Month: October 2026

On the Old Web

Posted on by Daria Bloodworth

The old web is fascinating. I remember the olden days when e-mail and free web hosting were measured in megabytes rather than gigabytes1. I remember how my family didn’t have an Internet connection of our own. The way I would update my website back then was by making changes to the website on the family computer and saving them to a floppy disk. I would then take them to the nearest library. Sometimes, my parents would give me a ride to the library, but other times, I walked. Yes, in Houston summer heat, I would walk an hour to the library and walk an hour back. Bear in mind, I was eleven at that time.

Websites back then were so small. When Geocities launched, the limit for free users was 2MB. In 2005, that limit was 15MB. Comparatively speaking, all three of my websites on NearlyFreeSpeech.net are currently taking up 1545.96 MiB. I’d have to spread them across roughly 1,100 floppies to get them all uploaded now. Ooof. Mercifully, AOL was also spamming people’s physical mailboxes with free disks across America. For a brief period, some of those disks were floppies that could be made writable once again.

vintage apple imac display in retro tech setup
Photo by Ruben Boekeloo on Pexels.com

But that’s why you could fit the entire Geocities archive on a 1TB hard drive and download it via Bittorrent.2 That’s why the Archive Team’s rescue of Geocities was even possible. It took months and hundreds of volunteers’ machines, but the finished dataset was startlingly small – because every page in it was tiny. Millions of homesteads, and the whole thing fit on a hard drive. Even thinking about the math, that is still incredible. Back then, my IDE was Notepad on Windows 95. Hell, even writing that now makes me feel particularly spoiled: how dare I hold up my jump to Linux on not finding the right IDE when I wrote HTML on fucking Notepad! Notepad!

But all of that is not why the old web is fascinating.

Okay, so why is the Old Web fascinating?

a man and a woman sculpting clay statue
Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels.com

For me, it is certainly beyond the pixellated (oftentimes unintentional) 90s aesthetic. Don’t get me wrong, that appeals to me too, but for me, it’s more about values. The observation by Tentcities is that the old web was more about self-expression than commerce. In fact, the first (and possibly only) commercial-focused domain name on the list of most linked domain names was amazon.com. Amazon was at #6, beat out by links to the NIH’s PubMed, Wikipedia, Monografias (a Spanish academic repository), and Angelfire. The most-linked domain name in the Geocities archive was other pages on Geocities itself.

The joy of creativity

The old web was a web where any nutjob could create a website on Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod, or any number of free web hosts. And the only limits were those of your imagination, the storage space, and how good your <table> game was. Web design in that era was both tedious and fun. It promised a joy of creativity that doesn’t require me to think about AI slop or hate speech or anything like that. I didn’t hear about Homestar Runner from an algorithm, I heard about it at school from someone else.

Browsing was an option too

But there’s also a different attitude towards the Internet back then. The Internet wasn’t just searchable, it was browsable too. There were search engines, sure, like Lycos and AltaVista and Yahoo and yes, eventually Google. But there were also directories like Yahoo Directory (which Yahoo also killed) and Dmoz. There were printed books full of lists of websites that you could type the (often-times long) addresses into and go to. This was a time before filter bubbles and algorithms directing us to more of the same.

It felt more optional

But also, the old web demanded less of our attention. We could choose to give it more, and I was one of those who did, but it was a web before push notifications. Where it wasn’t unreasonable to wait days, hell even weeks, before getting a response to correspondence. Yes, even in the days of e-mail.

So, what can we do?

interior of national museum of scotland
Photo by Radubradu on Pexels.com

The tragedy of the Old Web is to see it as a museum rather than a living tradition we can exercise now.

There are some people who love the aesthetic of the Old Web and I don’t begrudge them that. Hell, Veronica Explains designed the front-facing version of the Stop Bits’ website in HTML that could be loaded in Netscape 3.0 and the code she uses to generate it is 11ty. It’s certainly a more novel approach than hand coding a crap ton of HTML files individually. Cybersoda has gone whole hog on the old web aesthetic, using <div> tags instead of <table>s3.

