raspberry Pi, and the technical wall of actually installing, configuring, and maintaining their instance software of choice. There are new spam domains and new porn spammers and new harassers every day. Can you put in the time every day to ward them off? Can you put aside the money every month to keep your instance online? Can you keep the users on your instance in the legal white zone?</p>
<p>Tusky’s decision, coupled with Sunbeam City’s implosion after the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190620004015/https://sunbeam.city/@cocoron/102282495819964875">admin accounced that they were stepping down and that the instance would potentially be shutting down if they couldn’t find a suitable replacement for the administration and ownership,</a> has thrown the fediverse into roil. Either you’re all for setting a precedent and showing future corporations with bully money that it <em>is</em> possible for you to selectively silence others, or you’re full of hatred for minorities and need to die.</p>
<p>It’s the same damn discourse every single damn time! Censorship, censorship, censorship. Instance admins can block each other, drawing party lines, and you <em>better</em> be on the side that has clout behind it, or else you’re <em>cancelled</em>. What are you supposed to do if you’re just a run-of-the-mill user? What if you’re just sharecropping your little patch of online land, chilling with your friends, and then everything goes up in flames because the admin got in a fight with one of these app developers and now you’re on a “cancelled” instance? Telling people to start their own instance is neither viable nor considerate for the aforementioned reasons. And jumping from instance to instance is tiring. Nobody expects a Twitter or a Facebook user to constantly be switching profiles or accounts, getting everyone to refollow them, starting their account over from scratch every time drama flares up…</p>
<p>I was a second-class citizen for a while, jumping from instance to instance as one does, and then I “ascended” to the first class when I set up a Misskey instance about two weeks ago. I even wrote a <a href="../../../tutorials/misskey.html">little tutorial</a> on how to accomplish that, since most of the documentation is in Japanese, and what little has been translated into English is spotty at best if you’re not already well-versed in systems administration. It was, to put it in the simplest of terms, not worth it. There is nobody on the fediverse worth talking to. All the cliques have long since formed, and <em>gods above help you</em> if you ever decide to go against any of their party lines. What kind of person would willingly stay in an environment where they can so easily be painted with the same stroke as legitimate hate groups, and then search engines pick up on this, sear the paint into your skin near forever? At least in pubnixes, you have the opportunity for private resolution before everything blows up public.</p>
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<p><h2>What are we to do?</h2></p>
<p>Clearly the server-client model has failed us, for there is no reason why potentially thousands of people should be affected by the whims of one person, and there is <em>especially</em> no reason why anybody should be at the mercy of another just because they do not have the money or the skills to stake out their own little piece of whatever network they’re using. This throws out the fediverse- really, anything on the clearnet, since the server-client model is the very <em>backbone</em> of the modern Internet.</p>
<p>This leaves peer-to-peer services like Freenet, <a href="https://beakerbrowser.com/">Dat</a>, and <a href="https://zeronet.io">ZeroNet</a>. I can’t recommend Freenet since, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200407181754/https://www.pcworld.com/article/2040278/find-your-own-private-internet-with-freenet.html">by design, you don’t have granular control over which files you’re seeding</a>, which means you could be complicit in hosting disgusting materials like child pornography without your knowledge or consent. Dat and ZeroNet, however, let you choose on a site-by-site basis what you want to seed.</p>
<p>Both Dat and ZeroNet are well-suited for hosting static websites, so I have a <a href="http://127.0.0.1:43110/1MeeJWbbQHArbqD6UUHSjh9EVycvnTUBFa/">mirror</a> on both <b>(EDIT 2020-04-07: the Dat mirror is dead, lmao)</b>. ZeroNet requires JavaScript to be enabled in the browser, which might be a privacy nightmare for some, but one can go into the data folder for each website and see all the source files for each website, so it’s not that big of a deal if one’s running a sufficiently up-to-date browser. Dat doesn’t require JavaScript, but the Beaker Browser, the easiest way to access the Dat network, doesn’t support extensions last time I checked. (This <em>could</em> be worked around with <a href="https://github.com/sammacbeth/dat-fox">the Dat extension for Firefox, but it requires some <a href="https://github.com/sammacbeth/dat-fox-helper">command line trickery</a> to get it to work properly, and you won’t have access to all of Beaker Browser’s features.)</p>
<p>Neither are completely free from paywalls, however. Dat allows you to <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200407182024/https://beakerbrowser.com/docs/guides/use-a-domain-name-with-dat">use an existing domain name</a> to point to a Dat share, which means, if you already have a domain, you don’t have to buy another one. ZeroNet requires you to purchase a special Namecoin domain on the Namecoin blockchain if you <a href="https://zeronet.io/docs/faq/#how-can-i-register-a-bit-domain">want a fancy domain</a> that doesn’t look like spaghetti and you can’t run <a href="https://github.com/samr7/vanitygen">vanitygen</a> for some reason. And if you want to keep your site seeded when your computer is off, and you don’t have a bunch of friends to help you seed it for free… you’re back to being a second-class citizen. Going the Dat path, you could use <a href="https://hashbase.io">Hashbase</a> to seed your website, but that requires registration, and free accounts can only go up to a hundred megabytes of storage. And if Hashbase decides they don’t like your site, they have full freedom to shut it down and stop seeding whatever it is you were hosting. ZeroNet has some user-run proxies that can be used as a seeding peer, most of which disable site deletion on the user side, and the admins don’t seem too interested in pruning sites from all the “this site you are seeding is on a blacklist” messages that popped up when I last used one.</p>
