Well-meaning people keep asking me my pronouns. I am taking this as a sign to once again change my gender presentation and start actually dressing femme and not just androgynous. Now I only have to learn about fashion and maybe then I'll be a bit happier

I've always wondered why people were so ready to convert. Like, if I was some ancient Roman and some guy came up to me offering a new god that's even better than the old ones and much easier to worship, I wouldn't just immediately fall for it. It just seems like a scam.

It's not this one, is it?

My favorite memory of the two Pathfinder games, and I mean this unironically, is doing that infamous quest in Kingmaker right near the start where you have to fight swarms. Level 1 combat against enemies immune to weapon damage – you have to actually consider your options and possibly accept turning down the difficulty. That interplay of character options and enemy immunities is, in my opinion, the core gameplay of CRPGs.

Anthropology has a lot to answer for. Back in the 90s, a transphobe named Serena Nanda turned the gaze of the university onto the issue of gender in India and we are still living with the consequences. With the power of imperial knowledge-making behind her, she has laid down the dogma that only (educated, middle-class, white) Westerners claim to be trans women while those Indians we call hijra are actually a third gender. All the cis academics since agree with her and even the Indian courts cite her, so it must be true, right? So if you see photos of a protest with signs like "Hijras are women" or Indian trans women saying that they're trans women, you can rest assured that's that just our malign colonial influence. The exotic truth, on the other hand, is safely preserved in the centers of power of the Anglophone world thanks to the daily labor of cis academics everywhere – preserved from the colonial force of white trans women who threaten to extend their reach everywhere.

Bluesky is almost acceptable in terms of transphobia, but they should remove the part where you're put on a new list of evil trans women every day

I'm feeling very depressed this evening and I genuinely cannot tell whether it is because of dysphoria or because I lost at some meaningless video game

I miss him. We could all do with some more hatred for mainstream popular culture. Otherwise, what's even the point of being a communist?

If I had some time, I'd try and find out where our "common sense" notions of art come from. Like art being subjective, which is taken to mean that it is something like a kaleidoscope where no two people can be sure to see the same thing in it and every statement about it is just based on fleeting, un-shareable impressions. Obviously that's nonsense, but if you try debating people on the internet over whether something is well-written or if it negotiates a certain theme, they bring out clichés like this. Or the idea that art is produced by an individual in a semi-mystic, almost unconscious act which broods no further analysis or introspection – though just as often you see this as a strawman attributed to an author's opponents. In any case, I assure you that no notable Romantic ever believed this and that the concept of "genius" has never meant this in any serious author. These are just common sense clichés that come from nowhere and are seemingly everywhere.

I was about to say that this account cannot be real, it's obviously fake for hitting so many stereotypes and controversies at once, and then I saw that she's posting videos and everything. Sometimes reality is crueler than our imagination.

The Matrix chat is already going so strong that Element is unable to display all new messages after a few hours lol

Here's a kind of sweet and sour tofu that's easy and I find tasty

Someone I followed on Twitter once joked about starting the "Transsexual Review of Books" and I keep thinking that should be a real thing so that the idea of trans literature could become institutionalized (and so we no longer have to search in the most desperate places for any intelligent discussion, obviously).

I hate you for showing this to me

The idea of "chat rooms" is strange and new to me, personally, but I'm trying it out now.

Yeah, Malcolm Harris is correct that both of these "sides" are terribly unconvincing and unhelpful, while Marxism provides resources for thinking about art as a commodity and as something that resists commodification (dialectics!). I just think that one could press Lorentzen harder on the disparity between the ideals he espouses and his lack of literary and theoretical sophistication.

This is maybe a bit inside baseball, but Christian Lorentzen's review essay about some recent sociological books about literature production is upsetting me. This is because he's aiming at the right issue, which is that these books follow a reductive, cynical and capitalist theory of literature under the guise of empiricism, but what he puts up against that is just nostalgia for mediocre post-war "intellectuals" and second-rate romanticism. Like, he states that publishers consume literature instead of producing it (because novels apparently just spring fully-formed from the secret source of writers) – how naive is that! And his whole pose of defending intellectualism from the cynical rationality of career academics rings hollow to me when he's putting CIA-funded antisemites on a pedestal while writing a Substack on the side. You can't act like you're defending literature from the vagaries of our times when your political analysis is that blind. Basically, he's a smug git and I never want to hear from him again.

There's a new essay of literary criticism making the rounds. I'm upset about it because I think it's very bad and I don't know what to do about that

Once again Substack provides space and publicity for the meanest kind of Internet bigotry. I don't know why anyone would want their writings to appear next to this trash.

