someone should make a newsletter or blog or podcast or something about stuff made by Irish trans artists and call it Trashinscneach

free idea because I am far, far too tired to do this myself

Not that interesting but it’s decent fun. The sense that there is some sort of gender happening is amplified by the fact that Birdy and Tsutomu’s faces are identical and I am glad that Hayamiya is supportive. The first and last episodes stand out in terms of moments of animation with the smooth transformations of Birdy and Geega in the former and I love the sheer joy on Birdy’s face when she’s kicking arse in the latter.

This post discusses the mechanics of sexual pleasure for transgender women in frank detail.

A while ago Devon Price’s article The Quietly Coercive Nature of “Vanilla” Sex prompted a lot of self reflection about what I actually enjoy during sex and a few discussions with my partner about what what worked for each of us. I realised I never really enjoyed receiving oral sex very much, though I was more than willing to give it. This, happily, suited us both just fine. She also reminded me to finally get around to reading Fucking Trans Women.

One thing that became clear is how both of us, being trans women with penises, were using what worked for ourselves as a guide for the other. This was a mistake. Elilla’s recent post, An infodump on vaginal sex, by a lesbian, has gotten me thinking about this again. Like many others she make the distinction between people for whom clitoral stimulation works better and those for whom vaginal stimulation is preferable, or in her own terms: Clitoris-oriented bottom and penetration-oriented bottom. This is a familiar concept in writings about sex but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this sort of distinction applied to penises (not that I am a particular well-read in this regard). But it became clear to me, going over the differences in what worked for me and my partner, that I was somewhat of a clitoral (glans) orgasm girl and she was much more of a vaginal (scrotum, base and shaft) orgasm girl.

I had a small, battery powered handheld vibrator and while it could be fun for me to use it very much required me to already be aroused and erect to have much of any effect and the pleasure I got from it could be very fickle and flighty. I was surprised when it worked so much better for my partner and the ways in which it worked for her. I at first put it down to a difference in sensitivity but she enjoyed types of stimulation and areas of stimulation that really did nothing for me. The vibrations applied to the base of her penis and the area around her scrotum were immediately great for her in way that, to me, just felt like getting my skin vibrated. When I’m erect applying a vibrator to various parts of my knob can be pleasurable but it is the head that is feeling that. If I’m applying the toy to the base and it feels good that’s just because the vibrations are carrying their way up. Not so for my partner, apparently. I do seem to need stimulation of the glans—which in a penis is the equivalent tissue to the exposed part of the clitoris—for sexual stimulation in a way that was simply not the case for her. My limited experimentation with muffing and anal stimulation have also not proven to be particularly pleasurable, though I don’t yet have enough data to fully write those off.

An aside about vibrators: I have since gotten a corded Doxy vibrator and compared to the small battery powered one it is a hydrogen bomb vs. coughing baby situation. Like fuck I did not realise there was that much of a difference. It is not only much more intense but it can actually be effective at stimulating me even when I’m not already erect, which is very useful. My partner actually found it a bit much for her. I originally got the Doxy as a sort of shared Valentine’s Day gift to give to her that we could enjoy together when at her place but she told me to keep it and she took my battery-powered one home instead. Elilla stating that in her experience that other brands work better on penises has me intrigued.

I don’t have much in the way of data to come to any grand conclusions but I would advise anyone, even if you are already used to open communication with your partners about sex, to reconsider your assumptions about what you should be doing during sex, what is going to feel good for you and what is going to feel good for your partner. Their needs may not map directly from yours and you may not have fully examined what actually works for you, either. There may be things that you are going along with because they are seen as the default or things that everyone is meant to enjoy. Is there anything you are going through the motions of because you think it’s meant to feel good for you when it doesn’t? Is there anything your partner is focusing on because they have a false impression of what works for you or even because you have a false impression of what works for you?

And perhaps oral sex could also work better for me if these lessons about what actually gets me off were applied. I would be willing to experiment with that more but first I need to start getting laid again.

This review contains spoilers.

This series gets me genuinely anxious watching Lake’s struggling to be seen as a person, as someone separate from Tulip, as not some broken version of her past. It’s trans as hell.

I have pretty bad impulse control around eating. If there is food in front of me I struggle not to keep picking at it even if I’m already uncomfortably full and even if I don’t like it that much. I generally don’t keep sweets or alcohol in my house because I tend to binge through it if it’s there. Moderation is not something I am good at.

One thing Ellie used to do sometimes is hide chocolate bars around my house and then, when I was in need of a treat, tell me where to find one or pull them out herself. She was incredibly sweet. I found a Galaxy caramel bar in the back of the kitchen press this morning. One last birthday present from her.

And now I guess I just want to share stories about her. We watched a lot of TV together. Just cuddling on the sofa or in bed and watching television had honestly become of my favourite things. I came over to her place once when she was watching Evil, enjoyed it and then she rewatched it with me from the start and we carried through all the way to the end together. She talked about watching a video essay (I do not recall who by) about Miraculous Ladybug and how it matures and grows more complex each season and I basically downloaded it and made her watch the first few episodes as a joke and then just sort of fell into continuing it because I cannot resist sticking to a bit well beyond what is warranted. It was a bit of mindless fun to put on and cuddle and chat. We were most of the way through the third series.

Just feeling the warmth of her body against mine is one of the things that I miss most of all. I got her a rose gold Zippo lighter for her last birthday. She liked fire and burning little things. She could be a real little very tall gremlin. She had left the lighter in my house a few days before she died. I had it with me to give back to her when we found her body. Sometimes I light it for a while and then just feel the warmth of it in my hand. Somehow that feels like the closest thing to having her here again.

