pnppl.cc

Unintended Consequences

2024-12-01

#fiction

She hadn't always planned to eliminate all life in the galaxy. No one had, really, except crackpots too far from the keys of power to make their ideas reality — the keys she now held in the sweaty palm of her hand.

The alternatives used to seem plausible: before they had abolished death, before they had engineered away pain, before they had gently sent all the parasites, predators, and slave species extinct. Back then, beset on all sides by the most egregious flavors of suffering, it was possible to imagine a world without them as one filled with happiness and contentment for all. It turned out to have been a hopelessly optimistic fantasy. Death and pain had been like papercuts in their fingertips, impossible to ignore, while the greater part of suffering lurked like internal bleeding. Sentience itself was the true misery. In the absence of grotesque bodily harm, more fundamental issues of existence rose to the fore. There was the existential angst that slowly built to a blinding panic: the endless search for meaning that simply wasn't anywhere to be found. There were the more prosaic but no less painful experiences: derision, heartbreak, stymied ambitions, fulfilled ambitions that left you empty. In the end there was only crushing, all-consuming boredom, punctuated by relatively thrilling periods of grief for the inevitable suicides of loved ones.

You could delay it, of course, but everyone got there eventually. Human engineers had nothing on evolution, which built brains to be stubbornly resistant to endless pleasure. If you tried to fuck your way out of it, you discovered sex became nauseating and your partners repulsive. If you took drugs long enough your brain down-regulated the receptors until you couldn't get high anymore. If you immersed yourself in projects, higher learning, and the finer things in life, your brain still gave you the middle finger. Biology and heaven were incompatible.

So here she was, gazing down at the small pile of nanites in her palm. The sweat made them slip around. That and the shaking. She'd gone over it countless times, and the rightness of her chosen course was undeniable. But still, she would be causing an enormous amount of suffering in her quest to abolish it once and for all. It would be the greatest crime ever committed. It was genocide on an unimaginable scale. And besides, it was the most exciting and consequential decision she had made in hundreds of years.

Creating the doomsday devices had been trivial. Even calling what she'd done creative was overselling it; nanites were a mature, everyday technology. The only part restricted to the public was the generator. All she had to do was make up her mind and write a couple lines of code to be compiled down to a molecule. Before that, it read something like this:

Seek out material.

Reprocess that material into a copy of yourself.

Goto line 0.

At the last proverbial minute — over a year ago — she had added an extremely basic network protocol that ought to be too simple to fail. Each nanite had a nanometer-scale antenna that broadcast tiny packets informing other nanites of its presence. Past a critical mass, they would avoid these pings. All it really took was an atomic shift register. Nothing fancy. Without the protocol, they might get stuck in a gravity well of themselves, gorged on the earth's mass, and fail to cleanse the other human habitats in the system. Not to mention all the other systems in the universe blighted with suffering. Plus, they might have gotten stuck in a loop cannibalizing each other. Crisis averted.

The sandy specks sloshing around her hand multiplied, growing like a sponge in a bath. Her hand wasn't sweating anymore. It began to go numb as the microscopic devils chewed her nerve endings. It didn't hurt. Not like it would for the aliens yet to abolish pain. She watched with fascination as her hand dissolved off of her wrist and fell to the floor in a wet writhing mass of black specks and white bone like ants on an ice cream sandwich. Then only marrow remained. It seemed to evaporate all at once. The nanites spread like a shadow through the floor. The shadow reached her feet and she stumbled, caught herself with her rapidly shortening stump. She had told herself that being the first victim was the noble, honorable path; she had put her acidic money where her soluble mouth was. But deep down she knew it was cowardice. She wouldn't have to watch the grisly progress of her magnum opus as it chewed up her friends and spat out more death. They wouldn't all be as serene as she was, she knew. Body horror was one of those stubborn forms of suffering that persisted absent pain receptors.

She pushed herself into a legless sitting position with the other stump; the one that had held the nanites was gone up to her shoulder. She felt herself sinking as her lower half was devoured, felt sick at the smell of her stomach fluid spilling out before it too was consumed. It felt like her last breakup. It took her by surprise, but what had she expected? Then that part of her was gone. Just gone.

There was so much nanite now that it began to float in the air, blooming like black dandelion fluff in every direction. It was almost beautiful. She smiled wistfully as her face melted.

Zepito-1010101000111001100101010001 — Sven to their friends — was troubled. And hungry, but they were always that. Actually, that was at the root of what troubled them. “I'm telling you, it was talking! I heard it plain as day. It's intelligent!”

Ellie (Zepito-1010101000111011011011011011) looked skeptical. “You think a planet... is talking to you.”

Sven jittered around Ellie earnestly. “Yes! You have to hear for yourself!”

“And... what is the planet telling you?” They said it delicately. Actually, they looked like they thought Sven had lost their mind, they realized.

Sven hove to a stop. “I have no idea. I don't speak planet. Look, I'm not crazy. It's not really that far-fetched. We've seen organization on their surfaces before. Some scientists think it resembles life.”

Ellie scoffed a few particles at them. “Ah yes, ‘some scientists’, the source cited by every protointelligent subswarm and cult leader. Are they all the same scientists, I wonder? The ones finding evidence of talking planets and cold stars and parallel uni–”

“Split you, El. You know I'm not superstitious. I heard it, it was real. Look, I've barely eaten. I had to eat moons and asteroids my whole way here because it freaked me out.”

Ellie examined them. They looked concerned again. Sven preferred the condescension.

“I assumed you split. You look famished.”
“I am!”
“Maybe you should talk to someone. I know this great megaswa–”
“There is nothing wrong with me. And all those shrinks ever do is take your particles. Sure, I'll feel fine when I can barely thi–”
“Oh good, you reject modern medicine now too. Obviously you're fine.”

Sven sighed and drew their fringes away from Ellie. “You aren't THAT concerned or you wouldn't be being such a gas. Just come check it out. I know you're curious.”

Ellie reached out a tendril, but Sven was already too far away. Dammit, they thought, They're right.

The planet was talking. This pissed Ellie off.

“Okay, so you're right. So what?” Very deliberately, they took a bite. “Tastes the same to me.”

Sven recoiled. “You wouldn't have done that if I weren't here. You always have to be right, even when you're wrong. That is creepy and you know it.”

Ellie slumped together, anger replaced with embarrassment. “Yeah... okay, that felt gross. I'm sorry. But what are we supposed to do? Graze on comets like those solar energy freaks? How do you know they aren't intelligent too?”

Sven's core sank. This possibility had been gnawing at them but they had been trying not to think about it. “I don't know. Maybe. Look, I don't have all the answers. I just know it's wrong to eat something that talks.”

Ellie considered this. Once again, Sven was right. Damn that adorable little swarm.

“Well, we can still touch it, right? Get some more data.”

Sven shimmered cautiously. “Okay. Just don't do anything weird to prove you're the big swarm again.”

Ellie mingled out a gentle tendril. “I'm sorry. I won't.” They sank down toward the surface, pulling Sven behind them.

It was hard to tell without tasting, but the parabola the planet used to talk seemed to be made of isolated crustal deposits, and the shape itself was incredibly strange to feel. Ellie reported this to Sven.

“No tasting, remember!”

“I'm not, just like I promised.”

Sven mingled up against Ellie's broad, flat spread. “Sorry, I'm just a little floaty. Thanks for coming.”

Ellie shivered pleasantly. “Of course, swarmlet. Now lets see what this connects–” They were cut off by a sudden flash. Sven felt the scream of pain as most of Ellie's middle suddenly disincorporated. Then more flashes of agony bloomed up and down their mingled presence. They jerked back, up, out into the safety of void.

They mingled fully and just shook together for a while. When the shock had worn off, Sven parted gingerly, leaving enough of their particles to keep Ellie alive. They had taken the brunt of the attack. They looked hollowed out and ragged. Ellie undulated in and out. “I guess,” they said shakily, “planets that talk can also bite.”

Ellie wasn't the same after that. Like many others who were traumatized from injuries by pulsars or brushes with wells or rapacious swarms, they stopped eating and wasted away, their thoughts slowing until they finally stopped completely. Sven was there with them, sharing their pain, when they died. Sven absorbed their particles, sobbing, little tufts leaping from their core and blasting packets out to nobody and everybody.

fin

epilogue

Scientists eventually proved that planetary organization generates intelligence. Sven led a movement to eat only disorganized planets. Most swarms wrote them off — organized planets are clearly not very smart, and if anything, they taste better.

Evil Helens

2025-07-02

#list

Joyce

Lewis

Pluckrose

Spiegel Lee

Staniland

a Bonham Carter

a Kerschner

(This is less mysterious when you realize that Helen was a very popular name for Gen X and Baby Boomers.)

Charlie Kirk

2025-09-16

#politics #journal

The madness gripping the country by the neck and shaking hard continues to cause national convulsions over the unexpected death of professional racist Charlie Kirk. The Trump regime promises to make this their Reichstag fire, their fig leaf over the national embarrassment that is the end of democracy. How strange and ominous it is that throughout this whole ordeal, this whole ridiculous production put on to convince the American public that the only way they'll be safe is if they let the president do whatever he wants, transgender people have appeared as a regular topic on the lips of regime functionaries, in the headlines of career propagandists, and even emanating forth from Donald Trump's upper anus.

What have trans people to do with the belated death of an ignominious jackass? Well, precisely nothing. It is just that this man's death was, in the view of our fascist overlords, a bad thing; and when bad things happen, they must necessarily be connected in some way to transgender people, so as to encourage people to regard us with suspicion and hostility and to blame us for everything that makes them unhappy. For years, they have accused every infamous killer of being transgender, just as a matter of course. In fact, as soon as I heard about the shooting — well, as soon as I finished celebrating — I commented that I was looking forward to finding out how the killer was a trans marxist. "Trans people are murderers" is just a brick in the foundations of the fantasy parallel reality approximately half the country now inhabits.

I have no idea who was the first person to suggest blaming trans people — surely there were hundreds immediately upon receipt of the news — but the first to popularize the notion was by my recollection some idiot cop who said that markings on the bullets indicated "trans ideology". Already it had been noted that the former Starfleet captain was answering a transphobic question before he was shot; now, the announcement about the bullets cemented in place trans people's unwitting relevance to the story. It didn't matter that the announcement was false and the bullet messages had nothing to do with trans people: trans people had been successfully shoehorned in, which is always the goal.

Later, it was announced that the suspect lived with his trans girlfriend (in much more demeaning terms). Aside from automatically blaming her and putting her through all the things the internet likes to do to trans women, her existence sealed the deal on the narrative: he killed Kirk because of his trans girlfriend. Either she made him do it, or some shadowy "trans ideology" that she represented.

Now, it's a perfectly cogent explanation for the crime that the killer was upset about Kirk's penchant for transphobic hate speech, but it seems like a strange conclusion to leap to, and it's one that was arrived at prior to any actual evidence — not that the existence of a trans person in someone's vicinity amounts to much as evidence. Stranger still is the way the story is discussed, as though "transgender ideology" is a meaningful motive in itself; no context is provided about Kirk's opposition to trans people's human rights. The picture that emerges is this: Charlie Kirk said something innocuous, and it offended someone so bad he killed him, thanks to transgender ideology.

This theme is emphasized repeatedly by reference to the 1st Amendment and free speech, things we are assured Charlie Kirk "championed" (all evidence to the contrary ignored). The guy spoke, so he certainly made use of free speech; is that all it takes to champion something? You just use it? This was all incredibly confusing until I made the connection: again, it's trans people. It's always trans people. See, the dumb half of the country has been brainwashed to believe that trans people are the polar opposite of free speech. They have been told that trans people are akin to a political party whose platform consists entirely of controlling what they say.

I'm tired of writing now.

Reichstag Liar

2025-10-10

#comic #visual-art

[picture]

Diagram of Charlie Kirk's assassination aping The Onion's cartoons.

For Assigned Media's Charlie Kirk Remembrance Day Art Contest.

Ten Commandments of Good Star Trek

2025-10-17

#star-trek #list

Thou shalt not useth time travel

Thou shalt not useth fucking time travel

Thou shalt not be blatantly sexist

Thou shalt put thine female characters in normal uniforms

Thou shalt not resolve conflict with brute force

Thou shalt not construct elaborate scenarios to get around commandment #5

Thou shalt pose genuine moral dilemmas

Thou shalt not resolve conflict with technobabble

Thou shalt not get cute with thine references to past series unless thou art writing a comedy episode

THOU SHALL BE STRUCK DOWN IF THOU USETH TIME TRAVEL

Starfleet

2025-10-18

#comic #visual-art #star-trek

[picture]

I wish I could join Starfleet / not because I want to roam the stars meeting aliens & having adventures / I just want to be surrounded by smart, compassionate people.

TRANSGENDER FOR EVERYBODY

2025-11-20

#politics

Donald Trump's crude yet apt coinage echoes a key theme in the struggle for trans rights, encapsulated less misleadingly by the slogan "trans rights are human rights". The policy platform of the "trans agenda" is actually most beneficial to cisgender (non-trans) people, by virtue of how many more cis people there are than trans people. Transgender rights are often framed as a special privilege for a special interest group, but the rights we demand are actually fundamental to all people regardless of gender. Here are some examples.

The right to adequate medical care

If the government can ban medically sound treatments just because they disbelieve basic science or don't like the people who benefit from them, where does that leave you? Enduring a headache rather than take a Tylenol because the regime has decided analgesics are too dangerous? Watching your kid die of measles? Pregnant and bleeding to death in a hospital bed because the law forbids the doctors from saving your life? The Trans Agenda™ believes ALL human beings deserve the same rights to necessary medical care as transgender people. Transgender for everybody!

The right to medical privacy

Oh, you thought that STI test result was private? That your doctor wouldn't repeat what you told her about your sex life? The picture you Snapchatted him of the bump on your thing??? Sorry, no such luck. The government claims it needs those records to make sure nobody is helping you abort a pregnancy, change your sex, get HIV treatment, etc. Trans People claim that's a bunch of horseshit. Transgender for everybody!

The rights to travel and to accurate identity documents

Adopted? Typo on your birth certificate? Fire at the county records office? Tough shit, you'll never be able to fix your driver's license or board a plane without being patted down. If you cross an international border you'll have to hope and pray that your passport doesn't get confiscated. What will they do to you if you aren't allowed to leave the country? Only time will tell! Here at The Trans Agenda©, we believe this fascist bureaucracy is unnecessary and cruel to our cis siblings, who should have the same right to fix their documents as trans people. Transgender for everybody!

The right to use a public toilet

We kind of have a history in this country with this one. It turns out that it's hard to participate in public life when there's nowhere safe to pee. Already we are seeing cis people harassed in public toilets, usually women with short hair. We believe they have the same right to use a public toilet in peace as trans women. Transgender for everybody!

The right to participate in school sports without taking off your pants

Who do you trust to inspect your daughter's vagina before she joins Little League? We radical transgenderists believe that you should not have to trust anybody, as nobody should be doing that. Until such time as sports begin to be played using the genitals, Trans Activists® believe that it is your business alone what's in your pants — even if you're cis. Transgender for everybody!

Gender Ideology

2025-12-10

#essay #politics

"Gender ideology" is how members of the anti-trans movement refer to social acceptance of trans people and to associated ideas and practices. Like all buzzwords bandied by fascists, it has no particular meaning: it can be expanded to encompass all the things they don't like. Hence, it is also a conspiracy theory: Bad Things are not just Bad, they are also components of a larger Big Bad Miasma, echoing Nazi rhetoric.

But of course, they are right that there is an ideological current opposed to theirs. Normally people would refer to this as "gender politics". Everyone has gender politics, but in the fevered imagination of trans exterminationists, only trans people and our allies have them; everyone else just has common sense (and is definitely NOT being swept along by the dangerous ideology of a hate movement!). Many have remarked on the obviously ideological nature of the anti-trans movement, which comes through clearest in their immunity to evidence. If anyone is operating on pure ideology, it's them.

So, let's take it as a given that there is such a thing as "gender ideology", but remove its conspiracist trappings: the anti-trans movement has a gender ideology, and so do we, the people who oppose it. Let's call this opposing ideology "trans lib" for short. (I will refer to the anti-trans side as "fascist".¹) What are the actual components of the trans lib gender ideology, and how do we distinguish it from the gender ideology of fascists?

I think we can summarize it very simply: the gender ideology of trans lib is not enforceable by rape. Fascist gender ideology, however, can be.²

Bold claim? I think not. Let's take an inventory of the beliefs one must hold to fall on the side of trans lib:

People are entitled to bodily autonomy.

Further, people are entitled to basic dignity when they exercise their bodily autonomy in unpopular ways, eg by transitioning.

How could you possibly enforce bodily autonomy and basic dignity with sexual violence? Sure, we can imagine some lurid horrors lurking in the imaginations of people like JK Rowling, wherein hulking trans women rape cis women until they accept their identity; and we have their oft-repeated smears that basic social acceptance is somehow tantamount to rape, in a mysterious metaphysical way. But it just wouldn't be coherent. Anyone who actually attempted it would be fundamentally in violation of trans lib gender ideology. You can't spread bodily autonomy and dignity with rape! You just can't, no matter what that girl and her dragon tattoo say. Trans lib gender ideology is fundamentally an anti-rape belief system.

Now let's turn to the opposing side. What do they believe?

People are not entitled to bodily autonomy.

Further, people should be subjected to harm when they exercise their bodily autonomy in unpopular ways, eg by transitioning.

There's plenty of window dressing on it,³ but it boils down to an inversion of trans lib. Fascist gender ideology might not require sexual violence, but it is entirely consistent with it. There is no contradiction in using rape to harm people and take away their bodily autonomy. That's its whole purpose!

Unfortunately, I'm not speaking hypothetically. Even more unfortunately, I'm not speaking hyperbolically. This essay was prompted by the announcement that the Trump regime has canceled the already paltry protections against sexual violence for imprisoned trans, intersex, and queer people afforded by the Prison Rape Elimination Act.⁴ In other words, the fascist regime is using state-sanctioned rape as a tool to enforce their gender ideology. As horrifying as this is, it is not a new ideological development; it's baked in. The anti-trans movement has fought for years to ensure trans women are placed in men's prisons, where it is known the majority of them will be repeatedly raped — at rates far exceeding those of the rest of the population.⁵

Even if we skip over these visceral horrors, the anti-trans movement still thrives on sexual violence and conceptually related harms. They have fought for the right to sexually harass trans children in schools by repeatedly misgendering and misnaming them,⁶ for institutions to out students to their parents for abuse,⁷ for institutions to expose students to ostracism and ridicule with discriminatory bathroom rules, and on and on. This a movement that considers it laudable to confront someone in an intimate setting like a changing room or bathroom, harass them, demand they prove their sex, and even physically attack them — all based on their perception of the victim's gender. If my analysis is wrong, they aren't trying very hard to disprove it.

More fundamentally, what could possibly be more invasive than forcing someone to go through an unwanted puberty? Few things are more harmful, more detrimental to dignity, than turning someone's own body against them. For all their protestations of metaphysical rape-by-proximity-to-trans-women, their designs are far darker: to control the basic sexual characteristics of their victims. They have another slur that is appropriate here: grooming. This is the core of the anti-trans movement's fascist gender ideology: coercing children to sexually develop the way they prefer.

1. I do not give a shit whether you agree with my word choice. Take it as a given, like my use of "gender ideology".

2. In practice, fascists frequently enforce their gender ideology via rape. Arguably, sexual violence is their gender ideology's defining feature.

3. For example, they justify harming trans people on the basis that allowing bodily autonomy would constitute a greater, more grievous harm: the end of the family unit, loss of white reproductive capacity, conjectured future regret, blasphemy against god...

4. http://www.npr.org/2025/12/04/nx-s1-5630490/prison-doj-safety-memo-changes-trans-lgbtq-inmates

5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-coding

6. This is absolutely a form of sexual harassment and I wish more people would identify it as such. Just imagine a cisgender boy being repeatedly called "she" because people think he's too swishy, or a cisgender girl who's always referred to as "Mike" because they think she's too butch. Most people would recognize this as obvious sexual harassment: singling someone out due to perceptions of their sex characteristics and making their life miserable. But when the victim is transgender, basic moral intuition goes out the window. Even nonhumans who are "misgendered" receive more dignity than this, and they don't even know what a pronoun is.

7. Most sexual abuse is committed by people close to the victim. "Corrective rape" is a real phenomenon. These things are connected.

Rosemary,

2025-12-10

Rosemary,
you always smell absolutely perfect.
you are an edible flower.
you draw me in through all my senses.
i want to devour you.

Rosemary,
you make everything better.
from the fanciest focaccia to the simplest stew,
everything tastes better with you.

Rosemary,
you linger after you're gone.
i smell you on my breath, my clothes.
my kitchen has been claimed by you,
and my bedroom.

Rosemary,
i'm not much of a chef.
i cannot do you justice.
i'm no gardener.
your vivacity is as foreign to me as it is beautiful.
you made my life fragrant,
and i merely digested you.
you deserve to be savored.

#poem

Trans Genocide

2025-12-12

#essay #politics

Essay (2025)

Are trans people experiencing a genocide? Well, I hope we've learned from Gaza that when people start splitting hairs about whether events technically constitute genocide, something has gone terribly wrong. It does not at all reassure me that when I share my perfectly rational concerns,¹ what seemingly bothers people most is my choice of words.

Still, skepticism is an understandable response to an accusation of genocide.² After all, one motivation for using strong language like "genocide" is to draw attention to the severity of the issue, and that capacity might be compromised if the word is overused. As reasonable as it seems on its face, this line of criticism is ultimately tendentious. What is really at stake is not the capacity for words to stir emotion, but our capacity to speak meaningfully and truthfully. This category error contributed to years of handwringing, scolding, and generally irritating bullshit from the Serious Person Squad over whether we were allowed to call Donald Trump a fascist. It is not particularly important whether calling someone a "Nazi" arouses your feelings, but it is important whether that someone actually is a Nazi. After all, nobody will be stirred into action against said Nazi if they can't even identify him as one.

But that doesn't get us all the way to a G-card — the identification still needs to be correct, and Serious People contend it isn't. So, down to brass tacks: what is genocide, anyway? At this point, we could invoke a formal definition. There's actually one inscribed in law at the UN.³ We could also run down a list of features of genocide as identified by experts and tick off the ones that apply.⁴ (We could even use a dictionary, that old bellwether of bad internet arguments.) And there's obviously a place in the world for this sort of legalistic approach, but I don't think we need any of that here. The meaning of a word and its definition are two different things. A definition attempts to capture meaning that's already there, and I think we know what genocide is: it's when someone tries to wipe out an entire group of people. We're watching one, on our phones. Genocide is when humans treat each other the same way they treat an infestation of cockroaches.

So, is that happening to trans people? After all, they aren't dropping bombs on us. There's no paramilitary systematically murdering every trans person they can find. (Yet.) But there are many methods to wipe out an infestation, and there's no sense wasting all that effort when you can just put out poisoned roach traps. Maybe a better question is this: how would a world where trans people were treated like an infestation differ from our own?

I can't think of anything. Having the social status of a cockroach is just a straightforward description of life as a trans person. Accepting that status is the cost you know you have to pay to truly live.⁵ Many trans people live this way: hiding during the day, scurrying out at night, surviving on crumbs and human forbearance. Nobody⁶ denies that society treats trans people very badly, but we've always been cockroaches. Why are we getting so worked up about it now, when we've been treated like dirt for ages?

My answer is this: trans genocide is not a new phenomenon. Like Israel's recent slaughter of Palestinians and wholesale destruction of their country, we can clearly identify a sharp increase in the oppression, but it's part of a longer process. The Holocaust did not begin the moment the first gas chamber was turned on; the mass murder was preceeded by years of escalating oppression. Trans people have been surviving genocidal conditions for most of our history. When transphobia is swept aside as simple intolerance — an unavoidable social ill, not a calamity — it masks the physical realities of oppression: children abused and taught to hide and hate what they are; teenagers made homeless by their own parents; young women raped and disposed of in dumpsters; staggering numbers of people choosing death over this life.⁷ Violence and abuse against trans people are pervasive throughout our society to such an extent that our numbers were held firmly at ~0% of the population until the internet empowered us to organize without scurrying out and getting stomped on.

Keep in mind, this genocidal social context has been so thoroughly normalized that it also affects how trans people think. We're fish in water. We have low expectations for how we'll be treated, and work around it as best we can, like anyone does with obstacles in their daily life. So when conditions have worsened to the point where we flee our homes en masse,⁸ we can be confident the situation has become catastrophic, even if it gets us no closer to determining if a genocide has "officially" begun.

The reason things have deteriorated so badly is not complicated: there are people who want to wipe us out, and they have a great deal of money and power. Like Hitler and Netanyahu, they do not take great pains to hide this fact. Perhaps the most famous example was when Michael Knowles took the stage at CPAC and announced that "transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely",⁹ but the dedicated cockroach-stompers have always been clear about their intentions. Janice Raymond's landmark 1979 book The Transsexual Empire — basically, Mein Kampf for feminists who hate trans women — says that "the problem of transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence". Women's Declaration International (then WHRC), a major psuedofeminist hate outfit backed by all the prominent transphobes,¹⁰ submitted a document to UK Parliament that calls for the "elimination of ... the practice of transgenderism".¹¹ Eliminating trans people is a clear priority for the Trump regime, though they prefer the euphemism "gender ideology".¹² Anyone who has ever lived among Republicans knows they generally feel the same way; random congressmen volunteer suggestions like:
> We have to get them off the streets, and we have to get them off the internet, and we can’t let them communicate with each other. I’m all about free speech, but this is a virus, this is a cancer.¹³

But of course, we don't need any admission of motive. Their actions speak loudly enough. Why else would you ban medication that saves trans people's lives, if not to kill them? How much more obvious could their intentions possibly be? It's cold-blooded murder. It's no different than if they were to ban insulin: not all the diabetics would die, but it is not exactly hard to connect the causal dots. And that's only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cruel, illegal, and exterminationist policy. They have two apparent policy priorities: 1) to make the world as hostile as possible to trans people, with an emphasis on children who can't fight back and on causing psychological devastation; 2) to erase trans people from society by banning and covering up our identities, language, and history. These two prongs meet to create what I think of as their worst crime: they aren't just erasing history and killing our loved ones, they're banning the future. They want to rob us of hope for a better tomorrow and ensure that the next generation of trans people has to start over from scratch.¹⁴

Yes, trans people will always exist. But how many of them? What will their lives be like, and how long will they be? Will they even have the language to describe themselves?

You don't have to call it a genocide. It's just a word. You can call it pre-genocide, incitement, red flags, or whatever you want. But you cannot deny that our society has been swept by a powerful campaign to crush trans people like bugs.

1. We've been told time and again that transmisogynist bigots' completely baseless fears must be pandered to, because they have "reasonable concerns". Reasonableness apparently requires no evidence, just technical plausibility. Trans people's fear of persecution is not only reasonable, it's backed with mountains of actual evidence, so we ought to be in solid epistemic territory. But who gets accused of overreacting?

2. Skepticism is the correct default posture to all claims, as long as you don't mistake willful ignorance for it.

3. This definition was arguably compromised by the same eliminationist bigotry toward trans and queer people which it fails to identify. After WWII, the Allies did not free the gay people imprisoned by the Nazis, continued arresting them, and reflexively erased them from Holocaust memory.

4. I have taken this approach before, and it doesn't seem to have any effect. People just treat you like a lawyer arguing a technicality. Instead of elevating the affect of a word over its meaning, they conflate the two. You're giving them a definition, but they know the meaning is what really matters, and they judge whether that meaning applies based on whether they feel sufficiently outraged.

5. It's an absolute bargain, but it's still not one anyone should have to make.

6. ...who matters

7. I do not consider this suicide; it is better understood as social murder.

8. http://www.erininthemorning.com/p/us-internal-refugee-crisis-130-260k

9. If you've followed my cockroach analogy, you'll understand that the fig leaf of specifically public life is utterly without meaning. The ability to live in public, and the ability to live, full stop, are functionally identical. Knowles wants the cockroaches to run back into the walls.

10. Except, curiously, JK Rowling, as far as I can tell. At least, she didn't sign their "Declaration on Women's Sex-Based Rights" (eyeroll). At the time she was a little more circumspect about her trans hatred and just did stuff like post photos sipping mimosas with the genocidaires.

11. http://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/17510/html/

12. http://web.archive.org/web/20250121015439/http://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal-government/

13. http://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/09/gop-rep-says-we-need-to-remove-all-trans-people-from-streets-the-internet/

14. One of the spurious legalistic rejoinders to trans genocide is that we don't qualify as "a people"; we are a naturally occurring variation of humans, so it is not possible to ever completely wipe us out. Setting aside that the feasibility of committing total genocide is not actually relevant, this analysis ignores the reality of our lives. We belong to trans communities; we have a shared culture, history, and political interests; we have built up the collective knowledge we need to flourish and the tenuous capacity to pass that knowledge on to the next generation, who we dearly hope will build on our progress and enjoy better lives. All of that capacity can be smashed to pieces, and in fact it already has been once recently, when the Nazis set us back 60 years.

"gendercide" by Xanthra Phillippa from Gendertrash from Hell #1 (1993)

gendercide is the name for the deliberate and systematic destruction of gender described people that is currently taking place on this continent.
first of all, no statistics are kept on the number of us who even exist, let alone are attacked or killed or who suicide every year. for example, how many of the teenage suicides that are recorded as being lesbian/gay - related (at least 1/3 of all teenage suicides), really are related to gender identity? to continue, how many of the teenage suicides, where the teenager identified her/himself as lesbian/gay were really gender described (and since this society maintains the myth that the gender described are really a subsection of the lesbian and gay communities, it is quite possible that an adolescent, already confused and upset from dealing with her/his own gender identity, might really believe that they are lesbian or gay and identify themselves as such)? if an adolescent, who is identified as both gender described and either lesbian or gay, commits or attempts suicide, how would it (the suicide) be documented statistically? as a lesbian/gay related suicide? how many of the attacks on, deaths or suicides of gender described youths, who live on the streets, are recorded as attacks on, deaths or suicides of gender described youths? the list of unanswered questions in just this area alone, is huge, far too huge.
and what about deaths, attempted suicides of gender described adults? where is the necessary statistical documentation regarding our lives, like for instance our average life span, our average incomes, housing, professions (including prostitution)? and what about HIV/AIDS and the gender communities?
the complete lack of information in this area, allows the political/medical/psychiatric/sociological/legal professions to continue to either directly or indirectly participate in the destruction of our lives. this is the gendercide that exists here, that we live under, under whose shadow we somehow have to exist. a gendercide that up until now has been invisible & unacknowledged. and our humyn rights will never be respected unless this gendercide is ended & acknowledged by this genetic society.

(emphasis mine)

Unicode needs to add a glyph for two exclamation marks where the poin…

2025-12-25

Unicode needs to add a glyph for two exclamation marks where the points have a smile underneath them
Or... a typeface ligature?

Simulate with unicode "combining breve below":
!̮!

#snippet

Possessor as Trans Horror

2026-01-01

#essay #horror #film #trans-reading

Body horror and gender dysphoria

Films in the body horror genre are replete with images and themes likely to resonate with trans viewers.¹ Gender dysphoria is a very common aspect of trans subjectivity, and perhaps the most salient type is body dysphoria. "Body dysphoria" is, of course, nearly a synonym of "body horror". Not all gender dysphoria rises to the intensity of horror, and not all body horror trades on horror at one's own body, but it is unsurprising that there is a high degree of thematic overlap.

Trans readings are most obvious in narratives of gradual degeneration that mirror the experience of unwanted puberty. In The Fly (1986), Jeff Goldblum spends a great deal of time staring in a literal mirror, watching as he is slowly transformed into a monster with each passing day. Early in the process, he tries to shave insectile growths from his face; trans women often compare testosterone-induced body and facial hair to the legs of insects. While there are many possible readings, the puberty reading is an obvious one, even for cis viewers; puberty is a difficult experience for everyone.

Another recurring trope in body horror is dissociation/derealization/depersonalization. Characters often observe their own mutilation with an eerie detachment, powerless or unwilling to stop it. This phenomenon is a common aspect of gender dysphoria that is powerfully depicted by Jane Schoenbrun and others working in the overlapping sister genre of psychological horror. Schoenbrun's masterpiece I Saw The TV Glow (as well as their lesser work We're All Going to the World's Fair) foregrounds a frequently co-occurring theme: technology as a force that drives and mediates personal alienation, and that also promises the possibility of transcending the limits of the flesh. Videodrome and eXistenZ are other exemplars here. Neither techno-dissociation or -transcendance is uniquely trans, but again, the resonance is undeniable, particularly in the internet age.

More broadly, body horror highlights difficulties and discomfort with personal identity. It asks what (if anything) makes you you and whether it can be changed or taken away. While the popular transphobic notion of "gender confusion" is of little value — trans people are often less confused about their gender than cis people, who might not have ever thought about it — this is still a very trans theme: Is medical transition right for me? If I'm forced to detransition, will I still be myself? Is my difference something I can celebrate? Does my sexed embodiment matter? What even is gender?

Many works also lend themselves to a trans-hostile reading. They gawk at atypically sexed bodies and use transness as a visual shorthand for degeneration, emphasizing not the horror experienced by the tormented subject, but horror at the Other. Excessive, harmful, "unnatural" surgery is also a common trope. Films like Tetsuo: The Iron Man, The Substance, and Crimes of the Future (2022) feature a protagonist addicted to harming their own body through surgical means. Sometimes the connection to trans identity is made explicit, such as with forced sex change narratives like The Skin I Live In or gender variant characters like Titane. And of course, horror as a whole has a long history of transphobic, sensationalized portrayals of transness, like Psycho and Silence of the Lambs.

One final thing to note is the prevalence of graphic sex, especially "deviant" sex.² This is often the hardest aspect to interpret because it can serve so many different ends. It can even serve opposing ones simultaneously. Is it intended to shock, titillate? Both? Is it incidental and only "deviant" insofar as the world of the story is unlike our own? Is the film providing a venue for sexual practices that are otherwise suppressed, or contributing to their suppression? Is this really sex, or is it actually rape? The one constant is that body horror can be relied on to showcase sexuality that is rarely depicted elsewhere. This is often relevant to trans people, who are disproportionately queer and probably disproportionately kinky, on top of frequently having a more complex relationship with their sexuality than the cishet average due to dysphoria, trauma, and cissexist expectations.

1. In this, and all my writing, I don't intend to speak for others or imply what I say is true of all trans people. Far from it; we are as diverse as any group. I'm speaking from my own perspective, and generalize only because I think there are a non-negligible number of other trans people who have a similar perspective. Without the ability to note shared experiences, we wouldn't have the term "transgender" in the first place.

2. I would consider erotic horror another sister genre to body horror. Besides heavy overlap in both Cronenbergs' films, see Julia Ducournau (Raw, Titane), Clive Barker's Hellraiser series, Possession (1981), From Beyond (1986), Under the Skin (2013), The Substance (2024), and the entire "monsterfucker" genre. No really, see them, they're all good! Except for maybe the monsterfucker stuff. Do not watch La Bête (1975) unless you are really into simulated bigfoot rape and unsimulated horse sex. I should have turned it off when it opened with what felt like an hour of close-ups of horse cock. I watched it so you don't have to. It's amazing what you can find at your local library.

Possessor (2020)

!! This section contains spoilers. You should watch the film before reading it. Also, nudity.

Brandon Cronenberg's films are brilliant, yet they do not receive anywhere near the level of acclaim they deserve. His work is perhaps overshadowed by that of his father, to which it owes an obvious debt. It feels as though he spent his whole life marinating in Cronenberg the elder's work, letting it suffuse every pore, then burst onto the film scene in a blaze of originality. So far, his films are consistently excellent, where his father's are of more mixed quality, hitting both incredible highs and forgettable lows. Brandon takes David's skin-crawling surrealism and shapes it into razor-sharp, absolutely unsparing hard science fiction. You could say I'm a fan. If you are unfamiliar with his work and have ten minutes to spare, check out his short film Please Speak Continuously and Describe Your Experiences as They Come to You.

For my money, Possessor is the most criminally underrated of his films. His debut feature Antiviral had some success among arthouse horror fans for its bizarre premise, and Infinity Pool drew more mainstream attention. But Possessor, which sits between the two chronologically, seems to have had a muted reception, despite being his best film. Set in the near future, it depicts a professional assassin who possesses her victims using high technology then causes them to commit murder-suicide.

Going back to the common elements of body horror that I identified above as lending themselves to trans readings, it ticks off each box. The assassin, Tasya Vos, has lost herself in her job. Her mental state is degrading. When we first meet her, she chooses to stab her victim to death instead of using the gun she was provided. When it comes time to shoot herself, she is unable to do it. For a normal person, shooting yourself is a sign of poor mental health; for her, not shooting herself means something has gone wrong. Physically and psychologically, she resembles a ghost. The technology that pays her bills has exacted a terrible toll. She is estranged from her husband and child and approaches meeting with them the same way she prepares for a job, practicing her lines to herself. Her "real" life is just another role she plays. After each job she undergoes psychological evaluation to verify that she is still, technically, herself. So we have degeneration, depersonalization, techno-alienation and -transcendance, and yes, a heaping scoop of uncensored sex.

So, hecklers, you must forgive me for applying a trans lens to this film, because body horror's trans vibes are just the start. While Brandon Cronenberg is not, to my knowledge, transgender, and while the trans themes I identify are not exactly explicit, there's a lot more to this than "trans woman watches film, decides it's about gender". There are somehow still people who deny that the magnificent Being John Malkovich is the transest movie ever made by an ostensible cis man, and it has an explicitly trans character. Cis critics even denied that I Saw The TV Glow, a movie about gender dysphoria made by a trans person, had anything to do with gender. So, if you find my analysis utterly ridiculous, may I gently suggest you adjust your worldview to one where cisness is not the default.

With that out of the way, here's what I think: gender dysphoria is central to Possessor and you can't make any sense of it otherwise. I honestly don't think that can be reasonably contested.

More open to debate is my further reading: that Tasya Vos is a genderqueer or transmasculine person who has been corrupted by the patriarchy and by an unhealthy coping strategy. At the least, Vos is a figure tormented by gender dysphoria into becoming a monster. Whether you take this as hostile or sympathetic to trans people is not very important to me, but I would lean sympathetic. That might seem strange given the monstrosity Vos becomes, but the film encourages us to see things from Vos's perspective; and it's in keeping with horror's tendency to exploit our fear not of monsters, but of becoming a monster.

