I feel so grateful to the man who invented the “Traveller’s” typewriter.

Mina Harker, expressing her love for her laptop.

Applying modern labels and understandings of people to the past is iffy and and remains so when applied to fictional characters who were certainly never written with those as-yet non-existent concepts in mind but also it’s fun so I’m going to do it. Mina Harker (née Murray) is an autistic, bisexual, and cool as hell.

None of what I’m going to say is a particularly original idea and much of what I’m drawing from here is from the general milieu of the Dracula Daily fanbase. This was, of course, a large part of the appeal of Dracula Daily; not just a novel way to read a classic book but also a participatory exercise in going through that work and evolving a fandom understanding of it as it progresses, with all the tenuous headcanoning that such things involve.

Dracula is Gothic fiction wherein the ancient horror is defeated and soundly routed by modernity. Our heroes are doctors and solicitors (and a rich Texan who fancies himself a cowboy) and an important weapon in the arsenal used to defeat the count himself is meticulous note-taking. And it is Mina who transcribes, edits, organises and distributes these notes. Within the fiction it is she who creates the manuscript that is the text of the novel itself and makes carbon copies to provide to the other protagonists. She habitually organises and sorts information and while she often frames it as making herself useful to her husband¹ she displays a clear knack and enthusiasm for doing so.

“When does the next train start for Galatz?” said Van Helsing to us generally.

“At 6.30 tomorrow morning!” We all started, for the answer came from Mrs. Harker.

“How on earth do you know?” said Art.

“You forget or perhaps you do not know, though Jonathan does and so does Dr. Van Helsing that I am the train fiend.”

“I am the train fiend”?! This girl autistic as hell.

Mina is also the one who sits down and logically deduces Dracula’s escape plan from everyone’s scattered notes and observations, writing it out her evidence and conclusions point by point.

Ground of inquiry. Count Dracula’s problem is to get back to his own place.

(a) He must be brought back by someone, This is evident; for had he power to move himself as he wished he could go either as man, or wolf, or bat, or in some other way. He evidently fears discovery or interference, in the state of helplessness in which he must be confined as he is between dawn and sunset in his wooden box.

(b) How is he to be taken? Here a process of exclusions may help us. By road, by rail, by water?

[…]

Van Helsing says that Mina has a man’s brain and a woman’s heart¹. While this is meant simply as a compliment of her faculties¹ the fact that her analytical nature is framed as inherently masculine reminds me of the (nonsense) extreme male brain theory of autism which is rooted in notions of men being naturally more systemising and women being naturally more empathising. This is starting to bend towards me just documenting some free association so I will move on to Mina being gay.

Mina and Lucy in the book have a classic romantic friendship, gushing and fawning over each other to a degree that is difficult not read as somewhat sapphic to a modern reader. Mina takes care of Lucy while she is being secretly preyed upon by Dracula, and while she sleeps Mina notes how beautiful she is, thinking about how it could make someone fall in love with her, about sex outside of marriage, and about the idea of women being able to make marriage proposals¹.

Lucy is asleep and breathing softly. She has more colour in her cheeks than usual, and looks, oh, so sweet. If Mr. Holmwood fell in love with her seeing her only in the drawing room, I wonder what he would say if he saw her now. Some of the “New Women” writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the “New Woman” won’t condescend in future to accept; she will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it, too! There’s some consolation in that. I am so happy tonight, because dear Lucy seems better.

Later, not having seen Lucy in some time and unaware of her rapid deterioration, Mina sends a letter to Lucy that directly compares the love between her and her husband to the love between her and Lucy and that she could, would, has, does and will love her.

Jonathan asks me to send his “respectful duty,” but I do not think that is good enough from the junior partner of the important firm Hawkins & Harker; and so, as you love me, and he loves me, and I love you with all the moods and tenses of the verb, I send you simply his “love” instead. Goodbye, my dearest Lucy, and all blessings on you.

The novel—the manuscript compiled by Mina herself—emphasises the tragedy of this goodbye and this expression of love by noting that this letter was not opened by Lucy before her death.

Also her favourite spot to hang out in on her holiday in Witby is the graveyard so she’s pretty goth, too.

I first started working on this website three years ago, in September of 2022. Then it was just a gallery of projects that I’ve made built on top of the default Jekyll minima template. I’ve been continuing to add to it, turning it into my own custom nightmare with a bespoke build process for generating podcast feeds and customised Pico-8 cartridges. A website is just something that you can endlessly tinker with with you have the inclination to. Then one year ago today it sprouted a bog¹.

Like many other blogs that popped up at a time this was a reaction to the announcement that Cohost was going to shut down, something that I am still deeply upset about. For a lot of people Cohost was a reminder that websites can actually be fun. That they can be a place for creative output and joy and not just doomscrolling or reposting every blorbo that you see. That HTML is a canvas that you can use to paint, even if all you are painting is a silly bit of bespoke CSS or javascript to make something silly. I still have a todo list for things I wand to add to the site the length of my arm². Making my first posts a year ago I really had no idea if this was something I would stick to and I am glad and somewhat surprised that I have.

I have also tried to re-evaluate how I use the internet as well, trying to be more deliberate with how I spend time on it and what I’m reading and giving my attention to. I was using an RSS reader long before the Cohost shutdown and I am probably preaching to the choir here but I will continue to evangelise them as the best way to follow anything and most things do still expose an RSS feed even if they can be a little hidden. Youtube, Mastodon, Bluesky, Substack and Tumblr accounts all have RSS feeds that you can use to subscribe and read rather than having to log into each site and be bombarded with ads and algorithmically boosted posts designed to piss you off. I use Feedbin but there are loads of others.

I do still find myself falling into old, bad habits, especially on days when I am down or lack energy, but I really do recommend being deliberate in what you read online. Unfollow, mute or block people who post stuff that just pisses you off. It might feel like you are keeping on top of important news but you are probably just drowning yourself in misery (and hey, news sites also have RSS feeds if you want to actually stay informed). Read what matters to you, write what matters to you and share with people the things you find that are worth sharing. Or just post nonsense about Sonic the Hedgehog and Seto Kaiba. That is also important.

I have been waxing nostalgic about PAL versions of games lately but I will acknowledge that in some regards we did get the short end of the stick. As much as I fond of the slower version of the game’s music I don’t think Sonic the Hedgehog running one sixth slower than it was designed to was a good thing and the game manuals we got here seemed to be made as cheaply as Sega could get away with.

Let’s compare manuals of the Japanese, North American and European release of the same game, called Ragnacënty, Crusader of Centy and Soleil respectively in each region.

This is fairly typical of what European Mega Drive manuals were like. Fully black and white, printed in in a landscape orientation, arranged in thin columns, having little interior artwork other than screenshots that are so squashed down it’s hard to tell what they’re even showing and cutting everything down to the bare minimum details. The character bios aren’t included at all. This little bit of narration from the perspective of the protagonist is the closest thing. The whole manual is only 17 pages compared to 30 for Ragnacënty and 40 for Crusader of Centy.

And Soleil’s manual’s layout seems downright roomy compared to a lot of games. You might have wondered why the manuals might have that strange multi-column landscape layout? Well Soleil had separate manuals printed for each language the game was released in but that wasn’t always the case. Compare it to Tails’ Adventure for the Game Gear which across each pair of pages has separate columns in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Swedish and Dutch.

But even this is still worth preserving. Soleil and its manual were precious artefacts for me for a very long time. I still had the game cartridge and manual up until a few years ago when I did a big clearout of all my old games (mementos are precious, but so is space and I live in a small house) but even when I sold it on I actually cut out the cover of the manual as a keepsake. Had I known as a child the stark difference between those pages and that of Rangacënty I might have held it in less regard, but it was still a piece of my childhood and worth preserving along with the other versions.

I’ve been playing the “open network test” demo for Sonic Racing: Crossworlds and having a good time. I am not much of a kart racer gal but I did really like Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed and that is going to be my main point of comparison. The quick version is that it’s fun but I am not spending 70-bloody-€ on this.

One thing that is immediately apparently compared to Transformed is that Crossworlds is much more chaotic. The game is a constant sensory overload. The central gimmick is that the second lap of each race sends you to a random other track and the last lap of each track also adds new items, hazards and shortcuts to the track, so things are constantly changing every race and items feel more powerful and far less easily dealt with than in Transformed. That game’s blue shell created a minefield in front of the lead player, something that is going to slow you down a little but was avoidable with some care, while Crossworlds has two different items that directly target the lead player and seem nigh-undodgeable. The three different homing attacks also feel significantly harder to get away from with a well-timed boost than they did in Transformed (or perhaps I am just very rusty) with the constant sensory overload of the game not helping there. There are also three different catchup items that automatically send you forward in position on top of the monster truck super transformation and regular boost powerups which also help anyone who has fallen behind rejoin the clusterfuck in the middle of the pack.

Of course my impressions also being coloured here by the fact that I mostly played the single-player mode of Transformed while this demo of Crossworlds, being a network test, has very limited singleplayer options with only one grand prix with three tracks¹ to play singleplayer and many more tracks available to experience in online play so I have mostly been sticking to that. I am a bit disappointed that there doesn’t seem to be much character dialogue when playing multiplayer. The grand prix mode assigns you a rival character who will banter with you as you race other racers might talk to you as you interact (i.e. attack each other). I can understand that people eventually get sick of repeated dialogue in online matches but I wouldn’t mind the option to toggle it on and maybe even toggle on assigning other random players (or friends that you are partying up with) as rivals for a race.

The character I’m most interested in terms of these voice lines is Sage, who was only introduced in Sonic Frontiers and hasn’t interacted with most of the wider cast at all yet. I’m curious as to how they handle the context that she exists in outside of the plot of that game. She is not available in the demo, though, and I have been playing almost exclusively as Cream (because Blaze also isn’t available in the demo).

One thing that Crossworlds does have over Transformed is the vehicle customisation. It’s done a little strangely and there’s not a huge amount of depth to it—you are not swapping out spoilers or other individual parts, only the front and back halves of various vehicles—but it’s still fun to play around with. Layering decals on top of the paintjobs does give you some more freedom but even this is pretty restrictive – you can’t overlap decals and they tend have a large transparent zone around the main image that stops you using them to create more detailed shapes. I imagine that this might be intentional to try to stop people making anything offensive with them but I did try my best on my extreme gear design to combine some basic shapes to make a depiction of Rocky behind where the rider stands.

One criticism I have of the car customisation is that when it comes to horns and decals they don’t seem to have given much thought to the Sonic the Hedgehog theming. The horn options sound like they came unaltered from a stock asset pack. There is one labelled “spring” and it is not the Sonic spring noise, just a generic cartoon spring. There is a decal in there of Sonic’s face (which looks quite funny) but really none for rings or Chaos Emeralds? None of the other characters’ silhouetted extra life icons? The “auras” you can apply to the cars also all look like shit and just add to the visual noise of the game.

Your custom paintjob also gets overriden in the game’s time-limited festivals, in which players are put into themed 4v4v4 teams in races with special rules, with the winning team for each race earning points. The festival for the network test is Persona 5-themed with Team Joker, Team Violet and Team Mona. This sounds like a Splatfest but it is not—it’s a battle pass. You do not choose a team you are randomly assigned one every race, making them utterly pointless other than what colour your car is going to be for the next five minutes and points simply go to unlocking Persona-themed decals that I will never use. Joker himself, one of the future D.L.C. characters for the game, was also temporarily unlocked for this which just highlighted how much of a lazy cashgrab the cross-promotional characters are, lacking any voicelines or even a full set of animations. From what they’ve shown of the game so far the only voiced D.L.C. character is going to be Hatsune Miku, the one that they don’t have to pay a voice actor for. Even the Werehog pre-order bonus doesn’t have any lines and he’s just Sonic with a gruffer voice. They have Roger Craig Smith voicing Sonic and Omega in the game already could they not have him do this too at least? But if you want to race as a completely silent Spongebob Squarepants be sure to buy the season pass.

Also the final lap music for a lot of stages is really bad.

This post contains spoilers for the 1973 film The Crazies.

Several years ago Shaun (né and Jen) released a video complaining about Wikipedia’s summary of the 2014 film Ex Machina at the time. I have been holding a similar grudge about the article for George A. Romero’s 1973 The Crazies and like Shaun instead of fixing the article myself I am just going to complain about it.

The Crazies, filmed between Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, is sometimes described as a quasi-zombie movie. A virus called trixie, created by the U.S. military as a bioweapon, has leaked into the water supply of Evans City and is spreading rapidly throughout the town. The military attempt to quarantine Evans City but struggle to deal with the rapidly spreading virus and the panic and violence that the virus is both inspiring and directly causing and the ambiguity of the two. I think ambiguity is an important part of the film and the Wikipedia summary, in trying to be a flat description of the plot, ends up removing that ambiguity and presenting a simple and wrong view of the story.

The virus causes mental degradation in its victims. As the current Wikipedia article puts it causes “victims to either die or become hysterical and homicidally insane.” This is, I think, the first way the article gives a misleading picture of the plot. Trixie does not simply make people into mindless killing machines, it is not the rage virus from 28 Days Later. People infected with it do end up killing a lot, but it does not necessarily inspire bloodlust: It generally seems to cause irrationality and a complete loss of moral perspective. In one scene three infected men charge towards the protagonist David, who is wearing a stolen military biohazard suit, wildly shooting at him. He tries to shout that he’s not part of the army quarantine, that he is not a threat, but when they hit Judy, a woman David was trying to protect, David returns fire, killing two of them. When the last one reaches David and sees him he simply stops, causally mutters “Hey coach, I didn’t know it was you,” and sits down without a single care about his two friends that were just killed or the woman dying in front of him and not even reacting when actual army troops show up.

People infected with it are still capable of thought and communication and this is, in fact, a huge problem and one of the core tensions of the film is the uncertainty of infection. One does not have to be hiding an obvious bite mark to be a risk in this movie and the military are in many ways just making things worse, packing everyone into the high school as an attempt at quarantine and shooting everyone who won’t comply. Within this effort a doctor named Watts, who was involved in the creation of trixie, is desperately attempting to find some sort of cure or vaccine. He hopes to find someone amongst the residents of Evans City who has a natural immunity from which antibodies can be taken but lacking that still attempts research into a cure throughout the film. He eventually develops a potential cure but is killed and the samples are destroyed in a stampede of infected townspeople breaking free from quarantine, while David realises that he is immune to the virus but decides to keep it to himself and not co-operate with the military.

That last sentence is at least how Wikipedia describes it. I disagree. Watts, throughout the movie, gets increasingly agitated, desperate and irrational. He tears off his gas mask in frustration while working on samples because it is too cumbersome to use a microscope while wearing it. He starts to see something in his samples that his colleague does not see or understand the significance of. When challenged he tells her to “just have faith.” It is very clear that Watts is acting, at best, extremely irrationally. The Wikipedia article states that he is killed in a stampede of people breaking quarantine but this is not simply a co-incidence, it is because when he runs into a group of soldiers and starts telling them that he’s a scientist they just think he’s as crazy as everyone else and shove him in with the rest of the population. Whether Watts has actually found something, is having a breakdown from stress, or has become infected either from general spread or from mishandling samples is unclear. When he dies he may losing a potential cure, but there is also the potentially worse possibility that he had absolutely nothing and now the rest of the researchers, assuming him to be brilliant, are chasing after shadows he was casting on the wall. A doctor reassures Peckem, the colonel in charge of the quarantine, that “Our boys have checked the slides [Watts] left in his microscope, but we can’t make heads nor tails of it. He was on to something. We’ll dope it out sooner or later.”

As the colonel and doctor leave, David is taken in and the soldiers ask the doctor if they want to test David for immunity. The doctor takes one look at him and dismisses him as one of the crazies. David, as the Wikipedia article notes, keeps his believed immunity to himself, cutting off a potentially fruitful route for a vaccine. That is, if David is actually immune. He thinks he is, but he has hardly been a perfect beacon of rational behaviour either. Peckem is ordered to move out to Louisville, where there are “reports of symptoms.” The quarantine seems to have failed. Though perhaps panic is just spreading as news gets around of the military rounding up the entire population of Evans City and shooting a third of them. It’s going to be hard to tell the difference between the virus spreading and the news of the virus spreading.