If you want more inspiration, people are even reviving web rings. Web rings were a way to connect related websites. We can study how Geocities sites were connected to each other through these web rings. We can also build new ones ourselves. Examples of this include the Author Ring. Neocities is the place hosting a lot of static old web-style sites. Put yourself on it.

A museum and a living tradition

It need not be either/or. There is value in looking at the old web. I’m not shitting on archives like Oocities, nor am I shitting on retrospectives on the Geocities era. But, we can create new things based on the same ideas. The same aesthetic. We can publish independently again. The old web may be the Web we lost, but we can take it back.

I’d like to invite you to a web that is more about connection and self-expression than just selling you crap.

One final coda

Originally, this was supposed to be one post called “On WordPress”. I am still working on it but I’ve learned something… namely, if I am writing a post and I’m at the point where I’m that deep in subheadings, it’s time to seriously re-consider whether this can only be one post. Maybe I’ll write a post on that one day.

Fucking Notepad!

  1. No, terabytes were not even part of the conversation [↩]
  2. Okay, it’s likely not the entire archive of Geocities. There are undoubtedly parts of Geocities that didn’t survive the archive. I know my own Geocities site was a casualty. [↩]
  3. No, this is not me being elitist, designing using <table>s was legitimately a bitch and that’s one of those things I do not miss about the old web. I wouldn’t do it now either. [↩]

Given Time, There is No Problem That is Insurmountable

Posted on by Daria Bloodworth

One of the things I love about companies like Automattic1 are statements like the Automattic Creed. And one of the things in their creed is the statement that “given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable”. I genuinely like this idea. As someone who fought IRCC for years and eventually won permanent resident status, I believe that given enough time (and your mental health2), there truly is no problem that is insurmountable.

More details from Automattic

And of course, Automattic themselves had more to say on that line.

The key here is “given time.” Much of the work that we do is hard. It’s easier to put everyone in the same database. It’s easier to put everyone on the same domain, and you look much better on comScore rather than being dark matter. Open source eventually dominates every market it enters, but sometimes “eventually” can take a while. For online publishing and content management systems, WordPress helped it happen quickly.3 “Linux on the desktop”4 is perpetually a few years away.

We have to be comfortable swimming upstream, with most of the world considering us wrong for long periods of time. This is uncomfortable. Sometimes it means we’ll be ostracized. More often people, “Silicon Valley,” or the market will consider us parochial, unambitious, or just plain stupid. They’ll be right unless our success proves differently.

But, as someone who has been trying to lose weight and finish transition in the last twenty years, I know that some problems require more time to solve. In fact, getting permanent resident status has actually considerably advanced the goal of finishing transition. After all, I do live in the Territory with the best gender affirming care coverage in Canada.

Further, I think losing weight is the wrong metric, especially given that burning fat is much harder to guarantee by your own actions. All the dieting and exercising in the world can’t solve for a shitty metabolism. But, one thing I can do is focus on building muscle instead. Building muscle is easier. All I need is protein in + work to build muscle. Also, the number on the scale means fuck all to me. I just want to look good naked.

On swimming upstream

But yes, swimming upstream is not the most popular idea. Hell, my swimming upstream attracted the ire and abuse of my soon-to-be-ex-husband. And no, I’m not just talking about him scoffing at the idea of developing passive income given the insecurity with traditional employment. I’m also talking about how he would chew me out for not being able to find a job in Alberta, something I’ve always had trouble with. A job search that was fruitless for over a year only ended because I expanded my job search to the Yukon after learning about their gender affirming care coverage. But this would have been mitigated had I resisted my husband’s bad advice.

You see, my husband had a lot of limiting beliefs. Probably still does but I don’t talk to him anymore, so I couldn’t get a pulse on that. This caused him to start some projects with immense passion but then let them fall by the wayside. An example of this is his blog about Alberta politics, Bertatics. I encouraged him and for a couple of months, he sounded like he was fired up. But when it came to actually doing the work? He couldn’t deliver. He only made one post back at the beginning of 2024.

