Multi-Interest Nerding Sideblog

If people really want you to be safe, they tell you how to protect yourself.

You don't need to go out into the world scared. Your list of "scary traits/behaviors to look out for" should be applicable to people of your own race and social class. (there is honestly not a lot of difference between a homeless guy with unpredictable and potentially dangerous behaviors and a middle or upper class guy with unpredictable and potentially dangerous behaviors. and I know this because I have been face to face with both and am here to tell you about it.)

Even if you are a woman, you can go about the world taking reasonable precautions and interact with strange men. It's fine. I am a small feminine-appearing person and strange men have been far more helpful and kind and pleasant to interact with than scaremongering tells you. I am white and have had more problems with white men than non-white men in my life.

You could be a Harvard student and also be xX_BuffyFan69_Xx on another part of the internet and internet was still a developing frontier zone enough that you wouldn't expect those identities to connect and the rules and expectations of keeping info private still held in most places.

But online "face books" of college students were becoming increasingly common and the version implemented by a certain Harvard student was popular enough that it spread to other colleges. When I first heard about Facebook, it was still a "college student" thing that you signed up for to connect with people at your college.

(I never went to a school that did this and I think it speaks to an interesting mentality that such a thing is desirable in the first place. Not to mention the side project Zuck made for rating how hot his fellow students were... Profoundly immature.)

But it quickly expanded to be a thing that anyone could join. And for a brief flicker of time there was an assumption that you would just use it to stay connected with people you knew in brickspace. But by the late 00s I was getting career advice that was "you need to have a Facebook so that employers can look you up on it" and like, there was nothing legally okay about this, but it was a quickly adopted social norm that even if they couldn't read your Facebook you needed to have one to prove that you are a normal person or employers wouldn't hire you. (I did not have a Facebook account. I have never had a Facebook account.)

Facebook also quickly realized that tying your Facebook account to your real ID and serving you ads based on your real info was far, far more appealing to advertisers than trying to pitch goods to xX_BuffyFan69_Xx. Anytime Facebook made a new disgusting policy asking to expose yourself more to the internet, it was made with the idea of milking your info to sell to advertisers. It never ever matters to Facebook execs that this might be risky for some people. Everything is about profit.

Facebook was also somewhat clever in adding features that appealed to people with a low tech-literacy. You don't need to have a website to advertise your business online. You can just have a Facebook page for it. In the early 00s, there were very few sites like Squarespace (and they tended to cost money versus Facebook being "free") and the "social media" landscape looked more like blogs and webrings still. Facebook was a blog and photo gallery and it turned your personal social connections in a sort of webring and you could have a web presence there without much more effort than making a personal Facebook page. Facebook became everything.

For a lot of people, Facebook became the face of the internet, the portal through which they did everything they did online. I am pretty sure this was by design. "Capturing" internet traffic like this means that the ads on your site will reach more users, which in turn makes it lucrative for advertisers to throw money at you.

Facebook is largely responsible for the cultural shift in the acceptability of putting personal info online and the motivation was and still is making money off of its users at any moral cost.

As someone who has never had a Facebook, and puts in a lot of effort to avoid using Facebook-owned websites or services, it's been very interesting and horrifying to see this shift happen over my lifetime, along with a lot of bad faith arguments being put forward to justify this.

If you cannot remember a time with Facebook, you were robbed of space to play with identity. You are not safer because every website has your name and location and date of birth, etc. Laws and policies that seek to strip you of your privacy online will be used to hurt more innocent people than they will protect them. You are safer when the first line of defense is in your hands, by giving you information on dangers and tools to protect yourself, including reliable information on how to seek help, or the freedom to get away from predators by just disappearing into a new identity. Privacy is a defensive tool.

Growing up on the internet, I was taught that anyone who wanted to manipulate me into giving up private information was doing so because they wanted to make me more vulnerable to further manipulation and exploitation. It was about them getting control over me.

So, whenever I see laws and policies aimed at stripping me of my right to privacy, my first thought is "how are they planning to use this to exploit and hurt me?" It's that line of thinking that has kept me from joining Facebook even when it cost me Friends and made things more difficult. Because every single time I got worn down enough to consider it, Facebook would introduce some new awful "feature" with horrible implications for safety or sanity. And sometimes they would be bad enough that an uproar would force Facebook to change (or be sneakier about implementation) but by and large....people took Facebook's word for why things would be better if your info was public, if people could tag you in photos, if everything you did online was connected to everything else but especially Facebook. And this rippled out to the rest of the internet....

