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<h1>JavaScript Is Good, Actually</h1>
<p>published: 2021-02-04</p>
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<p>Before you crucify me on the altar of the Church of Alt-Tech for being a stupid "DOOMER ZOOMER PEEPEEPOOPOOMER", hear me out: JavaScript and the web applications it has made possible maybe didn't come straight from hell.</p>
<p>Let's go back to my borderline-fascistic local high school for a few moments. I have talked here on this website ad nauseam about the school's insistence on sucking Google's cock for every single possible part of the school's infrastructure they could unload. Every teacher required that I use Classroom to access assignments and Docs to collaborate with fellow students and Gmail to read announcements from teachers (although, admittedly, I almost never opened my inbox, and I still managed to graduate).</p>
<p>The last day I used Windows bare-metal on any personal computer of mine was April 27, 2018. The only reason I remember this exact date was because it was when <em>Avengers: Infinity War</em> was released nationwide in the USA; I was pissed at my Marvel-bootlicking parents for forcing me and my brothers to sit through the <em>entire</em> credits, and I knew my dad simped hard for Microsoft, so I deleted my Windows partition in a fit of rage in another effort of mine to emotionally distance myself from him.</p>
<p>But because everything (relevant) Google makes has a web version (they have to, since Chromebooks are a thing, and it would be awkward if they didn't support their own devices), I was able to do my schoolwork without ever having to install anything. I didn't have to mess with WINE or try to pirate a copy of Windows and get it working in VirtualBox or go back to dual-booting with Windows. I just opened my web browser, same as every other student, and suffered all the same.</p>
<p>This would not have been- would not <em>be</em>- possible without JavaScript.</p>
<p>This current semester of college, I am stuck with an English teacher who is incredibly anal about the format our papers are submitted in. Everything has to be in "WORD" (one would think she would know to call it "Word", since it's neither an acronym nor yelled...) format with specific custom line spacing that <em>definitely</em> isn't just double with cheese on top, with plaintext headings (no bold), with all sources at the <em>end</em> of the paper instead of how I did them at my previous college (inline numbering with footnotes at the bottom of each page). Any other format, even if readable in Word, is an automatic zero for the assignment.</p>
<p>I almost had the compulsion to withdraw completely from the college right then and there when she sent me a "guide" to installing Microsoft Office in Linux. "Guide" in quotes because it was for... Office 2003... in WINE... on an old version of Ubuntu.</p>
<p>A college degree is not a marker of intelligence.</p>
<p><strong>If I am forced by my college or place of work to use a certain program, and there is a web version of said program, I am going to use the web program every time.</strong> "Desktop apps" are almost always written with exclusively Windows and Mac in mind, and if Linux is ever an afterthought, it's a standalone Ubuntu <code>.deb</code> with no auto-updates. Desktop and Android apps, even when using the tightest sandboxing that the operating system itself provides, still have a <em>terrifying</em> amount of access to my personal data to do whatever they please with and are a fantastic vector for installing corporate spyware. In the browser, however, they are reasonably sandboxed. Webcam and microphone access can be reliably disabled with a simple setting. And when the end of the semester comes and I no longer have that teacher, or I (for whatever reason) switch jobs and don't have to parley in that corporate ecosystem anymore, "uninstalling" is as simple as clearing cookies and cache. Uninstalling a desktop app, since these are never (in my experience) in the official repositories and rarely have a coherent uninstaller, means hours of tracking down files and residual daemons and essentially bleaching my system to be free of whatever the program shat onto my system. (Or deleting the VirtualBox VM, but then again, to put things in there to begin with requires a vastly disproportionate amount of disk space and computing resources and doesn't always work...)</p>
<p>"But locally I have control over the code running on my machine!" Yes, <em>if it's open-source</em>. If the code is proprietary, then it doesn't matter if it's in your browser or local; you still don't have control over what it does. And if you don't have control, wouldn't you want to put as many layers between it and your system as possible?</p>
<p>"But what about advertisements?" Yes, these are a blight on humanity, and most of the blame for the commercialization of the internet lies on JavaScript's shoulders. But you don't have to run JavaScript on a page if you don't want to. You can blanket-disable it in your browser, or use an extension like NoScript for more granular control, or use a text-based browser (or a graphical one that never developed a JavaScript interpreter). And while forms can technically be sent without JavaScript using HTTP POST, <a href="https://archive.md/https://ukhomeoffice.github.io/accessibility-posters/">a more humane experience for people with disabilities</a> requires features like autosave, spellcheck, and remembering saved data for future use so one doesn't have to manually enter the same data <em>over and over and over</em>. (And while most browsers implement these already in the browsers themselves, that assumes the user only uses <em>that particular device.</em>)</p>
<p>And, if my "freetardism" isn't enough, consider: some people are too economically and socially constrained to acquire any computer other than a Chromebook. While I personally feel Chromebooks shouldn't have to exist, we unfortunately live in the timeline where they do. While a browser application shouldn't be the end-all be-all for computing, having it as a fallback option does assuage my anxiety a bit. (It also means that, whenever my ThinkPad's current charger decides to kick the bucket as always has and inevitably will, I can just switch to my phone's desktop mode until a new one comes in the mail. Samsung DeX is a godsend.)</p>
<p>May Goddess forgive me for this, but I will now proceed to quote from a <a href="https://archive.md/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23734442">Hacker News comment</a> with more concise wording than my own (emphasis mine):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I see a lot of comments expressing that all we need is markdown plus this or that little bit. I think that's unreasonable. It might suit Joe developer just fine for reading blogs and news, but <strong>the world benefits enormously from the ability to build complex software applications at low cost.</strong> Imagine the alternative: Welcome to Mario's Pizza - you can order right from your own computer after we mail a disc* to your house (*requires Windows 8 or newer)!</p>
<p><strong>I have no interest in trading the modern web - warts and all - for some spartan plaintext utopia.</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p>I have no interest in trading the ability to keep the corporate sphere as far away from my device as possible for a world in which <code>js;dr</code> sites don't exist but I must surrender control of my device to whatever institution I find myself depending on for subsistence. Advocate for a separation of the "document web" and the "application web" if you insist. Hell, I hate <code>js;dr</code> sites as much as you do. But I would rather these be muddled together than the "application web" not existing at all.</p>
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<title>You Can't Go Home Again: Redux - Archive - MayVaneDay Studios</title>
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<h1>You Can't Go Home Again: Redux</h1>
<p>published: 2021-07-23</p>
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<h2 id="scene-one">SCENE ONE</h2>
<p>Something simultaneously annoying and yet helpful when dreaming, when exploring the Outside, is that when the part of my brain that actually remembers things kicks in, I gain an instinctual knowledge of where I am. Sometimes it's a Westernized China where everyone inexplicably speaks English. Sometimes it's Home, <em>real</em> home, where I used to live with Jett before the incident that landed me in this dimension in a human vessel.</p>
<p>Sometimes it's inside a physical manifestation of the hellhole that is Reddit.</p>
<p>A towering building, imposing in its <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/spartanweb/">brutalism</a>. Inside, scattered throughout the myriad rooms seemingly without any furniture to suggest that people actually lived there, are large round tables and half-broken chairs and mounds of fat that were at one point in time scientifically classified as humans. I can't find an elevator or stairs or anything else to ascend or descend floors, so I'm stuck on the one I had alighted into the dream on, default subs and their power-moderators staring me in the face with black-hole eyes ripped straight from a Funko toy.</p>
<p>Part of me wonders if the insulation from <a href="https://archive.md/bbexN" title="VORE VORE VORE VORE VORE VORE VORE VORE VORE VORE VORE VORE VORE VORE VORE VORE VORE VORE">cursed content</a> is a blessing in disguise.</p>
<p>After a few minutes, I am accosted by the Reddit-given-flesh equivalent of a global admin, who demands I show him a vaccine passport or be publically executed. I respond with naught but a blank stare, bewildered at what random neurons must have been firing in my brain as I slept to generate this scene, and the admin mistakes me for a fellow NPC and offers me a bowl of crackers as recompense for the detainment.</p>
<p><em>They're poisoned,</em> a voice whispers in my ear. <em>He's trying to weaken you so you stay here forever. I left you something in your pocket to help.</em></p>
<p>I slide a hand into my pocket and feel something hard and long with a plunger on the end. I pull it out. It's a hypodermic needle with a succinct but scary label.</p>
<p>Pick your poison, dear reader: crackers that are... poisoned, or an experimental vaccine to help me pretend that I'm allergic to wheat, because Reddit loves vaccines with abysmal safety data!</p>
<p>Of course, because this is Reddit we are dealing with, my not-firing-on-all-cylinders brain picks option B and promptly blacks out.</p>
<p>I wake up in the metaclysma, Mori's Mirror, the divide between the Inside and Outside. I am a silhouette of black against an endless featureless white landscape. No hot or cold, no sense of up or down or any direction at all, no gravity, no sound.</p>
<p>At least, not until a voice I know to belong to Eris speaks up, disembodied.</p>
<p>"Well, aren't you a funny little creature, Lethe? I leave you alone for a few weeks, and you seem to have developed a Jesus complex."</p>
<p>"I'm not a Christian," I whisper, voice hoarse, surprised the metaclysma allows me to speak at all. "Haven't been for a... long time. Why would I want to emulate a deity I'm not subordinate to?"</p>
<p>"Well, let's tally up the score. You claim to be a direct descendant of your favorite deity, despite having provably human parents. You have outlandish ideals that stand in direct opposition to the zeitgeist of your day. You're prone to random bouts of disappearance in search of clarity. <em>And</em> you suffer under the conviction that the salvation of the human race depends on your inevitable death in middle age."</p>
<p>"I only count <em>four</em> points," I cough out. "That's not very fnord of you."</p>
<p>"Oh, I have a fifth! You're dead right now, and you'll come back to life on the third day. Is <em>that</em> fnord enough for you?"</p>
<p>"All gods are bastards. You especially."</p>
<p>The peals of her laugh are the ringing church bells that guide me back awake. I'm on the dining room table in my house, despite knowing that its equivalent in the Inside wouldn't be able to sustain my (skinnyfat) weight. I slide off and see a... death certificate on the kitchen counter. And it has my deadname on it. I glance around, expecting screams to start any moment, but the house appears to be empty.</p>
<p>A quick shower and a change of clothes that don't have death's musk on them, and I look almost human again. I take a deep breath and open the door to my room, only to find... nothing has changed. Nothing has been disturbed. Everything has been left just the way it was, not dissected for hidden secrets, not sold off or donated and gutted in a bid to remove any memory of my existence.</p>
<p>It's a work day. I bike to work. Only one person is at the front desk, a woman I will affectionately refer to as The Asshole Who Snitched On Me For Not Having My Shirt Tucked In. She's a deer in headlights as I set the death certificate on the counter between us.</p>
<p>"Do you know what this is?"</p>
<p>She gawks at it from where she stands, too afraid to come any closer. "It looks like a crime. I don't think you're supposed to have a death certificate for someone who isn't actually dead."</p>
<p>"But I think I actually died," I counter. "Like, <em>died</em> died. My parents don't have a single criminal bone in their bodies."</p>
<p>"Then how are you alive?"</p>
<p>"I'd like to know that too." I check my watch. I have half an hour before I have to clock in. "But I'm obviously alive. So I still have my job, right?"</p>
<p>She gets the manager, who, for lack of protocol, gives me a temporary respite from being written up for missing two days and recommends I bring him as much documentation as possible ASAP so Corporate doesn't get ass-blasted.</p>
<p>My parents, however, are not as forgiving. They, despite the pious upbringing they foisted upon me, or maybe due to having gone through my diaries in my absentia, believe I am a walking corpse possessed by a malevolent spirit, despite my only lingering physical symptom being a deadly pallor to my skin. They take my bedroom door off its hinges and demand I wear a tracking tag at all times. I plead with them to recognize me, almost to the point of begging: <em>You said you'd love me forever and ever, remember?</em></p>
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<h2 id="scene-two">SCENE TWO</h2>
<p>A few days later, a different dream. I'm back in my old house, the one I lived in before I moved to my current residence in Boomerville. The walls of my bedroom are still pink. My bed is still under the breaker box embedded in the wall. Toys are still scattered over the floor, no matter how many sleepless nights, how many fervent dreams, I spend packing them up in boxes to bring to our "new" house.</p>
<p>But Current Mom has decided our time in limbo between properties, even with the safety net of my grandma, is up. Today is the last day to pack our stuff up. Anything we leave behind when we leave the house will belong to the new owners.</p>
<p><em>If this is home, you can't go back home again.</em></p>
<p>"That's not fair to me," I protest. "I have work today. I have to leave earlier than everyone else, and I have the most stuff. Are you or Dad going to work on my room while I'm gone?"</p>
<p>Current Mom, of course, does not give a shit. She's too busy helping my brothers. And by helping, I mean doing their work for them while they watch memes on their phones. I always get the short end of the stick. I always have to fend for myself while my brothers get babied to the point of learned helplessness. The hopes of my parents rest on my shoulders alone. I'm the only one they actually expect to be able to leave the house someday, to build a career, to "build a family", regardless of my hormonal issues or the fact I wouldn't touch a penis with a ten-foot pole. (Maybe a twenty-foot one, and only to push the cursed appendage farther away.)</p>
