epic lol

5 years ago · ce5168ff44
--- a/about.txt
+++ b/about.txt
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 About me / FAQ
 ==============

 (last updated 3-3-2019)

 // Who are you?

 You can call me Seliph, or Lucina, or Vane, or Solstice, or whatever other name best represents how you know me. I answer to all, although my reaction might be slightly different.

 Consider me the red-headed black sheep of the unixverse. Your quirky little brother who has no idea what he's doing, but tries his best all the same.

 I write books and complain about the modern internet.

 I'm nineteen years old. I'm nonbinary, if that kind of thing matters to you.

 Also, I really apologise if you don't like HTML. I find it works better in screenreaders- more varied voice inflection- and I don't know how long I'll be alive, let alone how long until my eyes give out.

 // What's a MayVaneDay?

 It's the name of my website, formerly just my blog, that I started mid-2015. It started off as a terrible WordPress roleplaying log, then slowly branched out into more and different things as my family ceased surveilling my internet usage. I converted it into a plaintext website early 2018, where it sat solely on Neocities for about seven months before a misunderstanding regarding a post I made about my poor experiences in the Tumblr fictionkin community got me harassed off the site. Now I have three HTTP mirrors and four Gopher mirrors of the site, so if one place goes sour, I can up and leave and resettle elsewhere without a replay of the devastation of October 2018.

 // Are you mentally okay?

 It's debatable.

 // How can I contact you?

 email: rennica@tutanota.com (checked once a week)
 xmpp: seliph@disroot.org (checked daily)
 fediverse: lucina@mastodon.sdf.org (checked rarely)

 My GPG public key is in the /mayvaneday folder.

 // Gopher mirrors

 tilde.team: gopher://tilde.team/1/%7esolstice
 circumlunar.space: gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/1/%7eseliph/
 sdf.org: gopher://gopher.club/1/users/lucina/
--- a/abstain/aws.md
+++ b/abstain/aws.md
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 # GOOD WEBSITES THAT DON'T USE AMAZON WEB SERVICES (AWS) AND ARE THUS DOUBLE GOOD

 - tilde.team

 - searx.me

 - bitwarden.com (suspected Google Analytics, though)

 # GOOD WEBSITES THAT USE AWS (VERY BAD. VERY DISAPPOINTING)

 - keybase.io

 - duckduckgo.com

 # NEUTRAL-BAD SERVICES THAT USE AWS

 - aptoide.com

 - literally every preinstalled samsung app on Android
--- a/docs/anarplex/bridging-the-gap.txt
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 Bridging the Gap - From Etienne de la Boetie to Global Guerillas

 In his famous essay, the Discourse of Voluntary Servitude, french philosopher
 and political thinker, Etienne de la Boetie, makes the one observation that
 can explain every revolution, every political change and every advancement in
 freedom. If the people stop supporting their tyrants, not even actively
 bringing him down, but just removing their support for his actions, he will
 fall under his own weight. After all, every tyrant and even every group of
 tyrants is in the minority - by far. Even the bloated Big Governments of
 today are just tiny percentages of the overall population. If the people
 removed their support in the form of paying their money as taxes, no police
 hug, politician or bureaucrat would get paid day after tomorrow. The state
 lives hand to mouth all day, every day. The state doesn't save.

 There is one problem of course - there is no such entity as The People(tm).
 There are only individuals. And while The People might count millions and be,
 overall, immune to the tyrants' attacks, the individual is only a single
 erson and quite vulnerable to any punitive or retributive action of even a
 small group of tyrant thugs. Think of the tax protesters Ed and Elaine Brown.
 Think of Ghandi, who was put in jail for years. Scaring the individual is the
 only tactic the tyrant has. For if all individuals feel alone and scared,
 they won't dare remove their support. They'll fear being the one who gets hit
 by overly cruel and over the top punishment for stepping out of line.

 So how does one advance the cause of freedom for himself and others?

 Think superempowerment. Coined by John Robb of GlobalGuerillas.typepad.com,
 the term superempowerment describes technology, infrastructure, knowdledge
 and systems that enable the individual to have an impact far beyond his own
 means. It could be described as the capitalization or arming of every
 individual. A single man must work all day just to feed himself and stay
 alive. But a man working in a highly capitalized factory and armed with
 knowledge about production is able to earn hundreds of dollars in only eight
 hours each day. Those dollars will buy him food, shelter, clothes, energy, a
 car and much more. The productivity of the single person is greatly elevated
 due to capital being invested in his work.

 This seems like an obvious answer. Capitalize the individual. Superempower
 every person on the planet to opt out of the system if they so desire. When a
 voter dislikes the behaviour of a politician, removing his support for the
 politician should be as easy as sending out an email or stopping a monthly
 transfer on his bank account. 

 John Robb describes single individuals creating millions of dollars of damage
 per day by cutting oil pipelines or removing other vital bottlenecks in
 resource flow. That's not what is needed for toppling the tyrants. To remove
 their support of the government, what people need most is quite simple. The
 ability to stop paying taxes, and the safety from government retribution for
 doing so.

 As almost all countries nowadays force employers to pay taxes from their
 employees' wages, few people have the choice to not pay taxes. To make this a
 possibility, there needs to exist a simple and obvious way to pay employees,
 shop owners and other trade partners without using the traditional routes.
 This could take the form of cash, encrypted online-payments or silver coins.

 To make sure that nobody, while wagering the possibility to stop his support
 for tyranny, has to fear the tyrant's retribution, there need to exist safety
 mechanisms. This means the ability to hide payments from government control.
 In principal, this is easy. One just has to keep ones cash under the mattress
 instead of putting it on a government-inspected bank account with Bank of
 America. While neither trade partner tell on each other, government has
 little knowledge of their activities. That is, if they stick to untracked
 methods of payment, not bank wires, official cheques and credit cards.
 Government has historically been desperate enough to crack down on ordinary
 citizens, searching their premises for "illegal" money, gold, jewelery and
 other forms of possible barter or payment. But technically, this is
 impossible to do with everyone, as long as the tracked methods of payment are
 avoided. Government cannot possibly break into the houses of 300 million
 people each and every day, looking if there's a bundle of cash under the
 mattress this time. Only the superempowerment of government thugs, by way of
 cooperating credit card companies and bank institutions can enable this. If
 one stays clear of those, one should be able to hide every cash transaction.

 While government may collapse if The People(tm) all started using
 crypto-currencies today, it's not very likely that everyone will do so at the
 same time. There will be people who are first do go off the radar, and those
 people might get unneeded attention for just that - getting of the
 governments financial radar. If Joe earns $200,000 a year in 2010, but $0 in
 2011, yet still drives his Mercedes and moves into a new, luxurious home, the
 tyrant will smell deceit. Thus, especially in the beginnings, one must find
 ways to hide the move from tracked payments to free payments. There are many
 ways to accomplish this. Slowly reduce your official working hours, but
 continue working for free payment on the side. Take a year off to live off
 your savings, while secretly working for free money. Move your company off
 shore. Don't drive your new car around the IRS building while claiming you've
 lost your job. Actually, lose your job. Big Government will be happy to hide
 your ass for you.

 But protecting individuals willing to opt out from government is only one side
 of the coin. There also needs to be protection from those willing to exploit
 the opting out and the concurring loss in government power on ones side. For
 example, I can't go to the police and claim someone didn't pay me the 500
 gold coins he promised without attracting a lot of unwanted attention. In
 fact I'd probably go to jail for trading something worth 500 gold coins and
 not giving government it's fair share. Private institutions that protect free
 individuals, without forcing them to resort to government power to enforce
 their contracts, need to step in. There are of course countless forms and
 niches. Private arbitration of contract disputes. Private defense. Private
 insurance against theft, accident or other loss. Third party guarantors that
 make sure both parties consent to the trade before releasing the payment. As
 these are free institutions, not backed by coercion or goverment power, they
 can't rely on either to work. They need to function on a purely voluntary
 basis. This can be accomplished by systems of trust, recommendation,
 ostracizm and many other techniques.

 For these to function properly, secret communication is key. Nobody can help
 others defy the tyrant if the tyrant can read their emails. That means
 encryption, private darknets and alternative intra- or internets.

 Consider an example. A group of free entrepreneurs decide to form an insurance
 pool against being robbed by tyrant thugs. In case any one of them is being
 robbed by a government entity, they all split the loss. What is needed to
 make this insurance against robbery work? For one, they need a form of paying
 each other without drawing attention of the thugs. If each insurance payment
 led to further robbery, the pool wouldn't work. The person suffering the
 damage and receiving the payment also needs ways of using his compensation
 without drawing attention. This most likely means ways of shopping for goods
 and services without being tracked by the government. To make the whole
 insurance system work, the participants need to communicate in secret. Even
 sending encrypted email to one another is likely suspicious. Tyrants can draw
 connections between them even without knowing what they actually wrote each
 other. Any messages between them need to be sent over channels that disguise
 both the sender and the receiver to outsiders.

 All considered, most of the technical infrastructure is already developed.
 There are encrypted currencies. There is encrypted email. There are multi-hop
 VPN services, proxies and darknets. To superempower an individual willing to
 opt out of supporting tyranny, these technologies must be available to the
 layperson at the tip of his finger. He must first learn about their
 existance, be able to use them without much hassle and trust them with his
 money.

 The technological part is developed enough. What's needed is entrepreneurs,
 delivering those technologies in the hands of the people waiting for them.
 For if the people each decide to withdraw their support of the tyrant, and
 for $9.99/month are able to do so, the tyrant will indeed topple. 

 ***

 http://anarplexqtbch57j.onion/hosted/files/bridging_the_gap.txt
--- a/docs/anarplex/declaration-of-separation.txt
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 Declaration of Separation

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    = A Declaration of Separation =

    ==== To The Governments & People of Earth: ====
    We claim the right to exist, and we will defend it.
    We do not seek to overthrow anything. We do not seek to control anything. We
    merely wish to be left alone.
    All we ever wanted was to live in peace with our friends and neighbors. For a
    long, long time we bore insults to our liberty; we took blows, we did what we
    could to avoid injury and we worked through the system to get the offenses to
    stop. That has now changed.
    We no longer see any benefit in working through the world?s systems. At some
    point, working within a system becomes cowardly and immoral; for us, that
    point has arrived.
    Regardless of the parties in power, their governments have continued to
    restrict, restrain and punish us. We hereby reject them all. We hereby
    withdraw from them all. We hold the ruling states of this world and all that
    appertains to them to be self-serving and opposed to humanity.
    We now withdraw our obedience and reclaim the right to strike back when
    struck. We will not initiate force, but we do reserve the right to answer it.
    We did not choose this ? it was forced upon us.

    ==== To The Governments of Earth: ====
    You are building cages for all that is human. In the name of protection, you
    have intruded into all areas of human life, far exceeding the reach of any
    Caesar. You claim ultimate control of our property and our decisions, of our
    travels and even our identities. You claim ownership of humanity far beyond
    the dreams of any Emperor of any previous era.
    Understand clearly: We reject your authority and we reject your legitimacy. We
    do not believe that you have any right to do the things you do. You have
    massive power, but no right to impose it upon us and no legitimacy. We have
    forsaken you. We are no longer your citizens or your subjects.
    Your systems are inherently anti-human, even if all their operators are not.
    We are not merely angry young people. We are fathers and mothers; aunts,
    uncles and grandparents; we are business owners and trusted employees; we are
    mechanics and engineers and farmers. We are nurses and accountants and
    students and executives.
    We are on every continent.
    This is not a burst of outrage; this is a sober declaration that we no longer
    accept unearned suffering as our role in life.
    For long decades we sat quietly, hoping that things would turn around. We took
    no actions; we suffered along with everyone else. But after having our limits
    pushed back again and again, we have given up on your systems.
    If our fellow inhabitants of this planet wish to accept your rule, they are
    free to do so.
    We will not try to stop them. We, however, will no longer accept your
    constraints upon us.
    - - From now on, when you hurt us, we will bite back. If you leave us alone we
    will leave you alone and you can continue to rule your subjects. We are happy
    to live quietly. But if you come after us, there will be consequences.
    You caused this because of your fetish for control and power. The chief men
    and women among you are pathologically driven to control everyone and
    everything that moves upon this planet. You have made yourselves the judge of
    every human activity. No god-king of the ancient world ever had the power that
    your systems do.
    You have created a world where only the neutered are safe and where only
    outlaws are free.

    ==== To The People of Earth: ====
    We seek nothing from you. We do not want to rule you and we do not want to
    control you.
    All we wish is to live on earth in peace. As always, we will be helpful
    neighbors and generous acquaintances. We will remain honest business partners
    and trustworthy employees. We will continue to be loving parents and
    respectful children.
    We will not, however, be sacrificial animals. We reject the idea that others
    have a right to our lives and our property. We will not demand anything from
    you, and we will no longer acquiesce to any demands upon us. We have left that
    game. We reject all obligations to any person or organization beyond honesty,
    fair dealing and a respect for human life.
    We will shortly explain what we believe, but we are not demanding that you
    agree with us. All we ask is that you do not try to stop us. Continue to play
    the game if you wish; we will not try to disrupt it. We have merely walked
    away from it.
    We wish you peace.

    ==== To Those Who Will Condemn Us: ====
    We will ignore you.
    We welcome and seek the verdict of a just God, before whom we are willing to
    expose our innermost thoughts. Are you similarly willing?
    We would stand openly before all mankind if it were not suicidal. Perhaps some
    day we will have to accept slaughter for our crime of independence, but not
    yet.
    Your criticism and your malice are much deeper than mere disagreements of
    strategy or philosophy. You do not oppose our philosophy, you oppose our
    existence. Our presence in the world means that your precious ideals are
    false. Some of you would rather kill us than face the loss of your ideologies,
    just as those like you have either hated or killed every sufficiently
    independent human.
    You present yourselves to the world as compassionate, tolerant and
    enlightened, but we know that your smooth words are costumes. Oh yes, we know
    you, servant of the state; don?t forget, we were raised with you. We played
    with you in the schoolyard, we sat next to you in the classroom. Some of us
    studied at the same elite universities. We watched as you had your first
    tastes of power. We were the boys and girls standing next to you.
    Some of us were your first victims. We are not fooled by your carefully
    crafted public image.

    ==== What We Believe ====
    #1: Many humans resent the responsibilities that are implied by consciousness.
    We accept those responsibilities and we embrace consciousness. Rather than
    letting things happen to us (avoiding consciousness), we accept
    consciousness and choose to act in our own interest.
    We do not seek the refuge of blaming others, neither do we take refuge in
    crowds. We are willing to act on our personal judgment, and we are willing
    to accept the consequences thereof.

    #2: We believe in negative rights for all: That all humans should be free to
    do whatever they wish, as long as they do not intrude upon others; that no
    man has a right to the life, liberty or property of another; that we oppose
    aggression, fraud and coercion.

    #3: We do not believe that our way of life, or any other, will make life
    perfect or trouble-free. We expect crime and disagreements and ugliness, and
    we are prepared to deal with them. We do not seek a strongman to step in and
    solve problems for us.
    We agree to see to them ourselves.

    #4: We believe in free and unhindered commerce. So long as exchanges are
    voluntary and honest, no other party has a right to intervene ? before,
    during or after.

    #5: We believe that all individuals should keep their agreements.

    #6: We believe that honestly obtained property is fully legitimate and
    absolute.

    #7: We believe that some humans are evil and that they must be faced and dealt
    with. We accept the fact that this is a difficult area of life.

    #8: We believe that humans can self-organize effectively. We expect them to
    cooperate. We reject impositions of hierarchy and organization.

    #9: We believe that all humans are to be held as equals in all matters
    regarding justice.

    #10: We believe that the more a man or woman cares about right and wrong, the
    more of a threat he or she is perceived to be by governments.

    #11: We believe that there are only two true classes of human beings: Those
    who wish to exercise power upon others ? either directly or through
    intermediaries ? and those who have no such desires.

    #12: Large organizations and centralization are inherently anti-human. They
    must rely upon rules rather than principles, treating humans within the
    organization as obedient tools.

    ==== Our Plans: ====
    We are building our own society. We will supplement traditional tools with
    networking, cryptography, sound money, digital currency and anonymous
    messaging. Our society will not be centrally controlled. It will rely solely
    on voluntary arrangements.
    We welcome others to join us. We are looking for people who are independent
    creators of value, people who act more than talk, and people who do the right
    thing because it is the right thing.
    We will develop our own methods of dealing with injustice, built on the
    principles of negative rights, restitution, integrity and equal justice.
    We do not forbid anyone from having one foot in each realm ? ours and the old
    realm - although we demand that they do no damage to our realm. We are fully
    opposed to any use of our realm to facilitate crime in the old realm, such as
    the hiding of criminal proceeds.
    We expect to be loudly condemned, libeled and slandered by the authorities of
    the old regime. We expect them to defend their power and their image of
    legitimacy with all means available to them. We expect that many gullible and
    servile people will believe these lies, at least at first.
    We will consider traps laid for us to be criminal offenses.
    Any who wish to join us are encouraged to distribute this declaration, to act
    in furtherance of our new society, to voluntarily excel in virtues and to
    communicate and cooperate with other members of the new society.

    Free, unashamed men cannot be ruled.

    We are The Free and The Unashamed.

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 ]

 ***

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--- a/docs/anarplex/fifty-things-to-do-now.txt
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 Fifty things to do NOW

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    Fifty Things To Do NOW!

    1. Become a part-time entrepreneur, garage-market-dealer, urban farmer,
    welder, whatever. Just be productive under your own command. It doesn't
    matter what it is; just be directly productive, and directly deal with
    suppliers and clients. You'll find it awesomely liberating and it will
    be highly useful for the free underground market.
    2. Switch off the TV. Read books!
    3. Socialize with people that share your ethics and that are productive and
    respectful. Eat together, discuss, challenge each other, help each
    other, have a good time.
    4. Get a safe or safe deposit box. Start moving all the cash you can get in
    there, convert at least 30% of your cash to silver and/or gold coins.
    5. Invest in trust. Do minor deals for people on a trust basis. Taking
    others at their word, and let yourself be challenged by yours.
    6. Start looking for matches. When you talk with people, memorize what they
    do, and if an opportunity comes up, connect them with someone else for a
    minor finders fee (a burger, a few beers, whatever).
    7. Join your local LIMA house. (We'll explain this in a future post.)
    8. Travel, but don't go sight-seeing - spend your time getting to know the
    people there. Think about business opportunities with them.
    9. Start using aliases and pseudonyms. Get comfortable using them in
    real-life situations.
    10. Learn to use cryptography.
    11. Learn ethics and law (not the government law!).
    12. Study logic, especially the fallacies.
    13. Put more cash aside. Use your part-time job as the source of saved cash.
    14. Start to invest cash with people you know, in off the books projects.
    Start making micro-loans to people or buy shares in their operations.
    15. Learn basic double-entry book-keeping. Don't waste effort on the
    account-numbers they teach you - understand the concept and use it.
    16. Learn to write in code. We all have to use recordings, bookkeeping,
    contact books, transaction notes etc. These should be hard to decipher
    for someone taking a quick glimpse, and even hard for someone taking
    time to analyze them. Use tricks like date-shifting, shorthand, making
    up your own terms, etc. Or, if you want to spend a little more effort,
    learn to use memorized ciphers, such as memorizing some longer text,
    then apply it as a simple shifting-key to what you write, with the page
    number or a marker as a keypart.
    17. Tell other producers, entrepreneurs, traders etc that you appreciate
    what they do.
    18. Buy primarily from others like you, stay away from the on-the-books
    market as much as you can.
    19. When in conflict, ask someone to mediate. Solve conflicts yourself
    wherever you can. Use a mutually respected and trusted third party when
    necessary. Stay away from state 'justice' whenever you can.
    20. Start respecting secrets. Secrets are good most of the time;
    transparency is bad most of the time. Detox yourself from the
    'everything should be in the open' propaganda.
    21. Slowly make your part-time, off-the-books business, your main line of
    income. Things like underground dental hygiene are very cool.
    22. Learn that 'off-the-books' means that you really have to excel in what
    you do. You have to provide quality.
    23. Don't invest in single deals; invest in relationships with the market.
    24. Get over it: Voting doesn't help at all.
    25. Work with friends to create buying associations and selling
    associations. This will give you and others lots of money to save and
    lots of money to hide.
    26. Harbor a fugitive. (Good ones, obviously.)
    27. Help someone cross a border without documents.
    28. Offer small merchants silver or gold rather than fiat currency.
    29. Sell your products in silver or gold.
    30. Accept and use digital gold, such as Pecunix or C-gold.
    31. Start a community currency in your town.
    32. Use digital cash, such as eCache.
    33. Use Loom, Truebanc.
    34. Get serious about protecting your Internet traffic.
    35. Get comfortable working your will in the world.
    36. Learn how to work your will beneficially. This is not about being
    'right,' it is about causing benefit.
    37. Fix your mistakes (you will make them). Learn not to repeat them.
    38. Learn how to communicate effectively. Again, this is not about proving
    that you are right - this is about getting true ideas into other minds
    effectively.
    39. Stop obeying the state in some new way. Tell your friends about your
    success doing so.
    40. Get comfortable with the term 'Economic Civil Disobedience.'
    41. Spread the idea that the state is not magic - it is nothing more than a
    collection of your neighbors - no more ethical and noble than the lamer
    next door.
    42. Learn how to find the false assumptions in arguments. Most public lies
    sound okay if you don't find their unspoken assumptions. If they pass
    too quickly, find the written version and search for the lie it
    contains.
    43. Learn how to disagree with kindness.
    44. Accept the fact that most people are confused and are just barely
    hanging on to their last shreds of self-esteem. Understand that state
    intellectuals like this condition, as it makes people easier to keep in
    line - a little shame goes a long way.
    45. Don't waste your energy on the political crisis de jour. Busy your mind
    with more substantial things. Daily political dramas are a time-sink,
    and the statists like it. Stop following their script.
    46. Use jurisdictional arbitrage to deprive the state of your money. Work
    with friends if the setup costs are too large for you.
    47. Learn to defend yourself, your family, your neighbors and your town. No
    state means no military. Until you take this upon yourself, your plans
    will always have a gaping hole in their middle. There is no free lunch
    here either. Get weapons and be mentally prepared to use them. Decide in
    advance how and when you would use them - do not leave it to the emotion
    of the moment - that will make a shipwreck of the whole venture. Learn
    how to use them safely.
    48. Do something nice for your neighbor. The people who live near you are a
    far more important part of your environment than any other.
    49. Help people who suffer undeservedly. No state means you are responsible
    for charity. Sure, it will be much easier when the state isn't stealing
    all your extra money (or chasing you in hope of theft), but do what you
    can now and get used to the process.
    50. Watch over your friends. Notice when they are having a bad day, show
    some kindness and concern. If they are overloaded, carry some of their
    burden. We all have bad times, and your bad day may come too. Help one
    another. Restore one another.

    F&U
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 http://anarplexqtbch57j.onion/hosted/files/fiftythings.html
--- a/docs/gophermap
+++ b/docs/gophermap
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 A collection of snippets and documents found around the web.
 Archived here, in case the originals disappear.

 *
--- a/docs/poetry/baltimore.txt
+++ b/docs/poetry/baltimore.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,35 @@
 You're such a pretty young thing
 bored and apathetic
 what do you care if the world
 falls down around you
 have you retreated
 so far from the surface
 that you've forgotten
 the feel of the sun
 on your skin?
 Are you here or not
 buried in your ipod
 wishing this all would
 come to an end?
 and what if it did
 would a twinge of regret
 pass the hairs of you're neck
 as old systems die
 and a new world begins?
 crawl back into
 that familiar embrace
 the comfort of conformity

 such a poor complacent
 meek little sheep
 looking for a master
 waiting for the shepherd
 to lead you to the slaughter
 on the alter as you die
 will you smile satisfied
 knowing how he loves
 his shepherds pie?

 ***

 gopher://sdf.org/0/users/abaka/poetry/baltimore
--- a/docs/poetry/starry-eyed.txt
+++ b/docs/poetry/starry-eyed.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,35 @@
 Don't be surprised
 if the stars in your eyes
 leave you blinded

 if the things that we dream
 fall apart at the seams
 they're misguided

 you can't hide that you tried
 that it hurt and you cried
 don't deny it

 and now you think twice
 as your new dreams arise
 afraid one more time you might buy in

 then go the days
 slipping away
 they're behind you

 fading away
 the seconds each day
 will not try to

 remind you each day
 is a step towards the grave
 that's our due

 though you're here in this place
 one of these days
 the world will go on without you.

 ***

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 The Catastrophe of Postmodernism

 John Zerzan

 Madonna, "Are We Having Fun Yet?", supermarket tabloids, Milli Vanilli, virtual reality, "shop 'till you drop," PeeWee's Big Adventure, New Age/computer `empowerment', mega-malls, Talking Heads, comic-strip movies, `green' consumption. A build-up of the resolutely superficial and cynical. Toyota commercial: "New values: saving, caring -- all that stuff;" Details magazine: "Style Matters;" "Why Ask Why? Try Bud Dry;" watching television endlessly while mocking it. Incoherence, fragmentation, relativism -- up to and including the dismantling of the very notion of meaning (because the record of rationality has been so poor?); embrace of the marginal, while ignoring how easily margins are made fashionable. "The death of the subject" and "the crisis of representation."

 Postmodernism. Originally a theme within aesthetics, it has colonized "ever wider areas," according to Ernesto Laclau, "until it has become the new horizon of our cultural, philosophical, and political experience." "The growing conviction," as Richard Kearney has it, "that human culture as we have known it...is now reaching its end." It is, especially in the U.S., the intersection of poststructuralist philosophy and a vastly wider condition of society: both specialized ethos and, far more importantly, the arrival of what modern industrial society has portended. Postmodernism is contemporaneity, a morass of deferred solutions on every level, featuring ambiguity, the refusal to ponder either origins or ends, as well as the denial of oppositional approaches, "the new realism." Signifying nothing and going nowhere, pm [postmodernism] is an inverted millenarianism, a gathering fruition of the technological `life'-system of universal capital. It is not accidental that Carnegie-Mellon University, which in the '80s was the first to require that all students be equipped with computers, is establishing "the nation's first poststructuralist undergraduate curriculum."

 Consumer narcissism and a cosmic "what's the difference?" mark the end of philosophy as such and the etching of a landscape, according to Kroker and Cook, of "disintegration and decay against the back- ground radiation of parody, kitsch and burnout." Henry Kariel concludes that "for postmodernists, it is simply too late to oppose the momentum of industrial society." Surface, novelty, contingency -- there are no grounds available for criticizing our crisis. If the representative postmodernist resists summarizable conclusions, in favor of an alleged pluralism and openness of perspective, it is also reasonable (if one is allowed to use such a word) to predict that if and when we live in a completely pm culture, we would no longer know how to say so.

 The primacy of language & the end of the subject

 In terms of systematic thought, the growing preoccupation with language is a key factor accounting for the pm climate of narrowed focus and retreat. The so-called "descent into language," or the "linguistic turn" has levied the postmodernist-- poststructuralist assumption that language constitutes the human world and the human world constitutes the whole world. For most of this century language has been moving to center stage in philosophy, among figures as diverse as Wittgenstein, Quine, Heidegger, and Gadamer, while growing attention to communication theory, linguistics, cybernetics, and computer languages demonstrates a similar emphasis over several decades in science and technology. This very pronounced turn toward language itself was embraced by Foucault as a "decisive leap towards a wholly new form of thought." Less positively, it can be at least partially explained in terms of pessimism following the ebbing of the oppositional moment of the '60s. The '70s witnessed an alarming withdrawal into what Edward Said called the "labyrinth of textuality," as contrasted with the sometimes more insurrectionary intellectual activity of the preceding period.

 Perhaps it isn't paradoxical that "the fetish of the textual," as Ben Agger judged, "beckons in an age when intellectuals are dispossessed of their words." Language is more and more debased; drained of meaning, especially in its public usage. No longer can even words be counted on, and this is part of a larger anti-theory current, behind which stands a much larger defeat than the '60s: that of the whole train of Enlightenment rationality. We have depended on language as the supposedly sound and transparent handmaiden of reason and where has it gotten us? Auschwitz, Hiroshima, mass psychic misery, impending destruction of the planet, to name a few. Enter postmodernism, with its seemingly bizarre and fragmented turns and twists. Edith Wyschograd's Saints and Postmodernism (1990) not only testifies to the ubiquity of the pm `approach' -- there are apparently no fields outside its ken - - but also comments cogently on the new direction: "postmodernism as a `philosophical' and `literary' discursive style cannot straightforwardly appeal to the techniques of reason, themselves the instruments of theory, but must forge new and necessarily arcane means for undermining the pieties of reason."

 The immediate antecedent of postmodernism/poststructuralism, reigning in the '50s and much of the '60s, was organized around the centrality it accorded the linguistic model. Structuralism provided the premise that language constitutes our only means of access to the world of objects and experience and its extension, that meaning arises wholly from the play of differences within cultural sign systems. Levi- Strauss, for example, argued that the key to anthropology lies in the uncovering of unconscious social laws (e.g. those that regulate marriage ties and kinship), which are structured like language. It was the Swiss linguist Saussure who stressed, in a move very influential to postmodernism, that meaning resides not in a relationship between an utterance and that to which it refers, but in the relationship of signs to one another. This Saussurian belief in the enclosed, self-referential nature of language implies that everything is determined within language, leading to the scrapping of such quaint notions as alienation, ideology, repression, etc. and concluding that language and consciousness are virtually the same.

 On this trajectory, which rejects the view of language as an external means deployed by consciousness, appears the also very influential neo-Freudian, Jacques Lacan. For Lacan, not only is consciousness thoroughly permeated by language and without existence for itself apart from language, even the "unconscious is structured like a language."

 Earlier thinkers, most notably Nietzsche and Heidegger, had already suggested that a different language or a changed relationship to language might somehow bring new and important insights. With the linguistic turn of more recent times, even the concept of an individual who thinks as the basis of knowledge becomes shaky. Saussure discovered that "language is not a function of the speaking subject," the primacy of language displacing who it is that gives voice to it. Roland Barthes, whose career joins the structuralist and poststructuralist periods, decided "It is language that speaks, not the author," paralleled by Althusser's observation that history is "a process without a subject."

 If the subject is felt to be essentially a function of language, its stifling mediation and that of the symbolic order in general ascends toward the top of the agenda. Thus does postmodernism flail about trying to communicate what lies beyond language, "to present the unpresentable." Meanwhile, given the radical doubt introduced as to the availability to us of a referent in the world outside of language, the real fades from consideration. Jacques Derrida, the pivotal figure of the postmodernism ethos, proceeds as if the connection between words and the world were arbitrary. The object world plays no role for him. The exhaustion of modernism & the rise of postmodernism ut before turning to Derrida, a few more comments on precursors and the wider change in culture. Postmodernism raises questions about communication and meaning, so that the category of the aesthetic, for one, becomes problematic. For modernism, with its sunnier belief in representation, art and literature held at least some promise for providing a vision of fulfilment or understanding. Until the end of modernism, "high culture" was seen as a repository of moral and spiritual wisdom. Now there seems to be no such belief, the ubiquity of the question of language perhaps telling as to the vacancy left by the failure of other candidates of promising starting points of human imagination. In the '60s modernism seems to have reached the end of its development, the austere canon of its painting (e.g. Rothko, Reinhardt) giving way to pop art's uncritical espousal of the consumer culture's commercial vernacular. Postmodernism, and not just in the arts, is modernism without the hopes and dreams that made modernity bearable.

 A widespread "fast food" tendency is seen in the visual arts, in the direction of easily consumable entertainment. Howard Fox finds that "theatricality may be the single most pervasive property of postmodern art." A decadence or exhaustion of development is also detected in the dark paintings of an Eric Fischl, where often a kind of horror seems to lurk just below the surface. This quality links Fischl, America's quintessential pm painter, to the equally sinister Twin Peaks and pm's quintessential television figure, David Lynch. The image, since Warhol, is self-consciously a mechanically reproducible commodity and this is the bottom-line reason for both the depthlessness and the common note of eeriness and foreboding.

 Postmodern art's oft-noted eclecticism is an arbitrary recycling of fragments from everywhere, especially the past, often taking the form of parody and kitsch. Demoralized, derealized, dehistoricized: art that can no longer take itself seriously. The image no longer refers primarily to some `original', situated elsewhere in the `real' world; it increasingly refers only to other images. In this way it reflects how lost we are, how removed from nature, in the ever more mediated world of technological capitalism.

 The term postmodernism was first applied, in the '70s, to architecture. Christopher Jencks wrote of an anti-planning, pro-pluralism approach, the abandoning of modernism's dream of pure form in favor of listening to "the multiple languages of the people." More honest are Robert Venturi's celebration of Las Vegas and Piers Gough's admission that pm architecture is no more caring for people than was modernist architecture. The arches and columns laid over modernist boxes are a thin facade of playfulness and individuality, which scarcely transforms the anonymous concentrations of wealth and power underneath.

 Postmodernist writers question the very grounds for literature instead of continuing to create the illusion of an external world. The novel redirects its attention to itself; Donald Barthelme, for example, writes stories that seem to always remind the reader that they are artifices. By protesting against statement, point of view and other patterns of representation, pm literature exhibits its discomfort with the forms that tame and domesticate cultural products. As the wider world becomes more artificial and meaning less subject to our control, the new approach would rather reveal the illusion even at the cost of no longer saying anything. Here as elsewhere art is struggling against itself, its prior claims to help us understand the world evaporating while even the concept of imagination loses its potency.

 For some the loss of narrative voice or point of view is equivalent to the loss of our ability to locate ourselves historically. For postmodernists this loss is a kind of liberation. Raymond Federman, for instance, glories in the coming fiction that "will be seemingly devoid of any meaning...deliberately illogical, irrational, unrealistic, non sequitur, and incoherent."

 Fantasy, on the rise for decades, is a common form of the post- modern, carrying with it the reminder that the fantastic confronts civilization with the very forces it must repress for its survival. But it is a fantasy that, paralleling both deconstruction and high levels of cynicism and resignation in society, does not believe in itself to the extent of very much understanding or communicating. Pm writers seem to smother in the folds of language, conveying little else than their ironic stance regarding more traditional literature's pretensions to truth and meaning. Perhaps typical is Laurie Moore's 1990 novel, Like Life, whose title and content reveal a retreat from living and an inversion of the American Dream, in which things can only get worse.

 The celebration of impotence

 Postmodernism subverts two of the over-arching tenets of Enlightenment humanism: the power of language to shape the world and the power of consciousness to shape a self. Thus we have the postmodernist void, the general notion that the yearning for emancipation and freedom promised by humanist principles of subjectivity cannot be satisfied. Pm views the self as a linguistic convention; as William Burroughs put it, "Your `I' is a completely illusory concept."

 It is obvious that the celebrated ideal of individuality has been under pressure for a long time. Capitalism in fact has made a career of celebrating the individual while destroying him/her. And the works of Marx and Freud have done much to expose the largely misdirected and naive belief in the sovereign, rational Kantian self in charge of reality, with their more recent structuralist interpreters, Althusser and Lacan, contributing to and updating the effort. But this time the pressure is so extreme that the term `individual' has been rendered obsolete, replaced by `subject', which always includes the aspect of being subjected (as in the older "a subject of the king," for example). Even some libertarian radicals, such as the Interrogations group in France, join in the postmodernist chorus to reject the individual as a criterion for value due to the debasing of the category by ideology and history.

 So pm reveals that autonomy has largely been a myth and cherished ideals of mastery and will are similarly misguided. But if we are promised herewith a new and serious attempt at demystifying authority, concealed behind the guises of a bourgeois humanist `freedom', we actually get a dispersal of the subject so radical as to render it impotent, even nonexistent, as any kind of agent at all. Who or what is left to achieve a liberation, or is that just one more pipe dream? The postmodern stance wants it both ways: to put the thinking person "under erasure," while the very existence of its own critique depends on discredited ideas like subjectivity. Fred Dallmayr, acknowledging the widespread appeal of contemporary anti-humanism, warns that primary casualties are reflection and a sense of values. To assert that we are instances of language fore- most is obviously to strip away our capacity to grasp the whole, at a time when we are urgently required to do just that. Small wonder that to some, pm amounts, in practice, to merely a liberalism without the subject, while feminists who try to define or reclaim an authentic and autonomous female identity would also likely be unpersuaded.

 The postmodern subject, what is presumably left of subject-hood, seems to be mainly the personality constructed by and for technological capital, described by the marxist literary theorist Terry Eagleton as a "dispersed, decentered network of libidinal attachments, emptied of ethical substance and psychical interiority, the ephemeral function of this or that act of consumption, media experience, sexual relationship, trend or fashion." If Eagleton's definition of today's non-subject as announced by pm is unfaithful to their point of view, it is difficult to see where, to find grounds for a distancing from his scathing summary. With postmodernism even alienation dissolves, for there is no longer a subject to be alienated! Contemporary fragmentation and powerlessness could hardly be heralded more completely, or existing anger and disaffection more thoroughly ignored.

 Derrida, deconstruction & diff'rance

 Enough, for now, on background and general traits. The most influential specific postmodern approach has been Jacques Derrida's, known since the '60s as deconstruction. Postmodernism in philosophy means above all the writings of Derrida, and this earliest and most extreme outlook has found a resonance well beyond philosophy, in the popular culture and its mores.

 Certainly the "linguistic turn" bears on the emergence of Derrida, causing David Wood to call deconstruction "an absolutely unavoidable move in philosophy today," as thought negotiates its inescapable predicament as written language. That language is not innocent or neutral but bears a considerable number of presuppositions it has been his career to develop, exposing what he sees as the fundamentally self-contradictory nature of human discourse. The mathematician Kurt G�del's "Incompleteness Theorem" states that any formal system can be either consistent or complete, but not both. In rather parallel fashion, Derrida claims that language is constantly turning against itself so that, analyzed closely, we can neither say what we mean or mean what we say. But like semiologists before him, Derrida also suggests, at the same time, that a deconstructive method could demystify the ideological contents of all texts, interpreting all human activities as essentially texts. The basic contradiction and cover-up strategy inherent in the metaphysics of language in its widest sense might be laid bare and a more intimate kind of knowing result.

 What works against this latter claim, with its political promise constantly hinted at by Derrida, is precisely the content of deconstruction; it sees language as a constantly moving independent force that disallows a stabilizing of meaning or definite communication, as referred to above. This internally-generated flux he called `diff�rance' and this is what calls the very idea of meaning to collapse, along with the self-referential nature of language, which, as noted previously, says that there is no space outside of language, no "out there" for meaning to exist in anyway. Intention and the subject are overwhelmed, and what is revealed are not any "inner truths" but an endless proliferation of possible meanings generated by diff�rance, the principle that characterizes language. Meaning within language is also made elusive by Derrida's insistence that language is metaphorical and cannot therefore directly convey truth, a notion taken from Nietzsche, one which erases the distinction between philosophy and literature. All these insights supposedly contribute to the daring and subversive nature of deconstruction, but they surely provoke some basic questions as well. If meaning is indeterminate, how are Derrida's argument and terms not also indeterminate, un-pin-downable? He has replied to critics, for example, that they are unclear as to his meaning, while his `meaning' is that there can be no clear, definable meaning. And though his entire project is in an important sense aimed at subverting all systems' claims to any kind of transcendent truth, he raises diff�rance to the transcendent status of any philosophical first principle.

 For Derrida, it has been the valorizing of speech over writing that has caused all of Western thought to overlook the downfall that language itself causes philosophy. By privileging the spoken word a false sense of immediacy is produced, the invalid notion that in speaking the thing itself is present and representation overcome. But speech is no more `authentic' than the written word, not at all immune from the built-in failure of language to accurately or definitely deliver the (representational) goods. It is the misplaced desire for presence that characterizes Western metaphysics, an unreflected desire for the success of representation. It is important to note that because Derrida rejects the possibility of an unmediated existence, he assails the efficacy of representation but not the category itself. He mocks the game but plays it just the same. Diff�rance (later simply `difference') shades into indifference, due to the unavailability of truth or meaning, and joins the cynicism at large.

 Early on, Derrida discussed philosophy's false steps in the area of presence by reference to Husserl's tortured pursuit of it. Next he developed his theory of `grammatology', in which he restored writing to its proper primacy as against the West's phonocentric, or speech-valued, bias. This was mainly accomplished by critiques of major figures who committed the sin of phonocentrism, including Rousseau, Heidegger, Saussure, and Levi-Strauss, which is not to overlook his great indebtedness to the latter three of these four.

 As if remembering the obvious implications of his deconstructive approach, Derrida's writings shift in the '70s from the earlier, fairly straightforward philosophical discussions. Glas (1974) is a mishmash of Hegel and Gent, in which argument is replaced by free association and bad puns. Though baffling to even his warmest admirers, Glas certainly is in keeping with the tenet of the unavoidable ambiguity of language and a will to subvert the pretensions of orderly discourse. Spurs (1978) is a book- length study of Nietzsche that ultimately finds its focus in nothing Nietzsche published, but in a handwritten note in the margin of one of his notebooks: "I have forgotten my umbrella." Endless, undecidable possibilities exist as to the meaning or importance-if any-of this scrawled comment. This, of course, is Derrida's point, to suggest that the same can be said for everything Nietzsche wrote. The place for thought, according to deconstruction, is clearly (er, let us say unclearly) with the relative, the fragmented, the marginal.

 Meaning is certainly not something to be pinned down, if it exists at all. Commenting on Plato's Phaedrus, the master of de-composition goes so far as to assert that "like any text [it] couldn't not be involved, at least in a virtual, dynamic, lateral manner, with all the words that composed the system of the Greek language."

 Related is Derrida's opposition to binary opposites, like literal/metaphorical, serious/playful, deep/superficial, nature/culture, ad infinitum. He sees these as basic conceptual hierarchies, mainly smuggled in by language itself, which provide the illusion of definition or orientation. He further claims that the deconstructive work of overturning these pairings, which valorize one of the two over the other, leads to a political and social overturning of actual, non- conceptual hierarchies. But to automatically refuse all binary oppositions is itself a metaphysical proposition; it in fact bypasses politics and history out of a failure to see in opposites, however imprecise they may be, anything but a linguistic reality. In the dismantling of every binarism, deconstruction aims at "conceiving difference without opposition." What in a smaller dosage would seem a salutary approach, a skepticism about neat, either/or characterizations, proceeds to the very questionable prescription of refusing all unambiguity. To say that there can be no yes or no position is tantamount to a paralysis of relativism, in which `impotence' becomes the valorized partner to `opposition'.

 Perhaps the case of Paul De Man, who extended and deepened Derrida's seminal deconstructive positions (surpassing him, in the opinion of many), is instructive. Shortly after the death of De Man in 1985, it was discovered that as a young man he had written several anti-semitic, pro-Nazi newspaper articles in occupied Belgium. The status of this brilliant Yale deconstructor, and indeed to some, the moral and philosophical value of deconstruction itself, were called into question by the sensational revelation. De Man, like Derrida, had stressed "the duplicity, the confusion, the untruth that we take for granted in the use of language." Consistent with this, albeit to his discredit, in my opinion, was Derrida's tortuous commentary on De Man's collaborationist period: in sum, "how can we judge, who has the right to say?" A shabby testimony for deconstruction, considered in any way as a moment of the anti-authoritarian.

 Derrida announced that deconstruction "instigates the subversion of every kingdom." In fact, it has remained within the safely academic realm of inventing ever more ingenious textual complications to keep itself in business and avoid reflecting on its own political situation. One of Derrida's most central terms, dissemination, describes language, under the principle of difference, as not so much a rich harvest of meanings but a kind of endless loss and spillage, with meaning appearing everywhere and evaporating virtually at once. This flow of language, ceaseless and unsatisfying, is a most accurate parallel to that of the heart of consumer capital and its endless circulation of non-significance. Derrida thus unwittingly eternalizes and universalizes dominated life by rendering human communication in its image. The "every kingdom" he would see deconstruction subverting is instead extended and deemed absolute.

