Lark Space

My theme for 2026: Year of Collaboration

2026-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Every new year, I designate a theme for the coming calendar year. Different from a resolution--rather than prescribe specific goals--it provides a framework to influence the decisions I make over the course of the coming year.

My theme for 2025 was "Get involved". The goals was to connect more with my communities, attend more events, and do more community-building and activist work. It took until the tail end of the year for me to really start delivering on this goal, but I'd say it was a success!

Here are some of the accomplishments I made this year:

I started attending more local meetups.</li>
I started attending more protests and political actions.</li>
I did a lot of networking around Ace Archive. I feel like "networking" as a concept is poisoned by the corporate world; what I really mean is I went out of my way to meet folks, build connections, and tell them about my work. And good things came of it! I've given interviews, given talks, recruited volunteers, and started to build a community around the project.</li>
I got involved with my local makerspace, connecting with folks there are hosting events.</li>
I went to my first LARP, which was a ton of fun.</li>
I started attending a monthly furry meetup in my city and building connections with the folks there. I really pushed through the anxiety to make sure I attended very month and went out of my way to talk to new people. The first few months were rough at times; I felt like an outsider in a space where it felt like everyone had known each other for years. But now I feel like a part of that community, and I've started to build some real friendships.</li> </ul>
My theme for 2026 is my "year of collaboration". I've got a lot of projects I'm working on, but for the most part they've been solo endeavors. I want to start collaborating with folks on some of the work I do--not just for the benefit of the projects, but also to build community, because building community is the antidote to despair I need right now. I've already been doing a lot of that with Ace Archive, and I'm going to need to start doing that with FanJam if I want to reach people who would benefit from it.
If you're reading this, leave a comment letting me know what your theme for 2026 is! I love this tradition and I've managed to get several of my friends on board with it.

FanJam: A free event planning app for small cons

2025-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

A friend approached me with the idea back in the Spring. They were frustrated because the small con they had recently attended didn't have a good way of viewing the event schedule. All they had was a public link to a spreadsheet on Google Docs. This friend had been playing around with Airtable and similar apps, and decided to copy the con schedule into NocoDB</a> so they could have something more readable.

The pitch was, "What if you built a mobile app for attendees that was just a frontend for NocoDB"? That would save a ton of work over trying to build out a dashboard-like app for organizers. We'd just have to build the mobile app.

It turned out to be a lot of work anyways.

FanJam</a></li>
GitHub</a></li> </ul>
The mobile app turned out to be the easy part! The hardest part was figuring out how to make this app free for small cons. If I was planning on eating the hosting costs, I would need it to be cheap to host. Like, real cheap. My goal was a dozen cons and a couple thousand concurrent users for less than $40 USD per month. Yikes.
There are a couple factors that make this more reasonable than you might think:

Cons generally only last a few days, and generally don't all happen the same weekend, so traffic is pretty evenly distributed, and resources can be scaled up to accommodate burst traffic without exceeding the budget.</li>
Planning the schedule for a given con isn't generally a 24/7/365 affair, so I can automatically suspend those servers when they're not being used to save money.</li>
The data set is tiny, which means I can keep a full local copy on the user's device. This means no loading time in the app and less frequent requests to the server.</li> </ul>
But there were some challenges to overcome as well, namely that NocoDB is quite slow. There's no way I can rely on it to absorb significant traffic, which means I needed to build a caching layer in front of it.
I might share more of the technical details in future log entries. There's documentation on the architecture of the app in the GitHub repo, including diagrams.
When I show people FanJam, they'll often pull out their phone and show me the app from a con they've attended, usually to complain about it. It turns out there are a lot of bad apps out there trying to do what FanJam does. If I can build something that does it better and cheaper, I think there might actually be a market out there for me.
I'm really excited about this project. I have a long backlog of new features and enhancements I still want to implement, but in the coming weeks I'm going to start soliciting feedback from more than just a few friends, and maybe even start approaching some cons.
I imagine the hardest part will be convincing them it's not a scam lol.

