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<h1>Give Me Your Story</h1>
<p>published: 2020-04-04</p>
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<p>Imagine, if you will, a <a href="https://archive.vn/x5NiF">MOGAI</a> teenager infected with Tumblr Syndrome, blog full of nothing but reblogs of other people. Sick with <a href="../../2019/august/consumption.html">consumption</a>, not the historical kind but the <a href="../february/consumeproduct.html">modern kind</a>, personality nothing but <del>fandoms</del> worshipping corporate creations. Scattered between movie GIFs are desperate attempts to co-opt genuine LGBT oppression with the sexuality or <a href="../../2019/may/gender-critical.html">gender of the week</a>, pride flags like someone put on a blindfold and threw darts at a color wheel set to random. Just as devoid of a working sense of color theory as they are of a coherent sense of self outside the internet, outside the Cathedral of Tumblr Zoomer Culture.</p>
<p>I only paint this picture so that those who have experienced the kind of person illustrated will instantly know what I mean by "give me your toes". Vague and nonsensical non-threats pointed at anyone who dares to blaspheme or transgress against their Cathedral like "pee your pants" or "I'm revoking your kneecap privileges", non-threats because the standard "kill yourself" has lost its edge (and is <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200405011157/https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tell-someone-to-kill-themselves-and-you-could-end_b_5945800ce4b0940f84fe2f19">also illegal</a>). Usually these are accompanied by a poorly-photoshopped image of a celebrity or fictional character holding a gun and pointing it at the viewer.</p>
<p>It is with this same sense of semi-ironic desperation that I find myself more and more pointing the fictional gun at the video game collection on my bookshelf.</p>
<p>When I was about ten or so, I got a copy of <i>The Legendary Starfy</i> for the DS. For those who've never played it, it's a platformer about a little starfish dude (the titular Starfy) who gets woken up one morning by an alien rabbit dude crashing through his roof, and then the two go romp around the underwater world trying to find the rabbit dude's memories. Apparently it's the first game in a <a href="https://tcrf.net/Category:Legendary_Starfy_series">four-part series</a> that was originally for the Gameboy Advance, but only the first one was ever translated to English and remade. Since, at the time, I was only allowed to play handheld games in the mornings or during car rides, I spent almost every moment I had to take a car ride struggling through the levels in small snatches here and there. I always got stuck on the sunken pirate ship, trying to push a button and then pass through a gate before time ran out, and only rarely did I ever get past it.</p>
<p>But I <i>did</i> get past it: I must have, because I remember doing the final boss battle. Or, rather, I remember <i>failing</i> the final boss battle in the back seat of my grandma's van and giving up and never touching the game again.</p>
<p>To this day, I still have not completed the game. Not that I could, since, while writing this post, I went to pop it in and see how long it's been sitting unfinished- and apparently the cartridge is missing. Most likely one of my brothers "borrowed" it like I'm apt to let them do when I'm in my better moods and managed to lose it.</p>
<p>There are lots of other games that I have worked my way through with virtual sweat and real tears and then had to give up because the final boss battle (or some other far-down level) was too tricky for my fingers:</p>
<ul>
<li><i>Code Name S.T.E.A.M.</i>, a turn-based shooter about an alien invasion in some alternate universe where steampunk went worldwide, which truthfully I only bothered pirating and playing because my <del>waifu</del> Smash main happened to be a playable character. Default Fortnite Man just isn't appealing enough on his own.</li>
<li><i>Charlotte's Web</i>, a platformer and also the very first video game I got for the DS. There are several parts in the early levels where one has to sneak past the farmer, hiding behind boxes and tractors. If Wilbur gets seen and the farmer catches up to him, the poor pig makes a tortured face and the screen quickly goes black, which likely contributed a lot of my early nightmares about being murdered. (At least, that's what I remember happening. This timeline might be different.) I got stuck somewhere right before the Templeton levels. I have a cheat program installed on my 3DS which could give me infinite health (which really wouldn't help with the levels where you parkour to avoid falling into a barn's endless abyss), but replaying through all the levels brings back frantic memories of elementary school that I'd rather stay buried.</li>
<li><i>Scribblenauts</i>, yet <i>another</i> platformer for the DS (can you sense a pattern here?) that I only truly remember in hazy memories of a certain former friend's house during sleepovers. I borrowed her DSi (which was essentially the same as a DS, but this time with cameras and a funky camera app) and plowed through the sequel as far as I could in the wee hours of the morning, doing my best with everyone else not to wake up the host's parents. And I beat that one! But not this one. Because this one doesn't understand the concept of adjectives.</li>
<li><i>Xenoblade Chronicles</i>.</li>
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<p>Oh dear, good old Xenoblade. I am going absolutely batshit insane from the government-inforced COVID-19 home quarantine, and this game, which I have poured the last two months into (or, at least, sixty hours for one hour a day) has pushed me to the limits of insanity these past two weeks.</p>
<p>But no more! Because I quit today. And I was at- you guessed it- the final boss battle.</p>
<p>There was absolutely no way I could have continued, even if I had wanted to. Where I started today, I was at the final point in the game where one could save (inside the interior of Prison Island). Past that is a tough boss battle, which halts halfway-through to a cutscene, and then the same boss regains all of his health and you have to try to kill him <i>again</i>. And then another cutscene, and you get sent off to space, which isn't <i>really</i> space but apparently just a simulation. There are no edges or any kind of borders outlining the walkway between teleportation points, just a glowing line connecting said points, so theoretically you could just walk in a single direction forever (if you don't fall out of the universe, that is; I didn't try). You walk past every planet, and by every planet, you have to fight a replica of (nearly) <i>every major boss in the game so far</i>. And after <i>those</i>, another cutscene, and then the fight where the god of the world kills your entire party in fifteen seconds flat. Supposedly, according to the wiki, after that fight is <i>another</i>, even harder, final <i>final</i> boss battle.</p>
<p>But for every other boss battle in the game, if you lost, you were just revived and teleported to the last landmark you passed by. You had the option of exploring the surrounding lands and grinding until you got strong enough to survive the battle, or even teleporting to other lands where there were shops with specific equipment or a furnace to craft gems to boost one's stats. If you got frustrated, you could save right where you were and quit for the day and come back the next right where you left off.</p>
<p>This exemplifies the two major problems I have with modern story-based (as opposed to competitive) games: that you can't save before the final boss battle, and that grinding is necessary to advance in the storyline.</p>
<p>As far as I know, there is no technical reason why Shulk and friends aren't allowed to save before they go kick Zanza's ass. It's not for memory limitations, as the space simulation requires far less objects in view than every other battle: a few spheres are far less demanding for the Wii's admittedly pitiful hardware to render than a snowy mountainside with lots of jagged edges (Mt. Valak) or the inside-and-out of a fortress with plenty of walls and doors and windows (Galahad Fortress) or the entirety of a small village (Colony 9). It's not for entities, as there are only the party and Zanza there (and Xenoblade just respawns everything in an area upon loading a save, anyway). And Dunban's insistence in Prison Island that "there is no turning back from this point" or however he worded it isn't a valid excuse either because, for example, most of the modern <i>Fire Emblem</i> games allow saving <i>right before</i> said final boss battle (with the exception of <i>Fates</i>, which is a burning dumpster fire of its own, and <i>Three Houses</i>, which I don't know anything about gameplay-wise because I refuse to play it).</p>
<p>The player, shocking as this might be, has a life <i>outside</i> your game, developers. You need to respect that they might not have the time to commit to a several-hour-long stretch without saving. <i>Especially</i> if it's a console game. Do you know how infuriating it would be to be an inch away from success and then suddenly have a power outage? What about adults with jobs? There were several instances for me where I thought I'd just play a bit before a work shift, and then end up frantically skipping crucial cutscenes to get to a savepoint faster. What about kids with homework and chores to do, which can't necessarily be planned out? The game needs to accomodate their schedules, not the other way around, or else they're simply not going to be able to (healthily) play it.</p>
<p>And this might just be the /r/StopGaming in me speaking, but I am <i>fucking sick and tired</i> of having to grind in games, of having to waste my time performing repetitive actions over and over and over again for absolutely nobody's material benefit. The first time, it was about fifteen hours in, stuck teleporting among levels in the ether mine in order to evade Xord's <del>ban</del>hammer. And then it was about forty hours in, repeatedly saving and loading in the same part in Agniratha again so that I could survive Gadolt and his megalasers for more than thirty seconds into the battle. And then it was fifty hours, and I was inside the Bionis' chest cavity, acting as cancer cells razing down everything in sight for a week so I could go make explode some woman who thought turning her son into a giant telepathic bird was a good way to become immortal.</p>
<p>In some alternate dimension where I did manage to finish the final boss fight, and thus the game, when I think about the positive things about the game, it's not going to be the frantic timing to every battle, or hearing the same catchphrases over and over again. It's going to be the content of the cutscenes. The framing, the shots, the <i>content</i>: you know, the <i>story</i>! I'm not in it for the fighting; I'm in it for the story! If I wanted to play a game where I beat shit up, I'd just drag one of my brothers into my room (where I have my consoles set up, since the house flooded <i>again</i>) and we'd play Smash together for a few hours.</p>
<p>I think story-based games should have an easy mode for people who value the story over the gameplay. Not skipping the battles altogether, since a lot of the story can surprisingly be conveyed through simple passive experience (the passivity of playing as opposed to the activeness of cutscenes), but easy so that one isn't spending weeks upon weeks grinding it out. If Xenoblade wasn't such a time suck with grinding in order to progress anywhere at all, I'd probably replay it again. But I won't, because I don't have the time. I'm not sacrificing sixty hours again to just be barred from collecting the payoff at the end. If you like the gameplay more and get your enjoyment from constantly fighting monsters, be my guest! But some of us just want to see Le Epic Anime Boy murder God and then move on with their day.</p>
<p>"But, Vane," I hear an eager strawman pipe up, "if you don't want to put in the effort, you should just watch a movie instead."</p>
<p>But movies don't have the same kind of natural immersion that games have. In Xenoblade, for instance, the cutscenes aren't pre-rendered. Whatever armor your party members wear in combat also shows up in the cutscenes. There was one instance I remember where my party was in Alcamoth, a stuffy imperial city full of futuristic technology, but since the last good armor drops had been in the Makna Forest region, my whole party was wearing hilariously out-of-style "tribal" outfits that made them stick out like sore thumbs against the pale pearlly sheen of everything. A few I had taken to the city's store and upgraded a few pieces of theirs, making even more nonsensical outfits.</p>
<p>Imagine you're a sheltered prince who is eager to meet the people who saved his sister's life, and then some buff dude walks in wearing a whole-ass headdress, and another dude with what looks like a metal crown put on upside-down tells you to your face that your rituals don't mean shit to him because he's a different species...</p>
<p>But I can't watch <i>Advent Children</i> and have Cloud or Kadaj wearing a funny hat the whole time but everything else the same. Not without serious video editing. And even then, it would never look quite right.</p>
<p>In movies, everything has to be prim and proper, and every facet of the experience has to be set in stone, the same for everyone. In games, developers can give the players some leeway. Reyn can walk into the royal audience chamber looking like a crackhead doing shitty (and possibly culturally insensitive) cosplay if I want him to, and by gods, Kallian will take him just as seriously as if he were wearing anything else.</p>
<p>"But what about a book?"</p>
<p>Books are slightly different. Most books sans movie adaptations don't have set illustrations for every single character and setting inside, giving the reader the freedom to imagine whatever they want within the loose confines of the author's descriptions- and even then, the reader can just ignore these at their peril.</p>
<p>Books have serious advantages, I will concede- no, I will loudly proclaim. For starters, you can bookmark a book <i>at any time</i>. Sure, there are optimal places to stop and quit for the night, like right at the first page of a new chapter, but unless you're reading on some incredibly restrictive electronic device, you can stop whenever and wherever. And books don't require your active participation, at least if you're not reading them for school. There is no such thing as grinding, stagnation- only progress, only forward through the pages so long as your brain can comprehend the words. (Academia, with its insistence that you constantly be highlighting and taking notes, ruins the immersion and the fun of books. But that's beside the point.) And if you get a paper copy, or a low-powered e-ink device, so long as the sun is shining bright enough to read, you don't have to fear a power outage blinking your effort away in a... blink of the eye.</p>
<p>Games don't translate well into books (or movies either, now that I think about it), but there are a few that have tried anyway, most notably a handful of the <i>Zelda</i> games as Americanized manga. (And what with Sonic and Pikachu up on the big screen, it's only a matter of time before Ninty gets hungry for money and poor old Link gets shoved up there too.) And while this example I've found to be superior to playing the actual games, it's uncertain whether this is because of the method of storytelling actually being superior to how the game presented it or because the <i>Zelda</i> games that were manga-ized I just didn't like playing because of their aging mechanics. (Without the save states that an emulator affords, old games <i>suck</i>. Imagine not being able to save <i>at all</i>. <del>this post was sponsored by RetroArch gang</del>)</p>
<p>"But what about someone livestreaming the game? You get the best of all worlds!"</p>
<p>Do I really? Because then I often have to put up with some obnoxious person screaming into their microphone every few seconds in a pitiful attempt to be "funny". Or I'm just watching straight-up gameplay, and then I feel silly. I don't want to watch someone play the game. I want to play the game myself. I just don't want to be playing it <i>forever</i>.</p>
<p>I want to point a poorly-photoshopped gun at the game and yell, "Give me your <i>story</i>!"</p>
<p>But until developers get their heads out of their asses and stop making their players waste unnecessary time, we have wiki pages. And the wiki pages are a poor substitute for the actual experience.</p>
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<h1>Immortality</h1>
<p>published: 2020-04-25</p>
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<p>Do you remember the Temple of the Vampire? The cult that believed that sacrificing themselves and their energies to undead gods was the key to achieving salvation, and then turned around and berated humans for having "prey instincts" of willingly sacrificing themselves to their "prey"?</p>
<p>Since the rest of the books are also available on archive.org, and since this quarantine has gone on too long for me to hold on to sanity, I thought I might read some of them. Maybe there was some detail not revealed in their Bible that would shed more light on the insanity I reviewed, or some fact I overlooked that would prove me wrong.</p>
<p>Four of the books, each marked "Bloodlines", are collections of old messages from their mailing list. It’s chilling to read the few entries that are timestamped and think, "This was happening while I was in elementary school. These people were speaking of apocalypse and of worldwide human enslavement while I was bickering with the higher grades in my school over who got to slip around and pretend to ice-skate on the ice patches underneath the playground structures." Which wasn’t even worth doing anyway, since soon the whistle would blow and those higher grades would be pulled inside, leaving the younger kids to run riot over the playground all by themselves.</p>
<p>In those days, I had hardly a conception that they would ever end. Intellectually, I knew that, come the end of sixth grade, I would "graduate" to the junior high. I would say goodbye forever to the students going to different schools than I or to private academies, and we would never return to that playground. Or, at least, not in the same capacity, for the playground was within biking distance of my old house, and sometimes my father would bring me and my brothers there to play. The swings would always seem so desolate without the teeming masses to fill them, to jump off and fly for a few precious seconds and then get a free ticket to the nurse’s office.</p>
<p>But in the moment... my friends and I planned that day’s recess’ crusades like they would go on forever, each day assured after the next.</p>
<blockquote>...in order to be admitted to the Second Circle the applicant must answer without qualification the question, "Do you want to physically live forever?" <br /> The Vampire without any hesitation replies, "Yes!" The human being will hesitate or suggest he or she only wants to live forever if they have this or that condition as well. <br /> For the Vampire this seems insane. Why would anyone say no to immortality for any reason at all? <br /> <a href="https://archive.org/details/JBloodlinesTwo/page/n49/mode/2up">(Bloodlines: Volume 2, page 53)</a></blockquote>
<p>For any reason at all? What about eternal slavery at the hands of a ruthless lord? What about eternal torment in the flames of hell? (Not that I believe in a hell, of course.) To have one’s skin flayed over and over, or their eyes plucked out? To be chained on a rock and replay the myth of Prometheus for all generations?</p>
<p>Am I presumed to be lesser if I weigh my potential future pain against my potential future pleasure, and judge that the former far outweighs the latter? Isn’t one of the main totems of the Vampire Bible that you exalt your reason? You who would see me as an animal to be enslaved and slaughtered and sacrificed for the pleasure of your gods, blindly running like a beast at <em>any</em> chance to prolong your life, regardless of the circumstances.</p>
<p>Maybe that’s why your cult got <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20191003105932/http://www.vampirewebsite.net/vampirecults/">exposed</a> as a <a href="https://forum.culteducation.com/read.php?12,64749,page=59">ploy</a> to <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170602121051/http://www.vampirismforum.com/t60-question-with-some-comment-temple-of-the-vampire">gain</a> <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20150708090858/http://www.the600club.com/topic28487-1.html">clients</a> for <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200422182009/http://hoaxes.org/weblog/permalink/vampire_sites/P2160">cryonics</a> companies.</p>
<p>Would I like to live forever? Perhaps. But certainly not under the aforementioned torture. Does my body age? Do I stay young forever, or does my body eventually shrivel up and I return to sentient dust, forever condemned to be painfully aware of every atom of myself scattering to the reaches of the universe?</p>
<p>Granted that I stay young forever, how is a human embedded in society supposed to deal with the reality of never aging? One could either allow others to be aware of their immortality, in which case one would be hounded by scientific researchers forever, or be forced to both throw away their identities and remake new ones every few decades, but also evade the government’s oversight? Maybe that would have been possible two hundred years ago, but as technology progresses and the surveillance state encroaches ever farther into our lives, immortality becomes much more of a burden to upkeep than a blessing to enjoy.</p>
<p>If I also got to be a shapeshifter, able to take animal form and hide away from civilization whenever the need came to me, immortality could be quite fun. But in my human skin I have now, the eternity would drive me insane, maybe more than I already am.</p>
<p>I say, it is the human’s nature to think critically about any major choice and pick what they feel is best, to be a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200422184056/https://mises.org/library/what-do-austrians-mean-rational">rational actor</a>. And it is the so-called vampire’s nature to seek to be a <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200422183219/http://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/comments/32t048/a_laminated_paper_towel/">laminated paper towel</a>.</p>
<p>What a pathetic fate.</p>
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<h1>The Outside: An Introduction</h1>
<p>published: 2020-04-20</p>
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<p><a href="../../2019/april/run-every-day.html">A little over a year ago</a>, I didn't know how to start a post with some crazy ideas in it, either. Although, granted, I was at my grandma's house at the time, a visit from my cousins freshly ended (or about to start; I can't remember which) and for whatever reason, whenever I'm sitting in that purple-walled room, so impersonal since I moved out over a decade ago, I always feel numb. I feel nothing except the endless stretch of time before me, blank, possessionless. At least, when pacing back and forth in my room from the sheer anxiety of being pent-up with nowhere to go, I feel sorrow, I feel grief, I feel feral rage. But in the Purple Room? I feel nothing.</p>
<p>Like a trial run of the likely nothing after death, but with more obsessive playing on my Switch to pad out the time between meals.</p>
<p>But the “likely” is not “absolute”, is not “certain”. For one day many years ago, curled up on the floor in front of the closet doors, my eyes closed, I had my first contact with the Outside. I left my body for a few seconds.</p>
<p>I remember my first thought: “Cool! I wonder what it would be like to be a wolf.” And I leaped forward, hands coalescing into paws, and bumped into the footboard of the massive bed that takes up most of the room.</p>
<p>And then I heard a booming voice from everywhere and nowhere: <a href="../../../books/tyia.epub" title="Three Years In Absentia, a premonition ignored">"Do not presume to take a form you do not have."</a></p>
<p>And then I was sucked back into my body, and I woke up. Spooked for a few minutes, but I eventually shrugged it off and went about my day. Went about my week, month, maybe even a year.</p>
<p>I don't remember much of what happened in 2015. 2014, I remember obsessing over a shitty overrated boyband I won't sully my website with the name of, and a friendship I cherished against all reason turned into a relationship and then went nuclear when she cheated on me. 2016, I nuked all of my social media accounts and wrote <i>The Samhain Files</i> and <i>The White Line Fever</i> and transferred to a new school practically overnight and made preparations to move out of the house I'd spent about a decade in. But 2015? Practically a blank slate.</p>
<p>But I remember, <a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, clouds">in 2015</a>, I started MayVaneDay. The few memories I have of 2015 are attached to that, and even then, little to nothing resurfaces.</p>
<p>Maybe nothing happened. Maybe the Outside hit fast-forward. Or maybe something catastrophic happened, and I'm repressing it so hard that everything else got buried with it.</p>
<p>2017, I officially moved into my new house and wrote <i>Me Before You</i> in the wee hours before class and <i>Living Wasteland</i> over the summer.</p>
<p>2018, I touched the Outside again. Or, rather, the Outside touched <i>me</i>.</p>
