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Daily Interactive #10
Mar. 18th, 2025 10:07 pmThings don't always work out how they should
A basement
At the dark and shadowed far end, drums and amplifiers and a guitar on a stand. Follow the wire from the amp.
Follow it across the echoing floor til it gets to a power strip.
On the ground next to the power strip an e-bike battery, plugged into a charger, plugged into the strip. On the charger is a red light indicating it's not fully charged.
And the moment you step close to it
the light turns green.A purple diesel locomotive
A train car, double decker
It's only got a few people. A woman is sitting with her head tilted back, eyes closed, earbuds in.
She is not asleep. Not yet at least. That she looks asleep is what matters.
She has not yet bought a ticket. She might not need to.
It worked like this: she would get on the train and promptly close her eyes with her earbuds in before the train could play its announcement that all passengers must have their tickets activated. Then, when the conductor walked by, if the conductor walked by at all, she would take a moment to wake up, fumble for her phone, fumble into the app, take her time entering her password and finding her origin and destination from the list. If she was lucky the conductor would say "take your time" and move on to another passenger, and maybe never come back.
The insides of her eyelids go darker and she falls through the back of her skull. She is back in a b&b out of state with her parents who are just getting used to calling her their daughter. The snow blankets outdoors and a man pours orange juice from a glass pitcher.
"TICKETS" (loudly). She snaps back to the train carriage. The conductor is standing over her. "E-ticket, credit, or cash."
Christ these conductors are insistent.Daily Interactive #8
Mar. 16th, 2025 11:28 amMonty Hall presents you with three doors and asks you to pick one.
DOOR 1
You have selected DOOR 1
Monty Hall opens DOOR 3 and a horse runs out and tramples you to death and you die.DOOR 2
You have selected DOOR 2
Monty Hall opens DOOR 1 and water spills out. A lot of water. You and Monty Hall are floating near the ceiling gasping for breath before the water rises above your nostrils. You survive but your pants are left with a permanent stain that looks like you peed yourself.DOOR 3
You have selected DOOR 3
Monty Hall opens DOOR 2. It's a room.
Go inside?YES
You are now inside the room.
You might not want to leave.NO
You will never know what it's like inside it.Daily Interactive #7
Mar. 15th, 2025 08:22 pm✨MINIATURE FIGHTING GAME✨
👉Click Here to punch me in the face👈
ow
that hurt :(Daily Interactive #6
Mar. 12th, 2025 01:45 pmgo outside
touch yinglets
touch freakin yinglets or somethingDaily Interactive #5
Mar. 11th, 2025 10:25 pmrestroom
dimly lit but clean. one toilet, one window, one sink.
window
mounted high on the wall, suggesting the room is underground. diffuse daylight enters through frosted glass.mirror
the fluorescent tube above the mirror is the only other source of light besides the window. the glass is featureless, recently cleaned or barely touched.sink
automatic faucet, turns on easy, decent water pressuretoilet
nothing particularly remarkabledoor
locked from the inside.unlock it?
it is now unlocked.open it?
the door is now open.exit?
you are exiting the restroom.Daily Interactive #3
Mar. 9th, 2025 08:54 pmJoe many liberals does it take to change a log by bolb?????
None ,
their to busy ????
Their gender 😂😂😂😂😂😂Daily Interactive #2
Mar. 5th, 2025 07:28 pmclick here to boop the snoot
the missiles launch in five seconds
(no subject)
Feb. 13th, 2025 03:30 pmAs an adult I have regained the ability to be scared by museums. This is good because it is part of my un-numbing process.
At some point in childhood it becomes embarrassing to be scared in a museum. And so you begin the process of fixing yourself, studying your fear, exposing its contradictions. You learn to paint. You learn to sculpt. You volunteer in a museum and help to assemble exhibits. You spend a day working with fiberglass and lose maybe half a percent of your lung function, permanently. Years later you come back to the exhibits you remember as a child. Everything is smaller and more hackable. The list of donors on the wall is held together with legos, of all things. More years go by. Life comes at you harder than any museum can. Your hair streaks with gray. You're in a darkened gallery by yourself with no parents, no date, nobody to be embarrassed in front of. A wooden eagle sits atop a medieval pulpit and on the flat carved sides are multiple small church interiors and this is terrifying for reasons you cannot grasp. You look at it for as long as you can stand before fleeing, at a mature walking pace, stepping out into the atrium where the light of the sunset casts down on marble American statues and a fountain and you sit a while.
