bitching

Caoimhe

Caoimhe ⬥

via Cathode Church

I have suddenly started getting a huge influx of spam emails that are

  1. not actually addressed to my email addressed (I presume I am being BCC’d on them, but I cannot be arsed to look at decipher the email headers to check)
  2. in German
Caoimhe

Caoimhe ⬥

via Cathode Church

not fond of a few financial companies constantly trying to sanitise the internet and police what people get off to

context

Subscribestar have updated their terms of service to destroy their own business model by banning the only things that people use them instead of Patreon for

Caoimhe

Correction regarding the waiting list for trans healthcare in Ireland

Caoimhe ⬥

In previous posts about the Loughlinstown gender service I have stated that the waiting list is “well over a decade”. New information compiled by Jessica Black suggests that it would be more accurate to say “nearly two decades”. If you are referred to the self-declared national service today then by the time you are seen your referral will be old enough to legally drink in a pub.

Caoimhe

Caoimhe ⬥

via Cathode Church

I get annoyed by people saying that they met such-and-such politician and actually they’re really nice in person. Of course they are! It’s part of their job to be. They are advertising themself to you. I actually dislike them for the policies that they enact and ideals that they espouse, not that I was under the impression that they had poor social skills!

Caoimhe

Caoimhe ⬥

via Cathode Church

the thing about Ireland is it might only be 16°C but it's also 100% humidity so walking up hill to the train station with a backpack on I am drenched in sweat and it just doesn’t evaporate because the air is made of water

Caoimhe

Crediting queerness

Caoimhe ⬥

Update: I have now finished watching Dirty Pair and I will admit Kei and Yuri do seem to actually like each other more in the OVA series.

I want to be grumpy about something that is fairly harmless. I have been watching Dirty Pair occasionally for the last while and I was thinking Yuri and Kei and their relationship and other relationships in the show versus how my expectations had been shaped by seeing people talking about it beforehand.

I have known or followed people online for years who are fans of or talk about this show a bit and I have seen a lot of casual references to them being girlfriends or just casually referring to them as gay. I wasn’t really expecting them to actually be lesbians when I watched it but I was expecting to see some glimpse of what other people were referring to. Spock and Kirk don’t kiss in Star Trek but it’s easy to see how their chemistry lead to the invention of slash fiction. Kei and Yuri obviously don’t really hate each other—the show is doing classic tropes of bickering partners who care about each other in the end—but they are probably more lines where one calls the other too fat to be able to catch the eye of whichever man they are crushing on this episode than there is anything that feels like it could be romantic tension between them. The trans episode was nice but this show is aggressively heterosexual at all times.

Headcanons and reinterpretations are fun but I feel like at some point jokingly calling characters queer turns into giving credit where it is not due. I have seen so many posts about reading gay relationships into, say, Metal Gear or imagining how Hideo Kojima would write something in a queer way and I feel like people started making knowing jokes about this and over time convinced themselves that his writing is sincerely exploring queer themes and not just that the female characters he writes are very shallow and are constantly killed off for male angst and so the only relationships with any depth in his stories are between men. Maybe I am just being uncharitable to people or reading the room poorly, or being a needless grouchy bitch, but I feel like it eventually turns into crediting source material for the accomplishments of fan artists.