As soon as it was announced that Cohost was shutting down, I knew I at least needed some way to grieve it in community. I'm not a particularly observant Jew, but I do take to heart the idea that grief is a community experience. Cohost was never an experience of any individual in isolation, so its loss shouldn't be experienced in isolation either.

I talked to my wife and Xandra who had also made some rumblings about some sort of meet-up, we decided on a place and time, and I sent out an open invitation‎^[1]. We knew Seattle was a pretty big Cohost city, but based on the Philly and Boston turnouts we expected maybe thirty to forty people.

The last dedicated count we got was fifty-eight, but people kept showing up after that so I believe in the end we had more than sixty attendees. Lydia even came up from the Bay Area, shocking everyone there who knew her! I was completely blown away by this incredible outpouring of love for Cohost.

It was an intensely emotional mix of mourning and joy. We had a moment of silence for the loss of Cohost, we came together in a cheer of "Eggbug Forever!", but most of all people just hung out and chatted. We even had our very own rainbow:

Rose and I also came up with an idea for a little local mailing list for COVID-safe events. To help spread the word, we made a zine. I only printed fifty copies, which I thought would be plenty, so for anyone who showed up after all the zines were gone or who couldn't make it at all, I've reproduced it below:

one of my dear pleasures is seeing a person whom I'm not particularly attracted to, but whom I can just tell would make friends with different tastes absolutely gnaw on the furniture with lust

oops I lied

Actually it's just the theme Taylor Titmouse was using that has the right metadata. There's no way to get it for any arbitrary tumblr post. I'll have to write that custom scraper after all 😩

At least this post motivated me to come up with some sort of a story for reposts!

Thank you for giving me a reason to make an ask component. 🙂

When I include a repost like this in my Atom feed, I treat it as though the post I'm reblogging is itself in the feed, rather than a wrapper that contains that post. Generally speaking, As such, most of the metadata (author name, link, title if it has one) is in the rest of the feed entry rather than in the HTML contents. I don't create embeds directly from feeds—I always go to the source web page and create the embed from that—but if I were to do so, I'd treat all that metadata the same way I treat h-entry metadata for sites.

I also always wrap the things I'm embedding in some extra markup to get the nice little boxes…

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.