Essay

For as long as I’ve been using the internet, direct messaging, video-and-voice chat, and group messaging have predominantly been the domain of closed services.

I’ve used Facebook Messenger, Skype, Discord, and probably a handful of other platforms, and every one of them has gotten worse and worse until a critical mass of my friends got annoyed enough to switch to the next.

Well, that process has been progressing with the most recently adopted option - Discord - and I’m fed up. It’s time to break the cycle. A lot of the internet is moving towards federated services, and it’s time for the messaging space to move with it!

Or: On the Value of Commonly-Maligned Emotions

Or: Please, I’m Begging You: Stop Copying D&D

I’ve been thinking, just now ¹ This post was absolutely inspired by a recent CJ The X video (although I was already aware of the concept of gift economies for quite some time). , about gift economies and my friend’s post Rich Friend, Poor Friend.

I think it’s a good post in general, and I think that it’s probably pointing at a real issue some people have, but I don’t think it’s the only thing at play here.

My first book review! An extremely enjoyable novella about Possible Girlfriends.

Or: I Bought a VPN, Stopped the Government from GPS Tracking my Phone, and Still Cut $8/Month off my Phone Bill

This article was originally drafted and shared on October 4, 2020. It has been uploaded here due to the inaccessibility of its original publication.
This article is an incomplete first draft, and may be updated and reposted at a later date.

---

Death of the Author is a concept and term originally coined in the eponymous essay by Roland Barthes. In his essay’s conclusion, Barthes writes the following:

In this way is revealed the whole being of writing: a text consists of multiple writings, […] but there is one place where this multiplicity is collected, […] and this place is not the author, as we have hitherto said it was, but the reader:
the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of.
The unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination. But this destination can no longer be personal:
the reader is a man without history, without biography, without psychology; he is only that someone who holds gathered into a single field all the paths of which the text is constituted.
This is why it is absurd to hear the new writing condemned in the name of a humanism which hypocritically appoints itself the champion of the reader’s rights.
The reader has never been the concern of classical criticism: for it, there is no other man in literature but the one who writes.
We are now beginning to be the dupes no longer of such antiphrases, by which our society proudly champions precisely what it dismisses, ignores, smothers or destroys: we know that to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth.
The birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author.

They drag my body towards the pit.

I don’t want to go. I knew, when I made the decision, what they would do to me if I failed, and it was the strongest reason to turn back: the pain, the terror, my body forming into something bestial and wrong - despite my convictions, if I knew it would come to this, I would have fled.

I’m standing over the pit now, if it can truly be called “standing” when my body is so held by others, as it is now. The liquid rolls over upon itself like layers of oily sludge; a sour, putrid scent, shifting up from it.

I think I can do better than “nasin nanpa kijetesantakalu”.

To be autistic is, in many ways, much like it is to be an immigrant from a foreign land.

I do not mean this in the sense of metaphor, but more so that in some ways, it is the same experience. I do not know, directly, what exactly it is like to have come from another culture into one which I do not understand, but I do know for myself what it is like to be in a culture which is not mine and which I do not understand.