The Male Hysteric

I am definitely feeling some kind of way and am not sure why, but alas, I think that is part of the human experience.

The more I learn about traditional publishing the more I feel like it's not for me. It was a dream I had since I was a kid but the world has changed to the point that I am unsure what publishers are for. They do not publicize, which should have been their main function, as that's increasingly being outsourced to authors on social media, and they don't protect the writers from their own mistakes and the public, which seems to be an increasingly necessary part of publication that they're also outsourcing to the writers. Reaching a wide audience as a trans person... no longer feels like my goal. Moreover it does not feel safe. I have thought about locking down my twitter now that it's reached a certain number of followers that's too high for my liking. I studiously block a lot of users on sight but I know it's impossible to do so fast enough. I wish DW was a bit more active because I do appreciate its slower pace. While my Tumblr is far more curated there's still the possibility that my posts will leave their intended orbit and that's... not great.

Anyway that's depressing and I've been having more depressing thoughts but then, there's the matter of what that means, which may be good. I'd like to... actually post some of my writing online, if I don't have to jealously guard first publication rights for a traditional publisher. Maybe even... here? That would be something. Though, honestly, I have not written anything besides essays for a while. I could post about ideas I have been working on, though that's a little sparse in my head right now too. But I feel like maybe I could be more open, in this little corner, where I don't have much of an audience, even if it's technically public. Because I would like to share these things, and I've been told to just sit on them for the past fifteen years for what I've learned is no good reason... and I am tired.

I understand that probably no one will read this here, but, Hell. Maybe.

 Note: this is partially from a Tumblr post yesterday that I’ve since added to.

 I rewatched The Matrix(1999) last night for like the first time since middle school for research and I guess I have thoughts, now that I’ve had time to properly digest.

