10 february 2024

This comes up for me every year in my Facebook memories, and this year I'd like to make it into a blog post that can be more widely shared.

This is a big long thing, but I think it's important, so please bear with me if you will.

As you grow up, particularly when you are a child, but throughout your life, you are a sponge. You take in experiences and kinda store them in your brain. Think of it as a database. You take in all this information, and it gets stored. The stuff that's going on around the information itself, it also gets stored. People's reactions to what you do and say and how you portray yourself, they all get attached to this information. Think of it as metadata. The stuff that happens to you, the stuff that you do, all the reactions to it, and how it makes you feel, that all gets stored in your brain and attached to that data.

You also develop a worldview. Something that works to make sense of the information that's been stored. Call that a schema. You have this schema, and every once in a while, you'll run through some of that information in your brain, and the schema helps you to make sense of it, and the information itself helps to verify that your schema is correct.

So - what's happened in my life, quite a few times, is that my schema gets changed. My view of myself, who I am, and how I interact with the world changes. That will usually prompt me to take my internal database - all the information that's stored in my brain about myself and my experiences - and check that metadata against my schema.

This is how sexuality and gender identity work in my mind. I had ideas about how those things worked when I was younger, and when I ran that schema against my internal database, it helped me make sense of the world and my place in it. Then that schema changed (quite a few times, actually) and I re-ran that database against it, and was able to make more sense of the world. It also means that every time I re-run through that set of information, I reevaluate the metadata that's been set on it. Particularly the sets of metadata around attraction, identity, and self. Sometimes that reevaluation means that I set new and different metadata around those events based on my new understandings of myself and the world around me.

The point being, it's all right. It's okay to be a different person than you were five, ten, fifteen years ago - hopefully life is full of learning and changing. There's nothing wrong or deceptive about coming to new understandings of previous information about yourself based in the light of a new schema and understanding of who you are and what you are about.

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03 january 2024

I got an email today from Medium saying that "You've got a story, now's the time to write it." and "There's arguably no better habit than writing. Do it every day and you'll grow as a thinker, communicator, and human being."

I agree with you, Medium. What I disagree with you about is where to do it. I don't want to write on Medium, have my thoughts owned and monetized by Medium. I want to write here, on tilde, where it's not as serious an endeavor, and where I can post without any sort of subscription or tracking or other crap that most blogging platforms inflict upon you.

I want to write more. I feel like I've got things to say, and maybe they are worth listening to, but a lot of it falls in the category of "feels".

I want to tinker more. I want to putter around more. I did that a lot during my time off from work, and it was not just really nice, it helped me to parse and think about how I'm doing and my relationship/understanding of the world. I need to figure out how to do more of that in days that I have at work, and maybe even do some of that during work.

I want to be more gentle to myself. If I don't get a lot of writing and tinkering done this year, I'm not going to beat myself up over it. I'm sick of things that are regretful, I'm sick of hard resolutions where "I'm going to do this thing, and if I don't, I will feel really bad."

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12 december 2023

This is somewhat of last night's feels, but still something I wanted to write about.

Last night I felt off, and was really struggling to figure out what was going on with me. This happens a lot, and I've never been quite sure how to handle it. One of my favorite books for attempting to deal with self-crisises is Kate Bornstein's 101 Alternatives to Suicide. While I was definitely not suicidal, it's still a useful reference for what to do when I just... don't feel right.

One of the things that she talks about is doing a diagnostic. That's usually in the sense of something that can tell you about your current state -- a tarot reading or some other kind of self evaluation. Last night, I took the idea of a diagnostic literally.

I think of myself sometimes as more technology than person. It's an abstraction -- I don't literally think of myself as technology, but I understand and identify sometimes more with technology than I do with people. One of the things you can do with technology is run a literal diagnostic -- in the 80's and 90's this was often in the form of a "Diagnostics Diskette". You'd put this diskette in the machine, turn it on, and it would run through an analysis of all of the component systems of the machine. RAM, CPU, Disk, Video, Keyboard, Serial interfaces, etc, etc.

So last night I divided myself into a variety of systems. I went with the following list:

Cognitive, Emotional, Gastrointestinal, Endocrine, Sartorical (clothing), Physical Plant (the body), Social, Belief

and I went through each trying to discover in a brief sentence or two what the operational status was of each. I think it exposed that there are a lot of complex reasons for how I'm feeling lately. A lot about how I'm feeling has nothing to do with mysel per se, but more about how I'm relating to "the state of the world". In short, a lot of systems are currently strained or taxed, and that means that they are often having erratic behavior or other symptoms of being overloaded.

With that data, I was able to write out a "repair plan". It's going to take a while, as most long-term repairs do, but it at least gives me something that identifies the problem and comes up with something I can actually do about it.

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01 october 2023

I've been struggling a bit today to figure out how to sum up a lot of my feels lately. There's been a lot this last week, and I'm not sure quite how to untangle them and understand them, but I figured that doing a bit of writing here might be the best way to deal with them. So, here we go.

Monday morning, $job laid off 75 people. Rational me knows that tech companies have been laying people off a lot lately, and is astonished that $job has gone for so long without some kind of action like this. Emotional me was shattered. I've spent the week mostly being a shoulder, trying to process, and trying to reconcile what exactly my values are with regards to work.

I had done some work on myself earlier this year and came to the realization that my primary purpose at work is to reduce the toil and pain of other people as much as possible. Making money for the company is secondary, maybe even tertiary. So, when this news hit, I felt more than anything else. People I knew, hell, people I interviewed, no longer had a job.

I'm not a fan of capitalism. And I'm not a fan of grind culture, which is absolutely pervasive in the tech industry. I think when people are stressed and squashed in the way that grind culture demands, they actually increase risks, take shortcuts, and most importantly, they ignore the signs of danger and burnout that their body/mind is giving them. I know, because it's happened to me.

I'm trying to resolve my internal conflicts around working for a tech company and wanting to live a more sufficent-ish life. I like the principles of Permacomputing and Hopepunk, so the question is -- how can I make our home and lives more in alignment with what I want?

I have been thinking a lot about the idea of a home as an organic being. I think about places like Howl's Castle, or Hooty (the Owl House), and while I don't necessarily want a sentinent home, I do want one that is cozy and does its' best to take care of its inhabitants.

And I'm not sure how to get there. But I'm thinking and working on it. I'm resting and dreaming about it. And I'm actively pursuing rest in opposition to capitalism (something I have learned from Tricia Hersey's Rest is Resistance).

Deep churning feels, y'all.

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10 september 2023

It's my birthday.

d8888  .d8888b.  

d8P888 d88P Y88b d8P 888 888
d8P 888 888d888b.
d88 888 888P "Y88b 8888888888888 888 888 Y88b d88P 888 "Y8888P"

(This looks great in the feels app. It looks terrible on the web.)

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28 may 2023

Today, some thoughts about Amateur Radio:

I've been dipping my toe back into Amateur Radio this weekend. It's been a long time since I've done anything with it, and I've definitely had some hangups around getting back into it.

I started tinkering around with radio and computers in the early 90's. At the time, I was using a piece of software called JNOS to talk to other folks via packet radio using something called the AMPRnet. This is all a fancy way of saying that were were talking back and forth using TCP/IP over ham radio, and because the internet was in it's infancy, it was one of the ways that I could communicate with folks all over the world.

It's tied into my feelings about my grandfather, and masculinity as a whole. His basement was the typical "mad scientist" area growing up through the end of his life. All sorts of experiments and projects were always going on, sometimes at the expense of other things that could be going on in his life.