We were also rewatching shows we liked as teenagers together. She was showing me Wolf’s Rain, I was showing her Outlaw Star and we were revisiting The Big O together. She loved R. Dorothy. We had also started rewatching Fullmetal Alchemist together and had gotten as far as The Alchemy Exam back in September and then it took eight months till she was finally in the mood where she was happy to sit through Night of the Chimera’s Cry again just a few days before she died. Seeing as this has turned into the anime paragraph I will also say that we had both enjoyed Dungeon Meshi but had watched it separately as I was watching the dub and she was watching with subs. She loved Falin, too. She related a lot to robot girls and monster girls.

She was a big, lovely, autistic, dork and I cannot describe how wonderful it was watching her unmask and being earnest and silly about things she was self-concious about. I understand deeply the shame of trying to be normal, of burying stuff you are enthusiastic about, and I loved seeing her dig it all up. One time while we were hanging out at home I turned a corner to see her standing stimming in the middle of the living room, shaking her hands back and forth and bouncing a little. When she saw me she withdrew a little bit. She was a bashful about it but it was adorable. I wanted to encourage her. I asked her to keep doing it and when she demurred I cupped her head in my hands and begged her “Ellie, I need you to be more autistic!” She cringed into herself shyly from that but smiled and giggled and said, mock-ominously “You know not what you ask!” and I just kept saying it until she said she would. From then on “I need you be more autistic” became something I would implore when she was being self-conscious about herself.

She really liked making characters and just fucking around in games. I’d watch her play WWE 2K24 and she would often play a random match and not even particularly try to win. Just have fun and being playful with the narrative of a wrestling match, showboating, playing a referee and being as obviously biased as possible to the worse wrestler. She talked to me about some of her RPG characters. She had restarted Baldur’s Gate 3 a few times but had never actually gotten to the end. Her current character was named Drizz and she had a whole backstory thought out for him that she spent an evening explaining to me (with a lot of interruptions to explain details about the world because I do not know much about Dungeons & Dragons).

Drizz was a drow trans man, raised to be an assassin in a cult dedicated to Lolth, who was shunned for not wanting to be a woman, betrayed by his mentor and ended up living rough for a long time. There was a lot more detail but I confess my memory is very poor and I don’t know that she ever wrote any of this down. She played Drizz as angry, brash and socially inept, deliberately making obviously risky or poor choices with him that would piss people in the game off. She saw a bunch of scenes she hadn’t before with previous characters as a result. Also it’s definitely Drizz and not Drizzt. He gets mad if you call him Drizzt. He did not name himself after Drizzt and is annoyed at people who assume he did.

I am not good at conclusions. She was wonderful. She’s gone, but she was wonderful.

Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X

Your musical entertainment:

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Media

The Curious Case of the Pygmy Nuthatch — Forrest Wickman in Slate

A look at how creative decisions and compromises get made on a movie set.

You see, there’s a scene in that movie that tormented me, that kept me up at night, and that lately has had me interrogating a wide variety of seemingly devoted, and certainly well-compensated, filmmaking professionals. That’s because the bird in Charlie’s Angels is, I believe, the wrongest bird in the history of cinema—and one of the weirdest and most inexplicable flubs in any movie I can remember. It is elaborately, even ornately wrong. It has haunted not just me but, as I’d later learn, the birding community at large for almost a quarter of a century.

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Heaven Will be Mine – Caoimhe

My clone recently discovered Worst Girl Games and has been having a time of it. When I played it I actually didn’t click with Heaven Will Be Mine nearly as much as We Know the Devil but Caoimhe’s words on it are making me want to revisit it.

Heaven Will Be Mine is short and sweet. A full playthough is roughly five hours. Within that time, it packs a narrative of the trans struggle for identity and recognition, the search for meaning in a perpetually hostile world, the never-ending quest of humans’ self-discovery and exploration, and of course cool mechs beating each other up.

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A List Of Games By Trans People Before 2010 — Dot Maetrix

Cute little list and led me to this fun interview from Bad Games Hall of Fame with Rebecca “Burger” Heineman and to revisit this interview with Megumi, the programmer of Virtual Lab¹ that I had read before.

Not gonna lie I did NOT realise how long Maddy Thorson had been doing Trans-People-Can-Double-Jump Platformers before making this list. Like, I thought that Celeste was primarily her drawing from the twitchy platformer style of Super Meat Boy but as it turns out, lmao nope Not only does Jumper predate Meat Boy by sevaral years, but the lead character, Ogmo, went on to appear as a playable character in Super Meat Boy, acknowledging the influence that game had taken from Thorson’s work. Like, I fully had the order of cause and effect completely wrong here.

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Chips Theory, In Brief: Doctor Who’s Unresolved Aesthetic Debate — Tamsyn Elle

I swear that I am not going to keep linking to blogs by lifeforms that have been bred for thousands of years to sustain themselves solely on ever-more incomprehensible Doctor Who criticism but I needed to share the chips–soufflé spectrum model of media analysis with the world.

Note how chips becomes synecdoche for an ordinary life, an inescapable pillar of the daily grind as fundamental as work, home, sleep, and commuting. Chips is what the rest of us do.