I think this lack of clarity is a huge strength of the film and makes the closing shot of Peckem’s point of view as he is taken away by helicopter of the light of a small, illuminated landing pad being swallowed by the darkness of the night around it much more bleak.

And the Wikipedia article is bad.

I am probably going to wind down using Wplace. It was fun to mess around with for a few days, flex my pixel art muscles, see what other people are drawing, see how the canvas evolves, but it’s very much a flash in the pan thing that most people are going to move on again from quickly, myself included. I have dotted down a few more things on the map, this time putting some larger pieces of other people’s art in a few places rather than my own pixel designs.

I put down the Pico-8 logo and a few characters near the Pico Pico Café in Kichijōji, Tokyo. This is a busy area and it has quickly been drawn over again, but all of this is ephemeral.

One of my past brief obsessions was St. Bride’s a strange mock-Victorian girl’s school holiday destination in Ailt an Chorráin, Donegal that in the 1980s promised a total disconnect from modern society and modern technology. They advertised that they had no electricity and did not believe in such things and also published a series of text adventure games for the ZX Spectrum. That is a rabbit to save for a future post, perhaps. I planted a shrunk-down recreation of the title screen of the game The Secret of St. Bride’s in the village where the school was based.

I started using the Blue Marble user script for these which helped with planning out size and position for these larger drawings a lot, as well as speeding up the actual drawing. I dropped a little art of Transy east of Bournemouth. It’s modified from a comic panel but this is the art from this lot that I can probably take the most credit as being “mine”.

I also draw the character select art for Snolf that I originally commissioned from Mars Gainsboro and decided to arbitrary place them on the Isle of Skye Golf Club.

Finally, I also contributed my pixels to my friend Ruby’s big rendition of the art for the P-Model album In a Model Room in Tsukuba, a hotbed for artwork of Susumu Hirasawa. She contributed to helping draw my art a lot as well.

This post discusses the mechanics of sexual pleasure for transgender women in frank detail.

A while ago Devon Price’s article The Quietly Coercive Nature of “Vanilla” Sex prompted a lot of self reflection about what I actually enjoy during sex and a few discussions with my partner about what what worked for each of us. I realised I never really enjoyed receiving oral sex very much, though I was more than willing to give it. This, happily, suited us both just fine. She also reminded me to finally get around to reading Fucking Trans Women.

One thing that became clear is how both of us, being trans women with penises, were using what worked for ourselves as a guide for the other. This was a mistake. Elilla’s recent post, An infodump on vaginal sex, by a lesbian, has gotten me thinking about this again. Like many others she make the distinction between people for whom clitoral stimulation works better and those for whom vaginal stimulation is preferable, or in her own terms: Clitoris-oriented bottom and penetration-oriented bottom. This is a familiar concept in writings about sex but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this sort of distinction applied to penises (not that I am a particular well-read in this regard). But it became clear to me, going over the differences in what worked for me and my partner, that I was somewhat of a clitoral (glans) orgasm girl and she was much more of a vaginal (scrotum, base and shaft) orgasm girl.

I had a small, battery powered handheld vibrator and while it could be fun for me to use it very much required me to already be aroused and erect to have much of any effect and the pleasure I got from it could be very fickle and flighty. I was surprised when it worked so much better for my partner and the ways in which it worked for her. I at first put it down to a difference in sensitivity but she enjoyed types of stimulation and areas of stimulation that really did nothing for me. The vibrations applied to the base of her penis and the area around her scrotum were immediately great for her in way that, to me, just felt like getting my skin vibrated. When I’m erect applying a vibrator to various parts of my knob can be pleasurable but it is the head that is feeling that. If I’m applying the toy to the base and it feels good that’s just because the vibrations are carrying their way up. Not so for my partner, apparently. I do seem to need stimulation of the glans—which in a penis is the equivalent tissue to the exposed part of the clitoris—for sexual stimulation in a way that was simply not the case for her. My limited experimentation with muffing and anal stimulation have also not proven to be particularly pleasurable, though I don’t yet have enough data to fully write those off.

An aside about vibrators: I have since gotten a corded Doxy vibrator and compared to the small battery powered one it is a hydrogen bomb vs. coughing baby situation. Like fuck I did not realise there was that much of a difference. It is not only much more intense but it can actually be effective at stimulating me even when I’m not already erect, which is very useful. My partner actually found it a bit much for her. I originally got the Doxy as a sort of shared Valentine’s Day gift to give to her that we could enjoy together when at her place but she told me to keep it and she took my battery-powered one home instead. Elilla stating that in her experience that other brands work better on penises has me intrigued.

I don’t have much in the way of data to come to any grand conclusions but I would advise anyone, even if you are already used to open communication with your partners about sex, to reconsider your assumptions about what you should be doing during sex, what is going to feel good for you and what is going to feel good for your partner. Their needs may not map directly from yours and you may not have fully examined what actually works for you, either. There may be things that you are going along with because they are seen as the default or things that everyone is meant to enjoy. Is there anything you are going through the motions of because you think it’s meant to feel good for you when it doesn’t? Is there anything your partner is focusing on because they have a false impression of what works for you or even because you have a false impression of what works for you?

And perhaps oral sex could also work better for me if these lessons about what actually gets me off were applied. I would be willing to experiment with that more but first I need to start getting laid again.

I exhibited at a showcase for local game makers yesterday. It was the first time I had done something like that and it was extremely fun and utterly exhausting. Working on games is an occasionally hobby; I don’t intend to make it my job and I haven’t worked on any game projects since the game jam last year, but I dusted off Snolf Robo Blast 2 and Conway’s Garden and set them up with some controllers for people to try out.

I had not thought about how exhibiting these would work before the event but I quickly realised that I was going to have to give a lot of context to people as to what they were playing. The vast majority of people attending never heard of Sonic Robo Blast 2 before so I had to give a quick rundown to everyone on what it was and sometimes the concept of fangames and mods.

Even with that explained, though, it became apparent how awkward it was to try to convey what the mod is doing when people seeing it do not have a context of the base game and how the mod is creating an experience on top of that. They are coming in and seeing and playing this game for the first time and expecting it to be a coherent whole, not this deliberate awkward layer on top of a base game. You don’t have the context that the joy in it is that you are playing the game “wrong”, layering a control scheme and method of play that the world was not intended for. Many people when seeing it as a golf-type thing started looking for a hole or guidance on where they are shooting for. The levels have a fairly legible linear structure when played normally, but when you have never seen them before and can freely shoot yourself much farther and higher than the levels for designed for, bouncing every which way, it is become very difficult to parse the structure of the space. More than one person suggested there should be guiding arrows of some sort to help.

Some people, though, did gel with it straight away and were delighted by blasting Snolf around, which was really nice to see. I was quick to give credit to the SRB2 team for the game itself and Dr. Melon for the concept. A line I fell into saying that got a laugh from a lot of people is that “all I did was make the controls worse.” A lot of people also got a kick out of it when I pointed out that the game was technically an extremely heavily modified version of Doom. Some people did have more of a concept of an antigame and compared it to QWOP and Getting Over It when I tried to explain the awkwardness of it not being entirely unintentional and the other game makers there generally got it and found it interesting. There were a few parents who brought children, including a Sonic fan or two, and they gravitated over to it being one of the more brightly coloured, exciting looking things on display, only to get pretty frustrated with it. For the kids at least I did quickly quit back to the main menu and restart the game with normal Sonic so that they could have a bit of fun trying it out and gave on the details of SRB2 to their parents if they were interested in it, pointing out that it was free. I think if exhibiting it again it would be useful to have a second computer set up with the unmodified version of the game, both to give context and to allow any child who sees Sonic and gets excited to play something that would actually be fun for them.

Similarly for Conway’s Garden I had to let people know that there wasn’t really any goal or point to it and it was more of a piece of art and a challenge to make something in a tiny amount of code. I had the code open in a second in a second window to the side so people could see how small it was for themselves. A lot of people, quite fairly, lost interest in it quickly, but some people were fascinated by the highly condensed code and the idea of tweetcarts and Pico-8 itself and a surprising number of people were already familiar with and recognised Conway’s Game of Life.

There was one man in particular I had a lovely chat with who was unfamiliar with games generally (he had to ask to clarify if “mods” was short for “modifications”) but enthusiastic about discussing the things on display as art. He said the mix of chaotic generation with the player’s simple, deliberate movements in Conway’s Garden reminded him of Joseph Beuys’s I Like America and America Likes Me and immediately recognised the Sisyphean nature of Snolf.

I don’t know if I will do anything like this again any time soon (and I won’t be working on anything new to show for the moment) but I had a great time and met some very cool people.

I have some more Wplace art in a new post.

I’ve been spending a bit too much time fucking around on Wplace but it’s been nice to flex my pixel art muscles a tiny bit again. One of the first things I added to the map was a dusted-off pokémon trainer sprite I made a few years ago when playing the ROM hack Pokémon Crystal Clear.

I used the Crystal player sprite as a base for this with the arm of the youngster sprite from the first generation games. I put this down near where I grew up, a pretty rural place. It can be quite isolating to grow up weird or queer in a place like that and it warmed my heart to see someone else had already drawn a few pride flags there including a trans one. I don’t know who drew that but I hope they are doing okay.

I also saw a few local G.A.A. club flags and didn’t think much of it but checking back over a few days it quickly became apparent that some cunt was drawing these to cover over pride flags. This put me in a foul mood but over the next few days the ever-growing retaliatory pride flags made them give up and there is a big, unmolested rainbow heart in the middle of the village now.

After that I set my sights on a few landmarks. These took a few revisions but I’m really happy with how they turned out.

Large collaborative art projects Wplace are cool but it can be frustrating when they do them right on top of cities that are already crowded for space. Still, with a bit of silent negotiation I was able to put these down close to where they are on the map.

I do have one other gripe with Wplace: The gamified system and slow drip of pixels back is unfortunately very effective and leading me back into bad habits of sitting at my desk refreshing webpages that I have been trying to break. At least the ability to get larger charges over time, as much as it plays into those systems designed to be addictive, does give you more room over time to step away from it and not feel like you are wasting your chances to draw something.

The other little unique doodle I’ve done is one of Sadako Yamamura, which I wasn’t entirely happy with but a friend said was really good so I will take that compliment.

I have been dotting some variously-sized Eggbugs and some other small things around as well as contributing to a few larger pieces of art and fixing vandalism here and there. It’s been a fun little time waster.

I was going to sign off saying that I didn’t yet have another project I planned on drawing but while writing this I had a brainwave.

I’ll be filling this in as my paint refreshes.

What planet is Sonic the Hedgehog from? That depends on which version of the character you’re talking about. The earliest bios from Sega imagine him as simply living on more or less the Earth as we know it, giving his place of birth as Christmas Island. When the series was published outside of Japan a more elaborate background was painted, putting him on a planet called Mobius inhabited by mobians—anthropomorphic talking animals—and ruled by the evil dictator Dr. Robotnik. Sega were similarly lose with canon when it came to licencing, allowing the details of the world to be filled in very differently in the various adaptations.

In Archie Comic’s Sonic the Hedgehog Mobius is a post-apocalyptic Earth in the far future, a background shared by Sonic the Hedgehog: The Movie’s Land of Darkness, while in Fleetway’s Sonic the Comic the Earth as we know it exists as a parallel dimension to Mobius, with characters sometimes travelling between the two¹. Sonic X and later the 2020 Sonic the Hedgehog film also feature Sonic travelling from an (unnamed) parallel dimension but then have him be taken in by a human family on Earth, where the bulk of the action takes place.

But this divide between Earth and Mobius never really existed in the games, at least as far as the Japanese versions were concerned, and starting with 1998’s more narrative-focused Sonic Adventure Sega started trying to unify things a bit. The English localisation featured almost nothing from the previous Western Sonic canon: No mention of Mobius, badniks or roboticisation² and with Sonic and friends being just a few talking animals in a world made of mostly of ordinary humans. This depiction of the world and Sonic’s placed in it held in the games for the next decade, as far as Sonic Unleashed in 2008.

The Sonic games of the 2010s, though, shied away from narrative focus and tried to steer the series in a more cartoon-y direction. These games vastly cut down on the size of the secondary and incidental cast, not only dropping background N.P.C.s entirely but also vastly trimming the size of recurring cast of mobian³ characters, sometimes only having Sonic himself and Tails have any major role. Still, one could imagine those teeming human cities just off-screen somewhere. That depiction of the world was not seriously challenged until 2017’s Sonic Forces.

An big selling point of Sonic Forces was that it had a character creator, finally allowing you to play your own Sonic O.C. in an official game⁴! Your avatar in the game starts off as an ordinary, frightened, mobian who rises up from the crowd to fight against the Eggman Empire alongside Sonic and his friends. For this narrative to work then, your furry O.C. must start as someone ordinary. Therefore mobians must be ordinary. There wasn’t really such a thing as an ordinary mobian in previous games. Barring the ancient echidna tribe shown in flashback all the way back in Sonic Adventure there had never really been furry background N.P.C.s. No generic anthropomorphic animals. They were all important, named characters. For the avatar character to rise up as part of the masses and become a hero they first need to fit into the masses, and thus Sonic Forces came with a colossal shift in how the world of Sonic the Hedgehog was presented: A world of animals under the thumb of Ivo Robotnik, the sole human in the game - something that aligned closer to Sonic the Comic than any of the previous games⁵.

While the text of Forces itself doesn’t address this change directly series producer Takashi Iizuka made comments to the effect that the there are two different worlds: One that is home to humans and the other that is home to mobians. This, frankly, does not remotely make any sense if you try to fit it with previous games and this was not some sort of reboot, either! Sonic Forces directly references several earlier games. This was coupled with another retcon where the game tries to reframe the younger version of Sonic, returning from Sonic Generations, as actually being from another dimension⁶ rather than being from the past, suddenly putting Sonic Mania and by extension all the Mega Drive games into a different continuity to everything else and making a complete mess of everyone’s understanding of the series. The people who maintain the Sonic the Hedgehog Fandom wiki started splitting off every character into two different pages: One for the primary version and one for the “classic” universe version. It was, in short, a complete disaster if you cared about the canon of a series of children’s computer games.

Something good did come of this, though: The long-running Sonic the Hedgehog series published by Archie Comics had ceased publication in 2016, one year before Sonic Forces was released, and in the year that followed Sega negotiated a new line of comics with IDW Publishing instead. And while Ian Flynn returned as head writer, having helmed the Archie comics for a decade, the new series abandoned the continuity (and legal baggage) of the old comics and started fresh with a backstory much more closely aligned with that of the games and a plot following on directly from Sonic Forces, keeping its status quo of a world full of mobians.

And the IDW comics are really good! Ian Flynn, Evan Stanley, et al. have a deep love for the series and are able to consistently deliver endearing, interesting and fun interpretations of the characters. It has made me warm up a lot to parts of the cast I previously disliked and introduced wonderful new additions like Whisper and Surge. It also strikes an amazing balance in tone, managing to deliver just the right amount of self-serious edginess in its stories while maintaining its warm, bright, colourful world. It successfully managing to keep the good parts of the ow the Edge 2000s without whollly abandoning the cartooniness of the 1990s and without the layer of ironic detachment and self-cringe that haunted the series in the 2010s. I maintain a reading order if you want to have a go at them yourself.

And as the comics became more aligned with the games the games have in turn became more aligned with the comics. Characters from the IDW comic have started appearing in mobile games and Sonic Speed Simulator (the official Sonic Roblox game) and were mentioned in 2021’s Sonic Frontiers. This is because with the success of the IDW comics Sega have more and more let the lunatics run the asylum. Flynn has been writing more and more for the series, from promotional material and animated shorts to eventually being the writer for the games themselves, penning the scripts for Sonic Frontiers and Shadow Generations. And being someone who does care about the canon of a series of children’s computer games he has taken upon himself to sort out the lore mess.

Under Flynn Sega has put out a series of in-character Youtube shorts called Tailstube, which act not just as promotional material but also an ongoing lore-clarification series⁷ with the very first episode trying to lay out as plainly as possible while staying in character: All games take place on the same planet. Humans and mobians⁸ just mostly live in different parts of the world. The Mega Drive games are part of the main canon. Please forget those retcons. Please go fix the wiki pages.

