This. Is my pride and joy. A gift for my dad, who played Zork with me when I was a kid, and with his dad when he was a kid. I designed this pattern myself and had a great time puzzling out how to hide the glow in the dark letters!
Pattern: “West of House” by me Fabric: 2x1 on 18ct Blue-Grey Aida Started: 11/27/2021 Finished: 12/25/2021
Sharing another longer comic I made for The Nib back in 2016, since they’ll be shutting up shop at the end of this year. This piece was such a great excuse to dig deep into the world of sail-powered cargo! I particularly loved talking to the team behind Ceiba, who are now years into their build and documenting the entire shipbuilding process along the way.
i’ve been rewatching elementary the past couple days, and i’m on season 1, episode 15. it’s interesting to me, the development of their relationship. because i love them, obviously, but the way i remember them, as partners, as friends, as people who love each other, that isn’t there in the first season. in the first season, they’re strangers.
but there are these moments, these painfully human moments, where i can see glimpses of the future that they’re going to have. there are so many moments in elementary that stand out to me. “i think she is the person you love most in this world,” “i consider you to be exceptional, watson,” “i would lay down my life for you,” “we’re two people who love each other.” sherlock naming a bee after her. sherlock saying that she’s changed him, changed his life and changed who he is.
their partnership is beautiful and whole and complete. but in the first season, it isn’t. it’s raw, and kind of ugly, and messy. they aren’t used to each other yet, they’re each trying to pull away from the parts that make them uncomfortable.
but i think that makes all the more real. because adult friendships and adult relationships aren’t forged in the blink of an eye. trust takes time. love takes time. adapting to someone else takes time. learning how best to care for them takes time.
and i think that’s possibly one of the most beautiful messages there is. that there are beautiful, life-changing things out there, if you wait. that relationships need to be built, piece by piece, brick by brick. and sometimes there’s setbacks. sometimes we push too far, sometimes we cross a boundary that we didn’t even know existed. sometimes we’re too insecure, or too bottled up. but mistakes aren’t the end of everything. you can keep building.
before you know it, you look up, and you’re living in a beautiful house, with a rock solid foundation. someplace you can always come home to.
the first season has a lot of growth from both joan and sherlock. but i think a defining moment, one i’ve never noticed before, despite watching it several times, is the repeated quote in episode 12. “I’m going to miss this. well, maybe not this, but this. working with you. i think what you do is amazing.”
joan first says it to sherlock. and it’s echoed by sherlock, later in the same episode. that respect, which sherlock has never voiced before, is evident. he does, as much as he’s incapable of admitting it, respect the work that joan does. and in the same vein, he respects joan. and that to me, is the core part of season one, the core beginning of their friendship. the mutual acknowledgment that they work better together, and that they value their partnership.
the idea of open borders really doesn’t seem radical at all to me. like, from having traveled in the eu and between scotland and england/northern ireland and the republic, i’ve seen that it can and does work. what seems extreme to me is letting people drown at sea, especially when it’s being done by the eu??
the eu having internal open borders but then having an extremely hard border around it is an act of racism. i don’t think i’m exaggerating by saying that, europeans are free to enter where african and asian refugees are forbidden
“Perhaps you have forgotten. That’s one of the great problems of our modern world, you know. Forgetting. The victim never forgets. Ask an Irishman what the English did to him in 1920 and he’ll tell you the day of the month and the time and the name of every man they killed. Ask an Iranian what the English did to him in 1953 and he’ll tell you. His child will tell you. His grandchild will tell you. And when he has one, his great-grandchild will tell you too. But ask an Englishman—” He flung up his hands in mock ignorance. “If he ever knew, he has forgotten. ‘Move on!’ you tell us. ‘Move on! Forget what we’ve done to you. Tomorrow’s another day!’ But it isn’t, Mr. Brue.” He still had Brue’s hand. “Tomorrow was created yesterday, you see. That is the point I was making to you. And by the day before yesterday, too. To ignore history is to ignore the wolf at the door.”
Just thinking about how republicans are going after normie sex shit like “internet porn” and “dildos” now
we fucking told y'all
to be clear: the right views any sex that isn’t purely procreative as deviant. it’s not just kink, or queer sex they find abhorrent. And they genuinely believe that the better educated you are about sex in general, including about gender shit, the more deviant you are. they’re legitimately trying to claw everyone down to hell with them.
