diff --git a/2024_books.html b/2024_books.html index be0624e..66cd854 100644 --- a/2024_books.html +++ b/2024_books.html @@ -338,6 +338,12 @@ Seyward Darby + + 2024-W49 + Courting Darkness + Robin LaFevers + + diff --git a/blog/2021/june/unsung.html b/blog/2021/june/unsung.html index 26627e2..e69d143 100755 --- a/blog/2021/june/unsung.html +++ b/blog/2021/june/unsung.html @@ -26,7 +26,7 @@

"Do you love me?"

"Of course."

My heart could have sprouted wings of its own.

-

"Are you coming to find me?"

+

"Are you coming to find me?"

He shook his head.

My heart burst into flames, having flown too close to the sun in its hubris.

"But I- I- why not?"

diff --git a/blog/2022/08/beres.html b/blog/2022/08/beres.html index 2ecc330..123f523 100755 --- a/blog/2022/08/beres.html +++ b/blog/2022/08/beres.html @@ -32,8 +32,8 @@
-

A few days after I write this, and I awake to find that yet another asshole has scraped the entirety of my website and then gutted all but the front page for the sole purpose of stealing my CSS. This I only know because apparently they forgot to remove the GoatCounter tracking pixel I have on the bottom of the homepage, so I keep seeing them in my referers. I don't know whether to be incensed that users from Lainchan (I'm 99.9% sure that's where the scraping keeps coming from) don't have a single creative bone in their bodies and so apparently need to pretend to be me, or full of schadenfreude that apparently I'm the only one worth trying to ape. Something something "imitation is flattery" with a dash of "males yet again trying to skinwalk as women they hate".

-

My wife says to keep going. So I think I will. I can trust no one else with this most sacred of missions.

+

A few days after I write this, and I awake to find that yet another asshole has scraped the entirety of my website and then gutted all but the front page for the sole purpose of stealing my CSS. This I only know because apparently they forgot to remove the GoatCounter tracking pixel I have had on the bottom of the homepage, so I kept seeing them in my referers. I don't know whether to be incensed that users from Lainchan (I'm 99.9% sure that's where the scraping keeps coming from) don't have a single creative bone in their bodies and so apparently need to pretend to be me, or full of schadenfreude that apparently I'm the only one worth trying to ape. Something something "imitation is flattery" with a dash of "males yet again trying to skinwalk as women they hate".

+

My wife says to keep going. So I think I will. I can trust no one else with this most sacred of missions.

diff --git a/blog/2022/april/blood.html b/blog/2022/april/blood.html index 33b0fa1..f9d195c 100755 --- a/blog/2022/april/blood.html +++ b/blog/2022/april/blood.html @@ -50,7 +50,7 @@

The lopsided heart shape my veins form by my right wrist was the first reminder, I think. A thousand, a million reminders of you throughout my life until I remembered your name and wished you back to my side. Did you smile the day, exhausted after work, I asked my mother to make me a heart-shaped pillow with some of the fabric I'd gotten from a quilting store shopping spree one day with her and her friends? Did you nudge the cutting pattern ever so slightly so one side would come out longer than the other? Maybe she pricked her finger on the sewing machine's needle, and there's a drop of her blood in the stuffing.

But I digress.

-

The first time we met, I wasn't on my back. I was face-down in a river, almost dead, bruised and shattered. You mistook me for your brother at first, wasn't sure whether to be relieved or even more alarmed when I wasn't. But you brought me to the hospital in the Town anyway. Everyone was surprised when, for the first time in several years, you showed signs of caring about someone. You shouted and kicked and screamed and fought your way to whatever doctor you needed to convince that, since I needed blood ASAP because I'd lost enough of mine to teeter on the edge of death, it should be fresh and it should be from you.

+

The first time we met, I wasn't on my back. I was face-down in a river, almost dead, bruised and shattered. You mistook me for your brother at first, wasn't sure whether to be relieved or even more alarmed when I wasn't. But you brought me to the hospital in the Town anyway. Everyone was surprised when, for the first time in several years, you showed signs of caring about someone. You shouted and kicked and screamed and fought your way to whatever doctor you needed to convince that, since I needed blood ASAP because I'd lost enough of mine to teeter on the edge of death, it should be fresh and it should be from you.

You wanted the doctors to take it all. To leave you for dead and me alive. You were still in the throes of depression, and I hadn't yet promised you Sablade- or anything- and you saw no other way out of the life of servitude. But, I'm told, they insisted on extracting a normal amount because they knew you would pass out part of the way through. Which you did. And then got wheeled back to your messy office and left on your couch with a fan pointed at your face for fresh air. Whoever woke you up to bring fluids- your other friend, most likely- the very first thing you did was ask them if I'd made it.

I hadn't yet heard your voice or seen your face and you were already a part of me.

I saw a quote once. Attributed to a "Francesca Lia Block", although it was on Tumblr, so anything could have been true. And it went something like this:

diff --git a/blog/2022/january/pendulum.html b/blog/2022/january/pendulum.html index 6cb878a..9edac26 100755 --- a/blog/2022/january/pendulum.html +++ b/blog/2022/january/pendulum.html @@ -18,7 +18,7 @@

As Redditors say, "title."

