Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]

The Small Web is what a fair number of Internet Ancients and Great Old Ones are looking for when they wax nostalgic about the the way the Web used to be, before it became corporatized and centralized. And in addition to that, they're interested in moving web sites and interactions away from centralized servers with many users toward each person having their own server and domain and linking themselves between servers. If you are old enough to remember webrings, it seems like that's the idea going on here. More modern and younger audiences will see some of the same principles with decentralized, federated networks using the same protocols to communicate, like the significant number of entities that all communicate using ActivityPub as their protocol (or OStatus, or Zot).

I also think that projects like Neocities are also on board with the idea of the Small Web, because they're about giving people space to develop their own personal websites, mostly using simple tools like HTML, CSS, and perhaps a small amount of Javascript to go along with it.

I like the idea of keeping things outside of the control of large corporations. I'd much rather have the ability to discover small pockets of the Web, and interesting people, and be able to keep myself as myself all the way through, instead of having to register a new identity on every site and then try to use other cues for consistency of identity across those various sites. At the same time, server administration is not necessarily a thing that everyone wants to do for their own selves, and so if we want to encourage more people to have their own servers, their own presences, and to run their own services in relation to that, we have to do a few different things.

One of the first things that has to happen is for the tools and the servers to run on spare computing - which often means older hardware and/or inexpensive single-board computers. Which also means that people who want to join self-hosting, running their own servers, and administrating their own servers also have to learn how to run and administer Linux systems, as so many of the Free and Open Source utilities that run servers and hook them up to the Internet are designed for and run most smoothly on Linux. Most of those tools are also meant to be administered and set up through the command line, rather than any kind of graphical interface, including the use of secure shell (SSH) to do remote administration from anywhere.

So not only do we need people comfortable with the command line, and server packages that can run on old and underpowered hardware, we also need easy ways of making sure that systems and servers stay updated against threats and bots scanning for vulnerabilities in systems so they can exploit them. Those servers need to be deployed in ways that don't require someone to learn how to get elbows-deep into configuration files and to know what tricks are going to be used against them. Sensible and secure defaults, and most likely, hooking into systems like Let's Encrypt and other things that are meant to make sure that a server joining the Web is as secure as it can be made. And for most people, who won't want to administer the server, even if they do want to have control over their own websites and their own services, that means a lot of making things easier, using wizards and interactive setups, and otherwise putting in a lot of effort to make the process smooth and understandable, from the installation of Linux to the deployment of the server, and possibly some additional scripting tools to install and configure whatever services are desired on these Small Web servers. Or even building some GUI tools to make that work. It's the kind of thing that Y U No Host is developed for, for a single user, or a small group of trusted users, rather than a thing that's meant for the general Internet at large to use, so that could be a way of merging everything together. It would be something to try, certainly, although I think the best candidate box that I have for doing this would need some additional cabling run to it, or another network switch attached to that spot, so that there would be a cabled connection available for it to run.

Past that point, though, there's still one other issue for most people who want to host their own services on their own hardware - the Internet Service Provider that they get their connection from. A fair number of people get their Internet access from an ISP that believes they're mostly going to be using it for downloading things, streaming, and otherwise a regular amount of bandwidth and transfer for common household access. Adding a server and services that would have outside access and using more data transfer might either be something that the policies of their provider forbid, or it might move them closer to any bandwidth caps that might be part of their connection. (Because in the United States, even things that are billed as "unlimited" often have caps on them, because the service providers often think that such uses are stressing their networks or are "excessive" uses. And, in many parts of the country, there's one ISP for everyone in a geographic area, unless someone wants to change to a different method of delivery that may or may not actually exist in their area. Such monopolies are often functional, even if there are theoretical competitors in the area so that captured regulators don't actually start making noises about the need to have real competition in the area. Those kinds of situations can be avoided by hosting on other people's servers, but the Small Web people are about owning and hosting your own things and not being beholden to someone else to provide you with server space, or to have centralization points like server farms that are getting in the way of communication between people. And, of course, server hosting elsewhere costs money, much like domain name registration costs money. And once again we get back to the concept of "free as in 'free kittens' " as the underlying problem.