Now? Before 2003 it was legit technically illegal in some states for even straight couples to have oral or anal sex, and there are still laws in some states restricting how many dildos you can own etc.
I don’t really know what the goal is with putting a numerical limit on dildos, but with republicans the answer is usually “There isn’t one. Die.”
This is your periodic reminder that it is currently right now illegal in the united states to own porn that the average person in your community would be offended by. That’s the legal definition of obscenity (a piece of media that 1. Exists to turn people on 2. has no other “redeeming” purpose and 3. would be offensive to most people in your jurisdiction) and you can theoretically be arrested and go to jail for owning “obscene” media or giving it to other people.
“But that’s ridiculous,” you say, “porn that the average taxpayer would think was ~offensive~ is absolutely fuckin’ everywhere, on the internet and in real life, and nobody gets in trouble for it.” And you’d be right about that. Realistically, this is a law that cannot be enforced: it is way too easy to break, way too hard to track, and way too many people are interested in breaking it.
Same with the pre-Lawrence v. Texas laws against “sodomy” that headspace-hotel is talking about. Yeah, it was illegal to give a blowjob in the privacy of your own home. But of course most people who like blowjobs never even thought twice about those laws, because it’s usually pretty easy to Not tell a cop what you do in the privacy of your bedroom with your spouse.
“So if laws like this don’t actually stop people from doing whatever sexual things they want to do, why are you concerned about it? You just said these laws don’t hurt anybody, right?” Here’s the thing. The purpose of laws like this is to create an atmosphere where you can get away with doing “"deviant”“ things… if you hide it from polite society, if you keep it secret, if you know your place.
What you can’t do is go out in public and say that actually gay people can have happy relationships, or that masturbating sometimes doesn’t make you a depraved sex addict, or that it’s okay to want to enjoy having sex and not just do it as your Duty To Your Husband.
You can get away with doing what you want in private if you never challenge the dominant cultural message that what you’re doing is gross and immoral and people who do it are disgusting freaks. If you dare to speak up and point out that your ”“shameful secret”“ is actually normal, off you go to jail.
That’s the purpose of laws like this. To make it impossible to challenge the rhetorical stranglehold of conservative christianity on society. To shift the Overton window once and for all to the right. And that’s why we need to fight laws like this with all our strength, every time the right tries to push them forward, even when the specifics are stuff like "you can’t own more than five dildoes” that might seem like a silly thing to go to war over. It’s not about the specifics. It’s about limiting everyone’s speech to things a conservative preacher would say from the pulpit.
The other thing laws like this are good for is giving the police excuses
Younger Americans NEED to understand why Lawrence vs Texas went to the Supreme Court.
In 2003, police raided the private home of two gay men and charged them with sodomy. I cannot emphasize enough that THEY WERE NOT CURRENTLY HAVING SEX AT ALL when the police raided them. But the cops had “probable cause” to believe that they had, at some point, had non-procreative sex, which was illegal under Texas’s sodomy law, so they were charged with a crime.
Ultimately, the SCOTUS ruled that sodomy laws are unconstitutional because US citizens have a right to privacy: what consenting adults do in their own homes is their own business.
What you need to know is that in four states, including Texas and. Missouri, sodomy laws are still on the books. That means that if SCOTUS strikes down Lawrence vs Texas, these laws immediately go back into effect, and more states can add their own.
What would that look like?
If you’re on Tinder and your profile says you’re gay or bi, the police can subpoena your profile and use it to arrest you.
If you’re on Scruff or Grindr, the police can subpoena your location data and messages and use them to track down and arrest you and all your hookups.
If you’re in a same-sex marriage, the police can subpoena a list of same-sex marriage certificates and arrest every single couple—even if they’re widowed or divorced.
If your school has an LGBTQ club, the police can subpoena a list of members and arrest kids & college students.
They could subpoena data from FetLife and Facebook and Twitter and, yes, if they thought to do so, Tumblr. Rainbow flag in your profile? They’re drawing up charges.
And all of these people getting arrested and charged with sodomy, when convicted, will not only have their lives ruined by jail time, but will also likely be labeled sex offenders for the rest of their lives.
This is not ancient history. This was not “back in the day.” I WAS IN COLLEGE WHEN THIS HAPPENED.
And the Republicans are frothing at the fucking mouth to bring these horrors back.
Posting some old comics. This is vol 1 of a series of short comics I’ve been making in my spare time, under the umbrella “Phrasebook”. They’re each based on a phrase or word in Chinese that I’ve been thinking about.
