It started when I watched this YT vid (as all rabbit holes start it seems nowadays):

and I had that feeling that I had seen here someone before, and that was on X.com @xyzeva. So this led me to check out her website: https://kibty.town/, which also contains the blog post to her story of how she found that vulnerability in the Arc browser.

At the bottom of eva’s main home page we see a grid of 88x31 GIFs that represents a subset of her online community friend network. All of the other pages also have their own grids of these GIFs as well! How cute!…I’m not jealous or anything…

On one of the girl’s websites I had found a graph view explorer for the 88x31 GIFs which was pretty cool so I’m sharing it here for you.

Anyways you can pretty much just click through a hyperconnected network of these online peeps writing software or sharing their experiences of modding games together. As someone who has quite natural anti-social tendencies, I wonder what would it take for me to go out there and join a community or put in the effort of maintaining such a dynamic, and complicated set of relationships. Each subset group has a dynamic, one on ones have dynamics, and the “entire” group is probably too large to summon all at once in a single Discord VC. anyways, im just spitting nonesense…

Anyways, if we dive into some of the online personalities listed there, we notice some trends amongst this interconnected web of young developers:

• young (late teens or early 20s)
• using (she/her) pronouns and are openly trans or probably trans
• demonstrated interest, talent, and abilities in technology (e.g. web, video games, hardware, etc.)

It’s an interesting thing that in my head there is a dichotomy of narratives about “young” people, which are extremes of course. On one side you have those whose favorite piece of technology is their touchscreen enabled device, “do not know what a file is”, and could even have the thought that the only legimate programs are those found in the Windows App Store…

And on the other side you have cracked kids figuring out their gender in a society with a heavily enforced gender binary social construct and fucking around and finding out that they can make computers and technology in general do magical things if they put their minds to it. I’ll drop one interesting example I found of someone “Making my radio into a two way pager”, I’m not even sure what that means. Bridging a gap between radio analog communication and the computer network stack or something, go read it if you want to know… Anyways, they also made a lot of friends along the way. It’s beautiful to see. Honestly, I felt the same way too in college seeing underclassmen doing great things, things that I didn’t expect of them because perhaps I was looking down on them initially and didn’t expect much (I have a J for JUDGING in my Myers-Briggs Type Indicator® personality result).

Just wanted to do a short yap, because I was feeling nostalgic for Minecraft and Wizard101 and then stumbled upon a weird but interesting online community of nerds who spend a good amount of their time online and just being computer wizards. This is what unemployment and free time does to you. Next thing you know I will actually do the things I tell myself I should do.

Hey you, reader, go do the things you’ve always wanted to do, stop procrastinating!