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 does 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".
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?
I suppose I will never know.
My prometida's birthday is, at the time of writing this, a little over a week away. I've been putting the finishing touches on The Eschaton Eminence 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 "reconciling with my parents" thing is not going well, no matter how hard I try.
A traditionally hosted website (that is, not peer-to-peer) can be broken down into three major parts:
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 does 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 will run out eventually.
Hosting can 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 during your life, much less posthumously.) I personally use Codeberg Pages 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).
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 sign my commits with GPG to cryptographically prove that I'm the only person who's edited the files.
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.
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.
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 founded in 1996 and released to the public in 2001, 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.
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.
The best hope I have, it seems, is Git. Running git commit -S 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 /identity/ so people know.) Running git log --show-signature -1, where 1 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. 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.
Maybe, since Yamato seemed to know, I should have asked him how much time I have left to prepare.
]]>If I was the one most despised, then why was I the one that survived? Why did my siblings deign, seeing death was imminent and Chronos would get his way to remake the world in his image, decide that the one who also destroys and has never for a single moment known love be the one who the divine genocide survived? Which one of my siblings looked at me and thought that what the infant world needed was destruction's favorite god? Who spun their ceasing gaze towards my way and blessed me human so I Chronos forgot? It's a gaze I've come to become familiar with, this insistence that I'm not a burden, that I'm not by presence hurting, that to keep breathing I don't have to earn. But no matter how many times I fish for my mother's pity, I can't bring myself to, when her mouth makes the sound that I'm a blessing to all those around, her strained declaration believe. "But if you knew all that I've put people through, would you still feel the same?" Sharpened by heartache, tempered by pain, forged in despair, I, bond-breaking blade? *Whatever you did is dead and gone and in so many worlds away. There are enough armchair Christs. Stop self-inflicting pain.*]]>
"What's an operating system?" Whether they were being serious, I could never tell, but the question always hung over me like death's bell. And although camp is now disbanded and dead, still rings in a disused hall in my head the words penned on whiteboard in striking red: while all other girls were so much praise shot about their skills, their quests, their help, only written for me: "I guess she smiles a lot." And when I complained that I had put in more effort but barely anything received, Mom marched me to apologize even though in my eyes I had committed no crime. Just be happy with what you've got, with the crumbs we've thrown your way; never demand the more you're due, just smile and bear the pain. Just smile and bear the pain of being a prototype, forging the way to brothers to be done right, to be done at all, listened to, heard, given right to complain, and you yourself cast aside to either be shown up or prepared to die. I've failed the test on three separate times, so I know for sure I can't legally drive. If I need to get somewhere, either I catch a ride, call a bus, or gather my breath and bike. But you're driving me to death. You're running me raw. Soon, I think, there'll be nothing at all. Will you love me then, Mother, with Cheshire smile? A lot of what's praised and naught else remains.]]>
March is Women's History Month. Time to sit down and reflect on all the shit my ancestors went through so that I could be here today, collapsed in bed, distressed, wracked with anxiety, in desperate need to be exhumed from this disintegrating body. I'm forgetting my own herstory. Past entries in my journals are becoming letters from foreign countries, the other timelines where I am well, doing well, not at the bottom of a well. The other timelines where I am making things of worldwide importance, where on my childhood detractors I've gotten revenge. Not wishing I was a bird like those outside that now return in preparation for spring. It could have been so much worse. Straitjacket, locked up, never heard from again. Maybe lobotomized. How many geniuses have met their demise at the hands of a crude scalpel, I wonder? And I, here, how could I in this day or now convince the padded-wall jailers that the other soul that resides in me means well? "She has dominion over every part of me, but *noli timere*: I have no desire to harm my family." Who would lis- ten, not lock me up for ten days, weeks, months, years until I renounced this world within me so dear? Tell me, can you hear the screams from behind tied- on masks plastered with smiles for the crime of omitting domestic servitude from one's dreams? Can you feel on your hands the blood spilled from God's unwanted "blessing" that might instead kill when it comes to term, woman coming to terms that the Son who bled with promise to save won't give her better than wires with which to lacerate? Can you see how bright is the future we might have had if every woman brilliance was not snubbed out at every chance? The sheer weight is enough to make anyone go insane. I'm forgetting my own herstory. It seems some days that things have forever been this way, each day bleeding into the next, record on repeat. The slightest bit of thawing heat feels like a bitter attack: how dare I be reminded that this isn't all I've ever had. How dare anything have the audacity to remind that one day I won't anymore be able to hide. There will come a day when the sky breaks and lets in cleansing sunshine. And I'll have to look my mother in the face. And I'll have to tell her that when I die I'm going to a completely different place than Heaven or Hell. I'm going to remember the hell that the men of all history have inflicted and make a new world where to be what I am is not a sin, not gravely iniquitous. And she'll have to confer with Father and decide if what I've done is grave enough to warrant the psych ward's involuntary hold. This is my birthright as a female, isn't it? The padded room's blistering cold.]]>
There's a woman that I love, that I miss very much whenever she's not around. Spanish is her first language, although we've never had a chance to attempt an actual conversation in it. Written language in my dreams feels like I've developed her dyslexia as the letters dance around on the page and shift into other words and sentences and never stay still. And I was never very good at speaking in any language other than my own, and even then, unpolished artifacts from my elementary school years spent in speech therapy still remain. And she's fluent enough anyways, so until the time comes for me to leave this world and finally settle down with her in Sablade forever, we're stuck with talking and maybe tracing words on each other's skin.