We had one of Steff’s comedian friends staying with us on the weekend, lovely lad called Sam from Singapore. He had never been to Wales before, and he requested that we take him to a Welsh restaurant so he could try Welsh food
That’s surprisingly difficult, actually. Like a lot of Welsh culture, our culinary traditions have not exactly been applauded over the years, so you don’t really see them. But a lucky Google search revealed a brand new one has just opened in SA1 called the Welsh House, so great! Away we went.
Fuck me, they went all in.
It wasn’t just the menu (though fuck me, what a menu - one of their ‘for the table to share’ options was little mini leek and cheddar Welsh cakes with salted butter and they were paralysingly good). It wasn’t just that every alcohol was Welsh, even including the wine (surprisingly good btw, called 'Naturiol’.)
The table centerpieces were daffodils. All signs for the toilets were Welsh only. The walls had photos of Wales, modern and historical; the windows had the fleur de lis; the specials board (pork belly in Welsh cider and damson sauce with honey and wild garlic glazed carrots) had dragons on. I realise this is probably normal for country-themed restaurants, but I’ve never been to one for Wales before.
But the best bit, see, was the music
I clocked, when we walked in, that they were playing If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next by the Manic Street Preachers (you always clock the Manics). Ah, I thought. A Welsh song! In a Welsh restaurant! Ho ho ho.
As they seated us, it became What’s New Pussycat. Ah! I thought. Another Welsh song! Fu fu fu.
Then they played Monster by the Automatic and I was like my god are they only playing Welsh music?? That’s so cool! What an eclectic mix that’s going to be. We should suggest to them they should look into Welsh language music too, really mix it up.
And then they played Anrheoli by Yws Gwynedd and lads, Steff and I lost our shit. We lost our fucking shit. Sam’s sitting there, utterly bewildered. The staff are nervously edging away from us. We don’t care. It’s the first time I have ever heard a Welsh language song played outside of a Welsh language setting. We’re so excited.
“They’re playing Welsh music!!!” says Steff. “Holy shit!!!”
“Imagine if they played Sebona Fi!” I say, humorously.
“Nah,” says Steff. “You can’t in a restaurant. There’d be a riot, it’s faerie music.”
“…what?” says Sam
We explain the cultural phenomenon that is Sebona Fi. The song changes: Primadonna Girl, by Marina and the Diamonds.
“She’s Welsh??” says Sam.
“She’s from Abergavenny!” we beam.
“I don’t know what that means,” nods Sam, who is from Singapore.
Next: The Bartender and the Thief, by the Stereophonics. We’re in high spirits. The extraordinarily Welsh wine arrives, as does the rarebit on sourdough starter. Sam, a gay man, delightedly orders the faggots and peas.
They play Ben Rhys by Gwilym Bowen Rhys, and we lose our shit again. Sam is now used to this, because comedians are adaptable. “They even have daffodils!” I say, misty eyed. “Is that relevant?” Sam asks, fascinated.
They play Hiraeth, by PLU. Hard to explain that one. Very hard to explain the effect it has when it’s played in a restaurant, but Sam looks around the suddenly muted room and whispers “Are we in church?”
“It’s about Hiraeth,” whispers Steff. “So kind of.”
Next: the Masses Against the Classes, by the Manics. Utter tonal whiplash. This playlist is not remotely restaurant appropriate. It’s perfect.
“You’d think they’d pick like… a genre,” Sam says dreamily. “We just went from church to the barricades.”
The faggots arrive. “I forgot it would be a western sized portion,” Sam says morosely, of what to me is a normal sized plate of food. He tries one, and brightens.
They play Sebona Fi.
The place erupts.
Going from church to the barricades seems like a natural enough transition to me.
Hot dog water - there’s a Tumblr post out there I’ve seen saying hot dog water is the opposite of holy water, due to the fact that a single drop of it will contaminate what it touches. I assume this was partly inspired by this allusion but who knows for sure.
Also the the idea of holy water as inhuman and cleaning vs hot dog water as the remains of feeding someone - often a child - and entirely human. It may be dirty and I do not want it on me but God hot dog water has some memories. You will not wash away my sins. They’re mine. Also, anyone can make hot dog water but holy water is refined, restricted (yes anyone can make it in an emergency but lay people are restricted from it)
“you and I both know”
Unlike baptism for babies, this one is done between two people who are both aware of what is happening. The one receiving the baptism gives the orders about what they want to happen. The giver and receiver are portrayed as equals. They are equally aware of their humanity.
