2021-11-02: update that kinda turns into gender thoughts?
Life goes on. Like, house is reasonably settled but there's still some things I want to sort out with it. Due to lockdown I've mostly just spent a lot of time here and kinda maybe am a bit stuck with that now that there's not lockdown. Like, I wanna see friends and do things. But I don't actually know HOW to do that. So yeah, that's a thing.
Also, gender feels! I'm really not sure how to describe this but maybe the act of doing so will help. I guess I increasingly feel like there's contexts in my life where the way I want to present and be perceived as is "girl". That being said, there's other contexts in my life where I'm much more comfortable presenting and being perceived as "no thanks, none of that gender for me" but I'm noticing I said "much more comfortable" there instead of "want". Is that significant? Am I a trans girl holding parts of her back because of "easy", or am I, as I've generally explained myself to be, genderfluid? I think like ultimately if I am only letting the "true me" out in certain situations or whatever, like, so be it it's my gender I can do what I want with it. Like, when it comes down to it, I do not think being extremely transfem in presentation would be an issue at like Work or such places, but like I know that and yet it's still not a thing I'm inclined to do. So maybe I'm different versions of me in different scenarios or something?
Now I'm kinda wondering, like, maybe my loneliness is a desire for more situations where I'm the Girl version of me? Could make sense for that to be the case, but to a certain extent there's also just regular-ass loneliness, like I wanna see people and talk to people and maybe get out of the house a bit? I think it's more like maybe I want to see friends or do things, and my mode for seeing friends tends to be Girl.
So yeah umm I did a Gender Thoughts there. To a certain extent it is wild to me that I've been openly Gendery for years and still have things very much Not Figured Out, but like I'm gonna come back to "it's my gender I can do what I want with it". I keep having the temptation to like compare myself with others in terms of how they've done their gender, but like big deal that's their gender this one is mine and I can do what I want fuck you weirdbrain voice.
Here is an obligatory reminder that the only way I can tell if anyone sees this is if they actively choose to tell me so if you want to do that, it may be helpful. There is a guestbook linked above.
2021-06-27: life and shelves and unpacking
So, I went to everyone's favourite tax-dodging swedish furniture store IKEA yesterday. I got a blahaj and a front hall table and a desk for my old computer and a couch that still needs to be built and most relevantly a CD shelf. I'm glad they still sell something designed to hold CDs because, like, I've got a fair number of them and it helps if I can keep them organised. I'd also recently obtained a nicely old CD player (I think the model is from like 1986 or something) which hooks up nicely to my mostly even older hifi system. So yay, physical media. What do you expect of me?
I'm kinda in a weird state of flux with my house organising situation. Like things are very much not all sorted yet but I'm getting to the point of like where my kitchen starts being a barely managed mess but like there's also boxes that I still need to sort out. So that's weird. Or possibly normal, everyone always tells me that they have like loads of non-unpacked boxes apparently. But look, it feels weird, ok?
I could kinda do with more social event tbh. Like I wanna have house guests. Hasn't happened yet, like lockdown was a thing of course but also I'm now thinking like wait do I have friends and how do I get my friends to visit me? If anyone knows how to do that please tell me.
This is an interesting place to write things since I have no idea if anyone reads it. Unlike the evil side of the internet where everything has a "do an engagement" button where if you see a post you can click a thing to essentially go "hey person look at me seeing your post" which is really what a like button is I guess? Here the only engagement option is that guestbook button over there which you should click and then write in.
Thoughts: I should set up either a webforum or an IRC server or both and then persuade everyone to take refuge in them and escape the Bad Internet. This likely would not work since most are not as eccentric as I am.
2021-06-06: brain feelings
Alright, so I've been in the house that I own for a few weeks and then hey Victoria Lockdown number 4 hits, bleh. So that's a thing. I think by this point it's just everyone having their own different coping mechanisms for it considering it's fundamentally something that's out of most of our hands. And like I guess it just means bits of my life go on pause again, the problem is right now my life isn't exactly quite stable yet. Like, I just moved and I'm kinda still organising everything and like I wanna be able to be out and social and have friends over and all that but I can't so like idk. And the whole thing with getting my parents to help organise the house goes on hold with the "no visitors" rule too. So yeah it is... inconvenient. And maybe not conducive to mental health idk.