I am a prickly, solitary, urban, nocturnal, tech-loving, private person. I hate gardening. Most of the Post-Revolution Pastoral Fantasies sound like an utter nightmare to me.

Frankly, if you want to form a small community of shared values and bicycles and communal gardens, these places exist already. They're called "intentional communities", these days apparently. Join one! Start one! You don't have to wait for "after the revolution!" Go now!

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

Okay this is the problem with sharing pop science stuff online and content aggregation accounts

The study is real, it's very easy to find by searching up the author's name + study. Give it a read yourself. It's written in a pretty accessible way imo.

Note that it does not put forward any explanations for why this effect happens, only that it does. In the conclusion it posits many possible reasons for why, and that it's most likely nothing to do with the specific action of walking, merely any semi automatic repetitive activity. They also acknowledge the study did not account for the social company the walkers were in, which is a pretty massive factor imo. Considering the conclusion brings up MANY alternative explanations and future experiment possibilities, it's decidedly not "killed every alternative explanation" like the tweet says. The actual paper ends like most scientific papers, listing alternative possible explanations, these are preliminary results, more research is needed, wider demographics of people need to be included, etc.

Another thing is the phrasing of these tweets are like red flags flapping in the wind to me. Any short form social media content that's 1. Pop science 2. Conveys absolute certainty 3. Ends with self improvement biohacking adjacent advice, should set off alarm bells.

Look at the implications that if the tweets were true, it would mean wheelchair users and people with mobility issues would be inherently worse at creative tasks.

So who is this person that's tweeting this, rephrasing this paper in a "helpful" way that is sure to get shares from people who really value being creative and are looking for any way to become more creative in their -

OFC ITS AN AI BRO

You wanna see what his recent articles look like?

Knitting was suggested in the study and I know a lot of people who knit or crochet as a thing to do with their hands while they think. Playing with fidgets can work for me sometimes. Chewing gum works for me sometimes. (I went through A LOT of gum during my writing gig and sometimes stock up on gum when I've got a bunch of commissions to get through, lmao)

It looks like what seemed to be promising is the sort of stuff where you can kinda auto-pilot a physical activity. So, like, if you're still learning to knit, it might be awhile before that's a thing you can mostly do without needing to think hard about it. So I think there's a lot more to it than "walking makes you creative" because even activities that seem like they might take up too much mental energy/focus could sometimes work for brainstorming time for me once they became something I could do on autopilot.

When I worked as a library page, I got to the point where I could sort and shelve books with one part of my brain and play with ideas with the rest of my brain. Heck, there are even video games that I've played enough that I can coast on minimal actual thought and kinda drift and daydream while I play and I will sometimes fire those games up specifically because I wanna keep half an eye on some ideas while they simmer.

“Voting for the lesser of two evils doesn’t work.”

How would you know? It’s never been tried for long enough.

Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, and Kamala Harris all lost.

Biden won, but most people spent his entire presidency shitting on him and giving him absolutely no credit for his successes, which were MANY. (If you need a refresher: RFMA, PACT Act, Chips and Science, Inflation Reduction Act, Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson etc.)

You can’t say “vote blue no matter who” and “vote for the lesser of two evils” doesn’t work if you refuse to ever give it a chance of working.

Also I hate that phrase “lesser of two evils” when we’re talking about someone who supports unions and immigrants and healthcare and food assistance and queer rights and voting rights over someone who is literally trying to end us all.

And the lesser of two evils is, by definition, BETTER.

It’s like the difference between a wound with a bit of an infection, and literal death. Those aren’t comparable.

Democrats are not perfect and no one has ever claimed otherwise, but they are making lasting change. It’s slow and it’s not linear , but it is happening.

Pro forced birth Democrats have been all but forced out the party. Same with anti-gay Democrats AND anti-trans Democrats. You don’t see many Dems supported by the NRA at all anymore. And all Dems believe in the climate crisis.

This was NOT a given even 10 years ago.

Democrats are not becoming more conservative. They’re becoming less. Across the board. Progressive policies have become a deal breaker.

This is what you’re saying is one of “two evils”?

Give me a break.

Do you want things to get better or do you want to scream “perfection only!” and watch it get worse?

Cause that’s what we’re living right now.

We’re living in a refusal to vote for and celebrate the successful harm reduction, or “lesser of two evils,” as you say.

There are rarely examples where we actually get to see what happens if the “lesser of two evils” wins.