 Derrida represents both the well-travelled French tradition of explication de texte and a reaction against the Gallic veneration of Cartesian classicist language with its ideals of clarity and balance. Deconstruction emerged also, to a degree, as part of the original element of the near-revolution of 1968, namely the student revolt against rigidified French higher education. Some of its key terms (e.g. dissemination) are borrowed from Blanchot's reading of Heidegger, which is not to deny a significant originality in Derridean thought. Presence and representation constantly call each other into question, revealing the underlying system as infinitely fissured, and this in itself is an important contribution.

 Unfortunately, to transform metaphysics into the question of writing, in which meanings virtually choose themselves and thus one discourse (and therefore mode of action) cannot be demonstrated to be better than another, seems less than radical. Deconstruction is now embraced by the heads of English departments, professional societies, and other bodies-in-good-standing because it raises the issue of representation itself so weakly. Derrida's deconstruction of philosophy admits that it must leave intact the very concept whose lack of basis it exposes. While finding the notion of a language-independent reality untenable, neither does deconstruction promise liberation from the famous "prison house of language." The essence of language, the primacy of the symbolic, are not really tackled, but are shown to be as inescapable as they are inadequate to fulfilment. No exit; as Derrida declared: "It is not a question of releasing oneself into an unrepressive new order (there are none)."

 The crisis of representation

 If deconstruction's contribution is mainly just an erosion of our assurance of reality, it forgets that reality -- advertising and mass culture to mention just two superficial examples -- has already accomplished this. Thus this quintessentially postmodern point of view bespeaks the movement of thinking from decadence to its elegiac, or post-thought phase, or as John Fekete summarized it, "a most profound crisis of the Western mind, a most profound loss of nerve."

 Today's overload of representation serves to underline the radical impoverishment of life in technological class society -- technology is deprivation. The classical theory of representation held that meaning or truth preceded and prescribed the representations that communicated it. But we may now inhabit a postmodern culture where the image has become less the expression of an individual subject than the commodity of an anonymous consumerist technology. Ever more mediated, life in the Information Age is increasingly controlled by the manipulation of signs, symbols, marketing and testing data, etc. Our time, says Derrida, is "a time without nature."

 All formulations of the postmodern agree in detecting a crisis of representation. Derrida, as noted, began a challenge of the nature of the philosophical project itself as grounded in representation, raising some unanswerable questions about the relationship between representation and thought. Deconstruction undercuts the epistemological claims of representation, showing that language, for example, is inadequate to the task of representation. But this undercutting avoids tackling the repressive nature of its subject, insisting, again, that pure presence, a space beyond representation, can only be a utopian dream. There can be no unmediated contact or communication, only signs and representations; deconstruction is a search for presence and fulfilment interminably, necessarily, deferred.

 Jacques Lacan, sharing the same resignation as Derrida, at least reveals more concerning the malign essence of representation. Extending Freud, he determined that the subject is both constituted and alienated by the entry into the symbolic order, namely, into language. While denying the possibility of a return to a pre-language state in which the broken promise of presence might be honored, he could at least see the central, crippling stroke that is the submission of free-ranging desires to the symbolic world, the surrender of uniqueness to language. Lacan termed jouissance unspeakable because it could properly occur only outside of language: that happiness which is the desire for a world without the fracture of money or writing, a society without representation.

 The inability to generate symbolic meaning is, somewhat ironically, a basic problem for postmodernism. It plays out its stance at the frontier between what can be represented and what cannot, a half-way resolution (at best) that refuses to refuse representation. (Instead of providing the arguments for the view of the symbolic as repressive and alienating, the reader is referred to the first five essays of my Elements of Refusal [Left Bank Books, 1988], which deal with time, language, number, art, and agriculture as cultural estrangements owing to symbolization.) Meanwhile an estranged and exhausted public loses interest in the alleged solace of culture, and with the deepening and thickening of mediation emerges the discovery that perhaps this was always the meaning of culture. It is certainly not out of character, however, to find that postmodernism does not recognize reflection on the origins of representation, insisting as it does on the impossibility of unmediated existence.

 In response to the longing for the lost wholeness of pre-civilization, postmodernism says that culture has become so fundamental to human existence that there is no possibility of delving down under it. This, of course, recalls Freud, who recognized the essence of civilization as a suppression of freedom and wholeness, but who decided that work and culture were more important. Freud at least was honest enough to admit the contradiction or non-reconciliation involved in opting for the crippling nature of civilization, whereas the postmodernists do not.

 Floyd Merrell found that "a key, perhaps the principal key to Derridean thought" was Derrida's decision to place the question of origins off limits. And so while hinting throughout his work at a complicity between the fundamental assumptions of Western thought and the violences and repressions that have characterized Western civilization, Derrida has centrally, and very influentially, repudiated all notions of origins. Causative thinking, after all, is one of the objects of scorn for postmodernists. `Nature' is an illusion, so what could `unnatural' mean? In place of the situationists' wonderful "Under the pavement it's the beach," we have Foucault's famous repudiation, in The Order of Things, of the whole notion of the "repressive hypothesis." Freud gave us an understanding of culture as stunting and neurosis-generating; pm tells us that culture is all we can ever have, and that its foundations, if they exist, are not available to our understanding. Postmodernism is apparently what we are left with when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good.

 Not only does pm echo Beckett's comment in Endgame, "there's no more nature," but it also denies that there ever was any recognizable space outside of language and culture. `Nature', declared Derrida in discussing Rousseau, "has never existed." Again, alienation is ruled out; that concept necessarily implies an idea of authenticity which postmodernism finds unintelligible. In this vein, Derrida cited "the loss of what has never taken place, of a self-presence which has never been given but only dreamed of..." Despite the limitations of structuralism, Levi-Strauss' sense of affiliation with Rousseau, on the other hand, bore witness to his search for origins. Refusing to rule out liberation, either in terms of beginnings or goals, Levi-Strauss never ceased to long for an `intact' society, a non-fractured world where immediacy had not yet been broken. For this Derrida, pejoratively to be sure, presents Rousseau as a utopian and Levi-Strauss as an anarchist, cautioning against a "step further toward a sort of original an-archy," which would be only a dangerous delusion.

 The real danger consists in not challenging, at the most basic level, the alienation and domination threatening to completely overcome nature, what is left of the natural in the world and within ourselves. Marcuse discerned that "the memory of gratification is at the origin of all thinking, and the impulse to recapture past gratification is the hidden driving power behind the process of thought." The question of origins also involves the whole question of the birth of abstraction and indeed of philosophical conceptuality as such, and Marcuse came close, in his search for what would constitute a state of being without repression, to confronting culture itself. He certainly never quite escaped the impression "that something essential had been forgotten" by humanity. Similar is the brief pronouncement by Novalis, "Philosophy is homesickness." By comparison, Kroker and Cook are undeniably correct in concluding that "the postmodern culture is a forgetting, a forgetting of origins and destinations."

 Barthes, Foucault & Lyotard

 Turning to other poststructuralist/ postmodern figures, Roland Barthes, earlier in his career a major structuralist thinker, deserves mention. His Writing Degree Zero expressed the hope that language can be used in a utopian way and that there are controlling codes in culture that can be broken. By the early '70s, however, he fell into line with Derrida in seeing language as a metaphorical quagmire, whose metaphoricity is not recognized. Philosophy is befuddled by its own language and language in general cannot claim mastery of what it discusses. With The Empire of Signs (1970), Barthes had already renounced any critical, analytical intention. Ostensibly about Japan, this book is present- ed "without claiming to depict or analyze any reality whatsoever." Various fragments deal with cultural forms as diverse as haiku and slot machines, as parts of a sort of anti-utopian landscape wherein forms possess no meaning and all is surface. Empire may qualify as the first fully postmodern offering, and by the mid-'70s its author's notion of the pleasure of the text carried forward the same Derridean disdain for belief in the validity of public discourse. Writing had become an end in itself, a merely personal aesthetic the overriding consideration. Before his death in 1980, Barthes had explicitly denounced "any intellectual mode of writing," especially anything smacking of the political. By the time of his final work, Barthes by Barthes, the hedonism of words, paralleling a real-life dandyism, considered concepts not in terms of their validity or invalidity but only for their efficacy as tactics of writing.

 In 1985 AIDS claimed the most widely known influence on postmodernism, Michel Foucault. Sometimes called "the philosopher of the death of man" and considered by many the greatest of Nietzsche's modern disciples, his wide- ranging historical studies (e.g. on madness, penal practices, sexuality) made him very well known and in themselves suggest differences between Foucault and the relatively more abstract and ahistorical Derrida. Structuralism, as noted, had already forcefully devalued the individual on largely linguistic grounds, whereas Foucault characterized "man (as) only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a simple fold in our knowledge that will soon disappear." His emphasis lies in exposing `man' as that which is represented and brought forth as an object, specifically as a virtual invention of the modern human sciences. Despite an idiosyncratic style, Foucault's works were much more popular than those of Horkheimer and Adorno (e.g. The Dialectic of Enlightenment) and Erving Goffman, in the same vein of revealing the hidden agenda of bourgeois rationality. He pointed to the `individualizing' tactic at work in the key institutions in the early 1800s (the family, work, medicine, psychiatry, education), bringing out their normalizing, disciplinary roles within emerging capitalist modernity, as the `individual' is created by and for the dominant order.

 Foucault, typically pm, rejects originary thinking and the notion that there is a `reality' behind or underneath the prevailing discourse of an era. Likewise, the subject is a delusion essentially created by discourse, an `I' created out of the ruling linguistic usages. And so his detailed historical narratives, termed `archaeologies' of knowledge, are offered instead of theoretical overviews, as if they carried no ideological or philosophical assumptions. For Foucault there are no foundations of the social to be apprehended outside the contexts of various periods, or epistemes, as he called them; the foundations change from one episteme to another. The prevailing discourse, which constitutes its subjects, is seemingly self-forming; this is a rather unhelpful approach to history resulting primarily from the fact that Foucault makes no reference to social groups, but focuses entirely on systems of thought. A further problem arises from his view that the episteme of an age cannot be known by those who labor within it. If consciousness is precisely what, by Foucault's own account, fails to be aware of its relativism or to know what it would have looked like in previous epistemes, then Foucault's own elevated, encompassing awareness is impossible. This difficulty is acknowledged at the end of The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), but remains unanswered, a rather glaring and obvious problem.

 The dilemma of postmodernism is this: how can the status and validity of its theoretical approaches be ascertained if neither truth nor foundations for knowledge are admitted? If we remove the possibility of rational foundations or standards, on what basis can we operate? How can we understand what the society is that we oppose, let alone come to share such an understanding? Foucault's insistence on a Nietzschean perspectivism translates into the irreducible pluralism of interpretation. He relativized knowledge and truth only insofar as these notions attach to thought-systems other than his own, however. When pressed on this point, Foucault admitted to being incapable of rationally justifying his own opinions. Thus the liberal Habermas claims that postmodern thinkers like Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard are `neoconservative' for offering no consistent argumentation to move in one social direction rather than another. The pm embrace of relativism (or `pluralism') also means there is nothing to prevent the perspective of one social tendency from including a claim for the right to dominate another, in the absence of the possibility of determining standards.

 The topic of power, in fact, was a central one to Foucault and the ways he treated it are revealing. He wrote of the significant institutions of modern society as united by a control intentionality, a "carceral continuum" that expresses the logical finale of capitalism, from which there is no escape. But power itself, he determined, is a grid or field of relations in which subjects are constituted as both the products and the agents of power. Everything thus partakes of power and so it is no good trying to find a `fundamental', oppressive power to fight against. Modern power is insidious and "comes from everywhere." Like God, it is everywhere and nowhere at once.

 Foucault finds no beach underneath the paving stones, no `natural' order at all. There is only the certainty of successive regimes of power, each one of which must somehow be resisted. But Foucault's characteristically pm aversion to the whole notion of the human subject makes it quite difficult to see where such resistance might spring from, notwithstanding his view that there is no resistance to power that is not a variant of power itself. Regarding the latter point, Foucault reached a further dead- end in considering the relationship of power to knowledge. He came to see them as inextricably and ubiquitously linked, directly implying one another. The difficulties in continuing to say anything of substance in light of this interrelationship caused Foucault to eventually give up on a theory of power. The determinism involved meant, for one thing, that his political involvement became increasingly slight. It is not hard to see why Foucaultism was greatly boosted by the media, while the situationists, for example, were blacked out.

 Castoriadis once referred to Foucault's ideas on power and opposition to it as, "Resist if it amuses you -- but without a strategy, because then you would no longer be proletarian, but power." Foucault's own activism had attempted to embody the empiricist dream of a theory- and ideology-free approach, that of the "specific intellectual" who participates in particular, local struggles. This tactic sees theory used only concretely, as ad hoc "tool kit" methods for specific campaigns. Despite the good intentions, however, limiting theory to discrete, perishable instrumental `tools' not only refuses an explicit overview of society but accepts the general division of labor which is at the heart of alienation and domination. The desire to respect differences, local knowledge and the like refuses a reductive, totalitarian-tending overvaluing of theory, but only to accept the atomization of late capitalism with its splintering of life into the narrow specialties that are the province of so many experts. If "we are caught between the arrogance of surveying the whole and the timidity of inspecting the parts," as Rebecca Comay aptly put it, how does the second alternative (Foucault's) represent an advance over liberal reformism in general? This seems an especially pertinent question when one remembers how much Foucault's whole enterprise was aimed at disabusing us of the illusions of humanist reformers throughout history. The "specific intellectual" in fact turns out to be just one more expert, one more liberal attacking specifics rather than the roots of problems. And looking at the content of his activism, which was mainly in the area of penal reform, the orientation is almost too tepid to even qualify as liberal. In the '80s "he tried to gather, under the aegis of his chair at the College de France, historians, lawyers, judges, psychiatrists and doctors concerned with law and punishment," according to Keith Gandal. All the cops. "The work I did on the historical relativity of the prison form," said Foucault, "was an incitation to try to think of other forms of punishment." Obviously, he accepted the legitimacy of this society and of punishment; no less unsurprising was his corollary dismissal of anarchists as infantile in their hopes for the future and faith in human potential.

 The works of Jean-Francois Lyotard are significantly contradictory to each other -- in itself a pm trait -- but also express a central postmodern theme: that society cannot and should not be understood as a whole. Lyotard is a prime example of anti-totalizing thought to the point that he has summed up postmodernism as "incredulity toward metanarratives" or overviews. The idea that it is unhealthy as well as impossible to grasp the whole is part of an enormous reaction in France since the '60s against marxist and Communist influences. While Lyotard's chief target is the marxist tradition, once so very strong in French political and intellectual life, he goes further and rejects social theory in toto. For example, he has come to believe that any concept of alienation -- the idea that an original unity, wholeness, or innocence is fractured by the fragmentation and indifference of capitalism -- ends up as a totalitarian attempt to unify society coercively. Characteristically, his mid-'70s Libidinal Economy denounces theory as terror.

 One might say that this extreme reaction would be unlikely outside of a culture so dominated by the marxist left, but another look tells us that it fits perfectly with the wider, disillusioned postmodern condition. Lyotard's wholesale rejection of post-Kantian Enlightenment values does, after all, embody the realization that rational critique, at least in the form of the confident values and beliefs of Kantian, Hegelian and Marxist metanarrative theory, has been debunked by dismal historical reality. According to Lyotard, the pm era signifies that all consoling myths of intellectual mastery and truth are at an end, replaced by a plurality of `language-games', the Wittgensteinian notion of `truth' as provisionally shared and circulating without any kind of epistemological warrant or philosophical foundation. Language-games are a pragmatic, localized, tentative basis for knowledge; unlike the comprehensive views of theory or historical interpretation, they depend on the agreement of participants for their use-value. Lyotard's ideal is thus a multitude of "little narratives" instead of the "inherent dogmatism" of metanarratives or grand ideas. Unfortunately, such a pragmatic approach must accommodate to things as they are, and depends upon prevailing consensus virtually by definition. Thus Lyotard's approach is of limited value for creating a break from the everyday norms. Though his healthy, anti-authoritarian skepticism sees totalization as oppressive or coercive, what he overlooks is that the Foucaultian relativism of language-games, with their freely contracted agreement as to meaning, tends to hold that everything is of equal validity. As Gerard Raulet concluded, the resultant refusal of overview actually obeys the existing logic of homogeneity rather than somehow providing a haven for heterogeneity.

 To find progress suspect is, of course, prerequisite to any critical approach, but the quest for heterogeneity must include awareness of its disappearance and a search for the reasons why it disappeared. Postmodern thought generally behaves as if in complete ignorance of the news that division of labor and commodification are eliminating the basis for cultural or social heterogeneity. Pm seeks to preserve what is virtually non-existent and rejects the wider thinking necessary to deal with impoverished reality. In this area it is of interest to look at the relationship between pm and technology, which happens to be of decisive importance to Lyotard.

 Adorno found the way of contemporary totalitarianism prepared by the Enlightenment ideal of triumph over nature, also known as instrumental reason. Lyotard sees the fragmentation of knowledge as essential to combatting domination, which disallows the overview necessary to see that, to the contrary, the isolation that is fragmented knowledge forgets the social determination and purpose of that isolation. The celebrated `heterogeneity' is nothing much more than the splintering effect of an overbearing totality he would rather ignore. Critique is never more discarded than in Lyotard's postmodern positivism, resting as it does on the acceptance of a technical rationality that forgoes critique. Unsurprisingly, in the era of the decomposition of meaning and the renunciation of seeing what the ensemble of mere `facts' really add up to, Lyotard embraces the computerization of society. Rather like the Nietzschean Foucault, Lyotard believes that power is more and more the criterion of truth. He finds his companion in the post- modern pragmatist Richard Rorty who likewise welcomes modern technology and is deeply wedded to the hegemonic values of present-day industrial society.

 In 1985 Lyotard put together a spectacular high-tech exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris, featuring the artificial realities and microcomputer work of such artists as Myron Krueger. At the opening, its planner declared, "We wanted...to indicate that the world is not evolving toward greater clarity and simplicity, but rather toward a new degree of complexity in which the individual may feel very lost but in which he can in fact become more free." Apparently overviews are permitted if they coincide with the plans of our masters for us and for nature. But the more specific point lies with `immateriality', the title of the exhibit and a Lyotardian term which he associates with the erosion of identity, the breaking down of stable barriers between the self and a world produced by our involvement in labyrinthine technological and social systems. Needless to say, he approves of this condition, celebrating, for instance, the `pluralizing' potential of new communications technology -- of the sort that de-sensualizes life, flattens experience and eradicates the natural world. Lyotard writes: "All peoples have a right to science," as if he has the very slightest understanding of what science means. He prescribes "public free access to the memory and data banks." A horrific view of liberation, somewhat captured by: "Data banks are the encyclopedia of tomorrow; they are `nature' for postmodern men and women."

 Frank Lentricchia termed Derrida's deconstructionist project "an elegant, commanding overview matched in philosophic history only by Hegel." It is an obvious irony that the postmodernists require a general theory to support their assertion as to why there cannot and should not be general theories or metanarratives. Sartre, gestalt theorists and common sense tell us that what pm dismisses as "totalizing reason" is in fact inherent in perception itself: one sees a whole, as a rule, not discrete fragments. Another irony is provided by Charles Altieri's observation of Lyotard," that this thinker so acutely aware of the dangers inherent in master narratives nonetheless remains completely committed to the authority of generalized abstraction." Pm announces an anti-generalist bias, but its practitioners, Lyotard perhaps especially, retain a very high level of abstraction in discussing culture, modernity and other such topics which are of course already vast generalizations.

 "A liberated humanity," wrote Adorno, "would by no means be a totality." Nonetheless, we are currently stuck with a social world that is one and which totalizes with a vengeance. Postmodernism, with its celebrated fragmentation and heterogeneity, may choose to forget about the totality, but the totality will not forget about us.

 Deleuze, Guattari & Baudrillard

 Gilles Deleuze's `schizo-politics' flow, at least in part, from the prevailing pm refusal of overview, of a point of departure. Also called `nomadology', employing "rhizomatic writing," Deleuze's method champions the deterritorialization and decoding of structures of domination, by which capitalism will supersede itself through its own dynamic. With his sometime partner, Felix Guattari, with whom he shares a specialization in psychoanalysis, he hopes to see the system's schizophrenic tendency intensified to the point of shattering. Deleuze seems to share, or at least comes very close to, the absurdist conviction of Yoshimoto Takai that consumption constitutes a new form of resistance.

 This brand of denying the totality by the radical strategy of urging it to dispose of itself also recalls the impotent pm style of opposing representation: meanings do not penetrate to a center, they do not represent something beyond their reach. "Thinking without representing," is Charles Scott's description of Deleuze's approach. Schizo-politics celebrates surfaces and discontinuities; nomadology is the opposite of history.

 Deleuze also embodies the postmodern "death of the subject" theme, in his and Guattari's best-known work, Anti- Oedipus, and subsequently. `Desiringmachines', formed by the coupling of parts, human and nonhuman, with no distinction between them, seek to replace humans as the focus of his social theory. In opposition to the illusion of an individual subject in society, Deleuze portrays a subject no longer even recognizably anthropocentric. One cannot escape the feeling, despite his supposedly radical intention, of an embrace of alienation, even a wallowing in estrangement and decadence.

 In the early '70s Jean Baudrillard exposed the bourgeois foundations of marxism, mainly its veneration of production and work, in his Mirror of Production (1972). This contribution hastened the decline of marxism and the Communist Party in France, already in disarray after the reactionary role played by the Left against the upheavals of May '68. Since that time, however, Baudrillard has come to represent the darkest tendencies of postmodernism and has emerged, especially in America, as a pop star to the ultra-jaded, famous for his fully disenchanted views of the contemporary world. In addition to the unfortunate resonance between the almost hallucinatory morbidity of Baudrillard and a culture in decomposition, it is also true that he (along with Lyotard) has been magnified by the space he was expected to fill following the passing, in the '80s, of relatively deeper thinkers like Barthes and Foucault.

 Derrida's deconstructive description of the impossibility of a referent outside of representation becomes, for Baudrillard, a negative metaphysics in which reality is transformed by capitalism into simulations that have no backing. The culture of capital is seen as having gone beyond its fissures and contradictions to a place of self-sufficiency that reads like a rather science-fiction rendering of Adorno's totally administered society. And there can be no resistance, no "going back," in part because the alternative would be that nostalgia for the natural, for origins, so adamantly ruled out by postmodernism.

 "The real is that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction." Nature has been so far left behind that culture determines materiality; more specifically, media simulation shapes reality. "The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth - - it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true." Debord's "society of the spectacle" -- but at a stage of implosion of self, agency, and history into the void of simulations such that the spectacle is in service to itself alone.

 It is obvious that in our "Information Age," the electronic media technologies have become increasingly dominant, but the overreach of Baudrillard's dark vision is equally obvious. To stress the power of images should not obscure underlying material determinants and objectives, namely profit and expansion. The assertion that the power of the media now means that the real no longer exists is related to his claim that power "can no longer be found anywhere"; and both claims are false. Intoxicating rhetoric cannot erase the fact that the essential information of the Information Age deals with the hard realities of efficiency, accounting, productivity and the like. Production has not been supplanted by simulation, unless one can say that the planet is being ravaged by mere images, which is not to say that a progressive acceptance of the artificial does not greatly assist the erosion of what is left of the natural.

 Baudrillard contends that the difference between reality and representation has collapsed, leaving us in a `hyperreality' that is always and only a simulacrum. Curiously, he seems not only to acknowledge the inevitability of this development, but to celebrate it. The cultural, in its widest sense, has reached a qualitatively new stage in which the very realm of meaning and signification has disappeared. We live in "the age of events without consequences" in which the `real' only survives as formal category, and this, he imagines, is welcomed. "Why should we think that people want to disavow their daily lives in order to search for an alternative? On the contrary, they want to make a destiny of it...to ratify monotony by a grander monotony." If there should be any `resistance', his prescription for that is similar to that of Deleuze, who would prompt society to become more schizophrenic. That is, it consists wholly in what is granted by the system: "You want us to consume -- O.K., let's consume always more, and anything whatsoever; for any useless and absurd purpose." This is the radical strategy he names `hyperconformity'.

 At many points, one can only guess as to which phenomena, if any, Baudrillard's hyperbole refers. The movement of consumer society toward both uniformity and dispersal is perhaps glimpsed in one passage...but why bother when the assertions seem all too often cosmically inflated and ludicrous. This most extreme of the postmodern theorists, now himself a top-selling cultural object, has referred to the "ominous emptiness of all discourse," apparently unaware of the phrase as an apt reference to his own vacuities.

 Japan may not qualify as `hyperreality', but it is worth mentioning that its culture seems to be even more estranged and postmodern than that of the U.S. In the judgment of Masao Miyoshi, "the dispersal and demise of modern subjectivity, as talked about by Barthes, Foucault, and many others, have long been evident in Japan, where intellectuals have chronically complained about the absence of selfhood." A flood of largely specialized information, provided by experts of all kinds, highlights the Japanese high-tech consumer ethos, in which the indeterminacy of meaning and a high valuation of perpetual novelty work hand in hand. Yoshimoto Takai is perhaps the most prolific national cultural critic; somehow it does not seem bizarre to many that he is also a male fashion model, who extols the virtues and values of shopping.

 Yasuo Tanaka's hugely popular Somehow, Crystal (1980) was arguably the Japanese cultural phenomenon of the '80s, in that this vacuous, unabashedly consumerist novel, awash with brand names (a bit like Bret Easton Ellis's 1991 American Psycho), dominated the decade. But it is cynicism, even more than superficiality, that seems to mark that full dawning of postmodernism which Japan seems to be: how else does one explain that the most incisive analyses of pm there -- Now is the Meta-Mass Age, for example -- are published by the Parco Corporation, the country's trendiest marketing and retailing outlet. Shigesatu Itoi is a top media star, with his own television program, numerous publications, and constant appearances in magazines. The basis of this idol's fame? Simply that he wrote a series of state-of-the-art (flashy, fragmented, etc.) ads for Seibu, Japan's largest and most innovative department store chain. Where capitalism exists in its most advanced, postmodern form, knowledge is consumed in exactly the way that one buys clothes. `Meaning' is pass�, irrelevant; style and appearance are all.

 We are fast arriving at a sad and empty place, which the spirit of postmodernism embodies all too well. "Never in any previous civilization have the great metaphysical preoccupations, the fundamental questions of being and the meaning of life, seemed so utterly remote and pointless," in Frederic Jameson's judgment. Peter Sloterdijk finds that "the discontent in culture has assumed a new quality: it appears as universal, diffuse cynicism." The erosion of meaning, pushed forward by intensified reification and fragmentation, causes the cynic to appear everywhere. Psychologically "a borderline melancholic," he is now "a mass figure."

 The postmodern capitulation to perspectivism and decadence does not tend to view the present as alienated -- surely an old-fashioned concept -- but rather as normal and even pleasant. Robert Rauschenberg: "I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly, because they're surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable." It isn't just that "everything is culture," the culture of the commodity, that is offensive; it is also the pm affirmation of what is by its refusal to make qualitative distinctions and judgments. If the postmodern at least does us the favor, unwittingly, of registering the decomposition and even depravity of a cultural world that accompanies and abets the current frightening impoverishment of life, that may be its only `contribution'.

 We are all aware of the possibility that we may have to endure, until its self-destruction and ours, a world fatally out of focus. "Obviously, culture does not dissolve merely because persons are alienated," wrote John Murphy, adding, "A strange type of society has to be invented, nonetheless, in order for alienation to be considered normative."

 Meanwhile, where are vitality, refusal, the possibility of creating a non-mutilated world? Barthes proclaimed a Nietzschean "hedonism of discourse;" Lyotard counselled, "Let us be pagans." Such wild barbarians! Of course, their real stuff is blank and dispirited, a thoroughly relativized academic sterility. Postmodernism leaves us hopeless in an unending mall; without a living critique; nowhere.

 ***

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 Youth and Regression in an Infantile Society

 John Zerzan

 Among the young there are quite a few examples of a tendency to regress or turn back. Whether or not these phenomena are characteristic of something called "Generation X" we must leave for media to determine; after all, it's their job to define and make intelligible social reality. That aside, I think there are aspects of regression that are noteworthy/possibly significant, and which need to be put in context.

 Childhood was once a place of refuge, a secure zone of protection and innocence. For some time, however, as with every other part of life, the commodity and its attendant forms of violence have invaded this sphere. And yet it continues to represent a sort of haven, if some youth fashions are any indication. The waif look and Dr. Seuss-style clothes reflect this yearning to go back to a relatively better time and place. Seeing teens in oversized shirts and sweaters, for example, the sleeves hiding their hands, gives one a pronounced impression that they fear where they're headed and would like to be small children again.

 Popular forms of speech are another site of regression, it is possible to argue. Making statements into questions by the use of rising intonation is a type of stepping back from reality. The declarative sentence becomes an entreaty, "am I right in making even the most inoccuous assertion?" The speaker unconsciously questions his or her ability to say anything straightforwardly.

 The infinitely overused "like", as ubiquitous qualifier, also seems to signify a reversion, or evasion of adulthood. As in the case of putting a question mark on every utterance, "like" bespeaks an indirectness that borders on fear of connecting with reality. "We like went to the heach." Did you go or not? Reigning pop culture screenwriter Quentin Tarentino cannot seem to refrain from "like" in his own speech, an instance of postmodern semi-literacy. In the high-tech age of virtual reality perhaps reality is becoming virtual in a less noticed sense than VR.

 Which brings to mind the tendency toward illiteracy itself. While certainly not confined to the young generation, this development is less one of others' losing their literacy that it is of youth having less interest in adopting it than in previous times. The young Sartre once proclaimed that "No-one has written a word of truth about us." Non-literacy is in a very important sense a reaction to the tremendous accumulation of lies that comprises modern culture and everyday life.

 Television, a passive and in that respect childish form of mass media, has never been so widely consumed. Today's youth are not the first TV generation, but are more and more subject to what is often even stupider than before. Sociologist Vicki Abt revealed in fall 1994 her estimation, based on the study of 1,000 hours of Oprah, Donahue, and Sally Jessy Raphael, that 90 percent of the guests are illiterate. She draws the unmistakable conclusions as to the effects on viewers' literacy levels. To be obsessed with entertainment is reportediy a characteristic of "twentysomethings". And why not? Who could feel more betrayed in the desert of late capitalist nothingness than those most immersed in its recent worsening, and more desperately in need of diversion from its horrors?

 Today's music exhibits the themes of regression with a vengeance, or, I suppose one should say, without a vengeance. Doe-eyed gamin Kate Bush ("Mother Stands for Comfort," "The Warm Room") tends toward a retreat to childhood, while album cover art displays takes on kiddies, dolls, and the like (from groups like Dinosaur Jr., Stone Temple Pilots, Mutha's Day Out, Babes in Toyland, Sonic Youth). Nowhere was this more graphic than with Nirvana, whose third and final album was called In Utero. Returning to the womb was a recurring theme of Kurt Cobain, the anguished wail of one whose childhood could certainly not be taken for an idyll, in life or art. His regression was driven to its furthest point, in life and art.

 If punk in the late '70s drew on a vital rage, rock today, to generalize grandly, is more about powerlessness, fear, violation, confusion. Not that any of this is exactly new. The notebooks of Theodor Adorno fifty years ago were the basis for his Minimalia Moralia, a collection of short pieces that was subtitled Reflections on Damaged Life. He referred to his own damage; life in divided society is no abstraction, it damages each of us increasingly. In The New Yorker (March 7, 1994), reviewer Terrence Rafferty complained that the movie Reality Bites failed to give a clear picture of the new generation; it left one feeling "puzzled and vaguely crummy." Soon after, a letter to the editor by Josh Cohen provided this reply: "I hate to be the one to tell him this, but feeling puzzled and vaguely crummy pretty much is the experience of the new generation."

 Under "regression" one might add the seemingly more common occurrence of young adults returning to live with their parents. In a context of so few jobs that pay relatively decent wages, many cannot afford to do otherwise. Beyond that fact of life, there is a widespread rejection of white-collar careerism. But this refusal, in the absence of grounds for idealism, does not translate into freely chosen poverty or marginality. Thus, unlike the young in the '60s or even '70s, more choose to live with parents or accept, where possible, major support from them.

 Depression has been widely touted as endemic to the twentysomething generation, which explains the resonance of books like Elizabeth Wurtzel's confessional Prozac Nation: Young and Depressed in America (1994). As psychologist Martin Seligman's best-selling 1990 Learned Optimism put it, "Severe depression is 10 times more prevalent today than it was 50 years ago, and it strikes a full decade earlier in life on average than it did a generation ago." Among the news of rising drug use and its incidence among younger and younger age groups, there were two national studies in 1994 concerning the "startling" increase of binge drinking by college students, especially women. 'They reported rampant alcohol abuse leading to violence, vandalism, and other types of aggression.

 Such feelings and behaviors testify to frustration and despair that have nowhere to go when the social landscape is so frozen. Disaffection or even opposition are quickly marketed into salable style images; alienation as fashion. Meanwhile suicide, perhaps the ultimate regression, has been on a steady rise for several decades. And not just in the U.S., by the way. In Japan, Wataru Tsurumi's Complete Manual of Suicide (1993) sold over 200,000 copies in its first few months, chiefly to those under thirty.

 Eating disorders are trademark afflictions of today's young people and mirror the powerlessness of one's very early years.To not eat harks back to the stage at which this choice is almost the only option for protest.  Retreating from the world of school, occupations, etc., it constitutes, according to Kim Chernin's The Hungry Self (1985), "an extremely effective way to stop the movement into the world."

 For the past couple of decades or so, the psychological model of the individual has been that of Narcissus, named for the self-absorbed mythological figure. The popular Culture of Narcissism by Christopher Lasch (1979) was part of the shift from the earlier long-standing Oedipus personality paradigm. Today's dominant type is now one of longing for the absence of unsatisfied yearnings, a harkening back to an original unity/wholeness/perfection. The young, as might be surmised, are pre-eminently bearers of this recently arrived ethos, one which is primarily defined as a regression. Narcissistic disappointment, often termed "unrealistic," cannot accept the essentially "mediocre" nature of ordinary life (Kernberg 1988). Thus it is easy to see that narcissism is part of a general movement away from sacrifice and repression and thus has subversive potential. Of course, it is also true that there are common weaknesses in this personality orientation, such as self-absorption which takes no notice of the nature of society and hence neglects to question it. New Age solipsism is a perfect example of this tendency.

 All narcissistic types, according to Bursten (1986) are capable of flying into rages. This is related to the commonly-seen trait of narcissistic humiliation; the intolerable sense of injury and impotence contains the implicit threat of its forceful reversal. In this context, it doesn't seem out of place to mention that there has been, since the 1960s, a large literature linking narcissism and "terrorism."

 Taking account of regressive features among some of the young, one has to recognize in these features at least a somewhat justified strategy, on whatever level it could be said to be such. The world that youth are expected to enter and reproduce is bankrupt, fearsome, and without prospects.

 In fact, it is far more infantile in its workings and categories than in the defenses against it that youth erect for their own integrity. Not only, as a foundation of modern life, does the encroaching high-tech principle render us all daily more dependent; the institutions of society--and media is only the most glaring example--are themselves infantile and infantilizing. Who would legitimately feel anything but the need to "regress" in the opposite direction of such a non-future?

 ***

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 >>281245 (OP)
 It's real in that it represents the next stage of human development. It's nature's way of making a human suited for modern civilization where strength and speed are irrelevant and those that specialize the most are the fittest.

 Normalf*gs are obsolete and will, in time, be depreciated.
--- a/docs/quotes/8chan/combat-the-botnet.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/8chan/combat-the-botnet.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,24 @@
 To practice:
 Stop feeding the botnet. (this includes sunshine/8chan)
 Practice hacking/homebrewing old hardware or consoles.
 Reduce e-junk by recycling old tech.
 Use ferrite cores.
 Program more GPL code to combat the botnet sooner.
 Always log your network connections
 Wear cap on public walks to avoid CCTV botnet
 Get a non-shit WLAN card or router or non-part 15 FCC modem.
 Use very string wifi password
 Wipe or spoof IMEI. Some cellular networks still work with blank IMEI.

 Never use or do
 Nosec Windows
 Any internet service which requires your face ID or government issued ID.
 ^protip: the government uses windows internet explorer so (((they'd))) still somehow get your information straight through the backdoorOS
 Fingerprint and eye scan software on the phone or other digital device
 Barebones smartphone (even those marketed as privacy phone)
 Shit Apps. They literally log your serial number, fcc ic, imei, imsi.
 ^ protip: other people who should have with them by default a botnet app would leak your contact number and contact name to 3ds-letter parties in case you'd given some people your contact info
 Bluetooth
 ^ protip
 Leave computer not meant as server unattended (bonus for unclosed and leaky ports/protocols)
 Key escrow
--- a/docs/quotes/8chan/free-yourself-of-the-modern-web.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/8chan/free-yourself-of-the-modern-web.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,5 @@
 >like it or not, a modern web standards-comliant browser is kinda essential for basic usability these days.
 No. 90% of my internet use is mail, ftp, irc, ssh, torrent, ppp, and gopher. You *really* need to free yourself of the modern commercialized web; I only really use chans with browsers like Lynx/Links/w3m.

 >>917602
 This is my thinking too. And yet we live in an era where the average man cannot do a thing unless their [sic] is an "app for that".
--- a/docs/quotes/8chan/getting-normies-onto-floss-social-media.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/8chan/getting-normies-onto-floss-social-media.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,12 @@
 >>925878 (OP)
 Nope. The only way to get normies onto "FLOSS" social platforms us to repudiate the very things that make non-normies interested in them in the first place.

 What do I mean? Take diaspora for example. Neat concept. Anyone can host a pod. COncerned about privacy? Host your own! FAIL! The normie is confused and angered by these terms. Pod? As in pod people? Host? Like in the Bible? He'll stick with Facebook, tyvm! Oh you don't have to "host" your own, whatever that means? Oh, there are plenty of different diaspora "pods" out there that I can sign up for? FAIL! The normie is terrified and confused by choice. How does he choose!? He doesn't want to get a bad one that will steal his bank info!!!

 Normies want one website (or phone app) that "everybody" knows and that everybody else is using. In order to position a "FLOSS" social platform as the successor to, say, Facebook, or Twitter, you're going to have to get the normies on board, and that means one website (or app) where "everybody" is. That means millions of dollars in hosting costs. That meansyou either sell advertising like it's going out of style, or you get venture capital. That means you may be using open source software, but you've just become what you hated. Try competing with Facebook or venture-backed startups without datamining the fuck out of your users (or useds, as Stallman says). Memes aren't going to push normies onto diaspora et al., and no matter how horrifying the Zucc is, normies are going to kee zuccing his flensed pecker if it means they get to be on Facebook where "everybody" is.

 To get normies off proprietary social media platforms in large numbers, you're going to either have to:
 1. Destroy proprietary social media, OR
 2. Kill billions of normies.

 Either is fine by me.
--- a/docs/quotes/8chan/giving-up-to-a-mass.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/8chan/giving-up-to-a-mass.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
 >>50
 Religions, social movements, all that sort of stuff is there to deviate you from your own self.
 Giving in to the ideas of a mass means giving up on yourself, which is very comfortable if you are afraid of walking your own path
 There's nothing inherently right or wrong about it, but if you have a propension for it, you may as well follow any ideology that falls on your lap
--- a/docs/quotes/8chan/i-swear.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/8chan/i-swear.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
 >>10173387 (OP) #
 "I swear, by my life and by my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine."
--- a/docs/quotes/8chan/just-throwing-my-two-cents-in.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/8chan/just-throwing-my-two-cents-in.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,7 @@
 Just throwing my 2c in. Been online since '91

 I think it all really went downhill when monetization took hold of the internet.

 Creativity has been stifled. Humor suppressed. Entitlement to outrage & offense. Designs are all homogenized. Psychologists could probably articulate why this is happening. I really don't like it. Depresses me.

 Will be a tipping point when I give up. End up moving to the outskirts of the Simpson desert with my solar panels and caravan.
--- a/docs/quotes/8chan/little-brother.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/8chan/little-brother.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
 >>262180
 OP here. I've tried talking to my little brother about all of thos. But he doesn't share the feels. He can't understand me. I am stuck. The days go by, draining my life. Nothing happens. I just want to run away, but it's impossible to go out there and escape in this modernized world where your movement is monitored everywhere you go and you literally need to wagecuck to be able to live anywhere. the worst part is not the actual work you do, but the people you have to deal with.

 Pics related are early 2000s pants vs current year f*ggot pants.
--- a/docs/quotes/8chan/normies-are-empty-vessels.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/8chan/normies-are-empty-vessels.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
 >>15017866
 They're empty vessels. It's no joke when that anon called them NPCs, because that's what they are. They don't have a single individual thought in their minds. They have no concept of liking or disliking something personally, but need to patiently wait for the talking heads on the Talmud Vision to tell them what is and isn't kosher for them to consume.

 It's why their parasitism of established cultures and communities is so poisonous. These people come in, overwhelm the old fans by sheer weight of numbers and then sit idly by, waiting for the Anita Sarkeesian of this world to tell them what part of the hobby they're in the process of ruining is in need of pozz.
--- a/docs/quotes/8chan/once-met-a-guy.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/8chan/once-met-a-guy.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
 Once met a guy on a chan who claimed to have not spoken face to face with another human in nine years. Something about the way he typed made me believe him, he had this sense of calm that even managed to be conveyed through the computer, he managed to live entirely isolated for nine years.
 The fat one couldn't make it five hours. Isolation is the gate to transcending something that most normalf*gs just seem to accept blindly.
--- a/docs/quotes/8chan/self-reflection-poison.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/8chan/self-reflection-poison.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
 >>249325
 Self-reflection is poison to normalf*gs because without their relationships they are at their core boring, mediocre and empty. It's always starling [sic] to see it but they truly don't have any sort of depth beyond being a piece in a larger group consciousness.
--- a/docs/quotes/8chan/the-buddhists.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/8chan/the-buddhists.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
 > lamented my life for so long that disappointment has evolved into self-hatred for being a useless unwanted nobody
 > now I'm so far down the hole I actually get excited when this sickness morphs into something new, even the hurting is fun now

 On the bright side anon at least you can think (maybe). I believe it's the Buddhists who say knowledge/progress comes from suffering, and i think they're right. Theres [sic] a saying, that engineering comes from necessity, because only when one notices a problem can one think about it. Only when one finds issue in something, or lack thereof, will they suffer enough to encourage their minds to do something about it. Its [sic] why normalcattle is a term, because they are hopped up on narcissistic, hedonistic containment, blind to the issues around them, to the issues with themselves. Lemming is a term i hear thrown around, but i dont [sic] know how that started. They're satiated slaves anon, at least you aren't. Autism flurisheds [sic] through curiosity, curiosity is the urge to know more, for you know you know too little.
--- a/docs/quotes/8chan/you-can-never-forget-about-them.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/8chan/you-can-never-forget-about-them.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,5 @@
 You can never forget about them, you can only use them as fuel for your rage. Anger is the only response to these people. They benefit from the same people who ruined your life.

 The best case scenario would have been for you to die while you still had hope. Hell, it would have been best for all of us. Now all we have is the hate. If we learn to accept our position they win. Do not accept anything less than what you want. If what you want is impossible to achieve, don't settle for the next best thing. Make those who keep you from your goals suffer.