<p>ZeroNet has a few glaring advantages suitable for would-like-to-not-be second-class citizens, though, and one’s that, in case you ever <em>do</em> get your own server, it’s <em>exponentially</em> easier to use it as an extra peer. You download the same bundle as you would use on a computer, <a href="https://zeronet.io/docs/faq/#is-it-possible-to-install-zeronet-to-a-remote-machine">rename a plugin directory to enable it</a>, and then pass a few extra command line flags. Dat, on the other hand, <a href="https://github.com/beakerbrowser/homebase">requires up-to-date Node.js packages and use of their special process manager</a>. The second is that, if you’re switching machines or distrohopping, taking your ZeroNet data with you is as simple as copying the “ZeroBundle” folder wherever you downloaded and extracted it onto the new computer. Beaker Browser requires that you hunt for its data folder. On Linux, I know it’s in “~/.config/Beaker Browser”, but I have <em>absolutely no</em> idea where it might be hiding on Windows or Mac.</p>
<p>This peer-to-peer strategy can be extrapolated onto other non-website networking things, like Syncthing for files and <a href="https://github.com/39aldo39/DecSync">DecSync</a> for calendars and contacts and RSS, but non-social things are separate issues to be dealt with separately.</p>
<p>Ultimately, it doesn’t matter which one you pick. It doesn’t matter if you even pick one that I haven’t considered! Just, <em>please</em>, leave yourself a backdoor out of the server-client model. Take some initiative for once in your life! If nobody does anything about it, then <em>of course</em> ZeroNet and Dat and all the others are going to seem empty.</p>
<p>Empty and cold and sterile, just like the corporations you were supposed to be fleeing!</p>
<p>This garden is yours to cultivate!</p>
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<h1>Separatism</h1>
<p>published: 2019-06-21</p>
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<p>Popularized by Marilyn Frye in her 1978 essay <em>Notes on Separatism and Power</em>, female separatism is the concept that woman’s liberation can only be fully achieved once women separate completely from men, both socially and societally. For most women, this hardline rejection of men outright is untenable because it simply isn’t economically feasible, or they have loved ones who happen to be men, or whatever institutional obligations (like college) they have requires them to interact with men. In this situation, a compromise is made where interaction with men is reduced to exclusively those who are required in order to get on with day-to-day life.</p>
<p>Politically, female separatism involves centering, well, women in one’s politics. Only issues that affect women are the focus, but issues affecting men might be dealt with if they involve women as well. "Rehabilitating men" is not the goal, nor will it ever be, and every effort goes towards creating networks and resources to support women. Shelters for female survivors of abuse and economic support for single mothers are two prominent issues, to give some examples. Socially, female separatism involves centering and supporting women in everything they do. Giving female artists much-needed love and attention, creating female-only spaces where one can thrive, shutting out and shutting down men who actively threaten women. Keeping our shared herstory alive.</p>
<p>I would <em>love</em> to be a female separatist one day, <em>especially</em> a lesbian separatist (where the focus is especially on lesbians and bisexual women and the unique challenges they face). And while all people are ultimately individuals and should be judged on their individual merits, I cannot deny what I have seen with my own eyes, and it would be <em>especially</em> amiss as an autistic person to deny the patterns I've witnessed my whole life. Living in a world without the constant pressure to be pretty and formless for the pleasure and comfort of men. Living in a world where I am not constantly harassed by my brothers and male peers and told to suck it up and smile and stay silent because "boys will be boys" and "they were joking anyways". Living in a world where I am not constantly told that I am inferior because of the sequences of DNA that permeate every cell in my body, the skin shown to the outside world ensuring that my body can keep the energy needed to survive, the organs I possess that are capable of producing <em>life</em>.</p>
<p>My first inclination is that I would die to be in this world. But almost all of the female separatists I have encountered are either socialists or full-blown communists, ardent anti-individualists since it stops them from collectivizing everyone into the boxes of the Oppressor and Oppressed. I am an agorist, a libertarian, the <em>antithesis</em> of what they believe should be done with a society. And yet, I fit in perfectly: if you want to make the government wither away, you make it utterly irrelevant. Extrapolated, if you want men to leave you alone, you make them irrelevant. These women want to separate from men to escape from the violent force that shapes every moment of our lives, and yet to step into the conformist communism some of them want is to just reinstate the same force under a different name.</p>
<p>So what of libertarian separatism, then? Surely a libertarian man would know that force is immoral, and would refrain from engaging in the same destructive behaviors that have led to a desire for female separatism. It wouldn’t make me sexually attracted to them any more, but it would be a peaceful coexistence. But then the pool of potential people to form a community after the fact grows multitudes smaller, for the percentage of the population that believes in liberty and self-ownership is far less than the half of the planet that is female. A completely untenable position. And so long as a person does not infringe on another person’s rights to life, liberty, and property, they would be compatible with my standards for a peer no matter what label they took up, making the arbitrary division of separatism useless and counterproductive.</p>
