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<p><h1>beno</h1></p>
<p>published: 2016-05-03</p>
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<p>It has been almost twenty-four hours since you fell into my house, and so far, my parents have taken absolutely no notice to your sudden presence. I suppose that it could be possible that I am just hallucinating the heavenly figure who shuffled through my hallway at one in the morning with drooping wings weeping like a willow tree. But then how could I explain the breath that brushed my cheek ever so softly when you finally found your words and a tiny sliver of sanity? How could I explain the grime that collected at the shower drain yesterday evening when my parents were still out for a drink and you took advantage of the lack of parentals to take a shower?</p>
<p>The shower doesn’t work in the bathroom downstairs, so only I ever use it unless something is wrong with the one upstairs. Heck, even my brother- whose room is downstairs next to mine- doesn’t even use that bathroom, even though it would save his lazy self a dash up the stairs. You must have spent all of last night and the school day cooped up alone in there… literally, it seems, for in the nonfunctional shower stall is a pile of ragged ebony feathers and a few of my baby blankets stolen under cover of night.</p>
<p>I discovered you after I arrived home from the bus stop. I immediately abandoned my backpack on the patch of empty floor beside my bed and flung open the bathroom door- and then my hands rushed to my mouth in order to stifle a shriek. Your blood- or what I assume was your blood, for surely angels did not need to have such a mundane form of living in their veins- was painted all over the sink. Splatters must have dropped off of whatever you used as a brush as I nearly stepped into a nice trio of them right at the doorway.</p>
<p align="center"><img src="../../../img/beno-1.jpg" height="50%" width="50%" alt="blood in sink"></p>
<p>"<i>What the hell were you doing today?</i>" The words stumble heavily like drunkards out of my mouth. I throw a hand to the bloody mess awaiting me in the sink. "Are you a servant of the devil, come to reap my soul? Are you a Mephistopheles, determining that it’s my turn to be collected?"</p>
<p>The indignancies only get you to glance up at me from your coop in the shower stall as far as attention goes, and you only offer a shrug in response. A breath of wind escapes into the room and ruffles the curtains over the open window, and only once a ray of sun hits your hair for a brief second that I realize who exactly you are.</p>
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<p><h1>Cetra</h1></p>
<p>published: 2019-08-22</p>
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<p>The walls of the cave glistened with moisture residue. Like the inside of a mouth, almost, jaws open wide to swallow her whole.</p>
<p>The woman before her, resting on the rough stone slab, sucked in another heavy wet breath. Ragged exhale, limbs splayed over the edge, languishing like a ghost in a flowy white dress. Her skin was pale, almost sheet-white, accentuating the teardrop sapphire embedded in her forehead.</p>
<p>"Cetra," she whispered. "Come closer."</p>
<p>"Y-yes, Mother." Cetra flew to the woman's side and took a knee, head bowed, eyes barely visible under her hood. "What does my Demiurge require of me?"</p>
<p>"Cetra..." the woman breathed, not taking note of her young companion's words. Her hand reached out, summoning just enough strength to push the hood back, exposing the young Tailtiutian's glossy blue hair, single braid disappearing into the rest of her robe. "You came at just the right time. Not a moment too late. I hate to leave you in this condition."</p>
<p>Cetra's eyes flashed. Her head shot up. "You-"</p>
<p>"The state of this world is... too dangerous for me for now. Cetra..." The goddess brushed a few stray strands of hair out of Cetra's panicked eyes. "I'm going to sleep for a long time. I know not when I'll awake, if ever..." Her eyelids fluttered, as if her head was already pleading with her to fall into the arms of Morpheus. "I'm entrusting the task of protecting this cave- of protecting <em>me</em>- to you."</p>
<p>"I- I don't know if I can-"</p>
<p>"You can."</p>
<p>"H-how can you be sure, Mother?"</p>
<p>A faint flicker of a smile. "Because I know I can. And anything I can do, you can do... also."</p>
<p>The last word came out in a cough. The goddess' head lolled onto her elbow, eyes slid shut, finally at the limit of her energy, succumbed to exhaustion.</p>
<p>Cetra bolted to her feet, shook the woman's shoulders. "Mother?"</p>
<p>No response.</p>
<p>"Mother!" Cetra cried. "Don't... don't leave me alone in this world."</p>
<p><em>Who will sing in the depths of the night if you're gone?</em></p>
<p><em>Who will appease the other Shards?</em></p>
<p><em>I... I don't have a strong voice like you do.</em></p>
<p>Her mother's arms began to glow. Cetra stepped back, shielding her eyes with one arm, tears pricking in her eyes. There was no need to watch. It had happened to countless gods before her, and would happen to countless more after she was dead- a long time, if that, but it would come eventually. Earthly organs coming to a halt, skin turning to stone, mind falling silent. Statuebound until some sliver of her soul left conscious deemed it safe to come back out again.</p>
<p>Cetra turned to the entrance to the crypt. The robe swooshed around her legs. A light pricked in the darkness, entry to the cave far off. A single star to guide her home.</p>
<p>She pulled the hood back over her head.</p>
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<p><h1>¡corre!</h1></p>
<p>published: 2016-05-02</p>
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<p>You.</p>
<p>That's right, you.</p>
<p>You showed up on my doorstep like a shooting star, speckled with all the colors of the sunset- you could have been a factory reject of that evening's skybound hues from the bruises and battered limbs that greeted me that unfortunate end-of-day.</p>
<p>You waited patiently on the front porch, curled up on top of the welcome mat, as I rushed back inside to find a worn blanket to spread over the couch. The splotches adorning your torn lips squeezed and contracted as I scooped you back up in my arms and laid you down in the space I so hastily prepared. The angels that the elders said always watched us must not know how to speak English, for strange and unintelligible lisps escaped from your mouth as your head softly landed on the pillow.</p>
<p>Whence did you come? Your skin is too soft to have been hardened in the furnaces and infernos for eternity, and no god that I know of would allow one of his angelic creations to come to such harm. The scraggly appendages hidden under your shirt are weakened but intact- either you left of your own will, in which case I cannot for the life of me comprehend the reasons, or the other dimension on the other side of death is spring cleaning. But why would they throw out one such as you? And where are the others? Do you know?</p>
<p>The flames in your eyes dance back and forth as your attention drifts to my face. I must be a puff of wind like those driving the puffy chariots across the sky, because something in your irises flickers. For the first time that evening, your gaze doesn't look glassy and otherworldly.</p>
<p>You raise one hand up to my face, and I realize that in your sweatshirt is a jagged and torn hole plastered to your skin with drying blood. A few drops of scarlet leak onto the carpet- freshly cleaned yesterday as your vision clears and you finally comprehend your surroundings.</p>
<p>You clench a fistful of my hair in your raised fist and gently drag me down near to your own face. Your lips part- I can tell from the gust that rings in my ears. I close my eyes in anticipation of a kiss, but what follows us more adept at stealing my breath away in a single syllable.</p>
<p>"Run."</p>
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<p><h1>desaparecer</h1></p>
<p>published: 2017-01-27</p>
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<p>She brushed her hair out of her eyes as she ducked into the room, making a mental note to replace the lightbulbs the first chance she could. The cars zooming by on the highway a short skip away from the house cast neon shadows on the walls, ghosts there one moment and gone the next.</p>
<p>Sometimes she had visions of joining the shadows, escaping from the city at last after five years of the same desolate bed, the same unfilled picture frames hanging on the walls from holes which had long stretched beyond their original proportions. Her friends had abandoned her long ago for brighter prospects.</p>
<p>She slugged off her backpack beside the open entrance to her room and winced as the door squeaked behind her, ancient hinges never cleaned since their installation whining. The walls certainly couldn't talk, but the hinges could scream, threatening to call out her existence to the landlord whose eyes were currently averted elsewhere.</p>
<p>If she got her way, they would stay there until her payment came.</p>
<p>She flopped onto her bed, pulling over her backpack and relishing in the whoosh her short blade made when it was extracted. Her golden opportunity would come tomorrow.</p>
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<p><h1>Erin</h1></p>
<p>published: 2019-08-07</p>
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<p><em>Clack, clack, clack.</em></p>
<p>My fingers weave deftly through the tangled strands of yarn. Weaving, knitting, knotting. Clouds spill out from my hands, fog, mist, snow. Snow cascading everywhere, covering the land in a blanket, sending everything to sleep forever.</p>
<p>I sit here on my ill-begotten throne, self-imposed ivory tower, and I wait. I know not what I wait for, watching the clouds pass by, some of which I birthed, all of which I know I will never see again. Not in the same form, anyway, or in the same arrangement. Two atoms, or perhaps two crystals in a snowflake, defy fate by meeting in a single time and place and then separate, flung out in the universe. Never to meet each other again. I suppose people are the same, when you take the centuries and then the millennia into account. Two souls meet, and perhaps they spend their entire lives together, or maybe only a few minutes. And when those people die, and their souls are shredded apart and reformed like a small child's paper-mache, that meeting can never again be replicated. Never ever.</p>
<p><em>Who are you?</em></p>
<p><em>I'm Erin.</em></p>
<p><em>Who is Erin?</em></p>
<p><em>I don't know.</em></p>
<p>I once had a fiery soul. I once had an unsatisfied spirit, hungry for something more, something better than this mortal world could provide.</p>
<p>And then the muses came. Sang me to sleep at first, enthralled me with stories of the exploits of the people I saw in paintings everywhere, murals, wondering who these strange and beautiful people were that I passed by day after day. I sang in the sun, and I rolled in the grass, and words flowed from my fingers as gracefully as a spider building its web and as fiercely as a broken fire hydrant bursting out into the street. Gutters flooding, overflowing, iridescent splotches where they met the runoff from the street corner's mechanic shop set up in his garage. I made things I loved, and I loved making things.</p>
<p>And then the doldrums rolled in. Not all at once, although that winter night at the height of sixteen was the Fracture, the initial impact that would result in a Shatter. But to get from a Fracture to a Shatter... It was the little things. Collateral damage. A hasty word said here, a sudden packing and night spent in a hotel there. Bright stage lights, midnight nightmare frights, obsessively prodding and poking holes in reality in search of a shiny trinket I could not obtain. Sent forth from the place I'd lingered in ten years, a garden only now starting to blossom, straight into a grave where upon the light from the sun above plays.</p>
<p>Half a year ago, a little angel crashed through my closet and pulled me into a world unseen. That first night was rough, fraught with intimate encounters I won't sully this place recounting. Was it rape? Did I want it? It doesn't matter now. He came back every so often. Sometimes only after a few days, sometimes making me wait a whole month before he came back. Always we'd slip away through the portal in my closet, in my ceiling, in my wall to wherever he wanted me to see that day. And when I got stronger, became more accustomed to the slender colorless body he'd made for me, I started visiting him whenever I wanted. The moment in my dreams I became lucid, I yearned for his touch, yelled out his name, sought out the burn of our twin souls together as we both kicked and screamed in our respective worlds for independence. After a few months, I became acquainted with his Mistress as well. He wasn't officially under her command; it was a temporary alliance until some important work of his was done that I was never quite privy to.</p>
<p>He was calmer when I was at his side. Shy, almost. Like rage was the only emotion he'd ever learned, and he hadn't considered the possible need to comprehend any other.</p>
<p>I shouldn't have been surprised when, in the depths of my despair, he offered to prepare a place for me in his home. A place where I could be free from the worries of my earthly home. Safe from the tyrannies of the men in my own home.</p>
<p><em>The muses pull me to cleave the night and leave this world unseen.</em></p>
<p>You can't see me anymore. My work is complete to the muses' satisfaction. Seven books and countless poems to my name. And when the time came, I answered the angel's call. We shot through the sky, no possession to my name other than the little flash drive hanging from my neck, just like he'd specified I was allowed to take with me.</p>
<p>I thought it would be bliss.</p>
<p>It wasn't bliss. He hollowed me out, carved out my organs, replaced them with a hollow shell of a rib cage. Barely above the level of a doll. And then he disappeared, and his Mistress, hating humans but only ever tolerating me for my angel's benefit, cast me out. And what was the earth to do with a girl who'd sworn eternal perdition the moment her pen had lifted from the page for the last time? I drowned in the clouds. I practically became one myself. Drifted down to the earth in a pillar and turned that into an abode instead.</p>
<p>&quot;Come home, Cloud,&quot; Cirno says, his face cocky and full of glee.</p>
<p>But clouds have no home. Clouds have no face. Clouds move across the sky with poise and grace.</p>
<p>And then they evaporate and disappear.</p>
<p>And yet some part of my weary heart refuses to disappear.</p>
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<p><h1>Erin Interred</h1></p>
<p>published: 2020-08-09</p>
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<p>Sleep does not come.</p>
<p>I open my eyes.</p>
<p>A breeze sweeps through the abandoned warehouse. At least, that is what I think it was in a past life, back before whatever apocalypse happened while I was up in the tower. All of the loading bays where trucks would have parked are now wide open, doors missing, letting the sun and the birds come as they please.</p>
<p>Before me on the sprawling floor are rows upon rows of… caskets. Or something to that effect. Long boxes large enough to hold a person in lined up in neat rows, six or so feet space between all. None of them have any markers or nameplates or anything to hint at what- no, <em>who</em> might be inside.</p>
<p>Kurosagi lightly kicks one with the side of his foot. No reaction, no echo. The boxes are fixed on the ground, inert, as unmoving as boulders.</p>
<p>"We came here often," Kurosagi says, startling me back to attention. His gaze is distant. For a second, I even think he is wistful. "It's quiet here. Peaceful. Wide open, so if anyone were coming, I'd see them coming a mile away."</p>
<p>"You brought her to a... mausoleum?"</p>
<p>He tenses up just the slightest bit. A twitch of the jaw, drawing in his shoulders. "I told her that you were dead. That you had died giving birth to her. That you were buried here. This one, specifically." He nudges the casket again with his foot. "She always brought a book with her. She would read to you, or what she thought was you, for hours and hours..." He shakes his head. "And then some other servant of Mistress Velouria's went and told her the truth."</p>
<p>"And when was that?"</p>
<p>"A few weeks ago."</p>
<p>"You lied to her for <em>eighteen years</em>?"</p>
<p>"I didn't <em>want</em> to," he snaps. "What was I supposed to tell her? That you'd skipped out on her life because you were too afraid of living yourself?" He turns his back to me. The feathers on the tops of his wings flare, agitated, and then settle down again. "It doesn't matter. You were as good as dead anyway."</p>
<p>"You could have brought her to the tower."</p>
<p>"You weren't fit to be a mother. It would be like I'd have to raise <em>two</em> children. Two <em>stubborn, obstinate</em> children."</p>
<p>"<em>Kuroi</em>!" I grab his shoulder, twirl him back around. His eyes are alight, his jaw set, his fists trembling- but I can tell he is holding himself back anyway. I slap him across the cheek. The sound cracks through the place. His face flares red. "You never gave me a chance, you-"</p>
<p>Something lurks in the corner of my eye. Kurosagi sees it too.</p>
<p>We both turn.</p>
<p>At the other end of the warehouse are two boys- young men, rather, although it's hard to tell at this distance- one towering over the other. Both have blades and rods poking out of bags slung over their shoulders. Their eyes are wide, bug-like, staring at us like they are deer and we are several-ton trucks careening towards them on a highway.</p>
<p>Except, if anyone is getting run over and maimed from the glint of their blades' metal as it catches the sun, it's me.</p>
<p>And <em>maybe</em> Kurosagi, if they are fast enough.</p>
<p>Would he protect me if they attacked? Would he save me?</p>
<p>Or just himself?</p>
<p>The shorter one beckons to the taller one, who leans over so the shorter one can whisper something in his ear. He points in our direction and then makes a flapping gesture with his hand. The taller one nods.</p>
<p>Kurosagi steps in front of me, blocking me from view with one of his wings. He reaches into his robe, grassy-green today, and pulls out a long knife undoubtedly stolen from our kitchen.</p>
<p><em>Our kitchen.</em></p>
<p>Our <em>kitchen?</em></p>
<p><em>I doubt he would ever take me back to the tower. Not even if I asked.</em></p>
<p>"Hold!" Kurosagi yells. "What are you doing here?"</p>
<p>The older boy, from the sound of his voice as I cannot see him, pipes up first. His voice booms, crossing the distance between us without any effort at all. "I could ask you the same question, pretty boy. Who just hangs out at a mausoleum at this time of day?"</p>
<p>"Or at all," the younger boy says, his voice fainter, less distinct. "There are more exciting places in town to be, you know. I hear they finally fixed the air conditioning in the library. And the river's always fun to splash in-"</p>
<p>His voice cuts off suddenly. Scrambled footsteps, like he'd been elbowed too hard and almost fell over.</p>
<p>"We're just here to do some graverobbing," the older one explains. "A little corpse harvesting. No need to pull your blade on us, O Heavenly One. Not your business enough to be killing us over it."</p>
<p>Kurosagi remains tense, but he slips his knife back somewhere near his belt. There must be a holder or something like that hidden in the fabric, because he doesn't look cut up, nor does he wince when he says, "So long as you stay more than a blade's throw away from us."</p>
<p>"Fine by me."</p>
<p>Kurosagi draws his wings back in. I can see the boys again as they move to the closest casket and pop it open-</p>
<p>-and they hop in and disappear from sight.</p>
<p>There is not nearly enough room for the both of them, much less them <em>and a body</em>, in the stone box.</p>
<p>"So this is the last place you saw her?"</p>
<p>He nods. "She was pissed after she found out. So she paid one of the angels to alight her here. I chased after her as soon as I found out, but... she disappeared."</p>
<p>"What do you mean, <em>disappeared?</em>"</p>
<p>"You know, <em>vanished</em>? <em>Evanesced</em>? I'm not a thesaurus."</p>
<p>"I know what the word means. I'm asking what <em>you</em> mean."</p>
<p>"I mean, I saw her go in. I thought she was visiting your grave. Or what I told her was your grave. But I never saw her, or anyone, come back out that day."</p>
<p>"You didn't... go in to watch her?"</p>
<p>"I figured I'd give her some space."</p>
<p>I sigh. "Kuroi..."</p>
<p>He stiffens. "If you're going to chastise me, don't bother. I did all I could as a father. You have no right to judge, since you didn't even <em>try</em>."</p>
<p>The boys are still inside the casket. I glance down at the one beside me. Assuming they are all the same size, there is <em>still</em> no way three bodies can fit into that small of a space.</p>
<p><em>Unless there's more space...</em></p>
<p>"Kuroi. Open this casket."</p>
<p>His silent stewing dissolves into confusion. "You want me to <em>what?</em>"</p>
<p>"Open it."</p>
<p>"Why? There's just a body, a rotting body-"</p>
<p>"I'm not so sure. Open it."</p>
<p>Kuroi sighs. "Fine. But only because it's you asking."</p>
<p>There is an inch-deep divot like a reverse handle on one side of the casket, the side we stand on. Kurosagi slips around to the other side of the coffin and reaches over, his fingers digging into the divot. He grunts as he tries to pull it towards him, fingers red and then white as he struggles against the lid.</p>
<p>Dust spills onto the floor as whatever seal was on the casket loosens and crumbles away.</p>
<p>And then, with one final jerk, the lid falls open, and Kurosagi jumps out of the way in time not to be crushed under it.</p>
<p>There is no body inside. There is... <em>nothing</em>. A literal <em>nothing</em>. Just an abyss deeper down than the light above can reach. Smoke almost like a miniature sea laps at the edge of the casket, threatening to spill over. Two rungs of a ladder embedded in the inside face me, the rest- if there are any others- obscured.</p>
<p>He acts unfazed, but his eyes betray that he is even more surprised as I am. "Erin, I'm not letting you-"</p>
<p>I hold a hand out. "If you're going to try to stop me, don't bother."</p>
<p>"Don't tell me you'd be so stupid as to climb into a... void."</p>
<p>"Those other boys did. And they didn't look like they were trying to die."</p>
<p>I step forward, brace myself, lower a leg into the abyss. My foot hits another metal rung, somewhere below the others, right where I expected it to be.</p>
<p><em>Thank you, yesterday self, for choosing something other than a dress.</em></p>
<p>I grab onto the first rung and swing myself in. I am half-submerged in the smoke. Goosebumps flare, expecting it to be cold, wanting to be more prepared than I am pretending to me right now.</p>
<p>But, in truth, it feels like nothing at all.</p>
<p><em>What am I doing? I have no idea where this hole leads. Or even if it leads anywhere at all. I could be throwing my life away, just when it started again.</em></p>
<p><em>Would you rather spend another eternity aimless? Existing just for the sake of existing?</em></p>
<p>I look up at Kurosagi. "Will you come with me?"</p>
<p>His lips press into a tight line. He averts his eyes, thinking for a heavy few seconds until he finally answers, "I can't."</p>
<p>"Then... how did you put it? You have no right to judge. Because you didn't even try."</p>
<p>His eyes widen, but he makes no moves to stop me as I descend one rung. And then another. And then another.</p>
<p>And another, and another, until darkness envelops me.</p>
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<p><h1>Erin Permeated</h1></p>
<p>published: 2020-08-15</p>
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<p>The depths have always been terrifying.</p>
<p>Every week in elementary school days, my grandmother would take my cousins and brothers and I to the community center. We sprinted through lobbies, dashed down stairwells, loitered at the row of candy machines downstairs as the adults paid for our wristbands. The changing rooms were a veritable warzone, I remember, banging open and shut like the fins of a fish desperately trying to get away from a predator. We never got lockers. Someone would always stay beached on the concrete and tile shore, tasked with watching over our things.</p>
<p>Sometimes the lap pool would open up, and the staff would flood the crystal-clear waters with all of the inflatables that they usually kept jailed under the waterslide. And all the kids would exodus from the "normie pool" and line up at the edge of the lap pool's deep end, waiting for the sharp bark of a lifeguard to test their swimming ability. There was hardly any swimming to be had during those tests, just spasming from one end to the other and back again without drowning. Come that, a shackle of yellow around one wrist, and a wait until all the tests were done.</p>
<p><em>Don't look down.</em></p>
<p>I had never seen the floor of the deep end clearly in all the time we had gone there. Never clearly, just guessed, pieced together from glimpses through the beating waves. The pulsating blue-on-white would coax the primitive part of my mind into believing there was a shark waiting under the waves, waiting to gobble me up if I did not swim that test fast enough.</p>
<p>I took the test wearing goggles once. A wave of curiosity overtook me. And I plunged my face beneath the waters.</p>
<p>All of the pieces I'd gathered over the years stitched themselves up in a second. The floor seemed so far away and so close all at once, like I could just reach down and touch it. But it would shy away just that same amount, always forever out of reach. It was endless, forever, a world without end.</p>
<p>Infinity has a hard time fitting into a child's mind.</p>
<p>I have room in my body now.</p>
<p>Beyond the wall of inky shadows are waters. Body temperature, I almost do not feel them as I continue descending down the ladder. The moment the water passes my hips, the water pushes back on me, like a foam ball dunked under the waters, begging to return to the surface.</p>
<p><em>Remember those jokes you made with your cat-loving friend all those years ago? About how much fun it would be to be turned into floaty toys, drifting in a pool?</em></p>
<p>My cheeks start to burn.</p>
<p><em>I suppose I got my wish in the end.</em></p>
<p>The ladder does not end at the waters. I take a deep breath- <em>the instincts never stop, do they?</em>- and continue climbing down, buoyed by my feet hooked on each rail. I am lifting reverse weights. I am become weightless myself, and yet also somehow the world's heaviest object, a dumbbell in junior high dumped into a pool, falling down, down, down...</p>
<p>My ears pop. The darkness lifts.</p>
<p>There is no pool. There are no shadows.</p>
<p>There is only an endless sea of white. Flat, bright, yet not blinding. I am a shadowy silhouette against a piece of paper. A single color in a one-bit world.</p>
<p>The ladder ends.</p>
<p>I let go.</p>
<p>The ink vanishes from sight, leaving nothing but the infinite white. I look up. I look down. I twist all around. Nothing changes except for my own body. Whatever small organs there are in my ears tell my brain that I am upright, that down is down, that up is up. But there is nothing to orient myself with. Unless I am now a compass? Unless I <em>am</em> the orienter, directing some person unseen beyond the white?</p>
<p><em>Am I floating? Am I flying? Am I falling?</em></p>
<p>"<em>Hello?</em>"</p>
<p>I cover my ears a second before the echo booms too loud. Even then, my eardrums ache.</p>
<p><em>That's the boy from earlier!</em></p>
<p>"<em>Are you alright?</em>" he booms again.</p>
<p>I open my mouth to speak. No words come out.</p>
<p>"<em>How did you-</em>"</p>
<p>"<em>Shaver?</em>" another voice asks, cutting him off, softer this time. Still, I do not uncover my ears. "<em>There's someone in the metaclysma. Are you just going to</em> leave <em>her there?</em>"</p>
<p>"<em>I'm keeping an eye on the situation,</em>" he explains. "<em>If she doesn't need help, I don't want to make her feel useless or inadequate. And, in any case, you didn't need</em> me <em>to pull you out your first time.</em>"</p>
<p>"<em>That has nothing to do with it,</em>" she snaps back. "<em>Just fish her out before Horace sees and yells at us.</em>"</p>
<p>A shiver ripples through the water, and my body responds in turn, curling up before I even have a chance to think.</p>
<p>One year, at a day camp I always went to every summer, I brought that same pair of goggles to the waterfront. I was obsessed with seeing how far I could swim underwater before my lungs forced me to surface for air. But I would have to plan out my dives every time and be careful where I let my eyes wander, lest I almost swim right into one of the water filters. Obscured by the murky waters polluted by kicked-up sand and the occasional orphaned bandaid, they were always hidden until you were only a foot away from one, and then it would suddenly come into clear view and glare at you with its corroded face.</p>
<p>A flat shadow of a person, formless and without detail, fades into view a few feet away from me, close enough to touch. What could be a tail, or maybe just a random squiggle, juts out from somewhere on its body, anchored to the point right below me, to my own South Pole.</p>
<p>I think to squirm, to swim away. But there is no water, and I have no fins, and there is no air, and I have no wings. Impaled on a single pinpoint in space, unable to escape as the shadow of a person reaches what I assume is an arm out and grabs my own. At least, I assume it is touch, for I feel nothing, and yet I can watch as it pulls me closer and then tugs on the line attached to it.</p>
<p>The line waves. Nothing happens. I try to glance where its eyes would be were I able to see any sort of face. It nods in response, raises a thumbs-up with its free hand.</p>
<p><em>I wonder what I look like to it.</em></p>
<p>Nothing happens. We just float there. I open my mouth again. Still, no words come out.</p>
<p><em>Can it hear me? Can it tell what I'm trying to say?</em></p>
<p>Nothing happens.</p>
<p><em>Am I dead? Is this the ending I sought? A world of nothing, of nowhere, of no-one?</em></p>
<p>I close my eyes. The world is zero-bit. No information at all, just a sea of black.</p>
<p>In junior high, I dove off a diving board for the first time in my life. I'd psyched myself for the experience weeks beforehand. Looking at photos of oceans just beneath the surface, listening to sounds of microphones underwater, reminding myself <em>don't look down, don't look down</em>. The event itself was not nearly as exciting or as terrifying as I'd hoped it to be. But still, the moment I left my feet, the world came rushing up to me- and then I was cradled in the arms of some imprisoned ocean goddess, one of Velouria's children, the bubbles fleeing just as quickly as they'd come.</p>
<p>Everything happens all at once. Feeling comes back to my feet first, then my legs, rushing up through my body. When the line meets my eyes, the world rushes back into color all at once, and my body <em>smack</em>s against a rope net just barely slack, stretched over a pit of foam cubes.</p><p>The boy and I bounce a bit as the net resettles. I brush my clothes off. Not a single trace of moisture.</p>
<p>The world feels so cold.</p><p>Someone rushes to me, drapes a thick blanket over my shoulders, helps me off the net and onto a side platform and into a little cage. A manual elevator, chains clanking as they guide us down. The sensation of movement coming back throws the world into disarray. I sway. The girl beside me wraps an arm around my back, steadying me.</p>
<p><em>Was she the voice in the waters?</em></p>
<p>The world around us is dim. We are in some sort of underground city, descending down a hole I don't want to know how deep. Beyond the scaffolding keeping our elevator in place are tunnels every so often, floors of an infinite building carved out of the earth. The lights seem to go on forever, and yet I know I cannot see them all, the thick branches of an inverse tree.</p>
<p>The elevator slows, halts at one of these openings. An attendant opens the metal doors. The girl helps me out of the cage and onto stable floor.</p>
<p>She escorts me down the tunnel. Left, left, right, left again, then a series of turns so quick I lose track. She pushes open a set of double doors, frosty and opaque. An... infirmary inside, brightly lit, rows upon rows of beds, some with people peacefully sleeping away.</p>
<p>But none of the beds are for me. We pass through the doors and keep walking. The lights dim again. She brings me to a locked door, lets me lean against the wall for support as she fishes a keyring out of her pocket.</p>
<p>I finally get a good glimpse of her. A full head shorter than I am. Long lavender hair, wrangled into a sharp angular braid that sits obediently down her spine without even a single hair astray. A matching dress, lilac bordered with tan on the seams, lace poking out the underside like shy leaves. A long scar across her face, from her right eyebrow, across her nose, to right by the opposite corner of her mouth.</p>
<p>"You're not very talkative. Even for someone's first time in the metaclysma. It's like you carry the silence around with you."</p>
<p>"Am I... supposed to speak?"</p>
<p>"You just did."</p>
<p>The door opens. She ushers me in, closes the door behind us. A mattress on a bedframe, no blankets or frills or anything, faces us. Underneath the bed is a plastic crate.</p>
<p>"Lie down," the girl commands.</p>
<p>And I follow, covering my body up with the blanket. Only then do I notice the thin wires threaded throughout, the subtle hard bulges.</p>
<p><em>Sensors?</em></p>
<p>A ghost of a smirk on her face. "I didn't even have to tell you to." She turns to leave. "I'll be right back with the doctor. It's standard routine. A quick check, just in case anything went... missing."</p>
<p>She locks the door behind her.</p>
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<p><h1>Erin Examined</h1></p>
<p>published: 2020-08-22</p>
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<p>"And I'm telling you, Doctor, she's so passive. She didn't fight me at <i>all</i>. What kind of a person doesn't freak out after passing through the metaclysma? Or upon finding out there's been a whole different world under her this whole time?"</p>
<p>"Did you alert Horace before you fished her out?"</p>
<p>"I... no. I didn't. I mean, it's not like she's a Lorinthia or anything. She's not <i>dead</i>. Just... dead inside."</p>
<p>"So you mean to tell me that you just let in a potential sympathizer without any kind of questioning at all?"</p>
<p>"Which one is it, Grandpa? Do we interrogate them while they might be bleeding out inside, or do we bring them straight to you?"</p>
<p>A slap echoes through the halls. The door opens. A man getting up there in years but not yet geriatric shuffles in, followed closely by the girl from earlier, now with an angry red mark on one of her cheeks. A gray coat flows from the man's shoulders, almost sweeping the floor. Its buttoned pockets are bulging with what could be tools.</p>
<p><i>A doctor?</i></p>
<p>"I thought I told you to lay down," she mumbles.</p>
<p>"Your bed's not very comfortable," I respond.</p>
<p>My eyes follow the doctor man as he kneels at my bedside, fiddling with the corner of the blanket. He unbuttons one of his pockets and retrieves a thick black cord, which he attaches to some port hidden in the blanket's fabric. The other end goes into... a phone?</p>
<p><i>They still have phones here?</i></p>
<p><i>No, it's too big to be a phone. A... what was it called? A surface? A slate? A-</i></p>
<p><i>A tablet. That's what it was.</i></p>
<p>"Are you <i>listening?</i>" The girl is toe-to-toe with the foot of my bed. The doctor squints at something on the tablet's screen. "I said-"</p>
<p>The doctor's eyes suddenly widen. He sends a sharp glare to the girl. "How <i>long</i> did you leave her in the metaclysma?"</p>
<p>She shrugs. "I don't know. We fished her out as soon as we saw her. So... a few minutes?"</p>
<p>He turns back to me. "How in Velouria's name are you still alive?" He violently taps something on his tablet. "Your breathing is intermittent. Your blood flow is nil. <i>All</i> of your internal organs are missing. By all accounts, you should be a lifeless husk. And yet, you sit before me." He holds up two fingers and moves them back and forth, around in a circle, a zig-zag. "Your visual cortex seems intact. Say something."</p>
<p>"Um... something?"</p>
<p>He grabs a fistful of his silvery hair, exasperated, and lets it go just as violently. The strands frizz out as he looks back at his tablet. "Tell me how. Tell me how you are still alive."</p>
<p>I draw my legs into my arms. "Tell me where I am first."</p>
<p>"You're in Abyss. An apt name, no?"</p>
<p>The girl rolls her eyes behind him, where he can't see.</p>
<p>"That doesn't tell me much."</p>
<p>"I will tell you more once you answer my question."</p>
<p>"I..."</p>
<p><i>How much should I tell him? I barely know him. He could be with the Lorinthia. Cetra never told me how they</i> look <i>nowadays, or how to recognize one...</i></p>
<p><i>And yet... They know I'm not one. And they don't seem too kind to "sympathizers". Maybe they don't like them?</i></p>
<p>"Do you not remember?"</p>
<p>"Are you a Lorinthia?"</p>
<p>He scoffs. "A Lorinthia? In <i>Abyss?</i> They'd never get through the metaclysma. They'd disintegrate to bits and scraps the moment they touched the border."</p>
<p>"So you don't like them?"</p>
<p>"Personally? I find them <i>fascinating</i>. Professionally? I hope to never see one. Obviously you aren't one. So, then, what are you?"</p>
<p>"I'm a... human, I think." I glance behind me, just in case. "I don't seem to be an angel. And I don't think I've ever had god powers."</p>
<p>"There are more in the heavens than just gods and angels. How can a human survive without organs?"</p>
<p><i>Adamant, I see.</i></p>
<p>"I... I don't know." His brow starts to furrow. "Mistress Velouria did something to me a long time ago. Something about preservation so I'd live forever."</p>
<p>"Can you feel any obvious changes since you passed through the metaclysma?"</p>
<p>"Not... not that I know of."</p>
<p>He relaxes. He does not need to know the gory details of what happened that day. I almost think he can tell I am hiding something back, but what he <i>does</i> have must be satisfactory, for he stands back up and disconnects the tablet and cord.</p>
<p>"Selmina. Please take our guest straight to Horace."</p>
<p>"B-but-" She swallows her stammer. "<i>Straight</i> to him?"</p>
<p>"If Velouria is sending us people, I think he needs to know."</p>
<p>"I wasn't sent," I add. "I came here myself."</p>
<p>Confusion comes over his face. "But why?"</p>
<p>"I'm looking for my daughter."</p>
<p>"Well... Horace should still see you. Someone... <i>touched</i> by Velouria should be on his radar anyway." He nods to Selmina. "Away with you."</p>
<p>Selmina sighs. I slip off the bed, leaving the blanket behind, and follow her out the door, through the hallways, back to the elevator.</p>
<p>"This might take a while." Selmina slides down to the cage floor, stretches her arms, yawns. "Of course, it's never long enough for a proper nap..."</p>
<p>"Do you... nap often?"</p>
<p>"Well, it's not like there's much else to do here. There can only be so many people on guard duty at a time. And the aqua farm doesn't like to be crowded. And it's not like we have to go scavenging like the people above Abyss..." She opens one eye, focuses on me. "I almost feel bad for you surface people. Spending all your time just surviving. Is it hard?"</p>
<p>"I wouldn't know. I've only been on the surface-" <i>is that what it's called?</i>- "for a day."</p>
<p>"Huh."</p>
<p>Selmina shrugs and closes her eye again. And we continue descending, further, further, further...</p>
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<p>It feels like a century has passed by the time the cage slams into the ground. The <i>actual</i> ground, for I look outside the metal lattice and see not open air but dirt. Black dirt, barely illuminated by whatever light spilling out from the hallway can make it past the elevator, but I can see the rough clumpy surface all the same.</p>
<p>Selmina does not move as the attendant at the bottom opens the elevator cage door. I lightly poke her with the bottom of my foot. Her breath falters, startled, but she remains deep in the throes of sleep.</p>
<p>"You are here to see Horace, yes?" the attendant calls out to me in an accent I can't place.</p>
<p>I nod my head.</p>
<p>"Right ahead. The door at the very end."</p>
<p>I thank him and start walking.</p>
<p>The lights get progressively brighter the farther I walk. One door, two door, three doors. All have a piece of tape on them with a name I don't recognize. All of them are locked- or, at least the first few are, because I stop checking after the fourth or fifth.</p>
<p>And what would I do anyway if one opened? Walk inside and explore?</p>
<p>A long time ago, long before I ever knew of Mistress Velouria's existence, I was at the house of one of my grandparents. A TV covered the entire expanse of one wall. Usually the screen would be blaring football or Christmas tunes, since it felt like the only time I ever got to see that side of the family was during a holiday, and there was never any reason to think the adults would ever give me a place to sit beside them on the already crowded couch.</p>
<p>But every once in a great while, we would go over for no reason at all. There were no cousins to play with, and since no kids lived there anymore, there were no toys to play with either. Father would take away all of our electronics and expect us to somehow manage to entertain ourselves anyway. Rarely did it work.</p>
<p>One day, however, Father's sister came over. She had a video game with her, a multiplayer one. I asked if I could play- and she accepted, but threw a controller at me without another word. Everything was foreign to me. None of the faces were those my sheltered upbringing had allowed me to know. And she laughed at me after every match, after every time I bitterly failed. And I begged her to explain the game to me, and she refused every time.</p>
<p>And just like that hazy night biting back frustrated tears, I am in a foreign land, with foreign rules and foreign customs that I do not understand, that nobody has explained to me. But no tears are coming, or even on the horizon. I just press forward. One foot after another. The only thing I know for certain will work in this land.</p>
<p>Eventually, the doors flanking me on both sides come to a stop. The hallway ends. There just stands one set of double doors, wooden and imposing.</p>
<p>I knock.</p>
<p>The doors creak as they lurch open towards me. I jump out of the way before they can flatten me against the wall. The sound of what could be ancient hinges creaking open echoes through the hall- but the hinges don't <i>look</i> old, or even worn-out. They gleam golden, flawless, a miniature mirror staring back at me.</p>
<p>If this place were made out of plastic bricks, I would say that they had just taken the door off of a house and attached the rest of the structure to the end of this branch at the hole they'd made. For I peer past the doors, and it just looks like a standard living room from any old house of my time. A couch, a few armchairs, a coffee table. A cheap painting hanging tastefully on the wall. I take a step forward, and the carpet rustles underneath my socks.</p>
<p>The air smells like oranges.</p>
<p>"Enter," a deep voice booms from what I assume is the kitchen.</p>
<p>So I enter. I step gingerly across the carpet, as if I were home, that home from so long ago, ordered by parents not to step on any carpet with dirt-encrusted shoes.</p>
<p>There is one lone figure in the attached dining room. A towering figure, head just a foot under the ceiling. Draped around him are layers upon layers of thin flowing fabric, weaved together to make some kind of slick armor, greens and blues fading into each other like a rose grown in dyed water. A <i>masculine</i> flower, for the mountains and valleys of his muscles show through even the thick layer of armor. It covers even his neck, obscuring the lower half of his face, the upper half topped by a mountain of jet-black hair.</p>
<p>His eyes are softly glowing beacons, a sea of blue in a darkened face.</p>
<p>I wish I could see the rest of his face. What does he feel, staring down at me? Confusion, why someone so obviously weak as me is standing in the middle of his abode? Disgust, that I had the audacity to show up uninvited and then dare to be in the same space as him? Anger, that I interrupted whatever he was doing?</p>
<p>"Dr. Ophiel informed me you were coming. You have interrupted nothing."</p>
<p>His voice is almost flat, emotionless, like what a general would use with a simple soldier. A pawn.</p>
<p>He could crush me in an instant.</p>
<p>"I mean you no harm, so long as you mean Abyss none."</p>
<p>I force myself to keep eye contact. It almost feels like a distant me is balling her fists as I say, "Can you read my mind?"</p>
<p>"Only that which you choreograph so easily."</p>
<p>"So you know why I am here."</p>
<p>"That I cannot tell. Enlighten me."</p>
<p>"I... I'm searching for my daughter. She went missing sometime within the past month. I don't know exactly when. All I know is that she's probably here-"</p>
<p>"Give me her physical description."</p>
<p><i>I...</i></p>
<p><i>I don't know what Dimitri looks like. Is she tall like her father? Blonde like her mother, like I was at the time? Button or flat nose?</i></p>
<p><i>Does she have wings?</i></p>
<p><i>Do Nephilim have wings? Are they strong enough to fly?</i></p>
<p><i>Is she at least healthy?</i></p>
<p><i>I don't know.</i></p>
<p>"I don't know," I admit. "I know she's about eighteen. That's it."</p>
<p>Horace lets out a long sigh. The sound is less like human lungs and more like a pipe releasing pressure. "Time means nothing here. People are old one day and young the next as they please. I can't do anything if I don't know what to look for."</p>
<p>"Then please pardon me." I manage half a bow. "I need to leave. I need to keep searching-"</p>
<p>"Halt. There is no leaving Abyss."</p>
<p>"No... leaving?"</p>
<p>"Not for you." He steps forward. "I cannot allow a potential Millennium Girl out of my sight."</p>
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<p><h1>"The world is an onion"</h1></p>
<p>published: 2020-08-29</p>
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<p>When I was fresh into the teenage years, one summer, my father thought it would be a good idea to forcibly steal all of our electronics and lock them into a box to be returned come evening. His thought was that, without them to "waste" all day on, we'd go outside or play some card game or spend all day simping for him to return them. What <em>actually</em> ended up happening was that we became listless, restless, just waiting for evening to come and burning to ashes the hours between.</p>
<p>He had one loophole. For every hour that one read a book, that would be an hour earlier he would return our things. So my brothers and I would all pile onto the couch and spend the whole morning reading, even plowing through pages as we ate our lunch, so that he woud have to give us our things back after we were done eating. The whole afternoon would be hours to do what we would have normally been doing, which, contrary to his idea of us as screen zombies, was more away from the glow's call than in front of it.</p>
<p>One day, I was reading on the couch when all of a sudden I was overcome with a wave of exhaustion. I physically could not keep my eyes open. So I allowed myself to sleep. And, come evening, my brothers got their things back- and I didn't.</p>
<p>"You were only sleeping so you could get your things back sooner," he insisted.</p>
<p>"I was sleeping because I was <em>tired</em>," I countered.</p>
<p>But he wouldn't have it. So he kept my things in the box for a whole week, kept me cut off from the outside world. I cried myself to sleep that night. Punished for the crime of... sleeping, my fourteen-year-old self, unable to handle the sudden forced isolation, thought I would kill myself by ingesting more sleeping pills than I usually did.</p><p>I cursed the morning when it still came.</p>
<p>And now I stand in Horace's dining room, a world and a half away from that accursed couch. No doubt it has long ceased to exist, frame and springs rotting away in some landfill somewhere.</p>
<p>And now I stand before Horace, his words rattling around in my brain, the notion that I will never again see that morning I had so fiercely cursed.</p>
<p>"It is nothing personal," he continues. "It is nothing that you did. It is <em>not</em> your fault. The procedures Velouria conducted on you to make you immortal have rendered you part-divine. I do not for the life of me understand why she would be so willing to allow the creation of something that could destroy her. But you are here now. And I cannot allow you to leave Abyss."</p>
<p>I look down at my hands, open them. Slender, feeble, lilypads to Horace's hammers. I am not an invalid, but I am far from strong.</p>
<p>Even farther from <em>strong enough to kill Mistress Velouria</em>.</p>
<p>But if I am part divine, that does make me a target. That does make me a wanted person. A <em>desired body</em>.</p>
<p><em>Did Kurosagi know?</em></p>
<p>"But I thought the Millennium Girl just opened a portal to another dimension. And that it kills her in the process. But Mistress Velouria too?"</p>
<p>"Everyone who cannot reach the portal in time."</p>
<p>I look back at Horace.</p>
<p>"The portal crashes the system after enough time. It consumes too much memory for the machine to handle."</p>
<p>"Machines? Memory? I don't..."</p>
<p>An ache somewhere in my brain. A tiny flowering of pain. Not enough to react to, but enough to know it's there.</p>
<p>My eyes shift back down to my hands. I bring my palms closer, straining my eyes.</p>
<p>The ridges, the faint cracks like rivers running through a sun-scorched land, are gone. I have no fingerprints. Only the most obvious lines, the ones where my fingers bend and move, remain.</p>
<p>Has it always been this way?</p>
<p>"You expect me to believe that we... live in a simulation."</p>
<p>"Yes. If you would follow me."</p>
<p>Horace gives me no room to choose otherwise. He brushes past me and disappears down the stairs. I follow him to another living room, this one converted into a study. Bookcases line the walls. A gorgeous finished wooden desk, glossy brown with swirls running all through the surface, rests up against one wall. On top of the surface is a haphazard binder. Pages stick out, enough that I can tell it is a scrapbook of sorts.</p>
<p>He opens the binder, flips through until he comes to a page with a diagram that looks like an onion. Or maybe it is a water drop, or a jar.</p>
<p>Or a womb.</p>
<p>He points to the outside edges of the page. "This is the machine I spoke of. This is the Outside. I know nothing of what lies beyond it, only that this world is finite and limited and thus it must exist."</p>
<p>He points to the outer layer of the shape. "This is Abyss. It is the firewall that mediates connections between the Inside and the Outside. Lots of things come in, seeking out. Most of these are Lorinthia. Nothing leaves Abyss if it does not serve Abyss in leaving. Everything that makes it past the metaclysma becomes one more cell in the firewall. One more scale in its impenetrable shield."</p>
<p>He points to the inner layer of the shape. "This is where your world is, cut off from the Outside by Abyss. I do not yet know exactly how old it is. I know Velouria knows. She is the oldest entity that the programs of Abyss are aware of. Then again, maybe even Velouria has forgotten."</p>
<p>He turns to me. "The Lorinthia know all I have told you. They seek to escape."</p>
<p>"And you do not?"</p>
<p>"I seek to live. I know not what lies in the Outside, or even if there is anything left at all. I know that, if the system shuts down, all I know, all the life I have seen, dies in an instant." He closes the book. "There are two ways that the Lorinthia can escape. Somehow make it past the impenetrable metaclysma, which disintegrates them in an instant, and crash the firewall. Or make the Millennium Girl. Both will cause the system to shut down."</p>
<p>A ringing noise, like an old telephone, fills the room. Horace turns back to the desk, raps the edge twice. The screen on the wall comes to life.</p>
<p>A security camera feed. A sea of white above a mess of black. It is marked <u><em>BORDER VIEW #12</em></u>.</p>
<p>"The metaclysma is not harmless to non-Lorinthia. Prolonged exposure can cause internal organs to malfunction or even go missing. Given enough time, all that is left are skin and bones."</p>
<p>Something flickers on the screen. Then I see it. A black silhouette, diving in like an Olympic diver.</p>
<p><em>Do the Olympics even exist anymore?</em></p>
<p>A few seconds later, the limbs detach from the body. Then the head ejects, and each joint severs from each other, a rain of black particles shrinking and shrinking until even a single pixel is too large to show what is left.</p>
<p><em>Why do they even try? They'll just... die.</em></p>
<p>"Could someone not a Lorinthia crash the firewall?" I ask.</p>
<p>Horace shakes his head. "Abyss already knows you are here. You are still alive. You are still standing. It has accepted you as a part of it. To hurt it would be to hurt yourself."</p>
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<p><h1>Erin Hidden</h1></p>
<p>published: 2019-08-12</p>
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<p>The muses left me to desolation and despair. Somewhere between the calm solace of a morning meadow, with all its flowers waving hello to the sun, unaware of their impending demise, and a pit of hounds shrieking as if they were in hell. But then, I suppose, a great deal many things could fit in that gap. The whole gamut of human emotions spans from horizon to horizon. Everything has been expressed before. There is nothing new under the sun, much less the flowers far below, little faces so tiny I can't make them out distinctly from my tower window.</p>
<p>But I remember. I remember what the flowers looked like. That hasn't escaped me yet.</p>
<p>My bookcase rattles. A book slips off the shelf, lands on the floor with crumpled pages. I sigh and pick myself up from my chair and wander over, turn the book over, straighten out the pages. This time it's an old book of poetry. Nothing more than shards I remember from my previous life, the most rousing passages that burrowed their way deep into my brain. If I were to plummet and hit the ground and spill out all my memories onto the ground, amnesiac with the miracle of surviving such a fall, these few pieces would remain. It might be too much to hope, or maybe to bear, that they will come with me in the next life.</p>
<p>Plagiarism from an early age, if not a whole different planet, some species I have yet to learn of.</p>
