Category: Uncategorized

Just Because I’m a Millennial Doesn’t Mean My Whole Life is a Phone.

Posted on by Daria Bloodworth

On Thursday, I was waiting right outside a doctor’s office for an appointment at 1pm with a nurse. Someone asked me what day it is and I said it was Wednesday. Why? Because the office was closed until 2pm. I literally got a reminder phone call and I pulled it up in the calendar when I was on the phone with the medical assistant confirming the appointment. 1pm. I’ll be there. They wouldn’t make an appointment when they were closed, right?

But then I thought, the exercise class I go to runs tonight. It runs on Tuesday afternoons and Thursday evenings. Therefore, logic would dictate it has to be Thursday. Realizing that I had the right day (my appointment was on Thursday at 1pm despite the office being closed until 2pm), I started to panic a bit. I pulled out my phone and e-mailed the nurse to confirm my appointment time. And then, this person asked me a question that really got under my skin.

A “whole life”

“Those phones are your whole life, aren’t they?” or something equally judgey about my whole generation. I don’t remember what she actually said but it was something in that vein. I was in the literal middle of e-mailing the nurse to confirm that our appointment was that day at 1. That comment made me see red. I wanted to chew her out. My actual response?

In the sense that I have an appointment scheduled for today at 1 when their lobby doesn’t actually open up until 2 and I need to confirm that we’re actually on for one? Yeah, it is my whole life for the moment.

A bit snarky? Sure. But it’s the version that doesn’t result in me yelling profanities at an old lady. It’s not a good look. I mean, I remember when this lady rocked up to the building, I was standing right outside the door and she pulled on the handle, as if I was standing outside in early November in the Yukon for my fucking health. She didn’t bother to look at the hours on the door. She didn’t notice that another person was there, standing right outside facing the door waiting. No, she just pulled without looking to see if the clinic was open. And my focus on the phone was the problem for someone who pulled on a door to a medical office that was, in fact, closed?

What’s the obsession?

The thing is, I don’t get why boomers are so fucking obsessed with millennials and our phones? I’ll admit that I don’t have the healthiest relationship with my phone, but I think millennials get unfairly judged any time we use them. Like, when I’m in the middle of composing an e-mail to a medical professional for an appointment I’m supposed to be going to that day. Literally, this was the e-mail I wrote:

Hey, I’m at the door, don’t we have an appointment today at 1?

And I even attached a picture of myself standing outside the door. I figure, if nothing else, it can be used as defence if the program decides to bounce me for missed appointments.

I managed it well enough. The lady and I had a conversation for a bit until she decided to flounce off to “the hot tub”, probably the one at the Canada Games Centre. After she left and roughly ten minutes before my appointment, the nurse I e-mailed opens the door to let me in. She got my e-mail and everything went… about as well as can be expected.

So, why do I balk at this notion?

When I got home on Thursday evening, my Internet was disconnected. I guess Northwestel finally got tired of waiting for me to pay my Internet bill. In my defence, I was unemployed for a bit longer than I would have liked. And at first, I was thinking “oh, how do I get my Internet back on?” or “how do I avoid this being reported to the credit bureaux?”. I mean, after all, I am working on a career as an author, I still have to finish the design of yay.ee (in case you haven’t noticed), and I do have other things that would be easier with a home Internet connection. Then, I thought… this is an opportunity in disguise.

You see, do I really need home Internet? Not particularly. And honestly, considering I got a job (yeah, I know, not a fan of that fact but it is what it is for the time being) and I have a trip down to Alberta I need to plan for mid-April and I do need to get VFSRAC as soon as possible, I’ve decided that this is the time to pivot and focus on what’s important. I do intend to write a whole post on that soon. But here’s the thing that makes me balk specifically.

I’m against centralization of the Internet.