I also find it an intensely political hobby, even though there's a understood norm that we're supposed to keep politics out of it. It tends to attract folks who tend towards the right-wing, and I get tired of the intersection of second amendment and radio talk.

So I'm trying some new things. There's a Rainbow Amateur Radio Club, (rara.org), and I've joined. I've got a little JNOS server set up on a raspberry pi (not transmitting yet) that I'm tinkering with. I'm cleaning up and charging old equipment, and trying to figure out what I want to be doing with things -- what are the old interests worth dusting off, and what are the things that it's time to let go of?

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23 april 2023

Haven't written in a while. Feels as of late:

• Had friends over to our house for dinner and games last night. First time we've had anyone who wasn't working on the house over since the start of the global pandemic. Felt nice. But also exhausted. Afterwards I just conked out in bed, and woke up with a bunch of joint pain.

• Shifting responsibilities at work. I took on leadership of the LGBTQ+ DEI subcommittee at work, which won't mean much for when appraisals and promotions come around, but means a great deal to me personally.

• Also taking on a project that involves writing a bunch of Scala. It's been really hard to wrap my head around things, but it's also been very rewarding.

The total feels are optimistic, but cautious. There's a lot going on, but the things that are going on are feeding my soul.

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05 february 2023

The trip for work is upon me. Monday, I get in a metal tube and fly to Salt Lake City. Home of the first ban on HRT for teenagers.

I'm trying to have a bit of hope - my work is actually pretty decent when it comes to issues around diversity... at least they talk a good talk. We'll see what they're actually like and about in person for the next few days.

It is also bringing about a bunch of feels around myself and my identity (thanks brain, let's question everything! again! some more!). I just recently realized that some strange feelings when I present over-femme might be categorized as dysphoria that's reminding me, that oh, yeah, my gender falls more in the "nonbinary" space than it does in anything called "woman." idk, "woman adjacent", or "cacusing with the women" is probably more accurate.

oof. feels.

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28 december 2022

So... yesterday PDX had the largest number of people without power anywhere in the United States. And we were some of them. We went 11 hours without power in our home, and it was late into the night before we had the return of home internet.

There are a few things that come to mind from this experience. The first one being resilience. When confronted with a lack of power, we figured out how to keep going. We ate food from cans (sardines for lunch, yum!), we dug out lamps and candles, we listened to the radio a little, talked a lot, and played board games by the light of LEDs charged by a little solar panel.

Part of this going as smoothly as it did is planning. It wasn't an accident that we have emergency food stored, solar lighting ready to go (that's more to do with my mom being obsessed with all things solar, but I digress), an obsession with keeping up-to-date with the world regardless of what state it's in, and so on. We've had my father-in-law staying with us, and our practices of resilience scaled very well to accomodate him.

That's not to say it wasn't rough. Lack of heat and entertainment does things to people. When the internet came back on in the morning, I realized how much I miss bits and pieces that it contributes to my daily routine. Without the devices that I rely on for contact and services, I felt diminshed.

Today is maybe back to normal, but not quite. There's debris scattered around our condo complex, it's still rainy and cold out, there's still various weather related warnings that my phone is yelling at me about today. But all-in-all, I feel pretty good about today and what it might bring.

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14 november 2022

Lost a friend this week. She was so full of life and energy, and there's a bit of me that's really sad that I wasn't able to spend more time with her over the years. Also a reminder that whatever it is I want to be doing with my life, I'd better get on with doing it.

I have to travel for work in February and be out and about as a trans person in a not-entirely-welcoming environment. I'm doing things like ordering new pants, looking for shoes, and just generally trying to see if there are things that I can do to feel ready. It also means flying on a plane for the first time in more than two years, and that experience was massively anxiety-inducing for me even at the best of times.

My spouse and I went to Brown's Ferry Park, a little bit south of us, and were able to see some amazing views from a little dock on the Tualatin River. It makes my heart feel good to finally be seeing the leaves change and everything feeling a lot like fall.

Work tomorrow starts a week where I must get critical things done. I feel like I'm juggling all sorts of things, and worried about dropping a few of them as I go. Relying on others the best that I can.

Glum, anxious, and moody are my feels right now.

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28 october 2022

Been feeling very impostory at work today. Talked it through with a friend that's been visiting, and recognizing that some of it is about knowledge gaps where I need to figure out what I need to know and how I get there. Food for thought.

Working on not being self-deprecating at work, not getting in the way of my own success, not treating myself as lesser. It's hard work, exacerbated by holding a marginalized identity (which is something I don't allow myself to think about often).

It's rainy here in the PNW, and I'm loving it. Got today off and looking forward to a lovely weekend, and then maybe coming back to work with a bit more energy.

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16 october 2022

Finally getting to my hair today. My hair is usually dyed a bright red, which requires bleaching it first before applying the deeply colored hair dye. I'm in the bleaching part today, which means my scalp hurts a little and I need to sit still and not lean against anything for a half hour.

Yesterday I tested out livestreaming a DJ set on Twitch for the first time. It was more of a feeling out of the technology and seeing how I feel about live performance. The technology part is a bit difficult - I've got the DJ software running on an older Mac, and the stream software running on an older PC, which means I need to get the Mac video and audio over to the stream PC somehow. Turns out there's a piece of software called NDI made by NewTek that makes the video easy, but the audio part has been a pain. Latency is always going to be an issue, but I'm quite pleased with the results and looking forward to maybe trying it again later. The performing part was only a little nervewracking - the part that I most dislike is trying to talk while playing, and doing that over chat instead of voice actually made it a lot better. There's also a bit of... idk, embarassment at my hacked together setup which is then balanced a bit by a kind of pride in hacking together a setup that works. I can stream successfully without going out and buying a whole bunch of equipment. That makes me feel good.

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02 september 2022

Behold, the bag of mixed feels!

Vacation!

I've been off of work since Friday of last week, and it's been really nice, but also exhausting. We've been going out and doing a lot of things, and today's plan is to just have a very chill sort of day with not a lot going on. It's also highlighted how much I needed a break from work, how much I've needed something to change about work, and how much burnout I might actually be having right now.

Gender!

There's this interesting thing that has happened to me where I'm a little hesitant to "put on feminitity" when going out. I'm not terribly fond of makeup -- there's a component of how much work it takes, and the question of whether it's for me, or for someone else. However, I'm also considering whether or not I need to seriously invest in wearing a bra for protection and support purposes, and that's a new and fun endeavor. By fun I mean terrifying. I'm... well, I'm not constructed like your typical cisgender woman, and that means that whatever bra I'm going to need will be probably in an atypical size, and navigating all of that sounds absolutely exhausting. Tl;Dr - the further I get in my gender journey, the more I feel like I haven't gotten as far as I thought.

Technology!

This is mostly my petty ranting about how my current phone has had terrible wifi for months now and also just started outright ignoring the one wifi network that was working for a while. So, new phone ordered, and... it's past the estimated delivery date, and the phone company is not giving me any helpful information about, oh, idk, the location of the phone right now or when it might show up. Grr!

There's a lot of other stuff going on as well, so suffice it to say that I'm a bit of a mish-mashy-mess of feels and goings-on.

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03 july 2022

I've been thinking a lot lately about hair, queerness, and working in tech.

My hair is currently saturated with bleach and sitting on top of my head. My spouse shaved the sides of my head, and my plan is to dye the rest of it a deep deep red. There's a bit there where hair is the thing about my body where I have been able to exert the most control. It's where I can express my bodily autonomy most easily. There's no need for a prescription to change my hair, just the willingness to go through the time and energy for the process of making it be what I want it to be.