What makes the corporate, centralized system of social media and hosted material work is that it abstracts or offsets the administration and hosting costs so that someone can focus on the things they actually want to do. The money they pay or the data they give up is an acceptable trade compared to having to do the work of maintaining systems themselves. I'm still not feeling up to it myself, either for the expense of maintaining a domain and a server, or for the necessities of server maintenance. Yes, I run Linux and use those tools regularly for updating and maintaining my systems, but stepping up into doing self-hosting and data work in that way is still scary for me, so I figure that if I'm still hesitant about it, instead of enthusiastic about it, it's probably better for me not to do it, or to find some way of doing it that stays on the local network without popping out to the Internet at large until I feel like it would be useful to have remote access to things. I support having better tools, easier setup and hosting, and the ability to manage things sensibly and automatically, rather than having to do a lot of work and arcane things to get it all ready to go and then to keep up with arcane things to secure and harden the hosting against the probings of things looking for exploitation. For the moment, though, I'm more of a philosophical supporter than a hands-on person. If and when a use case shows up where I think the effort of self-hosting, or elsewhere-hosting, is the best idea to go with and start deploying those tools, well, you'll probably hear me swearing a blue streak as I go through all of that necessary setup, examination, testing, choosing, and everything that will get it to the point where I feel comfortable letting it ride and continue to exist.

Until then, though, I'll definitely continue to try and see where I can support and use things like Dreamwidth, or the server that my fediverse presence is on, and Neocities, and other things that, while I won't ever be completely free of large corporate services, I can try to minimize them and see how little of them I can use and still have a good experience with everything in my life.

[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]

I have not been short for most of my life. By the time I had exited elementary school, I was already well on my way to my full adult height, and I believe I had crested the six foot mark at that point. (1.82m, for people who use sensible metric systems instead of stange imperial ones.) As my mother would joke, it was a yearly question of whether we would make it to summer break before I outgrew my uniform clothes for that year. (I did not outgrow them, as best as I can remember, but there is also always a thriving exchange of uniform clothing for Catholic schooling, so if there had been a swap, I wouldn't have noticed.) I am most certainly not a member of the average height club for the country, although I am a member of the average height club for people of my body type in my family group. And my youngest sibling is taller than I am. (I'm a lttle over 1.9m, my sibling is just over 2m.) So there's plenty of my life where I find myself wishing for some additional length in many things. As I've gotten older, of course, and continued on a US diet, along with not getting quite as much exercise as I was during my university days, (marching band will definitely give you plenty of options for vigorous activity) I've also gotten rounder. (My ex routinely mentioned that I needed to be less skinny than I was, and so she might have gone in to try for some of that.)

( So that means I qualify as Big and Tall, and sometimes that's not great. )

For all of the jokes about the weather and the complete exclusion from the Average Height Club, I still like being tall, and I've come to accept that I'll have some big to me as well. So long as there aren't too many people trying to cut short their own existences by telling me that I have to go back to the skinny person that I was twenty years ago, I think I can manage to make it work. And it's a community that I think a fair number of people are part of.

[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]

A perfectly cheery topic to talk about as people are engaging in their holiday gatherings, the still-existent plague of SARS-CoV-2, and the feeling that we are entering the fifth year of March 02020. (Although, depending on how the politics of the U.S. go, we might have to turn that clock back to 02019 or 02016 instead.) I was hoping this one would go early, but the randomizer appears to have some spite still left.

( This year, I got the virus, much to my great aggravation )

Conveniently for this topic, sonia linked me to Maskbloc dot org, which maintains a list of local entities that provide masks and tests free of charge to their residents, so that there doesn't have to be a large outlay of costs to get back on the masking train. Some is better than none, and better-grade ones are more useful. It does sometimes take some doing to find one that works for you, however. And, of course, there are always some people who cannot, but if you can, do, so that the total exposure risk to everyone around you, and you yourself, is minimized. While we wait for the knockout punch, the fewer times you have to fight the damn thing off, the better for everyone. Here's hoping we get there soon.

