On not having a place in this world

Imagine, you're standing on this hill, surrounded by trees which are filled with blossom, as Spring moves towards Summer. You can smell the wildflowers on the air as the sound of birds and other critters mixes with the gentle rustling of the tree leaves in the breeze. As you close your eyes and lift your face towards the sky you can feel the warm sunlight caressing your skin.

This is the moment when you realise that you're in a place where you're home. Where it's safe and everything is all right. Where in a moment you'll return to the house where you live alone or with others, but it's all because that's the way which works for everyone.


It was around the beginning of this century, probably around 2001 or thereabouts, that I last still felt somewhat like that. After that my parents began to grow cold towards each other and the atmosphere in the house changed. Not long after that my parents divorced and first together with my mother, then alone it was a continuous journey from one house and apartment to another, in search of a home.

At this point I'm staying in a temporary apartment, trying to figure out what to do next as the last weeks at this place come and go. My grand plans of moving to the Alsace region of France have run into the harsh reality of supply and demand. How will this continue? I do not know. I wish I knew.


Similarly, my struggle to get a job last year and early this year didn't result in anything. Supply and demand, I guess. In the end it's not about you as a human being after all. It's just capitalistic reality. Essentially it's about us being merely the cells in this organism called 'Society'.

For all my dreams and hopes I had as a child and beyond, the cruel reality is we humans have made for ourselves is that the value of a person - much like that of a cell in an organism - is determined by their contribution to the system. My situation isn't even the worst imaginable, and it pains me to imagine the situations others find themselves in. There's so much pain. So much unfairness and so much suffering that those affected try to ignore. Plastic smiles.

Are any of us truly happy by living in small, cramped, concrete or stone hovels, practically on top of each other? With small, grimy windows opening into an environment that is choking with the exhaust fumes from cars, trucks and buses, mixed with the acrid smells of cigarette smoke and stale beer.

Is this place where our children play on streets near traffic, breathing in polluted air and only ever seeing the blue skies when they look up at this small strip of sky between the towering buildings. Is this place 'home'?

This reality of 'making the best of things' isn't that different from that scene in George Orwell's famous novell 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' where this woman outside the main character's window is hanging up the laundry while singing one of those auto-generated tunes that play on the radio. Obviously poor, the woman finds a reason to sing even though she lives in a rundown building, in a state of abject poverty, just like practically everybody else.

Just like in that world which Orwell described back in 1948 in the midst of post-war reconstruction, there are the haves and have-nots. The reality is that the handful of people who have practically everything are perfectly happy with keeping things the way they are. They are doing fine, so why would they care? Why would they care about the rest of the population? Those just exist to do their duty. Like any good skin, liver or fat cell.


How many of us consider the impact that 'our' decisions have on the rest of our body? On the tissues that are suffering because we had to do that late-night party, that copious consumption of alcohol and the many cigarettes that got smoked. We do not pay them mind, because we expect them to bounce back. That's what they're there for, after all.

In that sense it's only natural for the rich and wealthy to not care about the have-nots, I guess.


Sometimes I think about what it would mean to me if suddenly I found myself among the rich and famous. It's something that could theoretically happen after all, depending on how well my upcoming autobiography (and the associated Patreon [1] ) do. Say, with the support of a legion of patrons I get my autobiography done and published, and it turns out to be an international best-seller.

Suddenly I find myself being flown around the world for talkshows in places I haven't been to yet, while the money comes pouring in. All of a sudden all of my worries about financial stability and a place to live evaporate. What would I do?

The answer to that is pretty much summed up by the first few paragraphs of this blog entry. I'd want nothing more than to have that happy home for myself, and everybody else. I'm beyond sick of this world in which human lives are essentially meaningless, merely feed for the machine, as relevant as a single skin cell that will reach the end of its lifespan and gets discarded.

I do not claim to know the answer to everything, but I do feel strongly that the world I want to see is one in which there can be room for actual happiness and self-exploration instead of this top-down enforcement of how we should be living our all too brief lives.

