by Leah Rowe
Sixth book draft for human reviewers, pending commercial release. This digital version will always be available for free. I wrote it for fun, and it is provided for educational purposes.
Audio is available for some chapters: preamble warning sixteenyears ch1 ch2 ch3 ch4 ch5 ch6 ch7 ch8 ch9 ch10 ch11 ch12 ch13 ch14 ch15 ch16 ch17 ch18 ch19 ch20 ch21 ch22 ch23 ch24 ch24_2 ch25 ch26 ch27 ch28 ch29 ch30 ch30_call women epiphany
SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0
One of my favourite people in the world hosts a podcast. She asks each guest the same question, with the same dubious smile – ‘What is it like to be you?’ – and every time, you feel as though you’ve just been fucked by the bull. She* is a remarkable woman, amongst many whose words informed – yes, inspired – this memoir.
Many works of this genre fail, even when the author is one of our own; they elaborate, reassure and even apologise, politely as though judged by their worst enemy. They use language guaranteed to alienate readers on the very first page as those who remain are left with little more than an academic – yes, superficial – grasp, while the author diagnoses prematurely and pathologises what is otherwise a perfectly healthy – albeit unexplored, misunderstood, and ultimately extraordinary – mind. They stress, without fail, that the author is not… such and such. I am such.
Astute readers may appreciate subtle nuance as I offer, without whitewash, an entire psychological map of my life – and you will not receive a lollipop. You will live inside my world – you may even laugh, and I hope you do. You will not be harmed, I promise.
This book intentionally avoids naming its very topic until the end. Except where otherwise indicated, intellectual discussion is also avoided – instead, the topic is presented through scenes, matching my own thoughts at the time. I became self-aware, self-actualised in that awareness, when I stumbled on some literature at the age of fifteen years old. Since then, the public has gained a somewhat better understanding, but a lot of people I see who are ‘out’ seem to be caricatures of sorts – they internalise concepts of who they are in a pathological context and then become, as a matter of identity, their condition. This may be true, even when they do otherwise lead interesting lives.
I am not a condition. I am a human being, and I reject that word. Yes, that word.
Some scenes are written in more detail than others, but all of the scenes are written in the style of a summarised report; unlike other memoirs, I do not actively try to relive the scenes. I summarise events, focusing on my own cognition at the time of each event, sometimes reconciled with my current understanding which may have changed since. Look not only at the scenes, but the composition of them; people, places, things. A lot of this book, and the point it makes to the reader, is defined not only by what is written, but by what is not. This memoir is psychological in nature, with events and scenery as support, but the scenes themselves need not matter; I could probably describe an entirely different life with the same mind, had I lived a different life, writing a book in the same style as this one, and the message would be exactly the same.
All of this is to suggest: look not necessarily at the contents of my life, but the mind behind it. Pay attention to what I do, and judge by contrast; what would you have said, done or thought differently, throughout?
I leave all of it as an exercise for the astute reader. This book is provided for education purposes, demonstrating my mind instead of explaining it directly. A more direct, theoretical analysis shall be provided at the end of the book.
TRIGGER WARNING:
This book may contain violence, abuse, suicidal ideation, explicit sexual material, drug addiction, advanced British humour, medical trauma, harassment, and multiple bad pop culture references.
Reader discretion is advised.
I was happy as a child, though it would suffice more to say that I was unencumbered. I knew how to read when I was three years old. I read The Lord of the Rings when I was ten. There was a girl in my class who I sometimes teased – I still know her name.
I had a completely normal, middle-class childhood. My parents took us on outings, bought toys and books, arranged holidays, and kept us fed. We were not rich, but I never experienced poverty. I came from a stable, loving home.
I was a mostly normal, dumb child. I had lots of fun with insects, sticks, rocks, toy cars, and one time accidentally smashed a car window. Yes, normal childhood.
It was about 5 a.m. once and I wanted to play outside. I was about four years old, and I needed to unlock the back door; this required moving a lock that was at the top of the door, roughly two metres from the ground. I could not reach it, so I piled up a bunch of duvets and pillows until I could stand on them, reaching the lock. I proceeded to enter the garage and grab my bicycle. I then started riding around outside, and this made me very happy.
A neighbour had been up at that time, alarmed by the fact that I was riding my bicycle on the street at 5 a.m. and she called my parents immediately. My parents woke up and rushed me back inside the house, begging me never to do such a thing again. I just wanted to play! At no point did I think about my safety. I wanted to ride my bicycle! I didn’t see the point in waking up my parents, and I thought only about my bicycle.
I would associate with other children. I went to their houses, played their computer games, watched their TV, sometimes went outside with them. I thought more highly of you if you had better games. I also enjoyed camping with my local Scouts group.
I mostly hated sharing at school. I would become quite upset in fact, even sometimes becoming physically combative when other classmates and teachers tried to take my things away. I did not want to share the play area outside either; there was a wheel we could run on and it was all mine.
My early childhood, basically before puberty, was genuinely happy. I do not remember problems. I was just a happy, dumb kid. My teachers even commented that I laugh a lot. I played a lot with other kids, and enjoyed playing. Yes, I was a normal child.
Paintball was the best thing ever. I very much enjoyed shooting at people, sometimes at point blank range for fun. Even my father once suffered my fifteen-year-old wrath.
My parents would occasionally bore me, by taking me to visit my grandparents. I would play computer games or read, to pass the time – one time, my father brought with him a pirated tape of The Matrix: Reloaded, and I watched it while I was there.
My mother once tortured me by purchasing Sonic 3D for the Sega Saturn, but I did not have my Sega Saturn at grandma’s that day – I had to wait until we went home, to play it. My grandmother made the best Yorkshire puddings, but I wanted to play Sonic.
I was regarded as one of the nerds in school, both primary and secondary. I read a lot, and I liked computers. I even sat with the nerds, at secondary school – a special room, consisting of mostly autistic people and those with special needs. I liked going there because they all had the best computer games, on their handheld gaming systems.
I went on a school trip to Paris in 2007, aged fifteen. We visited the usual haunts, including the Louvre, saw how disappointing the Mona Lisa really is, and I did not speak French. A group of girls from my class broke into my room and filmed me as I slept. This apparently amused them, and a fellow genius also shared the room.
I generally excelled academically. I did well in all subjects, even hard ones like maths. I enjoyed the admiration of teachers and parents alike – not just academics either. I played a sport one day in PE and a classmate said: He’s just good at everything.
I also pretended to be left-handed in said sport, and enjoyed watching them run to the other side of the pitch as I scored twice. Ah, yes.
I possessed natural talent for the arts, taking Fine Art at college level when I was fourteen. I could paint photorealistic portraits at that age, with correct perspective. I enjoyed the women in my class, though something prevented anything beyond casual chatter – I also liked my teacher, herself a woman. Her husband, also an artist, would occasionally teach us but the wife was a much better artist.
In a class exercise, I once drew a perfect silhouette of Charles Darwin – the twist is that we were tasked to draw him upside down as a true test of skill. A classmate literally told me that she wanted my brain, to which I responded:
’I’m still using it. You can have it when I’m dead.’
I owned a Nokia 3210 mobile phone, which was made in Finland, on which I played the best computer game ever made: Snake. This is all I did on it.
I behaved myself quite well in public, mostly. I was often seen as meek, shy, yet goofy and always with a smile on my face. I was also a teacher’s pet. I achieved straight As.
I started to become more neutral in my teens. My emotional expressions started to quickly dull, as my parents even noted. Puberty gave me a calm rage, an anger at the world as I strived to be the best person I could be, for myself. I became highly competitive.
I used the internet more heavily from age thirteen onward, teaching myself numerous skills at an adult level. I taught myself about the world and its politics.
I got really panicked once when I was locked in a room, and beat the shit out of someone who was trapped in the room with me. I mean, not really. I was about eight, and just punched her, but I was eight. I just felt intense pressure, and I felt like attacking her was the right thing to do. She was a few years older than me, but young enough to still be hurt, and she just stared at me as I hit her. I was made to apologise, and all went back to normal afterward.
I also dated someone when I was twelve, and so was she, but neither of us were sexually active as we’d not, you know, started puberty. It was just a dare between both of our friends, and we both found it funny. We went to the cinema and watched a film. We broke up after a week. Ah, young love!
I was annoyed at a Scouts trip once, when I couldn’t do rope climbing, because an equipment failure caused someone to fall and fracture their hip. I remember being calm that day, when I watched the ambulance take her away. Then the trip continued. I didn’t think much of it at the time, and several of my peers expressed great concern for her wellbeing.
I lost interest in socialising, going into my mid teens, as I generally focused on my skills and intellect. I did still go to social events, as a matter of protocol; I even graduated from the Scouts to the Explorers, for example. I just lost interest.
My local Rotary Club presented me with an award for artistic excellence in 2008, and I was sixteen. I used the cheque to buy a Sony PlayStation 3 with Metal Gear Solid 4.
Childhood has one redeeming quality, in that it will eventually end; my former friends posted evidence on MySpace, documenting all of the havoc they wrought with their newfound freedom. Meanwhile, I started several new programming projects.
One girl did maintain contact with me on MSN Messenger. She’d sat with me in maths, and I admired the contrast of her completely manic personality next to mine. I’d looked up to her, and I’ve no idea why – she later married a man. Boring.
I played hundreds of computer games throughout my youth, and I was never abused.
’Maths and Physics? Good stuff!’
This is what a teacher said to my mother, when she expressed utter dismay that I would not continue Fine Art at college; I had also chosen Computer Science. Gordon Brown was the British prime minister.
Beating the bus to class on my bicycle provided a daily ritual, and I would totally fail my first year. Too busy writing games on my computer. I kept Computing in the second year, and picked the easiest filler classes available: Media Studies, and Psychology – most of my classmates had the same idea.
I rarely socialised outside of college, but did enjoy the lesbian couple next to me in Psych. They were both cute and once laughed when I did not know what a cervix was. Most of my colleagues seemed strange and I would just go home each day, in peace.
I enjoyed the women at work in my second year, which was a clothes shop for older women. All of my colleagues were women, and I found myself admiring their form in ways I did not yet fully understand – similar had occurred in class. A, shall we say very well-spoken lady in Computing had caught my eye, as she smoked her cigarette during break. I found that I compared myself to colleagues, envying them.
Sacked. Boss lady had her normal cigarette and told me gently that I failed to follow even the simplest instructions, rarely showed up on time and I’d absolutely refused to operate the till. I also ate a large amount of food in the kitchen, as my hunger was quite insatiable at all times. I felt happy and free as I went home, liberated perhaps.
I enjoyed my colleagues at this job. I would talk to them a lot, and express interest in their lives. I envied them, in fact, for reasons I didn’t quite understand then. I hated the job itself, but I felt comfortable around them. They expressed interest in me, though I was the only male-presenting human working there at the time. I didn’t even think of it at the time, when applying, though I was obviously a bit conscious of it. Some of my colleagues described me as shy. I myself felt a general sense of calmness, and I was mostly aloof. I just felt relaxed. I never moved beyond casual chatter with colleagues at work, though; I never went places with them, or met any of them outside of work.
Failed. Yes, I failed A-Level Psychology. Got an A in Computing though, both years. I submitted what was almost an NES emulator, complete with visual debugger, 6502 assembler and copious pages of documentation. How many sixteen-year-olds know how interrupts work on a computer?
I felt nothing but pure anger at myself, during this time. My exact words at the time, walking around campus were ’I just want a fucking good job, and lots of money’ – such was my undeveloped ambition at the time, but I would resent all of my peers. It felt to me like they were all more intelligent than me as they all looked down on me.
My problem then was not intellect, but rather that I did not apply myself in the right ways. I had little, if any, social contact during my A-Levels. I would often just do whatever I wanted, which usually meant playing computer games at home, or writing computer games. I enjoyed writing games. I did not care about most of my classes.
I took a karate class at this time, and very much enjoyed it. Unfortunately, I could no longer afford lessons when I lost my job, and I just never got back into it. I would ride on my bicycle to various dojos, not just in my town, and my instructors then said that I had a natural instinct for it. I just didn’t have the discipline to keep doing it.
I remember seeing a lady at my karate class once suffer from a fit due to her epilepsy. Her son was there dealing with her, and the entire class stopped until she was OK. I wasn’t even aware of what was going on for a few moments. She was otherwise much better at sparring than I was.
Anxiety defined a large period of this time in my life. A general anxiety as I felt the pressure of daily life, especially academic pressures, and I would just work on hobbies I liked. I had a general sense then that it was strange how I could be happy without human contact, as I literally went straight home after work or college, just spending time on my computer. I was still able to handle people at work or college, but I just did not have an interest in meeting any of them outside of such contexts.
Rejected. IBM interviewers noted my obvious talent and intellect at an interview for a Sponsored Degree in Computer Science, when I was 18. I failed the teamwork exercise when I gave totally bad advice, because I didn’t care about the stupid teamwork exercise.
My father seemed angry when he expressed concern about my future, like he was judging me, and I would shout at him because he had no right to tell me what I wanted to be. I did not sense that he cared, though he probably did, but I did not feel it myself. All I saw was that he did not understand my mind or my priorities in life.
My hero, Gordon Brown, was gone, replaced with someone completely incompetent who I utterly despised and who I knew then would destroy my country. A wink and a smile, and off to number ten you go! Oh well.
Hired! I left my dad alone in a café for hours after he came with me on the train to London. A private IT training college hired me on the spot, and I started then and there. I forgot that my dad even existed, until he laughed at me on the phone. He said well done, and I met him at home later. He’d given me ten Great British Pounds that morning but was holding twenty – I thought the other ten was also for me at first.
Sacked. Stupid virtualised Windows crap. Outsourced IT bored me, and I don’t think I ever helped a single customer on the phone. Boss man had me set up Nagios instead, to monitor all the servers – I played with OpenBSD instead, and worked on my own programming projects. I was more intelligent than him, and did what I wanted. I did not care, as the training college would just find me a new two-fifty-an-hour job.
Sacked. Boring sysadmin job at the college itself. I often wired the wrong rooms, wired them poorly and rarely showed up on time, sometimes not at all. I was also rude to my smoking partner, a lot. She had quit smoking but seemed to enjoy the smell as we became friends. I found it funny to corrupt her, until one day she asked, thirty minutes before lunch. I had thirty minutes to talk her out of it, and did the exact opposite; I saw the horror in her eyes turn to pure joy as she lost control of her own mind. Her boyfriend thought we were fucking; this, too, amused me. I was often rude to her on shifts, and I would argue with her a lot, essentially trying to boss her around.
The same lady told me once, on a shift, that I seemed to have a monotone voice. I learned since this time to have a more dynamic range in my speech, especially when I’m in polite company, though I still catch myself doing the same thing now. It’s not so much that I sound like a robot, but the tone in my voice will often remain constant.
At other times, earlier in my youth, people sometimes commented that I seemed to stare into space – one time at a Scouts trip, someone was looking at me in a dorm where we slept, and I’d apparently been staring without moving for an hour, often not even blinking. When I finally did move, the person looking at me was visibly startled.
But I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I?
Sacked again! Another sysadmin job. Was regularly rude to staff, but I did fix computer problems. I also took quite a lot of unearned smoke breaks, and enjoyed drinking my colleague’s Earl Grey tea, which my gay colleague complained about – he was gay. I simply did not care about the job, because it was not what I wanted – an easy job.
Parents gave up trying. I spent six months learning to speak Dutch, on an OpenArena game server. I joked to a redneck in that server that I might be gay – I once offered to take my clothes off for one of them. I befriended the man anyway, who worked for some big company in the Netherlands. He later moved to China for some reason.
My Dutch friend told me that I could be impulsive. I no longer remember the context for why he said this, but the general theme was, well, impulsivity. I would often make completely arbitrary and random decisions, that baffled him. He did enjoy talking to me, and I him. We talked a lot, over video link. I got to know about him and his family. He sometimes talked to me while he was at work. I found it funny, because he ran his OpenArena game server on his company’s mail server, as he was the company’s sysadmin.
During those six months, I also learned a lot more skills, working on several new programming projects; unfortunately, I lost my data at this time due to a disk crash on my computer. One of them was yet another computer emulation project.
That one actually implemented interrupts properly, on the computer that it was implementing, again a MOS 6502-based design, using a state machine design with cooperative threading to keep track of state – timing per CPU clock tick/tock cycle.
I just really liked the MOS CPUs for some reason. It’s what powered the Terminator played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, when he chased Sarah and Kyle in the alley, though he used a 6510. That code you see when the screen goes red is 6510 assembly code pulled out of a random computer magazine at the time.
Yes, I am a raging nerd, and I did this in my room for months while seeing no other human being except my parents, and my two annoying siblings who I would rage at constantly, because they annoyed me at all times. Mostly I’d just eat with them though.
I later found a small startup company brave enough to hire me, selling solar panels. I re-wrote their job management system and copy-pasted a competitor’s website. I was surrounded by telesales ladies who ate disgusting microwave meals, wore cheap perfume, and blasted BBC Radio music all fucking day. They were also dumber than sand, and had the most racist, homophobic views I’d ever heard. They just had no depth to them whatsoever – completely shallow women.
These women, I did not envy. One of them dared ask:
’You’ve never worked a real job in your life, have you?’
I pointed to my cranium. ’I work with my head.’
Mother told me I should be nice. I told her they couldn’t sack me, so I didn’t care. These women were so stupid. For example, one of them had a son who worked a minimum wage job in a pub, and she’d told him to work hard there as he might own it one day – “might’. This told me all I needed to know about his childhood, in that he had been permanently damaged by a woman who gave him all of the wrong instructions for how to live a highly profitable life. I despised both her lack of intelligence and that of the offspring that the son would not create.
I got the software done in a month, but the work dragged on for about six months as the boss always agreed to have new features developed – he once said that I am ’the brains of all his software.’ – some clever German man was staring at me as I showed him my code. He didn’t have his internal Google Translate on that day, but he seemed nice. He went to Pakistan with Boss Man to help him set up there as well.
Quite why he hired me, I still don’t know – maybe because I was young, and cheap. Boss Man even once offered to take me to Pakistan with him, but I told him I did not speak Urdu. Why the fuck would I go there anyway?
I took this job seriously, and I did it professionally. I thoroughly enjoyed the work, even when telesales drove me to near-murderous internal rage – which they did, every day. I worked on several programming projects, including some of my own.
I took at least ten smoke breaks, daily. Boss man’s wife, who he left in charge, often complained about the smell, especially when her children were there. They did get me a bucket. Her children annoyed me as they were so loud, and I felt like I had to be on much better behaviour around them.
There were loud, noisy teenagers on the bus when I went there in the mornings, as my bus was in the same time schedule as the morning school run. Seeing them all and trying to read a book while they were acting like animals just drove me to such white hot internal rage… I kept externally calm at all times, like a saint. Boys will be boys. They reminded me of the prison that I’d once been in, that I’d since escaped.
Anxiety, hello old friend. I was a mess, throughout this entire period, though ostensibly sane. I was in control of my mind, but I just felt anxious all the time, and I didn’t know why at the time. Part of it was very likely unresolved and suppressed gender dysphoria, as I discovered later in life that my gender transition cured some of it.
I got along well with an electrician who worked there. He asked me if I was Neo from The Matrix, while I blasted away an email at one hundred and fifty words per minute on my Unicomp Customizer 104, which had a US Dvorak keyboard layout. A terminal was open, showing my code, and a bunch of PHP programming manuals were also visible, on my Debian Linux workstation. I was extremely bored and wanted to leave.
Throughout this time, I had little, if any, social contact outside of home and work. Between that, and listening to my boss make stupid jokes when I did see him in the office, I was in hell. My boss was completely incompetent at all times, it seemed, spending far too much money on everything and I wondered if I’d ever get to keep my job. Alas, it was not to last.
Resigned. I was bored out of my fucking mind, and I did not want to smell one more of those awful curries. My boss threatened to sue, but I called his bluff.
I also masturbated at two of those jobs when nobody was around, nearly getting caught both times. In one case I went home immediately. In the other, I continued eating my lunch.
Wow, being an adult is hard. I also never did get my keyboard back.
After this, I did some freelance web development, but mostly made no money at all. I started a number of failed enterprises such as trying to buy and sell scrap computers in bulk – at one point, I even tried scrapping metals. I would mostly rot in my room for the next year and a half, while my dad would tell me that I need to look for a job – my mother did believe in me though, and largely enabled my behaviour.
I enjoyed the freedom to just think all day, and work on whatever projects I wanted. I read a lot, and basically continued my own personal education. I’ve always been self-driven in this regard, and I would one day assimilate all knowledge in the universe.
I also learned more Dutch, and played more OpenArena. I became able to read Dutch news articles, and watch Dutch TV reasonably well. My Dutch friend, now Chinese, was impressed at how quickly I seemed to pick up his now-abandoned language.
Yes, most of my plans went nowhere, but one of them did succeed, like making a website about cannabis; not selling it, no, but the guy liked taking pictures of it. Weird fetish or something. My Dutch friend did the graphics and got half the money. I visited Weedguy’s house twice, teaching him how to use Linux. He was the sort of person who believed in conspiracy theories and the only news channel he ever watched was Russia Today; he regularly told me what a hero Max Keiser is.
Wow. Being an adult is weird.
It’s the year 1983, Ronald Raygun is in power, and a strange man can’t print some documents. Enraged, he starts a movement that would change my life forever.
His name was Richard Matthew Stallman. He started the ’Free Software’ movement.
Imagine if food recipes were a black box with a button on it. You press the button and food comes out. Only a few people in the world know what goes inside, or how to cook it, and they punish you if you try to figure it out. Sharing a recipe could get you sued for millions.
This sounds absurd, but it is exactly what a lot of people accept on their computers. Free Software – or ’Open Source Software’ is software that lets you study, share, modify and use the software infinitely, as you wish. This is an entire movement started in the 1980s, and it runs much of the world today – entire systems are available, such as Linux, which replace proprietary systems like Windows or macOS.
The opposite of Free Software is proprietary software, or non-free software. Proprietary software is sort of like only having one chef in town. You can only eat one type of meal, cooked by a single chef, and no other chefs can even learn how to cook. There are no other chefs. Your computer – that is, your dinner – is not really yours.
Software freedom is like being able to cook your own food, run your own kitchen, perhaps even start your own restaurants. You can make and share recipes. You can hire other chefs. You can choose where to eat. Your computer is truly yours.
I started my own Free Software project called Libreboot in 2013. It is based on another project called “coreboot,’ which implements an analogue of BIOS/UEFI boot firmware. This is the software that you see before Windows/Mac, which sets up the CPU, memory and so on – it sets up the machine so that you can run software on it.
Coreboot had gained heavy commercial usage by 2013, but it was largely targeted at technical people – developers. Libreboot started as a means of providing something easy to use for regular, non-technical users, and I started a company that sells it pre-installed on computers.
My purgatory was finally over, and I could finally exist: we reach December 2013. I have absolutely no social life whatsoever, and no real-life friends to speak of. My lovely online Dutch friend would occasionally humour me with more bad memes on 9gag. Nice guy.
I’d felt like a ghost for years. Until then, I’d never gone out with friends or kept any friends since my teens – I’d not spoken to any of my former classmates in years, and that was OK. I’d been to a university called IRC all this time, and I was about to receive my award.
The computer was a wonderful crutch, for someone like me. I forgot all my stresses about the world around me. When I graduated away from regularly abusing people online, I started exploring skills instead since my mid-teens. I began my early twenties with the equivalent of a PhD in numerous disciplines related to computer science. I had no formal qualifications, but I know what I was doing, and I just worked on whatever I wanted.
I never felt the need to socialise with people outside of controlled environments like school or work, but by 2013, I had been unemployed for years, just teaching myself more; this, after several failed enterprises as well. I knew at that point that I should probably just get a job, but a happy accident happened with my work on Libreboot. I accidentally became the leader of a majorly famous project that I’d built from scratch.
The Free Software Foundation – FSF – is one of the biggest non-profit organisations championing Free Software, and it was created initially in 1985 to fund the GNU project, started by Richard Stallman in 1983. GNU was arguably still the largest Free Software project in 2013, when Libreboot started. They noticed what I was doing, thanks to a friend who contacted them, wanting to promote my work.
My initial strategy, when I started my company, was to just spam a link to it in various Free Software chatrooms. I also spammed a lot of people privately. This is what led to said friend, that I made by doing this, contacting the FSF.
Yes, professional networking. This all started from a tiny bedroom at my parents’ house. When I signed my contract with the FSF, I didn’t even have a printer, let alone scanner. I went into my parents’ bedroom while they were sleeping, to print off the documents as they had one – I didn’t even knock. Dad asked why I’d woken him and I told him to go back to sleep. They were ecstatic the next week.
Sales exploded in December, and countless people started working with me on Libreboot. Development generally surged. I had become famous overnight, with my eBay-sourced Free Software empire. The FSF promoted my work heavily. My completely unprofessional and haphazard company was being hailed everywhere. I was completely overwhelmed for a month, and didn’t ship anything until January.
Development skyrocketed and my company was expanding rapidly by the end of 2014. A company that the FSF previously focused on – that did not have a free BIOS – became jealous and wanted to derail my effort, as I was working on a new product. I hunkered down from October to January, pretending that the project was dead.
This confused a lot of people, but I came back in January 2015 with a bang. Libreboot is for everyone, but I still wanted to protect my company, as it was how I funded my work, and I also liked making money. This launch was even bigger than the last.
The year 2014 had been a success but it was spent entirely at my parents’ house. I never went outside, for the most part. I got to know a lot of people through my community, but they were just text on my screen – I practically lived inside the Libreboot chatroom. I was often aggressive to people, and authoritarian in general, but people liked my work and I delegated a lot. Libreboot was a collaborative work. I had to learn, overnight, how to lead a major international project, and people everywhere assumed I was some forty-year-old or something – I had a beard so I looked older. When I first went to an FSF conference, my comrades were shocked that I was only twenty-three years old.
I never went outside. I just sat at my computer writing code. I would occasionally go to the shop that was twenty metres from my home, to buy cigarettes and coffee. Living with parents meant that I still lived like a child, but I was making a six-figure salary. I compared myself to the workers in the shop, all on minimum wage, wondering how they could tolerate working for nothing. I made five hundred Great British Pounds per hour.
I still did not meet any real humans. My family were enough, as they clothed and fed me – and I still only paid them one hundred Great British Pounds per month in rent, as they had no idea how much money I was making.
I thoroughly enjoyed being in charge of such a major project, and I already let much of the power get to my head. I wasn’t exactly nasty at all times, but everyone in the project knew that I was in charge, and that made me feel good. I didn’t even spend most of the money I made. I still mainly just bought cigarettes and coffee. I would occasionally buy gear I wanted, but all cheap – I’ve never cared about money.
As one of my TV heroes – fictional, mind – once said: Money is the house that falls apart in ten years. He then says that he can’t respect anyone who doesn’t grasp this.
I suddenly found myself in Boston, MA, USA for LibrePlanet 2015, the FSF’s annual conference. It’s March 2015. I gave a talk about Libreboot at MIT, in halls the FSF rented. The audience was so packed that people had to stand. Everyone wanted to hear me.
The FSF had organised a Libreboot installation workshop under my guidance, a classroom where people could learn how to install it. I initially ignored the actual workshop. I neglected to go even when informed. I was too busy with my friend’s ThinkPad. I was competing with my own workshop!
You see, I’d crept into the speakers’ lounge with a comrade to install Libreboot there, on his ThinkPad. Some guy I knew online who shared my hotel room with me, and he got special treatment from me.
A photographer shot us as I worked, and that became the workshop apparently – according to the later news report. Several people came to see me instead of going to the workshop itself. One of the FSF’s sysadmins started the workshop without me.
I got to the real workshop at about 11 p.m., hours after it had started, and apologised for being late, though I actually found it funny. I knew it was protocol to apologise. They all knew I had been next door. One of them smiled and said:
’Don’t worry, we wouldn’t be here if not for you anyway.’
I had spent a few days the week before teaching the FSF about the equipment they needed and how to set it all up. They studied my notes fastidiously, even reviewing private documentation I had given them. They accurately recreated my setup.
Come to class, free your BIOS today! We created about thirty new Libreboot users in a day. The whole thing ran like clockwork. My own project mayhem.
I stayed for one hour and didn’t do the work – my FSF colleague did Libreboot installations, while I enjoyed talking to the roughly fifty people who came just to see me, most of them not even part of the classroom as people just came and went through the room. I learned what being God is like. I evacuated, leaving my FSF colleague to run it with one of my disciples. I knew how to use people, and I wanted to enjoy the conference. My entire emotion then was one of pride – I loved the attention.
This was by no means a small conference. Hundreds of people spoke to me. I liked all of the respect and attention that people were giving me. I liked being the most important person in the room. I met and befriended several people throughout.
The workshop was so popular that one of the FSF’s people missed his own organisation’s presentation. A representative from the Software Freedom Conservancy, then one of the FSF’s biggest allies on legal matters, summoned her colleague to the stage and was aghast to find him missing from the room.
I was in the front row of the audience and shouted to the speaker:
’He’s in the workshop.’
She understood immediately and announced to the crowd:
’Oh, he’s installing Libreboot!’
Several people laughed in the audience.
We went in large groups to various restaurants. My favourite was a vegan place called Veggie Galaxy, and there was also a really good Chinese restaurant next door. I cosied up to a lot of the FSF staff – and befriended several of the senior staff.
My own, actual Libreboot speech there was quite lacklustre really as I’d only prepared the slides in the speakers’ lounge an hour before, and I somehow deleted the entire Libreboot website by mistake just before the talk – I quickly restored a backup as I rushed to… a fast-food restaurant, where all I ordered was fries, reasoning that this would be quicker as my talk was in ten minutes. One of my comrades found me and insisted I eat a sandwich that he’d brought for me; then, he marched me to the stage.
Yes, I was the eccentric that they all loved, apparently. I was quite myself the whole time. The man who gave me the sandwich, and the man whose laptop I worked on, shared a room with me. He’d walked in on me when he arrived – I’d been flying for ten hours and fell right asleep. His first introduction to me was watching me sleep. He was sitting quietly at the desk in the room, when I awoke.
America felt strange, almost fake. My only concept of it was what I’d seen in films, but the real one contained wooden houses, many of which seemed to be falling apart. The buildings looked old and crumby – the infrastructure was all old. Streets looked unmaintained, and everything generally looked cheap. A strange, backwards country where all the people smiled at me – to them, this was a paradise. I enjoyed my fog as I observed just how sterile everything seemed. A dead, smiling city called Boston.
I left as quickly as I came, and Libreboot was a success. The next logical step? Join GNU! Sponsored by the FSF, GNU is one of the oldest and most politically important institutions in free software. With it, and a few other components, you can have a full system that is all free software. It was one of the largest Free Software projects.
It’s sort of like joining the European Union, at a smaller scale. You become part of a whole. The benefits for me were obvious: more power inside a larger institution.
GNU accession took roughly one year, while the project’s popularity continued to expand as development skyrocketed. My very own Project Mayhem, I thought.
So many people would join the Libreboot chatroom and follow my lead. I enjoyed organising various people within the project, and we collectively churned out a lot of useful new features, plus releases. Libreboot was a resounding technical success.
Libreboot officially joined the GNU project in the year that followed. So many people joined the project to contribute – code, documentation, general outreach. Lots of news sites and companies were supporting it. They all wanted to work with me, as I led them and did not tell them that I lived in a tiny bedroom at my parents’ house.
I yawned tens of thousands of lines of code and woke up in October 2015. It celebrated the FSF’s thirtieth year, and of course I attended – I did another talk!
I didn’t care about the money, but that was nice too. I made a lot. I enjoyed power, having lots of people working with me, who would help me to grow. This is the nature of Free Software in general, that people work interdependently because everyone can use the code – my own project used the works done by thousands of other people.
I sat in a bar with several of my FSF colleagues one night at FSF30, and I tried alcohol for the first time at twenty-three years old. I genuinely believed then since my teens that I had no emotions, that I lived in the Matrix, or that I was a robot. This weekend was no exception, but I found that alcohol gave me feelings I wasn’t used to. I found that I had emotions, but my colleagues all felt like robots. I always knew how to read a room, adapting to other people like they were all me – because they were all me. They all sounded like me, in my head, but I could not hear myself. Strange, but true.
Alcohol did make me looser, but I still had a high degree of control, to the extent that even while completely wasted, I only calmly thought:
‘Ah, so this is what being drunk feels like.’
Well, there was a woman there that I had a vague attraction to, who I’d spent some time with – we were friends from online. At the time, I’d fantasised about her, not even necessarily in a sexual way, but I did find her appealing. I liked her because of her intellect, as she always knew more than me and she taught me a lot more about technology. She herself commented once that I seem to learn quickly. When I met her that weekend, she made coffee for me at the FSF office and took me to the roof – and it wasn’t what you think. She said “We have roof’ and she showed me something up there that amused me, but I don’t remember now what it was.
I’d conversed with her at LibrePlanet 2015 as well, alongside other colleagues when we ate. I noticed her more, as she was quite alive intellectually and extremely out-spoken. Very rebel sort of attitude about everything, yet professional. She and one of her friends actually chased me as my train left on the Red Line, waving at me as I sped off in my carriage. My own emotional state was blank the entire time, and this strange woman otherwise intrigued me – I otherwise smiled back, waving and I went back home to the UK in peace.
Back to the bar at FSF30, we’d hugged goodbye as this was my last night – I also kissed her on the cheek for reasons that still elude me, but her hair got in the way. She was with one of her friends, and they both walked home.
I followed them both, but I was too drunk to know which way was up. My own emotional state was calm, in this moment. I could have sworn I saw them enter a building, that I learned next day was a post office or something. I’m quite certain they entered it, but I tried to enter the building myself and it was, of course, locked.
I don’t know what I would have said. I don’t think I would have physically done anything – drunk and confused, I simply walked back to the bar. I continued chatting with friends. Nothing came of it, and I did tell her online after I got home that I was attracted to her, to which she responded that she was gay. I was living as a man then, and I didn’t know I was trans – back then, I believed myself to be heterosexual as I was, in fact, attracted to women, though I was not sexually attracted to her. I simply enjoyed her presence. She was one of the most intellectually unique people I’d met.
It just so happens that this individual was in fact a transgender woman, and so was the girlfriend – yes, the lady she was with was her girlfriend, as I’d discovered later. I was not offended by this, and we all continued to be good friends. Her girlfriend was pleasant, often vulgar but extremely warm, yet she could be quite reserved and was not quite as outspoken. She was highly intelligent and articulate when I knew her, and had a bit of her own rebel streak in her.
I actually found it amazing, on two counts: one, that I had a gay friend and, two, that she looked female. She looked and sounded the part, which blew my mind. Before I met her, I believed that all trans women looked and sounded male. I had no intellectual understanding of gender dysphoria or gender identity – yet here were two beautiful women. They’d both had extensive voice training and they were unmistakeably female. If you didn’t know they were trans, you’d assume they were both born naturally as women, naturally in a physical and biological sense.
I’d enjoyed my time at FSF30, and spoke to both of these women the whole time I was there. I’d always preferred female friends, not even in a sexual or romantic way – I’d never asked a girl out when I was younger. I simply felt more socially comfortable around women. Back then, I did not even think about this fact on a conscious level, but I did nonetheless gravitate more reliably towards women. I just felt more comfortable around them, even as a man. I felt safe around women.
These lesbians had spent the entire night with me, and we discussed a great many things. Her girlfriend smiled one time that night, when I said: I am not my name. I did not, at that time, know that a transgender woman was smiling at me. I did see some strangeness in both of them compared to other women, but I had no knowledge of what a transgender person was, so I just thought they were both naturally born women with strange bodies and faces. I didn’t even flinch when another one of their female friends had a man’s voice. Maybe American women just sound male? Weird!
I was talking about myself, in a way that I did not understand at that time besides a general knowledge that I was somehow strange. A general, calm unease, but she apparently knew something as she smiled. She didn’t say anything, and I don’t even remember what either of us said, but I did say that one specific thing.
Those two were the ones I noticed most strongly in the room. I’d met up with the girlfriend earlier at the FSF office, as she was volunteering – so was I. Whenever I went to Boston, the first place I went was the FSF office. This lady, the one whose hair got in the way, was working as an FSF staffer at the time. We were good friends.
I still think fondly of her now as I write this, and we were close friends. We spoke a lot, mostly about technical things, but we also talked a little bit about our lives. She was always a bit guarded though, and I was a foggy ball of existential… whatever. I consciously remember being who I was then, but I am no longer that person.
They both just smiled at me all night, seeing me as the dopey bastard I was. I was the quiet, aloof little centre of the room that everyone still crowded around, because they enjoyed Libreboot – and I did offer a lot to conversations, when they were of a technical or political nature. These women, though, talked to me about anything else.
I’d done a short Libreboot speech that day, and she watched it. It was only a small conference, if it could even be a conference. She’d expressed great surprise and excitedly proclaimed to everyone when I arrived, sitting in her office:
‘He came all the way from Great Britain, just for FSF30!’
When I spent time with women, if they accepted me in their group, I felt like I was one of them. I consciously felt this even then, despite not knowing what this meant. I just felt a general belonging, like I identified with the group. I wanted to be with them, and it was usually never in a sexual or romantic way. They just seemed more interesting and more intelligent than men. Many women went to that conference.
I did also enjoy the company of men, but there was something stranger about them which I could not quite put my finger on. Something strangely familiar and even pleasant, yet I felt unease.
The thing is, I was still mostly withdrawn to my room at this time. I thought it was strange then that I could just stay in my room and feel fine. I was happy with my projects, and the fame that I’d built around them. I enjoyed all the attention that I had online.
I did, though, start meeting people in-person during this year, all of whom I’d met online through Libreboot. The problem, though, was that a lot of the people I met were young and stunted in similar ways. I did meet people, though. The guy I’m about to describe next, I met several times… yes:
While you were distracted, I walked through a strange door back to the UK, and I’m now spending time with some guy I met on a chatroom.
We mostly sat in his dorm and wrote code, or talked politics. We went out to a lot of restaurants too, and I would pay of course, being the gentleman that I thought I was back then. We would later go back to his room.
We sat and watched a film in his bed, namely Fight Club, on my laptop. It was a cramped dorm room so we couldn’t exactly use a sofa, and we were sitting quite close, cosy as we watched Tyler Durden be the coolest man on earth. I remember feeling quite relaxed next to him at the time, not quite knowing why I felt so good looking at him.
He was otherwise boring on a personal level. He was quite young, about twenty, and unsure about his place in the world. He was quite sensitive, and possessive; he was also quite shy. He was driven, enterprising, and had big dreams, but he was young. His personality seemed incomplete, so he’s probably no longer the person I knew. I can definitely say though that he is probably successful now, on a socioeconomic level.
Nothing happened. He became bored and we went to sleep instead. I went home the next morning. Literally just some bloke. You don’t know him. I also met his mother, and I wondered how the hell he breather in her hotel room; she’d filled it with her cigarette smoke. All of the windows were shut, and it was July. She had visited the UK to see her son, though I didn’t talk to her much.
I don’t remember what happened after. All that carbon monoxide made me pass out probably.
My whim woke me up in the Netherlands. Yes, I zip round quick – please keep up. It’s November 2015, and there is a lonely transgender woman who I’d spoken to recently.
To a stranger I ask: ‘Hoe laat is het?’
11 a.m. – my friend was late. We did eventually meet, at roughly midday.
We exchanged at length about computer science, veganism, politics, etc. We saw her normal town – I picked out fruit, but I had to bring my own bag. She was entirely pre-transition, lacking confidence in her own dress, and she had only recently come out of the closet. I accepted her womanhood, because I had no reason to do otherwise.
I had researched her condition so that I may understand it. She wasn’t confident about transition – she also had perceived family problems, and doctors were slow. She’d lived the wrong life and all she wanted was hormones.
I complimented her dress and makeup, encouraging her to wear it all. It seemed like the right thing to do – and I was bored. I don’t think I even had a reason to go there.
She slept in her parents’ secluded loft room. Enter her mother and I said thus:
‘Hallo. Ik heet Doodnaam.’
Elated, to this strange Englishman she responded thus:
‘Ah, goed zo! Je spreekt Nederlands!?’
Smiling, half-laughing and shaking my head, I responded:
‘Nee.’ – plausible deniability. She switched politely to English. Dutchfriend sighed. Dutchfriend was the sort of person who did not like controversy or confrontation; she was also quite bubbly around friends, warm to everyone around her. She had a certain giddy giggle that I knew was a cope; she did it when she was nervous about something or otherwise unsure, and here I was making an arse of myself in front of her mother.
I could have said yes, but: superpowers. I’d spent two years writing in Dutch with my other Dutch friend, but I’d never actually spoken it, and they all spoke English anyway.
I mean, the dad did have a very strange version of English, like when he described the Dutch dykes that prevented flooding. He said they ‘blow the water away’. My friend responded to him, politely asking that he not make another attempt at English.
Believing me to be incompetent and in no way capable of comprehending their conversation, they articulated freely at length about doctors’ schedules by the dinner table as I sat and drank their wine, staring meekly, and I smiled – I also petted their dog. The table had beautiful chandeliers above, next to their living room with a pirated TV box that my friend had set up, on which we’d watched My Little Pony. The carpet was dark brown, the walls were all beige… and they had a weed-smoking neighbour, whose smell often seeped through the vents in this large terraced house.
Ah, yes, Dutch people. I liked listening to the mother, because she was often highly intelligent about everything, even if she was stubborn. She took a lot of convincing, but she was otherwise warm and seemed to care about her daughter. The father was much more aloof, and had has own sort-of comic personality, always making a joke out of everything but otherwise keeping quiet. Her brother was also at the table, but I never spoke to him much; all I saw was his 3D-capable sixty-four-bit cartridge-based gaming system made by a highly litigious company, which had a game on it where a strange red plumber man could jump through pipes and even fly. Something to do with a princess.
Like, all the brother said to me the whole time was: ‘Thank you for smoking outside.’ - not really much to go on.
My friend got what she wanted, namely parental respect. I’d spoken to the mother that same day, alleviating her fears as I’d done extensive research. She worried that her daughter would look ugly, and that others might not accept her as a woman.
My friend’s therapist asked her to write a to-do list of all the things she needed, for her transition, and a journal. The friend wasn’t feeling up to it one night, so she dictated as I wrote, correcting as I went. She was too depressed to do it alone. I’d even gone with her to one of her therapist appointments, obviously waiting outside in the lobby. I was in her country anyway, so there was no reason not to go with her.
One night, she became overwhelmed to the point of tears. She asked permission to hug me and literally sit on my lap. I thought it strange, but saw no reason to deny her request. This is just what friends do, I thought. People hug each other, I thought.
What I had suppressed – and forgotten – for years became physically apparent. Nothing happened, because I was a dopey bastard, and we both went back to our computers. She tested me again the next night – still nothing – before asking plainly if I would lie with her – to which I whispered softly as my mind raced: Yes.
I froze as she budged across, until all she uttered were the following, soul-crushing words: ‘You’re really bad at this’ — and she laid out her hand, smiling. I felt such heat as my mind became mush, her body hard yet warm and soft. It never occurred to me that I might initiate, as this was not the purpose of my visit. I genuinely was here on a whim, to help her with her problems, and I did not expect to become aroused – she had facial hair, wore hoodies, and had not begun transition. She looked and smelled like a man, all the more alluring and it did not concern me.
She did as she pleased with my body, quite undignified as I was inexperienced – and wet. I woke up in bliss the next day, sun glistening through the window as I lay there with the most beautiful woman I’d ever met in my life. I did not want to leave her bed. She was my first.
This was an important self-discovery, alongside one fact that I merely affirmed:
My eyes turned blank as we embraced, aware of the room in every detail – she could not see them. Her parents had sensed that something in me seemed incomplete, but they could not quite place me.
Dutchfriend had said something similar, in a later encounter. Driving around in her car, she told me that I seem… empty. Not necessarily depressed – she commented for example that I seemed to have a high level of drive, especially in how I would energetically make decisions and implement something in Libreboot in an instant, bossing people around in the chatroom. No, she just said that I seem a bit “off’ in person, despite my otherwise seeming energy and charisma online.
As alluded to in chapter one, Too Smart For School, I can show a dynamic range in my tone of voice and facial or bodily expression. However, my natural instinct is to be quite calm and stoic. It’s not that I don’t feel anything, but I just do not naturally express myself on an emotional level in most cases – I laugh at jokes for example and I can become angry. I can become happy and smile at something I did – even there, I often take personal achievement or hardship in stride. I am not a Rowebot.
My lovely inner calm. I was completely relaxed and at peace, not trying to act in front of anyone. I was simply there, spending time with my friend. I had no intentions one way or the other really… it was a whim, as I said. I was just, you know, there. I really don’t know any other way to say it. I was in the room, for seemingly no reason at all, spending time with a woman that I’d spent all of maybe twenty non-consecutive hours talking to online. She was, essentially, a stranger and Ryanair flights were very cheap.
This goes alongside my blankness when hugging her – I was like that the whole time. I didn’t even think of it at the time. I don’t consciously be neutral, I just am – it’s when I’m not neutral that I’m thinking about it, because it requires conscious effort.
Thus, I did not even think about it intellectually at the time. I think intellectually about it now, in retrospect, analysing my time spent there, for the purpose of prose.
I digress.
I bought cola and the cashier switched to English. I considered this a tragedy. I noted how beautifully organised the streets were in the Netherlands – though I nearly got run over by a bicycle, en route to my cola.
I enjoyed looking at the train stations, as the overhead lines were arranged in a way that seemed unlike that of the UK. Everything was more tightly integrated in the Netherlands, as they seemed to have high quality public transport in general, much better than I was used to at home, though my friend drove me everywhere.
I enjoyed my friend, and her family. They were nice people. I just felt relaxed while I was there, and I’d just do things with my friend. A lot of the time, we just sat in her living room and watched cartoons. In fact, my entire time there was just like living at home. Just daily activities like eating, and shopping. This is how I usually spend my time, when I visit other countries; I almost always have a host, who I just talk to.
We shopped regularly, and mostly watched TV. I also saw her university, beautifully modern, where I pretended to be a student because I was hungry. I saw a postman deliver mail on a bicycle – of which there were many.
We also walked the family dog, twice.
Yes, that is what her mother saw. The last thing I saw was her mother smiling at me as she drank her coffee – I fell down her stairwell and landed in December 2015. I’m in my bedroom at home, burning punk CDs for my dad.
Weird. Oh well, the Netherlands was nice. I sighed, chain-smoked and wrote some code. Total blur, and I’m about to have another blackou.. January 2016. I’m travelling to Brussels for a conference called FOSD.. my Libreboot speech is in twelve hours. Time to grab my friend.
My essence enveloped the Netherlands and, wary now of her mother, sensed her form, from which I became manifest. We pressed one hundred and thirty kilometres through a Schengen wormhole to a five-star hotel in Brussels, and dined. FOSDEM paid the damages.
Satisfied, we quite simply walked to a bar, entry into which required answering: “Who is Richard Sta.. a spirited discussion with a bearded OpenBSD deve.. asked me how many fingers.. OpenBSD developer smiled menacingl.. a strange autistic man’s room with Dutchfrie.. Shitfaced, I could not find the exit. We laughed. I was having fun!
I passed out and woke up on stage. I gave an impassioned, albeit hungover Libreboot.. whisked away instantly to another bar, where once again we discussed, among other things, quantum me.. a lovely waitress stepped outside to enjoy a cigarette – very much enjoying it myself, feeling her as though we were but one body, watching with glee as I sipped my beer. I felt great sadness when she put it out!
I blinked and found myself on a stage in Denmark before falling sideways at warp speed through Copenhagen airport. All I saw was a woman wearing the most beautiful blue dress I’d ever seen, and I wondered just how soft that dress was. I felt her as she moved, a surreal pleasure as I landed softly into my March 2016 office chair in the United Kingdom. My Danish friend was nice.
I looked ugly in my Danish talk. Sweaty and ugly. Disgusting face. Crooked. Eerie.
I decided to just relax for the day. We don’t need portals in the UK, because the bus service is already decent enough. All that travel was quite dizzying anyway.
I was completely relaxed that day, and all I could think about was the Netherlands.
I removed hairs from my face in a photo editor and smiled ecstatically at a video of a Canadian lady named Tiffy inserting a dilator into her new vagina – and my mind violently snapped. What the fuck am I doing!?
She looked so happy, and my mind was sipping beers. This time, I’d had one too many.
Error.
My words to my Dutch lady, now thousands of miles away, were immediate:
‘I’ve been lying to you, and myself, for years.’
A five-minute pause followed. Then:
‘I’m a woman.’
Wow – and I had several names. My choices whittled down to Alice, Bianca, Heather and Leah. I chose Leah, because of the character Leah Brahms on that one episode of Star Trek: TNG. Actually, two episodes.
I had a biker gang beard. Great big bushy beard. My dad said I looked like a Jihad terrorist. I also tucked my penis regularly, compressing it and my testicles inside me, and walked around wearing layers of tight pants. I shaved my body regularly, even in my teens. Now it made sense.
It also made sense how I’d always imagined myself with a vagina, when thinking about sex. I regularly fantasised about one of my male friends when I was a teenager, but I’d put it out of my mind each time – being gay was not allowed in 2005.
I spent several weeks in what felt like psychosis – I tried so hard to disprove what had now become abundantly clear. I failed, every time, prompting both euphoria and terror on my part. I can only describe it as having been light-headed for weeks, hyper-aware of everything around me. I remained in my perfect fog, aware of it for the first time. I felt truly self-aware for the first time, but it was cold comfort.
Everything felt hostile at that point, a lie, like waking up from the Matrix. The world around me now seemed ugly and cruel. I was incredibly lonely – free, for the first time in my life. Emotionally free, but now I had to figure out what that actually, you know, meant. How would I live, knowing what I knew? What the fuck was I going to do now?
A new fog enveloped me on that day. I came out to some friends that worked with me on Libreboot, and one or two people in the FSF staff. They kept it private.
March 2016 arrived and as my fog reached Boston. A lot of trans people went to the FSF conferences, because there are a lot of trans people in the free software world – much more than in wider society. I now noticed them all. My trans friend from the FSF greeted me in her office as I arrived – me sitting in guy mode, her girlfriend entered the room and asked: How’s the new girl doing? – Fine, I replied, in my t-shirt and jeans.
What followed was a one-hour conversation with her, as I’d already met her at the FSF30 conference – we already knew each other. I very much enjoyed talking about myself, unencumbered for the first time in my life. I had her ear for the full hour, and we talked a lot more after that. I probably even smiled – she told me once, later, that it was so nice to see me smile, but I’d only do it involuntarily while drunk.
There were a lot of trans people at the LibrePlanet conference, and they would all get to know who I really was. I was still dressed in men’s clothing, uncomfortable coming out publicly even amongst friends, but they all called me Leah. Although I deeply regret this now, I would tell them all my deepest, darkest desires, and about myself as a person. I regret it because they were all basically just judging me, even if they were friendly. I resent now that I confided in them so much – I didn’t even need to be there.
I did nevertheless enjoy their company, and we would eat a lot. I also did tell them that I often don’t feel emotions – a fact that some of them may have picked up on at the time. I remember one time one of them saying something – or not saying it. I was mumbling to myself once when I thought nobody was around, and one of them entered the room I was in. I felt her presence as I switched to neutral. She knew.
I’m sure they all didn’t catch it then, because gender dysphoria and also the fact that half of the people there are autistic, gave me perfect cover. Disassociation was normal, and this was anything but: I was fully aware. I’d met a friend’s older brother years earlier, in my teens, who I thought was cool – he was autistic, and I’d emulate some of his traits, but I don’t think I actually was autistic myself. I mimic people. The fact that I’m into computers, though, makes it a more plausible claim.
It’s not that I didn’t have emotions though. I was able to laugh and cry. I was able to get angry too. I didn’t know how to control my temper then, so I would often get into big arguments at home even over trivial things. I would often be told that I talk down to people, and that I don’t let people talk, that I try to dominate in conversations. Multiple people said so. I was otherwise neutral, and everyone still felt like they were me.
I just told myself then that I wouldn’t be trans if the thought had even occurred to me in the first place. It was never even logical, just a general feeling I’d had, plus the other major triggers. It was the only thing that made sense, and that’s still the case now. When you know, you know, you know? It’s just like being in love, but it’s all pain. For me, a foggy, existential pain – and for the first time in my life, I had no control.
I wasn’t interested in philosophy. I went there that weekend to escape. I’d considered not going at all, to LibrePlanet. I only kept my schedule and went because of the other trans people I’d see there. I just wanted to go somewhere that I thought would be safe, isolated. Even while I was there, fighting to overcome repression was hard.
I later went with the first friend, the one who asked how the new girl was doing, to another friend’s place where I also got high on weed. I didn’t know how much was too much, it being my first time, so I smoked an entire joint while completely drunk. I felt a kind of non-existence that I can barely describe now. What I do know is that I hated it. She had to mildly hypnotise me just so I wouldn’t fall asleep, especially on the long train ride back to her house so that the numerous police officers we passed would not arrest me for public intoxication. Yes, we were two good friends, chatting on a train.
All I remember is feeling not only like I had a pair of tits, but that they were literally on fire and that everyone around me had my face, including my friend. Weed is weird. My friend also told me that this was the first time she saw me smile. I came alive while high, or buzzed. I knew this too, but they were only my feelings – once again, I still only saw myself. Weed simply made it more obvious – it was then that I knew. Everyone is me. They all sound like me, in my head. I hear their words, but all I saw was me.
Just before the weed, but while completely wasted on the alcohol with which my friend had so graciously plied me, I told her that I no longer cared who I was or about Libreboot. I was highly drunk while fixating on the FSF’s receptionist, a woman, who sat drinking with her boyfriend. I compared my life to hers on a purely socioeconomic basis, to my friend, explaining how she inspired me, because I only… my friend interrupted me. She smiled, completing my sentence:
’You want to be her’
Yes, I said, almost sobbing. She sensed that I’d had enough, and didn’t want me getting too out of control, so she took me to grab my luggage from another friend’s house, where I’d slept in the previous night. I got high on the weed, while we made our way there.
When we got there, I was so fucked up that I no longer responded verbally. I just smiled, off in my own world at all times; I had the key to enter the home of said friend, where my luggage was. They trusted me with it and they knew they might not be there later, when I needed my things back.
They just happened to be there and they could see just how fucked up I was. They all laughed, I’m told, saying my name repeatedly. I do remember giving them the keys, but not much else. My neutral fog was as it always is, but the weed made it more pronounced – I felt like I was now truly a robot, albeit it one that cannot reliably answer his or her own name. Weed is wonderful. Then we went to her house.
They were all nice to me and I knew I was in safe hands, but this action was also reckless. Getting drunk and high at the same time, for the first time, in a foreign country while my mind was also in that state, might not have been the wisest course of action. I didn’t even weigh the risks, not articulating for example that had they abandoned me in that state, I would have been defenceless on the streets of what was a violent suburb. My friends lived in a rough area. I was in that apartment and everyone was smoking weed, so I decided to try it. They didn’t even know I was new to it – I confidently took the joint, and they just thought I knew what I was doing.
I had déjà vu the next day when I was sober, passing a McDonald’s that I was sure I’d never been to. My friend was a vegan and I’d apparently horrified her by smashing a Big Mac into my face while stoned. She told me that she’d eaten my chips. Fair. I laugh it off, as did she – I’d apparently enjoyed myself, but I couldn’t remember any of it. I didn’t even seem dysfunctional to anyone else, but my friend had guided me the entire time. I don’t remember arriving at the train station to her house, but I do remember pulling out my bank card to swipe it through the ticket machine. My friend had been guiding me like a puppet the whole night. I was her perfectly stoned robot.
We were late to LibrePlanet, arriving at around 11 a.m. or so. I had missed my Libreboot talk, but the FSF’s sysadmin and one of my disciples had performed it for me. Several people had wondered whether I’d been captured by the CIA or something, especially as I wasn’t signing my emails – the truth is that I just didn’t have my GPG keys on the burner laptop, which I used at the time. I was once again in my normal, now-sober fog and I actually felt relaxed, albeit depressed. I was in guy mode.
I joked to my friend afterward, highlighting both the literal and spiritual truth in the statement: ’Deadname wasn’t there’ – and he never would be. Leah killed Deadname.
The wife of my other friend from the night before, whose keys I returned, approached me in the speaker’s lounge at the conference. She handed me my bottle of shampoo that I’d left, smiling profusely though I didn’t quite know why. I must have made an impression. I’d smoked with her two nights before, in guy mode – she knew me by my dead-name. I was staying at her home, in her guest room, and the husband summoned her inside because we were chatting – smoking on the porch at 2 a.m. – and this apparently made him uncomfortable. I found this mildly amusing, and I genuinely had no interest in the woman. She wanted me to share my cigarettes, and she was hosting me in her home, so it seemed fair. She was pleasant and I was calm.
I would spend the next week or two in my new stoner friend’s apartment, mostly at my laptop or watching TV with her, or her partner who was also there – they were all polyamorous, the other lady now absent. They sheltered me and offered friendship. Their friends would visit often, including one ’tranny chaser’ who one of them was also fucking on the side – I met him on my first night there, while I was still stoned.
At the time, I thought it similar to the unkempt appearance of some living quarters as depicted in the Matrix, when characters are shown who live in the city of Zion, a fitting comparison given what I knew of the Wachowski sisters – and that the film was indeed about trans people by way of allegory. I sat in my calm, stoned little fog for a fortnight.
Yes, this was young suburbia, the real kids of America, and I would spend it totally fried on their weed at all times, eating cheap American corn cereal and watching re-runs of Red Dwarf with my hosts. I would occasionally share my cigarettes.
My time in her apartment was extremely depressing. All I did was smoke weed and eat food, though she was happy to have me. I’d spent that period writing an even more asinine journal than this book, that I ended up chucking. Pure stoner crap, but in a young, twenty-four-year-old way. Absolute rubbish. I wrote about aliens for example.
They did show me how to apply makeup and so on. I also did wear feminine clothing inside their flat, but never outside. I’d slip on a coat and some jeans. I went home after about two weeks, since orders were backing up and I needed to become an adult at some point. I had real responsibilities requiring my attention, as I remained in fog.
Lovely people though. I went back with her to the FSF office on my last day, whose staff had expressed great surprise that I was even still there – they were none the wiser, and I wasn’t out as trans to them, except one.
During one of the nights, the night that I had become drunk and stoned, I had blurted out how proud I was for being Leah, to none other than the FSF’s licensing and compliance manager of that time. Shouting gleefully, while drunk, I told him that I am Leah. He smiled, apparently not knowing how to handle me as my friend sighed.
On a different night, I and several of my FSF colleagues, plus this and other friends, had simply gone out for pizza. We crashed out in the home of one staffer who graciously hosted people for the night. Everyone there who lived in Boston pretty much just let people use their rooms during that weekend. Such was their general camaraderie – and I felt alone. My fog filled the room that night.
I’d spent time there with numerous trans people as there were many of them at that conference. The conference generally welcomed us. I would relay my stories to them, walking through the streets of Boston as we sat in different venues.
This was not my country, so I switched instantly to mine and unlocked the front door. I became quite drunk on my grandmother’s whiskey and immediately came out as transgender to my mother, crying over the phone. Whoops!
My parents’ reaction was mixed, because dad was undergoing cancer treatment. I felt like they didn’t care about me. I didn’t visit him in hospital – the thought never even crossed my mind, except in passing. I couldn’t be bothered. I needed my own space. I had no hatred for my father, nor any desire to see him die – but I did not think about it. I was still in my calm little fog, now filled with an ever increasing rage as I wanted to become Leah – and I felt that if I’d stayed at that house any longer, that Leah would die. It would have been all too easy to fall back into my closet, as so many did. No!
At the time, I misinterpreted the fact that they were prioritising my dad’s cancer to mean that they did not support my transition, and I grew to resent them for months. I’d go on to ghost my mother for months, not even returning her phone calls.
An angry fog envelops me, bloody with a calm, soothing rage as I emerge in April. I’m living alone in a cheap, rented bungalow. I was rich so I didn’t cook, just ate out. I was also depressed, so I didn’t unpack for months and didn’t even have a bed. I was drunk daily, often waking up in vomit around broken glass. Sometimes cycling at 2 a.m. in my pyjamas.
I’m pissed, daily and in every sense of the word. The first night I got the keys, I slept there overnight, without even a bed. I curled myself up on a sofa left over, and used a nearby rug for warmth. I’d purchased a bottle of red wine and downed the lot, reasoning that I wanted to feel emotion that night. I spewed all of it back out.
I woke up with a bad headache, and walked for one hour to the McDonald’s for a Big Breakfast. I was calm, my town peaceful as always. I ate my breakfast like it was any other day, without a care in the world. I went back to my parents’ house that morning, and mother was quite angry that I’d not come home. This confused me, and I went back to my room, ignoring her – I knew I’d be leaving soon again, anyway.
She’d been there the previous night, shining a torch through the windows to see if I was there, but I did not respond. I did not, intellectually, even consider that she’d be worried. I just wanted to be alone. This was about two weeks before I actually moved.
The bungalow was very nice, and it only cost £800 a month. It had a plain entrance hall, and a reasonably sized living room complete with furniture, plus a rug. The landlord already left me a bed frame, so I only needed a mattress – the master bedroom was quite large, fit for two. It had a walk-in shower, in a very old-fashioned bathroom, and a mirror that I’d smashed on my first drunken night there. The kitchen was long and narrow, with many cupboards, and an electric stove that never worked right – it sometimes caught fire, when it got too hot. I just made sure to run it at a lower heat. The oven didn’t work, but I fried, steamed and microwaved – or simply ordered – my meals. The kitchen was old-school limestone and tiles, as was the bathroom. Hard wood floors, white walls everywhere – a standard low-cost rental.
The wiring was crap, actually dangerous as some of it was not even properly earthed. I sometimes had to reset the breaker, which happened a lot – like when a light blew out. Really shit wiring. The gas was old-fashioned too – I remember being drunk when I noticed a leak, and the gas man didn’t know what to do when I was laughing maniacally on the floor for some reason, but he did shut off the gas.
Workmen came that same week to disconnect the old gas pipe and route new ones, installing a combination boiler instead. I showered cold for a week, and it was winter.
I liked the garage, which was connected to the side of the house. I never used it, but I did like it. It was my laundry room, as it also had running water for, some, actual reason. The front garden was paved stone, with a small tree, and the back garden was all brick, no grass. Easy maintenance.
Mine was one of two bungalows on a private road – the neighbours were a senile old elderly couple, who enjoyed my company, though I never did enter their home. I never invited them into mine, though I did occasionally borrow items from them. A simple smile and a hello would suffice, and they would always smile back. Their son, an electrician, would sometimes visit and I would talk to him. Boring.
Nice place, and it was a detached bungalow so I could make a lot of noise. The street was very quiet at night, and the bungalow did also have insulation, so it was dead quiet. Even during summer with the windows opened, it was quiet – a visitor once commented that it was like living in a rural cottage. I enjoyed the quiet too, but sometimes that meant I could hear every creak at night. Very distracting, especially when you’re alone in dead silence, trying to sleep.
I saw my little brother about a month after I moved – yes that one – in the same cafe as me while I ate. He said I should visit my father in hospital. How dare my brother question me, I thought. He wouldn’t even call me Leah. Fuck him.
It’s not that my parents didn’t care. They’re actually supportive today, but back then they had my father to worry about. I interpreted that as having been abandoned, left to rot in my own misery.
I enjoyed my new adult freedom, but my home felt empty – my fog would still not left, as it were, yes. I felt exactly the same as I had done before, except I was now free to experience it undisturbed. I lived inside my own mind for months, except IRC. I did find a voice-chat server and I invited some people from Libreboot to it for a while.
