Lark Space

"Other" is the point

2026-09-23T00:00:00Z

This post was written for the September 2026 Midway Menagerie, where the theme is "identity and the self".

"Othering"--treating or portraying a group of people as fundamentally different from yourself--is an act of hate. The point is to malign groups you want gone.

It's also a concept I identify with, and I want to talk about that.

I use it/it pronouns, which is similar contradiction; to call someone an "it" is to dehumanize them, often with hateful intent. And in that context it certainly doesn't feel good. But among friends, being referred to with it/it pronouns actually feels affirming in a gender-y way.

I use other objectifying language to refer to myself as well. "Thing" feels pretty good. I like using third-person language in first- and second-person contexts ("How's Lark doing today?"). Also using "lark" as a common noun ("It's a lark!").

It is definitely not obvious to most people how objectifying language could be affirming for me, and for that reason most people are hesitant to use it.

I don't really identify with concepts like therian or otherkin; I don't feel a strong affinity toward a particular animal, object, or concept. It's moreso that my gender goals feel misaligned with humanity in an abstract sense.

Staring HRT^[1] was a critical step in my transition, and one of the best decisions I've ever made. I've managed to hit many of the goals I had set out for myself when I started my transition, which feels good. The more time I've spent living in my new body, however, the more I've come to realize there are still aspects of my physiology that don't feel aligned with my gender. But of the various alternatives, none of the options available to humans feel correct.

This is a really weird spot to be in, particularly because in some cases I don't even understand what an ideal state would look like. There's just a vague sense of wanting some secret third option.

My affinity for objectifying language isn't just about my body; it represents a more fundamental disconnect with how humans operate. This is definitely tied up with my neurotype as well--spending much of my life studying human interactions to try and crack the secret code of conventional social norms.

Reclaiming the concept of other is a rejection of humanity, but also an invitation to explore and own my full authentic self.

Relating all of this to this month's theme, I think part of what draws me to furry is the dehumanizing nature of it. I've talked before about how my connection to this community isn't really about being an animal person, but I do appreciate feeling less alone sitting with these feelings. While not universal, wanting to live in the body of your fursona is such a common experience here that I feel solidarity with the community.

I don't really know what I am. I'm not quite an animal, but hanging out with the animal people helps me feel okay being other.

HRT, or hormone replacement therapy, is a course of medical treatment where you take synthetic hormones to supplement or replace certain hormones in your body, typically testosterone or the various estrogens. Both cisgender and transgender people take HRT for various reason. ↩

Setting up my capsule tinylog

2026-09-05T00:00:00Z

Starting a tinylog

After Twitter died but before Bluesky won the race to replace it^[1], Mastodon was picking up a lot of attention from outside the usual FOSS crowd. I had never tried microblogging before--or any social media for that matter--so I figured I would give it a go.

I tried Mastodon three times, and fell off each time^[2]. Looking back, I think microblogging just isn't for me. It felt like everyone who bubbled up in my feed was funnier and more clever than me, and I couldn't help but compare myself to them. I was hanging on my phone feeding off the pings every time I got a rare like or retweet. It wasn't good for me.

I eventually settled on a read-only Bluesky so I can keep up with IRL friends.

Recently, my friend Ån got me back into Gemini--a sort of lightweight alternative to the web. They sold me on making a tinylog--the Gemini equivalent of a microblog.

You can find mine here: gemini://gemini.lark.gay/log/

I'm optimistic about this go-around. I think shouting into the void might work better for me than fishing for engagement; few enough people use Gemini that I don't feel so much pressure to produce quality content. My hope is that this can just be a place where I dump my miscellaneous thoughts over the course of the day without thinking too hard about it. Maybe I have a handful of friends who check in periodically. Maybe it's just for me.

I even set up a flow so I can post tinylog entries from my phone! That turned out to be much more complicated than I anticipated, so the rest of this post is going to be my devlog.

The devlog

The tinylog itself is a single gemtext file that is appended to with new log entries. That file then needs to be checked into version control, pushed to GitHub, and copied to my Gemini server.