Because either life is precious, or it is not.


Maya



[1] https://www.patreon.com/MayaPosch

That uncertain future

So where I'm at now is that the old apartment has been handed back to the slumlord, with just the final bills and such to be settled. This means that other than some potential financial fallout the direct and immediate threat from that place should be over with.

That leaves me with the two other, more immediate issues. One is to get that financial stability, as I saw myself pushed into becoming freelancer after a year of unsuccessful job interviews. Not that being a freelancer is that horrible, mind you. It seems that at this point I'm mostly doing the writing of articles for websites such as Hackaday and soon Hackster.io, which provides me with some income.

In addition to this, there's also the pressing issue of finding a place to live. I still got about a month until I have to leave the current apartment where I'm temporarily staying. At this point I have abandoned the thought of renting a house in the Alsace region of France as the possibility of that working out was painted too optimistically. Now it's back to looking for apartments in that same region. Hopefully that will work out better.

What will be next for me? I'm not sure. I'll just have to keep trying and see what happens.


Maya

This year's keywords are: freelance, France, Patreon

Starting tomorrow, I'll start moving my belongings to a temporary apartment as the search for a house in the Alsace region in France continues, as I wrote about in my previous blog entry. Getting all of the logistics organised for this move is still an ongoing process, even as the process of packing up at the old apartment is winding down.

My hope is that by the next weekend, everything will be at the new place, so that during the last week of this month I can finally end another less fun chapter in my life. Hopefully I'll be finally free of the old apartment and its slumlord after five years of struggling to find a new place, dealing with an eviction despite no debts or other reasons, etc.

There's still a lot of work to be done to get me over to the new place, with any bit of help appreciated, but this should be the first big improvement in my life in a long, long time.


Also tomorrow I'll be looking at this house in the Alsace for which I have a chance of being allowed to rent it. If that works out, then in a matter of weeks I'll be moving again, hopefully for the final time for a long time.

With living in a small French village also comes having to get a car, meaning that I'm comparing various used cars at this point, with plug-in hybrids looking especially attractive due to the low running and maintenance costs. This means that for the coming time I'll be spending quite a bit of money to set myself up.

This month is also the first month that I'm officially a freelancer. I'm still trying to find my way, of course, but there are many options open to me. Hopefully by next month I'll have that stable income in addition to a nice, quiet working environment.

I have set up a Patreon account [1] for those who want to support my efforts with finally finishing my autobiography, as well as maybe supporting a career as a writer. Feel free to have a look there and maybe toss a few bucks per month my way if you feel so inclined :)

Another thing I have been meaning to set up for a few years now, but haven't found the time yet, is a YouTube channel for Nyantronics [2], with a focus on electronics, software and science. Both Nyantronics projects, but also for general education, tear downs and all of the usual things.

Feel free to support me on Patreon, or donate to me directly. Or help out with these two moves the coming weeks and I'll make sure that there's free pizza for everyone :)


Maya


[1] https://www.patreon.com/MayaPosch
[2] http://www.nyantronics.com

Help with moving to France and going freelance

Sometimes one's life suddenly seems to find its course back again, even if issues remain. So it was for me that in the course of doing another batch of job interviews I got asked by one company whether I might be okay with working as a contractor for them. At the mentioning of this it was as if something clicked inside my head.

It's not as if I haven't worked as a contractor or freelancer before. For most of my professional career I have worked either for customers as freelancer, or on my own projects and products. The part that really appeals to me about freelancing is the freedom and responsibility towards oneself instead of towards a collection of bosses and other management types.

Thus I found myself at the tax accountant's office last week to get things sorted with the tax office with regards to my registration as freelancer. As of March 1st I will officially work as a freelancer. This of course means getting a lot of things in order, beyond just the business side of things. This of course also means getting my housing situation sorted.


