but it doesn't matter because i am just treading water spinning in circles swimming against the current and slowly falling beneath

and it doesn't matter because i am in pain i have always been in pain and nothing will ever change that

and it doesn't matter because we live and we die all within the blink of an eye and nothing i do will ever amount to anything more than some scribbles on the cave walls

but it doesn't matter because i am not alone my life touches yours and your life touches theirs

and it doesn't matter because i am a stone tossed into a lake i am ripples on the surface and i will be felt

but it doesn't matter because the world is cold unfeeling unthinking and it doesn't know that we are here

but it doesn't matter because the world is full of people of love and of the laughter of children

and it doesn't matter because i love you and i am here with you

but it doesn't matter because love can't save everyone it cannot cure it cannot fix and it cannot cheat death

and it doesn't matter because the world keeps turning; it doesn't pause to remember

and it doesn't matter because i am here and you are so far away and my arms cannot reach across the ocean

but it doesn't matter because you have touched every life every path you ever crossed and you have shaped the path for those that come after you

and it doesn't matter because we are ourselves made of the pieces of everyone we've met shaped by the holes that they leave when they can no longer stay

it doesn't matter because i love you, because you love me, and maybe that's enough

but it doesn't matter because we still hurt anyway

I am a fragile soul, The last straw in human form, The embodiment of the line between hope and despair. I am a patchwork garment, Held together with temporary stitching, Meant to last just one more day until I can be repaired.

I am a paper boat, carefully folded, Neat, clean lines, keeping me in shape, And yet I’m floating on an endless and stormy sea, Every day, slowly becoming damp, More and more fragile, And someday soon I will sink again.

I am stronger than I think, Yet weaker than I appear. I am duct tape and superglue, Sticky tape and blu-tack, Barely holding my form when I fall to the ground.

I want nothing more than to be loved, I deserve to be loved, don’t we all? Isn’t that all we’re chasing? Money and power, Knowledge and art, Aren’t these all just surrogates and substitutes For the love we so deeply yearn for?

And I love so deeply, So fully, so completely, I give and I give and I give But I always forget to keep a little for myself, And I always forget to take some from those around me.

I am a candle, burning brightly. My life is here and then it’ll be gone, But it’ll leave behind a pool of wax, The collective sum of all I’ve done, And maybe, just maybe, it’ll be enough. And maybe, just maybe, I will be enough.

I am a paper boat, drifting over the ocean, I am temporary, I am fragile, I am unique, I am a survivor, and I will endure.

(cw romantic gore, obsession)

and i crave you, you who my mother told stories of, grateful that i'd never meet you. i wonder if she's worked out that i met you long ago.

i give myself to you again take me hold me kiss me touch me

use me, for your pleasure i never was a treasure so snatch me at your leisure and never set me free

undress me and see if i'm all you desire unstitch me and see what holds me together unfurl me and see what i keep inside unmake me and see how the pieces fit

hit me you don't need a reason why kick me the sound of bone snapping is my lullaby choke me til the light drains from my eyes

cut me see how i rend tear me pull the sinew til it snaps gut me find that gorgeous rope and hang me that i might dance for you once more

my useful parts don't take much room there's no reason i need be intact so shed this old costume reveal the monster that you hide let my love for you bloom let me show you my devotion please send me to my doom and paint the mattress red

inhale my perfume the stench of death shall mark you

We're arting the alphabet from A-Z all year long! Each challenge lasts 2 weeks from the day this post was made. You can submit a new picture every day, work on one picture for 2 weeks, or post pics randomly. This is the most laid-back art challenge on the internet, & that means you have plenty of time to make your art however you want.

Congrats on making it this far into the year! We've reached the letter W Any art subject starting with that letter is fair game, no matter how abstract. Letters like æ, ñ, anything with a diacritical mark, etc., can go anywhere you like.

W is for Who's A Good Dog?!

Let's make wonderful art!

Use #ArtABCs & tag me @KarinWanderer so I see it!

Pick your social & post your art! Mastodon Bluesky

All art styles & skill levels are welcome- No AI, Yes alt text, CW as needed. Have a fantastic day, draw something for my art challenge, see you soon!

