A couple of weeks ago, on one of those quiet December nights when the year is wheezing out its last breath, I opened a folder on my PC I hadn’t touched since 2017 (that’s traveled hdd transfer to hdd transfer to cloud transfer, and so on). Inside was _3000 Miles of Blood (now named Dusk Incarnate)_ —rough, unfinished, and somehow still reaching out from its bleeding pages. I thought I was going to cringe. I expected to close the document and mutter to myself, “Yeah, what was I thinking, anyway?” Instead, I _couldn’t stop reading_. Morgan Karga—a consistent character who lives across a multiverse between this story and another I’m writing, _Dissolution Protocol_ —was still there, scarred and furious, dragging her companions across a dying America while werewolves howled at their heels. The highway soaked in blood. And something in me—maybe the part that’s lived a little more, lost a little more, written a hell of a lot more—knew this story wasn’t quite done with me yet. So I’m bringing her back. Sharper. Meaner. Truer. Why now? Because the world feels a little more like the one I imagined back then, when my only reference point was the era of the iPhone—broken interstates, flickering neon, people running from things they’re unable to name. Because I’m not the same writer I was in 2017, and Morgan deserves the version of me who knows how to make her hurt properly. And honestly? Because this story never really let me go. It was just waiting until I was ready to finish what we started. What’s different this time? The dialogue snaps like a switchblade now—short, mean, alive. Each state they cross shifts the tone the way the landscape does: sticky Southern gothic dread in Alabama, and dust-choked paranoia in Texas, and then to LA. The blood-bond between Morgan and Celia is deeper, messier, more desperate—feral tenderness in a world that doesn’t allow it at all. And the violence… God, the violence finally feels as heavy as it should. No more repetitive corner-ducking. Here’s a raw taste from the new outline/draft—one of the scenes that’s been living rent-free in my head. (Very much still in progress, so forgive the rough edges.) > I vaulted the gutter in one bound, boots slamming shingles slick with rain and pine rot. The wolf waited—massive shadow, fur matted black, eyes glowing venom-green under boiling clouds. Partial shift: torso bulging muscle, snout elongating with wet pops of bone and cartilage. "Warning from Sabina," it snarled, voice like sulfur and gravel. Drool hissed where it hit the roof, eating metal. "Turn back, bloodsucker. Or we finish what we started with your pet." Celia's face burned behind my eyes—gold sequins, lips on my wrist, bond sealing warm and eternal. Rage flared cold and clean. I laughed. "One dog? She must be scraping bottom." It charged. We slammed together mid-roof—impact rattling the trailer frame. Claws raked my side, shredding blouse and dead flesh in long, wet ribbons. Black blood sprayed hot across shingles, steaming in rain. Pain bloomed white-hot, but I twisted under, fangs sinking deep into its throat. Artery tore like wet rope; bitter, demon-tainted blood gushed over my tongue—burning, electric, wrong. It roared—sound shattering eardrums—and hammered my ribs. Bones cracked. I flew, slammed the chimney. Brick exploded in dust and shards. Strength ebbed fast, unnatural. Limbs turning lead. Occult. Demon-possessed. Below: Rick burst out, shotgun thundering. Double-ought buckshot shredded the wolf's flank—flesh erupting in bloody craters, ribs gleaming wet. It barely flinched, leaping for me again. I rolled, came up inside its guard. Claws—my own now—slashed upward, opening its belly from sternum to groin. Guts spilled in a hot, stinking cascade—ropes of intestine slapping wet against the roof, steaming viscera sliding toward the gutter. It howled, clamped jaws on my shoulder. Fangs punched through muscle, grated bone. I screamed raw. Rick fired point-blank—blast taking the wolf's ear and half its skull in a spray of bone fragments, brain matter, and black blood. It staggered, swung blind—claws catching Rick full across the chest. Shirt and skin peeled back in bloody flaps. Sternum cracked open like a book; heart and lungs exposed, pulsing frantic in rain. He gasped once—wet, bubbling—dropped the shotgun, crumpled off the porch into mud. Eyes wide on the storm, life leaking pink froth. This is the kind of story it’s becoming. No clean wins. Just survival, and the cost of it. If you like your road trips soaked in blood, your anti-heroes scarred inside and out, your werewolves vicious and your humans barely better… stick around. Morgan’s got 3000 miles left to go, and this time we’re going all the way. See you on the highway.

I’ve been carrying this sci-fi world in my head for years now—quietly mapping it, loving it, letting it grow. Writing a whole book feels like wrestling a leviathan, and yeah, sometimes I wonder, “Does anyone even read books anymore?” But that question doesn’t matter. Art is for you first, readers second. If you don’t build the dream, they can’t come live in it. **The Birth of a Monster** The Astraea is a ship belonging to a large class of space vessels known as Shrikes, utilized by the militarized force of the UEIA—or the United Empire of Interplanetary Authority. A fleet of twelve such ships is anchored to the Life Vessels, star-bound for the furthest reaches of the universe in their mission of human expansion and colonization. Why do “Life Vessels”—or, better known to sci-fi aficionados as ARK ships—need twelve military vessels anchored in their docking bays? In the event of a crisis, a disaster, or an attack, the millions of human beings aboard each Life Vessel require the protection of the UEIA’s military force. Those millions are all in stasis, including the high-ranking individuals who command the ship. Of those not in stasis are military personnel who “sleep” in shifts, and a vessel’s ten different E.M.M.A.s (short for Engineering and Manufacturing Model Automaton). In this story, it’s precisely a crisis aboard one of these vessels that leads to the Astraea being launched by the main character, Morgan Karga, and her companion E.M.M.A., named Andromeda—sans a full crew. The key difference between Life Vessels and these military ships is that the Life Vessels run on brand-new experimental technology that folds space and time to achieve travel. The Shrike vessels use more… _established_ warp techniques, via travel in subspace. And we all know subspace is not sustainable for human life, meaning any living being aboard one of these vessels _must_ be in stasis while in warp. Failure to remain in stasis could have _disastrous_ consequences. **Design Deep-Dive: Why She Looks Like That** The Astraea is black and, in comparison to a Life Vessel, quite small. But in all actuality, even these ships are very large—especially compared to Tackler variants. This is why they _usually_ require a full crew to navigate space. Morgan, though, isn’t so lucky (the reasons why she’s alone with nothing more than an automaton will be revealed in the story itself). These ships have a central engineering bay where their fission cores are stored, and this is _also_ where an E.M.M.A. would pilot the ship—with _no need_ to physically see the void around them. _Not that there’s much to see in subspace in the first place._ Aside from its vacuum-resistant paint job, the ship is long, with an underbelly that juts downward. If you were to imagine it yourself, you might think you’re looking at a gun or a rifle with only half a grip. There are no “wings,” as wind does not exist in space, but the engine thrusters on the back are circular and arranged in a trio. Ports and windows exist on all sides, with the largest on the command deck, where a human and a crew might pilot the Shrike vessel. Within its interior, the largest section is the many, _many_ cordoned-off living quarters toward the bottom of the vessel. These are “blocked” off from the rest of the ship, as this is where civilians might take up residence and wouldn’t have much to do with the inner workings. Think Star Trek, but not as pretty. The rest of the ship features sprawling, dimly lit hallways and lifts that lead to mess halls, military quarters, the aforementioned command deck, engineering, medical, a brig, and so on and so forth. It’s very much like piloting around a small city. But vast and liminal if you just so happen to be… by—yourself. **Exclusive Excerpt + Commentary** > Down in its belly, an automaton moves its hands in cyclical, repetitive motion across the holographic monitor that controls the warp and the integrity of the ship. Her body is covered in synthetic nanite flesh, eyes a black and ethereal blue, and she wears a common android’s set of attire—white bodysuit with black stripes that meet her wrists, neck, and ankles, and a single patch across the left of her chest that outlines a logo and the abbreviation, *UEIA*. Andromeda speaks to herself in whispers, “Seven, forty five, nine thousand, break, break, break, seven, twenty six, nine hundred, break, break, break …” The Astraea’s navigation systems do not budge. In a standard starship assigned by the United Empire of Interplanetary Authority—which this ship is not—the automaton typically controls and pilots the vessel when a commander is unavailable, from within the engineering bay. A ship of this size is usually also staffed by a minimum of forty-five different humanoids, all put through a decade-long rigorous and strict training protocol before they’re even remotely allowed to step aboard a UEIA vessel. The commander of the Astraea is one of those people. The rest are not aboard this ship. “I must bring her out of hibernation.” Andromeda speaks to the on-board artificial intelligence, a product of the late twenty-third century. This is still very much rough-draft territory, but I wanted you to taste the tone—the quiet dread, the mechanical loneliness. I’ve been spending a while reading the novel _Children of Time_ , and the voice I’m employing here is heavily influenced by that. **The Astraea as Metaphor** In reality, the Astraea’s environment is one of severe isolation—not just inside her halls, but in her place in the void itself. It’s no secret I’ve spent long stretches cut off from people, from society. Maybe this ship is my way of translating that pain into something vast and beautiful. Or maybe it’s not a metaphor at all, and I just tricked you~ 😉 **Reader Tease: What’s Coming Next** After the initial prologue, the story delves into the “launch” of the experimental Life Vessels—and I keep saying “experimental” because we’re dealing with a far-flung society in the 3200s that believes more in technological advancement than safeguards. But it’s the launching of those vessels that sets the real story in motion, and the consequences of the technology humanity has developed. And then we get to know Morgan a bit more, but ten years prior. That’s all I have to share for now, but I wanted this blog entry to be a return to form of how I used to post years ago. You know, _about the things that I do, including writing fiction_! I hope you enjoyed the read, and until next time~

Returning to writing, and I mean, in fiction, is something I’ve been struggling with for quite some time. It’s not that I struggle to think up worlds, and characters, and scenarios. No, that’s all in my head, all of the time. It’s translated into the music I’ve made, and the things I daydream about … or “night dream” about while I’m at work. But, the process of writing, editing, and publishing, have always been the biggest monster I’ve had to face, because, at least two of those things are mildly, to _extremely_ difficult. And when it comes to the first draft, I’m always thinking _way too hard_ about it. Instead of just putting words to the page. And it’s _so hard_ to break out of that habit. How do I know? Because I still haven’t broken out of it. That’s not even to mention all of the procrastinating I do, _constantly_. But this was all so much easier … when I still had a mentor. Someone to bounce those ideas off of, someone to steer me in a specific direction, or to tell me to _stop_ fussing over the details, and **just write**. Let it _flow_. Ed passed away in 2018, and I’ll never forget the influence he had over my work. To just write, though … is such an alien thing, now. It’s been so long, and yet, I have _at least three books_ halfway finished on one of my drives that have just kind of … been there. For years. The vampire novel, the novel about an android gaining her humanity, and some romance I was writing. And now, _this new thing_. Maybe sometime soon I’ll finish _all of it_. But I know what I need, and _want_ to finish, _now_ , is the new thing. The space opera, or space-oriented sci-fi, whatever you’d call it! I can’t really divulge too much, because I’d hate to see my specific ideas show up in something someone generated and regurgitated into a self published mess they couldn’t even tell you the name of. And, really, that’s the problem with using AI to generate fiction. The people who do it, they’re not putting something out into the world that they _know_ , or have bled over. It’s these types of people who think that authoring novels is something that can make you a quick buck, but let me tell you. A buck is about as much as I make per year on my previous works. Not that I’m all that proud of them, anymore. I wrote that stuff in my twenties, and it has zero relevance to my thoughts and ideas as they stand, now, at the end of 2025. Never-the-less, it is because of these reasons, I’d like to actually query an agent. But … in order to do that, I need a **finished manuscript**. And I need a mentor. I need a trampoline to throw my ideas at, or something to push me in a direction. I thought about constructing a local LLM on my PC, since its specs far outpace the minimum I’d need in order to do so, and just see what happens when I throw ideas at a closed “agentic” system. Maybe nothing. Maybe a lot. But, there’s still the ethical concerns behind that, _if there are any_. How much fuel or electricity would I be burning on my own PC, if I was just shooting the shit with an algorithmic voice machine. Would it be more, or _less_ than I use when I’m, say, playing Diablo 4? Maybe you’re thinking, “Hey, join a writer’s forum! Go to a book club!” I just ain’t like that, though. I don’t go out and find book clubs to join (although, maybe I should? Heck, it’d get me off of the computer screen every once in a while). And, my _last_ experience on a writer’s forum was with a bunch of snooty yet-to-be-author writers who shunned and belittled me for _even thinking_ that self publishing could be a viable option for those who don’t _want_ to be stuck waiting _years_ for an agent to go, “Okay, I’m interested.” And then, back to the “agentic” mentor idea. If I were bouncing ideas and thoughts off of a local LLM, would that put my work in a place where it’d be considered “made with AI,” or _influenced_ by it? Would that be ironic, in that a large majority of the story itself has to do with a woman struggling with the isolation of deep space, with only an automaton and a ship-side AI as her companions? Yeah, it _would_. I don’t know, though. I _do_ know, that bouncing ideas off of a remote LLM is a _really bad idea_. Unless you’re okay with your work being soaked up into a sponge that’ll end up in the hands of someone else. Maybe the hands of someone who’s trying to make a quick penny by tossing something generated into the void that is now self published works. It’s funny, though, that I’ve come _this_ full circle. From my twenties, shunning the Big Six, and going my own route, to turning forty, and thinking, “Actually, maybe tossing my fully hand-written work into a metaphoric black hole isn’t such a great idea, anymore?” This is my struggle, though. I’ve spent about an hour writing this post, _instead of writing the next chapter in my book_. Welcome to my brain.

