may is dreaming

virtual reality is really cool

Sat, 26 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

vr is something i have a really complicated relationship with. a lot of people know me as someone who is really passionate for the medium. it means a lot to me, and i've spent many, many hours in vr just hanging out and socializing in vrchat or tiring out my own arms in beat saber. you'd be forgiven for not knowing this about me, because it's the kind of thing i did not frequently chatter about for a long time. i kind of resent it a little; so much of who i am now can be traced back to me being a vrchat mirror dweller in what was at the time an incredibly niche platform that didn't have the market saturation it does today... shouldn't i care more that vr is withering on the vine?

i can't really remember when i got my oculus rift. it was right when the headset became properly affordable (2017?), after the touch controllers came out but well before the quest or even rift s. it was so early on that my order came in two boxes -- one with the rift, and one for the touch controllers which were just a few months prior sold seperately. the rift box even came with an xbox controller, a vestige of when the rift was just a headset and nothing else, conceived before valve and htc really managed to put the pieces together of what we now know as "room scale" vr.

i was excited. it was a new way to experience games, probably the most interesting thing that the industry put out since 3d graphics became a mainstay with the ps1. i fantasized about modding in support to garry's mod, my platform of choice for prototyping game ideas. back then unity wasn't quite as established, unreal seemed far out of scope and roblox was a bit too kiddy. garry's mod was the perfect balance, and i was going to be the one to put the pieces together and start a golden era of garry's mod vr ugc, where you could code and do anything. people would be doing darkrp bank heists in vr with all of their friends in tow, elevating what was previously an exciting but decidedly less visceral experience into an immersive heartpounding chase that felt like you were really there.

...the felt feeling when i got the thing was, less optimistic and a little more grounded, lol. in the end, i hit a lot of roadblocks. the biggest was vr apis just... didn't support directx 9. back when i first saw the dk2, it was a bit "dumb", a literal monitor bolted to your face with some software tricks to convince games to render to the correct output with some rotational input control. steamvr though, that had it's own compositor, with surface sharing to automatically apply lens distortion and all the stuff that makes vr feel "right". the problem? dx9 didn't support shared textures*, so the steamvr compostor was unable to actually grab the rendered views and flip them to the displays. eventually i did manage to cobble something together, but it was a mishmash of code i found in other repos, never anything more than a barely functional prototype. not wanting my efforts to go to waste, i was able to reach out to catse, the author of a far more mainstream gmod vr project and contribute some of my code and notes to their effort, which got me a little special thanks credit in the description of the workshop upload.

(*yes dx9ex supported it, but steamvr didn't. a stray forum post from a valve dev claimed eventual support was coming... as of 2026, it still doesn't)

there were other problems. you don't realize it just walking around, but the feeling of acceleration is vital for your immersion in the actual reality. not having that made things feel decidedly less, real. to this day it's an issue you run up against. visual experience can often be breathtaking... but you're not going to convince anyone that vr is worth it by shoving them into a virtual roller coaster. limited motion is another pretty unfortunate limitation, especially back then. wireless mainsteam vr is something that is still relatively new in the space, and even if you could cut the cord in 2016 / 2017, the player will inevitably run into a wall if they try to walk around like they would in real life. these things don't always kill the experience (beat saber for example does an excellent job staying within these limitations), but it does make the high stakes action in most fps games (aren't all vr shooting games first person..?) feel a lot less impressive than what you might be imagining in your head, especially if said game utilizes any form of vehicular travel.

so, what else is there? beat saber as stated previously is a favorite, pavlov became an early staple by basically being vr counter-strike (also notable for totally pissing away their good will practically overnight by nuking their modding support in favor of getting quest players onboard...), there's a whole slew of little games whose genre is best described as "paid vr tech demo" (job simulator, the stupid rick and morty one, etc) and... vrchat, a game that is exactly as described by it's name.

