The Internet is for Porn! You know, if you want...

As the spoiled man-baby tries to destroy Twitter to prop up the ego that tech bros have inflated beyond his actual talents and intellect, I joined Spoutible, which was started by the guy behind BotSentinel as a harassment- and disinformation-free alternative to Twitter. (It turns out Christopher Bouzy is also something of a thin-skinned man-baby, and I should not be surprised. But whatever.)

Of course I didn't actually READ the terms of service, because who does? But since I've never been suspended, even temporarily, from any social media platform, I assumed that I am pretty well-behaved and wouldn't need to worry.

NO, I haven't been suspended! 

But I did end up in a Spoutible spat. (It's like a twitter argument, but with 50% less racism.)

One of the activist romance writers I follow on Twitter–yes, there is totally such an awesome thing–criticized Spoutible's policy on sexually explicit content. Spoutible's beta testers evidently voted overwhelmingly against allowing sexually explicit content at all. 🙄 I think it's prudish pearl-clutching, but since I have no intention of posting or looking there for porn, whatever. Their platform, their rules.

However, Courtney Milan publicly criticized the vagueness of the policy, with all the reasons that the sex-positive have for being wary of censorship: my "erotic" may be your "pornographic." Where is that line? Who draws it? More importantly, the right-wing is aggressively trying to use "family values" as an excuse to silence and persecute the LGBTQIA+ community. Also do policies against "sexually explicit" material effectively ban sex workers from discussing their work? There are lots of issues that a vague, hand-wavy "no sexually explicit material" does not address. 

I posted, in my own tiny little Spoutible account with 20 followers, my disapproval of the ban in general, because I don't believe sexual content should be treated the same as harassment or disinformation. I didn't even curse for once!

And a user who must have either been following me or looking for a fight told me that "unsolicited sexually explicit material IS harassment." 

Hmmmm....

I asked how posting in one's own feed counts as sending unsolicited content when we have the ability to choose whom we follow. I used the analogy of a person walking into a clearly marked sex shop and yelling about being offended. 

I was told this was a false equivalency because *I* don't understand how timelines work. Um.... Pretty sure I do. Spoutible has yet to start showing me promoted posts from anyone I don't follow, so if I see something, I signed up for it. On social media, I always read the bios and a handful of posts, including re-posts, or Echos in the Spoutible parlance, before I follow someone, and I only occasionally, somewhere down the line, get surprised or offended by them. And then there is always a handy Unfollow option rather than jumping salty with someone over what they said on their own tiny virtual soapbox.

I asked if I should be expecting to see posts from accounts I don't follow. One could call my response Socratic or choose to interpret it as genuine failure to understand. I was not rude. I did not curse. I did not flash my tits or vag at her. 

Karen...uh...Wendy then told me I was "clearly here to create chaos." She followed that with a thoroughly hypocritical "be well" and probably blocked me. I don't care enough to check.

*I* create chaos? I posted a pic of my crocheted blanket and a sex-positive opinion, and I replied to someone who came into my house, so to speak, to try to school me.

She picked an argument with a stranger, lost, and flounced. Tale as old as...the internet itself.

Perhaps I have a snowflake-level uniqueness. I have been on the internet so long that I remember before Amazon.com was even just a bookstore, and yet I have never stumbled across or been sent unsolicited porn. In the mid-90s I had heard so much about how there was porn everywhere, but I had never seen any, so I went and searched for it, probably using webcrawler or early yahoo. It was...eh hem...not hard to find when I looked. But I had to actively look.

In the late 90s I worked for a startup that was trying to organize usenet, one of the early message board systems, before the search engines made human sorting totally unnecessary. I categorized a lot of porn groups, some with content that even I found disturbing, and I am unwaveringly sex-positive and against kink shaming. 

But never any accidental porn. 

I've also never been sexually harassed. I've been called an SJW, been told to shut up, and been told nobody cares what I think more times that I can count, but I've never been threatened with rape or other violence. 

I am not discounting the stories of women who post their disturbing and threatening DM exchanges, or even just the random, tasteless, unwanted nude, and any of that is a problem, but I wonder how common it actually is. Is your aunt with the moderate drinking problem and the six cats batting away dicks every day? Maybe I've just never had a high enough profile to attract scary attention? I think I peaked at about 300 followers on my most popular account, and a good portion were probably bots whom I didn't follow back and so never saw whatever content they posted. 

