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A Curated Selection of Abattoir Drippings: My Spam Folder, Screencapped and Mocked

CN pretty much every kind of bigoted abuse but mostly racist, instructions to suicide, MRAs/libertarians/edgelords being themselves.

As expected, answering 27 Questions has induced a steady influx of anti-humanist nonsense into my comments queue.  I’m better prepared than most to receive this onslaught, because I’ve watched this happen to people far more important and interesting than me for a long time, I’ve read what the various subsets of atheist dirtbag are about, and I feel no need to let them get close enough to get under my skin. They have no surprises for me, and nothing to say that far more articulate bigots haven’t said before. They can whine endlessly about how, in this heat, taking away their freeze-peach is a super mean thing to do, the kind of thing only a crate of hippos would dare make standard policy, and I can look at the other things in my spam folder and derive amusement from the idea that they think I’ll ever take them seriously.

Y’all are dangerous, not interesting. Understanding yourselves is a big step toward becoming better people, and I’m glad I could help.

With that in mind, this comment stuck out at me for how impressively it missed all the points.

My face at your shenanigans.
My face at your shenanigans.

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A Curated Selection of Abattoir Drippings: My Spam Folder, Screencapped and Mocked

The Miami Circle, Beimini, and the Ahistorical Weirdness of Modern Tainidad

There is a major historic site in Miami, called the Miami Circle. It is one of the oldest indigenous sites in South Florida, discovered during construction excavations. It is a circle marked with holes that once held 24 poles, suggestive of a clock, and it was found in association with many artifacts attributed to the Tequesta / Tekesta people who once inhabited this region of South Florida. Due to its highly urban location and the controversy surrounding whether it would be preserved as a historic site or built over as part of the property that encompassed it, the circle itself has been left underground and marked with informative placards. I’ve never stood at this site, but I have been on Miami River tours that went past it. Its riverfront location makes it obvious, as the only spot for miles where the buildings don’t edge directly onto the shore, even with the circle itself underground.

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The Miami Circle, Beimini, and the Ahistorical Weirdness of Modern Tainidad

A Solvency Bucket List

I’ve occasionally been challenged to put together a bucket list, but that framing device doesn’t do much for me. My dreams are at once too distant and too quotidian to fit on a “before I die” sort of list. For now, they’re a “when the tide comes in” sort of list: a dream for a future where scrambling for every cent is a distant memory, a plan for when I’m gainfully employed again (for various tiers of “gainfully”), and a promise to my future self.

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A Solvency Bucket List

Rose Quartz Creeps Me Out

It’s not easy for me to feel good about maternal figures in media. (Gee, I wonder why.) This is something I’m aware of and keep in mind when one of them starts to rub me the wrong way, or otherwise shows their flaws. I can acknowledge Dr. Maheswaran’s harshness and overly protective tendencies, I can see and cathartically process Sadie’s mother’s overweening enthusiasm and difficulty seeing the daughter in front of her, but Rose Quartz creeps me out.

Rose Quartz, who resembles a thickset, 8-foot-tall, rosy-skinned human with enormous pink curls and a rose quartz gem set in her midsection, looks down at the viewer and extends a hand.
Means to a end, every one.

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Rose Quartz Creeps Me Out

An Honest Fantasy, a Useful Lie

My parents claim they have an honest relationship with me. I hesitate to say they think so because the claim is so bizarrely impossible that them “thinking” their way into it seems like the real stretch.

Do you think I’ve been honest with you about me, Mom and Dad? Do you really think me knowing I was trans for almost two years before I told you is the aberration, the break from our pattern that signaled a loss of trust? I don’t believe that for a second. I think you twisted and turned your way into this narrative because it let you harp on how I handled my disclosures for a while, instead of having only your own bigotry to lean on as a reason why my being Alyssa instead of [deadname] is a crime against family honor. I think you built this skein in your minds because it was important to you to feel a certain way about your children, and that it has less than nothing to do with me.

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An Honest Fantasy, a Useful Lie

Answering 27 Questions from Raging Bigots, But This Time They Aren’t Christian

Some of the online atheosphere’s most noisome abattoir drippings all got together to lay out some questions they want “SJWs” to answer. (Some other folks addressing their foolishness here and here provide that context without giving them pageviews). Giving serious answers to unserious questions is a hobby of mine, so here are some interesting thoughts for uninteresting drivel.

Basically the original video.
Basically the original video.

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Answering 27 Questions from Raging Bigots, But This Time They Aren’t Christian

Heroes in a God’s World: Religion in D&D

The classic Western-fantasy adventuring party, appearing across a wide variety of media and baked into what Dungeons and Dragons in particular expects adventuring groups to be capable of, consists of four very different characters. By default, there is a “fighter,” who wears armor and specializes in swordplay or another close-range martial art; a “wizard,” who is a combination mobile artillery piece, library, and miscellaneous magical toolkit; a “rogue” or “thief,” whose specialty is stealth, lock-picking, smooth-talking, acrobatics, and similar skills; and a “cleric” or “priest,” who provides the favor of the gods to their allies, usually in the form of magical healing and defensive magic.

That last person raises difficult questions about the overall shape of the fantasy universe, which every D&D setting tries to answer one way or another. It’s not difficult to imagine a fantasy world where the term “cleric” means something more like what it means in our world, and refers to someone an adventuring party might visit afterward for wound-tending and soul-cleansing rather than a steadfast and magical battlefield ally. Ivanhoe is probably the work of fiction most famously within this tradition. But most Western fantasy assigns clerics and other agents of the divine power well in excess of the demonstrated abilities of real-world religious figures, including the power to raise the dead on demand, instantly heal deadly injuries multiple times a day, and brandish holy symbols to disperse zombies. The deities of a fantasy world that is home to this kind of priest are, thereby, much more powerful than the god of Ivanhoe and any deity associated with real-world religious practice, and have far more direct and overt effects on the world at large.

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Heroes in a God’s World: Religion in D&D

Jessie and James Deserve Better

The pair of Team Rocket agents Jessie and James (Musashi and Kojiro in the original Japanese) are fixtures of the Pokémon animated series. The series subjects them to endless misfortune, and they never achieve their stated goals. They spend much of each episode in various states of explosion, and the warmest welcome they manage among the protagonists is occasional deep mistrust rather than overt hostility. They have earned the love of fans for their insistent theatrics, incompetence as thieves, and impressive fashion sense, but the show itself is much less consistent.

They deserve better.

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Jessie and James Deserve Better

A Kanto for my Amantes: My Lovers Reimagined as Pokémon

A Kanto for my Amantes: My Lovers as Pokémon

There’s an idea, somewhere between a running gag and a stereotype, that some people collect lovers like a Pokémon trainer collects pets. This concept grades into ugly objectification here and there, up to and including people maintaining de facto bingo cards of the demographics they’d like to bed, but it’s also an interesting thought exercise for the polyamorous lady.

Going it alone is not how this world works. None of us is invincible, nor are we all best at everything. Humans are interdependent, and we need each other. Sometimes, we are each other’s accessibility devices; other times, we’re each other’s levees, holding up what can no longer stand on its own. We look for, and find, people who fit with who we are, and we grow fond of and interdependent with people who can accomplish the things that we cannot. In the best scenario, we’re not just lovers: we are family.

A person and their partners, then, can be rather like a well-balanced Pokémon team.

So, here are the members of my polycule reimagined as Pokémon.

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A Kanto for my Amantes: My Lovers Reimagined as Pokémon