[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]

Community: The Temporarily Able-Bodied

azurelunatic suggested this, and so naturally the randomizer decided it was time to do it.

"Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" are part of the "inalienable rights" provided by the Creator in the Declaration of Independence of the United States. Of course, at that time, and in most times since, the society of the United States tends to think of all of those things, and so many other things that constitute social participation, as having an asterisk next to them, which leads to a footnote that says, "if you are of able body and able mind." Even with the passage of various disability legislation and their additional requirements to make spaces, both physical and virtual, accessible to persons with disabilities, there's still a lot of work to be done to make things accessible, much less inclusive of people with disabilities.

The community that I am currently part of is the one of the Temporarily Able-Bodied. Even though I have variable attention stimulus trait, and therefore at least some part of my life can be viewed through a disability lens (even if the manifestation of trying to live with that disability is an entire load of systems and external reminders that are meant to make up for the deficiencies of my brain's ability to store and recall information well, to recall information in a timely manner, and/or to task-switch from one thing to another.) My physical health has been much less requiring of assistive devices and systems, and I am often the most able-bodied person in the household when it comes to doing physical tasks. I may not be the most knowledgeable person, or possibly even the correct person, but I am usually the one with the most ability and energy to spend on physical tasks.

( So, what's it like to be temporarily able-bodied, and what do I need to learn and remember to not be a dick to those who aren't? )

I thoroughly expect, since I have had a life of temporary able-bodied-ness, to grouse, complain, bitch, and otherwise bemoan the inevitable where I stop being so able-bodied, because I will remember the times where I used to be able to do things. What I also hope for myself is that I will accept the new limitations as they arrive and that there will be accommodations available for me so that I can still function with those limitations. And perhaps remember to yell a lot about those places that don't have them so that they get them, so that other people can also participate in places they were previously excluded from.

[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]

I was assigned male at birth, based on visible primary sexual characteristics of my infant self. What followed from that was the assumption that my outward gender would be the same as my assigned sex, and therefore I would be raised first as a boy, and then when the time was correct, I would take my place among the company of men and behave and function as a man in society.

Reality, of course, had other plans, and I am the beneficiary of the good fortune of living in an era where there is at least discussion and frameworks around the differences between chosen gender identity and assigned sex at birth. There may not be as much acceptance of those frameworks or credibility given to the discussions and those who have forged their path as transgender persons, binary or otherwise, but it is not currently so forbidden as to have the vocabulary of sex and gender removed entirely, despite the very best efforts of fools and charlatans worldwide.

And while I claim the community of not-men for myself, it still feels like it's seen as a question that is about whether or not someone else wants to accept that claim, instead of the claim itself being reality and someone has to decide whether they want to accept reality or reject it in favor of something more comforting to them. (I do not need to perform a particular presentation before my legitimacy and reality is accepted.)

( The Community of Men, and some of the common things pushed on them by hucksters, charlatans, and power-hungry sociopaths )

Even though I've since broken with the identity of being a man, I'm still part of that community in so many ways, usually imposed by others rather than through my free choice. It's not just "sir," but often how, if I place my body in the way of someone's pathways so that my partner can safely turn their shopping cart, people will move around me rather than try to go through me or complain at me for blocking their pathway. Or how much I can lean on my presentation and voice to command attention in a situation when I want it. (And how I get thanked for handling a situation using those tools.) I can watch a situation where someone completely discounts everything a colleague of mine is saying, the correct statements and procedures, but if I say the same thing, I'm treated as authoritative. (And someone will often try to twist the knife by saying "That woman who tried to help me before, she didn't know anything at all.") It's the "will you deal with this problem in the men's room" and the "Oh, I'm sorry if that is TMI, it's womanly things" and the part where all I have to do is stand there and other men will tell me the important details that they would not tell anyone else, on the assumption that as another man, I will be the one making the decisions. I even sometimes lean into it as a "well, if they can't conceive of me properly, at least they'll have a thought in their head about the man who does children's services and was pretty good at it with their younglings."

