I was promised candy

A story by SpiderFarmer on .

When I was kid, my dad got me a toy that was a medical bag filled with stuff like a stethoscope, and a needle that turned red when you pulled the plunger back, and would “shoot” it into your patient when you depressed the plunger, and eye charts and a hammer to test reflexes, and bottles and bottles of “pills” and “elixers” that were all candy.

I’ma be real honest here, I was the Dr. Feelgood of the kindergarten set. And to be fair, this was encouraged by adults continuously refilling my “pills” with more candy. (I guess after I melted the paint off my dad’s car with my chemistry set, they decided maybe I should be a pill mill instead of a chemist.)

My point being this: I was promised a medical future filled with instant cures and candy-like medicine. There is no reason on goddess’s green earth for prednisone to taste this awful. It’s a tiny little pill, how do they fit that much horrible into a teeny little pill?

Picture of a vintage children's doctor's bag complete with vials, stethoscope, microscope, eye chart, and loads of other goodies. GenX was the last generation to see a kit like this with candy medicine and pretend needles.

Ken Paxton, Christian Nationalism, and the moral failure of Texas

A story by SpiderFarmer on .

Ok y’all, speaking of #Texas, I have thoughts about #KenPaxton and the rise of the Christian Nationalists (hereby referred to as: XNats).

Texas does not have a law for changing #gender markers on a driver’s license. The process has been to request a court order for a change, which was then provided to the Texas Department of Public Safety (#DPS).

However, Ken Paxton instructed the DPS to send an internal email instructing staff to no longer change gender markers on #trans people’s driver’s licenses, even if they had a court order or an amended birth certificate.

As well, the DPS is now supposed to annotate the record of anyone requesting a gender change. (They’re making a list, and checking it twice.)

And they want to undo the gender marker corrections trans people have made in the past, stripping every transperson of a valid #ID.

This is real bad, y’all. Real bad.

https://www.texastribune.org/2024/08/21/transgender-texans-drivers-license-DPS

A story by SpiderFarmer on .

For the first day of #Artober, (like #inktober but with other media), I have used a cake knife, condiment bottles filled with paint, and a chain pull from an old ceiling fan. As you do. I give you: Jellyfish- V1. It’s still too wet to refine, and I may not anyway. I kinda dig it, mistakes and all. Because I mix my pigments with a binder that is white when wet, but dries clear, my dry paintings are always different than when they are wet. I hope this one isn’t too dark.

Cubic Camel

A story by SpiderFarmer on .
A camel composed of hundreds of stacked cubes. It is standing in front of a stacked cube skyline and dark sky with stars. The camera angle is from slightly below the camel, so the viewer is looking up towards his rather disdainful look. If a camel made of cubes can look disdainful, this one does.

I can’t figure out why alt text isn’t showing in this theme, so here is the alt text:
A camel composed of hundreds of stacked cubes. It is standing in front of a stacked cube skyline and dark sky with stars. The camera angle is from slightly below the camel, so the viewer is looking up towards his rather disdainful look. If a camel made of cubes can look disdainful, this one does.

Sigh, reflections of webs past

A story by SpiderFarmer on .

I’ll be honest, I don’t have time to maintain or repair what’s missing from this site. It’s not like anyone goes to personal websites anymore. The web has become one giant commercial honey pot. Back in the early 90s, when there was still discussion about how the internet was going to operate; dotcoms were the domains that nobody wanted, because the pioneers didn’t want capitalism ruining everything. Which, I mean, is what capitalism does.

The web used to be so quirky and weird. Kinda like Austin used to be quirky and weird, and now it’s just filled with entitled wealthy people who have pushed all the weird out, because nobody weird can afford to be there. Same with the web. Labors of love are just that, but it’s an invisible labor.

Unknown artists, unsigned bands, really weird geocities sites. Was it ugly? Oh heavens yes. Was it entertaining, without being another branch of curated media? Yep. Were there black-hat hackers and nazis and (gasp) music being shared? Yeah. We still have those, but the weirdness, that’s become much harder to find.

SpiderFarmer since 1995

A story by SpiderFarmer on .

I’m still getting hammered as though hackers think breaking into this site is going to help them hack the light company that used the same name. I haven’t spoken to them, I don’t know how they got their name, or why they’d choose not to reach out to me if they wanted this one. But I registered SpiderFarmer as a domain in 1995, and as a corporation in Delaware not long after.

Multiple people have suggested that I should put affiliate links on this site that lead to that one, since I’m already answering support questions (by directing them to the other company), but I’m not about to do that until I can find time to talk to my intellectual property attorney.

So, if you are looking for the lights company: they have a hyphen: https://www.spider-farmer.com/.
If you are looking for all the content that used used to be here, well…thank the hackers who took it all down, and my hosting company who apparently did not keep the backups I’ve been paying for for almost 30 years. So, that’s fun.

Hackers: This is just a sandboxed wordpress. There is nothing here for you. There is no access to other systems, networks or databases. Even if you did get in, you cannot root or bot this install. It’s literally a sandbox on a virtual. Listen, wouldn’t you rather go hack some billionaires and distribute all the money to NGOs or something?