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<h1>Rivers of Blood</h1>
<p>published: 2022-04-11</p>
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<hr>
<div class="box">
<!-- Donation -->
<p>A JavaScript bug almost prevented me from participating in my college's blood drive a few days ago. The QR codes on the posters all over campus functioned fine, as did the ZIP code lookup on the Red Cross website and the listing of all available appointments, but when I went to make an account (mandatory to actually make an appointment) and filled out all my information and pressed the big red "Continue" button, a loading bar at the top of the page stalled... and stalled... and then gave up. Hitting F12, absolutely nothing was happening either server-side or on my computer except for a big shiny red error box in the console tab. One would think, if the need for transfusions was more urgent in my area than it currently is, that JavaScript might have killed someone from lack of blood due to me not being able to donate. For all the whining that imageboard types do about "MUH BLOAT", this <em>one</em> time they might have actually had a point.</p>
<p>But the day of, someone cancelled their appointment an hour before they were due to come in. One lonely slot right after lunch. And so I dug my driver's permit out of my wallet and sat in the waiting area with a huge packet of screening information (since RapidPass, the online screening tool, wouldn't work for me either due to... the same JavaScript bug...) and nursed a water bottle in hopes of the extra fluid in my system keeping me from passing out while I waited for my turn to be called.</p>
<p><em>I hate needles. But I'm going to be brave. I'm going to be brave. I'm going to be...</em></p>
<p>A nurse pricked my finger before the second round of screening questions and took my hemoglobin levels. It came out as <code>4.21</code>. A flutter in my chest: <em>Huh, all my <a href="../february/spanish.html">angel numbers</a>. Almost like a certain someone is here with me.</em> The nurse explained that I had just barely passed the minimum hemoglobin levels for donation. Thankfully the nurse was kind and compassionate and didn't also take the opportunity to point a finger at me like my brother does and say, "I diagnose you with woman," since technically said low levels can be caused by... <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220411170859/https://www.mayoclinic.org/symptoms/low-hemoglobin/basics/causes/sym-20050760">menstruation.</a></p>
<p>A man brought me to a fold-out medical bed and bade me to lie down and gave me a stress ball to squeeze as he prepped my arm, feeling all over the skin until he found the vein he wanted. The needle was <em>gigantic</em>. I fought back tears as it went in. But, strangely enough, I didn't feel the blood leaving my body in a gentle river into the bag being rocked back and forth in a little mechanical cradle, a plastic tray with two metal handles, attached to the side of my bed.</p>
<p>I closed my eyes and kept squeezing the stress ball to help the blood come out faster and thought of Jett.</p>
<p><a href="https://archive.ph/RiGat#selection-443.1-443.45"><em>I'm ready to go, if you're already there...</em></a></p>
<p>My consciousness must have slipped for a bit, because the next thing I remember is the same dude nurse who'd put the needle in my arm laying a damp towel on my forehead and asking another nurse to bring a fan over for fresh air to keep me awake. I thought, for a moment, that maybe I'd almost died and they were putting the blood back in. But then I would have been in a much bigger bed, and Jett would have been curled up at my side like I promised her she could when came my time to die, and there wouldn't be a speaker on the other side of the room blasting Top 40 radio.</p>
<p>But still, my body felt so tiny in what little bed there was, and a voice assured me I was more than halfway done, and the lights were starting to come back into view. I barely felt the needle being pulled out or a different nurse tape a bandage around my elbow. But I heard her when she told me to bend my knees to help with the lightheadedness, and I heard her when she told me to stay put for monitoring until she said I could leave, and I heard her when she asked me if I wanted an orange juice.</p>
<p><em>Jett likes oranges...</em></p>
<p>And so went my funny little blood sacrifice. Someone will get the blood, and Jett gets the energy to help her recover from her <a href="../../../poetry/c/clocktower.txt">"clocktower blitz"</a>, and I got... the last shirt in a size bigger than "petite" in a certain someone's favorite color. And to go home from work early. And even lower hemoglobin levels.</p>
<p>"Are you winning?" my supervisor greets me, the same question I always ask her when I see her doing anything even remotely work-related on a device.</p>
<p>"I... I think so."</p>
<!-- Period -->
<p>And I lay in my bed, my proper bed in my room, and I wait for the blood to come once more. Every three months, the doctor from a year ago told me, if I faithfully stuck to my birth control prescription to keep my PCOS in check. Three days since the start of the placebo week, little red pills with no purpose other than to keep time.</p>