To post a tinylog entry, I use this web form. I have a magic link with a token in the query params that authenticates me.

That web form makes a fetch request against this edge function, which pulls the gemtext file from GitHub, appends the new entry, and pushes it back to main. I made this unnecessarily complicated by calling GitHub's low-level API to modify the git database directly. I could have just shelled out to git and executed a few commands, but instead I have to juggle refs, trees, blobs, and commits by hand. It is unclear why I chose this path.

Once the updated gemtext file is in main, I use a CI pipeline to copy the file to my VPS over SFTP. The CI pipeline in turn calls a just recipe.

It's clunky and inefficient. Posting a single tinylog entry takes over 30 seconds start to finish.

Still, I'm excited to give it a try.

Subjective opinion. ↩
Of course each time I took a break the instance I was using disappeared, so I needed to find a new instance and make a new account. ↩

Where is furry?

2026-08-18T00:00:00Z

This post was written for the August 2026 Midway Menagerie, where the theme is "Where is furry?"

Recently, someone sent me this article by Dr. Devon Price, in which they define queerness not as something you are, but as something you do and the people you surround yourself with. It articulates something I've felt for a while--that "queer" is not just a synonym for "LGBT". "Queer" is counterculture, a rejection of normative ideals. I'm not queer because I was simply born that way, or because I inject the gender juice once a week; I'm queer because I reject normative ideas about gender and sexuality, and because I live in community with others who do the same.

I've been thinking about how this perspective applies to furry. What makes me a furry? Like I talked about last month, it's not necessarily that I innately identify as an animal person.

This month Ån asks the question "Where is furry?", and while I could say that my primary touchpoint with furry is the in-person events--conventions, meetups, Anville, etc.--I think it's worth introspecting about what brings me to these spaces in the first place.

Furry isn't just a fandom; it's a counterculture. It's disproportionately queer and neurodivergent. It's a haven for people too weird to fit in; cringe culture broadly shuns furries^[1] as so weird as to trigger secondhand embarrassment. As my friend Loaf puts it: "being a furry is being gay for gay people". By adopting the label, furries are choosing to own that identity.

I'm furry not because I'm an animal person, but because I choose to adopt the label and everything that comes with it. The way I present in public reflects this.

Folks who know me rarely see me without my collar--a leather collar with a nametag dangling from it. It says "Lark". I wear it pretty much everywhere, sometimes against my better judgement. Most people don't acknowledge it, sometimes I get compliments on it^[2], but wearing it in public has never been a problem^[3].

Folk in the kink community generally read it as fetishwear--that I've been "collared"^[4]. Goths and punks read it as alt fashion. Furries read it as furry attire. None of these explanations tell the full story.

My collar isn't just alt fashion. It's not just queer signaling. It doesn't symbolize my relationship with anyone else. It also predates me identifying as a furry.

My collar represents my relationship with normativity. My relationship with queerness. But most importantly, it represents a commitment to myself--a commitment to own my identity, live authentically, and not let internalized shame direct the course of my life.

When I started wearing my collar out, I was terrified. But I pushed through the discomfort, hoping I would come out the other side of it more resilient. Wearing my collar out started as an exercise in getting over what strangers think of me, but it went on to embody a stubborn refusal to compromise on my identity. I don't hide who I am, because I don't feel like I can be my full authentic self otherwise.

Where is furry? Furry is something I carry with me--symbolically on my body, but also as a promise to be the most Lark I can be. More than just the friends I've made and the events I attend, furry represents growth. Finding myself has been a journey, and I owe much of what I've uncovered so far to this community.