excited to play with my headset, and interested in the idea of what a vr-native garry's mod may look like, vrchat became one of my most played games in vr. at the time, vrchat had custom avatars and worlds, but the udon scripting layer had yet to even get an official name, so worlds were at best museums to wander around in with the occasional one that cleverly utilized triggers and buttons to create small puzzle worlds. it didn't take me long to figure out how to shove an mmd model of remilia scarlet in there, and i began wandering pub worlds as a mute touhou girl.

back then, vrchat didn't really have the weird cliquey culture it does now. people were warmer, a lot more civil and eager to reach outside of their group to chat with strangers. it was a cool time to be around. i was a little too scared to talk, but i knew something about the entire thing clicked for me. i liked being around people. talking was out of the question, but i motioned with my hands and mimed my actions out, and i made a few friends even. i hung out with people, formed friendships that persist to this day, kitbashed my own avatar with various parts sourced from booth, learned so, so much about blender and unity and the entire stack of tools required to make this work... eventually, i wound up blowing something to the tune of $1300 CAD to import a valve index from the USA before they officially began shipping to canada, even buying vive trackers to complete a full body setup.

it felt right to be there. it felt right to look how i wanted, to identify how i wanted, for all of my motions to reflect perfectly in the mirrors that i adored so much to be in front of. i couldn't use my voice because, well, that'd betray my appearance, i'd reveal to everyone else that i wasn't actually this cute, that all of it was a facade and all of my newfound appreciation of self would crumble instantly if i ever gave up that one piece of information.

dear reader, have i ever mentioned that i am transgender?

this entire experience obviously broke a dam inside me. i had knew i was trans for a while, but so viscerally experiencing a feminine identity made it undeniable. i knew something had to shift so that maybe one day i could talk to others, with my own voice, not feeling some implicit longing that all of this was just a pretend life i lived when it was convenient.

there were nights when i would hang out with my (offline) friends in vrchat, particularly around 2020 where after a few drinks i had the confidence in me to hit my unmute button and just say words to other people, but it didn't come easily. around my online friends, i remained strictly a mute for at least a year... only ever communicating through text where possible, or by miming my motions out. it was undeniably cute, but it's not really the foundation to a lasting friendship if all you can do is play charades with someone.

eventually, i managed to get over it. in a private instance, i managed to say my first words. it felt a little embarassing and revealing... i had by this point came out as trans to them so there was no more secrets to hold close to my chest. my voice isn't really something i like, even today... but back then, it felt like it might make or break my relationship with these people. being around an inclusive group, naturally, everyone was overjoyed to hear their friend may start talking suddenly. i was accepted, for the first time.

not all good things can last forever, and unfortunately due to a series of catastrophic failings of empathy and an inability for the internet to let things go, my group was fractured by petty online drama. if you know me, you probably know enough to put together what i'm talking about, but in the interest of not kicking a bee's nest, suffice to say i am bitter that i let that happen and lost my grip on that group.

for a long time i had a lot of painful, hard memories of fun times in vrchat ruined by outside factors. i completely divorced myself from the platform, convinced myself that my time in vr was over and that i had became confidence enough in my own identity that i can "move past" vr. there's some truth in the idea that i didn't "need" vr anymore to validate my identity. i was out and openly trans. i was may now. everyone knew it, and i wasn't scared of shit like my voice or my appearance getting in the way. so why do i care so much still?

well, a lot of things. vr is still compelling to me as an escapist fantasy. i'm happy being me, i can stand that my body isn't perfect in all the ways i want it to be, nobody's is... but i can be exactly what i want in vr. i can be short. i can be cute. i can be frilly. all of this is entirely defined by my own ability to manipulate blender and unity... these things still appeal to me because they surpass many limits on what i can be in real life. and just more than anything else, it's fun to hang out in vrchat. it's a visceral feeling of being in a space with other people in a way you just do not get with any other form of online socialization. people are physically present, emoting with their body and eager to be close to you. you can't get that without having a big dumb vr headset strapped to your head.

