Hey. It's been a while.

I'm on month number ... 6 (and a half) of unemployed/CERB. In that time I have

- learned python3, including pandas, some numpy (mostly pyplot and seaborn), and some machine learning stuff to predict future patterns in data (mostly economic).

- learned basic SQL

- started to work my way through JavaScript

- written most of a novel (still working on it)

- released my first short fiction with a price tag attached to it (2 bucks - if you're interested in a smutty WLW romance let me know)

- had a poem accepted to a local zine called "Kill Your Lawn"

- written some other shorts that will need some editing but that can be sent out to submission calls.

- replaced the clutch in my car (my dad was a huge help)

- had, and recovered from, an orchidectomy ( a kind of bottom surgery for trans women)

- learned how to sew

- Had one roommate break lease and leave early (My other roommate and I said Yay!)

- Had another roommate move in, then promptly die of a heart attack. (this was very unfortunate)

- helped coordinate said roommate's family's access to the townhouse so that they could take their time moving out his stuff (he had a lot of stuff)

I'm sure there are other things, too. Despite the length of that list it feels like I've not done all that much. It's been very hard to play music lately, especially the bass. I've been playing cello at socially distanced baroque jams on a friend's patio once a week - potent potables required, seriousness discouraged.

As other writer friends have said, if I wrote a year like this into a book it would be dismissed by editors as unbelievable and unrealistic. A lot of things are really wrong. To grasp at any silver lining at all, at least this pandemic has highlighted the stark distance between those who can make a living in my country, and those who can't, and how much our disability system and employment insurance (our version of unemployment) have suffered a death by 1,000 cuts over the years. The need to reinvest in ourselves, as a country, has become obvious.

Hope you guys are surviving. Things are hard everywhere.

In a way his Trumpism is understandable, because I know he is continually annoyed by having to attend seminars about pronouns, sensitivity, etc., as part of his medical training. I think his perspective is that the majority of people don't know what sacrifice is and wouldn't be so concerned with political correctness had they ever been exposed to the real underbelly of the world (in a way that a Ranger with war experience has been).

This is, and has always been, the most bullshit excuse I've ever experienced.

Seminar presenter: "Maybe just don't treat people like shit?"

your bud: "Fuck that, these trans people who get disproportionately murdered and have often been completely disowned by the people who are supposed to care about them through thick and thin, are overrepresented in the military, and are disproportionately likely to experience homelessness, abuse, sex work, etc have never seen the real underbelly of the world like I have! They've never made any sacrifices ever! They can't possibly know what real life is like! They just need to toughen up!"

The inability for people like your friend to see past their own nose is astounding. My brother is a veteran with some pretty ugly PtSD, and he had been one of my biggest supporters, because he gets it. He doesn't want other people to feel the shitty things he's felt. He'd rather no one had to.

It costs your friend literally nothing to treat a trans person as a person, and treat them with respect. Instead he and his ego choose to create further suffering in a shitty world because he doesn't believe they've suffered enough to demand his pity.

Idunno what happened to make me stop coming around. I think it was just a very stressful time to be a trans person online. I use social media a lot differently than I used to now - I spend more time on things like discord and twitter, and less time on places like reddit.

Since this is the second time I've been brought up her in the past few months, I figure I'll give the ol' gal another try, and see what's up on hubski these days.

How do I know I'm better than I was? I lost my car keys for a solid hour today, and I didn't freak out or have a nervous breakdown. I just methodically searched throughout the house

and found them as I was disassembling my recliner.

You're welcome, glad it stuck. Some of the stuff you've said stuck with me over the years (positively).

but the people trying the hardest to champion usually end up being the ones being corrected the most because they're willing to put in the work.

The important part about being one of these people is to be okay with being corrected. Every community I've encountered, or personally been a part of, has been very giving to people who fuck up, so long as you correct yourself and keep moving. "Sorry, my bad," goes a long way.