The Wikipedia article on cringe culture literally opens with a picture of fursuiters. ↩
Sometimes these compliments are a subtle "I see you; I know what you are", but just as often I get genuine compliments from seemingly clueless strangers, which is also kinda sweet. Often they'll call it my "necklace". ↩
Ironically the one time I've been asked to take it off was at a much (a casual social kink event), because the greeters were worried about attracting too much attention from strangers. ↩
If you're not familiar, "collaring" someone is a tradition in the kink community that symbolizes reaching a certain level of commitment in the relationship. Generally, one person presents the other with a collar for them to wear, not unlike how couples in many cultures exchange rings when they're married. Often a more subtle "day collar" is worn when in public, if the person does not want to attract too much attention. My collar is definitely not subtle. ↩

Midway Menagerie July 2026 Roundup: "Fandom and Community"

2026-08-04T00:00:00Z

These are the posts from the July 2026 Midway Menagerie, a monthly furry blogging carnival. This month's theme was "Fandom and Community".

Loaf wrote "furry community", where he talks about his introduction to furry, what joining the fandom has meant to him, his relationship with online vs in-person community, and what it means to adopt the label.

In my first year of being a furry, my life completely transformed. I left a depressive haze and suddenly was on a nonstop emotional rollercoaster of extremely heightened experiences. Life was bright and overwhelming. I was alive, as myself, properly, for maybe the first time in my life. I had no idea what I was doing; the rules by which I lived my life no longer applied. Anything was possible.

As someone who is also fairly new to furry, it was interesting comparing our experiences. Like Loaf, online community has never really clicked for me; my social groups are all people I know IRL. Unlike Loaf, I spent most of my first con hiding in the quiet room.

Riven wrote "Fandom and Community", where they reflect on how the intersection of the furry fandom and IRL meetups allowed them to engage in fandom in a way they had never been able to before.

It was only when I found out that these gay little animals in my computer actually meet up in real life and hang out that I realized what a joy it was to be part of the community. Being able to talk face to face made everything so much easier - these were no longer nebulous titans, but actual ~~people~~ animals with their own personality and quirks.

I think Riven neatly summarizes one of the main hangups I have engaging with online community: "feeling like part of the conversation". Online interactions aren't bookended the way in-person interactions are; there's no way to jump in without feeling like I'm crashing a party.

Rouka wrote "Individualism in Fandoms", where she discusses her journey stepping into various communities--everything from furry to kink to gacha--and the roadblocks she faced along the way. She describes the way special education isolates neurodivergent kids, the challenge of expressing your authentic self while living with conservative parents, and the difficulty of breaking into longstanding friend groups. She closes with a message of hope for herself.

Don’t forget to remind yourself why you are in the community you are in to begin with, and don’t forget who you are and ultimately have a clear idea of who you want to be, both yourself and the people you want to be around.

I definitely relate to how impossible breaking into longstanding friend groups can feel, as well as the perils of navigating unspoken social rules. Rouka makes a good point in that it takes a stable foundation--a good home life and people who accept you for who you are--to have a chance of being social and stepping out into community. For different reasons--mostly health-related in my case--I didn't have that stable foundation when I was younger, and that similarly hampered my ability to make friends and find community.

Enii wrote "Midway Menagerie: July 2026", where she recounts her introduction to furry, from childhood to the present day. She talks about early experiences encountering furries online, early-web furry communities, platforms that have come and gone, her first conventions, and the friends she made along the way.

It was the summer of 2012 when I first learned about furries. I was on summer vacation before entering 8th grade and bouncing around YouTube one afternoon. I don't remember what led me to it, but eventually I stumbled across a few videos of the dance competition at Anthrocon 2012. I was amazed at the dancers' skill and especially at the fact that they pulled it off in full costume!

While the timeline differed--I didn't develop an interest in furry until a few years ago--running across videos of fursuiters having fun at a convention was the spark for me as well. I was also personally touched to hear that Anville has become so important to her, as it has to me.

Ån submitted "Fandom and Community", an essay in the form of an interactive text-based RPG. This poignant autobiographical piece is a non-chronological account of their entrance into the furry community, from the fandom's earliest days to our local furry scene.

Now, in the early 21st century, "community," like "friend," becomes a treacherous word. It gets stretched to cover fandoms, support networks, weak ties, strong ties, products and sales pitches. It's nearly meaningless, and also, in ways I've never said out loud, something I don't think I could exist without.