Ace Archive is an amateur project, and that's okay

2025-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

Last weekend I visited a queer archive library</a> in Providence, RI, and it gave me a lot to think about. I read a zine by Paul Soulellis called Survival by Sharing</a>, which is about archival work and makes a case for archives that are small, disorganized, private, and personal.
When I started Ace Archive, I felt a need to frame it as a big professional project and pretend it wasn't just one queer with no training working out of its bedroom. Maybe I thought I needed to justify its existence. As folks have started to discover the project (through no help of my own; I'm terrible at self-promoting), I think the justification has started to become evident. People are contributing with research and advice. The site gets a good amount of traffic. One person even curated an in-person ace history and art exhibit</a> using Ace Archive as a resource. And most importantly, I'm starting to gain the confidence that maybe all the work I've put in actually means something.
That queer library we visited could hardly be called a library; it was a few unorganized bookshelves and a few bins full of zines sharing space with a print studio. It was beautiful. Putting queer history in queer hands and sharing it around feels so much more profound than locking it away in a neoclassical marble vault.
Maybe Ace Archive is allowed to be amateur. Maybe that's even the point.
I've also been thinking about this article</a> on how to position yourself to customers as a startup. It advises founders to lean into the benefits of being a small company with small customers, rather than trying to pretend to be something they're not. I hesitate to equate this to Ace Archive--this is not a business and my values and goals do not align with startup culture or capitalist motives--but I think some of the advice is applicable. As I start to look for collaborators, I want to find people who value Ace Archive for what it is.
An idea I've had for the project for a long time is to curate content in the archive into "collections", so that people can browse and discover ace history more easily--make Ace Archive an educational resource rather than just a repository. I've dismissed the idea in the past because I was afraid it wouldn't "scale". But maybe it doesn't need to. Maybe I should be more realistic about how large this archive is actually likely to get and take advantage of the fact that I can personally browse and curate everything in it.
So I've done exactly that</a>! I've already curated a handful of collections, and I'll likely do more as I have time and as new material comes in.
As always, if this project interests you, get in touch</a>. Every person who contributes with research, advice, or even just a friendly hello warms my gay little heart.