And the thing is, when they win, they’re shit on so successfully that we lose next time. Again, Biden.

They do something, or many many things right and the goal post gets moved, again and again.

In the end, the only knowledge anyone has of their actions is that they can’t do anything right.

That’s a dangerous way of seeing the world.

I know this cause we are living it.

What is happening right now is a product of that way of thinking.

I don’t need to find statistics or read a report cause this is our reality.

This is what happens when people refuse to vote for and celebrate the wins of “the lesser of two evils.”

When people choose a candidate in the primary who has no chance of a snowball in hell of winning and then complain and don’t vote when a candidate they REALLY didn’t like becomes the party nominee.

This is our life.

We don’t have to imagine it.

And yet, the mantra hasn’t changed. The goalpost keeps being moved. Dems don’t get any credit for doing ANYTHING right. People spread demands that are literally impossible and convince other people that they are not only possible, but easy. And enough people refuse to vote for harm reduction that the harm is constantly increased.

Perfection is the enemy of progress. That’s not just a catchy phrase, it’s a fact.

If Al Gore had won, we would be A LOT further along on climate than we are now, and we would not have gone into Iraq.

If Hillary Clinton had won, we wouldn’t have lost the Supreme Court. We would still have Roe and affirmative action and the VRA and the Chevron Doctrine.

If Kamala Harris had won, we wouldn’t be at war with Venezuela and Iran and possibly Cuba and maybe Greenland? Trans people would not be attacked at the federal level. Immigrants would not be kidnapped off the streets. We would still have the Department of Education and labor and a DoJ that doesn’t do the president’s bidding.

THIS is the result of refusing to vote for and support the lesser of two evils, WE ARE LIVING IT!

So maybe going forward we stop. We give a chance for the lesser of two evils to actually work. To scream from the rooftops every time they do right thing. We don’t just vote for it once, but do so over at least a decade.

Cause we’ve tried your way. It hasn’t worked. This exact moment that you are reading this post is proof of that.

So let’s try this way, for once. Let’s give this country a fighting chance at actual progress.

4lb jasmine rice ($5)

24 eggs ($4)

4cups butter ($4)

4lb dry beans ($5)

buncha bananas ($2)

4lb oats ($4)

2lb ground flaxseed ($4)

10lb potatoes ($5)

10 cans tuna ($10)

2lb carrots ($3)

jar of peanut butter ($2)

a lil treat for yourself idk ($2)

But just for fun! for comparison, here's some prices from my area (usa, high cost of living ish area, trying to shop for the cheapest options I can find)

4lb jasmine rice ($10)

24 eggs ($5, surprisingly cheap actually? I mean. comparatively. I can remember buying nicer quality eggs for like half that price. so....)

4 cups butter ($10)

4lb dry beans ($6, I chose pinto beans here since butt-rice did not choose to specify)

buncha bananas ($3, estimated since bananas are sold by the lb so a big bunch or a bunch with hefty nanners may cost more!)

4lb oats (~$10-12 (unclear what kind of oats are intended so just going with the stuff I'd use to make a bowl of oatmeal which is not sold in increments that are easy to make 4lbs here so my math is kinda wibbly)

2lb ground flaxseed ($10)

10lb potatoes ($10, russets)

10 cans tuna ($12)

2lb carrots ($4)

jar of peanut butter ($4, 16oz)

a lil treat for yourself idk ($2, reese's peanut butter cups (2 cup package))

That's about $87, not including

any tax (which is also high in my area, pls do not assume I make an equally high wage to meet the hcol and tax rate. I do not.)

travel costs if I need to take a car or bus

fees for bags if I forgot to bring some with me (like, I usually do, but also if you're adhd/depressed/stressed, sometimes you just forget things and that's also part of your budget too)

delivery and service fees if you're too disabled to shop for yourself or have other limits on your ability to shop for yourself, and your friends/family/community can't do your shopping for you

Yeah, live art is ephemeral and that's part of the charm. The version of the play that you saw, in the theatre you saw it in, with the cast that you saw, on the night that you saw it, with the audience you saw it with it, with all the personal experiences making up the you that saw it is a totally unique experience that cannot be replicated or caught on film! Live theatre is a really neat and special experience!

People having super special theatre experiences and people wanting to have that live experience will not change if we broadcast a performance so that it can be seen by a wider audience.