I’m not exactly the biggest fan of traditional social media. I think it centralizes the Internet too much into the hands of a few. A few that have proven themselves to be poor stewards of such control. Algorithms and filter bubbles have made the Internet too insular, too targeted. While right-wingers tend to claim that we on the left want our safe spaces, I remember the volume of hate mail Normal Bob Smith used to get over his website, Jesus Dress Up. However, as Google started to implement filter bubbles, that hate mail started to dry up. The essay about it is in the sidebar of this page of his hate mail. If you’re looking for a more scholarly discussion on the topic, there’s a TED talk from 2011 about filter bubbles that Normal Bob Smith links to. But it wasn’t always this way.

If you’re as terminally online as I am, you’d remember a term called “PageRank”. It was how authoritative/popular Google saw your particular website depending on how many people linked to it and how authoritative the sites linking to it were. The Open Directory Project was seen as extremely authoritative, especially the more top level categories.1 This could, of course, be abused. Examples range from linking the term miserable failure to George W. Bush’s biography on the White House website to Dan Savage trying to make Santorum a reference to a byproduct of a sex act (seriously, only click this link if you’re not at work). But considering what we have to contend with now with filter bubbles? This was such small potatoes.

I think the Internet should be browsable and searchable.

Sometimes, I look at my YouTube front page and sigh. Mostly because it’s roughly the same stuff I’ve already been watching. Maybe I want something new? I don’t get categories of stuff I can browse, I get videos recommended to me, channels I’ve already subscribed to. Where’s the new stuff? Where’s the stuff I don’t know about yet but would be interested in? This is the tragedy of an Internet that is only searchable, not browsable.

This is what I mean when I talk about wanting an Internet that is both browsable and searchable. Sometimes, I need to find something specific. Other times, I don’t know what I need. Labels help, but what do you do when you don’t know the label for what you’re looking for? Before 2007, I didn’t know the word “transgender” or “transsexual”. Yes, in spite of being an unfortunate young viewer of the Jerry Springer Show, I didn’t know what these terms actually meant. I first learned it from some dude on MSN Messenger when I was trying to figure myself out.

He gave me a term, though. A term I could look up and learn more about the subject with. And that term allowed me to figure out what was up with me and access the knowledge and the care that I needed. Eventually, that term led me to sites where I could learn more. While some of the information I learned turned out to be wrong, it at least gave me the resources I needed to draw my own map.

Sometimes, you don’t know what you need. And that’s why the Internet needs to be both browsable and searchable to have the most utility.

I’m walking a path of healing rn

Ever since I fled my abusive soon-to-be-ex-husband, I have committed myself to healing. Healing from the abuse he inflicted upon me and finishing my transition. While some of the things about the Yukon do chafe me2, I’ve committed myself to one overarching goal: leave the Yukon better than I entered it. And I mean both in the sense of when I returned to the Yukon back in April after fleeing that horrible man and when I first moved to the Yukon in December 2021 to take my first job at the Gold Rush Inn.

This goal is across all dimensions of wellness. Physically, I want to get to my goal weight, finish my transition, and be at the peak I know I can reach for the first time of my life. Mentally, I want to be confident in the fact that I won’t fall for an abuser again and if I do, I’ll have the strength of character to act at the first red flag. Spiritually, it means pursuing the path of Knowledge & Conversation of the HGA. Financially, it means being able to support myself without traditional employment. While different people define different dimensions of wellness, the point isn’t just getting healthy. Healthy is a baseline. I want wellness.

I’m not the only one.

Even though AOL killed the original Open Directory Project, the project has been resurrected in Curlie. You can browse a multitude of pages and opinions on topics such as Thelema, PHP, The Yukon, hearses or even little Welsh towns with totally normal names. And some of the information might not be true or might be skewed towards one particular opinion. But it doesn’t change the fact that it could help lead you to other information. Build your own conclusions.

… But I’m getting slightly off topic. So, let’s bring it back.

So, why balk?

Because I feel that too often, we’re guided and nudged towards a slop factory on our phones that does not enrich us. That does not spark joy. That is not becoming of the Kings described in Liber AL vel Legis II:58.

