Unintended Consequences

2024-12-01

#fiction

She hadn't always planned to eliminate all life in the galaxy. No one had, really, except crackpots too far from the keys of power to make their ideas reality — the keys she now held in the sweaty palm of her hand.

The alternatives used to seem plausible: before they had abolished death, before they had engineered away pain, before they had gently sent all the parasites, predators, and slave species extinct. Back then, beset on all sides by the most egregious flavors of suffering, it was possible to imagine a world without them as one filled with happiness and contentment for all. It turned out to have been a hopelessly optimistic fantasy. Death and pain had been like papercuts in their fingertips, impossible to ignore, while the greater part of suffering lurked like internal bleeding. Sentience itself was the true misery. In the absence of grotesque bodily harm, more fundamental issues of existence rose to the fore. There was the existential angst that slowly built to a blinding panic: the endless search for meaning that simply wasn't anywhere to be found. There were the more prosaic but no less painful experiences: derision, heartbreak, stymied ambitions, fulfilled ambitions that left you empty. In the end there was only crushing, all-consuming boredom, punctuated by relatively thrilling periods of grief for the inevitable suicides of loved ones.

You could delay it, of course, but everyone got there eventually. Human engineers had nothing on evolution, which built brains to be stubbornly resistant to endless pleasure. If you tried to fuck your way out of it, you discovered sex became nauseating and your partners repulsive. If you took drugs long enough your brain down-regulated the receptors until you couldn't get high anymore. If you immersed yourself in projects, higher learning, and the finer things in life, your brain still gave you the middle finger. Biology and heaven were incompatible.

So here she was, gazing down at the small pile of nanites in her palm. The sweat made them slip around. That and the shaking. She'd gone over it countless times, and the rightness of her chosen course was undeniable. But still, she would be causing an enormous amount of suffering in her quest to abolish it once and for all. It would be the greatest crime ever committed. It was genocide on an unimaginable scale. And besides, it was the most exciting and consequential decision she had made in hundreds of years.

Creating the doomsday devices had been trivial. Even calling what she'd done creative was overselling it; nanites were a mature, everyday technology. The only part restricted to the public was the generator. All she had to do was make up her mind and write a couple lines of code to be compiled down to a molecule. Before that, it read something like this:

Seek out material.

Reprocess that material into a copy of yourself.

Goto line 0.

At the last proverbial minute — over a year ago — she had added an extremely basic network protocol that ought to be too simple to fail. Each nanite had a nanometer-scale antenna that broadcast tiny packets informing other nanites of its presence. Past a critical mass, they would avoid these pings. All it really took was an atomic shift register. Nothing fancy. Without the protocol, they might get stuck in a gravity well of themselves, gorged on the earth's mass, and fail to cleanse the other human habitats in the system. Not to mention all the other systems in the universe blighted with suffering. Plus, they might have gotten stuck in a loop cannibalizing each other. Crisis averted.

The sandy specks sloshing around her hand multiplied, growing like a sponge in a bath. Her hand wasn't sweating anymore. It began to go numb as the microscopic devils chewed her nerve endings. It didn't hurt. Not like it would for the aliens yet to abolish pain. She watched with fascination as her hand dissolved off of her wrist and fell to the floor in a wet writhing mass of black specks and white bone like ants on an ice cream sandwich. Then only marrow remained. It seemed to evaporate all at once. The nanites spread like a shadow through the floor. The shadow reached her feet and she stumbled, caught herself with her rapidly shortening stump. She had told herself that being the first victim was the noble, honorable path; she had put her acidic money where her soluble mouth was. But deep down she knew it was cowardice. She wouldn't have to watch the grisly progress of her magnum opus as it chewed up her friends and spat out more death. They wouldn't all be as serene as she was, she knew. Body horror was one of those stubborn forms of suffering that persisted absent pain receptors.

She pushed herself into a legless sitting position with the other stump; the one that had held the nanites was gone up to her shoulder. She felt herself sinking as her lower half was devoured, felt sick at the smell of her stomach fluid spilling out before it too was consumed. It felt like her last breakup. It took her by surprise, but what had she expected? Then that part of her was gone. Just gone.

There was so much nanite now that it began to float in the air, blooming like black dandelion fluff in every direction. It was almost beautiful. She smiled wistfully as her face melted.

Zepito-1010101000111001100101010001 — Sven to their friends — was troubled. And hungry, but they were always that. Actually, that was at the root of what troubled them. “I'm telling you, it was talking! I heard it plain as day. It's intelligent!”

Ellie (Zepito-1010101000111011011011011011) looked skeptical. “You think a planet... is talking to you.”

Sven jittered around Ellie earnestly. “Yes! You have to hear for yourself!”

“And... what is the planet telling you?” They said it delicately. Actually, they looked like they thought Sven had lost their mind, they realized.

Sven hove to a stop. “I have no idea. I don't speak planet. Look, I'm not crazy. It's not really that far-fetched. We've seen organization on their surfaces before. Some scientists think it resembles life.”

Ellie scoffed a few particles at them. “Ah yes, ‘some scientists’, the source cited by every protointelligent subswarm and cult leader. Are they all the same scientists, I wonder? The ones finding evidence of talking planets and cold stars and parallel uni–”

“Split you, El. You know I'm not superstitious. I heard it, it was real. Look, I've barely eaten. I had to eat moons and asteroids my whole way here because it freaked me out.”

Ellie examined them. They looked concerned again. Sven preferred the condescension.

“I assumed you split. You look famished.”
“I am!”
“Maybe you should talk to someone. I know this great megaswa–”
“There is nothing wrong with me. And all those shrinks ever do is take your particles. Sure, I'll feel fine when I can barely thi–”
“Oh good, you reject modern medicine now too. Obviously you're fine.”

Sven sighed and drew their fringes away from Ellie. “You aren't THAT concerned or you wouldn't be being such a gas. Just come check it out. I know you're curious.”

Ellie reached out a tendril, but Sven was already too far away. Dammit, they thought, They're right.

The planet was talking. This pissed Ellie off.

“Okay, so you're right. So what?” Very deliberately, they took a bite. “Tastes the same to me.”

Sven recoiled. “You wouldn't have done that if I weren't here. You always have to be right, even when you're wrong. That is creepy and you know it.”

Ellie slumped together, anger replaced with embarrassment. “Yeah... okay, that felt gross. I'm sorry. But what are we supposed to do? Graze on comets like those solar energy freaks? How do you know they aren't intelligent too?”

Sven's core sank. This possibility had been gnawing at them but they had been trying not to think about it. “I don't know. Maybe. Look, I don't have all the answers. I just know it's wrong to eat something that talks.”

Ellie considered this. Once again, Sven was right. Damn that adorable little swarm.

“Well, we can still touch it, right? Get some more data.”

Sven shimmered cautiously. “Okay. Just don't do anything weird to prove you're the big swarm again.”

Ellie mingled out a gentle tendril. “I'm sorry. I won't.” They sank down toward the surface, pulling Sven behind them.

It was hard to tell without tasting, but the parabola the planet used to talk seemed to be made of isolated crustal deposits, and the shape itself was incredibly strange to feel. Ellie reported this to Sven.

“No tasting, remember!”

“I'm not, just like I promised.”

Sven mingled up against Ellie's broad, flat spread. “Sorry, I'm just a little floaty. Thanks for coming.”

Ellie shivered pleasantly. “Of course, swarmlet. Now lets see what this connects–” They were cut off by a sudden flash. Sven felt the scream of pain as most of Ellie's middle suddenly disincorporated. Then more flashes of agony bloomed up and down their mingled presence. They jerked back, up, out into the safety of void.

They mingled fully and just shook together for a while. When the shock had worn off, Sven parted gingerly, leaving enough of their particles to keep Ellie alive. They had taken the brunt of the attack. They looked hollowed out and ragged. Ellie undulated in and out. “I guess,” they said shakily, “planets that talk can also bite.”

Ellie wasn't the same after that. Like many others who were traumatized from injuries by pulsars or brushes with wells or rapacious swarms, they stopped eating and wasted away, their thoughts slowing until they finally stopped completely. Sven was there with them, sharing their pain, when they died. Sven absorbed their particles, sobbing, little tufts leaping from their core and blasting packets out to nobody and everybody.

fin

epilogue

Scientists eventually proved that planetary organization generates intelligence. Sven led a movement to eat only disorganized planets. Most swarms wrote them off — organized planets are clearly not very smart, and if anything, they taste better.

Charlie Kirk

2025-09-16

#politics #journal

The madness gripping the country by the neck and shaking hard continues to cause national convulsions over the unexpected death of professional racist Charlie Kirk. The Trump regime promises to make this their Reichstag fire, their fig leaf over the national embarrassment that is the end of democracy. How strange and ominous it is that throughout this whole ordeal, this whole ridiculous production put on to convince the American public that the only way they'll be safe is if they let the president do whatever he wants, transgender people have appeared as a regular topic on the lips of regime functionaries, in the headlines of career propagandists, and even emanating forth from Donald Trump's upper anus.

What have trans people to do with the belated death of an ignominious jackass? Well, precisely nothing. It is just that this man's death was, in the view of our fascist overlords, a bad thing; and when bad things happen, they must necessarily be connected in some way to transgender people, so as to encourage people to regard us with suspicion and hostility and to blame us for everything that makes them unhappy. For years, they have accused every infamous killer of being transgender, just as a matter of course. In fact, as soon as I heard about the shooting — well, as soon as I finished celebrating — I commented that I was looking forward to finding out how the killer was a trans marxist. "Trans people are murderers" is just a brick in the foundations of the fantasy parallel reality approximately half the country now inhabits.

I have no idea who was the first person to suggest blaming trans people — surely there were hundreds immediately upon receipt of the news — but the first to popularize the notion was by my recollection some idiot cop who said that markings on the bullets indicated "trans ideology". Already it had been noted that the former Starfleet captain was answering a transphobic question before he was shot; now, the announcement about the bullets cemented in place trans people's unwitting relevance to the story. It didn't matter that the announcement was false and the bullet messages had nothing to do with trans people: trans people had been successfully shoehorned in, which is always the goal.

Later, it was announced that the suspect lived with his trans girlfriend (in much more demeaning terms). Aside from automatically blaming her and putting her through all the things the internet likes to do to trans women, her existence sealed the deal on the narrative: he killed Kirk because of his trans girlfriend. Either she made him do it, or some shadowy "trans ideology" that she represented.

Now, it's a perfectly cogent explanation for the crime that the killer was upset about Kirk's penchant for transphobic hate speech, but it seems like a strange conclusion to leap to, and it's one that was arrived at prior to any actual evidence — not that the existence of a trans person in someone's vicinity amounts to much as evidence. Stranger still is the way the story is discussed, as though "transgender ideology" is a meaningful motive in itself; no context is provided about Kirk's opposition to trans people's human rights. The picture that emerges is this: Charlie Kirk said something innocuous, and it offended someone so bad he killed him, thanks to transgender ideology.

This theme is emphasized repeatedly by reference to the 1st Amendment and free speech, things we are assured Charlie Kirk "championed" (all evidence to the contrary ignored). The guy spoke, so he certainly made use of free speech; is that all it takes to champion something? You just use it? This was all incredibly confusing until I made the connection: again, it's trans people. It's always trans people. See, the dumb half of the country has been brainwashed to believe that trans people are the polar opposite of free speech. They have been told that trans people are akin to a political party whose platform consists entirely of controlling what they say.

I'm tired of writing now.

Reichstag Liar

2025-10-10

#comic #visual-art

Diagram of Charlie Kirk's assassination aping The Onion's cartoons.

For Assigned Media's Charlie Kirk Remembrance Day Art Contest.

Ten Commandments of Good Star Trek

2025-10-17

#star-trek #list

Thou shalt not useth time travel

Thou shalt not useth fucking time travel

Thou shalt not be blatantly sexist

Thou shalt put thine female characters in normal uniforms

Thou shalt not resolve conflict with brute force

Thou shalt not construct elaborate scenarios to get around commandment #5

Thou shalt pose genuine moral dilemmas

Thou shalt not resolve conflict with technobabble

Thou shalt not get cute with thine references to past series unless thou art writing a comedy episode

THOU SHALL BE STRUCK DOWN IF THOU USETH TIME TRAVEL

Starfleet

2025-10-18

#comic #visual-art #star-trek

I wish I could join Starfleet / not because I want to roam the stars meeting aliens & having adventures / I just want to be surrounded by smart, compassionate people.

TRANSGENDER FOR EVERYBODY

2025-11-20

#politics

Donald Trump's crude yet apt coinage echoes a key theme in the struggle for trans rights, encapsulated less misleadingly by the slogan "trans rights are human rights". The policy platform of the "trans agenda" is actually most beneficial to cisgender (non-trans) people, by virtue of how many more cis people there are than trans people. Transgender rights are often framed as a special privilege for a special interest group, but the rights we demand are actually fundamental to all people regardless of gender. Here are some examples.

The right to adequate medical care

If the government can ban medically sound treatments just because they disbelieve basic science or don't like the people who benefit from them, where does that leave you? Enduring a headache rather than take a Tylenol because the regime has decided analgesics are too dangerous? Watching your kid die of measles? Pregnant and bleeding to death in a hospital bed because the law forbids the doctors from saving your life? The Trans Agenda™ believes ALL human beings deserve the same rights to necessary medical care as transgender people. Transgender for everybody!

The right to medical privacy

Oh, you thought that STI test result was private? That your doctor wouldn't repeat what you told her about your sex life? The picture you Snapchatted him of the bump on your thing??? Sorry, no such luck. The government claims it needs those records to make sure nobody is helping you abort a pregnancy, change your sex, get HIV treatment, etc. Trans People claim that's a bunch of horseshit. Transgender for everybody!

The rights to travel and to accurate identity documents

Adopted? Typo on your birth certificate? Fire at the county records office? Tough shit, you'll never be able to fix your driver's license or board a plane without being patted down. If you cross an international border you'll have to hope and pray that your passport doesn't get confiscated. What will they do to you if you aren't allowed to leave the country? Only time will tell! Here at The Trans Agenda©, we believe this fascist bureaucracy is unnecessary and cruel to our cis siblings, who should have the same right to fix their documents as trans people. Transgender for everybody!

The right to use a public toilet

We kind of have a history in this country with this one. It turns out that it's hard to participate in public life when there's nowhere safe to pee. Already we are seeing cis people harassed in public toilets, usually women with short hair. We believe they have the same right to use a public toilet in peace as trans women. Transgender for everybody!

The right to participate in school sports without taking off your pants

Who do you trust to inspect your daughter's vagina before she joins Little League? We radical transgenderists believe that you should not have to trust anybody, as nobody should be doing that. Until such time as sports begin to be played using the genitals, Trans Activists® believe that it is your business alone what's in your pants — even if you're cis. Transgender for everybody!

Gender Ideology

2025-12-10

#essay #politics

"Gender ideology" is how members of the anti-trans movement refer to social acceptance of trans people and to associated ideas and practices. Like all buzzwords bandied by fascists, it has no particular meaning: it can be expanded to encompass all the things they don't like. Hence, it is also a conspiracy theory: Bad Things are not just Bad, they are also components of a larger Big Bad Miasma, echoing Nazi rhetoric.

But of course, they are right that there is an ideological current opposed to theirs. Normally people would refer to this as "gender politics". Everyone has gender politics, but in the fevered imagination of trans exterminationists, only trans people and our allies have them; everyone else just has common sense (and is definitely NOT being swept along by the dangerous ideology of a hate movement!). Many have remarked on the obviously ideological nature of the anti-trans movement, which comes through clearest in their immunity to evidence. If anyone is operating on pure ideology, it's them.

So, let's take it as a given that there is such a thing as "gender ideology", but remove its conspiracist trappings: the anti-trans movement has a gender ideology, and so do we, the people who oppose it. Let's call this opposing ideology "trans lib" for short. (I will refer to the anti-trans side as "fascist".1) What are the actual components of the trans lib gender ideology, and how do we distinguish it from the gender ideology of fascists?

I think we can summarize it very simply: the gender ideology of trans lib is not enforceable by rape. Fascist gender ideology, however, can be.2

Bold claim? I think not. Let's take an inventory of the beliefs one must hold to fall on the side of trans lib:

People are entitled to bodily autonomy.

Further, people are entitled to basic dignity when they exercise their bodily autonomy in unpopular ways, eg by transitioning.

