The Male Hysteric

I am not sure how to explain but it feels like something changed with respect to US politics. But I don't know. But it's hard to shake the feeling given the headlines that something changed today.

The Taylor Swift money grab feels ominous as well.

I don't know. I'm playing cookie clicker and trying not to think about it right now.

I don't really have a coherent plan of action right now, but given the encroaching ID certification to view anything "adult" in certain countries and payment processors pressuring vendors to censor "mature" content and KOSA getting revived, I kind of feel like more than ever people need to get themselves a web space that isn't social media. Having a static site just seems to be increasingly a good idea, even if it's just a single, unformatted page of links to your friends' static sites, and keep a backup of your site locally in case you're forced to move.

I'd recommend getting started on neocities.org or nekoweb.org. Both have slightly different features. If we know each other and you want to be linked to my website, comment or DM me. Good luck out there.

Last night I decided to watch a video on MH 370 on YouTube. For those who don't remember, MH 370 was that famous Malaysian Airline flight that went missing back in 2014, which was a huge mystery at the time and the most likely explanation seems to be that the pilot deliberately depressurized the cabin to incapacitate and kill everyone else on the flight, turned off the electronics long enough to get far away from the expected route, and then ran the plane into the Indian Ocean once the plane was completely out of fuel. So, you know, totally horrific stuff, also absolutely wild to think about because there haven't really been any other cases like it. The presenter seemed to be a pilot with a European accent, and was going through all the technical reasons why the flight must have been piloted by someone and it was impossible for the autopilot to have done the impressive amount of manouevers specifically to avoid detection, and for that matter vanishingly unlikely for hijackers or anyone but the pilot to have done this. The breakdown of the technical information was new to me, but also, that the pilot murdered everyone on the flight and then crashed the plane isn't really new information to anyone. While the black box has never been found, this is the official theory of what happened outside of Malaysia, which won't acknowledge this as the official story to save face.

So, while there's a lot of conspiracy theories about MH 370, primarily about UFOs or a secluded military base located in the Indian Ocean, this wasn't about that. It seemed like a normal video and nothing about it seemed outlandish at all. And somehow, in the middle of it all, I got this very, very strange advertisement about why I should stop looking at porn, and how it was degrading my masculinity, and how I should click here to find out why.

I don't watch a lot of YouTube. Most of the YouTube I watch is with my husband through the main TV in the living room, like, he'll put on a podcast about knitting or reading or every so often I'll put on a yoga video. Most of the ads are excessively normie, like, literally stuff one would expect on old-school television, ads about Michael's craft stores, eczema medications, athletic wear, et cetera. I barely use YouTube on my phone, and I think most of my watching has been... psychology and psychiatry topics? And even then, I had never seen an ad like this. So really the exact moment I step into a primarily men's interest, technical transit information, I start getting routed to some kind of alt-right garbage. Wow. Just wow. This explains so goddamn much.

So, it looks like Google is lobotomizing itself -- it's replaced all of its internal development classes with AI-related courses. Which, on the surface may not seem like that huge of a deal if AI is the new hotness, except for it previously had over 500,000 listings that are now replaced with AI courses, and the previous courses that people had already been signed up for were cancelled in favor of pushing AI instead of even maintaining the stuff they have. So, if you think search is bad now, it's gonna get worse.

I'm going to use this news as an opportunity to push @Lori@hackers.town's essay The New Yahoo about how creating lists of links is more urgent than ever and only getting moreso. My personal site is mainly linklists and I've been thinking of trying to put together a dirt-easy HTML/CSS template to make your own linklist for people with basically zero web-building knowledge. I've also started experimenting with Linkslist.app which might be a more accessible alternative to gather and display links, at least until one would be able to put them on a real website. And, if all else fails, there's still even Pinterest and the like -- but not Pocket, because it's going down in July. Augh!!

I finally deleted my old twitter account. I started it in October 2010 in anticipation of 2010's NaNoWriMo. Neither Twitter nor NaNoWriMo have turned out well fifteen years on, it seems like. Ugh.

A someone who's always hated TikTok, I'm really upset they're banning it. It all seems incredibly ominous, really.

Apparently the owners of GouletPens are core founding members of an Evangelical church offshoot along with all that entails. This along with the recent Lamy/Harry Potter collaboration makes it not feel great to be a trans person into fountain pens right now.

Though, to be honest, the Lamy is more disappointing, because Gouletpens doesn't really offer much besides social media content that I don't pay attention to with purchases, and in the United States that fountain pens bring out all sorts of political weirdos is unsurprising, especially if you've ever been to pen conventions, though in my experience they tend to be more hard libertarian types than Evangelicals.

The thing is that there are definitely a few Lamys that I like, and because Barnes and Noble and Dick Blick sell Lamys around here their cartridges are probably the easiest to find locally. Even though I don't want to give the TERF lady from TERF island money, I'm not sure how much Lamy actually knows or cares about her. Lamy doesn't seem to know or understand too much about their foreign/angosphere market, as demonstrated by the Lamy Dark Lilac ink kerfuffle a little while back. I wonder if it's a little like how Hobonichi had a Michael Jackson collaboration a few years back and they didn't anticipate the backlash against it in the international market. However, I really doubt that the Harry Potter pens will be withdrawn. Ugh.

I'm still processing stuff but one thing you can do if you're queer* or otherwise marginalized is start archiving media that is important to you and represents you. This means physically having books, disks, etc, or for digital media at least having a copy/copies saved locally. If you see stuff you like, like fanfiction or art, SAVE IT at the very least!

On social media sites, where possible, you may want to back up your entries. Dreamwidth allows you to do this with their Export Journal feature. I know Twitter has an export feature as well, but it takes a while. Also, get off twitter, while you're at it.

I am sure everyone has their own ideas of what to do but this one at least is easy.


*You should probably start doing this no matter who you are as a lot of chuds are mad about women and minorities getting any screen time whatsoever, but there's a straight line between people deciding even the most desexualized queer media is "sexual/obscene content" and wanting to ban "pornography".

Wordpress seems to be... imploding?? I am unsure of the details but Matt Mullenweg, the CEO, seems to be bragging about all the tax evasion he's done. I am unsure how this will affect people who have Wordpress blogs or even tumblr, because he owns the company that owns tumblr too.

I don't know the details right now, just thought I'd point at it in case there are other people living under rocks too.

Apparently there is another fanfic purge of unseemly naughty-type fics going on on Wattpad. However, this one is made worse because apparently what's happening this time is an AI tool is flagging and shadowbanning anything that could be potentially naughty until it is reviewed by a human, at which point it will either be allowed back up or purged. So it's like last time, only even MORE automated.

Anyway, back up your work if it's on Wattpad, I guess. From the AO3 reddit, AO3 users are concerned about an influx from Wattpad going against etiquette and flooding the place with placeholder fics, harassment over 'immoral' stories, etc., so if you're on AO3, be prepared for that, too.