diff --git a/2024_books.html b/2024_books.html index 59e988d..65b965d 100755 --- a/2024_books.html +++ b/2024_books.html @@ -265,6 +265,12 @@ Annie Dillard + + 2024-W37 + Rapture and Melancholy + Edna St. Vincent Millay + I'll end up one of these days
like Vincent Millay
who only journaled
when her life was mundane. + diff --git a/2024_music.html b/2024_music.html index 02746b6..d34ebef 100755 --- a/2024_music.html +++ b/2024_music.html @@ -245,7 +245,7 @@ 2024-W35 Be the Cowboy Mitski - + Favorite track: Washing Machine Heart 2024-W36 @@ -253,6 +253,12 @@ Future Palace + + 2024-W37 + RIOT! + Paramore + Favorite track: Let The Flames Begin + diff --git a/blog/2019/may/gender-critical.html b/blog/2019/05/gender-critical.html similarity index 81% rename from blog/2019/may/gender-critical.html rename to blog/2019/05/gender-critical.html index 5271a2d..195c10a 100755 --- a/blog/2019/may/gender-critical.html +++ b/blog/2019/05/gender-critical.html @@ -12,18 +12,18 @@

So I guess I'm gender-critical now

published: 2019-05-23

-

updated: 2022-11-20

+

updated: 2024-09-05

I am biologically female.

-

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. 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.

+

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. 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 me being quite vocal in recent years that I have no intention of reproducing.

At the end of 2014, after my first girlfriend cheated on me, 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.

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.

-

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 subconscious 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 ever blossom into a healthy relationship.

+

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. Either I was subconsciously imagining them as "transmasculine female", deluding myself and lying to others for the sake of fitting in socially, or merely trying to protect myself from some danger my subconscious had picked up on - not actual attraction, but a defense mechanism. Hardly something that could ever blossom into a healthy relationship.

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.

-

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 female's presentation will always have that undertone of femaleness underneath it, which makes it special, what I'm attracted to, different from a masculine male or any other kind of male. We can discourse all day about the defintion of the word "woman", but no amount of redefining "woman" as a misogynistic stereotype will make me attracted to a male.

-

And, as it turns out, I'm not nonbinary either. Because the idea of "nonbinary" genders has historically been used to slot gender-non-conforming people into a "failed at assigned gender role" category, 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 really 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.

+

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 female's presentation will always have that undertone of femaleness underneath it, which makes it special, what I'm attracted to, different from a masculine male or any other kind of male. We can discourse all day about the defintion of the word "woman", but no amount of redefining "woman" as a misogynistic stereotype will make me legitimately attracted to a male.

+

And, as it turns out, I'm not nonbinary either. Because the idea of "nonbinary" genders has historically been used to slot gender-non-conforming people into a "failed at assigned gender role" category, 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 could barely get the people in my college to address me with they/them pronouns, and they were supposed to be super liberal and accepting about that kind of stuff! Do you really 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.

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. (Or Mastodon, now that I'm rewriting this post in 2022 and Twitter is up in flames.) As for personal reasons... I am still dysphoric. I still have dreams where I've managed to get a double mastectomy and a perfectly androgynous body and nobody saddles me with the gender role of "woman". 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 taken seriously.

If my dysphoria is the result of societal messaging saying that I'm inferior for being a female, then why the hell do I have to change? Why should I? Why should I take hormones and get surgery and make myself into a lifelong medical patient in search for a salvation that will never come? I stand alone in the wilderness, and my desired androgyny feels sterile, lifeless, out of place. I stand alone in the wilderness, and nothing hurts.

diff --git a/blog/2019/09/sign-of-life.html b/blog/2019/09/sign-of-life.html index 0badbaf..9cf0ad2 100755 --- a/blog/2019/09/sign-of-life.html +++ b/blog/2019/09/sign-of-life.html @@ -16,7 +16,7 @@
-

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 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. But now everything is covered in webs, gray as silk, sparkling in the sparse flickering light.

+

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 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. But now everything is covered in webs, gray as silk, sparkling in the sparse flickering light.

Returning home, are you? I never thought I’d see the day...

Welcome home, Vane Vander.

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.

diff --git a/blog/2019/october/cameras.html b/blog/2019/10/cameras.html similarity index 90% rename from blog/2019/october/cameras.html rename to blog/2019/10/cameras.html index a6ce884..9893f2a 100755 --- a/blog/2019/october/cameras.html +++ b/blog/2019/10/cameras.html @@ -28,9 +28,9 @@

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 ZeroNet, 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.