<p>And women are perfectly capable of being abusive and toxic in their own ways, and separatism so easily breeds toxic echo chambers that could devolve into full-blown cults a la the Moonies.</p>
<p>So I will exercise my right to association and disassociation as I will. I will not tolerate men who expect me to act as figurepieces in their grand games of sexual pursuit or who see me as lesser purely for my biological construction, and I will not accept the rule of those who would impose their own destructive and totalitarian authority on me.</p>
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<h1>So I guess I'm gender-critical now</h1>
<p>published: 2019-05-23</p>
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<p>I am biologically female.</p>
<p>That's not hate speech. I was born female. I have female genitals. Had I been born a male, my parents would have had me circumcised, but instead I was a girl, so I was spared for the time being. I was raised female, with all the emotional trappings and socialization and enforced femininity that comes as such. I grew up with the societal expectation that I would get married to a man and have children and live a standard suburban life, an expectation that the vast majority of people in my life still operate under despite being quite vocal in recent years that I have no intention of reproducing.</p>
<p>At the end of 2014, after my first girlfriend cheated on me (which I don't want to elaborate on), I came out as bisexual to my parents and slowly my friends (at the time). Starting the summer of 2016, as the sudden fluxes of puberty settled into something resembling the rhythm of womanhood and my dysphoria flared up in response, I toyed with the idea of being nonbinary.</p>
<p>Labels are not intended to be permanent once first applied. Not to political positions, or religious affiliation, or things like gender or sexuality. Labels are for accurately describing experiences. One's loyalty should be to reflecting the truth of themselves, not clinging to labels as if they were the last lifeboats leaving the Titanic. If that means changing the labels one uses as shorthand for all the intricacies of themselves, then so be it.</p>
<p>As my time at college draws to a close, I've been doing a lot of self-reflection. Who I am, where I want to go on life. And as it turns out, I'm... not attracted to men. All the men I've ever been attracted to have been fictional, far out of my social standing, or held power over me in some capacity. Either they had no capacity to actually hurt me, or they did, and my subconscous mind thought that, if I got close to them, I would somehow be "spared" from whatever danger it was picking up on. Not actual attraction, but a defense mechanism. Hardly something that could <em>ever</em> blossom into a healthy relationship.</p>
<p>Even to one not knee-deep in the clusterfuck that is the postmodern gender theory sphere, it's obvious that a woman exclusively attracted to other women is called a... lesbian.</p>
<p>An admission to which one might respond, "but what about fem-aligned nonbinary people? You can't tell what gender someone is by looking at them! And what about women who look like men?" To which I would respond, I am not attracted to male genitals. I am not attracted to the male physiology. A masculine woman's presentation will always have that undertone of womanness underneath it, which makes it special, <em>what I'm attracted to</em>, different from a masculine man or any other kind of man. (And there's a whole discourse on biological men who identify as female and are attracted to women and how lesbians should feel about <em>that</em>, and how trans activist rhetoric can get kind of rapey at times concerning this... but that's a post for another day.)</p>
<p>And, as it turns out, I'm not nonbinary either. Because the idea of "nonbinary" genders has <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200407181140/https://pinifera.tumblr.com/post/183924925858/hey-i-read-soemthing-abt-u-saying-nobinary">been historically used to oppress gender-non-conforming people</a>, and given that there is no definite meaning of what a nonbinary person transitioning would entail, it's kind of a... useless designation. Not to mention that it implies that one could simply "identify" in or out of sex-based oppression: I can barely get the people in my college to address me with they/them pronouns, and they're supposed to be super liberal and accepting about that kind of stuff! Do you <em>really</em> think that some random attacker on the street prowling for his next rape victim is going to care about what a pronoun pin says? I look like a female. I sound like a female. Everything about me screams "female", and no amount of "identifying" as something other than female is going to change biological reality.</p>
<p>Societal reasons aren't enough to get me to stop being something. If that were true, you'd still be reading this on a WordPress blog, and I'd have announced that this post went up via Twitter. As for personal reasons... I am still dysphoric. I still have dreams where I have a male body. But now I realize that most of it was because of these societal expectations that I so heavily resent being bound with. The technology side of the sphere on the internet that I inhabit (or used to inhabit, anyway) is heavily male-dominated. Back during the summer of 2018, when I was struggling through anhedonia, I spent a lot of time on chans, where the prevailing culture towards women is generally "tits or GTFO". And society in general, where I'm "too weak" or "too emotional" or "too-lighthearted". Being a man on the internet afforded me status, greater mobility, a greater likelihood of being <em>taken seriously</em>. And despite whatever book titles I use, I've never been great at the whole duality of spirit thing, so my brain took my mental reality and tried to apply it to my physical reality as well. And then, as a result, dysphoria.</p>