There’s an inescapable class element to this. Science fiction is often accused, with some justice, of being a middle-class genre; even when it’s militaristic our focus tends to be on the officer class. A good deal of the value of Rose in the first place is that, as a working-class soap opera type of character, she does not at first seem to belong on Doctor Who. Indeed, often that’s part of her quality: in her first episode it’s her experience in her school’s gymnastics team, silver medal, swinging on a chain, that saves the day with straightforward physicality where the Doctor’s talk of Shadow Proclamations and anti-plastic failed to hold sway. Then she’s befriending the lowly mechanics and servant girls who turn out to be key to their respective stories.

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Thoughts on IDW Transformers: The Furman Era — Bobby Schroeder

A nice little piece laying out some interest aspects of the Transformers series² through the lens of a particular run of comics including the historically weird handling of gender and how later IDW comics corrected that.

When James Roberts began writing the fan favorite series More Than Meets the Eye, he wanted to explore the subject of Transformer romance. And if Furman said that there aren’t any women on Cybertron, then, well… I guess he’s been left no choice but to declare it the robot yaoi planet! His hands were simply tied, folks.

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Media ∩ Technology

The Logistics of Road War in the Wasteland — Bret C. Devereaux

Look. If Bret Devereaux is going to keep writing articles analysing the practicalities of speculative fiction tropes I am going to keep linking to them.

Complicating this picture further are spare parts. Without the ability to manufacture bespoke spare pairs at scale, keeping these vehicles in operation is going to be very difficult. So we ought to expect to see, alongside an emphasis on fuel efficiency, a preference for robust, easy-to-maintain platforms that use widely available civilian vehicle components, rather than hard to source or scavange military components. After all, asking your local junk mechanic to service the AGT1500 gas turbine engine in an Abrams MBT is going to be a pretty big ask, compared to finding the parts to fix the engine of yet another Toyota pickup.

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Why We Don’t Have UIs Like the ones in Neon Genesis — Zemnmez

Damn now I want a vector-based display again.

Everyone who works with interfaces should be looking at these and asking themselves why interfaces don’t look like this. Where did we go so wrong? Where’s the big fuckup where we ended up with like, windows 95 instead of this shit? This is something I have devoted untold and definitely irresponsible brain space to. And honestly, the best answer I have is very simple, but I think also a kind of interesting look at how our tools shape the designs we make.

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I wasted $410 recreating a fake website that shows up for 10 seconds of a TV show almost no one remembers — Alyx Wijers

Wijers doing an extremely important job 🫡

When I watch TV and movies, I sometimes notice web addresses. I’ll usually note them down, and look them up later to see if they’re registered. In most cases, they’re registered by the studio or network or whatever and just redirect to their site. AMC, for example, keeps www.savewalterwhite.com up from Breaking Bad (now 12 years after the series ended, as of the time of writing), and www.cometlist.net up from Halt and Catch Fire.

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Technology

Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents — David Kriesel

Quite an old one but recently linked to by Tina. What if your scanned just randomly changed numbers around in the scanned image? What multiple models of scanners from the largest manufacturer in the world did that for years without being fixed? There is also an accompanying video.

In this article I present in which way scanners / copiers of the Xerox WorkCentre Line randomly alter written numbers in pages that are scanned. This is not an OCR problem (as we switched off OCR on purpose), it is a lot worse – patches of the pixel data are randomly replaced in a very subtle and dangerous way: The scanned images look correct at first glance, even though numbers may actually be incorrect. Without a fuss, this may cause scenarios like:

1. Incorrect invoices
2. Construction plans with incorrect numbers (as will be shown later in the article) even though they look right
3. Other incorrect construction plans, for example for bridges (danger of life may be the result!)
4. Incorrect metering of medicine, even worse, I think.

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I Want to Love Linux. It Doesn’t Love Me Back — Fireborn

First of a series of posts on this blog dealing with the hell that is trying to use Linux while blind.

Linux claims to support blind users here. It even ships the tools. But using them? Getting speech or braille output when you need it most? That’s a punishing mess of driver quirks, missing defaults, audio stack failures, and layers of modern regression hidden under the surface.

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Avoiding becoming the lone dependency peg with load-bearing anime — Xe Iaso

Anubis is a piece of software that has become popular for helping block unfriendly crawlers that have been overloading a lot of sites to grab data for neural network training without care for the damage they are doing to the web. It also has an cartoon character mascot that has proven useful for weeding people who like being dismissive pricks.

At some level, I use the presence of the Anubis mascot as a “shopping cart test”. If you either pay me for the unbranded version or leave the character intact, I’m going to take any bug reports more seriously. It’s a positive sign that you are willing to invest in the project’s success and help make sure that people developing vital infrastructure are not neglected.

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Technology ∩ Capitalism

Why Bell Labs Worked. — Areoform

Seen via a post by Fabio Manganiello going further into Bell’s treatment of people compared to what companies and academia both demand of them now, shared by Xerz and boosted by Jennifer Glauche which also inspired the next post by Elilla.

Reportedly, Kelly and others would hand people problems and then check in a few years later. Most founders and executives I know balk at this idea. After all, “what’s stopping someone from just slacking off?” Kelly would contend that’s the wrong question to ask. The right question is, “Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?”

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Deep in Mordor where the shadows lie: Dystopian tales of that time when I sold out to Google — Elilla

On the empty promises and dehumanisation of Google.

It’s the little things that bugged me, how people would eat the free candy or have a bowl of cereal and just leave trash and dirty dishes everywhere for the cleaning ladies (contractors) to deal with; more than that the way nobody looked at them or said “thank you”. We Brazilians have a social class for that, a social code underlying that studied invisibility, I knew what this was: these were maids. Servants. The women in my family, my friends at school. The “campus” was pretty open and my then-wife visited it a few times; it creeped the Fuck out of her, the distinction between people and non-people.