<!-- Offering -->
<p>One would think three months would be enough time to remember to get a diva cup. A little flexible cup to catch the blood with instead of going to sleep with a menstrual pad filled with harmful chemicals and waking up with a crumpled useless wad halfway down my leggings. An additional offering to my guardian angel, gently poured into the roots of the bush outside my bedroom window instead of leaving a cup full of snacks and worrying one of my brothers will discover it and ask why one of their hedgehog's food dishes is overturned and halfway across the backyard from the wind. Surely the wind couldn't have taken it from the cupboard in the kitchen inside and thrown it out the kitchen window that's always closed or with a bug screen over it?</p>
<p>Surely the wind couldn't have taken one of the blank porcelain birds from my room and gently placed it beside where the cup originally sat in the alcove in the bush's trunk? No, somebody must have put the two there together on purpose. Somebody must have been deliberately making a poor attempt at an offering.</p>
<!-- Nosebleed -->
<p>I wish there was more I could offer her.</p>
<p>There's an anime trope of someone seeing someone they adore and immediately developing a nosebleed, isn't there? A gush of emotion leading to a gush of blood from their face? I used to randomly get nosebleeds. No physical trauma, no dry weather, no trying to blow my nose too hard. Just typing away on my computer one moment, and a warm trickle of fluid down my face the next. I let it run in rivers down the bathroom sink. Occasionally bloody clumps would come out too. A period from the other end of my body, the beginning of the sentence.</p>
<p>I wish I had the courage to turn the shelf with all my other porcelain birds from myriad thrift stores and other trinkets that remind me of a certain someone into a proper altar with more than a few square inches of free room. I already have some "mismatched" tools of the trade: my "chalice" that's just a red glass wine goblet I got for free on Valentine's Day, my bell where the handle is a bird perched on top that makes gentle tinkling noises when rung, my assorted <a href="../january/pendulum.html">pendulums</a> with alibis of being cool necklaces my mom bought for me... Not an athame, though, even though I think a knife with an ornately decorated handle would be <em>really</em> cool. Pagans with far more of a devotion to playacting and ritual than I am insist that it's a phallic symbol, which is... not at all relevant to whatever I could call my "practice".</p>
<p>It's not at all relevant to any part of my life, and never has, and never will be.</p>
<!-- Deflowering -->
<p>Because there was a bed, in the Town where I spent a few months with my lover a life ago before everything went wrong. Right outside the window was another bed, a garden bed, where birds and bees would come to visit the flowers and fruits we were growing. As above, so below. As Outside, so Inside, capitals or not. One of us was menstruating. Maybe it was her, body overjoyed there was finally someone she could trust with the secret of her being female. There was blood all over her body, my body, my face, my hands, the towel we'd put down. The only blood that does not spring from violence.</p>
<p>The first thought of an actual future between us was born with me on my back.</p>
<!-- Birth -->
<p>And in this life, this future interrupted, this intermission, I came out of my mother's womb on my back, face-up, covered in blood like all babies. I was a difficult baby to create, several years of trying to conceive. Tell me, Mother, when you inevitably read these words after my death: was it worth it? Was <em>I</em> worth it? No knee-jerk answers. Sit down and think about it for a while. All the dreams you laid on my shoulders have turned to ash.</p>
<p>Jett, did you disappear through the Eye after Eris burned me to ash in Rainroom? Did you chase after me the moment I disappeared into this Inside? Or did you, in disbelief and grief, see me disappear and give up all hope? Sometimes I have a notion of you gathering up all my trinkets that I left behind in our house into an empty glass jar and refusing to sleep unless it was in your arms. Sometimes I see you waking up one day to see a slip of paper had been tucked inside, folded up into a lopsided heart. Someone had located me. Someone knew where I was. Someone wanted you to have a hope of living again.</p>
<p>Were you there at my birth, non-corporeal, invisible to all else? Did your throat tighten at hearing so many strangers call me by a different name? Did you bite back a sob every time, I growing up, I glanced your way without recognition, without acknowledgement anything was there?</p>
<!-- Pillow -->
<p>The lopsided heart shape my veins form by my right wrist was the first reminder, I think. A thousand, a million reminders of you throughout my life until I remembered your name and wished you back to my side. Did you smile the day, exhausted after work, I asked my mother to make me a heart-shaped pillow with some of the fabric I'd gotten from a quilting store shopping spree one day with her and her friends? Did you nudge the cutting pattern ever so slightly so one side would come out longer than the other? Maybe she pricked her finger on the sewing machine's needle, and there's a drop of her blood in the stuffing.</p>