it is a little odd seeing valve continuing to push the bar with vr. i was fortunate enough to land a day 1 order e-mail for my steam frame, and i have been having a lot of fun seeing how vr has come since the index in 2019 and the rift cv1 in 2017... it's not perfect in all the ways i had hoped, and obviously the price is going to be a hugely limiting factor in who is able to get their hands on it. in that way, i'm sad it's not going to be the reigniting factor for vr, especially after so many years of hype (those who knew anyting about vr were trawling through patent applications and copyrights since 2021, lol) and knowing that we were in the running to have a proper quest competitor finally.

despite everything, i will probably continue putting hours in vrchat and beat saber. admittedly, there's not much else interesting me that has me captivated with the idea of playing it... i have been enjoying some other games (in no particular order, pools, tetris effect and thumper, all 3 of which are actually hybrid games that can be played without vr and i highly recommend) but ultimately i know that i blew something to the tune of $1,800 CAD for a very, very overpriced vrchat machine. here's hoping i don't totally regret it, lol.

thoughts on big walk

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

this post contains spoilers for big walk and the finale of the game. if you haven't yet, i encourage you to buy the game and try it out with some friends. it's worth it.

communication is something i value a lot. not everyone holds it to the same regard as i do, but being able to sincerely share my feelings with my loved ones is something that i consider a requirement for my well being. contradictorily, i don't consider myself that good at it. i've never been diagnosed but i've often wondered if i have dyslexia. i definitely have some form of adhd. my thoughts often are scrambled and my attempts to convey them don't fare much better. i have reservations about putting myself in leadership roles because while i am capable of formulating a plan and acting on my own thoughts, my lengthy and scatterbrained explanations leave a lot to be desired.

all of this is to say, i didn't think i'd come away with such a positive feeling after finishing the final act of big walk, a game predicated entirely on your ability to talk through puzzles with a group of your friends.

when i first saw the reveal trailer at the 2023 geoff keighley game awards, i didn't think much of it. it felt like a game capitalizing on the recent trend of cooperative, laid-back multiplayer games (coloquially known as "friendslop" -- hate that term) presented with environment art that looked prototypical and unfinished. the faux gamer-chatter over the trailer didn't help my feelings towards it, and i tuned out until the name drop... when i noticed that big walk was created by house house, a studio which saw success with their prior work, untitled goose game. like big walk, goose game's premise, silly and benign as it may be, belied it's incredibly charming game design and presentation. i went "oh! those are the goose game guys!" and then it fell out of my short term memory to be forgotten about until launch.

suffice to say, big walk became a very popular game at launch and deservedly so!

i played big walk in a group of 5, largely composed of members of my polycule. it became evident that our group had a lot of "problem solvers" in it early on. every puzzle had everyone chiming in with their own solution, and solving puzzles was less about solving anything with an intuitive plan and more about deciding on whose intuitive plan we were to try first. it was hectic and created a bit of friction, but with time we learned to trust in eachother's decision making and commit to a plan together. it required us to put away our egos a bit, which is surprisingly difficult to do, lol...

being that our group was slightly larger than the 4 that the puzzles in the game were designed for, we often split up. not every puzzle required 4 people to participate, creating interesting interstitials where the group would seperate to explore the immediate area and radio in when we found something that did require the entire group's presence to solve. it was these moments that i realized the genius of big walk's design not just as a puzzle game but as a social game.

there are moments where the game expects you to be separated into smaller groups. interestingly, design decisions like needing another player to grab items from your belt or backpack ensure that it is always ideal to be travelling with at least one other person, but other decisions like the gondola cars seating no more than 2 at a time guarantee that players will inevitably find themselves paired together and feel inclined to make small talk. this experience was mundane but incredibly delightful, a feeling that has largely feels squeezed out of the average multiplayer game's lightning round matchmaking that lasts for 15 minutes at a time and often limits communication for fear of online toxicity. it had me recalling when game servers were things that orbited smaller online communities, rather than catch-all "fandoms" that include the entire playerbase and are often poorly moderated -- if moderated at all.