It's all the unearned privileges that come to me because of how I look, and all the unearned threat that comes to me as well, because of how I look. These are not mutually exclusive, although I'm probably more likely to notice when someone is giving me unearned threat than unearned privilege, because of the way I was raised not to notice the privilege, only its lack. It is a lifetime's work unlearning, and a lifetime more's to try seeing things from the perspective of the people who were raised with greater consciousness of their lack of privilege. And there's a lot of hurt feelings and running face-first into Finding Out without realizing that I've been doing the first part of that phrase. It hurts. And I try to at least learn from it, even if I have trouble getting over the feelings initially (or significantly afterward).

Even if I'm not a man, I kind of hope that my best self can be an example for them on how successful men behave, and manage to work through their feelings and their weaknesses, and aren't so supremely intimidated by the possibility that a woman might be correct and have the expertise needed for the situation.

[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]

sonia talked about the difference between spirituality and religion, and how being atheist does not necessarily mean being without spirituality, in conversation with sabotabby talking about atheism, lack of spirituality, and all of those pricks who call themselves atheists and rational thinkers but still look at the world from a religious perspective. I agreed at sonia's that one can be spiritual without requiring a religious framework or a god or gods in your spiritual framework, and then I sat on my hands, because study of religious frameworks is a thing that I have done, both formally and informally, although not necessarily comprehensively, and infodumping where it's not asked for is usually bad form, or so I have learned.

( Here's the infodump, because it's in my own space. )

[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]

As I alluded to in an earlier post in this series, I am a writer. There's far too much of my text all over the Internet, in notebooks, document files, work guides, forum posts, and journal entries for me to claim otherwise. And since I've done both fiction and nonfiction writing, opinions and linking to other sources, short form and long, poetry and prose, there's not really an escape for me to claim I'm not a writer. I could claim not to be a writer because I haven't written a breadlik or a vianelle or any specific form, but that's a rather pest-eaten fig leaf to try and hide behind.

Most people are artistic in one way or another, in some form they enjoy working with, or that they have success in, such that they have a medium that they prefer. Some people are multi-media artists, who can work in different things, or at different things, and produce works that fit their taste, or they use their chosen medium in such ways that their designs appear on other objects through the use of other professionals and their machines that create such things. In an earlier entry, I said that I was a person who draws things, but I wouldn't step that all the way up to being a visual artist, because I'm not drawing the things out of my head onto various media, or engaging in cinematography or cut-up artistry or other such things that would indicate that I feel like I'm something more than a complete amateur at those things. They are things I could do or learn and study how others do them, but I'm not practiced enough at them to think of them as art, necessarily.

( Words, however, have been with me for a very long time. )

We could do more, of course. We could always do more, and we won't really understand just how much art we are capable of until we live in a society that takes care of people well enough that they can create their art without having to worry about whether or not they can stay alive doing art. I really do wonder what people do as work and as art in that world, and whether we would recognize anything at all about it from our own perspective. I suspect we wouldn't, because true utopia would be entirely alien to us, without even a frame of reference to orient us.

[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]

I didn't actually intend to follow this pathway. What I wanted to do was play games for hours upon end, exploring, leveling up, and otherwise gaining mastery over a plethora of games in different styles and genres, with no greater ambition than that.

The problem, of course, is that computer gaming in that era was intimately entwined with progression in computers and technology themselves, and therefore, to learn how to run and play games, you had to learn about the underlying computer components, and how it was all put together, and at least some amount about operating systems and the constraints they imposed, the ways to navigate a command line, the need for device drivers, and how file systems worked.

I learned more about computer systems by trying to play games on them than I would have from the other pursuits of technology that I was being encouraged to explore, including programming.

( And Away We Go )

I certainly didn't intend to become one, but everything that I've done in life, each of those tasks that I wanted to do, each of those games I wanted to play, they've all contributed to my becoming a member of the computer nerds. (Yes, Hardison, I hear you. Age of the Geek, yes, but many of those geeks turned out to be people who didn't have strong morals, had their morals easily swayed by the promise of lucre, or are working somewhere that does something they find objectionable or at least uneasy-making because capitalism prevents us all from working our perfect jobs and instead forces us to work in places that can pay enough to satisfy capitalism.)

