exquisite-corpse.lesbian-chatroom

nastja

https://exquisite-corpse.lesbian-chatroom.nohost.me/only-you

E-CHAT 2NITE?

When I was around 10 years old, my dad made our family it's own e-mail server. My friends were also getting their own e-mail addresses for the first time and our worlds were expanding. You mean we can talk to each other after school without the rest of the house eavesdropping like they do when you talk on the landline??? Everyday when school let out we looked at each other, eyebrows raised, fingers mimicking typing on a keyboard, "e-chat tonight?" And that meant we were sitting at our computers (some in designated computer rooms, some at the corner of the living room), e-mailing each other back and forth for hours in the evening. It often got chaotic when multiple people were involved or someone responded to one e-mail twice. Messages got lost, it was hard to follow.

Read from bottom to top. This is the best example of an e-chat I could find in my oldest active e-mail account, can't track down the firsts from 2005. Reading back on old e-mails is like when you have a dream about someone. I can't stop thinking about Sarah from middle school now but she has no idea, possibly doesn't even remember me.

Read from bottom to top. This is the best example of an e-chat I could find in my oldest active e-mail account, can't track down the firsts from 2005. Reading back on old e-mails is like when you have a dream about someone. I can't stop thinking about Sarah from middle school now but she has no idea, possibly doesn't even remember me.

Messaging technology has both secretly seeped into our lives, and blatantly overtaken. I have vivid memories of the different ways I've kept-in-touch throughout my life, but don't really know how one evolved to the next. There's so much musing on how social media has impacted our lives out there, and what's stuck with me most is the recognition that the Internet used to be a place.1 It used to be a room (or corner) in our houses, where we logged on and then logged off. I've noticed my own distaste for answering text messages and looking at group chats; I miss being excited to see a message from my friends, waiting for one, even! furiously refreshing the screen!

THE INTERNET IS OUR OYSTER

As I began learning about the context for the internet, examples of community networks, how to build a self-hosted server, etc, that 10-yr-old feeling of how cool and wonderful the Internet is started twinkling again. While I am nostalgic, my reminiscing isn't coming from the desire to return to the good ol' early days of the 'net. Rather it's sparking the awesome childish desire to make anything we can think of, to reconstruct tools to work in our niches, to be attuned and responsive, to lay to rest what we don't want anymore, respectfully1. Technology/the internet doesn't have to be a locked box3 with a "engineers ONLY! no commoners allowed" posted on the front.

When I got my Yunohost server up and public, it was simply an ASCII art image. It later became a part of a webring with my fellow classmates webpages, all of our pages linking to each other :) But what could I do with a self-hosted server?

First self-hosted webpage with webring to classmates' pages

Here's a list of ideas I had:

  • database for a Signal loop book club I'm a part of where we take turns recording ourselves reading different articles and book chapters
  • database for recipes we've used for food-cooking-and-distro group
  • finally take my art website off wixsite and host it on my own
  • fake online bank because I keep getting scammed

I may go through with these or you may.

ICE MELTS TO WATER

There's a thought in the back of my head taunting me, "bring back e-chat". Fine. But it has to eventually dissolve. The way it did IRL, because we began using other shiny new things and we started highschool and stopped keeping in touch. And anyway, in my experience of organizing, projects have to transition out of existence, whether they change focus, or everyone dissipates into different efforts, or you have to shut down the project altogether because it's just not working or no one wants to do it anymore. Everything dies, but we have to take care of what we have to throw out1. Maintenance care is a top-shelf value of mine, including preventative maintenance, reuserepairreuserepairreuserepair, deep cleaning every couple weeks, maintenance > innovation, taking things out of the trash2. Part of maintenance care is also listening to shifts in yourself and the environment, accepting real actual limitations, and building in response constantly3.

Final idea for self-hosted web server: A comment box that posts your comments on a random spot of the page, never deletes anything and comments are posted on top of each other until eventually it's a chaos of characters and you can't actually read anything. Like the bathrooms in some dive bars and pizza shops, or the gum wall in Seattle. If someone posts something evil, a bunch of other people can comment on top of it to squash it. When it gets so filled, you can write in your secrets and no one will see them. They'll be in my database but I don't spill, and have a bad memory.

from Wikipedia's article on Latrinalia

If this made you think of entropy … yay :) It's the measure of how much space everything takes up, how everything changes in a closed system, how nothing that's ever existed really disappears. Entropy measures how much energy can't be turned into work, thus the tendency of our world toward great disorder. Or the natural tendency of the universe to spread it's energy out. It's the dust on our bedroom shelves, our coffees getting cold, every e-mail account you've ever registered, the friends we make along the way. Chaos collected. Even when you throw all that old stuff out, it still goes somewhere1.

This is the classic (maybe oversimplified) visual used to explain entropyThis is the classic (maybe oversimplified) visual used to explain entropy

GALAXY BRAIN

There is a DIY worm in my brain. It convinces me, "I can figure out how to make that". Sometimes the worm is right… sometimes delusional. As my extracurricular to SFPC class Solidarity Infrastructures, I attended YoutubeRedditcodingblogsforums University. If pre-pubescent me could learn HTML /CSS from Neopets guilds and Tamagotchi forums, post-higher education me can make my own self-hosted real-time comment page.