We're arting the alphabet from A-Z all year long! Each challenge lasts 2 weeks from the day this post was made. You can submit a new picture every day, work on one picture for 2 weeks, or post pics randomly. This is the most laid-back art challenge on the internet, & that means you have plenty of time to make your art however you want.

Congrats on making it this far into the year! We've reached the letter V Any art subject starting with that letter is fair game, no matter how abstract. Letters like æ, ñ, anything with a diacritical mark, etc., can go anywhere you like.

V is for Viking Shrimp

Let's make wonderful art!

Use #ArtABCs & tag me @KarinWanderer so I see it!

Pick your social & post your art! Mastodon Bluesky

All art styles & skill levels are welcome- No AI, Yes alt text, CW as needed. Have a fantastic day, draw something for my art challenge, see you soon!

there are times where i feel so paper thin; vellum, waiting to be marked and given a form, a ghost standing in the place where a girl once was.

at times, i move like a shadow on the walls, flitting about as the candleflame dances, soft and fuzzy, light shining through wax, a tunnel bored by an untrimmed wick

i burned too bright, i burned too long.

there's a hole in my chest, where the girl with my name used to live. she went to sleep long ago, and only wakes for short bursts.

i feel like i am made from the missing pieces in the lives of those who loved her.

a person-shaped void is still a void, and loving a ghost is a torment that i'd never willing let you hold

You came to drink from your spirit’s well To fill yourself with the love you deserved, To will life to flow through your veins, To revive your garden within.

And when the well runs dry And your garden still lays barren You fold your own flowers instead: A sea of colours, Of shapes, Of neat, clean, lines; And soon you learn my mistake — Paper flowers burn the brightest.

And as a new day dawns in paradise, You gaze upon your folded kingdom, You pull the drip of life out of your veins — It's time to see if you sink or swim, If you can survive without leaching blood from others, If you can breathe on your own.

And you behold true beauty, The sun lighting up all you’ve created. And you build a high glass wall, Around the garden that you’ve grown; Your guard is up, But you want the world to see you.

And for a time, All is well, And you tend to your garden: Folding tulips, Fixing creases, Painting the roses red.

The sun sets, The sun rises, A new day dawns in paradise, And the walls of glass gather the sun, And the sun lays waste to your garden—
An inferno tearing through your soul. So you turn back to your spirit’s well To fill yourself with the love you deserved, To will life to flow through your veins.

a man sits at the bar, slowly turning the drink in its glass. the woman to his right keeps touching his arm and laughing while he smiles politely; the man on his left thinks he's playing it cool by only staring at his reflection, but the man in the middle meets his gaze periodically.

the woman is telling a story about her coworker who swears she's being haunted. people tell him things. all kinds of things. everything.

the man knows each person in this room by name. Martin, the barkeep, drops his kids off at school every morning before he goes to sleep, and picks them up every afternoon. on weekends he takes the eldest to piano lessons, and the youngest to maths tutoring. Angela, in the far corner, picks flowers out of people's gardens on her morning walks. everyone hates her doing it, but she's just so bubbly and sweet that no one can bring themselves to say anything.

but this woman, she's new. and her story? that's why he comes here. he collects information, always searching for rumours, local ghost stories. anything that might be a clue.

the man is impossibly beautiful. genuinely impossibly. on paper, he should be roughly average. a little tall, a little lean. dark hair, roughly cut, falling messily about his face. on paper, photo paper, he's roughly average, but in person... his eyes are a few shades too light; they seem to shimmer in daylight and softly shine in the darkness. his skin is radiant, an ethereal glimmer surrounding him in the same way dust dances in the sunlight. his smile glows like a dying fire. maybe that's why Martin keeps topping off his drink and never asks him for a cent. perhaps it's why the woman, Joanna, can't stop talking to him.

”... that's when she first noticed the broken shards, right befo-”

“wait, you described a broken plate before. is this what you meant?”

“well yeah, but that's the thing: she didn't have any plates like that. the pattern on it, blood-red lines like spider webs, small flecks of gold...”

“does she have the pieces, do you know?” the man's smile was gone. whatever this was, it meant something to him, something direly important.