I'm struggling with the aloneness of being queer and working in tech. I think I realized this morning that I'm having to figure out my own direction in my job mostly by myself. I mean, there are others that have some ideas about where to point me and what I should be doing, but the reality of it is that it's mostly self-directed. Kinda like beeing queer. Kinda like being trans. And instead of pursuing any sort of direction right now, I've been kinda stuck just doing whatever comes up.

Today is going to be this sort of "let's get everything done today so that we have nothing to do tomorrow" day, and that means all of my hair needs, household cleaning, and any sort of chores need to happen today. I like the idea of having the time free of obligations, but I'm a bit crusty about having to get any of it done.

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05 june 2022

Yesterday evening, something arrived from Amazon that I've been waiting for close to 37 years for. I had preordered an Amiga 500 mini (from Amazon because they were the only place I could find in the US that were going to stock them) and it finally arrived.

I had this absolute sense of awe and wonder around the Amiga from the time I had heard about the thing. Adolescent and teenage me was obsessed with various kinds of computers, and I owned tons of magazines detailing how the Amiga worked, what software was the best, and how people were using their Amigas. But what I never actually had was the physical computer. Closest I ever got were a few Commodore 64s that I had owned over the years.

So I unpacked this thing last night, set it up, played a few games, and then felt strangely melancholy about it. I've been spending some time since then trying to suss out what is going on - why am I not having the jubliation that my 10 year old self would have imagined had that person fufilled the dreams of owning one of these.

A partial answer is that time has moved on. I'm still enamored by older computing technology, but for different reasons. I think that the charm of the Amiga, the C64, and computers like them was that they were really never mainstream in the way that the Apple II, the Macintosh, and the IBM PC became. Computing has now become this thing where outside of a few places (tilde.town being one of them) computers are a gateway to the WWW and not much else in and of themselves. Innovation now requires a market.

It comes from a time of hacking - and I mean that in the sense of taking something and tweaking and twisting and hammering and investigating until it fits your needs and desires. I had patience for that kind of hacking of that kind of thing during that time in my life, but now I'm spending my time hacking other things. I see being trans as a way of hacking gender, for example. I see some applications of technology that I do currently that are hacking as a more immediate and pertinent part of my self and my identity than I do this device that harkens to long ago.

So I'm struggling with where to put it, not in a physical sense but in a "where in my life does this fit" sense. I'm going to power it up every now and then, poke at it, feel some nostalgia, but I don't see it becoming a daily driver in the sense that it would have been when I was younger. It's nice to place it into a library of tools, thoughts, and ideas and see what became of them. A lot of modern game studios originally cut their teeth on the Amiga, and it's interesting to see the lineage between these older games and where they're at today. I'm also interested in the multimedia and digital art aspects of the Amiga - how did we craft a vision of the future back then, and in what ways has that differed from where we found ourselves?

Edit: I just found out about the mass shooting in Philadelphia last night. Fuck guns. Fuck gun apologists. Fuck gun hobbyists. Fuck our culture of death. But mostly fuck guns.

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30 may 2022

So, $work has been on a documentation kick lately, and of course being the nerdy and geeky person that I am, I've been working a bit today around some internal documentation for our home. Stuff around how to access things on the network, what the network even is, what the retrocomputing and radio projects lying around the house actually are.

The feels get a bit heavy here. CW: death of a loved one.

When my Grandfather passed away, I became the person in charge of clearing out "the basement" -- all of the tech and belongings that he has accumulated in a lifetime. It was a difficult and emotionally heavy task. There was a wide variety of stuff there that spoke of his curiosity about the world. And he spent his life down in that basement, and my Grandmother spent her life upstairs, and it became a physical barrier between the two.

This morning, I've been thinking about how much easier it would have been for me for there to be documentation around everything and what it was about/for - hence my own internal documentation project. It struck me that this kind of documentation, while it's useful for myself and tracking down obscure commands and software packages, it's really about making sure that my loved ones can also have access to the same things and, if need be, carry on without me. It's an act of caring, really.

I also recognize that I don't ever want to be in the situation of being squirreled away in a basement or a cave when pursuing my interests. There's some parallel play happening in our house right now even - my spouse is playing a game on the Switch, our kiddo is on the couch playing on his iPad, and I'm sitting on the stairs typing out my feels. Occasionally, one of us pops our head up and shares what they are doing. I would much rather have that then see us all hide away into our own little parts of the world.

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30 april 2022

Insomnia sucks. I always have thought of it as having the lightbulb on inside of the refrigerator when it is closed. My experience is usually that my brain just won't turn off, and the best thing to do is actually get up and try to do something. So - I got up at 3am this morning and listened to podcasts on my backlog.

I've got a lot going on. My spouse had a proceedure the Friday before yesterday to remove their toenails from their big toes because there was infection trapped underneath. It's been a long amount of healing, and while I enjoy being the person that is able to help and support, it also takes a lot out of me.

And then there's my father-in-law. He went into the hospital Thursday, and had double bypass coronary surgery yesterday. Last we heard the surgery went well and he's in the ICU healing.

The pandemic is eating away at my mental health. It's been months since a trip outside the house hasn't been a store or doctor trip. I'm kinda sick of it. Case counts in Oregon keep going up. The weather, however, is getting better and better and I'm very hopeful that as it improves, we are going to be able to get outside and do things with friends.

I am also feeling this desperate need for community, along with the feeling that I really struggle to put myself out there and believe that anyone else would actually like my authentic self. It's a recurring thing for me that tends to come in cycles. Hopefully I can do something about it really soon.

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01 january 2022

CW: Covid

I'm trying to sort through my feelings right now, and hey, this thing is called "feels", right?

I just got done watching two TikToks in a row, of people in tears, talking about how they've had two shots of the vaccine, and had their booster, and wear masks everywhere, and now, both of them have testing positive for Covid.

My twitter feed is chock full of people talking about how they've now caught it, and they're scared, and it's happening more and more...

There's this disappointed sadness, where I feel like our culture and our governments aren't willing to take the necessary measures to ensure our safety, all because it would "hurt the economy."

Economy isn't going to matter if we are all sick and dying. And yes, I get that most people will survive this, but you know what, some people won't. And they don't deserve this. Even the worst anti-vaccine hate spewing pundit doesn't deserve the kind of visceral death that awaits them with this disease.

And the feels quickly morph to anger. Anger at inaction. Anger at the callousness. I read reddit posts full of servers who are being made to work while still positive and contagious. It's profits over lives on a massive scale, it's profits over lives on the small scale too. It's the unnerving lack of compassion that I keep seeing.

My feels don't seem of much use to me right now. Maybe sitting with them will lead to some kind of action, but for right now, I'm doing the few things that I can do - staying home as much as possible, getting the booster when I can.

I don't know how we heal from this. I don't know how to give forgiveness and grace to someone who adamantly refuses to do the right thing. I don't know how to live in this capitalist system that is grinding people to death for it's profits.

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19 november 2021

Anger.

That's my feels today. My feels are angry. Angry at a society that has decided it's okay to go somewhere for the express purpose of shooting people you don't agree with and get off free because they can claim "self-defense."

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18 november 2021

I took a big chunk of vacation time from work, it started this morning, and I'm becoming more and more aware how desperately I needed it and how many of my needs I've been shoving aside in order to just get through work lately. Not even be successful, just get through the day to day.

The need for a legal name change is becoming more and more relevant. I've got a prescription in $LEGAL_NAME, and my other prescriptions in $OLD_PREFERRED_NAME, and that is causing hassles when trying to deal with insurance claims and just getting the damn medications I need from the pharmacy. I'm hopeful that if I can get a legal name change to $NEW_NAME and then change it everywhere, I can get it all sorted out. Names are a pain in the ass.