Yea! deem not of change: ye shall be as ye are, & not other. Therefore the kings of the earth shall be Kings for ever: the slaves shall serve. There is none that shall be cast down or lifted up: all is ever as it was. Yet there are masked ones my servants: it may be that yonder beggar is a King. A King may choose his garment as he will: there is no certain test: but a beggar cannot hide his poverty.

If I am not mindful of my consumption of a social media diet that is curated, I am not a Queen but a beggar. That is not the life I want. So, while I don’t see a need to give up my phone… I do see a troubling pattern with the most popular platforms and the need to be more intentional with our usage of our phones.

If I want to pursue that wellness I talked about, if I want to avoid filter bubbles and properly nourish my mind and my soul, I need to be mindful that I get a diverse, well-balanced diet of content. Not slop.

So, who am I?

I am a woman who has profound gratitude and love for the Internet. It helped me to find the answers that I needed to save my life and to actually live it. But I’m also a woman seeing it under attack by big corporations that do not care for human rights or freedom. They care about monetization. Only monetization.

The Internet has problems, I won’t deny it. Short form content has become an assault on our attention spans. Evidence supporting the bullshit asymmetry principle abounds when misinformation about trans people, vaccines, evolution, and other topics spreads faster than the corrections can arrive. The dead internet theory has never been more plausible than it is today and events such as the abrupt disruption in right-wing trolling when Ukraine attacked a Yandex data centre only support this.

I’m not one for despair, though. I think we can choose a different path. We can follow a rallying call for a more human Internet. And that starts with making more intentional choices. I’m not saying stop using Facebook or Instagram or Bluesky… just be mindful of the weaknesses of platforms. We can keep our phones, but the life we build with them should be nourished by them, not sapped.

  1. Fun fact, I used to be an editor at the Open Directory Project, the highest level category I wound up editing was /Arts/Animation/Anime/Fandom. [↩]
  2. seriously, how long must I endure with no Taco Bell? 🙁 [↩]

So, I got a Certificate of Identity

Posted on by Daria Bloodworth

On Tuesday, I received my very own Certificate of Identity. This came almost three months after IRCC received my application, so way past their last known published service standard. And some people did tell me that I wouldn’t be able to get this document. Some of them, because they don’t see the harm in travelling on a false passport. Or they refuse to accept the fact that yes, a passport that misrepresents a trans woman’s sex as “male” is false. After all, the reason why I need it is uncomplicated: the Trump administration has made it clear that they won’t issue accurate passports to trans people. I need an accurate passport to both travel internationally and return to Canada via air. Hell, the specific tenor of the correspondence from IRCC was preparing me to expect a refusal and to start rattling the sabre. Years of dealing with IRCC have created a sort of… adversarial tension between the agency and me.

Thankfully, it turned out for the best. No, I do not know why. And honestly, I was kinda hoping for a battle. Mostly because the agency’s public-facing advice on this topic is lacking and I want judicial recognition of the abysmal state of human rights for trans people south of the border. After all the bullshit I had to deal with fighting my own refugee case and making predictions that are continuing to be proven right? It’d be nice to be fighting a battle against IRCC where they have to face me under regular Judicial Review instead of the much more prejudicial ALJR process.

Can I travel to the United States on it?

A visa page in my Certificate of Identity with the following information printed: "This travel document is not valid for travel to the United States of America".

LOL, no.

Oh, you want a fuller explanation than that? Well, as a US citizen, I’m not allowed to enter the United States without a US passport. And Canadian policy mandates that travel documents issued to non-Canadians include a restriction from travelling to your country of origin. This is true for both Refugee Travel Documents and Certificates of Identity. So, even if I wanted to return to the United States, the answer is no. It is unlikely that I would be able to return until 2029 at the earliest. For multiple reasons. And most assuredly not on this travel document.

How long is it valid for?

For me, they issued it for five years. It’s valid until 2031. Most assuredly much more validity than I need, as I intend to apply for citizenship the second I qualify. However, there is no public-facing indication how long they guarantee the validity for. It’s up to the discretion of the officer. It’s unlikely they would issue it for longer than five years, though.

