MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)

a directive from within

published: 1-16-2019

“Scatter like the wind!”

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, decided to halve the amount of email and Nextcloud storage they would offer to new accounts. 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.

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.

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 them 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.

Should.

Should 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.

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 really shine, would be a nightmare…

I’m rambling again, aren’t I?

For as long as MayVaneDay has been around, I’ve been afflicted with a strange sense of wanderlust. I have 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 meatspace 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.

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 welovela.in, my friend tA’s newest Pleroma instance- I still feel the urge to disappear once I’ve been there for some period of time, once the people there know me.

Like there’s no permanent safe place for me in this world.

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?

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!

Maybe this means I’ve finally moved past Lucine. Past the tomb whose light shines forevermore, 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 live! 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.

I spend all my energy working myself into a creative fervor, a creative nothing in the eyes of this institution, and yet I will never see a penny of my fruits here. Material work for artificial debt.

Damn it all, I say! Damn it all! I want out! I want to be free of this cage, of all cages that would seek to bind me!

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.

I will mark my own fate,
I will choose my own path,
or I will go up flames
for the whole world to see!

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.

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.

Were that I had the courage to change my situation!