I had strange dreams last night, some of them about people at work withholding critical information from me. I'm not sure what exactly that's about, and if anything else it's underlining that I need to take a large break from work. I've been thinking that I need to figure out my reason for being at my job - why am I doing the things that I'm doing beyond "it pays the bills". There's some kernel of truth about myself that I need to uncover in order to figure out how I'm going to keep going at it. Work needs to be about more than making money for "the man" and other things capitalism related.

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08 november 2021

Some feels for a November morning.

First off, about the name and gender change that I talked about in my last feels. Turns out I live in the only county in Oregon where you must file a name and gender change in person in the physical courthouse. Bleah. So that has been on hold for the last little while.

We adopted two lovely kitties - Lauren and Selina. Laurel came home with us the day that we went in to adopt. Selina has had some eating issues that they wanted to address before sending her home with us, so we're waiting to hear from the Cat Adoption Team (actual name of the organization) in the next day or two so that she can come home to live with us.

I've switched my personal daily driver to a brand new Chromebook - it's a Lenovo 2-in-1 that easily becomes a tablet. I was looking for something that I could use as an e-reader at night, but I despise electronics that are only good for a single task, so this little friend came home with us this weekend. The really nice thing I didn't realize about chromebooks before is that they have a linux container that's built in and is a fully functional version of Debian, so there might be a few more feels and more hanging out on tilde.town in general.

Transition is going well. I've switched from estradiol pills to patches, and I feel like that has gone very well for me. Physical transition changes have felt like they are moving along much faster now then they were on the pills. I have labs scheduled for early December, so I'm hoping to see some tangible changes in my bloodwork.

The pandemic seems to just continue on. It seems relentless, and I am astonished at how people just continue to refuse to take the vaccine. If it was just folks that were harming themselves by their choices I don't think I would care quite as much, but it's obvious to me that part of the problem has been that unvaccinated folks are continuing to spread the virus. We knew the vaccine wasn't a fix-all, it works in conjunction with the social distancing, mask wearing, contact tracing, and other precautions. But we are accustomed to quick and easy fixes, and this is a place where we've become really complacent.

Arrrgh. Fall is absolutely beautiful here in the Pacific Northwest, and I'm trying to enjoy every bit where I can. Winter will soon be here, and with it lights and holiday foods and decorations and things to look forward too.

Tl;Dr - feels range from mildly optimistic to irritated with bureaucracy and people.

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05 september 2021

Really odd feels today. I'm feeling really withdrawn - father-in-law is staying with us, kiddo and spouse are playing video games in the living room, and I'm just in the back chilling in the bedroom. I don't know if it's hormonal (entirely possible), social exhaustion, or something else going on.

I filed my name and gender change this morning. The name change isn't actually a big deal, it's shortening my first name to what people actually call me, and so I don't have to deal with the longer version of my first name (which causes some dysphoria.) The gender change is a big deal - it means (at least in the eyes of the state of Oregon) that I would legally be nonbinary. My gender marker on legal documents that require one would have an "X" on them. I feel... pretty dang good about it. But also a bit strained, strange, and tired.

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03 september 2021

Today's feels are about politics.

So, I saw an opportunity on twitter to join a Discord around Solarpunk. I like the ideals of Solarpunk, and I think that a more hopeful vision of integrating technology and living more closely with the natural world. I also think it's a more plausible transformation for the future than a lot of other frameworks for living.

This discord had a survey. Three questions, the last question being different every time. Mine were:

1. Are you over 18?
2. What are your politics?
3. What do you think about trans liberation?

My answers to questions 1 and 3 seemed sufficient to the moderators. My initial answer to 2 was poked at twice and then I was given provisional membership.

I then left. If I had said "anarcho-communism" or some variant of it, I would have been let right in. But instead I explained that my politics are complicated.

Politics are extremely personal for me. I think there's a huge amount of theory bandied about in modern politics, and I get really tired of it. What I think politically is more about what I do in my daily life and not about the different theories about why I do things. Stringent adherence to a dogmatic ideology seems very dangerous to me.

The whole exchange bothers me a bit. I keep wondering if my refusal to reduce what I think and believe and do into a easily digestable form. Also, the things that I do on a daily basis to align with what I believe politically are nobody else's fucking business.

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24 august 2021

A very long week at work this week. Back of the napkin math says I worked 58 hours between Monday and Saturday, and then another 12-14 hours on Sunday. Needless to say, I didn't do a whole lot of work today and I'm taking tomorrow off. I'm trying to model folks who have to work long hours taking care of themselves afterwards, and also just trying to take care of myself overall. It's been a bit of a brutal schedule, but it meant that the project I was working on went off nearly without a hitch.

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12 may 2021

My feels are sporadic because... my feels are sporadic. That's kinda just how it is.

A few updates. I've since gotten the butterstick, and put it on the old HP Elitebook, which has now benefitted from moving to an SSD. The performance gain is amazing. I also put our "utility" computer on an SSD and it's become much faster and more reliable because of it. The butterstick does hurt my brain a bit, and I wish I had more time to spend on it, but I don't right now.

I built a nifty household backup solution. We're using a Pi 4 that has a few big USB disks attached and running in a RAID 1 config that backs everything up to AWS weekly. This runs syncthing, and everything in the house is running syncthing as well, so I get the added benefit of having all of my files synchronized between all the places that I'm at.

Medical stuff. March was one year on feminizing HRT. I sometimes wish that things would hurry up, but time being the way it is, it hasn't. Two new issues as of late:

1. Migraine headaches. I've had the worst headaches of my life in the past few weeks, and have been liberally taking Aleve to help take care of them.
2. Stomach problems. My stomach has been in pain a lot lately, and I'm on a multi-month course of Omeprazole to try and calm things down a bit. Getting older kinda sucks.

Work is stretching me a bit. I'm studying algorithms and data structure, because it's something I've never had to learn before now, and I'm really enjoying it. Exercising my brain in a different way than I have in the past.

Otherwise, feels are... odd. I've had my first COVID-19 vaccination, and will be getting the second next week. It's heartbreaking to see what's going on in India right now. I'm also struggling with what things are going to be like trying to go back into the world. Reconciling all of that is going to take a bit of doing.

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27 january 2021

The following is a bit of a ramble that's been rattling around in my head for a while. The concepts are probably ones that are familiar to townies, but I'm also inputting text to screen here to help with focusing those ideas and getting them out into the ether.

The cloud is other people's computers.

That phrase keeps sticking in my mind, but the important piece of it is that the cloud is computers that other people own. And those other people are not giving you access to their computers out of the kindness of their hearts. They want to use their resources to make as much money as they can. They accomplish this through a few key tactics that are important to recognize.

The freemium model is probably the most obvious. You become reliant upon a certain service that is free to a point, and then becomes something you have to pay for if you exceed certain metrics. Dropbox and Google Drive do this, to an extent. You get an amount of data storage that you can use for free, but if you exceed that cap, we're going to want to charge you a bit for your data.

Then there's the moving goalposts model. Your data cap is currently 50GB, but starting at arbitrary date we are going to make it 25GB and start charging you for the overage. It's a common tactic paired with the above model, and it's hard for users to get away from. You're already comfortable with their infrastructure, so it's a no brainer to just keep with them and pay the small amount of money they're asking to hold onto your data.

Which leads nicely into analytics. Cloud companies are all about analytics. Every concievable piece of how you are interacting with their software is being recorded, aggregated, and scrutinized with the purpose of figuring out how best to make money from you and others. It's interesting to me that people are often so focused on keeping the content of their data private, they don't realize that one of the biggest money makers for companies is the anayltics around the data. It's also pretty key in terms of police and other surveillance - what you've actually said isn't as important a lot of the times as who you're saying it to.

