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blog/2019/08/consumption.html

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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>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>

blog/2019/09/roophloch.html

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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>Call this <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240815152817/http://portal.mozz.us/gopher/zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~solderpunk/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>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://archive.md/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>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>

blog/2020/april/give-me-your-story.html

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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>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="../../2019/08/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>

blog/2020/june/homo.html

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 				<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>"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="../../2019/09/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>

blog/2022/02/spanish.html

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 				<h2>extrañar (to miss)</h2>
-				<p>There's a woman that I love, that I miss very much whenever she's not around. Spanish is her first language, although we've never had a chance to attempt an actual conversation in it. Written language in my dreams feels like I've developed her dyslexia as the letters dance around on the page and shift into other words and sentences and never stay still. And I was never very good at speaking in <em>any</em> language other than my own, and even then, unpolished artifacts from <a href="../../2019/september/roophloch.html">my elementary school years spent in speech therapy</a> still remain. And she's fluent enough anyways, so until the time comes for me to leave this world and finally settle down with her in Sablade forever, we're stuck with talking and <em>maybe</em> tracing words on each other's skin.</p>
+				<p>There's a woman that I love, that I miss very much whenever she's not around. Spanish is her first language, although we've never had a chance to attempt an actual conversation in it. Written language in my dreams feels like I've developed her dyslexia as the letters dance around on the page and shift into other words and sentences and never stay still. And I was never very good at speaking in <em>any</em> language other than my own, and even then, unpolished artifacts from <a href="../../2019/09/roophloch.html">my elementary school years spent in speech therapy</a> still remain. And she's fluent enough anyways, so until the time comes for me to leave this world and finally settle down with her in Sablade forever, we're stuck with talking and <em>maybe</em> tracing words on each other's skin.</p>
 				<p><code>Extrañar</code> is, to my surprise, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220225221557/https://www.etymologyofspanish.com/search?query=extra%C3%B1ar">related to the adjective</a> <code>extraño</code>, meaning "strange". This doesn't mean my love is strange or unusual- for fuck's sake, <a href="../january/sappho.html">don't call me "queer"</a>- but that both are ultimately derived from the Latin term <code>extra</code>, meaning "foreign" or "outside". And if I miss someone, they're certainly outside of where I want them to be... which is usually somewhere in my presence, if not at my side.</p>
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blog/2022/january/worth.html

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 				<p>And yet, the moment my brother entered his senior year at high school, my parents immediately set out to find him a job. A fervor they never displayed for me: fetching job applications, buying him fancy clothes for interviews, reminding him to follow up with people by phone. While I was able to fight with the bank's website interface to get my routing number for direct deposit, my brother struggled to read a sheet of paper telling him step-by-step how to set up a store-issued debit card. He didn't even try to decipher the words on the sheet, written in plain English, and just gave up until our parents coached him through the phone call with the automated system. If I had ever displayed such a lack of will, I would have been smacked (verbally, at the <em>very</em> least) into next Tuesday.</p>
 				<p>And this is only of employment. To write of how the school system abandoned me but coddled my brothers every step of the way would take a whole other post on its own.</p>
 				<p><strong>And yet I know I still need support.</strong> Even when working twenty-four hours a week and getting bonus pay on weekends, the maximum I could handle without quickly spiraling into another mental breakdown, I still couldn't make enough to dream of renting even the <em>shittiest</em> apartment in town, let alone have enough to buy food and miscellanea to keep me alive and save up money for the occasional inevitable emergency. I am told that "professional" jobs make more than fifteen dollars an hour, but the only entry-level job my professors seem aware exists in the tech industry to get experience is call center tech support. Which is out because I can't handle talking to disembodied voices... or being put on the spot... or dealing with the disposition of the stereotypical person who calls tech support in the first place. Barring a miracle, I've got nowhere to go after graduation other than to the same entry-level jobs at gas stations and restaurants and stores every other teenager and aimless adult is jockeying for in town.</p>
-				<p>Am I... not worthy because I'm less independent than I thought I would be, and yet more than those who would otherwise help believe I should be when I tell them I am mentally disabled and need help? I am not <a href="../../2019/september/roophloch.html">"soiling myself, wreaking havoc, and breaking things"</a>, but I am still a far cry from a functional neurotypical adult. Am I supposed to struggle on without help until I die from the inevitable burnout, or diminish myself so that others will finally see me as worthy of assistance?</p><p>Some part of my heart tells me that this can't be the criteria. My lover clearly thinks I'm worthy enough to be taken care of by her on my bad days, and in the future we have planned, since we won't have to work for subsistence, I can throw all my <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory">"spoons"</a> into properly caring for myself and honoring my brain's constant <del>desire</del> <em>mandate</em> to create instead of trying to balance my energy between the non-life of work and the non-life of recovering from work. Somehow she and I both see this future as a life worth living, a happy and joyous life, even if I need help sometimes. So the criteria must be something else.</p>
+				<p>Am I... not worthy because I'm less independent than I thought I would be, and yet more than those who would otherwise help believe I should be when I tell them I am mentally disabled and need help? I am not <a href="../../2019/09/roophloch.html">"soiling myself, wreaking havoc, and breaking things"</a>, but I am still a far cry from a functional neurotypical adult. Am I supposed to struggle on without help until I die from the inevitable burnout, or diminish myself so that others will finally see me as worthy of assistance?</p><p>Some part of my heart tells me that this can't be the criteria. My lover clearly thinks I'm worthy enough to be taken care of by her on my bad days, and in the future we have planned, since we won't have to work for subsistence, I can throw all my <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_theory">"spoons"</a> into properly caring for myself and honoring my brain's constant <del>desire</del> <em>mandate</em> to create instead of trying to balance my energy between the non-life of work and the non-life of recovering from work. Somehow she and I both see this future as a life worth living, a happy and joyous life, even if I need help sometimes. So the criteria must be something else.</p>
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blog/index.html

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 				<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>September 5 - <a href="./2019/09/roophloch.html">Neurodiversity <b>(ROOPHLOCH 2019)</b></a></li>
-				<li>August 14 - <a href="./2019/august/consumption.html">Consumption</a></li>
+				<li>August 14 - <a href="./2019/08/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>