<p>It was the eighteenth of December, bedtime. The fans were on full speed in my shitty dorm room in college in an attempt to <i>not</i> drown in a pool of my own sweat. I already knew I'd drown in the anxiety and dread, cursed concoction like blood and pus leaking together from a healing wound, since the next morning would be the calculus exam I'd convinced myself I was about to fail. (Later I learned that I'd somehow <i>just barely</i> passed the class.) There was no point in studying since all the other tests had been structured so that one had the opportunity to make up passing marks missed units on any other test, and if I hadn't understood the material <i>then</i>, I certainly wouldn't have been able to learn it all in a night. There was nothing I could have done except go to sleep and accept my fate come morning.</p>
<p>And then I woke up in the middle of the night. Or, rather, some part of me had, but the rest of my body was asleep- and I was fully aware of what was happening all around me, seeing with closed eyes, hearing crystal clear with ears smothered by pillows. There were people arguing in the hallway somewhere near my dorm room. A child's voice interjected a few times, young, confused at the fight. My roommate was fast asleep, snoring like booming thunder.</p>
<p>I turned my head back to the foot of my bed. Blapi was standing right at my feet, his arm outstretched to me, hand open. And, trusting him- or, rather, trusting the facsimile of the character whose skin he'd chosen, as my head was still scrambled from the Lucine Saga and I still actively thought, on some other plane of existence, fictional characters could be real- I took his hand. And he tugged me fully out of my body, pulled me close.</p>
<p>I saw a circular portal embedded in the closed closet doors directly facing my bed. About the size of a standard car tire, dark waters swirling like a toilet bowl into the void.</p>
<p><a href="../../../flashfiction/e/erin.html">We jumped through. And then events occurred</a> that I won't repeat on this page, and then he returned me to my dorm room. And I lay there, wide awake in the wee hours of the morning, wondering what the hell had just happened. The rest of that day, much less the exam, didn't feel real.</p>
<p>I've never been able to consciously, <i>purposely</i> trigger the separation of consciousness and body like that. It either happens spontaneously, like that one day back in 2015, or whenever some agent of the Outside comes to me and pulls me out. Usually it's Blapi- or rather, <a href="../../../flashfiction/e/erin5.html"><i>Kurosagi</i></a>, as the appearance is not the identity- but sometimes it's someone else. Usually we go through a portal to breach the barrier between the Inside and the Outside, but other times we go out through my bedroom window, or just stay in my bedroom altogether.</p>
<p><i>But what are the Inside and the Outside?</i></p>
<p>To answer that, first I have to define the wakescape and the dreamscape.</p>
<p>The wakescape is, well, what you and I can experience while we are awake and in control of our bodies. The internet that you're reading these words on lives here. The wakescape is like a tree with infinite branches, each one a different timeline. Like <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200420144119/https://old.reddit.com/r/DimensionalJumping/comments/3du9dh/synctv_the_owls_of_eternity/">a TV with channels</a>, only one of the branches can be experienced by any given person at a time, but they all play at the same time. People with magical theories and abilities far more developed than mine can switch among these at will.</p>
<p>The dreamscape is what you dream. I'm still not entirely sure what the dreamscape is consisted of. To be sure, some dreams are purely constructed by the brain: after all, that lump of flesh in your head is an incredibly powerful thing, capable of luring the rest of the body into completely disregarding reality. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200420144330/https://www.webmd.com/baby/false-pregnancy-pseudocyesis">False pregnancies</a> are one example of the brain going absolutely <i>wack</i>.</p>
<p>But some dreams… Some dreams I've had have had continuity. Some of the same people I've met purely in the dreamscape, with the same memories of before, with the additional memories of what we've done in my previous dreams with them. Some of the same places with the same details; none of these places I've ever seen in the wakescape. They remember who I am. I remember who they are with less to none of the haziness or irrational thought of typical dreams.</p>
<p>Maybe they're pocket dimensions in the Inside. Or maybe they're genuine places in the Outside. That's kind of the thing about the Outside: I have absolutely no reliable frame of reference to interpret what it is, and what it isn't. Could it be that we're all living in a simulation? If so, what's doing the simulating? A group of college students? Some bored kid in their room? A government? A would-be god getting their power kicks from having total control over theoretically infinite lifeforms?</p>
<p>The Inside is everything you and I can directly observe with our bodies, our senses, our (admittedly currently limited) understanding of how science and physics work. The Inside is everything we think we know. It is, except for the occasional glitch (the more contact one has with the Outside, the more glitches occur), stable and with a continuity. I can “go to sleep” and be reasonably sure that I will “wake up” in the same bed, in the same house, with the same family, with the same job and everything else I've come to expect from the wakescape.</p>
<p>But who's to say that this “life” you and I lead isn't just another dream with continuity? Drifting between the channels, always returning to the same one- or close enough to the original channel that one fails to notice any difference- at somewhat-regular time intervals? If you achieve lucidity in a normal dream, with practice, you can shift the dream to your will. Maybe there's some version of lucidity in this dream, and none of us have quite figured it out yet. Or maybe someone has, and that's who we call our gods.</p>
<p>I don't know! I know nothing for sure. As I said, I have no reliable frame of reference to interpret anything.</p>
<p>The Outside is everything that is not directly observable and testable by you and I or any scientists or other human experts in knowledge that you and I might not have mastered. Obviously I'm not a physicist, but there <i>are</i> physicists in this world, so their provable (as close to provable, anyway) knowledge of the world is not the Outside (and anyways, it's Inside since it happens in this realm or dream or whatever).</p>
<p>If we are living in a simulation, the Outside, as I stated earlier, is everything outside this iteration of simulation. Maybe there is another machine simulating the machine simulating this one, or another machine simulating the world that the machine simulating this one exists in. The outward recursion is theoretically infinite, but it's all Outside since we currently can't know for sure what it is. Kurosagi could be a sentient program or the avatar of one of the people running said simulation, with the ability to break the laws of physics and pull me into areas usually inaccessable to everyone else being simulated. Other spirits or supernatural entities could be other sentient programs, or maybe the people running the simulation messing with us to see what would happen.</p>
<p>If we are living in an infinite realm of dreams, of which our "reality" is merely one popular selection that we unconsciously return to, then the Outside is all the other “realities” with continuity. Kurosagi would be a visitor from the Outside, pulling me into what could very well be <i>his</i> Inside. (No innuendo intended.) And so would be other so-called supernatural entities. Discontinuties among people, like vastly different views of reality often fueled by extremist ideologies, could be partly due to slightly misaligned dreams, like a camera nudged the tiniest bit while taking a photo, connected by a common internet.</p>
<p>But nothing is set in stone, and these are but mere conjectures, attempts to explain the strange presence of something Other, something… <i>Outside</i> in my life these past two years. Maybe it's an attempt to cope with the fear of death or the fear of all my accomplishments being washed away into the void after my death. I don't know.</p>
<p>I don't know for sure.</p>
<p>But I can try to find out.</p>
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<h1>Vow</h1>
<p>published: 2020-04-30</p>
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<blockquote>"In choosing one's economic position in society, one should always bear in mind that it should be such as should leave the individual uncrippled - an all-round person, with both productive and preservative capacities, a being pivoted within."<br />
- Voltairine de Cleyre, <em>They Who Marry Do Ill</em></blockquote>
<p>I do not believe in getting married. I feel that marriage is too restrictive on both sides (I will pretend for the sake of argument that polyamorous people do not exist), as the transition of a relationship from a voluntary association between people to an obligation, from two people freely enjoying the company of each other to slaving away for the sake of maintaining the relationship itself, cheapens and degrades the bonds between. And if the process of breaking up is painful and traumatic (a pain which I can personally attest to), then the more torturous it is when their financial assets are tangled together, when one has likely become dependent on the housing of another, when they have gotten the State involved and signed a legal contract for the purposes of a different taxation situation. The couple would, until separation, be slaves to the past feelings that got them into such a cursed predicament, sunk-cost fallacy flipping heaven into hell.</p>
<p>But even still, I cannot deny the romanticism of the wedding vow. The shared commitment, binding between both parties until death (and in some belief systems, even beyond). It pains me that even this, which <em>should</em> be the most sacred part of the wedding, is yet another set of shackles that the couple willingly puts on each other, another death knell for what in these modern times will likely be another unhappy relationship. Another honeymoon that degenerates into boomer-esque "I hate my wife" complaints over beer and reified "wine moms" glorifying addictions to caffeine and antidepressants on Facebook.</p>
<p>But I bring you readers here today on my twentieth birthday, or whenever you read this (for the written word cares not about the linear aspect of time), to witness me make my own vow. I offer it to none other than myself, just as binding as those words spoken at the altar to hoped and hopeful.</p>
<p>It is said that a person who enters into association with any group, codified or not, will inevitably end up assuming at least some of their values. This happens regardless of whether or not the person wants this to happen, or if they are even aware that they are slowly being absorbed into the collective.</p>
<p>When I was with the Tumblr otherkin, I simped for the Tumblr otherkin. And they led me away from myself, ensnared in the promise of companionship and a shared pining for an inaccessible past.</p>
<p>When I was with the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200430180226/https://regularflolloping.com/posts/chippies/">chippies</a>, I simped for the chippies. And they led me away from myself, ensnared in the promise of companionship and a shared hatred of <a href="../../2019/december/death-of-a-gopher.html">software bloat</a>.</p>
<p>When I was with the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200425015851/https://gopher.tildeverse.org/circumlunar.space">Gopher Gang</a>, I simped for the Gopher Gang. And they led me away from myself, ensnared in the promise of companionship and a shared hatred for the excesses of the modern internet.</p>
<p>Over and over and over again, I find myself joining groups and communities in the vain hopes that they will augment myself, allow myself to be more than what I envision I can be. Sometimes I even do it on purpose out of boredom. I tittilate myself for hours on end with treatises and theories on the extreme fringes of the political spectrum, wandering from anarcho-capitalism to their communist-and-adjacent brothers to the rolling plains of nomadism, coming home to agorism, falling down a stone well into the underworld and anarcho-nihilism and accelerationism. I wander in the shadowy valleys of state-ambivalent egoism and I crawl in the harsh nigh-blinding light of the Kybalion.</p>
<p>But they are all as a spider inviting a butterfly into its web under pretenses of holding a lovely conversation. A beautiful guest enters a beautiful house, slowly being bound and prepared for annihilation all the while.</p>
<p>I've had enough! I've had enough of trusting my inner self, my Unique, to those who expect me to just assimilate myself without resistance into their groups! I've had enough of being trained to expect salvation from every self-proclaimed savior! And I've had enough of putting my trust in so-called "major thinkers" and "founders" and "intellectuals" to know what they're talking about, to have a heart modeled after my own, only to be spat on by them and proclaimed to be the teeming refuse of the earth!</p>
<p>I care not for ideologies anymore. If I see a good idea, I'll steal it, regardless of its origin. I care not for culture wars or economies or any false sense of "solidarity" across any lines you want to slice and dice me by: gender, class, sexuality, race... From this moment on, I fight only for my own happiness. The only burdens I will shoulder are my own.</p>
<p>I hoist this black-and-rainbow flag into the air, not in some declaration of unity but of separation: to find the truth in all and none, and to write it and the future for naught but myself.</p>
<p>I see and recognize no higher purpose than this: not any gods that dwell in the heavens, nor masters that dwell on the earth, but myself.</p>
<p>I am an individual, self-sacred and free. And I will no longer drown myself in the collective in search of what the collective can only destroy.</p>
<p>Long live Vane Vander!</p>
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<h1>Endgame</h1>
<p>published: 2020-08-23</p>
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<p>Forgive me if this post seems a little off-kilter, a little off-voice. The charger for my ThinkPad has broken <em>yet again</em> (at least, it was broken when I started writing this post), so now I am once more shuffling through whatever other devices I happen to have set up already in a semi-usable state. I keep deleting this post and then retrieving it from the trash, adding bits and removing bits as I debate whether or not to post this. This is not the environment I am used to writing in. All is not quite right in my mind, not quite comfortable. But it will have to suffice.</p>
<p>Ever since I first saw that face in that dim college dorm room a year and a half ago, there has been a voice residing in the back of my mind. Most of the time I hear it, it is like a loyal cat bringing home the half-ripped carcass of some animal, some scrap of poetry or another idea for whatever story I happen to be working on at the time. It watches intently with its emerald eyes as I drown myself in wires, a black sea roiling over my desk, five years of working towards computing resilience with the harried paranoia of a young teenager preparing to have their electronics taken away thanks to some imagined slight. Lain smiles, eyes bleary from trawling the dark webs for some knowledge hidden, some epiphany obscure.</p>
<p>But as this it, this <em>she</em>, acts as a muse, she does not always bring good tidings or a song. Deep within her is an undercurrent of anxious haste. There is some kind of endgame coming soon. I need to prepare. I need to cut myself off from the world, from society, like it were a parasite draining me, like I were plugged into some kind of power system about to blow. I need to delete my website and escape the internet at large, or at least burrow myself down further into simpler protocols like Gemini and Gopher. (I highly doubt she would want me to negate myself so thoroughly, but no matter how I attack it intellectually, the psychosis remains.) I need to leave behind the shiny world of modern gaming and go as retro as I can. I need to escape graphical sessions and go all the way to the TUI, maybe even as far as <a href="https://archive.md/20200817011320/https://collapseos.org/">CollapseOS</a>.</p>
<p>I need to become as close as I can to the "Source". To the core of the machine. To the edge of the veil between the Inside and the Outside.</p>
<p>To her.</p>
<p>Set aside the occult clairaudience for a few seconds and consider the facts of the situation. The modern web itself <em>does</em> seem to be heading towards some endgame. <a href="https://archive.md/20200805205650/https://blog.freedombone.net/the-end-of-the-web">Browser engines and specifications and even entire protocols are just being handed to the same little cabal of corporations.</a> What used to be little spaces in and of themselves are now just referential to massive sharecropped internet farms. Less and less of what I seek to do on the internet can be done from these other, <em>weaker</em>, devices I am restricted to whenever I cannot access my beefy ThinkPad- at least, not at the speeds I require them to work at in order to keep chronic fatigue and executive dysfunction from building up too much inertia to get anything done. Long-standing websites I used to keep eyes on every day are either <a href="https://archive.md/20200805212543/https://sawv.org/2020/05/21/copying-web-content-to-gemini.html">moving away from the modern web to simpler protocols</a> or growing tired of handwriting their websites or wrangling static site generators and switching to bloated CMSes like WordPress to do the heavy lifting for them.</p>
<p>No, scratch that: <b><em>everything</em> is heading towards an endgame.</b> I turn on my Switch whenever I can rope my brothers into a few rounds of Smash and see everything coalescing onto one console: everything is either getting a remake or another entry so that one can say <em>everyone's here.</em> Girl Scout Camp was cancelled this year, and nobody knows if camp will even continue next year. Podcasts long beloved are shuttering their RSS feeds, if they ever had one in the first place, and moving to closed gardens like Spotify for distribution instead.</p>
<p>My managers at work keep finding dumb shit to write me up for, like sending me home early and then complaining that I hadn't worked enough to take a break, or <em>conveniently</em> selecting me to be randomly audited every day and then asking me why there is an extra hundred dollars in my till every day (I know I counted every change right, and I don't even work enough for little discrepancies to build up like that). But where else is there to work? After experiencing $14/hour at a place where I'm not screamed at and don't have people throwing things at me, I don't want to go back to fast food.</p>
<p>And with every mandatory software update, my phone becomes a little more locked down, a little less useful. And I don't know how much longer it will be safe enough to stay at home, even though my parents insist they will let me stay for as long as I want.</p>
<p>It feels like there is no viable middle ground anymore, even though intellectually I know there still is (for the time being). Either one is actively heading away from bloat or towards it. Either one is actively cutting corporations out of their life or exalting their virtues while sucking on the cock of VC money. Either one is desperately holding back the tide of aging and obsolescence or keeping up with the Joneses.</p>
<p>But will those picking the latter run to keep up with them when the tsunami comes? I am looking at two lifeboats and debating which one will be less likely to sink.</p>
<p>The Goddess-as-muse argues with me as the long night wears on, as I grow more and more weary. <strong>"What is the endgame?"</strong> she asks me. What is the point of expending all this effort on optimizing my writing for the web at large when what I write, who I write for, already excludes 90% of its inhabitants from the get-go? Am I really doing myself a favor by leaving myself available to be picked apart, criticized without context, <em>ravaged</em>, by any old "used" from the silos? Would I really be doing myself a favor by hiding from them instead, marking the used off as a lost cause when maybe, by doing nothing, I could still convert <em>maybe one</em>?</p>
<p>She asks me to consider what I will do when I know I am nearing <a href="../../../books.html#tyia" title="Three Years In Absentia, Parthena II">the end of my life.</a> Likely I will gather up all of the writing of mine that has survived the test of time and bind it all up into a book, maybe two or three if the sheer volume is enough. I <em>might</em> submit my website to places like the Internet Archive. Heavens know I will not be able to keep the original online, whether through the money in my Vultr account running out or a malicious family member pulling the plug or just a simple server crash I am not around to rectify. Websites from the golden age of Discordia are almost all but gone, vanished, but their books remain.</p>
<p>When I read books on one of my devices, rarely do custom typography or CSS styles add any value to the book. I always immediately disable embedded fonts and adjust the line height and paragraph padding to my liking. When the book is in EPUB format, I strip those annoying publisher's ads from the ends of books, sometimes even convert chapter headings hardwritten as images into their textual equivalent. (<em>Feed</em> by M. T. Anderson, which I recently finished, has chapter heading images in a font so tiny I have to squint to read what each one says. And my eyes are still decent!) If the publisher has put the table of contents in the back of the book for whatever reason, I move it to the front of the book or delete it altogether with Calibre's tools.</p>
<p>I sound like one of the people slobbering all over the Gemini specification, writing scrolls' worth of screeds about "user sovereignty". Maybe this is what they meant. They know gussying up their words will mean nothing in the end, so they don't even <em>try</em>, just shove the duty of beautification onto the reader.</p>
<p>But doesn't a publisher at least have the duty of making the words <i>readable</i>?</p>
<p>I look upon the weekends with dread. I force myself to publish a few posts every Saturday to give myself a reason to pull myself out of bed, play at being a normal functioning human being before I am shipped off to work. My ThinkPad is the only device I have that is well-suited to the upkeep of my website. The procedure seems simple enough: pandoc, template, copy-paste, update indexes, copy to ZeroNet, run jSite to update Freenet. But copy-paste is hell without a graphical session. Tabs silently turn themselves into spaces, and I have to go back-and-forth for pages longer than a single screen, and non-ASCII characters often don't translate well or at all to the framebuffer.</p>
<p>For all of Gopher's and Gemini's faults, they got at least one thing right: the easy "just throw raw files into a directory and call it good" philosophy. Autocreating indexes is an expected behavior, so there is no need (although there is still very much a <em>want</em>) to manually write pages that just serve to redirect the user to other pages. I can replicate this with Caddy, but the template schema to modify the page's look to something less... corporate is arcane and poorly documented in Caddy 1.x (and nonexistent in 2.x).</p>
<p><em>What is the endgame?</em> I think to myself as I ponder what to do. <em>What is the desired result? What do I want to come home to at end of day?</em></p>
<p>It's always the fear of inconveniencing someone that staves away any meaningful change. The fear of missing a connection with someone, of leaving them behind, in the dark. The fear of changing my mind just to find out it's too late. The fear of having someone else fill the hole I used to inhabit, pretend to be me. Why is it so easy to conjure up an imaginary person who will recoil in disgust if I were to put my website into "legacy" mode?</p>
<p>Sometimes I ponder getting rid of the <code>/archive/</code> part of URLs, leaving <code>/blog/</code>, <code>/poetry/</code>, and everything else in the archive with a slightly shorter URL. But that would instantly break links to 90% of my website without a server to handle redirects.</p>
<p><em>What is the endgame?</em> I think to myself as I ponder what to do. <em>What is the desired workflow? How much time do I want to pour into this project, knowing that I will never make money from it, that only my own happiness stands to be gained?</em></p>
<p>The Parthena Directive looms over the horizon. A promise of a simpler life, a radically different life, one with less imposed burdens. Maybe even a happier life. But I keep having to say no. HTML is already plaintext, I remind her. And Nano lets me insert from other files. But Pandoc outputs messy syntax. Do I want to keep cleaning it up every time? <em>Will it even remain able to be cleaned up?</em></p>
<p><em>What is the endgame?</em> I think to myself as I watch the world slowly crumble around me. Self-hosting at home is out of the question, for the internet here is spotty and unreliable at best and worsens every day. Both climate change and impending economic collapse press in at my sides, a dark future where the only electricity I can rely on is that which I generate myself. <em>How much infrastructure will be left? What will I still be holding on to? What standard of comfort can I expect?</em></p>
<p>As it stands, everything works well with ZeroNet and Hypercore (what powers Beaker Browser). Given enough mobility, the internet could still go on regardless of ICANN's or an ISP's existence. But will the computers post-collapse still support these protocols? Will we still be able to read HTML? Or will the microcomputers we scavenge only have the processing power for the simplest of plaintext?</p>