Aside from being absolutely stunned by the effort that clearly went into this piece, I appreciated the vulnerable perspective into the life and history of a friend I consider a pillar of our local community. It's a reminder that we've all been small, scared, and unsure of our place in the world.

Goose wrote "Furries turned Family: Fandom of Being a Good Community Member", in which they distinguish between fandom as an interest group and fandom as a community. They never saw the interest in fandom until they accidentally dropped into the furry community and came to understand the ways in which furries uplift and support one another as family. They compare their experiences in the furry community with the kinds of community support families relied on to survive when they were growing up, and express gratitude for the furry family they've surrounded themself with.

And yea, maybe I found a good group, full of really cool people, who bring out the “italian grandmother” in me. Maybe I’ve found the most helpful and kind group of human beings in my city. But I’m damn grateful for them. They’re the difference between friends and community, fandom and family, and they welcome people with open arms. You just have to brave enough to ask to be apart of it all.

I grew up under a fairly traditional nuclear family structure, and I never had to wonder if my basic needs would be met. As a consequence of this privilege, I never really saw what this kind of community support looks like until I went out into the world on my own. I have friends who are going through it, and seeing how their communities turn out for them has been a beautiful thing.

anchovie wrote "on fandom and community", in which shi tries to pin down a definition of furry and hir relationship with the label. Shi talks about furry as a "gateway" to other communities, and why shi has historically been reluctant to identify as a furry.

so what is furry to me? is it some sort of weirdly-arranged fruit basket of hobbies i only participate in with other animal-people on the Internet? am i really a furry if my engagements with other furries are entirely dictated by mutual interest in non-furry things?

To this day, have a difficult time identifying as a furry without qualification. As I talk about in my piece, the interest in anthropomorphic characters that "traditionally" defines the community doesn't feel like it leaves a lot of space for me and my place in furry. Like anchovie's "gateway" analogy, I feel like it's mostly the connection that have come out of it which define what being a furry means to me.

I wrote "It's not really about the animals", where I describe how my relationship with the furry community is more centered on the community aspect than the furry part. I talk about the challenges I face integrating into new social contexts, and how rewarding it's been to come out on the other side of it.

My evolution from that timidity to organizing events of my own has been really good for me--a measure of self-confidence and proof that I can step into new social contexts and find success, even when it's hard.

Thank you to everyone who participated for the first month of this new carnival! It brings me joy to see folks engaging with this silly little project of mine, and I'm excited to see what folks write next month.

I encourage you to leave comments below with your thoughts on any of this month's submissions, or just the carnival as a whole. Also let me know if you would like to volunteer to host the carnival in September!

The theme for next month (August 2026) is "Where is furry?", hosted by Ån.

It's not really about the animals

2026-07-13T00:00:00Z

This post was written for the July 2026 Midway Menagerie, where the theme is "Fandom and Community".

I always love asking furries how they ended up in the community. Was there a particular piece of media that pulled them in? Did a friend drag them to a con? Did they find the fandom at a young age, or did it take time? How much do they engage in online vs IRL community? How long did it take to transition from engaging privately to engaging in community^[1]? To what extend do they even identify as a furry^[2]?

I like asking these questions because I'm fairly new to the community myself. It was only January 2025--about a year and a half ago as I'm writing this--that I adopted the label, after attending my first fur con. I didn't really consider myself a furry before then. I was curious, and probably would have accepted "furry-adjacent", but I never had a phase of being fully invested in furry without also engaging in furry community--unlike many of my friends, some of whom spent years as a closet fur. Online community and social media have never worked for me, so it took meeting someone at a party to find my entry point.

I also like asking folks this question because I think it reveals something about what furry identity and furry community mean to them. Because it wasn't the media or art that pulled me in; it was the people I met. For me, furry isn't really about the animals; it's about the people.

