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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.txt">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>So I guess I'm gender-critical now</h1>
<p>published: 2019-05-23</p>
</div>
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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>So I guess I'm gender-critical now</h1>
<p>published: 2019-05-23</p>
<p>updated: 2022-11-20</p>
</div>
<hr>
<div class="box">
<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 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>
<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 female's presentation will always have that undertone of femaleness underneath it, which makes it special, <em>what I'm attracted to</em>, 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.</p>
<p>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 <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. (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 <em>taken seriously</em>.</p>
<p>If my dysphoria is the result of societal messaging saying that I'm inferior for being a female, then why the hell do <em>I</em> have to change? Why <em>should</em> 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.</p>
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<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/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 software bloat.</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>
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<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>
<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 bloat 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>
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<h1>It's insane, the things you can get simply by asking</h1>
<p>published: 2022-11-22</p>
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<hr>
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<h2>At long last, Google will remove your address from search results without a legal order</h2>
<p>When I search up my legal name on Google, I don't even have to start scrolling down before I find pages showing my full street address, phone number, and a list of relatives. While I've never done anything that would compel the average person to track me down and make my life a living hell, like be a sexual predator, unfortunately sites like Kiwi Farms still exist, clinging on to life as they try to justify their existence as a harassment forum, and I <em>do</em> have a number of enemies I've made over the years who would love to fuck up my life purely for the crime of being a woman with Wrong Opinions on the Internet.</p>
<p>Fortunately, Google now has <a href="https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/9685456#ts=2889054%2C2889099%2C9166584%2C9171202">a form you can fill out</a> to request that they remove any links containing your personal information from search results. You don't even need to upload an ID or be signed into a Google account or show proof that you've tried to contact the webmaster of the offending pages first. Hell, you don't even need to <em>be</em> the person as long as you explain how you're related or authorized to fill out the form on their behalf. You simply need to give Google the following through the form:</p>
<ul>
<li>your legal name</li>
<li>country of residence</li>
<li>an email address for Google to contact you about the results of your request</li>
<li>a list of the offending links</li>
<li>a link to the Google search that shows the offending links</li>
<li>(optionally) any screenshots that show exactly where the personal information is on the webpage, because sometimes the Google support team doesn't like to scroll or hit Control+F</li>
</ul>
<p><strong>Please note that this does <em>NOT</em> take down the actual webpages, nor does it remove them from the indexes of other search engines like Bing.</strong> Bing <em>does</em> have its <a href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/concern/bing">own removal request form</a>, but at the time of writing I cannot yet confirm whether Microsoft will actually honor takedown requests made through it. The best course of action is to get the webmasters of the actual pages to remove your personal information, but getting the search results for one's name scrubbed is a good first action and, if the webmaster refuses to remove your personal information, better than doing nothing.</p>
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<h2>Wayback Machine will remove and blacklist your site on request without a DMCA takedown notice</h2>
