/selfhost

Below is a collection of links to self-hosted games and webtexts published in journals that couldn’t host them locally, listed in reverse chronological order. (For an excerpt of the webtext version of my dissertation, go to /diss.)

Pain and Relief Come of Themselves © 2022

Self-hosted

Content tags: Archives of displacement, chronic pain and fatigue, fictocriticism, hope, intergenerational trauma, photo gallery, South Asian parables, Tamil genocide

Inventio: Composed with HTML5 and Bootstrap 5 for a webtext WIP monograph and excerpted for Peitho. This responsive photo gallery uses Masonry to suggest the ever-shifting alignment of artifact and memory in its presentation of photographed objects that represent my experiences with intergenerational trauma and pain as a member of the Eelam Tamil diaspora.

Summary: In composing an archive that records remembrance, resistance, resilience, and adaptability from the ephemera of Eelam Tamil diasporic-disabled life in the U.S., I attempt to resist the violent erasure and rewriting of Eelam Tamil history and culture and of my disabled self-knowledge and oracular instinct. This archive contains a selection of quotidian cultural and medical objects and photographs that my family and I instinctively conserved — potentially for how they precipitate thought, feeling, and memory and provide opportunities for remembering the past and forging hopeful futurities. These objects map my thoughts, feelings, and associations about cultural identity, collective trauma, chronic pain, and radical possibility. The attendant parables attempt to recover a culturally specific past through culturally specific storytelling, without demystifying their inclusions and juxtapositions, flattening affect, or insisting on empirically verifiable truth. This archive is designed from below, meant to be read, felt, and deciphered from below, in solidarity with the familial archivists, oral historians, chronically ill patients, and other culture workers who must extensively self-document and for whom archiving is an expression of resistance and resilience.

perimortem (in theoretical rigor) © 2025

Self-hosted and hosted by publisher

Content tags: Ableism, armed conflict, bodily fluids, bombs, cutting, genocide, intergenerational trauma, racism, sexual violence, suicidal ideation, torture

Inventio: Composed with Inform 7 and excerpted from a keynote address of the same name (itself an excerpt of a much larger digital multimodal project), delivered at the 2024 Computers & Writing (C&W) conference. Ten of the 54 fragments read at C&W are available here in a parser-based format, as it was meant to be experienced. As the full game is a work in progress and has not yet been completed or beta-tested, I appreciate your patience with any glitches I missed.

Summary: That every university has a safe house for the reeducation of radicalized scholars is an open secret. After all, dissidents pose a threat to the survival of the academic community. You had faith in this mandate, but you weren’t sure such spaces really existed until now — now that you’ve snuck into one and are witnessing the examination of a colleague for yourself, the mysteries and abominations of her flesh exposed and aglow with energy channels and landmines. In the safe house, the only currency is pain, but its inflictions and self-inflictions are untethered from logic. Using a wounding/damage system, your observations, and your wits, you must decide whether to cut and remove the landmines from the research subject’s interior for access to the text, ‘curing’ her through surgical intervention and advancing your own research; leave her intact and anomalous, precluding access to the text and guaranteeing her disappearance; or compromise by exposing the landmines without taking them, accessing the text without seeking cure. You won’t learn anything unless you cut her, but you might not be immune to her contagion. You don’t know how long it takes for a body to incubate a minefield. You can’t turn back now.

Hollow Me, Hollow Me, Until Only You Remain © 2022

Self-hosted

Content tags: Ableism, graphic penetration, medical paternalism, near-death experience, racism, sexism, word-on-word translation mechanic

Inventio: Composed using Texture Writer for my dissertation. This game rhetorically analyzes the medical gaslighting, gender- and race-based stereotyping, and narrative imposition I endured during a weekend-long emergency room visit in September 2014, nine months after my appendix had perforated.

Summary: This interactive translation game plunges you into the tedious and harrowing experience of entering New York University (NYU) Langone’s ER as an Eelam Tamil American fibromyalgic queer woman in crisis. You arrived here because you are in a state of emergency: something inside you is rotting; for nine months, doctors have dismissed it as a flare-up of your usual chronic pain and fatigue; your body’s defenses, buckling under this negligence, are finally breaking down. As a chronically ill patient, you know all too well that your skin color, gender presentation, and non-apparent pain will impact the care you receive. Your only recourse is to aggressively engage with your medical records as various emergency physicians assess and reframe you in the patient intake process, crafting a patient identity for you that is sharply antithetical to what you are trying to convey.

“But You Look So Well!”: The Role of Dress Practices in (Un)Professionalizing the Expression and Experience of Chronic Pain © 2020

Hosted by Scalar

Content tags: Academic ableism, body modification, chronic pain, disability masquerade, dress practices

Inventio: Composed with Scalar for my dissertation. I photographed clothes and catalogued their purpose, price, and material and compiled them into different closets thematically organized around the context in which I predominantly wore the outfits therein. I used Scalar’s emphasis on relationships between elements to try to illustrate the relationships between my diasporic-disabled composition practice, my chronic pain, and my academic dress practices.

Summary: What do you wear to work when pain wears and works you? When fretting over sartorial decisions makes you look like an academic dilettante? When alternative femininities reveal you are an embodied, sexual being? When revealing body modifications estranges you from the moral enterprise of the neoliberal academy where you work? Academic dress practices belong to a moral enterprise that normalizes palatable forms of sexism, racism, classism, and ableism. Fibromyalgia means workplace clothing is a commitment with no room for error. My sartorial decisions balance academic identity with sporting femininities or the queer punk sensibility that boosts my self-confidence and accommodates my pain. These dress practices ensure I can modulate my pain expressions to shield others from my affects, in the department and in the classroom.