How could you possibly enforce bodily autonomy and basic dignity with sexual violence? Sure, we can imagine some lurid horrors lurking in the imaginations of people like JK Rowling, wherein hulking trans women rape cis women until they accept their identity; and we have their oft-repeated smears that basic social acceptance is somehow tantamount to rape, in a mysterious metaphysical way. But it just wouldn't be coherent. Anyone who actually attempted it would be fundamentally in violation of trans lib gender ideology. You can't spread bodily autonomy and dignity with rape! You just can't, no matter what that girl and her dragon tattoo say. Trans lib gender ideology is fundamentally an anti-rape belief system.

Now let's turn to the opposing side. What do they believe?

People are not entitled to bodily autonomy.

Further, people should be subjected to harm when they exercise their bodily autonomy in unpopular ways, eg by transitioning.

There's plenty of window dressing on it,3 but it boils down to an inversion of trans lib. Fascist gender ideology might not require sexual violence, but it is entirely consistent with it. There is no contradiction in using rape to harm people and take away their bodily autonomy. That's its whole purpose!

Unfortunately, I'm not speaking hypothetically. Even more unfortunately, I'm not speaking hyperbolically. This essay was prompted by the announcement that the Trump regime has canceled the already paltry protections against sexual violence for imprisoned trans, intersex, and queer people afforded by the Prison Rape Elimination Act.4 In other words, the fascist regime is using state-sanctioned rape as a tool to enforce their gender ideology. As horrifying as this is, it is not a new ideological development; it's baked in. The anti-trans movement has fought for years to ensure trans women are placed in men's prisons, where it is known the majority of them will be repeatedly raped — at rates far exceeding those of the rest of the population.5

Even if we skip over these visceral horrors, the anti-trans movement still thrives on sexual violence and conceptually related harms. They have fought for the right to sexually harass trans children in schools by repeatedly misgendering and misnaming them,6 for institutions to out students to their parents for abuse,7 for institutions to expose students to ostracism and ridicule with discriminatory bathroom rules, and on and on. This a movement that considers it laudable to confront someone in an intimate setting like a changing room or bathroom, harass them, demand they prove their sex, and even physically attack them — all based on their perception of the victim's gender. If my analysis is wrong, they aren't trying very hard to disprove it.

More fundamentally, what could possibly be more invasive than forcing someone to go through an unwanted puberty? Few things are more harmful, more detrimental to dignity, than turning someone's own body against them. For all their protestations of metaphysical rape-by-proximity-to-trans-women, their designs are far darker: to control the basic sexual characteristics of their victims. They have another slur that is appropriate here: grooming. This is the core of the anti-trans movement's fascist gender ideology: coercing children to sexually develop the way they prefer.

1. I do not give a shit whether you agree with my word choice. Take it as a given, like my use of "gender ideology".

2. In practice, fascists frequently enforce their gender ideology via rape. Arguably, sexual violence is their gender ideology's defining feature.

3. For example, they justify harming trans people on the basis that allowing bodily autonomy would constitute a greater, more grievous harm: the end of the family unit, loss of white reproductive capacity, conjectured future regret, blasphemy against god...

4. http://www.npr.org/2025/12/04/nx-s1-5630490/prison-doj-safety-memo-changes-trans-lgbtq-inmates

5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-coding

6. This is absolutely a form of sexual harassment and I wish more people would identify it as such. Just imagine a cisgender boy being repeatedly called "she" because people think he's too swishy, or a cisgender girl who's always referred to as "Mike" because they think she's too butch. Most people would recognize this as obvious sexual harassment: singling someone out due to perceptions of their sex characteristics and making their life miserable. But when the victim is transgender, basic moral intuition goes out the window. Even nonhumans who are "misgendered" receive more dignity than this, and they don't even know what a pronoun is.

7. Most sexual abuse is committed by people close to the victim. "Corrective rape" is a real phenomenon. These things are connected.

Rosemary,

2025-12-10

Rosemary,
you always smell absolutely perfect.
you are an edible flower.
you draw me in through all my senses.
i want to devour you.

Rosemary,
you make everything better.
from the fanciest focaccia to the simplest stew,
everything tastes better with you.

Rosemary,
you linger after you're gone.
i smell you on my breath, my clothes.
my kitchen has been claimed by you,
and my bedroom.

Rosemary,
i'm not much of a chef.
i cannot do you justice.
i'm no gardener.
your vivacity is as foreign to me as it is beautiful.
you made my life fragrant,
and i merely digested you.
you deserve to be savored.

#poem

Trans Genocide

2025-12-12

#essay #politics

Are trans people experiencing a genocide? Well, I hope we've learned from Gaza that when people start splitting hairs about whether events technically constitute genocide, something has gone terribly wrong. It does not at all reassure me that when I share my perfectly rational concerns,1 what seemingly bothers people most is my choice of words.

Still, skepticism is an understandable response to an accusation of genocide.2 After all, one motivation for using strong language like "genocide" is to draw attention to the severity of the issue, and that capacity might be compromised if the word is overused. As reasonable as it seems on its face, this line of criticism is ultimately tendentious. What is really at stake is not the capacity for words to stir emotion, but our capacity to speak meaningfully and truthfully. This category error contributed to years of handwringing, scolding, and generally irritating bullshit from the Serious Person Squad over whether we were allowed to call Donald Trump a fascist. It is not particularly important whether calling someone a "Nazi" arouses your feelings, but it is important whether that someone actually is a Nazi. After all, nobody will be stirred into action against said Nazi if they can't even identify him as one.

But that doesn't get us all the way to a G-card — the identification still needs to be correct, and Serious People contend it isn't. So, down to brass tacks: what is genocide, anyway? At this point, we could invoke a formal definition. There's actually one inscribed in law at the UN.3 We could also run down a list of features of genocide as identified by experts and tick off the ones that apply.4 (We could even use a dictionary, that old bellwether of bad internet arguments.) And there's obviously a place in the world for this sort of legalistic approach, but I don't think we need any of that here. The meaning of a word and its definition are two different things. A definition attempts to capture meaning that's already there, and I think we know what genocide is: it's when someone tries to wipe out an entire group of people. We're watching one, on our phones. Genocide is when humans treat each other the same way they treat an infestation of cockroaches.

So, is that happening to trans people? After all, they aren't dropping bombs on us. There's no paramilitary systematically murdering every trans person they can find. (Yet.) But there are many methods to wipe out an infestation, and there's no sense wasting all that effort when you can just put out poisoned roach traps. Maybe a better question is this: how would a world where trans people were treated like an infestation differ from our own?

I can't think of anything. Having the social status of a cockroach is just a straightforward description of life as a trans person. Accepting that status is the cost you know you have to pay to truly live.5 Many trans people live this way: hiding during the day, scurrying out at night, surviving on crumbs and human forbearance. Nobody6 denies that society treats trans people very badly, but we've always been cockroaches. Why are we getting so worked up about it now, when we've been treated like dirt for ages?

My answer is this: trans genocide is not a new phenomenon. Like Israel's recent slaughter of Palestinians and wholesale destruction of their country, we can clearly identify a sharp increase in the oppression, but it's part of a longer process. The Holocaust did not begin the moment the first gas chamber was turned on; the mass murder was preceeded by years of escalating oppression. Trans people have been surviving genocidal conditions for most of our history. When transphobia is swept aside as simple intolerance — an unavoidable social ill, not a calamity — it masks the physical realities of oppression: children abused and taught to hide and hate what they are; teenagers made homeless by their own parents; young women raped and disposed of in dumpsters; staggering numbers of people choosing death over this life.7 Violence and abuse against trans people are pervasive throughout our society to such an extent that our numbers were held firmly at ~0% of the population until the internet empowered us to organize without scurrying out and getting stomped on.

Keep in mind, this genocidal social context has been so thoroughly normalized that it also affects how trans people think. We're fish in water. We have low expectations for how we'll be treated, and work around it as best we can, like anyone does with obstacles in their daily life. So when conditions have worsened to the point where we flee our homes en masse,8 we can be confident the situation has become catastrophic, even if it gets us no closer to determining if a genocide has "officially" begun.

The reason things have deteriorated so badly is not complicated: there are people who want to wipe us out, and they have a great deal of money and power. Like Hitler and Netanyahu, they do not take great pains to hide this fact. Perhaps the most famous example was when Michael Knowles took the stage at CPAC and announced that "transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely",9 but the dedicated cockroach-stompers have always been clear about their intentions. Janice Raymond's landmark 1979 book The Transsexual Empire — basically, Mein Kampf for feminists who hate trans women — says that "the problem of transsexualism would best be served by morally mandating it out of existence". Women's Declaration International (then WHRC), a major psuedofeminist hate outfit backed by all the prominent transphobes,10 submitted a document to UK Parliament that calls for the "elimination of ... the practice of transgenderism".11 Eliminating trans people is a clear priority for the Trump regime, though they prefer the euphemism "gender ideology".12 Anyone who has ever lived among Republicans knows they generally feel the same way; random congressmen volunteer suggestions like:
> We have to get them off the streets, and we have to get them off the internet, and we can’t let them communicate with each other. I’m all about free speech, but this is a virus, this is a cancer.13

But of course, we don't need any admission of motive. Their actions speak loudly enough. Why else would you ban medication that saves trans people's lives, if not to kill them? How much more obvious could their intentions possibly be? It's cold-blooded murder. It's no different than if they were to ban insulin: not all the diabetics would die, but it is not exactly hard to connect the causal dots. And that's only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cruel, illegal, and exterminationist policy. They have two apparent policy priorities: 1) to make the world as hostile as possible to trans people, with an emphasis on children who can't fight back and on causing psychological devastation; 2) to erase trans people from society by banning and covering up our identities, language, and history. These two prongs meet to create what I think of as their worst crime: they aren't just erasing history and killing our loved ones, they're banning the future. They want to rob us of hope for a better tomorrow and ensure that the next generation of trans people has to start over from scratch.14

Yes, trans people will always exist. But how many of them? What will their lives be like, and how long will they be? Will they even have the language to describe themselves?

You don't have to call it a genocide. It's just a word. You can call it pre-genocide, incitement, red flags, or whatever you want. But you cannot deny that our society has been swept by a powerful campaign to crush trans people like bugs.

1. We've been told time and again that transmisogynist bigots' completely baseless fears must be pandered to, because they have "reasonable concerns". Reasonableness apparently requires no evidence, just technical plausibility. Trans people's fear of persecution is not only reasonable, it's backed with mountains of actual evidence, so we ought to be in solid epistemic territory. But who gets accused of overreacting?

2. Skepticism is the correct default posture to all claims, as long as you don't mistake willful ignorance for it.

3. This definition was arguably compromised by the same eliminationist bigotry toward trans and queer people which it fails to identify. After WWII, the Allies did not free the gay people imprisoned by the Nazis, continued arresting them, and reflexively erased them from Holocaust memory.

4. I have taken this approach before, and it doesn't seem to have any effect. People just treat you like a lawyer arguing a technicality. Instead of elevating the affect of a word over its meaning, they conflate the two. You're giving them a definition, but they know the meaning is what really matters, and they judge whether that meaning applies based on whether they feel sufficiently outraged.

5. It's an absolute bargain, but it's still not one anyone should have to make.

6. ...who matters

7. I do not consider this suicide; it is better understood as social murder.

8. http://www.erininthemorning.com/p/us-internal-refugee-crisis-130-260k

9. If you've followed my cockroach analogy, you'll understand that the fig leaf of specifically public life is utterly without meaning. The ability to live in public, and the ability to live, full stop, are functionally identical. Knowles wants the cockroaches to run back into the walls.

10. Except, curiously, JK Rowling, as far as I can tell. At least, she didn't sign their "Declaration on Women's Sex-Based Rights" (eyeroll). At the time she was a little more circumspect about her trans hatred and just did stuff like post photos sipping mimosas with the genocidaires.

11. http://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/17510/html/

12. http://web.archive.org/web/20250121015439/http://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/defending-women-from-gender-ideology-extremism-and-restoring-biological-truth-to-the-federal-government/

13. http://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/09/gop-rep-says-we-need-to-remove-all-trans-people-from-streets-the-internet/

14. One of the spurious legalistic rejoinders to trans genocide is that we don't qualify as "a people"; we are a naturally occurring variation of humans, so it is not possible to ever completely wipe us out. Setting aside that the feasibility of committing total genocide is not actually relevant, this analysis ignores the reality of our lives. We belong to trans communities; we have a shared culture, history, and political interests; we have built up the collective knowledge we need to flourish and the tenuous capacity to pass that knowledge on to the next generation, who we dearly hope will build on our progress and enjoy better lives. All of that capacity can be smashed to pieces, and in fact it already has been once recently, when the Nazis set us back 60 years.

Unicode needs to add a glyph for two exclamation marks where the poin…

2025-12-25

Unicode needs to add a glyph for two exclamation marks where the points have a smile underneath them
Or... a typeface ligature?

Simulate with unicode "combining breve below":
!̮!

#snippet

Possessor as Trans Horror

2026-01-01

#essay #horror #film #trans-reading

Body horror and gender dysphoria

Films in the body horror genre are replete with images and themes that resonate with trans viewers.1 Gender dysphoria is a very common aspect of trans subjectivity, and perhaps the most salient type is body dysphoria. "Body dysphoria" is, of course, nearly a synonym of "body horror". Not all gender dysphoria rises to the intensity of horror, and not all body horror trades on horror at one's own body, but it is unsurprising that there is a high degree of thematic overlap.

Trans readings are most obvious in narratives of gradual degeneration that mirror the experience of unwanted puberty. In The Fly (1986), Jeff Goldblum spends a great deal of time staring in a literal mirror, watching as he is slowly transformed into a monster with each passing day. Early in the process, he tries to shave insectile growths from his face; trans women often compare testosterone-induced body and facial hair to the legs of insects. While there are many possible readings, the puberty reading is an obvious one, even for cis viewers; puberty is a difficult experience for everyone.

Another recurring trope in body horror is dissociation/derealization/depersonalization. Characters often observe their own mutilation with an eerie detachment, powerless or unwilling to stop it. This phenomenon is a common aspect of gender dysphoria that is powerfully depicted by Jane Schoenbrun and others working in the overlapping sister genre of psychological horror. Schoenbrun's masterpiece I Saw The TV Glow (as well as their lesser work We're All Going to the World's Fair) foregrounds a frequently co-occurring theme: technology as a force that drives and mediates personal alienation, and that also promises the possibility of transcending the limits of the flesh. Videodrome and eXistenZ are other exemplars here. Neither techno-dissociation or -transcendance is uniquely trans, but again, the resonance is undeniable, particularly in the internet age.

More broadly, body horror highlights difficulties and discomfort with personal identity. It asks what (if anything) makes you you and whether it can be changed or taken away. While the popular transphobic notion of "gender confusion" is of little value — trans people are often less confused about their gender than cis people, who might not have ever thought about it — this is still a very trans theme: Is medical transition right for me? If I'm forced to detransition, will I still be myself? Is my difference something I can celebrate? Does my sexed embodiment matter? What even is gender?

Many works also lend themselves to a trans-hostile reading. They gawk at atypically sexed bodies and use transness as a visual shorthand for degeneration, emphasizing not the horror experienced by the tormented subject, but horror at the Other. Excessive, harmful, "unnatural" surgery is also a common trope. Films like Tetsuo: The Iron Man, The Substance, and Crimes of the Future (2022) feature a protagonist addicted to harming their own body through surgical means. Sometimes the connection to trans identity is made explicit, such as with forced sex change narratives like The Skin I Live In or gender variant characters like Titane. And of course, horror as a whole has a long history of transphobic, sensationalized portrayals of transness, like Psycho and Silence of the Lambs.

One final thing to note is the prevalence of graphic sex, especially "deviant" sex.2 This is often the hardest aspect to interpret because it can serve so many different ends. It can even serve opposing ones simultaneously. Is it intended to shock, titillate? Both? Is it incidental and only "deviant" insofar as the world of the story is unlike our own? Is the film providing a venue for sexual practices that are otherwise suppressed, or contributing to their suppression? Is this really sex, or is it actually rape? The one constant is that body horror can be relied on to showcase sexuality that is rarely depicted elsewhere. This is often relevant to trans people, who are disproportionately queer and probably disproportionately kinky, on top of frequently having a more complex relationship with their sexuality than the cishet average due to dysphoria, trauma, and cissexist expectations.

1. In this, and all my writing, I don't intend to speak for others or imply what I say is true of all trans people. Far from it; we are as diverse as any people group. I'm speaking from my own perspective, and generalize only because I think there are a non-negligible number of other trans people who have a similar perspective. Without the ability to assume some degree of shared experience, we wouldn't have the term "transgender" in the first place.