“the holy stuff won’t take”
Ooof heartbreaking, amazing line. Raises so many questions. What does it mean when the water “takes”? What has the receiver done that makes them unfit for holy water? Or, what has the holy water done that makes it to weak to help, to be a part of your life?
The poem as a whole - I love the lack of capitalization. It adds a sort of intimacy to the poem, and the statement from the speaker. The high words “baptise” and “holy” being offset by “take” and “hot dog”. Also “hot dog water” vs “holy stuff.” The cadence! I would lick it.
I love the serious analysis, and I think I find it persuasive.
This also sheds a lot of light on some plot points in Scooby Doo! Mystery Incorporated.
Not to turn this into another house full of chintz, but I'mma fuck this poem on the floor.
Meter
There are two readings of the poem’s meter that I immediately identify, the first is how I’d want to read it, and the second is how a normal person would probably read it, but both make the same point.
In my interpretation (left), the first line is four wholely irregular feet: an iamb into a dibrach into two trochees; The second line is two trouches into a hanging stressed syllable; And the third line is three iambs.
In the more normal interpretation(right), the first line and second line are six trochees all together plus that hanging syllable in ‘knowing’ which transitions the poem to iambic trimeter.
And look at the interesting result of that laid bare:
In English poetry there’s a tradition, all other things being equal, that iambs are considered the sophisticated foot with trochees often being contrasted as the vulgar or common foot.
The vulgar in specificity “hot dog water” is put in trochee, while the respectably vague “the holy stuff” is afforded iambs. Without the poet having thought of the stress things the pattern actively, this incapulation of the English poetic tradition is astounding. Especially when you consider the
Chiasmus
Chiasmus is a figure of rhetorical construction, in which two pairs of ideas are laid across each other, A B B A. It’s one of the more popular figures of rhetoric and if you’re looking for it you’ll see it everywhere.
In the most literal sense, it’s about repetition; but, you can apply it more liberally to ideas, thoughts, or in this case, parts of speech:
The nouns and verb pairs in the first and third lines crossover each other. They are in chiasmus. Structurally, the inversion makes the poem feel more solid, while still furthering emphasizing the contrast between the idea of hot dog water and the holy stuff.
I spent so much of my life romanticizing the Great and Powerful Enormity of the Sea, reading about the salt and the sweat of the sailors straining to haul the sails or anchor while dreading the monsters in the cold, icy deep fathoms below…and now you tell me that a fathom is only 6 feet deep -
Six feet is still more than enough for a grave.
Hi, that is the most metal addition you could have possibly made to this post
“If the economy only ‘works’ when working people have to choose between food, fuel and health care, when bosses can reduce your pay and cut your hours because you can’t get a job elsewhere, then the economy doesn’t work at all. … too much money creation’ is never a problem when it’s financing military spending or tax cuts.”
“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren’t. I’m not surprised some people prefer books.”
I think about this image a lot. This is an image from the Aurat March (Women’s March) in Karachi, Pakistan, on International Women’s Day 2018. The women in the picture are Pakistani trans women, aka khwaja siras or hijras; one is a friend of a close friend of mine.
In the eyes of the Pakistani government and anthropologists, they’re a “third gender.” They’re denied access to many resources that are available to cis women. Trans women in Pakistan didn’t decide to be third-gendered; cis people force it on them whether they like it or not.
Western anthropologists are keen on seeing non-Western trans women as culturally constructed third genders, “neither male nor female,” and often contrast them (a “legitimate” third gender accepted in its culture) with Western trans women (horrific parodies of female stereotypes).
There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors and jargon used to obscure the fact that while each culture’s trans women are treated as a single culturally constructed identity separate from all other trans women, cis women are treated as a universal category that can just be called “women.”
Even though Pakistani aurat and German Frauen and Guatemalan mujer will generally lead extraordinarily different lives due to the differences in culture, they are universally recognized as women.
The transmisogynist will say, “Yes, but we can’t ignore the way gender is culturally constructed, and hijras aren’t trans women, they’re a third gender. Now let’s worry less about trans people and more about the rights of women in Burkina Faso.”
In other words, to the transmisogynist, all cis women are women, and all trans women are something else.
“But Kat, you’re not Indian or Pakistani. You’re not a hijra or khwaja sira, why is this so important to you?”