 They need to know we won't take shit from them anymore.
--- a/docs/quotes/8chan/you-do-not-owe-the-world-anything.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/8chan/you-do-not-owe-the-world-anything.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,3 @@
 >>66403267
 >People can't even read a book.
 I read difficult literature every single day and actually participate in trying to learn from what I'm reading and to understand the author. However that hasn't changed my opinion that living up to your best potential isn't something you owe to society or the world. If you have only one life to live it's not the wrong choice to make bad decisions. The free will to make bad decisions is the first sin of man and also the defining trait of what makes us human. If I want to spend my time reading, watching anime, and playng videogames instead of using my best cognitive ability to better myself and the world I have every right to do it. If people don't like it they can exile me, or kill me I guess. I'm not giving the world a single ounce of genuine creative energy.
--- a/docs/quotes/8chan/you-have-to-federate.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/8chan/you-have-to-federate.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
 >>993534
 You have to federate. These huge corporations are your enemy. They have autocratic power without recourse from you. Honestly, the chans are in the same boat. Too much centralization poisoned all the waters and we gave up too much control. Flee and scatter to the wind and found your own communities like the INternet of old. That is the only salvation.
--- a/docs/quotes/8chan/your-brain-on-4chan.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/8chan/your-brain-on-4chan.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
 Not only are most of the people on here deranged- it's like an addiction.

 This is your life on 4chan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAHoxaphbEs

 Because of all the stimuli it ruins other forms of entertainment. You can't read books, practice an instrument, program, write a novel or anything else because it doesn't have the same stimuli. And another problem is all the fucked up shit that comes with that stimuli. You may think you're immune because it hasn't changed you yet, but it changes you gradually without you realizing it.

 For example, there's all the trap and sissy shit, everyone invalidates each other and puts each other down or they outright attack your self-esteem. In threads like this everyone talks about how much of a failure they are, and overtime you'll start to apply that shit to your life, accept and stop putting up any resistance.

 All the time that you spend on here is time you could have ut into programming, making music, reading, writing, studying Chess or whatever else you idealize. You could become an expert in any of those things and you would be so proud of yourself for getting so good. You wouldn't feel like a failure, but if all you've done is endless browsing threads instead then you would have nothing to show for it.

 If you have hobbies you can also make friends or find a gf through finding other people who do the same. This site is bad for you.
--- a/docs/quotes/discord/being-broken-is-being-human.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/discord/being-broken-is-being-human.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,2 @@
 cereal diddler 09/15/2018
 [@Nikku4211: Anime Hunter] being broken is being human, and humanity is worth it
--- a/docs/quotes/discord/systemspace-discord.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/discord/systemspace-discord.txt
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
 Something that this has taught me that I want to share with you all before I go: If you don't take charge of your own desiny, you risk letting yourself be steered and used by others more driven than you. Even if you have no goal, take the helm, and steer for yourself. Whether that's good, bad, or otherwise, at least you can say it was you who got you there.
--- a/docs/quotes/misc/anarcho-nomadism.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/misc/anarcho-nomadism.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,59 @@
 I ran into two interesting articles today, that both seem to be missing the same point. There's this article from iron_dwarf on the Ran Prieur subreddit and this article from MakeTotalDestr0i.

 To summarize, one of these articles is David Graeber's critique of the grand myth of civilization, in which we assume that we lived in egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers, until eventually we invented agriculture and everything went to shit. Graeber rightly points out that there were egalitarian cities without monarchs for hundreds of years, that tribes of hunter-gatherers can have oppression too and that it seems to have been more difficult for us to maintain freedom and equality within families, than within societies as a whole. Even those North American cultures that had egalitarian gatherings during some seasons had families ruled by patriarchs and tyrants for the rest of the year.

 Amir Taaki, like David Graeber somewhere at the top of my list of people I admire, is an anarchist of Persian origins who saw revolutionary potential in Bitcoin and went to Syria to fight for the Kurds against the genocidal Islamists of ISIS. He's back now and hopes to transform Bitcoin into something other than a multilevel marketing scheme of frat-boys staring at charts hoping to buy lamborghini's.

 So, Taaki thinks he can bring Bitcoin back to its quirky revolutionary roots, Graeber thinks the archeological evidence demonstrates we can create the kind of society we want for ourselves, rather than being forever stuck with inequality as some sort of permanent bug in our social operating system that has to be chronically treated by a class of technocrats studying GINI coefficients and other metrics.

 In both cases, it seems to me that the more important point goes unmentioned. Yes, there are certainly exceptions, but hunter-gatherer tribes were taken as a whole more egalitarian than most neolithic societies. We have genetic evidence demonstrating a rapid decline in genetic diversity in our species during the Neolithic revolution, simply because a small minority of men take control over society.

 At the same time, Bitcoin did in fact transform into a cult of greed, far removed from its founding principles. You have to be really dense to assume that a system that utilizes 400,000 times more electricity per transaction than VISA has any sort of future as a payment option. The coders and fanboys cling onto this system, because it gave them some sort of meaningful social role and earned them some money.

 Corruption, inequality, greed, these are ailments that slip into systems. The question Graeber and Taaki are asking is: How do we reform these systems back into something that functions again? The question you need to be asking yourself is: How do we avoid becoming dependent upon systems that will inevitably become corrupt?

 As an example, consider the state of modern jobs. Inequality has surged in our society, but it has had a different impact on the nature of labor, depending upon the kind of skills and background you have. If you're working a low-skilled blue collar job, you can expect to be treated as a slave nowadays. You'll have schedules that dictate where you need to be standing and how many times you're allowed to use the bathroom. The reason this happens, is because employers know you have no choice. They have no need to treat you like a human being, because you can't quit your job as you're lucky to have a job in the first place.

 Now imagine having a social role that's in high demand. You're now flexible. If your boss treats you like a slave, you'll quit and move to another employer. Your boss knows this and as a result chooses to treat you with dignity, because he has no other option. Your freedom ultimately depends, on your ability to have a choice and to say no. The pain imposed upon you will gradually increase as long as it benefits your employer, until the employer fears the pain imposed upon you might exceed that of the alternatives you have.

 I first figured this simple principle out when I was around 12 year old, forced to attend some terrible school for rich kids. I had two kids I hung out with during the breaks, one of whom was the typical kid who programs websites as a hobby. I once mentioned in passing that I had made a website once myself with a friend. He insisted I had to show it to him, but I told him I didn't really want to, as it was very personal and not very good looking. He told me eventually that if I didn't want to spend my breaks by myself, I had to show it to him.

 Of course this kid is 12 years old, so although he has the right mentality to grow into a petty office tyrant who makes a schedule for your bathroom breaks, he doesn't have the cognitive ability yet to be subtle about it. Note however, that his desire to impose his will on me is based on the fundamental assumption that I don't have a choice. Like a Silicon Valley employer who thinks he's the only alternative you have to living in a tent city, this kid thinks he is the only alternative I had to social ostracism. This wasn't true, I quite readily found other kids to hang out with.

 This principle exists everywhere however. Consider spousal abuse. The reason women were abused by husbands for generations, and modern boys are now regularly emotionally abused by their girlfriends, is because one partner has power over the other partner. The reason this power exists, is because the person has no genuine alternative, or at least believes themselves to have no genuine alternative.

 A big solution to this problem, would be non-monogamy. People who have multiple partners have little incentive to put up with a partner who behaves in an emotionally abusive manner. As non-monogamy becomes more widespread, relationships in general will become less abusive. When we return to work, the same principle can apply. A person who works for multiple bosses, will have greater freedom to terminate his arrangement with a boss who behaves in an abusive manner.

 Similarly, we need to have the freedom to move to different locations. A government that doesn't have to fear its citizens leaving, is a government that's free to behave in a tyrannical manner. The rich already have this freedom to move to foreign places, which is why corporations and wealthy individuals now find that governments around the world now dramatically reduce their taxes. However, poor people need to have this freedom too.

 There are multiple ways to go about this. The European Union allows you to move from one nation to another. However, because the Union itself has a government that makes increasingly more decisions, it means you're practically still stuck with the same government. Instead of unification, we need devolution. Consider the example of Spain. It would be ideal to have not just Spain as a country, but to have an independent Basque country, as well as an independent Catalonia, Galacia and Andalusia, with citizens free to migrate between these nations. This is how Europe effectively functioned in the 19th century, as citizens were typically free to move to another country and America as a whole functioned as an alternative to the tyranny we endured in our own nations.

 The current situation however, is a mere start. Ideally, we wouldn't have a single government operate within a particular geographical location, but to have multiple governments we can choose from. This sounds far-fetched to us, but this is exactly how Europe functioned before the emergence of the sovereign nation states of the post-Westphalian era. Living in a particular territory of the Holy Roman empire could mean being subject to a local count, as well as to a prince, a bishop, the Holy Roman Emperor, and even the Pope himself had a say in a nation's domestic affairs. There was no clear ultimate ruler of a particular geographic location. Today, the emergence of supranational organizations like the IMF, the European Union, the World Trade Organization and a wide variety of NGO's has similarly led to a situation where nobody is genuinely in control anymore.

 Finally, ideally we wouldn't just have the option to choose between employers, but to choose freedom from work. Far fetched? This situation has existed throughout history. Today we call it retirement and apply it to old people. In the past it was called the "rentiers class" and simply meant being rich. The black death decimated the population of Europe, leading to an era of unprecedented liberty, as wages grew dramatically. Peasants spent large parts of the year idle and could simply choose to refuse to work.

 What matters more than the conditions you live under, is whether you choose the conditions you live under. With choice comes freedom. For this reason, for much of human history, we didn't see the city as a source of oppression, but as a source of freedom. The countryside was a place for oppression, in the city you had a choice. You could apply to join a guild, you could beg, you could play music, you could steal, you could work as a prostitute or you could jump aboard a ship. In the countryside, you're just stuck toiling the fields.

 For the same reason, cryptocurrency is ultimately a source of liberation. Before the current era, you had government controlled currencies and that was all you had to work with. Today we have Bitcoin, but more importantly, we have the means to design our own currency with which we choose to perform economic transactions. Rather than working on "improving Bitcoin", we need to realize the simple fact that we have a choice to seek out alternative systems. There's nothing out there that requires us to participate in Bitcoin.

 The problem that leads to hierarchy, is that humans have a habit of slipping into stasis. From stasis comes dependency, from dependency comes power, from power comes hierarchy, which then leads to the loss of freedom. Bitcoin leads to a hierarchy, because the people who run the subreddit, the forum, the exchanges, the miners and the Github repository control the system, your "full node" doesn't decide jack shit. True freedom requires never being dependent upon any single phenomenon in your environment.

 To achieve such freedom, the solution has always been to forever be on the move. To stay stuck in a particular situation, means to develop dependence on the factors that surround you. The means to nomadism have always differed, but those who desire freedom and autonomy have historically tended to seek out nomadism. In the past it meant wandering around with herds of cattle, trading goods between cities. Today nomadism can mean many things. Some achieve it by playing music, others become digital nomads, whose source of income is entirely derived from the work they perform on their laptop.

 This is what the archeological and anthropological evidence demonstrates. There are hierarchical societies that don't practice agriculture. However, what tends to be going on in those cases is that people depend for nutrition on a particular location that delivers large amounts of food. As an example, a tribe might live in a desert near a river that's full of fish, or a tribe might live on an island. This leads to the emergence of hierarchies, because there is property over which ownership can be enforced and people have no real option to leave. Egalitarian bands of hunter-gatherers exist, because anyone who wants to make a bathroom-break schedule for the whole tribe or expects you to fill in a TPS report for every mongongo nut you bring back to the campfire wakes up in the morning and finds that half the tribe has left.

 Finally, the most important thing to understand is that freedom in our society is ultimately a mental choice. If you're working as a minimum wage slave for Amazon, you're stuck in that position because of the mental space you're stuck in. You come to believe you have no choice, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It seems to me that such mental inflexibility itself is a problem many people suffer from, it's a problem that tends slips in as we age. The personality trait openness declines as we age. When you take psychedelics however, your openness can be increased to levels of a young person again.

 Most people are mentally bound to conditions they shouldn't live in. As an example, consider my own case. With the salary I earn, I could be considered rather poor if I had to live in Amsterdam. However, I live in a small town in a house that's going to be demolished, so I manage to save roughly a third of my salary every month. Similarly, there are people who earn huge wages, but live in San Francisco. The problem in those cases is that people are geographically bound to conditions that lead to poverty. The New York Times recently had an article, insisting that even wealthy people are actually poor, because if you consider the lifestyle they lead their salaries are inadequate too.

 However, there's nobody out there forcing them to attend diners with their colleagues after work or to send their kids to private school. This is a case of mental poverty, a poverty of imagination. There are people in their thirties who had such jobs back in their twenties, retired and never work a day in their life again. The worst form of mental bonding however, is found in the form of religions, ideologies and traditions. Even if you have all the choices in the world available to you, you won't make use of them if you believe there's a guy who showed up thousands of years ago and appointed a bunch of guys in fancy dresses who can judge on his behalf how you should live.

 I'm an anarchist, but I'm more of an individualist anarchist than most, in the sense that I think freedom is a choice you have to create for yourself, it's generally not going to come about by a revolution. I believe in propaganda of the deed, but I think the best propaganda is generally not to go out and kill someone, but by living the kind of life you wish to live. Consider the case of the trainhoppers who were immortalized in Mike Brodie's photo series. This is what effective propaganda looks like.

 I struggle to think of people who are more free. They are free in ways we don't even think about. Consider the fact that you spend every morning dousing every part of your body in water, using soap to remove grease from your hair, then using a brush to cleanse your teeth, before applying a variety of perfumes to your body. This is a social obligation I would happily go without. I feel less oppressed by Peter Thiel and Bill Gates than I do by minimum-wage earners who frown when I'm not wearing clean clothing.

 Freedom is found by being perpetually on the move. We should aim to be like the wild grazers, who are perpetually journeying. Any place we graze too long is a place that will lead to our deaths. As human beings, we inhabit multiple spaces, mental as well as geographical. The overpopulated tech-boom cities should be fled from as readily as we should flee from toxic relationships, toxic cultures and toxic mentalities. If you think there is some kind of system, some ideology, some kind of government, or some group of people who can liberate you, you are mistaken. The liberators of today are the tyrants of tomorrow. Freedom is always going to have to be something you'll have to seek out for yourself. Keep moving.

 ***

 https://www.reddit.com/r/accountt1234/comments/82osw1/anarchonomadism_the_perpetual_flight_from/
--- a/docs/quotes/misc/antisocial-media-manifesto.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/misc/antisocial-media-manifesto.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
 Antisocial Media Manifesto

 Version 1

 1. Large social media systems have too much power over what content we view and how we interact with others over the Internet.

 2. They have this power because we users have freely given it to them in exchange for convenience.

 3. By granting so much power to others, we risk losing our freedom of expression and freedom of choice.

 4. We can reclaim our freedom by exercising it.

 5. The process is never-ending. There is no permanent safe haven for us in this world.


 2018/3/14 papa

 ***

 gopher://grex.org:70/0/~papa/pgphlog/2018/alm-Antisocial_Media_Manifesto
--- a/docs/quotes/misc/even-if-otherkin-is-not-a-delusion.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/misc/even-if-otherkin-is-not-a-delusion.txt
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
 Even if being otherkin isn't a "delusion", there are reasons not to focus on it. You may have been a fairy or dragon in a past life; but for whatever reason, your soul chose to be human now. There are some lessons that are best learned by being human and you cannot truly be human if you're constantly trying to recapture the magick of your past incarnations. You'll stagnate and be stuck in a form your soul is not entirely comfortable with... over and over and over again, until you learn to be human.
--- a/docs/quotes/misc/mental-patient.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/misc/mental-patient.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,42 @@
 To Be a Mental Patient
 by Rae Unzicker (1948-2001)

 To be a mental patient is to be stigmatized, ostracized, socialized, patronized, psychiatrized.

 To be a mental patient is to have everyone controlling your life but you. You're watched by your shrink, your social worker, your friends, your family.  And then you're diagnosed as paranoid.

 To be a mental patient is to live with the constant threat and possibility of being locked up at any time, for almost any reason.

 To be a mental patient is to live on $82 a month in food stamps, which won't let you buy Kleenex to dry your tears.  And to watch your shrink come back to his office from lunch, driving a Mercedes Benz.

 To be a mental patient is to take drugs that dull your mind, deaden your senses, make you jitter and drool and then you take more drugs to lessen the "side effects."

 To be a mental patient is to apply for jobs and lie about the last few months or years, because you've been in the hospital, and then you don't get the job anyway because you're a mental patient.  To be a mental patient is not to matter.

 To be a mental patient is never to be taken seriously.

 To be a mental patient is to be a resident of a ghetto, surrounded by other mental patients who are as scared and hungry and bored and broke as you are.

 To be a mental patient is to watch TV and see how violent and dangerous and dumb and incompetent and crazy you are.

 To be a mental patient is to be a statistic.

 To be a mental patient is to wear a label, and that label never goes away, a label that says little about what you are and even less about who you are.

 To be a mental patient is to never to say what you mean, but to sound like you mean what you say.

 To be a mental patient is to tell your psychiatrist he's helping you, even if he is not.

 To be a mental patient is to act glad when you're sad and calm when you're mad, and to always be "appropriate."

 To be a mental patient is to participate in stupid groups that call themselves therapy.  Music isn't music, its therapy; volleyball isn't sport, it's therapy; sewing is therapy; washing dishes is therapy.  Even the air you breathe is therapy and that's called "the milieu."

 To be a mental patient is not to die, even if you want to -- and not cry, and not hurt, and not be scared, and not be angry, and not be vulnerable, and not to laugh too loud -- because, if you do, you only prove that you are a mental patient even if you are not.

 And so you become a no-thing, in a no-world, and you are not.

 Rae Unzicker © 1984

 ***

 http://antipsychiatry.org/unzicker.htm
--- a/docs/quotes/misc/the-small-internet.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/misc/the-small-internet.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,111 @@

 ====================
 The Small Internet
 ====================


 If you want to say something to 1,000 people,
 Twitter is right over there,
 next to Facebook and Instagram.

 Good luck.

 Have fun.

 If you want to talk to _me_, though,
 then sit next to me.
 I want to hear what you have to say.

 You'll have to do some listening too, of course,
 but that's all part of the fun.

 On the Large Internet,
 communication is ubiquitous,
 but conversation is a radical act.

 On the Large Internet,
 communication is cheaper than water, than air.
 "Too cheap to meter."

 But _conversation_,
 full, deep conversation,
 with kindness, consideration, mutual respect:
 where exactly is that
 on the Large Internet?

 Maybe I just haven't found the right Reddit forum yet.

 In practical terms,
 when it comes to winning the lottery,
 there's no significant difference
 between buying a lottery ticket
 and not buying one.

 What are the odds
 you will have a real conversation
 or make a real connection
 on the Large Internet?

 You can comb through the Large Internet
 and take that chance if you like,
 but if it was me,
 I'd just as soon
 buy that lottery ticket.

 If you want deep connection,
 true community,
 the Large Internet will disappoint you
 over and over again.

 I think we can do better.

 Right here, right now,
 with me writing these words
 and you reading them,
 you and I are creating
 the Small Internet.

 The Small Internet happens
 when a few people
 use simple protocols
 to talk with each other
 and nobody else.

 Nothing special.

 No tricks.

 Just you and me,
 reading, writing,
 having a conversation.

 What the Small Internet offers
 easily, naturally, simply,
 the Large Internet can't provide at all,
 any more than a bulldozer can feed a baby.

 Here's the problem, though:
 the Large Internet, someone made it for us.
 The Small Internet, we have to create ourselves.

 There aren't any spectators
 on the Small Internet,
 only participants.

 Me, I think that's a good thing.

 It means you and I have work to do,
 and our work matters to our colleagues,
 our neighbors, our companions,
 our friends.

 So let's get started
 while we are still young and eager.

 That's what I think.

 How about you?

 ***

 gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-16__The_Small_Internet.txt
--- a/docs/quotes/misc/tomb.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/misc/tomb.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,242 @@
 abeautifulresistance.org
 The Tomb of the Atheist — GODS & RADICALS PRESS
 Rhyd Wildermuth
 25-32 minutes

 I’m standing, dazed, along the shores of Lake Michigan, staring into my distant reflection in the parabolic, ethereal polished glass of the Cloud Gate. The air’s chill, icy—a thin layer of rime had begun to form that morning along the edges of the sand.

 I’d stopped in Chicago to visit a man I love deeply, a man to whom a god had introduced me. I’d just spent several weeks traveling in Ireland and Wales, speaking to gods and meeting the dead of Ireland, and this was the last stop of my pilgrimage before returning to Seattle.

 The reflections in the Cloud Gate are fascinating, both distorted and yet hyper-realistic. It takes you awhile to pick yourself out of the throngs of others in the public square in which it sits, but once you do, it’s hard to lose yourself again. It seems as if you’re what the sky sees of you, rather than others. A strange perspective, but one you can get used to.

 The man, for whom I’m waiting before the Cloud Gate, appears with his partner. We don’t know each other very well, have never met before, but it seemed we ought to meet. And I’m never in Chicago.

 He smiles and introduces himself. And then, he places a gift in my hand.

 “The only thing I could think of to give another Druid was an Acorn,” he said.

 I held it, smiling. Here, in a sea of concrete, in the deepness of winter, my future quite unclear to me, I stare at the promise of an oak in my hand. It warmed me against the chill, grounded me into the world below the concrete.

 I stood there, considering the acorn in my hand, the reflection of myself in that strange glass, and began to realize who had just died in a tomb in Ireland a week before.

 On a grey and beautiful September morning I had woken, smiling, and kissed my lover before stumbling out of bed and making tea. He’d been visiting me all month, a long visit to determine whether we’d work out living with each other, as he lived several thousand miles away.

 I made my morning tea and checked email as I sipped it, waiting for the morning to come to consciousness. And then I spilled my tea.

    “You won’t believe this. I don’t myself, either. Check your email—I’ve forwarded it to you.”

 My hand trembled, but not from excitement. Dread, perhaps. I knew what the email would say before I opened it. The friend who’d sent it would only have one reason to forward a message to me.

 I opened it, scanned its words to confirm my terror, and then rolled several cigarettes, smoking each in turn until enough nicotine coursed through my brain to put me into that half-trance some smokers know quite well.

 “Really?” I asked aloud, but no one answered, only a breathing, autumnal silence.

 I waited to wake the beautiful man in my bed. The fur of his chest matted, his face peaceful, contentment radiating from his dreaming form. I wanted to watch him that way, perhaps keep him that way forever in my mind, stilled in the moment before I told him of my great fortune, fortune which we both probably knew, without saying, would make impossible many of our plans.

 Even now, I see him sleeping there, before I nuzzled him awake, before I spoke the words which would change not just him and I, but everything else I knew.
 Sunlight on Newgrange

 “I’m going to Newgrange.”

 The hiring manager looked at me. “What’s that?”

 “Uh. An ancient burial mound. Aligned with the sun, sorta. Um, solstice. It’s in Ireland.”

 “Oh,” he said. “That sounds cool. When—Oh. You can’t start yet, then, huh?”

 “Not unless you’d let me take a few weeks unpaid leave at the beginning of hire?”

 “Uh—I think HR would say now. Maybe you can start when you return…”

 That’d be nice, I thought. Though I’d been hoping to start sooner, returning to the full-time social work position I’d held before my…uh, last pilgrimage, the one that’d sent me away from Seattle for almost a year. I was back in Seattle, working per diem, happy to finally be sitting still, with a permanent address. Also, my lover planned to move in with me, and my writing was going well—I might finally get to do the sort of grown-up life that I’d had before gods started talking to me.

 Returning to full-time social work would cut into my writing. To write well, and often, one requires unoccupied time, and lots of it. It’s never just sitting in front of a computer and touching fingers against keys. It’s about the walks to a forest in the middle of the night, the hours spent staring listlessly out of windows or watching incense smoke curl from the glowing ember-tip. Sometimes it means getting drunk when you shouldn’t or don’t even want to. Lots of listening, thinking, with relentless false starts and stops. It’s an awful lot of work, actually

 But writing doesn’t pay rent, or buy food, so you have to also work elsewhere. This is the plight of any artist, finding work that doesn’t detract too much from art. Few ever find work which helps one’s art, though such does exist—photographers who work in camera shops, potters and painters who take jobs as art teachers for access to kilns and cheap canvases.

 Social work doesn’t help writing, but it doesn’t hurt it too much, either. On the worst days, it’ll make you distrust humanity completely, but on the better days, one at least goes home with a vague sense of having done something less horrible than what one could have.

 Full-time job, a lover to become a partner—this is what I’d been hoping for, working towards, ready to embrace. Enough money to survive in the brutal inflationary city of Seattle and perhaps a little to save. Maybe I’d join a gym, get my teeth fixed, purchase a third pair of pants and a second pair of shoes. Even, I’d hoped, I might start my medieval rock band again, the one I broke up when the gods came and…

 Uh, yeah. I’d been here before. Even the lover bit.

 The Druid who handed me the acorn before the Cloud Gate asked me a question I didn’t quite answer fully. He’d asked about the gods, stating he hadn’t done much with them and wasn’t sure he would. They seem to demand a lot, he’d suggested, but it was also a question.

 My answer sounded pretty, anyway. “If land spirits, the dead, and ancestors are all like notes in a symphony, a god is the melody.”

 Pretty, but untrue.

 A god’s like all the music written upon the pages of your existence, all the songs you hear wherever you go, each melody and each refrain. You are their instruments and they are the reason you’re sitting in a chair before a conductor in front of thousands of silent strangers straining to hear your notes.

 Gods re-order the world around you, shut fast doors and destroy keys as if to say, “you won’t need these anymore. We’ve other places for you to go.”  And then they hand you new keys and show you new doors to take you to different places that you’d never even considered visiting.
 grange-one.jpg


 One of those places for me, apparently, was Newgrange.

 The email from a friend that morning in late September was a forwarded message from the Brú na Bóinne visitor center, announcing I’d been selected by local schoolchildren for a chance to observe the Winter Solstice light from within the tomb. Access to Newgrange is relatively open the rest of the year—anyone can go and be part of the guided tours into the 5000-year old tomb. Lights are turned off during the guided tour, and artificial lights are shone into the chamber to mimic the effect which occurs the five mornings adjacent to and including the Winter Solstice.

 The phenomena was rediscovered in 1967 by the archaeologists who’d taken it upon themselves to restore the ancient burial site. Knowledge of the alignment of the entrance to the Winter Solstice sun persisted much longer, encoded in folk tales. Archeologists and anthropologists too often end up ignoring the oral accounts of the peoples they study. But time and again, letting the stories of peoples inform academia rather than the other way around restores truth to the world.

 It’s said that the smallpox vaccine, for instance, was developed after a researcher heard and than observed the folk custom of rubbing the pus of cox-pox wounds into the skin of children. The researcher gets credit for the “discovery,” as this is how The Science works.

 The Science can tell us lots about how things work or how they were done, but it begins to look quite ridiculous when it starts to try to tell us “why.” Why did the inhabitants of Ireland, some five millennia ago, build a massive (and enduring) tomb in the valley of the Boyne river and align it to the rising sun one day a year? Why Stonehenge? Why the pyramids, or ziggurats, or colossal statues along the Nile or on Easter Isle?

 Theories abound, and The Science is faddish. The Science hasn’t quite stopped doing lobotomies yet, but that exciting trend is happily almost over, replaced with chemicals to “right” what’s wrong with the brain when people start talking to gods or the dead. What comes next is as unpredictable as next decade’s hair fashions, and as permanent.

 Another thing The Science cannot quite explain were the emails that my friend Joseph sent me from Dublin. “I saw you in Dublin today, at least five times.”

 I’d read that email 8 months before the solstice. It was a curious thing. I wasn’t in Dublin, nor had I been before. It’s never been unusual for people to think they saw me, and even less unusual for others to recount vivid dreams involving me. My best friend dreamt of “Druid Rhyd” years before I decided to study Druidry; another friend told me where to find a god because he recalled me telling him later where I found him. I’m accustomed to such things and think little of them. One can only shrug when someone tells you that they taught you to shapechange in their dreams and remind them that you haven’t quite gotten the hang of it yourself yet.

 The week after Joseph thought he saw me, he put my name in to the drawing for Sostice in Newgrange. He didn’t put his own name in, though he could have. He never quite explained to me why this was, nor why he did it in the first place.
 Poster informing winners of the lottery for solstice how slim their chances had been.

 Poster informing winners of the lottery for solstice how slim their chances had been.

 It was to him they’d sent the selection email. 30 thousand others had put their names in hopes of attending, and only 50 are selected each year. Each selectee is allowed to bring a guest, and the 100 total attendees are divided up into three groups to be inside the tomb either December 20th, the 21st, or 22nd. I was invited to the first of the three days.

 So I was selected to go. I hadn’t put my name in. I’d never planned to go to Ireland, despite how many others had suggested I ought to, despite the voice of an Irishman met on a previous pilgrimage, showing me his spiral tattoos and insisting that I “must go” to Newgrange one day. The selection was exciting, and also eerie.

 One can’t go attributing every bit of strange fortune to the gods, of course.

 One also can’t go not attributing bizarre bits of fortune to the gods, either, at least if you’ve gone about worshiping them and telling them you’ll do what they’d like.

 Going to Ireland would mean not taking the full-time job I’d been offered. I wouldn’t be able to get the approval for unpaid time off during the holidays, and they couldn’t start me early enough to have sufficient paid-time for the trip. I’d also intended to help my lover with expenses for the move to Seattle. We’d planned on the first of December, but this would mean he’d be in a new city on his own during the week of Christmas while I traipsed about ancient holy sites without him. And I would already have to do a fundraiser to pay for the trip, as last-minute tickets to Ireland during the holidays aren’t something my income could ever hope to cover.

 I’d asked a diviner about a different matter, a question I’d not been able to answer on my own. She hadn’t known about the Newgrange trip, but had mentioned Lugh had my attention for some reason.

 “Huh,” I’d said. “So I just got selected to go to Newgrange in Ireland. I can’t afford to go, but maybe…”

 “Oh, you’re going,” she said, and her laughter almost scared me. “That much is very, very certain.”

 The next day I started a fundraiser, an Indigogo “campaign” and asked for 500 dollars. I raised that in the first 4 days, and received another 500 the next week.

 So I was going.

 The night before I left, my lover told me he was not ready to move. The specifics were unimportant—underlying the reason was an unspoken statement, the unacknowledged hesitancy which makes easily-surmountable obstacles suddenly impossible to overcome. Suddenly, going to Newgrange seemed the most unreasonable thing I could possibly have chosen to do, and it wasn’t even my idea in the first place.
 Llyn Dinas, the lake where Ceridwen is said to have sought the wisdom of Awen and where two dragons were said to be buried in perpetual war.

 Llyn Dinas, the lake where Ceridwen is said to have sought the wisdom of Awen and where two dragons were said to be buried in perpetual war.

 I woke at 5am the morning of my flight, hefted a rucksack full of books and clothes, stones, an altar box, gifts for people along the way. I was ‘told’ I didn’t need to pack certain things, like my alder wand. “One will be provided for you,” I’d heard. I played with the words, waited to see if they changed. They repeated, the same tone and certainty as before. So I left it on my altar, perplexed.

 “But bring the bee.”

 I stared at the yellow and white patch in my hands. I’d meant to sew it on my coat months before, soon after it was given to me. I was never certain why I’d waited, put it off. I’ve many intentions like this, intentions I rarely find the time to manifest. But perhaps I’d find a needle and thread along the way? So I placed it, without much thought, in my wooden altar box before packing it into my giant rucksack.

 I stayed a few days in Florida with family before leaving to Dublin. I’d visited them last year at the end of a pilgrimage; it seemed poetic to visit them again just before the next. My sisters and I laughed and talked and ate, catching each other up on our lives and hopes. They’d been as perplexed and amazed as I was regarding the Newgrange selection. “It seems really weird, right?” I’d asked. “The probability of getting chosen without even putting in your name…”

 They understood, agreed. Though I’d met no one who had shrugged off the serendipity of the trip, and even my more cynical friends had suggested it seemed “something wants you there,” without reference to other people’s conceptions of causation, the mystic becomes forced to ely on self-generated checks against magical thinking.

 These artificial “devil’s advocates” can be ridiculous, a caricature of the angry and cynical voices of others. Mine has the arrogant certainty of Richard Dawkins, the drunken wit of Christopher Hitchens, and the pop-appeal of Neil DeGrasse Tyson, a curmudgeon with a grudge always eager to tell me, “that’s not a god—you need psych meds. And oh, you’re poor because you’re lazy.”

 But even that compound, inner atheist naysayer was having trouble convincing me this wasn’t all about what I’d suspected it was, and the perspective of my sisters demolished all my inner cynic’s attempts. They knew what we came from, the abject poverty and misery, all the leaden weight of fate crushing every dream. When you’ve seen all the horrible things which can happen to a human, every nice thing already seems a miracle. Perhaps it’s why the poor, the homeless, the downtrodden and miserable are more likely to believe in gods and spirits than the middle-class lawyer or IT worker. Voltaire’s atheism was as elitist as Sam Harris’s, and both have enjoyed steady diets.

 Still. I liked that atheist in my head. Unlike Harris and Dawkins, he didn’t justify the torture of Muslims and suggest we should eradicate Islam off the face of the planet. He mostly just told me I’m insane and should be more reasonable and stop believing in crazy stuff and go shopping for nicer clothes.
 Light on the Boyne River, Drogheda, Ireland

 Light on the Boyne River, Drogheda, Ireland


 The first thing I noticed about Dublin was the dead.

 I didn’t always hear the dead and wasn’t always aware of their presence. I have the city of Eugene, Oregon, the grave of Demetria and Dionisia Palazios, and a Guédé that I met under an Elm tree to thank for that, as well as a drunken priest, who helped me stay on this side of the living after I met them.

 The streets of Dublin breathe the dead. Signs point the way to famous graves of revolutionaries and poets, but there’s no clear marking for the Croppy Acre along the River Liffey. You hear them before you find out why, what the large field before you precisely is: a mass grave of Revolutionaries, Republican fighters, their bodies dumped together in pits by the British. When we think “mass grave,” we like to kid ourselves that such things happen in “other lands,” though everyone in America is virtually living upon one.

 The connection between starved and slaughtered native and starved and slaughtered Irish-folk isn’t hard to make; if anything, it’s awfully hard to ignore. The dead scream, too, in the signs and graffiti smeared across the city proclaiming more revolution, more resistance, this time directed against the very system which drives colonial occupations for the last 300 years.

 Dublin isn’t far from Brú na Bóinne, a 45 minute bus ride away. I’d traveled already several thousand miles to get to Ireland, had just taken a several day detour to view Caer Arianrhod and speak to giants near the ancient Welsh town of Beddgelert, so the bus-ride from Dublin to the village of Donore wasn’t long at all.

 Still. That dread that I had felt when I first learned of my selection returned, this time accompanied by a spiraling, physical terror upon stepping foot off the bus.

 My inner Atheist had little to say about the matter. “Maybe you need a nap, that’s all. There’s no god here.”  He was always saying stuff like that.

 I slept with my clothes on, clutching an Alder wand that washed up on shore by Caer Arianrhod in Wales.

 “You know Brân attacked the Irish, right?” This was a priest talking, one I’d hoped might explain to me why the earth seemed to want to shake me off into the sky around Brú na Bóinne.

 “Yeah,” I assented. “But it was their fault.”

 “Still–” he replied, rather patiently. “Newgrange is the home of The Dagda, and, well…”

 Another priest I asked confirmed my dread. “You have to buy passage. Dirt money, beer, spit.  Pay the same on the way out. Someone will help you–you know who, I don’t.”

 And I checked a third oracle, just because my inner Atheist was having fits. “His mother’s body lies rotting in the summer ground.”

 Neil Dawkins Harris was gritting his teeth. It was actually interesting to hear from him again, though, as he’d seemed to have gotten lost on the ferry ride to Wales and wasn’t with me when I climbed 100 feet up a cliff face to ask some giants for help rebuilding the Cult of the Blessed Raven. He wasn’t there when Bran showed up to me in a dream and told me he’d be waiting after this was all over. He’d been silent when a Druid pulled my beard and wouldn’t let go until I pulled his back.

 I had three confirmations from others. Three other people didn’t think I was crazy. Druids like threes.

 I bought a beer, put a coin in my mouth, swished the beer around and then spit it all out on the ground, asking the Dagda for passage, and reminded him that the god who’s mother lied rotting in the summer fields had called me there in the first place. My inner atheist was awfully pissed at me, more than The Dagda had been.

 Reason told me that I’d done an awfully silly thing, maybe even a crazy thing. One doesn’t just risk a relationship and one’s livelihood to go on a pilgrimage to try to resurrect a god’s cult.

 Joseph and I talked a lot about this sort of thing while he hosted me in Dublin. He was as shocked as I about the selection, and I relied heavily on his narrative to help place my own. He moved to Dublin the year before to work in IT. He doesn’t like IT, didn’t know anyone in Dublin before taking the job. Didn’t quite even know why he put my name instead of his for the drawing.

 His best friend had died recently, and it’s a strange thing that I’m aware of dead spirits clinging closely to the living. His beloved friend wasn’t far, and I accepted quietly how much she was present to him when I was near. She and I even shared a birthday, and were both social workers.

 Because I could take a guest into Newgrange with me, I took him. It seemed the gods wanted him there as much they wanted me there.

 We walked that morning mostly in silence to the Brú na Bóinne visitor center, joining 20 other groggy but excited people awaiting something very few humans ever get the chance to try to see. And it was a chance, of course: there’s never a guarantee the sun will shine into the tomb on solstice morning, on account of clouds. There’d recently been a 6-year stretch where none of the visitors saw what we got to see that morning.

 We ate cookies and drank tea and waited for the bus that would drive us to Newgrange. Others had gone on ahead, a crowd of people waiting who hadn’t won the drawing but still hoped for a chance to watch the sun rise from outside.

 The awkward anticipation of the others in our group was as exhilarating as my own excitement.  Listening to strangers speak of what may come, how they’d been chosen, how they’d never dreamt of such a chance filled me with such warmth that I almost didn’t care if the sun would rise that morning. Gods written on the faces and the lips of others are as present as those whispering in dreams, and more tangible.

 When we arrived at the site of Newgrange, Joseph and I walked silently up the hill, both turning at once to stare at the hundreds of corvids which had taken to a barren tree just at the base of the mound. I’d told him of Brân and what I’d been doing in Wales. He smiled, wordlessly, and I was glad of a witness even as my inner atheist stamped his feet angrily, reminding me I’d have a lot more money if I stopped buying peanuts to feed crows in Seattle.

 Just outside the tomb was a man who drew my attention immediately. I noticed my hand rubbing the fabric of the bee patch in my pocket, the one that I ran back into our hotel room to grab because I heard a voice say I’d need it.

 And then we entered.

 It’s dark inside a tomb.

 We were led in by a guide who kindly walked us through what we might see, her voice assuring us in the darkness once the lights had been extinguished. We were allowed no photography, since it would distract from the experience of others, but she encouraged us to speak to each other, adding that she’d kindly guide anyone out who experienced any sudden terror in the claustrophic blackness in which we huddled.

 She spoke of the history of Newgrange; what The Science knows and particularly what The Science doesn’t know. She spoke fondly of the archeologist: the one who had confirmed that the folk stories about the chamber becoming illuminated in the Solstice sunrise, and then she reminded us that it was not certain we’d see it.

 “There was no light yesterday. We keep solstice vigil for 6 days each year, and I’ve only seen it a handful of times since I started working here.”

 And then her voice caught in her throat.  “Ah,” she said, all awe. “Here we are.”
 Light within Newgrange.


 Just at sunrise, the angle of the sun shines into a small window-box above the entrance to the tomb. From inside, one cannot quite see this window due to the angles of the construction, nor can one see the exit from within the inner chamber. We stood in complete darkness, and then suddenly, just as she spoke, the thinnest shaft of light, a spear of sun, shot through the window into the chamber.

 I still feel that great, collective inhalation of the gathered crowd huddled in the tomb at that first thin needle of light. There was nothing to say, nothing to understand, nothing to be done except watch.

 The light grew, and as it did a few people put out their hands to touch it, tentatively. They seemed so hesitant, unsure if it was appropriate, uncertain what it might do or mean. One could almost hear their inner atheists thumbing copies of Stephen Pinker’s latest drivel as mine was, but then, like a storm, the exuberance released, acceptance descended, and we basked in the sight.

 It was difficult to see what others were doing, but I noticed, just to my right, a man put on a pair of glasses that were not his. I’d seen those glasses: they were on Joseph’s mantle, next to the picture of his deceased friend. They’d belonged to her, and he’d put them on to gaze upon the light with her eyes, to see the way she might have seen, and perhaps to help her see, too.

 I left my inner atheist impaled upon Lugh’s shining spear in that tomb.

 Outside the tomb, the voices were raucous, full of joy and wonder. Those outside waited word from we who’d been within to hear what it was like. We who’d been inside tried to find the words to describe what we’d seen to faces full of as much wonder as we.

 Behind the tomb, I found the man I was supposed to find. He was standing in front of a stone that a friend had asked me to say a prayer before, and so I waited until he moved, my hand clutching the fabric in my pocket.

 There was no voice to tell me “no” any longer, no inner atheist to chide me for entertaining such ridiculous thoughts.

 I said hello to him. “Hey–I…can I give this you? I’m supposed to, I think.”
 Alley Valkyrie’s bee patch within Newgrange

 Alley Valkyrie’s bee patch within Newgrange

 The man looked at the patch in his hand. “It’s a bee.”

 I nodded. “Yeah. It’s from my friend Alley Valkyrie.”

 “I keep bees,” he said, his face betraying confusion and awe.

 Of course he keeps bees, I thought to myself. That’s why it’s for him. “It’s definitely for you, then. Happy Solstice.”

 Joseph and I left Newgrange soon after. I had to, as The Dagda had made it clear I was to take the first bus out.

 I got what I’d came for, though, saw what I needed to see. I’d recited the prayers I’d been asked to, delivered the bee I’d been directed to by unseen voices I’ve learned to trust much more than the suddenly silent, sadly deceased corpse of my inner atheist.

 I figured The Dagda could use some overly-reasonable company for a little while.

 ***

 https://abeautifulresistance.org/site/2018/12/20/the-tomb-of-the-atheist
--- a/docs/quotes/misc/why-use-gopher.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/misc/why-use-gopher.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,66 @@
                        Why Gopher?

 Deep beneath the realm of the world wide web lives the hidden world of the
 gopher, a forgotten curiosity seemingly inhabited only by computer geeks who
 refuse to have the common sense to use the web as it exists today.  To the
 casual observer, gopher usually elicits a scowl followed by a condescending
 "Text only?", "Monaco?" or, most commonly, "Why!?"  Despite Cameron's excellent
 retort to the gopher-scoffers, I thought I might comment briefly on the last
 common scathing retort of "Why."

 And to that "why?", I reply: "Why not?" In forgotten days of yore, we traveled
 by buggy, by stream trains, horse, foot and many other obsolete and even absurd
 forms of travel. Yet, to this day, we still use these slow forms of travel.
 Many find such inefficient forms of travel to be enjoyable, calling such
 activities "quaint" or "nostalgic" with no reference to their efficiency at
 getting them from point A to B.