… In fact, writing this now, it reminds me of why it is so critical that I should finish editing Project Ouzel so I can start working on other projects without neglecting the ones closest to fruition. Because while the author’s path is a harder, longer path to profitability, I feel like it is more sustainable in the long term than traditional employment could ever be. But what do I know? I just have 22 years of experience on the matter. I’ve had some years where I made six figures as a web developer and was getting interviews with Mozilla and Automattic, others where I was on social assistance.

Sometimes, experience says swimming upstream is the only thing that makes sense.

  1. Automattic is the company that created WordPress.com, the SaaS version of WordPress, along with a bunch of other assorted tools. [↩]
  2. Yeah, I wound up unknowingly sacrificing my mental health to obtain permanent resident status. Coercive control is a bitch. [↩]
  3. Hell yeah, I was there for this, back in the olden days when “installing a WordPress plugin” meant copying PHP code from random sites on the Internet and pasting it somewhere in your code. It’s amazing that more WordPress sites didn’t get bricked back then. [↩]
  4. I think the Linux on the desktop is getting a lot of support from the actions of both the Trump Administration and Microsoft/Apple. There are some people for whom the death of Rosetta 2 will not be a deal breaker. Just like there are some people for whom the death of 32-bit support in Mac OS X was not a deal breaker. Or the death of PowerPC support was not a deal breaker. Not to mention the fact that Windows 11 is simply a hot mess and Microsoft broke a lot of trust with users. [↩]

Having to Admit Why I Missed the Exercise Classes

Posted on by Daria Bloodworth

So, this evening, I’m going to start attending the exercise classes run by the Yukon Bariatric Program again. But, there’s the little matter of why I stopped attending in the first place. I don’t have to explain myself in front of the class, though, because I’d already told the nurse who co-runs it with the physical trainer. That’s when I admitted the why, and it was my Murderbot moment. I had to admit that the reason I stopped attending the exercise classes was because I wanted to watch the episodes of Silo season 3 as they came out.

It is a premium quality show, after all.

But, since season 3 of Silo is over and season four isn’t coming out until next July, I have no excuse not to attend the exercise classes. Though, I am going to have to delay my participation for a couple of minutes. After all, the classes start at 6pm and that is a rather inconvenient conflict with Liber Resh. Though, I could make the exercise that would immediately follow part of the post-Resh meditation.

I miss the pool.

Talking exercise and meditation always takes me back to the pool at the Canada Games Centre. The City closed it for annual maintenance a few months back, and since I left Arctic Star, money’s been tight, so swimming fell by the wayside.

But swimming laps for thirty minutes to an hour could be a pretty meditative practice to chase Resh with. It’s definitely an idea I’m looking to research and write about over on my author blog.

I’m Writing a Horrible Five Part Series of Posts, Let’s Talk About a Horse!

Posted on by Daria Bloodworth
The sign printed and taped to the side of the coin box, which reads as such: The Age Limit is 12 and the weight limit is 100 lbs, please respect these restrictions so Champion can continue being enjoyed by future generations. SHE IS 70 YEARS OLD! The first sentence is highlighted in yellow.

So, something terrible happened yesterday morning. I got an e-mail from IRCC. Like most communication I get from IRCC, it is a harbinger of tiring bullshit to come. Originally, it was supposed to be one post. However, after exploring the legal strategy and the religious reasons why I’m against pretending to be male, one post turned into five. So far, the series is 5,000 words and growing.

So tonight, with ninety minutes before bed, I’m choosing to think about the most pressing civic issue in Whitehorse: a horse I am contractually forbidden from riding. From the post header image above, we are at the Hougen Centre on Main Street. Well, okay, “contractually” is doing some heavy lifting there. I’m just an adult who can read. As someone who is trying to be an author, it’s going to be hard to argue that I didn’t see the three separate notices around the horse. I’d like to ride that horse, however, there’s just one problem.

You see, Champion is an old mechanical horse from the 1950s. As a result, there is an age limit of 12 and a weight limit of 45kg. Fascists.

But, you see, I’m the kind of person who sees this not as a hard boundary. Rather, it’s a mechanical problem. A physics problem, truly. How can I ride this horse without damaging it? Further, how can I present this case to the management of the Hougen Centre so they’ll let me ride the horse? Because I can’t accept that the hard limit is 45kg and if someone who is 45.1kg gets on, they break the damn horse.