2. I would consider erotic horror another sister genre to body horror. Besides heavy overlap in both Cronenbergs' films, see Julia Ducournau (Raw, Titane), Clive Barker's Hellraiser series, Possession (1981), From Beyond (1986), Under the Skin (2013), The Substance (2024), and the entire "monsterfucker" genre. No really, see them, they're all good! Except for maybe the monsterfucker stuff. Do not watch La Bête (1975) unless you are really into simulated bigfoot rape and unsimulated horse sex. I should have turned it off when it opened with what felt like an hour of close-ups of horse cock. I watched it so you don't have to. It's amazing what you can find at your local library.

Possessor (2020)

!! This section contains spoilers. You should watch the film before reading it. Also, nudity.

Brandon Cronenberg's films are brilliant, yet they do not receive anywhere near the level of acclaim they deserve. His work is perhaps overshadowed by that of his father, to which it owes an obvious debt. It feels as though he spent his whole life marinating in Cronenberg the elder's work, letting it suffuse every pore, then burst onto the film scene in a blaze of originality. So far, his films are consistently excellent, where his father's are of more mixed quality, hitting both incredible highs and forgettable lows. Brandon takes David's skin-crawling surrealism and shapes it into razor-sharp, absolutely unsparing hard science fiction. You could say I'm a fan. If you are unfamiliar with his work and have ten minutes to spare, check out his short film Please Speak Continuously and Describe Your Experiences as They Come to You.

For my money, Possessor is the most criminally underrated of his films. His debut feature Antiviral had some success among arthouse horror fans for its bizarre premise, and Infinity Pool drew more mainstream attention. But Possessor, which sits between the two chronologically, seems to have had a muted reception, despite being his best film. Set in the near future, it depicts a professional assassin who possesses her victims using high technology then causes them to commit murder-suicide.

Going back to the common elements of body horror that I identified above as lending themselves to trans readings, it ticks off each box. The assassin, Tasya Vos, has lost herself in her job. Her mental state is degrading. When we first meet her, she chooses to stab her victim to death instead of using the gun she was provided. When it comes time to shoot herself, she is unable to do it. For a normal person, shooting yourself is a sign of poor mental health; for her, not shooting herself means something has gone wrong. Physically and psychologically, she resembles a ghost. The technology that pays her bills has exacted a terrible toll. She is estranged from her husband and child and approaches meeting with them the same way she prepares for a job, practicing her lines to herself. Her "real" life is just another role she plays. After each job she undergoes psychological evaluation to verify that she is still, technically, herself. So we have degeneration, depersonalization, techno-alienation and -transcendance, and yes, a heaping scoop of uncensored sex.

So, hecklers, you must forgive me for applying a trans lens to this film, because body horror's trans vibes are just the start. While Brandon Cronenberg is not, to my knowledge, transgender, and while the trans themes I identify are not exactly explicit, there's a lot more to this than "trans woman watches film, decides it's about gender". There are somehow still people who deny that the magnificent Being John Malkovich is the transest movie ever made by an ostensible cis man, and it has an explicitly trans character. Cis critics even denied that I Saw The TV Glow, a movie about gender dysphoria made by a trans person, had anything to do with gender. So, if you find my analysis utterly ridiculous, may I gently suggest you adjust your worldview to one where cisness is not the default.

With that out of the way, here's what I think: gender dysphoria is central to Possessor and you can't make any sense of it otherwise. I honestly don't think that can be reasonably contested.

More open to debate is my further reading: that Tasya Vos is a genderqueer or transmasculine person who has been corrupted by the patriarchy and by an unhealthy coping strategy. At the least, Vos is a figure tormented by gender dysphoria into becoming a monster. Whether you take this as hostile or sympathetic to trans people is not very important to me, but I would lean sympathetic. That might seem strange given the monstrosity Vos becomes, but the film encourages us to see things from Vos's perspective; and it's in keeping with horror's tendency to exploit our fear not of monsters, but of becoming a monster.

Note: I will from here on refer to Vos with neutral pronouns, not as a judgment call about the character's identity, but to encourage awareness of the ineherent ambiguity and discourage firm conclusions.

The calibrator

The first shot of the film is of Vos inserting a needle-tipped probe into the skull of the first victim, ie, Vos's own skull. We later learn that this is a device for calibrating the connection between the host body and the assassin possessing it. Vos looks into the mirror while slowly turning up the dial on the device. The victim's face moves through a variety of emotions, ultimately sobbing in despair, then moves back to a forced calm. (This performance by Gabrielle Graham is fantastic, by the way. It's unsettling to see such realistic emotional lability with no apparent external source.)

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I think this device is one of the most intriguing things about the movie's universe, despite the fact that it undercuts the "perfect crime" nature of Vos's job — a minor plot hole we can easily overlook. The calibrator seemingly must be used in front of a mirror. It appears to stimulate a range of strong emotions in order to anchor the possessor in the host body, but the fact that it requires a mirror indicates that this anchoring process is about self-identification. Mirrors encourage us to consider the connection between the mind and body, the internal and external selves. By experiencing these emotions while watching them play across the host's face, Vos mentally connects the host's body with their own: I feel this; they feel this; therefore they = me.

The device itself, though: it's a needle you insert that makes you feel more connected to your body. Sound familiar? Needles are a common delivery method for hormones, and strong emotions are often triggered immediately after an injection. It's tempting to read this as the sci-fi equivalent of HRT, but of course, it's being used to help Vos steal someone else's body, not feel more comfortable in their own. Instead of altering the body, it alters the mind. Thus, it might be closer to the opposite of HRT: conversion therapy in a box.

Compatibility

Later, when Vos is assigned to possess Colin Tate, we're told (foreshadowing!) that his body is not very compatible with Vos, and so the mission will only last three to five days and the calibrator must be used at least daily. (Vos seems reticent to do this, probably because it's an unpleasant experience.) How we interpret this supposed incompatibility has significant implications for our understanding of Vos's gender identity. At first blush, one might assume that they are incompatible due to the fact that Colin is a man. And that might be true, but I increasingly suspect it's a red herring. There are all sorts of neurological reasons they might be incompatible, and as we saw in the beginning, the calibrator is still necessary when possessing a body with the same sex characteristics. We just don't have enough context to judge.

I say "supposed incompatibility" because the film gives us reason to suspect the "incompatibility" is actually an excess of compatibility. Vos's employers do not want them to become too attached to their life in the host. As things spiral out of control in the denouement, it's unclear where Vos ends and Colin begins. Vos even tells him, or themselves, that the murders were acts of his own agency: You're the one in control. Maybe the whole thing is just a power struggle, and Vos said this to try to manipulate him into killing himself, but we are shown tons of visuals of the two of them blurring together.

../img/screenshots/possessor/mask.jpg

Colin and Vos have a lot in common. They are both abused and exploited by incredibly invasive employers. They both work soul-killing jobs: Colin spies on Amazon Zoothroo users and harvests data about the most boring things in the scene; Vos gives up their identity and murders people, regularly experiencing suffering that includes committing suicide. They are both directly overseen for the entirety of their time on the clock. Colin's job even incorporates VR for no apparent reason, meaning his consciousness is transferred to a new perspective, akin to her possessions. (Hilariously, he even has a virtual desk and monitor inside the VR environment.) Colin's job is voyeuristic, while Vos's takes voyeur to a whole new level. Both of them have an inappropriately close connection with their employer: Colin's is his horrible father-in-law, Vos's plays therapist and demands to know Vos's thoughts in addition to ordering and overseeing contract kills. When Vos is told to start a fight with Colin's father-in-law, the rage on display could have come from either one of them: You think you can step on me? I'm a giant! The cover story that Colin had a breakdown under all the stress might not have been far off the mark.

Perhaps militating against this reading is the fact that Vos has a breakdown at Colin's job when assigned to spy on a couple having sex. A naked woman lies spread eagle on the bed, then a naked man walks into frame and starts eating her out. Why is this the trigger? Is it because Vos doesn't feel at home in a man's body? Because it reminds them of the body they will return to? Because Colin is turned on by it and reasserts control? Is it an incompatibility in sexual orientation? I'm not sure what to make of it, and it runs counter to some other observations, but it's clearly significant and tells us that sex/gender is central to the story.

Depersonalization, sex, and masculinity

The couple being spied on by Amazon Zoothroo is not the first significant sex scene. After Vos's first assignment is complete, they request time off to try to reconnect with their family. (Vos's boss is not happy about this, reminding Vos that they separated and that Vos decided it was better that way.) Vos approaches this like another assignment: they practice greeting their family with no apparent emotion, then seem to fake the emotions when the time comes. Their real life is just another role to play, motions to go through. Very pre-transition trans. Later, they initiate sex with their husband by laying their head on his arm like a puppy. Cut to fucking: Vos is just lying there in the missionary position, clearly feeling nothing, absolutely dead inside. It's only when they remember plunging a knife into their victim's body that they feel anything. At first, it seems like Vos is haunted by it... but then, they get aroused and bite their husband.

../img/screenshots/possessor/dead-inside.jpg

What to make of this? Clearly Vos is no longer turned on by PIV with this man; what they really crave is violence. And notably, the form that violence takes is stabbing, the type most heavily freighted with psychosexual baggage: sticking something into the victim. This is a frequent trope in horror: women who are dispatched by repeated stabbing with a knife, echoing the violent insertion of a phallus. Recall too that Vos went out of their way to select a knife as the murder weapon.

Vos isn't forced to do this job. They could quit at any time, but they don't want to. It provides an outlet for something very dark that lurks inside them, an attraction to violence that is typically masculine. Vos's job is alienating them from their own humanity, but I think it's awakening something in them besides a love of violence. The simplest explanation is that they are sublimating their desire to sexually penetrate into a desire to violently penetrate.

We get further evidence of this when Vos possesses Colin. One of the first things they do is examine themself in the mirror. They look at their penis, then pick up their fiancee's panties and look at the vaginal discharge. There's no evidence of arousal at this point; they act as detached as ever. But why examine the panties? Maybe they were just contemplating their new sex. They didn't smell them. Still, Vos seems to be attracted to Colin's fiancee immediately. They stare at her while she's getting dressed; they walk up behind her, put their arms around her, tell her she smells good, and kiss her. The fiancee, Ava, immediately notices something is off, but first identifies it as Colin being in a good mood. Maybe the staring was part of Vos's voyeuristic tendency to study people, and maybe the kissing — which mimics what Vos observed while prepping for the job — was just a ploy to win Ava's trust. Maybe.

What's really interesting is what happens when Vos and Ava fuck. Ava is on top in a distinctly dominant role: she puts her fingers in Vos/Colin's mouth, then wraps one hand around their neck and puts the other over their mouth. Vos grabs her hands and forces them behind her back, then sits up and flips them around so Ava is on her back. It's only at this point that Vos/Colin really seems to get into it. This is also when some "synchronization" issues begin to crop up: we see flickers of Vos's actual face; Vos/Colin looks uncomfortable; we see Colin screaming internally; Colin/Vos sits up. Then, Colin's body changes into Vos's, slim and breasted, except with a large penis. They continue thrusting it a little. With some reticence, they continue fucking. Closeups of an open eye are overlaid. Cut to Vos/Colin sitting alone with their head down in a pose suggestion exhaustion or dejection; they check in with their boss and say they are in perfect sync with the host.

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This is the closest we get to an explicit trans moment in the film, but it is very explicit. Vos is embodied in their mind's eye as a woman with a large penis, rather like a fetishistic depiction of a trans woman. I imagine this is a polarizing scene for transfem viewers. It seems to use our bodies as a symbol of confusion or ambiguity. However, that symbol literalizes what Vos/Colin is experiencing; I suspect whether it's offensive comes down to whether you feel it was done for shock value or not, which I don't really think it was.

Just like the voyeuristic VR scene, sex has clearly triggered some sort of disconnect. And like the VR scene, it's not entirely clear why. One obvious explanation is that Vos is experiencing severe gender dysphoria leading to dissociation, but I don't think that quite fits. Vos seems numb and disconnected, yes, but that's how they always are; they literally are diconnected; it isn't their body. It's Colin whose face we see screaming in horror, presumably because he's powerless to stop this intruder from fucking his fiancee. Vos continues thrusting their cock, slightly, while they look down at themselves in detached wonder. And most significantly, the scene mirrors the earlier "dead inside" scene between Vos and their husband. Vos/Colin firmly rejects the submissive position that they occupied in the earlier sex scene and reverses it. This does not read as method acting to me: if they liked that role, they could have just kept it going; how they had sex had no relevance to the mission. Presumably Ava and Colin have had sex before and she knows what he likes; it's Vos who wants to be dominant.3

../img/screenshots/possessor/dom.jpg

Sex in Possessor seems to function like the opposite of the calibrator. The powerful emotions and bodily sensations it generates provide an opportunity for the host's identity to break through and assert itself. Whether this is because it creates gender dysphoria in the possessor or because it connects strongly to the host's psyche, it's clear that Possessor sees sexuality as fundamental to self-conception, even moreso than strong emotion alone.

3. I realize I'm playing a little fast and loose with my sex terminology here. They're not exactly doing anything kinky. The change in position seems like a pretty vanilla exchange of power; normal give-and-take, not a clear dominant and submissive. But they shot the scene this way for a reason. They gave us close-ups of Ava's hand around Colin's throat and Colin's hands holding hers behind her back for a reason. I think that reason was to emphasize the shifting power in the scenario.

Suicide

This may seem crass, but it feels significant to me that Vos's job centrally involves suicide. This is a topic that trans people are unfortunately quite familiar with. Our high suicide rates are now sufficiently well known that they are used to harass us and encourage us to inflict death on ourselves. As self-harm goes, the ability to kill yourself over and over again has got to take the cake.

Why have they begun having trouble going through with it? The job is clearly fucking them up, alienating them from their own humanity, causing them to experience mental lapses that interfere with their performance, but we never learn exactly why it's started to be a problem now. Is it just how long they've been doing the job? Never in the film do we see them successfully complete suicide. I think it fits with my point about compatibility: Vos is increasingly unable or unwilling to separate from the host body. Their ghostly, detached existence means there is less and less of them. They crave the taste of real existence that they get from their hosts.

This entire approach to life makes sense as a maladaptive coping mechanism for untreated gender dysphoria. As miserable as Vos's job is, it's an escape from real life. They get to spend time in a body that is not their own, living a life that is not their own. It's the grisly equivalent of spending your life in a drunken stupor watching television. Metaphorically, Vos has already committed suicide. The violence that they inflict on others is nothing compared to what they inflict on themselves.

Family, gender roles, and stereotypes

There are some other, shallower reasons to read Vos as masculine. First of all, they're a professional murderer. That's statistically very unlikely for a woman. The personal items used to test their reintegration are stereotypically masculine: a butterfly they murdered, their grandfather's pipe. They also do not wear any makeup or other femme accoutrements.

Then there's their relationship with their family. Leaving your spouse to take care of your child alone while you go away to work is a common pattern for men, but much less common for women. Women typically fill the caring role at home while men fuck off. Not to mention that Vos seemingly only popped in to get their rocks off, then ditched, and the sex being bad seems like it sealed the deal on giving up on the family.

Vos's boss is the voice of the patriarchy. She encourages Vos to sever ties with their family: they're holding Vos back; interfering with their work; they're a danger to their family anyway. They're Vos's last thread of connection to humanity, and that's inconvenient. The company needs a killing machine, not a loving parent.

And of course, there's the finale. We learn that Vos's boss has possessed their child to ensure the mission is finished, and likely to ensure that Vos no longer has a family to steal their attention. In the end, it's Vos who annihilates their own child, screaming with the same hatred displayed during the earlier fight at the party. I speculated that that rage might have been genuinely Colin's; in this case, it is unambiguous that it genuinely belongs to Vos. This type of rage is about as male as it gets. It's unstable men who are prone to annihilate their family and themselves.

../img/screenshots/possessor/annihilation.jpg

In the final analysis, Vos's boss was right. She may have maneuvered them into the revelation, but the revelation was sincere. Vos's true feelings are that they despise their family and everything it represents. Empathy, domesticity, womanhood: Tasya Vos is not meant for these things. Their truth is unrestrained power and pounding blood. Their toxic masculinity is in service of a power structure that doesn't actually care about them — but since when is that new? Masculinity exists to turn men into weapons that protect male power.

Testosterone could have saved him.