<p>This isn't to say that I'm a radfem now. A lot of radical feminist rhetoric centers around women and men being two different social classes, collectivizing everyone and their experiences based on their biological sex. There are times when this is <em>greatly</em> useful, like examining religion's misogynistic influence on culture. But I believe in individual rights over all. They are <em>extremely rare</em>, few and far between, but there are genuinely good men in this world. And innocent individuals, no matter if they're male or female, should not have to suffer for the sins of the larger group that they did not personally commit.</p>
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<h1>A New Masthead</h1>
<p>published: 2019-11-19</p>
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<p><a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, Sorrowful Laika">Ever so recently</a>, <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity">everywhere given advice</a> to not base myself on a sense of melancholy, to avoid &quot;making sadness my aesthetic&quot;, to make it harder for one to relearn oneself and their worth outside of the borders of the Suffering Country they've unwittingly found themselves in exile from the rest of the world in.</p>
<p>One would be forgiven for thinking that all I ever focused on was the melancholy, that I had sacrificed myself on its altar for one last chance at appeasing the muses enough to refill the well of creative passion. And one would also be forgiven for thinking that I had failed somehow, that I had turned the muses against me forever, leaving the corpse of their once-favorite bird to rot inside the golden cage.</p>
<p>But, as much as I would like to be- as much as I have prepared to be as a coping mechanism- I am no nihilist. The natural world, despite staring down imminent destruction and <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190808113927/https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/n1x-hello-from-the-wired">total and complete technological takeover</a> and the slavery to the Wired inherent, still holds on to life, still clings to a sliver of a hope that it will not only survive its current trials and tribulations but <em>thrive</em> through them. And despite the constant voices of my surroundings entreating me to give up, that there is nothing left and that through my indecision I have dug a breathing grave which I lie in, there still remains a part of me, tumbling into the fiery tempest, arm outstretched to the sky, yelling with the softest voice- the <em>loudest</em> I possibly can-</p>
<p><em>Help me, please.</em></p>
<p>And it is a storm that comes and knocks everything down, that destroys everything in its path- <em>nearly</em> everything, for if my dreams were to be believed, the pillar of a fridge would always survive, white or gray, poking its head over the wreckage like a monument to survival. It is a storm that singes every edge I have, severs any connections to the heavens I might have ever had, leaves me barely breathing, just barely alive at the end.</p>
<p>But instead of the melancholy, the worship of the destruction, I instead find the strength to lift my head and watch the sunrise after with my weary eyes. The peek of the sun over the horizon as it casts its golden glow over the wreckage, the chaotic nest of a bird newly free from the cage, the assurance that the world has <em>not</em> ended, that there is still more life to be had. That <em>whatever the hell</em> just happened, Life was still more powerful, Life still prevailed.</p>
<p>And that is what I always stretch my hands out for, always yearn to grasp. The sudden paradoxical feelings of fragility and strength together. A brand new world with none of the trappings of the old. And once the bird's wings heal, they'll flap once, twice, and then back into the air where the beast belongs.</p>
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<h1>A World Just Beyond My Grasp</h1>
<p>published: 2019-11-09</p>
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<p>Late this morning, I ran away from home with little more than my purse and what I could shove into my backpack. I left behind my stash of music (which I kept forgetting to copy to my new laptop from my broken one) and the bulk of my video game collection and nearly all my clothes, all the things I have spent nineteen years collecting and hoarding that weren't washed away in the flood. All of my money, save the little cash that remains in my purse, is in the hands of my parents.</p>
<p>None of it feels real. My brain feels like, at any moment, I'll be back at home, sitting on my bed, confined in my room like I've been for the past five months. Slowly going crazy, losing touch with the outside world, with the <em>real</em> world. Constantly being entreated to give myself to the Spectacle, to reduce the depth of my mind to merely wondering what the next meal is and what game I'll waste the evening playing: to whatever is easiest for my jailers to manage.</p>
<p>I'm finally outside <a href="../../../poetry/g/the-golden-cage.txt">the golden cage</a>, and the world outside that I'd managed to convince myself wasn't real <em>is</em> real, and it's so wide and yet so restricting all at once.</p>
<p>Managed to convince <em>most</em> of myself, for some spark of <a href="../../../poetry/f/firebrand.txt">whatever the hell</a> I felt past January <a href="../september/sign-of-life.html">still burns within</a>.</p>
<p>And whatever that spark is must have been enough, for I bit the bullet and walked for an hour to the local library. I jayran across busy highways. I passed by the trail on which I had a mental breakdown one day in gym class, abusive gym teacher yelling at me to go faster, even though my legs were stone and my bike was two creaks away from collapsing, so close to home and yet so far away, always so far away. I took the long way, the way my phone told me to go, and then realized upon seeing one of the local hotels that there was a shortcut waiting for me all along.</p>