This review contains spoilers.

I will admit that 90% of my love of this film is the last fifteen minutes but I do adore Ryu mastering the instant transition and wakizashi-in-heels techniques and the rest of the movie is still good. Nana straightforwardly taking over a newly reinvigorated clan as the new boss at the end does not really make sense but it rules.

Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X

First some website bookkeeping: I’ve updated the homepage to emphasis my original bog posts a bit more and keep them on the page longer and moved the reviews and posts from other accounts that I’m mirroring to their own section. The bog and beag pages are left as-is at the moment. I am considering modifying them and their respective Atom feeds as well to have the default be without the mirrored posts but that will need a bit more consideration because I don’t want to create lots of broken links or cause a million posts to reappear in people’s newsreaders. I also updated my memorial page for Cohost a bit.

For some music: I had lovely time recently watching a couple of NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts with my partner in bed. Here is the Moses Boyd one:

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Digital media

Music CDs Are the Best — The Virtual Moose

Of course I ripped all the cds to my plex server while reading the booklets, something I really enjoy from the cd era. What no one told me though, and I guess why would they, is that Sarah McLachlan’s album Surfacing is a fucking multimedia cd-rom??

I am not the only person right now who is getting nostalgic about going back to a website and I think there’s a similar joy in old multimedia CDs from before everything got squashed into completely standardised forms for either social media site or streaming services. Little experiments, surprising features, discs that acted as different formats depending on what was reading them. While I was updating my Cohost page I threw in a short little bit of Javascript just embedded in the body of the page for a little bonus feature when you play the Love Honk audio. That wouldn’t actually have been possible even on Cohost itself but I think just quickly throwing a little unique interaction is carrying on that spirit that CSS crimes also gave us a glimpse of.

And in the golden age of multimedia discs you could have, as Virtual Moose discovered, little bonus programmes in your music album, hidden audio tracks if you put your PSX CD into a CD player or a a full XBox game demo on in your movie DVD alongside the minigames you could play on a normal DVD player with a remote.

This is turning into its own post so I will move on.

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Retro Achievement Mastery 168 - The Yakyuuken Special - Kon’ya wa 12-kaisen!! — Lizstar

Lizstar is nearly defeated by a pornographic rock-paper-scissors game for the Saturn.

This is Rie Kouno. My villaness. Pretty sure she’s the oldest girl here, actually. She’s got this like, Japanese Housewife energy to her, as if 22 is 45 years old, cause this game is make by perverts with bad views on women. But anyway, my strategy did not work on her. I left the game playing, on double speed, for two days. And I did not win. By the end of the five days, I had assumed I had run through the entire RNG track, and it didn’t work. So I tried on Paper. Still nothing, two days later. Scissors? Nothing.

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Kim-Venture (1979) — Jason Dyer

Seen via Misty De Méo. A not-quite Colossal Cave Adventure for a computer with a six-digit LCD calculator display and just over a kibibyte of memory.

Just like a common hack for modern machines is to see if it runs DOOM, programmers of the late-70s-early-80s tried to make every computer play a form of Adventure, even ones that were absurdly limited. Leedom cheekily explains in an interview he managed to fit “26 rooms, 2 treasures to take back, a magic rod, a magic word, a dragon, a bird, a whole bunch of stuff in there and I crammed it all into 1,185 bytes. I left 3 bytes over for user expansion.” In a different interview Leedom explains he used compression rather like the Z-Code of Infocom or the A-Code of Level 9.

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Sci-fi nerd shit

Doom’s Tears: Remote Villainy and Real Violence — Jack Elving

An old musing on the line between supervillainy and real evil.

I think one can argue that the reason Gwen Stacy’s death is romanticized has to do with that simple and basic genre convention being overturned. The staging of Gwen Stacy’s death is extremely weird and odd for several reasons. But at it’s core, the logic of the scene is simple: Villain kidnaps Girl — Hero chases after Villain — Hero confronts Villain — Villain endangers Girl — Hero at last moment catches her.

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The Second Russian Epoch, on Trial — The Hands Have Eyes

The first post of a new blog looking at Russel T. Davies’ return to writing Doctor Who. There is a second post too titled A Theory of Hyperpop Television. This is very much in the weeds of the fandom discourse and uses fandom terminology that is so obscure that I am not sure if some it is familiar to anyone outside of one specific Discord server. To explain two of the terms used: The Cambrian Era is a tongue-in-cheek term for the run of Doctor Who from 2005-2021 in reference to the geological Cambrian Era because the show was being produced by BBC Wales¹ and the Lupine Era is the run of Doctor Who from 2024 to the present because it is now being produced by a studio named Bad Wolf².

Obviously, at the end of the day, when the official (and snarky unofficial) histories are written up, the truth will out that this was an era incapable of living up to being all things to all people. And perhaps that was the only bar it was ever going to be allowed to define success as clearing. The historians may well conclude (the snarky ones, anyway), that it was simply not capable of being enough things to enough people to justify the ambition of attempting to appease the rads, the trads, the frocks, the guns, the soufflés, the chips, the centrists and the left (while the official histories will have a fascinating time explaining why the series cancellation was the result of a barnstorming success).

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A little more serious

Over five decades, here’s how voters have shifted away from the major parties — Casey Briggs et. al for the ABC

An animated visualisation of the steady drift away from the two major parties in Australian elections. I also appreciate that they have a legible non-animated version of the article in place if you don’t have Javascript enabled.