<p>A while back, I was looking through my <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20221118190214/https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter">GoatCounter</a> stats when I saw some visits in the past day from a new referer. Curious, I fired up Tor Browser (because who knows if new referers are just a sting operation to get my residential IP address, knowing my curiosity) and visited it... only to find it was a Christofascist trying to promote Let's Decentralize to his woman-hating friends. My first course of action to fuck him up a bit (which has worked for others) was to <a href="../september/gamutto.html">configure Caddy to forcibly redirect users coming from his site to a different webpage</a> in hopes of <a href="https://upload.letsdecentralize.org/misc/MisogynistsKeepMoving.png">signalling</a> that I don't appreciate the attention.</p>
<p>However, a week later, I checked back to see that he had replaced the link with a Wayback Machine archive of Let's Decentralize. Which I don't appreciate either for the same reason I don't keep that website in a Git repository like my other sites: if one of the darknet links turns into a child porn site in between my weekly checks, even if I remove it, the link will remain accessible because I can't retroactively edit the archive.</p>
<p>But I can <em>destroy</em> the archive.</p>
<p>To remove your site from the Wayback Machine, you send an email to <a href="mailto:info@archive.org">info@archive.org</a> asking politely:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Hello,</p>
<p>Please remove the following websites that I own from the Wayback Machine and exclude them from further archival:
<ul>
<li>mayvaneday.org</li>
<li>mayvaneday.art</li>
<li>deadendshrine.online</li>
<li>letsdecentralize.org</li>
</ul>
</p>
<p>Please let me know if you need any more information, such as to verify that I own these sites.</p>
<p>- vclv</p>
</blockquote>
<p>They respond with the actual form (truncated here for length) from a randomly generated Zendesk address:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Hello,</p>
<p>Thank you for contacting us. The Wayback Machine is a non-profit project founded by the Internet Archive to preserve a historical record of the Internet for purposes of research and broad public benefit. Thank you for considering the potential benefits of a more complete archive as you submit your request.</p>
<p>To allow us to better review and assist with this request, please follow the steps below.</p>
<p><em>STEP 1</em> : LIST (a) EACH URL/URL PATH THAT YOU WISH TO EXCLUDE, (b) THE PERIOD OF YOUR OWNERSHIP, AND (c) THE PERIOD YOU WISH TO EXCLUDE (where possible, we will target an exclusion to the requested period for a verified request)</p>
<p><em>EXAMPLE 1 (multiple URLs/paths from the same domain for same time period)</em>:</p>
<p>URL/URL path to exclude: site1.com/dir/file.html</p>
<p>URL/URL path to exclude: site1.com/images/</p>
<p>time period of domain ownership: 2020-02-25 to present</p>
<p>time period to exclude: 2020-02-25 to future</p>
<p><em>EXAMPLE 2 (full domain &amp; subdomains):</em></p>
<p>URL/URL path to exclude: site2.com (and all subdomains)</p>
<p>time period of domain ownership: 1998-01-31 to 2001-08-30</p>
<p>time period to exclude: 1998-01-31 to 2001-08-30</p>
<p><em>STEP 2</em> : Select and follow the applicable section(s) below for the URL(s) you want to exclude from the Wayback Machine.</p>
<p><em>A. IF YOU PERSONALLY OWN THE WEBSITE(S)</em> for the URL(s), please help us verify your ownership for those URLs by doing <em>one of the following</em>:</p>
<p>(PLEASE NOTE: if the whois listing for the domain shows that the most recent registration was later than the period you wish to exclude, we may ask for verification of past ownership in addition to any verification of current ownership)</p>
<ul>
<li>Add a text file with your request to the site’s root directory (e.g., domain.com/waybackverify.txt) or to your DNS records.</li>
<li>If a main email contact is identified on your site, send us your request from that address (and include a link to the place on the site where the contact is listed). Note: for companies with general customer service addresses listed as contacts and the like, we may request further verification.</li>
<li>If the registrant email is publicly viewable on a WHOIS lookup listing, send us an email from that address (and a link to the whois listing where it is displayed).</li>
<li>If your personal information (name, point of contact, verifiable image of self) appears on the site in a way that identifies you as owner, send us a scan of a valid photo ID bearing the same unique personal information (other sensitive information such as birth date, address, or phone number can be redacted). Please also send us a link to where it appears (not screenshots). </li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<p>You then reply with the same request as the first email you sent them, but in the format that they requested. I'll use one of the sites I submitted as an example:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Request 1</p>
<p>URL/URL path to exclude: mayvaneday.org (and all subdomains)</p>