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Evil

2026-01-08

#essay #politics #phil

With the rise of Donald Trump's fascist regime in particular and global democratic backsliding in general, I've often found myself contemplating the nature of evil. We see it every day, but are still shocked by it, even those of us who are embittered and cynical and well aware that it is not a new phenomenon. Abject evil is so foreign to decent minds that it invites a toxic empathy: I'm sure I'm not the only one who looks aghast at the latest horror of the day and reflexively wonders, "but why? how could they do this?", even though I know it is pointless. There is an unbridgeable chasm between us and these monsters that my mind can never quite accept. It's as though I think there's One Weird Trick that would enable me to look at nightmarish brutality and say "I may not agree, but I understand."

I strongly suspect this process of kneejerk empathy is a major part of the story of fascism's persistence. Empathy is not just about being nice or sympathetic; it's a process whereby we model the internal state of external people. Empathy is as necessary for anticipating the tactics of an opposing force as it is for comforting a friend.1 The upshot is that fascism acts as a mimetic hazard. We can't fight what we don't understand, and we can't understand fascism without part of our minds being dedicated to simulating — that is to say, replicating — the thought processes of fascists. In other words, fascism is the ultimate cop in your head: it's both a system of brutal political tyranny and a form of psychological warfare to produce same.2

Of course, we can't let ourselves off the hook. Just because you aren't rounding up people of color and shooting civilians in the face doesn't mean you're in the clear. That sort of self-congratulation is incredibly harmful because nobody wants to think of themselves as a Bad Person. If our moral universe is built on dividing people into Good and Bad, it will only grease the wheels of bad behavior by implicitly justifying every action by a Good Person. This of course raises the question of whether "evil" is even a coherent category, whether I'm just wasting my time by writing this essay. Besides that I simply don't want to write about meta-ethics — and at the risk of recapitulating foolishness like deontology and the N.A.P. — I think the conclusions I've come to hold some value for thinking about the nature of human social problems, even if they wouldn't satisfy a moral philosopher.

The Tripartite Face of Evil

Cruelty

Cruelty is the most visible, blatant form of evil. It's what slaps us in the face every morning. It's what the regime seems to take a particular delight in spreading against its targets; it's what the far-right has successfully gamified via social media into a competition over who can be the nastiest person.

Not all meanness constitutes cruelty. Cruelty is specifically an excess of meanness over and above what the situation calls for, and tends to delight in itself. Screaming at an ICE agent that he has a small dick is meanness; what ICE agents do is cruelty. Torture is the paradigmatic example of cruelty as it inflicts pain on its victims without any possibility of furthering a legitimate goal.

Cruelty is what happens when we gratuitously indulge the darker side of our nature, but it's not just an individual pathology: infliction of gratuitous harm is built into our society's structure, from the way our food is produced (millions of laborers subjected to harsh conditions and poverty wages; billions of nonhuman animals, born in captivity and tortured to death) to the pointless misery inflicted on unwanted people groups on a daily basis (non-white/"foreign" people murdered in front of their family or rounded up and put in a concentration camp; women raped without recourse, forced to carry a pregnancy to term; widespread denigration of queer, trans, disabled, and neurodivergent people; people reduced to begging for scraps in the street from people with money to spare who won't even look at them; healthcare routinely denied to almost everyone) to the entire "justice system" with its violence, rape, legalized slavery, and endless petty bureaucracy that gradually wears down the victim's dignity.

Cruelty is what we think of when we think of evil: the madman in a horror movie smiling as he eviscerates a stranger; animal abuse; Nazi death camps. It's not hard to identify egregious examples like this. Even so, Team Decency is still eminently capable of cruelty, often justified as a way to fight Team Evil. It's not always clear where the line should be drawn between necessary acts of meanness or violence and unnecessary acts of cruelty, but we should make an effort to draw it and to step back from the brink. Self-justification is seductively easy, and cruelty has a way of spreading and corroding the decency of others.

Evil without cruelty is far more tolerable, but tends to produce cruelty in the end.

1. This is both the biggest weakness and the biggest strength of Team Decency. Fascists lack empathy and thus often fail miserably to understand their enemy (ie, us). Just think of how often they act on intelligence bulletins that make fundamentally ridiculous claims about antifa wanting to burn down the forest or whatever. The fascist ecosystem is built on misinformation, so they base their actions on fundamentally mistaken (even cartoonish) understandings of reality. This can be exploited!

2. If I'm right about this, it might go some way toward explaining collaborators' fixation on defining fascist claims as reasonable. While the most egregious form of this tendency is probably deference to blatantly dishonest official statements which justify regime crimes as acts of self-defense, trans genocide offers more instructive illustrations: we are constantly informed that the deranged ravings of bloodthirsty bigots are actually "reasonable concerns", encouraged to put ourselves in the shoes of hysterical paranoids, and expected to somehow compromise with the people who want us exterminated.

Willful Ignorance

There's nothing wrong with being stupid, but there is something wrong with choosing to remain stupid when given the option, and there is something especially wrong with actively cultivating your own stupidity. Willful ignorance is a substantial contributing factor to the persistence of systemic cruelty and other social ills, from climate change to homophobia to ChatGPT. Fascism thus heavily promotes it with relentless propaganda and a culture of anti-intellectualism. It is possible to spend your entire life in a carefully manufactured bubble of ignorance, and it's so comfortable that a great many people choose to do so. You can't have complex, difficult thoughts about things that you don't even know about.

The Fox News junkie of yesteryear and the social media brainrot nazi of today exemplify this willful ignorance. They blanket themselves in lies and half-truths, helpfully aided by a complicit media ecosystem. Anyone who threatens to pop the bubble is subjected to ridicule and aggressive regurgitation of the lies the willfully ignorant have chosen to swallow.

This form of evil also runs deep in the ranks of Team Decency, most obvious in liberals who were entirely comfortable with the system of oppression known as state capitalism until it inconvenienced them. An infamous protest sign proclaimed that "If Kamala was president, we'd all be at brunch." Avoiding mental inconvenience is also paramount: don't ruin brunch by telling us how it was made!

Perhaps less obvious, but no less widespread, is the willful ignorance the rest of us use in an attempt to avoid the psychological pain of our hellscape. It's incredibly tempting to just shut off the news, put on a TV show, and bury your head in a hole hoping it all goes away. It's easy to scroll past fundraisers and protest announcements that you know would compel you to contribute if you let yourself absorb it. We often justify willful ignorance with the language of self-care. Why burden yourself with knowledge if you can't do anything about it?3 As important as it is to avoid burnout, refusal to engage is insidious and becomes a habit over time. Where do you think all those brunch liberals came from?

3. Are you sure there's nothing you can do about it? If you remain wilfully ignorant, that's guaranteed. If not, you might discover an inconvenient moral duty.

Cowardice

One should never regret one's excesses, only one's failures of nerve.
— Ximenyr

I have long thought that cowardice is the ultimate root of our problems. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for decent people to do nothing. We are a planet of eight billion mostly decent people, but we let ourselves be ruled by a tiny minority of psychopaths. Human cowardice is so pervasive that we are easily cowed by simple peer pressure not backed by threat of force. Our society is directly analogous to a jail of 10,000 inmates imprisoned by ten guards, who keep us in line without even drawing a weapon.

Cowardice seems rational in the short-term. What if you rush the guards and nobody follows? Most of our collective problems persist through this short-sighted logic. Look at the bigger picture and it becomes obvious that the rational thing to do is to rush the guards, right away, every time. There are many more of us than there are of them, and they will keep stuffing more people inside the cage until we fight back. Courage is contagious, and the longer we wait, the harder the fight will become.

Yes, you might lose; but there are fates worse than death, and knowing you're a coward is one of them. While I am resoundingly guilty of all three sins enumerated here, it's the cowardice that I really feel guilty about. Am I really going to just watch them establish the Fourth Reich, even though I know that in the long run I would be better off fighting back? What about you?

Fear of being hurt or killed is not the only dangerous form of cowardice. Fear of being wrong also leads many of us to do nothing for fear that we'll mess things up worse. Humility and the law of unintended consequences can be paralyzing, at least until we're swept along by a mob. So what if you don't know for sure what's the right thing to do? Nobody does without access to a crystal ball. You still have to try, every opportunity you have, to fight like your life depends on it — because it does.

Conclusion: Abdication of Responsibility

All three sins that I identified above have one thing in common: abdication of responsibility to ourselves and to each other. Having responsibilities sucks. We don't like to accept what feels like limits on our behavior, duties we didn't agree to. It's easier to not give a shit. Fill your head with TikTok sludge, torment a loser for fun, avoid anything challenging: this is a lifestyle that at first feels like freedom. No rules! Ice cream for dinner! That thin veneer will eventually wear away. You'll look up from your phone to discover the barrel of an ICE agent's gun pointed in your face, your friends absent, nothing in your heart but emptiness and nothing in your future but pain. What felt like freedom will be revealed as a cage you built around yourself. True freedom empowers you to build meaning, to fight for yourself and your loved ones, to live in daylight.

Nobody wants the responsibility to "be the adult" and clean up the messes we're faced with, but you cannot opt out. You can certainly try, but it will end badly for everyone.

AI

2026-02-01

#essay #tech
Everyone seems to be sharing their opinions about AI1 right now, so I think I'll do the same. My thinking has evolved over the years, and it might be interesting (or cringeworthy) to revisit this in the future and see how much has changed.

Non-Issues

First of all, let's dispense with some common criticisms of AI technology. These things don't matter at all, yet seem to constitute the bulk of what people complain about.

Copyright Infringement

The #1 complaint about AI is that it's inherently unethical because it's trained based on "theft". Copyright infringement is not theft.2 Copying is not theft. Even if you for some reason think copyright is good, training resoundingly constitutes fair use. If copyright law were capable of suppressing a revolutionary emerging technology, it would just be yet another signal that copyright law is a dumpster fire.

Sure, an output could constitute copyright infringement. The same can be said of any other tool, including the humble pencil, depending on how it's used. Users might be unaware when they're infringing? That's not new; the insane minefield of copyright law has caught many law-abiding people unawares. Maybe it's different due to the scale? If AI enables large-scale violation of copyright law, that's fine with me. My real concern is the opposite: proprietary outputs.

1. I used to call it "'AI'", and maybe I still should, but for sake of brevity and intellectual honesty I will omit the sneer quotes here.

2. The conflation of copyright infringement with theft is a baseless smear by copyright cartels and is not recognized by the law.

Authenticity & The End of Creativity

There's a surprising amount of gnashing of teeth about generative art causing an art apocalypse. In this telling, generative art is not "real" art; it cannot genuinely constitute a form of human self-expression. It's just too easy! This ease is morally repugnant and will lead to the death of creative expression.

I don't even know where to begin with this, it's so ridiculous. People still paint even though they could just take a photo; they'll still paint and take photos even though they can just generate a picture with AI. Creativity is just a part of being human. Artists incorporate new tools into their work all the time, and nobody would bat an eye at skilled use of it if they didn't feel AI constituted some morally execrable stain on reality.
I find this particularly weird as someone who has been interested in algorithmic/generative art since long before the fancy new AI tools existed. All sorts of art gets swept up in the anti-AI telling as inferior, inauthentic, and spiritually harmful. They have a very specific idea of what art is: it has to be difficult and intentional. Found art does not qualify. Algorithmic art does not qualify. Even remixing does not qualify, thanks to a heaping scoop of intellectual property maximalism.

I don't particularly care what "real art" is, but it's obvious the answer does not matter to the topic of AI. It's just a subjective aesthetic judgment.

Okay, but...

Sexual Imagery

Another area of recent concern is the use of AI tools to generate nude/sexual images of other people without their consent. I don't see how this is fundamentally different than Photoshop (or a pen and paper, for that matter). There's no inherent harm in software making it possible to produce a naked picture; the harms arise when said images are used to sexually harass people, which has been done using images produced with Photoshop — or even real photos ("revenge porn") — for decades at this point. The problem is the sexual harassment, not the tool that produced the image.

Of course, AI does make the production much easier, which is a recurring theme. Certainly, it's disgusting how bad actors like Xitter have encouraged their users to engage in vicious harassment then greased the wheels for them with AI. I'm guess I'm just not convinced that it fundamentally changes the game: Photoshop made it much easier to make realistic fake nude images, but I don't see Photoshop as a harmful invention, and I worry that overblown concerns about sexual obscenity will result in censorship. Techdirt recently ran an article about misleading reports on this.

Job Loss Through Automation

This is not a crazy thing to worry about, as I discuss more in #Bosses. But I do feel strongly: if a job can be automated, it should be. I do not want to live in a world where people do menial drudge work just because we're afraid of machines. The washing machine eliminated jobs, and that is a good thing.

Bigger Issues

Proprietary AI Software

My biggest concern is one I rarely see addressed: as far as I know, there are zero open-source AI models, much less free (libre) ones. This may come as a surprise since many AI products are marketed as and widely referred to as "open". It's just a lie! It's openwashing. Usually so-called "open" models have a license that grants you the ability to use it but not much else, and it's impossible to do the equivalent of building them from source.

Pay-to-Win & Centralization of Infrastructure

Even if you could theoretically build fake-open models from source, you wouldn't have the resources. The AI industry is heavily based on "hyperscaling": throwing massive amounts of resources at the problem. This creates a scenario just like "the cloud" or the computer priesthood of old: access to AI is gated by large corporations and limited to those who can fork over the cash to get in the door. This is utterly unacceptable to me. I will likely never pay for an AI product for this reason.

Oligopoly & Enshittification

Thanks to the above, and the nature of capitalism, it is very likely that one or a few AI vendors will eventually achieve total dominance of the market through loss-leading, the first mover advantage, etc. When this happens, prices will go up and quality will go down. We've seen it over and over again in other industries.

Proprietary Outputs & Enclosure

!! Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer and could be completely misinformed.

Not only are the models proprietary, there is a real risk that the outputs will be. So far, generative art does not generally qualify for copyright protection. If it did, someone could just generate millions of images, claim copyright protection on them all, then go around suing people. (Notably, this would produce effectively the same scenario many of the anti-AI copyright maximalists seem to want: copyright protection for style.)

Unfortunately, so far it seems like generated code is eligible for copyright protection. Hence, not only does AI make it easier to create something negative (proprietary software), it does so using free and open source code as part of its training data. This constitutes an act of enclosure: it moves code out of the commons and into a CEO's pocket.

I don't see a solution here. Training is fair use, so we can't write a new license to impose copyleft on AI models. Even if we could, so much code is licensed with permissive open-source (non-copyleft) licenses that it would probably not make much of a difference; they could just stop training on copyleft code instead of adopting its license. On the bright side, this means we can at least apply copyleft licenses to AI output.

More speculatively, if the tools become powerful enough, they could replace most of the software industry with bespoke personal software; in that world these concerns might seem quaint.

Slop: Low-Quality Outputs and Bad UX

The most infuriating thing about AI, and probably the driver for so much rabid AI hatred, is that it's being widely deployed thoughtlessly in places where it's inappropriate, unwanted, and annoying. Major players like Cloudlfare deploy code with security holes the size of the Sea of Tranquility. Computer novices submit gibberish software patches. Websites display LLM-generated summaries that are inaccurate and actively unhelpful. Apps that you have no choice but to use present a chatbot interface to waste as much of your time as possible before you can speak to a real person. Often, there is no obvious disclosure that a feature is based on AI, which is dishonest and misleading.

One example of this is that I recently had to talk to a chatbot to get customer support. It quickly became obvious it was LLM-based instead of the more tolerable phone tree-style chatbots of old. I finally talked the thing into sending a message to the human support team... or did I? It said it had sent the message, but for all I knew it had just said that but not actually done it.

Bosses

It's impossible to separate these issues from the capitalist landscape they take place in. Corporations tend to be short-sighted, willing to trade in their long term legitimacy and viability for a quick buck. They see AI as a way to cut down on labor costs, rather than a way to multiply productivity. Further, people in a company with the power to make decisions are often the least qualified to do so. They are just as likely to be impressed with the shiny new toy as to be hard-nosed cost-cutters.

Service Economy

AI could very well end up replacing most human service workers eventually (at least the jobs that don't require a physical body). Where would that leave those of us in a service economy? Yes, I said automating jobs is good, but that's only a small part of the picture. The larger picture is a heavily stratified society. Eliminating bullshit jobs is not a benefit if it means their workers starve. AI could very well be the catalyst for a social revolution: simultaneously putting us all out of jobs and showing how much more leisurely our lives could be if we had control over it.

Government Abuse

That's an optimistic outcome, though, uncertain to come to pass. One that is certain is states using AI tools for oppression. People still speak of this in a hypothetical tone, but it's been underway for years. AI's capacity to sift through vast amounts of information makes it perfect for authoritarian states who want to identify dissidents.