So, what’s next?

The first thing I plan to do is write a post telling all of you how I did it. Let me be clear, the specific fact pattern I argued from is for transgender US citizens who are permanent residents of Canada and cannot obtain a passport from any other country. Some of the facts might be relevant to you. Others might not. Also, I’m not an attorney, so please don’t take this as legal advice. It’s not. I’m not a lawyer, I’m just someone who probably earned a couple grey hairs because I fought IRCC for years. 0/10, would not recommend.

After that? Probably voice feminization surgery in South Korea. After all, I was originally planning on going in 2019 but my escape to Canada largely disrupted that. Now, it’s time to pull the trigger and make this happen. Maybe some travelling for the first time in so long. Hell, I’m thinking les Utopiales or les Imaginales in France. Or Carnevale in Venice. According to the correspondence I’ve been having with the Mexican consulate in Vancouver, it’s likely I won’t need a visa to travel to Mexico. Or Chernobyl if Russia ever stops fucking with Ukraine.

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.

The Real World Impact of Being Denied an Accurate, Legally Usable Passport

Posted on by Daria Bloodworth

I want to clarify one thing specifically. I don’t have a denial letter for myself, specifically. As of this date, I have not made an application for a US passport since receiving my last US passport book and card on January 11th, 2017. However, I know full well that the policy of the United States government, along with the results of similarly situated persons, demonstrates that the United States government will either issue me a false passport inconsistent with my actual sex or deny me a passport at all. This is due to Trump’s own personal “gender ideology” that trans women are somehow “male”. This is the problem with electing a man who constantly needs cognitive tests to the highest office in the land.

So, why haven’t I applied?

The answer is quite simple and is threefold. Though, I do need to explain a bit more about each time period.

When the Canada Border Services Agency had my passport

Before Trump took office and signed the executive order that directed the State Department to start issuing false passports to trans people, my US passport was not in my possession. I was actively litigating a refugee claim requesting Canada’s protection. As a part of the process, I had to surrender any and all American identification I had. This included my Colorado ID card, my Global Entry card, and my US Passport book and card.

I would have tried to renew it before Trump actually took office if I had access to my US passports. I say this with certainty because I did this before Trump’s first term started. When I renewed my US passport in 2016, I received my US passport just days before the first Trump administration took power. From November 2019 to the day I complied with my departure order in May 2025, my US passport was not in my possession.

After CBSA returned my passport to me and injunctive relief was granted

In late April, the Federal Court informed me that my Application for Leave and for Judicial Review was denied. This was the effective end of my refugee claim. I exhausted the last of my appeals and had to leave Canada. I immediately started reaching out to CBSA to arrange for my departure from Canada. Eventually, after obtaining contradictory answers, I was able to reach out with a local contact with IRCC here in Whitehorse. He connected me with CBSA in Edmonton and we coordinated my voluntary departure from Canada. Well, as “voluntary” as it can be when you’ve spent the majority of the previous decade fighting to remain in Canada.

However, on May 23rd, 2025, I received my Confirmation of Departure from Canada as I boarded my one-way flight to Denver. On May 27th, 2025, I immediately applied for Permanent Resident status. On June 21st, 2025, I returned to Canada on a one way flight back to Edmonton on a visitor visa. No injunctive relief was available in the four days between my return to the United States and my application for a permanent resident visa.

When the Court ordered injunctive relief

When injunctive relief was possible, I was not able to avail myself of that relief for two reasons. The first is that I was not yet a part of the defined class. My passport had more than a year of validity from the date the District Court granted relief until that relief was overturned by SCOTUS. I was never included in the Orr class while the relief was available. The second reason was, even if I wanted to attempt while the injunction was in force, I needed a passport. I was in the process of applying for permanent resident status. From May 27th to December 16th, 2025, I could not part with my passport. Not until I received my Electronic Confirmation of Permanent Resident status.