The specific source I'm talking about is incredibly obscure: It's a possible fragment of Callimachus preserved by some grammarian talking about galliambic verse, an ancient meter related to the gallae. Here's an online version; it really doesn't say much. But better known is Catullus 63, a poem in galliambic verse about Attis, the consort of Cybele, and the gallae. (And it really does write "gallae", which I totally forgot about!) If you can stand some literally ancient transphobia, it's a nice read. There's also some interesting playing with grammatical gender in the Latin, even if it's all ultimately written from a reactionary position. It's a testament to transfemininity in Ancient Rome in any case.

Another thing about "galli" is that it's a masculine noun, so it's already insulting on its own. There's at least one attestation of a feminine version, the Greek "gallai", but no one in academia is using it outside of its original source. A real pity.

There's a nice essay by Michelle Tea about her visiting Camp Trans, the counter-festival trans people were putting up against Michfest. Anyway, wait till you find out that the infamous "trans penis" incident that helped to galvanized the whole conflict occurred because a trans man who's also a cop took a shower – you couldn't write this in fiction.

New rule: You don't get to talk about the deleterious impact of Calvinism if you can't explain what "sola gratia" means. We've got to take at least this one word away from the Internet atheists

Incredible. The future. I will pay 10 billion dollars to replace my company with this picture.

I want to complain about HRT dosage and endocrinologists. Back when I took E via pills, I had some okay hormone levels going, but on the order of my new endo I switched to gel. I don't understand why, but it just doesn't work properly and I haven't been feeling right for a long while now. The doctor never really cared of course. I swear they're trained to think of "cross-gender" hormones as some rare poison that's the ultima ratio for the strange patients. Anyway, I'll be getting a new one soon and if they also suck, I'll have to look into getting a better one at the next town over. Why does it have to be that difficult?

12 o'clock is not early. Check your watch

Anyone here like to see Nazis' private communications get leaked? The artist Luke Turner was the target of an antisemitic harassment campaign by DC Miller and Nina Power, and it got to the point where he took them to court and actually won. The evidence from the case was apparently just now made public and Turner has excerpted the best/worst parts of their chats and secret twitter accounts: (content warnings for Nazism, antisemitism, racism, transphobia, ableism, really lots of stuff): https://luketurner.com/Nina_Power/

I think my favorite part is Nina Power writing in private that feminist academia has made her a Nazi while publicly claiming that support for trans people is misogyny. Really laying bare the TERF-to-Nazi pipeline there. On that note, her brave defender Kathleen Stock has reacted to this reveal of her commitment to fascism by reiterating that she has her full support. All in all, it's good to see that the courts sometimes can do the right thing and that another Nazi has gone bankrupt.

There is literally precedent that the president can just order the killing of anyone in the world if it's for "national self-defense". The democrats' attitude of despair just isn't matched by the actions taken by their leaders.

Today I made the mistake of standing wrong for a few hours and now I'm cursed with back pain. Really wishing I weren't accumulating medical conditions like Pokemon

Is it wrong to say that gamma male can get it

Any chance you're on iOS? That's where the bug mostly happens, but no one knows why. I can recommend using next.hexbear.net for now.

Edit: Yeah, I'm also on Firefox. I wonder why it works fine for everyone else.

I find it really mean when the fly is constantly circling and landing on me instead of the amply provided garbage. It's like, are you really saying I'm the biggest piece of trash here?

I experience it on Firefox on KDebian, but that's probably not helpful either

There's a bug on the new version where, basically, buttons don't work that others and I suffer from. Here's a thread with more details. The "Next" interface seems to work, however.

Same for me. Only one page and also, searching for communities and other clickable buttons (like the toggles between posts/comments or local/subscribed) don't work anymore.

I need, like, a shirt saying "I read Torrey Peters before it was cool"

It's a nice addition to the weekly /r/curatedtumblr transmisogyny post

I believe character descriptions became a big thing in the time of physiognomy – when Balzac narrates someone's physical appearance, he wants you to extrapolate the character's personality from that. Physiognomy fell out of fashion and if there is no other motivation to provide a description, like signalling someone's class position or injecting a bit of lyricism, it's simply economical to leave it out. To provide a counter-example, Mary Gaitskill always writes exactly one paragraph of description in her short stories which you can just skip because it's not properly integrated into the story as a whole.

I just got Dragon Age: Inquisition and to be honest, it's been rather frustrating so far. The controls/camera and interface are obviously made for a gamepad and the whole MMO vibe – endless fetch quests in wide, empty spaces; rogue and wizard are the classes that do damage while warriors are supposed to take the heat – is bothering me. And common equipment at level 7 being infinitely better than rare items at level 5 is just depressing. Still, I'm hoping that the story and characters pick up soon.