 For example, the fall time ritual of the "Hay Ride" is a most ridiculous
 and absurd form of travel imaginable yet, come autumn, people routinely
 give up their comfortable car seats, conditioned air, and spring/shock
 suspension to endure a bumpy, uncomfortable, hay fever filled ride that
 usually costs more than if you had simply drove your car around the
 block.  Indeed, I have seen them - they flock in droves to country
 tractor trailer, gleefully exhorting their somewhat doubtful children
 with gleeful pleas, exclaiming "Isn't this FUN?" (Not to be overly demeaning of
 hay ride participants, in most fun is a fair bit of absurdity)  Can a person
 not, with all this in mind, consider an alternate form of traversing the
 Internet?

 But, more so - with that in mind, imagine, if you will, finding a forgotten
 walking trail in the woods, hidden from the view of the world of mass transit,
 accessible only by those who don sneakers and take the proverbial road less
 traveled.  Would you not be tempted to explore?  Imagine, all the more, if the
 trail turned out to be a shortcut?  Who, other than the dullest of the
 dullards, would not find that of at least some interest?

 You may say it's a stretch, but I argue it's not far off base from gopher.
 Indeed, here is that forgotten trail in the woods, that abandoned railway, that
 Internet superhighway of days of yore hidden from view beneath the surface of
 the World Wide Web.  Not only does it still work but, for some purposes, it
 works quite well!  Be your destination simple news (thanks floodgap), a or a
 quick weather report, gopher fetches your information with a speed that is very
 hard to beat!

 Dwell not on missing pictures, but think instead on what else is missing:  Ads?
 Tracking cookies?  Animated gifs or, worse, flash video ads?  All gone in the
 realm of the gopher!  Java vulnerabilities?  Browser vulnerabilities?  Java
 script nonsense?  Not in the gopher tunnels.  Computer old?  Got windows 95 or
 even dos?  Gopher doesn't care.  With a half way decent firewall in front, a
 hacker is hard pressed to find any holes in gopher.  Slow connection?  Got a
 56k modem?  That's plenty more bandwidth than gopher needs. Ad sponsors make
 you carefully consider what you write on your blog?  Write as you want on
 gopher.

 Come one, come all - see the gopher holes of the Internet!  Pull that 486 out
 of the closet and put it to good use!  Enjoy the pure text goodness that the
 Internet founders intended.  Pure text is the best, and even Courier can be
 cool!  And, who knows, you may actually find something worth reading.  That
 much I can't guarantee, but this I can almost certainly guarantee: You won't be
 disappointed with its speed.

 -Helpdeskdan

 ***

 gopher://sdf.org/0/users/helpdeskdan/why.txt
--- a/docs/quotes/misc/you-are-magickal-enough-without-delusions.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/misc/you-are-magickal-enough-without-delusions.txt
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
 And guess what? You don't have to be a god to be an effective magician. You don't have to be a fairy to work with them or be a powerful Witch. You don't have to be a dragon to have a hoarding problem. You don't have to be a therian (wolf or otherwise) to be a wonderful shaman. You are MAGICKAL ENOUGH without giving into delusions.
--- a/docs/quotes/tumblr/capitalism-consumerism.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/tumblr/capitalism-consumerism.txt
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
 Hot take: Capitalism isn't the same thing as consumerism. Just because I think voluntary exchange is moral doesn't mean I have to approve of greed, avarice, waste, excess, decadence, or selfishness.
--- a/docs/quotes/tumblr/fandom-is-cancelled.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/tumblr/fandom-is-cancelled.txt
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
 Fandom is cancelled, we're going back to casually enjoying media and not basing our fucking identities around the shit we consume.
--- a/docs/quotes/tumblr/irresponsible-kin-community.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/tumblr/irresponsible-kin-community.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@
 it's irresponsible, narrow-minded, and at times dangerous how the communities refuse to give other explanations for behaviours, thoughts, and feelings.

 > food cravings can be because of normal, human nutritional deficiencies

 > an overwhelming, recurring desire to eat non-food objects is a real psychoatric disorder called pica

 > a recurring need for certain sensations can be a symptom of anxiety

 > there are numerous sensory conditions which lie on spectrums

 > but not every uncomfortable sensation means a condition, there are plenty of sensations/sounds/things people just don't like and this isn't because they're otherkin it's because of *individuality*. and not every want for certain things is a need

 > just because you really like an animal, thing, or character doesn't mean you are it

 > healthy outlets for escapism and such identification include writing, roleplaying, and art
--- a/docs/quotes/tumblr/kin-is-bullshit.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/tumblr/kin-is-bullshit.txt
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
 "i didn't choose to be kin! i've always been kin with [insert character]!!!" is honestly so mind-numbingly stupid. like in no possible way did you think you were a fictional character until you were exposed to whatever piece of fiction they belonged to, whether that be a tv show, a cartoon/anime, a book, whatever. you aren't born fictionkin, it's something you consciously choose to be. your kin "memories" that you possess aren't real. they're scenarios you conjured up in your mind. before finding out about that character, you didn't have any recollection of being them in a past like and you know it lol and the fact that you people think it's possible to even be something that only exists in a fictional reality in a past life is hysterical
--- a/docs/quotes/tumblr/rebirth.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/tumblr/rebirth.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,5 @@
 you know what's more freeing than killing yourself? running away to a small town and getting a job as a waitress. buying a cheap car and sticking a bed in the back and driving southwest. adopting a cat. learning a new instrument. moving apartments. visiting a friend in another city. chopping all your hair off.

 you can kill your current life without dying. you can kill this version of you and make a new one.

 maybe I'm just a bipolar sucker for rebirth but sometimes that thought is all that keeps me alive
--- a/docs/quotes/tumblr/son.txt
+++ b/docs/quotes/tumblr/son.txt
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
 Sun, ur getting older now and it's time u knew the truth. There is no justified hierarchy, that's just something we tell liberals so they'll feel better.
--- a/gophermap
+++ b/gophermap
@@ -0,0 +1,17 @@
                                   ___,      
 the muses pull me               .' .-~\     
 to cleave the night            /  /         
 and leave this world unseen   |  |          
                                \  '.___.;    but my work on this coil
                                 '._  _.'     is not yet complete
                                    ``        I thus mar my hands unclean

 1MayVaneDay	mayvaneday
 1a tomb dripping dank and wet	seliph
 1a tome from mediuth	paranoidsbible
 1mori's little library	docs
 1an abandoned black feather	viridi
 1software	software
 1Rennica	rennica
 0recent statuses	statuses.txt
 0about	about.txt
--- a/mayvaneday/archive/blog/2016/gophermap
+++ b/mayvaneday/archive/blog/2016/gophermap
@@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
 2016

 hJuly 1 - What do privacy, a crapton of puppies, and tea have in common?	july/privacy.html
 hOctober 30 - There's something in the air.	october/change.html
--- a/mayvaneday/archive/blog/2016/july/privacy.html
+++ b/mayvaneday/archive/blog/2016/july/privacy.html
@@ -0,0 +1,32 @@
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  <p><b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
  <p><b>What do privacy, a crapton of puppies, and tea have in common?</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 7-1-2016</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
  
 <p>(Before I begin: Yes, I know that I didn’t put ON A SIDE NOTE in the title, but that’s because this isn’t just a short status update about a hiatus or a family trip just gone by.)</p>

 <p align="center"><b>Alternative title: what I learned from marking as many of my social media profiles as possible “private”
 So what do privacy, a crapton of puppies, and tea have in common?</b></p>

 <p>The answer is this, quite simple: immature teenagers (mostly girls, although sometimes boys) thinking that they can one-up a person by mocking their appearance, personal tastes, etc. instead of addressing the problem at hand. Maybe you’ve seen some of these people at work in your social media feed or noticed some of the colloquial terms used to endorse, describe, or glamorize this behavior: “salty”, the frog and tea emojis put together at the end of an unnecessarily rude sentence (as if that constituted an argument), “roasting”…the list could go on and on. There are new words passing into the vernacular each day.</p>

 <p>There is a problem among many teens nowadays, and I say this as a teen myself: being nasty to other people is being glamorized beyond belief. Have teenagers always been rude to each other over the pettiest of arguments? Yes. But with the advent of the first generation raised with the internet, the repercussions of this behavior can be much worse, and a spat can cross multiple continents and involve thousands if not millions of people within a few seconds. A reputation can be ruined faster than one can find <a href="http://www.uebersetzung.at/twister/es.htm">a Spanish tongue-twister</a> and struggle through it.</p>

 <p>About two weeks ago, at the end of one of my poems, I made an announcement that I was setting both my Twitter and Instagram on private in order to prevent butthurt LGBT pride celebrators from hurling personal attacks on me for choosing to not celebrate my gender or my sexuality. When you’ve burned through three Tumblr accounts and have seen both the nicest and the most nasty people sides of the website, one can become quite scared for their personal privacy on the internet. On one hand, you’re just a few clicks away from countless galleries of puppies and other baby animals being adorable for hours on end of enjoyment. But on the other hand, you make one mistake- innocent intentions or not- and butthurt fandomites will descend on your sorry ass and leak your private information (an action known as “<a href="https://crashoverridenetwork.tumblr.com/post/108387569412/preventing-doxing">doxxing</a>“), flood all your possible pipes of interacting online with death threats akin to a DDoS, and otherwise render your experience of the internet to be painful at best. One misstep, and you’re the next <a href="http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/zamii070-harassment-controversy">zamii070</a>.</p>

 <p>However, if you set your social media profiles to be the most private they can be and carefully filter through follower and friend requests to only be people that you trust, how are angry hormonal girls supposed to snatch pictures of your face, send doctored screenshots to your employer, and lead harassment campaigns to smear your name? There’s a reason I’ve ceased to post my face anywhere. Nobody can photoshop my face into a grotesque mess if the closest thing they can find to a face is the Zorphian four-chambered heart, dubbed a “wonton” by the little girls of my unit last year at Girl Scout Camp.</p>

 <p>So what if it’s harder to get post notifications? It’s easy enough to pop an RSS feed into Nextcloud and enable notifications that way. If there’s enough of a will, there’ll always be a way- which I hear is a bastardized English proverb.</p>

 <p>Anonymity is a powerful thing, and I’ll gladly have far less likes on Instagram and no comments praising my appearance if it means I get to preserve it.</p>

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    <p align=center>
 <b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b>
  </p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
  <p><b>warning: change ahead</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 10-30-2016</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
  
 <p>There's something in the air.</p>
  
 <p>And no, it’s not turkeys- although we saw plenty of those on the way there.
 Over the past few months, there has been an impending sense of doom hanging over my head with no specific due date. It’s like I’ve forgotten to study for a big test right around the corner, like there’s some important date that all my peers know about and have been preparing for but that I’ve been left in the dark about- maybe on purpose, as I’ve never really been liked by my peers, maybe on accident.</p>

 <p>Do you know the feeling?</p>

 <p>I spent the day in a new town yesterday. Let’s call it Wychester as I don’t want to accidentally dox myself in the extremely minuscule chance that someone from Wychester reads my blog and particularly cares about the senior girl moving in to a small abandoned loop of road. We were originally going to be spending the day there in order to see a musical taking place at the school my father works at, but the day grew infinitely more interesting to me when we got a call from a realtor asking if we wanted to look at a house.</p>

 <p>The impending sense of doom was that, at the end of my junior year at high school, we would be moving to this Wychester so that my father didn’t have to spend multiple hours in a commute to and back from his job. It would help my younger brothers, my parents said. I concluded that everything else, like the friends that I’d just finally been able to make and the town that I adored, would just be collateral damage.</p>

 <p>That I'd just be collateral damage.</p>

 <p>There’s something in Wychester’s air, something that I haven’t yet been able to describe. It’s part loneliness, like I know that I’ll be emotionally isolated. High school has never been nice to me. Pair that with subpar social skills (although I’m improving all the time!) and the climate of a bunch of hormonal high school students that I know nothing about, and you’ve practically got yourself a recipe for a depressive sort of bump in the road of life. It’s part wistful longing, like I know that I’m caught between a rock and a hard place and wish that it wasn’t so, even though I know that there’s no other way that these cards could have fell.</p>

 <p>There are so many memories in this house here. How am I supposed to leave them all behind? Merely taking the objects with me won’t help much- it’s like trying to pull a bug out of a spider web. A trinket tipped over and resting on the same bookcase it has for five years isn’t the same as moving the trinket, placing it on a bookcase somewhere else, and then trying to emulate the tip. Something feels forced.</p>

 <p>And yet, something inside of me is eager to get out of this house, out of this stale city. Things are too predictable here, this section of my mind says. Too much same old, same old kills a writer, and the air of Wychester feels like a fresh breath after being underwater for too long.</p>

 <p>But my mind doesn’t particularly like having to deal with conflicting feelings, so it invents characters like Nox and Adelaide Audette and Lank from Walmart as methods to escape them for a little bit. They exist somewhere in between imaginary friends and anthropomorphic emotions. Maybe they’ll get fully-fledged stories one day, or at least more than a passing mention in a disorganized blog post. They won’t need boxes or loads of packing tape to come with me. They follow me everywhere- even to places where I would much rather prefer to be fully in my own mind. Would they follow me to Wychester, to the large living rooms of the second house we visited?</p>

 <p>There’s change in the air.</p>
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    <p align=center>
 <b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b>
  </p>
  <p><b>obligatory valentine's day post</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 2-14-2017</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>You thought this was going to be another poem, didn’t you? Another poem where I complain along with millions of other people how nobody wants to date me on this day that has no overall significance in my daily existence. Although I do have finals the next two days, so maybe I should put in some contingency plans just in case I don’t end up surviving.</p>

 <p>So why am I alone, you ask? I don’t particularly like answering that question, usually choosing to brush it off with the cliche answer of “I just haven’t found the right person yet.” And in a way, that’s true- I haven’t found a person yet, and I probably never will, because my expectations have been so warped by all the time I spent with my head in books and code and focusing in myself that I seem to have completely lost touch with reality.</p>

 <p>My perfect partner would probably be just as passionate about writing and privacy as I am- there’s something strangely romantic in proposing not to get a ring and increase oneself’s tax burdens but in purposely choosing to evade the constant unwarranted spying we live under. Not to give you spoilers for my next book, of course… But any pact to mutually improve each other would be just as devoted. I’d like to not get tangled up in romantic cliches. I’d like to believe I was destined for greatness, and reenacting some sappy fanfiction from the depths of the hellsite that is Wattpad isn’t exactly what I’m going for.</p>

 <p>But all the seemingly eligible candidates for a completely voluntary role seem to not be present or even existent. I don’t want to be a selfie prop to continue some meaningless streak- don’t make me go under the dog filter; tell me about your dogs, their habits and how long it takes for them to roll over and expose their bellies when you get home from school. Let’s not fume over others; let’s discuss the fumes polluting the environment and how we can carve out an existence that hurts the least amount of people as possible, if even anybody at all. A small stone ring in the garden encircling a small crop of plants to ease the grocery bill is better than an overpriced gemstone ring any day.</p>
  
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--- a/mayvaneday/archive/blog/2017/gophermap
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@@ -0,0 +1,8 @@
 2017

 hFebruary 14 - obligatory valentine's day post	february/valentine.html
 hMarch 17 - class	march/class.html
 hSeptember 8 - fame.exe	september/fame.html
 hOctober 12 - dispatches from nowhere	october/dispatches-from-nowhere.html
 hNovember 2 - 8:18 p.m. (or, the antithesis of wanderlust)	november/wanderlust.html
 hNovember 28 - infierno://	november/infierno.html
--- a/mayvaneday/archive/blog/2017/march/class.html
+++ b/mayvaneday/archive/blog/2017/march/class.html
@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
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 <b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b>
  </p>
  <p><b>class</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 3-17-2017</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>My room has been darkening for some hours and I’ve only noticed it now. But nothing can quite capture the feeling of dying sunlight on somebody else’s windowsill, hitting the half-dead fish surrounded by waters just as murky as your own intentions. Not to mention those of the strangers around you- constantly fiddling with a small purse, trying to find the best place to safeguard it from pickpockets without disturbing the gracious hosts or yourself.</p>

 <p>It had been eight months since I had last slept in that bed, unless my memory is playing tricks upon me again. And in that eight months, the obsessions had neither ceased nor waned- just changed their subjects, looking for another cheap thrill that would not have any result on the world.</p>

 <p>But corrupted alphabets have to end somewhere, unfounded fears put to rest and resurrected anew in other languages- tongues doing double duty, triple, tea bubbles and hasty words dissolving, sometimes sweet and sometimes bitter. A hit or miss event; mostly miss, something always amiss.</p>
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 <b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b>
  </p>
  <p><b>infierno://</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 11-28-2017</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>

 <p>The concept of “hell” is many different things to many different people. To some, it is a physical place where people rot and burn forever, whether justified or not. For others, it might be a child dying, or a foot aching forever, or being physically separated from a loved one and never being able to see them again.</p>

 <p>Hell can also be the computer lab, locked in with an aging and decrepit teacher convinced that the absolute kindergarten basics of a computer- logging in, how to use the save button, how to type things into a spreadsheet- need to be revisited despite being a high school class.</p>

 <p>I signed up for a class plainly named “Computer Applications” thinking I’d <i>learn</i> something. Maybe I’d finally find the motivation to wrap my head around C++ or JavaScript or Ruby or some other language I might need someday. Maybe I’d finally make sense of the mystifying terminal, Windows or one of a trillion Linux distros or whatever system it be on. Maybe I’d learn how to make a mini-server out of an old computer and deploy Nextcloud or whatever self-hosted apps I could possibly find useful.</p>

 <p>I <i>really</i> shouldn’t have expected as much. This is a school that thinks Chromebooks are the absolute gold standard of computing and thinks throwing their network behind a captive portal could <i>possibly</i> be a good idea. (I used to go to a <i>much bigger</i> school that had an open network, and while that has the same security issues concerning potential sniffers, everything still turned out okay.)</p>

 <p>There are a great many reasons why I <i>only</i> use my own hardware and not the school’s or anybody else’s. I can install whatever the hell I want on my own laptop, I can be reasonably sure that there aren’t any school-mandated spyware programs running in the background (the school network is a completely different story), and, most importantly, <i>I can use whatever operating system I want</i>.</p>

 <p>I run Linux Mint on my computer. <!-- it's Fedora now, buddy boy -->It’s fast, it’s far easier to update all my software all at once (and doesn’t take two hours just to reboot and apply system updates like Windows does), and I can sleep easy at night knowing that I’m not gonna wake up the next morning and see all my files deleted because the fools at Microsoft decided to use whatever backdoors they’ve cooked into OneDrive and arbitrarily deem me a violator of their Terms of Service.</p>

 <p>But this teacher seemingly has a fetish for Microsoft Office, and, even if we have Office installed on our own machines, she forces us like a tyrant to use the spyware-riddled school machines. Never mind that I already have a fully functioning copy of LibreOffice on my own computer and that it can do everything the class teaches <i>and more</i>. Never mind that the spacebar on the computer I’ve been assigned is almost completely broken. If she can’t shut down the entire computer at the push of a button from her lazy seat at her desk, it might as well be a one-way ticket to the… office.</p>

 <p>Funny how words work, isn’t it?</p>

 <p>I could also rant about how, by only teaching corporate-made products and not the alternatives, this school and thousands others are essentially creating future customers for the companies they’re sucking up to. <a href="https://www.gnu.org/education/edu-why.html">But others have made this point already</a>, and, knowing my horrid memory, <a href="https://mayvaneday.keybase.pub/archive/blog/2017/november/wanderlust.html">I probably already have as well.</a></p>

 <p>Yes, there’s a network folder that the teacher requires all the work be put into that only resides on the school’s infrastructure, <b>but that’s what we have flash drives and metadata scrubbers for</b>. But, hell, even the network folder doesn’t work most of the time: all but a few of the kids in the class have no goddamn idea what they’re doing, all piling into the folder at the beginning of class to make a subfolder for themselves and rewriting over each other over and over and over again.</p>

 <p>Is this what college is going to be like? A bunch of Snapchatting fools who can’t even capitalize the name of their own school and need someone to explain that the “Insert” tab in Excel is for… inserting things? (Who would have guessed?) I <i>know</i> all of this stuff already. I learned how to use PowerPoint in elementary school because that’s all we had at the time, and that’s all I knew.</p>

 <p>And guess what? LibreOffice works just the same. And it doesn’t make me feel disgusting inside.</p>

 <p>But there’s still the entire trimester, minus one day, left to go.</p>
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    <p align=center>
 <b>MayVaneDay Studios</b>
  </p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
  <p><b>8:18 p.m. (or, the antithesis of wanderlust)</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 11-2-2017</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p> 
 <p>August 2016 was a weird period in my life. I was still riding off the high satisfaction of completing my first novel, <i>The Samhain Files</i>, and was rushing as fast as my trembling fingers could type on my grandma’s clackety keyboard to complete <i>The White Line Fever</i> before school started. A goal which I didn’t meet, resulting in having to drag myself through writing on the school-issued iPad with the almost draconian restrictions on what could be installed on it. (I mean, I understand you don’t want any porn or games on it… but, come on, why allow Blogger but not WordPress? They both serve the same purposes. I mean, the latter is far superior because Google doesn’t have their grubby hands on it…)</p>
 <!-- note: Neocities is god tier, except for the community, which is shit. Awardspace has no SSL but no social features :3 -->
 <p>Something snapped in the last third of summer vacation. I don’t remember the date exactly, just like a lot of events I’ve found instrumental to my becoming in hindsight: the story of meeting my “waifu” in a lucid dream (a story I might have the courage to share one day), the angry rant about a certain subset of goths (that I won’t link here because Onionboy doesn’t deserve any more views)….</p>

 <p>But I remember exactly where it was- in the purple room in my grandmother’s house, curled up on the bed with a freshly pirated book.</p>

 <p><i>The Circle</i> by Dave Eggers is a terrifying book. And I don’t mean that lightly. I’ve never been the most perceptive of sarcasm or satire, often accidentally taking things face value and only realizing it after the fact. And as I read along those few aging summer days, watching the main character Mae stumble her way up the corporate ladder, I… I cheered everything on. Supported the advances of a predatory corporation as it swallowed more and more of the Wild West of the Internet up and coerced all peoples into its net, willing or not.</p>

 <p>And I finished the book after a few days, and I sat there like blood was dripping down my hands from a fresh murder. A murder it was- the slaughter of a long-hanging remnant of innocence, a rip in the veils, fluttering tattered in a fierce wind.</p>

 <p>That was the beginning of the end. Or the end of the beginning.</p>

 <p>It’s all semantics anyways.</p>

 <p>The school system I’d grown up in switched from using Microsoft’s products to Google’s around fourth grade- or was it fifth? I don’t remember too much, but I do remember <a href="/archive/blog/2016/july/cringe.html">the poorly made games made in Google Slides</a> and the drama I still haven’t been able to will myself to forget. They never taught us to use anything else- whenever the school WiFi went down, you’d have thought that the teachers would have marched us down to the computer labs and spent a few days slaving over the aging Microsoft Word installation just to keep the show running. But instead they just shrugged their shoulders and threw more money at the already incompetent IT department.</p>

 <p>The minds of young children are impressionable. And if you instill in them a deep-seated need for getting good grades, and then you make satiating those needs dependent on a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/10/31/a-mysterious-message-is-locking-google-docs-users-out-of-their-files/?noredirect=on">dysfunctional</a> system with little regard for the privacy of its users with no recourse other than to opt out of using the computer systems altogether, you set them up for a rude awakening down the road.</p>

 <p>Either one of their beloved companies shuts down and takes all their data with them, or something they entrusted to one of these corporations gets handed over to the police in order to convict that person for a law they didn’t know existed…</p>

 <p>Or one day they’re slapped in the face with the reality that these online services won’t last forever and that maybe having their only copy of their most precious files (or any files, really!) in one place is a horrible idea, and that they shouldn’t be trusting one single corporation with some of their most intimate digital possessions.</p>

 <p>That’s the danger of systems like Google’s. They just “work”, pure and simple with little to no configuration on the user’s part. No installation of software, no need to keep anything up to date, no need to even have anything more than a browser on the system. (I hate Chromebooks, but that’s a story for later.) There’s no impetus to download files as backups or to create backup plans in case of failure. Just keep creating files in the same system, years and years of work poised to go down the drain with the switch of a button thousands and thousands of miles away, one single point of failure.</p>

 <p>If Google goes down, I’ll still be able to access my files because they’re stored locally on my machine. If my machine gets borked, I’ll still be able to access my files because they’re backed up into an offsite Nextcloud server.</p>

 <p>If both happen? Well, both of us are screwed then, and it won’t matter.</p>

 <p>When things just “work”, there’s no incentive to try new ways of doing things, to expand one’s horizons before something breaks and the mere alternative becomes the necessary. I knew about Linux for a long time, but when the sound stopped working on my laptop in Windows mid-July, I finally downloaded my first Ubuntu ISO and started learning how to use it, not out of curiosity but <b>necessity</b>. (I eventually got it fixed by reinstalling the sound drivers, but by then, I’d already fallen in love with <a href="https://debian.org">the Debian ecosystem</a>.) And from there, I learned about <a href="https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-software-even-more-important.html">the virtues of FLOSS (free/libre open source) software</a>, and from there… Well, it felt incredibly liberating. A system that <i>I</i> had complete control over and a world of software I never even knew existed to help with the things I’d always had to do by hand since Google had never thought them important enough to implement.</p>

 <p>That’s not to say it was easy at first, or that I did it correctly right off the bat. In the beginning, I didn’t really care about privacy or the morality of the services or the people running them. I just wanted to be as far away from Google as possible while sacrificing as little mobile functionality as possible, since, at the time, I didn’t have a computer.</p>

 <p>But school still forces me to use Google products in order to submit assignments. Sure, the vast majority of the work can be done offline with LibreOffice or on S Note (which I only use because it has stylus support for my phone), but eventually I have to touch that dreaded white login screen, so simplified it’s almost beautiful.</p>

 <p>I absolutely hate this forced dependence. Given a few days, I could probably come up with a better system with one arm tied behind my back. But it would be rejected immediately because A) it would be almost nigh impossible for the school to spy on the students’ work to make sure they’re not exploring the ecosystem they’re forced to use, and B) they’d have to remember more than one short easily-guessable password. Boo hoo hoo, you have to learn how to not reuse your passwords across sites. Cry me a river.</p>

 <p>(I mean, seriously? What kind of shoddy overpaid IT department sets mere <i>lunch numbers</i> as passwords? Or birthdays? You just get a few pieces of information about a person you hate, and then you can wipe out all of their schoolwork with no recompense for the victim as they didn’t make any damn backups.)</p>

 <p>But then again, it’s all about the comfort of the teachers, isn’t it? Sacrifice the souls and privacy of the students in order to save a few minutes grading?</p>

 <p>And what of my peers? When they go out into the workforce, these are going to be the services they’ll know how to use best. And they’ll stay with what works for them without so much as a second thought.</p>

 <p>And there goes off yet another batch of lifelong users manufactured and sold hook and sinker until their beloved services sink. And I’ll still be here, typing away in LibreOffice with the status bar turned off so I can’t see the word count on whatever chapter I’ll be working on (I find that number a major distraction), ready to disappear and rematerialize at the drop of a hat amidst everyone else’s chaos.</p>

 <p>Flexibility was supposed to be a school virtue, right?</p>
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 <b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b>
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  <p><b>dispatches from nowhere</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 10-12-2017</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
  
 <p>The last few weeks have been an absolute mess, and I suppose I owe an explanation.</p>

 <p>My basement flooded a week and a half ago. The sky cried itself to sleep and made the sump pump in the lowest level of my house fail, causing unknown structural damage and destroying a great deal of personal possessions. Lots of mementos of my childhood are just <i>gone</i>. All the video game systems in my house either have their power cords destroyed, their controllers either outright broken or out of whack, or don’t have the correct output cords to be compatible with the TV in the first basement, which is where my room is. I’ve essentially become a refugee to whatever emulators I can get running on my computer, which, seeing as Windows has apparently decided to actively work against me whenever I boot into it to play games, really isn’t that fun of an experience.</p>

 <p>Except for last Saturday, a birthday party for several members of my family. Getting my rear end handed to me while playing several bootlegs of Wii games that took half of the day to download was pretty… interesting.</p>

 <p><i>The Duality of Mankind</i>, my next book, is now a third of the way done through the first draft. I’ve had to restart writing on it four times- first, two teenagers trawling their way through high school and the death of one of the main character’s family members; second, some sort of pseudo-anarchist utopia with a kid who fell form the sky; a third rewrite I won’t mention that only got half a paragraph before I gave up; and now the fourth attempt, which I’ve almost completely plotted.</p>

 <p>And what has become of me?</p>

 <p>I’m not quite sure. Halloween has become a balance of trying not to embarrass myself by dressing up as someone I’m not physically fit enough to be and not sucking up to anyone else by being so generic as to be unmockable and unremarkable. I remember almost half a decade ago wandering in my neighborhood with only a glowstick to illuminate my way, trampling among high hills and valleys with my cousins and brothers, a plastic pumpkin bucket swinging from my arm. The neighborhood was friendlier back then. Adults were a lot less terrifying, and checking over every piece of candy was just a stupid rule that could just be circumvented by stuffing your face full of chocolate while in the back of your van on the way home.</p>

 <p>But then the family scattered across the state, and we stopped waiting for the sun to leave, and we started waiting for parents to chaperone us instead. And eventually I stopped going out at all, waiting for a friend’s invite that never came.</p>

 <p>I’m not so sure that I want to be here anymore, but wanderlust isn’t so useful when you’re not even sure where “here” is.</p>

 <p>There are so many responsibilities that I’ve been neglecting, and I know that this is one of them. I’m coming back. I promise.</p>

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 <b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b>
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  <p><b>fame.exe</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 9-8-2017</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
  
 <p>I am still so afraid of life.</p>

 <p>The college spam is beginning to pile up. Gym class makes every day a living hell, days strung out one after the other. I keep finding myself clinging onto each day as they come if only to spread out the time between each torture session, stuck in a stark contrast from summer, wanting each day to lengthen as the sun wanes instead of speeding through every week with not much to do.</p>

 <p>It’s my own damn fault, and I’m very aware of it, and yet I find it hard to believe that anything is supposed to get better in adulthood- especially considering the future I see myself inevitably speeding straight to.</p>

 <p><a href="https://mayvaneday.keybase.pub/archive/poetry/f/famoso.html">I’ve said it before. I don’t want to be famous. I want to be well-respected</a>– and yet, in this current climate, a hand slicing and dicing a fellow human to shreds is more profitable to the general public than a hand outstretched in aid. The former generates outrage, which drives news ratings, which creates spaces for advertisers to sell their products. It creates opportunities for celebrities and other public figures to wank about their self-declared intellect and eject worn-out platitudes for the sole purpose of racking up upvotes. A genuine act of philanthropy may help the downtrodden of humanity, but it doesn’t boil the collective blood like a good dose of outrage can and does.</p>

 <p>The road to fame is paved with inconsequential spats on social media and a constant cycle of creating drama with other people and then claiming innocence. <!-- note: should add link to "how to become famous on the internet without any talent" tutorial when it comes up -->Spreading the seeds of inaudible discord, normalizing borderline slander- and for what? To feed superiority complexes? To set oneself on an imagined throne at the top of the world, every single fame who propelled you to fame and success just another serf on your land, farming money and worthless retweets?</p>

 <p>This isn’t a system I don’t think I could ever be compatible with. This isn’t a system I don’t want to be compatible with. I don’t want to spend all my time wasting away on social media, <!-- add link to "it's a bad day for stalkers" -->having meaningless spats with other competitors for people’s time when I could be writing books, when I could be taking care of myself, when I could be caring for the people I love the most. I don’t want to lust after the cool musician of the day, pretending to be someone I’m not just to bait their fans for cheap follows.</p>

 <p>But if I continue to put myself out on the public sphere, to contribute to public dialogue instead of hiding from criticism and writing everything down in my journal, never to see the light of day again- then eventually I’m going to attract the scum of humanity. The fangirls* mindlessly retweeting every little piece of drivel their “idols” shit out of their mouths. The fangirls who create countless roleplay accounts as their favorite celebrities with often only appearance and name in common- jacked-up ultra-gay caricatures of their former selves with all the parts of them that can’t be rabidly fetishized taken out, neatly packaged and fine-tuned to generate the maximum amount of “feels”. The fangirls who hound their “favorite” content creators to insanity if the works they produce so much as <a href="https://www.oneangrygamer.net/2017/07/female-artist-attacked-by-trans-community-for-gender-swapping-dream-daddy-characters/36015/">stray a hair from the path of ultra-political correctness.</a></p>

 <p>The day I see some teenage girl jacking off to a Twitter roleplay account of one of my characters bent beyond recognition into one of her hormonal fantasies is the day the last piece of my soul will die.</p>

 <p>Those are not the kind of people I want associated with me. Those are not the kind of people I want to be spamming me 24/7 with requests to follow them or random scraps of thought or accusations of not following public opinion. Hopefully not having a Twitter or Instagram or Tumblr will stave most of them off- but at what cost? Am I purposely crippling my own chances of being discovered by potential readers or a publisher or some other kind of literary agent that’ll get me out to the masses because I don’t consent to the privacy invasion nightmare that is modern social media? Am I cutting myself off from people who might otherwise be my friend, who otherwise might be potential fans because I’m not Snapchatting every moment of my life? Am I pushing away people I used to be close to because I’d rather use a platform that I can trust not to harvest my data** for advertisers?</p>

 <P>There have been moments where I’ve considered throwing in the towel. Reinstalling all the Google apps I uninstalled on the devices I was able to root*** and disabling them on the devices I couldn’t root. Reactivating my Instagram account and creating a new Twitter. Ceasing to resist every time a member of my family posts a picture of me on Facebook <a href="https://secureswissdata.com/why-facebook-isnt-free/">without my consent.</a></p>

 <p>But I wouldn’t be here right now, speaking to you over the internet across the restrictions of time and space, if I ever gave up that easily.</p>

 <p>Even though I might not be able to win against a system that requires me to sacrifice my soul to reach my goals, that doesn’t mean I should stop fighting for things to change for the better. For the opening of publishing systems that cut out the middleman and let content creators reap the full benefits of their fruits. For decentralized and distributed systems that allow me to communicate with other people no matter what servers we’re using or what our individual perspectives on privacy or digital freedom are.</p>

 <p>For a system I could be compatible with without having to compromise any part of myself- a life less frightening where trust wouldn’t carry such a high burden.</p>

 <p>For a change in heart, if such a thing will ever be possible.</p>

 <p><small>*Guys, gals, and nonbinary pals. You know what the hell I meant. Surely you’ve encountered one of these people before.</small></p>

 <p><small>**At the time of writing this, I still have a Facebook account, which I know is massive hypocrisy on my part. I will send in the deletion request before this year is over- I’ve been meaning to do so for quite a while. The only thing that held me back for this long was the constant guilt-tripping of… certain family members.</small></p>

 <p><small>***My current phone and my old tablet. (Which have been pretty much replaced with my computer, although current obligations force me to use my phone, and I still use the tablet from time to time.) My old phone consistently unroots itself within half an hour of running Kingroot on it, which is the only method that works on the software version it’s currently on.</small></p>
  
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 <b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b>
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  <p><b>irl</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 8-23-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>This story starts in the dead hours of the morning, where I get a text from an unknown number.</p>
 <p>&quot;Maybe it's my college roommate?&quot; I wonder, and then I start panicking, because how in the world would my roommate have gotten my number? Or maybe it's one of my family members whose contact I lost in the migration to my new phone since I forgot to configure DavDroid before the move. Or maybe it's one of my old friends trying to get in contact with me again.</p>
 <p>It was spam from some shitty app called IRL, calling me by my deadname and saying that someone had &quot;complimented&quot; me.</p>
 <p>I remember the dregs of high school, the old one I went to before I moved and everything went to hillbilly hell. There was this app called &quot;After School&quot; that required you to sign in with a Facebook account so it could &quot;confirm&quot; that it went to the school whose stream you were trying to access. Never mind that one could easily create a fake profile with said school for the sole purpose of accessing that app... But once one got in, they could leave any kind of anonymous message for everyone else who was accepted into that school's stream to see.</p>
 <p>It wasn't any kind of intellectual haven. 99% of the posts were either people talking about their crushes or calling each other whores.</p>
 <p>IRL is along the same strain of apps. Except this one automatically tried to snatch my contacts, leading me to frantically dive into the system settings and cut off all of the app's permissions except for phone, which it apparently needed in order to... sign up. Once I got past the five hundred questions to set up a profile (all of which I fudged or outright lied on), I finally got to my notifications to see what was worth spamming me on three different numbers.</p>
 <p>Someone nominated me for &quot;Brave AF&quot;.</p>

 <p>Was it worth it, anonymous internet person? Was leaking my number to a shady shitty social app worth the accolades without the social consequences? Was praising me without revealing your name worth knowing that my phone number and full birth name is now floating around on the internet, at the mercy of whoever coded and runs IRL not to sell to marketers and data aggreggators and spammers alike?</p>
 <p>IRL sucks up all your contacts by default. They have your name and phone number, and the names and phone numbers of all the people in your phone, and those of all the other people using their service, and they have the power to connect the dots. So what if a small handful of people are kind and put my preferred name in their contacts? One person puts my deadname in with my phone number, and it's game over for my anonymity.</p>
 <p>You think this won't be exploited? You think this can't be tapped into by the government with a single subpoena?</p>
 <p>I hereby nominate you for &quot;Asshole AF&quot;, and I don't need a closed-source proprietary app to tell you that.</p>
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 <b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b>
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  <p><b>early on a thundery Friday morning</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 8-3-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>I woke up at three in the morning after a nightmare where I was someone’s patron-saint, guarding them from the dog my grandma’s neighbor has even though their backyard consisted of a giant maze of fenced-in partitions. Almost like a petting zoo. And there were kids running about all through the maze, dodging the dog, and then somehow I ended up doing sick tricks on a motorcycle on a track that looked like it was straight out of Video Game Maker Tycoon while explaining to someone over the phone why so many unwashed men flock to Melee like it were the last boat leaving the Titanic.</p>
 <p>On the waking side of the world, I have no goddamn idea why I was even thinking about Melee in the first place, considering that I only played it a grand total of once and I always get roped into playing Subspace on Brawl with my brothers because they’re scared of playing any Smash game where I’m not on their side.</p>
 <p>I didn’t get to see the sun rise this morning, but I got to see the sun cast its golden tones over the house of one of our neighbors and then promptly disappear when a tiny thunderstorm rolled in.I got to hear the birds chirping outside and see a spider crawl across the outside side of my bedroom window.</p>
 <p>I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately. Some of it in a panic-fueled rage after having a mental breakdown thanks to my parents incessantly hounding me about college financial aid. Some of it right before I go to bed, making me pick up my phone after I already said good night to my internet friends and jot down a few notes before my eyes threaten to burn to a crisp. Some of it in the car, blaring music through my headphones so I don’t have to hear my brothers screaming about the latest copy-pasted Teen Titans Go episode.</p>
 <p>I have autism. Did you know that? It affects almost every part of my day-to-day existence, even if I’m good at masking as neurotypical for short periods of time or like to delude myself that it doesn’t affect me. For example, there are some textures that I <em>cannot</em> stand, like scrambled eggs or whipped yogurt. I can choke them down so I don’t hurt the cook’s feelings, but then I want to puke after. And I don’t like shirts with words or pictures on the front, although I don’t know if that’s genuinely because of autism or because anything more than solid colors leads to people knowing what I like and then being able to use that knowledge to embarrass me. I can “social” enough to order my own food at a restaurant or email a teacher about a problem I have, but afterwards I feel like I want to nap for a hundred years in a big dark cave. Repetitive sounds drive me up-the-wall insane.</p>
 <p>And I have special interests, apparently. Things that I’m inexplicably drawn to like a moth to a flame, even though the only moths I’ve ever seen not on the internet were outside or curled up and dead underneath a table at my grandma’s house when I drummed a TV remote beside it to scare it too much. They’re not addictions, because, while looking at pictures of our dear Poot or Lonk gives me a flutter in my heart, there are times when I need to momentarily forget that video games exist and do adulting. And I can with litle trouble.</p>
 <p>When did we decide that being passionate about something was childish? When did we decide that adulthood was to be drab and boring and slave away at a job to accumulate mere wealth and then roll over and die?</p>
 <p>I’m not an immature little kid. I’m still me, vehemently so, an individual who works best when allowed to be an individual- but, I’ll admit, setting yourself against the world all the time is so damn <em>tiring</em>. Not every waking moment can be devoted to improving oneself, and I’m ashamed that I even have to say that. People aren’t self-sustaining- people aren’t vacuums. We need to get inspiration from <em>somewhere</em>, from art, no matter what form that art takes- books, music, games.</p>
 <p>Part of what lead to my mental crash of early summer this year was the chan mentality of, if something is mainstream, it is trash regardless of its quality. If something couldn’t contribute to a superiority complex over the “normie” masses, then it wasn’t “good enough”. Places like /r/StopGaming are wrong, to an extent: yes, it’s bad to spend seven hours a day playing WoW or DoTA, farming for worthless virtual monies. But there’s nothing wrong with, say, occasionally playing Smash with my friends and family or maybe sinking an hour into a strategy game by myself when I can’t get up the spoons to write. It’s not the medium that matters, it’s the message, it’s what you get out of something that you enjoy. There are lots of things I can study in a game that aren’t just “durr how do I play this game”. There’s the visuals- character design, and the art style used, and all the little intricacies of the game’s map. There’s the audibles- one of the things that gets me through a long day is just sitting down in a quiet place with my headphones and a long playlist. And studying the voice acting in games that have it helps me to recognize other people’s emotions when I encounter them in real life. And there’s lore, which studying can help me recognize common tropes and why people like them and improve my own writing.</p>
 <p>Yes, I could do some of these with a book. And I still love to read. But sometimes I just don’t have the mental spoons to quiet my brain enough to read.</p>
 <p>But I digress.</p>
 <p>Over the last two weeks, I’ve been trying something of an experiment with myself. Maybe, if I stop treating everything my brain wanders back to when I’m idle as an “addiction”, maybe my mental health will improve. Maybe my writing block will finally end. Maybe I’ll stop being so much of an insufferable misanthrope.</p>
 <p>And guess what?</p>
 <p><strong>Big fuckin’ whoop, I was right!</strong></p>
 <p>Wow! For the first time in a long time, I don’t see a depression meme and instantly relate! What a foreign sensation, loving and accepting oneself and reaping the benefits is!</p>
 <p>I’m nine chapters into the sequel to <em>The Duality of Mankind</em>. I’m still putting the finishing touches on the first book, and then I’ll release it for peer review. Maybe tomorrow? The next day? Sometime real soon, because it’s coming out August 15, exactly two years to the date <em>The Samhain Files</em> came out and I celebrated my first book by going on a walk to a park and catching some Pokemon.</p>
 <p>I’m still here! And I’ll always be here!</p>