I did a bit of deep dive to see where this discussion built from, and I have to say I'm very disappointed that TNG posted an article by a person whose notoriety mostly comes from preferring that people like me don't exist. I think it behooves us to consider who writes articles, and what their motives might be, before we post them.

I would assert that this article is a much better read on the situation.

It's important to remember that trans people are, as has historically been the case (see Weimar Berlin, 1920s America, 1950s America), the canary in the coal mine of conservative attempts to pull the Overton window back in their direction. As a minority, we are easy to vilify, especially those of us who are gender non-conforming. We are not a part of regular experience, and so we are easily turned into a bogeyman. That's what the "Gender Critical" movement does, and it has reared its ugly head quite publicly in the UK.

The knock-on result of these current efforts (If they come for the trans people, and you do nothing because you are not a trans person) is that anyone who does not fit a conservative ideal of "man" and "woman" becomes subject to ridicule and lost opportunity. Already cis women are getting harassed by men for "going into the wrong bathroom". Fuck, my old masters teacher, a midwestern mom, has had this experience. the only "gender nonconforming" feature she has is a caesar haircut.

An incredible amount of the people who signed that letter are bad news. There have been some great rereads of Rowling's books with her current views in mind, and well, they get ugly. A race of human-like creatures who love to be servants and don't know what they would do if they were freed. a race of long-nosed caricatures who have few rights but control all the money. A woman who shapeshift but has "mannish hands" (a classic transphobic trope). Atwood has actively been part of attempts to silence women who accused a UBC professor of sexual assault.

These people are not good company. They have a right to say what they believe, but they don't have a right to freedom from criticism, or freedom from the consequences of saying those things, nor do they have a right to a public forum to say them. Free speech absolutism is the privileged opinion of people for which there are no actual consequences when they have an academic argument around "do Black people deserve to be beaten by police", and "Do trans people deserve rights". It is the privilege of those who believe they are unaffected.

Until, well, they are affected.

If you work at a company that actually supports you, then hustle can be a good thing. If you work at a company that needlessly exploits you, then you should be using your hustle somewhere else.

I work at a bakery. I do 10 hour shifts that are almost all hustle and hard work. It is by no means my dream job, but you know what?

- I have benefits, and I get paid pretty fairly.

- I have a positive work environment.

- I have a boss that has my back.

I am more than willing to hustle for her, pick up extra shifts, help out, come in for meetings on my days off. Good companies give back.

writing is making me happy these days. written quite a few shorts in the past year, working on a novel. going to do some writing tonight.

I've been having a lot of discussion about this with my brother, actually.

A lot of translations give out a set of cues to us, the reader, that they are using "archaic language", or other strategies, to say "this was a long time ago, and this is the image I want you to have in your head."

But the problem is that, like the music you hear every time Romans show up in film and television, they're in no way accurate to what things were actually like. They're just a set of cues that have been set up by more modern media, and our exposure to has told us that "those french horns mean Romans". We've been attempting to translate Beowulf into our perception of medieval speech as run through an academic English professor's verbiage. Considering that it was the sort of thing to be told around the drinking table, and was written down in that way, translations like that make very little sense.

Basically, we're already not translating "faithfully", and arguably haven't been since shortly after the poem was written down (if the original was even totally faithful, to begin with, but that gets into a whole other set of questions). This is a fundamental issue with translation, and especially translation of poetry - translate literally, or tell the story, or meet in the middle somewhere. they are two finite points that cannot both be satisfied fully. Headley herself weighs in on this in her preface, which is worth the cost of admission in and of itself without the translation.

If this gets dated, the correct response isn't to go back to the old translations (save for reference), it's to translate it again. And again. It's got to live, and it's got to be in the vernacular if it's truly going to be relevant and not left to the dusty corners of libraries and the drudgery of English Lit curriculum. Indeed, I'd pay money to get even the first two dozen lines or so written in as many common vernaculars as possible. Army guys around a table, steelworkers on lunch break, the Tuesday night sewing group, the activist group at a meeting, and so on.

