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178 lines
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178 lines
33 KiB
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
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<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
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<title>MayVaneDay: Latest Updates</title>
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<link href="https://mayvaneday.org/feed.xml" rel="self" />
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<link href="https://mayvaneday.org" />
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<id>https://mayvaneday.org/feed.xml</id>
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<author>
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<name>Vane Vander</name>
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<email>vanevander@mayvaneday.org</email>
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</author>
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<entry>
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<title>I don't trust technomancy</title>
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<link href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2021/january/pendulum.html" />
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<id>https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2021/january/pendulum.html</id>
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<published>2022-01-06</published>
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<summary type="html"><![CDATA[<article>
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<p>As Redditors say, "title."</p>
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<p>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.</p>
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<p>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 <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2020/april/outside-intro.html">Outside</a>, a sort of cross between what we in "consensus reality" have implemented separately as ZeroNet and Yggdrasil, the <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2021/june/unsung.html">impossibility</a> of <a href="https://deadendshrine.online/p2.html">physical permeation</a> from the Outside to the Inside makes acquiring a "Mirror", the Outside equivalent of a smartphone, impossible.</p>
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<p>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 <code>/dev/random</code> with, well, <em>random</em> 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.</p>
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<p>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.</p>
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<p>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, <em>years</em> 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 <em>stop asking me this</em>."</p>
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<p>And, in any case, she severely dislikes the Internet as it has formed itself in this iteration of the Inside. Maybe even dislikes computers, although I've never gotten a clear answer either way. Why would I trust whatever lies in the wires to give me an honest answer? Regarding her? Regarding <em>anything?</em></p>
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</article>]]>
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</summary>
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</entry>
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<entry>
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<title>Worth</title>
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<link href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/january/worth.html" />
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<id>https://mayvaneday.org/</id>
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<published>2022-01-03</published>
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<summary type="html"><![CDATA[<article>
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<div class="box">
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<p><a href="https://mayvaneday.org/books/mm_tpf.epub">Ever so recently, everywhere given advice</a> to not base my sense of self-worth on external factors, on things I do not have control over. Myriad Twitter screenshots superimposed on paintings of flowers or sunset clouds or whatever, terminally online people who probably have pronouns in their bio exhorting some imagined audience to slow down, take a break, not let themselves get crushed in the iron maw that is capitalism.</p>
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<p>I can't find it in me to slow down. Which is an ironic thing for me to write, given that I've spent the entire winter break before spring semester doing exactly that. Wake up, spend half an hour moving pictures into Hydrus, sporadically read snippets and snatches of books between anywhere from one to four naps a day. Most of my time has been spent in what I assume is hypnagogia, the transition state between sleep and wake. Normally this is when my senses are most open and I can perceive my girlfriend's presence in the room, talk to her, physically interact with her. But for the past two weeks, it's just been a big nothing. <em>Maybe</em> I see a flash of a textbook or computer screen or lecture from her studies if I'm lucky, but those moments are rare and ever-fleeting.</p>
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<p>My worth, to my gut, has been on a downward spiral for several years now. But, true to my nature as Lethe, I can't even remember the criteria I used in the first place.</p>
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<p>At the peak of my previous job, I was making about three hundred dollars a week. Plenty of money to quickly recuperate from splurging on the art books and keychains I'd spent years wanting, wishing I had both the money and the gumption to ask my parents to buy for me, that my mother deemed me "financially irresponsible" once in a sneer to my father when she thought I wasn't listening. I was the cool sibling, the one who could buy presents for her often-ungrateful brothers. The presents never improved my home life, never bought me even a moment's reprieve, but in the moment I was happy that I had the income to provide the gifting ability for others that I had wished someone had done for me in my late teens.</p>