I even have a twitter account specifically for selling my written erotica and THAT has never gotten so much as a single dick pic. I've had a couple of guys slide into my DMs to try to chat me up, but not a solitary, lone penis. I'm almost offended. If advertising that you write monster porn isn't an invitation to some kinky shit, I don't know what is.

So the idea that every woman on the internet is constantly swarmed by creeps sending blurry photos of their junk? I don't think so.

Grief is a Step Function

My mom died in April. My only sibling, my brother, died in July. My mom's death was expected. My brother's, at only 50, was most certainly not. 

Not having lost anyone truly dear to me before now, I would have thought that grieving would have some pattern to it. To borrow math graphs, it might have been a linear function with a negative slope, or exponential decay. It isn't. It's a random step function. August was terrible. September was better. October was bad. Thus far, November has been truly gutting. I will have my first holiday season without my mom or my brother, and I am ambushed by tiny little things at every turn that leave me leaking tears.

We got our Christmas tree, and as we finished putting up the plain baubles, I found the wooden Charlie Brown ornaments that my mother painted when I was three. The hands that painted them are gone forever.

I was reading an article about key changes in pop songs, thinking I would discuss it with my musical kids, and the last thought in the article was this:

    "You want to know why Motown was such an incredible font of composition? Three words: Detroit Public Schools."

Mom loved Motown and she went to Detroit public schools. She would have loved that. And I can't text it to her. 

And I can't call my brother to share that grief because he is gone too. The one person who should have been the lasting link to my childhood is also gone forever.

And I find myself here in the middle of The Two Towers, the slowest, most boring of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, where nothing is happening and there is only the overwhelming sense of the End of Things approaching, and I can't share a sardonic giggle with either of them about that analogy. 

I imagine that there will come a time when this doesn't hurt so much, when I no longer find myself crying over throwaway lines in NPR articles, when I no longer reflexively reach for my phone to share a silly thought or a story about my kids, only to remember that there is no one on the other end to answer. But there is no telling when that might be because grief has its own winding timeline.

Pearls Before Swine

The upside of my mother dying—insert cynical snort—is that (maybe) I can let go of trying to be a person she would be proud of. 

For my mother, the ugliest insult you could hurl at someone was to say he was selfish. It carried an outsized weight, a bitter contempt and hatred far beyond the conventional meaning. So to make my mother proud was to be selfless. To offer of myself, to give my time, my effort, my love without expectation of any return. And I have spent my life trying to live up to that. 

What a fucking waste.

During the pandemic, with schools working remotely, if at all, my coworker Luke was struggling to take care of his special needs child. Like most parents, only more so, school was primarily childcare for him. And when COVID took school away—right after he and his wife split, no less—he was kind of fucked. He was working maybe 25 hours a week. So I offered to take care of his son for a few hours a week so that he could actually...you know...be at the job that was paying his mortgage. I was watching this minimally verbal kid with severe behavior problems more than his family members could be bothered—because nobody but me would do it for free. Hundreds of hours of my life that I could have done literally anything else with, and that I will never get back. When money became available—from the state, and thanks to Democrats who care about people—Luke asked me if I would take the job, and I said I wasn't interested. Given his reverence for money, I was not going to become his employee, with the entitlement to my time that it implied. So I was no longer of use, and fuck me very much. 

His family members, however, now that pay was in the offering, could suddenly be stirred to watch their own flesh and blood. 🙄

So Luke and I continued to work together, and I continued to do nice, little things for him and everyone else, because it's who I'm supposed to be. I didn't need the job, and working for Melissa was irritating and demeaning af, but I continued, in part, because I was afraid that if *I* quit, Sharon would quit, and then Melissa would close the company, and what would Poor Luke do? Poor Luke, who needed the flexibility of a job that would let him drop everything so he could take care of his autistic kid.