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 <b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b>
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  <p><b>tumblr blues</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 8-29-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
  <p>Oh joy, another post complaining about why I left social media. Tumblr this time, if we’re being specific. Or <em>might leave</em>, if we’re being so specific that I’ll soon need to dig out the microscope from my brother’s bedroom and take it with me to college.</p>
 <p>But I won’t, because he’ll be starting high school in a few days, and it’ll probably come in handy.</p>
 <p>About two months ago, I made yet another Tumblr account. For my personal safety, I won’t be giving you the link. A month before that, while I was in the midst of my 8chan-fueled black hole, I’d made a different account in a vain attempt to force myself to write a diary novel about an angel sent down to Earth in order to “thot patrol” the planet. Safe to say, it only lasted about three days, and then it was quickly deactivated. Nobody noticed, because there were no followers, and, honestly, the angelkin community on tumblr probably doesn’t appreciate someone yelling the word “THOT” every three posts.</p>
 <p>But this new one was supposed to be an exercise in working with all the quirks and problems in myself instead of against them. Accepting that I was autistic and had special interests instead of labeling them as “obsessions” and publicly flagellating myself for having them, mostly. It wasn’t meant to ever get tied into this website right here, although, since Rinea’s a dumbass, it eventually did.</p>
 <p>More on that later.</p>
 <p>The first few days were rather peaceful. My mental health soared. My writer’s block lifted, and I finally started work on my next book, <em>A Lonely Signal Burns</em>. I started repairing my relationships with my brothers (although a sort of enmity exists between us, just subdued this time). I quickly befriended someone who I’m going to assume for the sake of this post was a minor, although I suppose I’ll never know, because our last interaction was this:</p>
 <p>“I’m not going to have WiFi for four more days, so this is the last time we will be able to talk.”</p>
 <p>I sent a sad emoji. “Have fun on your vacation!”</p>
 <p>“Thank you!”</p>
 <p>Several heart emojis ensued, and then I never heard from them again.</p>
 <p>We shared a special interest in the short time that we knew each other, and we laughed at joke posts, and we sent each other funny pictures of Poot. And although I soon befriended other people who liked many of the same things I did, this one person never came back.</p>
 <p>And I grew <em>very, very</em> scared.</p>
 <p>Soon after, I found myself embroiled in the anti-MAP community. Not a hate group against cartographers, but people striving to rid Tumblr of “minor-attracted persons”, a sugarcoated term for what is essentially a pedophile. I made a great deal of internet friends there, but eventually, seeing the same points made over and over again made me tired, and so I distanced myself from the anti-MAP community in hopes of going back to why I joined Tumblr in the first place- to satiate my autistic streak and give my recovering self a reason to wake up in the morning.</p>
 <p>And then I found the otherkin again.</p>
 <p>Otherkinity, if you don’t know, is essentially believing that you have a nonhuman soul inside of a human body. Whether this is due to reincarnation or some weird magic thing I don’t understand is up to the individual person to figure out. I, naturally, found myself falling into the angelkin communty, soon surrounded in my dashboard by fluffy feathers and people whining about how angel names all sounded the same. And then, soon after that, came the dragonkin deluge, and then fictionkin, and then MOGAI hell, and then a person with a thinspo blog followed me. And I started spiralling back down into the dark place I originally found myself in during the 8chan era, but instead of borderline Nazi flags lining the walls, it was “rabiesexual” pride flags and the face of that one white-haired dude from Danganronpa everywhere.</p>
 <p>Remember how, when I had the mental breakdown mid-June, I said that I didn’t want to be beholden to the whims of a game studio half a world away? Because, while I no longer have any fears about accidentally harming myself in the name of “Paloot”, I can’t say the same about the Tumblr kin community. (Kinmunity?)</p>
 <p>It came to the point where, every time I saw something new, a small voice in me wondered, “Am I kin with this?” And a louder voice would yell, “Are you <em>actually</em>, or are you just looking for an excuse to go on a reblogging spree and whore yourself out for more followers?”</p>
 <p>To answer the question: yes. Yes, I was.</p>
 <p>I almost feel bad for popular Tumblr accounts, by the way. Because they have thousands upon thousands of people following them, every eye watching them, they probably feel compelled to post about things that will keep those followers around, not things they they personally want to. An insular group of friends is harder to form and keep up.</p>
 <p>Speaking of insular groups of friends, as much as I hate proprietary software, I eventually found myself making a Discord account to join a server a friend of a close online friend was pestering me to join. I went in, and it was just people spamming pictures of… otters? and complaining about anime. It wasn’t the only time I’d felt pressured to make a Discord- all over Tumblr in the kinmunity were people advertising Discord servers to discuss their kins and special interests. I considered making one in the vague hopes that talking to people on the internet about things I liked would maybe, <em>just maybe</em>, make me feel less alone.</p>
 <p>But I felt more alone in that server, watching the names of people I didn’t know scroll up the screen, than I had before I’d joined tonglr.hell in the first place.</p>
 <p>I’ve noticed, throughout both of my time here and on Tumblr, that there seem to be two different versions of myself co-existing. One that’s writing to you now, that values libre software and only wishes to be with a few exclusive people. The one that does the writing, that does the reading, that aches and burns to be a self-sufficient individual free of influence from and power under any entity.</p>
 <p>We’ll call this version Kadaj, although maybe Kay for short is better, since, as much as it would feel good, I’d like to professionally <em>not</em> be perceived as a fictionkin.</p>
 <p>And then there’s a different version. The one with the special interests and the mentality of a six-year-old. The one that freaks out at the mere mention of college to the point of having a panic attack and crying.</p>
 <p>We’ll call this one Rinea.</p>
 <p>Rinea makes a Discord account and promptly makes a fool of herself, and Kay has trouble sleeping for the rest of the night. Kay entertains the thought of deleting the Tumblr account that led to this whole mess in an attempt to save his mental health, and Rinea throws a hissy fit.</p>
 <p>I won’t preach to you why Tumblr is toxic, because I’m sure <a href="https://thesaplingandthesoul.wordpress.com/2015/06/14/why-im-leaving-tumblr/">you’ve</a> <a href="https://www.theodysseyonline.com/left-tumblr">already</a> <a href="https://www.complex.com/style/2014/07/why-i-quit-tumblr">heard it</a> <a href="https://wherewordsflow.weebly.com/musings/tumblr-is-toxic-heres-why-and-why-you-should-quit">a thousand times before</a>. Accepting myself as queer was and is, in fact, a great help to my mental health. But maybe obsessing over it the whole time isn’t as healthy. And maybe maintaining a meticulous blocklist of tags for things I either didn’t want to see or didn’t care to see wasn’t the most constructive thing to do with my time, either. No matter how many variations of “danganronpa” I blocked, it didn’t stop “Komaeda’s fingers in his ass” posts from showing up, and it nearly drove me insane the same way boyband fangirls in seventh grade gave me a hate boner for a certain musical group I’d like to not ever bring up again.</p>
 <p>It’s almost ironic, isn’t it? In real life, if someone keeps obsessively talking about something I don’t give a damn about, I can turn my head, and maybe they’ll get the point. Or I can cover up my ears, or wear headphones earbuds to block out their noise, or just walk away. But online, on Tumblr, if someone doesn’t tag their posts, there’s no escaping from them short of blocking that person entirely. And then <em>that</em> puts them in a position to write a callout post calling you a coward for not wanting anything to do with them.</p>
 <p>I write books, and I want it to stay that way, not anything else. Not a person who lazily slaps pride flag backgrounds behind characters’ faces and calls it a day and then proceeds to get zero notes. Not someone who spends hours upon hours tending to a queue, vetting people to follow and reading longpost after longpost of why this and that is problematic. Making daddy jokes and borderline starting an online fight club in someone’s inbox might be absolutely hilarious in the short term, but is it really worth the long-term embarrassment in the long run?</p>
 <p>Is the version of myself my Tumblr friends know the version of myself I want to be?</p>
 <p>Maybe I won’t leave Tumblr again. Maybe I’ll stay. But if I stay, it’s going to be because it genuinely helps me become a better person, not because of whatever number of followers I’ve gained, not because it’ll hurt my internet friends’ feelings. If they won’t put in the effort to stay in touch on some other platform, then they were really never my friends at all.</p>
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 <b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b>
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  <p><b>wasted</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 8-19-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>The entirety of today was wasted. My family woke me up at six in the morning so that my father could go early to some sports competition. There was nothing for anyone who wasn’t competing to do other than stay in a cold building, and we even got kicked out of that after a few hours so that some dudes who were smoking could have lunch in peace. And outside wasn’t any better, because there wre just more people smoking. And then I almost died of thirst, and we hightailed it through a Subway after my brothers had a hissy fit over where we were going to eat for lunch.</p>
 <p>A convention of disgusting people, basically. A flower growing in the middle of a murky swamp. Everywhere smells like someone just ripped a nasty fart, and you’re fourteen hours away from the closest place to take a shower and nuke your entire skin of all the collective filth of humanity.</p>
 <p>Some day, I will never have to go to an athletic competition again. I will be free.</p>
 <p>Some day, I will be alive.</p>
 <p>But I’m a good fourth of the way through my next book, so that’s a plus, I guess. Or is it a third? I don’t know. I don’t know anything that’s going on anymore. I got locked out of my FAFSA account, and I had to call a government phone number to ask a nice lady to reset everything, and I almost had a panic attack when she said that it would take seven to ten days to verify everything. But granted, I’ve been panicking at a lot lately. College, my body dysphoria, the impending sense that shit is about to hit the fan in my household and that I need to flee to somewhere, to <em>anywhere</em> that isn’t where I am right now.</p>
 <p>I take back what I said about otherkin a long time ago. Most of them are lovely people, and I’ve made more friends in the past few days than in the past three months before that, and, by the looks of things, I probably am one too. But who knows anymore? Flash back to third grade, the year where I wrote a four-page “book” and tried to use it in a book report and the whole class laughed at me, and if you told the me then that I’d have five full-length novels written before I even started college…</p>
 <p>Maybe things would have been different. More hopeful, maybe. Not seeking validation in the schoolmates that would disappear like the smoke off all the cigarettes I saw today.</p>
 <p>My high school yearbook serves as a damn good mousepad, but it’s nothing but cursed otherwise.</p>
 <p>Maybe this day isn’t so wasted, after all. I started some digital cleaning. I started getting my priorities straight. And I wrote something.</p>
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  <p><b>a quixotic tomb, where light lives forevermore</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 12-7-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
  
 <blockquote>
 Staring down the barrel of a 45<br />
 Swimming through the ashes of another life<br />
 There is no real reason<br />
 To accept the way things have changed...
 </blockquote>

 <p>About six months ago, after I graduated from high school- and perhaps earlier, although exam stress probably kept me from seeing it- I fell into a deep state of anhedonia. Anhedonia, to the unaware, is an inability to feel pleasure, or to derive pleasure from actions that one used to gain great joy from. A condition adjacent to, and one of the major symptoms of, depression. This was a few months after looking through the list of cock.li email domains and discovering 8chan and getting pulled into a world of people complaining nonstop about the sickness of bloat festering in modern-day technology. It lasted until I moved into college at the end of August, where I no longer had the option of consciously opting out of nonfree software with no consequences and had to stay glued to a school-given Gmail account to survive.</p>

 <p>For whatever reason, during those dark three months, I became hung up on striving to completely cut out X11, or the Unix graphical software, from my computing life. I wanted to live completely in the terminal. Part of it was for previously stated reasons- better battery life on my soykaf laptop, less bloat, better focus instead of all the bells and whistles of graphical interfaces distracting me. But I think, in another sense, it was because the teletype is a lonely place to live. Even with Byobu to hug the edges of the screen, it's still an inky void staring at you. It's the closest that a layperson can get to the &quot;soul&quot; of the computer.</p>

 <p>And without a sense of pleasure to push me forward in life, one better believe that the void was on my mind a lot.</p>

 <p>And while I don't want to actively bury myself anymore, and I can feel something like happiness again, I can't exactly say that things have improved on the technology level. I can't seem to reconcile my desire to return to that misty strange dimension with the feeling that I'd be all alone- even though shell communities like <a href="https://sdf.org">sdf.org</a> and <a href="https://tilde.town">tilde.town</a> have plenty of people who share the sentiment that the modern web has gotten way out of hand and also share programs and networks where I'd be able to talk with these people, where I'd be able to make friends who'd encourage me to stay here, where I feel the most safe. Sometimes the desire for friends wins out, and I end up with fiascos like the Lucine saga, where I have to decide if the mess of trying to pull out of these harmful communities is worth the benefit of not being surveilled anymore by the megacorporations who own the platforms we met on.</p>

 <p>It almost always is worth the mess in the long run, but in that moment, it feels even more painful than just staying here in the misty strange dimension of teletype land and feeling sorry for myself.</p>

 <p>Which was why I was slightly scared and yet excited to learn about the gophersphere, or a loosely-connected association of websites that use the Gopher protocol instead of HTTP. There were three things that immediately stuck out to me:</p>

 <ol>
 <li><p>It forces everything to be organized. There are no such things as Gopherholes (slang for a Gopher website) that run in a single frame and never expose their subdirectories. You navigate through Gopherholes just like you would navigate through a folder on your computer. Folders can have metadata attached to them, like a short description of what's in the folder or a fancy navigation menu, but at the most basic level, you're greeted with a list of folders and whatever files are in that current folder.</p></li>
 <li><p>It's entirely text-based. You can upload images to a Gopherhole, along with literally any other kind of file, but they open as separate files. You cannot embed images or scripts or videos in a Gopherhole page. Most phloggers (the Gopher equivalent of bloggers) resort to using ASCII art instead, which fucks up screenreaders, but looks pretty to everyone else.</p></li>
 <li><p>Despite the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)#Origins">original Gopher software</a> being ancient as hell, there is still an active community of Gopher users and phloggers scattered around the web. Most of them seem to be concentrated at the SDF, but tiny little servers such as <a href="gopher://circumlunar.space:70">the Zaibatsu</a> exist as well with a dedicated userbase.</p></li>
 </ol>

 <p>One of my most vivid memories from that quixotic time was during the vacation to the Grand Canyon. I remember sitting in the window seat next to my brother, resting my head against the window and trying to fall asleep to the <i>Serial Experiments Lain</i> soundtrack. I think, had I known about Gopher back then, I would have been a little more optimistic about the state of the world. I would have had something concrete to run <em>to</em> instead of turning to strangers on Tumblr for validation.</p>

 <hr />

 <p>After the Lucine saga, and after I was harassed off Neocities, I needed somewhere other than my RSS feed to notify people of new posts. I needed somewhere stable that I could announce new website mirrors if wherever I decided to flee to wanted nothing to do with me. So I picked up <a href="https://keybase.io/mayvaneday">Keybase</a>, which allowed me to verify which mirrors were actually owned and operated by me, but that didn't have any social aspect to it- and besides, I hate centralization. So I joined <a href="https://witches.live/@mayvaneday">my first Mastodon instance</a>, which served me well for a time, until the admin decided to <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20181206232240/https://jorts.horse/users/anna/statuses/101090245046365157">ban-evade on a different instance</a> in order to yell at someone else for not being a tankie. So I switched to <a href="https://sunbeam.city/@palutena">Sunbeam City</a>, where everything went swell until a popular user tooted &quot;all white people are worthless&quot;. I understand that it was meant to be directed at white nationalists and Nazis, who truly <i>are</i> worthless, but given that the corner of Mastodon I was in was known for people openly venting about their bad mental health days, blanket statements like that seem really irresponsible and easily misinterpreted and might accidentally push an otherwise-alright leftist who is white to suicide.</p>

 <p>Which I tooted, and then immediately got pounced on for &quot;defending white nationalists&quot;, despite explicitly stating that my concern <em>excluded</em> race-based asshats as such, so clearly the collective reading comprehension of the fediverse isn't much better than discourse-infested Tumblr.</p>

 <p>Right now, I'm on <a href="https://ilovela.in/@seliph">ilovela.in</a>, and it's an alright place. A very tiny community, mostly consisting of me, tA, lunarised, vala, and other people whose aliases I haven't yet committed to memory. It would probably feel better if I <del>thanosed</del> halved my list of people I'm following to make my home timeline much less chaotic, but even then, it probably wouldn't fix that, recently, Firefox has been spiking to 100% CPU usage with even <em>one</em> tab open. <a href="https://brutaldon.online">Brutaldon</a> is an option, but not really viable with such a large following list since the timeline constantly jumps around. But after that, <i>maybe</i> it would be a huge step in moving, perhaps permanently, back into the misty strange dimension.</p>

 <p>But maybe my choice in fediverse clients isn't the problem. Maybe it's in the fediverse itself. Because, recently, Tumblr <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20181206020003/https://support.tumblr.com/post/180758979032/updates-to-tumblrs-community-guidelines">updated its Terms of Service</a> to pretty much ban all sexually explicit content from the website in a move to try to appease the Apple overlords into letting their app back onto the Apple App Store. So a huge flood of Tumblr users sought refuge in Mastodon, which was great for the shitposters, but not so great for the already-existing Mastodon culture. In the few days since the Tumblr exodus, all sorts of things that should have been tagged- and would have been had such posts been made by the people who'd assimilated- went into the federated timeline, a sort of &quot;firehose&quot; of all the posts made on all the instances that the instance you're currently on can see. Untagged porn, vents, current politics...</p>

 <p>The corner of the fediverse I inhabit has, inevitably, gotten Eternal Septembered. A small trickle of users would have been fine, as there would have been more than enough pressure for them to actually learn the social rules of the fediverse and generally not make asshats of themselves. But all at once, and the focus is instead on trying to wrangle them into not accidentally DDoSing everything and desperately get more moderators onto the bigger instances to keep the tumblrites from turning everything into a shit-flinging contest. I don't want the Tumblr kin culture here (kin themselves are fine, as long as they're not obnoxious); I don't want the Tumblr discourse culture here; I don't want internet celebrities to come to the fediverse and demand that everyone lick the shit off their boots.</p>

 <p>I don't want everything to move at the speed of light. I want a calm, tranquil lake with my friends. I want a single rock thrown into the water to make a <em>plop</em> and ripple waves out across the surface, instead of a hailstorm that just makes everything a blender and crushes us all to death.</p>

 <p>Maybe a good purge of my Mastodon account is what I need to do next, so I don't lose my mind.</p>

 <p>Maybe the Zaibatsu is where I need to go next, so I don't lose my feet.</p>

 <p>The green of the world above, and the purple of the world below.</p>

 <p>And maybe you and I will convene somewhere in the middle.</p>

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 <p align="center"><b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b></p>
 <p><b>a shatter down the hall</b></p>
 <p><b>published: 12-27-2018</b></p>
 <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>I've been drifting from phlog to phlog the past few days. I think it was a post by the illustrious <a href="gopher://baud.baby/0/phlog/fs20181106.txt">cat</a> of FAX SEX that pushed me to trawl through the <a href="gopher://sdf.org/1/users">SDF user index</a> in search of some active phlogs.</p>
 <p>The first thing you see is the sheer enormity of the index. My posts rarely go beyond three pages in fullscreen on Lynx, but the SDF user index has a whopping twenty-one pages, all sorted in alphabetical order.</p>
 <p>The second thing you notice is that almost all of the directories are... abandoned. Some people never put anything in their Gopher directories; some put only an &quot;under construction&quot; or &quot;test&quot; file in the index and left it at that. It's common to go entire pages without seeing one updated in the past year. Some have even stood abandoned since 2003, if they have any files in them at all.</p>
 <p>The SDF prides itself on being one of, if not <em>the</em>, oldest publix UNIX systems around. But what's the point on being old if there's barely anyone left? Just a bunch of hermits, repelling prospective members away when they see there's barely anything left?</p>
 <p>I won't bother you with the tales of the SDF's spotty administration; cat's post above already goes in far more detail, and I wasn't there to witness any of it anyway. But I'm going to start mirroring the few remnants I can find onto my own gopherhole, just in case the SDF does come crashing down one day and takes three decades of internet history with it.</p>
 <p>In other news, my experiment in setting up as many fediverse alts as possible to evade censorship, both via suspensions and instance blocks, failed spectacularly. A while back, the <a href="https://freespeechextremist.com/users/p">admin of the Pleroma instance Free Speech Extremist</a> followed me out of the blue. Immediately, warning bells went off in my head- free speech-type instances on the fediverse inevitably end up being a buzzing hive of MAGA chuds. But <span class="citation">@p</span> seemed to be a pretty chill dude, and he wasn't spouting off slurs every five posts like I've come to expect from the right-wing side of the fediverse, so I followed him back, and we existed as alright mutuals for a while.</p>
 <p>I joined his instance, and immediately I was met with a certain bible-thumping reply guy calling me a f*ggot and chucking ad-hominems at me like we were on a sinking ship and dumping cargo in a desperate attempt to stay alive. Not that I'm angry at him, or personally hurt- just disappointed that I ventured into this relative great unknown (since most of the instances I was on before had instance-blocked FSE wholesale), expecting to find god-tier bantering and forbidden knowledge that would make any communist shrink back in fear, and I only found vitriol in return.</p>
 <p><em>Maybe</em> my expectations were a little too high. It's not the admin's fault, of course; he does a sufficient job of keeping actually illegal stuff off his instance, and his rules seem to be enforced fairly and consistently. <del>If he's reading this right now, you're doing great work, and I wish you all the best.</del> <b>(EDIT 1-3-2018: Actually, never mind. He decided to set up a <a href="https://wagesofsinisdeath.com/users/ReadTheBible">Westboro Baptist Church-themed instance</a> to harass others in the pursuit of "becoming the most blocked instance on the fediverse." What a loser.)</b> But the effort that I would have to put in to make FSE a pleasant place to spend my time would be better spent elsewhere.</p>
 <p>And then I realized something:</p>
 <p>What's the point of social media if you're not going to be social on it?</p>
 <p>So I got rid of most of my other alts. I doubt anyone was sad to see me go, especially since one of the instances was nigh-abandoned and the admin apparently hadn't shown up since the beginning of October. I'm down to five now: my angelkin bot, my mains both on the Mastodon and Pleroma versions of ILL, a backup on hidden.blue, and the SDF one I use exclusively for blog updates. The communities on these are either near-nonexistent, only interact with me like I were one of their colleagues, or are run by one of my friends.</p>
 <p>Despite the stable nature of this arrangement, I understand that nothing is set in stone. The SDF could kick me off anytime, or I could have a falling-out with my chippie friends, or someone I used to know could come guns blazing with a fake callout post and smear me beyond any defense. Not that I expect to, but I once thought I would be friends forever with my former kinnie group, to the point where I was making arrangements to escape to live with one of them.</p>
 <p>To mangle the words of <a href="gopher://grex.org:70/0/~papa/pgphlog/2018/alm-Antisocial_Media_Manifesto">the Antisocial Media Manifesto</a>: the process of asserting one's freedom on the internet, whether that be freedom from surveillance or freedom to choose one's association or lack therof, is never-ending. There is no permanent safe haven for us in this world.</p>
 <p>One must be prepared to flee at a moment's notice if the need arises.</p>
 <p>One must not be afraid of death and the rebirth to follow.</p>
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 <p><b>digital sugar</b></p>
 <p><b>published: 12-26-2018</b></p>
 <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>Holidays are 1% dealing with my family's bullshit and 99% waiting for the event to happen so that I can brace myself to deal with said bullshit. That means a lot of time spent sitting in front of my computer, or my phone, or a little self-bound book with a few colored pencils in hand. It means a lot of browsing, searching for the next thing to wake me from my stupor, or at least give me an idea to write about.</p>
 <p>I recently came across a <a href="gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7eyargo/glog/./t17550.txt">post</a> by a fellow sundog at the Zaibatsu. It's about digital sugar, or the online equivalent of the white powder that almost every single American (including myself) is addicted to- clickbait videos, sensational drama on the fediverse, unnecessary podcasts, anything else that gives one instant gratification. Much like candy, it tastes good now, but too much of it and one feels sick to the stomach and unfulfilled.</p>
 <p>I've resolved to keep my combined following/followers on any one account to under four hundred. Any more than that, and I run the risk of either:</p>
 <ol>
 <li><p>Having a timeline so clogged that using Brutaldon or any other &quot;lightweight&quot; client becomes unbearable to use, and I start suffering FOMO because the timelines move quicker than a rushing river, or</p></li>
 <li><p>Attaining &quot;clout&quot; and becoming a toxic internet celebrity that everyone wants to suck off for the cherished Follow instead of, you know, treating me like an actual human being with faults and flaws of my own.</p></li>
 </ol>
 <p>Much like eating too many sugary products leads to an increased risk of diabetes and obesity, so does too much digital sugar lead to sensory overload, wasted time, and feelings of inadequacy. There simply aren't enough hours in the day for me to listen to every single podcast that I might be tangentially interested in. There isn't enough space in my monkeysphere for me to care about every single little thing that happens with people who I don't even remember why I followed them.</p>
 <p>And, if anything, I already know I don't like the feeling of being overweight.</p>
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 <b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b>
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  <p><b>why is most documentation so bloated?</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 12-6-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>The past few weeks, I've been doing an awful lot of thinking about disability and accessibility. I used to be friends with a person (someone from the Lucine saga, although I won't say exactly who) who knew that he would eventually go blind and was already preparing for that. Throughout the past month in my Reproductive Tech class here at college, we've been talking about disabled people and the struggles they often face in society. And- of course- I'm autistic myself.</p>

 <p>Accessibility is kind of a big deal. The vast majority of people who will read this probably have decent eyesight, and would have the hearing required to listen if I ever decided to branch out into videos or music instead of just plaintext. (There's a 99% chance that I won't, but that's a post for another day.) For blind people, we have image descriptions and screen readers. For deaf people, we have subtitles and transcripts and that annoying feature on smartphones where the flashlight flashes every time you get a notification and temporarily blinds everyone in the vicinity.</p>

 <p>Accessibility is important for people with "invisible" disabilities, as well. Anxious users trying to fill out web forms might benefit from simple structuring in pages and frequent reassuring that they are, in fact, going to the right place for whatever they need help with. Users with depression or executive dysfunction would benefit greatly from especially stable software that only crashes rarely, if at all, because if they pour a significant amount of time into a task and then that task crashes and takes all their work to the gutter with it, they might not have the mental energy to return to whatever task they were trying to do. And that would help users with attention disorders- gods know it's taking them a great amount of willpower to focus on something; if they get interrupted with a crash and have to do it all over again, they might not have the energy to refocus and redo their work.</p>

 <p>Which brings me to the titular question: <b>why is most documentation so bloated?</b></p>

 <p>I'm currently taking a class called Computer Science I. The required textbook is a <del>thicc</del> thick slab of 1% actual examples of what they're trying to illustrate and 99% wordy explanations as to how one would arrive at the example. Which blows, because I don't learn by sitting through boring lectures- I take an example and reverse-engineer it to figure out how it runs on its own. Sit me down in front of a computer with Unity and a manual and I couldn't make a video game in a thousand years, but sit me in front of my favorite video game and I'll start infodumping about all the little quirks I've noticed in the software and how the game mechanics work and even a rough imagining of the data types and if/whens and while loops contained within. A rudimentary understanding of the code within, even if it's proprietary and the source will never see the light of day.</p>

 <p>When I'm having a mental breakdown and rushing to get a coding project done, I don't want to have to wade through all the explanations of how the code works. I want a known-good working example I can tweak to my own workings, and I want it up front. If I ever feel like reading the wordy documentations, I should be able to scroll down a bit and get to all of them, but only when I have the time to.</p>

 <p>For example: I was working earier today on <a href="https://validator.w3.org/nu/?doc=https%3A%2F%2Fmayvaneday.keybase.pub%2F">getting my website to validate</a>. It yelled at me for forgetting to set the document language and pointed me to a documentation page. But <a href="https://www.w3.org/International/techniques/authoring-html#textprocessing">that page</a> was full of links, which broke without Javascript, and those links were <i>actually</i> pop-down menus holding more links, and <a href="https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-html-language-declarations">two pages later</a>, I finally found the relevant tag- hidden under a bunch of explanatory text.</p>

 <p>I'd love to write a replacement for that brick of a textbook, one more suited for attention-deficit people, one with the scales tipped (pun intended ;) ) in favor of examples instead of extraneous explanations. Wouldn't that be a nice manual to read? Would certainly have saved me a lot of time.</p>
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  <p><b>dogpiling</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 12-20-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>On the third of October, I signed into Neocities to find a myriad of comments accusing me of being homophobic with no real evidence to back that up. When I proceeded to delete the comments to clean up my page, I was immediately pounced on for "censorship", and then the accusations continued until I eventually packed up my bags and deleted my account. Without so much as an opportunity to explain myself or even find out where the accusations had come from, I was effectively homeless on the internet.</p>

 <p>So one would think that I would know how to spot dogpiling. Except, for some reason, I haven't. I was complicit in allowing a popular user, Nutt Godd, to be run off the fediverse about a month ago. He eventually came back, this time with his own fediverse instance, but the damage to his reputation was already done, and he's still struggling to get back up on his feet.</p>

 <p>I don't have the full details of the incident, since it happened when I was asleep- as all good things on the fediverse do- but from what I've pieced together, one night, Nutt Godd was musing about one of his favorite rappers, who was a sexual abuser along with a laundry list of other shitty things, and how the knowledge of what said rapper did conflicted with how he liked the rapper's music. Several users mistook this as somehow promoting rape culture and decided to stir up a shitstorm.</p>

 <p>While I never sent Nutt Godd any nasty messages, or even interacted with him while the shitstorm was raging, I did give some of the accusers attention, which was essentially the same thing as participating in the abuse. And while I don't particularly harbor any sentiment for fediverse personalities with large following like Mr. Godd's, it's still a shitty thing to grab the pitchforks and torches and run someone out of shitposting town without giving them the chance to explain themselves.</p>

 <p>I think I need to cut back on my time on the fediverse. Nutt Godd's downfall wasn't the only piece of drama to ever rustle everyone's jimmies: kin discourse hit almost immediately after Tumblr announced its NSFW ban and a mass of users migrated over, which caused me to lose a few long-standing friends even though I said little to nothing on the matter. And since I landed in the communist side of the fediverse upon my arrival, distangling myself from the red ideology just seems to get messier and messier.</p>

 <p>I do love being in the Wired. To write for myself who I am instead of giving my biology the reins and letting my genes do as they please. But the people one surrounds oneself with is just as important as the person themselves. The more brainspace I devote to the latest flavor of discourse, the less brainspace I have for other things which matter far more to me, like writing and hanging out with my genuine friends. (Shoutout to my fellow chippies!)</p>

 <p>I don't want to be the reason why someone feels unsafe on the fediverse. I don't want to be the reason why someone feels the need to abandon ship and isolate themselves even further.</p>
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 <p><b>hermitry</b></p>
 <p><b>published: 12-25-2018</b></p>
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 <p>I think one day I'd like to be a hermit. Much like Ikky in <em>The Viridian Shipping Company</em>, I'd like my own little piece of land out in the middle of nowhere, little to no interference from the outside world for plenty of miles around. Ikky practically had xir own planet all to xirself- Bryhista was a cold and undead planet, a never-ending tundra where feral Tailtiutians (shape-shifters descended from cryptids) were transported in order to live out the rest of their natural lives as their animal selves, the ability to become human again lost forever. Naturally, very few humans would want to live in such a place where monstrous and terrifyingly powerful entities roamed around as they pleased, so Ikky practically had as much land as xe wanted.</p>
 <p>But the only place I can think of where I'd get the same kind of feeling is the old cabin Up North. The farmhouse is long since rotted away, and the surrounding land sold to pay off part of the colossal debt that my paternal grandparents left behind. But there's still a little bit that still belongs to us, inhabited by my aging paternal great-grandfather and a few other adults with nebulous relations to me.</p>
 <p>The only problems I'd really have are getting money, food, and electricity. It's easy to just say that I'd grow everything myself, but my current home is smack-dab in the middle of Farm Territory, and even with the sprawling fields that they have, they don't make enough food to sustain themselves without selling it at profit and buying other food. Not to mention I'm not in the best shape, and being sweaty almost immediately sends me into a sensory meltdown.</p>
 <p>And there isn't much, if anything, that I'm good at that could easily be translated into profit under capitalism. I can bring computers back to life, but Windows makes me feel so icky that I have to immediately take a shower afterwards. And I can write, but having to write sensational clickbait pieces might as well propel me back into the anhedonia days, becoming the very purveyor of <a href="digital-sugar.html">digital sugar</a> that I sought to avoid, if not destroy. And my art skills aren't nearly up to par with artists that can actually sustain themselves on their craft alone. If they even exist, of course.</p>
 <p>Money withstanding, I'd love to be a hermit. No more having to deal with my brothers blasting the new shitty <em>Boss Baby</em> cartoon the next room over and then getting yelled at when I ask them to please turn it down. No more of my father randomly bursting into the guest room where I'm working and sitting down on the bed and carrying on with his business, invading my personal space under false pretenses of &quot;spending quality time&quot; when he'd get the message to go away and leave me to my business if there was an actual lock installed on the door. No more being shamed by my asshole uncle for the heinous act of... liking things.</p>
 <p>No more being misgendered to my face, that's for sure. Nobody knows you're not an ethereal entity on the Wired.</p>
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 <p><b>mouths in the wired</b></p>
 <p><b>published: 12-30-2018</b></p>
 <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <blockquote>
 You're somethin' else, to be able to translate your real world form so well here into the Wired... At my user level, this is the best I can do. Most people can only manage ears.
 </blockquote>
 <p>I don't know whether to be envious or pitiful of the people who are able to almost completely keep the internet out of their lives. It's like a horseshoe: on one end, you have the &quot;normies&quot; who might unironically ask what an operating system is, and the elderly people who never learned how to use any kind of computer in the first place; on the other end of the horseshoe, you have the ultra-techies who've been so roughed up and frayed by the Wired that they seek to do as much offline as possible, whether that be on a computer or in real life. In the middle of the horseshoe are the &quot;normies&quot; who <em>are</em> on the internet, but all they're aware of is Facebook or Twitter or Instagram and a handful of news sites, completely oblivious to the rest of the world wide web that binds us all.</p>
 <p>The vast majority of people on the internet are there to listen, not to create anything meaningful, anything that would stand the test of time. A bunch of ears without identity, receiving but never giving in return. Occasionally, at a slightly higher level, the ears morph into mouths and speak- but words are meaningless when there's no ears to listen, just spewing words out into a void as if they were any more important than the next mouth's words.</p>
 <p>By this, I don't mean that the world of art is being saturated; far from it. But a blog post lovingly crafted over the course of three days, or a poem, or a quick little ditty on a Gopher phlog are inherently more valuable than, say, a throwaway Facebook post, made one day and forgotten the next.</p>
 <p>I do honestly hope that the era of social media is dying before our eyes. With the constant parade of Facebook's scandals, and Tumblr's recent ban on all NSFW material, and Twitter's refusal to moderate their platform in any meaningful way, things on the &quot;normie&quot; side seem to be getting shittier and shittier. The human brain is simply not equipped to deal with hundreds upon hundreds of new people flashing by at the speed of light every single moment of every day- and these websites host <em>millions!</em> It's barely social anymore, even on the fediverse. Instead of interacting with people, I just search the federated timelines for &quot;good&quot; toots to boost. Strangers to validate with effortless buttons, everyone in search of the next hit of dopamine, for the next droplet of serotonin to make them feel blissful in such a fruitful wasteland.</p>
 <p><a href="https://tilde.town">Tilde.town</a> seemed so lonely when I first joined. Lots of things to do, and yet so little direction to go- at least, on the SDF, it was upfront that nearly everything was locked behind ARPA membership. But a quick dip into the internal IRC network and the bulletin board, and a few Gopher phlogs crawled later, and it feels like I've discovered a hidden cavern of crystal. Tildeverses are <em>intentional communities</em>, purposely kept small and active so people get to know each other and form meaningful relationships instead of drive-by likes that mean nothing in the grand scheme of things.</p>
 <p>I think, in the grand scheme of things, intentional communities like this might be the next refuge from the ever-encroaching grime of social media. The "social" aspect, without the dark patterns that morph everyone into rude clout-chasers just seeking that next boost or like.</p>
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  <p><b>you don't own me, assholes</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 12-14-2018</b></p>
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 <p>In the bottom of my clothes dresser lies a gray and orange shirt. I don't remember when exactly I got it- I think my parents might have forced me to get it during high school orientation, or maybe it was earlier- but it has &quot;We Are (city name)&quot; in big orange letters on the front and &quot;Class of 2018&quot; on the back. Except the front says &quot;We Are<b>n't</b> (city name)&quot;, the emphasis added with shaky black permanent marker that's faded over the years.</p>

 <p>School spirit celebrations post-elementary school were complete and utter soykaf. If there were no major suspensions, then the higher-ups would hire a DJ to blast everyone's ears out during lunch in the tiny cafeteria. I vividly remember standing in the alternate line, trying to get a shitty peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, and then a gaggle of girls crowded around the DJ and proceeded to throw their backs out doing the Harlem Shake. And then there were Friend Days, where I'd purposely go out of my way to sit somewhere secluded so I wouldn't be disturbed, and then some ninth-grade white girl with perfect teeth and a letter jacket full of athletic patches would sit by me anyway and force me into a conversation, regardless if I was verbal that day or not. Come high school, I just skipped all the pep fests I could and hung out in the classrooms of whatever teachers were feeling sympathetic that day and would let me hide.</p>

 <p>My exit questionaires that every student has to fill out before finals keep asking me the same goddamn questions. <em>Do you feel respected by your teachers? Do you feel respected by your peers? Was the coursework more challenging than you expected it to be? Would you recommend this class to a friend or prospective student?</em></p>

 <p><em>Do you feel like you belong here?</em></p>

 <p>What's the point in taking pride in an academic institution? I wasn't there when my college was founded. I wasn't even a sperm in my father's ballsack yet. I had no part in dreaming it up, or creating it, or filling it with money-hungry individuals who only give a shit about my health so long as it means I'll get to class regularly. All I contributed was a large coerced sum of money and my mental health.</p>

 <p>Am I supposed to be proud of this? Am I supposed to be proud of languishing in an institution where my worth is determined by a few numbers on a screen? Am I supposed to brand myself as one of their products, like a piece of cattle handed its own branding iron?</p>

 <p>There's a flatscreen TV hanging outside the offices to the math and computer science department professors. It runs on a constant slideshow. &quot;CARE&quot;, one of the slides proclaims, one of the many faculty groups on campus whose full name I can't remember. &quot;Empowering (college name) students to thrive <b>academically</b>.&quot; (Emphasis mine.) It's the &quot;academically&quot; part I can't get past- who cares about all the other stuff I can do outside of the classroom? What does it matter that I've already written five books in my short life, that I taught myself a great deal of Python before I ever stepped foot in a college, that I practically already have the skills necessary for the job I want(ed)? Who cares that I'm a friend, a lover, a brother? It's just the grades that matter. F means Failure at Life, and A means Acceptable for Capitalism.</p>

 <p>If you're from my college, and you know who I am, I have no loyalty to you. I feel no sentimentality for the institution that threw me back to anhedonia-era levels of depression just when I was finally starting to recover. I would turn my back and leave in a heartbeat if I knew that it wouldn't immediately financially fuck up myself and my family.</p>

 <p>Despite these shackles on my wrists, you don't own me, and you never did.</p>

 <hr>

 <p>With that being said, I don't know exactly where to go from here. I wanted to be a computer systems administrator- like lots of people on the fediverse are already, taking care of a system and making sure that the people who use it don't turn the place into <del>Fortnite</del> a Battle Royale and all kill each other and then nuke the server. But the current state of colleges seems to be churning out more and more employees for Google and Facebook and the like. I don't want to work for surveillance capitalism- I want to dedicate my life to <em>fighting</em> it! But that's <em>not profitable</em> in this current climate, apparently. If I'm not learning about Big Data and Big Companies, then I'm Big Worthless.</p>

 <p>I don't think a communications major would take me down that path. I'm loathe to follow in my father's footsteps, but... with the focus on writing, I'd be free to pursue computer-y things at my own pace, without having a mental breakdown over not being able to write Python Text Facebook with three days left to go before the entire assignment turns into a Big Zero. I'm already more than proficient at writing- I should be able to ride on that... right?</p>

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  <p><b>I don't particularly like Pokemon</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 12-23-2018</b></p>
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 <p>I don't particularly like Pokemon, as you could hopefully tell by the title. I don't hate it; there's just... something that rubs me the wrong way whenever I see one.</p>

 <p>A *lot* of things that rub me the wrong way, actually, now that I think of it.</p>

 <ol>
 <li>Towards the end of the Lucine saga (before everything went tits up), for whatever reason, I was bored with the state of my identity, so I went searching for more things to kin. I thought Arceus looked kinda cool, and he had a white-and-gold aesthetic, and I instantly fell in love. So it was a clear logical leap from that to "I was literally this in a past life." So now, whenever someone summons him in Smash during a fight, I get a reminder of that little pocket of time when the world was confusing and the world wasn't mine.</li>

 <li>The skin textures rub me the wrong way. It wasn't so much of a problem in the older games, where everything was pixellized to hell, but in Smash? I just don't understand how Charizard can be so... smooth. And what's up with the weird proportioning of Incineroar's body? It's jarring seeing a furry wrestler walking towards you and it looks like the lower half of his body was shrunken by the lightning item while his upper half remains intact. And what about Pokemon anatomy? Do they have bones and flesh like us? Do they bleed when they're hurt? Or are they just amalgamations of... some kind of plasticky substance that happened to take a specific form?</li>

 <li>It's a gateway to capitalist exploitation. Especially with the older games, if you wanted to play with multiple people, you had to buy more than one copy of the same game. And it's not enough to buy just that- since games are released in pairs, you have to get the matching one too if you want to get *all* of the Pokemon. And once you do get your hands on the games, and you manage to play all the way through and beat the final boss, there's not much else to do other than collect one of each kind of critter in the Pokedex. Just collect, collect, collect. Like hoarders do, except it's somehow more acceptable since it's in digital form. And with the card game, you don't see exactly which cards are in a pack (at least, last time I bought one) since the packaging's completely opaque. Either you get lucky and end up with one card that you want and a bunch of ones that are essentially junk, or you get all junk cards. More and more cards that you don't want, and more and more of your money down the drain.</li>
 <ol>
 <p>I don't hate Pokemon. I still have fond memories of sitting in my first house as a kindergartener, waiting for my dad to come down to the living room so we could play a quick round of the card game. And of course, one could pick any game out of the void and make these exact same complaints, albeit tweaked a bit since not every game has the same mechanics. But if the franchise's main slogan is literally promoting obsessive hoarding, then I have to stop and give pause.</p>
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 <p><b>the right to silence</b></p>
 <p><b>published: 12-24-2018</b></p>
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 <p>Silence is golden, we were taught as little kids. Sit down, shut up, listen to the teacher. Only speak when we're spoken to, or if we raise our hands first and are then given permission to open our mouths and make some noise we all collectively agree to comprehend.</p>
 <p>I'm not talking about the need for oneself to be silent, self-made mute- rather, the right to have a silent place to be, free from sensory disruptions, a place where one can think without being interrupted by some inconsiderate asshole making exploding noises in the next room over because the walls are thin as cheese.</p>
 <p>For some people, this is a room in the basement- an office, at least as long as people remember to shut the basement door behind them when they go upstairs. Or it's a college dorm room, until someone starts a drunken riot downstairs during a party and gets Campus Security called on them. Or it's a bedroom, peaceful until one's brothers start blasting the shitty new <i>Boss Baby</i> cartoon the next room over and you can hear every single word and any requests to turn it down are just met with yelling and turning it up even louder.</p>
 <p>With a quiet place to think, one can study or write or do whatever they need to do without the extra mental strain of having to filter out external sensory disruptions. It frees the brain to do more without having to fester in fear of being disrupted without warning.</p>
 <p>I think I'd like to be a hermit one day. This world is too loud for me to think.</p>
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 <p><b>text will stand the test of time</b></p>
 <p><b>published: 12-28-2018</b></p>
 <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>Hundreds, if not thousands of years from now, if we somehow survive whatever catastrophe that climate change brings, archaeologists will be trying to piece together the last remnants of the civilization that you and I lived in. They will be sifting through our cultural artifacts, minds racked with headaches as they attempt to make sense of all of the chaos.</p>
 <p>Long after your music files have degraded from bitrot, and the codecs that power your video files have been superseded ten times over and are no longer supported, and your heavily formatted word documents have succumbed to the inevitable corruption from being juggled among too many versions of different office suites, plain text will still shine bright and clear. Easy to backup on plain paper, readable by any text editor, barely taking up any space at all to the point of multiple backups being trivial.</p>
 <p>For the deaf, videos are often transcribed to plain text for use as subtitles. For the blind, plain text can be read aloud with a screenreader. Plain text can easily be given dark or light themes to help with sensory overload, and when printed and laminated or otherwise sealed from the elements, the information it contains can be a life-saving asset when other forms of media don't have the electricity to be retrieved or otherwise fail. Plain text doesn't require an X server to display, thus making it much more accessible to users with low-end devices or headless machines forced to use the teletype only.</p>
 <p>If all of the vowels disappeared from a text document, one would still be able to read most of it and reconstruct the original document. But if bytes disappear at random from a JPEG file, you're fucked. Because of the lossy compression, there is no reliable way to guess what the original bytes were.</p>
 <p>Long live plain text!</p>
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  <p><b>"we're all connected," said lain, with wires dripping down her body</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 12-12-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>Friends are a bit of an anomaly in my brain. An unexpected wrench in the gears, if you will. I can easily deal with people disliking me, usually after I've broken some unspoken social rule that I didn't know about, since it happens so often that I've grown used to it. But the concept of someone coming along and actually <em>liking</em> what I do, and then deciding to freely associate with me and even call me their <em>friend</em>- something in my brain short-circuits.</p>