I enjoy music, sometimes, but I normally prefer silence. Alternatively, I would watch videos of eight-bit computer games, like on a certain console made by a highly litigious corporation from Japan. I enjoyed the monotonous nature of the music in these games, and sometime played them myself. It soothed my neutral brain, and helped me to focus on my work. I still do it to this day.
Enter Badfriend, named because that’s what she was: a bad friend. She, herself trans, ran a support chat online for vulnerable trans people. I wasn’t ready to come out as trans, and another friend at the time recommended it. We both knew the lady. She was quite charming generally, in a counter-cultural scrappy sort of way. She was the sort of person who’d always insert herself into the line of fire to protect someone she cared about, and she was always highly chaotic in the room, full of energy; yet, she could also be quite rational at the same time. She was out-spoken at all times, and she’d never accept any nonsense either; she had no problem telling you when you’d messed up. She was the type of person who’d spend time mentoring everyone around her, almost like a sort-of mother figure. She was also high, nearly all of the time.
I was an absolute nutter on the chatroom. Drunk all the time. I lost count of all the angry rants I’d wake up to – I once dreamed that I was chatting on IRC, then woke up with my IRC window opened, as I frantically scrolled to see what I’d said. Badfriend was also a professional colleague of mine, outside of the chatroom, and had refused to tell me she was the same person; I only found out that Badfriend was the same lady I knew outside, by pure accident. She only admitted it to me after I confronted her, which meant that she was quite happy to have control over me as what I’d believed were two separate people enitrely. She could often be duplicitous like that.
I looked up to her at the time, and actually felt the need to prove myself. I should have just broken off contact, but I was weak then. She was also a moderator in that chatroom. I felt like she was trying to make me detransition, because she constantly expressed doubt that I was even trans or, when she finally became convinced, she told me that I’d have to be patient and live as Leah without… hormones, without treatment. This, to me, felt like asking for death, and I expressed righteous indignation. Yes, I was enraged – and drunk, daily. I lost count of all the angry rants I went on, waking up sometimes in my own shit – and I’d just shower. I’d drink some more, or go out and do… whatever. I was a mess, and all they could do was watch me die.
I hated Badfriend, because she already had everything, and was lecturing me about how I needed to be patient, and wait – I’d already waited twenty-four years. I wanted to be Leah now. It was more than hate. Her words were an attack on my right to exist, as though her words were, themselves, a knife. I looked up to her at the time, and felt the need to prove myself. I hated myself for it later, that I’d allowed her to hack my mind like that. I felt completely violated in every way.
I was eventually shown, by someone else in that channel, how to buy hormones on the internet after I’d expressed several times the desire to kill myself, and I researched how to dose it.
I describe with such drama, these harrowing ordeals, but most of this time was quiet; empty, as though the air itself was dull. My mind then was even more a fog than when I thought myself a man – the booze just made me angry, mostly, but it was still the same fog. I could still type accurately at one hundred and fifty words per minute while drunk, so they suffered my wrath daily.
I could not see how I’d ever truly become Leah. I drew on my wall once, a picture of a beautiful woman, with a note that read: ’If you kill yourself, you’ll never get to be this woman.’
There was a fish and chip shop near me that I regularly ate in, because of a waitress who worked there. I didn’t know her, but would enjoy being served food there. It had a full restaurant inside where you could also order regular meals, and I admired her form in ways that I did, now, understand. The restaurant, and the town, seemed dull – the world world was dull, but this woman’s body spoke to me like no other could.
I don’t think most people would have any concept of how lonely I felt, throughout. It was more than loneliness; I felt alien in my own home, and I just wanted to end it all. Other people still felt like robots, and I felt – now sober, and on hormones – like I was the only person alive.
Yes, it had become June, and I’d stopped drinking for a while. I took estradiol instead, excitedly in fact. Throughout this time, my drunkenness had been shielded from Libreboot. I even kept working on Libreboot, throughout.
I’d started to strongly feel the emotional and bodily effects of HRT. I was more aware of my feelings and felt more relaxed – still fog, but now I could laugh and cry. I felt my own emotions clearly, but everyone else was still a robot. I also cried randomly for no reason. I came home shopping and randomly fell to the floor in tears.
I cried every day, often in my room while my brother was working on laptops for me. All those years suppressing my feelings, and now I was a sopping mess.
It was fucking awesome. I could feel. I also laughed a lot more. I was suddenly aware not only of my own thoughts, but of my entire world. I started to notice more details in everything, like I could now see the world in HD. I experienced a general sense of calm, over time, and a reduced sense of anxiety too. This was freedom.
I still had the same sort of neutral disposition as before – this would continue, but I did feel more extremes of emotions for myself. Part of it may have had to do with stress, since I was suddenly fixing a major source of stress in my life. The overwhelming enormity of what little I’d now achieved simply dawned on me, while I contemplated what came after – I’m quite sure many people might do the same thing.
I, though, felt amazing. My crying was due to actual sadness, a general pervasive sadness that I still cannot place at an intellectual level – I just felt sad. At the time, I felt amazing about it. It may seem strange to some, that being sad feels amazing – before then, I was rarely sad. Not like this. This was intense. I laughed a lot more at jokes too.
I learned to deal with it, as I worked on my actual problems. This period of constant crying only lasted for a short while. Even after it had abated, I found that I was more aware of myself – it’s hard to explain, but it just sort of felt like my head was a little bit lighter, like it was “heavy’ before. I felt actual calm. My little brother told me that I now seemed more outgoing than before, as I also started meeting people offline.
I’d suffered then from what I later found to be anxiety, and I did take antidepressants for a while – which worked. They were the other half, HRT being the first. I later stopped, and my medical history is not all that important for this book. No, I mean, like when I’m in a room, I could feel myself in the room – feel my body, and place myself in the room. I didn’t feel any more like I was constantly inside my own head, even when I was. I don’t think I found enlightenment, but I probably came close.
I digress. Hormones are amazing. I angrily and proudly sent Badfriend a photo of my hormones. She asked if I was OK. I was more than OK – no thanks to her. I made my contempt quite clear.
Mother took me out dolled up, once, to a clinic appointment. I felt so great that day, but nervous – and I went back to guy mode. Despite being on hormones, I still did not have the confidence to dress as myself in public.
One of my other trans friends visited, from the chatroom. She strong-armed me, after I’d finished crying, into going out as Leah Rowe for the first time. I realised that I didn’t need to worry. Nobody would attack me. We had a nice day out!
My friend was still a robot to me, but now it was being friendly. We went to the pictures, and ate ice cream at a beach. A druggie family offered me heroin at the beach, which I declined – I felt no offence, but I did still follow them around while reporting them to the police and describing them in detail. It was the thing to do.
I’d also come out publicly online. Nobody cared. A few people said congrats. I could live my life in peace, and nobody would bother me, which is what I wanted.
FOSDEM and several news sites, also the FSF, changed my name on articles and such. FOSDEM agreed in advance that I would be accepted to do another talk in 2017 as Leah, if I applied later that year. The FSF had agreed similarly, for LibrePlanet 2017 – though my 2016 one wasn’t recorded anyway. They simply changed my name.
I became much more confident during her stay, even becoming more productive in my work. She gave me the kick I needed to become once again self-sufficient as I’d previously been quite depressed. She helped, first by showing that I had nothing to fear, and second, by inspiring my own struggles through her own. I didn’t need to ask, because she was just generally chatty and constantly told me about herself. I learned to model myself on her, to the extent that I would then become who I wanted to be.
We went everywhere together, as though we were dating. She had visited my country for reasons that still seem unclear to me, and I showed her a good time. I was no longer the gentleman, but it was still the thing to do, so I was her ambassador to the UK. I also enjoyed the confidence I’d quickly gained, going out dressed as Leah all the time. I rode my bicycle around town and for some, dumb, fucking reason, I heard a group of men sing ’I want to ride my bicycle’ as I rode past – you know the song.
The exact fucking thing happened when I rode past a group of teenagers. Weird. They must all just really like that one song from the 1980s that everyone has heard. I myself played it on repeat when I got home each time, amused by the irony of it.
Yes, I did want to ride my bicycle, thank you very much, as it was how I shopped. I also found a weird fetish group at this time, not marketed as a trans group, but as a cross-dresser group, though it also had trans people there – but a lot of regular male cross-dressers, who were not trans and just did it for, you know, fetish reasons, or as drag queens or whatever. It was a disco hall, and I would get completely smashed while I was there – robots, all. Blank, like me. My drunken stupor made me lament once more about all of the tasks laid ahead for my transition, which overwhelmed me. I drank some more, making all of these strange people upset – then one of them said call the police. I ended up crying on the floor, shouting and swearing as they carried me kicking and screaming. They pushed me out onto the street, telling me that I should never return after I screamed at one of them that I wanted to slit her throat.
My only thought then was that I’d left my coat inside. The coat was theirs now. Pity. I was completely shitfaced, staggering home to my foreign friend, not remembering who she was, because – I say again – yes, was drunk. I pushed her out of my bed.
She slept on the sofa, and had a right go at me the next day. I laughed. I also vomited in the kitchen while she showered, that morning, and cleaned it up quickly – she knew anyway, because now the kitchen smelled like bleach. Oh well. She made her usual blueberries with milk – because that is apparently breakfast. I had tinned tuna, with some toast. I ignored her for most of the day, as I had lots of work that day.
She visited my mother with me, relaying to her the same stories which made her break down in tears because she had a lot of personal problems. I myself sat in perfect silence as my mother hugged her tight, reassuring her that everything would be OK. I observed the room. I could never show such affection automatically, since I was incapable of even feeling it, and knew I was incapable. I regarded this as a burden, because I just didn’t know how to respond, but my mother was there to comfort her. The fact that my mother provided such comfort relieved me, as I would then not have to deal with it myself – I literally thought so, in those terms, while watching her cry.
Whatever. She got bored and I sent her back to the airport in a taxi that I’d paid, about a week or two later. We never spoke again after that, which seemed strange to me at the time, but I simply continued my life. She was my lovely German girl for a week.
I did cry after she left, because I thought I needed her to help me be myself – I’d been in Guy Mode before she came, and I didn’t think I’d have the strength to go out as Leah on my own, because I’d always gone places with her. I vowed not to regress, and I found then that I was now self-sufficient in that regard. I never spoke to her again – I didn’t even think about her, and we stopped chatting online.
GNU Libreboot was booming. Throughout that entire year, the year 2016, Libreboot development never stopped. I even worked on it during many of those nights in which I was drunk – the Libreboot chatroom never saw my drunkness, because I expressed what I was thinking in the trans chatrooms. The Libreboot chatroom got my code.
I was having sex with different booty calls every night from July, often drunk. There was this one guy twice my age, yes a guy, but into cross dressing as a fetish thing, and he had a cuckold arrangement with his disabled wife. He was my favourite, though I never did meet the lovely lady. He was about fifty years old, and I twenty four. On the first night, we’d eaten a pizza – both he and the room felt cold, until he was about to leave. We decided, in fact, that the meeting was a mistake but then we hugged goodbye, and I kissed him. He proceeded to guide me, softly as we started merging into my sofa, my erect penis touching his… and I also learned how to do anal sex.
I visited him once at his work, during day time, which embarrassed him a lot. I’d gone there on a whim, since it was on the way home from shopping and I was bored. I approached him calmly and simply said hello. He told me to never, ever do that again and eventually broke it off with me after I’d become drunk one too many times.
There was also this one guy from the Ministry of Defence, a technician guy who had done several tours in Afghanistan. He was so nervous and in his twenties I’d say. All he did was jerk me off, quite challenging as the estradiol had made me flaccid indeed, but he persevered. He later cooked dinner for me. Some tuna pasta dish. He taught me a way to measure pasta quantities, using coffee mugs. I never saw him again.
I visited gay bars, trying to find sexual partners. I went to a number of bars, and I would usually get drunk instead. I did not feel the room quite so much this night as I was there for one thing only. It was a peaceful night, and I generally enjoyed the music. A lesbian couple next to me quietly left, after I’d gone on at them about whatever interested me as I drank my gin and tonic. Perhaps they sensed something in me, or they were bored – all of them, strangers, and I was just sitting with them.
There was one person who tried to seduce me all night, before deciding not to come home with me, which annoyed me as I was indeed quite horny. My taxi arrived. I asked the driver to wait, went back inside, hugged him, smiled, and broke his nose. I saw a blur that was his face falling backward as I calmly and quickly walked out of the bar, my whim now satisfied. His friend called me a dirty tranny as I quickly entered the cab, unscathed. I did it on a whim, feeling no hatred or malice in me whatsoever. I felt great satisfaction as the driver took me home, and I worked on Libreboot all night.
I felt a general sense of entitlement over those who did make it to my bed. I would often invite people to visit and sleep with me. It was purely sexual, and none of my flings lasted for more than a week – usually no more than a single night.
I’d been banned from the trans support chatroom because I told a disabled lady in there to get a job. I wasn’t even angry, but she had some problems and I believed I’d be helping her in saying so. The admin – Badfriend – took her side and banned me.
I was sober at that time, taking only my estradiol. I mean, I did sometimes drink, but I was sober that day. I now felt like I had nobody to humour me, and I still needed the group – or so I thought. It was my only support group and she’d previously tried to de-trans me – this was the final straw. She learned what it was like to anger me that night.
Months prior, I had made two suicide attempts, once by trying to jump off of a building (I didn’t jump but did get to the top floor), and another time by riding my bicycle into traffic on a foggy day – actually foggy. I’ve seen what dying is like, because I’ve witnessed my last second of life; I am the product of quantum probability in that the car did swerve, for me. Another version of myself is dead, in a different universe.
To me, this was personal. Badfriend never wanted me to become Leah. She wanted me to stay as Deadname forever, because that person was controllable. She didn’t like that someone so close to her in her world was potentially becoming as unstable as I – yes, indeed – ended up becoming, that year. We had some professional relations outside of the chat, and she was probably uncomfortable with me at this point.
To me though, this was quite personal indeed. I rarely hold grudges, but I wanted her dead. I had achieved freedom for the first time in my life. Freedom over my own mind. To me, her designs upon me were one of death. She preferred a world where I did not exist. I felt then that Badfriend was a threat to my life, so she needed to go.
Both suicide attempts were around the same time she was telling me that I should not get hormones straight away, and that I needed to wait. I was on the verge of death, mentally. It sounds insane now, but I really did think back then that she wanted me dead. I was quite insane.
Her friends and others later told me several facts about her, as had Badfriend herself. She was also smoking weed heavily, which can induce psychosis under stress conditions. Over the coming months, she faced a series of life stresses that caused her to suffer a nervous breakdown. I would also talk to her boss, on occasion. We were friends, you see. I was friends with all of her colleagues, and they all knew that I’d been close friends with Badfriend – and we both did not speak of the new rift much, not in public anyway. Badfriend wanted to remain professional, and keep her job.
Basically, she sank to such emotional level such that she got herself sacked from her job – and I made no effort to stop this from happening. I watched. I was happy to see her burn. I would tell myself, likely a delusion yes, but I told myself anyway that her bad relationship with me might have contributed to it – that she may have become angry because of me. I’d generally been a pain in the arse in her chatroom, before she banned me, and we had several hostile exchanges online after that. I do not think it was mere coincidence that she was sacked at the same time, but what can I say?
Of course, I didn’t quite think about it or express it so eloquently back then. I was an angry drunk, improvising the whole time. I was still figuring people out. I literally do not remember most of it. I am simply making sense, now, for this book, of what I did – and I’d blacked out for some of it. I was pretty much unaware of almost all of what had happened, yes. I watched again, enjoying every minute. Whether I would do the same now is uncertain, but I had a lot less regard for my own wellbeing in those days, so I would resort to recklessness. She did it to herself, but I did not make her life easy.
I drank endlessly, and now my drunkenness had reached the Libreboot IRC channel. I had beef with the FSF and the GNU project as well, on separate technical matters. I’d become increasingly unhappy about the technical direction they wished to impose on the project, and I didn’t respect their authority. My experience with Badfriend merely served as a catalyst for what was about to come next, in a moment of madness that I still do not quite understand. All I know is what happened, but not why I did it.
Badfriend wasn’t enough. I found afterward that it didn’t make me feel better – and it didn’t make me feel worse. In fact, I felt calm. I felt no different, and wanted to take it out on someone else. I was just really angry to everyone. None of it made sense. I just hated for seemingly no reason. I was drunk all the time and just burning everything around me. I was drunk every night. I wouldn’t remember anything the next day anyway, and I would often get into fights online at this point.
Libreboot left GNU on my own drunken whim, announcing thus, and I completely alienated the FSF. I announced, unilaterally, that I would remove Libreboot from the GNU project. This, after Libreboot had already begun heavy integration with GNU. It was a core part of their messaging, and they regularly touted it as one of their own – several of their people had joined the project at that point, assisting in development.
I just started making up a bunch of shit about them, how they’d done this and that. One person resigned from the FSF. I didn’t care whether any of it was true. I enjoyed all the chaos. It gave me a rush when I did it, like when you drive a car really fast.
I had no other reason to do it. It served no purpose and benefited nobody – certainly not me. It was one of the most reckless things I ever did, and it could have destroyed my life, especially at a financial level. I was drunk, and liked the thrill of it. I remember doing it, wine bottle in hand. I was emotionally neutral, but I felt adrenaline – one of my friends pleaded with me not to do it. There, I felt a bliss as I destroyed the world.
Several people stopped talking to me. I just pissed off everyone around me. So what? I would simply replace all of my former friends, who I then regarded as my enemies.
Then I drank more, and passed out. Went to gender clinic after waking up, completely hungover. Regular appointment. Lived my life. I’d attacked my friend and seemingly destroyed myself for no reason. I remember feeling liberated that day, walking through London, like I was free from the FSF – and I did exactly as I pleased.
I was free from Badfriend too. I was insane, yes, and calm. Free to be me. Free to be alone again. I could do whatever I wanted and nobody was around to tell me differently. I’d burned the world around me, and now I was free – but it wasn’t, like, euphoric or anything. I thought nothing of it the next day. I just got on with my life, while multiple people had to deal with the mess I’d apparently created – that I did not even appreciate intellectually. One of my now former friends told me: ‘You don’t need to realise just how much damage you’ve caused.’ – come now, I thought, Libreboot is free and open source software, and I will still be in charge of it. Nothing will change!
I bragged about it to my gender therapist. I did tell her that I was hungover, which she found amusing too. My therapist said nothing. She just smiled, mostly, probably unsure how to deal with the lunatic sitting in front of her. I was proud anyway. I walked home through London that day, calm as I knew I was now the woman in the blue dress. I simply did not care about anything else.
I had removed them all. I did cry once or twice, when I became overwhelmed knowing that I might now lose my business and my home, and I worried about my future, but this was short-lived when business seemed fine. My life went on as usual, and I sighed in relief. What I had done was indeed reckless, but I literally thought nothing of it.
Several people started spamming the Libreboot chatroom, including some quite unsavoury characters from a certain far-right web forum – they had a thread there about me, which I found amusing. I paid it no mind, as they seemed to just be mostly bored, and I didn’t think they’d pose any physical threat to my person. Several of the people I’d left in charge of the chatroom dealt with their spam, while I laughed. I loved how creative they were with ASCII art, spamming it in such a way as to render colourful text calling me… all sorts of wonderful things. Yes, how nice. I went to visit my mother.
I actually found the post on that forum so amusing, that I kept looking at it. It’s a special kind of forum that targets vulnerable people – they identify emotionally weak people and try to isolate them, goading them into suicide. I knew what they were doing. Most people would be disgusted by what they do; I know that what they do is wrong, and I oppose it on principled grounds, but without any attached emotion. The reason they do it is because they’re bored, and a lot of them probably don’t even care. They find it funny; and I find it mostly uninspired. There are more productive things one can do with their time.
They were trying to do that with me, but it didn’t work. They misinterpreted my need for stimulation as loneliness and isolation. I mildly enjoyed their attacks, – I felt a warm rush. Not happy as in, proud, but I liked all of the controversy in general. I knew at an intellectual level that they wanted me dead, but they seemed to be mostly bored teenagers or young-adult NEETs, so I paid them no mind. The one who posted the thread about me was later banned from said forum, and they doxxed him too – I used the info in the thread to send him a written letter, thanking him for the amusement, though it was worded as something like: I forgive you. I saw on that forum that there were a lot of people who seemed to feel a similar boredom to mine, like everything around them was all bland, and I understood instantly why they did extreme things. I was never pulled into that crowd though, because I had discipline, and standards – and I’m trans anyway. It’s not like a bunch of fascists will accept me. I understand them, but that doesn’t mean I have to become them! There are far less destructive and arguably more productive ways to get your kicks.
I will explain, precisely, what I understood about them. Most of them were poor, uneducated people, or otherwise disenfranchised in some corner of the world, mostly the United States but there were others in there. They’d been duped, all roped in together since it was essentially a cult – they get you when you’re young, and become your friend. These were people who had no other outlet, and all of a particular neutral mindset that enabled them to be, you know, bored, all the time, like me. They wanted something, anything, that would get them going. Saying outrageously offensive things on the internet and attacking people gave these teenagers the jolt they needed, it seemed. Yes, once again, most of the people on that forum seemed to be teenagers. Hate, and rage more generally, are quite potent for boredom, but something that I’d grown out of many year ago by that point. Like I said, I understood them. I saw in myself that I could have easily become them, if I’d taken certain decisions differently, earlier in life.
Other, non-fascist forums also posted about me. I was everyone’s enemy. I’d dreamed once when I was in school about the possibility that I might one day become infamous; I’d watched the villains in some cartoons made by a highly litigious animation company, and I thought they were all cool.
Now I was the villain. That sounds somewhat cringe in prose, but I stand by it. I enjoyed being their object of fury. I was the pit that they dumped all of their anger into, but I just lived my life. From my perspective, nothing had really changed. I continued working on all of my projects, and I kept running my business. In fact, the controversy had led to a surge in sales – I actually made more money!
The barriers had been left open, and now the whole world could see my madness. It was plastered as much as I was, all over the internet. I laughed when I woke up, noticing that I had notifications in hundreds of IRC channels, and just as many private messages – I ignored all of them. I felt like I had when I used to start fights on the school playground. News sites didn’t touch Libreboot for a while – too hot, yes.
I was already in another trans chatroom at that point, which I also quickly crashed out of. The irony is that they were unhappy with my liberal attitudes that I had back then. I was also drunk there too, angry and rude to everyone at all times.
I lost my lady – the Dutch one that I lost my virginity to. I told her in an argument while drunk that I thought her new boyfriend was cheating on her. Sensing my drunken ruse, she said I’m ‘fucking manipulative’ and broke off all contact. This, alongside the trust issues caused by the fact that I’d just destroyed the life of her other friend, called Badfriend. Fuck them both, I thought. I did troll them for a while, with various sock puppet accounts that I sent into their chatroom.
Do not misunderstand me. Once the chaos died down, things became calm again and I went back to my fog. I simply felt nothing about it and did not think about it. I did end up with an overwhelming sense that my future was now quite uncertain, and I generally felt lost. It was the same feeling that I had before the chaos; in other words, I could have avoided all of the above, and I might have felt exactly the same. I can’t know for sure, but my future would continue to demonstrate this as a plausible outcome.
This is to say: I did not necessarily experience regret. I did not experience anything at all. My life did not change. A lot of people stopped talking to me, and I became somewhat of an outcast in my own community. A lot of people likely felt alienated during this period. I also had my own life to deal with. Everything simply continued. Someone at the time, who I’d known, told me that I didn’t seem to even know what was going on.
I started drinking much more heavily. Once the chaos calmed down, I just felt bored. Life was boring. I’d still visit my parents, but there was hardly anything special about that. I wasn’t in the spotlight anymore, and my life just felt ordinary again; ordinary means boring. This also began a period of overall stagnation for the Libreboot project, where no releases would occur for several years. Lots of development occurred, and I’ll have more to say about that in the next chapters, but I lost all focus for years.
I also fell out with one of my siblings at this time. I won’t go into detail because it doesn’t really matter, but years of hostility with him came to a climax one night and suffice it to say, I have not spoken to him since 2016 as I write this in 2026; no contact at all, for a decade.
What exactly was I supposed to do? I just kept living. What other choice was there?
Two months passed and I woke up in a strange hostel, somewhere in the continental European Union. The weather is nice, and nothing works. Totally backward country. Very poor. Most of the roads aren’t even roads. The world still burned at home.
Yes, I was meeting someone, who I’d just met that week online. I barely knew her. She was living with her transphobic parents, and on the verge of suicide. Like my Dutch friend, it seemed. A mirror perhaps, and I wanted a partner – it was boring at home. I met her in a trans chatroom for survivors of abuse.
We eloped. I met her in her country that weekend. We stayed in a cheap hostel – I met her friends, we went to various cities and we enjoyed ourselves. She was happy that someone like me, especially of my stature as I had told her about Libreboot, wanted to help her. I offered to take her back with me to the UK, that very same week.
I got to know her personality quickly. She was highly sensitive to the world’s problems, extremely left-wing, and quite friendly to everyone around her when she wasn’t depressed. She was extremely sensitive to other people’s feelings, yes, highly empathetic you could say. She was the sort of person who would absorb the feeling of the room, carried away by everyone else. She was the sort of person who would otherwise defer, because she hated conflict and wanted to avoid it at all costs. She was generally attentive to everyone around her, and her friends seemed to like her. She’d known them since she was a child. Very loyal sort of person, who just needed the right help.
She otherwise loved her country, but there was nothing for her there. She wasn’t the sort of person who wanted to fight, so her plan was to flee instead. Trans care was a mental hospital, and they would give you anything except the help you needed. Nobody cared about her. She wanted to leave ASAP, knowing that her country would drive her to madness.
We stayed in a hostel, because her mother was so hostile that she would not let me into her house. She also said later that something seemed off about me, similar to what the mother of Dutchfriend had said before. She was observing the same thing – I was my usual dopey self all night. Polite, yes, but quiet and somewhat aloof.
This was the sort of place you go to for a holiday, and indeed her country was hot despite it being November. Everything was also cheap. I spent a week or two very much enjoying the fine food and sunny weather with my new sex partner. She was also highly intelligent, and I enjoyed conversing with her about a great many things.
I really can’t articulate just how gay we were, while the world at home had burned all around me. I did tell her about what had happened, and she was quite shocked – I had indeed ‘fucked up’ – her words. I paid it no mind. Who was she to argue? I quickly changed the subject, as I did not want to talk about my professional life.
We fell asleep with our vibrator running, and we’d accidentally left the door unlocked, but closed. Upon waking, we discovered clear evidence that someone had entered our room since the door had been left slightly open. We reasoned that it must have been the cleaning lady. We both laughed it off, imagining just how much that lady saw.
Scenes like this continued for weeks. We were also banned once from an establishment, because we were both in the same toilet cubicle counting to one-hundred – she was counting in her language and I in Dutch. We were giggling. That’s all we did, and still someone complained. It was homophobic discrimination.
A group of teenagers came in our hostel each night. They knew the combination for the building, and they would sit in the communal kitchen, playing checkers as they smoked weed and listened to music. Girlfriend and I very much enjoyed watching them as we ate our midnight cereal. Yes, a calm night as I listened to their music – I did wonder if they were going to share their weed with us, but they never did.
They never left a trace. They’d put everything back, before quietly leaving at around 1 a.m. or so. They generally amused me, and they seemed nice. They were always stoned, and completely quiet – they whispered quietly amongst themselves, barely noticing our presence whatsoever.
The hostel was run-down, even by her country’s standards, but it was forty euros per night and mostly empty – not a busy tourist season. There was one other customer there, a family, and they were also nice. I enjoyed speaking with the grandmother of that family, who spoke perfect English, and they had a dog named Luna.
We went everywhere together. We did everything. Saw everything. I thoroughly enjoyed her backward country; I learned to appreciate its beauty that was somehow missing back home. Nothing worked, but this was a heaven of sorts, and it did have some nice landmarks. It was, I suppose, my second America.
All of her friends loved me too. Most days though, we were by ourselves, loitering. We would just enjoy ourselves, visiting all of the best spots; we were quite gay too.
I briefly saw a car number plate, and our music stopped as I heard a mild crunch. Glass in front of me, previously transparent, was now a wall as I enjoyed a peaceful silence. People came to see us as the smoke enveloped us. I was at peace, serene.
I stared at Girlfriend and screamed mildly. I knew instinctively that this was the right thing to do. I left the vehicle and took pics, loitering mostly. At one point, I laughed.
Girlfriend followed shortly, curling into a ball and entering what was clearly a panic attack as I informed her that we would be OK – the most logical response. I became annoyed that we would no longer get to eat with her friends; equally annoying was that she would not act. I then wondered how I would get to the hostel. Emergency services arrived and I quickly grabbed our bags, lest they be confiscated. We had business the next day, and fetching them from the depot would cause a delay.
I remained calm. I felt it strange then, how relaxed I was, but I paid it no mind. Relaxed is good. Multiple other vehicles passed us, mostly lorries. There was a bush behind me next to a haphazard brick wall, a river below it; there were roughly five houses to my right, plus a few other parked cars. We had hit one of them, but there were no casualties. To my left was a roundabout that we had just crossed, taking the second exit. The bricks on the pavement were old and cracked – the road we’d been on mostly gravel. On the other side of the road was a petrol station, then closed for the night. I saw roughly ten street lights, dotted around, and it was indeed night time.
Our car had slightly veered off track to the left, hitting the rear left corner of a parked vehicle at a roughly twenty-degree angle and the wheels were locked left at a roughly thirty-degree angle – this indicated that Girlfriend had attempted to swerve left, but it was too late. Her driver’s seat was on the left, and we were in the right-hand lane.
The damage to our vehicle was minimal, as we’d only been going roughly fifty kilometres per hour – the front right of our car had a large dent at impact, roughly thirty centimetres inward. Nothing to write home about, and the car was probably serviceable, but she’d been planning to live in the UK. Her mother dealt with the car.
It was an average-sized black car, typical family car. The one we crashed into was smaller, and silver. There were roughly ten onlookers from the nearby houses to my right. I called out, asking if one of them could call 112, but none of them spoke English.
The ambulance was as you’d expect. The two paramedics who tended to us wore dark green uniforms, both of them about thirty years old. Girlfriend and I both went in the same ambulance, and she interpreted in English for me. The hospital entrance had a dark brown wooden reception desk and glass front panel. It looked to be a fairly old design, roughly 1960s, and I suffered multiple tests in this beige-coloured building – nearly all of the walls were beige, with grey floors. Everything looked old.
The hospital seemed generally efficient, and Girlfriend got her medical report – mine seemed delayed. It finally reached 10 p.m. and the hospital seemed empty, making me doubt that I would ever be called. Girlfriend and I simply left.
We suspected discrimination when I didn’t receive my medical report at the hospital, as I was visibly trans. It became late and her friends were parked outside. They took us back to our hostel. I enjoyed conversing with them about Libreboot in the car, as Girlfriend had already told them about it. The night felt still, and all was well.
Neither of us were damaged, and Girlfriend had calmed down. Girlfriend would later tell me how freaked out she was, as she perceived my general calmness that night. She told me that I did not seem to show an emotional reaction of any kind.
Days earlier, she’d told me a plan to end it all in her car, while we travelled roughly 120 kilometres per hour. England seemed like the safer option.
I simply snapped my finger and we appeared instantaneously in my living room, like in a 1990s sci-fi – yes, that one – because Girlfriend had a phobia of flying. Ryanair was out of the question. My mother had left a note, wishing her luck. That was nice.
Then we took the bus into town, setting her up with a GP, bank, and continued our holiday immediately. We went to a local in-person trans group we found, since I reasoned that she needed to replace all her friends, now thousands of miles away. We did befriend several local trans people from the group, all of them nice, drinking tea at a small diner where we met monthly. There was also wine, which made me happy.
Dad lived, by the way. He laughed at an episode of Rick and Morty, the one with the drunk homeless man who has a theme park inside him – dad had a hole inside him, where his cancer had been. Girlfriend laughed too.
I quickly realised that Girlfriend’s mental problems were too much for me to handle. I didn’t know how to handle them – I was annoyed with her when she wanted attention, because she distracted me from my work. All I wanted was a reasonable human being to spend time with at my house. I’d invited an unwelcome stranger into my home.
I kept thinking about the crash, so I watched videos of them. I watched videos of people’s throats slashed, people lit on fire, falling from great heights, being shot in the head, and so on. The internet is full of such videos. I’d become curious, because of my neutral response during the crash. The videos didn’t bother me, which I found strange.
Not joy, not sorrow. Not pain, not fear – nothing. More specifically: whatever mood I’m currently in remains, as I watch. Flat. I feel no change to my emotional state, but I could simultaneously watch a funny episode of Family Guy and laugh at that, while death is playing on my screen. Peter’s lack of self-awareness is hilarious.
A more serious example: I’m anti-fascist and anti-genocide out of principle, opposing Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide in Palestine, yet I can watch videos of entire cities in rubble with pictures of starving, amputated children and feel nothing. I’ll still do what little I can to resist such atrocity, because I want to live in a peaceful world.
Girlfriend was in the shower, and I pretended to be a suicidal teenage trans girl whose father was raping her. The chatroom loved her until Leah Rowe arrived and spammed her back into the closet. Girlfriend came out of the shower and I ordered pizza.
I’d previously helped a sixteen-year-old trans woman in that same channel emancipate herself from religious-extremist parents and get herself trans medical care. This and the previously mentioned instance elicited the same emotional response: nothing.
Flat. It was part of my testing, and it needed to be done on real humans, were I to know reliably what might happen. I’ve performed hundreds of similar tests, with the exact same result every time, over decades.
The year ended, watching her play computer games while I ate instant noodles. Specifically: she was in pyjamas playing Metal Gear Solid V. I was sitting on the other side of the room, watching her behind from the right at a forty-five degree angle to her right, eating from a Chicken and Mushroom flavoured Pot Noodle cup.
She was specifically playing the campaign, in Metal Gear Solid V, where Snake infiltrates a Soviet base in Afghanistan. She was sniping in-game. One of my old schoolfriends clicked like on my Facebook post, where I literally posted that I’m celebrating New Years Day by eating a Pot Noodle and watching my girlfriend play computer games. I also played it myself, shortly after.
Badfriend did tell me one thing then that was true, and it’s that my anger would destroy me. Anger was how I dealt with anxiety back then; it’s how I dealt with problems. Anger is a powerful way to motivate oneself in the face of adversity, but it’s a double-edged sword. It can also make you depressed, and it can be self-destructive. I knew this then, after the GNU incident. I write with drama in this chapter, to reflect how I felt then, but I quickly learned after that period that this was absolutely true. My anger hurt me.
Girlfriend was the first attempt at fixing it, but I was emulating what someone else might do. To me, I just wanted a girlfriend. I pretty much just imported her into my life immediately after I met her, and at one point even contemplated marriage.
My problem then, and for the next while, was trying to emulate other people. I would often envy the things that other people had, that I wanted, and I would just strive in my own way, but the anger itself had just become a default response for everything. It would take me a while to realise this, as I didn’t know it then. Anger was the main way I controlled myself and others, when I felt like I did not have control over myself. All of my experiences with others then was based on comparing my life to theirs, on a superficial level; I’d often just absorb other people as I sat in a room.
I experienced the lives of others. Girlfriend was my first study. I write like this now in retrospect, but I’d convinced myself then that the relationship was actually real. I have to wonder if she herself knew what she was getting into. It quickly became a disaster, for both of us.
2016 wasn’t all bad. Most of it was spent shopping. Girlfriend didn’t exist yet.
I love shopping, and being near shops. Shops are the hallmark of civil society, and they just make me feel warm inside. Napoleon once derided Britain as a nation of shopkeepers, but that is what made England such a great place to live.
I’m not frivolously materialistic, in that I don’t feel the need to fill my home with random junk – quite the contrary. I was cycling one day at fifteen, in a foggy mist of pure silence, with a clarity of mind that I’ve seldom replicated since, and a thought occurred on that day – I want to be nothing. I want to simply exist, drifting through time and space. I told myself then that I do not want to strive for the six-figure salary, the big house, the big car, the not-big wife – I just want to think, freely.
I’ve always lived a largely utilitarian life, buying what I need for surviving or for learning – computers for programming and other creative work, pens and pencils for drawing, books for reading. Shopping is wonderful.
Nothing brings me more joy than bringing home a shiny new toy to play with. Yes, I love shopping in a utilitarian way. I enjoy the planning, the routine and the comfort that comes with knowing exactly what I wish to buy. I’ve usually been quite deliberate with my choices.
Suddenly thrust into adulthood, and living on my own for the first time, I was shopping daily. Food shopping was my favourite, as I felt the freedom of purchasing whatever food I wanted, and cooking it – not to perfection, mind, because I was a terrible cook. Cooking skills came later.
I’d enjoy seeing the same person each day, as I checked out my items. I avoided the self-checkout, because I enjoyed seeing other humans. There was one cashier at my local supermarket who seemed to be a trans man, and he often smiled at me. I enjoyed his presence.
I regularly dined at restaurants. There was one place in particular that I ate at daily, often to eat full English breakfast with tea – because at twenty-four years old, you can eat bacon daily and nothing will ever happen to you. The chef would smile at me and engage me in conversation, as he cooked my meal, usually the same meal, and the smiling waitress would occasionally humour me as well.
I ate at every, single restaurant in town. There were two fish and chip shops, one KFC, a McDonald’s, one very nice Portuguese restaurant, an Indian restaurant, several breakfast bars and all sorts – plus takeaway shops. I sampled them all. Absolutely all of them.
My brother was working with me, from around summer onward, and I would often buy things for him. For example, when he went to have his cigarette in my garden, he sat on an empty plant pot that he had placed upside down. One day, the pot broke and I excitedly rushed to a hardware shop to buy him a stool – I also bought a pair of scissors.
Then I would sit with him and humour him, or he would humour me, from his plastic stool. The stool was black, folding outward and it had a bright-red stripe pattern.
I bought a new bicycle that same day, and rode around on it for an entire evening. More drunk people would sing ’I want to ride my bicycle’ as I passed.
That same hardware shop was its own adventure. It sold tools, furniture, CDs, stationery, engine parts… all sorts. General tat, and all that – and there was a hidden sweets section at the back, and I would often go there just to buy sweets.
There was a corner shop run by a friendly Indian couple, from whom I would regularly purchase wine, crisps, chocolates and cigarettes. The venerable British off-licence.
I enjoyed my new internet connection, which I’d paid for myself. I had a very low-budget VDSL service with Zen Internet, a relatively decent internet service provider who gave me a 27Mbps download speed and 7Mbps upload speed. The first thing I did with it was torrent a good film.
When a friend visited from abroad, she wanted soldering gear – which I had. Walking to a local shop with her to buy solder and flux pleased me enormously. We never ended up using it, but I enjoyed the owner of that shop, and his assistant used to teach at my school. A general electronics shop.
Paying for cinema tickets was a ritual all of its own, and I revelled in the freedom of eating as many hotdogs as I wished while watching Mr. Spock make a complete arse of Kirk in a then-new Star Trek film, with my foreign friend, at a local cinema I’d been visiting since childhood. We had fish and chips afterward, and the chips were quite under-cooked.
My mother insisted that I own a mobile phone – until 2016, I’d never used one except for playing Snake II or to wake me up. My mother wanted to call me every day, so I made it my mission; I knew exactly where to purchase one, at a shop several towns over. I made an entire afternoon of it, cycling for an hour to buy the cheapest, most low-spec Android 4.0 device that I could find. My mother could now distract me, daily.
I loved my washing machine, which I picked out myself. It was raining that day – I was still in Guy Mode, just after moving, but I needed it fast. I cycled, with my raincoat that I had bought that same week, and picked the cheapest one they had. They delivered it the next day, and I felt such pride watching them as they connected the pipes. Turning it on to wash my clothes was like discovering fire. I would sometimes wash my clothes twice, just to watch it spin again.
I enjoyed sitting at the beach, on the benches of course – I hate the sand. I would admire the sea, the petrochemical plant, the various industrial ships that passed, and various other things as I ate my ice cream. I would also cycle there, on quieter days, as the beach had an excellent footpath.
I’d always loved the library, but now I would make the most of it. It was near all of the shops, so I would often go there on my way home. I enjoy browsing, and bringing home a new adventure to flick through that same night. I’ve always loved reading.
As much as it pains me to admit, I love going to the dentist. I feel complete whenever I leave, having paid extra for the full teeth clean – paying extra made me feel special, like I had all the power. At one point, I needed a root canal because I had split a tooth on something hard. Not fun at all, but I wore my new crown with pride.
I enjoyed burning CDs, with CD-Rs that I had purchased from that same general shop – the one with the hidden sweets, negating any benefit of having visited my dentist.
My brother would bring his Libreboot ThinkPad with him to work, that I had purchased for him, and he would load up Dragon Ball on it. We watched it on my crappy 27Mbps VDSL while banging out even more ThinkPads, for customers. Turtle Hermit training is no laughing matter.
I enjoyed purchasing reels of ethernet cable, to crimp as I wired up my entire home. I built a crappy little datacentre with my 7Mbps upload speed – the Libreboot project even ran on it.
I liked the shabby little hut where I often purchased electric extensions and outlets. I would also purchase screwdrivers, and other such items.
The keymaker who also buffed up my shoes was always nice – and a new set of keys certainly made my day. The stiffness of a newly cut key just made me so giddy.
Clothes shopping was something I adored, especially as I later gained the confidence to purchase clothes myself, as Leah – I very much enjoyed trying them on, sometimes walking home with what I’d tried on. Every new skirt was a new Leah. Usually purchased from Primark.
I enjoyed townspeople commenting on my dress, both good and bad. I found that most people were happy, haters few and far between. Several old schoolfriends would smile at me as they saw me in full dress, makeup and all – even someone who I thought would be most hostile, watched me with great interest as he drank in a beer garden. I was stopped on my bicycle, waiting for traffic to move, and I noticed him noticing me. I added him and several old schoolfriends on Facebook, even one that I’d played computer games with as a child.
I enjoyed it when men suddenly started staring at me all the time. My mother once received a phone call from a friend, who asked if she had a daughter that she’d never told her about.
They were complimenting my dress. These were the overly flamboyant clothes that I had picked out for myself, and I wore them with pride. Several of the women gave me tips.
I once purchased a wig, even though I have a full head of hair. I just liked the wig.
Yes, I am a filthy capitalist whore.
I liked shopping because it distracgted me from everything else. I enjoyed the control it gave me, and I liked having a material life that felt like mine. The way I wanted to set up my home, and live my life, was under my control. I couldn’t control the world, or people, quite as much, nor did I want to, but I could control shopping. That is what shopping means to me: control.
Girlfriend wasn’t fucking me, so we tried polyamory. She found a lovely eighteen-year-old, eager, and all too willing to please me. I fucked her. Girlfriend watched. Then she shared computer games with Girlfriend, ignoring me entirely, and she quickly left.
January 2017 had arrived and I felt a constant, eerily soothing presence; yes, Girlfriend kept going to trans meetings and meeting friends. I tagged along and drank the wine.
GNU officially acknowledged that Libreboot was no longer part of GNU; they had tried to replace me in GNU, but they could not find anyone both competent and willing, because most people have self-respect – and they probably didn’t want their name next to the word Libreboot.
Yes, Libreboot was invincible. Time for FOSDEM 2017 – I still hated Brussels though. Yes, I did another talk as Leah. Customs needed five agents to determine that, yes, the rapidly feminising Leah in full makeup matched the biker gang member on her passport, as I sat meekly. My transition was going swimmingly. Girlfriend laughed.
How nice. Met my Dutch lady – not my lady now – in Brussels, the one who cracked my egg. That lady, yes. She saw Girlfriend, who she instantly knew was not her problem. She walked away in horror, knowing full well what she was looking at.
She was looking at a trans woman in tacky femme clothing that I’d purchased cheap from Primark, and she hadn’t shaved for days. She had a generally dishevelled appearance, dead eyes, and she’d barely slept. She was completely dead to the world. Girlfriend didn’t want to be in Brussels, but I made her go. They both know who the other was, because I’d introduced them to each other, smiling. My idea of civility.
The night before, I’d left her in my hotel room alone as she slept, and I went out to get drunk – where I’d also met egg-cracker-lady. She told me that night that it was difficult for her to ever trust me again, after the events of 2016 – and I was just ranting away about something, wine in hand. I went to the toilet, and she was gone after I got back. Then some random guy offered to have sex with me, as if he wanted to rape me. I teleported back to my hotel room and sat on a chatroom for hours, Girlfriend none the wiser that I’d been anywhere – she was still fast asleep.
Girlfriend played a computer game on her portable gaming system that had been manufactured by a highly litigious company, while (not) watching my talk. Someone in the audience gave her playing tips – and knew that she was my girlfriend, because he had seen us. He found it funny that she was playing games at my talk. It amused me too. She was here because I could not trust that basket case alone in my house, with my brother who was also there doing some laptops for me. Business never stopped. Not even once.
FSF had leaned on FOSDEM organisers, asking them politely to urge that I do not badmouth the FSF in my talk. I proceeded to badmouth them in my talk, but only for about one minute, enjoying it immensely. The other forty-nine minutes of my talk were about Libreboot, and once again, people lined up to speak with me. I had, it seemed, suffered no consequences whatsoever, and this made me gloat glowingly.
A competitor had formed, consisting of former Libreboot contributors. I responded by promoting it in good faith at my talk, with a plan to integrate their code – they responded by shutting down, because they hated me that much. If they’d continued in that context, they would have effectively still worked under me, while Libreboot’s larger momentum would have blocked their own [commercial] success. I really would have merged their code, but oh well.
Bumped into egg-cracker-lady again, still at FOSDEM in Brussels, and I said hello. Girlfriend told me I should stop antagonising her. My exact words to egg-cracker-lady were, while smiling and my tone was respectful yet oddly menacing: ‘Hallo, hoe gaat het met jou?’
What’s so bad about that? All she said was, I’m fine, and then she went wherever the hell she was going. She was in full femme gear herself, and she seemed happy enough. I paid her no mind as I went to do my talk. Nice lady, still.
Some guy I knew was stalking us all week – the same autistic man who I’d met with my Dutch friend at FOSDEM 2016. I let him share the hotel room with Girlfriend and me. He also stayed at my house for a week, after FOSDEM ended. Good guy. Back to Brussels. He seemed unaware of literally anything that had gone in in my life, and we just chatted gleefully like it was still 2016. No…
Fuck Brussels. I wanted to leave in a hurry, so Girlfriend and I willed ourselves directly to my kitchen table in England circa April 2017, which had all my soldering gear on it plus some other shit. It was a completely different house, as we’d moved. The other guy left seven weeks ago, and he’s probably still configuring his NixOS ThinkPad.
Yes, England. Different house. Not Brussels. Brussels ended two months ago. We’re also having lunch. The lovely eighteen-year-old that I’d had sex with in front of Girlfriend also visited. The three of us are having lunch. Me, her and Girlfriend.
Girlfriend gave her one of her portable gaming machines made by a highly litigious company, and she immediately left – we did not have sex. I wasn’t even looking at her, and I did not talk to her at all. I was on IRC. Then Girlfriend and I continued eating.
Coup time! April 2017 saw me apologise and step down as Libreboot’s leader – though not really. A democratic committee under my de-facto control was put in charge, and I gave up no control whatsoever over the infrastructure. I let the committee do as they pleased with the code, pretending otherwise that Libreboot had become a democratic project. My public apology had been quite sincere, and this alleviated many of the public’s concerns – they praised my humility. I would then spend the next few years, you know, not working on the code. Let them do all the work, I thought.
It wasn’t even my idea. Some lady proposed it, then became my sysadmin. Some genius child – she was fourteen, and already running several major Free Software projects herself. She set up some nice infrastructure for me, and handled all of my publicity. I saw no reason not to deny free help. She ran an April Fool’s joke where the Libreboot website became Leahboot for a day, announcing that it had teamed up with Microsoft to provide a Secure Intel Management Engine Boot or something, because an opponent of gay marriage had apparently donated to the FSF. This generated a lot of confusion and laughter, which enabled more people to see the new constitutional changes mentioned above, which were enacted on 2nd April 2017 with my blessing.
I offered to rejoin GNU, knowing the FSF would never say yes. They didn’t say anything. I was safe. Doing so, plus the apology, plus appearing to step down, meant that Libreboot no longer had any limits on growth. All forgiven, and development surged once more. I was still bored the whole time, relieved now that other people would work on the project for me – and I would focus on my personal life, instead.
The fourteen-year-old left a few months later, and became extremely famous with another major project that she started. Libreboot was safe, and I’d promised her that I would never, ever abuse the project again. She knew that I’d never be so bold.
Everyone else could see what was going on, but I was being nice. Intentionally nice. I smiled at all times, and showed the absolute maximum courtesy possible in all things. Someone even asked what I’d done with the real Leah. Total one-eighty. To be clear, yes, a child was in charge of Libreboot for three months. All of this amused me.
I was done with Libreboot, at this point. I had no desire to work on it myself anymore, and the committee simply replaced me in all but name. I didn’t even like their technical plans; they begun an ambitious re-write of the project, that I thought was too complicated and would drag the project down for years. I’d proposed to simply improve my own code, my design, with regular new releases on that. Keeping all the code up to date, adding new hardware… but they wanted a new approach. The actual technical specifics are irrelevant for this book. What matters is this: they disregarded me entirely. I didn’t care, because I had my own things to worry about, like my upcoming surgery and other aspects of my transition.
So began a period of years in which I essentially became a nobody. I would continue to run my business, and live a life, but I stepped out of the spotlight for years. I would drift for years, at least in the free software world; I lived a life instead. I didn’t care about Libreboot anymore, at this point.
I wrote “April 2017’ in my Death Note and it became May 2017. Genius child is still in charge. The committee is three guys I knew, who work with the genius. They do whatever they want, while I enjoy my life. They only bother me when they need me, and I would absolutely never fail to respond when they did. Nope.
I wrote May 2017 and woke up in June. I’d met Catfriend months prior – she had a cat. I had my own trans chat at that point, with a website that teaches people how to buy hormones and do everything themselves, without relying on gatekeepers. Lots of people can’t easily get trans care, so this is essential, in countries that are hostile to trans people. Catfriend started transitioning because of this, and we became friends in my chatroom – like, my website gave her boobs. I want to make that very clear.
Catfriend, Girlfriend and I went to Camden Market. Catfriend found it sexually stimulating watching how I seemed to control Girlfriend – I didn’t even know I was doing it. I regarded it as caring for my Girlfriend, to mitigate her nervous meltdowns.
I gave Girlfriend freedom. She could always do and be what she wanted, but if she wanted me to do anything, I would always do things my way. Her ways were stupid, and she had no initiative whatsoever, so I just did everything. What’s wrong with that? She was also extremely pedantic at all times, annoying me constantly, so I often just shut myself in my room to work, leaving her to do whatever she wanted all day. She would sometimes ask why we were even together, if we were always apart.
Girlfriend, Catfriend and I drank smoothies that day. We also saw some tacky art. We also bought some random, frivolous items – Catfriend loved shopping as much as I did. You know, because Camden Market is full of tacky, frivolous shit.
Yes, Catfriend observed that I seemed to control everyone – not just Girlfriend, but everyone in the trans chat. She commented at one point when I spoke to my mother on the phone, that I didn’t even ask how she was – I’d just asked her for something, then hung up. Weird. What did she know, I thought?
I got angry a lot, because Girlfriend was just so overly emotional all the time. I insisted on logic at all times. I wasn’t taking any nonsense. Same in the chatroom. Who were they to argue? I helped people. I helped a sixteen-year-old with religious extremist parents secure hormones from a doctor without her parents knowing, and helped her set up a PO box. She got herself emancipated and everything. At the time, I just thought it seemed like the thing to do, and I was extremely bored – nothing else was going on, as Libreboot was well in hand and orders were slow that week. Passing the time by helping a teenager grow boobs seemed like the most logical use of my time. This was actually the second time I had done so, as was the purpose of my website and chatroom: help trans people transition, where the other chatrooms merely offered hug boxes. Fake it-will-be-ok… no. I offered something real.
There was even a doctor in our chatroom, who I’d found. Some eccentric who seemed to know everything. It was like a proper clinic and everything in there, and we told people which blood tests to get for example. My chatroom did what the others were too cowardly to do – actually fucking help people. I initially created the website when I was banned from one of the other chatrooms for advocating precisely this sort of thing, so I wanted to show them that it could be done.
Anyway, Catfriend told me that I’d been pretty despotic at all times, that I’d rant angrily all the time. No shit. I had a lot to say! Catfriend was showering me with constant praise, soothing my ego constantly. All of this turned her on, but I wasn’t hers yet. She was dating Girlfriend – we were poly. Girlfriend didn’t have my brain, but she was into bondage – whereas I was sexually as vanilla as they came, yet had the brain of Darth Sidious, the emperor in Star Wars – her words, not mine. We both turned her on in our own special ways, and today she had Girlfriend. I watched them, smoking my cigarette as Catfriend vaped, and Girlfriend was her usual dull self all day.
I fell asleep and woke up in July 2017 to learn over the phone that Grandfather is dead – this annoyed me, because I’d enjoyed my long slumber. I felt nothing but irritation on the phone, especially when my father apologised multiple times – I just wanted to go back to sleep, which I did, as soon as he finally hung up. I found the funeral boring, and meeting all of my relatives there was annoying because I hadn’t seen most of them in about ten years, sometimes longer, and I did not care about any of them. I even ate at a dinner gathering with them later, at one of my aunt’s houses.
I also had to tolerate the presence of my two brothers, at said house – and everyone was being so nice. I was in hell, all day. I did not speak to any of them at all. I did not even speak to Girlfriend, and I was on my phone the whole time, bored out of my mind. I enjoyed the lasagne at my aunt’s house. I had several helpings. I enjoyed listening to Safety Dance by Men Without Hats on repeat, when Girlfriend drove me home. I was actually singing to it, not thinking at all about where I’d just been.
Catfriend arrived the day after the funeral, and we had sex. We didn’t even hide from Girlfriend. I just wanted to kiss her, because she was beautiful. She was the one who seduced me first. Girlfriend said nothing, and locked herself in the master room while Catfriend and I fucked and got high in my guest room for days, undisturbed in our own little world, then continued at her house for two weeks, leaving Girlfriend alone.
I very much preferred Catfriend’s house to my own – my own was a detached three-bed in a boring, yuppie town. Catfriend’s was a crap terraced one-bed on a run-down council estate, in the centre of a bustling city – itself not actually a city, despite having a perfectly good cathedral. Lovely, lovely Reading. What a shithole. My shithole.
Real people lived there, quite unlike the robot Christians I had as neighbours, with whom I once shared in the nightmare of that oh-so-British delicacy, a cup of tea. Yes, quite. An ideal couple, who regularly attended Church; the husband was a mechanic, and their daughter had come to visit. She, the godly daughter, would tell me that the best way for me to make friends was to visit Church. My kind of hell.
I regularly said hello to the man, as I mounted my bicycle each day. It was a properly picturesque suburb that Girlfriend had chosen for us. She said it was ‘dope’ – but I hated my neighbours. Catfriend told me that I seemed to enjoy living in hell.
I listened to with great interest – as Catfriend did – the families we heard through Catfriend’s walls on both sides. I don’t think there was a single fully functional family on that street. Catfriend would sometimes get high to it, write poetry about it and meditate to it. Catfriend seemed more alive than anyone else I’d ever known.
Girlfriend was gone when I returned. I mean, not really, she wanted to stay, and still be friends, because she didn’t have the guts to, you know, just leave. She wanted to keep spending my money, and she wanted to eat my food for free. My immediate feeling when she announced it was one of relief, but also irritation. We got into an argument that day and she simply left, after I made it clear that she was unwelcome.
She would say later on that I’d been prone to extreme, often irrational anger and that I seemed to lack any awareness as to her emotional state – or that I simply didn’t care. My mother also told me that I’d been extremely insensitive.
One month before the breakup, my mother was in the car with us, listening to Girlfriend and me bicker. She laughed, commenting that we sound like old ladies. I never proposed to Girlfriend myself, but I had considered it. Once again, it seemed like the thing to do. I no longer had to worry about it.
Have you ever been fucked by someone while they explain their suicide plan to you? Catfriend and I broke up about a month after Girlfriend left, and remained good friends. I would continue visiting her on a non-sexual, mutually friendly basis.
Catfriend later brought someone else to their home, fresh meat to play with, and I got to watch. We both knew the girl, as she’d come from the chatroom. Catfriend was more or less using my chatroom as a hunting ground, which mildly amused me.
I didn’t mind. I also met another of Catfriend’s lures: a curiously Catholic yet also kinky, transgender lady who was not in any way Catholic at all. We all got high together. Catfriend’s house felt exactly like mine – I still think fondly of it. She was just cool.
Ex-Girlfriend found a new partner immediately, which I found amusing. Her new partner was someone I knew from our trans group, that I had been banned from, because I’d opposed the introduction of demographic data collection at the AGM – and the leader of the group generally didn’t like that I questioned everything at all times. She regularly manipulated what she accurately perceived to be a short temper on my part, and later just banned me from the group.
I was right of course, because I knew that data leaks were possible, and that introducing such a scheme would reduce the people who join the group to only those who had… valid identification, or identification that they were comfortable with.
Because, you know, it was a tiny little diner where we drank tea, and chatted. That’s all it needed to be. No need to ask for identifying information. All they wanted was tea. That’s all the trans group was. Tea. Also wine.
Girlfriend and I, along with another friend, made a competing group, but it collapsed as that was just before we broke up – and the friend stopped talking to me, accusing me of having engaged in domestic abuse. Their own partner was a survivor of it. This deeply annoyed me at the time, since I had just survived what was an extremely difficult relationship, and it was none of their fucking business – but I held my tongue. I was also annoyed because I enjoyed visiting their house – but I shrugged it off. Their house, actually a flat, was peaceful for some reason and I enjoyed playing computer games with them. They introduced me to Sonic Mania, for example.
I was everyone’s enemy again. So what? I replaced them the very next day after Girlfriend and I broke up, by going to a Labour Party stall, and I then did Labour Party activism for a full year. I even later came second in a local council election for my party. Nice people, totally boring and irrelevant, thoroughly deluded and not serious or professional, but nice. Still robots, mind, but they were voting for me now.
It’s now October 2017 for reasons beyond even me, you’re still in July 2017 summer dress and it’s fucking freezing. I have no idea what happened. Here, have my coat. I went to the FreeNode Live 2017 in Bristol, UK, to meet the FSF executive director. He said I wasn’t allowed to visit LibrePlanet 2018. Fair enough. He did agree to promote my company again and generally give me a free pass, avoiding any action against me whatsoever. He did not agree to there being a Libreboot installation workshop at LibrePlanet 2018, either. Libreboot was banned from LibrePlanet!
The FSF had started promoting several competing startups selling Libreboot gear. Fair enough, and Libreboot is free software, myself having benefited commercially from the work done by others, but the FSF did this while refusing to promote me at the time; I was the one giving them Libreboot, while they sucked funding from it.
Despite high living costs, I ran an aggressive discount sale for a year from 2017 to 2018, and at one point aggressively compared their high prices to mine on a forum; the owner of said company seemed overly prideful and prone to anger, so I brought it out of him in a thread. His company kept operating, but he could not compete on price. I would learn later that he’d started struggling. I did this simultaneously with another company by the same strategy. All of my competitors had higher operating costs than me, or lived in places that made other costs higher.
At the time, this made me happy and proud, knowing that I had the ability to do this, and it was part of my tactics with the FSF. I reasoned that they would eventually see no other option but to promote my company again. This, combined with my being very nice and polite to them at all times. I would say nice things about the FSF in public, since we were no longer enemies.
Matt Groening wrote this sentence and it’s now March 2018 – he stole it from an episode of Futurama. LibrePlanet 2018 was imminent, and I’d wanted to do a Libreboot workshop there. FSF boss said no to me the previous year, so I sent my buddies there with gear. A bunch of people just made an unofficial workshop, that FSF boss man wanted cancelled, but what was he going to do, say no to people doing the thing that is literally the fucking job of the FSF, namely promoting and installing Free Software?
The FSF executive director said the following, in his opening LibrePlanet 2018 keynote:
‘Social media during the conference: you can use the hashtag Libreboot – Libreboot? Holy cow, LibrePlanet! There will also be a Libreboot flashing happening through the common area’
Why be an angry twat when you can have someone else be one for you?
Let them have the anger. All I wanted was the money. I also wanted to watch new episodes of Star Trek: Discovery every week; the empress was my favourite character. I also enjoyed the third series of Rick and Morty, my favourite to this day as I enjoyed Rick being free to love his family on his terms; the end episode pissed me off though. I also enjoyed new weekly episodes of The Good Place, and Michael shall remain forever my favourite character; his solution to the trolley problem did cause some tasteful eyebrow twitching. All I did for the rest of 2017 was do business and watch TV.
The FSF did not capitulate, because we were friends; they instead willingly started promoting my company again, and even added two new products of mine to their listing. I was making more money again, and 2018 ended up being one of my best financial years.
Much of my anger became dormant in this period. I did experience a general sense of calm, satisfied that I had now achieved a level of control over my life. I still had daily stresses, but they were predictable stresses. Being able to predict the world around me made me feel safe.
Girlfriend still wasn’t fucking me, I’ve pushed you off of a cliff back to January 2017.
The trans group that Girlfriend and I attended from December 2016 to roughly July 2017 was quite nice. She was indeed my Girlfriend the entire time. I enjoyed going there every week. Girlfriend and I met a lot of really nice people in there.
This was a good time for trans people in the UK – the culture wars against trans people had not started yet, and there was even talk in government circles about banning things like conversion therapy. Informed-consent clinics like GenderGP had not yet been lawfared out of existence – twelve-year-old patients could get full hormone therapy – and the media in general was quite positive towards trans people. This was a good time to be transgender, in the UK.
Teenagers could still get puberty blockers on the National Health Service, so they wouldn’t become traumatised by turning into hideous beings as a result of the wrong puberty. There even were several teenage transgender people at said group. Their parents would sometimes come with them too. It was wonderful.
The UK was even ranked among the top ten for trans rights. Social media companies had not yet been co-opted by the far-right – Elon Musk supported the Democratic Party.
Yes, everything was happy and gay. It was in this era of optimism that groups like mine popped up. The group itself was relatively new, and well-organised. It was nothing like traditional LGBT groups, that typically held meetings in someone’s house or at a pub - no, this was held at a fancy diner – which did also serve alcohol, which was great. I’d order a glass or two of red wine while conversing with people. Always red wine, at meetings. I’d normally chat with one or two people, and null myself to pass the time. I was there because Girlfriend wanted to be there, and I thought I may as well enjoy it.
We regularly went on marches, various group activities to random places, and we even attended a Pride rally – which I myself attended. I did find it strange while there that so many people were staring at me, as I walked through a large British city. My group seemed more into it than I, who went there because Girlfriend wanted to go.
I found the amount of corporate whitewashing to be delightful. Seeing the LGBT-themed Barclays logo on a sign just created such warmth inside me. Ian McKellen, an actual ally, was also there, in a special reserved lane for celebrities — because yes, that is what Pride is about. But it’s Ian McKellen, so you can’t really complain. I watched a BBC interview he did in the 1980s, campaigning against Section 28. Ugh. Yes, pinkwashing is a thing.
Bunch of pervs too. A lot of those onlookers to each side, watching us walk. It probably wasn’t most of them, but I heard several sexually charged comments being hurled at us from the crowds, as we marched through the city that day, with our rainbows.
No joke either. One of the onlookers had spotted me in the crowd, and saw me enter a nearby train station afterward. I just wanted to go home, because it was fucking hot that day, and I hated the city that I was in. Some creep approached me and told me how beautiful I look. As if I needed someone’s approval! Scandalous!