Self-hosting a Matrix homeserver

2025-03-24T00:00:00+00:00

What is Matrix?</h2>
If you're not familiar with Matrix</a>, it's an open-source, decentralized, end-to-end encrypted chat platform. It's somewhat like Discord, with direct messages, rooms (comparable to channels or group chats in Discord), and spaces (comparable to Discord servers).
Matrix doesn't quite have feature parity with Discord, but it has pretty much all the features you expect of a chat app. I think the platform needs to mature before it's ready for mainstream adoption, but I'm holding out hope that someday it will be viable enough for Discord-based communities to feel enticed to switch over.
What's the appeal?</h2> With Discord almost certainly approaching an IPO, I fear that the enshittification</a> of the platform is imminent. Paired with the wave of public awareness of decentralized platforms like Mastodon, Lemmy, Pixelfed, and Peertube that we've seen in recent months, it feels like a perfect storm for Matrix to start seeing more adoption.
I worry about how deeply invested I am in Discord. There's little stopping the platform from implementing user-hostile changes, suspending my account without recourse, spying on me, getting hacked, or disappearing entirely. I believe very strongly in the power of federated, decentralized networks, and I think they're the only path forward for a free and open internet. Matrix being end-to-end encrypted is huge 1</a>; it protects privacy and security in a way that Discord fundamentally cannot.
It's encouraging to see that there's already a healthy diversity of client</a> and server</a> implementations, even if most of them are not yet feature-complete. I would have less confidence in the strength of the community and ecosystem if it consisted of only a single reference implementation.
Self-hosting a Matrix homeserver</h2>
Matrix has a concept of a homeserver, which is the server that hosts your user account and stores your (encrypted) messages. The domain of your homeserver forms part of your handle, which takes the form @username:example.com</code>. From the start, I was obsessed with the idea of having a lark.gay</code> handle. This does require hosting your own homeserver, but that also appeals to me because I want ownership and sovereignty over my own data. The only way to protect your data from disappearing someday is to host it yourself.
After assessing the landscape of server implementations, I settled on one calledconduwuit</a>.
The only fully feature-complete and stable server implementation available right now is Synapse</a>, however my understanding is that it's mired in performance issues and is intended to eventually be phased out by second-gen implementations like Dendrite</a>. I chose conduwuit over Dendrite because I have a lot more confidence in its maintainership; it seems to be seeing incredibly active development, whereas Dendrite's commit history indicates it has been in development for approximately eight years. I also happen to love using software made by trans people 🏳️‍⚧️.
The devlog</h2> Self-hosting a Matrix homeserver turned out to be somewhat more complicated than I would have hoped, even for an implementation that's meant to be easy to set up. This section is a technical devlog detailed how I did it. Before we dive in, I want to stress that you do not need to do any of this to use Matrix. Unless you really know that you want this, I would strongly recommend you join an existing homeserver</a> instead. Registering is very easy. conduwuit itself is just a statically linked binary with the database embedded, which is refreshingly simple. I just dropped the binary in /usr/local/bin</code>, created a system user to run it, and used one of the provided systemd unit files</a>--which are configured to provide a reasonable degree of sandboxing--to run it. Here are the relevant sections from my conduwuit config: [global] server_name = "lark.gay" port = 6167 database_path = "/var/lib/conduwuit" # I had to set this to true temporarily to register my user account. Because I # don't plan on sharing this server with anyone else, I set it back to false # immediately after. allow_registration = false # In order to set up my user account, I had to generate a random token. After # disabling registration, there's no need for one. #registration_token = "" [global.well_known] # I'll explain this later. client = "https://matrix.lark.gay" server = "matrix.lark.gay:8448" </code></pre> As recommended in the documentation, I set up Caddy</a> as a reverse proxy, which automatically handles acquiring and renewing TLS certificates. The config is remarkably simple: matrix.lark.gay, matrix.lark.gay:8448 { reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:6167 } </code></pre> I had to open up port 8448 (the default port for the Matrix federation API) on my firewall, in addition to 443 (HTTPS) and 80 (HTTP). Port 80 is necessary for Caddy to acquire TLS certificates. Because my server is running Fedora Atomic, which has SELinux enabled, I had to run the following commands to allow Caddy to bind the port. sudo semanage port -a -t http_port_t -p tcp 8448 sudo semanage port -a -t http_port_t -p udp 8448 </code></pre> Some of the complexity setting this up comes from the fact that I really wanted my homeserver's domain to be lark.gay</code>, which will obviously need to be shared with this site. To accomplish this, Matrix has a feature called delegation. To implement Matrix server delegation, I have to serve these two files from this site, which tell Matrix clients and other servers that they can actually find my homeserver at matrix.lark.gay</code>. /.well-known/matrix/server</code> { "m.server": "matrix.lark.gay:8448" } </code></pre> /.well-known/matrix/client</code> { "m.homeserver": { "base_url": "https://matrix.lark.gay" } } </code></pre> For Matrix server delegation to work, you also need to proxy traffic to /_matrix/*</code> and /_conduwuit/*</code> to your homeserver. However, lark.gay</code> doesn't point to a web server that I can configure to do that; it points directly to a CDN. However, Cloudflare has a feature</a> that lets me put a serverless function in front of the CDN, which you can see here</a>. I believe that about covers it! Not too complex in hindsight, but it did take me some time to figure out, particularly troubleshooting some of the more subtle bits, like SELinux. A fun anecdote: I started the process of setting this all up while I was bored on a flight, connecting to the server over SSH. At one point I needed to reboot, and committed the classic blunder of locking myself out of SSH access. The server has full-disk encryption configured with a password, meaning that I need to be physically present to enter the password so it can boot. After that ordeal, I decided to configure LUKS to use the TPM instead, which allows it to boot unattended. I also flipped the switch in the UEFI firmware settings setting it to automatically power back on if it loses and then regains power--say if the electricity goes out. Conclusion</h2> I'm quite pleased with my progress, and excited to start using Matrix… once I actually have friends to talk to 😅. All my friends are still on Discord, and it might take some convincing to get them to register an account and install a new chat app just for me. Thankfully I have some nerd friends who I'm sure will be happy to indulge me. Soatok, a security expert, has raised some very serious criticisms</a> of the actual security of the end-to-end encryption implementation in several Matrix clients. If your privacy or freedom are at risk, Signal is probably the better choice. ↩</a> </li> </ol> </section>