“well sh-”

the door opens slowly, silently, yet everyone hears it anyway. not exactly hears, per se. senses. every head is turned, every eye following the footsteps.

Her footsteps.

We're arting the alphabet from A-Z all year long! Each challenge lasts 2 weeks from the day this post was made. You can submit a new picture every day, work on one picture for 2 weeks, or post pics randomly. This is the most laid-back art challenge on the internet, & that means you have plenty of time to make your art however you want.

Congrats on making it this far into the year! We've reached the letter U Any art subject starting with that letter is fair game, no matter how abstract. Letters like æ, ñ, anything with a diacritical mark, etc., can go anywhere you like.

U is for Urchin

Let's make wonderful art!

Use #ArtABCs & tag me @KarinWanderer so I see it!

Pick your social & post your art! Mastodon Bluesky

All art styles & skill levels are welcome- No AI, Yes alt text, CW as needed. Have a fantastic day, draw something for my art challenge, see you soon!

In FOSS we love to focus on Freedom of Speech. We don't focus as much on the Freedoms of Association. Which came sharply into focus this summer.

The Preamble

Earlier this summer, the active members of Codeberg decided to take a stand on LLM coded projects. While you can donate to Codeberg, if you want to vote on Codeberg's policies, you must become an active member.

Codeberg has suffered in the past year from continual scrapers scraping their hosted repositories to build their language models.

It's also suffered from a series of spam attacks that use LLMs to spoof folks creating tickets. LLM generated spam has become a problem across our landscape. I'm regularly getting the uncanny valley of spam that takes close inspection to realise that it is spam.

Codeberg runs Forgejo, a fork of Gitea that is a fork of GOGs. It's forks all the way down. If you donate to Forgejo development, Codeberg is the fiscal host, but that money is earmarked for Forgejo development.

Codeberg is an instance that runs Forgejo. Much like chaos.social the instance I am on is an instance of Mastodon. Librecast still has a public mirror on Codeberg. So while we are not active members we are grateful to Codeberg members for taking this stand.

Who's Freedom is it anyway?

Codeberg is not Github and has never aimed to replace Github. To use a completely different example Mastodon isn't twitter. But there's a lot of folks who do seem to think of software being a direct replacement for other software when they had slightly different design goals.

The walled gardens of the 2010s seem to have changed folks expectations. The difference between those walled gardens and our community spaces is that the software those spaces choose to host isn't designed to take over the world and be a new platform. The point is for folks to build their own spaces and to chose who they allow in to collaborate with. They define their community rules as part of freedom of association. The walled gardens on the other hand claimed Freedom of Speech.

But who's freedom? Not ours. Community spaces aren't a replacement for Web 2.0 platforms. The software isn't locked up, anyone can contribute to it, and mostly there's not a bait and switch as with open core. The point is fully open collaboration.

Folks seem to be tied up looking for exact alternatives so that they and their friends can move en masse to the new thing.

Which is a little strange to me. But then being a Xennial, I grew up not being part of any worldview. I'm too young to be Gen X, and I'm too old to be a Millennial.

My childhood was analogue but computing was making it's way into my classroom via the BBC and Spectrum machines. I grew up with tape and then floppies loading the software. I started to learn Word and Wordperfect at the same time when I was temping as a secretary before I started my degree.

So the idea of one platform ruling overall for all time seems alien. I'm used to changing what I use. I'm a mutable person, I can't afford to lose that curiosity.

To be fair, I'm not particularly good at staying in one place either. I expect disruption, I know that all platforms are finite.

A tiny history

When GitHub started to do what all platforms do, people were looking for a new home.

Many had fled to GitHub from Sourceforge when it was discovered that Sourceforge was shipping malware along with downloads. People moved elsewhere, then git was created. In time we had GitHub, then GitLab and so on. Although people can and often do host their own GitLab instances.

GitHub is also a social network. A repository has metrics that can measure a projects success. There's that Gamification. But GitHub also had some community features like suggestions for codes of conduct. It's part of the reason why the Contributors Covenant became so popular. We'll leave aside for the moment the flip side of that. Gamification meaning that folks accepted a COC without understanding the values that went into the creation of those COCs. A Code of Conduct with no will to enforce it is worse than useless.