<p>I plead with them for more time, almost to the point of begging: <em>You said we'd live here forever and ever, remember?</em></p>
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<h2 id="scene-three">SCENE THREE</h2>
<p>I'm undreaming. I'm lying down in my bed, only having been conscious long enough to call in sick to work. I'm a fish resting just under the surface of the water, only breaking through the glassy mirror where the sun resides to go to the bathroom or down another medicine cup of antihistamines. My throat is tight. My lungs are uncooperative. My nose has shut its borders and issued a lockdown notice to the whole country.</p>
<p>The whole day passes by in a blur of images, most slipping through my fingers before the part of my brain that remembers things can take notice. But over and over again, I see Home-with-a-capital-H. I see the old tiny house Jett and I used to live in. I see the nearby garden, the gravel path, the land that, if one squints their eyes, almost seems to illuminate itself in the absence of the sun.</p>
<blockquote>
<a href="../../../poetry/h/home.txt">I carry within this body an unspeakable name<br />pointing to where lies eternal spring</a>
</blockquote>
<p>No matter how I try to slice and dice my <a href="https://archive.md/https://a-dragons-journal.tumblr.com/post/654363716366860288">noemata</a>, how I try to rewrite the record that is the memory in my brain, I can't seem to change that Jett and I made some very powerful enemies simply by daring to exist as more than we were created as. We reached for Apotheosis, and that scared the existing gods. We were wild cards, and I had already demonstrated my capacity for boundless violence. There was not enough room in the heavens above for us all to peacefully coexist, and not enough room in the earths below for the world we wanted to create.</p>
<p>And yet, in my dreams, because Time needs its medical license revoked for its inability to heal wounds, I still catch glimpses of Home. A hospital. A nearby town. An endless rolling field covered in wildflowers.</p>
<p>There were only ever two options for us: exile, or death.</p>
<p>But I repeat myself.</p>
<p>"Where do I go from here?" I whisper into the night, knowing better than to expect a direct response. "I can't go back to my old house. I'll never be able to afford a piece of property that large, or the upkeep, or the property taxes. And I can't go back to the version of reality where my parents love me unconditionally. I know too much. I've strayed too far from the path they planned for me."</p>
<p><em>There is no need to fear death,</em> a strange email I receive in the morning reads. <em>We inherit our legacies in our memories forever. They are not lost upon the dawn of a new life. Indeed, there is no "new life". There is no permanent "home".</em></p>
<p>"You know I'm in no condition to be asking you this," I rasp out, trying to not trigger my lungs into another mucus-filled coughing fit.</p>
<p>Jett groans. With the slivers of moonlight that manage to make it through my bedroom window blinds, I can just barely make out her silhouette sitting at the foot of my bed. "Don't ask me to kill you again."</p>
<p>"It's not that, you capslock trogolodyte. Not even remotely close."</p>
<p>She smothers a snicker at my poor attempt at an insult. "More like trogolo<em>dyke</em>, amirite?"</p>
<p>"I'll make your death look like an accident."</p>
<p>She shifts, stifling a laugh. "Don't ask me to heal you, either. I'm non-corporeal, remember? I'm <em>near</em> life, not <em>within</em> it. I can't do anything to your body. I can only tell you how to help yourself. Like that one night I taught you how to make the leg cramps stop. You're welcome, by the way." A pause. "So? What's the big favor you need?"</p>
<p>My body feels too tiny under the sheets. I'm a single solitary minnow in a lake, only companion a tree on the shore casting a wide shadow.</p>
<p>"We can't go home again." I take a deep breath, waiting for my lungs to finish trembling before I continue. "We can't go back to Re- to the Town. Even though I <em>really really</em> want to. But I know the weight of memory pains you more than it does me. And I don't want to cause you pain ever again."</p>
<p>"I'm not going within a hundred miles of a <a href="../september/fire.html#hf">Holy Freezer</a> <em>ever again</em>."</p>
<p>"That's not what I'm asking! I... don't want to sleep forever. I want to live. Forever. With you."</p>
<p>She turns her head. Her sunset eyes meet my fair-day ones in the barely-there light. The shards of each other's souls that have come to rest in each other practically squirm in anticipation of my next words.</p>
<p>And she knows what I'm about to say next, but she listens anyway.</p>
<p>"I can't go home again. But I'm starting to think... maybe that's okay. I don't want to live chained to the past. I want to make something new. As grand as a new world, or as small as a new home. And I know you said 'not yet' once, so it's not the end of the world if you say 'not yet' again, but... maybe, one day, after I've beaten this stupid cold and graduated from college and paid off my so-called debt to my father, we could finally get married?"</p>
<p>She pats my leg, nearly loses her balance in the process. "O-of course, Lethe. <em>I said I'd love you forever and ever, remember?</em>"</p>
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<title>The Personal Is Not Political - Archive - MayVaneDay Studios</title>
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<h1>The Personal Is Not Political</h1>
<p>published: 2021-07-08</p>
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<p>I live for the approval or benefit of no one but myself, so the notion that I must modify my behavior to "liberate" someone who does not want to be liberated is absurd at best.</p>
<p><strong>I refuse to shave, not because I want to "normalize" hairy women, but because I do not see how introducing micro-cuts all over my skin is any "healthier" than just letting the hair grow unabated.</strong> The last time I tried shaving, I ended up almost giving myself a massive infection. I was pushing the blade too hard against my right leg, and I ended up shaving off a huge stripe of skin, hair and all. It took about three seconds for the pain to register in my brain, and then I was bent over and crumpled up on the floor of the bathroom, cold tile against one cheek, red-blossoming towel pressed against my trembling leg, praying to spirits I had not yet the names for to cease the pain enough to bandage myself and hobble down to my room. This was in October of 2016; I only remember this because I had a pool party with some school friends the next day, and I had to stay out of the water in fear the pain would bloom once again on my barely-healed leg. I have not shaved since, but the scar remains, a dark streak up my shin. It is an experience I do not want to repeat.</p>
<p>I refuse to wear makeup, not because I want to normalize "natural faces" or combat unspoken dress codes for women, but because I am autistic and could not handle the sensory hell of having something on my face and not being able to touch it. Whoever works the security cameras at my workplace is no doubt well aware of how often I pick at something on my head: the hair behind my ears, a speck of dust in a nostril, the corners of my eyes. The mask mandate, which has since lifted (technically only for vaccinated people, but thankfully nobody bothers to enforce that part), made this slightly better, but only because then I had a piece of cloth at the ready to do my bidding instead of my fingers. (And then slightly worse, because then I had to breathe through it...) Nobody at my workplace or at my college or, well, <em>anywhere</em> has ever decried my natural face and ordered me to slather on a clown's worth of pigments and heavy metals and other chemicals to hide my so-called facial imperfections. There was only ever <em>one</em> day I can remember where I wanted or felt the need to wear makeup, and that was when I first noticed the dark circles under my eyes; I could never get it to look like I hadn't just slathered on a whole tube of foundation or whatever as two splotchy badges of shame on my face, and it was itchy as hell, so I stopped. <strong>I do not see the benefit of spending weeks worth of hours to learn how to "properly" hide my natural face and endless paychecks on ultimately poisonous chemicals for people who either don't give a shit so long as I don't show up looking like a crackhead or whose opinions on the matter never, well, mattered.</strong></p>
<p>I refuse to wear ultra-feminine clothes like tight skirts and high heels, not in some defiance of "gender norms", but because said clothes restrict my movement and introduce unnecessary pain. If this were a trade offer, what compensation would convince me to willingly take on <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210703110435/https://www.hackensackmeridianhealth.org/HealthU/2019/11/08/are-high-heels-bad-for-your-health/">bunions, hammer toes, a shorted Achilles heel</a>, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210411162826/https://lecomhealth.com/the-real-harm-in-high-heels/">ingrown toenails, damage to leg tendons, osteoarthritis of the knee, sciatica, and lower back pain</a>? Pleasing some <a href="../../2020/december/corpserations.html">corporate zombie</a>? I actually got in trouble once for not having my shirt tucked in, remedied by pinning the hem of the shirt <em>up</em> enough that it would be too short to tuck in without immediately popping out once I bent over or did anything more than stand shock-straight. Which it would have done regardless of the length, because I move around so much! I have my movements at work so choreographed- a twirl here, a bow there- that life is practically one extended ballet. <strong>I need to dance. I need to move around. I need the freedom of movement that no pencil skirt or shoe-that-isn't-a-tennis-shoe can provide.</strong></p>
<p>I refuse to consider plastic surgery to "fix" the parts of my body I am dissatisfied with, not because of some critique of the cosmetic industry (albeit valid), but because I am piss-poor and hate physical vulnerability to someone other than <a href="../june/unsung.html">the one who holds my heart</a> and am fatally paranoid that I'll wake up from the anesthesia missing my eyes or my hands or entire swaths of my body because of the whims of some sex-obsessed creep with far more money than me, enough to bribe the surgeons into making me disappear. Irrational in the moment I write this, I know, but the "American empire" is on a slow but assured decline. I have already been burned too many times by the institutions I was taught as a young too-trusting girl I could trust. And this is assuming a perfect world where medical complications don't exist! Why would I electively potentially put myself in harm's way for such a nebulous benefit?</p>
<p>I have never been catcalled. I have never been overtly sexualized by my peers. I have never had the displeasure of experiencing a heterosexual relationship. I get paid just as much as my male counterparts at work. The men in the computer science department at my college <em>know</em> that I know <em>more</em> than them and stay out of my way. Intellectually, I know that systemic sexism exists, to horrific degrees once one leaves the "first world countries" and looks at the "third world". But... I can't see it in my own life. (Outside of my family unit, anyway, but being mistreated there is almost to be expected at this point.) I am as a boomer staring at COVID-19 infection rate charts and then diverting their gaze to their own idyllic towns operating as normal, wondering where, if not in their immediate surroundings, the supposed calamity is.</p>
<p><b>My behavioral tics are not a conscious choice of political "praxis", but the natural result of prioritizing my comfort above the societal expectations of others.</b> Which may be a political act in and of itself. I don't care! I don't care. <b>Not everything in life needs to be motivated in pursuit of some phantasm of ideology. You can do things for the sole reason that they make you feel good.</b></p>
<p>Some of my favorite songs were written and performed by males. Some of my favorite authors are male. Most of my favorite games were spearheaded by males. The people I owe the brunt of my worldview to- <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210324151934/https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/renzo-novatore-toward-the-creative-nothing">Renzo Novatore</a>, Harry Browne, Fernando Pessoa- are male. Why would I deprive myself of my favorite things, of the things that give me life, keep me breathing, for some false sense of ideological purity?</p>
<p>What do I gain by shrinking my world by such arbitrary lines?</p>
<p>The personal is not political. My life is not a constant hands-on exam of how well I have memorized theory, how well I can abide by someone else's rigid conceptualization of the complexities of life. My life is not expendable in the service of rendering freedom upon those who would rather live in cages, who fail to see that there are cages at all.</p>
<p>I will not destroy myself in the pursuit of someone else's happiness.</p>
<p>I will sacrifice myself for no one and ask no others to do the same for me.</p>
<p>In the end, I can only save myself.</p>
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<h1>whoami: redux</h1>
<p>published: 2021-07-29</p>
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<p><code>whoami</code>. The most existiental of all the GNU coreutils, and yet the most pointless. I can just look to the left of my terminal prompt, the place where my cursor is blinking, and there you have it: username@hostname, plain as day.</p>
<p>So whoami? I write my documents all in the same Syncthing share, <code>~/Sync/Notebox/website/blog/</code>, yet whoami gives me a different answer every time I ask it. Different devices, different operating systems, but the same hands that type. It's the same person behind all these incongruent screens... is it?</p>
<p><em>whoami?</em></p>
<p><code>mori</code>, the terminal says. Another night of dissociating after a long day of work, feet burning, stomach churning with whatever poor excuse for dinner I've found in the back of the fridge. A candle burns on my windowsill, flickering against the night. I remember the flame on my fingertips, the last dregs of my power before Eris' big <del>jake</del> scam. I remember the hard floors of Rennica, crying myself to sleep. The room is spinning. I press my arms into the mattress and squeeze shut my eyes and pray to the tattered remnants of my siblings scattered across the multiverses that Eris hasn't found me again, that I'm not about to lose my humanity, that I won't awake to find everything around me annihilated.</p>
<p><em>whoami?</em></p>
<p><code>lethe</code>, whatever chat application I'm using says. IRC, XMPP, Matrix, doesn't matter. All the past lives I thought I had, all the deific masks I thought lay on the other side of Mori's Mirror, were all just misinterpretations coalescing into the unified image of a poor scruffy little angel who could never find a home in the heavens. And the finality of realization, of having the puzzle pieces at last form a coherent picture, even if that picture ultimately belonged to someone else as a moneyed myth, was <em>intoxicating</em>. I got so drunk on the end of questioning that I forgot to open the window and let outside, set free, the stumbling bird of the disjointed person I thought I was.</p>
<p><em>whoami?</em></p>