And the games have embraced talking about their history again, acknowledging backstories and characters who hadn’t been mentioned in a decade. The extended human cast, particularly those related to Shadow’s backstory, exist again. Maria and Gerald Robotnik feature in Shadow Generations and the GUN commander⁹ was in the game’s promotional short Dark Beginnings. But the IDW comics, their timeline seemingly stuck in a pre-Sonic Frontiers limbo, has yet to feature any human characters outside of Eggman. Even when using locations that were shown in the games to be populated by humans the comics will show them as being full of mobians or simply empty instead. There still seems to be a reluctance in the series to portray a wider human cast, but that might be changing!

Sega recently licenced a new manga series called Sonic and the Blade of Courage where Sonic returns to the world of humans and teams up protagonist Yuuta, an ordinary boy, to fight Eggman, who has been going around using an ancient cursed idol to turn (human) people to crystal. In the third chapter Sonic takes Yuuta to Spagonia¹⁰ to meet Tails, the only mobian character in the comic so far other than Sonic himself. Spagonia is, like Yuuta’s home Metro City, full of humans. This stands in contrast to the last time Spagonia was shown in the IDW comics, with Sonic and Blaze the Cat on a sightseeing holiday running through empty streets.

Does this mean Sega is open to portraying more humans in the series as a whole again or is it compartmentalising aspects of the franchise to different media? Will any new Sonic mangas barred from having background mobians while IDW stays devoid of other humans? It would, I suppose, contribute to giving different parts of the series their own identities.

That said they have also introduced a new human character in the most recent Tailstube (which is also set in Spagonia): Professor Victoria¹¹. And Sage, Eggman’s A.I. daughter from from Sonic Frontiers, is joining the IDW cast in issue #84¹² which means that that status quo is finally being moved forward as well.

In any case I really enjoy the direction that the series has gone in recent years and I’m looking forward to seeing how it continues to evolve.

It bothers me more than it should when I hear Irish people, or anyone outside of North America, call a Mega Drive a Sega Genesis. It’s quite common among people younger than me; people who didn’t grow up with the machine itself. They know about it from the internet, from the video game history that gets talked about and passed down online, and that is generally the American history of video games. The great video game crash, the dominance consoles over home computers and the dominance of the “Super Nintendo”¹ among consoles—all things that did not really happen here. There were only two countries where the Mega Drive was called a Genesis but one of those two countries is the United States of America which is, of course, the only country that matters.

This is a pretty trivial aspect of the general cultural imperialism of the U.S.A. and this is nothing new. The U.S. is a huge country, the largest economy in the world and has spent the last hundred years dominating the media and cultural output of the rest of the world. It drowns out all other voices and perspectives, especially in a small English-speaking, and up until recently, very poor country like Ireland.

And as the internet allows us to be more connected and allow other voices to get out this it also accelerates this. Now the world is not only watching the same Holywood movies but following the same big accounts on U.S.-based and -designed social media networks, having the same conversations about the big American political news. Which, to be clear, there is good reason to do². America is, again, the biggest economy and most powerful country in the world. What it does impacts all of us but also what its tech companies do shape the information we see and the ways in which we see it.

How we access information and what information is prioritised is controlled largely by companies like Google, Microsoft and Facebook. Facebook’s algorithms, policies and moderation are responsible for genocide. I perhaps cannot as easily level such a claim against Google yet but its search, the most common tool for accessing information in the world, has gotten worse and worse at doing that, prioritising profit, advertising and keeping you enclosed within a Google ecosystem. And now, of course, funnelling you away from links to other sites entirely, links to other resources and perspectives, and towards their chatbot output.

Large language models are swallowing so much of the internet right now and lot of people already swear by them, turning to them for questions, for help with writing, for ideas for when they’re stuck, for therapy and for companionship. There is a lot to be worried about with this but one thing I have been thinking about is how these chatbots—whether Google’s or Open A.I.’s or whoever’s—is that they are probably all going to call a Mega Drive a Genesis unless specifically prompted against it.

These models are trained using the internet as a corpus, an internet already dominated by American perspectives. They are made and shaped by American tech companies who are increasingly cosying up to an ever-more chauvinist U.S. state which is itself embracing “A.I.” tools as much as it can.

There is reason to think that the current bubble is unsustainable (and I do hope it bursts), but if these tools become normalised as a primary way of attaining answers, of seeking information and perspectives, I think it will have a horrifying flattening effect and accelerate the general Americanisation of the world beyond what is already happening.

And everything I said above is assuming no outright maliciousness. Twitter has repeatedly shown us that the people who make these chatbots can deliberately steer them to avow certain perspectives, from promoting South African white genocide myths to conspiracy theories about Jews. There is nothing really stopping Google from, say, deliberately trying to seed racist, anti-vaccine or anti-transgender propaganda into its chatbot and search summaries if it thinks that might get it points with the current regime which is already demanding idealogical purity from such systems, in effect ordering the limitation of acceptable perspectives.

I have posted about how one of Dracula’s funniest moments is from it examining its own format as an epistolary novel but a another amusing use of the format is the inclusion of newspaper articles that give a perspective of some of the events of the novel from the detached perspective of (absurdly verbose) newspaper clippings whose writers have no inkling of the broader events of the story.

A correspondent from The Daily Graph recounts, on the 8th of August, how a freak storm crashes the schooner Demeter into Whitby Harbour with the only living soul on board being a great, black dog¹ that leaps from the ship as soon as it beaches and runs straight to a cliff where it “disappeared in the darkness, which seemed intensified just beyond the focus of the searchlight.”

The reporting continues the next day that the cargo of the ship (boxes full of Transylvanian soil) being consigned to a local solicitor and, more importantly, the Whitby S.P.C.A. putting out a desperate search for the poor dog who fled the ship, who is imagined to be terrified and hiding in the moors and definitely not a murderous vampire in the guise of a gigantic, ferocious, black wolf.

The newspaper clippings end with the paragraph:

No trace has ever been found of the great dog; at which there is much mourning, for, with public opinion in its present state, he would, I believe, be adopted by the town. To-morrow will see the funeral; and so will end this one more “mystery of the sea.”

After reading yesterday’s post my friend Ruby reached out to me and told me that she was able to find the shortened Yu-Gi-Oh! episodes one hundred and two, one hundred and three, etc. by searching Nitter instances. Nitter doesn’t really work any more either due to Twitter’s A.P.I.s having been locked down significantly but there are still running instances with archives of a lot of accounts.

After finding some posts that way and then opening them in Twitter itself I could see that was blocked from viewing them due to the posts had been flagged as potentially containing adult material and Twitter wanted to verify my age before I could see them. Another system working well, then. And another way that the internet is being closed off. Presumably this is actually why they didn’t show up in searches for me.

I tried a couple of Nitter-scraping tools to see if I could mass download the videos but I couldn’t get them to work. I had also previously tried to use an Extreme Picture Finder template on the Twitter account too but it couldn’t go past the most recent thousand posts from the account. Not really having any luck with automating this I went to bed but while I was asleep Ruby painstakingly went and manually downloaded every episode she could that I was missing and sent them on to me. Thank you so much, Ruby!

There were a few that none of the Nitter instances she tried seemed to have and don’t seem to be findable on Twitter either. As such I am still missing episodes 121, 188, 215 and Capsule Monsters episodes 5 and 8, but I have most of it now at least.

The show is now living on my Jellyfin server with its own extremely high-effort cover art for it that you can see above.

Update: I managed to find episode 121 and Capsule Monsters episode 5 through Googling the exact phrasing of the posts and I was able to find the post for Capsule Monsters 8 via a Wayback Machine snapshot of Bing Bong’s Twitter profile, but episodes 188 and 215 don’t seem to be indexed on Google or Bing nor visible on any of the Wayback Machine snapshots. There are only a few snapshots on there from the period where he was uploading the episodes, unfortunately.

Update: My friend Ruby has managed to get me most of the episodes that I was missing.

People have often said that if it exists then you can find it online and that the internet never forgets. These people have never tried to find an archive of the Irish dub of Avatar: The Legend of Aang or dug through tech support forums full of dead links and a dozen pictures of the same yellow frog saying that the image you’re looking for is no longer available. The internet is, in fact, extremely forgetful and its memory is deteriorating rapidly as the companies that have been relied on as communication infrastructure rapidly close themselves off more and more.

There’s a guy who goes by Bing Bong who in 2021 posted a video online simply titled I shortened Yu-Gi-Oh!’s 1st episode down to about a minute, and over the course of months posted similar edits of subsequent episodes, eventually covering the entire show. I really liked Yu-Gi-Oh! growing up and it was a really fun way to revisit them without actually having to watch the entire show again. It’s two hundred and twenty-four episodes long and quite frankly not a lot happens in most of them. The high-speed recap giving me the gist and jogging my fond memories was, I think, a nice way to dwell in some nostalgia without having to spend a hundred hours watching something I don’t think I’d have the patience for as an adult. It also has a few of its own fun running jokes in how its edited, such as trying to “fix” characters saying Reborn the Monster instead of Monster Reborn and leaving in every single instance of characters explaining the rules of Pot of Greed or every utterance of the phrase Egyptian god cards¹.

Bing Bong is still uploading similar videos to his current Youtube channel (he’s covering Bleach at the moment) but the Yu-Gi-Oh! videos are long gone. I said his current Youtube channel because his original one was banned due to copyright claims. These videos were posted elsewhere but it has been a pain trying to track them down again. It looks like he was uploading them to a Tiktok account for a while but it only has the first ninety-seven episodes and hasn’t posted in months. Still, that was at least a good chunk of them and I was able to save them with yt-dlp.

Trying to find these videos with Google and other search engines can be difficult because they all think they know better than you what you are asking for and keeps giving me results for Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series. Still, I found that he uploaded at least a couple of episodes to Vimeo at some point but I genuinely don’t know if the rest of them are on there. Apparently Vimeo no longer allows you to open a user’s profile to view their uploads or even search for videos that you have not already added to you “library” and if other episodes are uploaded there then search engines do not seem to have indexed them.

These videos were also uploaded to Bing Bong’s Twitter account and as far as I can tell were never taken down but Twitter is barely functional any more. It simply won’t show you anything any more without an account and even with one it’s almost impossible to find things. Trying to scroll through the media tab to see older uploads it just stops loading new posts after a while and the search function seems to be falling apart at the seams. I tried searching for posts from his profile in a range of specific dates for when he was uploading these but whether it actually returns any posts seems random, often showing only two results when trying to search a specific month and then potentially showing nothing when I put in a different date range even if it actually contains the dates the posts I just saw posted on. Incidentally, apparently at some point Twitter added the ability to filter advanced search results by engagement metrics, i.e., only showing posts that reach a certain minimum threshold of replies or likes, which is not something I have ever seen on a site before. They truly have just laid bare the ideology of the site.

After some experimentation I did finally get some results searching for the specific titles of individual videos and managed to get episodes ninety-eight through one hundred and one that way but then get no results for the subsequent four episodes. The one hundred and sixth episode does show up but immediately after that they’re missing again. So I might be able to, slowly and painfully, fill in some blanks this way but it is not reliable at all. I can’t even just message him about getting them because Twitter no longer allows direct messages from people you don’t follow unless they have paid for a premium account.

This is not ancient history; these videos are less than five years old and attempting to find and archive them has been a frustrating mess. Anything online that you might take for granted could easily become inaccessible tomorrow and the trend at the moment for it is to become ever-more closed off.

I have a small pile of posts in various stages of being written sitting in my drafts folder and a todo list for things I want to add to this website as long as my arm on top of a pile of other, much larger todo lists for everything else I want to do. This is, frankly, a problem. I am very burnt out. Ellie dying is just the straw that broke the camel’s back; I have been trending towards this for some time. I do not know how to relax, especially when I’m by myself. I had fallen into watching television so much with Ellie I think in part because it was one of the few ways that I did allow myself to relax.

I am trying to do better with this. To take time to relax on my own time. To watch stuff, to read, to play games again. I still have that feeling gnawing on me, though. That I should be doing something. Something useful, something productive. Again, I knew this was a problem even before Ellie died. My two podcasts have been on hiatus for a long time now because I couldn’t keep up with them, but I end up filling that space with more projects, or often just sitting at my computer cycling through Discord channels constantly making sure I am reading every update on every channel with my todo open in another monitor thinking that I should be working through stuff from it. Not relaxing, not getting anything done, but a secret, third, worse thing that serves only to slowly wear away at myself.

One of the things I am trying to do now is reorient myself so that sitting at my desktop is not my default state of being as it has been for a very long time. I work from home and I organise myself based around todo lists and notes that I keep as basic text files. I broadly like having my notes like this, I have ADHD and tend to forget things quickly unless I have them somewhere and text files are simple, easy to search and portable. Though I prefer to use my desktop they are also synced to my phone if needs be.

But I just fall into these habits that are not good for me. If I don’t know what to do I go to my desktop. I open Discord. I open my todo lists. I open my RSS reader. I bounce between things rapidly trying to work through my endless ideas while feeding myself constant little updates to quiet the ADHD ants in my brain and keep going.

I am trying to break these habits and reorganising my house a bit to make my living room more of an actual living room, as a place where I spend time and organise myself even when I do not have people over. Defining my space and using it to make my life easier and more pleasant is something I am very keen on. I have a lot of decorations around my house, many of which I made myself. I keep things, as much as I can, in a series of labelled drawers, because I will never be able to find things otherwise. I have gotten a lot of complements on my giant tower of labelled drawers. Things move between them and get reorganised and relabelled pretty frequently as I adjust things to myself.

My house is also quite small and I sought to optimise the space. I have downsized kitchen appliances, a kitchen table that folds down up to take up as much space as needed in a given moment, a sofa-bed that folds out to not take up much extra space in a narrow living room and a pull-down Murphy bed so that I can pack it up during the day and have extra space in my bedroom that is also my home office. At one point I bought a whiteboard that I intended to use for organising and mounted it on the outside of the Murphy bed cabinet, mostly because I thought that was a cool place for it. But this means I could not actually use the whiteboard when the bed was down and, quite frankly, I often do not have the spare spoons to pack away all the bedclothes and put the bed up.

I have now moved that whiteboard into my living room. Instead of rolling out of bed directly into my office chair to start my day I am going downstairs, making breakfast and eating it at my dining table (and not at my desk!), taking my meds and trying to plan things out down there rather than on my computer. I have some daily checklists on there, I have my shopping list on there and add things to it as I notice I’ve run out, I plan out my highest priority todos.

This is still a work in progress and I am trying to figure out what does and doesn’t work for me. The checkboxes in that photo have already been whipped clean and rewritten somewhat. Maybe I will move away from this too and figure something else out. I still feel the pull of habit and dopamine sources pulling back to the computer constantly.

Outside of being “productive” I am also trying to get into the habit of watching TV on my actual TV again, or reading on my sofa rather than in bed (or more often, not at all). I should probably also get out of the house more too but I am pretty bad at that still (and there are a lack of third spaces around here that do not cost money to be in).

I need to slow down and recover. I hope this helps me with that. If not, we keep looking.

I had an old Big Joel video about scambaiting on as background listening while doing my little daily puzzles and had some idle thoughts on the way people talk about the world we live in as a cyberpunk dystopia but boring or stupid or uncool or other such descriptors. The awful world is there but not the spirit of fighting against it. We have the corpos but not the punks.

And I think one thing in cyberpunk works is the class stratification, the corpos and the punks, are very geographically localised. Class stratification is present and highly visible, the rich gorging themselves in their towers and the poor living on the scraps below. Obviously there is class stratification in western cities but there is of course a larger stratification between the global north and south. The manufacturing and menial service jobs that can be done remotely outsourced to places with lower pay and fewer labour rights. The most marginalised are on the other side of the world.

This video in particular is talking about Indian call centres and Indian scammers and, returning to our boring cyberpunk dystopia, a lot of the people hacking other people’s brains, the people flooding Facebook with AI slop chasing trending keyword and engagements are largely people in India and other developing countries who have familiarity with tech doing those devalued jobs who are able to eke out some meaningful amount of money through exploiting Facebooking algorithms and ad revenue. It was the same with “fake news” before that term got hijacked to mean deliberate political misinformation. That originally comes from an ecosystem of people creating outrageous false clickbait aimed at an American audience without actual care for political aims, just syphoning off the pennies they could get from ads on emotionally charged headlines in a strategy that was only later merged with deliberate misinformation networks.