up until the finale, the game had a silly, comedic and mostly unserious vibe that doesn't challenge the player's expectations much. our group never got that snagged on any one puzzle for an extended period of time, but they always felt novel enough to maintain our intrigue throughout. eventually, everyone is funneled towards a rather intimidating black monolith, entrance of which is only permitted once enough pre-requisite puzzles are completed surrounding the towers that landmark the island. just entering the top floor requires 4 players to be present, and opening the door causes just 1 player (of which i was fortunate enough to be selected) to receive a surreal and creepy vision of the final area of the game, a liminal space consisting entirely of concrete, contrasting the natural foliage of the rest of the setting. vitally, open mic stays on during this entire sequence, so my friends were rather concerned as i started to talk about seeing visions of the stark grey, brutalist construction of the final area. it was a cool moment; just another way the game's design encourages communication. it would've been easy to show everyone this sequence, but by limiting it to just one player, the group is forced to wonder just what the hell is up ahead based solely on one friend's verbal description.

the final area's gimmick is probably easy to predict if you think about how puzzles have been presented up to this point -- players lose their ability to communicate through verbal means, and everyone loses their perception of color such that all players in the lobby appear identical. the group is forced to communicate solely through visual means, without language or identity. none of the puzzles are that complex, but the sheer limitation imposed on the players and the construction of the final area makes it feel oppressive. the game hints at what's to come by imposing these same restrictions without a puzzle in an earlier area, so our group decided early on that we would have gestures for "yes" and "no" -- communicated using the controllable limbs of the player characters (in our case, arms up: yes, arms out: no.) this wound up being vital in the final area, and saved us a lot of hassle in the first puzzle. the mood was somber at times, being forced into total silence -- but even this didn't totally prevent extraneous communication from happening. raising your arms rapidly in the "yes" motion quickly became synonymous with "yay!", done celebratorily following the successful completion of a puzzle, and we began mashing the mute and menu buttons to maintain some levity (opening the menu or muting subtly changes the player's appearance and made a silly audible sound that wasn't muted in the final area.) all of this struck me as a little bit profound that even without language we could find ways to at least communicate our feelings.

the final floor of this area has you disabling the machine that was preventing the group from communicating, and what immediately followed was eager discussion about the challenges we faced and identifying who was who during the entire process. i eagerly talked about just how cool the entire experience was. like most good puzzle games, big walk's puzzles are never insurmountable but they always make you feel smart, gently guiding the player to the correct decision subtly.

the epilogue of the game has you watch the credits together on an in-game theater, sat on a couch next to the group you just spent silently solving puzzles with for the last 20 or so minutes, giving you an opportunity to further discuss your feelings. still reeling from just how novel the entire sequence was, i was eager to gush about how it made me feel while names of the big walk developers scrolled by. finally, the last area of the game instructs you to wave good bye. players leave the area one by one by entering a one way gate in a sequence i found myself getting intensely emotional at -- after the previous challenges, it felt incredibly bittersweet to say our farewells like this, just after completing several puzzles that required intense improvisational communication and trust in eachother. the game ends with one final message from the developers.

i was probably letting my emotions get the better of me. of course, all of us were in a discord call and unmuted following the ending to further discuss. i have the emotional fortitude of a wet napkin, it's not that hard to get me to start crying about a silly puzzle game like this.

i guess i felt the need to write all this because big walk was a really impactful piece of art to me. video games often today feel a bit anti-social, even multiplayer ones. playing something that was eager to push me and my friends together and give us an opportunity to talk about our lives and what's been happening within in a low stakes environment is something you just don't get a lot of anymore. i hope the success of big walk encourages other developers to build games with a heavier focus on the kind of relationship building communication that made me so endeared to it, because i'd love to play more of this kind of game in the future.

where did the niche counter culture of image boards go

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

at age 31 it would be insincere to start patterning myself as an old lady who is a veteran of the "old" internet, but being online for about 20 years now, i have observed some significant shifts in online culture. the rise of social media, slowly eroding privacy, but to me, the most fascinating has been how 4chan became a huge influential thing and eventually propelled a culture of racism, edginess and political incorrectness into the mainstream. being on 4chan at age 13 was decidedly not a great thing for a kid my age to have been doing, but that exposure gave me a taste for the niche and directly lead me to media like serial experiments lain and touhou project. i wouldn't be may without 4chan, sometimes i wonder if i would even be trans without being in that kind of environment where gender norms were often questioned (if you can believe it, 4chan used to be like that!)

