Quick Update: This site now supports webmentions!

June 22, 2023

Yayyy I set this site up to support webmentions! I just followed this really easy guide for neocities. I still need to set it up to display them but that shouldn't be too hard :3 For those who don't know, webmentions are basically a way to enable cross-site communication - like getting @'ed on twitter but between any site and not needing to be on social media! It's very very cool and I hope more and more sites adopt it because I think it helps make the switch from social media to your own website easier!.

Back at It!

June 17, 2023

Damn, It’s been around a year since I last touched this! I’ve been really busy so I’ve got a lot of stuff to touch on.

💻 Tech Shit

I guess the big thing is I’ve been working on another website project. I’m a part of an anarchist distro and have been working on designing our website as well as archiving our library! There’s still a lot to do but it’s in a nice spot that I’m currently happy with. You can currently find it at autistici.org/fugitivedistro but hopefully soon we’ll have a dedicated domain name.

Some of the TO-DO things on the web side are to make more pages for our sticker and poster designs and maybe do like a card layout that displays an image. I may also want to do that for the Zine section and try to figure out some kind of like...section drop down so it’s not all displaying at once. I maybe also want to make a cute landing page with like a randomly selecting quote, all out different links and ways to contact us and have the library live on it’s own subsection page thingy!

Then on the archival side, currently everything is archived on the Internet Archive who I love but I also want redundancy - not having a single point of failure. A project I’m inspired by is the Anarchist Sticker Archive who use IPFS to host their flies and it’s something I’m looking into. Then I also want to make a regular torrent snapshot of the library! On top of that I wrote some C# programs to automatically organize the library files into a CSV with relevant meta data and another one to upload all of it to the Internet Archive. I want to clean those up – maybe combine them – and eventually find a place to host the code. It’s really case specific and I’m not exactly a great programmer so I don’t think anyone will really find them useful but it’s important to me that all the stuff about our project is open source and that we explain how we set everything up!

🔧 Tinker Shit

I’ve also been doing a lot of tinkering, salvaging and various hands on projects! One of the things I got really obsessed with after the 2020 uprising is that victory isn’t as far off as we might think so I’ve been thinking about okay so we ‘win’ within a particular territory and then are economically blockaded by the rest of the world, what do we do?

So on one side I’m doing a lot of tinkering and salvaging. There’s a lot of things that just aren’t needed so we’ll have all this stuff we can take apart and re-purpose. I don’t have anything /too/ exciting to report on this front yet other than I’ve been salvaging motors and testing them. This is still a new thing for me.

Similarly I’ve been messing around with HDPE recycling! It’s a really common plastic that's great to work with because it’s melting point is well beyond it’s burning point so it’s safe to rework! I’ve been collecting a lot of it though I’ve yet to actually get around to melting any of it and trying to make things out of it. I think the two big things I’d be trying to make would be gears because I’ve got some ideas and designs for some useful hand crank machines that I want to made and then I’d want to make just sheets of HDPE largely because I have a project I need a custom casing for and I think this would be the easiest way to make it!

🌱 Plants!

A lot of this is in the same vein of ‘what do we do when we’re under economic blockade’ but me and a friend are working on making fabric out of nettles! They grow everywhere here, we harvested a small batch last week and left them in some water and in a few days we’re going to get them out and start processing them, I’m really excited! I war particularly inspired by this [video]! But there’s also a secondary inspiration which is I wanna make clothes! I have tastes that are well above my price range of zero dollars but I have plenty of time to spare. Honestly that’s why I do a lot of projects – I’ve got no money but all the time in the world.

Along with harvesting nettle we also harvested a shit ton of lemon balm – which is invasive here – I’ve dried and started storing!

Also we’ve been growing stuff! Some sunflowers and potatoes! The potato plants are so big now, they make me so happy :)

We’ve also got some mint, chocolate mint and orange mint my partner got from their sibling, though they’ve kinda died but we have been able to revive them and they’ve been making new growth! Also we have some dandelion growing, I’m excited about using the roots for tea! Then once they’re in season I’m going to collect a bunch of seeds from Broadleaf Plantain to grow it! It works well as greens (same with the dandelion leaves) as well as has some nice anti-inflammation properties and is nice to make a balm out of.

✨ Other Things!

I’m hoping to spend more time on this website, I’ve been really inspired by Gwern.net and particularly the wikipedia like popup links and want to try something like that! Also maybe a total re-design? Unsure at this point.

I’ve also still been posting most of my updates and thoughts on Twitter which I don’t like, so I think I want to make another section for all my shorter updates and half baked thoughts.

