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    <title>a quixotic tomb, where light lives forevermore - Archive - MayVaneDay Studios</title>
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<b>MayVaneDay Studios (Gopher Edition)</b>
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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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