mary cuntrarian

1. What is your favourite fruit? Kiwi, but it has to be perfectly ripe and juicy. Not under-ripe and crunchy, ick.

2. What is the last book you read? Absolution by Jeff Vandermeer and it was a doozy. A follow up to a beloved sci fi series ten years after it ended. I still don't know what to think about it and was just discussing it with a new friend. I don't know if it was needed but I'm glad it exists anyway. 

Also I read the collection of Blacksad I got the other day and besides it moving at a breakneck pace (shit just happens), I really loved it and want to read more.

3. Do you like any of your school photos? I was absent a lot when I was in school, and I was homeschooled for most of my life. I remember taking like two school photos, maybe 3. I hate my kindergarten picture and my freshman picture is when I had at home highlights gone wrong. So no.

4. Do you ever blowdry your armpits to get the deodorant to dry quicker? I HATE wet deodorant so no. It's the powder fresh type with the aluminum because I'm a weakling. I tried natural deodorant before and the only thing that worked was expensive crystal spray. Honestly I miss the spray but I'm too poor for it.

5. What was the last film you watched? I think it was The Matrix Resurrections, for the first time, and I was sleepy during the second half so I honestly need to watch it again but I really enjoyed it. It was a bit cringe at times but its the Wachowski sisters, what can you expect? :D

Of course, once I come to Dreamwidth and start blogging again and coding every day on my 2016 Macbook it decides it's probably time to die soon. The trackpad and keyboard stopped working, and I had to plug in a wired set. It's super annoying to use in bed and I don't have room anywhere else to use it.

At least the entire laptop isn't fucked, yet, but I have this feeling it might totally shit itself soon. Which would send me into a spiral because all I have right now is blogging and coding, it's my current hyperfixation and escape. I have other hobbies but I'm going to feel so lost without some sort of computer right now.

I have no money but Mr. Strange says they're going to get me a used laptop if they have to, because it's also for my work. I need to be able to edit my art and print out my prints of my work for vending markets. I have my own printer and I was using it but without a computer that won't be any use and there goes what little job I had. I love them so much but I don't want use to drain all our funds on this. It's important but it feels so dumb, at the same time.

Does anyone have any recommendations for laptops? Since I've been wanting to play some PC games I might as well get something that can do some light gaming like cozy pixel games and something that won't overheat when I'm coding all day. I have no idea how to look for a computer right now, what I would really want because I haven't had to worry about specs for almost ten years.

I just can't lose anything else, and literally can't afford to. I'm using my Willow Nightingale "Nothing Matters, Smile Anyway!" icon because it's fucking true.

(16) The Matrix + header
(12) Neon Genesis Evangelion + header


( Neo, get in the fucking Matrix. )

There is always a train, there is always a train and I am always on it, I am always on it. It is always moving forward and I am always riding it forward until it won't go anymore. I'm not driving the train but there is always a train that I am always on going forward without trying, going forward on a train that has no destination. There is always a train and I am the only one on it.

I used to live near enough a train station to actually ride it every now and then. Now I live in a backwards area that has little to no public transport. I've always found trains fun, I don't have special interest in them but when I'm riding one I feel especially interested in being there.

It seems like the most stable form of transport in that the car is literally on rails. I know very well things can go off the rails but in theory it's not supposed to (it's not supposed to) and that screech of steel on steel lets us all know this carriage is serious and feels older than the idea of travel.

I've been rewatching Neon Genesis Evangelion and before you roll your eyes I can tell you it's one of my most favorite things in the world, so you should feel bad. There are a lot of scenes at the train station or scenes on a train. To me it always represented the characters lack of agency, that no one in the show has any control over their lives nor even understand what they're doing and to what end. There are important moments that happen at train stations, in the show, in real life. I proposed to the love of my life at a train station, I've had panic attacks that felt like the end in trains, in buses, in the back of taxis. Once I got on the wrong bus and it changed the course of my entire life.

I moved across country with my mother when I was ten years old, on a train. My father was on the other side of that train, behind me, and if we had never left...

A lot of shit happens on trains. And cars. A lot. I read Lolita for the first time on a train, on a long trip, and it felt apt. I had been an emotionally abused child that was pulled from this safe place and that to somewhere I didn't know and back again. Never given agency or asked where I wanted to be, where I felt comfortable.

