Done some more on the Elasi frigate. I'm kind of stuck at the point where there are a bunch of places that probably need some extra detailing, but I'm not really sure how to go about that, or what would work best.

Oh well. It'll be a few weeks until I need this finished.

I have also made some forays into sketching out the D7 Klingon cruiser that the nacelles for the Elasi frigate come from.

I hate this thing so much.

Don't get me wrong, as much as I generally detest the Klingons, conceptually, the D7 is a great design.

But my gods, the shapes on this thing are horrible to actually try and build. I'm not willing to go the way Discovery did with streamlining everything down - the hunched-shouldered look gets lost too much in that version of the design - yet I absolutely understand why they did it. Urgh.

The only reason I will finish this is so I can brute-force it into something nicer and Romulan.

“Hey, why don’t you want trans men talking about their experiences or writing theory about themselves?”

Get comfortable with asking that question. Because you’re going to be asking it a lot.

Trans men, overall, have not been the ones talking about trans men in things like academia and when presenting feminist/political theory. If it’s not cis people, it’s the lucky few trans women who made it past the barriers while being openly trans. But not trans men.

Trans men have been absent from the discussion of trans men.

If I could underline that, I would.

But now we’re in online spaces, where random trans men and transmascs can just, put forth their ideas and share their stories and experiences and thoughts out in the open with each other and we can gain a better understanding of transmasculinity, the issues we face, the struggles we’re going through, what studies we need to convince someone with the authority to do so to conduct, all of that. We could (and should, if you’re able) be writing books and articles and using what means we have to put our voice out there.

But the response so far to us doing that hasn’t been “hey, cool, glad you’re finding a way to include yourselves in the discussion about you! This is desperately needed and we’re excited to see it!” It’s to just… repeat the old theory that was crafted without our input and without consulting us at us, demand that we read that, and shut up. Which tells me a pretty clear message: “we have already decided for you what your experiences are. We don’t want to have to rethink anything. Now shut up and stop being inconvenient to us.”

But uh. Dont. If you’re a trans man or transmasc, don’t just shut up. They wouldn’t be telling you to quiet down if they couldn’t hear you, and if they can hear you, so can somebody else. Be inconvenient. Be a huge pain in their ass. Make them have to sit down and go back to the drawing board so that the theory reflects your reality and not just their favorite token who just happened to get lucky enough to match the theory and now thinks this applies to all of us, or the theoretical trans man that only exists in their heads and on their papers.

And if you’re not a trans man or transmasc, feel free to join us in asking that question at the top of this post. Get comfortable with saying it. It’s your script to help make it easier for you to confront somebody intent on silencing trans men and transmascs. Make it uncomfortable for them to shut us down. If they can see how much pushback they’ll get for it, they’ll be less inclined.

violence and death and dying and blood and guts and gore and violence and viscera and fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you

@markscherz do you know what type of frog this is? I can't tell if its a small adult or a baby frog.

This is a juvenile Chacophrys pierottii, arguably the most comically proportioned frog ever. Here is an adult. If I had not taken this photo myself I would think it’s some kind of ridiculous meme render.

These are also the frogs that bury themselves in a backwards spiral that is seriously relatable.

I am going to squish them

fanfacts lace regrets to know about

Thanks for looking, everyone :)

If you'd like to read some of my thought process for this piece, I've done a write-up, freely viewable on my patreon.

If you see the quote "I refuse to share my body with a man who wouldn't defend it politically" or any variation of it floating around the internet — it was Kat Blaque who originally said it and she would really appreciate it if people gave her proper credit for it but it's gone viral on a lot of different platforms and most of the people sharing it don't know it's from her or choose not to credit her on purpose.

Like I just know terfs are going to be parroting it pretending it wasn't said by a black trans woman about herself & her life.

one of the most challenging skills i've had to learn as an adult is the art of figuring out whether i'm proportionally annoyed with someone or just tired and overstimulated and looking for reasons to be pissed off

congratulations to the only post i've ever had breach 100k notes without any real discourse or fighting, just a lot of people wearily going, oh, god, same

A very large chunk of intersex women and girls aren’t allowed to be pro athletes in track or running anymore and I wish more people were talking about it or hell, even just knew about it. I wish there was more of an outcry. I wish people cared more about defending intersex people in sport because why does it seemingly only fall on intersex athletes themselves to fight this shit at great cost to their privacy and safety.

I hope World Athletics rots in hell.

Hey. Stop fucking talking about our oppression like this. It erases us and contributes to our marginalization. Intersex people are not collateral damage or side targets. The oppression we face is not misdirected and meant for someone else. We are targets. There’s a reason gender affirming care bans carve out specific exceptions for intersex people. There’s a reason they are sex testing the way they are, because these regulations are largely specifically directed at intersex women. Intersex people are not unfortunate misdirected targets in their crusade against trans rights, we are targeted too. They hate us too.

It’s one thing to talk about the commonalities of the oppression faced by both trans and intersex women. It’s one thing to find solidarity and talk about the ways intersexism and transphobia and transmisogyny work together and overlap. That is good and contributes to a more complete understanding of all of these forms of oppression. To be clear, I do not and will never have an issue with solidarity and genuine discussion between two marginalized groups with similar goals and significant overlap. Trans people and intersex people should always stand together.

This is not that. This is erasing intersex people from the oppression we face for being intersex. Please understand that we are not hated out of perceived proximity to trans women. We are hated because society is violently intersexist and hates intersex people in our own right.

