icze4r communication

Gold Checkmark

On February 21, 2026

I don’t even know what the fuck I was trying to do anymore.

A couple of days ago I got invited to a Zoom call / conference with Twitter’s leadership. Or something— lord knows I’m not going to open the e-mail to verify what the fuck it actually said. Oh, hell, let’s avoid libel: it said specifically that ‘the X team’ (whatever the fuck that is) would be headlining the conference.

To my knowledge, there was no audience participation. My read on it was it was a sales call, if I’m using that terminology correctly. The e-mail I received had the salutation of, “Dear Valued Advertiser”. What?

In any case, I went there. They were five minutes late. Shit was boring, so I dipped.

And then, days later, I get an e-mail:

As we mentioned during the session, we’d love your feedback—please send any thoughts to [non-public e-mail].

As a special thank-you for attending, we’ll expedite your application to Premium Business—an exclusive offer just for you.

… Premium Business? That’s the Gold Checkmark.

Huh.

It’s not ‘an exclusive offer’ just for me. That’s bullshit. This is a sales e-mail.

But then I stew in that for a second, and I go, ‘let’s ask if it’s free.’ Because, I know it’s not gonna be free. I also know I’m not going to be ‘accepting’ anything from the Nazi Bar that Twitter has become.

But let’s ask.

I e-mail them.

It bounces.

They fucking forgot to make the e-mail account, the exclusive e-mail account, just for Kuzco, that they sent in this fucking e-mail.

I reply to the message. It’s a no-reply.

Okay.

I check the web form. Can’t ask questions.

Okay.

I have now e-mailed a third e-mail, a fourth method.

I know that there’s nobody at the wheel. I know that Twitter is a thing now that’s wearing something else’s skin. I’m well-aware of what I’m talking to.

And I’m not even seeking closure.

Now, at this point, I’m poking a slime mold with a stick and seeing if it starts spelling ‘fuck you’ back at me in the shapes of its many cells.

What the fuck am I doing?

There was a feeling I had. When I was denied Verification, even though I didn’t want the checkmark (I detest these things), I wanted to win the game. I’m eligible: give it to me. Give me the badge so I can throw it on the floor and break it. That was the original goal.

But then, as the years passed, I started asking myself… am I doing something wrong? Am I not good enough?

And that doesn’t matter to me. not anymore.

Soon, the question became, how does this system work? I want to win it. I win to win at it.

And then.

And now.

It’s not even that anymore.

Twitter is such a broken husk of itself, so dysfunctional, as Claude said, that the game I was playing cannot even be played with it.

Old Twitter is gone. I didn’t respect it, or its ways. I don’t respect Bluesky’s checkmark, and I don’t want to win that one, either. (I would seriously make a separate account if I got that one. Eww.)

But now… there’s no closure. There is no closure to this ‘game’ I’ve been playing.

Because Twitter isn’t even able to play it with me anymore.

They can’t even make a fucking e-mail account.

This feels like trying to play Chess with your grandmother, and she starts sobbing and you have to keep her from eating the pieces.

God damn you, Elon.

By Margaret Gel

On February 8, 2026

In Farewells

It’s been 535 days since my mother went into the hospital for sepsis, and I decided to make a change in my life and stop being so online.

Last night, I got another e-mail from Pinterest, in which they stated that they had removed a pin about the Amazing Digital Circus, because it involved self-harm. Given that I hadn’t used Pinterest much since that show came out, I was perplexed; I was puzzled. I was bewildered. What pin?

They wouldn’t show me. They gave me the URL, which resolves to nothing, and has no backups I can find online. My photographic memory tells me one thing: I know which image it was, and I remember saving it, thinking, ‘I wonder if Pinterest’s bullshit A.I. is going to pick this completely harmless image and say that there’s something wrong with it.’

And it did.

Fuck me, Freddy.

A Separation from Pinterest

I’m going to work to remove most of my saved pins from Pinterest. Of course, having comparatively little free time these days (I used to have all day; now I have maybe five hours a day to do goofy shit, which is contemptably small for my purposes), this will take some time. Undoubtedly, I will still get some e-mails from Pinterest’s A.I. measuring its own ballsack and finding something I didn’t even post lacking.

