mayvaneday/feed.xml

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	<title>MayVaneDay: Latest Updates</title>
	<link href="https://mayvaneday.org/feed.xml" rel="self" />
	<link href="https://mayvaneday.org" />
	<id>https://mayvaneday.org/feed.xml</id>
	<author>
		<name>Vane Vander</name>
		<email>vanevander@mayvaneday.org</email>
	</author>
	
	<entry>
		<title>Clocktower Blitz</title>
		<link href="https://mayvaneday.org/poetry/c/clocktower.txt" />
		<id>https://mayvaneday.org/poetry/c/clocktower.txt</id>
		<published>2022-04-06</published>
		<summary type="html"><![CDATA[<article>
<pre>
Please, my love, come home unharmed.
It's been almost a month since I
found you injured, limping, on a farm
half-familiar, glowing hearth.
We've been here before- or, at least, I have,
wandering in sprawling fields
trying to find homebound path.

Because isn't that
what this is all about?
Trying to find the way back home
despite all those who've declared
themselves roadblocks, obstacles.
Each of us condemned to roam,
sometimes aimless, usually on our own,
no one to ask us how we fare.

The bloodlust of my youth has faded away.
I've grown sick of conflict, of battles, of war.
How can anyone think cold-blooded murder holds glamour?
I'm sick as an invalid
two steps in the grave
of every moment worrying if you're okay.

"If there was a path
out of this heartbreak
without suffering any pain,
believe me,
Lethe,
I'd take it in a single breath."

I'd rather die
than live a thousand lives
safe but absent from your light.
But there's nothing I can do
as you ascend the campus clock tower
with staff in hand,
ready and prepared to make a last stand.
"I need you to know I feel the same.
Truth be told, I always have.
I've got a bad limp, but if I get my way,
you won't have to wait
much longer."
</pre>
				</article>]]>
		</summary>
	</entry>

	<entry>
		<title>Stealing Time</title>
		<link href="https://mayvaneday.org/poetry/s/stealing-time.txt" />
		<id>https://mayvaneday.org/poetry/s/stealing-time.txt</id>
		<published>2022-04-04</published>
		<summary type="html"><![CDATA[<article>
				<pre>
The bike path has been sprayed
with meteors, brown and burnished
and leaking to yellow, to naught.
Trees have done their part to furnish
the path
with each and every fallen branch
they could spare. The flags are frayed,
marking the entrance to Dead End Shrine,
sandwiched between two rainy days
and welcoming this stolen time.

This stolen time,
I've come to find,
is the only place where I can live.
Leaving work early,
wings unfurling
to mark a time loop created,
these bike trips where far too long I've left
to not come home covered in muck and sweat
and yet somehow never do,
the severed hours after bedtime
when comes to me all these rhymes,
rest of family long self-sedated.

I don't like this waiting.

I don't like the parting
when comes time for my love to once more return home.
"Please don't go.
Either stay
or take
me with you."

Every natural process of life
that I've ever shied
away from
becomes
less able to terrify
with her at my side.
I've made my peace
with the regular bleed
whether from womb or breast,
the growth of velvet patches
along my hips and chest,
the hot flashes,
the persistent desire
to rip open my seams
and throw my guts to the fire.

But my brain refuses to cooperate with me.
It's stealing time,
stealing memories.
I know that forgetfulness is my domain,
but there's still some recollections
I'd like to remain.

There's still some reflections
I don't recognize.
Stealing someone's body,
looking out through their eyes,
wearing like a coat their spirit, their life.
It makes sense in the moment,
the logic of how their life goes,
but I wake up and I wonder
why
this stranger is so vivid
but not my own exploits in the Outside.

I promised her that when came
the day
for me to give up this vessel and die,
I'd let her climb into my bed with me
instead of kneeling at my bedside.
Emulating that which my mother
did, but trading one body for another.
One last breach out of the womb.
One last parent-induced cry.

And after we leave, I promise you

I'll make up for the stolen time.
				</pre>
				</article>]]>
		</summary>
	</entry>

	<entry>
		<title>Two Two</title>
		<link href="https://mayvaneday.org/poetry/t/two-two.txt" />
		<id>https://mayvaneday.org/poetry/t/two-two.txt</id>
		<published>2022-03-23</published>
		<summary type="html"><![CDATA[<article>
				<pre>
I touch my face and it is not a face.
It is a collection of curves and lines
far different than it is in the Inside,
a shell that's grown over me
during my wave-tossing sleep.
My body has done it again,
sensing danger, clothed me in a different skin.

But I know that with it comes a price:
all deities eventually devolve or die,
turned to stone or lost grasp of their mind.

I'm so tired of planning for contingencies
like
"What if I'm at Dead End Shrine and I have to pee?"
"What if an ocular migraine hits at work and I'm unable to see?"
"What if Jett breaks her vows and stops loving me?"
I promised her
that I'd make us a world
and spend with her my eternity,
but there's so many crossroads in my blood
that I don't know how long that'll be.