It’s the end of the year, and I’ve done a lot! Of course, I _also_ had a list of things I wanted to do in my Apple Notes, and uh … I actually don’t think I did even one of them. Seems, “Get more serious about dating and dating apps” just wasn’t in the cards. Regardless, I still did a lot of _stuff_ , and things. Near the end of last year, I decided that hosting my own Mastodon instance, was just _too_ expensive to do on my own. From keeping remote-media bloat down, and figuring out how to keep Elastic Search under control, I ultimately decided that seventy bucks a month was too much. _Maybe_ , I’ll take another crack at it. I don’t know, yet. But, with taking my Mastodon instance down, I erected the website you’re reading this post on, _right now_. I learned a lot on and about JavaScript, and Python, and set this whole thing up to be … _reactive_ , and to showcase what I post on short-form social media, directly on my homepage, since I’m not _always_ writing blog posts (they take me a while!) During this time, I spent my online life on Labyrinth.Zone, and Social.lol. I _also_ spent time on Wafrn, and even became a moderator there, who contributed a little bit to its development (when I say a LITTLE BIT, I mean a very, very, very little bit), _but we know how that story went_ , and I have a whole lot of other things I want to say about the rising … thinly veiled MRA movement on the Fediverse, and beyond. But this just ain’t the post for it. On the side of development, and AI … I put a whole bunch of hacky utility scripts on Github, and then eventually and abruptly _stopped_ using Github. It’s been a turbulent year in regard to AI taking over everything, and especially in respect to how I feel about it. From outright hating every inch of it, to conceding that, if it doesn’t go away, then I’m going to spend a lot of time, maybe _too much time_ , seething with hatred, instead of simply just learning how to live with it. Which, is limited, _because I’ve been off of Windows for two whole years, now!_ I published my own Python app for ripping images off of an Instagram account, … and then subsequently found out later that as soon as you get rate limited, **it’s useless**. But, this was more of a response to being perma-banned by Instagram’s AI, for reasons unknown, with zero ways to regain control of my account, _ever_. On the “metaverse” that I willingly participate in … At the beginning of the year, I _also_ took my city in Second Life down, and only recently decided to put it back up again. I’m in-debt up to my ears, largely due to some animal vets … _years_ ago now, who gouged the absolute _hell_ out of me, and have been slowly recovering ever since. And, I thought, _why_ let debt control what I do and enjoy. What, like … I’m waiting to be debt free before I do what I want with my free time? I could be eighty years old by then! So, Neo Machina lives. And, as usual, I’ve continued maintaining my virtual store, REVOSA, in Second Life, for it’s _tenth year_ in a row that it’s been operating, entirely under my own control, and nobody else. I say, “nobody else,” because, although it is a much different beast than it was in 2015, it _was_ something I built in _response_ to someone screwing me over and stealing my oldest work. If you’ve read this far, you’re probably going, “Seems like a pretty mediocre year, so far!” But wait, there’s more! I launched a “Discover the Fediverse” web app that makes browsing servers slightly easier! And, while I don’t know if anyone even uses it, you can check it out, here, or load it into FDroid with this link. I also, _finally_ released my TWENTY NINTH album on Bandcamp! Something I’ve been going at since 2017, despite the railroading and stonewalling I received from certain dudes on Twitter within the synthwave scene, back in 2020. And then I launched a GoToSocial instance, and was satisfied with it for … about a week. Or, until I noticed that there’s really _no way_ to get a federated timeline going. Which, kind of, to me, defeats the purpose of _being on the Fediverse_. If your connections and the people you talk to are only coming in one direction, i.e., via their discovery of _you_ , then it seems kind of one-sided. Especially, since, I’m _on_ social media, not just to post and ghost, but to share my work with other people! So, I launched my Akkoma instance (registrations are via invite codes you must obtain from me), that lives on a server alongside my Bluesky PDS (which is private, and is mostly just for me). Akkoma is _very_ lightweight, and so far, over the course of a month, I’ve been able to keep the instance size down a considerable amount. But, we’ll see how this shakes out. In my personal life, or, in things I’ve been working on that people _can’t_ see directly, at all times, or even _ever_ , I’ve started re-writing my scifi novel (once again), and, although I have a lot of plans for it, I don’t have any idea for a date or time that it’ll be completed. For now. And … I think that’s most of it? There were _a lot_ of other little things that happened. My indecisiveness about social media in-general, hopping back and forth between Fedi and Bluesky, until I launched both my own Fedi instance and my own PDS, which I now just use as a short-form base of operations. And, of course, there’s my old-school PhpBB forum that I run, which has a few people posting here and there. Which, I should mention, only exists because of a heated argument I go into it with the guy who _runs_ MelonLand, over his entire dismissal of anyone’s valid concerns on the topic of AI. Anyway, that’s my year, uh, “wrapped.” I’m not sure what I want to accomplish for 2026, but maybe for sure, I’ll definitely put, “Be more serious about dating again” on my to-do list.

It’s not very often we see games get banned from the likes of Steam, or even Epic Games Store. Heck, Steam is well-known for hosting some of the most depraved content you’ll ever see from a game vendor, such as: Furry Hitler, Hitler Waifu, Heal Hitler, SEX with HITLER, Furry Hitler 2, and so on and so forth. But recently, there’s been kind of an upset in the gaming thunderdome, where an indie developer is _basically_ being cut-off from potential revenue, and in-turn, the survival of their studio, over their game **Horses** , which is currently banned by both Steam, and Epic Games Store. Ash Parrish on The Verge writes: > Valve and Epic say Horses violates their sexual content policies. Humble hasn’t yet said why it banned the game. However, Santa Ragione claims neither Epic nor Valve has clearly explained what exactly in the game is objectionable, and that these decisions have put the studio in peril of shutting down. The back-and-forth has catapulted Horses from a little-known prestige indie title to the next battleground in the fight between game storefronts, indie developers, content policies, and creative expression. and > In an interview with IGN, Pietro Righi Riva, one half of the team at Santa Ragione, said that the ban might have been caused by a scene involving a man and his daughter visiting a ranch where the titular “horses” are humans wearing horse masks. The daughter wants to ride one of the horses, which the player facilitates. “What followed was an interactive dialogue sequence where the player is leading, by a lead as if they were a horse, a naked adult woman with a young girl on her shoulders,” Riva said. He said that scene was part of a rough demo sent to Steam to satisfy the platform’s request for a playable build so Horses could get a “Coming Soon” page. Riva said that, ultimately, the character was changed in the final build. “We have since changed the character in the scene to be a twenty-something woman, both to avoid the juxtaposition and more importantly because the dialogue delivered in that scene, which deals with the societal structure in the world of Horses, works much better when delivered by an older character.” Now, they say they’ve changed the questionable scene that many _would_ probably find _too_ disturbing to see in the game, and for all intents and purposes, maybe _this_ is why the game’s been banned, regardless of the change being made. Or, maybe not? I do think it was _probably_ a bad decision to demo the game _in this way_ , and I have to wonder for a moment, what they were thinking. Artistic expression aside. But, I mean, _they got rid of it_. It’s tough to say when these vendors do not simply provide specific information regarding their decisions. But I can’t say that general nudity could be the reason, because, at the very least, _Steam is filled with games_ that contain nudity, most often, for no reason other than to be masturbatory, and quite a large amount of it is extremely misogynistic, violent, and a lot of it looks like trash (no offense, but they just _do_). I hope you’re ready for a million and one games all about a dude who’s discovering his sexual appetite while surrounded by tons of random women who all want to have sex with him, for some reason. And that’s not even the case with this game, though, and I can tell you this, because, in my limited time this morning, I purchased the game from GoG, and played it for a little bit. Right from the start of the game, you’re given a disclaimer that bluntly explains to you what the game is about, and what it’s attempting to depict, to you, the player. And, I just want to say, I feel like it’s a _shame_ that art has to be presented this way, with a big bold disclaimer explaining to you what a piece of art is attempting to depict. I seem to remember a time when art was something that was meant to be open for interpretation, where you would perhaps view something that depicts violence and sex, and you would use your own critical thinking to go, “Ah, yeah, this is why these things are bad, huh.” I have some thoughts on the degradation of critical thinking in our society, but that’s probably a discussion for another time. But I continued on in the game, and you’re introduced to the “horses” pretty quickly. And, I gotta say, I like the twenties silent film presentation of the game, and the random inclusion of real video capture for certain character actions. Anyway, you can see via this screenshot, that the nudity _isn’t even fully frontal_. There is a blur there. Maybe this can be turned off in the settings, maybe not. I didn’t go looking for a toggle, it wasn’t something I cared that much about. And it continues on from there with scenes that I would only really call mildly disturbing. Or, in my case, just kinda weird to look at. I didn’t complete the game, though. As I said, I have pretty limited time this morning, but I spent a little bit with it, and I didn’t really notice anything that would make Gabe Newell shit in his million dollar panties. Here are our horse buddies watching an indoctrination type of film late at night. Maybe the game gets _more_ disturbing. But, as experienced as I am with horror, I would at least call the opening and first couple of segments _really tame_. Like, I’ve seen worse _from other games on Steam_. And, you have to wonder, if depictions of sex with Hitler are, via Steam, considered a form of artistic expression, and allowed to remain on the store, then why not this? With the questionable scene removed from the game, and changed to something more appropriate, I feel like the developers are being pretty candid and open about what they’ve made here, so what’s the _real_ reason Valve and Epic have decided to potentially kill an indie studio? Fuckin’ … who knows, I guess? Go buy the game on GoG. It’s five dollars.