The story is in the telling, after all.

Maybe with Joe Rogan having Alex Jones on his podcast again, and spouting transphobic shit again, I can convince my brother to stop listening.

Unlikely.

It's been a while.

doing my Artists's Diploma in early music in Toronto. It's going okay. I did an audition for a local baroque group, and they liked me. hopefully I'll get some work out of that.

Went to a poetry writing workshop series for femmes and trans femmes last november. I've been writing a lot of poetry since. I think Lil is sick of reading it, tbh.

Hope all is well with y'all.

It's meeeeeeee

GOOD.

The shit we let rich white men just ... get away with? Madness.

You too, fam. I still lurk around here and try to keep up. I just don't have much to say these days.

Well, that's not entirely true. Google is better at search than anyone else, for sure. However, just because they are good at one service doesn't necessarily mean that they are good at other services (see Google Plus). When they use their platform as a dominant search engine to push their other products to the disadvantage of other, smaller companies, they are breaking anti-trust legislation that's been around since the time of the Robber Barons in late 19th century America.

Basically it's against the law for people (and by legal similarity, companies) to use their size and muscle to push other services out in anticompetitive ways. We've made our laws this way because we had to learn the hard way that this created Monopolies, and was disadvantageous not only to us as consumers, but also to our societies and our governments.

Now, if Google's shopping service pushed other services out by being significantly under the cost of all of the other businesses, that's one thing, because they are supplying a better price or service to consumers. This is what places like Walmart do. It's shady to run everything as a loss leader, but not illegal. But they weren't doing that, they just took all of the advertising - that those other companies bought from them, remember - and buried it underneath their own advertising, or put it in smaller fonts than their own advertising, etc. That's anticompetitive, and breaks antitrust laws worldwide.

Alien.

Alien is so many things. It is a fantastic sci-fi movie, monster movie, horror movie. Alien, and the sequel, Aliens, are two of my favourite movies of all time.

Maybe reddit is exactly what the front page of the internet is. Want to see what the internet looks like outside of oases like Hubski? Reddit's a pretty good example -Pseudoscience, photos of conventionally attractive women in photos they may or may not have consented to, racism, complaints of censorship on what is effectively private property. Oh, and the occasional cat pic.

Forgive me if i seem jaded, but Reddit isn't "the problem". Reddit is just a very good example of a cultural problem, as well as what happens when

1.) opinion is as good as fact

2.) anonymity is paramount.

State governments have to balance.

Our municipal governments work like that in relation to our provinces. They function as what we label "Creatures of the province", meaning that really they're just doing what work the province doesn't want to have to deal with on an administrative level.

It's incredibly annoying and leads to our provincial government meddling in the municipal affairs of our largest city. Which is ... Annoying. Yes, I realize I'm repeating that word but I'm so overloaded with negative emotions at this point in the year that I can't even bring myself to a more focused and pointed term for the banal daily evils of provincial politics (especially when we have more pressing provincial issues).

however, the point I want to bring up is that while you're right that central banks have summoned that money (I love your image, by the way, It's fantastic and apt as per usual), most functioning federal governments have been supporting their smaller provincial and state counterparts instead of actively stymying them as your federal government has. Your government could choose to, say, buy state bonds to keep your states afloat.

It has chosen not to.

And I think that this is something that's important to keep in mind in the discussion around this article. None of that had to happen. Choices were made - indeed, they're described here. So questioning who benefits from those choices is pretty important.

Man, I hope you're right and I'm wrong, because I'm making plans to get friends across the border if it gets as bad as I think it could.

LOL America is full of jesusfreaks therefore Trump wins.

I don't think that. Far from it, actually. But I do think a few things.

1.) Biden is not popular enough - he was the wrong candidate. I don't think anyone in the Democratic race was a good enough candidate.

2.) There are enough white Christians in battleground states that will either not vote, or vote 3rd party, and combined with

3.) The Republican's voter suppression efforts in other demographics, this will lead to enough purple states remaining red for Trump to win the Electoral College.

