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!)

I was able to take a few days off from work, but it's not nearly enough. I got to the Scarborough Faire renfaire again and some craft stores. But I'm really mourning the loss of Joann Fabric. It, like Toys R Us, is a victim of Vulture Capitalists stripping it for parts.

It was the last "fabric store" out there, since Hancock Fabric closed down in the 2010s. Michaels has fabric and some sewing supplies, but it's not geared towards sewing and the selection is kind of sparse. Same with Wal Mart - but it's Wal Mart. Snobby Lobby is not even worth mentioning, and those bigoted rightwing antiquities thieves can go get bent.

I really don't want to have to order stuff from Etsy every time I want to take on a sewing project that I can't find supplies for locally. This really sucks.

The owner/founder of Texas Renaissance Festival was found dead. That's all I'm saying here without a cut, but here's an article on the subject. Warning for Unpleasant Stuff. I guess we'll see what all of this means for Texas Renaissance Festival this year.

But, changing the subject, one thing that I've noticed that bothers me is that it seems like my ADHD is worse than ever. It's nearly gotten me into a few wrecks that only reflexes saved me from, and it's led me to make a few impulsive decisions that I've regretted later. I know I have to go back to therapy and get back on meds, but I don't want anyone to try and strongarm me into taking SSRIs again. And yes, the loss of Joann's is a blow because crafting is kind of how I blow off steam when I need a mental health break.

I feel like our Capitalist Overlords really want to make a world where all we can afford to do outside of work is Sleep, Stream Media from Streaming Services, Doomscroll Social Media, and Play Video Games. Which is an eventuality that none of us should tolerate.

Trust me, I am not trying to stir up nostalgia for the recent global pandemic, in which a lot of people died or were maimed. But there was this aspect of quarantine life, and I feel like it's the part that the so-called "Captains Of Industry" want us to forget the most:


[tweet from c0wbitch, reading "remember quarantine when everyone was making bread and dancing and making art and taking care of plants and just learning new useful skills and we got a small glimpse into what life is supposed to be like"]

This is where it's ended up, after about four years of experimentation:

1 cup almond flour
1 pinch salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
3 eggs
¼ cup sour cream or yogurt
¼ cup sugar or other sweetener
¼ cup regular flour
1 to 2 teaspoons vanilla extract, to taste, or another flavoring like almond extract.
⅓ cup neutral oil or coconut oil

Makes about 4-5 waffles. The 1/4 cup of regular flour is really just to bring everything together if that makes sense, but you can just use 1-1/4th to 1-1/2 cups almond flour and maybe put in a pinch or two of Xanthan gum if you want to make these gluten free.

EDIT: This post has sort of mutated since I posted it last night, as my emotions keep going back and forth ("We're gonna fight Trump every step of the way" to "fuck it let everything burn" and back again.)

I didn't want to have to write this post, but here goes.

Since the election on Tuesday, a short story by William Gibson, aka "The father of Cyberpunk," has been popping into my head. That story is called "Fragments Of A Hologram Rose."

This story, witten around 1980, is about a future American society on the brink of economic collapse, and the immediate aftermath of that collapse when it happens. Some of the details are different than the actual future we are now living in: in 1980, it was expected that the USSR would still be around in about 100 years or so (and maybe they were prescient: since Vladimir Putin is basically getting everything else he wanted, he might as well get that too!) And Japan was also expected to still be an economic and technological powerhouse well into the future, to the point of eclipsing America (it seems no one expected the early 1990s crash that they still have not completely recovered from.)

But aside from all that: the story is about a young man who has escapes his indentured internship from a megacorporation as society collapses and descends into chaos and food riots, and what becomes of him afterwards. It's a story of how the world people knew in the early 1980s gradually develops into the Cyberpunk setting of Neuromancer and Gibson's other stories, through this character's eyes.

But, as with a lot of William Gibson's stories, it may soon reflect reality more than we'd like.

Face it, you know the meme: Baby Boomers were promised interstellar travel and flying cars. Gen X was promised a cyberpunk dystopia, and it looks like this is the future that is panning out.