<p>There are two little kids running around the library. A slightly older girl is brave enough to walk around in public with a bunny-ears headband and an unironic Minions jacket. At the table next to mine is an overweight man with a Vietnam Veteran hat on gambling away his money on a shitty Chromebook that looks like it was stolen from the high school. Coughs boom from the downstairs bathroom as if they were heralds of an oncoming earthquake, even though we don't get earthquakes here in God's Asscrack, Minnesota.</p>
<p>On the walk home from college, late at night long after the sun had gone to sleep, passing by the chapel on the way to the dorms. I turn to my left, and I see the highway sloping down the hill. A million glittering lights, drivers that I will never meet, whose paths will only cross mine in this one sliver of time and then never again. And framing the road on both sides is a forest that spans as far as the eye can see. A veritable force field- a modern moat to protect the campus from the outside world.</p>
<p>The wind spoke to me. Memories of <a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, Sorrowful Laika">a past life</a>, messengers shouting of a future one just on the horizon.</p>
<p>I stood at the uncharted edge of the frontier to a secret world, a new world, a free world. I could taste it on the frost on my lips, feel it in the way my lungs constricted and screamed for air that wasn't full of winter's knives, in the way the wind fluttered through my unzipped coat.</p>
<p>At that moment, I could have turned my back on everything and disappeared under cover of darkness.</p>
<p>But I didn't. I returned to my dorm and fell asleep under warm covers. And, come morning, I went to my classes just as I was expected to.</p>
<p>Intellectually, I know I could turn my back on the golden cage now and never return home. I'm of the legal age: my jailers couldn't legally force me to return. I can stretch my fingers out and feel the borders between the golden cage's false conception of &quot;world&quot; and the secret world growing thin. I could rip the Wizard's curtains to shreds and watch as everything I worried about in the cage becomes <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200407184012/https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/there-is-a-secret-world-concealed-within-this-one">trivial and irrelevant and ridiculous</a> against the sheer mass of Life itself.</p>
<p>I would give up everything not in that backpack for a one-way ticket to that world in a heartbeat.</p>
<p>But what hurts more than the winter frost, what hurts more than the feeling of sweat in every crack in my skin taunting me closer to sensory overload- is that I <em>know</em> <a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, tell Rufi I'm not coming home.">my fingers will scab over</a>, and I will lose the sacred touch of a world where I am my own, and I will return to the golden cage at end of day. I will return to a world where the Spectacle is king, where my body is not my own, trading my dignity for one more day of a warm bed at night.</p>
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<h1>Possession</h1>
<p>published: 2019-11-13</p>
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<p>Not the demonic kind, mind you- but the kind that occurs when you own something, when something is in your <em>possession</em>. Whether tangible or digital, if I can hold it in my hands in some form, theoretically it is <em>mine</em>.</p>
<p>This morning, right after breakfast, my mom entreated me to go sorting through another one of the bins we <em>still</em> haven't completely unpacked from our move almost three years ago. Lots of assorted doodads I'd forgotten about, purses that went directly into the donate pile, crafts that accepted their demise in the bottom of the new box to send to storage. A crumpled and stained letter from my childhood, from a boy that I used to know, instantly opened without even an opportunity to express my discomfort with her going through my correspondence.</p>
<p>Mom unwraps an oblong object in a dirty and faded pillowcase. She immediately tosses the pillowcase over her shoulder, landing at the base of the laundry room door. The object, it turns out, is a ceramic statuette of a girl who could be mistaken for Strawberry Shortcake's blue twin separated at birth.</p>
<p>"Keep or donate?" she asks me.</p>
<p>I shrug my shoulders. More baby stuff from a decade ago, back when I would have happily let Mom decorate my room however she pleased. "Donate."</p>
<p>"No, we're keeping this," she immediately chirps back, her voice now tinged with a hint of annoyance that my tastes in decor have changed. "This belonged to my grandmother. It's going straight to the hutch."</p>
<p>And she sets the object aside, neither in the packing box nor in the donate pile.</p>
<p>It makes no sense. Presumably she gave the statuette to <em>me</em>, and she attributes the object to <em>my</em> pile of unpacked boxes, so it should be <em>my</em> possession to do with or dispose of as I please- and yet, the moment I did something she didn't like to it, she took it back anyway. So was it never mine to begin with? Just imposed on me, my fault for not putting it in my room and thus contributing to the pile of boxes in what should be the second living room?</p>
<p>If it had been up to me, everything would have either gone to donation or been sold off. <a href="./other-world.html">I already have all the possessions I want.</a></p>
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<p>My phone, even though it is in my possession as it sits on the desk next to me, is not my <em>possession</em>.</p>
<p>I can hold it in my hand, but I cannot use it any way I please: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200408153839/https://www.reddit.com/r/androidroot/comments/99zost/why_is_the_usa_version_of_the_samsung_galaxy_s9s9/">the bootloader is locked</a>, and thus it is unrootable. And unlike the phones I've had in the past, where there was only a gentle reminder that a new software update was available and said reminder could be disabled by freezing the system update app, my phone will <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200408153909/https://www.theandroidsoul.com/samsung-will-force-you-to-download-updates-after-postponing-for-a-maximum-of-10-times/">force an update after denying it for too long</a>.</p>