Thanks to my new lawyer I fortunately managed to avoid getting forcefully evicted earlier this month. The court ruled decidedly in my favor. Now I have at least until the end of next month to find an alternate place.  This is both positive and negative, as finding anything short-term that is even remotely decent is not easy in a city like Karlsruhe.

A few weeks ago I thus decided that I would be moving just across the border from here, in the region of France known as the Alsace. Finding a place to rent there is decidedly easier and comes with a host of other benefits for freelancers with a home office, such as a much more quiet environment to work in.

This is however the point where things get a bit too exciting, as I only have about two weeks left to find something. If not a house in the Alsace, then an emergency solution somewhere else until said house can be found. The more help I can get with this, the better.

If you live in or have any contacts in or near the Alsace who might be able to help, then that would be wonderful. The current regions and ZIP codes I'm looking in at the moment are:

• 67630 Scheibenhard
• 67630 Lauterbourg
• 67470 Munchhausen
• 67470 Schaffhouse-près-Seltz
• 67470 Seltz
• 67630 Neewiller-près-Lauterbourg
• 67470 Wintzenbach
• 67470 Mothern
• 67630 Niederlauterbach

Naturally the more quiet and more roomy the better. This means that a house would be ideal. Having proper internet access has to be a requirement due to my work, of course, so that slightly limits the options again. I'm planning on buying a car so that I'm not limited to public transport availability.

Feel free to contact me via the contact form on my personal website or Twitter if you have any questions or information.


Maya

Why we hate humans so much

I grew up on a farm with a few hectares of land, along with some cows and sheep that needed tending. Together with my two brothers we would spend much of each day outside when the weather was nice, whether by ourselves, or with friends from the village, though during winter some work still needed to be done on the farm to get everything winter-ready. In our village it was quite normal to live on a farm and have this amount of space.

Not everyone in the village lived on a farm, of course, and they would have less space than us farmers did. Still, everyone had their own house, a garden and especially in the original village section (not the new construction), people tended to know just about anything about each other. For much of my life I grew up not really knowing or caring who of the people in the village were or weren't family members. We'd share everything anyway and be there when anyone needed help.

That all dramatically changed when my parents divorced and I moved together with my mother into a house in the nearby city. That was the beginning of what has now been more than a decade of city life. It has convinced me that there are virtually no redeeming qualities to living in a city.

It's not just me, either. Report after report shows that cities are polluted death traps which shorten lifespans [1][2][3], in addition to causing severe stress- and disrupted sleeping pattern-related health issues. Living in a city, or raising children in a city is pretty much one of the worst things that we humans have inflicted upon ourselves over the past thousand years.

Another massive problem that cities perpetuate is that of poverty [4], with those children being born in poor neighbourhoods generally being out of luck unless they can somehow escape from those environments.


All of this does raise the question of why we hate ourselves and our fellow humans so much. Why do we lie to ourselves about what is obviously a massive health issue? Why do we dream of moving up in society while simultaneously trampling others down as we try to move upwards? Why this rat race?

The general way of thinking is that a single human being simply has to do with less. Nobody needs an apartment that's more than about twenty square meters or so. They'd go by just fine. Just cram lots of sub sixty square meter apartments into a few massively tall blocks and stuff them full with people.

Which is exactly what we have been doing with livestock over the past decades, with battery cages for chickens, cramming pigs into cages just barely enough to hold them, turkeys and other poultry on the floors of massive halls with no room to move.

They figured out at some point that dimming the light to about 10 lux caused chickens in battery cages to not inflict as much physical harm on themselves, as these low light levels would trigger resting behaviour. As pigs that got crammed together in small spaces would start resorting to cannibalism - eating the ears, tails and other parts of their fellow pigs - their tails and ears would be preemptively removed, along with some of their teeth.


To me the way humans and livestock are being treated kind of blurs together. The whole bio-industry with their industrial levels of animal cruelty exists because the old ways of raising livestock was too expensive and inefficient. So they optimised those inefficiencies away without any consideration for animal well-being.  But cruelty-free/reduced cruelty meat, poultry and eggs cost more, so it'll likely always remain a thing.