And as someone with a very limited, very amateur experience doing live theatre, yeah, there's something magical and unique and enriching about acting in front of a live audience, and also, I think people should get to see plays even if they can't come to them live.

thought it would be a good psa

for artists here too

that's not a normal file type for references.

for a written document you are looking for DOC or DOCX probably. maybe TXT. PAGES if it's from a mac. and a lot of my text files are ODT because I use libreoffice, lmao. (generally I will convert my files into DOCX for folks)

for pictures, you are likely to see JPEG/JPG, PNG, TIFF or maybe GIF.

And of course PDF, the tumblr of file types. (joke, but also, yes, you might see a PDF)

VBS stands for Visual Basic Script. It is a file type for code that could run on a Windows computer. You do not want to open/run this kind of file unless you know what it is and trust who sent it to you. There is NO reason to send references as a VBS file.

Please learn to recognize common file types and look at the file type of files you are being sent. If you don't recognize the file type, google it.

It's also good to note that these file types are risky:

EXE (one of the most well known for being potentially harmful - executes on launch)

sh (shell script - normally won't execute when opened)

bat (batch - will execute when opened)

VBS (executes when opened)

cmd (commands - executes when opened)

JS (JavaScript - won't execute when opened)

MSI (installer)

ISO (unless your doing something related disc backups, etc, you'll probably not need to open this type. I'm not that familiar with this type)

Docx - Microsoft word doc, they can actually contain harmful macros

it sucks that the complexity of common file types like docx and pdf means that they can contain something that can fuck your computer up or allow someone to hijack your computer

there are a lot of clever people out there who get their jollies from finding innovative ways to ruin people's lives so any time you open something from a stranger, there is a risk. some are more easily spotted, like using a very obviously incorrect file type, and some will be sneakier.

thought it would be a good psa

for artists here too

that's not a normal file type for references.

for a written document you are looking for DOC or DOCX probably. maybe TXT. PAGES if it's from a mac. and a lot of my text files are ODT because I use libreoffice, lmao. (generally I will convert my files into DOCX for folks)

for pictures, you are likely to see JPEG/JPG, PNG, TIFF or maybe GIF.

And of course PDF, the tumblr of file types. (joke, but also, yes, you might see a PDF)

VBS stands for Visual Basic Script. It is a file type for code that could run on a Windows computer. You do not want to open/run this kind of file unless you know what it is and trust who sent it to you. There is NO reason to send references as a VBS file.

Please learn to recognize common file types and look at the file type of files you are being sent. If you don't recognize the file type, google it.

I do not know where the app store is.

Okay, this lady explains to me (she is very good at customer service and there’s absolutely no sign on her face that she is baffled how someone like me can even be alive, even though logically she HAS TO be thinking that), it should be in your apps. Look at your apps.

I do not know how to look at my apps. I use like 4 apps (call, text, photos, music) and I put them on the front screen thing ages ago. I push all of the buttons on the phone and apps do not appear. There’s nothing in settings or anything either.

Try swiping up, she says.

I try this a few times. My phone does not register the contact. On the fourth time, it realises that I want it to do something, and oh, there are the apps. We install the app. We do all the sign-in and authentification code shit and it does not work. We do it again and it does not work again.

“If I had a checkbook I’d be out of here by now,” I say. She laughs because it is true. We’ve been here for twenty minutes. I restart my phone to see if that’s the problem and grumble under my breath about how banking never used to be so complicated. As I open the app again, I ask how people do internet banking if they don’t have phones.

She seems puzzled by the question. “We have ways for them to do banking,” she says, “but most… most people have phones.”

She’s probably right. You probably need a phone to survive if you’re homeless these days.

The program loads now but catches us in an endless sign-in loop and the problem, we learn from a supervisor who’s wandered over (presumably to see how helping one idiot put an app on their phone could possibly be taking so long) is actually not on my end. There’s something wrong with the version of the app that the woman assisting me has put on my account on the computer (that’s her half in this operation), so we have to uninstall the app on both systems and reinstall it. Fine. I uninstall the app. Now to go to the app store.

I have forgotten how to access the app store. I push all of the buttons on the phone and apps do not appear. There’s nothing in settings or anything either.

Try swiping up, the woman says.

Oh. There’s the app store.

We install it and get caught in an endless loop again but I am computer savvy enough to know that if restarting and reinstalling doesn’t work then sometimes just trying the same thing over and over again will make it work for no reason, and it does, after I sign in three times in a row we can FINALLY authenticate the app and I can FINALLY use it for two-factor authentication and I CAN FINALLY DO INTERNET BANKING AGAIN.