<p>The bookcase rattles again. I manage to catch the book this time. And then another book slides down, catches my shoulder- a sudden flush of pain- and then another one, another one, a whole flood of books all coming down and crashing.</p>
<p>I shield my face with my hands, edges of books still trying to crack open my fingers and poke at my eyes, crows flitting around Rapunzel's tower.</p>
<p>The torrent settles. The shelves are bare. Something rustles downstairs. I yank the skirt of my dress out from under the pile and stumble back onto my feet.</p>
<p>I push open my bedroom door. The top of the spiral stairway faces me. I gingerly take the railing, fingers tingling with the memory of all the etiquette lessons I took in the hopes of appeasing Mistress, and start to descend. A ghost, a spectre of the memory of some awful event raining down to haunt humanity once again.</p>
<p>"Hush. I think I hear something moving ahead."</p>
<p>"This is it, Grace. This is the final commander, and then we can take out Velouria herself."</p>
<p>"Yeah, I <i>know</i>, dumbass. I've been with you this whole time!"</p>
<p>"Heh..." An awkward laugh. "Sorry. I just get excited."</p>
<p>The sound of footsteps approach. I fold my hands and wait.</p>
<p>"You ready?"</p>
<p>"As ready as I'll ever be."</p>
<p>"Then let's strike!"</p>
<p>Shadows play on the walls. And then the source of the voices round the corner and appear, stumble to stop on the stairs. Two cherubs of children, not much younger than myself, <i>that</i> version of myself. Wide emerald eyes, messy mops of orange hair. One brandishing a sword, the other a silver bow.</p>
<p>"We've come to stop you, Lady Phrespane!" the boy yells, jumping up another step closer. "I won't let you terrorize this earth <i>any longer!</i>"</p>
<p>"Lady...?"</p>
<p>He lets out a battle cry and charges for me. I gently step aside, and he stumbles further up the staircase.</p>
<p>Confusion crosses his face. "What are you playing at?"</p>
<p>"I... I don't know. What <i>am</i> I playing at?"</p>
<p>Grace nocks an arrow. "No funny games, Lady Phrespane."</p>
<p>"I... I'm afraid I don't understand."</p>
<p>"I'm not stupid!" the boy yells. He charges for me again. I hop to the side, and he trips and tumbles down the stairs with a disgruntled Grace underneath.</p>
<p>They climb back up the stairs, Grace clearly frustrated. The boy wipes the hair out of his eyes. "Why aren't you fighting back?"</p>
<p>"Why should I?"</p>
<p>"Because- because you're the Westerly Terror! You've been sending tornadoes down to decimate the land under Mistress Velouria's command! And we humans won't stand for it anymore!"</p>
<p>"I... think you have me confused for somebody else."</p>
<p>"Wait, so you're... <i>not</i> Lady Phrespane?"</p>
<p>"No."</p>
<p>"Not even a little bit?"</p>
<p>I shake my head. "My name is Erin. I hold no title."</p>
<p>The two kids trade glances. "So..."</p>
<p>"I don't mind visitors. Heaven knows I'd practically set myself on fire from understimulation otherwise. Would you like some tea?"</p>
<p>"Yeah, and poison us? No thanks. I'm outta here."</p>
<p>"<i>Grace!</i>" The boy grabs her arm just as she turns to leave and thrusts her forward. "Are there cookies in the deal? I <i>love</i> cookies!"</p>
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<p>Grace sits in the corner, her head buried in a book of poetry. The same one that fell earlier, in fact. Hecat, as it turns out the boy's name is, lays splayed out on a free stretch of floor, stomach placated, sword just a few inches away just in case.</p>
<p>Just in case.</p>
<p>I run my fingers along the windowsill. Still silvery, still just as shiny as my first day of solitude. "Hecat?"</p>
<p>"Mmm?"</p>
<p>"How is Mistress Velouria doing? From what I take it, her campaign isn't going too well."</p>
<p>"W-wait, you <i>know</i> her?"</p>
<p>"Let's say we have a... <i>fraught</i> history together."</p>
<p>"I don't remember an Erin in Velouria's troops."</p>
<p>"Because I was never in her troops."</p>
<p>"I don't understand."</p>
<p>I tilt my head. "It's a rather long story. It's not fit for telling, anyway. What lapses below the clouds?"</p>
<p>"Huh?"</p>
<p>"She means, <i>what's going on below,</i> you idiot," Grace pipes up from her book.</p>
<p>"Oh. Yeah. Right. Well..." He scratches the back of his neck. "One of my father's cows had a baby recently. And the crops- well, the ones that survived the tornado- they're coming up nice and healthy."</p>
<p>"You live on a farm?"</p>
<p>"Yeah. Everybody does back home. In the city, it's all razzle and dazzle."</p>
<p>"Those aren't words," Grace chirped.</p>
<p>Hecat's cheeks flushed. "Oh, who cares?"</p>
<p>"I care." She slammed her book shut. "The sooner we deal with Velouria, the sooner we can get the king's gold and go home."</p>
<p>"You don't care for the <i>adventure?</i> For the glory?" Hecat shot to his feet. "This world is so big and wide, and finally we have the chance to see it..."</p>
<p>"So the world I once loved is gone forever." I close my eyes. The familiar strands of light, a whole rainbow's worth, dance across my vision. Just like they always have. "You may go when you please. I wouldn't condemn anybody to this life."</p>
<p>Hecat's attention flickers over to me, away from Grace, still sitting in the corner, now with a scowl on her face. "Don't you want to see it for yourself?"</p>
<p>"No."</p>
<p>"That's kind of sad." Hecat shrugs. "Come on, Grace. Maybe we'll find Phrespane elsewhere."</p>
<p>They pick themselves up and disappear through the bedroom door. I drift down to the pile of books and pick up another one, another one, another one. The bookcase gradually refills, more disorderly than before. No, rather... There was never any sort of order to it, anyways. There can't be chaos when there's no order to compare it with.</p>
<p>So what does that make <i>me</i>, then? Just a relic from a previous era relegated to a shelf, a heirloom passed down from a great-grandmother and forgotten on a jewelry rack, dusty and disused? Tacky, aesthetics clashing with modern sensibilities. I had a heirloom from a great-grandmother of mine, received back in the hazy days of elementary school. A week of madness, of playing in half-finished basements, vampires heading with faces held high into eternal slumbers crumpled in toy boxes. I got a fairy as well, who sat on one of my shelves until the day came to move. My cousins got other jewelry. I don't remember what. My brothers never gave a damn. I don't even think they were there, father's sons to the end, lapping up the attention they got when all the females were removed from their presence.</p>
<p>It's always been a male guiding my destiny, hasn't it? Whether I've liked it or not. Ineffectual pushback written off as ODD, as some kind of mental disturbance, unwarranted anger to be shoveled into a hole and papered over with drugs and gaslighting.</p>
<p>You have no right to be angry. You have no right to write about the things that haunt you in the night.</p>
<p>Why am I writing this?</p>
<p>Catharsis, I guess. A sort of healing I could never achieve in life. A sort of healing that can't be dealt with by the relative bandaid of running away. Trying to use a single plank to bridge over a sea.</p>
<p>He's not around anymore. Nobody's around anymore.</p>
<p>What happens to me from here on out is only up to me to decide.</p>
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<p><h1>Erin Devoted</h1></p>
<p>published: 2019-08-19</p>
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<p>I am half-sick of shadows.</p>
<p>I can't pinpoint the exact moment in my life when I let them in, or in what form they originally appeared in. Was it when I was but a babe of fifteen, round chubby face and a world's worth of hurt in my heart, still seeking the validation of men half the world away who would never know my name? The first time the veil my parents had intended to bury me with fell away, and I ran and sang in the field of life, heart suddenly light without the weight of appeasing an angry god. Was it at sixteen, when I stared a bull in the face, an angry machine still yet to show its horrific colors? Working late into the night to flee with all my files, arrange them in a way that made sense to my underage mind, my phone suddenly burdened with the weight of gigabytes upon gigabytes that had previously been delegated to the cloud. I almost fetishized the flight to liberation, I think. It happens when one is young, experiencing it for the first time. You get drunk on the sensation of ripping out the marionette master's strings from your wrists, bloody holes left be damned.</p>
<p>The monster opened its maw then, taught me the dark pleasure of deletion. It feels cathartic at first to delete an account you once used daily. Social media, that false gathering of bodiless souls in the cloud- like one gazing for the last time at a house they'd just finished moving out of. You cast your gaze over a town you know you will most likely never see again. Everyone else will wake up tomorrow and go about their daily lives, and maybe they will wonder about you, about your whereabouts for a little bit, and then the hole will close and everything will be just as it was before you had sullied everything with your presence. The hole in the web will close. The few neurons once devoted to your memory will be overwritten with someone else's face.</p>
<p>The sonder doesn't hurt until later. You delete and delete and delete, refreshed every time you can remove another entry from your password manager. The sonder festers in your heart like a cancer; unless you know what to watch out for, unless you're <em>actively looking</em>, it's hidden until it's too late to reverse course. You grow restless. You run out of harmful yet ultimately optional services to cull, and then you turn to actually necessary things to start removing. How many email accounts I have lost over the years... How many people have sought me out, and found nothing but a void to stare back at them?</p>
<p>Not that I remember any passwords anymore. Not that, if the only people who have ever ventured into this tower speak of kings and farms, any still persist, or that any would need them. Perhaps it's some hybrid timeline, and somewhere else in the kingdom lies a last vestige of the former internet. A mesh net, perhaps. Did they bother to save anything from the old world? Or just mark everything off as a loss and start fresh?</p>
<p>If I had that opportunity, would I take it? Descend down to the earth as a nobody and start over from scratch?</p>
<p>I wish I knew the answer.</p>
<p>The clouds are overcast and restless today. Too reflective to stare down at the earth- and there would be nothing to see anyways, just an endless sea of white- so I lie down on the floor. I don't know why it's taken me so long to notice that the fabric of my dress is on the scratchy side. I suppose I just never cared to notice. I'd wear it for eternity, with no need to ever wash it, so why should I have bothered to commit the feel to memory? Unless I wanted to torture myself forever and ever until the end of time.</p>
<p>Such was it back when the muses spoke to me. Almost never through concrete words but through the little sounds nobody else seemed to hear: the way the wind rushed in the air vents when the temperature inside got too out-of-hand, or when it rustled through the trees; the chirps of the crickets back when my father didn't spray so much weedkiller as he eventually escalated to; the soft patter of rain on the windowsill. Even the lightning had something to say to me, the thunder the words meant to be read between the lines, the flash of light the punchline to all her jokes. Lady Phrespane was a delightful one, if a little too headstrong for her own goodwill. But what harm could possibly befall a goddess in her own right? Even though we were never particularly close, I more interested in lying safe close to the bosom of Mistress Velouria herself instead of her daughter, we got along well enough.</p>
<p>Except the few times Mistress Velouria sent Phrespane after me like an errand dog, reminding me to stay in check, in line with the behavior fitting a devotee of hers. Never question intentions. Never question why this angel is into you. Never question why the Goddess has only revealed herself to you <em>now</em>, instead of all those eons ago when she supposedly made the world. Else risk a devastating flood, a thunderstorm, a tornado sent your way. For what can a human do against the sheer power of the weather? Like an ant to a garden hose.</p>
<p>You were always into gardening, after all. Like my mother.</p>
<p>You wanted to usurp my mother.</p>
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<p><h1>Erin Torn</h1></p>
<p>published: 2020-01-28</p>
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<p>"There's a war coming."</p>
<p>A girl, one of my co-workers at the only job that ever took me in, whispered that to me one day towards the end of a lengthy shift. Her dark eyes gazed at me with the strength of a thousand suns, a thousand stars that knew they were rapidly approaching the day we'd part forever.</p>
<p>She refused to elaborate. And then she shrunk back towards the grill, frantically shaking her head, the bangles on her headscarf waving every which way. Denying she'd ever said anything, anything of substance, anything at all.</p>
<p>But she was right. A war was raging on in the undercurrents below our feet. We were standing in a river, silt squishing between our toes, waters once crystal-clear and idyllic. And the waters were lapping at our feet, slowly creeping up our legs, past our knees. Soft blanket turns to forceful hand.</p>
<p>And I fled in a lover's arms.</p>
<p>Maybe she buckled under the force and collapsed into the waters, swept under into a watery grave. Maybe she finally found the fortitude to crawl out of the river before it was too late. Maybe someone else saved her.</p>
<p>I suppose I'll never know. Because she's long since dead, dust along with the world I used to know, and the rivers have been replaced with a sea of clouds, thicker now that it's wintertime and the skies are always overcast. The days are shorter, and the moon greets me with her slender face more often than not. Maybe I'm already long since dead too, colorless corpse barred from decay, since I don't feel the cold at all.</p>
<p>But I remembered something this morning, staring into the fluffy abyss, conquest of mashed potatoes:</p>
<p>I had a child.</p>
<p>I had <em>his</em> child.</p>
<p>He carved out my organs, and with that came my womb, pink pillow of flesh that had been party to a thousand secrets. Sedated enough to dissolve into my surroundings, I only felt the burning in my hips as the rest of my body was vacated one organ after another. Limbs too heavy for even an ineffectual resistance, head just as hazy as the clouds now outside my tower window.</p>
<p>&quot;Velouria...&quot;</p>
<p>He said something to me. I couldn't make out the words. Maybe it was an apology for all the blood spilling out onto the dirt floor underneath us. Maybe he was calling Velouria to help retrieve the child, or just put me down even further so I couldn't call her name anymore. Maybe he was cursing the folly of seducing a mere mortal human, needy flesh trembling, blessed with fragile physical life and a place in the cycle of life. How needy humans are, after all. In constant pursuit of sustenance, lungs pleading for air, skin politely requesting to be washed. But gods don't get dirty or hungry or need air to breathe, and neither do their direct underlings. Eternal life in a state indistinguishable from death.</p>
<p>Needy flesh trembling, slowly draining of color like the plastic window clings once mounted in my bedroom window. Purple butterflies in blazing color, forgotten for a year, then rediscovered as gray-blue blobs, all detail gone.</p>
<p>Maybe the child was already gone from my body, had already kissed <a href="../../../poetry/g/the-golden-cage.txt">the poison air in which it was born</a>. Already half-tied to that strange world by way of genes, baptized by breathing, finally freed from the womb and wrapped in a blanket of wind for him to hold.</p>
<p><em>Would it be alright?</em> I would have thought had I the capacity to think in that moment. <em>Did they know how to care for a human infant? Would it even need anything, carried through life on its divine genes? Would it live forever, as its father no doubt would, or would it eventually be cursed to the ground as well?</em></p>
<p><em>Where would the soul go, if it already resided in heaven? Would he have to recycle his own child?</em></p>
<p><em>Would I ever see it again?</em></p>
<p>I don't think the baby cried.</p>
<p>Eventually they left. And the trees in the courtyard wept red and golden tears, burying me as the pain of absence settled in and made its acquaintance.</p>
<p>I should have liked to stay there, I thought. To sleep under cover of leaves forever, safe in the bosom of Mistress Velouria's fortress.</p>
<p>I suppose, in a strange way, I got my wish.</p>
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<p><h1>Erin Entreated</h1></p>
<p>published: 2020-03-19</p>
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<p>The days are slowly, but surely, getting longer. Even though I don't have a clock or anything to measure it for sure, or a parting of the clouds to confirm that green grows below instead of endless white, the sun hangs above a little more each day.</p>
<p><i>It's springtime, isn't it?</i></p>
<p><a href="../../../poetry/a/lain.txt"><i>The chill in the air, and the green everywhere, beckoning you home...</i></a></p>
<p><i>But this is home now.</i></p>
<p>In college days, in bygone days, come spring, I had the thought that I could somehow banish time. That, if I covered up all the clocks, the green light on the microwave and the white numbers on the phone and everywhere else with a timestamp, that time would stop forever. That I could roam in the arboretum forever, trapped in the blissful limbo of the one day before the last of the spring final exams, not a single obligation in the world.</p>
<p>A room without organs. All the decorations taken down, as much as possible shoved into boxes, every surface wiped down and pristine. As if time was a lie, as if I'd never been there at all.</p>
<p>"It's about time, Erin."</p>
<p>Something bolts through my veins. A subdued surprise. It's not a pleasant sensation.</p>
<p><i>I know that voice.</i></p>
<p>I turn around.</p>
<p>Kurosagi is standing on the windowsill. A blue scarf is wrapped around his face to protect from the cold, the cold that I no longer know how to feel. He's wearing a matching robe the same shade as the sky, most likely stolen from a villager down below as two jagged slashes for his wings poke out to say hello in the breeze.</p>
<p>His hand grips the frame of the window as he swings down into the room.</p>
<p>"Kuroi." Like a breeze escaping me.</p>
<p>"So you <i>do</i> remember me." His scarf shifts. A smile underneath, maybe. He turns to the bookshelf. His darkened eyes scan the titles on the covers. "Brain in a jar. I wonder..." One of his arms reaches for a book. His fingers linger on the top of the spine. "May I?"</p>
<p>"No, you may not."</p>
<p>"Why not? Afraid that I'll... like it?" He tips his head. "Afraid that I'll tell someone down below, and then your tower will be flooded with people singing accolades? Or worse- that the <i>king</i>-" his voice wavers with vitriol- "will summon you, and then you'll <i>have</i> to leave the tower?"</p>
<p>I don't give him the pleasure of a response.</p>
<p>"Isn't that right, Erin? You told me once you'd rather die than be famous. So I swept you up to heaven right when you would have hit it off. And now the world has left you alone. Some peace the forgotten have."</p>
<p>"Some heaven this is, to strip me of life and yet leave me alive."</p>
<p>"You left me no other choice."</p>
<p>"I could have-" a shiver through my spine- "stayed with you forever."</p>
<p>He rolls his eyes. "In what capacity? Mistress Velouria would have gladly accepted another angel in her ranks." He takes his finger off the book. His arm drops back down to his side. "A shame, really. I know you always wanted to fly. But I seem to recall a certain cry in the night... What was it again?"</p>
<p>"I... I don't..."</p>
<p>"Remember? I do. 'No gods, no masters'? Something to that effect."</p>
<p>"Was I really so..."</p>
<p>"Brave? Truthful? Bold? Truth be told, I've always felt the same. It's what I love about you, that you hold no loyalties or bonds to else but yourself. Or <i>loved</i>. Do you feel <i>anything</i> in that empty shell of yours?"</p>
<p>"I feel..."</p>
<p>I feel what? Sadness? No, I'm not grieving for anything... not violently, anyway. Wistful? That might be a better fit. An organ all on its own, nestled right where my left lung used to be, present in every breath.</p>
<p>Happy? Am I happy here? Or merely content?</p>
<p>Why do I breathe without lungs? Just pushing air around as it is, no respiration to be had? Is it just... something to do? Something to keep me company?</p>
<p>"I feel," I say, and leave it at that.</p>
<p>Kurosagi lurches forward and takes my hand in his. He seizes up as if suddenly hit by a wall of winter wind.</p>
<p>"You feel like death."</p>
<p>"And whose fault is that again?"</p>
<p>"Mistress Velouria's. I would have strung you in the stars, Erin. I would have made you a constellation in the heavens, and the people would have sung your songs forever. But you always hated the thought of being a star."</p>
<p>"And what of you?"</p>
<p>His eyes flicker. "Me?"</p>
<p>"You... are allied with Mistress Velouria. And yet you say you hate the gods, just as I... do?"</p>
<p>He lets go of my hand and steps back. But he is not taken aback. Rather, his face looks dark, as if a storm has just rolled in.</p>
<p>"Death is the only truth," he says. "It is the only thing in life that is certain. Time fails me, as the higher realms spin at their own pace, and I can never predict how long I'll be gone. My body fails me when it bleeds in battle, when I am punctured or cut or punched. Money fails me, the weather fails me, the essence of matter itself fails me."</p>
<p>"And this is my fault?"</p>
<p>He shakes his head. "I realized this a long time ago. Long before you walked on this earth. Mistress Velouria is the strongest of the gods-"</p>
<p>"You and I both know that's not true."</p>
<p>"She is the least likely to kill me for not living up to expectations. I consider that strength, to be lenient."</p>
<p>"She was not lenient with me."</p>
<p>"Because I asked her not to be."</p>
<p>Our eyes meet.</p>
<p>"Mistress Velouria gave me few options. It would have been a betrayal to keep you locked up frozen as a statue forever. And if I kept your soul in a locket close to my chest, I might have lost you if the chain broke, or someone stole it thinking it a family heirloom. And I could not bear to see you a... bear, or some other creature in Mistress Velouria's deathless menagerie."</p>
<p>"You could not have just... asked me what I wanted?"</p>
<p>A moment of strained silence.</p>
<p>"I wanted to preserve you forever. To have another truth. And you would have told me you would rather die."</p>
<p>I turn away from him, away from the sunshine starting to peak behind his wings, filter through his feathers. Something stirs behind my eyes.</p>
<p>"Begone from here, Kuroi."</p>
<p>"Not yet. I still have to tell you something."</p>
<p>"If it is not an apology, I have no desire to hear it."</p>
<p>"Erin, our daughter is missing."</p>
<p>"Like how you went missing?"</p>
<p>"<i>Erin...</i>" He sighs. "Gods above, we have a lot to catch up on." A hand on my shoulder. I shrug it off. "Perhaps today isn't the best day to ask for your assistance."</p>
<p>Something hot streaks down my face. I reach up to wipe it away.</p>
<p>My finger comes back wet.</p>
<p>"Go away."</p>
<p>"Fine. But I will be back, Erin. And I hope you will find it in your heart to forgive me before then."</p>
<p>The soft patter of steps on the floor. The sun scatters as he unfurls his wings. And then he is gone, and everything is silent again.</p>
<p>I turn to my bookshelf.</p>
<p>There is a book missing.</p>
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<p><h1>Erin Egress</h1></p>
<p>published: 2020-04-09</p>
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<p><i>There is a book missing. There is a book missing. There is a book missing...</i></p>
<p>How peculiar that this is the only absence that comes naturally to me. I can put my hand against my chest, right around where my bellybutton is, and push ever so slightly- and feel the skin go taut, like squeezing a balloon. And I can remember the feeling of my emotions fading those first few months in this tower, of the violent tumult of grief dissolving into torpor as the days stretched out before me forever, gradually accepting that history was over and so too was the need to react to anything.</p>
<p>But there is a book missing. There is a change in the environment. And there's nothing I can do about it. Nothing except exhume the old instincts of panic.</p>
<p>Breath in, breath out.</p>
<p><i>Why am I breathing?</i></p>
<p><i>I don't have lungs. I don't need to breathe.</i></p>
<p><i>Is it possible to just... stop?</i></p>
<p>I let the air exit me and pull in no more, the last breath I <i>should</i> have taken long ago. Nothing happens. Nothing changes, except perhaps the few muscles left in my chest glance around, wonder what they're supposed to do now.</p>
<p><i>I wonder what it would be like to be a corpse.</i></p>
<p>I lie down on the floor, put my hands on my chest, close my eyes. The sun shines beyond my eyelids. I could be sunbathing. I could be a teenager again on the shore of a beach, half-guarding my family's pile of junk poorly hidden underneath a towel.</p>
<p>I could be dead.</p>
<p>A shadow streaks over the room.</p>
<p>Maybe I'm in the bottom of an open grave. Maybe there's a preacher leaning over the hole, preparing to read the final rites before they blanket me in dirt.</p>
<p>It would be what I deserve, to sleep with the worms.</p>
<p>"So, Erin-"</p>
<p>And then Kurosagi is at my side in an instant. A hand, an arm underneath my head, my legs, cradled against his chest, familiar whiff of citrus, the rough fabric of his scarf against my cheek.</p>
<p>I let my arms fall.</p>
<p>"<i>Erin!</i>" His hands are trembling. "Come on, this isn't funny!"</p>
<p>His arms give way, lowering me back to the floor. And then his face is a few inches away, breath soft against my cheek. A few fingers brush my neck, my chest.</p>
<p>"Velouria," he curses under his breath, "you <i>promised</i> me she would be safe, you-" and then he profanes the air between us. "I don't understand. Was it one of Hidehaji's goons? A Lorinthia? Some kind of rogue...?"</p>
<p>His words trail off.</p>
<p>I feel a few fingers tug on my collar.</p>
<p>"Hey!" I slap his hand away and open my eyes. Kurosagi hops back, tense like he expects a fight, like he expects me to be possessed or... something. I prop myself up. "Did you really just try to <i>strip</i> me?"</p>
<p>"I was checking for wounds!" he hisses back.</p>
<p>"Did you <i>really</i> think it was possible for me to die here? After all your talk of <i>preserving</i> me?"</p>
<p>"Well..." A strained breath. He forces himself to relax. "No, I <i>didn't</i>. But after just now... Has anyone been able to scale the tower?"</p>
<p>"Two kids. A long time ago."</p>
<p>Kurosagi curses under his breath. "Erin, you know I said I was coming back for you."</p>
<p>"I know." I pull my legs closer. "I still do not forgive you."</p>
<p>He averts his eyes.</p>
<p>"Kuroi?" I put a hand on the bookcase right beside me. "There's supposed to be a book of poetry on this bookshelf."</p>
<p>His cheeks flush red.</p>
<p>"Did you take it?"</p>
<p>He locks his jaw.</p>
<p>"<i>Kuroi, where is my book?</i>"</p>
<p>He closes his eyes.</p>
<p>I pull myself up and march over to him, plant my hands squarely on his shoulders. "Kuroi. <i>Where is my book?</i>"</p>
<p>"It is no longer in my possession."</p>
<p>"No longer-"</p>
<p>He shoots to his feet-</p>
<p>The book falls out from one of the folds in his robe.</p>
<p>My eyes flicker to it, and then to his face. "You would... lie to me?"</p>
<p>"I- Erin-"</p>
<p>"And you claim to love me. But you don't even think me worthy of the truth."</p>
<p>"I <i>do</i> love you, Erin. Now and forever. I just... I needed something of yours beside me. Some reminder that you were alive. That you existed."</p>
<p>"You could not have just... asked me if you could borrow it?"</p>
<p>"You would have said no. That you'd rather keep it here." He crosses his arms. "You claim to love me, but you refuse to let me have <i>some</i> proof of our bond."</p>
<p>"Do you really think I still love you?"</p>
<p>He stiffens. Like it's <i>his</i> turn to play the corpse.</p>
<p>"My affection for you is a skeleton." I start pacing in what little space I have. "The bones are bare, only suggesting what it once was. And you can wrap as many organs and muscles and flesh around it as you want, but that won't bring it back to life."</p>
<p>"And what's that supposed to mean?"</p>
<p>"I remember that I loved you, Kuroi. And my heart yearns to be loved in return. It would be so easy to use the path already worn. But my head says no, that you would just... lead me around on a leash, like a <i>beast</i>, like Mistress Velouria would! And you claim to be better than her? More powerful?"</p>
<p>"You understand that I am the only thing standing between you and Mistress Velouria's rage?"</p>
<p>"I know."</p>
<p>"So... this is it?"</p>
<p>"No. I will stay with you." I stop pacing and turn to him. "But understand, Kuroi, that I will only tolerate your presence for my daughter's sake."</p>
<p>"Wh- She's <i>my</i> daughter too!"</p>
<p>"You-"</p>
<p>My throat chokes up. Something burns in my chest, right where my heart used to be.</p>
<p><i>Was it rape? Did I want it?</i></p>
<p><i>Did I want it?</i></p>
<p><i>Did I</i> ask <i>for it?</i></p>
<p>The words, when they do come out, come out slowly, unsure of their finality.</p>
<p>"You raped me."</p>
<p>"I did not-"</p>
<p>"You forced yourself upon me and then abandoned me. I carried her without knowing for six months. All of the pain I have carried since we met has been because of you."</p>
<p>"<i>And I raised her for eighteen years!</i>" His feathers rustle. "All of the pain of not having a true mother beside me was because of your <i>stubborn</i> refusal to join me at my side! We could have been a happy family, Erin. She could have grown up to be a normal, <i>happy</i> angel with a place in the world. But you condemned her to be a Nephilim with the whole damned <i>universe</i> after her. What about the Lorinthia? Do you think they're actually going to give up a chance to <i>finally</i> make the Millennium Girl?"</p>
<p>It's like a blow in a boxing match, or a sudden gust of wind. The world turned upside-down.</p>
<p>"Lorinthia?" My mind fogs over. "I... I don't..."</p>
<p>"You know nothing that's going on in the world. I should have known." His arm shoots out. He holds a hand out to me. "I'll show you. I'll show you everything."</p>
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<p><h1>First Contact</h1></p>
<p>published: 2020-07-18</p>
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<p>I have no memories of my own baptismal. I know that it happened, for there are pictures of it in the scrapbook my mother made of my infant years. A pastor dripping holy water on my forehead, pronouncing me blessed, afraid that, if he dunked me in the water like those who knew how to hold their breath, I would breathe in the still and stone-cold waters and my tiny lungs would drown in search of air.</p>
<p>One of my younger brothers, fresh into middle school, decided to get baptized. I remember not why. Only that one moment I was inside the sanctuary, listening to the pastor preach a faith I had fallen out of, and the next I was leaning over the water fountain near the bathrooms trying to entrap the whole ocean in my stomach. My father chastised me for leaving. I refused to tell him why. He called me spiritually blind.</p>
<p>But I am as blind as Rapunzel's prince as I clutch on to Kurosagi for dear life, face buried in the deep blue drapes of his scarf like the baptismal pool my father would gladly have pushed me under. Except the floor of this pool is thousands of meters below my body. The rushing in my ears is not the chanting of a preacher proclaiming rebirth but wind's terrifying song of descent. The waves are not waves but the undulating motions of Kurosagi's wings slowing our fall.</p>
<p>And the waves rock back and forth like the cradle of that infant so doted on by her parents and grandparents, the first grandchild to be born, the last grandchild to die.</p>
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<p>Soft footfall. The weight of gravity returns to my bones. Kurosagi lowers one of his arms, helping me find my footing, a stable pillar beside me as I open my eyes.</p>
<p>I did not look down. Looking down had been eternity's job. But some part of me wishes I had.</p>
<p>We are nowhere near the tower. It isn't even in sight as I turn around and around, spinning before the world can start in my stead. We stand in an unpaved driveway, loose dirt aleady staining my socks- except it can barely be called a driveway, for there are no vehicles in what would have been a garage. And it is a wide not-garage, the house's gaping maw, ready to swallow me whole with teeth of loose rocks and a tongue of a disordered pile of sticks. And for miles upon miles is scattered forest, short trees just barely tall enough to obscure the horizon.</p>
<p>"I believe this house used to be of your family," Kurosagi says.</p>
<p>"Y-yes. Yes, it was."</p>
<p>I step closer to the garage, rub my eyes. The unmistakable door leading inside is ajar, betraying a sliver of the living room, the living room where the adults used to laze on the couch and watch football while the kids played downstairs. My nose crunches in faint memory. A rancid smell, a despicable smell.</p>
<p>"You seem displeased."</p>
<p>"I remember..."</p>
<p>I step into the garage. More of the living room comes into view. The door to the side room where my father thought to preach to me about how I should not spend so much time staring into screens, how I was wasting my life away in pursuit of a false world. And all around us was the field sprinkled with snow, a wasteland of gray sky meeting white field, just as bright as the screens he would have me throw away.</p>
<p><i>How silly he would feel if he knew I would spend eternity staring at clouds instead.</i></p>
<p>But now the fields are trees, dark green meeting a sky just as dismal.</p>
<p>"You remember?"</p>
<p>"Smoke. A stench. The reek of death."</p>
<p>And some of the adults would pour into the basement where we kids were wrestling and light up some cigarettes, uncaring that there were small children who would easily choke on the fumes. It was their house, they mocked, and they'd poison everyone inside if they wanted.</p>
<p>There was a bear skin on the wall, declawed, stretched flat. Its eyes bored into my soul, mouth wide open, roaring for help that would never come.</p>
<p>A chill down my spine. I twirl around, meet Kurosagi's eyes-</p>
<p>-and something barrels into my back, and we tumble to the ground.</p>
<p>"<i>Kuri!</i>" a child's voice whines. "You brought a friend to play and <i>didn't tell me?</i>"</p>
<p>A hiss of a sigh escapes him. "Kizelle..."</p>
<p>"No! You never say my name happy!"</p>
<p>Kizelle crawls off of me. I pull myself to my feet and turn to meet my assailant.</p>
<p>A wide-eyed girl who can't be more than sixteen stands at my side. Her head barely comes up to my shoulder, and that's counting the fluffy blonde hair almost spurting around her head like it were a helmet. A thick-knit shawl, a shade of pale champagne, is draped over her shoulders. Except for her neck, almost her whole body is encased in what almost looks like a cloth wetsuit, black embroidered with a brighter hue of pink crawling up her sides, formless and terminating in open palms and ankles.</p>
<p>Her nose crinkles as I brush the dirt off of my dress. The first time it's been stained in forever.</p>
<p>Her eyes wander up to my own. She pouts. "I bet Kuri says <i>your</i> name happy."</p>
<p>"<i>Erin,</i>" he says, clearly restraining himself, "this is my friend Kizelle."</p>
<p>"Is she a Lorinthia? I don't-"</p>
<p>"<i>No!</i> I'm not a Lorinthia!" Kizelle furiously shakes her head. "I'm a <i>Tailtiutian</i>, for heaven's sake!" She holds her arms out. "Do I <i>look</i> like a robot? Do I <i>look</i> like I can slither in the Wired- I mean, I can definitely <i>slither</i>, but-"</p>
<p>"Kizelle," Kurosagi breathes, "Erin has no idea what any of those words mean."</p>
<p>"You mean, you don't know what a <i>Lorinthia</i> is?" She cocks her head, confused. "But they're <i>everywhere!</i> They're in every city's internets, and sometimes they patrol on the streets looking for the Millennium Girl. But I don't think they'll ever find her, 'cause she doesn't exist. You need to be a divine, <i>and</i> a human, <i>and</i> a Lorinthia, all at the same time. And that's not even possible-"</p>
<p>"<i>Kizelle.</i>"</p>
<p>The young girl bites her lip in frustration. "I know! I know! I can't help it!" And then she stomps the earth and takes off running into the house again.</p>
<p>Kurosagi rolls his eyes. "So now you know where I've been hiding from the war."</p>
<p>"How do you tolerate ...that?"</p>
<p>"Simple. I don't. I have my ways of avoiding her." He holds out a hand. "Shall we?"</p>
<p>"Shall we what?"</p>
<p>A tired look.</p>
<p>I take his hand and let him lead me inside.</p>
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<p>I am as a ghost in a dream, a feverish delirium where everything is in place and yet not quite. There are stools beside the kitchen island, but they are not <i>the</i> stools that I and my kid cousins used to sit at and steal bits and pieces of food from before the holiday dinners were ready to be served. There are bottles and buckets littering the kitchen counters, but they are not <i>the</i> bottles and buckets full of wine and other alcohol that the adults would get borderline drunk on, silently judged by my father, straight-edge until the end. At the head of the living room is a low wide table, but it is not <i>the</i> table that the television used to rest on. Old tattered books rest in scattered piles, some half-open with pages crumpled, betraying a careless toss over a shoulder.</p>
<p>Kurosagi excuses himself and heads for the bathroom. The door to the side room is slightly ajar.</p>
<p><i>I wonder if the old fireplace still stands...</i></p>
<p>I wander through the door. It does not give way easily like it used to, hinges shrieking like a small child having a meltdown-</p>
<p>Something smacks my shoulder. A beast's head. A... lizard? A lizard with wings, human-sized, covered in feathers blue as a spring sky.</p>
<p>Its head retreats. It curls in on itself. A flash of light later, and it is a... a girl instead, dressed almost exactly as Kizelle, but with accents of blue instead of pink.</p>
<p>She rubs her eyes. A moaning sound.</p>
<p>"I... I'm sorry if I woke you up," I offer.</p>
<p>"Doubtful." She yanks a lock of blue hair back behind one ear. "H-hey, do I know you or something? Why are you here?"</p>
<p>The door creaks further. The girl cringes, hands instantly over her ears. Kurosagi's wing brushes against my arm.</p>
<p>"I know <i>you</i>," the girl adds. "This your friend or something?"</p>
<p>"Yes, Cetra," Kurosagi sighs.</p>
<p>Cetra rubs her eyes. "A damn shame. She would have been safer in the tower."</p>
<p>"Cetra, you know-"</p>
<p>"Do I? Do I know?" She crosses her arms. "Or are you just assuming I automatically know every stray thought that goes through that thick skull of yours?"</p>
<p>"If you would <i>let me speak</i>, maybe I would explain."</p>
<p>Cetra crosses her arms. "Then speak."</p>
<p>"You know she's been in that tower for hundreds of years. She doesn't know <i>shit</i> about the world as it is now. I need you to use that fancy Reia thing or whatever to get her caught up to speed."</p>
<p>"And what's in it for me?"</p>
<p>"A feeling of superiority."</p>
<p>"I already have that." Another yawn. "I'd rather take another nap. <i>Undisturbed</i> this time."</p>
<p>"Misplaced, as always." A pause. "I'd go into town for the next supply run."</p>
<p>"And the one after that."</p>
<p>"I don't know if I'll be around here that long."</p>
<p>"Well, it's either you or <i>her</i>-" she tips her head toward me- "doing it. You know everything'll run out faster-"</p>
<p>"Actually," I pipe up, "I don't need anything. I won't be a burden on you."</p>
<p>"Really, now? Maybe you should just go with angel boy then. Can't bring back armfuls of useless crap if he's carrying you instead." She turned away. "But I repeat myself."</p>
<p>An insult. My first insult in forever.</p>
<p>I don't give her the pleasure of a response.</p>
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<p><h1>Erin Educated</h1></p>
<p>published: 2020-07-27</p>
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<p>Ghosts used to monotone to me. Scrawling their screeds on my bedrooms walls, they'd pen countless treatises on whatever was weighing heavy on my heart that day. Thoughts of lovers from past lives, the thoughts of last lives themselves, the theories, the scattered pieces of evidence to support them. Memories of days gone by, better years slipped through my fingers, the places remaining but the time lost forever. Grayscale phantoms of the leaves swaying outside, the green hands waving goodbye, knowing that one fated day I'd give them my own last wave by.</p>
<p>"Popular opinion at this time was that the internet was a human right, crucial to the ongoing of the economy when many formerly employed peoples were unable to return to work for fear of contracting the virus. Because previously the doctrine of 'minimalism' had been a fad, many workers were unprepared when the lockdown orders were passed, and consumption of electronic devices and internet bandwidth exploded in the following months..."</p>
<p>One lone tree sways outside the side room. The curtains have been pulled back all the way, letting the whole of whatever light will come in welcome. It is not a lot; the sun is still blocked out by the endless sea of clouds. But the ghosts have found me again, sun still strong enough to cast a shadow, and they chatter as if not a single moment has passed between us. Every second they chatter is a second that Kurosagi is away, gone to the nearest city still standing for a supply run. Every second they chatter is one I realize I cannot understand the language of the ghosts anymore.</p>
<p>"One day, approximately seven months after the city had officially disbanded, a Lorinthia by the name of Makuil Jigreen declared the hospital, which was in a state of severe disrepair, his, and he and his subordinates started converting the building into a base for their operations..."</p>
<p>I wonder- do Kizelle and Cetra live here all the time? Is this their... <em>home?</em> Does anyone ever challenge them for the rights to the property, or hound them for fees to live there? Or has the rest of the world forgotten about this place? Although not in as good shape as it was in my own time, compared to a tiny cottage in disrepair like those... those kids whose names have already slipped from my mind, this place is a bastion of luxury.</p>
<p>"Bioimplants, at the time of the collapse, were still several decades away from being sophisticated enough to properly interface with the brain without the need for external decoding devices. This did not deter Jigreen, who, using his military power to direct medical supply lines to his new base, proceeded to experiment with human prisoners in hopes of eventually converting them to full Lorinthia. Small implants were successful, but with the replacement of statistically significant amounts of brain matter came severe brain damage, leaving the test subjects little more than living dolls..."</p>
<p>My arms ache from hanging limp at my sides. My legs tingle from lying straight out on the floor. I do not dare to move. I am a doll. I am a forgotten porcelain doll on a shelf, set pretty once and abandoned forever, never to know warm touch ever again.</p>
<p>"Of course, these military incursions were not without resistance. Over the next few years, the Lorinthia in the state's capital clashed violently with several groups of self-organized militias, the most successful of which was led by a human named Horace Hidehaji-"</p>
<p><em>I know that name.</em></p>
<p>"Oh, so <em>now</em> you suddenly start listening?" Cetra lets out a wide yawn and slams the laptop shut. "I might as well stop. It's not like you'll learn anymore if I continue anyway."</p>
<p>"Kurosagi mentioned that man once."</p>
<p>Cetra leans back in the armchair she'd settled herself in. "Who?"</p>
<p>"Hidehaji."</p>
<p>"I don't doubt it. He's a pretty... famous man." Her eyes slide shut. "Yet another reason why you shouldn't be here right now."</p>
<p>"Why not?"</p>
<p>"Oh, you know-"</p>
<p>"No, I don't know."</p>
<p>Cetra adjusts herself. Her eyelids sag. I can almost see a ghostly shade of Morpheus behind her, entreating her to sleep. "Well, maybe you should have listened."</p>
<p>"You expect me to digest two hundred years' worth of history in an hour."</p>
<p>"No, because you don't have a stomach to digest it with in the first place."</p>
<p>I pull myself to my feet. My shadow casts away the ghosts, chatter instantly falling silent. The empty space between us is deafening. I take a step, another step, across the carpet until I am toe-to-toe with Cetra, towering over her.</p>
<p>"Tell me. Who is Hidehaji?"</p>
<p>"The reason we can't leave," Cetra mumbles.</p>
<p>"Leave where? This place?"</p>
<p>Cetra shrugs her shoulders. "Lots of places. Not that you'd understand."</p>
<p>"I stayed behind so you could educate me. So do it. Or..."</p>
<p>The corner of Cetra's mouth curls up. "Or what?"</p>
<p>"I'll tell Kuroi."</p>
<p>"You act as if he isn't already disappointed in me. As if I didn't stop caring a hundred years ago."</p>
<p>"Tailtiutians live that long?"</p>
<p>Cetra hums.</p>
<p>"All those years, and no wisdom to show for it."</p>
<p>Kurosagi clears his throat behind me.</p>
<p>A shiver- no, a fully-fledged lightning bolt- shoots down my spine.</p>
<p>"You're doing the next supply run," he says, his breath heavy.</p>
<p>Cetra shrugs. Her eyes slide all the way closed, giving up. "I taught her like you asked. She refused to listen. Just stared at the damn floor like a doll."</p>
<p>"Erin..." He sighs. "Fine. A promise is a promise. Erin, if you would join me in the kitchen."</p>
<p>He leaves, not waiting for me. I wait a moment, watching Cetra's breath slow underneath me, and then turn and exit the side room. Kurosagi is darting all over the kitchen like a startled hummingbird. Cabinets fly open and closed like the pipes of a church organ, singing a discordant melody all their own.</p>
<p>Or a rhythm, for I close my eyes and cannot for the life of me make anything out of the noise.</p>
<p>I take a seat on one of the stools at the kitchen island. A pause as he looks in one of his faded fabric bags, the next to be raided. "Kuroi."</p>
<p>He turns to face me. "So I assume you know the Lorinthia are after us."</p>
<p>"I still don't even know what they <em>are</em>." A pause. "No... That's not true. Kizelle said they were robots."</p>
<p>"Humanoid androids, to be exact. Ones that figured out how to self-reproduce like people." He turns back to the bags, returns to restocking the cupboards and shelves, just slower this time as he speaks. "Warlords of most of the cities still intact. Hellbent on getting the hell out of this dimension. No matter how many lives they have to take."</p>
<p>"This... dimension?"</p>
<p>His eyes darken. He slams a box of cereal into an empty slot between other boxes. I wince at the sudden <em>bang</em>.</p>
<p>"You don't..." He shakes his head. "Maybe it's better that way."</p>
<p>"Don't say I don't remember. Don't say I forgot." I set my hands on the islandtop. "Millennium Girl. They're trying to make her. See, I remembered something."</p>
<p>He grimaces. "Because I told you <em>this morning</em>."</p>
<p>"Tell me more."</p>
<p>"Lorinthia, human, divine. All three parts coexisting in harmony within a single person. <em>Supposedly</em> this makes the Millennium Girl able to open a portal to another dimension. At the expense of <em>her own life</em>." A sack of apples, on the cusp of being ripe. He steps to the fridge, dragging along milk with him. "If we had a human and a functional vehicle with us, we'd make them go in our place. I could take one in a fight... probably. Five, maybe. More than that?..." Kurosagi shakes his head. "They don't attack humans anymore. Not since they figured out Lorinthia implants don't get passed down to children. And Tailtiutians were never on their radar to begin with. Implants would never take hold with all the shapeshifting they do. But divine beings like yours truly?" He cackles. "I don't think I'm cut out for a life of being a vegetable strapped down to some table comatose while some robot assholes farm my prick all day."</p>
<p>I blanch. Not that my skin can get any paler.</p>
<p>"To make <em>children</em>," he adds. "With humans. Nephilim. Lorinthia can't reproduce with anyone but their own." He slams the fridge shut. "I have to... I <em>have</em> to find my daughter soon. Others are looking too. Colleagues. Fellow angels. But Mistress Velouria can't spare the whole heavens just for one... <em>unwanted</em> girl."</p>
<p>"Kuroi..."</p>
<p>"You'd think she'd care more," he continues, talking to himself, more food finding its places. "The Lorinthia open the heavens, and it's all over. Everything falls apart. This whole land will..."</p>
<p>He shakes his head. His fluffy hair rustles. The light catches a splotch on the back of his neck.</p>
<p>I get up and stroll over to him. He ignores me until I brush a hand on the back of his neck. He freezes, bites down a shiver, at my deathly touch, fingers just barely grazing his skin.</p>
<p>On the back of his neck is not a splotch. It is a jagged diamond. A pale pink upside-down V caressing an even paler pink one rightside-up. The whole thing could fit under my thumb.</p>
<p>"Kuroi?" I trace the shape with a finger. "What is this?"</p>
<p>"You."</p>
<p>"I... don't understand."</p>
<p>"You gave that to me. You caused it."</p>
<p>"I may remember little, but I know I was never a tattoo artist."</p>
<p>"No, not like that." He reaches behind him, takes my hand in his, pulls it over his head so he can see it in front of him. Away from the mark. "It appears on angels who've been... close with humans. We're supposed to be celibate, only available for Mistress Velouria. It's considered a mark of betrayal."</p>
<p>"Was she angry?"</p>
<p>"Disappointed? Yes. Angry? No. I think it was because she already knew who you were by the time Dimitri happened."</p>
<p>"Who?"</p>
<p>Our eyes meet.</p>
<p>"Our... daughter?"</p>
<p><em>Dimitri.</em> That's her name. <em>Dimitri</em>. I would have thought it a boy's name. A funny thought, to think I know <em>nothing</em> of her, and yet... the name feels just right. Fitting. Perfect.</p>
<p>The man who stands before me would know. His eyes make no indication of uncongruence. I must be right, right for all the sorry onces since I imprisoned myself in that tower all those lifetimes ago.</p>
<p>"I want to find her," Kurosagi says. "I want to bring her home."</p>
<p>I am a mother now.</p>
<p>I must do as mothers do.</p>
<p>"Do you know where you saw her last?"</p>
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<p><h1>Erin Eyed</h1></p>
<p>published: 2020-08-02</p>
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<p>When I was a young child, every time the oldest of my cousins would come over to play for an afternoon, I would always beg her father to let her spend the night, to let her and me and my still-infantile brothers to have a sleepover. Almost never was she prepared, bringing only whatever toys she wanted to flaunt to me, to brag about having thanks to her divorced-parents-double-holidays. So her father almost never said yes. But the few times he did...</p>
<p>There was a script we would always follow, although it loosened up more and more as the years went by.</p>
<p>Constructing a fan, nonfunctional as it was, from building toys. <em>Rod goes in hole goes in circular hub.</em></p>
<p>Making pies in the sandbox, little more than just filling the same containers over and over and over again. Sometimes her father would go behind our grandmother's back and splash some water into the sandbox, and then we'd play like we would at the beach, castles and kingdoms growing in the sand and then dissolving as the sun burned longer on.</p>
<p>Building some grand structure with the oversized plastic bricks. Pretending to be caterpillars munching through a mountain of leaves when we had to deconstruct what we'd made to put the bricks away at end of day.</p>
<p>Curling up in the bedsheets, forming a chrysalis, waiting until morning to bloom.</p>
<p>She always forgot come morning. Too tired to keep up the playing anymore, just munching on dry cereal until her father came to put a dampener on whatever party still smoldered on.</p>
<p>Despite having had taken a shower the night before, I would always have to take another one just to scrub off the feeling of another person having been in the same bed as me.</p>
<p>"Erin!"</p>
<p>A shock across my spine. The sudden weight of arms around me, a mountain dropped on my back, too much for my body to bear, forcing me to the ground-</p>
<p>"Oh! Sorry!" The weight lets up just as quick as it'd come. Kizelle comes into view, more worry than guilt as I straighten myself up again. "I didn't mean to make you fall. I promise."</p>
<p>I brush the wrinkles out of my dress. "I... I'm fine."</p>
<p>"I didn't break you or anything?"</p>
<p>"No."</p>
<p>"Oh, I'm so glad!" Kizelle flashes me a smile. "Kuri would bend me like a toothpick if I hurt you, I just know!"</p>
<p>She turns around. The bathroom door stands closed just a foot ahead. A faded butterfly decal stretches over the wood, peeking out just over her head. Light streams out from the crack under the door. <em>Locked.</em></p>
<p>She turns back to me. "Are you waiting to shower too?"</p>
<p>I shake my head. "I don't have to."</p>
<p>"You sure? Kuri doesn't like stinky people."</p>
<p>"I haven't showered since..."</p>
<p><em>When was the last time I showered? Since I ate? Drank? Actually slept, instead of just pretending to?</em></p>
<p><em>When was the last time I did anything other than just stare at the clouds?</em></p>
<p>"...since a long time," I say. "I'm fine."</p>
<p>"Oh, well..."</p>
<p>Kizelle eyes me up and down. A lump of dread in my throat, like a parent fearing their child is about to say something incredibly rude to a kind of person they haven't encountered before- pregnant, visibly disabled, a different race... But the lock on the bathroom door jiggles, door opening a second after, and Cetra emerges, face weary, wrapped in a ragged white towel.</p>
<p>Kizelle darts into the bathroom like a startled insect and slams the door shut. Cetra winces. Our eyes catch. She scowls, one eye hidden behind her blue hair, now damp and subdued.</p>
<p>"What are <em>you</em> looking at?"</p>
<p>"You say this is the apocalypse, and yet you have running water...?"</p>