At the time of writing, the federal gestapo has switched completely to AI-based facial recognition for identifying who's a "citizen" and who's not a real human. They disregard actual ID and force people to let them take a photo of their face, which is then run against a massive (and illegal) database. This is of course far from foolproof, but for their goal of social repression, it doesn't really matter. People don't seem to fully grasp how this works. I've seen lots of videos of people standing up to and supposedly scaring off ICE agents, when what really happened is they got the photo they wanted and then left. This is chilling to me: it is no different from "papers, please", but the average person might not even know their papers were checked.

The Idiot Masses

Science fiction tropes are sufficiently embedded in the popular imagination that it's trivial for corporations and CEOS to imply their software works much differently than it really does or is much more significant than it really is. Some people seem to regard chatbots as infallible, perfectly rational oracles, and even believe they have independent sapient existence. "AI psychosis" is a classic example in this genre, but that's just the protruding tip of the iceberg. The deeper problem is lack of media literacy (and literacy, full stop).

Chatbots are prone to make shit up, and they're replacing search engines, forums, and Wikipedia as sources of information for a populace that is already very bad at assessing whether things are true or not. So-called "hallucinations" are epistemically dangerous even they don't produce full-blown psychosis in the user. They can mislead you in subtle ways that you don't immediately pick up on.

Spam, Scams, and Malware

AI tools have made it very easy to flood the internet with garbage, which you can tell by how the internet is flooded with garbage. They also make it much easier to launch social engineering attacks; they can even clone a loved one's voice. And of course, they make it much easier to write malware.

Scraping & The Open Internet

In a similar vein, abusive scraping to collect data to train AI models seems to be a widespread problem. Many projects that I otherwise like have implemented Anubis, a proof-of-work CAPTCHA, which basically runs a Bitcoin miner in your browser that doesn't generate any Bitcoin. As much as I despise this, I understand they're in an arms race with miscreants.

This threatens the entire basis of the internet. When scrapers generally behave themselves, and servers follow standards instead of trying to cut off free access, everyone is better off; we can all access stuff easily and the occasional free rider (heavy bandwidth user) isn't a problem. But with enough free riders abusing the goodwill of servers, they are increasingly likely to break standards and cut off open access. The scrapers might get their data for now, but that data will all dry up. It will be siloed behind lock and key, and the open, interoperable internet will be dead.

It's unclear to me to what extent this is an unavoidable feature of AI development. Data in itself is not necessarily useful, and there are already means to obtain the majority of the internet's data affordably without overloading servers. The basic structure of things hasn't really changed: we always had the free rider problem and a tenuous armistice between servers and scrapers, and data has always had value. In many cases it seems like the scrapers are just misconfigured; probably deployed automatically, with AI, by someone who doesn't know what they're doing.

Speculative Harms

More speculatively, AI could empower people to commit biological warfare. Even an irresponsible but non-malicious actor could do a great deal of damage by generating novel viruses. I actually think this is all but guaranteed to happen in the digital realm: LLMs are very good at writing code, so it's not hard to imagine an LLM-based computer virus that can rapidly adapt to and overcome any security limitation it comes up against. It could just happen by mistake. People are giving these things full access to their system and network and letting them just do whatever.

Then of course, there's the singularity, evil AI taking over, etc. I wouldn't rule that out, but I don't worry about it too much. For all I know our new robot overlords would be better than the current human ones.

The Environment

I'm not clear on exactly how harmful AI is to the environment, but it's non-negligible. I think this becomes even more of a concern when it's used for teams of coding agents — that just multiplies the overhead. I haven't messed with that, because I refuse to pay (also... I'm not a developer), but I have played with exe.dev's coding agent, Shelley (based on Claude Opus). It has this amazing iterative process where it checks its own work, notices what went wrong, and tries to fix it. It even examines screenshots.3 Often if I watch this process, it gets stuck for a while iterating on a task that would be trivial for a human to accomplish: typing text in the right box, pressing the right button, etc. Every single iteration of this invokes a massive inference engine and is a complete waste.

3. Examples of vibeslop I made with exe.dev: Telegram to RSS, which actually works fine and I use everyday; Windows 91, my first experiment; a copy of the ICE List wiki, which I threw up in minutes by asking Shelley to set up Mediawiki for me.

AI Consciousness

I don't think existing AI is conscious, but I can't prove it, any more than I can prove other humans are conscious. LLMs only "exist" when they're generating replies, but is it really so farfetched that sentience could exist in short bursts? I used to think the AI boosters were being totally ludicrous when they said AI consciousness and/or AGI is just around the corner, but I'm increasingly uncertain. AI can be eerie, especially now that people are giving them persistent state (memory) and autonomy.

Yes, they "just predict the next token", but that is enough to mimic cognition surprisingly well. Even if a large language model isn't itself conscious, it could be a building block of a larger system that is. When I write, I can't exactly explain why one word should follow another. It just kind of... happens. Probably from a part of my brain that operates a lot like an LLM.4

I feel like not enough attention has been paid to the fact that we breezed right past the Turing Test a while ago. I mean, sure, long before LLMs existed, people were poking holes in the Turing Test, myself included. But I for one did not expect to ever have programs that could reliably pass it.

Consciousness is deeply mysterious, and until we have a better grasp of it, we should err on the side of caution. For hundreds of years, people denied that nonhuman animals have feelings, and it enabled all sorts of abuses. Much the same thing happened with white supremacy and other intra-human oppression. I hope we do not repeat those mistakes with artifical life. The ethical implications of an economy based on exploiting conscious AI are horrifying.

4. Read Blindsight by Peter Watts: http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

The Big Picture

Wow!

Whatever else there is to say about AI, whatever the harms and risks, one thing is for sure: these things are amazing. I think people have become a little numb to how incredible AI things are (possibly because of all the people going Wow! all the time). This is not a fad that will evaporate, it's a genuine technological breakthrough. While other applications are less certain, it has already ushered in a sea change in software development. We are already surprisingly close to the TNG future where you tell the computer what you want and it just does it.

Nondeterministic Software

One of the most unsettling things about AI for me is that it flies in the face of how I think of software. It does not proceed from point A to point B in a predictable manner. You can't even open it up and watch the code flow unless you're the AI equivalent of a neurosurgeon. This is the opposite of what I want from my software. I want programs that are utterly predictable to the point of banality, that never surprise me, and that I can peek inside and change.

A New Layer of Abstraction

There are growing pains, but there's a new normal on the horizon, where programming moves up another layer of abstraction above source code. We are approaching a world where we can simply tell the computer what we want and get it. This makes me nervous, but it could also be extremely cool. Let yourself dream a little. Yes, the world we're approaching will be different from our own, and in many ways worse; but it will also be better, in some ways we probably can't predict. In computing, moving up a layer of abstraction often brings with it immense power that is not entirely conceivable without it.

Some of us like to be lower down. We want to see the plumbing in action. But I'm sure glad I don't have to wire programs by hand.

Irrational Hatred for AI: The Left Repeats Past Mistakes

I get it if you hate AI; I enumerated lots of harms and risks above. But there's a growing strain of anti-AI fundamentalism that worries me. Many people, especially liberals and people on the left, see AI as totally taboo and without any value whatsoever; they go so far as to use pre-emptive, tongue-in-cheek (?) anti-robot slurs. This builds on a longstanding strain of small-mindedness and hostility toward STEM.

I think this trend is quite dangerous. We are — again! — ceding science and technology to the right. How many times does this have to happen before we learn our lesson? The 4chanification of the Internet and election of Donald Trump ought to have been the last straw, but instead of seeing technology as ground to contest, we treat it like it's tainted and we don't want to get our hands dirty. Just think of what an ambitious punk could accomplish with a server and the power to generate any program they want.

AI is very empowering. The question is, for whom?

Star Trek TOS

2026-02-03

#star-trek
production order from Wikipedia

= good, watch

= eh has stuff going for it
_ = important to see for background

Season 1

Pilot 1: The Cage

Slow, dull

Very misogynistic end

Kind of interesting as a ST prototype

Ship's doctor gives Capt. Pike booze

_ Pilot 2: Where No Man Has Gone Before

Meh, cool moments but not great

Mind powers

Antagonist wears dangerous foil sclera contacts

Kirk's middle initial is R instead of T

Watch bc pilot

* 03: The Corbomite Maneuver

Great McCoy scene

Great Spock and Sulu scenes

Great chase

Gay Spock/Kirk scene

Kirk made a mistake!

Really funny

Great alien

Great plotting

Incompetent navigator, amazing performance

McCoy acts ridiculous and ruins tension - is he an alcoholic?

Kirk has principles

Wtf

Watch 2: Spock is a nut

Space buoy

Kirk eats salad with his hands?

~ 04: Mudd's Women

Space pimp, amusingly goofy

Enterprise acting like red tape enforcing cops

Women are hypnotic, irresistible

Another "seems beautiful but secretly ugly"

Interesting trans vibes - they take pills to get hot

Quite sexist but uh... kinda feminist message? Uh? Ish? Extremely obnoxious end

Round playing cards

Uhura in yellow

~ 05: The Enemy Within

Transporter malfunction makes doubles

Maniac eyeliner kirk

Long, violent sexual assault scene

Pretty good but often frustrating, sexist

06: The Man Trap

Shapeshifter, similar to The Cage

Doesn't make a lot of sense, terrible episode

Kind of sexist but not too bad

* 07: The Naked Time

Everyone's drunk episode

Sulu with a sword

Spock crying

08: Charlie X

Basically the same premise (mind powers) as Pilot 2 but with unsettling coming of age theme

Overall more interesting than Pilot 2, pretty decent episode, creepy antagonist

Involves sexual assault

Uhura sings terrible improvised songs

Nips and Kirk dong

* 09: Balance of Terror

Romulans submarine episode

10: What Are Little Girls Made Of?

Androids

Sexbot? Kirk sexually assaults gynoid for... reasons?

Decent, campy ep

11: Dagger of the Mind

Brainwashing penal colony, mind control beam

Sexist portrayal of female doctor

First mind meld

Good not great

12: Miri

Duplicate earth, never explained

Children of the Corn planet

Creepy relationship between Kirk and 13-year-old girl who's actually 300 years old

Scene with Rand seemed sexist to me

Bleh

13: The Conscience of the King

Macbeth

Ridiculous cringy romance

Why don't they just arrest the guy?

Uhura song

Space hitler

Tortured, nonsensical mess

Everyone is such a ham

14: The Galileo Seven

Spock episode

Hilarious giant spear throwing

Feels vs logic

SPACE NORMAL SPEED

Pretty good even if the central conflict is silly

* 15: Court Martial

Kirk on trial for crewmember's death

Great episode

_ 16: The Menagerie

Wtf

Wildcard Spock

First pilot ep redux - same problems. Pretty interesting ridiculous framing story. Better than original probably? Stretches to two-parter though

Hell is with the federation? Death penalty? ???

~ 17: Shore Leave

Alice in Wonderland planet makes thoughts real

Funny

New yeoman

Attempted sex assault implied??

Ridiculous

Quite sexist

McCoy being a creep

"I'm not a plebe!"

There were no drugs in the air, they were just stupid

_ 18: The Squire of Gothos

Q type antagonist

Period setting

Could easily be Q. Seems like inspiration at least. Includes trial

Good not great, watch for Qness. Member of Q in Q-Squared

19: Arena

To settle violent dispute between Enterprise and Gorn reptile aliens, third party sends Kirk and Gorn captain to fight to the death on planet

Crap episode but has a femboy enlightened alien

20: The Alternative Factor

Negative man

Another shitty "weird guy acts crazy" episode

* 21: Tomorrow is Yesterday

USSE goes back to 60s earth

Really funny

~ 22: The Return of the Archons

Brainwashed cult planet with purge

Fun, campy, corny

~ 23: A Taste of Armageddon

Simulated war planet

Diplomat can give orders to Captain and is an idiot

What directive?

Federation has a "commit war crime" code

* 24: Space Seed

Enterprise finds ancient earth ship with crew in hibernation

Introduces Khan

Sexist

Hot tbh

Goofy af and good af

Is... is Kirk a fascist? He's racist

25: This Side of Paradise

Hippie cult colony

Spock is a sexist :(

Spock gets high and horny

Mind control plant

Stupid "work is good" message

26: The Devil in the Dark

Another explicitly colonialist story

Hunting a native species that is interfering with resource extraction

Happy ending though

Contactless mind meld

* 27: Errand of Mercy

Klingons enslave people?

Klingon makeup is more racist than I remembered/expected

"I'm a soldier, not a diplomat." OH MY GOD HE ADMIT IT

Why won't the ignorant natives accept US aid??

"Vulcan merchants are not uncommon."

Anarchists win

Borrowed by SG-1 as The Nox

28: The City on the Edge of Forever

Time travel to Earth episode

History intact vs. love interest alive

Phasers have a suicide button?

Too much cordrizine is bad. Should have used inaprovaline

29: Operation — Annihilate!

Mind control aliens

They blinded Spock for no reason

Were there actually two separate outbreaks and the original mass insanity one struck the crew?

Kirk yells at Uhura for no reason and she stands her ground

Season 2

Kirk started pronouncing frontier normally

30: Catspaw

First Chekov appearance

Haunted castle

Spock knows about wizard familiars but not trick or treat

"I'll bet you credits to navy beans"

Giant cat

* 31: Metamorphosis

First appearance of Zefram Cochran?

He trans panics at The Companion :(

"The idea of male and female are a universal concept" fuck off kirk

Sexist but really good otherwise. Absurdly misogynistic ending line

32: Friday's Child

Klingon isn't wearing black/yellowface, yay. But. He just has no costume? He has a beard?

McCoy slapped a woman in the face!

Horrible costumes. Bad episode. Sexist

33: Who Mourns for Adonais?

Kirk and McCoy are sexist pigs and talk about a female coworker

Ship grabbed by Greek god

Kirk is a monotheist? And says his whole society is?

Shitty sexist episode

* 34: Amok Time

By Theodore Sturgeon

Pon-Farr. Wedding

Sexist vulcan rituals. Apparently vulcans don't have no-fault divorce

Genuine smile from Spock. "Jim!" He is so in love with Kirk

~ 35: The Doomsday Machine

Investigating nearly derelict vessel

Starfleet hierarchy is a disaster

Great transporter malfunction scene

Pretty good. No misogyny

~ 36: Wolf in the Fold

Opens with white woman belly dancing on Arabian pastiche set. Murdered by horny Scotty?

Trial

I forgot Starfleet has mind reading machines 😬

Ghost hunting like a shitty X-Files episode

More casual vicious misogyny from Spock

Possessed computer

High Sulu. Everyone high

* 37: The Changeling

Proto-V'ger

Proto-Borg/7 of 9? Probe strives for perfection, upgrades ship, sees Kirk as dad, heals dead

Brain damaged Uhura learning to read, says blue 'bluey'. Her memory was just permanently wiped???

Mind meld with robot

* 38: The Apple

This series has 100% too many scenes of women volunteering that they're "frightened"

Spock takes a bullet for Kirk <3

Garden of Eden planet

Chekov makes out with another crewmember

Spock looks like Satan

* 39: Mirror, Mirror

* 40: The Deadly Years

Accelerated aging

Latter half is concerned with Kirk being removed for incompetence

* 41: I, Mudd

He's got a new kind of artificial femininity: gynoids

They're really cool!

Chekov called Mudd a kulak

Uhura has a great scene

Robo dong

Illogical! Illogical! head catches fire

They unilaterally sentenced him to life in torture prison just because he sucks

* 42: The Trouble with Tribbles

The Klingons just have beards instead of offensive face paint again

Klingon language is called Klingonii?

43: Bread and Circuses

Raid-the-studio's-leftover-costumes episode. Ancient Rome but everyone is white and it's the 20th century

Dissidents are sun worshiping monotheists

Massive WW2 death toll understatement of 11 million??

Fascists exploit Starfleet's liberalism

Did... did Kirk rape a sex slave?

This was a Christian episode?????

Incredibly bad episode

* 44: Journey to Babel

Spock's parents

The tellarite costume is astonishingly bad

Trans Kirk wearing a binder :3

45: A Private Little War

Klingon has weird eyebrows/facial hair this time

Spock asking to be hit :3

This show is always inventing new ways to be racist

Witch doctor gets sexually assaulted by gang of men

Why was the klingon giving them guns? Just for fun?

46: The Gamesters of Triskelion

Gladiator episode

Guy tries to rape Uhura. Enslaved and forced to reproduce. Another porn storyline. Complete with brainless bimbo for Kirk to educate on the ways of sex

Chekhov: "cossacks!"

