Things Change

It is great that you had the perseverance to see this through, and unfortunately it isn't rare at all that local medical care is not up to speed with rare diseases or misdiagnosing a rare disease as a more common one.

I lost a sister (at the ripe old age of 23) to such a case so I'm quite familiar with the territory.

That's a comment by jacquesm. I think that's the only time he mentioned that he had a sibling who died young of an unspecified cause and probably rare disease so. He's very protective of his privacy.

He hasn't spoken to me in years. I no longer participate on Hacker News. I don't know how to explain my opinions of his behavior and how I saw it without sounding crazy.

If you don't have a Hacker News account, you may not see his flagged to death reply to my comment here. He was uncharacteristically ugly to me, so much so someone stepped in to ask him to stop his crap.

I believe I emailed the moderator and said please ignore it or something like that. I felt at the time and still believe he did that intentionally to tell people "I'm the asshole here!" 

My participation on Hacker News got better after that. When I first joined and he talked to me regularly, I was fairly warmly welcomed and then he stopped speaking to me, but didn't run me off Hacker News.

I could feel the chill in the air and people seemed scared and confused, not wanting to offend him and not knowing what constituted not offending him. And I believe he intentionally did that to convince people he was a man with a thing for me letting me stay and to be at ease with my presence there.

If his sister had Cystic Fibrosis and he knows he's a carrier, maybe that's why he did all this stuff that never made sense to me. Because I was quite open about getting involved with non-white men as a quick and dirty genetics test, so if he's a carrier and knows it, he knows I don't really want to sleep with him.

And I suggest that in part because one of his three children had serious respiratory problems. 

What his logic was, I don't know. Maybe he imagined he was preserving hope of getting with me somewhere down the road.

I've spent years homeless.

My last comment on Hacker News is dated March 8, 2025.

My last submission says 10 months ago. I don't believe that's really accurate, but my blog post about it doesn't really give a date for the original submission and it could be close to the original date because I posted it hoping to find it again and not really intending to resume participation.

I believe he and others from HN enthusiastically helped a troubled youth who self identified as a MTF trans individual I usually call Genevieve. I genuinely believe Genevieve was abused. I am no longer convinced that individual is really trans.

I believe jacquesm and other successful men felt they could help a MTF trans youth because people would likely assume they weren't sleeping with her and I was not similarly helped because people would have assumed it was an affair or plans to eventually get with me.

My life is in the toilet and I see no way out of the mess I'm in. I'm homeless for the second time and it's at like 2.5 years again and making the leader board of Hacker News never helped me establish an adequate income, though I'm certain it's the primary reason Patrick McKenzie is supposedly worth more than a million dollars and has helped many other men line their pockets.

For a long time, I imagined jacquesm was someone who cared about my welfare as a person and I was fond of him because of THAT. But it's been sixteen years since we both helped a troubled youth who probably lied to jacquesm and burned me and I've spent like half of that homeless and no financial rescue has come and no one posts my writing anywhere, least of all Hacker News, and my Patreon isn't growing etc.

If his sister died of Cystic Fibrosis or anything akin to THAT, he could have been writing me all these years and trying to open doors for me professionally all these years based on that as a way to back me and assure people he's not just trying to get into my panties.

I don't know how a woman can get anywhere in this world. That seems like an impossible nut to crack. 

Because I have come to believe that I was largely allowed to stay and make the leaderboard because one of the big dogs had the hots for me and then never helped me establish an earned income. And I am shocked at how callous everyone was towards a woman with a genetic disorder just trying to earn enough to get off the street while throwing money at the likes of Patrick McKenzie and to my knowledge no one ever called him on his shit.

Whatever I once felt for Jack AKA jacquesm died years ago and I don't continue to write about him as some sort of ode to true love. I do it because I'm fascinated with social stuff and I'm still trying to figure out how in the hell a woman establishes an adequate earned income on merit rather than supporting herself on her back.

And it looks like the answer is: She doesn't.

It's not allowed. They will literally step over your body in the gutter while gaslighting you and acting like you are CRAZY to IMAGINE ANYONE makes money the way they do. 

Whatever was going on in his mind, I want out of this nightmare where no matter how much I accomplish, I can't make my life work. And if whatever is going through his mind is part of why I can't make my life work, I wish he would get the fuck over it.

Because I stopped imagining we might get together a lot of years ago and I don't want him, no. 

I NEVER said that because I thought we had mutual respect or something and I thought I didn't need to. I thought he knew years ago that ship had sailed.

But my life is not looking like the outcome of some powerful man trying to help me establish an earned incomevon merit in spite of being a woman. It's looking more like a rich man still imagines he's going to be my knight in shining armor someday and me remaining poor keeps that hope alive because he's ALWAYS bought sex via the heteronormative meme of being a good provider.

For the record: I've never sold it.

And keeping me in poverty in hopes of keeping that door open isn't love and I wouldn't marry him if he was the last man on Earth at this point.