Why do messaging apps assume I have a canonical name? 2025-03-20T00:00:00+00:00 A lark by any other name</h2> My name is Lark Aster. At least that's the name I go by in Lark Space. It's also what most of my friends call me. But I actually have a few other chosen names that I use in different contexts: I have a name that my origin family, my coworkers, and the government call me. I'll call this my "government name".</li> I have a name that my polycule calls me.</li> I have a few other names that I use with specific people. In some cases more than one per person, if one of them is used specifically in a D/s capacity. I often call these "intimate names".</li> </ul> I often think of my names as existing on a spectrum from most public to most private: The name the government calls me</li> The name my friends call me</li> The name my polycule calls me</li> The names only specific people call me</li> </ol> If you think of the people, communities, and institutions in my life as existing in a series of concentric circles around me--where the innermost circle represents my most intimate relationships and the outermost circle represents the public at large--my names represent the boundaries between those rings. Not all the people in my life know all my names! Generally, people closer to the center will know my more public names, but I'm more selective about sharing more private names with people farther out. For example, my coworkers don't know that my friends call me Lark, and I rarely share intimate names with other people. Fake names, True names, old names, new names</h2> Communications platforms will generally ask you to choose the name you appear as to others, and in most cases, will let you choose whatever name you want. This presents a challenge: deciding which name to use on a given platform. On Telegram, using Lark was an easy choice. I use Telegram almost exclusively for chatting with furry friends, who all know me as Lark. On Signal, for a long time, I used my government name. Unlike Telegram, I don't associate Signal with any particular community or friend group. I just have a handful of contacts from various contexts who happen to be easiest to reach on Signal. I figured that if I had to choose a single name, it might as well be my government name, since that's what most people think of as their "canonical" name. But then I started connecting with new folks over Signal--joining various group chats for groups and events in my local area. I would go to these events and introduce myself as Lark, because that's what felt most appropriate. But I would then have to explain that my name is different on Signal. On many platforms, this is common. People have handles they use in online spaces, and "real" names they use in-person. But online handles follow wildly different conventions from IRL names; you wouldn't commonly expect to find numbers in an IRL name, for example. You can generally infer if a name is an online handle, and assume that that person has a different name they go by in IRL contexts. My government name, while maybe somewhat uncommon, does pretty unambiguously pass as a "real" name, so people who see it on Signal will not tend to expect that I will introduce myself differently in person. Eventually I grew tired and decided that if most people who I talk to on Signal know me as Lark, it may as well be my Signal name. But this feels like a betrayal of the public/private partition that Lark represents for me. It felt especially weird when my grandmother texted me on Signal to ask who Lark is^{1</a>.} Deconstructing the canonical name paradigm</h2> Discord actually solves this problem for me quite well. The way it handles names is pretty flexible: You choose a single "user profile" name that everyone sees by default.</li> You have the option of choosing a separate name (and pronouns!) for each server2</a> you join.</li> Your friends can set a "friend nickname" for you, which is the name you appear to them as in DMs and group chats.</li> </ul> Here's how I use it: My user profile name is a handle--not one of my "real" names. This means that anyone I interact with on the platform only has the names I choose to give them.</li> I choose a name for each server that I'm a member of, depending on which I think is most appropriate.</li> People who know me by a particular name can set that as my friend nickname.</li> </ul> Discord is my primary chat platform; it's how I talk to most of my friends. I'm not thrilled with how invested I am in the platform given that it's not open-source or end-to-end encrypted, but I do appreciate that it doesn't shoehorn me into choosing a single "canonical" name, and I wish other platforms would follow suit. It was actually a very sweet interaction; I explained that most of my friends call me Lark, but I still prefer [government name] with her, and she told me that she's happy to call me whatever I want. Genuinely a top-tier ally. ↩</a> </li> If you're not familiar with Discord, a "server" is analogous to a Slack workspace or a Matrix space; it's a collection of text and voice channels with a membership and permissions system. Different communities you engage with on Discord will generally each have their own server. ↩</a> </li> </ol> </section> Switching to Jujutsu: A git-compatible VCS 2025-02-22T00:00:00+00:00 I've been curious about non-git version control systems like Mercurial</a>, Fossil</a>, and Pijul</a> for a while, but switching away from git is difficult given its ubiquity, particularly considering the other VCSes have next to no support among the major hosting platforms. However, a friend recently clued me in to a relatively new VCS that's repo-compatible with git. It's called Jujutsu</a>. You can use Jujutsu with git forges like GitHub, and you can collaborate with people using git--without them even knowing! After playing around with it for a few weeks, it's almost completely supplanted git for me; I don't foresee myself going back. The CLI is much more sensible--a famous shortcoming of git--but it's more than just another git frontend. Its data model makes rewriting history, rebasing, and conflict resolution much less painful. It took some adjustment and unlearning of git paradigms, but after just a few weeks I'm already more confident navigating complex situations in Jujutsu than I am after 10 years of working with git. My one gripe with Jujutsu is the lack of git LFS support; using Jujutsu with LFS-enabled repos will implicitly check in those files, which is annoying. A friend and I collaborated to write a quick reference and cheat sheet</a> for Jujutsu. You can find his blog post here</a>. I highly recommend you give it a try. Choosing my starred contacts as a relationship anarchist 2025-02-17T00:00:00+00:00 So in my phone's contacts app, you can "star" some contacts. As far as I can tell, this has two implications: Starred contacts float to the top of the list.