<p>The muse smiles, holds her arms open wide for an embrace. But I cannot see what lies beyond her. I cannot see if anything remains.</p>
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<h1>Corpserations</h1>
<p>published: 2020-12-15</p>
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<p>For a few years now, but even more since Corona-chan started her world tour, I have been getting random headaches in the afternoon. Not strong enough to warrant popping any pills, but enough to make me hesitate before I read a book or play a game or pull out my laptop- before I do <em>anything</em> to keep at bay the inevitable boredom that sets in. Like a storm cloud looming in on the horizon, nothing has happened <em>yet</em>, but the visible promise of gloom to come curbs all enthusiasm to do anything of value. And so I sit in my room, staring at the wall, mind running in circles. There is nothing I have the desire to do, or there <em>is</em>, and I can't bring myself to do it- and even if I did, the storm cloud blocks out the sun, my mental capacity taking a nap.</p>
<p>And so I do the same.</p>
<p>I am not adept at meditating. I lie down on my back on my bed, palms down and pressed against the sheets. And I wait. And I wait. And before I know it, it is several hours later, and I am drifting out of a curious state of mind: not quite asleep, but definitely not awake. It is in this state that, upon waking up from, I have had many of my out-of-body experiences. But not today. All that greets me is a strange sort of nothing inside, all the people inside my body quelled in a reverse choir that sings silence, and the steady hum of warmed air flowing through the vents in the walls so my family does not die from hypothermia from this winter that is not. (There is no snow on the ground, but it is still <em>frigid</em>.)</p>
<p>Drifting up from this half-conscious state, images float across my eyes without inhibition, without the mental voice that screams to stay on task, to not be distracted. An alligator wearing pants. A robot with a chicken face. One of my brothers wearing a plate on his head as a hat.</p>
<p>A magazine ad of Mario and the Kool-aid Man standing together on a blank white background, the text underneath them reading, "Buy our products or we'll cut off your testicles, retard."</p>
<p>That's it. That's all there is. No logos. No subtle manipulation. No pandering to fantasies about being rich or intelligent or sexy. Just a corporate mascot and a blatant threat.</p>
<p>Their eyes look dead inside.</p>
<p>My eyes look dead inside when I lose a match in Splatoon for the fifteenth time. It is not like there is anything better to do in the game than beat up other people online: the story is lackluster, essentially the same gameplay as online but with a story that drags out for far too long bolted onto the end, and I am <em>not</em> shelling (pardon me) out twenty dollars for... more customization options, which I'd only get after slogging through <em>another</em> story mode. And even when I manage to win, there are only so many times one can yell "AHHHSOWHENYA" (or however the intro to <em>The Lion King</em> goes) when jumping down to a lower level of Moray Towers and still find it funny.</p>
<p>There are only so many stages.</p>
<p>There are only so many customizaton options: gender, eye color, skin color, and the types of pants one wears. Any more, and one has to go into one of the little in-game shops to buy clothes. Which are <em>all</em> stamped with a little logo and the name of the in-game corporation that made it, as if the player is supposed to care. Without these clothes, every character online would literally be the same: same head model, same body model, same small random selection of gender-locked voices.</p>
<p>The corporatism is stifling. I hide away from the world-as-advertising for an hour or so only to hop into a fantasy society where the only thing to do is shop and kill people with the things you just bought. (In all fairness, I never intended to play it myself; I bought it when it was on sale because my brothers desperately wanted to play it and I wanted something to lord over them.)</p>
<p>I grow tired. I grow into a corpse in the land of the dead, the land of Corpserations.</p>
<p>I know not if March has finally caught up to me and I am going stir-crazy from the lockdowns or if it is just time for my yearly histrionic Extremely Online-flavored doomerism. But I am living in a system that is bumping up against its limits. Every natural resource has to be commandeered and then destroyed by miniature governments who haven't yet built physical militaries to coerce people into becoming dependent on their products. Every facet of life has to be commodized, packed into a neat product, sellable to the lowest common denominator. Everything posits itself as an alternative to identity, as the salve to heal my voided heart. Everything is a chance to advertise. My parents with their decorating decisions, one brother who blasts cartoons at full volume at every meal, another whose near-sole topic of conversation is some piece of pop culture or another.</p>
<p>How I wish I had some kind of filter to permanently block the constant cognitive attack. My RSS feed reader, a veritable warzone, is already a much more tolerable place to inhabit once I filter out all the shit about, for example, Kingdom Hearts or girlbossified Kamala Harris or countless fandom zines I have already decided I am not interested in buying. (Sorry, but your prized "OTP ship" is probably boring and void of chemistry.) But, if I remember correctly, there was a Black Mirror (or some other "technology bad" show) episode about that, where people could "block" each other in real life and they'd practically disappear. What technology would be required to produce such an effect? What would the long-term mental consequences be? If it were hacked... One would never be able to trust that their version of reality wasn't being adulterated by some outside entity ever again.</p>
<p>Every night I have to chastise myself for the runaway thoughts where I pretend that I made it big, that I have to market MayVaneDay Studios like other video game companies do on social media. I am structuring my works, my website, to purposely <em>not</em> "make it big": I have never hired an editor or graphic designer to polish my rough edges; I do not use "flashy" web frameworks; I do not run advertisements on my site or buy ads on other sites; I eschew social media (although I unfortunately recently had to make a throwaway Discord to participate in a zine; details coming later). I do not want delusions of corporate grandeur steering my decisions. But in this dead world, everything, and I mean <em>everything</em>, is a brand. Everything exists only to be consumed in a desperate attempt to stitch together an artificial identity.</p>
<p>To bastardize a popular Bible quote, what good does it do me if I gain the world if it costs me my soul? What good does it do my life if I become a Corpseration, a reanimated entity with a human-like egregore but no actual human spirit within?</p>
<p>I do not mean to "fedpost", but I feel a tsunami of schadenfreude wash me over whenever some misfortune befalls a celebrity, a massive business, a politician, some member of the global elite. For some measure of the misery I feel from the constant cognitive assault they lob at me: may it be reversed a thousand times back!</p>
<p align="center"><img src="../../../img/corp-1.png" alt="meme reading: STOP TELLING ME TO BUY THINGS! I HOPE YOUR CEO GETS FUCKING ASSASSINATED"></p>
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<h1>32-bit is still good, you freaks</h1>
<p>published: 2020-02-01</p>
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<blockquote>Node.js? More like... Nad.jiss!<br /> HA HA HAHA HA HAHA PENIS JOKE<br /> - You, probably</blockquote>
<p>I'm back in college again. I've been taking classes for about a month now. It's a hell of a lot nicer than the old one, because:</p>
<ol style="list-style-type: decimal">
<li>it's not a residential college, which means that, after financial aid, I only have to pay about $200/semester; and</li>
<li>all but one of my classes are online, and the one day a week I need to be on campus I can schedule a bus to take me there, so I'm not dependent on my father or anyone else's goodwill.</li>
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<p>That one class on campus is a "tech support" class. "Tech support" in quotes because very little actual support ever gets done. There are two boys in the back who are desperately trying to diagnose why someone's beefy 64-gigabytes-of-ram server only shows up as 48 gigabytes, and another boy who's trying to build their own desktop tower but is missing half the pieces, and a geriatric boomer with one leg who doesn't seem to grasp the concept that repeatedly clicking the login button on a page with autofill enabled will only ever log him into that specific account being autofilled.</p>
<p>But I somehow convinced my grandma to let me fix the broken desktop computer sitting in her den, the one that I wrote <em>The Samhain Files</em> and part of <em>The White Line Fever</em> on before the sudden move an hour away separated me from it. It was a faulty power supply, just like I'd always known, like I'd told my father in hopes that he would do something about it. He didn't do shit, just let it languish.</p>
<p>And now, since she's in the market for a laptop, the desktop is mine since I'm the one who fixed it.</p>
<p>So I did what I naturally do when I <del>steal</del> <em>receive</em> old electronics from my family members: I wiped the hard drive and installed Linux on it. But almost all of the distros I wanted to test on it either refused to recognize the Ethernet port in the back of the case (there's no wireless card installed), didn't support full-disk encryption in the default installer (I'm not spending all day fucking around with /etc/crypttab and GRUB), or... only supported 64-bit processors.</p>
<p>It's a Dell Inspiron 530. A 300 gigabyte hard drive and two gigabytes of RAM. <b>(EDIT 2020-05-29: And apparently 64-bit, and I only figured it out just now, but my point still stands.)</b> The processor's speed is a few hundredths of a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200408160102/https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/g/ghz.htm">gigahertz</a> less than the ThinkPad I'm typing this on right now, and the speed is barely noticable (in fact, it actually feels <em>more</em> responsive). Its only weakness is having one lonely compute core, which the OEM Windows Vista install absolutely <em>swamped</em> but Linux Mint handles just fine.</p>
<p>Here's where things actually get relevant to the title. I spent all of the last day of January's morning setting up the desktop and configuring all my dotfiles and toolchain just the way I like them.</p>
<p>Install Syncthing, and a few clicks away, and I can get files onto the clearnet, Tor, and I2P versions.</p>
<p>Throw my main ZeroNet install in a Syncthing folder, and I can sign changes to the zite as well.</p>
<p>Everything works just as it does on all my other systems.</p>
<p>Except for <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200131234126/https://beakerbrowser.com/install/">Beaker Browser. Because it only distributes 64-bit AppImages</a>. And you can't run it from source, either, because <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200131234227/https://github.com/nodesource/distributions/blob/master/README.md">Node.js dropped support for 32-bit in the 10.x series</a>. And I can't use an alternative client to update the Dat mirrors of my websites, because <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20191213040841/https://docs.datproject.org/docs/dat-server"><em>those</em> are written in Node.js too</a>!</p>
<p>There is no technical reason I can think of why Node.js can't support 32-bit anymore. The most information I've found to absolve their decision is <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190831054244/https://github.com/nodejs/build/issues/885"><em>one</em> Github issue</a> where an incompatible CentOS dependency is cited as the reason why they can no longer support... <em>all</em> the Linux distros they used to be able to. There <em>is</em> an <a href="https://unofficial-builds.nodejs.org/">unofficial build page</a> where there appear to be 32-bit binaries, but there's little to no quality testing to ensure that the binaries actually... work.</p>
<p>"But why can't you just update the Dat mirror when you're on a 64-bit machine?" I hear a strawman say. And the answer is twofold: executive dysfunction, and because <em>I shouldn't have to.</em></p>
<p>Executive dysfunction is a bitch. It's hard enough to keep my focus to remember to manually copy everything over to the ZeroNet mirror every time I update something on my site or add something new. It's part of why I killed the Gopher mirror. Having to remember to go onto my ThinkPad after every time I shut down the desktop, boot <em>that</em> machine up, and then copy everything over is a bunch of undue mental strain that disincentivizes me from updating the website at all.</p>
<p>And, frankly, it's quite ridiculous that my 32-bit machine is capable of fulfilling all the tasks that my 64-bit machines are, and yet it can't. It's not for <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190619012348/http://ask-leo.com/are_64bit_pcs_more_secure_than_32bit_machines.html">security reasons</a>, as the only major non-Windows-specific difference between 32- and 64-bit security-wise I've been able to find is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_space_layout_randomization">the implementation of address space layout randomization</a>.</p>
<p>"But what about the aging machines you decried a month ago? Isn't this the same situation, where you were left out in the cold because your machine was too old?" I hear another strawman say. And the answer to that: these two situations are <em>nothing</em> alike.</p>
<p>In the Gopher situation, these were machines that <em>couldn't</em> participate in the modern internet. Either they couldn't handle the modern encryption ciphers, or they didn't have the resources to run anything but the most lightweight of browsers, or they simply didn't understand the concept of a protocol more advanced than plain Gopher. The experience of using one of these machines would be vastly different than using one of my own devices. Either they <em>couldn't</em> be updated, in which case there's no point in continuing support, or they could and the owners refused to for the sake of the "retro experience", in which case they're not entitled to support just for their sole enjoyment.</p>
<p>In this situation, this <em>is</em> a computer that is perfectly capable of everything that I normally do day-to-day (except for the aforementioned Dat clients). I can use the exact same interfaces and commands and software (given that the software is compiled for i386). Everything is up-to-date. Other than the architecture difference, it is essentially the same exact system.</p>
<p>One could make the argument that we are already heading towards a future where 32-bit machines will be shut out defacto like the aging Gopher machines- in that programs are becoming, thanks to Electron and related frameworks favoring flashy interfaces over performance, too bloated to fit in 32-bit's four gigabyte maximum RAM address space. But that wouldn't be 32-bit's fault. What about all the 64-bit machines with less than eight gigabytes of RAM? Already I've had to switch multiple programs I used to use to lightweight yet modern equivalents because they grew too bloated for my ThinkPad (with six gigabytes of RAM) to handle and stay snappy. Like Cinnamon (the DE) to i3, or Firefox to Falkon, or Nemo (the file explorer) to PCManFM, or Tilix to lxterminal...</p>
<p>And those lightweight equivalents would continue to exist, if not thrive and expand in number because of more and more people pushed out from minimum RAM requirements.</p>
<p>Like gamer Eloi and disgruntled Morlocks lurking underground in resentment.</p>
<p>And as an addendum before I forget: I find it ironic that "solarpunk" and "green thinking" is in vogue in tech circles nowadays from the climate change scare, and yet Linux distros seem to be dropping 32-bit support left and right. Wouldn't you want to keep old hardware useful and out of landfills? And what about the people with low incomes who can't afford to upgrade their hardware? Either they have to cripple themselves in the bank to stay "up-to-date", or in computing power as they pick up a Chromebook or other cloud-dependent device and hand all their data and control over to Daddy Google.</p>
<p>And heaven knows we hate Daddy Google.</p>
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<h1>Consume Product</h1>
<p>published: 2020-02-05</p>
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<p>They go by many names. Normies, puppets, normalf&amp;gs, zombies, NPCs. <em><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200205143543/https://old.reddit.com/r/ConsumeProduct/comments/dy27d9/at_what_point_does_one_become_a_bugman/">Bugmen</a>.</em> Those who accept popular culture at face value, the values passed down to them, the schooling that they received as children, without ever critically examining why they believe the things they believe- or if said things are even true to begin with.</p>
<p>While my family isn't completely bugmen, since they don't literally eat bugs and they still go out of the house to do sports and social activities with their friends (they live a more lively social life than myself, one might easily argue), there's still a strong "consume product" vibe that permeates every atom of the air I breathe in. The Dr. Who door that lies useless in the corner of the living room, the Star Wars merch lying scattered all around the house, the tons and tons of legos on the "Lego table" (really two workhorse benches and a wide square of wood) that rarely get played with anymore. Collecting more toys for the sake of collection, every brother's room a sea of toys on the floor, only purpose nowadays to be relegated to dust-collecting clutter and an everpresent excuse for a parent to yell at them to finally clean their room.</p>
<p>Sitting on one of the decorative bookshelves in the living room is an unopened Dr. Who Playmobil figure, encased in its plastic-and-cardboard coffin forever. Heaven forbid someone open it and play with it, you know, as <em>toys</em> are meant to be used.</p>
<p>Brothers lie in bed all day, burying their faces in YouTube. Days are made or broken on whether or not I let them borrow one of my video games, like an addict begging for their next hit. And nearly every night, a new church service at the Altar of Television, all but me staring listlessly at a glowing screen as the dreams of multi-billion-dollar corporations beam straight into their empty heads.</p>
<p>And <a href="../../../poetry/w/watershed.txt">Saint Sakura</a> stares at them as they surround the family altar, wondering when the rampant consumerism started- or if maybe it was there all along, and only just relatively recently has the curtain been pulled back. And then she turns back and returns downstairs, beats back the encroaching tendrils of consumerism creeping like overgrown vines into her last place of refuge: her room.</p>
<p>And <a href="../../../poetry/s/sakura.txt">Saint Sakura</a> has been fighting for what seems like forever. In elementary school, the constant passing fads, duck-tape flowers and stationery emblazoned with one's favorite cartoon characters. Kept sheltered from the brunt of it by caring parents, always out of the loop in a sea of peers. In middle school, waiting to get back to actual instruction when <em>High School Musical</em> fans derailed the class, bugmen then turning around to proclaim that anyone who didn't consume that particular movie series "didn't have a childhood" or that it had "sucked". And from then on and bleeding into high school, trap music blaring in the halls, biting my lip until it bled, trading the involuntary pain of a migraine from the bass shaking in my bones for the distraction of the taste of blood in my mouth.</p>
<p>"You sound very resentful of their sense of happiness and purpose, Vane," I hear a strawman say. "Their sense of community around the things they like. Why don't you improve yourself instead of complaining? Flourishing is the best revenge, after all."</p>
<p>And I'd agree with you on that second part, flimsy strawman, but what kind of happiness is tying so much of one's identity to the products of a corporation? What kind of false consciousness, <em>false sense of life</em>?</p>
<p>And by whose standards would I be flourishing?</p>
<p>The same people at /r/ConsumeProduct, who've kicked me off my throne of resigned apathy enough to write this post? (Although, to be honest, I can't remember if the post that inspired this one was on there or /r/CleanLivingKings, and in any case, it seems to have been deleted. Essentially the same ethos, anyway.) They're just strangers on the internet. They'll probably (hopefully, rather, for my sake) never know who I am. And besides, the kind of self-improvement they peddle would never leave me happy, orthodox NPCs in their own right: Eat only these approved foods. Partake in only these approved activities. Find only this type of person attractive. Worship only this one god in this one particular fashion.</p>
<p>Become a lumberjack to your own vast wilderness, razing the forest down to build a cathedral in its place that cuts into your ribs like a corset laced too tight.</p>
<p>To chain myself to a man, to bring children into this world, bourne from the void to know undue suffering... I would never be able to handle the constant responsibility with no break, no clear end in sight, the loveless sacrifice of it all. I would never be able to forgive myself for throwing away my dreams to continue the senseless story of the human race. There are almost eight billion people in this world; one less reproducing changes nothing.</p>
<p>My parents would ask that hell from me as well, although, to their credit, they <em>have</em> slowly grown more used to the reality of me being a lesbian, not likely to ever bring them any grandchildren ever. Not that home is any more welcoming than it ever was, as now one of my brothers has given himself the license to openly talk about how disgusting and unnatural he finds homosexuality at every given opportunity, <em>unless</em> he can "consoom" it in the form of preapproved fictional characters.</p>
<p>The horrifying reality of the situation is: there is no escape from the Cathedral of Consuming, for self-improvement in itself can be a product, a golden calf, another altar in the Cathedral to sacrifice oneself on. Hell, there's a whole <em>industry</em> centered around selling self-improvement as just another product you can buy off the shelf. You can purchase thousands of dollars' worth of gym equipment (or a gym membership to use once and promptly forget about) and self-help books and organic food... and yet, somehow, you're not magically any closer to an ubermensch than you were, just closer to broke and now with more things taking up space in your house.</p>
<p>Not to say that working to be a better version of yourself is bad. For example, cutting out soda from one's diet is universally good, as is not spending all of one's day sitting on their ass. But it has to be a better version of <em>yourself</em>, not someone else, regardless if you think that that persona of someone else would be better or healthier or <em>happier</em> than your own. It has to be in line with your own values and desires, not those of someone else, or else you'll live a shadow of a life, always grasping across the void at a forever-unattainable ghost of your ideal on the other side, unnecessarily suffering all the while.</p>
<blockquote>In any of these ways, you allow someone else to determine what you should think and be. You deny your own self when you suppress desires that aren't considered "legitimate"... or when you settle for a certain life because you've been told that's all you should expect in the world.<br /> - Harry Browne, <em>How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World</em></blockquote>
<p>I suspect the idolization of "self-improvement" is part of why cryptofascism has come out from the shadows so much in recent years, as it's one of the few ideologies that tackles the soullessness of bugman-style consumerism head-on and posits itself as the keeper of the antidote. (This isn't to excuse its collectivism or violence; just an observation.) So one, the bitter taste of being assaulted with demands to consume the popular media and opinions of the day still fresh on their tongue, wanders into places like /r/ConsumeProduct thinking they've found comrades to complain with and cope alongside. And sewn here and there, sometimes blatantly, sometimes implied, are blanket accusations of the groups they feel are at fault: homosexuals, Jewish people, women... anyone who does not fit neatly into their Cathedral.</p>
<p>And, if you repeat a lie long enough...</p>
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<h1>"Bro, literally none of this internet shit is real."</h1>
<p>published: 2020-02-03</p>
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<p>Today is the first Smash Sunday in what feels like a year. Probably because it <em>was</em> a year. There certainly weren't any while I was <a href="../../2019/november/masthead.html">spiraling into NEETdom</a>. I'm typing this right now in the same classroom as before, the same situation as before: my brothers and some of their friends are blasting two different games at the same time, screaming at the top of their lungs, sinking more and even more of their time into these fictional characters they cherish so much. (One of them, clearly lightyears ahead of the others in mental age, keeps complaining that he doesn't know any of the characters and that he'd rather be playing Call of Duty, so I guess there are always exceptions.)</p>