Liberal MP Keith Wolahan agrees: “When I speak to colleagues in Canberra, even those on really healthy margins, they’re looking over their shoulder thinking, is my seat facing a contest that hasn’t happened before?”

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Futa_FAQ.md: My lesbian experience with topping without testosterone — Elilla

Seen via Rabbit’s link roundup, which also happens to link back to one of my link roundups. You are now trapped in an infinite loop.

Unter testosterone, spontaneous libido was urgent, almost like having to pee, or having to crack your fingers when they’re tensely uncomfortable. It would happen without rhyme or reason (I recall getting hard for no reason in the midst of trying to understand math textbooks (and I don’t even like math (ok δ looks kinda fuckable but…))).

Under estrogen, my responsive libido frequently needs to be fed before it can exist.

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The History of Women’s Public Toilets in Britain — Claudia Elphick

Also via a link roundup from Rabbit.

This lack of access to toilets impeded women’s access to public spaces as there were no women’s toilets in the work place or anywhere else in public. This led to the formation of the Ladies Sanitary Association, organised shortly after the creation of the first public flushing toilet. The Association campaigned from the 1850s onwards, through lectures and the distribution of pamphlets on the subject. They succeeded somewhat, as a few women’s toilets opened in Britain.

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The Serious Zone

‘It left me traumatised’: The barriers to accessing transgender healthcare in Ireland — Conor O’Carroll

If you haven’t had enough misery reading about Ireland’s treatment of trans healthcare from me Conor O’Carroll has written a series of three articles in The Journal after having interviewed Irish trans people about healthcare and DIY.

• ‘It left me traumatised’: The barriers to accessing transgender healthcare in Ireland
• Transgender people turning to DIY-healthcare due to lack of trust in National Gender Service
• Transgender people moving to Ireland put on long waitlist for vital healthcare until assessed

Muireann, who was in her early 20s at the time, explained that her family weren’t overly supportive and that she had come out to her friends.

She was told that she had to be out publicly full-time in order to access healthcare.

[…]

When Muireann got her family on board, she rang the clinic and was told she could now see an endocrinologist. Fifteen months passed without any word from the NGS, despite monthly calls from Muireann and enquiries from her GP on her behalf.

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The Gist: Trans rights are Data rights — Simon McGarr

A solicitor looking at some recent legal rulings related to trans rights.

In other words, the CJEU, building on the earlier findings of the European Court of Human Rights’ privacy law decision in the Godwin case against the UK, recognises that the issue of recognising, recording and otherwise processing a person’s gender identity is an issue of data protection.

This is not a novel application of data protection law. It is exactly what the law has always been intended to achieve- it is a recognition that, all other things being equal, a person should be empowered to be the primary author of their own life.

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People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies — Miles Klee

I think I saw David Gerard sharing this one.

The infinite “yes, and…” machine does not mix well with people going through mental health crises it turns out.

“I have to tread carefully because I feel like he will leave me or divorce me if I fight him on this theory,” this 38-year-old woman admits. “He’s been talking about lightness and dark and how there’s a war. This ChatGPT has given him blueprints to a teleporter and some other sci-fi type things you only see in movies. It has also given him access to an ‘ancient archive’ with information on the builders that created these universes.” She and her husband have been arguing for days on end about his claims, she says, and she does not believe a therapist can help him, as “he truly believes he’s not crazy.” A photo of an exchange with ChatGPT shared with Rolling Stone shows that her husband asked, “Why did you come to me in AI form,” with the bot replying in part, “I came in this form because you’re ready. Ready to remember. Ready to awaken. Ready to guide and be guided.” The message ends with a question: “Would you like to know what I remember about why you were chosen?”

I rambled in an episode of a podcast about German Army parkas after spotting one in an episode of Ring: The Final Chapter. I remembered seeing them around back in the day in charity shops and such. As a result of this a partner ended up buying me one that we spotted in a vintage clothes stand at a market. I really liked it but I don’t particularly want to go around with German flags on my shoulders so I decided to replace them with some alternative patches I got on Patchion.

Further horrific stories of treatment of patients by Loughlinstown. None of it is a surprise at this point.

https://www.thejournal.ie/investigates-national-gender-service-6690859-Apr2025/

I started taking ADHD medication one week ago. The path to get these has been humiliating. In the end I went to a private clinic but I have wasted so much time with a public health service that has completely eroded any trust or faith that I might have had with it.

I have known that I have had ADHD and autism for years. The more I talked to people over the year that have them the more it became obvious that their experiences matched my own, the more that I was drawn to people who had them, who were like me and shared my experiences and understood me¹. The people who I love most in the world are other AuDHD trans women.

But these are disorders and come with their problems, too. Doing even the simplest things is a struggle sometimes. Taking care of myself, doing the exercises that stop my back from being in pain, keeping things clean and, of course, my job. I have so often fallen behind in work and then in a burst of stress powered through what needed to get done at the last minute. I used to stay in late all the time to get things done that should have been finished hours before. I have lied to people over and over again about work, pretending I had more done than I did, hoping to make it up afterwards. My original masters project fell through when I got caught in a downward spiral of paralysing stress and lies about making progress while continuing to stare at a blank page. Eventually I broke down crying to my supervisor after admitting I really had basically nothing. He helped me start over and my family supported me massively through writing a new thesis. Over time I have learnt how to manage things a bit better, how to recognise my limits and work around them, but I continued to struggle daily.