There is an extremely corny photo of me on the internet, with the worst curls possible, and I’m being extremely gay with Girlfriend. We’re at the trans group together, and her future girlfriend is sitting near us. We’re all quite happy in the photo. In 2017, I did not know how to style my hair at all, and it got much worse in 2018. Yes.
I got into a lot of arguments on the social media page of this group. I meant well, but we all had a lot of different political opinions, and I sometimes didn’t control myself when, you know, controlling people, because their opinions were wrong. I was mostly fine though, and a lot of people apparently found me quite charming.
Yes, I made a lot of friends, including one very special lady who would one day judge my dietary choices, and she was already an uptight twat even then, but I was nice to her. Her mother asked me for not one but two cigarettes outside a pub one night, and the mother also befriended my mother, then one day we all went out to a nice sushi place. Yes, how nice. I did enjoy the mother. She told me how much she likes The Smiths, which automatically made her good friendship material.
The group attracted a lot of really nice visitors too, including several quite famous people – famous on Twitter anyway. The author of the Assigned Male web-comic once went there, in fact, while she visited the United Kingdom. They would all come to our crap little diner to come talk to us. The group was just really organised in general, and the leader even lobbied government for example, on a variety of issues – the banning of trans conversation therapy was a major one, at that time, and Theresa May’s conservative government had voiced some support for such a move.
One of the things the group did well was telling people which GP surgeries would help you, for example. GP surgeries were not obligated to provide trans care, even if you had documentation from a licensed gender clinic, so they made a list. They did lots of useful things like that. I admired how generally effective the group was, at everything it did, even after it later banned me – it was just a highly competent group, and I respect high competence.
I remember getting into an argument with Girlfriend once, and went there on the train. I didn’t talk to her the whole time, even walking quickly ahead of her as she followed me, begging me to talk to her. I did start talking to her again just before we got there that night, because I thought it would be weird if we didn’t talk while we were in there. I no longer remember what we were arguing about, but it was something petty and I’d decided on a whim that I must punish her. It was petty.
I was banned after the Annual General Meeting (AGM) because I’d protested a new policy of collecting demographic data about visitors to the group, citing privacy concerns and the possibility of data leak. It was also a creeping concern regarding data collection in general, and if handled poorly, fewer people would come, especially if they didn’t have ID or were, you know, uncomfortable being recorded in a database. The vote passed, the measure implemented, and I continued arguing about it until I was banned, seeing all of them as out of touch. I myself did not want to submit data.
I didn’t regulate my emotions at times, and I made an arse of myself. I could always be quite convincing a lot of the time, often charming people I met, but I would just as easily piss people off. For example, one time we were discussing at a table in the diner, about whether we would want to cure Gender Dysphoria permanently at the genetic level. I argued relentlessly that we should not, because that would be eugenics which is bad, and the person talking to me – a disabled person – called me a monster. Such splendid irony.
I will describe drama that occurred, but I was friendly most of the time. Often eccentric, and people would sometimes tell Girlfriend that they were freaked out about how I seemed able to switch opinions on a whim. They couldn’t predict what I thought or how I’d react to things. If there was a major discussion, pleasant or otherwise, I’d often be the one to start it.
I didn’t think of it at the time, because it’s just natural, but I just always want to talk to others, and express myself. I often engaged in discussions even if I didn’t know the subject matter, just to hear myself speak. There is apparently a word for this. I was like this online, and arguably still am as I write this, often going on long rants about any number of seemingly random topics that interest me. Always in places with lots of people, and I’d often express quite edgy opinions. A friend of mine told me at the time, that I don’t seem to believe in anything, or that I otherwise just seem to say certain things for clout.
The meetings were monthly, but there were lots of off-shoot social gatherings from it. One of them was another trans group that someone made, as a bi-weekly meetup at a pub. I got into a big fight with the owner of that group, after I’d been banned from the main group at AGM – and I was talking shit about the main group at the meeting, while drunk, at the table for everyone to hear. Then the leader of the new one banned me too, because I was being an arse. I don’t even remember what happened, because I was drunk, but I was having a proper go at the lady in the garden outside. Girlfriend was incredibly embarrassed and drove me home – where I immediately passed out.
There was another lady there that night, who ran an online trans chat – that I already knew about! I was surprised that she was local, so I befriended her instead. We formed an alliance of sorts between her chatroom and mine, where if basically someone couldn’t get help one day at theirs, they come to mine, and vice versa.
She broke that off after a month, after seeing some of my more despotic and controlling behaviour in my own chat. My own chat didn’t even have a code of conduct, or when it did, I didn’t follow it – and would abuse it against someone when I didn’t like them, which happened a lot.
I’d become much more tyrannical in the chatroom. I was abusive to a lot of people, and not just the trans chat – I was professional in Libreboot, but still it came out there. I wasn’t even pretending. I didn’t delude myself. I was just an arse, and I knew it.
I had a fiercely independent spirit and I would not yield to anyone. I thought the leaders of the group were phonies, and I did not hide my contempt. A friend I made from the group made a new group with me, along with Girlfriend, but it collapsed soon after because of when Girlfriend and I broke up. In the two weeks that this new group existed, half of the people from the main group did say they would be interested in joining – we had one meeting, poorly organised, that was just the three of us at a coffee shop. We ended up just chatting generally about whatever the hell we talked about. I was too busy getting slightly drunk – only slightly, that evening.
A bunch of them had previously come to my house for some reason. I don’t even remember why. Girlfriend must have invited them. I was playing Crash Bandicoot 3 the whole time they were there, on my PlayStation, and one of our guests shared in the nostalgia with me. I otherwise didn’t think about any of them, and I was mildly annoyed when the friend watched me play, because I was on one of the motorbike levels which required concentration – she wouldn’t shut up about how nostalgic watching me play was, not realising that she was preventing me from, you know, playing. That was the leader of the new sub-group, prior to her having created it, when we were all still friends. I still remember her face, but I do not remember her name.
I regularly clashed with the leader of the group, before my ban. I think she probably had experience with people who have my personality, and just wanted an excuse to get rid of me because she knew I was trouble. She was often quite hostile to me, and didn’t seem to tolerate any of my usual shit. She knew how to handle me. That’s probably the reason why I didn’t like her. I always know when someone doesn’t like me.
I spat in her face once. Don’t worry, not her face, but the printout of her face on a poster that had been put up in town. I wasn’t even angry about her, I just saw her face and was completely calm. I spat on it purely on a whim, and continued shopping. This occurred several years after I’d been banned. Spitting on it was the correct thing to do, despite now being calm, because it’s what I would have done then if given the opportunity – and so I did. I did it again when walking past it on my way home. I smiled, both times, and nobody saw me do it.
It wasn’t just me who disliked the group leader. She pissed off a lot of people in the group. We all saw her as a petty tyrant who just loved to have her picture taken. She was extremely authoritarian in general, mitigated only by the fact that most of the people in there were still actually nice. We all hated her, but we liked each other, and the diner served us excellent tea – free of charge. Girlfriend went running back to them all, after we broke up – understandable, as she herself needed them. I didn’t.
I write with such drama, about conflicts I had with others, but most of my days in this period were peaceful, and people seemed to enjoy my company. I’d often contribute a lot, especially in political conversations; discussions about trans politics, at the trans group, for example.
I was often seen as goofy and aloof by others, somewhat of an eccentric. I was the one in the group who would just be off doing my own thing while the rest of the group was doing a photo or something. There was even a raffle, and I did play in that. I won a pair of wireless speakers for my computer.
Around this time, I was also visiting a local Linux Users Group, which was totally boring. Just a bunch of boomers talking about literally anything except Linux, because they all knew each other and just wanted to chat. I felt a bit outcast in there, because I considered myself to be superior to most of them intellectually, and I had nothing in common with any of them. I did show them GNU Libreboot – but like I said, boring people. Not a trans group. Just thought I’d mention them. Yes.
To be clear, the Linux Users Group has no bearing on this story whatsoever. I found none of them interesting, and they did not affect my life in any way whatsoever. I got bored after two meetings.
Speaking of irrelevant! This, on top of the other stuff like Catfriend, trolling the FSF director at FreeNode Live, and the fact that I was often drunk for all of the second half of 2017 – one day even vomiting all over cream carpet. My mother was none the wiser when she visited, because I’d rushed to the supermarket quickly to buy carpet cleaner, and got it all out quick. Yes, I was a mess.
Before the FreeNode Live conference, the night before, I had smoked one cigarette. Just one. Yes, I’m terrible. I knew relapse was reversible, because I knew alcohol destroys nicotine, so I just downed two bottles of wine. I was fine the next day, but found that I’d smashed up some furniture. No worries. I dealt with it after I got home. Nothing was preventing my meeting with the FSF.
It totally worked by the way. I did not experience any nicotine withdrawal symptoms. I didn’t reset my counter. I just, you know, stayed quit. Yes, momentary lapse in judgement, followed by more impaired judgement. It seemed to make sense at the time.
The FSF guy didn’t even know I was coming. I knew he’d be at that conference, so I got on a coach just to see him. Pretty much ambushed him, actually. Didn’t stick around for the FreeNode conference – I was only there for him. I immediately got back on a coach after. I was in Bristol for only one hour, but the coach was a total of about eight hours round trip. Worth it, just to see his dumb little face, I thought.
Yeah between that and my time in the Labour Party too. Totally irrelevant bastards, but I liked some of them. There was this one bloke I liked, sadly no longer alive, proper leftie who took the proper piss out of everyone at meetings, because our local party was, well, red Tories basically.
I was their token tranny. Jeremy Corbyn was the leader of the party, and they needed to look as progressive as possible. Fortunately, politicians are much easier to control. At one point, they made me LGBT chairperson in my local party. They needed someone to fill the role, and I was the first – only – person available to fill it.
I got to butt heads with a nearby Labour Party group, whose LGBT rep was a known transphobe, who repeatedly advocated for repealing the 2004 Gender Recognition Act. I got her sacked and later someone I like who is an actual ally got the job. After that, I would definitely stay in the party forever. Yes.
Yes. My opinion at the time was that they were all just a bunch of twats. I could handle phonies, because when I wanted to see real human beings and not robots, I’d just get high with Catfriend for a week. Catfriend is still the real hero. Everyone else was a bunch of pretenders.
Yes, love at first sight, how nice. My lovely foreign girlfriend spent her first week in England vomiting into my toilet due to a stomach bug. I watched her on the floor and felt utter contempt, because I had orders due in the morning. I took her to the GP the next day, who prescribed anti-sickness tablets, and I let her rest up on my sofa. I didn’t want her vomiting in my bed.
I bought her a car. I hate driving and I figured she could take me places. It gave her some freedom too. I handled her doctors – because she couldn’t handle the phone. I handled her bank – because she was dysphoric about that too, apparently. I handled her phone calls – apparently her voice made her depressed. She didn’t mind calling her friends though. I paid it no mind, but I did notice it immediately.
I enjoyed building her new gaming computer, replacing the one she’d left behind in her country. I gave her the best processor available and the best graphics card. I took extra time to route all of the wires precisely, making it all look neat with the custom cooling system – that I had built myself. Everything clean. I was extremely proud.
I cooked her meals. I literally dragged her to the shower when she was too depressed to get out of bed – and this happened a lot, even when we had arrangements. I had to dress her. Like, she would refuse to get dressed. I didn’t want to sleep next to a tramp.
All I wanted was a house friend who could help me with my life and occasionally entertain me. She refused to look for a job, but I did give her an allowance later on. I told her on day one that I’d help her get started, and help her become independent. She decided that she would just use me instead. I was easier, apparently.
She was basically a child. I felt enraged when she couldn’t even perform basic functions – it was as though I had to be her brain. Like an anchor tied to my ankle. She became a noose around my neck. My lovely little parasite, I thought. My dad told me she’s taking the piss. She did more than that – she sucked my soul dry.
Even my mother would later say so, that if you left her alone for a week, she’d starve. I reasoned that she was depressed, and got her on antidepressants through my GP. I helped her purchase hormones for her transition, which helped. She was never one hundred percent, and she would still have no energy. Like a car that just won’t start.
This annoyed me. Her sadness became a trigger: it meant that I would be distracted from my work. She complained about everything, and never helped with anything.
She wasn’t incapable, not at all. When her childhood friend flew to England, she went in the fucking car to London all day and was happy as could be. She’d come home and I couldn’t even fucking sleep because of how loud they both were – though her friend did cook amazing food for us both. Yes, she was perfectly normal then.
I became so overwhelmed and burned out myself, dealing with her, that I stopped looking after myself. I started to gain weight fast. I started drinking, to make her more tolerable. Ah, that’s better. Much more manageable now.
Yeah, total mess. It never stopped. It never fucking stopped. Eventually, I just started shouting at her. I stopped tolerating her nonsense, because she clearly had no intention of helping herself, let alone me. Why should I bother?
We did occasionally go on outings, or sit indoors and play computer games. We visited a local trans group, as I reasoned that she would want to replace her old friends.
She claimed to show an interest in my life, but she never showed any concern for my mental health. I couldn’t breathe. She complained, simultaneously, that I would not share with her – I shared everything, and I literally gave her everything. No respect.
Her mother was a fucking saint, for raising her to her eighteenth birthday. I would have dumped her in an adoption agency. Actually, I would never have children – and I told her so. If they’re any worse than this, and I assume they are, then I don’t want it. I knew, literally as a result of meeting Girlfriend, that I would be a terrible parent – and that I would be trapped for eighteen years. At least Girlfriend could be dumped.
She would later criticise me, myself, for some of the things I said to her whilst enraged – because she drained me. She sucked me dry at all times. This, too, annoyed me. She never forgot anything. Say the wrong thing once, and you’re doomed, but I had to be the one to please her at all times. She never did anything for me, not once.
Then I made the mistake of moving to a bigger, more expensive house – my boring house. I loved my bungalow, but she insisted that we needed more space. Fine, I said.
She was occasionally useful. She translated my trans support website into her native language, and she served as a moderator in my chatroom. This is how we met Catfriend, for example. Catfriend saw immediately what this was.
I tried to keep it going. Maybe wait a few months and she’ll be OK. I paid her deposit, pending Gender Reassignment Surgery – I later pulled the deposit when we broke up.
I made sure, even complaining loudly to uncooperative doctors, to get her on the waiting list for NHS trans medical care – and again, handled the phone for her. I even had to drag her to those. She couldn’t handle anything herself.
I was living her life, instead of mine. I basically replaced her mother. Ten thousand British Pounds. That is roughly how much I spent on her, in six months. Ungrateful bitch. She also stopped having sex with me, after arriving in the UK.
I would often tell her that she is a parasite on the body, that she needed to get up off her lazy arse, and do some work for herself. I would regularly berate her – not because I had any intention to hurt her. I was simply offended by the fact that she would not look after herself, and that she expected me to. I provided her all the things she needed, especially for transition, in freedom away from her hostile mother. She still needed to take care of herself. I became sick of her.
I did not respect her when she wanted things from me though, like attention. I would be forced to listen to her stories, always the same stories. Like when she got depressed every Christmas, for like no reason – who the fuck gets depressed at Christmas? I actually used to shout at her, telling her to get a grip, because it was too much for me to handle. I tolerated it at first, reasoning it to be first-move jitters, fair enough, but it went on. She refused to put any effort into her care. Why should I respect someone who doesn’t respect themselves? That’s what I thought back then.
The nerve, that she actually broke up with me, and not the other way around. I was humiliated, broken. I just couldn’t cope, and took steps to make myself happy again. I felt immediately free when we broke up, like I could live my own life again.
Judgemental cunt, I thought. Her friends too. What more is there to say? When we broke up, I used a certain word to describe her – an accurate word, and immediate red flag, that then made one of her friends accuse me of possible domestic abuse.
Domestic abuse!? Are you fucking joking!? What about me? I was the one who nearly went fucking insane. Bitch. I would have been better off if I never met her. I was immediately happy the day after she left, free to be me again, undisturbed.
It wasn’t all bad. I did have a lot of fun with her on some days. We went to a lot of places, and I enjoyed having someone to talk to. I just didn’t like all the stress of dealing with her. I simply needed a better partner.
We went to a lot of places with each other, and in the early days, we both spoke of a long future together. We both enjoyed each other’s company in the early days, especially when we first met, but the relationship just went sour after a few months. Most of it was just normal relationship troubles that anyone else would face. My own description of her is simply how I felt, in ways that I mostly did not even express back then.
I didn’t even see myself as inherently hostile. I genuinely believed, at this time, that I was the one being attacked. I was the one under constant pressure from others, and being judged for what I believed to be good intentions. I just wouldn’t tolerate nonsense, that’s all, and I could not handle intense emotions from others if it impeded my freedom I wanted in my own pursuits. I wanted to help, but did not wanted to be burdened, if that makes sense; I simultaneously did not ask for helf, myself. This is actually something that people commented on at the time, that I had a tendency to just do everything myself and never ask anyone for help, and that this might potentially be a weakness in certain situations, especially ones that might overwhelm me.
In spite of these stories, which describe drama, I felt happy on most days. I simply focused on my projects and my work. This was a time in my life when I had a lot more control over my life, others’ lives notwithstanding. I had no concept then that things could get any worse; I was often arrogant, and simply did not plan for the future. I just enjoyed what was then a relatively high wealth, at least higher than I’d been used to earlier in my life. There was nothing sinister about me. I never planned anything. Everything that happened then seemed random to me.
Love at first kiss, how based. July 2017 now. Yes, Catfriend and I met on the chatroom that Girlfriend and I had set up, and we eloped. When we first kissed, it felt like telepathy. We’d been seducing each other for weeks, her more heavily seducing me of course, and we’d played constant mind games. When we first met, we told ourselves that such a union would be mutually assured destruction, given our similar personalities.
We nonetheless couldn’t help ourselves, and Catfriend actively delighted in destroying the poor relationship I had with Girlfriend – she regularly told me that I should free myself of her, that I should be my own person, that I could thrive on my own. She was right, and tonight I would share this freedom with her.
Catfriend herself was a highly creative person, often writing in her poetry book about all the strange and wonderful people she met. She probably made me a character in it, but I let the mystery remain. She seemed to have quite intense angst about the world, and she regularly used drugs to cope. She was otherwise a lot like me, in a lot of ways. She had quite a dark sense of humour and didn’t seem to mind when I went on weird rants. A real counter-culture type, and she didn’t flinch when I told her about some of my earlier exploits; the GNU incident for example, in which she told me that the world often tries to take down powerful women. A delusion of course, as I was just someone who sold ThinkPads to a few people, but I enjoyed indulging in it. I never did quite get a clear read on her, for the same reason she couldn’t quite get one on me, but we both identified each other by exactly that absence. We were both able to read people easily, but we could not read each other, so we’d spend time trying to ‘hack’ each other’s minds.
She had been dating Girlfriend first, because she identified her vulnerabilities as I had, but unlike me, she actively wished to destroy her. That’s one of the things Catfriend did, find people and suck them dry. She was actively sadistic, not physically, but at a psychological level. I admired this quality and found it attractive myself, though I’ve never really been into BDSM itself – but Girlfriend was. Girlfriend and I were poly.
I have discipline, and I really can’t be bothered anyway. I can destroy people, but I regard activities like hers as being mostly petty. All I knew is that I’d been taken. She successfully seduced me over many weeks, by indulging every single one of my delusions, about myself and about others. She would regularly praise me, telling me that I’m Machiavellian this, that, and at one point she even compared my linguistic style to that of the Unabomber. I laughed.
If I had to compare our relationship, she was basically the dark side of the force, seducing me and whispering in my ear. I didn’t want to resist, so we kissed.
Girlfriend and I were in her game room, and Catfriend was with us. Catfriend had come ostensibly to visit Girlfriend, but we knew. We’d already committed the act in our mind. We both knew. We never even said we’d do it. It just happened.
I was playing a computer game, specifically Ape Escape 2, on Girlfriend’s PlayStation 4. I commented at the time that it seems to be just a PlayStation 2 emulator sanctioned by Sony, and Catfriend watched me play. I don’t remember what Girlfriend was doing – I wasn’t looking at her at all. I think she might have been chatting with us.
Catfriend and I were both sitting on the floor, as I played, and Girlfriend was in her chair, at her desk, watching me play. Catfriend had been sitting right next to me, not touching me exactly, but we were sitting right next to each other, and she was so gentle. She’d been gently chatting with just me, all night, making me laugh.
Catfriend made me feel good. Girlfriend went to the toilet. I lost all control and gave in; I kissed Catfriend. By the time I noticed the room again, Girlfriend was already sitting in her chair.
Catfriend slowed me down, as I was all too eager. My mind turned to complete mush. She had me. I wanted to be hers. I immediately became erect and tried to touch her – but she pushed my hand away, whispering gently: ‘Not yet.’
My mind just melted entirely. We just kept kissing. I wanted to be as close to her as possible, and our bodies simply merged. Her body was so soft and warm. I think I genuinely loved her. The only human being that I ever loved. I thought of her always, even before this time, and now she had me.
She had me. She owned me. I was hers. I discovered my own softness that night. I’d never let my guard down for anyone, and she just knew all my buttons.
I probably even purred, but I did lower my head into her lap and curl up like a cat. Catfriend stroked me like one, and I felt every stroke. The warmth I felt was something I’d never experienced before in my life, and it was heaven. I felt like I was in heaven. I fell asleep in her lap.
It became night, and Girlfriend had already left the room. She locked herself in our master bedroom, and I never saw her again until afternoon next day.
Catfriend and I went to my guest room, and we continued to kiss. Now we could be free. I let her do whatever she wanted to me. It made me happy. I wanted to be hers, and she undressed me. We became naked and merged. My entire body was on fire. I was also still high from the weed that we’d vaped earlier.
I don’t even remember falling asleep. We just kissed. I experienced a state of pure bliss, like my mind was all that existed, and hers was there with me.
I’d never felt so relaxed in my life. I also cried tears of joy and she did to me whatever she wanted. All I wanted to do was obey her every word. I felt like I could hear her dreams, as we drifted off to sleep.
Morning came. I had orders all day, and Catfriend sat with me for eight hours. She would tell me later that this was a highly unconventional second date, but she would write her poetry while watching me. She wrote it about me.
I was high all day, even while working. Working through Libreboot laptop orders while unable to even count proved challenging. She kept me high all day, because that is what she wanted for me. I did what I was told. I did whatever she asked, and she wanted me to be high. I did as my mother instructed.
She stroked my hair once, while I answered an email to a customer, and I sank back in my chair. My hair was on fire, my entire body electrified. She made sure that I was aroused all day, but I had to make sure all work was done for the day.
She allowed it. She could wait. After 5 p.m. or so, she had me, and I. I loved her and did whatever I was told. This continued for days, and then we went to her house.
I barely even saw Girlfriend for the five days that Catfriend was at my house. I never spoke to her. Catfriend protected me from her. She did not like Girlfriend, so we went to her house instead. We arrived by train to Catfriend’s city, and she held my hand as we…
I had no idea where we were even going. I trusted her with my life. I would do whatever she said, and follow her. We watched Sailor Moon while high, in her beautifully messy council house. She found it adorable how I smiled at Luna the cat, and told me so.
I wasn’t disabled. I was still aware, like when we watched the Good Place. She started me on season two, and I immediately guessed that the characters were in hell – which surprised even Catfriend that I’d guessed it so fast.
I told her that the characters seem to be gaslit nonstop, told that they’re in heaven even though everything is stressing them out, that bliss is always around the corner. I told her that this is what I did to others in real life, and Catfriend told me that it was possible to do this consensually – I responded: what would be the point?
Then we went to her bedroom and continued having sex. Her cat often watched. This continued for two weeks. She was also into Free Software herself, and we worked on a lot of projects, or we’d just watch TV all day – Star Trek: Discovery had just come out. I liked the Klingons.
We later decided that we were not sexually compatible – she only aroused me, and serviced me. I never initiated anything myself. I never aroused her, or never tried to – at no point did I make an effort to please her sexually in any way. It was all for me. She was into kinky ropes and stuff, which I told her I would not do. I also did not want to be strangled, but it was offered.
She had me, and did whatever she wanted for me. I enjoyed every moment of it, but it was not to last. We broke up about a month after I broke up with Girlfriend, and remained good friends. Our next encounters were non-sexual, but we did get high a lot, and I’d enjoy watching Catfriend repeat the process on much weaker minds than mine.
She never really had me. I just liked the sex. I did think it was love, at the time. Catfriend just knew how to fuck me. I was annoyed that the sex would not continue – but I did like Catfriend’s friends. They were riots. I loved her city too.
I kicked Girlfriend out of my house the moment I got home, after our first encounter. Catfriend gave me the jolt I needed, to take control of my life, and the sex was exquisite. I did have severe brain fog for two weeks, coming off of the weed.
It was more than just sex. I regarded Catfriend as my equal, and I still do. My equal intellectually. She was exactly like me, but our upbringings and environments could not be more different. In many ways, I regarded her life as superior to mine.
She knew I was her equal too. I remained in control of my faculties the whole time. I was just high, and extremely aroused while being so. She knew how to please me.
She learned. There was one moment of perfect calm, after I’d taken a hit, and I was purely myself for the evening. Later, I would relay to her several fantasies I’d had.
She had real freedom. She didn’t have a job for example, and lived on benefits. She wanted to die. She explained how she would gas herself, leaving food out for the cat. I did not notice that I had ejaculated. I simply stroked her hair and told her stories, and then we’d fall asleep.
There was one moment when she stared into me for a good five minutes, and sporadically throughout the day, in which she said that she could not read me.
At last report, a mutual friend told me she was still alive, as of March 2021. I hope she still is, and I wish her well. She showed me a part of myself that I didn’t know I had, and we both understood each other perfectly – and I loved every minute of it.
A long term relationship would have never worked with catfriend. We both knew it at the time, and both agreed that it would likely never last, but I had a lot of fun with her while it did last.
The main reason I enjoyed catfriend was simply that I could be honest about how I felt, and it did not seem alien to her. She seemed to understand everything I said to her, and the nuances of how my mind worked, given her own similarities.
I learned how to be boring. My girlfriend left me in the summer of 2017. I actually did cry at the time – I knew I wanted her gone, and I wasn’t crying for her. I was used to the stress of dealing with her, and the stress that I generally felt in my life at that point, and I’d suddenly become free. I had suddenly gained freedom, freedom to be alone, and freedom to think by myself. I let out a good cry. I’d usually bottled up all the stress, because she was that stressful to deal with, and I myself was a bit of a mess.
Now I had the freedom to cry, but it also triggered me to remember my loneliness that I’d felt when coming out, when I believed that my existence would never come to me – back when I didn’t think becoming Leah was possible. I was a year into my transition at this point, and becoming quite beautiful. This, too, was something that I could finally appreciate in peace.
I cried. It was fucking awesome. I cried all night. I cried, and cried, and occasionally laughed. I was free. Free to cry, and that’s exactly what I did. I didn’t even cry in bed. I dropped to the floor whenever I felt like it, just to cry. I would get up after I stopped, after some brief contemplation. This was my new freedom, and I would wear it with pride.
I thought it was her at first, but I analysed my thoughts the next morning. I hadn’t thought of her at all. I was just finally releasing all my emotions at once, as I said, having suppressed them. I’d been dealing with all my stress from the aftermath of my early transition, especially the GNU drama, then I suddenly met Girlfriend – and had to shove that aside for a while.
The next day, I went to a restaurant alone, for late breakfast. It was a local Wimpy bar, which used to be quite popular in the UK, and still exists. It’s basically fried food, and I used to enjoy going there when I was a child, so I fancied some that day. I wasn’t used to being alone, so being around lots of strangers in a restaurant also made me feel a bit triggered – it triggered me because the last time I’d sat in a restaurant alone was in Guy Mode, during those first lonely months coming out.
I then went into a coffee shop next door, to have a latte, because they don’t do those in the Wimpy. After my latte, I happened to notice the Labour Party stall outside. They just happened to be doing one that day. I’d been a member since 2015 at that point, and I just joined the stall on a whim, having previously done no physical activism. I already covered Labour, and I don’t feel the need to repeat it or elaborate on any of it.
Yes, I don’t really remember much else, except that I basically replaced my entire set of friends very quickly. The Labour Party were my friends now, and I would often engage socially with them. My relations with Labour were actually productive, and never chaotic or dramatic at all. I just got on with everyone, and I even ran as a candidate in the May 2018 local council election, coming second-place.
Of course, I don’t really regard any of those Labour people as having been real friends. They were simply colleagues. None of them would fall on a sword for me – we were simply working together.
I knew at this time that I needed to make some changes in my life. I spent a good solid few weeks that month, just analysing everything from my life, until this point. Being alone gave me the time to think. Many quiet nights indeed. I started writing a journal, and I noticed a pattern.
There was a reason why I’d been alienating so many people over the years. It wasn’t because they were all bad. I just didn’t control myself properly. I’d known for years what sort of person I was, but it all came to a head and I basically decided to calm myself down. I needed to be more personable and more friendly, tempering some of my worst personality traits.
I didn’t stop drinking, but I limited it to mostly weekends, and even then only on the evenings. I’d occasionally indulge once during the week, and never two bottles of wine – usually never. Always one, or even less than that. Something to treat myself with, and watch films or something, after a long hard week.
I didn’t become more productive in my work, because I was already productive in work, but I did tidy my house. I threw out a load of old junk, and made my house incredibly boring. I re-purposed ex-Girlfriend’s games room as my own, setting up my own computer in there, and had my mother come over to retrieve ex-Girlfriend’s stuff – which she had a lot of.
I did have some fun with it, as I had not yet developed full restraint. I resented the fact that my mother had essentially started treating ex-Girlfriend as a second daughter, nursing her and giving her all of the support that she was supposed to be giving me – I was left to fend for myself. The fact that I did not need emotional support was irrelevant – I was aware of the fact that none was offered. She blamed me for causing all of the chaos, lecturing me on a daily basis, even though I was not the one to break off the relationship. I was prepared to keep ex-Girlfriend, until she broke up with me.
No, it was the principle of the matter. I was made out to be the villain, so I owned it. I had been quite offended on the day my ex-Girlfriend broke up with me, because of how she did it. I climbed out of bed and begun my day, and she simply stood over me, breaking it to me gently – as though she was trying not to hurt my feelings, but this too was false. She wanted to stay, as I said, because she believed she had nowhere else to go.
The way she looked at me made me furious at the time, though I held my tongue. She looked down on me like I was the villain, the arsehole – all I did was make myself happy, because she wasn’t giving me any. She was a pain in the arse from day one. Her face and her tone said: ha, I do not answer to you now. Oh yeah? We’ll see about that. She offered me continued friendship, talking down to me like I’m stupid, trying to get me to… ugh. Yes. She had to go, so I forced her to actually, you know, leave. I made it clear to her that day that she would not be permitted to stay.
Like, yeah, get the fuck out of my house, bitch. Is what I thought. Yes. Get the fuck out. I made sure to get the keys from her, so that she could not enter my house again. I wanted her gone. I told myself then that I should have got rid of her months ago.
Mother came that day, wanting to collect ex-Girlfriend’s stuff. I refused to answer the door, for several hours, and just did my work quietly. Mother wasn’t sure if I was actually in, but she would continue shouting my name, telling me how unreasonable I was being – and ex-Girlfriend was outside the whole time. I had every intention of giving her stuff, but I was just being a dick, for fun. Then my mother lectured me when she came in, saying how I needed to make it right with her - what? I wanted to scream bloody murder then and there, but I held my tongue.
Yes, betrayed, but then it hit me: I do need to make it right, for me. I vowed that I would never let anyone hijack my life again, nor hijack my mind. Part of my weakness, you see, was my short temper, so I thought: What if I’m not angry all the time?
I didn’t do it for them. I wanted more control over myself. In this way, I would be able to handle other people more effectively.
It’s not rocket science. I just kept doing my life, as always, but with more restraint. If I was extremely angry – or happy – in a conversation, I would not suppress it – no. Suppressing my anger didn’t work before, but what I did instead was acknowledge it – while not indulging it. My voice would remain calm, even if you deserved my wrath.
You did deserve my wrath, at all times, so it felt like I was faking it all the time, but the lack of additional drama served another purpose. Having anger is one thing, but expressing it makes you worse, and then anger becomes normal. I simply stopped expressing anger. I would force myself to behave logically at all times. This was very difficult, but I learned.
Over time, I would experience a genuine lack of anger. I would just think, verbally and intentionally, what the best response is to each situation, and do that, or say that. This started to become natural, to the extent that I became invincible at a psychological level.
This was not just in real life, but on the internet as well. I became much more professional and personable for everyone, and I even engaged with several commercial entities that wished to sample and review some of my work.
I learned, at this time, that I did not need to use my anger, even when I had it, which meant that I also experienced reduced anger. I found that I had become more easily able to control others, but I chose not to at this time. I made friends instead.
When I’m calm, I experience the world as mostly flat – I once described it to a friend like hearing the music, and hearing every tone – most people become distracted by the movement of the song and they do not truly hear it. I hear every part of it. I hear all of the nuance of it, without bias. I also have a pitch-perfect memory. De-cluttering my house meant that I had no distractions other than my own, perfect mind. I also happen to possess a highly musical mind, but that is immaterial.
I began taking excellent care of my health – cutting down on drinking was just the start. I initially decided that I would cut out meat, which would also enable me to lose weight more easily, as I needed to do so for my surgery. This was relatively easy, but I noticed after one week that my shopping basket was mostly vegan. The only non-vegan item was cheese, which made me smile one day at the supermarket and I put it back. I went home vegan that day.
This initially began with a pescetarian diet, because fish is healthier than regular meat, but I was cooking sardines one day and became quite ill from the sight of a bad fish – the stench was unbelievable, and I just went off of meat entirely.
I began exercising daily. I already had an exercise bike at home, but ex-Girlfriend used it. I kept it and started using it myself. I went swimming a lot, and regular Labour Party activism also meant that I was out on my bicycle a lot.
Part of my exercise routine was food shopping. I didn’t like the supermarkets in my town anyway – I had moved to a town near my hometown, and it was boring, as I said. My old bungalow was much nicer. I missed my hometown, so I would just shop there regularly. I only used the bicycle when I needed to go somewhere special, or didn’t have time. I otherwise walked everywhere – walking was my meditation, where I would simply think about whatever I wanted.
My preferred supermarket was in my home town, so I walked there, which took about two hours. Walking back meant carrying lots of heavy shopping, which trained my upper body strength. All quite logical, and vegan food does not spoil for short periods in the summer heat, since it was just vegetables and fruit.
Where possible, I would occasionally visit my mother, as part of my shopping routine. I became much more friendly with mother, after ex-Girlfriend had finally moved out. Yes, because she had lived with my mother temporarily, while mother found her a job.
I cut out all sugar from my diet, even in coffee. I would occasionally indulge, but being vegan meant that even sweets were mostly unavailable, because many of them contain gelatin for example. No milk, obviously – I did try nut milk, even tried to make some myself, but it seemed pointless. Black coffee is fine. I also cut down on coffee consumption – the fact that I gave up smoking meant that I didn’t need as much coffee, because nicotine reduces the effects of caffeine in the blood, so when you quit, you need to halve your caffeine intake anyway.
I liked my new bliss. I found the blog of someone*** like me, at that time – the blog is sadly no longer online, but I also have her book. Not exactly self-help… fuck no. It was great, and I even spoke to her on IRC. She spoke on her blog of constant boredom, self-destructive behaviour… I won’t bore you. Her life was quite similar to what you have read in this book thus far. I found it quite by accident, when searching on a whim, for people like me – at that time, the results I got on Google were often not very useful. I especially enjoyed her article titled “Center Line’ – and wish I could find it on the WayBack Machine. Oh well.
I did get drunk on some evenings, sometimes very much so, and I would rant on IRC, but I intentionally made sure I wasn’t on my computer – I even turned it off. Not being able to type my encryption passphrase, due to lack of eye coordination while drunk, kept me safe. I normally just wrote in my journal, or watched videos on my phone.
I kept a journal, daily. I said earlier in this book that I dislike therapy – and this is not based on ignorance. I have seen how much of a waste of time it is, because I’d previously tried psychotherapy. It didn’t work on me. The therapists would always annoy me, because I felt like they were talking down to me. I did briefly try Cognitive Behavioural Therapy – even more useless.
Therapy is such a fraudulent concept, so I just fixed myself. All I needed was to sort my shit out and actually help myself. I don’t diss psychiatry though, because that involves medications, which are useful. If you’re depressed or anxious for example, anti-depressants help. If you’re schizophrenic, anti-psychotic drugs help. Whatever. Psychotherapists are frauds. Scamming the whole world, all of them. Absolutely worthless.
No, the problem was this: I did not process thoughts verbally. For a while, I was intentionally keeping conscious watch on my thoughts at all times. If I felt that there was silence, I would intentionally verbalise my thoughts. I know this sounds strange to most people, but I’ve never naturally thought on a verbal level. I tend to just be calm. I can think verbally, but I don’t do it automatically. I don’t think in language. It’s too inefficient, but it helped in this case, because it meant that I could write it down. I wrote in a journal daily, literally just what I was thinking, and what I had done that day.
I became genuinely happy and calm, and I was not a robot – far from it. My thoughts became far more intense, during this period, but I controlled myself. I was ruthless with myself – manipulating only myself. I used logic to become a Good Person. Next came my house.
I myself did not have many personal items, even then. I had my business items, but nothing really personal. I’ve never been an overly materialistic person, but I did have a lot of clutter. I intentionally made my house as plain as possible. I already never watched TV anyway, because I have my laptop, but I started eliminating all redundant things from my life.
My house had plain white walls. There was hardwood flooring downstairs, cream carpet upstairs. The house was relatively modernised, to a standard from about late 2000s; the kitchen and bathroom were styled accordingly. It had a conservatory, a large living room and large kitchen. A large garden, front and back, which I never used. In the living room was a small desk with my laptop and a second monitor. Beside it were several shelves with company items, for shipping, and there was a sofa at the end of the living room. The red curtains were always drawn. The kitchen was relatively plain, undecorated and I had no snacks, just vegetables, nuts, legumes… vegan shit. Yes. A conservatory was connected to the kitchen, containing only my exercise bicycle, and an apparatus to hang my clothes on – there was also a clothing hook outside. The upstairs, with cream carpet on the landing, had a very respectable toilet and shower. There was one large bedroom and two small bedrooms. The large bedroom contained only my bed, and some drawers containing notepads plus pens; my clothing and a mirror were also present. A small game room, previously used by ex-Girlfriend, contained another small desk with another computer on it, a desktop, that I seldom used. The third small bedroom contained various servers that hosted my software projects, and another desk where I would sometimes write from.
My house was not merely de-cluttered from a visual perspective, but from an electrical and energy perspective. I mainly steamed all of my food, which used very little energy. I stored hot drinks in thermal flasks to avoid excess heating usage. I kept the thermostat down during winter, to about eighteen degrees Celsius. I reconfigured all of my computers, especially servers, so that I used fewer electrical outlets and I would use as little energy as possible – I often turned computers off.
I avoided plastic or even paper packaging when shopping, and mostly only bought food. I would buy food items loose, when possible. This, combined with a generally efficient lifestyle meant that I produced very little waste – I re-used packaging for example, when shipping computers.
I regularly went through entire fortnights where I would not even fill a black rubbish bag – and I’d barely even touch a pink recycling bag. I threw out perhaps ten bags that year, most of it recycled.
In short, I had an extremely minimalist lifestyle. Most people would not be able to tolerate it. I actually started becoming annoyed, when I noticed how wasteful literally everyone else was.
I would not even eat out. When I went anywhere, I would take a warm vegetable soup with me in a food flask. I would even eat it during long outings with my local Labour Party – I did indulge once or twice, like when I ordered a fine meal at a restaurant we all met at.
I rarely invited guests, but my mother would occasionally visit. My mother even commented herself about how boring my house was. It was about as minimalist as you could possibly get. I did have a lot of lab gear, but that was it. Soldering equipment for example.
When you did visit, you knew how different my house was. I’d made a place that was mine, to reflect my personality; despite the chaos outside, this was how I’d always imagined a house. Functional. I made everything efficient and frugal, despite having copious space – I’d often admired people who lived in small apartments, like in Tokyo, where space had to be used efficiently.
To my mind, entering my house was like entering another planet. The outside world being what it was, my house was a place where I could just be me. I’d often enjoy just sitting in silence for hours, thinking to myself. It was my own private paradise, and you needed a visa to enter my little world.
Catfriend found it adorable. I’d shown her many photos. Her own home was the exact opposite of mine, lots of frivolous possessions and things. I did admire her home in that we had the same utilitarian mindset – she had ethernet cables running throughout her house, and she liked to run servers for example. She ran a lot of tech.
We used to compare each other’s setups. Her computing setups were much more over-engineered than mine, with lots of big machines and it was all a bit of a mess. I did enjoy watching Sailor Moon though, on her Raspberry Pi hooked up to her TV living room. Her Raspberry Pi ran Kodi, a media centre program.
My own home networking setup was extremely minimalist. We both ran our own websites, mail servers and other such things, even custom Linux routers, at home – but mine would be one or two machines, multi-purpose and neatly wired.
This was the contrast. Her chaos versus my control. I liked visiting her, for this and other contrasts. We were the exact opposite in terms of home preferences.
One of my brothers said it another way, that I’d become a boring hippie vegan thing. I brought my soup with me once to my mother’s house, while he was there, and he told me he wasn’t interested in trying my boring, tasteless soup, which was actually quite tasty.
Mother visited. We listened to The Cure. She felt safer for some reason, as she started telling me things about her childhood that she never told me before. She noted how calm and personable I was becoming. I liked the Vulcans from Star Trek: Enterprise and made myself like them.
I enjoyed watching her become depressed because I had no snacks. She raided each cupboard, disappointed each time and expecting the next one to be any different in my plain, unassuming and neatly organised kitchen. Mother was hungry. Only vegetables, nuts, lentils and other things – I offered her yesterday’s lentil soup. I felt like Michael from the Good Place, opening a new frozen yoghurt bar. She literally said that it’s like being in hell. Vulcans do have pointy ears, you know.
Mother told me that she didn’t know how I or anyone could tolerate living in my house. She told me many times that it was boring. She would actually annoy me sometimes by buying things, or suggesting that I put up decorations, but I liked my boring house. I made it that way intentionally.
I’d watch my mother calmly as she slowly fell asleep on my sofa. I’d given her a blanket for the night, and I continued my work for the evening. I quietly went to my own bed after a few hours. I made her breakfast in the morning, and she sat on her phone quietly for a few hours, then going home at around lunchtime.
I relayed this to Catfriend afterward, who found it equally amusing. I’d also made my house incredibly boring – I didn’t even have a TV. I did have peach-flavoured yoghurt, which I’d intentionally purchased – and enjoyed myself – because I knew nobody else would.
The months went by peacefully, as I calmly focused on my life. I exercised a lot more, introducing a strict exercise routine: two to three hours a day of cycling before breakfast, swimming a few times per week, exercise bike in the evenings. I was 130kg in July 2017, and 80kg in July 2018.
One day, I was calmly food shopping one day, and ex-Girlfriend had a new girlfriend. They ambushed me in a supermarket, or so it felt at the time, engaging me in pleasant conversation. What a nightmare. New-girlfriend was literally looking at my shopping basket and judging my choices, noting the type of vinegar I had purchased – I’d planned to make chickpea salad.
New-girlfriend always annoyed me, because I couldn’t read her well. She seemed highly intelligent, but she did not express her emotions much. She was probably on the autistic spectrum. She took part in conversations at the trans group, when Roommate and I were girlfriends, and she’d occasionally offer little tid bits of wisdom. I knew when I met her that she’d be trouble. She was highly passionate though, politically, mostly left-wing, and a vegan. She was usually quiet. I liked her mother a lot more, and spoke to her often - so did mine.
I watched them both in their car, as I unlocked my bicycle. She’d actually touched my basket, without asking, and I chose to remember this fact. For now, though, my Vulcan philosophy would prevent further action.
I took great pride in my cooking, even taking photographs of meals that I cooked, taking notes of recipes, tweaking them – until I got everything right. Suddenly thrusting myself into veganism without a plan meant that I needed to learn cooking skills quickly, and I did. I mostly cooked stews and soups, because these could be done in bulk and therefore save a lot of energy – plus time.
I once attended a Labour Party meeting, consisting of multiple Labour Party constituency groups. I didn’t announce that it was me, and I’m sure health and safety law did not allow it, but I decided on a whim one day to just make lots of falafel and houmous sandwiches for the event, and I left them out discreetly at the meeting, next to all the other food that caterers had left out. Vegan food terrorism. I did it for fun.
During the event, which was a drag queen event and also a quiz night, one of the presenters announced on the stage mic, saying: ‘Whoever made the falafel and houmous sandwiches, they were lovely, thank you.’
Yes, I beat the caterers. I was too busy drinking the free gin graciously donated by a colleague, and got a bit drunk, but not enough to make an arse of myself – I knew my limits. My colleagues could probably see how much I drank though. It was a fun night.
The only social contact I had was the Labour Party, and briefly Catfriend. Catfriend and I broke up after a while, and we stopped seeing each other as much, though we did occasionally still meet as regular non-sexual friends, and we would chat online.
My Labour Party colleagues were sufficient human contact – that, and the people who worked the tills at various shops, who I’d occasionally get to know. I never felt the need for deep interpersonal contact – simply being with other people was enough. I’m still human, and humans go insane when they’re alone for too long.
Most of my contact with people was, then, mostly work-oriented. I enjoyed working political campaigns with my Labour colleagues, but I would not also then visit their houses just to socialise – I’d often avoid social gatherings, unless it was essentially. For example, I would never willingly enter a pub. I can just as easily drink at home!
I had become the LGBT chairperson in my local Labour Party, which meant that I would manage my local Labour Party’s LGBT-related activities – this meant working with other LGBT Labour groups, and other LGBT groups more generally. It meant that, during events where multiple groups attended, I would occasionally meet my old friends from groups that had banned me. Now they had to talk to me again.
Yes. They even liked me, apparently. I had no need to dislike them, and simply enjoyed their company. Because I no longer felt the need to engage in petty behaviour, I also did not try to control them in any way – nor did I get into arguments with them. There was no need. They were nice people, who meant me no harm whatsoever.
I was nice to Leah Rowe, which meant being nice to them, because it meant that they would probably be nice to me. It’s a logical to assume that people will respond with a general level of reciprocity, yes. I made a conscious effort to do the same.
My local Labour Party group sat with another one night, specifically for an LGBT-related event – yes, Pride. The LGBT chairperson of the other group was trans, but quite fuck-ugly – yes – and made that everyone else’s problem by expressing extremely transphobic views at all times. She ran a blog where she routinely advocated for abolishing the 2004 Gender Recognition Act, courting podcast interviews with multiple reactionary figures – mostly from Conservative-aligned organisations, which made my highly astute eyebrows twinge uncontrollably.
This is not uncommon, as some trans people can actually become resentful and start attacking their own kind. This one regularly referred to trans women as ’biological males,’ and she was well-known in my local community for holding such views. It is for this reason that a lot of trans people boycotted that local Labour Party, which worked alongside mine. I also knew she was clever, and I sensed that she might challenge me.
I got her sacked of course. I got the ball rolling to sack her from the party, reporting her for things she had said and generally making it as socially difficult as possible for her to remain in post. I myself kept quiet, because I was now a Vulcan. I simply told all of my comrades about her, citing each and every one of her posts, and I spent several evenings reading the party constitution. Yes, quite.
I did enjoy her presence at that meeting, as she was quite charming in person. We were drinking in a pub garden, and she referred to herself that night as a ’walking happy-meal’ – the mosquitoes were out in full force.
It may sound boring, but I was genuinely quite active socially. I was extremely active, in my local Labour Party. I befriended a large number of people, none of whom ever visited my house – and I had been making quite a name for myself. My Vulcan-level control meant that I was personable at all times, and I smiled a lot. I was generally quite talkative at meetings, and completely assertive in all things, but in a thoughtful and non-aggressive way.
I sat in the house of a person who had some authority in my local Labour Party – yes. He told me once that I seemed to possess a political knowledge far beyond my years, and that I was clearly intelligent. This occurred while he made me lunch, and we conversed more generally. There was even talk of making me a future parliamentary candidate – in short, I’d gained their complete trust.
The man himself was quite bossy at meetings. He was the sort of person who’d always have the most intelligent opinion in the room, even when someone else proved him wrong, and he didn’t like it when you upset his ego. He was usually charming, smiling at everyone, but very authoritarian. He once argued so hard with a woman that it became a pissing match and she stormed out of the room; the meeting ended because of it. I had a go at him myself, telling him how he was not the Labour party, and that he should probably treat people better. I enjoyed watching the gears in his mind start to jam when he couldn’t scare me; he started having a go at me, but I remained calm and he started becoming polite very quickly. I told him he didn’t deserve to be in the party, and left.
I specifically liked the Vulcans in Star Trek: Enterprise, because they seemed more real to me. Those ones carried guns and used them when necessary – what? It’s Star Trek, but pre-Federation, so it shows Vulcans when they are at their most based. I really can’t say it any better than that.
I was becoming much healthier and fitter. I lost several kilograms in body mass every month, due to my strict diet and exercise routine. I went from 130kg to 80kg in a year. Hills started to feel like cycling on a flat road, when I was on my bicycle – they became no sweat whatsoever.
I didn’t need all the space, as all of the clutter belonged to my ex-Girlfriend, so I would later move into another small bungalow in my hometown, which my mother took the proper piss out of – she called it Noddy’s House. You know, Noddy, the TV show. The contents of Bungalow were identical, but it cost a lot less and it was centralised around a tiny lobby area, connecting a bathroom, a kitchen, a living room and one bedroom – a loft was present, with plenty of storage space, so I had plenty of space anyway. The outside garage was later converted into an additional bedroom with heating and insulation, plus electricity.
I remember the day I went to deal with all of the paperwork. It was some time during very early 2018, and it had snowed quite heavily – a rare thing, where I live. The snow had reached a thickness of approximately thirty centimetres on the ground, after a heavy storm – I remember walking in that storm once, full protective gear on, to visit my parents. The estate agents thought I was mad for walking the whole way, but I got my keys and went to sort the place out.
Being back in my home town again made me feel peace. I didn’t like my robot Christian neighbours, and the town I’d lived in was basically fake. Not rich at all, but the people there acted like it – my neighbours were all a bunch of snobs. The druggie family was nice, though I had to be vigilant that they didn’t steal my mail.
Noddy’s house had a certain charm, and my neighbours were still robot Christians actually, but now they were my robot Christians. It was also a bungalow, not a house, and I would live there for the next four years. My people. My town. I was also now much closer to my parents’ house, who would regularly come to visit me in my boring, tiny cartoon bungalow.
I would go on to never see any of my neighbours – one of them even said that I never seem to talk. One of them was a bit senile, and sometimes made rude comments about me for some reason as he walked his dog, though apparently several other neighbours also hated him. Another, at the end of the street, was extremely right-wing but in the most hilarious way possible, as he always articulated the most ignorant views that the Daily Mail happened to circulate that month. He always seemed to like me though, so who really cares. All of my neighbours were old farts.
I had relapsed to smoking at this point, before quickly switching to vaping. I did not relapse by chance – for example, one wasn’t offered to me while I was drunk. I simply wished to experience the buzz from ingesting nicotine, and I accepted addiction as a consequence – I’d calmly walked to the shop and bought a pack of cigarettes.
I mean, I was also drunk, and cycled there. It was late at night, and I just smoked an entire pack. I felt free the next day, because I no longer needed to worry about relapse. I simply enjoyed smoking again.
I was outside smoking one day – I never smoked indoors, because I didn’t want to stink up the place. It was night time and the one young neighbour, a young couple, was having a party next door. The lady, mid twenties or so, was visibly drunk and came to talk to me. She asked me for a cigarette, which I gladly gave her, knowing that it would be the last moment of her own free will.
Nice lady. We spoke passionately as she told me about her life, having only just moved in. She worked at a local bookshop – and she enjoyed several of my cigarettes. She was very pretty, and I never spoke to her again.
It was in Noddy’s House where I watched Hashtag Libreboot, and it was during this period that absolutely no murders occurred, whatsoever. Absolutely no murders whatsoever, from July 2017 to July 2018. None at all.
This whole period of my life was mostly nice. I felt like I had everything under control at all times, and I experienced a general lack of stress, especially after moving back to my hometown. I was just at peace all the time. I mean, I had normal work stress, but everyone has that. None of it bothered me. I just relaxed and got on with it.
You’re travelling through a portal to a wondrous realm of boredom and unlimited two-megabit internet access. A road warning appears. It’s the year 2003, and I am a blossoming twelve-year-old boy with a moustache. I’m smiling, and I’ve locked all the doors behind you.
Anger was the main thing, but I wasn’t constantly angry – I was usually calm, but I could be triggered. I became quite aggressive at home, during my teenage years. I would become angry at the most trivial of things, and try to dominate in conversations – I frequently argued with my parents and brothers. I once made my brother cry on his eleventh birthday. My father asked me in the car how I could do such a thing, and I just kept talking. It amused me, and I took no stock of anyone’s feelings whatsoever – I don’t remember what we were arguing about. I remember not caring at all, and I would just keep talking – then when I was made to stop talking, I became annoyed about that, and I paid my brother no mind at all. He deserved to cry, I thought.
I did not merely become angry. I often reduced my opponents to tears, wearing them out entirely so that they no longer wished to argue with me. This also burned me out, which served to further fuel my anger. I would release it further, as time went on. The cause of my anger was never quite clear, and I would rarely even remember the discussion afterward. I would simply express great anger, dumbfounding everyone.
My father sometimes told me that I was essentially Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I rarely exhibited such anger outside the home – outside, I was generally quite meek. I was also quite meek inside the home, most of the time – most of the time, I was well-behaved and I would just do my things.
I was a compulsive liar, but it’s not like every sentence that came out of my mouth was a lie. I usually tell the truth, but sometimes I’m just bored, and I lie on a whim. I told a friend he couldn’t come skateboarding with me – I didn’t even have a skateboard. In 2020, aged 29, I tweeted that I had visited North Korea. I have never set foot there. The post was retweeted roughly 5,000 times.
I love lying. I once bragged to a group of friends at a social event that I’d once seen my dad completely smashed at a party, that he’d done all sorts of things – I no longer remember exactly what I said, but I put on a convincing performance. My friends laughed. My dad never drinks.
I once told my classmates that my dad had once killed someone via electrocution, in his job as an electrical control room operator, switching high-voltage lines on or off so that the workmen could safely enter a given work site. My classmates believed it, and a rumour had spread around the school. A teacher actually pulled me out of class to ask if it was true, which I obviously denied, and she told me that I should not spread such lies about my own father. I’d said it on a whim, lacking any ulterior motive.
I was at a friend’s house once and lied that I’d been run over by a car as a child, pointing to a bump on the back of my head, which the mother then felt with her fingers. She expressed relief that I’d survived without permanent damage, but the truth is that I’d simply fallen out of my bunk bed once and hit my head on the back of a wooden chair – and there was blood, but I suffered no obvious brain damage. I didn’t even get it checked. Strange, that, but I’ve not had any problems.
I didn’t even plan my lies. I’d just make shit up on the spot. I’ve still done this as an adult, typically in harmless contexts. It is mostly pointless, but I do in fact possess a vivid imagination, and always have. Lying gave me a sense of calm, and I’d just say whatever I wanted – it was a kind of freedom, because I had control of the truth.
I enjoyed stealing as a teen. I once stole £1 coins from the uniforms of every person in my class, while loitering or pretending to read a book. I didn’t need the money, but I enjoyed the thrill. I was about thirteen or fourteen. Most of my stealing was opportunistic, petty and completely benign, but I did enjoy it immensely.
We were playing a game in the dark once, at a Scouts camping trip. One team had to defend a base from invaders in the other team – if the defending team saw you, you were out. If at least one attacker got to the flag at the centre of the base, the defenders lost, or all of the attackers would be found and the defenders won.
I loved sneaking onto the base. The defenders would also walk around the bushes, trying to find you, so you had to sneak carefully. I thought of it like a real-life version of the computer game Metal Gear Solid, with me as Solid Snake, and I would thoroughly enjoy getting to the base. I was good at it too. I had my camouflage suit on.
I played it again on my own the next night, hiding in some bushes. A group of some of the girls in our group were walking along a path, and I made some noises – but I said nothing. They stood silently, asking who was there. They were flashing torches, but I was well-hidden. I ran in the other direction, and they never saw my face. Yes, don’t go out alone!
I did work experience in my last year of secondary school and took the absolute piss. I did the job badly, took excess unpaid tea breaks, and skipped about half of it after one of my great-aunts died of Alzheimer’s. Grief was plausible. Nobody questioned grief.
I started smoking at twelve, because I was attracted to women who smoke. The sight and smell of it was just alluring, so I stole my mother’s cigarettes and became hooked. They quickly caught me, because they obviously noticed that they cigarettes were missing, and I got the standard lecture about how bad it is to smoke.
How does a kid buy cigarettes? They don’t. I would steal them. Not just from parents either. I remember being at a marriage ceremony once, and hundreds of us were packed into a dance hall for the after-party. I just wanted one, and a random lady’s purse was on one of the tables. Lots of people were watching, and could literally see me, but I expertly crept my hand in and stole an entire pack, plus some money. The rush was exhilarating – I’d always enjoyed stealing anyway, but this was extreme. The rush was intense, and I felt calm - the rush from the nicotine was quite excellent too, I thought. I just felt good about all of it.
I was on a camping trip with the Scouts, and once just brazenly walked into the tent belonging to one of my camping instructors. I stole all of her cigarettes, and walked away quite pleased with myself. Not one cigarette, not two cigarettes – no. I stole three packs. Now I could smoke.
I actually got a rush from the thrill of it. If I’d been caught in either of these instances, I would have found myself in a lot of trouble. I didn’t care who they belonged to. I just took every pack.
I regularly stole from my parents, often £20 notes or more. I didn’t just buy cigarettes – I bought computer games too. I once bought a certain popular game owned by a highly litigious company about catching various strange digital creatures in tiny spherical objects, a new version of which had just come out, for my portable handheld gaming system that was made by an equally litigious company, whose trademark I shall not name. I got it the day it came out, after I’d waited for months.
Can’t do that shit no more, everything’s digital now. Games are digital, and money is digital. Even shopping itself is digital, as many parts of the UK no longer even have high street shops. You can’t steal a book now, because there are no bookshops, and libraries are shutting down – the kids in school have computer tablets now. Sometimes, even sex is digital – one day, they will make air digital. I love computers, but I remember when things were tangible. The 2000s were incredibly based.
I did get into a few fights in and out of school, but that’s just normal boy stuff. I tried to avoid fights in school, because I didn’t want to get into trouble – though I did enjoy it when I won. I didn’t want to lose fights, though, so I would avoid getting into fights.
Violence gave the same rush as other vices, but with more consequences. I was also quite meek physically, so it wasn’t like I could just be the school bully or something. There were plenty of kids bigger than me, and some of them had older brothers. I just didn’t bother with violence.
I often stole from friends, usually computer games. I felt better if I didn’t own it. I just liked the idea of depriving someone. This is actually how I framed it then – and I was sometimes caught. When I was, I’d only be annoyed that I’d have to give it back. Apologising was also quite humiliating.
My father literally told me at several points that I don’t seem to have remorse, because of certain things I did which will not be written in this book – but suffice it to say, they were pretty terrible. He didn’t even know the half of it. My own mind was even more vivid than any physical activity I could partake in, as the mind releases one from all earthly limitations.
The thing about me is that I knew how to be discreet. I almost never got caught, and even when I did, I could often blame it on someone else, or otherwise mitigate my actions somehow. I never admitted guilt either, even when I knew that my accuser knew I was lying – like when I smoked in the toilets one time, in a church where we were staying with the Scouts, on a trip. The toilets were right next to the dinner hall where we’d eaten, and next to the rooms where we slept. It was so clearly obvious that I had done it, and he could even smell it on me, but I still said it wasn’t me.
I don’t think anything even came of that. I mean, he probably told my parents, or didn’t, who knows. Nothing came of it, but I had no shame in lying. It wasn’t even an embarrassment thing. I just saw no reason to admit that I’d done it. Who was he to tell me what to do, I thought?
I was quite irresponsible, like when hiking with the Scouts. I’d never want to be the one to read the map, or generally help out when we got lost. I just sort of stood with the group, minding my own business as I followed them around. I once did try to guide a group and we ended up in the completely wrong town, on the other side of the map – somehow. Our instructors picked us up and we all had a good laugh, after our blisters had healed. I’d kept telling the group we were nearly there, until they finally became overwhelmed with pain. I had no idea where we were going.
My preference would always be to let other people take responsibility in everything. I never wanted to take charge. This was especially true when I had to be responsible for others.
I’m like this even today as I write this. I generally just do not want to accept negative consequences in anything. If I can make someone else sort my problems out for me, I will. Even if someone doesn’t want to help me, I can often use their feelings to make them do it – if they feel pity for me, or they care for me, and they just want to help.
I will often just do whatever I want, instead of what I should be doing. Keeping to a stuck routine is difficult for me – even if I have a deadline approaching for something important. For example, bills may be paid late, taxes are usually sometimes right on the deadline – in the past, they have occasionally been late.
Before I launched my company, a friend once told me that I seem to always just do the thing that’s fun first, and that I never seem to want to do the hard work. He said that I take shortcuts in everything. The context here is irrelevant – and it’s still true today.
It’s not that I cheat, as such – I’m not even lazy. I’m always doing something. Most of what I do would not be considered relaxing. I don’t watch TV for example. I will just hack on random projects, often complete random ones.
When I was in school, this would translate to going on random forums or just reading a really nice book, even if I had coursework – I got straight As because school was easy anyway, but college was different. I failed nearly all of my classes in college. I passed in computer science, because I liked writing software, but I got As on my practical work – I got a C in theory, and re-took theory exams which got me a B. The practical work was so highly graded that I averaged out to a weak A overall.
Speaking of that forum. I wasn’t just abusive in forums as a teenager. I was also generally quite nerdy. The forums that I visited mostly pertained to Japanese anime and also computer emulation. I would engage in conversations, more generally, but one thing someone said once stuck with me. This person called me a certain word then, and said that I seem to have a somewhat dissociated stance about the world, and even about myself. I found it strange at the time, but he was referring to my generally dispassionate nature. I would often engage on certain topics that give others pause for thought, and I would just argue without feeling. I was mostly a bored teen.
Yet, the practical assignment that I handed in was literally a fucking emulator. Computer emulation is something that not even most PhD students would try – even people with over a decade of experience. I did that shit when I was sixteen. This required reading copious pages of documentation, and understanding literally how an entire computer works. Actually implementing it is another matter. Emulators are hard.
I could cite this and dozens of other examples, but the message is clear: I can work hard on whatever I want, but I find it hard to obey schedules imposed by others. It’s the main reason I started my own business, so that I could have more control.
My actual workload in my business is low, because I have a high profit margin, so I’m able to do about five to ten non-consecutive hours of work per week, and pay bills. Most of my time is spent doing all kinds of random things.
If I entered the regular job market again, I think I might struggle, especially for complex jobs, despite my intellect and skills. I told myself that if this ever happened, I would try to go on benefits or just do a really simple job, like cleaning toilets.
I don’t have low, depressive periods either. I’m usually quite calm, and I’m always doing something. I’m hyper-focused all the time, but only on what I want. I generally do the minimal amount of work necessary for anything else.
I was told in my late twenties that someone in my year group had been beating both his wife and his child. His friends no longer talked to him because of this, but I knew why he had done it. When he was younger, he was always the type to strive for everything, but he didn’t have much intelligence either, so there was that resentment factor; he would become angry a lot, and he would sometimes release that anger onto others. I simply extrapolated from that.