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.

For our third example, we'll turn the cameras around, and focus on... me. Or, rather, the places I live.

-

My friend's house is covered 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 mother, of all people- has made fun of them for this, for consenting to the auditory cameras, but they just shrug it off every time.

+

My friend's house is covered 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 mother, of all people - has made fun of them for this, for consenting to the auditory cameras, but they just shrug it off every time.

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.

-

At home- or the place I spend most of my time in, anyway- 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.

+

At home - or the place I spend most of my time in, anyway - 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.

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...

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.

diff --git a/blog/2019/november/other-world.html b/blog/2019/november/other-world.html index fa77cc2..2167dc1 100755 --- a/blog/2019/november/other-world.html +++ b/blog/2019/november/other-world.html @@ -19,7 +19,7 @@

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.

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 real 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.

I'm finally outside the golden cage, and the world outside that I'd managed to convince myself wasn't real is real, and it's so wide and yet so restricting all at once.

-

Managed to convince most of myself, for some spark of whatever the hell I felt past January still burns within.

+

Managed to convince most of myself, for some spark of whatever the hell I felt past January still burns within.

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.

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.

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.

diff --git a/blog/2020/april/give-me-your-story.html b/blog/2020/april/give-me-your-story.html index 7f7c202..55ea3f3 100755 --- a/blog/2020/april/give-me-your-story.html +++ b/blog/2020/april/give-me-your-story.html @@ -16,7 +16,7 @@
-

Imagine, if you will, a MOGAI teenager infected with Tumblr Syndrome, blog full of nothing but reblogs of other people. Sick with consumption, not the historical kind but the modern kind, personality nothing but fandoms worshipping corporate creations. Scattered between movie GIFs are desperate attempts to co-opt genuine LGBT oppression with the sexuality or gender of the week, 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.

+

Imagine, if you will, a MOGAI teenager infected with Tumblr Syndrome, blog full of nothing but reblogs of other people. Sick with consumption, not the historical kind but the modern kind, personality nothing but fandoms worshipping corporate creations. Scattered between movie GIFs are desperate attempts to co-opt genuine LGBT oppression with the sexuality or gender of the week, 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.

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 also illegal). Usually these are accompanied by a poorly-photoshopped image of a celebrity or fictional character holding a gun and pointing it at the viewer.

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.

When I was about ten or so, I got a copy of The Legendary Starfy 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 four-part series 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.

diff --git a/blog/2020/july/signal.html b/blog/2020/july/signal.html index d3ac21d..52a83dd 100755 --- a/blog/2020/july/signal.html +++ b/blog/2020/july/signal.html @@ -25,7 +25,7 @@

I must admit, I erupted in laughter when I saw the so-called "Climate Strike Software License". 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 canonical Open Source Definition, 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 really 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 to be able to be upheld in court, but even then, it was in court by an entity with the financial resources to take the offender to court. And changing the license will ultimately do nothing, as you can't retroactively revoke a license from code 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.

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 vonu to describe their position, the existence of SLAPPs 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? 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.

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 every classic ROM they have (and a few... contemporary ones, while we're at it) and not feel a single shred of guilt.

-

Licenses that exclude entities on the basis of falling into some category or another, like the "No Harm" 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 being gender-critical 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.

+

Licenses that exclude entities on the basis of falling into some category or another, like the "No Harm" 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 being gender-critical 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.

In all that I do, I strive more and more to achieve vonu, 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 then 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.

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 tanelorn.city. 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. 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. 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 don't want using those tools.

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 vonu from you. I don't want to use Gemini for reasons I stated in an earlier post, 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.

diff --git a/blog/index.html b/blog/index.html index 1f40d7d..dcaa8bd 100755 --- a/blog/index.html +++ b/blog/index.html @@ -126,13 +126,13 @@
  • November 19 - A New Masthead
  • November 13 - Possession
  • November 9 - A World Just Beyond My Grasp
    • -
  • October 3 - Cameras
    • -
  • September 29 - Sign of Life
    • +
  • October 3 - Cameras
    • +
  • September 29 - Sign of Life
  • September 5 - Neurodiversity (ROOPHLOCH 2019)
  • August 14 - Consumption
  • June 21 - Separatism
  • June 20 - Second-Class Citizens
    • -
  • May 23 - So I guess I'm gender-critical now
    • +
  • May 23 - So I guess I'm gender-critical now
  • April 20 - run every day
  • April 11 - The Honkpill
  • April 1 - Weest In Peace