I don't know how long I'll get to enjoy
the sweet epilogue from a life
of having to fight
to be able to do something other than destroy.

And now another year has come and gone.
Almost a whole year from when I sung that song
to the wilderness, to the wind,
to any spirit drenched in sin
who might have known where you had gone,
that I loved you, I missed you,
I was sorry for the cries
I might have elicited from you before my demise.

How long did you wait, Jett, for us to reunite?
How many calendar crosses?
How many sleepless nights?
How many times did I see your face
and wish you were real
as you begged my memory to make haste?

And now two whole years have vanished into the ether
from when the world broke
and I gained Mori's Mirror
and a sturdy(ish) way into the Outside.
All the people I was have been satisfied,
and now it's just me, Lethe, trying to find
a way to reconcile this blood from my birth
with the world where I promised we'd never again hurt.

Two years and two days
from when you I first gazed
to when I finally started to learn all your ways.

Two years and two days
since awoke this blood.
It's been a good year, I think.
I hope I'm fully with you the next one.
				</pre>
				</article>]]>
		</summary>
	</entry>

	<entry>
		<title>The quest for digital immortality</title>
		<link href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/march/digital-immortality.html" />
		<id>https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/march/digital-immortality.html</id>
		<published>2022-03-14</published>
		<summary type="html"><![CDATA[<article>
				<p>A week ago, throughout the course of a single day, I received a chain of bizarre emails from a "Yamato Kuribayashi". A cursory search through our least favorite search engine shows that this name <em>does</em> belong to a real person living in Japan, but I have no idea if he was the actual person emailing me, and I suppose I will never know. Although, if he was, he was exceptionally bad at OPSEC. Arriving in groups of two or three every few hours and with the message only in the subject line, message body solely composed of the Japanese equivalent of "sent from my iPhone", the first few said "die", "I'll kill you", and "death". Once I asked him why he was sending me these, both in English and in a poorly-translated copy-paste from Google Translate, the bundles of messages continued, but now instead of death threats they held "we are sorry for the inconvenience". He kept apologizing until evening, where he strangely offered to share his location over Find My iPhone and then said he would "change [his] behavior and become a true human being".</p>
				<p>Was it an omen? A prank gone awry by a technologically inept person? A person so incensed after reading something on my website that he had felt compelled to try to push my paranoid buttons?</p>
				<p>I suppose I will never know.</p>
				<p>My <code>prometida</code>'s birthday is, at the time of writing this, a little over a week away. I've been putting the finishing touches on <em>The Eschaton Eminence</em> and working on some kind of knit-flower floral display and tidying my room. The last two are not going particularly well... although I can't tell if this is because my body is slowing down or if I was wrong and I do have winter-induced seasonal affective disorder after all and the lethargy is sapping my will to do anything. Theoretically, all is in place for my impending demise. May or November, I'm not entirely sure: I asked for an extension so my future-wife would have time to complete her own studies, but apparently her campus has erupted in fiery riots and she's temporarily fled for her own safety, and the <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2021/december/exhausted.html">"reconciling with my parents"</a> thing is not going well, no matter how hard I try.</p>
				<p>A traditionally hosted website (that is, not peer-to-peer) can be broken down into three major parts:</p>
				<ol>
					<li>the domain</li>
					<li>the hosting</li>
					<li>the content</li>
				</ol>
				<p>Domains, unless one goes to Freenom or some other shady "free" registrar or piggybacks off someone else using a subdomain, cost money. This is arguably the most fragile part of a website: even the smallest error in DNS configuration can render a website inaccessible, and DNS records update slower than one can reboot a web server daemon to fix a typo in configuration, meaning more downtime. It doesn't matter if the hosting is still up and the same IP used if there's no domain to point to that IP, and if the IP <em>does</em> change, manual intervention is required to keep the domain pointed to the right place unless one has a script already in place running in a crontab. (And even then, it's prone to API changes.) I could theoretically load up my Namesilo account with a bunch of funds and set the most important of my domains to auto-renew, but the money <em>will</em> run out eventually.</p>
				<p>Hosting <em>can</em> cost money, depending on how much control one wants over how their website is presented. If one just wants to put up some static HTML and assets and not a full-blown webapp that requires a backend and a database and a kajillion Node.js modules all crashing in the background, there are lots of free hosting services. (If you're attached to WordPress or some other convoluted CMS, good luck staying secure <em>during</em> your life, much less posthumously.) I personally use <a href="https://codeberg.page">Codeberg Pages</a> since there's no hard limit on file sizes (unlike Neocities) or restrictions on what can be uploaded (unlike Neocities) and no annoying social features (unlike Neocities) and I can use the domains I already own instead of being relegated to sharecropping on a subdomain without paying extra (unlike... Neocities).</p>
				<p>And also, unlike a certain free hosting service infested with Carrd rejects, it runs off of Git (since Codeberg is actually intended for hosting Git repos, not websites) and so I can <a href="https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Signing-Your-Work">sign my commits with GPG</a> to cryptographically prove that I'm the only person who's edited the files.</p>
				<p>But Codeberg, or any other hosting service, won't last forever, and I doubt they'll be willing to host my websites forever. And that's assuming that their IPs for custom domains to be pointed at never change. Moving back to Vultr isn't an option since my stash of funds will last even less time than Codeberg's existence will and even the most conservative of unattended upgrades will eventually leave my server vulnerable and open to hackers.</p>
				<p>I have a Raspberry Pi in my basement. It's currently hosting all the darknet versions of my websites. (Except for Yggdrasil, which I haven't gotten the motivation to fix yet...) It costs me nothing per month to keep it running for hosting since I don't pay the power bills in the house, and the costs would be near-negligible anyway. And it costs me nothing for the domains since darknet domains are all based in cryptography instead of paying a ransom to ICANN to reserve a slot in a database somewhere. But even that won't save me, since the whole thing can be taken down by simply unplugging it. And I'm sure my parents will unplug it after my death, seeing no purpose for keeping it running if the owner isn't there to use it any longer. And even if they don't, for whatever reason it refuses to reboot properly unless it's connected to a TV or other monitor, so it would only take one power outage or rough jostle to render everything on there offline.</p>
				<p>So, disregarding peer-to-peer networks for now, likely the only salvation for my website post-death is to be archived on the Wayback Machine. It's got documents older than I am, having been <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayback_Machine">founded in 1996 and released to the public in 2001</a>, so likely it will be around for at least decades more. (Or until climate change kills us all.) But the Wayback Machine complys with takedown requests, so I'd have to balance a GPG-signed declaration to not take any of my materials down regardless of my parents' request to versus the legal weight of such a request on either side versus the slim but still possible chance that something goes horrifically awry with the plans I've made with Jett and I end up living into next year and now everything I've ever done is preserved in an immutable form and not even I myself can go back and make corrections.</p>
				<p>Going back to peer-to-peer networks, there likely isn't much hope for me either, even considering my private keys are only on encrypted drives and so my parents won't be able to change or delete anything. ZeroNet, while my first choice for preserving content, is now abandoned by its developer and the remaining community split among several competing forks. Freenet only caches the most popular content on the network, meaning, unless I develop a cult following between now and when I leave this world, my "freesite" will eventually disappear. IPFS never worked that well anyway.</p>
				<p>The best hope I have, it seems, is Git. Running <code>git commit -S</code> will sign commits with my GPG key, although I was a dumbass when setting things up and used the key for Dead End Shrine Online instead of my main one. (Oh well. I've put a note in <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/identity/index.html"><code>/identity/</code></a> so people know.) Running <code>git log --show-signature -1</code>, where <code>1</code> is the amount of previous commits to show, will verify that I was the one who signed changes; any attempts to modify content posthumously will show a different key. It's inherently sneakernet-friendly and doesn't require any wacky peer-to-peer software to keep up-to-date and can have its config modified to pull from a different mirror if one insists on using a darknet. <strong>It won't do me any good when it comes to the links to my website at the back of my books... but at least it'll prove that, at some point in time, those links were mine.</strong></p>
				<p>Maybe, since Yamato seemed to know, I should have asked him how much time I have left to prepare.</p>
				</article>]]>
		</summary>
	</entry>