Similarly, one points at how inefficient the average human being is. When not at an office doing useful work, or otherwise participating in the economy, they are just a drain on resources, filling space that could be filled with more humans. There's nothing to be gained by making it affordable for the average person to buy a house with a garden, and allow their children to grow up surrounded by nature instead of inside glass, concrete, stone and asphalt-lined cages. That's just not productive.


On our farm, our cows and sheep would spend time outside as much as possible, to eat the fresh grass and otherwise do their thing. We'd bring the cows in only for milking and during the night. Of course, we were painfully aware of this not being efficient. Other farmers had already begun to stop letting their cattle graze outside as much as we did, instead keeping them in the stables and feeding them either dried grass or cattle feed.

These days there's more of a market for meat, poultry and eggs that comes from animals who actually have seen some daylight during their lives, so it's more realistic to farm that way again. For humans there's no such hope, however. Most farmers have already quit their business and sold their farms to mega farms that are run by large companies.

Unless one is rich, this means that one will have to accept that the future for themselves and those around them means less living space, smaller apartments with more restrictions, more stress and more concrete and only a miserable patch of half-dead and dying plants surrounded by muddy grass (commonly referred to as a 'public park') to serve as a way to 'escape the city'.


Makes one wonder whether dimming the light inside cities to 10 lux might be a solution, along with the removal of any appendages which its inhabitants do not need to carry out their jobs anyway. Could solve all crime and violence issues in one stroke, while increasing productivity many fold

Maybe this is the perfect time to consider a career in being livestock..


Maya


[1] https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/health-impacts-of-living-in-a-city/
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/13/warning-living-city-seriously-damage-health
[3] https://www.who.int/sustainable-development/cities/health-risks/en/
[4] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4570570/

Trying to make the world a better place, even as it wants me dead

Over the past months, a big focus of me alongside working on my upcoming book [1][2] and of course trying to find a new full-time job, has been setting up a new website to host the range of projects that I have started last year. These include a variety of hardware projects, involving the design of PCBs in KiCad for things ranging from building monitoring and control to the controlling of LED-based room lighting, and writing the firmware to drive these boards.

The website, Nyantronics.com [3], also features the biggest project of all: Internet of Plants (soon to be renamed Greentropia). This project focuses on high-density indoor farming solutions, as a way to solve the issue of food production in today's world, and the massive pollution and habitat destructions that this causes.

By having all vegetables and fruit grown in environments that are isolated from the environment, and by having many floors of this, it solves not only the problem of habitat destruction, but also removes the need for pesticides and herbicides to be used. Further it reduces the need to transport food across the globe, as well as plastic packaging.

Our focus is on moving to hydroponics and fogponics, so as to remove the need for soil and to optimise plant growth. A big part of making indoor farming like this work is to make it as energy-efficient as possible. So far we have been researching various grow LED options and of course hydroponics, fogponics and related to reduce the amount of energy required to produce fruit and vegetables, as well as look at making staple foods such as rice and soy beans work in this setting.

Looking at comparable efforts, such as the big EDEN ISS [4] project, we can see the potential here, and slowly we're bringing others into the project as well. It's a multi-disciplinary project, bringing together botany, biology, electronics, physics, anthropology, software development, mechanical engineering and many more fields. This makes it into an incredibly challenging but also incredibly fun project.


And yet, when I woke up this morning, I felt horrible. All I could see was this young child inside of me with adults yelling at it and generally being complete and utter jerks. The latter being mostly the people who are trying to kick me out of the apartment where I'm currently staying, merely on account of disliking me. Add to this the pressure of still being unemployed and having nowhere to go if I want to keep my unemployment benefits and health insurance.

Some days I'm not sure how things got this way. When you always tried to do things properly and always be nice and friendly to people, it's the worst kind of feeling when you aren't merely met with indifference, but with outright hostility. To know that you're not even a stain in the eyes of some people, but something far less.