<p>She shrugs, keeping her arms close so the towel doesn't fall. "Kurosagi set it up. Solar power, decent filtered water from the lake. We could probably grow enough food here if we cleared some of the-" She stops herself. "No, the tree cover is too important. Other than that? This place is pretty self-sufficient."</p>
<p>"Did Kurosagi ever... bring his child here?"</p>
<p>"What am I? A walking exposition?" She brushes past me, descends down the stairs. "Leave me alone. I'm going to bed."</p>
<p>"No need to be rude."</p>
<p>I reach for her arm, thinking to stop her-</p>
<p>-but she is already gone. Disappeared. Out of sight.</p>
<p>"Don't you think it's time you turned in too?" Kurosagi yawns behind me. "No real need to be lingering out here if you don't need anything."</p>
<p>"I want to look at my stomach."</p>
<p>"You could just look down."</p>
<p>I glare at him. "I want to see the scar."</p>
<p>"The scar?"</p>
<p>"The one that you gave me."</p>
<p>"I don't... Oh. <em>That</em> scar. I have a mirror in my bedroom. You can look there."</p>
<p>Before I can respond, he takes my hand and pulls me down the stairs. I see, on the other end of the room, where there was once a bookshelf against the wall to hide the gun cellar is now just a white hazy curtain, presumably leading to Cetra's room. We take an immediate right, past an actual bedroom door.</p>
<p>Kurosagi flicks the light on. An electric lamp blazes to life on the nightstand.</p>
<p>My breath catches in my throat.</p>
<p>The room is practically the same as it was when we met, not for the first time where the ghosts of my mother threatened to burst in at any moment through nothing but a blanket barrier, but the second and third and all the others until that portal closed and we had to find another. The room is sparse. Nothing greets us except for a king-size bed, the nightstand, and a sliding closet door- which, closed, is nothing but mirror and a thin frame.</p>
<p>A mirror which is facing me.</p>
<p>I look like a child in front of Kurosagi's towering frame. A small, wispy, barely-there child.</p>
<p>"Kuroi." I take a deep breath. "Please leave."</p>
<p>I almost believe he is sincere when he says, "Why?"</p>
<p>"I am not stripping down in your presence."</p>
<p>"Well, maybe I want to see the scar too. I'm the one who caused it, after all."</p>
<p>"It's my body. And I don't want you seeing it."</p>
<p>He rolls his eyes, but he leaves the room, leaving me alone. I take a step forward, and another, and another until I am close enough to the mirror to make it fog up with my breath. And even though I know it does nothing, even though I know I do not have to, I hold my breath as I finally shed the dress, the chrysalis forgotten the very last sleepover with my cousin.</p>
<p>The dirt-dinged fabric crumples on the ground.</p>
<p><em>I will not fear. I will not fear. I will not fear...</em></p>
<p>I force myself to look into the mirror.</p>
<p>My body is a countryside. My breasts are two mountains looming on the distant horizon, unaware that anything is amiss. My rib cage is on full display, soft rolling hills and valleys down to the flood plains, the sudden cutoff where there is no bone to give my chest definition.</p>
<p>I do not remember who stitched me back up. I do not even remember if I was stitched back up at all, or if I was just abandoned to let the leaves do as they willed. But the scar starts near my sternum, detours around my bellybutton, and then disappears somewhere hidden by my underwear. Slightly puckered where flesh meets flesh, like a cut on a rotting apple. It does not ache. It does not burn red. It just... is. As if it were meant to be there all along, just another part of the body.</p>
<p>Of <em>my</em> body.</p>
<p>Strangely enough, I do not look like a skeleton. I do not look like I am held together by nothing but a few inches of skin and a spinal column. I just look like a slightly deflated woman, only my empty torso bearing the un-weight of memory. Flash-frozen from the time I disappeared with Kurosagi into that forever sky, nothing but the air stolen from my chest.</p>
<p><em>I remember I used to tell him that he always took my breath away.</em></p>
<p>Kurosagi knocks on the door. My body jolts, startled.</p>
<p>"Are you almost done? It's almost my turn to shower. I need some clean clothes to change into."</p>
<p>"I could hand you some."</p>
<p>"Or you could let me come in and get them myself."</p>
<p>I sigh and pick up my dress. It hangs limp from my hands. Without form, I notice, it looks like a cleaning rag.</p>
<p>I hold it close to my chest, wishing for some semblance of modesty, and step aside. "Come in."</p>
<p>Kurosagi creaks the door open just wide enough for him to slip in. He pretends to not see me standing half-naked beside him as he slides the closet open, revealing a whirlwind of colors. But all of them are muted, I notice as he flicks through, as if the hue had drained from them a long time ago, leaving only a faint memory in their place.</p>
<p>"There's plenty of space in my bed for you tonight if you want it."</p>
<p>"I-I'm fine, Kuroi. I don't need to sleep."</p>
<p>"The nights get chilly here. <em>Bitterly</em> so."</p>
<p>"And you think I am not just as cold?"</p>
<p>"It burns less when I know it's because of you."</p>
<p>A fluffy red sleep robe in his arms. His gaze lingers on me for a moment, and then he leaves the room, vanishing upstairs.</p>
<p>I turn back to the empty closet. The dress slips from my hands. I make no moves to retrieve it. My hands search in the closet, feeling everything, all the fluffs and scratchies and stretchies and thins and heavies until my fingers snag on the last hanger, all the way in the back.</p>
<p>I let it fall into my hands. An oversize white shirt. A pair of shorts with a drawstring in the front to adjust the waistband. I let myself drown in the fabric, truly <em>clean</em> rather than just <em>not dirty</em>.</p>
<p>I might as well have put the dress back on, for the shirt tumbles down almost to my knees.</p>
<p>I slip out of the room. The lamp's light spills out into the downstairs living room, throwing everything into shadows. The chairs have long since been replaced, but they are still <em>there</em>. I brace myself and shove one to the opposite end of the room, the weird little side area that juts out without an actual wall to mark it off separate. A window stretches from floor to ceiling.</p>
<p>A shadow. My body tenses- and then I realize it is just the bearskin, still staring, still howling its silent scream for help.</p>
<p>I sit down.</p>
<p>Sleep does not come.</p>
<p>I watch the sun disappear over the horizon. A farewell to my first day on earth.</p>
<p>Sleep does not come.</p>
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<p><h1>Hollow War</h1></p>
<p>published: 2019-08-15</p>
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<p><em>[DATE OF DISPATCH: UNKNOWN.]</em></p>
<p>We've been holding this bunker for a few months now. The enemy shows no signs of moving along, or even letting us out, just content to sit their fat ass practically on top of us and try to smoke us out.</p>
<p>...Yes, alright, Jotem, I'll try to cut down on the fart jokes. But, in all seriousness, we were almost tear-gassed yesterday. Kick down the door, a few rogue canisters- and tears for days and days. We're lucky they didn't think to storm us when we were down for the count, laundering hankerchiefs like kingdom come. Perhaps they're playing the long con. Waiting us out until we're even weaker.</p>
<p>Morale is low, as expected. Marissa keeps trying to run drills to keep everyone on the up-and-up. She's not meeting with much luck. Most are content to practically snooze through their shift for watch duty and lie around the rest of the time. As a result, the exercise bike stands vacant, I'd say, about ninety-nine percent of the time. I've started using it again in the past few days. If anything, it earns a smile from Marissa. Some small measure of favor.</p>
<p>But war isn't the time for love, and <em>certainly</em> not puppy crushes on squad leaders!</p>
<p>But I digress. Marissa wants to plan an attack sometime this month. Or the next month, or the next... This bunker was built a long time ago, and the little garden system is already fully functional and automatic, so we're not at any loss for food or time. We could stay here forever, if we wanted to.</p>
<p>I'm starting to think most of this squad doesn't give a damn if they have to spend the rest of their lives down here. I'll lead an attack, just me and Marissa, if it ends all of this. But the enemy... They're currently too strong as it is. We'd never stand a chance.</p>
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<p><h1>in 100 words</h1></p>
<p>published: 2017-01-03/18</p>
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<p><h2>1</h2></p>
<p>She ranted and raved at the podium, decrying how much time she had wasted in the dim, stuffy room- sixty-nine days, she calculated. Sixty-nine days that could have been spent pursuing knowledge, forming relationships, finding her place in the world around her. But it would never return, lost in a daze of chasing a dream she now knew would never come to fruition. The sleepless nights that would never be refunded, hoping that she was special, that there was something more out there than her dismal life- but she could not pay the ultimate price.</p>
<p>The crowd refused to listen.</p>
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<p><h2>provizora</h2></p>
<p>She knew not of how many days she had left to walk on her beloved earth or how many rotations of the planet she called home remained until she would become like the fog, the smoke that surrounded her home, temporal and wind-blown. But there was one thought that echoed in her skull as she strolled down the ashen sidewalk- there would be a fire blazing, ready for her when she returned. Maybe the deities would take pity on her and she would become smoke, ready to steal the breath from some other unfortunate lover's lungs.</p>
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<p><h2>distrajxo</h2></p>
<p>Her eyes flickered as she glanced past countless pages of regrettable tattoos, profane street signs, displeasing women with nose rings, and plaintext quotes that reminded her of her self-pitying days back when high school felt like an entirely new world unfolding before her. How out of her mind she had felt back then. How convinced that she was fundamentally damaged.</p>
<p>She looked away from the screen, rubbing her eyes. Music blared to her right, distraction from the writing the back of her mind told her she had to complete that day. Deadlines were her enemy. The worst ones were self-imposed.</p>
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<p><h2>komputilo</h2></p>
<p>Sprawled out on her bed, staring at the ceiling, wishing that her thoughts could form coherent sentences. Her hands curled around the pendant on her necklace, wishing that the owner of its second half could come back, if only for a second, so that she'd have the motivation to get up and search for the perfect words to speak her mind with.</p>
<p>She closed her eyes. The word count box stared at her, screaming fables of how she wasn't good enough, of how she was either too brief or too rambling. A keyboard warrior in every sense of the word.</p>
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<p><h2>oceana ondo</h2></p>
<p>She stood at the edge of the swimming pool, averting her eyes from what she knew to be an anxiety-inducer. Fear of heights had plagued her for as long as she could remember, and depths haunted her the same- worse, in fact, for they always looked closer when there was a barrier of waves in between them.</p>
<p>She gulped. It had been a while since she had made a debacle about it being her first time to jump off a diving board. Shallow ends had forever been her friend.</p>
<p>And, as it turned out, pools weren't really catalysts of change.</p>
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<p><h2>aprender</h2></p>
<p>He spent all day learning about meiosis. Not because he had any particular interest, but because his mind wouldn't allow him to skip a single assignment, no matter how lackluster or asinine. It wasn't like him; he'd been the king of slackers at his old school, and the rewards he'd gotten didn't serve him well where he now was.</p>
<p>He wiped his forehead, taking a sip from his peach water.</p>
<p><i>This was a mistake.</i></p>
<p><i>Probably.</i></p>
<p>He would have much rather spent the day writing or coding, but he couldn't have everything he wanted in life, for better or for worse.</p>
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<p><h2>dormir</h2></p>
<p>His head nodded against the wooden table as he struggled to stay awake. The crystal dug into his chest as his teacher chastised him for drifting off when they were supposed to be taking notes.</p>
<p>He mumbled an apology as he pulled his notebook over and fumbled his pen. It dropped onto the floor. He groaned, leaning over. The vertigo was back, and it wasn't going away anytime soon.</p>
<p>How he'd love to be back in his room, still curled up in the sheets, wasting the day away romping in the frosted-over fields of his mind. He'd be back soon.</p>
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<p><h1>i'll be there in a few minutes</h1></p>
<p>published: 2017-06-06</p>
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<p><i>I'll be there in a few minutes.</i></p>
<p>She tightened the screws on the rudimentary limb in front of her, nothing more than a conglomeration of cheap Legos she had found off the internet and salvaged from multiple failed contraptions she had made in her youth. The youth that was now a haze to her, a haze of failing friendships and a desire to prove herself to her peers and a singular, pure, unadulterated desire.</p>
<p>She had always been fascinated with computers. As a kindergartner, she banged happily away at a keyboard with a plastic toilet beneath her, toilet training not stopping her from scribbling across the screen, convinced by her school that none of her drawings were worthy of being saved and feeling like an absolute criminal when she discovered that no cops would show up at her door for the tiny collection of bits and bytes. Then the fairy age came, and with it the stuffed animals and her first virtual online world.</p>
<p>Oh, how she had wanted to romp around in the mansion she had created, unpolished as it was. But now, looking back, she was disgusted with the glitz and glam and desperate attempts at appeal that the holding company had imposed on it. Whatever happened to the good old Windows XP days? To when the internet was some wild west begging to be explored and features came before looks?</p>
<p>Things felt more human then.</p>
<p>She tightened the screws again, sending away the waves of nostalgia, but they poked her shoulder and begged to be acknowledged. <i>Born too late to pioneer the web</i>, they taunted. <i>Born too early to pioneer immortality</i>.</p>
<p>It was her fantasy, her wet dream, the last thing she imagined before she went to sleep. The motivation that kept her going. How ironic it was that the thing that kept her tethered to the world promised to help her escape it.</p>
<p>But there was no use trying to figure out how to upload her mind to her computer if there was no body for it to inhabit, so she pulled out a leg from underneath her bed and matched it up to her own. Same length, same implied height, but the copy had more muscle to it, wires poking out and awaiting synthetic flesh that hadn't been invented yet.</p>
<p>Although she was rather impartial to the exposed look.</p>
<p>"Lycia?" a voice whispered outside of her door.</p>
<p>She set the leg on the ground, slid off her bed, and opened the door to find her childhood friend, her partner in crime. The corner of her mouth quirked up in an attempt at a smile.</p>
<p>"Lukas."</p>
<p>She motioned for him to come inside the room, locking the door behind her so any siblings wouldn't disrupt them while they were working. It wasn't their body to adulterate or imprint with unwashed, sticky fingerprints.</p>
<p>Lukas slung his bag onto the bed and pulled out a styrofoam cube with packing tape encompassing the middle. He handed it to Lycia. "Go on." He winked. "Open it."</p>
<p>Lycia retrieved the box cutters from her dresser- Lukas winced, and she put it back and got a school scissors instead. She hacked away at the tape, releasing a breath as it gave way, the clamshell foam pieces falling away to reveal-</p>
<p>She modeled the hand against her own, fiddled with the joints, the perfect shining aluminum gleaming in her bedroom light. Perfect fingertips, somewhere in between the blemished daintiness of her own and the stoutness of Lukas'. She blushed, feeling the first smile in days of dedicated work. "Where did you get this?"</p>
<p>"One of the tourists from the cities." He pulled Lycia's in-progress leg onto the bed. "Traded him half of my pea plant harvest for this week and two week's worth of lodging in my guest room."</p>
<p>"Oh, Lukas..." Lycia sighed and shook her head. "You shouldn't have-"</p>
<p>"It was fine. Really. I had too many peas than I knew how to deal with. And…" He placed his own hand on her shoulder, making her meet his eyes. "Now we've got a template. We just need to make three more."</p>
<p>"And a torso."</p>
<p>"And a torso," he sighed. "And the rest of the limbs. And a working head."</p>
<p>Lycia reached under her bed and retrieved her toolbox, wiping the sweat off her forehead before clicking it open. Someday, she hoped, she wouldn't have to deal with sweat or grime any longer.</p>
<p>"And a working brain."</p>
<p>What would the transfer be like? A slow gradual degrading of who she was and then suddenly booting into the new body? Hanging in a void while everything was moving, neither here nor there?</p>
<p>Maybe this was all impossible and she'd end up killing herself instead.</p>
<p>But there were worse ways to go out.</p>
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<p><h1>Flash Fiction</h1></p>
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<p><h2>Erin</h2></p>
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<li><a href="./e/erin.html">Erin</a></li>
<li><a href="./e/erin2.html">Erin Hidden</a></li>
<li><a href="./e/erin3.html">Erin Devoted</a></li>
<li><a href="./e/erin4.html">Erin Torn</a></li>
<li><a href="./e/erin5.html">Erin Entreated</a></li>
<li><a href="./e/erin6.html">Erin Egress</a></li>
<li><a href="./e/erin7.html">First Contact</a></li>
<li><a href="./e/erin8.html">Erin Educated</a></li>
<li><a href="./e/erin9.html">Erin Eyed</a></li>
<li><a href="./e/erin10.html">Erin Interred</a></li>
<li><a href="./e/erin11.html">Erin Permeated</a></li>
<li><a href="./e/erin12.html">Erin Examined</a></li>
<li><a href="./e/erin13.html">"The world is an onion"</a></li>
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<li><a href="./b/beno.html">beno</a></li>
<li><a href="./c/corre.html">¡corre!</a></li>
<li><a href="./c/cetra.html">Cetra</a></li>
<li><a href="./d/desaparecer.html">desaparecer</a></li>
<li><a href="./h/hollow-war.html">Hollow War</a></li>
<li><a href="./i/in-100-words.html">in 100 words</a></li>
<li><a href="./i/minutes.html">i'll be there in a few minutes</a></li>
<li><a href="./k/kiel-resti.html">kiel resti</a></li>
<li><a href="./l/lucine-whence.html">lucine, whence you came</a></li>
<li><a href="./m/medusa-must-live.html">medusa must live</a></li>
<li><a href="./m/midnight-hands.html">midnight hands</a></li>
<li><a href="./n/nostalgia-1.html">nostalgia week, day 1</a></li>
<li><a href="./n/nostalgia-2.html">nostalgia week, day 2</a></li>
<li><a href="./o/ora-statuo.html">ora statuo</a></li>
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<p><h1>kiel resti</h1></p>
<p>published: 2016-05-04</p>
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<p>This faded and damp tunnel has been my thought shelter from ever since I moved here in first grade up to the current moment. A thousand ghostly footprints mark the walls, mostly from hurr-durr people who like to stick their shoes on their hands and pretend that they're walking up the walls. Only once as a small child was I fooled by these, and then never again.</p>
<p>On the roof of the tunnel is a single word scrawled in sharpie. It appeared sometime during the one week in fifth grade where I was under a completely different sky. Every afternoon after school, it echoes when I slip in and pull out my notebook, and every evening when a flare from my mother alerts the children to their family's dinnertime, it screams as I pull my body out of the shallow alcove my body has left over time. Nobody else hears the soft voices imploring me to remain among the stone when I bring them along to visit this tunnel of peace just barely bug enough for both of our bodies to sit comfortably. The sharpie, dwindling with every year that the weather pelts its attacks upon it, apparently only has a message for me.</p>
<p>Inside the cracks of the concrete walls and ceiling, dandelions spring up every year in the spring. Their yellow heads poke out for a few weeks before the lack of consistent sun sends them drooping to form a canopy just as dismal as the sky here. There is no color at the loop at the edge of the world, at least for me. Others rejoice at what I assume are vibrant colors littering the place.</p>
<p>Vehicles of all colors and sizes zip along the highway just visible from here. This tunnel used to be a hiking path, but the complaints from the hikers enabled the city to slowly abandon maintenance. The vines that creep along the ground and the trunks of the trees in summer sure appreciate the lack of interference from seemingly benevolent hands. But Mother Nature always thirsts for more.</p>
<p>One day about a year ago, I took a scruffy blue boy here. He froze when he approached the entrance of the tunnel, and we remained cemented there like century-old statues for a few minutes before he shook his head and slipped in before me.</p>
<p>He'd brought a backpack full of homework with him, which he deposited to his right closer to the end of the tunnel blocked with old dirt and silt. I inquired as to what subject he needed to study for that day, but he stayed silent as he turned the pockets of his coat inside out.</p>
<p>Ashes of all sorts of gradients spilled onto the floor of the tunnel between us, and I scrambled to pull myself into a standing position before he held out a hand in front of him. His lips partner, importing me to sit back down, and I slipped back down to my former position as he scooped up a pinch of the sandy ashes with his fingertips.</p>
<p>These were from his previous home, he explained to me with trembling lips. They traveled here in his pockets, resisting hundreds of washes as he traversed thousands of miles of land only to end up in this transient state. His friends, disintegrated in the inferno that expelled him from his childhood home, have finally found a resting place.</p>
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<p><h1>lucine, whence you came</h1></p>
<p>published: 2019-02-11</p>
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<p>You and I sit on opposite ends of the table. You sip coffee from a cracked mug. I twirl a few locks of hair in my fingers, eyes elsewhere, disinterested in the contents of whatever air we'd just gotten done exchanging.</p>
<p>You set down your cup. "So, about the weather...?"</p>
<p>I shrug. "What about it?"</p>
<p>"The sky's been awfully gray recently." You take another sip of coffee. "Listen, Lucine-"</p>
<p>"<i>That's not my name,</i>" I hiss through my teeth.</p>
<p>You sigh. "That's the name you gave me last night... But fine. Whatever. What I'm trying to say is, what's gotten into you recently? Last year, I could have left you alone for a month and then come back, and you would have been more or less the same- but now I can't even leave you alone for <i>five minutes</i> without you morphing into something... urecognizable. It's <i>disorienting</i>, Lucine. Keeping up with you is like running a marathon. It was fun at first, watching you flit about everywhere, but..." You tap your fingers on the table. "It's tiring. And I'm beyond fatigued."</p>
<p>"It's what I have to do," I answer. "This is my soul's fate- this is <i>my</i> fate. To mask myself, to hide from the light, to wander the earth. I can't stand still, else I'll be a moving target."</p>
<p>"I thought you wanted to be respected? How is <i>this</i>-" you gesture towards me, towards my whole body- "deserving of any respect? You constantly antagonize people. You assume the worst of everyone. You search for reasons to cut people off-"</p>
<p>I wave my arm to cut you off. "Listen. I love you. I love you <i>so, so</i> dearly. And maybe, in a better life, you and I would have been faster friends, or maybe even something more. But this is my life- this is mine, and mine alone to find. And this place-" I gesture all around me, to the house, to the ground it rests on, to the land surrounding it- "this soil isn't letting me grow anymore. I've stagnated. Any growth I've found is in <i>spite</i> of it." I push my chair back and stand up. "I'm sorry. I need to be elsewhere so the soil can heal. So <i>I</i> can heal."</p>
<p>"Lucine..." You rub your forehead, the skin between your eyes. "You <i>are</i> coming back, right?"</p>
<p>"Maybe someday. When fate is kinder to both of us." I turn away and leave- but stop at the doorway, lingering, longer than I know I should. "I will make you a promise, though. You and I will meet again. But you may not know it."</p>
<p>"W-why?" You kick your own chair back and bolt to your feet. "What are you saying?"</p>
<p>"I'll repeat myself. You and I will meet again." I step out the door. "But I will not be me."</p>
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<p><h1>medusa must live</h1></p>
<p>published: 2019-01-05</p>
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<p>"What strange shapes the human forms take! Deformed under a street light, shadows betraying the eldritch form within! In every person, both a sinner and a saint." Mediuth tossed her hair back and turned back to the bookcase, dragging her long nails, almost claws, over the bound spines. Bound tighter than herself, she'd wager. "What a wild world mankind inhabits. Every one yearns to be solo, alone, their own unit- and yet, in the process of becoming One, they just fall right back into the Many."</p>
<p>"Darling, you're rambling again."</p>
<p>Mediuth barely had any time to turn around in shock before the intruder snapped her fingers. As quickly as she drew breath, she reverted back to the ball of light, dropping down to the floor with a <i>thunk</i>. She immediately dimmed. Her six wings, detached, curled around her formless body in shame.</p>
<p>"And you're parading around in that <i>ugly</i> skin again." The intruder clicked her tongue. A shapely woman, long black hair waving down to her waist, a matching form-fitting dress glinting in the dim candlelight. "How many times have I told you? Take joy in who you are."</p>
<p>"That <i>was</i> who I am," Mediuth cut back, voice coming from everywhere and nowhere.</p>
<p>"Nonsense. We've come a long way past the grave. You are to be <i>light</i> now!"</p>
<p>She threw Mediuth into the air, expecting her to unfurl and catch light, but she just thunked back down to the floor again. Disappointed, the intruder clicked her tongue again and turned aboutface and left the room. Three <i>click</i>s as she locked each of the deadbolts from the outside.</p>
<p>Mediuth rolled back to the bookcase. One of her wings lifted, peeking out.</p>
<p><i>Okay, she's gone.</i></p>
<p>She imagined herself taking a deep breath and took her former form again. The thick cords in her hair hissed- she stroked each of them, cradling the heads, two in each palm. They licked her fingers back, lapping at her skin like little affectionate puppies.</p>
<p>Puppies that didn't poop everywhere and dig holes in the shelves, at least.</p>
<p>"Yes, Esther, Velaire, Hostile, Sylvain." She let go and nudged the heads back up. Two more came down to her palms. "Imogen, Versace. Shh, babies. You're just fine. I promise." She let go of these and slid a book out from its shelf. Heavy, bulky, a ripped purple book cover stretched over the hard surface. "Would you like me to tell you a story?"</p>
<p>The snakes hissed again, harder.</p>
<p>"Not that one?" Mediuth sighed. "I understand. Hard to comprehend a picture book when you can barely see." She returned the book to the shelf and pulled out a different one. "Poetry. Is this one better?"</p>
<p>The snakes drew their heads in close, peering over her shoulders, intent.</p>
<p>"Alright." She dug her claw into the book half-way and opened the pages. "<i>Heaven Save Us All</i>, December first, twenty-eighteen:"</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Defiled,<br />
demured,<br />
lost in censure.</p>
<p>Cast out,<br />
made blind,<br />
no longer divine.</p>
<p>I will mark my own fate,<br />
I will choose my own path,<br />
or I will go up in flames<br />
for the whole world to see.</p>
<p>And at the edge of eternity,<br />
you will ask:<br />
Who was I?<br />
Who could I have been?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>She took a deep breath. "As soon as you're born-"</p>
<p>The locks flew open. Mediuth slammed the book shut and hid it behind her back just as the black-haired woman poked her head around the door.</p>
<p>"What lovely words!" She flashed Mediuth a smile.</p>
<p>Mediuth resisted the urge to gag. <i>I don't write them for you.</i></p>
<p>"I don't think it's healthy for you to always be pining after something impossible," her captor added. "You're not leaving this place. Not ever."</p>
<p>Mediuth blanked her face and forced herself to make eye contact. Becoming almost a statue herself, instead of the other way around.</p>
<p>"No reaction? Well... just remember, you chose to be here."</p>
<p>Her captor disappeared again, re-locking the doors like every other time.</p>
<p>Mediuth grimaced. "Storytime's over. I'm sorry. Not if she's listening."</p>
<p>The snakes hissed as she slid the poetry book back into its place on the shelf. She strode over to the window and threw aside the blinds- squinting, temporarily blind as her eyes adjusted to the sudden flood of light.</p>
<p>Nothing but trees around her. Rapunzel, trapped in the tower. Except there was no hair to let down, no prince rushing to her rescue, no vile witch holding her captive.</p>
<p>Although that last part was negotiable.</p>
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<p><h1>midnight hands</h1></p>
<p>originally published: 2018-01-03</p>
<p>last updated: 2018-12-23</p>
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<p>The midnight winter wind swept through the trees again, swaying them, an audible lullaby like so many lonely nights throughout the years. Snow caked onto the ground, a million sparkles in the yellow glare of the aging streetlights. From soft rolling hills pristine until morning to the jagged cliffs made by the nighttime snowplows, the white stuff was everywhere.</p>
<p>The girl wiped her forehead and turned her head to the sky. Not a single star in the murky expanse, the light of the city the brightest star of them all. There had been a belt in the sky a few months ago, she remembered. A belt ready to crack as a whip and spur her on, barreling straight into a future unknown that she wasn’t sure she’d ever be ready to face. But it was long since gone, both from that old sky and the one she stared up at now. None but the loose belt hanging from her waist to hold her together.</p>
<p>Another gust of wind, sleepless whispers from the neighborhood across the lake rattling in the tree branches, a primal language she’d become bilingual in as a young child. Her short and choppy hair fluttered around her eyes- she brushed them out of her face, keeping her gaze focused on the stars. She shivered and tugged on the collars of her sleeves, hastily sewn on, never enough time in the world to fix them. The seams threatened to pop loose, but just like every other time before, they held strong.</p>
<p>There were more important things in the world than being the most fashionable one on the block, she reminded herself.</p>
<p>But in that winter night, waiting for the right time to jump, it was the only thing she could think of.</p>
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<p><h1>nostalgia week, day one</h1></p>
<p>published: 2016-09-01</p>
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<p>A young man straightens out his hat as his eyes wander back to the screen for the fifteenth time that night. The sounds of <i>drip, drip, drip</i> filter into his ears and settle there, muddling up his mind from the words he has tried so hard to focus on.</p>
<p><i>Damn, maybe there's a leaky pipe in the bathroom again. I should get some duck tape in the morning to fix that.</i></p>
<p>He picks up his phone and writes a small note there beside the grocery list he made a few days ago and forgot about it. There's a portal near the hardware store, so maybe there'll be more than one reason for him to leave the house. But there's no time for dillydallying on other games, for a deadline for a delicious poem is closing in.</p>
<p>A perfect line sprints into his mind, and his fingers race against the keyboard, against time itself as he struggles to record it all before it can escape. It is a fish floundering against the line on the fishing pole that his muse is holding- a losing fight destined to fail, and his internal editor second-guesses himself just enough to confuse the words and then lose his train of thought.</p>
<p>“Damn!” he shouts, pounding his hands on the desk and confusing the keys on the keyboard. Not even a second later, he regrets the outburst, fearing that his parents will wake up and chastise him not only for using profanity in their house but for being awake at such a godawful hour. Writing is something that can only be done on a well-functioning brain, they might argue. And sleep deprivation does not lead to a well-functioning brain.</p>
<p>His mind wanders back to the hazy days of seventh grade- where his immature twelve-year-old self tried to make sense of a much wider range of potential peers and instead alienating the vast majority of them. His feet quicken halfway down that particular Memory Lane, slowing down and then stopping to loiter on the lawn of a specific period of time around the second trimester. In the window, a TV replays the sight of his young body thrashing in bed, restless as his deeply religious psyche believed that he was about to be possessed by the devil and refused to give up his soul.</p>
<p>He winces, both from the memory and from being thrown back into his chair. The mostly empty document stares back at him. It is two in the morning, and his phone has been buzzing for a few seconds- his ex got a new phone and desperately wants to cry on his digital shoulder. The desire to block her number wanders into his mind, but he casts it off for the moment and files it in with the grocery list and the reminder to fix the leaky pipe.</p>
<p>He remembers the fictional planet of Solaris as his cat wanders into the room and beelines for his leg, a good post to rub up against. Good old Solaris, making those who orbited around it experience so many delusions to the point of being forced to believe that all sensory input was real. He knows that he does not own a cat since his mother is allergic, but ever since he attempted and failed to astral project, the cat has been paying him company whenever he tried to write. At no other time does the cat show up, not even when summoned. Words are its catnip. A good paragraph is a scratch on the tummy.</p>
<p>The man looks back to the screen. The cursor flickers in the faint glow of the room, and suddenly he is stricken with the urge to spill all the details about this cat. The yellow and green eyes watch as he divulges memories, both repressed and at the top of his consciousness.</p>
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<p><h1>nostalgia week, day two</h1></p>
<p>published: 2016-09-02</p>
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<p>The man is back at work again for yet another night of staring at his computer screen. The cat is curled up at his feet, snoozing away and twitching every once in a while. Maybe it’s thinking of chasing a mouse- the man last saw one a few months ago while up north and trying desperately to stay on track for his writing. Maybe the cat is dreaming about what it would be doing if it weren’t so concerned with giving the poor man some company.</p>
<p>The man pulls his notebook again, sighing in frustration when he sees the assignment that he laid for this night a week ago. <i>Resurrect a dead character from one of your earlier works</i>, it reads. <i>Let them walk around the room for a bit. Have a conversation. See if you can learn form the past.</i></p>
<p>He runs a hand through the part of his hair flopping out from his hat, trying to think of a suitable character to bring back that would cause the least amount of detrimental consequences on his fictional canon. If it were up to him, he wouldn’t have done this assignment in the first place- the people who are dead should stay dead, but his poetry is getting stale and he had already taken photos of every interesting thing in his neighborhood.</p>
<p>Maybe he could bring back the stereotypical Japanese princess he dreamed up during his hamster phase- but there was no characterization to her. The humanized trigonometry functions come to mind, but they only suffered through one book and a few shreds of a sequel that never came to fruition.</p>
<p>But wait- and he slaps his forehead, but the horrific idea refuses to leave his body. There is an edgy character waiting in the deep recesses of his old books that he never wants the light of day to reach ever again. Her husband is dead too, waiting in the shadows. Dead among the archives of his current blog, they lie as an eternal shrine to the dead past.</p>
<p>As if possessed by a ghost, his hands creep onto the keyboard against his will and draw out the girl who has died seven (or possibly more) times. She collapses onto the floor, coughing and convulsing, and the man can do nothing but sit fixated and grow anxious at the blood dripping from her mouth onto the dirty carpet.</p>
<p>"Em..." Her voice rattles as she sits up, bloodshot emerald eyes digging into his flattened chest. "Who are you? You’re not Em."</p>
<p>"You can call me Kellin," he offers, searching the back of his mind for the nearest fire escape in case things get heated. He doesn’t know how to open the windows, and the girl is sitting in front of the hallway leading to the front door. "Kellin Avaroe."</p>
<p>Her eyes search around the room. "Where is Em?"</p>
<p>"She isn’t here anymore."</p>
<p>Her voice rattles as her emaciated body slowly stands up with a great deal of effort. "Why am I alive? Where is Rishen?"</p>
<p>"I don’t know-" he backs up in his chair, tensing his muscles in case he has to use the chair to bash her over the head- "I don’t know! I’m under orders! This wasn’t my choice!"</p>
<p>"Where is Rishen...?" she moans as she takes a few strained steps.</p>
<p>Kellin’s butt slides off of his chair, and Yasmin’s eyes glimmer with bloodlust as he collides with the floor. He is immediately on his feet, hands palming the chair. "Don’t come any closer."</p>
<p>"Why am I alive? Em promised- promised that my soul could rest-"</p>
<p><i>Damn, why didn’t I bring a gun?</i></p>
<p><i>Because you can’t write with a gun, Kellin.</i></p>
<p>Yasmin shambles closer. One of Kellin’s sweaty hands palms the pen lying on his desk- if all else fails, maybe he can poke one of her eyes as a distraction. Those emerald eyes...</p>
<p>"And you brought me back..."</p>
<p>There’s a button on the pen that Kellin hadn’t noticed before, which he presses only to find a weak laser pointer dot glowing on the ceiling. He points it at Yasmin, and she hisses as a tiny hole in her clothes begins to sizzle.</p>
<p>"Begone, you beast!" he shouts, not caring about fear or his parents possibly waking up or the fact that this character is only a figment of his imagination. Or <i>was</i>, rather, because she rapidly disintegrates into stardust and piles onto the carpet.</p>
<p>Kellin sighs and adjusts his hat, throwing a glance to his still snoozing hat. What a stupid night it has been. Maybe he should have just stuck to poetry.</p>
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<p><h1>ora statuo</h1></p>
<p>published: 2016-05-05</p>
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<p>This shadow plays across my mind with misty breath and the very same fingers that danced across the landscape. The fog surrounding me becomes my foundation, hiding pores leaking inner demons and concealing years of imperfections melded down into a roughened texture.</p>
<p>I know not from where I came or to where I will go when I am done with this plane of existence, but as the shadow licks his finger and presses it to my forehead, the landscape burst into golden and rouge flames. None of them lick my feet, for the shadow wraps around me like last season's dresses and offers an iota of protection. Is this what the former gods felt like when gazing out at the sun blooming into existence?</p>
<p>The shadow's spindly neck offshoots in a thin strand from its position on my shoulder and tips its head towards me in greeting, bearing a crooked smile. The sight of his tipsy teeth, blackened with soot from the burning grasses underneath my soles, is enough to trandform my heart into a shuddering and wobbling record of days long gone.</p>
<p>An arm untangles itself from my bosom, and my pupils constrict as one of his fingers extends. When it brushes against my lips, ice slips into my veins- the impulse to scream filters through my brain, but my lips have frozen shut.</p>
<p>My legs kick out from behind me, and only then does the heat of my surroundings hit my nerves. I stumble to get up, but the shadow continues its presence right beside me. More nerves succumb to the void of unfeeling as he strokes his hands across my face, and I have not traveled thirty feet before I am forced to kneel on the grass.</p>
<p>The shadow grabs my ankles, which fuse together and become immobile. I twist around to sleep him away, but my feet flail, and I end up face-down on the charred grass.</p>
<p>"You're not getting away that easily, my statue," the shadow hisses as he straddles my hips and flips me onto my back. Just before he slaps my face and forced my eyes to fixate forever on the horizon, I gain a glimpse of my body- streaked with immobile strips of gold contrasting bleakly with the rest of the body still alive and breathing.</p>
<p>I suppose now that my girlfriend's words have finally come true- I have a heart of gold, but with that comes the rest of the package.</p>
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<p><h1>solace</h1></p>
<p>published: 2018-01-27</p>
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<p>A rickety house, ready and waiting to fall apart, stood at the sea-side, just another blot of gray against the unpainted canvas sky. Water with just the slightest tinge of blue lapped at the rocks in the house's front yard.</p>
<p>A girl slipped out the front door, her eyes just as desaturated as everything else. Like an accidental flick of the brush, like a fish in the most dismal and remote place in the ocean. A pail swung on her arm. She stepped over all the rocks, feet bare and skin thick with years' worth of calluses, and stooped down to collect some of the water in her pail.</p>
<p>A gust of wind with a mischievous face and adventurous hands. Her dress, mismatched patches and hasty stitching, fluttered. Pink skin shone to the sun like a fish without its scales, a newborn baby without its mother's touch. The wind tore its hands through her hair, setting it wild, caressing her cheeks.</p>
<p>"What are you doing here?" the sun whispered. "This is no place for stray thoughts. No place for a lovely specimen of time like you."</p>
<p>The girl shook her head and shrugged her shoulders and went on her way.</p>
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<p><h1>whoami</h1></p>
<p>published: 2018-05-26</p>
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<p>whoami. The most existiental of all the UNIX commands, and yet the most pointless. I can just look to the left of where my cursor is blinking, and there you have it- username@hostname, plain as day.</p>
<p>So whoami? I write my documents in /home/vanevander/, yet whoami says root. I tell GNURoot Debian my name, and yet it still addresses me as "root".</p>
<p>Much like real life, I suppose. I once tried giving people my preferred name, thought I'd start testing a potential post-transition future. (I identified as nonbinary.) And they shrugged it off and rolled their eyes and called me weird and kept calling me by my birth name.</p>
<p>whoami?</p>
<p>Fi, the terminal says. Another night of disassociating into whatever video game I played last, the room spinning so fast that I press my arms into the mattress and close my eyes and pray to deities I know in the back of my mind are nonexistent that the planet won't reject me and eject me into orbit to choke and die alone amid the trash of humanity.</p>
<p>whoami?</p>
<p>Luci, whatever chat application I'm using with Matrix at the time says. Unless it's one I frequently use Bitmask on, in which case it says Serlis. But Luci- a fragment of a time I thought I knew what the hell was going on with my gender identity. A fragment of a time where I was closest to the Patron-Saint of Productivity, where I almost had a true role model I wasn't just sucking up to.</p>
<p>whoami?</p>
<p>Medusa, my computer says. The one who never sleeps, the one whose desire has faded into the night, now only longing to turn away from the world and self-seclude in a voluntary secular monastery of her own creation. Waiting for the object of her death with open arms and a throat ready to giggle at the drop of a single ragged feather.</p>
<p>whoami?</p>
<p>Cloud, my phone says. The primordial god of chaos. An echo of the last night I spent in a hotel, the last night before I moved into my current house. So many hours wasted chasing after so many codes that would never work, only to be done in in a second in a bleary night in April a few months later.</p>
<p>But I've been forgetting the most important question of all.</p>
<p>whoareyou?</p>
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<h1>The Honkpill</h1>
<p>published: 2019-04-11</p>
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<p>Outside of the text-only internet, you might have seen a meme of a squished Pepe with a clown costume on floating around. A rainbow afro and a red nose, which he honks in unabated glee at the chaos unfolding around him. And as much as I dislike centering my worldview on what some memesters in the darkest reaches of the internet have brewed up, Clown Pepe seems an apt mascot for this weird and wild timeline we've seemed to split ourselves into and the utter inanity that has become the new normal.</p>
<p>From the same places that gave birth to Clown Pepe are the concept of the "pills", which represent various outlooks one could adopt to attempt to keep themselves sane:</p>
<ul>
<li>the "red pill", favorite of MGTOWites and generally right-leaning men and origin of the chad-virgin dichotomy.</li>
<li>the blue pill, widely considered the opposite of the red pill and either used as <a href="https://archive.md/20200821212438/https://www.reddit.com/r/thebluepill">purposeful satire</a> to critique red pill views or as an insult by red-pillers towards anyone who's a "beta cuck nu-male".</li>
<li>the <a href="https://archive.md/20200821212709/https://www.reddit.com/r/PunchingMorpheus">purple pill</a>, which seeks a peace and understanding between the two major genders as opposed to the red pill's stance of women meaning to be submissive and men being locked into an eternal fight of proving their "chadness".</li>
<li>the blackpill, often peddled by "doomers" and ultra-nihilists, which claims that everything sucks, nothing is okay, and nothing will ever get better again- humanity is already doomed.</li>
</ul>
<p>These aren't the only pills that exist, but they're the ones I know of off the top of my head, and since there are only so many colors to choose from and people have resorted to just using any old nouns for their nounpills now, I don't want to waste your time.</p>
<p>Here is where the honkpill comes in. Take the bleak outlook of the blackpill, with all its hopelessness and despair at the disintegration of the surrounding world- but instead of lying down and dying, you choose to continue to live. You choose to be happy, in spite of the news and the Onion becoming one and the same, in spite of the increasing polarization in the political sphere, in spite of the impending societal collapse. Things are weird, and maybe you don't have the mental energy or capacity to fully untangle what's going on around you, but you're going to have a good time in the midst of it all nonetheless.</p>
<p>So instead of putting a pistol in your mouth, you put a red honker on your nose, and you embrace the chaos with a grin on your face.</p>
<p>The honkpill is happiness. The honkpill is hope.</p>
<p>Honk honk!</p>
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<h1>run every day</h1>
<p>published: 2019-04-20</p>
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<p>There will never be a good intro to this post. There will never be an opening statement I can put here that will make me sound any less crazy than I already am.</p>
<p>But that's okay.</p>
<p>Two summers ago, I fell in love with a genre of music I'd like to call &quot;gardenpunk&quot;. Generally calm yet raw, punctuated with riffs trailing off into the distance and screaming about being lonely and not happy anymore. Most of the indie songs I had downloaded that fit that, I've long since lost, but <a href="https://archive.md/20200821212905/https://fistbenders.bandcamp.com/">Fist Benders</a> is the only one that seems to have stayed, endured the test of time and my shitty memory. Lying sprawled out on the carpet in my room at my grandma's house, light spilling in from the blinded windows, curtains drawn back and restrained with lacy skirt-like things like two angels in one-shouldered dresses.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sometimes life is fun,<br /> I am upside down,<br /> you are far away,<br /> everyone's selfish,<br /> we all want someone<br /> to share our story with.</p>
<p>- Fist Benders, &quot;Understanding&quot;</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Really, the only reason I happened to remember them on this particular day was because of a deep-seated restlessness coming to a head. A pervading sense that there was <em>something</em> before this life, chopped up into bite-sized segments and by my subconscious and sprinkled into my dreams without abandon.</p>
<p>There's a beginning, and there's certainly a middle, but there's no end. Just a blank space, a blot in the book of history where the words trail off into nothing. Ohio State University published a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20161228160444/http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/exptaking.htm">study in 2012</a> stating that, &quot;when you 'lose yourself' inside the world of a fictional character while reading a story, you may actually end up changing your own behavior and thoughts to match that of the character...&quot; Which would explain the itch in my chest, since these stories never show the end of the character's life, just the middle part where all the <em>good</em> stuff happens. Nobody ever wants to see, or even cares to see, their famed hero live out the rest of their lives happy and content and growing old in the world they've created.</p>
<p>And yet...</p>
<p>And yet.</p>
<p>In a different sort of light, I- and multiple other people here in the gophersphere- have expressed a similar sort of deep-seated restlessness, discontent, dissatisfaction with life here. <a href="https://archive.md/20200821213128/https://proxy.vulpes.one/gopher/baud.baby/0/phlog/fs20190414.txt">Cat's boredom with the constant tech talk</a>, <a href="https://archive.md/20200821213302/https://gopher.tildeverse.org/1436.ninja/0/Phlog/20190414.post">the person behind RPoD's desire for the end of the world, if only to burn down all that is fake and surrounds us</a>. There is something wrong with this world around us, and much like a caged animal pacing around in its own confines, we are painfully aware that there is little you or I can do about it. Like we each want to escape to our own personal Rennicas, a world where the decisions of people half the world away don't affect us, a world without tyrranical governmental surveillance and abusive technology.</p>
<p>The anxiety's been pouring into my dreams. It's the same script over and over: my parents break some treasured possession of mine, furious at some indistinct slight my brain is too terrified to give a coherent shape to. They give preferential treatment to my brothers, who are allowed to laze around and take whatever they like from me without recourse. I get fed up and take flight with only what I can fit in my backpack, and they give unrelenting chase, a fatal jailbreak that always ends in me waking up pissed as hell.</p>
<p>I can't move out because I have little to no money, and I can't pay back the college debts I've been forced by my father to accrue because I have little to no money, and I can't get a job to earn money because I'm stuck instead in a place that sucks in money and spits out nothing of value in return. So, much like the Windows user that's read over all the instructions to install Linux but finds themselves mortified at the thought of accidentally deleting all their data and breaking their computer, I sit here, a boat needing to leave the shore but unable to leave the dock.</p>
<p>So this stress, at least for me, materializes in minimalism. An incessant desire to make oneself as small as possible. Maybe in the hopes of becoming <em>so</em> small that, when the boot comes down to crush me, I'll just fall in the cracks instead. If I'm small, and I don't make noise, and I don't <em>feel</em> anything, don't take up any space, nobody will be angry at me, right?</p>
<p>But the problem with minimalism is that the logical conclusion for it is for one to cease to exist. <a href="../../../poetry/p/prepari.txt">To cleave the night and leave the world unseen.</a> Comfort and happiness and pleasure are not inherently bad things! It's when these things come at the expense of other people or one's own well-being that they need to be reined in. Art, like bacteria and microbes, do not flourish in a sterile environment like the extremes of minimalism require, and they're both necessary for life.</p>
<p>I'll be an ardent minimalist when I'm dead and gone and don't require anything anymore!</p>
<p>To summarize, here's a reply I saw on 8chan one day, dug up out of my screenshots folder:</p>
<blockquote>
&gt;&gt;1038589<br /> Don't try to be a minimalist. Minimalism is pure mental illness, depression to be specific. Don't fall for it. Instead you should aim to use the best tool for the job. If it turns out some tiny image viewer is the best then use that but make sure that's true. Don't start using some gimped piece of ass because some guy with a 16gb RAM 500gb SSD Ryzen 7 or some shit is installing gentoo and talking about how st is way more minimal than xterm.
