Feels good to flex my pixelart skills inbetween all the technical stuff.
yknow, i used to be vers. a vers bottom, even. sure, i'd flip fuck every once in a while *crowd raucously cheers and claps* -- thank you, yeah, thanks -- but the catcher's mitt was my home turf, know what i mean ? that's where the magic happened. but nowadays -- now that, yknow, nobody wants to work anymore -- i happen to be a vers top. that's how the cookie crumbles, folks. i tried to take it slow, changed my grindr profile to Vers, but yknow what happens when you tell people, when you put it out there to, yknow, these puppygirls and catboys and all them, that you're versatile, you say you swing both ways, and all they hear is Top. they say there's a top shortage, right ? *crowd boos and sneers* that's right. so i don't even bother anymore. what they don't tell you, alright -- what they don't teach you these days is that it takes some real vulnerability to be the top. yeah, that's right. when you're a bottom, you think, yknow, this is as vulnerable as it gets, right? to have someone inside of me ? *crowd erupts with laughter* but through that same mechanism, the bottom experiences desire internally, that's the secret. and for the top, it's external-- the top has to extend desire, has to make desire known -- to reach out there, hands exposed to the void between hearts, and say: i want you *crowd gasps, shuffles nervously in their seats* and that's it, folks. that's all she wrote. tops- topping, from that precipice, is the endless enumeration of ways to want. and that's why nobody wants to do it anymore.
nothin' quite like how a dog loves
let dead dogs lie - silas denver melvin // red dog - elizabeth frink // how to be a dog - andrew kane // domestication syndrome - dhole b // no origin found // for your own good - leah horlick // pleasure - beth cavener // it will come back - hozier // i am a dog. i have blood all over my teeth. - uhode // same poem as directly previous
i am totally going to come across as a boomer in this post but as an engineer it's common sense to not build systems with a single point of failure. and i'm starting to realize that our usage of the smart phone is exactly that. a single point of failure. the calling/texting is the implied function of the smartphone, which is fine. that's what it's built for. but nowadays we don't think to keep a physical map or atlas or gps unit in our car because our phone has google maps. we don't keep address books anymore because it's all stored in our contacts. i serve customers who no longer carry a wallet/physical card because it's all on their phone. this is literally a single point of failure. if you lose or break your phone when you are in a foreign place you are fucking screwed. maybe you're still screwed even in your home town because so many people have become accustomed to using a smart phone to take them anywhere.
the more exclusive functions I add to my phone the harder it is to not use it. a single point of failure, a single vulnerability point (how many services are you signed into, how much data on you and your friends/family/colleagues is stored on it, how many aspects of your identity are vulnerable to being stolen in one go), a mix of everything personal and professional and private and public.
the three things I most want to do to limit this are:
- phone-replacement EDC (map, compass, calculator, dumb phone, notebook etc.)
- dedicated devices (communicator, music player, navigator, digital multitool (think qr scanner, calculator etc.))
- limit number of online services and provide reliable contact points
the first and last are easy to do. the middle one is more of a challenge
eventually you realize you don’t want to die. you just don’t want to live the life you’re living. and slowly you try to create a life you want to live. just gotta start there.
things i live by:
- if a thing seems really obvious and you dont know why it hasnt been tried please google it or ask. there is probably a reason.
- reddit is a godsend use it for everything.
- "no this old thing is really cringey/embarrassing i dont need it let me just delete it.." BABY GIRL NO THATS THE DEVIL TALKING YOU WILL WANT THAT LATER
- "i dont need to write it out! my mem-" shut up. your memory is evil and hates you. write it down.
- do NOT use the more "user-friendly" options where they take out some "unnecessary" choices that "just arent needed." they want you dependent. scrape through dirt and mud you need the skills [this does not apply to accommodations or games.]
- piracy is NOT bad. hacking consoles/apple products is NOT bad.
- no publicly traded companies is your friend. they can not be good in any situation they are inherently fucking evil. i can NOT emphasize how much publicly traded companies are the devil.
- similarly: if a company is doing something shockingly good look up if they're publicly traded and if they are look up what the catch is.
- GOOGLE IT. LOOK UP TUTORIALS. THIS IS HOW YOU GROW AND LEARN
- before you buy anything important look up "[product + company] drama/controversy/issues". if its really important do it on google and then like three search alternatives. also check reviews
- double check EVERYTHING and ANYTHING you hear, ESPECIALLY if it seems too good to be true.
- ASK QUESTIONS!! FUCKING ASK
- reach OUT!! meet NEW PEOPLE!!! I DONT CARE IF ITS SCARY YOU HAVE TO TRY
- go outside and be in the sun. this will do wonders i promise.
- Most anti-virus software is unnecessary and most free options are likely to end up being harmful. You can use it but I personally think it’s a scam, windows default firewall is good enough already.
- r/piracy has a compendium of good sites to go to for pirating stuff. Still recommend using a VPN, plus a Virtual Machine if you want to be extra safe.
- Check files and links with virustotal to easily scan them in your browser. Helps catch malicious files that other options might not. You can also use Polyswarm, Metadefender, or other options.