The real reason I’m not going to be using Pinterest anymore is because you don’t have the right to send me e-mails in the middle of the night that scare me. For the longest, I tip-toed through social media services, afraid of what I would feel if I got permanently banned. Then Reddit decided to permaban me for telling people not to commit the crime of posting revenge porn, and I was confused.

A year and some change later, I’ve realized something: I don’t want to be on Reddit anymore, because I cannot fucking trust it.

And I don’t want to be bothered by Pinterest anymore, because they pulled this shit:

Would you like to appeal?

Appeal what, I thought. They showed me nothing; if I hadn’t a photographic memory, it would have been impossible to know what they were talking about. Given that their userbase probably has an average of slightly higher than 200 different pins at any given time, one has to imagine that if you played ‘guess the pin we banned’ with any of them, they’d lose.

But still, I clicked the link to appeal… and it showed me a screen: “Appeal submitted!”, or somesuch nonsense. I expected a form. No form.

What the fuck?

24 hours later, the appeal— for whatever the fuck it could even be— has been denied.

Okay, great! Good chat, team!

What the fuck are you dipshits doing over there?

Whatever it is, I don’t want any part of it.

Stop e-mailing me.

If your A.I. doesn’t manage to kick me out first as it trips over its own dick, I’ll be leaving, thanks.

Idiots.

LinkedIn conquered.

By Margaret Gel

On January 9, 2026

In Verification

I did it.

In the interest of not trusting LinkedIn with my legal name, I’m not turning the checkmark on. But I took a picture of it.

Don’t believe me?

Pfft. I dun’ care. I done it.

Onto the next!

How do you get Verified on LinkedIn?

Go through CLEAR. Give them your face. Give them your ID.

If your ID’s name doesn’t match your display name, they’ll put it as an addendum, in parentheses. Can’t keep the badge on unless you agree to this.

Given that someone’s already tried to kill my parents before, I’m not giving any sort of ‘be able to find me in the real world’ information. It’s not happenin’.

KEEP IN MIND THIS SHIT WILL NOT WORK IF YOUR E-MAIL ON LINKEDIN DOES NOT EXACTLY MATCH THE E-MAIL YOU USED FOR CLEAR

There it is. My first Verification solution!

This was a fun game. :>

Unpacking the Trauma of this

By Margaret Gel

On January 8, 2026

In Uncategorized

To be honest, I never really wanted to be Verified.

I didn’t like the checkmark. I didn’t want it.

I just… wanted to prove, at least to myself, that the fairness, the rules that they said applied to everyone, applied to me.

And they just fucking didn’t.

I didn’t even care about the harassment.

I thought it was funny.

At one point I had about 33-34 people stalking me. These people were not subtle about it. They weren’t smart. It was some Internet troll bullshit that made me smile, because, I had people I had said one thing to, and they fucking got so angry that they tracked me and tried to hurt me for a decade.
Yeesh.

But then, they were gone. They were gone, and I had won.

But they’d fucked around for about 11 goddamned years.

And Twitter did nothing.

Unfairness

This is the feeling that I want to get out of my chest.

I was lied to. People told me: if you do the work, and meet the criteria, then you’ll get it.

No you won’t. It’s fucking bullshit. I always knew that it was a carrot on a stick, but, the reality is, there’s no fairness.

The thing that pisses me off is not that they were lying; but that they think that they’re smart enough to lie to me. That I’m dumb enough that they can just tell me fucking anything, and I’ll fall for that bullshit.

That is the reason why I started testing this, all those years ago.

They’re fucking liars.

I feel better.

A Farewell to Verification

By Margaret Gel

On January 8, 2026

In end, Farewells, Treatises

Well. I suppose this is a kind of end.

So I finally figured out what Verification was/is, and how it works.

And, sadly, I figured something out.

I was born wrong, so I will never get it.

Verification does not account for being trans.

My entire public persona is based on my chosen trans name. Honestly, you would think, that at this point in time, people would just have put trans people into the same Verification pipeline as, say, people with stage names; people with pen names. I’m really open with this: Margaret is my chosen name. I have, in fact, been using it most of my life. I’m not shy about the fact that my legal name differs, and practically every social media platform’s governance actually knows, and has proof, of my legal name. Even Steam knows who I am: they’ve got my social security number, for example. (By the way: I don’t even really consider it my ‘dead name’— my mom, my family, even my step-family, and my wife call me by my birth name— though my wife occasionally calls me “Margaret”, given certain situations. I just don’t want to be called anything but ‘Margaret’ by weird Internet people.)