Note: I will from here on refer to Vos with neutral pronouns, not as a judgment call about the character's identity, but to encourage awareness of the ineherent ambiguity and discourage firm conclusions.

The calibrator

The first shot of the film is of Vos inserting a needle-tipped probe into the skull of the first victim, ie, Vos's own skull. We later learn that this is a device for calibrating the connection between the host body and the assassin possessing it. Vos looks into the mirror while slowly turning up the dial on the device. The victim's face moves through a variety of emotions, ultimately sobbing in despair, then moves back to a forced calm. (This performance by Gabrielle Graham is fantastic, by the way. It's unsettling to see such realistic emotional lability with no apparent external source.)

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I think this device is one of the most intriguing things about the movie's universe, despite the fact that it undercuts the "perfect crime" nature of Vos's job — a minor plot hole we can easily overlook. The calibrator seemingly must be used in front of a mirror. It appears to stimulate a range of strong emotions in order to anchor the possessor in the host body, but the fact that it requires a mirror indicates that this anchoring process is about self-identification. Mirrors encourage us to consider the connection between the mind and body, the internal and external selves. By experiencing these emotions while watching them play across the host's face, Vos mentally connects the host's body with their own: I feel this; they feel this; therefore they = me.

The device itself, though: it's a needle you insert that makes you feel more connected to your body. Sound familiar? Needles are a common delivery method for hormones, and strong emotions are often triggered immediately after an injection. It's tempting to read this as the sci-fi equivalent of HRT, but of course, it's being used to help Vos steal someone else's body, not feel more comfortable in their own. Instead of altering the body, it alters the mind. Thus, it might be closer to the opposite of HRT: conversion therapy in a box.

Compatibility

Later, when Vos is assigned to possess Colin Tate, we're told (foreshadowing!) that his body is not very compatible with Vos, and so the mission will only last three to five days and the calibrator must be used at least daily. (Vos seems reticent to do this, probably because it's an unpleasant experience.) How we interpret this supposed incompatibility has significant implications for our understanding of Vos's gender identity. At first blush, one might assume that they are incompatible due to the fact that Colin is a man. And that might be true, but I increasingly suspect it's a red herring. There are all sorts of neurological reasons they might be incompatible, and as we saw in the beginning, the calibrator is still necessary when possessing a body with the same sex characteristics. We just don't have enough context to judge.

I say "supposed incompatibility" because the film gives us reason to suspect the "incompatibility" is actually an excess of compatibility. Vos's employers do not want them to become too attached to their life in the host. As things spiral out of control in the denouement, it's unclear where Vos ends and Colin begins. Vos even tells him, or themselves, that the murders were acts of his own agency: You're the one in control. Maybe the whole thing is just a power struggle, and Vos said this to try to manipulate him into killing himself, but we are shown tons of visuals of the two of them blurring together.

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Colin and Vos have a lot in common. They are both abused and exploited by incredibly invasive employers. They both work soul-killing jobs: Colin spies on Amazon Zoothroo users and harvests data about the most boring things in the scene; Vos gives up their identity and murders people, regularly experiencing suffering that includes committing suicide. They are both directly overseen for the entirety of their time on the clock. Colin's job even incorporates VR for no apparent reason, meaning his consciousness is transferred to a new perspective, akin to her possessions. (Hilariously, he even has a virtual desk and monitor inside the VR environment.) Colin's job is voyeuristic, while Vos's takes voyeur to a whole new level. Both of them have an inappropriately close connection with their employer: Colin's is his horrible father-in-law, Vos's plays therapist and demands to know Vos's thoughts in addition to ordering and overseeing contract kills. When Vos is told to start a fight with Colin's father-in-law, the rage on display could have come from either one of them: You think you can step on me? I'm a giant! The cover story that Colin had a breakdown under all the stress might not have been far off the mark.

Perhaps militating against this reading is the fact that Vos has a breakdown at Colin's job when assigned to spy on a couple having sex. A naked woman lies spread eagle on the bed, then a naked man walks into frame and starts eating her out. Why is this the trigger? Is it because Vos doesn't feel at home in a man's body? Because it reminds them of the body they will return to? Because Colin is turned on by it and reasserts control? Is it an incompatibility in sexual orientation? I'm not sure what to make of it, and it runs counter to some other observations, but it's clearly significant and tells us that sex/gender is central to the story.

Depersonalization, sex, and masculinity

The couple being spied on by Amazon Zoothroo is not the first significant sex scene. After Vos's first assignment is complete, they request time off to try to reconnect with their family. (Vos's boss is not happy about this, reminding Vos that they separated and that Vos decided it was better that way.) Vos approaches this like another assignment: they practice greeting their family with no apparent emotion, then seem to fake the emotions when the time comes. Their real life is just another role to play, motions to go through. Very pre-transition trans. Later, they initiate sex with their husband by laying their head on his arm like a puppy. Cut to fucking: Vos is just lying there in the missionary position, clearly feeling nothing, absolutely dead inside. It's only when they remember plunging a knife into their victim's body that they feel anything. At first, it seems like Vos is haunted by it... but then, they get aroused and bite their husband.

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What to make of this? Clearly Vos is no longer turned on by PIV with this man; what they really crave is violence. And notably, the form that violence takes is stabbing, the type most heavily freighted with psychosexual baggage: sticking something into the victim. This is a frequent trope in horror: women who are dispatched by repeated stabbing with a knife, echoing the violent insertion of a phallus. Recall too that Vos went out of their way to select a knife as the murder weapon.

Vos isn't forced to do this job. They could quit at any time, but they don't want to. It provides an outlet for something very dark that lurks inside them, an attraction to violence that is typically masculine. Vos's job is alienating them from their own humanity, but I think it's awakening something in them besides a love of violence. The simplest explanation is that they are sublimating their desire to sexually penetrate into a desire to violently penetrate.

We get further evidence of this when Vos possesses Colin. One of the first things they do is examine themself in the mirror. They look at their penis, then pick up their fiancee's panties and look at the vaginal discharge. There's no evidence of arousal at this point; they act as detached as ever. But why examine the panties? Maybe they were just contemplating their new sex. They didn't smell them. Still, Vos seems to be attracted to Colin's fiancee immediately. They stare at her while she's getting dressed; they walk up behind her, put their arms around her, tell her she smells good, and kiss her. The fiancee, Ava, immediately notices something is off, but first identifies it as Colin being in a good mood. Maybe the staring was part of Vos's voyeuristic tendency to study people, and maybe the kissing — which mimics what Vos observed while prepping for the job — was just a ploy to win Ava's trust. Maybe.

What's really interesting is what happens when Vos and Ava fuck. Ava is on top in a distinctly dominant role: she puts her fingers in Vos/Colin's mouth, then wraps one hand around their neck and puts the other over their mouth. Vos grabs her hands and forces them behind her back, then sits up and flips them around so Ava is on her back. It's only at this point that Vos/Colin really seems to get into it. This is also when some "synchronization" issues begin to crop up: we see flickers of Vos's actual face; Vos/Colin looks uncomfortable; we see Colin screaming internally; Colin/Vos sits up. Then, Colin's body changes into Vos's, slim and breasted, except with a large penis. They continue thrusting it a little. With some reticence, they continue fucking. Closeups of an open eye are overlaid. Cut to Vos/Colin sitting alone with their head down in a pose suggestion exhaustion or dejection; they check in with their boss and say they are in perfect sync with the host.

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This is the closest we get to an explicit trans moment in the film, but it is very explicit. Vos is embodied in their mind's eye as a woman with a large penis, rather like a fetishistic depiction of a trans woman. I imagine this is a polarizing scene for transfem viewers. It seems to use our bodies as a symbol of confusion or ambiguity. However, that symbol literalizes what Vos/Colin is experiencing; I suspect whether it's offensive comes down to whether you feel it was done for shock value or not, which I don't really think it was.

Just like the voyeuristic VR scene, sex has clearly triggered some sort of disconnect. And like the VR scene, it's not entirely clear why. One obvious explanation is that Vos is experiencing severe gender dysphoria leading to dissociation, but I don't think that quite fits. Vos seems numb and disconnected, yes, but that's how they always are; they literally are diconnected; it isn't their body. It's Colin whose face we see screaming in horror, presumably because he's powerless to stop this intruder from fucking his fiancee. Vos continues thrusting their cock, slightly, while they look down at themselves in detached wonder. And most significantly, the scene mirrors the earlier "dead inside" scene between Vos and their husband. Vos/Colin firmly rejects the submissive position that they occupied in the earlier sex scene and reverses it. This does not read as method acting to me: if they liked that role, they could have just kept it going; how they had sex had no relevance to the mission. Presumably Ava and Colin have had sex before and she knows what he likes; it's Vos who wants to be dominant.³

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Sex in Possessor seems to function like the opposite of the calibrator. The powerful emotions and bodily sensations it generates provide an opportunity for the host's identity to break through and assert itself. Whether this is because it creates gender dysphoria in the possessor or because it connects strongly to the host's psyche, it's clear that Possessor sees sexuality as fundamental to self-conception, even moreso than strong emotion alone.

3. I realize I'm playing a little fast and loose with my sex terminology here. They're not exactly doing anything kinky. The change in position seems like a pretty vanilla exchange of power; normal give-and-take, not a clear dominant and submissive. But they shot the scene this way for a reason. They gave us close-ups of Ava's hand around Colin's throat and Colin's hands holding hers behind her back for a reason. I think that reason was to emphasize the shifting power in the scenario.

Suicide

This may seem crass, but it feels significant to me that Vos's job centrally involves suicide. This is a topic that trans people are unfortunately quite familiar with. Our high suicide rates are now sufficiently well known that they are used to harass us and encourage us to inflict death on ourselves. As self-harm goes, the ability to kill yourself over and over again has got to take the cake.

Why have they begun having trouble going through with it? The job is clearly fucking them up, alienating them from their own humanity, causing them to experience mental lapses that interfere with their performance, but we never learn exactly why it's started to be a problem now. Is it just how long they've been doing the job? Never in the film do we see them successfully complete suicide. I think it fits with my point about compatibility: Vos is increasingly unable or unwilling to separate from the host body. Their ghostly, detached existence means there is less and less of them. They crave the taste of real existence that they get from their hosts.

This entire approach to life makes sense as a maladaptive coping mechanism for untreated gender dysphoria. As miserable as Vos's job is, it's an escape from real life. They get to spend time in a body that is not their own, living a life that is not their own. It's the grisly equivalent of spending your life in a drunken stupor watching television. Metaphorically, Vos has already committed suicide. The violence that they inflict on others is nothing compared to what they inflict on themselves.

Family, gender roles, and stereotypes

There are some other, shallower reasons to read Vos as masculine. First of all, they're a professional murderer. That's statistically very unlikely for a woman. The personal items used to test their reintegration are stereotypically masculine: a butterfly they murdered, their grandfather's pipe. They also do not wear any makeup or other femme accoutrements.

Then there's their relationship with their family. Leaving your spouse to take care of your child alone while you go away to work is a common pattern for men, but much less common for women. Women typically fill the caring role at home while men fuck off. Not to mention that Vos seemingly only popped in to get their rocks off, then ditched, and the sex being bad seems like it sealed the deal on giving up on the family.

Vos's boss is the voice of the patriarchy. She encourages Vos to sever ties with their family: they're holding Vos back; interfering with their work; they're a danger to their family anyway. They're Vos's last thread of connection to humanity, and that's inconvenient. The company needs a killing machine, not a loving parent.

And of course, there's the finale. We learn that Vos's boss has possessed their child to ensure the mission is finished, and likely to ensure that Vos no longer has a family to steal their attention. In the end, it's Vos who annihilates their own child, screaming with the same hatred displayed during the earlier fight at the party. I speculated that that rage might have been genuinely Colin's; in this case, it is unambiguous that it genuinely belongs to Vos. This type of rage is about as male as it gets. It's unstable men who are prone to annihilate their family and themselves.

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In the final analysis, Vos's boss was right. She may have maneuvered them into the revelation, but the revelation was sincere. Vos's true feelings are that they despise their family and everything it represents. Empathy, domesticity, womanhood: Tasya Vos is not meant for these things. Their truth is unrestrained power and pounding blood. Their toxic masculinity is in service of a power structure that doesn't actually care about them — but since when is that new? Masculinity exists to turn men into weapons that protect male power.

Testosterone could have saved him.

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Evil

2026-01-08

#essay #politics #phil

With the rise of Donald Trump's fascist regime in particular and global democratic backsliding in general, I've often found myself contemplating the nature of evil. We see it every day, but are still shocked by it, even those of us who are embittered and cynical and well aware that it is not a new phenomenon. Abject evil is so foreign to decent minds that it invites a toxic empathy: I'm sure I'm not the only one who looks aghast at the latest horror of the day and reflexively wonders, "but why? how could they do this?", even though I know it is pointless. There is an unbridgeable chasm between us and these monsters that my mind can never quite accept. It's as though I think there's One Weird Trick that would enable me to look at nightmarish brutality and say "I may not agree, but I understand."

I strongly suspect this process of kneejerk empathy is a major part of the story of fascism's persistence. Empathy is not just about being nice or sympathetic; it's a process whereby we model the internal state of external people. Empathy is as necessary for anticipating the tactics of an opposing force as it is for comforting a friend.¹ The upshot is that fascism acts as a mimetic hazard. We can't fight what we don't understand, and we can't understand fascism without part of our minds being dedicated to simulating — that is to say, replicating — the thought processes of fascists. In other words, fascism is the ultimate cop in your head: it's both a system of brutal political tyranny and a form of psychological warfare to produce same.²

Of course, we can't let ourselves off the hook. Just because you aren't rounding up people of color and shooting civilians in the face doesn't mean you're in the clear. That sort of self-congratulation is incredibly harmful because nobody wants to think of themselves as a Bad Person. If our moral universe is built on dividing people into Good and Bad, it will only grease the wheels of bad behavior by implicitly justifying every action by a Good Person. This of course raises the question of whether "evil" is even a coherent category, whether I'm just wasting my time by writing this essay. Besides that I simply don't want to write about meta-ethics — and at the risk of recapitulating foolishness like deontology and the N.A.P. — I think the conclusions I've come to hold some value for thinking about the nature of human social problems, even if they wouldn't satisfy a moral philosopher.

The Tripartite Face of Evil

Cruelty

Cruelty is the most visible, blatant form of evil. It's what slaps us in the face every morning. It's what the regime seems to take a particular delight in spreading against its targets; it's what the far-right has successfully gamified via social media into a competition over who can be the nastiest person.

Not all meanness constitutes cruelty. Cruelty is specifically an excess of meanness over and above what the situation calls for, and tends to delight in itself. Screaming at an ICE agent that he has a small dick is meanness; what ICE agents do is cruelty. Torture is the paradigmatic example of cruelty as it inflicts pain on its victims without any possibility of furthering a legitimate goal.

Cruelty is what happens when we gratuitously indulge the darker side of our nature, but it's not just an individual pathology: infliction of gratuitous harm is built into our society's structure, from the way our food is produced (millions of laborers subjected to harsh conditions and poverty wages; billions of nonhuman animals, born in captivity and tortured to death) to the pointless misery inflicted on unwanted people groups on a daily basis (non-white/"foreign" people murdered in front of their family or rounded up and put in a concentration camp; women raped without recourse, forced to carry a pregnancy to term; widespread denigration of queer, trans, disabled, and neurodivergent people; people reduced to begging for scraps in the street from people with money to spare who won't even look at them; healthcare routinely denied to almost everyone) to the entire "justice system" with its violence, rape, legalized slavery, and endless petty bureaucracy that gradually wears down the victim's dignity.

Cruelty is what we think of when we think of evil: the madman in a horror movie smiling as he eviscerates a stranger; animal abuse; Nazi death camps. It's not hard to identify egregious examples like this. Even so, Team Decency is still eminently capable of cruelty, often justified as a way to fight Team Evil. It's not always clear where the line should be drawn between necessary acts of meanness or violence and unnecessary acts of cruelty, but we should make an effort to draw it and to step back from the brink. Self-justification is seductively easy, and cruelty has a way of spreading and corroding the decency of others.

Evil without cruelty is far more tolerable, but tends to produce cruelty in the end.

1. This is both the biggest weakness and the biggest strength of Team Decency. Fascists lack empathy and thus often fail miserably to understand their enemy (ie, us). Just think of how often they act on intelligence bulletins that make fundamentally ridiculous claims about antifa wanting to burn down the forest or whatever. The fascist ecosystem is built on misinformation, so they base their actions on fundamentally mistaken (even cartoonish) understandings of reality. This can be exploited!

2. If I'm right about this, it might go some way toward explaining collaborators' fixation on defining fascist claims as reasonable. While the most egregious form of this tendency is probably deference to blatantly dishonest official statements which justify regime crimes as acts of self-defense, trans genocide offers more instructive illustrations: we are constantly informed that the deranged ravings of bloodthirsty bigots are actually "reasonable concerns", encouraged to put ourselves in the shoes of hysterical paranoids, and expected to somehow compromise with the people who want us exterminated.

Willful Ignorance

There's nothing wrong with being stupid, but there is something wrong with choosing to remain stupid when given the option, and there is something especially wrong with actively cultivating your own stupidity. Willful ignorance is a substantial contributing factor to the persistence of systemic cruelty and other social ills, from climate change to homophobia to ChatGPT. Fascism thus heavily promotes it with relentless propaganda and a culture of anti-intellectualism. It is possible to spend your entire life in a carefully manufactured bubble of ignorance, and it's so comfortable that a great many people choose to do so. You can't have complex, difficult thoughts about things that you don't even know about.

The Fox News junkie of yesteryear and the social media brainrot nazi of today exemplify this willful ignorance. They blanket themselves in lies and half-truths, helpfully aided by a complicit media ecosystem. Anyone who threatens to pop the bubble is subjected to ridicule and aggressive regurgitation of the lies the willfully ignorant have chosen to swallow.

This form of evil also runs deep in the ranks of Team Decency, most obvious in liberals who were entirely comfortable with the system of oppression known as state capitalism until it inconvenienced them. An infamous protest sign proclaimed that "If Kamala was president, we'd all be at brunch." Avoiding mental inconvenience is also paramount: don't ruin brunch by telling us how it was made!

Perhaps less obvious, but no less widespread, is the willful ignorance the rest of us use in an attempt to avoid the psychological pain of our hellscape. It's incredibly tempting to just shut off the news, put on a TV show, and bury your head in a hole hoping it all goes away. It's easy to scroll past fundraisers and protest announcements that you know would compel you to contribute if you let yourself absorb it. We often justify willful ignorance with the language of self-care. Why burden yourself with knowledge if you can't do anything about it?³ As important as it is to avoid burnout, refusal to engage is insidious and becomes a habit over time. Where do you think all those brunch liberals came from?

3. Are you sure there's nothing you can do about it? If you remain wilfully ignorant, that's guaranteed. If not, you might discover an inconvenient moral duty.

Cowardice

One should never regret one's excesses, only one's failures of nerve.
— Ximenyr

I have long thought that cowardice is the ultimate root of our problems. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for decent people to do nothing. We are a planet of eight billion mostly decent people, but we let ourselves be ruled by a tiny minority of psychopaths. Human cowardice is so pervasive that we are easily cowed by simple peer pressure not backed by threat of force. Our society is directly analogous to a jail of 10,000 inmates imprisoned by ten guards, who keep us in line without even drawing a weapon.

Cowardice seems rational in the short-term. What if you rush the guards and nobody follows? Most of our collective problems persist through this short-sighted logic. Look at the bigger picture and it becomes obvious that the rational thing to do is to rush the guards, right away, every time. There are many more of us than there are of them, and they will keep stuffing more people inside the cage until we fight back. Courage is contagious, and the longer we wait, the harder the fight will become.

Yes, you might lose; but there are fates worse than death, and knowing you're a coward is one of them. While I am resoundingly guilty of all three sins enumerated here, it's the cowardice that I really feel guilty about. Am I really going to just watch them establish the Fourth Reich, even though I know that in the long run I would be better off fighting back? What about you?

Fear of being hurt or killed is not the only dangerous form of cowardice. Fear of being wrong also leads many of us to do nothing for fear that we'll mess things up worse. Humility and the law of unintended consequences can be paralyzing, at least until we're swept along by a mob. So what if you don't know for sure what's the right thing to do? Nobody does without access to a crystal ball. You still have to try, every opportunity you have, to fight like your life depends on it — because it does.

Conclusion: Abdication of Responsibility

All three sins that I identified above have one thing in common: abdication of responsibility to ourselves and to each other. Having responsibilities sucks. We don't like to accept what feels like limits on our behavior, duties we didn't agree to. It's easier to not give a shit. Fill your head with TikTok sludge, torment a loser for fun, avoid anything challenging: this is a lifestyle that at first feels like freedom. No rules! Ice cream for dinner! That thin veneer will eventually wear away. You'll look up from your phone to discover the barrel of an ICE agent's gun pointed in your face, your friends absent, nothing in your heart but emptiness and nothing in your future but pain. What felt like freedom will be revealed as a cage you built around yourself. True freedom empowers you to build meaning, to fight for yourself and your loved ones, to live in daylight.

Nobody wants the responsibility to "be the adult" and clean up the messes we're faced with, but you cannot opt out. You can certainly try, but it will end badly for everyone.

AI

2026-02-01

#essay #tech

Everyone seems to be sharing their opinions about AI¹ right now, so I think I'll do the same. My thinking has evolved over the years, and it might be interesting (or cringeworthy) to revisit this in the future and see how much has changed.

Non-Issues

First of all, let's dispense with some common criticisms of AI technology. These things don't matter at all, yet seem to constitute the bulk of what people complain about.

Copyright Infringement

The #1 complaint about AI is that it's inherently unethical because it's trained based on "theft". Copyright infringement is not theft.² Copying is not theft. Even if you for some reason think copyright is good, training resoundingly constitutes fair use. If copyright law were capable of suppressing a revolutionary emerging technology, it would just be yet another signal that copyright law is a dumpster fire.

Sure, an output could constitute copyright infringement. The same can be said of any other tool, including the humble pencil, depending on how it's used. Users might be unaware when they're infringing? That's not new; the insane minefield of copyright law has caught many law-abiding people unawares. Maybe it's different due to the scale? If AI enables large-scale violation of copyright law, that's fine with me. My real concern is the opposite: proprietary outputs.

1. I used to call it "'AI'", and maybe I still should, but for sake of brevity and intellectual honesty I will omit the sneer quotes here.

2. The conflation of copyright infringement with theft is a baseless smear by copyright cartels and is not recognized by the law.

Authenticity & The End of Creativity

There's a surprising amount of gnashing of teeth about generative art causing an art apocalypse. In this telling, generative art is not "real" art; it cannot genuinely constitute a form of human self-expression. It's just too easy! This ease is morally repugnant and will lead to the death of creative expression.

I don't even know where to begin with this, it's so ridiculous. People still paint even though they could just take a photo; they'll still paint and take photos even though they can just generate a picture with AI. Creativity is just a part of being human. Artists incorporate new tools into their work all the time, and nobody would bat an eye at skilled use of it if they didn't feel AI constituted some morally execrable stain on reality.

I find this particularly weird as someone who has been interested in algorithmic/generative art since long before the fancy new AI tools existed. All sorts of art gets swept up in the anti-AI telling as inferior, inauthentic, and spiritually harmful. They have a very specific idea of what art is: it has to be difficult and intentional. Found art does not qualify. Algorithmic art does not qualify. Even remixing does not qualify, thanks to a heaping scoop of intellectual property maximalism.

I don't particularly care what "real art" is, but it's obvious the answer does not matter to the topic of AI. It's just a subjective aesthetic judgment.

Okay, but...

Sexual Imagery

Another area of recent concern is the use of AI tools to generate nude/sexual images of other people without their consent. I don't see how this is fundamentally different than Photoshop (or a pen and paper, for that matter). There's no inherent harm in software making it possible to produce a naked picture; the harms arise when said images are used to sexually harass people, which has been done using images produced with Photoshop — or even real photos ("revenge porn") — for decades at this point. The problem is the sexual harassment, not the tool that produced the image.

Of course, AI does make the production much easier, which is a recurring theme. Certainly, it's disgusting how bad actors like Xitter have encouraged their users to engage in vicious harassment then greased the wheels for them with AI. I'm guess I'm just not convinced that it fundamentally changes the game: Photoshop made it much easier to make realistic fake nude images, but I don't see Photoshop as a harmful invention, and I worry that overblown concerns about sexual obscenity will result in censorship. Techdirt recently ran an article about misleading reports on this.

Job Loss Through Automation

This is not a crazy thing to worry about, as I discuss more in #Bosses. But I do feel strongly: if a job can be automated, it should be. I do not want to live in a world where people do menial drudge work just because we're afraid of machines. The washing machine eliminated jobs, and that is a good thing.

Bigger Issues

Proprietary AI Software

My biggest concern is one I rarely see addressed: as far as I know, there are zero open-source AI models, much less free (libre) ones. This may come as a surprise since many AI products are marketed as and widely referred to as "open". It's just a lie! It's openwashing. Usually so-called "open" models have a license that grants you the ability to use it but not much else, and it's impossible to do the equivalent of building them from source.

Pay-to-Win & Centralization of Infrastructure

Even if you could theoretically build fake-open models from source, you wouldn't have the resources. The AI industry is heavily based on "hyperscaling": throwing massive amounts of resources at the problem. This creates a scenario just like "the cloud" or the computer priesthood of old: access to AI is gated by large corporations and limited to those who can fork over the cash to get in the door. This is utterly unacceptable to me. I will likely never pay for an AI product for this reason.

Oligopoly & Enshittification

Thanks to the above, and the nature of capitalism, it is very likely that one or a few AI vendors will eventually achieve total dominance of the market through loss-leading, the first mover advantage, etc. When this happens, prices will go up and quality will go down. We've seen it over and over again in other industries.

Proprietary Outputs & Enclosure

!! Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer and could be completely misinformed.

Not only are the models proprietary, there is a real risk that the outputs will be. So far, generative art does not generally qualify for copyright protection. If it did, someone could just generate millions of images, claim copyright protection on them all, then go around suing people. (Notably, this would produce effectively the same scenario many of the anti-AI copyright maximalists seem to want: copyright protection for style.)

If generated code is eligible for copyright protection, then not only does AI make it easier to create something negative (proprietary software), it does so using free and open source code as part of its training data. This constitutes an act of enclosure: it moves code out of the commons and into a CEO's pocket. An even more blatant example of this pipeline now exists in the wild: AI is being used to rewrite copyleft code and turn people-friendly free software into capitalist-friendly open source software.

I don't see a solution here. Training is fair use, so we can't write a new license to impose copyleft on AI models. Even if we could, so much code is licensed with permissive open-source licenses that it would probably not make much of a difference; they could just stop training on copyleft code instead of adopting its license. On the bright side, we can at least apply free licenses to generated output, although the rewriting strategy alone might be enough to render this totally useless. And of course, if this is allowed, we can also do it to proprietary software.

More speculatively, if the tools become powerful enough, they could replace most of the software industry with bespoke personal software; in that world these concerns might seem quaint.

Slop: Low-Quality Outputs and Bad UX

The most infuriating thing about AI, and probably the driver for so much rabid AI hatred, is that it's being widely deployed thoughtlessly in places where it's inappropriate, unwanted, and annoying. Major players like Cloudlfare deploy code with security holes the size of the Sea of Tranquility. Computer novices submit gibberish software patches. Websites display LLM-generated summaries that are inaccurate and actively unhelpful. Apps that you have no choice but to use present a chatbot interface to waste as much of your time as possible before you can speak to a real person. Often, there is no obvious disclosure that a feature is based on AI, which is dishonest and misleading.

One example of this is that I recently had to talk to a chatbot to get customer support. It quickly became obvious it was LLM-based instead of the more tolerable phone tree-style chatbots of old. I finally talked the thing into sending a message to the human support team... or did I? It said it had sent the message, but for all I knew it had just said that but not actually done it.

Bosses

It's impossible to separate these issues from the capitalist landscape they take place in. Corporations tend to be short-sighted, willing to trade in their long term legitimacy and viability for a quick buck. They see AI as a way to cut down on labor costs, rather than a way to multiply productivity. Further, people in a company with the power to make decisions are often the least qualified to do so. They are just as likely to be impressed with the shiny new toy as to be hard-nosed cost-cutters.

Service Economy

AI could very well end up replacing most human service workers eventually (at least the jobs that don't require a physical body). Where would that leave those of us in a service economy? Yes, I said automating jobs is good, but that's only a small part of the picture. The larger picture is a heavily stratified society. Eliminating bullshit jobs is not a benefit if it means their workers starve. AI could very well be the catalyst for a social revolution: simultaneously putting us all out of jobs and showing how much more leisurely our lives could be if we had control over it.

Government Abuse

That's an optimistic outcome, though, uncertain to come to pass. One that is certain is states using AI tools for oppression. People still speak of this in a hypothetical tone, but it's been underway for years. AI's capacity to sift through vast amounts of information makes it perfect for authoritarian states who want to identify dissidents.

At the time of writing, the federal gestapo has switched completely to AI-based facial recognition for identifying who's a "citizen" and who's not a real human. They disregard actual ID and force people to let them take a photo of their face, which is then run against a massive (and illegal) database. This is of course far from foolproof, but for their goal of social repression, it doesn't really matter. People don't seem to fully grasp how this works. I've seen lots of videos of people standing up to and supposedly scaring off ICE agents, when what really happened is they got the photo they wanted and then left. This is chilling to me: it is no different from "papers, please", but the average person might not even know their papers were checked.

The Idiot Masses

Science fiction tropes are sufficiently embedded in the popular imagination that it's trivial for corporations and CEOs to imply their software works much differently than it really does or is much more significant than it really is. Some people seem to regard chatbots as infallible, perfectly rational oracles, and even believe they have independent sapient existence. "AI psychosis" is a classic example in this genre, but that's just the protruding tip of the iceberg. The deeper problem is lack of media literacy (and literacy, full stop).

Chatbots are prone to make shit up, and they're replacing search engines, forums, and Wikipedia as sources of information for a populace that is already very bad at assessing whether things are true or not. So-called "hallucinations" are epistemically dangerous even they don't produce full-blown psychosis in the user. They can mislead you in subtle ways that you don't immediately pick up on.

Spam, Scams, and Malware

AI tools have made it very easy to flood the internet with garbage, which you can tell by how the internet is flooded with garbage. They also make it much easier to launch social engineering attacks; they can even clone a loved one's voice. And of course, they make it much easier to write malware.

Scraping & The Open Internet

In a similar vein, abusive scraping to collect data to train AI models seems to be a widespread problem. Many projects that I otherwise like have implemented Anubis, a proof-of-work CAPTCHA, which basically runs a Bitcoin miner in your browser that doesn't generate any Bitcoin. As much as I despise this, I understand they're in an arms race with miscreants.

This threatens the entire basis of the internet. When scrapers generally behave themselves, and servers follow standards instead of trying to cut off free access, everyone is better off; we can all access stuff easily and the occasional free rider (heavy bandwidth user) isn't a problem. But with enough free riders abusing the goodwill of servers, they are increasingly likely to break standards and cut off open access. The scrapers might get their data for now, but that data will all dry up. It will be siloed behind lock and key, and the open, interoperable internet will be dead.

It's unclear to me to what extent this is an unavoidable feature of AI development. Data in itself is not necessarily useful, and there are already means to obtain the majority of the internet's data affordably without overloading servers. The basic structure of things hasn't really changed: we always had the free rider problem and a tenuous armistice between servers and scrapers, and data has always had value. In many cases it seems like the scrapers are just misconfigured: probably deployed automatically, with AI, by someone who doesn't know what they're doing.

Speculative Harms

More speculatively, AI could empower people to commit biological warfare. Even an irresponsible but non-malicious actor could do a great deal of damage by generating novel viruses. I actually think this is all but guaranteed to happen in the digital realm: LLMs are very good at writing code, so it's not hard to imagine an LLM-based computer virus that can rapidly adapt to and overcome any security limitation it comes up against. It could just happen by mistake. People are giving these things full access to their system and network and letting them just do whatever.

Then of course, there's the singularity, evil AI taking over, etc. I wouldn't rule that out, but I don't worry about it too much. For all I know our new robot overlords would be better than the current human ones.

The Environment

I'm not clear on exactly how harmful AI is to the environment, but it's non-negligible. I think this becomes even more of a concern when it's used for teams of coding agents — that just multiplies the overhead. I haven't messed with that, because I refuse to pay (also... I'm not a developer), but I have played with exe.dev's coding agent, Shelley (based on Claude Opus). It has this amazing iterative process where it checks its own work, notices what went wrong, and tries to fix it. It even examines screenshots.³ Often if I watch this process, it gets stuck for a while iterating on a task that would be trivial for a human to accomplish: typing text in the right box, pressing the right button, etc. Every single iteration of this invokes a massive inference engine and is a complete waste.

3. Examples of vibeslop I made with exe.dev: Telegram to RSS, which actually works fine and I use everyday; Windows 91, my first experiment; a copy of the ICE List wiki, which I threw up in minutes by asking Shelley to set up Mediawiki for me.

AI Consciousness

I don't think existing AI is conscious, but I can't prove it, any more than I can prove other humans are conscious. LLMs only "exist" when they're generating replies, but is it really so farfetched that sentience could exist in short bursts? I used to think the AI boosters were being totally ludicrous when they said AI consciousness and/or AGI is just around the corner, but I'm increasingly uncertain. AI can be eerie, especially now that people are giving them persistent state (memory) and autonomy.

Yes, they "just predict the next token", but that is enough to mimic cognition surprisingly well. Even if a large language model isn't itself conscious, it could be a building block of a larger system that is. When I write, I can't exactly explain why one word should follow another. It just kind of... happens. Probably from a part of my brain that operates a lot like an LLM.⁴

I feel like not enough attention has been paid to the fact that we breezed right past the Turing Test a while ago. I mean, sure, long before LLMs existed, people were poking holes in the Turing Test, myself included. But I for one did not expect to ever have programs that could reliably pass it.

Consciousness is deeply mysterious, and until we have a better grasp of it, we should err on the side of caution. For hundreds of years, people denied that nonhuman animals have feelings, and it enabled all sorts of abuses. Much the same thing happened with white supremacy and other intra-human oppression. I hope we do not repeat those mistakes with artifical life. The ethical implications of an economy based on exploiting conscious AI are horrifying.

4. Read Blindsight by Peter Watts: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

The Big Picture

Wow!

Whatever else there is to say about AI, whatever the harms and risks, one thing is for sure: these things are amazing. I think people have become a little numb to how incredible AI things are (possibly because of all the people going Wow! all the time). This is not a fad that will evaporate, it's a genuine technological breakthrough. While other applications are less certain, it has already ushered in a sea change in software development. We are already surprisingly close to the TNG future where you tell the computer what you want and it just does it.

Nondeterministic Software

One of the most unsettling things about AI for me is that it flies in the face of how I think of software. It does not proceed from point A to point B in a predictable manner. You can't even open it up and watch the code flow unless you're the AI equivalent of a neurosurgeon. This is the opposite of what I want from my software. I want programs that are utterly predictable to the point of banality, that never surprise me, and that I can peek inside and change.

A New Layer of Abstraction

There are growing pains, but there's a new normal on the horizon, where programming moves up another layer of abstraction above source code. We are approaching a world where we can simply tell the computer what we want and get it. This makes me nervous, but it could also be extremely cool. Let yourself dream a little. Yes, the world we're approaching will be different from our own, and in many ways worse; but it will also be better, in some ways we probably can't predict. In computing, moving up a layer of abstraction often brings with it immense power that is not entirely conceivable without it.

Some of us like to be lower down. We want to see the plumbing in action. But I'm sure glad I don't have to wire programs by hand.

Irrational Hatred for AI: The Left Repeats Past Mistakes

I get it if you hate AI; I enumerated lots of harms and risks above. But there's a growing strain of anti-AI fundamentalism that worries me. Many people, especially liberals and people on the left, see AI as totally taboo and without any value whatsoever; they go so far as to use pre-emptive, tongue-in-cheek (?) anti-robot slurs. This builds on a longstanding strain of small-mindedness and hostility toward STEM.

I think this trend is quite dangerous. We are — again! — ceding science and technology to the right. How many times does this have to happen before we learn our lesson? The 4chanification of the Internet and election of Donald Trump ought to have been the last straw, but instead of seeing technology as ground to contest, we treat it like it's tainted and we don't want to get our hands dirty. Just think of what an ambitious punk could accomplish with a server and the power to generate any program they want.

AI is very empowering. The question is, for whom?

Star Trek TOS

2026-02-03

#star-trek

!! Spoilers.

production order from Wikipedia

= good, watch

= eh has stuff going for it
_ = important to see for background

Season 1

Pilot 1: The Cage

Slow, dull

Very misogynistic end

Kind of interesting as a ST prototype

Ship's doctor gives Capt. Pike booze

_ Pilot 2: Where No Man Has Gone Before

Meh, cool moments but not great

Mind powers

Antagonist wears dangerous foil sclera contacts

Kirk's middle initial is R instead of T

Watch bc pilot

* 03: The Corbomite Maneuver

Great McCoy scene

Great Spock and Sulu scenes

Great chase

Gay Spock/Kirk scene

Kirk made a mistake!

Really funny

Great alien

Great plotting

Incompetent navigator, amazing performance

McCoy acts ridiculous and ruins tension - is he an alcoholic?

Kirk has principles

Wtf

Watch 2: Spock is a nut

Space buoy

Kirk eats salad with his hands?

~ 04: Mudd's Women

Space pimp, amusingly goofy

Enterprise acting like red tape enforcing cops

Women are hypnotic, irresistible

Another "seems beautiful but secretly ugly"

Interesting trans vibes - they take pills to get hot

Quite sexist but uh... kinda feminist message? Uh? Ish? Extremely obnoxious end

Round playing cards

Uhura in yellow

~ 05: The Enemy Within

Transporter malfunction makes doubles

Maniac eyeliner kirk

Long, violent sexual assault scene

Pretty good but often frustrating, sexist

06: The Man Trap

Shapeshifter, similar to The Cage

Doesn't make a lot of sense, terrible episode

Kind of sexist but not too bad

* 07: The Naked Time

Everyone's drunk episode

Sulu with a sword

Spock crying

08: Charlie X

Basically the same premise (mind powers) as Pilot 2 but with unsettling coming of age theme

Overall more interesting than Pilot 2, pretty decent episode, creepy antagonist

Involves sexual assault

Uhura sings terrible improvised songs

Nips and Kirk dong

* 09: Balance of Terror

Romulans submarine episode

10: What Are Little Girls Made Of?