It's harmful.

Our Software Licences cover Freedom of Speech. A Code of Conduct defines the Freedom of Association in Safety. For a community you need both.

Code and Posts

Codeberg is an association that happens to be for hosting code and providing a space for folks to collaborate on. It takes some elements from GitHub. So of course some folks looking for a new home as GitHub went really sloppy chose Codeberg.

Codeberg has never aimed to be the number one platform to host code. It's easy to migrate to it. What's important is that you can also migrate from it, thanks to Forgejo and Gitea before it.

Codeberg will provide space for free, but it is supported by folks who pay. Folks who want to influence policy become part of its association. This summer, there was a proposal to ban LLM vibe coded projects. This was voted in by active members in July.

Some folks are rather sore and feel this is censorship. Again. This isn't a Freedom of Speech issue. The Active members of Codeberg have chosen who they want to associate with. They enforced their rights of Freedom of Association in Safety. Specifically the part of who they want to allow in a group. They don't want to include Vibe Coded projects and you cannot make them. They cannot be compelled to associate with your Vibe Coded projects.

I love this. A group of folks exercising their human rights in FOSS, it's awesome.

Folks often talk about the Paradox of Tolerance when it comes to hate speech. But Poppers Paradox doesn't directly address the idea of Freedom of Association in Safety. Perhaps because it should be obvious. You don't let Nazis in the bar if you want to protect free speech as given time, Nazis will endanger people as they seek to take away folks Freedoms.

The two rights are twinned. Free Speech isn't possible without folks being safe enough to associate and no one can be compelled to join the group.

I often see the censorship argument when folks are opposed to blocklists or the idea of archipelagos in the Fediverse. They see the sharing of blocklists as censorship and exclusivity. They argue it's a bubble and we should allow other points of view. Which misses the second part of Freedom of Association. No one can be compelled to join a group, and neither do we have to let anyone into our group.

But you cannot push Freedom of Speech without Freedom of Association. Which is what the XKCD comic is about but doesn't explicitly reference it.

But do you know what does explicitly references Freedom of Association?

Article 20 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Let me remind you:

Article 20

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
2. No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

The members of Codeberg have chosen to exercise that right for their members. I'm not a member, but I am grateful to the members for doing so. We need bastions so we can have at least one place free of vibe coded projects.

Some folks may regret moving to Codeberg now. Some folks have even written about their upset with this. Again, this isn't censorship. It's not a Free Speech Issue. The members are stating their boundaries. Let me repeat myself again, this is a Freedom of Association issue.

You're free to leave, and find a community that works for you. It's the beauty of the Fediverse and of Forgejo based instances.

You can create your own space to host your cryptocurrency and vibe coded projects and collaborate together.

We won't stop you.

That's the beauty of Freedom of Association.

We're arting the alphabet from A-Z all year long! Each challenge lasts 2 weeks from the day this post was made. You can submit a new picture every day, work on one picture for 2 weeks, or post pics randomly. This is the most laid-back art challenge on the internet, & that means you have plenty of time to make your art however you want.

Congrats on making it this far into the year! We've reached the letter T Any art subject starting with that letter is fair game, no matter how abstract. Letters like æ, ñ, anything with a diacritical mark, etc., can go anywhere you like.

T is for Totoro

Let's make wonderful art!

Use #ArtABCs & tag me @KarinWanderer so I see it!

Pick your social & post your art! Mastodon Bluesky

All art styles & skill levels are welcome- No AI, Yes alt text, CW as needed. Have a fantastic day, draw something for my art challenge, see you soon!

How to devalue a project and it's community.

Ancient History

At the turn of the century, I was in the middle of an industrial placement in a Corporate Office. As part of the placement I got to experience two different aspects of the infrastructure that a large corporate needed at that time.

For the first six months I got to play around in the business information unit. Kinda training folks how to navigate the file structures in the company drives. We were also librarians who's job it was to order information from Document Archives. I got to coordinate a Document Management system Pilot which lasted the whole year.