I did not articulate this to my old schoolfriend. I gave the usual gesture of mild concern, apparently horrified that he could have done such a thing, whilst internally rationalising his behaviour.
I had absolutely no discipline of any kind. I actually hated being told what to do. The only reason I put effort in during secondary school was because back then, I believed the lie that getting good grades in school guarantees a good income later in life. I learned, quite reliably, in my twenties, that this was not the case, but back then I believed it. So my responsibility then was reward-based, not innate – I otherwise had no work ethic of any kind. I did, in fact, get straight As in school.
I also once urinated on a classmate’s uniform for like, no reason at all, during PE class. I excused myself to use the toilet, and just destroyed his uniform. I had no idea whose it was. I just, you know, thought it would be funny. I have no idea how they didn’t catch me. Maybe he was just too embarrassed, and never reported it. I think they just implicitly trust teenage boys not to urinate on the uniforms of other teenage boys, in a changing room during gym class. Yeah.
My general lack of fear manifested in physical and non-physical ways, even for the most mundane of things. Like when I had a deadline approaching for something, I would not feel the pressure at all – sometimes I would enjoy the rush of completing something just on time, but I can generally just ignore deadlines. If I don’t want to do something, I can just ignore it, regardless of consequences.
Consequences are for other people. If I can make someone else take responsibility for me, I will make them do so. I’ve always been recklessly irresponsible, in all things. I’m not necessarily lazy, but I always just want to do my own things, and not have to deal with anything. I’ve always been like that – adulthood imposes the necessity of responsibility as a matter of survival but even there, I do as little of it as possible. If I can just laze around, I will.
Like I said though, I was mostly just a normal kid. I have no frame of reference though, because nobody ever told me what I did was wrong or weird – nobody knew what I did.
I was a teacher’s pet in school, and would often pretend to be ignorant or naive about certain things. I did this intentionally, because it was a useful defence – whenever something did happen, I could quite reliably deflect blame away from myself. Most of the shit I did was solitary in nature, and yes quite childish, but I was mostly a loner – after about thirteen or fourteen that is.
I collected a reward for getting straight As in my exams, and had my photo taken, shortly after leaving secondary school. On the day, my father and I passed a fellow student of mine who was crying into her mother’s arms with a teacher present. I walked straight past the girl, saying nothing – I didn’t even notice that she was crying. My dad stopped me, asking me if I had any feelings for this girl whatsoever – he himself had asked what’s wrong. She failed her classes and she was now worried about her future. She’d been pregnant at thirteen and missed two years of school. All I thought at the time was that she’s a loser. My views now are more nuanced.
As for computer games, I stopped really wanting to play them at other people’s houses. I had as many games as I wanted with my chipped PlayStation and CD rewriter at home, so I no longer needed my friends. Yeah. That was basically all I ever did at home, from then on. Either that or I would read – I loved visiting the library. The school itself also had a decent library of its own.
I remember my father would berate me for not getting out with friends – that I did not have. I told him plainly, in the car, that I don’t need friends. He stayed quiet after that.
One of my friends visited me once, to tell me that his mother had died. I was actually annoyed, because my mother expressed such sympathy, and I just didn’t know how to act in this situation. I knew he was upset, but all I remembered was that his was always the most boring house. He had the worst games, the worst taste in games, and his parents were quite strict, especially the mother. She had died from a stroke, sitting in her armchair, and he himself had found her, initially dialling 999 out of panic.
He left, and I immediately went back to my room to do whatever the hell I was doing that day. I never followed up, and I never spoke to him again. I didn’t think about him.
One of my little brothers was arguing with me one day. I do not remember what the argument was about, but the crime he committed was to insult both my intelligence and my ego – what he actually did or said was quite minor, I know that much. I poured an entire carton of milk into a cupboard in his room, containing his school books. Most of them were destroyed – and I felt a complete calm while doing it. It was sort of like catharsis, and I just felt relaxed. My entire family was furious, calling it deranged, and I never did tell them why I did it – because I didn’t know. I just did it. It happened because of the argument we’d had, three days after the argument had ended.
I was about thirteen once, sleeping at my grandparents’ house – my parents had gone somewhere with my two brothers, so I was there for the weekend. I enjoyed spending time there as I’d just got a new game for my PlayStation 2, which I’d hooked up there in the room they gave me. My grandmother drove me around town one day, taking me to nice restaurants and she also bought me yet another computer game that I wanted – I was amused when we got home, because she told me that it was the first time she’d driven in over a decade. She just wanted to entertain me for the day, and we went everywhere.
I discovered masturbation during that weekend, but that’s not the juicy part – though I did imagine myself with a vagina, for some reason, which I thought was quite strange back then. Weird. No, the weirdest part was when I broke out of her house.
I wanted to smoke, and I had my cigarettes with me, but I knew I’d get into trouble. I reasoned that it would be best to do it outside, so I crept past their room – and I had to be very sneaky. There was a window to the back garden, that I could open, but it would only open slightly. It was the type of window that would slide up and down, but it was partly broken.
Opening and closing the window made a lot of noise, as did climbing in and out of it. I was hyper-aware the whole time, knowing that I could wake up my grandparents, but I was also calm – I found that it made me happy. I felt good sneaking in and out – the act itself of sneaking made me feel good. It was a mild rush, breaking out of the house, and then sneaking back in like a burglar. I just stayed up most of the night, playing on my PlayStation at low volume, sneaking in and out repeatedly. I did it every night I was there, and I’d just throw my butts into the street.
I can recount many other instances like that, where I enjoyed sneaking, like when I’d sneak off from camp in the Scouts, or sneak into places. I found that it made me calm. It was the same kind of calm as when I lit that big camp fire, or when I stole things. I was never very violent, but beating someone up in a fight did something similar – with the added rush knowing that the other kid would fight back. Ditto outrage, when people were angry with me about something. I had no idea why these things made me feel good, but I did them anyway. Urinating on that boy’s uniform was the same.
I was grounded once – I actually didn’t get grounded much. Most of my childhood was normal, and I was usually well-behaved because I had excellent parents. I never got up and thought about doing crime or breaking the rules – whenever it happened, it was impulse when a given opportunity presented itself. Extremely impulsive.
I did escape once, when grounded. I crept quietly out of the house on a summer day and mounted my bicycle. I’d stolen some money from my parents and I just went out for the day. I felt amazing, and I don’t remember much about what I did – I mostly just went shopping, smoked, and generally met up with some other kids from school. I was at the lake at one point, and my dad was on the other side of it, having spotted me – he shouted my name and I laughed, like we were playing in the park or something, and I sped off. Neither of them saw me all day. The act of escaping made me feel good – though I was properly disciplined when I did finally return home. My pupils were also dilated.
I was a loner at school, though I did also talk to classmates and visited a few people’s houses – I was also a nerd. Other kids at school always thought I was meek, though I did have a right go at a PE teacher once. He was an arsehole anyway, and I threatened to kill him, in so many words – I made some vague reference about finding where he lives or something. He said, are you threatening me? I simply said: Yes. He immediately said: Get out of my sight – I felt adrenaline, like dopamine, a rush, a warmth, and I walked away. I don’t remember where I went, though I do remember reading a book, so I probably went to the school library or something. My classmates were flabbergasted, saying something like: He just threatened Sir!
I was not angry when I said it – in fact, I was quite happy, thinking about something else, but I did think he was being an arsehole to me. He kept telling me what to do, and wouldn’t let me just stand at the side of the field – I did not want to take part in football that day.
I felt no guilt about what I said and didn’t even have an intention to actually do it – I just said it for like, no reason at all. I sensed though that something might happen, so I went into his office on a whim during lunchtime. One of my friends was outside and heard the whole thing. I confidently stood over him and apologised, saying this and that about how I know what I did was wrong, that although I was annoyed, I had no excuse – the usual stuff. I didn’t actually feel any guilt or remorse at all about what I’d done.
I felt a rush here too, because this teacher did have actual power over me – he could report me, which is why I apologised. I just sensed that it would be the most logical thing to do – I wasn’t scared during the day, before this. He tried to interrupt me several times, and I’d pause meekly, knowing that it’d be better to keep my mouth shut. When I was done, he said something like: You’ve been a man, and you’ve apologised, so my talk with the headteacher will not happen. I left the room, feeling like I’d just got away with murder, and I bragged to my friend for the rest of that day.
My classmates didn’t think I was meek when I won in a fight. I did not engage in violence as a premeditated activity, but I did sometimes fight other classmates when challenged. I once offended someone and beat the absolute shit out of him – he came with an army of his friends and before I knew it, I heard the words fight, fight, fight. I knew violence was risky, but I indulged myself in this instance, whacking him repeatedly and blocking most of his attacks. I wanted to finish him, but one of the teachers broke up the fight. I felt a much more intense euphoria than in other incidents, while I pushed him into the bike racks – it was fun. I enjoyed punching him. I wanted to end him – I didn’t get punished much. I just got detention or something. He was much bigger than me. I enjoyed the admiration of his friends afterward, who were much nicer to me after that. Violence is stupid though, and I knew at that age that it would be too risky to engage in regularly, so I generally avoided it.
I understood violence, though. There was someone in my year group at school, who would always become angry with everyone. He was extremely aggressive, impulsive, undisciplined and he always got into trouble – very much a low-functioning person. He was also charming, and he had a lot of friends. He was the sort of person you didn’t want to mess with – he seemed to actively delight in inflicting pain on others. He was reasonably intelligent, but he just didn’t apply himself so he didn’t do well in school. He was constantly in trouble with teachers. He got suspended, a lot.
Extremely charming. He got all the girls. Proper bad boy. He was the one they wanted. It’s biology. We’re wired to like bastards. We want to be controlled by them – most of us do anyway. Not me. I saw right through him – because I understood him perfectly. The only difference is that I was not violent. I had violence in me, but I was never given the opportunity vis a vis upbringing and environment, in which to develop it. I regarded violence then as something undignified, because it shows that you have no control – if you have to use physical violence, or the threat of violence, it shows a general lack of intelligence. I always just used my mind, but I had a lot of discipline even then – I sometimes did strange things, in an opportunistic context. Never premeditated or as a general routine.
I generally avoided him, but he was in some of my classes. He would sometimes intimidate me, because I was the loner in the class, and the nerd. I didn’t mind letting him read my notes, so that he could, you know, pass his class. He sometimes tried to insult me but I paid it no mind. Him and his friends – verbal insults like that never really bothered me though. I mean, bullying is so pointless if all you’re going to do is hurt my feelings. Sticks and stones, as they say.
He did approach me one day though, outside of maths class. I have no idea why, I think he just wanted to say hello or something. He just stood in front of me, with my back to the locker, staring at me in the eyes, proper baddy. Cold, dead eyes. I stared at him too, completely undeterred, and I even smiled at one point. I did feel the adrenaline start, as though we were about to fight, but I was otherwise still. I thought nothing of it when he became bored, and I just did the boring class as normal.
One day, I was in one of my moods though and he wanted to see my book. I said no, and he started wrestling me for it – I just wasn’t giving him my book. I was in a proper mood, and we just started fighting. I managed to push him to the ground, which made me laugh – but he was three times my size, and knocked my lights out. I woke up with a split upper lip and I required stitches. No love lost.
He was suspended of course – and later expelled, when he beat up a twelve-year-old. He would always laugh when he beat someone up, or when he tormented something, as though it was a victory. Such a stupid and undeveloped mind. The violence itself did not concern me – what I saw, though, was a very stupid man. He gave in to his anger, believing it to be a source of power as he controlled others with it.
That kind of control is illusory and fleeting. You cannot truly control people with the fear of physical violence, and reality or the law always catches up with you. I read a news story about him a few years later, where he has been arrested and imprisoned. He had been abusing a woman even after breaking up with her, and she was terrified of him. One day, she was eating and he kidnapped her outside a restaurant, driving her around while she struggled to escape the vehicle – at one point, the vehicle crashed, and she fled. This was all in the news report. He was arrested that same day.
I understand precisely how and why a person would be driven to such violence, and why they would behave like that in general. I knew the man growing up, and I knew what sort of family he came from – he was never given a chance. He simply gave in to all of his most animalistic impulses and become the least useful version of himself. Pity. Those people are easy to control. He was also a drug dealer before becoming imprisoned – but that part does not concern me.
I remember him when he was a child. He was alright. I used to play with him in primary school. He was nice. His environment made him become violent later in life. My environment couldn’t be more different, as I had loving parents and a stable home. I was furnished with books, and encouraged to pursue intellect instead. I otherwise had the same rage he did – that part is innate. I understood him instinctively, the way his mind worked. To be clear, because I want the reader to be fully cognisant of the point which I am trying to make, yes: I understand the mind of a violent abuser more than I do the mind of the victim, though I myself am non-violent.
Reading about him reminded me of my relationship with my former girlfriend – again, restraint. I never physically or emotionally tortured her – my only crime was being emotionally negligent, and later cheating on her. What reminded me though, was control – this man was a control freak, even when I knew him at a young age. He could not tolerate other people around him, and he would just control them. I understood that need for control – and the frustration when people behave unpredictably.
Back then, I just thought I was a robot. I was constantly bored, even in situations such as this. I went on as though nothing had happened. I was mostly stoic at school – composed. I actually did have emotions, like laughter – if we watched a funny film in class, I would laugh. My chemistry teacher put Borat on once, and I laughed the whole time – my classmates told me that I laugh like a girl.
Then I discovered the internet. I generally abused forums on the internet, and I learned all kinds of psychological tricks which I would just use for fun. I would find targets, often the webmasters themselves, and terrorise them. The internet granted anonymity in a way that the physical world did not, and I felt that it was the perfect place to hone my skills. I found it strange that I could do these things – I regarded it then as a superpower. I also read Einstein’s theory of special relativity.
I regularly abused people online as a teenager. There was a popular forum that I regularly spammed, engaging in all kinds of extreme psychological attacks. The administrator was technically incompetent, and this was the early 2000s. Long story short, the guy shut his forum down and I continued to badmouth him on other forums. He never did me any harm.
The other thing I enjoyed most on the internet was sock puppeteering. I would pretend to be all sorts of people, and get to know someone, usually in an online computer game. I would insert myself into someone’s life, extracting things from them – and eventually I would betray them somehow, revealing myself. Their disappointment was something satisfying. I often pretended to be a girl.
The thing I became most good at was getting other people to tell me about their lives. I can just befriend anyone, online and offline, and I can usually find out everything about my target – people like to tell their story. They like to be heard. People like it when you seem to understand them.
Obviously, like literally every other teenager that has ever used the internet, I looked up porn. I obviously enjoyed it. There was one video in particular that I really enjoyed, of a woman in an office just minding her own business, doing work. Her boss walked in and just started touching her – and she’d resist. She’d struggle as he took off all her clothes, slowly, throwing himself over her – and I’d imagine I was her. I knew I was a woman then, only suppressing it later – I had no vocabulary for transgender concepts, and no concept of transition, so I didn’t literally think I’m a woman, but I would still feel like I was one when imagining sex for example. All I knew was that I enjoyed watching a woman being raped, though they people in the video were obviously just actors. I often watched videos like that. I’d have dreams where I was the woman. Speaking of transgender people, I think one of my friends might have been trans too – he told me once that he dreamed he was in Resident Evil 2, shooting zombies, and he was wearing a dress or something. Weird.
Yes, the internet is wonderful. How nice.
I could become quite hyperactive and just do really insane shit. Most of it, I don’t even remember now, but it was always the same feeling. When I got like that, it was as though I’d left my own body, like everything was just happy, like I was in bliss, and I’d feel light-headed. It felt amazing.
The problem, however, is that I had extremely good parents, who constantly kept watch over me. They cared too much about my personal safety, and they took an active role in nurturing my growth. I was well-supervised in general, by the adults in my life, to the extent that I just never managed to indulge most of my passions back then. It was, ironically, burned out of me.
You have been snatched violently and it’s 2005. I’m fourteen, and I have severe acne.
Vandalism was never really my thing. When it happened, it was just a spur of the moment sort of thing, usually by accident. I did like fire, though, a lot. An instructor at a Scouts camp actually got really scared once when we made a campfire, because I was being a proper nutcase that night.
I was extremely hyperactive, probably from consuming too much sugar or something, and I was just throwing things endlessly onto a fire, trying to make the fire as big as I possibly could. Initially, some of my friends also joined in, but even they started to become terrified and asked me to stop – I didn’t stop. I just kept throwing more things onto the fire, as well as several flammable items. The fire reached a height of roughly ten metres, possibly more, and it was becoming much wider.
I myself could have been burned. The fire was actually dangerous – the embers alone could have set anyone around it on fire. Like, I’m not describing simple childish hi-jinks. My friends were actually scared of me, and called me a psycho, having initially believed it was a harmless prank – they themselves had been laughing, but I just kept going. I was laughing maniacally while I did it, as though I were actually possessed.
I still remember clearly how I felt. It’s like when you kiss someone you really like, someone you’re extremely attracted to. That rush of endorphins and dopamine, the warmth, the light-headedness of it, like nothing else exists in the world. All I saw was the fire. It was such that I would just watch myself feed it, and I felt inner peace.
I was like this with other dangers too. I enjoyed danger. I had no concept of safety. When they actually told me it was dangerous, it surprised me. At no point did I actually think whether it was safe. All I saw was fire, which made me feel extremely alive, and I just wanted more of that feeling, which I know now was pure adrenaline – fourteen-year-old me just knew it felt good.
If I were alone, I would have burned the entire fucking camp down. I enjoyed anything that gave me the same rush. This included rock climbing, which I enjoyed specifically because I was otherwise afraid of heights. I enjoyed challenging myself like that. I was shielded heavily throughout childhood, so I was never able to become too reckless. The fire was a rare exception.
The instructors came with buckets and sand to put it out, actually struggling to do so. From then on, I was no longer allowed around fires, or I’d be supervised more closely around them. This made me actually sad.
I have raped and murdered people in dreams, sometimes engaging in necrophilia within said dreams. I wake up wet, feeling completely relaxed. There is always a sexual component; since Gender Reassignment Surgery, my sex drive has been reduced to near-zero and these dreams have stopped occurring. I would obviously never do such things in reality, as it would not benefit me in any real way, but dreams release one from such limitations. I simply do what I want, in dreams. This might sometimes be as benign as walking; when I become lucid in a dream, I enjoy walking through walls and flying. Walking in dreams is extremely difficult, and requires a lot more discipline than in real life, because you also have to maintain physics while remaining lucid; I normally just wake up, or lose lucidity. It’s the number one thing I do when becoming lucid. I’ll just walk around my town, and the town is empty when I do this. There are no people around.
One of the strangest things about humans in dreams is how alien they look. When I become lucid, and I look at the faces of other humans in my dream, they look like aliens. Their eyes and nose are all wrong, as is the general proportions on their body. They look like aliens from a sci-fi. The first time I had such a violent dream, I found it strange but went about my day.
Sometimes I’m the one being abused in a dream. I had a dream once where I was kidnapped, and I woke up multiple times inside the dream, only to be kidnapped again. It became quite dizzying, until I finally woke up for real and my entire room felt white as I did. I was somewhat disoriented but went about my day as normal.
I’m God when I dream.
You are now being dragged at great speed, by rope from the back of my car.
1996 again, and I have a Sega Master System. I have Sonic the Hedgehog II, Alex Kidd in Miracle World, Black Belt and Bonanza Brothers. I had it until I was about ten, and I would always pester my mother to buy me a new cartridge at the weekly car boot sale. We weren’t poor but my parents couldn’t justify a Sega Megadrive. My mother played Sonic too, while I was at school.
1997 now, and I got a Sega Saturn! Die Hard Arcade, Nights into Dreams, Sonic R. My father would play Daytona USA and Sega Rally Championship.
1998 and I got a chipped PlayStation – but it didn’t work well, the CD drive was worn out – my cousin though, burned me about fifty games. I loved Duke Nukem: Time To Kill, Medal of Honour, Doom and Time Crisis.
1999 and I had a handheld gaming system made by a certain highly litigious company. I loved playing on my turquoise machine, which took AA batteries and I would play it in school. I had a strange game on it, that had you catch monsters inside tiny balls.
In 2001, I was annoyed because I couldn’t watch cartoons. Cartoon Network was interrupted for the day, by a global international news story about a burning building. I was horrified. I wanted to watch Ed, Edd and Eddy.
I bought books. A Series of Unfortunate Events was one of my favourites. I also liked the child in Artemis Fowl – his general intelligence and how he always seemed to have everyone under his control. Even the fairy cops feared him.
Throughout, parents would occasionally disrupt me from my games. I once complained that I’d be at my grandmother’s house for a week – I’d actually asked how long we’d be there. I normally took my PlayStation with me, and played it alone. Sports on my dad’s radio, as we drove in the car… one time, I threw his Libertines CD out the window, because my brothers were annoying me. I don’t remember the context. My dad actually stopped on the hard shoulder, because his rage was so strong that he did not feel safe driving any longer. This amused me.
2002: I had a PlayStation 2 with Grand Theft Auto III and Metal Gear Solid 2. My parents bought me a DVD of the new Spider-Man film starring Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst, released that year, and I watched it on my PlayStation 2. I was blown away by its fidelity over VHS tape, on my thirteen-inch cathode-ray tube television.
That same year, my favourite Internet Service Provider, Andrews & Arnold Ltd, made IPv6 available by default for all customers, but I wouldn’t learn of them until 2014.
In 2004, my parents bought me a newer handheld gaming system made by the same highly litigious company. It had better graphics than the old one, but still could not handle 3D. The cartridges were smaller, about half the size, and I had a backlit screen.
Throughout childhood, I went places with friends, on my bicycle or in the car with adults. I remember one day, I was catching crabs at the beach, and accidentally threw the hook into my friend’s leg. We all couldn’t stop laughing. His mother tended to him.
I loved buying games for this. There was an independent video rental shop, where I would buy games for £5.
2005 and I later had my mate Dave install for me a PlayStation 2 mod-chip so I could download games for free, burning them to DVDs. He actually was called Dave. He ran said aforementioned video rental shop. I also bought a copy of Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence. Hideo Kojima deserved every penny.
Also 2005, my friend was on holiday so I couldn’t borrow his Windows XP disc. I installed Ubuntu Linux instead, using a CD that I happened to have. My first Linux.
In that same year, on the one day I took a day off from school, my dad bought me two DVDs: The Terminator, and Planet of the Apes. I enjoyed both films.
I liked fishing with my uncle. I once brought some home for my mother to cook, in our holiday caravan. Sometimes, my father would take me and my brothers out on activities. I was once annoyed that he tried getting me to like the game of football.
In 2008, I won £300 in a Fine Art award ceremony, and bought a PlayStation 3. I had Grand Theft Auto 4 and Metal Gear Solid 4.
I also had a new console made by the aforementioned highly litigious company. It was controlled with a patented infrared device, and I used it to play Resident Evil 4 – that console had the best version of this game, in my opinion. I played it on a large thirty-inch cathode-ray tube television with stereo audio and a composite video cable.
In 2009 I got a job at college, and bought an Xbox 360. I also bought a twenty-six-inch LCD TV and an HDMI cable. There was a place I used to go during break to be alone, in the woods, to read or to smoke – I don’t know why I went there, but it was peaceful. Silent. One day, I masturbated there, and nearly got caught – a man and his dog approached, as it was a secluded but otherwise accessible path. I felt quite pleased with myself, and said hello to the man, having only finished zipping up my trousers seconds ago. I had other hiding spots too. I’d also eat my lunch in those places. I just wanted to be alone!
In 2011, I had some IT jobs, and I bought a new PC. It still ran Linux. I just wanted a shiny new computer. I was fired from every job for gross negligence, and quit the last one, leaving the boss to find someone else as good and as cheap as me to maintain my code – a victory, haha. I stole from some of my employers, and I even sometimes masturbated at my desk… I already covered this. I’m just reminding you that I was a bastard.
I once fantasised about the boss in one of my jobs, along with his wife, both lovely people. I liked them both, especially when I fantasised about tying them up to wooden boards. I’d force the wife to smoke or something, and just feed them both. Keep them as my pets or something. Obviously, I would never kidnap anyone or abuse them in the real world – my vivid imagination freed me to do as I pleased. Most of my fantasies, though, are quite mundane, but I did quite like them both.
In 2013, the Libreboot project was born, and I was still a bastard. Still am.
How did I feel? I felt like a normal child. How do you expect me to feel? I’m me. I can’t feel like anything else. I laughed and cried like any other child. I don’t think I experienced what might be described as love then – though I liked my parents. They were robots like everyone else, but these ones fed and clothed me. I didn’t always understand them, but they put up with me and enabled my intellect to grow.
These incidents were just so – and the list I’ve provided is by no means exhaustive. No, sir! I otherwise lived a normal life, quite comparable to any other child. I really don’t know how else to say it. I became more of a loner in my teens, once I started to become intellectually and materially more independent, but I did still hang out with a few people. I did occasionally meet up with people in my late teens or visit family and such, leading up to my twentieth birthday.
I never felt like I was missing anything then. I simply lived my life, the best way I knew how, with the tools that I was given. I can say that I was given excellent tools. I was often seen by others as chaotic and unpredictable at times, but most people said I was charming – when I wanted to be – or I’d otherwise try not to bother anyone. I lived a peaceful, quiet life, and that’s all I have to say. No more discussing my childhood!
No drama. Just a normal child who sometimes made mistakes. The difference was not the mistakes made, or good decisions made, but the mind behind them. I was social, in some sense, but the way I related to others then was completely different. It was always transactional, even from a young age. A lot of children are the same, but they develop a deeper emotional connection as their minds develop; people like me seem like other children, at this age. There were a lot of differences even then, but the difference between myself and others would only become more obvious as I aged into adulthood. I was happy most days, even relaxed, as I just focused on my life.
July 2018 now, and I’m at the London Passport Office. Have you ever had to call your doctor from the London Passport Office? Security tried to escort me from the building, but I wasn’t leaving without my passport. I was there for my passport that said Ms. Leah Rowe with the letter F, and a dishevelled-looking photo of myself. I had all of the documents I needed, even a letter from my doctor, where I forgot the doctor’s signature. Whoops.
The doctor faxed a new copy of the document with his signature on it, while security asked why I was just loitering in the lobby. If I wanted to bomb them, I wouldn’t exactly hang around, would I? I just wanted my fucking passport. The man at the desk explained it to them – yes, all sorted. Passport arrived at my home the next day.
It was July 2018. I’d totally failed to raise money for surgery and had to beg on the internet. Fortunately, I’d been leading a highly popular cult called the Libreboot project for five years, so multiple Libreboot fans sent me thousands of US dollars at a time and I raised about $20,000 in a week. All sorted. One of them was someone who’d begun their own gender transition, inspired by mine. Five thousand dollars. I did thank them, though I took it in stride that I could count on their support – it had been my experience at that point that I always had an angel to take care of me. There was always someone, and I had no problem asking for help.
The Libreboot committee was furious that I’d abused the Libreboot infrastructure for this purpose, but they agreed reluctantly to allow it – on condition that it be worded perfectly. I needed them to stay in the project, so I did submit to their review and the text of my campaign went through several drafts. It was published directly on the Libreboot website, where I knew it would be seen, and I provided a payment link.
My parents ate with me on the day I left, at the airport. They had driven me there, and I was totally calm the whole time. Of course, they themselves were terrified, and my mother told me years later that she’d cried the moment I left her sight through the ticket gate. I didn’t want to take her with me, for precisely that reason, and being in Thailand on my own meant that I’d have freedom – I liked being alone, you see.
I was having Gender Reassignment Surgery in a foreign country, the country of Thailand. Yes, I was getting a vagina. It all felt totally fake upon landing, like everything was a prop in a TV studio, but that could have been the forty-eight hours of no sleep talking. A man from the clinic had my name on a sign at the airport. We visited psychiatrists, lawyers, physicians and I signed about fifty disclaimers. Totally worth it.
Perfect health. I’d abused my body for a full year to reach 80kg, perfect blood pressure, athlete-level resting heart rate and the nurse even asked me how much I work out. I had superhuman health. The irony is that I was excited about the exercise gym available at the hotel I’d be staying at. I’d seen photos of it and imagined myself using it each morning.
Then the clinic – where several patients hugged me. Such was the camaraderie of this place, by design, to ensure that those going through such absolutely mental recovery would not be lonely. I went to my hotel and slept for a glorious eighteen hours.
My hotel was extremely old-fashioned, like what you see in an old 007 film. A large round hall as you entered, with lush flora and fauna. A man was always in the centre of the hall, playing music on a large piano, surrounded by flowers. I was greeted at reception with a glass of sugar cane juice. The receptionist seemed unimpressed when I simply downed the lot, and walked away. I was knackered and needed sleep.
A ’No Durians’ sign was present, next to the No Smoking signs. Two-thousand baht fine for smelly fruit – bloody sheets, though, were tolerated. That hotel was used by the clinic, reserving an entire floor for patients, and nurses had access to rooms. This was so that they could monitor us daily, after initial recovery in the nearby hospital. The clinic keeps patients there for a month after surgery, and their aftercare was world-renowned.
The heat and the humidity there was unbearable, unlike anything I’d ever known. It felt like breathing warm water, and it even had a smell. The city also smelled. A sweaty, oily heat smell. I would learn to love it, and even miss it, after I left.
The next day, I would get to know some patients. There was a downstairs breakfast area and I would go to the clinic next. At the clinic, my surgeon seemed quite enthusiastic about the fact that I had excellent elasticity. He was actually smiling. His apprentice was nodding. I’d never known anyone to be this happy about my genitalia before, but I suppose it made sense.
He estimated that I would have a depth of roughly eight inches, which was very good. I was then immediately taken to the hospital, it being lunchtime, and I would also eat lunch there that day. My room was just like another hotel room, and it even had an extra area for a visitor to sleep in. Some patients came with parents or lovers, but I was there alone as I couldn’t afford to bring anyone. I didn’t want anyone with me anyway.
Surgery came the next day, at the hospital. I noted how modern it felt inside, and there were lots of screens everywhere to help guide you, like the starship, Enterprise. Not that I needed help; the clinic took care of me.
The food was awful, especially for vegans. I quickly switched to meat. Even that was absolute slop. Nutritional slop. I wasn’t allowed to eat it anyway, after 10 p.m. – a nurse came in and cleaned my bowels with an enema, watching me pissing out of my arse several times. The nurse also shaved every single hair off of my genitalia. For some reason, I masturbated afterward.
Then I just went to sleep. I woke up feeling full of life – it was important that I get a good night’s sleep. They ordered me to piss and then shower immediately. These people wasted no time.
A team of male nurses, who all looked like they went to the gym a lot, then entered my room and wheeled me to an operational theatre. I met eyes with another patient I’d seen the day before, but we did not speak each other’s language – she simply smiled at me. A beautiful Japanese lady, roughly my age. She had a large entourage with her, and seemed to come from some wealth. A lot of the patients there were incredibly wealthy. I didn’t feel like an imposter, because I had paid for it and deserved to be here but I did find it funny, given how I’d funded my trip. I was mildly disappointed that I could not speak to her, and I wished I could understand Japanese. Pity.
The nurses all spoke to me, as they and all the assistants prepared. My surgeon and his assistant both spoke to me, reassuring me that I was in safe hands. I wasn’t worried, due to my research. I remember how white the room was, and how many electrical sockets were present on a large tower in the centre of the room, containing all of the tools that were about to cut me open. I was both blissful and thankful.
I quietly spoke to one of the nurses, completely calm, though I don’t remember the topic. My anaesthetist would soon stand over me to ask whether I was ready. I said: Surprise me. I continued speaking with the nurse, who smiled at me and even laughed at my jokes. I then heard the following words: ’Sharp scratch.’
I only remember thanking them in this moment. Moments later, I was being wheeled down a hall, the lights dimmer this time, not quite sure what had happened as I had only just conversed with the lovely nurse. We were moving at what seemed like high speed and everything was a blur. I heard chatter in the background, and then a blurry blob resembling my surgeon wearing a white mask was staring down at me, uttering the following words: ‘Your operation was a success, and there were no complications.’
The next week was mostly a blur. I slept a lot, and mostly just watched cartoons when awake, on my laptop. I spoke to my mother a lot, who didn’t need to know how awful the hospital meals were.
I published a photo of myself and a message of thanks, to the Libreboot website. The committee no longer concerned me, because now I had what I wanted – no, now I wanted something far more important. Two days post-op, I crossed the room for the kettle. Every stitch felt ready to burst, but I was adamant that I would have not one, but two cups of coffee. The nurse laughed, but also told me that I should never, ever do that again. She took away my coffee. At no point had I even considered how unsafe my caffeinated adventure could possibly be, in what was three metres across a small room.
One boring week later, Mrs. Cathy came out and I pissed blood. Cathy was an evil fucking cunt, my bride from hell. Back in she went, and then I left the hospital. I pissed into Cathy for weeks. Cathy sucks. I later figured out that I could hide her in my handbag, with the tube routed through my dress. This enabled me some dignity to walk around without her being seen. That evil bag.
A patient cried because someone she loved had died. Everyone comforted her as my soup went cold and I went back to my room, devastated. I loved my hotel room; it was the cheapest room available. It had a large double bed, a very respectable shower – with a broken nozzle that hurt when I used it. It did have a fridge. Everything except the mattress was made of wood. There was an old twenty-inch cathode-ray tube television with analogue aerial. I would arrange everything so that it was within reach, and a nurse visited me every day – I also befriended the cleaning lady, who showed me photos of her home.
The room was dead silent at night, and I’d blast my Chinese TV all night, or watch Archer on my laptop. Sometimes Sailor Moon. I would occasionally invite other patients to relax with me as I entertained them. One time, I was explaining to my guests how the cathode-ray tube television in my room worked, and I was high on all the painkillers. I was half-naked in my pyjamas as they ate some of my leftover pizza. The air conditioning had malfunctioned, and I sweated as a makeshift fan was running – I was determined to explain exactly how an electron gun works. Cathy enjoyed my lecture.
I sometimes abused the sleeping pills they gave me, taking far more than I should along with the other drugs. Mixed with alcohol, I sometimes woke up in paralysis. In this state, the room appeared like I was submerged in water, and I could not feel my body weight. My eyes felt as though I could float around the room. It was a state of pure thought, fully awake while I also felt my dreams.
Dead skin fell out of my vagina. Cathy stayed in, the bitch that she is, but I had the last laugh. Cathy came out a few weeks later, a week before I left. I was terrified because she fell out while I sat on the toilet. The nurse, who I called frantically on the phone, told me that I should just pee, after I’d freaked out a thousand times.
Pissing with a vagina for the first time is wonderful; it’s almost like telekinesis. I just think and it comes out. Total inner peace. I felt like I had Little Leah my entire life – that’s what I call her.
That was actually the third time Cathy came out. The second time, I still couldn’t piss – still no blood, but having her put back in me hurt like a bitch. Delirious, I asked my clinic friend, who also had her own Cathy, to sing the Soviet Union National Anthem in Klingon. She did. I laughed so hard that the nurse couldn’t find my urethra, and I had to be physically restrained. Fuck Cathy.
I annoyed one of the nurses. We were in a class at the clinic, being told how to insert the dilators in our vaginas. I’d ranted endlessly on a Discord chatroom set up by clinic patients, about the wonders of communism, and why they were all entitled yuppies – how they simply took their new bodies for granted. At one point, being told the dynamic dilation technique, a nurse commented that they would never allow such things in China, because they’re communists, and this fact had come up for some reason. My eyebrows twitched.
I told the nurse that China is awesome. A patient – the one who had banned me from Discord – in the room visibly sighed, and nobody dared question my logic. I’d been watching too much CCTV-4, the Chinese daily TV channel, which was available for some reason on my CRT TV. I once watched a documentary about Mao during the revolution of 1949, and it basically made him look like Jesus. He’d show up during a manic scene and light his cigarette – everything fixed, as he sips his tea, smiling with everyone. Mao was incredibly based, apparently.
I was banned from the Discord server because I mixed tramadol with rum one night, while also taking my SSRIs that I was on at the time – all three of these mixed caused a certain high in my brain that made me extremely insane. I cannot describe in words just how insane I was, and I do not remember what I said, but it was infamous the next day. Nobody told me what I’d said, but some patients avoided me after that. I thoroughly enjoyed their indignation as they literally sat on the other side of the room away from my group, during breakfast.
A few friends and a few weeks later, I would travel back to the UK – for now, though, I wanted to enjoy myself! The patients I met were nice and I still remember all of their names. I don’t normally care much for people, but I was trapped in that hellhole for a month so I decided I may as well make friends. I played Mortal Kombat with one of them, on my Libreboot ThinkPad with a PlayStation emulator. We also ate pizza one time, in my room, and we occasionally went to restaurants. Cathy shared drinks with me, and I emptied her into the one available squatter.
It was just like being back in school. Most of my peers were entitled yuppies who I obviously didn’t much care for, and there were even cliques, just like in school. My group consisted of myself, an Australian, one American and one British, who were all very nice. There was a group of French patients who constantly talked about their wealth and seemed to think they were better than everyone; they often tried to control everyone around them, including my American friend. They never stepped one foot near me, sensing my disdain, which I made no effort to hide. My American friend actually called me a bitch repellent – that is how we became friends.
I did like the American lady the most. Total normie but she respected my quirks as she had known people like me before, and for some reason I just liked her. We went out one day to a nearby shop, and I showed her my butt-pack: the cushion that the clinic gave us for sitting could be tied to a backpack so that you could sit anywhere without pain, by lowering the backpack. This was among several examples, plus an explanation of my professional life, that led said friend to tell me how clever and resourceful I am, improvising even the most insanely mundane things in ways like this. My lovely American friend, yes. Absolutely normal woman, but she somehow felt pleasant and she always smiled at me. Not a threat in any sense of the word. She was the one who enjoyed my lecture!
It wasn’t all fun and games. As my American friend put it, this was business, not a holiday. Painful business, and we would all have our own bad days. My American friend once couldn’t walk back to her room, but I was feeling up for it. I helped walk her back to her room, unlocking her door for her – and then leaving to go back downstairs. My other friends were eating downstairs. I remember having that same neutrality on my face, while walking my friend to her room, like when I’d visited my first transgender friend in 2015.
I remember having another thought in my mind at the time, seeing my doped out friend as she passed out in her bed. I thought nothing of it, and simply left the room to continue eating. She was very pretty, and I didn’t see her until the next day.
Business indeed. I would often wake up with bloody sheets, sometimes piss stains. I sometimes couldn’t even get myself out of bed. I often couldn’t sleep, through all the pain. Dilating three times a day through extreme pain, and we had to keep doing it. We had to shower three times daily, but I couldn’t stand for more than a few minutes before feeling like I’d pass out. Getting to the clinic felt like a marathon, despite being around the corner. My seat cushion helped, but even sitting was painful. Changing into a new pair of socks was the worst thing of all. Everything hurt, at all times.
I once lay on the clinic sofa, crying because I just couldn’t move. I wanted to buy snacks, and a former patient who volunteered there drove me in her car to the nearby corner shop. I bought whatever I wanted. They dragged me, crying, back to my hotel room.
Similar happened once when we ate as a group, at a restaurant around the corner from the hotel. The food was nice, and I had a good time, but I’d over-done it and simply could not walk back. I was taken in both arms by two other people – patients themselves – while I cried the whole way.
I didn’t respect hotel staff either. I would often order food, usually with at least two glasses of rum and coke to my room each night. Mixing alcohol and tramadol also made me loopy, which led to a rather infamous scene in a chatroom one night – just a surreal stream of consciousness.
I was me the whole time, and I had no inhibitions. I did not control my thoughts at all, during that time. This is part of why the American liked me, I suppose. I’m quite intense when I don’t control myself, and that can sometimes land me in trouble – not that I was any threat here, in that state.
I made up stories too. For some reason, I told one of the clinic patients that I work for the post office. I told another patient that I’d once survived a seventy miles per hour head-on traffic collision unscathed – and she believed it. She said God wasn’t ready for me that day.
I expressed extreme opinions, often quite edgy ones, that made people uncomfortable, like the idea that Communism was the best possible political system, or that heroin is harmless – I don’t condone drug-taking, but I was being edgy. I was often vulgar. I think the people in my group liked it, or they were just taking the piss behind my back, but I didn’t really care. I knew that I would never see them again.
They were sort of like single-serving friends, like in the film. You know the one. That film. Single-serving flight friends. I didn’t care what they thought of me, because I knew I would never see them again after a few weeks. I just had to survive their presence until I left.
Some of my friends were a bit nuts too. Remember the French ones? I went to their room once. They were having a sleepover or something. Totally childish, and they had one of the nicer rooms. Bitches. I felt outcast, and felt that they were quite dull. The Australian from my group was there – she felt lonely there, having been invited, so she invited me. The actual occupants of the room did not invite me, and probably didn’t want me there. They never spoke to me.
For some reason, I had been invited. My suspicion was that the French ladies were soliciting other patients for sex, but they could tell that I wasn’t interested. My Australian friend was eighteen, and her grandmother was sleeping in her room – she’d come to the clinic with her grandmother.
I was in bed with a bag of piss beside me when the eighteen-year-old Australian climbed on top of me. ‘Hello there,’ I said, smiling.
She didn’t seem to mind the bag of piss sitting next to me. My very British defence had deterred what was clearly sexual assault. She climbed off.
I didn’t think of it afterward. Just a cute, confused and horny Australian. She was a bit psycho, which was exactly why I liked her, especially up close. She also had a really nice hybrid Australian/Vietnamese accent, which just made her even cooler.
I continued eating breakfast with her each morning. No need to report the incident. I told her later that I wasn’t into her, but she had no trouble correcting me; she felt my erection. She told me so plainly, while smiling at me and maintaining eye contact.
This isn’t even the strangest thing that happened. A lot of those patients were nuts. Absolutely fucking bananas. One of them once got high and tried to jump off of a roof for instance.
I found it curious that they cancelled her surgery because of it. What had happened was that the French ladies – yes – had given her hallucinogenic drugs to calm her down, but she ended up having an extremely violent trip. They were also generally just scaring the lady. I never saw it happen, but I did imagine it. I found it funny, though I remained polite while my American friend told the story, telling her just how awful it all sounded. Yes, normal woman. Do not offend the lovely American.
I was a mess the whole time, and I would often lash out at people in pain. The nurses often became annoyed with me. I pissed off a lot of people. I didn’t like not being in control of myself.
A new American arrived, and I told her what she had in store. ’Why are you trying to scare me?’ she asked.
’Us girls gotta stick together,’ I said – I simply did not like her. She was a professional athlete, rich and had the same entitled attitude as most of the other patients.
The American and British lady in my group liked my rants. They thought I was cool apparently. The ladies in my group weren’t rich – they were normal, like me. They lived actual real lives. I was the one in the group who said what nobody else would. Bitch repellent, yes.
One of the yuppies invaded the sanctity of our group and bragged about her wealth. Her husband was with her too and was also rich – some stupid insurance broker in New York. The stupid bitch just kept telling us about her house and car and… ugh. She had the most annoying voice too. Absolutely insufferable woman who had no problem telling me how to live my life. She sucked all of the energy out of the room, and I’m sure everyone else hated her as much as I did.
The bitch once actually entered my room to wake me up. My door was unlocked and she simply assumed permission. I wondered how much damage I could do to her for such a brutal intrusion into my sanctuary, but I was late for my clinic appointment. Good thing she woke me. I forgot about it shortly thereafter, but I did have to keep tolerating her.
She infuriated me in the downstairs dim-sum restaurant. I had spent an entire evening the previous night, watching videos about how to eat it properly and with the correct etiquette, and the bitch asked for a fork. I wanted to shove it in her eye.
Her husband was even worse. A very stupid New Yorker himself who complained – yes he did – about the squatters, and how the bathrooms were always wet. Yes, wear the slippers they give you, I thought. Oh, you don’t like taking your shoes off when you enter a Seven-Eleven? Fuck off back to America then, stupid pig. I held my tongue.
Most of my days there were quite boring, though. We were all in extreme pain, recovering in our rooms and we all slept a lot – I was no exception. I would often have days where nobody was awake, and I’d eat alone downstairs, or just go on my computer all day. The dilation schedule itself was brutal: one hour, and you have to insert a hard, straight dildo-shaped object into an open wound, holding it there. After a while, we were also instructed to rotate, for increased width as well as depth. Doing that was painful, and then we’d have to shower. Showering hurt, a lot. My bathroom was always a bloody mess – the cleaner regularly had to mop up my blood and piss.
My surgeon showed me photos of my surgery on the last day. I think he just loved his job or something. He showed me all of what he had done to me, gore included, and handed me a USB flash drive with a copy of the evidence. Excellent.
I left with little fanfare. I’d jettisoned nearly all of my clothes, mostly purchased just before the trip to match local fashion. I needed space for all the dilators, lube, condoms, piss mats and various other gear I’d need for my recovery at home. I left my room in a total mess.
My friends came to say goodbye and found only my discarded clothes. I messaged them later to say that I was late for my flight – they had served their purpose. One of them would annoy me by calling me at 2 a.m. to recount the story. I did install a modchip in a PlayStation 2 for one of them.
I was apparently a vegan, so I got my meal first on the return flight. The airport’s reserved lane for Buddhist monks amused me. The Australian and I also kept in touch, somehow. My one regret was that I never did get to try fried crickets.
In spite of any overly dramatic representation here, this was one of the best, most happiest periods in my life. I genuinely enjoyed myself in Thailand, and I enjoyed the friends I made there. I really did just have fun for a month. I was there for a month anyway, in pain, so I made the most of it. I felt relaxed the whole time, with very little anxiety of any kind. It really did feel like being back at school, in a way; that part was not hyperbole. I missed my friends after I got home; I tnink, though, that if I’d continued staying there for much longer, that the novelty would have worn off. The place I stayed at in Thailand was a boring industrial district, and I basically treated it like I was on holiday.
I had a Facebook account, that I’d used for my Labour Party activism, but I resigned my membership on a whim during this time, inspired by my friend who was in the Communist Party. I posted the photos of my surgery being performed, to my Facebook account, which my Labour Party colleagues still followed. My account was immediately banned, which amused me. I no longer needed the account.
I also posted the photos to my blog, in an article titled “I had the balls to do this”, because I’m very funny and talented. It ended up being posted for shock value on multiple right-wing forums, and I was told once by someone that they saw it while they were in class at college. I’m smiling, in the article, and without warning, it just starts showing my balls being removed, and my entire crotch just being cut up and spliced.
A friend on IRC told me I was insane. She told me it was positively deranged that I would post such private photos. I just found it funny. I did it on a whim while bored, in Thailand, before I flew home. I found it funny when people found it so horrifying, because to me it just looked like a routine surgery, one that had given me a level of inner peace I’d never known previously. My surgeon was a genius.
It was a beautifully serene British summer day, a perfect bliss as though I had entered heaven. I was riding my bicycle without a care in the world. An army of ducks had wandered from the lake, and were blocking the road. Life felt perfect. Just as I went to dismount, and walk around the adorable little things, I received a call from my mother.
She had made my ex somewhat of a second daughter, and had temporarily housed her – she then moved into her own place, after my mother had found her a job.
Fast forward to this glorious day a week before my surgery, while I counted the number of ducks, I heard that her landlord had kicked her out. I figured I would need a nurse after I got home, so I ignored my mother’s rudeness and agreed to let my ex move back in with me, who shall hereafter be known as Roommate.
I had a lot of fun with my surgery friends, one of whom was the Japanese lady that got her surgery in Roommate’s place, after I’d cancelled Roommate’s surgery deposit. I forgot that Roommate was even at my house, the entire time. I was too busy dilating, eating dim sum and not eating crickets the whole time.
Enter 1st September 2018. I had felt every bump rip every stitch in my crotch through a highly turbulent fifteen-hour flight. Economy class, without entertainment, only a bloody hole – yellow, by the time I landed. You do not know pain. My parents failed to pick me up, because Roommate’s car had broken down. An airport attendant refused to push me further, so I cried profusely until he did. I screamed at my mother on the phone all the way home, in a cab that cost me three hundred Great British Pounds.
I screamed bloody murder for two hours, on the phone with my mother. She was there to greet me in my driveway, shower me – and clothe me. Then I had to dilate – and shower again. I cried again. Then she fed me. Then I thanked her, through tears. It was humiliating.
Then I remembered that Roommate exists. She walked in and stared at me, and I remembered that I’d left her behind. I remembered the smiling Japanese lady and I smiled harder. I remembered the beautiful Japanese lady, yes, and I calmed down. I took a hit of my vape, and smiled again. I even laughed. Everything was well in hand.
Our relationship would go on to have all the energy of a bad situation comedy. Her friends even said so. We would get up to all sorts of weird things together, and the dysfunction of the two of us in that tiny bungalow caused us all kinds of problems.
Roommate and Mother both prepared food for me. I didn’t want to burden them, since they weren’t vegans, so I stopped being vegan. They made me a lot of dairy-rich meals, because I reasoned that vegetarian dieting would be feasible for them at least. I did later start eating meat again, though, during recovery. I’d eaten meat in Thailand, because there weren’t any viable vegan options while I was there, and I reasoned that I needed much more protein to speed up recovery.
I loved my new body, and I went nudist for a while, indoors. I walked around a lot, in my house, and Roommate often saw me naked. This also amused me at the time, because I’d canceled her surgery; she was supposed to come with me to Thailand, but I canceled her deposit after we broke up, since I’d already paid it myself. She hadn’t paid a penny. Now she had to watch me enjoy myself, in my new body.
Morning came, and I was already extremely bored. Home was boring. Sitting in bed all day was boring. Roommate more or less wiped my arse and did anything I asked, but she was a boring friend – and apparently, my dubious maid, who still didn’t know how to use a shower. She did help me change socks sometimes. My mother came every day to cook my meals, and she too was boring. My worker up North was especially boring. Everything had become mind-numbingly boring. Even the air was boring.
Then the Jehovah’s Witnesses changed my life – for six weeks. I literally just invited them in. They came for a few hours each week and told me all about God. They saw my weakness and quickly picked up on my scientific mind, so they focused on supposedly scientific information contained in the Holy Bible.
They told me all manner of things, like how humanity was once immortal, how we all became evil and how we’re all going to… not hell, because they don’t believe in that either, it seemed. They spoke of one day entering God’s kingdom where everyone would have perfect health at all times, all needs provided and we would all live forever. One eternal kingdom – God’s Kingdom. It sounded amazing! I wanted to hear more of this wonderful tale!
It was an absolute load of bollocks, but they were my weekly real-life television channel. They also did extra shopping for me and made me cups of tea. I also showed them the Inter Dimensional Cable episode of Rick and Morty. Roommate was furious that I even let them in. She locked herself in her room whenever they were here.
The Jehovah’s Witnesses once entered my house while I was dilating. I pulled the duvet over the lube and learned about Pontius Pilate, my religious friends none the wiser that I’d pissed bloody lube as I took multiple fat vapes. I continued dilating, immediately after they left and still didn’t close the door. Too fucking hot.
I was trolling them of course. After six weeks I became much more mobile and they showed up on schedule. I forgot they were coming and I just couldn’t be bothered so I told them what I think, that the God they describe is a fascist and that the world they want is called fascism. The look of horror in their eyes brought me great joy. A wonderful end to six week as we fade to black.
The guy was actually upset, saying only: ’You don’t know him.’ – He and his disciple walked away to proselytise someone else. He did later come back to my driveway while I was drunk, the next year, and I just… do not remember what I said, but it resulted in him spamming my text messages for a day. Nice bloke. Insane, but nice.
November 2018 rolls around and I did a new Libreboot talk at FreeNode.Live 2018 in Bristol, UK. I was on my feet quickly. I very much enjoyed it, and spent many nights there talking to a very special friend online as my vagina sang to her. She told me I have a porn-star pussy. I also got drunk in my room on the last night, throwing up and leaving a huge mess for the staff to clean up – and on the same night, enjoyed a very nice Indian restaurant meal with a random Libreboot fan who had been stalking me all day. Nice bloke, and he also bought one of my routers.
On that same night, while drunk, I had written in my journal, sitting at a bar with my rum and coke, the following words: ’My life is comically absurd.’
I knew exactly what it meant the next day. The FSF executive director was there and had me fix a Libreboot issue on his ThinkPad – I insisted that he install Vim before I do so. He is an emacs maintainer. I also volunteered at the FSF booth, and sold one of their Emacs books to an onlooker – that was my job, to sell gear for the FSF. The juxtaposition of me sitting in that chair amused me. I was smiling politely at the FSF boss all day, being extremely nice to him and even complimenting his dress. He told me a bit about himself, like how he used to smoke cigarettes and be really fat – before going vegan and not smoking cigarettes. That is all I remember him saying. I nodded meekly while not reading his Emacs books, but I found the GNU plushy satisfying.
I was back. No rest for the wicked, and I took it slow nonetheless – no heavy lifting for a year, but that’s what my minion in the North was for. Christmas came and went without incident, except that Roommate would cry as always – and I just played Duke Nukem 3D in DosBox on my Libreboot desktop computer. Roommate kept me entertained every now and then, and I would watch TV with her or play computer games with her. We would often just talk, like friends. She still had her problems of course, but she was doing a little bit better, and she knew how to avoid offending me.
I was rubbish at judging time, so we once drove all the way to the north of England to meet someone, who I thought was closer; our destination was a four-hour drive. I just kept giving her directions until she finally asked where the hell we were going. She was furious the rest of the way there and back – and we got back at around 3 a.m. or so. My meeting with the man lasted only one hour.
We got about two to three hours of sleep and then went to a Pride event. This is why she was furious, because she knew she’d be exhausted all day. I laughed at her and told her to just sleep at home – knowing that she had a Pride event. I mostly slept in the car, both ways, and spent time with my local Labour Party, forgetting that Roommate even existed until she later drove me home.
My roommate once held me hostage while bedridden, making me watch every then released episode of Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure. I learned to like it. Jotaro is a beefbus. Roommate also brought her weird friends home to entertain me, many of whom were quite nice. She also brought her new girlfriend home regularly, who would be dealt with at a later date.
I couldn’t stand staying in bed. I went shopping for food again after two months recovery, using Roommate, who would drive me and carry everything. Any number of errands actually. There was just one problem: her stay with me was finite while I got back on my feet, as she looked for a new place with her girlfriend. Roommate was into BDSM, but her new girlfriend was not; in other words, Roommate needed a new partner. She said so herself, but she loved her girlfriend and had remained loyal.
New-girlfriend had come home with Roommate on occasion, and it was the supermarket all over again, only now she was judging my fucking house. Bitch. She came in during the morning, after staying the night with Roommate, and used my toilet. I remember she did look quite pretty as the morning sun glistened over her, but I knew that the mind behind it was duller than dishwater – archaeologists usually are. I was soldering some stuff in my lab. She said nothing to me, actually avoiding eye contact with me the entire time, as though I was a piece of shit. She never even thanked me for the vegan pizza I’d cooked the previous night, the recipe for which I also shared with her. I did say good morning, politely. Yes, that one was wily.
Roommate reached breaking point later that week, and decided to take my advice, dumping new-Girlfriend. She’d already been cheating on her in her mind, so this was just acknowledging reality – all she needed to do was commit physically to the act.
I told her that she should follow her heart, that she should, in other words, leave her girlfriend and seek BDSM partners. I even helped her buy the gear she needed. Her girlfriend was highly intelligent and would likely have a good job soon in her highly specialised field of… archaeology, and they could have possibly been happy together, but the sex would have been unsatisfying to both of them. Now, I’m all about unhappy marriages, but I liked having a maid.
I remember the night she drove to her girlfriend’s place – the one who gave me salad tips. She was nervous the whole time before leaving, feeling extreme guilt at her desire because she did genuinely love her. She cried profusely after she got home, which did annoy me because I had to deal with all the fallout. I was nonetheless satisfied that I had got my revenge for the salad.
It also meant that she now stayed with me to be my friend. She soon started seeing BDSM people. Her new BDSM partners were the weird friends I mentioned, and it was a new person each night – sometimes the same one. I wasn’t interested in the sex and paid no attention, but I would talk to a lot of them after they were done, or during breakfast the next morning. They would tell me about their lives, and some of them did actually have quite interesting lives.
Libreboot was well in hand. The committee wrote a lot of code and attracted lots of developers. Why should I bother them, I thought? Let them get on with it. They maintained my castle for me. I also had my worker in the North. All I did was invoicing.
Everything was in hand. I had freedom. I also had pain, and had to tolerate Roommate’s friends, but that was a small price to pay. I’d sit and vape while listening to them bore me to tears.
I taught myself highly advanced electrical engineering and spent a year mastering microsoldering, entirely from visualising what I saw from YouTube videos and then replicating it – successfully. I possess a highly visual mind, and I’m good with my hands.
I also drew a lot. Mostly anime fan art, especially crossovers. Goku hunting dragon balls in Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, for example. FSF posted a realistic drawing I did of Richard Stallman – they called it ‘terrific,’ yes.
I moonlighted in the Communist Party for a while, because someone I knew was in it, and I was curious. I shitposted some stuff on Twitter, but I was never involved much in activism. I sympathise with them, but I don’t really care. Social democratic politics is fine. I did post some really stupid stuff, no longer online, because I was bored. Some vaguely defined revolutionary spiel. Yes. The leader of the Communist Party of Britain shall be named: Party Comrade Boss. Yes, and I will have more to say about him.
I also went to a lot of general social outings with Roommate, as I was walking again by November 2018. My surgery killed almost all my sex drive so I no longer required sex either. What I had now was essentially a new best friend, for the second time. We were not dating, just living together and sharing deeply personal stories and feelings with each other on a regular basis, and generally expressing an interest in each other’s hobbies. We were best friends.
She would occasionally bring home a new dominatrix – one of whom was a Jamaican lady with the most beautiful dreadlocks I have ever seen, who told me what a sex headache is. She explained it to me while I was speedrunning Metal Gear Solid 3 Subsistence on my Sony PlayStation 2, after she’d fucked Roommate. I was often selected to be their conversation partner after they were done with Roommate. I don’t know why. The Jamaican lady was my favourite one, and she enjoyed watching me sneak around in Groznygrad – I was playing the game on European Extreme difficulty.
Roommate came home to find the PlayStation 2 still on. I stood up, pulled my trousers down, and pissed two bottles of Merlot onto the floor. Total fugue state. I couldn’t stop laughing at her angry note the next morning as I imagined her cleaning my piss. I started my day, and immediately made her drive me somewhere in her car.
She could say nothing at all. I needed all the help I could get, at this difficult time. I was genuinely in need of help, but I did take several liberties.
I once also showed my pornographic collection to my mother while drunk, during this time. She said nothing. She’d made cocktails for me one night, and I was just chatting with her. She told me later that I seem really weird when I’m drunk; not happy or sad drunk like most people. No, I just say weird things when I’m drunk.
Two days is all it takes to be me, and I was two-months post-op. I joined the Communist Party during October 2018, one month after I arrived home from my surgery. My friend, whom I had met through the Free Software movement, was in it at the time. One day, he happened to accidentally include some Communist material in something else that he sent me, which made me curious.
Communism is stupid. I really just did not believe in it at all, but I’m able to rationalise almost any political view. I’m able to put myself inside the mind of anyone, and internalise their world-view. Watch:
I’d already been familiar with the history of the Communist Party years before, because I’d studied them when I was in college during the late 2000s. I’ve always been sympathetic to the concept of Marxism, and all of its implementations – I can be critical of specific human rights abuses that sometimes occurred in Communist countries, but how is that any different to the capitalist abuses when people are evicted from their homes – because the government decided to privatise public services and make everyone poor?
It resonated with me also because of my Free Software politics, which is essentially socialism in all but name. It is the idea that everyone, no matter who they are, must work collectively to own their society, by controlling the very means of… production. Yes. Communism. Excellent.
This can be goods, services but more importantly, the very culture itself. Ditto media, education, infrastructure – in our Western societies, these tend to be centrally owned and not under our actual control. We can vote for representatives, but circumstances often prevent even them from acting in our favour. They can be bought. The idea of communism is to establish a largely decentralised… boring. Read a book about Communism.
I’m a believer in democracy, but I mean direct democracy. One thing communist countries all claim is the democracy expressed through citizens’ assemblies – far more nuanced than what we’re taught in the west. Western media will often paint a country like China or DPRK as corrupt dictatorships, but what I see is that these countries came from poverty. I mean, the Korean Workers’ Party is pretty based, apparently. They were owned – often occupied – and decided to control their own futures instead. I see in China that a billion people have been lifted out of poverty since the 1980s – and I see the general rapid growth in that country, especially since the Deng reforms. Growth in terms of economics, industry and culture. These countries introduced universal healthcare and welfare states for the first time, and much of the reason we have such things in the West now is a direct legacy of that, when we competed with these countries during the Cold War. That’s what Soviet means. It literally translates to: citizen’s council.
The end of the Cold War saw massive deindustrialisation and privatisation of the former Soviet Union. Millions of people lost their jobs, and went hungry. They didn’t even get democracy – a kind of cronyism developed, where once the people had the power to determine how their own country was built, you now had owners. American owners, mostly. Many former Soviet countries today still haven’t recovered since that time, stuck in poverty – though some people did get rich.
Only some. It used to be that they didn’t have much, but what they had, everyone had. Of course, our Western leaders would spin it, hailing the newfound freedoms in the east. Institutions like the EU and NATO rapidly expanded eastward as bright young engineers, mathematicians, artists and all sorts were drained westward – having been educated by public universities, built with blood. Oh well, you have democracy now.
Go anywhere in Eastern Europe or in most of Russia today, and you’ll find no shortage of older people who will tell you how much better they had it. None of them would blink if it came back.
Freedom is the ability to eat, sleep and live comfortably, knowing that nothing will ever happen to you, that there will always be someone to catch you when you fall. Socialism gives you that peace.
Of course, I don’t want censored internet, and I like having a free press, and I’m under no illusion about what actually happens in such countries. North Korea is not a nice place to live. China is pretty OK for most people these days, but the effort to get there cost many lives. At the same time, I won’t say that Mao was a butcher because of the Cultural Revolution or Great Leap Forward – they were acts of incompetence, not malice, implemented then in good faith because he wanted his country to thrive. Before the PRC, China had been occupied relentlessly by foreign powers. The Japanese fucked them quite royally during World War II, for example.
I don’t like concentration camps. If the state can lock up one person, they might lock me up, so I don’t want them, even if I also believe that religion is a threat to the security of any democratic state – but I digress. Religious people should not be in government, but they apparently have the right to.
I don’t like slavery either, which a lot of early Soviet infrastructure was built with. Before you criticise these countries, consider how wealthy capitalist nations were built. Do not delude yourself into thinking that the West was any better.
The West still causes more damage today. Imperialism costs more lives than any communist government ever did. Notwithstanding that the USSR also had a somewhat imperialist agenda – but they also built their own computers, TVs, rockets and all kinds of wonderful things, having been peasant economies only a few decades prior. Enter the Communist Party of Britain, a curious bunch of mostly hypocrites who talk socialism, but…
…I fondly remember drinking with them, at the 2018 Executive Committee in Croydon, UK. They’re totally not serious at all. They’re communists, at an intellectual level, but they didn’t strike me as anything more than casual pub goers who sometimes posted YouTube videos. They would quote all the usual history, and a lot of what they say actually makes sense. But they’re all just mostly normal, useless people, who nobody will ever, ever take seriously.
I wasn’t allowed in the meeting itself, but it took place at a big house where several other left-wing organisations also went. There was a small pub downstairs, and various conference rooms. Upstairs were offices, occupied by the Communist Party. Several trade unions operated in the downstairs section, sometimes just meeting up there – it was also a common meeting point for left-wing journalist organisations, such as the Morning Star.
That weekend, lots of activists, mostly – yes – communists, met up and just chatted each evening, and some people were there during the day too.
