it feels lonely sometimes being a queer person (especially a trans femme) who doesn't do programming and is honestly not that good at computer and not really interested in changing that?

there was a point a couple of years ago where i was looking into learning python so i could maybe do a career change. my living situation got better and i started to have some minor success at streaming so i just sort of forgot about it because it was purely born out of self-preservation

but sometimes my twitch chat absolutely goes off on a programming or tech tangent and i feel like i'm intruding on a conversation in my own stream! it's weird! there's a vocabulary that's so deeply removed from the layperson there - which is a common STEM problem, as i found in grad school. geologists aren't any better, they just use words that i actually understand (or used to, i haven't considered myself a geologist in several years now)

it's kind of a passive gatekeeping, which is a term that's become very loaded in the past decade or so of Being Online - i mean that in a completely neutral way here, it is neither a good nor bad thing, technical language is obviously important, but it's pretty off-putting when it's sprinkled in what should be a casual conversation (i definitely consider most twitch streams to be casual conversation)

anyway, i don't really have a grand conclusion here - i'm mostly just spilling thoughts - but i can wrap this back around to mastodon, since every time someone tries to explain what the hell it is and how it works, my eyes glaze over. i latched onto cohost more because nobody had to explain how it works to me (also the vibes are great)