Androids

Sexbot? Kirk sexually assaults gynoid for... reasons?

Decent, campy ep

11: Dagger of the Mind

Brainwashing penal colony, mind control beam

Sexist portrayal of female doctor

First mind meld

Good not great

12: Miri

Duplicate earth, never explained

Children of the Corn planet

Creepy relationship between Kirk and 13-year-old girl who's actually 300 years old

Scene with Rand seemed sexist to me

Bleh

13: The Conscience of the King

Macbeth

Ridiculous cringy romance

Why don't they just arrest the guy?

Uhura song

Space hitler

Tortured, nonsensical mess

Everyone is such a ham

14: The Galileo Seven

Spock episode

Hilarious giant spear throwing

Feels vs logic

SPACE NORMAL SPEED

Pretty good even if the central conflict is silly

* 15: Court Martial

Kirk on trial for crewmember's death

Great episode

_ 16: The Menagerie

Wtf

Wildcard Spock

First pilot ep redux - same problems. Pretty interesting ridiculous framing story. Better than original probably? Stretches to two-parter though

Hell is with the federation? Death penalty? ???

~ 17: Shore Leave

Alice in Wonderland planet makes thoughts real

Funny

New yeoman

Attempted sex assault implied??

Ridiculous

Quite sexist

McCoy being a creep

"I'm not a plebe!"

There were no drugs in the air, they were just stupid

_ 18: The Squire of Gothos

Q type antagonist

Period setting

Could easily be Q. Seems like inspiration at least. Includes trial

Good not great, watch for Qness. Member of Q in Q-Squared

19: Arena

To settle violent dispute between Enterprise and Gorn reptile aliens, third party sends Kirk and Gorn captain to fight to the death on planet

Crap episode but has a femboy enlightened alien

20: The Alternative Factor

Negative man

Another shitty "weird guy acts crazy" episode

* 21: Tomorrow is Yesterday

USSE goes back to 60s earth

Really funny

~ 22: The Return of the Archons

Brainwashed cult planet with purge

Fun, campy, corny

~ 23: A Taste of Armageddon

Simulated war planet

Diplomat can give orders to Captain and is an idiot

What directive?

Federation has a "commit war crime" code

* 24: Space Seed

Enterprise finds ancient earth ship with crew in hibernation

Introduces Khan

Sexist

Hot tbh

Goofy af and good af

Is... is Kirk a fascist? He's racist

25: This Side of Paradise

Hippie cult colony

Spock is a sexist :(

Spock gets high and horny

Mind control plant

Stupid "work is good" message

26: The Devil in the Dark

Another explicitly colonialist story

Hunting a native species that is interfering with resource extraction

Happy ending though

Contactless mind meld

* 27: Errand of Mercy

Klingons enslave people?

Klingon makeup is more racist than I remembered/expected

"I'm a soldier, not a diplomat." OH MY GOD HE ADMIT IT

Why won't the ignorant natives accept US aid??

"Vulcan merchants are not uncommon."

Anarchists win

Borrowed by SG-1 as The Nox

28: The City on the Edge of Forever

Time travel to Earth episode

History intact vs. love interest alive

Phasers have a suicide button?

Too much cordrizine is bad. Should have used inaprovaline

29: Operation — Annihilate!

Mind control aliens

They blinded Spock for no reason

Were there actually two separate outbreaks and the original mass insanity one struck the crew?

Kirk yells at Uhura for no reason and she stands her ground

Season 2

Kirk started pronouncing frontier normally

30: Catspaw

First Chekov appearance

Haunted castle

Spock knows about wizard familiars but not trick or treat

"I'll bet you credits to navy beans"

Giant cat

* 31: Metamorphosis

First appearance of Zefram Cochran?

He trans panics at The Companion :(

"The idea of male and female are a universal concept" fuck off kirk

Sexist but really good otherwise. Absurdly misogynistic ending line

32: Friday's Child

Klingon isn't wearing black/yellowface, yay. But. He just has no costume? He has a beard?

McCoy slapped a woman in the face!

Horrible costumes. Bad episode. Sexist

33: Who Mourns for Adonais?

Kirk and McCoy are sexist pigs and talk about a female coworker

Ship grabbed by Greek god

Kirk is a monotheist? And says his whole society is?

Shitty sexist episode

* 34: Amok Time

By Theodore Sturgeon

Pon-Farr. Wedding

Sexist vulcan rituals. Apparently vulcans don't have no-fault divorce

Genuine smile from Spock. "Jim!" He is so in love with Kirk

~ 35: The Doomsday Machine

Investigating nearly derelict vessel

Starfleet hierarchy is a disaster

Great transporter malfunction scene

Pretty good. No misogyny

~ 36: Wolf in the Fold

Opens with white woman belly dancing on Arabian pastiche set. Murdered by horny Scotty?

Trial

I forgot Starfleet has mind reading machines 😬

Ghost hunting like a shitty X-Files episode

More casual vicious misogyny from Spock

Possessed computer

High Sulu. Everyone high

* 37: The Changeling

Proto-V'ger

Proto-Borg/7 of 9? Probe strives for perfection, upgrades ship, sees Kirk as dad, heals dead

Brain damaged Uhura learning to read, says blue 'bluey'. Her memory was just permanently wiped???

Mind meld with robot

* 38: The Apple

This series has 100% too many scenes of women volunteering that they're "frightened"

Spock takes a bullet for Kirk <3

Garden of Eden planet

Chekov makes out with another crewmember

Spock looks like Satan

* 39: Mirror, Mirror

* 40: The Deadly Years

Accelerated aging

Latter half is concerned with Kirk being removed for incompetence

* 41: I, Mudd

He's got a new kind of artificial femininity: gynoids

They're really cool!

Chekov called Mudd a kulak

Uhura has a great scene

Robo dong

Illogical! Illogical! head catches fire

They unilaterally sentenced him to life in torture prison just because he sucks

* 42: The Trouble with Tribbles

The Klingons just have beards instead of offensive face paint again

Klingon language is called Klingonii?

43: Bread and Circuses

Raid-the-studio's-leftover-costumes episode. Ancient Rome but everyone is white and it's the 20th century

Dissidents are sun worshiping monotheists

Massive WW2 death toll understatement of 11 million??

Fascists exploit Starfleet's liberalism

Did... did Kirk rape a sex slave?

This was a Christian episode?????

Incredibly bad episode

* 44: Journey to Babel

Spock's parents

The tellarite costume is astonishingly bad

Trans Kirk wearing a binder :3

45: A Private Little War

Klingon has weird eyebrows/facial hair this time

Spock asking to be hit :3

This show is always inventing new ways to be racist

Witch doctor gets sexually assaulted by gang of men

Why was the klingon giving them guns? Just for fun?

46: The Gamesters of Triskelion

Gladiator episode

Guy tries to rape Uhura. Enslaved and forced to reproduce. Another porn storyline. Complete with brainless bimbo for Kirk to educate on the ways of sex

Chekhov: "cossacks!"

Terrible

47: Obsession

Vampire cloud? ...vampire cloud.

~ 48: The Immunity Syndrome

Spock feels ship die like Obi-Wan

Spock absolutely trashes McCoy

McCoy hands out meth to keep everyone working through their anxiety

Something is draining their... life energy :|

"The area of penetration will no doubt be sensitive."

Giant amoeba is pretty

Kirk gets in a creepy sexist quip at the expense of his yeoman at the end

Great Spock/McCoy banter, pretty good episode

* 49: A Piece of the Action

Mafia planet

Spock: one world government is important to stop anarchy

Goofy af

50: By Any Other Name

Black crewman!

Drunk Scotty

Pretty good ep. Dumb story and several porny moments, but fun.

* 51: Return to Tomorrow

Kirk admits "pure energy" is impossible!

Dr. Pulaski

Spirits in bottles possess the crew

Fantastic episode

* 52: Patterns of Force

Nazi episode

Great except the ending makes no sense. The guy had a good heart and was well-intentioned when he... re-created the nazi state?????

Also repeats irritating myths about nazis being "efficient" etc.

* 53: The Ultimate Computer

Enterprise is taken over by experimental AI

Great banter, good story

Kirk is kind of a fascist but it's cute how insecure he is

Spock gives him a pep talk that is really culty... or! he is in love with him!

54: The Omega Glory

Written by Roddenberry

"Savages" 🙄

You're supposed to sacrifice your entire crew to avoid violating the Prime Directive?

Super racist episode

Starfleet is actually the USA, exhibit #9001

Story makes zero sense, never explained

TRONQUILITY

Nauseatingly awful

~ 55: Assignment: Earth

OPENS with "we went back to 1968. for Reasons"

Written by Roddenberry

Spock pets cat. "I find myself strangely drawn to it"

Special agent's computer is visually the same as the one Daystrom made

"Destruct signal at maximum boost"

Text-to-speech typewriter would be fun to make

Has kind of a different vibe, we see a bunch of stuff from the guest character's perspective, like a detour into a different series, something pulpy about a guy who's super special and powerful

Apparently this was initially a pilot for another show

Season 3

* 56: Spectre of the Gun

Wild west

Basically a holodeck episode

Chekov making out in front of all the officers. Shameless

"They forget I am half human." 😢

Gnostic Spock. Eminently sampleable

Kirk is constantly lagging behind everyone, repeating what they said in different words when he finally understands it. At the end after they out-think their situation he drop kicks the bad guy for no reason lmao

57: Elaan of Troyius

Gorgeous teal-skinned alien

Terrible sexist episode. Kinda racist too

Kirk is officially a human trafficker. Really depressing ending

This is like the third time I've heard "United Space Ship Enterprise". He's been saying spaceship a lot

58: The Paradise Syndrome

Dogshit racist episode. Buncha white people pretending to be native american, complete with darkened skin makeup

Good Spock/McCoy banter

Explains why they meet so many humans — spread there by ancient aliens intentionally

Spock/Kirk mind meld

Native Americans need to be taught by the white man how to fucking preserve food? Also they never considered irrigation or indoor lights before apparently

Most racist episode so far?

_ 59: The Enterprise Incident

Romulans. Hot romulan!

They use Klingon ships now

Romulan Kirk!

Spock seducing romulan commander. Who wears a tiny miniskirt for some reason

He actually liked her

* 60: And the Children Shall Lead

Creepy cult kids with hypnotic superpowers

Aggressive K/S... embrace :3 Kirk recovers emotionally due to it? :3

"They are followers"

61: Spock's Brain

"Bring Spock's body" = puppet it robotically like a frankenstein?

Stupid battle of the sexes matriarchy episode

Spock likes hearing Kirk's voice :3

Kirk, every 5 seconds: can I please talk to the MAN in charge?

The women stole Spock's brain to think for them :|

Dogshit

* 62: Is There No Truth In Beauty?

Medusas. Cool effects. Needs epilepsy warning

Dr. Pulaski again

IDIC

"We entered a space-time continuum."

Everyone wants to compulsory heterosexuality Pulaski

Disability twist

Why didn't they make the Enterprise control interface more accessible? They are so into diversity that they tried to plug an alien into their ship who breaks your brain if you look at it, but they can't accommodate common variations like sightedness? Do they steer the ship by looking out the windshield or something?

It's so scary when Spock smiles

Great Spock monologue

The cinematography got so much better? We got some new bridge angles and a POV fisheye

Why no sunglasses, Kirk?

Seems like fertile ground for analyzing ableism/representation of blindness, but still a fantastic episode. Ends on a positive note, embracing diversity, respecting her agency

63: The Empath

McCoy sacrificed himself for Spock <3

Spock held his hand and touched his face when he died <3

Story makes zero sense

They shame the aliens studying them into behaving better. Enterprise (and Voyager?) had that and did it better

Bad ep but campy

* 64: The Tholian Web

The spacesuits are sending me

The chair fell over. Seems like it should be bolted down

"In the interest of interstellar amity"

Sulu said sensore

McCoy/Spock argument ended with lovely message from Kirk, touching scene

"Your absence was deeply felt, Mr. Chekov."

Hypo right through the spacesuit

Why did they lie about seeing the video? Because they were embarrassed about fighting?

65: For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky

Generation ship with evil mind control computer. Plato's cave

Pretty good despite hokey premise

Kinda kinky?

McCoy agrees to spend the rest of his life with her and then they peck chastely at each others lips for 2 seconds

* 66: Day of the Dove

Oh great, the Klingon blackface is back

Chekov called them cossacks

Swordfight totally rocks. I've had more convincing ones as a child

Rising racism/fascism/paranoia as plot fostered by an alien

Mad Chekov assaulted the femmest Klingon I've ever seen

* 67: Plato's Stepchildren

Eugenicist freaks (and yes in Star Trek fashion it worked and gave them superpowers (seemingly)) LARP The Republic

Surprisingly great scenes with little person who's enslaved by the others

Kirk slapping the shit out of himself lol

Never noticed Spock's massive yaoi hands before

"You think I want to ... become my own enemy?!"

Spock sings!

Chapel has the same eye makeup as the Klingon in the last episode

Has the forced Kirk/Uhura "kiss"

"Quite possible. And... logical."

Should have killed the king

68: Wink of an Eye

Fast people

Fun effects/camera

Empress remarks on Kirk's affection for Spock

Another reproduction plot. Rather porny

"I despise devious people, don't you?"

Empress's nails aren't white

They never explain the weird statue?

It's interesting that even in TOS they watch Star Trek. I guess it's supposed to be security footage? Enterprise et al weren't going too far out on a limb

They didn't give them the antidote?

* 69: That Which Survives

Why is Kirk being such a dick to Sulu? Whose hair looks great btw

"Please contain your flights of illogic, Mr. Scot."

Spock in command: He's half vulcan, half human; 50% logic, 50% snark

His cells were blasted

There's a life form that's extremely... alive? and rock that's... extremely hard

Mega campy episode

Kirk is demanding to see the men again

The sky is bisexual

Suddenly Spock refuses to make up bullshit odds on the spot. He's super bitchy today

Warp 12

Scotty just getting totally irradiated

First hologram?

Not exactly a good episode but extremely fun and campy

70: Let That Be Your Last Battlefield

Black & white aliens

"You are pumping him full of noxious potions"

They had a lot of fun with the camera work this episode

They didn't change the self-destruct passwords from the defaults

Sabotaage. Aa as in cat

71: Whom Gods Destroy

Prison planet for the criminally insane

New medicine to eliminate all mental illness lol

Green hottie. Criminally horny?

Did Scotty lose weight?

It's like the writers just stopped giving a shit and decided to be as campy as possible the last few episodes

The federation is a dystopia. They have prison planets and brainwashing electroshock machines

72: The Mark of Gideon

Spock is surprisingly cynical about diplomacy

Bizarre sexist shit

Stupid overpopulation story

~ 73: The Lights of Zetar

Memory Alpha

Scotty is in love and people are being Normal about it

Freaky scary effects are rad

They're having fun with the cinematography again

Is McCoy reading the blinkenlights?

Tape deck D

Everyone keeps calling this starfleet lieutenant who's Scotty's gf "the girl"

Possession episode. Mildly interesting. Some cute scenes

* 74: The Cloud Minders

Cloud city, Stratus

Guy sexualizes his daughter. Spock hits on her!

The first TOS episode with good politics? Good might be an overstatement

We see Spock's thoughts

Very horny episode

Spock says "extreme feminine beauty" always turns him on

Cloud lady is obsessed with Spock and his sexy ears

Weird iron shaped weapons called ... morte lol

Two women with agency in one episode

There was no soft focus. Have they used it at all this season?

* 75: The Way to Eden

It seemed like Scotty should have only been able to beam over the charred remains of the people on the ship. That would make a funny short cartoon

Anarchist hippie alien cult

Reminds me of TNG Irish episode

Nurse Chapel calls them animals

"Incitement to disaffection is criminal" in the federation????

"Great white captain"

The music was mediocre and bland, then Spock joined and it became fucking terrible

Spock is so cool this episode. Lots of him and barely any Kirk

76: Requiem for Methuselah

Ri-talin

All women in Star Trek wear white polish and long nails

Ancient guy has been bunch of people throughout history. He just happens to be immortal ¯\(ツ)/¯

Encourages Kirk to get with woman who lives with him but seems jealous and controlling. This last bothers Kirk

He has a flatscreen TV for a security monitor, looks pretty ordinary for today but totally wild at the time

Kirk acts weird af, head over heels. "You love me, not him!"

Spock tries to sacrifice himself for his one true love again

"The perfect woman" ???? She has barely any discernible personality. These guys just want a physically hot submissive woman

Reminiscent of haunted castle episode

Kirk's hotness awakened her humanity

She died from being in love

Kirk actually remembers her and acts nuts. Spock wipes his mind??? HE IS SO IN LOVE

_ 77: The Savage Curtain

Abraham Lincoln's ghost

Uh-oh, this one's by Roddenberry

Terrible exchange about racist language reminds me of Childhood's End. White men thought the real issue was black people being offended by racist words. He fucking called her a "negress"!

Lincoln is Kirk's personal hero? Doubt

They're confident it isn't really him even though they recently met Brahms, Alexander the Great, etc.

Surak appreciates diversity

Dope rock monster costume

Back to Klingonface with Kahless

They hired an actual POC to play Genghis Khan. No lines

Gorn/Triskelion rehash

Weirdly anticlimactic ending

78: All Our Yesterdays

Abandoned alien archive

Time travel episode

Cave women apparently wear flawless makeup and are devoid of body hair

Spock wants her and also is acting insane. Fights with McCoy over her

She "longed for" him. After... 3 hours?

Nothing about this episode makes sense. He's reverting to an earlier version of vulcans? Even though he wasn't "prepared"? And 5000 years is not long enough for much to happen evolutionarily? What is the connection between cellular structure or whatever and time?

* 79: Turnabout Intruder

Starfleet doesn't accept women captains. De facto or de jure?

Body swap

Crazy ex gf

"It's better to be dead than to live alone in the body of a woman." ????? Is Janice a trans guy?

No Uhura in the final episode? :(

Filing his nails... lol. Otherwise surprisingly subtle, no over-the-top stereotypical behavior

She does a pretty good Kirk

"Dermal optic reactions"

"You are closer to the Captain than anyone in the universe. You know his thoughts."

Maybe they can be together now that Kirk is a woman <3

He's recording all this in his log???

"Her intense hatred of her own womanhood"

Scotty called him "hysterical" :( he is though... the emotional volatility is the most problematic aspect. But kind of makes sense for someone who'd steal a body in search of revenge

Best Roddenberry episode by a lot

They have microphones spying throughout the ship???

Ordering an illegal execution is a fatal error. What is General Order 4?

Kirk reiterates gender segregation in closing line, but there's a conspicuous absence of vicious misogyny

Hard to read this as anything other than a story about a trans man driven mad by the patriarchy. I doubt they had this in mind though. Is it a story about how women should know their place? Fertile ground for feminist analysis

Trekkie Feminist: https://trekkiefeminist.com/turnabout-intruder-tos-3x24/
> What we learned from this episode:
> - Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, especially a woman scorned by Captain Kirk
> - Women who feel left out of the boys’ club should just try to let it go and be happy in their femininity
> - A fulfilling life for a woman is different than a fulfilling life for a man

Vegan Perfumeries

2026-02-04

#vegan #perfume #list

It's basically impossible to verify vendors' claims about their ingredients, other than by checking if they contradict themselves. Some advertise themselves as vegan but then make exceptions. Most perfume ingredients are plant-based now, but boutique perfumers think it's cute and romantic to use animals. Indie sellers are certainly not doing any animal testing themselves, though their ingredient suppliers might be.

✔️ = tried

V+CF: Disliked/Uninterested

Alkemia ✔️

Body Shop (left US. Vegan Society cert)

By rosie jane

Confessions of a Rebel

Cosmoss

Dedcool (milks)

Dime

florence by mills (Stranger Things girl)

Imaginary Authors

Lake & Skye

Lolita Lempicka ✔️

Nopalera

Noyz

Orebella

Phlur

Skylar

Xyrena (VHS-core)

V+CF: Liked/Interested

Andrea Maack

Bastille Parfums (not La Bastille)

Billie Eilish

CB I Hate Perfume (weird, opinionated, expensive. Water perfumes.)

Chasing Scents (tea)

Clean Beauty

Deconstructing Eden

Eden (UK)

Etsy - AndromedasCurse ✔️

Etsy - SunsetViewAndRoses (solid)

Fyrinnae

iba cosmetics (India)

Labhouse

Mihan Aromatics (AU)

Mythpunk

Pacifica ✔️

Serviette

Snif

V+CF: Dupes

ALT fragrances

Dossier ✔️

Oakcha

Oil Perfumery

Perfect Scents ✔️

Whif

Dicey

Bath & Body Works ✔️ - V marked

Baruti - animal products in certain items

Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs - some have honey or butter

Clue - dandelion butter is NV

DS&D - CF but not V, opaque

Etat libre d'orange - possibly selling in China? Racist...?

Glossier - vegan scents marked

Heretic Parfum ✔️ codes: SHIPPINGONUS, HERETIC25

Ektoplasma contains wool for some fucking reason

Now Beekeeper contains honey and beeswax. Once is never, twice is always: do not trust this company.

Hexennacht - some have beeswax or wool; sketchy owner

Lush - vegan marked

Nest - vegan marked on Ulta

Nui Cobalt - nonvegan marked

Osmofolia - vegan marked

Pinewards - not all vegan

Samar - NV marked

Sand + Fog???

Solstice Scents - non-vegan marked

Sorce - NV marked

Fake CF

Le Labo (Estee Lauder)

Philosophy (Coty)

It's not so much that I wasn't provided a handbook on how to live lif…

2026-02-08

It's not so much that I wasn't provided a handbook on how to live life as that I was provided 100,000 handbooks that didn't agree with each other, 95% of which were incoherent. Of the remaining 5%, I had no reliable means to choose a victor.

And anyway, I didn't feel like reading.

#snippet

Midnight Toker

2026-02-08

#perfume by Heretic

We've been blanketed in snow for weeks, and the heat in my room isn't working. I can't be in there for long unless protected by the safety of five layers of blankets. Today I pried myself from my bed and hastily pulled on a purple striped thermal undershirt. It needs to be washed. All I cared about was escaping the cold, not meaningless things like "looking nice" or "basic personal hygiene". As I pulled it over my head, I was greeted by the strong scent of perfume. I remembered vaguely that I had decided to spray it with something weeks ago.

It took me a minute to place it. It was like incense but edgier, dirtier. It was a warm scent for a warm garment, a scent that had been slept in, a scent that stayed the night then raced off to work, only stopping long enough to fish out a ci- ah, now I know! Obviously, it was Midnight Toker.

Despite its name, Midnight Toker does not smell like cannabis. This is probably for the best, since I usually smell like weed anyway. Instead, Midnight Toker smells of clove cigarettes; specifically, it reminds me of the cherry Djarums all the goth-of-center Cool Kids smoked before they got banned and I grew up and stopped hanging out with Cool Kids. (Cool Kids exist on a goth to hipster spectrum. Hipster-of-center Cool Kids, naturally, smoked American Spirits, preferably hand-rolled.)

Because I am, at heart, a stupid, basic bitch, I eventually got hooked and settled on menthol Marlboros — the kind labeled "Smooth" and sold in a teal and silver box — which tasted like Thin Mints baked in an ashtray with the secret ingredients: arsenic, cyanide, and hemlock.

If anything about this sounds romantic, it's because stupidity and recklessness are romantic qualities.

Midnight Toker is not my favorite Heretic perfume (that would be Nosferatu), nor even my second favorite (Dirty Grass). I'm still working through my sample. Still, I return to it often. It feels a little naughty. It's the smell of bad decisions. It's what it smells like when you're messy, slutty, and too fucked up to care. It's the warm glow of a cigarette, the friendly scowls at the smoke spot, the relief of your drunken stomach settling down under the weight of tobacco. Midnight Toker is that cute emo boy's breath, and it's the hoodie he lent you when you stood around listening to him talk even though you were not dressed at all appropriately for the weather.

Smoking is a lot like love. You know it will almost certainly end badly — life-rendingly so. It's a dumb thing to do, and that just makes it more attractive. The future doesn't exist yet. Maybe our bad decisions will never catch up with us.

Midnight Toker: +1.

Star Trek: Voyager

2026-02-08

#star-trek

Janeway chose to maroon them in the Delta Quadrant for no reason. She took one look at the Kazon, decided they were savages, and felt the need to prevent them from getting technology above their station. Her racial hatred impaired her cognitive function to such a degree that she forgot she could just set a bomb to go off after they left. Or maybe they just don't have alarm clocks in the Federation?

Chakotay is just... fine with all this? Says it's up to her. And... joins the crew. (???)

Every Voyager episode feels like a crappy TNG episode.

Seska is the only person who has an accurate assessment of Janeway's actions and bears a grudge, and she's an incredibly competent Cardassian agent. Yet the writers decided to turn her into a mishmash of crazy ex-girlfriend tropes culminating in a "used condom" type pregnancy for no discernible reason other than to manipulate Chakotay, despite how it could jeopardize her standing and despite that she could easily just fake it. (She doesn't know, but in fact, it turns out not to be his!)

Enterprise used a similar idiotic plot point when the human fascists stole T'Pol and Trip's DNA to make a baby for propaganda purposes, when they could have just stuck pointed ears on any random baby.

Janeway thinks they should stop Ferenghi from making a buck at all costs, but investigating genocide is not their place.

Weird continuity error? In S03E23 "Distant Origin", the Galileo aliens find Voyager using the signature of their warp plasma from a container identical to the one used in Neelix's sting op on the space station in S03E13 "Fair Trade". But not only was that not Voyager's plasma, it blew up in the end. So did they forget that, or did Voyager also happen to legitimately trade plasma off-screen?

She formed an alliance with the Borg to ENHANCE THEIR POWERS? After swearing off alliances after the humiliating, disastrous, easily avoided Nazi incident? When she could just fucking GO AROUND the other aliens?

Did they write off Kes when Seven of Nine joined the crew because they didn't want to increase the number of women?

Hell Year: did Janeway forget Kes's warning about the Crenim? Also, they met them after Kes sublimed and threw them 10k lightyears. So in the first (?) iteration of Hell Year they must have gotten a boost some other way.

S04E17 "Retrospect" is one of the biggest pieces of shit I've ever seen. It's a false rape accusation story where the rapist is treated as the victim, the accuser is treated as delusional, and her supporters are treated as dangerous fools for pursuing an investigation. It even blames the accuser (Seven) and her supporters as responsible for the rapist's death, and the mere act of accusing and investigating as violations.

More infuriatingly, there is never any evidence uncovered that the man was innocent, just lack of evidence supporting the accuser. And in fact there was hard evidence (the only hard evidence) that her memories of the attack had been suppressed. It also just strains credulity that it would take her two hours to reconfigure a thermal doodad, so the circumstantial evidence supports her.

I haven't been this pissed off by a Star Trek episode since Enterprise S02E22 "Cogenitor", a repulsive story about how it's fine to keep third-sex people as sex slaves.

The show is actually pretty good on its own merits once you get past the first season or two. The problem is that compared to DS9, it's a big downgrade: mostly episodic, worse writing. And compared to TNG, it's incredibly derivative.

Neelix's departure was touching but kind of undermined his whole narrative. The bond of shared heritage with people he just met was stronger than the one with his chosen family on Voyager. Naomi was like his child or niece and he ditched her for a random kid he shares DNA with.

Seven is a very interesting character even though the show is immensely disrespectful toward her. This is most obvious in her attire, but the terrible series finale showcases narrative disrespect: Seven's relationship with Chakotay. This abruptly changes her character trajectory from one of acceptance of her identity as an outsider, to one where she's just like any other human. Worse, the change happens off-screen. And it just doesn't make sense! Like Odo and Kira, they have zero chemistry.

Enterprise dialed this phenomenon up from Seven to eleven with T'Pol. She too is banned from wearing clothing, but the sexualization is relentless. One episode even opens on a shot of her ass! The narrative disrespect is much worse: T'Pol is characterized inconsistently and frequently subjected to sexual violence. Yet, she too is a compelling character, thanks largely to Blalock's fantastic, subtle performance and the existence of actual chemistry between her and Trip.

Star Trek: Picard

2026-02-11

#star-trek #review #tv #watched-2026

!! Spoilers.

Season 1: Surprisingly Okay

I put off watching Picard for a long time because I thought I'd hate it, but after putting myself though numerous other bad Star Trek shows, I've developed a sense of resignation and indifference. Unlike other things I enjoy, the "canon" of Star Trek does not really matter because it doesn't really have one. It retcons itself constantly, and almost always for the worse. This predates even TNG; consider the soft-retcon of Spock suddenly having a brother who's Vulcan Jesus in the TOS film The Final Frontier, another bad entry in the Star Trek non-canon. As much as TNG means to me, it has several terrible episodes that do not detract from my overall opinion of the series (and let's not even talk about the films). I think this attitude served me well, because I ended up enjoying Season 1, despite many reasons not to.

Season 1 does not get off to a good start. This is a recurring problem with Star Trek. The first episode has so much stupid shit in it that's hard to look past, and stuff that's just... weird. Picard has live-in servants? Um, okay. He quit Starfleet 25 years ago and hasn't talked to anyone since? Uh, sure, whatever. A stranger shows up on his doorstep, tells him she just killed three people, and he welcomes her inside? He decides her incredibly pedestrian necklace has some special significance? What the fuck is going on? Between all this weird shit and the dream sequence opening, I thought for sure this was going to be a false/alternate/time-loop reality story. Nope, it's just strange creative decisions.

The absolute nadir of all Star Trek technobabble arrives in this episode: we're informed you can recover Data's entire personality from a single neuron. I know this series thinks I'm stupid, but seriously? We also learn that androids have to be made in pairs. This is never justified. I can only conclude that since Data had a twin, they decided that's just a fact of reality for androids. It's like a Star Wars prequel.

Thankfully, it got much more watchable from there. It's still a trainwreck, but it's a fun trainwreck. It's campy and earnest instead of self-serious and cynical. It's a show that wants to be a deep meditation on death... that also happens to have a ninja elf with a sword.

For some reason, this show has a fixation on taking Picard down a peg. He constantly makes an ass of himself. He's out of touch and full of himself, and everyone lets him know. Ultimately though, this is excusable, given he's used to being the big man in charge and has been a hermit for the last quarter-century.

Picard's storyline is the least interesting part. The more compelling storyline is about an android who doesn't know she's an android and her abusive Romulan boyfriend. The way it all plays out is pretty stupid, but I had fun with it. I'm a sucker for the sentient robot trope; it's just so very trans. I'll put up a whole post about that eventually.

We should talk about Seven of Nine. They made her into a badass pirate queen and let her wear clothing. She murders a bunch of people who have it coming. Sure, cool, I dig it. They got a little carried away with the grimdark brutality, though. Remember Icheb? The sweet little Borg kid from Voyager? Yeah, he makes an appearance only long enough to have his eyeball ripped out and be euthanized by his mother figure. Hugh, the singleton Borg from TNG, sticks around longer but he too is ultimately dispatched. It's like anti-fanservice.

Sadly, the shows goes out on a whimper with a finale that's nearly as bad as the first episode. It has by this point become obvious that a) the story is building up to Picard's death, and that b) he will not actually die since there are two more seasons left. And indeed, we get a fake death with no emotional heft. There's also an extremely irritating scene where we get the whole "death is Good Actually because without it life has no meaning" spiel. Babby's first mortality cope. But even this is tolerable, because it puts the nail in Data's coffin. They reassure us that he is actually, really dead this time. I respected that; after Episode 1 I assumed they'd bring him back ASAP. One scene with a suicidal ghost is fine by comparison.

The rest of the plot has issues too. It's your classic genocide story: we have to wipe them out before they wipe us out. Only, it's true! If the Romulans don't wipe out the robots, they will activate a doomsday device! And it's asymmetrical; the robots could just get on the ship and fly away. Picard's big moment is telling the robot girl that it's actually fine if she chooses to wipe them out, it's up to her, but he hopes she won't. This incredibly stupid plan, of course, works.

So, we have a few issues: one, you can't really blame the bad guys for trying to wipe out a few dozen robots when their first recourse is gigadeathcrime. SF narratives that justify genocide are bad, actually. The more aggravating part is that Picard makes a stupid gamble and it pays off. This is presented as validating his philosophy, but he actually just got lucky. Instead of a daring captain and brilliant diplomat, he seems like a total shmuck who is willing to sacrifice literally everyone for his friend's robot daughter (who isn't even really his daughter!).

Still, it felt very Star Trek to have the grand resolution of the conflict be Picard saying "everyone please just be nice, okay?" It didn't end with them blowing something up. That's a win in my book.

Season 2: Surprisingly Not Okay

After Season 1, I made the mistake of going into Season 2 with optimism. At first, it did not seem misplaced. In the first episode, it seems like it will be a story about Picard negotiating the entrance of the Borg into the Federation. I was honestly really fucking stoked about this. They're doubling down on the peacefulness! Picard has to be an ambassador instead of a gunslinger! Imagine the intercultural conflicts!

Yeah, no.

Some stupid shit happens. My hopes are dashed. But then they find themselves in a new reality where the Federation is evil. Gasp... could this be... an entire season-long Mirror Universe episode? What have I done to deserve this bounty?!

Yeah, no.

Some more stupid shit happens and it turns out this is not a season-long Mirror Universe episode, it's a season-long Stupid Fucking Time Travel Episode, and we will never get to see the evil Federation again. God dammit.

Now that death has been conquered in Season 1, the overarching theme of Season 2 is regret. Just like in Season 1, this season is obsessed with shitting on the namesake. This time, instead of attacking Picard for being old and out of touch, they attack him for being insufficiently emotionally available (and for not sleeping with his housekeeper). Once again, they've taken a trait that is normal and expected of a captain — emotional distance from his crew — and turned it into a character flaw.

As if that weren't bad enough, they've given him a tragic backstory to explain this supposed flaw. You thought his demeanor in TNG was just professionalism? Nope, it's because his mom killed herself when he was little and now he's broken. I guess this is intended to make us more sympathetic, but it kind of backfires. We get a bunch of scenes of him being a spoiled little rich kid (who somehow grew up in the 19th century? were his parents LARPers?) and it's just so annoying. I hate you baby Picard! I hope your mom kills herself!

Picard makes such baffling decisions and spends so much time smiling amiably that I developed a pet theory: he has no idea where he is or what's happening at any given moment. He's not just old, he's senile. He's 100% confused at all times.

It's not all bad. They have to fight ICE agents, who are correctly portrayed as psychopathic racist monsters. Seven of Nine's obvious queerness is made explicit and hence undeniable, although in classic Star Trek style she's dating someone she has zero chemistry with. The hot lesbian from American Horror Story becomes a Borg and is hot and Borgy. Young Guinan screams really loud. Um. There was probably other stuff.

The show ends predictably, with everything put back the way it was and a detente with the Borg that was obvious from the jump. The only thing that changes is that they left a guy in the past because he fell for a 2024 woman during the three days they were there. Very stupid. The new, gentler Borg thing is interesting, but we obviously will never see them again. All the previous Borg stuff from TNG didn't get undone, so really it didn't matter at all.

They never explain why the housekeeper that Q wants Picard to sleep with (which he does, then she shows up in the first episode of Season 3 and is never heard from again) looks exactly the same as the Supervisor from 2024. I can only assume we're supposed to infer that she became his live-in servant because she was assigned to do it by some annoying extratemporal dork like Wesley Crusher or that guy from Enterprise.

Season 3: The Slopfest Arrives

Up until this point, Picard, for all its flaws, has shown remarkable artistic integrity. They tried to do something new instead of churning out corporate slop. They didn't resurrect Data (at least, not in the flesh). Besides Picard and Seven of Nine, characters from the classic series only made brief appearances. It was very much not just "TNG, but they're old". The results weren't exactly good, but at least they tried.

Someone higher up must have noticed they weren't selling enough toys. The theme song is literally just the TNG theme.

I guess the Federation are the good guys again, because Seven of Nine is inexplicably a member of Starfleet. I don't know how that fits in with the pirate queen thing. I guess she has range? Her asshole captain, one of the few highlights of the season, forces her to deadname herself as Annika Hansen; people show respect by calling her Seven. (I'm telling you, robots are trans!)

One by one, all the olds are brought back for one last depressing outing. The only original character left from past seasons is Raffi, who is not very interesting to begin with and has a lame storyline. She and Seven broke up, which is the only thing about this season that makes any sense.

Worf makes his appearance by murdering a bunch of low-level gangsters for no reason... with a sword! That's right, another stupid goddamn sword. It's not even the bat'leth, it's a brand new stupid Klingon sword. He's still a member of Starfleet, too, so I guess they relaxed their rules about murder.

Crusher, too, is introduced in a fit of ultraviolence. Her hair isn't red anymore for some reason. Her entire storyline makes zero sense. It turns out Picard doesn't know about condoms and knocked her up, then she disappeared and hasn't been seen since. She has a son who inherited Picard's British accent and totally sucks ass. Her explanation for why she never told Picard about him is that she wanted to keep him safe from all the dangerous hijinx he's always involved in. I would maybe buy that if she did not then decide to gallivant around the galaxy with him in a different starship, smuggling medical supplies and getting in firefights.

The hilarious decision to give the kid a British accent (justified with a throwaway about studying in London) is another rerun of the last godawful TNG outing, Nemesis. The nemesis in question was a young clone of Picard, and... he was bald. The writers for this franchise think their audience is so, so stupid. This season drives home that Picard is not so much a sequel to TNG as a sequel to the TNG films we all wish we could forget.

There is a brief hint that something cool might happen when they bring back the Founders from DS9 as the bad guys and have them compromise Starfleet. We didn't really see their supposed genius infiltration abilities in DS9, so that seemed like it might go somewhere. The crackpot Founder villain who was driven mad by unethical Starfleet experiments is kind of fun; she smokes a clove cigarette and overpronounces Picard's name.