Since I was seventeen, I’ve been a smoker. I should warn you, this whole post is about nicotine, smoking, and addiction, and if that’s something you don’t want to read about, click away. But, I smoked for a long time, even tried dip, early e-cigarettes, and nicotine gum. Eventually, vapes got enough variety and development that they were _actually_ viable, and five years ago, I replaced cigarettes with vaping. Little did I know, that vaping would also harm me. You see, vaping _is_ safer than cigarettes, but it’s _still dangerous._ You’re still inhaling chemicals that coat your lungs, and, if you’re bad about changing your coils when they’ve burned out, _you’re also inhaling metals_. Nevertheless, a lot of vapers will talk your ear off about how _totally safe and fine_ vaping is, and how nicotine is really not that much different or any more dangerous than caffeine (which, I tend to agree with, especially since they sort of do the same thing). I’ve seen a lot of anti-vaping ads that are disingenuous over the years. So much so, that I started to believe the tobacco lobby was just trying to get people back on cigarettes (see: Camel Snus). Exaggerated Tik-tok rage-bait ads, where someone’s got plastic tubes duct-taped to their chest and they’re pretending to cough, wheeze, and stagger as they walk. Because the number one way to convince people that their vice is bad, is to make it look like you’re lying and trying to manipulate them. But, with my addictions, and how _easily_ accessible my vape is, at all times, when I’m at home, it seems I may have caused myself a lung injury. I’m talking, driving to work, hand on my chest, heart racing and trying to figure out if I needed to pull over and call an ambulance. Which, I didn’t. I kept driving, I walked into work, and I sat down in the office. … continuing to clutch my chest, while my face burned red, and then, suddenly, it went away. One of the reasons I’ve held onto nicotine all these years, is because I just _enjoy_ the calm it gives me, and when it comes to tobacco, I also like tobacco! The smell of tobacco, the taste. I’m a weirdo! But, unfortunately, this stuff can kill you. And despite my vices, it’s _possible_ this could kill _me_. Wild, right? Much the same as drinking (which I actually don’t really do, _at all_), it’s the moderation part that you have to take seriously, whether you smoke cigarettes, dip some chew, or vaporize e-juice. And, as most of us know, addiction works directly against the idea of _moderation_. Cigarettes tar up your lungs, chew eats away at your gums and your cheek, and vaping, from what I can feel in my chest when it’s hurting, uh, stabs me in the lung with a knife?? Oh, and I guess drinking damages your liver, which, once that’s failed, you’re done. Never-the-less, ergo, therefore, I’m kind of at another life crossroads? I have some tins of Zyn that I’ve been sucking on and it helps, but the urge to grab my vape is _so strong_. I wish we were at the “replacing our bodies with cybernetics” part of society, rather than the “erase science and send everyone back to the dark ages” part.

The man who thinks using Linux is like leaving the United States for Canada, and also refuses to allow Linux gamers to participate in his games (see: Fortnite), also thinks Steam (a platform where Fortnite isn’t listed) should do away with the “made with AI” labeling. Because, nothing says, “We don’t need this, actually!” more than using your platform, as an obscenely rich guy with a massive following, to pressure one of the longest-lasting game vendors to remove a content label. > Agreed. The AI tag is relevant to art exhibits for authorship disclosure, and to digital content licensing marketplaces where buyers need to understand the rights situation. It makes no sense for game stores, where AI will be involved in nearly all future production. > > — Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) November 26, 2025 Sure do love waking up in the morning with enough money to chill and be cool, but, instead, choose to influence Gamers not to abandon Windows (and all of its spyware and vibe-coded architecture) and to stop using their voices to speak their minds on developers who use AI. Is what I’d say if I was an idiot named Tim Sweeney. > Installing Linux is sort of the equivalent of moving to Canada when one doesn’t like US political trends. > > Nope, we’ve got to fight for the freedoms we have today, where we have them today. > > — Tim Sweeney (@TimSweeneyEpic) February 15, 2018 I do apologize for making you look at posts from Twitter, and yes, the Linux tweet is from 2018, but it’s quite obvious he’s continued holding these anti-consumer opinions for as long as he’s been losing his hairline. Here’s a link to a neutral, no-opinions-shared post that does nothing but mention that Sweeney said that the AI tag should be removed from vendors. To posit that _all game developers_ will soon be incorporating AI into their workflows in game development processes, isn’t something I would call _true_. I’d call it more like, wishful thinking from Silicon Valley Tech Bros. Most recently, both the newest Call of Duty (in a line of nonstop Call of Duties that keep coming out so fast that you start to wonder where the fuck that call is even coming from), and Embark’s ARC Raiders, are using AI. Both of these games are on Steam, and both have the AI generated content disclosure. Both of these tags have drawn backlash from players of each game, regardless of the fact that both of these disclosures differ from each other. Differing, in that, Activision used AI to generate assets for Black Ops 7, and ARC Raiders paid some voice actors for the rights to train their voices for player call-outs in-game. And, do you know what executives, investors, and possibly even CEOs, dislike? Lost sales. Lost sales due to backlash and boycotts. It becomes clearer _pretty quickly_ why the guy who thinks you should keep using Windows, and refuses to support Linux, also thinks that no games should ever mention whether or not they’ve been developed with some form of “AI.” Does Embark and Activision-Blizzard’s use of AI mean that _all_ studios are going to suddenly start using AI (with all the public backlash it would come with)? Of course not. But _would they_ if a simple tag were removed? Also, probably not. Obviously, people are going to continue playing and buying games, and a lot of them are going to just ignore whether they were developed with AI. But _some_ people like to know what their money is supporting, and I don’t think, in an era of the total enshitification of all of the internet, that we should further make it harder for people to _know_ what they support. ChatGPT is doing a good enough job at making it harder for regular people to tell what’s real and what’s fake. All of that aside … Tim Sweeney is a weenie, his opinions are trash, and I hope someone buys Fortnite/Unreal from him, and puts the damn game on Steam. … And discloses the AI that’s probably being used in its continued development. I should also mention that I’ve been _trying_ to be a little more chill about AI. Trying not to aim the word-rifle at anything and everything that even so much as slightly resembles generative content. Because, if the bubble doesn’t pop, we’re _stuck with it_. And the billionaire class that doesn’t care whether their decisions destroy the whole world or not, are doing the best they can to make _sure_ we’re stuck with chatbots who have Twitter algorithms plugged into their brains. Therefore, ergo, this is me being _slightly_ more reasonable. It may also seem a little ridiculous, that me, a 40 year old Gamer with no wife or kids, would like to dabble in the procurement of dubs in the Night of the Forts via Steam and Proton, and _it is_. I pride myself in my own ridiculousness. But, I also pride myself in my basic understanding of Linux, and conviction in that Microsoft is a parasitic corporation that deserves to burn to the ground, and that players of videogames should know where their money’s going, and _what it’s funding_.

After a lot of deliberating and deciding, since I’m not really capable of just throwing ten years of work in the trash and forgetting about it, and because I’ve had _months_ of work I did in 2023 kind of just … offline, in Second Life: Neo Machina is back online. And I know what you’re thinking, “Isn’t this the third time you’ve turned it back on?” It is. Neo Machina was originally something I built as a replacement to the _old_ Neo Machina that once existed back in the 2010-2020 era, and eventually went offline, _never to return_. I was a little upset about this, because it was one of the coolest places to visit, and one of _my_ favorite places. So, I did what any normal person would do, and I bought a homestead from Linden Labs, and rebuilt it. In my _own_ vision. Except this version, alongside laser-tag, an arcade, a nightclub, an apartment skyrise, a swimming pool, plus more! This version also has my store, because of _course_ it does. I wouldn’t call it the most _amazing_ thing ever made. It’s kind of shoddy and low-res in some places, and there’s some filler I have sitting around that awaits a _full region_ upgrade, which would afford me _even more_ building space. But … you don’t do that, unless you have 200+ USD per month you’re willing to blow. Which I don’t, and am not! It’s fine though. I feel like the main reason I’ve been wanting to quit and leave Second Life and my store behind, is because having my own entire region _was_ my biggest goal, and getting rid of it, well, back-stepping just sucks. It sucks ass. So, as long as I have an income, Neo Machina will live. Come on over and visit!

I’m at this impasse with my Second Life store, and I just can’t make a decision. If you’ve read my blog at all over the past year or more, even, you already know I’ve shut it down, and then opened it again, and then shut it down, and then opened it again. A lot of my indecision comes from this feeling, like, I started this thing in 2015, and removing its presence from within the world itself, along with quite possibly my _own_ presence, feels like giving up, or a failure. I’m not one who accepts failure. And, for all intents and purposes, my store _hasn’t_ failed. It’s made consistent sales, _every single month_ , for the past ten years. It’s not hundreds or thousands of dollars, but _it’s sales_. The problem, is that Linden Labs is about _the only_ company charging exuberant amounts of money to “own” pieces of land so that you can put your stuff down. We’re talking, twelve bucks a month for a tiny piece of land that’s good for a box with some furniture to pretend you have an apartment, and upwards of twenty, to forty, to sixty, to eighty, and into the hundreds of dollars per month to have _real_ space. And all of this exists on separate servers, all linked together in the virtual world. If you’re going to run a store, and you want to have it in-world, you either need to pay Linden Labs for at least _some_ space that’s larger than the tiny bit you get for a subscription, or _rent_ your land from one of the barons who control most of the land in Second Life. The latter is the more expensive option, even if _they’re both expensive options_. Compare this all to, say, renting a server for Minecraft, which can be as low as just _five dollars_. And Minecraft is _almost_ essentially the same idea. You can build stuff. You can plop things down. And you can invite your friends and be social! Hell, this entire website is running on a six dollar server. My Akkoma instance is running on an eighteen dollar server. That “Discover the Fediverse” app I made? Running on a six dollar server. All of that combined, for _less_ than it costs to have a single swatch of land in Second Life to have an actual physical place people can come to and browse my creations. Now, this is only really half of the issue. I’d be _more than willing_ to keep paying Linden Labs without question, far into the future, as long as I still have a job … if Second Life itself hadn’t become a desolate wasteland of thousands of people who don’t talk to anyone anymore. It’s as bad as dating apps: I message someone, we talk for a bit, sometimes we click, sometimes we don’t. Either way, neither of us ever speak to each other _ever again_. You go to dance clubs to hear a DJ’s set, and everyone stands around AFK or talking in direct messages. You go to roleplay sims and nobody wants to roleplay with anyone but their cliques and in-groups. You go to the “safe hubs” where people land whenever their regions go offline, and you’ve got five people in child avatars who’ve somehow avoided being banned, a bunch of trolls running around abusing avatar push mechanics, and seventeen vampires drinking your blood. It’s just not fun anymore. There doesn’t seem to be _any fun to have_. And Phillip Linden is dead-set on finding a way to squeeze AI into Second Life. But, am I to blame? Am _I_ the one who’s just not sociable anymore? Or, is it the increasingly isolated world we live in that’s causing all of this? Either way, I’m not sure which road to take here. Keep the store’s location running, keep paying Linden Lab, or, take it down, relegate my time in Second Life to a memory, and move on with my creativity to something new. What do you think?