Have you ever heard of the Neapolitan third gender “femminiello”? It’s the term my moniker “The Femme in Yellow” is derived from, and yes, I’m Neapolitan. Shut up.
I’m going to tell you a little bit about the femminielli, and I want you to see if any of this sounds familiar. Femminielli are a third gender in Neapolitan culture of people assigned male at birth who have a feminine gender expression.
They are lauded and respected in the local culture, considered to be good omens and bringers of good luck. At festivals you’d bring a femminiello with you to go gambling, and often they would be brought in to give blessings to newborns. Noticing anything familiar yet?
Oh and also they were largely relegated to begging and sex work and were not allowed to be educated and many were homeless and lived in the back alleys of Naples, but you know we don’t really like to mention that part because it sounds a lot less romantic and mystical.
And if you’re sitting there, asking yourself why a an accurate description of femminiello sounds almost note for note like the same way hijras get described and talked about, then you can start to understand why that picture at the start of this post has so much meaning for me.
And you can also start to understand why I get so frustrated when I see other queer people buy into this fool notion that for some reason the transes from different cultures must never mix.
That friend I mentioned earlier is a white American trans woman. She spent years living in India, and as I recal the story the family she was staying with saw her as a white, foreign hijra and she was asked to use her magic hijra powers to bless the house she was staying in.
So when it comes to various cultural trans identities there are two ways we can look at this. We can look at things from a standpoint of expressed identity, in which case we have to preferentially choose to translate one word for the local word, or to leave it untranslated.
If we translate it, people will say we’re artificially imposing an outside category (so long as it’s not cis people, that’s fine). If we don’t, what we’re implying, is that this concept doesn’t exist in the target language, which suggests that it’s fundamentally a different thing
A concrete example is that Serena Nanda in her 1990 and 2000 books, bent over backwards to say that Hijras are categorically NOT trans women. Lots of them are!
And Don Kulick bent over backwards in his 1998 book to say that travesti are categorically NOT trans women, even though some of the ones he cited were then and are now trans women.
The other option, is to look at practice, and talk about a community of practice of people who are AMAB, who wear women’s clothing, take women’s names, fulfill women’s social roles, use women’s language and mannerisms, etc WITHIN THEIR OWN CULTURAL CONTEXT.
This community of practice, whatever we want to call it - trans woman, hijra, transfeminine, femminiello, fairy, queen, to name just a few - can then be seen to CLEARLY be trans-national and trans-cultural in a way that is not clearly evident in the other way of looking at things.
And this is important, in my mind, because it is this axis of similarity that is serving as the basis for a growing transnational transgender rights movement, particularly in South Asia. It’s why you see pictures like this one taken at the 2018 Aurat March in Karachi, Pakistan.
And it also groups rather than splits, pointing out not only points of continuity in the practices of western trans women and fa'afafines, but also between trans women in South Asia outside the hijra community, and members of the hijra community both trans women and not.
To be blunt, I’m not all that interested in the word trans woman, or the word hijra. I’m not interested in the word femminiello or the word fa'afafine.
I’m interested in the fact that when I visit India, and I meet hijras (or trans women, self-expressed) and I say I’m a trans woman, we suddenly sit together, talk about life, they ask to see American hormones and compare them to Indian hormones.
There is a shared community of practice that creates a bond between us that cis people don’t have. That’s not to say that we all have the exact same internal sense of self, but for the most part, we belong to the same community of practice based on life histories and behavior.
I think that’s something cis people have absolutely missed - largely in an effort to artificially isolate trans women. This practice of arguing about whether a particular “third gender” label = trans women or not, also tends to artificially homogenize trans women as a group.
You see this in Kulick and Nanda, where if you read them, you could be forgiven for thinking all American trans women are white, middle class, middle-aged, and college-educated, who all follow rigid codes of behavior and surgical schedules prescribed by male physicians.
There are trans women who think of themselves as separate from cis women, as literally another kind of thing, there are trans women who think of themselves as coterminous with cis women, there are trans women who think of themselves as anything under the sun you want to imagine.
The problem is that historically, cis people have gone to tremendous lengths to destroy points of continuity in the transgender community (see everything I’ve cited and more), and particularly this has been an exercise in transmisogyny of grotesque levels.
The question is do you want to talk about culturally different ways of being trans, or do you want to try to create as many neatly-boxed third genders as you can to prop up transphobic theoretical frameworks? To date, people have done the latter. I’m interested in the former.
I guess what I’m really trying to say with all of this is that we’re all family y'all.
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