“Thanks for your help,” I say.

“No problem.”

“I’m sorry it took so long,” I say.

“It’s really not a problem,” she says, and because she’s a professional it’s totally convincing, but I have helped people with tech before and I know how much it sucks. I look at this woman who, on any other day, would be a good few years older than me, but not today. For today, I am a doddering 96-year-old woman who wishes for a simple chequebook and does not like smartphones.

I get up, and I pick up my bag and my walking stick, and I leave the bank, thinking about the scarf I’ve been knitting and how much more work I have to do on it. I wonder if I should bake scones tonight.

Just because something exists doesn’t make it a positive addition to my life. I also don’t have fancy clothes I won’t wear, or a subscription to any streaming services, or an expensive car (well I don’t drive, but if I did I still wouldn’t get an expensive car), or any internet-connected household appliances. Just because something has existed for ages doesn’t mean I have to want to use it.

Companies absolutely should not expect me to have a more up-to-date smartphone. My grandmother reluctantly bought a flip phone to keep in contact with family members in an emergency, but doesn’t like or understand smartphones. With this security system, she can’t bank at the library. The world is full of homeless or impoverished people who need phones to survive but absolutely cannot afford to keep fucking getting new ones. I have a lot to say about our high-consumerist, planned-obsolescence-laden culture, and I gotta say when companies expect you to get rid of perfectly serviceable handheld computers every two years and get a new one just so you can use their basic services, that is NOT reasonable. That is NOT okay. That is NOT an expectation that anyone should have. How would we be if people did that with clothes? You can’t eat in this restaurant unless the clothes you’re wearing were made within the last few years? It’s fucking stupid.

The only thing physically wrong with my phone is that the screen’s a bit scratched up and doesn’t register contact all the time, and for that reason I do intend to replace it; I’m waiting until I finish my job (ten weeks) before I change phone service providers to one that’ll let me use a cheaper handset. (Unlocked handsets are so much more pricey.) That’s a reasonable reason for me to get a new (very cheap, very basic) handset. “The new iPhone Zigglybob Jenga 4 is out so everyone needs the fancyphone!” is not, and basic life services like banking should not expect me to have a smartphone at all. (I would prefer a flip phone. I only went to smartphones in the first place because I needed Google Maps a lot; I don’t need google maps here but everyone’s forcing me to use sixteen billion apps to do anything instead.)

“Customers without smartphones are not second class customers, they’re customers.”

Part of my job is to talk folks into using our website or app, but even with that in mind we have folks who are blind or don’t get internet out where they live or CAN’T have the website or app for security reasons because they’ve gotten scammed so hard before and simply cannot be trusted to not give out their credentials, that kind of thing.

I have literally had to walk someone through using a computer mouse.

I had customers who were homeless or just struggled to keep a phone. (low-cost, pay-as-you-go smartphones exist, but you often need online access to, yanno, pay. and, of course, money. and stuff gets sold, stolen or "confiscated" a fair bit).

And in general a lot of folks who aren't terminally online are really, really not tech savvy and don't understand that if the website or service wants a phone number, then giving it a friend or family member's number (or even a landline!!) is not in your best interest when it comes to the TFA that number is actually for. I developed a grudge against TFA due to the number of customers I dealt with who no longer had access to the phone number that they originally used and now could not access a site or service with their password because the site also now wanted a number from a device that was inaccessible or just plain gone and I had to try to help them find the secret FAQ and support section where they might be able to email or call someone to get their account (which they have the password for!) unlocked. Which is a bother that people who have limited access to computer or phone time just do not need. So I remain angry at the assumption of TFA that everyone will access to the same number and a smartphone! It's not a sensible security measure if folks can lose access to the key because they can't afford to maintain the key!!!

I left the library before everything was apps all the time, but I could see that time coming on the horizon as my library finally updated their app and began really pushing it and the amount of time I spent bent over someone's phone or ipad trying to troubleshoot our own app started to increase. (I think library apps are great! I love being able to access the library online! But also, the library is about access to information for all and I think it's bad policy/gatekeeping to prioritize the service of customers who have access and knowledge of tech tools over the ones who are lacking such access and knowledge.)

Interacting with them is cool and having them at pride I’m not opposed to but as a person who’s queer it does feel like they’re kinda dressing it up

I am far more concerned about assholes in my safe spaces making my spaces unsafe or undesirable to be in. This is a far more likely risk.