<!-- River -->
<p>But I digress.</p>
<p>The first time we met, I wasn't on my back. I was <a href="https://deadendshrine.online/p6.html">face-down in a river, almost dead, bruised and shattered</a>. You mistook me for your brother at first, wasn't sure whether to be relieved or even more alarmed when I wasn't. But you brought me to the hospital in the Town anyway. Everyone was surprised when, for the first time in several years, you showed signs of caring about someone. You shouted and kicked and screamed and fought your way to whatever doctor you needed to convince that, since I needed blood ASAP because I'd lost enough of mine to teeter on the edge of death, it should be fresh and it should be from you.</p>
<p>You wanted the doctors to take it all. To leave you for dead and me alive. You were still in the throes of depression, and I hadn't yet promised you Sablade- or anything- and you saw no other way out of the life of servitude. But, I'm told, they insisted on extracting a normal amount because they knew you would pass out part of the way through. Which you did. And then got wheeled back to your messy office and left on your couch with a fan pointed at your face for fresh air. Whoever woke you up to bring fluids- your other friend, most likely- the very first thing you did was ask them if I'd made it.</p>
<p>I hadn't yet heard your voice or seen your face and you were already a part of me.</p>
<p>I saw a quote once. Attributed to a "Francesca Lia Block", although it was on Tumblr, so anything could have been true. And it went something like this:</p>
<blockquote>You are in my blood. I can't help it. We can't be anywhere except together.</blockquote>
</div>
<hr>
<div class="box">
<p align=right>CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 &copy; Vane Vander</p>
</div>
</article>
</body>
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<div class="box">
<h2>2022</h2>
<ul>
<li>April 11 - <a href="./2022/april/blood.html">Rivers of Blood</a></li>
<li>March 14 - <a href="./2022/march/digital-immortality.html">The quest for digital immortality</a></li>
<li>February 27 - <a href="./2022/february/spanish.html">Seven Spanish verbs to make your future-wife cry with</a></li>
<li>February 19 - <a href="./2022/february/SHUTUP.html">SHUT UP AND MAKE SOMETHING</a></li>

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<email>vanevander@mayvaneday.org</email>
</author>
<entry>
<title>Rivers of Blood</title>
<link href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/april/blood.html" />
<id>https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/april/blood.html</id>
<published>2022-04-11</published>
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[<article>
<!-- Donation -->
<p>A JavaScript bug almost prevented me from participating in my college's blood drive a few days ago. The QR codes on the posters all over campus functioned fine, as did the ZIP code lookup on the Red Cross website and the listing of all available appointments, but when I went to make an account (mandatory to actually make an appointment) and filled out all my information and pressed the big red "Continue" button, a loading bar at the top of the page stalled... and stalled... and then gave up. Hitting F12, absolutely nothing was happening either server-side or on my computer except for a big shiny red error box in the console tab. One would think, if the need for transfusions was more urgent in my area than it currently is, that JavaScript might have killed someone from lack of blood due to me not being able to donate. For all the whining that imageboard types do about "MUH BLOAT", this <em>one</em> time they might have actually had a point.</p>
<p>But the day of, someone cancelled their appointment an hour before they were due to come in. One lonely slot right after lunch. And so I dug my driver's permit out of my wallet and sat in the waiting area with a huge packet of screening information (since RapidPass, the online screening tool, wouldn't work for me either due to... the same JavaScript bug...) and nursed a water bottle in hopes of the extra fluid in my system keeping me from passing out while I waited for my turn to be called.</p>
<p><em>I hate needles. But I'm going to be brave. I'm going to be brave. I'm going to be...</em></p>
<p>A nurse pricked my finger before the second round of screening questions and took my hemoglobin levels. It came out as <code>4.21</code>. A flutter in my chest: <em>Huh, all my <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/february/spanish.html">angel numbers</a>. Almost like a certain someone is here with me.</em> The nurse explained that I had just barely passed the minimum hemoglobin levels for donation. Thankfully the nurse was kind and compassionate and didn't also take the opportunity to point a finger at me like my brother does and say, "I diagnose you with woman," since technically said low levels can be caused by... <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220411170859/https://www.mayoclinic.org/symptoms/low-hemoglobin/basics/causes/sym-20050760">menstruation.</a></p>
