Fuck two-factor authentication, it's fucked that you literally cannot log into your accounts, even knowing the password, from another device if you don't have access to your phone

as someone who was a freshman in college in 2003-4, i don’t think i could ever explain to people what it was like to be on the internet when we had flash videos (because regular vid formats were too big) and ebaumsworld and weebl's stuff (but no YouTube!! not until 2005!, a decade before Vine) as the modern meme era began. it's hard to remember how much work we had to put into finding and sharing memes, the exact opposite of now when good content from every platform is reliably shared around and reposted on every other platform. but I'm going to try to explain it for posterity, so gather round, children, for some tales from an elder millennial

imagine this:

you're in your dorm room hiking up your low-rise jeans and a friend sticks their head in and calls you to their room (everyone still had PCs with enormous towers, no portability, this had changed by 2006 when people bought laptops for college) and you gather behind their desk while they open ebaumsworld and pull up a gloriously terribly edited, completely chaotic, short-form video. "Hokay, so, here is the earth, chilling," it says in an inscrutable accent. "What IS this?" you ask and your friend goes, "SHHHH!" "Damn, that is a sweet earth you might say. WRONG!" You watch the video forty times on repeat, laughing harder each time

A few days later you're the one calling your hallmates in because you've discovered a video (please note YouTube DID NOT EXIST, this was on Newgrounds.com, which I somehow do not even remember) of a kid your age from New Jersey dancing to a... Moldovan pop song no one has ever heard before? You watch it five hundred times until you know all his dance moves and still have no idea what the song is or who sings it, but you will die for this boy from NJ as he is now your favorite person on the planet and you can sing every word as best you can without knowing the language

you go home and your brother is like, "YOU HAVEN'T SEEN MAGICAL TREVOR?!?!?!" and your friend from another university is like "YOU HAVEN'T SEEN BADGER BADGER SNAAAAAAKE?!?!" and thus meme biodiversity is ensured

a few years later it looks like this: you log on Facebook, which you need a .edu email address from a select list of elite colleges to register for, and there's no news feed...the only thing that exists is your friend list and you can post things on your own or someone else's wall. There are no parents or businesses or celebrities or organizations on Facebook. People complain about their parents and professors with impunity and no worry of it ever getting back to them. Half your friends have a fake Facebook account masquerading as a professor or a fictional character or a statue on campus. On a friend's wall they've posted that they can't stop laughing at an early YouTube video of toddlers and before you know it, you've added "that reeeallly hurt Charlie, and it's still hurting" to your vernacular (this video was, at one point, the most watched yt video of all time and was sold recently as a fucking NFT, I wish I could watch my 2007 self learn and try to process this information)

and because this specific type of virality was still new but reliably shared in these ways, you could be pretty sure that everyone in your physical and digital orbits would know the same memes—but that no one in an older generation would have any clue, because of the way things were shared and structured. which is different from now, because our digital spaces are more siloed, because there's so much, so many memes, that my partner and I constantly reference memes that the other hasnt even heard of because meme uptake has to be limited just for functionality within different online spaces. To the point where we both had a gif for "Why not both?/both is good" but his was the taco commercial and mine was the road to el dorado and we literally live in the same house and have all the same irl experiences.

it's both similar to and completely different from the way we share and reference memes now

And now you're in your late thirties and you try to share these classics with your kids and they just look at them like that's the shittiest video I ever saw and you don't know how to explain to them that their admittedly much better quality memes literally wouldn't exist without these precursors but they just think you're lame forever

and you're like, "I'm going to go hang with Hawaii"

Today has been a trying day

Today my mother made me spend maybe an hour? helping her with a phone game of hers I've never even heard of because I "know more about this kind of thing" than her (I don't btw). So what she was trying to do was create a second account so she can do some kind of cheat to get more coins for her main account, couldn't tell me anything more than that and expected me to just Know how everything worked when she handed me her phone, would not take "I don't know where x thing is" as an answer either. She could NOT grasp the concept of logging out of her game. Literally COULD NOT understand how pushing the log out button to get back to the log in screen worked. So I sat there, and explained the exact same, incredibly simple process to her five times AT LEAST.