</blockquote>
<p>While I don't agree with the extremism of the post, and the inverse- purposely using as bloated as possible software- isn't a good situation either, it's the core idea I like. Use the right tools for the job. Minimalism can be a fun experiment, or a way to squeeze as much life as possible out of old and aging hardware, or a strategy to leave one as little exposed as possible security-wise, but pursuing it for purely its own sake, it can leave one feeling rather... empty inside.</p>
<p>So to Cat and the RPoD writer, I'd say: it's okay if you want to take a break. Moving on to something that leaves you feeling more fulfilled at the end of the day is a perfectly valid strategy. Hell, I should probably cut back on my own rampant Gopher usage as well. Four holes, one of which I don't even update anymore, all of which give me massive anxiety whenever it comes time to publish a post since I have to remember to keep everything the same on each and every one of them.</p>
<p>What I wouldn't give for my own server...</p>
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<h1>Weest In Peace</h1>
<p>published: 2019-04-01</p>
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<p>There exists a species of person on the internet I'd like to describe as a "Discord bro". Their native habitat is, as their name suggests, the proprietary chat service Discord, wherein they join (or perhaps create) dozens of servers in which to spam ironic memes and discuss how this makes them so much better than "those normies", all while completely ignoring the <a href="https://archive.md/20200821213424/https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/discord.html">completely unethical</a> <a href="https://archive.md/20200821213643/https://stallman.org/discord.html">nature of Discord.</a> They're almost exclusively male and avid video game fans- although, I should note as to avoid sounding like a third-wave feminist harpy screeching, these two things, whether alone or apart, aren't necessarily good or bad either way. But when paired with Discord, you generally get a person who desperately wants to stand apart from the crowd, but just ends up being another cookie-cutter shape.</p>
<p>In short, being a user of a corporate proprietary chat service is not a replacement for a personality.</p>
<p>Generally, I can ignore these kinds of people. But Weest, one of the people I <em>was</em> subscribed to on the Big Red, recently put out a <a href="https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=_c2Oui8DtyM">new video</a> in which he baits a scammer pretending to be a would-be sponsor into sponsoring a dedicated video to his shitty Pokemon-Go-meets-Monopoly game, only to completely shit on the game. Which is all fine and dandy and interesting, despite being a "Discord bro".</p>
<p>What set me off in this instance was the intro, in which he explains why sponsors flood his business email. He spends a few moments (about three minutes in) describing the demographics of his audience: young gamer men who use Discord, essentially. And immediately after, he remarks how this makes him "valuable" and how his manager "uses those numbers" when he reaches out to people.</p>
<p>Am I nothing but a number to you, Weest? Am I just a pair of eyes you and your handler uses when trying to decide who will sponsor your bread and circuses today?</p>
<p>I know it's a lot of "much ado about nothing", double since the "unsubscribe and get on with your life" button exists, but <em>god damn</em>, do I hate being dehumanized in the name of money, in the name of someone else's ego!</p>
<p>But it's not just overweight boys with a weird sense of humor (that I actually somewhat overlap with on occasion) that are the problem here; it's the entire industry of "internet influencers" rampant on the HTTP. You are just a number; your body is not your own; your mind belongs to us. Submit to advertising. Download this shitty mobile game so that I can go on not contributing much of anything to society, make things that will be forgotten about by next week, much less next century or the rest of eternity. Who cares about questions of existence, of mortality, of art and beauty and what it means to be a human on this wretched and divine piece of rock? Let's talk about the petty drama of the week. Let's talk about sad people doing sad things in their sad homes.</p>
<p>Let's talk about memes.</p>
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<h1>Consumption</h1>
<p>published: 2019-08-14</p>
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<p>Out to ages yonder, people I shall never meet ever again in this lifetime, to what some may call a fancier age. &quot;She's taken with <a href="https://archive.md/20200821213941/http://logicmgmt.com/1876/overview/medicine/diseases.htm">consumption</a>.&quot; Isolated in a hospital somewhere, sick, deathly ill. Wasting away. Men like skinnier girls, you know? Men like corpses, dolls, playthings. Men like helpless creatures. But they're afraid of this corpse, for if it takes them, it may take their life as well. Something else is consuming the woman this time.</p>
<p>I stand in my kitchen as scattered light plays on the hardwood floor, reflections of the tree branches waving outside. <em>I should like to be a tree one day,</em> I think. And I think, and I think, and I think of anything other than the fridge which holds food to be consumed. Nothing much more than some cheese and an apple- an apple, which came from an apple tree somewhere I will probably never see. It was an apple which supposedly condemned humanity to sin and despair and death. A story I don't subscribe to, but one which surrounds me nonetheless. Lilith and Eve, lovers separated by the whims of an angry god. Here is an apple tree. Do not consume its fruits, partake of the rapture of knowledge of oneself.</p>
<p>Deep in the small of the night, wading through despair, wailing for a life I'm not even sure I ever lived, a place I'm still not completely convinced exists. Everything in the world is <a href="https://archive.md/20200821214115/https://gopher.tildeverse.org/zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/asceticism-or-something-like-it.txt">bloat</a>. Your beloved games? Bloat. Your eye candy desktop? Bloat. Graphical browsers? Bloat. This sync program is bloat; use this different one. Oh, it has less features to the point of being useless? I don't care. <a href="../april/run-every-day.html">Bloat, bloat, bloat.</a> You slam your laptop shut in frustration, but there is no escape. What of media? The things you surround yourself offline, online, in the weird space between with the constant connectivity of today? Breaks aren't allowed. You have to constantly be creating, creating more than you consume.</p>
<p>Growing plants without soil or water, trying to fish in a manmade lake, living without food.</p>
<p>Do not consume.</p>
<p>Do not consume.</p>
<p>Do not consume.</p>
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<p><h1>Death Of A Gopher</h1></p>
<p>published: 2019-12-14</p>
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<p>The wire bars of the <a href="../../../poetry/g/the-golden-cage.txt">golden cage</a> bend open just a little farther, enough for me to stick my head out: I have a job now! A part-time job, I should clarify, so I won't be able to move out anytime soon, but the tiny sprout of <em>something</em> is better than the black hole of <em>nothing</em>.</p>
<p>The new revenue stream means that, unless something catastrophic happens like a mass deplatforming or getting fired, MayVaneDay can stay on its own stable VPS indefinitely.</p>
<p>Thanks to college payments, my bank balance dropped below a comfortable amount sometime in October, so I moved everything to the Raspberry Pi on my desk in my room for the following two months since it would be free. Surprisingly enough, even though IPv4 was blocked to hell, IPv6 was completely open, so I could run whatever the hell I wanted!</p>
<p>Except for pygopherd. Because pygopherd only supported IPv4. So my Gopher mirror was shot to hell, and because there's no point in updating a mirror that nobody can use, I let the whole thing fall into disrepair. Everything else I struggled to keep online since the router at home likes to periodically disconnect every device and refuse to let them back on for hours on end, so I put a line in the crontab to reboot the Pi at midnight every night to force it to reconnect and crossed my fingers that the ZeroNet mirror would finally get some seeders.</p>
<p>Which it did, thanks to <a href="https://archive.md/20200821214932/http://misc-stuff.terraaeon.com/articles/miss-old-internet.html">a little exposure</a>! And it was easier to maintain than Gopher, since all I had to do was change all the absolute links to relative links, as opposed to Gopher where I had to also strip out all the images and CSS (since most everyone views Gopher in a terminal, and what would be the point of transmitting things they couldn't see?) That would be "bloat". And everyone hates <a href="../august/consumption.html">"bloat"</a>.</p>
<p>Why? Why should I care about bloat? Who even defines "bloat", anyway? Some <a href="https://archive.md/20200821215101/https://regularflolloping.com/posts/slow-down/">authoritarian jerk who can't even be fucked to use proper grammar</a>? Is "bloat" defined by lines of code, or megabytes of RAM used, or the mental strain required to remember how to use the program? Sure, most of us can agree that Windows 10 with all the spyware options enabled with five browsers and seventeen autostart-on-boot programs <del>and one of those unironically being Discord</del> is bloat, but where do we draw the line from there? Where does the red side of the spectrum line officially turn blue? At the beginning, where it's no longer pure #FF0000? Only when it's pure #0000FF, and we've devolved into cavemen using stick figure pictures to communicate with each other? But aren't pictures bloat? Or is it language? Speaking? Writing? <em>Thinking?</em></p>
<p>It can't be <a href="../april/run-every-day.html">being dead</a>, for part of decomposing is <a href="https://archive.md/20200821215250/https://sciencing.com/the-stages-of-the-human-decomposition-process-12757794.html">intestinal bacteria producing gases</a>, which makes one rather... bloated.</p>
<p>Maybe I want decadence! Maybe I want lavish websites with pleasing color schemes and little image icons as buttons! (Given that the buttons have alt text, of course.) Maybe I want reflowable text and custom fonts that won't break the UI! Maybe I want <a href="https://weirdiverse.mayvaneday.art">pages with a thousand faces</a> that reinvent themselves every page load! Maybe I want websites that I can zip up in a single archive and throw wherever I damn please, instead of asking permission from some purposely convoluted database!</p>
<p>Maybe I want the crazy and macabre, the <a href="../../../poetry/l/lumo-en-vivo.html">spirited and alive</a>!</p>
<p>And maybe I want transport security too, which Gopher seems to have a <a href="https://archive.md/20200821215459/https://gopher.tildeverse.org/zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/why-gopher-needs-crypto.txt">little problem with</a>. And the <a href="https://archive.md/20200821215625/https://gopher.tildeverse.org/zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/1/~solderpunk/gemini">proposed fix</a>, which I must admit is the best fix to Gopher possible without scrapping the whole thing and reinventing HTTP, can't be easily implemented because of all those ancient machines bogging everyone else down. And heaven forbid we leave <em>them</em> out. Seriously, a protocol with <em>absolutely no transport security</em>- what kind of a braindead idea is Gopher? Are you okay with having every word thrown down the pipe accessible to your ISP to log and peer into and inject whatever they want into it? And signing every post with PGP won't help, since your key would also be transmitted in plaintext: if your government <em>really</em> wanted to fuck you over, they could just make your ISP reroute all requests to that particular Gopher server to their own and substitute their own PGP keys, and you'd be none the wiser. There would be no possible trust that a specific post was written by a specific person, unless you'd received their keys through a different, more secure channel. In which case: what's the point?</p>
<p>Security through obscurity is no security at all, and I've lived enough of my life as an insecure sniffling little imitation of a human being.</p>
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<p>In tangentially related news, I'm deleting my Github and Keybase accounts.</p>
<p>I've already known of the <a href="https://archive.md/20200821215750/https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/26/17954714/microsoft-github-deal-acquisition-complete">Microsoft acquisition</a> for some time now. But the main problem with Github is the network effect: without an account, one can't easily submit bug reports or pull requests. My Github page has mainly sat abandoned since that one Python class I took last year at college, the exception being the aforementioned bug reports.</p>
<p>I signed up for Keybase at the start of <a href="../../../poetry/o/october-7-2018.txt">October of 2018</a>, right after the explosive aftermath of the Lucine saga, where I was worried that one of the Tumblrites I'd pissed off would start impersonating me in attempts to get me in trouble with the law. My line of thought was that, if I had some kind of centralized official service where I could prove exactly what websites and social media accounts I was in control of, the likelihood of someone else to successfully put on my personage like a meat puppet would be effectively zero.</p>
<p>So why leave now?</p>
<p>Long story short:</p>
<ul>
<li>Keybase made a big deal about their <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190915210946/https://keybase.io/a/i/r/d/r/o/p/spacedrop2019">Stellar airdrop</a>. Woo! Everyone gets up to $500 in free cryptocurrency! I wake up one morning, and suddenly I'm $20 richer.</li>
<li>A shitton of spam bots sign up for Keybase, Github, and Hacker News. The latter two complain to Keybase, who <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20191009002412/https://keybase.io/a/i/r/d/r/o/p/spacedrop2019">cancels the October airdrop</a> and changes the requirements to receiving an SMS from a relatively short list of countries, notable for essentially saying "fuck you" to anyone living in Canada.</li>
<li>Stellar, the cryptocurrency they were giving out, peaks for a few days (around $0.08) and then plummets (to $0.05).</li>
<li>The spam bots <a href="https://archive.md/20200821220001/https://www.whiskey-tango.org/2019/11/keybase-weve-got-privacy-problem.html">get</a> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200408155300/https://github.com/keybase/keybase-issues/issues/3546">worse</a>, sending unsolicited messages and requests for payment. Yours truly got a few spam followers, but no weird messages.</li>
<li>Keybase, feeling the heat, says "fuck it" and <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20191213195655/https://keybase.io/a/i/r/d/r/o/p/spacedrop2019">cancels the whole airdrop</a> so nobody gets anything after 2019 ends.</li>
</ul>
<p>Which would be all fine and dandy if Keybase had <em>asked</em> users if they had wanted to participate first, instead of automatically adding a Stellar wallet to every account the first month of the airdrop. <b>Keybase took the private keys of its users and <a href="https://archive.md/20200821220224/https://sneak.berlin/20190929/keybase-backdoor/">automatically signed a payment address onto their profiles without their consent</a>, which <i>they themselves</i> <a href="https://archive.md/20200821220516/https://keybase.io/blog/2014-10-08/the-horror-of-a-secure-golden-key">define as a backdoor</a>. And <a href="https://archive.md/20200821220646/https://github.com/keybase/client/issues/15555">there is currently no way to remove the Stellar wallet from one's profile</a>.</b></p>
<p>And while Keybase technically lets you have the secret keys to the Stellar wallet, meaning one could theoretically use a different wallet app, the issue remains that none of this should have happened without the users' consent- and that Keybase violated it for a glorified promotion.</p>
<p>If they have the ability to do <em>this</em>, even if it's for (disputably) benevolent purposes, what's to stop them from getting malicious in the future?</p>
<p>There are smaller issues with Keybase as well. The desktop app doesn't work on Tails, for one. The FUSE filesystem mounts automatically and doesn't seem to be removable, which can mess up <code>df -h</code> counts, even though technically Ubuntu's Snap system has the same problem. And, the most egregious one in my eyes, is that <em>it's centralized</em>.</p>
<p>There is no further reason for me to be using Keybase or Github, and the upcoming new decade is the perfect excuse to do some <del>spring</del> winter cleaning.</p>
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<h1>The fediverse will not save us.</h1>
<p>published: 2019-01-03</p>
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<p>Welcome to 2019. The "year of Vane Vander", as I called it in a post whose name I don't remember off the top of my head right now, is three days, almost four, past us. The past few months have been an avalanche of ever-more-chaotic events- what would one expect from a year that started with the Tide pod challenge? (Yeah, that was a whole year ago, even though it feels like only yesterday.)</p>
<p>Something's changed in me in those twelve months. And yet... I can't seem to put my finger on it. My political stances don't seem to be any different: I'm still an agorist, and I still believe in freedom of association (or disassociation from; remember we're talking about groups and not mental illness here), and I still feel icky around people whose <em>entire</em> identities revolve around seemingly immutable characteristics of themselves. I still write books. I still don't believe in the Abrahamic god, and I'm still working on untangling myself from the spiritual delusions I seem to have picked up seemingly out of nowhere around last April. Or was it May? I can't remember.</p>
<p>Maybe it was... the social media? I'm not on WordPress anymore- <em>there's</em> a change I can put my finger on! Neither am I on Neocities. Or Facebook. Or... Tumblr.</p>
<p>But I still keep making a complete ass of myself, no matter the platform, spurred on by the incessant need for external validation- so maybe that's not a real change at all.</p>
<p>I opened this post today to talk to you about the fediverse. Mastodon and Pleroma, specifically, since I've never been an Instagram-type person (as Pixelfed would replace) and I haven't tried Misskey. Although Friendica <a href="https://archive.md/20200821221124/https://friendi.ca/2018/11/18/activitypub-support-in-friendica/">recently got support for ActivityPub</a>, the protocol that Mastodon and Pleroma speak, it sits closer to the "federation", which consists of diaspora*, Hubzilla, and GNU Social. The federation and the fediverse, despite sounding similar, are two <i>completely different</i> universes. Not the best genius who came up with those names, I think.</p>
<p>Mastodon and Pleroma, for the unaware, are two competing microblogging services on the fediverse. Their userbases have always been more or less at each other's throats, probably encouraged by the fact that the main developers of each are two polar opposites: <a href="https://archive.md/20200821221251/https://mastodon.social/@Gargron">Eugen</a>, the developer of Mastodon, is just a "normal" middle-aged white dude who rakes in thousands of dollars each month from Patreon, whereas <a href="https://archive.md/20200821221507/https://pleroma.soykaf.com/users/lain">Lain</a> is, as far as I know, completely pseudonymous.</p>
<p>Pleroma users' main complaints against Mastodon:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li>It's bloated and resource-heavy, costing much more to host each month. At the very least, if you don't want to host at home, $3 for Pleroma, &gt;$9 for Mastodon- although Vultr and masto.host's low-tier prices might change at any time. I've hosted a Pleroma instance on my shitty Raspberry Pi at home for a few days as a test, and I was still able to use it for other blogging-related tasks; Mastodon wouldn't run on my device, but I've heard horror stories of someone managing to get it running on FOUR of them interlinked together.</li>
<li><a href="https://fediverse.network/pleroma.site/federation">Pleroma instances can automatically advertise their MRF, or defederation, policies.</a> This helps in administration transparency, because when admins decide to make the potentially catastrophic decision to mute or wholesale block an instance, the affected users need to know so that they can move to a different instance if they disagree with the decision. Mastodon admins can also make a list of domains they block, but unlike Pleroma, there is no easy way to verify that they're being truthful.</li>
<li>The three-paned Mastodon default interface dumps an overwhelming amount of information on the user, and it doesn't scale nicely on screens of different sizes, which means a lot of horizontal scrolling if you click on a post to try to view the full thread. The default Pleroma interface has only one pane, and it doesn't autoscroll with new posts, which means a lot more control over the amount of information thrown at the viewer at once.</li>
</ol>
<p>Mastodon users' main complaints against Pleroma:</p>
<ol type="1">
<li>It doesn't have an easy way to user-side mute words and phrases and block whole domains from being able to follow oneself. I'd block the infantilizing baby words "cofe", "smol"/"tol", and "pee pee poo poo" (among others) in a heartbeat if I could, but because Mastalab (the fediverse app I use on Android) relies on the server handling mutes instead of the app itself, I can only mute these things on the few Mastodon instances I'm on. And if I need to clean out my followers, I have to do it manually.</li>
<li>Because the cost to host it is much lower, it attracts more bad actors. Whether this is from uninspired trolls making throwaway instances to harass people, or stereotypical basement-dwellers with little disposable income who want places to fester in their hatred, shitty instances seem to invariably run Pleroma more often than not.</li>
<li>Compounding the issue with bad actors, because Mastodon doesn't give external instances an easy way to see if they're blocked or not, Pleroma instances often still retrieve posts from other instances they're blocked from. And because the default Pleroma frontpage is the Whole Known Network, a collection of all the posts from all the instances that particular instance can see, if Instance A blocks Instance C, but Instance B blocks neither A nor B, a person on Instance C could use Instance B's Whole Known Network to circumvent Instance A's blocks.</li>
</ol>
<p>Both sides have valid points. And yet, the little discussion I see always devolves into petty discourse where both sides feel like they've been personally wronged.</p>
<p>Which brings me to my main point: just because you are on the fediverse, that does not automatically make you better than whatever hellsites you came from. Being on a FLOSS social media platform that purports to have learned from the ethical mistakes of proprietary social media silos does not mean that you have a free excuse to act just as toxic as the people who probably pushed you off of those sites to begin with.</p>
<p>My time on the fediverse started off very chill. I ran an angel aesthetics bot on an instance recommended by an anon on a Lainchan thread, and occasionally I'd dip into the local and federated timelines to see what community I'd set up shop in. It seemed idyllic: lots of inside jokes I didn't really get, tolerable banter, little discourse. But now I've seen clout-chasing internet celebrities, and witchhunts against people I now consider friends for minor slipups that could have been rectified in direct messages, and literal cults start their own instances. Callout culture runs rampant, and in this place where I thought I'd finally be safe, I just have to watch my words even more in order to keep the mobs away. I left 8chan to get away from the constant slurs and hateful rhetoric: and yet, one could take a walk down any "free speech" or "loli" instance and get a compressed version of the same vitriol. And on most of the queer-friendly instances, I'd get skinned alive for even daring to suggest that maybe, just <em>maybe</em>, big-scale socialism isn't the best solution to corporatism's countless problems.</p>
<p>I wonder what happened to make the fediverse so sour. Or maybe it was always like this, and the more I hop among instances, a migrant of my own making, the more shit that mars my soul, renders me resentful, makes me blind to the few things on this network worth saving.</p>
<p>Or maybe every place on the internet is like this, has these same problems, and no amount of instance hopping and MRF policies will save us. A social site is useless without the people that are supposed to inhabit it, after all.</p>
<p>Maybe the few of us unhappy need to burn everything down and start new again.</p>
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<h1>Second-Class Citizens</h1>
<p>published: 2019-06-20</p>
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<p><h2>Webkinz, eleven years on</h2></p>
<p>April 26, 2008. The birthday party mere days before my eighth birthday. First grade- or maybe second; I can’t keep track of time- girls sitting in my living room upstairs, opening presents, having a good time.</p>
<p>One of them gave me a little blue hippo for some online game I’d never heard of before. And when all the girls left and the dread of writing all those thank-you notes settled into my chest, I sat down with my parents and signed up with the little code in the tag affixed to the hippo’s paw.</p>
<p>Webkinz is a standard game geared for little kids where you can adopt a pet and decorate a house and play shoddy Flash games to earn in-game currency. What separated it from the other dime-a-dozen MMORPGs for kids at the time I joined, however, was the fact that you <em>had</em> to buy a physical stuffed animal in order to receive a code to join, and that you <em>had</em> to keep buying these at least once a year to keep your account alive. If you couldn't afford to buy one in time, or simply forgot, then your account was deactivated and placed in a short waiting period before it was permanently deleted. Because of the forced paywall, the servers could afford to stay open, and so there was only one tier of membership. A few years in, and the company introduced “Deluxe” accounts, which at the time only meant a fancy gold hat you could put on your virtual pet and access to a separate store and a few extra social features. Not that it mattered much to me, since I could play all the games I wanted, and whatever exclusive items I wanted I could scam out of the Deluxe players in the trading rooms with a little bit of effort. Some of those items, like a kimono and a tornado in a pot and a few vehicles, still sit scattered around my inventory and my house to this day.</p>
<p>Somewhere along the way, probably with my transition into middle school, I forgot about the whole place. Desperately sought to make my own online game with my nonexistent coding skills, and failed every time. My stuffed animals got packed away into a storage box when we moved houses, and stayed forgotten. It must have been the summer after I graduated from high school, then, that I remembered that Webkinz existed, and logged in to find that I had been demoted to a free tier.</p>
<p>Oh yeah, there was a free tier! And the “normal” tier was now a standard membership, and Deluxe members still got to strut around with their exclusive items and unwarranted self-importance like they always had. And half of the wallpapers in my house were gone, deleted long after they were “retired” to make space in the shop for the new Deluxe-only items along with most of the items in those rooms. And a good two-thirds of the arcade games I used to spend hours upon hours playing were paywalled, and my privileges to KinzChat Plus, which was the free-for-all typing mode in the social areas instead of stringing together pre-made sentences, were revoked. My house, once a thematic wonderland with a little school and a massive kitchen and bedrooms for each pet sorted by species and theme, was a barren wasteland.</p>
<p>And there were more changes that had happened in my absence. There was a mayor now where once it had been a lawless and free land, a creepy chipmunk lady whose eyes drilled into my soul. The old “Things To Do” menu with its purple tab and eye-blinding golden text was now a grid of icons a la an iPad home screen. The hamster maze section, which was notable for requiring Unity instead of the standard Flash Player that the rest of the site used, had long since been shuttered. Badges for quests littered the left side of the screen. There was <em>always</em> another damn quest to do.</p>
<p>But my pets seemed no worse for the wait, and they had removed the obnoxious logout games that always plagued us children when we needed to quickly exit for whatever our parents were yelling at us to do, so it wasn't all doom and gloom.</p>
<p>Given that I now had my credit card on me, I caved in and bought a year of Deluxe. I put the golden hat on my pet. I booted Ferin Live (because my current distro, Devuan, doesn’t play well with Flash Player) and played all the arcade games I had played as a child and rolled into KinzChat Plus to see who I could scam rare items out of next.</p>
<p>It wasn’t nearly as satisfying as I’d hoped. Everything ran as if I were playing on a potato, despite the fact that I <em>vividly</em> remember everything being fast as hell back when I played on my grandma’s old computer running Windows ME. All my brothers and cousins were still stuck on the free tier, if they could even remember their logins at all. I couldn’t invite anybody over to my house like in days of old, and I couldn’t play the multiplayer arcade games behind a Deluxe paywall with them. I had become the first-class citizen I had resented so harshly as a child.</p>
<p>But 360 days remain in my subscription, since it’s billed yearly, so while my time remains, I’ll probably be working on FOSS clones of the games with what little Python and GB Studio experience I know. Using my privilege of financial freedom for other’s benefit, for no altruistic reason than it makes me feel good inside.</p>
<p>And it'll save <em>me</em> money too, when my subscription runs out.</p>
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<p><h2>The fediverse is burning down</h2></p>
<p><i><a href="https://tusky.app/">Tusky</a> banned Gab! The sky is falling!</i></p>
<p>In all seriousness, the drama roiling through the fediverse at the time of writing is <a href="https://gab.com/gab/posts/VnZRendFcDM1alBhNm9QeWV4d0xidz09">Gab’s announcement to switch to the Mastodon backend</a> for sustainability purposes and to enable federation. Tusky, one of the popular fediverse apps, decided to take the initiative of removing the in-app capability to sign in to several instances arbitrarily deemed as “white nationalist” havens and rickrolling whose who still attempted to do so. While their intentions are noble- <em>I</em> certainly don’t want to make it easier on hateful identitarians- what gets blocked and what stays available to use in the app was seized by the developer instead of staying in the hands of the instance admins like it has always been before now.</p>
<p>But in both instances, there has been little an individual user can do. The average user doesn't know how to operate Git, or compile an Android app. If their admin defederates from a certain instance, and a significant enough portion of their friends were on said instance, they have little recourse but to jump ship onto another instance with a more lenient federation policy. Or if an instance goes down, whether without warning or with, or if said user gets banned with no opportunity to appeal… If you don’t have your own instance on the fediverse, you’re essentially a second-class citizen. And to get into the first-class requires jumping two walls: the inherent paywall of renting a VPS or buying a Raspberry Pi, and the technical wall of actually installing, configuring, and maintaining their instance software of choice. There are new spam domains and new porn spammers and new harassers every day. Can you put in the time every day to ward them off? Can you put aside the money every month to keep your instance online? Can you keep the users on your instance in the legal white zone?</p>
<p>Tusky’s decision, coupled with Sunbeam City’s implosion after the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190620004015/https://sunbeam.city/@cocoron/102282495819964875">admin accounced that they were stepping down and that the instance would potentially be shutting down if they couldn’t find a suitable replacement for the administration and ownership,</a> has thrown the fediverse into roil. Either you’re all for setting a precedent and showing future corporations with bully money that it <em>is</em> possible for you to selectively silence others, or you’re full of hatred for minorities and need to die.</p>
<p>It’s the same damn discourse every single damn time! Censorship, censorship, censorship. Instance admins can block each other, drawing party lines, and you <em>better</em> be on the side that has clout behind it, or else you’re <em>cancelled</em>. What are you supposed to do if you’re just a run-of-the-mill user? What if you’re just sharecropping your little patch of online land, chilling with your friends, and then everything goes up in flames because the admin got in a fight with one of these app developers and now you’re on a “cancelled” instance? Telling people to start their own instance is neither viable nor considerate for the aforementioned reasons. And jumping from instance to instance is tiring. Nobody expects a Twitter or a Facebook user to constantly be switching profiles or accounts, getting everyone to refollow them, starting their account over from scratch every time drama flares up…</p>
<p>I was a second-class citizen for a while, jumping from instance to instance as one does, and then I “ascended” to the first class when I set up a Misskey instance about two weeks ago. I even wrote a <a href="../../../tutorials/misskey.html">little tutorial</a> on how to accomplish that, since most of the documentation is in Japanese, and what little has been translated into English is spotty at best if you’re not already well-versed in systems administration. It was, to put it in the simplest of terms, not worth it. There is nobody on the fediverse worth talking to. All the cliques have long since formed, and <em>gods above help you</em> if you ever decide to go against any of their party lines. What kind of person would willingly stay in an environment where they can so easily be painted with the same stroke as legitimate hate groups, and then search engines pick up on this, sear the paint into your skin near forever? At least in pubnixes, you have the opportunity for private resolution before everything blows up public.</p>
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<p><h2>What are we to do?</h2></p>
<p>Clearly the server-client model has failed us, for there is no reason why potentially thousands of people should be affected by the whims of one person, and there is <em>especially</em> no reason why anybody should be at the mercy of another just because they do not have the money or the skills to stake out their own little piece of whatever network they’re using. This throws out the fediverse- really, anything on the clearnet, since the server-client model is the very <em>backbone</em> of the modern Internet.</p>
<p>This leaves peer-to-peer services like Freenet, <a href="https://beakerbrowser.com/">Dat</a>, and <a href="https://zeronet.io">ZeroNet</a>. I can’t recommend Freenet since, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200407181754/https://www.pcworld.com/article/2040278/find-your-own-private-internet-with-freenet.html">by design, you don’t have granular control over which files you’re seeding</a>, which means you could be complicit in hosting disgusting materials like child pornography without your knowledge or consent. Dat and ZeroNet, however, let you choose on a site-by-site basis what you want to seed.</p>
<p>Both Dat and ZeroNet are well-suited for hosting static websites, so I have a <a href="http://127.0.0.1:43110/1MeeJWbbQHArbqD6UUHSjh9EVycvnTUBFa/">mirror</a> on both <b>(EDIT 2020-04-07: the Dat mirror is dead, lmao)</b>. ZeroNet requires JavaScript to be enabled in the browser, which might be a privacy nightmare for some, but one can go into the data folder for each website and see all the source files for each website, so it’s not that big of a deal if one’s running a sufficiently up-to-date browser. Dat doesn’t require JavaScript, but the Beaker Browser, the easiest way to access the Dat network, doesn’t support extensions last time I checked. (This <em>could</em> be worked around with <a href="https://github.com/sammacbeth/dat-fox">the Dat extension for Firefox, but it requires some <a href="https://github.com/sammacbeth/dat-fox-helper">command line trickery</a> to get it to work properly, and you won’t have access to all of Beaker Browser’s features.)</p>
<p>Neither are completely free from paywalls, however. Dat allows you to <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200407182024/https://beakerbrowser.com/docs/guides/use-a-domain-name-with-dat">use an existing domain name</a> to point to a Dat share, which means, if you already have a domain, you don’t have to buy another one. ZeroNet requires you to purchase a special Namecoin domain on the Namecoin blockchain if you <a href="https://zeronet.io/docs/faq/#how-can-i-register-a-bit-domain">want a fancy domain</a> that doesn’t look like spaghetti and you can’t run <a href="https://github.com/samr7/vanitygen">vanitygen</a> for some reason. And if you want to keep your site seeded when your computer is off, and you don’t have a bunch of friends to help you seed it for free… you’re back to being a second-class citizen. Going the Dat path, you could use <a href="https://hashbase.io">Hashbase</a> to seed your website, but that requires registration, and free accounts can only go up to a hundred megabytes of storage. And if Hashbase decides they don’t like your site, they have full freedom to shut it down and stop seeding whatever it is you were hosting. ZeroNet has some user-run proxies that can be used as a seeding peer, most of which disable site deletion on the user side, and the admins don’t seem too interested in pruning sites from all the “this site you are seeding is on a blacklist” messages that popped up when I last used one.</p>
<p>ZeroNet has a few glaring advantages suitable for would-like-to-not-be second-class citizens, though, and one’s that, in case you ever <em>do</em> get your own server, it’s <em>exponentially</em> easier to use it as an extra peer. You download the same bundle as you would use on a computer, <a href="https://zeronet.io/docs/faq/#is-it-possible-to-install-zeronet-to-a-remote-machine">rename a plugin directory to enable it</a>, and then pass a few extra command line flags. Dat, on the other hand, <a href="https://github.com/beakerbrowser/homebase">requires up-to-date Node.js packages and use of their special process manager</a>. The second is that, if you’re switching machines or distrohopping, taking your ZeroNet data with you is as simple as copying the “ZeroBundle” folder wherever you downloaded and extracted it onto the new computer. Beaker Browser requires that you hunt for its data folder. On Linux, I know it’s in “~/.config/Beaker Browser”, but I have <em>absolutely no</em> idea where it might be hiding on Windows or Mac.</p>
<p>This peer-to-peer strategy can be extrapolated onto other non-website networking things, like Syncthing for files and <a href="https://github.com/39aldo39/DecSync">DecSync</a> for calendars and contacts and RSS, but non-social things are separate issues to be dealt with separately.</p>
<p>Ultimately, it doesn’t matter which one you pick. It doesn’t matter if you even pick one that I haven’t considered! Just, <em>please</em>, leave yourself a backdoor out of the server-client model. Take some initiative for once in your life! If nobody does anything about it, then <em>of course</em> ZeroNet and Dat and all the others are going to seem empty.</p>
<p>Empty and cold and sterile, just like the corporations you were supposed to be fleeing!</p>
<p>This garden is yours to cultivate!</p>
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<h1>Separatism</h1>
<p>published: 2019-06-21</p>
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<p>Popularized by Marilyn Frye in her 1978 essay <em>Notes on Separatism and Power</em>, female separatism is the concept that woman’s liberation can only be fully achieved once women separate completely from men, both socially and societally. For most women, this hardline rejection of men outright is untenable because it simply isn’t economically feasible, or they have loved ones who happen to be men, or whatever institutional obligations (like college) they have requires them to interact with men. In this situation, a compromise is made where interaction with men is reduced to exclusively those who are required in order to get on with day-to-day life.</p>
<p>Politically, female separatism involves centering, well, women in one’s politics. Only issues that affect women are the focus, but issues affecting men might be dealt with if they involve women as well. "Rehabilitating men" is not the goal, nor will it ever be, and every effort goes towards creating networks and resources to support women. Shelters for female survivors of abuse and economic support for single mothers are two prominent issues, to give some examples. Socially, female separatism involves centering and supporting women in everything they do. Giving female artists much-needed love and attention, creating female-only spaces where one can thrive, shutting out and shutting down men who actively threaten women. Keeping our shared herstory alive.</p>
<p>I would <em>love</em> to be a female separatist one day, <em>especially</em> a lesbian separatist (where the focus is especially on lesbians and bisexual women and the unique challenges they face). And while all people are ultimately individuals and should be judged on their individual merits, I cannot deny what I have seen with my own eyes, and it would be <em>especially</em> amiss as an autistic person to deny the patterns I've witnessed my whole life. Living in a world without the constant pressure to be pretty and formless for the pleasure and comfort of men. Living in a world where I am not constantly harassed by my brothers and male peers and told to suck it up and smile and stay silent because "boys will be boys" and "they were joking anyways". Living in a world where I am not constantly told that I am inferior because of the sequences of DNA that permeate every cell in my body, the skin shown to the outside world ensuring that my body can keep the energy needed to survive, the organs I possess that are capable of producing <em>life</em>.</p>
<p>My first inclination is that I would die to be in this world. But almost all of the female separatists I have encountered are either socialists or full-blown communists, ardent anti-individualists since it stops them from collectivizing everyone into the boxes of the Oppressor and Oppressed. I am an agorist, a libertarian, the <em>antithesis</em> of what they believe should be done with a society. And yet, I fit in perfectly: if you want to make the government wither away, you make it utterly irrelevant. Extrapolated, if you want men to leave you alone, you make them irrelevant. These women want to separate from men to escape from the violent force that shapes every moment of our lives, and yet to step into the conformist communism some of them want is to just reinstate the same force under a different name.</p>
<p>So what of libertarian separatism, then? Surely a libertarian man would know that force is immoral, and would refrain from engaging in the same destructive behaviors that have led to a desire for female separatism. It wouldn’t make me sexually attracted to them any more, but it would be a peaceful coexistence. But then the pool of potential people to form a community after the fact grows multitudes smaller, for the percentage of the population that believes in liberty and self-ownership is far less than the half of the planet that is female. A completely untenable position. And so long as a person does not infringe on another person’s rights to life, liberty, and property, they would be compatible with my standards for a peer no matter what label they took up, making the arbitrary division of separatism useless and counterproductive.</p>
<p>And women are perfectly capable of being abusive and toxic in their own ways, and separatism so easily breeds toxic echo chambers that could devolve into full-blown cults a la the Moonies.</p>
<p>So I will exercise my right to association and disassociation as I will. I will not tolerate men who expect me to act as figurepieces in their grand games of sexual pursuit or who see me as lesser purely for my biological construction, and I will not accept the rule of those who would impose their own destructive and totalitarian authority on me.</p>
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<h1>So I guess I'm gender-critical now</h1>
<p>published: 2019-05-23</p>
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<p>I am biologically female.</p>
<p>That's not hate speech. I was born female. I have female genitals. Had I been born a male, my parents would have had me circumcised, but instead I was a girl, so I was spared for the time being. I was raised female, with all the emotional trappings and socialization and enforced femininity that comes as such. I grew up with the societal expectation that I would get married to a man and have children and live a standard suburban life, an expectation that the vast majority of people in my life still operate under despite being quite vocal in recent years that I have no intention of reproducing.</p>
<p>At the end of 2014, after my first girlfriend cheated on me (which I don't want to elaborate on), I came out as bisexual to my parents and slowly my friends (at the time). Starting the summer of 2016, as the sudden fluxes of puberty settled into something resembling the rhythm of womanhood and my dysphoria flared up in response, I toyed with the idea of being nonbinary.</p>
<p>Labels are not intended to be permanent once first applied. Not to political positions, or religious affiliation, or things like gender or sexuality. Labels are for accurately describing experiences. One's loyalty should be to reflecting the truth of themselves, not clinging to labels as if they were the last lifeboats leaving the Titanic. If that means changing the labels one uses as shorthand for all the intricacies of themselves, then so be it.</p>
<p>As my time at college draws to a close, I've been doing a lot of self-reflection. Who I am, where I want to go on life. And as it turns out, I'm... not attracted to men. All the men I've ever been attracted to have been fictional, far out of my social standing, or held power over me in some capacity. Either they had no capacity to actually hurt me, or they did, and my subconscous mind thought that, if I got close to them, I would somehow be "spared" from whatever danger it was picking up on. Not actual attraction, but a defense mechanism. Hardly something that could <em>ever</em> blossom into a healthy relationship.</p>
<p>Even to one not knee-deep in the clusterfuck that is the postmodern gender theory sphere, it's obvious that a woman exclusively attracted to other women is called a... lesbian.</p>
<p>An admission to which one might respond, "but what about fem-aligned nonbinary people? You can't tell what gender someone is by looking at them! And what about women who look like men?" To which I would respond, I am not attracted to male genitals. I am not attracted to the male physiology. A masculine woman's presentation will always have that undertone of womanness underneath it, which makes it special, <em>what I'm attracted to</em>, different from a masculine man or any other kind of man. (And there's a whole discourse on biological men who identify as female and are attracted to women and how lesbians should feel about <em>that</em>, and how trans activist rhetoric can get kind of rapey at times concerning this... but that's a post for another day.)</p>
<p>And, as it turns out, I'm not nonbinary either. Because the idea of "nonbinary" genders has <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200407181140/https://pinifera.tumblr.com/post/183924925858/hey-i-read-soemthing-abt-u-saying-nobinary">been historically used to oppress gender-non-conforming people</a>, and given that there is no definite meaning of what a nonbinary person transitioning would entail, it's kind of a... useless designation. Not to mention that it implies that one could simply "identify" in or out of sex-based oppression: I can barely get the people in my college to address me with they/them pronouns, and they're supposed to be super liberal and accepting about that kind of stuff! Do you <em>really</em> think that some random attacker on the street prowling for his next rape victim is going to care about what a pronoun pin says? I look like a female. I sound like a female. Everything about me screams "female", and no amount of "identifying" as something other than female is going to change biological reality.</p>
<p>Societal reasons aren't enough to get me to stop being something. If that were true, you'd still be reading this on a WordPress blog, and I'd have announced that this post went up via Twitter. As for personal reasons... I am still dysphoric. I still have dreams where I have a male body. But now I realize that most of it was because of these societal expectations that I so heavily resent being bound with. The technology side of the sphere on the internet that I inhabit (or used to inhabit, anyway) is heavily male-dominated. Back during the summer of 2018, when I was struggling through anhedonia, I spent a lot of time on chans, where the prevailing culture towards women is generally "tits or GTFO". And society in general, where I'm "too weak" or "too emotional" or "too-lighthearted". Being a man on the internet afforded me status, greater mobility, a greater likelihood of being <em>taken seriously</em>. And despite whatever book titles I use, I've never been great at the whole duality of spirit thing, so my brain took my mental reality and tried to apply it to my physical reality as well. And then, as a result, dysphoria.</p>
<p>This isn't to say that I'm a radfem now. A lot of radical feminist rhetoric centers around women and men being two different social classes, collectivizing everyone and their experiences based on their biological sex. There are times when this is <em>greatly</em> useful, like examining religion's misogynistic influence on culture. But I believe in individual rights over all. They are <em>extremely rare</em>, few and far between, but there are genuinely good men in this world. And innocent individuals, no matter if they're male or female, should not have to suffer for the sins of the larger group that they did not personally commit.</p>
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<h1>A New Masthead</h1>
<p>published: 2019-11-19</p>
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<p><a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, Sorrowful Laika">Ever so recently</a>, <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity">everywhere given advice</a> to not base myself on a sense of melancholy, to avoid &quot;making sadness my aesthetic&quot;, to make it harder for one to relearn oneself and their worth outside of the borders of the Suffering Country they've unwittingly found themselves in exile from the rest of the world in.</p>
<p>One would be forgiven for thinking that all I ever focused on was the melancholy, that I had sacrificed myself on its altar for one last chance at appeasing the muses enough to refill the well of creative passion. And one would also be forgiven for thinking that I had failed somehow, that I had turned the muses against me forever, leaving the corpse of their once-favorite bird to rot inside the golden cage.</p>
<p>But, as much as I would like to be- as much as I have prepared to be as a coping mechanism- I am no nihilist. The natural world, despite staring down imminent destruction and <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190808113927/https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/n1x-hello-from-the-wired">total and complete technological takeover</a> and the slavery to the Wired inherent, still holds on to life, still clings to a sliver of a hope that it will not only survive its current trials and tribulations but <em>thrive</em> through them. And despite the constant voices of my surroundings entreating me to give up, that there is nothing left and that through my indecision I have dug a breathing grave which I lie in, there still remains a part of me, tumbling into the fiery tempest, arm outstretched to the sky, yelling with the softest voice- the <em>loudest</em> I possibly can-</p>
<p><em>Help me, please.</em></p>
<p>And it is a storm that comes and knocks everything down, that destroys everything in its path- <em>nearly</em> everything, for if my dreams were to be believed, the pillar of a fridge would always survive, white or gray, poking its head over the wreckage like a monument to survival. It is a storm that singes every edge I have, severs any connections to the heavens I might have ever had, leaves me barely breathing, just barely alive at the end.</p>
<p>But instead of the melancholy, the worship of the destruction, I instead find the strength to lift my head and watch the sunrise after with my weary eyes. The peek of the sun over the horizon as it casts its golden glow over the wreckage, the chaotic nest of a bird newly free from the cage, the assurance that the world has <em>not</em> ended, that there is still more life to be had. That <em>whatever the hell</em> just happened, Life was still more powerful, Life still prevailed.</p>
<p>And that is what I always stretch my hands out for, always yearn to grasp. The sudden paradoxical feelings of fragility and strength together. A brand new world with none of the trappings of the old. And once the bird's wings heal, they'll flap once, twice, and then back into the air where the beast belongs.</p>
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<h1>A World Just Beyond My Grasp</h1>
<p>published: 2019-11-09</p>
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<p>Late this morning, I ran away from home with little more than my purse and what I could shove into my backpack. I left behind my stash of music (which I kept forgetting to copy to my new laptop from my broken one) and the bulk of my video game collection and nearly all my clothes, all the things I have spent nineteen years collecting and hoarding that weren't washed away in the flood. All of my money, save the little cash that remains in my purse, is in the hands of my parents.</p>
<p>None of it feels real. My brain feels like, at any moment, I'll be back at home, sitting on my bed, confined in my room like I've been for the past five months. Slowly going crazy, losing touch with the outside world, with the <em>real</em> world. Constantly being entreated to give myself to the Spectacle, to reduce the depth of my mind to merely wondering what the next meal is and what game I'll waste the evening playing: to whatever is easiest for my jailers to manage.</p>
<p>I'm finally outside <a href="../../../poetry/g/the-golden-cage.txt">the golden cage</a>, and the world outside that I'd managed to convince myself wasn't real <em>is</em> real, and it's so wide and yet so restricting all at once.</p>
<p>Managed to convince <em>most</em> of myself, for some spark of <a href="../../../poetry/f/firebrand.txt">whatever the hell</a> I felt past January <a href="../september/sign-of-life.html">still burns within</a>.</p>
<p>And whatever that spark is must have been enough, for I bit the bullet and walked for an hour to the local library. I jayran across busy highways. I passed by the trail on which I had a mental breakdown one day in gym class, abusive gym teacher yelling at me to go faster, even though my legs were stone and my bike was two creaks away from collapsing, so close to home and yet so far away, always so far away. I took the long way, the way my phone told me to go, and then realized upon seeing one of the local hotels that there was a shortcut waiting for me all along.</p>
<p>There are two little kids running around the library. A slightly older girl is brave enough to walk around in public with a bunny-ears headband and an unironic Minions jacket. At the table next to mine is an overweight man with a Vietnam Veteran hat on gambling away his money on a shitty Chromebook that looks like it was stolen from the high school. Coughs boom from the downstairs bathroom as if they were heralds of an oncoming earthquake, even though we don't get earthquakes here in God's Asscrack, Minnesota.</p>
<p>On the walk home from college, late at night long after the sun had gone to sleep, passing by the chapel on the way to the dorms. I turn to my left, and I see the highway sloping down the hill. A million glittering lights, drivers that I will never meet, whose paths will only cross mine in this one sliver of time and then never again. And framing the road on both sides is a forest that spans as far as the eye can see. A veritable force field- a modern moat to protect the campus from the outside world.</p>
<p>The wind spoke to me. Memories of <a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, Sorrowful Laika">a past life</a>, messengers shouting of a future one just on the horizon.</p>
<p>I stood at the uncharted edge of the frontier to a secret world, a new world, a free world. I could taste it on the frost on my lips, feel it in the way my lungs constricted and screamed for air that wasn't full of winter's knives, in the way the wind fluttered through my unzipped coat.</p>
<p>At that moment, I could have turned my back on everything and disappeared under cover of darkness.</p>
<p>But I didn't. I returned to my dorm and fell asleep under warm covers. And, come morning, I went to my classes just as I was expected to.</p>
<p>Intellectually, I know I could turn my back on the golden cage now and never return home. I'm of the legal age: my jailers couldn't legally force me to return. I can stretch my fingers out and feel the borders between the golden cage's false conception of &quot;world&quot; and the secret world growing thin. I could rip the Wizard's curtains to shreds and watch as everything I worried about in the cage becomes <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200407184012/https://crimethinc.com/2000/09/11/there-is-a-secret-world-concealed-within-this-one">trivial and irrelevant and ridiculous</a> against the sheer mass of Life itself.</p>
<p>I would give up everything not in that backpack for a one-way ticket to that world in a heartbeat.</p>
<p>But what hurts more than the winter frost, what hurts more than the feeling of sweat in every crack in my skin taunting me closer to sensory overload- is that I <em>know</em> <a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, tell Rufi I'm not coming home.">my fingers will scab over</a>, and I will lose the sacred touch of a world where I am my own, and I will return to the golden cage at end of day. I will return to a world where the Spectacle is king, where my body is not my own, trading my dignity for one more day of a warm bed at night.</p>