What do I mean by that? I have some art of myself in a cat shape, and I've always felt a certain affinity toward cats, but I don't identify strongly with my fursona in the way some friends do. I have friends whose relationship with their sense of self, body, and fursona remind me a lot of my experience of gender pre-transition. To them, their fursona is who they are--canonically. My relationship with my fursona--to the extent I even have one--isn't nearly that powerful.

To explain what I love about the furry community, I'll defer to what I wrote for the Anville website:

If you're part of the furry community, then you know: we look out for each other. We fund each other's healthcare. We house each other. We show up for one another.

Furries value artists; we have our own economy that respects the work of creatives and cares about compensating them, which is especially important right now.

Furries accept each other as we are, because the diversity of identities that intersect in this community mean that we know what it's like to be pushed to the margins.

The furries are shockingly well-connected. I'd like to think I had a fairly active social life before finding the furry community. But after? It absolutely exploded. The number of furry meetups, club nights, and events in my mid-sized city is dizzying, and friends who are new to the local community report the same experience. I've even dipped my toe into community organizing with Anville.

To expand on my experience with furry community, I'd like to talk about one event in particular.

There's a monthly furry meetup at a brewery in my city, which over the past year and a half has become the nexus of furry community for me; we generally see 20-40 folks each month, and at this point I know most of the regulars. I always look forward to seeing my friends, and they're excited to see me too! Making this meetup every month is a high priority for me; in the past 18 months I've only missed one.

For as much as I love this meetup, it wasn't always a good time. I really struggled to integrate myself into the group, which is unfortunately typical for a Lark entering new social contexts. Coming in, it felt like everyone already knew each other, and had for years. Folks knew what to talk about, caught up, shared inside jokes… they belonged there. I certainly didn't feel that way. I've never been great at driving conversations with people I don't know well, and inserting yourself into others' conversations runs the risk of being rude and disruptive.

There were several months I left early and walked home in tears. It feels embarrassing to admit that in a blog post I'm sharing with these same friends; it's not like anyone was being mean or deliberately excluding me. Having the kind of relationship with the group that I enjoy now simply felt unattainable, and that's a problem that it took me a full twelve months to crack. I started attending this meetup in January 2025, and I distinctly remember the December 2025 meetup being the first time I left that brewery feeling like I was in a space were I belonged, surrounded by friends. Since then, I've had a wonderful time each month.

I'm incredibly happy to be where I'm at with this group, but there's still grief about needing to work so hard to get there, especially when I see folks who joined much more recently than me build those relationships so much quicker. I don't like to think of relationship-building as a race, but it does feel like getting lapped. I sometimes even feel jealous watching it happen.

Still, I'm proud of myself. Part of what makes me so proud of the work I've done with Anville is the personal development it represents. It took months of encouragement for a friend to finally convince me to attend the brewery meetup; I was too timid. My evolution from that timidity to organizing events of my own has been really good for me--a measure of self-confidence and proof that I can step into new social contexts and find success, even when it's hard.

A few months ago, during Q&A after giving a talk, a friend in the audience raised their hand and asked me how I would define "community". Despite having spent the past 40 minutes talking about community, I didn't have a good answer for them, and I don't have one now. For a long time, "community" was something I felt I was lacking--even among a healthy friend group--but I could never put my finger on what exactly I was looking for.

Whatever "community" is, I think I've finally found it.

Not to presuppose that this is how it works for everyone, but if they've never engaged in furry community, I probably haven't met them to ask the question! ↩
I do have at least one friend who is not a furry, but still attends furry cons and meetups fairly regularly. ↩

Call for submissions: July 2026 Midway Menagerie - "Fandom and Community"

2026-06-16T00:00:00Z

Update: You can read the submissions from this month here.

This is a call for submissions for the July 2026 Midway Menagerie, a monthly furry blogging carnival.

A blogging carnival is an event that gets people blogging around a particular topic. Every month, there's a theme or discussion prompt for folks to respond to, and at the end of the month there's a roundup post linking to everyone's submissions. A rotating "host" decides that month's theme, collects responses, and posts the roundup. The idea is to encourage discussion and helps folks discover new blogs. Think of it like a book club, except instead of reading books you write essays and share them.