- Avoid using the same password for everything. A password manager with syncing to your phone like with Firefox is super useful as well. It offers auto generated passwords that would be super hard to crack, but they can be hard to remember. Best practice is to have passwords that are long but are ones you’ll actually be able to recall.
- Support Wikipedia and the internet archive if you can, the world would be a worse place without them.
- Theres free alternatives to most high end software, such as Photopea, which is a surprisingly decent Photoshop alternative that runs in the browser.
i’m working on a play about 65-year-old lesbians, and my dramaturg is an older gay man who has been helping me with historical context and research, and also just in general giving me advice based on his own personal experiences.
fav thing he told me so far, said with a lot of love: “dyke drama was specific. it was always so specific. it was precise and narrowed and pointed. and also so dumb.”
also spoke to an older lesbian professor. i was asking her all these questions about marches and protests and summits and infighting and rallies and “what was it like what did this mean to you what was it like to experience that?”
and she kinda stared at me for a bit and said, “you know, it was a lot. and it was big and it did feel revolutionary. but also at that time i was mainly focused on getting my heart broken in a bar.”
and like. yeah.
another thing my dramaturg told me, from the perspective of a gay man who lived through the 80’s, was that whenever a young gay person asks him what the dating and play scene used to be like, he answers:
“we went to rallies and funerals.”
our persistence in our continued existence is big and scary and revolutionary, and the grief stretches on and the losses hit hard.
and because of that, i think it’s important to remember the dumb drama, and the first loves, and the first heartbreaks over beer. i think it’s important to go to rallies and vigils, and also dive bars and game nights.
it’s all so big and so small.
Couple of evolution ideas.
I'd like more old pokemon to evolve again.
Couldn't decide on the design between Sunbuddy on its own, or with its Sunkern buds. I like both.
Anonymous asked:
thots on astrology? related, thoughts on mbti?
k i like that you guys just pop in my inbox from time to time and invite me to run my mouth about topics and concepts. like truly what else is this website for.
anyway astrology (& sorry, most of what i know here pertains specifically to europe in the middle ages onward) is genuinely such a bizarro historical case of a science whose core epistemological presupposition (a geocentrist and specifically anthropocentrist cosmology) has completely fallen out of favour in both popular and professional discourse, and i don't think most people appreciate how weird it is for astrology to continue existing with this degree of popular and mainstream participation lol. like most fringe science actually bothers to have some semblence of its own reactionary epistemology to fall back on; astrology just doesn't seem to care. it would be like if the medical guilds fully endorsed the position that blood is circulated in the human body by the heart, but then also recommended as treatments for clotting disorders medical practices that only make sense on the supposition that the liver is the origin of all blood and is continuously creating more of it. like no other science that i can think of tries to have it both ways to the extent astrology does. like, one reason phrenology and eugenics are bad comparison points here is because they're very much copacetic with post-enlightenment naturalism and evolutionary transpositions in the social sciences. astrology, like, intellectually is not and yet here it is anyway. ideology innit.
anyhow i assume the reason you asked about this in conjunction with mbti is because today's astrology is largely purporting to provide psychological analysis and is therefore more similar to a system like mbti than to the historical use of star-reading as a predictive science. obviously both astrology and mbti are deeply reactionary in this respect and belong to a larger trend toward attempting to categorise, measure, and taxonomise the psyche, tho an important difference here is that mbti has hereditarian elements, which no form of astrology that i know of does. i think astrology's shift in the personal-psychological direction has to do with a few different factors, including medical astrological practice (orthodox in the european middle ages, then varying degrees of heterodox from the early modern period onward) and self-help movements in the 20th century.
but in any case it, mbti, and similar attempts at psychometry are, like, staggeringly essentialist in conception and practice, and i do think their current popularity reflects some deeply reactionary tendencies amongst people who often (not always) consider themselves otherwise progressive or leftist. it's honestly kind of worrisome how many people will jump on a project that explicitly aims to define static and immutable human 'types' as long as it's dressed in quasi-spiritual or psy-scientific terminology. like i do think we all need to pause and think about the ideological ends and consequences of how we talk about each other and our bodies, minds, and birth circumstances 😵💫
#to julia#ignore the astrology part but like#about the last talk we had regarding mbti#this post explains well what i meant about my problems w categorization#especially when talking about neurodivergent folk#but didnt evolve at that talk bc i had to do smtg or whatever#the problems go even deeper but dont matter as your not that interested and neither am i anymore and we dont wanna talk boring stuff
“As a child I paid very little attention to authors’ names; they were irrelevant; I did not believe in authors. To be perfectly candid, this is still true. I do not believe in authors. A book exists, it’s there. The author isn’t there — some grown-up you never met — may even be dead. The book is what is real. You read it, you and it form a relationship, perhaps a trivial one, perhaps a deep and lasting one. As you read it word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and reread, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul. Where, in all this, does the author come in? Like the God of the eighteenth-century deists, only at the beginning. Long ago, before you and the book met each other. The author’s work is done, complete; the ongoing work, the present act of creation, is a collaboration by the words that stand on the page and the eyes that read them.”
- Ursula K. Le Guin, from “Books Remembered,” Children’s Book Council Calendar xxxvi:2 (November 1977)