The second half of the placement was downstairs near the server rooms in the applications group. I got to learn how to package software for the companies common desktop. I got to sit in change control meetings to understand the importance of not breaking our systems as it would disrupt the company operations. I had my own services to manage and not break, including the antivirus update that went to 300 desktops in the UK group. For a twenty year old student, I felt this was a pretty big deal. They put a lot of trust in me.

I learned that infrastructure's job was to be a stable foundation for the companies processes to run on. I kept that lesson with me.

Time went on, gradually, I had a sense of those very foundations starting to be replaced by sand. It started with the process of Dev Ops. The era of “Move fast and Break things” broke the promise of Infrastructure.

I'm old fashioned, I always felt that software needed to be tested and released only after ensuring it doesn't break user systems and processes. Over the years we've seen interfaces change seemingly on a whim. We've seen our functionality be taken away as our ability to easily access the controls is abstracted away from us more and more. Our infrastructure isn't stable any more.

Users generally want stuff to just work and not change too much. Which I know from being on the ground in user support for decades while keeping our infrastructure services running without too much change. If the infrastructure had been sand I wouldn't have had the time to provide the support to end users that they needed.

I wouldn't have had the time to have the empathy for end users. As I look around our landscape, I'm seeing a huge lack of empathy for this next generation of end users.

Does the FOSS social contract exist?

I used to think that it did exist, but now I'm not so sure.

My understanding was that Developers put up their software to give to the world and a community formed around it. Everyone had something to bring, even folks who weren't involved in public. I mean that. FOSS used to spread through word of mouth and hobbyist doing activism in their other communities, weither those communities wanted it or not.

I'm not kidding, I've had to smooth over a new clients contact attitude when I mention Open Source. Sometimes I even succeeded. I've helped to run mixed environments. Nowadays I'm not sure I should have. I'm not so sure we did ourselves any favours with our current crop of software stacks. It's all becoming a little tainted by the fascism, our politics does inform our tech. You cannot separate tech from the Politics of the people who create that tech.

Perhaps I can see a little clearer now.

There's an attitude from some Devs who seem to feel that users are a black hole who will always demand more and never contribute back.

Which is puzzling to me. Were you not the folks who always seemed to show disdain for folks still on Windows? Were you not campaigning for Free Software as an alternative solution to proprietary software?

Oh silly me, some of you never were. You were content to scream RTFM at folks who are new and don't understand how to ask the question. Some of you even idolised the Bastard Operator from Hell, and like I did as well in my early twenties before I came to FOSS.

I think I'm fortunate as the folks I've directly worked with providing services to end users using FOSS software helped me to develop my empathy. To appreciate the Devs and the folks who kept using our services for as long as we cared to give them. Now I'm in a small FOSS project and trying to build something better.

It would be a lot easier if the systems we're using to do our project work didn't feel like they are eroding from under us. I work for a small FOSS project. We're a Human Rights Project masquerading as a FOSS project. So the ideologies of the folks we work with matter. The hardware we choose as our next daily drivers matter, on the very rare occasion we have to replace them. We do not replace our machines until they are unrepairable and so dead. We still have some systems from 2011. Which in this economy and well, for the climate is a must.

We've always ran our infrastructure longer than most. Partly because we wanted to lessen disruption. Some of our clients ran infrastructure from the nineties. Outside of our web focused landscape that's normal. Some offices run systems that are older.

We've always been infrastructure focused, and that includes what end users use as their daily drivers. It's why until last year I was still helping folks who ran windows, despite running my desktop and my servers on Linux since 2006.

I started using KDE because of Kubuntu, Ubuntu was the first distro for me that felt easy to use and easy to setup. I installed it on an old HP laptop that couldn't run windows anymore. That laptop ran Linux for several years, until it couldn't power up.

Ubuntu also had a period of stability. Last year I switched to Debian and chose to keep using KDE. Short term I'll keep using them. Long term, well I'm looking with great interest at the work that the MNT Reform community are doing to reduce LLMs being in their ecosystem. There's already folks in that community looking at creating a NetBSD image and others looking at the rest of the stack.

Community is what matters

I also like the community that is forming around the MNT Reform ecosystem. It's on IRC and runs a discourse.