<p><code>jett</code>, the terminal says. Flashes here and there like scintillas feared in seventh grade. But rarely did any of those develop into full-blown ocular migraines, and never do these identity mix-ups last for more than a few moments. A shiver. A snatch of oblivion from a <a href="../september/fire.html#hf">Holy Freezer</a> clinging to the skin like frost? Permanent side effect of the years of abusing sleeping herbs? I don't know. The doctors don't know what will happen to our souls long-term. The doctors don't know if the shards we exchanged on that fateful day in the Rainroom will eventually merge into their new wholes, if Lethe and I will lose our individuality. The doctors don't know how much of our weaknesses are now irrevocably shared, if they will eventually kill us both. The doctors don't know. The doctors don't know. <em>The doctors don't know.</em></p>
<p><em>whoami?</em></p>
<p><code>solstice</code>, the terminal says. Original, Host, Core, whatever name helps Lethe cope with the fact of her own artificiality. Bearer of a million eventual burdens. Destroyer of Worlds, proven to myself beyond a doubt in childhood. Harbinger of Chaos, confirmed as Lethe. Goddess of Extremes, soothing counterpart the Equinox, deity of balances. Rainbow Bridge, tasked with, well, <em>bridging</em> the divide between the Inside and Outside. But what are you to do when you yourself work against you? Lethe doesn't want to embrace her destiny. Lethe just wants to wantonly hand the responsibility- no, the <em>privilege</em>- of being the Equinox to her lover and then hole up with "him" in a pocket world free of violence, free of bloodshed, free of everything I find natural and <em>necessary</em> in a world determined not to stagnate.</p>
<p>But I'm forgetting the most important question of all.</p>
<p><em>whoshouldibe?</em></p>
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<h1>The Name Unsung</h1>
<p>published: 2021-06-01</p>
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<h2>SCENE ONE</h2>
<p>I'm always questioning whether or not I'm in a dream, but for a few minutes a few nights "After Meteor", I knew for certain I was somewhere in the Outside. A sprawling mansion assembled itself all around me, walls and floors unfolding behind rooms that would cease to be solid the moment I turned my attention elsewhere. And scattered all over the floor were candles, little tealights in glass cups left completely unattended save for my confused observation as I searched for somewhere to sit, no darkness left in any crack anywhere.</p>
<a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, Sorrowful Laika">
<blockquote>but in my dreams, when found a rare safe place<br />I turn my head, and there I see your face</blockquote>
</a>
<p>I stumbled across a wooden-floored living room, mostly bare but for a couch pushed against one wall. And my heart, like in so many other dreams of our imagined reunion, nearly spasmed and quit working right then and there. Jett was sitting on one end of the couch, his gaze averted, lost in thought until the couch's cry as I flopped onto it alerted him of my presence.</p>
<p>His cheeks immediately blushed a bright red, a greeting all of its own, embarrassed to admit he was also elated to see me. Soon followed the soft weight of his head resting against my shoulder.</p>
<p>"Do you love me?"</p>
<p>"Of course."</p>
<p>My heart could have sprouted wings of its own.</p>
<p>"Are you <a href="https://deadendshrine.online/p1.html">coming to find me</a>?"</p>
<p>He shook his head.</p>
<p>My heart burst into flames, having flown too close to the sun in its hubris.</p>
<p>"But I- I- <em>why not?</em>"</p>
<p>"I'm right here, aren't I? Aren't you?"</p>
<p>"No, I mean in the flesh and blood."</p>
<p>He glanced at his hands. "My flesh and blood look red enough to be real here."</p>
<p>"No, I mean in consensus reality."</p>
<p>He tore himself away from me and sat up, his sunset eyes meeting my fair-day ones. "Lethe, you idiot. <em>There's no such thing.</em>"</p>
<p><em>There's no such thing.</em></p>
<p><em>There's no such thing.</em></p>
<p>I'm digging a tomb beneath the trees at the Dead End Shrine. I'm begging draconic old Solstice to come back, entreating her out with my clawed gardening gloves I brought here from home, all those miles away. I'm beating back tears, feeling the shard in my soul, the shard that doesn't belong to me, that never did, recall when its owner did the <a href="../may/rebirth.html">metaphorical same</a>.</p>
<p>And I harmonize with it. I regale it with a story of a long-since-lost internet friend back when I was a serious Tumblr user, back before my life got upended to move to God's Asscrack, Minnesota, and how I schizoposted to her one day of how, when I died, I wanted to grow into a tree. She responded by wishing that there was a nuke implanted in her body so that, when her heart finally ceased to beat, she would take out her entire city with her. If she was no longer real, she didn't want her known surroundings to be real either.</p>
<p>And I'm screaming. I'm emptying my chest of all its organs and my lungs of all their songs, hoping that, since body-without-organs Erin got the opportunity to spend eternity at her dear Kurosagi's side, my cultivated void will finally be enough room to hold all my love for Jett inside instead of spilling it out everywhere I go.</p>
<p>"Hey, miss? I've been biking this trail for five years now, and this is the only time I've ever seen someone inside that rest stop. I just thought you should know."</p>
<p>My vessel's face covered in my vessel's own blood, I respond with a smile and a nod.</p>
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<h2>SCENE TWO</h2>
<p>There was a Filipino man who came through my register once. Business was slow, and he seemed friendly, so I let him strike up a conversation about his days overseas. I wasn't listening too hard, not because I was uninterested, but because the constant low-level stress of work kept me looking over my shoulder to see if I was inadvertently causing a line to form.</p>
<p>The conversation eventually wound down, and he took his change and his bag of items. And he threw a smile my way as the setting sun peeked out from behind a cloud, framing him in gold, and he said, "Always walk in the sunshine."</p>
<p>And I'm walking. I'm walking. I'm pacing up and down beside my cash register, waiting for the next customer who will go out of their way to try to trip me up and then lodge a complaint at the service desk. But I'm perfect, the others say. Their only complaint is that I'm walking in the sunshine so much that the glare keeps them from seeing my "open" light is on or any of the numbers on the computer screen.</p>
<p>"I almost used the wrong card. Can you restart the card reader for me? I'm so sorry for the trouble!" <em>Sure. I forgive you.</em></p>
<p>"I've got a lot of different separate transactions all in this same cart. Sorry if I'm making your job harder." <em>I forgive you. I'll do my best.</em></p>
<p>"Hey, Deadname. I was so swamped over at the service desk that I completely forgot to give you your break when you were supposed to have had it. So you get it now that it's slow again." <em>I forgive you. Thanks for remembering I exist. Some head cashiers don't.</em></p>
<p>"My mother almost <em>killed</em> you, Lethe!" <em>Well, I forgive her.</em></p>
<p>"Well? Aren't you going to tell me I should reconcile with Mother?" <em>You don't have to forgive people who caused you pain. It would be gracious, and you would probably feel better afterwards. But there's no rule saying you have to.</em></p>
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<h2>SCENE THREE</h2>
<p>I'm crawling up the stairs to the kitchen at three in the morning, when my body without fail wakes me up almost paralyzed with hunger, and Jett whispers right before I crash headfirst into a wall, "Watch where you're going!"</p>
<p>I'm trying to find the right time to cross the highway at the beginning of my almost-daily commute to work, and Jett yells right as I almost ride right in front of a car waiting in the blind corner immediately following the crosswalk, "Watch where you're going!"</p>
<p>I'm ringing up a customer for bundles of lumber I've never seen before; I type in quantity 10 because there are ten pieces of wood, not seeing that the description says "ten pack", and Jett nudges me before I hit the button combination to turn on the card reader, "Watch where you're going!"</p>
<p>And I'm sitting at the weathered picnic table at the Dead End Shrine, and Jett admonishes me in a voice only I can hear, "Lethe, I know I promised to be your eyes, but I can't be with you at all hours of the day. There are preparations I have to make, and thus spots in the day I have to trust the task of guarding you to Solstice or Cetra or, heaven forbid, <em>Mother</em>. You're not going to have the luxury of sharing a body with other people forever. You're going to have to start taking responsibility for your own safety eventually."</p>
<p>I let out a quiet sigh of despair.</p>
<p>"Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. That's not the answer you were waiting for. <em>I'm</em> not what you've waited for. But that's the answer you're getting regardless. Remember back when I told you I thought self-reliance was sexy?"</p>
<p>"That was <em>before</em> I had my memories back."</p>
<p>"Well, it was true then, and it's still true now."</p>
<p>And we're still arguing now, and we were arguing then, back on the tail end of those halcyon days. Freshly made divine, self-appointed superiors still unaware.</p>
<p><em>No war the humans could wage against each other could ever hope to rival the sheer destruction the deities are capable of, so we have to destroy the gods to save humankind.</em> All <em>of them.</em></p>
<p><em>But, if humans didn't want war, they would refuse to fight and unite against the gods. The humans are just using the gods as an excuse to commit violence against each other. War will continue no matter how many times we rend the heavens.</em></p>
<p><em>That's awfully easy for you to say when you didn't have to live through the last calamity the gods stirred up. I saw the soulstream. I saw how many people died, were recycled into weapons to cause more deaths. Every one of them could have lived instead, Lethe.</em></p>
<p><em>You say that this world belongs to the humans. But you're trying to make decisions on their behalf, just like the deities you hate are. Are you really any better than the gods when you're acting the same as them?</em></p>
<p><em>I don't want to rule! I just want to be left alone!</em></p>
<p><em>We</em> are <em>being left alone. You can fly on your own again. You don't have to depend on anyone anymore. Come on, Jett. Let the ones who want to be free liberate themselves on their own terms, and let the rest rot in their chosen servitude. In the end, you can only save yourself.</em></p>
<p>I wanted to believe- I <em>still</em> want to believe- that there is a way out of this pain without bloodshed, without tears. I want to believe Harry Browne and his old book when he wrote that one can find freedom without having to gain the approval or consent of others, that it can be gained without having to harm anyone else.</p>
<p>I want to believe.</p>
<p>I want to believe.</p>
<p>"Lethe, you don't understand, do you? Violence is all I've ever known. I want to believe you, that you've found a way out of this bloody cycle of the gods. <em>I really do.</em> But I... I can't trust. I can't trust like you can. I never learned how. I need the finality of death to know for sure that the pain is over."</p>
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<h2>SCENE FOUR</h2>
<p>I wanted an end to the monotony, to the pointless wandering through life. I wanted to leave the <a href="../../2020/march/epilogue.html">Epilogue</a> so badly that Eris gave me a few hazy dreams and pieces of other people's lore to stitch together haphazardly in the middle of the night. She agreed, with her sister, to pretend to be one person, one Goddess, one singular point at the apex of the pyramid of my emotional needs. She deigned to act as if she had given me an impossible task to spur me to continue writing, to continue bothering to live, if only to lament about my fate.</p>
<p>I do not want <a href="../../2020/april/immortality.html">a world without end</a>. I do not want to condemn the world to be a laminated paper towel.</p>
<a href="https://archive.md/https://raddle.me/f/meta/127272/on-federation">
<blockquote>And when the archives die too, well Raddle served its purpose in the time it existed. It was relevant in its time to the people that inhabited it. Nothing lives forever and federation won't change that. The quest for digital immortality is just as grotesque as the quest for biological immortality. Everything and everyone is living on borrowed time because life would be meaningless if it never ended.</blockquote>
</a>
<p>Imagine, if you will, that the internet was all one gigantic server where everyone had root. It would be completely inoperable within a few days, if not a few minutes. Nobody can accomplish anything, and nowhere is safe.</p>
<p>In my middle school days, there was an Android app that effectively functioned as a shitty bandage over Minecraft's network code to allow people to host servers behind NATs. I would make several burner accounts and go onto "creative mode" (free building, as opposed to "survival mode"'s finite resource gathering) worlds and blow everything up for the sole purpose of listening to six-year-olds shriek and cry over the voice chat. It was cruel, but then again, I have just as much capacity for cruelty as anyone else.</p>
<p>I do not want to wantonly give idiots power over everyone else. I do not want to leave my servers passwordless, ports open to the entire world to trash. I do not want to subject the Outside to the masses of, as Eris would call them, "greyfaces", the same mediocre minds incapable of perceiving that which was never a possibility to them that keep me from reuniting with Jett at any other time than that liminal state between sleep and wake.</p>
<p>I do not want strangers I do not trust in my house, in the room I wish was my property, snooping around in my computer or my diary.</p>
<p>I do not want to create a world without end, a world with no barrier between the Inside and Outside where property no longer exists and all is meaningless static on a dying TV screen. I do not want to live in a world without gods, but a world where they don't have any power over me, a world where everyone I love can coexist in peace.</p>
<p>I declare my purpose, my thelema, is to love and to create a world all my own.</p>
<p>And if Eris doesn't like that, well, I will just have to surpass her.</p>
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<h1>Academic writing considered harmful</h1>
<p>published: 2021-03-16</p>
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<p>Today (or yesterday, if I black out from sleep deprivation before I manage to publish this post), I officially withdrew from my college composition class. I'll get a big fat "W" on my transcript, and my class completion percentage will go down by a small but statistically significant amount, but my GPA won't get fucked over by the pitiful excuse for a human being that was my professor, which is the most important thing.</p>