</li> You can configure starred contacts to bypass Do Not Disturb mode.</li> </ul> This is a fairly simple feature, but choosing which contacts to bless with a star has proven difficult for reasons that are wrapped up in a lot of my feelings about relationships. For context, I'm aromatic and polyamorous, and I like to use the framework of relationship anarchy1</a> to navigate the relationships in my life. In short, that means I don't like to prioritize some kinds of relationships over others or categorize them into to buckets, like "partner" as something distinct from (and more important than) "friend". Every relationship in my life is special and unique in its own way, and I could never compare or rank them. It's a rejection of relationship hierarchies, much like social anarchism is a rejection of power hierarchies. Obviously starring contacts in my phone does not impose a hierarchy on my friends. But it kinda feels that way. There's this unspoken implication that features like this are intended to be used for your family and partners. Even though it's a purely logistical decision, choosing which friends I want to star feels like picking favorites. I often complain about the ways in which our amatonormative society devalues nonstandard relationship styles though institutions and systems that make assumptions about how you structure your life. But this really isn't one of those cases; my phone is just asking me who I want to be able to reach me when it's on Do Not Disturb, which is a very fair question that shouldn't be causing me so much angst. For an overview of what relationship anarchy is about, I recommend the essay that introduced the term</a>. ↩</a> </li> </ol> </section> Cuttle: A combat card game 2025-01-14T00:00:00+00:00 I've always struggled with card games and board games. I have somewhat slow processing and poor working memory, so keeping the game state and rules in my head is challenging, and it ends up slowing the game down for the other players, which can be frustrating for them. I suspect learning games on my own ahead of time might be easier for me, so I'm not trying to learn a new game on the spot while feeling time pressure from folks who just want to get started. I'm also wondering if it might be easier to choose games my friends don't already know how to play and teaching them, so I'm not slowing them down while I get used to the rules. I recently discovered a somewhat obscure card game called Cuttle, which is a lot like Magic: The Gathering, but played with a standard 52-card deck. That really appeals to me, partly because I've always wanted to play Magic, but discovered the complexity of the rules is a barrier for me, and partly because I don't need to participate in the deck-building aspect of the game. One major problem I have with learning new games is how the rulebooks are written. I often struggle to get the bigger picture--understanding the goal of the game, what a turn looks like, etc. So I decided to write my own rulebook</a>, along with a cheatsheet to reference during the game. It follows the standard rules, but is written in a way that's more compatible with my brain, and I'm hoping with be helpful to others as well. I'm really excited to try this game out with my friends. I've always felt left out not being able to participate in tabletop games, so I think this might be good for me. Not Without Help: Accessibility in activism 2025-01-03T00:00:00+00:00 After attending a protest with a friend, we started talking about accessibility in the context of activism. In particular, thinking about how attending public actions isn't an option for everyone; it's difficult enough for me and my friend due to sensory issues. But there are other ways to get involved; I did some web development work for the group organizing the protest, for example. The problem is, a lot of folks are turned off the idea of getting involved because they have a limited view of what activism looks like. We started thinking about how you can find roles for people in activist groups they might not otherwise think they have a role in. We were inspired by this infographic</a> by Devon Price, which introduces the concept of activist "character classes"--examples of roles folks can take in activist group that go beyond attending protests. I decided to build a website called Not Without Help</a>, with the goal of connecting activist groups with people who want to get involved. It's an inbox for organizers to collect contact information from folks who are interested, and where volunteers can share information about what kinds of help they can offer. I used Devon Price's activist character classes as a template for respondents to check off which roles they're interested in. It's intended to be a replacement for tools like Google Forms, albeit with a much more limited feature set. I implemented end-to-end encryption for responses, so only the organizers can see the information people submit. I also implemented a system for access control, so that organizers can control who they authorize to view the responses, and revoke that access if necessary. Right now, the tool is pretty simple and the feature set is fairly limited. I have some ideas for what comes next, but I need to give more thought to exactly what problems I'm trying to solve, and probably get feedback from activist groups to understand what their needs are. Some ideas I've had so far: Building it out into a more generic form builder, or at least allowing organizers to define their own roles not on the preset list.</li> Implementing a sort of job board where organizers can opt to list their group in a central directory, and volunteers can browse groups looking for help.