But I think just the phrase "Fragments Of A Hologram Rose" is an apt metaphor. The shattered, decaying remnants of a beautiful illusion. Right now, that sounds like America to me.

I'm seeing posts like "I'm not going to let MAGA snuff out my light!" and I'm like, cool. But I'm tired of "Hopepunk." To continue with the William Gibson references: instead, I want to channel the rage of Molly Millions dueling with the corporate ninja on the Killing Floor. (From Johnny Mnemonic. The short story, not the film that was inspired by it.) Or giving Riviera a hot dose (in Neuromancer.)

A refrain I have heard a lot since Tuesday is, "MAGA just won. Why are they so mad?" And my response has been: because someone probably just explained to them how tariffs work for the first time in their lives. But also, because they expected us to still be shocked and despairing to the point of surrender. They didn't expect our defiance and rage. They didn't expect people angrily exclaiming "no, you stupid shit, he wasn't just bullshitting- he said he's going to do that stuff, and he meant it. No, this is how tariffs work."

The hangover is already setting in for some of them. There are reports trickling in of people who are already losing their jobs and having their bonuses cut because of the tariffs they just voted for. Some of them are starting to realize that cheaper groceries may not be in the cards after all, and they just played themselves.

The thing is: once Trumpers realize that Trump's policies are not just going to affect the people they hate - once they realize how badly they screwed themselves - they are going to first beg for, and then demand, our understanding, help and compassion. They'll demand our sympathy, after years of openly fantasizing about murdering everyone they don't agree with. They do not deserve it. But if by acting to resist Trump and protect ourselves, we prevent some of the hurting that these people have gone out their way to inflict on themselves, then I'm ok with that.

But I don't think the incels who are going around telling women "your body, my choice" realize that their only true source of relief, pornography, is about to be criminalized. I'm sure they've bought into the idea that once no fault divorce is gone, they'll be able to compel a woman to be with them - as if that is going to fill the empty, shrieking abyss of self-inflicted loneliness and existential despair in their hearts.

Remember Gamergate? The movement of angry adult-aged little boys with mommy issues, who freaked out about Evil Feminists like we were going to personally come to their homes and take their video games away, just because a woman in a plaid shirt and large hoop earrings talked about a lack of equal representation for women in gaming? The ones who were instrumental in Trump gaining momentum with young men in 2016? I wonder how they are going to take it when violent video games, the laziest scapegoat for the school shooting epidemic, are banned under Project 2025. And that's if they can even afford to update to the latest video hardware and/or next generation consoles after the tariffs kick in. Haha, oops.

(Meanwhile: even if we never see a release of Elder Scrolls 6 at this point, my rig will be able to run Skyrim, Morrowind, and Daggerfall Unity indefinitely. My collection of ancient Bethesda games are smiling at me, Simperials. Can you say the same?)

Trumpers don't seem swayed by the number of women who have died since Roe vs Wade was repealed: but then, we also know from school shootings and the pandemic that mass death isn't real to them (unless it's the "mass death" of clusters of cells that haven't become a human being yet.) The actual human cost isn't real to them, unless it somehow affects them personally. Only then does it become a tragedy.

Immigrants have been the backbone of food production and construction in this country for decades. What happens when they're forced out? One thing I hear a lot is, "once all the illegals are deported, Americans will take those jobs again." Hahaha. Ahahahahhahaha. Do they really think Americans who have been indoctrinated to see those jobs as "demeaning" will "lower themselves" to perform manual labor for cents on the dollar? Immigrant workers shouldn't have even had to do it under the conditions and for the pay they were doing it for. They deserve living wages and benefits, whether or not they were born in this country or came here legally.

But this may be exactly how people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel have envisioned it: deport everyone currently working those jobs, then starve everyone else to the point that they'll accept serfdom and feel gratitude for it.

I don't think people are ready to "embrace the pain" as Elon Musk is telling them they're going to have to do. But the pain is coming. And when it does: well, if schadenfreude is going to be the one pleasure we are afforded, it is one in which I will partake. And remember, above all: they wanted this. They voted for it. As we will be reminding them, over and over and over again.