<p>time period of domain ownership: 2021-06-01 to present</p>
<p>time period to exclude: 2021-06-01 to future</p>
<p>Proof of ownership at https://mayvaneday.org/waybackverify.txt</p>
<p>I am also listed as a contact address at https://mayvaneday.org/identity</p>
</blockquote>
<p>For "time period of domain ownership", you can usually go into your registrar's dashboard and it'll tell you when you registered the domain. Otherwise, if you're the first and only person who has ever owned the domain you want blacklisted, WHOIS records almost always show when the domain was created. For example, when you look up <code>mayvaneday.org</code>, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20221119002545/https://www.whois.com/whois/mayvaneday.org">WHOIS responds with</a>:</p>
<p><code>Creation Date: 2021-06-02T00:35:25Z</code></p>
<p>It may be off by a day depending on your time zone, but the people behind the Wayback Machine didn't get hung up on the time difference when I tried, so I doubt they'll care much in the future.</p>
<p>You will also need to upload a file created after the first removal request explicitly stating that you are the webmaster and you want the site removed. The email address that you used to make the original request should also be listed on the site's contact page. If signing a snippet with a GPG key listed on the site had been an option, I would have done that as well. Hey, if you're reading this and you work at the Internet Archive...</p>
<p>Within a few days, if your request is successful, you will receive a reply:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Hello,</p>
<p>The following has been submitted for exclusion from the Wayback Machine at web.archive.org:</p>
<ul>
<li>mayvaneday.org</li>
<li>mayvaneday.art</li>
<li>deadendshrine.online</li>
<li>letsdecentralize.org</li>
</ul>
<p>Please allow up to a day for the automated portions of the process to run their course and for the changes to take effect.</p>
<p>The Internet Archive Team</p>
</blockquote>
<p>After waiting the recommended day for the Wayback Machine to purge my sites from their archive, I checked back on the Christofascist's website and saw that he had removed the link to Let's Decentralize in a fit of frustration. A few months later, or "now" as I write this, and it seems he's also deleted his entire site. Good riddance.</p>
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<h2>Librarians will <em>not</em> kill you if you call and ask for a book return date extension</h2>
<p>At the time of writing this, I have been sick with COVID-19 for about a week. It took you three <em>years</em> to find me, you stupid virus. Come on, my wife's not even corporeal and spends most of her time in a completely different world and it took her <em>less than a month</em>. Aren't you supposed to be backed by the state of China or something? Anyways, my mother got infected first, and I honestly can't tell which of us have it worse: she's up and doing laundry and other household chores but sneezing and coughing constantly and her skin has the pallor of death, and my symptoms are milder and I feel more alert but only have short bursts of lucidity lasting half an hour or so before I need to go back to sleep. I've been taking the opportunity to tease my brothers about how I'm sick too and therefore there's no expectation that I make dinner for them in Mother's absence. ("What do you mean, you <em>don't</em> want the COVID spaghetti?")</p>
<p>Normally, every week on the way to my job search meetings, I like to stop at the library for an hour or two and get some reading done without having to worry about being interrupted by one of my family members. Jett and I like to play a game where I sit down at <a href="../../2019/november/other-world.html">the table I've always liked to write at when at the library</a> and, whatever book on the shelf across from me first catches my eye, I have to check out and read. The first time we played this, she picked out a book titled "Angels for Idiots" and a print copy of <em>The Woman's History of the World</em> by Rosalind Miles (which I'd been meaning to read for a long time) and a YA book I'd first attempted to get through in 2017 shortly after I'd moved there but only read the first chapter and had to pay late fees on. This time, the selections were <em>The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life</em> by Thomas Moore (kinda meh, considering most of his suggestions were some variant of "do more religion, LMAO") and <em>Finding Your Own North Star</em> by Martha Beck (a self-help book, and also full of pencil annotations by whoever checked it out last).</p>
<p>But I missed my meeting this week due to my illness, and the next scheduled meeting would be <em>after</em> the due date, assuming I would be recovered enough to go back out in public. So I looked up my local library's website, which looked like the webmaster had duck-taped together a bunch of static HTML pages over a half-installed WordPress instance, and called the number. (I may need help with a lot of things, but making calls to people I don't know is <em>not</em> one of them.)</p>