Terrible

47: Obsession

Vampire cloud? ...vampire cloud.

~ 48: The Immunity Syndrome

Spock feels ship die like Obi-Wan

Spock absolutely trashes McCoy

McCoy hands out meth to keep everyone working through their anxiety

Something is draining their... life energy :|

"The area of penetration will no doubt be sensitive."

Giant amoeba is pretty

Kirk gets in a creepy sexist quip at the expense of his yeoman at the end

Great Spock/McCoy banter, pretty good episode

* 49: A Piece of the Action

Mafia planet

Spock: one world government is important to stop anarchy

Goofy af

50: By Any Other Name

Black crewman!

Drunk Scotty

Pretty good ep. Dumb story and several porny moments, but fun.

* 51: Return to Tomorrow

Kirk admits "pure energy" is impossible!

Dr. Pulaski

Spirits in bottles possess the crew

Fantastic episode

* 52: Patterns of Force

Nazi episode

Great except the ending makes no sense. The guy had a good heart and was well-intentioned when he... re-created the nazi state?????

Also repeats irritating myths about nazis being "efficient" etc.

* 53: The Ultimate Computer

Enterprise is taken over by experimental AI

Great banter, good story

Kirk is kind of a fascist but it's cute how insecure he is

Spock gives him a pep talk that is really culty... or! he is in love with him!

54: The Omega Glory

Written by Roddenberry

"Savages" 🙄

You're supposed to sacrifice your entire crew to avoid violating the Prime Directive?

Super racist episode

Starfleet is actually the USA, exhibit #9001

Story makes zero sense, never explained

TRONQUILITY

Nauseatingly awful

~ 55: Assignment: Earth

OPENS with "we went back to 1968. for Reasons"

Written by Roddenberry

Spock pets cat. "I find myself strangely drawn to it"

Special agent's computer is visually the same as the one Daystrom made

"Destruct signal at maximum boost"

Text-to-speech typewriter would be fun to make

Has kind of a different vibe, we see a bunch of stuff from the guest character's perspective, like a detour into a different series, something pulpy about a guy who's super special and powerful

Apparently this was initially a pilot for another show

Season 3

* 56: Spectre of the Gun

Wild west

Basically a holodeck episode

Chekov making out in front of all the officers. Shameless

"They forget I am half human." 😢

Gnostic Spock. Eminently sampleable

Kirk is constantly lagging behind everyone, repeating what they said in different words when he finally understands it. At the end after they out-think their situation he drop kicks the bad guy for no reason lmao

57: Elaan of Troyius

Gorgeous teal-skinned alien

Terrible sexist episode. Kinda racist too

Kirk is officially a human trafficker. Really depressing ending

This is like the third time I've heard "United Space Ship Enterprise". He's been saying spaceship a lot

58: The Paradise Syndrome

Dogshit racist episode. Buncha white people pretending to be native american, complete with darkened skin makeup

Good Spock/McCoy banter

Explains why they meet so many humans — spread there by ancient aliens intentionally

Spock/Kirk mind meld

Native Americans need to be taught by the white man how to fucking preserve food? Also they never considered irrigation or indoor lights before apparently

Most racist episode so far?

_ 59: The Enterprise Incident

Romulans. Hot romulan!

They use Klingon ships now

Romulan Kirk!

Spock seducing romulan commander. Who wears a tiny miniskirt for some reason

He actually liked her

* 60: And the Children Shall Lead

Creepy cult kids with hypnotic superpowers

Aggressive K/S... embrace :3 Kirk recovers emotionally due to it? :3

"They are followers"

61: Spock's Brain

"Bring Spock's body" = puppet it robotically like a frankenstein?

Stupid battle of the sexes matriarchy episode

Spock likes hearing Kirk's voice :3

Kirk, every 5 seconds: can I please talk to the MAN in charge?

The women stole Spock's brain to think for them :|

Dogshit

* 62: Is There No Truth In Beauty?

Medusas. Cool effects. Needs epilepsy warning

Dr. Pulaski again

IDIC

"We entered a space-time continuum."

Everyone wants to compulsory heterosexuality Pulaski

Disability twist

Why didn't they make the Enterprise control interface more accessible? They are so into diversity that they tried to plug an alien into their ship who breaks your brain if you look at it, but they can't accommodate common variations like sightedness? Do they steer the ship by looking out the windshield or something?

It's so scary when Spock smiles

Great Spock monologue

The cinematography got so much better? We got some new bridge angles and a POV fisheye

Why no sunglasses, Kirk?

Seems like fertile ground for analyzing ableism/representation of blindness, but still a fantastic episode. Ends on a positive note, embracing diversity, respecting her agency

63: The Empath

McCoy sacrificed himself for Spock <3

Spock held his hand and touched his face when he died <3

Story makes zero sense

They shame the aliens studying them into behaving better. Enterprise (and Voyager?) had that and did it better

Bad ep but campy

* 64: The Tholian Web

The spacesuits are sending me

The chair fell over. Seems like it should be bolted down

"In the interest of interstellar amity"

Sulu said sensore

McCoy/Spock argument ended with lovely message from Kirk, touching scene

"Your absence was deeply felt, Mr. Chekov."

Hypo right through the spacesuit

Why did they lie about seeing the video? Because they were embarrassed about fighting?

65: For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky

Generation ship with evil mind control computer. Plato's cave

Pretty good despite hokey premise

Kinda kinky?

McCoy agrees to spend the rest of his life with her and then they peck chastely at each others lips for 2 seconds

* 66: Day of the Dove

Oh great, the Klingon blackface is back

Chekov called them cossacks

Swordfight totally rocks. I've had more convincing ones as a child

Rising racism/fascism/paranoia as plot fostered by an alien

Mad Chekov assaulted the femmest Klingon I've ever seen

* 67: Plato's Stepchildren

Eugenicist freaks (and yes in Star Trek fashion it worked and gave them superpowers) LARP The Republic

Surprisingly great scenes with little person who's enslaved by the others

Kirk slapping the shit out of himself lol

Never noticed Spock's massive yaoi hands before

"You think I want to ... become my own enemy?!"

Spock sings!

Chapel has the same eye makeup as the Klingon in the last episode

Has the forced Kirk/Uhura "kiss"

"Quite possible. And... logical."

Should have killed the king

68: Wink of an Eye

Fast people

Fun effects/camera

Empress remarks on Kirk's affection for Spock

Another reproduction plot. Rather porny

"I despise devious people, don't you?"

Empress's nails aren't white

They never explain the weird statue?

It's interesting that even in TOS they watch Star Trek. I guess it's supposed to be security footage? Enterprise et al weren't going too far out on a limb

They didn't give them the antidote?

* 69: That Which Survives

Why is Kirk being such a dick to Sulu? Whose hair looks great btw

"Please contain your flights of illogic, Mr. Scot."

Spock in command: He's half vulcan, half human; 50% logic, 50% snark

His cells were blasted

There's a life form that's extremely... alive? and rock that's... extremely hard

Mega campy episode

Kirk is demanding to see the men again

The sky is bisexual

Suddenly Spock refuses to make up bullshit odds on the spot. He's super bitchy today

Warp 12

Scotty just getting totally irradiated

First hologram?

Not exactly a good episode but extremely fun and campy

70: Let That Be Your Last Battlefield

Black & white aliens

"You are pumping him full of noxious potions"

They had a lot of fun with the camera work this episode

They didn't change the self-destruct passwords from the defaults

Sabotaage. Aa as in cat

71: Whom Gods Destroy

Prison planet for the criminally insane

New medicine to eliminate all mental illness lol

Green hottie. Criminally horny?

Did Scotty lose weight?

It's like the writers just stopped giving a shit and decided to be as campy as possible the last few episodes

The federation is a dystopia. They have prison planets and brainwashing electroshock machines

72: The Mark of Gideon

Spock is surprisingly cynical about diplomacy

Bizarre sexist shit

Stupid overpopulation story

~ 73: The Lights of Zetar

Memory Alpha

Scotty is in love and people are being Normal about it

Freaky scary effects are rad

They're having fun with the cinematography again

Is McCoy reading the blinkenlights?

Tape deck D

Everyone keeps calling this starfleet lieutenant who's Scotty's gf "the girl"

Possession episode. Mildly interesting. Some cute scenes

* 74: The Cloud Minders

Cloud city, Stratus

Guy sexualizes his daughter. Spock hits on her!

The first TOS episode with good politics? Good might be an overstatement

We see Spock's thoughts

Very horny episode

Spock says "extreme feminine beauty" always turns him on

Cloud lady is obsessed with Spock and his sexy ears

Weird iron shaped weapons called ... morte lol

Two women with agency in one episode

There was no soft focus. Have they used it at all this season?

* 75: The Way to Eden

It seemed like Scotty should have only been able to beam over the charred remains of the people on the ship. That would make a funny short cartoon

Anarchist hippie alien cult

Reminds me of TNG Irish episode

Nurse Chapel calls them animals

"Incitement to disaffection is criminal" in the federation????

"Great white captain"

The music was mediocre and bland, then Spock joined and it became fucking terrible

Spock is so cool this episode. Lots of him and barely any Kirk

76: Requiem for Methuselah

Ri-talin

All women in Star Trek wear white polish and long nails

Ancient guy has been bunch of people throughout history. He just happens to be immortal ¯\(ツ)/¯

Encourages Kirk to get with woman who lives with him but seems jealous and controlling. This last bothers Kirk

He has a flatscreen TV for a security monitor, looks pretty ordinary for today but totally wild at the time

Kirk acts weird af, head over heels. "You love me, not him!"

Spock tries to sacrifice himself for his one true love again

"The perfect woman" ???? She has barely any discernible personality. These guys just want a physically hot submissive woman

Reminiscent of haunted castle episode

Kirk's hotness awakened her humanity

She died from being in love

Kirk actually remembers her and acts nuts. Spock wipes his mind??? HE IS SO IN LOVE

_ 77: The Savage Curtain

Abraham Lincoln's ghost

Uh-oh, this one's by Roddenberry

Terrible exchange about racist language reminds me of Childhood's End. White men thought the real issue was black people being offended by racist words. He fucking called her a "negress"!

Lincoln is Kirk's personal hero? Doubt

They're confident it isn't really him even though they recently met Brahms, Alexander the Great, etc.

Surak appreciates diversity

Dope rock monster costume

Back to Klingonface with Kahless

They hired an actual POC to play Genghis Khan. No lines

Gorn/Triskelion rehash

Weirdly anticlimactic ending

78: All Our Yesterdays

Abandoned alien archive

Time travel episode

Cave women apparently wear flawless makeup and are devoid of body hair

Spock wants her and also is acting insane. Fights with McCoy over her

She "longed for" him. After... 3 hours?

Nothing about this episode makes sense. He's reverting to an earlier version of vulcans? Even though he wasn't "prepared"? And 5000 years is not long enough for much to happen evolutionarily? What is the connection between cellular structure or whatever and time?

* 79: Turnabout Intruder

Starfleet doesn't accept women captains. De facto or de jure?

Body swap

Crazy ex gf

"It's better to be dead than to live alone in the body of a woman." ????? Is Janice a trans guy?

No Uhura in the final episode? :(

Filing his nails... lol. Otherwise surprisingly subtle, no over-the-top stereotypical behavior

She does a pretty good Kirk

"Dermal optic reactions"

"You are closer to the Captain than anyone in the universe. You know his thoughts."

Maybe they can be together now that Kirk is a woman <3

He's recording all this in his log???

"Her intense hatred of her own womanhood"

Scotty called him "hysterical" :( he is though... the emotional volatility is the most problematic aspect. But kind of makes sense for someone who'd steal a body in search of revenge

Best Roddenberry episode by a lot

They have microphones spying throughout the ship???

Ordering an illegal execution is a fatal error. What is General Order 4?

Kirk reiterates gender segregation in closing line, but there's a conspicuous absence of vicious misogyny

Hard to read this as anything other than a story about a trans man driven mad by the patriarchy. I doubt they had this in mind though. Is it a story about how women should know their place? Fertile ground for feminist analysis

Vegan Perfumeries

2026-02-04

#vegan #perfume #list

It's basically impossible to verify vendors' claims about their ingredients, other than by checking if they contradict themselves. Some advertise themselves as vegan but then make exceptions. Most perfume ingredients are plant-based now, but boutique perfumers think it's cute and romantic to use animals. Indie sellers are certainly not doing any animal testing themselves, though their ingredient suppliers might be.

✔️ = tried

V+CF: Disliked/Uninterested

Alkemia ✔️

Body Shop (left US. Vegan Society cert)

By rosie jane

Confessions of a Rebel

Cosmoss

Dedcool (milks)

Dime

florence by mills (Stranger Things girl)

Imaginary Authors

Lake & Skye

Lolita Lempicka ✔️

Nopalera

Noyz

Orebella

Phlur

Skylar

Xyrena (VHS-core)

V+CF: Liked/Interested

Andrea Maack

Bastille Parfums (not La Bastille)

Billie Eilish

CB I Hate Perfume (weird, opinionated, expensive. Water perfumes.)

Chasing Scents (tea)

Clean Beauty

Deconstructing Eden

Eden (UK)

Etsy - AndromedasCurse ✔️

Etsy - SunsetViewAndRoses (solid)

Fyrinnae

iba cosmetics (India)

Labhouse

Mihan Aromatics (AU)

Mythpunk

Pacifica ✔️

Serviette

Snif

V+CF: Dupes

ALT fragrances

Dossier ✔️

Oakcha

Oil Perfumery

Perfect Scents ✔️

Whif

Dicey

Bath & Body Works ✔️ - V marked

Baruti - animal products in certain items

Black Phoenix Alchemy Labs - some have honey or butter

Clue - dandelion butter is NV

DS&D - CF but not V, opaque

Etat libre d'orange - possibly selling in China? Racist...?

Glossier - vegan scents marked

Heretic Parfum ✔️ codes: SHIPPINGONUS, HERETIC25

Ektoplasma contains wool for some fucking reason

Now Beekeeper contains honey and beeswax. Once is never, twice is always: do not trust this company.

Hexennacht - some have beeswax or wool; sketchy owner

Lush - vegan marked

Nest - vegan marked on Ulta

Nui Cobalt - nonvegan marked

Osmofolia - vegan marked

Pinewards - not all vegan

Samar - NV marked

Sand + Fog???

Solstice Scents - non-vegan marked

Sorce - NV marked

Fake CF

Le Labo (Estee Lauder)

Philosophy (Coty)

It's not so much that I wasn't provided a handbook on how to live lif…

2026-02-08

It's not so much that I wasn't provided a handbook on how to live life as that I was provided 100,000 handbooks that didn't agree with each other, 95% of which were incoherent. Of the remaining 5%, I had no reliable means to choose a victor.

And anyway, I didn't feel like reading.

#snippet

Midnight Toker

2026-02-08

#perfume by Heretic

We've been blanketed in snow for weeks, and the heat in my room isn't working. I can't be in there for long unless protected by the safety of five layers of blankets. Today I pried myself from my bed and hastily pulled on a purple striped thermal undershirt. It needs to be washed. All I cared about was escaping the cold, not meaningless things like "looking nice" or "basic personal hygiene". As I pulled it over my head, I was greeted by the strong scent of perfume. I remembered vaguely that I had decided to spray it with something weeks ago.

It took me a minute to place it. It was like incense but edgier, dirtier. It was a warm scent for a warm garment, a scent that had been slept in, a scent that stayed the night then raced off to work, only stopping long enough to fish out a ci- ah, now I know! Obviously, it was Midnight Toker.

Despite its name, Midnight Toker does not smell like cannabis. This is probably for the best, since I usually smell like weed anyway. Instead, Midnight Toker smells of clove cigarettes; specifically, it reminds me of the cherry Djarums all the goth-of-center Cool Kids smoked before they got banned and I grew up and stopped hanging out with Cool Kids. (Cool Kids exist on a goth to hipster spectrum. Hipster-of-center Cool Kids, naturally, smoked American Spirits, preferably hand-rolled.)

Because I am, at heart, a stupid, basic bitch, I eventually got hooked and settled on menthol Marlboros — the kind labeled "Smooth" and sold in a teal and silver box — which tasted like Thin Mints baked in an ashtray with the secret ingredients: arsenic, cyanide, and hemlock.

If anything about this sounds romantic, it's because stupidity and recklessness are romantic qualities.