<p>I could go join them. I'm getting paid to essentially babysit them, after all. I could do what is essentially a glorified version of staring at a screen and twitching one's thumbs for three hours.</p>
<p>Or I could bury my face deeper into my computer and try to shut the repetitive music out and spend those three hours still staring at a screen, albeit twitching more fingers than just my thumbs, enveloping myself in the opinions of those I will never meet in real life.</p>
<p>Caught between two bad situations: mindless gaming, and mindless surfing.</p>
<p>Someone three months ago <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20191210102551/http://misc-stuff.terraaeon.com/articles/miss-old-internet.html">shilled my website on a post of theirs</a> and then <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200104212041/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21402518">submitted their post link to Hacker News</a>. I'd known about the original site that the post was on before, but because they didn't have an RSS feed, I'd forgotten that the site existed until the owner let me know that they'd written a post about me.</p>
<p>And Hacker News was... less than enthusiastic. A statistically significant chunk of the comments were, as usual, complaining about Reddit. A few people got into a fight over what to do in a situation where one was hosting a site from home and their fifteen minutes of fame was too much for their residential internet connection to handle. Which I found funny, because I actually <em>was</em> hosting my site from home at the time, and my internet connection hardly felt the weight at all. (Although the router at home is shitty as is, constantly disconnecting everybody not plugged into one of the four Ethernet ports on the back, so I couldn't have told the difference anyway.)</p>
<p>Someone put my name in quotes. Who hurt you? Am I not real enough to you to warrant being believed that my given name is my name?</p>
<p>Actually, I don't give a damn if you think I'm real or not. I'm real regardless. My name is Vane Vander, and you're getting no other.</p>
<p>Surprisingly, there wasn't any criticism directed at <em>me</em>, only at the person who wrote the original post. Which is refreshing, I guess, but also a bit anxiety-inducing: I've escaped the fire this time, but what happens next time I do something to anger the geeksphere? What happens next time I hold some opinion that goes against the Church of Alt-Tech, and someone is incensed enough to sacrifice me on the public altar of the Cathedral of Internet?</p><!-- i hate you too lainchan lol -->
<p>This site used to be a hobby of mine. An escape from the mundane <a href="../../../poetry/g/the-golden-cage.txt">trappings</a> of my situation. A valve for stress. A labor of love. But now I watch the access logs fill up, and every minute someone requests poor old <code>/feed.xml</code>, and hundreds of bots and crawlers I never even knew existed until that fateful day all run around as they please and steal all they can until I ban them first in Caddy and finally in iptables. The anxiety rolls in like a storm on the horizon, dark clouds constantly on the peripheries, and suddenly I have this audience that I never asked for, and I feel this constant pressure to perform for said audience, to structure posts so that they'll look good when submitted to Hacker News and similar places, to regurgitate the same opinions that I know are acceptable on there so I won't wake up one morning to hundreds of emails in my inbox from people telling me off.</p>
<p>And every few days, I still get a hit with <code>news.ycombinator.com</code> (no subpages, just the front page) in the referer header. And my heart rate kicks up: what if I'm on the front page? And I go to the front page, and, much to my relief, I'm nowhere to be seen. I've dodged the Cathedral for another day.</p>
<p>But why do I get anxious? Why do I even bother to have a reaction anymore? <a href="https://archive.is/nD5FJ">None of this internet shit is real.</a> At the end of the day, I'm just some asshole on the internet, and you are too. Just like the video games raging on right now in the background, we've accomplished almost nothing other than eye strain when we log off and shut down our computers for the night. (Well, I have stories and poems in my pocket, but those don't count since I wrote them offline.) There's no point in me trying to chase someone else's approval or work towards someone else's edification. My happiness is the only one I know for sure I can change, commenters be damned.</p>
<p>So for those who come from Hacker News or some other social discussion site in the future, please know: <strong>I am not your friend.</strong> But I am not your enemy, either. This website doesn't exist for me to regurgitate the same opinions or tutorials or <em>whatever</em> as any of the other tech-related sites you like to pin up on your technological walls. This site doesn't exist to fill some kind of niche, or to earn revenue for me. I'll never run or allow ads on this site- or any other site I run- ever again. It doesn't exist for you to debate over, or moral-grandstand about yourself. It doesn't exist to vindicate you, or validate your preconceived notions of who I am, of who I could become.</p>
<p>It doesn't exist for <em>you</em>.</p>
<p>It exists for <em>me</em>.</p>
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<h1>Law in the absence of law</h1>
<p>published: 2020-02-19</p>
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<p><em>In case you think you've wandered into a manifesto, or some kind of universally-applicable theory, close this tab now. It's not. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200409171906/https://nyxus.xyz/posts/theorypunk/">It never will be.</a></em></p>
<p>Let's say that your god has thrown me into some kind of hellscape where I have to relive the year I spent at a residential college, and one night I decide to go to the dining hall. I sit at a table. On the other side of a table is another person who I hold no particular ill will towards, but who I don't know well, and he the same towards me. Ambivalent strangers, if you will. And let's also say that I'm going through the hellscape this time around with my current possessions in their current states, which means my headphones are broken. (And let's assume I was thrust into this hellscape before today, where I got a replacement of sorts to tide me over until I can repair the older ones. And, while we're in the business of assuming things, let's assume that we're in some parallel universe where people universally use "headphones" to mean "the ones you put over your ears" and "earbuds" to mean "the ones you put inside your ears", which they <em>are</em>, and people should really learn that words have meanings.)</p>
<p>Around his neck is a pair of rather high-quality headphones. Not the kind you'd see hypebeasts wear, but high-quality nonetheless. They seem to be wireless, but have a port for an aux cord to plug in, implying they also have a wired mode. He takes them off to eat- but, out of forgetfulness, forgets to take them with him when he gets up to leave.</p>
<p>What do I do?</p>
<p>Should I steal them?</p>
<p>In the presence of law, the State-enforced law backed by violence, I wouldn't steal the headphones, because to do so would be theft, and I'd likely get thrown into a cage and fined more money than I could ever hope to afford, not to mention having my reputation tarnished beyond belief.</p>
<p>In the absence of State-enforced law, but in a parallel universe where we lived in an Ancapistan-like region where people followed the non-aggression principle and those who didn't were physically removed from said region, I still wouldn't steal the headphones, because that would be a violation of the NAP. Maybe the State wouldn't come after me, but either <em>someone</em> would, or I'd be ostracized beyond belief to the point where nobody would do business with me and I'd be unable to function in the society until I returned them. And since most (peaceful) people place trustworthiness so highly when doing business, State or without, who would want to do business with a known thief?</p>
<p>But I am an egoist at heart. And what about when I can't trust the people around me to follow the NAP? What if I set aside all notion of law and virtue and acted only with thought for myself and my own desires?</p>
<p>Well, I still wouldn't steal the headphones. The trust economy still comes into play. And I value my reputation more than some silly stolen headphones anyway, especially so when being well-loved by the potentially hostile surrounding community might be the difference between life and death. (Being at the mercy of a hostile community who could gang up and kill you at any moment leaves the door wide open for the pressure of coercion, which is its own can of worms and deserves its own future post.)</p>
<p>But even without the hypothetical community, and without any notion of the law or <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200409171927/https://www.the-philosophy.com/kant-categorical-imperative">Kant's categorical imperative</a> insisting that I don't because <em>what if someone stole from you, and how would that make you feel</em>, and even assuming that I'd never face consequences for the act of theft: I still wouldn't. Because it would make me <em>feel bad</em>. I'd be burdened with guilt every time I used them.</p>
<p>So I leave them on the table. Maybe I pick them up and run up to the fellow student who left them there. And he smiles at me and thanks me, and he thinks kindly of me for a few moments.</p>
<p>And it makes me feel good inside for those same moments, knowing I stuck to my morals.</p>
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<h1>Partyarchy</h1>
<p>published: 2020-01-07</p>
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<p>2020 is an election year in the United States of America, in case you've been living under a rock or have somehow dodged the incessant political talk since the previous election. But who will we hand the crown over to for the next four years? Orange Man of Unbridled Debauchery? Ineffectual Bernie &quot;I Wrote The Damn Bill&quot; Sanders? Mr. Free Money For NEETs? Professional Figurehead Who Happens To Also Be Gay?</p>
<p>Why am I even sullying my blog with the name of statists who will never have my true interests at heart, who, when all is said and done, are only concerned with increasing and keeping their power over the American people? They're all the same at the end of day: promise one thing during campaign season, and then just uphold the status quo once they get their coveted seat in the Oval Office. Even oh-so-precious Jacob Hornberger, who every libertarian podcaster shouts at me to believe is the second coming of the Messiah and will lead us with a golden lamp to liberty, is a statist at end of day, for a requirement of being president is having a state to preside over.</p>
<p>Such is the fate of minarchy, of libertarian gradualism that holds that, to decrease the government's hold on the people, one must first gain control of the government. One goes in, puts themselves on the public stage, maybe even goes so far as to see themselves as a spy sneaking into a high-security facility or as a David going against Goliath's Leviathan. You take the shape of that which you hate the most so that you survive the slaughter- but eventually you forget that there was a time that you weren't a monster. The monster becomes you. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200408155825/https://www.newlibertarian.io/2019/12/our-enemy-party.html">The &quot;libertarian&quot; seeking to change the system with the system becomes the police trying to change the police system from the inside, the judge trying to change the judicial system from the inside, the executioner trying to change the execution system from the inside.</a></p>
<p>And then they all unwittingly work together to indict and execute their cousin agorist, their dear family member who cannot live with the cognitive dissonance of helping the state to hurt the state and decides to do away with the government in their lives altogether here and now.</p>
<p>&quot;It's not yet time to reach for freedom,&quot; they assure themselves. &quot;Not yet time for revolution.&quot;</p>
<p>Not yet time? <em>You idiots!</em> If not now, then when? How much worse does it have to get? You insist &quot;give me liberty or give me death&quot;, but given a way to <em>finally</em> effectively snatch the golden tincture of liberty in your fingers, you instead reach for the state's bottle of sedation right next to it on the shelf.</p>
<p>But what does it mean to reach for freedom, anyway? If the partyarchists (god, what a monstrous word) would be believed, then I could drown all my sorrows in saving enough money for a train ride to escape to the better parts of New Hampshire. I could stash the cash somewhere where my parents would forget about it and then flee in the middle of the night with nothing more than I could carry on my back. But what of the college debt that I'm just barely chipping away at, now that I'm finally employed? What of the rectangular tracking device in my pocket I've been conditioned to live my life through? What of the craft supplies I've hoarded, all the paper books I've so lovingly arranged on my bookshelf? Sure, I could abdicate myself of most of my possessions if I absolutely had to in order to survive... but it's my property. It's mine. It's one of the few things I can properly call mine.</p>
<p>The NEETs who I've just left would admonish me and proclaim that I am, in my shitty job, annihilating myself to conform to someone else's dream. But a driver's license is, thanks to shaky hands and skittish judgement behind the wheel, out of reach, and so my ability to flee is limited. My ability to accrue the things I need to survive, even more so. In a prepper's terms, &quot;bugging out&quot; is off the table. Anywhere I can go must be reasonably reachable on my own two feet.</p>
<p>And, truth be told, I am not one for political action. I am not one to sing and dance on the stage of public life. That's (part of) why you're reading this on a backwater website instead of, say, Facebook. I prefer backstage, subsisting where most cannot see me. Tomatoes get thrown at actors, but rarely (if ever) at the people working the curtains or the lights. The effects are still visible, but the people responsible are safely out of the way.</p>
<p>If we citizens are the theater crew and the police are the audience, then to make a bold move towards New Hampshire for me would be like dropping down onto stage and making a series of profane gestures that would immediately get me dragged off stage by an irate audience and beaten to a pulp in a dark alley somewhere. It would attract too much state attention towards me when all I want to do is disappear to them. To make enough that I can get by, but not enough that they can start stealing it through income taxes. To sleep in a place that I own, and to do what I please with my body and the property I own. Who cares about the laws when the police don't know that the laws are being broken?</p>
<p>What is an agorist like me supposed to do with partyarchy? Working with the state is the <em>exact opposite</em> of counter-economics. I can't use the same system that enslaves me every day to free me. Here, in Bumfuck, Minnesota, so long as the police don't look my way, I live in Ancapistan every day.</p>
<p>Cancer grows and kills a person by <a href="https://www.cancer.ca/en/cancer-information/cancer-101/what-is-cancer/how-cancer-starts-grows-and-spreads/?region=on">uncontrollably growing cencerous cells and spreading them all over</a>, not by making normal cells and lying in wait. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomy_of_the_state">anatomy of the state</a> has tolerance for cells like its own, cells that serve its purposes in the end. Only when a cell becomes cancerous- <em>seditious</em>- does it become a genuine threat. But if the body does not know that there is cancer lurking around, then it cannot act until it is too late.</p>
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<h1>What happens after HTML?</h1>
<p>published: 2020-07-12</p>
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<p>Back in the murky days of the early 2010's, possibly even 2009, I wanted to make my first website. I and a friend, who I fell out of contact with in high school, wanted to make a pay-to-play website in the same veins as Webkinz. Of course, the business venture was doomed to fail, as we would be selling not plush stuffed animals but shitty pompom balls glued on pieces of heart-shaped felt to resemble a little creature. I asked my father for help, as apparently he'd set up a crude website of his own a decade earlier to announce my birth and share pictures of my infant self, and he laughed me out of the room and told me that making websites costed money.</p>
<p>Undeterred, I found a tutorial for HTML and CSS off some backwater website. It was nothing like the slick tutorials one would find today if they wanted to learn, nor had I any idea that places like Codecademy existed. The website gave a small zip file to download, full of sample images and navigational buttons, and I slowly worked my way through with Notepad and a constantly crashing Windows Vista machine. (<a href="../february/32bit.html">The same one that's now mine, funnily enough.</a>) I only remember that this happened in elementary school because I know I showed my social worker (or maybe she was a counselor; I don't remember) the files on a flash drive I'd smuggled in.</p>
<p>I felt like the world's most wanted criminal as I signed up for a free hosting service under a false name and an obviously fake address. The terms of service said that they would attempt to verify all addresses and terminate the accounts of people who they couldn't verify existed. It apparently took them over a decade to figure it out and delete my abandoned site there. Or maybe it was just an inactive account being cleaned...</p>
<p>A major part of what initially pulled me towards Gemini was the simplicity of the <code>text/gemini</code> markup language. HTML is littered with ending tags and closing tags. Sure, one could serve plaintext <code>.txt</code> files, but then there wouldn't be any inline links or stylization whatsoever. And <a href="../june/homo.html">heaven knows I hate unformatted plaintext</a> when it comes to the web. Both from an aesthetics standpoint, since I hate blandness and homogeneity, and from a neurodivergent one, since walls of tiny text that all blend into one another demand an attention span to plod my way through far longer than I can usually muster.</p>
<p>Another pretty damning argument, or weak depending on the point of view, is that Gemini <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200707212036/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23730408">isn't backwards-compatible with the pre-existing web</a>. As the top commenter on the Hacker News thread (in a <a href="../february/hackernews.html">rare moment of sanity for an HN comment</a>) says, emphasis mine:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The protocol is new and primitive, it's easy to write tools around it, write texts about it, etc. A small community forms, and you're part of it. You can advertise it to others, or rant against the mainstream, or whatever. <strong>But now what? You lose interest and abandon it, and eventually it dies.</strong></p>
<p>... <strong>The advantage here is that the community is not an island. Users of Big Browser can still read your latest rants.</strong> They can even learn about this project and, while perhaps not using Mom-and-Pop browser, may support it in their sites, since it wouldn't require another server; mostly just having their site work without JavaScript would be a huge step forward. Right, you don't have Google filtering based on Accessibility. The community can create a search engine that does. Now what? You just get on with your life, producing and consuming AccessibleWeb content without the gratuitous incompatibility.</p>
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<p>But I didn't come here to dunk on Gemini again. My point is that most modern browsers, <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/markdown-preview-plus/febilkbfcbhebfnokafefeacimjdckgl?hl=en-US">without</a> <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/markdown-viewer-webext/">extensions</a>, don't natively render document types other than <code>text/html</code>. (I am counting PDFs in on this since technically rendering those is thanks to an extension, just now usually built-in.) Even trying to view an image standalone makes the browser generate an impromptu HTML document to display it in. Thus, if one wants to build an accessible website that doesn't require potential visitors to install additional extensions or even <em>whole browsers</em>, they have to either handwrite HTML or subordinate themselves to a framework or service that does it for them. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200708221307/https://www.webdesigndev.com/10-good-and-10-bad-things-about-adobes-dreamweaver/">Adobe Dreamweaver</a>, which I thankfully never had the misfortune of using, is notorious for constructing bloated and opaque HTML.</p><p>But since mainstream browsers don't look like they're going to support Markdown rendering natively anytime soon, one writing their website would have to somehow translate their pages into HTML <em>before</em> they hit the browser. In other words, if the client side won't do or can't be trusted to do it, the server will have to do it. Using one of my tulpas' sites <b>(EDIT 2021-07-18: the website no longer exists because I no longer own the domain)</b> (with consent), I experimented with several server-side Markdown-to-HTML servers:</p>
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<li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200707211729/https://github.com/crempp/mdweb">mdweb</a> worked well when it was configured properly. But it relies heavily on templates, and the ones it comes with are riddled with JavaScript and weird CSS frameworks that were exactly what I was trying to <em>escape</em> from. The documentation is sparse and doesn't really go into detail how to write a theme from scratch, so I deemed it more trouble than it was worth.</li>
<li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200707211716/https://github.com/mkaz/lanyon/">lanyon</a> also relies heavily on templates. This one <em>did</em> have proper documentation on how to write them, but the web server didn't seem to actually render any changes to my site unless I manually stopped and restarted it each time, which rather... defeats the purpose. True, I could write a systemd service and a crontab line to restart it every few hours, but if I were actively writing a document and wanted to see how it looked like before I anounced it, I'd have to wait until the next time the server restarted, and if I wasn't doing anything to my site, it would be reloading unnecessarily.</li>
<li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200707211706/https://github.com/oscarmorrison/md-page">md-page</a> depends on client-side JavaScript to be enabled. Since it's essentially an HTML page with Markdown hanging off the end, without that JavaScript to turn it into valid HTML, most browsers would just mangle the raw Markdown into an unreadable glob of text.</li>
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<p>This site runs on Caddy. If we were still on the glorious Caddy 1.x days, we'd have a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200707211659/https://caddyserver.com/v1/docs/markdown">markdown directive</a> built in that does everything we want: just throw some <code>text/markdown</code> files in a folder, point the server to a <code>style.css</code> file to throw on everything, and go. But Caddy 2.x insists on using <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200708223918/https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/directives/templates">templates</a> and making the prospective site-writer dig through complicated, sometimes non-existent, documentation to try to grasp some semblance of Markdown rendering.</p>
<p>Thankfully, since the old 1.x download pages were still up, I <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200708224225/https://caddyserver.com/download/linux/amd64?license=personal&amp;telemetry=off">saved the program</a> in the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200708224355/https://caddyserver.com/download/linux/arm7?license=personal&amp;telemetry=off">Wayback Machine</a> so it would continue to be available after the Caddy developers memoryholed everything. Meaning, with the power of a reverse proxy, I could write a site entirely in Markdown with the end reader none the wiser.</p>
<p>Here's my current configuration:</p>
<pre>
REDACTED:2015 {
root /home/vanevander/Sync/website/azure/
markdown / {
css /style.css # this gets applied to every page
}
tls off # since this is behind a reverse proxy
bind 127.0.0.1 # don&#39;t let people bypass the reverse proxy
browse # dynamically generate file listings for folders without an index.md, like how Gopher and Gemini do
}
</pre>
<p>But this only works for server-side websites. Since one of my goals (or restraints) with this is to not assume the client knows this is supposed to be Markdown, I can't just slap a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200708225311/https://github.com/rivy/js-user.markdown-render">userscript</a> in a ZeroNet directory and call it a day. And even if I were to do that, I'd have to maintain a separate version of the website just for peer-to-peer websites, as inserting that JavaScript would also affect Caddy's rendered pages.</p>