Well, the fucker up and quit Monday without having given any notice that he was looking. Jose had asked ALL of his employees, given the precarious footing of the tiny company, to please let him know if they were thinking of leaving. He wouldn't blame them, wouldn't penalize them, would even offer recommendations because he understood that people have to do what's best for themselves, but he needed to be able to plan to try to keep the shitty little ship afloat. One of the engineers let him know—after she'd been rejected—that she had interviewed, and Jose had told Luke that he'd been hurt that she had done it despite his request.

And despite all of that, hereafter forever known as, Fucking Luke went and found another job and accepted it without telling Jose. Or me.

Because no matter what you do for people, they are shitty and not worth your effort.

When the Online Systems Go Offline

I have had a Wells Fargo account for nearly 30 years. I have been faithfully paying my current Wells Fargo mortgage online from my Wells Fargo checking account for over decade. So when I went to pay my mortgage last Friday, I was surprised to find that the transaction could not be processed despite the fact that there is clearly enough money in the account. It said to try again later or call the customer service number.

I tried again Saturday. I tried again Sunday. I tried again Monday. Today I finally gave up and called the number. 

Automated Voice: Please say or enter your account or card number.

Shit, where's my account number on the website? It's all asterisks. Duh, think! I know it by heart since I've been a Wells Fargo customer for 30 years.

Me:**********

Automated Voice: Please say your account number one digit at a time, or enter it using the keypad.

(sigh)

Me: * * * * * * * * * *

Automated Voice: You can add voice print identification for the future. Please follow the prompts to set it up, or say cancel.

Oh, FUCK NO.

Me: Cancel.

Automated Voice: You can add voice print identification in the future. Would you like to continue to receive prompts?

Me: No.

Automated Voice: If you would like to add voice print identification in the future, please speak to a customer service representative.

How many times do I have to say no to this?

Automated Voice: Please wait for the next customer service representative.

Their hold music sucks, but I guess I can at least be thankful it's not Opus No. 1.

April: Thank you for calling. This call may be recorded. ...yada yada yada... For security purposes, can I have your name?

Me: Jessica Cordova

April: Do you go by another name?

Duh. My bad. I haven't changed my name with Wells Fargo because the nearest branch in 1000 miles away.

Me: Jessica Madarasz. M-A-D-A-R-A-S-Z

April: Do you have access to the name on your statement?

Me: Yes?

Child, I just gave it to you.

April: ...

Me: It's not Jessica Madarasz? That's weird. 

Panicking slightly inside. Guess I should have set up Voice Print ID... But imagine how fucked it would have been if it had been someone else calling. I'd have been locked out of my own account forever.

April: If you can't provide the name on the statement, you'll need to go to a branch for further ID verification.

Me: The nearest branch is 1000 miles away.

April: ...

Fuck. Wait! I'm logged on! I can download a statement and check.

For fuck's sake. Really? Are you shitting me?

Me: Jessica Meagan M-E-A-G-A-N Madarasz

Now the bitch is satisfied. Great.

April: How can I help you?

Me: I've been trying to pay my mortgage online since Friday, and the website keeps telling me to try back later.

April: Can you log on?

God grant me the strength.

Me: Yes, and when I try to pay my mortgage, I get an error saying that the transaction cannot be processed at this time despite the fact that there is enough money in the account.

I read her the exact wording.

April: Have you contacted the mortgage department?

Me (clearly exasperated): No. Why would I do that when the website says to call this number?

April (salty): I'm just trying to find out if you've talked to the mortgage department. I'll need to transfer you to them.

FFS.

I wait. 

More loud, shitty hold music.

Automated Voice: Since this is a call about a debt collection, the call may be monitored and legal proceedings may follow.

Motherfucker, I've been TRYING TO PAY YOU FOR FOUR DAYS.

I explain to Curly (srsly?) that I've been trying to pay them for four days.

Curly: I'd be happy to help you with that. Can I offer you other Wells Fargo products that apply to you?

Me (curt): No.

Curly: Okaaaay. Can I have the routing number?

Are you fucking kidding me? If Y'ALL don't know it...

Me: **************

Curly: That's shows as a Wells Fargo account.

No shit, Sherlock.

So Curly finally sets up the payment, explains that if I want to cancel it, I have to call, but I may not be able to cancel it on the day it's set to be processed, and will I please fill out the email survey saying that she was an excellent representative of Wells Fargo?