<p>A man brought me to a fold-out medical bed and bade me to lie down and gave me a stress ball to squeeze as he prepped my arm, feeling all over the skin until he found the vein he wanted. The needle was <em>gigantic</em>. I fought back tears as it went in. But, strangely enough, I didn't feel the blood leaving my body in a gentle river into the bag being rocked back and forth in a little mechanical cradle, a plastic tray with two metal handles, attached to the side of my bed.</p>
<p>I closed my eyes and kept squeezing the stress ball to help the blood come out faster and thought of Jett.</p>
<p><a href="https://archive.ph/RiGat#selection-443.1-443.45"><em>I'm ready to go, if you're already there...</em></a></p>
<p>My consciousness must have slipped for a bit, because the next thing I remember is the same dude nurse who'd put the needle in my arm laying a damp towel on my forehead and asking another nurse to bring a fan over for fresh air to keep me awake. I thought, for a moment, that maybe I'd almost died and they were putting the blood back in. But then I would have been in a much bigger bed, and Jett would have been curled up at my side like I promised her she could when came my time to die, and there wouldn't be a speaker on the other side of the room blasting Top 40 radio.</p>
<p>But still, my body felt so tiny in what little bed there was, and a voice assured me I was more than halfway done, and the lights were starting to come back into view. I barely felt the needle being pulled out or a different nurse tape a bandage around my elbow. But I heard her when she told me to bend my knees to help with the lightheadedness, and I heard her when she told me to stay put for monitoring until she said I could leave, and I heard her when she asked me if I wanted an orange juice.</p>
<p><em>Jett likes oranges...</em></p>
<p>And so went my funny little blood sacrifice. Someone will get the blood, and Jett gets the energy to help her recover from her <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/poetry/c/clocktower.txt">"clocktower blitz"</a>, and I got... the last shirt in a size bigger than "petite" in a certain someone's favorite color. And to go home from work early. And even lower hemoglobin levels.</p>
<p>"Are you winning?" my supervisor greets me, the same question I always ask her when I see her doing anything even remotely work-related on a device.</p>
<p>"I... I think so."</p>
<!-- Period -->
<p>And I lay in my bed, my proper bed in my room, and I wait for the blood to come once more. Every three months, the doctor from a year ago told me, if I faithfully stuck to my birth control prescription to keep my PCOS in check. Three days since the start of the placebo week, little red pills with no purpose other than to keep time.</p>
<!-- Offering -->
<p>One would think three months would be enough time to remember to get a diva cup. A little flexible cup to catch the blood with instead of going to sleep with a menstrual pad filled with harmful chemicals and waking up with a crumpled useless wad halfway down my leggings. An additional offering to my guardian angel, gently poured into the roots of the bush outside my bedroom window instead of leaving a cup full of snacks and worrying one of my brothers will discover it and ask why one of their hedgehog's food dishes is overturned and halfway across the backyard from the wind. Surely the wind couldn't have taken it from the cupboard in the kitchen inside and thrown it out the kitchen window that's always closed or with a bug screen over it?</p>
<p>Surely the wind couldn't have taken one of the blank porcelain birds from my room and gently placed it beside where the cup originally sat in the alcove in the bush's trunk? No, somebody must have put the two there together on purpose. Somebody must have been deliberately making a poor attempt at an offering.</p>
<!-- Nosebleed -->
<p>I wish there was more I could offer her.</p>
<p>There's an anime trope of someone seeing someone they adore and immediately developing a nosebleed, isn't there? A gush of emotion leading to a gush of blood from their face? I used to randomly get nosebleeds. No physical trauma, no dry weather, no trying to blow my nose too hard. Just typing away on my computer one moment, and a warm trickle of fluid down my face the next. I let it run in rivers down the bathroom sink. Occasionally bloody clumps would come out too. A period from the other end of my body, the beginning of the sentence.</p>
