Everything in our life is hierarchal, even blog posts.

Information, the world and—

Nothing is naturally hierarchal. Everything tends towards chaos: sludge: entropyless faded fjkloookhggghujj etc

even my bloody blog forces me to divide and conquer my fleeting thoughts into rigid categories.

i gave up on groups of pages a long time ago but the pages still have walls of their own. blogs usually have a title or topic or something holding them together, not naturally: it’s because i put in effort to make it that way, against all my natural tendencies, and it feels CRAP

i often look at all the things i want to write about and get excited to do it. but then i sit down or something and i start writing one of them and i feel sad / frustrated / confused because it’s MISSING SO MUCH

by picking one thing i lose all the others and that’s not a true representation of what’s going on in my head. it’s a failing to communicate what’s really going on in there. and that feels really important to me because

Why don’t we collaborate better? why is the world so focused on individual gains / on self improvement / on self preservation? or more often than not we’re focused on helping someone with more power than ourselves, with coercion of many kinds

I think it’s because we don’t share enough context between each other. we keep too much information trapped in our heads and we become too trapped off from one another. we don’t understand each other and we don’t empathise with each other: because we don’t see and feel what’s in each others brains

It feels weird to share so much information: It feels abnormal. But without sharing TONS, we can’t collaborate. That’s why we must normalise sharing scrappy fiddles.

Felix’s recent sharing of his inner monologue was a great example of this. He shared a lot of stuff that was buzzing around his head and i didn’t know that was all buzzing around his head, and a lot of it was buzzing around my head too and i had no idea!!

There are many reasons why you might avoid sharing your thoughts. You might think something like: Why would anyone care what I think about stubble? What’s the point or purpose of this? Is there any? but that’s the whole point. it has unknown rewards. rewards that are unknown to YOU. that’s WHY you’re sharing it. so you can enter the UNKNOWN.

maybe nothing will happen. maybe something will. so i may as well share with you what the stubble on my face means.

Yes, the stubble on my face.

The stubble on my face can mean many things.

It can be an indicator / reminder that I went through an unwanted puberty despite me trying not to. Or it can be a symbol of my gender fluidity / a refusal to stick to gender norms. Or perhaps it’s a telltale sign of my laziness and lack of organisation / a failure to book a laser appointment. Or maybe it’s a hint of some reluctance to get rid of it, even if I could?

At a certain time of day it’s a note of how late it is: I’m a human clock and my stubble is the hour hand. Or it’s a thing that appears every time I’m ill / too unwell to shave my face.

or it tells you how i feel. am i in a messy / scruffy mood? or a neat mood?

is this interesting? it doesn’t matter it needs to be shared

When I first started growing stubble I tried not to think about it / I was in denial. I refused to believe that there was something growing on my face. So I didn’t do anything about it and it grew longer. Some boys at school mocked me for it, and the shame began.

I remember disliking the disgusting velcro feeling of it on my tongue.

When I finally started shaving, I was horrified at how difficult it was to get it off.

I always tried to shave it all off but I didn’t like shaving it off because it reminded me of shaving it off.

But why?

At the time i told myself many things, i told myself it was because i was supposed to be a girl, not a boy, and it was all wrong. but zooming out now, i can see that those thoughts were deeply misogynistic and transphobic. and i can also see that i was denial: i was too scared by the idea of being outside the gender binary so i incorrectly clung onto the one that made the most sense

fast forward a decade, and finally accepting my stubble was one of the final steps towards accepting my gender fluidity. i think it looks cool when a feminine face has stubble, there’s something a bit rugged about it.

unfortunately, i hate the sensory feeling of it, its like velcro on my face, so i rarely do it

zooming out even further, i can see my mixed up teenage self getting confused with ALL these different feelings, but it comes down to something as boring as a sensory feeling. sometimes i wonder about getting it zapped off but i realise that it would make me sad. if i got it zapped off it wouldn’t be for me: it would be for the hierarchical patriarchy, judging me as lower down the ladder for not fitting into one of their little categories

i don’t fit into a category! and neither do my blog posts, from this day forwards. we could be talking about stubble in one part and interleave it with something completely different, like strudel, and strudel

when i first heard about strudel, i thought that it was made by Alex McLean and i had no idea who that was. but then i found out that strudel was made by Felix and Jade, and i had no idea who they were.

i could see that there were people like eddy flux and switch angel and daslyfe and froos, all very active on the strudel discord and github, but i couldn’t find Felix and Jade.

over the course of months i began to realise who was who. Felix is eddy flux and Jade is daslyfe and switch angel, but even writing this right now i doubt it, despite having met both of them in person

This is a portrait of Switch Angel.

I’d occasionally get a heart or unicorn emoji from her on the strudel discord and i started to recognise her avatar. i saw that she was doing a lot of new strudel features and a lot of music stuff and posting vertical videos on the internet and i didn’t quite get it. but i thought it was pretty cool and i kinda kept following along

then i saw that she was going to errorcamp and i thought oh that’s cool I’ll meet her there

but then i heard about a bunch of american live coders spending a week in London before errorcamp and i saw she was coming along. i met her and jame and all of the incredible boston and USA-ers who were there.

i saw her and i had a moment like “wait a second- is that- are you-“ and yeah it was and we got a photo together and meanwhile, some other American coders were setting up to perform, at the open slots AlgoRhythms event. and it felt like a bit of a fun culture clash.

they all had way higher standards than us. they wanted to do sound checks and eliminate any unwanted interference and fix broken or blurry protectors and we all usually plug in and go even with all those issues

who is to say who’s approach is right or wrong / normal or weird: it was DIFFERENT and that’s okay

as always i stood around and enjoyed all the music and visuals and chatted to people too. i spoke to someone who travelled there specially from down south and it was there first time. i asked them why they came and they said they came specially to see Switch Angel on her tour.

on her Tour!?

and you might expect this blog post to contain the entire story that I’ve started here but it won’t Because blog posts don’t need neat boxes.

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