 <p><em>Someone</em>'s got to be making up bullshit. Maybe they want something out of me, and so they're trying to butter me up and make me more pliable? Or maybe they're actually collecting &quot;receipts&quot; on me and just attempting to fly under the radar so I won't suspect that they're making a callout post about everything wrong I've ever done in my life.</p>

 <p>An unhealthy suspicion of everyone who treats me kindly on the internet is, well, <em>unhealthy</em>, but it's saved my skin from more situations than I can count. If it hadn't been for extensively using Tor and Whonix during the Lucine saga, shit could have hit the fan so much harder than it did, and I probably owe my life to such anonymizing technologies. I don't want to leave a trace where I go, because that means there's contingencies when shit hits the fan on whatever platform I'm currently using and I need to leave at a moment's notice. There's people who'll be concerned about my mental health and whereabouts and people who'll be confused and sad and might think I &quot;ghosted&quot; them, perhaps for nefarious reasons.</p>

 <p>But yet... every person wants friends. Every person wants people they can trust, people they can depend on, people they can turn to in catastrophe.</p>

 <p>Every person wants to be liked by <em>someone.</em></p>

 <p>I have some friends on <a href="https://ilovela.in">my home fediverse instance</a>. >@tA, @lunarised, @NotAnElfie, @vala, and a handful others that are rarely active enough for me to catch them on the federated timeline. At least, I would consider them friends by any conventional definition- we get along, and we voluntarily associate with each other, and we haven't had any major arguments yet. We congratulate each other when things go right, and console each other when things go wrong. And maybe we don't all share the same interests- I know absolute shit about Bionicles, and I doubt anyone really understands when I go off the deep end and start posting incoherently about Smash lore- but nobody, at least to my knowledge, ever feels like they're annoying anyone when they infodump about what they love.</p>
 <p>We're <a href="https://regularflolloping.com/posts/chippies/">chippies</a>. We watch out for our friends. We appreciate our friends for who they are, instead of who we wish they could be, or who we thought they were in a past life. It's a lopsided home, but it's a home nonetheless, and one we're damn proud of.</p>
 <p>It's an awesome community, and I'm grateful as all hell that, out of all the instances I could have jumped to after I fled Tumblr, I somehow ended up on Layer 13.</p>

 <p>And yet... something's still missing. Something's not quite clicking right in my brain.</p>

 <p>What is it?</p>

 <p>Maybe I'm just overly paranoid. Maybe the people who harassed me off Neocities were right- maybe I do need to seek therapy. But then again, trust comes into play- my parents, meaning well, could pay for a therapist, but then how would I know that the therapist wouldn't just snitch on everything I say to my parents? Especially since I come from a conservative Christian background, even though I'm almost the complete opposite of how I was raised in terms of identity- if I need to talk about, say, overhearing my grandma ranting about gender-neutral bathrooms behind my back, then I might be safer with my internet friends than with a meatspace person with the authority to fuck my life up in a matter of seconds.</p>

 <p>Or maybe it's the lack of physical touch inherent with internet relationships. Like Lain sitting in her room full of computers, bleary-eyed late into the night, I still haven't fully adjusted to being immersed in the Wired instead of just a passer-by, or a surface user. Baptized in the code, reborn as fully me instead of just a digital representation of me.</p>

 <p>Lain would know how to connect to others, right?</p>

 <p>I've noticed a few positive changes in my life ever since I joined Layer 13. I've been writing more, for instance, since my friends are <a href="https://regularflolloping.com/atom.xml">also</a> <a href="http://lunarised.com/blog/">blog-writers</a>. Not &quot;bloggers&quot;, since that makes us sound like we're a bunch of white women with perfect teeth blogging about drinking natural bottled water and jogging while chasing trends and trying to gain as many Clout Points(tm) as possible on the main WordPress instance. And I've repaired my relationship with Lain, realizing her as a conduit for improving myself and a symbol of hope instead of despair and technological death like back in June. I've realized a sudden love for drawing, as well.</p>

 <p>I do love my friends. And even if I succumb to paranoia in the end- which I highly doubt I will- I don't think I'll be able to stay away for long.</p>

 <p>We're all connected.</p>

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 2018

 hMarch 21 - losing my passion	march/passion.html
 hMarch 29 - comfy	march/comfy.html
 hMay 24 - Lately, the world has been getting a hell of a lot scarier.	may/reclusion.html
 hMay 26 - whoami	may/whoami.html
 hMay 27 - gacha	may/gacha.html
 hMay 28 - memes	may/memes.html
 hJune 23 - a return to the wild west	may/web.html
 hJuly 13 - it's getting worse	july/help.html
 hJuly 20 - rain: an autistic manifesto	july/rain.html
 hAugust 3 - thunder	august/thunder.html
 hAugust 19 - wasted	august/wasted.html
 hAugust 23 - irl	august/irl.html
 hAugust 29 - tumblr blues	august/tumblr.html
 hSeptember 11 - in the white light	september/in-the-white-light.html
 hSeptember 19 - What's healthier? Time limits, or time boundaries?	september/time-limits.html
 hSeptember 29 - lucine	september/lucine.html
 hNovember 21 - lucine and medusa meet in a bar and duke it out	november/bar.html
 hDecember 6 - why is most documentation so bloated?	december/documentation-bloat.html
 hDecember 7 - a quixotic tomb, where light lives forevermore	december/a-quixotic-tomb.html
 hDecember 12 - we're all connected, said lain	december/we-are-all-connected.html
 hDecember 14 - you don't own me, assholes	december/not-your-object.html
 hDecember 20 - dogpiling	december/dogpiling.html
 hDecember 23 - I don't particularly like Pokemon	december/pokemon.html
 hDecember 24 - the right to silence	december/silence.html
 hDecember 25 - hermitry	december/hermitry.html
 hDecember 26 - digital sugar	december/digital-sugar.html
 hDecember 27 - a shatter down the hall	december/a-shatter-down-the-hall.html
 hDecember 28 - text will stand the test of time	december/text-is-superior.html
 hDecember 30 - mouths in the wired	december/mouths-in-the-wired.html
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 <b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b>
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  <p><b>it's getting worse</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 7-13-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>It's getting worse. At least, I think it is. Self-reflection is getting harder and harder these days. Everything is. I've binned four book ideas since I finished <i>The Duality of Mankind</i>, can you believe that? One about an interstellar shipping company, one about a boy trying to get out of the hospital system in Hell, one about finding an old god in an abandoned tomb, and a sequel to <i>Living Wasteland</i> where a Miralayan rebel hijacks the autocontrol system and takes over Liv's brain and liberates the people of Miralay to be free on the terraformed surface.</p>

 <p>They were all such good ideas, and yet... I can't seem to focus. I can only focus on Poot. Pat, Pitstain. Going back to Tumblr and wasting several hours reblogging nothing but fanart. Time I could have spent reading or forcing myself to write what I'm currently desperately trying to keep myself writing, a sequel to <i>The Duality of Mankind</i>.</p>

 <p>But I head off to Girl Scout Camp tomorrow. My first year as an adult, trying to navigate the harrowing waters of more responsibility and yet less. Less involvement and more detatchment while I get upstaged by normies in tie-dye yellow shirts.</p>

 <p>Is God really a number I cannot count to? Why shouldn't everything that glitters be gold? My boys are glittering. The boys upstaged me before I even knew of their existence.</p>

 <p>Everything hurts. My brain, my feet, the space right behind my eyes, my ears. I want to get off this crazy train. I want to wake up.</p>
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    <b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b>
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  <p><b>rain: an autistic manifesto</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 7-20-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>It is getting cloudy outside, and I spent at least a third of Girl Scout Camp behind the main cabin on the verge of crying because everybody was already running smoothly without me and I suddenly realized that I am utterly replaceable. I tried to help a little girl crying and I got yelled at for interfering with someone else’s unit. I tried to explain to the girls in the red unit that it was unsafe to go swimming without a lifeguard because what if I get a cramp in one of my legs, and they told me that they hoped I drowned.</p>
 <p>I spent three years begging, <i>pleading</i> with the core staff to let me do the newsletter, and they finally relented one year before I turned eighteen so that they could pat themselves on the back for the bare minimum. I cherished that year. I ran around camp without a single complaint and took beautiful pictures of everything the girls were doing and I hand-crafted my own templates when the old controlling lady who was training me threw herself for a complete loop when she saw LibreOffice in the title bar and not Microshit Office and the template they’d been using for the past who-knows-how-many years wouldn’t display correctly.</p>
 <p>And then they gave it to a girl who asks dumb questions like “what’s an operating system” when I explain why she doesn’t have anything better to edit her photos with than Paint because they gave her a shitty computer to do her work on and “what’s encryption” when she gets confused why I enter so many passwords into my computer every time I turn it on.</p>
 <p>It’s because I have special needs for my computer, I explain. I don’t trust anyone with my computer. I have unwritten books and a decade’s worth of photos and all sorts of torrented movies I mean to watch again and I don’t want anyone getting a single bit of it without my permission. If I left my computer unencrypted, someone might plant malignant code and steal all my passwords and use my files to blackmail someone.</p>
 <p>And then she looks confused, and I drop the subject and show her where she spelled words wrong and where she needs to move her commas so that her wall of boilerplate text is readable.</p>
 <p>It is getting darker outside, and I am crying behind the main cabin some more because my girlfriend accidentally told everyone that I have autism and all the girls I was supposed to protect in my unit started mocking me instead. You’re not an adult; you act like a camper that’s allowed to eat the adult snacks in the cabin basement. You don’t sit back like adults are supposed to. You say weird things like “it’s time to consume some hydrogen-based liquids” instead of yelling “water break” and you draw angel heads on people’s shirts and you disappear at random.</p>
 <p>You’ve been going to camp since you were a pinkie- in first grade- and every step of the way, you were singled out, separated, discriminated against because you were autistic, because you <i>are</i> autistic because, no matter how hard we light it up blue, we still don’t have a cure, still don’t have a way to shut you up. We screamed at you when you were tiny and wanted to swim more than the alloted swim time and we ripped the part with your name on it off the swaps you gave us and we forced you into our unit pictures even though you hate having your picture taken, hate having someone you don’t completely trust have a copy of your likeness to do with as they please.</p>
 <p>You’re not an adult.</p>
 <p>You’re a camper with privileges.</p>
 <p>You can get ice cream when everyone else does. Oh, me? Oh, I get ice cream early because I was helping in the kitchen. No, I don’t care that you were just helping the newsletter girl. Run back to your unit.</p>
 <p>It is okay for the girls in the red unit to tell me to die, but it is not okay for me to tell Coconut to go to hell.</p>
 <p>It is raining softly outside, and I am on the bus ride home, sitting right beside my girlfriend who asks me what’s wrong and why am I sad and understands when I say that Coconut’s an asshole who acts like she owns the camp just because she’s the daughter of one of the camp directors. Coconut disappeared for years and everyone cheered when she led morning flag instead of the actual director. I stayed for all twelve years and bandaged girls’ legs when they fell down and showed them how to grow origami flowers from paper and dried so many tears that I could make my own Red Sea and part it down the middle. I taught them a new camp song- the Beard Song- and I made swaps in the shape of little pride flags when my cousin’s friend came out to me and her as nonbinary, and I cheered my team on when they played bootleg quidditch and won.</p>
 <p>And I’m a nuisance, and I need to stop asking each unit for a team photo between games.</p>
 <p>And Coconut yells at me like I’m a pinkie who wandered away from where her unit has planted their backpacks in the spectating area, and I want to punch her in the face.</p>
 <p>It is pouring rain outside, and I’m finally starting to understand what some people of color mean when they said that, even though they can legally do all the things they should have been allowed to do when this country was founded, that they still experience racism. Because I can have a driver’s permit, and I can get accepted to college, and I can force myself to verbalize enough to order my own food at a restaurant and have short conversations with people enough to be seen as “normal”. But it doesn’t change the fact that people still see me as a diagnosis, as a problem to be worked <i>around</i>, rather than a person to be worked <i>with</i>.</p>
 <p>It doesn’t change the fact that, no matter how hard I work to “pass” as neurotypical, the world is still fundamentally wired in a way that is difficult for me to navigate.</p>
 <p>I am finally starting to understand what some LGBT people mean when, even though sexuality and gender aren’t and shouldn’t be the main point of one’s identity but just another facet, they go to Pride parades and wear things with pride flags on them and be, you know, <i>proud</i> that they’re whatever gender or sexuality they are. Because there are still crusty old people out there who think “gayness” can be cured, and there are self-proclaimed “autism moms” who flaunt their children on shitty blogs and exploit them for money and sympathy and then have the audacity to pull out their blue pistols and gun for a “cure”.</p>
 <p>It is starting to clear up outside, and I am starting to realize a truth: when the world refuses to let you exist, you spit in the world’s face and choose to exist anyway.</p>

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 <b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b>
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  <p><b>I have an addiction.</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 6-14-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>I have an addiction. Not to drugs or to sex or to anything that might wind me up in jail or missing half of my limbs in the back of an alley or in a morgue.</p>

 <p>I have an addiction to video games. More specificially, one specific one. And I want it to stop.</p>

 <p>I have autism. Did you know that? Probably, if you've been paying attention to me for any long period of time. <i>Especially</i> if you know me in real life. Part of it is that I can't talk about anything I have even a <i>slight</i> interest in. I- I physically <i>can't</i>. You go up to me in the middle of the street or at the end of a class or wherever and you mention anything along the lines of, say, Zelda or writing or memery, and I'll lock up and stop talking and look for the nearest exit out. My mind only lets me mention things I like when I'm in the relative privacy of an online conversation, and even then only through a long-winded series of nicknames and inside jokes in place of the actual name of the thing.</p>

 <p>I have an addiction to something. I can't tell you upfront what it is for the aforementioned reason. But my mind <i>will</i> let me refer to it by nicknames: CTR-P-AKDE, or Angel Land Story 2: The One Where Pit Fucking Dies, or "no, Vane, I don't want to play Uprising with you; now load up that hecking Smash cartridge so we can Final Destination, no items, Fox only".</p>

 <p>Early last year, I moved to a town far away from where I grew up, far away from my friends and family. I was essentially transplanted in a dying town full of shitty people who only cared about me and related to me in terms of my father. I was never really able to make any lasting friends there, only fair-weather people I could trust to help me in group projects or to catch me up in whatever the hell was going on whenever I missed a day at school.</p>

 <p>Needless to say, I was pretty emotionally brittle at the time. So I clung to the first thing that hadn't already been tainted by the normies at my old school or my grubby-handed brothers. I hung onto it like it was the last lifeboat leaving the Titanic.</p>

 <p>It worked for a while. Slogging through a painful transition at school, roughing it through the hour-long car ride back home, and then another chapter through the game. It kept me happy for a while, even long after I'd defeated the game. High replay value, if you will, blissfully unaware as it slowly crept outside of the boundaries of "just a game" and started infecting my writing, my relationship with the person who would eventually become my girlfriend, my very <i>thought process</i> in all hours of the day.</p>

 <p>I used to be a Christian. Again, something you've probably picked up on if you've spent enough time in the poetry archives here. I used to have a god that I'd pray to every night, at least until I eventually stumbled across a theological question I couldn't just brush off and my faith began to unravel like a badly stitched square of knitting.</p>

 <p>We'll get back to that in a little while.</p>

 <p>A few months ago, I stumbled across <a href="https://8ch.net">8chan</a>. It was the beginning of the start of my agoraphobia, the moment when the seeds were starting to sprout- and seeing people who shared my fellow hatred of "normalf*gs" (censored for certain people's feefees) was like dumping a pound of fertilizer all over the whole mess. I soaked in the admissions of wanting to retreat from the world and live far away from the cancer of society like a jumbo-sized sponge.</p>

 <p>Baby's first nihilism came to whisper sweet nothings in my ear in the dead of night before I could finally make myself go to sleep.</p>

 <p>My mental health deteriorated. My attention span dramatically decreased. I went from being the bright soul who'd worked day and night for six months on <i>The Duality of Mankind</i> to a snivelling mess looking back on the outside world with nothing but condescension.</p>

 <p>I wanted to turn my back on the whole damn world and leave it forever. I wanted to seal myself into a tomb of my own making and wait for the heat-death of the universe. I wanted to build a monastery and dedicate myself to a goddess of my own creation and live out the rest of my days writing in a void, ableit a peaceful void.</p>

 <p>I wanted to die, plain and simple.</p>

 <p>Was I so desperate for a master of higher powers that I made one appear out of thin air? That I stole someone else's and put it on a pedestal so high not even my ego could see the top?</p>

 <p><a href="https://hooktube.com/watch?v=NfjsLmya1PI">Present day, present time</a>. I'm having a mental breakdown on the first stop of the last great family vacation for a while. My chest is tight, my eyes are sore, and my head pounds with a pleading to stop writing for the night and to go to bed.</p>

 <p>And I have an addiction.</p>

 <p>Addictions aren't inherently bad. I also have an addiction to eating and breathing and getting at least <i>some</i> sleep every night, even if it's far less than I should be getting. Are these things bad simply because I'm addicted to them?</p>

 <p>Some addictions are inherently bad, and we as a society instantly recognize them as destructive. Alcohol, smoking, drugs, gambling. We put people in rehab and hire therapists and create entire industries around getting people off these addictions.</p>

 <p>I'm glad <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/health/classify-gaming-addiction-mental-health-disorder-article-1.3721762">the WHO recognized gaming addiction</a>. I spent the last two weeks doing little else but playing old games and thinking about games and thinking about a certain little angel and the game he comes from. I spent the last two weeks fighting off anhedonia and struggling to write even the simplest of poems, let alone another entire book. It's a miracle I have something I can call my next future book, <i>A Hospital for Souls</i>. Even if it was born out of another mental breakdown in the middle of the night, an unedited mess that grows more tangled with each day, it's better than nothing.</p>

 <p>It's better than being dead.</p>

 <p>My ex had an addiction to a certain boyband that was wildly popular when we were in middle school. Her entire life revolved around it- she owned a boatload of merchandise; she wrote its name next to hers in all her school documents; <i>it was all she ever talked about</i>. Her entire life revolved around five people she would never meet, would never have a true emotional connection with.</p>

 <p>What separates the her of then from the me of now?</p>

 <p>There's nothing wrong with liking things. There's nothing wrong with having special interests. But when something external to you becomes your whole identity, your whole <i>being</i>, and then that thing sours... it's like a rug pulled out from under your feet. It's like a blindfold ripped away from your eyes and suddenly discovering that you were never able to see in the first place.</p>

 <p>If I stand for nothing, then I will fall for everything. But if I stand on a pillar of wet sand, eventually it will crack and dry and crumble into dust, and I will fall fast and I will fall hard.</p>

 <p>Hello from rock bottom, by the way.</p>

 <p>Forget the Lain Era, where I romanticized being immortal in the throes of the internet, enshrined in the thrashing waves of cyberspace, seen by every eye ever to peer at a computer screen and yet never truly seen at all.</p>

 <p>Forget the Medusa Era, where I romanticized death and the end of my life, comdemned to rot away in a seal of stone.</p>

 <p>Forget the Fi Era, where all I thought about was the divine reborn, reincarnated into a mortal body, sent on a lifelong mission with only half-recovered memories as verification of the purpose of said person's earthly life.</p>

 <p>Forget all the other eras named after fictional characters I had no hand in creating. Forget all the painful versions of myself, self-inflicting an unattainable standard in the name of a nonexistent deity.</p>

 <p>I'm not a faithful priestess. I'm not a guardian to something reborn, *anything* reborn, pissing my life away waiting for someone to come who will never come because they never *were*.</p>

 <p>I'm not dead, and I'm not an otherworldly being, and I'm not any combination of those two things.</p>

 <p>I'm not a mindless consumer, beholden to the whims of a game studio half the world away.</p>

 <p>Metaphorical God help me, from this day forth, I will fight until my very last breath to stay myself. I will not seal myself away from the world. I will face it head on, and I will overcome every challenge "normies" throw my way.</p>

 <p>Because I'm Vane Vander.</p>
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 <b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b>
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  <p><b>a return to the wild west</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 6-23-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>I hate my phone. I hate that it's the first thing I grab when I wake up in the morning, day after day after day. I hate that everyone I know expects me to keep it turned on and charged and ready for their inane messages 24/7 and treats me like a second-class citizen whenever I turn it off for whatever reason. If I'm not available to spam shit-tier minion memes poorly screenshotted from facebook at, I might as well not even exist.</p>

 <p>Having a phone is seen as a rite of passage for independence as a teenager, even though it's the exact opposite, really- but which shackles are better? Your parents' wrists because they're too paranoid to let you out of their sights for even a split-second, or a phone with perpetual tracking capabilities baked into the baseband and obeying every beck and call of your ISP at the behest of the two people who donated DNA to your existence?</p>

 <p>You already know how I feel about proprietary software. I abhor it, and I despise devices which require it in order to function. I hate not being able to trust that it'll obey my commands and *my commands alone*, only beholden to me and me alone.</p>

 <p>My phone is not supported by <a href="https://www.replicant.us/">Replicant</a>, a completely FOSS version of Android. It requires proprietary drivers to boot, let alone operate the Bluetooth and WiFi and mobile data modules, let alone every other piece of my phone still shackled to stock Android by Samsung. It requires flashing a <a href="https://androidforums.com/threads/root-sm-n900v-verizon-note-3-lollipop-success.1016822/">slightly shady firmware</a> in order to root it, and even then, it's a soft root- any "removed" apps show back up on a factory reset, which is irrelevant as it then soft-bricks itself until I reflash the original firmware. At any time and for any reason, my parents could call up Verizon, and the shady people there could remotely locate my phone.</p>

 <p>And thus me, unless I don't have my phone on me, in which case they'd freak out even harder and consider getting the police involved.</p>

 <p>Don't get me wrong- phones can be an absolute godsend. A music player, a flashlight, a drawing pad, a notebook for writing in, a camera, a portable distraction device to silently signal to others that you're a misanthrope and don't want to talk to normies. Except for when they run out of data, and you're forced to use public wifi with all its glories of public sniffers and captive portals and draconian firewalls.</p>

 <p>So what happens when you run out of data, and your paranoia won't let you use that crippled public connection? Well, you're stuck with whatever you have offline.</p>

 <p>My brothers are stuck with Chromebooks, because my school doesn't give a rat's damn about anything other than costs, leading it to <a href="https://mayvaneday.keybase.pub/archive/blog/2017/november/infierno.html">trade its students' souls</a> for a chance to <a href="https://mayvaneday.keybase.pub/archive/blog/2017/november/wanderlust.html">suck Google's primary-colored cock.</a><!-- there are more posts I need to link here --> They require a constant internet connection for 99% of their functions, unless you're lucky enough to get one that can install Android apps, in which case it's down to 98%. They're basically botbet browsers with keyboards.</p>

 <p>They don't hold a flame to my laptop, which can be a:</p>

 <ul>
 <li>music player</li>
 <li>game console</li>
 <li>word processor</li>
 <li>photo editor</li>
 <li>TV</li>
 <li>chat machine</li>
 <li>programming workstation</li>
 </ul>

 <p>All without internet.</p>

 <p>Recently, I bought a Raspberry Pi. I set it up as a headless Syncthing server. Syncthing is a program for decentralized file synchronization: unlike a traditional FTP or Nextcloud server, every device is its own node, so if one node goes down, the remaining nodes can continue to sync with each other. Syncthing also supports dynamic IP addresses, so no matter what network I'm set up on, I can sync my files.</p>

 <p>And unlike the other two options, Syncthing can work on a LAN without outside network access.</p>

 <p>Which leads me to meshnets. A network of devices all linked together to form their own mini-internet, still functional regardless of whether or not the outside internet is working or accessible. It's not as apocalyptic as one might think- local multiplayer in games, sharing files between two friends.</p>

 <p>Hosting mirrors of websites cached offline and updated in the few fleeting moments of access to the outside world.</p>

 <p>My books are licensed under Creative Commons. <!-- insert specific license --> This website is as well. I don't care if you wget the whole thing and host a mirror for yourself, just as long as you make it clear that I made all the content and not you. Hell, I even *encourage* it! The biggest threat to me isn't losing profits, because I don't make any profits off this in the first place, but obscurity. I'd rather not make a penny off my work and be well-known and well-respected than never get the chance at all.</p>

 <p>So mirror away. Run a copy of MayVaneDay for your friends, for your family, for your weird little computer club. Just be sure to check back here every once in a while for any updates. :)</p>

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 <b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b>
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  <p><b>comfy</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 3-29-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>It’s a word I already knew, a word I already knew the definition to. But thanks to <a href="https://8ch.net">the most cancerous imageboard on the internet</a>, it’s taken up a whole new meaning.</p>

 <p>Comfy.</p>

 <p>I can’t exactly put my finger on what “comfy” is- it’s easier to define what “comfy” isn’t.</p>

 <p>Stock Android phones running the default Google themes aren’t comfy, devoid of all emotion or personality, just one more product straight off the conveyor belt.</p>

 <p>Chromebooks aren’t comfy in the slightest, being as the most “customization” one can do on them is move the dock position and change the background.</p>

 <p><del>Windoze</del> <del>Winblows</del> <del>the bane of my existence</del> <i>Windows 10</i> isn’t comfy at all. I mean, using Linux can get hectic at times, but at least it doesn’t puke ADVERTISEMENTS all over the system!</p>

 <p>But the default Windows XP that I grew up with, that ran on the weird old desktop that ended up meeting its demise in the back of the office before it got gutted and turned into a bedroom for one of my siblings, was comfy.</p>

 <p>Antergos with six different windows open at the same time while working on my homepage is pretty comfy, I’ll admit. Especially with a solarized GNOME that I don’t have to spend forever digging through menus just to pull up one program- Windows key, a short search, enter, and I’m on my way without so much as even looking at the touchpad.</p>

 <p>Old screenshots of crowded dashboards for what I assume is WOW look comfy, if not a little stressful imagining the hectic gameplay that must have been going on at that fossilized moment in time.</p>

 <p>But I wouldn’t know, because I’ve never played WOW.</p>

 <p>Maybe “comfy” is just a misplaced sense of nostalgia. Windows XP was pretty cool to ten-year-old me, even if I never got the password-protected folders working. And I used to have a working copy of Game Maker Tycoon I got from a school book order, where I’d take the premade maps and just romp around in them instead of actually getting anything done.</p>

 <p>And then the license verification servers stopped working, so I can’t reinstall it for the time being.</p>

 <p>But I still miss Web 1.0 a lot, even though I was born in the tail end of it just in time for monumentally bad ideas like MySpace to start popping up and for Usenet to start winding down, even though both still exist today. There’s something unrefined and yet romantic in a static page without any sort of JavaScript making bloated widgets or walls keeping out people who aren’t paying subscribers or logged into Facebook or Google or whatever privacy-raping service is all the rage these days.</p>
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  <p><b>losing my passion</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 3-21-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>I don’t know why, but recently, I seem to have lost any and all passion for things I once loved to do. Even finishing <i>The Duality of Mankind</i> was laborious and met with anxiety instead of relief and fulfillment.</p>

 <p>I don’t know whether it’s due to the crushing disappointment from rejection by a former Creative Writing teacher…</p>

 <p>Or maybe it’s because of the soul-crushing assignment in Foods II of having to write an <i>entire story</i> about making jelly.</p>

 <p>It could just be that discovering the darkest reaches of the internet has killed my brain and I need a detox.</p>
 <!-- hint: it was this -->
 <p>On a side note, I had a dream last night. I was sitting down to lunch with a trusted friend and confidante- a boy with black hair and a pale complexion who was my age, although we were closer to what I would guess a twenty-year-old to be like instead of hormonal teenagers on the brink of freedom from parental control.</p>

 <p>We were discussing the school’s newest anti-bullying technology over lunch. I was busy chomping away at a salad with thin slices of ham drenched in ranch, but I don’t remember in the slightest what he was eating. The same thing, I would presume. But the anti-bullying app- it was comprised of two sections. One reported the latest instances of bullying as they occurred in shorthand much like a police officer would use. The other one was sort of an “After School” anonymous chatting fiasco, but it was sane and didn’t require Facebook to login or authenticate, and it was centered around leaving messages of encouragement and hope for suicidal students.</p>

 <p>At least, that was what it was designed for, because on that unfortunate day, it was flooded with students fretting over seeing a forearm-sized purple dragon flitting about the school, slipping in backpacks and nesting in lockers and sucking up water from other people’s waterbottles as they tramped down the hall. There was one girl that it seemed to hang around more often than others- a friend, maybe; she certainly didn’t seem bothered by it at all.</p>

 <p>I quickly choked down my salad and left; it was an experimental restaurant, where sensors detected what you ate and you were automatically charged to your bank account when you left. By the time I arrived at the school to check it out, the dragon had been cornered in one of the shower stalls in the girl’s locker rooms.</p>

 <p>In human form.</p>

 <p>I knocked gently on the shower stall. Bashful, she shook her head and backed into the corner of the small porcelain space, body a blurry silhouette through the stall door.</p>

 <p>“I’ll give you a few minutes to get changed,” I said, trying not to be confrontative. “I just want to talk to you about what’s been going on.”</p>

 <p>“O-Okay.”</p>

 <p>She slowly pulled her clothes back on- where she got them from, I had no idea- and unlocked the shower stall and pushed it open. Only her head peeked out from the door.</p>

 <p>She was a pretty young girl, about six or seven. Her eyes were a deep purple, her hair a slightly lighter version of the same shade, tangled and knotted into two rudimentary pigtails. My interface pinged- a little notification popped up in the corner of my vision, distracting me for a moment.</p>

 <p>She had exactly forty-nine freckles, it said.</p>
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 <b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b>
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  <p><b>gacha</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 5-27-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>Gacha games. You know, the ones where you have to go on missions to unlock whatever the in-game currency is (gems, orbs, jewels?) to use in randomly summoning allies so you can go on more missions to earn more... money.</p>

 <p>Or, you know, you could just buy a shitton of money with your actual money and just spend that instead.</p>

 <p>Except why would you? Why would <i>anyone?</i> It's just a collection of bits and bytes that resides on a server you'll probably never get to travel to in your life. It's meaningless- it's literally <i>worthless</i>. It's just a bunch of numbers on a screen that have artificial value assigned to them. When the servers shut down, all of that sweet, sweet data is going with it. And then it won't matter if you have a five-star Ephraim or Hector or whatever.</p>

 <p>A long, long time from now, when I'm on my deathbed, my final thoughts aren't going to be, "Man, I wish I played more <i>Fire Emblem Heroes</i>." They're going to be about all the things I accomplished in life because I deleted that damn app and stopped wasting my time in the mornings.</p>

 <p>I can't get back the time I wasted on gacha games. But I can choose not to waste any more. And I hope you will too.</p>
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  <p><b>memes</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 5-28-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>I love memes. Love, not <i>loved</i>, because I still do, despite my recent disillusionment with the world of normies. I.. I just don't understand how "Despacito" or "Burger King foot lettuce" or "do you know da wey" became so funny. One's a shitty pop song, and the others are just... things, I guess, things with no vestige of humor to them.</p>

 <p>My favorite meme, as those who know me in real life already know to death, is "understandable, have a great day". There's nothing particularly funny about the predictable exchange- it's the fact that it's so mundane that makes it funny. One expects autistic screeching at the fact that whatever the dude asked for in the drive-through wasn't available, but he just calmly drives away instead. It's something primal, something particular that tickles the unconscious.</p>

 <p>I used to be known to my family and friends as the "underground dark web meme dealer". Now, I look at 99% of memes, and all I can muster is a shrug. Is this the Eternal September of memes? Are post-post-ironic memes the logical conclusion and we can go no further? Are "dank" memes so prolific now that the whole concept of memes have ceased to be dank?</p>

 <p>It scares me to think that there are some people out there whose sole identity is memes. Chasing after a neverending flurry of pop culture references, parroting out catchphrases like we were all six again just off of a binge of Saturday morning cartoons. Like I were surrounded with millions of badly-trained AI programs, spitting out memes only tangentially related to whatever subject I'd been trying to discuss with them.</p>
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 <b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b>
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  <p><b>reclusion</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 5-24-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>Lately, the world has been getting a hell of a lot scarier.</p>

 <p>I open my web browser to look up a simple tidbit of information for a school project I won't even remember in a week's time, and I'm immediately bombarded with several dozen trackers and analytics scripts and even the occasional cryptocoin miner. I block all of these scripts, and the webpage results in five layers of popups and sidebars that I can't exit out of because the relevant scripts aren't loaded, or, if I'm lucky, the page just stops working at all.</p>

 <p>So I get frustrated. I open said pages in Lynx or a similar text-based browser, and voila, the page somehow doesn't immediately kick me off. Except I have to scroll through five pages of topbar links before I get to the actual text, and even then, the text is muddled with all of the alt texts of the images that didn't load because it's a text browser and you apparently need some fancy-dancy X server wizard shit to load a simple image. Never mind a video or a game or anything that isn't sound or text.</p>

 <p>Living purely in a terminal in [insert whatever year it currently is] is self-inflicted hell, unless you're using a shitty hand-me-down computer from the Ice Age, in which case you can take off the "self-inflicted". I had a pretty comfy TTY-only setup on my grandma's old computer with Ubuntu Server 17.10, which was the last version that had 32-bit support. Except for the fact that I couldn't connect to any other WiFi networks except for the one I set it up at, and I couldn't tell NetworkManager to actually do its job because that requires nmcli and, at least last time I checked, you can't install packages from the internet without... the internet.</p>

 <p>And <i>that's</i> just for networking. Listening to music, okay, sure, if you're okay with memorizing a Byzantine-tier amount of keybinds, you could probably get away with cmus. If you especially hate yourself, you could use youtube-dl to get some cool videos to watch. But good luck watching them without X. One could probably use Calibre's CLI tools to eventually hammer out a basic ePub file, but for working on the Peer Review Edition, I need to have that HTML editor on the left and a live preview on the right, just like in Calibre's GUI ePub editor. And last time I checked, unless I set up some weird config with nano (the only sane terminal text editor) and an auto-updating w3m in a multiplexer, that's just not going to happen.</p>

 <p>For the past few months, I've been having an obsession with trying to live 100% in the terminal. An obsession bordering on... autism, if you will. (Which I have.) Some things I've managed to migrate 100%- okay, that's a lie; it's only music I'm comfortable only accessing through a text interface. Other things, like email and chat, are <i>workable</i> in a terminal, but only through an obtuse interface (Finch with the libpurple-matrix plugin) or with an unnecessary amount of config involved (Alpine, configure your own damn server configs for once).</p>

 <p>I know the benefits. Faster loadtime, far fewer distractions, longer battery life, less disk space taken up with bloat. (You don't need the whole Electron runtime just to burn an ISO to a disk. <i>cough cough</i> Etcher <i>cough</i>)</p>

 <p>But are the tradeoffs- not being able to participate in the modern internet, in <i>modern life</i>- worth it?</p>

 <p>There are a lot of things that scare me about the modern internet. But we need to talk about Google first.</p>

 <p>Google pretty much has the monopoly on search engines, even become synonymous with the concept of looking things up on the internet, even though I can name at least seven alternatives off the top of my head. (For your information: Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Startpage, YaCy, Searx, Qwant, Ecosia, <i>maybe</i> Ixquick?) My school uses Google Classroom for <i>fucking everything</i>, from class announcements to dropboxes for assignments to class discussions. Long gone are the romaticized images from my youth of class bulletin boards and wire baskets for assignments and, you know, those weird days where you'd walk into class and all the desks were arranged in a circle and you'd actually talk face-to-face. Everything has to go through the big G now, apparently.</p>

 <p>I'm not one to fall for ultra-fundamentalists screaming "oh my god, this is secretly Satanic" at everything, but I step inside my school, and it's like one big ritual to the smiling god of California that claims to do no evil. Unquestioned omnipresence over every aspect of the student's life. Email correspondence between teacher and student. Document collaboration, whether alone or with groups, smiling normalcattle not even aware that alternatives to Google Docs exist, like AbiCollab or Airborn. File storage. Consumption of art and media. Consumption, not enjoyment, because everything quality and worthwhile is locked behind a paywall or restricted by arbitrary limits of per-month views or per-day skips or what-have-you. The mere act of browsing, with Chrone sending <i>literally every single thing you do</i> to Google's servers. You could <i>blink</i>, and its telemetry would send another packet to Google.</p>

 <p>Teachers unthinkingly sacrifice their students' privacy for a modicum of convenience.</p>

 <p>Teachers unthinkingly sacrifice their students to become the next customers of the big G.</p>

 <p>I remember the entrepreneur unit in ninth grade social studies class. A whole month talking about people like Vanderbilt (who I stole my last name from, if you're wondering) who brutally ran other people out of business and started a monopoly. The teachers shook their heads and wagged their fingers and warned us about the dangers of allowing so few people to amass so much extra-governmental power over the populace.</p>

 <p>What would happen if Google ceased to exist overnight?</p>

 <p>What would happen if the USA government got out of bed with the big G and its promiscuous willing to share data and took its anti-monopoly laws seriously?</p>

 <p>Normies would have a fucking meltdown, that's what. All their centralized data, placated into allowing one website to be their sole beacon of access for so long, just... gone.</p>

 <p>But I digress big time. Where were we? Complaining about the modern internet?</p>

 <p>Ah. Let's continue there.</p>

 <p>I go to Scribus and try to download a document that I need for one of my extracurricular studies, and I get hit with a registration wall. I try to make an RSS feed for a Facebook page for an indie band I like, and I get hit with 504's and entries clogged up with 700 comments I didn't ask for and potato-quality images that require me to load the original Facebook page with all of its JavaScript and tracking code just to see the original in semi-decent quality. I go to literally any archive website (a requirement if one's going to link to somewhere on an imageboard) and I get hit with CloudFlare and its botnet Google Street View captchas because I was so audacious as to try to surf the web with Tor or a VPN (or both) enabled.</p>

 <p>Why does WordPress need so much JavaScript to display a simple page? I load up my old website (if you're reading this before I shut it down for good) and it looks like fuarrking trash. Half of the sidebars are broken, there's big ugly boxes where the ads should have gone, and everything looks out of proportion because only paying users get decent CSS. But I load the home page for this lovely site you're reading this on right now, and it looks the same no matter what flavor of NoScript I'm using, because it's just static HTML and a dash of CSS so it doesn't look straight out of a Gopher screenshot from the pre-Eternal September days of the internet.</p>

 <p>Why does every news site need something as elaborate as Disqus to have comments on their site? Isn't a simple HTML form enough?</p>

 <p>Why does every "social" site need to be the second coming of <del>Jesus</del> Facebook? I grew up on the tail end of a more chaotic era. I was in elementary school when Chanology was relevant. Imageboards were obscure and chaotic and not just seen as places where Trump fans and borderline Nazis festered. There were actual <i>forums</i> for all sorts of different interests. IRC channels were everywhere. (Although I fuarrking <i>hate</i> IRC, but that's a story for another day.) If you could name it, there was probably a little corner of the internet where you could hang out and immerse yourself in said thing.</p>

 <p>Now everything is spontaneous. Everything is documented. Everything is worthless if it can't be instashared. Hell, today I made kabobs (<del>kerbobbers?</del> <i>quebobbos</i>) in Foods class in school, and the first thought I had when holding my kabob dripping with wet raw meat juice was, "Hmm, I should take a picture of this."</p>

 <p>It worries me.</p>

 <p>I want the old internet back. I want weird personal webpages like you see all the time on Neocities to run rampant and free. No hard restrictions on who can express themselves, just knowledge of basic HTML and the spirit to keep working even when copy-pasting a template to keep your formatting consistent for the hundredth time. Websites on Neocities feel like I'm stepping into a person's house, if only for a moment, admiring their furniture and the pictures they've hung up on the walls and their choice in paint and carpet and everything in between. Social media just feels sterile and cold, one bland hard-to-fuck-up template for everybody.</p>

 <p>I want the internet populace to scatter like so many dandelion seeds on the wind. </p>

 <p>But, for now, I wait. I sit here on my bed on my old Android tablet with GNURoot Debian and type away in an HTML document in Nano. I pluck away on the keyboard of whatever device I've temporarily enslaved with my Tails drive and figure out what packages work well with the persistent packages feature and which ones won't work because they haven't bothered to implement SOCKS5 proxy settings.</p>

 <p>I sit here, and I wait in my self-imposed digital monastery, watching the world crumple to ash around me.</p>

 <p>And I wait for the SDF to finally receive my $1 registration fee.</p>
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  <p><b>whoami</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 5-26-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>whoami. The most existiental of all the UNIX commands, and yet the most pointless. I can just look to the left of where my cursor is blinking, and there you have it- username@hostname, plain as day.</p>

 <p>So whoami? I write my documents in /home/vanevander/, yet whoami says root. I tell GNURoot Debian my name, and yet it still addresses me as "root".</p>

 <p>Much like real life, I suppose. I once tried giving people my preferred name, thought I'd start testing a potential post-transition future. (I'm nonbinary.) And they shrugged it off and rolled their eyes and called me weird and kept calling me by my birth name.</p>

 <p>whoami?</p>

 <p>Fi, the terminal says. Another night of disassociating into whatever video game I played last, the room spinning so fast that I press my arms into the mattress and close my eyes and pray to deities I know in the back of my mind are nonexistent that the planet won't reject me and eject me into orbit to choke and die alone amid the trash of humanity.</p>

 <p>whoami?</p>

 <p>Luci, whatever chat application I'm using with Matrix at the time says. Unless it's one I frequently use Bitmask on, in which case it says Serlis. But Luci- a fragment of a time I thought I knew what the hell was going on with my gender identity. A fragment of a time where I was closest to the Patron-Saint of Productivity, where I almost had a true role model I wasn't just sucking up to.</p>

 <p>whoami?</p>

 <p>Medusa, my computer says. The one who never sleeps, the one whose desire has faded into the night, now only longing to turn away from the world and self-seclude in a voluntary secular monastery of her own creation. Waiting for the object of her death with open arms and a throat ready to giggle at the drop of a single ragged feather.</p>

 <p>whoami?</p>

 <p>Cloud, my phone says. The Nezperdian god of chaos. An echo of the last night I spent in a hotel, the last night before I moved into my current house. So many hours wasted chasing after so many codes that would never work, only to be done in in a second in a bleary night in April a few months later.</p>