This month's theme is "Fandom and Community". Here are some specific prompts to get you started, but feel free to take the theme in a different direction!

We often call ourselves the "furry community" or the "furry fandom", but what does that mean? What makes something a community; where does "community" start and end, and what does it mean to be part of one?
What aspects of furry community have you found rewarding or challenging?
How have you seen the furry community evolve over time? What do you think about the direction it's headed?
What was your introduction to the furry community like?
What has your experience of online vs IRL community been like? To what extent do you engage with each, and what is different between the two for you?
Some folks use the terms "furry fandom" and "furry community" interchangeably. Others use them differently, or prefer one over the other. How do you feel?
What makes the furry community different from other affinity, interest, or identity groups you may be a part of?

Submissions are due by the end of July. I'm posting this first edition of the carnival mid-June, but giving folks until the end of July so the people who told me they're interested in setting up their own blog have a little extra time to do so.

You don't need a blog to participate! If you don't have anywhere to post your submission, feel free to send it to me anyways and I'll host it here as a guest post. I'm also happy to post your submission anonymously.

You can send me your submission by commenting on this post, via email or Signal, or messaging me on any other platform (Telegram, etc.) where you have my contact info.

Still not sure how this whole carnival thing works? Check out the home page for the carnival.

Happy writing!

Starting a furry blogging carnival

2026-06-15T00:00:00Z

A blogging carnival is an event that gets people blogging around a single topic. Every month one blog volunteers to host the carnival; they choose a topic, and everyone submits their blog posts to them. At the end of the month, the host posts a "roundup" summarizing and linking to all the entries.

I used to write for two carnivals pretty regularly, on my old blog: A Carnival of Aces and its sister blog A Carnival of Aros. These blogs were mostly centered around long-form essays on asexuality and aromanticism respectively, which was very much my jam.

After being active for over 10 years, both blogs unfortunately died out a few years ago. It's shame, because I really enjoyed writing for them. These days I struggle to write as consistently as I would like to, but back then I was writing almost every month. Having a prompt helped give me a starting point--I find it much easier to be creative when given some constraints--and having a deadline helped keep me accountable to actually getting it done.

The carnivals also helped introduce me to new blogs and prompt me to read the ones I was already aware of.

I'd like to have that experience again, and maybe even share it with friends. I think it could be an excellent way to build closer connections with people in my circles--facilitate the kinds of conversations I love to have but that can be difficult to initiate in person. What if I started a furry blogging carnival? I already know a number of furries with blogs and personal sites; maybe they'd be into the idea too.

Off the top of my head, here are some ideas for carnival topics:

"Community" -- We often call ourselves the "furry community", but what does that mean? What makes something a community; where does "community" start and end, and what does it mean to be part of one? What aspects of furry community have you found rewarding or challenging?
"Representation" -- What makes furry representation in news or media "good" or "bad"? What aspects of the community do you see represented, and which do you not? What aspects of yourself do you see represented, and which do you want to? Do you think visibility is good for the furry community?
"Belonging" -- What does it mean to "belong" in the furry community? Do you feel like you belong here? Have you always?
"Identity" -- To what extent do you identify as a furry? What does being a furry mean to you?
"Self" -- How does being a furry intersect with your sense of self? Do you have a fursona? Does your fursona feel like a part of you, a character separate from you, your "true" self, or something else? Does being a furry feel like something you "do" or something you "are"?

If this idea sounds like something that would interest you, please let me know. I would love to make it happen.

My theme for 2026: Year of Collaboration

2026-01-02T00:00:00Z

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.
I started attending more protests and political actions.
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.
I got involved with my local makerspace, connecting with folks there are hosting events.
I went to my first LARP, which was a ton of fun.
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.

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

2025-09-26T00:00:00Z

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 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.

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.
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.
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.

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

2025-06-19T00:00:00Z

Last weekend I visited a queer archive library in Providence, RI, and it gave me a lot to think about. I read a zine by Paul Soulellis called Survival by Sharing, 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 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 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! 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. Every person who contributes with research, advice, or even just a friendly hello warms my gay little heart.