Getting Yunohost set up was a drama series season of scrappily piecing together the required hardware through the magic of my local buynothing group and repair cafe, and then getting scammed on e-Bay, which left me with a suspended account and the e-Bay agent first-name last-naming me, the way your mom does when your sibling gets you in trouble. Out of ease, I succumbed to the cloud (Digital Ocean Droplet). Re: the principles of using the cloud …. When you put your money in a bank account it also doesn't exist physically and you still use it, and it's safer than keeping it all in your bedroom. Perhaps the principles lie in choosing between a credit union and Wells Fargo, Mayfirst and Google. Or not having any money or internet at all. Take with a grain of salt, I keep getting scammed anyway.

The first domain on my Yunohost server was made with Lichen-Markdown, which made building a website breezy. But I later came to understand I would need an application that would allow my page to connect to a database. Maybe Lichen-Markdown can do that, but I ended up using mywebapp because it already included a mysql database on install. Also had to install myphpadmin because after one try, I couldn't wrap my head around configuring the mysql through terminal, need a user interface, we can't all be hackers. And before that, I installed Virtual Studio Code because it's easier to write code on than a text editor. And can't forget the Filezilla FTP (filefuck transferthe protocolpolice) to get code files onto my page. This was starting to feel like I was being sold add-ons for no good reason. If I need to install one more goddamn thing ……

For the comment box HTML code, I followed one coding blog tutorial1 and after some preference adjustments and a refresh on my site … There She Is …. Miss Comment Box! And it works! Until it doesn't. Ran into a series of issues it hurts to try to recall.

I admit I really did think in the beginning that I could just Ctrl-C Ctrl-V one page of HTML code to make this. I flirted with so many options for building this – see the vocab list and footnote below.1

VOCAB LIST:

  • Digital Ocean Droplet: cloud-based virtual machine where I installed yunohost
  • Yunohost: self-hosted server
  • mywebapp: application for configuring front-facing web page
  • myphpadmin: user interface for accessing/configuring mysql
  • mysql database: the table/matrix the comment data for my web page is stored
  • Virtual Studio Code: program for writing code
  • Filezilla: file transfer protocol
  • Pusher account: I think this is a simpler alternative to the mysql database
  • XAMPP: I didn't fully understand this because it required root permissions to do anything and I didn't want to do that. It will be uninstalled.

TALKING OUT LOUD

For now I have made something so deranged and delightful. Have you ever wanted to have a conversation with yourself? On the public Internet but that no one else will see? Do you want to relive double- triple- quadruple- texting someone with no response? Do you want a place to take notes that will disappear when you exit the browser? Do you want a place other than your bathroom mirror to do morning affirmations? Welcome to Only You Chatroom. Miss Comment Box from earlier is fully functioning, you can post a comment and it will show up on that page. If someone else opens the same page, your posts are gone and they can write their own. If you exit your browser and reopen the page, your posts are gone. I don't know where they've gone nor how entropy explains a black hole.

featuring lyrics from Deceptacon by Le Tigre

featuring lyrics from Deceptacon by Le Tigre

CLEARER & MORE COMPLICATED

All of this learning has been really enlightening. It's also solidifying my understanding of why technology and the internet is so inaccessible. Its really hard to learn! Every time I could start to grasp one part of what a code was doing, another part was introduced that I'd have to do more research about. I didn't even get to figuring out how get the comments to post in random places/on top of each other. One day this would be really cool to collaborate on with a seasoned coder. If you're reading this and have any expertise or suggestions, send me a message!

WHERE AM I

Dear Diary

1I can't find the reference but there is one.

1The Organic Internet: Building Communications Networks from the Grassroots, Panayotis Antoniadis, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-66592-4_13#citeas

Underneath and on the Sidelines: Sustaining Feminist Infrastructures Using Speculative Fiction, Spideralax, https://donestech.net/files/iterations-spideralex-underneath-and-on-the-sidelines.pdf

3Black Gooey Universe, American Artist https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59238d36d2b8575d127794a4/t/5a60bdecf9619a7f881b02a0/1516289526013/UNBAG_2_AmericanArtist.pdf

1Watching the Sunset: An Interview with Deana Haggag, Cameron Shaw, https://pelicanbomb.com/art-review/2018/watching-the-sunset-an-interview-with-deana-haggag

^this is about non-profit orgs which imo should never have been 'sunrised' anyway but the sentiment applies to any kind of project

2Maintenance and Care, Shannon Mattern, https://placesjournal.org/article/maintenance-and-care/

3Crip Technoscience Manifesto,Aimi Hamraie & Kelly Fritsch, https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/29607/24772

1Should Data Expire? Entropy and Permanence in Digital Landscapes, Honor Ash, https://solarprotocol.net/sunthinking/ash.html

1How To Build A Real-Time Commenting System, Phil Leggetter, https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/05/building-real-time-commenting-system/

1Creating a Simple Comment Section using PHP and SQLite Tutorial, oretnom23, https://www.sourcecodester.com/tutorial/php/15005/creating-simple-comment-section-using-php-and-sqlite-tutorial

Commenting System with PHP, MySQL, and AJAX, David Adams, https://codeshack.io/commenting-system-php-mysql-ajax/

Build a Real-Time Chat App: PHP, MySQL & AJAX Tutorial, Ali Aslan, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idoqt54HU5U