Loughlinstown

But I did not seek treatment for a long time. A large part of this was due the the ableism and transphobia of the “National Gender Service”, the largest gender clinic in the Republic of Ireland, located in Loughlinstown, County Dublin. I was referred to the clinic in January of 2019. At the time I was informed that I was number 200 on the waiting list. That wait, sitting so far up a list, proved intolerable. Before I was seen in Loughlinstown I started taking minoxidil to try and prevent hair loss, began laser facial hair removal, started hormone replacement therapy with a private clinic, got a deed poll and a gender recognition certificate to legally change my name and gender, and the National Gender Service lost the records of over one hundred patient referrals. The news of that last thing broke in November of 2019 but it wasn’t until April 2020 that I was sent a letter assuring me that they still had my referral and that the clinic was no longer telling people what position they were on in the waiting list.

I had, as I said, already started medically transitioning, assisted by a private clinic, but that is expensive and I still wanted to go through the public system. It would save me money and it seemed like the way it “should” be done. I hate private healthcare as a concept. Everyone should be taken care of, not just those who can pay. I was finally seen in Loughlinstown in June of 2021, over two years after my initial referral. If you are referred today it will take you over thirteen years to be seen. It was a three hours drive to Dublin, a three hour interview with a psychiatrist, and a three hour drive home. It was utterly exhausting.

I was asked about my entire life and medical history. Like many others, I was ask about sex and masturbation so that my sexuality could be scrutinised by the man interviewing me. I have heard of much worse and more invasive questioning from people. When I was not comfortable answering certain questions I was not pressed on them. I passed enough of the other unspoken tests that meant I was an acceptable, respectable trans woman. I had stability, safety and independence. I was already out to friends, family and people that I worked with. People who are struggling, who have difficulty with employment or who are afraid to socially transition are often denied medication by doctors in Loughlinstown. If your life does not line up to their expectation of stability and normalcy they reserve the right to deny you treatment until you are ready, in their eyes, to transition. For those who do not have the means to seek private treatment they may not see any alternative except a public system that can deny them anyway for not meeting the standards of a comfortable, stable environment (that is, in our society, wealth) that is seen as a perquisite to be allowed to decide what to do with your body.

Patients have stated publicly or reported to TENI that they are being denied or delayed treatment for reasons such as suspected autism, ADHD, unsatisfactorily answering overtly sexual questions or for not bringing family members into assessments which community members continue to report to us, despite public statements by the HSE to the contrary. Assessments include questions about masturbation, porn habits, sexual history, thoughts during oral sex, detailed genital descriptions of themselves and sexual partners and even racial preferences.

Lilith Ferreyra-Carroll in GCN

Trans people of course share these stories with each other. About being rejected for being unemployed, for being fearful of coming out to bigoted family, for having untreated ADHD or autism. And when we do the doctors who run the Loughlinstown clinic accuse us of being “coached” to fast-tracked sex changes. Donal O’Shea, endocrinologist in Loughlinstown, is incredibly concerned about the rise in autistic people seeking to transition. He is worried that it is linked to “visibility around Kardashian personality Caitlyn Jenner” and compares people coming to a doctor and wanting to medically transition to a patient who asks their doctor to treat their pneumonia by amputating a lung.

Paul Moran, consultant psychiatrist in Loughlinstown, is also concerned about screening for neurodiverse people and wrote an opinion piece in The Journal welcoming the findings of the Cass Report, which he consulted on, which has been criticised in a joint statement by WPATH, ASIAPATH, EPATH, PATHA, and USPATH², which was headed by a supposedly independent pædiatrician who reportedly had previously expressed shock at medical transition practises and strongly recommended anti-transition literature to colleagues, which current Tory leader Kemi Badenoch suggested was commissioned due to “having gender-critical men and women in the UK government” and never would have existed otherwise.

Yale’s Integrity Project’s review of the report described the Cass Report as levying “unsupported assertions about gender identity, gender dysphoria, standard practices, and the safety of gender-affirming medical treatments”, as repeating “claims that have been disproved by sound evidence” and that it “misinterprets and misrepresents its own data.” But it is a wonderful document for those who wish to justify more roadblocks towards transition. Who will forever see the struggles of trans people not as a civil rights matter but as purely a medical question where doctors do not merely assist or facility their trans patients but hold power over them.

And the Loughlinstown gender clinic, originally a regional endocrinology unit that over time started to take more and more trans patients, have decided that they should hold their authority over all trans people in the Republic of Ireland. They declared themselves the “National” Gender Service without authorisation and write letters to people’s GPs to advise them not to do blood tests for trans people who are sourcing hormones from other providers.

I’m not sure where the title ‘National’ derives from [...] I do not consider at this stage that we can view this service appropriately as a ‘National’ service, as I have not received evidence to validate government or HSE recognition of this status.

Siobhán Ní Bhriain, national clinical lead for integrated care, Health Service Executive, in a 2022 letter

The ability of the men who run this clinic to gatekeep who gets hormone treatments is very important to them. They urged for years for the HSE to drop the WPATH model, which the HSE eventually did, walking back a promise from the 2020 programme for government. The WPATH 7 guidelines allowing for other models of care such as informed consent was far too liberal for Loughlinstown.