Extrañar is, to my surprise, related to the adjective extraño, meaning "strange". This doesn't mean my love is strange or unusual- for fuck's sake, don't call me "queer"- but that both are ultimately derived from the Latin term extra, meaning "foreign" or "outside". And if I miss someone, they're certainly outside of where I want them to be... which is usually somewhere in my presence, if not at my side.
Una breve visión de un patio en un campus universitario. Está nevando. Los cielos están cubiertos. Hay una estatua rodeada de flores que florecen en el invierno.
Hay una mujer de cabello oscuro cerca de la estatua. Le duele la garganta, como las flores están creciendo allí también. Ella teme, si ella llora, las lágrimas se congelarán en sus ojos.
"...Te extraño."
Ocupar comes from the Latin terms ob, meaning "toward, and capere, "to capture". Ocupar as a verb has many other meanings other than "to take care of" which involve occupying something, including "to take up space", "to spend time", "to take a seat", and "to fill a vacancy". If one puts a pre in front of ocuparse, it becomes "to worry about", as if one's mind had been... occupied by invasive thoughts. Funny how language works!
Approximately once a month, my college puts on a Grocery Bingo. There are twenty numbered bags (which I help organize college-bought groceries into as part of my job), and the first twenty people to get bingos win a bag. Each student can only win once per month. There used to be a rule where students who had won could keep playing to potentially win a bag for one of their friends, but the rule got nuked after last month where a group of approximately thirty nursing students who all looked like literal clones of each other swarmed the place with multiple devices per student and took all the bags for themselves. I am also trying to convince my supervisor to move the Grocery Bingo days to Thursdays instead of Wednesdays because Wednesdays are when the nursing students descend on the campus commons like a swarm of locusts and Thursdays campus is usually near-empty... wish me luck?
Mis números de angeles son once y catorce. A veces también uno y cuatro. Son de la fiesta del Dia de los Callejones Sin Salidas que se encuentra el catorce de noviembre.
Estoy jugando bingo. Todos estan ganando excepto por yo. Son las once y cuarenta y uno de la mañana cuando yo oigo, "No te preocupes. Yo me ocuparé de ti." Pienso en mi prometida. Entonces finalmente gano.
Vivir comes from the Latin vivere, meaning "id". Not as in "identity", but the Freudian id, the unconscious part of the psyche that serves as the "source of psychic energy derived from instinctual needs and drives". When des is added to the beginning of a Spanish verb, it generally makes it its opposite. Therefore, one would think desvivirse (the se means it's being done to something) would mean "to kill"... but that's matar.
El gas tóxico se está filtrando en mi casa. Es pesado y oscuro como una enorme nube de humo. Tengo miedo de que nadie pueda limpiarlo y nunca podré regresar a mi casa, así que tomo una mochila y una maleta y pongo todas mis cosas favoritas.
Vamos a la casa de mi abuela. No hay otro lugar para ir. Recuerdo en la camioneta que olvidé algunos libros. Empiezo a llorar cuando mi novia me llama. Ella dice que ella se desvivirá por salvarlos de la casa. Cuando llegamos, los libros se apilan en la cama en la Habitación Púrpura. Y mi novia está allí, feliz que estoy a salvo.
I've done my best to search for an etymology for buscar, but so far it's eluded me.
When I was in high school and bored beyond my mind on the computer, I would open random files in a hex editor just to see what was inside. As expected, most of them were just garbage, long columns full of unprintable characters. Occasionally, when I opened an old-school game ROM, I'd see what appeared to be a pixel art of some sort, or a repeating-enough-to-not-be-a-coincidence but otherwise incomprehensible block of symbols, or random snippets of ASCII strings. One game in particular, I discovered, had the full map data uncompressed, which meant I could, after having written a quick guide of which hex values meant which block types, edit the levels to get rid of annoying detours and dead ends and hard-to-parkour areas.
Why did I do it? To this day, I'm still not sure. Maybe I was hoping there would be some hidden message from the past in one of the files, a symbol of hope or dread. Maybe I was expecting, if I stared into the mess of hex values for long enough, to see the face of some impersonal god staring back. What was I searching for? What did I hope to find?