In early October, I stepped down from my moderator position over at app.wafrn.net, which also followed me deleting my accounts and moving onward with my own instance/s. I detailed that this was something I felt necessary for multiple reasons, which includes the suspicious moderation response to a trans woman who was less-than-nice in a post she made about men, and Wafrn’s strange association with new-age Men’s Rights Activist / TERF, “Wild Aspen.” From the other mods on the team using phrases like “TIRF” and “transmisandry” (see: my recent post, “What is Transmisogyny?”), to the head developer using his Tumblr account to tell trans women to go sign up on a “trans women only” fediverse instance if they don’t like his moderation decisions: It seemed to me that this “Tumblr alternative” that originally launched as a response to transmisogyny and transphobia on Tumblr, had become exactly the thing it claims to _not be_. One of the _main_ and only issues with the fediverse, is people’s tendency to cut-off entire communities on a whim without warning or clear justification, and _sometimes_ , when they do this, they share their instance-level blocklists around. I fully believe this is the _one thing_ that needs to be clearly addressed in order to make the fediverse a more _just_ environment for marginalized people … but, I’m getting ahead of myself here. On the first couple of points, Aspen is the trans man repeatedly mentioned by me as the person Gabbo has deferred to numerous times when making moderation decisions, even at odds with advice I had directly given him when it came to moderating bad behavior, and especially bad behavior from trans users on his instance/project. Aspen is for sure a wild piece-of-work, who shouldn’t be anywhere _near_ someone who’s moderating a large fediverse community, but I’ll just give you this to sum up what the problem with him, is. If you’re unsure _how_ this person is associated with Wafrn, or doubt what I’m saying, log into the Wafrn Discord, where this guy will be regularly active, or even ask Gabbo himself if that’s one of his friends. Secondly, the question of the user who was swiftly banned, without question or conversation. An account that posted, “I hate men, and that includes trans men!” Which, I have mentioned numerous times is _admittedly_ kind of mean, but definitely something you _need_ to look at through the lens of intersectionality, and not act on a knee-jerk decision. Because it would look bad. And it was to this suggestion that I was ignored. Gabbo says the account was an “op,” and I’ve seen no evidence of this, or any definition of what that’s supposed to _even mean_. The account was left to return to Tumblr where she asks to the void why she can’t access her Wafrn account. Normally, when making moderation decisions against accounts that affect their ability to log in and post, you would have a conversation with the user, or give them some kind of notice. No such thing was done here. Maybe this is how you would respond to neo nazis on the fediverse, or pedophiles, for that matter, but certainly not _marginalized people_ expressing anger, even if you disagree with what they’ve said, or are concerned about them being some kind of “psyop,” which, is just ridiculous to read aloud. And then, while being criticized for his moderation decision _on_ Tumblr, Gabbo posts that trans women should go join transfem.space, where he’s _certain_ you’d also be banned for expressing anger or discontent directed at men, whether they be cis or trans. And, if that’s true, … uhm, it just means that people shouldn’t join transfem.space, _either_. But! I’m not speaking for transfem.space. I don’t know how they would actually handle something like this, nor have I seen them outright ban users for one single offense against their rules. For all intents and purposes, transfem.space is a _fine_ instance to join and participate in. I’m just theorizing here based on Gabbo’s own words. It’s becoming quite clear, though, _who_ Wafrn is really for, and it ain’t trans women. This is all the icing on the cake, though, and we haven’t even gotten to the actual cake yet, and it’s something _I wasn’t even aware of_ while I was actively being a moderator _at_ Wafrn. Had I known this from the beginning, not only would I have _not_ made an account on the instance, but I would have _also_ completely declined the request that I join the moderation team. The instance is currently blocking multiple trans/trans fem instances, and these are just the ones I could easily find on their publicly available instance-block list. _Update: I’ve been informed that the nano.lgbt block is justified on the grounds of CSA, but it’s important to know that the other instances are not guilty of this and remain on the Wafrn blocklist for seemingly no reason at all_ I _really_ need instance admins to step back and take a look at this, and all of this behavior, and consider how this makes the fediverse look to people on the outside, such as Bluesky users who are second-guessing the integrity of its moderation team, and the CEO, and considering alternatives, _such as the fediverse_. If I were a trans woman who only posts on Bluesky, who became fed-up with the constant rotation of _bad_ coming out of Bluesky’s moderation team, and then navigated to the fediverse only to see a large instance connected to both fedi _and_ Bluesky publicly lambasting a trans woman and blocking multiple trans instances: I’d stay _right the fuck where I am_. And this angers me, specifically, because I spend _so much time_ rallying for the fediverse, speaking to people in an attempt to dispel rumors and misconceptions, and then you actually come over to fedi and you see … fuckin’, Wafrn, apparently a haven for trans community MRAs, or even TERFs, calling a trans woman a **misandrist** and booting her out of the instance that’s supposed to be at-odds with Photomatt’s extreme transmisogyny and his actions _against_ a single trans woman who no longer has an account on Tumblr. Now, you might say, “Well, this could potentially be a copy/pasted blocklist that nobody’s combed through to find suspect blocks that don’t make sense!” And in response to that, I’d ask you, why, an instance using brand new software, that’s attempting to be some _symbol_ of respect in regard to women, trans women, and queer people in-general, would just lazily import a blocklist without vetting its source, or what’s _actually contained on the list_ (if you browse the Wafrn blocklist, you’ll find mastodon.lol, which hasn’t been in-service since at least 2023, which is _before_ Wafrn launched). And I give you, Wafrn: Either _extremely_ unprepared and amateur, and staffed by people who have no idea what they’re doing, or talking about, or, seemingly actively hostile to trans women who step out-of-line under a veneer of feigned ignorance with multiple users at the steering wheel who have used the phrase “misandry” un-ironically. Or both. And to that, maybe you think a lot of instance admins just copy blocklists into their databases, and perhaps _some do_. But, I can at least say for myself, that, no. I don’t do that. I have a massive instance blocklist that I spent hours manually typing into Akkoma’s MRF settings, and even when I was running a Mastodon instance, I _at least looked_ at the GardenFence blocklist _before_ I imported it. I wish I could say that this is the first time I’ve seen a fediverse instance shoot itself in the foot with active hostility aimed at cis and/or trans women, but … uh, I remember mastodon.lol, bofa.lol, kzynk, etc, etc, and there are currently _other_ instances with highly questionable decision making coming from the top of the chain. But, that’s a story for another time that I’m not sure I’d want to bring up, because some of the involved parties do not want to be … involved. Never-the-less, I’m sorry I had to write about this, but I _did_ have to write about it. Because too much ridiculousness is dying in silence these days, and you gotta hold the spotlight to stuff like this every once in awhile, or people will just keep getting away with injustices. And I have far, _far_ too much experience with abusive people just _getting away_ with injustices and abuse to the tune of zero consequences or corrective action.

Mozilla this, Mozilla that. The Mozilla corporation hates you. It hates its userbase. Mozilla desperately wants you to _stop_ using the Firefox browser. It seems every single day they’re coming up with some new, egregious way to shove some “AI” feature into the web browser, further peeling back the skin on a piece of software that was once supposed to be about your privacy, and protecting it. I don’t know if anyone’s listened to Sam Altman speak for five seconds, but there is nothing private about AI. Ever since Mozilla shutdown their Mastodon instance, and ran away, leaving nothing but a mastodon.social account in their wake, they’ve been doing _all the things_ that they probably _knew_ Mastodon users would massively criticize them for. So, I guess they figured, why pay for an instance where you’re just going to get dunked on nonstop? And buddy, you haven’t even seen the half of what they know they’re going to get trounced for doing. Via someone I follow on the Fediverse, whoms’t I shan’t name unless she reads this and asks me to (she turned off notifications on the post she made about this, which makes me think she probably doesn’t want the added attention of potential blog viewers on my website), Mozilla is backing a bot for LLM web scrapers that dodges CAPTCHA. If those words weren’t rage-inducing enough, at the bottom of the page, they say, this: **Building a better web?** Fuckin’ … **HOW**? By pushing the plagiarism machines past people’s SECURITY so that you can STEAL THEIR GODDAMN DATA? Fuck. I just cannot wrap my head around how _screwed_ Mozilla is. Once this bubble pops, I hope it takes them down, _entirely_. I hope twenty years from now, nobody knows what the hell a Mozilla is. Download Vivaldi today.

Today I discovered something new about Linux, or maybe just Pop!_OS itself, since that’s nearly the only distro I’ve used, besides Debian (on a repurposed Dell). And, let me tell you, this wouldn’t be even half the problem it became for an hour while I was munching on my lunch, if games weren’t so _freakin_ large in 2025. Yeah, I was attempting to install Where Winds Meet, while simultaneously downloading some packages for project development. I was watching Danny Gonzalez on Youtube talk about his experience with the cybertruck, and using terminal while also toggling a new game on Steam. First, Vivaldi closed itself and wouldn’t re-open. Then the terminal gave the weirdest feedback I’ve ever seen, and everything stopped functioning. I had to use the magic keyboard shortcuts to pop myself into full terminal mode, and then reboot. But, once I got past my disc encryption, there was nothing! Just a blank screen. I guess the display manager … can’t load, not even the login screen, when you’ve got _zero_ space on your hdd? That’s new. The fix wasn’t immediately apparent, but once I figured it out, I booted into terminal, deleted all the packages I had downloaded, and was finally able to get back into my PC _the normal way_. Noted: Keep a close eye on storage space! But … man! I _really_ wish dev studios would find a way to minimize the massive amounts of data they’re pushing in their games nowadays. 98 gigs for Where Winds Meet, a brand new MMO that’s, apparently, really popular. Also, 120 gigs for Diablo 4, 80 gigs to have Genshin Impact on your PC instead of your phone, 80 gigs to keep Cyberpunk 2077 on your hdd, because you’re _definitely_ coming back to it sometime _soon_ , 100+ gigs for World of Wacraft + Classic + the Midnight beta, and 120 some-odd gigs for the remastered Oblivion, that you definitely want to keep. Because it’s awesome. I need another hard-drive. So! I’ve been writing for a _long_ time. This blog isn’t the first place I’ve written things. I have backups and imports from blogs I’ve kept since 20 … 13? I think? And my time writing online spans across, _mostly_ Wordpress blogs. But _none_ of them have ever had ads or banner ads. If I make any money, it’s from subscriptions. If you like what I do, and want to kick a few bucks my way, and maybe put some cash in my hand for another hard-drive, you can subscribe on my subscription page via Stripe, or on my Liberapay. Thanks for reading.