i used to be an avid lurker, posting on rare occasions, but felt actually interacting with image boards was more abbrasive than it was worth. i was happy to find out what flavor of the month anime or video game were getting posted on /a/ and /v/, and i often went to /jp/ once my interest in touhou began to set in. i fondly recollect it now, but i've since completely excised 4chan from my rotation of websites i keep up on. the reasons should be glaringly obvious to anyone whose looked at the place lately, and anyone i still know from back then has done the same.

it was on 4chan that i gained my taste for anime, indie games, that kind of thing. believe it or not, when you got past all of the shitposting and arguments, 4chan was not entirely terrible as an outlet for discussing media on the bleeding edge of culture, stuff seen no where else. /a/ was always eager to have threads for FLCL, welcome to the NHK, gurren lagann, /v/ would discuss guilty gear and blazblue well before anime fighting games became a little more palatable to the average gamer... there were other outlets you could find this stuff, but they were similarly entrenched in internet culture if they weren't outright sharing a userbase. 4chan culture was pervasive and the memes born in the annals of /v/, /b/ and /a/ would spread to reddit, twitter, etc. people still post old 4chan screencaps. 4chan was the internet's black sheep, always a convenient scapegoat to blame internet toxicity on, but it was beloved for being unique.

i hesitate to call it a "golden age", but i do fondly reminisce on when 4chan was just a bunch of anons talking about weird interests, being mean, or generally being a nuisance at best. of course you had individuals who took things too far, but generally the worst thing that happened is that /b/ would occaisonally go harass the church of scientology or track down someone who was abusing animals. sometimes /g/ broke into a school's PA system and would play loud cacophonic micspam and laugh as confused teachers looked around in disbelief and rushed to unplug each speaker.

now, it's something else. i guess i feel stupid for being so naive. faux racism attracts real racists. joking about extremeism pulled in actual extremists. i didn't keep up on /pol/ when it was just starting out. it struck me as a containment board, meant to act as a honeypot for users who would make politically extreme shitposts in other boards. it quickly gained a reputation being as unpalatable as /b/, full of disingenuous posters who were more interested in pushing the bounds of what was socially acceptable to say online than saying anything of substance. /pol/ skyrocketed in popularity during the 2015 electoral season, eventually becoming 4chan's most popular board.

donald trump's social media team, seemingly aware of /pol/, began playing to their newfound audience. this sudden and surreal mixing of online culture and mainstream politics culminated in the posting of a trump-ified pepe the frog to trump's official twitter account. i feel like this was the exact moment the shark got jumped. the president was posting pepe the frog and wojak! posters celebrated. "he's /ourguy/!!!" trump supporters flocked to 4chan, and suddenly it became a hivemind of weirdo republican cocksuckers. wojaks and pepes became the sole memetic export of the website. suddenly, 4chan wasn't about counter culture, it was about american politics. being edgy isn't "cool" anymore, now it is socially acceptable for a sitting representative to call one of her constituents "tranny" and for the president of the united states to call a governer the r-slur. did 4chan cause this? i dunno. does it feel surreal that politicians that are being voted for by real people feel comfortable talking exactly like a mid-2010s anon would on /b/? absolutely.

moot, the previous owner, had sold the website in 2015 to a man named hiroyuki nishimura, a veteran in the space who had previously founded 2channel (not to be confused with futaba channel, sometimes known as 2chan), a japanese message board with a somewhat similar culture as 4chan. i always blamed hiroyuki for this downfall. having inherited a dumpster fire and needing a way to make it profitable overnight, i had assumed 4chan's descent into weird, reactionary politics was hiro's doing, a desperate hail mary to make a completely unmarketable website a profitable success. it was a commonly held belief, a convenience in how it split the website's history into two distinct halves, "moot" and "hiroyuki". it enshrined moot as the benevolent founder who believed in his website, and hiro as the greedy outsider who just wanted to make a quick buck.