<p>And I've fantasized about downgrading to a flip phone for a long time, both for the privacy benefits of not dealing with Apple's or Google's incessant tracking baked into the core of the phone, and for the inability to install "modern" apps staving off <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200408153941/https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/23/smartphone-vs-flip-phone">phone addiction</a>. But my parents would never allow me to do so, not even if I asked in the most polite manner possible, for they've "spent too much money on it" in true <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200408154027/https://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/03/25/the-sunk-cost-fallacy/">sunk-cost</a> fashion, even though I never wanted a smartphone in the first place. I could buy a cheap one off eBay behind their backs, but I wouldn't be allowed to connect it to the phone plan, so it would sit useless without phone service to make it functional.</p>
<p>And one day, when I make my break and run free and get a place to call all my own, my phone will <em>still</em> not be my own, for it's locked into the Verizon network. My parents would still be within their "rights" to track the phone's location, or remotely lock it or wipe it and make it useless. I wouldn't be able to transfer it to a carrier of my choice, one with a far more cheaper monthly bill.</p>
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<p>And am <em>I myself</em> even my own possession?</p>
<p>Do I own my emotions? For even the slighest amount of displeasure immediately gets labeled as boiling rage, an incongruent response to one's surroundings- even though if <em>you</em> were eating a meal in silence, and then someone waltzed in blasting shitty music through the phone in their back pocket, you'd be a little silently annoyed too.</p>
<blockquote>
<a href="../../../books.html#tdom" title="The Duality of Mankind, chapter 14">"I have many emotions," Lex cut in, rolling his eyes, one hand pushing on the bathroom door to keep it open. "Irritated, upset, moody, fatigued, annoyed, pissed, disgruntled, invalidated. To call them all 'grumpy' would be a disservice to the English language and an insult to myself."</a>
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<p>Do I own my movements? For everywhere I go, I have to carry the phone around so I can be "reached" in case of emergency, even though my parents, and their parents, and their parents before them were allowed to explore without the watchful eye of technology over them at all times. And everywhere I go, I must always keep my parents informed of- the rare moments when I am allowed to wander without the fear of a report afterward, it is only because they failed to ask or simply never noticed in the first place.</p>
<p>Do I own my body? For I <em>never</em> consent to having my photo taken, much less posted on Facebook, and yet both of my parents get indignant when I demand that they stop feeding my facial data to Facebook. I motion to opt out of holiday photos, knowing that they'll get plastered everywhere on the internet, and then my parents threaten to take away everything that matters to me in response- and even if they <em>did</em>, they'd still force me into the picture. Always a smiling doll for others' visual pleasure, never my own. And then they joke about mounting cameras everywhere to catch who leaves empty buckets of ice cream in the freezers or wiretaps in my room to listen in on the few words I utter in a former safe place and even going so far to remove all the bedroom doors when we don't come to dinner as quickly as they'd like (even though, most of the time, I genuinely didn't hear them yell because I was listening to music), and I scream that <em>I do not consent</em> to the invasion of privacy and that I'm moving out given the first opportunity, and they simply laugh.</p>
<p>They laugh and proclaim that I cannot afford to move out, that I will never be able to afford to move out. There is no escape from the golden cage. There is simply nothing to be done for money in this dead town, save a janitor position that won't be enough to cover rent (not for a long while, anyway). And I cannot flee to the city of my grandmother, or into the arms of a well-meaning but disconscious-of-privacy-or-anything-else-that-I-care-about friend- they simply won't allow it. They'd just leverage the law to capture me and bring me back to the golden cage once again.</p>
<p>They laugh, for, in their eyes, I am their possession.</p>
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<h1>Cameras</h1>
<p>published: 2019-10-03</p>
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<p>The funny thing about elucidation is that everywhere you once thought safe is no longer so.</p>
<p>For our first example, take my local park. I went on a walk, not too far from my house (probably the only place I could get away from home without breaking out in a sweat, one-way ticket to sensory meltdown) and sat down in the shaded pavilion, where sat three rows of picnic tables.</p>
<p><i>This area is under surveillance,</i> a sign mounted high up inside the roof greeted me. And, sure enough, on either side of the roof were two black glassy boxes pointed straight at me. And surely the eyes of the state are no better than my parents', and <i>those</i> certainly aren't conducive for writing, so I picked myself up (for luckily I'd seen the cameras before unpacking my stuff to work) and continued walking.</p>
<p>The shattered remnants of a pen rest farther down the path, little shards of neon yellow plastic. One can't go a single step without stepping on a strip of asphalt darker than the rest, hasty fix for cracks that just shone right back through anyway.</p>
<p>I cracked open my window earlier, and a burning scent filled my room. A disused furnace, sleeping dragon awoken from slumber and put back to work despite its groggy mind. And the same cold that beckoned a year ago crept back in, calling, whispering of the same things as it had a year ago back in college: to go outside and see what I could of the world, lest I rot to nothing in my room and discovered that I had survived everything thrown at me so far only to languish and give up and turn to dust.</p>