Self-hosting a Matrix homeserver

2025-03-24T00:00:00Z

What is Matrix?

If you're not familiar with Matrix, 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?

With Discord almost certainly approaching an IPO, I fear that the enshittification 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]; 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 and server 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

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. From the start, I was obsessed with the idea of having a lark.gay 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 called conduwuit.

The only fully feature-complete and stable server implementation available right now is Synapse, 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. 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

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 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, created a system user to run it, and used one of the provided systemd unit files--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"

As recommended in the documentation, I set up Caddy 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
}

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

Some of the complexity setting this up comes from the fact that I really wanted my homeserver's domain to be lark.gay, 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.

/.well-known/matrix/server

{
  "m.server": "matrix.lark.gay:8448"
}

/.well-known/matrix/client

{
  "m.homeserver": {
    "base_url": "https://matrix.lark.gay"
  }
}

For Matrix server delegation to work, you also need to proxy traffic to /_matrix/* and /_conduwuit/* to your homeserver. However, lark.gay 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 that lets me put a serverless function in front of the CDN, which you can see here.

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

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 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. ↩

Why do messaging apps assume I have a canonical name?

2025-03-20T00:00:00Z

A lark by any other name

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".
I have a name that my polycule calls me.
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".

I often think of my names as existing on a spectrum from most public to most private:

The name the government calls me
The name my friends call me
The name my polycule calls me
The names only specific people call me

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

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].

Deconstructing the canonical name paradigm

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.
You have the option of choosing a separate name (and pronouns!) for each server^[2] you join.
Your friends can set a "friend nickname" for you, which is the name you appear to them as in DMs and group chats.

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.
I choose a name for each server that I'm a member of, depending on which I think is most appropriate.
People who know me by a particular name can set that as my friend nickname.

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. ↩
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. ↩

Switching to Jujutsu: A git-compatible VCS

2025-02-22T00:00:00Z

I've been curious about non-git version control systems like Mercurial, Fossil, and Pijul 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. 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 for Jujutsu. You can find his blog post here.

I highly recommend you give it a try.

Choosing my starred contacts as a relationship anarchist

2025-02-17T00:00:00Z

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.
You can configure starred contacts to bypass Do Not Disturb mode.

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 anarchy^[1] 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. ↩

Cuttle: A combat card game

2025-01-14T00:00:00Z

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, 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

2025-01-03T00:00:00Z

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 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, 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.
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.

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

2024-12-20T00:00:00Z

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, 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

2024-11-20T00:00:00Z

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.

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.
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.
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.
You can configure it to automatically detect NSFW photos and mark them as private.

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, 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 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 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. They offer managed hosting for a bunch of FOSS apps, and they make it pretty simple.

Building a furry art and maker space

2024-11-15T00:00:00Z

Update: The project has a website.

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"--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

2024-11-13T00:00:00Z

We're all trying to figure out how to move forward after the election^[1].

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 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 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. ↩

Empire of Normality: A review

2024-10-22T00:00:00Z

Summary

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

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

2024-10-17T00:00:00Z

Web feeds, commonly known as RSS feeds^[1], 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 have web feeds. The US government has a collection of feeds 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 feed instead, which is a more modern alternative. If you're making a website, you should probably use Atom instead of RSS. ↩

The Gemini protocol: Bringing back the old web

2024-10-15T00:00:00Z

This has no relation to Google's Gemini large language model.

The Gemini protocol 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 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 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 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

2024-10-14T00:00:00Z

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

2024-10-11T00:00:00Z

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.
When folks use my name as a common noun.
When folks use third-person pronouns in second-person contexts.

Using my name as a common noun could mean saying things like:

"What's new with the lark?"

"I found a lark!"

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?"

"I need to talk to Lark about something."

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

2024-10-10T00:00:00Z

Hello!

I've decided it's finally time to build myself a proper personal site.

Let's see how this goes.