"I didn't think the leopard would eat *my* face!"

Shortly before the election, I re-watched 1977 Ralph Bakshi film Wizards. It's a movie I grew up with. I suspect it was how I got "Elfpilled" (though Tolkien has an equal share of the blame for that.) And once you get past the framing device (nazi mutants vs cartoonish hippie/barbarian Fairies and Elves, and a comic, cigar-chomping Wizard) and the underlying message, "science and technology are inherently bad and always lead to war and oppression," (which is representative of the anti-nuke cold-war era hippie mindset that permeates and informs the movie) it does seem eerily prescient. A parable about the ways that propaganda can embolden and enable fascism and destroy democracy.

How can we "smash the projector" when it's a screen in everyone's pockets?

My first action after the election was called for Trump was to delete Reddit. We were manipulated into thinking Kamala Harris had the election in the bag, by a media that was desperately trying to milk as much engagement and clicks and revenue as possible by socially engineering a fake horse race narrative. This same media has been breathlessly anticipating Trump's return to power since 2020; because anxious, scared people stay glued to their screens, and that "engagement" makes them money.

EDIT: I've sort of changed my mind about "Echo Chambers." Especially since Alexandria Ocacio-Cortez made the point that an echo chamber basically won the 2024 election, and she's right.

But it seems clear at this point that Elon Musk's goal of buying Twitter was to do exactly what he did: in the words of Catherynne Valente, to take the world's biggest microphone, set it to reverb, and shove it up his own ass. To shut down communication and organization on the left, and to spread disinfo and radicalize everyone else.

The best time to delete Twitter was in November 2022, and the second best time is now.

For a while now, I've been evangelizing a return to Web 1.0. Personal websites, webrings, PHP forums, IRC. Platforms that bots, Russian trollfarms, MAGA, and Alt Right simps aren't looking for, are not tracking, and may not even be aware of because for a lot of them, it was from before their time. That, or Mastodon.

People used to bemoan the fact that Google doesn't categorize Dreamwidth pages. Now this could be to our advantage.

Other than that: wake the fuck up, samurai. Once again, we have a Democracy to defend.

Let's see what people think when they start getting exactly what they voted for. It just sucks that the rest of us are going to get it, too. They might be screaming "this isn't what I voted for!" before long, after what they very much did vote for starts happening to them. But for the ones who literally did not vote for this, things are really going to suck for a long time. We're going to have to resist what and where we can, and we're going to have to show up for each other and be there for each other.

current mood:

I meant to get more writing done this week. But everything is still happening so much, and my brain is fried. But I'd like to share a recent spiritual epiphany I've had.

If you've been on the internet at all over the past few years, you may be familiar with this meme:


More than one of the "everything is happening so much" issues I've had to deal with recently has involved people who were arrogant. They believed they were immune to consequences. And it dawned on me that this is really what "arrogance" is.

There's a common type of mythological story that goes, "Mankind grew arrogant. Then the gods smited or smote them." (I'm not sure which one of those is grammatically correct here, but yeah.)

Well, mankind has grown arrogant. And we're being smited. Or Smote.

We've seen it in larger world events, in chickens coming home to roost in regards to Donald Trump, his finances (or lacktherof) and the events of January 6, 2021. We've saw it expressed in the tragic submarine disaster this past spring. And whether or not we want to acknowledge it, we have seen it expressed in our collective responses to climate change and the Covid 19 pandemic.

But the seeds of this epiphany were really planted in 2015, when I went to the Texas "regional burn" or Burning Man-style event, "Burning Flipside."

It had rained almost nonstop for weeks beforehand, and really showed no signs of letting up. But when the friends of mine who had been going for years chuckled (nervously) and said, "there have been wet years before, a little rain and mud never hurt anyone," I felt reassured.

