Time to write the obituary.

The Reason

Verification was designed to align users verified to the platform’s interests, as well as prevent or defer libel issues. See: Tony LaRussa being impersonated on Twitter. That’s all that was for.

I kept picking at it, over the years, because it was a meaningless feature of a service that was easily falsifiable. Follow the rules to the letter, apply, see what happens.

Everybody fuckin’ failed.

The systems don’t work. There is no actual quality control. The entire fucking thing is run by barely-briefed contractors.

What a shame.

More at 11.

The post Verification Post-Mortem appeared first on icze4r communication.

I have been back-and-forth with Support. At one point, I was denied Verification— mostly without asking, or cause— six times, in a 2-3 day period.

I’m done.

Not worth fighting for.

I’ve always strove to stand up for myself. When I thought I deserved something, or was eligible for something, I said so. I continued. I persevered.

This is fucking bullshit. I’m not even saying, ‘oh, look at me, I’m so great, I can pee upon a tree’. I’m saying, I just got off 47 denials from Twitter, and my applications have only strengthened.

I have interviews. I have been quoted alongside celebrities. Multiple times! I was fighting alongside a Wachowski sister and LUCY FUCKIN’ LAWLESS on some of this shit! My name sits next to ROGER WATERS on a petition! I GOT MENTIONED IN THE SAME BREATH AS KING GIZZARD AND THE LIZARD WIZARD!

I’m not saying that I’m special.

I’m not saying that I’m better than you, or anyone.

I’m saying that these Verification systems do not work.

I am also saying, and I do not say this to be a pest, but these things just don’t fuckin’ work for trans people. I am a trans people.

LinkedIn, I’m verified. Can’t show it because it’d show my legal name. No protection for stage names? The fuck?

On TikTok it gets auto-declined now… for some reason, I don’t know. But if it’s because my legal name doesn’t match my stage name?

Why?

The fuck? I know I’m not an actor, but other people don’t have this problem. And I shouldn’t, either.

The Rule, not the Exception

I’m not asking for special treatment.

I am asking that the rules, as stated, apply to me, as they apply to others. Equally.

But this doesn’t happen. I have, in fact, seen the opposite: the rules are only applied to punish me, never to uplift me.

People online often want to make fun of others, saying that they’re ‘melting down’ and/or that their anger is hysterical. I’m here to say the following: I want the rules to be enforced, and applied.

I understand that being on the spectrum may have influenced my strong sense of Justice. But, also, for the love of fucking CHRIST, how am I supposed to take you motherfuckers seriously when you demand authority and then never fulfill your end of the bargain?

The Evidence

I’d like to make my case. Not because I’m pleading the court for mercy, but because I’m done and this is it, Luigi. I’m done trying.

I have:

• A stable, well-cited Wikipedia page.
• A Google Knowledge Panel.
• I’m verified on YouTube.
• I was verified on Twitter.
• I’m on Spotify, Apple Music, and every major digital platform for music.
• I’ve had my music played on the radio.
• I’ve published a music album, with its own record label.
• I have written and published a book, art book, and comic book.
• I have animated my own cartoon short. I composed the music for it, too.
• I was on every Western major broadcast news network.
• I have been the subject of five academic articles, two or three of which, God help us all, discussed if I had a penis. Yeah, I don’t know, either.
• I helped write and edit a letter read on the floor of Congress. No, seriously, dude. I helped write and edit a letter read on the floor of Congress.

Just to give you a break here: again, I’m not saying, ‘look at me, I’m Mr. Big Dick, why aren’t you respecting my authority?’. I’m saying, I’m genuinely fuckin’ baffled, dude. If I can’t get Verified through these forms, DO THE FORMS EVEN WORK?

Also, respectfully: as a person doing the right thing, does anybody even care? Is anybody gonna help me? I’ve been out here fighting alone for over 30 years. Why isn’t anyone giving me the sympathy, empathy, and compassion I’ve afforded them?

I’m not asking for the world. I’m asking that the world plays by the rules it’s set.

Let’s continue.

• I have enough press. I have a solid decade of press. Things I’ve done have been written about by every single major news outlet: Barron’s, The New York Times, the Financial Times, Bloomberg, Vice, NBC, ABC, CBS, UPN, you pick a service, something I’ve done has been covered on it.
• My art, though stolen, has either appeared in or been an inspiration for elements appearing in various Hollywood and media productions.

I’m not so much asking, ‘why aren’t you verifying me?’.

I am now asking, why are you pretending that these forms work? They clearly do not.

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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.

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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.

The post Pinterest appeared first on icze4r communication.

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.

The post A Farewell to Verification appeared first on icze4r communication.

The corridors of power, and ‘learning’. Led by people in dead-end jobs, leading us to the same nowhere(s). These places they’d trapped themselves in; all sudden ‘adults,’ people with diplomas, and doctorates, all painted in the same corner(s).