Well, that’s everything for now! See y’all soon! ~💟

Been a Minute!

December 18, 2022

It’s been a minute! I’ve been busy working on the website for a distro project as well as just generally going through it – changing of seasons, lack of sunlight, my estrogen ran out for a few months (but I was able to get it refilled). I’m currently in the process of trying to pick myself up and get back at things but inertia is a motherfucker.

But I’m excited to get back to this, especially as twitter really goes to shit. I’ve got some cute design ideas I wanna try out >:)

Besides working on the website I’ve been filling up my time by doing a little writing, formatting zines, and catching up on anime and manga. I really lost my mind over Lycoris Recoil this season, just absolutely in loveeeeeee with it. Also been watching Bocchi the Rock and Witch From Mercury which I am both so fucking hype about. I really feel like Bocchi encompasses my internal anxiety world in a way I’ve never quite seen described elsewhere haha ^-^; and I love the Big Robot Lesbians and I pray that they actually end up together I need it!!!

Also incredibly excited for some stuff that’s been announced next year – I Favor The Villianess is getting an anime adaption which I am so excited for!!! AND!!!! It’s not confirmed but there is rumor that Whisper Me A Lovesong is getting an anime adaptation next year and I need it so badly…….I will cry if it doesn’t happen……..

As for reading, I think the only like really compelling thing I’ve read lately is Her Tale of Shim Chong, and usually I don’t really like the like poor girl x rich girl kinda stuff but this was done so well….and there's so much drama and heart break and such satisfying revenge arcs! If you decide to read it, trigger warning for physical abuse and sexual harassment!

Okay, that’s enough gushing about anime and manga lol.

What else has been going on….I picked up piano recently! A friend was looking to get rid of her keyboard so I grabbed it and it’s been really nice. I’ve been slacking on my practice as of late so I need to get back to that, but I’ve been really trying to learn some Mitsukiyo songs! I listened to one album and immediately I was like god damn I need to learn the piano…….

I think that’s the big stuff, I’ll try and update some of the website before the end of the year. Hope everyone is doing well <3

Scribbles on the First Page

September 9, 2022

Whenever I get a new notebook or sketchbook the first thing I do is mindlessly scribble in the first page to get over that ~newness~ feeling that stops me from actually using them. Consider this first blogpost as a similar vein – a generally mindless brain dump.

I’ve been working on developing and writing a critique of social media and algorithmic control for a long time and I was talking about it a little bit on twitter and someone send me a link to the yesterweb and instantly I was hit with a wave of nostalgia and went down a many hour rabbit hole. That’s a large part of what inspired me to make a personal website. I, like a lot of people in my age range I think, grew up on the internet. Early on it was mostly smaller sites with forums and oekak boards and personal pages you could customize like websites, and also stuff like fan forums. I was really late to getting facebook and generally against it but was basically pressured into it by my family. Then I spent a lot of time on FB, then Tumblr, then and now Twitter and all along the way it got more boring, empty, and anxiety inducing.

I don't think this is particularly radical or anything – though maybe my thoughts will change as I continue to use it – but it’s really nice to have a space that’s just mine. Where what I see isn’t controlled by an algorithm and I don’t feel a conscious or unconscious pressure to perform for an audience. It’s nice to write in long form (I really do think the way I think has been trained to fit into tweet limits), it’s nice to have silence.

I read this piece recently called Against Community Building, Towards Friendship by Ziq. It’s not the best thing I’ve ever read, but it raises some good points. One thing in particular stood out to me about this concept of “aloneliness”. They say:

“There’s a word that describes how we feel when we need time to ourselve but can’t get it because we live in these vast interconnected global communities, surrounded wall-to-wall, block-to-block, nation-to-nation in every direction by other people and have no way to tune out their vociferous voices and energies. It’s the mirror image to loneliness - 'aloneliness'. This innate state of being was surprisingly only coined recently, in 2019, by Robert Coplan, a Canadian psychologist.

If loneliness is the yearning to connect to others, being aloney is the deep-seeded need to disconnect from others and retreat into the self. This is something that becomes harder and harder as the communal collective is centered and the individual is increasingly diminished and cast as a villainous foil to the precious community ideal.”

It’s a pretty apt way to describe how I feel – in general but especially – online.

So, that’s that.

On another note, it seems wildfire season has started. I’m pretty far away from active fires but it’s still hazy here. As much as I hate the dreary PNW rain I sure hope it comes soon.

I think that’s all for now, see ya! 🌷