I know it's not their fault. They didn't design the website in the first place. They didn't break it in the second. They didn't write the automated menus. They didn't write the scripts they have to go through. 

But for fuck's sake. 

And none of this addresses the original problem, which may still crop up at the end of this month when I go to make the November payment....

Etsy: Vile Den of Thieves

I started knitting in 2006, and I've been on Ravelry since you needed an invitation to participate in the beta. My mom taught me how to crochet when I was a child, but I've done a lot more knitting since learning because I prefer the look of knit fabric for clothing. However, recently, especially since the pandemic shutdowns, the youths have taken up crochet, and I had FOMO. 

(I suspect a large part of why young people crochet rather than knit is due to the prevalence of "video tutorials" on YouTube that these people raised in media saturation prefer, rather than having to decipher a written pattern. And those kids can get off my lawn!!! I love Millennials and Gen Z. Really. They just choose not to read, which breaks my heart, though I digress.)

In any case, the resurgence of crochet had me looking at crochet patterns, and a pattern listed on Ravelry directed me to Etsy, which has a gobsmacking number of crochet patterns. 

I was a little annoyed that people have listed patterns for sale that are clearly just scans of old knitting and crochet magazines. The Etsy store owners can have no claim of ownership of the intellectual property of a pattern in a physical copy of Vogue Knitting magazine from the mid-80s that they found in their grandmother's craft room, and here they are charging $2 for it. It didn't bother me too much with REALLY old—excuse me, "vintage"—patterns because there is no other way to acquire the out-of-print pattern legally and to compensate the 1980s designers or publishers, so $2 for the work of scanning and uploading? OK, I guess. Still hinky, but whatever. 

However, in flicking through the Etsy patterns, I recognized a crochet top that I had actually made from a pattern I'd found on Ravelry. The top had the same name as the one I'd made, but the store name didn't ring a bell. So I checked Ravelry, and indeed, the pattern is available for free from the actual designer on her website. There is at least one other pattern by that designer in the Etsy shop in question. The Etsy thief even used her pictures for one of the tops! And they are asking for $6.36 for a literally freely-available pattern. I hunted around for a comment section to be able to link to the designer's website and the free pattern, but you need to be a verified buyer in order to comment. I looked for a way to report the listing, but the only option was to report a listing as your own intellectual property, not someone else's. So I went to the designer's Ravelry page and sent her a message letting her know that SHE could report the fraudulent listing. I certainly didn't buy the pattern from Etsy to see how much work the seller might have done to turn the blog post into a downloadable PDF, or if they clicked Print-to-PDF on the blog post and uploaded. 

(As of a week later, the designer has not responded to my message, so either she's not checking Ravelry, or she just doesn't think it's worth the trouble to address the fraud.)

So now, in addition to questioning whether I should use Etsy because the corporation has increased its cut of actual creators' pay, if I do choose to buy something from Etsy, I need to investigate the sellers to see whether they seem to be the owners of the intellectual property because Etsy evidently turns a blind eye.

And all of this, along with the many ways to manipulate Kindle self-publishing and Kindle Unlimited to either downright steal other people's writing or game the system to trick it into paying more than you've earned, offends my sense of fair play. That there are so many people looking for a way to cheat rather than create is just so infuriating and disheartening at the same time. 

The Theme is Fascism!

 Maggie's Senior Prom is tomorrow night, and she is going. Ugh.

I have my whopping share of generalized Gen X disaffection that caused me to leave high school at 16, and I have a particular animosity toward The Prom because of the pervasive fiction that "you'll regret it forever if you don't go." I do not regret not having gone to the prom. I have been to formal events since then—the Millennium Celebration at the San Francisco Opera was quite memorable—so I know that if that's what you're into, there is no shortage of events for which you can buy an expensive single-use dress and uncomfortable shoes. 

But all of Maggie's friends wanted to go to the prom—because you'll regret it if you don't!—so we bought her a dress and a ridiculously expensive ticket. The event is being catered by a local microbrewery, which is sad because they are 17-19 and can't drink. It's just some pretty expensive hipster mac 'n' cheese. But she'll regret it if she doesn't go!