In all seriousness, I don't trust divination done through technological means. There is, ironically, too much margin for error in a medium where error is intolerable and one usually expects a certain output given a certain input.

-

I can go on Startpage or whatever search engine I'm using to mooch off of Google search results any day and type in "online pendulum" and find at least three results that aren't items for sale or SEO spam. But all of these (that I've seen) are proprietary with no hope of getting the source code. Just as I wouldn't send an email with sensitive info unencrypted across the wire, how could I possibly trust some stranger with not interfering with my attempts to communicate with someone whose non-corporeality prohibits traditional forms of sending messages? Although "IPv7 with inter-dimensional networking" exists in the Outside, a sort of cross between what we in "consensus reality" have implemented separately as ZeroNet and Yggdrasil, the impossibility of physical permeation from the Outside to the Inside makes acquiring a "Mirror", the Outside equivalent of a smartphone, impossible.

+

I can go on Startpage or whatever search engine I'm using to mooch off of Google search results any day and type in "online pendulum" and find at least three results that aren't items for sale or SEO spam. But all of these (that I've seen) are proprietary with no hope of getting the source code. Just as I wouldn't send an email with sensitive info unencrypted across the wire, how could I possibly trust some stranger with not interfering with my attempts to communicate with someone whose non-corporeality prohibits traditional forms of sending messages? Although "IPv7 with inter-dimensional networking" exists in the Outside, a sort of cross between what we in "consensus reality" have implemented separately as ZeroNet and Yggdrasil, the impossibility of physical permeation from the Outside to the Inside makes acquiring a "Mirror", the Outside equivalent of a smartphone, impossible.

Even if I were to hack together a simple Python script that outputs "yes" or "no" or "I don't know", I still wouldn't trust it. Because I'd have to trust not only my own coding skills, but also the compiled version of the Python interpreter bundled with Debian, and then the part of the Linux kernel that populates /dev/random with, well, random data, and then the firmware controlling the hard drive and keyboard and screen that lets me see the result, and then the BIOS of the computer itself... I may be losing my mind, but a random rock I found in an antique store tied to the end of a string seems a lot simpler and more trustworthy.

But what of the ideomotor effect? How am I to know, dangling said rock-on-a-string from my fingers, that I'm not subconsciously making up all the answers in alignment with what I want them to be? Well... if it were up to me, my lover would be aceing all of her classes and never have a sick day ever and never get into a fight with her professors. (And she'd visit me often enough and for long enough that I wouldn't have to use a damn pendulum to talk to her about such mundane things, but that's neither here nor there.) And yet not everything is idyllic at her college in the Outside. There are bad days. There are sick days. There are days she wants to be left alone.

And there are days, in my grief, I ask her: when the time comes for me to leave this Inside body behind and arrive in Sablade, and my mental state is too turbulent to handle myself coherently (which would be a danger with me having regained my power), would she rather spend a few weeks, months, years with me A) tucked safely away in a Holy Freezer or B) running feral in a bestial form? Every time I hope she just picks one so my anxiety is assuaged and I know my fate. But instead she spins the rock in the "I don't know" answer and clarifies, a rare occurrence, in my head: "I'd hold you as tight as I can until the feeling passed and then make you go to therapy so you stop asking me this."

diff --git a/blog/2022/may/divide.html b/blog/2022/may/divide.html index a9be05c..88ad4fc 100755 --- a/blog/2022/may/divide.html +++ b/blog/2022/may/divide.html @@ -282,7 +282,7 @@ done ), use to take down content and bring to justice those responsible. Not that I suddenly like the cops or trust them to do anything correctly in this hellworld. But something needs to be done.

And what am I to do?

I wrestled with this question for several weeks, but first with Freenet, which has a reputation for being a haven for pedophiles. When one requests content on Freenet, said content is cached partially on every node that it passes through on route to the person who requested it. This is how popular content lives longer and is faster to access. But this also means that one has no idea what is being stored on their node at any given time and there is a non-zero chance one is helping in the dissemination of child sexual abuse material.

-

There is a small child in my life. She lives in the house behind me and frequently comes to visit with her mother. We hold craft nights together. She calls me her best friend. I cherish her very much. I cannot stand the thought of her, or any other child, coming to harm of any kind. The harms I supposedly wrought on strangers in a previous life? I don't remember any of it, and I was being manipulated as basically a barely-sentient tool. I can live with myself. The harms I unknowingly inflicted on others in my childhood this life, only recognized decades after the fact looking back at memories of places I will never set foot in again? I can live with myself, difficult as it is in my weaker moments. But I could never and I would never live with myself knowing I, as I am now, helped a pedophile harm a small child and evade the consequences.