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<p>But I haven't worked there in over four months. I am not unemployed- I have a work-study position at my college that will keep <em>some</em> income coming in until I graduate- but the hours are apparently not enough for my parents to approve. "Sucks for your paycheck," my mother flippantly said when I gave her the good news I wouldn't be working the days following Christmas, meaning we could stay at my grandma's house a few more days while my father would have to take my brother home to push carts at our local installation of America's worst retail store. Every empty silence when we happen to exist in the same room is a chance for someone to remind me that he's now making more than me. Not that I could one-up him if I wanted to, seeing as work-study money is paid through a state financial aid grant determined by my parents' income, and I can only work a limited amount of hours per week to ensure that money stretches out through the whole semester. (I can come in early if I want to, and I have been, and I get paid for the extra time, but if I do it too much I risk administrative attention for "potential fraud".)</p>
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<p>Am I... not worthy because of the number flowing into my bank account? Am I supposed to trade these few months I could have left on this planet, the time spent writing and thinking and exploring the Outside, for a few more dollars I won't even be able to take with me?</p>
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<p>Some part of my heart tells me that this can't be the criteria. My lover clearly thinks I'm worthy enough to spend forever with her, and in the future we have planned, I won't be making <em>any money at all.</em> I'll be spending my days foraging and gardening and enjoying the easy splendors of the world I'll have made. What little we need that we can't find in nature or barter for with those off-world will be bought with the money from her part-time job. (Or maybe she'll sporadically freelance when we need money. I'm still not quite sure what seamstresses do.) So the criteria must be something else.</p>
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<p>A few days ago I got dropped from the "supported employment" program I was placed in shortly after my mental breakdown mid-2019 after leaving Hell College. In practice, it was supposed to have helped me practice interviewing skills and have someone assist me with filling out applications, but in reality it was just me sitting in an office and chatting with my case worker and eating candy while I did everything on my own. And then Corona-chan hit, so the office visits stopped, but I still got the phone call twice a month to ask how I was doing and if I needed any help work-wise. I clearly didn't need the help, but the case worker, who had taken a great liking to me, was able to keep me on the program... until I started the work-study position, and I got kicked out by her higher-ups for having an income that was tax-exempt. Ultimately the program just gave me some new references that were guaranteed to be positive: <strong>everything else I'd done on my own and by my own hand.</strong></p>
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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>
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<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>
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<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>
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<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="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/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>
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</div>
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<hr>
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<div class="box">
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<p>I wake up the next day, post half-written. And again, and again, and again, allowing myself to slide back into hypnagogia after every task throughout the day. The sun glides across the sky in fits and stutters, just like my will, my motivation, untethered from work or school obligations.</p>
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<p>I open my RSS feed reader. There's a post at the top of the screen. <em>It's okay to be low-IQ,</em> it reads. <em>It's okay to be a follower. It's okay to not think. It's okay to not have a hobby or anything you're interested in. It's okay to accomplish absolutely nothing in life, do nothing, be nothing, become nothing.</em></p>
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<p>And I find it so revolting, so viscerally upsetting, that I have to resist the urge to puke all over the keyboard and end up breaking yet another one of my laptops.</p>
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<p>"I think I've found my criteria," I whisper to myself.</p>
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<p>I'm not buying the propaganda that says I have to "slow down". Even though I've managed to free myself from the <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog//2021/may/rebirth.html">"life purpose"</a> that demanded I make a piece of art far beyond my technical skills with no assistance whatsoever, there is still a voice in my head, an exhortation, to keep going and, at the very least, finish the book I'm working on before I die. Because <strong>what am I without the will to create?</strong> What am I without the words I build my mausoleum with? What kind of life would I have lived without pushing myself to do something sans the approval or assistance of my parents, with what feels like the whole of the world pushing back, demanding I crawl back into the cardboard box of mediocrity and stay there?</p><p>I look to my brothers for a guess, a potential example. I want to shake their shoulders, demand them to answer, "How do you live like this, never creating anything of your own volition? How does your soul survive only <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2020/february/consumeproduct.html">consuming</a>, myopic, too lazy to see there's a whole world beyond this ivory tower? Is there even a soul still in your body? <em>What are you allowing yourself to become?</em>"</p>