Recently I was having a bit of a bad brain feelings on my private twitter and a friend (kindly) pointed me in the direction of therapy. Which, like, fuck, maybe yeah that's something I need to look into again? I've got all the details handy if I want to book appointments through work but like the thing about anxiety stuff is it makes taking the steps to do something about it harder I guess. I will see how I go. But like I think this lack of social contact kinda makes my brain feelings worse, like it's a lot easier to fall into the "nobody likes me" feeling when I'm not getting much in-person reinforcement that thatisn't the case.
Fuck, idk maybe I just need a video date with someone? Actually right now I need my head to stop aching. Bad head stop doing that.
If I'm going to have a video date I also need my life to give me the space required to actually make myself look the way I'd want to on a date. Which is really harder than it should be. yay gender problems
ok that's some brain feelings there, now I have expelled them onto the internet maybe they'll stop being in my head?
2021-05-15: wtf I own a house?
OK, like this is absolutely wild, right? Like I managed to buy a house and moved into it a few days ago. Admittedly this is with A LOT of help from my parents, but like, how? What business have I in this home ownership thing? I mean, I'm someone who essentially keeps a journal in the form of manually edited static HTML pages on some free web hosting. That's the kind of thing a teenager does. A teenager from like twenty or more years ago. What the actual heck.
Anyway, I'm at the point of doing a large amount of unpacking. Eventually I'll end up with all my anime and such on my shelves I think. And that'll probably mean I should update that "photos of all my shelves" page that I've got here. So hey, look forward to that if I ever get my shit together and finish the unpacking. There's also a lot of clothes to unpack, which come with the kinda annoying realisation that I've got lots of clothes that no longer fit me, largely due to that long stretch of time where we all stayed indoors for a year or so because of fucking covid, and as such I've been somewhat less active. Maybe that'll fix itself? Who knows lol.
Haven't yet managed to get enough stuff unpacked to allow me to present femme. Will get there eventually, not entirely sure which box it's all ended up in. Like, I have a lot of boxes. I'll find everything eventually I'm sure.
Lots of tasty food places near my new house. So that's nice, it'll probably get me out of the house a bit more since like I'll want to do like pick up takeaway instead of delivery I think. I had a really good pizza last night so that's good.
Kinda rambling here but yeah. Let me know (via guestbook or however) if you're actually reading this! Not that I'm really writing it for anyone except me but if someone is paying attention it'd help if I knew.
2021-02-18: the first post of the year!
Today, there was a Really Big Silly Event on a popular social media site in this silly country where I live. To be honest, I tend to wonder if the problem is that we have a whole big internet out there but all we do is use like two or three Really Big Websites that then become way too powerful and use that power for their own evil purposes and refuse to relinquish it and don't care if they fuck up anything along the way. So to express these opinions I came to the thing that's just ultimately just some HTML files on a server, you know, how the Internet is SUPPOSED to work.
Anyway, facebook sucks and it's the social network for not-cool-people anyway, like your parents or the people you went to high school with who you have less and less in common with. Where do the cool people go? Well, there's my private Kawaii Uguu Industries discord server that's entirely extremly cool people, but also it seems like the Conventionally Online Types gravitate towards Twitter. The problem is, Twitter is the Hell Site. It's a vicious wild west where people are quick with the dunks and hot takes and generally an atmosphere of that kind of "being witty but in kinda a mean way" thing that people seem to mistake for humour. Of course, Twitter is mostly just a case of who you follow, so it's entirely possible that I just find myself following a bunch of arseholes or arsehole-adjacent people.
So I started a fresh new twitter account and I try to only tweet from a nice kind of headspace there and only follow nice people. At first I didn't really tell anyone about it but then I did for some of my friends. I probably am not going to explicitly mention it on main because there are probably some of the aforementioned assholes who'll start following it and I'd really rather not get their attention. But hey I'm going to plug it here. So if you're reading this and use twitter and want to see my good account, it's here: @milliesquilly.
Yes, there is also Genders going on. Of course there are, it's me we're talking about here. See like every single archived news post for more on that. Will I figure it out? I don't have to it's fluid I can do what I want.
