!Christina's questions --- agk's diary 4 October 2026 --- written on GPD MicroPC with vi --- I've missed Christina's questions. gopher.club/1/users/christyotwisty/ Here are her five for October. 1. How for a North American to plan deGoogling? Be prepared to radically simplify and reskill, use neglected parts of your brain, to mix decades in daily life. Depends on how tangled in Google you are what you'll have to do to untangle. Buy a cheap domain from porkbun or namecheap and pay for email with a provider like fastmail or migadu. Use lite.duckduckgo.com/lite for search. Get a casio f91w wristwatch and find a used clock radio at the thrift store. Use cash and checks as much as you can. Never use an app to pay. Go to your bank branch, bank in person. Everything beyond this, my solutions may be too radical/low tech for most. Ditch your smartphone. Use a voip phone from a provider like 1-voip or callcentric or an inexpensive non-android dumbphone with a no-data plan. Your phone bill should be 10-20 USD/mo. If you have a dumbphone, leave it at home or turn it off often. Get everyone used to you never being instantly available, but always dependably return- ing calls/messages. Learn your way around. Frequent the library. Have a useful map or map book on hand. Don't watch movies or TV often. When you do, check out DVDs from the library (use inter- library loan if necessary), or watch on pirate sites. Cumbersome is good. Bottomless feeds are bad. Read books. Get news from a radio station you like, or from an aggregator or blog with great community/commentariat (many people like soylent news, lobste.rs, or hacker news for tech news. Naked capitalism covers economics and politics, as does sovereignista.com). Don't get lost in the news. Pull an RSS feed for the section of your local news you follow. Read the paper on paper at the library. Download books from annas-archive to an e-reader. Read books. Listen to a good local radio station or to physical media (tapes, CDs, records). Borrow CDs from the library. Copy what you like. Or torrent and burn CDs. Listen to language tapes or take a class. Write with nano or vi on a public access unix server if you want access from many terminals; write with vi or svedit or freedos edit on dos if you want personal computing. Gopher, email, and a good BBS make for great social media replacements. But also do stuff. Volunteer. Take leadership. Ride a bike. Go to church. Take a class. Tutor a kid. Throw dinner parties. Join a club. Take your time. Why do you want to deGoogle? 2. What is your preference: hiking up a mountain, or reading a good novel? Depends on the day. When I was a teenager, my friend Tomas and I went on a multiday backpacking trip in the mountains while reading the entirety of James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist aloud. These days I read more than I hike, but I cave more than I hike too. 3. What were your horseback riding experiences? If none, have you ever caught a fish? Vaguely remember awkwardly riding a horse once on a vacation. Haven't caught a fish since I was a little girl, with my Pa, who loved fishing. 4. What is an activity that makes you feel alive? Have you repeatedly remained hyper for hours post-activity? Caving. Fixing chaos in a dysfunctional psych hospital. Helping an Alcoholics Anonymous sponsee through her first step. Leading music in church a capella (I don't play any instruments). Biking to the discrete math class I'm taking. Making DOS computers for kids out of discarded machines, and seeing the kids and their parents experience the magic. 5. To what extent do you research a candidate running for public office? A little. I helped pick the US Senate and US House candidate I'm going to vote for. I've been dubious about them along the way, but they've stuck out the race and grown along the way. They'll have political maturity to communicate to the candidates who follow them in the anti-war, anti-corruption, and anti-big data center/ surveillance camps. Several of my acquaintences are running for city council. I feel like their positions are often incoherent, naive, or pro-small business tyrant. But this time around, one of them has really shaped up, and most of what she's saying is clear, focused, and relevant to the powers she'll be able to exercise if she wins. Nobody good on some of the races. Bonus: If you experience stimuli that trigger post- traumatic stress reactions, do you keep quiet about its origins, thinking everybody else has worse trauma? Do you figure people who haven't your specific trauma won't understand, so why bother opening up? Sounds like you're in a pickle, Christina. I started my trauma recovery just being weird. I'd dip out of Narcotics Anonymous meetings to lay in the locked bathroom with my arms wrenched behind my back and my face on the cool tile, taking a trip back to solitary confinement in administrative segregation, or torture in custody by the NYPD. If I started talking in a meeting I quickly got lonely and incoherent, babbling about helicopter surveillance, the FBI, losing friends, house raids, grand juries. The people I was talking to understood homeless- ness, addiction, and violence, but not polit- ical persecution. My friend Revia (a sniper, veteran of the US's imperialist adventure in Afghanistan, and single mom of two) told me to pay atten- tion to our friend who was a veteran of the US's imperialist adventure in Vietnam. The more he talked about what he'd experienced there, the more alone he felt, the more he realized no one in the room understood, so the more he desperately talked, sometimes til the Narcotics Anonymous meeting ended. "Tell your drug stories to addicts and your war stories to veterans," Revia said to me. "Go where the understanding is." In the 25 years since then, I've taken my opportunities to talk to people who under- stand when I can, love friends actively facing persecution, test how safe I am today (pretty safe), and live in an ever widening circle of trust. Talking's important, but not to just anyone, and talk by itself isn't enough.