<p>Which my mother would have probably liked, since it would mean more material to sacrifice to her pet hedgehogs as bedding. The same fate as my old stack of art paper, a few unfinished journals, hasty heartfelt notes. Gods only know what else has been condemned to a fate of shit.</p>
<p>Next to the park is an "advanced wellness system", which is a pretentious name for what one would get if a gym aficionado was put in charge of designing a playground without having ever actually met a single kid in their life. Three stairs, two cots-but-made-of-metal, the cycling part of a bike. Plenty of pull-up stations. Everything made out of the same garish colors and burn-your-skin-off-in-the-summer metals as the actual playground.</p>
<p>No visible cameras in sight, but no protection from the rain, either.</p>
<p>You give up safety in exchange for freedom. Except, at the park, it's a false sense of safety, for it's not like, if anybody came out of the cars idling in the parking lot while I was there and attacked me, police would suddenly start pouring out of the cameras and arrest my assaulters.</p>
<p>And for our second example, you give up the safety of not having to personally worry about financing your server and personally securing it for the freedom of not having to answer to anybody: not a corporate overlord like Google or Facebook, not a slackoff server admin who refuses to kick out repeat abusers of other users, not an easily-offended community when they come for you with their pitchforks and torches. There are other ways to be hurt when the day comes: the classic DDoS attack, mass reporting to a VPS provider, slander on social media where the search engines are likely to pick up on it. Even on <a href="../june/second-class-citizens.html">ZeroNet</a>, one isn't completely “safe”, as there's still the infinitely small chance of the Bitcoin private key of your zite being stolen, or a massive and widely-used blocklist adding your zite or user ID for the crime of having a wrong opinion.</p>
<p>But the cameras remain, and will remain so long as corporatism reigns and the NSA has its sticky fingers in everything. Autumn comes, but the chilling effect remains no matter the season.</p>
<p>For our third example, we'll turn the cameras around, and focus on... me. Or, rather, the places I live.</p>
<p>My friend's house is <i>covered</i> in Amazon Alexas and Google Homes. Every device has voice controls turned on. Always listening, always reporting everything to their respective corporations. And my mother- my <i>mother</i>, of all people- has made fun of them for this, for consenting to the auditory cameras, but they just shrug it off every time.</p>
<p>And the air grows frigid around us. Where once sparks flew and we spent hours thinking they were only mere minutes between us, the sparks go out, and I count the minutes until we go home, feigning a smile and going through the same routines in Minecraft for the millionth time.</p>
<p>At home- or the place I spend most of my time in, for <i>true home</i> is lost to me forever- the surveillance is less thick. No Alexas disgrace the air, but everyone except for me is apparently too lazy to use their device keyboards, opting for voice dictation instead. Asking Siri the most ridiculous questions for the sole purpose of making me miffed, laughing to themselves when I refuse to consent to Apple analyzing whatever noises I make and leave the room.</p>
<p>But something more sinister is lurking beneath the surface. I... I can't seem to concentrate in the confines of my home anymore. The first third of this post was drafted at the park, and these last two seem to be some mere moment of respite, some sweet relief. I don't know if it's a psychic attack, willing or not, or my subconscious forcing me out of a place I swore I'd be out of forever just a year ago, or something else...</p>
<p>But I keep all my devices encrypted, full disk whenever possible, and I wipe and reinstall everything regularly, for I'll be damned if the cameras become real. Even if this is the only way to resist the golden cage, in such a seemingly insignificant area, I keep it close to my heart.</p>
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<h1>Neurodiversity (ROOPHLOCH 2019)</h1>
<p>published: 2019-09-05</p>
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<p>Call this <a href="gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7esolderpunk/phlog/announcing-roophloch-2019.txt">ROOPHLOCH</a>, or something like it, for I sit here alone in my backyard on a humid and buggy day. The world is almost imperceptibly different today than it was yesterday. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200407182959/https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/gaming/sans-from-undertale-joins-smash-bros-ultimate-as-a-mii-fighter-costume/ar-AAGOro2">Sans is in Smash</a>, and school has started (which makes the house more quiet than I can handle), and apparently I've started lifting every day. An alternate timeline where everything is not quite right, and yet a little bit better every day.</p>
<p>Yesterday, while sitting in the same spot under a tree and pretending there wasn't a Direct going on, I read an article titled <a href="https://spectator.us/dangers-neurodiversity-cure-autism/">"The Dangers of 'Neurodiversity'"</a>, which struck a particular nerve. In the article, the author points out that, despite the neurodiversity movement's insistence that autistic people are not disabled but "differently abled", it is the fact that he is autistic and not his environment which has gotten him fired from jobs for behavior problems over twenty times and severely impacted his social and motor skills. The main crux of his argument is that the existence of "high-functioning" autistic people does not and should not prevent a search for the cure to autism, and that identity politics actively harms "low-functioning" autistic people whose disability greatly impacts their ability to function in mainstream society.</p>