[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]

As the joke went, at the time that it was awarded, I had claim to approximately 1 fifty-thousandth of a Hugo Award. (113/5,000,000 works on AO3 (or eventually on AO3, but backdated appropriately, or 1.13/50,000 of a Hugo.) That's one of those things that both showcases the size and scale of the community of fanworks at one moment in time and how much transformative works have been drawn out of the shadows and have become much more part of the normal discourse around fandom, canon, and the like. (And in the intervening years, the amount of fanworks is apparently just over twelve million now, including creation and import of other archives, so the Hugo amounts are smaller than they were before, but probably spread out more among all the participants now.)

( Transformative fandom history )

( A more personal story )

The ratio now is closer to 1/600,000th of a Hugo Award, and in the intervening time, some of the most protective authors have died, the AO3 exists, in and of itself, and instead of being the thing that requires shibboleths and secrecy, fandom is beginning to become something that's leverageable to success. Fanartists, of course, have been able to leverage that to showcase their portfolios and their ability to mimic or wildly diverge from other styles, and sometimes that means getting hired for projects or getting to work on things that they've been drawing fanart for. At least a few traditionally published authors have published their fanworks with the serial numbers filed off. Some of them have found agents because that agent was looking for more of their fanwork. Some openly acknowledge their fannish roots and credit their involvement in transformative fandom for the practice of the craft of writing (and, sometimes, the discipline that the being a professional author requires) and the ability to take criticism from editors and others. Transformative fandom is being studied by srs bzns scholars who are writing papers, theses, and getting their doctorates from those studies. The OTW has an open-access journal for the acafans to publish in, among other places where such material could be found.

In response to the purges and content deletions, and the constant, if not usually exercised, threat of legal action from the corporations and authors who are the original creators of the material transformative fandom uses, the Organization for Transformative Works has staked out a bold claim. According to them, "fanworks are creative and transformative, core fair uses, and [the OTW] will therefore be proactive in protecting and defending fanworks from commercial exploitation and legal challenge". So far, the OTW has not been challenged on that position, although they do put limitations on what kinds of works they will accept at the Archive of Our Own that allows them to defend that position as strongly as possible. (To some degree, still, because nobody wants to be the case where a court makes a decision about the legality of fanworks.) The OTW's position and promise to defend fanworks carves out space that wasn't explicitly present before. Fans have responded in kind, both in providing lots of material for the archive, and in financial support of the archive. It shows just how many people there are who are interested in more stories, more perspectives, making things closer to the reality of the writer or reader, or putting their favorites into situations extremely far-flung from their original contexts. (Or putting two different franchises together to see how well they'll work with each other.)

The difference, I suppose, is that they're more visible now, and more people are willing to say they're part of the community.

[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]

There was a vendor at one of my local conventions selling a set of materials from a collection they've called the Recovering Perfectionist. The messages on those items are both there to make you laugh, but also, if you're a recovering perfectionist, to make you smile and remind you that you don't have to let the weasels bite you quite so hard.

• Failure is Absolutely an Option
• Practice Makes Good Enough
• Dream Mediocre

Each of those messages has been a difficult thing to learn, because Twice Exceptionality means a lot of success in the structured environments of schools, learning, and grading, and that can give you the feeling that while some aspects of your life might be loose, the wheels have not come completely off in everything, and so long as you keep succeeding at your coursework, everything will turn out fine.

( This particular flaw went in early and has been hurting me ever since )

The bad boss retired. I eventually ended the bad relationship, having to finally admit to myself that I could not perfect it, and I could not be perfect for her, A new relationship saw someone like them and then proceeded to nag me until I got diagnostics and prodded me to explain to the person diagnosing what I am like when none of my compensating systems are online, rather than what I'm like when in operating at my best days. Because admitting I am imperfect is still hard, even when there are benefits to doing so.