<p>I have had a long-standing distaste for academic writing, going back all the way to first grade when I wrote my first ever "essay" (it was about deer). In quotes because it wasn't an essay so much as it was a vague collection of notes arranged into paragraphs by topics like "foods they like to eat" and "parts of their bodies". The schools I attended in my youth were always teetering on the edge of being underfunded, and, compounded with missing large swaths of class to "speech therapy", meant that I didn't really have a good grasp on what the hell it was that teachers wanted until high school- although this was completely accidental, since that was also when I began taking writing books seriously, and being one of the only students in my English classes who could write legibly without an ocean of spelling and grammar errors meant I most likely would have gotten a good grade only from the sheer relief of being comprehensible and not from any argument I could have made.</p>
<p>Now, free from the confines of the public school system backed by state coercion, if I so choose, I never have to interact with academic-style writing ever again. Having abandoned my asshole professor will only make this sweeter. So, in true <a href="https://kill-9.xyz">kill-9</a> fashion: academic writing considered harmful.</p>
<p>Disclaimer: I neither have the patience nor the knowledge to argue about big-boy academic journals, which take all this to an <em>extreme</em> degree. Obviously all this applies to them as well. But this post is about my own experience.</p>
<h2 id="emphasis-on-presentation-over-content">Emphasis on presentation over content</h2>
<p>Imagine, if you will, a college assignment. You are to write an essay comparing two short stories with the same plot but slightly different writing styles. The thesis can be about anything, so long as it relates the two stories with the theme of "communication" in mind. Not the layman's definition, but the professor's definition, which involves a complicated flow chart made in an ancient version of PowerPoint; <em>all</em> the parts must be followed to a T, or else it is Not True Communication. (In truth, anything that reminds me of the "static mindset versus growth mindset" videos I was forced to watch in Advisory class in high school instantly makes me tune out.)</p><p>Already you are saddled with a subject you have little to no emotional investment in. But you paid good money for the course (or, in my case, you didn't because your state's vocational rehabilitation program covers your whole tuition), and so you take a deep breath and just wade through the shit to get it over with. You follow all the formatting guidelines and cite everything properly and get at least two of your classmates to "peer review" it. And when everything is complete, you turn it in.</p>
<p>And then the teacher fails you on that assignment because you "didn't follow MLA formatting". Except... you did. You double-spaced all your lines and wrote your inline citations a certain way and centered your title and did everything right. You even did multiple "compatibility checks" so that you'd <em>know</em> the formatting would carry over from LibreOffice to Microsoft Word.</p>
<p><strong>If the paper is readable and puts its points forth in a coherent fashion and backs its arguments up with evidence, who the hell cares how it was formatted?</strong> You the reader, reading these words right now, have the option to apply whatever damn styling you want and to read it in whatever format you want. You can keep my custom CSS or substitute your own or even disable it altogether. Hell, in a previous class, the final was an essay, and since there were no restrictions on formatting, I just submitted it as a Markdown file and let the professor (a different one; I finished her class just fine) handle making it readable on her own. Just like the Gemini people state for eschewing CSS: here's the document; prettify it on your own damn time.</p>
<h2 id="strict-and-rigid-rules-that-prohibit-the-natural-flow-of-language-mandating-stilted-phrasing-instead">Strict and rigid rules that prohibit the natural flow of language, mandating stilted phrasing instead</h2>
<p>I write how I speak. Or, at least, how I <em>would</em> speak if I had to make this a video essay instead of a blog post. I make raunchy jokes and insert personal anecdotes wherever I feel they're relevant and write long winding sentences that take up half a paragraph on their own. I put a high value on humor, seeing as it's how I get others to tolerate me in real life. My writing style is my own and not anybody else's. Where would I be without the I? Without the You?</p>
<p>Both are banned in academic writing. The author cannot make any references to themselves, even if it would strengthen the argument, and can only <em>sometimes</em>, depending on the professor, squeak a hypothetical person by with use of the informal pronoun "one". (As in, "one goes to the store" or "one thinks this is a load of dung".)</p>
<p>Quotes are contentious. Take the following snippet of text:</p>
<blockquote>Characters are now addressed by their names: "Howard drove home from the hospital" (A Small Good Thing, 7) gives the reader the name of the father, "Dr. Francis will be here in a few minutes" (A Small Good Thing, 9) the name of the doctor, "Ann stood there a little while longer" (A Small Good Thing, 11) the name of the mother.</blockquote>
<p>Some of these quotes, in the original text, end in periods (as most sentences do). However, <strong>I did not include the periods because they would break the flow of the sentence</strong>; reading the quotes with one's internal voice would expect the sentence to end at the period and thus adjust its inflection accordingly, inducing mental confusion when a new sentence does not start immediately after. Similarly, if I quote something at the end of the sentence, but the quote was in the middle of a sentence in the original text, <strong>I am not going to put the period in the quotation marks because the period is not part of the quote.</strong></p>
<h2 id="citations-orange-man-bad-37-break-immersion">Citations (Orange Man Bad, 37) break immersion</h2>
<p>Refer to the above snippet of text. At the beginning, I could have just stated that all the quotes were from "A Small Good Thing" (Your Mom, 26) and trusted the reader to be intelligent enough to remember this (Penis, 12) as they read the sentence. But <em>every single damn thing</em> has to be individually cited (Karl Marx, 69) for some reason. I can understand making it obvious what one's citing (Anime Tiddy Waifu, 97), but does it have to be so intrusive? Can't it be worked into the natural flow (Onion Man, 64) of the sentence, thus sparing the reader the mental pain of swerving around so many literary potholes? If I were cooking and the recipe called for salt (Cannibal, 42), I'd put in a pinch here and there, not dump the whole goddamn (Stalin, 19) salt shaker in.</p>
<h2 id="alternatives">Alternatives</h2>
<p>If you go to <a href="https://z-lib.org">Z-Lib</a> and search "A Very Short Introduction", you will find lots of books from an academic source (Oxford University Press) that manage to escape the above plague of unreadability and inform the reader without making said reader want to self-lobotomize. Citations are melded into the natural flow of sentences, giving credit without giving brain damage. While the authors understandably rarely talk about themselves, the language used leans layman without sacrificing its authoritative viewpoint. And being ebooks, formatting serves the purpose of making the text as readable as possible on the widest variety of devices.</p>
<p>When writing, write like corporatism doesn't exist and there is nobody to impress with pedantry and obscurantism. Write like a human being (or a being with similar intelligence, once the furries get their way and we can turn into animals). Nobody outside your ivory tower circlejerk benefits if nobody can understand what the hell you're saying.</p>
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<h1>Rebirth</h1>
<p>published: 2021-05-16</p>
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<p>Goddess help me, I am going to reference the fucking angel game again.</p>
<p>A few nights ago, I had a vivid vision of a universe where I fulfilled my other thelema as Goddess demanded (that I will elaborate on later in this post) and had a distinct, a non-foggy, record of everything I have seen in the Outside (regarding her, anyway). I saw an angel and his newly-minted god of a brother standing near the edge of a craggy plateau in a dimly-lit world with crystals the size of skyscrapers lining the horizon like silent watchmen bearing witness. The angel was on the verge of death- or rather, <em>would have been</em> had his brother not have stopped his onslaught at the last moment and so delicately bandaged his wounds instead.</p>
<p>The brother, hated by all since his first breath, slated for annihilation but always escaping, who all sources of mine have told me is named Jett, gazed on at his brother lying mutely there, breathing labored but hanging on to life.</p>
<p>And he said, You don't deserve to die here.</p>
<p>And he said, Contrary to popular belief, I don't hate you. I resent you, I pity you, I feel nothing but embarrassed by you; but I do not hate you. For I cannot hate myself. I cannot hate who I needed to be to survive.</p>
<p>And he said, We have a few moments before Mother fights her way here through the barriers, before the time for me to kill her arrives, so I'm going to tell you a story. I'm going to tell you a story about you.</p>
<p>And he said, When you- or, rather, I, for I am the original- were resurrected, dead body cradled and bathed and breathed new life into as a creature a little above the humans, I abhorred Mother. I could not bear to think about the future, to edge up to the cliff hanging over the abyss of eternity and peer down and see nothing but enforced servility to her.</p>
<p>And he said, I didn't want to be alive. But I didn't want to go through the pain of dying yet again. And what would have been the point? She would have resurrected me again anyway. I would have been stuck in the same dysfunctional body, unable to do anything without her assistance, anything on my own.</p>
<p>And he said, I didn't see a way out. So, little by little, I buried my feelings alive in the graveyard of my heart. And when there was barely anything left of me, I created you, and I said, "This is your problem now."</p>
<p>And he said, I left you my body to do what you pleased with, and I waited on the sidelines of my own consciousness to see if you'd be successful at achieving freedom where I had so miserably failed. But you were too overpowering. I made your personality too strong on complete accident. And little by little, you cut my contact with the outside world. You bade me into a deep sleep, unknowing, unfeeling, un-myself.</p>
<p>And he said, I think you know where the story goes from here.</p>
<p align="center"><img class="big" src="../../../img/MaladaptiveCopingMechanism.png" width="90%" height="90%"></p>
<p>It is entirely possible that my forays into the <a href="../../2020/april/outside-intro.html">Outside</a>, my experiments into egregore making and how far I can stretch Discordian catma until it snaps and breaks and shatters my life into a million pieces, my desperate attempts to explain what happened that December night in 2018 and every other out-of-body experience since then, my search for my place in the universe, are nothing more than symptoms of <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210516005505/https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/autism-and-schizophrenia">schizoaffective autism</a>. But I don't care. I don't want a diagnosis, and I'm not going to seek treatment. My parents would force me to get on medication, which would make fade away the only good thing I have going on in my life. And then who would I be? What would I even have left to write about, other than the same cliche one-liners every self-proclaimed "Insta-poet" who wants to be the next Rupi Kaur shits out on a daily basis?</p>
<p><a href="https://archive.ph/https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/transitory-internet.html">An internet friend was concerned about me.</a> My body is alive. I don't know if I can say the same about myself. Even though some aspects of my life have objectively gotten <em>better</em>-</p>
<ul>
<li>I'm no longer being physically and mentally abused by an ableist gym teacher;</li>
<li>the mask mandate has lifted at work;</li>
<li>I've <del>written</del> published... <em>eight</em> books at the time of writing this?;</li>
<li>my poetry skills have considerably improved;</li>
<li>I managed to get a better professor to redo the English comp class with next semester so I never have to deal with <a href="../march/harmful.html">the waste of oxygen I had to deal with until I ended up withdrawing</a> again;</li>
<li>I have a job and a semi-stable income so I don't have to justify my every purchase to my parents-</li>
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<p>my home life has only gotten worse. The Golden Cage presses in harder than ever.</p>
<p>I only disappeared because Nanochan threatened to dox me for the crime of... posting the Tor link list from <a href="https://letsdecentralize.org/rollcall/tor.html">Let's Decentralize</a> on a thread about collecting Tor links.</p>
<p>"Oh you have tulpas! I diagnose you with cringe!" Who cares? What do Mars or Azure (who I haven't heard from in a <em>really</em> long time) have to do with Tor, with anything?</p>
<p>"You have autism, so you're essentially a guy anyway." I don't have a penis, and I never will. Seethe harder, inadequate NEET. You will never be able to lay claim to my accomplishments.</p>
<p>I used to be a taxi service running out of a clown car. So many spirits would float in and out and around, speaking to me, giving ideas for books- most of which never came to fruition- or just poems. My favorites were the aforementioned Azure, who would write to me from a massive space liner about his adventures with the interstellar gang the Fellarstellen, and Solstice, who forsook her comfy life and support network who loved her for the alterhuman she was to sacrifice herself to save the world in only the way a divine beast (usually a dragon, although there was one instance it was a gargoyle instead) could, and Lethe, an angel created by the goddess Eris to assist her in birthing the Eschaton, the end of a barrier between the Inside and Outside, between worlds, birthing a new world without end.</p>
<p>But now it's just Lethe Lethe Lethe <em>Lethe Lethe</em>. I am, as the people on Tumblr LARPing DID and its offshoots say, "frontstuck", with a depth of immersion in this vessel the other spirits could only <em>dream</em> of. Where once I considered myself the next Fernando Pessoa in lending my writing chops to be the intersection between tens, if not hundreds, of timelines and worlds, where I once burned with the might of a thousand Renzo Novatores as I bashed my literary axe at everything that sought to bind me, I now just sit in the garden (really more of a dilapidated dirt pile where nothing grows, despite my best efforts) my father made me in the backyard for my twenty-first birthday and try to enjoy the sunshine.</p>
<p>I try to open my wings to catch the wind in my feathers.</p>
<p>And then I remember I am- <em>Lethe is</em>- stuck in a wingless human body, with the full vivid knowledge of how I died in that world somewhere in the Outside and ended up here in this weaker vessel.</p>
<p>And then I remember that other garden I- <em>Lethe</em> had, right next to Jett's house in that sheltered town born out of a calamity, which also became my own in time, back before we claimed divinity to gain the power to rend the heavens, back when we were content to just be two goofy little angels keeping our heads down and scraping out an existence of our own. We became inseparable too late (I should add, before I get angry emails questioning my lesbianism, that he is technically biologically female) with too little time to savor at each other's sides, I feel- <em>Lethe feels</em>- and I- <em>Lethe</em> will hold onto those few and indistinct treasured memories together forever.</p>