Why can’t I apply now?

And now? Now, I have no injunctive relief to rely on. I am watching the Orr case move its way through the American court system. I am watching the State Department argue in open court that it should have the right to issue false passports to transgender people. Passports that are effectively useless, given how negatively immigration officials around the world view the usage of false passports. The latest Order from the District of Massachusetts is an order for discovery from the Orr plaintiffs. So, needless to say, this case is likely to drag on long past the day I finally become eligible to apply for Canadian citizenship.

Why can’t I use an inaccurate passport?

Because I know that immigration officials take a fairly dim view of people who present false documents to them. I freely admit that the legality of false passports actually issued by the national authority is untested. However, the chain of facts remain the same. I know full well I’m not male. I don’t believe that every employee of the State Department is unwell enough to believe any woman, whether trans or cis, is “male”. Therefore, there is at least one, if not more, point of intentional falsification of a US passport.

So, even having it is a crime under 18 USC § 1543. But using it is a separate crime. And even though I’d likely be acquitted due to the fact that my receipt and usage of it is wholly due to State action, this only resolves the liability under 18 USC § 1543. Entrapment by the US government is not a defence to criminal inadmissibility to Canada under s. 36 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. Conviction is not a requirement for me to be found inadmissible under s. 36 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act. The act is enough to destroy the life I’ve built for myself in Canada.

I also tend to believe that when it comes to lying to the government, the dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed.

So, what’s next?

The clock continues to tick down. Barring a miracle out of the District of Massachusetts, January 10th, 2027 is the last day that I have access to a legally usable, accurate US passport. Well, in theory. After all, IRCC has actual custody of my US passport while they’re processing my Certificate of Identity application. But after January 10th, 2027, I will, for all intents and purposes, be “effectively stateless” due to the hardships placed upon me by the US government. This is not just my opinion but the opinion of the UNHCR and the Supreme Court of Canada in Canada v. Ward. To quote the Court:

The inquiry as to whether a claimant meets the “Convention refugee” definition must focus on whether there is a “well‑founded fear”, which the claimant must first establish, and all that follows must be “by reason of” that fear. Two categories, both requiring the claimant to be outside his or her state of nationality by reason of that fear, exist. The first requires that the claimant be unable to avail him‑ or herself of that state’s protection. It originally related only to stateless persons, but can now include those refused passports or other protections by their state of nationality.

While I accept that this doesn’t cite either the Royal Prerogative or the Citizenship Act, it doesn’t need to. The fact that they recognize that the denial of a passport by a person’s state as a hardship is enough. If the Canadian government has chosen to mitigate those hardships by granting me a Certificate of Identity, I’ll consider this resolved. However, if they choose either to deny the Certificate of Identity application or fail to render a decision by that date, that’s a different story. I’ll look at other legal remedies available to me.

Finally Getting Around to Taking the iPhone Photography Course I Signed Up (and Paid) For

Posted on by Daria Bloodworth
This entry is part 1 of 1 in the series Learning to Take Photos For My Blog(s)

So, most of the cover photos for the two blogs I’m currently running (this one and dariabloodworth.ca) are from Pexels. It’s a good option, it’s not AI slop, and it’s fair use. But here’s the thing, I read a lot of posts from pro-AI people talking about willfully violating the rules of platforms that are against AI slop being submitted to their platforms. Also, there is something beautiful about taking my own photos for my own blog. And I have been interested in photography for a while. It’s one of those art forms that I can do in spite of having the shittiest motor skills imaginable.

Welcome back to iPhone Photography School, here’s an ad!

Knowing what I needed to work on, I logged into iPhone Photography School. After all, I paid for the course content, I might as well take advantage of it. And, immediately upon logging in, I got a pop-up modal ad for some shit they’re pushing called “AI Lab”. And when I exited it, I got a hero ad for… AI Lab. I get the distinct sense that they’re interested in pushing AI crap on me.

