numb3r_5ev3n

First and foremost: https://neocities.org

1. "Ok but like. What the fuck is there to do on the internet anymore?" Tumblr post with Old Web resources.

2. The Small Web

3. Resources List for the Personal Web, from the The 32-bit Cafe. (Thanks, finch!)

4. Website Background Archives. Most of the ones I remember from back in the day are there.

5. Free Code Camp! Learn to code your own website!

Some of my thoughts are echoed by The Liberal Redneck, here.

The whole thing about Jeffrey Epstein having an influence on 4chan and /pol/, here.

TL;DR, this shit goes way past the victimization of children into possible murder and cannibalism, and my capacity to handle those details is very limited. I'm not one of those "true crime" fans who are capable of consuming this kind stuff as "content," or even thinking of it as such. These are details which should have compelled any other society with even a semi-functioning legal apparatus to completely shut down the people committing these kinds of atrocities. The phrase "under the jail" comes to mind. But apparently, we were not even that functional of society back in 2007-2008, when Epstein got off nearly scott-free from the then-ongoing attempts to prosecute his crimes.

We might be living in a very different world today if our legal system had been able to shut him down in 2007-2008, and pull down every single billionaire or hanger-on connected with him. Trump probably wouldn't be president today, for one. And /pol/ would not have been reopened. Our society has arguably been destroyed because we couldn't manage to put one predatory creep away for good eighteen years ago. But if we weren't able to put one predatory creep away, maybe it was doomed to fail, or already failed.

There were so many slippery slope moments in the 2000s that people screamed about, and we were all told to shut up and we were overreacting. This was just one of them. The 2000s just feel like one big slippery slope. And now we've slid into fullblown authoritarian fascism. And it doesn't surprise me at all that it arrived hand-delivered by predator creeps who victimize children.

One sentiment I am seeing a lot in the yotube comments of videos talking about these crimes boils down to, "I don't understand the kind of person who sets out to do these sick, predatory things to people. All I want to do is live my dumb life and work my dumb job and enjoy my dumb little hobbies." And I think that's most of us in the 99%, frankly. Once again, I'm reminded of William Gibson's line about how the extremely wealthy have lost their humanity.

This video articulates something that I have been feeling about the Republican party since 9/11 and The War In Iraq/The War On Terror, though I'm sure it was ongoing even before that.

To sum it up, the person who made this video explains that people in the West assume that Putin has an endgame, an actual end he is working towards. But people in Russia understand in a way that people in the West do not that power is the end in and of itself. Endless war and stress and strife serves this agenda in the way that any abuser tries to keep their abuse victims living in a constant fearful present where nothing is certain, no source of information can really be trusted, and the only constant is the power of the oligarchs on top, dominated by the despot above them.

And this has been the Republicans' game since at least the early 2000s. And why those of us who have been feeling this, who have been trying to convince everyone else of this since then feel so jaded and disillusioned now. We told you. We told you where this was headed. We told you that just grabbing and holding onto power was what they wanted, that the age of "business as usual," of "reach across the isle" was done. Oh well.

This is supported by this next article from Medium, by Sprinkled Salt (who is also on Tumblr.) It's time to just admit that MAGA are collectively just a bunch of abusers, and just being nicer to them won't change that or stop that. The only way you stop a bully is by standing up to them, or avoiding them, or leaving them.

Which leads us next to another banger by Catherynne Valente, "This Is Why You Feel That Way: The Incredibly Sad Root of America's Great Malaise." Yes, it's on Substack. Yes, I'm aware that Nazis are on Substack. So is everyone else, apparently. They're going to be there until we get rid of Nazis, in general. I recall a quote by Terry Pratchett about how the best way to deal with a house on fire is by taking the fire out of the house. And yes, this is what we collectively need to be figuring out how to do right now. Unfortunately for us, the best time to have done that was 26 years ago, before it started raging out of control. People have been joking about the "This Is Fine" meme for years, but yeah.

[Tumblr post from Kaiyves-backup which reads, "HE COULD BE IN JAIL RIGHT NOW! We got so close and if the election had gone the other way he absolutely would be and he wouldn't be harming anyone and we would never have to hear of him ever again and every day it tears me up that we were THIS CLOSE to that."]