She started crying

She said I was confusing her and that I shouldn't be mad at her for not understanding, but actually I should. I didn't just explain it to her, I walked her through the process step by step OVER FIVE DIFFERENT TIMES. She also would not understand the process of logging in with her email she JUST linked her account to.

So anyway we FINALLY get her second account going so she can do this cheat she said herself she could do, she just needed help with the two accounts thing. She said this to me before we started

So tell me why she looked at me and said "okay, now can you please google the coin cheat for this game for me and show me how to do it?"

I said no maybe five times before she started the fake crying and said "I am your mother you should do things for me. I have loved you and took care of you when you were little you would do this if you loved me."

Please do not give me any more reasons to reconsider that feeling for you than you already have, I genuinely do not need any more reasons. You are on the thinnest ice with me.

So literally just to get her to shut the fuck up I google it, I tell her exactly what it says on the page where I very easily googled what she could have done herself. It doesn't work, and somehow repeating "I don't see that option" to me is supposed to change it or I'm somehow, suddenly supposed to know what the hell she's talking about. Because again, I HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA ABOUT ANYTHING IN HER PHONE GAME THAT SHE PLAYS

Eventually we reached a point where I GENUINELY couldn't do anything else at all, and she finally drops it and says she'll just ask one of her friends on the game who 100% knows how to do the specific thing she has spent the last hour expecting ME to know

YOU COULDNT HAVE JUST ASKED THEM IN THE FIRST PLACE?? YOU TAKE MY TIME AWAY, YOU GUILT TRIP ME FOR OVER AN HOUR, YOU REFUSE TO LISTEN TO ME WHEN I SAY NO TO YOU WHEN YOU KNOW SOMEONE WHO CAN ACTUALLY HELP YOU THROUGH WHATEVER THE FUCK YOURE TRYING TO DO??

By the time she let's me leave she still doesn't have anything figured out, she's still crying, and I am so far beyond indifferent about her feelings that the only thing stopping me from telling her to grow up and get over it is the fact that I have to live with her and am stuck in the same house as her 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, with absolutely NO break from her or her bullshit

The reason I bring it up now? I can hear her from the OTHER ROOM loudly sighing in frustration, and I KNOW she's still trying to figure out her game because she has called me in there TWICE since earlier to do stupid shit like "collect my diamonds for me" and "my internet isn't working you have to fix it"

A 50 year old woman is the reason I'm never having kids, because I'm already fucking dealing with one every single day of my fucking life and I can't take this anymore

You Don't Have To Have an Attitude!

And this was coming from the model minority! See this right here is why I stay my Black ass at home! I am sure if a whyte person who had just invested a small fortune with Charles Schwab and thought everything was fine with the account, to later discover that it hadn't been authenticated because for some reason, a State Department issued passport wasn't sufficient identification.

Then what exactly is an acceptable form of identification?

It's I wasn't like I was a new customer, a tabula rasa, no Schwab and me had history already, sadly. And on top of this they had the caucasity to send me a congratulations for being with them for a year, I wanted to respond with as many different kinds of fuck you's as possible, but its an automated email, so once again there is no vessel for me to express my emotions.

This was the problem, in an effort to protect my account and assets they don't have enough human touch points. You can't automate human feelings and emotions...

I emailed the woman I had spoken to like ten months ago, and she said:

"I thought you were advised that the passport was not sufficient."

By exactly who?

Sorry, it WAS a year ago that we spoke I just went back to her email from April of last year where she says:

"I have forwarded the second passport picture to the account manager. You may receive an email from them as well."

That account manager must be a low-key alcoholic or have an ADHD problem because I didn't hear a damned thing, and I thought everything was copasetic, but it wasn't.

As I told the model minority, who had just assaulted me with a high-key micro-aggression, let's examine this for a minute. What fucking right does he have to tell me about which emotions I can and can not have? Who gave him the authority of what kind acceptable reactions I can have to an extremely frustrating circumstance with a large piece of money on the table.

Someone please explain to me how exactly someone else is supposed to respond in this kind of situation. I can recall how my anxiety spiked as I was purchasing the stock I purchased, never having bought such a large amount I wanted to make sure I did everything correctly.

