Hungry Ghosts

The Northwest Community Bail Fund has put out a zine on how to help friends and family who've been arrested. You can read it here. I haven't had the chance to go through it in-depth, but while it has a lot of regional advice, there seems to be plenty of general advice, too.

If that link is inaccessible, an unofficial mirror of the zine can be found here. I recommend downloading your own copy of this zine and any others that you might want to read or share later, as a general rule of thumb.

[Phosphor] The more I interact with software, the more I'm convinced that app making is a kind of trap.

In the wake of Simply Plural being sunsetted, I'm seeing a lot of people announcing that they're going to make a new plural app. And don't get me wrong - I think it's good to have options. I don't want to dissuade people from trying new things. But I genuinely don't think many of these people know what they're getting into, especially the people who say that their future app is also going to have online functionality and social features.

See, a lot of non-devs and novice devs think that making an app is a one-and-done kind of deal. You have to write a bunch of code and get it working and that's a lot of work, but once you're done, you're done, right? WRONG.

For one thing, scope creep is a thing. It's so easy to get overambitious with your featureset, and even if you rein yourself in, your users will inevitably want more. Some of their requests will be unreasonable, some will be reasonable, and either way, you'll be stuck developing until the end of time if you try to fulfill them all.

Let's say you're good at saying no, though. Let's say you succeed at implementing every feature you want and you won't add any more. Now you're done, right? NOPE. Because software doesn't exist in isolation. Your apps run on a phone or on a browser or on a desktop, and all of these change, and more often and more significantly than you'd think. Phones especially are vicious about change - I can't begin to count the number of times I've gone to install an app only to find that it won't work on newer versions of Android, or the times I've installed a phone update only to find that suddenly parts of an app's UI are now broken because they got shoved off the screen or whatever. (And it's not just an Android problem - this happens on iOS, too!) Browsers and desktops tend to be less dramatic, but they also still change. Either way, you will have to continue updating your app to make sure it works on every platform you've developed it for, with no end in sight. Are you ready for that commitment? Are you especially ready for that commitment when it involves making your app work for over a dozen different models of phone that you don't own, where your only way of knowing what's going on is incredibly vague bug reports from your very non-technical users?

And if your app has any kind of server and database, the load only increases, because that's something else that you have to maintain. People are always finding novel ways to break shit, or break into shit. Are you prepared to deal with your servers suddenly going down at 3 in the morning? How about while you're across the country? Do you have a game plan for if someone hacks into your database and steals all of your users' data? Because I promise there will be jerks who will do all that for a laugh, especially if you're hosting a service for a group as stigmatized as the plural community. Can you tolerate always being on edge, always being vigilant for some new disaster, especially as your userbase grows from a few dozen to hundreds to thousands to more?

And if you plan to have any way for your users to interact with each other, are you prepared for the inevitable moderation nightmares? Do you have a way for users to report issues to you and a way to verify their claims? Do you have a plan to prevent problem users from just reregistering after they're banned? Can you tolerate witnessing some of the most vile shit in the world, up to and including literal CSAM? Are you prepared to make agonizing calls on gray-and-gray situations where no one is wrong and no one is right and everyone is hurt? Are you prepared for people to take every decision you make with the worst possible faith, to outright lie about you and to uncritically believe those lies?

And in addition to the maintenance work, servers cost money. Hosting images especially costs so much money. Do you have a plan for funding them that isn't just "keep paying for them out of the goodness of your own heart?" (Because shit happens, and all it takes is one career loss, one accident, one medical emergency to wipe out your savings.) If you're providing the service for free with an optional subscription, are you sure people will choose to pay you? Are you prepared to wrangle payment processor bullshit? Reports (both truthful and not) from users of their subscriptions malfunctioning? Are you ready for people to make bullshit claims about how you're an evil capitalist profiting off a marginalized community when you're not even fucking making enough to cover operational costs, let alone to live off of?

You might say, "well, that is a lot of work, but I won't be doing it alone. I'll bring on other people to help." Cool! Can you trust those people? Like, can you trust these people as coworkers and not just as friends? Can you trust them to not abuse their position? To keep their professional cool when users get impatient? To not gossip about sensitive information and to not accidentally let slip important development credentials? Do you have a plan for if a user comes to you with reports that one of your staff has been abusive? Do you have a plan for handling conflict between team members, including conflict that involves you? Do you have a plan for if a key team member gets hit by a bus? Do you have a plan for if you get hit by a bus?

(Also, don't even think of using generative AI. All the environmental and labor issues aside, genAI is not anywhere near enough to replace a skilled developer. It's more akin to a glorified autocomplete. Autocomplete might save you the effort of writing a few words, but it is not capable of thinking critically about the meaning you want to convey. So too with code - good code is not just a collection of scripts, but a collection of decisions about structure, data, and tradeoffs. Generative AI cannot make those decisions with any amount of reliability. And you should trust it with moderation even less than you should trust it with code.)