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<h1>Possession</h1>
<p>published: 2019-11-13</p>
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<p>Not the demonic kind, mind you- but the kind that occurs when you own something, when something is in your <em>possession</em>. Whether tangible or digital, if I can hold it in my hands in some form, theoretically it is <em>mine</em>.</p>
<p>This morning, right after breakfast, my mom entreated me to go sorting through another one of the bins we <em>still</em> haven't completely unpacked from our move almost three years ago. Lots of assorted doodads I'd forgotten about, purses that went directly into the donate pile, crafts that accepted their demise in the bottom of the new box to send to storage. A crumpled and stained letter from my childhood, from a boy that I used to know, instantly opened without even an opportunity to express my discomfort with her going through my correspondence.</p>
<p>Mom unwraps an oblong object in a dirty and faded pillowcase. She immediately tosses the pillowcase over her shoulder, landing at the base of the laundry room door. The object, it turns out, is a ceramic statuette of a girl who could be mistaken for Strawberry Shortcake's blue twin separated at birth.</p>
<p>"Keep or donate?" she asks me.</p>
<p>I shrug my shoulders. More baby stuff from a decade ago, back when I would have happily let Mom decorate my room however she pleased. "Donate."</p>
<p>"No, we're keeping this," she immediately chirps back, her voice now tinged with a hint of annoyance that my tastes in decor have changed. "This belonged to my grandmother. It's going straight to the hutch."</p>
<p>And she sets the object aside, neither in the packing box nor in the donate pile.</p>
<p>It makes no sense. Presumably she gave the statuette to <em>me</em>, and she attributes the object to <em>my</em> pile of unpacked boxes, so it should be <em>my</em> possession to do with or dispose of as I please- and yet, the moment I did something she didn't like to it, she took it back anyway. So was it never mine to begin with? Just imposed on me, my fault for not putting it in my room and thus contributing to the pile of boxes in what should be the second living room?</p>
<p>If it had been up to me, everything would have either gone to donation or been sold off. <a href="./other-world.html">I already have all the possessions I want.</a></p>
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<p>My phone, even though it is in my possession as it sits on the desk next to me, is not my <em>possession</em>.</p>
<p>I can hold it in my hand, but I cannot use it any way I please: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200408153839/https://www.reddit.com/r/androidroot/comments/99zost/why_is_the_usa_version_of_the_samsung_galaxy_s9s9/">the bootloader is locked</a>, and thus it is unrootable. And unlike the phones I've had in the past, where there was only a gentle reminder that a new software update was available and said reminder could be disabled by freezing the system update app, my phone will <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200408153909/https://www.theandroidsoul.com/samsung-will-force-you-to-download-updates-after-postponing-for-a-maximum-of-10-times/">force an update after denying it for too long</a>.</p>
<p>And I've fantasized about downgrading to a flip phone for a long time, both for the privacy benefits of not dealing with Apple's or Google's incessant tracking baked into the core of the phone, and for the inability to install "modern" apps staving off <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200408153941/https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/23/smartphone-vs-flip-phone">phone addiction</a>. But my parents would never allow me to do so, not even if I asked in the most polite manner possible, for they've "spent too much money on it" in true <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200408154027/https://youarenotsosmart.com/2011/03/25/the-sunk-cost-fallacy/">sunk-cost</a> fashion, even though I never wanted a smartphone in the first place. I could buy a cheap one off eBay behind their backs, but I wouldn't be allowed to connect it to the phone plan, so it would sit useless without phone service to make it functional.</p>
<p>And one day, when I make my break and run free and get a place to call all my own, my phone will <em>still</em> not be my own, for it's locked into the Verizon network. My parents would still be within their "rights" to track the phone's location, or remotely lock it or wipe it and make it useless. I wouldn't be able to transfer it to a carrier of my choice, one with a far more cheaper monthly bill.</p>
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<p>And am <em>I myself</em> even my own possession?</p>
<p>Do I own my emotions? For even the slighest amount of displeasure immediately gets labeled as boiling rage, an incongruent response to one's surroundings- even though if <em>you</em> were eating a meal in silence, and then someone waltzed in blasting shitty music through the phone in their back pocket, you'd be a little silently annoyed too.</p>
<blockquote>
<a href="../../../books.html#tdom" title="The Duality of Mankind, chapter 14">"I have many emotions," Lex cut in, rolling his eyes, one hand pushing on the bathroom door to keep it open. "Irritated, upset, moody, fatigued, annoyed, pissed, disgruntled, invalidated. To call them all 'grumpy' would be a disservice to the English language and an insult to myself."</a>
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<p>Do I own my movements? For everywhere I go, I have to carry the phone around so I can be "reached" in case of emergency, even though my parents, and their parents, and their parents before them were allowed to explore without the watchful eye of technology over them at all times. And everywhere I go, I must always keep my parents informed of- the rare moments when I am allowed to wander without the fear of a report afterward, it is only because they failed to ask or simply never noticed in the first place.</p>
<p>Do I own my body? For I <em>never</em> consent to having my photo taken, much less posted on Facebook, and yet both of my parents get indignant when I demand that they stop feeding my facial data to Facebook. I motion to opt out of holiday photos, knowing that they'll get plastered everywhere on the internet, and then my parents threaten to take away everything that matters to me in response- and even if they <em>did</em>, they'd still force me into the picture. Always a smiling doll for others' visual pleasure, never my own. And then they joke about mounting cameras everywhere to catch who leaves empty buckets of ice cream in the freezers or wiretaps in my room to listen in on the few words I utter in a former safe place and even going so far to remove all the bedroom doors when we don't come to dinner as quickly as they'd like (even though, most of the time, I genuinely didn't hear them yell because I was listening to music), and I scream that <em>I do not consent</em> to the invasion of privacy and that I'm moving out given the first opportunity, and they simply laugh.</p>
<p>They laugh and proclaim that I cannot afford to move out, that I will never be able to afford to move out. There is no escape from the golden cage. There is simply nothing to be done for money in this dead town, save a janitor position that won't be enough to cover rent (not for a long while, anyway). And I cannot flee to the city of my grandmother, or into the arms of a well-meaning but disconscious-of-privacy-or-anything-else-that-I-care-about friend- they simply won't allow it. They'd just leverage the law to capture me and bring me back to the golden cage once again.</p>
<p>They laugh, for, in their eyes, I am their possession.</p>
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<h1>Cameras</h1>
<p>published: 2019-10-03</p>
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<p>The funny thing about elucidation is that everywhere you once thought safe is no longer so.</p>
<p>For our first example, take my local park. I went on a walk, not too far from my house (probably the only place I could get away from home without breaking out in a sweat, one-way ticket to sensory meltdown) and sat down in the shaded pavilion, where sat three rows of picnic tables.</p>
<p><i>This area is under surveillance,</i> a sign mounted high up inside the roof greeted me. And, sure enough, on either side of the roof were two black glassy boxes pointed straight at me. And surely the eyes of the state are no better than my parents', and <i>those</i> certainly aren't conducive for writing, so I picked myself up (for luckily I'd seen the cameras before unpacking my stuff to work) and continued walking.</p>
<p>The shattered remnants of a pen rest farther down the path, little shards of neon yellow plastic. One can't go a single step without stepping on a strip of asphalt darker than the rest, hasty fix for cracks that just shone right back through anyway.</p>
<p>I cracked open my window earlier, and a burning scent filled my room. A disused furnace, sleeping dragon awoken from slumber and put back to work despite its groggy mind. And the same cold that beckoned a year ago crept back in, calling, whispering of the same things as it had a year ago back in college: to go outside and see what I could of the world, lest I rot to nothing in my room and discovered that I had survived everything thrown at me so far only to languish and give up and turn to dust.</p>
<p>Which my mother would have probably liked, since it would mean more material to sacrifice to her pet hedgehogs as bedding. The same fate as my old stack of art paper, a few unfinished journals, hasty heartfelt notes. Gods only know what else has been condemned to a fate of shit.</p>
<p>Next to the park is an "advanced wellness system", which is a pretentious name for what one would get if a gym aficionado was put in charge of designing a playground without having ever actually met a single kid in their life. Three stairs, two cots-but-made-of-metal, the cycling part of a bike. Plenty of pull-up stations. Everything made out of the same garish colors and burn-your-skin-off-in-the-summer metals as the actual playground.</p>
<p>No visible cameras in sight, but no protection from the rain, either.</p>
<p>You give up safety in exchange for freedom. Except, at the park, it's a false sense of safety, for it's not like, if anybody came out of the cars idling in the parking lot while I was there and attacked me, police would suddenly start pouring out of the cameras and arrest my assaulters.</p>
<p>And for our second example, you give up the safety of not having to personally worry about financing your server and personally securing it for the freedom of not having to answer to anybody: not a corporate overlord like Google or Facebook, not a slackoff server admin who refuses to kick out repeat abusers of other users, not an easily-offended community when they come for you with their pitchforks and torches. There are other ways to be hurt when the day comes: the classic DDoS attack, mass reporting to a VPS provider, slander on social media where the search engines are likely to pick up on it. Even on <a href="../june/second-class-citizens.html">ZeroNet</a>, one isn't completely “safe”, as there's still the infinitely small chance of the Bitcoin private key of your zite being stolen, or a massive and widely-used blocklist adding your zite or user ID for the crime of having a wrong opinion.</p>
<p>But the cameras remain, and will remain so long as corporatism reigns and the NSA has its sticky fingers in everything. Autumn comes, but the chilling effect remains no matter the season.</p>
<p>For our third example, we'll turn the cameras around, and focus on... me. Or, rather, the places I live.</p>
<p>My friend's house is <i>covered</i> in Amazon Alexas and Google Homes. Every device has voice controls turned on. Always listening, always reporting everything to their respective corporations. And my mother- my <i>mother</i>, of all people- has made fun of them for this, for consenting to the auditory cameras, but they just shrug it off every time.</p>
<p>And the air grows frigid around us. Where once sparks flew and we spent hours thinking they were only mere minutes between us, the sparks go out, and I count the minutes until we go home, feigning a smile and going through the same routines in Minecraft for the millionth time.</p>
<p>At home- or the place I spend most of my time in, for <i>true home</i> is lost to me forever- the surveillance is less thick. No Alexas disgrace the air, but everyone except for me is apparently too lazy to use their device keyboards, opting for voice dictation instead. Asking Siri the most ridiculous questions for the sole purpose of making me miffed, laughing to themselves when I refuse to consent to Apple analyzing whatever noises I make and leave the room.</p>
<p>But something more sinister is lurking beneath the surface. I... I can't seem to concentrate in the confines of my home anymore. The first third of this post was drafted at the park, and these last two seem to be some mere moment of respite, some sweet relief. I don't know if it's a psychic attack, willing or not, or my subconscious forcing me out of a place I swore I'd be out of forever just a year ago, or something else...</p>
<p>But I keep all my devices encrypted, full disk whenever possible, and I wipe and reinstall everything regularly, for I'll be damned if the cameras become real. Even if this is the only way to resist the golden cage, in such a seemingly insignificant area, I keep it close to my heart.</p>
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<h1>Neurodiversity (ROOPHLOCH 2019)</h1>
<p>published: 2019-09-05</p>
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<p>Call this <a href="gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7esolderpunk/phlog/announcing-roophloch-2019.txt">ROOPHLOCH</a>, or something like it, for I sit here alone in my backyard on a humid and buggy day. The world is almost imperceptibly different today than it was yesterday. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200407182959/https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/gaming/sans-from-undertale-joins-smash-bros-ultimate-as-a-mii-fighter-costume/ar-AAGOro2">Sans is in Smash</a>, and school has started (which makes the house more quiet than I can handle), and apparently I've started lifting every day. An alternate timeline where everything is not quite right, and yet a little bit better every day.</p>
<p>Yesterday, while sitting in the same spot under a tree and pretending there wasn't a Direct going on, I read an article titled <a href="https://spectator.us/dangers-neurodiversity-cure-autism/">"The Dangers of 'Neurodiversity'"</a>, which struck a particular nerve. In the article, the author points out that, despite the neurodiversity movement's insistence that autistic people are not disabled but "differently abled", it is the fact that he is autistic and not his environment which has gotten him fired from jobs for behavior problems over twenty times and severely impacted his social and motor skills. The main crux of his argument is that the existence of "high-functioning" autistic people does not and should not prevent a search for the cure to autism, and that identity politics actively harms "low-functioning" autistic people whose disability greatly impacts their ability to function in mainstream society.</p>
<p>I have mixed feelings about this. In my elementary school years, I was pathologized, constantly pulled out of classes and locked in a room where I would have to do kindergarten-level reading to a school official who didn't give a damn about whether I was bored or frustrated with the banality of the work she gave me. Cards with pictures of simple nouns, like "apple", and the word underneath, made to read each one- yes! I know it's an apple! When the cards ran out, I was forced to go into "gifted education", where, instead of getting to make rubber band cars and catapults with the rest of my grade in science class, I and several other kids cramped ourselves into a repurposed storage closet and analyzed short shories at the behest of an underpaid teacher- and never received any academic rewards, like better grades, for doing so. The IEP which was supposed to protect me and help me grow into a productive member of society just like my peers only isolated me from them. If the issue is a lack of socializing, why would you separate a child from the peers they were supposed to be socializing with?</p>
<p>Given the existence of a cure, my parents almost certainly would have given doctors permission to irrevocably alter my brain chemistry without my consent, essentially killing one child in exchange for a lower-maintenance replacement.</p>
<p>Which future do you choose? One where the very essence of your soul is up for your parents to mold and replace at will like a computer, or one where the fact of the world being designed around a mindset that is fundamentally exhausting for you to mask yourself as for extended periods of time threatens to essentially condemn you to the golden cage of your parents' care for eternity?</p>
<p>One might look at a child who "soils themselves, wreak havoc, and breaks things", as the article puts it, a child who will grow up into an adult who does those very same things, and agree that this child needs a cure. "Low-functioning" individuals who might want a cure often cannot advocate for themselves because of the very same disability they need cured, which leads to a strange sort of confirmation bias. But how "low-functioning" is too low? Should a "high-functioning" person who might have a few quirks but otherwise can take care of themselves and live a fulfilling life be forced to take a cure at the behest of their employer?</p>
<p>Who gets to draw that line? The parents? The State? The disabled individuals themselves?</p>
<p><i>Where</i> do we draw the line?</p>
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<h1>Sign of Life</h1>
<p>published: 2019-09-29</p>
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<p>I feel as though I am waking up after a long sleep. Cradled by the undercurrents- not a sudden and fierce unleashing of power, like Ceuta bursting out from her tomb, but something more subdued, more silent. A trawl through the tombs instead, torch in amnesic hand, shards of memories slowly bubbling back to the surface as my eyes gaze on the carvings on the ancient hallways I pass by. Times past, long since passed, times where <a href="../../../flashfiction/e/erin.html">I sang in the sun and rolled in the grass. Times where the words flowed from my fingers as gracefully as a spider building its web.</a> But now everything is covered in webs, gray as silk, sparkling in the sparse flickering light.</p>
<p><em>Returning home, are you? I never thought I’d see the day...</em></p>
<p><em>Welcome home, Vane Vander.</em></p>
<p>I feel as though, in the vast wilderness of my being, some part of me has died in order to survive. The forest has been razed, burnt to the ground. And although I know it will grow back, and it will bloom in abundance as it once did in full defiance of all I have gone through, it will never grow back the same.</p>
<p>I have scorched myself in the flame of my passion, and now, instead of the overgrown bush that reached in a million directions and tangled itself in its intricacies, I am the little sprout poking its head out from the ashes, free to see the sun through the frames of the tree branches sans leaves lost in the blaze.</p>
<p>One can only grow up from here.</p>
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<p><a href="../../../books/tyia.epub" title="Three Years In Absentia, a premonition ignored">And now I stand at the precipice of yet another fleeing</a>, but this time, I am not seeking refuge: I have my own server, my own website, my own domain. I have backdoors (in the "way out" sense, not the "security hole" sense) in ZeroNet and Tor and I2P. I am not dependent on the goodwill of anyone anymore, except for those who I have paid for their services, and they care little what I do so long as they receive their pennies at the end of the day.</p>
<p>Any time I join a community, it always ends up in my being abused in one way or another. Whether from full-blown psychological warfare to a six-page essay in response to a throwaway comment to the common "it's just banter, bro", it always happens. Always it's one rotten apple that's allowed to fester, spoiling the whole bunch.</p>
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<p>Community, as an ideal, stands in opposition to individuality, because it requires in the reining in of the unique for a supposed greater whole. I recognize no greater whole to whom I am willing to give such power, so I have no interest in community.</p>
<p>- Apio Ludd, <i>I Want Friends, Not Community</i></p>
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<p>So I come to the mouth of the tomb. The air of the world kisses my face for the first time in what feels like forever. The sky is overcast. It is slightly chilly out, the start of October, the true end of summer. The unshaven hairs on my arms stand up a little, and I smile at the thought that, even if I don’t quite remember what to do from here on out, some part of me knows.</p>
<p>Some part of me will always know, I guess.</p>
<p>I ascend the last few stairs and step out of the cave. A familiar song fills my ears, or perhaps "bundle of melodic noises" would be a better description, for it carries no discernable melody. And yet, if any one of the noises were to disappear, the whole thing would fall apart.</p>
<p>It sings of something lurking beneath the surface. Something from days forgotten redicovered anew.</p>
<p>A friend, a lover.</p>
<p>A poet, a brother.</p>
<p>Long live Vane Vander, indeed.</p>
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<h1>Give Me Your Story</h1>
<p>published: 2020-04-04</p>
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<p>Imagine, if you will, a <a href="https://archive.vn/x5NiF">MOGAI</a> teenager infected with Tumblr Syndrome, blog full of nothing but reblogs of other people. Sick with <a href="../../2019/august/consumption.html">consumption</a>, not the historical kind but the <a href="../february/consumeproduct.html">modern kind</a>, personality nothing but <del>fandoms</del> worshipping corporate creations. Scattered between movie GIFs are desperate attempts to co-opt genuine LGBT oppression with the sexuality or <a href="../../2019/may/gender-critical.html">gender of the week</a>, pride flags like someone put on a blindfold and threw darts at a color wheel set to random. Just as devoid of a working sense of color theory as they are of a coherent sense of self outside the internet, outside the Cathedral of Tumblr Zoomer Culture.</p>
<p>I only paint this picture so that those who have experienced the kind of person illustrated will instantly know what I mean by "give me your toes". Vague and nonsensical non-threats pointed at anyone who dares to blaspheme or transgress against their Cathedral like "pee your pants" or "I'm revoking your kneecap privileges", non-threats because the standard "kill yourself" has lost its edge (and is <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200405011157/https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tell-someone-to-kill-themselves-and-you-could-end_b_5945800ce4b0940f84fe2f19">also illegal</a>). Usually these are accompanied by a poorly-photoshopped image of a celebrity or fictional character holding a gun and pointing it at the viewer.</p>
<p>It is with this same sense of semi-ironic desperation that I find myself more and more pointing the fictional gun at the video game collection on my bookshelf.</p>
<p>When I was about ten or so, I got a copy of <i>The Legendary Starfy</i> for the DS. For those who've never played it, it's a platformer about a little starfish dude (the titular Starfy) who gets woken up one morning by an alien rabbit dude crashing through his roof, and then the two go romp around the underwater world trying to find the rabbit dude's memories. Apparently it's the first game in a <a href="https://tcrf.net/Category:Legendary_Starfy_series">four-part series</a> that was originally for the Gameboy Advance, but only the first one was ever translated to English and remade. Since, at the time, I was only allowed to play handheld games in the mornings or during car rides, I spent almost every moment I had to take a car ride struggling through the levels in small snatches here and there. I always got stuck on the sunken pirate ship, trying to push a button and then pass through a gate before time ran out, and only rarely did I ever get past it.</p>
<p>But I <i>did</i> get past it: I must have, because I remember doing the final boss battle. Or, rather, I remember <i>failing</i> the final boss battle in the back seat of my grandma's van and giving up and never touching the game again.</p>
<p>To this day, I still have not completed the game. Not that I could, since, while writing this post, I went to pop it in and see how long it's been sitting unfinished- and apparently the cartridge is missing. Most likely one of my brothers "borrowed" it like I'm apt to let them do when I'm in my better moods and managed to lose it.</p>
<p>There are lots of other games that I have worked my way through with virtual sweat and real tears and then had to give up because the final boss battle (or some other far-down level) was too tricky for my fingers:</p>
<ul>
<li><i>Code Name S.T.E.A.M.</i>, a turn-based shooter about an alien invasion in some alternate universe where steampunk went worldwide, which truthfully I only bothered pirating and playing because my <del>waifu</del> Smash main happened to be a playable character. Default Fortnite Man just isn't appealing enough on his own.</li>
<li><i>Charlotte's Web</i>, a platformer and also the very first video game I got for the DS. There are several parts in the early levels where one has to sneak past the farmer, hiding behind boxes and tractors. If Wilbur gets seen and the farmer catches up to him, the poor pig makes a tortured face and the screen quickly goes black, which likely contributed a lot of my early nightmares about being murdered. (At least, that's what I remember happening. This timeline might be different.) I got stuck somewhere right before the Templeton levels. I have a cheat program installed on my 3DS which could give me infinite health (which really wouldn't help with the levels where you parkour to avoid falling into a barn's endless abyss), but replaying through all the levels brings back frantic memories of elementary school that I'd rather stay buried.</li>
<li><i>Scribblenauts</i>, yet <i>another</i> platformer for the DS (can you sense a pattern here?) that I only truly remember in hazy memories of a certain former friend's house during sleepovers. I borrowed her DSi (which was essentially the same as a DS, but this time with cameras and a funky camera app) and plowed through the sequel as far as I could in the wee hours of the morning, doing my best with everyone else not to wake up the host's parents. And I beat that one! But not this one. Because this one doesn't understand the concept of adjectives.</li>
<li><i>Xenoblade Chronicles</i>.</li>
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<p>Oh dear, good old Xenoblade. I am going absolutely batshit insane from the government-inforced COVID-19 home quarantine, and this game, which I have poured the last two months into (or, at least, sixty hours for one hour a day) has pushed me to the limits of insanity these past two weeks.</p>
<p>But no more! Because I quit today. And I was at- you guessed it- the final boss battle.</p>
<p>There was absolutely no way I could have continued, even if I had wanted to. Where I started today, I was at the final point in the game where one could save (inside the interior of Prison Island). Past that is a tough boss battle, which halts halfway-through to a cutscene, and then the same boss regains all of his health and you have to try to kill him <i>again</i>. And then another cutscene, and you get sent off to space, which isn't <i>really</i> space but apparently just a simulation. There are no edges or any kind of borders outlining the walkway between teleportation points, just a glowing line connecting said points, so theoretically you could just walk in a single direction forever (if you don't fall out of the universe, that is; I didn't try). You walk past every planet, and by every planet, you have to fight a replica of (nearly) <i>every major boss in the game so far</i>. And after <i>those</i>, another cutscene, and then the fight where the god of the world kills your entire party in fifteen seconds flat. Supposedly, according to the wiki, after that fight is <i>another</i>, even harder, final <i>final</i> boss battle.</p>
<p>But for every other boss battle in the game, if you lost, you were just revived and teleported to the last landmark you passed by. You had the option of exploring the surrounding lands and grinding until you got strong enough to survive the battle, or even teleporting to other lands where there were shops with specific equipment or a furnace to craft gems to boost one's stats. If you got frustrated, you could save right where you were and quit for the day and come back the next right where you left off.</p>
<p>This exemplifies the two major problems I have with modern story-based (as opposed to competitive) games: that you can't save before the final boss battle, and that grinding is necessary to advance in the storyline.</p>
<p>As far as I know, there is no technical reason why Shulk and friends aren't allowed to save before they go kick Zanza's ass. It's not for memory limitations, as the space simulation requires far less objects in view than every other battle: a few spheres are far less demanding for the Wii's admittedly pitiful hardware to render than a snowy mountainside with lots of jagged edges (Mt. Valak) or the inside-and-out of a fortress with plenty of walls and doors and windows (Galahad Fortress) or the entirety of a small village (Colony 9). It's not for entities, as there are only the party and Zanza there (and Xenoblade just respawns everything in an area upon loading a save, anyway). And Dunban's insistence in Prison Island that "there is no turning back from this point" or however he worded it isn't a valid excuse either because, for example, most of the modern <i>Fire Emblem</i> games allow saving <i>right before</i> said final boss battle (with the exception of <i>Fates</i>, which is a burning dumpster fire of its own, and <i>Three Houses</i>, which I don't know anything about gameplay-wise because I refuse to play it).</p>
<p>The player, shocking as this might be, has a life <i>outside</i> your game, developers. You need to respect that they might not have the time to commit to a several-hour-long stretch without saving. <i>Especially</i> if it's a console game. Do you know how infuriating it would be to be an inch away from success and then suddenly have a power outage? What about adults with jobs? There were several instances for me where I thought I'd just play a bit before a work shift, and then end up frantically skipping crucial cutscenes to get to a savepoint faster. What about kids with homework and chores to do, which can't necessarily be planned out? The game needs to accomodate their schedules, not the other way around, or else they're simply not going to be able to (healthily) play it.</p>
<p>And this might just be the /r/StopGaming in me speaking, but I am <i>fucking sick and tired</i> of having to grind in games, of having to waste my time performing repetitive actions over and over and over again for absolutely nobody's material benefit. The first time, it was about fifteen hours in, stuck teleporting among levels in the ether mine in order to evade Xord's <del>ban</del>hammer. And then it was about forty hours in, repeatedly saving and loading in the same part in Agniratha again so that I could survive Gadolt and his megalasers for more than thirty seconds into the battle. And then it was fifty hours, and I was inside the Bionis' chest cavity, acting as cancer cells razing down everything in sight for a week so I could go make explode some woman who thought turning her son into a giant telepathic bird was a good way to become immortal.</p>
<p>In some alternate dimension where I did manage to finish the final boss fight, and thus the game, when I think about the positive things about the game, it's not going to be the frantic timing to every battle, or hearing the same catchphrases over and over again. It's going to be the content of the cutscenes. The framing, the shots, the <i>content</i>: you know, the <i>story</i>! I'm not in it for the fighting; I'm in it for the story! If I wanted to play a game where I beat shit up, I'd just drag one of my brothers into my room (where I have my consoles set up, since the house flooded <i>again</i>) and we'd play Smash together for a few hours.</p>
<p>I think story-based games should have an easy mode for people who value the story over the gameplay. Not skipping the battles altogether, since a lot of the story can surprisingly be conveyed through simple passive experience (the passivity of playing as opposed to the activeness of cutscenes), but easy so that one isn't spending weeks upon weeks grinding it out. If Xenoblade wasn't such a time suck with grinding in order to progress anywhere at all, I'd probably replay it again. But I won't, because I don't have the time. I'm not sacrificing sixty hours again to just be barred from collecting the payoff at the end. If you like the gameplay more and get your enjoyment from constantly fighting monsters, be my guest! But some of us just want to see Le Epic Anime Boy murder God and then move on with their day.</p>
<p>"But, Vane," I hear an eager strawman pipe up, "if you don't want to put in the effort, you should just watch a movie instead."</p>
<p>But movies don't have the same kind of natural immersion that games have. In Xenoblade, for instance, the cutscenes aren't pre-rendered. Whatever armor your party members wear in combat also shows up in the cutscenes. There was one instance I remember where my party was in Alcamoth, a stuffy imperial city full of futuristic technology, but since the last good armor drops had been in the Makna Forest region, my whole party was wearing hilariously out-of-style "tribal" outfits that made them stick out like sore thumbs against the pale pearlly sheen of everything. A few I had taken to the city's store and upgraded a few pieces of theirs, making even more nonsensical outfits.</p>
<p>Imagine you're a sheltered prince who is eager to meet the people who saved his sister's life, and then some buff dude walks in wearing a whole-ass headdress, and another dude with what looks like a metal crown put on upside-down tells you to your face that your rituals don't mean shit to him because he's a different species...</p>
<p>But I can't watch <i>Advent Children</i> and have Cloud or Kadaj wearing a funny hat the whole time but everything else the same. Not without serious video editing. And even then, it would never look quite right.</p>
<p>In movies, everything has to be prim and proper, and every facet of the experience has to be set in stone, the same for everyone. In games, developers can give the players some leeway. Reyn can walk into the royal audience chamber looking like a crackhead doing shitty (and possibly culturally insensitive) cosplay if I want him to, and by gods, Kallian will take him just as seriously as if he were wearing anything else.</p>
<p>"But what about a book?"</p>
<p>Books are slightly different. Most books sans movie adaptations don't have set illustrations for every single character and setting inside, giving the reader the freedom to imagine whatever they want within the loose confines of the author's descriptions- and even then, the reader can just ignore these at their peril.</p>
<p>Books have serious advantages, I will concede- no, I will loudly proclaim. For starters, you can bookmark a book <i>at any time</i>. Sure, there are optimal places to stop and quit for the night, like right at the first page of a new chapter, but unless you're reading on some incredibly restrictive electronic device, you can stop whenever and wherever. And books don't require your active participation, at least if you're not reading them for school. There is no such thing as grinding, stagnation- only progress, only forward through the pages so long as your brain can comprehend the words. (Academia, with its insistence that you constantly be highlighting and taking notes, ruins the immersion and the fun of books. But that's beside the point.) And if you get a paper copy, or a low-powered e-ink device, so long as the sun is shining bright enough to read, you don't have to fear a power outage blinking your effort away in a... blink of the eye.</p>
<p>Games don't translate well into books (or movies either, now that I think about it), but there are a few that have tried anyway, most notably a handful of the <i>Zelda</i> games as Americanized manga. (And what with Sonic and Pikachu up on the big screen, it's only a matter of time before Ninty gets hungry for money and poor old Link gets shoved up there too.) And while this example I've found to be superior to playing the actual games, it's uncertain whether this is because of the method of storytelling actually being superior to how the game presented it or because the <i>Zelda</i> games that were manga-ized I just didn't like playing because of their aging mechanics. (Without the save states that an emulator affords, old games <i>suck</i>. Imagine not being able to save <i>at all</i>. <del>this post was sponsored by RetroArch gang</del>)</p>
<p>"But what about someone livestreaming the game? You get the best of all worlds!"</p>
<p>Do I really? Because then I often have to put up with some obnoxious person screaming into their microphone every few seconds in a pitiful attempt to be "funny". Or I'm just watching straight-up gameplay, and then I feel silly. I don't want to watch someone play the game. I want to play the game myself. I just don't want to be playing it <i>forever</i>.</p>
<p>I want to point a poorly-photoshopped gun at the game and yell, "Give me your <i>story</i>!"</p>
<p>But until developers get their heads out of their asses and stop making their players waste unnecessary time, we have wiki pages. And the wiki pages are a poor substitute for the actual experience.</p>
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<h1>Immortality</h1>
<p>published: 2020-04-25</p>
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<p>Do you remember the Temple of the Vampire? The cult that believed that sacrificing themselves and their energies to undead gods was the key to achieving salvation, and then turned around and berated humans for having "prey instincts" of willingly sacrificing themselves to their "prey"?</p>
<p>Since the rest of the books are also available on archive.org, and since this quarantine has gone on too long for me to hold on to sanity, I thought I might read some of them. Maybe there was some detail not revealed in their Bible that would shed more light on the insanity I reviewed, or some fact I overlooked that would prove me wrong.</p>
<p>Four of the books, each marked "Bloodlines", are collections of old messages from their mailing list. It’s chilling to read the few entries that are timestamped and think, "This was happening while I was in elementary school. These people were speaking of apocalypse and of worldwide human enslavement while I was bickering with the higher grades in my school over who got to slip around and pretend to ice-skate on the ice patches underneath the playground structures." Which wasn’t even worth doing anyway, since soon the whistle would blow and those higher grades would be pulled inside, leaving the younger kids to run riot over the playground all by themselves.</p>
<p>In those days, I had hardly a conception that they would ever end. Intellectually, I knew that, come the end of sixth grade, I would "graduate" to the junior high. I would say goodbye forever to the students going to different schools than I or to private academies, and we would never return to that playground. Or, at least, not in the same capacity, for the playground was within biking distance of my old house, and sometimes my father would bring me and my brothers there to play. The swings would always seem so desolate without the teeming masses to fill them, to jump off and fly for a few precious seconds and then get a free ticket to the nurse’s office.</p>
<p>But in the moment... my friends and I planned that day’s recess’ crusades like they would go on forever, each day assured after the next.</p>
<blockquote>...in order to be admitted to the Second Circle the applicant must answer without qualification the question, "Do you want to physically live forever?" <br /> The Vampire without any hesitation replies, "Yes!" The human being will hesitate or suggest he or she only wants to live forever if they have this or that condition as well. <br /> For the Vampire this seems insane. Why would anyone say no to immortality for any reason at all? <br /> <a href="https://archive.org/details/JBloodlinesTwo/page/n49/mode/2up">(Bloodlines: Volume 2, page 53)</a></blockquote>
<p>For any reason at all? What about eternal slavery at the hands of a ruthless lord? What about eternal torment in the flames of hell? (Not that I believe in a hell, of course.) To have one’s skin flayed over and over, or their eyes plucked out? To be chained on a rock and replay the myth of Prometheus for all generations?</p>
<p>Am I presumed to be lesser if I weigh my potential future pain against my potential future pleasure, and judge that the former far outweighs the latter? Isn’t one of the main totems of the Vampire Bible that you exalt your reason? You who would see me as an animal to be enslaved and slaughtered and sacrificed for the pleasure of your gods, blindly running like a beast at <em>any</em> chance to prolong your life, regardless of the circumstances.</p>
<p>Maybe that’s why your cult got <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20191003105932/http://www.vampirewebsite.net/vampirecults/">exposed</a> as a <a href="https://forum.culteducation.com/read.php?12,64749,page=59">ploy</a> to <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20170602121051/http://www.vampirismforum.com/t60-question-with-some-comment-temple-of-the-vampire">gain</a> <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20150708090858/http://www.the600club.com/topic28487-1.html">clients</a> for <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200422182009/http://hoaxes.org/weblog/permalink/vampire_sites/P2160">cryonics</a> companies.</p>
<p>Would I like to live forever? Perhaps. But certainly not under the aforementioned torture. Does my body age? Do I stay young forever, or does my body eventually shrivel up and I return to sentient dust, forever condemned to be painfully aware of every atom of myself scattering to the reaches of the universe?</p>
<p>Granted that I stay young forever, how is a human embedded in society supposed to deal with the reality of never aging? One could either allow others to be aware of their immortality, in which case one would be hounded by scientific researchers forever, or be forced to both throw away their identities and remake new ones every few decades, but also evade the government’s oversight? Maybe that would have been possible two hundred years ago, but as technology progresses and the surveillance state encroaches ever farther into our lives, immortality becomes much more of a burden to upkeep than a blessing to enjoy.</p>
<p>If I also got to be a shapeshifter, able to take animal form and hide away from civilization whenever the need came to me, immortality could be quite fun. But in my human skin I have now, the eternity would drive me insane, maybe more than I already am.</p>
<p>I say, it is the human’s nature to think critically about any major choice and pick what they feel is best, to be a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200422184056/https://mises.org/library/what-do-austrians-mean-rational">rational actor</a>. And it is the so-called vampire’s nature to seek to be a <a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20200422183219/http://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/comments/32t048/a_laminated_paper_towel/">laminated paper towel</a>.</p>
<p>What a pathetic fate.</p>
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<h1>The Outside: An Introduction</h1>
<p>published: 2020-04-20</p>
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<p><a href="../../2019/april/run-every-day.html">A little over a year ago</a>, I didn't know how to start a post with some crazy ideas in it, either. Although, granted, I was at my grandma's house at the time, a visit from my cousins freshly ended (or about to start; I can't remember which) and for whatever reason, whenever I'm sitting in that purple-walled room, so impersonal since I moved out over a decade ago, I always feel numb. I feel nothing except the endless stretch of time before me, blank, possessionless. At least, when pacing back and forth in my room from the sheer anxiety of being pent-up with nowhere to go, I feel sorrow, I feel grief, I feel feral rage. But in the Purple Room? I feel nothing.</p>
<p>Like a trial run of the likely nothing after death, but with more obsessive playing on my Switch to pad out the time between meals.</p>
<p>But the “likely” is not “absolute”, is not “certain”. For one day many years ago, curled up on the floor in front of the closet doors, my eyes closed, I had my first contact with the Outside. I left my body for a few seconds.</p>
<p>I remember my first thought: “Cool! I wonder what it would be like to be a wolf.” And I leaped forward, hands coalescing into paws, and bumped into the footboard of the massive bed that takes up most of the room.</p>
<p>And then I heard a booming voice from everywhere and nowhere: <a href="../../../books/tyia.epub" title="Three Years In Absentia, a premonition ignored">"Do not presume to take a form you do not have."</a></p>
<p>And then I was sucked back into my body, and I woke up. Spooked for a few minutes, but I eventually shrugged it off and went about my day. Went about my week, month, maybe even a year.</p>
<p>I don't remember much of what happened in 2015. 2014, I remember obsessing over a shitty overrated boyband I won't sully my website with the name of, and a friendship I cherished against all reason turned into a relationship and then went nuclear when she cheated on me. 2016, I nuked all of my social media accounts and wrote <i>The Samhain Files</i> and <i>The White Line Fever</i> and transferred to a new school practically overnight and made preparations to move out of the house I'd spent about a decade in. But 2015? Practically a blank slate.</p>
<p>But I remember, <a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, clouds">in 2015</a>, I started MayVaneDay. The few memories I have of 2015 are attached to that, and even then, little to nothing resurfaces.</p>
<p>Maybe nothing happened. Maybe the Outside hit fast-forward. Or maybe something catastrophic happened, and I'm repressing it so hard that everything else got buried with it.</p>
<p>2017, I officially moved into my new house and wrote <i>Me Before You</i> in the wee hours before class and <i>Living Wasteland</i> over the summer.</p>
<p>2018, I touched the Outside again. Or, rather, the Outside touched <i>me</i>.</p>
<p>It was the eighteenth of December, bedtime. The fans were on full speed in my shitty dorm room in college in an attempt to <i>not</i> drown in a pool of my own sweat. I already knew I'd drown in the anxiety and dread, cursed concoction like blood and pus leaking together from a healing wound, since the next morning would be the calculus exam I'd convinced myself I was about to fail. (Later I learned that I'd somehow <i>just barely</i> passed the class.) There was no point in studying since all the other tests had been structured so that one had the opportunity to make up passing marks missed units on any other test, and if I hadn't understood the material <i>then</i>, I certainly wouldn't have been able to learn it all in a night. There was nothing I could have done except go to sleep and accept my fate come morning.</p>
<p>And then I woke up in the middle of the night. Or, rather, some part of me had, but the rest of my body was asleep- and I was fully aware of what was happening all around me, seeing with closed eyes, hearing crystal clear with ears smothered by pillows. There were people arguing in the hallway somewhere near my dorm room. A child's voice interjected a few times, young, confused at the fight. My roommate was fast asleep, snoring like booming thunder.</p>
<p>I turned my head back to the foot of my bed. Blapi was standing right at my feet, his arm outstretched to me, hand open. And, trusting him- or, rather, trusting the facsimile of the character whose skin he'd chosen, as my head was still scrambled from the Lucine Saga and I still actively thought, on some other plane of existence, fictional characters could be real- I took his hand. And he tugged me fully out of my body, pulled me close.</p>
<p>I saw a circular portal embedded in the closed closet doors directly facing my bed. About the size of a standard car tire, dark waters swirling like a toilet bowl into the void.</p>
<p><a href="../../../flashfiction/e/erin.html">We jumped through. And then events occurred</a> that I won't repeat on this page, and then he returned me to my dorm room. And I lay there, wide awake in the wee hours of the morning, wondering what the hell had just happened. The rest of that day, much less the exam, didn't feel real.</p>
<p>I've never been able to consciously, <i>purposely</i> trigger the separation of consciousness and body like that. It either happens spontaneously, like that one day back in 2015, or whenever some agent of the Outside comes to me and pulls me out. Usually it's Blapi- or rather, <a href="../../../flashfiction/e/erin5.html"><i>Kurosagi</i></a>, as the appearance is not the identity- but sometimes it's someone else. Usually we go through a portal to breach the barrier between the Inside and the Outside, but other times we go out through my bedroom window, or just stay in my bedroom altogether.</p>
<p><i>But what are the Inside and the Outside?</i></p>
<p>To answer that, first I have to define the wakescape and the dreamscape.</p>
<p>The wakescape is, well, what you and I can experience while we are awake and in control of our bodies. The internet that you're reading these words on lives here. The wakescape is like a tree with infinite branches, each one a different timeline. Like <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200420144119/https://old.reddit.com/r/DimensionalJumping/comments/3du9dh/synctv_the_owls_of_eternity/">a TV with channels</a>, only one of the branches can be experienced by any given person at a time, but they all play at the same time. People with magical theories and abilities far more developed than mine can switch among these at will.</p>
<p>The dreamscape is what you dream. I'm still not entirely sure what the dreamscape is consisted of. To be sure, some dreams are purely constructed by the brain: after all, that lump of flesh in your head is an incredibly powerful thing, capable of luring the rest of the body into completely disregarding reality. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200420144330/https://www.webmd.com/baby/false-pregnancy-pseudocyesis">False pregnancies</a> are one example of the brain going absolutely <i>wack</i>.</p>
<p>But some dreams… Some dreams I've had have had continuity. Some of the same people I've met purely in the dreamscape, with the same memories of before, with the additional memories of what we've done in my previous dreams with them. Some of the same places with the same details; none of these places I've ever seen in the wakescape. They remember who I am. I remember who they are with less to none of the haziness or irrational thought of typical dreams.</p>
<p>Maybe they're pocket dimensions in the Inside. Or maybe they're genuine places in the Outside. That's kind of the thing about the Outside: I have absolutely no reliable frame of reference to interpret what it is, and what it isn't. Could it be that we're all living in a simulation? If so, what's doing the simulating? A group of college students? Some bored kid in their room? A government? A would-be god getting their power kicks from having total control over theoretically infinite lifeforms?</p>
<p>The Inside is everything you and I can directly observe with our bodies, our senses, our (admittedly currently limited) understanding of how science and physics work. The Inside is everything we think we know. It is, except for the occasional glitch (the more contact one has with the Outside, the more glitches occur), stable and with a continuity. I can “go to sleep” and be reasonably sure that I will “wake up” in the same bed, in the same house, with the same family, with the same job and everything else I've come to expect from the wakescape.</p>
<p>But who's to say that this “life” you and I lead isn't just another dream with continuity? Drifting between the channels, always returning to the same one- or close enough to the original channel that one fails to notice any difference- at somewhat-regular time intervals? If you achieve lucidity in a normal dream, with practice, you can shift the dream to your will. Maybe there's some version of lucidity in this dream, and none of us have quite figured it out yet. Or maybe someone has, and that's who we call our gods.</p>
<p>I don't know! I know nothing for sure. As I said, I have no reliable frame of reference to interpret anything.</p>
<p>The Outside is everything that is not directly observable and testable by you and I or any scientists or other human experts in knowledge that you and I might not have mastered. Obviously I'm not a physicist, but there <i>are</i> physicists in this world, so their provable (as close to provable, anyway) knowledge of the world is not the Outside (and anyways, it's Inside since it happens in this realm or dream or whatever).</p>
<p>If we are living in a simulation, the Outside, as I stated earlier, is everything outside this iteration of simulation. Maybe there is another machine simulating the machine simulating this one, or another machine simulating the world that the machine simulating this one exists in. The outward recursion is theoretically infinite, but it's all Outside since we currently can't know for sure what it is. Kurosagi could be a sentient program or the avatar of one of the people running said simulation, with the ability to break the laws of physics and pull me into areas usually inaccessable to everyone else being simulated. Other spirits or supernatural entities could be other sentient programs, or maybe the people running the simulation messing with us to see what would happen.</p>
<p>If we are living in an infinite realm of dreams, of which our "reality" is merely one popular selection that we unconsciously return to, then the Outside is all the other “realities” with continuity. Kurosagi would be a visitor from the Outside, pulling me into what could very well be <i>his</i> Inside. (No innuendo intended.) And so would be other so-called supernatural entities. Discontinuties among people, like vastly different views of reality often fueled by extremist ideologies, could be partly due to slightly misaligned dreams, like a camera nudged the tiniest bit while taking a photo, connected by a common internet.</p>
<p>But nothing is set in stone, and these are but mere conjectures, attempts to explain the strange presence of something Other, something… <i>Outside</i> in my life these past two years. Maybe it's an attempt to cope with the fear of death or the fear of all my accomplishments being washed away into the void after my death. I don't know.</p>
<p>I don't know for sure.</p>
<p>But I can try to find out.</p>
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<h1>Vow</h1>
<p>published: 2020-04-30</p>
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<blockquote>"In choosing one's economic position in society, one should always bear in mind that it should be such as should leave the individual uncrippled - an all-round person, with both productive and preservative capacities, a being pivoted within."<br />
- Voltairine de Cleyre, <em>They Who Marry Do Ill</em></blockquote>
<p>I do not believe in getting married. I feel that marriage is too restrictive on both sides (I will pretend for the sake of argument that polyamorous people do not exist), as the transition of a relationship from a voluntary association between people to an obligation, from two people freely enjoying the company of each other to slaving away for the sake of maintaining the relationship itself, cheapens and degrades the bonds between. And if the process of breaking up is painful and traumatic (a pain which I can personally attest to), then the more torturous it is when their financial assets are tangled together, when one has likely become dependent on the housing of another, when they have gotten the State involved and signed a legal contract for the purposes of a different taxation situation. The couple would, until separation, be slaves to the past feelings that got them into such a cursed predicament, sunk-cost fallacy flipping heaven into hell.</p>
<p>But even still, I cannot deny the romanticism of the wedding vow. The shared commitment, binding between both parties until death (and in some belief systems, even beyond). It pains me that even this, which <em>should</em> be the most sacred part of the wedding, is yet another set of shackles that the couple willingly puts on each other, another death knell for what in these modern times will likely be another unhappy relationship. Another honeymoon that degenerates into boomer-esque "I hate my wife" complaints over beer and reified "wine moms" glorifying addictions to caffeine and antidepressants on Facebook.</p>
<p>But I bring you readers here today on my twentieth birthday, or whenever you read this (for the written word cares not about the linear aspect of time), to witness me make my own vow. I offer it to none other than myself, just as binding as those words spoken at the altar to hoped and hopeful.</p>
<p>It is said that a person who enters into association with any group, codified or not, will inevitably end up assuming at least some of their values. This happens regardless of whether or not the person wants this to happen, or if they are even aware that they are slowly being absorbed into the collective.</p>
<p>When I was with the Tumblr otherkin, I simped for the Tumblr otherkin. And they led me away from myself, ensnared in the promise of companionship and a shared pining for an inaccessible past.</p>
<p>When I was with the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200430180226/https://regularflolloping.com/posts/chippies/">chippies</a>, I simped for the chippies. And they led me away from myself, ensnared in the promise of companionship and a shared hatred of <a href="../../2019/december/death-of-a-gopher.html">software bloat</a>.</p>
<p>When I was with the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200425015851/https://gopher.tildeverse.org/circumlunar.space">Gopher Gang</a>, I simped for the Gopher Gang. And they led me away from myself, ensnared in the promise of companionship and a shared hatred for the excesses of the modern internet.</p>