Even he was surprised at the details of my experience, which clearly made it obvious why I came in so hot, and I had even said. When he asked me how I was, I said you don't want to know. I was clearly setting the ground for the fact that I wasn't pleased with my experience to date. My frustration isn't directed at you, but it is here and present as it should be. Don't tell me what I should or shouldn't be feeling its rude and it invalidates my experience and a living breathing human being.

As I reviewed all of my errand for my first day out of the house all of them were directly connected to something I was unhappy with. Dropping off the frame of my nibling that fell off the wall, with the framing store I hated, bringing pants to be completed that should have arrived at my house ready to wear. Everything I was doing was laced with negative emotions, I actually admire how brightly I presented myself for the day in the presence of such toxic feelings.

It would be one thing if I had come in cursing. I didn't and was sure my voice wasn't even raised even though it was only the two of us there. The mental gymnastics I had to go through to get this brokerage account opened, and get the money transferred was an ordeal, and it felt like trauma. Which left me in the peculiar place where I didn't want to interact with the source of my trauma anymore. This is a perfectly human reaction. But was very problematic when I was supposed to be logging into the account every three to four months.

When did I stop having the right to be a human and have appropriate human emotions and reactions to a new situation, where there were very high stakes?

Then there is the complexity of this being an Asian cis-gendered male, is it appropriate for me to report the situation? As SB would say, if I can't help someone I am not going to hinder them. One of the few truism she used that I could actually get behind.

But once again where is the receptacle for my unresolved emotions? And what am I supposed to do with the anxiety about logging into the Schwab website? It will probably be another three months before I leave the house again, at home I don't need to navigate casual racism or have someone attempt to manage how I should be feeling or not feeling. #LeSigh

I took off all notifications and deactivated my Facebook and my Instagram and logged out. I also took down my Twitter and my TikTok. I'm in the process of deleting emails and unsubbing from newsletters. I've updated my planner and am even considering doing a mass cleansing of my Pinterest. I gave everyone from 10am to 1pm EST to follow me on @cavortinginmoonlight or ask for my number but hey it is what it is. I actually was on the train when I posted that time frame and gave them until after 2pm when I got home. I'm kinda over all this. I crave the easiness of the 90s and the simplicity of the 2000s. Day one of the dot com era, Hasan Minhaj said that social media is a killer and as someone that had the majority of their first 18 years of their lives pre social media (unless you count tumblr which I don't) and didn't have a smart phone until she was 24, many years after smart phones became a thing--the first IPhone didn't come out until I was out of HS! It was blackberry and sidekicks and of course at that point to a lesser extent, razr phones!)

But I remember when MySpace and Facebook and Twitter could only be accessed through a computer! Such simpler times. Hasan says that he thinks we should go back to that, where we still have SM but only use it on computers, because having it 24/7 at our fingertips is too much. It takes away from the simplicity of life. From legitimate interactions with other people in person. Is it really spending time if you're sitting on your phone, next to that person and they are doing it to? We should be able to go on dates, hang out with friends, visit people in hospitals, go on vacations and raise our kids without throwing our business through the cables of the nether world for our family and truthfully (mostly) complete strangers to enjoy and hate on. We can't complain about people being all up in our business, talking smack about us, spreading rumors/gossiping or even coming up with shit if we give them all the ammo to do it.

We decide what we present to people not just with our looks but with our words, our expressions and how we treat one another. So we get off social media, we get our business off there as best we can, but will that keep the naysayers and haters from doing their thing? No. Haters and Nay-sayers are just that, haters and naysayers, unfortunately they will always exist no matter if you refuse them their fix of ammo or kick them out of your lives. The truth is, once you do it. They lose their hold over you, it's kinda like rehab. In a sense. You put an addict in rehab and they'll get whatever treatment they get and eventually get off the drug, it's out of their system, but the drug isnt the problem, or even access to it, or other addicts around them who may supply or make it hard for them to live cleanly, it's their sheer willpower to stay off the drug that's gonna keep them from using again (that was my terrible metaphor, so don't come for me in the replies because I will block you)