<p>And the librarian answered after a few rings. And I asked her, "I have some books due next week, but I have COVID-19 and I can't leave my house. Is it possible to renew my books over the phone?"</p>
<p>And, thankfully, she responded: "Of course! Do you have your library card ready?"</p>
<p>So I read her the barcode number on the back of my card, and she renewed my books for another month. I don't think I'll need the whole month, since I'm already done with the first book (what a slog it was; I think I spent half of <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20221120023137/https://nitter.pussthecat.org/Waffuum/status/1592160247971729408">Dead End Day this year</a> speed-reading at Jett's insistence I get the damn thing over with) and the second book is going by faster than I expected. All in all, my phone says the call only lasted a whole <em>fifty-three seconds</em>. Hell yeah, speedrunning LARPing as a functional adult!</p>
<p>I only hope my "quick phone interview" I have next week is just as painless...</p>
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@ -50,7 +50,7 @@ Peers:
tls://tasty.chowder.land:9001
tls://supergay.network:9001
tls://lancis.iscute.moe:49274
tls://mayvaneday.org:1414
tls://letsdecentralize.org:1414
]
</pre>
<p>All these peers are taken from the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20221006040725/https://github.com/yggdrasil-network/public-peers/blob/master/north-america/united-states.md">public peer list</a> that the Yggdrasil developers maintain. <strong>We won't use these in our theoretical female-only network.</strong> The peers listed above are only for the global Yggdrasil testnet currently in operation. In our theoretical network, we would only add peers of other members of the network.</p>

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<h2>2022</h2>
<ul>
<li>November 22 - <a href="./2022/november/asking.html">It's insane, the things you can get simply by asking</a></li>
<li>November 1 - <a href="./2022/november/ld.html">Woman who would have been revered prophetess 4,000 years ago now relegated to clicking links, opening tabs</a></li>
<li>October 25 - <a href="./2022/october/email.html">Anonymous email is still alive and well</a></li>
<li>October 24 - <a href="./2022/october/ovarit.html">Short statement on the Ovarit situation</a></li>
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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 class="based">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 class="based">November 9 - <a href="./2019/november/other-world.html">A World Just Beyond My Grasp</a></li>

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# MayVaneDay ASS (https://tilde.town/~dzwdz/ass/) feed
2022-11-22 https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/november/asking.html It's insane, the things you can get simply by asking
2022-11-01 https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/november/ld.html Woman who would have been revered prophetess 4,000 years ago now relegated to clicking links, opening tabs
2022-10-25 https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/october/email.html Anonymous email is still alive and well
2022-10-24 https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/october/ovarit.html Short statement on the Ovarit situation

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<h3>Announcement Box</h3>
<ul>
<li>2022-10-31: <span class="lesbian">Congratulations on graduating, Jett!</span> I'm so very proud of you! I can't wait to see all you'll accomplish in this next chapter of your life.</li>
<li>2022-10-24: Sorry, I ended up being wrong about the below. I still feel like shit, but I'm back to writing. Task failed successfully?</li>
<li>2022-10-18: Not much motivation to write lately. Still reeling from the betrayal and loss of a dear friend... and also finally getting some new dressers in my room. Not sure of the direction I want to take this site in the future. <del>Don't expect anything new until November at the very least.</del></li>
<li>2022-10-07: If there was a website dedicated to harassing someone I loved, I'd do everything I could to get it taken offline, "freeze peach" be damned. Maybe I'm just built different.</li>
<li>2022-10-03: It's been four years since the first Rebirth Day, Ghost. I lived. You failed to kill me.</li>
<li>2022-11-21: Want to try out <a href="https://github.com/markqvist/NomadNet">NomadNet</a>? What, are you some kind of <em>nerd</em>? My peer address is <code>4e44c82f902bd69938a681a7aa200206</code>. Now you can watch me fail at the Micron markup language in <em>real time</em>!</li>
</ul>
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