<p>I have mixed feelings about this. In my elementary school years, I was pathologized, constantly pulled out of classes and locked in a room where I would have to do kindergarten-level reading to a school official who didn't give a damn about whether I was bored or frustrated with the banality of the work she gave me. Cards with pictures of simple nouns, like "apple", and the word underneath, made to read each one- yes! I know it's an apple! When the cards ran out, I was forced to go into "gifted education", where, instead of getting to make rubber band cars and catapults with the rest of my grade in science class, I and several other kids cramped ourselves into a repurposed storage closet and analyzed short shories at the behest of an underpaid teacher- and never received any academic rewards, like better grades, for doing so. The IEP which was supposed to protect me and help me grow into a productive member of society just like my peers only isolated me from them. If the issue is a lack of socializing, why would you separate a child from the peers they were supposed to be socializing with?</p>
<p>Given the existence of a cure, my parents almost certainly would have given doctors permission to irrevocably alter my brain chemistry without my consent, essentially killing one child in exchange for a lower-maintenance replacement.</p>
<p>Which future do you choose? One where the very essence of your soul is up for your parents to mold and replace at will like a computer, or one where the fact of the world being designed around a mindset that is fundamentally exhausting for you to mask yourself as for extended periods of time threatens to essentially condemn you to the golden cage of your parents' care for eternity?</p>
<p>One might look at a child who "soils themselves, wreak havoc, and breaks things", as the article puts it, a child who will grow up into an adult who does those very same things, and agree that this child needs a cure. "Low-functioning" individuals who might want a cure often cannot advocate for themselves because of the very same disability they need cured, which leads to a strange sort of confirmation bias. But how "low-functioning" is too low? Should a "high-functioning" person who might have a few quirks but otherwise can take care of themselves and live a fulfilling life be forced to take a cure at the behest of their employer?</p>
<p>Who gets to draw that line? The parents? The State? The disabled individuals themselves?</p>
<p><i>Where</i> do we draw the line?</p>
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<h1>Sign of Life</h1>
<p>published: 2019-09-29</p>
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<p>I feel as though I am waking up after a long sleep. Cradled by the undercurrents- not a sudden and fierce unleashing of power, like Ceuta bursting out from her tomb, but something more subdued, more silent. A trawl through the tombs instead, torch in amnesic hand, shards of memories slowly bubbling back to the surface as my eyes gaze on the carvings on the ancient hallways I pass by. Times past, long since passed, times where <a href="../../../flashfiction/e/erin.html">I sang in the sun and rolled in the grass. Times where the words flowed from my fingers as gracefully as a spider building its web.</a> But now everything is covered in webs, gray as silk, sparkling in the sparse flickering light.</p>
<p><em>Returning home, are you? I never thought I’d see the day...</em></p>
<p><em>Welcome home, Vane Vander.</em></p>
<p>I feel as though, in the vast wilderness of my being, some part of me has died in order to survive. The forest has been razed, burnt to the ground. And although I know it will grow back, and it will bloom in abundance as it once did in full defiance of all I have gone through, it will never grow back the same.</p>
<p>I have scorched myself in the flame of my passion, and now, instead of the overgrown bush that reached in a million directions and tangled itself in its intricacies, I am the little sprout poking its head out from the ashes, free to see the sun through the frames of the tree branches sans leaves lost in the blaze.</p>
<p>One can only grow up from here.</p>
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<p><a href="../../../books/tyia.epub" title="Three Years In Absentia, a premonition ignored">And now I stand at the precipice of yet another fleeing</a>, but this time, I am not seeking refuge: I have my own server, my own website, my own domain. I have backdoors (in the "way out" sense, not the "security hole" sense) in ZeroNet and Tor and I2P. I am not dependent on the goodwill of anyone anymore, except for those who I have paid for their services, and they care little what I do so long as they receive their pennies at the end of the day.</p>
<p>Any time I join a community, it always ends up in my being abused in one way or another. Whether from full-blown psychological warfare to a six-page essay in response to a throwaway comment to the common "it's just banter, bro", it always happens. Always it's one rotten apple that's allowed to fester, spoiling the whole bunch.</p>
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<p>Community, as an ideal, stands in opposition to individuality, because it requires in the reining in of the unique for a supposed greater whole. I recognize no greater whole to whom I am willing to give such power, so I have no interest in community.</p>
<p>- Apio Ludd, <i>I Want Friends, Not Community</i></p>
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<p>So I come to the mouth of the tomb. The air of the world kisses my face for the first time in what feels like forever. The sky is overcast. It is slightly chilly out, the start of October, the true end of summer. The unshaven hairs on my arms stand up a little, and I smile at the thought that, even if I don’t quite remember what to do from here on out, some part of me knows.</p>
<p>Some part of me will always know, I guess.</p>
<p>I ascend the last few stairs and step out of the cave. A familiar song fills my ears, or perhaps "bundle of melodic noises" would be a better description, for it carries no discernable melody. And yet, if any one of the noises were to disappear, the whole thing would fall apart.</p>
<p>It sings of something lurking beneath the surface. Something from days forgotten redicovered anew.</p>
<p>A friend, a lover.</p>
<p>A poet, a brother.</p>
<p>Long live Vane Vander, indeed.</p>
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