The school sent out "Important Information" today, and it is the most joyless bullshit I've seen for something that is supposed to be "fun." It begins by saying you cannot show up late—no admission after 6:45. No refunds. It goes on to warn that you MUST have a ticket, and it MUST be in your name, and you MUST show ID that matches the ticket. Better not have broken up with your boyfriend—which, of course, teenagers would never do 🙄—after you bought his ticket or you're screwed. No refunds.

Then there are detailed instructions about parking and drop offs. If you get dropped off, you have to climb to the third floor of a parking garage—in your formalwear—to enter through the door where you're subject to identity verification and search of your person and your purse. Not exactly a red carpet entry, especially if you've rented a limo.

Then they remind you that you better behave, or you'll be denied entry or be asked to leave. No refunds.

And finally, you will not be ALLOWED to leave early. So after an adult has felt you up, you've had your belongings searched, you've been asked to sit quietly like you're in school, been fed overpriced buffet food, and had to pay for someone to take a bad picture that will one day be laughed at on the Internet, if you're somehow not having a good time, you're still stuck. No escape. 

And did we mention, no refunds?

...but you'll regret it if you don't go.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure Maggie is already regretting agreeing to go.

My Mom Died Tonight (Or Is It Yesterday?)

My mom had a stroke a decade ago and another one last year. She had been suffering from heart failure for several years. She had been hospitalized twice in the past year. My sister-in-law Lucy called yesterday to let me know that my mom wasn't feeling well. Or, worse than usual, anyway. I had already known because I had talked to my mom the day before, and she had literally asked, when complaining about her ongoing health problems, why the doctors wouldn't just let her curl up and die. 

And at 2:00 in the morning East Coast time, my dad called to tell me that mom had passed. He was beside himself, which is not surprising. He is a drama queen to begin with, and if it were me at home with her, I would have been forced to google what you do when someone dies relatively peacefully at home. 911 doesn't seem like the right answer. There is no longer any risk to life and no emergency service that can help the situation.

It's a very practical problem that is the sort of thing my mother would have taken a deep breath and handled. 

But she's gone.

And as self-serving as it often seems in other people, the thoughts of "what she would have wanted" keep rising in my mind: 

She would have approved of my dad's joke that, ever the designated driver, she died on 4/20. She would have approved of my joke that it was the stupid iron supplements that she had started taking that were what killed her. She would have found it funny that my last text to her was that I hope she feels better soon. She approved of making light of, well, everything.

Should we cancel the trip with Antonio to Berklee College of Music this Saturday for New Student Welcome Day? Fuck no! She would not have wanted us to stop living and doing joyous things. 

Should they hold a memorial for her? (As Jose keeps pointing out, they donated her remains to a medical school—shut up, it's what she WANTED—so there can't be a proper "funeral.") I feared that the people most materially affected by her death—my dad and my brother's family for whom she was essentially a domestic worker—would decide to have one. She would not have wanted a funeral, and even if they held one, it really would have only been her family getting together to mourn together because she had all but withdrawn from contact with anyone else. 

What she would have wanted was for us to not make a fuss over her death and to go on, as productively and happily as possible. 

I hope that my brother and dad are eternally grateful to Lucy for dealing with body. Ever practical, my mother had tried to arrange it before her death, but there was an issue with the organization that she had contracted, and Lucy stepped in and arranged for UCSF Medical School to take the body instead. If it had been left up to my dad, he probably would have let the mortuary talk him into buying a $10,000 casket in which to cremate mom's body, which would have absolutely infuriated her ghost, if such a thing existed. I feel like it should be someone's campaign to let poor people know that they can do a double good of donating remains for organ donation/tissue harvesting or medical school training and save the ridiculous expense of a funeral and burial. Some organizations will even return the cremated remains—if you're interested in that sort of thing—after the useful bits have been taken to pass forward life and health. (I also started googling after Lucy told me about the hiccup with the first organization, but I didn't think both of us working the problem made sense, especially since it's more in her skillset. If not for her, I'm sure I, from the opposite side of a continent, would have been the one trying to arrange the donation so I am also thankful for Lucy.)

I have lots more thoughts that I will need to write about because, despite the irrational pull to do so, I can't call her to talk about how to go about grieving her immeasurable loss...