And there's always that young child in the dark room. Terrified of adults. Never daring to trust adults again after what those adults did to her 5-year old self. The me today who is trying to get past those experiences, but who just keeps being reminded that adults are never to be trusted, not ever again.


I'm still hoping that I won't get kicked out of the apartment next month now that a date to have it forcibly cleared has been set. It's going to cost me a lot more money on lawyers and related adult fun to try and avoid this.

I'm still hoping that I will get that new job, get to move to a new place and that just for once these horrible things stop happening to me. I'm still trying. Still hoping.

I finally want that five-year old me to feel safe for the very first time. To move on and focus on these projects that can transform the world and the future of humanity. Not keep being stuck dealing with the same horrible types of people and revisiting the same old traumas over and over again.

Instead I want that fascinating future, working on cool projects that enrich me and humanity as a whole. To get this world away from this eternal darkness that threatens to swallow everything because there are certain adults who insist on living at the cost of others.


Maya


[1] https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/hands-embedded-programming-c17
[2] https://amzn.to/2Vl79wP
[3] http://www.nyantronics.com/index.php
[4] https://eden-iss.net/

Gender dysphoria and body identity dysphoria

Back in early 2005 I found myself watching a documentary on Discovery Channel on the topic of body identity dysphoria (BID) [1]. It followed this young woman who spent much of her time looking for a surgeon who would amputate her legs. Not because she had any medical problems, but simply because it felt 'right' to her to not having legs. She could recall seeing this person in a wheelchair as a child, with that person having the same kind of amputation as she ended up seeking for herself years later.

Not long after watching that documentary I found myself dealing with first the suspicion of me being transgender, quickly followed by the growing realisation that I had to be intersex. The memories of watching those BID sufferers faded to the background, until recently, when I found myself considering BID again, this time in the context of gender dysphoria and similar disorders.

Briefly put, BID is the desire to have invasive surgery performed on one's body in order to amputate healthy body parts, or to lose parts of one's body's functionality. The source of this desire appears to be in the brain's view of the body, with the functionality or parts that are deemed undesirable falling outside of this mapping.

For BID sufferers amputation or induced paralysis appears to be the only real solution, as ethically convoluted this solution may be. This is similar to with gender dysphoria (GD), where those affected will describe a strong desire to have their genitals removed, along with many other characteristics of their body. So-called sex-reassignment surgery involves the removal of one's existing genitals, and the surgical creation of a facsimile approximation of the opposite sex's genitals.

In both cases the hope is that by giving in to the desire for surgical interference, the psychological suffering will cease, and the person can live a normal life again. In the case of BID, the suffering can increase to the point where the person will self-amputate. Both BID and GD are very real forms of suffering, without a clear solution, or cause.


Looking back on the past fourteen years that I spent dealing with my intersex condition, I can see the many choices that I had to make in order to find myself. Most strongly of all, I can see the weird medical attitude towards BID, GD and intersex cases.

With the first, there's little inclination by doctors to assist surgically. With the second it's becoming easier and easier to the point where even children can apply, and with the third 'normalisation' surgery is forced on unwilling intersex individuals - including infants - but actual medical help is not available.

I consider myself fortunate to not have any kind of dysphoria or medical disorder. Yet I'm not blind to the horrific irony that while BID and GD require intense psychological and medical attention and are met with guarded caution, the medical approach towards intersex is one of overly enthusiastic surgical intervention.

With intersex there's no protocol, real-life test, psychological evolution or the like. Nobody will weigh the ethics of chopping up the genitals of an intersex infant, or ask whether it's proper to subject an adult intersex person like myself to psychological pressure to undergo 'normalisation' surgery and to be repeatedly told that I am not capable of making decisions myself, that I should rely on the doctors.

With BID and GD individuals are born with a problem. With intersex individuals are born without a problem, but have problems created for them.

I wish all three groups could get the help that they need.


Maya


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_integrity_dysphoria