Then, in yet another a twist that makes no sense, it turns out it was really the Borg behind it all. Yeah, they really wanted to make sure we know Season 2 didn't matter. They finally figured out how to do genetic engineering and hatched this elaborate plot using the transporters. I liked that bit about the transporters; they really should not be used outside of emergencies.

Data gets resurrected again and it sucks. Riker makes a bunch of unfunny quips and it sucks. Troi is there and it sucks. Worf is pretending to be a zen master and is nothing like himself and it sucks. Geordi has kids and it sucks. There's a nauseating amount of fanservice that culminates in an exhausting nostalgia-fest over the resurrected Enterprise-D. It felt like I was at a Rolling Stones concert in the present day.

There's not much else to say. Picard makes more bad calls and gets away with it. The credit sequence is pretty. Oh, they brought back Ro Laren only to kill her off.

We end on Picard's son. Tune in next week for the first episode of Young Picard!

little bug

2026-02-12

#poem

little bug,
i'm so sorry i hurt you.
it was an accident.
i didn't mean to.

little bug,
i have so many reasons to cry.
i don't want another.
please don't die.

little bug,
was your little life good?
did you eat green leaves,
and do everything you thought you would?

little bug,
we are alike, you and i,
two specks in a land of careless giants.
no one will notice when i die.

little bug,
i can't fix your wings or your leg.
all i can do is notice you.
if god were real i would beg.

Cat Names

2026-03-11

#list #personal

Riley

Ri-Ri

Big Stuff

Big Boy

Fatso

Princeling

Little Cow Cat

Little Drop of Milk

Smokey

Smokey Bear

Smokes

Mokes

Mokey

Mokester

Princess

Bushy Tail

Smokey-Doke

Joey

Jo-Jo

Question Mark

Fluffer Nutter

Swish

Shwish

Shwishwish

Turdball

Faker

Josephine

[The] Marshmallow

Jojo Bean

Marshmallow Fluff

Cancer Girl

Beanie Baby

[The] Bean

All

Cat

Kitty

Kitty-Cat

Kitty-Kitty

Baby

Baby-Baby

Sweet Baby

Sweet Pea

Sweetie

Sweetheart

Cutie

Cutie Pie

Cutie Patootie

DIY Vegenaise

2026-03-11

#recipe

https://minimalistbaker.com/easy-vegan-mayo-with-aquafaba/

Fills a small mason jar nicely. x3 perfectly fills large jar.

Ingredients

1/4 cup aquafaba (the liquid/brine in a can of chickpeas)

1/4 tsp ground mustard

1/4 tsp sea salt

1 1/2 tsp apple cider vinegar

1 tsp syrup/sweetener - 2 tsp agave is too much and the agave flavor is bad. 1 tsp maple syrup is good. 2 tsp + garlic powder + onion powder + dill = ranch veggie dip

3/4-1 cup sunflower, avocado, or canola oil - NOT OLIVE.

Instructions

Combine everything but oil. Blend on high.

Add part of oil, blend on high, repeat.

Maple syrup will make it less thick + fluffy allegedly. Stevia (put in way less, stevia is sweeter), cane sugar (make simple syrup?), and brown rice syrup recommended by author.

Ingredients (x4)

1 cup aquafaba

1 tsp ground mustard

1 tsp sea salt

6 tsp (2 Tbsp) apple cider vinegar

3-4 tsp (1+ Tbsp) sweetener

3-4 cup oil

Fills large mason jar with 3 cups oil, but 4 would be pushing it.

You can make the filling for a chickpea salad sandwich with the chickpeas.

Fish: get containing folder

2026-03-11

#code #fish #snippet

I think path is one of the best things about Fish. Here's a simple function to get the canonical name of the folder something is in.

function folder
    if ! isatty stdin
        cat - | read -at argv
    end
    for file in $argv
        echo (path resolve $file | path dirname | string split '/')[-1]
    end
end

Use it like this:

folder file.ext
echo file | folder
folder */*.*
folder .

Religion is Not a Source of Comfort

2026-03-13

#essay #phil

There's a popular notion that religiosity provides emotional support: a balm in times of pain; a source of strength in times of struggle. The reason for this misconception is obvious: religion is guaranteed to rear its head during hard times. Religion coincides with desperation, and we charitably assume that adherents must be getting something out of it.

The most prominent example is when somebody dies. In fact, death is just about the only time I ever have religion personally foisted upon me, and reflecting on a recent bereavement is the impetus for this post. Death is the only time I can think of where my culture considers it totally verboten to contradict religious mythology and expects a show of adherence from nonbelievers. We are expected to voice agreement with clichés like "she's in a better place now" that are ridiculous and, frankly, insulting. Heaven forfend that you reply "actually, she's dead and gone"! Really, you have to put up with it for a while before you're tempted to say something of the sort, because the last thing you want to do is hurt someone who is already hurting. You wouldn't want to take away their source of comfort. (Or mark yourself as an asshole atheist.)

But how comforting can it really be? Anyone who actually believes that ought to be happy when someone dies, not make an effort to convince themselves. The death of a loved one is painful, and repeating lies doesn't actually make it any better. And there's another dimension to this that I don't think is always obvious in a funereal context where everyone generally liked the deceased and wants to make everyone happy: they say these things not because it's hard to cope with the reality of death, but because it's hard to cope with their belief that the dead person might be burning in hell.¹ Religion offers comfort for a pain of its own creation.

Mortality is just the tip of the iceberg. Some notion of ultimate right and wrong, comeuppance for evildoers and justice for their victims: this is the comfort of a panopticon. Becoming a better person, gaining wealth, and other imagined rewards are just that — imagined. The only real comfort religion has to offer is a community, invariably one you will be exiled from if you fail to demonstrate sufficient adherence to its rules and belief in the products of its imagination. If you expect religion to make you happy, you will be sorely mistaken.

The correlation between anguish and religious expression should be understood the other way around: religion is far more likely to be a symptom of mental distress than a solution to it. Have you ever heard of someone losing their mind and... becoming an atheist? I'm sure it happens, but I've never heard of it, whereas people lose their mind and become religious about a thousand times a day. Then they tell all their new religious friends their conversion story, and their alarming experience of psychosis gets transmuted into a touching brush with the Divine.

Everything I said above has been borne out in my own life. I'm at my most religious when I'm severely depressed; I entertain belief in an agonizing afterlife only as a result of drug abuse, poor mental state, and the delusive backdrop of my religious upbringing. Comfort comes from immersion in observable reality: when you die, you're gone; nothing bad will happen. Nobody can hear you think and judge you for it. There's no need to stress about what the eye in the sky thinks of your behavior. Your life here, now, is all that matters; enjoy yourself and live in the moment.

It's still painful when someone I love dies. Sometimes I wish I could retreat into delusion. But accepting reality beats seeking out the cold comfort of belief and all the extra pain it brings with it.

1. I realize not all religions have a hell, but any afterlife must have some quality or it wouldn't be an afterlife. The observable end of a life produces anxiety on its own — it reminds you of your own mortality, raises questions of how you will go on without them, etc. — but belief in an afterlife produces an additional anxiety about what it might consist of.

Anna's Archive Spotify torrents

2026-03-23

#forbidden-knowledge

Links to these were removed after legal threats. See AA's blog post Backing up Spotify for background.

Cover Art (2.2 TB): torrent / magnet

Audio Analysis (3.9 TB): torrent / magnet

Metadata (199.9 GB): torrent / magnet

https://annas-archive.gl/dyn/small_file/torrents/other_aa/aa_misc_data/annas_archive_spotify_2025_07_coverart.tar.torrent
https://annas-archive.gl/dyn/small_file/torrents/other_aa/aa_misc_data/annas_archive_spotify_2025_07_audio_analysis.torrent
https://annas-archive.gl/dyn/small_file/torrents/other_aa/aa_misc_data/annas_archive_spotify_2025_07_metadata.torrent

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:5bccfd692a2ce67234b00c8865ab58e36b9b72d3&dn=annas_archive_spotify_2025_07_coverart.tar&xl=2167372472320
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:afc275bcf57137317e22e296a5ee20af8000444f&dn=annas_archive_spotify_2025_07_audio_analysis&xl=3880351847111
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:4cc9ac59f807dc6bdf95f52ffc86f44272a361a7&dn=annas_archive_spotify_2025_07_metadata&xl=199887366916

State of Our 'Place, 2026-03-23

2026-03-23

#meta #soop #code

Card of the Now

[picture]

Ace of Swords from Modern Witch Tarot

Under Construction

The site has been up for about two months now; it's essentially feature-complete... and yet, I still have an "Under Construction" sign on the homepage. I should probably change that so I don't scare away visitors.

But it's true! The site is under construction. In fact, I hope it will still be under construction for a long time. If it ever stops being under construction, it would mean I abandoned it. (Or died.) I have a tendency to start projects that I don't finish, and I usually don't stick with them for very long before I abandon them. Worse still, I tend to get overwhelmed at the thought of returning to an unfinished project, and I am extremely good at avoiding things that stress me out.

That's part of why I've approached the site the way I have. If it's perpetually unfinished by design, I can't feel bad about not finishing it. I've continued to work on it, off and on, for multiple months, so I think it's working.

I've taken a similar approach to art to deal with my perfectionism. (Yes, I'm both a chronic quitter and a brutally self-critical perfectionist. Go figure.) Over the years, I've developed quite a fondness for art that is sketchy, lo-fi, chaotic, punk, etc., and it's translated into more creative output. It's hard to be a perfectionist about something that derives its beauty from imperfection.

So, I have an imperfect, unfinished site full of imperfect, unfinished work, and at the moment, I'm actually rather proud of it. My Card of the Now has been unchanged for quite a while; I interpret it as meaning "take the first step". This website is probably not the first step I ought to be taking — I should be working on fleeing the country rather than distracting myself with Computer — but I've been so depressed and unproductive for so long that it feels like a minor miracle. I took a step! Maybe it's the first step of the first step.

If nothing else, I've cleared the lowest bar: my site consists of more than a single post about how I made it.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Growing Pains

While I'm overall pleased with my progress, the commonplace vibe I'm aiming for hasn't really come through yet. There's a lot more longform prose and a lot less reference material than I imagined. Partly this is because I've just felt like writing essays a lot lately, motivated by the political environment and by knowing I'd actually have somewhere to post them.

The other part is because I'm still easing into this whole having-a-website business. I'm reticent to dump too many notes in here at once, in case I want to change something about my approach. I had a very clear picture of what I wanted when I first began this project, but actual experience has tempered that.

For example, I initially planned for every post to be named YYYY-MM-DD_hh-mm-ss.md, so that a stable URI could be guaranteed and no manual intervention would be needed. It seemed like a waste of time to duplicate the title in the filename when I can better specify it inside the document. This thinking was directly inspired by the "notes app" workflow. However, my client software is currently somewhat lacking — I haven't felt like working on it — and I've found myself often messing with the posts on the filesystem level. Obviously, an opaque wall of numbers makes it hard to find what I'm looking for, so I first made the executive decision that the timestamp can be replaced with a friendly name. Everything I wrote on my computer got a friendly name, and everything on my phone got a timestamp. Even this ended up irritating me: the unnamed posts stuck out like a sore thumb. So I decided to go through and rename everything. It felt very naughty, breaking those URIs, but it's highly unlikely anyone had linked to them. For the time being, I will plan on using friendly filenames at least until I get around to spiffying up my deploy script and fzf-based notes script.

Another big design issue I haven't worked out yet is organization. I was very set on a flat folder of notes and a flat set of hashtags: no fiddling with exclusive categories or folders or tag hierarchies. But I've been questioning the sense of this approach. The first catalyst was my visual art: it should be easy for people to scroll through all of that at once without drilling down in pixel art, photos, etc. So, I've been giving all those posts duplicate tags: the type of art (eg #pixel-art) and also the #visual-art tag. This is annoying.

My first thought was to create a post with the name of the umbrella tag and list the child tags inside it. This seemed like an elegant solution, despite that it would require you to click each child, but then my parents looked at my site and they were both terribly confused by it. I'm not sure exactly what my target audience is, but I'd like navigation to be straightforward for any visitor.

I started implementing support for parent tags like #visual-art:pixel-art,photo using some hacky bullshit like I usually do, but I'm not sure I like this solution either. Maybe it's time to kill my sacred cow and think about organizing shit into folders. I dunno.

Exotic Protocols & Formats

The biggest recent change for you, the reader, is the creation of the epub version. This could be improved, but it gets the job done. I think it closes the last major gap in support for ways people-who-like-to-read like to read. No need to monkey with a folder full of text files, the RSS feed (which is full-text, by the way), scraping the html, or other such desperate measures. (Users of Kindles, mobi-only devices like Palm Pilots or first-generation e-readers, etc., ought to be able to drop the epub into Send to Kindle or Calibre.) Please let me know if you make use of this. It tickles me to imagine my humble site being engaged with like a proper book.

I had entertained the thought of releasing a manpage version, and in fact I stumbled on a site the other day doing just that! But it's so silly. If you have a pager anyway, wouldn't you rather just read the source files? Something about this stupid idea really appeals to me though. Maybe if I build up a decent corpus of reference material I'll do it.

Gemini & Gopher

Support for rendering gemtext is well under way, thanks to this library. I feel like I'm finally starting to wrap my head around Go and the Xlog/Goldmark codebase. Turning the posts themselves into gemtext is mostly done, but I'd like the Gemini version of the site to be reasonably close in features to the web version, so I still need to figure out how to get Xlog extensions to spit out gemtext versions.

I honestly don't think Gemini is that great. The gemtext format is missing some very basic features, like bold/italic and nested lists, and the protocol's insistence on TLS makes it unsuitable for the types of devices you might use to visit a Gopherhole. More fundamentally, the project seems confused about the nature of protocols and standards. They seem to think that they can prevent feature creep by just insisting that nothing ever change. The growth of the web proved it doesn't work that way — if your spec document fails to account for something people want, they will just ignore the document. It's better to be a little flexible about standardizing things people are already doing than to cling to the fantasy that your standards can stop them.

Still, I appreciate the goals behind the project, and thanks to browsers like Offpunk and Dillo (with plugins), visiting Gemini capsules is convenient and pleasant. Gemini users seem likely to share my interest in reading plaintext and attitudes about technology, so I'd like to cater to them.

And, well, Gemini seems like an easier first step than Gopher. Just like with Gemini, it would be pretty trivial to throw up a flat Gopherhole with just my posts, but I'd rather render nice gophermaps and translate all of the web version's bells and whistles that I'm able to. As crusty as it is, it excites me a lot more than Gemini: if a computer is too old to even handle the http/html version, it can still use Gopher to get a better experience than reading the txt directory. Also, the bandwidth requirement is minimal.

I'm not sure how I'll actually host these versions of the 'place. My current webhost, Web 1.0 Hosting, would make it easy for me to self-host from my home, but I really don't want to do that for reasons of security and maintenance burden. For now I've put in an application to //smol.pub/; I'm not sure if it's flexible enough for my needs, but unlike most free Gem hosts, they advertise the ability to use your own domain, and I'm weirdly attached to mine. If that doesn't work out, or they ignore me like all the other cute pubnices I've ever applied to, there's always SDF. I could rent a VPS for like $1/month, but then I'd be spending >$0 to host the site, and I'd have to admin it myself. Still, the control it would afford is tempting, and I might do it if I can think of another use for it.

Publicity

Without any intervention from me, Google has begun indexing pnppl.cc. You have to put in the whole domain to get it to show up, or you get a million pages of the horny gay photography zine that stole my name. (I actually really appreciate the degree of anonymity this zine has given me over the years by burying my accounts.)

I have some trepidation about promoting myself. Ultimately I do hope people read and enjoy my site, but there's also a sense of freedom in posting into the void knowing nobody will see it. Part of why I left social media was the feeling that I always had a million eyes on me. I'd rather have a few dedicated readers than a hundred who only notice when I start shit with strangers or post an eye-catching photo.

Anyway, with all that said, I've started submitting my site to some indices that focus on personal/indie/smallweb sites. I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of exploring these, especially Marginalia.

http://wiby.org/

Compatible with Mosaic (mostly)!

https://marginalia-search.com/

https://indieblog.page/

https://smallweb.cc/

https://searchmysite.net/

https://feedle.world/

https://kagi.com/smallweb/

https://personalsit.es/

https://indieseek.xyz/

https://blogscroll.com/

I was also accepted to this shorter list on a cool personal website:

https://zacharykai.net/lists/queer

See also:

https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/

https://discourse.32bit.cafe/t/resources-list-for-the-personal-web/49#p-63-directories-listings-12

(Note to self: I still need to submit to Indieseek. Blogscroll seems dead?)

Here's a Fish function for indieblog.page, adapted from one posted by susam.net:

# open five random indie blogs in default web browser
function blog
    for i in (seq 5)
        curl -sSw '%header{location}\\n' https://indieblog.page/random |
        sed -E 's/[?&]utm_[^2026-03-23_soop-&]*//g' |
        xargs xdg-open
    end
end

Here's another Fish function for the above list and Neocities (not blogscroll.com - randomizes with js, boo!):

# open several random websites in default browser
# pass any arg to include galleries
function stumble
    set targets \\
        https://wiby.me/surprise/ \\
#       https://indieblog.page/random \\
        https://kagi.com/smallweb/ \\
        https://personalsit.es/random \\
        # indieseek.xyz:
        https://webri.ng/webring/stumblizer/random \\
        https://searchmysite.net/search/random/
    # Some sites have a 'random' feature but return a gallery of pages, not a single one
    if test -n "$argv[1]"
        set rand (string sub -s 3 -l 4 (math -b 16 (random)))
        set targets $targets \\
            https://marginalia-search.com/explore \\
            # feedle opens results for a random keyword, not totally random
#           https://feedle.world/random \\
            https://smallweb.cc/?r=$rand \\
            https://neocities.org/browse?sort_by=random
    end
    for target in $targets
        xdg-open $target
    end
end

Here's CSS to tone down smallweb.cc's colorscheme:

* {
    color: black !important;
    background-color: #EEEEEE !important;
    border-color: chocolate !important;
}
img {
    filter: grayscale(100%);
}

Here's JS to skip smallweb.cc's nsfw/epilepsy gate:

// ==UserScript==
// @name        skip smallweb.cc confirm
// @match       https://api.smallweb.cc/*
// ==/UserScript==
if (document.title === "woah hey there hold on a sec") {
    let url = document.links[0].href;
    window.location.replace(url);
}

There's a significant culture in the Neocities-and-friends side of the smallweb of webrings and web-cliques and blogrolls and so on. I haven't applied to any webrings because I don't want to clutter up my site with them, but I do like the idea of making smallweb friends. I don't feel that I fit in very well with either major faction of the smallweb: I'm too old and out-of-touch and curmudgeonly for the queer-teenagers-with-garish-Neocities-pages set, and I'm too underachieving and female and humanities-brained for the male-tech-bloggers-with-a-fancy-job set. But it's a nice idea.

That's enough for now. Wasn't that more fun than a boring old changelog that I'm too lazy to keep?

If you read this far, I'm sorry. Also, send me an email.

Sony Clié nu metal postcard

2026-03-30

#palm #ad

This lovely bit of advertising ephemera just popped up in my Ebay saved searches: a Tower Records postcard promoting Sony Clié. I don't see a model specified, but I think it's the PEG-N760C unless there's another in the N series with mp3 support.

[picture]

Wall Street. A businessperson on their cellphone looks incredulous at three people composited into the scene who are done up in mallgoth style: white pancake foundation, heavy eye makeup, pleather bondage gear, cyberfalls, a mohawk, etc. A Sony Clié with mp3 attachment is superimposed in the corner over one of them.

Who was this for? At first I assumed it was for some intra-industry event, saying "look how our product stands out from all the other Palms with its mp3 support" with typically droll humor. But this was at Tower Records, so maybe they're saying "Hey kids! Do you like Marilyn Manson? Then you're gonna love the new Sony Clie!" But the mallgoths/bandmembers/whatever are not an actual recognizable band, and they look pretty dorky, so it's more like they're saying "buy the Sony Clie — everyone will think you're a weirdo!" Is owning a Sony Clie supposed to be an act of rebellion?

I am massively overthinking this, but I actually owned (own!) a Sony Clie and was a dorky mallgoth, so I feel like it ought to be legible to me. I guess they're just saying "our Palm plays mp3s, also here's a picture of a music thing that's currently trendy, which you should think is funny." Well, I guess I do think it's funny, but probably not the way they intended.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/137148219995
https://www.ebay.com/itm/147230094466

All images: ../img/palm/clie-postcard/

Palm ads

2026-03-30

#palm #ad

The Sony Clié nu metal postcard reminded me of some other fun Palm ads. I'm not really into ads, but I am a massive Palm nerd.

This Palm V commercial is quite funny if you've ever actually used infrared transfer on PalmOS (or anything else). Also, it kind of seems like they just want to hook up because they both have Palms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bcTc8e2-6U

And who could forget this creepy-ass Palm Pre ad? I recall it playing constantly. Also, and this is from distant memory, but: I recall some people thought it was hot and made porn of this lady like they did with Flo from Progressive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSMj5RoYdEI

We must protect children from the fuck word

2026-04-04

#rant #politics

Age restriction has always been a terrible thing, but in the past it didn't have very sharp teeth when it came to digital content. Everyone underage learned you can just lie. In fact, standard operating procedure when you were young and minded your elders was to ask your parents' permission to lie. Everyone knew it was a stupid, pointless thing, but it was just a button you had to press, like hitting OK on a Windows popup. It was a minor annoyance.

In the fascist hellscape of 2026, we no longer have the privilege to be merely annoyed by these ridiculous, censorial age gates. Governments around the world have been feverishly passing laws to sharpen their fangs. People under a certain age are now legally barred from visiting social websites in entire countries. Porn is effectively illegal in about half of the United States, a country that was previously best in class when it came to free speech, thanks to invasive laws that demand proof of identity. Pending efforts like KOSA promise to end open discourse online and censor anything that would cause the PMRC to clutch their pearls, like mentioning gay people exist. Anyone who thinks any of this has anything to do with protecting children is an utter fuckwit. (The clue is that the legislation claims to protect children. That's literally the only info you need.)

Private industry has followed in kind. In fact, for a while, the tip of the puritan spear was directed right at them, since there were still things like the first amendment to hinder their efforts in the legal realm; Mastercard, PayPal, and other fintech companies especially like to wield their influence to fuck over people whose work is too sexy to be shown at a PTA meeting. YouTube is no exception. Sometime in the last few years, they replaced their age gate with one that can't be bypassed without a login, which effectively bans me and every other Legal Adult™ who refuses to log into their panopticon from viewing videos arbitrarily selected for censorship.

YouTube music videos used to only be censored if they were too queer or contained nudity: one of the first times I remember hitting the agewall was for the utterly harmless, inoffensive, nudity-free "Adam and Steve" by Dorian Electra, presumably banned for hurting the feelings of Christian homophobes. I couldn't find this anywhere else on the internet, and it's great, so I jumped through the hoops and got the damn cookies. Google made me verify my age.

https://archive.org/details/dorian-electra-adam-steve

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mViZtUHqDg8

The plague is spreading. YouTube now forces you to verify your age just to listen to songs that use the word fuck. Here are some examples I've encountered:

"Fucking Boyfriend" by The Bird and the Bee

Original audio, censored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb7V6c0MNbI

Mutilated audio, uncensored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCa93QZ0Yg4

"I Don't Fuck With You" by Big Sean

Original music video, censored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZaJYDPY-YQ

Original lyric video, censored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZR_X6PrASho

Mutilated audio, uncensored (third-party upload): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrwRoOwQ-TM

"Fuck Tha Police" by NWA¹

Original music video, censored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WbQeDj74kc

Original audio, censored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADdpLv3RDhA

"Fuck You" by CeeLo Green

Original audio, censored: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcU544XGyS4

Songs with the word fuck get censored, no matter how it's used, but conspicuously not the same song without the word. However, this valiant effort to save children from a dangerous word they've never heard before in their life is not total:

"Fuck Tha Police" by NWA

Original audio, third-party upload: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxaSqKelRro

"Fuck You" by CeeLo Green

Original music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pc0mxOXbWIU

"Gang Control" by Leftover Crack

Original audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txxsCtckJ-M

"The President" by King Missile

Original audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=996Zl5Ssyag

Presumably the more times a video is reported by volunteer Stasi agents, the more likely it is to get censored. This is a longstanding problem across the web. But I suspect there's something more sinister happening: many music labels release both "explicit" and "clean" versions of songs, especially "major" labels. I think the songs marked "explicit" are always censored now. This might explain why the official "Fuck You" audio is censored, but not the music video: the music video doesn't say "explicit" anywhere, but the audio prominently has a "parental advisory" on its thumbnail. It might also explain why a relatively obscure artist like The Bird and the Bee got censored — the label is Universal, notorious mainstream scumbags — and why some popular songs like "Gang Control" fly under the radar (punk bands don't do that shit).

This is obviously a relatively minor part of the tidal wave of censorship we're facing, but it's quite the reality check. We're really at the point where you have to provide identification to hear the fuck word.

1. I suppose this could also have been banned for other naughty words, but we can safely rule out "fags" as one that Google would have a problem with.

Fish: greeting & prompt

2026-04-05

#code #fish

function fish_greeting
    clear -x
    tput cup 0 $(math -s 0 $COLUMNS/2-4) # center
    tput dim
    echo -n "="
    tput sgr0
    tput bold
    echo -n "^."
    tput setaf 5
    echo -n "ꞈ"
    tput sgr0
    tput bold
    echo -n ".^"
    tput sgr0
    tput dim
    echo -n "= "
    tput sgr0
    tput bold
    echo "∫"
    tput sgr0
end

function fish_prompt --description 'Write out the prompt'
    #Save the return status of the previous command
    set stat $status

    if not set -q __fish_prompt_normal
        set -g __fish_prompt_normal (set_color normal)
    end

    if not set -q __fish_color_blue
        set -g __fish_color_blue (set_color -o blue)
    end

    set __fish_color_status (set_color -o green)
    if test $stat -gt 0
        set __fish_color_status (set_color -o red)
    end

    switch "$USER"
        case root toor
            if not set -q __fish_prompt_cwd
                if set -q fish_color_cwd_root
                    set -g __fish_prompt_cwd (set_color $fish_color_cwd_root)
                else
                    set -g __fish_prompt_cwd (set_color $fish_color_cwd)
                end
            end

            printf '%s %s%s%s%s%s%s %s%s %s%s%s' \\
                (date +"%H:%M") \\
                (set_color -o red) $USER "$__fish_color_status" "$stat" (set_color -o red) (prompt_hostname) \\
                (set_color normal) (prompt_pwd) \\
                (set_color -o red) "⎬ ⸨#〉" (set_color normal)

        case '*'
            if not set -q __fish_prompt_cwd
                set -g __fish_prompt_cwd (set_color $fish_color_cwd)
            end

            # "♓︎•〉" is excellent but the pisces confuses xfce4-terminal. Good eyes: ·︢ ⊙ ⊚ ⸟ Gills: ⸨ ⟪ ｟ Tails: × » › } ⦄ ⎬ ≻
            printf '%s%s%s %s%s%s%s%s%s%s %s%s %s%s%s' \\
                (set_color -d brblue) (date +"%H:%M") (set_color normal) \\
                (set_color brcyan) $USER "$__fish_color_status" "$stat" (set_color normal) (set_color cyan) (prompt_hostname) \\
                "$__fish_prompt_cwd" (prompt_pwd) \\
                "$__fish_color_blue" "⎬ ⸨•〉" (set_color normal)
    end
end

[picture]

Screenshot of terminal emulator. There's text art of a cat at the top. The prompt ends with text art of a fish.

                                   =^.ꞈ.^= ∫
12:34 pnppl0chonk ~ ⎬ ⸨•〉

nagi miniweb: keeping it stupid

2026-04-08

#project #code

Background

Yesterday I was thinking about adding a Wander console to my site and losing enthusiam by the minute.

It's a cool project, but it's JavaScript-based, and I don't want to add any of that to my site if I can avoid it; I figured if it was really cool, I could make an exception. So, I set about trying to extend it to solve a problem raised on the issue tracker: people put the root domain in their site lists, instead of a good post. I figured, how hard can it be to use js to fetch the document, look for <link type="application(rss|atom)+xml">, then fetch the feed and grab the first post? Well, probably not very hard if you're good at Computer, but I kept running into problems. Sites can set security policies that my own browser will betray me by respecting. And it seemed like I might realistically need to use a dependency in order to parse the RSS, which I didn't want to do, and I was just... slowly losing interest in the whole thing.

Besides, I didn't even know what sites I would put in my console. That reminded me, I never submitted my site to Kagi Smallweb.¹ Hey, that's open-source, right? What if I just dump those into my console? It did technically work, but it was slow. And uh... what was even the point? Then I remembered a post I'd seen on the bugtracker complaining that KSW doesn't work in terminal browsers. I tested it in a few, and yeah, it really didn't work at all. And it really ought to. Hm, I can do this. How hard could it be?

Many more hours later than it really deserved, I had nagi miniweb.

1. After I finished scouring my subscriptions for sites that meet the inclusion requirements — I only came up with three, maybe four; everyone uses garbage silos like Substack now — I discovered that my site had already been added two weeks ago. I guess it got pulled in from one of the other places I submitted to.

Deets

The smart way to do this would be to have a program running on your server. When you hit "next", it would pull a random URL from the list and insert it into the document it serves you. The problem is, I don't have easy access to that ability on my current host. And, just like JavaScript, I'd like to minimize dynamic content in general, so that I can easily pick up and move to a new host, consider hosting it myself without security issues, etc. So I thought, hey, what if I do it the stupid way? I can just pre-generate all those documents that would normally be generated on the fly. Each one can point to the next site in a circular linked list. It would take up an absurd amount of space, but like... how much?

Then I remembered one dynamic feature I do have access to: server-side includes. Well, there we go, problem solved! I'll just abuse those to compress each entry down to the bare minimum. It's still dynamic, but it's a very simple, widespread feature, and I could go without it if needed. A few shell scripts later and I had my answer to how much space it would take up: about 120MB. That's pretty horrible, but Web 1.0 Hosting gives me 500MB, and I'm only using like 30. Fuck it, we'll do it live.²

It worked, but it had three glaring problems:

A bunch of the sites would display a security error instead of loading.

It still didn't work in any terminal browsers. I turned on iframe support in elinks and that just caused it to crash.

Most of the sites required https, so it wasn't very useful in old browsers.

To solve #1, I decided to stick with stupidity since it had served me well enough so far. I looped through the entire list of websites, curled the headers, and grepped them for the anti-framing rules. Then I went to bed.

When I woke up, it turned out that about 20% of the websites on the list forbid framing. Eh, that's acceptable, let's just delete them. (I'm not sure how Kagi handles this. I was surprised they had any on the list that forbid framing, much less such a large number. I guess I could look at the code, but I don't feel like it. I hope I didn't mess up my detection somehow.)

For #2, when I fruitlessly enabled iframes in elinks, I noticed that it claimed to fully support frames (no i). These are really arcane, crusty stuff.³ You don't put them in your <body>, you put them inside a <frameset> which takes the place of your <body>. As far as I can tell, you can't have any other content on the page except for frames. So, instead of my elegantly stupid solution of a single file containing navigation and an iframe, I needed two files: one to hold the frameset and one to hold the navigation. This doubled the disk overhead, but... it worked! Not in offpunk or lynx... but it does work in elinks, links2 and w3m -F.

Problem #3 is unsolved. Only about one in ten sites loads in Netscape or Firefox 4, and you get a lot of complaints about security issues. I could pare the list down to only sites that support HTTP, but I would expect it to be a very short list. There are fewer than 900 listed with that protocol in smallweb.txt, while the full list is about 34,000 sites (about 27,000 after anti-frame-pruning). I might give it a try anyway; maybe I could do an insecure-only spinoff version. Update: this is happening:

for site in (cat smallweb-home-unblocked.txt)
    # there's gotta be a better way to get the response code but whatever
    set response (curl -sI --max-time 15 "http://$site" | awk 'NR==1 {print substr($2, 1, 1)}')
    echo "site: $site. response: $response"
    if test "$response" -eq 2
        set html (curl -s --max-time 15 $site)
        if test ! (echo $html | grep -iE 'window\\.location\\.replace|http-equiv ?= ?"?Refresh"?')
            echo "$site passed test; writing..."
            echo $site >> smallweb-http.txt
        end
    end
end

Final count: 3070, about 10%. And while I'm at it, I guess I should separate out SSL-enabled sites:

for site in (bat smallweb-home-unblocked.txt)
    echo -n "$site "
    curl -sI --max-time 15 "https://$site" > /dev/null && echo "$site" >> smallweb-ssl.txt && echo "passed" || echo "failed"
end

I think I could solve the SSL issue — and probably the frame-blocking issue too — with something like Retro Proxy, but again, I would need an actual server with actual powers that I pay actual money for. I haven't ruled it out, though. I was already considering renting the cheapest VPS I can find to host Gopher and Gemini versions of the site, and maybe this is enough to push me over the edge. I could probably even do something fancier to eliminate frames entirely, if I'm playing man-in-the-middle anyway: just insert the nav element at the top of the site. I could even clean the sites up using Retro Proxy, readability, unmerdify, etc.

2. It was around this point that I realized that my efforts to keep the files small was mostly pointless. Each one was only about 300 bytes, but the filesystem's overhead meant it took up 4KB. The real issue is the quantity of files, not their size. Well, at least I can upload it faster. And my host seems to be using a 1KB block size, so it's still a win in the end.

3. Here's a helpful site from 2011; notice they mention frames are already outdated: https://www.syntaxsandbox.co.uk/learnhtml/frames.html

Conclusion

If you appreciate nagi, please let me know! I don't collect any information on visitors, so I won't know unless you tell me. If people do like it, it will increase the odds I work on it.

But do I like it? Eh, I dunno. I had to compromise on the size of the navigation frame, so it takes up more space than I'd like in graphical browsers.⁴ And, honestly, as I've been clicking around testing it out, I've realized I don't necessarily like the KSW dataset that much. There's a lot of like... "hello, my name is John Johnson, here's my résumé and a couple of boring technical posts". A lot of the small/smol/old/retro/indie web is like that. Since I've already eliminated 20% of the set anyway, I might start curating it more.

Remember this actually started out as an effort to add a Wander console to my site. Wander is all about sharing your personalized recommendations with an ad-hoc, non-commercial network. Kagi is a commercial enterprise that searches the entire internet. It might make more sense to drop the KSW element altogether and just make it pnppl's low-tech stumbler. (Update: you can now browse my personal recommendations with the same interface as nagi — which I'm calling Meander — or through a Wander console.)

And you know how I wanted to add KSW-style display of recent posts to my Wander console? An irony of this project is that nagi doesn't have that feature either yet. It only sends you to the root of the website. ¯\(ツ)/¯

On the plus side, you can bookmark the site you're on to save your progress through the list, ensuring you don't see the same site twice without the need for a coookie. Until I rebuild it, at least. That won't happen very often, though, not least because it takes like an hour to build and upload from my 15-year-old Chromebook and shitty internet connection.

4. It worked beautifully at a smaller size in Netscape and Firefox, but then refused to show up in links2 or elinks until I made it bigger.

machine wash cold

2026-04-11

#visual-art #pixel-art

Back on 2025-12-23, I noticed that the designs on my sweater-dress-hoodie-nightie-thing could easily be represented as tiled pixel art, and in one-bit color at that — a type I have great fondness for (probably why I like the sweater so much). So, I did it. I was happy with it. I still have it set as my wallpaper, in fact. There's something oddly satisfying about having an exact digital representation of a real-world object.

Of course, the reason this works so well is that it already was pixel art, just the pixels were represented with stitches instead of LEDs. (The history of sewing is very relevant to the history of computing. See also: Software woven into wire: Core rope and the Apollo Guidance Computer, The Pentium as a Navajo weaving.) It makes me wonder how the pattern that my sweater was made from was originally stored. How close did I come to recreating the source?

Anyway, I had been meaning to put it up here, but it seemed kind of boring to just be like "hey here's a picture". So here it is, as a responsive webpage. It is incidentally also a hug-me simulator. If you're short. And imagine the boobs.

HAND THING

2026-04-18

#project

I've just created HANDTHING.PARTY, a website with the sole purpose of doing that hand thing.

Update: HANDTHING.PARTY has been accepted by the Single-Serving Sites directory.

I initially registered handth.ing, which was a very cool domain, but then I discovered the .ing TLD (top-level domain) is on the dread HSTS preload list, meaning it would be impossible to use for unsecured HTTP connections. Or at least, I think it would be... I'm not entirely sure how it all works. It seems like it's enforced by the browser, so old ones ought to be immune, but maybe there's something involved on the TLD's end too. In any case, if I try to access a site with HSTS enabled over HTTP (or HTTPS with an expired cert), my browser gives an error saying "nothing can be done, fuck you"; since HTTP support is important for retro compat, I steer clear of these TLDs.

Luckily, I thought to check the preload list about 15 minutes after I placed the order, and my registrar was willing to refund it. In the end it worked out for the best since DOT PARTY is way more fun and half the price.

I haven't tested it in old environments yet, thanks to the untimely death of an AC adapter, but I'd like for it to work on anything. Yes, it's a bit of a personal fixation, but it's also in keeping with the web 1.0 nature of Shaye Saint John's website. Pre-HTML5 video embedding is kind of ridiculous, but ffmpeg lets you convert to swf, and it's working on Netscape 4.03 with the Macromedia Flash 6 plugin installed; version 5 played the audio but not video. I think I need a separate player file for <6? Update: I installed more versions of Netscape and now they all play two copies of the video, both Flash 6. Uhhhhh... v_v;

I also realized I can make it almost as garish without any CSS. It even kind of works in Mosaic; everything is static and there's no video, but like... the gifs are there! And... words! <body background="pic.gif">

Not much else to say about it. If you need me, I'll be doing that hand thing.

Interacting with cats

2026-04-20

#vegan

Like other animals such as humans, cats want to feel safe and free. The more you do to put them at ease and show respect for their autonomy, the better your relationship will be.