2020-12-28: probably the last post of the year
Well, we've all just about made it through 2020, an absolute fucking shithouse bastard of a year. Good job if you made it.
Gender thoughts continue - see my posts from the 7th of July and 1st of August earlier this year for context, but I think I'm back to wanting to go by Millie as a name, at least sometimes. Probably still Mickey in official contexts (or most of them at this point) but if friends wanna call me Millie that'd make me happy. Identity and names and presentation are all weird intertwined tricky things, huh?
Sometimes I feel like this website and a lot of what I say is essentially me shouting into the void powerlessly. I saw one of those "oh this social media service is evil, you should all delete the app" posts flying around, of course on another equally awful social media service, and I feel like there's a desire to break free of like whatever the fuck facebook and twitter and instagram represent, but, like, I don't think it's a case of going "oh delete it", at least not for me - there needs to be something to replace them. Unless you're some wild extrovert who has plenty of social life going on in the offline world (and if you are, wow you're terrifying to me) then odds are you're reliant on the Internets to provide at least part of your social interaction, and therefore cutting off the tools you use to get that without replacing them just isn't going to work. To be honest, the most meaningful online social thing I have going is my Discord that's just me and my friends. I think the advantage is it's not filled with advertising and corporations and That Fucking Evil God That Is The Algorithm.
I feel like for personal expression there's nothing quite like a bespoke personal webpage - like this thing is just Pure Mickey in style. I really need to do more with it, to be honest! I wanna make like subsections about my favourite music and anime and stuff, maybe I could do little shrine-style minisites. Could be a bit of a project if I remember it when I'm bored, huh? (Update later in the day, I did it!)
Anyway, Mickey out, see you in cyberspace cuties! <3
2020-10-04: that new star war game
So, there's a new star war game out. Star Wars Squadrons. And it's a space combat sim - a genre that we haven't seen much of in recent history, except maybe for Elite Dangerous which always seemed overly complicated to me TBH. Now we've got, really, a successor and modernisation and streamlining of the classic X-Wing game series. With maybe a bit of Wing Commander DNA in there too (at least the structure of the between-mission bits of the campaign feels very Wing Commander to me).
So, most of you who know me probably have heard my claim that TIE Fighter is the best computer game ever, so you can probably gather that I'm something of a fan of the genre. But what particularly excites me about this game is the multiplayer! When I was a mere youth, back in the Distant Past, I actually used to play the game X-Wing Alliance online quite a lot, competitively! There was a league and everything. And while I've been enjoying the campaign of Squadrons so far, I'm actually quite keen to get into the multiplayer. So that means you, if you're reading this, should get the game and play it with me! I promise to shout things like "stay on target" and "lock s-foils in attack position" and "Gamma One is the Emperor's stool pigeon" into the voice chat.
I feel I also need to mention the X-Wing novel series, because it's great. I'm very disappointed that the pilot customisation doesn't have a "horse's head" option (yet).
Dang, I am reminiscing about when I was like 13 or something. The past is weird!
2020-08-01: What's in a name?
Probably not much to say. I kinda am having second thoughts about the last post. I think I'll probably just stick with being Mickey for now. IDK, names and gender are fucking weeeeeeeeeeeeeird right?
I feel weirdly lonely and disconnected lately. Pretty sure this is still isolation related. But like I'll feel like an alien.
It's hard to concentrate on stuff too sometimes. This seems like a problem.
Current state of the world sure doesn't help though
2020-07-11: Gender
So, being the big fat queer babe that I am, I guess lately I have been thinking a bit about gender and identity and all that. I've sort of been thinking about name stuff, since like there is a potential for me legally changing my name if I want to - apparently in Victoria if you file the paperwork at the same time as the gender change paperwork you basically only have to pay one application fee, which has its advantages.
So like, I could change it legally to Mickey, but there's other stuff that's been on my mind lately. Like, if you know me you'll know that I can be pretty femme, even though notionally I'm nonbinary and gender-fluid and such. But like let's say if I do change my first name to Mickey, I'd probably want to keep my middle name. And it's fairly masculine. And like, in the back of my head, there's kind of a "what if I had a more explicitly femme name" thought there. Maybe it's related to the "what if I'm a girl" thoughts I have at times, it is COMPLICATED let me tell you! But like, maybe what I could do is add an extra middle name, like a more femme one, and go by that.