i guess nobody was expecting the actual truth to come out of the epstein files, lol.

now rather infamously, the release of the epstein files confirmed that moot created /pol/ mere weeks after meeting epstein and his associates. it's the kind of sucker punch you don't expect coming after you've believed naively that this entire thing was caused by a change in ownership.

it's a complicated feeling having been on the ground floor of all of this. i feel guilty for going along with it. it makes me wonder if 4chan didn't exist, would all of this had still happened? younger people who have never interacted with the site refer to people like me detrimentally, disingeniously calling "4chan trans" as having a "nazi phase" that we're all trying to collectively sweep under the rug. i don't think it's that simple, but these accusations often come from individuals who aren't even old enough to reflect on their teenage years yet. i feel pretty strongly about the narrative being foisted onto me by people who weren't even online during 4chan's hayday, only knowing it as a magnet for the worst kind of person they can imagine.

"/b/ was never good" was a phrase that bounced around a lot on 4chan but i feel it is just as fair to say "4chan was never good". racism was always abound, posters were intentionally abbrasive and rude, but all of it felt like a bit of aposematism to scare off "normies". i'm not trying to excuse it, but the mood generally was that it was all for trolling's sake. unserious, exagerated, intentionally unpalatable noise that everyone eventually tuned out.

4chan was never good, but i'm glad to have been around to see it before it stopped being interesting.

the folley of being insincere to yourself

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

there's a saying floating around that gets invoked a lot nowadays in online circles, especially kink positive ones; "kill the cop in your head". it's kind of ridiculous and a little dramatic, invoking feelings of oppressvie authority and criminalizing thought... but there's a lot of truth to it. i had a cop in my head for years. learning to excise that judgemental self from my psyche was probably the best thing i could've done for myself at a time when my self-hate was at an all time high, but it took a long time for me to sit down and interrogate what exactly i was worried about.

without going into too much detail, i learned a while ago i have ocd. not the stereotypical germophobe or perfectionist ocd, but the kind that makes me worry endlessly about the moral consequences of almost everything i do. i have this under control now for the most part but go back as recently as 2022 and i was a neurotic mess. i was constantly stressing about people online taking issue with how i present myself, how i lived my life, how i behaved in the past, etc.

to illustrate what this is like...

one day i got in a near miss in my car, the kind that was mostly my fault but something that fortunately everyone was able to walk away from. someone was pretty rightfully pissed off at me and i felt like an idiot. importantly, nobody got hit. for the remainder of the day and following day, i felt like i was being tortured. i combed over my memories repeatedly to make absolutely sure everything was ok and when those memories eventually began tarnishing from being recalled so much, i became very slightly convinced that maybe i did hit someone, misremembered, and drove off in a hit and run that would carry criminal charges and i'd be taken to prison. every knock on the door became a moment of panic as i waited to hear an officer's voice through the wall asking if i was home.

obviously this is an insane overreaction. you don't hit something with your car then cluelessly drive off, especially when you drive a beat up little car like i do. hitting something is painfully obvious. i can barely hit a dip in the road and without hearing some clunk or click. you have to shut down these things early otherwise a spiral like that is likely to happen.

for various reasons, this ocd began targeting some of my coping mechanisms and the way i like to present myself. i think the reasons why should be relatively obvious, even if it's an extreme reach. i was worried of people jumping to conclusions about me, calling me problematic, calling my ideal image gross and making me a target of online harassment. i have a lot of hurt around being made a target online, having been doxxed as a teenager and cyberstalked for a long period of my life, the idea of that machine starting back up again in a far more public fashion terrifies me. so i shut myself down. i didn't let myself be me. may can't be "small", that's wrong. may can't want care and love and affection in her moments of vulnerability from someone bigger, that's problematic. these things are immutable but i wanted so desperately to get rid of them, so i pretended that i did and that nothing was wrong with doing so. obviously, repressing this huge part of my psyche was torture and absolutely not what i should have done. it's insane and illogical, but the thing with ocd is that these insane illogical thoughts become the norm.

