Title: Loving From a Distance
Date: 2024-05-13
Author: zlg
Since my last post here, life has had mixed happenings, as it tends to. It's
also a lot longer than I expected it to be when I started writing. I dunno.
Seemed like a good time to write. We're trying something new:
MOOD WARNING
============
This Post May Contain Triggers:
* sexual assault or domestic violence
* self-harm
* neurodivergence struggles
* cultural toxic masculinity struggles
* ostracism
There will be happy Linux and gaming things after.
LIFE
====
My wrists are still kinda shitty and I can barely do things like sweep and mop
a restaurant floor for more than 20-30 minutes before tingles or pain happen.
The last doctor I saw basically said she has nothing more to do for me. I don't
trust injections in my wrists, especially after this whole process of "Okay you
gotta do this, then this will happen," and the second part doesn't *actually*
happen. Twice this shit has happened, so I guess I'm supposed to look for a
lawyer or something? Spend money I don't have? How American.
I believe there is the legal concept of making a worker whole. Well, I'm at
reduced labor capacity, my savings are basically fucking gone, and have had no
luck finding gainful employment that won't also mess my wrists up further. I am
not whole. Morally I recognize this situation is wrong but practically, I do not
know what to do and do not feel like my caseworker is really working for me. I
feel like anyone connected to the establishment is looking to screw me over,
like there's some tag on my file somewhere in DC that says "loser" so they just
default to being against me. I kinda feel resentful to deal with this while also
dealing with a greater society that tells me my life is wonderful, and I'm on
top of the world, and don't need help because of what I happen to be.
This frustration has led to a few lessons about myself, how I'm perceived and
dealt with by others, and some insight into the induced isolation and othering
I've experienced from humanity since birth. Why are other people more entitled
to respect, rights, or privileges than me? It seems like equality is more of a
buzzword than a strongly held value among people. People appear to care more
about going along with whatever's happening than doing what's right or decent.
That doesn't gel with me, at all. Double standards are unacceptable. Even the
philosophy of law doesn't work unless EVERYONE is subject to it. Another, is how
quick people are to act hypocritical or lie to suit an immediate argument or
agenda. How can I be expected to respect such behavior, or the person generating
it, when they will sacrifice morals to appear to "win" an argument?
I'm not envious of being kicked out of groups that hold such inconsistent
values, but it still sucks to be a puzzle piece with no puzzle. Am I really so
uncommon, unlikeable, or unpersonable? Statistically I should have a community,
but I don't really feel like there is one. The Zaibatsu here is great but I
recognize our Venn diagram is but a sliver of shared space. Other groups that
I've been around, focused on gaming, IRC, Linux distros, what-have-you... I
didn't belong there either. Why? I'm not sure. Most of the time it was over
inconsistently applying rules and social mores. Preferential treatment, cliques,
other normie behavior. In essence, I was Too Different and likely in their
minds, Too Difficult to be around because I noticed the sly rhetorical tricks
they'd try or catch them in lies. I'm not a good doormat or punching bag.
I have had thoughts of self-harm, quite regularly actually. No sense in lying
about that. But I'm also not going to do anything about it; society largely
gives zero shits if some random middle-aged guy offs himself. A blip in the
local news, some hand-wringing if there was a manifesto, and nothing ever
changes. Men, we're always the problem and yet also, somehow, the solution. Easy
stance to assume when it requires no effort from the speaker. Easy to say that
when your efforts to help others don't garner accusations of homosexuality,
misogyny, or being "too exclusive". Show me a domestic violence or sexual
assault clinic for men that hasn't been harassed just for existing. Show me
groups of guys who don't get accused of bromances when they hug each other. Show
me people who *don't* laugh at the idea of a man being sodomized or raped, eager
to call him a Bitch. There is a cultural maxim of male worthlessness, and it's
embraced on both ends of the political spectrum, just in different ways.
People don't really care about men who kill themselves. They want the appearance
of caring, because that's extremely valuable to them. They *really* care about
the attachment they had to that person breaking, his usefulness disappearing.
The money draining away. No longer having a safety blanket, gopher, or other
Beast of Burden benefits of having a man around. The facade of the person they
thought they knew, shattering, when they realize how much pain he was in. That
clashes with how they "thought he was okay". He was never okay, but he also knew
nobody would give a shit, because he tried talking about the *less* intense
things and was cast aside for it. How dare he let his guard down. He's a Man™!
And what are men, if not muscle, money, and manual labor? Tools for others to
exploit. Complaint and weakness free, of course.
People, and institutions, reveal their values through their behavior. Not their
words. Words cannot be trusted to predict behavior, because lying is too easy.