And finally, what about you? Health, money, time, motivation - none of these are guaranteed to continue into the future. You may lose your job, if you had one to begin with. You may lose your housing, if you had any to begin with. You may become disabled in new ways. You may just burn out, after years of dealing with more demands, more problems, more petty conflicts. Can you keep going, even then? And if not, do you have a plan for getting out?

This doesn't even cover everything. I'm positive that if I sat here I could think of so many other Ongoing Things. And again, like, I can't control what anyone does. If you truly in your heart want to make A New Plural App, then I won't stop you. But please, take some time to really think about what you're getting into. Go in with a plan, at the very least.

(At some point I might expand this into an essay about resource-making in general. I just really needed to get my thoughts as Someone Who Did Software For A Job out there.)

(Crossposted from Reddit.)

Asian-American here. (Happy Lunar New Year!) I think I responded to one of your other threads a while back, about Buddhism.

I've been wanting to write about how our individual experience of being Asian-American has affected our plurality, but it's a surprisingly difficult topic - I think in large part because being Asian in the US has long been about invisibility, to the point that we've become habituated to ignoring our own Asianness. And Asian-American experiences are so diverse (especially when it comes to colorism, fluency, and citizen status - our experiences, being pale East Asian, US-born, and fluent in English are quite different from the experiences of a darker-skinned immigrant still learning English) that it feels fraught to write about our own experiences, out of concern that they'd be taken as Representation Of All Asian-American Experiences. But I do definitely think it has affected us, even if we can't name every way it has yet.

Off of the top of my head, our parents (who are immigrants) always had a strongly pragmatic cast to how they approached the world. Extremely resourceful folks, saw objects for what they could do rather than what they were "supposed" to do and could jury-rig anything to their needs. They didn't believe in letting their feelings get in the way of doing what needed to be done (or so they liked to claim) and what needed to be done was defined by what concrete value it brought to the family, not some kind of abstract morality divorced from reality. (Or so they liked to claim.) They thought constantly in collective - what was good for the family, not just our nuclear unit but the extended group, the way people's actions reflected on said family, etc.

Make no mistake: our parents sucked in a lot of ways that left scars. But they did teach us a lot of things, some good, some that can't be neatly classified as good or bad. When I look, I can see traces of it running everywhere through our plurality. Our willingness to jury-rig and modify parts of our own functioning. Our focus on concrete advice on living plural. The relative ease with which we accept ideas like "people in systems can be both individuals and parts of a whole - singlets, too, are individuals who are parts of their communities." On a more fraught level: a tendency to stifle our feelings and efface ourselves for the good of the group. Being perhaps a little too comfortable with being unseen. Difficulty distinguishing looking okay from being okay. Generational trauma that manifests, among other ways, as a fear of scarcity and a complicated relationship with food. A need to Achieve Something and Be Successful. Things that kept us outwardly functional, even through incredibly trying circumstances, while also eroding our deeper well-being.

And also, for us, US-born to immigrant parents who were our main connection to our culture, who we are purposefully no longer in contact with - there is a perpetual sense of... not simply loss, but having been severed from a greater whole. When we cut away what was killing us, a lot of good went with it too. Something that was always with us, unnoticed in the background, until it was gone. Even those of us who don't quite see themselves as Asian can sense its absence. We look after each other, try to create our own little culture with its own little traditions within, but it can't ever be a replacement.

Oh, and of course, there's the topic of race and internal identity. Sure have a lot of feelings (and frustrations) about the ways people handle that subject, considering none of us Look Asian internally and a number of us don't even feel personally connected to Asian identity. But I won't get into it here. Not on the new year. Inauspicious, you see.

Which misconceptions about plurality (or specific types of plurality) bother you the most? (Or at all, really.)

Feel free to list anything, but we're especially interested in lesser-known misconceptions and information correcting misconceptions with sources.

(Inspired in large part by this Reddit post.)

New resource website from a system in the Western tulpamancy community: https://ratpileresource.club/

Haven't gone through all of it yet, but it seems focused on developing better communication within a system (in both the mechanical and interpersonal senses) with a sprinkling of personal experience.

More current events talk: this is stuff that I consider hopeful, soul-nourishing, action-oriented stuff, but I'll still put it under a cut in case anyone needs to avoid it.

( Read more... )

Got around to refining that old post into a proper essay. Mind the content warnings on this one.

A Post-Unmortem of Acute Madness: On surviving an episode of acute psychosis as a group.

(Crossposted from Tumblr.)

In another post I made, I spoke about a relationship I had that felt more like a Secret Third Thing than a "typical" romantic relationship.