Over the course of the past ten years, and … I really can’t believe I’m saying “ten years.” Has it been that long? But, over the years, I’ve been in a lot of different online spaces. I’ve been _deep_ in the discourse. From Tumblr, to Reddit, to Twitter, and back again. But, there’s something that’s been kind of bothering me, and I feel like when I take the time to _fully_ write out a real post, it sort of stops me from sounding angry, like I’ve got knives in my mouth. What I’ve noticed though, is that, now, across social media, and _especially_ on Bluesky, there’s … a whole new generation of fresh-out-of-high-school trans people, and I’m noticing that points and ideas that were argued to death _years_ ago, are back again. Being argued, _again_. I don’t know if this is an issue with the fact that these things have been discussed across different networks and are lost to the tunnels and tubes of the net, or that learning, and discussing things, is really only something that lasts in the social memory of _those who were there_ , and then there’s this cut-off point where that information just _never travels_. And so, we’re back again. We’re arguing against people in our own communities who are resurrecting the idea of “misandry” and “transmisandry” as a real concept. As if everybody’s forgotten the numerous pieces written on this back in like … 2014. Like everyone’s forgotten that _one_ gif set. Misandry can’t be a real concept, because misogyny is something that exists across an axis of oppression. And, unfortunately, we live in a society where women are oppressed. Cis, and trans. And, I don’t think it’s divisive to say that men hold the reigns to that axis. Maybe you don’t intend to snap those reigns. Maybe you don’t participate in it, or make a conscious effort not to. And that’s great. But it’s important to talk about these things, because people are talking about … _these things_ , as if they’re brand new concepts that nobody has ever spoken about before. It’s important, also, because there are some trans men, even, who believe that they _cannot_ be oppressive, and in fact, it’s the trans women who are oppressing _them_ when we speak about these things. Like, when some trans woman creates an account on Wafrn, and, as some weird litmus test, posts, “I hate men and that includes trans men!” And she gets banned immediately. Litmus test failed. Those who don’t experience transmisogyny have, and will continually position that having their feelings hurt by being shown these things, by being _told_ that they are capable of violence and oppression, is, in fact, oppressive _to them_. Hurt feelings will _never_ be oppression, if your hurt feelings aren’t pushing you out of a job, or housing, or the act of having food in your mouth. Like I detailed in my last post on some more personal struggles and violence I’ve experienced, shouting slurs at me and running up on me while I’m sitting in my car is a _bit more_ than hurt feelings. It’s an intended act of violence that I narrowly escaped due only to _luck_ , _because_ I was visibly trans, and visibly a trans woman. Someone online saying something that makes you feel kinda sad about _who you are_ sucks, but it’s not impacting your daily life in a way that _stops_ you from being able to _live_ and thrive. As the kids would say, maybe it’s time to touch that grass. It goes in this really big circle, though, that never gets anywhere, because nobody wants to feel bad, or lonely. Even if, we have to ask people who aren’t trans women, why they’re looking to cure their loneliness in places that _aren’t meant for them_ … But, what is “misandry,” really? A fascist misdirection tool created as a concept that asserts that women receive preferential treatment at odds with men, in the _discrimination_ of men. Something that largely became popular around the era of GamerGate and Men’s Rights Activism. If these things _don’t_ sound like something you’ve heard in an Andrew Tate video, I’m not sure how else I can help you conceptualize that _this is bad_. _Why_ anyone would make a serious concerted effort to re-compartmentalize and re-invent Men’s Rights Activism _within_ the trans community is _beyond me_. Unless, of course, we’re hitting this wall again, where discussions and information that has already been discussed and learned years and years ago, just hasn’t traveled. Hasn’t melded with the zeitgeist of modern trans communities. Which puts us in this unfortunate situation, _again_. Where even now, I’ll be scrolling the timeline over on the Fediverse, and there are _more and more_ transmisogyny-exempt types posting about how _egregious_ and _painful_ it is to see “those people” (trans women) talking about them in ways that aren’t kind, that don’t make space for them, that make them feel icky and unwelcome. But, in order to talk about _what_ transmisogyny is, I first have to speak to what the faux concept of “misandry” is, because it’s important to understand how ridiculous the concept is, and _know_ that it is _not real_. Women cannot oppress men. Trans women cannot oppress trans men. Transmisogyny is when a trans man on Tumblr asserts that there’s no representation of trans men in media, and his examples of the over-representation of trans women (in said media) are 99% all examples of violent, and transphobic caricatures. Transmisogyny is when a trans woman’s life, hopes, dreams, and aspirations are ripped away from her, pulled out from under her like a rug, at any slightly perceived transgression. A transgression that can be as simple as asking someone not to misgender her in a slightly pointed and angry way. At which point she spends years trying to convince people she’s _not crazy_ and that she _deserves justice_ , largely, to the sympathy of nearly no one, while simultaneously _knowing_ that if this was any other person, of any other type of gender identification, **this wouldn’t have even happened**. Transmisogyny is the expectation that a trans woman _must_ treat your feelings with kid gloves, while disregarding her own. Transmisogyny is when a politician expresses sexual desires toward trans women all throughout his browser history, and simultaneously legislates away her right to use a bathroom in public, because she’s obviously a man … of whoms’t you treat worse than the cis women in your life. Transmisogyny is the intersection of misogyny and transphobia that has killed so many of my sisters, that I can’t even count them on one hand. But I can recall most of their faces, because I knew them, if not personally, by casual social discourse. Transmisogyny is when you read this post and find yourself more angry at the fact that I’ve invalidated the concept of “misandry” rather than angry at the fact that transmisogyny is a deadly weapon that almost everyone loves to wield. But, okay, I’ll concede. If you’re one of those angry people, you might be thinking, “Well, surely you don’t think that _because_ people within the trans community can be transmisogynists, that they don’t also experience discrimination and oppression?” And I do. I know this. You see, there was this concept of feminism from even more years and years ago, called, Intersectional Feminism. And, for some reason, _it died_. It went under the rug. Everyone forgot about it, just like they forgot about all of these other things. Or maybe I’ve been living on the wrong side of the internet where people suddenly just don’t talk about this anymore, who knows! But, hey, if you’re still mad at my words here, I’m sorry. I’ll try to be more considerate next time. Or, maybe, acknowledge that reading this and having this information will have no tangible impact on your daily life that harms you in any way shape or form, and that you totally don’t need to add me to your personal hit-list on Bluesky where you’ve assigned me the label “transmisandrist” with a description that’s got more red flags than a Fox News fan at a Trump rally.

Lately, and as time marches forward, the AI bubble seems to be inching closer to the pop. What this means for the US economy is … up in the air, I guess. I honestly don’t know if it would change anything for me now, or not. I know everything costs way more than it should. I buy seven items for my weekend away from work, and it costs me sixty dollars. Then I put twenty five bucks into my gas tank and it lasts me two weeks? It doesn’t make any sense. Despite confidence in LLMs sinking, investors are still trying to force companies to push it into anything and everything, no matter what public perception may be (hint: it’s bad). Like with Mozilla, continually pumping out AI updates to the applause and adulation of absolutely no one. “Introducing AI, the Firefox Way!” Bro, nobody asked for this. _Nobody cares_. Just look at what they’re saying! It’s almost as if, what _you_ as the consumer think and want, _don’t matter_ , even if it’s _your_ money that supports part of what keeps these companies afloat. It’s really all about what’ll keep the investors … investing. And, I guess that’s a consequence of late-stage capitalism. What happens when there are no longer any consumers, and the billionaires are just shuffling money around between themselves? Hey, at least we’ve got AI “powered” toys teaching children how to light their homes on fire. I’ve got to wonder, when does the money have a conscience? Possibly, never. Money is just paper. A made up “thing” that some assholes decided was important … uh, a billion years ago. Recently, I’ve been praising ARC Raiders as one of the best games of the past decade, but _even that game_ has deployed AI in a way that’s … _sort of_ exploitative to voice actors. Wherein, Embark licensed some people’s voices, and then used an LLM to generate voice lines, along with a few other features, including the voip system. See more in this extremely critical Eurogamer review. I feel like I’ve personally reached this boiling point where I just have … AI fatigue. Last year I ran my own Mastodon instance, and I spent a good portion of my time just banning AI-enjoyers nonstop. Instance level ban here, there, everywhere! And then I moved to labyrinth.zone and took a break from all of that. Then I launched a GoToSocial instance where I couldn’t see a federated timeline, _at all_. I decided I didn’t like that, and deployed my own Akkoma instance, instead. And … I find myself, still, kinda sorta, not really reading much of the federated timeline. Because it’s exhausting. For every person who agrees that slop-posters should be excised from social media timelines, there are five losers deploying python scripted bots that shovel out slop at breakneck speed, and at a fever pitch. At this point, I’m just waiting for the bubble to go boom. I’m waiting for Sam Altman to get hauled off to prison for being an accessory to manslaughter caused via his own app, and for all the CEOs who have no idea how their companies work, or what technology _even is_ , to cry themselves into a ditch, broke as a newborn baby. It’s either that, or we’re going to burn as fuel and water consumption boils the entire planet alive. Sorry, I was spiraling into the dark-zone for a moment there. It’s not _all_ bad, though. _Everyone knows_ AI sucks ass. Nobody actually likes this stuff. And I’m pretty sure even the billionaires are pretending it’s cool. Well, maybe except for Mark Zuckerberg, who has once again used his influence and technology to sexually harass women. And Elon Musk, who, last month, decided that his Nazi-tailored AI is now the Twitter algorithm. Or Satya Nadella, who has said, as of April 2025, that as much as 30% of code by Microsoft is vibed. Okay, maybe the billionaires have bought into it, hook, line, and sinker. Is there anything you’d like as a side-dish with your entree of the bourgeoisie? Maybe some pickles?

The funny thing about the article written ten years ago by Porpentine, aside from it being incredibly long, is that despite it’s message, the only people who ever reference it, are the types of people the author warns against. The abusers, the abusive—The people who refuse to take accountability for their actions in harm they’ve caused against others, being rightfully criticized, and then coming out with a social media post, like, “Damn, I’ve been hot allostatic loaded!” And I’m writing this not as an analysis of the article itself, but as as condemnation of those who continue to trot it out as a shield from rightful criticism, and to hopefully reposition its meaning so that a new generation of trans people finally understand what this was all actually about. > For years, queer/trans/feminist scenes have been processing an influx of trans fems, often impoverished, disabled, and/or from traumatic backgrounds. These scenes have been abusing them, using them as free labor, and sexually exploiting them. The leaders of these scenes exert undue influence over tastemaking, jobs, finance, access to conferences, access to spaces. If someone resists, they are disappeared, in the mundane, boring, horrible way that many trans people are susceptible to, through a trapdoor that can be activated at any time. Housing, community, reputation—gone. No one mourns them, no one asks questions. Everyone agrees that they must have been crazy and problematic and that is why they were gone. Quoted via Hot Allostatic Load at The New Inquiry. I want to highlight HAL, because it seems to have largely gone over the heads of many. So much so that as of recently, on the enshitified Bluesky, a _man_ recently referenced it in some criticism he was receiving for some ridiculous “take” or statement he made. I don’t even know what it was, or know that I want to investigate what the issue even was, as his timeline is so chronically online that I’d have to sit here for an hour or more trying to comb through and find the offending posts. It’s wild to me. Wild because, “Hot Allostatic Load” is a piece specifically about, and analyzing the systemic abuse and the disappearing of, trans feminine individuals, and _only_ trans feminine individuals, and it seems we’ve gone so far past the plot that now, HAL just means, “Someone was mean to me online,” for anyone who needs a little misdirection from whatever actually bad or nasty thing they’ve said, or done. And this includes Laurelai Bailey, known for so much abuse in trans feminine circles, the article could just be about things she’s done to other trans women, _specifically_. But I want to tell a story. A story I’ve been talking about for years, at this point. Not that I think positioning it alongside references to Hot Allostatic Load will drum up anymore awareness of what’s happened than writing about this has, in the past, but just for … irony’s sake. Yeah. For irony. In 2020, when Twitter was still used by regular people, rather than crypto-grifters and far-right extremists, I released the album, “Ride Eternal,” which exploded across the synthwave/darksynth scene, _especially_ on Twitter. It hit the first page of bestselling darksynth music on Bandcamp for a few hours, and I was suddenly receiving some kind of attention to the work I’d done, and was doing. This was all still during the time when I was in a bit of a struggling period in my life. Not that I’m _not_ struggling now, but it was _much worse_ back then. I was mostly isolated, mentally dealing with trauma thrust upon me by my previous job … for the crime of having come out as a trans woman. The crime of publicly beginning a medical transition. It took a year and a half of daily abuse and harassment for me to lose my grip on my own sanity, and I left. I left with hopes that I could separate myself from the abuse, and secure my own income, through a possibly misguided belief that building a virtual store in Second Life could be sustainable. Not that building a store in Second Life _wasn’t_ fun, but an income of 15-20 USD per month from store sales is … uh, not an income. Still dealing with anxiety and depression so severe, that going into public would cause me to freeze up and be immobile, I needed a new idea. And this anxiety wasn’t without merit. Part of it was _obviously_ caused by the trauma I’d been subjected to. Other parts of it had to do with me lashing out in fear, in defense. It had to do with my near abduction one night when I was out alone buying a pack of cigarettes at a gas station, and a strange man saw me sitting with the driver side door of the vehicle I was driving, open. I remember clearly, he shouted slurs at me and came running for the door. Yeah, that time I was almost disappeared for real. Anyway, … I really liked Synthwave. I thought it would be cool if I could _make_ it. And so, that became _the next thing_. And from 2017 on-ward, I made album, after album, after album while I learned how to do things better; how to make music that actually sounded good, every single time. To cut my musical journey saga short, this eventually led to what I consider my best selling album, Ride Eternal, in 2020. But, being of a marginalized group, there is always the bad that comes with sudden extreme visibility. This is how it started. It’s been _so long_ that I don’t even remember what it was that he said initially that prompted him to misgender me in this way. The account I was posting on was deleted at least three years ago, along with the thousands of followers I once had. And, I want to note, especially, that _he did_ eventually apologize for this. Months, or a year later? I also don’t remember how long that took. It’s funny, though, that this is the only person who’s ever apologized for their heinous behavior in regard to things people have done _to me_ , specifically. But, of course, I stood up for myself. I _shot back_ , and this was the ensuing response by not only other artists in the Twitter Synthwave scene, but _other trans women_. To this day, it still makes me feel dizzy, _angry_ , that _none_ of the trans people who followed me, some of which I considered _friends_ , came to my defense. Nobody jumped in and backed me up. Nobody said, “Hey, what the _fuck_ is wrong with you guys?” _Nobody had my back_. I was alone. Like I’ve always been. It would be a massive understatement to say that I lost my mind. And, this doesn’t even capture the things that happened silently. The multiple men behind the online streaming radio station, that still operates to this day, nightride.fm, stealthily silencing me, blocking me, and, along with a slew of other artists, _removing the reviews they’d posted on my albums over on Bandcamp_. I was erased from a music career that I spent, at that point, four years building. Four years, while I was dealing with trauma, and pain, and pulling myself out of the grips of Laurelai Bailey’s years-long manipulation and coercion. Broke, no money, no resources. And this was the straw that _really_ sent me. That broke the camel’s back. A disproportionate, _violent_ reaction to a trans woman telling someone _not_ to misgender her. But I guess I deserved that. Just like I deserved to be harassed and abused from the moment I came out as trans. I deserved to lose everything I worked for. Deserved to sequester myself back into the closet, to return to the very corporation that traumatized me, because I _dared to use my own voice in a way that I saw fit_ that other people didn’t like. They don’t like when you’re not gentle with them in their hatred _of you_. I’m the crazy one. And ever since, and you can see it on my Bandcamp, I’ve never managed to pull back any of those connections I had. The audience I had. The reputation. Heck, my own _label_ ghosted me, and I haven’t heard from him since. He’s still in possession of files that I need if I’m ever to sell the physical version of Ride Eternal again. But, for all I know, he’s living in the desert with no internet connection. And then the years passed. Twitter became a hell-hole. Bluesky opened. I joined. I got harassed when I asked a trans woman with a large following to censor herself a little bit when she addressed her followers with the t-slur (Bonnie). Her numerous sycophants told me that _nobody cares_ about how I feel about anything. My feelings do not matter. So, I became a ghost. I moved Mastodon instances. I got banned from a place I’d spent four years interacting with the community (hackers.town), because I had a mental break in response to a troll. I had a reaction to the constant bullshit that people must think _I deserve_ to have thrust upon me. I still have mental breaks, all of the time. I moved to Threads, got banned by their AI for no reason. I erected my own Fediverse instances, joined a few where the people are _at least_ trustworthy enough not to zap my account for telling a troll to go fuck himself. But, aside from the few who speak to me, the people I talk to in private, and the cool people on the Fediverse who _do_ interact with me. Who _do_ try to understand me. I’m a ghost. Deep down I’ll always be a ghost. None of the work I’ve done, none of what I’ve built matters all that much. It’s a raindrop in a black hole. And I blame all of those people. The ones who’ve never apologized. The ones who thought they could “mulch” me and make me disappear. But I survived. And I’m still here. Is this what a “hot allostatic load” is? I don’t know. I feel weary assigning myself something that so many have used as a misdirection for abuse. But I can plainly tell you, the reader, that I’m not a happy person. I don’t sleep soundly. And I’ve never felt like I wasn’t alone. When Laurelai Bailey jumped into my notifications on Twitter years ago and told me that I’d be alone the rest of my life, I didn’t believe her at the time. But I’m starting to.