1. Inevitable “gosh everyone looks so young!” Now I’m used to Lawrence Fishburne from Hannibal and Keanu Reeves from John Wick. I haven’t seen anything Carrie-Anne Moss has been up to since but apparently she was in another Frankenstein movie in 2015 which I may be obligated to watch if I can find it on streaming given my Frankenstein fixation (though it doesn’t fit the original plot it seems to fit thematically, from the summary, maybe)
2. Some of the effects hold up much better than others. Even originally the squids looked strange to me in how they moved in the original, swimming in air, so they looked the same quality to me whereas online people think they look less impressive than modern effects The agent exploding looked especially goofy but a lot of it did seem to hold up, especially near the beginning — the mirror scene, the mouth and bug, etc. I saw a comment that “bullet time” looks retro now but I’m not sure if that’s due to the effect itself but rather its overuse in parody/pastiche
3. I do think that’s a big part of the impression of watching the film today, that because it was THE thing just before memes started proliferating, everything in it has been parodied to death so seeing the original unadulterated version feels a bit surreal. The heavy stylization of not just the effects but dialogue and movement makes the whole thing surreal (intended) but also a bit goofy now (unintended). 
4. Despite being so heavily stylized, the shots still felt longer and overall the film still felt less polished than modern action films. I am not sure how much of this is the HD now or how everything is over-edited for smoothness, which ironically added a weird layer of reality over the intended surreality, which was probably not intended at the time.
5. I know everyone treats The Matrix as lore-heavy and this may be an effect of everyone knowing the plot by cultural osmosis now, but… the film itself didn’t seem super lore-heavy, it is stylized like it’s lore-heavy but the actual film is pretty straightforward though there is a lot of exposition. It feels kind of like Inception in that way, that it presents itself as dreamlike but the film itself, despite the effects, is pretty straightforward and easy to follow. Then again, it’s probably more that there is a lot of Matrix lore, but the first movie needed to stand alone to get into theatres. I remember my brother being a bit obsessed and would tell me stuff he found online about “lore” and even had a copy of The Ani-Matrix. There was a lot, but the first movie had to be a sensation first, I guess. 
6. In terms of “lore” about the creation of the film itself, I’ve heard the character Switch was supposed to be one gender in the Matrix and another in reality, essentially that this character was supposed to be trans. I love textually and subtextually trans characters and of course loved Switch immediately despite them having essentially no development but, thinking about the original plan, I’m not even sure what that would mean? Like, how you appear in the matrix has to do with a ‘residual memory’ of yourself, but also with training you can control it, so if you were trans, would how you look in the matrix after training be a reflection of your real gender? But does that really thematically go with how this group wants everyone to be free of the matrix? Or, would the matrix, being “realistic” and oppressive, force you to take on the appearance of the assigned gender? I mean there’s the assumption that someone in a ragtag group of freedom fighters would have spotty access to trans treatments at best but the medical tech aboard the Nebudchannezzar seems really advanced so it’s possible they’re synthesizing their own hormones and etc. Like I’d imagine a trans character may try out a different gender in the training programs first and then trying to get treatment so eventually presenting the same both inside and outside the matrix, but that would be difficult to portray if the film was not about them (and in 1999, it absolutely would not be). The nude-colored shirt Switch wore under their blazer to give the impression of being shirtless looked like a nod to this idea even if it was questionable as originally conceived.
7. Speaking of Switch’s clothes, the heavy all-black fashion stylization that I recall was exaggerated. Aside from Switch wearing white, there’s also Morpheus’s green tie, and if you look closely the gold lining of Agent Smith’s blazer (which was a nice touch!). Somehow all of these touches got lost in parody and pastiche.
8. I was not raised Christian at all so the religious references did not feel quite so over-the-top when I first saw it, but now I’m just like, wow. Along with the name ‘Switch’ this film does not do subtlety.
9. You would think with the famous scene of Neo and Trinity shooting up the security checkpoint would be a good demonstration of how those points are generally just theatre and actually create bottlenecks for people in line in them but alas I’ve never seen it cited as a demonstration of the concept.
10. There’s a lot of warranted criticism about the Wachowski’s portrayal of race in their works but the film is still overtly about rescuing a Black man, a known terrorist and apparently “the most dangerous man in the world”, and this is mostly done by shooting up uniformed security officers and agents, and they succeed at it. I get that this film was made pre-911 but I still wonder if this concept would fly these days. 

Going through Dracula Daily on tumblr it seemed inevitable that Jack Seward would become an extremely divisive character as the guy who runs an "immense lunatic asylum" who is obviously struggling with his own mental health issues which grants him outpouring of sympathy and little meow meow or even blorbo status and brings down the ire of the other half who thinks that morality when it comes to interpreting his actions as malpractice as black and white, regardless of the time period. And a big contention here is the time period, with the claim that we need to judge him with the knowledge of the time period's knowledge of mental illness.

But the thing about Seward's character is that, I would argue we don't. Not because morality and knowledge of mental health is absolute throughout the ages but because, uh, despite the difference between the vocabulary, Seward is actually extremely modern. Condescension to patients especially to third parties, the-ends-justify-the-means goading of patients, etc., like... it's been a bit since I've read the book but anyone who thinks this sort of shit isn't extremely common now is hopelessly naive and has not interacted with medical professionals much.  I have not been in in-patient psychiatric but like. People being mistreated by their doctors is not uncommon, especially if they have some kind of marginalization or disability, even if that disability is literally why they need treatment. Like, ABA is legal and common and has tons of advocates, and conversion therapy is being fought over for trans people. Our entire CDC has been gutted for the purpose of exclusively selling weight loss as a cure to all ills to the point that it can't actually do anything about infectious disease, when research on weight loss again and again doesn't prove results across populations. Doctors are constantly mishandling pain patients especially due to new laws and "wisdom" and God Forbid what they think and do if you're Black. I literally just had a psych appointment a few days ago where the doctor just talked over me the whole time about me not sleeping and watching too much news when, well, *gestures broadly at the world*.