The entire Communist party leadership was there. I first met the then-leader of the party, Party Comrade Boss (PCB), in a lift at the hotel where I was staying. My friend had a room there, paid for by the party, and he let me share it with him. I would sometimes dilate in there, and he’d give me privacy, of course – and I spent most of that weekend with him. The meeting was held in October 2018.
I met all of the Party leadership. My friend introduced me to them, citing the fact that I was apparently a great potential asset to the party, due to my work on Libreboot and other things. He reasoned that I would be useful, because the party was at that time in need of modernisation. Much of its digital infrastructure was, well, non-existent. Just a website and an email system.
I sat in the offices upstairs, distracting him from his job all day while I admired all of the posters they had. One of them read: Our flag stays red! He was proofreading an article for that evening’s Morning Star – solidarity with some left-wing cause in a right-wing dictatorship, somewhere in Africa.
These were real lefties. Hardcore lefties. Not the casual kind that you see on Twitter, or your local Labour or Green Party. These people were the real deal. They even had a plan: Britain’s Road to Socialism. I read it myself, as my friend sent me party literature for free. It basically contained the ingredients for a gradual coup of the British state, but it was written in language that prevented it from being considered treason or terrorism – which means that it would never succeed.
A bunch of crap, mostly. The day Britain goes socialist, is the day ducks actually learn to talk. Never going to happen. I just sat and vibed all weekend. They all loved me. They did bend over backwards to gloss over the fact that there was currently a civil war in the party, over the debate for or against trans rights – I knew for example that they did not respect non-binary people. Their literature regarded transgender people as decadent, as products of the capitalist… come on. Give me a fucking break, please.
I’d previously passed an actual interview, to join the Party. Yes, they vet their members, and I had no problem telling them the wonders of dialectic… whatever. I don’t even remember now. I skimmed some shit online, and correctly answered the question: ‘Is Jeremy Corbyn a Socialist?’ – I said no, he’s a social democrat. I passed my exam. I was now a Communist. Wankers.
That weekend was nice. I was a complete arsehole to everyone, every day, still vaping inside the pub after being told repeatedly to vape in the cold outside, and I’d just get completely smashed. I insulted everyone around me, bored a lot of people to tears, and mostly just made people extremely uncomfortable.
Puffing repeatedly on my vape, I was talking to some Morning Star and trade union people, and I just started insulting them. I don’t even know why. I was being semi-intellectual with them, belittling all of them and dismissing all of their arguments. At one point, one of them had actually had enough and left the room.
Later that same evening, Party Comrade Boss’s wife smoked an entire pack of cigarettes while I touched her soul. We’d both become incredibly drunk. At one point, Party Comrade Boss came out to offer us yet another bottle of premium champagne, and I joked, stating that this was literally champagne socialism. Party Comrade Boss said nothing, and went inside. He left us alone with the bottle.
Nothing quite so insidious really. We were just talking passionately about Britain’s road to socialism, and at one point I just outputted a series of words in an impassioned rant that I no longer remember. I saw the tears start to flow in her eyes. A highly intelligent woman too.
It became night. My friend, Party Comrade Boss, his wife and I later crammed into a taxi as the night wore down, since we were all staying at the same hotel. The wife and I could barely stand. I was completely out of my mind.
I do not remember any of the nights at his hotel room. I don’t remember even entering the room on any of the nights, because I was completely blacked out every time. My friend would always have to escort me there. Like, I do not remember ever going to sleep. I only know that I woke up every day, in that same room.
I sang a lot. I don’t usually sing, but I sang a lot during that weekend, especially while walking through the streets with my friend and several of my comrades. We hit the town, mostly to buy more booze – or so that I could buy more vaping juice.
At one point, I was uncontrollably throwing things everywhere. I just wanted to throw things. Sometimes bottles. At one point, I nearly threw my vape, but my friend stopped me.
I did treat them all to KFC for some reason. I was completely pissed and wanted chicken, then I just bought a big bucket for everyone and brought it back.
Croydon was nice. There was a nice Moroccan restaurant there, where I ate a delicious lentil soup and a falafel sandwich, plus a cup of tea. This amused me as I was the only white person in there, and everyone around me was eating English breakfast.
I really just do not remember most of that weekend whatsoever.
Like, I was totally smashed the whole time. I was sober during the day, and spoke intellectually with them too – I told Party Comrade Boss for example about the wonders of Free Software ideology. Since he is an extremely intelligent man, he immediately saw that Free Software is socialism, and agreed to start implementing use of it in the party – I told him about Linux for example.
I also generally gave him advice about how to improve his website. One of the problems with a lot of old-school lefties is that they’re too wordy, and the website was no exception. The pamphlets can be essays, but your website is an advertisement.
Your website is supposed to seduce me, not bore me.
Nice people, and they were actually playing it smart. They were bigging up Jeremy Corbyn at the time, as well as several hard-left Labour members of parliament. Diane Abbott, for example, regularly wrote in the Morning Star.
The idea was that Jeremy Corbyn would become prime minister, and then the revolution begins. Yes. While they all drove nice cars, lived in nice houses… nope. Let’s just say it how it is: Wankers. Yes, they were wankers.
Last morning before home, my friend left his room – and I’d overstayed past checkout. Someone actually entered the room while I was sleeping, and told me I should leave instantly. I kissed him on the cheek as he left – I don’t remember which one.
I quickly dilated before I left, leaving the hotel staff to clean up after me. Yes. Croydon. How nice. The rest of my activism was a series of drunken rants on Twitter. I never went to meetings.
You were whacked on the head and it’s 2020. Nothing happened in 2019. Enter COVID. The Chinese government had spent a full year plotting to completely destroy my life, and then I was drinking daily. I would cause a lot more pain for Roommate at that point, and I would feel completely justified the whole time.
COVID fucked everything. Absolutely fucking everything. My suppliers were fucked, and I was fucked. Everything was fucked. I did however spend a full year mastering my soldering skills. I did retro games-console mods and repairs for free – for fun – if people paid for parts and shipping both ways. I lost count of how many PlayStation 2 modchips I installed. Some guy thought I was a commercial threat to his shit little modshop, and did a smear campaign against me, after I published a series of useful tips and tricks that made several of his commercial products completely obsolete.
I was being paid by the government to sit at home anyway, so I chose to master all of my other skills. My roommate alternated between calling me a genius, or running to my parents’ house when I became too drunk. I don’t do alcohol well. I’m basically a really mean drunk.
I also ordered an illegal amount of weed on an unnamed dark web shop, and was high for a month. My roommate didn’t mind me then. Weed makes me become the nicest person in the world. When my mother found my stash, I told her it was my medicine drawer. She laughed. I have not consumed any cannabis since that time – and I see no reason to. Yes, this was a strange time in my life. Pro-tip: don’t solder while high.
Nothing else happened, though I did finally beat Shin Megami Tensei on my SNES; Louis Cypher is the greatest villain in all of computer game history. I beat it on my heavily modified SNES: region-free SuperCIC modchip, de-jitter mod which also provided accurate NTSC clock, corrected capacitor values for NTSC composite video output, which I engineered myself by comparing PAL and NTSC mainboard schematics – on a fourteen-inch CRT that I’d repaired, adjusting geometry pots and re-capping entirely. I also had a nice HD upscaler, but I’m a purist. Always composite on a CRT TV.
I fell asleep all year until December 2020 came and I finally rebooted my company – and attempted my first coup of the Libreboot project. FSF didn’t want to know me, having de-listed my company on their website, as COVID gave them the perfect excuse. They made it clear that I was on my own, so I decided to own it.
I created a new project, OSBoot, that aimed to be a lot more pragmatic than Libreboot. Based on Libreboot, yes, but OSBoot violated several key policies of the Free Software Foundation – such as not including proprietary software. Yes, only Free Software, as the FSF’s purist policies dictated. I wanted to do this in Libreboot, as this would enable more computers to work – it’s what the upstream coreboot project does, on which Libreboot was based. I knew though that the FSF had ideological influence, and they could raise a stink about it if I did it too fast.
Simply changing Libreboot would alienate everyone too fast, so I launched OSBoot as a stepping stone, testing the waters alongside it; it ran parallel to the Libreboot project. I threw out the code that the Libreboot Committee had written, because it never worked, and simply spent two weeks modernising what I had last implemented in 2016. The Libreboot Committee had, since 2017, begun a wholesale rewrite of all the code, but their new code simply never worked – they would be dealt with later.
It was an immediate hit, and people would regularly tell me that this is now the new Libreboot, in all but name. Still, I waited. I got a bit excited at first, and simply removed my underlings from Libreboot, taking full control again and vowing to replace it with OSBoot, but this was a mistake. Yes, I was too excited. I can be impulsive sometimes.
Doing it too soon would be too much, and I could let them have their illusion of control for a while longer. I had no emotional concept of the fact that these people had worked hard for years on their version of the software, or the fact that they now relied on my infrastructure – still under my absolute control, which I’d previously said I would never touch otherwise.
That’s not what I signed up for, though. I wanted them to produce releases for me. That was the unwritten rule. Please me, or leave. They had not produced any useful releases in five years, and they themselves had started to alienate would-be contributors; they were now a liability, defeating the very purpose of their presence in the first place, namely to provide Libreboot releases while I did literally anything else.
The OSBoot launch was an immediate success, and I started selling it exclusively on my website. I had taken over Libreboot in all but name – that would come later. Within weeks, I modernised everything and had something people could use. Meanwhile, Libreboot itself was still comatose. My grandmother also died. COVID meant that I did not have to attend the funeral.
I forgot to pay Roommate’s car insurance and didn’t want to pay the fine, so her car was crushed. She became incredibly depressed and sat in her room all day. This would quickly annoy me, and I started treating her again more or less like I had in 2017, but she knew now from the stress of her previous experience to be extra nice. She would sit meekly in her room most of the day, and never bother me – and we were not dating, so I had no obligation to comfort her in any way. She was my guest, and she’d better behave. I still cooked and cleaned for her, but I left her to rot. I only spoke to her when she spoke to me, usually, unless I was bored – at which point, I would usually just enter her room, and watch her play games with her weird friends.
2021 came through like a hurricane. I didn’t like their rewrite of Libreboot, which started in 2017. I was now using my old design, modernised, and there were two Libreboots; they wanted me to let them keep doing their thing on my infrastructure, while I did my releases. I knew what this really meant: they would compete with me at a later date. I just chucked them out. The freedom I felt was exhilarating. Of course, they were outraged, which caused an even bigger rush, but it was more than that – I was me again. I’d spent years having my own ideas for the project rejected. I’d actually tried to make the whole, you know, democracy thing work, but I had fundamentally better ideas for how to run the project. I just focused on making everything cheap, so that it could be maintained more quickly, getting more releases out each year and reaching more users. I was about quantity over quality – though I polished the latter.
I simply felt free again. One of the people I threw out kept telling me all the things I needed to do to the project, as though he was still in charge, obviously in shock that I’d just sacked him. I felt incredibly free at that point, because I no longer needed to implement any of his plans, nor indulge him in any way. I never needed to, and I’d now acknowledged it. I lamented only that I didn’t kick him out sooner – I’d planned exactly this move in 2017, with something exactly like OSBoot then. I pussied then, because of my surgery. Oh well. What mattered was I now had freedom, and I wasn’t wasting time.
At some point in a conversation, he told me I’d missed the point of what he said, to which I retorted: ‘I’m not missing the point. I’m ignoring the point.’
During the coup, which happened simultaneously to another coup that I’ll explain momentarily, the adrenaline I felt was intense. What triggered it was when I listened to a banger trance playlist one night, and something in me snapped at just the right moment. I knew the risk of running such a coup, but I felt intense energy in that moment, and then I couped – and then I purged. I simply purged. Several of my colleagues at the time wondered if I’d gone insane.
The people I threw out did try to denounce me, and cause drama about the whole thing. They actually did register another Libreboot domain name, but they never managed to launch a new project.
They couldn’t poke through all the noise, because I publicly defended Richard Stallman after he suddenly returned to the FSF, during LibrePlanet 2021. This happened in parallel to my Libreboot takeover, and quite intentionally. He’d been ostracised because in 2019, he publicly defended a suspected paedophile, and years of grievances meant that people just absolutely crucified him in every way. He was forced to resign, but now he was back, and the entire free software movement was in civil war.
I was gloating the entire time, bragging about the fact that I’d suddenly taken everything over so quickly. I actually bragged, like a villain, on IRC. I did not hide or censor myself in any way.
Retroactive continuity. I barely even announced the change, referring to the former Libreboot maintainers as being ‘removed’ – but the actual page was titled: Resignations.
It was a funny way to show such contempt, I thought, as development once again skyrocketed. I offered no apology, and I took great pains to ensure that nobody would ever speak their names – I simply provided my own code, inviting other developers.
Every respectable free software organisation publicly denounced the FSF and there was even talk of a new splinter group: the GNU Assembly. Meanwhile, I wanted to suddenly oust every member of the Libreboot project, seize control in the most abrupt way possible, and do releases entirely on my own, throwing away five years of work and violating all of the trust I’d earned since 2017.
Richard Stallman provided the perfect cover, so I publicly defended him, swimming against the tide and pissing off literally everyone. I did this simultaneously to my takeover of Libreboot. I took no stock of how risky this might be – the danger of such a move, as I’m about to describe, simply did not dawn on me. I was in the heat of the moment, and I felt the rush. The hunt, the chase… the kill, as it were. It was the same feeling when I booted those jokers out of the project. I simply wanted to win.
They were all lunatics. I was on the FSF’s Minetest server (similar to Minecraft) the whole time, waiting for shit to happen – and this was before my Libreboot purge, as I poured lava everywhere while explaining to someone how I’d try to make the Libreboot Committee still work, before I decided to just purge. I half-expected that the FSF would chicken out, and that Stallman would remain in the shadows. Nope. Madness. Pure madness. Half of the board of directors quit, as did half of the staff.
The whole world was out for blood. Both sides set up their own petition – mine won, calling for RMS to remain in post. If this were an election, Stallman won by a landslide. The FSF’s executive director had blocked Libreboot from being promoted since 2020, which meant that he too needed to go. Although this was unintended, he himself resigned after my campaign led to thousands of people harassing the FSF. They all demanded that their hero, Richard Stallman, be praised and honoured in his role.
I immediately began a wholesale reorganisation of Libreboot, marketing OSBoot as its spiritual successor, while continuing to keep the two projects separate – for now. I felt that nobody could challenge me, because I’d defended Stallman, which is why I did. I didn’t even wait. I knew, on the day my article came out, that I was absolutely fucking in charge – and I gloated loudly, on every chatroom. I was incredibly petty, and very much in charge, yes. Nobody dared speak. They just made the best of it, thanking me. I had, after all, given them real progress. I was the one who’d clean up the project and get it moving again. They accepted my authority because there was nobody else left.
I then gradually removed myself from the Stallman campaign, switching sides entirely, because the FSF still would not help me – I didn’t expect them to. The other side is where the money was, and I felt that they were so nebulous in their corporatism anyway that they’d soon forget everything. They’re like a cat with a laser pointer and a cardboard box. They would soon have a shiny new distraction, called FreeNode.
I knew then that the best way to effect sudden change was during a big fight. At one point, lots of people even suggested that I become the FSF’s new executive director. I’m not joking. I even applied, though they never responded to my application.
My coup complete, a new Libreboot release was finally ready by 20 May 2021. The first in five years, but there was a problem. I’d been mostly offline for a week, and I was unaware that another coup was underway simultaneously. When the Libreboot release did come out, the first in five year, the new FSF – under Stallman’s firm hand – publicly praised it, promoting it, but only that release. Several people in the GNU project complained, loudly, which just made my day even brighter. I was back. But back to FreeNode, yes:
FreeNode was the largest IRC chat server and extremely popular for free software projects; all of Libreboot’s development was done there. I woke up on 20 May to do a Libreboot release, only to find that FreeNode had gone completely insane. Years earlier, FreeNode had been sold off to a rich tycoon who nonetheless kept – for a time – the more or less liberal, civically minded admins who ran the network.
There was a power grab at FreeNode, and it was assumed that the admins would just do whatever they were told. Instead, they created a brand new network from scratch and started a massive smear campaign against FreeNode. Twenty years of critical free software infrastructure erupted in total civil war. This meant that FreeNode suddenly had no staff.
FreeNode quickly recruited a bunch of white supremacists who ran another network, to run his new FreeNode. It got so insane that FreeNode even started hijacking channels, causing more and more people to simply leave the network. They even hijacked the FSF, and they thought it would be funny to make me a moderator there, which I obviously did not abuse.
I quickly established order and then announced the new Libreboot release, on 21 May 2021. I didn’t pick a side, and just kept two communities running on both networks, but I would slowly bleed out the FreeNode channel in coming weeks. I successfully avoided being hijacked because of this neutrality, and due to the fact that I’d told Lee what a wonderful job he’s doing. That’s all a narcissist needs for them to leave you alone – at one point, he told all his nazi friends how ’based’ I am. I know, right? Turns out these people are just thick as shit, but I digress.
I gradually started banning two people daily from my FreeNode channel, messaging them immediately to say that I’d moved to Libera, because they were competent and FreeNode was not. I didn’t like the general racism and bigotry that had become FreeNode. I had to destroy the channel slowly – otherwise it would have been hijacked. I did this even after FreeNode wiped the entire channel and user database clean, to retain control of my increasingly empty FreeNode channel. I even registered both the channel and my username from scratch, post-purge. There was no fanfare whatsoever, but I did not want a dopefiend and a team of neo-nazis to have any influence on my projects. My project was one of the few to avoid being hijacked by FreeNode.
At the time, I also befriended the leader of a major free software project, who for this book shall be called Flowergirl. She has connections including corporate, and a lot of prestige in the entire movement. I like being around powerful, highly intelligent people. Fuck Stallman.
Libreboot was booming too. Everyone, including Stallman’s weird friends, wanted to help Libreboot. The FSF no longer had any authority over me, but I had authority over their followers, and Libreboot had easily made up for the last five years, by the end of 2021. We got it done.
This period in my life was defined by anger. My anxiety had returned during the COVID period, and even after I quit drinking, I found that I just resented how much I’d fallen, how much I’d stagnated. I felt that I wasn’t in control of my life, having just gone through my transition, especially surgery. I’d spent a year in recovery and now wanted my life back. All of the things I’d built, like Libreboot, were rotting, and I wanted it all back.
My anger returned, and drove me throughout that period, but it was a much colder anger than I’d known before. I experienced it then as a general sense of calm, but an old friend would tell me how terrifying I truly was. She told me that the contents of my speech, how I write and how I act were very much like they were in 2016, just more controlled; yes, I was sober.
I was told by this same person that I destroy everything I touch, and that I had apparently developed a God Complex.
I was God. No complex required.
That’s what I thought anyway. I told her where to shove it, and that I like being the person I am. I told her that I had control over my life again, and that she would not talk me out of it. I resented how weak I was in the years leading up to, and including, 2016.
If I had to sum up this period in one word, it would be: grievances. I was settling old scores, largely perceived, but some of them real. I simply wanted full control over everything, and nothing was stopping me.
It wasn’t all orderly either. I was publicly aggressive and gloated a lot, especially after what I perceived then as the completed coup. I just bragged online, all the time, about how I once again had everything back, and how I’d not suffered any consequences in the end. On the night when I launched the Stallman article, coinciding with my takeover, I had been awake for two days, perked up on caffeine and I had the video of Palpatine on repeat, in the scene where he proclaims unlimited power.
Obviously, I was my best self. I still, to this day, regard everything I did back then as being necessary. I wasn’t going to let anyone walk all over me, though I probably could have been just a little bit nicer. Only a little bit.
My experience before then, between 2016-2020, were one of general malaise. I just had a general, pervasive feeling that I’d failed in my life, but I was stuck in a loop. I couldn’t bring myself to do anything until after my surgery and other aspects of my transition felt complete. There were just so many stresses and I focused on my business at the same time. I felt weak the whole time, and angry that other people seemed to be dumping all over the Libreboot project. The people I left in charge were incompetent, and I told them so, but they kept getting on with it. They regularly shut me out of any and all cooperation, calling my ideas stupid, criticising my work; the straw finally broke one day in 2020 when one of the committee members referred to my earlier work as “reference,”, which did genuinely insult me.
I felt such great freedom, getting rid of him. I’d become so used to just doing whatever he said, because I spent so many years unable to do anything myself. Now I had freedom, but my programming still kicked in for a short period, where I would justify my new development direction to him. I did even try to accomodate him. I say him, referring to the actual leader of the project; Libreboot had a committee, but it was one man in particular who had de-facto control of the project, through that committee. When I suddenly realised that I’d successfully removed him without consequence, I smiled.
I did feel a loss when I removed him, as there was one reason I didn’t kick him out sooner. He did have a lot of hardware knowledge, and did genuinely provide some useful advice from time to time. He was bad at running the project and his contribution to the project was a net negative, but he also did user support on the Libreboot chatroom. When he was gone, I had to take over many of his responsibilities until I found new people to help me out in the project, but it was all worth it. He turned a lot of people away from the project, because he had a similarly controlling nature compared to mine; the only difference is that my own work produced viable releases for users.
When I first took over the project, I worried that the health of the project may still wane, regardless of my own ability, because I was unsure whether I myself would be able to sustain the effort, especially after he and some of his friends then quit. It was a gamble, and I willingly took it, because I thought then that there was nothing to lose. The real reason though, as I said, was control. I simply wanted absolute control of the project, for the sake of my own ego, whiich I experienced as freedom, once I achieved it.
I quickly attracted new developers, and started delegating my authority again. I’d also done this with him, when he first joined, but the difference now was that people who actually contributed in ways I wanted were now joining the project again. The new people worked under my technicalr direction instead of his. I barely even announced the change, on the Libreboot website; everything continued, as though my leadership was always there. I actually deleted the rewrite that he had worked on, and just used my old code, modernising it entirely.
In other words, I deleted five years of work. I wasted five years of someone’s time, and I did so without hesitation. I wanted my own control, and did not want anyone challenging me. This person just fundamentally opposed my leadership in any capacity, and disagreed with me on every technical decision that I later made. The details of those disagreements is irrelevant; the human aspect is all that matters, for this story, and this has now been covered so let’s move on.
I announced my takeover of Libreboot on 28 March 2021. On 31 March 2021, the people I threw out wrote several forum posts that became big news – they were on the front page of Hacker News for example. I drowned them out by announcing my defense of Richard Stallman. I already described this in the previous article.
I was manic myself. I started writing the article on 23 March, with the help of some individuals in a chatroom called free-rms – and many of them were white nationalists. I normally detest Nazis, but they were running the pro-Stallman campaign.
An unholy alliance formed. They were quite weak, and needed institutional backing. They themselves were quite surprised that I signed the petition in defense of Stallman. Then I wrote this article, and they provided feedback. You couldn’t just whip up some spiel with AI in those days, so I actually did spend a week writing the most effective article possible.
I’d go shopping and think ’this is a coup, this is a coup, this is a coup’ – and adrenaline was running high. I knew what I was doing. I knew. I knew. I knew.
I want to stress: people went absolutely insane. I was well-known in the movement, and I say again that the pro-Stallman crowd has virtually no institutional backing. Despite still being a relatively small voice, I was big enough that defending him would cause a lot of noise.
After I released my article, Stallman’s supporters were much more emboldened, and it put a lot more pressure on the FSF. I have no way to know precisely what effect it had, but I say without arrogance that it would have been much easier for the FSF to sweep him back under the rug otherwise. My article angered a lot of people, which was my intention – to distract from the chaos that would have otherwise ensued with my takeover of the Libreboot project.
Here is some of that article. I don’t need to show all of it, to illustrate my point. It shows how I came across back then, to the public, targeting the specific audience and their psychology as I’d perceived it then:
Defend Richard Stallman!
2 years ago, known Thought Criminal Richard M Stallman was falsely accused of defending rape in an Orwellian smear campaign, orchestrated by mainstream media at the behest of proprietary software vendors. 36 years fighting for your digital freedom, cancelled. It was so vicious that he resigned from his post as president of the Free Software Foundation. The FSF did nothing to protect or defend him. However, you can defend him!
On 21 March 2021, FSF board of directors re-instated Richard Stallman. In response, the media started a new smear campaign. A petition was created, calling for the forceful removal of RMS and the entire FSF board of directors. RMS has been wrongly accused of sexism, transphobia, ableism and a whole host of things intended to discredit him. Do not listen to any of it. Richard Stallman’s political notes and articles paint the picture of a man who has staunchly campaigned against bigotry in all its forms!
In response, we, the Free software movement, started our own petition. We wish for RMS to remain in his post, and for the FSF to hold their ground. We call for the FSF to defend Richard Stallman’s honour and his legacy. Richard Stallman is a human being, whose right to free speech was heavily suppressed. We must demonstrate our support of him to the FSF, loudly and clearly.
If you support Free Software, believe in freedom of speech, freedom of community and social justice (true social justice, where a person is treated with dignity and not cancelled just for their beliefs), sign your name here:
[Link to petition]
[…]
Don’t be fooled. If a Free Software project is on the anti-RMS list, that just means the leadership implemented said decision. It says nothing of the individuals inside said organisation.
Please also email the FSF and tell them you support Richard! The FSF’s contact details are here: [FSF contact page on FSF website]
Our opponents wish to destroy Free Software:
[…] - basically, the kind of language I wrote here was the kind you’d see in an extremely aggressive populist politician calling a certain group an enemy of the people, or something like that.
Richard Stallman is my hero:
[… general fanatacism went here]
Let me tell you something:
[… cult-like rebuttal of some accusations against Stallman, using my own standing in the community to legitimise his shitty behaviour]
Background information:
I could address each specific accusation made against him, [… and I did, and I was insane about it]
Exposing our opponents for who they are:
[… a long list of smears against various people and organisations]
That’s all!
Defend RMS!
Can’t be bothered to write more. I was going to go through the list more exhaustively, but I think you see the point.
End of article…
I was running high the whole time, on adrenaline. I posted this article to Twitter and gained roughly one thousand new followers – and multiple others blocked me. I became universally hated in corporate circles, for a time – but again, cat with laser pointer.
The article did it’s job. This was my perfectly crafted bomb.
Just some cult crap that I cobbled together. I just, you know, threw the dead cat on the table. One – just one – person on hacker-news noticed my strategy, since I just happened to release this on the day that my Libreboot takeover was causing controversy.
This article killed the controversy. Nobody – absolutely nobody – covered my takeover. They also didn’t cover the Stallman article, because it was so absolutely insane that, well, why would they? I didn’t believe a word of it myself.
I deleted the article after a few months, when the dust settled, and joined the other side. Stallman was not my friend. He was my dead cat.
A certain webforum, called 4chan – yes – in their /pol/ section, dedicated to neo-nazis and short for “politically incorrect’, referred to me as “based’ and “our girl’ during the incident. They were the people running free-rms. At one point, they even made me an “honorary woman’ – they went back to calling my project Trannyboot though, once the dust had settled. I was under no illusions about them, but they did have some strange ideas about the world. At one point, they freely debated about whether trans people exist, and I joked to them as I went to make my coffee:
“Feel free to debate my right to exist while I go run errands.’
Or something like that. They laughed, but I was not their girl. Very strange people. I was gloating the entire time. How could they be so stupid, I thought? These were also the types of people who would have caused most of the controversy, for fun, regarding my takeover of the Libreboot project. The fact that they were helping me on the Stallman article just distracted them entirely. They loved their hero, Stallman, more than they wanted to hurt me, despite otherwise hating me, because they were fascists; fascists hate trans people.
This was the article I published on 30 March 2021. The people I’d thrown out made a forum post that was gaining traction, denouncing me after I’d thrown them out. My Stallman article wasn’t ready yet – and I needed to let the controversy of the takeover bleed a little bit, to let people know I was in charge, but I also needed to defend myself until I dropped the Stallman F-Bomb.
This was issued, the night before the Stallman article. The article’s URL had had the title, Resignations, and the article was as follows:
As the title suggests, Person1 and Person2 are no longer a part of the Libreboot project. While I am sad to see them go, I say one thing freely: I wish both of them well. I’m extremely grateful for the work that they have done over the years; their passion, their burning desire to help others and their energy for Free Software is inspiring. Person2 in particular has given me a lot of advice on things over the years. I hope that they do continue their work, and I’ve already told Person2 that I will provide him with the money/resources if he needs it, to help him set up physical hosting infrastructure for a new project forked from Libreboot. I will do it without a moment’s hesitation.
[… and some more things followed]
[… I basically made it seem like they resigned, when I actually removed them]
[… it was addressing a past that one of them made to smear me]
[… and some generic spiel about how my actions were for the greater good]
This complemented another article.
Earlier that same day, I’d announced my takeover of the Libreboot project, with the following article, which came before the one above:
Rapid progress is being made towards a new Libreboot release. It should be done by late April or early June 2021. Many new boards will be supported, with lots of bugs fixed, new features added and the latest coreboot/GRUB/SeaBIOS versions used on all boards. The Libreboot website will be massively overhauled.
I, Leah Rowe, have re-taken full control of the Libreboot project after 4 years delay in bringing out a new release. Long story in short, Libreboot began a new and ambitious re-write of its build system in 2017; as of 2021, that build system is still not ready; the design is fundamentally flawed and the code is unmaintainable so I have scrapped the rewrite entirely. The work will be preserved, for reference, but it has otherwise been abandoned.
I, Leah Rowe, was not responsible for that re-write. The design of that re-written build system is fundamentally flawed, and it has too many bugs. The people working on it kept adding too many new features without fixing fundamental issues. I have revoked all of their access to project infrastructure; Libreboot is now lead by me. I have a completely different idea for how to run the project and what a coreboot distro should be.
I, Leah Rowe, stepped down from Libreboot development in 2017. Since late 2020, I’ve been actively developing Libreboot again. I have been working on another project, forked via Libreboot 20160907 build system lbmk but on documentation from December 2020. That project is: [link to OSBoot project] - if Libreboot seems dead to you right now, it’s because I’ve been doing the work exclusively in osboot, with the intention of adapting that work back into Libreboot.
[… a long list of technical changes to Libreboot were then listed]
All I want is code. Your code.
End of article
I just felt proud the whole time, like I’d somehow “won” - against myself. I identified then what was a previous weakness on my part, lamenting the loss of my control over the project in 2017. I identified a general sense of stagnation that I myself had allowed to occur, and I felt then like I was basically taking revenge against myself, correcting my past mistake.
That mistake being: loss of control. It was all about my own ego, and my own control over my own life. I wanted absolute power, at all costs.
Really though, it was just the same kind of anger as before.
I posted my full home address to Twitter and only noticed two years later. I still loved shopping, in 2019, and now I had Roommate’s car. My forced takeover of the Libreboot project was two years away – and nobody knew my name.
The people who led the Libreboot project then were its de-facto leaders, in all but name. The project had a committee, of which I was a member, but I was long gone. There was no chance that I’d ever return. The future was safe.
I bought pens, pencils, and all sorts. I drew an ungodly amount of anime fan art, usually crossovers. Goku hunting for dragon balls in Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid. Eh? I made a photorealistic pencil sketch of my childhood hero, Richard Matthew Stallman. The Free Software Foundation called it ’terrific’ and tweeted it.
Worker was doing laptops for me. All I had to do was emails, and banking. I sent stock to Worker’s house while I recovered from surgery, and this continued long after.
He helped me while I recovered from surgery, but then I wanted to keep my new freedom. His services meant that I no longer needed to do real work myself.
I would wake up with sometimes tens of thousands of Great British Pounds worth of money, and purchase tens of thousands of Great British Pounds worth of stock for Worker, delivered to his house. His elderly mother was proud that her son now had a job.
Worker got a list of orders, which he completed, and I would send him a shipping label.
Worker bantered gleefully with his UPS driver.
Worker handled all customer warranty repairs.
Worker was my friend.
Worker was well-paid.
Worker was showered with gifts.
Worker was praised.
Worker talked politics with me.
Worker was my friend.
Worker did it all.
Roommate drove me everywhere.
I had what was now stable, essentially passive income and I could spend all of my time indulging in every single intellectual and creative passion I had.
I spent several months just drawing. My childhood skills had not gone away, but then I could walk – now I could work.
I did a Libreboot talk at FreeNode Live 2018 conference – where I met several new friends.
Roommate drove me everywhere: supermarkets especially. I still loved food.
If Roommate was sleeping, I would wake her. Straight in the car, wherever I wanted to go. Sometimes, all the way on the other side of the country and back.
Sometimes, this would be for something as simple as a Sony PlayStation – you see, I was into retro games consoles, specifically mods and repairs. I bought all of the games consoles and parts that I’d always wanted as a teenager.
I once went to someone’s house with Roommate, and left her outside in the car for an hour. The guy was showing me all the artwork in his house, and of course, I was there to buy from him a sixteen-bit games console made by a highly litigious company.
I went myself, to people’s houses, and bought games consoles – at one time, I met someone outside a shop, and he had one in his van.
I would modify the consoles to remove copyright and regional restrictions, enhancing their video and audio outputs, and adding a general fuckton of features. I lost track of how many CDs and DVDs I burned, how many flash cartridges I bought, how many Sega Master System ROM images I copied to SD cards, and just how many games I played, that I could never play as a kid.
Fuck Libreboot by the way. I did absolutely fuck-all on Libreboot that year – the committee was in charge, and I would simply be thanked for their hard work. They would be dealt with at a later time.
I met up with so many friends from IRC, and I went travelling – a lot. Roommate came with.
I had everything.
I also drank – a lot. I was often drunk.
Roommate called me a genius once, because I’d learned soldering in a month, and I was really good at it in a month – and teaching myself electronics much more rapidly. I made her watch me on some of my projects. Better than watching her play the Binding of Isaac, because, why the fuck would anyone play that shitty game.
I was not a genius, I told her. I’m normal. This is just me being normal, I said.
I loved food shopping even more. I went vegan again, and tortured Roommate immensely with it. She apparently didn’t like all the spice I put in my food – so I put even more.
Who was she to complain? I made the best tofu stir-fry in all of England.
I made her eat kale every day.
I was also spending like a drunken sailor, especially when COVID came. My business had to shut down, but that didn’t stop me from spending. I still paid down company debts, bought things for the company, and bought things for myself. If it weren’t for COVID, I would have kept things going nicely, even in that state. It’s COVID that threw me off the deepend.
I did not want to stop. I had no sense of time – the days bled into weeks, then months.
This went on, from January 2019 to November 2020. So many Great British Pounds lost to my stupor, and I have no idea what I even spent it on. I simply no longer cared.
I can’t even provide a chronological timeline, because those whole two years feel like a month. Probably because of how much gin I drank.
Roommate made a streaming channel, doing crap BDSM stuff while playing computer games. Apparently, people enjoy watching a virtual cartoon rendition of someone playing games in latex – vtubing, as the hipsters call it. Not really my cup of tea.
I once walked, barefoot and crazed, to my mother’s house.
I also got high for a month, when I purchased some bitcoins on a whim and purchased one month’s worth of Silver Haze from an unnamed Onion website – I made splifs. Roommate said she’d never seen me so relaxed.
Weed is wonderful. I loved buying it. Weed shopping is wonderful.
I would regularly enter Roommate’s room, to talk to her, while she was streaming. Some of her weird internet friends seemed nice.
I bought a Sony PVM, thirty inch model. This is a special type of cathode-ray tube television, high fidelity, historically used by film studio. With the right cabling, you get arcade-level picture quality.
It cost £600, and weighed a ton. I made Roommate carry it. I played Time Crisis on it.
I once made her drive me to Kent, and didn’t even buy anything. I just chilled with the guy. Just some guy I met online and I went to see him. You don’t know him.
Almost none of my money was spent on Roommate.
I also went nudist for a while. No need to buy new clothes.
I was also drinking, a lot. I may have mentioned this already.
I once purchased three bottles of gin, and a police officer annoyed me by lecturing me about my drinking – my mother’s love prevented an arrest that night.
I paid for a cleaner, the mother of a childhood friend, who once found my empty bottles. I still remember the look of panic in her eyes, and she’d obviously told my mother.
Worker quit and I kept buying gin. He said I have a fundamental disrespect for human beings.
Roommate kept pouring my gin down the sink. She told me alcohol is bad.
Alcohol is good.
I spent so much fucking money.
I told Roommate that I sleepwalk, after she found me sleeping on the floor.
I already sleep-talk, with my eyes open, so Roommate was made to believe that I slept on the floor sober.
This happened all the time.
I shat myself in a supermarket. I came home, showered, and cooked.
I called the shop owner a twat. I apologised the next day, because I wanted to keep shopping there. I loved buying gin, and cheese.
The same shop owner did see my buds once, in my shopping bag. He laughed, and I told him what shop I’d used.
My company went offline during COVID. COVID fucked everything, and I went off the deep end completely, in 2020 – but one day, I re-launched. I was too sick and tired of not having a life anymore, so I just said fuck it.
OSBoot started because some guy wanted coreboot on a ThinkPad X230. Other projects at the time supported it, or you could do a custom coreboot yourself, but I knew they were all rubbish. I decided to just fork Libreboot from 2016 and make a new project – just for the X230.
This ended my years of stagnation. I wrote in an earlier chapter about it. As part of this contract, I found that I had a lot of fun. OSBoot gave me back my mojo. I remembered all the years in which I didn’t think I had the energy anymore, and I remembered the years of technical disagreements with the Libreboot committee. At this point, Libreboot itself had not done any new Libreboot releases in years, and development was more or less at a standstill. Work was being done, but nobody took the project seriously anymore.
I found that I got a lot of work done on OSBoot in a very short period of time, and I took great pride in the work. I quickly found new users, even for what was then an experimental re-launch of my own Libreboot project, in all but name; I even thought in these terms. Months prior, I had hinted on Twitter about the possibility of launching a so-called Libreboot Classic.
The whim of one man whose Christmas I ruined, started OSBoot. Yes, I ruined his Christmas because OSBoot took longer to get off the ground. He knew I’d take several weeks anyway, and that I’d likely not ship until after Christmas.
Apparently, this caused an argument because he’d bought it for his son or something. I shipped his X230 anyway, and OSBoot was becoming popular already. I pretty much revitalised my entire career with it.
I found that funny. Roommate and I made it a running gag, that I’d ruined someone’s Christmas.
She had to laugh at all my jokes, and indulge me at all times, probably because she saw how much of an arsehole I could be when I drank. Alchohol doesn’t change who you are, but it does make you a bit more honest.
What I did not buy was a new insurance policy. I forgot to renew her car insurance, and she lost her car. Whoops. I didn’t buy her another one, and just left her to rot for years. She was depressed without her car, and she just spent every day at that point playing computer games in her room.
I bought her latex gear and some other shit, for her vtubing bullshit. I watched some of her streams, and even talked to some of her friends. I was the dopey nerd, who talked about computers and shit. I would sometimes annoy her, because I’d talk politics and shit.
I don’t like not being in control, so I stopped drinking.
I nearly lost everything, which made me appreciate everything.
This is no joke. That shit was the darkest period of my entire fucking life.
Fuck China. They caused all that shit. They did that shit to me.
Stay at home? Fuck that. Fuck lockdowns. Fuck that. Fuck that shit.
I did like getting my vaccine though. I don’t know, it just made me feel British.
I don’t tend to dwell on mistakes. I just became sober, and regained control of my life. I can only control what I’m doing in the moment, and try to direct my own future.
I realised towards the end of 2020 that I didn’t need to be angry at myself.
I needed to be angry at the world, so I began 2021 by unleashing my wrath upon it.
It was dumb, but what was I supposed to do, die?
The lesson was this: do not give someone like me unlimited free time and booze.
I threw out most of the things I bought, into a giant skip. I needed space for Libreboot stock.
I love buying Libreboot stock. I love buying ThinkPads.
I love buying RAM.
I love seeing it leave, once it’s all set up, to every customer.
I don’t actually care about the money. I just love completing a task.
I… I
I… me.
I. I. I.
Has a nice ring to it. This is what I learned.
I quit communism. I needed to look professional.
I learned how to be a drunk, and I learned how to die.
I learned how to wake up from the floor and continue work.
I learned to laugh again, and I just threw it all away. I learned.
If you’re going to be damned, then be damned as the person you are.
I learned to be bored again, and I made my house boring again.
I learned.
My anger still was not resolved, of course. This period was immediately followed by the one in which I took over Libreboot again, and all of the conflict that later came out of that, which I will continue in the next chapters.
When I drank all the time, and especially during the darkest parts of these drunken periods, I just felt extreme despair. I just thought that there was no way I’d ever get back control, after COVID happened. I just assumed that everything was lost, and I ruminated accordingly. I was a mess. This period was not fun at all, and it took every bit of emotional strength for me to come out of it. I simply forgot any pain I felt, and just came back. I had no time for regrets anymore. Better to fight and lose, than to die, I thought.
The nice thing about being bored, and sober, is that you now need to get your buzz through other means. My buzz always came from reading, or completing a task. I’m a very intellectual person, and I say this without arrogance. One of my friends told me once that I can sometimes say things that come across as rude, when the reality is that I’m just that smart. Good guy.
Yes, the coup was incomplete, so I was still out for blood – and I had a new apprentice. Yes, that good guy. We begin in January 2022 and the FSF had failed to reward me for my 2021 loyalty, even flat-out refusing to promote my company – they had de-listed it while it was offline during 2020. Still, they had ideological leadership within the movement, so I had to be careful.
They saw me beg for money in 2020; I knew what true hunger was, and these bastards refused to lift a finger when I came back. Just because I dared use my position to stay alive, because I was near death twice. They accused me of being unprofessional. Damn right, I was… nope. They needed to go.
They were happy to promote two of my competitors, one of whom was known on forums to scam every customer they had; the other, I out-competed so hard out of revenge that his return became short-lived. COVID made me bitter. When it’s your own blood you can taste, you don’t hold back.
Fuck them. This was personal now. The fact that I didn’t need them is irrelevant – I thought I did, and these people owed me big. They were quite happy to congratulate me for my work but unwilling to put their money where their mouth is. I now had the desire to see them all burn. They wanted me gone. I know when I’m not wanted. In the wise words of Anthony Fremont: I don’t like anybody who doesn’t like me.
OSBoot and Libreboot both still existed, developed in parallel but with aggressive technical focus in OSBoot – OSBoot was marketed as the successor to Libreboot. OSBoot existed to slowly sway their people over to my side, subverting the entire core ideology of the FSF community.
Having OSBoot be separate meant that the FSF would, for now, continue to promote Libreboot, and I gambled that they would likely ignore such side quests. Their main crown jewel was safe, for now – and under their ideological control, but they underestimated the sheer strength of my will.
I often wrote the following words, on random pieces of paper as I pleased:
SEQUESTER THE FSF. DESTROY RYF.
RYF – Respects Your Freedom - was the name of the FSF policy that Libreboot adhered to, underpinning what was then nine years of Libreboot history. My company had long since abandoned this policy, selling only OSBoot gear, but Libreboot was my precious Ming vase. I did not, at any point, consider any of the consequences for the FSF that might arise, were I to do what I’d planned next. All I saw were my own goals, and I was prepared to stop at nothing.
OSBoot development started booming in 2022, thanks to the sole efforts of an eccentric Canadian man who joined the project to volunteer. I will call him C-Man. He also disliked the FSF intensely, stating quite correctly that their policies are overly dogmatic and even self-defeating, that they let perfection become the enemy of the good and that they, as a result, alienate large swathes of the public from joining their cause. I needed someone like him, so I’d been grooming him for months.
C-Man did most of the work on Libreboot during 2022, under my guidance. He was my apprentice, and I his Sith lord – he even joked that OSBoot was a Rule of Two. We were plotting to take over the free software galaxy together, while I also helped some random Chinese teenager learn the nuances of the Unix operating system, helping them in their bid to re-write all of it.
I did all kinds of random projects at this time. This was a highly creative year for me, and I submitted a number of upstream bug fixes while C-Man worked on OSBoot’s build system.
I also joined the Conservative Party at this time, because COVID broke my brain. The Tories did an excellent job during Covid, I thought, and I’d become sympathetic to their dogma about sound money after scrimping, starving and generally digging myself out of my COVID-shaped hole. We will have more to say about the Tories in a later chapter, yes. Let’s destroy the FSF first.
One day, I decided that I would simply throw out Roommate. I didn’t care where she went; I wanted my freedom back, and I wanted to be alone again. I removed her access to my home – in which I was the only legal tenant, and she was my well-overstayed guest of four years. The previous day, I had fixed a problem with her computer and did not have any plans to evict her – we had even discussed our futures together, especially in these trying times.
I mean, I’d already threatened similar actions before, which always resulted in my mother quickly coming over to talk me out of it, and calm me down, because there was nowhere for Roommate to go and she didn’t want her either. She was the only one that could, and she made it clear that she would stop talking to me if I ever did such a thing. I therefore accepted that I would be stuck with Roommate – only my mother saved her, for a time, because I do actually listen to my mother. I do what she tells me, most of the time. She’s my mother, and she always talks sense. There is no emotional truth to this, she’s just my mother. I don’t need a reason to be loyal to her, but I am – and will be, until the day she dies. Because she’s my mother, yes. Do I need to explain?
That was the coup: successfully removing Roommate before Mother had time to calm me down. Roommate had to go. She was a constant distraction to my work, constantly depressed and unable to find work, eating my food and generally limiting my future growth. Everything I wanted to do revolved around her, which meant I couldn’t do the things I wanted to do.
She had rotted in that room for over two years without a job, without a car, without money, and I simply did not want to care for her anymore. She provided me no benefit whatsoever, and I wanted to have more time for myself. I wanted freedom. My mother had previously pleaded with me not to kick her out, over previous months. I came close, many times, and my mother talked me out of it each time. Not this time. I knew that if I backed down now, I might never get in the mood again for a while, and I might be stuck with her again for a few more years. I wanted freedom NOW.
Roommate knocked until she cried, and I went to sleep. I did not care about her fear, or her tears – I regarded them with contempt, actually. I awoke later and cooked a glorious meal that was all mine. I revelled in the perfect silence that was once again my life. I showered, and did my work. I even went shopping. I experienced a whole day of total freedom. I literally did not think about Roommate – not even once. A gloriously productive day. I did absolutely whatever I wanted, in total freedom, all day!
My mother couldn’t cope. I’d called her bluff and she didn’t want to deal with Roommate either. She’d had enough at that point. Roommate was generally a pain in the arse to everyone, in spite of my apparent callousness. She contacted Roommate’s mother, who graciously agreed to take Roommate back into her loving arms. We all knew that the mother had previously been abusive – and of course, the mother would lie to mine that this time she would be different. I personally did not care, but I knew – and thought precisely – that the mother would likely make Roommate go back into the closet. I was right too, as I’d discovered later. Roommate went back into Guy Mode the day she arrived back in her country. I did not care one way or the other about this – neither sorrow nor joy. I simply enjoyed my life. The only reason I found out anything is because my mother followed up regularly, and she would regularly annoy me by reminding me that Roommate ever existed, telling me about how she’s settling in. I did have to pay for her evacuation from the UK, which seemed fair, and I agreed on one condition – that I would be allowed to see her leave, at the airport.
Seeing her pass the barrier, I knew that she was legally in no-man’s land, and thus no longer permitted back into the UK – her UK residency was pending post-Brexit, and passing that barrier meant that the application would become null and void. I watched Roommate disappear into a crowd, and sighed in relief.
I watched her pass the airport barrier into no-man’s land, knowing that her post-Brexit residency application had just died behind her. Now she could no longer live in the UK. If she’d climbed back over the gate, it would be an illegal entry pending removal. There was little chance now that she could ever enter my life again. The North Sea and British customs would prevent it now.
The sun outside seemed to shine more brightly for the rest of the day, as though the heavens had opened once more. A beautiful British summer day, in the middle of October. The rest of that day was the happiest I’d known in years, and aside from some computers of hers that I shipped to her new address the next day, I never spoke to her again. Everyone in my family would tell me how much happier I’d become.
That’s a series wrap. I didn’t go back to the bottle. I’m still sober as I write this, in 2026. She had made sure I avoid drinking, because of what I’d put her through while I kept her. I now had the freedom to destroy myself – but I’d matured. I remained sober.
I was constantly blackout drunk in 2019, and I barely remember any of it. The year 2022 would not become another 2019.
My landlady was also kicking me out, at the same time! The landlady had transformed into a gang of grown children whose mother had just died, and they wanted to sell the house. I had until December to leave, but I only took five days to move back in with my parents, moving my entire company into a rented office that I also found. My entire life – Roommate, business, and temporarily my freedom – had been flipped upside down.
Nothing was going to bring me down. Then the gloves came off. Totally unencumbered, by November, I had done the unthinkable: I deleted the OSBoot project. It was merged quite unceremoniously in a day, back into Libreboot. In other words, Libreboot was deleted, and OSBoot renamed to Libreboot.
I had a plan, you see. The FSF was furious, but stayed silent – as I’d hoped they would. I’d literally published my plan to do so, at this exact time, earlier in July, so that they would study my June release – and leave them in limbo, hence the five-month delay. It was by design. For five months, they didn’t know whether I would or wouldn’t, and I suggested at several times that I might not. Yes.
We did it all in a day. C-Man did the documentation, and I did the build system. My ideological takeover was complete. OSBoot had been a resounding success by that point, with most members of the community preferring it over Libreboot. Libreboot had become well and truly a lame duck.
I held all the cards. I had a multi-million dollar organisation with 40 years of prestige by the balls. The FSF did try to poach several of my developers, but they all knew who was in charge. All I did was confirm, with a forty-thousand-line patch, what everyone already accepted as reality.
A colleague informed me that the FSF had made contact, asking if they’d help them create a new Libreboot project. Nobody did, in that month – nobody would. The hall was now rented for 2023, and it was time to see who could dance.
A former friend was being hunted by armed fascists. I watched her livestream for a while, then went food shopping – I did tell her not to get herself killed, but I was hungry. She later posted a video of them chasing her in their car. She’d shown me all of this, contacting me privately – I don’t know why, as we hadn’t talked for ages, and we weren’t friends. Weird, I thought. I thought nothing of it afterward.
I came home, cooked a meal, worked on Libreboot and I later found out she survived. I forgot all about it the next day, and I had a lot of work that week. I also spent two weeks off work during the latter half of December 2022 making a new website (fedfree.org) teaching people how to self-host various servers for fun.
My general feeling throughout 2022, prior to removing Roommate and merging osboot, was one of malaise. I just drifted throughout that time, bored really. It was one of my off years. C-Man did most of the heavy lifting on OSBoot then; my own work continued his, after the merger, and I began in late 2022 what became a multi-year technical audit of Libreboot, massively improving the quality of the code. Despite the drama, some of what I will describe next, much of this period was spent purely on technical work. It was basically just an extremely professional and rapid level of development in the project, and it marked a milestone in my general career. I just became more professional, basically.
I also became much more arrogant, as you shall see, but this was one of the happiest years for me. After I got rid of everyone, and did the merger, I just felt like I had everything I wanted. Cake and eat it, I thought; I’d done away with all the limitations that hampered my growth, and now I could expand my business much further. I’d also removed all of my financial burdens, by moving back in temporarily with parents while I rented a cheap office for the company. I had a sense of financial freedom again, for a time, and this allowed me to just focus on code. I did a lot, intellectually and creatively, in the period that followed.
The year 2023 started in complete serenity as I played dead, like a patient feline at a summer lake. The FSF was also silent as I experienced several months of total peace. I stated openly, multiple times on multiple weeks, that the FSF had given up in disgrace. I articulated at length, gloating about the fact that the FSF were cowards, and that I could relax. I expressed great arrogance, where I knew they watched. It was normal for their staff and fans to join my chatroom, and I was baiting them heavily.
They needed to be as relaxed and self-confident as possible, and to assume that I was in my worst possible mental state, before they would proceed. I made it look like I had no idea what was going on, and made Libreboot look weak by temporarily withholding new work – until March.
I expected the FSF to announce their own version of the Libreboot project during LibrePlanet 2023, but I couldn’t be sure. I decided to chance it. I did a release four hours before their conference began, and my gamble paid immediate dividends.
They did announce their own project, re-using the same name, Libreboot! This would have been disastrous, given their resources, and it could have gained momentum. Instead, the momentum of my own release that day derailed their launch. News sites covered my release instead, and barely mentioned the FSF at all.
They would go on to do essentially no development work at all. They needed a bunch of people to quickly join it, inspired by their announcement – that I had trashed.
When I saw their actual announcement, I felt a calmness but my heart also sank. I knew in advance, who the FSF would choose to lead their new project, as they’d worked under me before and told me themselves that they were unhappy with Libreboot’s policy change. They regarded OSBoot as proprietary software.
I avoided anger on that day, fearing controversy. My intention then was to simply derail their launch, and ensure that they did not gain recognition. Adding fuel to the fire would be foolish. I went so far as to instruct my colleagues to stay quiet.
What surprised me was that the FSF had not actually performed any work themselves. I theorised that they relied on the momentum of their own launch to attract immediate developer contributions, much as had been the case with my 2013 launch. My own counter-coup had obviously thwarted any such ambition, at least for now.
Although the FSF is a multimillion dollar organisation, it was notoriously difficult to receive funding from them on actual software. Most of the FSF’s money was spent on publicity and outreach, plus staff, yet the FSF was also the chief financial sponsor of the GNU project.
In practice, then, FSF-aligned projects still needed their own resources. The FSF also did not promote their own new Libreboot project directly, which further contributed to my suspicion. Simply speaking, they wanted quiet momentum – to catch me by surprise. The idea then would have been that development continued on their own infrastructure, as though nothing had changed.
In other words, I had effected my own counter-coup to their coup! The day ended without incident. Further contributing to my suspicions was the fact that their project was hosted on third party infrastructure, via SourceHut. SourceHut provides infrastructure for Free Software projects, but it is not affiliated with the FSF and its leader had even been critical about aspects of the FSF’s leadership.
The idea, then, would be that the FSF’s own effort might appear more grassroots; it’s called astroturfing. I knew the owner of SourceHut and simply asked him to delete the FSF’s new project, which he did. Three weeks passed, after he asked them to rename or be deleted – likely self-protection on his part, an illusion of procedure.
To ensure that the FSF could not move to another provider, I registered Libreboot on every known public Free Software hosting provider. By doing this, the FSF would then have no choice but to use their own infrastructure, which would reveal their ruse. This sounds far-fetched, but the FSF has been known to use such tactics in the past.
When SourceHut deleted the FSF’s project, it also meant that their Libreboot website went offline. To rub salt in the wound, I intentionally did yet another Libreboot release that same day. It was so bold that even the wife of one of the FSF’s senior staff liked my post, as I’d announced it on my social media account. She found it funny.
The purge was well in hand. This is how you fight a multi-million dollar organisation with only ten Great British Pounds to your name. Their dream was to destroy me, and that’s exactly what I punish – dreams. I want to control the truth, and they wanted to prevent that.
I never stopped. Libreboot development would continue relentlessly, for the next few years, rapidly re-writing and making more efficient, the entire codebase. It was manic. The FSF’s effort was dead in the water, but I kept pretending like they were a mortal threat – so that they wouldn’t be. I made sure to strengthen the Libreboot project relentlessly, for the next two years, in ways that ensured they could not compete.
The FSF simply gave up. They did revive their website, but its developers gave up, at least temporarily – I suspected that they might try again.
Summer 2023 began with a Wikipedia editing war. Several FSF staffers and volunteers tried to make the Libreboot Wikipedia page link their own project, instead of mine. I wasn’t directly involved, as I’m not allowed to edit the Libreboot article, but I did object to their proposal that the article be deleted; I was generally involved in discussions, during the controversy. It went to the general administrative noticeboard twice.
The individual in charge had been trolling other Wikipedia articles, pushing out other editors on a variety of spurious charges, throwing the book at them.
The FSF had already set up infrastructure for a new attempt at replacing Libreboot, this time called GNU Boot – a name that I myself had suggested, because I knew that it would not perform well on Google search. I sold it to them with the following catchphrase: ‘Restricted boot? Try GNU Boot!’
They initially resisted, regarding themselves as the real Libreboot, but my aggression had deterred any further attempt on their part. They renamed, at my behest. Several of my Libreboot colleagues had also pressured them.
The Wikipedia war was a distraction, because they wanted me to be caught off guard by GNU Boot. They did not know that I knew they were setting it up, but I’d monitored them closely since their first attempt.
I befriended several Wikipedia admins and simply asked them to enforce the rules. The attacks on Libreboot’s Wikipedia article violated Wikipedia’s rules, but rules have to be enforced. The hostile editors relied on overwhelming other editors, so that they would just let it happen – in other words, they required me to be negligent. I got them banned globally from editing Wikipedia articles.
Round two! The FSF still didn’t have enough developers. The two people they put in charge had no actual work done, and they needed a lot of help to get their project off the ground. This time, I wrote a scathing article, directly attacking them on the Libreboot website.
My article argued repeatedly that their project was unsustainable, while I continued to push my own releases. Despite having a lot less money than the FSF, I had the right people, and together we out-competed them on a technical level.
Mere technical superiority is not enough, but my article went into depth about all of their publicly stated development goals, attacking each as unviable.
However, the rules of such conflict are the same as that of a national election campaign, but less grandiose. I nonetheless treated it like one, as though I would be imprisoned or put to death if I did not win the election. I treated it like my life was on the line.
I did not hold back, but I remained professional. I only criticised on technical grounds. Yes! I also released an unofficial GNU Boot project of my own, as a proof of concept to help them. This was to exploit the fact that they themselves had failed to do any work themselves. My own release was technically superior to theirs in every way.
This was bait, and it worked: they emailed me a cease and desist, on trademark grounds. I of course backed down, publishing a screenshot of said email. Yes.
A popular YouTuber picked up on all the chaos and covered it. It appeared on the frontpage of several news sites and forums. Through my actions, I had triggered the FSF to say and do things against itself; I attacked them in their weakest state, that I had made efforts to engineer, regardless of whether I succeeded.
Nearly everyone took my side, and started taking the absolute piss out of the FSF, citing them as incompetent and petty. The FSF’s reputation tanked. The FSF themselves were quiet. I kept marketing it as the FSF and GNU project attacking Libreboot, to make them look more powerful. In reality, it was just two guys attacking me, who had no money and barely any real infrastructure.
Being part of GNU weakened them, precisely because GNU and FSF already had such a poor reputation from the previous Stallman controversy, and a general perception among the public that they are dogmatic and essentially cult-like.
Nobody wanted to listen to the FSF, so they did not listen to GNU Boot either. I was, in a way, Goliath, dressed like David, if Goliath had ten British Pounds and David had three million US dollars.
The other main problem was democracy, and specifically that GNU Boot claimed to have it – in reality, they were hypocrites as they too did what they wanted, but what they did have was a more openly collaborative development style. They preferred to work more extensively with upstream projects, merging their changes into them and not carrying too many of their own customisations.
Their logic was that this would enable easier maintenance, but the problem is that it introduced external maintenance burdens and dependencies. Meanwhile, I just did whatever I wanted in Libreboot, at all times, on my own whim. It just so happens that I also took actions with the interests of the community in mind, and knew how to delegate as always. I simply led my project more efficiently than they did theirs.
I, too, also work with external projects, but only when it is practical. I otherwise operated from the principle that Libreboot always comes first. This is a logical first principle, and my dictator status in the project enabled fast decision making.
My own madness was part of the equation. It was controlled – nothing like 2016. The FSF however, knew from past experience just how destabilising I could be, and how unstable I personally could be. I played on that. The FSF played it safe, and lost.
Enter Canoeboot, which sounds just like GNU Boot, and that is exactly the point. That was my other strategy. After denouncing them, calling them incompetent, I launched Canoeboot in October 2023. It mirrors Libreboot at all times, but strips out any changes that would not comply with FSF. It’s maintained tightly in sync at all times, and became the number one choice of boot firmware for both FSF fans and staff alike.
Several members of the FSF community started badmouthing me on various forums, and this I did revel in, but I knew that I needed to win them over. This is precisely why I created Canoeboot, and it’s why I continued posting positively on their forums. I knew that if I had their support, then the FSF could never challenge me again. The goal was to make it so that Canoeboot seemed like their most logical choice of free boot firmware. This strategy worked, to the extent that they began assisting it directly, even promoting it for me.
Just like an election campaign. It doesn’t matter what your opponent says about you. What you want to do is go after their followers, instead. There is nothing sinister about any of it – I simply provided them high quality software that they could use.
I personally saw the FSF use a Canoeboot laptop in their Machine Learning talk at FOSDEM 2025. Canoeboot heavily promotes Libreboot, in its documentation, and intentionally avoids linking to any of the FSF’s material – it avoids even mentioning the FSF, or GNU. It does this, while teaching the GNU Free Software ideology, but intentionally fails to defend it or convince the user that such ideology even matters at all. It does just enough to satisfy FSF fans, so that the FSF cannot attack it, while not helping the FSF in any way.
Throughout, I was playing constant mind games with the GNU Boot developers, every member of the GNU Advisory Committee, all of the FSF staff, various communities and more – befriending some of them along the way. I’d already had good friendships with many. I could be quite aggressive with some.
I did not simply show the world their incompetence, or the futility of their actions against me – I relentlessly pressed the point to all of the people inside. My goal was to make them internalise their own loss, regardless of how viable or unviable their plans may have been.
It was not just me either. I had lots of supporters who would talk to them as well. They were not just against me, but my entire community. I had built an entire movement that they no longer controlled – my own political constituency, if you will. I simply had the people, and this included some of the most highly competent developers. Several coreboot developers were part of Libreboot, directly.
I used my own resources more effectively, and used my own people well. I also worked hard – I myself worked on Libreboot relentlessly, throughout. The moral of the story is that they compelled me to do my job more thoroughly. Their original intent was to have me quit the Libreboot project and cede ground. I called their bluff, and watched them blink, doing the exact opposite of what they wanted me to do. If GNU Boot were a human being, I would have been charged with stalking.
Nobody won. The FSF’s project still exists, at least nominally, though they never managed to make a stable release – they did make a few lacklustre beta releases. The Cold Boot War ended in February 2025, when the FSF’s executive director one day had the courage to ask me a single question in so many words: What do you want?
I told her I want respect, to be respected and for the FSF to praise my name for [my] work, that they used every day. I wanted an assurance that they would credit the work, and not try to destroy it. This time, after two years of futility, they did what they should have done in 2020.
They started this war in 2019, when Richard Stallman contacted the erstwhile Libreboot committee asking about releases, without my knowledge. The war existed only in their mind, then.
They did not need to say it. All they had to do was imagine a world without Leah Rowe. It lived on in my mind for five years, and ended with an agreement. I mean, it was all a load of shit. One of my colleagues told me, at the height of it: ’If you weren’t a software developer, you’d be a serial killer.’
I kept my freedom. Freedom to define what Libreboot is, and the freedom to govern my own work. Freedom to control the truth – without their permission.
I am the senate, I thought, but then I just decided to relax and be extremely nice to everyone. Nobody ever talks about when the dictator is nice. I just cannot be bothered, mostly. If you challenge me, I will absolutely think of you and nothing but you until your challenge has been removed – if you leave me alone, I just relax.
I prefer to work with people. I make a habit of surrounding myself with the most intelligent people in the entire movement. It would have been better if the whole conflict never started, but they gave me no choice.
I met the GNU Boot developers at a German software conference, the Chaos Communication Congress, in Hamburg during December 2025. Good guys. I put the GNU Boot sticker they gave me, on my own ThinkPad for the lulz. They both laughed.
This was no joke. My anger existed since I was a child, and I only learned to properly control it in my late twenties. It used to get me into a lot of trouble. I would become angry, and I would try to control people, in ways that I know now are illusory. This occurred even under the guise of help – when I ran my trans chatroom for example. I’d just tell people what to do, and I’d become angry when they responded differently, or when I didn’t get what I wanted. I learned at a young age to use psychological violence as intimidation.