So, what to do? It helps to know some of these things, and keep in mind that there's no such thing as a free cloud service, just as there's no such thing as a free lunch. There's some ways that you can get away from the cloud -- I've been working on a personal project to get my family's storage out of the cloud and into something that we have real direct control over while retaining the ubiquity and utility that cloud providers give.

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03 january 2021

So. I’ve got this idea for a few different kinds of technology blogs that I want to write, and maybe this is just two different kinds of posts for the same blog. They’re mostly based around things that I’m looking at and thinking about right now. I’m trying to figure out where to put them in terms of hosting, and how to go about doing them.

First idea: I want to write about the cloud, using it for some things, and getting away from it for some things. This is coming about for a few reasons. The catalyst has really been Google Photos moving away from unlimited uploads, but it’s not the only reason. I think there’s a lot of benefit to using something like FreedomBox, and hosting your own utilities and data within your own personal network. I’m also interested in how to “safely” use things like social media, varying technological ecosystems, etc.

The second idea is that I want to write about tools. I’ve been using a lot of different kinds of digital tools in the last while, and I’d like a space to talk about some of them. It gets dangerously close to “review” territory, and while there’s some crossover for that, I think I want to talk more about the how and why of picking a piece of technology for your needs, and less about pros and cons of a specific device. I think there’s a space for that line of thinking, but I’m not sure where and in what format.

For now, I think watch this space for details. I’ve got an upcoming project centered around FreedomBox that might be the both the right starting point for idea #1, and the space to host the whole shebang.

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23 december 2020

Too many things floating about in my braiiiiin...

Been thinking a lot about walled gardens and computers. Kiddo got one of the new iPads for Yule with the Apple Pencil, and the Apple Pencil doesn't work properly. There's no user-facing way of doing any sort of meaningful diagnosis of it, there's only making sure that it pairs properly through bluetooth. "Fixing" it means taking both devices to an Apple Store so that they can dink around with it and figure out what's going on.

There's some new device envy that I've been having about this, but also the recognition that I'm probably better off fixing and improving my existing devices that I dearly love. I have an old HP EliteBook 2760p that's been an absolute tank that needs a replacement keyboard and could benefit from upgrading to an SSD... and is that "better" than something else that's new and shiny...? I mean, I tend to think so, but then again this disposable technology culture is pretty disgusting to me.

Then there's some human-computer interface stuff. I got a new keyboard for my birthday, and it's been going really well, but I'm also fascinated by some of the stuff coming out of G Heavy Industries (gboards.ca). If I have some extra holiday cash, it might be going that direction for either the Butterstick (a 20% keyboard that's only two rows) or a Ginny (10% keyboard - 12 total keys). It's a bit user-hostile, but there's something in going to a more minimal typing arrangement. I'm also the kind of person that's into styluses and touchscreens (see the 2760 above), as well as trackballs, trackpads, etc.

I wish there was a more robust solution to having the same environment across multiple devices. I can get that in my text/terminal world from having a tmux session running on a raspberry pi that keeps my chat, feels, and mastadon sessions up and running, but it would be really nice to have that kind of persistent session available across multiple other devices as a GUI thing. Google does a sort of tab sharing that gets me part of the way there, but I think a kind of "ubiquitous computing" model is still a ways off. It's also not terribly profitable, as you wouldn't need to consume quite as many devices in order for things to work well for you. A while ago I played around with LTSP under Ubuntu, which allowed for things like that, but it's been a while and I'm not even sure what's out there anymore.

I've also been re-reading Donnna Haraway's _Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan_MeetsOncoMouse(tm), which I have failed to read quite a few times, but might have enough context now as a transgender person in my 40s to tackle. In my 20s I picked this up after my Women's Studies professor suggested that Haraway's new book was exceedingly difficult to parse, and I of course took that as a challenge, ordered the book, and then proceeded to figure out that yes, Haraway's writing is super dense and beyond my grasp. It's still super dense to me, and I struggle with some of the concepts, but there's the wonderfully delicious merging of techological, sociological, gender studies, cultural studies, the arts, and a whole slew of other contextual discourses. I also took this kind of writing and work very very seriously when I was younger, and can afford now to take this bit of reading as fun (and give myself the right to skip about or ignore things that are either too much of a struggle, or just plain not interesting to me).

I'm also intentionally rebalancing things at work for 2021 to more align with what's going on with me as a person. There's going to be more D+I work next year, as I'm part of the LGBTQ+ subcommittee there, and feel that I want to bring my more radical activist attittude into that particular space. There's also a need for me to do more teaching, training, mentoring, and managing as we continue to grow and move forward. It's a pivot away from things that I was doing as more of an individual contributor, and more of a leader-type role.

That's a lot of feels going on all at once, not to mention the holidays and this sort of sense that with the pandemic going on, all the celebratory type stuff is feeling fairly muted. I'm hoping that it will get better soon, but without massive social changes that I think are really really needed, it's going to be a hollow victory over Covid, with not a lot of real progress or change coming because of it.

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04 december 2020

My father in law, his two brothers, and the one brother's wife have all tested positive for COVID-19.

I'm an emotional wreck. I'm not sure what's keeping me going on right now, aside from trying to support my spouse and kiddo. We are all not doing okay. I took the day off of work to... idk, help, process...?

I don't have much else in the way of feels, aside from that y'all need to wear a mask, and don't go anywhere unless it's essential, and certainly don't gather in any groups anywhere.

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11 october 2020

We had lunch with friends today.

Okay, maybe "had lunch" is strong. We sat under our bulding's carport in our parking spot, about eight feet away from our friends that we haven't seen in person since well before the pandemic started.

It was nice, but it was also very strange. Not having had a lot of in-person interaction except for going out grocery shopping has really taken a bit of a toll.

I'm glad to be in one of the states that's continuing to take the pandemic seriously. I have friends teaching in states where kids are still going to school physically, and they continue to be terrified.

There's that meme going around about how it seems like we're hallucinating a pandemic. I totally feel like that lately. We have been so careful, we don't leave the house except for groceries, the pharmacy, and the occasional vet visit.

Everything continues to be so relentlessly strange.

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28 september 2020

World: "I do not like the thing you are doing can you do a different thing that I like." Me: "I will fucking increase the fucking thing."

https://floccinaucinihilipilificationa.tumblr.com/post/96040472380

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25 september 2020

I'm feeling depressed by the stupidity of others.

Case #1: I'm watching the 8-Bit Guy on Youtube. Not one of my favorite retrocomputing folks, but he at least has some amount of production value to his videos. He finds this incredibly rare computer at Computer Reset, and he takes it home. When he plugs it in, it gives two beeps on post and then it refuses to display anything (it's an IBM Model that nobody has ever heard of that has an integrated monitor). The power switch for the system is inside of the integrated monitor. He takes the machine apart, finds where the power supply connects to the monitor, tests continuity on the monitor side with the switch open, and the proceeds to short the power supply side with a paper clip. He then turns on mains power to hear a sharp snap noise.

I'm irritated because this is a well-followed Youtube personality doing something EXTREMELY STUPID AND DANGEROUS and then just proceeding to Dremel the power supply open because he can't be arsed to find a security bit to open the thing up. He then gets to tinker with the remaining rare computers from Computer Reset because he's, guess what, a famous Youtuber. Ugh.