</li> </ul> I'm happy with the progress I've made so far, and I'm excited to move forward with the project and see what comes next. My theme for 2025: Get Involved 2024-12-20T00:00:00+00:00 Every new year, I designate a theme for the coming calendar year. Different from a resolution--rather than prescribe specific goals--it provides a framework to influence the decisions I make over the course of the coming year. My theme for 2024 was "Say yes to things". The goal was to get myself out of my comfort zone and try things I might not otherwise try, even if my anxiety would typically steer me away from them. Someone invited me to a concert last-minute? Or on a trip with few concrete details? Or to an event I don't know if I'll enjoy? Or to a party where I don't know anyone? Or to a new social situation I don't have a script for? My anxiety would typically steer me away from saying yes to these kinds of invitations, but since it's my Year of Saying Yes to Things, I guess I'll go anyways. This year's theme was a huge success. Most of the things I said yes to (and might otherwise have said no to) turned out to be good experiences, and many of them even cherished memories. I got to have a lot of experiences I might not have had otherwise, and I think this experiment has been good for me in lasting ways; navigating new and unfamiliar situations helps me build up a library of scripts for those situations, which reduces my anxiety considerably the next time I find myself in a similar one. My theme for 2025 is "Getting involved". Taking the success of 2024 a step further, I want to push myself to get more involved in the communities that I'm a part of. Whether that's getting more involved with activist groups, helping to build a furry art space in Somerville</a>, contributing to more open-source projects, civic engagement, or something else I haven't thought of yet, I'm tired of being siloed in the work that I do. I want to be part of something larger than the solo projects I usually occupy myself with. I want to make a difference. If you're reading this, leave a comment letting me know what your theme for 2025 is. This isn't YouTube--I'm not getting points for engagement--I genuinely want to know! Migrating my photo library to Immich 2024-11-20T00:00:00+00:00 A few years ago I undertook a project to de-Google my life, as much as possible. There are a few Google services I still use--I haven't been able to divorce myself from Google Calendar just yet--but overall the endeavor has been fairly successful! Beyond the obvious reason to move away from Google services--privacy--having custody over my own data is important to me. I've heard too many stories of people having their Google accounts suspended due to a false-positive in Google's abuse detection systems, often without recourse. One of the major Google services I wanted to move away from is Google Photos. It's admittedly a good product, but I wanted something open-source and self-hosted with reasonable feature parity. I eventually settled on PhotoPrism</a>. PhotoPrism replicates some of Google Photos' most useful features, namely face and object detection. It also adds some new ones, like: Screenshots, memes, and other non-photographic images are automatically partitioned off into a separate folder. This is really nice for allowing me to back up everything without cluttering my photos timeline with memes.</li> Nearly-identical photos (usually photos that were taken in burst mode or in quick succession) are stacked together, so they're still individually accessible but don't clutter up your library.</li> You can mark some photos as private so they're hidden from your library by default. This makes handing your phone to someone to scroll through your photos much less anxiety-provoking.</li> You can configure it to automatically detect NSFW photos and mark them as private.</li> </ul> Unfortunately though, the PhotoPrism UX isn't great. It's slow, there's no native app for mobile (only a PWA), and it relies on a clunky third-party app to sync photos from your phone. A friend recently introduced me to Immich</a>, and I wanted to give it a try. The UI is much faster than PhotoPrism and more touch-friendly on mobile, comparable to Google Photos. It doesn't have private photos, photo stacking, or non-photographic image detection like PhotoPrism, but it does have a promising roadmap</a> which includes at least some of those features. Migrating my photo library over from PhotoPrism to Immich wasn't terribly difficult. I found this script</a> for migrating albums and favorites, which worked reasonably well. The most challenging part was that my ISP only offers paltry upload speeds. I really love just how much high-quality open-source software there is out there going toe-to-toe with proprietary services from major tech companies. If you're interested in trying Immich yourself, but find self-hosting intimidating, I recommend checking out PikaPods</a>. They offer managed hosting for a bunch of FOSS apps, and they make it pretty simple. Building a furry art and maker space 2024-11-15T00:00:00+00:00 Update: The project has a website</a>. After some folks in my local furry community were struggling to find a venue to organize a meetup, someone floated an idea: what if furries in my city had their own venue? A space where they could host events, workshops, and classes, socialize, and collaborate on projects? An art and maker space where folks would have access to equipment and storage for their projects. The crazy thing is that I think it might actually happen. I'm excited by the idea of having a "third place</a>"--someplace I can escape to to get out of the house, meet new people, work on projects, and feel a sense of community. I think that's something I've been lacking: a broader sense of community beyond just my extended friend network. I get some of that in kink, but I'm not actually particularly active in the local scene these days. The kink community is a context that frames most of my relationships and social interactions, but it's not necessarily something I feel like I'm "part of" beyond the people I am personally or transitively acquainted with. I think having this third space will be particularly impactful for me because I work from home, and so don't really have a "second place" either. I spend most of my time either in my home or those of my friends; I don't spend much time out in the world unless there's a specific activity attached, and there aren't really any communal spaces I frequent. The part of the process of planning and creating this space that has just absolutely blown me away is how well-connected these folks are, along with the range of impressive accomplishments they each personally bring to the table. Within a few days they've assembled a team of local furries with experience in leadership positions, community organizing, running art studios and maker spaces, fundraising and applying for grants, and even an CPA accountant. They've self-organized into working groups, established a membership model, and collected pledges for membership fees totaling a few thousands dollars a month. And this is all just from word of mouth over the span of about a week. I am amazed by how much talent is concentrated in this community and how quickly they've been able to mobilize to make this dream a reality. The timeline is long; they're not expecting to be ready to move in until Spring 2026 at the earliest. Still, I'm excited to see what happens. Oh wait I can make zines too 2024-11-13T00:00:00+00:00 We're all trying to figure out how to move forward after the election1</a>. I want to get more involved in my local community, and I'm hoping that involvement can be an antidote to the powerlessness I've been feeling. Over the weekend I helped a friend who was making a zine on how to make activism accessible. They live in a fairly rural area, so I offered to help them circulate it. We printed a few dozen copies and I took a stack home to distribute in my city. There are a lot of Little Free Libraries</a> in my area--I was able to hit 10 or so within just a mile radius of my apartment--so the