The current fly in the ointment: I’m nowhere near the weight limit right now

I’m not stupid. I know full well that being three times the weight limit, I’d break Champion. No cap. However, as someone who knows how to use a TDEE calculator, I know that a healthy weight for a woman of my age and height is 62-64kg. This is a much easier ask than being roughly 140kg wanting to ride the horse. Still outside the posted weight limit, but much closer than I am right now. Thankfully, I’m participating in the Yukon Bariatric Program. I’m hoping in 2-3 years’ time, I’ll be much closer to my goal weight. By then, I’m aiming to be a published author. Maybe, just maybe, people will be reading this blog other than a few developers who get lured here with the promise of WordPress plugins and PHP libraries.

… If that’s the case, could we figure out a way for me to ride Champion? At least by then, I’ll have moved from catastrophically ineligible to just regular ineligible. And hey, it never hurts to ask. After all, I’m planning on fighting a legal battle with less favourable odds. I’ve already beat the odds expected of me by one particular Service Alberta employee. She thought CBSA would have deported me by now.

Safe Here, But Unable to Travel Anywhere

Posted on by Daria Bloodworth

Ever since 2019, Canada’s been my home and I’ve also been effectively unable to leave Canada. At first, this was because I was actively litigating a refugee claim but after Trump regained the Presidency in 2024, one of his first acts was to deny transgender people many of the rights of citizenship. One of these rights is the ability to access accurate passports. I applied for a certificate of identity in mid-July because, unfortunately, I am unable to obtain a legally usable, accurate passport from the US. Legally unusable pursuant to Canadian and American law.

While the harm was ordered by the Trump administration, the fact of the matter is that without a valid travel document, I am effectively unable to travel to my country of nationality. The Canadian courts have, to varying extents, recognized a denial of a national passport as a form of functional statelessness. In my previous post, I discuss the legal precedent of Canada v. Ward, [1993] 2 S.C.R. 689, where the Supreme Court of Canada affirms this logic.

The Cage

In a report on ghost immigrants and Sunny Wang’s Newcan immigration consultancy fraud, CBC’s The Fifth Estate touched on a fairly unique concept. Ian Young from the South China Morning Post referred to it as “Yiminjian” or “immigration jail”. This concept interprets the residency requirement as a form of “jail”. For me, I can see the applicability of this concept as the border has become not just much harder for me to cross but to the point of virtually impossible and legally perilous.

The concept is also echoed in interviews with stateless person Mike Gogulski. Unlike Gogulski, I’m in a much more precarious position as I do not have a legally usable travel document. He, on the other hand, has been issued a stateless person’s travel document by the Slovakian government. And even he characterizes his position as being “in a cage” due to his severely restricted ability to travel.

IRCC’s complicity

I have been actively reaching out to the powers that be to try to resolve this issue. And their initial correspondence once they received my application is not promising. Here is the bit of the letter they sent me that makes me think that IRCC is unlikely to grant me a Certificate of Identity.

Certificates of Identity are issued to permanent residents of Canada who are not yet Canadian citizens, and who, although not considered to have refugee status in Canada, are otherwise stateless or unable, for a valid reason, to obtain a national passport or travel document from any source. These documents are not issued simply to facilitate travel or the attainment of visas.

Since you are a citizen of the United States of America you would not, under normal circumstances, qualify for a Certificate of Identity unless a request for passport facilities was refused by the authorities of the United States of America and you could provide this office with the letter of refusal.

The information contained in your application does not provide us with sufficient grounds to warrant the issuance of a Certificate of Identity. It is, therefore, suggested that you communicate in writing with the embassy to determine your eligibility to obtain passport facilities, retaining copies of your letters as well as the registration receipt from the postal authorities. If your request is refused, forward the letter of refusal to this office. If the letter is not written in French or English it will be necessary for you to provide a certified translation.

