intro.

Hi, hello, salutations, etc. I'm Ikoe. This is my page. I call it Starflyers. Not much else of importance to add.

Starflyers, for continued lack of a better description, is an archive of stupidities and assets alike. On one hand, it serves as an easily-accessible means of grabbing some stuff I'd normally struggle with acquiring for one reason or another; on the other, it's laden with stuff I neglected to update over the past four-ish years. It is what it is.

Per usual, it's mobile-friendly enough, and seeing as I'm not really gonna bother too much with catering to the wretched lands of Mobile, it's almost certainly staying that way. If I can browse it with little to no hassle on my phone, then it must be good for everyone else! (Very, very theoretically. And selfishly.)

Anyhow, the pages themselves!

Thought(s) of the ${day,week,month}

I know that every good and excellent thing in the world stands moment by moment on the razor-edge of danger and must be fought for (...)
—Thornton Wilder, "The Skin of Our Teeth"

The fragility of what we have has been on my mind, lately. It's a bummer topic and it's something I hesitate to talk about in close circles for any number of reasons, albeit the big one is naturally just that it's seldom fun to bring up or discuss at length. But it swims in my brain, regardless.

The latest case has been fixated on Steam, and the all-too-known pain of payment processors (of all 'bodies') imposing absurdly conservative views on platforms they should have no control over, and the very real danger it poses against works of explicit nature. It starts, of course, with something "agreeably detestable" - dime-a-dozen incest hentai VNs are at the front of the bill right now, ostensibly. But it always inevitably gets out of hand, and it always gets to a point where it silences the artistic voices and works of minorities for fear of being "unclean."

Prior to that, Bluesky—in what felt like a rugpull and a half, especially considering the audience that populated it at the beginning and the audience that STILL populates it (hint, hint: trans and queer people alike!)—casually announced that users in the UK will have to identify themselves with some form of documentation, which (in case it needs to be stressed) is fucking absurd. It's also understandably very easy to get bummed out about because... where else do you go? We don't talk about X. Tumblr's not the same brand of site. Cohost tried to be a genuinely, earnestly good site in use and heart and then died. Mastodon exists, and yet it still feels distinctly arcane in ways hard to describe. If this seems like an overly-worried line of thought, bear in mind that it will not be particularly difficult for Bluesky to push that system on other countries and regions if the demand shows up (and if they continue to lack any backbone, which... well, outcome doesn't look good and all).

This, combined with any number of ongoing issues—the gradual police-statification of the US and the continued oppression of its minority citizens, the open degradation of trans people in the West, the continued conflicts in the East, the resource abuse that feeds the uselessness of LLMs, so on and so forth—is a lot. Too much, even. One goes to bed and rises the next morning regardless, but there's a weariness to it now.

I remain hopeful in any case. There are signs of a shift on several fronts. Protests, outcries—uneasy discussions in break rooms, at the least. Petitions, for what they're worth. Anything goes. It's all a step in the right direction.

My mind, for the sake of closing this in the same way I opened it, goes to a quote courtesy of Omar El Akkad; the same one from which the title of his book is put together:

One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.