<p>And even though <a href="../february/32bit.html">I hate Node.js with a passion</a>, I have to admit that the latest builds of Beaker Browser support <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200708231723/https://beakerbrowser.com/docs/guides/create-a-markdown-site">rendering Markdown automatically</a>. Although CSS isn't automatically applied, and thus one has to put the HTML line at the top of the file to enable it. Curiously enough, this makes Caddy's pages have duplicate CSS entries, although it doesn't seem to affect the pages. Beaker Browser also doesn't play well (actually, at all) with Caddy's convention of writing TOML at the top of a Markdown file to set metadata such as the page title, so this:</p>
<pre>
+++
title = &quot;Page title here&quot;
+++
</pre>
<p>gets rendered as:</p>
<p><code>+++title = "Page title here"+++</code></p>
<p>which is obviously ugly and doesn't work at all. Normal <code>&lt;title&gt;</code> tags work as a workaround, I guess.</p>
<p>So, under this system, I'm not entirely free of HTML, nor can I yet code an entire page from memory since I have to remember the CSS line. But it's a start towards a future without template files, a future where blogging demands less mental working memory, less friction against chronic fatigue.</p>
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<p>So I'm revisiting this post a few days after I drafted it. Tired and worn out from work, a precious hour or two from willing my body to sleep like a rock so that tomorrow is less hell.</p>
<p>Despite all of the rationalization I've done above, I still can't seem to will myself to follow through with anything I've written here on my own site. Mostly because of the dependency on a technically dead piece of software. Not that a transition to Markdown would be the worst thing ever- it's still <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200712143250/https://plaintextproject.online/articles/2018/01/26/markdown.html"><em>plaintext</em>, after all</a>- but it would be like moving my entire digital notepad to a word processor on a whim. Even with LibreOffice's open formats, if I don't have access to the software and I <em>need</em> to open a file right then and there, the best I can do is unzip it like any other archive and go digging within. I can convert the HTML to Markdown until the cows come home, but if I don't have a server that can serve those files, then what's the point? I'd just have to go back eventually.</p>
<p>In some future yet unknown to me where we've all migrated onto a computing architecture other than ARM or x86, hopefully one that's fully open-source, what will the software we use look like? Will we even be on Linux anymore, or even a UNIX-based system while we're pondering? Caddy can talk a big game about not having any dependencies, but it still technically has one: the Go language. If Go doesn't exist on the systems of the future, good luck getting Caddy to run on it without any kind of virtualization. (Assuming the climate crisis doesn't knock us down to Raspberry Pi-levels of computing power and we can even virtualize in the first place.)</p>
<p>What will the web look like, for that matter? What will the browsers and the networks we use prioritize? Ease-of-use like Markdown, or infinite customization like HTML? Or will some other plaintext format take its place? Or will the commercialization come to a tipping point, and everyone is forced to use some proprietary binary format?</p>
<p>Or maybe the world will shatter and the internet die forever, and something else rise up in its place, and none of this will matter anyway.</p>
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<h1>You Can't Stop The Signal</h1>
<p>published: 2020-07-26</p>
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<blockquote>
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200721025616/https://vonupodcast.com/faq/"><strong>Vonu</strong> is the condition or quality of, as well as the action of achieving, an invulnerability to coercion. Etymologically, it is an awkward contraction of the phrase, VOluntary Not vUlnerable (hence, "vonu").</a>
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<p>Copyright requires coercion. If there is no State with a monopoly on violence to loom over a populace and threaten whoever has the misfortune of losing a copyright lawsuit with time in jail or theft of money or property, then there is no real power in a license attached to "intellectual property". In the end, it doesn't matter if the license is permissive or not; people who you don't like with ideologies you disapprove of are going to take it and use it, and there is nothing you can do to stop them without resorting to violence, and you are beset with <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200721020653/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Max_Stirner">phantasms</a> and riddled with delusions if you think otherwise.</p>
<p>Early 2018 up until it shut down in August 2019, I spent a lot of time on 8chan. My favorite board was /tech/, home of ceaseless threads where Linux and BSD fanboys fought it out and femboys shared screenshots of their riced desktops. The /fucko/ threads were my favorite. Laden with useful (if not a little outdated) advice on how to technologically protect oneself from the State, and how to destroy the evidence were one to find out that the police were after them. From the baby things like switching to FOSS software and making a GPG keypair to ghosting it out with Tails and Libreboot and full-disk encryption with a built-in "nuke". How ironic that imageboards like 8chan have a reputation of being wastelands and havens for all sorts of disgusting identitarians like neonazis, and yet their effort ended up helping me, an <em>anarchist lesbian</em>, clean up my digital tracks even further than what I'd started with the Google Freakout of 2016.</p>
<p>I am sure that they would have been <em>extremely displeased</em> to know that their knowledge helped someone they would have so openly considered a degenerate, a walking piece of filth, someone to be exterminated from the land. But how were they to know? How would they have stopped me from seeing the fruits of their research without also severely restricting their ability to disseminate it amongst themselves? Should they have written a "No Homosexuals Allowed" license and slapped it on top of their carefully constructed guides? Obviously they did not, and <em>it wouldn't have worked anyway</em>. A piece of paper, digital or physical, is not going to stop me from using information. And because I was <em>vonu</em> from them, hidden from 8chan's logging by Tor and Tails, there would be no way for them to know that any kind of copyright infringement had taken place.</p>
<p>I must admit, I erupted in laughter when I saw the so-called <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200713171551/https://github.com/climate-strike/license">"Climate Strike Software License"</a>. The general gist of it is that certain pieces of software, mostly Python math-related modules from the list they provided, are in use by companies contributing to the climate crisis, and thus they must be stopped by a... digital piece of paper. Never mind that the CSSL violates the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200721024722/https://opensource.org/osd-annotated">canonical Open Source Definition</a>, and thus, if a piece of software switched to this new license, it would immediately break GPL compatibility and thus fuck over every FOSS project relying on it, climate-accelerating or not. Do you <em>really</em> think that a megacorporation so obviously protected by the governments that allow it to exist would be cowed by a mere text file? Only relatively recently has the GPL been proven <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200721015944/https://www.theregister.com/2017/05/13/gnu_gpl_enforceable_contract/">to be able to be upheld in court</a>, but even then, it was <em>in court</em> by an entity with the financial resources to take the offender to court. And changing the license will ultimately do nothing, as <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200721025033/https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7375/is-it-possible-for-linux-developers-to-retroactively-pull-their-code-from-linu">you can't retroactively revoke a license from code</a> as the code-of-conduct controversy with the Linux kernel proves. Said harmful companies could just continue to use the old versions of the programs covered under licenses that they aren't violating and carry on with their day so long as the code still works.</p>
<p>In the case that I cited above, it was one company against another company. One entity with the money to pursue litigation against another company with the money to defend themselves. Although I wouldn't use <em>vonu</em> to describe their position, the existence of <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200721030530/https://anti-slapp.org/what-is-a-slapp">SLAPPs</a> prove that corporations and governments have little to no fear of individual people mounting complaints against them. Do you really think you can successfully defend your piece of "intellectual property" from license violation in any meaningful way without litigation? <strong>In the end, without the threat of violence, nobody gives a shit about licenses, and those who do have a cop in their heads. Your code, your art, is going to get stolen anyway, and there isn't anything you can do about it other than hope you have the social clout for people to know who it really belongs to anyway and respect that of their own free will.</strong></p>
<p>Video games are technically pieces of software. Almost all of them are under a proprietary license that forbids making backups or sharing them with friends or obtaining the software through "unauthorized" channels. But I don't give a shit! Nintendo's "copyright" is a phantasm to me. I will download <a href="https://the-eye.eu/public/rom/">every classic ROM they have</a> (and a few... <em>contemporary</em> ones, while we're at it) and not feel a single shred of guilt.</p>
<p>Licenses that exclude entities on the basis of falling into some category or another, like the <a href="http://archive.md/N2zNP">"No Harm"</a> license, have little to no power in the actual world. For example, one with a vendetta against me who knew I used a piece of software under the aforementioned license could easily take my post about <a href="../../2019/may/gender-critical.html">being gender-critical</a> and claim that I am contributing to "hate speech or discrimination" regarding gender and gender identity. Even though nowhere in the post do I advocate for violence or claim to hate anyone with a "gender identity", merely just state that I find the concept of gender personally stifling, it's their word against mine.</p>
<p>In all that I do, I strive more and more to achieve <em>vonu</em>, to become invulnerable to coercion. That's why there's so many darknet gateways into this website. That's why I write under a pseudonym. That's why I left the Zaibatsu and the tildes and Neocities. I already know that, in my short time on the internet, I have made a myriad of enemies who would love to see me go dark and never post a single thing again, who would gladly shut me up had they the power. And some days, I have to admit, I wonder what it would be like to throw it all away and return to being a normie. But this website is my home. It is the one thing I can come back to at the end of day and know that it is truly mine. And even then- even <em>then</em> it is not completely vonu. I still rely on other parties: Namecheap and Namesilo for domains, Vultr for VPS hosting, Paypal to pay them off every month or year, a bank to pay Paypal off, a job to pay the bank off, enough positive/neutral social standing to keep my job, enough customers at the place I work at to justify my slot on the payroll... I feel freer than I did when I started MayVaneDay five years ago, and yet I am still so entrenched in the ruts of other people's lives, still at the mercy of so many entities.</p>
<p>Take the aforementioned example of my stance on gender. I am neither "trans-exclusionary" nor a "radical feminist". But I am sure that someone, somewhere, has labeled me as a "TERF". That is why I laugh when I see codes of conduct like the one at the Gemini hosting service <a href="http://archive.md/zLsDI">tanelorn.city</a>. You have the right to decide who uses your server resources. You have the right to decide who you want to associate and dissociate with. I am in no way advocating that authoritarians be given free rein to shit up everything, or even to be listened to. <strong>Just remember: those who you do not want to share your spaces with will set up their own spaces. Just like how you wish they would cease to exist, so do they wish the same upon you. The ways you protect yourself will be the ways they protect themselves. You cannot stop them. But they cannot stop you either.</strong> Tor's anonymity comes agnostic of the beliefs of the person using it. GPG encryption works regardless of the beliefs of the person using it. Any attempt to weaken these, like the State's persistent attempts to get backdoors inserted into proven encryption methods that plague their investigations, will not only weaken those who truly need it but also do nothing to people not under the State's duress, to the exact people you <em>don't</em> want using those tools.</p>
<p>You do not want to associate with me because of who you think I am, impression true or false regardless? Fine. But technologies like Tor and I2P allow me to be <em>vonu</em> from you. I don't want to use Gemini for <a href="../june/homo.html">reasons I stated in an earlier post</a>, but if I did want to set up my own server, there is nothing Solderpunk could do to stop me. Not a license, not a strongly-worded letter to fuck off, not a legal campaign (and honestly, I doubt he would sling the court system against me both because he is a very kind man and because he lives in a different country than me). I have the source code to multiple servers and clients. Given enough time, I could write my own. And who is to stop me from using them once I have them? A protocol is an idea. Ideas want to be free.</p>
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<p>But enough of depressing things like software development. Let's take a little break, have a little comic relief as a treat. You've read a lot of words. Feel free to rest your eyes a bit here. The words will still be here when you get back.</p>
<blockquote>
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200721043449/https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tyler-the-creators-cyber-bullying-tweet">Hahahahahahahaha How The Fuck Is Copyright Real Hahahaha Brodie Just Walk Away From The Screen Like Bro Close Your Eyes Haha</a>
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<p>Rest of this post aside, it's absolutely wild how humans that lived long before us decided that we can just... take certain combinations of letters and numbers and symbols and say, "I created this. I own this arrangement of characters. Only I can control how this arrangement is used." Like... On a purely technical level, there is no difference between a novel and six hundred pages of me keysmashing. It is only because we as human beings ascribe value and meaning to the former and not the latter that only the former gets shackled in the copyright system.</p>
<p>Absolutely wild how it's possible to get locked up for nothing more than distributing combinations of letters and numbers and symbols. Aren't they all symbols in the end? Scrawlings we assign value to in the system we call "language"? Ultimately it's all just chicken scratch. And yet entire industries rise and fall on controlling where they go...</p>
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<p>Patents are "intellectual property", sheets of paper that entities only abide by because of fear of litigation. The pharmaceutical industry in the United States would not be in the deplorable state it is in now if it were not for the patent system enabling price gouging. The free market would run wild, companies seeking the cheapest way to produce medicine, and the one with the best balance of low prices and high quality would get the most business.</p>
<p>Stories are "intellectual property". And my ever-growing collection of ebooks can attest to the fact that DRM is only a temporary and relatively-easily-defeated measure to stop ebook piracy. And even though most literature and other vehicles of stories are licensed under the equivalent of proprietary licences, that doesn't stop <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200721040201/https://archiveofourown.org/works/20579735?view_full_work=true">fanfiction writers</a> or the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190826192503/https://gamebanana.com/skins/148006">modding community</a>. And song remixes... I hate how "remix" has become synonymous with "drown out everything else in the song with the same sounds in every single goddamn trap song", but it <em>is</em> derivative, and it is <em>not</em> stopping anytime soon.</p>
<p>Given enough time, everything will become public domain, and none of this will matter anyway. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20201205180143/https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/my-stolen-code-on-github.html">Your carefully crafted software license will go to shit.</a> Your copyright will lapse. And a million flowers will bloom out of the cracks where once they were confined to only your walled garden. Your "copyright" is only a temporary delay that helps no one and <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200722153327/https://gopher.tildeverse.org/sdf.org/0/users/jebug29/log/2020-07/20-2209">prevents well-meaning people from preserving whatever legacy you have.</a></p>
<p>Authoritarians will steal your "intellectual property". Authoritarians will see your "keep out" signs and spit on them and trample them under their feet on their way to take what is yours and claim it as your own. Licenses are like laws; clearly they have failed to prevent tyranny from taking root. The time for working within the State is over. Friendship ended with legislation; now direct action is my friend.</p>
<p>Copyright is a phantasm. Its only weight comes from the threat of State violence. Steal their code, their stories, their songs, their "intellectual property" right back. Liberate yourself with the fruits of their labor just as they have enslaved you with yours. Achieve <em>vonu</em>.</p>
<p>They can't stop your signal.</p>
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<h1>Gemini Means Homogenization</h1>
<p>published: 2020-06-20</p>
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<p>Once upon a time, I got a job at a place we'll call Milk Monarch so that some future bootlicking employer has a harder time finding this post. I went to work there for one day and then, immediately upon returning home, went on the scheduling website and announced that I was quitting. There was simply no way I was going to work in ninety-degree heat wearing a visor and long heavy dress pants with <i>no breaks</i>.</p>
<p>But even if I tried to pull the autism card, there was no way that I could have possibly been given an exemption on those parts of the dress code. For the whole point of a dress code is to homogenize its employees as much as possible, turn former individuals into mere replaceable agents of whatever corporation they have the misfortune of having to work for. Doubly so during the Corona-chan party, when everywhere I go I am harangued into wearing a facemask that actually does little to protect me and just makes it hard for me to breathe. As much of my face as possible is hidden from the customer, my range of vision reduced to a small sliver as if I had been thrown into the depths of a fundamentalist Islamic country.</p>
<p>But, hey, at least it made it harder for people to see me cry, biting down the throes of a panic attack as I sprayed down trash cans!</p>
<p>I hate homogeneity. A collectivist pipedream, blending all the colors of the rainbow into the same shade of dirt I step over with my feet on my way to my favorite tree to read under. But this isn't my mother's garden. Nothing meaningful grows out of this brown, just holes ever-growing where worms slip under the earth and ants digging their colonies to be flooded when the rain comes.</p>
<p>"All people are born equal" is a lie. Some people are born with talents for art, some a predisposition for mathematics, others physically strong. People come in both neurotypical and <a href="../../2019/september/roophloch.html">neurodivergent</a> flavors. There are all kinds of races and ethnic groups and divisions and sub-divisions of all of them. And with the vast diversity of cultural practices and languages and food and celebrations... This world is a colorful place. So long as people are peaceful to each other, why would I want it to be any other way?</p>
<p>I can only exist in a world where I am the only one of me. Unique, differentiated, separate and yet a part of the world. Even if the homogenization were of myself, making everyone see things exactly the way I do, I would still refuse to live in it, for without the differences of other people, there would be no surprises, no spontaneity arising from a mind I cannot access. There would be no point in being, for there would always be someone better than me at being me.</p>
<p>If every website in the world looked exactly as mine does, although the JavaScript menace would be defeated (assuming they were all blogs), it would be just as boring of a world. It would be just like everyone having the same layout of house and the same furniture. Part of the fun of going to someone else's house is exploring the space that they live in every day, seeing how they've arranged their house to do the things they want it to do. Part of the fun of going to someone else's website is figuring out the layout, where everything is, what all the buttons do. And both websites and people's houses tell you so much about the person living inside: whether they're a clean freak or more relaxed on the hygiene issue, what color schemes they find pleasant, whether they're a minimalist or a maximalist...</p>
<p>Granted, things like colors or advanced layouts don't work in browsers without CSS support. But given the Chrome/Firefox near-duopoly on the mainstream browser market and the prohibitive time cost of developing a separate browser engine not based on one of the two, the vast majority of readers would have to go out of their way to use a browser without even basic CSS support. And not everyone likes to have JavaScript enabled (for good reasons, and websites worth their time will at least pleasantly degrade to a readable state without it). But to have the <i>option</i> to have these things to give one's site just that extra pinch of individuality, I feel, is an important part of- dare I say it- <i>user sovereignty</i>.</p>
<p>Proponents of <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200620001155/https://proxy.vulpes.one/gopher/republic.circumlunar.space/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-16__The_Small_Internet.txt">the so-called "Small Internet"</a> build their sites and protocols around the concept that the only ethical filetype to serve is unformatted (aka sans-CSS or anything like it) plaintext, and that it is up to the client authors and the users themselves to determine how they want content to be displayed. According to the head developer, Solderpunk, himself:</p>
<blockquote>
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200620001945/https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification-modified.gmi">Authors should not expect to exercise any control over the precise rendering of their text lines, only of their actual textual content.</a>
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<p>But this is already how the web works. Users have the option of using browsers that don't support CSS or JavaScript, or disabling them if said browsers <i>do</i> support those, or using <a href="https://add0n.com/stylus.html">extensions</a> to <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/">control</a> <a href="https://noscript.net/">these</a> <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/">at will</a>. The same cannot be said of Gemini browsers. Even <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200620002252/https://github.com/MasterQ32/kristall/blob/master/README.md">Kristall</a>, which yours truly has <a href="../../../tutorials/kristall-haiku.html">contributed to</a> and considers the best of the "Small Internet" browsers, only allows control over a relatively tiny subset of CSS. I don't "expect to exercise any control" when I code my site, only suggest a default stylesheet so my website doesn't look like trash by default.</p>
<p>I must admit that here is where the oh-so-beloved terminal fails. For every site at its most functional looks the same, takes on whatever color scheme I have applied to my system at that moment. Remnants of a layout dependent on the bloated parts of CSS or JavaScript, like the infamous several pages of bullet-point navigational menus in Lynx, don't count because they detract from the site instead of serving it. But I am an outlier case. Lynx only takes up a tiny fraction of a percent of browser share. I know going in that I am most likely going to get a second-class experience. <b>I can accept the breakage of poorly-coded sites if that means I can surf the web without fear of anything nasty</b> (a boon Solderpunk will later claim only for Gemini).</p>
<p>Solderpunk, in his <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200620002844/https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/users/solderpunk/cornedbeef/why-not-just-use-a-subset-of-http-and-html.gmi">most recent post</a>, talks at length about why he is developing a new protocol instead of trying to reclaim the web. His main point is that he specifically wants a place where all content looks and acts the same by default, where all gemsites (or whatever term Gemini sites are called now) are defanged and neutered and cannot possibly do any harm to the reader.</p>