At some point in childhood it becomes embarrassing to be scared in a museum. And so you begin the process of fixing yourself, studying your fear, exposing its contradictions. You learn to paint. You learn to sculpt. You volunteer in a museum and help to assemble exhibits. You spend a day working with fiberglass and lose maybe half a percent of your lung function, permanently. Years later you come back to the exhibits you remember as a child. Everything is smaller and more hackable. The list of donors on the wall is held together with legos, of all things. More years go by. Life comes at you harder than any museum can. Your hair streaks with gray. You're in a darkened gallery by yourself with no parents, no date, nobody to be embarrassed in front of. A wooden eagle sits atop a medieval pulpit and on the flat carved sides are multiple small church interiors and this is terrifying for reasons you cannot grasp. You look at it for as long as you can stand before fleeing, at a mature walking pace, stepping out into the atrium where the light of the sunset casts down on marble American statues and a fountain and you sit a while.
"Support Trans Kids" and Its Limits
Feb. 10th, 2025 03:59 pmOne of my major frustrations with the slogan "support trans kids" is that it encourages cis adults to only focus on the children who appear to them as legibly trans. These tend to be children with supportive parents, or supportive teachers, or some other adult who gives their transness legitimacy. These children still need support, but they're already receiving a fair amount of support as trans kids go. "Support trans kids" is not so well suited to the forcibly closeted child who smiles through all the misgendering, and doesn't know if *you* are a safe adult to share their secret with, or if you'll just single them out for more punishment. Or the child kept in artificial ignorance who will never have the knowledge to figure out they're trans until they escape their parents' control. Or the child of a liberal family whose parents' support for trans people in the abstract is matched only by their conviction that their own child is not trans. These are all children in desperate need of support, but to the adult ally, "support trans kids" need not apply to the child who merely appears depressed, or withdrawn, or weird, or confused.
The oppression of trans youth is something I believe can only be solved with radical youth empowerment and radical gender autonomy for *everyone*. Support trans kids, yes, but support every kid's right to be trans. Let children wear clothes of the "wrong" gender if they want, and let their reasons for doing so be none of your business. Let them tell you which pronouns to call you, even if it's "just a phase". Learn to resist the urge to tell children who and what they are, and learn to make room for them to tell you.
Make knowledge of transness available to all children, not just the "really trans" ones. Make hormones and puberty blockers a standard part of puberty education, less "here's what's gonna happen to your body", more "here are your options". Let all children have a wide network of trusted adults they can turn to, and let that network include trans adults. Hire us to be your childcare workers, your educators, your babysitter. Reach out to us, because we can't take for granted that we'll be allowed to exist around kids. Supporting trans kids also means supporting trans adults because your child is looking at us to see if they have a future.
A realization I had recently is that I didn't always know I was a girl, but I did always know that I deserved more autonomy than I was getting. I knew that I needed more freedom to choose what clothes I wore, but it was only when I was an adult with the freedom to "dress funny" that I was able to figure out by trial and error that I wanted to wear skirts and dresses, then wear bras and camisoles, then grow breasts to fill them. I didn't know that I was a girl, but I did know that people were too quick to tell me what I am, and that this was making it harder for me know myself.
Throughout my gender journey "trans rights" was less useful to me than the right to be trans. Indeed, "trans rights" was a mixed blessing because even while it showed me there were people ready to support me on the other side, it was just as easily weaponized against me to discourage gender deviance. The cisgender liberal social scene I was in had an unfortunate habit of defining respect for trans people in terms of policing the gender expression of the cis-by-default. Are you wearing a dress in a way that respects real trans women? Maybe you shouldn't wear it at all. The joy you take in describing your mannerisms as feminine is kind of problematic, almost like you're the one forcing gender norms on everything. "Trans rights" as a set of special privileges reserved for the Genuinely Trans, is very easily twisted around to assuage cis comfort, especially if it rests upon the idea that being trans is acceptable because it's rare. Would you still support trans rights if it meant that you'd wake up tomorrow and half the women in the ladies' room had penises? You should.
So yeah. "Support trans kids" is the bare minimum. Listen to kids of all genders and take them seriously. Give them the freedom to practice being weird and cringe without requiring some pre-existing gender minority status to justify it. Listen to trans adults when we talk about the roadblocks we faced as children, and don't just assume that "it was a different time"; many of those roadblocks are still here today, or they've mutated to fit the current political climate. Be skeptical of the feeling that you have all the answers when it comes to gender or children. Support kids. Or get out of the way. Or both.
The oppression of trans youth is something I believe can only be solved with radical youth empowerment and radical gender autonomy for *everyone*. Support trans kids, yes, but support every kid's right to be trans. Let children wear clothes of the "wrong" gender if they want, and let their reasons for doing so be none of your business. Let them tell you which pronouns to call you, even if it's "just a phase". Learn to resist the urge to tell children who and what they are, and learn to make room for them to tell you.