I've been rewatching Evangelion because I'm depressed. Because I feel like I've lost all control of my life and while the world continues to burn around me, I just want to watch something worse. Something beautiful and raw, but worse. It's the same reason I watch horror, to feel comforted by the surreal absurded unreality of it all. But I need hope and hope is television to the sad elder millennial. Hope is media, in small doses, here and there, the good shit that gets into your bloodstream and changes your dna. Or something more scientific sounding.

I think I've lost my train of thought.

(Edit: Recently watched The Matrix Revolutions since I posted this... There is always a fucking train.)

I've been listening to a lot of Lord Huron. Probably too much. Recently I became obsessed with the Southern Reach trilogy, now four books total with the new one. Lord Huron might be one of the most Area X-core bands because they do work as companions. I could put on "Time's Blur" on repeat through reading the entire first novel and it would probably sync up like those old urban legends about albums syncing up to movies. "Looking Back" seems to be from Old Jim's pov, and "What Do It Mean" could be the anthem of the series. Or "Not Dead Yet".

Anyway, because of this combination I've been thinking about death and decay probably more than I should be. Specifically the death of the internet and the decay of our online footprint. The path of our lives we weave through the world wide web is long and winding and strange. It can also be frozen in time, or placed in a sort of stasis.

Does anything truly die on the internet?

Last night I was on the Wayback Machine using an old "Dollzmaker" to well, make a doll. (If you'd like an example or to make one yourself, go ham.)

When I was in middle school aged (and high school, let's be honest), I used to spend way too much time on these Dollzmaker sites. I remember for a while my mother and I only had WebTV which didn't let you do much online. Think of a crappy Chromebook with your television as the monitor. You couldn't save files to a hard drive or download software. I remember begging users online to make me custom dollz in Photoshop, which I barely even knew what that was at the time.

I'd later graduate to using Photoshop, and getting a real computer, but I stayed obsessed with those dollz. I would stare zombified at the screen dragging and placing little assets to Frankenstein myself together. Killing my eyesight one pixel at a time.

Those little shiny bitches used to be my whole personality. They represented me as I couldn't be at the time, or how I thought I couldn't be. Pretty, sexy, wearing wild cool clothes. I was plain and too poor to ever get the sort of clothes I wanted.

The internet is like a living organism. Like the Crawler in Annihilation, it thinks and writes and records. I'm not talking about AI, more about the metaphorical idea of the world wide web. The terroir of it. Things would die forever if humans didn't keep cataloguing them, if we didn't invent things like the Wayback Machine to revive decaying web pages.

How much of the internet is in us, and us in the internet?

People talk about their online footprint all the time but I can feel mine like a tether. I don't think I've ever said anything too bad, mind. I most likely said dumb things out of ignorance. Probably some not so feminist speak? What i mean though when I say I feel it like a tether is pulling at me is somewhere along the web is a line from the first moment I logged onto a computer that leads up directly to my last breath. Isn't that fucking weird?

I hold so much nostalgia for the experience of searching for and making those Dollz. The memory is buried in my mind like mushrooms growing in the dirt. But somewhere deep in all that code is me, as well. I've found old flickr accounts, livejournal entries, cached webpages with my old childish usernames burrowed somewhere in the page text. I've changed the internet in small ways, and in ways more obviously and also imperceptibly, it's changed me.

Last night I burst into tears making one of these Dollz, thinking about how one day the only things left behind to prove I ever existed will be the ghost of me online. It was a random intrusive thought that hit me to my core. One day this little pixelated, inappropriately dressed icon will represent me somewhere when I'm not here anymore.

In the Southern Reach trilogy, doppelgängers and inconceivable monsters replace the dead. Nothing, floral nor fauna, every truly dies. It just shifts, and evolves.

In Lord Huron's new album, The Cosmic Selector v. 1, the narrator in the first song sings about "living outside of my body and mind". Is that what we're doing? Leaving behind memories, dreams and nightmares to keep us immortal?

There's something about the new album that has carried on from almost every other Lord Huron album, but in a good way. The theme of a lonely traveler who is forever looking for some mythical other half. "Is There Anybody Out There" says "i'm alone in this place, and i stare out into space, and i feel something strange, like my world has changed."

Just like Control, like Gloria, like the biologist and my technological footprint. Like Saul. Our histories change us, decay us, and become us.