+

There is a small child in my life. She lives in the house behind me and frequently comes to visit with her mother. We hold craft nights together. She calls me her best friend. I cherish her very much. I cannot stand the thought of her, or any other child, coming to harm of any kind. The harms I supposedly wrought on strangers in a previous life? I don't remember any of it, and I was being manipulated as basically a barely-sentient tool. I can live with myself. The harms I unknowingly inflicted on others in my childhood this life, only recognized decades after the fact looking back at memories of places I will never set foot in again? I can live with myself, difficult as it is in my weaker moments. But I could never and I would never live with myself knowing I, as I am now, helped a pedophile harm a small child and evade the consequences.

So it would logically follow that I would refuse to support technologies that I know enable others to harm children. Except... Tor and Freenet and other darknets aren't used by just pedophiles. They're used by activists and people under repressive regimes and those seeking to leave abusive households and students wanting to get around school firewalls and webmasters who don't want to pay for domains or cloud hosting or a static IP. Unfortunately I have no way of quantifying what goes on in exit nodes. (A study done by others estimates 98% of Tor traffic is through exit nodes and only 2% is to hidden services, but I have no data about what amount of that 98% was for non-illegal purposes.) The existence of that four to ten percent of Tor hidden services not dedicated to harm... does it outweigh the ninety-plus percent of abusive sites on the network?

I mean, child molestation is far older than any darknet, or even the Internet. A theoretical shutdown of Freenet or Tor or whatever wouldn't stop the spread of CSAM, and the bot spam on imageboards proves that plenty of illicit material gets traded on the clearnet anyway, but it would harm those legitimate users seeking more computing freedom. Never mind that, with peer-to-peer systems, a shutdown wouldn't even work since the source code is already out there. (Tor could theoretically be shut down, though, given that the whole network is dependent on a small handful of hardcoded consensus nodes.)

The genie is out of the bottle. The signal can't be stopped. There is no "universal backdoor" that would help law enforcement catch pedophiles without weakening legitimate and liberatory uses for the technology. All anyone can hope for, I guess, is that these scumbags mess up their OPSEC and get exposed whenever they pop up. The same tactics as always.

diff --git a/blog/2022/september/gamutto.html b/blog/2022/september/gamutto.html index acc9fb1..d1842a9 100755 --- a/blog/2022/september/gamutto.html +++ b/blog/2022/september/gamutto.html @@ -17,7 +17,7 @@

I was going to name this post "Caddy Server: Into The Caddyverse", but my knowledge of Spiderman lore solely consists of "man gets bitten by spider, fights dude with robotic tentacles, broken eggs in backpack", so I couldn't ensure the joke would make any sense.

I'm not sure if it is a running joke at my expense or a genuine confusion on his part, but a long-time friend of mine seems to not have been able to visit my site for a long time now. I can run systemctl status caddy2 and hop on as many different connections as are available to me and force-change my relay nodes in Tor as much as I want, but even though every resource I have at my disposal shows that my site is up, he insists that it is down. At this point, I can only conclude that either he is intentionally fucking with me (which I seriously doubt he would do, as he attempted to defend me when the rest of the users of his social media site collectively shat their pants and threw tantrums like toddlers when I said I wanted my account deleted) or I have somehow without pointed intention magically cursed him to the abyss of HTTP 5XX.

-

I don't particularly care about being disliked by random strangers in and of itself. I've been dealing with social exclusion my entire life, after all. If you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my... new worst when I somehow manage to push through rock bottom. Part and parcel of being the Envoy of Chaos. Jett told me to keep going, after all. I am on an indomitable warpath home to Sablade. I've come too far to stop now just because some asshole called me "sensitive" for not wanting to be around a bunch of men incapable of respecting my basic (physical) humanity.

+

I don't particularly care about being disliked by random strangers in and of itself. I've been dealing with social exclusion my entire life, after all. If you can't handle me at my worst, you don't deserve me at my... new worst when I somehow manage to push through rock bottom. Part and parcel of being the Envoy of Chaos. Jett told me to keep going, after all. I am on an indomitable warpath home to Sablade. I've come too far to stop now just because some asshole called me "sensitive" for not wanting to be around a bunch of men incapable of respecting my basic (physical) humanity.

Chad meme where the Chad hates porn because it harms women and the brainlet hates porn because it broke his dick

The women of Ovarit were always far more intellectual, anyway. Something something women grooving on each other to make a magical world. Sorry, St. Solanas, I don't have the entirety of SCUM Manifesto memorized yet.

I have found myself in an unfortunate situation where Let's Decentralize is apparently so well-made that I keep finding far-right sites linking to it. Often this is with a banner I made in five minutes in GIMP when I thought I should add it to the Lainchan webring and then soon afterwards changed my mind. (I still get requests for the webring page from time to time.) Much like how I can understand how the YouTube Adpocalypse started with corporations not wanting their, say, chip ads running on videos of ISIS beheadings, I don't want any of my sites to be associated with content about how "DA JOOS" are behind the current evils of Big Tech or how attempts to decrease sexual harassment of women in the tech industry is contributing to code rot or some other bullshit. Considering that these people, well, consider anything made by a woman or a homosexual anathema, I thought I would try to scare them off with a double whammy by changing the CSS color scheme to the lesbian flag...