RSSWhat else remains to give?
29 March 2025
Around this time of year, last year, I wrote a post about how life had been running my ragged. I drew some pretty cathartic vent art about it too.
In the ensuing year, my body continued to be a mixed success of good and bad, of improvements and sickness, but at least I didn't get COVID again. I did not manage to get employed, though self employment is slowly revealing small feelers. I managed to do alright as an artist of 88x31 buttons during The Death of Cohost. Oh that's right, Cohost exploded, and with it the last vestiges of my interest in social media.
So here I am, doing this again.
The Death of Cohost, and my resignation to the fediverse
Many people have moved on from Cohost, either receding back to Tumblr or moving on to Bluesky, and these people have a great time with it and I'm sure that's lovely for them, but to be frank the idea of making a Bluesky brings bile into my throat. And I danced with Tumblr ages ago and never understood it, and since then I've heard its only gotten more arcane and insular. I don't want trans teens arguing with me about whether queer is a slur. I'm not the kind of faggot who has time for that. And I'm not ready to get into arguments about nouveau-tagging and content moderations Round 2.0 on Bluesky. It's already enough of a fucking struggle to get people to stop the harmful practice of CW'ing food. (I've been working on this for ages but please talk to literally any professionals about it.)
With the death of Cohost and the many obnoxious handwringing posts about how "there were problems" and "missteps" and "staff didn't make all the right decisions" I largely decided to stay quiet publicly, because frankly as another white tranny I figure my voice isn't really that relevant to the larger picture. There were valid and important discussions from people of colour who had much smarter things to say about it all than I did.
But what I shared with folks in private is what I'm going to share here now, which is that there simply aren't any places that exist for me online any more.
I grew up on web forums, instant messengers, telephone calls and waiting for my friends at the bridge over the river after school. Discord is a noise machine where everyone everywhere constantly wants my attention, where I can't read a fucking Q&A without agreeing to participate under some bespoke set of rules. All conversations are simultaneously always happening and never happening. There's no room to breath, no stopping it, it's on until you turn off all your devices.
I first started blogging when I was 17, on a Blogger blog which is what I originally bought this domain for. It's gone to the aether, don't worry, I made sure of that. And before that I was an insufferable nerd on forums like |REDACTED|, Adventure Game Studio, |REDACTED|, and TIGSource.
Tumblr never clicked for my brain. My ex-spouse tried to help me with that, and it didn't work. Twitter was never more than ghostly. None of the other big sites worked for me. My highschool friends and I were big on DeviantArt, and, well, look where that landed. It's ironic that after everything I've become an admin of a Hometown instance, the closest thing I could have to optimal social media other than Cohost.
If I were to place all social media on a scale from Bleeding Eye Sockets to Feels Okay it would look something like this:
The result is that I've been severed, cut off, and no longer find myself able to easily connect with a bunch of people by coexisting in a space with them. And that fucking blows. I have a friend who frequently vents to me about feeling alienated and atomized by relatively mundane interactions with other people. I love it dearly. But we are not the same. I have slowly discovered I am an extrovert, albeit an extremely traumatized one, and I had the zenith ripped from my hands by the backstabbing leech of a payment provider.
Fuck Stripe.
It is safe to say I have been reclusive since The Death of Cohost. Whereas many people felt they had good alternative ways to coalesce and connect, I found I was already struggling to survive and look after myself, and instead could only fall back to Mastodon. And so I took over my instance, as a last bastion for socializing in the awful post-apocalypse of the modern web.
And my own Body continues to rust
I know many transfemmes who love cybernetics, cyborgs, the idea of inorganic bodies, whatever have you. And I deeply understand it. I might just be a bit of a biofreak with my own proclivities towards enjoying my flesh as its own form, but I do get it. Especially when it feels like every joint and bone I have is rusting.
It feels fitting that once again I have found the opening stretch of 2025 to be a rash of medical appointments with various degrees of longitude. Oh, and in mid December my ear ruptured. I had gained an infection on the way home from visiting Juniper and I sat on it too long, and it blew itself a perforation to relieve the pressure. So I was without hearing in one side until late January, which is a horribly disorienting experience.
Which lead to writing this post. And
-six months in the future-
it sat in my drafts for the rest of the year. Then in december where I finally decided to lay it to rest. For the parts I wrote of here are important to me, and I wish to maintain, and I wish to share. So you will find it in your feed reader, probably, maybe layered deep amongst a year of read posts, a sudden unread post. Something that leapt out from the dark and old words that came back.
I still grieve for Cohost. It bounces like a ball in my brain, every once in a while remembering what we lost, sending me into a moment of silence where I imagine crushing cans in the snow, the death of society, and what little else we can do. And I come too, back from the memory, into Toronto in the snow, after a long year of madness and AI apocalypse and I feel so very tired.
Maybe 2026 will be better.