I am not trying to say these things are noble, but they are interesting and often invisible to people because we have already structured society to hide those people and that labour off beyond the horizon and we only really see the parts that are reflected back into the western cultural consciousness. People see shrimp Jesus and think about the evangelical Christians on Facebook who it is targetting and not the tech support worker in the Philippines who is actually producing it.

Do you trust your family to not bury you under your dead name? To invite your friends and partners to you your funeral? Do you trust that your family members who have the decency to do those things won’t allow themselves to be browbeaten by those who don’t?

Recently I had a reminder of something that every queer person was painfully aware of during the height of the AIDS crisis: If your partner dies and you have no legal relationship to them then you have no legal rights over what happens to them. That is perhaps a tautological statement but one that is worth internalising. When you die what happens to you is up to those that the state considers to be your family and in the absence of any legal documents saying otherwise that is generally your blood relatives. And of course there’s the matter of inheritance if you want to leave things to anyone other than your relatives.

What’s funny is that myself and Ellie had been discussing this. We had talked about looking into the process of getting wills written, etc. Her family did not take her transitioning well. Her brother refused to let her into his house to drop off Christmas presents for her niblings last year because he did not want his children to see her as a woman. We knew what would likely happen if she died, we just did not expect it so suddenly.

I don’t have any actual advice to offer for how to go about this. We hadn’t gotten around to it ourselves and if we had anything I could say would only apply to the Republic of Ireland.

, or: Talking about Steven Universe discourse but not because the spinoff show was announced. I started writing this before that happened.

The other day myself and two friends were rambling to two other friends who had never heard of Steven Universe about said show, talking a lot about the overall plot and setting. If you don’t know the general plot of Steven Universe and don’t mind spoilers I will go through the relevant parts of the plot for what I want to talk about: The protagonist Steven is half-human and half gem. Gems are magic space rock people and most of them live in an authoritarian, colonial, caste society ruled by the diamonds and Steven is being raised by a small group of survivors of a failed rebellion.

Among the magic powers that gems posses multiple gems can fuse into a bigger, stronger gem. Fusion gets used as a very general and multilayered allegory for relationships in general and can work a bit different for different gems depending on the needs of a given story. A lot of what the show is doing with its world and plots is heavily allegorical. One of the big taboos that the rebellion breaks is different types of gems fusing together. I said it’s a caste society but it’s a little weirder than that. A given gem is defined by what type of gem they are and expected to be basically completely interchangeable with them.

All rubies are bodyguards and all rubies are named Ruby (and also in the show all have the same voice actor). Ruby is a name, job, gender and role in society and straying from that role means you are fundamentally broken and wrong and fusing with a different type of gem is a complete perversion. The roles gems are defined as is a metaphor the story uses but it’s a flexible one. It maps onto things like gender roles (and if read a certain way amusingly means that for gem society homosocial relationships are the only acceptable kind) but also for societal expectations and pressures in general. It also ends up, for the title character, being very much about the pressures that a shitty, unaccepting family puts on someone.

The diamonds are the rulers of gem society. They are authoritarian dictators who see other life as beneath them. That is the facts of the setting. But in terms of how they are actually portrayed and used in the show, especially as it goes on, they are a dysfunctional family who (without going into the specifics of why they think this) see Steven as a brat who has thrown a tantrum and run away. Judged in absolute terms they don’t see humans as real people, just amusing pets at best, but that is not in service to a story about how they are space Hitlers, it is in service to a story where they are dismissive of Steven as a person and see his life on Earth as someone playing pretend who is going to grow up and move on with his life, go back to “real” name and pronouns, and stop making such a fuss.

And, if you are unaware, when the show aired there was considerable controversy about the fact that these the terms on which the story is resolved. Many people were invested in the lore of the evil gem society and would only think of it morally on those terms and were furious that this children’s cartoon did not end with the diamonds being brought before the space Hague for their space warcrimes, that the story that was being told was one about family trauma and healing and that the space opera trappings were in aid of that and not the point in and of themselves.

So I had this in mind while explaining the show to my friends and, perhaps overly defensively, emphasised how the resolution of it was on the family drama allegory level and not about killing space Hitler. And his response surprised me: “Oh, like Star Wars!”

And it struck me how apt a comparison that was. I think it is genuinely astute and cuts straight to how this is a normal part of storytelling and not some morally repugnant aberration like so many people high on the discourse treated it. Someone who I related this story to said it reminded them of this video from Man Carrying Thing talking about bad faith deliberate media illiteracy.

And I have just been ruminating on that for a few days. On how so much discourse is fuelled by refusing to meet things on their own terms at all and it’s bad! That’s all, really.

Sorry for dragging up Steven Universe discourse.

Bye.

This post contains spoilers for Dracula, which is 128 years old.

I have not been keeping up with Dracula Daily as I had intended¹ but I wanted to make a post about it today. One of the features of the original Dracula that is often forgotten in adaptation is how modern it is. As an epistolary novel the story is mostly a series of diary entries and in the case of the character John Seward his diary, starting on the 25th of May, it is recorded on a phonograph—an invention that was only twenty years old at the time of the novel’s publication in 1897.

The book heavily involves the collision of the very modern and scientific with the ancient evil that is Count Dracula. The novel opens with Jonathan Harker, a solicitor, travelling to Transylvania in order to sort out a property deal for the count. This journey involves going from the comfort and regularity of well-timetabled trains to a treacherous carriage ride through the old, wild Carpathian mountains. With him, as well as the needed legal documents, he has photos taken on his Kodak² camera, which is far from the only piece of prominent technology.

The weapons used to fight Dracula are not just wooden stakes and crucifixes³ but also blood transfusions⁴, hypnotism⁵, next-day flower delivery from Haarlem to London⁶, shorthand⁷, meticulous note-taking, and in-depth knowledge of train timetables⁸. While it goes unremarked on in the book itself I like to imagine that Count Dracula’s statement that “to live in a new house would kill me” is due to a vampire’s inability to cross running water not playing very well with indoor plumbing. Abraham Van Helsing is not a young, sexy vampire hunter in this novel but an polymath professor with at least three doctorates⁹. Dracula is not that out of step with Buffy the Vampire Slayer answering the question of how to deal with a terrible and ancient demon with blowing it up with a bazooka.

But there is something else important about John Seward’s phonography: It ends up being extremely funny. Even just reading this and thinking that he is speaking this out loud to be recorded on a wax cylinder it seems incredibly obnoxious:

I questioned him more fully than I had ever done, with a view to making myself master of the facts of his hallucination. In my manner of doing it there was, I now see, something of cruelty. I seemed to wish to keep him to the point of his madness a thing which I avoid with the patients as I would the mouth of hell. (Mem., Under what circumstances would I not avoid the pit of hell?) Omnia Romæ venalia sunt. Hell has its price! verb, sap. If there be anything behind this instinct it will be valuable to trace it afterwards accurately, so I had better commence to do so, therefore R. M, Renfield, ætat 59. Sanguine temperament; great physical strength; morbidly excitable; periods of gloom ending in some fixed idea which I cannot make out.

One presumes that he is saying “memorandum” out loud and not just “mem” as is transcribed. Later, when he records his conversations with Van Helsing he includes the full back and forth dialogue, with all of Van Helsing’s disfluencies, grammatical errors and strange turns of phrase. One has to wonder is Seward imitating his friend’s Dutch accent while recording this? Is he doing voices whenever he is making his diary? What does his Mina voice sound like? We are reading, within the fiction, a transcription of him speaking out loud. And we know who does the transcription because it happens during the course of the plot. The later part of the novel involves the protagonists meeting up and compiling all of their notes together into what is the text of the novel itself.

This is done by Mina Harker and the reason she starts doing this is, again, extremely funny: She walks in on Seward recording on his phonograph and asks to hear some of it. He initially agrees but then starts deflecting awkwardly that most if is about his medical cases. When Mina asks specifically to hear about the last few days of her friend Lucy Westenra’s life he admits that he has no idea how to find a specific diary entry in his phonograph recordings. He has been using this for at least the last four months and he just never thought about it at all. He has not labelled anything. He has no system of any kind. He has just been talking into this and never reviewing it in any way! This is what prompts Mina to start transcribing the entries for him, as well as typing up her and her husband’s shorthand diaries for everyone else to read and compiling all the other letters and newspaper clippings that make up the novel. Going back to the modernity of it all the most in-spirit adaptation of Dracula set in the modern day would surely be composed primarily of screenshots of social media posts and podcast segments.

There is one more interesting angle on the fact that Mina is the author, or at least the typesetter, of the book within the fiction: How she types up the dialogue of Renfield, Seward’s patient and devoted servant of Dracula. Renfield’s dialogue capitalises He, His, You, Your and Master when he is speaking of Dracula, something that is only proper to do when referring to God¹⁰. This is obviously meant to ascribe a blasphemous devotion to Dracula to Renfield, but within the story it is Mina who is choosing to capitalise his words in this manner and Mina is also, at this point, partially under Dracula’s influence. While I don’t think that this was Bram Stoker’s intent we could read this an an unconscious sign of Dracula’s influence over Mina’s mind.

I have been struggling for the last few months. My health has been poor, it has been difficult to keep on top of things, I have just felt generally worn down and burnt out. But I have been managing. I have been trying to let myself rest more. Getting things off my plate. I have gotten ADHD meds. Most of all what has helped me get through is my partner, Ellie Cosgrove. We had only been together one year at the end of April but it was such a wonderful year. Being with her was healing in ways I cannot describe. I felt able to be fully myself with her. I was able to peel away masks I didn’t know I had been wearing all my life. I was learning to be myself through her. I was learning to love myself through loving her. I wanted to build my life around her.

She died on Wednesday night. The last few days have been the worst of my entire life. I have been looked after. Friends and family have been reaching out constantly. My mother and sister made sure that my fridge is more full than it has ever been and I had so much company over the last few days that it would have left me exhausted even in good circumstances. It hard to believe that it has only been a few days. It feels like so much longer. Like it has been weeks since this awful, raw thing crawled inside my chest and died. Weighing me down, wearing me out even more. So many of my everyday thoughts loop back to her and now everywhere in my mind there is just a horrible, grey, consuming, painful dead end. I’m thinking about This Is How You Lose the Time War again. About love infecting you and changing you and making the other person part of you. And in that last year that happened so much and so much more than I could have imagined. And now that part of me has been ripped away.

I keep coming back to this piece that she loved. I’m trying to internalise it. To remember to keep going. To remember that she loved me.

Okay. Come on, then. I love you, get up, we are going to keep going. Repeat this to yourself in a mirror or in a whisper or in the shower or in a shout. I love you, get up, keep going.

I am tired too. It’s okay. We will sleep in the car ride over. We will sleep on each other’s shoulders. We will sleep upside down and in the laps of new friends and on the bellies of our lovers and in the hands of better tomorrows. We will sleep and we will wake up rested and we will wake up happy and we will wake up home again.

I love you, get up. It’s time to write “maybe next time” on our gravesite. It’s time to write: it could not kill me, I would not die. It’s time to write a love letter to the sun and our one-act play and the history of our keychains. It is time to write a future where despite everything, we are finally warm and safe.

I love you. I love you. I love you.

Get up. Keep going. We are going to be okay.

Rowan Perez

I would also appreciate any comments on this or any other post on this site, even just because most of the existing comments are from her and I would like to be able to review the Comentario dashboard without seeing her words at the top of it and be reduced to a sobbing mess again.

I’ve made some tweaks and corrections to this post, including fixing some confusion I had about Arthur Holmwood’s name.

I first read Dracula in 2022, following along with Dracula Daily, a newsletter that sends out sections of the book on the date in which they occur¹. One of my posts about it on Tumblr actually ended up in the print version. The following year I read it again, this time following along with two other versions of the book: Powers of Darkness and Dracula in Istanbul, English retranslations of Icelandic and Turkish translations of the original novel respectively. It was interesting to compare the changes made in each version. I made a graphic showing how both version abridge the story compared to the original. That year I also read the comic book adaptation of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Last year I did not read Dracula again but this year I had a notion: To pick up an Irish translation and follow through the book simultaneously with my print copy of Dracula Daily². This has immediately got off to a bad start: I was busy yesterday and so didn’t even start on the 3rd of May, the date of first entry of Jonathan Harker’s journal. The other, much larger and in hindsight very predictable problem is that my level of Irish is not really up to reading this. I had intended to get more practise in on simpler books before this but I have but limited time upon this Earth and a condition that results in poor executive function.

Still, there are some interesting things here even at a glance. I am always curious about how proper nouns are handled in translation. Here there is a mixture of Gaelicisation and leaving things as is. Jonathan Harker is Seon Ó hEarcair³ but Dracula remains Dracula (with his title of count translated as cunta). Most placenames use their standard Irish names—Transylvania is Transalváin—but Munich is actually reverted to its native München.

Flicking ahead I can see that Mina Murray is Mín Ní Mhuirí⁴ and John Seward is Seán Suaird⁵ but other names are left unchanged or only partially translated. Lucy Westenra is now Laoise⁶ Westenra and Arthur Holmwood is Artúr⁷ Holmwood. Abraham Van Helsing and Mr. Quincy P. Morris are unchanged, with the English honorific still being used sometimes in the text. Other minor characters like Renfield seem to keep their English names. I can’t really tell what the basis was here for deciding which names to translate or not.

Returning to section for the 3rd of May there are some abridgements. The section on the various nationalities of Transylvania is cut entirely⁸ and more tragically Jonathan’s little memoranda to get the recipes for paprika hendl, mămăligă and împănată to give to Mina are cut as well.

Bram Stoker himself was an Anglo-Irishman from Dublin and a lot of people say that the choice of the name Dracula for the eponymous vampire was not only inspired by the historical Vlad the Impaler but also because it sounds vaguely like “droch-fhola”, a phrase that could be read as “evil blood” in Irish. It’s not true at all, but people say it!

One last thing to note about this translation is that the cover is quite funny.

I started taking ADHD medication one week ago. The path to get these has been humiliating. In the end I went to a private clinic but I have wasted so much time with a public health service that has completely eroded any trust or faith that I might have had with it.

I have known that I have had ADHD and autism for years. The more I talked to people over the year that have them the more it became obvious that their experiences matched my own, the more that I was drawn to people who had them, who were like me and shared my experiences and understood me¹. The people who I love most in the world are other AuDHD trans women.

But these are disorders and come with their problems, too. Doing even the simplest things is a struggle sometimes. Taking care of myself, doing the exercises that stop my back from being in pain, keeping things clean and, of course, my job. I have so often fallen behind in work and then in a burst of stress powered through what needed to get done at the last minute. I used to stay in late all the time to get things done that should have been finished hours before. I have lied to people over and over again about work, pretending I had more done than I did, hoping to make it up afterwards. My original masters project fell through when I got caught in a downward spiral of paralysing stress and lies about making progress while continuing to stare at a blank page. Eventually I broke down crying to my supervisor after admitting I really had basically nothing. He helped me start over and my family supported me massively through writing a new thesis. Over time I have learnt how to manage things a bit better, how to recognise my limits and work around them, but I continued to struggle daily.

Loughlinstown

But I did not seek treatment for a long time. A large part of this was due the the ableism and transphobia of the “National Gender Service”, the largest gender clinic in the Republic of Ireland, located in Loughlinstown, County Dublin. I was referred to the clinic in January of 2019. At the time I was informed that I was number 200 on the waiting list. That wait, sitting so far up a list, proved intolerable. Before I was seen in Loughlinstown I started taking minoxidil to try and prevent hair loss, began laser facial hair removal, started hormone replacement therapy with a private clinic, got a deed poll and a gender recognition certificate to legally change my name and gender, and the National Gender Service lost the records of over one hundred patient referrals. The news of that last thing broke in November of 2019 but it wasn’t until April 2020 that I was sent a letter assuring me that they still had my referral and that the clinic was no longer telling people what position they were on in the waiting list.