plan was to drop a copy in each one. It's such a tiny act of resistance, but it felt good to do something. Even just as a distraction. Since doing this, I've been reflecting on how powerful and relevant zines feel as a medium, even as I type this for my web log. There's something deeply intimate about printing 20 zines and reaching 20 people in your local community, as opposed to publishing to this log and reaching an unknown number of people not bound by geography. And I realized that I can do it too; I can make my own zines and circulate them in my community. It feels silly that this comes as such a shocking revelation for me--that I can print and fold paper instead of building complex web apps with a global reach--but I'm excited by the possibilities. Maybe I can put my typewriter</a> to use for it, even. One friend joked I should make a zine to proselytize about Linux. That would actually be very silly and on-brand of me; maybe I should. If you're reading this in the future or from outside the US, I'm specifically referring to the 2024 US presidential election. Depending on how the next four years go, future readers may not need this disambiguated. ↩</a> </li> </ol> </section> Empire of Normality: A review 2024-10-22T00:00:00+00:00 Summary</h2> The book opens by explaining that traditionally, across cultures, mental and bodily health were conceptualized as a matter of balance or equilibrium rather than a pathology of specific disorders to be cured. However, with the Industrial Revolution came the idea that the body can be conceptualized as a machine that is either "working" or "broken". Health was assessed in terms of productivity, and productivity was assessed in terms of production output. This body-as-a-machine paradigm benefited white, nondisabled, middle-class people by justifying and reifying the hierarchies imposed by colonialism and imperialism. Today, we assess health in terms of deviation from a statistical mean, with bands of deviation that we consider "healthy". Historically, however, this was not the case. This concept of an "ideal man" based in systematically ranking people only came with the Industrial Revolution and its propensity to value some bodies and minds over others. Karl Marx's theory of alienation argues that capitalism and the specialization of labor deprive workers of independent thought the ability to self-direct. Chapman argues that while this theory was originally proposed in the context of manufacturing work in a primarily industrial economy, the concept still applies to post-industrial economies where physical labor is replaced with cognitive and emotional labor. Rather than some sort of disease or chemical imbalance, it is capitalism which disables us by holding us to impossibly stringent standards of functioning--narrowing the requirements for what is required to thrive in society. As the social model of disability posits that it is society's inability to accommodate difference that disables us, Chapman argues that capitalism creates a world tailored to the needs and abilities of a small subset of bodyminds. While there have been recent pushes to accommodate the differences and recognize the abilities of neurodivergent people in the workplace, these only serve to mine neurodivergent people as an untapped source of productivity. Chapman's central thesis in Empire of Normality is that we won't see true neurodivergent liberation until we fully dismantle capitalism. Review</h2> The ideas presented in this book are solid and well-argued, but potentially difficult to follow without some familiarity with the basic concepts of disability justice and the neurodiversity movement. I think this book may have benefited from a more accessible introduction to these concepts, building up to its more complex ideas. I think a dense text written in academic prose is somewhat at odds with the spirit of accommodating a broad spectrum of cognitive styles and abilities. I also think the book's focus on recounting a comprehensive history may have done it a disservice. Not having much of background in philosophy or socioeconomic theory, I struggled to follow the volley of names of people and theories and ideologies--flipping back and forth between chapters before giving up and glossing over them. All that being said, this book is well worth the read for anyone interested in disability justice and neurodiversity theory. Much of the field has not kept up with the pace of neurodivergent-led theory and activism, whereas Empire of Normality is refreshingly contemporary, relevant, and nuanced. It's also a relatively short text, which offsets its density. While the book's arguments are nuanced, it does not vacillate in its convictions. Chapman does not back down from their central thesis: neurodivergent liberation is impossible under capitalism. Web feeds: An antidote to doomscrolling 2024-10-17T00:00:00+00:00 Web feeds, commonly known as RSS feeds1</a>, are a mechanism for subscribing to news sites, blogs, podcasts, social media posts, and really anything else on the web. Most blogging engines automatically generate a web feed. Most news sites have web feeds. Social media posts on Mastodon</a> have web feeds. The US government has a collection of feeds</a> for everything from congressional bills to court decisions. You install an app on your phone or computer, pick which feeds you want to subscribe to, and they appear in your own personal timeline. It's a simple system that has incredible power for putting you back in control of your mental health. We're used to massive machine learning models curating our feeds for us, deciding what media we consume. And this concept is sold to us under the premise that these feeds are "personalized"--relevant to our interests. What we often forget is the incentives at play. Companies make money when we engage with their platforms, and so they are incentivized to monopolize our attention by any means necessary. This causes tragic, inflammatory, and polarizing content to bubble up to the top, which affects not just our health as individuals, but the cohesion and strength of our communities. Shortly after coming out as trans, my news feed was inundated with transphobic content, assaulting me with news of oppressive policy decisions and violence around the country and around the world. This was happening during a vulnerable period in my transition, when I was trying to figure out what my future would look like. And it gave me anxiety about the world I was coming into. This prompted me to step away from algorithmic news feeds and focus on the news I actually want to consume--the news that isn't detrimental to my health--and web feeds were the solution to that. Feed readers let you subscribe to the content you want to see. Many let you set up custom feeds aggregating multiple news sources. Some even let you set up keyword filters to block out content you don't want to see or notify you for content you do. There are a number of open-source and proprietary feed readers for desktop and mobile. Seeing exactly the content you've subscribed to shouldn't be a radical