Community is what drew me in from Windows land. Folks willing to help and ask questions and be pesky users. The fact there was an environment that folks could ask these questions and the fact that the questions were not limited to the specific community spaces. It felt like the cool areas of fandom, where folks were happy and sharing. Folks just helping each other and creating things for other folks to enjoy.

With generative AI, it feels like we've forgotten that. But the LLM discourse has been useful for one thing. It's reminded us of the rot that's ALWAYS been through STEM. The attitude of you should be grateful and not complain about what I'm giving you for free. Unless you contribute directly and visibly then we can freely ignore you.

Which ignores the support work in our communities outside our public spaces. You will never see the in person support of an install party. Or the folks loading Linux on their parent's and children's hardware.

But let's turn back to the idea of FOSS devs putting up their code for free.

It often wasn't for free. When a project gets big enough, folks can charge for support. They get a platform, some power and we give it to them. Because we need our daily drivers. We need our software stack. We can't just go and live in the woods because the stack is in the very fabric of our modern societies.

It's infrastructure. We've put our stuff out there and people use it. That code becomes infrastructure. Except now It's sand and with LLMs we're putting more loose sand in with the extra benefits of fascist aligned technology.

So forgive me, If I a mere end user who contributed nothing back would like FOSS projects to consider not allowing AI code into their codebases and therefore my infrastructure.

Clearly I have contributed nothing back specifically to various projects, other than quietly advocating for FOSS (including KDE) and undoing the reputational damage that FOSS folks did to our community by advocating for Open Source to my clients. I wasn't aware that the social contract had to extend to contributing to all projects.

Some of us won't make that mistake again. You're clearly better off without us scolding you.

Time for some of us to build our infrastructure elsewhere and to support folks that won't allow fascists in the bar.

Nobody said “Yes all men” Until after you said “Not all men!” We saw you throw up your hands in defence, Dismiss all our claims because “Not all men!” “Yes all men” is a reaction To your reaction of disgust To our reaction of rebellion Against your action of oppression.

You say that “yes all men” is an overreaction But what you don’t realise is that we are OVER your reaction, Your actions, your inactions, Your inability to distinguish between generalisation and overdramatisation Is what fuels the cries of “yes all men”

I was part of the problem. I remember one night, talking to my best friend About this girl who I thought was leading me on, Giving me attention and generally being polite. I was fixated on her, so everything made me think she was into me That I had a right to feel hurt when she said she wasn’t Over and over again That I had a right to be angry That I had a right to say vile things about her That I had a right My best friend, a girl, like most of my friends, She didn’t speak up that night, She just smiled and nodded, So I must have been right I must have been right to feel these things I must have been right to say the horrible things I said I must have been right It was my right. The guys at school laughed and agreed Told me “fuck that bitch” “What a whore” That only fuelled the rage more I was right It was my right

Can you imagine how the whole world shifted when I realised who I was? Can you imagine going from being part of the problem, To seeing the problem Trying to fix the problem To living the problem

The first time I went out while out, The teenagers in their shitty car Wearing their school uniforms My uniform The uniform of a place I loved and respected They jeered, they whistled and told me they’d be back. My bus took too long to come that day, But they took even longer

Of course, nobody experiences catcalls like that They never happen Just ask the internet, Plenty of guys will tell you so They’ll tell you how women make this up To feel better about themselves To feel wanted To make other women jealous That they tell these lies to make men look like vultures, Buzzards circling the walking meat that is all a woman is to them That these things cannot happen They never happen

It was my first day being viewed as a women, The first strangers to see me that day made me fear for my life The first interaction I had as a women Left me crying, trying to figure out if I needed to go home Or if I could hold on until I met my friends

But is it all men? Of course not It’s not all men, just the first ones I ran into that day It’s not all men, just the first random stranger to come up to my friend when we went clubbing Who followed her around for over an hour trying to get some She made it clear she wasn’t keen, He hung around for another half hour Before finally getting angry and leaving It’s not all men, just that one guy crossing the street later that night, The one who stopped me and my girlfriend at the edge of the road Who put his arm around my waist while staring at my girlfriend It’s not all men, just the ones who whistle and toot as they drive past While I'm walking in the dark, already fearing for my life

Being out as trans, as non-binary, is so draining I always laugh and say “it’s the prep” “The time it takes to get my hair right and my makeup passable” “I have no practice and it takes twice as long as it should” But it’s not It’s the time it takes to plan the shortest possible route, Through the most populated areas, The most possible time spent on ONE bus, Avoiding standing around near groups of people, Avoiding anywhere where the young men are. It’s having to work out the timing to be served by a woman, So that the men won’t stare too long, Find cracks in what they think is a facade but is just my inexperience It’s trying not to let them see that I am not what they think, While telling myself I am equal to you, That I AM what they think I am It’s trying not to be too clingy to my friends, Trying not to hide in the crowd too much, To ask for too much support It’s trying to convince people that I’m not fishing for compliments, I’m just genuinely scared and insecure

It’s knowing that a man can kill me, And get away without doing anything By saying “I panicked” Because I am not a person, I’m their worst nightmare I am a freakshow I am a walking contradiction They felt entitled to me in some way Because they thought I was a woman, And upon deciding I wasn’t, They “panicked”, And I died

It may not be all men, But it’s men that I’m afraid of.

beeeep

hey love, it's me still. i know it's not been all that long since i last wrote you a letter but... birthdays, and all that...

another year, already. how long has it been? 15... 16(?) birthdays? god, love... it flies, yet it crawls.

i do mean it though, it's still me. i'm still me. you wouldn't recognise me anymore, hell i wouldn't recognise me... and yet, still me. fuck, love, we were so young.

we were so young, and we hurt so much. i still do. i'm... jealous of you, in a way, as fucked up as it is. you were able to do the one thing i wanted most in the world, and i had to stay here.

but i think that's a good thing, actually. i think things might finally be on the right track. i have a place, my darling sister, i have a place in the world. i have a family that i forged in fire. i have my craft, i have my work. i actually have things going for me, love.

and the girl in the mirror... when you knew me, i could barely even look there, for fear of seeing her. she wasn't there all the time, but she always looked so sad. now she's there, every day, smiling back at me. you'd love her. i wish we got the chance for you to meet her.

i wish i got to show you my music, love. i wish you got to meet the Tired Doll. i wish i got to introduce you to my Witch and my Doll. i wish you could know the girl who chose to take your name, the name etched into my flesh because i was terrified i'd forget you...

my love, my sweetheart, my angel

i miss you and i will love you to the end of existence, and my sorrow over you will be the last thing to die.

rest well, Chloe.

click

We're arting the alphabet from A-Z all year long! Each challenge lasts 2 weeks from the day this post was made. You can submit a new picture every day, work on one picture for 2 weeks, or post pics randomly. This is the most laid-back art challenge on the internet, & that means you have plenty of time to make your art however you want.

Congrats on making it this far into the year! We've reached the letter S Any art subject starting with that letter is fair game, no matter how abstract. Letters like æ, ñ, anything with a diacritical mark, etc., can go anywhere you like.

S is for Stylized

Let's make wonderful art!

Use #ArtABCs & tag me @KarinWanderer so I see it!

Pick your social & post your art! Mastodon Bluesky

All art styles & skill levels are welcome- No AI, Yes alt text, CW as needed. Have a fantastic day, draw something for my art challenge, see you soon!

cw kidnapping, assault

muffled talking, footsteps on dry grass, cracking twigs and crunching leaves. a door creaking.

“ahh there it is, my little prize. you were a tricky toy to nab, but you know i live for the chase. do you have a name? do Dolls have names? ... well?”

a thud. pain. a buried scream. then... a soft chuckle and the sound of an open palm slap, but... no pain?

“ah. silly me, i completely forgot.”

white. everything is white. white light, white noise, white... skin. this one's skin. cold, white, porcelain.

but there's a taste... cloth? blood?

“don't move.”

shapes are starting to coalesce into shadowy forms as this one's eyes adjust to the sudden crashing flood of light rushing in. it's... someone.

a sharp pain as something is yanked free from the Doll's mouth

“there. now answer: do Dolls have names?”

”...”

a thud, a no longer gagged scream, and pain.

“th-they do! we do...”

... that's an unpleasant laugh.

“and do you have a name?”

“this one...”

“speak.”

“this one does, but it doesn't know what it is.”