Sophie McLeish @sophieactual@witches.town

Sez you and who else's nexus?

We are not not going to have have a jinx tiff with ourselves, Sophie.

Fuck off Sophie.

Repeat to self daily. Do not jinx while dreaming. It is bad enough talking while dreaming. Do not jinx while dreaming.

@kara_dreamer That really didn't Englishify from dreamspace too well.

Cute angel, must be on the altar of a white witch.

Yup, that's better.

@kara_dreamer Regardless of where we stand now, and it's not really that far removed, as a child, we inferred from our somewhat witchy mother that even chains in the seventh level of hell could only tie an angel to the altar of the seventh level of the first heaven, and qlippothically a demon could only be bound to hell, never to heaven.

So we guess the angel wings are folded out of sight. :)

@Sylvhem ROFL. Being up to 12 hours ahead (or 13 hours for daylight saving, years ago IBM had to do a microcode patch for the OS/3x0 series just for us down here, the field only allowed a 12 hour offset) of a lot of the online world's population we're sort of used to extended alternate day conversations.

They lack immediacy, but the texture, ooooooh, with that time available, the English language can be the smallest camel-hair brush. Or brutally offensive, if your infer misses their imply.

@kara_dreamer @mona ouch

@grime_witch manga may be better (depending on your state of mind) actually

We found this on youtube. The Lawrence Welk Orchestra playing Sister Ray. It took a moment to metabolise but, hey, musicians play music. Then the disconnect hit us as we watched the audience dancing. Stunned mullet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i48BP1PUoFI

For so very long after the clothing store incident, as we slowly woke each morning, we'd tentatively slide our hands between the crisp white sheets, searching for that vestige of childhood, finally detached, lying quietly by itself.

But to no avail. There it was again, always, still stubbornly attached.

Then one morning, while getting dressed, we looked at the waist string on the pajama pants, looped it around and around and pulled. Hard.

All that got us was an excruciatingly embarrassing visit to the doctor to check on the bruising.

Our mother picked us up from kindergarten.

"We're going shopping for new clothes for you.”

We bounced into the store and picked out exactly what we wanted.

"They're very pretty dear, but the boys section is over here."

We were about to protest but the infinite sadness in her eyes warned us that something was not quite right.

An exasperated "Boring!" escaped while we thought about this.

But we complied.

Maybe by next time that useless appendage would have fallen off and we could have proper girls clothing.

We were far too pretty for our own good, then there was the arm wrapped across our chest so tightly we could barely breath, the obscenity pressed into our back, the hand pushed inside our pants. The white hot rage as we tried to scream "we’re only a child, you can't ...” then because we're a full-blown empath, we were drowning in their roiling sea of emotions. Then silence and swimming back to the surface.

We were lucky, a family friend couldn't risk leaving us bleeding.

But our mortified silence was taken as consent. We learned quickly to never be alone, even though we craved quiet. We learned to become unavailable.

We've been recapitulating the major traumas from this life, trying to integrate the damage that caused us to have such a flagrant disregard for authority.

At times, a healthy disregard that we don't want to lose, but it has caused us rather serious problems as well.

We weren't going to jinx this, it's raw, but if our pain helps someone to feel less alone, well ... we'll post it under a strong CW.

Also as a likely consequence, it was hardly surprising that when we found IT, we absorbed programming like most people ate lunch.

After we started dreaming in assembly language, we realised that our life was going to be mostly rather lonely, the phantoms that populated our world were sadly two dimensionally flat.

Our birth mother was a white Celtic witch who had been adopted out at birth, promptly orphaned, then raised in that extended family by a tangata whenua wet nurse.

As a consequence, we grew up with an ad-hoc mixture of English and te reo Māori and, equally weighted, the creation myths of the Catholic church, the Celts, and the tangata whenua.

Probably as a direct result of who she was, our mother recognised our plurality and transgender-ness from the very beginning and guided us delicately through the morass.

@Eve We're a bit old in this meatspace, we went through our larval stage in the unforgiving hands of the OS/360 assembler, and never returned. Linux didn't exist. We’ve watched as milli-, micro-, nano-, pico-, and femto- code layers abstracted the day to day OS's away from progressively virtualised hardware. Our thinking is still heavily coloured by bare-metal. We'll wear the geek's geek epithet we were given, but uncomfortably.

Real understanding comes from the electron level of gate junctions, not Haskell.

Every day we spend a short while in witches town and it makes us feel so very happy. Maybe there is hope for the world.

And @Eve says something cogent and beautiful and the maybe turns into a yes, there is hope.

@Eve @KitRedgrave When an OS is interrupt driven, most are, and ignore timeslicing, it's a pretty big hammer, a task can fiddle away without the OS taking much notice.

Assume a task has decided to take this approach to suborn the AI, entropy where the AI's OS has inferred there isn't any worthy of note.

A singularity would be a total game-changer, but would it necessarily be Armageddon?

@grime_witch Eco-friendly repurposing of essential equipment. One small step toward saving the planet by reducing consumerism.