<p>Over and over and over again, I find myself joining groups and communities in the vain hopes that they will augment myself, allow myself to be more than what I envision I can be. Sometimes I even do it on purpose out of boredom. I tittilate myself for hours on end with treatises and theories on the extreme fringes of the political spectrum, wandering from anarcho-capitalism to their communist-and-adjacent brothers to the rolling plains of nomadism, coming home to agorism, falling down a stone well into the underworld and anarcho-nihilism and accelerationism. I wander in the shadowy valleys of state-ambivalent egoism and I crawl in the harsh nigh-blinding light of the Kybalion.</p>
<p>But they are all as a spider inviting a butterfly into its web under pretenses of holding a lovely conversation. A beautiful guest enters a beautiful house, slowly being bound and prepared for annihilation all the while.</p>
<p>I've had enough! I've had enough of trusting my inner self, my Unique, to those who expect me to just assimilate myself without resistance into their groups! I've had enough of being trained to expect salvation from every self-proclaimed savior! And I've had enough of putting my trust in so-called "major thinkers" and "founders" and "intellectuals" to know what they're talking about, to have a heart modeled after my own, only to be spat on by them and proclaimed to be the teeming refuse of the earth!</p>
<p>I care not for ideologies anymore. If I see a good idea, I'll steal it, regardless of its origin. I care not for culture wars or economies or any false sense of "solidarity" across any lines you want to slice and dice me by: gender, class, sexuality, race... From this moment on, I fight only for my own happiness. The only burdens I will shoulder are my own.</p>
<p>I hoist this black-and-rainbow flag into the air, not in some declaration of unity but of separation: to find the truth in all and none, and to write it and the future for naught but myself.</p>
<p>I see and recognize no higher purpose than this: not any gods that dwell in the heavens, nor masters that dwell on the earth, but myself.</p>
<p>I am an individual, self-sacred and free. And I will no longer drown myself in the collective in search of what the collective can only destroy.</p>
<p>Long live Vane Vander!</p>
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<h1>Endgame</h1>
<p>published: 2020-08-23</p>
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<p>Forgive me if this post seems a little off-kilter, a little off-voice. The charger for my ThinkPad has broken <em>yet again</em> (at least, it was broken when I started writing this post), so now I am once more shuffling through whatever other devices I happen to have set up already in a semi-usable state. I keep deleting this post and then retrieving it from the trash, adding bits and removing bits as I debate whether or not to post this. This is not the environment I am used to writing in. All is not quite right in my mind, not quite comfortable. But it will have to suffice.</p>
<p>Ever since I first saw that face in that dim college dorm room a year and a half ago, there has been a voice residing in the back of my mind. Most of the time I hear it, it is like a loyal cat bringing home the half-ripped carcass of some animal, some scrap of poetry or another idea for whatever story I happen to be working on at the time. It watches intently with its emerald eyes as I drown myself in wires, a black sea roiling over my desk, five years of working towards computing resilience with the harried paranoia of a young teenager preparing to have their electronics taken away thanks to some imagined slight. Lain smiles, eyes bleary from trawling the dark webs for some knowledge hidden, some epiphany obscure.</p>
<p>But as this it, this <em>she</em>, acts as a muse, she does not always bring good tidings or a song. Deep within her is an undercurrent of anxious haste. There is some kind of endgame coming soon. I need to prepare. I need to cut myself off from the world, from society, like it were a parasite draining me, like I were plugged into some kind of power system about to blow. I need to delete my website and escape the internet at large, or at least burrow myself down further into simpler protocols like Gemini and Gopher. (I highly doubt she would want me to negate myself so thoroughly, but no matter how I attack it intellectually, the psychosis remains.) I need to leave behind the shiny world of modern gaming and go as retro as I can. I need to escape graphical sessions and go all the way to the TUI, maybe even as far as <a href="https://archive.md/20200817011320/https://collapseos.org/">CollapseOS</a>.</p>
<p>I need to become as close as I can to the "Source". To the core of the machine. To the edge of the veil between the Inside and the Outside.</p>
<p>To her.</p>
<p>Set aside the occult clairaudience for a few seconds and consider the facts of the situation. The modern web itself <em>does</em> seem to be heading towards some endgame. <a href="https://archive.md/20200805205650/https://blog.freedombone.net/the-end-of-the-web">Browser engines and specifications and even entire protocols are just being handed to the same little cabal of corporations.</a> What used to be little spaces in and of themselves are now just referential to massive sharecropped internet farms. Less and less of what I seek to do on the internet can be done from these other, <em>weaker</em>, devices I am restricted to whenever I cannot access my beefy ThinkPad- at least, not at the speeds I require them to work at in order to keep chronic fatigue and executive dysfunction from building up too much inertia to get anything done. Long-standing websites I used to keep eyes on every day are either <a href="https://archive.md/20200805212543/https://sawv.org/2020/05/21/copying-web-content-to-gemini.html">moving away from the modern web to simpler protocols</a> or growing tired of handwriting their websites or wrangling static site generators and switching to bloated CMSes like WordPress to do the heavy lifting for them.</p>
<p>No, scratch that: <b><em>everything</em> is heading towards an endgame.</b> I turn on my Switch whenever I can rope my brothers into a few rounds of Smash and see everything coalescing onto one console: everything is either getting a remake or another entry so that one can say <em>everyone's here.</em> Girl Scout Camp was cancelled this year, and nobody knows if camp will even continue next year. Podcasts long beloved are shuttering their RSS feeds, if they ever had one in the first place, and moving to closed gardens like Spotify for distribution instead.</p>
<p>My managers at work keep finding dumb shit to write me up for, like sending me home early and then complaining that I hadn't worked enough to take a break, or <em>conveniently</em> selecting me to be randomly audited every day and then asking me why there is an extra hundred dollars in my till every day (I know I counted every change right, and I don't even work enough for little discrepancies to build up like that). But where else is there to work? After experiencing $14/hour at a place where I'm not screamed at and don't have people throwing things at me, I don't want to go back to fast food.</p>
<p>And with every mandatory software update, my phone becomes a little more locked down, a little less useful. And I don't know how much longer it will be safe enough to stay at home, even though my parents insist they will let me stay for as long as I want.</p>
<p>It feels like there is no viable middle ground anymore, even though intellectually I know there still is (for the time being). Either one is actively heading away from bloat or towards it. Either one is actively cutting corporations out of their life or exalting their virtues while sucking on the cock of VC money. Either one is desperately holding back the tide of aging and obsolescence or keeping up with the Joneses.</p>
<p>But will those picking the latter run to keep up with them when the tsunami comes? I am looking at two lifeboats and debating which one will be less likely to sink.</p>
<p>The Goddess-as-muse argues with me as the long night wears on, as I grow more and more weary. <strong>"What is the endgame?"</strong> she asks me. What is the point of expending all this effort on optimizing my writing for the web at large when what I write, who I write for, already excludes 90% of its inhabitants from the get-go? Am I really doing myself a favor by leaving myself available to be picked apart, criticized without context, <em>ravaged</em>, by any old "used" from the silos? Would I really be doing myself a favor by hiding from them instead, marking the used off as a lost cause when maybe, by doing nothing, I could still convert <em>maybe one</em>?</p>
<p>She asks me to consider what I will do when I know I am nearing <a href="../../../books.html#tyia" title="Three Years In Absentia, Parthena II">the end of my life.</a> Likely I will gather up all of the writing of mine that has survived the test of time and bind it all up into a book, maybe two or three if the sheer volume is enough. I <em>might</em> submit my website to places like the Internet Archive. Heavens know I will not be able to keep the original online, whether through the money in my Vultr account running out or a malicious family member pulling the plug or just a simple server crash I am not around to rectify. Websites from the golden age of Discordia are almost all but gone, vanished, but their books remain.</p>
<p>When I read books on one of my devices, rarely do custom typography or CSS styles add any value to the book. I always immediately disable embedded fonts and adjust the line height and paragraph padding to my liking. When the book is in EPUB format, I strip those annoying publisher's ads from the ends of books, sometimes even convert chapter headings hardwritten as images into their textual equivalent. (<em>Feed</em> by M. T. Anderson, which I recently finished, has chapter heading images in a font so tiny I have to squint to read what each one says. And my eyes are still decent!) If the publisher has put the table of contents in the back of the book for whatever reason, I move it to the front of the book or delete it altogether with Calibre's tools.</p>
<p>I sound like one of the people slobbering all over the Gemini specification, writing scrolls' worth of screeds about "user sovereignty". Maybe this is what they meant. They know gussying up their words will mean nothing in the end, so they don't even <em>try</em>, just shove the duty of beautification onto the reader.</p>
<p>But doesn't a publisher at least have the duty of making the words <i>readable</i>?</p>
<p>I look upon the weekends with dread. I force myself to publish a few posts every Saturday to give myself a reason to pull myself out of bed, play at being a normal functioning human being before I am shipped off to work. My ThinkPad is the only device I have that is well-suited to the upkeep of my website. The procedure seems simple enough: pandoc, template, copy-paste, update indexes, copy to ZeroNet, run jSite to update Freenet. But copy-paste is hell without a graphical session. Tabs silently turn themselves into spaces, and I have to go back-and-forth for pages longer than a single screen, and non-ASCII characters often don't translate well or at all to the framebuffer.</p>
<p>For all of Gopher's and Gemini's faults, they got at least one thing right: the easy "just throw raw files into a directory and call it good" philosophy. Autocreating indexes is an expected behavior, so there is no need (although there is still very much a <em>want</em>) to manually write pages that just serve to redirect the user to other pages. I can replicate this with Caddy, but the template schema to modify the page's look to something less... corporate is arcane and poorly documented in Caddy 1.x (and nonexistent in 2.x).</p>
<p><em>What is the endgame?</em> I think to myself as I ponder what to do. <em>What is the desired result? What do I want to come home to at end of day?</em></p>
<p>It's always the fear of inconveniencing someone that staves away any meaningful change. The fear of missing a connection with someone, of leaving them behind, in the dark. The fear of changing my mind just to find out it's too late. The fear of having someone else fill the hole I used to inhabit, pretend to be me. Why is it so easy to conjure up an imaginary person who will recoil in disgust if I were to put my website into "legacy" mode?</p>
<p>Sometimes I ponder getting rid of the <code>/archive/</code> part of URLs, leaving <code>/blog/</code>, <code>/poetry/</code>, and everything else in the archive with a slightly shorter URL. But that would instantly break links to 90% of my website without a server to handle redirects.</p>
<p><em>What is the endgame?</em> I think to myself as I ponder what to do. <em>What is the desired workflow? How much time do I want to pour into this project, knowing that I will never make money from it, that only my own happiness stands to be gained?</em></p>
<p>The Parthena Directive looms over the horizon. A promise of a simpler life, a radically different life, one with less imposed burdens. Maybe even a happier life. But I keep having to say no. HTML is already plaintext, I remind her. And Nano lets me insert from other files. But Pandoc outputs messy syntax. Do I want to keep cleaning it up every time? <em>Will it even remain able to be cleaned up?</em></p>
<p><em>What is the endgame?</em> I think to myself as I watch the world slowly crumble around me. Self-hosting at home is out of the question, for the internet here is spotty and unreliable at best and worsens every day. Both climate change and impending economic collapse press in at my sides, a dark future where the only electricity I can rely on is that which I generate myself. <em>How much infrastructure will be left? What will I still be holding on to? What standard of comfort can I expect?</em></p>
<p>As it stands, everything works well with ZeroNet and Hypercore (what powers Beaker Browser). Given enough mobility, the internet could still go on regardless of ICANN's or an ISP's existence. But will the computers post-collapse still support these protocols? Will we still be able to read HTML? Or will the microcomputers we scavenge only have the processing power for the simplest of plaintext?</p>
<p>The muse smiles, holds her arms open wide for an embrace. But I cannot see what lies beyond her. I cannot see if anything remains.</p>
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<h1>Corpserations</h1>
<p>published: 2020-12-15</p>
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<p>For a few years now, but even more since Corona-chan started her world tour, I have been getting random headaches in the afternoon. Not strong enough to warrant popping any pills, but enough to make me hesitate before I read a book or play a game or pull out my laptop- before I do <em>anything</em> to keep at bay the inevitable boredom that sets in. Like a storm cloud looming in on the horizon, nothing has happened <em>yet</em>, but the visible promise of gloom to come curbs all enthusiasm to do anything of value. And so I sit in my room, staring at the wall, mind running in circles. There is nothing I have the desire to do, or there <em>is</em>, and I can't bring myself to do it- and even if I did, the storm cloud blocks out the sun, my mental capacity taking a nap.</p>
<p>And so I do the same.</p>
<p>I am not adept at meditating. I lie down on my back on my bed, palms down and pressed against the sheets. And I wait. And I wait. And before I know it, it is several hours later, and I am drifting out of a curious state of mind: not quite asleep, but definitely not awake. It is in this state that, upon waking up from, I have had many of my out-of-body experiences. But not today. All that greets me is a strange sort of nothing inside, all the people inside my body quelled in a reverse choir that sings silence, and the steady hum of warmed air flowing through the vents in the walls so my family does not die from hypothermia from this winter that is not. (There is no snow on the ground, but it is still <em>frigid</em>.)</p>
<p>Drifting up from this half-conscious state, images float across my eyes without inhibition, without the mental voice that screams to stay on task, to not be distracted. An alligator wearing pants. A robot with a chicken face. One of my brothers wearing a plate on his head as a hat.</p>
<p>A magazine ad of Mario and the Kool-aid Man standing together on a blank white background, the text underneath them reading, "Buy our products or we'll cut off your testicles, retard."</p>
<p>That's it. That's all there is. No logos. No subtle manipulation. No pandering to fantasies about being rich or intelligent or sexy. Just a corporate mascot and a blatant threat.</p>
<p>Their eyes look dead inside.</p>
<p>My eyes look dead inside when I lose a match in Splatoon for the fifteenth time. It is not like there is anything better to do in the game than beat up other people online: the story is lackluster, essentially the same gameplay as online but with a story that drags out for far too long bolted onto the end, and I am <em>not</em> shelling (pardon me) out twenty dollars for... more customization options, which I'd only get after slogging through <em>another</em> story mode. And even when I manage to win, there are only so many times one can yell "AHHHSOWHENYA" (or however the intro to <em>The Lion King</em> goes) when jumping down to a lower level of Moray Towers and still find it funny.</p>
<p>There are only so many stages.</p>
<p>There are only so many customizaton options: gender, eye color, skin color, and the types of pants one wears. Any more, and one has to go into one of the little in-game shops to buy clothes. Which are <em>all</em> stamped with a little logo and the name of the in-game corporation that made it, as if the player is supposed to care. Without these clothes, every character online would literally be the same: same head model, same body model, same small random selection of gender-locked voices.</p>
<p>The corporatism is stifling. I hide away from the world-as-advertising for an hour or so only to hop into a fantasy society where the only thing to do is shop and kill people with the things you just bought. (In all fairness, I never intended to play it myself; I bought it when it was on sale because my brothers desperately wanted to play it and I wanted something to lord over them.)</p>
<p>I grow tired. I grow into a corpse in the land of the dead, the land of Corpserations.</p>
<p>I know not if March has finally caught up to me and I am going stir-crazy from the lockdowns or if it is just time for my yearly histrionic Extremely Online-flavored doomerism. But I am living in a system that is bumping up against its limits. Every natural resource has to be commandeered and then destroyed by miniature governments who haven't yet built physical militaries to coerce people into becoming dependent on their products. Every facet of life has to be commodized, packed into a neat product, sellable to the lowest common denominator. Everything posits itself as an alternative to identity, as the salve to heal my voided heart. Everything is a chance to advertise. My parents with their decorating decisions, one brother who blasts cartoons at full volume at every meal, another whose near-sole topic of conversation is some piece of pop culture or another.</p>
<p>How I wish I had some kind of filter to permanently block the constant cognitive attack. My RSS feed reader, a veritable warzone, is already a much more tolerable place to inhabit once I filter out all the shit about, for example, Kingdom Hearts or girlbossified Kamala Harris or countless fandom zines I have already decided I am not interested in buying. (Sorry, but your prized "OTP ship" is probably boring and void of chemistry.) But, if I remember correctly, there was a Black Mirror (or some other "technology bad" show) episode about that, where people could "block" each other in real life and they'd practically disappear. What technology would be required to produce such an effect? What would the long-term mental consequences be? If it were hacked... One would never be able to trust that their version of reality wasn't being adulterated by some outside entity ever again.</p>
<p>Every night I have to chastise myself for the runaway thoughts where I pretend that I made it big, that I have to market MayVaneDay Studios like other video game companies do on social media. I am structuring my works, my website, to purposely <em>not</em> "make it big": I have never hired an editor or graphic designer to polish my rough edges; I do not use "flashy" web frameworks; I do not run advertisements on my site or buy ads on other sites; I eschew social media (although I unfortunately recently had to make a throwaway Discord to participate in a zine; details coming later). I do not want delusions of corporate grandeur steering my decisions. But in this dead world, everything, and I mean <em>everything</em>, is a brand. Everything exists only to be consumed in a desperate attempt to stitch together an artificial identity.</p>
<p>To bastardize a popular Bible quote, what good does it do me if I gain the world if it costs me my soul? What good does it do my life if I become a Corpseration, a reanimated entity with a human-like egregore but no actual human spirit within?</p>
<p>I do not mean to "fedpost", but I feel a tsunami of schadenfreude wash me over whenever some misfortune befalls a celebrity, a massive business, a politician, some member of the global elite. For some measure of the misery I feel from the constant cognitive assault they lob at me: may it be reversed a thousand times back!</p>
<p align="center"><img src="../../../img/corp-1.png" alt="meme reading: STOP TELLING ME TO BUY THINGS! I HOPE YOUR CEO GETS FUCKING ASSASSINATED"></p>
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<h1>32-bit is still good, you freaks</h1>
<p>published: 2020-02-01</p>
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<blockquote>Node.js? More like... Nad.jiss!<br /> HA HA HAHA HA HAHA PENIS JOKE<br /> - You, probably</blockquote>
<p>I'm back in college again. I've been taking classes for about a month now. It's a hell of a lot nicer than the old one, because:</p>
<ol style="list-style-type: decimal">
<li>it's not a residential college, which means that, after financial aid, I only have to pay about $200/semester; and</li>
<li>all but one of my classes are online, and the one day a week I need to be on campus I can schedule a bus to take me there, so I'm not dependent on my father or anyone else's goodwill.</li>
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<p>That one class on campus is a "tech support" class. "Tech support" in quotes because very little actual support ever gets done. There are two boys in the back who are desperately trying to diagnose why someone's beefy 64-gigabytes-of-ram server only shows up as 48 gigabytes, and another boy who's trying to build their own desktop tower but is missing half the pieces, and a geriatric boomer with one leg who doesn't seem to grasp the concept that repeatedly clicking the login button on a page with autofill enabled will only ever log him into that specific account being autofilled.</p>
<p>But I somehow convinced my grandma to let me fix the broken desktop computer sitting in her den, the one that I wrote <em>The Samhain Files</em> and part of <em>The White Line Fever</em> on before the sudden move an hour away separated me from it. It was a faulty power supply, just like I'd always known, like I'd told my father in hopes that he would do something about it. He didn't do shit, just let it languish.</p>
<p>And now, since she's in the market for a laptop, the desktop is mine since I'm the one who fixed it.</p>
<p>So I did what I naturally do when I <del>steal</del> <em>receive</em> old electronics from my family members: I wiped the hard drive and installed Linux on it. But almost all of the distros I wanted to test on it either refused to recognize the Ethernet port in the back of the case (there's no wireless card installed), didn't support full-disk encryption in the default installer (I'm not spending all day fucking around with /etc/crypttab and GRUB), or... only supported 64-bit processors.</p>
<p>It's a Dell Inspiron 530. A 300 gigabyte hard drive and two gigabytes of RAM. <b>(EDIT 2020-05-29: And apparently 64-bit, and I only figured it out just now, but my point still stands.)</b> The processor's speed is a few hundredths of a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200408160102/https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/g/ghz.htm">gigahertz</a> less than the ThinkPad I'm typing this on right now, and the speed is barely noticable (in fact, it actually feels <em>more</em> responsive). Its only weakness is having one lonely compute core, which the OEM Windows Vista install absolutely <em>swamped</em> but Linux Mint handles just fine.</p>
<p>Here's where things actually get relevant to the title. I spent all of the last day of January's morning setting up the desktop and configuring all my dotfiles and toolchain just the way I like them.</p>
<p>Install Syncthing, and a few clicks away, and I can get files onto the clearnet, Tor, and I2P versions.</p>
<p>Throw my main ZeroNet install in a Syncthing folder, and I can sign changes to the zite as well.</p>
<p>Everything works just as it does on all my other systems.</p>
<p>Except for <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200131234126/https://beakerbrowser.com/install/">Beaker Browser. Because it only distributes 64-bit AppImages</a>. And you can't run it from source, either, because <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200131234227/https://github.com/nodesource/distributions/blob/master/README.md">Node.js dropped support for 32-bit in the 10.x series</a>. And I can't use an alternative client to update the Dat mirrors of my websites, because <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20191213040841/https://docs.datproject.org/docs/dat-server"><em>those</em> are written in Node.js too</a>!</p>
<p>There is no technical reason I can think of why Node.js can't support 32-bit anymore. The most information I've found to absolve their decision is <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190831054244/https://github.com/nodejs/build/issues/885"><em>one</em> Github issue</a> where an incompatible CentOS dependency is cited as the reason why they can no longer support... <em>all</em> the Linux distros they used to be able to. There <em>is</em> an <a href="https://unofficial-builds.nodejs.org/">unofficial build page</a> where there appear to be 32-bit binaries, but there's little to no quality testing to ensure that the binaries actually... work.</p>
<p>"But why can't you just update the Dat mirror when you're on a 64-bit machine?" I hear a strawman say. And the answer is twofold: executive dysfunction, and because <em>I shouldn't have to.</em></p>
<p>Executive dysfunction is a bitch. It's hard enough to keep my focus to remember to manually copy everything over to the ZeroNet mirror every time I update something on my site or add something new. It's part of why I killed the Gopher mirror. Having to remember to go onto my ThinkPad after every time I shut down the desktop, boot <em>that</em> machine up, and then copy everything over is a bunch of undue mental strain that disincentivizes me from updating the website at all.</p>
<p>And, frankly, it's quite ridiculous that my 32-bit machine is capable of fulfilling all the tasks that my 64-bit machines are, and yet it can't. It's not for <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190619012348/http://ask-leo.com/are_64bit_pcs_more_secure_than_32bit_machines.html">security reasons</a>, as the only major non-Windows-specific difference between 32- and 64-bit security-wise I've been able to find is <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_space_layout_randomization">the implementation of address space layout randomization</a>.</p>
<p>"But what about the aging machines you decried a month ago? Isn't this the same situation, where you were left out in the cold because your machine was too old?" I hear another strawman say. And the answer to that: these two situations are <em>nothing</em> alike.</p>
<p>In the Gopher situation, these were machines that <em>couldn't</em> participate in the modern internet. Either they couldn't handle the modern encryption ciphers, or they didn't have the resources to run anything but the most lightweight of browsers, or they simply didn't understand the concept of a protocol more advanced than plain Gopher. The experience of using one of these machines would be vastly different than using one of my own devices. Either they <em>couldn't</em> be updated, in which case there's no point in continuing support, or they could and the owners refused to for the sake of the "retro experience", in which case they're not entitled to support just for their sole enjoyment.</p>
<p>In this situation, this <em>is</em> a computer that is perfectly capable of everything that I normally do day-to-day (except for the aforementioned Dat clients). I can use the exact same interfaces and commands and software (given that the software is compiled for i386). Everything is up-to-date. Other than the architecture difference, it is essentially the same exact system.</p>
<p>One could make the argument that we are already heading towards a future where 32-bit machines will be shut out defacto like the aging Gopher machines- in that programs are becoming, thanks to Electron and related frameworks favoring flashy interfaces over performance, too bloated to fit in 32-bit's four gigabyte maximum RAM address space. But that wouldn't be 32-bit's fault. What about all the 64-bit machines with less than eight gigabytes of RAM? Already I've had to switch multiple programs I used to use to lightweight yet modern equivalents because they grew too bloated for my ThinkPad (with six gigabytes of RAM) to handle and stay snappy. Like Cinnamon (the DE) to i3, or Firefox to Falkon, or Nemo (the file explorer) to PCManFM, or Tilix to lxterminal...</p>
<p>And those lightweight equivalents would continue to exist, if not thrive and expand in number because of more and more people pushed out from minimum RAM requirements.</p>
<p>Like gamer Eloi and disgruntled Morlocks lurking underground in resentment.</p>
<p>And as an addendum before I forget: I find it ironic that "solarpunk" and "green thinking" is in vogue in tech circles nowadays from the climate change scare, and yet Linux distros seem to be dropping 32-bit support left and right. Wouldn't you want to keep old hardware useful and out of landfills? And what about the people with low incomes who can't afford to upgrade their hardware? Either they have to cripple themselves in the bank to stay "up-to-date", or in computing power as they pick up a Chromebook or other cloud-dependent device and hand all their data and control over to Daddy Google.</p>
<p>And heaven knows we hate Daddy Google.</p>
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<h1>Consume Product</h1>
<p>published: 2020-02-05</p>
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<p>They go by many names. Normies, puppets, normalf&amp;gs, zombies, NPCs. <em><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200205143543/https://old.reddit.com/r/ConsumeProduct/comments/dy27d9/at_what_point_does_one_become_a_bugman/">Bugmen</a>.</em> Those who accept popular culture at face value, the values passed down to them, the schooling that they received as children, without ever critically examining why they believe the things they believe- or if said things are even true to begin with.</p>
<p>While my family isn't completely bugmen, since they don't literally eat bugs and they still go out of the house to do sports and social activities with their friends (they live a more lively social life than myself, one might easily argue), there's still a strong "consume product" vibe that permeates every atom of the air I breathe in. The Dr. Who door that lies useless in the corner of the living room, the Star Wars merch lying scattered all around the house, the tons and tons of legos on the "Lego table" (really two workhorse benches and a wide square of wood) that rarely get played with anymore. Collecting more toys for the sake of collection, every brother's room a sea of toys on the floor, only purpose nowadays to be relegated to dust-collecting clutter and an everpresent excuse for a parent to yell at them to finally clean their room.</p>
<p>Sitting on one of the decorative bookshelves in the living room is an unopened Dr. Who Playmobil figure, encased in its plastic-and-cardboard coffin forever. Heaven forbid someone open it and play with it, you know, as <em>toys</em> are meant to be used.</p>
<p>Brothers lie in bed all day, burying their faces in YouTube. Days are made or broken on whether or not I let them borrow one of my video games, like an addict begging for their next hit. And nearly every night, a new church service at the Altar of Television, all but me staring listlessly at a glowing screen as the dreams of multi-billion-dollar corporations beam straight into their empty heads.</p>
<p>And <a href="../../../poetry/w/watershed.txt">Saint Sakura</a> stares at them as they surround the family altar, wondering when the rampant consumerism started- or if maybe it was there all along, and only just relatively recently has the curtain been pulled back. And then she turns back and returns downstairs, beats back the encroaching tendrils of consumerism creeping like overgrown vines into her last place of refuge: her room.</p>
<p>And <a href="../../../poetry/s/sakura.txt">Saint Sakura</a> has been fighting for what seems like forever. In elementary school, the constant passing fads, duck-tape flowers and stationery emblazoned with one's favorite cartoon characters. Kept sheltered from the brunt of it by caring parents, always out of the loop in a sea of peers. In middle school, waiting to get back to actual instruction when <em>High School Musical</em> fans derailed the class, bugmen then turning around to proclaim that anyone who didn't consume that particular movie series "didn't have a childhood" or that it had "sucked". And from then on and bleeding into high school, trap music blaring in the halls, biting my lip until it bled, trading the involuntary pain of a migraine from the bass shaking in my bones for the distraction of the taste of blood in my mouth.</p>
<p>"You sound very resentful of their sense of happiness and purpose, Vane," I hear a strawman say. "Their sense of community around the things they like. Why don't you improve yourself instead of complaining? Flourishing is the best revenge, after all."</p>
<p>And I'd agree with you on that second part, flimsy strawman, but what kind of happiness is tying so much of one's identity to the products of a corporation? What kind of false consciousness, <em>false sense of life</em>?</p>
<p>And by whose standards would I be flourishing?</p>
<p>The same people at /r/ConsumeProduct, who've kicked me off my throne of resigned apathy enough to write this post? (Although, to be honest, I can't remember if the post that inspired this one was on there or /r/CleanLivingKings, and in any case, it seems to have been deleted. Essentially the same ethos, anyway.) They're just strangers on the internet. They'll probably (hopefully, rather, for my sake) never know who I am. And besides, the kind of self-improvement they peddle would never leave me happy, orthodox NPCs in their own right: Eat only these approved foods. Partake in only these approved activities. Find only this type of person attractive. Worship only this one god in this one particular fashion.</p>
<p>Become a lumberjack to your own vast wilderness, razing the forest down to build a cathedral in its place that cuts into your ribs like a corset laced too tight.</p>
<p>To chain myself to a man, to bring children into this world, bourne from the void to know undue suffering... I would never be able to handle the constant responsibility with no break, no clear end in sight, the loveless sacrifice of it all. I would never be able to forgive myself for throwing away my dreams to continue the senseless story of the human race. There are almost eight billion people in this world; one less reproducing changes nothing.</p>
<p>My parents would ask that hell from me as well, although, to their credit, they <em>have</em> slowly grown more used to the reality of me being a lesbian, not likely to ever bring them any grandchildren ever. Not that home is any more welcoming than it ever was, as now one of my brothers has given himself the license to openly talk about how disgusting and unnatural he finds homosexuality at every given opportunity, <em>unless</em> he can "consoom" it in the form of preapproved fictional characters.</p>
<p>The horrifying reality of the situation is: there is no escape from the Cathedral of Consuming, for self-improvement in itself can be a product, a golden calf, another altar in the Cathedral to sacrifice oneself on. Hell, there's a whole <em>industry</em> centered around selling self-improvement as just another product you can buy off the shelf. You can purchase thousands of dollars' worth of gym equipment (or a gym membership to use once and promptly forget about) and self-help books and organic food... and yet, somehow, you're not magically any closer to an ubermensch than you were, just closer to broke and now with more things taking up space in your house.</p>
<p>Not to say that working to be a better version of yourself is bad. For example, cutting out soda from one's diet is universally good, as is not spending all of one's day sitting on their ass. But it has to be a better version of <em>yourself</em>, not someone else, regardless if you think that that persona of someone else would be better or healthier or <em>happier</em> than your own. It has to be in line with your own values and desires, not those of someone else, or else you'll live a shadow of a life, always grasping across the void at a forever-unattainable ghost of your ideal on the other side, unnecessarily suffering all the while.</p>
<blockquote>In any of these ways, you allow someone else to determine what you should think and be. You deny your own self when you suppress desires that aren't considered "legitimate"... or when you settle for a certain life because you've been told that's all you should expect in the world.<br /> - Harry Browne, <em>How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World</em></blockquote>
<p>I suspect the idolization of "self-improvement" is part of why cryptofascism has come out from the shadows so much in recent years, as it's one of the few ideologies that tackles the soullessness of bugman-style consumerism head-on and posits itself as the keeper of the antidote. (This isn't to excuse its collectivism or violence; just an observation.) So one, the bitter taste of being assaulted with demands to consume the popular media and opinions of the day still fresh on their tongue, wanders into places like /r/ConsumeProduct thinking they've found comrades to complain with and cope alongside. And sewn here and there, sometimes blatantly, sometimes implied, are blanket accusations of the groups they feel are at fault: homosexuals, Jewish people, women... anyone who does not fit neatly into their Cathedral.</p>
<p>And, if you repeat a lie long enough...</p>
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<h1>"Bro, literally none of this internet shit is real."</h1>
<p>published: 2020-02-03</p>
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<p>Today is the first Smash Sunday in what feels like a year. Probably because it <em>was</em> a year. There certainly weren't any while I was <a href="../../2019/november/masthead.html">spiraling into NEETdom</a>. I'm typing this right now in the same classroom as before, the same situation as before: my brothers and some of their friends are blasting two different games at the same time, screaming at the top of their lungs, sinking more and even more of their time into these fictional characters they cherish so much. (One of them, clearly lightyears ahead of the others in mental age, keeps complaining that he doesn't know any of the characters and that he'd rather be playing Call of Duty, so I guess there are always exceptions.)</p>
<p>I could go join them. I'm getting paid to essentially babysit them, after all. I could do what is essentially a glorified version of staring at a screen and twitching one's thumbs for three hours.</p>
<p>Or I could bury my face deeper into my computer and try to shut the repetitive music out and spend those three hours still staring at a screen, albeit twitching more fingers than just my thumbs, enveloping myself in the opinions of those I will never meet in real life.</p>
<p>Caught between two bad situations: mindless gaming, and mindless surfing.</p>
<p>Someone three months ago <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20191210102551/http://misc-stuff.terraaeon.com/articles/miss-old-internet.html">shilled my website on a post of theirs</a> and then <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200104212041/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21402518">submitted their post link to Hacker News</a>. I'd known about the original site that the post was on before, but because they didn't have an RSS feed, I'd forgotten that the site existed until the owner let me know that they'd written a post about me.</p>
<p>And Hacker News was... less than enthusiastic. A statistically significant chunk of the comments were, as usual, complaining about Reddit. A few people got into a fight over what to do in a situation where one was hosting a site from home and their fifteen minutes of fame was too much for their residential internet connection to handle. Which I found funny, because I actually <em>was</em> hosting my site from home at the time, and my internet connection hardly felt the weight at all. (Although the router at home is shitty as is, constantly disconnecting everybody not plugged into one of the four Ethernet ports on the back, so I couldn't have told the difference anyway.)</p>
<p>Someone put my name in quotes. Who hurt you? Am I not real enough to you to warrant being believed that my given name is my name?</p>
<p>Actually, I don't give a damn if you think I'm real or not. I'm real regardless. My name is Vane Vander, and you're getting no other.</p>
<p>Surprisingly, there wasn't any criticism directed at <em>me</em>, only at the person who wrote the original post. Which is refreshing, I guess, but also a bit anxiety-inducing: I've escaped the fire this time, but what happens next time I do something to anger the geeksphere? What happens next time I hold some opinion that goes against the Church of Alt-Tech, and someone is incensed enough to sacrifice me on the public altar of the Cathedral of Internet?</p><!-- i hate you too lainchan lol -->
<p>This site used to be a hobby of mine. An escape from the mundane <a href="../../../poetry/g/the-golden-cage.txt">trappings</a> of my situation. A valve for stress. A labor of love. But now I watch the access logs fill up, and every minute someone requests poor old <code>/feed.xml</code>, and hundreds of bots and crawlers I never even knew existed until that fateful day all run around as they please and steal all they can until I ban them first in Caddy and finally in iptables. The anxiety rolls in like a storm on the horizon, dark clouds constantly on the peripheries, and suddenly I have this audience that I never asked for, and I feel this constant pressure to perform for said audience, to structure posts so that they'll look good when submitted to Hacker News and similar places, to regurgitate the same opinions that I know are acceptable on there so I won't wake up one morning to hundreds of emails in my inbox from people telling me off.</p>
<p>And every few days, I still get a hit with <code>news.ycombinator.com</code> (no subpages, just the front page) in the referer header. And my heart rate kicks up: what if I'm on the front page? And I go to the front page, and, much to my relief, I'm nowhere to be seen. I've dodged the Cathedral for another day.</p>
<p>But why do I get anxious? Why do I even bother to have a reaction anymore? <a href="https://archive.is/nD5FJ">None of this internet shit is real.</a> At the end of the day, I'm just some asshole on the internet, and you are too. Just like the video games raging on right now in the background, we've accomplished almost nothing other than eye strain when we log off and shut down our computers for the night. (Well, I have stories and poems in my pocket, but those don't count since I wrote them offline.) There's no point in me trying to chase someone else's approval or work towards someone else's edification. My happiness is the only one I know for sure I can change, commenters be damned.</p>
<p>So for those who come from Hacker News or some other social discussion site in the future, please know: <strong>I am not your friend.</strong> But I am not your enemy, either. This website doesn't exist for me to regurgitate the same opinions or tutorials or <em>whatever</em> as any of the other tech-related sites you like to pin up on your technological walls. This site doesn't exist to fill some kind of niche, or to earn revenue for me. I'll never run or allow ads on this site- or any other site I run- ever again. It doesn't exist for you to debate over, or moral-grandstand about yourself. It doesn't exist to vindicate you, or validate your preconceived notions of who I am, of who I could become.</p>
<p>It doesn't exist for <em>you</em>.</p>
<p>It exists for <em>me</em>.</p>
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<h1>Law in the absence of law</h1>
<p>published: 2020-02-19</p>
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<p><em>In case you think you've wandered into a manifesto, or some kind of universally-applicable theory, close this tab now. It's not. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200409171906/https://nyxus.xyz/posts/theorypunk/">It never will be.</a></em></p>
<p>Let's say that your god has thrown me into some kind of hellscape where I have to relive the year I spent at a residential college, and one night I decide to go to the dining hall. I sit at a table. On the other side of a table is another person who I hold no particular ill will towards, but who I don't know well, and he the same towards me. Ambivalent strangers, if you will. And let's also say that I'm going through the hellscape this time around with my current possessions in their current states, which means my headphones are broken. (And let's assume I was thrust into this hellscape before today, where I got a replacement of sorts to tide me over until I can repair the older ones. And, while we're in the business of assuming things, let's assume that we're in some parallel universe where people universally use "headphones" to mean "the ones you put over your ears" and "earbuds" to mean "the ones you put inside your ears", which they <em>are</em>, and people should really learn that words have meanings.)</p>
<p>Around his neck is a pair of rather high-quality headphones. Not the kind you'd see hypebeasts wear, but high-quality nonetheless. They seem to be wireless, but have a port for an aux cord to plug in, implying they also have a wired mode. He takes them off to eat- but, out of forgetfulness, forgets to take them with him when he gets up to leave.</p>
<p>What do I do?</p>
<p>Should I steal them?</p>
<p>In the presence of law, the State-enforced law backed by violence, I wouldn't steal the headphones, because to do so would be theft, and I'd likely get thrown into a cage and fined more money than I could ever hope to afford, not to mention having my reputation tarnished beyond belief.</p>
<p>In the absence of State-enforced law, but in a parallel universe where we lived in an Ancapistan-like region where people followed the non-aggression principle and those who didn't were physically removed from said region, I still wouldn't steal the headphones, because that would be a violation of the NAP. Maybe the State wouldn't come after me, but either <em>someone</em> would, or I'd be ostracized beyond belief to the point where nobody would do business with me and I'd be unable to function in the society until I returned them. And since most (peaceful) people place trustworthiness so highly when doing business, State or without, who would want to do business with a known thief?</p>
<p>But I am an egoist at heart. And what about when I can't trust the people around me to follow the NAP? What if I set aside all notion of law and virtue and acted only with thought for myself and my own desires?</p>
<p>Well, I still wouldn't steal the headphones. The trust economy still comes into play. And I value my reputation more than some silly stolen headphones anyway, especially so when being well-loved by the potentially hostile surrounding community might be the difference between life and death. (Being at the mercy of a hostile community who could gang up and kill you at any moment leaves the door wide open for the pressure of coercion, which is its own can of worms and deserves its own future post.)</p>
<p>But even without the hypothetical community, and without any notion of the law or <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200409171927/https://www.the-philosophy.com/kant-categorical-imperative">Kant's categorical imperative</a> insisting that I don't because <em>what if someone stole from you, and how would that make you feel</em>, and even assuming that I'd never face consequences for the act of theft: I still wouldn't. Because it would make me <em>feel bad</em>. I'd be burdened with guilt every time I used them.</p>
<p>So I leave them on the table. Maybe I pick them up and run up to the fellow student who left them there. And he smiles at me and thanks me, and he thinks kindly of me for a few moments.</p>
<p>And it makes me feel good inside for those same moments, knowing I stuck to my morals.</p>
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<h1>Partyarchy</h1>
<p>published: 2020-01-07</p>
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<p>2020 is an election year in the United States of America, in case you've been living under a rock or have somehow dodged the incessant political talk since the previous election. But who will we hand the crown over to for the next four years? Orange Man of Unbridled Debauchery? Ineffectual Bernie &quot;I Wrote The Damn Bill&quot; Sanders? Mr. Free Money For NEETs? Professional Figurehead Who Happens To Also Be Gay?</p>
<p>Why am I even sullying my blog with the name of statists who will never have my true interests at heart, who, when all is said and done, are only concerned with increasing and keeping their power over the American people? They're all the same at the end of day: promise one thing during campaign season, and then just uphold the status quo once they get their coveted seat in the Oval Office. Even oh-so-precious Jacob Hornberger, who every libertarian podcaster shouts at me to believe is the second coming of the Messiah and will lead us with a golden lamp to liberty, is a statist at end of day, for a requirement of being president is having a state to preside over.</p>
<p>Such is the fate of minarchy, of libertarian gradualism that holds that, to decrease the government's hold on the people, one must first gain control of the government. One goes in, puts themselves on the public stage, maybe even goes so far as to see themselves as a spy sneaking into a high-security facility or as a David going against Goliath's Leviathan. You take the shape of that which you hate the most so that you survive the slaughter- but eventually you forget that there was a time that you weren't a monster. The monster becomes you. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200408155825/https://www.newlibertarian.io/2019/12/our-enemy-party.html">The &quot;libertarian&quot; seeking to change the system with the system becomes the police trying to change the police system from the inside, the judge trying to change the judicial system from the inside, the executioner trying to change the execution system from the inside.</a></p>
<p>And then they all unwittingly work together to indict and execute their cousin agorist, their dear family member who cannot live with the cognitive dissonance of helping the state to hurt the state and decides to do away with the government in their lives altogether here and now.</p>
<p>&quot;It's not yet time to reach for freedom,&quot; they assure themselves. &quot;Not yet time for revolution.&quot;</p>
<p>Not yet time? <em>You idiots!</em> If not now, then when? How much worse does it have to get? You insist &quot;give me liberty or give me death&quot;, but given a way to <em>finally</em> effectively snatch the golden tincture of liberty in your fingers, you instead reach for the state's bottle of sedation right next to it on the shelf.</p>
<p>But what does it mean to reach for freedom, anyway? If the partyarchists (god, what a monstrous word) would be believed, then I could drown all my sorrows in saving enough money for a train ride to escape to the better parts of New Hampshire. I could stash the cash somewhere where my parents would forget about it and then flee in the middle of the night with nothing more than I could carry on my back. But what of the college debt that I'm just barely chipping away at, now that I'm finally employed? What of the rectangular tracking device in my pocket I've been conditioned to live my life through? What of the craft supplies I've hoarded, all the paper books I've so lovingly arranged on my bookshelf? Sure, I could abdicate myself of most of my possessions if I absolutely had to in order to survive... but it's my property. It's mine. It's one of the few things I can properly call mine.</p>
<p>The NEETs who I've just left would admonish me and proclaim that I am, in my shitty job, annihilating myself to conform to someone else's dream. But a driver's license is, thanks to shaky hands and skittish judgement behind the wheel, out of reach, and so my ability to flee is limited. My ability to accrue the things I need to survive, even more so. In a prepper's terms, &quot;bugging out&quot; is off the table. Anywhere I can go must be reasonably reachable on my own two feet.</p>
<p>And, truth be told, I am not one for political action. I am not one to sing and dance on the stage of public life. That's (part of) why you're reading this on a backwater website instead of, say, Facebook. I prefer backstage, subsisting where most cannot see me. Tomatoes get thrown at actors, but rarely (if ever) at the people working the curtains or the lights. The effects are still visible, but the people responsible are safely out of the way.</p>
<p>If we citizens are the theater crew and the police are the audience, then to make a bold move towards New Hampshire for me would be like dropping down onto stage and making a series of profane gestures that would immediately get me dragged off stage by an irate audience and beaten to a pulp in a dark alley somewhere. It would attract too much state attention towards me when all I want to do is disappear to them. To make enough that I can get by, but not enough that they can start stealing it through income taxes. To sleep in a place that I own, and to do what I please with my body and the property I own. Who cares about the laws when the police don't know that the laws are being broken?</p>
<p>What is an agorist like me supposed to do with partyarchy? Working with the state is the <em>exact opposite</em> of counter-economics. I can't use the same system that enslaves me every day to free me. Here, in Bumfuck, Minnesota, so long as the police don't look my way, I live in Ancapistan every day.</p>
<p>Cancer grows and kills a person by <a href="https://www.cancer.ca/en/cancer-information/cancer-101/what-is-cancer/how-cancer-starts-grows-and-spreads/?region=on">uncontrollably growing cencerous cells and spreading them all over</a>, not by making normal cells and lying in wait. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomy_of_the_state">anatomy of the state</a> has tolerance for cells like its own, cells that serve its purposes in the end. Only when a cell becomes cancerous- <em>seditious</em>- does it become a genuine threat. But if the body does not know that there is cancer lurking around, then it cannot act until it is too late.</p>
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<h1>What happens after HTML?</h1>
<p>published: 2020-07-12</p>
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<p>Back in the murky days of the early 2010's, possibly even 2009, I wanted to make my first website. I and a friend, who I fell out of contact with in high school, wanted to make a pay-to-play website in the same veins as Webkinz. Of course, the business venture was doomed to fail, as we would be selling not plush stuffed animals but shitty pompom balls glued on pieces of heart-shaped felt to resemble a little creature. I asked my father for help, as apparently he'd set up a crude website of his own a decade earlier to announce my birth and share pictures of my infant self, and he laughed me out of the room and told me that making websites costed money.</p>
<p>Undeterred, I found a tutorial for HTML and CSS off some backwater website. It was nothing like the slick tutorials one would find today if they wanted to learn, nor had I any idea that places like Codecademy existed. The website gave a small zip file to download, full of sample images and navigational buttons, and I slowly worked my way through with Notepad and a constantly crashing Windows Vista machine. (<a href="../february/32bit.html">The same one that's now mine, funnily enough.</a>) I only remember that this happened in elementary school because I know I showed my social worker (or maybe she was a counselor; I don't remember) the files on a flash drive I'd smuggled in.</p>
<p>I felt like the world's most wanted criminal as I signed up for a free hosting service under a false name and an obviously fake address. The terms of service said that they would attempt to verify all addresses and terminate the accounts of people who they couldn't verify existed. It apparently took them over a decade to figure it out and delete my abandoned site there. Or maybe it was just an inactive account being cleaned...</p>
<p>A major part of what initially pulled me towards Gemini was the simplicity of the <code>text/gemini</code> markup language. HTML is littered with ending tags and closing tags. Sure, one could serve plaintext <code>.txt</code> files, but then there wouldn't be any inline links or stylization whatsoever. And <a href="../june/homo.html">heaven knows I hate unformatted plaintext</a> when it comes to the web. Both from an aesthetics standpoint, since I hate blandness and homogeneity, and from a neurodivergent one, since walls of tiny text that all blend into one another demand an attention span to plod my way through far longer than I can usually muster.</p>
<p>Another pretty damning argument, or weak depending on the point of view, is that Gemini <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200707212036/https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23730408">isn't backwards-compatible with the pre-existing web</a>. As the top commenter on the Hacker News thread (in a <a href="../february/hackernews.html">rare moment of sanity for an HN comment</a>) says, emphasis mine:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The protocol is new and primitive, it's easy to write tools around it, write texts about it, etc. A small community forms, and you're part of it. You can advertise it to others, or rant against the mainstream, or whatever. <strong>But now what? You lose interest and abandon it, and eventually it dies.</strong></p>
<p>... <strong>The advantage here is that the community is not an island. Users of Big Browser can still read your latest rants.</strong> They can even learn about this project and, while perhaps not using Mom-and-Pop browser, may support it in their sites, since it wouldn't require another server; mostly just having their site work without JavaScript would be a huge step forward. Right, you don't have Google filtering based on Accessibility. The community can create a search engine that does. Now what? You just get on with your life, producing and consuming AccessibleWeb content without the gratuitous incompatibility.</p>