Anyway, I'm thinking of being Mickey Millicent Paul Lastname, and I'm kinda trying out asking friends to call me Millie, to see if I like it. I think I kinda am into it so far, I like the sort of more explicitly femme feeling of it. Like going by Mickey and like with the way I often present in public I feel like people are just sort of thinking "Mickey is a guy" whether consciously or subconsciously. So I kind of want a more overtly femme name there to kind of kick society in the face about that aspect of my gender, I guess. I don't think I want to stop going by Mickey, just have this in the mix as another name I can go by.
Gender is an interesting thing. Like, I think for me it kind of is something that exists at the boundary space between myself and how I relate to other people - kind of like me wanting to say "this is who I want you to see me as and this is how I want you to relate to me". And names, as well as presentation etc, are kinda part of that, because all this stuff is coded all sorts of ways I guess, so it's how I communicate how I want to be perceived. If that makes sense. It maybe doesn't. Who knows.
Anyway, hi, I'm Millie. Or Mickey. Or Milky, if you ABSOLUTELY must lol. Or Mikey, if and only if you are family.
So that's what I think about when I'm lying in bed right before I go to sleep, I guess.
2020-06-28: it's probably my bedtime
Late night post. I've finished Kimagure Orange Road, that series is so fucking good. Not sure what anime to really dive into next, I've enjoyed Aura Battler Dunbine but I just want another series like KOR I think. Not sure what that series could be yet, feel free to make suggestions.
World still bad, covid-19 hotspots in Melbourne etc. Gotta balace remaining aware somehow and looking after my mental health. Not sure if I can do that very well.
I've been ordering a lot of nice shiny new discs. It is possible that I'm buying too many. I think I'll be OK but like yeah idk. It's probably like a coping mechanism, giving me nice exciting life things. I guess. I wanna be able to go out and see people again! And I mean people other than my family, haha. It's hard, I did manage to catch up with someone but like I just feel so cooped up. But like right now I don't think I'd really want to travel into Melbourne or anything. I guess normally I get like some social interaction and a change of scene from going into work. It's odd that so many people are like "working from home is great, I want to do this all the time" because for me it's like "argh I'm in this building all the time, I miss going into the office and actually SEEING people". Maybe those people have more interesting home lives than me, I don't know.
Christ, that's a lot. I guess I am continuing to not do great. I've got like almost an hour of footage of me talking about tiny games machines that I need to edit into a video at some point, but that still hasn't happened. Will it happen? Who knows. Would anyone watch it? Well, nobody really watches any of my videos unless it's an unboxing of something really cool and topical, so probably not. And my logic on video making is if I enjoy the process, so maybe I'll get back to editing it sometime.
Anyway, let me know if there's any good anime like KOR that you'd recommend. So like, some combination of sweet and fluffy and romantic and 80s as all fuck. You know what, let me know in my guestbook. See that link on the top right? Click it and use that technology! (Or, like, tell me by other means but it's more fun if you write in my guestbook!)
I guess I was trying to do this weekly but I didn't write anything last week. Oh well time is meaningless and everything blurs together.
2020-06-14:
Outside world: still horrifying. Or at least that's how it looks from Twitter. I haven't really been out in it. Is this a significant contributor to my poor mental health? Probably. Let's talk about games or something.
Persona 4 finally hit PC. It's taken bloody ages to do so. I guess Atlus finally realised PCs exist or something. Has it aged poorly? Possibly, I know that one writer guy seems to have some iffy ideas. Does it take bloody ages to get going as a game? Yes it seriously does, and firing it up briefly this morning reminded me of that. So much scene-setting before they actually go inside the TV, christ almighty.