concept. Web feeds are an open standard; anyone can publish them, and anyone can subscribe to them, and corporations can't take that away from you. Technically, RSS is one of several web feed formats, but it's been genericized as a term for web feeds generally. This site has an Atom</a> feed instead, which is a more modern alternative. If you're making a website, you should probably use Atom instead of RSS. ↩</a> </li> </ol> </section> The Gemini protocol: Bringing back the old web 2024-10-15T00:00:00+00:00 This has no relation to Google's Gemini large language model. The Gemini protocol</a> is a lightweight alternative to the web. I'll often jokingly refer to it as "Web 0.5", playing on terms like "Web 2.0" and "Web 3.0". Over the past few decades, the web has grown into a behemoth--a massive, global platform for building rich applications and networks that serve billions of users. The smallweb movement presents an alternative: small websites and small networks. Tight-knit communities of peers. A focus on content over presentation. In its earliest iterations, the web was nothing more than a network of documents that link to one another. Check out the first ever website</a> as an example. Over time, the web has accumulated layers of complexity to enable the applications it's used for today. That complexity comes at a cost, however: ballooning resource usage requiring ever-more powerful computers, threats to our privacy, and the commodification of our attention. Gemini is a return to the principles of the early web: a network of documents that link to one another. It's private, secure, and lightweight by default--deliberately designed to head off any attempts to expand its scope or complexity. Instead of massive social media networks controlled by big tech monopolies, Gemini is full of small blogs and personal sites hosted by individuals just for the fun of it. If this appeals to you, I encourage you to give it a try. I recommend downloading Lagrange</a>, a browser like Chrome or Firefox, but for Gemini. If you're interested in hosting your own Gemini site, I built a simple static site generator</a> that you might find useful. I used to host a Gemini site under this domain. I've taken a break from it, but might return someday. Amid the growing enshittification of the web, alternatives like Gemini are starting to look more and more appealing. They won't replace the web, but they don't need to. Gemini is a small, quiet corner I can retreat to when I need a break, and I'm grateful for it. A case for typewriters 2024-10-14T00:00:00+00:00 A few months ago I bought myself a typewriter. Friends were somewhat baffled, given that I work in tech, but I've found that I actually really enjoy using it. Between my job and hobbies, I spend a lot of time in front of a screen. Computers are attention-grabbing and pull me away from my physical environment; I can spend hours working on a personal project and fully disconnect from the world around me, distorting the passage of time. I don't like this sensation of realizing I've been absorbed for hours, and typewriters solve that for me. Using a typewriter is a very manual and intentional process that I find grounding and meditative. I'm sitting down to use it for a specific purpose, without any distractions to divert my attention. The process of it--lifting the bail, inserting the paper, turning the platen, setting margins--is a ritual I really enjoy. I mostly use it to write letters; I enjoy exchanging letters with my friends. I find them to be a more personal and thoughtful way to express my appreciation for someone--it's easier to be vulnerable the more asynchronous the communication method is. I also use it for taking notes occasionally. This one is situational, because I need most of my notes in my notes app so I always have them available and can search them, but some things I actually prefer to have on paper, like if I want to pin them to the fridge to reference at home. Often when writing notes or letters or stories, I get caught up fussing with wording and structure, and that gets in the way of me actually getting my thoughts out of my head. Because my typewriter makes editing more difficult, I'm forced to just write, without being perfectly happy with what I've written. I may go through multiple drafts, but there's a practical limit to how much I can revise. For me, one of the major hurdles to doing creative work is accepting that "good enough" is good enough. To that end, my typewriter has been quite helpful. Referring to the lark 2024-10-11T00:00:00+00:00 I love experimenting with pronouns and the ways in which we refer to one another. I use they/it pronouns. I often have a difficult time articulating what exactly it is about it/it that I enjoy; I guess I like the idea that my gender isn't just nonbinary, but other. In the same vein, there are other ways I like to play with pronouns. I also enjoy: Referring to myself in the third person.</li> When folks use my name as a common noun.</li> When folks use third-person pronouns in second-person contexts.</li> </ol> Using my name as a common noun could mean saying things like: "What's new with the lark?" </blockquote> "I found a lark!" </blockquote> Using third-person pronouns in second-person contexts means that, when addressing me directly, people use the third person, like this: "Would Lark like to go out to eat?" </blockquote> "I need to talk to Lark about something." </blockquote> I've come to quite enjoy being referred to this way. A surprising number of my friends have picked it up; once a few started doing it consistently, others followed suit, without me ever talking to them about it. I'm quite lucky to have friends who are willing to indulge me in these experiments 💚 test post; please ignore 2024-10-10T00:00:00+00:00 Hello! I've decided it's finally time to build myself a proper personal site. Let's see how this goes.

Lark Space

My theme for 2026: Year of Collaboration

FanJam: A free event planning app for small cons

Ace Archive is an amateur project, and that's okay

Self-hosting a Matrix homeserver

Why do messaging apps assume I have a canonical name?

A lark by any other name</h2> My name is Lark Aster. At least that's the name I go by in Lark Space. It's also what most of my friends call me. But I actually have a few other chosen names that I use in different contexts:</p>

Deconstructing the canonical name paradigm</h2> Discord actually solves this problem for me quite well. The way it handles names is pretty flexible:</p> You choose a single "user profile" name that everyone sees by default.</li>

Switching to Jujutsu: A git-compatible VCS

Choosing my starred contacts as a relationship anarchist

Cuttle: A combat card game

Not Without Help: Accessibility in activism

My theme for 2025: Get Involved

Migrating my photo library to Immich

Building a furry art and maker space

Oh wait I can make zines too

Empire of Normality: A review

Web feeds: An antidote to doomscrolling

The Gemini protocol: Bringing back the old web

A case for typewriters

Referring to the lark

test post; please ignore