Make knowledge of transness available to all children, not just the "really trans" ones. Make hormones and puberty blockers a standard part of puberty education, less "here's what's gonna happen to your body", more "here are your options". Let all children have a wide network of trusted adults they can turn to, and let that network include trans adults. Hire us to be your childcare workers, your educators, your babysitter. Reach out to us, because we can't take for granted that we'll be allowed to exist around kids. Supporting trans kids also means supporting trans adults because your child is looking at us to see if they have a future.
A realization I had recently is that I didn't always know I was a girl, but I did always know that I deserved more autonomy than I was getting. I knew that I needed more freedom to choose what clothes I wore, but it was only when I was an adult with the freedom to "dress funny" that I was able to figure out by trial and error that I wanted to wear skirts and dresses, then wear bras and camisoles, then grow breasts to fill them. I didn't know that I was a girl, but I did know that people were too quick to tell me what I am, and that this was making it harder for me know myself.
Throughout my gender journey "trans rights" was less useful to me than the right to be trans. Indeed, "trans rights" was a mixed blessing because even while it showed me there were people ready to support me on the other side, it was just as easily weaponized against me to discourage gender deviance. The cisgender liberal social scene I was in had an unfortunate habit of defining respect for trans people in terms of policing the gender expression of the cis-by-default. Are you wearing a dress in a way that respects real trans women? Maybe you shouldn't wear it at all. The joy you take in describing your mannerisms as feminine is kind of problematic, almost like you're the one forcing gender norms on everything. "Trans rights" as a set of special privileges reserved for the Genuinely Trans, is very easily twisted around to assuage cis comfort, especially if it rests upon the idea that being trans is acceptable because it's rare. Would you still support trans rights if it meant that you'd wake up tomorrow and half the women in the ladies' room had penises? You should.
So yeah. "Support trans kids" is the bare minimum. Listen to kids of all genders and take them seriously. Give them the freedom to practice being weird and cringe without requiring some pre-existing gender minority status to justify it. Listen to trans adults when we talk about the roadblocks we faced as children, and don't just assume that "it was a different time"; many of those roadblocks are still here today, or they've mutated to fit the current political climate. Be skeptical of the feeling that you have all the answers when it comes to gender or children. Support kids. Or get out of the way. Or both.
Second post
Nov. 10th, 2024 01:09 pmTrue to my predictions, I did experience a minor hassle getting my first post published. Turns out I never verified my email and Dreamwidth was not happy about that. So then I had to find the old verification email, click the link, get told that the link had expired, ask Dreamwidth to send me a new email, wait for the email to come in, click the verification link in the new email, and then hit the post button.
I'm saying all this not to complain but just to illustrate that every new platform you set up an account on has its own hiccups. I think it's good to sign up for new platforms as the old ones die (like Cohost) or turn evil (like Twitter), the process of signing up for new platforms is a task that we trivialize at our own peril. If we pretend it's easy, then we unnecessarily discourage people who are not techy, or who are facing barriers we don't know about (maybe they only have access to a library computer, maybe they're doing everything through their phone). And then we miss out on the diversity of voices that our online communities *could* be supporting.
Anyways, I'm here. I'm posting. It's less scary than I thought.
I'm saying all this not to complain but just to illustrate that every new platform you set up an account on has its own hiccups. I think it's good to sign up for new platforms as the old ones die (like Cohost) or turn evil (like Twitter), the process of signing up for new platforms is a task that we trivialize at our own peril. If we pretend it's easy, then we unnecessarily discourage people who are not techy, or who are facing barriers we don't know about (maybe they only have access to a library computer, maybe they're doing everything through their phone). And then we miss out on the diversity of voices that our online communities *could* be supporting.
Anyways, I'm here. I'm posting. It's less scary than I thought.
First post
Nov. 10th, 2024 01:04 pmThere are a lot of good reasons to not get too invested in making a first post perfect, or even good.
For one thing, there's the ever-present worry that the platform won't work the way you expect it to. You press the "post" button, but you were supposed to know that "post" actually means "delete" my post, and now you have several paragraphs down the drain. Or you write a post that looks good but immediately reads extremely bad once it's uploaded because of evil internet psychological magic. I don't know.
This is my first ever post on Dreamwidth, a platform I've never posted on before, and barely even know how to browse on. But I'm interested in learning.
And now I will hit the "post" button and hope that it doesn't destroy the world
For one thing, there's the ever-present worry that the platform won't work the way you expect it to. You press the "post" button, but you were supposed to know that "post" actually means "delete" my post, and now you have several paragraphs down the drain. Or you write a post that looks good but immediately reads extremely bad once it's uploaded because of evil internet psychological magic. I don't know.
This is my first ever post on Dreamwidth, a platform I've never posted on before, and barely even know how to browse on. But I'm interested in learning.
And now I will hit the "post" button and hope that it doesn't destroy the world