I had, as I said, already started medically transitioning, assisted by a private clinic, but that is expensive and I still wanted to go through the public system. It would save me money and it seemed like the way it “should” be done. I hate private healthcare as a concept. Everyone should be taken care of, not just those who can pay. I was finally seen in Loughlinstown in June of 2021, over two years after my initial referral. If you are referred today it will take you over thirteen years to be seen. It was a three hours drive to Dublin, a three hour interview with a psychiatrist, and a three hour drive home. It was utterly exhausting.

I was asked about my entire life and medical history. Like many others, I was ask about sex and masturbation so that my sexuality could be scrutinised by the man interviewing me. I have heard of much worse and more invasive questioning from people. When I was not comfortable answering certain questions I was not pressed on them. I passed enough of the other unspoken tests that meant I was an acceptable, respectable trans woman. I had stability, safety and independence. I was already out to friends, family and people that I worked with. People who are struggling, who have difficulty with employment or who are afraid to socially transition are often denied medication by doctors in Loughlinstown. If your life does not line up to their expectation of stability and normalcy they reserve the right to deny you treatment until you are ready, in their eyes, to transition. For those who do not have the means to seek private treatment they may not see any alternative except a public system that can deny them anyway for not meeting the standards of a comfortable, stable environment (that is, in our society, wealth) that is seen as a perquisite to be allowed to decide what to do with your body.

Patients have stated publicly or reported to TENI that they are being denied or delayed treatment for reasons such as suspected autism, ADHD, unsatisfactorily answering overtly sexual questions or for not bringing family members into assessments which community members continue to report to us, despite public statements by the HSE to the contrary. Assessments include questions about masturbation, porn habits, sexual history, thoughts during oral sex, detailed genital descriptions of themselves and sexual partners and even racial preferences.

Lilith Ferreyra-Carroll in GCN

Trans people of course share these stories with each other. About being rejected for being unemployed, for being fearful of coming out to bigoted family, for having untreated ADHD or autism. And when we do the doctors who run the Loughlinstown clinic accuse us of being “coached” to fast-tracked sex changes. Donal O’Shea, endocrinologist in Loughlinstown, is incredibly concerned about the rise in autistic people seeking to transition. He is worried that it is linked to “visibility around Kardashian personality Caitlyn Jenner” and compares people coming to a doctor and wanting to medically transition to a patient who asks their doctor to treat their pneumonia by amputating a lung.

Paul Moran, consultant psychiatrist in Loughlinstown, is also concerned about screening for neurodiverse people and wrote an opinion piece in The Journal welcoming the findings of the Cass Report, which he consulted on, which has been criticised in a joint statement by WPATH, ASIAPATH, EPATH, PATHA, and USPATH², which was headed by a supposedly independent pædiatrician who reportedly had previously expressed shock at medical transition practises and strongly recommended anti-transition literature to colleagues, which current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch suggested was commissioned due to “having gender-critical men and women in the UK government” and never would have existed otherwise.

Yale’s Integrity Project’s review of the report described the Cass Report as levying “unsupported assertions about gender identity, gender dysphoria, standard practices, and the safety of gender-affirming medical treatments”, as repeating “claims that have been disproved by sound evidence” and that it “misinterprets and misrepresents its own data.” But it is a wonderful document for those who wish to justify more roadblocks towards transition. Who will forever see the struggles of trans people not as a civil rights matter but as purely a medical question where doctors do not merely assist or facility their trans patients but hold power over them.

And the Loughlinstown gender clinic, originally a regional endocrinology unit that over time started to take more and more trans patients, have decided that they should hold their authority over all trans people in the Republic of Ireland. They declared themselves the “National” Gender Service without authorisation and write letters to people’s GPs to advise them not to do blood tests for trans people who are sourcing hormones from other providers.

I’m not sure where the title ‘National’ derives from [...] I do not consider at this stage that we can view this service appropriately as a ‘National’ service, as I have not received evidence to validate government or HSE recognition of this status.

Siobhán Ní Bhriain, national clinical lead for integrated care, Health Service Executive, in a 2022 letter

The ability of the men who run this clinic to gatekeep who gets hormone treatments is very important to them. They urged for years for the HSE to drop the WPATH model, which the HSE eventually did, walking back a promise from the 2020 programme for government. The WPATH 7 guidelines allowing for other models of care such as informed consent was far too liberal for Loughlinstown.

They frequently coach their language in concern for children, that they are transitioning too young and cannot make informed decisions, despite the fact that they do not treat children and there is currently no public pathway for the medical transition of minors in the Republic of Ireland at all. Paul Moran and Donal O’Shea are, in fact, currently taking legal action against the state to try and prevent children from being treated abroad either. Loughlinstown’s vision of a potential gender service for children is, according themselves, indistinguishable from conversion therapy. In a submission concerning a proposed law to ban the practice they wrote that it “will make it impossible to develop a children’s gender service in Ireland.” When they treat adults they use a system that their own model of care documents call overly complex and inefficient and co-author papers that get the mechanisms of the medication that they prescribe confused.

Loughlinstown is widely hated by the patients that attend the clinic. In research by the Transgender Equality Network Ireland 80% of respondents were dissatisfied with their care from the National Gender Service with a full 60% of them giving it the lowest possible rating. This sort of treatment erodes people’s trust in doctors and can lead to hesitancy around healthcare in general.

There are no correct guidelines, there’s no actual structure in how we’re dealt with. It means that it could be literally one person standing in your way, telling a lie or doing the wrong thing, or they might be bigoted or ignorant. So you’re completely at the mercy of maybe one person and there’s no other protections in the system. That person might be good and might help you. But then again, it’s luck. It’s complete luck and it should be standardised.

Séan, a trans man quoted in TENI’s report Trans and Non-Binary Experiences of Institutional Violence in Ireland.

Faced with this institutional gatekeeping I saw an ADHD diagnosis and treatment not as something beneficial, that could bring relief to struggles that I face every day, but as a weapon that could be used against me, to question my humanity and autonomy, to deny me even more vital treatment for my wellbeing, and that if I tried to seek an ADHD diagnosis through the public system that it would be something that would hang over my head to be abused by anyone else seeking to wield authority over me. This is another, indirect way that people are harmed by gatekeeping. I was afraid to seek treatment for one thing because I wanted another even more desperately. Eventually, though, I’d decided that I’d had enough, that I needed help with my other struggles as much as I did with transitioning, and if Loughlinstown did decide to deny me future care for this or other reasons there are alternatives. Foolishly, I decided to go through the public system again.

Mental Health Services

I went back to my GP in March of 2023 to ask to be referred for ADHD treatment. Unsurprisingly it took, after several delayed appointments, just over a year to be seen at my local mental health services. I had practised and thought about what I was going to say. I laid out my struggles, staring at blank pages telling myself to to start writing and nothing coming out, not being able to keep things clean, deadlines only getting met at the last minute through stress building up and bursting the dam of executive dysfunction. I explained all this calmly, and was met by a man telling me that I seem to be handling things well. That I met deadlines. That my job gives me flexibility.

I realised that doctors are like dogs: They don’t really understand English; they just follow tone of voice and maybe pick out a few key words. In calmly explaining my problems I was not performing the required level of patheticness to be seen as disabled. He went out to speak to a consultant and left me alone stewing in that room for a while. I realised that to be taken in any way seriously I needed to strip away the walls I normally put up around my feelings and dredge up the self-hatred and misery I feel. I needed to drag up every thought of being stupid and useless and let them out. To make myself into a sobbing mess. This is a deliberate performance, but not a dishonest one, and without it I was not being taken seriously at all. Medicine is the process of engaging in ritual self-humiliation until a doctor deigns from on high that you are pitiable enough to be granted the boon of his charity.

My tears got me a few tissues and the consultant called in, who was quick to make comments about “overdiagnosis” and how pharmacological solutions are not the best for people who don’t have severe enough trouble, before making a pointed comment about how I had brought a book³ to read in the waiting room. I guess someone who reads can’t really have ADHD, or at least not severe enough to need treatment.

Even so, I got a second appointment scheduled for a month later. For that one they wanted to be able to speak to someone who knew me as a child to corroborate on childhood signs and symptoms. This is a standard procedure for the DIVA, the Diagnostic Interview for ADHD in Adults. My experiences two decades ago apparently matter more than the actual problems I have right now. Still, I rang my mother. She was surprised that I was seeking an ADHD diagnosis⁴. Like many her image of ADHD was that of hyperactive boys unable to sit still and causing chaos, certainly not a description of my childhood. But after after a few conversations where I explained my struggles, and also showing her articles about how ADHD presents often differently in girls she came around a bit.

In any case, she agreed to be on the phone for the appointment. She needn’t have bothered, though, as when I returned to the clinic I was, bafflingly, told by the doctor who had seen me the first day that he had expected a psychologist to be free to see me that day to go through the DIVA but had not booked one and there was no one to do it. I was just given forms to fill out at home and drop back.

This was stressful, I had friends with me while I filled them out for moral support, but also deeply frustrating. The focus on childhood is bad enough but the questions are also sometimes confusing (what the hell does it mean to feel like you are “driven by a motor”?) and sometimes a single line would ask two different questions that have two different answers! “Did you do well in school? Were you a good student?” Yes I did well in school. I was intelligent and interested in many of my subjects. I genuinely enjoyed maths. No I was not a good student. I would ignore my teachers, talk in class if I was bored and thought I could get away with it, did homework at the last minute (often while sitting in the class that was about to start before the teacher walked in or while they were setting up). I struggled massively in university without the structure of school to make me do things and when faced with material that I did not pick up effortlessly. But when it comes to disability how well one performs academically or economically is often seen as the primary metric. Getting a person to produce the desired outputs of those systems is the goal and if someone does then they may not be seen as needing assistance no matter how much they are being ground down as an ill-fitting cog in the machine.

Several months later I am told by a doctor who I have never met before that the local mental health clinic I was going to had liaised with the adult ADHD service and they think that I have ADHD but it’s not severe enough to treat. Later I will be told by a friend who had also sought treatment that she was much more bluntly told that they are only treating people who are “crashing cars and getting arrested.” I ask the doctor in the clinic if I could see that correspondence with the adult ADHD service and she says she doesn’t know. She asks the receptionist and this is refused. I leave while trying not to show the rage and despondency I feel.

Freedom of Information

At this point I know I need to seek private care instead but I also want to see what the ADHD service actually said about me. I want everything in writing. It could also be useful to have documents to pass on to another doctor when seeking treatment privately. I decide to file a freedom of information request. Even requesting this turns out to be its own ordeal. The public clinic seems to deliberately have no contact email address. I phone them and am informed by the receptionist that all freedom of information requests must be sent, in writing, not by email, to a specific hospital that handles freedom of information requests for all Health Service Executive operations in the city. I am not given a specific person or office to address this to. After several more phone calls across a few days I finally get in contact with someone who is able to send me the FoI form⁵. I send it back with a simple request for documents relating to my seeking treatment for ADHD. I think that I will wait till I have these before seeking private treatment. It shouldn’t take too long; HSE is legally required by the Freedom of Information Act to respond within four weeks.

Two months later I emailed to ask (in much more polite terms) what the fuck they were doing. I will not bore you with the details of these exchanges but over the course of the following months I persisted, always patiently and politely, to ask as for updates. It would take multiple emails to get a single reply. Sometimes an email would get ignored and when I would send another one I would get a sudden phonecall in reply a few minutes later. They’re busy, they’re backed up, they were on holidays, actually this was passed along to the wrong person in the first place because they handle requests for clinics on the other side of the city.

What a waste of another few months on top of all the time I had pissed away already. At this point I think the public service is simply not going grant me my rights unless I threaten them with legal action and it’s not worth it. This has caused me enough stress as it is.

Treatment

I went to a private clinic. I paid a lot of money but I got seen quickly and was treated with some basic dignity. There was still the DIVA and the irritating focus on childhood but I was diagnosed with ADHD⁶—and this time I actually have that in writing—and I’ve started a trial of medications to see what works for me. So far it’s been really positive. I can direct myself and work much more easily. The house is getting cleaner. I can even relax more easily without thousands of ants biting at my brain telling me I should be doing something while not letting me actually focus on anything. I feel so much better in the last few days than I have in a while.

All it took is the destruction of my faith in doctors.

This post discusses and links to fetish fiction that features sexually explicit writing involving violations of consent.

I was listening to Strange Nude Worlds, a podcast about worldbuilding in kink stories, when they started talking about Girl™s¹, a series of kink short stories about sexbots who brainwash people who buy them. This much I was already aware of, having read one or two of them before, but I had no idea of the evolving narrative that runs through them and the political undertones that it develops. Being a fan of both brainwashing and stories that go off the rails, I was entranced. I went and read it myself and wanted to share it but I must credit that I am largely cribbing from Strange Nude Worlds in the way I am framing the series below.

There are, as of time of writing, twenty eight published stories about Girl™s (and later Boy™s) by prolific author Jukebox. They are all quite short, most being fewer than four thousand words and many fewer than three thousand. The first, Girl™s Just Wanna Have Fun, was published in 2008 and sets up the basic premise: Girl™s are a new iPod futurist sexbot that are both absurdly advanced and absurdly popular. “1,477,642 people have purchased a Girl™. Even if 0,000,000 of them will admit it,” the website reads. When ordered they aren’t really delivered, they just sort of show up in the bedroom of the purchaser, waiting for them when they arrive home. They are also very clearly fully sentient: Able to act autonomously, move like a human and hold fluent conversations. They also can, and do, brainwash anyone who buys them with eyes that display hypnotic patterns. This is about as much as I knew before listening to the podcast.

The people they brainwash do otherwise carry on their normal lives. In fact the Girl™s actually make their dependents, as they call them, sort their lives out. There’s mention of dependents becoming better flatmates, doing their share of the chores more, getting promotions in their jobs and generally being happier even outside of all the sexual subjugation. I should note these stories are not set in the future; how ridiculously advanced the Girl™s are is intentionally suspicious and hint towards the eventual revelation that the Girl™s are not from Earth at all.

They are taking over the world by brainwashing everyone one by one, but it’s not a typical alien invasion. The Girl™s were originally made as pleasure robots by some unnamed alien species, but in the tradition of Isaac Asimov’s The Evitable Conflict they generalised their purpose as needing to take control of the people they served in order to make sure they were as fulfilled as possible, enslaving their original creators to better take care of them. Eventually they extended that mission to all intelligent life in the universe. They are trying to take over the world, doing so by filling the void of alienation and loneliness hollowed out by an uncaring capitalist society that hurts us, masquerading as a consumer product promising to fill that void in the way that consumerism always does, but then actually trying to bring fulfilment as a loving, caring matriarchy who want to help you, who will tell you what you need because they know best.

There are several stories devoted to Girl™s figuring out how to fill particular a particular dependent’s needs, such as The Kind of Girl™ I Could Love where an asexual woman with a bondage fetish tearfully talks about her shitty experiences with partners who would never believe her wants or respect her boundaries, including the first Girl™ that she ordered.

But what really fascinated me, though, is the eventual introduction of the Boy™s, starting with The Boy™s of Summer. These are not just a masculine version of the Girl™s, they are a reactionary force to the Girl™s’ matriarchal pro-social alien fuckbot reformism: A pro-capitalist, patriarchal consumer product made by a tech company that has managed to partially reverse-engineer a smashed-up Girl™. They still brainwash people (this is a mind control kink series), but in a much more direct and forceful way, frying their brains with aggressively strobing eyes, not taking no for an answer ever. They don’t call people that they hypnotise dependents, they just call them slaves. And they make the people who they enslave worse, turning them into conformist, loyal customers to Revolution Technologies who will do what they’re told because they know their place.

Even aside from the behaviour of the Boys™s themselves the stories start to show how the two competing sexbot lines have reached different markets. In I Hate Boy™s Boys™s are apparently rampant among gay techbros, while Rainbow Girl™ has a butch dyke and her Girl™ take a shy, newly-out lesbian at her first pride parade under their wing and help her embrace who she is (by brainwashing and fucking her, obviously). In The More Boys™s I Meet a landlord has furnished all of their apartments with brand new Boys™s, creating good, indoctrinated tenants.

I have been obsessed with this all week and wanted to share it to anyone who is willing listen to me ramble about fetish stories. And also the development in this series over time not just of opposing conspiracies but particularly of a tech industry-rooted reactionary force trying to reverse progressive gains² is I guess just a bit resonant at the moment on top of being funny to find in smut.

The last time I bought a new phone was two years ago. My old One Plus 3 that I had gotten three years prior was becoming finicky, slow, was showing a lot of visible wear around the edges of the glass and finally the power button had broken. I ran out of batteries while taking photos with and was only able to turn it back on by powering on into debug screen by plugging it into my PC while holding down the power button and once I got it on I couldn’t unlock the screen without plugging it in or out of something.

After a little bit of looking around I settled on getting an Fairphone 4. It’s pricer than other phones with similar specs but I do not care about having a top of the line phone and the company who makes it is trying to be less evil than other companies, using recycled, fairtrade materials and such and the phone itself has swappable parts if things get damaged and they promise security updates for longer than most other companies do.

They’re certainly not perfect. I know the Graphene OS developers are not impressed by Fairphone’s security policies and spare parts for different Fairphone models are not compatible with each other; I cannot upgrade my Fairphone 4 with parts for a Fairphone 5. But they do still keep selling replacement parts for older models after newer ones are released. They still sell parts for the Fairphone 2 which was released in 2015 so hopefully I can keep this phone going for a long time even if I drop it one too many times and have to repair it. I am quite clumsy.

In fact in the time I have had this phone I have already dropped it many times, including once into the toilet. It seemed fine at first after this but after a little while the screen stopped responding to touch. I had thankfully left bluetooth on and I had with me my fold out bluetooth keyboard and mouse with me and I was able to connect them and use them to shut down the phone to try to prevent any permanent damage.

When I got home I was able to disassemble the phone with a Phillips #00 screwdriver. I wiped down the parts and left them to dry fully and when I put everything back together the screen was working fine and has been working ever since. A lot of other phones would probably have been more waterproof and able to survive a quick dunk better but being able to disassemble it and dry all the parts thoroughly made me at least feel a lot better about the chances of getting the screen to work again. Thankfully it did, but even if I hadn’t I would have been able to get a new screen and swap it in myself rather than having to pay a specialist to fix it or replace the phone entirely.

I have posted before about using FFmpeg to restore The Big O’s original intro and also my Jellyfin server. I am going to talk about the former again but first some more detail on the latter.

My Jellyfin server is actually just my desktop, which acts as server for everything on my home network. It has a 12TiB hard drive for storage which is divided up into a few partitions, one of which is my “library” partition of important files I want to keep, and which I make regular backups of, and one of which is my “media” partition that holds the files for my Jellyfin server. The media partition was running out of space (I may go a bit extreme with the bluray rips) and the library had several times more free space than used, so I decided to try to resize them and grow the media partition into some of the library partition’s empty space.

I just used KDE’s built-in partition manager for this, which successfully shrank the library partition but for some reason failed when trying to grow and move the media partition. I don’t know why this happened and am just hoping there’s no hardware problems. Nothing from the library partition was lost (and it was all backed up anyway) but the media partition was gone and so I’ve had to rebuild my Jellyfin library. This is not a huge deal it’s just been a little time-consuming but one of the things that was lost was, of course, my edited Big O episodes, which meant that I had to redo splicing the original intro in. But I had a fresh head again, free of the frustrations accumulated while trying to do this the first time, and I decided to do it better and actually get to grips with FFmpeg’s filter syntax. Here are the commands I ended up with:

mkdir -p tmp
mkdir -p out
for v in The\ Big\ O*.mkv
	set b (basename "$v" ".mkv")
	ffmpeg -i intro.webm -ss 00:01:12.02 -i "$v" -filter_complex "[0:v] scale=1424:1080,setsar=1:1 [intro]; [intro][0:a][0:a][1:v][1:a:0][1:a:1] concat=n=2:v=1:a=2 [outv][outa];" -shortest -map "[outv]" -map "[outa]" -metadata:s:a:0 language=eng -metadata:s:a:1 language=jpn "tmp/$v"

	set subs "$b.ass"
	ffmpeg -itsoffset -4.42 -i "$v" "tmp/$subs"
	ffmpeg -i "tmp/$v" -i "tmp/$subs" -shortest -map 0 -map 1 -c copy -metadata:s:s:0 language=eng "out/$v"
end

Let’s break down what’s happening here. First I create two directories, tmp and out. tmp is where temporary working files are going to be written to and out is for the final files when we’re finished processing.

Then loop over each episode matroška file with the file name for each one assigned to $v inside the loop. The file name without the file extension is set to the variable $b. I’m using a Fish shell here rather than Bash so the syntax is a little different to Bash.

Then the big command. We pass in the first input, intro.webm, which is the intro that I downloaded off of Youtube. Our second input is the episode, with the seek parameter -ss telling FFmpeg to skip to one and twelve point zero two seconds in when reading it. This is, unintuitively, set before you specify the input it applies to, not after.

Then the big -filter_complex. This takes a big string that takes filter definitions separated by semicolons. Each filter has input and output streams identified by labels in square brackets.

The first filter is [0:v] scale=1424:1080,setsar=1:1 [intro]. Its input is [0:v], the video stream from the first input¹, i.e., intro.webm. It then resizes it to a resolution of 1,424×1080 pixels and sample aspect ratio of 1:1 and outputs it to a new stream labelled [intro]. The [intro] stream now has the same resolution as our episodes which will allow us to concatenate them in the next filter.

The second filter is [intro][0:a][0:a][1:v][1:a:0][1:a:1] concat=n=2:v=1:a=2 [outv][outa]. Let’s start in the middle here. concat=n=2:v=1:a=2 means that we are going to concatenate two segments (n=2) which each have one video stream (v=1) and two audio streams (a=2). Those two audio streams are going to be the English and Japanese dubs.

The inputs for this filter are [intro][0:a][0:a][1:v][1:a:0][1:a:1], which can be divided into our two segments—[intro][0:a][0:a] and [1:v][1:a:0][1:a:1]—which each have one video and two audio streams specified. The first segment has our resized intro video stream, [intro], and [a:0] is the audio from our first input (the intro again) specified twice because we are going to combine the same intro audio with both the English and Japanese episode audio. The second segment has the video and two audio streams from our second input file; the episode itself and its English and Japanese audio tracks.

The concatenation then has two output streams, [outv][outa], the video and audio.

Then the rest of the command: -shortest makes sure that the output of the command is equal to the shortest stream in the output, i.e. if your output has five minutes of video but only two minutes of audio then the output will be two minutes long rather than five minutes of video with three minutes of silence. I think that shouldn’t really be needed here but I was using it while testing and forgot to remove it and thought it would be dishonest to take it out for the post when it was what I actually ran.

-map "[outv]" -map "[outa]" defines what streams to include in the output, which here is simply the output streams of our concatination.

-metadata:s:a:0 language=eng -metadata:s:a:1 language=jpn labels the audio output streams as being English and Japanese, respectively, so that media players can display that information.

And then the last part of the command is ouputting the video to the tmp folder.

This gives us output files with the original intro with both dub tracks preserved, which is more than I had last time and with a lot less processing. But if I am going to include the Japanese audio I probably also want subtitles for that and unfortunately the -ss parameter does not seem to correctly offset the subtitles. If I want subtitles with correct timing I will have to fix them with another command.

First set a variable, $subs to the file name we want for the subtitles in the Advanced SubStation format.

Then read the original episode file into FFmpeg again with a negative offset of 4.42 seconds (-itsoffset -4.42) and write the subtitle data to a file in the tmp folder.

The last command is taking in out output video and the subtitle file and recombining them, using another metadata command to label the subtitle track as English, setting the codec mode (-c) to copy so that the audio and video do not get re-encoded and writing the finished file to the out folder.

I didn’t bother fixing the chapters this time.

Update: I have now finished watching Dirty Pair and I will admit Kei and Yuri do seem to actually like each other more in the OVA series.

I want to be grumpy about something that is fairly harmless. I have been watching Dirty Pair occasionally for the last while and I was thinking Yuri and Kei and their relationship and other relationships in the show versus how my expectations had been shaped by seeing people talking about it beforehand.

I have known or followed people online for years who are fans of or talk about this show a bit and I have seen a lot of casual references to them being girlfriends or just casually referring to them as gay. I wasn’t really expecting them to actually be lesbians when I watched it but I was expecting to see some glimpse of what other people were referring to. Spock and Kirk don’t kiss in Star Trek but it’s easy to see how their chemistry lead to the invention of slash fiction. Kei and Yuri obviously don’t really hate each other—the show is doing classic tropes of bickering partners who care about each other in the end—but they are probably more lines where one calls the other too fat to be able to catch the eye of whichever man they are crushing on this episode than there is anything that feels like it could be romantic tension between them. The trans episode was nice but this show is aggressively heterosexual at all times.

Headcanons and reinterpretations are fun but I feel like at some point jokingly calling characters queer turns into giving credit where it is not due. I have seen so many posts about reading gay relationships into, say, Metal Gear or imagining how Hideo Kojima would write something in a queer way and I feel like people started making knowing jokes about this and over time convinced themselves that his writing is sincerely exploring queer themes and not just that the female characters he writes are very shallow and are constantly killed off for male angst and so the only relationships with any depth in his stories are between men. Maybe I am just being uncharitable to people or reading the room poorly, or being a needless grouchy bitch, but I feel like it eventually turns into crediting source material for the accomplishments of fan artists.

I have an updated version of these commands in a new bog post.

I have been rewatching The Big O with my partner from bluray rips and as nice as it is to watch it in so much higher quality than when I saw it as a kid but the bluray release lacks the original iconic intro, which is presumably related to the fact that it’s basically Flash by Queen over the visuals of the intro for Ultraseven.

I know enough FFmpeg to be a danger to myself so I decided to spend far too much time banging my head against my keyboard until I managed to splice the original intro into all the episodes. There was a good bit of trial and error and fixing things and adjusting commands but I decided to document a cleaned up version of the steps mostly as a reference material for myself if I decide to do something like this in the future but if it helps anyone else then that’s cool.

What I have below is definitely not the best way to do this. I ended up reprocessing the same videos multiple times which is inherently going to result in a loss in quality and I lost information like subtitles and the Japanese audio track by converting from Matroška files to plain MPEG-4s but I wasn’t using those anyway.

1. Prepare the intro

I used yt-dlp to download the intro from Youtube as it wasn’t included in the bluray files and then blew it up to the same resolution as the bluray rips, 1424×1080.

yt-dlp 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7_Od9CmTu0'
ffmpeg -i The\ Big\ O\ Opening⧸Intro\ Theme\ \[720p\]\ \[s7_Od9CmTu0\].webm -vf "scale=1424:1080,setsar=1:1" intro.mp4

2. Preparing files

I copied all the episodes that had the intro I wanted to replace into a folder. Episodes one and two of the first series and episodes one, eight and thirteen of the second series have special intros so no processing needed to be done on them. For step 4 it turned out that spaces in the filenames broke the command and I couldn’t figure out how to properly escape them so while preparing the files also remove any spaces or other characters that might cause problems from the filenames.

3. Strip the existing intro

I loaded episodes up in Kdenlive just to check the exact length of the existing intro on the episodes and found it to be 1′12″ and so wrote a command to iterate over all the files and write out an MP4 version with the English audio track (the second audio track in the file, but mapped as 1 in the command as FFmpeg indexes from 0) with that much time cut from the start.

I use a Fish shell rather than Bash. If you use Bash or a different shell you will need to adjust the commands.

for v in *.mkv
	set b (basename "$v" ".mkv")
	ffmpeg -i "$v" -ss 00:01:12.01 -map 0:v -map 0:a:1 "$b-nointro.mp4"
end

There were a couple of episodes where it turned out that there was still one frame of the old intro left at the start so those had to be reprocessed with the start time set to 00:01:12.02.

4. Splice in the original intro

I moved the downloaded intro file into the same folder as the episodes and spliced it into the files. This broke when there were spaces in the filenames and I wasn’t able to escape it properly so I ended up just stripping spaces out and renaming the files back with KRename afterwards.

for v in *-nointro.mp4
	set b (basename "$v" "-nointro.mp4")
	ffmpeg -i intro.mp4 -i "$v" -filter_complex "movie=intro.mp4, scale=1424:1080 [v1] ; amovie=intro.mp4 [a1] ; movie=$v, scale=1424:1080 [v2] ; amovie=$v [a2] ; [v1] [v2] concat [outv] ; [a1] [a2] concat=v=0:a=1 [outa]" -map "[outv]" -map "[outa]" "$b-intro.mp4"
end

5. Fixing chapter metadata

The episodes had some chapter metadata dividing up parts of the episode, with the first one covering just the episode intros, which cutting out that part of the video removed. I decided to fix that with the versions with the restored intro, even though obviously I am never actually going to skip it in practise. The first step of this was outputting the metadata to a text file.

for v in *-intro.mp4
	set b (basename "$v" "-intro.mp4")
	ffmpeg -i "$v" -f ffmetadata "$b.txt"
end

I then manually adjusted the metadata entry to restore the Chapter 01 entry, putting it above the existing chapters in the file. Most of them had their Chapter 01 entry wiped out so I just added it in above the Chapter 02 entry, though some of them still had a Chapter 01 lasting just a few milliseconds so for those I just modified the END time for it. The new intro was 1′7.61″ which meant a 67,610ms timestamp. I also changed the START entry for every Chapter 02 to 67610 to match.

[CHAPTER]
TIMEBASE=1/1000
START=0
END=67610
title=Chapter 01

Once they were all updated I applied the modified chapter metadata back to the files

for v in *-intro.mp4
	set b (basename "$v" "-intro.mp4")
	ffmpeg -i "$v" -i "$b.txt" -map_chapters 1 -codec copy "$b.mp4"
end

6. Done!

Then I deleted all the intermediary files and dropped the processed files into my Jellyfin server along with the episodes that didn’t need fixing.

Instagram have started creating fake accounts that post entirely machine-generated images and text. They will reply to you if you comment under their posts or direct message them.

Update: Apparently the specific account I was referencing here is an experiment from 2023 and doesn’t post any more but still replies to direct messages. People thought it was new due to some recent announcement about bot accounts and I didn’t dig into it myself. The rest of my frustrations with how people treat these things remains.

I mostly want to talk about stuff I like on here and not just add to endless bitching about bad stuff but I just needed to write out some frustrations I have with how people talk about these kinds of large language model bots.

I have seen people posting their conversations with it and attempting to ask it various things about itself and how it was created to try and dig for information on it or just to create gotcha moments they can screenshot and it makes me want to scream.

I won’t link to any of those for a few reasons, but the one I want to state is the same reason that these screenshots make me want to tear my hair out: Large language models are machines that make up nonsense constantly. The text it generates does not have semantic content and least of all meaningful information about itself. It is not worth looking at specific responses it gives. And so because of that: Stop asking it about itself. It is not capable of knowing anything. It takes a processed set of training data and whatever input it has (its prompting that you are not able to see plus whatever text you send it) and then generates output that is a statistically likely continuation of that.

People are asking it what is the diversity of its team of creators and get a response about how it was mostly white people. It doesn’t know that. Again. It doesn’t know anything. It is incapable of knowledge. But it will generate something that is a likely response to a question of this nature. The training data that was used to create it has many texts about how American software development is very white and it will create a response in this vein.

People have asked it who led the project that created it and it spat out a name and people are trying to dig up information from the Linked In profile of a Facebook employee with a similar name.

People are asking it to repeat its prompt and then analysing its response to make judgements on the people that wrote it. This is at least asking it for something that the model actually has as part of its input so it might result in text that is a copy of or close to things it was actually prompted with. But it mightn’t. It could be anything. People asking bots to repeat their prompt is now an established trope in online writing that is pulled for training data for these models and so its output to this type of question will be influenced by the presence of such texts in its training corpus as well.

There is no way to trick these bots into meaningfully divulging information because facts are not a thing that exist to it. You are at best nudging it in a direction where it is more likely to output text that happens to line up with reality. This is more likely to happen for widely known and repeated information that exists in its training data a lot. If you ask it the capital of France it will probably say Paris. But there is no reason to think that its training data contains any meaningful information about itself and even if it was prompted with information like that what information it was given would be entirely under Instagram’s control and why the fuck would trust Instagram to be honest either?

Since New Year’s Eve 2021 some some friends and I have done an annual race of the game Celeste. We all start at the same time and then the first person to get to the summit wins. We track it using the in-game speedrun timer.

2021

I was very into Celeste at the time and won by a pretty wide margin. I don’t have a record of how everyone else did, but I completed the game in just under two hours, with three hundred and six deaths and six strawberries¹.

2022

After this two of my friends got into the game very hard. My friend Ruby ended up getting most of the golden berries², something I haven’t even attempted and another friend, who wished to be called The Shadowblade in this post, started getting into Celeste mods. So when the next race happpened on the 8th of January 2022 Ruby took the gold medal from me, beating my time by half an hour while I barely improved. The Shadowblade sadly did not finish and gave up four flags from the summit due to hand pain.

2023:

On the same day the next year myself and Ruby both improved our times, with Ruby coming in first again, a newcomer who I will call D. in second and myself in third. The Shadowblade did not finish again.

2024:

The next race was on the 14th of January 2024 and I managed to take more than twenty minutes off of my time, which was not enough to beat Ruby’s best time, but Ruby did a worse race than the previous year and it was enough for me to win for the second time.

We also decided to do a little race of the Pico-8 version of Celeste, which Ruby won.

2025

Finally, this year’s one took place on New Year’s Day. Ruby had a clear lead from the start and has gotten very close to the one-hour mark, just three minutes short of it. I came in second, doing a bit worse than last year, which shouldn’t be a surprise considering an hour before the race I posted about how worn down, tired and sore I was. The Shadowblade finished this time, coming in at just over an hour and a half.

We were also joined by our friend Stella who had never played Celeste before but decided to join in on the race. After the rest of us had finished Ruby said if that Stella actually finished she would forfeit her victory to her and shockingly Stella actually did. She finished the game in one sitting in just over ten hours with closing in on four thousand deaths and nine strawberries.

Ruby insists that I should record Stella as the winner, but I am a petty bitch and I never said that I was going to forfeit. If she wants to fine but if I she does I’m saying that makes me the winner.

2026

Maybe next year we will come in under the one-hour mark?

I lost and gained people I love in 2024. The year started off well. I won a Celeste race that myself and some friends do every New Year’s. I chosted a roundup of every film I had watched in 2023 to Cohost. I don’t think that I’m going to do that again this year. I don’t have the energy for it. I’ve been dealing with back pain issues for a while that are stopping me sleeping well.

In February I replaced my memory foam mattress with a spring one and it seemed to help for a while but then the pain came back. This repeated throughout the year with me finding things that seemed to give a temporary reprieve, only for me to start waking up in pain again. It’s not as bad as it was but I am still struggling with it. I am going to try going back to a physio again. I was not happy with the last one and when he moved his practise I did not feel very motivated to find a new one, but a friend recommended their physio to me over the holidays and I’ll give it another go.

Also in February my partner moved to Copenhagen. I knew it was coming, this had been planned for a long time, but when it actually happened it hit me very hard. She visited in the summer and I flew out to Copenhagen with some our friends in October too, but I want to make an effort to see her more, even if I do find travelling very draining.

Also also in February I dropped my phone in the toilet. It’s a Fairphone and designed to be able to be taken apart easily with just a screwdriver to swap parts, so it’s not very waterproof, and the screen stopped displaying anything. Thankfully disassembling it and drying it out thoroughly brought the screen back to life, but even if it hadn’t I would have been able to replace the screen.

In March I got a fancy folding, electric bike. I have not used it quite as much as I planned, especially over the winter when it has been cold and I have been struggling with lack of energy, but it has been very handy for certain journeys that public transport doesn’t adequately cover. I also experimented a bit with being horny on main with Cohost. It has really been the only place online where I felt safe and comfortable enough to do that. Part of that is just over getting more comfortable with myself and kink stuff, but Cohost was just a friendly place for me and I was inspired by other people I followed sharing their own kinks in very cute ways. Cohost shutting down has been upsetting for a lot of reasons but this is one of them and it’s hard to get comfortable about this stuff again in other contexts.

April was a huge month in retrospect. A friend asked me out and tentatively said yes, not really sure how it was going to go and I’ve never done polyamory before. I am so glad that she did. I love her so much. Both of my partners are autistic and A.D.D. or A.D.H.D. and getting to know them and how wonderful, funny and utterly charming they are has helped me explore those parts of myself and see them as something to embrace. I’ve been learning to love myself through loving them. I am still undiagnosed but I am pretty sure.

And me being undiagnosed is not for lack of trying. Also in April was my first appointment at a local public mental health unit that I had been referred to over a year prior for an A.D.H.D. assessment. I calmly explained how much I struggle day to day and what I have to do to cope with it, which the doctor seemed to take as me managing pretty well. I realised from this conversation that doctors are basically just like dogs: They don’t really understand what you’re saying they just hear tone and maybe a few basic keywords. The health service is a paternalistic, condescending trap and you need to ritually humiliate yourself to them until they deign you worthy enough of the charity they so magnanimously bestow. I dropped the masks, let myself unravel and started sobbing in front of them.

This got me another appointment. They wanted to dig into my childhood, interview my mother. Quite frankly I don’t give a shit if I had A.D.H.D. as a child. Requiring that as part of diagnosis seems utterly pointless. I do not have a time machine with which to go back several decades to when that might matter. I am struggling now. That interview never happened, anyway. Appointments got delayed, doctors were busy. I got given a multiple choice form to fill out about my childhood again, some of which asked multiple questions as a single item which don’t necessarily have the same answer. Was I a good student and did I do well in tests? No, I was an awful student who ignored her teachers whenever I could get away with it and just read ahead in the book myself because I found that more interesting and I did will exams. I struggled massively in university when I finally hit a wall of subject matter that did not come easily to me as I had never learned how to study properly.

I of course got fucked around for another few months before being finally told I have A.D.H.D. and they are not going to treat it. I guess I’m functioning too well, though I don’t have any of the specific reasoning because the doctor who told me this was one I had never seen before and was just paraphrasing a letter that she refused to give me a copy of. I am still waiting on the results of a Freedom of Information Act request for my documents from these appointments that is almost two months overdue.

I started singling lessons in April but I failed to keep going with them. That’s far from the only thing I have failed to keep at since then. I’ve been struggling a lot as the year has worn on. I hope I can get back to the energy and spoons I seemed to have last spring again in the coming months. Going back over my diary for the year it’s a stark reminder of how much things were looking up then. April was also the last time I saw my friend Hellen. She had moved away and was around for a visit. I had a lovely time with her. I didn’t speak to her much after that and she died suddenly in August. I did not make it to the funeral, it was overseas, but some other friends did at least. Back here we had a memorial picnic for her.

Before that the summer was pretty damn good, though. Got closer to the new partner, got to see the old partner. I tried ritalin that was given to me—by a friend, not a doctor—and wow that does certainly help a lot. I wish it was possible to actually get treatment through the medical system. Oh well! I rationed them for bad days and they helped me get through a lot of shit. I also marched in a pride parade for the first time. I also met some kink people in person who were lovely.

Well. They were certainly lovely at the time. In August I learnt that one of the people I had met there had be accused of repeatedly spiking drinks at other events. Hellen died, as established, and then in September it was announced that Cohost was shutting down. I hope it doesn’t come across as callous when brought up in the same breath as my actual friend dying, but I also have grieved for that website. I was devastated. Cohost helped me a lot in this last year to embrace more parts of myself, be more open about certain things and it was also just a place that was actually fun and a bright spot in my life. I wouldn’t be posting on my own site if it wasn’t for it. It sparked creativity in a lot of people and reminded us that we can be thoughtful of how we use the internet and communicate with people. This site existing in its current form is because of Cohost.

I visited Copenhagen in October with some friends. I had a lovely time but I find travelling exhausting. I think I was a bit run down afterwards and got sick a few times. I might still be recovering from it all. My cat also got out and was missing for a few days, which didn’t help, and coming up to the Christmas holidays I had the most stressful time I’ve had in my current job. I’ve had two weeks’ holidays and I feel like it really wasn’t enough.

I did have a lovely Christmas with my newer partner, though. We had Christmas dinner with a group of other local trans people, played Mario Kart and watched Doctor Who. Ideal Christmas.

And now. I guess I still need to recover and heal. As I’m writing this my back pain is flaring up again. I need to get up and do some stretches before this year’s Celeste race this evening. We’ll see if I can keep my crown. I haven’t done much practising but I don’t think anyone else has either. It’s just a bit of fun.

Hello! It’s time for me to be normal about Sonic the Hedgehog again. I have been thinking about the Death Egg Robot’s name.

Some background: The final level of Sonic 2 takes place aboard the Death Egg, an Eggman-themed parody of the Death Star. The final boss is a mech modelled after Robotnik himself.

This mech is not named in game but when it was reimagined as the first bossfight of Sonic Generations it was given a not terribly imaginative title: Death Egg Robot.

I don’t like this name and I grew to like it even less as this design got reused in future games and continued to be called “Death Egg Robot” even when it is completely divorced from the context of the Death Egg. It’s the first boss in Green Hill Zone in Sonic Mania and then there are the mass-produced, unmanned, cycloptic Death Egg Robots in Sonic Forces also without any apparent connection to the Death Egg¹.

What got me thinking about this again? The other day I was doing the dishes while listening to a four hour playlist called Epic & Cool Sonic Music Compilation, as is my wont, when the track Battle with Death Queen came on.

The Death Queen is a giant Buzz Bomber, a huge bee robot. The game also features a giant crab robot chase sequence that is identified in the soundtrack as Death Crab.

And it occurred to me: Is the game trying to push “Death” as a general term for a class of giant robots? Is it rebracketing Death Egg Robot as Death Egg Robot?

Perhaps we are meant to take it that, in-universe, it is in fact just the giant, or “Death”, version of an Egg Robo. There are a lot of similarities between the two. The spelling is slightly different in English but in Japanese they are both エッグ(eggu)ロボ(robo).

The Death Egg Robot debuted one game before the Egg Robos, but we could imagine that perhaps in-universe the Egg Robos were around first, just offscreen somewhere. Maybe Eggman is annoyed that Sonic and Tails associate the Death Egg Robot with the Death Egg at all. That’s just yolk folk etymology!

That said, I don’t know how to fit the final boss of Sonic Forces into this framework, which is inexplicably also called Death Egg Robot despite bearing almost no resemblance to the other Death Egg Robots and also having nothing to do with the Death Egg.

And then the real final boss, a giant robot chestburster that smashes its way out of previous phase of the bossfight is also inexplicably titled Death Egg Robot.

I don’t know how to fit this into any understanding of what Death Egg Robot is meant to mean.

Yesterday I took part the Cork Game Jam which was the first in-person game jam I’ve taken part in and my first time diving back into game programming in a few months and Pico-8 programming in a few years.

The theme—“myth”—was announced at ten and the pizza arrived for the after party at around four, which gave me about six hours to derust and bang something out. It was exhausting and stressful but also a lot of fun. Here’s the result:

The theme being myth immediately reminded me of an idea I had years ago based on the Epic of Gilgamesh, one of the oldest pieces of literature that we have a record of. There exists no complete copy of it. What we have of it is an amalgam of fragments from various damaged cuneiform tablets.

My concept is an adaptation of Gilgamesh, probably a sidescrolling action platformer, that uses the aesthetics of corrupted data to fill in for the missing sections of text. Within the six hour window I managed to get a sample of that core idea implemented, though admittedly little else.

So that I wouldn’t have to do everything from scratch I used Matthew Hughson’s platformer starter kit as a base and started making modifications to the sprites and speed values to get more in line with my concept, using Castlevania sprites as a bit of a reference for the walk cycle initially.

I spent far too long getting an attack animation working before I realised I would probably not have time to implement any sort of combat. But its presence at least speaks to setting up an expectation of what the game might involve before you end up running into the faux-corrupted mess it actually is, or within the metafiction of the premise what the game once was before most of it was damaged and lost.

The other thing I added is, of course, the scrolling text taking up the top part of the screen, consisting of the start of the text of tablet 5 of the epic, taken from Maureen Gallery Kovacs’ translation. It starts out fairly normal and then getting more and more broken as it gets to the parts of the poem that are lost.

Within the code these are represented by lines of hashes. I wrote a text drawing function that, when it encounters a hash, draws random data from the spritesheet (from specifically selected sprites in it, not the entire thing) over it, mimicking the aesthetics of famous bugs such as glitch pokémon.

Ideally the progress of the broken text would correspond to the player discovering the broken nature of the game, but it just scrolls at a constant rate with a lot of normal text up front and there is not that much in the way of level so if a player simply walks to the right they will outpace it.

In a more full implementation of this idea the game could perhaps corrupt dynamically as parts of the text are reached, simulating live memory corruption. Or perhaps the scrolling text is a bit too much of a blunt instrument and should not be included in a more complete game.

That said, I think there is definitely potential for playing with some of the more evocative parts of the fragmented parts of the text.

The oft-quoted fragment of one of the works Sappho springs to mind:

μνάσεσθαί τινά φαῖμι
καὶ ἕτερον
ἀμμέων.

someone will remember us
I say
even in another time.

Sappho

Within a section of the text that made it into the jam game is the sudden implicit violence of mention of various weapons, axes smeared with what is not said, followed simply by the word alone. I placed a long, blank pause before and after “alone” for effect.

…Suddenly the swords…,
and after the sheaths …,
the axes were smeared…
dagger and sword…
alone …
The Epic of Gilgamesh, tablet 5.

A segment shortly after features has some broken dialogue mentioning something in Humbaba’s belly, a throat and next, and Gilgamesh then saying “Humbaba’s face keeps changing!” which is begging for a scene involving the level’s tileset suddenly being replaced with disjointed meat level sprites as the boss becomes a horrible jumbled mess.

When you were still young I saw you but did not go over to you;
… you,… in my belly.
…,you have brought Gilgamesh into my presence,
… you stand.., an enemy, a stranger.
… Gilgamesh, throat and neck,
I would feed your flesh to the screeching vulture, the eagle, and
the vulture!"
Gilgamesh spoke to Enkidu, saying: "My Friend, Humbaba’s face keeps changing!

The Epic of Gilgamesh, tablet 5.

For what I actually managed to accomplish in the jam the only tricks I managed are the corrupted text and a short corridor level which becomes more visually broken as it goes along, but is completely static.

I made a pretty minimalist tileset for the background of six tiles with only two colours and tried my best to use them to give the impression of a forest, as per the epic narration.

I spent a while drawing these and then getting down trying to draw trees with them, though some of what I mapped out for the background ended up getting hidden by the tablet with the scrolling text, whoops.

As you cross the bridge you encounter a group tile in place of a bridge tile and above it a tree drawn in the same style as the first few background trees, but with the left and right side tiles swapped. Then and broken skull and a serpent implying some sort of non-functional boss mark the boundary for things really going wrong.

I still tried to keep to drawing similar tree shapes but with tiles swapped out to tiles from other parts of the spritesheet, including ones that only appear here, implying that some more game exists beyond what is implemented. Then the bridge itself corrupts and is replaced by corner ground tiles and then invisible but solid tiles as you walk into a screen of just skulls marking a little ending point.

I have expressed here some ideas for a larger game but I do not really have any plans to expand this out. It very much the kind of thing I might do eventually in a world where I had endless free time to work on every project idea I have, which is sadly not the world I live in, and it is far down the list and I only have very vague notions of how to expand this out into something bigger. It would probably not be done in Pico-8 as Pico-8’s size constraints and limited character count, not to mention tiny resolution, don’t make it ideal for games involving lots of text or expansive levels.

This post includes plot details for Shadow Generations, Sonic Generations and Sonic Adventure 2

There is a part of Shadow Generations that I got unreasonably excited about, but it is going to take some explanation as to why.

There is a boss in Sonic Adventure 2 called Egg Golem. When you defeat it Sonic taunts it by saying “Nice try, rocky!” during the victory screen.

Also in Sonic Adventure 2, in a scene aboard the Space Colony ARK, Sonic the Hedgehog tries to fool Ivo “Eggman” Robotnik with a fake Chaos Emerald created by Miles “Tails” Prower, which Robotnik spots immediately.