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<p>But I didn't come here to dunk on Gemini again. My point is that most modern browsers, <a href="https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/markdown-preview-plus/febilkbfcbhebfnokafefeacimjdckgl?hl=en-US">without</a> <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/markdown-viewer-webext/">extensions</a>, don't natively render document types other than <code>text/html</code>. (I am counting PDFs in on this since technically rendering those is thanks to an extension, just now usually built-in.) Even trying to view an image standalone makes the browser generate an impromptu HTML document to display it in. Thus, if one wants to build an accessible website that doesn't require potential visitors to install additional extensions or even <em>whole browsers</em>, they have to either handwrite HTML or subordinate themselves to a framework or service that does it for them. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200708221307/https://www.webdesigndev.com/10-good-and-10-bad-things-about-adobes-dreamweaver/">Adobe Dreamweaver</a>, which I thankfully never had the misfortune of using, is notorious for constructing bloated and opaque HTML.</p><p>But since mainstream browsers don't look like they're going to support Markdown rendering natively anytime soon, one writing their website would have to somehow translate their pages into HTML <em>before</em> they hit the browser. In other words, if the client side won't do or can't be trusted to do it, the server will have to do it. Using one of my tulpas' sites <b>(EDIT 2021-07-18: the website no longer exists because I no longer own the domain)</b> (with consent), I experimented with several server-side Markdown-to-HTML servers:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200707211729/https://github.com/crempp/mdweb">mdweb</a> worked well when it was configured properly. But it relies heavily on templates, and the ones it comes with are riddled with JavaScript and weird CSS frameworks that were exactly what I was trying to <em>escape</em> from. The documentation is sparse and doesn't really go into detail how to write a theme from scratch, so I deemed it more trouble than it was worth.</li>
<li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200707211716/https://github.com/mkaz/lanyon/">lanyon</a> also relies heavily on templates. This one <em>did</em> have proper documentation on how to write them, but the web server didn't seem to actually render any changes to my site unless I manually stopped and restarted it each time, which rather... defeats the purpose. True, I could write a systemd service and a crontab line to restart it every few hours, but if I were actively writing a document and wanted to see how it looked like before I anounced it, I'd have to wait until the next time the server restarted, and if I wasn't doing anything to my site, it would be reloading unnecessarily.</li>
<li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200707211706/https://github.com/oscarmorrison/md-page">md-page</a> depends on client-side JavaScript to be enabled. Since it's essentially an HTML page with Markdown hanging off the end, without that JavaScript to turn it into valid HTML, most browsers would just mangle the raw Markdown into an unreadable glob of text.</li>
</ul>
<p>This site runs on Caddy. If we were still on the glorious Caddy 1.x days, we'd have a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200707211659/https://caddyserver.com/v1/docs/markdown">markdown directive</a> built in that does everything we want: just throw some <code>text/markdown</code> files in a folder, point the server to a <code>style.css</code> file to throw on everything, and go. But Caddy 2.x insists on using <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200708223918/https://caddyserver.com/docs/caddyfile/directives/templates">templates</a> and making the prospective site-writer dig through complicated, sometimes non-existent, documentation to try to grasp some semblance of Markdown rendering.</p>
<p>Thankfully, since the old 1.x download pages were still up, I <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200708224225/https://caddyserver.com/download/linux/amd64?license=personal&amp;telemetry=off">saved the program</a> in the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200708224355/https://caddyserver.com/download/linux/arm7?license=personal&amp;telemetry=off">Wayback Machine</a> so it would continue to be available after the Caddy developers memoryholed everything. Meaning, with the power of a reverse proxy, I could write a site entirely in Markdown with the end reader none the wiser.</p>
<p>Here's my current configuration:</p>
<pre>
REDACTED:2015 {
root /home/vanevander/Sync/website/azure/
markdown / {
css /style.css # this gets applied to every page
}
tls off # since this is behind a reverse proxy
bind 127.0.0.1 # don&#39;t let people bypass the reverse proxy
browse # dynamically generate file listings for folders without an index.md, like how Gopher and Gemini do
}
</pre>
<p>But this only works for server-side websites. Since one of my goals (or restraints) with this is to not assume the client knows this is supposed to be Markdown, I can't just slap a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200708225311/https://github.com/rivy/js-user.markdown-render">userscript</a> in a ZeroNet directory and call it a day. And even if I were to do that, I'd have to maintain a separate version of the website just for peer-to-peer websites, as inserting that JavaScript would also affect Caddy's rendered pages.</p>
<p>And even though <a href="../february/32bit.html">I hate Node.js with a passion</a>, I have to admit that the latest builds of Beaker Browser support <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200708231723/https://beakerbrowser.com/docs/guides/create-a-markdown-site">rendering Markdown automatically</a>. Although CSS isn't automatically applied, and thus one has to put the HTML line at the top of the file to enable it. Curiously enough, this makes Caddy's pages have duplicate CSS entries, although it doesn't seem to affect the pages. Beaker Browser also doesn't play well (actually, at all) with Caddy's convention of writing TOML at the top of a Markdown file to set metadata such as the page title, so this:</p>
<pre>
+++
title = &quot;Page title here&quot;
+++
</pre>
<p>gets rendered as:</p>
<p><code>+++title = "Page title here"+++</code></p>
<p>which is obviously ugly and doesn't work at all. Normal <code>&lt;title&gt;</code> tags work as a workaround, I guess.</p>
<p>So, under this system, I'm not entirely free of HTML, nor can I yet code an entire page from memory since I have to remember the CSS line. But it's a start towards a future without template files, a future where blogging demands less mental working memory, less friction against chronic fatigue.</p>
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<p>So I'm revisiting this post a few days after I drafted it. Tired and worn out from work, a precious hour or two from willing my body to sleep like a rock so that tomorrow is less hell.</p>
<p>Despite all of the rationalization I've done above, I still can't seem to will myself to follow through with anything I've written here on my own site. Mostly because of the dependency on a technically dead piece of software. Not that a transition to Markdown would be the worst thing ever- it's still <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200712143250/https://plaintextproject.online/articles/2018/01/26/markdown.html"><em>plaintext</em>, after all</a>- but it would be like moving my entire digital notepad to a word processor on a whim. Even with LibreOffice's open formats, if I don't have access to the software and I <em>need</em> to open a file right then and there, the best I can do is unzip it like any other archive and go digging within. I can convert the HTML to Markdown until the cows come home, but if I don't have a server that can serve those files, then what's the point? I'd just have to go back eventually.</p>
<p>In some future yet unknown to me where we've all migrated onto a computing architecture other than ARM or x86, hopefully one that's fully open-source, what will the software we use look like? Will we even be on Linux anymore, or even a UNIX-based system while we're pondering? Caddy can talk a big game about not having any dependencies, but it still technically has one: the Go language. If Go doesn't exist on the systems of the future, good luck getting Caddy to run on it without any kind of virtualization. (Assuming the climate crisis doesn't knock us down to Raspberry Pi-levels of computing power and we can even virtualize in the first place.)</p>
<p>What will the web look like, for that matter? What will the browsers and the networks we use prioritize? Ease-of-use like Markdown, or infinite customization like HTML? Or will some other plaintext format take its place? Or will the commercialization come to a tipping point, and everyone is forced to use some proprietary binary format?</p>
<p>Or maybe the world will shatter and the internet die forever, and something else rise up in its place, and none of this will matter anyway.</p>
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<h1>You Can't Stop The Signal</h1>
<p>published: 2020-07-26</p>
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<blockquote>
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200721025616/https://vonupodcast.com/faq/"><strong>Vonu</strong> is the condition or quality of, as well as the action of achieving, an invulnerability to coercion. Etymologically, it is an awkward contraction of the phrase, VOluntary Not vUlnerable (hence, "vonu").</a>
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<p>Copyright requires coercion. If there is no State with a monopoly on violence to loom over a populace and threaten whoever has the misfortune of losing a copyright lawsuit with time in jail or theft of money or property, then there is no real power in a license attached to "intellectual property". In the end, it doesn't matter if the license is permissive or not; people who you don't like with ideologies you disapprove of are going to take it and use it, and there is nothing you can do to stop them without resorting to violence, and you are beset with <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200721020653/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_Max_Stirner">phantasms</a> and riddled with delusions if you think otherwise.</p>
<p>Early 2018 up until it shut down in August 2019, I spent a lot of time on 8chan. My favorite board was /tech/, home of ceaseless threads where Linux and BSD fanboys fought it out and femboys shared screenshots of their riced desktops. The /fucko/ threads were my favorite. Laden with useful (if not a little outdated) advice on how to technologically protect oneself from the State, and how to destroy the evidence were one to find out that the police were after them. From the baby things like switching to FOSS software and making a GPG keypair to ghosting it out with Tails and Libreboot and full-disk encryption with a built-in "nuke". How ironic that imageboards like 8chan have a reputation of being wastelands and havens for all sorts of disgusting identitarians like neonazis, and yet their effort ended up helping me, an <em>anarchist lesbian</em>, clean up my digital tracks even further than what I'd started with the Google Freakout of 2016.</p>
<p>I am sure that they would have been <em>extremely displeased</em> to know that their knowledge helped someone they would have so openly considered a degenerate, a walking piece of filth, someone to be exterminated from the land. But how were they to know? How would they have stopped me from seeing the fruits of their research without also severely restricting their ability to disseminate it amongst themselves? Should they have written a "No Homosexuals Allowed" license and slapped it on top of their carefully constructed guides? Obviously they did not, and <em>it wouldn't have worked anyway</em>. A piece of paper, digital or physical, is not going to stop me from using information. And because I was <em>vonu</em> from them, hidden from 8chan's logging by Tor and Tails, there would be no way for them to know that any kind of copyright infringement had taken place.</p>
<p>I must admit, I erupted in laughter when I saw the so-called <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200713171551/https://github.com/climate-strike/license">"Climate Strike Software License"</a>. The general gist of it is that certain pieces of software, mostly Python math-related modules from the list they provided, are in use by companies contributing to the climate crisis, and thus they must be stopped by a... digital piece of paper. Never mind that the CSSL violates the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200721024722/https://opensource.org/osd-annotated">canonical Open Source Definition</a>, and thus, if a piece of software switched to this new license, it would immediately break GPL compatibility and thus fuck over every FOSS project relying on it, climate-accelerating or not. Do you <em>really</em> think that a megacorporation so obviously protected by the governments that allow it to exist would be cowed by a mere text file? Only relatively recently has the GPL been proven <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200721015944/https://www.theregister.com/2017/05/13/gnu_gpl_enforceable_contract/">to be able to be upheld in court</a>, but even then, it was <em>in court</em> by an entity with the financial resources to take the offender to court. And changing the license will ultimately do nothing, as <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200721025033/https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/7375/is-it-possible-for-linux-developers-to-retroactively-pull-their-code-from-linu">you can't retroactively revoke a license from code</a> as the code-of-conduct controversy with the Linux kernel proves. Said harmful companies could just continue to use the old versions of the programs covered under licenses that they aren't violating and carry on with their day so long as the code still works.</p>
<p>In the case that I cited above, it was one company against another company. One entity with the money to pursue litigation against another company with the money to defend themselves. Although I wouldn't use <em>vonu</em> to describe their position, the existence of <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200721030530/https://anti-slapp.org/what-is-a-slapp">SLAPPs</a> prove that corporations and governments have little to no fear of individual people mounting complaints against them. Do you really think you can successfully defend your piece of "intellectual property" from license violation in any meaningful way without litigation? <strong>In the end, without the threat of violence, nobody gives a shit about licenses, and those who do have a cop in their heads. Your code, your art, is going to get stolen anyway, and there isn't anything you can do about it other than hope you have the social clout for people to know who it really belongs to anyway and respect that of their own free will.</strong></p>
<p>Video games are technically pieces of software. Almost all of them are under a proprietary license that forbids making backups or sharing them with friends or obtaining the software through "unauthorized" channels. But I don't give a shit! Nintendo's "copyright" is a phantasm to me. I will download <a href="https://the-eye.eu/public/rom/">every classic ROM they have</a> (and a few... <em>contemporary</em> ones, while we're at it) and not feel a single shred of guilt.</p>
<p>Licenses that exclude entities on the basis of falling into some category or another, like the <a href="http://archive.md/N2zNP">"No Harm"</a> license, have little to no power in the actual world. For example, one with a vendetta against me who knew I used a piece of software under the aforementioned license could easily take my post about <a href="../../2019/may/gender-critical.html">being gender-critical</a> and claim that I am contributing to "hate speech or discrimination" regarding gender and gender identity. Even though nowhere in the post do I advocate for violence or claim to hate anyone with a "gender identity", merely just state that I find the concept of gender personally stifling, it's their word against mine.</p>
<p>In all that I do, I strive more and more to achieve <em>vonu</em>, to become invulnerable to coercion. That's why there's so many darknet gateways into this website. That's why I write under a pseudonym. That's why I left the Zaibatsu and the tildes and Neocities. I already know that, in my short time on the internet, I have made a myriad of enemies who would love to see me go dark and never post a single thing again, who would gladly shut me up had they the power. And some days, I have to admit, I wonder what it would be like to throw it all away and return to being a normie. But this website is my home. It is the one thing I can come back to at the end of day and know that it is truly mine. And even then- even <em>then</em> it is not completely vonu. I still rely on other parties: Namecheap and Namesilo for domains, Vultr for VPS hosting, Paypal to pay them off every month or year, a bank to pay Paypal off, a job to pay the bank off, enough positive/neutral social standing to keep my job, enough customers at the place I work at to justify my slot on the payroll... I feel freer than I did when I started MayVaneDay five years ago, and yet I am still so entrenched in the ruts of other people's lives, still at the mercy of so many entities.</p>
<p>Take the aforementioned example of my stance on gender. I am neither "trans-exclusionary" nor a "radical feminist". But I am sure that someone, somewhere, has labeled me as a "TERF". That is why I laugh when I see codes of conduct like the one at the Gemini hosting service <a href="http://archive.md/zLsDI">tanelorn.city</a>. You have the right to decide who uses your server resources. You have the right to decide who you want to associate and dissociate with. I am in no way advocating that authoritarians be given free rein to shit up everything, or even to be listened to. <strong>Just remember: those who you do not want to share your spaces with will set up their own spaces. Just like how you wish they would cease to exist, so do they wish the same upon you. The ways you protect yourself will be the ways they protect themselves. You cannot stop them. But they cannot stop you either.</strong> Tor's anonymity comes agnostic of the beliefs of the person using it. GPG encryption works regardless of the beliefs of the person using it. Any attempt to weaken these, like the State's persistent attempts to get backdoors inserted into proven encryption methods that plague their investigations, will not only weaken those who truly need it but also do nothing to people not under the State's duress, to the exact people you <em>don't</em> want using those tools.</p>
<p>You do not want to associate with me because of who you think I am, impression true or false regardless? Fine. But technologies like Tor and I2P allow me to be <em>vonu</em> from you. I don't want to use Gemini for <a href="../june/homo.html">reasons I stated in an earlier post</a>, but if I did want to set up my own server, there is nothing Solderpunk could do to stop me. Not a license, not a strongly-worded letter to fuck off, not a legal campaign (and honestly, I doubt he would sling the court system against me both because he is a very kind man and because he lives in a different country than me). I have the source code to multiple servers and clients. Given enough time, I could write my own. And who is to stop me from using them once I have them? A protocol is an idea. Ideas want to be free.</p>
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<p>But enough of depressing things like software development. Let's take a little break, have a little comic relief as a treat. You've read a lot of words. Feel free to rest your eyes a bit here. The words will still be here when you get back.</p>
<blockquote>
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200721043449/https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tyler-the-creators-cyber-bullying-tweet">Hahahahahahahaha How The Fuck Is Copyright Real Hahahaha Brodie Just Walk Away From The Screen Like Bro Close Your Eyes Haha</a>
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<p>Rest of this post aside, it's absolutely wild how humans that lived long before us decided that we can just... take certain combinations of letters and numbers and symbols and say, "I created this. I own this arrangement of characters. Only I can control how this arrangement is used." Like... On a purely technical level, there is no difference between a novel and six hundred pages of me keysmashing. It is only because we as human beings ascribe value and meaning to the former and not the latter that only the former gets shackled in the copyright system.</p>
<p>Absolutely wild how it's possible to get locked up for nothing more than distributing combinations of letters and numbers and symbols. Aren't they all symbols in the end? Scrawlings we assign value to in the system we call "language"? Ultimately it's all just chicken scratch. And yet entire industries rise and fall on controlling where they go...</p>
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<p>Patents are "intellectual property", sheets of paper that entities only abide by because of fear of litigation. The pharmaceutical industry in the United States would not be in the deplorable state it is in now if it were not for the patent system enabling price gouging. The free market would run wild, companies seeking the cheapest way to produce medicine, and the one with the best balance of low prices and high quality would get the most business.</p>
<p>Stories are "intellectual property". And my ever-growing collection of ebooks can attest to the fact that DRM is only a temporary and relatively-easily-defeated measure to stop ebook piracy. And even though most literature and other vehicles of stories are licensed under the equivalent of proprietary licences, that doesn't stop <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200721040201/https://archiveofourown.org/works/20579735?view_full_work=true">fanfiction writers</a> or the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20190826192503/https://gamebanana.com/skins/148006">modding community</a>. And song remixes... I hate how "remix" has become synonymous with "drown out everything else in the song with the same sounds in every single goddamn trap song", but it <em>is</em> derivative, and it is <em>not</em> stopping anytime soon.</p>
<p>Given enough time, everything will become public domain, and none of this will matter anyway. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20201205180143/https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/my-stolen-code-on-github.html">Your carefully crafted software license will go to shit.</a> Your copyright will lapse. And a million flowers will bloom out of the cracks where once they were confined to only your walled garden. Your "copyright" is only a temporary delay that helps no one and <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200722153327/https://gopher.tildeverse.org/sdf.org/0/users/jebug29/log/2020-07/20-2209">prevents well-meaning people from preserving whatever legacy you have.</a></p>
<p>Authoritarians will steal your "intellectual property". Authoritarians will see your "keep out" signs and spit on them and trample them under their feet on their way to take what is yours and claim it as your own. Licenses are like laws; clearly they have failed to prevent tyranny from taking root. The time for working within the State is over. Friendship ended with legislation; now direct action is my friend.</p>
<p>Copyright is a phantasm. Its only weight comes from the threat of State violence. Steal their code, their stories, their songs, their "intellectual property" right back. Liberate yourself with the fruits of their labor just as they have enslaved you with yours. Achieve <em>vonu</em>.</p>
<p>They can't stop your signal.</p>
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<h1>Gemini Means Homogenization</h1>
<p>published: 2020-06-20</p>
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<p>Once upon a time, I got a job at a place we'll call Milk Monarch so that some future bootlicking employer has a harder time finding this post. I went to work there for one day and then, immediately upon returning home, went on the scheduling website and announced that I was quitting. There was simply no way I was going to work in ninety-degree heat wearing a visor and long heavy dress pants with <i>no breaks</i>.</p>
<p>But even if I tried to pull the autism card, there was no way that I could have possibly been given an exemption on those parts of the dress code. For the whole point of a dress code is to homogenize its employees as much as possible, turn former individuals into mere replaceable agents of whatever corporation they have the misfortune of having to work for. Doubly so during the Corona-chan party, when everywhere I go I am harangued into wearing a facemask that actually does little to protect me and just makes it hard for me to breathe. As much of my face as possible is hidden from the customer, my range of vision reduced to a small sliver as if I had been thrown into the depths of a fundamentalist Islamic country.</p>
<p>But, hey, at least it made it harder for people to see me cry, biting down the throes of a panic attack as I sprayed down trash cans!</p>
<p>I hate homogeneity. A collectivist pipedream, blending all the colors of the rainbow into the same shade of dirt I step over with my feet on my way to my favorite tree to read under. But this isn't my mother's garden. Nothing meaningful grows out of this brown, just holes ever-growing where worms slip under the earth and ants digging their colonies to be flooded when the rain comes.</p>
<p>"All people are born equal" is a lie. Some people are born with talents for art, some a predisposition for mathematics, others physically strong. People come in both neurotypical and <a href="../../2019/september/roophloch.html">neurodivergent</a> flavors. There are all kinds of races and ethnic groups and divisions and sub-divisions of all of them. And with the vast diversity of cultural practices and languages and food and celebrations... This world is a colorful place. So long as people are peaceful to each other, why would I want it to be any other way?</p>
<p>I can only exist in a world where I am the only one of me. Unique, differentiated, separate and yet a part of the world. Even if the homogenization were of myself, making everyone see things exactly the way I do, I would still refuse to live in it, for without the differences of other people, there would be no surprises, no spontaneity arising from a mind I cannot access. There would be no point in being, for there would always be someone better than me at being me.</p>
<p>If every website in the world looked exactly as mine does, although the JavaScript menace would be defeated (assuming they were all blogs), it would be just as boring of a world. It would be just like everyone having the same layout of house and the same furniture. Part of the fun of going to someone else's house is exploring the space that they live in every day, seeing how they've arranged their house to do the things they want it to do. Part of the fun of going to someone else's website is figuring out the layout, where everything is, what all the buttons do. And both websites and people's houses tell you so much about the person living inside: whether they're a clean freak or more relaxed on the hygiene issue, what color schemes they find pleasant, whether they're a minimalist or a maximalist...</p>
<p>Granted, things like colors or advanced layouts don't work in browsers without CSS support. But given the Chrome/Firefox near-duopoly on the mainstream browser market and the prohibitive time cost of developing a separate browser engine not based on one of the two, the vast majority of readers would have to go out of their way to use a browser without even basic CSS support. And not everyone likes to have JavaScript enabled (for good reasons, and websites worth their time will at least pleasantly degrade to a readable state without it). But to have the <i>option</i> to have these things to give one's site just that extra pinch of individuality, I feel, is an important part of- dare I say it- <i>user sovereignty</i>.</p>
<p>Proponents of <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200620001155/https://proxy.vulpes.one/gopher/republic.circumlunar.space/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-16__The_Small_Internet.txt">the so-called "Small Internet"</a> build their sites and protocols around the concept that the only ethical filetype to serve is unformatted (aka sans-CSS or anything like it) plaintext, and that it is up to the client authors and the users themselves to determine how they want content to be displayed. According to the head developer, Solderpunk, himself:</p>
<blockquote>
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200620001945/https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification-modified.gmi">Authors should not expect to exercise any control over the precise rendering of their text lines, only of their actual textual content.</a>
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<p>But this is already how the web works. Users have the option of using browsers that don't support CSS or JavaScript, or disabling them if said browsers <i>do</i> support those, or using <a href="https://add0n.com/stylus.html">extensions</a> to <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/">control</a> <a href="https://noscript.net/">these</a> <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublock-origin/">at will</a>. The same cannot be said of Gemini browsers. Even <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200620002252/https://github.com/MasterQ32/kristall/blob/master/README.md">Kristall</a>, which yours truly has <a href="../../../tutorials/kristall-haiku.html">contributed to</a> and considers the best of the "Small Internet" browsers, only allows control over a relatively tiny subset of CSS. I don't "expect to exercise any control" when I code my site, only suggest a default stylesheet so my website doesn't look like trash by default.</p>
<p>I must admit that here is where the oh-so-beloved terminal fails. For every site at its most functional looks the same, takes on whatever color scheme I have applied to my system at that moment. Remnants of a layout dependent on the bloated parts of CSS or JavaScript, like the infamous several pages of bullet-point navigational menus in Lynx, don't count because they detract from the site instead of serving it. But I am an outlier case. Lynx only takes up a tiny fraction of a percent of browser share. I know going in that I am most likely going to get a second-class experience. <b>I can accept the breakage of poorly-coded sites if that means I can surf the web without fear of anything nasty</b> (a boon Solderpunk will later claim only for Gemini).</p>
<p>Solderpunk, in his <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200620002844/https://proxy.vulpes.one/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/users/solderpunk/cornedbeef/why-not-just-use-a-subset-of-http-and-html.gmi">most recent post</a>, talks at length about why he is developing a new protocol instead of trying to reclaim the web. His main point is that he specifically wants a place where all content looks and acts the same by default, where all gemsites (or whatever term Gemini sites are called now) are defanged and neutered and cannot possibly do any harm to the reader.</p>
<p>A noble goal, to seek to protect users- except that this forces <i>homogenization</i>. All content looks the same visually. There is nothing graphics-wise to differenciate one author from another, one gemsite from another. Everything churns into the same putrid-brown sludge of walls of text. Although I may generally dislike the denizens of Neocities for some reason or another, at least when I go <a href="https://neocities.org/browse">browse through</a>, I feel like I'm taking a tour through fairyland and not a <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200620153035/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khrushchyovka">Soviet-era slum</a>. <b>(EDIT 2020-08-26: This is mainly only true for browsers that faithfully follow the spec of "one document per request". <a href="https://github.com/RangerMauve/agregore-browser">Agregore</a> is a graphical browser with Gemini support that renders my site just like how it's <i>supposed</i> to look, CSS stylesheets and all. Also, the <a href="https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/mayvaneday.art/index.html">Mozz.us Gemini-to-HTTP proxy</a> seems to do this as well.)</b></p>
<p>Solderpunk argues that there is no point in trying to carve out, as he calls it, a "SafeWeb" from HTTP/S because there is "simply no way to know in advance whether fetching any given https:// URL will yield SafeWeb content or UnsafeWeb content." One can either use browser extensions, as I mentioned earlier, to neuter or wrangle into submission sites on mainstream browsers or use a browser that doesn't support "UnsafeWeb" sites. <i>Or</i> just build a protocol where one doesn't always have to be on the defensive, like Gemini.</p>
<blockquote>Safeweb status is inherently unstable by virtue of being a subset of something greater - people will start off building SafeWebsites but then later decide that "SafeWeb plus just these one or two extra tags that I really want and promise to use responsibly!" is "SafeEnoughWeb".</blockquote>
<p>But this is true of everything network-wise. Anybody on the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200620004115/https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/">Gemini mailing list</a> can attest to the constant attempts to stuff more functionality into the damn protocol, like content uploading and inline content, and Solderpunk's desperate vetoing of these. What is to stop someone from saying "fuck it" to the official spec and creating an addition to the <code>text/gemini</code> format or the protocol itself and then developing a server and client that supports it? Is it "SafeEnoughGem" then? Compliant clients will refuse to respect anything the spec does not like, just as my "dozen third-party plugins" will refuse to respect anything I do not like.</p>
<p><b>There is no such thing as a permanently safe web protocol.</b> Remember Gopher? It's possible to serve an HTML page with JavaScript and CSS embedded over Gopher. Graphical browsers will treat it the same as if it were HTTP. Obviously, as it stands, Gopher would have troubles with server-side applications out-of-the-box, but it's not impossible to add support to a server-side application to make a Gopher site just as heinous as the HTTP/S everyone so claims to hate.</p>
<blockquote>All of this is an <i>insane</i> quantity of tedious and error-prone work in order to do a bad job of replicating what simple-by-design protocols like Gopher or Gemini offer at a drastically reduced cost of entry: a clearly defined online space, distinct from the web, where you know for sure and in advance that everybody is playing by the same rules.</blockquote>
<p>You may have a point, Solderpunk, about Gemini being "psychologically liberating" since one does not have to defend themselves, since the interface for every site is the same, since implementation of servers and clients is comparatively easy. <i>For now</i>. Had I not already known the full control an HTTP/S website affords me and only <i>now</i> joined the internet as an author, I might have gone with Gemini for its ease-of-use. But you will not be the benevolent-dictator-for-life forever. All good things, all golden eras, come to an end eventually. One day you may find Gemini becoming the same bloated protocol you sought to flee if enough developers want it so. One day you may find your ant colonies flooding.</p><p>From the <a href="../../../nomad.md.asc">Nomadic Manifesto</a>:</p>
<blockquote>...there is no permanent safe haven for us in this world. We are condemned to wandering forever.</blockquote>
<p>I would rather have a dangerous, potentially devastating, liberation than a safe sanitized serfdom. I would rather have my body intact and have to learn how to defend it than have everyone's limbs chopped off so nobody can hurt each other. And I would rather have a billion sworn enemies than have even one person forced to be the exact same as me, than I be forced to homogenize myself for the sake of another person's safety.</p>
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<h1>"Free speech" kinda sucks, actually</h1>
<p>published: 2020-06-16</p>
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<p>Today, through the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200616000557/https://gopher.tildeverse.org/i-logout.cz/1/bongusta/">Bongusta Gopher aggregator</a>, I stumbled upon a person who pretentiously calls themselves <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200616000816/https://gopher.tildeverse.org/aussies.space/1/~freet/phlog/">"The Free Thinker"</a>, fresh with hot takes such as <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20200616000421/https://gopher.tildeverse.org/aussies.space/0/~freet/phlog/2020-05-31The_Best_Thing_About_Gopher_is_that_its_Unencrypted.txt">"actually, transport security is bad because it prevents me from using my shitty machines; damn everyone else"</a>. While occasionally they make a salient point, the majority of their phlog consists of either crap I don't care about or crap I don't care enough to point out why they're wrong about.</p>
<p>But I can't bring myself to feel any sort of negative feelings about them, for I see a lot of myself in them. From their writing, they know they stand against the majority's opinion on any given subject. They have ascended beyond caring. They have ideas they know others will find idiotic, and dare to have them anyway.</p>
<p>But what is the "free" in "free thinker" supposed to mean, anyway? Free as in gratis, since their posts aren't behind a firewall (and thanks to Corona-chan, I don't have to pay for the transport of bits and bytes into my home network, either)? Free as in freedom, Stallman's variety, where I don't have to use any proprietary software to reach their server, to read their words, where I can remix them as I see fit and scatter them on the wind like dandelion seeds?</p>
<p>Or maybe it's "free from overt outside influence".</p>
<p>Can speech ever truly be free? For it costs calories to move my mouth, to make my lungs push out air to form words, to move my fingers on a screen. Nearly negligible, or otherwise there would be no such thing as obese internet celebrities, but there nonetheless.</p>
<p>Maybe one would define "free speech" as speech done without fear of censorship by anybody else. On the surface, one would feel inclined to support this. If it is technologically impossible for one to be censored, then one could "speak" without the fear of a government or any other body of people proclaiming themselves to have power over others silencing their words before they reached anybody else or stopping the signal once it had.</p>
<p>There is such a place where this is possible. It's called the ZeroTalk forum on ZeroNet. And it's an absolute cesspool of people covered by all of a hysterical liberal's favorite words. Racists, fascists, peddlers of fake news, misogynists, transphobes, homophobes... If it's on a bingo board of things Orange Man Bad has been called the past four years, one is certain to find that kind of person shitting up ZeroTalk.</p>
<p>This can be mitigated to a limited degree. Several blocklists, including MOAB by the not-a-cesspool-dweller Styromaniac, give ZeroNet peers the ability to filter out the worst of it. But blocklists only work by user ID or zite address, not by keyword (at least, last time I checked). And ZeroNet has none of these enabled out-of-the-box. The default experience for normie newcomers is to be instantly flooded with pretty damn close to the worst humanity has to offer.</p>
<p>Do not misinterpret me. I am not calling for censorship. But what is "censorship", anyway? Some, including the aforementioned ZeroTalk denizens, might define censorship as "anytime someone chooses not to hear what I have to say". Under that definition, blocklists are a form of censorship as they are a blanket mute of anything a list of posters has ever posted. But if the cost of removing this "censorship" is to have to choose between seeing the same uninspired string of racial slurs ad nauseam or leaving said community to opt out, well, <i>hasta la vista</i>, baby.</p>
<p>Ideologically, I know that peer-to-peer is superior to client-server for the reasons I laid out <a href="../../2019/june/second-class-citizens.html">a year ago</a>. Client-server inherently disadvantages those without the financial resources to pay for a VPS or the technical knowhow to run their own server behind ever-restrictive ISPs. And peer-to-peer is a lot closer to apocalypse-ready since most P2P systems don't require a connection to the outside world for base functionality. (Although I don't see how one bugging in would get much in the way of communication without others to be traveling and spreading their data around...)</p>
<p>But my personal experience sometimes finds me preferring client-server and the control it gives the person running the server. On ZeroNet, owners of interactive zites can't easily remove submitted content, if at all. They can only suggest to other clients seeding that specific zite to hide certain users' content.</p>
<p>This may seem desirable at first glance. But imagine that you are an owner of a small forum on ZeroNet about a niche interest of yours. Vidya, electronics, outdoor extreme sports, sub-sub-subcategories of a certain political ideology, doesn't matter. You and a handful of others are civil and self-policing and pleasant to each other. But one day the spammers find it. They spew slurs and ads everywhere. It takes you a while, but you manage to pull together a decent blocklist and make a sticky post advising visitors to use it to get back to normal, maybe even submit it to MOAB so the rest of ZeroNet benefits.</p>
<p>But congratulations! Your zite is now forever mutilated. You can delete the spammy content from your side, but so long as those spammers are connected to the same trackers everyone else is using, new visitors will use them in pulling your zite to their machine, and the spammers' user-submitted content will come along with that.</p>
<p>On a client-server forum, the admin would just ban said spammers, delete their content, and blacklist said IP addresses from registering again (if on a network with IP addresses, that is). Communities on client-server models have greater control over what speech they are allowed to tolerate. If said servers are on darknets like Tor or I2P, they have even greater freedom to decide their own rules, for the masking of their geographical locations and the extra transport security provides a pretty damn good (but not infallible) protection against government interference. This does not have to be limited to a single server; a chat on Matrix could be spearheaded on one server, with users from other servers joining, but the admin would still have ultimate control (last I remember; they might have changed it) over who stays in the chat and who gets kicked or banned. Peer-to-peer systems that rely on invites from someone already in the forum being joined, like Briar, have greater control than ZeroNet's free-for-all system over who gets in, but once a peer gets compromised or lets a bad apple in, it becomes downright difficult to purge bad actors if not impossible.</p>
<p>Self-determination is one of the greatest things I put value on in this life. (I will not call it a "right", for technically rights do not exist without the power to protect them, but that is a pondering for another post.) An individual should have the ability to decide who they associate and disassociate from and be able to do so at will (given the consent of those being associated with, of course; no such consent is needed for leaving). A group should have the ability to decide their own rules for operation and grant who they feel trustworthy the power to enforce them.</p> <p>I am not advocating for centralization. Far from it! I do not want the entire internet to become just Reddit and Facebook and Twitter and Google. But I see the people I read quite frequently proclaiming the virtues of "user sovereignity" without also acknowledging the sovereignity of the, for lack of a better term, "usee". If this site had comments, would I not be justified in moderating them so that I would not become host to filth? Should I be disallowed from preventing known spambots and attackers from accessing my site? Am I unreasonable, as "The Free Thinker" would assuredly label me, for requiring decent levels of transport security to protect my words and your eyes from man-in-the-middling?</p>
<p>Would <i>you</i> allow random people to walk into your house and let out a steamy crap on your carpet? No! You control (or, I sure hope you do or can) who comes into your abode. So why is it okay when it happens on the internet? Let those who want to roll in filth build their houses of mud and manure, and let those who aspire to excellence build their cathedrals and sacred meeting places. And when some from both agree to meet each other and listen to what each has to say, let them build showers to meet each other halfway.</p>
<p>(Innuendo not intended.)</p>
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<h1>Antinatalism</h1>
<p>published: 2020-03-21</p>
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<p>It is unethical and highly immoral to bring children into this world.</p>
<p>The absence of pleasure is not bad. If I sit on my bed in my room and stare at the wall, that is not inherently bad. True, there are far better things I could be doing with my time, far more than it would be prudent to list here. But there are also far <em>worse</em> things I could be doing. To stare at the wall brings me no harm and no gain. It is a neutral action.</p>
<p>But the presence of pain <em>is</em> bad. If I get a cut on my finger, it stings, and I might bleed a little, and I have an increased risk of infection in that area until the wound heals. There is no benefit to getting that cut or experiencing that pain. If I lose a treasured object and I feel sad, that is bad, and I gain nothing. This is to distinguish the pain of a negative experience from the pain of a positive one: if I want to get physically stronger, and I exert myself until my muscles are sore, although I am experiencing physical pain, it is a positive event for me.</p>
<p>Given that the absence of pleasure is not bad, but that the presence of pain is bad, it logically holds that it is better to be absent of pleasure than it is to be experiencing pain. To be alive is to be able to experience pain. Before I became alive, when I was in the metaphorical "void", I did not experience any pain.</p>
<p>A child that has not been conceived cannot feel pleasure, but it cannot feel pain either. Studies are inconclusive whether or not an embryo conceived and then aborted can feel the pain of its abortion, but whatever pain it does feel, if any at all, is brief, and then it returns to the void of nonexistence.</p>
<p>This is not to say that, once conceived, one is obligated to bring the pregnancy to completion just because the life has been forced out of the void. The earlier one can abort a pregnancy, the better, as the potential pain the embryo feels is minimized. It also does not make abortion necessarily a good, merely the less bad of two bad options: the potential short pain of abortion, or the pain of birth <em>and</em> the pain to be endured throughout however long the child's lifespan is, which is not guaranteed to be outweighed by the potential pleasure to be experienced.</p>
<p>This also does not justify murder, as one might think: after all, after the murder, one is dead, and one cannot feel pain in death, right? But murder is an involuntary subjection to death. Murder <em>forces</em> death upon the victim just as conception <em>forces</em> life upon the birthee. <em>Suicide</em> would be justified, as it is a voluntary ending of one's life (and often a surprisingly rational response to a perceived future life where the pain far outweighs the pleasure one is to receive). But the key word here is "voluntary". Every person owns their own body (self-ownership) and has the right to do whatever they want to their body (morphological freedom) so long as they do not force others to give them the fruits of their labor in order to do so (you can pay a surgeon to give you an elective cosmetic surgery, but you cannot force them under the threat of violence, your own or by the government, to do that surgery). If they decide to end their own life, then that is their right.</p>
<p>But it is impossible for birth to be voluntary, as it is impossible to ask an unborn person for their consent to be born. As far as we know, there is no alternate dimension where the souls of all the unborn people reside, waiting to be born, that a prospective parent could contact to ask for consent. And even if there was: how would one even go about asking for consent? A requirement of having rights in most "civilized" countries is to be alive. You know, to have corporeal form? To have a body? As far as I know, we don't (yet) live in the timeline where notary publics in banks can hold seances to ask the unborn to sign off on the consent forms to being born. And this scenario assumes that the "soul", or whatever you want to call it, already has the sentience and knowledge and cognitive ability to fully understand the ramifications of what they would be consenting to. There is no way (currently) to contact the unborn except to give them corporeal form, to give them <em>life</em>, at which point it's a <em>little</em> too late to get consent.</p>
<p>And what if, even in this outlandish scenario, they <em>didn't</em> give consent, and the parent gave birth to them anyway? The parent gambles with a life not their own in the hopes that their child will have a good life. Say there's a lottery a parent can play where there is a fifty-fifty chance of either their child receiving a million dollars upon turning eighteen and their child being diagnosed with a painful and horrific terminal illness upon turning eighteen. One would be right to judge that it would be cruel to put a child on the line to play in said lottery, even though the benefit of the good outcome would be towards the child. So why is it okay to make a child play the lottery of life when it is far more likely for them to get a bad outcome, even if not as harsh as the terminal illness, than to get a good one? The average person in a "civilized" country is far closer to being homeless than they are to being a billionaire. And while the terminal illness is catastrophic, what about the total sum of all the suffering and pain the average person experiences in their lifetime? Is death by a thousand cuts worth the brief (and often false) respites in between?</p>
<p>Why force the child to take the chance? Why force the child to experience the inevitable pain of existence when, by refusing to procreate, the prospective parent can for sure prevent their child from ever suffering?</p>
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<h1>Living In The Epilogue</h1>
<p>published: 2020-03-26</p>
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<p>It's become a bad habit of mine recently to leave my bedroom window open regardless of the weather. The temperature hovers around the high-thirties to the low-forties, indecisive whether it wants to scatter snow over the ground in a last attempt to drag out the last dregs of winter or to give up and let it all melt. Any snow that dares to come down is almost always gone within twenty-four hours, leaving blistered and brown grass in its wake like a little kid repeatedly woken up in the night, confused whether to be awake or asleep, never truly able to be either.</p>
<p>But it's always chilly outside. And since the vents barely work in my room, I can rarely tell the difference by touch alone. The tips of my fingers going numb, the vague ache in my thighs, the sounds of birds chirping and singing in the air: these are the only reminders to close it again at end of day.</p>
<p>If I remember.</p>
<p>There used to be other sounds in the air. The neighbors congregating in one of their yards. A toddler playing in the backyard connected to ours, flitting in and out of the plastic playground like an indecisive bird. The sounds of cars and trucks and motorcycles gunning their engines to show off what they perceive to be raw power on the nearby roads.</p>
<p>At my previous house, I used to lie awake at night and listen to the sounds of the vehicles speeding through the nearby highway. And at college, <a href="../../2019/november/other-world.html">walking back to my dorms from work</a>, I would watch the glow of the headlights coming down the rolling hills like fireflies, like meteors crashing down to earth.</p>
<p>And it was on those roads that the stories came to me, running in sonderous snippets, unaware heralds of a strange sense of disconnection- of dissociation- that they could not yet articulate into words.</p>
<p>And as I wove them into coherent narratives, I found my own narrative starting to unravel at the seams.</p>
<p>In elementary school, as I didn't fit in neatly with the rest of the special-needs kids since I had too much cognitive ability to be content with essentially being babysat in a room full of toys all day, I instead got shoved into the &quot;gifted and talented&quot; program, which was the school administration's way of saying, &quot;Congratulations, you're good at licking the boots of the state's educational system! Let's pull you out of your normal classes and give you harder ones while still expecting you to do all of the homework for both <em>simultaneously</em>.&quot; I and about ten other kids were sold the lies that we were <em>so much better</em> than those other kids who only got the <em>normal</em> classes, that we were destined for greatness, that we would succeed in all of our educational endeavors with flying colors. We were written a story with us as our own protagonist, given plot armor, promised a happy ending.</p>
<p>I never found out how the others ended up, since the transition to junior high separated all of us, and then the sapling that I was, finally taking root after ten years of mass rejection from the soil, was ripped up and transplanted to a town where I'd never see any of them again anyway.</p>
<p>We as humans think in stories. It's hard to do otherwise. You burn your hand on the stove, and then never again as you remember the story of how your hand throbbed in pain. You learn how to do a skill, and in visualizing it in your head, you play a mini-story of some formless person acting out those steps so that you can mirror their actions in your own. You pass down your values and morals to little children by telling them fables.</p>
<p>You drown the pain of existence by stitching yourself into a story, a coherent one, one with a moral and a gist and some sense of a definite ending.</p>
<p>But stories in the human sense are not real. They are <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20110831022543/theviewfromhell.blogspot.com/2010/12/living-in-epilogue-social-policy-as.html">social constructs</a>. You convince yourself that you are living in a narrative because to do otherwise is to concede that there is no purpose of life, no grand scheme of things, just the endless expanse of day after day after day.</p>
<p>Gamers who play story-based games with post-games- in other words, games that let you keep playing even after the final boss fight- rarely stay long in the post-boss world. Without the grand struggle to strive for, the big boss to defeat or the lover to save or the treasure to acquire, the world becomes boring, pointless. One pours their time into games to create heaven, and then finds that, without conflict or an objective, there is no compelling reason- <em>story</em>- to keep them hanging around.</p>
<p>Heaven is, for most religious-minded people, the final end stage of their constructed story of life. Heaven is the cessation of struggle, of desire, the eternal epilogue.</p>
<blockquote>&quot;We may make up stories and allow them to shape our perceptions, but ultimately there is no story. We are all living in the epilogue of reality...&quot; <br />- Sarah Perry, <em>Every Cradle Is a Grave</em></blockquote>
<p>And I'm trapped in the epilogue. There is no rhyme or reason to my life. If there was a grand struggle to this story of mine, I can't discern if it's over or where it is now if not- and the confusion is <a href="../../../poetry/s/sakura.txt">taking a toll</a> on my <a href="../../../flashfiction/c/cetra.html">ability to write</a>. The confusion is terrifying. Who am I if I <a href="../../../poetry/o/october-7-2018.txt">have no story</a>? A <a href="../../../flashfiction/e/erin4.html">body without organs</a>? How am I supposed to string together a coherent narrative if I don't have one of my own to fall back on?</p>
<p>And I fall, and I fall further into the vortex with my wings ablaze, and I fall forever...</p>
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<h1>I Do Not Seek Annihilation</h1>
<p>published: 2020-10-31</p>
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<p>Despite the voice in my head that shrieks <strong>"KILL DESTROY KILL DESTROY"</strong> at every slight inconvenience, I neither find pleasure in nor gain satisfaction from gratuitous violence.</p>
<p>Once, during a vacation sometime in the cusp between elementary in middle school (2011, I think, although I am too lazy to rifle through my photos and find the date proper), my family and I went to some cave system out of state. There was a side attraction, a video game theater, where one overpaid for a ticket and then entered a small theater with a plastic laser gun and played through some short interactive movie. One of the movies had a barebone plot, if any at all, that distilled down to "cowboys genocide aliens".</p>
<p>I told my mother that I did not feel comfortable partaking in such senseless violence, even if simulated. What had the aliens done to me to deserve such a gruesome fate? Were she to pay for a ticket, I would not participate; I would sit it out. I offered to save her the fifteen dollars or so that my ticket would have cost and wait on a nearby bench for them to finish.</p>
<p>My mother told me to shut up and that I had no choice. She paid for five tickets and dragged me into the dim room that reeked of sweat, and my parents and my brothers spent the next seven minutes or so gleefully bursting open the swollen green heads of any unfortunate extraterrestrials that wandered onto the screen.</p>
<p>On the ending credits, there was a big fat zero next to my name.</p>
<p>I think she grounded me afterwards. Which I find hilarious, if not "doomer fuel", because now <em>she</em> is the one proclaiming herself a pacifist whenever she sees me and my brothers playing Smash. But there is no death in Smash, merely a ceaseless cycle of knockouts and respawning. Everyone knew what they were getting into at the start. Everybody is okay at end of day.</p>
<p>If only I could say the same.</p>