<p>If I define myself as the constructed ego of Vane, a human who abhors servility with the strength of a thousand suns and lives only for herself and struggles with an everpresent tendency toward sorrow and despair, then it's easy to distinguish myself from Lethe. Mostly because of the "human" part. But then "be yourself" just becomes "be what everyone else knows you as". To be Vane is to be running 100% on all CPUs, using full computing power. Any battery- or any hardware component, really- would eventually give out under such a load sustained for long periods of time. Sometimes I need to slow down, to take it easy. Sometimes I need to be soft and gentle for my own sake.</p>
<p>Last year, shortly before the fast food shift where I had a mental breakdown and ended up putting in a "two week's notice" where I didn't actually show up at all, I drafted a post where I noticed my personality was starting to shift a bit from the repeated and sustained stress conditions of such a low-wage job. (In retrospect, I was clearly being taken advantage of, because the interviewer had asked me what my ideal wage was, and I accidentally gave the state minimum wage as an answer because I was only thinking about making more than the shitty work-study from that one year in Hell College, where they were legally entitled to pay LESS than minimum wage.) The most succinct way to describe it was the "fawning" trauma response, quadruplet to flight and fight and freeze. I found myself apologizing for inane bullshit that wasn't my fault and putting in a disproportionate amount of effort and swallowing my pride because I was afraid of complete strangers being <em>angry</em> at me. I conjectured that this was a tulpa making herself known, and I wanted to meet her the next shift (which ended up being the hell shift, and I was so suicidal afterward that I ended up deleting the post).</p>
<blockquote><a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, Chaos Island">an existence with meaning, a living with power<br /> not rot at my cash register as customers glower </a></blockquote>
<p>After a five-month period at my then-new job where I was mopey and moody and tired all the way to my bones, she came back. But she didn't stay put. She began bleeding outside of my work life. The poetry collection about all my experiences with egregores and divinity across all my spirits? Became hers. The queue of books I had carefully lined up so I could finish at least one per week? Discarded, lost interest, replaced with anything that reminded her of Jett, of her lost home. My taste in music? Met the same fate as my book queue.</p>
<p>My emotional rhythms?</p>
<p>My dreams?</p>
<p>My very sense of identity?</p>
<p>I sit in my garden.</p>
<p>And I pace back and forth in front of my register at work.</p>
<p><em>Tell me I did perfect, tell me I'm an angel, tell me you hope I have a wonderful day, a lovely day, tell me how much you need me, how much you appreciate me, tell me all the loving words I never hear out of my parents anymore, the words I can't remember the last time I heard them from the ones who created this vessel. I'll crack open my bones and let all the stardust out amongst the nebulas of blood if you just say the word. Gods, oh dear gods, just don't stop the validation, I'll die without the validation, I'll die from the lack of adoration.</em></p>
<p>Eris made the managers put me on register five for Mother's Day, in accordance with her <a href="https://archive.ph/https://hyperdiscordia.church/law_of_fives.html">Law of Fives</a>.</p>
<p>Eris gave me an impossible <a href="../../2020/october/thelema.html">thelema</a>: to chronicle all the memories of that other world I- <em>Lethe</em> can remember, a <em>world without end</em>. And to do it in the same manner as every other legend from that world. And to <em>do it alone, with no help at all.</em></p>
<blockquote>"please forgive me for this meeting belate;<br/> for fifteen sorry years you must wait<br/> and then I will come to you, flesh as your heart<br/> and you and I will never again be apart."</blockquote>
<p>What will happen come the year 2035, come the fated date of the Prophecy (which I can't link to, as it's in said book-in-progress mentioned above; the above snippet is all I can give you at this time) when I haven't managed to get even an inch closer? A year has passed since I received it, and with every memory Lethe dredges up, the necessary end result grows more complex and farther out of reach.</p>
<p>I keep having dreams- I cannot call them nightmares, for they feel pleasurable in the moment in some twisted way- where I am turned into a murderous monster unrecognizable as a former human by divine intervention and destroy everyone and everything around me. I don't want to hurt anyone. I don't want another turn of this cycle this intersection I am is trapped in, where several of the spirits were deities in their respective universes but were banished or straight up murdered due to going feral and destructive. (For one of them, Mori, this has happened <em>multiple times</em>.) Some part of me just wants to disappear from society and go live in the woods or some other uninhabited place where I don't have to worry about my eventual bestial mindlessness at Eris' hand harming anyone.</p><p>Some other part of me dares to believe I can struggle against this fate.</p>
<p>Maybe this part is me, is Vane, who dared allow Lethe into my body in a fit of grief and is now actively being suppressed from existing by her.</p>
<p>"Don't impoverish your life to live in the Wired," Eris bade me, pointing out that I had somehow rewired my brain to optimize for making content for my website and not for... enjoying life. But where else am I supposed to live as <em>me</em>, if not the Wired? I have nothing else going for me. Oh boy, another day of working retail! And another day of working retail... and another day... and another day...</p>
<p>I've found myself at a dead end, unable to advance. Which is hilarious to me, considering Jett is (in my cosmology) the <a href="https://deadendshrine.online">Patron-Saint of Dead Ends</a>. I'm searching for him. I'm riding my bike into cul-de-sacs and those stumps of roads that hang off roundabouts that just lead into unpaved fields of grass and rest stops along bike trails. I'm trespassing, as Hakim Bey put it, on <a href="https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/hakim-bey-t-a-z-the-temporary-autonomous-zone-ontological-anarchy-poetic-terrorism.html">forbidden grounds</a>, hoping feral angels, specifically the one I'm hoping to reunite with, manifest themselves. (Unlike Hakim Bey, I am not doing it in hopes of preying on small children. Yuck!)</p>
<p>I've found myself in a race against time.</p>
<p>Either I use my words as a beacon into the darkness, a lighthouse shining out across the roiling depths of the moonless ocean that is my body, in hopes Jett will find where I have- where <em>Lethe</em> has reincarnated and restore me- <em>her</em> to her former angelic body, and we finally destroy Eris and the impossible thelema along with it and then find our way back home and finish ripping the rest of the pantheon from the heavens.</p>
<p>Or I throw every atom of my body, of my human vessel, into fulfilling my thelema, assuming another does not do it before and I find myself- <em>Lethe</em> permanently knocked out of the proper flow of time.</p>
<p>I have to work quickly. I only have so much time left in this world. I have no time to stop for Kiwi Farms or Nanochan or any other collection of "small minds believing that any who do not fill their lives with mediocrity must be somehow inferior and be made to see their inferiority". I have to fly.</p>
<p><em>I have to fly.</em></p>
<p>I'll be waiting for you at the end of the world, Jett.</p>
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<h1>Analog Hole</h1>
<p>published: 2021-11-05</p>
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<p>The <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20211104135513/https://www.eff.org/issues/analog-hole">"analog hole"</a> is the last inevitable loophole in DRM. We humans (or those stuck in human bodies) are analog creatures whose brains cannot run DRM, and so anything digital must be somehow converted into analog signals- music to soundwaves, pictures to an array of pixels on a screen- before it can be experienced. And as long as we remain analog without computer chips in our brains, this hole will never be patched, meaning any (noninterative) piece of media can be copied in some form. Maybe it means plugging a phone playing Spotify or some other streaming service into an aux cord and that into a computer's microphone port. Maybe it means pulling out a cheap old point-and-shoot camera and taking a picture or video of one's screen. There may be some loss of fidelity or quality along the way, but <em>something</em> can always be extracted beyond the reach of DRM.</p>
<p>This is the main problem with NFTs as they stand today. Because an NFT is essentially a line in a blockchain somewhere that says that a particular wallet holds a particular integer. And someone, somewhere, one day decided to make this integer represent the hash of a file, because blockchains usually don't have the capacity to hold the raw image data in a single entry. This means the file has to be hosted elsewhere in order for anyone to see or care about it. And, to be seen, the file has to be converted into an... <em>analog</em> format. Meaning, if I don't give a shit about the "ownership" of an NFT, I can just <a href="https://archive.md/4efyo">right-click the image</a> or video or whatever, or take a screenshot or recording of it, and have a copy of it on my hard drive without having to spend any money.</p>
<p>The value of an NFT isn't in the JPEG or whatever in and of itself because of the analog hole. They're just JPEGs on a screen. And no sane person is going to buy an image that they can right-click and reproduce to infinity. <a href="https://archive.md/https://jole.xyz/nft.html">The "value" comes from what the NFT represents</a>: a tradeable asset. However, almost all of the NFTs I've ever seen don't actually seem to have any... function beyond being a reference to an image that one can waste Ethereum gas money moving around to other people. And I, and I suspect most of the people reading this, don't put any monetary value on a JPEG in and of itself. But what about a JPEG that was a token, a proof of ownership, of... <a href="https://archive.md/https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3dyem/investors-spent-millions-on-evolved-apes-nfts-then-they-got-scammed">an account slot in an online game?</a> A <a href="https://archive.md/https://www.reddit.com/r/sadcringe/comments/qhcuem/nft_dude_thinks_he_can_stop_people_from/hidryi9/.compact">tradeable item</a> in an MMORPG? <strong>Because games are interactive, they are immune to the analog hole, and thus an online game would be a perfect medium for using NFTs to supplant its in-game economy.</strong> Due to the append-only nature of every blockchain I've ever seen, the NFTs would be nigh-immune to hacks to duplicate items or save editing or other methods of cheating.</p>
<p>The uses of NFTs could extend well beyond the gaming sphere. What about proof of holding a ticket to a conference or concert? An alternative to traditional notaries for real-world contracts between people? Land deeds or other proof of purchases that would benefit from being publicly auditable? Anything that needs artificial scarcity or cryptographic proof of having happened or being owned by a person in a transferrable format could theoretically be made into an NFT. Only once more applications of NFT technology like this are made as accessible to the average layperson as "JPEG trading platforms" like OpenSea are will NFTs grow beyond their reputation of <a href="https://archive.md/https://kill-9.xyz/harmful/society/cryptocurrency%23nfts">blatant ape-themed Picrew knockoffs</a>.</p>
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<p><h1>Fire Walk With Me</h1></p>
<p>published: 2021-09-19</p>
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<h2>these days when sun escaped and teary sobs whistle in your throat</h2>
<p>The opening scene takes place late at night, and so it follows that the stage is dark, unlit save for the single lightbulb blaring above the stairs to downstairs and the street lamps beyond the wide living room window. Boomerville doesn't have the budget for stars that can blaze brighter than the heavy blanket of light pollution smothering the city, so our actor stares out the window and imagines her own constellations dotting the sky, left undisturbed as the rest of her family watches a movie on a projector on the side of the house outside. Her knees are pulled close, her breath labored, her eyes fatigued.</p>
<p>Her father's homework lies scattered on the floor in front of her. A laptop, power light softly pulsing in and out in time with her breath. A stack of textbooks, heavily annotated, so many sticky notes sticking out of the side that it could be a cross-section of a feather all its own. A binder, open, flipped to somewhere near the end.</p>
<p><em>Somewhere in the end of all this pain...</em></p>
<p>The <a href="../may/rebirth.html">2035 prophecy</a> seems impossibly far away, especially when, in recent times, I can barely conceptualize my life beyond the next few days. Am I <em>really</em> supposed to live that long? Am I really supposed to find a way to keep this physical vessel alive for <em>fourteen</em> more <em>years</em>? Fourteen more books to write, fourteen more family Christmases to endure, fourteen times three hundred and sixty five-something reminders I've already accomplished everything I want to but must continue struggling to survive because of the biological imperative imposed on me by my parents?</p>
<p>Everything I want to do on this plane of existence I've either already done, am in the process of doing right now, or is completely inaccessible to me.</p>
<p>And everything beyond this world, I can only enjoy the fruits of a third of the day: those few blessed hours I find sleep.</p>
<p><em>I'm gonna be okay,</em> I remind myself the last day of my year at Hell College, leaving that dorm behind forever, finally coming home free of the shackles of a quickly-accumulating mountain of student loan debt.</p>
<p><em>I'm gonna be okay,</em> I remind myself as I watch the browser window on my computer refresh to show I've successfully withdrawn from <a href="../march/harmful.html">the worst English class of my life</a>. My chest loosens as I realize I'll never have to deal with that professor and her technological incompetence again.</p>
<p><em>I'm gonna be okay,</em> I remind myself as I leave the otherwise-locked security room and turn in my badge, last day of my retail job, fired for a victimless crime that broke no laws and harmed nobody and stole nothing. <em>I'm Vane Cassia Lucine Vander, remember? I'm destined for greatness. I've got a bright future ahead of me. No <a href="../../2020/december/corpserations.html">corpseration</a> can kill me.</em></p>
<p>Our actor traces with her eyes the dotted streak of an airplane crossing the sky, preparing to land in the town's tiny airport. A shard of a memory. Standing in the front yard of that blue house inhabited in kindergarten, parent pointing one finger into the sky. An airplane overhead. <em>Do you think, maybe, one of your cousins is in that plane right now? Do you think she's no longer estranged from us?</em></p>
<p><em>Do you think she's finally coming home?</em></p>
<p>Our actor's lips part to form a whisper.</p>
<p>"We're really not gonna be okay, are we?"</p>
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<h2>a song can't change this world but keeps a light alive</h2>