<p>I wish I had the courage to turn the shelf with all my other porcelain birds from myriad thrift stores and other trinkets that remind me of a certain someone into a proper altar with more than a few square inches of free room. I already have some "mismatched" tools of the trade: my "chalice" that's just a red glass wine goblet I got for free on Valentine's Day, my bell where the handle is a bird perched on top that makes gentle tinkling noises when rung, my assorted <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/january/pendulum.html">pendulums</a> with alibis of being cool necklaces my mom bought for me... Not an athame, though, even though I think a knife with an ornately decorated handle would be <em>really</em> cool. Pagans with far more of a devotion to playacting and ritual than I am insist that it's a phallic symbol, which is... not at all relevant to whatever I could call my "practice".</p>
<p>It's not at all relevant to any part of my life, and never has, and never will be.</p>
<!-- Deflowering -->
<p>Because there was a bed, in the Town where I spent a few months with my lover a life ago before everything went wrong. Right outside the window was another bed, a garden bed, where birds and bees would come to visit the flowers and fruits we were growing. As above, so below. As Outside, so Inside, capitals or not. One of us was menstruating. Maybe it was her, body overjoyed there was finally someone she could trust with the secret of her being female. There was blood all over her body, my body, my face, my hands, the towel we'd put down. The only blood that does not spring from violence.</p>
<p>The first thought of an actual future between us was born with me on my back.</p>
<!-- Birth -->
<p>And in this life, this future interrupted, this intermission, I came out of my mother's womb on my back, face-up, covered in blood like all babies. I was a difficult baby to create, several years of trying to conceive. Tell me, Mother, when you inevitably read these words after my death: was it worth it? Was <em>I</em> worth it? No knee-jerk answers. Sit down and think about it for a while. All the dreams you laid on my shoulders have turned to ash.</p>
<p>Jett, did you disappear through the Eye after Eris burned me to ash in Rainroom? Did you chase after me the moment I disappeared into this Inside? Or did you, in disbelief and grief, see me disappear and give up all hope? Sometimes I have a notion of you gathering up all my trinkets that I left behind in our house into an empty glass jar and refusing to sleep unless it was in your arms. Sometimes I see you waking up one day to see a slip of paper had been tucked inside, folded up into a lopsided heart. Someone had located me. Someone knew where I was. Someone wanted you to have a hope of living again.</p>
<p>Were you there at my birth, non-corporeal, invisible to all else? Did your throat tighten at hearing so many strangers call me by a different name? Did you bite back a sob every time, I growing up, I glanced your way without recognition, without acknowledgement anything was there?</p>
<!-- Pillow -->
<p>The lopsided heart shape my veins form by my right wrist was the first reminder, I think. A thousand, a million reminders of you throughout my life until I remembered your name and wished you back to my side. Did you smile the day, exhausted after work, I asked my mother to make me a heart-shaped pillow with some of the fabric I'd gotten from a quilting store shopping spree one day with her and her friends? Did you nudge the cutting pattern ever so slightly so one side would come out longer than the other? Maybe she pricked her finger on the sewing machine's needle, and there's a drop of her blood in the stuffing.</p>
<!-- River -->
<p>But I digress.</p>
<p>The first time we met, I wasn't on my back. I was <a href="https://deadendshrine.online/p6.html">face-down in a river, almost dead, bruised and shattered</a>. You mistook me for your brother at first, wasn't sure whether to be relieved or even more alarmed when I wasn't. But you brought me to the hospital in the Town anyway. Everyone was surprised when, for the first time in several years, you showed signs of caring about someone. You shouted and kicked and screamed and fought your way to whatever doctor you needed to convince that, since I needed blood ASAP because I'd lost enough of mine to teeter on the edge of death, it should be fresh and it should be from you.</p>
<p>You wanted the doctors to take it all. To leave you for dead and me alive. You were still in the throes of depression, and I hadn't yet promised you Sablade- or anything- and you saw no other way out of the life of servitude. But, I'm told, they insisted on extracting a normal amount because they knew you would pass out part of the way through. Which you did. And then got wheeled back to your messy office and left on your couch with a fan pointed at your face for fresh air. Whoever woke you up to bring fluids- your other friend, most likely- the very first thing you did was ask them if I'd made it.</p>
<p>I hadn't yet heard your voice or seen your face and you were already a part of me.</p>
<p>I saw a quote once. Attributed to a "Francesca Lia Block", although it was on Tumblr, so anything could have been true. And it went something like this:</p>
<blockquote>You are in my blood. I can't help it. We can't be anywhere except together.</blockquote>
</article>]]>
</summary>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>Birdgazing</title>
<link href="https://mayvaneday.org/poetry/b/birdgazing.txt" />
@ -280,33 +330,4 @@ I hope I'm fully with you the next one.