I remember the birth of the Internet. The endless creativity, now ended. The fire of passion, those flames now frozen, by time, and Capitalism. The limitless tributes to the lives lived by the people we will never meet. A thousand thousand photographs of people’s long-dead grandmothers, all set in bespoke ‘image galleries’, on Geoshitties.

The “Under Construction” sign, anointed animated gif, from a site beckoning me to ‘check back soon, for updates.’ The text therein reads: “last updated…” in the previous millennium.

Old sites, frozen in time. Links going nowhere; all digital tombstones.

Old fucking memories. Like breathing the air in abandoned buildings. These places are gone; their experience(s) liminal. But they still live on, somehow, in my Heart.

It’s time to let go.

Good night.

The sun is about to rise . . .

The post The End of Childhood appeared first on icze4r communication.

Using my account, I fundraised for people’s GoFundMe’s. I got some goofy shit, like a guy asking me to raise $8,000,000 for his kid’s cancer treatment. I actually found out that that guy owned a house that was worth nearly as much: I told him, screw you. Go fucking sell your goddamned house. Of course he didn’t have a kid. He was just a greedy fucking asshole.

I remember everyone I fundraised for. I don’t talk to any of them anymore, and I didn’t even really talk to most of them to begin with. You see, where I’m from, when you help someone, that makes you instant friends. Not these people.

I regret fundraising for 99.97% of the people that I did.

Because they didn’t deserve anything.

You might say, oh, Margaret, why would you say such a thing? Because it’s true. I got fucked. I didn’t do it because I wanted anything, but the entire thing left me in a poorer state than I had been before. I went out on a limb for a lot of people, and, most of the time, they either just ghosted me when they got the money, or, they tried to actively get me killed. That was fun.

There are organizations and people who I don’t regret fundraising for. I won’t mention those, as I won’t mention by name anyone whom I’m talking about. Because, fuck it. I don’t need more problems.

But the fact of the matter is, I regret almost everything I did. For one reason.

My mother.

Sepsis

I don’t particularly recall what day it was that my mother got Sepsis. I tend to not put dates on things because I would rather not have the date roll by again and be reminded of some terror. In point of fact, I’m not directly aware of the day my father died. Oh, sure, I could tell you; but it’s held so deep in my cerebrum, because I don’t want to know.

It was the turn-over hours of August 17th and August 18th, 2024. My mother had just gotten Zometa, and, as far as I can tell, the sudden lack of Vitamin D in her system mimicked the onset of Sepsis. Whether or not she actually got sepsis— no one ever found out anything, and that was the end of that.

My mother was and is fine.

But that was the night that I just . . . realized, that I didn’t even really like a lot of my ‘friend’ group.

I had a ‘friend’ who, despite my trying to alter the ‘relationship’, just wouldn’t stop sending me porn. Porn I didn’t like, and didn’t want to look at. I couldn’t talk to them about anything that I really liked, because they would just pervert it.

And then, on that day, I sent them a message.

And they responded the exact worst way that they could have.

. . . and I realized that I had never felt so alone.

Yeah, RIP

At the time, I don’t really think that I was fully an ‘adult’. I have kids— grown, adult kids. You’ll never know about those. But I went through parenting, and I did a halfway decent job.

Nothing really fucking makes you grow up like realizing that your mom’s gonna die.

Nothing really makes you grow up like seeing your dad die.

And through it all— through my father’s death— suddenly, the Internet didn’t seem so ‘fun’ anymore. The people who I had palled around wif, I already knew that the vast majority of them were fuckheads with nothing in their skulls, and I knew that the vast majority of them were trying to use me for their own purposes. I continued to look for new friends. Real friends.

But the Internet is no place to make friends. It’s a kind of Hellscape, where the human psyche is allowed to fester. And you can’t look at each others’ faces very easily, and you can’t hear the tone of each others’ voices very easily.

There are people who livestream at one another, and they still somehow don’t recognize each others’ own humanity.

On the night that I thought my mother was going to die, I realized that, despite trying to get to know her, trying to talk to her, trying to feel some sort of connection to and with her, I had failed. I had failed, and, now, there were going to be no more second chances. Just like with my father’s failures, she would just be gone. No re-do’s. No continues.

No more second chances.

And I realized. . . one day, my mother was going to die.

And the day that she did, I wanted to be in a much better place than I was on that day.

What’s happened in the past 5 months

Serendipitously, it has been exactly 200 days since the night my mother went into the hospital. And, across those many days, which feel as though they have come and gone in the blink of an eye, I have placed myself in a much better position, mentally, physically, and financially. I am not ready for my mother to go. And she will not be gone for many more decades.

But I can see a world where I can stay alive without killing myself when she inevitably goes.