<p>A noble goal, to seek to protect users- except that this forces <i>homogenization</i>. All content looks the same visually. There is nothing graphics-wise to differenciate one author from another, one gemsite from another. Everything churns into the same putrid-brown sludge of walls of text. Although I may generally dislike the denizens of Neocities for some reason or another, at least when I go <a href="https://neocities.org/browse">browse through</a>, I feel like I'm taking a tour through fairyland and not a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200620153035/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchyovka">Soviet-era slum</a>. <b>(EDIT 2020-08-26: This is mainly only true for browsers that faithfully follow the spec of "one document per request". <a href="https://github.com/RangerMauve/agregore-browser">Agregore</a> is a graphical browser with Gemini support that renders my site just like how it's <i>supposed</i> to look, CSS stylesheets and all. Also, the <a href="https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/mayvaneday.art/index.html">Mozz.us Gemini-to-HTTP proxy</a> seems to do this as well.)</b></p>
<p>Solderpunk argues that there is no point in trying to carve out, as he calls it, a "SafeWeb" from HTTP/S because there is "simply no way to know in advance whether fetching any given https:// URL will yield SafeWeb content or UnsafeWeb content." One can either use browser extensions, as I mentioned earlier, to neuter or wrangle into submission sites on mainstream browsers or use a browser that doesn't support "UnsafeWeb" sites. <i>Or</i> just build a protocol where one doesn't always have to be on the defensive, like Gemini.</p>
<blockquote>Safeweb status is inherently unstable by virtue of being a subset of something greater - people will start off building SafeWebsites but then later decide that "SafeWeb plus just these one or two extra tags that I really want and promise to use responsibly!" is "SafeEnoughWeb".</blockquote>
<p>But this is true of everything network-wise. Anybody on the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200620004115/https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/">Gemini mailing list</a> can attest to the constant attempts to stuff more functionality into the damn protocol, like content uploading and inline content, and Solderpunk's desperate vetoing of these. What is to stop someone from saying "fuck it" to the official spec and creating an addition to the <code>text/gemini</code> format or the protocol itself and then developing a server and client that supports it? Is it "SafeEnoughGem" then? Compliant clients will refuse to respect anything the spec does not like, just as my "dozen third-party plugins" will refuse to respect anything I do not like.</p>
<p><b>There is no such thing as a permanently safe web protocol.</b> Remember Gopher? It's possible to serve an HTML page with JavaScript and CSS embedded over Gopher. Graphical browsers will treat it the same as if it were HTTP. Obviously, as it stands, Gopher would have troubles with server-side applications out-of-the-box, but it's not impossible to add support to a server-side application to make a Gopher site just as heinous as the HTTP/S everyone so claims to hate.</p>
<blockquote>All of this is an <i>insane</i> quantity of tedious and error-prone work in order to do a bad job of replicating what simple-by-design protocols like Gopher or Gemini offer at a drastically reduced cost of entry: a clearly defined online space, distinct from the web, where you know for sure and in advance that everybody is playing by the same rules.</blockquote>
<p>You may have a point, Solderpunk, about Gemini being "psychologically liberating" since one does not have to defend themselves, since the interface for every site is the same, since implementation of servers and clients is comparatively easy. <i>For now</i>. Had I not already known the full control an HTTP/S website affords me and only <i>now</i> joined the internet as an author, I might have gone with Gemini for its ease-of-use. But you will not be the benevolent-dictator-for-life forever. All good things, all golden eras, come to an end eventually. One day you may find Gemini becoming the same bloated protocol you sought to flee if enough developers want it so. One day you may find your ant colonies flooding.</p><p>From the <a href="../../../nomad.md.asc">Nomadic Manifesto</a>:</p>
<blockquote>...there is no permanent safe haven for us in this world. We are condemned to wandering forever.</blockquote>
<p>I would rather have a dangerous, potentially devastating, liberation than a safe sanitized serfdom. I would rather have my body intact and have to learn how to defend it than have everyone's limbs chopped off so nobody can hurt each other. And I would rather have a billion sworn enemies than have even one person forced to be the exact same as me, than I be forced to homogenize myself for the sake of another person's safety.</p>
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<h1>"Free speech" kinda sucks, actually</h1>
<p>published: 2020-06-16</p>
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<p>Today, through the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200616000557/https://gopher.tildeverse.org/i-logout.cz/1/bongusta/">Bongusta Gopher aggregator</a>, I stumbled upon a person who pretentiously calls themselves <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200616000816/https://gopher.tildeverse.org/aussies.space/1/~freet/phlog/">"The Free Thinker"</a>, fresh with hot takes such as <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200616000421/https://gopher.tildeverse.org/aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2020-05-31The_Best_Thing_About_Gopher_is_that_its_Unencrypted.txt">"actually, transport security is bad because it prevents me from using my shitty machines; damn everyone else"</a>. While occasionally they make a salient point, the majority of their phlog consists of either crap I don't care about or crap I don't care enough to point out why they're wrong about.</p>
<p>But I can't bring myself to feel any sort of negative feelings about them, for I see a lot of myself in them. From their writing, they know they stand against the majority's opinion on any given subject. They have ascended beyond caring. They have ideas they know others will find idiotic, and dare to have them anyway.</p>
<p>But what is the "free" in "free thinker" supposed to mean, anyway? Free as in gratis, since their posts aren't behind a firewall (and thanks to Corona-chan, I don't have to pay for the transport of bits and bytes into my home network, either)? Free as in freedom, Stallman's variety, where I don't have to use any proprietary software to reach their server, to read their words, where I can remix them as I see fit and scatter them on the wind like dandelion seeds?</p>
<p>Or maybe it's "free from overt outside influence".</p>
<p>Can speech ever truly be free? For it costs calories to move my mouth, to make my lungs push out air to form words, to move my fingers on a screen. Nearly negligible, or otherwise there would be no such thing as obese internet celebrities, but there nonetheless.</p>
<p>Maybe one would define "free speech" as speech done without fear of censorship by anybody else. On the surface, one would feel inclined to support this. If it is technologically impossible for one to be censored, then one could "speak" without the fear of a government or any other body of people proclaiming themselves to have power over others silencing their words before they reached anybody else or stopping the signal once it had.</p>
<p>There is such a place where this is possible. It's called the ZeroTalk forum on ZeroNet. And it's an absolute cesspool of people covered by all of a hysterical liberal's favorite words. Racists, fascists, peddlers of fake news, misogynists, transphobes, homophobes... If it's on a bingo board of things Orange Man Bad has been called the past four years, one is certain to find that kind of person shitting up ZeroTalk.</p>
<p>This can be mitigated to a limited degree. Several blocklists, including MOAB by the not-a-cesspool-dweller Styromaniac, give ZeroNet peers the ability to filter out the worst of it. But blocklists only work by user ID or zite address, not by keyword (at least, last time I checked). And ZeroNet has none of these enabled out-of-the-box. The default experience for normie newcomers is to be instantly flooded with pretty damn close to the worst humanity has to offer.</p>
<p>Do not misinterpret me. I am not calling for censorship. But what is "censorship", anyway? Some, including the aforementioned ZeroTalk denizens, might define censorship as "anytime someone chooses not to hear what I have to say". Under that definition, blocklists are a form of censorship as they are a blanket mute of anything a list of posters has ever posted. But if the cost of removing this "censorship" is to have to choose between seeing the same uninspired string of racial slurs ad nauseam or leaving said community to opt out, well, <i>hasta la vista</i>, baby.</p>
<p>Ideologically, I know that peer-to-peer is superior to client-server for the reasons I laid out <a href="../../2019/june/second-class-citizens.html">a year ago</a>. Client-server inherently disadvantages those without the financial resources to pay for a VPS or the technical knowhow to run their own server behind ever-restrictive ISPs. And peer-to-peer is a lot closer to apocalypse-ready since most P2P systems don't require a connection to the outside world for base functionality. (Although I don't see how one bugging in would get much in the way of communication without others to be traveling and spreading their data around...)</p>
<p>But my personal experience sometimes finds me preferring client-server and the control it gives the person running the server. On ZeroNet, owners of interactive zites can't easily remove submitted content, if at all. They can only suggest to other clients seeding that specific zite to hide certain users' content.</p>
<p>This may seem desirable at first glance. But imagine that you are an owner of a small forum on ZeroNet about a niche interest of yours. Vidya, electronics, outdoor extreme sports, sub-sub-subcategories of a certain political ideology, doesn't matter. You and a handful of others are civil and self-policing and pleasant to each other. But one day the spammers find it. They spew slurs and ads everywhere. It takes you a while, but you manage to pull together a decent blocklist and make a sticky post advising visitors to use it to get back to normal, maybe even submit it to MOAB so the rest of ZeroNet benefits.</p>
<p>But congratulations! Your zite is now forever mutilated. You can delete the spammy content from your side, but so long as those spammers are connected to the same trackers everyone else is using, new visitors will use them in pulling your zite to their machine, and the spammers' user-submitted content will come along with that.</p>
<p>On a client-server forum, the admin would just ban said spammers, delete their content, and blacklist said IP addresses from registering again (if on a network with IP addresses, that is). Communities on client-server models have greater control over what speech they are allowed to tolerate. If said servers are on darknets like Tor or I2P, they have even greater freedom to decide their own rules, for the masking of their geographical locations and the extra transport security provides a pretty damn good (but not infallible) protection against government interference. This does not have to be limited to a single server; a chat on Matrix could be spearheaded on one server, with users from other servers joining, but the admin would still have ultimate control (last I remember; they might have changed it) over who stays in the chat and who gets kicked or banned. Peer-to-peer systems that rely on invites from someone already in the forum being joined, like Briar, have greater control than ZeroNet's free-for-all system over who gets in, but once a peer gets compromised or lets a bad apple in, it becomes downright difficult to purge bad actors if not impossible.</p>
<p>Self-determination is one of the greatest things I put value on in this life. (I will not call it a "right", for technically rights do not exist without the power to protect them, but that is a pondering for another post.) An individual should have the ability to decide who they associate and disassociate from and be able to do so at will (given the consent of those being associated with, of course; no such consent is needed for leaving). A group should have the ability to decide their own rules for operation and grant who they feel trustworthy the power to enforce them.</p> <p>I am not advocating for centralization. Far from it! I do not want the entire internet to become just Reddit and Facebook and Twitter and Google. But I see the people I read quite frequently proclaiming the virtues of "user sovereignity" without also acknowledging the sovereignity of the, for lack of a better term, "usee". If this site had comments, would I not be justified in moderating them so that I would not become host to filth? Should I be disallowed from preventing known spambots and attackers from accessing my site? Am I unreasonable, as "The Free Thinker" would assuredly label me, for requiring decent levels of transport security to protect my words and your eyes from man-in-the-middling?</p>
<p>Would <i>you</i> allow random people to walk into your house and let out a steamy crap on your carpet? No! You control (or, I sure hope you do or can) who comes into your abode. So why is it okay when it happens on the internet? Let those who want to roll in filth build their houses of mud and manure, and let those who aspire to excellence build their cathedrals and sacred meeting places. And when some from both agree to meet each other and listen to what each has to say, let them build showers to meet each other halfway.</p>
<p>(Innuendo not intended.)</p>
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<h1>Antinatalism</h1>
<p>published: 2020-03-21</p>
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<p>It is unethical and highly immoral to bring children into this world.</p>
<p>The absence of pleasure is not bad. If I sit on my bed in my room and stare at the wall, that is not inherently bad. True, there are far better things I could be doing with my time, far more than it would be prudent to list here. But there are also far <em>worse</em> things I could be doing. To stare at the wall brings me no harm and no gain. It is a neutral action.</p>
<p>But the presence of pain <em>is</em> bad. If I get a cut on my finger, it stings, and I might bleed a little, and I have an increased risk of infection in that area until the wound heals. There is no benefit to getting that cut or experiencing that pain. If I lose a treasured object and I feel sad, that is bad, and I gain nothing. This is to distinguish the pain of a negative experience from the pain of a positive one: if I want to get physically stronger, and I exert myself until my muscles are sore, although I am experiencing physical pain, it is a positive event for me.</p>
<p>Given that the absence of pleasure is not bad, but that the presence of pain is bad, it logically holds that it is better to be absent of pleasure than it is to be experiencing pain. To be alive is to be able to experience pain. Before I became alive, when I was in the metaphorical "void", I did not experience any pain.</p>
<p>A child that has not been conceived cannot feel pleasure, but it cannot feel pain either. Studies are inconclusive whether or not an embryo conceived and then aborted can feel the pain of its abortion, but whatever pain it does feel, if any at all, is brief, and then it returns to the void of nonexistence.</p>
<p>This is not to say that, once conceived, one is obligated to bring the pregnancy to completion just because the life has been forced out of the void. The earlier one can abort a pregnancy, the better, as the potential pain the embryo feels is minimized. It also does not make abortion necessarily a good, merely the less bad of two bad options: the potential short pain of abortion, or the pain of birth <em>and</em> the pain to be endured throughout however long the child's lifespan is, which is not guaranteed to be outweighed by the potential pleasure to be experienced.</p>
<p>This also does not justify murder, as one might think: after all, after the murder, one is dead, and one cannot feel pain in death, right? But murder is an involuntary subjection to death. Murder <em>forces</em> death upon the victim just as conception <em>forces</em> life upon the birthee. <em>Suicide</em> would be justified, as it is a voluntary ending of one's life (and often a surprisingly rational response to a perceived future life where the pain far outweighs the pleasure one is to receive). But the key word here is "voluntary". Every person owns their own body (self-ownership) and has the right to do whatever they want to their body (morphological freedom) so long as they do not force others to give them the fruits of their labor in order to do so (you can pay a surgeon to give you an elective cosmetic surgery, but you cannot force them under the threat of violence, your own or by the government, to do that surgery). If they decide to end their own life, then that is their right.</p>
<p>But it is impossible for birth to be voluntary, as it is impossible to ask an unborn person for their consent to be born. As far as we know, there is no alternate dimension where the souls of all the unborn people reside, waiting to be born, that a prospective parent could contact to ask for consent. And even if there was: how would one even go about asking for consent? A requirement of having rights in most "civilized" countries is to be alive. You know, to have corporeal form? To have a body? As far as I know, we don't (yet) live in the timeline where notary publics in banks can hold seances to ask the unborn to sign off on the consent forms to being born. And this scenario assumes that the "soul", or whatever you want to call it, already has the sentience and knowledge and cognitive ability to fully understand the ramifications of what they would be consenting to. There is no way (currently) to contact the unborn except to give them corporeal form, to give them <em>life</em>, at which point it's a <em>little</em> too late to get consent.</p>
<p>And what if, even in this outlandish scenario, they <em>didn't</em> give consent, and the parent gave birth to them anyway? The parent gambles with a life not their own in the hopes that their child will have a good life. Say there's a lottery a parent can play where there is a fifty-fifty chance of either their child receiving a million dollars upon turning eighteen and their child being diagnosed with a painful and horrific terminal illness upon turning eighteen. One would be right to judge that it would be cruel to put a child on the line to play in said lottery, even though the benefit of the good outcome would be towards the child. So why is it okay to make a child play the lottery of life when it is far more likely for them to get a bad outcome, even if not as harsh as the terminal illness, than to get a good one? The average person in a "civilized" country is far closer to being homeless than they are to being a billionaire. And while the terminal illness is catastrophic, what about the total sum of all the suffering and pain the average person experiences in their lifetime? Is death by a thousand cuts worth the brief (and often false) respites in between?</p>
<p>Why force the child to take the chance? Why force the child to experience the inevitable pain of existence when, by refusing to procreate, the prospective parent can for sure prevent their child from ever suffering?</p>
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<h1>Living In The Epilogue</h1>
<p>published: 2020-03-26</p>
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<p>It's become a bad habit of mine recently to leave my bedroom window open regardless of the weather. The temperature hovers around the high-thirties to the low-forties, indecisive whether it wants to scatter snow over the ground in a last attempt to drag out the last dregs of winter or to give up and let it all melt. Any snow that dares to come down is almost always gone within twenty-four hours, leaving blistered and brown grass in its wake like a little kid repeatedly woken up in the night, confused whether to be awake or asleep, never truly able to be either.</p>
<p>But it's always chilly outside. And since the vents barely work in my room, I can rarely tell the difference by touch alone. The tips of my fingers going numb, the vague ache in my thighs, the sounds of birds chirping and singing in the air: these are the only reminders to close it again at end of day.</p>
<p>If I remember.</p>
<p>There used to be other sounds in the air. The neighbors congregating in one of their yards. A toddler playing in the backyard connected to ours, flitting in and out of the plastic playground like an indecisive bird. The sounds of cars and trucks and motorcycles gunning their engines to show off what they perceive to be raw power on the nearby roads.</p>
<p>At my previous house, I used to lie awake at night and listen to the sounds of the vehicles speeding through the nearby highway. And at college, <a href="../../2019/november/other-world.html">walking back to my dorms from work</a>, I would watch the glow of the headlights coming down the rolling hills like fireflies, like meteors crashing down to earth.</p>
<p>And it was on those roads that the stories came to me, running in sonderous snippets, unaware heralds of a strange sense of disconnection- of dissociation- that they could not yet articulate into words.</p>
<p>And as I wove them into coherent narratives, I found my own narrative starting to unravel at the seams.</p>
<p>In elementary school, as I didn't fit in neatly with the rest of the special-needs kids since I had too much cognitive ability to be content with essentially being babysat in a room full of toys all day, I instead got shoved into the &quot;gifted and talented&quot; program, which was the school administration's way of saying, &quot;Congratulations, you're good at licking the boots of the state's educational system! Let's pull you out of your normal classes and give you harder ones while still expecting you to do all of the homework for both <em>simultaneously</em>.&quot; I and about ten other kids were sold the lies that we were <em>so much better</em> than those other kids who only got the <em>normal</em> classes, that we were destined for greatness, that we would succeed in all of our educational endeavors with flying colors. We were written a story with us as our own protagonist, given plot armor, promised a happy ending.</p>
<p>I never found out how the others ended up, since the transition to junior high separated all of us, and then the sapling that I was, finally taking root after ten years of mass rejection from the soil, was ripped up and transplanted to a town where I'd never see any of them again anyway.</p>
<p>We as humans think in stories. It's hard to do otherwise. You burn your hand on the stove, and then never again as you remember the story of how your hand throbbed in pain. You learn how to do a skill, and in visualizing it in your head, you play a mini-story of some formless person acting out those steps so that you can mirror their actions in your own. You pass down your values and morals to little children by telling them fables.</p>
<p>You drown the pain of existence by stitching yourself into a story, a coherent one, one with a moral and a gist and some sense of a definite ending.</p>
<p>But stories in the human sense are not real. They are <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110831022543/theviewfromhell.blogspot.com/2010/12/living-in-epilogue-social-policy-as.html">social constructs</a>. You convince yourself that you are living in a narrative because to do otherwise is to concede that there is no purpose of life, no grand scheme of things, just the endless expanse of day after day after day.</p>
<p>Gamers who play story-based games with post-games- in other words, games that let you keep playing even after the final boss fight- rarely stay long in the post-boss world. Without the grand struggle to strive for, the big boss to defeat or the lover to save or the treasure to acquire, the world becomes boring, pointless. One pours their time into games to create heaven, and then finds that, without conflict or an objective, there is no compelling reason- <em>story</em>- to keep them hanging around.</p>
<p>Heaven is, for most religious-minded people, the final end stage of their constructed story of life. Heaven is the cessation of struggle, of desire, the eternal epilogue.</p>
<blockquote>&quot;We may make up stories and allow them to shape our perceptions, but ultimately there is no story. We are all living in the epilogue of reality...&quot; <br />- Sarah Perry, <em>Every Cradle Is a Grave</em></blockquote>
<p>And I'm trapped in the epilogue. There is no rhyme or reason to my life. If there was a grand struggle to this story of mine, I can't discern if it's over or where it is now if not- and the confusion is <a href="../../../poetry/s/sakura.txt">taking a toll</a> on my <a href="../../../flashfiction/c/cetra.html">ability to write</a>. The confusion is terrifying. Who am I if I <a href="../../../poetry/o/october-7-2018.txt">have no story</a>? A <a href="../../../flashfiction/e/erin4.html">body without organs</a>? How am I supposed to string together a coherent narrative if I don't have one of my own to fall back on?</p>
<p>And I fall, and I fall further into the vortex with my wings ablaze, and I fall forever...</p>
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<h1>I Do Not Seek Annihilation</h1>