[Image with Caption: A black cat spotted atop the stones at Stonehenge during the Winter Solstice Celebrations. This is considered to be a good omen for the coming year.]

Current Mood.

My iron has felt low for about two weeks now, and I've gone back to taking a daily multivitamin. It may be time to go see a doctor and see if this is back at the point of needing actual supplements, but last year my job switched me to the shitty insurance (good luck getting in anywhere within a six month timeframe unless it's urgent care or the ER, and I need a referral for Planned Parenthood, LOL.) and it doesn't get switched back until the first of the year. But when it gets to the point where all I think about besides my fanfic is how damn cold I am all the time and how nice it would be to just chow down on an entire bag of steamed broccoli, I know there's a problem.

My dopamine levels are crashing again, and I'm trying to keep the momentum going on my writing. Like I know the process is going through a fuckton of drafts and re-writes, but it sucks having to go through so many drafts and re-writes? It sucks that this is what The Process entails? I mean regardless, the fact that I have written more in the past month than I have over the last decade is pretty important, I think. But I don't want to stop there.

I have voiced my opinion on Christmas and the Holidays on this blog several times by this point. It's a Neurodivergent person's nightmare (or at least THIS Neurodivergent person's nightmare) and the only things I like about the Holidays as an adult are making baked goods and actually hanging out with family and then getting to go to my friends' New Years Eve Party where we play In The Air Tonight to the Ball Drop every year (except for 2020.)


Current Mood.

[A panel from Alan Moore's Watchmen, with the caption "It's November 10th now. There is a circulatory system walking through the kitchen..."]

[Tumblr post from doctor-doodleman which reads, "I should lock the fuck in *half an hour passes* I should lock the fuck in *half an hour passes* I should-"]

The thing I want to get across to MAGA right now, more than anything else, is that they are creating a future that they themselves will not want to live in once it gets here. They think it will be wonderful, they think it will be everything they wanted, they think they will be in blissful ecstacy once they have made us shut up and disappear...but once we are gone, once their outrage addiction finally starts to fizzle out and and all they have left is burnout, the only ones who will be left to tear apart will be each other. And they're already doing it. The September 10th shooter is a Groyper, after all. It's already started.

MAGA acted like being politely asked to refer to people by their preferred pronouns, or to please wear a mask in the grocery store, or people suggesting they get a vaccine during the pandemic was tyranny - because they've never actually lived in tyranny. They've never actually lived under a regime that actively represses free speech and personal freedoms. They want to claim that "cancel culture" is no different. But at this rate, they're about to find out just how bad government restriction of free speech is by comparison.

They wanted to compare the threat of "being cancelled" to persecution for "thought crimes" ala the novel 1984, but they're about to find out how much worse actual government persecution for "thought crimes" is about to get under Trump. They're going to find out how much worse it will be than the censure or personal judgement from their liberal acquaintances or family members, or random strangers on the internet.

They think "the libs" will be the only people affected, and they're about to find out how wrong they are about that.

It's like the MAGAs who go to Russia, thinking it's right wing paradise - only to find that all of their speech and activities are monitored 24/7, and oops, Dad just got conscripted! That's the reality that they're creating for themselves over here. They think living under authoritarianism will be awesome, until they're down in it and realizing that it sucks, and they're begging for someone from the civilized world to please come extract them.

It's being sold to them by the same pack of grifters who learned in the aftermath of 9/11/2001 that if they kept the outrage burning, and kept the fear of the Other stoked to appropriate levels, these folks will gladly turn their brains off and give up their Constitutionally-granted freedoms, and buy anything the grifters want to sell them. But there will come a point that the outrage stops doing it for them, and then all that will be left will be misery. And by then they will have willingly ceded away any power that the Constitution granted them to do anything to save themselves. Yes, even their precious Second Amendment. (What, you think they won't willingly hand their guns over to "Daddy Trump," when we already watched them willingly bend over for "Daddy Bush" and the Patriot Act?)

People who have studied the authoritarian playbook can see this coming a mile away.

And there will be no one to "come extract them" by that point. They'll just be stuck in the Authoritarian Hell they created for themselves.