Then we went, and it was a nightmare. The day after the burn, the land flooded and suddenly became three separate islands surrounded by rising floodwaters. Those left had to seek whatever shelter they could until they could be airlifted out. Which wasn't me or anyone I had camped with, because we'd spent the previous day striking camp and packing up, because some instinct or set of firing neurons was warning us that if things started to look bad, we needed to be able to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible.

And that was when I realized that Mother Nature didn't care that we were a lot of tree hugging Hippies, she'd kill us just the same. We were stupid and arrogant to be out there.

I'm grateful, and I'm surprised, that no one was killed. Hearing about the similar situation this year at Burning Man made me sick to my stomach.

Our ancestors lived in this reality every day of their lives, for thousands and thousands of years. For most of human history, in fact. They didn't live apart from nature, because the level of separation from it that we imagine we have today didn't exist for them. They knew that Nature (to borrow a turn of phrase from Nicholas Cage's character from The Rock,) would kill them the moment they stopped respecting it.

Any Egyptologists reading this are free to correct me, but I feel like this concept was symbolically expressed and deified as the god Sobek. The Crocodile god.

The ancient Egyptians relied on the Nile river. It was the literal lifeblood of their civilization and their culture and their economy and their national identity. And, just like the crocodiles and hippopotamuses that lived in its waters, and just like the waters themselves in certain conditions, they knew it would kill them the moment they stopped respecting it.

Fuck Around And Find Out.

When we were warned about climate change, a lot of us denied it and came up with conspiracy theories about how it wasn't happening, or how it couldn't possibly be manmade.

Another epiphany I've had recently is about how most conspiracy theories work this way. They're a way of denying responsibility, or denying reality. If the bad thing isn't really happening or if it isn't manmade, or is the fault of some shadowy clandestine bad guys, or an attempt by those sinister clandestine bad guys to manipulate or control people's behavior, then you don't have to do anything to change your behavior. You don't have to adapt. You can even tell yourself a feelgood story about how refusing to adapt is admirable and heroic!

A lot of people have been the same way about the Covid 19 pandemic. You've heard them say that it isn't real, it's a government plot, it's not as dangerous as people are saying, people are overreacting, and in fact the things we have to protect ourselves from it - masks and vaccines, are more dangerous than the virus itself even. Anything to deny responsibility, anything but having to change our behavior.

I've seen people who identify as Druids (one of them here on Dreamwidth, a guy who is very prominent in Druidic and Occult subcultural circles and has several books to his name) make these claims, as if staring Mother Nature or The Goddess Herself in the face and screaming "I WILL NOT COMPLY!"

I'm really not sure what to make of anyone claiming to be a Druid with this kind of mindset, whatever their politics are. What I think it goes to show is: we're so sheltered and separated from nature and the normal cycles of cause and effect that even people who claim to revere the natural world to the point of adopting one of the modern Druidic revival belief systems are afflicted with this kind of arrogance, and the denial of responsibility and the reality we're in.

As someone who has made a serious effort to study Traditional Witchcraft, I see a lot of Traditional Witchcraft types scoffing at the idea of Wiccan concepts like the Threefold Law. And honestly, I think the Threefold Law was invented because teenage dingbats (like I used to be) playing around with magic and maybe trying to hex someone for the first time don't really understand the concept of consequences and personal responsibility yet, if ever. But if they can imagine something bad that they want to happen to someone else, they can imagine what it might be like to have it rebound upon themselves three times over. It's a scare tactic that serves a purpose.

And I feel like we maybe don't have enough of those anymore.

Because we're arrogant. As Philip K Dick said, "Reality is that which does not go away when you stop believing in it." And it's killing a lot of us, because we're not respecting it. It's already been going on for a while now.

And if the last three or four years have taught us anything, there are lots of people who would rather cling to their arrogance than save their own lives. Or the lives of those around them.

Fuck Around And Find Out.

I got my flu and covid shots for this year, and got switched to Focalin because Concerta just can't be filled right now. And any side effects from the shots have been effectively canceled out by what is turning out to be the pharmacological equivalent of rocket fuel.

My desk and bookshelves got cleaned and organized and re-arranged yesterday. I guess let's see what else I have the spoons for now.