I need you to understand that this is happening not just because of the current horrific levels of anti-trans rhetoric and policy, but also because intersex women (and a women that may not even be intersex but is simply speculated to be by mobs online because she dared to be good at boxing and beat a white woman while not being white and not being ‘feminine’ enough for societal standards), especially Black and brown intersex women, dared to succeed and be good at sports and that was unacceptable to a deeply intersexist society. The horrific levels of hatred and discrimination that Caster Semenya, for instance, has been subjected to were not just a byproduct of transphobia, it is rooted in racism and misogyny and intersexism.

Is it intertwined with transphobia and do transphobia and intersexism intertwine and support each other? Yes! But I also need people to call it for what it is (intersexism/anti-intersex bigotry) and center intersex people in the oppression we face.

Let me repeat that again: when we talk about the discrimination faced by intersex people, perisex people, and even people in general, including intersex people, need to center intersex people. Because we’re not going to fight intersexism if we refuse to recognize it for what it is.

Like idk it feels like some of you can’t conceptualize that intersex people are a marginalized and oppressed group on our own and that our oppression isn’t just piggybacking off of the oppression of other marginalized groups sometimes. And that sucks.

"very guilty and problematic client" holy copaganda batman

let’s start parsing who does and doesn’t deserve representation and assign moral weight to agreeing to protect their rights I don’t see how this could possibly go wrong

The purpose of a defence attorney is to make sure the police have done their job. The prosecution says "they did the thing" and the defence says "well can you prove it?" and if they can't, the defendant goes free because the prosecution fucked up.

All they have to do is their job. As long as they don't fuck up doing ther job, the guilty will go to prison. The reason the guilty go free so often is because the police are constantly fucking up and not doing their damn job.

It's very telling that these people can't really conceive of a situation where they might be wrongfully arrested for something and labeled "very problematic and guilty" and may, in fact, need exactly the kind of legal representation that they're side-eyeing. Even in the realm of thought experiments there are the categorically ""problematic"" and they can't even imagine a world where they could ever be lumped in with them, even wrongfully, because surely people would OBVIOUSLY know they're innocent, surely this only happens to Others

#even if the client is totally guilty#the defense attorney's job is still to make sure they're treated fairly#even guilty people should not be abused by the system because no one wanted to speak up for them#once again as soon as we decide some people don't deserve rights#we're on a fast track to no one has rights

Analyzing the politics of a work that's meant to be apolitical is actually a really interesting exercise because it asks you to critically examine what the creator considers to be "political" in the first place. Which ideas are just How Things Are, and which ones are Political, and how is that influenced by the creator's beliefs?

My favorite example of this is the original arcade game of Pac-Man. One of the most Shapes And Colors pieces of pop culture made from the explicit desire to be broadly appealing, maybe the closest game to what people consider apolitical besides something like Tetris (which, would be a whole other post on why the making of Tetris has huge political implications, I'm not kidding).

Starting with what's in the game you'd have to ask, why is it about a Pac Man? Why is he chased by/eating ghosts? Male as default on an otherwise uncharacterized shape avatar is obviously a political aspect but really, why ghosts? For one thing this variant of "bedsheet ghost" is internationally recognized as a mythological character in a way that yokai or selkie or bigfoots just wouldn't be in the pre-web arcade era. But was it ok to represent dead loved ones as edible cannon fodder? Isn't the afterlife a touchy subject for a lot of demographics? Even in the simplest media, real ideas about real stuff creeps in around it.

That brings me to why Pac-Man is my favorite example of how politics happen in a work that seems apolitical: The hero being a Pac-Man is the tip of the iceberg of the game's gender politics. Toru Iwatani's whole idea of a game that was more about gameplay communicated thru simple shapes that do the fundamental human activity of eating was meant as a direct counterpoint to the spaceship/airplane/military games and boxing/martial art/tough guy revenge quest games that were filling arcades and trying to appeal to a boy's demographic. In other words, Pac-Man succeeded because women liked it.

Actually, Anon, fandom is significantly older than fan base or fanbase; the OED gives the first known citation of fandom meaning “the community of fans of a thing” from 1903, while their first entry for fan base isn’t until the 1970s. If you compare the frequencies of the two terms in Google Ngram Viewer, you’ll see that fandom has historically been far more frequent, with fan base running a distant second (and the closed form fanbase an even more distant third).

The OED also rejects your portmanteau hypothesis, though I suppose sportswriters from the 1900s might’ve been trying to be quirky and different when they coined fandom from the productive derivational suffix -dom, which the OED also gives copies examples of throughout the 1800s (including BA-dom, old fogey-dom, blizzard-dom and theater-dom.

Respect the fandom, guys. It’s older than Steve Rogers. 

So, seeing as the OED does not provide free access to its sources, I looked this up. According to various webpages, included this one, 'fandom' was used in 1903 by the Cincinnati Enquirer to refer to baseball fans.

Thus not only do we have an early example of a word that combines 'fanatic' with '-dom' as in 'kingdom', we also have a useful reminder that when it comes to excessively liking things to the point of it being its own subculture, people who are into sports have the rest of us beat by several orders of magnitude.

kisses come best in threes

I am posting this in large part because it took me an annoyingly long time to realise what I was getting wrong with the lighting grid. But behold! The (extremely preliminary) start of a drydock.

And a few hours detailing work.

This whole tube is intended to be sunk into an asteroid, as part of a starbase. I probably need to do a lot more to really sell the scale here...

There we go. Nothing like lots of windows to set the scale for a large model.

I was a little worried about fixing the side-mounted worker modules in place, since that restricts where ships can be positioned. However, I think adding multiple such modules alleviates that.

...the *other* obvious downside is that, as a fixed unit, you cannot expect this kind of drydock to scale up with larger ships, unlike a possible more modular free-floating lattice dock. But that is what they call a useful factor to write into the fiction of this starbase.