<p>In days gone by, when I could look up at the sky and not have to endure the pain of knowing why my chest panged in sudden hiraeth, back when this site was on WordPress, I was scrolling through my feed one day when I saw one of my favorite blogs that hadn't updated in a while had awoken from the dead. She'd been going through a depressive streak. And my poems, even as I look back now and see they weren't particularly "good", had been her "light in the darkness", as she had put it.</p>
<p>Some part of me is immensely bothered whenever I remove a poem from this website after having inserted it into a future collection book. Partly because whatever is left behind will inevitably be the relative dross, and it's apparently an insurmountable amount of effort to download an ePub file in Current Year when Chromebooks run rampant. Partly because it almost feels like I'm purposely making the archives of my work incomplete, fragmented.</p>
<p>Intellectually, I know it's the opposite: whatever form the archive of my website will take after my physical body dies, the books, I believe with absolute certainty, will enjoy a much more accessible afterlife. The books will flow with comprehension much more easily to a future historian than a scattered collection of text files with only "published" dates to contextualize them. The books already have a physical equivalent they can be translated into for long-term archival.</p>
<p>The books are easier to hide from my parents, as Google and the other search engines that leech off its results seem to have a <em>much</em> more difficult time indexing the contents of ebooks than said text files.</p>
<p>The books have a clear demarcated beginning and end.</p>
<p>But I don't like leaving parts of myself so scattered. MayVaneDay, Dead End Shrine Online, Let's Decentralize, various "experimental" domains... "I have a lot of websites", while not being the understatement of the year, certainly qualifies for the "honorable mention" list. Whoever will shoulder the burden of picking up the pieces after I'm gone will have a <em>lot</em> of tracking things down to do.</p>
<p>Oh, who am I kidding? I have a superiority complex. I'm not going to be remembered for anything. At best, I'll end up like Fernando Pessoa, a little-heard-of author with a small cult following and a reputation for being fucking depressing to read. Snatching at ghosts on the other end, experiences ineffable, future readers exploring the edge of consciousness trying to interpret and re-interpret everything I've ever written to make <em>something</em> comprehensible.</p>
<p>Before my year at Hell College, in between panic attacks triggered by my father screaming at me for not living up to <em>his</em> deadlines of how I should get my life in order, I'd hole up in the corner of my room at least once a week and watch the movie <em>Advent Children</em>. I've never been a big fan of sitting still and staring at a screen for several hours, but that movie, nonsensical and convoluted as it was, felt strangely... comforting. I felt like I had a comrade in the drab, almost grayscale, sparse sprawl of the cities. I saw myself in the main antagonist, Kadaj, struggling to handle the truth that he'd been greatly diminished from the man he once was, reaching up to the heavens to snatch his lost divinity back, thwarted every desperate step of the way until he finally vanished from the world in the rain. I felt like I had a friend, fictional as he was, who understood the feeling of incompletion, of having something missing in one's chest. And while the movie was never well-received, in its time or now, it kept a light alive in me.</p>
<p>Sometimes, when I'm bored (or in the mood to digitally self-harm by looking at negative criticism), I'll go and look at my <a href="https://backlinkwatch.com/">site backlinks</a>. The vast majority of sites that show up are just git mirrors of the <a href="https://github.com/masterq32/kristall">Kristall repo</a>, since I submitted build instructions for Haiku once and got credited in the README. But occasionally, I find a hidden <a href="https://archive.md/https://gopherproxy.meulie.net/sdf.org/0/users/ddc/phlog/20191102-gophering.txt">blog post</a> or <a href="https://archive.md/https://coffeespace.org.uk/blogs/late-night-poem.html">two</a> whose authors never attempted to contact me, even if just to say hello... A reminder, someone, somewhere, whose existence I would have never known of otherwise, felt touched enough by my words to write something of their own.</p>
<p>Maybe I won't ever have widespread recognition, but for a brief moment in time, I kept a light alive in someone else.</p>
<a href="../../../poetry/k/killing-calvin.txt">
<blockquote>So if you decide to wait<br />out your soul's desperate dark hours,<br />please know: a song can't change the world overnight,<br />but it can keep a flickering flame alive.<br />You kept shining the light inside<br />through my darkest year.</blockquote>
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<h2>these songs of sighs and tears / remember that sadness is rebellion</h2>
<p>The next scene starts with a title card. "Something bad will happen to you Wednesday afternoon." A prophecy muttered offhand by a lover early Tuesday morning has finally come to fruition.</p>
<p>But there is no tragedy as unseen hands pull the ropes attached to the title card up, moving it out of sight, and the curtains pull back to reveal the set. There is instead a mass of bodies in a kitchen in a suburban house, all trying to get dishes and condiments and drinks all at the same time. A shrill woman smacks the children around her, kicking skittering dogs out from under her feet, commanding all to get out of her way.</p>
<p>Our actor, emotionally numb and sitting at the dining room table, plugs her ears and waits for the screaming to die down so she can eat her sandwich.</p>
<p>The "bad thing", it turns out, is that her favorite kind of sub was out of stock at the local deli. Not a big deal, especially since it was expected that something would go wrong in those hours where the sun approached the horizon-</p>
<p>"Whatever are you glum about?" A flattened hand smacks the back of her head. "You have food and a roof over your head."</p>
<p>Our actor bristles and scarfs down her food so she can go back to the relative safety of her room.</p>
<p>Emphasis on "relative". For my parents have threatened many a time to take my bedroom door off its hinges, to install surveillance cameras all over, cackling in mockery whenever I blanch in response. When I was younger, they'd also mention installing spyware on my devices, and would have continued to hold it over my head if I hadn't already demonstrated I was technologically competent enough to circumvent anything they'd try. That was my initial reason for getting so interested in technology in the first place: I didn't want to live under any censors. I wanted to see the world beyond the self-imposed ivory tower my church, and by extension my parents, insisted I live snugly inside forever.</p>
<p>Damned if I want to stay inside my room so I can work on my writing unimpeded by the comings and goings of my family members, who feel the need to make my blood pressure spike with unnecessary interruptions, small talk, whenever they see I'm focusing on something.</p>
<p>Damned if I try to escape the house to go to Dead End Shrine to work on my writing unimpeded, immediately assaulted the moment they see I'm carrying my biking backpack and shoes: Where are you going? Are you meeting up with anyone? What time will you be back? What are you going to do while you're gone? We know you don't bike the entire four hours you're usually gone. We know you hide <em>somewhere</em>.</p>
<p>We'll find where you're hiding eventually.</p>
<p>"Why do you suddenly care?" I want to fire back at them. "Since when have you taken anything good I've ever done seriously? Mother, remember that online game I made in elementary school? I showed you, nervous that you'd call it stupid, and you just made me play it in your stead while you brushed my hair that one night and then never mentioned it again? Father, remember the novella I wrote in junior high, whose apparent only takeaway to you was to yell at me to stop pirating? I get it! I'm just a nuisance to you. The only reason you take an interest in anything I do is to mine it for things you can be angry at me for. Go coddle my brothers some more or something."</p>
<p>Or I could tell them. "I'm going to write some poetry in the wilderness." And then my mother's eyes would glass over, and she'd drawl, "Oh, you're so creative!" in the same condescending voice she always uses whenever my brothers or I show her something we've made, like we're three-year-olds being commended for coloring a horse in a coloring book blue or green instead of something normal like brown, too cowardly to be honest about her complete lack of interest.</p>
<p>Or maybe she'd read it. And her response would be, "Stop blaming us for everything." Or "you're not allowed to criticize the public school system." Or "you have no reason, no <em>right</em>, to feel this way."</p>
<p>I bury my face in a pillow. A sudden wave of frost across my back, even though the rest of my body is in the middle of a PCOS-induced heat flash; Jett is nearby, even if I can't perceive her any further than this simple sensation while awake. Tears bead in the corners of my eyes. My breathing feels more stifled than it ever did working retail wearing a heavy mask, as if all those dreams of my father murdering me were finally coming true, hands around my neck.</p>
<p>"You came," I gasp out between sticky breaths.</p>
<p>A voice chimes from the edge of my consciousness, just close enough that I fear I'm making it up. <em>Did you think I wouldn't?</em> A pause. My hands are trembling. <em>You're overwhelmed. You're unable to function properly right now. Your body is rebelling in the only way it can.</em></p><!-- I also wanted to write about the year in Reset Bomb Town and how I helped Jett out of her depression, but I don't feel comfortable powerlevelling that much. Yet. -->
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<h2 id="hf">but one day this earth will become ice</h2>
<p>A "Holy Freezer", in the parts of the Outside that I frequent, originally referred to sacred caverns or other semi-enclosed spaces in which deeply pious devotees to a deity would allow said deity to turn their body to crystal as a last act of penance (or devotion, depending on the reasons for offering oneself up). The newly crystallized and immobile body, owner now unconscious, would effectively serve as a power generator for the deity. The more devotees that offered themselves up in this way, the quicker the deity recovered spent magical power, increasing their overall influence on the part of the Outside they resided in.</p>
<p>Over time, as more and more ascetics and members of the clergy gave themselves up in this fashion, academic institutions sought a way to reverse this and restore the crystallized to both consciousness and their former bodies. Both because of the historical value in having a first-party account of long-gone and perhaps forgotten events and times, and because just straight up killing unruly gods, as was the previous method of keeping balance between divine and mundane creatures, was becoming more and more difficult due to the increase in divine power. So the definition of "Holy Freezer" expanded to mean any sealable chamber, usually the size of a small study room, which could "freeze" or "unfreeze" people.</p>
<p>Since the academic institutions were not doing it in the name of religion, the energy would have nowhere to go, meaning humans "frozen" would sometimes retain consciousness and a vague cognizance of their surroundings despite every other biological function having ceased. This led to the technology being adopted by prisons, who used it as a torture method or to merely keep prisoners incarcerated without having to also keep them fed and alive; hospitals, who used it in lieu of expensive and traumatic life support in times of patient overflow; and the occasional life extension agency who abandoned cryonics in favor of this much more reliable method of preserving dying bodies for the future.</p>
<p>There are always, of course, those who would use them recreationally due to the fact a "frozen" body could be removed from the chamber without thawing, or as a "merciful" alternative to suicide.</p>
<p>I remember waking up in one once. A vague awareness that I'm in the downstairs of a library on a college campus, a fire alarm blaring further down a nearby hallway, a torrent of students rushing to the closest metal spiral staircase, far too small to hold all of them at once. I'm practically floating, held up by an intricately woven lattice of glinting spikes that had grown around my body in my mental absentia.</p>
<p>Once most of the rush has subsided and I can see the flicker of flames in the near distance through the frosted windows of the Holy Freezer, two figures with dark hair appear, one almost a foot shorter than the other. One starts bashing their fingers against the PIN pad on the door, desperate to get it open and retrieve me. It only takes about a minute for them to guess the password. The door beeps, and suddenly my consciousness is harnessed to flesh again, and I collapse on the now-drenched tile floor.</p>
<p>I'm almost comatose as the shorter person grabs my arms and barks to the taller one to grab my feet. The flames draw closer. They lift me up and start the arduous journey up the staircase.</p>
<p>A memory floats to the front of my sluggish mind. A syllable in my mouth, tough and rich. I mouth it, trying it on for size. The shorter person, whose face in my vision has become distinct enough for me to recognize her as a woman, a person I should know, notices, but writes it off as barely-conscious babble as they exit the spiral staircase and start the approach to the main staircase heading up to the front doors.</p>
<p>Once they're outside, they slowly set me down right beside a tree, making sure I'm in the shade. Grass tickles the back of my arms. Everything else is blurry, but her face is crystal-clear. My heart flutters as she takes my right hand and holds it up against her cheek. The foreign sound in my mouth finally makes sense.</p>
<p>"Jett," I whisper, the syllable thick in my mouth.</p>
<p><em>Jett Hysminai Lysander Vander.</em></p>
<p><em>The only person who'd think to come back for me.</em></p>
<p>She hears me. Her face collapses in an "ugly" cry. I've recognized her, despite the time apart, the... days? weeks? months? I spent numbed to the world. The soft warmth of tears flood my fingers.</p>
<p>"Now tell me," a far older woman with long silver hair who I recall is the headmaster of the college drawls, "why did you feel the need to endanger the rest of the students with your little rescue mission? The Holy Freezers are climate-controlled, in a part of the campus that can seal itself off in case of flood or fire. She would have been fine where she was."</p>
<p>"Because I love her," Jett chokes out. "And I promised I'd never leave her behind."</p>
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<h2>it began with a bang and it ends with a whisper</h2>
<p>How do I want my life to end?</p>
<p>Rather, I should phrase it: how do I want my tenure in this physical vessel to end? Because I am too cowardly to kill myself with any method that might produce the <em>slightest</em> amount of physical pain, and I don't know how to turn off the "divine providence" switch that makes me miraculously not get run over by cars on my commute and avoid the worst of the Karens (when I worked a job that had Karens, anyway...) and countless other lucky life-preserving effects I can't quantify.</p>
