AUTHOR'S NOTE: this post is a copy of something i wrote in mid december 2017. the sentiments remain true.
so i've been thinking tonight (and to a lesser extent for the past week (and to an even lesser extent the past few years)) and i've decided that i, ash, noted white noise poster extraordinaire, am a robot.
what
well, the more ontologically-accurate statement is 'i like being thought of as a robot and sometimes describing myself in terms that would be used to describe a robot, such as 'chassis' instead of 'body', 'RAM' and 'disk space' for 'memory', 'battery level' for 'wakefulness', etc., and i disprefer being referred to as 'human'.'
but that's way the hell longer to say.
okay but you're not a robot
yes thank you captain fucking obvious. i don't believe i'm a reincarnation or a projection or something, i'm not really spiritual at all. i'm well aware that my chassis is in fact composed of hydrocarbons and is a mostly-typical example of homo sapiens sapiens.
that's not the point, though, which is that i would really rather it not be that, and pretending it's a robot makes me feel better about myself.
why?
because i hate my body, and to a somewhat lesser extent hate my brain (and even my mind). there's no debug port, the source code was only discovered recently and the compilation process is a fucking nightmare, and the alert system is garbage ('oh hey, my head hurts, I wonder what of the 30 things could be wrong') and can't be turned off ('yes i know that something's wrong with my arm, i'm getting lasers shot into it, i don't care'). i hate having to be unconscious for a third of my existence.
robots are... not that, at least per the association i have with them in my mind. to me they represent self-control, intelligence, discipline, emotional stability, customization. so many things i wish i had.
but robots are software, and software is terrible! and so is hardware!
yes. i know. again, i don't care. this is fantasy, and in my fantasy world i don't have any bugs or exploits and i'm not broken down or made of proprietary parts i have to pay way too much to replace.
besides, wetware neural networks aren't exactly perfect, and do you know how much it costs simply to do a bit of chassis remodeling? it ain't fucking cheap.
isn't this just escapism and denial of reality?
i don't know, but i know you don't know that either.
ok, so do i call you a robot everywhere?
not everywhere. lots of places it'd just cause more issue than it'd be worth dealing with. this isn't like my gender; i would very strongly object to being called a man anywhere, but if you call me a human in places where calling me a robot would be 'weird' then i'll understand.
speaking of gender...
it's Complicated. i like 'it' pronouns for myself, and if you're talking about me in a place for me to see it and we're among cool people i would very much appreciate it if you used them, but i know 'it' has kind of A History with respect to trans people. and 'she' is still acceptable, i'm still close enough to a girl for that to be okay.
what about your name?
ash is still fine. maybe i'll come up with a cool set of robot names.
why are you structuring this as a dialogue despite the fact that you're the only one writing?
because i want to. besides, most FAQs aren't actually Frequently Asked anyway.
tl;dr?
i like robot words being used for me. i'm still named ash, i still use 'she' pronouns, but 'it' is also acceptable and makes me feel nice.