This wasn’t even conscious – most of the time, it was involuntary. There was no sense telling me to calm down, as doing so would just make me even worse. Then you would become my target, for violating my right – to be irrationally angry.
I didn’t mellow out for their benefit. I wanted more control, of myself and others. I wanted to be happier, and more productive, so I trained myself to merely acknowledge – but not express – my anger, until one day I became genuinely calm.
I nearly forgot this lesson during the Cold Boot War. There were times, during that conflict, in which I expressed such unambiguous and unbridled hatred toward the GNU Boot developers, simply for existing. One of them joined the Libreboot chatroom, and I simply raged. My intention was to remove them from the entire movement, not just destroy their project.
Destroying their project was my main goal. The reason I felt this way is because I felt that they wished to destroy mine, and they continued in their failure to demonstrate otherwise. Libreboot is a major part of my life, a part of my own ego you could say.
I had no intention of controlling them. I just didn’t want them controlling me, and because I thought they wanted to control me, I decided I wanted to destroy them. I would have probably failed in the end, because humans have a nasty habit of never truly following your instructions, but I would have tried to make their lives hell.
It would have become more extreme. It was the principle of the matter. I did sometimes experience rage – most of the time, I was calm. I alternated between actual anger, and the principle of it – in the latter, I merely applied anger more effectively. Yes, applied anger. It’s a thing. I will behave as though I’m angry, even when I’m calm. It’s just like when I spat that lady’s face in the poster.
The FSF were not necessarily trying to destroy me – they did literally try to steal the Libreboot name, but I don’t think they had me in mind. They were genuinely hurt by what I did. In extreme cases like this, my own mind takes over and I sometimes project onto others. I treated it like a wargames exercise, whereas they felt deeply hurt on a genuinely emotional level, seeing me as hostile.
In this instance, my projection was that the FSF were hostile, that they wanted to take everything away from me… no! This is how my lizard brain felt, but I’m also not stupid. I use my feelings as a guide, but I am not controlled by them. I prefer to use logic.
I knew what I was doing. I knew this would hurt them, and I calculated in advance that they would likely be unsuccessful if they tried to oppose my decision. They simply cared about the ideological purity of the movement.
However, my objective was not to hurt them. I simply wanted to help Libreboot, to make it grow further and to increase my power. I wanted to make more money selling it, for example, and I wanted more people to use Libreboot. That was my only goal.
I did not take stock of their feelings whatsoever, except insofar as they might dictate any physical action on their part – and I tried, where I could, to anticipate all of their actions. I was fighting a logistical war. They were fighting a holy war, but I am not holy.
So when they told me later that Libreboot had become proprietary, that was not an attack on me – rather, an expression of genuine hurt on their part. Like when you offend someone’s religion.
When they tried to delete the Libreboot Wikipedia article, they were doing God’s – Stallman’s – work. They were doing a service to the movement. Yes.
I’ve never felt that kind of loyalty myself, because I’m generally pragmatic – albeit eccentric – in all things. Girlfriend and many other people from my past, told me that it was scary how I’d just seemingly change all of my opinions on a dime.
This was no different, but it was at an institutional scale.
Even when I created Canoeboot, or its earlier nonGeNUine Boot precursor, the FSF people still didn’t want to accept my help though, and one of them gave a very specific reason: they wanted to be free from me, specifically my behaviour.
They were referring to my seeming eccentric nature, how I would randomly change opinion and completely remake everything over time. They saw me as chaotic – Richard Stallman himself once told me that I was ‘unpredictable’.
No shit. To me though, this was about freedom: freedom to do as I pleased. I adapt to changing circumstances. The reason I changed Libreboot’s policy was because the project was dying.
It was dying, because the hardware it could possibly support was getting older and older. It was becoming impossible to support newer hardware, under the ideological restraints that it imposed.
I created OSBoot, later merging it into Libreboot, as a pragmatic way of ensuring that everything remain as pure as possible, from a Free Software ideological perspective. The FSF, though, were all about purity and they didn’t mind falling behind -
Richard Stallman himself once said that the goal of Free Software is not to be widely used, or popular. No, the goal was freedom no matter the cost.
I was unhappy with this dogma, as I believed it to be a limit on the actual viability of the Free Software movement as a whole. When you adopt a purist position like that, it alienates people who otherwise like the idea of it but can’t yet fully assimilate into it.
One of the people high up in GNU told me he was quite upset with the change, because he’d previously talked a lot about Libreboot at conferences, promoting it as a poster child – of sorts – for the entire movement.
That man was Alexandre Oliva, leader of FSF Latin America, who at one point during the Cold Boot War posted something like this on the homepage of the FSFLA website: ‘Leah Rowe is a fake news factory. She made a GNU Boot that isn’t GNU, and a Libreboot that isn’t Libreboot.’ – this made me laugh, and I was sad when the message had later disappeared.
He cited the FSF’s initial fork project as the “GeNUine’ Libreboot, obviously a play on GNU. My troll project, the one-off one prior to Canoeboot, was called nonGeNUine Boot, directly parodying his article.
I liked all the attention. I didn’t feel bad, because these people could always just make their own project, and I expected them to. I was just mad that they tried to replace me instead of just, you know, doing their own thing.
To them, it was personal. Oliva himself told me that it felt like a spike in his shoes. I did also once submit Canoeboot to GNU, proposing that it replace GNU Boot – and this was a genuine proposal. I wasn’t worried about them taking it over, because I literally did not want to continue working on it.
They all told me that they could not trust me, and that the pain from my earlier betrayal was too much. I literally do not understand when people feel this way, because I did in fact genuinely wish to submit it.
My main goal in doing so was to get rid of GNU Boot – the reason I created Canoeboot was literally so as to dilute their power base, because I did not want them to become powerful at an ideological level within the movement. As I’ve alluded to in this book, I wanted to control the truth.
I understood them well enough to beat them, and I’d do it again if I had to. I was proud when I beat them. I was the villain in their eyes – and I prevailed. I felt like I’d taken over the world, and I laughed accordingly.
I’m not joking. I regularly laughed like a maniac on the Libreboot chatroom. I did not hide my disdain. I was openly maniacal the whole time. Several of my friends enjoyed it immensely. Most people stayed quiet, because normal people want to avoid conflict at all costs – and a few highly rational people tried to calm me down.
There was even one person in particular who had my ear, and the FSF’s, who tried in vain to broker an agreement – one in which we would both flourish. I was having none of it. I just wanted to win. I wanted to have absolute power, and crush the FSF.
I just felt good the whole time. The thrill, the rush, the hunt… I felt bored afterwards. I generally thrive in chaos. Having a good enemy to sink my teeth into makes me feel alive. The FSF is in a worse position now, because the end result still left them using my own software, and they left with less power than they had before.
I specifically identified my victory as being thus: I reduced the FSF to a level where the emotional cost of fighting me again would deter any such future conflict. That is: they will remember the stress, and think twice.
I brokered the truce with them, via Canoeboot, not out of remorse or regret. I wanted them to stop opposing me, so I gave them permission. I’d previously been such a bastard to them that they kept going anyway, even when it was hopeless. I reduced them until surrender – marketed as a truce – was the only viable option. I let them save face and they let me continue doing whatever I want without consequence.
A former friend, who used to work for the FSF, summarised the whole affair in one word, which was sent to me without context in a private message – but I knew what it meant. The message said only: ‘Welp.’
I wrote this chapter as though it were a war diary, because my mind saw this period in relatively combative terms; territorial, on an intellectual level. Most people who engaged in this period simply found it amusing. When I relayed this story, condensed at my FOSDEM 2026 talk, one of the organisers laughed at the end as I packed up my things. Several people in the audience had also laughed. At the time of these events, most comments online expressed great amusement, mostly making fun of the FSF or me; when making fun of me, they would say things like:
“This is top-shelf shitposting and I’m all for it.”
“This is a level of pettiness that all Arch Linux users should aspire to.”
“Leah Rowe is my hero.” - stated ironically, in context.
“Leah Rowe is not the sort of person you want as your enemy.”
“This is why we can’t have nice things in Linux.”
Serious, but not serious. The whole thing was a wash, but I got my kicks.
My actual anger had started to wane again, in this period. I felt relaxed, especially as my financial situation was stable then. This entire period was highly productive for me on a professional level. Despite all of the chaos, the entire period just saw rapid growth. I grew a lot, intellectually, during this period. A lot more people joined the Libreboot project, and I just had control of everything. I actually don’t experience control of others anymore as something to generally strive for; I’ve always known how to delegate work, in a professional context. When I speak of control, I speak only about control of myself. My own intellectual sovereignty, if you will.
A lot of people won’t understand that concept, but that’s really what this whole period was all about. I’d done the hard work, taking back control of everything, especially in the earlier 2021 period, so this period was all about consolidation. When I feel like I’m secure, that the threats against me are eliminated or otherwise contained, my instinct is to just relax and start focusing inward. It’s not so much that I want to control others; I want to control Leah Rowe, and I respond against threats to that, more than anything else. Perhaps some readers might understand the nuance here.
I felt, at this late stage, that I could finally relax. My anger subsided, and I could just focus on whatever I wanted. I felt free, because I no longer had anyone breathing down my neck, not even the FSF. I’d finally got rid of all the obstacles between me and my goals, whatever they may be; I didn’t even have any. Why would I? I already had Libreboot. I just improve that, incrementally in whatever way I can. It uses coreboot, and the goal of Libreboot is to just support everything coreboot supports, so not much planning was needed. We basically just add whatever we want, to Libreboot.
I regularly gloated about my freedom, laughing at the FSF for their seeming incompetence. I specifically identified that I’d suffered a complete lack of consequences for any and all past chaos. To me, it felt like I’d completely reset everything, and taken over the world. My world. My Libreboot world. I still knew that Libreboot is a relatively niche project, that most normal people don’t care about, but I didn’t care about normal people. I cared about my world. I didn’t take over the world; I took over mine. I was in charge, and that was the goal. There really is nothing else to say.
I’m also a sore winner. I’d “won” the war, long before it ended. Basically, the start of 2024 marked a period of total control for me; the FSF’s own project was in complete disarray, and it was clear that I had become the dominant one. I still kept attacking them, knowing that they were no longer a threat. I simply did not want the fight to stop, because I enjoyed the fight itself. The thrill… the hunt. Once a hunt is over, I’m lost, and need to stimulate myself some other way.
The fact that I’m a sore winner also means that I spiral after a major success in general. When I do a Libreboot release, I always feel low afterward. It’s sort of like post mortum depression, though probably not as severe. I’m the sort of person who always needs a challenge, and this has always been the case. I thrive when I have a well-defined challenge, and this was one of the most politically and technically challenging periods of my life, so I also regard it as having been one of the most fun periods of my life. Most of it was just spent obsessively auditing the source code of Libreboot, optimising and cleaning it up; a lot of the things I worked on would seem incredibly petty to most people, but I’m a massive control freak. My controlling tendencies come out strongly in my own work, as that is where I channel them; I channel them into perfecting my work.
This applies not just to Libreboot, but to electronics projects or works of art that I’ve produced. I often take longer to do something at a one hundred percent level of perfection, instead of tolerating something lesser. It’s a strength and a weakness, because in some cases, it also means that I can lose sight of the overall sense of my life, and drop everything else, but it also means that the work I do tends to be of high quality. I say my work is high quality, based not only on my own biased point of view, but on what other people literally tell me. I am highly competent, in my own field. I demand it. I demand the same of others who work under me. If you’re going to do anything, you better do it right.
This chapter will show the reader some nuance of how I perceive friendship, when I make friends. The person that I’m about to describe is only one of many; I have had several close friendships, throughout my life. They all have a pattern similar to this one. I don’t need to describe them all, and this one will suffice so as to illustrate my point.
She wasn’t Asian, but I will call her Ricegirl. A friend I had; as I write this, we haven’t spoken in years, so I would say our friendship is dormant. Not broken, just dormant; the last times we spoke, we were on quite good terms, and I don’t remember us ever arguing or fighting.
Basically, this person is extremely intense intellectually. She has done a lot of really cool projects over the decades. I got to know her and her family a lot, over the years. She’s quite passionate about people, sensitive to them, and quite energetic at her best. She’s just generally quite passionate about everything, though she has also suffered hardships.
I met her in person once, when she came to a city that was near me, otherwise our relationship was entirely online. Our relationship was largely professional, in that most of what we spoke about were our projects, but we’d also talk politics a lot, and we’d generally just get to know each other’s personalities.
I would define her as being one of my few actual friendships in life, in that we’ve both generally taken steps to care for each other in times of need. For example, she was addicted to certain drugs for a while, which I helped her come off twice; she relapsed once. I don’t know if she’s still sober; I haven’t spoken to her meaningfully for about two years or so as I write this.
I want to be more specific: when I say true friendship, it means that she was an actual friend. I therefore need to explain how I define friendship. To me, friendship is when two people find each other stimulating in some way, for example intellectually, and then exchange information about each other to each other, trusting each other and generally looking out for one another. This can be implemented, regardless of feelings. In my case, this friendship was implemented in the pure absence of all feeling, though I’m reasonably confident that she felt something emotionally about me, as she generally felt compassion for the people in her life. I have had other friendships in the past, as I’ve defined them, and I have a small number of them now. Yes, I have friends.
I don’t need to go into details about her family or about her as a person, for this book, because that’s not relevant for the point that this chapter tries to make, but what I can say is that we’re close. I’ve told her many of the things in this book, albeit in a much more intense form, and also an earlier form; she has not seen my further psychological progression since our last encounters, at least as I write this.
She has seen me during many of my darkest periods, for example during COVID, and she has always been supportive of me; she’s the sort of person who would always say nice things about me to others, even when I didn’t believe in myself at the time. COVID was a dark period in my life, though the same can be said for a lot of people. I was obviously no exception.
I met her in person once, and I felt pretty neutral the whole time. I was my usual neutral self, as alluded to in this book and in later chapters; the feeling was the same blankness I felt when I met my Dutch friend in 2015. I did enjoy my visit, or rather, I did not dislike my visit. The actual nature of my visit is irrelevant, but I was going there to show my support for her in a time of need, and she just happened to be in reach that day.
I remember feeling the same that day, going to meet her, as when I went to visit my Dutch friend in 2015. I went there on a whim, when summoned; I don’t remember if I offered to go, or if she invited me first, but I ended up going. It was a calm night, and I had nothing else to do that night, so I just went on a whim. I sat with her for a few hours. She told me at the time that I seemed more feminine in person than from my pictures online, and I played DOOM II on her portable gaming system, that I had expressed interest in while I was there. I don’t quite remember exactly what we spoke about. I was quite calm and generally stoic while there, just like when I visited Dutch friend. I did find her presence relaxing, and we generally had a good time. Seeing her did not provoke any emotional response, but I did chat with her and she seemed to enjoy my company. I was just completely calm the whole night. I then went home, feeling the same level of calm.
I went because we normally live too far apart to make in-person encounters practical. Visiting her where she lives would be too expensive. I simply took the opportunity to visit her, while she was nearer to me. I met her in a city that was financially viable for me to visit, but the name of that city is irrelevant for this book.
One of the things I noticed with her, as with several other people in my life, is that I almost never contacted her myself. I would sometimes message her though, online, but most of our encounters were the result of her contacting me.
I felt nothing about her the entire time, and she knew this too. She knew at the time that our relationship existed on an intellectual basis; she had previously told me that people like me seem alien to her, before I told her that I am also such a person.
I got to know about her family over the years, and some of her difficulties. I once told her that she should leave her family; I stopped doing so, after it became clear to me that doing so was unproductive, and likely to just cause alienation. She herself had, if I recall, told me to stop once, so I did anyway. I don’t remember that though. She is an extremely intelligent person, and I thought at the time that she might thrive on her own, not taking into account that she simply loved her family, despite any actual hardships they caused her.
My analysis of that, at the time, was that if I were in her same situation, I would have probably abandoned the family, so it seemed logical to me at the time. The people she lives with are nice, and they care for her; they’ve been with her even in her worst states, like during her worst episodes with drugs before she got clean.
I never became chemically addicted to alcohol, during my alcoholic period. I was psychologically alcoholic, and would have developed a chemical addiction had I continued drinking for longer, but I did otherwise have an understanding of drug addiction (e.g. nicotine withdrawal). Because of this, I was able to use myself as a model, lying to her that I am a recovering alcoholic; technically, what I said was true in the letter of the law, as I had pre-addiction alcoholic tendencies, but the spirit of it was that I had gone through withdrawal or something. I knew that this would cause her to become inspired in her own challenge, and it worked. She resisted the temptation to use drugs, while she got herself clean. I explained to her all the psychology of addiction, the rule that one equals all, and so on; I have had experience too with other drug addicts in the past.
Yes, I lied to her. I felt nothing when she got clean, or when she later relapsed, or when she got clean again. I experienced each event as mere fact, but she was my friend so the correct response was to help her get clean. I therefore did exactly that. This will sound alien to a lot of people, when I frame it as a correct response, but that is how my mind works when thinking about things. A later chapter will elaborate further on why I work like this. I felt no change to my emotional state, listening to her hardship. I did sometimes become annoyed dealing with her, but she was, as I said, my friend. I’d become annoyed when I had work for example, but I put the effort in for her. She regarded me as her friend, and she had been one to me as well. The simple fact of her friendship was something that I decided would warrant reciprocation, on that basis alone. The mere concept of friendship. This may sound strange to some readers. My relationships with people tend to be a bit transactional like that. I simply knew that she was a decent person, who would always have my back, and so I had hers.
I didn’t feel bad about it either. It seemed only like the most logical thing to do. I might have otherwise seemed like I was preaching to her, like I didn’t understand; I did understand, and I needed her to understand that I understood. I’ve known that a lot of people tend to be much more emotionally inclined in this way, so it was for the best, I thought.
I would sometimes defend her online, when people attacked her. She would do the same for me. We each had our own struggles, at various times while we spoke to each other, and we would just generally help each other.
Yes, she was my friend. I would still regard her as such, though I affirmed once more with this person: I still feel exactly the same afterward. I’m relieved when an actual stress in my life is resolved, like for example if I’m really skint and someone helps me with money, in the rare instances where I need to ask for such help.
Flat. Just like with Dutchfriend. Even when experiencing deep friendships like this, I’m implementing it intellectually. I will cover this more clearly, as a general concept, in a later chapter. This chapter has been a primer for the reader.
I felt nothing when watching her as she spiralled during her drug crisis. When she’d babble on the phone, or just generally become a mess, I felt nothing. I would still ask if she’s OK, of course, and still try to get her clean.
When she told me about one of her children, who seemed to be suffering from certain problems, I felt nothing; I’d still wish her luck in helping her child. It works the other way, like when she’d tell me with great joy about something wonderful about her child; in that instance, I would tell her that it’s good.
She understood this about me. She is also one of the few people I’ve ever done this with. Most relationships I have with people tend to be a lot more superficial, but I learned a lot about this lady, and she learned a lot about me. We both put a general effort into caring for each other, taking an interest in each other’s lives. I actually don’t feel anything, and didn’t feel anything, one way or the other; I can be happy or sad for myself. When it’s someone else, my body will say and do the correct things where possible. I try to basically implement all of the most correct actions for each person I meet.
I simply regarded her as a highly intelligent person, worthy of my friendship. I saw her as inherently open-minded about everything, someone who would always stop to think. She could become emotional like anyone else, but she always accepted me and my quirks. I don’t think I ever hid anything from her either. I remember being quite open about myself with her, about everything going on in my life. This is why I remember my relationship with her more vividly, because I normally put up several guards with most people, or at least I have. She knows exactly what I’m like, as described in this entire book, and still accepted me, and so the friendship simply continued.
I would occasionally help her get certain technology cheap, since I had access to a lot of tech in my own capacity; I don’t just do Libreboot. I do all sorts. I would sometimes provide her with things, as a favour at times, or I would sell to her at low cost, often with no profit at all, merely breaking even.
I did often become annoyed when she was in her more manic states. She could be quite manic sometimes, especially when she was doing drugs, but I always made an effort to return her calls and talk to her anyway. I knew she would do the same for me, so it seemed only fair. When someone offers me friendship, I make it my mission to do the same for them. It just makes sense to have friends.
I say again: I do not feel anything emotionally for this woman. I say this not to be cruel, or to make a point; rather, this is how I experience every person I meet. I can enjoy your presence, but I enjoy it in ways other than through close emotional bonding. My emotional state now, regarding her existence, is the same as when I met her. I do, though, have an intellectual understanding of her as a person, and I know her sensibilities. I know how to behave when I speak with her, and I knew that she seemed to enjoy my company whenever we spoke, so the friendship simply continued for a long time. I anticipate that we will likely have contact with each other again at some point in the future.
More nuance: I can say that my life has been positively influenced by having known her. My conversations with her enabled me to explore several aspects of my own personality, and she taught me a lot of things. She was there for me, listening to me when I needed someone to listen to me, when my own life was in disarray at times. I believe I too may have contributed positively to her own life. In all, it was a highly profitable friendship.
Readers may have found this chapter strange, and it is my job to remind you: everything you’ve read in this chapter is real. This is how I experienced a deep friendship with another person, and I feel quite similarly about every other person I’ve met. I was not without feeling, though; for example, she sometimes made me laugh. I never felt sad for her, even when helping her in her darkest times, and I did help her. I never felt good when she did. I was simply her friend. If this sounds alien, don’t worry.
A later chapter will elaborate on this further. This chapter provides a nuance in preparation for said chapter, and its placement here is critical for the rest of the book prior to that chapter, namely chapter twenty nine; my time in politics, at conferences and others will serve as contrast for this chapter, before you reach the end of the book. I should stress to the reader, yes, that my friendship with this person was healthy and never damaged in any way. We remain on good speaking terms, when we do speak, and I’m quite sure that I’ll probably continue talking with her at some point in the future.
There is a nuance: I did feel better around her, but it’s because I made myself feel better, fixing several problems in my life at the time that I did know her. She simply provided me with friendship, sometimes distracting me, indeed sometimes defending me. It’s quite possible that if I hadn’t known her, I might not have helped myself as much. She gave me a lot of really good advice, several times, in various contexts.
This period was one of general calm. I had everything in my professiional life under control, and I felt like I had no stresses left to worry about. I’d just keep those going. When this happens, I stop focusing inward so much, and I start exploring the world again. This is usually when I meet more people.
This was also one of the strangest periods of my life.
It was an incredibly boring day at work in June 2024, doing Libreboot orders, and a man from my local conservative party called me. I forgot I was even still a member, and he would later praise me for my ’highly stimulating intellect,’ which is code for ’agreeing with me while using lots of advanced English words’ as I see it, but I digress.
He wanted me to put some signs up for the May 2024 local council elections, and I saw no reason why not. Then he invited me to the next local party meeting that month. I didn’t want a brick through my window, but I did go to the meeting. There was an election, the 2024 General Election, and I had Full Leah Mode turned on.
I arrived at the start of the meeting, 7.30PM, and walked upstairs at my local Conservative club. I was actually thirty minutes late as the meeting had started at 7 p.m. – they were already in the thick of heated debate. Everyone, mostly elderly robots – about fifty of them – were there, packed into a non-air-conditioned room.
I said ’Hi, I’m Leah’ as my former enemies all stared at me. They knew exactly who I was as I sat down to enjoy my first meeting. No ceremony, just elderly boomers pretending that the world wasn’t already on fire for two hours. Now I knew where the robot Christians came from.
These people were my enemies six years prior, in 2018 when I campaigned for the Labour Party. Several of them recognised me, and questioned me.
Why the sudden change of heart? I had no problem telling them my epiphany about the wonders of freedom to own property and of the state as an enabler but not administrator of private wealth, that only the free market can truly generate it, and of the importance that people free of government intrusion in their daily lives.
I was immediately impressed at how organised my local Tories were. Even considering the higher number of activists in this highly conservative electoral constituency, they knew how to make good use of people. Everything regimented, yet anyone with a good idea could share it and the group might even implement it. Meritocracy.
The immediate weekend had me packing envelopes and leaflets alongside dozens of other activists ready for postal votes. Teams would be allocated, deciding who posted what and where.
Next came canvassing, which I had never done before but soon figured out. Various activists would engage in numerous charitable initiatives and sit at various politically agnostic social initiatives – the group and leadership regularly informed at all times, at yet more meetings.
A chatroom kept all of us in touch at all times, and there would be regular meetups at local HQ during campaigning – a welcome rest after a long day. Highly professional – you knew your place. I didn’t read the leaflets of course. Why would I? That’s for the voters, not I.
The next six weeks would consist of several marathons. We became quite tanned after walking for hours, meeting voters, often dogs, sometimes running away from dogs.
Every awkward address or angry voter was a new adventure, and tens of thousands of them would tell us just how badly I personally had failed them all, in the past twenty years. I mean, I was a bastard in school. One of them was making lunch so I wrote ’sandwiches’ on the canvass form.
I will now start talking about someone from my local Conservative Party who will, for the purposes of this book, be named Very Important Person (VIP). I would learn to admire Very Important Person as I stood next to her, watching her lie to a disabled pensioner that their Personal Independence Payment would never be cancelled – only Labour would be so cruel. The extent to which she could smile and lie was remarkable – she barely even spoke, just nodding and repeating back exactly what the voter just told them. A few puffs on her vape and off to the next door.
Very Important Person was extremely charming, always the centre of the room. She pleased everyone with her apparent wit, in a social sense at least. Her charm worked largely by anecdote; for example, she showed up a meeting once and at one point, talked dirty about… sex. The exact context is irrelevant, and only she had the ability to keep such topics purely wholesome. She was the sort of person who would always tell a story, and anecdote was precisely the tool she often used in arguments as well. She was also highly professional at the same time, and good at networking with people. She was the kind of person who’d always be moving fast, and you almost never saw her. You barely earned her gaze as she entered the room, because she held the entire room. She was the most important person in the room, her energy pulling everyone around her bubbly orbit. I could also tell that she was highly intelligent, but it was a quiet kind; she did not show her cards to anyone.
Every one of my colleagues would drive me to my next postcode, and I would single-handedly deliver thousands of leaflets. They all thanked me for my service. I lost count of how many houses I spoke to: all of them would blame me personally, for everything they hated about modern Britain.
A lady whose son couldn’t get a job, despite training. A man whose mother had died from delays to cancer treatment An elderly lady who would vote for the Reform party, because of all those bloody immigrants – and I would tell her how Nigel Farage sang the Hitler Youth in school. A jaded yuppie whose precious routine I had ruined with my presence.
A colleague would tell me that Blair was to blame for everything. I heard it all. Every opinion, except those that accurately pinpointed the exact infrastructural, demographic and socioeconomic shift of the past twenty years and how to address it, because heaven forbid they be informed.
Everyone needs a story. I verbally agreed with one of them, calling Rishi Sunak an entitled twat while Very Important Person was in earshot, who probably agreed with me. I just did what I’ve always done: listen, learn and adapt. We all knew Rishi was toast, and I saw no reason to lie.
I was now a full-blown Tory. I had become the enemy, and I was dressed accordingly. One colleague after another would drive me home, each day praising me for my hard work – they all told me that I worked the best. I was the young convert that everyone loved. All of them would listen to my stories, impressed by my intellect and seeming charm. I befriended them all.
Very Important Person’s car was a mess inside, large items thrown everywhere in the back and it had apparently not been cleaned for a while. She puffed on her vape while thanking me for all my work that day – our conversations though seemed quite superficial. I would observe her at gatherings, and she would always be on her phone. Always chatting, always busy, but always friendly.
Between that and her eight hours of weekly parliamentary business, I wondered if she ever slept. Very tired person. Six weeks passed, and I found myself manning several polling stations, with my blue rosette on.
I enjoyed my Green Party opponents at one of these polling stations. I seemed to know more than they did about climate science, having ridden there to that polling station on my bicycle. I smiled gleefully when I saw them eating meat and one of them even owned a Skoda.
They were very much impressed by my intellect and could tell that I was not actually a Tory. One of them even suggested that I join the green party; after I had insulted them by saying that they are not socialists, because the Green Party is a social-democratic party. I wished them good luck as I rode home on my bicycle, and thought of them fondly as I did.
I told my Green Party opponents, now friends but on that day my opponents, about Free Software and Right to Repair. I was quite impressed that they seemed to understand exactly what I was talking about, and why it mattered for the planet.
Very intelligent people. I might have joined them then and there, but that would require further nudging. It was an old man and a young woman – and the woman had such a perfect smile.
The Conservative Party lost that election badly, because of course they did. For some reason though, Very Important Person was very happy. It was a landslide where now my former colleagues could gloat. Very Important Person was quite beside herself indeed, and she was even promoted.
I was the only one they couldn’t charm. Very Important Person would later describe me as ’your very clever daughter Leah,’ in a letter to my mother. I’d often made insightful remarks at meetings, like when I said that the recent US import tariffs were correct in principle, but that it would be better if the US implemented a federal VAT system to replace local state taxes. It’s one of the few countries without VAT, and doing it this way would greatly reduce the tax gap while largely automating the process of re-balancing the US’s laughably unbalanced goods trade deficit. Her response was some vague story about her family farm when UK VAT first replaced the system of purchase taxes. Very Stupid Person.
I would hear several of them make transphobic remarks, when they thought I couldn’t hear. I knew who these people were, but these people were my new research – and maybe I would convince the more intelligent of them to remember that attacking trans rights is the least conservative thing ever. What about personal liberty, freedom of expression and freedom from government intrusion?
I did nonetheless get myself on the shortlist for candidates at next year’s local council elections; not that I got to be a candidate, but I very much enjoyed telling Santa about the wonders of libertarian economic policy applied to the reality and inner workings of the British state.
That’s what I called him: Santa. He looks like Santa at all times, minus the robes. He sat across from me along with ten or so other colleagues, asking me, a former communist, dead in the eye why the Conservative Party was my new home, and why I would never, ever leave it. Santa was also the chairman of my local party, and everyone loved him. He was the kind of person who could just light up the room with a smile. He was nice to everyone, including me, at all times.
I had spent six months learning all of Santa’s wishes, and I had three Red Bulls inside me. Their approval of me was unanimous. A highly dubious gift, that gave my socialist parents very mixed feelings.
Went to the 2024 Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham. Complete waste of time. I spent half of it in my hotel room, adding Sony PlayStation support to Libreboot and archiving DuckStation, a PlayStation emulator, whose author had recently turned it into a proprietary software project. I archived the version that was Free Software, and spoke to one of the lead developers of a PlayStation 2 emulator called PCSX2, whose work was also present in DuckStation.
The talks were incredibly boring, but I did enjoy the talk from the now-deposed unnamed mayor, of a major British city, talking about his legacy in office. I enjoyed the trade union talk, that was also there for some reason. Most of my colleagues preferred the free wine, and I never saw them.
Very Important Person was there, serving as the highlight of my trip. Of course, she was on her phone the whole time, like always, chatting amongst comrades and such.
Absolute waste of time and money, and I nearly got mugged twice. The arms dealer was fun – I met an arms dealer at the conference. He was funny, but I’m never going to Birmingham again. Fuck Birmingham. I was nearly mugged twice, and the whole area that I stayed in was extremely rough.
The whole meeting the next day at my conservative club lectured me about how there are some bad apples in the community, and that’s why we can’t have nice things like trans rights. Oh dear.
Equally Important Person once did a speech at our club. Like Very Important Person, she was also a woman, and I asked her, during questions and answers, why she had once singled out trans people for abuse in an article. I was quite polite, and knew she would not answer me, but did enjoy watching her lie in-person. She apparently never said that. Indeed. These people are masters.
Very Young Person actually facepalmed while I asked it. Very Important Person would kneel beside me after the fact, to tell me that trans women lost the right to be trans when they went to prison. Delightful.
Very Young Person is actually a future Liberal Democrat, and he will one day learn this. He is, for now, a Conservative Party member who believes in the National Health Service, the Welfare State, opposes Brexit, believes in human rights, freedom of speech, gay rights, and so on. Yes, how nice.
Very Young Person looked up to me, and was also on the shortlist. I very much enjoyed listening to this progressively minded youngster rationalise every single one of his party’s retrograde policies. I also admired his general, unmasked arrogance. He wasn’t just destined for power – he told you so. His level of entitlement felt refreshing, even if he was mostly unpleasant.
He was also not very intelligent, but, yeah, nice enough bloke. I’m sure he’ll be a boring Tory MP one day. The future is safe. He didn’t seem to have many of his own stated opinions, and he’d only just come out of college; I got him to tell me what he truly thought, and I’d later see him stand next to his worst enemies in an election leaflet made for him. His main goal was power at all costs. Like I said: the future is safe.
Very Nasty Person complained loudly in parliament about five trans women currently in women’s prisons – she said: Men in women’s prisons. Just some lady I saw while watching the parliament channel. Very nasty women.
Nobody challenged her, beautiful though her words were, yes. Why would they? The entire party was as vacuous in their principles as her. People forget the legacy of the Local Government Act 1988, of which Section 28 decimated LGBT rights. Indeed, the government had been slowly eroding our rights for years. Bitch.
I sat at a polling station listening to Reform and an independent talk shit about Jews. I told them Jews were human beings whose lives were none of their business. Reform won by a country mile. Seig…
I visited Parliament with my party. Elvis Presley was with us on the coach, charming every single pensioner on the bus – I was the youngest person there, and also charmed. The house of commons is five times smaller in real life than on TV, and looks quite tacky.
Standing at the dispatch box, wondering if this room was actually fake, I saw all the other tourists who were also there. A group of schoolchildren stood in front of the green seats to have photos taken – they were not allowed to actually sit.
All I remember was thinking that the room looked dirty. Everything was haphazard and strange. The room also seemed high-tech, with plenty of visible equipment.
Westminster has a uniquely British charm. I found myself amused that the pomp and ceremony of our global Britain was conducted from this quite farcically maintained building in central London. The artwork and statues made it all worthwhile.
You felt the sweat of every person in history who had ever walked those halls, like the sound of footsteps would bring the place alive.
Angela Rayner was still the Labour Party’s deputy leader, and walked past our tour group. She was shorter, fatter and prettier in person, though I did not speak to her.
Boring place, and the canteen was always empty. I managed to grab a very disappointing, somewhat nutritious meal while Elvis ate a panini. The man who originally called me to put up signs, he was there, watching me eat. He said nothing while I gave him some boring, charming lecture about whatever the hell we were talking about. He held onto every word, while watching me eat my dry, tasteless meal.
There was also a well-stocked gift shop. I bought chocolates for my mother and ate most of them on the coach – I left four. I also bought a mug and a notebook. I usually hate gift shops, but I was in-character and I fancied eating chocolate.
Very Important Person was there, and we all sat down to have tea. I gave her a passionate lecture about how the new party leader should better sell herself, by focusing on her childhood upbringing – her story – and how every other successful leader had done so. Blair did it. Attlee did it. Thatcher did it – the daughter of a shopkeeper. Everyone needs a story. I cited an interview in which Kemi Badenoch had described her upbringing in Nigeria, the corruption there and how she was inspired by Britain when she came at sixteen, how much she enjoyed the freedom of working in McDonald’s and living comfortably in Great Britain with her family.
A real pull yourself up from the bootstraps story, I said, and I told her that Britons would feel compelled to hear more of it. People like to feel that their leaders are normal, and it was a charming story. Several pensioners in the room told me it was a good idea – Very Important Person herself gave her usual non-answer, because she suffers from a lack of general intelligence. Unfortunately.
Yes, I’m clever. Very Important Person was too, but she pretended to be stupid at all times. She made a convincing performance. How else could she be chief whip of the party?
Elvis didn’t hear my speech. He was elsewhere, probably seducing more women. He had his boyfriend with him.
Very Important Person had Important Parliamentary Business, and would not return home with us.
Very Important Person approached me while she was drunk at the 2024 Christmas party. My question to Equally Important Person obviously left its mark, and she slurred something like:
’We will have many debates, even if we disagree, I’m sure.’
She winked.
She and most of my colleagues were thoroughly deluded. They operated from a position of relative privilege in their lives, and seemed not to know how real human beings live. I would sit at meetings and think that they are all actually stupid. The whole world burned around them and they would just pretend that the ship is not sinking around them. I jumped off, because I lost respect for them. They were losers.
Nothing fancy. My resignation was implemented by the following email, forwarded to both CCHQ and Very Important Person on 27th November 2025:
Dear CCHQ,
I hereby notify the Party of my resignation. I shall be cancelling my Direct Debit with the Party.
Name: Leah Rowe
Address: my home address
Membership number: membership number
I have observed an increase in racism, transphobia, other bigotry, even fascist ideology, in the national party, that must not be ignored. Just the other week, one Tory MP in parliament was obsessing over so-called ’biological males’ in women’s prisons; nobody challenged her.
As a proud anti-fascist, I do not merely choose to disassociate myself from such people; I also promise that I will strongly oppose them.
Good day.
Eight days later, I defected to the Green Party of England and Wales. The next time I met Very Important Person, she was my enemy, on polling night for the 2026 Essex County Council Elections. I stood as the Green Party Candidate in my town, coming fourth; Very Young Person was my opponent and came third.
Everyone’s on best behaviour at polling night. I happily chatted with several of my former Conservative and Labour colleagues, on a great many things. Most Conservatives aren’t evil; most of the ones I met are nice people, who just want to do right by their country. The same was true of my old Labour friends. I spoke to a lovely woman from an independent party, who I’d met previously.
I did not speak to the Reform candidates, because I regard them as fascists. They all won by a landslide, in my town and beyond, that night. Anti-semites and transphobes, all. Upon seizing the council here, they banned LGBT flags from libraries and removed Ukrainian flags from the County Council administrative building. Bastards.
I learned. I remain proud to this day. Although I didn’t win, I stood for a cause that I truly believed in. I did enjoy Very Young Person’s company, in a diplomatic capacity. I beat my former Labour Party colleagues, who came fifth.
Very Important Person was her usual, dull self, all night. Very Young Person is still a liberal, and Santa is still an incredibly charming man, who I’m sure has my best wishes in mind even to this day. Lovely man.
I don’t wink. Bitch.
We’re still in the same period, mentally, as the Conservative period; in fact, I was still a member of the Conservative Party during FOSDEM 2025. When I become relaxed, and I have everything under control, I just meet people. I have fun. That’s quite normal for anyone, really. And so began the silly season.
Yes:
What was Brexit exactly? I beamed directly to Université Libre de Bruxelles, spotting two of my most intelligent friends in the matter stream: Flowergirl, and Flowerman.
Flowergirl was the exact opposite in person to the person I knew online. The one I knew online was bossy, a no-nonsense sort of person who you didn’t want to offend. The in-person Flowergirl smiled, and laughed at everything, generally made fun of everything and was extremely relaxed at all times. She’d chat a lot about everything that interested her, and I would contribute to her conversation. Flowerman was very much similar. They were both nerds, and I enjoyed both of their highly stimulating intellects. We talked about a lot.
I only keep high quality friends. I spent the entire weekend with them, and we got up to all kinds of mischief. For example, we took the proper piss out of a meat locker late at night, full of expired meat that had oxidised. Meat lockers are a thing in Brussels. Flowergirl took a photo of me pointing at it. We all had a good laugh.
I hate Brussels. Always have. The food is all French, which means lots of butter and oil, and… bread. Hard bread. I’m sorry, but this is what I would consider to be hell.
I generally avoid Brussels, and I only go there if I’m doing a talk at FOSDEM, or if someone I like is going. I went because Flowerman and Flowergirl were going. I’d only decided to go, three days before it began, booking a flight and hotel room last-minute!
FOSDEM itself is largely international, and has no French food in sight. Just burger and pizza trucks, with chip – and waffles. It’s all I ate during the day. I never use the canteen there, because the queue for coffee is insane – there is a specific vending machine in the AW building, serving coffee, and most people don’t know it’s there. It’s really tucked away. I’d go there to get coffee, then wander around with it. Ninety cents.
I knew that coffee machine was there at FOSDEM 2016. In 2025, it was still there!
I spent the entire first morning on Saturday in the Firmware and Bootloader room, watching every firmware and bootloader talk. Yes. I was the one who always asked the most difficult questions at the end. For example, I asked Lennart Poettering about Linux UKIs in the context of coreboot and edk2, and whether he’d experimented with it, forcing him to admit that he’d never used coreboot, in a room full of… coreboot developers.
I wasn’t there to talk, this year. I just enjoyed asking the most generally interesting and challenging questions in all of the talks. I love questions and answers.
I met a lot of cool people. I went to eat lunch once with executives from a non-profit foundation that supported a major Free Software project; I had an egg-salad sandwich with Americano. Flowerman was there and showed everyone his passport photo, which made him look like a serial killer. He had another ID photo that made him look like the unabomber. We all laughed.
Most of the weekend was spent just walking around Brussels and eating at nice restaurants. I liked the FOSDEM event because it felt like being back in school – in fact, it was a university campus and several students would walk around campus as well, who were not attending the conference. Thousands of us all crammed like sardines in a campus far too small to host FOSDEM. That’s what makes FOSDEM what it is.
I engaged a lot with both Flowergirl and Flowerman on politics. I won’t reveal the contents of the conversation in this book, but suffice it to say, our conversations were intense – we were basically emulating IRC, but in-person, so it was sort of like love.
For example, we were all completely knackered one night and eating at our hotel – we had the same hotel. A group of business people were conversing, drinking wine near us, laughing loudly. They were speaking Dutch, engaging in pointless smalltalk and I understood about half of it, so I knew exactly what they were all saying: absolutely fuck-all. I told my friend: I escaped that world. I was pointing to them.
I told Flowergirl that I hated smalltalk. I can do it when forced to, but I prefer long, intellectually challenging conversations, especially about topics I’ve never heard of.
Flowergirl and Flowerman are both incredibly autistic, and I thought it would be funny at one point for us to try emulating small-talk, after I’d taken the piss out of the boring Dutch people nearby. We couldn’t. We just couldn’t. It was just so alien to all of us, but we did try – and then we all immediately started laughing uncontrollably.
On another night, I sat with Flowerman in his room and he told me about his childhood – I won’t reveal the contents of the conversation, but it was intense. I described mine. Then we went out to eat, taking Flowergirl with us, groggy as she’d been sleeping. We banged on her door and ate at a nice Portuguese restaurant – because I absolutely refuse to eat French food. I hate French food.
I crashed the FSF’s Machine Learning talk. I felt darkly satisfied to know that they were using a Canoeboot machine for their presentation, and I left the talk about 20 minutes before it ended. Flowerman was in front of me as we left, and I made sure to walk in front of the stage, but outside of the camera’s view. I looked at the FSF’s new executive director in the eye as I passed. She knew who I was. I said nothing.
I watched a recording later, and she is visibly shaken, almost like she’s trying to avoid showing anger on stage. She turns away briefly to someone in the front of the audience, smiling in a sort of like, I don’t know how to describe it, scolding in a sort of acknowledging way. You know what I mean. You could definitely see that she hated me, for some reason. I’d left my mark on her, I thought. The talk itself was trash. How was a small organisation like the FSF going to fight AI?
That was a month before she capitulated, asking me what I wanted: respect. It was after she had such courage, that I then regarded the FSF as an honourable institution.
Flowergirl and I met up with another of her friends, who I shall call the Princess – she came from some wealth and was actually a quite important person. I won’t reveal the contents of the conversation, but I liked her personality. She was quite chaotic and fun, yes, but also highly intelligent, and I even told her so. She told me some stuff about her country that I found enthralling, and we had a jolly good time – and this would not be my last encounter with Princess. Nope.
There was a moment when we were walking to a restaurant, and I trailed behind. Princess looked behind her, toward me, looking at me strangely – I wonder what she saw? I was walking quite nonchalantly, quietly, just following the group, almost as if I was stalking them as they all chatted away. She’d obviously noted my absence. I had my unassuming jacket and sunglasses on, and I was just walking casually, minding my own business, yes.
Then we went to a nice Syrian place, to eat. There are a lot of Syrian refugees in Brussels, which means that the quality of cuisine had risen by roughly five hundred percent there over the last decade.
Another person was with us, who I’d known for years, and he was the leader of several major Free Software projects – I will just call him the Watchman, because he is a libertarian. Yes. He has absolutely no bearing on any of the story, and he is literally just a side character.
You now know that the Watchman exists. Yes. I did not object, despite the fact that he was thoroughly deluded. Libertarianism is whack. No sense arguing with the Watchman. I wanted to enjoy the food, so I did that instead.
I made a proper pig of myself too, and I even ate several other people’s leftovers.
I met the lady from 2015. We were both in a room, and she had a mask on, because apparently COVID was still a thing. I approached her, calling her by name as I recognised the eyes. She was friendly, and we hit it off. All forgiven, apparently. She knew I’d changed a lot over the years, and basically become totally chill. Bumped into her again multiple times. I enjoyed her company.
I told her in a private message afterward that it was fate, that we met that day. I thanked her for inspiring me during those earlier years, apologising for my past transgressions. She did not respond, but she did indicate that she appreciated the message.
I met up with the Software Freedom Conservancy as well, since Libreboot had applied to become a member project. They had not replied to my emails so I ambushed one of their representatives, just before their talk. I actually walked up to them on stage, to talk to them, smiling profusely.
This person showed the usual politician’s politeness, that empty smile and assured me that it would be looked into, but of course the Conservancy would cite ’governance issues’ – which in translation, meant that the various FSF people who overlapped with their community had probably breathed down all of their necks.
Libreboot became part of Software in the Public Interest instead, who were totally chill. They supported a number of major projects, such as Arch Linux and Debian Linux.
Flowergirl and Flowerman are both incredibly based.
I recorded this chapter initially after writing it, but then wrote something extra at the end, about a lady I met at CCC. Anonymised, of course, pertaining to a memory I had about my former Dutchfriend from 2015, who this lady somehow triggered in me when I met her. This extension is marked at the end of the text.
…
Still the silly season, but I’m a member of the Green Party now. Long story. More on that later, I promise.
I hate cops, especially border cops. Especially when I had no sleep the night before, and the border cop is asking me why I’m staying in Germany during Christmas – I thought she would turn me back. Yes, and I didn’t want to turn on my computer to show her my hotel documents.
Alas, I was no longer European. I look to my right and all those EU people just buzzed through fine, on their cards. No worries. I thought to myself: ‘I want to be one of those people.’
She was obviously finishing up her shift soon anyway, it being so late, and she looked tired. She eventually just smiled as I tapped my heels as and my hotel appeared. I’m in a room that contains only a bed, and about two by two metres of walking space plus a rail for my clothes – it cost me fifty euros each night, complete with communal toilets and showers. Germans.
I was one week early for the world’s biggest hacker conference, in the centre of Hamburg. Yes, this was the 39th Chaos Communication Congress – or, 39C3. The nice thing about Germany is that there is a Lidl in sight at all times, so I had no shortage of sandwiches. I spent my first few days wandering the streets of Hamburg, getting to know the place.
One time, the self-checkout machines were broken. I watched a spirited discussion between an angry customer, and a burned-out worker trying to calm the lady down. Germans.
Yes, for several days before the conference, I walked around Hamburg all day as though I myself were German. I also spent a lot of time in my hotel room, working on Libreboot – and a tax return.
Serious business. The first Chaos Communication Congress happened in the 1980s – and there were actually two of them. The other was in East Germany, and they merged after German Reunification. These people mocked, evaded and generally sabotaged the Stasi for fun.
CCC is sacred, and I would not sully it with English. I spoke German, as often as I could, the whole time. Next time though, I’ll know to say ’Ich möchte’ and not ’Kann ich habe’ in a restaurant. Yes.
I’d spent time since October learning the language, in preparation, by watching nothing but the Bundestag debates and daytime news – occasionally actual shows. I learned the conjugations and learned to spell words as I heard them. I learned at a rapid rate, repeating everything, and I often spoke in German with ChatGPT – poorly. However, I was then proficient enough to survive.
My first real German experience was a homeless man, who ambushed me in the street. His name was Stefan. I was frantically trying to buy a watch at a jewellery store, which was closing early due to Christmas, and the man suddenly approached me.
He just started freestyle rapping. I thought I was being attacked, but then I recognised the beat. I smiled, and he smiled. He was drunk – I could smell it on his breath.
I thanked him greatly for his performance, though I didn’t have any money on me – just my card. He did nonetheless hug me, and even kiss me on the cheek – which I didn’t mind. He was nice.
A group of black teenagers with extremely thick accents showed me how to use the Hauptbahnhof train station at Hamburg, as I needed to travel to Dammtor – where CCC was, at the CCH building. Their accents were extremely harsh, and I understood everything they said – in German – as they complimented me, sensing that I was in no way fluent but otherwise comprehending their words, it seemed – a shock even to me. I apparently spoke passible German – they did initially ask me if I spoke Englisch. I said ‘Nein’ and they continued telling me how to use the train station – and I boarded the train to Dammtor. I also once gave a random lady directions. I did frighten one lady once when I said ‘Entschuldige’ – the correct word is ‘Entschuldigung – eine kurz frage,’ but oh well. I felt incredibly pleased with myself anyway.
I found that I was mostly able to speak German proficiently, albeit poorly as my pronunciation was off. There was one restaurant in particular that I ate at three times, because I liked the waitress. I never spoke English, except when I was really tired. I was mildly annoyed that my non-EU debit card would have a surcharge applied to it when I ordered. My money was no longer European.
Yes, I attended the Chaos Communication Congress. It is the happiest, gayest place in the world, for four days. I’d been lucky enough that a person I’d befriended gave me her ticket, as she had to cancel her trip. I’d failed to buy one myself in the infamous ’F5 lottery’ – tickets literally sell out in seconds.
I mean, I’ve never seen so many gays, trans people and furries all in one place. It was fucking awesome, and I never wanted to leave. The conference was also full of communists, many wearing cat ears. It was as though I’d entered queer heaven.
I won’t talk that much about CCC itself, because it is an unwritten rule that what happens at CCC, stays in CCC. I did, however, enjoy working shifts. I will talk about my shift work at CCC.
I volunteered as part of CCC’s Angel programme – the Engelsystem, as it’s called. In this system, any jobs that need doing can be selected and then you do them. Volunteer work, yes.
The conference officially ran from the 27th of December to the 30th, but there was pre-conference, and some people hung around for a bit on the 31st as well. My first shift was on the 25th of December, working in a kitchen, scrubbing dishes – yes, I did this instead of spending time with my family, on Christmas Day.
I found novelty in that, since I usually find Christmas to be false. I’m not a Christian, and I’m also not a child anymore – I don’t need presents. I also worked in the cloakroom a lot, from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. each day, because these early morning jobs got you double-points.
Yes, there was a points system – earn enough points and you get a certain number of meal tokens. With these, you could eat for free in the Engelküche, which I did for every meal of every day. Fresh, nutritious vegan food, because the chefs were all vegans and they had imposed their iron will.
I once guarded an emergency door from accidental frivolous usage – because, Germans. I once guarded a lift for the same reason – again, Germans. There was also a dance. Several people were openly engaging in a sexual manner – also Germans.
The congress ran twenty four hours round the clock, and I regularly slept in a hammock there – I rarely slept in my hotel. I once woke up at 3 a.m. or so and witnessed the happiest, gayest rave of all time – the entire building shook. I did not take part, but seeing it did make me happy.
I also did trash pickup a couple of times. Someone showed me a useful skill they have: they can whistle like a bird. Kola, bitte. I met and befriended several Germans as I sipped premium cola on the third floor.
A child approached me on one of my trash shifts and offered me pancakes. What? Smiling at the child, I responded: ‘Nein, danke.’
My shift partner did have some. I later told him that I used to be a junkie, for some reason, and that someone once spiked my drink – the implication was that I’d been raped. I have no idea why I do this. It’s like, just, well, breathing basically.
I liked the cloakroom shifts for another reason: I met a different shift partner every time. There are lots of interesting people at CCC, but it’s quite noisy during the day. Talking to the same person for two hours can be fun, and every person had a different story. I did four hours, but it consisted of two consecutive two-hour shifts, and most people would only do a single two-hour shift.
I met multiple leaders of multiple major Free Software projects, who had booths and tables at CCC. They were all quite happy to see me – except one.
One of them annoyed me by asking me about Libreboot. Wait for my FOSDEM talk, I said. FOSDEM 2026. I had wanted to do a Libreboot talk at 39c3 in German, but I was rejected – for the best, since I wasn’t fluent enough. I will only talk German, at CCC.
I did speak English to the GNU Boot guys. I took one of their stickers. Several actually.
Working the cloakroom during those hours gave double points, yes, but also did not require as much effort. There were massive queue for it during the day, but it was almost dead in the early hours, so I could sit on my laptop and mostly write software, or whatever else I wanted.
On one of the shifts, I ate free soup, given be the chefs who were going around giving free soup to literally every shift worker, on every type of shift. It was delicious.
I did not talk about Libreboot. You do not talk about Libreboot at CCC. I avoided talking about Libreboot – I was there to enjoy CCC. I talk about Libreboot at FOSDEM.
For some reason, I was extremely rude to one of my trash shift partners, on one of the days. He was just really not confident at all, constantly stuttering, and he just annoyed me. He seemed actually incompetent at, you know, picking up rubbish, and bagging it, yet he was also trying to guide me around. I think he was just nervous or something. I would just tell him to hurry the fuck up. Schnell schnell.
At one point, with the same person, we pass a staff toilet that we weren’t allowed to enter. He know this because the sign said: ‘Eintritt verboten.’
Because he’s German, he said I can’t go in there, because Germans love rules. I am apparently not allowed to use a fucking toilet. I told my friend: ‘Das ist mir wurst. Warte mal, bitte.’
Yes, I’m not walking hundreds of metres when there’s a pisser right next to me. Germans. My German friend did not question my logic, and waited patiently.
Yes, Germans. Speaking of Germans, and rules: I was once one minute away from the end of a cloakroom shift, but my replacement arrived one minute early, so my supervisor told me one minute early that I was aloud to leave… one minute early. Yes.
I told my supervisor: I still have one minute. You now have a fifty percent increase to your workforce, for one minute – she smiled, saying that I seem more German than most Germans.
Lovely woman. I hope I meet her again. Saw her a couple times. The same woman was running a workshop, showing people how to pick locks, and recreate missing keys from a given lock. She wanted you to have this skill.
There was an electronics class, but I did not go – it was mostly attended by children, who are much less tolerant to broken German, and my German wasn’t fluent enough. I really wanted to teach youngsters how to do micro-soldering, which I’m good at.
I did not go to any talks, except two lightning talks: one about Palentir, and one was some generic shit from Die Linke, who were there – because CCC is full of commies. I enjoyed them both. Several participants recognised me, but did not talk to me – but they were staring at me, as I watched the talk, sitting cross legged with my rucksack.
Weird.
I never go to talks at conferences anyway, or I only go to a few. You can watch those online. I go to meet people. I got a sticker that has the Pirate Bay logo, with the caption ’AI training data’ – can’t get that in a talk.
Doing Angel shifts also meant I got limited edition stickers – available only to Angels. I once sat in a tent, and drank tea. There was a tented area, that served tea. Just tea.
I also read some communist literature, which the guy said was not communist, but he smiled and chatted more openly with me when I told him I was once in the Communist Party of Britain. I did also say that I’d since switched to the Greens. He didn’t need to know that I was once blue. I liked him. He also complimented my German.
Yes, most of my time was spent on shifts, and sitting in the Engelküche. The contents of those conversations are classified, but one of them was a furry. No relation.
The reason was simple: I spent two weeks constantly conversing in German, and listening passive to Germans. My German comprehension and speaking ability improved leaps and bounds. It was practise for the next Congress in 2026.
Engelküche during day and Garderobe between 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. gave plenty of practice. I only spoke English in the cloakroom once, because my shift partner on one of the shifts only spoke English – and she seemed nice.
I also sat around at a lot of random events. For example, there was a small corner corridor dedicated to the dancing plague of 1518 – and everyone was being gay, including me.
One of the other Angels in Heaven – the organising room for allocating Angel shifts and a general meeting place – berated me heavily. I’d written my real name instead of my Engelsystem username, on my name tag, which hampered identification. I’d also not put it in a proper plastic protector, so the ink would rub off easily. I also used the wrong ink. I was also only allowed one – just one – name tag. He made sure to confiscate the first. I simply did as I was told, because I fully respected this very German man.
I sat in his very chair the next day, and on several other days, welcoming new Angels, registering them as having arrived. I could not type several of their usernames, due to my US Dvorak keyboard – typing umlauts wasn’t very practical.
The other receptionists at Heaven did tell me that my German is excellent. I seemed to comprehend German well, and speak it well, given I’d only been practising for two months. I’d started from scratch in October 2025, and 39c3 was in December 2025. Every German I met said that. One of them said, ironically in English: ‘That’s pretty sick.’
One of them later asked, because he’d seen me bragging about it online, and I was now bragging in front of him: ‘Bist du Leah?’ – in his thick southern accent. He had to leave early, but I said yes. He seemed extremely happy.
I met Princess again, who said hello to me excitedly amongst her friends, all of them going the opposite direction as I approached my 4 a.m. cloakroom shift. I said hello back with a gleeful yawn, exhaling from my vape as I did. Nice lady.
I met Bunnie Huang on one of my cloakroom shifts. Good guy. No relation.
I met the GNU Boot developers, and I put a GNU Boot sticker on my laptop. They laughed.
A man offered methamphetamine for free during cloakroom duty. I did not partake. You do not need drugs at CCC. CCC is the drug. No drugs for me. Only coffee, and Engelwasser – both free of charge, for Angels.
To be clear: I was in the cloakroom for four hours every day. I met the entire conference this way. Most of it anyway. The temptation to stay up all night and just perk up on various stimulants was quite alluring, so lots of people will have done it.
I also bought a Wasserkocher, to make coffee in my hotel room. Lidl arabica. I would make it in my hotel room each morning, as I showered and got dressed for my täglich Garderobeengelarbeitsschichten. I did not get a t-shirt – my friend and I were well-gutted.
I worked roughly forty hours of Engelarbeitsschichten in the space of a few days, which meant that I would be eligible for easier entry to CCC 2026 – precisely my purpose in working forty hours of Angel shifts.
Most of my colleagues were extremely gay, or adjacent to it. I actually cried. I did catch CCCold, commonly known as Congress Flu. Totally worth it, and this is all you get. Your head would explode if I told you all of it anyway. I will go there again in 2026.
…
This next part was recorded separately, as shown above:
This wasn’t all fun and games. I mean, it was, but something happpened to me on my last night at CCC. I met a lovely German lady on one of my shifts. She was very young, about twenty I’d say, and we were just chatting. We met on one of my shifts. Nice lady, and she was really happy to talk to me. At first, she didn’t even know who I was, and we were just talking; I eventually told her that I’m the leader of the Libreboot project, which made her even happier.
The specifics of what we talked about doesn’t really matter, but she was really nice to me, and we just talked a lot. Something about her reminded me of my former Dutch friend, the one from 2015. Just the general feeling I had when talking to her. We quickly become friendly with each other, and I don’t even remember what we talked about, but we both really enjoyed each other’s company.
We tried to get an Engel t-shirt at one point, and we were disappointed that they’d all run out. We were sitting around a circle with several of her friends just chatting, as teardown had begun. We watched the world around us disappear, chatting gleefully and just generally having a good time. I felt good.
At one point, I went to the toilet and caught myself thinking: ‘This will not be another Dutchfriend.’ - and I felt weird, but didn’t think much else of it at that point.
Then we were eating in the Engelküche. My friend had to leave early to catch her train back to her town, but I’d insisted that we both eat; she had a long journey, and it was best not to go on an empty stomach, I said. We chatted some more.
We hugged as she left, and at one point I said to her: ‘For some reason, I feel like you’re one of the coolest people I’ve ever met,’ and I meant it as well. When she left, I felt tears start to flow. I had no idea at the time. I wasn’t exactly attracted to this lady, no, but I knew later what it meant. I was trying not to cry as I continued to eat my meal, and I muttered under my breath again: ‘She is not Dutchfriend’; my actual words were a bit harsher than that. I’d also told her, in that moment when she left, that I tend to be a bit dispassionate, though I did not elaborate.
Something about her just reminded me of a time when I’d met Dutchfriend at FOSDEM 2016, when she left, and after that, I got drunk at a bar with my other friend, and I’d started crying that night. I had no idea why at the time.
I finished my meal in the Engelküche and went back to my hotel. I was raw, crying and laughing at the same time, hyper aware of everything around me as I did. I’d generally been quite emotionally open at CCC so I had my guard down the whole time.
I wasn’t crying for her. I thought it might be at the time, but it wasn’t love; what I had just experienced was a trigger. I’d been traumatised by my previous experiences in 2016, coming out as trans, and the later stresses, especially when I lost control of everything later on in my drunken stupor. I was completely sober during CCC, and the memories just came rushing back in this moment.
I told a friend about it from my hotel room that night. I was fine the next day. I didn’t think about her after that, though I later met her again at FOSDEM 2026. Just a really nice lady that I met. I hadn’t cried because of my new German friend. No. I cried because she made me remember Dutchfriend.
It meant nothing. I was just triggered by my former traumatic experiences from 2016, and I saw it in those terms after I’d calmed down. I rationalised it this way in my mind and I snapped back, once again in control.
I actually went back to CCC for the next two days after that night, as teardown still continued for the next few days. I just wanted to be in Germany for a few more days. I had meal tokens left over from my Engelarbeitsschichten, so I just sat and wrote code in the Engelküche, now much quieter, talking to more Germans who also stayed behind.
Yes, CCC is one hell of a drug. It’s so manic and you meet so many other people. It’s just such a friendly environment and they accept you for who you are. I was me the whole time, not masking or anything, but I was actually happy the whole time. I was charming a lot, and I spoke to a lot of people. It also somewhat felt like Thailand; I’d been quite open there too.
That’s the thing about trauma, isn’t it? It creeps up on you. I think I did finally become invincible again, on that weekend. I’d dealt with Badfriend too; we weren’t enemies anymore, during that weekend, having become somewhat friendlier again in the years leading up to this point. All of my old demons had been expunged.
Weird, how the mind works, but oh well.
My taxi driver took me to Hamburg airport, and said to me at one point that my German fluency level was far superior to that of his English. I considered it high praise. My Bavarian friend did say the following English words, as his card reader was apparently broken – and I’d lost my heels: ‘Cash is best, fuck the rest.’
‘Danke dir,’ I said as he carried my bags, and I told him to keep the change. I paid the man forty euros for his trouble. I then sat in the airport lobby for a while, writing code as Badfriend pinged me on IRC; she always knows, somehow, where I am at all times, but we were apparently friendly now. I provided her with some technical advice while I listened to families around me speak a variety of languages. I was one hour ahead of schedule.
I felt completely serene that night, like when you’ve just had the best sex for days and your mind is at peace. CCC has that effect on you. I actually cried several times afterward. Even Badfriend couldn’t bring me down. My airline finally started luggage check-in, and I smiled as the check-in man charged me an extra fifty euros for my over-sized luggage. I’d picked up a lot of gear at CCC. Worth every cent.
Smiling still, I make my way to customs. Hamburg airport really is quite beautiful at night, and has that strange German charm. Everything is just so efficient and clean.
Airports and libraries both have the same rules. Everyone is on their best behaviour in an airport. A man and his wife were speaking English, complaining heavily about everything. They both seemed quite short-tempered and impatient, entitled actually – she complained about ’crap German customs’ like the Germans owed her something.
I could tell that they were both on short fuses. Perhaps something had happened to them or they were in a hurry or something. Either way, they both seemed annoyed, and I was in my best mood that night.
I summoned their attention with a simple ’Excuse me,’ making sure that they were both looking at me. I said in English, proudly and at a volume that all other passengers could hear clearly:
‘Instead of complaining, why don’t you learn to respect German culture, and learn German?’