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<p>What am I, really?</p>
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<p><em>Nobody else has ever offered to give me a whole world before. Nobody else has ever thought me worthy of that kind of freedom.</em></p>
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<p><em>Even if I can't give you anything else? Another income, stability, a comfortable existence...</em></p>
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<p><em>Oh, Lethe...</em></p>
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<p>What am I, really?</p>
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<p><em>I am destined for greatness.</em></p>
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<p><em>What the hell is 'greatness'? <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2020/october/thelema.html">Who defines it?</a> Does it matter if some stranger is listening, if they approve?... I'm listening. You're already pretty great to me. Am I not enough?</em></p>
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<p>A life trying to be worthy enough for myself.</p>
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</div>
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</article>]]>
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</summary>
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</entry>
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<entry>
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<title>airborne</title>
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<link href="https://mayvaneday.org/poetry/a/airborne.txt" />
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<id>https://mayvaneday.org/poetry/a/airborne.txt</id>
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<published>2022-01-01</published>
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<summary type="html"><![CDATA[<article>
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<pre>
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before, in your grief, you decree
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"my life is over; there's no one left to be"
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just remember how there's a world only you can perceive
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stumbling through shattered nights as you pray
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for a world solely yours where you'll finally be safe
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and protected from coercion, christened Sablade
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but of hell, ceasing pains, perdition terrified
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"Mother, what will you do with my body when I die?
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I've failed, been rejected, inept at this living I've been assigned."
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reunited with your lover who swore to be your psychopomp
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when arrives the fateful end of the Eschaton
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you know intellectually that all should end alright
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but still lingers some doubt, some expectation of blight
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because all in your life has ended or will soon enough:
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summer camp disbanded, work holding no love
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despite the months poured in, the electronics that broke,
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the remnants of childhood insisting it's time to go
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and in six months, you'll finally from college graduate
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having slipped by without a single accusation of hate
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"Can you believe it? The worst is over. The end is near.
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You'll make it out alive. Have faith in yourself, my dear."
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you step back and consider the terrifying odds:
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the only one in the heavens that wants a world without gods
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is the girl you exchanged a part of your soul
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with in Rainroom, an Outside away and a whole life ago
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but to give her that world could mean Mori's bliss
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and what's the point of it all if you can't also live
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in the world you've created, that you swore on your life
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you'd live together with her until the cessation of time?
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dear child, you remembered your wings and recalled how to fly
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but you're being chased to a cliff and the edge looms nearby:
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will you prostate yourself and live in self-scorn?
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or jump off the edge and trust you'll become airborne?