For the _longest_ time, I’ve been wanting a way to subscribe to my moderation list from Bluesky, _on_ my bridged accounts that I actually post from, on the Fediverse. This is important, because, aside from the on-going enshitification of Bluesky, there are _a lot_ of bad-faith actors on Bluesky, along with many, many trolls, jerks, and nard-heads. Making sure that they can’t interact with me over the bridge is _extremely_ important, and now, you can finally do that! As of six days ago, the brid.gy service that connects Fediverse users with Bluesky, and vice versa, finally introduced a feature that easily allows you to subscribe to block/moderation lists from Bluesky, if you happen to be on the Fediverse. > Post by @[email protected] View on Mastodon I won’t be sharing a link to my moderation list, because it’s more a private list for me to keep track of people I’ve blocked more easily, and to block them across multiple accounts. Since it’s a catch-all sort of deal, it has anything ranging from assholes who did me wrong, to nazis, and government accounts. Obviously, this isn’t something that _every_ person would want to subscribe to, because maybe one of the assholes who caused me distress isn’t somebody you want to block. I don’t know! There is one issue, though. This doesn’t technically work correctly with non-Mastodon accounts. This is an issue that keeps cropping up whenever people develop new things that work with the Fediverse (I’m guilty of this with my Discover Fedi app lol), in that, those features _mainly_ only work with Mastodon, and then when it comes to the alternatives, like Misskey, Akkoma, and so on and so forth, you have to come up with workarounds. This is no different. In order to properly subscribe to a blocklist, you’ll want to use the method they’ve explained, i.e., in sending a DM that says “block https://link.to.the.list,” but in regard to doing so on Akkoma … and this is kind of funny to me, you’ll have to find a DM that the brid.gy account has already sent to you (such as when you originally followed in order to bridge your account), and then _reply_ to it with the aforementioned method for blocklist subscription. And it works! Hurray! Now Jesse Singal won’t be able to see your Fediverse posts. Congratulations.

It’s the start of my weekend again, and that’s good news for me, because I can get back to scrounging for loot in ARC Raiders. Albeit, I do find myself yearning for a second vacation only a week after the last has ended. I like to relax, who knew! But, before I dive into Gamer World, I feel like I want to write something, because if I don’t write, I don’t feel like I’ve done anything _for myself_ and my own ambitions in solo “work.” And, I think this post is going to be more about social media, due to the fact that it’s the main reason I use the internet in 2025, and there’s something that’s been troubling me since the pandemic and the sale of Twitter. Back in 2022, when Elon Musk orchestrated a hostile takeover of Twitter, _people ran_. And from that point onward, and even _today_ , the app continues to bleed real people, as they’re replaced by bots controlled by algorithms in order to make the app seem more alive than it is. Despite this, corporations and game-dev studios remain, for … uh, reasons I’m not too sure of. And, now that it’s 2025, there are for sure generation-alpha teenagers who look back on 2022 as if it was three decades ago, mustering up nostalgia for an app that was also bad before Apartheid Boy bought it. But, good or bad, _I was there_ (and in some capacity, I have some accounts that remain, which are mainly just auto-posting content from the places I’m actually active). I had somewhat of a sense of community. I had over three thousand followers, and when I spoke, it didn’t seem like I was talking into an empty void (hello, Bluesky, the place where, unless you’ve already got an in-group, you may as well be a ghost). It didn’t seem like I was writing a public journal that most people don’t care about. I think it’s plain to see, though, that this buyout quite literally caused a net-split. A splintering of the Internet as we knew it circa 2010 to 2022. A lot of people had and _are_ already on the Fediverse (known as Mastodon to the average person who calls a Playstation 5 a Nintendo), but then Bluesky was erected, and, because it mirrors old-Twitter so closely, that’s where _a lot_ of Twitter diehards fled, despite its continued enshitification over the past year (see: Jay Busky’s crash-out, an upcoming system that’ll put platform manipulation in the hands of random people, among many other things, such as being owned by crypto-dudes). What would a discussion on the net-split be, though, if we didn’t mention the fallen heroes who tried to replace Twitter before a billionaire bought it in order to pretend he has friends? Pressing F in the chat for: **Ello**, an app that was launched in 2014, which had a _really_ unique interface that I actually kind of enjoyed. But, it failed to gain real steam, was eventually switched to some kind of artist, patreon hybrid … thing, and then shutdown in 2023. I feel like these people just launched _way too early_ , and had they waited … five years, it’d still be alive and well, today. **Hive Social** , which _was_ gaining popularity, until a security exploit took it down. The devs attempted to recover while the app sort of slipped out of the memory of the general public, and are currently relaunching with testing under a brand new beta version. I was a member of the original Hive Social, and am also a member of the beta test. Uhm … I think that’s it, actually? I know years back I remember seeing someone hopeful about launching a Twitter-clone, but then they posted a test screenshot showing one of the first users, who was a high-profile TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist). So, that died before there was even any water for it to be dead in (I wish I could remember the name of this, but it basically died as a concept minutes after he shared the aforementioned screenshot). Suffice to say, _a lot has happened_ since 2022, and now we have three major Twitter contenders. There is, of course, as previously mentioned, the Fediverse, Bluesky, and also Meta’s Threads. I find it _hard_ to count Threads, though, because the platform is almost just entirely grifters and influencers trying to get the most engagement possible in hopes of securing an imaginary paycheck from Zuck, by copying and pasting statuses from forty seven thousand other accounts. It’s pretty bad, and is _exactly the reason_ engagement should not be monetized. But, don’t tell that to billionaires who want to inflate their egos with shallow user counts and a lack of context for the reasons as to why those users exist. On a personal level though, and to the reason I wanted to write this post, it’s been rough? Being a musician whose been making music since 2017, an independent author who’s been writing since 2008, a web developer / regular developer whose been doing all sorts of things for the past couple years, and a creator in the virtual world, Second Life, whose been going at it since 2014 … interest groups for _all of these things_ are spread out among **all of these apps**. Although, it would be rude or egregious of me _not to mention_ the fact that the Fediverse has been a _major_ source of album sales since 2017. The network with no algorithms and _only_ real human engagement, is, logically and unsurprisingly, the place where I see the most support for what I do. But, even then, there are mutuals from Twitter of whom I haven’t seen in years now (I mentioned earlier maintaining accounts on Twitter, which are mainly old accounts I never used that I am _now_ using in order to direct anybody who might have known me in the past to the places where I actually _am_ , because I deleted the big account I once had). People who moved to Bluesky who I’ve either never found, or _did find_ , but they changed almost _completely_ as a person. And let’s not forget, my _first_ experiences on Bluesky, which were worse than what you would experience as a new user on 4chan confused about how things work. And then, let’s not also forget, if you’re a person who does things, like music, art, etc, etc, follower counts are … actually kind of important. The average person who logs on to post and participate in a little banter every now and then, they won’t see the importance of these things. Some of them will and _do_ actively rally against it. I guess what I’m trying to say is, the social internet in 2025 is amazing, but it also sucks. I don’t like being split between a million different apps, trying to rally together support for what I do that mirrors or even exceeds what I once had. I don’t like feeling like a ghost. I don’t like this manic pressure I feel in my brain that has me running around different networks, different protocols, different Fediverse software. And yet, it continues, going ‘round and ‘round in a circle. I _wish_ there was as solution.