I think there's a lot of argument that his actions are pretty tame considering the context within the novel or even that there's a possibility, given the rest of his life, that his actions are being influenced by being in proximity to Renfield for so long, like some kind of Dracula-vibes run-off. But like. I can't stand the idea that his actions are being argued with the assumption that we're really that much better today. Like yes there's laws and ethics codes and such but, perhaps disturbingly, people haven't changed that much.

Hello, I know it's been an eternity since I've posted. I tried to get onto tumblr because I was realizing twitter was bad for my mental health (just before Musk started fucking around with buying twitter prompting a potential exodus -- no seriously I was doing it before it was cool!!). Tumblr is actually a very fun site. I used it a lot from about 18-24 -- when Homestuck was The Thing, if that's any indication of what my experience was like -- left because my dashboard was out of control with content I didn't like (before the porn ban -- again, BEFORE IT WAS COOL!!), and now I've returned maybe a bit more mature and able to curate my feed better, though that's obviously not something I've been able to do with twitter so the big advantage I've had is "starting fresh." I've seen some basic-level craziness with the pro/antishipping stuff but for the most part my experience hasn't been too bad? The crowd seems to skew a bit young for me, though.

I do think some of the reason I've been able to miss some of the crazy is because I've mostly been blogging about Frankenstein literary analysis (with a little Dracula, now that Dracula Daily is the thing). When you're looking at a book as old with as much analysis already existing as Frankenstein it does a little to weed out some of the immature reactionary stuff, but there are still some number of people who can't separate text from blorboism, for lack of a better term.

I'm brain-depositary there if you're interested, btw.

Anyway, this is a really long preamble to the fact that I need a static site to store this stuff. I've been posting essentially fully-functional essays on my tumblr and tumblr is a really, REALLY bad place to store essays. I've been thinking of having a static or mostly-static site with maybe a guestbook for a while, to store an index of resources and some of my writing like media analysis essays or tutorials that need a stable web address for access. I have a LOT of complaints about how the internet functions now, that corralling people into a limited number of social media sites, algorithmic searching, putting everything on video, etc. has made it essentially impossible to FIND and KEEP resources stable online. They used to say that when you posted anything on the internet it's there forever but our corporate overlords have found that it's more profitable to make nothing last and force us to create endless 'content' for them to keep making inaccessible as their combines churn.

Anyway, possibly out of nostalgia's sake, I picked up my old Neocities site, cleared out what was essentially an art project/html practice site, and was looking to start building there. I spent a lot of time in elementary school building a static geocities site to host pixel art dolls I'd made and was reaching deep into these reserves when trying to build anything on neocities and kept remembering how I did things, thinking naively, with all my code experience as a mature adult that this could not possibly be the best way to manually build static sites, and then trying to look up what I was trying to do, and learning that, dear reader, it was -- I'm mostly discussing the lack of includes to make pages consistent, etc. This got me looking at static site generators like Hugo, making me wonder if I really wanted to go that route because I would really be learning something completely new here or if I should just do... something else, considering what I want to do, or to just go really retro in my site building and not even bother with stuff like real sidebar navigation on neocities.

So friends, if anyone is indeed reading my posts, I am asking for advice on what to do here. Do I continue on neocities and go full 1999 on this static site that I want to build, considering it's the equivalent of an online bomb-shelter anyway, or do I go find another site builder and host that can make it a bit more modern? I don't have my own domain name and would rather not have to subscribe to anything for now, but being able to download my site locally as a backup is definitely a plus. If you think there's anything else I should consider for this site, I'd be much obliged if you told me about that as well. Thanks.

 All this news about the international supply chain woes makes me want to hoard things I really don’t need which I know is Bad, but also… well, what if I can’t get Things?

At the very least, I got a new job, and the office is freezing so I can get good use of all the socks and sweaters I made during the pandemic.