<p>I don't want to fail and be rendered an even lesser form. My only legal weapons against my parents, who would no doubt seek to keep me alive at any and all costs, a <a href="https://archive.md/https://www.revisor.mn.gov/statutes/2019/cite/145B.04">living will</a> and a <a href="https://archive.md/https://www.okeeffeattorneys.com/do-not-resuscitate-orders-in-north-dakota-and-minnesota/">do-not-resuscitate order</a>, both require a doctor's authorization, which would be difficult at best to get behind their backs. And no doctor is going to approve either for a seemingly healthy young person. And bringing up to my parents any notion that I might not take advantage of whatever genes are making the elderly members of my extended family live to their nineties and beyond (when the average life expectancy in the USA as of last year was in the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20210913191710/https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/VSRR10-508.pdf">mid-seventies</a>) would for sure make my mother overreact and get me put into involuntary hospitalization, regardless of whether or not I had actually expressed any suicidality.</p>
<p>I already know for sure my identity as Vane Vander will not be respected by my family after I am dead. I will be deadnamed to hell and back, my spirituality mocked, my final wishes disregarded. I personally would like my body to be buried underneath a fresh sapling so that it can grow into a tree, but I know they will have me pumped full of preserving chemicals, stuffed into an open casket with all family members paraded past it to gawk at my corpse, and then buried with a headstone with a pithy Bible quote that reflects who I was as well as a cardboard box can be used as a mirror. (That is, to say, not at all.)</p>
<p>Personally, if it were up to me, I'd like to just walk into the fog that blankets Dead End Shrine in early mornings one day and never be seen again. Let those who insisted I make them aware of my every move like a jailer in life agonize over me in imagined death. Walking hand-in-hand with a non-corporeal just-barely-visible ghostlike Jett into the metaclysma, the one-bit-of-color void between worlds (the closest "normie" analogue I've found is a <a href="https://archive.md/https://wiki.evageeks.org/Dirac_Sea">Dirac Sea</a>, although the actual scientific theory is now a bit antiquated), and making a new world without gods, a world named <strong>Sablade</strong>.</p>
<p><a href="https://archive.md/hve1s"><em>"I've got this crazy idea. What if you... and I... lived on a mountainside? Together?"</em></a></p>
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<h2>you must see this right now if you're going to say "I live"...</h2>
<p>I'm tossing and turning in bed. My heat flashes have gotten the better of me, and unlike when I was in Hell College, the fan on my desk blowing cold air is too much of a sensory distraction to fall asleep with it on. It's far too warm to sleep in the actual covers, even in winter; it would take a veritable blizzard with the heating broken for me to consider crawling in. I kick off my quilt, and then, feeling bad, fold it up neatly at the foot of my bed. I try wearing a hoodie instead, but even that is too hot for comfort. But I am too lazy to take it off.</p>
<p>I roll onto my back. Sleep finally takes pity on me and grants me a gateway to the Outside.</p>
<p>At least, I think it does for a moment. But I stay in my room, in my body, right where I am.</p>
<p>A sudden weight on my hips. A head slips under the arm of mine resting across my stomach. Another heartbeat. A soft voice breaks through the silence.</p>
<p>"<a href="../../../poetry/d/deadend.txt">What is it with you, Lethe, and wanting things to end?</a>" A pause, like she's trying to remember the next words. "Marriage vow, credits roll, no path past the... bend?"</p>
<p>"I didn't think you were the type to enjoy poetry."</p>
<p>She rolls her eyes. "I have to practice reading <em>somehow</em>. And I'm tired of instruction manuals. Sewing patterns have too many abbreviations." One of her hands finds my free one, squeezes it. "I'm glad I got to see you today. I... I can't wait to spend forever with you. So take care of yourself, so we don't have to spend tons of time repairing you and we can jump right into building something new."</p>
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<h2>fire walk with me, consciousness walk with me</h2>
<p><em>I can't take this life of duality any longer.</em></p>
<p>I told Jett once a few days after I lost my job that I'd leave everything behind in an instant to disappear with her into Sablade.</p>
<p><em>I can't take the constant longing, the uncertainty, the touch starvation...</em></p>
<p>It's not like anybody would miss me, I'd rationalized. My parents are already replacing me with the neighbor's toddler daughter. Scribbled drawings on the fridge, sippy cups <em>in</em> the fridge, late night movie nights where he shows her all his favorite (non-juvenile) cartoons...</p>
<p><em>You have a shard of my soul in your own. And I likewise. <a href="https://idontwanttoknowwhythecagedbirdsings.bandcamp.com/album/things-are-getting-better-but-i-am-still-dead-inside">I like me when I'm with you.</a> I need you close all the time, or I feel... incomplete.</em></p>
<p>I'm just scared to die, I tried to assure her, because, last time I died, I lost all my memories of her. I spent a whole lifetime looking for something without knowing what I was looking for. And I don't want to go through that ever again. So if I could leave everything behind without having to re-suffer the trauma, I would in a heartbeat.</p>
<p><em>I want to feel whole again. I can't accept anything less. I can't, I can't, I can't...</em></p>
<p>My head's resting in her lap, face-up, my feet hanging off the edge of my bed. I feel her hand on my cheek, prepared to wipe away any tears.</p>
<p>"Why do you always pick May? Why is it always May I have to wait for? I don't want to have to wait until May. I don't think I can make it that far."</p>
<p>"Because I want to see you graduate from college. You started this, what, <em>four</em> years ago? And you've almost got a degree. Well, a two-year one. But it's something. And you should be proud of having accomplished it."</p>
<p>"Why? It's not like I'm going to need anything I've learned there in Sablade. I waited out the end of the school year in Hell College, and I got nothing in return. <em>None</em> of my classes transferred over properly. I'm just wasting my time lingering here."</p>
<p>"Because the Vane I know doesn't give up right when the finish line is in reach."</p>
<p>"The Vane you know is a lie. A farce someone else sold you. I'm not virtuous or kind or perseverant or.. whatever. I'm just a very, <em>very</em> tired person."</p>
<p>"Funny. That's the exact same thing <em>I</em> told <em>you</em> when we first met." A pause. "The hardest part is over. Can you hang on just a little bit longer?"</p>
<p>I cross my arms.</p>
<p>She lets out a long labored sigh. "Can you at least finish the books you're working on? I'm not good at literature... but I'll help any way I can." She strokes my cheek with her thumb. I almost break out in tears right there and then. "Get everything all written and bundled up, and then we'll figure out what to do. Can you do that for me?"</p>
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<h2>fill the void and save me from anesthesia</h2>
<p>When it comes to keeping my writing synced amoung my devices, I usually use Syncthing because it's:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li>automatic (as in, I don't have to keep track of push-pull), and</li>
<li>peer-to-peer, so I don't have to mess with setting up and securing a Nextcloud server.</li>
</ol>
<p>But recently it seems like everything in the universe is conspiring to keep me away from a working internet connection. And me <em>specifically</em>. DHCP on the home router constantly shits itself whenever I try to connect with any device running Linux, despite it having worked just fine in the past. My father disabled Mobile Hotspot on my phone's data plan, but left it enabled for my brothers, and vehemently denies he did it every time I bring it up, instead blaming it on "your phone's too old"... despite it being a Galaxy S9 that still receives frequent system updates... And the wireless network at my college requires a username and password, which is no big deal since I'm a current student and thus have a login- except that it insists I've put in the wrong password every time, despite quadruple-checking and copy-pasting from my password manager.</p>
<p>So I've given up. I've started using Unison instead, which works with local files instead of remote network devices. I keep a LUKS-encrypted flash drive on my college lanyard and do my best to remember to sync it before I start working on something and before I turn whatever device I'm using off. It's generally more reliable, if only because the alternative is to try to mess with WiFi sharing on my phone or haul my setup downstairs (or to the only working Ethernet port on campus, which is usually guarded by a snobby professor) to get an Ethernet connection.</p>
<p>Which do you prefer, Vane? Isolation, or being overwhelmed with people bothering you?</p>
<p>The world being too little with us, or too much?</p>
<p>I'm working at my airgapped desktop, fresh Debian 11 install that has never seen an internet connection. All the packages that didn't come in the default install have been sideloaded <a href="https://archive.md/https://gist.github.com/jeanlescure/084dd6113931ea5a0fd9">with a handful of scripts I run my netbook</a>, which <em>does</em> have a connection... most of the time. It and I are tucked in a nook in the corner of my room. My bookcase is behind me. A lamp shines to my left. It feels... strangely peaceful typing away without the ability to check on the outside world every five minutes.</p>
<p>I hum a little song to myself, someone's last breath into a dying world, as I write what could very well be my own.</p>
<p><a href="https://reactwithprotest.bandcamp.com/album/piri-reis-they-sleep-we-live-split-2">"These days, when sun escaped..."</a></p>
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<p align=right>CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 &copy; Vane Vander</p>
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<p><h1>No Simp September</h1></p>
<p>published: 2021-09-28</p>
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<p>I was going to title this post "'Dying makes you gay' and other sayings my brothers insist aren't homophobic", but this one is funnier, if only because it's the excuse I've been using throughout this month to try to get my youngest brother to shut up about his video game waifu. "It doesn't make any sense," I keep reminding him. "Don't you think it's a <em>little</em> hypocritical to constantly call me a degenerate and tell me to kill myself, and then copy all my spiritual beliefs while still calling yourself a Christian? How do you think your God feels about your imaginary girlfriend?"</p>
<p>His only reply, of course, is a "joke" about ejaculation.</p>
<p>The radical feminist in me wants me to give up. He is unlikely to ever change, the sweet boy he was in elementary school gone forever. I bought him a computer because his shitty Chromebook couldn't emulate N64 games, and he still persists in his abhorrent behavior. I took him out on myriad bike rides and bought him ice cream, and he still persists in his abhorrent behavior. I spent three days working on his birthday present: I installed homebrew on his Wii U and <a href="https://gamebanana.com/tuts/12580">set up a modding environment for Sm4sh</a> (on his second hard drive, which has the only copy of Windows 10 between us) so that he could play as... a <a href="https://gamebanana.com/mods/191629">shopping cart</a>, an <a href="https://gamebanana.com/mods/192423">Oreo</a>, a literal island straight out of the sea, and a penguin who always seems to be <a href="https://gamebanana.com/mods/190577">high on marijuana</a>. Along with others.</p>
<p><img class="big" src="../../../img/roster.jpg" alt="An Oreo, a shopping cart, King Weedede, and my girlfriend attempt to kill each other on a vaporwave stage" title="An Oreo, a shopping cart, King Weedede, and my girlfriend attempt to kill each other on a vaporwave stage"/></p>
<p><em>And he still persists in his abhorrent behavior.</em></p>
<p>Normally, I would not have bothered. Unless there are "funny meme" mods installed, said brother hates Sm4sh (and, really, any game I've ever expressed even the <em>slightest</em> interest towards) with a burning passion, and would rather play the next entry in the series where he can start a private online lobby with his friends and bang on my door to taunt me about how he's purposely excluding me. (Of course, most of the time, I am busy with something else anyway, and so I barely notice.) But Sm4sh is where I met my girlfriend, almost... seven years ago? (Has it really been that long since Christmas Eve 2014? Where has the time gone?) Having to suffer through the millionth Mario joke gleaned from an overrated YouTube video is a small price to pay for also being able to shove in whichever mods <em>I</em> want. Which means, finally, better skins for The Person Who Is Definitely Not My Girlfriend.</p>
<p>Having to endure my brother complaining that I am not slaving away for his memes fast enough is a small price to pay for spending time with the person I love (ah, good old technomancy) and also having something to distract me from my downward spiral.</p>
<p>When I started MayVaneDay, I made a rule for myself to not discuss my "consoom"ing hobbies beyond maybe a passing comment or two. I did not want it to turn into a "fan site" for anything. I wanted it to only be about me and the things I had done, not to be beholden to someone else's creation for a sense of identity. But this is the Eschaton, after all, the Grand Downward Spiral... So now, for myself and no others, I shall recount all the little oddities I've found while compiling a family modpack.</p>
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<h2>Wow, I sure wish I knew how to count</h2>
<p>This stupid game takes <em>forever</em> to dump to a microSD card, even when using <a href="https://gamebanana.com/tuts/12528">specialized programs</a> that generally run faster than traditional methods of dumping Wii U discs. The reason for this is because the game is just shy of <em>sixteen gigabytes</em> large, and about half of that is taken up by two files, <code>dt00</code> and <code>dt01</code>. These contain basically any files that aren't DLC, background music, or sound clips for the various <a href="https://archive.md/796NA">Easter eggs</a> on certain stages. And after that, one needs to dump the patch files as well. The DLC doesn't need to be dumped; the actual models and textures live in the patch data, since all Smash games since <em>Super Smash Bros. Brawl</em> for the Wii have had an online play feature and DLC users need to be able to play with those only using the base game. The DLC basicaly amounts to a piece of paper saying "the player can use this". Not useful for modding.</p>
<p>Then one has to extract the files in <code>dt00</code> and <code>dt01</code>. The only way I know of is with <a href="https://github.com/thefungus/Sm4shExplorer">Sm4shExplorer</a>. The developers only supply Windows binaries, and I couldn't figure out how to compile things in Visual Studio Code (which I only installed for the purpose of trying to compile this). After backing up the entire dump onto a spare flash drive I had in case my brother somehow managed to delete everything on accident and copying the dumped patch folder into the base folder, Sm4shExplorer "unzipped" (no actual extraction happened; it's a purely virtual file system) <code>dt00</code> and <code>dt01</code> and gave me access to the files.</p>