	<entry>
		<title>The Female Urge To...</title>
		<link href="https://mayvaneday.org/poetry/f/female-urge.txt" />
		<id>https://mayvaneday.org/poetry/f/female-urge.txt</id>
		<published>2022-03-11</published>
		<summary type="html"><![CDATA[<article>
<pre>
If I was the one most despised,
then why
was I
the one that survived?

Why did my siblings deign,
seeing death was imminent
and Chronos would get his way
to remake the world in his image,
decide
that the one who also destroys
and has never for a single moment known love
be the one who the divine
genocide
survived?

Which one of my siblings looked at me and thought
that what the infant world needed was destruction's favorite god?
Who spun their ceasing gaze
towards my way
and blessed me human so I Chronos forgot?

It's a gaze I've come
to become
familiar with,
this insistence
that I'm not a burden,
that I'm not by presence hurting,
that to keep breathing I don't have to earn.

But no matter how many times I fish for my mother's pity,
I can't bring myself to, when her mouth makes the sound
that I'm a blessing to all those around,
her strained declaration believe.

"But if you knew
all that I've put people through,
would you
still feel the same?"

Sharpened by heartache,
tempered by pain,
forged in despair,
I, bond-breaking blade?

*Whatever you did is dead and gone
and in so many worlds away.
There are enough armchair Christs.
Stop self-inflicting pain.*
</pre>
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