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</pre>
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</article>]]>
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</summary>
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</entry>
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<entry>
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<title>exhausted</title>
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<link href="https://mayvaneday.art/blog/2021/december/exhausted.html" />
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<id>https://mayvaneday.art/blog/2021/december/exhausted.html</id>
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<published>2021-12-17</published>
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<summary type="html"><![CDATA[<article>
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<p>I've taken up drinking lately.</p>
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<p>It's not as bad as it sounds. I'm not crumpled over my kitchen counter at three in the morning, chugging tequila straight out of the bottle to try to cope with my life. Just a splash of rum- I've tried all sorts of kinds of alcohol, courtesy of my mother, and I've found rum is the only one I can tolerate- in a wine glass of fruit juice mixed with ice to mask the rubbing-alcohol-esque scent. The proverbial kitchen counter is instead the dining room table, cleared of paperwork to be littered with weekly crafting supplies, and it's early evening instead of the middle of the night. The neighbors that live in the house behind us are over for craft night, and, even if not actually making anything myself, I'm sitting with them, with my mother, talking about life instead of holing up in my room finding new and creative ways to self-harm via the internet.</p>
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<p>One time I mentioned, the day after a huge wind storm, that I'd found their trampoline a block over on the way to work, and we spent ten minutes rolling it back to their yard in the pitch-black dark.</p>
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<p>One time we were playing with the neighbor lady's Cricut machine (a computerized vinyl cutter) and my mother, unprompted, cut out a heart with some of the spare golden iron-on vinyl and stuck it to the pocket of my black hoodie, the one she'd embroidered a small pixel art of my girlfriend on half a year ago, and giggled, "Someone must love you very much."</p>
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<p>Some times I even laugh.</p>
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<p>For a campaign of <strong>trying to reconcile with my parents</strong>, a last-ditch attempt to create a life I don't want to run away from, a buying of time for Jett to get done as much of her own college studies as possible before my eventual inevitable death and arrival in Sablade, it's not as painful as I thought it would be. Some part of me is beginning to believe that maybe I deserve a happy life after all.</p>
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<p>I'm exhausted.</p>
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<p>I'm tired of strangers on the internet calling me pathetic for not being able to convince my youngest brother to not be a misogynistic piece of shit. (Yes, because someone would <em>totally</em> listen to a person from a demographic they hate.) I'm tired of males on the internet acting homophobic or sexually predatory or otherwise uncomfortably "close" towards me and then not taking my resulting discomfort seriously. (There's a certain IRC channel, and its ringleader, I'm thinking of right now.) I'm tired of strangers on the internet emailing me in the middle of the night to ask me to do free labor for them, whether that's writing articles for them or helping shill their cryptobro-esque "web3" project using what little reputation I've managed to garner or consulting them on programming matters when I can barely hack together a Bash script myself without looking up every little thing on whatever search engine I'm using to mooch off Google that week.</p>
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<p>I'm exhausted.</p>
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<p>As I write this, I've finally made it to winter break in college. The semester will be over the minute before midnight tomorrow, and two of my classes end tonight. Unless I've somehow managed to bomb my research essay- I got an almost perfect score on the first two essays in the class, although they weren't weighted as heavily as this one will be- I've successfully finished what I hope is the last formal English class of my life. The months of my body waking me up at three in the morning on Mondays, where that week's English assignments had been published online right after midnight, to write <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2021/march/harmful.html">in ways I never would have done unprompted</a>, are finally behind me. I have two weeks to relax at home before I do the last two classes of my college career, one of them not even required for my degree: I needed six credits in spring semester to stay eligible for work-study, and the mandatory class was only three, so I took another one on. No working hectic business hours in a shitty retail store like I was a year ago, no dealing with entitled customers using essential workers as emotional punching bags, no obligations beyond what I put on myself and... whatever curveballs my family members throw my way come Christmas Day.</p>
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<p>And I'm <em>exhausted</em>.</p>