To that end, I am losing interest in socialization. I don't belong in any
human group I've ever attempted to join or been welcomed to. Many that I *was*
welcomed to were often conditional on my contributions or volunteer labor, the
Zaibatsu notwithstanding. The operative message received from greater humanity
is "you must be useful to be considered a person, if you are a man. You must
give freely and never complain about being exploited. Never open up or share
feelings, unless it's anger. That's okay." It feels odd to be regarded in that
way while others' identities are recognized for their unique flavor, like women,
LGBT, PoC, etc. They get holidays and extra boosts on algorithms or any
diversity initiatives, which is nice and all, but, are we supposed to just
ignore that men get treated like we aren't worthy of *any* recognition? People
can tell when they're being deliberately kept out of a group or considered
unworthy. This is the difference between "also" and "instead of". Inclusion is
about adding, not swapping.
Like, what's men's month? Men's Health Day? Where do men get discounts in the
market? Men's nights in places where men don't hang out often? Don't make me
laugh. Father's Day occupies the same time of year as graduations. Guess which
take precedence. And none of that stupid Movember or No-Nut November where it's
some meme bullshit that nobody really takes seriously. There is no genuine
celebration of men for being men in our society. It is considered an inherently
evil, problematic, undesirable identity.
Men don't really have a flavor, we're considered "the default". Or some sort of
sports + beer + wrestling + muscle + meat stereotypical garbage is trotted out.
I think shit's gotten so wack that neither society OR men know what to think of
masculinity anymore. It seems practically taboo to be a man. I certainly don't
feel welcome in society, even shopping or dining out. Nobody wants to see a man
at the park, shopping in a store, anywhere NEAR children, even if saving them
from something, etc. I hesitate to ask where society expects men to be to feel
safe.
If we're such a social creature, why is the acceptance of neurodivergence so
hard for people to swallow? I think the answer to that is simply, we are not
so far evolved from apes to be totally distinct from them. It's stupid-ass
monkey behavior that gets retconned by the frontal cortex in the form of
rationalization. Monkey hate what it not understand. Every monkey have to be the
same. I simply do not understand this oppressive desire for conformity among
others "of my kind". It seems that I am included as a person only when it's
convenient for others, and discarded on the same terms.
Is the solution to personhood truly to be an indifferent, self-serving,
retconning asshole by default? Just absolve responsibility and insist people go
along with whatever bullshit's being peddled? Is that really it?
It may as well be `Error: No route to host.`
- - -
I recently learned that regularly being angry when you wake up and not knowing
why can be signs of ADHD or anxiety. That tracks I guess, but the process for a
proper diagnosis is outside of my means currently. It's draining and
bewildering to know from toddlerhood that you're different, but be unable to
decipher why or how to mitigate things to where socialization isn't so painful.
I'm not naive enough to believe integration will ever happen for me. You have to
fit the mould for that. There's a certain caricature of a person that you have
to be to gain acceptance, and the price of that conditional, paper-thin
acceptance is not worth the moral and mental effort I would need to expend to
pass myself off as one of them.
At some point you have to stop the facade, stop pretending that you're anything
other than... The Other. Fuck it. If people wanted it any other way, they'd have
worked to make it better.
- - -
LOVING AT A DISTANCE
====================
Get to the point you fuckin' codger!
Amidst the angst and general dissatisfaction from earlier, I found an opinion on
some random link aggregator that said something like, "I really love X thing,
but the fans really turn me off."
I realized that I feel that way about almost all of my interests. I really like
certain things, and when I've tried to interact with others who, allegedly, like
the same thing, the results are *so* varied. Most fandoms are a turn-off with
how cliquish it tends to get. New ideas don't seem to reach them, or if they do,
they get poked at or bullied unless some big revelation or someone with clout
agrees. You begin to wonder how much they actually like the subject matter when
you look at how they talk with others about it.
It makes for a weird experience. Because you're supposed to have some common
ground, right? But it's not there. There's too much friction between how you see
the thing, or the things you like about said thing, or something else. There's
an amorphous "correct opinion" lurking in these spaces and it's kinda gross.
So, I wanted to ask if anyone else experiences this. Are there things you like
whose communities you don't feel like you're really "in"? Sometimes I wish I had
stayed loving certain things at more distance, and lived my life ignorant of
some fandoms. Once you know certain things about certain groups, you don't want
to associate with them. Ignorance sometimes really is bliss, haha.
LINUX
=====
I have tried to take my mind off of the state of my wrists and family law shit
through setting up my laptop with a source-based distro again. PureOS was just
too Debian-stable-y and GNOME-y for my liking. I gave it an honest shot and,
nothing but problems. Now it's on Gentoo and... heh, still has problems. But
they are technical problems that I can solve, because Gentoo includes a quality
toolchain as a requirement of facilitating their OS and I know how to write
ebuilds. The problems are, at worst, a day's worth of config away from being
fixed. I just can't focus to save my life and struggle to get the time and
mental space to get things done.
Laptops are a giant pain in the ass to configure on Linux. It took at least 6
kernel+initramfs+OOT module dances to get all the hardware talking the way it
should. I'm still struggling to improve battery life, and ACPI events act wonky.