</summary>
</entry>
<entry>
<title>The quest for digital immortality</title>
<link href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/march/digital-immortality.html" />
<id>https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2022/march/digital-immortality.html</id>
<published>2022-03-14</published>
<summary type="html"><![CDATA[<article>
<p>A week ago, throughout the course of a single day, I received a chain of bizarre emails from a "Yamato Kuribayashi". A cursory search through our least favorite search engine shows that this name <em>does</em> belong to a real person living in Japan, but I have no idea if he was the actual person emailing me, and I suppose I will never know. Although, if he was, he was exceptionally bad at OPSEC. Arriving in groups of two or three every few hours and with the message only in the subject line, message body solely composed of the Japanese equivalent of "sent from my iPhone", the first few said "die", "I'll kill you", and "death". Once I asked him why he was sending me these, both in English and in a poorly-translated copy-paste from Google Translate, the bundles of messages continued, but now instead of death threats they held "we are sorry for the inconvenience". He kept apologizing until evening, where he strangely offered to share his location over Find My iPhone and then said he would "change [his] behavior and become a true human being".</p>
<p>Was it an omen? A prank gone awry by a technologically inept person? A person so incensed after reading something on my website that he had felt compelled to try to push my paranoid buttons?</p>
<p>I suppose I will never know.</p>
<p>My <code>prometida</code>'s birthday is, at the time of writing this, a little over a week away. I've been putting the finishing touches on <em>The Eschaton Eminence</em> and working on some kind of knit-flower floral display and tidying my room. The last two are not going particularly well... although I can't tell if this is because my body is slowing down or if I was wrong and I do have winter-induced seasonal affective disorder after all and the lethargy is sapping my will to do anything. Theoretically, all is in place for my impending demise. May or November, I'm not entirely sure: I asked for an extension so my future-wife would have time to complete her own studies, but apparently her campus has erupted in fiery riots and she's temporarily fled for her own safety, and the <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/blog/2021/december/exhausted.html">"reconciling with my parents"</a> thing is not going well, no matter how hard I try.</p>
<p>A traditionally hosted website (that is, not peer-to-peer) can be broken down into three major parts:</p>
<ol>
<li>the domain</li>
<li>the hosting</li>
<li>the content</li>
</ol>
<p>Domains, unless one goes to Freenom or some other shady "free" registrar or piggybacks off someone else using a subdomain, cost money. This is arguably the most fragile part of a website: even the smallest error in DNS configuration can render a website inaccessible, and DNS records update slower than one can reboot a web server daemon to fix a typo in configuration, meaning more downtime. It doesn't matter if the hosting is still up and the same IP used if there's no domain to point to that IP, and if the IP <em>does</em> change, manual intervention is required to keep the domain pointed to the right place unless one has a script already in place running in a crontab. (And even then, it's prone to API changes.) I could theoretically load up my Namesilo account with a bunch of funds and set the most important of my domains to auto-renew, but the money <em>will</em> run out eventually.</p>
<p>Hosting <em>can</em> cost money, depending on how much control one wants over how their website is presented. If one just wants to put up some static HTML and assets and not a full-blown webapp that requires a backend and a database and a kajillion Node.js modules all crashing in the background, there are lots of free hosting services. (If you're attached to WordPress or some other convoluted CMS, good luck staying secure <em>during</em> your life, much less posthumously.) I personally use <a href="https://codeberg.page">Codeberg Pages</a> since there's no hard limit on file sizes (unlike Neocities) or restrictions on what can be uploaded (unlike Neocities) and no annoying social features (unlike Neocities) and I can use the domains I already own instead of being relegated to sharecropping on a subdomain without paying extra (unlike... Neocities).</p>