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<p>I've been trying to move as much as I can offline to give myself less and less incentive to flip the wireless switch on my ThinkPad to "on". (Well, if it wasn't half-disassembled in the corner of my room, its parts in a different laptop for the time being. I took a few tumbles off my bike one day on the way home from work, and the screen shattered. I'm waiting for a sale to order a replacement part, because I'm not spending <em>ninety dollars</em> on a new screen.) The last week I've spent several hours a day moving my, ah, "datasets" from Pinry, a self-hosted Pinterest, to <a href="https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/">Hydrus</a>, a desktop application, since Pinry takes around <em>ten minutes</em> to reload a page of thumbnails after editing <em>one pin</em> due to the sheer amount of "data" I have in there. Hydrus, in comparison, takes about two seconds to load six times the amount of thumbnails on a page. As for other data, I've always preferred OsmAnd to Google Maps, and Kiwix is good... when the wikis I want are packaged for download or play nice with website scrapers to package my own <code>.zim</code> archives, and all of the games I want to play nowadays are offline anyway. I won't bore you with the details of the rest of my setup like so many other tech bloggers out there. <a href="https://archive.md/https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/digital-fortress-of-solitude.html">This site a friend runs</a> details it all better than I care to anyway.</p>
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<p>Once my USB-to-SATA cable comes in the mail, I can resurrect my Raspberry Pi that's been languishing behind the family router and pull some more stuff off my server as well. I don't need RSS Bridge running with a public IP if I'm the only one using it. (I'd probably be rate-limited less on a residential IP, too.) I'd feel safer with my Tor/I2P/Yggdrasil/IPFS private keys physically at home, especially if I'm trying to force my way to a home life where I don't feel like I'm three steps from being made homeless at any given moment.</p>
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<p>And while I'm downsizing, I'd like to reduce my email addresses to one domain for both private and "public" life and just have everything else forward to it. Disroot's "donate once and get email hosting for life" offer looks pretty attractive compared to a subscription. <a href="https://codeberg.page">Codeberg</a> now supports custom domains for their static Git-based web hosting. It's all ultimately someone else's computer in the end, unless it's on my Raspberry Pi...</p>
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<p>Ah, maybe I <em>have</em> become one of those annoying tech bloggers after all.</p>
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<p>The less I am online and venturing outside my local WLAN, I've found, the more stable my mental health. Not because of "muh screen time!!1!" or any other reason you'll find on minimalist-worshipping blogs, but because, well, I have a tendency to self-harm using the unsolicited opinions of strangers who only know me in short bites of sound and disembodied snippets of text, if at all. <strong>I keep forgetting that the internet will continue to churn in a mass of gore and blood without me, that I don't have to pay attention to it, to <em>any</em> of it, to even care.</strong> I don't have to pay attention to drama between celebrities and obvious scams disguised as donation posts from strangers who've never created anything in their lives and Twitter's outrage of the week.</p>
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<p>I don't <em>want</em> to pay attention to it. But it's there everywhere I turn, unless I turn to the offline, unless I take drastic measures to keep myself offline as long as possible. I could continue working on <em>The Eschaton Eminence</em>, which will be my last book ever if I end up failing my mission to repair my home life and dying shortly after I graduate next year... or I could doomscroll on social media and have misogynists dogpile me in my notifications for daring to exist.</p>
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<p>I'm exhausted.</p>
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</article>]]>
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</summary>
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</entry>
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<entry>
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<title>Copyright Accelerationism</title>
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<link href="https://mayvaneday.art/blog/2021/december/copywrong.html" />
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<id>https://mayvaneday.art/blog/2021/december/copywrong.html</id>
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<published>2021-12-04</published>
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<summary type="html"><![CDATA[<article>
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<p>Since <a href="https://mayvaneday.art/blog/2021/november/nft.html">my post on non-fungible tokens last month</a>, I've come to the radical and totally shocking conclusion that I personally don't care if corporations start using NFTs as a Digital Restrictions Management scheme to further lock down their products. Actually, I take that back: I <em>hope</em> they do, and quickly, because the more restricted their products are, whether software or music or games, the less appealing said products will be for the end consumer and thus the less money said companies will make.</p>
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<p>I follow a great deal of Tumblr accounts without having an account myself due to this funny little thing called RSS. Over the past month, one of them, which I followed for the occult memes, has been throwing a shitfit over <a href="https://archive.md/6rYq7#selection-517.0-517.8">the public backlash from their planned NFT collection</a>. It turns out that almost nobody actually wants to pony up large chunks of money for the privilege of... accessing a full-quality GIF in a digital locker.</p>