<p>published: 2020-10-31</p>
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<p>Despite the voice in my head that shrieks <strong>"KILL DESTROY KILL DESTROY"</strong> at every slight inconvenience, I neither find pleasure in nor gain satisfaction from gratuitous violence.</p>
<p>Once, during a vacation sometime in the cusp between elementary in middle school (2011, I think, although I am too lazy to rifle through my photos and find the date proper), my family and I went to some cave system out of state. There was a side attraction, a video game theater, where one overpaid for a ticket and then entered a small theater with a plastic laser gun and played through some short interactive movie. One of the movies had a barebone plot, if any at all, that distilled down to "cowboys genocide aliens".</p>
<p>I told my mother that I did not feel comfortable partaking in such senseless violence, even if simulated. What had the aliens done to me to deserve such a gruesome fate? Were she to pay for a ticket, I would not participate; I would sit it out. I offered to save her the fifteen dollars or so that my ticket would have cost and wait on a nearby bench for them to finish.</p>
<p>My mother told me to shut up and that I had no choice. She paid for five tickets and dragged me into the dim room that reeked of sweat, and my parents and my brothers spent the next seven minutes or so gleefully bursting open the swollen green heads of any unfortunate extraterrestrials that wandered onto the screen.</p>
<p>On the ending credits, there was a big fat zero next to my name.</p>
<p>I think she grounded me afterwards. Which I find hilarious, if not "doomer fuel", because now <em>she</em> is the one proclaiming herself a pacifist whenever she sees me and my brothers playing Smash. But there is no death in Smash, merely a ceaseless cycle of knockouts and respawning. Everyone knew what they were getting into at the start. Everybody is okay at end of day.</p>
<p>If only I could say the same.</p>
<p>Were it up to my mother (or any other entity deigning to fill the role) to decide my path in life, I would be nothing but a daughter, a reference to someone else's reproductive exploits, never an individual in my own right. A certain level of achievement is tolerated, this is true, but only so the mother can point and say: "<em>My</em> child did this." As if I am only a conduit for unlived dreams, a vessel to be vicariously lived through.</p>
<p>I consider myself an antinatalist because I do not think it ethical to give a person life, and thus the guarantee of experiencing suffering, without their consent. But I am already here, and to return myself prematurely to whatever lies beyond the veil would be too painful of an endeavor for me to undertake. To make that choice for others would be just as abhorrent as to put them in that situation to begin with.</p>
<p>I do not yearn for the flame of all I am to <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20201022022634if_/https://www.reddit.com/r/antinatalism/comments/j97cfc/a_dissolving_ouroboros_gif/">flicker out forevermore</a>.</p>
<p>I do not seek annihilation.</p>
<p>I want my life, and this world, to go on and on and on for as long as people wish to live in it, forever evolving in form and experience. I want to be a tree, and a wind that carries along words and birds, and a flower blooming in the cracks in a concrete jail wall in all defiance... I want to dive in the depths of a black hole and hike along a trail of stars and catch a ride on a comet. I want ichor to ignite my veins like a fuse and ambrosia to scour my throat, dissolving the dreck, leaving only the highest-grade poetry behind to sing for all time.</p>
<p>I want Stirner, and Novatore, and de Cleyre. I want freedom, and love, and my ego, my Self, my Unique.</p>
<p>I do not seek to end my life, but to change it.</p>
<p>I do not seek annihilation, but <em>liberation</em>.</p>
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<h1>Deitus?</h1>
<p>published: 2020-10-24</p>
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<blockquote><a href="http://sonic.net/yronwode/arcane-archive.org/religion/satanism/thelema-xeper-deitus-1.php">DEITUS is a new Word for a new Aeon. It is the realization that man's consciousness is eternal and omnipotent. It is, further, the realization, that the individual Will is a direct manifestation of the Will of the Universe. The Law of the Aeon of Lucifer is THELEMA, XEPER, DEITUS or "Will to come into being as a God."<br />When you attain DEITIS [sic], you become a manifestation of the dynamic consciousness of the universe... you become the very embodiment of God or Satan...</a></blockquote>
<p>Last night (at the time of writing this), I was dragged into work on a day I would usually have off for a late-night team meeting. Truth be told, they were supposed to have happened every few months or so, but because of Corona-chan, the managers had been putting them off until now. So I donned my work-issued vest and followed my co-workers, also confused and mostly new enough to have never gone to a work meeting before, and sat down on a cold floor upstairs while a handful of managers lambasted us for everything we'd done wrong and chucked candy at us like so many bullets whenever they thought we "looked bored" or were "going to sleep".</p>
<p>I imagined a sword in my hand, or maybe a beam of fire, as we were told we were not licking the boots of the General Office hard enough. I wondered what the building would look like covered in flames as the manager talking admonished <em>someone</em>, an impersonal <em>you</em>, for taking twenty minutes in the bathroom.</p>
<p>Over and over I have dreams where I am in some kind of vulnerable position: at school, at work... A teacher, a customer, someone else irate corners me, presses my nerves until I make some kind of honest mistake. And then, threatened, my blood glows aflame. A sudden rush of power. And then the person dissolves into a pile of ash at my feet, threat neutralized.</p>
<p>There are a great many things I would do for the power to defend myself, to protect myself. But a god I do not wish to become, for, as the old adage goes, "absolute power corrupts absolutely." To become a deity, a being sans conflict, would be to forever <a href="../march/epilogue.html">live in the Epilogue.</a> (Or, if there are other beings in the heavens, to cause massive collateral harm as mortal beings get caught up in our struggles.)</p>
<p>For a few months, I have been tossing the idea back and forth of a pair of archetypes. Similar to the lesbian <em>butch</em> and <em>femme</em>, I feel the persistent presence of the <em>ocean</em> and the <em>moon</em>.</p>
<p>A woman first appearing shallow, emotionless, detached from the world. Reclusive, withdrawn. But below the frothy skin is an ocean of terrifying depth, home to a litany of unnerving creatures, each more marvelous than the last. Only a tiny fraction of the depths have ever been mapped, far too vast to explore in one lifetime. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20201008180133/https://www.insidescience.org/video/what-would-happen-if-there-were-no-moon">She needs the moon to regulate herself, to keep herself from succumbing to the chaos within.</a></p>
<p>A woman too dazzling, too radiant, to behold directly. A fierce being of unstoppable ambition, ego higher than her lunar namesake. But she is lonely. She requires an anchor to keep her from flying off in a moment's haste, a reason to keep returning to the earth. She needs someone to appreciate her shining bright, someone to look, someone to acknowledge her. She needs someone who will gladly accept the secrets she casts off like meteors, take them to a watery grave.</p>
<p>And while <a href="../../../books.html#mm_tpf" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, Edell III">I could easily fit myself</a> within the loose description of the ocean, it is merely that: a description, not a prescription. I do not look at a label and go, "hmm, I shall mold myself to it"; I look at it, and if it already describes who I am, then I toy with it (although I would rather discard the whole concept of labels altogether).</p>
<p>Why, I wonder, are so many occultists hung up on molding themselves to something Other? Emptying themselves in hopes that a deity will take hold of their sack of flesh and live through it instead of themselves? Regardless of whether or not I am a part of THE ALL, there is a reason I am down here and now separate from it, and I am not so keen on cutting it short and returning early.</p>
<p>I examine <em>thelema</em> and start down the path of <em>xeper</em>. But I hesitate at <em>deitus</em>. I do not wish to live as an "embodiment" of anything other than myself. I do not wish to manifest the entirety of the collective universe, only that which is Willed to myself and <em>only</em> myself. What is the real difference between a person who gives up all their possessions and kills their ego to become one with a so-called "benevolent" god, and one who discards their humanity and seeks to become a mere conduit for the devil? Both are chasing phantasms, false machinations of their own minds. Both put so little value on themselves that they are too afraid to live without some being beyond this realm to vicariously live through, to sacrifice themselves on the altar of.</p>
<p>A world full of plastic people who are only a god's playthings would be either numbingly boring in its perfection or mindlessly cruel in its meaninglessness.</p>
<p><em>Thelema, xeper, egomet.</em></p>
<p><em>I Will to come into being as myself.</em></p>
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<h1>Thelema</h1>
<p>published: 2020-10-10</p>
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<p>Throughout my life, I have had many psychoses. And while they abate after some time, they never truly go away, merely changing form.</p>
<p>The first one that I can recall was in seventh grade, where, after having read a book on angels I had picked at random in the middle school library (there were many classes with mandatory reading time, where one would be given detention if they had the misfortune to show up without a book the teachers deemed acceptable), I was overtaken with the sudden and violent desire to acquire wings of my own. I prayed, <em>begged</em>, my childhood god, still two years out from losing my faith, to grant me the ability to fly. I admit I was myopic. How would I have explained it, had it happened? Humans do not have wings. Their bodies would not be strong enough to support the amount of force required to make their bodies airborne. My entire anatomy would have had to be gutted, rewired, replaced.</p>
<p>But yet I persist in having dreams where my wish is fulfilled. Almost always it is coupled with running away from home and the deep terror of my father giving chase, intending to murder me via a stab to the chest or neck. Sometimes my bra presses too hard into my back, and I can almost delude myself into feeling those extra two limbs there, feeling the breeze rustle in my feathers, thirsting to catch the wind and laugh in the face of the sun.</p>
<p>In the beginning days of my first year of college, likely as a coping mechanism, I was seized with a tumult of emotions I could not easily explain: I wanted to go home to places my rational mind knew never existed, return to people my rational mind knew were mere machinations. It occupied my every thought, my every action up until my habit of randomly up-and-leaving social media accounts without "proper" goodbyes to my mutuals pissed the wrong person off one too many times and I got harassed off Neocities for explaining (in the previously linked post) how I'd changed my mind on who I was, who I was allowing myself to be turned into, how I was returning to what computer geeks know as the "last known good state".</p>
<p>Even now it remains. I know who I am, and yet I look for myself in every fictional character I come across, my first instinct to wonder: "Were I you in another life?" As if I am insecure in who I am, in what I have accomplished in my short time in this body, needing to vicariously live through some other personage in order to have something to feel proud about. Occasionally I indulge myself, just <a href="../../../poetry/m/melia.txt">long enough</a> to <a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, Sorrowful Laika">let forth</a> a <a href="../../../poetry/u/uncharming-veneer.txt">few poems</a> <a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, liberi">before</a> the floodgates of living in the past (or future) come back.</p>
<p>And now? Now, I am burdened with an impossible task: to become nothing.</p>
<p>Somehow, in some way, minimalism took hold of my heart and started throttling it. I beat it back over and over and over again, and yet it returns every time. I have blood on my hands, it says, for the crime of existing, of using more resources than I technically need, of using <em>any</em> resources at all. The only way it will be satiated is when I am using <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20201005024238/https://collapseos.org/roadmap.html">Collapse OS</a> on a Z80 (or some other low-power machine) powered by solar batteries and am living in some poorly-constructed hut in the middle of the forest with no other possessions to my name than what I absolutely need to survive- and yet continue writing.</p>
<p>I do not want to be broken down into my barest essentials. Line art in itself can be beautiful, can serve one's representational needs, but how much more <em>captivating</em> colors and shading can make it! And no matter how far I would go in cutting myself down, it would never be enough for this psychosis. It would only be satiated upon my death, and yet it does not long for this- for the cessation of my being would mean its end as well.</p>
<blockquote>"But since he can't get away from the world, and in fact can't do so for the very reason that all his activity rises from his endeavors to get away, therefore in <em>pushing the world away</em> (for which it is still necessary that what is to be pushed away and rejected continues to exist; otherwise there would be nothing more to push away); thus, at most, he reaches an extreme degree of liberation, differing from the less liberated only in degree. If he himself achieved the deadening of the earthly senses, which only allows the monotonous whispering of the word "Brahm," he would still not differ essentially from the sensual human being."<br /> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20201005023015/https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-stirner-the-unique-and-its-property">- Max Stirner, <em>The Unique and Its Property</em></a></blockquote>
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<p><em>Thelema</em> is a Greek word that roughly translates to "will". In occult circles, this "will" is <a href="https://archive.vn/https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Will">not will as in willpower (doing whatever you want) but rather one's destiny, one's purpose, the grand course of one's life.</a> Maybe even one's <em>fate</em> (even though the other voice in my head, at least in her earliest days, would rail against such a thing).</p>
<p>I have often said since the very first days of this blog (and even before then, on websites whose only remaining trace of existence is <a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, clouds">one poem</a>) that I am destined for greatness. But what is "greatness"? Who decides what is great, and what is not? To some, the fact that I have accomplished so little in such a short time is great. Some part of me would relish in this, to be able to rest on my laurels for a while, exhaustedly venting my burnt-out spirit. But is there some threshold somewhere of how many people need to like me, even <em>know of my existence</em>, before I can be considered great, before I can fulfill this "destiny"?</p>
<p>If there is, then I will forever be the lowest of the low.</p>
<p>I have also said that I do not wish to be famous but to be respected. <a href="https://archive.vn/https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/15404-perhaps-one-did-not-want-to-be-loved-so-much">Not to be loved, necessarily, but rather to be understood.</a> I do not think it likely that my purpose on this earth is to pander hard enough to have a positive impression on the cultural zeitgeist, to become another Avengers, another Mario- a "cultural default", if you will.</p>
<p>So what, then, is my destiny? What will be my fate? What is my <em>thelema</em>? <strong>Is it even necessary for me to have one</strong>, or is it okay for, as some random person on Twitter puts it, "find interesting things until I die"? I ask Goddess over and over and over, but she does not respond. Possibly she is not there, was never there, just a construction of my mind. Maybe she just wants me to figure it out myself.</p>
<p>I have heard many an occultist expound on the value of listening to one's dreams. Prophecies, maybe. Divine visions, perhaps. Wisdom from one's unconsciousness, most likely. But being autistic, I have never been good at sussing out metaphors, forever wishing others would stop with the needless mysticism and just be straightforward.</p>
<p>Take flying, for instance. Am I to literally become an angel, to escape this mortal coil in some deity's service? Or is it a metaphor for freedom, and my <em>thelema</em> is to find a way to escape the reach of the government, or even just my own parents? There is only so much I can do alone as an individual, so much liberation I can lead others towards. The only person I can save in the end is myself.</p>
<p>Is my obsession with past lives an indication that my <em>thelema</em> is to discover which ones truly <em>were</em> mine, and to integrate the knowledge from them into this one? I do not even know if I <em>can</em> call them mine, for this assumes that one soul is always the same soul, never splintering, never merging with another.</p>
<p>Those who have read my books understand my theory of soul shattering, where upon death a soul splinters into hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces and blends with others to form a new mosaic. Most lose their memories, while a few somehow manage to retain them, flashes of images and disembodied sounds as they were. This leaves room for those who manage to remember their reincarnations, while also explaining why one might see many people claiming to be the same person (usually people who were in positions of power, while this also might be just a desire to vicariously live through the dead): one person's memories may be passed down to multiple people.</p>
<p>If this is the case, then this explains why I have so many disjointed "memories" of so many different people from so many places, some of which do not even exist in this dimension. But can I truly call them "I" when other people with memories, different but of the same people, would be just as legitimate in claiming them as themselves?</p>
<p>How horrifying it is to think, when I die and if I do not manage to evade this dimension's soul recycling mechanism, there may soon be a group of people with memories of my private moments, bickering over which one of them is the real "I".</p>
<p>But I do not wish to always be living in the past.</p>
<p>I am not going to throw away this life I have now in the service of previous ones.</p><p>I am not going to throw away my life.</p>
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<p>Of course, as usual, Goddess does not give me a straight answer, nor does she grant me an audience with her so that I may question her freely with the full use of my mental faculties. Instead, she gives me a dream.</p>
<p>I am in my old elementary school, a sprawling one-story building. From the looks of the teacher who nervously paces the room, I am observing my old sixth grade class. And yet this must be a new addition built since I left there nearly a decade ago (am I really so old?) as I don't recognize the room at all, long and dim with a bare concrete floor. If not for the desks, I would have thought it a hallway, or maybe an art gallery sans the art on the wall.</p>
<p>I am sitting at a desk next to a boy who was quite annoying to deal with in real life. He has brought in two massive curtains made out of Minecraft cake, except somehow skinned to look like giant chunks of red meat, and hangs them up in front of his and my desks. The teacher is not amused, but continues with class.</p>
<p>I come back the next day. I am walking down the long hallway to the sixth grade classrooms when I suddenly realize that I have completely forgotten my backpack at home (which <em>did</em> happen to me once, but only once, and only in kindergarten). All I have in my possession is my phone (my current smartphone, not the flip phone I had at the time) and its charging cable. I wish for the school day to be over with already so that I do not have to suffer through the embarrassment of being forced to use a Chromebook and curse the school for expecting all their students to keep all their files, even personal, in their state-mandated Google account.</p>
<p>I arrive in the classroom. Nobody is there. In fact, the whole school appears to be empty.</p>
<p>I have the bright idea to go searching for my old assignments when the teacher walks in. Thinking I am interfering with her grades, she threatens to report me to the police- as "Melia". <em>Not</em> my legal name. (<em>She must not recognize me,</em> I think.) But, she offers, she will not press charges if I take up the role of self-hosting some of the district's network services for its students.</p>
<p>To her shock, I reply that I gladly would, but I would need to be provided a server to do so as there was no way I would be able (or willing) to do it on my residental connection at home.</p>
<p>Suddenly another person walks in. The city has a princess, and her name is also Melia, and she is fuming at being accused of breaking into the school.</p>
<p>And then the <em>actual</em> Melia (as in, the character from <em>Xenoblade</em>) walks in, also angry that she is being roped into this-</p><p>I hear gunshots from across the building. I leave them to their bickering over who is the real Melia and take off at a dead run. Almost immediately, a few rooms over (which somehow just <em>happen</em> to look like the hallway stretch from the Sunday school wing of my childhood church), a bunch of students are ripping into a cartload of cardboard boxes that had been delivered to the school, full of pillows and mattresses and such. Their eyes are feral, fingers bared like claws, tearing the boxes and everything in them completely asunder.</p>
<p>We meet eyes, and suddenly they are after <em>me</em>. As usual in my dreams, I can use telekinesis, and so I throw them aside the moment they leap into the air. Some of my friends have been caught in the fray, and so I give them openings to escape. The rampaging students grow fiercer, and so I start using pepper spray to subdue the ones with actual weapons. Some of my friends are injured, and so I summon a huge wagon (the type you might pull behind you on your way to a picnic or the local park) and start helping them in so I can pull them out.</p>
<p>I see Luce. A shard of metal the size of my fist is sticking out of one of her legs. I scoop her up in my arms and start fleeing with the wagon full of people.</p>
<p>The ringleader stops me halfway down the seemingly endless hallway. A boy I had the misfortune of knowing in high school: as wide around as I am tall (maybe even more), mountains of fat and sweat cascading off of him, leaving behind an absolutely rancid smell everywhere he went. (I promise you that I am not exaggerating.) He blocks almost the whole path.</p>
<p>"Do black lives matter?" he yells at me.</p>
<p>"Of <em>course</em> they matter," I respond. "Some of the people I am trying to save are black. Do their lives not matter to you?"</p>
<p>This answer enrages him. He lunges towards me as if to strangle me. Suddenly there is a pistol in my free hand. I unload several bullets into his fleshy mass, stopping him in his tracks, and continue my desperate escape.</p>
<p>Outside, there is a schoolbus waiting for me. I help Luce into one of the seats in the front row and start helping load the others into wherever we can seat them fastest. Apparently we miss some, because the bus drives one block and then u-turns, remembering the others.</p>
<p>And then we set off for the hospital.</p>
<p>I wake up in a hot sweat, the single blanket over me askew. It is five in the morning. The sounds of my brothers getting ready for school echo down to me from the first floor kitchen.</p>
<p><em>You save Luce over and over again in so many dreams,</em> I think. <em>Why?</em></p>
<p><em>Because you love her.</em></p>
<p><em>Your</em> thelema <em>is to love,</em> I suddenly think. <a href="https://archive.md/https://sites.google.com/site/thelemaforbeginners/home/4-love"><em>Love shall be the whole of the law; love under will.</em></a></p>
<p>Sometime mid-April, I had drafted a post where I wondered how in the world I was suddenly able to pull off a five-hour shift at work despite barely having been able to do two and a half hours at my shitty work-study (more like work-work and no study) job my first year in college. I theorized that it was because I had developed an alternate personality, someone infinitely more outgoing and helpful. I wanted to meet them next shift, I wrote. I wanted to ask them what in the world they were doing inside of my body.</p>
<p>I showed up that next shift to find the lobby locked due to Corona-chan, every employee working the drive-through. That shift was, and I do not exaggerate, hell on earth. How in the world am I supposed to juggle taking orders, taking payment for orders, and keeping track of orders so that each person driving through gets the correct food? How is <em>anyone</em>? Truly, fast food is a violation of human dignity.</p>