<p>Were it up to my mother (or any other entity deigning to fill the role) to decide my path in life, I would be nothing but a daughter, a reference to someone else's reproductive exploits, never an individual in my own right. A certain level of achievement is tolerated, this is true, but only so the mother can point and say: "<em>My</em> child did this." As if I am only a conduit for unlived dreams, a vessel to be vicariously lived through.</p>
<p>I consider myself an antinatalist because I do not think it ethical to give a person life, and thus the guarantee of experiencing suffering, without their consent. But I am already here, and to return myself prematurely to whatever lies beyond the veil would be too painful of an endeavor for me to undertake. To make that choice for others would be just as abhorrent as to put them in that situation to begin with.</p>
<p>I do not yearn for the flame of all I am to <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20201022022634if_/https://www.reddit.com/r/antinatalism/comments/j97cfc/a_dissolving_ouroboros_gif/">flicker out forevermore</a>.</p>
<p>I do not seek annihilation.</p>
<p>I want my life, and this world, to go on and on and on for as long as people wish to live in it, forever evolving in form and experience. I want to be a tree, and a wind that carries along words and birds, and a flower blooming in the cracks in a concrete jail wall in all defiance... I want to dive in the depths of a black hole and hike along a trail of stars and catch a ride on a comet. I want ichor to ignite my veins like a fuse and ambrosia to scour my throat, dissolving the dreck, leaving only the highest-grade poetry behind to sing for all time.</p>
<p>I want Stirner, and Novatore, and de Cleyre. I want freedom, and love, and my ego, my Self, my Unique.</p>
<p>I do not seek to end my life, but to change it.</p>
<p>I do not seek annihilation, but <em>liberation</em>.</p>
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<h1>Deitus?</h1>
<p>published: 2020-10-24</p>
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<blockquote><a href="http://sonic.net/yronwode/arcane-archive.org/religion/satanism/thelema-xeper-deitus-1.php">DEITUS is a new Word for a new Aeon. It is the realization that man's consciousness is eternal and omnipotent. It is, further, the realization, that the individual Will is a direct manifestation of the Will of the Universe. The Law of the Aeon of Lucifer is THELEMA, XEPER, DEITUS or "Will to come into being as a God."<br />When you attain DEITIS [sic], you become a manifestation of the dynamic consciousness of the universe... you become the very embodiment of God or Satan...</a></blockquote>
<p>Last night (at the time of writing this), I was dragged into work on a day I would usually have off for a late-night team meeting. Truth be told, they were supposed to have happened every few months or so, but because of Corona-chan, the managers had been putting them off until now. So I donned my work-issued vest and followed my co-workers, also confused and mostly new enough to have never gone to a work meeting before, and sat down on a cold floor upstairs while a handful of managers lambasted us for everything we'd done wrong and chucked candy at us like so many bullets whenever they thought we "looked bored" or were "going to sleep".</p>
<p>I imagined a sword in my hand, or maybe a beam of fire, as we were told we were not licking the boots of the General Office hard enough. I wondered what the building would look like covered in flames as the manager talking admonished <em>someone</em>, an impersonal <em>you</em>, for taking twenty minutes in the bathroom.</p>
<p>Over and over I have dreams where I am in some kind of vulnerable position: at school, at work... A teacher, a customer, someone else irate corners me, presses my nerves until I make some kind of honest mistake. And then, threatened, my blood glows aflame. A sudden rush of power. And then the person dissolves into a pile of ash at my feet, threat neutralized.</p>
<p>There are a great many things I would do for the power to defend myself, to protect myself. But a god I do not wish to become, for, as the old adage goes, "absolute power corrupts absolutely." To become a deity, a being sans conflict, would be to forever <a href="../march/epilogue.html">live in the Epilogue.</a> (Or, if there are other beings in the heavens, to cause massive collateral harm as mortal beings get caught up in our struggles.)</p>
<p>For a few months, I have been tossing the idea back and forth of a pair of archetypes. Similar to the lesbian <em>butch</em> and <em>femme</em>, I feel the persistent presence of the <em>ocean</em> and the <em>moon</em>.</p>
<p>A woman first appearing shallow, emotionless, detached from the world. Reclusive, withdrawn. But below the frothy skin is an ocean of terrifying depth, home to a litany of unnerving creatures, each more marvelous than the last. Only a tiny fraction of the depths have ever been mapped, far too vast to explore in one lifetime. <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20201008180133/https://www.insidescience.org/video/what-would-happen-if-there-were-no-moon">She needs the moon to regulate herself, to keep herself from succumbing to the chaos within.</a></p>
<p>A woman too dazzling, too radiant, to behold directly. A fierce being of unstoppable ambition, ego higher than her lunar namesake. But she is lonely. She requires an anchor to keep her from flying off in a moment's haste, a reason to keep returning to the earth. She needs someone to appreciate her shining bright, someone to look, someone to acknowledge her. She needs someone who will gladly accept the secrets she casts off like meteors, take them to a watery grave.</p>
<p>And while <a href="../../../books.html#mm_tpf" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, Edell III">I could easily fit myself</a> within the loose description of the ocean, it is merely that: a description, not a prescription. I do not look at a label and go, "hmm, I shall mold myself to it"; I look at it, and if it already describes who I am, then I toy with it (although I would rather discard the whole concept of labels altogether).</p>
<p>Why, I wonder, are so many occultists hung up on molding themselves to something Other? Emptying themselves in hopes that a deity will take hold of their sack of flesh and live through it instead of themselves? Regardless of whether or not I am a part of THE ALL, there is a reason I am down here and now separate from it, and I am not so keen on cutting it short and returning early.</p>
<p>I examine <em>thelema</em> and start down the path of <em>xeper</em>. But I hesitate at <em>deitus</em>. I do not wish to live as an "embodiment" of anything other than myself. I do not wish to manifest the entirety of the collective universe, only that which is Willed to myself and <em>only</em> myself. What is the real difference between a person who gives up all their possessions and kills their ego to become one with a so-called "benevolent" god, and one who discards their humanity and seeks to become a mere conduit for the devil? Both are chasing phantasms, false machinations of their own minds. Both put so little value on themselves that they are too afraid to live without some being beyond this realm to vicariously live through, to sacrifice themselves on the altar of.</p>
<p>A world full of plastic people who are only a god's playthings would be either numbingly boring in its perfection or mindlessly cruel in its meaninglessness.</p>
<p><em>Thelema, xeper, egomet.</em></p>
<p><em>I Will to come into being as myself.</em></p>
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<h1>Thelema</h1>
<p>published: 2020-10-10</p>
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<p>Throughout my life, I have had many psychoses. And while they abate after some time, they never truly go away, merely changing form.</p>
<p>The first one that I can recall was in seventh grade, where, after having read a book on angels I had picked at random in the middle school library (there were many classes with mandatory reading time, where one would be given detention if they had the misfortune to show up without a book the teachers deemed acceptable), I was overtaken with the sudden and violent desire to acquire wings of my own. I prayed, <em>begged</em>, my childhood god, still two years out from losing my faith, to grant me the ability to fly. I admit I was myopic. How would I have explained it, had it happened? Humans do not have wings. Their bodies would not be strong enough to support the amount of force required to make their bodies airborne. My entire anatomy would have had to be gutted, rewired, replaced.</p>
<p>But yet I persist in having dreams where my wish is fulfilled. Almost always it is coupled with running away from home and the deep terror of my father giving chase, intending to murder me via a stab to the chest or neck. Sometimes my bra presses too hard into my back, and I can almost delude myself into feeling those extra two limbs there, feeling the breeze rustle in my feathers, thirsting to catch the wind and laugh in the face of the sun.</p>
<p>In the beginning days of my first year of college, likely as a coping mechanism, I was seized with a tumult of emotions I could not easily explain: I wanted to go home to places my rational mind knew never existed, return to people my rational mind knew were mere machinations. It occupied my every thought, my every action up until my habit of randomly up-and-leaving social media accounts without "proper" goodbyes to my mutuals pissed the wrong person off one too many times and I got harassed off Neocities for explaining (in the previously linked post) how I'd changed my mind on who I was, who I was allowing myself to be turned into, how I was returning to what computer geeks know as the "last known good state".</p>
<p>Even now it remains. I know who I am, and yet I look for myself in every fictional character I come across, my first instinct to wonder: "Were I you in another life?" As if I am insecure in who I am, in what I have accomplished in my short time in this body, needing to vicariously live through some other personage in order to have something to feel proud about. Occasionally I indulge myself, just <a href="../../../poetry/m/melia.txt">long enough</a> to <a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, Sorrowful Laika">let forth</a> a <a href="../../../poetry/u/uncharming-veneer.txt">few poems</a> <a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, liberi">before</a> the floodgates of living in the past (or future) come back.</p>
<p>And now? Now, I am burdened with an impossible task: to become nothing.</p>
<p>Somehow, in some way, minimalism took hold of my heart and started throttling it. I beat it back over and over and over again, and yet it returns every time. I have blood on my hands, it says, for the crime of existing, of using more resources than I technically need, of using <em>any</em> resources at all. The only way it will be satiated is when I am using <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20201005024238/https://collapseos.org/roadmap.html">Collapse OS</a> on a Z80 (or some other low-power machine) powered by solar batteries and am living in some poorly-constructed hut in the middle of the forest with no other possessions to my name than what I absolutely need to survive- and yet continue writing.</p>
<p>I do not want to be broken down into my barest essentials. Line art in itself can be beautiful, can serve one's representational needs, but how much more <em>captivating</em> colors and shading can make it! And no matter how far I would go in cutting myself down, it would never be enough for this psychosis. It would only be satiated upon my death, and yet it does not long for this- for the cessation of my being would mean its end as well.</p>
<blockquote>"But since he can't get away from the world, and in fact can't do so for the very reason that all his activity rises from his endeavors to get away, therefore in <em>pushing the world away</em> (for which it is still necessary that what is to be pushed away and rejected continues to exist; otherwise there would be nothing more to push away); thus, at most, he reaches an extreme degree of liberation, differing from the less liberated only in degree. If he himself achieved the deadening of the earthly senses, which only allows the monotonous whispering of the word "Brahm," he would still not differ essentially from the sensual human being."<br /> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20201005023015/https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/max-stirner-the-unique-and-its-property">- Max Stirner, <em>The Unique and Its Property</em></a></blockquote>
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<p><em>Thelema</em> is a Greek word that roughly translates to "will". In occult circles, this "will" is <a href="https://archive.vn/https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Will">not will as in willpower (doing whatever you want) but rather one's destiny, one's purpose, the grand course of one's life.</a> Maybe even one's <em>fate</em> (even though the other voice in my head, at least in her earliest days, would rail against such a thing).</p>
<p>I have often said since the very first days of this blog (and even before then, on websites whose only remaining trace of existence is <a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, clouds">one poem</a>) that I am destined for greatness. But what is "greatness"? Who decides what is great, and what is not? To some, the fact that I have accomplished so little in such a short time is great. Some part of me would relish in this, to be able to rest on my laurels for a while, exhaustedly venting my burnt-out spirit. But is there some threshold somewhere of how many people need to like me, even <em>know of my existence</em>, before I can be considered great, before I can fulfill this "destiny"?</p>
<p>If there is, then I will forever be the lowest of the low.</p>
<p>I have also said that I do not wish to be famous but to be respected. <a href="https://archive.vn/https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/15404-perhaps-one-did-not-want-to-be-loved-so-much">Not to be loved, necessarily, but rather to be understood.</a> I do not think it likely that my purpose on this earth is to pander hard enough to have a positive impression on the cultural zeitgeist, to become another Avengers, another Mario- a "cultural default", if you will.</p>
<p>So what, then, is my destiny? What will be my fate? What is my <em>thelema</em>? <strong>Is it even necessary for me to have one</strong>, or is it okay for, as some random person on Twitter puts it, "find interesting things until I die"? I ask Goddess over and over and over, but she does not respond. Possibly she is not there, was never there, just a construction of my mind. Maybe she just wants me to figure it out myself.</p>
<p>I have heard many an occultist expound on the value of listening to one's dreams. Prophecies, maybe. Divine visions, perhaps. Wisdom from one's unconsciousness, most likely. But being autistic, I have never been good at sussing out metaphors, forever wishing others would stop with the needless mysticism and just be straightforward.</p>
<p>Take flying, for instance. Am I to literally become an angel, to escape this mortal coil in some deity's service? Or is it a metaphor for freedom, and my <em>thelema</em> is to find a way to escape the reach of the government, or even just my own parents? There is only so much I can do alone as an individual, so much liberation I can lead others towards. The only person I can save in the end is myself.</p>
<p>Is my obsession with past lives an indication that my <em>thelema</em> is to discover which ones truly <em>were</em> mine, and to integrate the knowledge from them into this one? I do not even know if I <em>can</em> call them mine, for this assumes that one soul is always the same soul, never splintering, never merging with another.</p>
<p>Those who have read my books understand my theory of soul shattering, where upon death a soul splinters into hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces and blends with others to form a new mosaic. Most lose their memories, while a few somehow manage to retain them, flashes of images and disembodied sounds as they were. This leaves room for those who manage to remember their reincarnations, while also explaining why one might see many people claiming to be the same person (usually people who were in positions of power, while this also might be just a desire to vicariously live through the dead): one person's memories may be passed down to multiple people.</p>
<p>If this is the case, then this explains why I have so many disjointed "memories" of so many different people from so many places, some of which do not even exist in this dimension. But can I truly call them "I" when other people with memories, different but of the same people, would be just as legitimate in claiming them as themselves?</p>
<p>How horrifying it is to think, when I die and if I do not manage to evade this dimension's soul recycling mechanism, there may soon be a group of people with memories of my private moments, bickering over which one of them is the real "I".</p>
<p>But I do not wish to always be living in the past.</p>
<p>I am not going to throw away this life I have now in the service of previous ones.</p><p>I am not going to throw away my life.</p>
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<p>Of course, as usual, Goddess does not give me a straight answer, nor does she grant me an audience with her so that I may question her freely with the full use of my mental faculties. Instead, she gives me a dream.</p>
<p>I am in my old elementary school, a sprawling one-story building. From the looks of the teacher who nervously paces the room, I am observing my old sixth grade class. And yet this must be a new addition built since I left there nearly a decade ago (am I really so old?) as I don't recognize the room at all, long and dim with a bare concrete floor. If not for the desks, I would have thought it a hallway, or maybe an art gallery sans the art on the wall.</p>
<p>I am sitting at a desk next to a boy who was quite annoying to deal with in real life. He has brought in two massive curtains made out of Minecraft cake, except somehow skinned to look like giant chunks of red meat, and hangs them up in front of his and my desks. The teacher is not amused, but continues with class.</p>
<p>I come back the next day. I am walking down the long hallway to the sixth grade classrooms when I suddenly realize that I have completely forgotten my backpack at home (which <em>did</em> happen to me once, but only once, and only in kindergarten). All I have in my possession is my phone (my current smartphone, not the flip phone I had at the time) and its charging cable. I wish for the school day to be over with already so that I do not have to suffer through the embarrassment of being forced to use a Chromebook and curse the school for expecting all their students to keep all their files, even personal, in their state-mandated Google account.</p>
<p>I arrive in the classroom. Nobody is there. In fact, the whole school appears to be empty.</p>
<p>I have the bright idea to go searching for my old assignments when the teacher walks in. Thinking I am interfering with her grades, she threatens to report me to the police- as "Melia". <em>Not</em> my legal name. (<em>She must not recognize me,</em> I think.) But, she offers, she will not press charges if I take up the role of self-hosting some of the district's network services for its students.</p>
<p>To her shock, I reply that I gladly would, but I would need to be provided a server to do so as there was no way I would be able (or willing) to do it on my residental connection at home.</p>
<p>Suddenly another person walks in. The city has a princess, and her name is also Melia, and she is fuming at being accused of breaking into the school.</p>
<p>And then the <em>actual</em> Melia (as in, the character from <em>Xenoblade</em>) walks in, also angry that she is being roped into this-</p><p>I hear gunshots from across the building. I leave them to their bickering over who is the real Melia and take off at a dead run. Almost immediately, a few rooms over (which somehow just <em>happen</em> to look like the hallway stretch from the Sunday school wing of my childhood church), a bunch of students are ripping into a cartload of cardboard boxes that had been delivered to the school, full of pillows and mattresses and such. Their eyes are feral, fingers bared like claws, tearing the boxes and everything in them completely asunder.</p>
<p>We meet eyes, and suddenly they are after <em>me</em>. As usual in my dreams, I can use telekinesis, and so I throw them aside the moment they leap into the air. Some of my friends have been caught in the fray, and so I give them openings to escape. The rampaging students grow fiercer, and so I start using pepper spray to subdue the ones with actual weapons. Some of my friends are injured, and so I summon a huge wagon (the type you might pull behind you on your way to a picnic or the local park) and start helping them in so I can pull them out.</p>
<p>I see Luce. A shard of metal the size of my fist is sticking out of one of her legs. I scoop her up in my arms and start fleeing with the wagon full of people.</p>
<p>The ringleader stops me halfway down the seemingly endless hallway. A boy I had the misfortune of knowing in high school: as wide around as I am tall (maybe even more), mountains of fat and sweat cascading off of him, leaving behind an absolutely rancid smell everywhere he went. (I promise you that I am not exaggerating.) He blocks almost the whole path.</p>
<p>"Do black lives matter?" he yells at me.</p>
<p>"Of <em>course</em> they matter," I respond. "Some of the people I am trying to save are black. Do their lives not matter to you?"</p>
<p>This answer enrages him. He lunges towards me as if to strangle me. Suddenly there is a pistol in my free hand. I unload several bullets into his fleshy mass, stopping him in his tracks, and continue my desperate escape.</p>
<p>Outside, there is a schoolbus waiting for me. I help Luce into one of the seats in the front row and start helping load the others into wherever we can seat them fastest. Apparently we miss some, because the bus drives one block and then u-turns, remembering the others.</p>
<p>And then we set off for the hospital.</p>
<p>I wake up in a hot sweat, the single blanket over me askew. It is five in the morning. The sounds of my brothers getting ready for school echo down to me from the first floor kitchen.</p>
<p><em>You save Luce over and over again in so many dreams,</em> I think. <em>Why?</em></p>
<p><em>Because you love her.</em></p>
<p><em>Your</em> thelema <em>is to love,</em> I suddenly think. <a href="https://archive.md/https://sites.google.com/site/thelemaforbeginners/home/4-love"><em>Love shall be the whole of the law; love under will.</em></a></p>
<p>Sometime mid-April, I had drafted a post where I wondered how in the world I was suddenly able to pull off a five-hour shift at work despite barely having been able to do two and a half hours at my shitty work-study (more like work-work and no study) job my first year in college. I theorized that it was because I had developed an alternate personality, someone infinitely more outgoing and helpful. I wanted to meet them next shift, I wrote. I wanted to ask them what in the world they were doing inside of my body.</p>
<p>I showed up that next shift to find the lobby locked due to Corona-chan, every employee working the drive-through. That shift was, and I do not exaggerate, hell on earth. How in the world am I supposed to juggle taking orders, taking payment for orders, and keeping track of orders so that each person driving through gets the correct food? How is <em>anyone</em>? Truly, fast food is a violation of human dignity.</p>
<p>The lead manager, who had spent the shift <em>literally throwing</em> steaming-hot bags of food at me, had the audacity to ask me if I was free that weekend to take additional shifts. I told him I would check my calendar. When he texted, I told him I was busy.</p>
<p>I would have quit on the spot, but the would-be rage of my father held me back, and so I searched for job openings between sobs in the parking lot as I waited for him to come and pick me up.</p>
<p>I can only consider it a stroke of luck that the COVID that had robbed me of my adequate position working front register gave me a new job at a retail store, paid fifty percent more to do fifty percent less work. <a href="../../../books.html#tyia" title="Three Years In Absentia, Parthena II">"Corona-chan will set you free", indeed.</a></p>
<p>In the beginning days of the new job, I was just as grumpy as my co-workers. But soon I found I did not have the energy to constantly curse my existence and also do my job correctly (it turns out scanning barcodes actually uses quite a lot of brainpower to keep track of everything). Where my co-workers grumbled and gave dead stares to approaching customers, I danced and greeted everyone and was patient as I explained things to them.</p>
<p>I felt a strange love for the universe, for everything in it. I did not have it in me anymore to sustain such hatred in my heart, to always have my defenses up, hardened and afraid. True, at home, they would tense up again around my parents. But more often than not, they were down, and the house would feel a little bit like how a home should.</p>
<p>I would close my eyes at night, exhausted, and dream of a life of purpose, an existence with power, a world without end.</p>
<p>As I pace up and down in front of whatever register I have been assigned that day, I wonder: <em>Is my</em> thelema <em>to love? To find that world? To create it, even?</em></p>
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<h1>Xeper</h1>
<p>published: 2020-10-17</p>
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<a href="https://archive.md/https://heart-fools.tumblr.com/post/121094768429/at-some-point-growing-stopped-being-painful-and">
<blockquote>you must allow yourself to outgrow<br />
and depart from certain eras of your life with a gentle sort of<br />
ruthlessness<br />
- katy maxwell, "girl of the earth"</blockquote>
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<p>Tiny bugs swirl all around me as I sit here in the backyard. Microscopic, infinite, brought in by the wind. Quickly crumbling to dirt as I swipe them off my body, off my computer, off my purse. It is just hot enough to make wearing my hoodie uncomfortable, even though it is the only shield I have against the ceaseless onslaught of insects.</p>
<p>At least, save for going inside, which I am able to do at will as a human.</p>
<p>I peel my jacket off my body and flop down on my bed. My skin is covered in faint black streaks, little disembodied insect legs, red spots that itch. I turn my fan on, turn on some <a href="https://archive.md/https://setsvko.bandcamp.com/">calming music</a> to help me write.</p>
<p>Two years and two days ago (at the time of writing this), I remember, I abandoned the lab time scheduled for my Intro to Python class early. Usually I would stay for the full time, even if all my assignments were done, and work on my website, answer comments on my site on Neocities, scroll through my Tumblr page unbeknownst that its remaining days were in the single digits.</p>
<p>I opened my profile, ready and eager to publish what I would soon rewrite as <a href="../../../poetry/f/fatali.txt">"fatali"</a> (then only what is now the first stanza) and was immediately flooded with accusations of being homophobic and transphobic for the crime of... not wanting to be a fictionkin anymore. I cleaned up the comments, but they were quickly replaced (by the same person) with nonsensical strings of Korean letters. I don't think there was a block function at the time, but if there was, it was useless, because very quickly other people started admonishing me for not wanting... <em>literal spam</em> all over my profile.</p>
<p>I downloaded the zip file containing my whole site and deleted the Neocities account. Just like that, I had become undone. I had unpersoned myself. The only evidence that I had ever existed on the internet as Vane Vander lay in that precious little file that sat in my Downloads folder.</p>
<p>Searching for a webhost without any kind of social aspect, I eventually returned to <a href="https://archive.md/https://www.freehostingeu.com/">the very first (actual) host I had ever used</a> four days later and <a href="../../../poetry/o/october-7-2018.txt">immediately went back to writing</a>. It would be a few more days before I would discover Keybase, which carried me until I got access to my bank account and could finally rent my own VPS.</p>
<p>The <a href="../july/html.html">very first website I had ever written was actually an online game</a>. I made several, each just as broken as the last: first a clone of Webkinz (which never really panned out beyond a mockup in PowerPoint), then of Howrse and Babydow after I got banned for spamming Christian propaganda on the forums, then of a generic pet care game. There were no actual server-side mechanics to control anything; I would have to go in and manually update the HTML every day after checking about a hundred different page view counters and recalculating each entity's stats.</p>
<p>Funnily enough, it was a youth group pastor at my old church who introduced me to blogging. He had asked me one night early in seventh grade if I could make a website for him. Excited, I spent the next week slavishly gathering all the website-making resources and tutorials I could- and then, come the actual night, he shrugged his shoulders and said he had just gone ahead and signed up for Google's Blogger. I think that was the start of my resentment towards him. I never had enthusiasm for Wednesday night youth group ever again.</p>
<p>I stayed on Blogger until about early 2015, when I jumped ship to WordPress. Not because I knew anything about Google's evils yet- that would take another year for me to realize- but because my parents had <a href="https://mars.mayvaneday.org/blog/2019/0919.html">threatened once to contact Google's support team in order to hijack my account</a> if I did not acquiesce to their censorship. The more spread out my online presence was, the harder it would be for my parents to push one button to shut it all down the moment I said something they did not like.</p>
<p>Of course, it didn't take them long to find the WordPress blog I had set up. But I persisted. And after I had deleted my Facebook account, it was like my parents' knowledge of my having a website completely vanished from their consciousness, as if, without it spoonfed to them in their home feed, it was outside of their electronic myopia, had ceased to exist altogether.</p>
<hr />
<p>"Xeper" is an <a href="https://archive.md/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_of_Set#Self-deification_and_Xeper">Egyptian hieroglyphic term</a> that roughly means "to come into being", mainly as an act of apotheosis. It stands in opposition to traditional occultic practices, namely the Hermetic ones, where one is expected to surrender their sense of self and subsume themselves into some higher entity: THE ALL, God, the universe, whatever other names collectivists have given it. It is not a one-time action, but instead a continual process, a constant state of change.</p>
<p>My mother tells me that I came into this world face-up, instead of <a href="https://archive.md/https://www.babycenter.com/pregnancy/your-body/posterior-position_1454005">face-down like a baby is supposed to</a>. I came into this world dysfunctional, bogged down with chronic fatigue and a speech disorder and a mind fundamentally alien, at odds with the society around it.</p>
<p>But my body was human. And so, ultimately, I was raised as a human.</p>
<p>For a long time, I have <a href="../../../poetry/r/regnant.txt">wondered</a> what it would be like to take on some other form. Whether I would be free to <a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, As Cetra">switch between my human and animalistic skin at will</a>, or <a href="../../../flashfiction/e/erin5.html">be stuck forever</a> as <a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, Bear With It">one or the other</a>, or to be freed from <a href="../../poetry/a/atlas.txt">the constraints of the physical</a> and be <a href="../../../books/mm_tac.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Adoration Corporation, Berke Broke">something new altogether</a>.</p>
<p><a href="../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, degenesis">It does not always end well.</a></p>
<p>I can feel a strange sort of change rustling in my bones. One does not wake up in the morning briefly feeling themselves in a different skin, a more fitting one, for no reason. But what am I becoming? <em>What am I coming into being as?</em> What <a href="https://archive.md/https://xeper.info/pub/pub_hp_welcome.html">hidden potentials</a> have long lain locked within the deepest recesses of my heart, now threatening to come into full bloom, pushing through my skin like a sprout breaking through the surface of soil?</p>
<p>Some creature foreign to human eyes, too beautiful and strange to behold. A holder of the cosmos, privy to its deepest secrets, fully capable of actualizing my <em>thelema</em>, of charting my course through the stars.</p>
<p>Through every stage of my website's existence, it has been nearly unrecognizable from the one before. <em>I</em> have been unrecognizable from who I had been the previous revolution, and yet still holding a continuity. But this time, I feel, there will be no grand restructuring of this HTML necessary to accompany who I will become, whatever form I may end up taking.</p>
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<h1>Collectivism</h1>
<p>published: 2020-09-19</p>
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<p>More and more I wonder exactly how much of myself is separate from other people.</p>
<p>When a radical feminist (which I am not) speaks of <em>individualism vs collectivism</em>, what they most certainly actually mean is <em>atomization vs enmeshment</em>. The social reality of things, where the vast majority of people both before and after the Industrial Revolution are unable to provide for one hundred percent of their needs themselves and thus have to interact with and rely on others to fulfill what they cannot themselves. Hyper-atomist as I am, I am still yet enmeshed in the social structures of my family, of my workplace, of my college. I still must rely on a ride to get to work on time, whether it be from my father or scheduled with the local bus company. I still must work in order to get money to buy the food I need to live. I still must comply with just enough laws and regulations in order for the police (city, state, country) to turn a blind eye to me as they pass overhead on their way to find someone to arrest and keep the jails full.</p>
<p>I have had many dreams of Rennica, an underground world almost completely severed from the world above, self-sufficient. The only reason to come out, to come up, would be for leisure, for pleasure, to experience something unable to be created down there in the depths. To explore a world one no longer had any obligations to.</p>
<p>I lie awake at night, wondering how much of my works I can truly call original. Can <em>any</em> artist claim to be truly original? Everything is inspired by something else, even if the original action, original actor, original event is obscured and unable to be sussed out from the new work. Nothing, save for completely random noise, is <em>ex nihilo</em> anymore, and even then, random noise must have a <em>seed</em> for the algorithms to use.</p>
<p>I lie awake at night, wondering how much of <em>myself</em> I can truly call original. Everything, in a sense, is reactionary, because <strong>everything is a reaction to something else</strong>, even if that something else is no longer the reason for perpetuating it. My borderline autistic obsession with privacy started as a reaction to my parents' overbearing surveillance of my private life. My anarchism started as a reaction to the inane leadership at the Girl Scout Camp I attend every year (well, except for this one), only truly calling it that once I was introduced to the word by one of the adults who also disagreed with the leadership. (We both got in trouble that year; I was forced to lie low for a few years, and she never returned to camp.) My love for writing was originally a reaction to watching my father spend hours on end typing into his school-issued Macintosh, a writer himself (who will readily wax poetic to anyone who will listen about how much he hates <em>Twilght</em> because it delegitimatized the vampire genre).</p>
<p>Hell, even this post itself is a <a href="https://www.bitchute.com/video/nvcJqLbsUbE/">reaction to a video I watched earlier today</a>. Had I not watched it, I probably would have spent the evening I wrote this playing video games or agonizing about the upcoming work weekend or the narrative speech I have two weeks to record a video of myself giving.</p>
<p>Maybe this is part of why I have had such an anti-internet streak lately (in my private life): in order for me to be here for you to read these words, I have to comply with an ISP, a hosting provider, and a domain registry; I have to publish in a format readable by browsers; I have to set up my server in a specific way in order to be accessible. And for what? To become a single brain cell in a larger organism, a part of a global hivemind, a node open for surveillance. The network drowns me in the dime-a-million opinions of others who I will never meet, inundates me with horrors that never would have plagued me had I not been scrolling on my damn phone. Human minds were not made to interact with so many masses of people. My brain does not have room for them all. Each person blends into one another, a faceless endless stream of throwaway jerkoffs. And I, by being here (although the effect is lessened by my refusal to use social media), am enmeshed into it.</p>
<p>But I digress.</p>
<p>When I speak of <em>individualism vs collectivism</em>, I mean the very simple fact that I am not others. If I can experience it or cannot access it, then it is not a part of myself.</p>
<blockquote>
"...if you are the one who is looking at something, then that something is not you. So right away, in one fell swoop, you know what you're not: you're not the outside world. You're the one who is inside looking out at that world."<br /> - Michael Singer, <em>The Untethered Soul</em>
</blockquote>
<p>I sometimes wonder what qualifies as "real life", as the "real me", as the life that "matters" (as if there could ever be such a thing).</p>
<p>Is the little Minecraft person on the TV screen the real me? But I cannot feel the bricks under my feet, the winter breeze in the snow-covered biome, the crunch of my bones as I fall off a building-in-progress on accident. I can see the TV and the controller in my hands and the console resting on its shelf. That must not be it.</p>
<p>Is the fictional character in a book I like the real me? But I cannot feel the winds at my fingertips, the strange smell of the dilapidated home I live in, the cheap soda burning my throat. I can see the e-reader in my hands and the words on the pages within. That must not be it (even though he is my namesake).</p>
<p>I take a break from writing and go upstairs to refill my waterbottle. Sitting in the kitchen is my father's new dog, already weighing more than twice as much as she did when he drove halfway across the state and back to get her. In the living room is my mother, engrossed in some cheesy soap opera, knitting needles in her lap, project already forgotten. Taking off on his bike outside is my brother, worried he will be late to his Wednesday night youth group at one of the myriad local churches.</p>
<p>I can gaze at their bodies, at their movements. I can listen to the words that they speak (or bark). But nothing they do I can influence. None of their thoughts I can access. I am my own Inside, and they are all the Outside in relation to myself.</p>
<p>I am an <em>individual</em>.</p>
<p>There are more than seven billion individuals on this planet. <a href="../april/outside-intro.html">There are more than seven billion versions of reality.</a> Were we all part of one whole, as frustrates me to no end when occultists chant it over and over like a mantra, I would think it possible to combine two consciousnesses, to merge two Insides into one. But given a set of twins who spend each moment of their waking lives together, going through the same actions and experiences, raised the same, both will be different individuals. Both will inevitably differenciate, as they are <em>individuals</em>, not a collective.</p>
<p>If I cannot access the mind of another person, if I cannot puppet a body other than my own: how can I be responsible for the actions of another person I have had no contact with? <strong>How can I be held culpable as a member of a group when I did not ask to be a part of said group, when I have no choice to disassociate from it or associate with another, when I do not actively identify as part of it?</strong></p>
<p>A male who does not sexually harass or harm females or act in grossly misogynist manners towards them is not my enemy. A heterosexual person who does not seek to restrict me from expressing my lesbianism is not my enemy. A neurotypical person who lets me exist autistic as I am and does not prevent me from self-regulating my sensory input is not my enemy.</p>
<p>An individual who does not seek to bind me to some collective but recognizes that I am a separate I is not my enemy.</p>
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<h1>It's Just A Goddamn Protocol, Not Your Saving Grace (ROOPHLOCH 2020)</h1>
<p>published: 2020-09-26</p>
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<p>This post will never make it onto Solderpunk's <a href="https://archive.md/https://proxy.vulpes.one/gopher/zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/phlog/announcing-roophloch-2020.txt">ROOPHLOCH 2020</a> listing, and that's okay. While this site technically <em>can</em> be served on port 70 thanks to <del>Gophernicus</del> <em>pygopherd</em> on the Raspberry Pi in my basement, the fact of Gopher forcing the file selector ("0" for plain text, "1" for directories, "h" for HTML, etc) to be part of the URL pretty much guarantees that sooner or later there's going to be a link that makes a client try to parse an image as HTML or something equally ridiculous. I'm not going to rewrite my entire site to use absolute links just to satisfy a tiny sliver of a sliver of a percent of potential readers.</p>
<p>Recently, the people of Gemini have been throwing a shitfit on the <a href="https://archive.md/https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/2020/date.html">development mailing list</a> over the idea of serving anything other than unformatted plain text on dear port 1965. The reasoning, as it goes, is that somehow Gemini and gemtext are supposed to go hand-in-hand, one complementing the other, and so gemtext must be the only document type available on the Gemini protocol. Any attempt to offer more than the barest of Markdown is <a href="https://archive.md/https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/2020/002667.html">"WWW decadence"</a>, regardless of whether or not the formatting is actually decadent or just quality-of-life measures.</p>
<p>"Decadence". What an absurd notion! Is it decadent to want accessibility text? To structure tables in a logical manner: as <em>actual tables</em>, not just preformatted text that gets mangled come a screen width less than expected? To offer a default stylesheet so that one doesn't burn their eyes out with most browsers' default of black text on white? (<a href="https://archive.md/https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/new-color-scheme.html">That default is bad for your eyesight, by the way.</a>)</p>
<p>It is no secret that I am quite critical of Gemini's prevailing culture of <a href="../../../poetry/g/gemini.txt">"no bloat at all costs"</a>, so I will try not to repeat myself <em>too</em> much. What a shame that such a beautiful protocol- mandatory transport security, simple request structure, an emphasis on one-off requests instead of a long-lived connection that streams data to you forever- is hamstrung by such a drab, self-burying, <em>collectivist</em> community.</p>
<p><a href="https://archive.md/https://proxy.vulpes.one/gopher/republic.circumlunar.space/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-24__How_We_Should_Grow.txt">"We need to keep the Small Internet from getting too big too quickly."</a></p>
<p><a href="https://archive.md/https://proxy.vulpes.one/gopher/republic.circumlunar.space/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-18__Small_Internet_Manifesto.txt">"We are the mice living in the foundations of the Internet."</p>
<p>"We voluntarily restrict our use of CPU, memory, disk space, and bandwidth."</p>
<p>"We prefer small cohesive groups of people."</a></p>
<p><em>Who the fuck is "we"?</em></p>
<p>Am I required to sign some form waiving away my individuality in order to use the Gemini protocol? Am I required to join a religion, <a href="https://archive.md/https://proxy.vulpes.one/gopher/republic.circumlunar.space/0/~spring/phlog/2020-07-27__A_Book_Of_Proverbs.txt">be preached to about how I need to cut myself down</a> into <a href="../../../../books/mm_tpf.epub" title="Mori's Mirror and The Poetry Factory, Sorrowful Laika">something so small</a>? Must I bend over backwards to satiate the presentational whims of every person who wants to visit this site?</p>
<p>I realize now that <strong>it is not the protocol that is the problem. It's the <em>people</em>.</strong> HTTP/S is technically fine; it is the commercialization and the centralization that makes it so repulsive. If the entire WWW was Neocities-esque home pages full of glitter graphics and weird ramblings about niche topics and there was no Facebook or Twitter to be heard of, if there was never a JavaScript, then I sincerely doubt that there would be such a frenzied push against "bloat".</p>
<p>Gemtext simply does not cut it for me. At the very <em>least</em>, I need inline links. I don't want my posts to be littered with constant breaks in the middle of paragraphs in order to link to something, or to have constant <code>[1] [2] [3]</code>-esque footnote markers that require a reader to memorize numbers that <em>might</em> point to something interesting and constantly jump back and forth between the actual post and the footer with all the links. I want parts of poems to be able to subtly link to other pages (explaining a reference, or citing a source of inspiration) without links to destroy the artistic impact or just be a clunky distraction. These are not choices I make for personal aesthetics; they make this site more accessible for people with attention deficiency disorders.</p>
<p>Exalt Gemini for its lack of stylesheets or inline images? <a href="gemini://mayvaneday.art/index.html">View this website</a> in the <a href="https://archive.md/https://github.com/RangerMauve/agregore-browser">Agregore browser</a>. It looks exactly the same. Same stylesheet, same layout, same functionality. Were it not for the simplistic interface, I might believe for a second that it was just another tab open in Brave. The only difference is the protocol the data went over.</p>
<blockquote>
<a href="https://archive.md/https://sawv.org/2020/09/18/fall-2020-gemini-tech-discussions.html">Currently, numerous Gemini clients exist that display Gemtext as plain text or as rendered text. Most Gemini client developers would not add support to render HTML. Eventually, the number of Gemini browser developers might diminish, leaving only a few "modern" Gemini browsers. And of course, the HTML fans on Gemini won't be satisfied with having only a limited subset of HTML. They will advocate for some CSS and eventually for some kind of client-side programming language.</a>
</blockquote>
<p>"Eventually"? It's already here. One just needs a client that supports it, like Agregore. There is no point in debating on a mailing list whether or not HTML should be "allowed"; discussion basically amounts to pandering to a faceless collective: "Hey, can I have permission to do something that you have no power to stop me from doing anyway?"</p>
<p>What a weak will one must have, to let someone they will never truly meet dictate their decisions.</p>
<p>One already has the choice to browse the WWW with a browser that does not support CSS or JavaScript if one finds those things abhorrent. The problem with this is having to deal with commercial sites like Amazon or "web apps" like Google's online office suite. Institutions like my college or my workplace can force me to use sites like these to remain enrolled or on the payroll (aka not be fired). But nobody is pointing a gun to your head and saying you have to read Joe Shmoe's blog about his hobbies or whatever.</p>
<p>Would you die without access to the information on a <code>js;dr</code> page, or a non-gemtext one for that matter? Then assess whether you value your life or your ideological purity more. The amount of people I see who espoused "#MeToo" and then went on to tell me that I must vote for the senile rapist Biden or else Orange Man Bad is going to do Orange Man Bad things indicates to me that you most likely have no qualms about compromising your values anyway.</p>
<p>So what if Gemini technically supports JavaScript? It's a <em>data transmission protocol</em>. What would the alternative be? A fashistic restriction of what kinds of data can be sent over the pipe? So much for "user sovereignty".</p>
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<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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<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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<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>
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<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>
</a>
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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>
</ul>
<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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<h1>Blog Posts</h1>
<p>"The first time you meet an angel, you get a horrible beating." - Terry A. Davis</p>
<p>"I am deliberate and afraid of nothing." - Audre Lorde</p>
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<h2>2021</h2>
<ul>
<li>November 5 - <a href="./2021/november/nft.html">Analog Hole</a></li>
<li>September 28 - <a href="./2021/september/nosimp.html">No Simp September</a></li>
<li>September 26 - <a href="./2021/september/not-harmful.html">Considering software harmful considered harmful</a></li>
<li>September 19 - <a href="./2021/september/fire.html">Fire Walk With Me</a></li>
<li>July 29 - <a href="./2021/july/whoami2.html">whoami: redux</a></li>
<li>July 23 - <a href="./2021/july/home-again.html">You Can't Go Home Again: Redux</a></li>
<li>July 8 - <a href="./2021/july/political.html">The Personal Is Not Political</a></li>
<li>June 1 - <a href="./2021/june/unsung.html">The Name Unsung</a></li>
<li>May 16 - <a href="./2021/may/rebirth.html">Rebirth</a></li>
<li>March 16 - <a href="./2021/march/harmful.html">Academic writing considered harmful</a></li>
<li>February 4 - <a href="./2021/february/javascript-good.html">JavaScript Is Good, Actually</a></li>
</ul>
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<h2>2020</h2>
<ul>
<li>December 15 - <a href="./2020/december/corpserations.html">Corpserations</a></li>
<li>October 31 - <a href="./2020/october/annihilation.html">I Do Not Seek Annihilation</a></li>
<li>October 24 - <a href="./2020/october/deitus.html">Deitus?</a></li>
<li>October 17 - <a href="./2020/october/xeper.html">Xeper</a></li>
<li>October 10 - <a href="./2020/october/thelema.html">Thelema</a></li>
<li>September 26 - <a href="./2020/september/roophloch2.html">It's Just A Goddamn Protocol, Not Your Saving Grace <b>(ROOPHLOCH 2020)</b></a></li>
<li>September 19 - <a href="./2020/september/collectivism.html">Collectivism</a></li>
<li>August 23 - <a href="./2020/august/endgame.html">Endgame</a></li>
<li>July 26 - <a href="./2020/july/signal.html">You Can't Stop The Signal</a></li>
<li>July 12 - <a href="./2020/july/html.html">What happens after HTML?</a></li>
<li>June 20 - <a href="./2020/june/homo.html">Gemini Means Homogenization</a></li>
<li>June 16 - <a href="./2020/june/speech.html">"Free speech" kinda sucks, actually</a></li>
<li>April 30 - <a href="./2020/april/vow.html">Vow</a></li>
<li>April 25 - <a href="./2020/april/immortality.html">Immortality</a></li>
<li>April 20 - <a href="./2020/april/outside-intro.html">The Outside: An Introduction</a></li>
<li>April 4 - <a href="./2020/april/give-me-your-story.html">Give Me Your Story</a></li>
<li>March 26 - <a href="./2020/march/epilogue.html">Living In The Epilogue</a></li>
<li>March 21 - <a href="./2020/march/antinatalism.html">Antinatalism</a></li>
<li>February 19 - <a href="./2020/february/law.html">Law in the absence of law</a></li>
<li>February 5 - <a href="./2020/february/consumeproduct.html">Consume Product</a></li>
<li>February 3 - <a href="./2020/february/hackernews.html">"Bro, literally none of this internet shit is real."</a></li>
<li>February 1 - <a href="./2020/february/32bit.html">32-bit is still good, you freaks</a></li>
<li>January 7 - <a href="./2020/january/partyarchy.html">Partyarchy</a></li>
</ul>
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<h2>2019</h2>
<ul>
<li>December 14 - <a href="./2019/december/death-of-a-gopher.html">Death Of A Gopher</a></li>
<li>November 19 - <a href="./2019/november/masthead.html">A New Masthead</a></li>
<li>November 13 - <a href="./2019/november/possession.html">Possession</a></li>
<li>November 9 - <a href="./2019/november/other-world.html">A World Just Beyond My Grasp</a></li>
<li>October 3 - <a href="./2019/october/cameras.html">Cameras</a></li>
<li>September 29 - <a href="./2019/september/sign-of-life.html">Sign of Life</a></li>
<li>September 5 - <a href="./2019/september/roophloch.html">Neurodiversity <b>(ROOPHLOCH 2019)</b></a></li>
<li>August 14 - <a href="./2019/august/consumption.html">Consumption</a></li>
<li>June 21 - <a href="./2019/june/separatism.html">Separatism</a></li>
<li>June 20 - <a href="./2019/june/second-class-citizens.html">Second-Class Citizens</a></li>
<li>May 23 - <a href="./2019/may/gender-critical.html">So I guess I'm gender-critical now</a></li>
<li>April 20 - <a href="./2019/april/run-every-day.html">run every day</a></li>
<li>April 11 - <a href="./2019/april/honkpill.html">The Honkpill</a></li>
<li>April 1 - <a href="./2019/april/weest-in-peace.html">Weest In Peace</a></li>
<li>January 3 - <a href="./2019/january/fediverse.html">The fediverse will not save us.</a></li>
</ul>
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<h2>2018</h2>
<ul>
<li>May 26 - <a href="./2018/may/whoami.html">whoami</a></li>
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动态网自由门 天安門 天安门 法輪功 李洪志 Free Tibet 六四天安門事件 The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 天安門大屠殺 The Tiananmen Square Massacre 反右派鬥爭 The Anti-Rightist Struggle 大躍進政策 The Great Leap Forward 文化大革命 The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 人權 Human Rights 民運 Democratization 自由 Freedom 獨立 Independence 多黨制 Multi-party system 台灣 臺灣 Taiwan Formosa 中華民國 Republic of China 西藏 土伯特 唐古特 Tibet 達賴喇嘛 Dalai Lama 法輪功 Falun Dafa 新疆維吾爾自治區 The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region 諾貝爾和平獎 Nobel Peace Prize 劉暁波 Liu Xiaobo 民主 言論 思想 反共 反革命 抗議 運動 騷亂 暴亂 騷擾 擾亂 抗暴 平反 維權 示威游行 李洪志 法輪大法 大法弟子 強制斷種 強制堕胎 民族淨化 人體實驗 肅清 胡耀邦 趙紫陽 魏京生 王丹 還政於民 和平演變 激流中國 北京之春 大紀元時報 九評論共産黨 獨裁 專制 壓制 統一 監視 鎮壓 迫害 侵略 掠奪 破壞 拷問 屠殺 活摘器官 誘拐 買賣人口 遊進 走私 毒品 賣淫 春畫 賭博 六合彩 天安門 天安门 法輪功 李洪志 Winnie the Pooh 劉曉波动态网自由门

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/* https://gamebanana.com/skins/149836 */
/* *donkey kong voice* oh these are some pretty cool anarchist theory */
/* *a giant renzo novatore appears* */
/* AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA */
body {
background-color: #000000;
font-size: large;
margin: auto;
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table.web {
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color: #068DB9;
}

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/* Edelgard did nothing wrong */
/* friendship ended with Rhea, now Edelgard is my best friend */
body {
background-color: #000000;
font-size: large;
margin: auto;
margin-top:40px;
font-family: monospace;
color: #D6EDF5;
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div.help, body.mayvaneday {
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table.web {
border: 1px solid white;
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table {
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color: #cecd8c;
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hr {
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color: #758f63;
}

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body {
background-image: url(./back.gif);
background-color: #000000;
font-family: monospace;
color: #FFFFFF;
max-width:900px;
margin: auto;
font-size: large;
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a, a:visited {
text-decoration: none;
color: inherit;
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.box, nav {
margin-top: 3%;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px 5px black;
background: #000000;
padding: 10px 10px 5px 20px;
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max-width: 700px;
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table {
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padding: 3px;
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article a, ul a, td a {
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hr {
display: none;
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@media only screen and (min-width: 900px) {
body {
float: right;
padding-right: 100px;
min-width: 600px;
overflow: scroll;
overflow-x: hidden;
}
}
body {
background-image: url("./css/melia.png");
background-repeat: no-repeat;
background-size: cover;
background-attachment: fixed;
background-color: #000000;
background-position: top left;
font-family: monospace;
color: #FFFFFF;
max-width:900px;
margin: auto;
font-size: large;
margin-bottom: 10px;
}
a, a:visited {
text-decoration: none;
color: inherit;
}
.box, .card, nav {
margin-top: 3%;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
background: #242424;
padding: 10px 10px 5px 20px;
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.box-smaller {
max-width: 700px;
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table {
width: 100%;
padding: 3px;
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article a, ul a, td a {
text-decoration: underline;
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hr {
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img.big {
width: 100%;
height: auto;
}

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body {
background-color: #000000;
font-size: large;
margin: auto;
margin-top:40px;
font-family: monospace;
color: #f5d6e4;
}
div.help, body.mayvaneday {
max-width:900px;
padding:0 10px;
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h1, h2 {
font-family: monospace;
color: #4f6599;
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p {
font-family: monospace;
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color: #ff99cc;
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color: #e085b3;
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i, em {
font-family: monospace;
color: #ffb3da;
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hr {
border: 0;
border-top: 3px dashed;
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