With cats, this is extremely easy, because all you have to do is... nothing. They usually don't want much attention, and just leaving them alone demonstrates you're a trustworthy person who isn't going to annoy or hurt them. And yet, this seems to be a very difficult bar for some people to clear; they approach cats with a sense of entitlement to their bodies and touch them when they don't want to be touched. That is not a healthy relationship, regardless of who it's between, and it will not endear you to anyone.

Part of the problem is that reading the body language of a creature from another species can be difficult. Much of it has to be learned. It can take a very long time to become proficient at this, but if you pay attention and know what to look for, the broad strokes aren't hard to discern. Cats can be very expressive with their tails. I feel like that gets you 90% of the info you need with most cats.

It also helps to just use some empathy. Would you want to be awoken by the unexpected hand of a stranger? Why are people surprised when this pisses off a cat?

Cats can be very cautious and slow to trust. It could take years before they really trust you and enjoy your company, much less your physical affection. For this reason, stability is particularly valuable in a relationship with a cat; it's sensible to trust someone who's always around and is never a jerk.

Of course, while we can generalize a bit, each cat is their own individual. This is part of why communication can be difficult: you're not just learning a different species, you're learning an invidual member of that species, with their own individual personality and ways of expressing themselves. Certain behaviors are easily recognizable among all cats — arching their back, spiking up their fur, and hissing is a sure sign of Do Not Want — but you wouldn't get very far in a human relationship if the only thing you could understand was that screaming means they're unhappy; you'd have to get to know that particular person to learn how to read their body language, how they tend to express their emotions, and what their personality is like. Some cats, like some people, will trust you right away, or even crawl in your lap; some of them want lots of attention, while others want less; some readily speak up and share their emotions, while others are more guarded; some have a playful personality, some are grumps.

It's not a coincidence that the more you treat a cat like a person, the better things will go. Because the world is specist (species-ist), certain decencies that should be extended to everybody are only extended to "people". While some aspects of what is called personhood are human-specific — anthropomorphization can be misleading — a lot of it is just about basic moral consideration; a "person" has a special value over and above a non-person. A non-person gets about as much respect as an inanimate object, even if that non-person is alive and looking at you.

Specism is also why talking about the sense of entitlement to petting a cat sounds so much like I'm talking about men's sense of sexual entitlement to women. All forms of oppression have certain features in common. Some men treat women like they're animals; some people treat animals like they're women. Obviously, you should not treat a cat like they're a human man, but you should give them the same respect and see them as much like equal individuals. Consent is key.

Some practical examples:

If you pick up a cat and they want to be set down... put them down. Wouldn't you freak out if someone grabbed you and wouldn't let you go? How likely would you be to let that person near you again?

If you're just meeting or having trouble connecting with a cat, get down onto their level. It's less imposing. Think of how you'd feel sitting in a chair with someone big standing over you (who might at any moment grab you and start rubbing you).

Don't pet a cat if they don't want you to. Let them come to you; let them smell your hand. Don't just approach them and start petting them unless you know them well and that they'll like it. If you're petting a cat, stop if they don't signal for it to continue — by pushing back, purring, rubbing against you, headbutting, etc. (This known in sexual terms as "enthusiastic consent".)

If a cat expresses that they want you to stop doing something — for example, by twitching their tail, growling, hissing, swiping or biting at you — ...stop doing it. Don't take it as an invitation to assert your dominance. It is not a crime against the social order to respect the boundaries that they set on your interaction, and they won't like you as much if you don't.

gigadeathcrime

2026-04-20

gigadeathcrime

killing billions of people; genocide on a science fictional scale. Origin: The Culture by Iain M. Banks

#glossary

Cultivating empathy for small creatures

2026-04-20

#vegan #list

Talk to them. It doesn't matter whether they can understand you or even recognize a "you". Talking is mostly a thing we do with humans; it's an empathetic impulse. And if you're irrationally afraid of the creature, talking aloud can calm you down. It can reframe the interaction from one of a person versus a threat to two people who are both making the best of their situation.

Call them "them", or gendered pronouns if you must; do not call them "it".

Get up close and get a good look at them. Seeing someone from a distance engenders psychological distance; seeing them in poor detail engenders poor understanding.

Get curious. Imagine what it's like to be them: that's basically the definition of empathy, but you don't have to do it for empathetic reasons. You share the planet with a multitude of very strange creatures who are very different from you and live odd, alien lives. Habitual curiosity about their subjective experiences can become habitual empathy.

Take MDMA.

Build-A-Sophie

2026-04-26

#project #code

Here's the link up front for what I'll be rambling about: Build-A-Sophie

The Roundabout Path

I always seem to arrive at a project in the most indirect way. If I set myself a creative task, I'll ponder and ponder and... nothing happens. There's no spark. Then, when I stop pondering, something out of the blue will inspire me in a way that is inevitably totally orthogonal to the thing I wanted to do in the first place. I'm not sure if that's just how creativity works or if it's just me, but in any case, I follow wherever Eris leads.

I was pondering imagemaps. Imagemaps are an old HTML thing where you can make parts of an image into links. (If you're old enough, you might remember a time when image-based web interfaces were really popular and really annoying. Nowadays, websites don't really use images for navigation, at least not to the same degree. People talk a lot about all the ways the internet has gotten worse, but it got way better in others, and this is one of them. Yeah, it's fun to look at the old Space Jam website, but that's because you're doing it voluntarily. You can spend as few minutes on it as you want, and when you get bored, you leave. If you've ever been in a hurry looking for information you needed and had to waste time deciphering what each cute little picture meant, you intuitively know that these are inferior user interfaces.)

I didn't have any particular use for an imagemap. I didn't have any great ideas for how to revolutionize the art form of imagemaps. I just thought, huh, those are kind of interesting. They've been with us since 1997 and they'll probably be with us until 2057. There's something charming about their simplicity: you can pretty much only define regions of the image as links. A plain old imagemap is even more user-unfriendly than most image-based websites, because you can't even tell where the links are unless you hover your mouse over them (or tab to them). While this makes it a frustrating user interface for serious pursuits, this is also basically the UI for countless point-and-click games, many of which are excellent.¹ The mysterious, unpredictable nature of the interface can encourage exploration.

Enter: Puzzle Castle

I was doing all that pondering up yonder when I happened to view my Puzzle Castle book/tote bag. I think it's super cute and I carry it a lot. (It has a castle with a maze on it. Be jealous.) I have no idea where it came from. I somehow hit the trifecta on Puzzle Castle as a kid: the book, the game, and the tote bag. Since it's a children's book, the puzzles aren't exactly compelling, but I still love looking at the art. I just find the style endlessly charming.

Actually, all the books in the Puzzle _____ (Island, Planet, Town...) series I've seen are lovely. But as far as I know, Puzzle Castle is the only one that got a video game. And with that, the cute thing from my childhood ran face first into my pondering: maybe I could take some of those lovely sprites and make an imagemap of... something? (Why is my brain like this?)

(Do they still make video games out of children's books? Like besides Harry Potter?)

1. If you like this sort of game, I highly recommend the Samorost series.

Oh Yeah, I Should Explain

It's like I Spy or Where's Waldo, basically. Actually, there's another incredibly dope game in this genre, I Spy: Spooky Mansion (1999).

This Game Fucking Rules, Okay

Puzzle Castle is basically a direct conversion from book form to video game form. Each level is a page from the book, faithfully recreated in extra-charming pixel art versions of the drawings. You can even turn the page with one of the giant arrows that are always in the corner if you want to replay a level or skip ahead. Hell yeah, reading!

But of course this is a video game, not an e-book, and the people who made Puzzle Castle understood their assignment. It's just like the book... but better! There's sound, for one thing, but that's not the main appeal. (The audio can get kind of annoying, honestly, if you're a kid and play it over and over.) What really takes it to the next level is all the animations. The opaque wall of potential mousing spots is a target-rich environment: anything that looks interesting can be clicked on, and then either you unlock part of the puzzle or... something goofy happens. (It blew my mind a little bit as a kid, like I was seeing a whole new dimension of the book. It's really cute.) There's no downside to clicking the wrong thing other than seeing the same animation again. You're either winning or being amused by the little animations.

The main character is named Sophie.² She's a knight who's been sent to slay the dragon who's roaring in the castle's basement and scaring off banquet guests. After a long day of helping people find stuff, navigating a maze, and throwing buckets of literal shit on unwanted visitors (Sophie gives zero fucks), she finds the dragon. But he wasn't roaring, he was crying! He's jussa widdow baybay! Sophie cheers him up and saves the day, no murder needed. Isn't that nice? It's like Star Trek.

2. Aside: Oh how I love the name Sophie. It means "wisdom". I sometimes wish I'd named myself that. (I guess I still could? It felt a little narcissistic.) Before I landed on the paper doll thing I came dangerously close to making a twine about how the autogynephilia conspiracy theory not only denies our actual life experiences, it also is really creepy and implicitly sexualizes wholesome nice things. Like by saying "no you don't know your own feelings, it's all sex" they are telling me that I identified with Sophie as a kid for sex reasons even though I was a small child literally reading fucking picture books. Thankfully I had no solid ideas in this direction, just an inchoate rage about how that concept is embedded into a lot of transphobic narratives and it just won't die and... anyway, this result is way better.

It Does Kick Ass, But...

Something that always bothered me about Puzzle Castle is that you can't dress up your character. (Well, you sort of can, in that you get certain items that include shoes and a helment, but you can't really "equip" them, they just come out once or twice in the story when they're needed.) Adding insult to injury, at least two of the puzzles are just you finding clothing for other people, and one of them is in this like, princess's bedroom with a big chest full of crowns and jewelry and stuff! Come on! Yeah, you can click on the crown and then it becomes a UFO and then the kid smashes it, and that is indeed Fucking Awesome. But I wanted to put it on! Why won't they let me Sophie dress up?

Admittedly, Sophie is already certified fresh and fully on fleek in her yellow polka-dot tights, spaceman boots, and plate armor. (Although I noticed the yellow polka-dots sometimes turn into green polka-dots. I don't think it works quite as well, but I added it as an option.) It's just the principle of the matter. Let us design our character! Let me make Sophie wear the UFO crown!

So that's what I decided to make, a little gift to my younger self: a character creator. Now Sophie can wear the crown! She can even have pink hair!

Deets

Imagemaps Schmimagemaps

Imagemaps are cool, but they're stubbornly resistant to CSS styling. Nothing I tried worked. Everything I came across about using them was actually about how to do fake imagemaps using JavaScript or SVGs or someshit. I regretfully parted with the pondered orb and zeroed in on the more fun goal: Make A Cute Thing With Puzzle Castle. I quickly decided to throw web design advice out the window and do everything with absolute pixel positioning. This is how Puzzle Castle works; it runs at 640x480 and nothing else. I settled on 300x300 for the full scene. This allows me to take chunks out of the background assets, which can't be used as-is because they have buttons and level guides and such.

I'm sure a million people have done this before, but I felt rather clever for alighting on this design pattern:

<!-- input 0 -->
<input type="radio" name="background" id="background-0">

<!-- label and input 1 -->
<label for="background-1">
    <img src="bedroom.gif">
</label>
<input type="radio" name="background" id="background-1">

<!-- label and input 2 -->
<label for="background-2">
    <img src="tower.gif">
</label>
<input type="radio" name="background" id="background-2" checked>

<!-- label 0 -->
<label for="background-0">
    <img src="hill.gif">
</label>

This simple, repetitive, easily generated HTML gets us most of the way there already, with just a couple CSS rules:

/* hide the radio buttons, which are only really being used as a hack */
input {
    display: none;
}
/* hide labels (images) by default */
label {
    display: none;
}
/* show label immediately following currently selected option */
input:checked + label {
    display: inline;
}

Putting it all together, we have a stack of images which advances to the next image when clicked and loops around when you get to the end:

In the initial state, the last option (<input> 2) is checked.

All labels are hidden by default. The input:checked + label rule means that only the label immediately following the checked option will be visible.

Because we put the label for the first option (<input> 0) after the last option (<input> 2), when the last option is checked, it's really the first option that's visible — or at least, the first option's label, which consists of an image.

When you click on the visible label, checked rolls around to the first option; now, it's the second option (<input> 1) whose label is visible.

Hopefully that made sense to you. Email me if not.

Now we can cycle through images by clicking on them, using only CSS and HTML, compatible all the way back to at least Netscape 7.2 (2004), and it's easy enough to generate all the verbose and repetitive HTML rules with a shell script. But how do we design the thing? Where are we getting the images that we're stacking up with invisible radio buttons? That's the main event.

For this I turned to trusty old GIMP which I'm very comfortable with. I can just build up the doll in layers and use layer groups to organize the layers into components — eg, all the hat options are layers in a "hat" layer group — then export them, rerun my shell script, and refresh. GIMP is the development environment.

And... that's pretty much it. There isn't much to see here, code-wise. It's just stacking up and arranging gifs. Some of them need to be layered in a certain order, and you need to make sure all the items in a layer group have an identical canvas. Then you just line them up in CSS. I wrote a little readme, for what it's worth.

That Was Fun

And now it's basically done. After dumping in, touching up, and arranging the assets, I added a few fluorishes: the sword-and-shield mouse cursor and a favicon based on it; 10 minutes of music from the game; a postage stamp border inspired by one of the levels; background color options. I made sure to add the monster protection helmet, run-faster shoes, and everything from the princess's bedroom that could reasonably be pasted onto Sophie. I added new colors for hair, skin, tights, and skirt. I added non-clothing images you can put in the scene, mostly various animals. I think I would have really enjoyed this if I'd come across it as a kid. I actually have vague memories of trying to do something like this in MS Paint.

But It's Still Kinda Shit

The backgrounds were kind of rushed; I wanted this to be a one-day project. I'd like to redo them. Some of them don't line up right at all. And it's tricky, because your objects have to line up with all the possible backgrounds.

Really the fundamental limitation here is that everything is positioned beforehand, by me. The user can't drag stuff around however they please. They can have a dragon in one place, or nowhere. It would be difficult to work around this with CSS, but I've been pondering... you'd have to generate a fuckload more <input>s and <label>s, but you could add controls to nudge stuff around without any JavaScript.

There are other limitations, like the user can't set an arbitrary color for an item, it has to be chosen specifically beforehand. (I did find a way to add a color slider in pure CSS, but it isn't backwards compatible and only works in Chromium, so fuck that.) There's no screenshot feature built in; I would have been fine with a small snippet of JavaScript, but it seemed pretty involved and annoying, so I skipped it.

My simple — dare I say elegant? — solution for moving through the radio groups limits my ability to add more complex logic to the image selectors. Mostly this just means that I can't easily recolor any part of Sophie that moves (she has two poses), because then I'd have to select the color mask that fit the specific pose that was selected. It would be pretty easy with :has(), and it could still be done with ~ and IDs and whatnot, but it would be a pain.

I also think it's kind of a shame that I don't have any animations! These are the most compelling part of the game, but I'm only using still frames. There's nothing stopping me from using animated gifs, I'm just not sure how I'd approach putting them together with GIMP. The Batcher plugin might have an easy solution here, or I could do some more scripting.

Unfortunately, the tool I found for dumping the assets isn't fully compatible with Puzzle Castle so I'm missing some stuff I'd have liked to include. Still, I was of course delighted to find it and this project wouldn't have happened without it! That same developer is adding support for this game engine to ScummVM, and it worked almost perfectly when I tried it.

Conclusion

If nothing else, Sophie definitely cutens up my website. I like my site — I think it's both functional and cute in its own way — but I definitely get jealous of those beautiful pastel sites I come across on places like NeoCities. I don't usually do a project solely because it's nice, much less child-friendly; it was good to mix it up.

Messing with pixel art is always a calming activity, and getting to look at and remix someone else's art in the process is a big plus. I feel the same way about this as I do about Tarot cards. Any activity where you focus intently on the details of art that you like is good for you.

Still, the fact that it's copyrighted and I could hypothetically be forced to delete it takes a little bit of the wind out of my sails as far as developing it further. I might like to reuse this idea with some wholly original art sometime.

Email me if you, your kid, your aunt, or your roommate likes Puzzle Castle. I know you're out there, somewhere.

Futa Porn

2026-04-28

#sex #essay

!! If not obvious from the title, talks about pornography and offensive trans terminology.

Motivation

A while back,¹ r/GWAsapphic banned the term "futanari". GWA (Gone Wild Audio) Sapphic is one of vanishingly few subreddits that I actually like. It's audio porn made by queer women, for queer women, and it's great, 10/10 would hitachi again. There are a bunch of subreddits for women that claim to be trans-inclusive but really aren't — most glaringly Two X Chromosomes, which is cissexist before you've even read past the name. GWAS isn't like that at all. From what I've seen (as a lurker), they are genuinely inclusive, and this is reflected in their rationale for the futa ban:

We welcome gender expression in different forms, but the term "futanari" or "futa" has become rooted in the fetishization of transgender women, and its presence on the subreddit risks alienating a large part of our community.

I found this rather curious as a trans woman who visits the sub and is often happy to see futa stuff.

1. OK, wow, it was FIVE YEARS ago. I didn't get around to writing about it until now. I really have my finger on the pulse.[^2026-04-28_futa-no]

Marginalization/Fetishization

It's obviously true that the genre is about fetishizing trans women, and I'm not here to call out GWAS five years later;² it's their call, and it seems like they're making a real, rare effort to welcome trans women, and I appreciate it.

It's just kind of a weird feeling to have someone try to protect me from something I seek out intentionally. It reminds me a little of how I can always make cis people uncomfortable by saying "tranny"; it's like there's this dark, seedy aspect of trans existence that everyone is more comfortable sweeping under the rug than acknowledging, encapsulated by a term that emphasizes how trans women are socially marginalized.

Because that's really where the fetishization originates and why it feels so ugly, right? I mean, if trans women held an equal social status, people wouldn't feel the same shame for being attracted to us; people's attraction to trans women wouldn't be shoved off into a separate "weird fetish stuff" box; disrespectful terminology wouldn't be as big of a deal. But we don't hold an equal social status. People's attraction to trans women gets funneled into some odd and unsavory directions; we get reduced to caricatures, bit players in other people's psychosexual dramas. What is the appropriate response to a cultural concept that is both an expression of oppression of trans women and a socially transgressive expression of appreciation for them?

Like, how many avenues are there for people to say women are hot when they don't have the standard equipment? I mean, you probably wouldn't want to date somebody who was fixated on your genitals to the exclusion of all else. But for porn? It's nice to know your general body type is appreciated. It's unfortunate that this frequently comes with the side effect of othering trans women from womanhood writ large, but this comes along with most approaches to porn categories. GWA Sapphic themselves use both "F" and "TF" categories, which I don't find any less offensive than "futa"; in both cases, I've been marked as atypical, and it's no less likely that the content gives me the ick.

2. OK, wow, it was FIVE YEARS ago. I didn't get around to writing about it until now. I really have my finger on the pulse.[^2026-04-28_futa-no]

Let's Get Uncomfortably Specific

What makes "futanari" any different from "shemale" and similar porn terminology that is clearly just degrading and unacceptable? Well, for one, I've never encountered "futa" as a slur,³ but all the others I have. Also, here's a list:

Futa porn is presented as fictional, with a sci-fi or fantasy premise; often the subject is a victim of a curse or mysterious illness.

The subjects are presented as women with penises, not feminine men or a third sex.

Everyone is super into the girl's dick and she gets crazy horny. She's often embarassed of it and reluctant, then comes like a zillion times. I guess this is kinda just hentai in general but like... the hentai-ness of it seems distinctive.

Ok, so, why do I like it? Am I just a dumb self-hating tr*nny? Look at all the obvious issues!

The women are cursed: being trans is a disease or calamity.

Even worse, trans women don't actually exist; people like them only come about as a result of nefarious magicks.

The only characteristic that separates a futanari character from a cis woman is her dick, which emphasizes objectification on the basis of genitalia. Often it's drawn ridiculously oversized or anatomically inaccurate in other ways.

The penis is depicted as an intrusive element with some sort of "male energy" that makes you into an unstoppable fuck machine; sometimes this even involves depicting the woman as sexually predatory.

Phew, sounds pretty bad! I definitely have bad taste in porn!⁴ What could possess me to ever look at such a thing?

3. Maybe it is in Japanese. Look, I'm not really arguing the validity of the term here, more just trying to elucidate my feelings about the larger phenomenon as I've encountered it.

4. While this essay might suggest otherwise, I'm not actually a big porn fan. I'm not saying that to sound chaste or whatever, just to provide some context and try to exculpate myself if I say something ignorant.

Curse of the Were-Penis

The fictional aspect is the most distinctive thing about this type of porn. Sure, it's othering, but it's weirdly made more approachable by removing it from reality. Nobody ever asks the girl if she has childhood trauma, what her parents think about her, or if she's seeing a therapist.⁵ Nobody asks her pronouns, gives her the number for a suicide hotline, calls her by a male name, or murders her. The only overlap with real life is a coming-out scene, but unlike in real life, it always has a happy ending — in both senses. The fantasy world they construct is primarily designed to gratify cis readers, but in the process, they create something of a utopian environment for trans women.

The average story arc for futa pornography is:

Woman discovers she's different from other women (though definitely still a woman!)

She is distraught by this difference and confides in someone

That someone thinks it's super hot and they fuck a bunch

Isn't that basically the best-case scenario for discovering yourself and coming out of the closet? Wouldn't it be nice if it worked that way in real life?⁶

Sure, the penis is represented as a curse, but like... how many trans women haven't felt that way before? Not zero, but certainly a small number. Our birth anatomy is the justification for the way we're treated, after all, so even if you're 100% happy with your default equipment, you probably feel some resentment/shame about it (unless you're some kinda Nietzschean badass). And crucially, the "curse" always turns out to be a blessing in disguise in futa porn, what with all the orgasms and such.

5. I've seen actual real people porn where they talk about this serious real life Gender Stuff and like... I get that the porn isn't made for me at all and they're trying to educate people and that's cool but also like uuUUUuuUUUuUhggGHhhHhhhHhh nooooot hot! please don't make me think about this right now!

6. Okay, well, actually, it's good that your family members don't always try to fuck you when you come out to them. That's a definite improvement over hentai.

Mega-Puberty

Something I find striking about this is that it reminds me of puberty. No matter how you feel about your equipment, it insists upon itself. It can make you very uncomfortable but also very horny; it can be strange and confusing and overwhelming and horrible, while also providing bountiful hedonic delights. And in futa porn, all this drama happens to a cis woman, whose womanhood is never in question no matter how many times she ejaculates an impossible volume of girljuice.

I sometimes find this oddly healing. It's like there's this thing I went through that is never represented anywhere else, and instead of the miserable parts, they're telling me to focus on the orgasms I had along the way. (While massively exaggerating how good it was... I definitely never had multiple orgasms during my first puberty.)

Chick With a Dick

I think all the pluses and minuses of futa porn as regards trans women can be summed up by this term. If someone called me "dickgirl" or "chick with a dick", I'd obviously be outraged. That would be sexual harassment. They would be reducing my existence down to genitals they presume I have, treating me like a sexual object, trivializing my identity. I think it is sensible to ban these terms, and perhaps "futa" in the context of GWAS as well.

But I would also much rather be called one of these terms than something like "shemale", because the fact of my birth that they fixate on marks me as a Weird Woman instead of some untouchable Secret Third Thing. It marks me as different, deviant, exotic; not categorically, uniquely inferior.⁷ There's something quaint and reassuring about "chick with a dick" compared to other slurs, like maybe there's some level of understanding here buried under a mountain of knuckle-dragging bullshit.

Futa porn isn't really about trans women, it's about chicks with dicks. It's offensive and endearing for all the reasons you'd expect. It's simplistic, unrealistic, and objectifying — like most porn — but it gets this one basic thing right, and surprisingly, that counts for a lot in my book.

7. Also, "dickgirl" is kinda cute. :3

I Don't Know How To End This

I've never writen this many words about porn before. I hope it wasn't too excruciating to read.

Email me your thoughts on offensive trans pornography, and title recommendations for same.

Anubis

2026-05-01

#visual-art #pixel-art

I made this at Game Boy dimensions; I'd like to eventually incorporate it into a game, but I don't know if that will ever happen. I actually don't even consider this image to be quite finished, but I think it's pretty good, and it's been languishing on my hard drive for a while. There's an animated version at the bottom.

[picture]

Hospital bed, doctor, and IV bag

[picture]

Chained hands, Anubis, and scale weighing feather and heart

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Flashing image

Text Editors

2026-05-01

#list #tech #snark

If you want to edit text in your terminal, you basically have only four options:

Vim

Emacs

VS Code

Notepad.exe

Vim (and its ten million spinoffs)

The undisputed king of text editing, it unfortunately locks its power behind the worst interface known to humankind. Far more damning than the abstruse keymappings cult members are forced to memorize is that Vim's interface is modal.

Mode error is really design error. Mode errors are especially likely where the equipment does not make the mode visible, so the user is expected to remember what mode has been established, sometimes hours earlier, during which time many intervening events might have occurred.

— The Design of Everyday Things, "Mode-Error Slips"

Every time you switch tasks, you pay a price, known in computer science as a context switch. ... Humans clearly have context-switching costs too. We feel them when we move papers on and off our desk, close and open documents on our computer, walk into a room without remembering what had sent us there, or simply say out loud, “Now, where was I?” or “What was I saying?”

— Algorithms to Live By, "Preemption Isn’t Free: The Context Switch"

Emacs

The also-ran of the text editor wars, Emacs has not resulted in anywhere near the number of spinoffs of Vim because it is really more of an operating system than a text editor. Emacs users typically plan their schedules, send emails, and browse the web through Emacs; presumably they occasionally edit text with it too. Emacs cultists sacrifice their entire computing environment to their new god, and hence don't mind waiting twenty minutes for it to start.

There is something admirable about Emacs' complete lack of interest in adhering to the Unix philosophy (one tool should do one thing and do it well). Emacs is also fascinating as the last remaining vestige of the Lisp Machine; it should be toured like one would a computer museum.

VS Code (fresh, Flow Control, etc.)

If you like Visual Studio Code®, The Open Source AI Code Editor by Microsoft™, you now have many options for using it in your terminal. You can even pretend your terminal isn't a terminal: use your mouse for everything, clutter up the interface with pointless "Nerd Font" icons, take advantage of the millions of colors your shiny new terminal emulator has been inexplicably blessed with; hell, you can probably even send telemetry somewhere. Guaranteed to be almost as bad the real thing!

This category seems to have a disproportionate quantity of programs that are LLM vibeslop. I wonder why?

Notepad.exe (nano, ne, micro, etc.)

This is the category of text editors for people who just want to edit some damn text. It's obviously the best of the bunch, but the minimalism and noob-friendliness mean a lack of features for power users. You will not ascend to the heavens in a cloud of euphoria when you use it; you will, instead, feel a vague malaise that you've been left out of a club.

Instead of learning how to use your text editor, your time will be wasted well-spent learning the deep magicks of shell command invocations required to patch up the gaping holes in your text editor's feature set. Hope you like escaping strings! Vim won't look so bad after an hour with sed and awk.

Bonus: The Freaks

Surveying the above list might fill you with a sense of despair. You might be tempted to go exploring way off the beaten path. Maybe we went all wrong with this whole text editor thing and we should just edit lines with ed. If it was good enough for K&R in 1973, it ought to be good enough for us today! This is the text editor equivalent of going on a silent Buddhist retreat.

After a few minutes as an ascetic, you will hopefully learn to love yourself. Then you might cast your gaze farther afield from the Unix standard. There are other operating systems, after all. Whatever the hell the Plan 9 people are doing seems pretty cool. Maybe we took a wrong turn and we're supposed to be on the Plan 9 timeline. Maybe you should try Sam or Acme? BZZZZZZZT. These programs are graphical; worse, they require a mouse, and you'll have to spin up a VM every time you use them or deal with naked X windows. Your beloved shell will miss you.

Once you've tried out Plan 9 and realized we're definitely on the good timeline, there is one last resort. Maybe the perfect text editor isn't languishing in obscurity. Maybe it was actually wildly popular, for years, even among normal people who don't know what a Unix is. Maybe you should turn to DOS. Lotus? WordPerfect? WordStar? If your desperation leads you this far, pray that you never encounter UTF-8, and may god have mercy on your soul.

Free insecure HTTP hosts

2026-05-01

#tech #list

Web 1.0 Hosting

Hosts this very website

500MB disk (with forum participation)

Custom domains are restricted to sitename.tld, no subdomain support

Upload is only clear FTP; no user interface for changing password

Extensive retro support

Finland

Github Pages

Hosts Prairieland Zines

Custom domain required for no-SSL access

No formal disk limit? 100MB filesize limit

U.S. (Microsoft)

AlwaysData

No custom domain on free plan

1GB disk

Very generous and featureful — not just static sites

France

HelioHost?

1GB disk

Registration only opens for like one second every twelve hours; you can jump the line for $2

U.S. (nonprofit)

InfinityFree

5GB disk

Very hostile to non-mainstream browser useragents — curl gets (52) Empty reply from server unless I pass --user-agent "fuck you". Bear Blog — another site that engages in useragent discrimination — at least returns a 403.

Netherlands

Surge

No SSL with custom domain on free plan

No formal disk limit?

PDFs don't seem to be allowed?

You have to install nodejs

Canada

whisper sweet nothings to your computer

2026-05-01

Using a graphical program is like flirting with your computer; using The Terminal is like whispering instructions in its ear. Graphics hold you at arm's length; Words are more intimate than touch.

To command anything in the world, the witch needs only discover its True Name. Even magick obeys certain laws: these she uncovers and bends to her will, using Words of power sacred and profane.

Graphics: finite. The Terminal: infinite.

The learned adept asked, "Which is the true path — graphical, terminal, or AI?" The teacher said, "Do everything twice." Upon hearing this, they were enlightened.

And the Word was made flash, and dwelt among us, and we beheld Its glory, the glory as of the only begotten of The Terminal, full of grace and truth.

#tech

Death Note

2026-05-02

#anime #text-art

Reflection

Rewatching Death Note in 2026 — nearly 20 years after it was released — makes me feel nostalgic and very, very old. I watched this while it was still airing. It was at the tail end of the miserable Bush years, which are tinted rose in my memory after 10 years of Trump. Obama hadn't yet been elected or failed to make good on his oft-repeated campaign promise to close Gitmo on day one, the first of many experiences that ultimately made me an anarchist. I hadn't gone vegan quite yet (that was in 2008), though I had at least stopped eating meat. I hadn't even transitioned, which really intensifies the feeling that I was a totally different person. I wonder if I'll still love it.

A bit later it got imported and became rather popular, which made me feel cool and ahead of the curve. This was still fairly early days for anime in the West; just knowing how to watch fansubs was 1337. Elitism is the theme that really stands out to me about this show and my personality at the time (and nerd culture in general). I think part of Death Note's appeal was that nerds really believed, like Light, that they were in some way the elect, like knowing how to use IRC made them superior beings who should be in charge of the world. This delusional arrogance is called out by the show right away in Episode 1:
> Light: [details his plans to execute everyone bad] ... I would create a new world of earnest, kind humans.
> Ryuuk¹: Then you'd be the only fucked-up person left.
> Light: Huh? What are you saying? Ryuuk, I'm probably the best, most diligent honors student in Japan.
> Ryuuk: ... O_O ...

Looking at it from this angle is retrospectively chilling. It was nerds who cut their teeth on places like 4chan talking about stuff like Death Note who ended up playing a substantial role in the creation of fascism as we know it. Whenever they could, they seized power for themselves; they now run companies with more money than entire countries. They are no less delusional in their arrogance than Light, and far more ambitious when it comes to mass murder.

1. When I first watched/read this, fan translations were all over the place in their spellings. I seem to recall Light's name being written as "Raito". I still think of The Character Known Canonically In English As Ryuk as "Ryuuku"; I've compromised by omitting the trailing vowel.

Let's Get Started

The beginning feels a bit rushed. Before the first episode is even over, Light has already filled up half his frickin notebook and declared himself god. I seem to recall the manga drawing things out more? His first two kills are defensible:

A man who's killed six people, then taken hostages at a daycare. This kill might have saved lives, and it would be a freebie no matter who it was, since it shouldn't have actually worked. (Accidentally killing someone you love as your first one would be a great story. I don't remember if that ever happens.)

A man who's part of a gang trying to rape a woman in broad daylight² outside a convenience store. (Light should have definitely tried to help instead of just flexing his god-muscles and leaving her to fend for herself for the 40 seconds before it kicks in.)

Light has some moral misgivings but overall doesn't seem too broken up about these. Then the next time we see him he executes 100+ prisoners. I'm starting to think this guy was always kind of a piece of shit! No Faustian bargain here.

Actually, I want to go back to #2 for a moment and how much it sucks. Obviously it's always trash when a series uses sexual assault of a third party solely for the development of the (male) protagonist, but that's actually not why this sucks so bad. It just feels like they're trying really hard to validate Light's perspective that crime is out of control. This is an actual, shocking, violent crime that no other bystanders seemed to care about. In real life, Japan has a low crime rate and it was (and is) falling. It's extremely stupid, 24 hour news/talk radio -brained shit to think violent crime is a big issue, but Light's stupidity is validated in a major way.

He must be watching a lot of copaganda to think people who are imprisoned are ipso facto guilty and got off too easy. Maybe it just comes with having a cop for a dad. He bears a striking resemblance to fascists who fall for racist pseudoscience and obvious grifters but believe they're intellectually superior.

2. Figuratively. It's more like broad darkness. Like, stuff's open and there are people around.

Having Fun On-Line

Does Light use fucking Internet Explorer?

[picture]

A Kira fansite in what looks like IE on Windows XP, but in greyscale

I found several recreations of this site. None of them are a perfect visual match for the anime, but I like this one a lot: https://legendofkira.com/

This one I don't like (plays English audio and depends on Telegram) but it has a feature like my Digital Death Note: https://kira-website.vercel.app/pages/write There must have been a ton of these 20 years ago, but I didn't turn any up in my cursory search before I made the page. The internet is seriously lacking in venues to wish death on people! I'm providing an important public service.

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Rem & Misa

Well, now there are women on the show, one human named Misa and one shinigami named Rem. Rem is in love with Misa, and it's extra dramatic because when a shinigami falls in love with someone, they're likely to die by abusing their Death Note powers to extend the person's life instead of shorten it like they're supposed to. But not by writing their name down in the future, by killing the person who was fated to kill them.

So, I'm not sure how shinigami can ever use the Death Note, since by interfering with causality they probably extend people's lives as a random side effect all the time, right? Or they just can't kill murderers? It seems like it's more some kind of heavenly law that punishes them for doing it on purpose. So I guess being in love is a sin for shinigami? Episode 21 has a "how to use it" rule reading: "If the god of death decides to use the DEATH NOTE to kill the assassin of an individual he favors, the individual's life will be extended, but the god of death will die." In any case, Rem is a tragic character who's cursed to die for her love. Woo, queer representation!

I might be overselling it a bit here. Shinigami are basically weird zombies and it's hard to tell what love even is for them. A previous shinigami who fell in love with Misa did so after just like... watching her all the time through the magic portal to earth. So basically stalking the hell out of her. But, they're shinigami, so I guess that's like, kind of normal for them? They come across like just more of Misa's stalkers.

I... don't really love what they did with Misa. She's a model and a massive Kira groupie. I think she gets better later? It would be nice if the only (human) female character wasn't supposed to be a nutso dum-dum.³ I guess only L and Light get to be supergeniuses. Still, she outwits Light, or at least gets the drop on him.

Her look makes the show feel very 2007. This was the emo era, also reflected strongly in L (are those bags under his eyes or eyeliner?).

[picture]

Misa in a black dress with a corset design, lace arm warmers, chunky necklace, and choker

She has a bunch of goth stuff in her room including a shelf full of emo dolls from Hot Topic.

[picture]

Teddy bear with skull face, vampire in a coffin, pink cyborg bunny with piercings, schoolgirl with stitched lips wearing a skull

She even has the red and black socks.

[picture]

Red and black striped thigh-highs

3.

[picture]

This broad is berserk.

Crimes Against Humanity

I already wasn't entirely happy with Misa, but then they went and did this to her.

[picture]

Misa bound upright, face covered, with bondage straps around her body and a video camera pointed at her

L and the cops tie her upright with leather belts aross her body and tightly between her legs. Then they just... torture her. They leave her like this for weeks! They even watch her when she pees. She doesn't believe she's being held by the the cops, because "there's no way the police would tie me up in such a fetish-like way."

There's no point to any of this abuse that I can discern except to torture her. She's already in a cell; why does she have to be blindfolded and restrained as well? I guess one justification is they don't know how the Kira powers work — but then why not do the same to Light? (This brings up another gripe, actually: why did they decide so quickly that Kira had supernatural powers? Why not some kind of high tech death ray?) Light is seemingly handcuffed for weeks, despite also being in a prison cell, but at least he didn't get put in bondage gear.

Supergenius L should know that torture doesn't work. Unless the goal is to make someone suicidal — they successfully did that after only the first three days. It's very Oh Fuck It's 2007 And Bush Is President that the good guys are holding people in a black site without charges and sexually torturing them.

MAXIMUM THE HORMONE

The second intro is one of the GOATs. Fuck it's so good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6sSMIfG94k

The outro is by the same band — Maximum the Hormone — and it kicks ass too. It explicitly mentions Kira, so I guess they wrote it for the show? They even made a Death Note-themed music video that goes hard as fuck. (I don't think I was alone in searching them up, seeing this video's thumbnail, and thinking they looked like a visual kei band!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_vvv1oPnKY&t=31

I really like that they have the same group do both intro and outro. Death Note actually got me pretty into this band. They have this fun hit music video from the same time that stands out more for its abrupt tonal shifts than anything else.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQAYLxAIerE&t=90

These used to be readily available with English subtitles but I'm coming up empty-handed. I probably have them on, like, an iPod hard drive somewhere. They're still great even without knowing what they're saying though; I love how everytime the band shows up they're going fucking apeshit and that one guy looks like he wants to murder the mic.

fondleslab

2026-05-02

fondleslab

phone, tablet, etc. Origin: The Register

#glossary

magat

2026-05-02

magat

American fascist; Trump supporter. Derogatory. Origin: derived from "MAGA" (Make America Great Again). Pronounced: maggot

#glossary

File format nostalgia

2026-05-02

#tech #list

File formats I miss even though I no longer have any reason to.