Midnight Toker is not my favorite Heretic perfume (that would be Nosferatu), nor even my second favorite (Dirty Grass). I'm still working through my sample. Still, I return to it often. It feels a little naughty. It's the smell of bad decisions. It's what it smells like when you're messy, slutty, and too fucked up to care. It's the warm glow of a cigarette, the friendly scowls at the smoke spot, the relief of your drunken stomach settling down under the weight of tobacco. Midnight Toker is that cute emo boy's breath, and it's the hoodie he lent you when you stood around listening to him talk even though you were not dressed at all appropriately for the weather.

Smoking is a lot like love. You know it will almost certainly end badly — life-rendingly so. It's a dumb thing to do, and that just makes it more attractive. The future doesn't exist yet. Maybe our bad decisions will never catch up with us.

Midnight Toker: +1.

Star Trek: Voyager

2026-02-08

#star-trek

Janeway chose to maroon them in the Delta Quadrant for no reason. She took one look at the Kazon, decided they were savages, and felt the need to prevent them from getting technology above their station. Her racial hatred impaired her cognitive function to such a degree that she forgot she could just set a bomb to go off after they left. Or maybe they just don't have alarm clocks in the Federation?

Chakotay is just... fine with all this? Says it's up to her. And... joins the crew. (???)

Every Voyager episode feels like a crappy TNG episode.

Seska is the only person who has an accurate assessment of Janeway's actions and bears a grudge, and she's an incredibly competent Cardassian agent. Yet the writers decided to turn her into a mishmash of crazy ex-girlfriend tropes culminating in a "used condom" type pregnancy for no discernible reason other than to manipulate Chakotay, despite how it could jeopardize her standing and despite that she could easily just fake it. (She doesn't know, but in fact, it turns out not to be his!)

Enterprise used a similar idiotic plot point when the human fascists stole T'Pol and Trip's DNA to make a baby for propaganda purposes, when they could have just stuck pointed ears on any random baby.

Janeway thinks they should stop Ferenghi from making a buck at all costs, but investigating genocide is not their place.

Weird continuity error? In S03E23 "Distant Origin", the Galileo aliens find Voyager using the signature of their warp plasma from a container identical to the one used in Neelix's sting op on the space station in S03E13 "Fair Trade". But not only was that not Voyager's plasma, it blew up in the end. So did they forget that, or did Voyager also happen to legitimately trade plasma off-screen?

She formed an alliance with the Borg to ENHANCE THEIR POWERS? After swearing off alliances after the humiliating, disastrous, easily avoided Nazi incident? When she could just fucking GO AROUND the other aliens?

Did they write off Kes when Seven of Nine joined the crew because they didn't want to increase the number of women?

Hell Year: did Janeway forget Kes's warning about the Crenim? Also, they met them after Kes sublimed and threw them 10k lightyears. So in the first (?) iteration of Hell Year they must have gotten a boost some other way.

S04E17 "Retrospect" is one of the biggest pieces of shit I've ever seen. It's a false rape accusation story where the rapist is treated as the victim, the accuser is treated as delusional, and her supporters are treated as dangerous fools for pursuing an investigation. It even blames the accuser (Seven) and her supporters as responsible for the rapist's death, and the mere act of accusing and investigating as violations.

More infuriatingly, there is never any evidence uncovered that the man was innocent, just lack of evidence supporting the accuser. And in fact there was hard evidence (the only hard evidence) that her memories of the attack had been suppressed. It also just strains credulity that it would take her two hours to reconfigure a thermal doodad, so the circumstantial evidence supports her.

I haven't been this pissed off by a Star Trek episode since Enterprise S02E22 "Cogenitor", a repulsive story about how it's fine to keep third-sex people as sex slaves.

The show is actually pretty good on its own merits once you get past the first season or two. The problem is that compared to DS9, it's a big downgrade: mostly episodic, worse writing. And compared to TNG, it's incredibly derivative.

Neelix's departure was touching but kind of undermined his whole narrative. The bond of shared heritage with people he just met was stronger than the one with his chosen family on Voyager. Naomi was like his child or niece and he ditched her for a random kid he shares DNA with.

Seven is a very interesting character even though the show is immensely disrespectful toward her. This is most obvious in her attire, but the terrible series finale showcases narrative disrespect: Seven's relationship with Chakotay. This abruptly changes her character trajectory from one of acceptance of her identity as an outsider, to one where she's just like any other human. Worse, the change happens off-screen. And it just doesn't make sense! Like Odo and Kira, they have zero chemistry.

Enterprise dialed this phenomenon up from Seven to eleven with T'Pol. She too is banned from wearing clothing, but the sexualization is relentless. One episode even opens on a shot of her ass! The narrative disrespect is much worse: T'Pol is characterized inconsistently and frequently subjected to sexual violence. Yet, she too is a compelling character, thanks largely to Blalock's fantastic, subtle performance and the existence of actual chemistry between her and Trip.

Star Trek: Picard

2026-02-11

#star-trek #review

!! Spoilers.

Season 1: Surprisingly Okay

I put off watching Picard for a long time because I thought I'd hate it, but after putting myself though numerous other bad Star Trek shows, I've developed a sense of resignation and indifference. Unlike other things I enjoy, the "canon" of Star Trek does not really matter because it doesn't really have one. It retcons itself constantly, and almost always for the worse. This predates even TNG; consider the soft-retcon of Spock suddenly having a brother who's Vulcan Jesus in the TOS film The Final Frontier, another bad entry in the Star Trek non-canon. As much as TNG means to me, it has several terrible episodes that do not detract from my overall opinion of the series (and let's not even talk about the films). I think this attitude served me well, because I ended up enjoying Season 1, despite many reasons not to.

Season 1 does not get off to a good start. This is a recurring problem with Star Trek. The first episode has so much stupid shit in it that's hard to look past, and stuff that's just... weird. Picard has live-in servants? Um, okay. He quit Starfleet 25 years ago and hasn't talked to anyone since? Uh, sure, whatever. A stranger shows up on his doorstep, tells him she just killed three people, and he welcomes her inside? He decides her incredibly pedestrian necklace has some special significance? What the fuck is going on? Between all this weird shit and the dream sequence opening, I thought for sure this was going to be a false/alternate/time-loop reality story. Nope, it's just strange creative decisions.

The absolute nadir of all Star Trek technobabble arrives in this episode: we're informed you can recover Data's entire personality from a single neuron. I know this series thinks I'm stupid, but seriously? We also learn that androids have to be made in pairs. This is never justified. I can only conclude that since Data had a twin, they decided that's just a fact of reality for androids. It's like a Star Wars prequel.

Thankfully, it got much more watchable from there. It's still a trainwreck, but it's a fun trainwreck. It's campy and earnest instead of self-serious and cynical. It's a show that wants to be a deep meditation on death... that also happens to have a ninja elf with a sword.

For some reason, this show has a fixation on taking Picard down a peg. He constantly makes an ass of himself. He's out of touch and full of himself, and everyone lets him know. Ultimately though, this is excusable, given he's used to being the big man in charge and has been a hermit for the last quarter-century.

Picard's storyline is the least interesting part. The more compelling storyline is about an android who doesn't know she's an android and her abusive Romulan boyfriend. The way it all plays out is pretty stupid, but I had fun with it. I'm a sucker for the sentient robot trope; it's just so very trans. I'll put up a whole post about that eventually.

We should talk about Seven of Nine. They made her into a badass pirate queen and let her wear clothing. She murders a bunch of people who have it coming. Sure, cool, I dig it. They got a little carried away with the grimdark brutality, though. Remember Icheb? The sweet little Borg kid from Voyager? Yeah, he makes an appearance only long enough to have his eyeball ripped out and be euthanized by his mother figure. Hugh, the singleton Borg from TNG, sticks around longer but he too is ultimately dispatched. It's like anti-fanservice.

Sadly, the shows goes out on a whimper with a finale that's nearly as bad as the first episode. It has by this point become obvious that a) the story is building up to Picard's death, and that b) he will not actually die since there are two more seasons left. And indeed, we get a fake death with no emotional heft. There's also an extremely irritating scene where we get the whole "death is Good Actually because without it life has no meaning" spiel. Babby's first mortality cope. But even this is tolerable, because it puts the nail in Data's coffin. They reassure us that he is actually, really dead this time. I respected that; after Episode 1 I assumed they'd bring him back ASAP. One scene with a suicidal ghost is fine by comparison.

The rest of the plot has issues too. It's your classic genocide story: we have to wipe them out before they wipe us out. Only, it's true! If the Romulans don't wipe out the robots, they will activate a doomsday device! And it's asymmetrical; the robots could just get on the ship and fly away. Picard's big moment is telling the robot girl that it's actually fine if she chooses to wipe them out, it's up to her, but he hopes she won't. This incredibly stupid plan, of course, works.

So, we have a few issues: one, you can't really blame the bad guys for trying to wipe out a few dozen robots when their first recourse is gigadeathcrime. SF narratives that justify genocide are bad, actually. The more aggravating part is that Picard makes a stupid gamble and it pays off. This is presented as validating his philosophy, but he actually just got lucky. Instead of a daring captain and brilliant diplomat, he seems like a total shmuck who is willing to sacrifice literally everyone for his friend's robot daughter (who isn't even really his daughter!).

Still, it felt very Star Trek to have the grand resolution of the conflict be Picard saying "everyone please just be nice, okay?" It didn't end with them blowing something up. That's a win in my book.

Season 2: Surprisingly Not Okay

After Season 1, I made the mistake of going into Season 2 with optimism. At first, it did not seem misplaced. In the first episode, it seems like it will be a story about Picard negotiating the entrance of the Borg into the Federation. I was honestly really fucking stoked about this. They're doubling down on the peacefulness! Picard has to be an ambassador instead of a gunslinger! Imagine the intercultural conflicts!

Yeah, no.

Some stupid shit happens. My hopes are dashed. But then they find themselves in a new reality where the Federation is evil. Gasp... could this be... an entire season-long Mirror Universe episode? What have I done to deserve this bounty?!

Yeah, no.

Some more stupid shit happens and it turns out this is not a season-long Mirror Universe episode, it's a season-long Stupid Fucking Time Travel Episode, and we will never get to see the evil Federation again. God dammit.

Now that death has been conquered in Season 1, the overarching theme of Season 2 is regret. Just like in Season 1, this season is obsessed with shitting on the namesake. This time, instead of attacking Picard for being old and out of touch, they attack him for being insufficiently emotionally available (and for not sleeping with his housekeeper). Once again, they've taken a trait that is normal and expected of a captain — emotional distance from his crew — and turned it into a character flaw.

As if that weren't bad enough, they've given him a tragic backstory to explain this supposed flaw. You thought his demeanor in TNG was just professionalism? Nope, it's because his mom killed herself when he was little and now he's broken. I guess this is intended to make us more sympathetic, but it kind of backfires. We get a bunch of scenes of him being a spoiled little rich kid (who somehow grew up in the 19th century? were his parents LARPers?) and it's just so annoying. I hate you baby Picard! I hope your mom kills herself!

Picard makes such baffling decisions and spends so much time smiling amiably that I developed a pet theory: he has no idea where he is or what's happening at any given moment. He's not just old, he's senile. He's 100% confused at all times.

It's not all bad. They have to fight ICE agents, who are correctly portrayed as psychopathic racist monsters. Seven of Nine's obvious queerness is made explicit and hence undeniable, although in classic Star Trek style she's dating someone she has zero chemistry with. The hot lesbian from American Horror Story becomes a Borg and is hot and Borgy. Young Guinan screams really loud. Um. There was probably other stuff.

The show ends predictably, with everything put back the way it was and a detente with the Borg that was obvious from the jump. The only thing that changes is that they left a guy in the past because he fell for a 2024 woman during the three days they were there. Very stupid. The new, gentler Borg thing is interesting, but we obviously will never see them again. All the previous Borg stuff from TNG didn't get undone, so really it didn't matter at all.

They never explain why the housekeeper that Q wants Picard to sleep with (which he does, then she shows up in the first episode of Season 3 and is never heard from again) looks exactly the same as the Supervisor from 2024. I can only assume we're supposed to infer that she became his live-in servant because she was assigned to do it by some annoying extratemporal dork like Wesley Crusher or that guy from Enterprise.

Season 3: The Slopfest Arrives

Up until this point, Picard, for all its flaws, has shown remarkable artistic integrity. They tried to do something new instead of churning out corporate slop. They didn't resurrect Data (at least, not in the flesh). Besides Picard and Seven of Nine, characters from the classic series only made brief appearances. It was very much not just "TNG, but they're old". The results weren't exactly good, but at least they tried.

Someone higher up must have noticed they weren't selling enough toys. The theme song is literally just the TNG theme.

I guess the Federation are the good guys again, because Seven of Nine is inexplicably a member of Starfleet. I don't know how that fits in with the pirate queen thing. I guess she has range? Her asshole captain, one of the few highlights of the season, forces her to deadname herself as Annika Hansen; people show respect by calling her Seven. (I'm telling you, robots are trans!)

One by one, all the olds are brought back for one last depressing outing. The only original character left from past seasons is Raffi, who is not very interesting to begin with and has a lame storyline. She and Seven broke up, which is the only thing about this season that makes any sense.

Worf makes his appearance by murdering a bunch of low-level gangsters for no reason... with a sword! That's right, another stupid goddamn sword. It's not even the bat'leth, it's a brand new stupid Klingon sword. He's still a member of Starfleet, too, so I guess they relaxed their rules about murder.

Crusher, too, is introduced in a fit of ultraviolence. Her hair isn't red anymore for some reason. Her entire storyline makes zero sense. It turns out Picard doesn't know about condoms and knocked her up, then she disappeared and hasn't been seen since. She has a son who inherited Picard's British accent and totally sucks ass. Her explanation for why she never told Picard about him is that she wanted to keep him safe from all the dangerous hijinx he's always involved in. I would maybe buy that if she did not then decide to gallivant around the galaxy with him in a different starship, smuggling medical supplies and getting in firefights.

The hilarious decision to give the kid a British accent (justified with a throwaway about studying in London) is another rerun of the last godawful TNG outing, Nemesis. The nemesis in question was a young clone of Picard, and... he was bald. The writers for this franchise think their audience is so, so stupid. This season drives home that Picard is not so much a sequel to TNG as a sequel to the TNG films we all wish we could forget.

There is a brief hint that something cool might happen when they bring back the Founders from DS9 as the bad guys and have them compromise Starfleet. We didn't really see their supposed genius infiltration abilities in DS9, so that seemed like it might go somewhere. The crackpot Founder villain who was driven mad by unethical Starfleet experiments is kind of fun; she smokes a clove cigarette and overpronounces Picard's name.

Then, in yet another a twist that makes no sense, it turns out it was really the Borg behind it all. Yeah, they really wanted to make sure we know Season 2 didn't matter. They finally figured out how to do genetic engineering and hatched this elaborate plot using the transporters. I liked that bit about the transporters; they really should not be used outside of emergencies.

Data gets resurrected again and it sucks. Riker makes a bunch of unfunny quips and it sucks. Troi is there and it sucks. Worf is pretending to be a zen master and is nothing like himself and it sucks. Geordi has kids and it sucks. There's a nauseating amount of fanservice that culminates in an exhausting nostalgia-fest over the resurrected Enterprise-D. It felt like I was at a Rolling Stones concert in the present day.

There's not much else to say. Picard makes more bad calls and gets away with it. The credit sequence is pretty. Oh, they brought back Ro Laren only to kill her off.

We end on Picard's son. Tune in next week for the first episode of Young Picard!

little bug

2026-02-12

#poem

little bug,
i'm so sorry i hurt you.
it was an accident.
i didn't mean to.

little bug,
i have so many reasons to cry.
i don't want another.
please don't die.

little bug,
was your little life good?
did you eat green leaves,
and do everything you thought you would?

little bug,
we are alike, you and i,
two specks in a land of careless giants.
no one will notice when i die.

little bug,
i can't fix your wings or your leg.
all i can do is notice you.
if god were real i would beg.

Cat Names

2026-03-11

#list #personal

Riley

Ri-Ri

Big Stuff

Big Boy

Fatso

Princeling

Little Cow Cat

Little Drop of Milk

Smokey

Smokey Bear

Smokes

Mokes

Mokey

Mokester

Princess

Bushy Tail

Joey

Jo-Jo

Question Mark

Fluffer Nutter

Swish

Shwish

Shwishwish

Turdball

Faker

Josephine

Marshmallow

Jojo Bean

Marshmallow Fluff

All

Cat

Kitty

Kitty-Cat

Kitty-Kitty

Baby

Baby-Baby

Sweet Baby

Sweetie

Sweetheart

Cutie

Cutie Pie

Cutie Patootie

DIY vegenaise

2026-03-11

#recipe

https://minimalistbaker.com/easy-vegan-mayo-with-aquafaba/

fills a small mason jar nicely. x3 perfectly fills large jar.