The modal ad for their AI slop service, with a countdown!
A hero ad for their AI slop service, with the requisite countdown!

And when I got past the big AI slop advert, I saw that I didn’t get too far into the course material. Which is pretty… typical for me in recent years. And I’m honestly not happy about that fact, but I’m going through some pretty decently sized life changes and I’m back in the Yukon for a reason.

Several, in fact.

But, while I’m here, I am engaging with the Yukon’s bariatric program… not because I need bariatric surgery. In fact, I’ve already had bariatric surgery. But after having had bariatric surgery in Fort Collins, I didn’t get any post-op support after I plateaued. This clinic seems different. They put me on Vyvanse, which I actually was on back in Longmont but I was using it for treating the ADHD part of my AuDHD. But, this time, it’s to try to accelerate my metabolism to get me out of the rut that is keeping me from losing weight. But, now that I’m on Vyvanse again, maybe I should try to enrich myself. It’s time to learn a skill.

Back in the Course

It’s time to actually complete the iPhone Photography School course I paid for. And if that pink bit in the Module 1 part in the sidebar is any indication, I didn’t get too far in the course. This both makes me feel bad that I didn’t take this course that I paid for… but also good in the sense that I didn’t forget things that I had actually learned.

The content of my iPhone Photography School iPhone Photography course.

I also want to add, they have a crapton of courses… and I actually paid for two of them. The iPhone photography course and a separate iPhone video course. I might blog about taking that one later. But this post is about getting back into this photography course. And I’m going to try to complete Modules 1 & 2 this week. So, yes, I used another cover photo from Pexels for this post. But I’m hoping that I’ll be able to change the ratio to be mostly my own photos.

P.S. I noticed the advert in the footer

Also, yes, I have noticed that there’s an advert to upsell me lifetime updates for this course for iOS 26. This site seems to love upselling their other courses and I’m not going to lie, some of them look very interesting and I might sign up for those too. We’ll see how this one goes first. But as for purchasing lifetime updates for my course, I’m not going to be taking advantage of that. Mostly because I do intend to leave the Apple ecosystem fully at some point. And unless the Fairphone comes to Canada, I’m going to have to wait until I can travel internationally again. That is not going to happen until I either get a Certificate of Identity or become a Canadian citizen. And yes, I have applied for the former. IRCC appears to be taking their time on issuing me a Certificate of Identity.

So, what the hell is this?

Posted on by Daria Bloodworth

Hi there! You’re here a bit earlier than I intended. So, this is yay.ee. It’s a website different from dariabloodworth.ca, mostly because I was tempted to blog about gardening and tech and other things outside of writing. But, if you’re here when this post is live and the site is currently in progress, you might have some questions… like why? How?

Inspiration

Bryan Veloso‘s the one that got me on this. I was there when he was redesigning Avalonstar after the Aries Project. Here’s the way he described what he was up to and here’s how it came along to a fully designed site in roughly a month.

The evolution of the design of Avalonstar

Why?

Well, first, having a domain as short as yay.ee creates a sort of pressure to do something with it apart from receiving e-mail. After all, what else could I do? Put a picture of Fluttershy on here while writing something like “Fluttershy is not a baguette, but she is a cute pony.” I can’t imagine who would do that.

I also have some… problems with my author site that I am currently trying to troubleshoot… and I need a site that is being live designed to test out some theories. Also, I’m actively switching to Linux and I’m kinda cramping my author blog’s style by having my journey to switching to Linux live there.

Also, I fucking hate the site editor function in new WordPress. It offended me so much that, for the first time since it split from b2, I started abandoning WordPress. However, after seeing that I don’t like the other ones (and yes, I’m including ClassicPress in that too), I decided to come back to WordPress.

How?

I’ve downloaded the underscores theme from Automattic. I’m hoping to make… somewhat daily updates to the theme. Keep in mind, I’m actively working on a bunch of novels too. In fact, I’m going to attempt to use the CSSEdit features in Espresso and see if hits the same nostalgia buttons that the old CSSEdit did.