You told me to keep going, Jett.

blog/2019/june/second-class-citizens.html

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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>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>

blog/2019/may/gender-critical.html

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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>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.</p>
+				<p>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.</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 subconscious mind thought that, if I got close to them, I would somehow be "spared" from whatever danger it was picking up on. Not <em>actual</em> 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>

blog/2019/october/cameras.html

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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><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 those of 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>
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 				<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>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.</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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