Case #2: Been having yelly fits with our kiddo over Zoom and School

So, our kiddo has online school right now, and yesterday the school district sent out an email on how to approach entering Zoom calls. The problem now is that somehow Zoom is losing authentication when it closes, and something about the order of operations of when you sign into Zoom is causing a problem. The Zoom desktop client has been a piece of junk for as long as I've been using it on Linux, and it's not much better on kiddo's Chromebook. This escalated this morning into kiddo and I yelling at each other about what the right thing to do was in order to get into class. I am so tired of online school right now, and I know it's totally the right thing to do, but I don't have time or energy to be doing my own work AND playing household IT person all day long.

On a brigher note, it's raining today here in Beaverton, and I'm quite happy with that. This is the kind of "gloomy" fall weather that I really enjoy, and I hope that it keeps up for a bit.

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20 september 2020

It's been a week. Here in the Pacific Northwest, we've been having terrible, terrible air quality. Most days the air quality index (AQI) has been in the "Hazardous" range, and we've been feeling lucky to be in the "Very Healthy" category on Thursday. Yesterday and today, we finally got into the "Normal" category for air quality. It means that there's been a lot of stuff that we've been putting off that we now have been able to do.

I spent part of this morning baking gluten-free bread, and also making dairy free cheese. My partner has celiac, and I'm lactose intolerant. We're a fun pair at restaurants, not that we've gone out anywhere that we can sit down and eat since March. We also did a bunch of sitting around the house, but also took a walk and had several lovely chats. We went on a walk through the condo complex today, and it was nice to feel the air and see the sky.

My birthday was last week, and several of the things that I ordered for myself finally arrived today. I got myself a new mechanical keyboard that I'm absolutely loving (it is giving me a lot of joy while I'm writing down my feels), and a bunch of odd art supplies intented both for making my weekly planner more enjoyable, and some for doing sketches. I had never considered sketching before a friend started doing a sketching "spa" every Sunday morning on Twitch full of exercises. Since then I've been avidly following the exercises and see some improvement in my art. Actually, I'm seeing myself make art, and I like it. I think I put off making art for so long, that I convinced myself that making art was not something that I cam actually capable of. Turns out, it's yet another of those things where the process is often more rewarding than the end result.

In terms of feels, now that the air has cleared, I'm actually feeling pretty good, all things considering. I have a long and stressful work week ahead, with three major projects that I need to wrap up by Thursday.

(FYI: The sketch spa is 10am PST on Sundays at twitch.tv/rebeccahicksprime)

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05 september 2020

Spent this morning cleaning up some keyboards. Not anything really collectable, notable, or rare. One is an Apple USB keyboard that originally came with the original iMac, the other is a Dell Bluetooth keyboard that I've had for ages (I'm typing on the Dell right now).

My work issued keyboard was truly terrible - it was one of those flat Logitech ones that were absolutely painful to type on. My current work keyboard is a cheap gaming keyboard with imitation Cherry MX Blues and really nice trans-flag-colored keycaps. It makes me so happy to sit down and use it.

I've been diving deep into the rabbit hole of mechanical keyboards and come to the realization that I've got a lot of underrated keyboards in the house that I've got emotional attachements to.

This thing where I take out old stuff, clean it up, and put it to use is something that tends to come up around my birthday every year. I'm turning 43 this year, and there's some amount of pressure in my brain to justify my being - what use am I? There's a reality that I'm of course just perfectly useful and valuable in and of myself as I get older. It's a thing to wrestle with every year, and I don't expect to ever figure it out or fully silence that voice.

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01 september 2020

Well, it's September. It's my birth month, I'll be 43 this month.

Yesterday was the first time in a long while that I felt at peace in my body. It was a strange experience, but also really really good.

I forget how much I loathe summer and the heat until autumn is just around the corner. There are going to be a few more warm days this month, but knowing that will change soon is giving me some hope.

I see all these think pieces about how the United States is on the verge of becoming a totalitarian regime. I think it's already happened. We are keeping kids in cages. We are disappearing people off the streets. We have the most sophisticated intellegence network (powered in part by information that we're voluntarily feeding into it, thanks Google and Facebook).

I haven't left the house for something that wasn't a necessary errand since March. Okay, that's not entirely true. My spouse, kiddo, and I went to the nature park last month so that we could breathe in some fresh air from near the trees. I miss seeing all the reasons that we moved the Oregon - all the landmarks, all the nature, all the food, all the coastline. I miss it, but I'm not going to relax being careful and vigilant to go out and see it. If my spouse got covid, they'd probably be dead. I also cannot fathom the idea of being so irresponsible to cause the infection of people you love. I couldn't live with myself if I did that. It would haunt me.

It's early in the morning as I'm writing this, and I'm about to get ready for work. Work has been pretty steady, and the routine is both helpful and somewhat monotonous. This quarantine has been an exercise in patience, mindfulness, accepting what we can change and do right now. I'd like to see it end, but I am skeptical of the effectiveness of the vaccines that are going to be pushed on us as soon as clinical trials are done. I think I'd like to see them out in the wild for a few months and their effect on the infection and mortality rates before deciding that they are the right thing to do. Hopefully I'm not alone in that assessment.

Sorry, all the feels this morning. That's kinda how things are right now.

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20 august 2020

My spouse and I went to the drug store tonight. They needed pads, and we wanted to get some chips and stuff for us and our kiddo.

I picked up a bag of pickle chips, thinking mmm... pickles.

So we get home, and later in the evening I go to grab my bag of chips. And I read the ingredients. And I see that they have milk ingredients (whey) listed. And I'm allergic to milk products. Not in a mild upset stomach way. In a stop breathing way.

I threw a fit. It's been a shitty day, it's been a shitty week, it's been a shitty month, it's been a shitty year, and I just want my damn pickle chips to not have milk in them.

It's 100% petty. It's childish. I threw the bag against the wall in disgust.

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01 august 2020

My last feels entry was in March, the start of all of this, what feels like years ago but has only actually been months.

My family and I have been spending nearly all the time at home. We go out when we need to get groceries, or take things out to the dumpster or recycling or check the mail. My spouse and I both have jobs that were already remote, and our kiddo has a school district that will be starting fully remote and has the option for kids to stay that way regardless if they're allowed to go back into the physical school or not.

I wonder about how much we are staying in and how much that's eroding at our selves. I had a small fit today as I was yearning for the feeling of being in a bustling city full of interesting foods and shops and people, and that feels completely inaccessable right now. There's this feeling that we are... idk, silly, strange, outsiders, for not going out into the world right now and doing things, but at the same time, the number of COVID-19 cases just keeps going up with no end in sight.

Today has just been a strange strange day. First time in a long time that I haven't tied my long hair back into a ponytail. I dug out some "old" radio equipment -- it's old SDR stuff that used to belong to my late grandfather, and I used it to listen to the local weather and a jazz station. I miss the time when you could look around and find something interesting or unique when listening to the radio. Now everything seems streamed in addition to broadcast. Except for maybe folks that still use two-way radios like police or fire departments.

I've been on HRT since March, and feel more myself than I have well, ever. I like the feel and touch of my body and don't think about it as much as a mind driving around some sort of meat vehicle.

I've been reading the Wayfarers series of books by Becky Chambers, and the one I'm reading right now (A Close and Common Orbit) is really themed about the relationship between mind and body. It's certainly resonating with where I'm at right now and how I'm feeling about my body/self.

Feels are complicated and strange right now.

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08 march 2020

In the words of 10,000 Maniacs:

Theeeese ahh-re deeeaaays...

That you'll remember...

I had group therapy last week for the first time. It was a group specifically geared towards transfeminine folk, and the conversations there must have sparked something in me. A catalyst for change. Unapologetic demand for respect and competency in care. It felt good.