<p>The lead manager, who had spent the shift <em>literally throwing</em> steaming-hot bags of food at me, had the audacity to ask me if I was free that weekend to take additional shifts. I told him I would check my calendar. When he texted, I told him I was busy.</p>
<p>I would have quit on the spot, but the would-be rage of my father held me back, and so I searched for job openings between sobs in the parking lot as I waited for him to come and pick me up.</p>
<p>I can only consider it a stroke of luck that the COVID that had robbed me of my adequate position working front register gave me a new job at a retail store, paid fifty percent more to do fifty percent less work. <a href="../../../books.html#tyia" title="Three Years In Absentia, Parthena II">"Corona-chan will set you free", indeed.</a></p>
<p>In the beginning days of the new job, I was just as grumpy as my co-workers. But soon I found I did not have the energy to constantly curse my existence and also do my job correctly (it turns out scanning barcodes actually uses quite a lot of brainpower to keep track of everything). Where my co-workers grumbled and gave dead stares to approaching customers, I danced and greeted everyone and was patient as I explained things to them.</p>
<p>I felt a strange love for the universe, for everything in it. I did not have it in me anymore to sustain such hatred in my heart, to always have my defenses up, hardened and afraid. True, at home, they would tense up again around my parents. But more often than not, they were down, and the house would feel a little bit like how a home should.</p>
<p>I would close my eyes at night, exhausted, and dream of a life of purpose, an existence with power, a world without end.</p>
<p>As I pace up and down in front of whatever register I have been assigned that day, I wonder: <em>Is my</em> thelema <em>to love? To find that world? To create it, even?</em></p>
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<h1>Xeper</h1>
<p>published: 2020-10-17</p>
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<a href="https://archive.md/https://heart-fools.tumblr.com/post/121094768429/at-some-point-growing-stopped-being-painful-and">
<blockquote>you must allow yourself to outgrow<br />
and depart from certain eras of your life with a gentle sort of<br />
ruthlessness<br />
- katy maxwell, "girl of the earth"</blockquote>
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<p>Tiny bugs swirl all around me as I sit here in the backyard. Microscopic, infinite, brought in by the wind. Quickly crumbling to dirt as I swipe them off my body, off my computer, off my purse. It is just hot enough to make wearing my hoodie uncomfortable, even though it is the only shield I have against the ceaseless onslaught of insects.</p>
<p>At least, save for going inside, which I am able to do at will as a human.</p>
<p>I peel my jacket off my body and flop down on my bed. My skin is covered in faint black streaks, little disembodied insect legs, red spots that itch. I turn my fan on, turn on some <a href="https://archive.md/https://setsvko.bandcamp.com/">calming music</a> to help me write.</p>
<p>Two years and two days ago (at the time of writing this), I remember, I abandoned the lab time scheduled for my Intro to Python class early. Usually I would stay for the full time, even if all my assignments were done, and work on my website, answer comments on my site on Neocities, scroll through my Tumblr page unbeknownst that its remaining days were in the single digits.</p>
<p>I opened my profile, ready and eager to publish what I would soon rewrite as <a href="../../../poetry/f/fatali.txt">"fatali"</a> (then only what is now the first stanza) and was immediately flooded with accusations of being homophobic and transphobic for the crime of... not wanting to be a fictionkin anymore. I cleaned up the comments, but they were quickly replaced (by the same person) with nonsensical strings of Korean letters. I don't think there was a block function at the time, but if there was, it was useless, because very quickly other people started admonishing me for not wanting... <em>literal spam</em> all over my profile.</p>
<p>I downloaded the zip file containing my whole site and deleted the Neocities account. Just like that, I had become undone. I had unpersoned myself. The only evidence that I had ever existed on the internet as Vane Vander lay in that precious little file that sat in my Downloads folder.</p>
<p>Searching for a webhost without any kind of social aspect, I eventually returned to <a href="https://archive.md/https://www.freehostingeu.com/">the very first (actual) host I had ever used</a> four days later and <a href="../../../poetry/o/october-7-2018.txt">immediately went back to writing</a>. It would be a few more days before I would discover Keybase, which carried me until I got access to my bank account and could finally rent my own VPS.</p>
<p>The <a href="../july/html.html">very first website I had ever written was actually an online game</a>. I made several, each just as broken as the last: first a clone of Webkinz (which never really panned out beyond a mockup in PowerPoint), then of Howrse and Babydow after I got banned for spamming Christian propaganda on the forums, then of a generic pet care game. There were no actual server-side mechanics to control anything; I would have to go in and manually update the HTML every day after checking about a hundred different page view counters and recalculating each entity's stats.</p>
<p>Funnily enough, it was a youth group pastor at my old church who introduced me to blogging. He had asked me one night early in seventh grade if I could make a website for him. Excited, I spent the next week slavishly gathering all the website-making resources and tutorials I could- and then, come the actual night, he shrugged his shoulders and said he had just gone ahead and signed up for Google's Blogger. I think that was the start of my resentment towards him. I never had enthusiasm for Wednesday night youth group ever again.</p>
<p>I stayed on Blogger until about early 2015, when I jumped ship to WordPress. Not because I knew anything about Google's evils yet- that would take another year for me to realize- but because my parents had <a href="https://mars.mayvaneday.org/blog/2019/0919.html">threatened once to contact Google's support team in order to hijack my account</a> if I did not acquiesce to their censorship. The more spread out my online presence was, the harder it would be for my parents to push one button to shut it all down the moment I said something they did not like.</p>
<p>Of course, it didn't take them long to find the WordPress blog I had set up. But I persisted. And after I had deleted my Facebook account, it was like my parents' knowledge of my having a website completely vanished from their consciousness, as if, without it spoonfed to them in their home feed, it was outside of their electronic myopia, had ceased to exist altogether.</p>
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<p>"Xeper" is an <a href="https://archive.md/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Set#Self-deification_and_Xeper">Egyptian hieroglyphic term</a> that roughly means "to come into being", mainly as an act of apotheosis. It stands in opposition to traditional occultic practices, namely the Hermetic ones, where one is expected to surrender their sense of self and subsume themselves into some higher entity: THE ALL, God, the universe, whatever other names collectivists have given it. It is not a one-time action, but instead a continual process, a constant state of change.</p>
<p>My mother tells me that I came into this world face-up, instead of <a href="https://archive.md/https://www.babycenter.com/pregnancy/your-body/posterior-position_1454005">face-down like a baby is supposed to</a>. I came into this world dysfunctional, bogged down with chronic fatigue and a speech disorder and a mind fundamentally alien, at odds with the society around it.</p>
<p>But my body was human. And so, ultimately, I was raised as a human.</p>
<p>For a long time, I have <a href="../../../poetry/r/regnant.txt">wondered</a> what it would be like to take on some other form. Whether I would be free to <a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, As Cetra">switch between my human and animalistic skin at will</a>, or <a href="../../../flashfiction/e/erin5.html">be stuck forever</a> as <a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, Bear With It">one or the other</a>, or to be freed from <a href="../../poetry/a/atlas.txt">the constraints of the physical</a> and be <a href="../../../books/mm_tac.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Adoration Corporation, Berke Broke">something new altogether</a>.</p>
<p><a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, degenesis">It does not always end well.</a></p>
<p>I can feel a strange sort of change rustling in my bones. One does not wake up in the morning briefly feeling themselves in a different skin, a more fitting one, for no reason. But what am I becoming? <em>What am I coming into being as?</em> What <a href="https://archive.md/https://xeper.info/pub/pub_hp_welcome.html">hidden potentials</a> have long lain locked within the deepest recesses of my heart, now threatening to come into full bloom, pushing through my skin like a sprout breaking through the surface of soil?</p>
<p>Some creature foreign to human eyes, too beautiful and strange to behold. A holder of the cosmos, privy to its deepest secrets, fully capable of actualizing my <em>thelema</em>, of charting my course through the stars.</p>
<p>Through every stage of my website's existence, it has been nearly unrecognizable from the one before. <em>I</em> have been unrecognizable from who I had been the previous revolution, and yet still holding a continuity. But this time, I feel, there will be no grand restructuring of this HTML necessary to accompany who I will become, whatever form I may end up taking.</p>
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<h1>Collectivism</h1>
<p>published: 2020-09-19</p>
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<p>More and more I wonder exactly how much of myself is separate from other people.</p>
<p>When a radical feminist (which I am not) speaks of <em>individualism vs collectivism</em>, what they most certainly actually mean is <em>atomization vs enmeshment</em>. The social reality of things, where the vast majority of people both before and after the Industrial Revolution are unable to provide for one hundred percent of their needs themselves and thus have to interact with and rely on others to fulfill what they cannot themselves. Hyper-atomist as I am, I am still yet enmeshed in the social structures of my family, of my workplace, of my college. I still must rely on a ride to get to work on time, whether it be from my father or scheduled with the local bus company. I still must work in order to get money to buy the food I need to live. I still must comply with just enough laws and regulations in order for the police (city, state, country) to turn a blind eye to me as they pass overhead on their way to find someone to arrest and keep the jails full.</p>
<p>I have had many dreams of Rennica, an underground world almost completely severed from the world above, self-sufficient. The only reason to come out, to come up, would be for leisure, for pleasure, to experience something unable to be created down there in the depths. To explore a world one no longer had any obligations to.</p>
<p>I lie awake at night, wondering how much of my works I can truly call original. Can <em>any</em> artist claim to be truly original? Everything is inspired by something else, even if the original action, original actor, original event is obscured and unable to be sussed out from the new work. Nothing, save for completely random noise, is <em>ex nihilo</em> anymore, and even then, random noise must have a <em>seed</em> for the algorithms to use.</p>
<p>I lie awake at night, wondering how much of <em>myself</em> I can truly call original. Everything, in a sense, is reactionary, because <strong>everything is a reaction to something else</strong>, even if that something else is no longer the reason for perpetuating it. My borderline autistic obsession with privacy started as a reaction to my parents' overbearing surveillance of my private life. My anarchism started as a reaction to the inane leadership at the Girl Scout Camp I attend every year (well, except for this one), only truly calling it that once I was introduced to the word by one of the adults who also disagreed with the leadership. (We both got in trouble that year; I was forced to lie low for a few years, and she never returned to camp.) My love for writing was originally a reaction to watching my father spend hours on end typing into his school-issued Macintosh, a writer himself (who will readily wax poetic to anyone who will listen about how much he hates <em>Twilght</em> because it delegitimatized the vampire genre).</p>
<p>Hell, even this post itself is a <a href="https://www.bitchute.com/video/nvcJqLbsUbE/">reaction to a video I watched earlier today</a>. Had I not watched it, I probably would have spent the evening I wrote this playing video games or agonizing about the upcoming work weekend or the narrative speech I have two weeks to record a video of myself giving.</p>
<p>Maybe this is part of why I have had such an anti-internet streak lately (in my private life): in order for me to be here for you to read these words, I have to comply with an ISP, a hosting provider, and a domain registry; I have to publish in a format readable by browsers; I have to set up my server in a specific way in order to be accessible. And for what? To become a single brain cell in a larger organism, a part of a global hivemind, a node open for surveillance. The network drowns me in the dime-a-million opinions of others who I will never meet, inundates me with horrors that never would have plagued me had I not been scrolling on my damn phone. Human minds were not made to interact with so many masses of people. My brain does not have room for them all. Each person blends into one another, a faceless endless stream of throwaway jerkoffs. And I, by being here (although the effect is lessened by my refusal to use social media), am enmeshed into it.</p>
<p>But I digress.</p>
<p>When I speak of <em>individualism vs collectivism</em>, I mean the very simple fact that I am not others. If I can experience it or cannot access it, then it is not a part of myself.</p>
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"...if you are the one who is looking at something, then that something is not you. So right away, in one fell swoop, you know what you're not: you're not the outside world. You're the one who is inside looking out at that world."<br /> - Michael Singer, <em>The Untethered Soul</em>
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<p>I sometimes wonder what qualifies as "real life", as the "real me", as the life that "matters" (as if there could ever be such a thing).</p>
<p>Is the little Minecraft person on the TV screen the real me? But I cannot feel the bricks under my feet, the winter breeze in the snow-covered biome, the crunch of my bones as I fall off a building-in-progress on accident. I can see the TV and the controller in my hands and the console resting on its shelf. That must not be it.</p>
<p>Is the fictional character in a book I like the real me? But I cannot feel the winds at my fingertips, the strange smell of the dilapidated home I live in, the cheap soda burning my throat. I can see the e-reader in my hands and the words on the pages within. That must not be it (even though he is my namesake).</p>
<p>I take a break from writing and go upstairs to refill my waterbottle. Sitting in the kitchen is my father's new dog, already weighing more than twice as much as she did when he drove halfway across the state and back to get her. In the living room is my mother, engrossed in some cheesy soap opera, knitting needles in her lap, project already forgotten. Taking off on his bike outside is my brother, worried he will be late to his Wednesday night youth group at one of the myriad local churches.</p>
<p>I can gaze at their bodies, at their movements. I can listen to the words that they speak (or bark). But nothing they do I can influence. None of their thoughts I can access. I am my own Inside, and they are all the Outside in relation to myself.</p>
<p>I am an <em>individual</em>.</p>
<p>There are more than seven billion individuals on this planet. <a href="../april/outside-intro.html">There are more than seven billion versions of reality.</a> Were we all part of one whole, as frustrates me to no end when occultists chant it over and over like a mantra, I would think it possible to combine two consciousnesses, to merge two Insides into one. But given a set of twins who spend each moment of their waking lives together, going through the same actions and experiences, raised the same, both will be different individuals. Both will inevitably differenciate, as they are <em>individuals</em>, not a collective.</p>
<p>If I cannot access the mind of another person, if I cannot puppet a body other than my own: how can I be responsible for the actions of another person I have had no contact with? <strong>How can I be held culpable as a member of a group when I did not ask to be a part of said group, when I have no choice to disassociate from it or associate with another, when I do not actively identify as part of it?</strong></p>
<p>A male who does not sexually harass or harm females or act in grossly misogynist manners towards them is not my enemy. A heterosexual person who does not seek to restrict me from expressing my lesbianism is not my enemy. A neurotypical person who lets me exist autistic as I am and does not prevent me from self-regulating my sensory input is not my enemy.</p>
<p>An individual who does not seek to bind me to some collective but recognizes that I am a separate I is not my enemy.</p>
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<h1>It's Just A Goddamn Protocol, Not Your Saving Grace (ROOPHLOCH 2020)</h1>
<p>published: 2020-09-26</p>
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<p>This post will never make it onto Solderpunk's <a href="https://archive.md/https://proxy.vulpes.one/gopher/zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/announcing-roophloch-2020.txt">ROOPHLOCH 2020</a> listing, and that's okay. While this site technically <em>can</em> be served on port 70 thanks to <del>Gophernicus</del> <em>pygopherd</em> on the Raspberry Pi in my basement, the fact of Gopher forcing the file selector ("0" for plain text, "1" for directories, "h" for HTML, etc) to be part of the URL pretty much guarantees that sooner or later there's going to be a link that makes a client try to parse an image as HTML or something equally ridiculous. I'm not going to rewrite my entire site to use absolute links just to satisfy a tiny sliver of a sliver of a percent of potential readers.</p>
<p>Recently, the people of Gemini have been throwing a shitfit on the <a href="https://archive.md/https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/2020/date.html">development mailing list</a> over the idea of serving anything other than unformatted plain text on dear port 1965. The reasoning, as it goes, is that somehow Gemini and gemtext are supposed to go hand-in-hand, one complementing the other, and so gemtext must be the only document type available on the Gemini protocol. Any attempt to offer more than the barest of Markdown is <a href="https://archive.md/https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/2020/002667.html">"WWW decadence"</a>, regardless of whether or not the formatting is actually decadent or just quality-of-life measures.</p>
<p>"Decadence". What an absurd notion! Is it decadent to want accessibility text? To structure tables in a logical manner: as <em>actual tables</em>, not just preformatted text that gets mangled come a screen width less than expected? To offer a default stylesheet so that one doesn't burn their eyes out with most browsers' default of black text on white? (<a href="https://archive.md/https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/new-color-scheme.html">That default is bad for your eyesight, by the way.</a>)</p>
<p>It is no secret that I am quite critical of Gemini's prevailing culture of <a href="../../../poetry/g/gemini.txt">"no bloat at all costs"</a>, so I will try not to repeat myself <em>too</em> much. What a shame that such a beautiful protocol- mandatory transport security, simple request structure, an emphasis on one-off requests instead of a long-lived connection that streams data to you forever- is hamstrung by such a drab, self-burying, <em>collectivist</em> community.</p>
<p><a href="https://archive.md/https://proxy.vulpes.one/gopher/republic.circumlunar.space/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-24__How_We_Should_Grow.txt">"We need to keep the Small Internet from getting too big too quickly."</a></p>
<p><a href="https://archive.md/https://proxy.vulpes.one/gopher/republic.circumlunar.space/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-18__Small_Internet_Manifesto.txt">"We are the mice living in the foundations of the Internet."</p>
<p>"We voluntarily restrict our use of CPU, memory, disk space, and bandwidth."</p>
<p>"We prefer small cohesive groups of people."</a></p>
<p><em>Who the fuck is "we"?</em></p>
<p>Am I required to sign some form waiving away my individuality in order to use the Gemini protocol? Am I required to join a religion, <a href="https://archive.md/https://proxy.vulpes.one/gopher/republic.circumlunar.space/0/~spring/phlog/2020-07-27__A_Book_Of_Proverbs.txt">be preached to about how I need to cut myself down</a> into <a href="../../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, Sorrowful Laika">something so small</a>? Must I bend over backwards to satiate the presentational whims of every person who wants to visit this site?</p>
<p>I realize now that <strong>it is not the protocol that is the problem. It's the <em>people</em>.</strong> HTTP/S is technically fine; it is the commercialization and the centralization that makes it so repulsive. If the entire WWW was Neocities-esque home pages full of glitter graphics and weird ramblings about niche topics and there was no Facebook or Twitter to be heard of, if there was never a JavaScript, then I sincerely doubt that there would be such a frenzied push against "bloat".</p>
<p>Gemtext simply does not cut it for me. At the very <em>least</em>, I need inline links. I don't want my posts to be littered with constant breaks in the middle of paragraphs in order to link to something, or to have constant <code>[1] [2] [3]</code>-esque footnote markers that require a reader to memorize numbers that <em>might</em> point to something interesting and constantly jump back and forth between the actual post and the footer with all the links. I want parts of poems to be able to subtly link to other pages (explaining a reference, or citing a source of inspiration) without links to destroy the artistic impact or just be a clunky distraction. These are not choices I make for personal aesthetics; they make this site more accessible for people with attention deficiency disorders.</p>
<p>Exalt Gemini for its lack of stylesheets or inline images? <a href="gemini://mayvaneday.art/index.html">View this website</a> in the <a href="https://archive.md/https://github.com/RangerMauve/agregore-browser">Agregore browser</a>. It looks exactly the same. Same stylesheet, same layout, same functionality. Were it not for the simplistic interface, I might believe for a second that it was just another tab open in Brave. The only difference is the protocol the data went over.</p>
<blockquote>
<a href="https://archive.md/https://sawv.org/2020/09/18/fall-2020-gemini-tech-discussions.html">Currently, numerous Gemini clients exist that display Gemtext as plain text or as rendered text. Most Gemini client developers would not add support to render HTML. Eventually, the number of Gemini browser developers might diminish, leaving only a few "modern" Gemini browsers. And of course, the HTML fans on Gemini won't be satisfied with having only a limited subset of HTML. They will advocate for some CSS and eventually for some kind of client-side programming language.</a>
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<p>"Eventually"? It's already here. One just needs a client that supports it, like Agregore. There is no point in debating on a mailing list whether or not HTML should be "allowed"; discussion basically amounts to pandering to a faceless collective: "Hey, can I have permission to do something that you have no power to stop me from doing anyway?"</p>
<p>What a weak will one must have, to let someone they will never truly meet dictate their decisions.</p>
<p>One already has the choice to browse the WWW with a browser that does not support CSS or JavaScript if one finds those things abhorrent. The problem with this is having to deal with commercial sites like Amazon or "web apps" like Google's online office suite. Institutions like my college or my workplace can force me to use sites like these to remain enrolled or on the payroll (aka not be fired). But nobody is pointing a gun to your head and saying you have to read Joe Shmoe's blog about his hobbies or whatever.</p>
<p>Would you die without access to the information on a <code>js;dr</code> page, or a non-gemtext one for that matter? Then assess whether you value your life or your ideological purity more. The amount of people I see who espoused "#MeToo" and then went on to tell me that I must vote for the senile rapist Biden or else Orange Man Bad is going to do Orange Man Bad things indicates to me that you most likely have no qualms about compromising your values anyway.</p>
<p>So what if Gemini technically supports JavaScript? It's a <em>data transmission protocol</em>. What would the alternative be? A fashistic restriction of what kinds of data can be sent over the pipe? So much for "user sovereignty".</p>
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