therapy helped, but it was a slow process. my friends knew that i needed to get out of this mindset but i was hard to convince. i became a shell of my former self for years. then, a breakthrough. through total social media happenstance, i stumbled across a visual novel called coquette dragoon. anyone whose known me since i read it knows that i am insane for this vn. in the interest of not spoiling too much of it, i leave it as an exercise to the reader to go support the author and give it a read. however, i do want to share a passage here.

it's a little bit pathetic to admit but reading this made me feel understood in a way that i never really had until then. there was a surreality of reading someone else's work and feeling like it was written about me, as if it had aped thoughts straight out of my own head and presented them to me as someone else's despite no prior connection to the work. this was one of the passages that bookended the chapters that were finished up to that point and leaving off on such a powerful, compassionate piece of writing definitely made me a bit insane for the work as a whole. when i recommend visual novels to people, coquette is right at the top of the list. it's probably not for everyone but if you ever want to understand how may thinks, i'd encourage you to read it and pay close attention to xio. may is like that!

when i realized that i wasn't uniquely flawed in a way nobody else was, but was in fact a hurt person trying to be loved in a way that was comfortable to me, that's when my ocd began to crumble. immediately, everyone could tell i was happier. i lit up in a way i hadn't in years and i let myself be fussed over, cared for. may was allowed to be small and no internet weirdos could tell her not to be. over time, i've reconciled this and cranked it to 11. being loudly myself is vital to my well being now i think. i keep talking about "lowering the rent" but every time i post that, more people follow me on bsky. people adore may for being relentlessly herself.

i don't really have a good conclusion here other than if any of this resonates, try to remember you are never alone in your struggles. you're allowed to be yourself. it is imperative to be yourself. don't let anyone take that away, especially not the cop in your head...

when did webdev get so complicated

Sat, 29 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

you'll have to excuse the incendiary nature of this post, as it was made with malice and anger in my heart.

the web is a fascinating piece of technology for me. an accessible universal platform for apps, viewable on anything from phone to laptop to desktop to game console, rife with documentation so that anyone who wants to put a website up can. i know some people aren't fond that the web browser has kind of become the one thing that computers actually Do now, and i have my concerns too. but, for the most part, i think it is a useful technology to have around.

so why the hell is every modern framework a clusterfuck of boilerplate that takes weeks to understand top to bottom?

for years the most complicated thing you ever had to setup was like, https. and to be fair, that has actually gotten easier. nowadays you punch in certbot once and it works forever. but if you wanna start a new web project in like, react:

install node
install npm
run npx to init your project
npx goes "hey man are you chill with downloading this random boilerplate generator that will download more things", say yes
npx installs the package, the package starts up, asks you 10 different onboarding questions that determines what of the 300 dependencies aren't optional
run npm run serve or whatever and a web server magically boots up and now you have a placeholder page

okay cool. i spend 30 minutes trying to navigate the framework, try to learn through online documentation because the templating engine has gone through 3 different iterations, eventually find out the newest version uses a thing called JSX that is kind of like html if it sucked a little bit more. i build my website, navigating through the complicated ordeal of figuring out routing (requires another dependency) and feel the entire thing was largely bogged down by the process. i get it. i understand why state as a source of truth for layout is good. but the way this has become the default way of building websites feels incredibly detrimental.

so, whatever. i'm not building a reactive responsive phone app for my investors. i'm building a blog. i want a blog. i want to generate a static site. fortunately, "static site generators" are a thing that exist! cool. i begin my search. hugo! hugo looks good. hugo looks like exactly what i want actually. so i dig into the docs and oh my lord why is it like that ????

admittedly, i did very little fishing through hugo. the reason was largely that i know html, css and javascript. i guess i technically know scss through immersion, and i know a bit of modern framework-y things like react but more preferably svelte. when i looked up "hugo custom css" i was taken to a documentation detailing themes. there's a cli command to add a theme, but from there i didn't really find much official documentation. everything was third parties, roughly conveying what you need to do to make a new theme, but never actually showing me what that looked like in thorough detail and worse, the entire tutorial was a multi page ordeal. to ultimately come away with some html and css, that i could just, write myself. most of the recommendations i saw online said find a configurable template instead of doing the work of writing the css yourself.