Current Mood:

So, I had lost myself over the past year or so, caught between OCD shame spiral ruminations, the SSRI medication that was supposed to be alleviating that and really wasn't and actually made everything worse (I'm starting to suspect that SSRIs really don't work for me at all) money problems, and the general ongoing suckiness of the pandemic that just won't end (covid is still here and it's still killing people.) I'm having a hard time getting my ADHD meds because there's a shortage and the pharmacy won't fill the prescription.

Somehow, somewhere, I found myself this week. I'm still trying to exactly work out how and where.

flamingsword helped me talk through some of it. But mostly it was just giving myself permission to access parts of myself that I'd compartmentalized away because I didn't feel like I was worthy if that makes sense?

It really hit me when I was reminiscing with some friends in group chat about the late 1990s. Some of the people in our group are late Millenials and were literally toddlers in the late 1990s, and sometimes us Gen Xers in the group will get on a "back in my day" tangent.

And the question is: how do you become the person you want to be anyway despite all of the bullshit that's happened? The thing is, 1998 me had no idea how much of an aptitude I really had for technical stuff. 1998 me wanted to be a combination of Stevie Nicks and Siouxsie Sioux - (ETA: and as I explained in a previous post, I was actually afraid of technology back then.) 2023 me has a much better idea of what my "best self" looks like. But it involves reclaiming a lot of stuff from 1998 that I'd locked away in my mind. I can't really explain it any better than that. Maybe, "what 1998 me would have tried to be if I'd known then what I know now."

I think every middle-aged person has regrets about their young adulthood, even if mental illness isn't a factor. There's a feeling of having squandered the best years of your life figuring stuff out, and by the time you have stuff figured out it's 20+ years later and you're middle aged and the world is on fire.

Anyway, at some point in the past few days, I started to dig up old image assets and play around with GIMP, and began editing my website again. Then I was like "I'm going to make a 90s Hacker Playlist." And I so did. And somewhere along the way, I rediscovered myself.

Also, since I guess this is a meme since the Barbie movie (which I still need to see) came out:

mojo dojo casa house


But on a more serious note:

Oh hey, I changed my blog layout again.

- Back in the day, there was a perfect pixel background that lent itself really well to my sort of goth/cyberpunk/Matrix-themed Geocities-level website (it was on batcave dot net, but yeah.) It came from one of those "free tiled backgrounds" sites from the early 2000s.



As most tiled backgrounds do, it looked terrible scaled at anything above 800x600 resolution, really. On this blog, at 1920x1080, it looks more like a hedgerow. But I've been trying to come up with an equivalent using filter > render > fractal in GIMP, and this current background is what I've managed to come up with so far. EDIT: I'm still playing around with different backgrounds to see what works best.

- Well, it's been unseasonably nice so far this week. It actually got down to 93 today: or as people here like to call it, "a cold snap."

- I have been fully sucked into the collective zeitgeist experience that is Baldur's Gate 3. More on this to come.

- More Trump indictments! You know, I'm really glad. I really thought he was going to be allowed to just scuttle away back into the woodwork and take up painting or something and rehab his image. Hell, his mishandling of Covid is already being memory holed, along with the worst parts of the Covid pandemic itself! But it does look like he is well and truly borked.

I really hope this shit sticks, we get to see mugshots, and he gets to see the inside of a prison cell. We collectively need this as a Nation.

- I hyperextended my right knee last month, and then accidentally did it again when it was almost healed. Now that it's almost healed again, and I realize how I did it and can hopefully avoid doing that again, I'm going to try starting up my exercise regimen again.

Here is what I was managing to do most days. But really this needs to be the stretching routine I do before actual exercise.

- This week's Magickal Tome is Damien Echols's Angels and Archangels: A Magician's Guide. I really like his style of writing and how he imparts the information.

Current Mood:

It's basically this:

I can't look back fondly on my childhood, the 80s and the first part of the 90s, because trauma.

I don't really have a lot of great memories of my teenage years either, because of trauma.

