I had a great deal of energy pushing me toward working on a kernel project after I came off the mood stabiliser. Having readded some testosterone to the mix, and..

The energy remains in some sense, and I could choose to devote it to the kernel, but I feel more inclined to simply be helpful on Discord to newcomers, and then put my energy toward language learning.

toki pona seems fun, but watching the conversations going on in ma pona it’s clear that its function is (intentionally) limited. I yearn for something greater, wider, deeper; of a depth not decided by the conventions that can only arise from mutual conversation with those present, but one with its roots thrust into the past.

Russian I continue to learn at the speed of my nestmate, so I will rededicate the energy I have now toward the language of my ancestors; mu emakeel, so to speak.

I thought to resist the pull, but following it has been fruitful lately, so I’ll continue to let it guide me xx

I was contemplating (intentional/endogenous) plural identity formation, and it occurred to me how much in common the mindstates before and after have with trans identity formation.

When I think back to who I was before I’d really accepted myself as being trans, I had all the usual hangups: what if I’m faking it, what if it’s not actually better, what if it’s grass-is-greener, what will my family/friends think, etc. etc. There was something basically obscuring it, and yet — while many aspects of my material reality have surely shifted in the decade since — internally the changes are not huge. The most prominent one is simply identification; a willingness to see the self through a given lens, followed by the confirmatory euphoria of knowing truth.

There’s nothing fundamentally different about questioning-me and knowing-me, just a change in what I’m willing to accept about myself.

It was much the same with plurality. It had long made sense as a means of better understanding my self, but before you cross the gap (which really takes place in lots of little ways, rather than one leap, but some of the little ways are bigger than others), doubt fills your mind and occludes those moments of recognisance. Even though it “made sense” even stronger was the sense that it was generally thought to be a faked phenomenon (sound familiar?), one with no real value other than to seek attention.

I wonder just how many possibly useful lenses are hidden this way; in general, and for my selves specifically. What, if accepted, would let me go even further in my quest for self-knowledge?

I’m incredibly blocked at work.

Circumstances mean that there’s a large drain on motivation, and the piece of work I’m up to right now I haven’t really budged from in weeks. Months? Working part-time has its benefits, also its downsides.

How much longer can this go on?

I was alerted by a commenter that it’s been more than a year, now, since this video dropped:

COVID measures had already begun to be implemented; national borders shut, most schools already closed. Watching this press conference, a scene from The Simpsons played in my mind. I’d been getting a little comfy with a video editing program to record IIDX plays, so I gave it a crack.

I don’t really have networks to tap, but Niki liked it so much she diligently dropped it into comments on Facebook and Twitter replies wherever it seemed appropriate. Before I knew it, I had a moderately popular YouTube video. It entered the popular discourse when it was further remixed, but if you ask me, the Trump oversamples are just kinda gross.

One thing that’s been interesting to see has been how the popularity of the video corresponded with (literally) viral events:

The three major events were:

• Late March, video released, Dan Andrews said “get on the beers”.
• Mid-May, first lockdown restrictions eased.
• October 26, Victoria recorded zero new cases/deaths for the first time since June. Dan reported that he “might go a little higher up the shelf” than beers.

I dreamt of her, fractally.

I dream of her often enough, but lately the edge had been taken off, no heavy meaning invested, instead accompanied by a casual lightness that never really graced our actual relationship with its presence.

This time, though, it was her, her, her, and me, apologising, reaching through one dream and into the next to try to make contact, to establish some connection, to get the message through that I wished more than anything it hadn’t gone that way. In one level she had bleached her hair, same as me; we were dancing in a circle and Niki (?) pointed her out to me, just behind me.

At the end of the dream I was apologising to Niki, saying I needed to go out on a motorcycle ride with her at short notice, having finally reconnected.

Ugh.

Maybe it’s just the elevated T levels lately, but god if I don’t feel a lot of animosity towards certain behaviours.

There’s this one guy who’s just joined a programming language community, and like:

• He doesn’t really understand the language or its motivations yet, is trying to learn, but is way out of his depth still. That’s cool, so was I once.
• Despite this, though, he keeps trying to “help” people in areas he is still way out of his depth in, and like, should definitely be aware he is out his depth in. Blind leading the blind.
• When something doesn’t make sense, he starts going wild saying how it’s stupid, must be a bug, starts @mentioning the creator (who probably isn’t even online) saying “please tell me it’s a bug”. I hand-hold him and explain how, no, he’s just got it wrong, he calms down. Why be so belligerently wrong about something?
• In various chat rooms people will be discussing using certain features (or not using them) and he’ll start just kinda circlejerking with no-one in particular about how good it is that the language lets you do this, “unlike CERTAIN OTHER LANGUAGES”, but like, dude, shut up, we’re trying to have a conversation here?

It takes every fibre of my being to not be like “ok, just shut up,” but I’m thoroughly irritated after a few weeks of this. The last one in particular is one I see a lot from new entrants to this community; they barely understand it but they have decided it’s the best thing ever and for some reason feel a need to go on about that, rather than just.. actually use it and make something.

Maybe I’m hostile to the idea of people deciding to invest themselves in something they don’t understand well yet, perhaps because when I was young I did a lot of that while casting around for places to hang my identity up on.

I dreamt a dream that has left me unsettled all day.

backstory Ⅰ

Since I first had any kind of sexual inkling whatsoever — which is to say, since I was 12 when I’d hang around on an 18+ BDSM-themed furry MUCK and began RPing — I only ever had any inclination to be in a submissive position. When I found randoms to RP with, it was Asherah, the small pink bunny girl, wanting to have anything and everything done to her, especially if consent lines got blurry.

Even then I had to power-bottom a little bit. One rando I recall was only into the most vanilla dynamics, whereas I kept wanting to up the ante. (Tie me up! Get creative with things! Don’t just fuck me, for christ’s sake.) I got bored.

I also kinda.. baited an IRL friend who was a little too obsessed with me into joining me on the server, and then kept trying to “suggest” him into doing stuff to me. (I’m not especially proud of it, but like. I was 12, he was 13, everything at home was completely fucked up, he was super into me and could match my intelligence to boot, so.. now that we got furry MUCK-married, couldn’t we furry MUCK-do-other-stuff too please?)

This positioning of myself carried pretty strong for a while. There is probably a (bidirectional) link between that and trans feels. It’s funny how predictably some things go; I was ostensibly into girls, not boys (never mind the actual physicality that existed between me and aforementioned IRL friend for a while), but then I became a trans girl, and so liking other trans girls is only natural, and then you stop seeing “dick” as a possibly unsettling thing ‘boys’ have (and you’re not sure about your own) but a hot thing girls have too, and then you look at boys and you’re like, hm. You sure could overpower me.

backstory Ⅱ

Despite this, in relationships since I have often ended up being the one with power. Perhaps stemming from the same instinct that led to power-bottoming before, I’d much rather we get anywhere than nowhere, and I have a kind of.. exuberant personality that tends to draw in others who prefer to follow. I am naturally extremely protective, quite opinionated, have mom-vibes, and until recently have been a people-pleaser to a fault. Not knowing myself how to separate these qualities from those of a ~dominant~ has lead to me getting into places I’ve later not known how to deal with.

This mainly became a thing in two relationships, collectively spanning seven years, or a majority of my post-transition life so far.

In the first case I had a handle on life in many ways she did not yet (she was quite a bit younger than me), and so I provided everything I could; housing, a stable life away from sometimes violent parents, support for her relationships and hobbies outside me, and later when I could afford it, university education.

I’m a person who just wants to give, and as I’ve discovered lately in therapy, one who doesn’t believe, strictly speaking, that I actually deserve nice things. Accordingly, giving nice things to other is a very sure route to getting a similar sense of happiness, effectively, even if it does ultimately mean I don’t get what I truly want, and ends up being unsustainable. She didn’t want many responsibilities of life and liked the sound of a more formal and continuous D/s relationship, so I agreed to give it my best. Our relationship did not last the dissolution of the D/s layer of it (among many other issues, but this came to represent a lot about it).

In the second case, she was a few years older than me, but with a heart of absolute gold who had been mistreated a lot, both historically and more immediately. She nurtured a rare kindness and trust despite all that and I felt so much like I wanted to safeguard that. As our relationship quickly deepened she wanted to know if I would be her “protector”, and I assented immediately. (And I still do. <3) Then in natural order, more D/s-style parameters followed, and I put my all into it as well. It just seemed to make sense, and I had already so much of the “technique” down that the lack of deep-felt enthusiasm for the role seemed of secondary concern for a time, or not even—completely masked. I couldn’t feel that I didn’t have my heart in it, only that I wanted to make her happy.

Once you get used to ignoring what you want for a long time, you lose touch with it entirely. It took a massive reconfiguration of our relationship to accommodate removing this part of it — it had been in place from not even a month after we started dating, and there we were some year and a half later trying to imagine “us” without that. It was the best, most correct decision, but I still wish I’d figured this all out long ago and spared her the hurt.

There was one relationship in the past where I was explicitly the s to someone else’s D, but we lacked harmony regarding what each of us wanted out of a D/s relationship, and I found myself pushing for more than she wanted to give (or, well, take). It was fun being a rope bunny, though.

backstory Ⅲ

What triggered the reconfiguration was my own realisation of my asexuality. I’d been slowly putting the pieces together for a while, and then one well-timed acid trip and I just kind of blurted it out, at once feeling the surge of unverifiable truth. As I experienced a moment of serenity, my partner a sense of loss of what was. The relief of no longer feeling beholden to the allo norms of sex-having then prompted the follow-up question of whether I still wanted to be her dominant. The writing had been on the wall for a while, but it was then that the jig was finally up and I seized the chance to say “no”, as painful as it was. Pretending to be something I was not was behind me.

Living a mostly sexless life has been so much better for me. I just don’t have interest in being sexual with another, and just barely more interest in being sexual by myself. Still, it was in my own fantasies that my sexuality originated, so it’s not too surprising that it does live on there a little.

Last year I saw an endocrinologist for the first time since starting transition (which seems super dumb in retrospect but what can you do, trans healthcare is a mess), and we discovered that both my E and T levels were way too low. My E was below the very conservative range put forth by the Australian medical establishment (and well below what Americans would consider normal), and T levels at almost absolute zero. Even in natal women, T is in a clear non-zero range, and completely lacking it could explain a lack of libido, which certainly described me, as well as lack of energy in general.

So I set to correcting my E levels, then T levels. I’m now on ~3% of the anti-androgen dose that I used to be on and my T levels have just slightly inclined upward. They are still below the low watermark for “normal female levels”, but at least I get a reading.

I still don’t have any interest in being sexual with others, even though I’ve had an inkling of a sex drive for a little while again now, so it doesn’t look like the asexual descriptor was particularly linked to my hormones, but I’m increasingly feeling a need to have some kind of a sexual relationship with myself again.

the point

Last night I dreamt a dream — many, actually, with complicated interconnections, people I didn’t recognise, other people who seem like maybe they’re stand-ins for real people, a variety of settings, some drama unrelated to all this.

But there was one “segment” of it that left an indelible expression, because it seemed like my unconscious needed to make a point.

To date, I’ve never been collared by someone else in an impactful way. The tangible, real sense that you belonged to someone else now — even if time-limited or otherwise scoped. The understanding that it was not yours to put on, or yours to remove, even if it was very much your collar. I have (attempted) to provide that experience for others, when in reality it was what I wanted myself. I’ve “self-collared” a bit here and there.

In one distinct dream, I was collared. I was strongly aware I was collared, and moreover, I physically couldn’t remove it even if I wanted to. It was locked. It wasn’t up to me, and I just had to deal.

It felt really, really good. There was a sense that people might notice it, that they might point it out to each other, and that I was literally powerless to do anything about it. If I wanted to go about my day, I just had to accept that this was my lot.

I’ve never felt that before—that powerlessness. Yet it’s what I’ve wanted all along.

The dream then offered a counterpoint.

Later, somehow, the key came into my possession. The dream didn’t describe the actual supposed holder of the key, but the narrative seemed to be that whoever had collared me needed me to hold onto the key now, too. I wanted to be sure not to lose it, so I put it on a necklace.

The feeling was radically altered. Having the means of unlocking it on my person at all times meant it just became jewellery. It was no longer an aspect of control over me, just some ring with a finnicky clasp. Being out in public and being seen wearing it wasn’t a demonstration of someone else’s power over me, just my own determination. Frankly, as a trans person, somedays being seen in public at all can require a fair bit of that. This feeling barely registered, the same lack of impact that self-collaring has. I can always just take it off.

I want to feel that first one again.

There’s a weird tension in programming — on the one hand, as you learn the ropes, you (hopefully) learn very quickly that the problem is almost always in your code, and not, say, the compiler, stdlib, kernel, etc. This is usually very correct; the people who’ve worked on those things have many times the experience you did when you decided that there must be a bug in printf or something.

You’ll later realise you tried to print something through a pointer to a stack-allocated variable that’s long since gone. These accusations tend to wane as you gain familiarity with your subject matter, and wax as you step out into lands populated with ever more footguns, exposing more of the architecture than you ever suspected was there. (See also: the emails from me to the libev mailing list in 2011.)

At some point, though, your journies will take you to places where things aren’t so clear cut, and you’ll start to gain a sixth sense; a kind of visceral experience that things are not as they have been promised to be.

A few weeks ago, that sixth sense whispered in my ear: “what if, instead of your cruddy bootloader written in a pre-1.0 systems language for a platform you don’t fully understand, it’s the 20 year-old project with 80,000 commits that’s wrong?” And it was right.

I recently received an Inkplate, and while I’m in the middle of a few interesting projects already, I couldn’t let it sit there unused. Until I get a longer chunk of time to turn it into something really nifty — maybe an embedded debugging helper of some kind — it can at least mean I no longer need to have Mail.app open.

kmlyink’s README explains:

This repo has two parts:

• a Dockerised IMAP proxy written in Ruby.

  It speaks plain HTTP, like an ESP can manage. It just fetches your Inbox listing and puts it in JSON.

• a MicroPython module that connects to your wifi, speaks to the IMAP proxy, and formats it into the display.

It took just a few hours to get it all up and running. Delightful!

Ever find yourself needing to implement a device tree blob (aka FDT, flattened device tree) parser and want to save yourself some time? Learn from my mistakes!

If you try to do it in one pass, you will hurt yourself

I charged headlong into writing dtb.zig by starting at the top of the Devicetree Specification page on the “Flattened Devicetree (DTB)” Format” and reading down. It looked delightfully simple. Keep in mind, I still didn’t know what I yet needed out of it, just that I probably needed to reference the DTB to get it. (I kind of know better now.)