so i tossed the idea of using hugo and hopped on github. and wouldn't you know it there was a beautiful project called makesite.py that is 130 lines of gods own python that takes some html and css and sticks the entire thing together. i got the entire thing running with ci on github pages in a day. and the beautiful thing is, i understand it. i know how it works. the entire inner workings of my website are intuitive to understand and i was able to figure it out all in my spare time following a workday.

i can't say that about my svelte portfolio, which i ultimately did like making but whose project folder with dependencies is nearly 100mib...

nail in the coffin: this blog totals 1.3mib. about 95% of that is the background image.

reconciling the feeling of "smallness"

Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

although my life is hardly very complicated, i often tell my friends how "small" i feel within my own world. it's kind of like vulnerability? but somehow it feels different. it shifts how i view myself and others. when i have a difficult day, when i'm stressed or anxious, or when putting in an inordinate amount of time at my job to meet a client's demands, may feels "small". the complicating factor here is that employers don't hire "small" people. they want capable, willing people who can be raked over the coals and come out the other end swinging. so i kinda deal with this feeling by pushing them down and meeting my problems at their level. but sometimes may wishes she could just be, "small".

now if you know anything about may you know that i am a bit of a pervert for things like size difference. i dunno if this is the chicken or the egg, but they're intrinsically linked. playing with just how "small" i get to be, and how "small" i am perceived as, these are fun concepts for may. obviously there's a physical component here. i am pretty tall and not easily mistaken in a crowd, but within almost all of the roleplayed kayfabe that i participate in i opt to be far smaller than that. maybe this is a grass is always greener situation, but it just seems so much more preferable to be small and adorable than unwieldy and big (not without its appeal! but not really my thing, usually...)

if physical size were the only component of this, i wouldn't talk in bizarre riddles about it. being "small" isn't just, being small. it's about social hierarchies, expectations placed on the individual, responsibility and emotional fortitude. and all of that is to say, being "small" makes me feel like i am on a lower rung than others. it feels like i have less capacity to deal with the stressors that everyone else seems to handle seamlessly. of course, i am a bit of a crybaby too, so there's that emotional component.

for a long time i viewed all of this as a failure that needed to be expunged but lately i've been allowing myself to reconcile all of this and interrogate the feeling. i am allowing myself to fantasize about a may who is given some levity, space to exist, and a helping hand when the overwhelming expectations of the world she is in comes crashing down. it's a pleasant shared escapist fantasy that i can retreat to with some of the friends who are willing to indulge me. the roleplayed encouragement, doting and care -- idk if it helps me get through it, but i certainly feel a lot more capable than i ever used to be when it comes down to it.

obviously none of this is a substitute for self care and confidence and growth and all of that. i do make sure i'm not just succumbing to some fantasy world and ignoring my problems... i try to remind myself that being physically big isn't all bad, and i don't need to be small to be cute. by most metrics, i'm successful in the ways that i need to be (job, shelter, loved ones, mental health), so maybe it's all just perspective?

but it would be nice just to be small, if only for a little while

testing 1, 2...

Thu, 27 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

ARE YOU THERE?

ARE WE CONNECTED?

❤️

EXCELLENT.

TRULY EXCELLENT.

NOW.

WE MAY BEGIN.

hello. my name is may, as you may have summized. i have recently found myself wishing i had an outlet for more long form thoughts, the kind that don't neatly fit into a 300 character limit.

i have a lot of thoughts! sometimes too many. or maybe just a few very long thoughts. but sometimes when letting these loose into the wild, i worry i am crowding my followers timelines. i hope that this space may be where i write out my longer form thoughts. these are not guaranteed to be poignant, thought provoking, or even comprehensible... but i hope that i may share them with you.

regardless of what you get out of it, thank you for looking at my little space.