Solid chance this is my last selfie to go out on "social media" as such, and so I hope you'll forgive a bit of nostalgia. Posting selfies, especially early in transition, was hugely important for me. For most of my life up to that point I had regarded my looks with suspicion if not outright hostility, and the selfie became the medium through which I began to take ownership of my appearance and develop a sense of style. The first time I looked at a picture I'd taken of myself and realized "oh. I'm hot" was a huge milestone for me.

Posting selfies to social media was an inseparable part of this. As my style became something I actively put effort and care into, having people appreciate it became a reminder that that work was doing something. It wasn't the dreaded numbers, it was the people: people whose taste and style I also saw and appreciated, people who I was friends with and people I just saw around.

When COVID began, I went from taking and posting selfies almost on a weekly basis to nearly not taking them at all. I no longer felt I had any reason to dress up. Wearing lipstick felt foolish when it would just get ruined by a mask. I wasn't getting any new clothes, because I hate having to remember to send back online orders I don't like. My trademark blue hair was growing out, because even after the vaccine made it feasible to be masked indoors with strangers I couldn't bear the pain of trying to find a salon that still required them. I didn't realize until my roots had overtaken me how much the blue had become a part of my self-image, how much it hurt to look in the mirror and not see the self in my heart.

Little by little, I pulled myself out of that hole. Although the pandemic is very much still present and I am very much still taking precautions, I found ways to allow my sense of style to flourish in between those precautions. I'll put on lipstick just because I feel like it. Liz took careful measurements so I could do online shopping with minimal risk of send-backs. Every now and then I'll even strap on a P100 respirator and go to a physical store. I asked around and found a local salon that not only still requires masks, but is queer- and disabled-owned.

And I started taking selfies again. I took selfies to give myself a reason to care about my appearance again. I took selfies as a reward for putting in the work to make myself look and feel good. I took selfies to send to friends, I took selfies to flirt, I took selfies with pals, I took selfies at beaches and forests and birthdays and the precious few weddings that were safe enough for me to attend. I took selfies to remind the world that I existed, and to…

I was all set to set up a custom Tumblr scraper so I could reblog art and stuff on here, but it turns out Tumblr already uses the h-entry microformat out of the box! I don't have to do anything special at all! Except maybe to handle reblog chains, but that's something I should really do anyway.

I've added WebMention support, both sending and receiving (although not currently displaying). I'll write more about that later. I've tightened up the microformats I'm using, particularly including them on nested embeds. It's fun and I'm happy to have this blog set up to play real nice with all these interoperable standards... but so far I don't know anyone else who I can actually interoperate with.

Thrilled to announce that I now have this up and running, at least in its most basic aspect. The embed above is automatically generated and pulled down directly from the source post. Nothing in this is specific to my blog; I can also do it with someone else's. By way of example, please enjoy this post from my beautiful wife:

Injecting embeds

Here's what the embed looks like in my blog source right now:

{% genericPost "https://nex-3.com/blog/once-i-add-the/",
    date: "2024-09-20T07:06:00Z",
    tags: "#meta",
    author: "Natalie",
    authorUrl: "/",
    authorAvatar: "/assets/avatar.webp" %}
  <p>
    Once I add the ability to embed arbitrary blog posts from other blogs on
    here it's over. I'm gonna be reblogging like a wild animal. Y'all are gonna
    have your eyes blown clean outta your heads.
  </p>
{% endgenericPost %}

I have a template for the embed, some CSS to style it, and a little custom Liquid tag to bring it all together. But the real magic is in how I generate the genericPost in the first place. Here's what the original source looks like before I run my embed injector on it:

 
https://nex-3.com/blog/once-i-add-the/

That's it! Just a URL surrounded by empty lines. The injector pulls down the webpage, extracts critical information about the blog post, and replaces the URL with a call to genericPost. My Letterboxd and Cohost embeds work the same way, with their own custom templates and metadata that let me match the style of the original websites.

Structured post data with h-entry

But I did say that this wasn't specific to my blog. With Letterboxd and Cohost, I've just hard-coded their HTML structure. I can't rely on that if I want to get information from any old blog, though. They all use different HTML structures!

So instead, I'm making use of the h-entry microformat. This is a tiny little specification that defines a way to mark up an existing post to indicate metadata in the existing HTML structure. At its simplest, it's just a few class names annotated with the HTML. Here's the simplified HTML for the post above:

<article class="h-entry">
  <p class="attribution">
    <a href="/blog/once-i-add-the/" rel="canonical" class="…

This is a post whose seeds have been bouncing around in my head for years. I always intended to write it up and publish it on Cohost, and so the twilight of that storied website seems like as good a forcing function as any.

In this post, I seek to understand and explain the pervasive phenomenon of COVID denialism from the perspecitve of disability justice, specifically as someone who remains extremely cautious and anticipates doing so indefinitely. It's not intended to excuse this behavior—denialism is actively harmful to everyone the denialist interacts with and fundamentally eugenicist in effect whether or not in intention. But understanding and even empathizing with people who believe falsehoods and do harm can be valuable, especially when they make up such a huge portion of the world and for many of us are inescapably part of our networks and communities.

COVID in the Social Model of Disability

The first crucial thing to understand is that, if you're at least on board with the basic idea that COVID denialism is a pervasive problem, COVID-19 has already disabled you. Even if it didn't give you long-term side effects, even if you're lucky enough never to have caught it, you have been disabled by it. Or to be more precise: you're disabled with respect to COVID-19. The specific agent of your disability is the society that subjects you to snide remarks and outright harassment for wearing a mask, that closes off opportunities for social interaction and employment to you, that makes it impossible for you to exist within it without putting your health at risk.

This is an analysis based on the social model of disability, a major branch of disability theory that emphasizes the way disability is created by a society's failure to provide accommodations for certain bodies and minds rather than intrinsic aspects of those bodies and minds themselves. To use a lightly clichéd example: my severe nearsightedness doesn't function as a disability, because I exist in a society^[1] that accepts it as "normal" and provides easy access to socially unremarkable assistive devices (glasses), or even invisible assistive devices (contacts) if I so choose. But my sleep disorder is a disability—society doesn't consider it "normal" in the same way, and so it's seen as my personal failure and I have to work to make sure it doesn't affect my relationships^[2] or employability.

Using this model, if you exist in a society that has accepted the uncontrolled spread of COVID-19 as normal, the attempt to avoid catching this disease is itself a disability. Society is organized to systematically deny accommodations like mask mandates, sanitizing ventilation^[3], lockdowns and contact tracing, and free access to vaccines, prophylatics, tests, treatments, and protective equipment. Depending on the specific activity and your risk tolerance, public existence while taking reasonable COVID precautions ranges from requiring serious equipment and preparation to being outright impossible. Even if your body isn't any different than it was in 2019, you…

Once I add the ability to embed arbitrary blog posts from other blogs on here it's over. I'm gonna be reblogging like a wild animal. Y'all are gonna have your eyes blown clean outta your heads.

I love that people are thinking about how to make chunks of the web reusable in standalone contexts, but I really truly deeply with that all the solutions like htmx and web components weren't so hopelessly intrinsically tied to JavaScript. I cut my teeth on the ideals of the semantic web and I strongly believe that a web page should be fundamentally usable with JavaScript disabled. For highly interactive applications I concede this as a lost cause, but it breaks my heart to think that personal websites and blogs, which are essentially plain hypertext, are being built on technologies that simply can't work without scripting.