They frequently coach their language in concern for children, that they are transitioning too young and cannot make informed decisions, despite the fact that they do not treat children and there is currently no public pathway for the medical transition of minors in the Republic of Ireland at all. Paul Moran and Donal O’Shea are, in fact, currently taking legal action against the state to try and prevent children from being treated abroad either. Loughlinstown’s vision of a potential gender service for children is, according themselves, indistinguishable from conversion therapy. In a submission concerning a proposed law to ban the practice they wrote that it “will make it impossible to develop a children’s gender service in Ireland.” When they treat adults they use a system that their own model of care documents call overly complex and inefficient and co-author papers that get the mechanisms of the medication that they prescribe confused.

Loughlinstown is widely hated by the patients that attend the clinic. In research by the Transgender Equality Network Ireland 80% of respondents were dissatisfied with their care from the National Gender Service with a full 60% of them giving it the lowest possible rating. This sort of treatment erodes people’s trust in doctors and can lead to hesitancy around healthcare in general.

There are no correct guidelines, there’s no actual structure in how we’re dealt with. It means that it could be literally one person standing in your way, telling a lie or doing the wrong thing, or they might be bigoted or ignorant. So you’re completely at the mercy of maybe one person and there’s no other protections in the system. That person might be good and might help you. But then again, it’s luck. It’s complete luck and it should be standardised.

Séan, a trans man quoted in TENI’s report Trans and Non-Binary Experiences of Institutional Violence in Ireland.

Faced with this institutional gatekeeping I saw an ADHD diagnosis and treatment not as something beneficial, that could bring relief to struggles that I face every day, but as a weapon that could be used against me, to question my humanity and autonomy, to deny me even more vital treatment for my wellbeing, and that if I tried to seek an ADHD diagnosis through the public system that it would be something that would hang over my head to be abused by anyone else seeking to wield authority over me. This is another, indirect way that people are harmed by gatekeeping. I was afraid to seek treatment for one thing because I wanted another even more desperately. Eventually, though, I’d decided that I’d had enough, that I needed help with my other struggles as much as I did with transitioning, and if Loughlinstown did decide to deny me future care for this or other reasons there are alternatives. Foolishly, I decided to go through the public system again.

Mental Health Services

I went back to my GP in March of 2023 to ask to be referred for ADHD treatment. Unsurprisingly it took, after several delayed appointments, just over a year to be seen at my local mental health services. I had practised and thought about what I was going to say. I laid out my struggles, staring at blank pages telling myself to to start writing and nothing coming out, not being able to keep things clean, deadlines only getting met at the last minute through stress building up and bursting the dam of executive dysfunction. I explained all this calmly, and was met by a man telling me that I seem to be handling things well. That I met deadlines. That my job gives me flexibility.

I realised that doctors are like dogs: They don’t really understand English; they just follow tone of voice and maybe pick out a few key words. In calmly explaining my problems I was not performing the required level of patheticness to be seen as disabled. He went out to speak to a consultant and left me alone stewing in that room for a while. I realised that to be taken in any way seriously I needed to strip away the walls I normally put up around my feelings and dredge up the self-hatred and misery I feel. I needed to drag up every thought of being stupid and useless and let them out. To make myself into a sobbing mess. This is a deliberate performance, but not a dishonest one, and without it I was not being taken seriously at all. Medicine is the process of engaging in ritual self-humiliation until a doctor deigns from on high that you are pitiable enough to be granted the boon of his charity.

My tears got me a few tissues and the consultant called in, who was quick to make comments about “overdiagnosis” and how pharmacological solutions are not the best for people who don’t have severe enough trouble, before making a pointed comment about how I had brought a book³ to read in the waiting room. I guess someone who reads can’t really have ADHD, or at least not severe enough to need treatment.

Even so, I got a second appointment scheduled for a month later. For that one they wanted to be able to speak to someone who knew me as a child to corroborate on childhood signs and symptoms. This is a standard procedure for the DIVA, the Diagnostic Interview for ADHD in Adults. My experiences two decades ago apparently matter more than the actual problems I have right now. Still, I rang my mother. She was surprised that I was seeking an ADHD diagnosis⁴. Like many her image of ADHD was that of hyperactive boys unable to sit still and causing chaos, certainly not a description of my childhood. But after after a few conversations where I explained my struggles, and also showing her articles about how ADHD presents often differently in girls she came around a bit.

In any case, she agreed to be on the phone for the appointment. She needn’t have bothered, though, as when I returned to the clinic I was, bafflingly, told by the doctor who had seen me the first day that he had expected a psychologist to be free to see me that day to go through the DIVA but had not booked one and there was no one to do it. I was just given forms to fill out at home and drop back.

This was stressful, I had friends with me while I filled them out for moral support, but also deeply frustrating. The focus on childhood is bad enough but the questions are also sometimes confusing (what the hell does it mean to feel like you are “driven by a motor”?) and sometimes a single line would ask two different questions that have two different answers! “Did you do well in school? Were you a good student?” Yes I did well in school. I was intelligent and interested in many of my subjects. I genuinely enjoyed maths. No I was not a good student. I would ignore my teachers, talk in class if I was bored and thought I could get away with it, did homework at the last minute (often while sitting in the class that was about to start before the teacher walked in or while they were setting up). I struggled massively in university without the structure of school to make me do things and when faced with material that I did not pick up effortlessly. But when it comes to disability how well one performs academically or economically is often seen as the primary metric. Getting a person to produce the desired outputs of those systems is the goal and if someone does then they may not be seen as needing assistance no matter how much they are being ground down as an ill-fitting cog in the machine.