That's what matters - Can the Democrats flip enough purple states, or usually red states that look flippable (like potentially Arizona), to make the Electoral College work for them.

Yeah. I appreciate that the article points out that this is not currently peer-reviewed, at least.

ETA: I think one huge problem we're facing right now is that we are being pressured to push the scientific method and verification to its limits. We are desperate for information on COVID-19 at a policy level, and at a media level.

Oho, man, This shit is just the latest in racist bullshit (and mental health bullshit) that's been going on here in Canda.

Something like seven indigenous people have been killed by law enforcement officers since the start of the pandemic. That might sound like small change to you, but murder is comparatively rare here period, let alone shootings.

In addition to that, we have the current movement around 1492 Landback Lane and the Wet'Suwet'en pipeline protests.

We got lots of skeletons up here, fam. It's ugly. We had re-education "Residential Schools" up until the 90s.

I don't think it's 100% fair to say that the Steam platform is not, or at least has previously not been healthy for the gaming industry.

While greenlight is not a perfect system, or even a good system, it and Xbox Live Arcade have exposed thousands of games and the people who made them to a huge, receptive audience. Steam is one of the biggest engines that moved the indie game market forward to become what it is now. All I buy, for the most part, are "Indie" games, from little "i" indie like Night in the Woods to the occasional "Triple I" indie like the Binding of Isaac.

Yeah, Valve is not your friend. No shit. they're a corporation and their goal is to suck you dry just like every other corporation and company. But credit where it's due, their attempts at expanding their market and profit margins inadvertently created an environment that helped indie games thrive, and also helped expand games outside of the PC space into Mac and Linux (because SteamOS is a unix based system and they require support for a lot of their games).

Thank you!

It's funny you mention strings, the instrument I'm playing it on is a guitar with four strings tuned like a cello - adGC from high to low.

When I was young, my dad was away a lot fixing airplanes. He'd be gone for weeks at a time to Goose Bay, or Gander, or Labrador.

But at the same time, he was never "absent" in my life, and when my dad was home, he made every effort to be at any event any of us kids were involved in. He was a Beaver (then Scout) leader, he took us camping, canoeing, built us a tree house. All the while, he and my mom both were working and running a home business to try and make ends meet in 1990s Newfoundland - where one had a hard time buying a job.

Yes my father was away, but his return was the spring that kept all of us (my mom included) through the winter of his absence.

Be the spring, KB.

The rest of the developed world is just going to have to accept that if they want to move forward on anything, they just have to do it. If the United States wants to play ball, they'll come along, and if not, just don't even bother trying to court them. I think the G7 relies, and has relied too heavily on the US leadership in the past, and it's just not going to happen right now - the GOP is very "stay the course or regress" at the moment, and Trump himself is more interested in playing to his base and distracting from scandal than anything at the moment. His strategy of "well I'll just take my ball and go home" is has to lead to the rest of the world moving on without him, or we will literally get nowhere - it's not worth any political capital to try and convince the current administration of anything.

Audition for early music program at U of T went well. My teacher was very happy. I am concerned that my masters degree grades hadn't shown up by the time of audition, but we'll see.

I also have an early music concert in Toronto this Sunday. Maybe lil or someguyfromcanada or other toronto peeps want to come? It's by donation, and it's not too snobby - there are some amateur viola da gambists playing (including myself). The set of 12 Fantasias for viola da gamba by Telemann was only recently discovered, and I believe this is their Canadian premiere.

could be fun, right? right?? just me, huh?

Trying out Intermittent Fasting to get my weight more under control. Not looking to lose a ton of weight, just better control what I eat and when.

The thing about this article, and articles like it, is that they look for the most extreme people that they can find at a place like Oberlin, and then write about them as if they represent the entire student body. That's like going to a Republican rally and looking for the people who are both KKK and NRA, then writing about the whole 40% of america's voting population as if they were all so. It's bad writing, it's shit generalization, and it screams "get off my lawn".