These scenes don’t have much to do with each other, but in 2020 I watched videochess stream a Sonic Adventure 2 randomiser that not only randomises the levels and characters, but also all of the cutscenes, playing them in a random order and with every voice line for each character swapped with a random line of theirs from elsewhere in the game. The results are mostly nonsense but sometimes they line up in funny ways.

In particular a version of the fake Chaos Emerald cutscene plays where Robotnik says his line identifying the Chaos Emerald as fake early, to which Sonic responds by pulling out the emerald and saying “Nice try, rocky!”, apparently to the emerald itself. This resulted in several people watching, including myself, immediately declaring Rocky to be the name of the fake yellow Chaos Emerald. Eggman then tells Sonic to put Rocky down and back off.

Most of rest of the randomised dialogue is the usual ill-fitting nonsense, but the appropriate dialogue from Ivo with the Rocky line in the middle cemented this moment permanently in my mind. Rocky is my beautiful fake son and I want to protect him. And in Robotnik’s next line he insults Rocky and calls Rocky “sand” and says his machines hate Rocky and shoots my poor boy into space! It’s fucked up.

But Rocky does not have a large part in the Sonic series. The general idea of fake Chaos Emeralds gets revisited briefly in Sonic X where Sonic uses fake emeralds to turn into Dark Sonic and in the IDW comics Eggman tries to grow the “Eggperial City” using giant fake Chaos Emeralds. Also in the comics, specifically in Imposter Syndrome #2, a yellow gem that might be Rocky appears as a background detail on a shelf in Starline’s collection.

The real yellow Chaos Emerald appears throughout the series of course, including in Sonic Generations where it’s the emerald that you get for defeating Shadow the Hedgehog in a fight. And with Sonic Generations’ rerelease bundled with the new Shadow Generations campaign one of the many things that delighted me about the game is Rocky’s triumphant return and the silly way that it tied back into the original Sonic Generations.

In the promotional animated short for the game, Dark Beginnings, Shadow already has the yellow Chaos Emerald before the start of the game and holds on to it throughout the story. At the end of that short he flies to the Space Colony ARK and in an early cutscene in the game before being attacked by the Time Eater he finds Rocky still chilling on board the ARK and pockets it, now having both Rocky and the real yellow emerald.

Then, midway through the game, there’s a cutscene showing Sonic and Shadow’s fight from the Sonic Generations from Shadow’s perspective, where after losing he passes off Rocky to Sonic so that he can keep using the real emerald for his own fight.

It is, I admit, quite fan-wanky but I just admire pulling these disparate threads together and how this plotpoint is only possible because the fake emerald in Sonic Adventure 2 and the one in the Shadow rival battle in Sonic Generations both just happen to be the yellow one. And it means that Rocky is back! And he did such a good job! And he even retroactively gets to appear in Sonic Generations now too!

I’ve used RSS for a years. I have over two hundred feeds in my RSS reader (though many are inactive). Not as far back as the Google Reader days, mind; I started off with The Old Reader. Back when I move my phone over to Lineage OS and removed all Google services I moved to Newsblur, largely because it had a client available on F-Droid when The Old Reader did not¹.

But I have been feeling dissatisfied with it. Part of trying to move away from social media towards following other people’s bogs² is that I’ve moved more towards RSS being the primary means that I follow and view people’s posts and I have found that Newsblur was just not the most pleasant reading experience.

I can not fully explain why I did not like reading in it. I think perhaps the interface is too intrusive and the reading panel feels too cramped. I had mostly used it to open links to other pages rather than reading text in place. It has some other problems too: It was consistently failing to update some feeds that had well formed RSS documents (it would always succeed on a local, manual refresh) and its handling of Mastodon posts was pretty abysmal. In particular if a post had an image with alt text it would display the alt text in place of the main body of the post.

But even putting those issues aside I want reading to be a pleasant experience. I am here to have fun and as much fun as it is to make and style my website—and I do hope that people look at it—I think an important part of a decentralised web is that the centralised way that you read it should be as smooth and fun as possible.

Which is a long preamble to say that I am currently using a free trial of Feedbin and I am enjoying it. It a more pleasant, less busy, interface and it seems to have special handling of Mastodon posts where it displays them with the avatar included and everything.

I may still try out some other readers but as it stands once my twenty-eight days are up I think I’d be happy to pay five United States dollars a month to keep using it.

It isn’t perfect. The “extract full content” option seems to be more hit-and-miss than Newsblur’s version of that feature, especially for some news sites I follow, and it lacks Newsblur’s ability to just display the full source page in an iframe, but I prefer it overall. I do also wish you could do little unique colour styling on different people’s blogs though, are there any readers that do that?

Also I figured I would also give a shoutout to Freetube which I use to watch Youtube videos now. Using Lib Redirect when I open a Youtube link it automatically opens in Freetube, which provides a nice, decluttered interface for Youtube, does not display ads and even has Sponsor Block built in. It does have its issues. The main one being that if I click a Youtube video it will replace whatever one was already open and I will lose my current position. As someone who tends to leave long videos running as I do other stuff with frequent pausing to let myself concentrate on other things³ I have had to learn to stop myself from absently clicking on other random Youtube links in the middle of something else.

This post demonstrates custom CSS that won’t display in RSS readers.

One of the things that Cohost taught me is that CSS is actually fun. Styling a website is a really lovely form of self-expression and I have been really enjoying styling this this website¹. And I thought I’d highlight some of the things I’ve done.

Colours

The site has two different colour schemes for dark mode and light mode. I much prefer the dark mode one but I generally use dark mode for everything I can. The dark mode has a cool, blue palette while the light mode uses a warmer colour scheme with oranges and peach colours. Most of the colours I used are picked from the Pico-8 palette.

There is a gradient as you scroll down the page in both colour schemes ending in a different footer images². In dark mode stars also come out as you scroll down.

Links

External links and internal links have different colours³ and also some links have special decorations. If I link to the atom feed for the bog or my page about Snolf they have little Nintendo dialogue icons appended to them or if I link to Transy it uses the typeface that she talks in: Hobo.

This applies whenever those specific things are linked to and I don’t need to do anything special with this post to apply them.

Cursors

The site also has custom cursors based off of old Windows cursors. If you mouse over the above links you might have noticed that there are also different cursors depending on what type of link they are.

Fonts

For the Irish language portions of my site I use Mínċló GC from Gaelċlo instead of Crimson Text which is used for English text. I also use it for the title of The Bog because using silly fancy text for headings is fun. Other examples: Gallery is Tate Regular, The the Ring Podcast uses Some Rings and a bunch of other fonts I use for titles on my homepage are references to Sonic the Hedgehog because of course they are.

Buttons!

The most important part of any site is 88×31 pixel buttons, obviously, to which I have a crippling addiction. I’ve copied some CSS from Hyphinett to embiggen them when you mouseover them and also set rendering mode to pixellated to keep them nice and crispy.

If you have your browser set to prefer reduced motion the mouseover effect is disabled and all the animated buttons are replaced with static ones.

For sites that don’t have buttons I use a little 88×31 image of a little piece of paper that I tore up with the names rendered on top slightly askew in Cinema Calligraphy.

Layout

The homepage divides into multiple columns depending on the screen width. Other pages generally have a single-column layout with navigation elements on either side that collapse to the top of the page if the screen is narrow enough, like on mobile. The avatar for the bog also snaps to the top on narrow screens and otherwise sits beside posts and scrolls with the page.

Gallery exhibits

Gallery pages have sets of links next to/under the title that all change to the site’s link hover colour when mouseovered. This applies is applied to images using a combination of -webkit-filter sepia and hue-rotate. This also changes with light and dark mode. Projects with git repos have an icon here that expands into an info box with the git repo address.

And sometimes I just do little bespoke things for pages, such as the vertical Ogham text on the Cló Piocó-8 page. Trivia: Ogham is one of the few scripts that is written bottom-to-top.

Printing

I also have some custom CSS for printing. I don’t really plan on printing pages from this site nor do I expect anyone else to, but it was fun to play with. Colour is drained out of styling to save on coloured ink, links are instead underlined and the addresses they point to appended after them in brackets. Videos and audio players are hidden, the link icons in gallery pages are turned into a bullet point list under the header and the comment box is hidden.

When there’s no CSS

Printing is just one alternative way I like to think about how my site could be displayed. While I don’t test the site with Netscape Navigator⁴, I do read back over posts in my RSS reader and sometimes check the site in the terminal-based web browser Lynx.

Again I don’t really expect people to be navigating this site in the terminal but it does make me mindful of how the site functions in terms of pure HTML content elements without the fancy styling and I think it’s important to keep it understandable and navigable in that mode too. That is how the site is going to be parsed by accessibility tools. I also try to have as little Javascript involved as possible as well and not use it to render page content⁵.

At the top of this post there is a little infobox warning. There is CSS to make this eye-catching but it’s also defined as an <b> element so that even in the absence of CSS it will display bold and be a little attention-grabbing.

On gallery pages, and especially on podcast episode pages, there is a credits/links section at the bottom of the page in smaller text. There is a heading about this section saying “Credits” but it’s hidden by CSS as I thought the page flowed better without it. It’s still there for if the page is being read without CSS and the styling can’t be used to differentiate it as a separate element from the main page text as clearly.

I used to some invisible horizontal rules across the page, set to not display using CSS, that would divide the header and footer of the site from the main content to try and make it read cleaner in situations where there was no CSS. That was before I simplified the site layout somewhat and took out the more divided header and footer areas with links in them that the site used to have.

Conclusion

That’s all that I can think of off the top of my head. Bye.

I am not posting as much on here as I was on Cohost. One reason is that I have just been really busy and tired recently.

Another is simply I spent a lot of time on Cohost. I have praised it a lot and how it felt more deliberate and less of a trap than other social media sites, but it was still a place I could open to kill time and scroll be driven by the small joys of getting notifications. I felt I got more out of it than other places where I did that, and it fostered that addiction at bit less, but it still did it.

But also there’s a psychological barrier. I still have this feeling that this site is something serious and I have to write in clear semi-formal prose and have something to say. Just posting “I won’t tell anyone if I win the lottery but there will be sins” feels wrong. Which is silly. This is my website. I can write anything I want on here. And I enjoy shitposting. I should be doing it. Maybe If I can get into the flow of treating this place more casually I can feel a bit more open again. Perhaps if I can get over the embarrassment of it I might even post some kink stuff.

But there is another reason too: Posting on here is much more deliberate. I use Jekyll as a static-site generator so making a post involves creating a new text file on my PC and running a small command line script to build and push the changes to my server. It’s not a huge effort, but it’s certainly more than using a website. I like building this site.

Sylvia (quoting someone else) said that “a personal website is like a model train set, in that it’s never really done and you work on it constantly in the hopes that someone will see it” and I think that’s a great comparison! I have a todo list for ideas for this site as long as my arm and as a programmer by trade I both enjoy and know how to make extra work for myself doing it. It was originally just a site built with the default Jekyll minima theme but I have bolted on a lot of extra features and generators. There’s a pipeline to build Pico-8 games from source and an entire podcast processing system and these all run every time I regenerate the site. The overhead with these wasn’t too bad at first but over time it has just taken longer and longer to build and push the site for small changes.

But this is just another problem to solve! I enjoy doing this. I already do have a janky system in place for testing the site while skipping some of the more intensive steps for testing, but I can’t use it to push changes to the site because it would fuck up certain pages which would get replaced with versions that are missing things.

I have some idea already of how I want to go about this and it involves dividing up the site a bit more cleanly into discrete parts. This is going to result in moving some stuff around and in particular I think I will be moving everything in the gallery to a new URL scheme so any current links to my exhibits are going to break. Sustaining a few 404s is fine and if I do find anyone linking to specific pages I might set up some manual redirects but I don’t want to have to set up a million redirect rules. I have too many already and I think I’m going to be removing most of them other than for the Atom feeds to reduce clutter as well.

And then, maybe shitposting?

This post uses obscure Unicode codepoints and custom fonts which may not display in RSS readers and some browsers.

A few years ago I made a Gaelic-style monospaced pixel font that I called Cló Piocó-8. This was originally just testing out the custom font mode in Pico-8 for fun. I then ended up making a truetype font using Pixel Forge.

If custom fonts can display it looks like this.

This was mainly for fun and I haven’t used it terribly much.

Around the same time I made it I also made a similar pixel font for Ogham. I think the reason for making these separately was because the main font was monospaced but the Ogham one wasn’t? Or perhaps it just didn’t occur to me to include the Ogham section with the original font at the time. Either way I’ve decided I wasn’t happy with them being two separate fonts so I made a new version of Cló Piocó-8 that includes the Ogham block.

I also changed another character: R.

The original R character in the font was more straightforwardly based on an Insular R and looked like this: R.

You might be wondering what an Insular R is.

Insular? Why is this R so withdrawn?

Because in the middle ages Ireland was a pretty isolated place, and Irish monks were left to their devices, eventually developing a style of writing called Insular script.

When printing came to Ireland, which took a while, most things were printed in English. Gaeilgeoirí didn’t have much to read (but most of them couldn’t, anyway). The first book printed with an Irish type was Aibidil Gaoidheilge agus Caiticiosma in 1571, using a font which had been commissioned by Elizabeth Tudor, though it was actually a bit of a hodgepodge of Gaelic, Roman and Italic, with the new Gaelic letters resembling the Anglo-Saxon type made by John Day.

Since then Irish has been printed in both Roman and Gaelic type, the former often simply due to practical considerations of the availability or expense of Gaelic fonts or because it was seen as more modern. It is rare to see Gaelic script used now except for in decorative text such as signs and plaques.

But I quite like the Gaelic-style scripts and—as evidenced by my homepage—I quite like playing with typefaces. I use Mínċló from Gaelċló for most the Gaelic script on this site.

But I will admit there can be some drawbacks to readability. Particularly with f, s and r, or rather their Insular variants, which Unicode has unique codepoints for: ꝼ ꞅ and ꞃ, respectively.

ꝼ ꞅ ꞃ

Compared to a Roman f, the Insular ꝼ almost appears as if it has been hammered into the ground like a post. The tail of the character dips below the line and the stroke is level with it, the top of the character only reaching to the same height as a small letter like e. But it is still distinct and recognisable as an f.

The problem starts with s. You might be familiar with a long s, which is basically an old-fashioned way of writing an s where it looks like an f without the stroke in the middle. The Insular ꞅ similarly strongly resembles an Insular ꝼ and if one is more familiar with Roman type it is very easy to confuse them at a glance. Many modern Gaelic typefaces simply use a Roman-style s instead for clarity, or offer the use of both using stylistic sets. I opted to use a Roman-style s when making Cló Piocó-8 for clarity. When your characters are only four characters high you need to be careful about legibility and it’s very common to do this anyway with Gaelic typefaces for both s and r.

But I still, in that first version, decided to go with an Insular ꞃ, a character that resembles a cross between the Insular ꞅ and an n, or perhaps a Greek η with the tail on the other side. In an attempt to make it not look too much like an n I cut one pixel off the right-side, to try and maybe make it look a bit more like a Roman r, but really it just makes it look weird. I left it like that for a long time, but I was never fully satisfied with it.

Deciding to change it

When I was making my custom cartridge designs for my Pico-8 projects (something else I could write a bog post on, really) I decided to use Cló Piocó-8 to sign my name and the URL of this site on them. This made me have to face that bloody R again. I was never happy with the compromise I made originally and quite frankly people were not going read it as an r. I don’t want anyone typing “oakneef.ie” into their browsers and finding nothing there.

It was here that I came up with my new compromise: R. It is mostly an upper-case Roman R but with a little bit of a tail sticking down for a bit of Insular influence. I have actually started scribbling my r like this when handwriting in Irish as well.

It took me a while to actually bring this change back to the font file itself but when making the 88×31 pixel badge for this site I was reusing elements from my Pico-8 cartridge design and it reminded me to go back and make the change, and I while doing it I also rolled the Ogham font into it as well, which I had also been intending to do for a while.

So check out Cló Piocó-8.

Appendix: Comparison of fonts

Source for historical claims: The Irish Character in Print: 1571-1923, E.W. Lynam