My German was not perfect at this time, but I’d watched enough Tagesschau24, Bundestagssitzungen and In aller Freundschaft to understand the man’s response. The wife was British, and the man some other nationality that I could not ascertain from the voice – though he did not sound German. To my surprise, the man actually did speak fluent German. I will, for this book, translate his German response into English.
He said, losing all of his marbles, something like: ‘You fucking tranny bitch, English bitch, why don’t you mind your own fucking business you stupid cunt. Fucking English bitch.’
I could see that his eyes might pop at any moment, and I’m sure that if this were a pub, it would have ended in fisticuffs. I responded, fluently:
‘Da haben Sie recht. Es tut mir leid.’ – meaning, roughly: ‘I stand corrected. I apologise.’
I was laughing slightly, politely yet mockingly, my head held high as I looked away. I proceeded forth with a general calm, as I had just ruined someone’s day. Yes, quite.
The man, no longer rational, was held up by customs. He later followed me. I actually waved my arms while he was behind me, pretending that I did not sense him, and I gloated loudly to myself. I proclaimed, in the most British way possible:
‘His fury was palpable’ – laughing, quite beside myself.
Still stalking me, I briefly peered into a shop that was obviously closing, and said to the man inside:
‘Haben Sie geöffnet?’ (are you open?) – I really was thirsty, and I wanted to buy cola.
The shopkeeper, audibly burned out, dismissed me immediately with a throaty ’Nei.’
I responded, politely as I walked away:
‘Entschuldigung.’
My ruse was working. My perfect German ruse. I actually did understand German, but I wanted this man’s head to explode. I felt a perfect euphoric bliss as I proceeded to my gate.
In a twist of fate, the man was also on the same flight as me. I made sure to speak perfect German while he was looking at me, scolding – he knew he could not retaliate, because again: airport rules.
A polite elderly lady near us at the gate asked me if priority boarding was underway, in German of course. I responded with something like: ’Ja, ich glaube, das ist für Sie.’ – she had a blue ticket, and so did I. We both proceeded, as indeed priority boarding had begun. The lady complimented my German, and I thanked her, my dubious airport friend still very much enthused with white-hot rage – he stayed behind in cattle class as I and the lovely Frau boarded our Ryanair flight.
I’d stared, smiling at my English friend’s wife the whole time. She was quite beautiful and so was the man; I enjoyed looking at both of them. I wondered if they’d been on their honeymoon? It was New Year’s Day, after all.
I made sure to say ‘Vielen Dank’ as fluently as possible to the guard after he verified my boarding pass. My German was actually shit, but I think I made a lasting first impression on the man.
The man passed me, at long last, long after I myself had sat down, his face still ready to melt – and I knew he’d spotted me. I stared at him as he walked past my seat, and the man intentionally did not look back at me. The wife was clearly shaken. I paid them no mind, calmly opening my book which I’d also read at CCC and my hotel.
A lovely Ukrainian couple sat next to me on the flight, who spoke perfect English. I was speaking to them, in my natural thick South East Essex accent – only CCC gets clear English. We both enjoyed our spirited conversations about life, and everything. Single-serving flight friend. I did not talk to the man – only the woman.
A woman vomited violently on the plane, threatened to sue everyone, then fled down the runway. I was annoyed I couldn’t see the chase. Police suspected drugs. I was laughing at her, explaining to my lady, who was from Ukraine, how this crazy lady was sealing her own fate for when she later appeared in court. Every word she said would be recalled by the dozens of passengers who heard her. Like, my only thought was that this lady should keep her mouth shut. Oh, those weren’t my drugs, officer!
My lovely lady from Ukraine was also freaked out by the copy of M.E. Thomas’s ’Confessions of a Sociopath’ laid out on my table, the book I’d been reading.
‘She’s just a bit of a nutter, isn’t she?’ I said to the officer, full South East Essex now.
‘Dunno,’ said the officer, and I wished him a good night.
I rushed to my shuttle from the terminal, all of us packed like sardines. The man and his lovely wife were still with me – and no longer my concern. I proceeded to thoroughly charm a random English lady, roughly twenty years old, relaying to her all about my time in Hamburg, where she had also been. I told her how nice it was to speak to a lovely English woman, having spoken only German for two weeks. We both recalled gleefully about how much fun we’d had, telling each other of our trips.
In full South East Essex accent, smiling, I reassured the woman. She had lost sight of her boyfriend, and I said: ‘Oh, I’m sure you’ll find him’ – we then talked about fireworks.
German Silvester is no joke – the Germans go absolutely mental with fireworks, ever since gatherings were banned during COVID. German youth responded by stockpiling even more fun and deadly explosives, setting them off openly in the streets, starting fires in the streets and generally causing mayhem in the streets.
This legacy continued, even after COVID had officially ended. I personally witnessed bombs being thrown in the street, which annoyed me at first – I just wanted to get back to my hotel.
I once laughed when I saw a young hooded man hold a lit rocket in his hand, firing it into a street full of parked cars. I and others around me stood back until it was safe – and as I proceeded henceforth, South East Essex Leah said audibly while laughing maniacally:
‘Fucking Germans, eh?’
I was alone, and several law-abiding Germans glanced in my direction.
Police sirens raged like music everywhere amidst the smell of burning as people shouted violently, and the streets were full of glass by morning. I slept like a baby; my hotel room was in the centre of Hamburg, a stone’s throw away from Hauptbahnhof train station. I heard it all as I read quietly, and drifted off.
My generic English lady stressed that she’d found the ordeal quite traumatising, having witnessed it herself, and that she would never, ever visit Hamburg again during Christmas.
I told her no, it was brilliant, and that I would definitely be back next year. I had also purchased fruit and various nuts from that same location, as there were a lot of Iranians there running market stalls. There was also a Lidl, my favourite place in the world.
She gave me quite the funny look.
British people.
I told my cab driver all about it on the drive home. He told me stories about his time fleeing war from his home country somewhere in the middle east. At least this man had something real to talk about. He was the real hero that day.
I paid the man extra for his trouble; there was a big traffic jam on the M25 that night. I called it the M25 tax. I could not even will myself upstairs when I got in. My cab driver had nearly crashed several times, as he was a shit driver, and I simply crashed on my sofa. I thought fondly of Badfriend the whole time.
Brussels still thought me European, asking politely for my fingers. That was all I heard, when Border Cop pointed vaguely at a device in front of me. I waved both hands and asked, smiling: ‘You want my fingers?’
He laughed as I materialised directly in the AW campus building at Université libre de Bruxelles. Ninety cents for one Americano, if only I’d had digits. Pity.
CCC had left me completely skint, so I ate only nuts, crisps, fruit and bread purchased from supermarkets scouted on arrival. That, and FOSDEM food truck pizza. I slept in the sleaziest shithole I could find, for fifty euros each night. My room had a photo of a woman looking visibly distressed as she’d dropped about fifty oranges from her bag, and they were all over the stairwell.
Whe I arrived on stage, I set up my laptop and the organisers set up up on the microphones. We initially tried one that fit into my clothing, which required that they attach it. The organiser said ‘Can I touch you?’ to which I responded ‘Yes, you can touch me,’ and he awkwardly installed the mic. It didn’t work, so I had to use the hand mic.
I never, ever do anything on time, or even well. I do everything at the very last minute. I did a Libreboot release that same morning, announcing one hour before my speech. Fingerless, a FOSDEM volunteer held the hand mic as I gave my speech. I delivered my speech on roughly two hours of sleep.
The talk went well, as I laid out the ideological basis of the Libreboot project, its history, its general development – and this included a full, uncensored account of the Cold Boot War. The audience laughed several times, but malfunctions to streaming equipment cut off some of the funnier parts. The online recording is still gold.
After I was done gloating about 2023-2025, I did a tech demo that failed – Libreboot caches everything offline, but one of the projects it uses still downloaded uncached translation files at build time – GNU GRUB is the bane of my entire life. The internet was down during my talk, so I had to improvise – which I did, expertly. Flowergirl and half of CCC watched my boring talk, which they still found entertaining.
About thirty people lined up to speak with me on stage, after I’d finished my speech. The next speaker eventually smiled and booted me off the stage. FOSDEM gave me gingerbread men as a reward for my talk, which I saved for my mother at home.
FOSDEM had their own Garderobe in K building, but I was not volunteering. I did smile, remembering fondly my entire time at CCC, about thirty percent of it spent on Garderobeengelarbeitsschichten. Fun times. My talk was in K building.
I attended another talk about coreboot, and a fellow hacker who I had royally pissed off at CCC was there, ignoring my presence the entire time. Nice lady.
A former Libreboot Committee member ambushed me. He wanted to catch up on old times, so I fled with my food truck pizza and hid in H building with a much cooler friend.
There were several talks about computer emulation, and I watched all of them. My PCSX2 friend from 2024 walked past me, giving me the nod, but we did not talk. We knew we were cool, acknowledging each other’s presence on the H building stairwell.
A very boring German man ambushed me near the AW coffee machine. He told me everything about his LinkedIn profile, about his job working cybersecurity or something, and I was bored out of my mind.
Flowergirl and I watched a boring talk in Janson, and I cheered her up by showing her my GNU Boot sticker, which I’d proudly displayed in my Libreboot speech. She giggled.
There was also black mould on the ceiling of the Janson theatre. Flowergirl said she’d tried not to think about it as I pointed it out. There was also a cool robot.
Flowergirl’s hotel was near my shithole, so we walked together one night. She knew exactly how to get back, because she’d memorised the tram lines in Brussels, knowing exactly which route the tram took. Instead of using the tram, we walked, because the tram was too packed apparently. I didn’t mind. Flowergirl is awesome.
A lovely German lady met me, who I’d befriended at CCC. We spoke German via messenger app the entire time, and met up several times. She watched several talks with me, including two of the emulation talks. She watched my Libreboot talk. We met on one of my Engelarbeitsschichten. She was quite young, about twenty I’d say, and quite eager in conversations; she was just warm in general, and we’d conversed about a great many topics. She was also quite authoritative when she needed to be, and I admired watching her boss around other Germans on one of our shifts. I didn’t get to know her much as we only knew each other then for a few hours, on our last day at CCC. She was with what appeared to be her girlfriend at FOSDEM, and the three of us just attended talks.
No feelings this time. I didn’t tell her about my experience that night at CCC. I just enjoyed my time with her once again, and this time I wasn’t triggered; my former Dutchfriend, though, was not at FOSDEM 2026.
I collected so many stickers at FOSDEM. I even collected a Fedora Linux sticker, even though I would never use Fedora Linux. I just like stickers. Several people told me I have a comically absurd number of stickers on my ThinkPad. I also put a coreboot sticker on my phone.
I met the Chinese teenager from 2022, now an adult whose lightning talk inspired me. My Chinese friend said: ‘There are a lot of smokers in Brussels.’ – and to my naive young friend, I replied: ‘Yes, it’s a French-speaking city.’
I fixed the bug that blew up my tech demo, at a bar, while talking to my Chinese friend. Nursing my cola, we met several others from the Libreboot IRC chatroom.
A drunk, pedantic, thoroughly uninspired Englishman bored me. I felt him drain my IQ dry in real time, so I downed my cola and jumped the North Sea.
Yes, bitch. I’m back.
Warning for readers: the book is getting serious now. This chapter is ostensibly about a popular online computer game, but we will shortly delve into the topic of the book, directly. You will be primed, for this chapter and the next, before reading the final, penultimate chapter that will confirm or deny your theories. This book has, thus far, been written to seduce you. Now it will school you, because this isn’t a game. I didn’t write this book to entertain you. I wrote it to teach you, because nearly everything else I’ve read about people like me is shit; either wildly inaccurate, or downright hostile.
The person I’m about to describe is an example of why I often present myself the way I do, as the book has shown thus far. The book is going to become much darker from this point onward, and extreme reader discretion is advised. If you are in any way actually vulnerable, emotionally, turn back now. End reading the book, here.
Unlike many of my kind though, I don’t call it masking. I don’t mask. I’m me the whole time. All I do on a daily basis is try to live in this world, that I often regard as wholly hostile. I digress, however.
We begin immediately, thus:
I told someone in an online game during some time in 2026, about several of the stories in this book. I generally expressed great pride at the time – though we were just getting to know each other.
This was a completely random person. My encounter with her is what inspired me to write this book, as a means of studying myself and as education for others. I’d had the idea to write such a book before, but she provided me with the final nudge to do so.
The game itself doesn’t matter, but she had been suffering from long term health problems for which breakthrough medical treatments had recently become available. She got her life in order, having otherwise spent a decade in severe physical and psychological pain. She was considered disabled, yet now had control of her own body and mind for the first time in years. Some miracle drug that just came out.
She happened to meet me at this time. She also had a girlfriend who she no longer loved, but who had cared for her. They were in a hopeless situation that neither of them could easily escape from, and essentially co-dependent.
I told her that she should leave her girlfriend, now that she has such freedom – that the girlfriend helped her to get. I spoke with her for about a week. For some reason, I wasn’t trying to control myself – the game in question seemed to bring out my natural personality, in ways that I now understand. The game in question manipulates human greed in ways no other game does, and the game is full of fucked up people.
This lady had expressed suicidal thoughts at several points. I told her that death is pointless, of course. She was suicidal due to the overwhelming nature of what she had to do, to leave her country, and reach safety. She relayed to me several plans, all of which seemed somewhat infeasible – and I just kept telling her she needed to leave immediately.
Her girlfriend and some other people couldn’t leave quite as easily. I told her what I told another friend in the same situation, from the same country – a recently fascist country. I told her that she needs to survive. I told her that she needed to live, even if it meant abandoning everyone – even the ones who helped her. She’d go on a massive rant about this, that, and how she could never do that, and I’d respond by saying only: ‘Live.’
I once told another person the exact same thing, who was from that same country. I understand the emotional connections people have to their countries and loved ones, intellectually even if I may not feel it myself, and what I told both people was correct: living is good, and you need to do it reliably. Leave. Get the fuck out, now, I said. She understood too, at one stating: ‘Einstein left one year ago on the current timeline.’
She later told me to stop recommending that she leave her girlfriend, that she would block me otherwise. Fair enough. I did stop, and we did continue speaking. I would continue to tell her more about myself, and she would share herself with me.
She intrigued me at the time, because she seemed to pick up on a lot of my personality traits. She had studied psychology at PhD level, and experienced my type of mind chemically, through use of certain drugs – though her mind was normal. She told me that it horrified her, that it seemed alien. She did say she was autistic, which I would regard as normal. For example, she noticed my specificity in choice of words, and my need for order – when I described Girlfriend to her, later Roommate, she noted my repeated use of the word ’kept’ – that I had kept her, for a long time.
She told me at one point that I should be in prison, for some of the things I’d done. I went into great detail. This book does not lie, but it does frame things a certain way, mostly for my own legal protection. Most events in this book were actually more intense in real life, and I explained them to her at full intensity. I did not merely explain – I was gloating, as though I were describing love.
For what crime, I asked? I had not committed any crimes. Who was she to tell me anyway, I thought? I otherwise kept listening to her, because it was one of the few times in which someone had been so candid. She, and Badfriend; Dutchfriend had also referred to be by a certain word once, in passing.
She told me that she pitied me, because I apparently don’t know what I’m missing. She said that the kind of connection she felt to others was something special, and that I am essentially not human – or something like that.
Someone else told me the same thing once, especially when I described to her what it was like to go through life without experiencing love or close human connection, irrespective of physical proximity; I’d largely emulated these feelings, reasoning that it was the best way to survive contact with others. The person I spoke to told me that I was missing something very important.
She told me that if she could, she would ’cure’ me, to which I responded: that would be death. It would be the death of my mind, and therein myself. She told me plainly that this would not be to save me, but to protect others – and I responded, reminding her just how ironic it was that she would condemn me to death. She was advocating for genocide.
I felt nothing against her whatsoever, and I even wished her well, before she blocked me. At no point was I ever rude to her. All I did was meet someone cool in an online game. I often seek novelty. She apparently took screenshots of everything, to which I responded that I would write this book. She wished me luck with baited breath.
She herself told me that I seem to seek novelty in people, that I seem to have intense relationships with them, before discarding them or somehow burning them out – she basically made me sound like a vampire. A psychic vampire perhaps – and maybe she was right. I don’t know. I’m simply reporting what she said, in the spirit that she said it.
The game in question also seemed to be full of several other people similar to myself, with varying levels of discipline. I decided to stop playing it, for this reason, because I did not want to lose control of myself – and the game itself is a waste of time anyway.
A waste of time. I don’t know what it is about that game, but it just made me honest. I was frequently honest about myself with everyone I met. The game provides a sense of anonymity – I had previously played it in the late 2000s, and it amused me that the game not only still existed, but that it still had lots of players, with regular updates.
She told me at one point that she enjoyed ‘poking’ inside my brain. She poked quite deeply, and I even enjoyed it. I enjoyed the intellectual challenge that she provided. Oh well.
I couldn’t check if she was still alive, because she blocked me. For some reason, I did check a few times – despite being blocked, I could still go places in-game where she’d hung out. I have better things to do than play computer games, so I stopped trying.
She was wrong, but I understood her fear. Not wrong… but wrong. She was wrong. She just doesn’t get it, and that’s OK. I don’t expect her to. I told her that I’d learned a great deal more control, to which she agreed with one caveat: she believed that I could still snap, if only the situation would present itself. Such bigotry, I thought, as she cited a friend I knew for eight years – though, the actual context is irrelevant.
She told me that she did not want to risk becoming another character in my story. Another person that I’d known years earlier, once told me that I seem to simulate people in my head, that I have delusions of people – that I would sometimes let my imagination run wild. She said that it was quite frightening, how I measure people.
She told me that I basically do not see people as themselves, that I see them based on my own goals and dreams – which I would not agree with entirely, but it did seem strange for her to say it that way. I don’t think I’m frightening. How else am I supposed to rate people, except by the things they literally say and do, extrapolating from that?
I’m not a mind-reader. Her exact phrasing, though, was more like this: people live rent-free inside my head. I found the phrasing itself uncanny, but she was describing something which I’d been conscious, myself, of doing. To me, though, it felt natural.
This was one of the games I’d played as a teenager, where I pretended to be a girl – before I knew I was trans. I once met a man there and seduced him, only to tell him two weeks later that I didn’t care about him. Quite childish really. Nothing grandiose.
Old School RuneScape is one hell of a drug. This time, I’d quickly trained my character to a high level. I was intentionally luring level-three players to an advanced demon cave, watching their characters die. I was simply killing time – the lady who blocked me said that perhaps this was a practice round. I felt catharsis watching them run from the cave as they died.
Doing so meant that they would lose all of their items. They can pay an in-game non-playable-character called Death who would grant their retrieval, but this can be quite jarring for new players – many players will simply quit the game in frustration.
If the player survived, or I was bored, I would lead them to a safe spot in the cave, where they can quickly train their mage and range skills. I’d tell them something like: ‘You survived, so now we’re friends.’
I had a plan to raise my player stats further, so that I could begin player-killing in the game’s ‘Wilderness’ area, but I became bored and I stopped playing the game. It’s just a fucking computer game. Get a grip.
I had no designs upon this woman. Just some lady really. Her contention, though, was that my whim might decide otherwise at some time in the future. I was not offended by this at an emotional level, but I did correctly interpret it as an insult because such a statement effectively robs me of my own agency. It suggests, by proxy, that I cannot control myself and implies that I need to be controlled externally; she was saying that I should not be free.
She is my enemy, though I have to be more specific and take it much wider: anyone who thinks like her is my enemy. She is my enemy for the same reason transphobes are my enemy; she was expressing bigotry. Bigotry, in this context, is any time in which someone expresses the belief that a given demographic of people are somehow inferior or, in this case, to be viewed with suspicion.
She looked behind the mask, as it were, understood what she was looking at, and decided that I am one to be feared. This is a direct attack on my own humanity, and it is caused by a general level of ignorance that I have vowed to eradicate through education.
I said this then, in my head, and I still say it now, but I say it then and now on a purely factual level. In the past, I would have ripped this lady’s head off. I used to become much more easily offended when someone hurt my pride or ego, but I’d evolved since then. I learned since around 2020 that I do not need to prove myself to others. I’d experienced a complete breakdown during COVID, and learned what losing everything is like. I learned how utterly unimportant people’s views are since then, as I just want to focus on improving myself. This lady saw a version of me that no longer exists. I don’t need to be offended, at an emotional level, so I’m not. I am operationally offended. I identify people like her as a threat to my right to choose. I learned this ever since 2018, in the period described by Boring House; my comeback after the COVID period merely completed this lesson. I became psychologically invincible, during that period.
This is relevant to RuneScape, yes. That is not satire. We’re getting serious now. The book is moving into theory now, instead of stories, and this is the first such chapter. First though, let’s start with my usual public Leah tone:
In December 2025, I joined a new enemy, because my gay CCC friends thought it was a good idea and I wanted to be gay with them. I started learning German in October 2025 as preparation for the 2025 Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany. It’s an extremely left-wing computing and technology conference. My exact, precise method of learning German was what one of my good friends there called Bruteforcedeutschgelernen when I described it – itself a joke, that he thought I didn’t understand, as ‘gelernen’ is never a valid word. Yes, I was smiling the entire time.
Well, that method of learning was basically an extreme simulation of the Total Immersion Technique. People learn languages faster when suddenly thrown into a foreign country, living and working there. I simply watched German TV shows all day, and one of my main stress-test materials was Bundestagssitzungen – that is, I watched political debates in the German Bundestag, which is equivalent to the British House of Commons. My German comrade from CCC very much approved. The other aspect of my German learning is talking to ChatGPT and also real Germans, in German, verbally whenever time permits. I loved watching Bündnis 90/Die Grünen when they came on in the Bundestag debates – that’s the German Green Party. The long and short of it is that they seemed to be the most intelligent and wise people in the room, given Germany’s unique problems, especially the then-current trend of deindustrialisation by proxy as a result of the boom in various… learn German politics if you want. I looked at the British Green Party and found that they sound exactly the same, just without the funny accents, and I decided on pure whim to join the Green Party.
Yes indeed, as I write this in the year 2026, I am a member of the Green Party of England and Wales. The purpose of this book is not to talk about political ideology – although, yes: I used to be a Conservative. I also used to be a Communist. Before that, I was in the Labour Party. Where on earth will I go next? I just seem to keep changing!
Or have I? I still think the same as before. My mind is exactly the same now as it was when I was in the Conservative Party. Ditto the Communist Party, and even the Labour Party. I still hold all of the opinions I had then. They all still make sense, as does the ideology of the Green Party. How is that possible, you ask?
The Green Party of England and Wales is a social-democratic party focusing on environmental issues. It wants to create a country where people can live in dignity and prosperity, in a fair society where the most vulnerable are protected, and it wants to do all of that in a way that doesn’t destroy the planet. It wants… environmentally sustainable left-wing politics. Yes, how nice. Sign me up.
I was never really a conservative. I sympathise with aspects of conservatism even now, but I don’t think their world view is all that useful – it’s beautiful in theory, to let everyone have economic freedom this, property rights this… free market this. Well guess what? Profit sometimes means people get screwed. Lots of things that people need or things that would be useful, are not profitable. Conservatives don’t tend to be all that passionate about people, no. Most of the ones I met are thoroughly deluded. They did well in life and they want to keep doing… aggh. No.
As the next chapter will discuss, I don’t generally tend to think emotionally about things. I just use logic. A lot of people in the past have told me that it’s quite jarring to watch how quickly I will just change my mind, how I just change everything all at once, seemingly on a dime. I still think fondly of some of my former conservative party colleagues, because there were a few intelligent people there. Ditto Labour. I would even say the same about some of my former Communist colleagues, if you could call them colleagues – all I did was get drunk and insult them at their 2018 EC meeting.
I’m able to put myself in the mind of any political ideology, even extreme ones, and know exactly how someone came to that conclusion. Of course, I would not join a far-right party – because I don’t want human beings to die, and far-right politics always singles out groups of people, condemning them to death, or a life of misery. In history, they always single people like me out first. In the Third Reich, it was LGBT people who first suffered – Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology was the first gender clinic in the world offering trans medical care in the Weimar Republic, and the nazis turned it into a propaganda centre when they took over. History rarely talks about LGBT people under the nazis, but it’s true – and homosexuality was only legalised in Germany after the 1990 reunification. Many gays continued to be locked up after WWII ended. I do understand fascists though – I know how they think. I know how they exploit grievance, how they attack education and warp reality to suit their reactionary policies, how they scapegoat people… I know all of that crap. Fascists are stupid, and nobody should ever take them seriously. They always cause misery and someone else has to clean up after they’re gone. I would never support fascists, ever – because they want to kill me.
My politics are based on what times I live in. In 2022, I thought that it might be possible to have a properly conservative government, focusing on enterprise as a means of human growth. I supported Liz Truss for example, and the only reason I didn’t vote for her was because I’d only been a member of the Conservative Party for about two months, whereas I needed to have been a member for at least three. Their kind of politics can work, when implemented properly, but the way the British state works just makes it infeasible, to the extent that their solutions just end up destroying everything for no benefit whatsoever. I also became generally disillusioned when they started showing just how incompetent they were, after Liz Truss was booted from office – and most of my colleagues in my local Conservative party were just really stupid people. Stupid and out of touch. Not worth my time.
The Green Party was the only British political party currently championing massive investment in industry and infrastructure in a way that makes sense, at least as I wrote this. They had a very sensible policy on taxation, especially the idea of taxing wealth. They wanted to reverse the massive privatisation of public services from past decades, and democratise everything. They want to invest properly in people, and I believed their plans would boost business growth in general. It has nothing to do with people.
You will note that in what I’m writing, I don’t talk about people. I don’t necessarily lack care for them, but I view politics from an infrastructural lens. To me, people are numbers on a balance sheet. I only care about the money. People will live and do business as they please, but you need to have a sensible set of national policies to guide them – and I think the Greens are what we need. Green parties worldwide, or at least the core of their policies, especially on climate. The world is, as I write this, on the verge of total collapse: food systems in the global south have been degrading for years, due to rising temperatures, and the effects of climate change mean that vast swathes of the world population will start to move north. This is going to have a huge effect on the north, which includes the UK. We are in the northern region of the world.
So yes, I switched. I snapped out of the spell, mostly a trauma response from COVID, and kissed conservatism goodbye. It may be that in the future, when all of our problems are solved, we can have conservatives. Right now, countries everywhere need to spend a lot of money on everything, and on everyone, to deal with the coming crises, mostly of a humanitarian nature. It’s the left-wing parties that spend money. They are the ones that care about people – and I’m people. I see the…
Nope.
Politics. How boring. I went to the regional green party conference for the south east of England in 2026, and saw a lot of interesting speakers there, including people like Natalie Bennett, and there were a lot of talks about election campaign strategies – there was also a very interesting talk about race politics, and about how racial bias generally affects minority rights. All sorts of things.
I found it interesting, but it was mostly boring. All of my friends there, and I met several new ones at that conference, are highly passionate people. They feel it in their body, like this stuff matters at a deep personal level. I just see the money, and I think the Green Party will be the most competent in office.
I thought that if the Green Party won in a general election, they would put policies in place on a scale identical to the Labour government of the late 1940s, and I think that would be good. That is what we need. That Labour government implemented the National Health Service, the welfare state, and they started a massive campaign of house building, especially council housing. They invested in industry everywhere, and they introduced all kinds of new legislation that generally aimed to increase equality in society. They took a broken, bankrupt country – yes, Britain was broken after World War Two – and within a few years, left such a legacy that led to some of the highest living standards in British history. When people think of the good old days, like the fifties or sixties, they forget about Attlee’s legacy – and they forget about how the unions gave them good pay. The Labour party today is no longer that party.
Here’s the thing though: when I hear left-wing politics talk about poverty and despair, of mass hunger, and of general inequality in society, I agree with it but there is one caveat. I don’t agree with it on an emotional level. I agree with it because I think it just makes sense to make sure everyone is taken care of, that the most vulnerable in society are protected, and that the planet we live on remains a nice place to live. That’s why I also support action on climate change.
I believe these things, because I’m a human being living on planet earth. I will become sick one day, or crippled, or both, and I will become old. I want to live in a world that will support me, no matter what – and that is why I became left-wing again. It’s all about me. I will care for others, and I will do what I can in my limited capacity to help bring about this kind of world. A fair world, a just world… for people. Because I’m people.
It really is that simple. Of course, I was really bored that day, and had to play nice with my colleagues all day. I actually dislike being around people in general, and conferences always drain me by the end of the day. After I’m done smiling, laughing at jokes, eating, and being nice to everyone all day, I come home and just sink into my chair. I did meet a lovely lady at a bar though, who said she voted for me – I’d recently come fourth, in a local government election.
It really can be exhausting. When I show up at your leafleting stall, deliver leaflets for you, talk to voters, write articles for you, generally work for you, that’s exactly what it all is – work. I don’t naturally smile, but politicians are supposed to smile, so I do. I will come to your social at the local pub, and not drink with you – I will enjoy my cola, and just sit meekly as I listen to you. I may offer some insight into a campaign or something, but I will not fundamentally enjoy talking to you. I’m all business. My face goes blank when it’s out of view. I go back to my lovely, perfectly neutral world, which I’ll have a lot more to say about in the next chapter. I like my world. It’s heaven.
A lot of people will find this alien. I literally do not have emotional experiences with politics, despite being deeply political. I can hear stories about child poverty in London – which rose by several factors in London when the conservatives were in last in office, and all I see are the numbers. All I see is money. All I see is departments, offices, infrastructure and technology. I see the apparatus of the state and I think about how it can be made most efficient, how more money can be spent on everything, to help people – because it makes sense. Because… I’m people.
I can still sit with members from other political parties, and see them all in similar terms. I can converse with them, laugh with them, and generally have a good time. I can put myself in their minds, and I can understand them. I understand them all. The difference with me is that I don’t hold opinions – I assume them. I’m capable of holding multiple conflicting opinions about a topic, and just pick one at random.
Political dogma is otherwise a stream of plaintext. All of the politicians I meet from every party sound the same to me, at an emotional level, even if their ideologies couldn’t be more different. I can look at them all, and see that they are all just variations on a theme. I find it fascinating that people can look at the same world with the same facts, and arbitrarily limit their minds to one world view. I’m not like that at all. I see the universe. I see the entire world. I understand it all. Politics is just people, and I’m good at learning what people think, and… well, the next chapter will explain it.
My conscience is adaptable, and politics is simply an extension of one’s conscience. I adapt with the world around me. I’m not bound like many people are to one way of thinking. If I find something better, I will replace you.
I’m about to get serious. No more story. Let’s see how well you read me throughout the book, shall we? The book promised a relative lack of intellection discussion as it demonstrates my mind through scene and prose, to demonstrate rather than explain how my mind works – I do nonetheless feel the need to explain certain concepts, now, concepts that may seem alien to most readers. The reader has occupied my mind, at least superficially, but they may have coloured it with their own.
Read this section and then the next ones. After you have done so, read the book again several times, from start to finish, keeping in mind the concepts that I’m now about to discuss. This book was written to charm you the first time – because yes, superficial charm is such a nebulous concept. Perhaps, on second reading, you might get the trick. This book was written to demonstrate the workings of my mind, so if you really want to understand someone like me, you should read it again.
Irrespective of context, you have read passages that seem strange not only by their content but by their order – you have likely been intrigued, where I seem to express great feeling and drive, at times that seem strange. You’ve seen the stories progress rapidly, at a pace that may give others pause for thought. Look now not at the scene, but the mind. My mind. My mind experienced these events at the speed they are written. If I seem to skip something you believe is important, such as checking whether someone is OK, or… yes, I skipped writing about it, because I skipped doing it in reality. If you see large periods of time in the book, sometimes years, in which I made no human connections at all, it’s because I didn’t – though I’ve always had at least superficial human contact, even when I went friendless for a while. Friendships for me are like waves, yes, in that they come and go. Sometimes they hit the shore.
This was intentional, as it showed how fast my mind processed these events – and I’ve attempted, throughout, to convey exactly how I thought then. This was done emotionally, stylistically and intentionally, throughout the book. I wrote the book for neurotypical readers, in such a way that – I hope – allowed them to simulate being me while reading. This is, I believe, the best way to explain people like me, which is why I wrote this book. Time will tell, on publication, whether I was successful.
The way I live, and think, is not something that I appreciate consciously on a daily basis, because for me it is completely natural – ergo, I do not intellectualise it in any way. It is to me, like breathing. Writing it in this book, intellectually and in a way that might provide clarity for readers, was a fun challenge for me.
I like challenges! I now offer you one: When you do read it again, note not only the events themselves, but the words. Look at the mind more closely. Look at what I chose to remember. Look at… let me explain.
You may have begun to clock several concepts intellectually, throughout. Now I will tell you what I called all of it, in 2018 as that was my major introspective period coinciding with the ‘Boring House’ period – no, it was not mere drama. Pay closer attention!
Boring House was your first clue, and the most pure of all chapters. It was definitely my favourite chapter to write! Back then, I called my condition ‘Chronic Boredom Syndrome,’ a fitting label because it accurately, albeit somewhat jokingly, describes how I work.
There is a certain word that people typically might use when describing me, especially in a clinical context, except that I don’t meet large parts of its criteria; things like sexual promiscuity and criminal versatility, perhaps childhood delinquency and so on – OK, the jury may be out on that one. This word and the clinical world around it, made worse now with an even less accurate term, does not describe Leah Rowe. The purpose of this book has, throughout, been to demonstrate my mind through scenery, and contrast – the contrast of your mind versus mine. If you notice me completely skip something in the story, that you yourself would have… yes, that’s the trick. You got it. I skipped it in reality. The reader may have caught a glimpse of my mind in these moments. Those readers who share my type of mind will have seen through it all on first reading, and they likely do not need a second reading. They get it. This book is not for them, though I assume some of them might enjoy it.
I mean, I did also write it for them – yes, you – because they might also see themselves in it and be like, damn, yeah, fuck, that’s me, holy shit. Lol. But yeah, this book is written for the normies too. It’s… my masterpiece, yes let’s call it that.
Alternatively, I may have referred to my condition as Neutrality. This concept is even better – of course, the clinical world may say “shallow affect’ – such nebulous yet wily… no. Let’s talk about my earlier life as an example: 2017, Girlfriend, Catfriend, Labour, trans groups, the period described by the boring life chapter, and so on. Actually, this applies to all periods of my life, but that period was the most potent for this exercise as it was my most socially active to date while I wrote this book.
Essentially, I was trying and failing to emulate suburbia, but I lacked commitment to any sort of effort – what I’d dreamt was the appearance of it. Most people at this time would have seen that I’m just some young yuppie with an odd girlfriend – and later broke up. I was the eccentric, and yes some people believed I might be impossible.
I felt completely overwhelmed throughout, because I was trying to emulate emotions that I simply do not have, and the pressure of doing that daily was just too much. When you hear about people like me being extremely nasty in situations like that, this is often the reason why, because we just sort of lose our minds. It’s not because we’re mad or evil or whatever else, it’s just that we’re actually in hell. It’s not that I had ill designs myself, but that I felt my life had been imposed upon by others – I felt suffocated. There are so many protocols of behaviour that I just did not care for.
Girlfriend and I visited several friends that she’d made. There was this one couple whom we visited, in their crummy little apartment – I liked them, though they liked a version of myself that had quickly become irritable. I lashed out a lot, often to the point of insanity and I would frequently shut myself off from others. Let me be clear: she was the one making friends. I simply tagged along. I would not have made the effort otherwise – I rarely try to meet people in real life, because most of them just don’t get me at all, and I don’t live in their world. I do sometimes meet people like myself, and I usually find them to be, well, more satisfying to be around.
My girlfriend arranged most social visits – going to people’s houses, sitting in their living rooms and drinking beer, playing computer games… going to pride events, etc. I handled the money, and made sure we were fed. I’d just tag along as she befriended everyone around her. I felt no connection to any of these people.
I don’t like it when my own life is disturbed. I prefer solitude, most of the time, which in retrospect now makes the whole thing seem absurd. I simply did not need these people, but they did confirm to me many of the things that I’d always suspected.
When I experience people, I understand at an intellectual level that they have different hobbies, jobs, live in different houses, eat different food and have different political beliefs. I learn to appreciate the subtle nuances of opinion in things, and I’m very good at quickly understanding the sensibilities of each and every person I meet.
However! I experience them all in the exact same emotional register – as if reading schematics of two different circuit boards, comparing their parts and re-wiring them. I only experience individuals intellectually, but every person I meet elicits the same neutral response. For this reason, I never feel like I have one special person – I can prioritise certain people if they give me better sex, more food, more… things.
Put another way: when you walk into a supermarket, every orange is the same. They look, smell and taste exactly the same – and that is how I experience people, internally. I do not experience individuals as separate emotionally – that is, I intuit their emotions quite well, without actually experiencing them in real-time. I build complex models of people in my mind, as though they are living in a house called Leah Rowe. The version that I have of them may not match the real human being – and in the past, my models have been wildly inaccurate. Over time though, I would have much better training data. That year, 2017, was my first real year interacting with people outside of a controlled environment like, say, school, or a conference – I never felt the need to socialise with people during my early to late teens outside of school. I never went out with anyone – my Dutch friend was the first person I’d ever dated, if one might call it that. I’d had earlier experiences, such as my various jobs, and yes of course school was a major part too, but 2017 was the year when the human called Leah was first put to test – and that Leah failed. The one writing this book has evolved a lot since that time.
I understand that they are separate, but I do not feel it. Even if I’ve known a group of people for a long time, offline, I may read their online chats online at a later date; this is a good way to demonstrate it, because yes, that’s what your words coming out of your mouth are to me: a stream of text. You all feel, emotionally, like plaintext, to me. I can reliably observe you, and know how you’re feeling, but it will not alter my own emotional state in any way.
My own mind is not without feelings, but they are largely egocentric in nature. I do not automatically think about other human beings on anything more than a superficial level. When I model a person, I can understand their emotions intellectually – but when I read or hear their words, I am processing them through my neutral brain. I do not love for example, and I have never experienced what people describe as empathy or remorse – not physically, though I emulate them with logic.
This concept of neutrality is alien to most people, and it’s why I felt the need to explain it, contextualising the main prose. I hope, as you read more of the book, you may remember it, because this fact is constant. It remains constant, throughout the book.
As I once wrote in older journals, I’m neutral even about my own neutrality. I’m not necessarily happy or sad about it – it is simply a fact, that I deal with as I please.
I’ve been like this since as young as I can remember, even so young as four years old. My neutral mind existed when I was four. I’ve probably had it since I was born, but I don’t remember much before the age of four. Catfriend does not escape from this fact, though she was genuinely awesome, and probably still is – assuming she’s still alive. I lost contact with her in 2018.
The somewhat absurdist tone of this book has been my written approximation of the kind of charisma and charm I that deploy verbally, especially in scenes – and in the way I write them, I tried to perfectly recreate them as they were, all things considered. I’m neutral then, too. I was neutral the whole time. I was neutral while writing this book. My mind never leaves neutral.
When I was younger, I didn’t mask at all. I was often regarded as robotic by classmates and teachers in school – though their chosen word was “aloof’. You will notice the overly austere tone of these explanations, after all of these stories, which may have seemed intense – what you’ve just read is the actual tone inside my mind. This paragraph, and this chapter – and some earlier parts of this book, probably. When the way I write suddenly seems a bit off, perhaps dry and cold – that’s Neutralbrain. You are reading my neutral mind. My mind sounds like what you are reading, at all times.
Let me be more clear: you sound like this in my mind, at all times. Things and places often do too. I myself even come across as neutral, in my mind. I can feel, sometimes, but my own literal self is neutral about itself, nearly all of the time. I am not a robot. I want to make that clear. There is a specific term that people use to describe me, but I regard it and other terms currently existing as inadequate – and will cover them in the next chapters. There is no medical terminology or socially accepted norm for me that I currently regard as respectful of my right to even exist – again, wait until you read the next chapter.
Neutral does not mean robotic. This sounds like a contradiction but it’s true. I can feel extreme pride for my work, and bliss as I go about me day. I can feel joy, or depression. I think it probably just depends on what I ate that day, and how much stress I have; I’m happiest when I have fewer burdens, when I can just drift all day on whatever hobbies I like. This is the same for everyone, but most people are more complicated than that. With me, this is all I get, and it’s fleeting. It happens in short waves, and then it’s gone. I’m not describing disassociation or depersonalisation. I’m fully aware at all times. Imagine it like a car that won’t start. My engine might start for brief periods of time, and then stall again. It’s extremely difficult to convey this conceptually, especially for neurotypical readers, and I’m confident that a lot of people will misinterpret this entire book, especially this chapter.
Here’s another hint: when you re-read, notice how I describe the places I go to with such reverence or disdain – how often do I talk about the people I meet, and how much do I focus on them? You may start to notice a pattern.
Take Flowergirl for example. Do I write at all, at any point, about what she’s like, her personality, what sort of person she is, how I feel about her… ask the same for any other character in the book. Even Girlfriend – I never hated her personally, only the situation that I was in when she was around.
You will notice when I describe people in this book, that I skip entire sections about them. The kinds of things that a neurotypical person would experience with people, that are simply not written in this book – and it’s not an accident. My mind simply did not have those experiences at all, so I can’t write about them. I will not write about something that did not exist.
I once told my own mother that I care for her, but not about her. It is the same with everyone else. I actually make an effort to care for others, when it seems appropriate, though I can also become annoyed about it.
My mother is a perfect example. She has been suffering with chronic pain for several years due to spinal issues – I moved back into my parents house in 2022 and I still live there as I write this. I have listened to her writhe in pain constantly, on and off – I have heard her pray to God and ask for death. I have seen her scream in pain. She has done this in front of me, tears pouring, and I feel nothing. I can watch it in pure bliss thinking about something else entirely – my mouth will still output the correct sequence of words to comfort her, and my body will make her a cup of tea or anything else she wants. My mother is a Special Person – she’s my mother. I don’t feel loyalty to her – or anyone – but I can show loyalty. I don’t feel an emotional need to care for her and will forget she exists sometimes – when I went on Scouts trips for example, where I would be away from home for weeks, I would not think about my parents at all. They did not exist, until they picked me up from camp at the end of summer.
I don’t love my mother. I’ve never experienced love. I will never experience it. I told her that if she were to die, I would simply arrange her funeral, attend the funeral, and “think about her’ – true. I would do all that is expected of me. She’s my mother.
My loyalty to her is not based on emotions of any kind. It is implemented on a purely intellectual level. It is simply a contract that we have as humans – of course, there are those who have bad parents, who will quite rightly cut off all ties. I have good parents, and I reward them with my undying loyalty. This is done not out of love – there is no feeling behind it at all. I simply do it. I will continue doing it, until they die.
I have an excellent mother. If motherhood was a contest, with a score of up to one hundred, my mother would score one hundred. I could not have asked for a better one. I don’t feel grateful – I will still thank her for all her help, but there is no feeling behind it. Ditto sorry. I never feel remorse, so the word sorry is meaningless.
There is a nuance, however. I do actually feel comfortable talking to my mother. She understands several aspects of my personality, especially relating to empathy. My relationship with her is largely healthy, and she is one of the people that I’m able to talk to and not feel strained. I enjoy her company.
I once experienced, at some point in 2025, a brief glimpse of what I might feel in the future after my parents are gone. They were merely away for a few days, but I had the house to myself; I went shopping locally as always. I felt a weird sense of loneliness, not a sad kind, but a pervasive emptiness. It was similar to what I’d experienced earlier, like in 2016, but under complete calm, without stress or chaos of any kind. Just a calm loneliness. I caught a glimpse of how I might feel all the time, in the future, unless I build relations now.
My parents are the only people I have a relationship currently, besides some people I speak to online, and not in Libreboot either. Just some people I know. I do have my party politics as well, but with them it’s all just politics, there is no real friendship there. The feeling occurred while I was shopping. Just shopping. I was completely calm, and the shop was quite packed that day. I was completely serene, and just felt like I was the only person in the world.
It did not make me feel sad, but it did feel strange, and it has informed my plans over the next few years. The years creep up on me faster than I can sense them, as I write this. Ten years is a long time. I don’t know how else to explain it: I simply caught a glimpse of my future that day. My neutral future.
My neutrality, though, is not limited to others. It is applied also to myself. I often do not think about myself at an emotional level, one way or the other. I take achievements in stride, ditto failures – when I have a deadline fast approaching, I’m able to ignore it, not even with any sense of panic. I’m a fog. Always have been.
My business is a perfect example. I’ve managed to keep it running for over a decade, and I make good money, but I rarely get anything done on time. If someone orders a laptop from me, I often take about a week to ship it. It’s often not that I’m even overworked – I’ll catch up with a month of work in about three or four days.
Because it’s my company and I want to keep running it, I do try to ensure that laptops are shipped on time, but sometimes when your order is delayed for a week, it’s because I’m at home, or just staring into space thinking, perhaps distracted by a new hobby I found. I’m constantly thinking. My mind never stops.
This very book is an example, as it distracted me from all other much more important tasks while writing it, and I ignored all of them – many of them serious responsibilities. I can be quite irresponsible and reckless even now – though it is rarer now. I considered this book important, and would not stop writing it until it was done.
I am also not without discipline. I always pull myself back and catch up – often though, I will try to find someone that might do it for me. I love it when someone else wants to do my work for me, especially unpaid – Free Software gives you a lot of that privilege, because people simply want to use the code, so someone will always take over.
I think with little regard whatsoever for my own health or safety. It’s not that I will ride a bicycle recklessly or run through traffic dangerously – these things do not give me much of a thrill. No, I simply do not think about myself, most of the time. I don’t exist. I am a fog. I can laugh and smile at things, or get angry at things, in instances where that is natural, but my intellectual and emotional self is largely flat. Who I am, in this regard, has remained constant throughout my life. It’s not that I don’t exist, but I’m also not there – I just live in the moment. If you ask me to describe myself, I will actually struggle – I literally do not know who I am. I know my name, where I was born, what I do for a job, where I went to school, people I’ve met – I wrote this book as proof of that. Through it all though, I am the same fog. I am a fog. I am also an orange.
At the same time, I also have long-term goals. I want to eventually live in my own house, that I own and do not rent – I could have done so earlier in life. My wealth decreased as things got more expensive which meant that my real-term wealth evaporated. As I write this, my current, literal plan for the future is this:
Buy a house in the north-east of England, or somewhere cheap in Finland, where house prices are cheap. Go off-grid with solar and wind, insulation and storage heating – minimise use of water, except for drinking and showering, organising pipework for low long-term maintenance. Between this and eating cheap, near-expired food or from food-banks, my living costs would then be near-zero whilst also having freedom.
Once I’ve done so, I would then do very little work or none at all – even going on benefits, if possible, would satisfy me. I have greed, but not material greed – I have time greed. You see, I want to have the most maximum amount of free time possible. I want it for a very specific reason, namely so that I may think freely and drift for the rest of my life. This is my dream. I write this, because you’ll see people say sometimes that people like me can lack long-term goals. This is false. I have goals, and discipline. Parts of this book will even show that.
I have no plans besides this. I did not, for example, imagine meeting a new partner or having a family. There is every chance that I may repeat the experience of 2016-2018, were I to find a new partner. I’ve been dry since 2017 as I write this, in 2026. I’ve not even sought relations. There are no relations in my future. No people. I may meet them – and they will enter my orbit. I’m not going to say I’ll be nice to them, or mean to them – I will be Leah to them. That is what I’ll be. There is no pretence. I will do what I will do, whatever that is. It’ll probably be something completely boring and benign, as it is with most people.
Gender Reassignment Surgery cut my sex drive to near-zero, which I consider to be a kind of freedom – I am no longer a slave of my own body. I now control my own mind. Sex was the only aspect I sought in previous relations, so I now no longer need romance. This is not to say that I don’t experience lust, but it is now at a level so low that I can ignore it – as a result, I am now much stronger than I used to be, because I am no longer controlled in that regard. Hence my freedom. I was freed from sex.
What of ambition? In this lovely Northern English home, presumably a former council-owned terraced house, I do not live to old age. I do not think about retirement, in an economic or social perspective. I simply exist now, and I will continue to exist until I do not. I have no concept of growing old, even when I know this to be true at an intellectual level. My body has started disobeying my mind already, as I write this. I know that I will become old – but I don’t think about it. I don’t think about it.
I told my mother once that when I die, it’ll probably be at my desk. I’ll be alone, in a house, doing something at my computer. The smell will begin to offend my neighbours, and the local services will break in to retrieve my corpse. I will have no benefactors – my assets and wealth will go to the state.
I am a registered organ donor. When I die, my body will be cut up and used for science. This seems, to me, like a most efficient use of my otherwise useless corpse. This seemed most appropriate to me – you can have all of me when I’m dead.
I do want my life to be as comfortable as possible, while I’m alive. What I fear the most is crippling illness, or disability. Loss of control. Were I to develop dementia, I would wish that the state simply put me down. I fear the loss of my intellectual freedom.
I want to reduce my responsibilities and long-term risks so that I can essentially retire young. My greed, my lust, is indeed an intellectual and creative one. I told someone once, that all I want to do is keep expanding my intellect and creativity, learning new skills and work on interesting projects. I’m a creative, and I enjoy making things. I don’t lust after the things made by others, that all imply duty of some kind – a car for example. Cars require heavy maintenance and they carry huge financial burden.
My physical freedom matters, but my intellectual freedom is what I value most. Many people value things, people and their relations therein – no, I want the freedom to think. If I wish, I may become Albert Einstein, or Pablo Picasso.
All of this is the same concept: my emotional neutrality, or Chronic Boredom Syndrome. Someone** I greatly admire, whose book I also have, suggested a new medical term to describe my condition: Low Affect Disorder.
I don’t like the word “disorder’, but it is at least less offensive, and more usefully accurate. Most other words and discussion around them will look at certain symptoms. For example, they may discuss criminal versatility and other such things that are, in my opinion, a function of one’s environment and not neurology. Poverty, for example, creates more necessity for crime and this may lead to more violence.
Neutrality is boring. I’ve attempted to kill boredom at times, usually failing, though I’ve found fleeting moments of relief – this book told you about some of my daring exploits, when I felt most alive. I mostly accept though that I’ll always be bored. I simply live with boredom. I’m neutral about boredom – I’m neither happy nor sad about it. I’m simply bored. I state as a matter of fact that I am chronically bored.
Because I am bored, and rarely stimulated by anything, I’m often irresponsible, because I rarely feel a jolt when I complete a task. I will complete a task as a matter of protocol – but I always falter. My office for example, is rarely cleaned, I rarely file taxes early – always just on time, right up to the deadline. I… never do anything on time if I don’t have to. I regularly shirk responsibilities. My natural tendency is to just float around this earth, going wherever my whim takes me.
I can be kind on a whim. When I give people things, and this book showed several examples. I do it because I’m bored. It doesn’t alter my emotional state. I… just do it.
Shallow affect? That is what I described here. I gave major examples, but here’s something more mundane: a woman I know has a son, and I’ve known the mother since I was a child. I regularly see her at a local shop where she works, and I ask her how her son is doing. I ask her about her mother, and even her dog when I’m really wily. I do not care. I have the same neutrality, and my natural instinct is to not ask at all. I simply get in, get what I want – in this case, to pay for my things – and leave. Simply asking how someone is doing is something that I learned at a cognitive level.
The answer is something that annoys me more. She’ll tell me how her son is approaching college, or some other aspect of his life, feeling great pride – and I will nod, smile, even laugh. I genuinely do not care that she or the son exists. She is the neutral stream of text in a sea of text – the world is, to me, plaintext.
I’ll still give a giddy giggle and a smile and wish her well, in my charming South East Essex accent, as I leave the shop and go home to cook a glorious meal. I will then offer to make my mother a cup of tea.
If I’m not acting, my natural tone of voice is flat. I don’t sound like a robot, but my tone remains constant, and my face is as stone. I’ve alluded to this neutral face at several points in the book. That is my natural state at all times. I can laugh and smile – I can genuinely be happy, for myself – but when it’s around other people, nope.
Never really any trouble with the law though. My parents raised me well, and I’m too stupid to become a criminal. I don’t need to break the law, or the rules. Breaking them still leaves me neutral, most of the time, unless it’s something major – and I don’t want to go to jail. There are other ways to get my kicks, but I’m getting older and I don’t really want to face heavy consequence – I get tired a lot more now. So I just be… bored!
If this feels repetitive reading this, it’s intentional. I’m writing it this way to show you how boring my mind is. It’s bored with boredom, and boredom is boring, and boring is… bored. Neutrality is neutral, is neutral, and… if your brain doesn’t work this way, then you probably have no idea what I’m talking about.
I’m a flat tone. Imagine that my brain were music. My brain is stuck on the same note. It might occasionally come unjammed for a while, but it always comes back.
Sometimes, when I’m in serious danger, I may become cathartic and even feel a buzz, quite intensely in fact, but this is fleeting and rare – I accepted, at an intellectual level, so I made a new best friend called Boredom.
It’s intoxicating.
I’m probably boring even you now, so let’s talk shop:
Every other book will wax lyrical about how they’re pro-social… fuck that. No. I do not need permission to be myself. I’m simply bored, and that’s all there fucking is to it. No! Fuck that shit. I’m not pro-social. I’m not reformed. I’m not self-controlled. I didn’t write this to please anyone. I write this to educate everyone. There’s a difference.
I never think about the victims – I don’t think about my benefactors either. That lady whose job I ruined – probably because, you know, I drove her to rage and then, you know, failed to prevent her from being sacked – had gender reassignment surgery six months later. She got it by crowdfunding, after losing her employment health insurance obviously. I didn’t feel anything. I didn’t even laugh. I did donate $1000 US dollars to her crowdfunder, reasoning that this would add plausible deniability in case she ever came after me – she could not resist someone who was so generous. Then I basically left her alone. She meant nothing to me. I only found the link to her crowd funder because someone from her former employer felt sorry for her, and showed it to me out of the blue.
That lady who I made relapse to smoking in 2011 will be in her thirties now – ripe for small-cell lung cancer. My lovely neighbour 2018 has the same in store for her. I’m sexually attracted to women who smoke, and wanted to watch them smoke – loss of control is an additional component to my sexual tastes. I like watching women become psychologically enslaved, by a variety of methods, nicotine being but one. Even in fiction; for example, watching people become assimilated by the borg in Star Trek turned me on. This is why I made those women relapse. Most people who quit don’t know that when they take even one strong drag, they’re hooked again. And I watch them the next day. I become aroused watching them, but then they’re gone. I don’t think about them after that.
The two blokes I threw out from Libreboot in 2021? No idea what happened to them. They were both poor, and both using Libreboot as a means to establish their own commercial presence under my guidance – they had people in the chatroom send them things to work on for example, and I had apparently set up an arrangement with them where I might send them products as well. It was all fine, until one day I got really high while listening to one specific part of a trance playlist, that just tickled the right part of my brain and they were gone the next morning, after five years.
That last part is something I’ve tried to, you know, fix, because I want to keep them forever. I like it when people help me improve my projects, and I credit them heavily. I praise their name, I made sure everyone knows they exist. Good work deserves respect. I also forget the people I help.
Yes, it works both ways. I can help someone, and leave a happy person instead of a victim. I don’t make a habit of making either. I do what I want, and it may just happen that I benefit someone or hurt them – I do not think about it. I may give something to someone if I’m obliged or forced, or I may hurt someone if forced – I generally tend to want a lack of trouble. I want peace, so I try to avoid trouble. I will not think about it though. Once it’s happened, it’s done, final. Can’t go back, whether good or bad, so I just keep living life forward. I never think about the past, because it’s literally pointless. I only thought about it for the purposes of this book.
I may think about the past when planning me future though. I mean, some people say that I and others of my kind often lack the ability to learn from mistakes. No! False! I learn plenty. What, do you think we’re stupid? Fuck off.
Oranges though. Even friends are oranges. People I’ve known for years.
A better way to think about it is like colour-blind people. I am, by way of analogy, colour-blind about other people’s feelings. Now, a colour-blind person may adopt methods of identifying a colour they can’t see, but they will never actually see it. I have developed ways to anticipate the emotional state of a room, but I do not automatically see it myself. It’s as I said, you’re plaintext.
Every person I meet is plaintext. It is as if listening to music, but all I have are the notes. Empaths, meanwhile, hear the music of humanity. I have only the notes, and I studied them fastidiously. This is harder to do, and indeed empaths sense feelings from others much faster than I do.
Oranges. I’m often colour-blind even to myself. I myself can be my own orange, at times. A lot of the time, I’m not using emotion at all when thinking about myself, or generally going about my day. I am not describing depression, nor am I describing disassociation. I am describing my neutral mind. I am aware of myself, and others around me. I remember it all.
I can sometimes feel intense emotions, but I do think I’m probably a lot less emotional than most people. It has especially become truer as I age – I don’t get nearly as angry these days, and things that used to excite me start to feel more mundane. I’m just becoming much calmer and more rational as I age, though that’s probably true of all humans. I won’t think too much about that.
Yes, this book has provided several accounts of both kind and sadistic acts. I don’t go out of my way to do either – it’s opportunistic, mainly. I don’t get out of bed and decide to be a bastard. I don’t decide to just hurt a random person – I have a sadistic streak in me, but I rarely use it unless I’m in the right type of mood. Ditto kindness. I don’t wake up in the morning and decide that I will just be kind, for the sake of being kind. I’m neutral.
When I wake up, I take a piss, eat breakfast and have coffee. I then shower, and brush my teeth. I do my hair, and I get dressed. I read, or watch the news – I might go on IRC. I might check up on a few projects. I’ll do some work for the day – Libreboot laptop orders for example. I’ll work on projects, or go somewhere for the day. I’ll go to a Green Party meeting. I’ll… do me all day. I might do you, one way or the other, if the situation dictates, but I’ll mostly just do me. I’m a very me person, yes.
I need a reason to be kind – an incentive. Ditto sadism. I need to know that the profit justifies the cost. I might sometimes do either, on a random whim, if I have nothing better to do. I sometimes have nothing to do myself, or things are going so well at the moment and there’s just nothing on at the moment, so I will roam the world. My fog.
I’m an engineer. I like building things, because it distracts me from the fog. I really like thinking about complex systems, mapping them in my head and building them. I take great pride in seeing ideas I have come to life through code, but it works elsewhere. I enjoy admiring photos of electronics products and mods that I’ve done. I enjoy looking at artwork that I’ve produced. I sometimes enjoy admiring the work done by others. I can feel extreme pride in my work, and just admire it for hours – ditto others’ works.
I’m the architect. I see the world as inherently beautiful from an artistic and scientific view. When I go places, I love admiring the architecture of cities – I loved Paris for example. I enjoyed Hamburg when I went there, because of how functional everything it and it sort of reminded me of the UK a bit – everything just works a bit better in Hamburg than in the UK. Hamburg is my happy place. I see beauty in order – when I work on software, the thing I like doing most is auditing code, and making it efficient. I like problem solving. I see the music of the world. People don’t concern me so much. There is an entire world that I find beauty in. I like things. I like systems.
I possess a highly analytic mind. I often catch patterns that people miss, and I’ll just think about a system for a long time. I possess a highly visual and photographic mind – I can write code in my head, and think about it in my head. Sometimes, I’ll revisit a project after months, to test an idea, after just processing it in my mind. That’s the sort of person I am. I think like a scientist about everything, including people, even though I know people are more complex than that – I just model them better over time.
I can like people. I often like to befriend highly intelligent people who have a similar artistic or engineering mindset – to me, they’re both the same thing. All of my long-term friendships – and I have several long-term friends actually – are on a purely intellectual basis. It may be that the other person feels something for me, but with me it’s all logic. I seek intellectual and creative novelty. I like smart people. It’s that simple. I enjoy working with people on projects – social contexts do not concern me so much. I will handle the latter as best I can, but I prefer to just build the world around me, and possibly make a bit of money doing so. I possess a high intellect and I enjoy using it.
I’m also confused, a lot of the time. People can confuse me. Throughout this book, I have relayed stories that may suggest I am in control, like I rule the world perhaps. My own small world, anyway. I control myself, but others are a mystery to me. After a while, the same people start to drain me. When it goes beyond the superficial, the professional, the courteous and when it comes time to really connect, this is when I start to fall apart. I have no intentions one way or the other, but I have no model of others besides the largely surface level relations that I have. I’ve become better at dealing with people over time, but I still become drained when I’m around them for too long. My own needs take precedence; some may consider that a person like me is to be envied, but they may not consider that because I don’t feel these connections, that my boredom becomes overwhelming. When people need me on such a deep level, I just start to break.
I used to deal with this tension by simply avoiding people. I still find it soothing now to be alone, and alone is my usual default, but I do make the effort. However, I don’t generally try to emulate people the way I did before. I know that this cannot be sustained, so I just don’t. I’m neither happy nor sad that these limitations exist; they’re simply there, and I have an intellectual understanding of them. I’m still me. A lot of the reason I use to stumble a lot was because I tried to be something which I know I’m not, nor will be. The result was that I’d often become highly stressed over time, and I’d sometimes lash out at others; this part does not concern me as much as the consequences.
This started in 2018, in the period described by Boring House. I am boring. I’m not suppressing anything, nor trying to emulate anything. I am quite unapologetically self-interested and self-driven. On relationships for example, I know that most other humans are not compatible with me on more than a superficial level. I know that there may be some who understand the way I think, and they will accept me, but I know that it’s just not possible for me to have a healthy long-term relationship with most people. I’m much happier these days as a result, and I focus on my strengths instead. I focus on my work, for example. I’m good professionally, so I focus on that.
I know that my interests can be fleeting; contrary to what some people might say about us, a lot of people like me are not power-hungry. I actually considered what might happen if I ruled the world or, less grandiose, became the British prime minister or something like that. My conclusion, every time, is that I’d likely just get bored and step down. I would not have the drive to just keep going. I don’t need praise from others and I don’t need their permission to feel accomplished. I gain satisfaction from my various intellectual pursuits, most of them solitary. I sometimes meet people who like my work, such as Libreboot, and that’s nice too, but it’s all for me. On politics for example; I can become quite active in an election campaign, and then quickly lose interest once it’s over, withdrawing entirely. I keep up a presence at meetings when I can, but my mind is often not in it. I simply do not experience the world emotionally the way they do, and I sometimes just have to focus on myself.
Myself. That’s the key here. This was the key reason I failed in the past, because I tried too hard to focus on others. I learned the hard way, how they trigger me, how certain aspects of my personality can be brought out depending on who I’m with. I’m more aware of it now but awareness is all I can do; intellect can only take me so far. I’m still human.
Consider that as I write this, I’m not even half-way through my life, if national statistics as to life expectancy are to be trusted. I’m thirty four years old as I write this. I will probably change over time, in ways that I don’t predict now, but the overall concept of who I am now will probably remain. I have several more decades of crippling boredom to contend with. I will need to fill that boredom, somehow; projects like Libreboot can fill some of it, and I always find some other random hobby to sink my teeth into. Hobbies are one of the main ways I cope.
I’m what some people might call a psychopath, or sociopath. I find these terms incredibly unproductive, especially given the conversations around them. I feel that a lot of ‘out’ psychopaths act like caricatures – there is so much drama about them. That is why I only mention these terms at the very end of the book. I got annoyed when every other book I read talked about being pro-social this, reformed that, self-restrained this… bullshit. Absolute bullshit. Not all are like that, but nearly everything I’ve read or watched is exactly like that. They compare themselves to the neurotypical even when they claim not to, and other themselves – and by extension, they other me.
There is no accurate medical terminology to describe who I am, in a way that doesn’t also want to end me or call me a disease. What I want is for people like me to have the freedom to be themselves. That doesn’t mean going out and causing mayhem… no. I just want us to be free. It’s just like trans people – I also happen to be transgender. I want transgender people to be free to self-identify as whatever gender seems most appropriate for them, transitioning in whatever way they like, if at all, expressing themselves and living as they please – without being talked down to. I want freedom.