I've been messing around with old PC games a bit today (you know, as you do) trying to get them running nicely so I can have a neat little shortcut in my GOG Galaxy. Mostly, this involves setting up DOSBox, of course. But it's occurred to me that there's an interesting hole in terms of getting old PC games running - namely the realm of 16-bit Windows applications. See, with pure DOS stuff, that's where DOSBox comes in and it generally does a fine job. And with more recent Windows software (i.e. 32-bit executables and such) those will in theory run natively on modern Windows, although often this needs to be helped along with funny DLLs to make two-decade old versions of DirectX work and such. But with 16-bit Windows, often what you need to do is install actual Windows inside DOSBox. Which is not ideal, to be honest. I did briefly try out a piece of software called winevdm, that essentially works like wine on a linux box to run 16-bit windows software on modern 64-bit Windows. I have only very briefly tried it out though, without much luck yet. But I'm definitely curious and I'll probably tinker some more.
In the realm of anime, I'd been watching a fair amount of Kimagure Orange Road and I'm inching ever so closer and closer to the end. That really is a fucking great series, tbh. Also: Sailor Stars.
I just tried out that winevdm thing - it actually kinda sorta works. Although maybe not super well. The world of Windows 3.1 games is pretty narrow, so who knows if it'll get much attention. SimTower seemed to run albeit without audio.
I think I'd like to see people IRL again and go out. I dunno how much is "oh there's still covid so maybe I shouldn't" and how much is the whole anxiety thing combined with like many months of being a recluse. It is really tricky.
Anyway, that's some words.
2020-06-09: feeling exhausted
Well, the world is absolutely wild and not great in multiple dimensions. The global pandemic that is COVID-19 continues, and protests against police brutality and mistreatment of people of colour have been responded to... by police doing more police brutality. End result for me being that I'm basically cooped up at home and the internet is not always conducive to my mental health being great.
So yeah this is going to be a bit self-indulgent, but I suppose that's the point of a diary. I feel kinda alone and a bit unsure about everything. I'm wondering if maybe I'm not eating right, since this evening I just feel kinda faint, which is maybe a blood sugar thing? Anyway I probably do not want to go into much detail here.
I wanna talk about anime I've been enjoying lately. Kimagure Orange Road is super good and I'm getting near to the end - I think the next episode is when it starts having the third OP so there's only like 12 episodes left to go (and then the OVAs and movie). It's a really good show though and I love all the fluffy 80s hair
It's occurred to me that not getting out really at all is maybe part of the problem with my moods. Like I'm basically always here, right where I'm typing this. Is this too much of a public space to write this sort of thing? I'm not sure.
Oh also I have been playing the Command and Conquer Remastered Collection. It's actually really good, like I have many memories of these games as a kid and it's a lot easier now that there's an easy mode lol. So that's been fun.
This post is a bit all over the place, huh? Sorry about that. And sorry if it's a bit intense.
Update: if you're reading this, I think I'll be OK. But I'm sure I'd appreciate someone saying hi if you want to do that.
2020-05-30: A reformatting of sorts
So, once again I was reminded of the distasteful nature of modern social media platforms, and all their metrics and "likes" and influencers and whatnot. And that led me to remember this little site, that I keep thinking I ought to do something with. So now I am - I'm repurposing the "news" section into essentially "news about my life" as opposed to "site update news" which I've moved to the front page. So yes I've just reinvented blogs but with the difference of I'm having to HTML this all by hand instead of using fucking wordpress or some shit. And there's no bloody comments section, just gestures to the guestbook link up above. So please feel free to comment there!
Anyway, modern internet. I keep wanting to call it "web 2.0" except that's been a term that's been around for so long that I think we're at least up to "web 3.11 for workgroups" now. But whatever. I wanna be free of it. As such, this!
Life at the moment is a bit empty feeling, what with the pandemic and all. Like, I am not the most social person anyway, but like it's one thing to spend most of my free time at home staring at this screen but it's another thing to spend literally ALL of my time at home staring at this screen. I'm keeping going though, somehow. Lots of social times with internet people
I've been getting through a fair amount of anime lately, as well as Star Trek. Increasingly I think it's Star Trek that I'm particularly a fan of, like that is the thing I can dive into and enjoy and all. I've been working on perfecting my video collection of it - including getting the one slipcover that I'm missing for season 3 of TOS. And I've been slowly making my way through TNG - after that I'll be able to rewatch DS9 and go through Voyager and then finally give Enterprise a proper watch.
I guess this section is more of a diary than a news section so I guess I'll rename it "diary" or some such. I think I'll try and write a new entry every weekend, we'll see how I go