Some communities are good about having and enforcing rules about assholes. Some are not.

I am trying to go out and join more queer spaces despite the fact that I hate social group drama. But I am willing to take that risk in order to expand my circle of fellow queer people.

If a Fake Queer wants to join my social group and pretend to be queer and behaves according to all the rules and is not an asshole, like, I am okay with that. Maybe they'll figure out something about themselves while they are there. So long as they don't, like, start positioning themselves on a expert on queer experiences (something I would also find aggravating in my fellow queer people), like, whatever. So long as you're being chill and listening, you're not ruining the safety of the space.

As soon as they behave like an asshole ( for any reason) though, this is a situation that needs mediating. If it becomes clear during mediation that they wanted to infiltrate my queer crafting space to spy on queer people knitting together muwahaha, like, yeah, I'd want this person to leave. Because joining a group to spy on them, for whatever reason, is antisocial behavior that should get you banned from the group.

Basically, I think anyone who has asshole reasons to join a queer-only space will be found and kicked out for being an asshole eventually. I'm more concerned about having an asshole-free environment than witch-hunting potential Fake Queers who have got sucked into actually enjoying my Queer knitting group.

Free WordPress site

If you have a mailing list, there is a significant chance your mailing list provider offers some form of "make a website!" thing

https://www.w3schools.com

i know i know i know i know i know

it is just one more thing to learn and there is a service to handle it for you

i know i know i know i know i know

it is easy for me to say this having been a Make Stuff For a Long Time kind of person so this is all second nature and isn't it just easier to have one less goddamn thing to worry about

i know i know i know i know i know

what it is like for a chunk of text you do not own / operate / have any say over

to suddenly say "...we're sorry, we're shutting down, we too are disappointed..."

and/or

"we are excited to roll out FEATURE that will HELP US but PISS YOUR AUDIENCE OFF"

and/or

"we were bought out by private equity and now we have to make loan payments on the equity they are borrowing against to gut our staff like fish haha not literally... unless...?"

i have zero evidence of any untowards plans to the above

and

as per above i have been doing this for awhile and have Seen Things

as a final note

basic HTML is INCREDIBLY user-forgot-something code friendly

your absolute basic, hammered together, missing like portions of the code HTML page "FIND ME HERE" will probably work

and the aesthetic will probably be charming

I own the domain. I own the code. If my host booted me off, I'd still own my domain and my code and could move to a new host and have my site back up in a day and it would look the same to any users.

If you need a basic site to do a basic job like "this is me! these are my important links! yeah!" you can do that with basic html no problem!

I've only reached a point like last year where my needs (portfolio site that scales with display size) outstripped my patience to learn code. I got very close before handing it over to a friend to implement with the rule that it had to be as simple as possible because I wanted to be able to update and make changes myself without destroying my site and having to pay them to fix it, lmao.

But if they could not have made something for me that was within my range of website-literacy, I might still use Ye Olde HTML because I feel that strongly about my personal site being something I can control!

If you're new to messing around with code and making websites, I might also suggest looking at neocities. The whole ethos of neocities is bringing back having your own personal website for whatever and expressing yourself the way you want to as opposed to the way social media aims to shape our expression. The neocities community is browsable, with searchable tags, so you can check out a lot of sites with that retro personal site vibe. There's beautifully complex sites and some crunchy basic sites. It's great place to browse and shake up your ideas of what a website should be for and what it should look like! Escape the clean corporate box!

Ernest online, but Jack IRL?

Ernest and Algy being fannish friends who've met at a convention and Ernest just never bothered to disclose his real name? (Jack comes from a small, more conservative town and is used to keeping his online self and offline self strictly separated so that he can maintain his legal guardianship over his younger cousin in a town that might take offense at a young gay man raising a kid.)

Ernest writes fic and quippy social media posts and is a BNF with a fair amount of small but entertaining scandals. More than a few call-out posts have been written about him as a bit of a fandom diva. Though maybe not as much as his friend Algy who is known to be a fickle fan and a bit flaky about following through on commitments, tho, of course, some folks will always appear to remind you that he has to take care of his poor sickly friend ("friend?") (known as "Bunbury" online.)