A couple of weeks ago, during the beginning of a little vacation I took away from my offline job, I was meandering through Youtube, _as you do_ , and I came across this clip of a guy wandering through industrial architecture in some game I’d never heard of. He was moving through hallways and rusted corridors with a long hammer, and climbing over rocks, and I was like, “What in the entire _hell_ is this?” What I saw was entirely mundane at the time, but there was just _something about it_ that spoke to me in a way that nothing else has in well over a decade. Obviously, that game is ARC Raiders. Fast forward to near the end of last week, and I’m _in that game_ , standing atop the launch tower in the spaceport map. But this was a day after my very first experience in the game, which was to have my hand held for the thirty seconds the game takes to explain things to you, before you’re dropped into a _real_ lobby out in the Dams. And damned, I was. Walking through a dusty bowl of dead vehicles and broken buildings, with a gun that couldn’t hurt a flea, opening chests and looking through small silos. I turn around, and there’s another player staring at me. I had no idea I’d run into someone so early, _or at all_. And before I knew it, he had deposited his bullets into my face, and I was dead. This was a surprise to me, but I wasn’t really holding any items worth anything. So, not much of a loss. This is probably the point that some people would become angry. Maybe they’d refund the game, or descend into the community Discord to rage about PVP in a PVPVE game. I kept going, though. I figured out how to operate the different voice channels, and then I joined new lobbies. I got better guns, better _stuff_ , and started crafting. I started running into players more frequently and learned how to say, “DON’T SHOOT!” And … most of the time, so far, at least, this works in keeping yourself alive. But it’s exactly _this_ dynamic that makes ARC Raiders so unique, I think. And maybe you’d say, “Well, Escape from Tarkov is kind of like this, too!” I don’t care about Tarkov, though. Games that don’t work on Linux, or games that _intentionally_ don’t work on Linux, are of no interest to me. Double that for games where you can _only be a man_. ARC is _mostly_ a game about working through the apocalypse, after most of civilization has left on a ship to some other planet, or star system (it’s unclear to me), and everyone else is left back on Earth to deal with the extremely aggressive and deadly AI husks that roam the surface. You scavenge for items to supply the population that lives underground, and supplies are scarce. On top of that, while you’re topside, you only have thirty minutes to do what you’re going to do, _every single time_ , before those same bots, or ARCs, bomb you and the entire playfield from orbit. This creates tension, and anxiety, and every single player who’s working toward their own goals have only a few choices when it comes to encountering other players. You can shoot on sight, but the few times I’ve done that, it’s _almost always_ ended in myself being shot to death, and losing everything I have. You can announce yourself to other players, which almost _always_ has a different outcome, in varying levels of violence and peace, but most of the time has resulted, at the very least, in not being shot, and at most, in a temporary team. Even sometimes in a temporary team where myself and a stranger will be up against other strangers who are actively shooting at _both of us_ , and then yelling through their mics about how unfair it is that others are teaming up against them. Or, you can ignore everyone and acknowledge that this is Raiders versus AI. Or, adopt some kind of ethos that is a combination of all of these things. It’s up to you! The core of the gameplay, I feel, is that the constant threat of death and loss makes scenarios where people _actively choose to be good_ , feel special, and profound, while we all currently live in a society and a world that is rapidly descending into hate and violence. Maybe this was intentional and by design, but it has the effect of directly showing you that a lot of people are generally capable of being decent, rather than evil, or antagonistic. And that’s what makes ARC Raiders so unique. Sure, there are other games where people can be good. But, like in No Man’s Sky, it’s not really a PVP game, so people are generally _not_ antagonists. Or, in EVE Online, where one of the _only actual interesting things to do_ is PVP, there’s no real incentive to be good. Games that setup the environment for players to be either this or that, without a lot of wiggle room, or reasons to go against the grain, don’t feel as special as this has the potential to continue to be, in ARC. And this is why I pray that Embark ignores all of the people _who don’t get it_ , and refuse to add a “PVE only mode.” There’d be no point to it. Go out, raid, fight the bots, and repeat? No other threats? No room for teamwork that feels like intentional moral decisions people are either making, or not making? Either way, ARC Raiders is my definite game of the year. 10 out of 10. 15 awesomes out of awesomes. Never thought we’d seen another game that is actually exciting to play. And even then, I remain cautiously optimistic, as it is really easy for a studio to mess up a good thing. But, let’s just hope that doesn’t happen.

Today, I got home from work a little early, and decided to do a few things. I’ve been working on a lot lately, in fact, I just finished my latest album! But, I’ve also been making updates here to my website, and I’ve had a lot of changes ready to go for Discover Fedi as well, which now includes a welcome page with more information that I feel is real important to understanding how it works, and links I want people to visit (like my own). But, that’s not all! With a flurry of keyboard smashing, and exploring options (this was actually suggested to me by a user on the Fediverse), I’ve got Discover Fedi working as an app via F-Droid! When I originally started this project, I _wanted_ it to be on iOS and the official Play Store, … but, this costs a bunch of money, and there are a lot of review processes, and checks, and balances, and basically, a big stinking wall in front of what I want to do. Annoying stuff. Stuff I don’t want to deal with. Thankfully, there’s a third party app store on Android, and you can sign the certificates yourself, and get everything running relatively easily. Which is what I’ve done. If you don’t have F-Droid installed on your phone, go here. And then head on over to the Discover Fedi repo page, and in the F-Droid settings where you’ll want to add a repo, scan the QR code on _this_ page. Once it installs, you can use it exactly the same way that it’s used on the web app version, except you don’t need to have it running in a browser! I’m done updating it for now, but I’ll be making changes periodically, so keep an eye on updates!

Posting a reminder, since I’m about to be a little occupied with Arc Raiders for a bit, that disc eRROR 19​.​92 ~DE​-​LUX releases **tomorrow** , for Halloween! An album I put on the back-burner for _about a year_ , and then slightly longer than that, that I was originally going to release under a new music-name, “PLEXX,” and then decided not to … because Eyeshadow 2600 FM has already been “established.” You know, if that even means anything in the post-Musk-buyout social media world, where I went from 3000+ followers, to instance hopping on the Fediverse like a Linux loyalist (and yes, I am a Linux loyalist). Regardless, check it out, NOW! disc eRROR 19​.​92 ~DE​-​LUX by Eyeshadow 2600 FM Come follow me on my main social for more ramblings and updates in regard to music, and whatever else I happen to be working on! For people new to the Fediverse, just type @[email protected] into your search, easy peasy. You can also follow on Bluesky, but I don’t recommend Bsky, as it’s a dead app with a declining userbase, and I mainly only maintain a presence there so I can tell people how putrid the vibes are. That’s it, though! If you’re launching into Arc Raiders in a few hours, I’ll see you top side, and maybe I’ll steal your loots~

A week or two ago, I don’t know, I find it harder and harder to measure time, I migrated over to my own personally hosted GoToSocial instance. The software is _really_ cool and I admire/enjoy the work the devs are doing and have done on it. But, and that’s a small butt, there are some missing features, things that other more long-standing software _already has_ that I kind of find vital to have access to as someone who is a “creator” of sorts, who needs to be able to access and see things correctly. But, again, GoToSocial is really cool, and I’ll continue watching its development updates. So, what I did for a replacement, because I _need_ to be able to see the federated timeline. Especially as an admin, _so that I can effectively identify and block out unwanted content_ , and because I’d _like_ to possibly integrate a relay or two … I installed Akkoma and the Pleroma front-end. Which has these things, plus more. I’m not entirely sure it’s _exactly_ as light-weight as GoToSocial, but … Akkoma is light-weight, especially in comparison to Mastodon, which eats resources like kids eat candy on Halloween. This is my nullspace. I know, I’ve been jumping around a lot ever since I turned off my Mastodon instance, and I’m aware some unscrupulous admins out there auto-block Akkoma instances because of associations the software may or may not have to the original Pleroma project (which used to have a lead dev who was heavily embedded in nazi irony posting). But, they just gotta get over it, you know? Mastodon’s not the only software out there, and if it’s going to be as heavy as a neutron bomb, the people who run Mastodon instances should expect that not everyone is going to run it. I think, at the end of my Mastodon instance, I was spending like … 70 dollars a month. That’s too much. And that’s coming from me, who was once spending _two hundred dollars a month_ just so I could own and run my own region in Second Life. Never-the-less, Nullspace is not that much different than my GoToSocial instance, except that registrations are by invite-code only, and in order to get one, you gotta talk to me. That’s it, that’s the post.

A couple of posts ago, when I was talking about all the ways Bluesky has been disappointing, and sorta kinda enshitifying itself, despite claims of being bulletproof in regard to … being enshitified, alongside data that shows that user activity on Bluesky _is on the decline_ , while activity on the Fediverse is on its continuous upward climb. A climb it’s been on since, well, _forever_. Anyway, I lost track of my thoughts here, but when I made that post, there was this guy, uh, I think his name is MacGruber, or MacKoba, or something! I don’t know, but it really pisses him off when I, _specifically_ , write negatively about Bluesky. And he shares it with his followers, which just so happen to contain a little less than a handful of other people who also hate me for things, like, calling them out on transmisogyny, calling them out for selling generative slop on their Patreons, and so on and so forth. I addressed this guy on his Mastodon account, and he referred to me as a “journalist” (despite thinking that what I write is “not very good”), and that he shouldn’t have to respect blocks, even though I’ve had him blocked on Bluesky for almost a _year_ after discovering that he added me to a blocklist specifically called something like, “People allergic to AI,” and then later, “People who are mean to the Bluesky devs” abloobloobloo. In fact, I only know that this guy has been obsessively commenting on my blog posts related to Bluesky, _because I have webmentions turned on_ , and I’ve been largely ignoring him. But, it made me kind of realize something kind of unrelated? I’ve been … afraid to talk about _myself_? To write about … myself! Because of stuff like this. Because of stalkers, and people who obsess. And, I kind of realize that this whole act of only writing about news, gaming news, games, etc, etc, probably feels or reads like I’m holding everyone and everything at arms length. And I am. I’ve written about a lot of different things in regard to myself over the years, but more like … in a scattered sort of way. I’ve routinely talked about what happened in 2020 on Twitter in regard to the synthwave community, and what the people over at nightride.fm perpetuated that effectively excommunicated me from the scene, as an artist, because I told Moonrunner that it was transphobic to call me a “he/she/they” when he was addressing me in a “sub-posting” sort of manner. And I’ve tried to bring this up each time I release a new album (by the way, I have an album releasing on October 31st). There’s _a lot_ more to it than that. A lot more artists involved in the backlash, some of which still block me across new social networks as they crop up. There has never been any justice for this, nobody has ever reaped what they’ve sewn. Most people know, that, after this incident, I returned to the physical offline workspace, and returned to the closet. I stuffed myself back into the closet, as a trans woman, because, well … I’m scared? I don’t have _any_ support? I don’t even really have all that many friends. And I’m getting older. We all know that a lot of trans community online spaces don’t really _give two shits_ about you once you’ve grown past the age of like, twenty nine. A lot of people online _in-general_ will act as though you’re a ghost, _unless they personally feel like they can fuck you_. And boy oh boy, do I feel like a ghost most days. Heck, the first time I registered on Bluesky, back when it was still an invite-only privileged garden, I was dogpiled by some trans community personality cult (Bonnie? @bonnie?? I don’t know), because I asked her to slap a content warning on posts where she addressed her followers (I was one of them) as “tr_nnies.” Content warnings are kind of a no-brainer that happen regularly on ActivityPub/Mastodon, and I suppose it was my mistake for thinking that people on other sites _also_ care about other people. But, I had only signed up on Bluesky, because Meta was fumbling Threads, and basically started making it worse only months after having launched it. And I was only on Threads, because I was banned from hackers.town (now masto.hackers.town) for having a mental health crisis wherein I told a troll to go fuck himself, and lost my account of _fours years_. This is also something I’ve talked about frequently. The admin has _never_ reached out to apologize. This is why I feel the most comfortable on social media, if _I’m the one_ who runs the server, and has control over my data. And this is also why my social “reach” is basically dead. On Bluesky, there’s no “engagement” because half the people I see on the timeline are sharing and saying things that are, frankly, _horrible_ and _wrong_ most of the time (like this trans man, recently, who just came out of the woodwork calling trans people “chasers” for dating each other, and there was mostly absolutely zero push-back), and I don’t tolerate them. I’m not _nice_. I have _no reason_ to **be** nice to most people, because most people haven’t given me a reason to treat them kindly … at least, on the big ol’ Bluesky. _Even the people_ who’ve claimed that they wanted to “help me” months and months ago have been dismissive, inattentive, or just plainly _not present at all_. And, it kind of builds up this sense that, you know, people on Bluesky, or trans community related circles on Bluesky, are largely fake and superficial, even as the government is moving to legislate the trans community out of existence. And it’s really telling that the only time anyone on Bluesky wants to engage with me, genuinely, is when I talk about the numerous upon numerous abuses that have been perpetuated against me over the course of a decade, via Laurelai Bailey. You’re probably reading this and maybe you’re thinking to yourself, “Wow, what a victim complex,” or “Jesus, are you just a punching bag for assholes?” Whatever you’re thinking, I just haven’t really given myself space to talk about these sorts of things, online, **on my own damn blog** , and I’m suddenly realizing, I don’t really know why? I’m an adult. I can say and do whatever I want? Bad people can’t stop me from talking about myself, or about bad things that have happened? And maybe that’s one of the reasons I’m so angry all of the time. Angry because so many people have perpetuated harm, against me specifically, and have _never answered for it_ , and angry because … for like, _five years_ I haven’t given myself space to talk about myself, to talk about how dead and alone everything feels. To be, emotionally and mentally, exactly the same as I was ten years ago, but ignored, ghosted, and treated as an entity that _doesn’t exist at all_ , while the only thing that’s ever happened to me, is just constant fucking abuse. To talk about these things on the website that all the internet leftists, and the trans community _praise_ constantly, and to widely be sneered at, to have people jump into my mentions, or onto the comments in my blog posts and _only_ make snide fucking remarks. I’ve had enough, and it’s about time things start to change.