That was what, Tuesday? Thursday I had an appointment with my GP. There was a conversation. It went something like this:

"Doc, I would like the HRT." "Cool. Get the letter from your therapist and I will write you a script ASAP. Let's do this."

Mind. Blown.

So then, I had been planning to come out at work. It was this item on my to-do list that kept being put off and put off. I had planned on doing it Friday. Friday morning comes around and I get an email that one of our coworkers is transitioning, these are the pronouns to use, this is the name that they would like.

Wow.

Is there something in the air right now? So, I went to my boss and bosses boss and had another conversation. It went something like this:

"I would like to be referred to with she/her pronouns." Boss: "Okay." Bosses' Boss: "Honestly, I'm surprised this hasn't happened sooner."

Okay. After years of feeling like I'm in a rut in terms of gender and expression, in the space of a week everything is suddenly shifting and working towards the things that I've wanted for a long time.

Never before, and never since, I promise. Will the whole world be warm as this.

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12 january 2020

Yesterday and today have been strange.

Yesterday, I had two passes of really cool stuff on Twitter. First, a bunch of trans folks followed me (and I followed them) and second, I posted about folks that I follow in Women's Soccer, and that got reposted by the LA NWSL account.

Today, we all sat around the house and watched a bunch of TV and didn't do much of anything. I know that we need days like that some days, but somehow I now feel... a bit worse. I didn't get anything done, and there is still stuff on my list that "needs doing", and that pressure is growing... and...

and I know that the sort of performance culture that makes me feel like shit when I don't get things done is a load of crap. But it still eats at me. And I still feel crappy about it, and I do know that there's no real reason that I should.

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09 january 2020

Today has been rough emotionally. Last night my twitter feed was full of public trans figures commenting on the awfulness of various things, and then criticism of other public trans folks that I happen to follow, and... felt like deleting twitter from my life for a while. It's the primary means for me figuring out what's going on in the wider world, and that's admittedly a problem. I should probably change that soon.

Struggled a lot with dysphoria in the bathroom getting ready for work this morning. I don't like my facial hair, I don't like my body hair, and I was really in a bad place about how I was feeling about my body overall. I keep going around about which things I'd like to change -- I've got painted fingernails and plan on re-dying my hair soon, but there's bigger issues about whether HRT would be right for me, and if I need to present more femininely than I do or not... argh.

My therapist and I have talked a lot about "activating community" recently - the need to be around and involved with other trans foks, but I'm currently pretty terrible at it. I don't feel much of a connection with the larger queer community in Portland, and being in the suburbs makes getting to any sort of thing that isn't nearby a hassle. There are times that I wonder about our decision to live in the suburbs instead of the city (although we would have never been able to afford city living, so we would never have moved).

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01 january 2020

Happy new year!

I don't know about resolutions - I've never been very good at keeping things like that. I'm working on figuring out some things using a Passion Planner (https://passionplanner.com - they sell them there, but also have .pdf versions for you to print out so that cost is not an issue). I'm trying to slowly layer things into my life that will lead to better health.

I think the focus for me this next year is feeling healthy. That's a bigger mess of things than it looks at first glance. It includes things like exercise, eating healthier, losing weight - but also feeling more congruent in gender expression and how I present myself to the world. I've been hesitant to pursue HRT, but I've finally gotten myself a therapist and there's a possibility that's the right thing for the future. It would certainly complicate things at work - I work remotely, but present in a more masculine way (since that's how I was when I got hired). That will probably have to change in the future, but I find that incredibly scary. I think the first step in that is activating existing community that I have and see where that goes.

Spend more time on tilde.town is on my short term list as well. I miss this place, and I really need to work on being part of an active community. I had ideas for art and writing that I wanted to do last year for the zine that I never got around to. I'm kinda sick of never getting around to things that are important to me, so I'm going to be making explicit time for them in the coming year.

<3 Allie.

P.S. - I've made an account change. I've used the moniker frankblues around the net for many years, and it doesn't feel quite right anymore. alliesanders makes a lot more sense for me, and it's what I'll be using from here on out.

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24 november 2019

I keep coming back to tilde after getting tired of and sick of other online communities. I've tried waaaay too many discords and slack channels and don't ever get the feeling I get when I'm tinkering around here.

And I have not been spending enough time tinkering. I've been spending time working and working and dealing with depression and home stuff and gender and gender and more gender all the time gender.

Now, if I could merge the tinkering and gender shit... that would be transhumanism, wouldn't it? ;)

I'm making space to be not okay, I'm honoring when I feel that way, and I'm doing work to feel and actually be much better.

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02 july 2019

I miss writing and reading about feels.

Hello again town! I missed you terribly. My raspberry pi that I use for a bastion box got into a bad state and I couldn't remotely ssh into it, so tonight I finally hooked it up to something with HDMI and fixed it all up.

I have a doctor's appointment this month, for the first time in at least 5 years. I'm going to chat about maybe some low-dose HRT further down the road. I've been feeling more and more that I want and need the effects of estrogen, but I'm not buying into the whole gender binary for myself. We'll see how that goes.

I

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25 october 2018

"You're misunderstood and when you're used you are abused or just ignored. Yours is a lonely crowded life. You sit alone between and watch them not know how to treat you. How does no one understand That it must suck to be an apostrophe..."

                    - The Doubleclicks, "Apostrophe"

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09 october 2018

Monday night: apocalypse dreams. Trump blew up the moon. Gravity was suspended. Then I woke up and my brain processed things for about two hours. Then I never got back to sleep.

The conclusions:

1. Elon Musk's SpaceX is not about research or exploration. It is about the rich being able to evacuate the planet after it is so fucked as to be uninhabitable.

2. If he thought it was the right thing to do, for whatever reason, Donald Trump would not hesitate to lay waste the entire surface of the planet, whether by the current means of extracting every last bit of value from it, or the execution of mankind through the use of nuclear weapons. His administration has pretty much stated outright that the planet is lost and there is no point in trying to change our behaviors in order to fix it.

3. Our only hope is in each other. The only thing that will save the planet is a stark change in our behaviors. It may come down to a desparate need to remove power from the rich in order to survive.

I was watching an episode of Grand Designs where a woman was building a brand new house in a protected forest. The building standards were something that were referred to as "code 6." It was a very stringent set of requirements that basically ensured that the new home was completely carbon neutral.

I thought about it, and that just doesn't fly here in the US. If we ever tried to legislate the construction of new homes in such a stringent way, people would howl. We are so so so concerned with preserving the rights of the individual (and the wealthy individual in particular) that we're willing to set fire to the planet in order to preserve it.

I'm sorry, rest of the world. I'm sorry you have to put up with this shit. I'm sorry that we've doomed us all.

I'm trying to be a bit more upbeat here this morning, but it's hard.

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26 september 2018

Today just feels really crappy.

We're hiring someone with 20 years experience and who will make double the amount of a "regular hire" - he's going to report to me and learn how to do my job in order to "be my backup."

I'm feeling a bit sick about this. I've been working my ass off at work lately and I'm not sure that I'm getting treated fairly anymore. Or was ever treated fairly in the first place. The tech world pisses me off most days.

Personally, I also feel like shit. My neck hurts, I'm still feeling stuck where I'm at and not able to figure out how to move forward and grow. I'm also 41 now, thanks, birthday.

I want to end on a high note here but it's rough.

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26 august 2018

Just finished up a family trip to Seattle. It's big, it's loud, it's expensive, it's not home. I feel so much better about Portland (and living in the suburbs means access to Portland on my terms) and living here now that I've visited somewhere else.

There were good bits, though. I was astonished by the amount of diversity there. Just people going about their business being people. I know that happens here, but idk - it seemed almost amplified somehow in Seattle.