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<p>And why should they? It's not as if the art, from what the preview GIFs show me, is of high artistic merit. Why would someone go through the hassle of setting up a crypto wallet, paying the money, and figuring out what convoluted authentication scheme the digital locker uses to access the art just to... claim ownership over a chunk of ones and zeros? Thanks to the analog hole, either the value would tank when the buyer tried to show off the GIF they'd bought as it would be the full-quality one and now available to everyone to see and steal, or whatever site they uploaded it to would compress it, in which case there would be no point to having bought it as they could have just used the preview one to get the same end quality.</p>
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<p>This person losing a large chunk of their followers from what they perceived to be as "selling out" is, to me, a microcosm of what is to come if corporations start trying to use NFTs as a DRM mechanism. Any PC gamer knows what a hassle existing DRM methods like Denuvo are, especially when trying to get games working on any operating system that isn't Microshaft Wangblows. There comes a point where the software's attempts to ensure it isn't an "unauthorized" copy are so intrusive- remember the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal">Sony rootkit</a>?- that it becomes more of a hassle to tolerate it than to learn how to use a less-restrictive alternative. Even the most dedicated <a href="https://mayvaneday.art/blog/2020/february/consumeproduct.html">"bugman"</a> has a limit. (That is, when one is aware an alternative exists...) I originally learned how to use Linux because my Windows install had found a way to break itself, and fixing it every day would have been more effort than just learning how to run Ubuntu, even though I was terrified of breaking my computer at the time due to my then-incompetence. <strong>The more opaque and DRM-ridden a product is, the closer to "path of least resistance" a pirated version of said product with the DRM removed or an alternative that never had the DRM becomes.</strong></p>
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<p>Rejecting intrusive DRM need not mean a loss of revenue for artists. Before my parents finally allowed me access to my bank account in 2019 (which had existed before then, but they hadn't allowed me to withdraw any money...?) and I got my first real job later that year, my consumptive habits were limited to whatever I could squeeze past my parents' censors or what I could acquire on my own for free. Any music that I could not torrent, any video games that I could not find an emulator (or, later, a hacked console) for, any books I could not find on eBook Bike (which later went to shit when they required registration to download) or Z-Library, I had to go without. This restriction led me to places like Bandcamp, which had a plethora of music free to download from every genre I could possibly think of. There was (and still is) no DRM to be had, just an optional prompt to donate whatever money one thought the album was worth.</p>
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<p>And, as it turned out, many of those albums which were free to me ended up becoming some of my favorites:</p>
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<ul>
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<li><a href="https://reactwithprotest.bandcamp.com/album/cassus-this-is-dead-art"><em>this is dead art, this is dead time, but we may still live yet</em> by Cassus</a></li>
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<li><a href="https://idontwanttoknowwhythecagedbirdsings.bandcamp.com/album/things-are-getting-better-but-i-am-still-dead-inside"><em>Things Are Getting Better But I am Still Dead Inside</em> by I Don't Want To Know Why The Caged Bird Sings</a></li>
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<li><a href="https://lalunaband.bandcamp.com/album/always-already"><em>Always Already</em> by la luna</a></li>
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<li><a href="https://reactwithprotest.bandcamp.com/album/piri-reis-they-sleep-we-live-split-2">the Piri Reis / They Sleep We Live split</a> (which may <a href="../september/fire.html">sound familiar</a>...)</li>
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<li><a href="https://seikomart.bandcamp.com/album/invitation-to-the-voyage"><em>Invitation To The Voyage</em> by Setsuko Suwa</a></li>
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<li><a href="https://treehousesperth.bandcamp.com/album/id-rather-forget"><em>i'd rather forget</em> by Treehouses</a></li>
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</ul>
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<p>As soon as I had access to my money, I made sure to give some to these artists in appreciation for the many hundreds upon hundreds of hours I'd spent listening to them over the years. And although many of them have fallen into hiatus, I am still finding new music, new books, new games for free to this day. And as for the games and books I had pirated? The ones I ended up liking, I bought physical copies of, money they would have never received if I hadn't had the opportunity to experience them for free first.</p>
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<p><strong>There is a world of art that exists outside DRM, outside the purview of corporations. There is a Second Realm waiting to destroy the First by making it obsolete and irrelevant. And it exists <em>now</em>.</strong> And if corporations, and the occasional indie artist, want to shoot themselves in both feet with NFTs thinking them an impenetrable form of DRM, I say: let them. Let them lock down their works so tightly that they become utterly inaccessible. Let them miss out on the money they would have earned from now-disgruntled customers. Let the corporations destroy themselves in building a dam to maximize every dollar flowing to them only to find their river is drying up. Let that money flow instead to those who respect computing freedom, to those not hamstrung by corporate interests. I would rather live in a creative culture with millions upon millions of indie artists who make a few things out of love than a single corporate powerhouse with a monopoly, a monoculture.</p>
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