 <p>But I've been forgetting the most important question of all.</p>

 <p>whoareyou?</p>
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  <p><b>lucine and medusa meet in a bar and duke it out</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 11-21-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>My eyes hurt, and I accidentally left my smartwatch with the broken strap in my dorm room at college, and something's gone fucky with the WiFi at my house. My DNS refuses to resolve any GPG keyservers, so even though I'm using Riseup Black's god-tier VPN, I'm still probably under attack.</p>
 <p>Now, if this were two months ago, and I was still paranoid about the FBI busting my ass for shit I didn't do, I'd be packing it up and saying, &quot;This is it, lads. This is the end.&quot; And although it might have seemed like the end for a really long time- I haven't written an actual post in about two months, which would have <em>never</em> happened on WordPress, what with all the social features keeping me addicted- if it really were the end, then I probably wouldn't be drafting this post right now.</p>
 <p>But let's cut to the chase. Strip away the bloat of blogginess, if you will. Because we've left the blog behind a long, long time ago.</p>
 <p>I stayed up late last night, pondering a Very Important Question:</p>
 <p>Do I exist?</p>
 <p>can touch my hands and feel the skin of my palms, and the sensations that the touch nerves on my fingers send to my brain say that I exist in that physical sense, in that short span of time where my fingertips were up against the place where converge the cracks on my palm and the scar from the blister in elementary school that stretched until it popped and made me unable to write well for a few weeks.</p>
 <p>I can ask my parents if I exist, and they will roll their eyes and say, of course I exist; they made me, after all. My father will get angry for self-depreciating again, and my mother will mention how she popped me out of her uterus, and then I will get a deep, sickening sensation that no matter how much I try to differenciate myself from the perfect little Christian girl I grew up as, that they molded me as, I will never be able to change my genes. I will always remain a product of them, at least until the cyberpunk revolution comes and we can edit our bodies as freely as we please.</p>
 <p>I can ask my internet friends if I exist, and they will say yes. <em>Someone</em> has to be pressing buttons on a keyboard on the other end. But then again, how do I know that someone isn't making all those almost-lucid posts on the markov chain bots that are rampant all over the <a href="https://fediverse.party/">Fediverse</a>?</p>
 <p>It's the internet that's the most interesting of these three. Because, despite other people's perceptions of me, I still exist. But where do I exist? Am I a single entity, or are there millions of Vane Vanders running around, each one of them unique from the others by the perceptions of the people who have me in their minds? Am I a vibrant person with a colorful past, or am I just a passerby in someone else's story?</p>
 <p>Both, I would wager.</p>
 <p>As a person I admire once said, <a href="https://regularflolloping.com/posts/identity-in-the-wired/">&quot;your identity is malleable, and you are the one in control.&quot;</a> In real life, my identity is largely decided by my parents, and will continue to be so until I finally become financially independent on them: my race, my assigned gender at birth, my name, my economic status. In real life, people call me &quot;she&quot; because that is what my parents introduce me as; they see me as a &quot;white girl&quot; with not the best physical appearance and make value judgements about me solely based on what they can ascertain from my physical body. But on the internet, so long as I evade parental censorship, everything about my identity is for me to decide. <em>I</em> say I am nonbinary; <em>I</em> say that I am an author; <em>I</em> say that I am a fundamentally good person.</p>
 <p>And yet, this identity that I have so painstakingly crafted for myself could be reset in a matter of moments, as it did that fateful afternoon on October 3. At any moment, I could decide to be someone entirely new. Take to using exclusively Tails and change my name and pronouns and set up a new internet presence completely untied from my current one.</p>
 <p>I won't- I'm proud of who I am, and I won't shy from my history, for it has made me who I am- but it is always an option, and that has made all the difference.</p>
 <p>So who is the real me? Is it the meatspace me, where people deadname me, where they defer to my parents to fill in the blanks that I refuse to give strangers? Or is the one you know here, online, in what some would call the Wired?</p>
 <p>I want to choose who I am, and who I will be. And without the trappings of a physical body, that is infinitely more difficult to change than a few words on a screen, I have as much control as I possibly can without veering into authoritarian territory.</p>
 <p>This person, whose words you are reading on your screen right now, is the real me.</p>
 <p>Long live Vane Vander!</p>
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  <p><b>in the white light</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 9-11-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>If you’re one of my mutuals on a certain blogging platform, congratuations! I’m taking a break from the <a href="https://www.inc.com/quora/7-refreshing-ways-to-escape-from-your-social-media.html">social</a> <a href="https://www.fsf.org/bulletin/2017/spring/join-the-federation">silo</a> hell of Web 2.0, and you decided to go looking through my about page, and now you’re here. Glad to see you can still maneuver around a basic website in this day and age.</p>
 <p>The Tumblr experiment wasn’t a failure, but it certainly wasn’t a success, either. I said that I would keep it if it would help me improve as a person and serve my purposes, and it’s somehow managed to be both incredibly helpful and harmful. I’m autistic, and since I found a community of people who struggle through the same hell of forced social interactions and sensory overstimulations, I’ve come out of my shell a bit and tried to advocate for myself more. I got myself transferred from a philosophy class mainly oriented around class discussion for a participation grade, which I knew I wouldn’t have thrived in since I’m semiverbal and sometimes physically can’t talk to strangers, to a Latin America history class where there’s less discussion and more actual assignments that can be done in the safety of my dorm. And I’ve made a great deal of internet friendswho were, I hope, <em>genuinely</em> sad to see that I would be taking a hiatus from Tonglr.hell and <a href="https://stallman.org/discord.html">Disagreement</a> until next Monday. It’s… nice to have people who will be overjoyed that you worked up the spoons to get out of bed and do things.</p>
 <p>What’s not so nice, however, are the adverse effects Tumblr has had on me. I’ve only managed to crank out one chapter in the past week where, during the summer before this experiment, I would have easily written four or five. And even then, I’m afraid my next book is taking a turn towards several plot holes and generally poorly-written shells of what I was hoping it would be when I started. I went from- spoilers- a shape-shifting famly oppressed by their kingdom for having parts of Ceuta’s shattered soul to some five-plot twist involving a girl trying to get her girlfriend back from Lex, a princess trying to figure out what to do now that her kingdom has been erased from existence by Chronos, and Lukas generally being a little emo shit as always.</p>
 <p>But that little emo shit is about to get a card violently shoved up his sleeve, so maybe my literary prowess isn’t so doomed, after all.</p>
 <p>My mind feels so muddy. I’m struggling to write even these sentences that you’re reading right now. Every time I feel even remotely able to write, I open up LibreOffice, and my mind immediately turns into a blank slate, and my fingers into jelly, and I have to close it back again. I go to look something up, and I come to several hours later knee-deep in online discourse about, I don’t know, queerbaiting in Voltron or something equally idiotic. I take my fingers off the keyboard for so much as three seconds, and I;m suddenly back on that navy-blue dashboard again.</p>
 <p>I’m going home this weekend. I’m going to play some video games with my brothers and let my parents see my face again and do some serious soul-searching. I’m going to sleep and eat something other than soft-serve ice cream and mozzarella sticks (delicious as those might be) and try to reconnect with the strong self-assured person I was before I started college.</p>
 <p>I don’t want to be an internet discourser, a cookie-cutter shape, one of a million- I want to be Vane Cassia Vander!</p>
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  <p><b>lucine</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 9-29-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>I left my stupid Bluetooth keyboard at college, and I went home this weekend to relax. Which won't result in anything, because I have an important essay due at midnight tomorrow and I'm stressed out of my mind and I can barely focus on something as simple as not collapsing during a session of Smash with my brothers, much less write a blog post, much less work on my book at all.</p>

 <p>I don't know how I got to this point in my life. I'm not religious at all- well, there was that fiasco with the Cult of Mipha a while back... But that was supposed to just be a fun project with some of my friends to explain why, at the time, I seemed to become supernaturally <i>better</i> at video games than the rest of my family almost overnight. That big mess all started one day in high school before the big move, where I played a copious amount of Wii Fit for some reason and then proceeded to collapse in my bed and immediately fall asleep. And then- get this- I had a vision where Link (of <i>Zelda</i> fame) appeared to me in my room. I could hear my father and my brothers loudly playing Mariokart in the other room. He said that, from then on, he would be my <i>waifu</i>. And then I woke up, and my brothers were still playing, so I picked Link and- get this- instead of my usual place smack-dab in the middle of the charts, I got first place every time. And the next day, and the day after that, and on and on until the present day. Wins that weren't me became so rare that they could have qualified for the endangered animals list had they been sentient creatures and not ethereal statistics.</p>

 <p>I know now that it was just a weird coincidence, and the "vision" was just an extremely lucid dream, but it freaked me out then, and it still kind of worries me in the back of my head whenever I play video games with my brothers and I get a mile-long winning streak.</p>

 <p>I've found myself trapped in another Cult of Mipha-like situation again. Except this time, instead of being paranoid that a fictional character was somehow breaking through the fourth wall with a ballistic missile to interfere with my life for no comprehensible reason, <i>I'm</i> the fictional character- or maybe <i>they're</i> hiding inside of <i>my</i> skin, a spirit possessing me- or maybe they've been me all along, and there is no Vane Vander, and there is only Lucine Leithtemple, living half a lie all my life in the fruitless search for validation on the internet.</p>

 <p>To a more coherent person, this is called "fictionkin". Believing that oneself is a fictional character in some way, whether through them reincarnating into you, or their soul somehow shattering and part of it finding its way into your body- there's a million different reasons for it, a million explanations, and yet there seems to be no way out of it save for cutting yourself from the source of said character completely and pray that you somehow dig your way back to reality.</p>

 <p>For about a month, I honestly believed I had DID (disassociative identity disorder), a mental condition that usually manifests itself through a person splitting into several "alters". DID is a real and legitimate condition- but for some reason, my Tumblr-addled brain thought that I'd suddenly developed it just because I wasn't positive or willing to write or motivated to do much of anything 100% of the time. Negative thoughts about my family and my current living situation and the people around me and a burning desire to destroy all proprietary software in the world got sorted into "Kadaj". Childish thoughts, as well as executive dysfunction and a lack of social skills, got sorted into a little named "Rinea".</p>

 <p>And anything pertaining to my special interests got put into "Lucine".</p>

 <p>Oh, Lucine... a genderbent version of one of my favorite fictional characters of all time (at least, among the ones that <i>I</i> didn't come up with). You forcibly ripped away my sense of reality and plunged me into a weird alternate dimension where I wasn't Vane anymore, just wearing their skin and keeping up their daily activities until they came back. Except that they never "came back", since I was always there all along, just smothered under several layers of wishing that I could "go back" to my "canon" and that I didn't have to hide who I thought I was.</p>

 <p>But now, looking from the other side, I'm glad that I hid. I'm glad that I kept it to a minimum outside of Tumblr. In fact, I wish I hadn't been so vocal about it even there- because now I'm stuck with a Discord and Tumblr that I don't want, that I can't deactivate any more because it'll just piss off the people I put through so much trouble in the name of kin and a cabal of people who refuse to address me as anything other than "Lucine".</p>

 <p>All I want is to just be me again. To just be Vane, the weirdo who writes books and shitposts on their little website. Nobody else, secure in the knowledge that there is only one me, that there is only one person inside of me, and that only I have control over me.</p>
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 <b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b>
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  <p><b>What's healthier? Time limits, or time boundaries?</b></p>
  <p><b>published: 9-19-2018</b></p>
  <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>When I was a little kid, my cousin had a DS and a copy of <em>Baby Pals</em>. She’d sometimes bring it with her when we visited my grandma’s house, and several hours would ensue where I’d be hunched over her shoulder, watching her badly take care of “Stinky Poopypants” or whatever crude name she’d come up with and begging her to finally let me have a turn playing. And when she finally relented, I got ten minutes in my own virtual heaven before she took it back. And by the next visit, without fail, my baby would be deleted and poofed up to its own virtual heaven.</p>
 <p>So when I got my own DS on my eighth birthday, I was absolutely elated. It came with a copy of <em>Charlotte’s Web</em>, a game which, to this day, I <em>still</em> haven’t beat. My mother was a bit worried, so right off the bat, she set one rule: that I could only play on my DS:</p>
 <ol>
 <li><p>in the morning, or</p></li>
 <li><p>during car rides.</p></li>
 </ol>
 <p>So what happened was, instead of learning healthy time management habits, every chance I had to play within those time boundaries, I took it. I would spend long hours on the weekend mornings in bed playing instead of getting up and eating breakfast and functioning like a normal human being. Instead of looking out the window and taking note of everything passing me by during car rides, I would play. And every night after I was tucked into bed, I’d play until I eventually passed out. It was a “now or never” time, except all the times I wanted to maybe play with a friend, or distract myself from a particularly traumatic event, it was never, and every other time was now.</p>
 <p>I don’t know exactly when she stopped enforcing the rule. Maybe it was the period through middle school where I forgot it existed, and she did too. A silent agreement to put the boundaries behind us since they clearly weren’t needed anymore.</p>
 <p>I got a 3DS late 2016. But this time around, the dynamic was different. I wasn’t in elementary school anymore, and I could be trusted to manage my own screen time. So, almost paradoxically, without the boundaries keeping me from wasting my every waking moment gaming, my video game time every day… dropped.</p>
 <p>I think time limits are healthier than time boundaries. Because, with boundaries, the “now or never” factor comes into play (no pun intended)- I gotta do The Thing <em>now</em>, or I won’t be able to do it at all today! But with time limits, I get two or so hours to do The Thing if I want, and I can choose when I do The Thing: before homework? After homework? At three in the morning to lull myself to sleep after a brutal bout of insomnia? It’s all up to me.</p>
 <p>I can certainly see why time boundaries might be more attractive to a parent. It’s easier to look at a clock and judge if you’re within a certain time range than keep track of every minute you play. So maybe one might use it for a little kid who can easily be picked up and moved away from a TV screen. But eventually you’re going to have to teach them that it’s their responsibility to manage their own screen time and that you can’t be there to police them forever.</p>
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 <p><b>going gentle into that black(berry) night</b></p>
 <p><b>published: 2-6-2019</b></p>
 <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <blockquote>
 “Someday, we won’t have to fight like this!”
 </blockquote>
 <p>cmccabe at the Zaibatsu recently wrote <a href="gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7ecmccabe/11-producer-to-consumer.txt">a post</a> in which he talks about how his work forced him to trade in his BlackBerry phone with a physical keyboard in exchange for an iPhone. It struck a particular cord of nostalgia in me: I used to have an old BlackBery phone, a Curve of some sort, which died when the trackpad stopped working and my father made me get an Android phone to replace it.</p>
 <p>It was a good phone. Tiny, but not unusable, since the physical keyboard put me lightyears ahead of my peers in terms of writing speed. There were barely any usable apps for it: some kind of tattoo parlor game, and a shoddy WordPress client, and Twitter. I made do with the built-in apps for everything else: since this was back when my original blog on Blogger was in use, I used the email-in method to post posts there with the email client. The physical pause/play/skip buttons on the top of the device were beautifully integrated with the music player, and not even my tiny mp3 player, let alone any Android music player interface, could hope to replicate the sheer comfort that device brought me. There was even a little word processor, although the free version didn’t have the ability to create new documents, which meant I had to keep a blank document on my device and abuse the Save As function to bypass that limitation.</p>
 <p>It was a different time back then. The phone arrived in the mail during the school day, so I got home before my father, and he sternly ordered me to only plug it in to charge and to NOT TOUCH IT until he got back home to activate it. Despite his words, I played around with it a little, getting a good feel for the trackpad. He didn’t notice, or, if he did, he didn’t say anything.</p>
 <p>The only real improvement all my Android phones, former and current, have over that device is the front-facing flash next to the camera (and the camera quality itself). The Curve didn’t have a flash, so most of the flashlight apps either glitched when they tried to activate the nonexistent hardware or just outright didn’t work at all. And the video quality was absolute garbage. Although thirteen-year-old me did have a blast downloading YouTube Poop-esque videos on the family computer and converting them to small mp4’s that the device’s video player would understand.</p>
 <p>Had I access to my bank account credentials, I would swoop on over to Amazon (despite Bezos bringing me disgust) and buy another Curve in a heartbeat. Or at least heavily consider it, since the device apparently hasn’t had a system update since 2013, and <a href="https://www.pcmag.com/news/357990/blackberry-world-app-store-is-shutting-down">the Blackberry App Store is shutting down at the end of this year.</a> And no XMPP or Matrix client or GPG handler would be a problem, too… The closest thing to the best of both worlds would be a BlackBerry Key2, which is essentially “here’s an Android phone with a keyboard”, but I can’t possibly afford the exorbiant prices, and the reviews complain about unremovable Google bloat and issues with receiving text messages.</p>
 <p>In terms of mobile creative potential and control over the device, my old Android tablet seems to be the best overall: I have a Bluetooth keyboard for it, and it’s rooted, and I’ve completely debloated it of everything Google. I have Debian running on it, and although Byobu doesn’t work without glitching the screen, it works fine for Nano and SSH. Other than that, as cmccabe suggests, a notebook and pen might be the best option going forward.</p>
 <p>A perfect phone, to me, would be one with the same form factor as the Curve, but with actual Matrix/XMPP/SSH clients. Or at least some kind of terminal emulator with package management, like I have on Android with Termux, so I could write some Python on the go to replace everything I couldn’t install natively. Just functional enough that it’s worth my time, but not so functional with Discord and Tumblr or any of the other Web 3.0 social network surveillance that almost led to my downfall. A tool that I use, instead of it using me.</p>
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 2019