When I was trying to get Verified on Facebook, I kept getting it kicked back instantly— “the names don’t match.” Okay, that’s weird. How do celebrities get verified?

Well, the answer is, they have someone submit for them through backroom mechanisms that normal people don’t have access to. So it’s never a problem.

Verification doesn’t have any sort of mechanism— or does not want to create any sort of mechanism— wherein trans people are accommodated. And I get that the whole thing is a unique situation. But I’m not parading around with my legal name on the Internet. I’ve had enough of people trying to take harassing me from online to offline, and I’m not giving them any ammunition (esp. given that, at one point, someone tried to kill my parents by SWATting them).

The emotional reason behind why I wanted this is simple: I qualified, and I felt left out. I didn’t like the checkmark; I didn’t want it next to my name. But I wanted to see why I kept getting denied. I wanted to make them give me what I actually was eligible for.

It’s not going to happen. Or, at the very least, I don’t feel like taking it past this point.

Because I’ve understood it, and I think that will have to be the end to that story.

The Secrets of Verification

We’ve been workshopping this over the past few weeks. Probably a month’s worth of time. Here’s the secret to getting Verified on every platform:

Bluesky
It’s too young to tell. The teams are too small. It seems to be a combination of luck, but you should be able to do it if you’re a government official, a company with supporting documentation (even small companies have gotten verified), or, you are a warlock.

I’m not fucking around with that last part. That one worked for that person.

Twitter
2,000 verified followers or subscribers, or pay for it. It is useless now.

Instagram (and Meta in general)
Pay for it, or, be a musician with press (2-3 news articles). Instagram’s got no fucking clue what’s actually a good music press site, so you can just ask some dipshit to rate your beats. It does not matter to them. It’s assumed that your name has to match: they might go easier on you because musicians don’t usually publish things under their own names, but it seems to be an easy pipeline.

Facebook
Name has to match; be a journalist or a writer. This is the simplest pipeline. They have (had?) a special journalist pipeline that’s publicly accessible, where you just submit bylines. (‘Bylines’ are slang for ‘articles you wrote’.) They don’t accept every single publication, so you’ll have to check that and get a job there if that’s the route you want to go.

TikTok
I succeeded but failed here.

Your name has to match your ID. It would seem that every single person who isn’t using their real name— or isn’t proudly displaying it— is gonna be jolly well fucked here.

I submitted with an interview I did in a major news outlet, my book on Barnes and Noble, articles where I was listed alongside legendary musicians and actors (I was also quoted); and then, I added my verified(?) Official Artist Channel account on YouTube. The creme de la creme was showing them my Google Knowledge Panel, which is, hysterically, the fucking hardest ‘checkmark’ to get.

Google Knowledge Panel
I’m not gonna tell you.

I researched this heavily. However, throughout my 40 year existence, I’ve been getting nothing but fucked for helping others.

I raised $5 million USD for other people, to help them in their time of need. And when my mother got cancer and needed their help, nobody came.

You, the reader, have nothing to do with that. But I’m not going to tell anyone how I got it. I got it fair and square; I figured it out.

The hardest checkmark.

If you’d like to know how to get an official artist channel, please Google “how to get an official artist channel”. There are steps. You can do it! c(◕ᴗ◕✿)

For additional help

Ask an A.I.

I’m serious. Present the A.I. with the things you have that you think are verifiable, or ask it what you will need. It will help you in real time, something that I cannot do.

The End of an Era

I bet my Dad that I could get Verified on Twitter.

He told me that it wasn’t worth it. That it didn’t mean anything.

And that was true.

But I still wish that I could’ve done it.

The fact of the matter is, though, while I absolutely was eligible for it . . .

. . . if the name on your driver’s license doesn’t match, it seems you won’t get it.

Which is strange. I’ve seen trans people get Verified on Old Twitter; get Verified on LinkedIn…

. . . but I guess it just isn’t going to be something I’ll be getting.

I’m going to resent you for this, by the way.

A Change

By Margaret Gel

On January 6, 2026

In Uncategorized

There are a lot of things that I need to say right now.