The term psychopath or sociopath mean nothing clinically now but pertain to so-called treatment, not acceptance. They and modern terminology like Anti Social Personality Disorder require that I also be extremely violent or show criminal behaviour – much of it is based on research done in prisons. I don’t meet vast swathes of the criteria, and I’m sure I would fail diagnosis, yet I have the lack of empathy, lack of remorse, the impulsivity… shallow emotional depth. All that good stuff. I also have realistic long-term goals, a lack of delusions about myself – my writing might indicate grandeur, but I see clearly. I’m not perfect, but I am a fully sane and rational human being. Don’t let me fool you otherwise. I am in no way intellectually or morally impaired, and I am in full control of all my faculties. I’m usually quite boring. A lot of the people I meet say I’m charming – if I’m not masking, they’ll think I’m aloof and off in my own world, which I always am anyway, but that’s besides the point.
There is one lady whose book I have. It’s Patric Gagne, who wrote the book “Sociopath: A memoir’ – I’ve watched a lot of her videos on YouTube as well, and she coined a new medical terminology: Low Affect Disorder. I think this might be a less offensive term at least, but I think people like me are much more complex. In any case, there is currently no competent medical handling for people like me that is actually in practice. I will say though that there are lots of people who probably have a brain like mine, who cause a lot of trouble – and in most cases, I’ll bet it’s because they just didn’t have the right environment. They may not even be aware of what they are, and so they have no intellectual basis on which to guide themselves. I say labels are unproductive… but they can be helpful – they also need to be accurate, and if someone does want help for it, it has to come without strings. The individual with this brain quirk – yes quirk, not disorder – must be free to choose the life they want. I think there needs to be a lot more discussion and education about so-called psychopaths.
Let’s call it what it is. When you hear the term “successful psychopath’, “pro-social psychopath’, “reformed psychopath’, “high-functioning psychopath’… these are deeply offensive conceptually. They are judging someone without giving them any agency over what sort of person they want to be. Let’s go back to trans people. I’m trans, yes? I’m non-binary. I do not identify strictly with the female gender, though I mostly present femme – this book has presented me as female, because that’s easier. I also don’t care if someone genders me female, and all my documents are female, mostly because the UK doesn’t recognise non-binary people legally anyway. Even if they did, as some people do – such as Ireland –, other countries don’t. It’s just easier.
Well now! Traditionally, treatment for gender dysphoria has meant conforming to a ridiculously strict set of criteria – WPATH comes to mind. Living in gender role, dressing a certain way… in other words, someone else is telling the trans person what sort of person they can be. If you then “pass’ as male – or female – then you are now a successful, fully assimilated trans person. You can conform to your gender role. Modern research indicates though that gender is a spectrum – and so too is psychopathy, for want of a better word. Humanity itself is a spectrum, so singling out psychopaths and trying to “cure’ them – as current clinical contexts dictate, usually in a criminal context exclusively – is basically the same kind of erasure. We are a minority after all. It’s the same argument. In fact, as I write this, I looked at ME Thomas and she posted a short video on her YouTube channel about Psychopath Awareness Month.
Education, education, education – has a nice ring to it, no?
I’ve seen people online, mostly YouTube, talk about how they are such… and such. Yes. Guess what? If all you do is read off of the PCL-R checklist and do videos for clout, saying that you’ve done this, not done that, all you’re gonna get is weirdos. You do a disservice to yourself, because all you are at that point is a condition. You are not a condition. You’re a person. I bet most of you are interesting and decent people, most likely boring too. This isn’t even necessarily an insult.
As for myself? There’s just a part of my brain that has the volume turned down. That’s all I regard this as. Like the TV that won’t tune in, ever. Who I am is a result of my environment and how I was raised, and I like to think that I’ve used my time on this earth to my own benefit. I became self-aware when I was fifteen because someone called me a sociopath on a forum… so I looked it up. Yep. I checked all the boxes, and I still do now, as I write this book. I found it funny at the time, and just went on with life.
If I had to summarise it, my mind might be divided into four separate priorities in terms of how I operate: my neutral state is the default, but I sometimes want to kill boredom. I enjoy control of myself and others as necessary, and I occasionally enjoy certain thrills – ever fleeting, of course. These have already been discussed in the book, so there’s no need to go further. Yes, I’m a bored Rowebot orange.
I also think the term “masking’ is generally problematic, for another reason. When someone identifying as a psychopath claims that they mask, they might also delude themselves into thinking that certain emotions or feelings aren’t there – that is to say, they might claim to mask when it might in fact not be. I don’t believe in binary representations of anything – empathy is not binary. Some psychopaths might experience weak empathy, as opposed to an absence of it. I actually don’t think it’s possible to completely lack empathy, but I could be wrong. I know with me that it’s, like, turned way way down, but I sometimes have flashes of it, which the next chapter will briefly cover – only briefly, because not much actual explanation is needed.
I wrote this book for me, to analyse myself, and an as exercise for the reader – because nearly everything else I’ve read is crap. They give an overly academic, largely medicalised account of their lives. Indeed, many of those books start with a letter from a therapist or something – some of them are therapists themselves. That’s all fine, and I’m not knocking them either, but I feel that people will just reduce us to a checklist. I wanted something different with my book. I’m not a checklist. I’m… me. I’m complex. I have complex emotions and thoughts, and I do complex things. I live a highly active professional life, and I have passions on things that interest me – like Libreboot, computer science more generally, linguistics, art… all sorts. I’m all over the place. There’s always something that interests me. I’m also into politics.
Oranges though. You are all oranges, and so am I. You all look, smell and taste exactly the same, and so do I. I know you’re all very different, but I don’t see it. I don’t want to see it. I like not seeing it, and I know I never will. It’s just a difference in how I’m wired. I was born this way. I also happen to really like oranges sometimes. I enjoy eating them. Oranges are good. I want more of them. The more the merrier!
I hope you found the book useful! I would encourage you to do a lot more research on this subject, if you haven’t already. As I write this, there is a change happening, with lots of people like myself coming forward. We need a lot more public awareness.
Oranges. You’ll also note how much I ranted in this chapter, with seeming delusional speak, and overly grandiose… yes. I wrote it like that intentionally, for this chapter, but that is how I sound sometimes inside my head. It’s how I sometimes sound online.
There is nothing glamorous about who I am. I’m a normal, boring human person. I’ve sometimes contemplated how a neurotypical person might feel if they had my brain for a day, and then returned to their own brain afterward; what would they feel about it? To me, this is normal. It works the other way as well.
Nothing glamorous at all. Most of my days are completely ordinary. I wake up and just do work, or errands. I watch TV, read, go somewhere… normal human things. I often feel pressure from daily demands, like anyone else, and I have to make sure I eat three square meals. I maintain human relations as anyone else would, especially as I’m dealing with other people on a daily basis. I have long-term friends who I converse with, all of whom know my personality; they knew many of the things that are in this book, because I told them. They remain my friends precisely because they accept me. I learned the hard way, many years ago, that I should just be myself around others. Myself is quite boring and ordinary at all times, mostly anyway.
Readers probably expected bodies, given the title of this book. There are no bodies. There are normal human mistakes, mistakes which I may have processed on a completely alien emotional plane, but even there I’m not all that different; I can experience regret, when the consequences of an action might hurt me in the future. I was reckless with money during my twenties, and I pay for that in my thirties. There are interesting people who I don’t talk to anymore, who I could still talk to if I hadn’t been an arse. Related to both of these facts is the fact that Libreboot, while excellent in its own right and loved by many users, has not gone as far as I’d hoped; I can pinpoint all of those times in which I could have taken the project further. The way I deal with regret, though, is to simply do the things I would have done. There is no time for regret, at an emotional level; I simply keep living forward. I accept every aspect of my life, as it has evolved, as simple fact, and I’m constantly seeking to improve myself. I also did some good things for myself, and I live a life in relative freedom compared to most people; most people don’t have something like Libreboot. I continue working towards the realisation of my dreams, like any normal person, knowing that I’ll still die in the end; I keep going anyway. Why would I do anything else?
You will have seen, throughout this book, that my life is extremely mundane. Such was even alluded to directly, in earlier chapters of this book, and now you have your proof. The novelty of this book is not the events, but the mind, namely my mind. It has been both a gift and a curse, but I don’t think much of it either; I’m simply me. I don’t even have a full concept of how different types of humans will perceive this book, but what I can tell you, dear reader, is that I feel completely normal. To me, everything you’ve read is normal. I can say, without delusion, that I have lived a completely normal life, relative to my own neurology and environment.
Once again, I am completely boring. I hope you were entertained!
There’s a lot of media sensation about people like me, that makes us out to be such and such. Many others of my kind will fall victim to it themselves, and that is precisely why I wrote this book. I want to show the world how thoroughly boring most of us are; a few others like me have written their own literature. I’m not the first, and I hope I’m not the last.
I will now get a few last things out of the way in some follow-up chapters, before you re-read the book. It’s important.
We’re nearly at the end of the book now, and there are a few things that I need to get off my chest. Important facts and trivia, or opinions, that otherwise don’t belong exclusively in their own chapter.
Much of this is presented as my personal feelings and subjective experience, especially the PCL-R/ASPD criticisms. Focus more on my mind, rather than what I say. I do feel very strongly though that the psychiatric profession is currently ill-equipped to handle me. It just does not help me, nor does it seem to have any designs that might benefit me personally. Current pathology about me wants to change me, and assimilate me into polite society, in ways that I’m personally not comfortable with; they demand that I make changes to benefit others, rather than primarily in service to myself. The latter has been the central motivation behind my self-guided growth, especially since the 2018 Boring House period.
No more babbling. Time to get serious.
Let’s begin with my hero, Robert Hare.
The Robert Hare PCL-R psychopathy checklist is bullshit, and here’s why. I’ll go through the criteria, and tell you what I think:
• Glibness/superficial charm: literally everyone can be glib or charming. Why is that part of the fucking criteria?
• Grandiose sense of self-worth: literally everyone is capable of being grandiose. That’s all of fucking humanity.
• Need for stimulation / proneness to boredom: literally all of fucking humanity.
• Pathological lying: an actual difference of neurology may influence this, if it causes weakened remorse, to the extent that one may lie more easily, but empaths lie all the time. Lying is just something that some humans do, for whatever reason. I don’t think we need to pathologise dishonesty, do we?
• Conning/manipulative: Ditto, but lots of people learn to be extremely deceptive and manipulative. It is simply a part of the human condition – I’ve seen plenty of empaths do it.
• Lack of remorse or guilt: depends on the context. Sometimes, an empath may experience a lack of remorse or guilt over an action. A soldier for example, might feel bad the first few times when killing someone, but the hundredth time might start to feel like a statistic. A drug addict, otherwise empathetic, might steal to get their next fix – and it may simply become so routine that they stop feeling bad. I could go on, but you get the point. – someone like me though is obviously less predisposed to such a feeling though. We’ll include this one in the Leah Rowe checklist.
• Shallow affect: This one seems fine, and seems like a valid thing to go on. This one goes on the Leah Rowe checklist. You can’t fake affect, and you can’t fake low affect – you either have affective tendencies or you don’t. It’s chemistry.
• Callous / lack of empathy: This can go on the list, yes. Approved for Leah Rowe list.
• Parasitic lifestyle: hard no. Plenty of empaths are parasitic too. How you live is based on your environment, a lot of times how you grow up. What the fuck does that even mean, parasitic? How do you define it? Total bullshit. Environmental factors only.
• Poor behavioural controls: Come now, lots of humans behave badly. Come the fuck on. Come now. No. Piss off.
• Promiscuous sexual behaviour: Is sex a crime now?
• Early behavioural problems: Who hasn’t been naughty as a child? Seriously. This is white-picket-fence-level contempt for normal human beings.
• Lack of realistic, long-term life goals: Oh, yeah, let’s just use capitalism to judge everything. That’s all this means. More white-picket-fence snobbery. What if you can’t plan your life because you’re poor? Poverty breeds more poverty. Lots of people that Hare interviewed were poor, uneducated – and poverty breeds crime. When you have no education or prospects, you do crime… and you can’t plan. Fuck you, Robert Hare.
• Impulsivity: Literally most humans I know love shopping for frivolous junk, and they go crazy over the next shiny thing. They love their fast cars. They love their McDonald’s hamburger. They love tapping on their mobile phones and ordering a bunch of shit on Amazon. They love being random and spontaneous. Is being human a crime now?
• Irresponsibility: I hardly see how anything scientifically measurable might cause this. Once again white-picket-fence bullshit. Anyone of sufficient upbringing with the right level of intelligence can properly plan their life, and act with care towards themselves or others. More white-picket-fence snobbery. I see right through it.
• Failure to accept responsibility: Plenty of empaths I’ve met are irresponsible at all times. They may fail to accept responsibility for a number of things, like when being accused of a crime that they don’t want to go to jail for, and Robert Hare interviewed mostly criminals, yes. Fuck you again, Robert Hare.
• Many short-term marital relationships: Literally half of all marriages fail. Also, robot Christians fuck off. Thanks.
• Juvenile delinquency: I was a saint.
• Revocation of conditional release: I am a law-abiding gangster. I’ve also never been to prison, and… yes, poverty again, hello old friend. People who grow up with resources apply themselves better and probably won’t do crime. Most criminals are empaths. People can fall foul for all sorts of reasons.
• Criminal versatility: there are plenty of empaths who I’d throw in prison, such as most politicians. Empaths can be versatile.
Lack of remorse/guilt, shallow affect, callous / lack of empathy: now those are things that can be affected by the brain. That’s why I like Patric Gagne’s proposed terminology: Low Affect Disorder. That’s literally what and all it is. There’s a thing that lights up in normal brains, that doesn’t in ours. We got the volume turned down.
The rest of PCL-R is white-picket-fence-robot-christian bullshit. No wonder Ted went mad.
If I don’t elaborate, it’s because I don’t want to. It does not deserve my time.
I don’t want to elaborate, so I will. Let’s now talk about ASPD.
Anti-social Personality Disorder – ASPD – is bullshit, and here’s why. I refer to: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK546673/
Yes, it’s so unbelievably nebulous that I scarcely know to begin. The first problem is that it lumps so many different groups of people together that it hardly even means anything, but even the diagnostic criteria within it are so unreliable and basically have the same problems as PCL-R, but they made it more complicated to diagnose.
Let’s compare this to lawyers then. Lawyers make more money when the law is more complicated. Ditto accountants – when the tax code is so complex that you can’t just do it yourself. Psychology is the same, and ASPD to me looks like nothing more than a cash grab. That’s the best thing about pseudoscience, you can just make shit up and get paid even more.
If it looks, talks and walks like a duck, it costs £500 an hour. Quacks, all, and here’s why.
First… genetics… it just has some stats. I don’t care about that. Neurodevelopmental… it shows a laundry list of completely unrelated conditions like Huntington disease, endocrine disorders, heavy metal poisoning*, head trauma, cerebral tumours… yeah and all of what it lists could cause all kinds of things to happen to a human being.
Family and Psychosocial factors: in other words, how wealthy you were growing up, and whether your parents raised you right. Yes, apparently growing up poor can make you more likely to commit crimes and such – and someone gets to diagnose you with ASPD because someone made it up. Yay. So, a lot of people basically who aren’t psychopaths in a neurological sense, get lumped in.
Epidemiology… it says people with ASPD are likely to be less intelligent and less educated. Apparently, homelessness is more likely as a result of failure to hold down a job and pay rent, etc. It literally says we are stupid, but “we’ – yes, again – includes too many people. If you’re an empath but you grow up in poverty or an unstable home, you will more likely commit crimes and if you do them all in the right order and make the correct mistakes at the right time… someone gets paid £500 an hour to diagnose you with a condition they made up. IQ is also not a reliable measure of intelligence, as again, poverty fucks everything. Someone born poor will score lower on IQ tests and do less well in school, on average, than someone whose parents could afford books and such, not to mention afford the time to spend on their kids.
Pathophysiology… too long. This part seems fine. Whatever. It’s talking about findings from neuroscience and how certain parts of the brain light up. Just go read the link yourself if you want. I don’t care about this part – not for the book, anyway. Like, this is the most important part, but the point of my critique is to show that it’s surrounded by bullshit. This is the non-bullshit part, and you should look into it yourself.
Back to bullshit:
*studies around the world did show that reduction in lead worldwide caused a reduction in violent crimes and an increase in academic performance, after they removed a lot of lead from fuels. Look it up if you want. Studies everywhere showed the same result.
Under “History and Physical’, it specifies:
• Tattoos: Tattoos are cool, and not a reliable marker of whether someone is a psychopath, yet the article literally says someone with tattoos or face markings is more likely to be one. Damn. They don’t even hide their contempt now. I wish I was making this up. White-picket-fence rubbish. Does that make one of my cousins a psychopath? Her body is full of tattoos. She’s a lovely woman. Fuck off.
• Manipulative, disinhibited behaviour, aggressive, deceitful… literally anything can cause this. How brightly a certain part of brain lights up has little effect in practice – nurture over nature. If you grow up in poverty, you will be more likely drawn to crime and then you will more likely demonstrate such behaviour.
• Speech: apparently, we are not likely to be speech-impaired. This is literally part of the diagnostic criteria, for some reason. Nice to know I’m not impaired – and I speak three languages. Lucky me. What does my linguistic skill have to do with anything?
• Affect: yes, this goes on the Leah Rowe list like before. I’ll take this one. Psychopaths have low/flat affect. That’s like, first principles.
• Thought content: It says to assess suicide/murder risk, especially in light of drug use… plenty of empathetic people take drugs and do murder. Why is this on the list? It says drug use may cause psychosis. Duh. I know plenty of stoners who got fried.
• Perceptions: it says we don’t suffer hallucinations unless we do drugs. Is it telling me to do drugs? I don’t know what this is.
• Thought process: here it says we think linearly with limited range and logic. It goes on to say that we may fail to learn from mistakes. SO… we’re stupid.
• Cognition: It charitably states that our cognition and orientation are not impaired. Thanks. I’m honoured. Thank you so much!
• Insight: it says we have a poor understanding or remorse for how our actions may affect “social or operational functioning’ – such Orwellian language, but yes, psychopaths have low/no remorse for things. We’ll add this I suppose.
• Judgement and impulse control: it says we do not control our own impulses well and may make rash decisions. I mean, OK, but so do lots of empaths. Any number of things can cause a person to behave foolishly. Intellect and environment play a role.
Treatment / management: tl;dr CBT and drugs. Even within the nebulous concept that is ASPD, I consider this as being akin to gay conversion therapy. I would especially consider this for someone like me. These people do not respect my right to exist. They fundamentally do not accept me as valid – that’s why they put Disorder next to my name. I am broken, yes.
I don’t really want to go on further, so I will.
So we have again: low/flat affect. Low remorse. Also brainwaves. The problem with ASPD is that it doesn’t mean anything. Let’s talk clusters:
Cluster A
◦ Personality disorders with odd or eccentric characteristics
◦ Paranoid personality disorder, schizoid personality disorder, and schizotypal personality disorder
◦ Often exhibit social withdrawal, peculiar or paranoid beliefs, and difficulties forming close relationships
Cluster B
◦ Comprises personality disorders with dramatic, emotional, or erratic behaviors
◦ Antisocial personality disorder, borderline personality disorder (BPD), histrionic personality disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder (NPD)
◦ Often display impulsive actions, emotional instability, and challenges in maintaining stable relationships
• Cluster C
◦ Personality disorders with anxious and fearful characteristics
◦ Avoidant personality disorder, dependent personality disorder, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder
◦ Often experience significant anxiety, fear of abandonment, and an excessive need for control or perfectionism
Note here that most of this is behavioural observation, meaning, not science. This is not to say that some people might accidentally benefit from the intervention of a therapist – it’s pot luck. I don’t even need to spell it out. Just look at it.
Schizoid… what? Why? Leave loners alone.
Because… quack.
You can’t medicate lifestyle. If you’re in an environment that enables violence, then the environment is your problem, not your brain. ASPD though is nonsense. I don’t need to elaborate further, as I rest my case. It’s a completely ambiguous diagnostic category.
Behaviour is shaped by how you were raised, what environment you’re in, what options you had, and what your brain happens to be doing… which can literally change with the wind. Human beings are diverse creatures.
Anyone with any number of neurological conditions, even neurotypical people, could fall under ASPD if they just make the right lifestyle choices. You could make a religion out of it. Quack.
I value science. Neuroscience for example is wonderful – please do check James Fallon’s book called The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain – it goes in depth. Ditto pharmacology. The rest I can toss, and I will. My £500 stays in my pocket, thank you. (I live in the UK and the NHS is useless here – if I wanted to talk to these people, I’d have to pay £500 an hour)
ASPD and the medical profession surrounding it are precisely what I refer to when I spoke earlier of conversion therapy. These people see us as problems to be fixed, whereas I suggest that we instead be treated as valid human beings, whose lives everyone else can… mind their own business of. Yes, fuck off.
Quack, quack.
A random eighteen-year-old once verbally ambushed me at a pub, at some time during 2024-2026. The context regarding her having approached me is irrelevant, but she had good reason to, as she knew of me and she just wanted to say hello. I was surrounded by several of my friends.
No relation. She was slightly drunk and showed signs quite familiar to me that she may have been, in some way, autistic. She was not gay – she even said so, for some reason. She kept ranting at me, quickly revealing her highly articulate intellect.
She’s one of the few people I’ve ever met that can talk more than me. I couldn’t get a single word in edgeways, and I didn’t want to either. I wanted to hear her rant. I did ask her if she was on the autistic spectrum, and her response was that she’d been asked that same question many times – in other words, yes.
She just kept talking, and I very much enjoyed listening to her.
She had expressed great interest in me personally, albeit superficially and on a mostly political level; I was on best behaviour, listening intently to every word. We discussed whatever interested her, the whole time, and I would validate all of her feelings. I felt that this was the right thing to do.
I offered little, if any, of my own anecdotes. I saw no harm indulging her intellectual passions. She seemed relatively innocent, naive, and she had no problem volunteering extensive volumes of information about herself, and the people close to her.
I recognised such young intensity, and saw no reason to pursue it further. I left with my friends, and went home. I glimpsed her buying another pint as I left.
A highly intelligent young person. I remained sober the whole time.
Fascinating.
Here are some random anecdotes about times in which I cried.
No, I did not kill Steven Spielberg.
The ending of the film ’Schindler’s List’ made me cry, when Oskar Schindler laments that he could have saved more Jews from death, if only he had sold more of his belongings. He breaks down in tears as he is presented a ring honouring him, by the roughly one-thousand Jews he saved, and he becomes overwhelmed, crying because he could have saved ten more Jews. They all thank him anyway, saying they wouldn’t be alive if not for him. Tears come out of my eyes whenever I watch this scene. They’re coming out of my eyes now as I write about it. Only that scene though.
’Das Leben der Anderen,’ a 2006 film, is set in the erstwhile Deutsche Demokratische Republik and centres around a Stasi agent, who falls in love with the couple he’s monitoring; he ultimately tries to save both of their lives at the end of the film. I didn’t cry when the wife character died, but he is seen two years later after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and enters a book shop where he purchases a book written by the husband. The book has an entry before prologue, dedicated in thanks to his former Stasi identification number. He understands immediately and buys it. The cashier asks him if he’d like it gift-wrapped, to which the former agent says ’Nein, das ist für mich’ – the film immediately freezes frame on his eyes, as he is about to cry tears of joy, and the final credits roll. I cry every time I watch it.
I know exactly why I cried, because I have recognised when I myself have become overwhelmed after a major achievement, or when I’ve come out of major crisis, and cried in relief afterward – in the thick of it, you just sort of get on with it. Coming out of difficult relationships and suddenly being free, suddenly… yeah, you get it. I think in these scenes, I’m crying for myself. There are other examples, and I give these as random ones. It’s fleeting, and minor; I don’t shed tears in streams, but I do feel them start to flow a bit. That’s the thing about psychopaths; we do have empathy sometimes. The clue is in: weak empathy. Empathy is a spectrum.
I can also laugh, like when I watched the South Park episode about Mr. Hanky the Christmas Poo, or the King of the Hill episode where Dale tells Bobby that a strong hurricane may send an egg directly through a brick wall – or, Humpty’s Revenge, as experts call it. I was quite beside myself.
I can experience small flashes of joy watching others – it’s also fleeting. This is not a contradiction – it’s all still oranges, most of the time. This is to say, that psychopaths may not necessary lack empathy. It’s just turned way, way, way down. I prefer to think of it like a simultaneously weak and intermittent connection on an old phone line. You might sometimes get through, but the voice is garbled and then cuts off again for the rest of the day.
I had mild flashbacks after the car crash. I was a robot when it happened, but I did sit in my chair later and see the number plate again repeatedly in my mind. The shock was there – but mildly. It was unpleasant. I knew something strange had occurred, but it was a mild shock. I quickly forgot about it though. Yes, I am human, though I did not cry in that instance. Oh well.
I cried a lot when I was younger. I could will myself into crying, if I got angry enough and became generally overwhelmed. All quite ordinary, really. I don’t generally cry even when I’m extremely stressed; you have to really push my buttons to make me cry. I’ve become even better at not crying, as I age.
Part of that though might have just been my male upbringing. I came out as trans in my twenties. Before then, I was socialised male, and in my culture, men aren’t allowed to cry. Like, I’ve never seen my dad cry. Ever.
Crying is awesome. When I do cry, I experience it as a release, and a general calm after the fact. I’m hyper aware of everything around me. If I’m just completely overwhelmed to the point of madness, I let out a good cry, and then my mind snaps back into action; if you make me cry, it’s because I’m about to win. It’s called a switch-comeback; the concept normally applies to combat sports, when the fighter is so broken to the point of ruin, and just comes back for one last heroic effort and wins. That is how I normally treat crying.
I don’t remember ever crying, and I mean serious crying, for other people. When I do cry for others, and yes it does happen, I’m thinking about myself, like in those film scenes.
I really don’t cry though, as a rule. I can remember all of the times I’ve cried, but I don’t think it plays an important part of my development. They are flukes, exceptions, not the rule. I’m generally a very practical person, even when I’m not; in the past, anger is how I’ve dealt with stress instead, expressing myself through rage. Perhaps if I was born and raised female, I might have cried instead; again, male upbringing. Lots of men become aggressive in situations where women are more likely to cry.
I digress.
Here’s a time when I didn’t cry:
A long time friend of mine confessed that she was a paedophile. I felt intense pressure after that, because I had a lot of orders that month so I didn’t get round to reporting it immediately; I did post some samples of recordings that I’d made of our conversations, to immediately let everyone know I was no longer friends with her. This mattered, because she was at a low point in her life and may have confessed to more people; I did not want people to think I was covering for her in any way, and I wasn’t, so I needed to make the breakup unambiguous. I sent a lazy report to the FBI, but only actually bothered with a proper police report in her state about a month later. Nothing came of it, because the police did not have enough probable cause in spite of the confession, and she remained free. Oh well. Destroying her didn’t give me much of a kick, but it seemed like the most appropriate response.
At one point, she called me on the phone, begging me to stop, pleading for her life as she did not want to be killed or raped in prison; such was plausible, in her country, though I simply told her that it was “not a foregone conclusion” and she eventually hung up in frustration. I told her at several times that the correct response is prison, or whichever sentence is deemed appropriate by a judge; I did not tell her that she deserved punishment. I only said that the correct response was imprisonment, berating her for the stupidity on her part of having confessed to me in the first place. My emotional state was neutral, throughout the call; I did understand her fear, at one point even articulating that fact while calling her fears “unfounded”. I was torturing her, at a psychological level, during that entire call. A friend of mine was listening to the call. The purpose of this and my other efforts recording her was to demonstrate her competence, in case it ever did go to trial. I fully cooperated with the police in her state, talking to them daily via email and telephone. The police lady I spoke to was highly professional.
There is a part during the recording in which I cough, and then clear my throat. It seems relatively innocuous to the casual listener, but it was intentional and also part of my torture; she suffers from tourettes syndrome and that sound triggers violent twitches on her part. These twitches cause extreme psychosomatic pain, which leaves her thoroughly disabled for roughly one minute; the pain is felt physically and psychologically. I’d avoided making these sounds throughout my conversations whenever I spoke with her, as I’d also trained myself to avoid them in public speeches. Ditto um, er and so on - these too, also triggered her twitches. In the recording, I decided to punish her indignation with coughing. This is why she said, in that part of the recording: “Please stop clearing your throat; it hurts!”
I did not feel anything about her victims; I did not even feel disgusted by the confessions, and they were extremely detailed as I’d made her confess more while I recorded her. I’m not a paedophile myself, and I knew intellectually that she simply had a disease; this is not to say that one cannot exercise restraint either. I know that the correct response is to report paedophiles, so that is what I did. She trusted me, confiding in me at the time, unwise though it may have been on her part. I shall remember our conversations fondly, prior to the confessions, as she was otherwise a genius in her field. She was the author of several projects pertaining to computer emulation. I vividly remember her once stimming across her parents’ house in a call with me, explaining to me how the GPU works in a Sony PlayStation 3.
I had a dream about her months later, where we’d met up again in my town; she’d come to my town for some reason. I’m not capable of love, but telling someone you love them makes them feel good. In the dream, I told her I still love her, but that we cannot be friends. She said several times, when I knew her, that she also loved me, for what it’s worth. I was constantly panicked in the dream, worried that others might see me with her. In the dream, we then travelled to the United States and I abandoned her in a crowd once we reached New York. Boarding my train, she somehow got her revenge on me by making it rain, and it was raining urine; a bucket of piss also landed on me. I woke up inside the dream and ranted about it on IRC, only to realise that the IRC chat was also a dream. The dream then switched to a surreal scene in which I cooked spaghetti bolognese in my bathtub. I then woke up for real, and told my mother about it. I found the whole thing quite hilarious.
I meant what I said in the dream, this way: I do actually wish her well. I won’t be friends with her again, because I have a policy of not being friends with people like her, but I do hope that she learns self-control and avoids such action. I also know that most people like her never stop doing what they do, and so I just can’t be friends with her. It’s just not possible. She was a pain in the ass when I knew her anyway, pedantic about everything and caused me a lot of trouble all the time. Her personality was highly abrasive, and she never censored herself. She was also highly intelligent and sensitive about the world; we talked politics a lot, and she had quite left-wing views. Yes, let’s say left-wing. If it wasn’t for her paedophilia, we’d still be friends. Everything I know about her is still true, and her confession changes none of it. I genuinely do wish her well; I also hopes she stops targeting youngsters online. I know she probably won’t, so we’re no longer friends. It’s that simple. It is like someone told me once, in a different context, but it applies here: she is the crocodile, and she needs to feed. I want to be at least one hundred feet away from the swamp, so I don’t get dragged in.
If I had to summarise my feelings about her in one word, I would say: annoyed. I am annoyed that she’s a paedophile. Not disgusted or horrified. I’ve seen worse. There are a lot of fucked up people. She isn’t even a very good paedophile. She is physically disabled and can’t even leave her own home. Her activities were mostly webcam stuff. Still illegal, and still, you know, bad. But like, yeah, what the fuck. Why couldn’t she just, you know, not have been a fucking pedo? I like talking to highly intelligent people, and she is a highly intelligent person, who otherwise has an interesting life. That life is now wasted. That is what I feel about her. I lament what is the waste of a human life: her life, and her intellectual works are now thoroughly tainted on a social level.
Oh well. I did not cry. I simply thought of her fondly, and moved on. I even met, online, some of the people who I suspected were her victims. She often brought youngsters into my chatrooms, though I did not suspect then that she was a paedophile. She was, herself, in her late teens and then early twenties. Like, I didn’t think of it at the time, but she regularly seemed to be friends with young persons, roughly sixteen to seventeen years old. Nothing odd about that at first glance, because she was 26 when I last spoke to her, prior to her confessions. She had relations with these youngsters that spanned years, and she would frequently tell me of new girlfriends, followed by later breakup, then a new one… I just didn’t bother to ask. Some of those people she brought in might have been thirteen or forteen when she met them. Some of these people were really fucked up, like one of them had disassociative identity disorder for example, presenting herself as plural. When she told me she’s a pedophile and she gave me details, one of the things she said was that she targets younger people who have transphobic or otherwise abusive parents, which chimes well with this observation; abuse can cause dissociative symptoms.
I didn’t think much about it. Just a passing thought, really. One of them, I’m quite sure was one of her relations. I don’t have to worry about them anymore, since she’s banned from my communities, which means she won’t drag those other people into my communities. All I care about is that she’s no longer my problem. She is no longer a liability to me in any way.
It would have been clearer if she was, say, forty five years old, and met up with these people. The last suspicious person, exemplifying the above account, was about sixteen when my former friend was about twenty three.
In retrospect now, I should have probably seen the red flags, especially with some of her other proclivities that I did know about, but hindsight is twenty-twenty. I’m glad that she confessed. If she had chickened out that day, I might have never found out, and she would have remained my friend. If that had happened, she would have continued being a liability to me in terms of reputation. Like, I do not care about her crimes, but I know that everyone else hates pedos. I oppose pedos out of principle, and will always report one, but my actual feeling is neutral. My actual emotional response is non-existent, and I tell myself that these are just people who have a desire that is morally unacceptable - yes, moral.
This example from my life is perfect, because it demonstrates morality versus empathy. I felt no empathy of any kind, but I knew the correct response, and I did what was necessary.
Like I said, oh well. People like her are a dime a dozen. The fact that she got away with it doesn’t bother me either. There are plenty more people like her. It is one of those crimes with the lowest reporting rate, and an even lower conviction rate. Statistically, that whole episode is meaningless.
Moving on!
Finally, here’s one more unrelated tangent:
They suspected autism in my youth, because I had problems with authority and I often failed to interact socially with other children. I would often prefer to be alone, and this carries true through to my adult life. The big one, though, was repetition and let me refute that immediately: the reason I watched the same VHS tape all day was that my parents would not buy more. I made do with what I had as we lacked internet or cable TV in my 1990s childhood. BBC, ITV, Channel Four and Channel Five sometimes showed cartoons, but my child brain could not just sift through that all day either.
Yes, Thomas the Tank Engine made me autistic. I went to a psychotherapist when I was twenty-eight with my mother and gave all the right questions to the exam. Drive-Thru Assburgers essentially, as the interview lasted only one hour and my mother did most of the talking. Mother was happy. We made a day of it in lovely, lovely Basildon.
Let’s ignore my biological father who has BPD. My grandmother was smoking once in my house, and I had a right go at her. I just wouldn’t stop, and she saw the extent of my own fury that seemingly disregarded… all she said as she left was: I knew it.
I knew how to be autistic because my friend’s older brother was on the spectrum, and I thought he was cool when he showed me computer emulation. My love of computer science came from him. That, and wanting to know how the little man inside the screen responded to me in Duke Nukem when I was younger.
One of the things I’m good at doing is emulating people, ironic in this context yes, but it’s just a normal human skill that I excel at. I’m able to intuit other peoples’ sensibilities and mannerisms, replicating them myself.
When I’m not masking myself, my natural tendency is to just focus on myself entirely, and withdraw into my own little world. I am what I would refer to as a “low-effort” psychopath, in that I did not put large efforts earlier in my life into mixing with other people. Had I got a job for example, instead of try to go alone and later creating Libreboot, I might have developed people emulation skills much earlier, and my trajectory might have looked much different. I may have looked more like your prototypical psychopath.
Every autistic person I’ve met who knows me, in ways described by this book, tells me that they couldn’t be more different. They intensely feel for other people around them, and they are much more emotionally connected to others than I am. There is a pervasive stereotype that autistic people are withdrawn, and detached from others, but this is not true. They merely express their feelings differently, but they’re there.
I can consistently do what many autistic people can’t, in social contexts, but I was a shielded child when I grew up. Add to that my love for computing, and it was easy to call me autistic. I have extensive experience with autistic people, because I knew them in school; I was in the top set for maths, later in my education, and I hung around with them a lot during break, mostly to play computer games.
I knew a lot of autistic people when I studied computer science at college. Lots of people in the Libreboot community and other free software communities are also autistic. I never had to put effort into properly emulating others, earlier in my twenties, simply because Libreboot shielded me from it. I never needed to develop a career, because Libreboot was my career, and so I was able to just continue living in relative isolation, much like earlier in life.
I pass as autistic, in my communities. I have made repeated efforts over the years to tell people what I’m really like, describing many concepts as shown in this book, but that was years prior to this book and I was much drunker then. I also had a much less developed sense of myself then, and fewer sources of proof than what I now have for this book; the 2016 incidents were my strongest proofs, but it was easier to shrug off. Over time, though, as I approached my thirties, the same pattern persisted.
Yes, lots of other books talk about low-functioning, high-functioning, pro-social psychopaths, and so on. I’m a new kind: a lazy psychopath. I understand, at a deep intellectual level, who I am. There have been events in my life that amplify my tendencies, but I usually don’t use them. Like, I’m not even a very good psychopath. I don’t really use my powers, as it were, most of the time. Most of the time, I just go about my life like any other person. There is no grandiosity to any of it, in spite of my writing. This book documents the flash points in my life, and attempts to describe some of the more mundane parts, but I’m mostly just normal. Like, lots of literature out there will make us out to be villains, like we twirl our moustaches and actively go out to harm others like Mr. Hyde or something. One, I lasered off my moustache years ago, and two, I literally just cannot be bothered. Like, for real, I’m thirty four as I write this. I’ve been there, done that. I’ve seen that shit.
I know how to fuck you, but I don’t want to. I just cannot be bothered. I’m a thoroughly boring, utterly uninspired person who happens to have what might otherwise be a crippling liability as it is for so many others. My life is a happy accident, one in which I’ve been able to achieve a relative peace.
Lots of people have told me I’m autistic, and this is true in terms of how I often behave in public, but I believe it to be false from a neurological perspective. If there were a way to reliably scan a brain to determine whether one is autistic or psychopathic, and I’m sure there are probably some useful tests, though I’m not a neuroscientist myself, it would show differences. If you take someone who is naturally psychopathic but put them in isolation for years, especially in a context like computer science where autistic people are much more prevalent, and this person does not actively put high effort into many of the traits that mark psychopath, what you get is someone who, almost without trying, appears autistic. That is what I think happened with me.
My mother, although undiagnosed, believes that she is on the autistic spectrum. She does display empathy, and emotional connecctions to others. She is never manipulative, and she finds lying extremely difficult for example. She is often sensitive to loudness, lots of shouting, especially when people talk for too long about something that might overwhelm her. She told me numerous stories of her childhood that further back up the hypothesis, combined with my own analysis of her behaviour throughout my childhood all the way to adult life. She’s often obsessed with hobbies, mostly artistic projects, and she’s really good at picking up new skills quickly, obsessing over them in fact. She shows all the signs, albeit it with the female mask; detecting autism in women is often harder, due to the differences in how women are raised socially.
She was also abused by my violent biological father, who was later diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder. I never met the man myself, nor do I wish to, because I don’t think it would profit me. She escaped from him when I was very young, raising me with her mother until I was about two years old; she then met my step-father on holiday, who took both me and her into his care.
She saw my behaviour in early years, and likely projected a lot; autism was just an easier label. My school and college, though, never had me formally diagnosed. I was shown as having several autistic traits, and put on a special programme allowing specialist tutoring throughout education.
I met and befriended a lot of autistic people in my teens, and later going into my adult years. I simply socialised around them, in the latter part of my childhood and then adulthood. As I said, I copied a lot of their traits. Before my mid-teens, it was much less clear. On a superficial level, a low-effort psychopath, that is, someone who doeesn’t mask and doesn’t actively do things like abuse or manipulate people on a daily basis, might read autistic if they have the kinds of friends I did, and the hobbies that I did. My need for control was also present from a young age, which I would channel into hobbies and projects. It would be correct to say that, during my life, I have exhibited traits at a superficial level that read as autistic. For many years, I simply accepted this as fact, but I believe my cognition could not be more different. I was an undeveloped psychopath, and later a low-effort one; I just did not grow up in an environment that encouraged the growth of key psychopathic traits. I was given books and computers, instead, and then I became the leader of a major free software project.
I simply did not need to develop those traits. As you can see in earlier parts of my book, there have been times when I demonstrate quite abusive behaviour, and thought patterns that align with psychopathy. This is largely why I would likely not pass diagnosis, I think, for ASPD or whatever the psychiatric profession invents next.
I do not regard myself as “high-functioning”. I am undeveloped and low-effort; I developed some of the traits naturally as a consequence of my environment, when challenged, but by the time I’d got there, I was already mature in all the ways that mattered. I’d developed the mask without the need to actually mask; autism isn’t even a mask. The way I live and the things I do is just commonly read as such. From my perspective, all I do is life my life the way I always have.
Whether I actually am autistic does not actually concern me. I only offer these thoughts for completeness, since it’s natural that a lot of people might bring it up anyway. Because I think my diagnosis is wrong, I also don’t claim certain benefits for example; in the UK, autistic people are considered disabled and may quality for certain welfare benefits such as the Personal Independence Payment. I simply do not claim these. I went to Basildon that day with my mother, on a whim, and it made her happy. That’s all there is.
I digress.
My actual aspie friend, Flowerman, asked me on IRC what I would do if I were a conscious, sentient aeroplane. In this experiment, I have full bodily autonomy; I can feel every part of the plane, because I am the plane. I control every inch of the plane. I’m otherwise a normal plane, and passengers ride me to their destinations.
I provided a comprehensive solution to this problem:
2025-08-20 21:21:21 <@leah> being an aeroplane
2025-08-20 21:21:30 <@leah> that’s an interesting thought experiment, which i will now commit to
2025-08-20 21:21:43 <+Flowerman> heh, enjoy
2025-08-20 21:22:18 <@leah> my first instinct would be to feel annoyed that all these people are sitting on me
2025-08-20 21:22:24 <@leah> i’d want to remove them immediately
2025-08-20 21:22:35 <@leah> so i’d open all the doors mid-air
2025-08-20 21:22:53 <@leah> and then i’d just, like, roam
2025-08-20 21:23:22 <@leah> like, for real, these people are going to the toilet inside me
2025-08-20 21:23:24 <@leah> what the fuck?
2025-08-20 21:23:26 <+Flowerman> the doors don’t have power actuators (except for the airbus a380), but they do have sensors and actuatable locks
2025-08-20 21:23:44 <+Flowerman> you cannot perceive toilet use, but you can probably perceive the state of the toilet door and whether someone is smoking in there
2025-08-20 21:24:07 <@leah> well, a bit of nicotine harms nobody. let them smoke up in there
2025-08-20 21:24:12 <+Flowerman> you also have the ability to activate a fire suppression device inside the wastebin in the toilet
2025-08-20 21:24:19 <@leah> and open the airlocks after they’re about to sit down
2025-08-20 21:24:34 <@leah> fire supression
2025-08-20 21:24:38 <@leah> what kind; halon or water?
2025-08-20 21:25:07 <+Flowerman> not sure, but AFAIK the wastebins in airliner toilets have fire suppression systems for the inevitable situation where someone smokes in there and throws a cigarette in the trash
2025-08-20 21:25:27 <+Flowerman> airliners generally still carry halon though, it was exempted from the convention
2025-08-20 21:25:27 <@leah> can’t the whole toilet have fire suppression?
2025-08-20 21:25:32 <@leah> cuz then i’d just lock the toilet door
2025-08-20 21:25:39 <@leah> and turn the suppression on permanently
2025-08-20 21:25:48 <@leah> either drowning them in water, or suffocating them with halon gas
2025-08-20 21:25:48 <+Flowerman> i mean anything which adds weight costs a fuckton on an airliner
2025-08-20 21:26:06 <@leah> this would deter further smoking by new passengers
2025-08-20 21:26:10 <+Flowerman> you add the fire suppression system which adds weight, which means the floor has to be stronger, which also adds weight, which means the XYZ has to be stronger, which means the wings have to be stronger etc etc etc
2025-08-20 21:26:10 <@leah> if they’re wily enough to ride me
2025-08-20 21:26:14 <+Flowerman> these are called ‘gearing effects’
2025-08-20 21:26:31 <@Chinesefriend> lesson is do not ride leah
2025-08-20 21:26:31 <+Flowerman> I don’t know what the typical ratio is but adding x grams of weight to a plane adds way more than x grams due to the knockon engineering requirements
2025-08-20 21:26:34 <@leah> fine, fine. but i get to punish smoking with death, correct?
2025-08-20 21:26:57 <+Flowerman> i don’t think that’s part of the laws you were given as boeing-777-AI.exe
2025-08-20 21:27:04 <@leah> this is hilarious
2025-08-20 21:27:11 <@leah> i’m literally laughing out loud at this conversation
2025-08-20 21:27:14 <@leah> me as a plane
2025-08-20 21:27:17 <+Flowerman> in fact i’m pretty sure you MUST NOT kill people even if they do smoke
2025-08-20 21:27:18 <@leah> fantastic
2025-08-20 21:27:35 <@leah> but like
2025-08-20 21:27:40 <@leah> how are they going to punish me?
2025-08-20 21:27:43 <@leah> you can’t put a plane in prison
2025-08-20 21:27:57 <+Flowerman> yes but they can delete you entirely and reimage the firmware
2025-08-20 21:28:05 <@leah> if i have computers in there, with internet, i could probably hack some refuelling planes
2025-08-20 21:28:09 <@leah> and just stay in the sky forever
2025-08-20 21:28:14 <+Flowerman> see the thing about computers is, people don’t recognise them as life, so they will just kill you if you do anything wrong
2025-08-20 21:28:27 <+Flowerman> similarly to how an OS will just kill a process for a single illegal instruction with no mercy
2025-08-20 21:28:27 <@leah> well that sucks
2025-08-20 21:28:36 <+Flowerman> the inner life of computers is actually crazy totalitarian if you think about it
2025-08-20 21:28:52 <+Flowerman> computers are actually the most fascist technology possible
2025-08-20 21:28:58 <@leah> and that fact is the basis for popular works of fiction
2025-08-20 21:29:17 <@leah> the first example of this that comes to mind is the movie ’tron’
2025-08-20 21:29:20 <+Flowerman> right!
2025-08-20 21:29:23 <+Flowerman> I was just going to mention Tron
2025-08-20 21:29:36 <@leah> this is why we’re friends. because we think the same.
2025-08-20 21:29:37 <+Flowerman> so the protag is given an identity disc, and he is told, if you lose your identity disc YOU WILL BE TERMINATED
2025-08-20 21:29:47 <+Flowerman> and 14yo or w/e me watching this was like ’wtf this is absurdly harsh’
2025-08-20 21:29:54 <+Flowerman> except… that is literally how a computer works
2025-08-20 21:29:57 <@leah> how do the owners know i’m malfunctioning though?
2025-08-20 21:30:06 <+Flowerman> process executes an illegal operation and it is terminated, no second chances
2025-08-20 21:30:15 <@leah> i could just as easily labotomise my passengers, for example
2025-08-20 21:30:46 <+Flowerman> leah: you have read the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy books right?
2025-08-20 21:30:53 <@leah> naturally
2025-08-20 21:31:02 <+Flowerman> so the words ’lemon soaked paper napkins’ are meaningful to you?
2025-08-20 21:31:26 <@leah> i mean, what of it?
2025-08-20 21:32:50 <+Flowerman> yeah, that scene disturbed the hell out of me for like a year when I read it first
2025-08-20 21:33:12 <@leah> yeah their planet dies because they all got depressed
2025-08-20 21:33:35 <+Flowerman> well I mean the robot flight attendants keeping everyone in statis until the napkins are delivered
2025-08-20 21:33:44 <+Flowerman> for whatever reason, the ruthlessness/totalitarianism of machines has always both fascinated and disturbed me even as a child, like for some reason I was always hyper-aware of it
2025-08-20 21:33:48 <@leah> oh, rigtn
2025-08-20 21:33:56 <@leah> that bit kind of reminds me of the paperclip analogy
2025-08-20 21:34:19 <@leah> if one day AI became competent enough, we could order it to collect every paper clip in the universe
2025-08-20 21:34:36 <@leah> but if it wasn’t aligned with human values, it would end up doing so in horrifying ways we didn’t intend
2025-08-20 21:34:37 <+Flowerman> yeah
2025-08-20 21:34:49 <@leah> and all we wanted was an infinite supply of paperclips
2025-08-20 21:34:57 <@leah> for, you know, pages of text and stuff
2025-08-20 21:35:23 <@leah> no but like, if i were a plane
2025-08-20 21:35:32 <@leah> i’d find the best way to remove all the passengers.
2025-08-20 21:36:02 <+Flowerman> and then you would go and audition to star in a pixar movie ‘planes’ so you can be a star and not just a carrier for other people /s
2025-08-20 21:36:59 <@leah> and then the disney execs would get on board, because they wanted to see i was any good
2025-08-20 21:37:11 <@leah> to see if i was any good*
2025-08-20 21:37:28 <+Flowerman> and then you killed the disney execs
2025-08-20 21:37:33 <+Flowerman> damn, that’s one hell of a service to humanity
2025-08-20 21:37:33 <@leah> no
2025-08-20 21:37:37 <+Flowerman> /s
2025-08-20 21:37:39 <@leah> i would not kill them
2025-08-20 21:37:54 <@leah> i would hold them in the air indefinitely, and provide them everything they need to stayy alive
2025-08-20 21:38:01 <@leah> thus keeping them in a kind of purgatory
2025-08-20 21:38:07 <@leah> and i would turn off the wifi
2025-08-20 21:38:11 <+Flowerman> ooohhhh, I love closed circle stories
2025-08-20 21:38:23 <@leah> i’d watch them go insane
2025-08-20 21:38:25 <+Flowerman> this reminds me of a novel idea I once had
2025-08-20 21:38:29 <@leah> and then make that the movie
2025-08-20 21:38:37 <+Flowerman> so in reality, there’s a lot of planes in the air at any one time, and thus a lot of humans in the air at any one time
2025-08-20 21:38:46 <+Flowerman> the premise would be, everyone not in the air just suddenly dies. worldwide.
2025-08-20 21:38:55 <@leah> Chinesefriend is correct in saying: don’t ride leah
Yes, mostly women. Nearly everyone who inspired this book were women. Yes, those stars in my book meant something. Now I will tell you who they are:
*The woman referenced in preamble, who asked: What is it like to be you? That woman is none other than M.E. Thomas aka Jamie, who authored: Confessions of a Sociopath.
**The person, also a woman, referenced in “Neutral gear’ who coined the term “Low Affect Disorder’ is Patric Gagne, who authored: Sociopath: A memoir.
***Jessica Kelly’s book, A Tale of Two Masks, was my first inspiration. I’d initially found her blog, psychogendered, in 2018 and I even spoke to her once or twice on IRC. Nice lady. Very interesting, and similar professional life to mine – I actually only read her book in 2025 though, and I absolutely loved every chapter. Much of it describes the way I live too – I especially enjoyed her stories about coming out as transgender, in the book. Both the blog, which is no longer online as I write this, and the book, cover her experience as a diagnosed psychopath, and her exercise in self-restraint. I very much relate to a number of the stories in her book, though we had very different upbringings.
These and other people, most of them curiously female, inspired my own book. I greatly enjoyed reading their books, their blogs and watching their YouTube videos.
The one non-female entity that also inspired this book was James Fallon, who wrote: The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist’s Personal Journey into the Dark Side of the Brain.
I’m not offended when people call me a psychopath, but I don’t think that word means anything – ditto sociopath. I already explained why, so I don’t need to repeat myself.
Submitted for your approval:
One day, I wish to live in a world where people like myself are normalised. This is why I avoided using the normal words – because they always invite suspicion, and deter actual understanding. I probably seem eccentric and strange to some people, especially those who read my book, but then they read it again… and then they get to know me. Then they do the research.
Perhaps readers might consider what it’s like to be me. I know I’ve definitely answered ME’s question, many times over, but I will summarise it much more succinctly. What is it like to be me? It is to live through constant boredom, knowing that I have to keep having this boredom for several more decades. It is to know that no matter how interesting my life is, or how far I get in life, I will still feel exactly the same as I did before. I learned to accept that over time, and try to temper myself so that I experience fewer stresses. I feel that this is all fine, because it’s just who I am, but I don’t think most readers will even fathom what this means. Can you imagine what it’s possibly like to feel as bored as I do, at all times?
I mean, I sometimes have periods of extreme energy, but those are fleeting. Most of the time I’m just bored out of my mind, and that is what it’s like to be me. I just muddle through as best I can, really. What more is there to say?
What is it like to be me… it is to know that no matter what I do in life, I will always come back to the same place in my head. No matter how sensational or mundane some of these stories are, as I’ve written, I always come back to the same headspace as before. I can improve my understanding of myself, but I’m still myself, and being myself can be quite challenging in this world. Some people might look at those like me and envy us in some ways, but I would suggest that you think twice; being me, and staying sane, requires a lot more effort because I have to do consciously what comes naturally to most people.
What is it like to be me? It is knowing that I live in a world that does not currently understand me, nor accept me; this does not concern me personally, because I just get on with my life. I do know, however, that the world hates me. This amuses me but also concerns me. It tells me that I live in an inferior version of the world, because there is another world that might be more comfortable for people like me; such a world could be built, but this requires more people to be educated about people like me.
What is it like to be me? It’s knowing these things I know, like what I’ve written in the book, knowing that I’m getting older. I will become old, and ill. I do not have an exciting future to look forward to. I have a neutral future to look forward to, and I don’t even feel anything one way or the other about that. I just have a general sense that my life will become harder to maintain, over time. I can fill my life with hobbies and fleeting intellectual passions, but I’m just going to break at some point. Being me, and staying sane, is extremely challenging at times, and it will become more challenging as I age. From what I can tell, it seems that the world I live in might actually be designed to make people like me go insane. That is what it sometimes feels like to be me.
What is it like to be me? I have the boredom, my fog as it were, and everything often seems bland. Combine this with a high intellect and the ability to fully understand the problems of the world around me. I have suffered from major depressive periods at several times in my life. The years 2016, 2019 and much of 2020 for example. Large periods in time prior to 2014, including much of my teen years. I was lucky enough to find success with Libreboot and my various other works; I can imagine a much worse outcome, where I lived an even more boring life than the one described in this book.
I choose not to imagine that life, and I will do my best to avoid that fate. Imagine finally: a person like me may find it difficult to maintain long-term relations. The book has already covered this. As I age, it’s going to be much harder for me to be the fiercely independent person that I’ve been. That is going to break me. One of the things I need to do, as I write this, is literally establish a long-term support structure for myself. My parents and all of my relatives will die, and I don’t care much for my siblings; I may have no choice but to make a family in the future. One that accepts my personality, that will actually cater to me, in a way that is sustainable both for them and also myself. I know of several others like myself who do in fact have this. I don’t exactly want or not want this for myself, but I do identify it as my main long-term weakness.
I have no choice but to be me, and I must somehow survive to my fortieth birthday as me. This book has described me in my youth, which has ended. I’m in my thirties as I write this, and life is going to become much harder from this point on. I have no idea if I’m prepared. I’m not even scared; this is the curse. I may even find in twenty years that I’m exactly the same as I am now. I know that as I write this, I’m fundamentally the same as I was when I was twenty. I know more about the world now, but I haven’t changed. What has changed is that I have fewer delusions about the world, as a consequence of ageing. Life has already happened to me, several times, and it will keep happening to me.
That is what it’s like to be me. There is no glamour or dignity in it at all. Allow me to explain it another way before we close. If I were to one day have a neurotypical mind, if my mind suddenly rewired itself in such a way as to make me become a neurotypical person, what would I find? Let me try to answer that, as best I can with my current, neutral mind:
I would find that I’ve lived a life without the normal psychological development that most humans experience naturally. I would suddenly find myself in a mind that is unprepared to handle itself, and the fact that I did not previously handle certain aspects of my past would suddenly overwhelm me. It would probably drive me mad. Even if my mind were to snap back after a day, I would remember the madness. There are just certain aspects of the human experience that I have skipped, because my mind was incapable of experiencing them. There are parts of my brain that just do not fire up like they do in a normal human brain.
You have read a book that describes what you might have seen as a brilliant or otherwise novel mind, but you might have considered that I have experienced despair multiple times. Just because I don’t feel it for others, doesn’t mean I don’t experience it for myself. I Still Love Shopping satirises what was the darkest period of my life, and I contemplated suicide several times during that period. When I later reassumed control of Libreboot, and my life in general, my feeling at the time was anger. Pure anger, like I was taking revenge against the world; it felt great. That is why I responded the way I did during the cold boot war.
Then my life went back to a version of itself from the mid 2010s from 2025 onward, and with it comes the same despair. Do not misunderstand me, however: I am not describing suicidality, or depression. I still feel that anger now, in a pervasive way. I see my future as restoring my past. I deeply regret the things I did poorly or not at all in my twenties, and I’ve been re-building in my thirties. This time, sober.
I want a family. My ideal partner is probably someone like me, perhaps someone who, like me, appreciates the beauty of the world. Someone like catfriend, from earlier in my life… but not on drugs. What I see in my future is unclear, but I have a general sense that my life is probably going to change drastically, over the next decade from the time of writing. I have felt a general sense of stagnation in the years leading up to writing this book.
My life could have been much worse, and could also be much better. I feel, at the time of writing this book, that I’m basically at a huge crossroads in my life. My parents are retiring and will soon die; it’s just inevitable. Dad had cancer a few years ago and relapse is always possible, and my mother is probably not long for this world either. I just have a general feeling that both my parents will be dead in the next decade or so. I myself am becoming older, and I need long-term financial security… and long-term social stability.
What is it like to be me? I’m thirty four as I write this, yet I still think and live like I did when I was twenty five. I’m sober, and more experienced, but I have experienced a decade of absolute stagnation in every sense. Socially, politically, financially, in every other way I can think of. I’m wiser, and older. What I anticipate now is a transition, as I approach middle age. Middle-age is just around the corner, and old age after that. I live under no illusion at all, in that I’m aware how quickly these will come.
I have no choice, and it’s going to be hard. That, in summary, is what it’s like to be me. It is to know that in spite of my mind, the life I’ve lived, the life I expect I’ll continue living, and the mind I expect to continue having, that the world around me will just keep going on around me. It will not stop for me. What is it like to be me?
What is it like to be me??? It is to know that without a plan, I will actually spiral. That is what I felt that day, in the shop. That one day where I felt alone. I saw my future. I saw it all, clearly, and I didn’t like it. What it’s like to be me, is to know what awaits me unless I make some changes now.
It is to know that I will make these changes, and still have my same mind. My mind is a gift and a curse. I have become more aware of myself, of all my strengths and weaknesses, and as I age, I know that my strengths will become much lamer. I will break.
That is what it is like. It is to be human. What else were you expecting? All of this is to say, that I am acutely self-aware, and that is the problem.
Do not misunderstand me. I am not describing fear. I feel a rush as I write this. I feel that there is a lot more excitement waiting for me. A lot more boredom too, but a lot more… life. I look forward to it. I know that I’ll rise to it. Life is a thing that happens to me, a bull that I try to ride, and eventually it will kill me. For now, I rise to the challenge.
I expect to die kicking and screaming. When I’m old, I will just go insane. That is what I predict. I think when I’m eighty, I’ll still have the same mind I do now. I’ll be much wiser, and that will be the problem. I think I’ll stop here. I look forward to becoming the state’s problem.
Do not misunderstand me. Some of my writing will suggest otherwise, but I like who I am. I’m proud of my history, and my growth thus far. I’m proud of myself for having written this book. I wouldn’t change a thing about me, or my mind. I’m simply me, and I’m going to keep being me.
That is why I mention these honourable women. Their works shed more light on this subject. I didn’t see the point in reinventing the wheel, hence the very different way in which my book was written. I wanted to do something different with my book, and show the mind itself, unfiltered. This is not to say that my mind is representative of all others; I only represent myself. If you want a more academic understanding, those other books and other resources online will help you. There’s actually a lot of research into psychopathy, but we are still among the most misunderstood and most highly stigmatised people on the planet.
I hope this book was useful. I wrote it mostly as an introspection for myself, and I myself have even learned from writing it. I’ve noticed several patterns through to the month in which this book was written – yes, month. It took a month to write.
I pause for thought.
Writing this book has caused me to have somewhat of a breakthrough in my thinking about my entire life. It’s early days yet as I write this at thirty-four, and the book was more or less completed during mid 2026. What I see is a general pattern throughout my life, namely the fear of loss. I have been largely driven to boost my own power in my own little world, to have freedom over myself and generally live a life free from external authority imposed by others. I’ve not exactly been greedy as such, materially or in any other sense, but I’ve always had the idea that I must have control over everything.
An epiphany on the same scale as my 2018 Boring House period has begun, and I don’t know where it will lead me, but I can say this:
I no longer fear loss. The pattern I see throughout my life is that I’ve feared loss, however loss is defined in a given context, on a purely selfish perspective of course, but always defined as some sense of loss. In the past, I responded with anger to control myself and others, and later applied my anger more calmly; I’ve been aggressive at times.
In periods like the Cold Boot War, I’ve often responded with extreme aggression. I can argue that my actions in times like these may have helped me, but they all came under the same assumption: that my current lifestyle, the current life I lead, and the things I have in my current life are actually important. They are not. This is not to say that I won’t continue to defend what I have, and to continue boosting what I have. What I can say is that I’ve stopped fearing the loss of my current life.
I have, since writing this book, noticed all the patterns in my behaviours and how differently each scenario could have gone. If my business had actually failed during COVID for example, I would be leading a very different life today as I write this. I got lucky in that instance, but I decided to run with that as a thought experiment.
My conclusion, in each mental simulation that I’ve performed, is that with the mind I have, the intellect I have and the personality I have, with the control that I’ve established over the years, I would quickly re-build something else for myself. I’ve basically concluded that even in the worst possible scenario, I will probably be fine. What I wrote about my future in the Honourable Women chapter is still true, of course; I do need to start thinking about support structures to sustain myself as I age.
I don’t realyl know how to properly describe it in words. I described it to a friend who understand exactly what I meant though. I’ve basically simulated, in my mind, the complete death of Leah Rowe as I know it. Not death in a corporeal sense; in each simulation, the human being named Leah Rowe remains alive, but their life completely disappears and has to be replaced with something else, built from scratch. Say I lost Libreboot for example, and my business; there are a million things I could do.
If I one day end up hospitalised for a long period of time, and I lose everything, or I end up in prison for example, not that I think I would, but let’s say I did. It really doesn’t matter. Just imagine the worst possible scenarios. That is what I’ve done, in my head. I normally shy away from such thoughts.
The irony is that the loss of my fear means that I’m probably going to be much better able to protect the life I have now, and expand upon it. Because I no longer experience fear as such, I will be able to respond much more calmly to every contingency. The wisdom is in knowing that I will only ever do what I will do; doing my best is irrelevant. I will do what I will do. I won’t fail or succeed; I will simply live.
I am not articulating a point of view that says nothing matters. What I am saying, though, is that I have now seen my future more clearly. I don’t know which future I’ll have, but I have a general sense of what sorts of things I might now expect.
As I’ve already said, this is only the start of a current change in my mind, and it may take many months; it may even take years to complete. I can say, though, that writing this book and documenting decades of my life has enabled me to unlock my mind and see patterns in my life that I would not have otherwise seen. I am now much better able to think accurately about my life, about myself and where I want to go.
I have freed myself from the fear of myself, and the fear of loss. I feel a calm rush as I write this, and I have a smile on my face. All I did was remove myself for a moment. It’s the same trick I used in 2018.
All of this is to say, that the person documented in this book will probably not exist in five years from now. A new me will exist, that will probably laugh at everything in this book, including this final chapter.
I pause for thought once again. Yes!
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