The battery sends a number of 80 and 81 signals from time to time and I can't
figure out why. The EC firmware appears to work, aside from me not knowing how
to sign kernel modules yet...
But hey, MPD works! Bluetooth and wifi and audio work! Sleep and wake work! I
haven't been brave enough to fuck with hibernate yet since coreboot likes to
remove the `resume=` part of the kernel line for some reason. X11 also works
but I need to make it use glamor and get rid of the screen tearing, without the
need to run compton.
- - -
Truly, there are very few things left to knock out before I can resume my
creative or programming projects. It just sucks, because I've been in some form
of OS-tinkering or data recovery since the beginning of the year. My server went
down at the end of last year, and took a month to get back up. I started the
laptop swap around the end of March, I think? Longest time to knock out a Gentoo
install, by far.
I really need to do something about this lack of focus and motivation. I used to
be able to get an xorg+firefox+terminal Gentoo install going within a weekend.
To be fair, it's been five years since I've spent any real effort on a Linux
system. I can't deny it's comfortable to be back in this environment. Nothing's
a mystery. I can get by in Debian but its structure never made much sense to me.
PROJECTS
========
There are plans brewing for bringing VGStash to its next stage. I am accepting
collaborators who are interested in social game collection profile sharing,
blogging, and forum design. This is still in the planning stages, but I feel
having some outside but qualified and passionate opinions may help temper the
rougher parts of its direction.
When I get back into Python, I need to build an sgopherd-compatible Generator
for Pelican, so I can write my posts in one place and publish on the Web and
Gopher at the same time. This would increase the usefulness of my gopherhole, as
currently it's updated manually. Anything that gets ported from the Web blog has
to be reformatted for easy viewing on Gopher. Not sustainable.
I think I want to make a virtual pet. My girlfriend was on a Tamagotchi spree,
and expressed how much she loved them, and shared a bunch of opinions and ideas
for virtual pets. Naturally, that means I have to make one, right? :) It's all
good, I have some ideas and now a stronger reason to dive into LOVE2D. I enjoy
PICO-8 but its limitations are challenging to work around and the lack of code
viewing space really limits my ability to think about the code. I didn't realize
how important viewport size was to me until I found myself struggling with
keeping mental context in PICO-8. While that definitely encourages you to write
tighter code, there are undeniably parts of a game where the code gets hairy and
HAS to be hairy for the complexity you're looking for. Usually in the main loop
or object interaction and management.
Third party PICO-8 tools always feel incomplete or hacked together, nothing I
could depend on for a gamedev workflow from code line 1 to releasing on SPLORE.
I may mess around with a few tools before putting PICO-8 back in the drawer for
a while, but my main concern is incorrect cartridge handling or mangling of
data.
GAMES
=====
Along the way to setting up my laptop on Gentoo, I learned you can link your
Factorio account to Steam and be able to download the native Linux build without
installing Steam! That's a huge boon since Factorio is kind of *the* killer PC
game for me right now. I have launched a rocket, finally, and managed to go from
scratch to a locomotive in around 80 minutes (netting me the 90min cheevo).
I'm eyeing the final challenge of launching a rocket in 8 hours and I have no
freakin' clue how I'm going to get there.
I've even thrown all the crafting trees into graphviz in an attempt to form a
factory layout that's sane, and I can't figure it out. Sometimes it even can't
generate a diagram due to taking so long. If I ever successfully model this
tree, it will completely change how I build factories.
- - -
When we get the time, my girlfriend's been watching me play through Persona 5. I
managed to pick it back up after leaving it sit since 2018, and I just got
Yusuke in the party. It was satisfying to beat Kamoshida's ass and this game is
finally opening up so much it's overwhelming. Definitely a sort of "grown up"
Pokemon, with a social sim tacked onto it.
She also picked up a used PS4 Pro from a co-worker, so I got the Castlevania
Requiem collection (for that sweet Rondo of Blood release) and Borderlands 3
since playing it on the desktop makes it nearly take off. I helped her pick out
some good PS4 games too, so we have The Last Guardian, Nier: Automata, Horizon
Zero Dawn, Rage 2, and Far Cry Primal. I forget what else we have, but I see why
people are into Nier. It's not every day that you start an action RPG with a
shmup presentation and pivot to Gradius-style shmup, to third person action
game. Giant mechs, pretty lady robots? Damnit Square Enix, this is actually
good.
- - -
I beat Final Fantasy Adventure (AKA Seiken Densetsu 1) on the Collection of Mana
earlier this year, and am playing through Sword of Mana (its GBA remake) as the
Heroine to get her side of the story. Maybe I'll get to Secret of Mana by the
end of the year. I never got past the point where you get the baby dragon.
- - -
Thanks for reading this mess. We'll see how the rest of the year pans out. Stay
cool this summer.