[…]make what basically amounts to the opposite of a suicide pact with someone ("despite everything we are going to live the best that we can, and we're taking each other with us") without any particular feelings involved, only for particular feelings to get involved (to this day, despite the feelings, it still feels more like a Secret Third Thing than dating per se. probably because we don't consider the feelings the origin or foundation of our relationship)

Because I feel like rambling about in-system relationships, Secret Third Things, and their overlap today, I'll disclose that that particular relationship is with another person in my system. (The other in that post being my outerworld partners - those relationships are also unconventional in their own ways, but that's a story for another post.)

There's a bit of important context to know about us first. (It involves past trauma, particularly child abuse - I've put it under the cut.)

( Read more... )

To be polished into an essay later: old posts we made about hobbies

Hobbies that one or more of us have: writing, oldschool website-making, crochet, origami, fountain pens, digital and traditional art, cello, multiplayer gaming, mechanical keyboards, lucid dreaming, indoor gardening, reading miscellaneous nonfiction.

For starting points for the more accessible of these...

Writing: everyone hypes up writing a novel. You really don't need to write a novel. Write short stories, drabbles, single scenes, sequences of words that got stuck in your head, rants about this or that. Get into the habit of writing and prioritize writing something rather than something polished.

Oldschool website-making: there's a number of hosts around, Neocities being probably the most known, Nekoweb being a newer option that's pretty good. Look up tutorials on HTML and CSS (you don't need to touch JS)

Origami: lots of patterns around the web. Look for beginner ones. You don't need fancy paper, we made stuff out of printer and notebook paper for years. Just familiarize yourself with cutting your own squares (fold edge over until flush with the other edge to make a triangle, cut off the trailing paper, unfold triangle into square, ta-da).

Traditional art: hardest part here will be mindset. You'll compare yourself to other artists and angst about how you're not where you want to be a LOT, and it sucks. Think about it like a video game - any art you draw, no matter how shitty, is EXP, while no art means no EXP. Read the "50% Rule" on Drawabox.com and do your best to keep its principles in mind.

Multiplayer gaming: bunch of free multiplayer games out there. Of the ones we play, Warframe and Sky: Children of the Light probably give you the most access to the game without paying, just be prepared to be sad about not being able to afford many things. Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV are fun, but they only give you free access to parts of the game, and then you gotta pay for expansions.
Tbh, if you have a computer that can run it + mods, I would recommend buying Minecraft if you have money to spare - the huge modding ecosystem means you'll get objectively more game for your money than buying an MMO expansion.

Lucid dreaming: "Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming" by Stephen LaBerge is probably the most comprehensive book I've found on the topic, and you might be able to read it for free on Archive.org. I've personally found that reading about lucid dreaming + keeping a dream journal is usually enough for me to lucid dream without having to dip into the more involved techniques, but your mileage may vary. Be mindful of getting into this if you have chronic nightmares - lucid dreaming can help you manage them, but ime there's a transition period where you remember dreams more vividly but aren't lucid in them yet.

Reading miscellaneous nonfiction: again, Archive.org is your friend! If you have a library card, Libby lets you borrow ebooks from your library.

Regarding web development, I fully believe that you have it in you. CSS is daunting, often arcane. But in our experience, it does not remain that way forever. Some years ago, it took us hours to center a single element; now, we delight in debugging others' CSS and have written all of the styling on our site by hand. Like fronting, there is only one way to improve, and that is practice.

As for resources, I will disclaim that we haven't used all of these. But we have seen them recommended by several others.

Free and Newbie-Friendly Static Site Hosts

• Neocities (The best-known host, by far!)
• Nekoweb (This is the place that our site is hosted. We began on Neocities; it is more established and populous, but we enjoy Nekoweb more.)

Resources for Learning

• HTML for People (We have only taken a cursory look at this. But we liked what we saw!)
• Kevin Powell's Youtube channel (We have not used this. But people speak very highly of him.)
• freeCodeCamp's course on responsive web design (Once again, we have not used this. But people speak highly of freeCodeCamp.)
• CSS Diner (A little game to help you learn and practice CSS selectors. We have not delved deeply into this one.)
• Flexbox Froggy (Another CSS game, this time with a focus on flexbox. We have not played this, but people speak highly of it.)

Documentation

• MDN Web Docs (The most comprehensive reference for HTML, CSS, and Javascript, maintained by Mozilla, Google, and many volunteers.)
• w3schools (I have seen people say to take this one with a grain of salt. But it has been generally helpful to us. We prefer the MDN documentation, but we will often cross-reference the two if we're unsure how something is used.)

If you live in the Seattle area, an organizer I ran into has put together a list of food assistance resources, from state assistance to local shops that are giving away free meals. List under the cut. I cannot personally vouch for any of these, but I haven't had reason to believe they aren't legit.

EDIT: there's a website for them now https://seattle-area-aid.nekoweb.org/ but I'll still keep this list in case it dies.

( Seattle area resources )