(Algernon uses Bunburying to augment his meager income, to get out of things he doesn't want to do, and as his psued for writing fics he doesn't want associated with his main persona online. Bunbury has his/their own small but passionate fanbase. )

Ernest has an on again off again thing with fan artist Gwen, who has been unable to come to cons so far because her mother is very strict. But she and Algy have somehow managed to convince her mother than Algy will stick by her through the con and protect her from seeing/doing anything she shouldn't. (A promise Algy and Gwen have no intent of keeping)

Which would be great for Ernest, except that he's being forced to escort his cousin C.C (they/them, at least online) to the con and C.C. only knows him as Jack and is really, really hoping to meet their fave fic writer, Ernest, at the con!

The only thing he can think to do to get out of this is to quickly write a post in his hotel room as Ernest's brother Jack claiming that Ernest has died! Suddenly! Tragically! Of, uh, Covid. So he definitely won't be able to meet C.C at the con!

While Jack is distracted by the chaos his announcement has caused online, Algernon stumbles across C.C in the lobby and pretends to be Ernest (as Jack's friend, he's well up on all of Ernest's fics and headcanons and so on, though he quickly segues to spouting his own, superior, opinions) and thoroughly charms C.C.

Gwen joins them, and expresses her own excitement at her plans to meet-up with Ernest. Another fan overhears and is like "didn't you hear? he's dead!" and shows them the post on their phone (the con wifi is a little janky so it takes a little to load) Chaos and confusion ensues!

Jack finally arrives and asks what everyone is crowding around the phone and shouting for for. ("Apparently, Ernest has died, Jack," Algy says meaningfully. "But that cannot be, because as you well know, I am Ernest.")

Which means when Victor wakes up to the Creature standing by his bed like ☺️, and Victor freaks out and runs away, the Creature could have ostensibly wandered into the hallway after him, only to be met with a pack of incredibly drunk-after-an-all-night-1818-rager yet well-meaning frat boys.

Who were so blasted that they were just like, "Dude, what, do you play rugby? Holy shit, he's fuckin' huge, look at this fuckin' guy! Absolute unit!" And they all whooped and hollered and just ushered the Creature into their dorm to keep the party going.

And the Creature was just like, "?????" but very pleased to find other people vaguely shaped like him, so he lets them because he may be just minutes old but he knew early on all he really wanted was one (1) buddy and now there's, like, a herd of them and they're all having a blast.

When the guys inevitably pass out, sloshed beyond all sense, he just sits and waits for them to wake up and when they do, later that morning, he's poking at one of them to make sure the guy is still breathing, and the kid wakes up and yells for a second and squints at the 8 foot-tall (rugby???? player????) guy in their dorm and is like, "Shit, what is that?"

And another one squints at him and goes, "I don't fuckin' know, bro, but he can throw us so hard. Did you see how David just...fuckin'...flew out the window last night? Just hurled David like it was no big deal. That was awesome."

David groans and puts his head under his pillow because his headache is awful but he lets out a pained, muffled, "that was awesome" in agreement.

So in a rare case of wholesome frat boy camaraderie, this herd of college roommate boys, all of whom are dumb as rocks but well-meaning, just take the Creature in because, "There's this huge fucking monster guy and it's the coolest thing we've ever seen."

This would possibly mean the Creature is socialized to be a dumb-as-rocks frat boy, but because I cannot allow that to happen and because there is no universe in which he would not be into poetry, he somehow also gets socialized by liberal arts majors and is just as Sensitive™, it rubs off on his frat buddies, who start saying things like, "No, man, it's Sturm und Drang, it's, like, the fuckin' vast rolling of the soul that, like...fuckin' eschews Enlightenment rationalism."

But some of the boys' lingo inevitably rubs off on the Creature so when, months later, Victor comes back to get all of his things with Henry post-mental breakdown, he bumps into a crowd of rowdy guys playfully jostling each other, and that crowd includes an 8-foot tall dude in a letterman jacket holding a volume of Goethe in one hand and a tankard of beer in the other, and he scoffs down at Victor and goes, "Accursed Creator! Why didst thou abandon me in my hour of need? Fuckin' lame."

The Creature is an ambitious garage science project by nerd stereotype. Maybe a bit of a alt-nerd, but still probably wears glasses and is coded as Uncool. We'll give him a Sidekick who is probably even more nerd-coded, but also maybe a bit more socially savvy. He's likely to be not-white with at least one uncomfortable racial stereotype aspect to his character that only comes up as the butt of jokes.

After being screamed at by his creator, The Creature ambles off into the night and finds a pre-season jock party for probably football. Football is the most stereotypical high school jock sport and our Creature can be broad and tall. They adopt him same as their 1818 counterparts do and take him to try-outs the next day. He gets to be Quarterback, replacing the kid who was QB before and making the QB start to think "wait a minute, who is this guy and where did he come from anyway....?"