<p>And also, unlike a certain free hosting service infested with Carrd rejects, it runs off of Git (since Codeberg is actually intended for hosting Git repos, not websites) and so I can <a href="https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Signing-Your-Work">sign my commits with GPG</a> to cryptographically prove that I'm the only person who's edited the files.</p>
<p>But Codeberg, or any other hosting service, won't last forever, and I doubt they'll be willing to host my websites forever. And that's assuming that their IPs for custom domains to be pointed at never change. Moving back to Vultr isn't an option since my stash of funds will last even less time than Codeberg's existence will and even the most conservative of unattended upgrades will eventually leave my server vulnerable and open to hackers.</p>
<p>I have a Raspberry Pi in my basement. It's currently hosting all the darknet versions of my websites. (Except for Yggdrasil, which I haven't gotten the motivation to fix yet...) It costs me nothing per month to keep it running for hosting since I don't pay the power bills in the house, and the costs would be near-negligible anyway. And it costs me nothing for the domains since darknet domains are all based in cryptography instead of paying a ransom to ICANN to reserve a slot in a database somewhere. But even that won't save me, since the whole thing can be taken down by simply unplugging it. And I'm sure my parents will unplug it after my death, seeing no purpose for keeping it running if the owner isn't there to use it any longer. And even if they don't, for whatever reason it refuses to reboot properly unless it's connected to a TV or other monitor, so it would only take one power outage or rough jostle to render everything on there offline.</p>
<p>So, disregarding peer-to-peer networks for now, likely the only salvation for my website post-death is to be archived on the Wayback Machine. It's got documents older than I am, having been <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayback_Machine">founded in 1996 and released to the public in 2001</a>, so likely it will be around for at least decades more. (Or until climate change kills us all.) But the Wayback Machine complys with takedown requests, so I'd have to balance a GPG-signed declaration to not take any of my materials down regardless of my parents' request to versus the legal weight of such a request on either side versus the slim but still possible chance that something goes horrifically awry with the plans I've made with Jett and I end up living into next year and now everything I've ever done is preserved in an immutable form and not even I myself can go back and make corrections.</p>
<p>Going back to peer-to-peer networks, there likely isn't much hope for me either, even considering my private keys are only on encrypted drives and so my parents won't be able to change or delete anything. ZeroNet, while my first choice for preserving content, is now abandoned by its developer and the remaining community split among several competing forks. Freenet only caches the most popular content on the network, meaning, unless I develop a cult following between now and when I leave this world, my "freesite" will eventually disappear. IPFS never worked that well anyway.</p>
<p>The best hope I have, it seems, is Git. Running <code>git commit -S</code> will sign commits with my GPG key, although I was a dumbass when setting things up and used the key for Dead End Shrine Online instead of my main one. (Oh well. I've put a note in <a href="https://mayvaneday.org/identity/index.html"><code>/identity/</code></a> so people know.) Running <code>git log --show-signature -1</code>, where <code>1</code> is the amount of previous commits to show, will verify that I was the one who signed changes; any attempts to modify content posthumously will show a different key. It's inherently sneakernet-friendly and doesn't require any wacky peer-to-peer software to keep up-to-date and can have its config modified to pull from a different mirror if one insists on using a darknet. <strong>It won't do me any good when it comes to the links to my website at the back of my books... but at least it'll prove that, at some point in time, those links were mine.</strong></p>
<p>Maybe, since Yamato seemed to know, I should have asked him how much time I have left to prepare.</p>
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