I want to share what I sent them. This included the application with a 16-page letter that outlined why I can’t obtain a legally usable, accurate US passport, the risk of travelling under a false passport under US and Canadian law. I also included the following:

Corresponding with the Powers that Be

When IRCC determined, for reasons unstated, that the documentation I provided “does not provide us sufficient grounds to warrant the issuance of a Certificate of Identity”, I started reaching out. This determination was made in spite of the fact that there’s a clear causal chain between the Executive Order that directed the denial, the impact of the denial resulting in initial granting of injunctive relief, and the reversal of said relief by SCOTUS. I reached out to my US Congressman and Senators. These are Congressman Joe Neguse, Senator Michael Bennet, and Senator John Hickenlooper. Congressman Neguse’s office took point on this inquiry. Eventually, I received forwarded correspondence from the American Citizen Services chief of the Vancouver Consulate. While it didn’t deny me a passport specifically by name, it did reinforce my thesis.

Current US passport makes it extremely unlikely that a transgender person would be able to successfully apply for and receive an accurate, legally usable passport.

I forwarded this fact to IRCC early last month. The last correspondence I received from IRCC is from the Minister’s office. Strap in people, this gets ridiculous.

The correspondence from the Ministerial Enquiries Division

This is the e-mail I received from the Ministerial Enquiries Division, which is apparently who responds when you e-mail [email protected].

Dear Daria Bloodworth:

Thank you for your correspondence dated August 17, 2026, addressed to the Honourable Lena Metlege Diab, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, regarding your immigration situation. I have been asked to respond to you.

I appreciate you sharing the circumstances that prompted you to write, and I understand that you are going through a difficult time. Canada has a proud history of providing protection to the world’s most vulnerable groups, including persons in the LGBTQ2 community. Canada relies primarily on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to identify individuals for resettlement to Canada who are the most vulnerable and at risk. These individuals include persons persecuted on the basis of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. Private sponsorship groups in Canada can also identify refugees who need to be resettled, including individuals from the LGBTQ2 community.

I note that you have contacted to the Case Processing Centre in Sydney, which is the appropriate office to respond to your request.

Although I understand that this may not be the response you had anticipated, I hope that you will find this information to be helpful.

Sincerely,

Ministerial Enquiries Division

I’m honestly not sure what any of this has to do with my Certificate of Identity application. In fact, it reads more like meritless back patting. They can claim that “Canada has a proud history of providing protection to the world’s most vulnerable groups” but I know better. I have first hand experience of how hard IRCC fights against transgender people who win a refugee claim. As of this date, the Case Processing Centre in Sydney has not responded to my request for a Certificate of Identity and we are well past double the service standard set by IRCC. The first, last, and only time I heard from the Case Processing Centre in Sydney was back in early August. This was almost two months ago.

Echoes from the past

There is a woman who was in a similar situation to my own. Guldana Salimjan only got her Certificate of Identity expedited after CBC reported on her story. She made more than twenty inquiries to IRCC and waited nearly six months before the media paid attention and got IRCC to act. Six months past mid-July, my US passport will already be expired.

In fact, the CBC article contains one line that sends chills down my spine and raises another very important question. And I’ll quote that line now:

According to the IRCC letter, Chinese citizens wouldn’t normally qualify for a Canadian certificate of identity, unless accompanied by paperwork from Chinese authorities proving their ineligibility for a Chinese passport.

Call me crazy, but that has a lot of parallels to the letter I received from IRCC in early August. Makes me wonder if this is a form letter that IRCC likes to send out when people apply for a Certificate of Identity. That suspicion is only strengthened by the volume of supporting evidence I submitted to IRCC when I applied for my Certificate of Identity. So, the case of Guldana Salimjan raises four very important questions.

Why do we need a journalist to get IRCC to act?

Why can’t the process just work?

What are my options if I can’t get a journalist to care about my application?

Is IRCC sending form letters with canned responses to applicants for Certificates of Identity in lieu of actually evaluating the applications on the merits?

So, what next?

As I said in my previous post on this topic, there is a clock ticking on this problem. January 10th, 2027 is the expiry date on both my US passport book and card. This means on January 11th, 2027, I will be without a valid travel document. And they are in the custody of IRCC, awaiting a decision on my Certificate of Identity. The question is no longer whether this policy denies me a passport, it’s whether anyone notices before the last accurate one I own expires.