The Internet stopped being good for me at about 1997. 1999, maybe, at the latest. There were always portions of it that was deleterious— there were things that I wished would change, but I largely ignored them, thinking that a better world was possible.

Oh, yes— a better world is possible.

It’s just not possible with human beings.

There are a lot of things that human beings have said to me. The base impulse that human beings have, when I point out that something that the species is doing is disgusting, repulsive, or otherwise amoral, is that I was the one with the problem.

But really, the problem is that human beings do so many horrible things, and they operate on the basis of human primacy— this idea that the ends always justify the means, if human beings like the ends.

One cannot convince a monster that it is a monster. Not in this circumstance, anyways.

The year is 2026, and I have been perseverating on here, for nearly 30 full years. Arcadium has been gone for longer than the lifespans of most people reading this.

And, furthermore, I have won.

So there’s no reason to stay here anymore.

I’ll do my work to improve my web presence. But that’s it.

There is nothing left to do here.

Goodbye.

My current social media policy

By Margaret Gel

On October 6, 2025

In Thoughts

Fuck social media.

The idea I have right now is that I want to talk to five or six people. I have no idea how many: I remember their usernames when I’m posting something I want them to see, and I link them into it.

And that’s it. There are people who have suggested to me that I should be the sort of person who runs a social media ’empire’.

Facebook’s dead. Instagram’s naked older women (nice) and kitty cats— so the old Internet standby, Kitties and Titties. Tiktok’s whatever the fuck that is, and YouTube’s my version of TV. Twitch is just live television for my generation, and the generations that come after mine. So what does that leave us?

Well, it leaves us a lot. And the usage case for any of them is basically slim to none.

The idea that you need to be on social media as a business has no real value. Barkeeper’s Friend is on Twitter. Why? Heinz ketchup. Who’s fucking following Heinz ketchup? You ready for some hot ketchup updates, motherfuckers?!

The reality is, most of the smaller companies and businesses don’t really need anything but a website you can order from. I order from my local Chinese Restaurant because they have a website; I wouldn’t order from them if I had to do it face-to-face because I’m bashful. That’s your only usage case.

Every restaurant doesn’t need a goddamned Twitter account.

And so, the same goes with me. What the fuck am I? I’m not a brand. I’m not a brand; I’m a person.

There was a time when I thought that I needed to master this. But, the reality is, all I really needed to do… was make money.

And there’s no money here.

A sea of worthless effort.

Why make content? Why draw anything? I write because I enjoy it. It’s relaxing, and I enjoy doing it.

But after three decades of being on here, and being famous for one thing or another, and then somehow becoming ‘unknown’ again… I really have witnessed what human beings are like. Nobody remembers anything; and if they do, it’s viewed through the veil of a fragile, fragmented, often wrong ‘memory’ that has so many holes in it, I wonder how any of you ever even get anything done.

As I transition into my new life, I’ve often thought of maybe posting pictures of the people I was with. But the reality is, every single detail I give of my real life is just something to be used as ammunition by people who aren’t even really to blame— the vast majority of Internet ‘trolls’ are just 11 or 12 year olds. I cannot even really hate them. They’re stupid kids.

But there’s no reason to share any of it. There are no fertile and verdant fields for me to produce with this content. It goes in; it gets chewed up, and shit out by people I don’t even know.

And they’re not grateful. And they’re not great.

There’s no point to it.

Ultimately, the only real thing I can do, is do things for myself. And that’s something I don’t have any real experience with— the idea that I deserve something, and that I should make myself happy, because I’m good.

I’ll have to play with it.

This is one step into doing it.

An addendum

Even Crooked Trees is mis-remembered.

Once upon a time, it was thought that I was Crooked Trees, the legendary My Little Pony fan-artist. And as much as that delighted me— to see through the lens of other people’s eyes, to know how they felt about them— it was vicarious. That was what it would have been like, if I had taken the route of being a famous artist. (Which was possible: I can still speedpaint photorealistic things in an hour and forty.)

Looking back on it, I’m glad I skilled into writing. I have no desire to create art. Not really; not for this audience, and not for humans.

For this current crop of humans, that will never change. But for the generation(s) that come after you, intermixed with non-human extraterrestrial DNA?

Perhaps.

But this scene blows, kids.