I'll be 41 soon, and I'm still ruminating on the idea of going on HRT. There's a vein of discourse where the thought of someone NB or "not sure" about HRT should avoid it like the plague (and subsquently, be avoided like the plague). There's a contrasting viewpoint, more supported by informed consent, that if you think HRT might be right for you, go ahead and go for it. There shouldn't be adverse physical changes from a low dose for the first month, and the potential for a positive reaction outweighs the potential impacts of a negative one.

I can either waste time not living my best possible life, or take a risk on whether something is right for me or not. There's this thing that happened around my 39th birthday where I looked in the mirror and decided that I didn't want to die as a grizzled old man. That somehow, the idea of myself as this patriarchal elder was so repugnant and sickening, that I needed to somehow avoid that fate. I need to take ownership of this meatbag that I drive around with my soul from day to day. And part of that may be trying to run it on a non-factory speced endocrine system.

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02 august 2018

I am feeling a certain loss of autonomy today. It's assumed that I'll just mosey along with what everyone else in my life wants me to be doing right now, but that's both not what I want and not fair to me.

It doesn't help that it seems like right now my life is this hellish mix of depression, anxiety, dysphoria, the hot weather sucking the life out of me, and various other obligations on my life. At 40 (almost 41 now) I feel like I sound like a whiny teenager. It's all the same shit and doesn't really ever change, you know?

There was this tweet yesterday from @alicegoldfuss where she talked about gender as if it were an OS. I joked that my gender was several VMs running on a hypervisor, but I think there's something deeper there. The process of building up a gender is somewhat exhausting, and the process of tearing another down is also unapealling. I'd like to just randomly gender about and not have to think about any work or social consequences. Because it's fucking 2018 and we should be able to be who we want to be without worrying about getting the shit beat out of us at the fucking McDonalds or losing our job and suddenly becoming homeless.

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18 july 2018

I've been watching a bit of Ted Nelson on youtube today, and I've been wondering a bit... did we get this whole modern technology thing wrong? Is there an alternative universe where the World Wide Web was actually NOT the thing that took off, and gopherspace, SSH, using text, actually communicating - those things stayed around and thrived? What would have happened if the interent had NOT gone commercial? What's the alternative universe where non-PC computers didn't die out? What kind of modern Amiga or Sun or SGI machine could we be using now to surf the multiplicities of not-web information? What if the Newton had stayed around, and the iPad never happened? Where's my color Newton with high-speed internet access and excellent handwriting recognition or dictation abilities?

When did data become a thing we consume, voraciously, instead of a thing we create or make sense of?

Can I have my alternative technological universe?

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08 july 2018

It's Sunday morning here in the Pacific Northwest. I'm struggling with a whole miasma of stuff stuck in my head today. I'm writing my thoughts here, in a text editor on a community-based *nix server using a Bondi Blue iMac because sometimes really really good tools remain good long after their practical use goes away.

Our country's situation sucks right now, and I'm not doing as much about it as I would like. We've got a ten-year old kid, and there's a lot of time and energy invested in making sure that they are going to be alright and have some sort of positive future ahead of them. I donate to causes, I try to amplify things online - I'm not on the front lines protesting right now, but I'm doing little things where I can. Things are bad, and it's been a long and slow process that's actually gotten us there.

We're growing some food on the balcony, and that's a revolutionary act in and of itself. It's something that's probably going to become more and more important - can you sustain yourself using very basic tools? It's one of the things I really like about spaces like this that are community driven and "lo-fi" - getting here and doing stuff doesn't take a whole lot of resources. It also keeps it under the radar a bit, and I like that.

I'm still struggling with gender shit. Demigirl seems most appropriate right now. My presentation is fairly androgynous right now, compared to pictures of about a year ago where I was putting on makeup and wearing dresses and skirts everywhere. I think I'm seeking a place where I feel settled and okay, and I still haven't found that yet. I've thought a bit about trying to seek out an informed consent clinic and trying out low-dose HRT to help alleviate some dysphoria and maybe make me feel like I belong in my skin. I dunno. It's part of the human experience in the 21st century - the feeling like your body is just a meatbag that carries your brain, thoughts, and self about - but one of the things that chronic illness has taught me is that my body IS myself. There's no distinction between mind, body, and person. It makes dealing with gender and the parts of my body that feel incongruent harder.

Sorry for the braindump, but it feels good to say some of this and this seems like a good place to do so. The little things are good - coffee, the weather, having a nice place to live. Moving here (PDX area) from Utah has been... lifegiving. It'll be a year in August. I wonder what another year here will bring / encourage / flourish.

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05 november 2017

Todays gender is genderblah.

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02 november 2017

With apologies to Miley Cyrus (and it's stuck in my head right now, arrrgggh):

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31 october 2017

I am Queer. Queer as fuck.

What do I mean by Queer?

Queer meaning I'm sexually fluid and attracted to people of varied and diverse genders.

Queer meaning my own gender is in flux. Masculine is right out - no matter how much I've tried to fit in that box, it never ever ever has worked correctly. I've tried identifying fully feminine, and that doesn't quite work right either.

Queer meaning fuck gender norms anyway. I'll wear and behave and think and use the pronouns (she/her, btw) that I fucking want.

Queer meaning fuck the patriarchy.

Queer meaning I believe in my body's amazing capacity for love and pleasure.

I'm sure there's more to add to this definition, but this is what I've got so far.

I think writing this out is more for myself, but hopefully also for others to see that you aren't alone out there. We all have different struggles but seeing that others are struggling too helps sometimes.

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22 september 2017

It's the weekend.

I have leftover testing work that needs to be done before Monday morning. Guess who has two thumbs and is going to be working some this weekend. That'd be me.

I've been reprogramming old ham radio equipment (by old I mean 2000s vintage) for the new area we live in, instead of the Salt Lake valley. There's a lot more traffic here given any random time than there was living in Utah. Kinda nice to see.

I'm trying to invest in my own interests and have a break from all the other work crap I have to deal with, but it's hard.

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20 september 2017

Greetings from Beaverton Oregon, where it's pouring rain right now. Not just a little drizzle, but actually pouring a ton of rain. This is entirely why my partner and I and our child up and left our lives in Salt Lake City and moved here.

Well, that and the politics.

They (my partner) are non-binary and got a driver's license with a non-binary gender marker. Didn't have to supply any paperwork or anything, just said that's what they wanted and that's what they got. I find that completely amazing.

My gender feels? I have no idea. I was assigned male at birth, went through a period feeling genderfluid, tried living as a woman for a while, and now I'm in this strange jumbled state where I don't know what I am. It's all a big blurry mess, and right now I just feel like some sort of plug-in employee that does my job and gets paid. I'd like for that to change and feel more like a human being, but I'm not in that place right now. I'm hoping that typing out more of my feels will make me feel more human in the long run.

I dunno.

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02 november 2016

Writing my feels in plaintext... heh.

Today felt like a long day. My work day involved getting none of the things that I wanted to get done, done. I work as a software tester for a "cloud" company, and I didn't get my major bit of work done today. The testing team is going out for a team activity tomorrow, playing vintage arcade games, so not sure I'm getting much done tomorrow either.

Home, with kiddo. She's watching Ninjago - an action adventure Lego ninja things. We're going to play video games a bit tonight. She's eight years old, and really an amazing kid.

There are times that I feel like my life is a huge grind. Work, home, sleep. Work home sleep. Workhomesleep. For millions of us right now, this holding pattern seems to be our lives. I have to admit that I am terrified to see what will become of the world around us after Tuesday - after the election. That dread seems to be around all the time. More about that later, maybe.

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