My early adult years in the latter part of the 90s and the first half of the 2000s were a haze of avoidance and disassociation because of trauma and undiagnosed or mis-diagnosed mental illness. It didn't help that everyone around me then kept telling me I was being a selfish, self-absorbed whiner/crybaby, and the trauma and mental illness were "all in my head" (no shit, Sherlock!) and to just get over the trauma and mental illness! Just like that, just get over it! (Cue the "saying 'I'm depressed' in a mirror five times summons a Karen in yoga pants who will tell you to 'Just Go Outside'" meme,) Until I finally started to get my shit together and try to 'right the ship'" so to speak - a process that is still ongoing in the 2020s.

I thought I had mostly righted the ship in 2010 and was finally Adulting Successfully! Except, no! It was just another layer of The Matrix, like that theory that Neo is still in the Matrix at the end of Matrix Reloaded when he shocks those Sentinels, and its just Matrices all the way down!

I was still largely dissociating and getting stuck in hyperfocus mode, and it was still causing a lot of problems in my life. I did not really realize this was what was happening until a video by May Leitz sometime in 2021 where she says the magic words, "don't use disturbing media to disassociate" (starting at approximately 6:25 in the video, and CW for some disturbing imagery in this video in general.)

And I just ignored the word "disturbing" and realized - I had been using media to disassociate from my life. That I'd been doing it my whole life. That maybe a lot of people were doing this, and had been doing so for a while. That maybe it was a trend that had been trending upwards since things in the world started to get really scary and upsetting at around the start of the 2000s, and just kept getting worse.

But for me in particular, this form of disassociation led to stuff that happened while I was disassociating or because I was disassociating that led to more trauma. In my case, it was actually a vicious cycle - and has been for a longass time.

But even despite all the trauma, there were things about previous periods of my life that I liked, and now I'm kind of in the process of reclaiming those things? But some of those things are now tainted because their creators (Jay Kay Ar, Joss Whedon) have turned out to be monstrous assholes. Heck, if you look at the old fandom trifecta that ruled Livejournal back in the day: LOTR, Harry Potter, and Buffy The Vampire Slayer, (the "SuperWhoLock" of the early 2000s) only LOTR is still without stain.

But this end-stage capitalist hellpocalypse (in which I still have to work for some reason) has dragged on for so unbearably long that I'm tired. I'm just so fucking tired all the time. But I feel like there's still reason to keep going, because there will come a time when the stars are no longer right for the bullshit fascist uprising that keeps trying to happen - and when that's the case, I want to still be around to see it.

Current Mood:
https://youtube.com/shorts/tp2go7GB2Dg?feature=share

I saw Dungeons And Dragons Honor Among Thieves! It's really great and people should see it!

I got some free swag!
( exhibit A )

I'm going to do a follow-up post because for as long as I have been a tabletop RPG gamer (i.e. since 1991 or so) I have had sort of a love/hate relationship with some aspects of the Forgotten Realms, including the weird way it addresses (or doesn't address) some of its weird political themes. So, more to come on that. But the movie is great! I feel like I'm going to have to see it a dozen times just to catch all of the easter eggs. Gonna preorder the Blu Ray.

And, I got my first Microsoft Cloud Cert! (AZ-900)

( exhibit B )
(LOL, the testing site needs to clean their printer or check the cartridges.)

Why this cert, you ask, after all my recent bloviating about tech having gone down the wrong path over the past ten years or so in my opinion? Well, 1. It and any future cloud certs will potentially put me back in the running for a hosting job, 2. my personal precept of "learn as much as you can about stuff that scares you," and 3. my current job required it and paid for it.

In other not-so-great news, Booster Gold the sugar glider is dealing with some health issues due to the fact that he is now an Old Old Man. Chief among those is ankylosing spondylitis. He's on (a much, much lesser dose of) the same meds my Mom is currently taking for her arthritis, as well as some antibiotics. I know this is basically one of those long term maintenance care things and will be for the forseeable future, but thankfully he has a good vet and we're just taking things one day at a time.

Current Mood: