Website and all contents thereof property of Maren Wasser
Contact me - marensdasein@gmail.com
Well this is it, my inaugural post on my blog. What an auspicious word to use on this day. I won't carry on about it, none of us need another excuse to confront the what's happening today. What I do want to talk about is what this all means: this website, this blog, this whole project. As no doubt many of you are aware, the winds of public discourse are shifting. One of the knock-on effects of this Meta has altered their moderation policy to, among other things, specifically permit the harrassment of LGBTQ+ people. To quote their own community standards page:
"We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like 'weird.'"
I hope I don't need to further expound upon why this alteration to their community standards concerns me as a bisexual trans person. Meta has codified that they will permit the bullying of queer individuals, so if they don't want me there, then I'm leaving. Why not to some other social media platform? Bluesky is gaining popularity. Well I have a Bluesky, but I love longform posts too damn much to be satisfied with just that. Besides, I've seen it happen to too many online services: enshittification a term which here means the tendency for services to get increasingly worse in order to maintain or build profit. I see no reason Bluesky should be immune to enshittification so I see it as an inevitibility. Granted, Neocities (the hosting platform I'm using for this website) might not be immune as well, but at the very least I'm building somthing here that I could migrate to another hosting service nearly effortlessly, and that I have total control over. Do you think any social media platform in 2025 would permit a deliberately paired down Web 1.0 aesthetic with a color scheme inspired by the trans pride flag? I think not.
So what can y'all expect going forward? Well instead of checking Facebook to see what's going on with me and my life come on down here. The goal is to post a new blog post EVERY DAY by the end of the day (whatever that happens to mean to me). Until it becomes too much for me to manage, you can shoot me an E-Mail at marensdasein@gmail.com, letting me know you want to recieve E-Mail updates, and I'll send out an E-Mail whenever I add a new thing to the site. I plan on figuring out comment sections at some point, but for now if you want to respond to somthing I've posted here you can send it on down to the website's E-Mail, or however else you would normally contact me. Might feel inclined to do a sort of "mailbag" blog post if people send me interesting responses and things.
Oh and one more thing, A few features on the site are still incomplete. Notably the lack of poetry in the prose and poetry section, and the lack of photos in the photo section. Some of my poems rely on specific text formatting that I don't want the website design to bugger with. So, I need to figure out the best way to display those, and photo galleries that look good and perform well are a bit more complicated than blocks of text. So, I need to hash those things out, but given that MOST of my internet presence is text I think we can go on ahead and call this website functional.