makz | Public Entry!?

A wild, public entry has appeared.

＞ Fight
＞ Magic
＞ Item
＞ Run

…I'm going to assume you're reading this post instead of trying to defeat it in a valiant turn-based battle, and keep writing with that assumption as a basis.

Hello.

My buddy decided to use Dreamwidth more, and I, who only ever post freinds-locked things, thought it might be nice to post something publicly to encourage his continued use of this place.

I like writing. Even when I don't have anything to say, I've always liked writing. The limitations of social media, and the expectation that anything at all can be said in short little bursts of text, have always frustrated me. Let me be long-winded. Let me play around with words.

So, maybe I should briefly introduce myself before going on about my day?

I'm Maki, or makz, or jakka-ningen in the Gundam fandom. I've been online since the AOL demo disc days, and thought my cousins were so cool for using Netscape back in the 90s. I fell in love with the internet as a canvas that allowed anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection to publish themselves, and reduced the friction necessary to communicate with strangers to pressing a button rather than using a postage stamp and revealing your home address to strangers. How great! How amazing! Now I'm a computer engineer!

I might have become a little disillusioned since then.

I grew up as a girl-type child, and then worked very hard to inhabit the spirit of "teen girl" during the "girl power" moment we had in the 90s. …Technically by the time I was actually a teen girl, it was the 2000s, but that's fine; I didn't mind. Even if the video game magazines were chock full of ads that smelled of chauvinism and machismo, I clung to both girlhood and the promise of the digital revolution.

I was always really interested in the ways that communications technology overlapped with the performance of girlhood. I read manga where teen girls sent coded messages to one another on their beepers and called one another on party-lines, costing their parents a crazy amount of money on their monthly phone bills. I stayed up late at night to call my school friends after the surge hours for daytime telephone calling ended, talking one another through levels of Gameboy games — a small, personal circle of Nintendo Power Line teenyboppers armed with GameFAQs printouts.

To me, my gender was something facilitated by machines. My performance of femininity was defined by pastel pink websites with MIDI files that auto-played on page load. My understanding of my friends' personalities was augmented by Quizilla games copied and pasted into our Livejournals. I had a lot of fun finding new digital postcards to send to acquaintances I'd met at anime conventions. The "dings" of YIM and AIM let me know others were also bored on a Saturday night after finishing up homework assignments.

I've since lost a lot of faith in technology as more people use it to prop up end-times capitalism, and a lot of faith in my own self-identification along the lines of gender as, once again propped up by technology, regressive policies aimed at tearing down my sisters, trans and cis alike, are pushed through by oligarchy.

…In any case, I'm someone who talks about things like this, in this way. If you're already exhausted, you should probably stop here, because it doesn't ever get less like this with me.

My personal profile (in English and Japanese) is over on the site I'm building to complement my Bluesky account, and if you view it on a big screen, it does some fun things with columns. (It's still readable on a mobile screen, though!)

No matter how disillusioned I become with computers and the companies that build out the internet, I'll always like making my own little webpages and pretending they'll all coalesce into a coherent website one day.

As for what's current with me, I'm happy to say I'm starting a new job soon! "Tomorrow" soon! My second week on the job, I'm meant to fly out to a different city and get hands-on experience with my team, who are all normally in different cities throughout the US.

I've worked with this company before, but not with this team, and not with this division. The world is moving really fast, in some really upsetting directions, but hopefully my personal life is going in a positive direction. The IT side of computers will always need a team of people to wrestle the machines with our hands and feet and teeth and screwdriver sets and soldering irons, running cable and implementing hotfixes as things break, and no amount of executives who think AI can perform miracles will reduce the necessity of computer lackeys. My new job title is "Systems Engineer," and hopefully that opens enough doors for me that I can afford to live a more human lifestyle than I, a fairly average millennial, have been living up until now.

Unlike people born with the destiny of a rose, I've been a nameless flower drifting in the breeze up until now… But maybe! I can put money into a 401k! Maybe I can survive the apocalypse after all! (It's far more complicated, nowadays, surviving the apocalypse. Money alone can't save me. But it won't hurt!)

If we've gotta fall, let's fall beautifully. But let's try not to fall!

Other than the new job, let's see… what am I reading, recently?

I picked up a book called "The Soul of a New Machine," by Tracy Kidder, about the history of some microcomputer, but oddly enough, nowhere on the book cover does it say which microcomputer it's talking about. I'm 20 pages in, and I still don't know. The book itself was apparently published in 1981, and was a Pulitzer Prize winner. I didn't buy this because I was interested in the computer itself — it was just in the "tech" section of a used bookstore and I thought it sounded interesting — and so far it's got a very compelling voice, along with the easiest to understand explanation of transistors I've ever read in my life. (I've taken plenty of undergraduate courses in computing, but really, this was concise and understandable, and came with a brief history lesson.)

It always takes me forever to get through nonfiction books about tech, but this one is especially well-written, so maybe I'll finish it before the month is out. And if not, I can reread the pop psychology book I was reading before and take notes this time.

I'm also reading a manga called "Hana no Asuka-gumi!" which is also from the 1980s. It's a very compelling sukeban manga, which comes with both plusses and minuses for me as a reader. Plusses: It's gorgeous; the action is fun; the cast of characters is broad; everyone has their own "quirks;" and it's got that slightly amoral "this is the way the world is!" feeling of shoujo manga from that era, which I adore. Minuses: I can't read delinquent Japanese very well because I'm basically a bouya. I'm a proper young gentleman, speaking proper young gentleman Japanese. I have to read the lines out loud to figure out what the words are, sometimes.

We'll see how long I can read this manga before I get frustrated with my language ability (lol).

This seems like as good a place to leave off as any, so I'm off to see a a man about a haircut! Maybe I'll post more publicly in the future… or maybe this, too will just end up friends-locked eventually. We'll see!

Byyyyyye