Much comedy is made out of adults doing double-takes at the Creature and then shrugging it off with various comments about "kids these days." ("Never seen one of those goth freaks have any interest in sports before...but i'm not gonna turn away a freak with a arm like that!")

Because this a 90's teen comedy, we will also have the requisite raunchy comments about the, ahem, size, of the Creature. (critics : "Young Frankenstein did it better") Lots of cheerleaders and alt-girls and goths being horny about him. There will also be one guy on the football team whose whole schtick is that he keeps making remarks that suggest he's gay. (He's included in the "raunchy rumors about the New Guy" montage, for example, at his most Stereotypically Gay.) It's almost progressive for the 90's, but he's also routinely "humourously" pummeled by the rest of the team every time he does something Too Gay. (Also, because this is the 90's, there is at least one use of "gay" to mean "stupid.") The Creature is oblivious to this attention at first.

Elizabeth is a superfically sweet cheerleader and is not seen making raunchy comments because she is a Good Girl. She has a crush on the football player who used to the quarterback before the Creature joined the team. She's Nerdenstein's cousin, as per the book, but like a cousin-once-removed. Nerdenstein also has a crush on her, though she rarely talks to him outside of family get-togethers and generally being polite and sweet at school in a way that gets her teased by other cheerleaders. (She explains that she has to because he's technically family) There's an uncomfy scene where Nerdenstein tries to explain to his Sidekick that she's a distant cousin so it's not really incest in a bit that's too long and ends with the Sidekick still just kinda like "Ew."

(Nerdenstein is not meant to be a redeemable nerd and the movie constantly paints him as in the wrong. This is not a "the nerds are cool actually, dude" film. This is a "nerds are gross and fun to laugh at" movie.)

Of course Prom or some other Big Dance comes up and the Creature needs a date, so he returns to his creator and begs for Nerdenstein to make him a girlfriend because despite all the girl-attention he gets he's kinda nervous about asking girls out and wants someone like himself! Creator and Creature have it out here about Creator shunning his jock creation ("you abandoned me to play sports!" "you ran away screaming when I woke up! the Team has always had my back, bro!") Despite jock-inflected speech, it's clear that the Creature has been paying attention in his classes and getting good grades and is now somewhat articulate in a bro-filtered way and he's inherently more compassionate than his creator, but in his frustration results to treating his creator just as the jocks always did and storms off.

Meanwhile, the Sidekick is trying to do his friend a solid, despite his discomfort with it, by asking Elizabeth to consider going to the prom with "someone close to her that maybe she's overlooked somehow. someone shy and smart and uh....a but weird....but like an okay guy actually...." and she misinterprets this as being about the Creature and decides to ask the Creature to Prom. Astonished almost back to being completely inarticulate again, the Creature accepts. The Team helps the Creature find a suit. (The gay stereotype nerd will pipe up here.) The ex-quarterback is grumpy about this and disappears from these scenes.

The Prom! Set to vaguely hip background music until the dance scene where some random song by a popular group is used while the Creature and Elizabeth slow dance.

Meanwhile, the ex-quarterback and Nerdenstein are both plotting revenge for the Creature daring to steal "my girl." They bump into each other mid-scheme (each towing a Sidekick. The ex-QB's Sidekick is the Ambigiously Gay Football Player, for obvious reasons) The two lock eyes and decide despite jock and nerd being natural enemies, now is the time for a team-up.

Ultimately their plan boils down to an overly complicated scheme for setting Prom on fire, which terrifies the Creature and sends him into a rampage of destruction (insert meaningless visual reference to Carrie somewhere in here) before exiting the grounds and rampaging his way through a neighborhood before disappearing. Prom is ruined, and the Creature's reputation is trashed! Hooray! High-five! (ew, nerd/jock cooties)

Science Fair time! Obviously Nerdenstein had to scrap his original project, but he's totally a genius and his new project will impress teachers and Elizabeth will notice him for sure now! He unveils his project for the judges and uh-oh, someone replaced his new project with a bunch of his notes and apparatus and stuff pointing to him as the creator of The Quarterback Creature that "caused the fire that burned down the gym and got people hurt" and the adults are finally seeing what was in front of their faces the whole time and are asking questions like "wait a minute? you made a guy......outta corpses? uhh....that's illegal, son" while the QB grins the background and puts his arm around Elizabeth and sirens wail in the distance.