Much to nobody’s surprise, after selling a handheld Xbox for one thousand United States dollar-eenoes, filling Windows 11 with all of the worst back-door bots, malware, and privacy invasion tech, killing Windows 10, and contributing to an e-waste pandemic, Microsoft’s next announcement is that the follow-up to the Series X and S will have “premium hardware” with a “curated experience.” And that this will be more in-line with their latest mega-ask, that you spend 500 dollars more than you would on a Steam Deck, to play PC–I mean, Xbox games, in the palm of your sweaty, earwax covered fingers. Right. Sure. > In an interview with Mashable, Xbox president Sarah Bond talked in vague terms about what Microsoft is going for with its next-gen console, but did suggest it will be a premium hybrid PC and console. "The next-gen console is going to be a very premium, very high-end curated experience," Bond said. "You're starting to see some of the thinking we have in this handheld [ROG Xbox Ally], but I don't want to give it all away." That’s a reference to the recently released ROG Xbox Ally X handheld, which costs $1,000. (In another interview, Bond said this and the less powerful, $600 ROG Ally are ultimately Asus-made handhelds — and because of this, Asus set the price.) So, Xbox fans are now wincing at the thought of how expensive the next-gen console will be, particularly in the context of recent price rises to Xbox Game Pass and the Xbox Series X and S. Quoted from IGN. 2025 has been … a year. A year of corporations making the _worst_ decisions. The kinds of decisions nobody asked for, or about. Like today’s announcement from Krafton, that they’ll be replacing their entire workplace with AI. Hope you weren’t interested in following the progress on their development of inZoi, because the investors _demand blood_. 2025 is a year of having to weigh your morals against, _ever having fun again_ , it seems. But, back on the the Xbox beat: Ever since the Xbox One came out, I’ve been slowly questioning why I’m buying these consoles. And then the Series X | S came out, and I’m still questioning, “Why have I bought this? Why don’t I just use my PC?” And now, after a year and a half of Microsoft giving investors all of their love and devotion, I’ve plugged my Nintendo Switch back in, and put my Xbox in a drawer, _never to be seen again_. And that was before the CEO of Xbox, whom’st I have never heard of before, decided to announce that the next Xbox _could_ potentially cost as much as a PC. Because nobody will see through that. Nobody will decide for themselves that, “Hey, uh, why don’t I just buy a PC?” Do you know what else can load up Steam, and Epic Games, and a Web browser, and app stores? A whole entire normal ass **computer**. And you can upgrade those, yourself, without waiting five to eight years! Anyway, my vacation from work starts _now_ , and I have some sleeping to do. I can’t wait to wake up eight hours from now and find out what dumb decision yet another company that controls everything I used to enjoy has decided to destroy or enshitify, today.

Nevermind the title of this post. I couldn’t think of anything catchy, or witty, mostly because I’m running on the five hours of sleep my brain allowed me to have, and I’m jittery with the excitement of finally getting some real time off from work … after tomorrow night, when I work my one shift for the next week and a half. That aside, every so often I log onto my PDS, and I search up “mastodon” in order to see what people are saying about the Fediverse (because people on other social sites use “mastodon” as short-hand for the _entire_ Fediverse), and while I do believe many have begun moving over, there are some people out there who don’t quite understand that things have changed since 2016. Meanwhile, on Bluesky, we’ve had continued enshitification, its CEO having a meltdown for days at a time, and now with thirty or more US government accounts moving to the platform in order to … troll people? And couple this with the fact that, in order to _actually become_ independent on Bluesky, and enact _real_ decentralization, you not only need to host a PDS, and you not only need to host a relay, but you _also_ need to host an appview, among other things I’m probably still unaware of, that are all exceedingly more expensive (when bundled together) than launching a Fediverse app for 10 bucks. It’s becoming pretty apparent that Jay Bsky doesn’t want you on her platform, and yet, whenever I search up “mastodon” _on_ Bluesky, these are the kinds of things I see from the very people its CEO doesn’t want around anymore: with more greatest hits, like, or the continued lateral gaslighting, where people convince themselves that things that were problems, or not implemented, five years ago, are still things that aren’t working: So, anyway, I wanted to write this post in order to dispell some misconceptions about the Fediverse, because people shouldn’t be operating on assumptions they made in 2016 when the only name you knew was “Mastodon.” First and foremost, in regard to the final screenshot: Yes, Mastodon, and other software on the Fediverse, _do_ have indexed search. This started being implemented around 2023, and it works pretty well. Other apps don’t yet have it, such as GoToSocial, where this is a feature, rather than a bug. Because GTS is more about privacy and sustainability (as in, you can run a GTS instance on a very cheap server and use almost no resources to publish to the Fediverse). But, I believe the aforementioned belief is also a symptom of simply not knowing that Mastodon is only _one_ piece of software across a protocol that has existed since at least 2008 (StatusNet). Or that people take what they believe from others in their social circles, and then that continues until that circle becomes bigger, and suddenly you have swaths of people saying things like, “Mastodon? I thought there were only 5 people there!” Kind of like how a studio releases a new game, and two influencers say that it sucks nards without ever having played it, and then their fans and followers take them at their word and suddenly half the internet is going, “Yeah, I think Bobblefarts 10 sucks, I mean, @jinglenuts said so, and I trust him!” But, okay, okay, here are some things I’ve seen people complain about, that actually aren’t issues anymore: * 1: There’s no indexed search! As mentioned above, this was implemented on Mastodon in 2023, and other software, such as Misskey, and even Pleroma (I think?) * 2: The Fediverse is all tech nerds and nobody else! I would beg to differ, especially with all the LGBTQ+ and queer instances out there, the art instances, the cyberpunk instances, the instances where people are all doing their best dril impressions, the single-user instances where one person is just posting whatever comes into their brains, and so and so forth! There are far too many to name off the top of my head, but you can try out my Discover Fedi app for yourself (still in a pre-release stage) at discoverfedi.app. Also, I thought we, as a society, had moved past being antagonistic about “nerds?” * 3: There’s nobody on “Mastodon” (the Fediverse) Right, so … (sourced from the Friendica instance it’s hosted on, here) Meanwhile: (sourced from bluefacts.app) So, by and large, Bluesky still has more daily active users than the Fediverse, but that number is decreasing. On the flipside, the Fediverse is inching closer to its milestone of twenty million registered users, and nearly a million daily active users. Suffice to say, there are people on “Mastodon,” and at this rate, it’ll eventually eclipse Bluesky. * 4: “Mastodon” is as complicated as installing Linux! It really isn’t. I’ve said it before, but, if you can install Discord, create a username, and search for servers, read their rules, _agree to those rules_ , and get through their onboarding processes, that are _different on every server_ , you can join a “Mastodon” instance just fine. The important thing being, that you _really do_ need to make sure the server you’re looking at _has_ rules, and that they’re _good rules_. Take five minutes out of your day. I promise it won’t hurt. Also, installing Linux isn’t hard. Try Debian. * 5: Mastodon is the only app! This isn’t really something I’ve seen people say, but more something I feel people outside of the Fedi believe. To side-step having to list everything a second time, here’s a page I wrote a while back listing different ways that you can access the Fediverse. * 6: It’s too hard to follow people! This one is kind of true, but also kind of not true. _Finding_ people you already know _from other platforms_ may be difficult, if you don’t have any way to contact them in order to ask for their handles, but if you _know_ someone’s handle, you can follow them easy-peasy. So, let’s say your friend’s Fediverse handle is @[email protected], all you’d have to do is copy/paste that into the search bar of, say, Mastodon, and blamo, their account shows up, you click it, hit follow, and you’re done. Now, obviously, this can be _slightly_ harder if an instance is defederating “nukearasaka.fuckyou” but this is also something people are working on. Currently, Mastodon gives notifications that an instance is being blocked, and how you might be affected by that. If you don’t like that the server you’re on is blocking another server you’re interested in following people on … * 7: It’s too hard to move accounts! You can move, and it’s actually not as complicated as you might think. In account settings on the server you’re moving away from, and the one you’re moving to, you just have to input the handles of the opposite accounts as an alias, and then click “move” on the instance you’re moving away from. While your posts won’t follow you, your followers will. You can also export follows, blocks, mutes, lists, and your entire archive (your posts, even if there’s no current way to import them). This may be different than Bluesky, where you simply supply an invite code, and click the move button in order to migrate to another PDS, but _there are hardly any Bluesky PDS’s to move to_ , and tools for migration aren’t that easy to find, because they _aren’t built-in to the appview_. So, I’d say that moving on the Fediverse _can_ be a little complicated, but it’s actually _much more complicated_ on Bluesky. * 8: I just want to logon and post and not think about anything And that’s fine! You do you! I just think it’s currently _very_ important to consider _where_ you’re posting. _Who_ you’re giving your data and even identity information to. Sure, maybe this is something regular average people don’t think about, **but they should**. Jay Graber has gone so far as to take money from crypto-bros, to inviting fascists to her platform _while_ actively trolling marginalized people, and some think it’s still relevant to say things like this? I mean, I don’t think it was _ever_ relevant, but I also don’t take my ideas about things from other people who took their ideas from other people who took their ideas from other people who took the end is never the end is never the end is never the end is n

I’ve referenced having written about games I’ve enjoyed becoming lost media a couple of times now. How this wouldn’t have to happen if these studios just put a little bit of effort into releasing an offline version of whatever they’re killing. This goes for The Matrix Online, to The Sims Social (Facebook). Years of your life, time you’ve spent on something, maybe even money you’ve spent, and then it’s gone. Because, at some point, we just accepted that always-online games with no local singleplayer, were okay, and if they’re taken away, that’s just the nature of things, right? Today, EA, recently sold to Saudi Arabia and Jared Kushner, is beginning the process of shutting down The Sims Mobile. _Every single time_ this happens, it becomes more and more apparent that we **need** initiatives like Stopkillinggames.com, because no matter how apathetic or ambivalent you are toward mobile games, and especially Sims mobile games, there are people who play these games. People who _spend money on them_. And then, for _some reason_ , it’s completely legal to just kill the game. Remove access. No refunds. Portions of how you spent hours of your life are deleted, and _gone forever_. It _seems_ illegal. But, regardless of what sounds legal or not, or whether or not anyone actually wants this to happen. We know EA. They don’t listen to players, they don’t listen to people. The Sims Mobile is dead. To my sim I created years and years ago, and refused to retire, I guess this is goodbye? “Just play Sims Freeplay!” There’s just something _off_ about Freeplay, something I can’t really put my finger on? Sure, it’s a little more traditional in a Sims game sort of sense, but it’s also not. The customization is shallow, the graphics are a bit dated, building feels restrictive, and you know? I just happen to like the Sims 4 styled mobile game _more_. Plus, who’s to say Freeplay won’t have its plug pulled in the coming months, anyway? With EA going private to fascist companies, I’m sure a game with women in it, that wear whatever they want, is not long for this world. To EA: