gemini, consciousness, loneliness
Slept in a few hours later than normal today. Feeling bleh.
Listening to a lot of Duster today. Mostly disc 3 of Capsule Losing Contact, which is all their EPs, some singles, and some unreleased tracks.
My fascination with Gopher has been rekindled--by Gemini, another web-alternative protocol.
The way I live is really lonely. It's been weighing on me.
Not a ton to say. Only been up for 5-6 hours so far, but wanna get some things written down. This'll be pretty stream-of-consciousness.
Duster is really good. Seems to fit pretty much any mood I find myself in. Universal constant.
A brief poem:
there is no solace:
i dream of lonely bong rips into the night
Florida in October-November has weird weather in the evenings, or at least weird light. There's a pond outside my window, and some very dark clouds overhead, so the pond looks a very very dark gray. But there's an open window to the sun in the west. so the buildings and the trees are all glowing golden. Everything not lit by the sun is tinged a dark cobalt. I give Florida a lot of shit, but nowhere has ever looked like this.
I know nothing about Gopher and Gemini as protocols, like the nitty-gritty, but I think they're neat on a conceptual level. Gopher is approximately contemporarneous with early HTTP, and it's a much "purer" (and more limited) form of hypertext. My understanding is that Gemini came along a lot more recently, like within the last few years, and is a retooling of the Gopher protocols and markup to better fit the contemporary Internet. I found Gemini through the site of Sunshine Gardens (www) (gemini), who seem to use it a lot. Earlier I installed Bombadillo, and I've been using that to browse. It works well, but I wish it was prettier.
Sunshine Gardens are another of the online decentral-service co-ops I ran into after getting on Ygg, and the main one besides Volatile that I've been reading/thinking about. They're a lot more explicitly political, but not in an absolute sense? The Volatile community has lovely people, but they're more or less all libertarian centrists (as is the platform), Which I can kinda (barely) tolerate, but the culture is also steeped in /b/ shitposting, which I haven't found tolerable in half a decade. I can't explain Sunshine Gardens as well as they've explained themselves in the links above (the Walkaway Handbook is basically their manifesto, afaict), and it's recommended reading. I find it very interesting. The Handbook embraces mutual aid/free association and the inherent freedom and liberation of knowledge, essentially Kropotkin as I would understand him, but also asserts that leftism is not an effective or meaningful response to the pressures of neoliberal capitalism. (And they're honestly on the right track: the Left has grappled with this since Marx-Engels. They had their own formulation of permanent revolution, Trotsky had his rejection thereof, and the third-world Maoists have a similar rejection, but they all have their own problems. I haven't done the reading needed to comment much more on that.)
Anyway, Sunshine Gardens boil down to separatist solarpunks/technological permaculturalists, which I think is neat, except maybe the separatist part. Idk. I gotta give the Handbook another read and think some more.
I have a weighted blanket now. I like it.
Living where I do sucks. The social status of disability, and the way it interacts with the social status of transness, really really sucks. I knew one person locally, another chronically ill trans person, and she moved 3 hours away because she got kicked out of her fuckin' house. All I have here is my ex, really, and the circles she runs in in the city an hour or so away (which I'm not comfortable interacting with again, both because it's hard to leave the house and go that far and because I burned bridges with them during my last episode). I'm very lonely here. I wish I could at least work so I could throw money at things to do, but I can't, so I can't. (My other problem with SG: the co-op model demands either capital or labor investment. It's fundamentally ableist. It takes tons and tons of privilege to "opt out" or "walk away," which nigh-universally means being white, abled, or possessing privilege some other way.)
Still thinking about Pleroma.