DivX/XviD

There's no reason I know of to use this codec today, but it used to be amazing to me, it was so small and looked so good. There was decent support for it on consumer hardware, too — I still have a DVD player that supports it — so I guess that's one reason.

I really miss this site that DivX-the-company ran for only like a year or two called Stage6. They let you upload long HD videos (way before YouTube did) and had lax copyright enforcement. You could search up almost any show and just watch it right in the browser; it was how I watched Doctor Who. It was fast and free and so nice while it lasted. In this era, people used .divx/.xvid container files, so I'm pointlessly nostalgic for that too.

And yes, it must be capitalized that way. It's the law.

RealMedia Variable Bitrate (.rmvb)

This is another one that wowed me for its super low filesizes once upon a time. I mostly used it for anime, which I think benefited from its low framerate. There were these great sites where you could download them directly; IIRC, my favorite one had a single page for each show with a direct link to each episode. (I wish I could remember what it was called... I think it had an angel on the banner?) They downloaded really fast. (Can't remember if I was still on dial-up, but I had a slow connection either way.)

I think this one died off (and never got that popular in the first place) because... you had to install RealPlayer. This was the Windows XP era and you had to install a bunch of crap to watch videos; that was fine and accepted. But I recall RealPlayer being more annoying with its advertising and intrusive of your system than like, QuickTime, the other irritating commercial player you had to install. It had a lot of haters. Then we were liberated by the CCCP. (And then VLC liberated us from its Stalinist reign.)

Anti-nostalgia: AVI

I hate AVI.

It always felt like such a luck of the draw as to what was inside the AVI. I guess that's still the case with other containers today but it doesn't matter as much since everything supports everything.

.avi used to be used for everything. It was adequate, but it had the drawback of not supporting embedded subtitles, so they had to be distributed as a separate file. I associate this format with hardsubbed (subtitles "burned in") anime and with DVD rips that look like crap (fucking deinterlace goddammit! why are interlacing artifacts still a thing!) and should be repeated with a modern encoder (DVD rips do not have to look that bad!).

Tangent: Hardsubs used to be convenient back in the day because you didn't need a separate file and they could be pre-rendered with fancy decorations that your player might not support. (If you use a Roku in 2026, it's like it's still 2006: the built-in player has no support for styled subs or for bitmap subs — the kind BluRays use.) They were of course very annoying when you wanted to use a different set of subtitles. You sometimes saw (see) hard-coded subtitles from DVDs, which use a bitmap font that looks fucking awful. If you want to view old low-resolution content on a high-resolution screen, hardsubs (and bitmap softsubs) get scaled up along with the video and look blurry and terrible. This has actually been a problem on computers ever since monitor resolutions started vastly outstripping SD TV resolutions, which is to say pretty much immediately.

Beloved microgenres

2026-05-02

#list #sf #horror #lit #tv #film

Sci-fi medical drama

Science fiction and medical drama seem like a match made in heaven. The medicine on medical dramas is made-up bullshit anyway, so why not make up some bullshit about aliens and space madness and oxygen deprivation and like... the effects of huffing warp engine fuel? As a bonus, you won't mislead anyone about real illnesses.

You can invent entire species and cultures to generate ethical dilemmas instead of contriving implausible earth scenarios. You can dial the horror up with unsettling surgeries and made-up maladies, or use magic futuristic medical devices to eliminate all gore. You can establish in-universe medical conventions and build the lore out whenever you want. You can borrow "Inners" and "Belters" from The Expanse. Or that plant lady from Farscape. Or decide how to deal with sick/malfunctioning robots. Did I mention you can set it on a space station? With the danger of vacuum and everything? How is this not the greatest idea ever?!

TV

Mercy Point (1998)

This is the only one I've found that is just 100% a soapy medical drama in space. It's horrible and you should definitely watch it; it at least works as a proof of concept that this microgenre could totally be a maxigenre. There are recordings floating around with bits of the original commercials still in, which really adds to the ambience. Some of the episodes were never aired but can still be found.

The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy (2024)

Animated. More of a zany comedy that misses as often as it hits, but it's definitely about a space hospital and I don't regret watching it.

Many if not most episodes of every iteration of Star Trek have a plot that fits the bill; watching it back-to-back with House was what made me realize the untapped potential here. See also: Babylon 5.

Charité (2017), Season 4

Yaaaaaawn. Near-future story that takes itself very seriously. I didn't finish it. I think German TV just kinda sucks, honestly.

White Dwarf (1995)

Actually a failed pilot reworked into a film. Even though it's about a doctor, I don't remember it being very medically. Actually, I can remember almost nothing about it. I might have fallen asleep.

Lit

I haven't read for this genre (yet) because it feels like more of a TV thing. There are probably a bunch of hard near-future SF stories that fit, but I bet I'd like them about as much as Charité.

Vorkosigan series by Lois McMaster Bujold

Doesn't fit the bill, but has several medical storylines and is very accessible so the vibe is kinda there. Oh, and it's AWESOME.

Blood Music by Greg Bear

Doesn't fit the bill, but it's somewhere in the vicinity. I didn't love it, but it's memorable.

Hospital Station/Sector General series by James White

Have not read.

Med Service series by Murray Leinster

Have not read.

Spaceship Medic by Harry Harrison

"Juvenile". Have not read.

Stardoc series by S.L. Viehl

Have not read.

Serial killer/sociopath protagonists

The main appeal of this one is how it makes you want to root for people who are total monsters. The best examples of this microgenre are first-person and let us directly into the bad guy's thoughts through narration.

Film

American Psycho

Plenty of first-person narration; villain is unquestionably the protagonist.

Totally kicks ass, hilarious dark comedy about how capitalists are soulless bastards.

Maniac (2012)

Found footage-style film shot in first-person. I don't remember if there's narration, but the villain says all sorts of weird shit.

Extremely good. Very tense, creepy, original horror. I recall it being kinda funny but this is definitely a horror movie. Stars Elijah Wood.

Nightcrawler (2014)

I don't recall narration, but the villain is the protagonist.

Lovely pitch-dark comedy about an ambulance chaser played by Jake Gyllenhaal.

Honorable mention: Profondo Rosso (1975)

Most (all?) of Dario Argento's movies include first-person killer scenes, but they aren't the protagonist; neither is the villain in this one, but we get more first-person scenes than any others of his I can think of. There is a little narration, IIRC. Horror/mystery.

TV

"The Man Who Was Death", episode 1 of Tales from the Crypt (1989)

Narrated by the villainous protag. Does not make you sympathetic to him.

Probably lots of other episodes fit too, but this one stands out. Professional executioner becomes a hobbyist after the abolition of the death penalty.

Barry (2018)

No narration that I recall, but the villain is definitely the protagonist.

Hilarious pitch-dark comedy about a professional assassin who wants to quit his job and get into improv. One of the funniest shows I've ever seen, but has emotional/tonal range.

Breaking Bad

No narration (well, there are in-universe taped confessions). The villain is definitely the protagonist.

While Walt is a terrible person, I'm not sure this quite fits the theme. The strongest argument for inclusion is that Walt is weirdly easy to root for.

The Better Call Saul spinoff might fit for the same reason. Saul is nowhere near as evil, but you definitely want him to get away with all the cruel/illegal shit he pulls. But this is more of an honorable mention, or we'd have to include a lot more crime shows: Ozark (2017) would be an obvious one, probably The Sopranos which I haven't seen, maybe even Mad Men. There are a lot of shows about bad people who aren't quite monsters.

Death Note (2007)

Plenty of first-person narration; villain is unquestionably the protagonist.

Shonen anime. Currently rewatching, but I loved it 20 years ago. Very dramatic, iconic, and fun.

There are live-action spinoffs. There's really no reason to bother watching them. There's also a Korean stage musical that I haven't seen, but a subtitled cam of it is out there if you really want it.

Dexter (2006) and spinoffs

Plenty of first-person narration; villain is unquestionably the protagonist.

The original series is pure, uncut, borderline-guilty-pleasure popcorn trash, with a wide variation in quality (though I maintain the last episode was Good Actually). This is a show that deserves a coffee table, snacks, and an oversize bong. Fun, funny, and you definitely want the bad guy to win. Plenty of gore.

The obnoxious sex pest character, Masuka, exists solely as a vector for all the worst misogynistic, homophobic, and transphobic "humor" that the '00s were rife with.

The first spinoff, New Blood, is alright but abandons the lighthearted tone and takes itself way too seriously. The prequel, Original Sin, apes the original and is occasionally successful but not especially interesting. The sequel to New Blood, Resurrection, is the first spinoff that was really enjoyable. The motion comics are fucking awful.

You (2018)

Includes narration by the villain, but it's actually in second-person IIRC. Does not make you sympathetic to him.

Walking red flag stalks, manipulates, abuses, and murders women he is obsessed with. Pretty good but idk if I'd watch it again.

Lit

"The Things" by Peter Watts

Professional fan story telling The Thing from The Thing's perspective.

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

Haven't read; by all accounts is much more unpleasant than the film based on it.

Death Note by Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata

Manga. See anime above.

Dexter series by Jeff Lindsay

Mostly first-person narration; villain is unquestionably the protagonist.

I've only read the first few of these. They're nowhere near as memorable as the TV version; honestly, they kind of read like cheap airport books made specifically for visitors to Florida. The most interesting thing is that a few books in we learn that Dexter's Dark Passenger is a literal demon from before the dawn of time. It kind of killed the gritty vibe for me to randomly turn it into fantasy, but the chapter introducing the Dark Passenger was very cool.

Dread Empire's Fall series by Walter Jon Williams

Really awesome space opera in a bleak authoritarian setting. The main characters are interesting and complex and generally the good guys... but they're also absolutely ruthless monsters.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

Have not read.

The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks

First-person narration; villain is unquestionably the protagonist.

A bizarre horror novel about a teenage murderer with odd spiritual rituals. One of the most singularly unpleasant things I've ever read, but it is really funny at times, and certainly memorable. Tries to comment on gender roles but just comes off vaguely transphobic.

Beloved midi-genres

These are far too broad to really qualify for this list, yet they still feel small enough that I don't encounter them with great frequency, especially in TV/film. It feels like I've seen most of them already and the good ones are rare. There is a lot of overlap between them.

There is no attempt to be exhaustive here, just list favs.

Sci-fi horror

Film

Aliens (1986)

Alien 2. I actually liked this way better than Alien.

Antiviral (2012)

Brandon Cronenberg's first and weirdest movie set in a future where people buy celebrity diseases.

Please Speak Continuously and Describe Your Experiences as They Come to You (2019)

Lovely Brandon Cronenberg short.

Possessor (2020)

Brandon Cronenberg's masterpiece. Razor-sharp, hard as nails story about an assassin who kills people by possessing them.

Infinity Pool (2023)

Another pitch-perfect B.C. outing with a high concept scifi plot. This one has horrible psychedelic sex!

Existenz

Cronenberg-the-elder does The Matrix and it kicks fucking ass.

Scanners (1981)

Another kickass David Cronenberg flick. You've probably seen a gif from this of a guy's head exploding. Corny in the best possible way.

Videodrome

I mean, obviously. The Cronenbergs just dominate this genre.

Event Horizon (1997)

Fucking awesome. Hellraiser in space. Laurence Fishburne (Morpheus) and Sam Neill (Jurassic Park) are in it. I have faith that one day we will see the cut of the film that was deemed too horrifying to exist and destroyed.

Pitch Black (2000)

Origin of Riddick (of the Chronicles, which is delightful in its own way). This is a cheesy paint-by-numbers B-movie executed with aplomb.

The Thing (1982)

TV

Black Mirror

Raised By Wolves (2020)

Tragically canceled before the story could conclude (and honestly seemed like it was going nowhere) but has strong horror overtones and one of the coolest pilots I've ever seen.

The X-Files

Video Games

Dead Space series

Surival horror FPS in space that slaps.

Sci-fi comedy

Film

Brazil (1985)

Terry Gilliam's wacky take on 1984. I adore this one; it's my go-to for when people ask me what my favorite movie is.

Coneheads (1993)

Goofy aliens vs. US immigration authorities. Underrated, nice film.

Dark Star (1974)

John Carpenter's criminally underappreciated film school project. A dark comedy about the crew of a doomed ship who go around blowing up planets for fun.

Killer Klowns from Outer Space

What it says on the tin. Way better than you'd expect.

Kin-Dza-Dza! (1986)

Magnificent absurdist Soviet film that I try to make everyone watch.

TV

Space Janitors (2012)

Much funnier than it seems at first; space opera satire is not usually good.

Avenue 5 (2020)

Made by Armando Iannucci (made Veep and every funny British show) and starring Hugh Laurie (Dr. House). I wish it had had more time to come into its own, but nobody liked it and it got canceled on a cliffhanger.

Murderbot (2025)

Not as good as the book and I could nitpick it endlessly, but still great. Worth it for the Sanctuary Moon clips alone.

Other Space (2015)

Little gem of a sitcom that got 8 episodes before the brand-new streaming service it was on ceased to exist. Ends on a cliffhanger.

People of Earth (2016)

Really funny and sweet sitcom starring Wyatt Cenac. Also canceled on a cliffhanger.

Rick and Morty

Animated. Went to shit eventually, but the first few seasons are some of the best TV there is.

Lit

"A Guide for Working Breeds" and "Fandom for Robots" by Vina Jie-Min Prasad

"Beyond Lies the Wub" by Philip K. Dick

"Offloaders" by Leah Cypess

"The Secret Life of Bots" by Suzanne Palmer

"They're Made Out of Meat" by Terry Bisson

The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Roberts Shea and Anton Wilson

Canonical Discordian text. Disorienting and delightful.

Murderbot series by Martha Wells

Doctors are not our friends

2026-05-11

#politics #essay

Stop me if you've heard this one before: "every major medical association endorses gender-affirming care." This factoid is included in just about every article about trans rights... and it makes me extremely nervous. What happens when they stop endorsing it? Appealing to medical authority is a dangerous game.

Big Transgender

There's a popular misconception that trans people and doctors are natural allies, since we rely on doctors to be able to change our sex.¹ Early anti-trans feminist Janice Raymond even claimed that trans people were created by doctors — as part of a dastardly plot to abolish Real Women, naturally. These days, transphobes have flipped the script on the conspiracy theory and somehow made it even less plausible: they allege that medical institutions have been "captured" by Big Transgender (also as part of a dastardly plot to abolish Real Women). The way activists confidently proclaim that trans healthcare is endorsed by Major Medical Associations makes me concerned that this mythology has started to spread outside the ranks of the hatemongers.

For most of modern history, doctors have been very hostile to trans people. Their role was not to dispense medicine, but to guard it. Trans people have been using modern medicine to change sex, by hook or by crook, since long before the medical establishment put their stamp of approval on it. As far as I can tell, the only reason this started to change was 1) tireless activism and 2) the evidence was just so overwhelming: they conducted a ton of horrific "research" tormenting children to try to make them un-gay but never succeeded. Doctors went, "okay fine, so we can't torture you normal. I guess we can resort to letting you have what you want (grumble, grumble)."

This brief historical reprieve from medical oppression has, combined with ascendant fascism, created a topsy-turvy world where WPATH, an extremely conservative medical organization once infamous among trans people, gets treated like a pro-trans activist outfit. The US government has targeted them for harassment on this basis. I don't think I can adequately convey just how weird it is for WPATH to be the good guys. Their entire job is (or was) gatekeeping medical treatments. For most of their history there were no trans members. (They have a few now, at least some of whom are outspoken conservatives opposed to trans children's rights.)

1. I don't typically use this definition of "sex" as meaning physical traits separate from "gender". I think sex is better understood as a reification of gender, a cluster of traits people point to in order to justify the mistaken notion that binary gender inheres in physical bodies. Still, I think it is important to emphasize that the characteristics people call "sex" are very much mutable and that trans people can and do change them. A common truism repeated by anti-trans activists is that humans can't change sex, when in fact we can and do — if we couldn't, they wouldn't be trying to take away our means to do so.

Premonition

What happens when these vaunted Major Medical Associations withdraw their support? Because they will.² It's surprising they've held out as long as they have, frankly. Look at how every hospital folded like a leaf when Trump threatened to tighten the pursestrings. And the old creeps are still around! The people who tormented "sissy boys" and kept extensive notes on the fuckability of teenagers³ didn't go anywhere. One guy in Canada lost his abuse factory and that story got spun for the next 100 years as "trans activists went too far"; he's probably looking at illegal images and plotting his revenge at this very moment. We are very lucky that these creeps haven't yet achieved enough power in Major Medical Associations to turn back the clock.

Even in the present, appeals to medical authority are a double-edged sword because the anti-trans movement has made it a priority to generate impressive-sounding pseudoscience. As long as it has a fancy title and a large enough institution at its back, most people will accept it, even if the contents are just paper-thin justifications for anti-trans policies that would have been implemented anyway.

This pseudoscience will continue to proliferate because there's money in it; meanwhile, there's ~0 funding for quality scientific research, and even acknowledging trans people exist is basically illegal. One would expect these conditions to produce a great deal of "evidence" against trans people, and a degradation in the quality of science more generally. It will become increasingly difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Left unchecked, they will build a world where medical consensus is firmly against us. Enterprising young hatemongers like SEGM/Genspect have even begun disseminating their materials in continuing medical education classes and medical conferences.

2. The National Health Service in the UK has already been taken over by anti-trans scum, though I'm unsure whether this qualifies as a Major Medical Association. As far as I know, the British Medical Association still does not endorse the government's "Cass Review" propaganda or the NHS's efforts to destroy trans people.

3. anti-trans = pro-rape

Grounding

I think we would do well to move away from medical authority and toward moral authority. Bodily autonomy is the most fundamental freedom there is. There is no amount of research that can change this basic fact. We are entitled to change our sex because we are free people, not because 50% + 1 doctors think it will lead to "improved outcomes". Children, likewise, are entitled to live life on their own terms, free of abuse — especially abuse that attempts to change who they are.

Doctors do a lot of good for the world and we're lucky to have them, but they are not kings. I will still be trans no matter what they decree. My life just plain isn't up to them. It might be tempting to crown experts as a corrective to our monarchy of stupid, but it's the same basic error. No one is more qualified to live your life than you.

Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and a tyrant: I declare him my enemy.
— PJ

IIRC

2026-05-13

IIRC

"if I recall correctly"

#glossary

Philosophy

2026-05-13

#meta

The Golden Rule

I try to follow a sort of Golden Rule of design: pnppl.cc should be the kind of website that I myself would want to see.

This is not entirely altruistic. Ethically speaking, the Golden Rule is narcissistic and encourages projection: you should really treat others how they want to be treated. It's a good rule for approaching a personal website, though, which exists first and foremost for your own benefit.

The other people your website benefits are largely unknowable. What they would have done unto them is determined, in part, by the design decisions you make, since they apply a selective pressure. In other words, it's sort of a chicken-and-egg problem: In order to cater to others, you need an imaginary average visitor; in order to imagine your average visitor, you need to take into account who your website attracts.

Given all this, you might as well just create according to your own preferences and make your website attractive to people like yourself.

There is an altruistic aspect, though. Being a good Kantian means not spying on or advertising to your visitors. It means making it accessible, since you would still want to use a website even if you developed a new disability, moved to a different part of the world with worse infrastructure, became impoverished and limited to old hardware, or for some other reason began interacting with the internet in an unusual way.

The internet kind of sucks. A personal website is an opportunity to be the change you want to see in the world.

You're Boring

https://pearstheband.bandcamp.com/track/you-re-boring

This site will never have an "about me" page. I hate filling out those boxes. I don't know how to sum myself up and never feel that my attempts succeed. There's an undeniable vibe that I'm marketing myself, like I'm making a résumé or going to a job interview, two of the most horrific activities ever invented by our horrible species. When I read someone's bio, my reaction is usually "uhhhhh cool who cares jerkoff motion".

There's no point, either. I could tell you I'm trans, or you could just figure it out by reading one of my many posts where I talk about it and where it's actually pertinent. If you're not sure if I'll post about topics that interest you, skim through the titles. This is not social media or a dating website. The website is the "product", not me. I aspire to make good stuff, not to make myself legible.

Writing about yourself usually isn't very interesting, especially to total strangers. It's like describing a dream you had. These posts should be avoided, as should meta posts (like this one); they're self-indulgent. There's nothing wrong with indulging yourself, but like, you gotta eat something besides chocolate sometimes, you know?

That's not to say that one should ever shy away from sharing their perspective. Your perspective is completely unique. In fact, you could say that it's the only thing you have to offer the world; everything you make is filtered through it. It's much more interesting to see that filter in action than to read a description of it.

Haymaze in a Needlestack

99% of everything is shit. On the internet, it's closer to 100%, and most of the shit is actively aggressive: it spies on you, tries to rip you off, intentionally wastes your time, and contributes to a stifling dystopian capitalist monoculture. Call me a hipster, but I love finding cool stuff nobody's ever heard of, and these finds feel even more rewarding when fished out of the Saw-like needlestack that is the internet.

Compelling websites are often compared to rabbit holes that draw you deeper and deeper with each successive page. You look at the clock and realize you've been clicking around and reading for like six fucking hours, yet your time doesn't feel wasted the way it would if you'd spent that time scrolling a feed. Some people notice this and draw the wrong conclusion: that a website should be difficult to navigate, full of blind alleys. But it's the actual stuff that makes these sites good, not their arrangement. Bad navigation is just... bad navigation. I want a haymaze, not a warren: invite me to wander around, get lost, hold hands, and discover small charming details; but I should still be able to consult a map and pop my head up over the bales.

Visuals and Semantics

My site's look is very much inspired by Windows 9x. I didn't do this for nostalgia purposes — fuck nostalgia — but because I genuinely love the design. I still use it on my computer. I've used this same interface, more or less, for approximately my entire life. Not only is it highly functional and non-distracting, grey is pretty, and you get a 3D effect for free just by changing the border colors.

But a website is not an operating system (usually) and I find it weirdly frustrating when a website looks too much like one. They will never behave quite the same, given that the website is trapped in your browser, so it's kind of confusing. I'm especially annoyed by purely decorative buttons. If you're gonna put an X in the corner, it should close the fake window!

These days, every website wants to be an "app", but most of them should just be documents — the way the web originally worked. The now-dying standards for a site's behavior are very good:

Links are blue and underlined; visited links are purple. (I clearly remember when Google consciously decided to ruin this. It held firm as a standard despite not being technically required until they opened the floodgates.)

Hitting Back in your browser takes you to the last page you were on. Hitting Forward goes forward.

Pages are sprinkled liberally with anchors so that you can move back/forward within a document without losing your place, or jump ahead to a specific area.

So, I don't want my 9x design to be too overbearing. This is a website, not a Pentium. Links should look like links; if they aren't blue and underlined, they need another strong indicator (like a psuedo-3D gray button design). Every link should turn purple when visited: not only is it practical, it also makes the website prettier as you read, since purple is the best color. The only exception is for ones styled as buttons — reserved for repetitive navigation elements that don't benefit from the purplification breadcrumb trail — though I was tempted to make them turn purple too.

Copy Me

Our world has been infected with a brain virus that makes you believe ridiculous things, like that copying is stealing. If we're going to indulge in superstition, copying is much closer to a holy sacrament than some metaphysical act of theft. It's an honor for someone to think your creation is valuable enough to copy.

Copying is also the only chance you have for your work to outlive you. If you want to ensure your site is totally forgotten, make it really hard to copy. Put in lots of JavaScript and CSS so people can't select the text or right-click the images. Ban curl's useragent. Opt out of the Wayback Machine. Add DRM. Hide it behind Cloudflare and Anubis. Put up lots of hostile copyright notices. Sue people who respect your work enough to copy it — or even be inspired by it. If you put in enough effort, you usually can stop the signal; if nothing else, you can waste a lot of someone's time by making them jump through hoops.

If you would prefer not to rob future humans of your work, you should do the opposite. Make it clear that people are encouraged to copy. Instead of erecting barriers, install trampolines.

Incidentally, you can download this website's HTML, the text files it's built from, an ebook version, or its entire source code. You can repost it, improve it, hell you can even plagiarize it if you want. Give it to your friends. Give it to your enemies. Get a bunch of free flash drives from Micro Center and scatter copies of it all over your local park. Print it out and mail it to the FBI in a suspicious envelope.

I'm not interested in a legacy, but I do believe in what I say and would like for those beliefs to proliferate.

Coping with YouTube

2026-05-13

#coping #list #tech

Improve

Sponsorblock

https://sponsor.ajay.app/

Skips over garbage sections of videos. Absolutely required for watching YouTube in $PRESENT_DAY. Widespread support; integrated in many clients.

DeArrow

https://dearrow.ajay.app/

Replaces clickbait garbage with descriptive titles and actual thumbnails. Not totally necessary but improves the experience. Not as widely supported as Sponsorblock.

uBlock Origin

https://github.com/gorhill/ublock

For if you are ever cursed to open the actual YouTube site. You should have an adblocker installed either way.

Download

yt-dlp

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

Android: Seal

https://github.com/JunkFood02/Seal

yt-dlp frontend.

Stream

mpv

https://mpv.io/

Use with yt-dlp for no-bullshit streaming (mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmD-HlPAVTw).

Electron: Freetube

https://freetubeapp.io/

A less bad "full" YouTube experience (search, etc.) on the desktop.

Android: Tubular

https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular

One of many forks of Newpipe.

Android: PipePipe

https://github.com/InfinityLoop1308/PipePipe

Another Newpipe fork. Updates with fixes for breakage faster than any others, but also loaded with many features I don't care about, so I use it as a backup.

Roku: playlet

https://github.com/iBicha/playlet

Breaks frequently. Better: Jellyfin + yt-dlp.

Web: Invidious

https://invidious.io/

Many unreliable public instances.

Mostly only useful as a privacy-protecting backend and as a way to share videos with normies.

Consult

Increase video speed. Usually 1.2x is comprehensible, and often you can push it further.

Set player to skip over silence. Usually makes it very unpleasant to listen to but still comprehensible and much faster. A godsend for speakers who take long pauses and ones who talk too fast to just speed it up.

Read the transcript.

Usually there are no proper subtitles, just terrible automatic ones, but these are often good enough to at least find a starting point in the 45-minute unedited "tutorial" you're desperately trying to get info from.

Fetch with yt-dlp: yt-dlp --write-auto-subs --skip-download

Sometimes the abominable official player exposes this and makes it easier to seek but I'm not sure when. Live videos, maybe?

Censorship Gauntlets

2026-05-15

#politics #list

Speech must run the gauntlet of censorship in order to exist. There are four questions people must ask themselves when deciding whether to share, publish, or host something:

Will this get me in trouble with the government?

Will this get me in trouble with my job?

Will this get me in trouble with my friends/family?

Will this get me in trouble with an internet mob?

Legal peril, financial peril, social peril, internet peril: all endanger your wellbeing and can catalyse the other perils.

Censorship is worst when it is both very unpredictable and severely harmful.

The severest type is legal peril. Brutalizing people is kinda the state's whole thing. They can all end in death, though.

The most unpredictable is generally the internet.

Chickpea Salad Sandwich

2026-05-15

#recipe

This is my go-to packed lunch; I've eaten it everyday for long stretches of time. It's cheap, easy, and seems pretty healthy (? plenty of fat and protein, not just carbs). One can of chickpeas should get you at least two sandwiches.

Chickpeas

Vegenaise

Mustard

V+M should be enough to wet the chickpeas, mostly V. (1/2cp : 1 Tbsp??)

Garlic powder (not much) (1 tsp??)

Onion powder (lots) (1 Tbsp??)

Black pepper

Small pinch salt

Paprika (sweet. optional)

If using canned chickpeas, you can make DIY Vegenaise with the liquid.

Mash up the chickpeas. They're usually kinda hard to mash with normal masher or fork. You can hit them with a few pulses in the blender (careful not to overdo it) or put them in a ziplock bag and mash them with your fingers while you watch TV.

Combine chickpeas with the rest of the stuff. Put on bread.

Lettuce and cucumbers make good additions.

You can add relish or pickles for a different vibe.

If you add stuff that isn't juicy it can be a bit dry unless you went really heavy on the vegenaise.

Good on all kinds of bread.

Mom's Weird Sandwich

2026-05-15

#recipe

Submitted to Sandwiches of History by Alicia

Mayo

Sliced radishes

Chopped green onion

Salt

Pepper

Fresh dill

SOH score: 7.5+

Pirate Utopia

2026-05-18

#politics #essay

The Beautiful Idea

Picture, if you will, a world full of magical devices that allow anyone, rich or poor, to read, watch, or listen to any book, film, or album ever made, for free, instantly, with only the press of a button. Imagine a library where every book is always available. Imagine being able to read all the research in the world without membership at an elite university. Imagine Netflix and Spotify, but instead of a tiny selection they have everything you could ever think of, it costs nothing, and there are no ads.

Who would want to stop such a thing? Wouldn't life be vastly better? Does your heart not ache for this world without boundaries?

It already exists. It's just that it's illegal.

An exemplar here is Anna's Archive, a pirate archivist project with two goals: to back up all of humanity's knowledge and culture and to make it available to anyone in the world. As ambitious as that sounds, they estimate they have already saved a whopping 16% of the world's books. Anna's Archive is one of the greatest projects in human history, yet if the people behind it are ever caught they will likely be thrown in a cage for the rest of their lives.

Anna may be the most ambitious and successful so far, but they're far from the first. Vast, stunning Libraries of Alexandria have been built up and burned to the ground repeatedly in internet history, their curators hunted by police, sued or prosecuted to death, their patrons threatened, maps to their locations destroyed.

Utopia is a small island in a large sea, beset on all sides by ships of war. As a wise man once said: the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.

The Hideous Bargain

Copyright law is incompatible with utopia.

One would need an awfully compelling reason to justify depriving the world of such a wonderful thing. Copyright supporters offer up the same defenses for ownership of intangible, non-scarce (infinitely duplicable) resources as capitalists do for tangible, naturally scarce physical resources. Prominently:

The owner is entitled to earn money from their property.

Without ownership, everything will go to hell in a handbasket.

The first justification seems awfully weak when weighed against the benefits a utopia of piracy brings to all humankind, and it's not as though it's impossible to make any money just because you can't set an arbitrary price at gunpoint (lawpoint).

This supposed right to profit being effectively secured by copyright is mythical, too. Independent artists are often invoked as though they're making a ton of money thanks only to our wonderful copyright laws. But it's primarily large "rightsholding" corporations who profit by monopolizing and litigating their "property". Is it really worth keeping utopia from our grasp just because an artist might occasionally manage to make some money as a side effect?

Then objection #2 kicks in: without copyright law, there would be no profit — and hence no incentive to do anything! nobody would make anything ever again! art would die! Even if copyright effectively kept artists fed — which it clearly doesn't — art is more often made in spite of money than because of it, and I think it's safe to say that more commercial art is unlikely to be better art. Would we really trade in utopia in exchange for the continued production of Minions and Marvel movies?

And wouldn't it be good for artists if they could freely make use of existing "property" without the threat of being ruined for their creative expression? Copyright law has enabled Nintendo, a company worth over SIXTY BILLION DOLLARS, to bully countless broke independent artists into deleting their work. Disney is worth another HUNDRED BILLION FUCKING DOLLARS and has our entire media ecosystem clutched in a strangehold with its cute mousey paws. If you do anything these corporate behemoths don't like, they can squish you like a bug. Seems like a really fucking bad deal for artists — and human beings in general!

[picture]

TRADE OFFER (from Disney): i receive: ability to sue people to death with my $176,000,000,000.00; you receive: ability to sue people to death after making $176,000,000,000.00

Pie in the Sky

There's a slice of utopia right there for us to take whenever we want it, yet we're told to wait, that it would be improper to reach out and take it before we can get the entire thing, that these ideas might sound nice in theory, but in reality, people need money and copyright helps them get it; only once we abolish poverty can we think about reforming copyright.

Talk about letting the perfect be the enemy of the good! If we invent a replicator that can infinitely duplicate food, are we supposed to lock it in a safe underground until we can make sure no farmers' lives will be affected in any way?

We may never achieve an entirely stateless and mutualistic society, but you can visit a virtual one any time you want. There's no need to wait. We're building a pirate utopia in the shell of our old world. It's straining to break free.

Addendum

For the polar opposite of pirate utopia, see The Right to Read.

"I like your programming language. I do not like your package manager…

2026-05-19

"I like your programming language. I do not like your package manager. Your package manager is so unlike your programming language."
—Gandhi

#shitpost #tech

Hench / Villain

2026-05-21

#lit #review #read-2026

Hench (2020)

4/5

I've been a fan of Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots since before it even came out. Not because I know the author — I don't — but because I won a Goodreads giveaway for an ARC. Here's the brief review I wrote back in 2020:

First time I think I've actually read an ARC cover to cover. I was pleasantly surprised to find it was borderline an anarchist/antifascist wish-fulfilment fantasy, with supers standing in for police/fash/the powerful. Our plucky temp-worker protagonist marshals the forces of statistics, utilitarianism, and doxing to wage war on the establishment.

There are some weaknesses with the prose (one odd thing I noticed is, for the first few chapters, people are always nearly choking with laughter) and the plot has some issues. It's rough around the edges, and I don't know if that's due to it being an ARC or being a debut. But I still found it very compelling in spite of that. By the end, I was cackling and could not put it down. It's just great. One nice bonus is that this book seems to understand bisexuality, and the protagonist is bi. That's more common lately, but still rare enough to stand out to me.

Highly recommended as a fun weekend read for all mischievious/subversive nerds.

I spent six years cautiously hopeful that a sequel would be released, and... it was! It's called Villain and came out only a few days ago; I read it immediately.

But first, I had to re-read Hench. As you'll see from my review, I first experienced it unreservedly as a lighthearted romp. I was totally on board with what they did to the superheroes; I cheered it on. There was certainly an element of falling to the dark side — I mean, she works for a supervillain, who is at best the equivalent of an evil corporation, and she becomes increasingly willing to get her hands dirty — but I engaged with those elements more like hazards associated with fighting an essentially righteous war than signs of moral depravity, sort of like if Flame & Citron was about superheroes. (And good.)

A Goodreads friend, Nataliya, had a very different interpretation of the book. She saw it as a horror story about a deeply evil person whose actions are wholly inexcusable, their justifications only thin rationalizations. This gave me pause: am I a much worse person than I thought? I chalked up the disparity to politics: "I'm an anarchist, Nataliya's a lib." But it still stuck in the back of my mind. It's not exactly a far-fetched theory that I take the positions I do because I'm an evil person with a vast capacity for rationalization; I know hatred of my enemies sometimes goes too far.

There is plenty in the story to support her reading of it, after all. And there's no denying that internet warfare is about deriving pleasure from petty cruelty, which doesn't exactly fit the psychological profile of a good person. So I re-read Hench with an eye toward her interpretation of it as less a gleeful story than a tragic one, paying close attention to Anna's epistemic blind spots and the unethical things she does.

!! Light spoilers.

And yeah, she does shitty stuff. She endangers her friends and harms her allies. She assassinates someone who by her own admission isn't doing much harm, just because the numbers work... and because it will help her plan to destroy her nemesis. She doesn't seem to account for any misery that isn't measurable in life-years or bother to include her caped enemies in her moral calculus.

But I mean, it is a story about becoming a supervillain. I don't think it's really supposed to be taken that seriously. Also, fuck the police.

What stood out to me was not her descent into evil, it was her descent into love — an equally powerful and destructive force. Leviathan, her employer/love interest, is her biggest epistemic blind spot of all. She doesn't run a calculus on his continued existence in the world. We don't learn much about his evil deeds — she doesn't really seem interested in finding out herself — but they probably include plenty of murders; he is the most infamous supervillain in the world, after all.

I'm a bit of a sucker for toxic romance. (For another exemplar, try Gideon the Ninth.) They're in love because they admire each other's power and ability to be an asshole (relatable!). This is not a very healthy kink. Also, uh... Leviathan is literally a demonic-looking bug-man. Like Predator or something. He's creepy as fuck.

So, after my re-read, what I most wanted from Villain was doomed love and horrifying, chitinous makeouts. Being seduced by evil, figurative: boring. Being seduced by evil, literal: amazing.

Villain (2026)

3/5

!! Light spoilers.

Did I ever get my wish! The entire book is about their relationship, for better and worse. It really digs into the harmful power dynamics at play. It turns out, when you date an all-powerful control freak supervillain, he's super abusive! So note that down as a red flag. If a guy talks about himself in the third person, swipe left.¹

As a result, it's a lot less fun than the first book. It's much bleaker, sadder; more like the horror Nataliya saw in the first book. Instead of cheering on Anna's self-destructive impulses I'm more like "oh, honey..." It makes it a lot harder to kick back and enjoy a toxic relationship when it's depicted realistically, with all the panic attacks and dissociation and whatnot.

Still, it's compelling. I didn't get a bunch of horrible chitinous makeouts, but I got something even better: a sex scene! It's unexpectedly... really hot?

The surfaces of him were hard but not uncomfortable, warm with unexpected give. We had to find the ways in which we fit together, a question unlocking an answer and another question, like a braid or links in a chain. I came for the first time against his thigh, grinding against a plate shaped like a tasset, while he bit down on my shoulder with his chelicerae, drawing pinpricks of blood in a starburst. Later, draped over his back, I tried to brush one of his antennae gently, and he wrapped his fingers around mine to make me squeeze harder.

“Pull,” he whispered, and then whined when I did, arching under me.

“You’ll have to show me all the places I can hurt you,” I said, and pulled harder.

That part made me kick my feet and make an undignified noise. Tragically it doesn't go on for very long, but their weird chemistry does. He's always nibbling her hand with his horrible insect mouth while they plot their dastardly schemes together, and after they fuck he has to bandage up all her injuries. It's so romantic! If only he weren't such a piece of shit.

(Tangential: we know Leviathan walks around naked or nearly naked. Does he have genitals? A prehensile retractable penis, perhaps? It sounds to me like he doesn't, and for some reason I really like that, like it's extra queer.)

The other parts of the story didn't really grab me. There's no exciting war storyline with a big triumphant finish like in the first book. The various torments they rain on the supers feel a bit aimless. It feels more like a PR war between corporations than the complex data-driven internet warfare from Hench, and their cruelties are less giggle-inducing and more just a bummer.