It railroads over the fact that if you look through the babying, and the unrealistic demands, these people have some serious points.

At Yale, the associate head of a residence balked at the suggestion that students avoid potentially offensive Halloween costumes,[...] her remarks were deemed insensitive, especially from someone tasked with fostering a sense of community...

Let's face it, no one actually thinks that the "Taco with sombrero and moustache" costume is actually funny anyways, and what does being a "Sexy Indian" have to do with a spooky holiday? These costumes are inappropriate, and always were - but now the people to whom those symbols belong are calling us on our shit.

Adams believes that the Oberlin board’s denunciation of Joy Karega’s Facebook posts shows hypervigilance toward anti-Semitism and comparative indifference toward racial oppression.

That's a good point. Should the teacher be disciplined? Of course (of course in my country Free speech does not work the same way as if does in America), but you have to make sure that you are also being the same level of strict with any other kind of racism - Because that's what anti-semitism is, just another form of racism. Jews were seen as a distinct race of people for so long that there is a cultural concept of the jewish people as more than a religious group, but a race - thats why it was so easy to lump them together and hate them.

“There’s been a shift from explicit racism to implicit racism,” she says. “It’s still racism. But now you’re criticized for complaining about it, because you’re allowed to go to college: ‘What are you complaining about? There’s a black President!’

This is the sort of thing, tucked in towards the end of the article, that the article should be written about. When we talk about Black Lives Matter, when we talk about Trans Lives Matter, maybe we should be looking at the broad spectrum of what they're saying and think "Hmm, got a point."

As much as America in particular sees protest as part of its civil lifeblood, nobody likes protestors and it's easy to focus on how privileged these kids are. We can't forget though, that it is just this group of people - those who are privileged but feel powerless - who've been moving and shaking for good and bad for over a hundred years. Vietnam protests? Rich kids. Affirmative Action? Rich kids. Minimum wage? Rich kids. Suffragette Movement? Rich kids. Anti-Slavery? Rich Kids.

Bolshevik Revolution? Kids of Russian Nobles whose roles had been slowly made redundant by the tsar - and the educated noble women who were told they could never use that education.

French Revolution? Rich Merchant class people who wanted a voice in politics, and women of all classes who wanted the same.

As you can tell by my examples, some of the things they've done are great, some of theme are terrifying. The last two examples in particular are what happens when you let this shit hang out in a pressure cooker, getting worse and worse until it explodes. Ignore them at your peril.

I mean, I literally just told you that I personally know people who are signal boosting these stories, who are involved in activism, who are the kind of people who tell all their friends before major holidays to save the fireworks so the veterans in the area don't have to find a dark, quiet place to hide.

The people in my community who are advocating for physical doctors to listen to women when they're in pain are the same people who are advocating for mental health doctors and psychologists to listen to men when they're in pain. The rate of suicide in men is absolutely gobsmacking. So is the rate of suicide for children under the age of 13.

What drove me to comment as I did is that so often, these stories come with an unspoken (or sometimes explicitly spoken) tag line of "and where are the feminists who say they're for equality?" When it happens, it always comes off to me like the News commentators who ask about black-on-black violence after a white cop kills a black kid.

And in some cases, it's well warranted because there are some shit people who claim feminism. Germaine Greer, for example, is a shit feminist. But again, I need to reinforce that the only people I see talking about these stories are intersectional feminists and queer people. These are the people I see helping people with mental health issues, helping veterans and sexual assault survivors with PTSD. And they're the people who I see get made fun of for creating "safe spaces" where people can talk about their shit, where they know and accept that the concepts like "manning up" are a result of toxic masculinity, a type of masculinity that says men are not allowed to show any emotion other than derision and rage.

And these are also the voices that mainstream culture and mainstream politics are doing their best to squeeze out.

I'm back from Iceland.

It was gorgeous, and I had lots of fun.