I was listening to the Alicia Navarro episode of Crime Junkie (don't judge me) and was struck by how much of the advice, understanding, and information about teenagers meeting sketchy people online has not changed in the past, oh... since I was doing it, so about fifteen years. And that is absolutely wild to me, because here I am, a grown up, who could literally tell you all about talking about strangers on the internet as a teenager and it being a formative experience. It was even stranger given that Brit, the co-host, gave a cursory nod about it being a formative experience for her but she didn't speak on it at all, instead giving priority to the same pablum that's always been said on it.

It's also weird that the advice and understanding is the same even though the internet was so different fifteen years ago! Kids rarely posted their full names online, or photos of themselves, or much about themselves beyond their interests and personal problems when they were conversing publicly on interest forums. Now, instead of every type of interest being separated into their own forums and there being spaces that were created to be kid- and teen-friendly like neopets and gaiaonline, everyone is shoved onto the same four social media sites where they're encouraged to post all sorts of personal information including photos and videos of themselves, or they're playing video games online where their voice is used to communicate which creates no record of what was actually said.

So much is made out of parental responsibility about this but there are so, so many ways that companies online have failed kids due to rampant need to monetize. A big part of this has been Youtube with various controversies from the video content directed at kids to the fact that algorithms in Youtube have been directing pedophiles to CESM. The destruction of forums has destroyed all but the broadest lines of moderation, and all of that moderation is focused on keeping the platform making money by keeping it in the Apple Store and the like, scrubbing sexual content not "for children" but for wealthy investors who think gay sex is icky. And this isn't even counting the culture these platforms encourage -- some kids were making carrds and insisting on full names, ages, marginalizations, mental and chronic illnesses etc. to be visible for people they interacted with and putting that information out there to be easily accessible is so dangerous not just from "internet predators" but also for way more mundane purposes.

The internet isn't even being made for humans in mind anymore, much less kids, and navigating it is way different than it was when I was a teenager -- so why are we stuck giving out the same advice on To Catch A Predator?

 Depressing news. Found a turtle with a cracked shell on a walk yesterday, and was trying to get in contact with wildlife rescues for like an hour. Eventually they told me to put it somewhere safe like a box in the garage and call before I came to drop it off. It was alive when I checked on it at 7 7 AM but by the time I got a call back from the wildlife rescue at 10 AM it was dead. I had it for like twelve hours before it died and I couldn’t get it help. 

Well, I've decided to delete twitter from my phone's home screen. It's still technically on the phone (because I'm a coward) but it's at least not easily accessible, which is a step.

Twitter is a bad place. Humans were not meant to read every idle thought everyone can spit out of their heads, even if those people are marginally your 'friends'.

It seems important to like... figure out something else. But again, I'm too lazy to actually figure out Neocities and the like. I literally have surgery early next week and will be laid up for two weeks, so even if I can't actually code and put together my own site (I doubt I would be able to get much done while on narcotics) I may be able to explore what's there a bit, maybe get some inspiration...

My friend says I need to do some DnD character creation while I'm high though, hah. I've gotten more Sailor Moon books and am going to try to look at the series on Netflix. Also, new Lupin is out. Et cetera. If I have trouble being laid up, it's because of my own restlessness, not because I don't have anything relaxing to do, I'm sure.

I finally got my hands on a copy of this (with the special cover, too!) and have been very, very slowly making my way through it (I've been busy...) and it has a lot of advice on how to keep an actual horror themed RP going. And I mean, the advice is fine, but also like... given the nature of D&D games, it just seems sort of... impossible? Like games inevitably fall into gigglefits, that's just how they are. It may be the lowest common denominator of these games, or at least all of the ones I've played. It seems like you'd have to choose players even more carefully than the typical game if you wanted to keep a serious, scary vibe.

However, the new lineages? badass, love them. Free unlimited spider climb, the best ability in the game, may mean I never play anything but a damphir again.