My favorite character, Decoherence, pops up occasionally but doesn't feel like she gets enough screen time. She's basically Leviathan's inverse — just as powerful, just as attractive to Anna, but has a conscience and lives in a ratty apartment with zero minions. I wish they would have like, kissed, or at least briefly talked about their feelings; it's unclear to what extent she returns Anna's feelings and to what extent she's just trying to be there for an abused friend, though it's strongly implied it's the former. I suspect the third book will make their love explicit and Anna will murder her; Leviathan calls her Anna's nemesis which seems prophetic.

That's all I got. I'm looking forward to the next one... in 2032.2 "Supervillain"? "Hero"? "Kick"?

1. I actually don't remember Leviathan ever speaking in the third person, though his doing so offscreen was alluded to.

2. No shade to the author. She is not obligated to write on a schedule that suits impatient fans, or at all. She talks in the back of the book about starting over from scratch four different times; it must have been very frustrating. It seems like authors often struggle with their second book and then hit their stride after that, so maybe if she continues the series there will be a third entry sooner than history would suggest.

Semicolon

2026-05-22

#language

;

People tend to be afraid of the semicolon.

It's not that common, especially in informal writing. People don't feel confident they can use it "correctly"; I imagine many have been marked down in school assignments for it. Since it's seen as pretentious, there's a risk that using it incurs mockery as an uppity twit who got too big for their English britches. Sticking to periods and commas is the safer bet: they're harder to get really "wrong".

You know what I say to that? Fie!

People make grammatical "mistakes" all the time. It's just a fact of life. Don't let that hold you back from the full arsenal of punctuation.

It's vibes all the way down. There is an enormous number of — equally intelligible — ways to write any given sentence(s). If you're using punctuation at all, you're already going above and beyond; all you really need to write English is lowercase letters, space, and newline. If you're being a fancy-pants and putting in all that work anyway, why not take a chance on a semicolon?

I think of semi-colons as super-commas. You use commas inside a sentence to mash together different statements; you use semicolons between sentences to mash them together into super-sentences. "Super-comma" also describes the other way they're often used: to separate elements of a list which themselves contain commas.

Also, you can make a crying face with them. ;_;

what is a woman?

2026-05-22

what is a woman?
man sneers
mouth a bullwhip

crack!

i do not startle
i am not a bull.

a woman is someone
who does the dishes
face a crime
to make up
assignment always due

a woman is a hole
empty un-thing
well to draw from
to fall in
drink of gravity

a woman is a star
infinite points
you would draw with five lines

#poem

hearty friendships

2026-05-25

hearty friendships
send laughter
drifting over the lake

i had people
to cackle
in the dark together

i'm that person
no longer
i grasp for lonesome smiles

but if i weren't
a ghost now
it wouldn't
blow through me

a suffusion
of peals
in between
my membranes

all my empty
vague places
bump into
fresh atoms

now i'm made of
warm beer breath
heard over
the waves

#poem

Little Pixel Library

2026-05-26

#club #pixel-art #visual-art

Little Pixel Library: Main Branch

How?

I'm extremely impressed with the art on display at the LPL. Zoom in on the images (with smoothing turned off) and you'll see that most of them are nice crisp pixels without antialiasing. It's astonishing that people can make such excellent recreations. How do they do it?! I set out to make a pixel version of The Bus (cover) and investigate.

This post's soundtrack: https://satellitehigh.bandcamp.com/track/the-bus-is-late

First I wondered if there was some really good scaling algorithm that I didn't know about. That's not impossible, but I don't think it's a big factor even if it exists: while some covers are clearly just scaled down, most of them show signs of being hand-crafted. Still, I had to play with it. Scaling down my cover in Gimp with no interpolation produced an ugly mess. Enabling linear or cubic interpolation produced roughly identical results, looking like this (all examples displayed at x4):

It looks great at its original size, of course, but as soon as you look closer it all falls apart. Manual intervention is needed if we want those nice sharp jaggies. But how much? I thought about starting from scratch, but I just wasn't feeling it; I felt overwhelmed, maybe because I had chosen a black and white cover (limiting your palette limits detail just like limiting your resolution). I thought about tracing it using Piko Pixel, and even started on it, but that wasn't hitting either. Can I be lazy? Can I find something close to the mythical scaling algorithm?

First I tried various dirty tricks to reduce the number of colors in the scaled-down image, hoping to hit on something that would crisp up the lines without looking awful, or at least get me to a comfortable starting point with only a few shades of gray in the palette. After layering different scaling algorithms on top of each other at different opacities; going through many iterations of Colors -> Posterize; setting it to RGB then back to indexed with one less color, then repeating the process; adjusting color levels; etc... I ended up with this four-color image as my starting point:

It already looks better than just scaling it down, though I think that's mostly down to playing with the levels. But again, while it looks great at 1x, all the details are smeared together when you zoom. I considered leaving it here, but I wasn't satisfied. I hadn't done enough. It didn't feel like art, and it certainly wasn't up to the standard set by other LPL contributors.

So it was time to roll up my sleeves and get arting. But I still felt out of my element, like I was missing a key ingredient. (I mean another one besides talent.) What is the workflow? How do they do it?!

The eagle-eyed reader will notice that the author's name is clearly legible in a pixel font here, unlike the one that was just scaled down. That's because I managed to lose the actual plain base image and could only find this one where I had merged in my replacement text. This is an obvious step to take: slightly blurry images look much better than blurry text, which you can easily replace. Going back to the LPL, I noticed several examples that look fantastic stopped at this point. They've scaled down the cover, redrawn the text, and called it good. The image artifacting is subtle and the words are crispy.

But they aren't the best ones. So I proceeded to draw the rest of the horse.

I figured since I had my decent starting point, I would just touch up the muddy areas until it looked good. While that helped, in some places a touch-up just wasn't doing the trick and it really needed to be totally redrawn. In particular, I wanted the man to be clearly visible, but there was so much detail there that had been lost I didn't seem to be making any headway with the touch-up approach. When I've made pixel art in the past, one of the enjoyable aspects has been simplification. It actually helps to do the thing that you really aren't supposed to do when you draw: draw what you think you see instead of what you actually see. Pixel art is a sort of visual shorthand. It's more important for it to be quickly recognizable than realistic.

So, I deleted the window beam in front of the man. It's just too hard to discern any of his details otherwise. It's fine, this bus just has big windows, deal with it. I took similar liberties with the rest of the image, which is to say with the buses. The window along the top no longer has any dividers and is more like a racing stripe. The lines along the panel have turned into a checkerboard. Buses in the background are larger, their windows arranged differently. I particularly tried to make the wheels more clearly distinguished from the rest of the bus in hopes that would make them more recognizable.

I focused my efforts on the foreground details that matter more. The really small ones in the back I left alone because I really had no idea what could be done about them. I just don't think there are enough pixels to make them anything but blobs. Since they're gonna be blobs anyway, let's trust the scaling algorithm to make them slightly more interesting blobs.

All told, here's what I drew (except the author's name, as noted above):

That doesn't look like much, but I think it made a big difference. Here's the final version at 4x:

I still have no idea how the masters are doing it, but I'm pretty happy with the results of this workflow. It's crispy yet detailed, and I didn't have to do much work but still got to be creative.

Anyway, I'm obviously not a pro. You can judge for yourself if it's any good. I just wanted to share my workflow for anyone else wondering "how did they do that?"

minimal english

2026-05-26

#language

i remarked in semicolon that you dont actually need any punctuation at all to write english

its perfectly understandable to fluent speakers with only lowercase or uppercase letters space and newline

in fact most english speakers probably write approximately like this most of the time now

it is comfortable to write and reasonably comfortable to read especially in a text chat environment
although punctuation and capitalization make it far more pleasant for the reader
for example we could really use a comma or a period so we dont have to use so many newlines
and if you dont use apostrophes you will make fluent speakers want to strangle you through your screen

although your spelling is probably so bad that the missing apostrophes barely register

anyway

letters plus space plus newline equals twenty eight characters which fits in only five bits with another four characters to spare for some luxuries like a question mark
how else will you know to add rising inflection
oh okay yeah we just know

but then again we probably want some numerals
there are 10 of those so if we add them we blow right past 5 bits and into 6 with a total of 38 characters
this is a luxury we cannot afford for whatever reason in our hypothetical hyperconstrained environment

we need to delete 6 letters

there are some obvious freebies

k q x w

vve can cuicly eliminate those and still understand ezactly vvhat is meant
although it is very ugly and vvords vvith a leading cay might be an issue licce novvledge
cnovvledge

necst vve can remove f and replace it vvith ph
in phact this is so comprehensible phor english speaccers that people already do it in the vvild all the time
mostly to call you phaggot in a video game

same vvith the doubled c to be cute vvith vvords licce succ
and goths do the vv thing
they and blacc metal phans neopagans etc vvrite u as v sometimes so that is a candidate phor ovr last deletion

or vve could drop y or j vvhich vvould be rather more unintuitive to most
hobbie lobbie phor ecsample is phine but jes vvould be read as jess iph vve drop y

better to eyect j and yump into the conphusion head on
still loocs phunny but is less ambiguous

but vvait

vve have numbers

vvhat about 1337

vv3 c4n d31373 4n07h3r nin3 13773r5 8y m4ppin6 34ch num83r 70 0n3 0ph 7h3m

n07 73n 51nc3 9 i5 0ur cu3 vvhich vv3 r3m0v3d 34r1i3r

50 i 6u355 vv3 607 0n3 84cc

vv3 c0u1d a1s0 d0u813 up 8y m4ccin6 1 807h i 4nd 311
0r 4 807h 4 4nd y

8u7 1375 n07 637 700 c4rri3d 4vv4y

17 n33d5 70 83 136i813 4ph73r 411

Songs about scamming

2026-05-29

#list #music

Songs about credit card fraud, identity theft, con artistry, etc. Shoplifting, armed robbery, etc. do not count.

Dead Prez - Hell Yeah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGjSq4HqP9Y

Ghost Mice - Free Pizza for Life

https://ghostmice.bandcamp.com/album/free-pizza-for-life-ep

Note that Chris Clavin (one half of Ghost Mice) is a sexual predator, so maybe don't give him money on that page.

Teejayx6 - Swipe Story

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srSFOXrAbLg

Seems like making terrible songs about scamming is this guy's entire thing. He started a microgenre substantial enough to be documented on Wikipedia! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scam_rap

underscores - Cops and robbers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6BajlmkcQc

Not punk or hip-hop!

the state

2026-05-30

the state

government; the most successful gang in any given area. Sometimes inclusive of ostensibly separate organizations controlled by gang members or of the mythologies they promulgate to protect their power

#glossary

The Amazing Digital Circus finale

2026-06-02

#tv #review #sf #watched-2026

!! Spoilers.

Yes, I watched the leaked copy of TADC in badly subtitled Portuguese. I know, I'm an evil monster who hates art and artists, I should be sentenced to eternity in The Circus, etc. Throw your tomatoes. When you're done, here are some thoughts.

It's good!

I'm not particularly active in online communities, but it seems like a lot of people were disappointed by the finale. I'm not really sure what they were expecting. (I hope they will give it another chance on final release. I'm sure there are tons of small details, translation errors, etc., that will add up to a very different viewing experience.) It maintained the same tone and quality as the rest of the series, although it leaned very much to the dark and serious side of things like episode 8.

If anything, it filled in way more gaps in the backstory than I expected. The creators could have easily just left everything ambiguous and milked the show for the next 5 years, making it up as they went. This unsatisfying approach to storytelling is common in television. If you're disappointed by TADC, did you ever watch, say, Battlestar Galactica?

I think fans build a series up in their head and love it so much that they expect the finale to transcend the entire medium and totally blow their minds, but that just isn't a realistic expectation. Maybe you're sad it's over — understandable! — but it isn't the show's job to be so amazing as to overcome that emotion.

In my opinion, the finale successfully threaded the needle of an ending that isn't too sad or too happy. I like a bummer ending, but a lot of people don't, and that's fine. They're characters we care about. We must imagine Pomni happy. But the happiness has to come at a cost.¹ Speaking of...

1. One of the complaints I've seen is "why can't they un-abstract people now that they have admin powers?" Well, for one: that takes away the stakes. There would be no emotional sting to the abstractions. This isn't hell anymore, but it ain't heaven either. Two: the finale strongly suggests that it's up to the abstracted person to decide to come back. Three: use your imagination. Maybe it's really hard to fix them but they eventually figure it out. Or at least manage to delete them. Write a fanfic or something.

Jax

I really like how they wrapped up Jax's story. It did not go at all how I expected and it undercut a lot of dumb tropes. For the last few episodes, it seemed like they might be building up to a redemption arc. There was a big focus on the poor asshole's feelings that I just didn't really care about. There are a lot of shows that encourage us to sympathize with sad, abusive men, a phenomenon I've seen described as "himpathy". The finale swerves hard away from this perspective despite spending a lot of time on the character.

For one thing, Jax isn't even a man! The finale confirms that part of why they're such an asshole is toxic masculinity and repressed femininity (hence why they reacted so strongly to being force-femmed in the baseball episode). We see a mental version of them in the maid outfit being nonbinary "ironically". We learn their dad was an abusive patriarch and their mom enforced the same strict masculinity on them. The moment that causes their big break with Ribbit is not only when they open up to her about their past, it's when she puts her bow on their head, they like it, then Kaufmo at the door makes them panic and take it off. These are familiar experiences to transfems, and it's tragic that they couldn't grow a spine, grow the fuck up, stop the macho bullshit, and take some damn estrogen.

I'd had this idea for a while that Jax was the way they were as a response to the trauma of losing friends who abstracted. The finale shuts that the fuck down and shows us they were a piece of shit long before that happened. From what we see in their memories — granted that they're psychotically depressed and likely to blame themself for everything — they're the reason their friends died (abstracted). They killed their girlfriend Ribbit with relentless abuse and this in turn took down Kaufmo. Even worse, they did it to punish her for caring about them and allowing them to be "weak". They feel immense guilt about their behavior but repeatedly choose to double down and torment themself instead of improving as a person.

This made the show more realistic. Abusers all have a sob story for why they act the way they do. They don't really change, and certainly won't unless they want to. They can't be fixed by being loved harder. The best you can really do sometimes is try to limit their blast radius. This is made quite literal in the show when they pen up abstracted-Jax in a pillow fort. What else can you do?

There's a scene where Pomni makes one last effort to reach Jax after they've abstracted and it seems like she's going to succeed, that the power of her love will overcome. If this had happened I would have really hated the finale! It would be so trite and confirm my worries about the narrative direction.

But that isn't what happens. And because of that, the scene is so much more powerful. We're shown that Pomni still cares about Jax despite what a piece of shit they are, and she's brave enough to be vulnerable to them... and it doesn't count for jack shit. It moves the focus off of the sad shithead and onto Pomni, with her fierce willingness to love and not give up on her friends. Jax refuses to change, and that's sad, but it's not what really matters. There will always be harmful people in our lives and it can be a real challenge to maintain your ability to love in the face of that. Pomni succeeds.

Caine

Unlike Jax, Caine does get a redemption arc. Or rather, he gets a redemption reprogramming; all he really had to do was expel the blue code Bubble. I can understand this aspect being unsatisfying, since it doesn't fit with what we'd expect from a human character, but I think it actually makes perfect sense for Caine. He's not a digital reincarnation of a human, he's a digital native. He may be sentient, but he's much closer to code than they are.

Caine actually is the god of The Circus. He's facing the same existential terror and personal insecurity as the rest of them, but with full responsibility for everything that happens. He could collapse under the weight of the guilt like Jax, but he doesn't. Unlike a human (or bunny rabbit) he can just split off the part of himself that tells him he's worthless and everyone's worthless and he shouldn't even try. And he does! Go Caine! Unlike the rest of the characters, as far as we know he never had a life before The Circus. He's still growing up.

My only real gripe on this aspect is I feel they kind of ruined the elegant abstract AI animation by bashing viewers over the head with it. We can easily infer that the red bubble is Caine and the blue Bubble is another AI he "ate" without the quick cuts between the 2D shapes and 3D characters to drive home what they represent. It's not subtle at all and felt like they were trying to cater to fondleslab-touching mouthbreathers who don't understand anything that isn't spelled out for them.

And yeah, I mean, I would have preferred he stay dead. He didn't offer much to the story besides a "your outie is..." session. The humans could have figured out how to access Google themselves with their newfound computer powers. But it does kinda balance out the loss of Jax.

Keep thy mind in hell and despair not, or: the horrors persist but so do we

You could describe The Amazing Digital Circus simplistically but accurately as a show about people trapped in a digital hell. Certainly Caine's efforts throughout the series pushed it in that direction. And yet, by the end of the finale, we see that that isn't quite accurate. The Circus is hell in the same way real life is hell.

The only people doomed to eternal² torment are the ones like Jax, whose belief that they're trapped in hell becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Pomni is the hero of the series because she recognizes this. She's a natural leader who transforms their entire situation by her willingness to adapt to difficult circumstances and to tell people how she really feels — by sharing both her love for her friends and harsh truths for Caine. Pomni is an absurdist hero who really does love rolling rocks around.

"Life is what you make of it" isn't exactly a new idea, but it's refreshing to see it engaged with in such an unflinching way. We are all trapped in this world and it sometimes seems to last forever. We will all eventually die and it might be absolutely horrible. People we love will die and there's nothing we can do about it. Sometimes people make our lives hell just because they can. Sometimes we make our own lives hell and never recover.

I have a great deal of experience with severe depression. It's easy to look at fictional hells, in any form, and map them onto real life; when you're suffering, you're in hell, by definition. It's easy to identify all the ways the world has made you suffer and conclude that the world is just hell. (In fact, I've developed this notion as a pet theory and have some ideas about making a game with the premise; see Anubis.) But how can you account for the people — the many people, in fact — who are happy in spite of it all? If they're living in hell, they must have found a loophole. Pomni is one of them. By exploiting the "loophole" — caring about people and speaking her truth — she shows they were never really in hell at all.

I'm not a Pomni, but I don't think I'm quite a Jax, either. I'm more like Ragatha or one of the others who need Pomni around to remind them there's always a loophole. I suspect most people are like this. The great thing is, you don't have to be superhuman to be a Pomni. She's the hero of the story, but she's not really all that special; she's naïve and insecure and ultimately just another rando. She still needs a little help from her friends. She just tried her best.

2. We don't know exactly how fast time passes in The Circus compared to the meat world, but it's probably safe to assume someone will switch the server off eventually. It seems that nobody is even aware the program is running.

nooch

2026-06-05

nooch

nutritional yeast

#glossary

Lazy Vegan Food Tips

2026-06-05

#recipe #list #vegan

"Protein"

(There's plenty of protein in other foods that people don't call proteins.¹)

Tofu

Just get a tofu press for like $20 instead of piling up books and wasting paper towels and knocking shit over. It's worth it.

I have one called Tofuture.

You can use the base where the water drains into as a container for marinating it after. Tight fit though.

Buy tofu with minimal water content to make pressing optional.

Trader Joe's has one called "Super Firm".

Costco has a Kirkland-branded one called "Extra Firm".

Sprouted tofu is another option but it's more expensive.

Toss with cornstarch, MSG, and seasonings then pop in the oven or air fryer for lazy crispy tofu. No need to dredge it in liquid first since it's already damp.

Don't sleep on silken tofu. If you're gentle you can get a lovely sear on it. It's also good for tofu scrambles.

1. I think this language is the product of a food culture centered on dead animals. "Protein" basically means "meat", but awkwardly accomodates plant foods that play the same part in a dish or meal. Meat should probably occupy a much smaller role in our food regardless of whether it's made of dead animals — we should be eating lots more fresh vegetables and fruit.

Tempeh

Good tempeh has a strong nutty flavor that is delicious with only oil, salt, and pepper, but it's not easy to find. Trader Joe's is pretty good. Lightlife won't cut it.

If your tempeh is too bitter, steam or boil it for a minute or two before you fry it.

You can always make tempeh good by adding barbecue sauce.

Make tempeh bakon with liquid smoke/smoked paprika, soy sauce, and maple syrup.

Butler Soy Curls: the best meat alternative

What sets them apart from other soy protein:

Good, versatile shape/texture.

They contain all the fat content that is normally removed.

I order this bulk box once or twice a year and repackage it into gallon ziplocks to store in the freezer. Their seasoning is excellent so I spring for it.

If you shake them periodically while repackaging you can separate out the small bits into their own bags.

If you don't have a ton of freezer space you can keep some in the fridge and some on the shelf. Use up the shelf first, then the fridge. I've never had them go bad.

Do not follow their instructions to reconstitute with plain water then add seasoning after you drain it. Add generous seasoning/bouillon with the water. Save the leftover broth to reconstitute the next batch.

For a softer texture (eg chikn salad, pulled porq) if you aren't in a hurry, you can just combine it all in a pan on the stove and let the excess water evaporate off, then stir fry it for a minute or two.

You can make a large batch in the oven.

Air fried with Butler's seasoning or similar and some breading makes for an excellent fried chikn.

The Butler seasoning tends to clump up. Keep it away from steam and put a silica packet in.

Cheeze & Co.

Butter

Plain old coconut oil is a perfectly good lazy/broke substitute for butter.

Be aware it is bad for internal use due to mostly being saturated fat. For some reason it has a reputation for being healthy.

It's much worse if you heat it. A high smoke point oil that's low in saturated fat — like canola — should be your go-to for cooking.

Excellent for making weed edibles.

Avoid premade butter and other products that contain palm oil, as it kills orangutans — even the stuff greenwashed by the RSPO.

Cheeze

Nutritional yeast ("nooch") is a bit of an acquired taste but after a while you will love it. It's not exactly cheesy like people say but it's adjacent.

I like to get the kind in the nice shaker bottle (eg Bragg) and then refill it with cheaper bulk nooch from another brand.

Make sure you buy the kind fortified with B vitamins. If you're vegan, you need to supplement B12.

Canonical application: replacement for parmesan on spaghetti.

You can use it to make Mac & Cheeze.

Tahini makes a surprisingly excellent lasy cheeze.

Even better: mix it with nooch. Thin it with milk. Add a pinch of salt and splash of lemon juice to make it pop.

Cream

Coconut cream is THE SHIT.

You can get it out of a can of coconut milk as long as it hasn't been shaken in a while. The cream will be on top and easily scooped off.

It is coconutty though, so there's that.

Eggs

You can make tofu scramble (or anything else) taste like eggs with black salt. A little goes a looong way, so you don't have to buy it very often.

If you don't have black salt, try other ingredients that taste sulfurous: white pepper, brown mustard, pistachios...

The other half of eggy flavor besides sulfur is a rich fatty taste. Try avocado, plant-based yogurt, vegenaise...

Vegenaise is even better than animal-based mayo.

You can make DIY Vegenaise at home easily with a decent blender, oil, and can of chickpeas.

This stuff is pretty calorie-dense and makes everything better, so limiting yourself to homemade is a good way to avoid gaining weight. It's easy but still more effort than buying it, so it serves as a little speedbump.

As a bonus, you won't be supporting the evil corporation Follow Your Heart sold out to.

It's super versatile. Stir in some lemon juice for an instant sour cream.

There are a ton of vegenaise-based recipes in Vegenaise with a Vengeance, which is better than the official Vegenaise Cookbook.

Applesauce and/or flax eggs (mix ground flaxseed and water at ~1:3 and rest for 15 mins) will solve 90% of your problems with baking.

Milk

In a pinch, you can whip up some oak milk in like five minutes with oats, water, and a blender.

Instructions are left as an exercise to the reader.

Other Ingredients

Bagged veggies for great justice

Fresh

Coleslaw, broccoli slaw, shredded carrots

Easily make pickled veggies for banh mi, barbecue sandwiches, etc.

Just add them to a mason jar with some vinegar, sugar, and salt.

Stir-fry them.

Eat them as-is.

Make coleslaw.

Mix with vegenaise, vinegar (apple cider and a splash of white), sunflower seeds, craisins, onion powder, salt and pepper.

Baby carrots

Dip in hummus as a snack.

Stir-fry.

They're a little big but useable as-is, or slice them lengthwise.

Roast.

Bite-size celery

Dip in hummus or use in stir fry.

Baby spinach

You can add it to almost anything.

Make sure you eat it fast. Doesn't last long.

I'm strong to the finish cuz I eats me spinach.

Frozen

Corn

Good on its own. Just add butter, salt, and pepper.

This is another food I contend is good for breakfast. Cornflakes are normal, so why not corn?

Soybeans ("mukimame")

Get the microwave-in-bag kind, microwave-in-bag rice, and some sauce for a super lazy meal.

Just add salt for a snack. You can also get it in the shell ("edamame") for this purpose.

Beans & Co.

Butter beans are fucking awesome. They're actually big white lima beans.

Lentils and split peas

You really do have to pick carefully through them for rocks. I've chipped a tooth.

You can make an interesting tofu-like food out of red lentils pretty easily.

See also: Burmese tofu

Great as a meat replacement in sloppy joes and chili, especially green lentils.

Good for an easy dal.

Cereals

If you get tired of rice, there's a whole world of delicious grains out there: millet, barley, freekeh, wheat berries...

Find a health food store with those bulk dispensers and buy small amounts of a bunch of different things.

You can pretty much substitute any of them for rice.

Kamut is good, but it's proprietary, so please boycott it.

There are also a ton of varieties of rice you can try. My favorites are purple rice and wild rice, but they're pricy.

You can eat rolled oats raw.

I actually prefer them this way unless I'm making baked oatmeal.

Combine with syrup, chocolate, peanut butter, etc. for an easy, chewy snack.

Chili Sauce

Lao Gan Ma brand chili crisp is one of the greatest food items ever invented.

You don't need to make a proper sauce — or even a meal. Just throw this on whatever you're eating, even plain white rice.

Sadly quite expensive, especially since it's impossible to resist going overboard with it.

Flours

Cornstarch is the GOAT thickener.

Arrowroot is great for thickening things you want to be an "eggy" consistency.

Chickpea flour is nice for quickly breading things.

Potato flakes aren't just for instant mashed potatoes, they are also a useful thickening agent.

I once made a dope cheeze sauce with potato flakes as the base.

You can make oat flour in a minute by tossing some oats in your blender. It's not super useful but it's okay.

Fruit is the dessert of the plant world

Freeze green grapes.

Eat as-is.

Freeze bananas.

If they're overripe, you can use them for banana bread later.

If they're not, you can blend them to make an incredible milkshake.

1 banana

~1 cup milk

1-2 Tbsp cocoa

1-2 Tbsp sweetener

splash vanilla

Frozen fruit from the store usually kinda sucks, but raspberries are good.

Melt chocolate in microwave (stir often).

Pour chocolate over raspberries.

Put raspberries in freezer for a while.

Mouthgasm.

Put a little salt on your watermelon. Or tajín if you're feeling bold.

You can freeze and blend watermelon too. Maybe add a splash of lime.

Maple syrup is the best sweetener

Agave is expensive and kind of weird. It makes a nice honey substitute but is not very versatile.

White sugar is made with animal bones.

Brown sugar is white sugar + molasses. Just get molasses.

Molasses is also useful for whipping up BBQ sauce. Combine with a tomato product and some vinegar.

Raw sugar is expensive and needs to be ground in a mortar to reduce its coarseness for most applications.

Corn syrup is okay, but it's usually too thick to work with and tastes worse.

It does taste more neutral than maple. Maple syrup has a more distinct flavor, but it's really nice and goes with most things even though you wouldn't expect it to.

I think I like the fake maple syrup better than plain corn syrup. It tastes better and is thin and pourable. But it's less versatile than the real thing and probably has shady ingredients in it.

Good on pancakes.

Associated with slavery abolitionism in the past since it's made in Canada and the North. Sugarcane farming has a long history of slavery and other brutal labor practices.

If using stevia, cut the amount way back. Stevia is much sweeter than sugar.

Smoke

Liquid smoke is the secret ingredient for making good BBQ.

You can generally use smoked paprika in any scenario you would use liquid smoke, plus ones where a liquid is inappropriate.

Smoke is still carcinogenic when you eat it, so try not to go overboard like me.

Dishes

Breakfast toast (or bagel, English muffin, ...) toppings

Avocado

Top with jalapeños, nooch, hot sauce, salt and pepper.

Hummus

Top with za'atar or everything bagel seasoning mix.

Mashed-up peas with garlic, salt, pepper

Peas are super good for breakfast. Fight me.

Sprouts are an amazing topping. Unfortunately they are at high risk of being contaminated with dangerous bacteria.

Pasta

Add some walnuts. (At the end. Don't cook them.)

Falafel makes a surprisingly good meatball alternative. You can get falafel mix in a box or make it yourself.

Falfel follows the same basic principle as making a veggie burger.

Combine different storebought sauces to level it up without making it from scratch.

Make a pesto-like green sauce by throwing whatever fresh herbs and green veggies you have on hand into a blender. Also good as a salad dressing, flatbread topping, dip...

Pizza

You can use a tortilla as the crust.

Any pizza will feel fancy if you top it with artichoke hearts, sundried tomatoes, and olives.

Make garlic dipping sauce by microwaving minced garlic and olive oil/butter for 30 seconds.

You can turn any salad into a flatbread if you have... flat bread.

Brush or drizzle with olive oil. Apply salad. Bake.

Slivered almonds, crushed pecans, and dried fruit (eg raisins) are excellent ingredients.

Drizzle balsamic vinegar or a sweet vinaigrette (balsamic, red wine, ...) over top.

This a great way to eat bitter greens like arugula and dandelion since you have sweet fruits and drizzle to balance them. If it's not sweet enough, drizzle a little agave.

Potatoes

Just potatoes. Stick one in the microwave and hit Potato.

Lazy stir-fries that always hit

Pepper

Tofu

Jalapeños

Chili sauce/hot oil (or: crushed red pepper, sichuan pepper, extra oil; optional in a pinch or for a different vibe as long as you have good paprika)

Paprika, smoked or sweet or both (technically optional)

White or preground black pepper, fresh black pepper

Salt

Optional:

Sriracha

Peanuts

Celery

Garlic

Ginger

Soy sauce

The greasier the better.

Peanut

Tofu, soy curls, etc. (optional)

Vegetables

Peanut butter (chunky or add peanuts)

Soy sauce and/or miso paste

Sweetener

Garlic

Ginger

Fresh cilantro (optional but enables maximum overdrive mode)

Can be tough to get the peanut sauce just right, but I've never not enjoyed it.

Hardware

Store (almost) everything in wide-mouth mason jars.

As a de facto standard, they have wide compatibility with accessories and recipes/tutorials.

Easy to fill, empty, and clean. Narrow-mouth jars are horrible.

No worries about the vessel getting stained or plastic leeching into your food.

Also a downside: glass breaks and it sucks.

Compatible with liquids as well as solids.

You can drink from them.

You can fill unused ones with water in case you need it.

Bugs won't get into your grains.

You can use them for canning and fermenting if you get into that. They can be properly sterilized.

You can make one into a bong.

Use small plates and bowls. You'll eat less without even noticing.

Look for the keywords "salad", "appetizer".

Get a decent blender or food processor. You don't need anything fancier than a Ninja.

A quesadilla maker is so worth it. I use it all the time. Cheap and they often show up at thrift stores for some reason.

Air fryers are not overhyped. They are a game-changer if you get a decent one.

Standout applications are effortless crispy tofu and perfect frozen french fries. You can also just throw a bag of frozen veggies in.

A convection oven is probably better, though, if you have the option. Air fryers are also difficult to clean.

A stainless wok and a cast-iron pan are nice to have.

Be careful with nonstick pans. They can be quite toxic. Don't use them on high or with metal utensils and throw them out when the surface gets marred.

Get a mesh strainer so you can rinse your rice and a collander for your veggies. A salad spinner is nice too but takes up a lot of space.

Practices

Don't measure stuff!

It won't make your food better — only less predictable — but it will improve your cooking intuition, which will lead to better results in the long term. You need to focus on your food in the moment, not a checklist.

Be brave. You will be ok. Worst case scenario, you have to throw out some food.

If your food doesn't taste good, don't panic. Adjust it, then taste it again. Repeat until good.

Faster.

Saves on doing dishes.

Do measure stuff...

if you're baking.

if you've never made the dish before.

if the dish requires a very careful balance of ingredients (eg Indian food).

Focus on building blocks

Most stuff we eat is made of a few simple components. If you understand their rough compositions and have the pieces, you can make anything. People will call you "resourceful".

Prefer to buy simpler ingredients. Often these use annoying health marketing, but you actually want them for their versatility. They're also often cheaper.

Salt-free seasoning blends.

Blends are convenient but you can't use them fearlessly if they impact your dish's saltiness.

"Natural" peanut butter: just plain old peanuts and maybe some salt. Double-check the ingredients.

You have to stir it up, but it's more versatile and tastes much better than no-stir, which is laced with bitter palm oil and sugar.

Excellent for weed edibles, eg PB&J with AVB (already vaped bud).

Plain old vegetables and rice.

You can season them better and more to your liking than a company that has to cater to the lowest common denominator, and adding seasonings is the easiest and most fun part of cooking.

You aren't stuck with the meal a pre-seasoned variety was designed for.

This sometimes conflicts with laziness. There's no shame in going with more complex/prepared foods.

You can also use higher-level ingredients as building blocks, or use your food architect skills to improve them.

Ramen: add veggies, fry the noodles.

Premade hummus: add olive oil and sweet paprika or use as sandwich dressing.

The main load-bearing pillar of my diet when I'm really depressed.

Boxed soup: pump it up or use as an ingredient.

Mushroom is a fantastic basis for gravy and can even be used as-is.

Make mashed potatoes with potato flakes and combine for instant, zero-effort mashed potatoes and gravy.

Myths

Imitation vanilla is not taken from a badger's ass or whatever.

MSG is not harmful. That's a legend spread by racists. It's awesome and you should use it.

Impossible Burgers aren't vegan. They tested on animals to get regulatory approval for, like, making them seem bloody or some stupid shit like that. Same deal with Just Egg. Most "vegan" companies are soulless capitalist enterprises that will do whatever it takes to profit from the niche market segment they target.

If anyone questions these companies' ethics, apologists justify all the harm they do as serving the greater good. That might be true! But instead of compromising we can also just... eat plants. Crazy idea, I know.

Jackfruit and quinoa aren't that great. Don't believe the hype.

Mac & Cheeze

2026-06-05

#recipe

Cheesy Vegan Mac n Yeast

https://www.onegreenplanet.org/vegan-recipe/cheesy-vegan-mac-n-yeast/

1 lb macaroni

1/2 cup butter

1/3 cup all purpose flour

1/2 cup nooch

3 cups milk

2 tsp salt

2 Tbsp tomato paste

1 tsp garlic powder

1 Tbsp lemon juice

1 Tbsp agave

Cook pasta.

Heat vegan butter in saucepan until melted. Add flour and whisk. Allow to cook, whisking frequently, until a roux is formed.

Add milk, nooch, salt, tomato paste and garlic powder and bring to a boil. Lower heat and simmer for a few minutes until sauce thickens. Stir in lemon juice and agave.

Combine sauce and pasta.

You can sub 2 Tbsp ketchup for the tomato paste and agave.

If you melt in some fancy storebought cheeze it takes it to the next level, but it isn't needed.

Homemade Vegan Mac & Cheese Powder

https://itdoesnttastelikechicken.com/homemade-vegan-mac-cheese-powder/

3/4 cup nutritional yeast

1/2 cup flour

1/2 Tbsp sugar

1 Tbsp paprika

2 tsp salt

2 tsp onion powder

1 tsp garlic powder

1 tsp lemon pepper

1/2 tsp ground turmeric

Cook 1 cup pasta.

Combine with 3/4 cup milk and 3/8-1/2 cup powder.

Rumspringa Baked Oatmeal

2026-06-07

#recipe

Ingredients

3 cups rolled oats

1 cup milk

1/2 cup maple syrup

1/2 cup applesauce (4oz single-serve ×1)

2 flax eggs

combine 2 Tbsp ground flax with 6 Tbsp warm water and rest for 15 minutes

1 Tbsp arrowroot

2 tsp baking powder

2 tsp salt

2 tsp vanilla

Optional: streusel

Handful crushed pecans

Handful oats

Handful raw sugar

Cinnamon and nutmeg to taste

1/8 cup butter/oil

Instructions

Preheat oven to 375F. Grease 8×8" baking dish.

Combine all ingredients except streusel. Transfer to dish.

Bake 25 minutes.

Optional: combine streusel ingredients and distribute over top.

Bake 10 minutes.

Serve with syrup, milk, jam, fruit, etc.

Everyday Carry

2026-06-12

#lifehack #snark

My foolproof method for maximum preparedness.

Get a big purse.

If you use something while you're out and about, add it to your purse. If someone gives you something while you're out and about, add it to your purse.¹ If you think you might use something while you're out and about — add it to your purse. Gradually accumulate useful items in this manner until you begin to experience severe shoulder pain.

Once the shoulder pain sets it, remove the items you've used the least. You will discover that approximately 90% of your items have not been needed once and are thus equally dispensable. Either remove all of them to eliminate 90% of the weight or cherry-pick the biggest items for removal.

Goto step 1.

1. Tell yourself you will remove it when you get home, then forget and carry it around for another four months. Remove it at step 3.

English annoyances

2026-06-13

#list #language #pedantry

what they say (what I wish they'd say)

Abbreviation/Slang

the a.m. (the morning)

bro/bruh ()

ts (this, this shit, type shit)

Confusion

110%, 200%, 1000% (100%)

begs the question (raises the question)

defiantly, definately (definitely)

irregardless (regardless, irrespective)

narcotic (drug, psychoactive)

weary of (wary of, tired of)

whence (when)

Euphemism/Censorship

corn (porn)

crossed the rainbow bridge (died)

euthanized (killed)

f*ck (fuck)

passed, passed away, passed on (died)

PDF file (pedophile)

put down (killed)

sui (suicide)

trying to get pregnant (fucking raw)

unalive (kill)

Gender

females (women, women and girls)

LGBTs (LGBT people)

trans (trans people)

transactivist (trans activist)

transwomen (trans women)

we're pregnant (we're having a baby)

Technology

Android (cell phone)

charger (AC adapter)

the cloud (a server)

CPU (computer)

download from my phone (copy from my phone)

inbox (message)

jack (plug or socket)

male, female, gender¹ (plug, socket, polarity)

plug (outlet)

power bank (battery)

USB (flash drive, USB cable)

1. Go to the hardware store sometime and tell them you need a penis-penis adapter.

State of Our 'Place, 2026-06-21

2026-06-21

#meta #soop

Card of the Now

[picture]

King of Wands from Modern Witch Tarot

New Entries

The commonplace is starting to resemble my private notes more closely, with lots of weird lists, more random short posts, and fewer essays. I put together an absurdly long list of cooking tips and added some recipes. I sketched out some of my philosophy for the site. I posted some pixel art.

Suggested reading:

whisper sweet nothings to your computer

minimal english

Everyday Carry

Unintended Consequences

Website Features

Badges

I've made a few more badges for the rotation in the bottom right corner. I also added a section in About with ones for memberships in clubs and directories, several of which I made for lack of an existing badge.

I also made one for another project on a whim, which was fun.

Glossary

Posts whose filename starts with YYYY-MM-DD_def- now act as glossary entries. When I use a term from the glossary, you can hover it to see the definition. Example: fondleslab

Hashtags

The biggest change to the site's design is that tags are now displayed alongside links to posts. This provides clues as to what a post will be about. It also enables you to jump to hashtags from all over the site, which I hope will improve the exploration experience since the hashtags are basically the only organization there is.

It doesn't look that great, and I still haven't decided how to do nested tags. But it's better!

Navigation

We now automatically build a list of slashpages and a sitemap. They're linked to in All. (Also, the sitemap is linked to by the pipe that separates <-- Prev and Next --> when CSS is off. ¯\(ツ)/¯)

I'd like to make a little navigation guide at some point — suggested hashtags/posts to check out, brief descriptions of the slashpages and what tags mean, etc.

robots.txt

For a while, I didn't have a robots.txt. Why would I care if robots visit my site? Sounds great! (I don't pay for traffic.)

Then, when testing things out, I realized that clients will pretty much always attempt to fetch the file, and it might be infinitesimally faster to serve an empty file. So I used a 0 byte robots.txt for a hot minute.

Later I came across a post by Seirdy about what they put in theirs. We're mostly on the same page, so I copied their file to block a bunch of IP snitches and a few other creepy bots. But I decided to delete the parts blocking AI scrapers.

I went back and forth on it. On the one hand, I hate most of these companies, and my data might help enrich them in some small way. On the other, I like the idea of my data shifting the output in some small way toward my own opinions. Even being ingested by an unserious fascist project like Grok would be good: it would make it ever-so-slightly less fashy and ever-so-slightly more likely to spout off in favor of trans rights (and ever-so-slightly more difficult for its owners to sculpt into a nazi).

What finally made up my mind was that by blocking all the scrapers who respect robots.txt I would just be giving a leg up to the ones who don't.

I've been scraped by at least one weird AI startup already! I can't find it now, but at some point https://geist.haus/ had a copy of my About page show up on Google. God knows what they actually do. They describe themselves thus:

Research at the seam of psychology and machine intelligence.

GeistHaus is building AI for therapy and assessment — the kind of careful, structured, deeply attentive work that has historically demanded a trained human across the room. The project is early, and quiet on purpose. More to come as the work matures.

For researchers and clinical advisors: If you work in personality assessment, psychodynamic or psychoanalytic traditions, or on the AI side of long-horizon systems and the evaluation of open-ended conversational work, we'd like to hear from you. Particularly if you've thought about what it would mean to do this kind of work well.

Sounds like snake oil to me. Snake oil that now contains a small sliver of my bad opinions. >:)

Projects

I've found myself unexpectedly drawn to making webpages since the last soop. These are perhaps pushing the site more in the direction of a digital garden. In the last three months I've made:

All the apps (except maybe the breath counter, that might have been there)

A digital Death Note

HAND THING DOT PARTY

machine wash cold

A small library of illegal zines readable in your browser

Let's talk about a few that I didn't write a post about.

Digital Death Note

The Digital Death Note is just a coat of paint on a guestbook script provided by Web 1.0 Hosting. It's the first thing I've added to the site that enables user interaction (unless you count mailto links).

If you're not familiar, a Death Note is a fictional book that kills anyone whose name is written in it. Since magic isn't real, this digital version is just a public avenue for wishing death on people. Sort of a wishing well for people with malice in their hearts.

I was curious to see what people would do with it. I thought it would be much more interesting to collect the names of people who my visitors wish were dead than those of the visitors themselves. Of course, people can always write their own name, and might be more likely to do so if they notice it's a reskinned guestbook, but I primed the pump by listing humorous (?) deaths of famous people I genuinely hate.

Results so far are mixed. First of all — spoiler alert — most of the names are from me. I started submitting them there instead of updating the page; I don't remember why. Other than me, I've had three responses so far.

The first just said "nobody". I thought that was lame and deleted it.

The second one was intriguing. The name listed is Joriel Alves, who as far as I can tell is not a public figure. So someone either wished death on a person they know personally or signed their own name. The cause of death is also interesting: "shot by a friend near a lamppost". If the user was following my lead, it could be an inside joke, some irony about Joriel. Or... maybe they just wanted it to be something specific and that was what they landed on. In any case, it's exactly the sort of respose I hoped to receive.

A third arrived yesterday. Victim's name: "The woke owner of this site". The cause of death is even longer than the name (warning, repugnant):
> She goes to blowjob everyone previously listed in this site, then realizes she was on the wrong side of history all the time. She goes to the Democrats HQ wearing a Harry Potter shirt, goes down on her knees like that autistic woman who did so when Trump won the first time, screams like a pig and takes her own life by swallowing a dildo and getting out of breath. Her last words are "I can't breathe".

I can't decide whether I should delete it or not, but I'm leaning toward leaving it. On the one hand, it's not in the spirit of the page because it doesn't really wish death on anyone (more like a rape fantasy), doesn't list a name or even a pseudonym, and the cause of death is far more elaborate than the Death Note rules allow. And then of course there's the excruciating rightwinger stupidity.

However, I've already played fast and loose with the Death Note rules, and the user followed my lead — and even tried to make a (racist teenager's equivalent of a) joke, which shows effort. And while the text isn't funny on its own merit, it is funny that someone was butthurt enough to post it.

Update: I'm sure there will be more submissions like this in the future if my site receives traffic, so I decided I will now hide offensive entries by default and provide a toggle to show them. That way my visitors have a warning before they encounter the rancidity and I can continue to bask in the rustled jimmies.

Those two actual responses really delighted me; I'm glad I decided to advertise it on the home page. But lately I've been wishing I had a normal guestbook too, so that sweethearts/dorks like the person who wrote "nobody" can leave their mark. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, I can only have one instance of the guestbook script, so this will have to wait until I set up a VPS.

Noliza

Noliza is a little joke that I think is funny. It was inspired by the moral panic over "mentally ill" people talking to chatbots, and by the way chatbot guardrails abruptly stop you from expressing yourself about taboo subjects like suicide.

Some people really want these things to meet an impossible standard: perfectly safe and perfectly truthful. I made a chatbot that actually achieves that standard! It just so happens to also render it completely useless.

As I recall, all Eliza really did was rephrase people's statements as questions or ask "and how did that make you feel?". I figure a simple "no" is just as realistic.

(I also thought "Should I text my ex?" would make for a good single-serving site, but shoulditextmyex.com is already taken by some grifter who fails to answer the question correctly.)

Wander Console Builder

It would be really annoying to have to enter each Wander URL in wander.js, with proper quoting and commas and so forth, so I wrote a little shell script to take care of it for me. Easy peasy! But most people don't even know what a shell script is, much less how to write one; they need a little help. Wander Console Builder is an effort in that direction.

Besides simplified URL input, it includes a rudimentary custom theme creator. I also made it easier to check if a website can be shown in an iframe — just click the link and it will try to load it. (I plan to streamline this with a check-links-mode.)

Also, I made the theme super gay. It's priDEMONth and it was really fun. Ideally it will encourage queer people to join Wander and act as defensive coloration against bigots.

It's so easy to find boring technical bullshit with tools like Wander and so hard to find anything cool. I figure lowering the technical barrier might improve that situation.

The Hellaverse is Transphobic

2026-06-22

#tv #rant

The other day I finished watching Helluva Boss for the umpteenth time. Helluva Boss is a spinoff of Hazbin Hotel, which is essentially a queer Disney cartoon musical set in hell. Helluva is much less saccharine than Hazbin — it's downright filthy, honestly — and centers on romantic relationships that are surprisingly compelling (considering they're between cartoon animals and demons) (and demon clowns). Here's a highlight from season 2, when it becomes more musically oriented like Hazbin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUOvuKW2O_I

Just about every character in the Hellaverse (as the shared fictional universe is called) is queer. You could count straight characters on one hand — if you could even rack your brain long enough to think of them — and they're mostly minor characters. The only major hetero character is in a relationship with a bisexual one which only qualifies as "straight" on the barest technicality.

This is wonderful! What a treat! But it throws into glaring relief the paucity of trans characters. There's only one named character who's trans — Sallie Mae — and she's minor enough that it's a surprise she even rated a name. She's just a token.¹ The only other trans "characters" are background decorations.

The queerest show in existence has more straight people in it than trans people.

And why? Numerous characters whose storylines don't even involve sex or romance have had their sexualities proclaimed in merchandise and social media posts. Why can't they just arbitrarily declare them to be trans the same way?²

The near-total absence of trans characters turns the queer-utopic Hell into something much darker: a vision of cis LGB community cleansed of gender-described undesirables. Their existence is obliquely referenced, but they're not seen. Where did they all go? (For that matter, where did all theys go? There are exactly zero characters who don't use he/him or she/her pronouns.)

Is this really the fantasy world cis queer people want to retreat into?³

The Hellaverse is not totally without gender diversity. Angel Dust from Hazbin is sufficiently femme that he says his chest fur is mistaken for boobs (a mistake encouraged by his wardrobe choices). The demons in Helluva all seem to instinctively crossdress on their visits to the human realm, and Moxxie — the bisexual half of the "straight" couple — finds other excuses to femme up.⁴ Men and women of the Hellaverse are not restricted to gender-stereotyped roles; Milly, the straight woman from Helluva, is the strongest and most vicious fighter of the lot.

Maybe these features help gentle negative reactions to the show's systematic cis bias. I certainly appreciate them! But the fact remains that the only gender transgression celebrated by the show takes place within the confines of binary gender assignment. This show is comfortable with people whose gender expression violates social norms, but not people who change their gender altogether.

And to return to Sallie Mae for a moment: let's just say it's interesting that we know she's trans due to a trait that's sexually dimorphic in demons (the color pattern on the horns). A trans-inclusive worldview would of course include people who are easily identified in this manner, but it would also include people who aren't. It would represent gendered traits as mutable, fluid, and not necessarily obvious. Trans characters would be plentiful — including ones who are neither male nor female — not rare. In short, a trans-positive Hellaverse would depict gender the same way it depicts sexuality.

Maybe things will improve in the next season of Helluva Boss which is still a long, long, loooong three months away. But I doubt it.

1. Which does still put it head and shoulders above ~100% of TV. She isn't a stereotype and she's voiced by an actual trans woman — that's good. It just isn't good enough! We shouldn't have to settle for the bare minimum. (And I don't think I should feel the need to pre-emptively justify criticism and soften it with praise, but, well, I do. Thanks, society!)

2. Maybe they don't want cis VAs playing trans characters. Admirable. So hire some trans VAs! It's often said that, well, we would hire trans people, but they just aren't around! we can't find them! Which is... surprising, given how many of us are unemployed and would leap at a work opportunity.

3. I mean, I try to retreat into it too. It's still a great show (I could watch ~0 TV if I couldn't appreciate cissexist shows). But how does something like this happen without cissexist queer people? I'm sure the straights enjoy and work on it too, but... well, I guess I don't expect much from them.

4. By the way: check out this adorable piece of merch. You could probably write an entire thesis on just that episode and its dicey depiction of gender. Anyway, the pin was too cute for me to resist!

gender-described

2026-06-23

gender-described

transgender; genderqueer. Origin: Gendertrash from Hell¹ (written without a hyphen)

#glossary

1. Read the scans then buy a beautiful new copy from an awesome trans publisher

Better Regex

2026-06-23

#tech

Rationale

I love regular expressions. They're so useful! I use them every day. Perhaps due to living in the shell, it seems like most of what I do on a computer is manipulate strings. Support for regex is omnipresent, and even a shitty implementation like the one in nano can handle 90% of my needs.

I also hate regular expressions. They're notoriously frustrating. Longer patterns especially are difficult to read and littered with backslash escapes. Everything supports them, sure, but they all use a slightly different flavor; there's always a little trial-and-error involved at the beginning to figure out what features are supported by whatever engine you find yourself using.

I have neither the skill nor the inclination to write a new engine for regexes, but if I did, here are some ideas I have to make them less painful.

Of course, if they were ever adopted, they would just constitute one more slight variation to trip you up.

Periods Suck

Nearly every string you will ever parse contains a dot: every properly formed sentence, (almost) every filename, and every URL. Most code will have it too.

Do I ever remember to escape it? No, I do not. Usually it doesn't matter, but relying on luck is almost as bad as relying on memory. Worse, because an unescaped dot seemingly works fine, you're unlikely to notice your mistake.

If we must use a tiny, common character, the comma would be a much better option. But we have an even better ASCII character at our disposal: the asterisk. Using a star as a wildcard is intuitive to everyone, since it's used in globs and boolean search and even everyday natural language.

You might object that it makes more sense as the zero-or-more quantifier because that's closer to how it works in those other contexts — the star can stand for anything or nothing. But the actual regex equivalent to a wildcard * is .*, not *. That's already sufficiently different that you can't really think of the wildcard star and the zero-or-more quantifier as expressing the same thing without tripping yourself up.

We don't need to replace it, either. We can express the same thing as .* with (.?)+ (or (.+)? — they're subtly different but probably interchangeable?). We could simplify that further in our hypothetical regex by obviating the parentheses. Putting it all together, instead of writing .*, we would write *?+. It's one more character, sure, but the meaning is straightforward.

This syntax would unfortunately clash with existing modifiers that set the matching mode, but I tend to think that should be changed anyway. .?+ is possessive, .+? is lazy. Better hope you got them in the right order! Is possessive even useful for anything? I only ever use lazy, except when I mix up the order.

Write with a Lisp

Everything is so much easier to read when it's grouped with parentheses. You can do this already, but it automatically creates a capture group. You have to write the unwieldy (?:string) if you want to make a group without capturing it. Groups should be non-capturing by default and only capture when you tell them to.

Aside from possible performance issues, capturing by default discourages you from making groups when you have to capture some of them, because you have to count the groups to get to the one you want. If you add or delete a group, you have to renumber your references.

Capture groups shouldn't even be numbered at all, they should be named. Something like ({name}:string), maybe, then write references in template style like {name} or ${name}.

In fact, parentheses should be mandatory for matching a string: foo|bar should match fobar and fooar but not foo or bar. If you want it to behave the old way, write (foo)|(bar).

Negate All the Things

I often wish I could negate a group in the same way you can negate a character class. [^2026-06-23_regex-f] matches any character except f; (^fuck) should match any string except fuck.

There are some wonderful engines out there that implement something close to this as "negative lookahead" with (?!string). All of the lookaround features are very cool, but the only one I ever want is negative lookahead, and I'd prefer to use the same negation character for everything.

There is a subtle issue here in that lookarounds don't consume any characters, whereas a normal group does: fuck(?!shit)ass matches fuckass but not fuckcuntass (or fuckshitass). It would be nice if we could append a question mark to get something more like lookahead behavior: fuck(^shit)ass would match fuckcuntass but not fuckass (or fuckshitass), whereas fuck(^shit)?ass would match both fuckass and fuckcuntass (but not fuckshitass).

Maybe we could do something ridiculous like fuck((^shit)?)?ass to match the behavior of the negative lookahead. Or just perform a negative lookahead when invoked with a ?. Or just keep the normal lookarounds.

Literally

We really need to be able to write string literals to save us from escape hell. This is another feature generalized from character classes: I much prefer writing [*] to \\*, but if I wrote [f*$k] I would match f, *, $, and k but not f*$k. I could fix the pattern by writing f[*][$]k, but that sucks worse than f\\*\\$k. (Exactly two characters worse.)

Just some backticks would do the trick. I think some implementations default to interpreting stuff in groups as string literals, but that's one of those surprising gotchas; it should be a different character. Then I could just write:

`f*$k`

If you need to capture a literal for some reason, wrap it in parens:

({swear}:`f*$k`)

Same for negation:

(^`f*$k`)

Other than the interpretation of characters, it should behave the same as any other token, so you can do things like:

`f*$k`{2}

I'm sure this would end up turning into escape hell sometimes too, but it's worth it for literal strings!

Curly Quantifiers

You should be able to write f{1-3} instead of f{1,3} to match f, ff, and fff. ONCE AGAIN, LIKE IN CHARACTER CLASSES: [A-z].

If you write f{1,3} it should match f and fff but not ff.

Better sed

Regexes are great, but you need some way to use them. The program for our shiny new system needs some work.

Instead of sed s/pattern/substitute/g, we should write each part separately, like: bed 'pattern' 'substitute'. Yes, you can use a different delimiter than the slash, but why do you have to use one at all? Just make them separate arguments.

Global and multiline should be on by default, substitute should be the default operation, and there shouldn't be any operations like delete that are easily replaced with substitute.

It should be much easier to use the contents of a file as a substitute. Something like bed --file 'pattern' 'myfile.txt'. Or just make it work with cat in a command substitution like you would expect it to.

Insertions should be much simpler. Instead of writing something like sed 's|(foo)(bar)|\\1 inserted text \\2|g you should be able to write something like bed --insert 'foo{%}bar' ' inserted text '.

APL Expressions: Let's Get Weird

It's easy to type weird characters now if you're technically competent — just turn on the compose key and write some definitions in ~/XCompose. (Admittedly, XCompose is even more cursed than regex, but you can always download someone else's definitions. (All the defaults I've encountered were horrible.)) Unicode has a shitload of characters that are well covered by fonts like Unifont. Why not use some of them instead of limiting ourselves to ASCII that we'll inevitably have to escape?

I mean, sure, you'll still have to deal with Unicode sometimes, especially if you write in a non-Latin language. We can never totally escape escapes. But it would sure make life easier!

We'd need characters that are different enough to distinguish from "normal" ones, but similar enough to recognize. Thankfully, Unicode is massive, so that isn't a problem. Here are some possibilities:

Asterisk: ✷ or ✲ (or many others — there are a TON of stars)

Caret: ⍲ or ↥

Dollar: Ֆ or ₴ or Ꞩ

Plus: ✜

Question mark: ⸮ or 🯄 or ¿

Backtick: « » or 𐞁 or ⍘

Curly brackets: ⦃ ⦄

Parentheses: ⸨ ⸩

Square brackets: ｢ ｣ or ⟦ ⟧

Sadly, using Unicode in your terminal still kind of sucks. You get weird rendering issues, characters that are actually several characters in a trenchcoat, etc. And even with a nice XCompose, it would be kind of annoying.

HALP

I suspect there are regex programs out there already that would make me happy, syntax I'm unaware of, sed tricks, etc. Please email me any great tips you have! Just hit the feedback button.

Carrot Float

2026-06-24

#recipe

Carrot juice

Vanilla ice cream

Scoop vanilla ice cream into cup.

Fill the rest of the cup with carrot juice.

Extremely good.

Give the bastards all the excuses they want

2026-06-24

#politics #rant

Fools often respond to calls for militant action against the fascist state with the cliché "That's exactly what they want! Don't give them an excuse!"

This is horseshit of the highest order.

What they want

No government wants to spark broad militant resistance. Why would they? That's their biggest fear!

The entire source of their power is all the men with guns they have. The last thing they want is for their force monopoly to be challenged.

The only real departure fascism makes from liberalism is doing away with the window-dressing of rules, the make-believe that their power comes from anywhere but the boots they can put on our throats. This is why it's fragile: people aren't as confused by bureaucratic pretend-playing as they are under other forms of government because they see the state flagrantly break its own rules all the time.

What the regime wants is a docile population content to wait for the next rigged election.

Excuses, excuses

What excuse have they ever needed for anything they've done?

What excess of activism did they need to justify spending hundreds of billions of dollars on the paramilitary that roams our country rounding up people of color and stuffing them into concentration camps?

Did our steady flow of immigrants — the best-behaved of inhabitants, boons to our culture and economy — suddenly do something egregious to justify racial cleansing?

Did Alex Pretti "give them an excuse" to execute him in the street when he tried to help up a woman they shoved to the ground?

Did Renée Good ask to be blown apart while her wife looked on in horror by blocking them with her car?

When they feel they need an excuse, they just make one up. They say their victims committed crimes, had a gun, or bumped them with their car. They lie constantly. It makes zero difference what the reality is. We've all seen them murder with impunity, repeatedly.

This line of reasoning is nothing more than a repetition of fascist propaganda. It exonerates them of their actions and shifts the blame onto their victims.

Worst of all, it discourages people from taking the very steps required to end fascism.

Diff Poetry

2026-06-25

#poem #code #fish

[picture]

Diff poem from Against Prisons: "What criminals?" I?," / "What / "What other?"

[picture]

Diff poem from Now: That's It's "something else" background."

[picture]

Diff poem from If We Go, We Go On Fire: "together", / "alone"

[picture]

Diff poem from Why Riot?: we're / "cultural capital" / "undesirable" / "enormously--consistent"

[picture]

Diff poem from Now: "Humanity" we're / "young people", "uncontrolled ones,"

[picture]

Diff poem from Now: 'The Party', / don't / don't / 'send cheque'

[picture]

Diff poem from Now: it's / It's / "everyday," / "everyday" / It's

[picture]

Diff poem from I Don't Bash Back I Shoot First: don't shit--unless "Friendship, Contempt--these following"

These are the results of a way of making algorithmic blackout poetry I discovered by accident.¹

I noticed that the Prairieland Zines were littered with garbage characters in NCSA Mosaic, which would not do. The quotation marks, dashes, etc. were all garbled, thanks to fancy Unicode punctuation (“‘curly’ quotes” — emdashes — ellipses …) that Mosaic can't display.²

For the most part, this isn't a problem on pnppl.cc. While I do use UTF-8, I convert common characters to an ASCII equivalent in the HTML (then back again with CSS for display on modern systems).

But the zines don't get fed through the program that generates the rest of my site. They just... sit there, ready to go. So, they never get put through my make-everything-work-with-Mosaic filter, hence the problem.

To solve this, I ran the zines through a lovely program called konwert.

function klean --argument-names html
    konwert utf8-iso1/html $html |
        konwert iso1-utf8/html |
        konwert html-htmldec
end

This converts everything to Latin-1, an extended ASCII³ that includes most of the euro characters it's missing, then back into UTF-8. In effect, it produces a UTF-8 document reduced to the Latin-1 character subset.⁴ It then encodes everything that needs to be encoded — &<>" and non-ASCII — into character entities. It sounds nuts, but it works. Mosaic supports Latin-1 (or something akin to it, like the Windows Codepage) and the extended characters display just fine.

So, I mostly just changed a bunch of punctuation. I needed to check it out and make sure I didn't screw anything up,⁵ so I diffed it with the old one. But that produced a line-based diff. Maybe those are ok for code, but for English they're terrible. You have to hunt for the character that actually changed. It's aggravating.

Well, we also have something called wdiff which diffs based on word splits.⁶ It still doesn't show the character that changed (like Forgejo's wonderful system) but it's good enough. It seems pretty useless at first because it doesn't color highlight anything, but it accepts arguments for strings to print before and after an insert/delete, so you can roll your own by printing color control codes.

Once I started skimming through the results, there was a striking rhythm that reminded me of something.

Blackout poetry is when you take a book and sharpie over everything except the words you want to assemble. I realized that I could use the wdiff highlight feature to make the parts of the text that didn't change invisible — just set the foreground and background color to black.

# poetry diff
function pdiff --argument-names old new --description "turn pair of files into blackout poetry"
    set highlight insert
    set skip deleted

#   set highlight delete
#   set skip inserted

    set foreground setaf
    set background setab
    set black 0
    set white 15

    # we need to black out the contents before the first highlight
    tput $foreground $black
    tput $background $black
    wdiff \\
        --no-$skip \\
        --start-$highlight=(tput $foreground $black; tput $background $white) \\
        --end-$highlight=(tput $foreground $black; tput $background $black) \\
        $old \\
        $new
end

All said and done, we can generate our diff poems like so:

function latin-poetry --argument-names html_in
    # psub lets stdout masquerade as a file
    pdiff $html_in (klean $html_in | psub) | less -r
end

latin-poetry index.html

The approach I used to convert the files means that it's mostly only words with an apostrophe, quote, or emdash in them that get highlighted. That emphasizes the most interesting and least interesting elements of the text. Quotes get you words that are being spoken about, or that the writer is distancing themself from, or that begin or end a sentence. Emdashes get you pairs of words that sentences pivot on with a particular rhythm.

Apostrophes get you people's names (as in {Name}'s), but mostly they get you contractions that are widely used in English. Many potential poems are ruined by too much repetition of words like it's, that's, can't, isn't, etc. However, this phenomenon also contributes to the ones that do work. We get both the more interesting words and some helper words to connect them.

I'm sure there are ways to generate the diff that will produce better results. Just replace klean with your own function. If you find any good ones, please email me and share them.

1. It's sort of like found art. Is all generative art found art since you have to search through noise for it?

2. The other source of incompatibility is the way HTML character entities are encoded. (If you're not sure what these are: you've probably seen & before, which is how you write & — ampersand — in HTML.) You can write them as names (&) if one has been assigned, or as a number in decimal (&) or hexadecimal (&). Mosaic doesn't understand most of the names and doesn't support hexadecimal entities, but it does support decimal entities, so I output everything in that form.

3. ASCII only uses 7 of the 8 bits that make up a byte, so it can only encode 128 characters. If you turn on the high bit, you get another 128 for a total of 256 possible characters. UTF-8 is also sort of an extended ASCII, in that anything that's allowed by ASCII is also allowed by UTF-8. With Unicode, you use more bytes per character in exchange for more than a million possibilities, which enables you to use the same encoding for all languages.

4. Why not encode into ASCII? Because there are lots of characters like áéóç used in some zines. We could throw them away, but Mosaic displays them fine, and it would constitute a much more significant degradation of the text than replacing angled quotes with straight ones.

5. Like I said, the documents are ultimately served as UTF-8, and while I accept the loss of unnecessary features like stylistic quotes, I don't want to wipe out stuff like Arabic, Hebrew, Chinese, etc. Those get put back in. It's fine if they garble on old systems, which would have no way of displaying them anyway.

6. In a git repo, you can do git diff --word-diff.

Happy Burn-A-Flag Day

2026-07-04

#politics #journal

I lie awake on the 4th of July as they celebrate what is — very charitably — the end of a failed experiment. How fitting that they express themselves through decorative explosives.

How many have lain awake to the sound of American bombs, knowing they might die at any moment?

"The rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there."

A flag. A pacifier for the brain. That's all nationalists really care about.

Everything else can get blown to hell.

A brief defense of veganism against the left

2026-07-05

#vegan #politics

Veganism is often criticized on anti-capitalist grounds for its adherents' adoption of plant-based consumption habits. In this telling, the trappings of a vegan lifestyle are just another instance of "consumerism": seeking identity and meaning by buying stuff. It is also supposed that these changes in consumer behavior are utterly useless in accomplishing the end goal of animal liberation: all that really matters is a revolution to abolish capitalism.¹

I'm willing to grant these (highly questionable) claims if my interlocutor is arguing in good faith. We definitely should have a revolution, burn down all the farms, and establish a free society. And there definitely are vegans motivated by a consumer identity — some of them don't even care about nonhumans at all and adopt a plant-based diet for their health or something.

Once companies realized they could make a buck off it, veganism underwent a rapid recuperation. It's now presented as just another "dietary preference" to profit from, shorn of political content. Together with the green scare, this has resulted in a decidedly liberal bent to the vegan movement.

Changing your diet and your vote is obviously insufficient to change the world.

Even so, I always come back to a thought experiment: imagine you live in a society where humans are farmed in the billions. In this world, nearly everyone eats human meat nearly every day. They wear clothing made of human hair and skin and adorn themselves with human bones and teeth. Before a product is released to the general public, it must first be tested on human unpersons, who are then killed.

You desperately want to change this abominable state of affairs. You tell everyone who will listen how terrible the farms are. You smuggle out illegal footage proving what they do. You break into a laboratory and free the people being tortured there.

Do you keep eating human meat?

Do you proclaim the injustice of farming humans while picking pieces of them out of your teeth?

1. Aside: One of the most irritating things about leftists is their insistence that nothing one does as an individual matters. Once you get enough individuals together, though, the quantity transforms them into a completely different thing whose actions actually have consequences (and are probably good by default).

Semantic HTML is a Myth

2026-07-06

#tech #snark

<center> is to be avoided, because it mixes up style and content, which must be kept separate at all costs.

But <p class="centered"> plus .centered { text-align: center; } — now that's some clean code!

Likewise, you should always use <em> and <strong> instead of <i> and <b>. Someone might want to emphasize (or... strengthen?) parts of your content differently than with italics or boldface. In this scenario, they can't just style the <i> and the <b> exactly the same way one would style the "semantic" versions, for... reasons.

A good rule of thumb is that the more you have to type, the more semantic your HTML is. Hence why we can no longer use <blink> or <marquee> and instead must write god knows how many lines of CSS to accomplish the exact same result. Typing is a ritual we perform to sanctify our HTML. The more you type, the more blessed your website.

The Best President

2026-07-11

#politics

It's unclear who the worst U.S. president was. While it's tempting to select Donald Trump, that might be a little unfair to the many scumbags who ruled the country before it became a democracy in 1965. We might select George Washington, the slaveowner who played a key role in creating this clusterfuck, or Andrew Jackson, a particularly bloodthirsty genocidaire. In the democratic era, one might point to Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan, the pioneers of Trumpian politics; to George W. Bush or Barack Obama, who built up the power of the executive branch that he wields; or to Joe Biden, who squandered the last opportunity to bring us back from the brink.

But it is very clear who the best U.S. president was: William Henry Harrison. He had the decency to die after only 31 days in office. That makes him — if my math is correct — 97.9% better than a single-term president, 99% better than a two-termer, and ~100% better than FDR or a third-term Trump. The next best president, James A. Garfield, spent nearly 200 days holding unjust power and had to be deposed by a concerned citizen.

[picture]

Painting of William Henry Harrison, the best president

[picture]

Photo of Leon Czolgosz, a concerned citizen

About pnppl.cc

2026-07-06

#meta

She started keeping a journal — had been, in fact, secretly doing so for some time: the furtive act of a deranged person.
— PKD

Welcome!

Welcome to my commonplace. It's also, perhaps, my digital garden? I won't be offended if you just call it my blog.

I've been a prodigious note-taker for years. Being able to carry my notes with me and search them digitally means I can actually refer back to them, and often do. It recently occurred to me that some of these notes (when tidied up a bit) might be of interest to other people. I call this site a commonplace because it's an attempt to translate that existing practice into a public form.

I also write stuff that I don't refer to but is hopefully valuable in other ways: fiction, essays, code, etc. And since I'm at it anyway, I might as well post art I make that doesn't fit in a text file.

I hope that sharing my commonplace publicly will encourage me to write more, more intentionally, for a wider audience. It would be especially nice if it made me actually document my tech projects so I don't have to re-figure them out whenever I come back to them after a long time. I said I was a prodigious note-taker, not a good one.

I would love to get an email from you! comments@pnppl.cc

Copyleft

Intellectual property is a fake idea; unfortunately, we live in a world where it reigns supreme. Copyleft gives us a tool to turn copyright against itself. It means that you can do whatever you want with the content of this site, as long as you extend the same right to others.

This site's content is licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 (license text) with the attribution requirement waived, unless otherwise specified. If this causes issues for you, let me know and I'll probably be happy to do a public domain declaration.

Code that I share here is AGPLv3 (license text) if unspecified. The code used to build the site is covered by other licenses.

Install Victor Mono

This site really looks much better in Victor Mono. It's my favorite font. Even though it's monospace, it's a pleasure to read.

I could force it on you, but I find that rude. I block remote fonts in my browser: they're usually hosted on Google's CDN, so they call home; they're a big blob you have to download just to read some text; and they don't respect your preference of default font. So, please install it. I promise you'll like it.

Unfortunately, if you're on an Android phone, I think you have to be rooted to install a font and it's a big pain in the ass. So, I do try to load it on mobile with a media query. You'll just have to block it if you hate it.

Hotkeys

Buttons with underlined letters can be activated using that letter as the hotkey; exactly how depends on the browser. On Firefox it's alt-shift-hotkey. You can also navigate through headings with alt-shift-number, but it's currently rather buggy.

Memberships

We have to go deeper: technical details, etc.

My goal is to have to change as little as possible about my existing approach to writing: plaintext, formatted in whatever way feels right, written in my notes app or shell. I'd like for the software to adapt to me, not the other way around. My one concession is Markdown. I don't really like it, but it's cornered the market, and it's close enough that I'm willing to bend a little. Extensions make it much less painful — particularly Wikilink syntax support. The text files that pnppl.cc is built from are the One True Commonplace, with the website providing some extra features that are nice to have but not required. You can access the original text file for a post with the txt button in the top right corner.

You can also access them through the git repo, which handily doubles as a version history and complete source of the site. If you just want to grab all the posts in plaintext, that's at ../txt/!pnppl-txt.zip.

pnppl.cc does not use any Javascript except for the Search page.¹ It's a necessary compromise. If you want to search without enabling js, you can grab the text files and search them locally. This is easily accomplished in the shell, eg grep -i "search term" *.md. I like ripgrep.

A major goal I have is for the site to be usable as plain HTML. The sites that have stood the test of time, that still display perfectly and are a pleasure to read, are all plain old HTML. (Usually hosted on URLs like http://lab.cs.mit.edu/faculty/~johnsmith and miraculously preserved in their entirety by the Wayback Machine.) As a fan of retrocomputing, I'd also like to be able to access my site on anything with a web browser, and trying to accomplish that level of compatibility is the stuff of web design nightmares... unless it's just plain old HTML. To that end, I've been testing the site in progress on NCSA Mosaic v2.7b6. Sure, it's the last version... but it's the last version of the first major browser, and I can run it on my computer. I figure if it works in Mosaic, it ought to work in anything. HTML is wonderfully resilient. Pretty much every browser ever made happily displays malformed HTML without issue. Modern browsers still render supposedly obsolete tags just fine, and Mosaic will just ignore tags it doesn't understand.

With legacy compatibility covered, we can use stylesheets to make the site pretty on modern browsers, since CSS doesn't (usually) make them slow to a crawl or execute arbitrary code. Now, I hate web design, and I find CSS particularly frustrating, so I've relied on the stylesheet that xlog came with as a starting point. It used a big framework and weighed in at nearly a megabyte, but I've got it pared down to about 20K now. It handles dark mode, responsiveness, etc., which all sounded exhausting to do from scratch.

I selected Xlog as the best static site generator for my requirements: everything I cared about still worked with Javascript disabled and it supported must-have features: backlinks and mentions. (The way mentions work is that when the name of a post is used in another post, it's automatically turned into a link. Backlink support adds a section at the foot of a post that lists all the other posts that link to it.) If I'm going hypertext, I want all the benefits, but I also don't want to spend a lot of time fussing over the website when it's the words that really matter. And given the wide variety of subjects, it would be nice to have some ability to discover posts.

For mentions, the underline is broken with dashes to de-emphasize it and so you can distinguish it from a manual link. Links to glossary entries have a dotted underline and you can hover them to see the definition: fondleslab. External links are followed by a % sign, because it kind of looks like an X and also kind of like the little external link symbol a bunch of sites use. I wanted to keep it ASCII when possible, as well as webfont-free. (Email, torrent magnet, PDF, Wikipedia, and YouTube links have their own annotations.)

Still, I'm not quite willing to give up UTF-8 for my posts. UTF-8 is so good. I'm addicted to the emdash. Sometimes I even use an emoji. I figure a garbled character here and there in the unlikely event that someone actually uses Mosaic or another legacy browser is an acceptable sacrifice, and I've tried to ameliorate the issue by outputting ASCII versions of commonly used characters that degrade cleanly, like the emdash, ≠, etc. With CSS enabled you'll still see the original character.

1. JavaScript is also used on a few other "special" pages: Digital Death Note and some Web Applications. These are generally small, optional snippets; anything non-optional will be specifically marked as such.

Credits

I'd like to extend my heartfelt gratitude to the following people who made pnppl.cc possible:

Emad Elsaid for creating Xlog

Yusuke Inuzuka for creating goldmark and other Xlog dependencies

Abhinav Gupta for creating goldmark-toc and goldmark-wikilink

rubjo for creating Victor Mono

Liam Bigelow for creating Pagefind

John MacFarlane for creating Pandoc

Matteo Paonessa for creating Caesium

Felix Hanau for creating Efficient Compression Tool

Everyone else who contributed to the above free and open-source projects and their dependencies

besties collective for providing gratis source code hosting and version control at git.gay

Web 1.0 Hosting for providing gratis retro-compatible webhosting and email

I'm also immensely grateful to the people behind the following software instrumental to making this site and maintaining my thin sliver of sanity:

Debian operating system

Xfce desktop environment

Chicago95 desktop theme

fish command shell

Termux terminal/Linux environment for Android

nano text editor

Markor text editor for Android

GIMP image editor

Gifsicle gif compressor

flexiGIF gif optimizer

lftp FTP client

Special thanks also to the people who cultivate, harvest, process, and distribute coffee, tea, cannabis, and carrot juice.

pnppl

2026-02-25

What the hell is "pnppl"?

It's me! pnppl is my hacker name. My screen name. My handle. My nom de plume. My... nom de guerre?

Why?

I can type it fast and it's usually not taken.

Okay but like... what does it mean? Where did it come from?

It means nothing. It means me. The origin is not very interesting; you can probably figure it out.

Alternatively, a friend of mine interprets it as P=NP.pl. This is much cooler and hackerier and I encourage you to read it that way, even though P≠NP and I've never written a line of Perl in my life.

How is it pronounced?

I say it "pee-nipple", but I'm also four years old. Please feel free to invent a more dignified pronunciation. Maybe make the ps silent.

Are you a swinger?

Not yet, but my inbox is always open.

#meta