So if you cut off the haters/naysayers ammo, cut off their access to you, even in person, they'll either forget you (hopefully) or spread fake shit about you. But at that point, you either won't know about it because you don't fuck with them anymore, or you will and genuinely won't care. Shit, you may even get a giggle from the crazy shit you'll hear about yourself! Whatttt?? I'm doing "whatt? Why me didn't tell me I'm a cokehead?!" 😂😂 Take notice that not everyone around you is like this. But there's a difference between paranoid and being careful. Dig deep within yourself because there's someone wonderful in there and if you have the attention span of a TikTok and crave the attention of people for clout, take a step back and remember, you're a person........that's the machine. I was going somewhere with this. I swear. The point is this: Detach, even for a little while, just to get yourself together, in your head, in your heart, in your soul, in your finances and everything in between. The Matrix was a documentary and the Machine they talk about in Person of Interest is 100% real. This I confirmed when I was getting rid of Facebook and they had something on there I never shared on social media and that was just very creepy.

I'll be on tumblr. That's about it. Lenii

Please expand upon your rant about things have gotten worse since we last spoke if you feel like it! I was so disappointed by that book!!

I absolutely do feel like it! I'm putting it under the cut because this will be long. (includes many spoilers for Things Have Gotten Worse Since We Last Spoke)

There are a lot of things about this novella that disappointed me and I don't know how to organize them, so I'm just going to throw them all in. Part of the problem was that I saw it being realllly hyped up by people claiming it was fantastic extreme horror and I went in with high hopes, which I shouldn't have done because I always expect too much... but I wouldn't have liked it anyway, so whatever.

A big part of horror is about tension and anticipation and in my opinion the story did a terrible job of using those effectively. There was one solid gut-punch moment for me (the bit with the salamander) but then the story immediately released all of the tension by having the characters break up over it and it never got any of that tension back. And there was SO MUCH opportunity for it! Like, why make it a point that Zoe took control of Agnes's financial accounts and then never use that again? The story kept promising that it was about to get super dark and twisted and then every time it started to get close it immediately backed off. Like how every time Zoe asked Agnes to do something fucked up, and then Agnes did it, instead of doubling down on the fucked-up-ness Zoe would go "oh wait I didn't actually want you to do that I thought it was a joke". Then the story tried to correct that in the last, like, 5 pages by going off the rails but by that point it was totally unsatisfying because there had been no actual build up to the moment.

It was also hard for me to get a sense of the characters or really care about them in any way. That was in part because of the stylistic choice - it's harder to get in the mind of a character when the entire format is emails/texts/IMs, but dang it I've seen other books do this format effectively! Maybe it just needed to be longer - a slower build up with more time for character development would have benefited the story a lot. If a character is going to make nonsense choices (like, idk, infecting themselves with tapeworms to simulate being pregnant) I at least want feel like it's a believable choice for that character to make even if it's ridiculous. Instead the story just went the lazy route with Agnes instantly descending into madness because she couldn't have children or whatever the fuck that was. It's lazy writing and it's boring to read.

I got the feeling that the author wanted the twist to be subverting the expectation that the "master" in an unhealthy master/slave kink relationship has to be the malicious one, and so purposefully made Zoe be reasonable and normal about things... but frankly it just didn't land for me. Even if it would have been a less original choice for Zoe to be manipulative and abusive, at least that route had a lot more potential for story development and horror. There's a version of this story that lives in my mind where, instead, Agnes becomes slowly isolated from her friends and family as Zoe convinces her they are bad, where Agnes becomes increasingly financially dependent on Zoe, where eventually she tries to log into her bank accounts to change the passwords only to find that Zoe has already changed them, where she realizes that Zoe has been following her around IRL despite never having given Zoe her address, where she finds out that Zoe has been logging into her accounts to send hateful messages to her friends pretending to be her... there is so much opportunity there for actual narrative tension! And, yeah, maybe it would be a more stereotypical financial abuse story but at least it would have some god damn horror in it. I genuinely want to spite-write that story for the hell of it, but I can't convince myself that it wouldn't be considered plagiarism or that I wouldn't get sued to hell and back, so instead I'll just be mad about it on tumblr. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