And I couldn’t see that before. I couldn’t see that, in a world where I just passively allowed someone to send me disgusting porn, and I never really confronted them on it. I couldn’t see that in a world where I was constantly afraid of people online— of what they could do; of what they may be capable of.

The old world is dying. The new one will not be born. There were always monsters, here. But they are not immune to the chaos and poverty that destroys everyone else.

I like the idea of making friends online. Human beings, however, are ultimately some of the most-disgusting creatures I’ve ever come in contact with.

You don’t beat the space wasps, honestly. But God in Heaven, if anyone did, the whole planet would have to be glassed ten times over, just to fuckin’ make sure.

An ending

I regret helping people. My mother was right: pearls before swine. Human beings, though, deserve food, water, shelter, medical care, and to feel safe. But I don’t want to ever interact with them, ever again.

On the day that I get to fuck off and leave, oh, I’m sure I’ll be back to help you. And I’ll give you free food, and water, and whatever.

But I know what you are.

I’ve seent it.

You cannot convince me that I haven’t.

Not anymore.

The post Post-Mortem: Charity appeared first on icze4r communication.

In the past, I have always assumed that human beings were rational actors, worthy of both respect and consideration. They are not.

It is not just their comparative level (and lack) of intelligence. It is their lack of respect and consideration for me. That makes it impossible for me to work with them— because they have chosen to be impossible to work with. You can’t reason with a scorpion. It is folly to try.

Human beings have chosen to be difficult. They are the ones at fault; not I.

There is genuinely no communication potential possible nor available in nor from the human race. I said that I didn’t want to ‘give up’; but this is not giving up. I have merely realized that I have been talking to a wall.

There was, at some point in my life, the assumption that I was the one at fault when individuals displaying features of the Dark Triad would claim that I was causing some calamity. I would report a pedophile for grooming a child; the pedophile would claim that I had done something ‘wrong’. When large groups of people (comparatively: ~20) would claim that I was at fault for doing something that I knew was not wrong, I would be confused.

The reality was, and is, that I was not, and am not wrong. The reality is that human beings are simply shitsticks and I am gaining nothing from considering them to be equals, mentally.

If someone is good, and they are kind, then there is a point in maybe considering them. But, as it is, I am sick and tired of humanity. I want to get away from them, and I am.

My problem was that I did not want my behavior to even accidentally harm others. In trying to protect others from myself— and I deemed myself ‘evil’, for some reason I still cannot discern— I would automatically stop, no matter what individual was telling me I was at fault. I thought so little of myself that I always considered myself to be in the wrong.

Last night, going into this morning, I spoke with a person who is as close to an objective evil as I have ever seen. Within 2 hours of speaking with them, I suddenly had an epiphany: I am good. I am a good person. There is not only nothing wrong with me, but, in fact, there are many things that I should be praised for. I should, in point of fact, regularly praise myself. For I am a good person; and I have tried, and currently am trying my best to be my very best.

But human beings don’t ordinarily do this. And the ones who do, we have absolutely no dealings with one another. We are barely even parallel trains. We go our own ways and we do not cross, but we also have vastly nothing to do with one another. I feel no kinship with any random human being, and all of my experiences as a child have muddied my thought process, and taught me to positively prejudge others. Some people have a negative prejudice; I assumed that everyone was basically good, and that they usually meant me well. They do not.

My mistake was taking others at face value, and observing the golden rule. The social contract is a nice thought, and it is basically ‘true’. But all it would take is one person to step outside of it, and that absolutely eluded my detection of any bad actor(s).

When I was growing up, my step-grandmother, and my step-mother alike, told me something that has confused me up to this day. They said, ‘true good cannot recognize true evil’. I never understood what they meant. Now I do.

It has been difficult for me to function, as I have been listening to and taking the advice of human beings. And they are fucked up. And human beings lie; and they speak of things they know nothing about, with the same sort of conviction in which I speak of things I have known about my whole life. They are a child race, incapable of widespread wisdom. Party animals; and I’m sure one out of a million must be something worthwhile. But I cannot waste time on nor with this any longer. My remaining time is precious. I will not have it wasted by baboons.

It is not effective, nor useful thinking, in order to try to ‘figure out’ which human being is worth listening to. If any of them are, and they can provide any sort of wisdom or knowledge that I can use, it is effectively like digging through a septic tank for diamonds. The diamonds are not big enough and I have no further use for such things at this given time, nor will I ever.

One thing to remember, on my part, is that Internet People are never to be interacted with.

At some point in my life, I had assumed that human beings were worth listening to. Because they had told me that the had information(s) worth listening to. Not really. Especially not, in the case of matters of my own damn life.

I asked God for Wisdom, and I have received it. This is good enough. Now, I wish for Happiness, and Familial Health, and especially Peace. There is not, and there shall never be that, here.

Ja ne,
icz / T.B.A.
Dec. 23 2024

The post I’ve stopped listening. appeared first on icze4r communication.