Ingredients

1/4 cup aquafaba (the liquid/brine in a can of chickpeas)

1/4 tsp ground mustard

1/4 tsp sea salt

1 1/2 tsp apple cider vinegar

1 tsp syrup/sweetener - 2tsp agave is too much and the agave flavor is bad. 1tsp maple syrup is good. 2tsp + garlic powder + onion powder + dill = ranch veggie dip

3/4-1 cup sunflower, avocado, or canola oil - NOT OLIVE.

Instructions

Combine everything but oil. Blend on high with an immersion blender for best results. Ninja normal blender works, use punctured ziplock to drip oil in without making a mess.

Add the oil very slowly. Move the immersion blender up and down to incorporate air.

maple syrup will make it less thick + fluffy allegedly. stevia, cane sugar, and brown rice syrup recommended by author

Fish: get containing folder

2026-03-11

#code #fish #snippet

I think path is one of the best things about Fish. Here's a simple function to get the canonical name of the folder something is in.

function folder
    if ! isatty stdin
        cat - | read -at argv
    end
    for file in $argv
        echo (path resolve $file | path dirname | string split '/')[-1]
    end
end

Use it like this:

folder file.ext
echo file | folder
folder */*.*
folder .

Religion is Not a Source of Comfort

2026-03-13

#essay #phil

There's a popular notion that religiosity provides emotional support: a balm in times of pain; a source of strength in times of struggle. The reason for this misconception is obvious: religion is guaranteed to rear its head during hard times. Religion coincides with desperation, and we charitably assume that adherents must be getting something out of it.

The most prominent example is when somebody dies. In fact, death is just about the only time I ever have religion personally foisted upon me, and reflecting on a recent bereavement is the impetus for this post. Death is the only time I can think of where my culture considers it totally verboten to contradict religious mythology and expects a show of adherence from nonbelievers. We are expected to voice agreement with clichés like "she's in a better place now" that are ridiculous and, frankly, insulting. Heaven forfend that you reply "actually, she's dead and gone"! Really, you have to put up with it for a while before you're tempted to say something of the sort, because the last thing you want to do is hurt someone who is already hurting. You wouldn't want to take away their source of comfort. (Or mark yourself as an asshole atheist.)

But how comforting can it really be? Anyone who actually believes that ought to be happy when someone dies, not make an effort to convince themselves. The death of a loved one is painful, and repeating lies doesn't actually make it any better. And there's another dimension to this that I don't think is always obvious in a funereal context where everyone generally liked the deceased and wants to make everyone happy: they say these things not because it's hard to cope with the reality of death, but because it's hard to cope with their belief that the dead person might be burning in hell.1 Religion offers comfort for a pain of its own creation.

Mortality is just the tip of the iceberg. Some notion of ultimate right and wrong, comeuppance for evildoers and justice for their victims: this is the comfort of a panopticon. Becoming a better person, gaining wealth, and other imagined rewards are just that — imagined. The only real comfort religion has to offer is a community, invariably one you will be exiled from if you fail to demonstrate sufficient adherence to its rules and belief in the products of its imagination. If you expect religion to make you happy, you will be sorely mistaken.

The correlation between anguish and religious expression should be understood the other way around: religion is far more likely to be a symptom of mental distress than a solution to it. Have you ever heard of someone losing their mind and... becoming an atheist? I'm sure it happens, but I've never heard of it, whereas people lose their mind and become religious about a thousand times a day. Then they tell all their new religious friends their conversion story, and their alarming experience of psychosis gets transmuted into a touching brush with the Divine.

Everything I said above has been borne out in my own life. I'm at my most religious when I'm severely depressed; I entertain belief in an agonizing afterlife only as a result of drug abuse, poor mental state, and the delusive backdrop of my religious upbringing. Comfort comes from immersion in observable reality: when you die, you're gone; nothing bad will happen. Nobody can hear you think and judge you for it. There's no need to stress about what the eye in the sky thinks of your behavior. Your life here, now, is all that matters; enjoy yourself and live in the moment.

It's still painful when someone I love dies. Sometimes I wish I could retreat into delusion. But accepting reality beats seeking out the cold comfort of belief and all the extra pain it brings with it.

1. I realize not all religions have a hell, but any afterlife must have some quality or it wouldn't be an afterlife. The observable end of a life produces anxiety on its own — it reminds you of your own mortality, raises questions of how you will go on without them, etc. — but belief in an afterlife produces an additional anxiety about what it might consist of.

Anna's Archive Spotify torrents

2026-03-23

#forbidden-knowledge

Links to these were removed after legal threats. See AA's blog post Backing up Spotify for background.

Cover Art (2.2 TB): torrent / magnet

Audio Analysis (3.9 TB): torrent / magnet

Metadata (199.9 GB): torrent / magnet

https://annas-archive.gl/dyn/small_file/torrents/other_aa/aa_misc_data/annas_archive_spotify_2025_07_coverart.tar.torrent
https://annas-archive.gl/dyn/small_file/torrents/other_aa/aa_misc_data/annas_archive_spotify_2025_07_audio_analysis.torrent
https://annas-archive.gl/dyn/small_file/torrents/other_aa/aa_misc_data/annas_archive_spotify_2025_07_metadata.torrent

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:5bccfd692a2ce67234b00c8865ab58e36b9b72d3&dn=annas_archive_spotify_2025_07_coverart.tar&xl=2167372472320
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:afc275bcf57137317e22e296a5ee20af8000444f&dn=annas_archive_spotify_2025_07_audio_analysis&xl=3880351847111
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:4cc9ac59f807dc6bdf95f52ffc86f44272a361a7&dn=annas_archive_spotify_2025_07_metadata&xl=199887366916

State of Our 'Place, 2026-03-23

2026-03-23

#meta #soop #code

Card of the Now

Ace of Swords from Modern Witch Tarot

Under Construction

The site has been up for about two months now; it's essentially feature-complete... and yet, I still have an "Under Construction" sign on the homepage. I should probably change that so I don't scare away visitors.

But it's true! The site is under construction. In fact, I hope it will still be under construction for a long time. If it ever stops being under construction, it would mean I abandoned it. (Or died.) I have a tendency to start projects that I don't finish, and I usually don't stick with them for very long before I abandon them. Worse still, I tend to get overwhelmed at the thought of returning to an unfinished project, and I am extremely good at avoiding things that stress me out.

That's part of why I've approached the site the way I have. If it's perpetually unfinished by design, I can't feel bad about not finishing it. I've continued to work on it, off and on, for multiple months, so I think it's working.

I've taken a similar approach to art to deal with my perfectionism. (Yes, I'm both a chronic quitter and a brutally self-critical perfectionist. Go figure.) Over the years, I've developed quite a fondness for art that is sketchy, lo-fi, chaotic, punk, etc., and it's translated into more creative output. It's hard to be a perfectionist about something that derives its beauty from imperfection.

So, I have an imperfect, unfinished site full of imperfect, unfinished work, and at the moment, I'm actually rather proud of it. My Card of the Now has been unchanged for quite a while; I interpret it as meaning "take the first step". This website is probably not the first step I ought to be taking — I should be working on fleeing the country rather than distracting myself with Computer — but I've been so depressed and unproductive for so long that it feels like a minor miracle. I took a step! Maybe it's the first step of the first step.

If nothing else, I've cleared the lowest bar: my site consists of more than a single post about how I made it.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Growing Pains

While I'm overall pleased with my progress, the commonplace vibe I'm aiming for hasn't really come through yet. There's a lot more longform prose and a lot less reference material than I imagined. Partly this is because I've just felt like writing essays a lot lately, motivated by the political environment and by knowing I'd actually have somewhere to post them.

The other part is because I'm still easing into this whole having-a-website business. I'm reticent to dump too many notes in here at once, in case I want to change something about my approach. I had a very clear picture of what I wanted when I first began this project, but actual experience has tempered that.

For example, I initially planned for every post to be named YYYY-MM-DD_hh-mm-ss.md, so that a stable URI could be guaranteed and no manual intervention would be needed. It seemed like a waste of time to duplicate the title in the filename when I can better specify it inside the document. This thinking was directly inspired by the "notes app" workflow. However, my client software is currently somewhat lacking — I haven't felt like working on it — and I've found myself often messing with the posts on the filesystem level. Obviously, an opaque wall of numbers makes it hard to find what I'm looking for, so I first made the executive decision that the timestamp can be replaced with a friendly name. Everything I wrote on my computer got a friendly name, and everything on my phone got a timestamp. Even this ended up irritating me: the unnamed posts stuck out like a sore thumb. So I decided to go through and rename everything. It felt very naughty, breaking those URIs, but it's highly unlikely anyone had linked to them. For the time being, I will plan on using friendly filenames at least until I get around to spiffying up my deploy script and fzf-based notes script.

Another big design issue I haven't worked out yet is organization. I was very set on a flat folder of notes and a flat set of hashtags: no fiddling with exclusive categories or folders or tag hierarchies. But I've been questioning the sense of this approach. The first catalyst was my visual art: it should be easy for people to scroll through all of that at once without drilling down in pixel art, photos, etc. So, I've been giving all those posts duplicate tags: the type of art (eg #pixel-art) and also the #visual-art tag. This is annoying.

My first thought was to create a post with the name of the umbrella tag and list the child tags inside it. This seemed like an elegant solution, despite that it would require you to click each child, but then my parents looked at my site and they were both terribly confused by it. I'm not sure exactly what my target audience is, but I'd like navigation to be straightforward for any visitor.

I started implementing support for parent tags like #visual-art:pixel-art,photo using some hacky bullshit like I usually do, but I'm not sure I like this solution either. Maybe it's time to kill my sacred cow and think about organizing shit into folders. I dunno.

Exotic Protocols & Formats

The biggest recent change for you, the reader, is the creation of the epub version. This could be improved, but it gets the job done. I think it closes the last major gap in support for ways people-who-like-to-read like to read. No need to monkey with a folder full of text files, the RSS feed (which is full-text, by the way), scraping the html, or other such desperate measures. (Users of Kindles, mobi-only devices like Palm Pilots or first-generation e-readers, etc., ought to be able to drop the epub into Send to Kindle or Calibre.) Please let me know if you make use of this. It tickles me to imagine my humble site being engaged with like a proper book.

I had entertained the thought of releasing a manpage version, and in fact I stumbled on a site the other day doing just that! But it's so silly. If you have a pager anyway, wouldn't you rather just read the source files? Something about this stupid idea really appeals to me though. Maybe if I build up a decent corpus of reference material I'll do it.

Gemini & Gopher

Support for rendering gemtext is well under way, thanks to this library. I feel like I'm finally starting to wrap my head around Go and the Xlog/Goldmark codebase. Turning the posts themselves into gemtext is mostly done, but I'd like the Gemini version of the site to be reasonably close in features to the web version, so I still need to figure out how to get Xlog extensions to spit out gemtext versions.

I honestly don't think Gemini is that great. The gemtext format is missing some very basic features, like bold/italic and nested lists, and the protocol's insistence on TLS makes it unsuitable for the types of devices you might use to visit a Gopherhole. More fundamentally, the project seems confused about the nature of protocols and standards. They seem to think that they can prevent feature creep by just insisting that nothing ever change. The growth of the web proved it doesn't work that way — if your spec document fails to account for something people want, they will just ignore the document. It's better to be a little flexible about standardizing things people are already doing than to cling to the fantasy that your standards can stop them.

Still, I appreciate the goals behind the project, and thanks to browsers like Offpunk and Dillo (with plugins), visiting Gemini capsules is convenient and pleasant. Gemini users seem likely to share my interest in reading plaintext and attitudes about technology, so I'd like to cater to them.

And, well, Gemini seems like an easier first step than Gopher. Just like with Gemini, it would be pretty trivial to throw up a flat Gopherhole with just my posts, but I'd rather render nice gophermaps and translate all of the web version's bells and whistles that I'm able to. As crusty as it is, it excites me a lot more than Gemini: if a computer is too old to even handle the http/html version, it can still use Gopher to get a better experience than reading the txt directory. Also, the bandwidth requirement is minimal.

I'm not sure how I'll actually host these versions of the 'place. My current webhost, Web 1.0 Hosting, would make it easy for me to self-host from my home, but I really don't want to do that for reasons of security and maintenance burden. For now I've put in an application to //smol.pub/; I'm not sure if it's flexible enough for my needs, but unlike most free Gem hosts, they advertise the ability to use your own domain, and I'm weirdly attached to mine. If that doesn't work out, or they ignore me like all the other cute pubnices I've ever applied to, there's always SDF. I could rent a VPS for like $1/month, but then I'd be spending >$0 to host the site, and I'd have to admin it myself. Still, the control it would afford is tempting, and I might do it if I can think of another use for it.

Publicity

Without any intervention from me, Google has begun indexing pnppl.cc. You have to put in the whole domain to get it to show up, or you get a million pages of the horny gay photography zine that stole my name. (I actually really appreciate the degree of anonymity this zine has given me over the years by burying my accounts.)

I have some trepidation about promoting myself. Ultimately I do hope people read and enjoy my site, but there's also a sense of freedom in posting into the void knowing nobody will see it. Part of why I left social media was the feeling that I always had a million eyes on me. I'd rather have a few dedicated readers than a hundred who only notice when I start shit with strangers or post an eye-catching photo.

Anyway, with all that said, I've started submitting my site to some indices that focus on personal/indie/smallweb sites. I've gotten a lot of enjoyment out of exploring these, especially Marginalia.

http://wiby.org/

Compatible with Mosaic (mostly)!

https://marginalia-search.com/

https://indieblog.page/

https://smallweb.cc/

https://searchmysite.net/

https://feedle.world/

https://kagi.com/smallweb/

https://personalsit.es/

https://indieseek.xyz/

https://blogscroll.com/

I was also accepted to this shorter list on a cool personal website:

https://zacharykai.net/lists/queer

See also:

https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/

https://discourse.32bit.cafe/t/resources-list-for-the-personal-web/49#p-63-directories-listings-12

(Note to self: I still need to submit to Kagi through Blogscroll.)

Here's a Fish function for indieblog.page, adapted from one posted by susam.net:

# open five random indie blogs in default web browser
function blog
    for i in (seq 5)
        curl -sSw '%header{location}\\n' https://indieblog.page/random |
        sed -E 's/[?&]utm_[^2026-03-23_soop-&]*//g' |
        xargs xdg-open
    end
end

Here's another Fish function for the above list (blogscroll.com randomizes with js, boo!):

# open several random websites in default browser
# pass any arg to include galleries
function stumble
    set targets \\
        https://wiby.me/surprise/ \\
#       https://indieblog.page/random \\
        https://kagi.com/smallweb/ \\
        https://personalsit.es/random \\
        # indieseek.xyz:
        https://webri.ng/webring/stumblizer/random \\
        https://searchmysite.net/search/random/
    for target in $targets
        xdg-open $target
    end
    # Some sites have a 'random' feature but return a gallery of pages, not a single one
    if test -n "$argv[1]"
        set rand (string sub -s 3 -l 4 (math -b 16 (random)))
        set galleries \\
            https://marginalia-search.com/explore \\
            # feedle opens results for a random keyword, not totally random
#           https://feedle.world/random \\
            https://smallweb.cc/?r=$rand
        for gallery in $galleries
            xdg-open $gallery
        end
    end
end

Here's CSS to tone down smallweb.cc's colorscheme:

* {
    color: black !important;
    background-color: #EEEEEE !important;
    border-color: chocolate !important;
}
img {
    filter: grayscale(100%);
}

Here's JS to skip smallweb.cc's nsfw/epilepsy gate:

// ==UserScript==
// @name        skip smallweb.cc confirm
// @match       https://api.smallweb.cc/*
// ==/UserScript==
if (document.title === "woah hey there hold on a sec") {
    let url = document.links[0].href;
    window.location.replace(url);
}

There's a significant culture in the Neocities-and-friends side of the smallweb of webrings and web-cliques and blogrolls and so on. I haven't applied to any webrings because I don't want to clutter up my site with them, but I do like the idea of making smallweb friends. I don't feel that I fit in very well with either major faction of the smallweb: I'm too old and out-of-touch and curmudgeonly for the queer-teenagers-with-garish-Neocities-pages set, and I'm too underachieving and female and humanities-brained for the male-tech-bloggers-with-a-fancy-job set. But it's a nice idea.

That's enough for now. Wasn't that more fun than a boring old changelog that I'm too lazy to keep?

If you read this far, I'm sorry. Also, send me an email.