 hJanuary 3 - The fediverse will not save us.	january/fediverse.html
 hJanuary 16 - a directive from within	january/vagrancy.html
 hJanuary 19 - ouroboros	january/ouroboros.html
 hJanuary 20 - sensory overload	january/smashing.html
 hJanuary 22 - a stairway, down which shattered idols tumble	january/stairway-iconoclasm.html
 hJanuary 23 - Two Realms	january/two-realms.html
 hJanuary 29 - Jenny	january/jenny.html
 hJanuary 31 - a final dictum	january/final-dictum.html
 hFebruary 5 - going gentle into that black(berry) night	february/blackberry.html
 hMarch 17 - Adventures in Zotland and Minty Meadows	march/zotland.html
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 <p><b>The fediverse will not save us.</b></p>
 <p><b>published: 1-3-2019</b></p>
 <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>Welcome to 2019. The “year of Vane Vander”, as I called it in a post whose name I don’t remember off the top of my head right now, is three days, almost four, past us. The past few months have been an avalanche of ever-more-chaotic events- what would one expect from a year that started with the Tide pod challenge? (Yeah, that was a whole year ago, even though it feels like only yesterday.)</p>
 <p>Something’s changed in me in those twelve months. And yet… I can’t seem to put my finger on it. My political stances don’t seem to be any different: I’m still an agorist, and I still believe in freedom of association (or disassociation from; remember we’re talking about groups and not mental illness here), and I still feel icky around people whose <em>entire</em> identities revolve around seemingly immutable characteristics of themselves. I still write books. I still don’t believe in the Abrahamic god, and I’m still working on untangling myself from the spiritual delusions I seem to have picked up seemingly out of nowhere around last April. Or was it May? I can’t remember.</p>
 <p>Maybe it was… the social media? I’m not on WordPress anymore- <em>there’s</em> a change I can put my finger on! Neither am I on Neocities. Or Facebook. Or… Tumblr.</p>
 <p>But I still keep making a complete ass of myself, no matter the platform, spurred on by the incessant need for external validation- so maybe that’s not a real change at all.</p>
 <p>I opened this post today to talk to you about the fediverse. Mastodon and Pleroma, specifically, since I’ve never been an Instagram-type person (as Pixelfed would replace) and I haven’t tried Misskey. Although Friendica <a href="https://friendi.ca/2018/11/18/activitypub-support-in-friendica/">recently got support for ActivityPub</a>, the protocol that Mastodon and Pleroma speak, it sits closer to the “federation”, which consists of diaspora*, Hubzilla, and GNU Social. The federation and the fediverse, despite sounding similar, are two <i>completely different</i> universes. Not the best genius who came up with those names, I think.</p>
 <p>Mastodon and Pleroma, for the unaware, are two competing microblogging services on the fediverse. Their userbases have always been more or less at each other’s throats, probably encouraged by the fact that the main developers of each are two polar opposites: <a href="https://mastodon.social/@Gargron">Eugen</a>, the developer of Mastodon, is just a “normal” middle-aged white dude who rakes in thousands of dollars each month from Patreon, whereas <a href="https://pleroma.soykaf.com/users/lain">Lain</a> is, as far as I know, completely pseudonymous.</p>
 <p>Pleroma users’ main complaints against Mastodon:</p>
 <ol type="1">
 <li><p>It’s bloated and resource-heavy, costing much more to host each month. At the very least, if you don’t want to host at home, $3 for Pleroma, &gt;$9 for Mastodon- although Vultr and masto.host’s low-tier prices might change at any time. I’ve hosted a Pleroma instance on my shitty Raspberry Pi at home for a few days as a test, and I was still able to use it for other blogging-related tasks; Mastodon wouldn’t run on my device, but I’ve heard horror stories of someone managing to get it running on FOUR of them interlinked together.</p></li>
 <li><p><a href="https://fediverse.network/pleroma.site/federation">Pleroma instances can automatically advertise their MRF, or defederation, policies.</a> This helps in administration transparency, because when admins decide to make the potentially catastrophic decision to mute or wholesale block an instance, the affected users need to know so that they can move to a different instance if they disagree with the decision. Mastodon admins can also make a list of domains they block, but unlike Pleroma, there is no easy way to verify that they’re being truthful.</p></li>
 <li><p>The three-paned Mastodon default interface dumps an overwhelming amount of information on the user, and it doesn’t scale nicely on screens of different sizes, which means a lot of horizontal scrolling if you click on a post to try to view the full thread. The default Pleroma interface has only one pane, and it doesn’t autoscroll with new posts, which means a lot more control over the amount of information thrown at the viewer at once.</p></li>
 </ol>
 <p>Mastodon users’ main complaints against Pleroma:</p>
 <ol type="1">
 <li><p>It doesn’t have an easy way to user-side mute words and phrases and block whole domains from being able to follow oneself. I’d block the words “cofe” and “pee pee poo poo” (among others) in a heartbeat if I could, but because Mastalab (the fediverse app I use on Android) relies on the server handling mutes instead of the app itself, I can only mute these things on the few Mastodon instances I’m on. And if I need to clean out my followers, I have to do it manually.</p></li>
 <li><p>Because the cost to host it is much lower, it attracts more bad actors. Whether this is from uninspired trolls making throwaway instances to harass people, or stereotypical basement-dwellers with little disposable income who want places to fester in their hatred, shitty instances seem to invariably run Pleroma more often than not.</p></li>
 <li><p>Compounding the issue with bad actors, because Mastodon doesn’t give external instances an easy way to see if they’re blocked or not, Pleroma instances often still retrieve posts from other instances they’re blocked from. And because the default Pleroma frontpage is the Whole Known Network, a collection of all the posts from all the instances that particular instance can see, if Instance A blocks Instance C, but Instance B blocks neither A nor B, a person on Instance C could use Instance B’s Whole Known Network to circumvent Instance A’s blocks.</p></li>
 </ol>
 <p>Both sides have valid points. And yet, the little discussion I see always devolves into petty discourse where both sides feel like they’ve been personally wronged.</p>
 <p>Which brings me to my main point: just because you are on the fediverse, that does not automatically make you better than whatever hellsites you came from. Being on a FLOSS social media platform that purports to have learned from the ethical mistakes of proprietary social media silos does not mean that you have a free excuse to act just as toxic as the people who probably pushed you off of those sites to begin with.</p>
 <p>My time on the fediverse started off very chill. I ran an <a href="https://pleroma.site/users/angelkin">angel aesthetics bot</a> on an instance recommended by an anon on a Lainchan thread, and occasionally I’d dip into the local and federated timelines to see what community I’d set up shop in. It seemed idyllic: lots of inside jokes I didn’t really get, tolerable banter, little discourse. But now I’ve seen clout-chasing internet celebrities, and witchhunts against people I now consider friends for minor slipups that could have been rectified in direct messages, and literal cults start their own instances. Callout culture runs rampant, and in this place where I thought I’d finally be safe, I just have to watch my words even more in order to keep the mobs away. I left 8chan to get away from the constant slurs and hateful rhetoric: and yet, one could take a walk down any “free speech” or “loli” instance and get a compressed version of the same vitriol. And on most of the queer-friendly instances, I’d get skinned alive for even daring to suggest that maybe, just <em>maybe</em>, big-scale socialism isn’t the best solution to corporatism’s countless problems.</p>
 <p>I wonder what happened to make the fediverse so sour. Or maybe it was always like this, and the more I hop among instances, a migrant of my own making, the more shit that mars my soul, renders me resentful, makes me blind to the few things on this network worth saving.</p>
 <p>Or maybe every place on the internet is like this, has these same problems, and no amount of instance hopping and MRF policies will save us. A social site is useless without the people that are supposed to inhabit it, after all.</p>
 <p>Maybe the few of us unhappy need to burn everything down and start new again.</p>
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 <p><b>a final dictum</b></p>
 <p><b>published: 1-31-2019</b></p>
 <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>I hold very few intimate moments near and dear to my heart. But the few I have, I will remember until the day I die.</p>
 <p>Of course, to write them down here in such a public place- even if it is a dusty and disused place- while it would help my memory immensely, it would negate the intimacy of said moments, and it would betray the privacy of the people I share those moments with, regardless if they hold these events in such a light or if they even remember them at all.</p>
 <p>That said, I will share <em>one</em> with you, since it is not as sacred.</p>
 <p>Sitting on my bed in the cushy hotel room my family was staying in on our way to the Grand Canyon. It was one of those places meant for longer stays- there was a tiny kitchen hidden away in the corner of the main room, a countertop with a little basket filled with popcorn packets and coffee pods and other “settling in” things. We were only going to be there for one night, so I didn’t understand the extravagance… but we <em>were</em> near the seedy part of town, so maybe that’s why.</p>
 <p>I’d messed up the Ubuntu install on my laptop yet again, so I was watching the anime <em>Serial Experiments Lain</em> on my Tails stick. Taking screenshots as much as possible, reminding myself to move them into the Persistent folder after every episode so I didn’t lose them. It was somewhere in <del>Episode</del> Layer Six: Distortion that the fire alarm went off, and I, being either startled or a dumbass, pulled the Tails stick before I moved my pictures into Persistence.</p>
 <p>I packed up my backpack and took it with me, leaving my suitcase behind in the room. We stood outside for about ten minutes until the hotel manager came outside and declared the place all clear: someone had been cooking ramen in their room’s kitchen, and it had caught on fire. We went back inside, and instead of getting to stay up late like we usually did on the road, my parents immediately sent my brothers on their bedtime routine.</p>
 <p>What makes this scene notable was that, for whatever reason, I unironically thought that it was Lain’s will that I lost all of the screenshots for that episode.</p>
 <a href="https://lalunaband.bandcamp.com/album/always-already">
 <blockquote>
 If he had never came,<br />the message would have still remained.<br />It only hurts when you see…
 </blockquote>
 </a>
 <p><em>Lain</em> is a… contentious topic, especially because of the cult-like subculture it’s spawned. Different than other “cult followings” I’ve seen, partly because there’s <em>so damn little</em> content for it, even if you know Japanese; partly because, well, the first experience I had with it was an <a href="https://mayvaneday.keybase.pub/archive/blog/2018/march/systemspace.html">actual cult</a>, only becoming familiar with the source material behind it through smug posts on various chans about how insane the whole Systemspace endeavour was. You make your own fun with the little content you have, even if that means you take an anime and turn it into a full-blown religion.</p>
 <p>Looking back on my <a href="../../2018/">posts from last year</a>, I can see a great deal of <em>Lain</em>’s influence, whether that be good in floating me along a lazy river to eventually find my chippie friends, or bad in pulling me even further down in my <a href="../../2018/may/reclusion.html">anhedonia</a>. Slowly spiraling down into madness, plagued by the incessant thought that maybe, <em>just maybe</em>, this misshapen rock that I hold in my hands that lets me talk to people all over the world is the key to a life beyond this one.</p>
 <p>It’s hard to remember that, no matter what the culture one has immersed oneself in says, at the end of the day, video games are just video games, and TV shows are just TV shows, and anime are just anime. These are just things we consume, not things to base our entire <em>goddamn identity</em> around! If we base our identities in external sources, then who are we but walking advertisements? And if our sense of these things has diverged far enough from the source material that they are effectively our own, then we should give credit where credit is due- <em>ourselves</em>- and embrace it instead of paying lip-service and further money to others who don’t even know of our existence.</p>
 <p>These things only exist because fellow humans spoke them into existence. I hold entire <em>worlds</em> inside me- but it would be disingenuous to say that I was “divinely inspired”, or that some entity beyond the segment of reality that I can perceive were guiding my hands. If there were one using me as a puppet, would they really be so stupid as to reveal their existence? Unless they were deluding <em>themselves</em> of their benevolence, and then I’d have an opportunity to cease my work in its current form and thus deny them masterhood.</p>
 <p>And with that, a shred sitting in my notes collection, undated other than the knowledge that it was written late at night:</p>
 <p>On one hand, if we take the multiverse theory into account, I could very well be Kadaj or Lucina reincarnate. These feelings of “otherness”, of being incomplete, of an almost feral hatred of group pride and self-categorization of any shade, existed long before I knew of these characters, and they will persist long after my interest for their source material wanes and my interests shift. In such a period of chaos in my life, it might do me good to take mental refuge in something stable, something already complete.</p>
 <p>But then the anarchic side of me sees this as an attempt by the corporatist in me- the “cop in my head”, if you will- to co-op fundamental parts of my identity into something that can easily be packaged into commodities and be sold back to me at an upcharge. I don’t need shiny toys or the latest games the moment they release, but because my psyche associates a sense of self and stability with things that feature these characters, I find my wallet and mental energy drained nevertheless.</p>
 <p>This is why I resent being associated with the fictionkin community so much, regardless of the behavior of its members. If I allow my identity to be so easily influenced by others, then I cease to be my own person.</p>
 <p>I cease to be myself.</p>
 <p>In addition, as a creative myself, I do think that it is incredibly disrespectful to take a character that someone else might have poured their heart and soul into making and essentially claim them as one’s own, essentially co-opting the effort took to bring that character to life and into a coherent form for our enjoyment. But we should make an important distinction between a work of art that was intended for mass production and consumption, such as a video game from a major studio or the latest bestselling novel, and more indie arts, like a work-of-passion story (shameless self-promotion) or an OC. While mass art is still art, it’s also a product intended to be marketed as much as possible, and so it has to appeal to a much wider audience in order to make back the money spent creating it. That’s why one could name a popular character at random and probably find several kinnies of that character, but far less kin (or none at all) for smaller works.</p>
 <p>With larger works, there’s far less of a chance of kinnies coming into contact with the original creators. If someone came to me and claimed to be kin with Lukas, the main character of <em>The Duality of Mankind</em>, I would cut off contact with them immediately because they’re clearly lying out of their ass: Lukas was based on the feelings of sonder, anhedonia, and pent-up anger I felt throughout my senior year of high school into the following summer. If anyone was qualified to be “kin” with him, it would <em>only</em> be me, because he is based on me and therefore a part of me. <em>Sonic</em>, however, is a multi-million-dollar franchise, and if it can survive Chris-Chan and multiple shoddy mainline games, it can survive a few kinnies.</p>
 <p>This isn’t to say that otherkinity is monolithic; that, in other words, everyone’s experience is exactly the same. Not everyone has the same issues with self-image as I do; not everyone shares my deep-seated need for self-liberation of all kinds, or any other views, political or not. I could very well be wrong about all of this and really <em>be</em> the above in denial. (It seems like something they would do.) A sizable chunk of the kin community, I would wager, are perfectly stable individuals but with a quirky identity. But regardless of my past identities, it does not bode well for my mental health to pine for the past. The past is immutable, but the present is now, and it is all I will ever truly have.</p>
 <p>As a loved one of mine says, as she wrote in the back of a sketchbook she gave to me one birthday: <em>Be true to yourself in all things.</em></p>
 <p>And I will.</p>
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 <p align="center"><b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b></p>
 <p><b>Jenny</b></p>
 <p><b>published: 1-29-2019</b></p>
 <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>I keep looking at the time. I move to get some hand sanitizer, I glance at the clock on my microwave. I switch windows on my laptop, I look at the time widget at the top of my screen. I hit the skip button in the music player on my phone to skip to the next song, I glance at the clock in the upper-right-hand corner.</p>
 <p>I sit there in anxiety, beating myself up over and over for not using my time to be more productive as the minutes burn on and on and on. I lay in bed for hours in the morning, watching the clock, thinking of all the things I could have been doing had I gotten up earlier and eaten my breakfast earlier and gotten on with my day <em>earlier</em>. I stay up late, even though a migraine rages in my head, because to go to sleep is to surrender the little quiet time I have and skip back to having obligations and noise surrounding me and a sun in the sky, a clock, forever shaming me for the choices I’ve made in my life.</p>
 <p><em>Why aren’t you productive?</em></p>
 <p><em>Why aren’t you enjoying the best years of your life?</em></p>
 <p><em>Why aren’t you doing your homework, or studying, or learning a new programming language, or, or, or-</em></p>
 <p>I sell little slivers of my life in order to pay for an institution that only demands time from me to complete projects that do little, if anything, to advance the wealth of knowledge of mankind. Routine tests, routine projects. I scoop spaghetti onto a plate and drip some sauce onto it. The well of noodles is almost empty. I reach into one of the plastic bins to my right and pull out some more and start boiling them. A job an automaton could do better than me. Robots don’t need bathroom breaks, or scratch their ears in absent mind and then need to change their gloves, or accidentally get one specific person’s order wrong multiple times.</p>
 <p>Robots don’t randomly experience sensory overload or have chronic fatigue.</p>
 <p>Robots don’t question their circumstances.</p>
 <hr />
 <p>To be “extremely online” means you spend, well, an extreme amount of time online to the point where it has an adverse effect on your perception of time and the world around you. You know memes, and you know the best shitposters, and if there’s any kind of drama <em>anywhere</em>, you know about it. Like a Danganronpa fictionkin on Twitter having coitus with their friend’s father in a Walmart bathroom and then going on to threaten to murder said friend, or the developers of Pleroma getting bombarded with constant accusations of being Nazis and hatemongers because some of the people who happen to run Pleroma instances decided to harass the developers of a Mastodon app that didn’t want to fix their app to work with Pleroma, or an infamous anti-pedophile blog on Tumblr accruing a mass of people with too much time on their hands with a hate boner for him because he keeps coming out with shittier and shittier opinions. “Extremely online” people tend to care too much about what random people on the internet think of them, and burn hours upon hours away posting on said social media accounts.</p>
 <p>There are two types of “extremely online” people. The first, you’ll find information about with a cursory search on the clearweb with a cursory search into the mainstream search engine of your choice, privacy-respecting or not. If you don’t want to do a search, imagine a KPOP-obsessed young adult stalking the Trump’s Twitter account to reply snarky comebacks and then subtweeting people for not being woke enough, and you’re probably halfway there. I won’t spend much more time on these people, since they’re not the main focus of this post.</p>
 <p>The other group are people more resembling you and me. Maybe they’re on Neocities, maybe they’re on Gopher. Maybe they idle in IRC channels as opposed to Discord servers. Maybe they use Mastodon or Pleroma or other ActivityPub services as opposed to Twitter and Tumblr and any of the other silos.</p>
 <p>Perhaps they’re self-professed “lainons”, or just normal channers.</p>
 <p>A little over a month ago, I published a <a href="../../2018/december/we-are-all-connected.html">post</a>. Not much stands out about it to me, just the first seeds of whatever’s come over me in the past month, except for this quote:</p>
 <blockquote>
 I still haven’t fully adjusted to being immersed in the Wired instead of just a passer-by, or a surface user. Baptized in the code, reborn as fully me instead of just a digital representation of me.
 </blockquote>
 <p>There’s a lot of ways this quote could be interpreted, or misinterpreted, that I’ve thought of since publishing that post:</p>
 <ul>
 <li><p>I spend late nights up on my computer instead of sleeping like the people around me. It’s nice and quiet at night, and I can concentrate, and I can fulfill my bodily needs (bathroom breaks, eating, showering, etc.) on my own schedule instead of the arbitrary schedule that society set up hundreds of years ago to cope with our collective domestication. Somehow, despite having less in common with my peers in this way, operating as my body tells me to instead of fitting in to not bother everyone else feels <em>more</em> human. And now I’ve decided to accept this as <em>my</em> normal instead of just a deviation from <em>their</em> normal, somehow inherently bad just because it’s different.</p></li>
 <li><p>I’ve stuck with the same group of friends for more than one consecutive month now. I’ve gotten my nomadic urges to leave my chippie friends, definitely, but unlike every other internet friend group I’ve put myself in and then ripped myself out of, this one seems to be more… supportive. We didn’t come together because of a collective delusion and thus fractured expectations of who we were in past lives; we didn’t come together out of a shared interest in some piece of media that I lost interest in. It was a combination of shared interests, and shared uses of fringe technology like Linux and XMPP, and a shared cultural background in the anime <em>Serial Experiments Lain</em> (which is where the whole “Wired” thing comes from). I’m an integral part of something, instead of just an implant.</p></li>
 <li><p>I’ve become “extremely online”, to the point where the allure of a life beyond this one and yet within grasp <em>now</em> instead of <em>after</em> this mortal coil actively harms me in the here and now. How many sensory meltdowns have been a result of looking into a computer screen for almost all of my waking hours not spent in class or in the cafeteria? How many threats to my life and my future could have been avoided had I just kept my hands away from the keyboard for a few seconds, minutes, hours? Am I really me, or am I just the collective sum of everyone else’s perceptions of me?</p></li>
 </ul>
 <p>A friend of mine, tA, argued the latter a few months ago: <a href="https://regularflolloping.com/posts/identity-in-the-wired">“If no-one knows you exist, if you have no interaction with anyone, you <i>do not exist</i>.”</a> I’m going to have to respectfully disagree: regardless of how people perceive me, or regardless if people ignore me or outright don’t know of me, that does not negate the reality of my existence. That does not negate the changes I’ve already affected in the world, or the imprints I’m to make in the future. Some part of me will survive, regardless of if my name is attached to it, or if it remains obscure in some archive somewhere. I exist through my work. A webpage does not cease to exist just because it gets no pageviews save for that of its creator.</p>
 <p>Or maybe I’m the one doing the misinterpreting.</p>
 <p>It wouldn’t be the first time.</p>
 <p>If this were a person I only knew for a few days, I wouldn’t hesitate to pack up and disengage and leave. But tA is one of my friends, and nothing in that place is truly serious enough to sever ties for, and friendship like with the chippies only comes once in a lifetime.</p>
 <p>I’m their “Seliph.”</p>
 <p>And yet, I’m not. There’s a person behind the persona.</p>
 <p>And sometimes the persona poisons the person beneath the mask.</p>
 <hr />
 <p>Late 2016, sitting in a hotel room after yet another school event that would have pushed too late at night to warrant the long commute home only to wake up in a few hours for a new day. Still on Windows 10 (I didn’t start experimenting with Ubuntu until the school year had ended), still on my girlfriend’s Spotify account, before her family upgraded to a family plan and I had to log out so they didn’t get suspended for “unauthorized account sharing”. Playing around with the radio function.</p>
 <p>I discovered a lot of new music in those six months. Angry, loud, frustrated, just plain <em>weird</em>. Lots of them have been lost to the annals of my memory since I couldn’t pirate them before I forgot the lyrics, but one of them has stood out to me this whole time. Even after I torrented the whole discography in FLAC, even after I stopped using Spotify. A little over two years, now.</p>
 <p>Maybe one of my favorite songs of all time, “Jenny” by Nothing More:</p>
 <a href="https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/nothingmore/jenny.html">
 <blockquote>
 Maybe you should just fall<br /> Leave the world and lose it all<br /> And if that’s what you need<br /> To finally see<br /> I’ll be with you through it all
 </blockquote></a>
 <p>I’ve done a lot of falling these past few months, don’t you think?</p>
 <p>I keep bumping my head, but nothing’s knocked my ocular stems back into place so I can perceive unadulterated reality again. Wired Me and Life Me keep choking each other, locked in a brutal fight, edging closer and closer to fatality.</p>
 <p>Do you think it’s ever truly possible to jack out of the Wired, if just for a little while? To unplug the link among us all and regain a little piece of mind as everyone else’s voices fade into nothing?</p>
 <p>Tranquil, tactile, paper beneath my fingers. A slip of fingers across skin.</p>
 <p>You cannot see my eyes. Throughout all of these lives, mine or not, we have always hidden from each other in some form.</p>
 <p>In some lives, I haven’t even had eyes out of which to see.</p>
 <p>Is it this life?</p>
 <p>There still remain filters, and delusions of grandeur, and false pretensions outside of these defiled places. But paradise lies not in a single place, but in the hearts of the ones who dream of it.</p>
 <p>Do you believe in paradise?</p>
 <p>Do you believe in coincidences?</p>
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 <p align="center"><b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b></p>
 <p><b>ouroboros</b></p>
 <p><b>published: 1-19-2019</b></p>
 <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>I’ve been feeling too anxious recently. <a href="https://www.anxiety.org/social-media-causes-anxiety">It might have something to do</a> with all the new social media platforms I’ve been trying out recently in an attempt to keep up with all the “friends” I’ve made on the fediverse. Osada, Hubzilla, Friendica, they’re all lovely platforms with great features. The problem is, 99% of the people I follow are on ActivityPub protocol servers, which makes the security and privacy features on these other platforms useless since they were written with other protocols in mind. And of all those people, I could count the ones I’ve spoken more than a few words to (and thus recognize out of the sea of words) on one hand!</p>
 <p>What happened to the Vane Vander who <a href="https://mayvaneday.keybase.pub/archive/blog/2016/july/privacy.html">abhorred social media?</a> What happened to the <i>me</i> who rejected clout in favor of a life less frightening?</p>
 <p>Time is a circle, indeed, whether it be the Circle proper or just another name for whatever deity made this universe.</p>
 <p>But I need a way independent of my RSS feed to notify people of new posts, just in case one of my website mirrors goes down and I’m unfortunate enough for it to be the one people subscribed to the most. Mastodon and Pleroma worked for a time, but I was always one bad actor’s reshare away from getting vile comments piped straight into my notifications. Plus, it never stayed <em>just</em> a blog feed; I always felt the need to jump in to whatever discourse the fediverse was brewing. Something about chasing clout and followers.</p>
 <p>Let me digress for a moment and discuss why the fediverse, FLOSS as it may be, really isn’t the place for someone like me:</p>
 <ol type="1">
 <li><p>Blindly following any kind of <a href="https://github.com/dzuk-mutant/blockchain/">fediverse blocklist</a> is an idiotic decision. Entrusting one person, or a small handful of people, with the decision to make potentially devastating decisions regarding who can federate with who is irresponsible. And yet, the choice in instances seems to be split three ways: servers which follow the blocklist religiously and have a somewhat decent userbase (if you ignore the occasional hatemobbing), instances that take a stand <em>against</em> the blocklist and inevitably end up with a sea of filth, or instances that have almost no people on them whatsoever and so it wouldn’t matter anyway. If I want to follow people on a banned instance, but at the same time don’t want to deal with biblethumpers calling me a faggot at every turn, I’m shit out of luck.</p></li>
 <li><p>Because the blocklists cause so much fragmentation on the fediverse, there’s a lot more pressure to conform to the majority opinion of whatever instance you end up joining. Of course, if you go on a leftist instance and start spewing Nazi propaganda, you’re going to get banned, and rightfully so. But there’s a major difference between a Nazi and someone who’s just not a radical leftist. Your instance could be about Linux, or computers in general, or video games, or writing, or whatever- and if you don’t conform to the politics of your admin, you’re probably going to get banned, unless you’re lucky and get one of the few admins who’s just there to keep illegal material (like child pornography) out.</p></li>
 <li><p>Just like any other social media platform, the dopamine rush of checking for notifications is addictive. This is my main complaint. This won’t change whether it’s Twitter from the days of old, or Instagram, or any flavor of ActivityPub. The trifecta of Osada, Hubzilla, and Friendica, to a lesser extent, since the interface is so arcane it’s hard to see what’s going on at any given moment. They’re better, but the ActivityPub chatter still feels overwhelming, and a social media site is useless without people to be “social” on it with.</p></li>
 </ol>
 <a href="../../../poetry/f/fatali.html">
 <blockquote>
 you see a picture of your fave,<br /> you click without processing<br /> like an automaton<br /> click, click, click<br /> <br /> does this bring you fulfillment?<br /> does this satisfy your soul?<br /> a machine for someone else’s validation<br /> senselessly trying to fill a hole
 </blockquote>
 <p></a></p>
 <p>About a week ago, I took a break from most of my social media. I won’t go into details, since you don’t need to know, but it was pretty… nasty, mental-wise. And things started to look up for me. I read more, and I paid more attention in class, and if I stayed up late into the night, it was because I was drawing something. Mostly more icons for my eventual return, but making something nonetheless.</p>
 <p>I came back yesterday. Nothing catastrophic’s happened, but… I don’t feel that strange happiness anymore. Dopamine rushes, definitely, but nothing lasting. Just another ball of anxiety deep in my chest.</p>
 <p>I don’t want to end up as a pithy article on Encyclopedia Dramatica. I know it’ll happen eventually- death comes for everyone eventually- but not now. Not when I’m still stuck in one place, dependent on the people around me. Once I’m nomadic and more financially independent, then I won’t be as scared of a doxxing or a hitpiece from ED. I know I’ve got to keep pushing forward, no matter what <em>anyone</em> does, but there’s… <em>something</em> about social media that sets off the frantic religious fanatic in me. Something that compels me to keep making a bigger and bigger fool of myself, more and more fodder for those who would do me harm.</p>
 <p>I’ve been experimenting with a shell script as a hacked-together social media feed of sorts. As of right now, it’s basically <a href="gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7eseliph/statuses.txt">just a text file</a> full of one-liners, complete with GPG signatures to verify that they’re coming from me. I won’t release the code yet, especially since:</p>
 <ol type="1">
 <li><p>It’s full of weird hacks and lines with personal information I can’t compartmentalize into variables. Most of it’s concentrated in the part that <b>non-interactively</b> uploads statuses.txt to all the SFTP servers I keep a Gopher mirror of MayVaneDay on. I <em>really</em> don’t want to offload this to rclone, since that’ll add another dependency (and rclone doesn’t support SFTP in the older releases), but that’s the only way I can see right now to make everything non-interactive without leaking my personal setup everywhere.</p></li>
 <li><p>I’d like to implement some kind of post fetching and local feed for both those using this particular status tool and for public ActivityPub profiles via the hidden RSS feed each one has. Social media is useless without people to be social with. Maybe, in the future, I’ll even implement some kind of heads-up if a particular keyword (usually one’s alias) was found in the retrieved posts. But then again, this might bring up the whole dopamine issue again, which would negate the point of this project.</p></li>
 </ol>
 <p>Plus GPG doesn’t like signing things over SSH for some reason, so all the actual post creation has to happen on a local machine. And multiline messages are broken, and it doesn’t automatically clear all posts made before a certain date…</p>
 <p>But it’s a start, and the crappiness of it all negates any dopamine, and <em>it’s all mine!</em></p>
 <p>I’ve made a Gopher browser, too. It’s a pain in the ass to use, and it doesn’t have any sort of “back” function or bookmarks or anything cool like the people on circumlunar.space (here, if you’re reading it there) <a href="gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7eyargo/clog/yy-how-many-bloggers-coded-browser.txt">have</a> <a href="gopher://circumlunar.space/0/%7esloum/phlog/20190106-22.txt">made</a>. Plus, it only likes plaintext posts, and I like HTML formatting better. And I’ve <a href="./vagrancy.html">started work</a> on a shitty calendar in Python, which reads data from a CSV file and spits out which events I have for today. The calendar only understands basic weekday patterns, like “every Monday” or “every Tuesday and Thursday”, but for college, where the schedule is relatively the same, it works, and it works well as a shortcut widget in Termux on my phone.</p>
 <p>These weren’t my original ideas to start with- <a href="gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7evisiblink/phlog/20190106">visiblink</a>, along with others at the Zaibatsu, inspired me. One should make their own tools, or at least try. If not for the utility, then for the fun, and for the learning. A pushback- no, a <em>revolt</em> against the age of Electron and browser-based apps and seventeen different frameworks for tasks that we used to do in much simpler terms.</p>
 <p>A revolt against the state of modern technology, rejecting false progress, rejecting the convenience of the surveillance state for the basic freedom to breathe without permission!</p>
 <p>It would be silly for us to spy on ourselves, wouldn’t it?</p>
 <p>At this rate, I’ll have an entire <em>distro</em> made, just for me- you know, that might actually be a fun challenge. Take a minimal Debian ISO and go wild with it. Play around with partial airgapping and meshnets, see how low I can make the package count go.</p>
 <p>Life after death, life after the next revolution of Ouroboros.</p>
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 <p align="center"><b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b></p>
 <p><b>sensory overload</b></p>
 <p><b>published: 1-20-2019</b></p>
 <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>Instead of mindlessly browsing social media, shooting out shitposts at the speed of light that won’t matter next time the sun kisses us with its rays, I’m staring at a blank file in Nano during a babysitting job for my brothers. They’re blasting two different video games at the same time in the same room, and their eyes are practically glued to the TVs, so there really isn’t much “babysitting” for me to do.</p>
 <p>But because of the discordant sounds, I can’t concentrate well, so I already know I’m not going to be writing the next Shakespeare in these three hours I have to sit here. I type three words, and then I get distracted by the Smash 4 theme, and then I come to my senses fifteen minutes later, no closer to another post than I was.</p>
 <blockquote>
 my brother’s friend, playing <i>Super Mario Odyssey</i>: “bassist” sounds like “racist”
 </blockquote>
 <p>I remember the first time I played Smash. It was a complete sensory overload: the only characters I recognized were the Mario ones, and <em>maybe</em> Link and Zelda; the music blared at top volume since the TV remote was missing, probably under someone’s butt in the crowded side room all my cousins and other kids were forced into while the adults drank themselves silly with Christmas Eve alcohol; and there weren’t enough controllers, so the loser had to give up their controller every time.</p>
 <p>It was flashy, and it was chaos, and I fell in love at first sight. Much like the modern Web, or the <a href="gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-18__Small_Internet_Manifesto.txt">“large internet”</a>. Both with a user/fanbase festering with entitlement and unwarranted self-importance, both with a carefully curated experience meant for wide-scale consumption, both actively resistant to any attempts to modify it and make it one’s own. (Seriously, it really shouldn’t be <em>this</em> hard to make Smash mods more complicated than “original recolor, donut steel”.)</p>
 <p>Here, the similarities end. Because Smash is, at the end of the day, just a fighting game for little kids. You can’t dox people with it, or send mobs to harass people on it. But you also can’t really make friends with it. It’s an experience set in stone. It’s a single-purpose item.</p>
 <p>But the <a href="gopher://republic.circumlunar.space/0/~spring/phlog/2019-01-16__The_Small_Internet.txt">Large Internet</a>… There, or <em>here</em> if you’re reading this on an HTTP mirror, you can do <em>anything</em>. You can say <em>anything</em>. Anyone can start a server and start publishing their own material without the gatekeeping of the older forms of mass media.</p>
 <p>However, despite this, the current societal trend seems to be to confine oneself to a handful of massive silos. Millions, if not billions, of people screaming all at the same time, but not all the <em>same</em> message at the same time, discordant voices along with the advertisements and flashy colors and dark patterns.</p>
 <p>Sensory overload, as it were.</p>
 <p><a href="gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7evisiblink/phlog/20190109">The terminal, however, feels different.</a> I have yet to see an ad on someone’s homemade phlog. If anyone had an ANSI-fueled eyesore of a color scheme, I wouldn’t know it, since my custom colorscheme overrides everything. Browsing through someone’s gopherhole doesn’t use megabytes upon megabytes of tracker scripts and cryptomining and seventeen imported JavaScript frameworks.</p>
 <p>The Zaibatsu, and the Small Internet as a whole, feels like the old library at my old high school, before they tore everything down and built a brand-spaking-new building in its place. The walls were close to falling down, and the tables and chairs were scattered everywhere, and half of the bookcases had plastic veils on them to protect the books from the dust and residue that would occasionally snow from the ceiling. It was a tiny space, where I spent the free time I got whenever class got cancelled by playing with my new laptop (back when it had Windows 10 and I hadn’t discovered Linux yet) and emulating <em>Fire Emblem Fates</em> at five frames per second on a bleeding-edge build of Citra and editing <em><a href="https://mayvaneday.keybase.pub/books.html">Me Before You</a></em>. The whole building had a sickly-sweet smell, which made my stomach lurch at first, but I eventually learned to love it, to associate it with <em>safety</em>.</p>
 <p>With <em>home</em>.</p>
 <p>The Large Internet, on the other hand, feels like the library that took its place. Set on an outlook peering over the cafeteria, it’s constantly loud. Surveillance cameras are everywhere. There’s only a few places to sit, and the computers there run an extremely locked-down version of Windows 10 with the school’s filtered and censored internet. Technically speaking, it’s capable of more, but in practice, it actually does less.</p>
 <p>I’ve revived my grandma’s old Acer Aspire One notebook. It only holds 51% of its original battery capacity, and the single gigabyte of memory severely limits what I can do with it. I have to run it in a TTY most of the time, since graphical environments hog memory, and for the few GUI programs I can’t live without, I have a broken i3 config I can <code>startx</code> into.</p>
 <p>In the Large Internet, the netbook immediately wimps out. Only ten minutes of battery life, CPU slowing down to a crawl, 100% RAM usage, if I’m lucky. Without luck, the whole thing just freezes.</p>
 <p>In the Small Internet, even with whatever bug keeps making dmesg puke all over my screen, I can still browse and write and check in on my friends and acquaintances with little lag, the only barriers being how fast I can type on the <em>incredibly cramped</em> keyboard and how long I can make the shitty battery last.</p>
 <p>It’s slow. It’s contemplative. It satisfies my soul. It was where computers began, and when the Large Internet comes crashing down in flames like a gas blimp gone wrong and “normies” struggle to come to terms with the reality that they willingly gave up control of their inner selves, it is where they will end.</p>
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 <p><b>a stairway, down which shattered idols tumble</b></p>
 <p><b>published: 1-22-2019</b></p>
 <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>It must be incredibly painful writing for a big lifestyle blog. Or any kind of high-traffic website, really. You get a topic to write about, and then you have to spend countless hours carefully hedging your words and making your post appeal to as broad of an audience as possible so you can rake in those sweet, sweet clicks.</p>
 <p>But, fortunately, I’ve always been just abrasive enough to keep my little online abode low-traffic, so I get to talk about myself all I want.</p>
 <p>Self-improvement is all the rage these days. I want to lose weight; I want to write more; I want to stop relapsing every time I doubt my self-identity even the slightest amount. Even if it means I have to come up with every single aspect of my identity through my own effort, instead of doing the default consumerist thing and offloading the effort of thinking to a third-party entity.</p>
 <p>But that’s too much effort, isn’t it? It’s too much effort to think? It’s too much effort to not immediately fall into the trap of, “which character will I conform myself into in order to gain some validation in this dying world?”</p>
 <p>“What brand will I wear today, as if I were cattle on a ranch thousands upon thousands of miles away from here? Who will I belong to? What will make me visible to my peers?”</p>
 <p>It’s easy to forget that these identities, so carefully crafted and packaged up and delivered to you, aren’t meant to be real people. They aren’t substitutes for real-life interaction, people outside the fantasy. These corporations- they <em>want</em> you to give yourself up into these character slots. They <em>want</em> you to base your identity in their creations, because then they can keep selling you life over and over and over again, keep you sucking at their teat, dependent on their work for you to feel <em>whole</em>.</p>
 <p>I know it’s easy. I know it feels safe and comfortable. But if you keep putting mass-produced creations on pedestals and worshipping them as idols, they will only fail you again and again. You will not find lasting happiness in purchases, or quick matches made of only button presses and quick breaths, or mindlessly clicking on likes and reshares to appease others’ need for validation.</p>
 <p>Let there be no more false idols! Let there be no more false consciousness in the “fandoms”, in the hollow forms these corporations have crafted for us! There are no gods among us in these dark places you and I congregate in, naught but humans speaking to each other on a global scale. Let us be humans, with all our flaws, with all of our undiluted hopes and dreams.</p>
 <hr />
 <p>Damn, have I gone off the deep end?</p>
 <p>One of the things I appreciate about gopherspace is that there are no internet celebrities. People on YouTube constantly complain about the “Viner Invasion” diluting the site’s standards of “comedy”, and no matter which microblogging site you go onto, whether it’s Twitter or Gab or any of the Mastodon/Pleroma instances, there’s people who spend hours upon hours every day shitposting their way into a fragile sort of notoriety. But there- or here, if you’re underground right now- it’s just normal people like you and me. Sure, admins are on a slightly higher ground than the rest of us- it’s <em>their</em> servers, after all- but they aren’t some unattainable entity sitting in the clouds that we must constantly pay penance to. They’re humans too, and we can know them just like anyone else here.</p>
 <p>Perhaps it’s the barriers to entry that keeps us underground and relatively undiluted. SFTP is kinda hard to do from a phone, after all, and creating “content” isn’t as easy as snapping an uninspired picture of food and barfing it out onto Instagram. There are a few phlogs and gophersites that are more well-known than others, but the simplicity of the Gopher protocol keeps them on the same level as the rest of us.</p>
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 <p><b>Two Realms</b></p>
 <p><b>published: 1-23-2019</b></p>
 <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>One of the main ideas of radical agorism I became aware to about a year ago was the idea of <a href="http://anarplexqtbch57j.onion/hosted/files/two_realms.html">the Second Realm</a>. When one thinks of revolution, of liberation, they think of two extremes: either there is a government, or there is no government. The idea of the Second Realm holds that a Strong Individual cannot exist in a State because their existence threatens the State and because the State threatens their own existence in return; the State will attempt to crush any threat to its authority, and the Individuals will attempt to destroy their oppressors. Neither side has much to gain in this scenario, and both sides stand to lose a lot: a few thousand Individuals are no match for a state military, and yet, if the State’s reaction is too harsh, the people who comprise its military might desert and compromise the State’s strength itself.</p>
 <p>Thus, the best solution is to have two realms: the First, controlled by the State, and the Second, controlled by the Individual. Each leaves each other alone, avoiding needless bloodshed. People decide to become part of one or the other through their actions. Most who partake in the Second stay partially in the First- some because what they want or need cannot be found in one Realm alone, some to offer themselves as a bridge between the two as a service. Each Realm has their own separate territories, economic systems, etc. The eventual goal is to bleed out the First Realm until it completely collapses, leaving only the Second, but until then, it is our responsibility to carve out freedom where we can and help others to escape.</p>
 <p>In the same vein, we can think of these spaces that we inhabit as a situation of Two Realms.</p>
 <ul>
 <li><p>The First Realm is the everyday HTTP clearnet. Facebook, Reddit, and all the other Web 3.0 silos live here. Most people never venture out of the First Realm; most people go through their digital life completely unaware that the Second Realm exists, or if they know of it, they take the absolute worst-case scenarios and smear the whole place as it.</p></li>
 <li><p>The Second Realm consists of the dusty, disused, and dark places of the Internet. Gopherspace, Tor, I2P, Freenet, you name it. A lack of content discovery and a lack of certain functionalities are the price the denizens of the Second Realm pay for increased protection against the prying eyes of the surveillance state.</p></li>
 </ul>
 <p>The only people I know of who regularly venture out of the First Realm are probably the ones who are reading this right now. And I don’t yet know of anyone who’s successfully managed to cut the First Realm- the clearnet, the HTTP space, the thing that we at the Zaibatsu take refuge from- completely out of their lives. I know that I can’t, at least not right now- school requires me to use Google products, and none of my meatspace friends are interested in the idea of darknets.</p>
 <p>Can you imagine a world without JavaScript trackers or Google or whatever intelligence agency presides in your government?</p>
 <p>Wouldn’t you want the people you love to flourish in such a world?</p>
 <p>But in building the Second Realm here, as <a href="gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7evisiblink/phlog/20190121">visiblink puts in their latest post</a>, we must be careful not to contaminate this environment in which we thrive. This <b>lack of tracking, this careful thought put into every post, these tight-knit communities</b>- we must be careful to preserve these. If this means we wring the filth out of our souls on the clearnet so that we may shine clear here, then so be it. In addition, we leave some things at the door when we cross over from one Realm to the other. We don’t bring clickbait, or blatant attention whoring, or try to implement the anti-patterns and tracking here that we left behind in the First. If a mass of people suddenly becomes aware of Gopher and wants to join, whether through our actions or some other phenomena, we don’t recreate the massive silos with millions of users that we left behind- we encourage users to decentralize onto lots of other servers, and even set up some of their own in the process.</p>
 <p>The only problem I see left, really, is what we’ll do when the floods start lapping at our gates. Tumblr’s ban of all NSFW content sent a plethora of new users to the fediverse, which quickly DDoSed some servers into oblivion and left others straining under the weight, and of those that stayed up, they had to deal with the thousands of accounts that gave no damns as to the established social conventions of the fediverse and just imported their own culture in. Let users in too quick, and we get Eternal Septembered, and then we turn into a ghost town when the things listed above that drew us in here fail to regal the attention of the still-First Realm-minded masses and they leave. Unlike the fediverse, however, registration on these Gopherholes is manual. You generate SSH keys and send the public ones in, and the admin sets you up and lets you in on their own time. That alone would deter a lot of the people who would contaminate this environment, since there’s no instant graitifcation of joining, and would give us time to acclimate the new people.</p>
 <p>Of course, most of that’s moot when the Zaibatsu’s registrations are closed. But we must keep this in mind for the future, whether the Zaibatsu opens again or we ourselves move on and start our own little pubnixes.</p>
 <p>If nothing else, take visiblink’s words with you: don’t contaminate these environments in which we thrive. Don’t bring the First Realm’s waste into the Second Realm.</p>
 <p>We have heaven here. Don’t turn it into hell.</p>
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 <p><b>a directive from within</b></p>
 <p><b>published: 1-16-2019</b></p>
 <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <blockquote>
 “Scatter like the wind!”
 </blockquote>
 <p>Relatively recently, Disroot, a privacy-oriented service provider that hosts Nextcloud and email and other things I’ve used quite extensively over the past year or so, <a href="https://disroot.org/en/blog/annual-report-2018">decided to halve the amount of email and Nextcloud storage they would offer to new accounts.</a> For now, it doesn’t seem to affect existing accounts, so I won’t wake up one day and find that half of my files are gone.</p>
 <p>But recently I’ve revived my Raspberry Pi. It doesn’t have Nextcloud or FreshRSS or anything else from the nice YunoHost setup I had before winter break, but I can access it via SSH from a remote device, and pygopherd mirrors my Gopher working directory on both port 70 and 80, so I don’t miss the extra bloat too much.</p>
 <p>I have my own server, my own little corner of the web. So, really, I shouldn’t need Disroot. According to their philosophy, since I have the resources, I should disroot myself from <em>them</em> and host my own services to further decentralize this network I’m speaking to you via right now, whether that be called the Wired, or the Internet, or the Web, or whatever.</p>
 <p><em>Should.</em></p>
 <p><em>Should</em> is the key word here. But, ironically, I’ve become completely entangled with them, and disrooting myself from Disroot would be several days’ work. Less than it was with Google, because Disroot doesn’t employ dark patterns to make you feel guilty for leaving, and they don’t go to such great lengths to prevent you from leaving… but it’s a great deal of calendars and online accounts linked to my email and social networks that’ll all need new homes.</p>
 <p>I’ve been heavily considering moving to just having a handful of text files for my notes and calendar and contacts and other things that need not be networked. Write my own parsers in Python, only have to deal with syncing one folder in Syncthing instead of reconfiguring seventeen clients whenever I distrohop. Except that using my phone on the go and terminal emulators don’t exactly mix well, and I kinda like having a list of that day’s events ready on my watch instead of having to pull out my phone every time I manage to forget the smallest of things. Plus syncing it with Tails, where the benefits of such a simple system would <em>really</em> shine, would be a nightmare…</p>
 <p>I’m rambling again, aren’t I?</p>
 <p>For as long as MayVaneDay has been around, I’ve been afflicted with a strange sense of <em>wanderlust</em>. I <em>have</em> to be constantly moving. Moving websites, moving social media handles (and often whole instances), moving personas to hide from the laziest of hate mobs. “Nomadic” would be a kind way of putting it- except that that word implies that it was some kind of choice, or that it’s just a cultural thing that my subconscious picked up in childhood. But my immediate family doesn’t seem to have the same itch, nor my extended family, nor anyone else I know in <del>meatspace</del> real life. Small town pride is everywhere I go. A constant need to shut oneself off from the world, content with where they are now, just seeing the same horizons day after day after day.</p>
 <p>And yet I see myself burning bridges everywhere I go. Leaving Tumblr, leaving Discord, leaving Neocities, all with wildfires raging into the night. Old friends discarded despite my better judgement, sometimes for my own physical safety once they ascertain who I truly am beneath my dopey exterior. Even in places where I know I’m safe and loved- like <a href="https://welovela.in">welovela.in, my friend tA’s newest Pleroma instance</a>- I still feel the urge to disappear once I’ve been there for some period of time, once the people there know me.</p>
 <p>Like there’s no <a href="gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/%7eseliph/seliph/nomad-manifesto.txt">permanent safe place for me in this world.</a></p>
 <p>Do you feel it too? An itch, a sensation, burning bright hot in your feet? A constant need to see what lies over the horizon, to run your hands over the most remote streams, to bask in the suns of lands your ancestors have never stepped foot in?</p>
 <p>What a misfortune I was cursed with chronic fatigue! Always condemned to be sleepy, to have bad lungs and weary limbs, always itching but never possessing the energy to finally satiate the scratch!</p>
 <p>Maybe this means I’ve finally moved past Lucine. Past <a href="../../2018/december/a-quixotic-tomb.html">the tomb whose light shines forevermore</a>, but whose light is just a ruse, a black hole sucking in everything it touches. I don’t want to die anymore! I want to <em>live!</em> I want to be alive, and staying in this rotting institution I’ve been forced into feels like settling myself into a grave anew every morning. Tracing the same motions, reading the same musty old books, working for people who see you as dispensable and disposable and just another problem to be dealt with on the payroll.</p>
 <p>I spend all my energy working myself into a creative fervor, a creative <em>nothing</em> in the eyes of this institution, and yet I will never see a penny of my fruits here. Material work for artificial debt.</p>
 <p>Damn it all, I say! Damn it all! I want <em>out!</em> I want to be free of this cage, of all cages that would seek to bind me!</p>
 <p>I want to roam the world. A voluntary vagrant, both outside of the Wired and in. I wish to be nothing in the eyes of the State, and yet everything in the eyes of the I. Defined by neither imposed identity nor ideology, bound by neither borders nor braces.</p>
 <blockquote>
 <a href="../../../poetry/f/fatali.html"> I will mark my own fate,<br /> I will choose my own path,<br /> or I will go up flames<br /> for the whole world to see!</a>
 </blockquote>
 <p>And yet, I sit here at my desk, and even though my heart burns with radicalization and my chest thumps with the hope of better days, all I know I have energy for right now is a quick shower and a tumble straight into my bed. Tossing and turning the rest of the night, pleading with myself to get some sleep so I don’t look like death tomorrow in class and get docked participation points. Were there no work tomorrow, no class tomorrow, no tedious reading assignments to waste my time or work to send anxiety raveling through my body as I count down the hours… I would stay up much later. Use the night to draw, to write, to call upon every repressed thought that I bury in the day and let it carry me to places unknown.</p>
 <p>Were that I weren’t bound by financial responsibility, I might already be realizing the I to my fullest instead of just sitting in my room and reading accounts of other people whose passions burned equally bright, whose endeavors to find their I were more successful than my own situation.</p>
 <p>Were that I had the courage to change my situation!</p>
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 <p><b>Adventures in Zotland and Minty Meadows</b></p>
 <p><b>published: 3-17-2019</b></p>
 <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>A few years ago, back in a weary rainy place I outgrew several years later, some of my friends and companions and I were sitting around a fire, tending to it right before we would make our lunch. I had to go inside the cabin for something- what, exactly, has slipped my mind- and I must have forgotten that one of my friends was making minty tea, because the entire place <em>reeked</em> of mint. Like I'd stepped into a middle-schooler's mouth after a gum-chewing session, hastily spat out before class so they didn't get sent to the principal's office.</p>
 <p>After work yesterday, I stepped into my dorm room, and it was like I was back in that cabin. Because the whole place, instead of the characteristic <em>nothing</em> that I've taken to assume is just how I smell, the mint was everywhere, and it was nigh-unbearable for a few hours until it just faded into the background with everything else. Of course, it could have just been the heater too, which my roommate must have cranked up as well without letting me know. (I keep it off because I have issues regulating my body temperature, and I always feel like I'm burning up to a crisp otherwise.)</p>
 <p>Recently, I've been flirting with the idea of using <a href="https://tails.boum.org">Tails</a> as my primary operating system, starting with a month of Tails-only to really push the system's limits. Given the current theme of &quot;freedom in restriction&quot; here in circumlunar space, it's... a trip and a half. Plain SSH and SFTP work exactly the same, since SSH keys are one of the official persistence slots that come pre-configured. Calibre's stopped working because one of the Qt libraries refuses to install, but I've built an AppImage for Calibre, and I've recently taken to just converting my PDFs to Markdown anyway. A handful of emulators work, given that they put their config files in your home directory and you put that in your dotfiles and you manually copy over your savestates each way each time after you play. Keybase, however, doesn't work, and neither does Beaker Browser, which, if I were to get serious about this, would kill two of my websites right off the bat. Keybase because it uses some esoteric system of putting its config files god-knows-where, Beaker Browser because Tails blocks all non-Tor traffic and BB doesn't have any options to configure a proxy to use said Tor connection.</p>
 <p>Kodachi, which I currently use on my laptop, would be a far superior option in live mode if:</p>
 <ol style="list-style-type: decimal">
 <li><p>it actually supported encrypted persistence the way Tails does, so the flash drive doesn't immediately kill itself with all the read-writes of a normal system, and</p></li>
 <li><p>I could turn off MAC spoofing, which would actually make it useful on networks such as my college's where everything is captive-portalled to hell and back, and</p></li>
 <li><p>there was a way other than disassembling the ISO to disable whatever font engine Kodachi uses that makes the entire system slow to a crawl, forced to constantly toggle between TTY0 and the X session in order for the screen to update.</p></li>
 </ol>
 <p>Either/or, it would go a long way in calming the paranoia that's suddenly jacked up in me again what with recent events. Freedom in restriction: freedom from having to remember to clean out old logs, freedom from persistent cookies and trackers following me from session to session, freedom from a billion shoddily-written programs that just enabled me to waste my time in all sorts of ways. The tininess of the persistent storage partition also forces me to decide: which files are actually valuable in the case of a sudden evacuation? Is this 200 MB PDF really worth it, or can its text be extracted and filler images thrown away?</p>
 <p>Thankfully, at the time of writing this, neither anyone at the Zaibatsu nor the Republic has expressed their opinion on the New Zealand shooting. I can only hope that this is intentional, that everything there is to say on the absolute mess of a manifesto that he published has already been said: that free speech is a critical human right, and that taking it away will just drive the groups that spawned that vile murderer further out of the light of public scrutiny.</p>
 <p>And that, speaking from personal experience, <em>Spyro the Dragon 3</em> has fuck-all to do with &quot;ethno-nationalism&quot;. Was this a meme before? Did I miss out on a memetic memo somewhere? I don't understand.</p>
 <p>Unfortunately, I can't say the same about... the other group of people I hung out with. Am I really a &quot;dumb radical centrist&quot; for not fitting cleanly into the left-right paradigm? Is free speech on the internet really a myth? (I must be writing this on Mt. Olympus, then.) And is spending time with smug techbros who go &quot;UM, AKSCHUALLY&quot; at every opportunity, closeted racists, and borderline pedophiles <em>really</em> the best use of my time?</p>
 <p>It looks like I'm a nomad again. Another set of accounts burned, another batch of usernames and passwords changed.</p>
 <p>For whatever reason- I don't know if this is intentional on the developers' part, or this is just an <em>especially</em> nasty bug- but I can't seem to actually delete any of my old Pleroma profiles. It disallows me from logging in, but the full profiles still show up on all the instances they were federated to, and other users can still interact with them. Ghosts of myself that I can't banish, can't sweep away into the trash to be forgotten by time.</p>
 <p>As a result, I've almost completely soured on social media, despite the aforementioned Keybase troubles preventing me from going completely to one RSS feed that's been verified to actually be <em>mine</em>. Wouldn't it be nice if there was some kind of network that was <em>truly</em> nomadic (unlike the current setup, where a move would have to be announced ahead of time to avoid losing people), <em>and</em> respected its users' privacy at the same time (unlike Pleroma), <em>and</em> kept random strangers from spamming everything into oblivion (Neocities, and every other social media site in existence)?</p>
 <p>Oh, wait, that's an actual thing! It's called <a href="https://zotlabs.org/help/en/about/about#Glossary">the Zot protocol</a>. In the form of <a href="https://zotlabs.com/zap/">Zap</a>, but more frequently <a href="https://zotlabs.org/page/hubzilla/hubzilla-project">Hubzilla</a>.</p>
 <p>The project itself isn't particularly remarkable at first glance: it looks like an awful Facebook clone from ten years ago, complete with an <a href="https://hub.disroot.org/help/en/comanche">esoteric website-making language</a>, and a labyrinth of privacy options, and all of its functionality spread out across a billion plugins.</p>
 <p>And crickets, because... it's awfully empty. Which can be dirtily resolved by installing the &quot;ActivityPub Protocol&quot; plugin and adding all my old friends from the fediverse, but then, at the top of all their profile pages, a warning reads:</p>
 <p align="center">
 <b>This connection may be unreachable from other channel locations.<br /> Location independence is not supported by their network.</b>
 </p>
 <p>And then I thank the silence. Because there might not be very many people there, but the few that I can hear, I know they are free. They're not tied to a single identity. If their admin goes sour, or their server gets suddenly shut down by a power outage or a government seizure or some other disaster, they can easily pack up and move to a different server with all their connections and settings like nothing had ever happened.</p>
 <p>Of course, ActivityPub (what powers Pleroma and Mastodon and the like) wasn't built for this. It was built with the expectation that people would stay in one place forever, or, if they moved, they'd have the time beforehand to alert people of their new location. So why should I persist in a place where my feet are stuck in the mud?</p>
 <blockquote>
 <a href="https://z.macgirvin.com/channel/mike/?f=&mid=b64.aHR0cHM6Ly96Lm1hY2dpcnZpbi5jb20vaXRlbS82YmUyZjVlYi02ZmNiLTQ2MmQtYTA5Yi1jMzViNGI3YzlkYzc">
 <p>
 If you are interested in a &quot;fediverse&quot; of &quot;social networking projects&quot; which can all communicate and work together seamlessly, it is time for you to get off the Zot6 train. It is not stopping at your station.
 </p>
 <p>
 Zot6 is standing up for the right of people to have nomadic identities, privacy, and granular permissions over their profiles and content (including their media content). It is also standing up for the right of people to not be forced to accept spam or unsolicited replies to their content from people they don't know or never heard of (or who they have even <em>blocked</em>). Unfortunately these rights are incompatible with the rest of the so-called &quot;fediverse&quot; (and &quot;federation&quot;). Hence all connections to those networks are being severed.
 </p>
 </a>
 </blockquote>
 <p>One would think, with all the complaints on the leftist side of the fediverse about &quot;trolls&quot; and the such constantly swarming in their connections, they'd instantly jump on a network that would allow them the ability to fine-tune who gets to interact with them. But that would be too hard, wouldn't it? Give up meaningless internet points and a few hours of time that could instead be spent complaining and nursing an extensive defederation list.</p>
 <p>If you want freedom in this world, you have to seek it out yourself, <em>grab it</em> yourself, instead of just sitting on your ass and complaining.</p>
 <blockquote>
 <a href="https://forum.yunohost.org/t/osada-zap-version-2-2/6156">
 <p>
 Zap and Osada do one thing (social networking) and do it well.
 </p>
 <p>
 Use Osada if you want a really good ActivityPub server, and use Zap if you want or need nomadic identity and much stronger privacy than the fediverse can offer.
 </p>
 <p>
 Select one or the other. You can’t have it all. That actually doesn’t work - and there isn’t any way to make it work.
 </p>
 <p>
 Zap will always be the smaller network, because people will always give up their privacy to follow the herd and be where their friends are.
 </p>
 <p>
 Use Hubzilla if you actually know what a ‘platform’ is and want to build something great (decentralised communities and cities with shoppes and businesses that all respect your freedom) rather than than just waste your life in idle chit-chat.
 </p>
 </a>
 </blockquote>
 <p>I don't want to waste my days in idle chit-chat, discussing who's the best anime girl of the week or whatever drama's brewing on The Whole Known Network or trying to figure out who's a genuine fascist and who's just posting edgy memes for the sadistic shit-stirring and snickers and smug JPEGs. I want my freedom of movement, and I want my freedom of association, and I want it <em>now,</em> shallow friendships be damned!</p>
 <p>Of course, the absolute paradise scenario would be a world where everyone had fellowsh and their own pubnix that they ran or belonged to and their own gopherhole. But then we run into the nomadic identity problem again, and that would be a <em>lot</em> of people in gopherspace to sift through, wouldn't it? And fellowsh really isn't the best place to announce new posts- you don't log in for a few days, and depending on how quickly people update their .plan and .project files, you could miss a great deal, or someone could blink out of existence without a trace.</p>
 <p>It's a Small Internet you and I live in, and it's the biggest world I've ever seen.</p>
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 as soon as you're born, they make you feel small!
 and then wear you down until you're nothing at all
 a good little girl or boy sitting at the stand
 forced silent unless you first raise your hand

 1year 2016	2016/
 1year 2017	2017/
 1year 2018	2018/
 1year 2019	2019/
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  <p><b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b></p>
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  <p><b>beno</b></p>
  <p>published: 5-3-2016</p>
 <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>It has been almost twenty-four hours since you fell into my house, and so far, my parents have taken absolutely no notice to your sudden presence. I suppose that it could be possible that I am just hallucinating the heavenly figure who shuffled through my hallway at one in the morning with drooping wings weeping like a willow tree. But then how could I explain the breath that brushed my cheek ever so softly when you finally found your words and a tiny sliver of sanity? How could I explain the grime that collected at the shower drain yesterday evening when my parents were still out for a drink and you took advantage of the lack of parentals to take a shower?</p>

 <p>The shower doesn’t work in the bathroom downstairs, so only I ever use it unless something is wrong with the one upstairs. Heck, even my brother- whose room is downstairs next to mine- doesn’t even use that bathroom, even though it would save his lazy self a dash up the stairs. You must have spent all of last night and the school day cooped up alone in there… literally, it seems, for in the nonfunctional shower stall is a pile of ragged ebony feathers and a few of my baby blankets stolen under cover of night.</p>

 <p>I discovered you after I arrived home from the bus stop. I immediately abandoned my backpack on the patch of empty floor beside my bed and flung open the bathroom door- and then my hands rushed to my mouth in order to stifle a shriek. Your blood- or what I assume was your blood, for surely angels did not need to have such a mundane form of living in their veins- was painted all over the sink. Splatters must have dropped off of whatever you used as a brush as I nearly stepped into a nice trio of them right at the doorway.</p>

 <p>“<i>What the hell were you doing today?</i>” The words stumble heavily like drunkards out of my mouth. I throw a hand to the bloody mess awaiting me in the sink. “Are you a servant of the devil, come to reap my soul? Are you a Mephistopheles, determining that it’s my turn to be collected?”</p>

 <p>The indignancies only get you to glance up at me from your coop in the shower stall as far as attention goes, and you only offer a shrug in response. A breath of wind escapes into the room and ruffles the curtains over the open window, and only once a ray of sun hits your hair for a brief second that I realize who exactly you are.</p>

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  <p><b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b></p>
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  <p><b>¡corre!</b></p>
  <p>published: 5-2-2016</p>
 <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>You.</p>

 <p>That’s right, you.</p>

 <p>You showed up on my doorstep like a shooting star, speckled with all the colors of the sunset- you could have been a factory reject of that evening’s skybound hues from the bruises and battered limbs that greeted me that unfortunate end-of-day.</p>

 <p>You waited patiently on the front porch, curled up on top of the welcome mat, as I rushed back inside to find a worn blanket to spread over the couch. The splotches adorning your torn lips squeezed and contracted as I scooped you back up in my arms and laid you down in the space I so hastily prepared. The angels that the elders said always watched us must not know how to speak English, for strange and unintelligible lisps escaped from your mouth as your head softly landed on the pillow.</p>

 <p>Whence did you come? Your skin is too soft to have been hardened in the furnaces and infernos for eternity, and no god that I know of would allow one of his angelic creations to come to such harm. The scraggly appendages hidden under your shirt are weakened but intact- either you left of your own will, in which case I cannot for the life of me comprehend the reasons, or the other dimension on the other side of death is spring cleaning. But why would they throw out one such as you? And where are the others? Do you know?</p>

 <p>The flames in your eyes dance back and forth as your attention drifts to my face. I must be a puff of wind like those driving the puffy chariots across the sky, because something in your irises flickers. For the first time that evening, your gaze doesn’t look glassy and otherworldly.</p>

 <p>You raise one hand up to my face, and I realize that in your sweatshirt is a jagged and torn hole plastered to your skin with drying blood. A few drops of scarlet leak onto the carpet- freshly cleaned yesterday as your vision clears and you finally comprehend your surroundings.</p>

 <p>You clench a fistful of my hair in your raised fist and gently drag me down near to your own face. Your lips part- I can tell from the gust that rings in my ears. I close my eyes in anticipation of a kiss, but what follows us more adept at stealing my breath away in a single syllable.</p>

 <p>“Run.”</p>
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  <p><b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b></p>
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  <p><b>desaparecer</b></p>
  <p>published: 1-27-2017</p>
 <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p>She brushed her hair out of her eyes as she ducked into the room, making a mental note to replace the lightbulbs the first chance she could. The cars zooming by on the highway a short skip away from the house cast neon shadows on the walls, ghosts there one moment and gone the next.</p>

 <p>Sometimes she had visions of joining the shadows, escaping from the city at last after five years of the same desolate bed, the same unfilled picture frames hanging on the walls from holes which had long stretched beyond their original proportions. Her friends had abandoned her long ago for brighter prospects.</p>

 <p>She slugged off her backpack beside the open entrance to her room and winced as the door squeaked behind her, ancient hinges never cleaned since their installation whining. The walls certainly couldn’t talk, but the hinges could scream, threatening to call out her existence to the landlord whose eyes were currently averted elsewhere.</p>

 <p>If she got her way, they would stay there until her payment came.</p>

 <p>She flopped onto her bed, pulling over her backpack and relishing in the whoosh her short blade made when it was extracted. Her golden opportunity would come tomorrow.</p>
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  <p><b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b></p>
  </p>
  <p><b>in 100 words</b></p>
  <p>published: 1-3/18-2017</p>
 <p>&nbsp;</p>
 <p><b>#1</b></p>
 <p>She ranted and raved at the podium, decrying how much time she had wasted in the dim, stuffy room- sixty-nine days, she calculated. Sixty-nine days that could have been spent pursuing knowledge, forming relationships, finding her place in the world around her. But it would never return, lost in a daze of chasing a dream she now knew would never come to fruition. The sleepless nights that would never be refunded, hoping that she was special, that there was something more out there than her dismal life- but she could not pay the ultimate price.</p>

 <p>The crowd refused to listen.</p>

 <p>&nbsp;</p>

 <p><b>provizora</b></p>

 <p>She knew not of how many days she had left to walk on her beloved earth or how many rotations of the planet she called home remained until she would become like the fog, the smoke that surrounded her home, temporal and wind-blown. But there was one thought that echoed in her skull as she strolled down the ashen sidewalk- there would be a fire blazing, ready for her when she returned. Maybe the deities would take pity on her and she would become smoke, ready to steal the breath from some other unfortunate lover’s lungs.</p>

 <p>&nbsp;</p>

 <p><b>distrajxo</b></p>

 <p>Her eyes flickered as she glanced past countless pages of regrettable tattoos, profane street signs, displeasing women with nose rings, and plaintext quotes that reminded her of her self-pitying days back when high school felt like an entirely new world unfolding before her. How out of her mind she had felt back then. How convinced that she was fundamentally damaged.</p>

 <p>She looked away from the screen, rubbing her eyes. Music blared to her right, distraction from the writing the back of her mind told her she had to complete that day. Deadlines were her enemy. The worst ones were self-imposed.</p>

 <p>&nbsp;</p>

 <p><b>komputilo</b></p>

 <p>Sprawled out on her bed, staring at the ceiling, wishing that her thoughts could form coherent sentences. Her hands curled around the pendant on her necklace, wishing that the owner of its second half could come back, if only for a second, so that she’d have the motivation to get up and search for the perfect words to speak her mind with.</p>

 <p>She closed her eyes. The word count box stared at her, screaming fables of how she wasn’t good enough, of how she was either too brief or too rambling. A keyboard warrior in every sense of the word.</p>

 <p>&nbsp;</p>

 <p><b>oceana ondo</b></p>

 <p>She stood at the edge of the swimming pool, averting her eyes from what she knew to be an anxiety-inducer. Fear of heights had plagued her for as long as she could remember, and depths haunted her the same- worse, in fact, for they always looked closer when there was a barrier of waves in between them.</p>

 <p>She gulped. It had been a while since she had made a debacle about it being her first time to jump off a diving board. Shallow ends had forever been her friend.</p>

 <p>And, as it turned out, pools weren’t really catalysts of change.</p>

 <p>&nbsp;</p>

 <p><b>aprender</b></p>

 <p>He spent all day learning about meiosis. Not because he had any particular interest, but because his mind wouldn’t allow him to skip a single assignment, no matter how lackluster or asinine. It wasn’t like him; he’d been the king of slackers at his old school, and the rewards he’d gotten didn’t serve him well where he now was.</p>

 <p>He wiped his forehead, taking a sip from his peach water.</p>

 <p><i>This was a mistake.</i></p>

 <p><i>Probably.</i></p>

 <p>He would have much rather spent the day writing or coding, but he couldn’t have everything he wanted in life, for better or for worse.</p>

 <p>&nbsp;</p>

 <p><b>dormir</b></p>

 <p>His head nodded against the wooden table as he struggled to stay awake. The crystal dug into his chest as his teacher chastised him for drifting off when they were supposed to be taking notes.</p>

 <p>He mumbled an apology as he pulled his notebook over and fumbled his pen. It dropped onto the floor. He groaned, leaning over. The vertigo was back, and it wasn’t going away anytime soon.</p>

 <p>How he’d love to be back in his room, still curled up in the sheets, wasting the day away romping in the frosted-over fields of his mind. He’d be back soon.</p>
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