Estoy sentado en mi cama en mi habitación. Tengo una computadora portátil. El monitor está lleno de colores giratorios como un sueño psicodélico.
En el interior, veo la cara de la mujer que amo. Ella se extiende los brazos. Sus manos están buscando a las mías. Entonces empiezo a despertarme. Frenética, sus manos finalmente encuentran a las mías. Nuestros ojos se reúnen. Las agarra mis muñecas con fuerza, tratando de hacerme quedarse con ella el mayor tiempo posible.
Desear comes from the noun deseo, meaning "desire". Deseo, in turn, comes from the Latin desidium, meaning "lust", and desidia, meaning "idleness". I'm not sure what desiring something has to do with laziness, unless one is pulling a Pessoa and believing their dreams are better left as dreams since the finished reality can never live up to the imagination...
Or, I suppose, since the woman I love I can only see in dreams, then desire and rest would be intimately intertwined with each other.
I've desired to rest for a very long time, for a very long time. To lie down in permafrost or a shallow grave somewhere and sleep for an unknown amount of time, disturbed by nothing and nobody, and wake up with my body intact and ageless like nothing had happened. While things have slowly been getting better for me in my personal life, and I'm trying to comprehend the fact that there are people who love me, I still can't shake the masochist part of me that insists I deserve nothing but pain, that I've somehow committed some great sin, some great crime against humanity, with no hope of atonement. To have the breath taken from me, snuffed out in a gentle act of mercy so I never hurt anyone ever again, even if it means influencing someone I love to do it against their will...
Estoy acostado en la cama. Las manos de mi amante están alrededor de mi garganta. Las pupilas de sus ojos son pequeños. Su respiración es inestable, como ella va a llorar.
¡Deja de pedirme que te lastime a ti!
¡Lo odio cuando haces esto!
Yo... yo no deseo a matarte.
Prometer comes from the Latin pro, meaning "toward", and mittere, "to send" or "to give". Going further back, the root verb, meter, comes from the Proto-Indo-European meith, "to exchange". I've made a lot of vows in my life, sent them out into the world. Some knowing there would be no chance of ever being fulfilled, some already fulfilled without the other person's knowledge and only made to make myself look like a miracle worker, some kept near to my heart... Maybe, someday, I'll get to exchange a vow with a very special person.
Estoy en la casa que solía ser de mi familia, en el patio delantero. Mi padre está enojado como siempre. Comienza a gritar sobre su deseo de que yo viva sola y que yo soy una decepción.
Mi pecho se aprieta. Decido que he terminado de escucharle. Llamo a mi prometida a mi teléfono y le digo que estoy teniendo un ataque de pánico. Su voz es suave y reconfortante. Ella llegará y me salvará. Mi padre escucha y dice que a la mujer no se le permite venir. Le digo que se decida: ¿estoy suficientemente discapacitado como para necesitar que me proteja, o puedo vivir una vida propia?
Está tan enojado que me encierro en mi habitación por seguridad. No necesito nada, pero de todos modos lleno una bolsa con ropa. Llega mi amante. Escapo por la ventana de mi habitación.
Mi padre nos sigue afuera. Estoy en los brazos de la mujer, y ella está flotando demasiado alto para que él nos alcance.
Mi padre aúlla: "¿Cómo tienes la audacia?"
La mujer responde: "Le prometí que nunca yo le abandonaría."
Pasar comes from the Latin term passus, meaning "step". Most of the meanings of this verb have to do with travel: to cross the road, to proceed, to go ahead. Others have to do with the passage of time: ¿Qué te ha pasado? "What happened to you?"
Lately I have not spent much time on the computer. There is simply not much to do anymore. No IRC channels with people worth lurking with, no fast threads on imageboards on topics I would bother dealing with "channer" types to participate in, rarely any fun essays to read. I've been trying to get back into knitting. I think I'd like to make a long vine of flowers to hang up near the ceiling along one of my bedroom walls for my lover's birthday. I think she'd like that, a pre-taste of spring, even if wooly and without the gentle smell live flowers carry with them as if to whisper, "I'm alive, and you're alive, and we're alive together at the same time, even if only for a short while. How lucky we are to get to experience this moment in time. There will be many like it, but never exactly the same as this one." And I wonder what it will be like once we have our own world, our own house, our own front yard with nobody else around for hundreds of miles. A wide bloom of flowers down the mountainside, the firm cradle of a fork of tree roots making a narrow Y, the gentle warmth of the springtime sun on our skin...
Jett está descansando sobre mi pecho. Es en la mitad de la mañana. Su cara está enterrado en mi cuello. Estoy acariciando las alas de ella. Su respiración es lenta y profunda. Creo que va a quedarse dormido.
"¿Lethe? Nunca dije que yo quiero pasar toda mi vida contigo. Pero es cierto."