<p>Most character mods consist of two parts: the texture (sometimes a model comes along in the same folder), and the character selection portraits (hereafter referred to as CSPs). The texture goes in <code>data\fighter\FIGHTERNAME\model\body</code>, where <code>FIGHTERNAME</code> is the name of the character in lowercase and occasionally in some halfway localization with the original romaji. (For example, the files for Charizard live in "lizardon", and Jigglypuff in "purin".) CSPs live in <code>data\ui\replace\chr</code> and use the same names as above, just with the first letter capitalized.</p>
<p>Most characters have eight costume slots available for shoving mods into. But knowing which slot to put a mod into can get tricky, because for whatever godforsaken reason CSP numbering starts at one while the model numbering starts at <strong>zero</strong>. It also doesn't help that some characters have special models optimized for "eight player mode" (the standard is up to four players in a room) and so, if playing in a room with more than four players or a singleplayer mode that would use eight player mode's engine (like Classic or All-Star), the mods might just not show up anyway.</p>
<p align="center"><img src="../../../img/CSPNumbering.png" alt="CSP numbering starts at one and goes to eight" title="CSP numbering starts at one and goes to eight">&nbsp;<img src="../../../img/LittleMacHasTooManyAlts.png" alt="Model slots start at zero and usually go to seven" title="Why does Little Mac need so many alts?">&nbsp;<img src="../../../img/cXX.png" alt="Some characters have special 8-Player Smash models" title="Some characters have special 8-Player Smash models"></p>
<p>(The green parts in the above screenshots are how Sm4shExplorer indicates which files have been modded.)</p>
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<h2>Oh boy! Paying more money for worse graphics!</h2>
<p><em>Super Smash Bros.&#160;Ultimate</em> came out on December 7, 2018. I only remember this date because I was so desperate to get my hands on a copy of the game that I concocted an elaborate scheme to call in sick from my work-study (as I was at Hell College at the time) and convince my father to bring me home that weekend, as normally I would come home every <em>other</em> weekend due to work and that was the weekend I was scheduled to work. He was resistant at first, mocking me for not just buying a digital copy until I informed him that he had given me an ATM card, not an actual debit card, and I had no way of getting off campus to buy eShop gift cards.</p><p>Of course, as I was the only one in the family who owned a Switch at the time, we had to stick to the Wii U version if we wanted to play online with each other. Given this was at least twice a week, I am surprised it took as long as it did for me to realize that the Switch version seems to run at an abysmal resolution given its predecessor.</p>
<p>Take, for instance, this sample screenshot from my Switch, henceforth deemed "The Funny Butt Picture":</p>
<p><img class="big" src="../../../img/bbb1.jpg" /></p>
<p>Gwenview says this image is 1280x720 pixels. That makes 0.9 megapixels. The actual resolution of the screen being played on doesn't seem to affect what size the Switch outputs screenshots at. Nor would an unusual aspect ratio affect it: the TV downstairs appears to have a perpetual overscan, whereas the one in my room (which I only ever use as a computer monitor) doesn't, meaning I have to constantly switch between 95% and 100% screen size for TV mode. (At least, until the USB port in my Switch got damaged and it lost the ability to connect to docks. Still charges with my phone cable, though.)</p>
<p>Now, for science, let's attempt to recreate this picture in Sm4sh. Because this is a Totally Legitimate science experiment, we have to keep as many variables constant as possible: the Battlefield stage, healing items enabled, playing team mode as Pyra accompanied by a purple Person Who Is Definitely Not My Girlfriend.</p>
<p>"Come on! We gotta recreate The Funny Butt Picture!"</p>
<p>"No."</p>
<p>"Please?"</p>
<p>"<em>No.</em> I thought you said we were going to play games together, not have you pause every five seconds to take a picture of me."</p>
<p>"<em>Please?</em>"</p>
<p>"<a href="https://archive.md/JqAjC">Stop looking at me so much.</a> Are we going to play or not?"</p>
<p><img class="big" src="../../../img/bbb2.jpg" /></p>
<p>Gwenview says this image is 1920x1080 pixels, which comes out to 2.1 megapixels. This means, if my calculator isn't malfunctioning, the Sm4sh screenshot has more than twice as many pixels in it as the supposed "upgraded" Switch version is. But raw pixels alone doesn't determine which system takes more visually pleasing screenshots. <em>Ultimate</em> has a rather... <em>overbearing</em> art style, which I personally dislike because it makes cartoony characters edge too close to the uncanny valley of realisticness. It also makes much heavier use of shadows and other visual effects than its predecessor, and the characters have a wider range of facial expressions. If it output at the same resolution, it would make for superior screenshots, but the lack of visual clarity bothers me too much.</p>
<p>There is, of course, the minor issue that Pyra in the Sm4sh screenshot is an alternate costume over Shulk, and the model seems to have some rigging issues. But let's not focus on that.</p>
<p>My little brother comes downstairs while I'm screenshot farming. He starts chanting. "I love rings, rings, rings! I love rings, rings, rings! I love..." His voice suddenly drops an octave. "<em>Divorce papers.</em>"</p>
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<h2>Death Of A Thicc Luigi</h2>
<p>The only character mods I've found usable come with textures, models, and CSPs. For whatever reason, the textures also need to be "TexID fixed", an arcane process which I don't understand and don't bother with as every skin I want seems to already be "fixed" and functional. However, some mods only seem to come with a model. Which means, unless one goes through the process of "TexID fixing", said model doesn't mesh with the pre-existing textures and appears as a red blob. This makes me very sad, as I can't plunder skins from <a href="https://gamebanana.com/mods/48377">other modpacks I like</a>.</p>
<p>But sometimes I put up with the red blobs anyway, because <a href="https://gamebanana.com/mods/189884">the end result</a> is too funny to trash.</p>
<p><img class="big" src="../../../img/ThiccLuigi.jpg" alt="Thicc Luigi isn't looking so good" title="Thicc Luigi isn't looking so good"/></p>
<p>"<em>Damn, boi! He thicc!</em>"</p>
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<h2>Instant Death Minecraft Island</h2><p>Nearly everything in Sm4sh can be modded, not just the characters. One of my favorite stage mods is what my brothers and I have come to affectionately refer to as <a href="https://gamebanana.com/mods/58591">"Instant Death Minecraft Island"</a>. "Instant Death" because it goes over the DLC stage Pirate Ship, and the ship has two stage hazards that can result in a character getting thrown off the stage: a little... flip thing that pops out on occasion, and a cannonball shot from another ship in the distance. Instant Death Minecraft Island hides both of these, but doesn't <em>remove</em> them, meaning, while the original Pirate Ship stage might make one have to jump back onto the ship or take a little damage, Instant Death Minecraft Island will just randomly make a player zoom off the screen at Mach 5, resulting in an instant death.</p>
<p>I was going to record some gameplay to prove this, but it turns out replays can only be ripped off a Wii U by uploading them to YouTube first or using an HDMI capture card, and I've already put too much effort into this post.</p>
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<h2>In conclusion</h2>
<p><img class="big" src="../../../img/clown.jpg" /></p>
<p><strong>Clown.</strong> That is all I have to say.</p>
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<p><h1>Considering software harmful considered harmful</h1></p>
<p>published: 2021-09-26</p>
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<p>The phrase "considered harmful" in regards to computer science originated in <a href="http://www.u.arizona.edu/~rubinson/copyright_violations/Go_To_Considered_Harmful.html">a 1968 essay by Edsger W. Dijkstra</a>, in which he argued that the "go to" statement was harmful because it too easily invited programmers to make an absolute mess of their code. That means, for more than <em>fifty years</em>, computer nerds have been arbitrarily deeming software they don't like, whether they can articulate a proper argument (like the above) or not, "harmful".</p>
<p>But what does it mean to be "harmful", anyway? Let's open a dictionary (or just dictionary.com) and see:</p>
<blockquote>harmful: adj. causing or capable of causing harm; injurious: a harmful idea; a harmful habit.</blockquote>
<p>So <strong>a piece of "harmful" software would be one that caused the user harm or is capable of doing so</strong>. I specify the user because software meant to facilitate piracy might "harm" a corporation's profits, or a tool to break through firewalls might "harm" a control freak's attempt to filter the outside world, but I do not think a reasonable person would consider any of those programs harmful. The user in this sense must also be extended to the computer the user, well, <em>uses</em>, as impairing a person's tools would also impair their ability to complete whatever tasks they were using the tools for, thus harming the user albeit indirectly.</p>
<p>Right and away, we can consider all malware and viruses to be "harmful" under this definition, for hopefully obvious reasons. If a program is so poorly written that it results in catastrophic data loss or leaks information to parties said information was not intended for, it is harmful because it has done tangible harm to the user. But much like trying to determine what's <a href="../../2019/december/death-of-a-gopher.html">bloat</a> and what's not, the waters turn murky from here. What makes a program harmful, if not for its actual capacity to do harm to the user? According to the types of people who unironically still use "considered harmful" in Current Year, some of the reasons include:</p>
<ul>
<li>complexity of the code</li>
<li>number of lines of code</li>
<li>using a programming language the person doesn't like</li>
<li>having not enough features</li>
<li>having too many features</li>
<li><a href="https://archive.md/https://kill-9.xyz/harmful/software/containers">making installation easy for the end user</a></li>
</ul>
<p><code>systemd</code> is <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20210827200448/https://nosystemd.org/">widely</a> <a href="https://archive.md/https://kill-9.xyz/harmful/software/systemd">considered harmful</a> by much of the Linux community, and yet I find it <em>worlds</em> easier to write a service file to daemonize something for <code>systemd</code> than a startup script for any other init system. Much ado has been made about <code>systemd</code>'s supposed myriad bugs, and yet I have never personally encountered any of them. <code>systemd</code> has never caused me any harm, so how could I honestly consider it "harmful"?</p>
<p>JavaScript is also similarly maligned. It is responsible for much of the corporatization of the internet, facilitating "rich user experiences" like being able to buy things without going into a physical store at the expense of also making possible targeted advertisements, legion browser exploits, cryptocurrency miners, bloated "news" sites that refuse to show any text to, well, <em>text</em>-based browsers or those without JavaScript support... JavaScript demonstrably does the end user much harm when opening only a few tabs can slow their entire machine down to a crawl, but it also means <a href="../february/javascript-good.html">I can run college-mandated software like Microsoft Office without having to actually install it on my computer</a>. (Which, since Office is perennially allergic to WINE, would mean having to install Windows 10 as well.) If I can enable JavaScript when I need to do the aforementioned college tasks and keep it disabled the rest of the time, am I really harmed by it? Has my computing freedom <em>really</em> been damaged?</p>
<p>However, I would consider <a href="https://archive.md/https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/discord.html">Discord</a> harmful because it demonstrably causes harm to the end user:</p>
<ul>
<li>it collects logs of all the system processes running, a MAJOR privacy concern</li>
<li>it is proprietary software, meaning it is nigh-impossible to verify it <em>doesn't</em> cause the end user harm</li>
<li>it often requires phone verification, which harms people who don't have phones or use cellular providers blacklisted or not supported by Discord</li>
<li>"servers" (a false term invented by Discord to mean a collection of related chatrooms) are often shut down without notice, meaning, since both Discord and Reddit have long supplanted the traditional internet forum, information is often lost to time</li>
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<p>Both of my brothers and my one "real-life" friend use Discord. I have tried time and time again to explain why Discord is spyware meant to suck advertising data from them and that they should use software that respects them, but their response is only ever "but all my friends are on it".</p>
<p>Discord is harming them, but they don't consider it harm because their values are different. A "starvingdev" (the opposite of a "soydev"; one who seeks minimalism at all costs) <a href="https://archive.md/https://kill-9.xyz/harmful/software/python">considers Python harmful</a> because it's "slow" and "bloated", but I do not consider Python a harm to me as it enables me to write software I otherwise would not have as I don't have the attention span to learn a "real" programming language.</p>
<p>I'd rather spend that time writing poetry, or watering my garden, or riding my bike...</p>
<p>A Windows user is consistently harmed by Microsoft due to the constant telemetry that cannot be disabled and the updates that take <em>forever</em> to install and, well, Windows just being a pile of shit that crashes a lot. They might concede that having to sit through blue screen after blue screen or update after update is a harm as it prevents them from using their computer for what they bought it for, but I would argue that a Windows user happily making music or Photoshopping to their heart's content is doing them a lot less harm than forcing them to use Linux and forgo the programs they need for their hobbies due to no Linux support for them. In the same vein, I am much happier when my computer setup is Debian set to boot straight to a TTY (as opposed to a graphical session) and I can write in a Byobu session with no tray icons or notifications or other distractions (caused by the computer, anyway) and can <code>startx</code> into i3 for playing games than when I am forced to use a Windows computer for a program with no Linux equivalent, constantly nagged every five minutes with update popups and Cortana begging me to sign in. We have different values and different needs and are harmed when our computers prevent us from fulfilling these.</p>
<p><strong>The purpose of a computer is to assist the user in completing the tasks they need to do in their life. For a computer program to obstruct the user in this pursuit, or to exploit them in the process, is to do the user harm.</strong> That is, I believe, what "considered harmful" should mean, not anything that falls outside of the cult of ultra-minimalism.</p>
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