Several months later I am told by a doctor who I have never met before that the local mental health clinic I was going to had liaised with the adult ADHD service and they think that I have ADHD but it’s not severe enough to treat. Later I will be told by a friend who had also sought treatment that she was much more bluntly told that they are only treating people who are “crashing cars and getting arrested.” I ask the doctor in the clinic if I could see that correspondence with the adult ADHD service and she says she doesn’t know. She asks the receptionist and this is refused. I leave while trying not to show the rage and despondency I feel.

Freedom of Information

At this point I know I need to seek private care instead but I also want to see what the ADHD service actually said about me. I want everything in writing. It could also be useful to have documents to pass on to another doctor when seeking treatment privately. I decide to file a freedom of information request. Even requesting this turns out to be its own ordeal. The public clinic seems to deliberately have no contact email address. I phone them and am informed by the receptionist that all freedom of information requests must be sent, in writing, not by email, to a specific hospital that handles freedom of information requests for all Health Service Executive operations in the city. I am not given a specific person or office to address this to. After several more phone calls across a few days I finally get in contact with someone who is able to send me the FoI form⁵. I send it back with a simple request for documents relating to my seeking treatment for ADHD. I think that I will wait till I have these before seeking private treatment. It shouldn’t take too long; HSE is legally required by the Freedom of Information Act to respond within four weeks.

Two months later I emailed to ask (in much more polite terms) what the fuck they were doing. I will not bore you with the details of these exchanges but over the course of the following months I persisted, always patiently and politely, to ask as for updates. It would take multiple emails to get a single reply. Sometimes an email would get ignored and when I would send another one I would get a sudden phonecall in reply a few minutes later. They’re busy, they’re backed up, they were on holidays, actually this was passed along to the wrong person in the first place because they handle requests for clinics on the other side of the city.

What a waste of another few months on top of all the time I had pissed away already. At this point I think the public service is simply not going grant me my rights unless I threaten them with legal action and it’s not worth it. This has caused me enough stress as it is.

Treatment

I went to a private clinic. I paid a lot of money but I got seen quickly and was treated with some basic dignity. There was still the DIVA and the irritating focus on childhood but I was diagnosed with ADHD⁶—and this time I actually have that in writing—and I’ve started a trial of medications to see what works for me. So far it’s been really positive. I can direct myself and work much more easily. The house is getting cleaner. I can even relax more easily without thousands of ants biting at my brain telling me I should be doing something while not letting me actually focus on anything. I feel so much better in the last few days than I have in a while.

All it took is the destruction of my faith in doctors.

Court papers were lodged on Friday, almost 18 months after Prof O’Shea and Dr Moran made a formal complaint against the Health Service Executive (HSE) with Hiqa over the HSE’s referral of young people for assessment abroad, saying it posed a risk to these children.

https://www.irishtimes.com/health/2025/04/13/doctors-initiate-legal-action-over-states-transgender-policy/

thinking about her...

spoilers for The Clan’s Heir Is a Trans Woman

Paul Moran & Donal O’Shea

Italian trans woman named Bianca Cogiati

I don’t wear jewellery much but I still have an occasional hobby of making my own earrings and I just enjoy a good kitschy earring in general.

Here’s some things I have stuck a fishhook in:

Some other earrings that I didn’t make but felt like showing off.

I lost and gained people I love in 2024. The year started off well. I won a Celeste race that myself and some friends do every New Year’s. I chosted a roundup of every film I had watched in 2023 to Cohost. I don’t think that I’m going to do that again this year. I don’t have the energy for it. I’ve been dealing with back pain issues for a while that are stopping me sleeping well.

In February I replaced my memory foam mattress with a spring one and it seemed to help for a while but then the pain came back. This repeated throughout the year with me finding things that seemed to give a temporary reprieve, only for me to start waking up in pain again. It’s not as bad as it was but I am still struggling with it. I am going to try going back to a physio again. I was not happy with the last one and when he moved his practise I did not feel very motivated to find a new one, but a friend recommended their physio to me over the holidays and I’ll give it another go.

Also in February my partner moved to Copenhagen. I knew it was coming, this had been planned for a long time, but when it actually happened it hit me very hard. She visited in the summer and I flew out to Copenhagen with some our friends in October too, but I want to make an effort to see her more, even if I do find travelling very draining.

Also also in February I dropped my phone in the toilet. It’s a Fairphone and designed to be able to be taken apart easily with just a screwdriver to swap parts, so it’s not very waterproof, and the screen stopped displaying anything. Thankfully disassembling it and drying it out thoroughly brought the screen back to life, but even if it hadn’t I would have been able to replace the screen.

In March I got a fancy folding, electric bike. I have not used it quite as much as I planned, especially over the winter when it has been cold and I have been struggling with lack of energy, but it has been very handy for certain journeys that public transport doesn’t adequately cover. I also experimented a bit with being horny on main with Cohost. It has really been the only place online where I felt safe and comfortable enough to do that. Part of that is just over getting more comfortable with myself and kink stuff, but Cohost was just a friendly place for me and I was inspired by other people I followed sharing their own kinks in very cute ways. Cohost shutting down has been upsetting for a lot of reasons but this is one of them and it’s hard to get comfortable about this stuff again in other contexts.

April was a huge month in retrospect. A friend asked me out and tentatively said yes, not really sure how it was going to go and I’ve never done polyamory before. I am so glad that she did. I love her so much. Both of my partners are autistic and A.D.D. or A.D.H.D. and getting to know them and how wonderful, funny and utterly charming they are has helped me explore those parts of myself and see them as something to embrace. I’ve been learning to love myself through loving them. I am still undiagnosed but I am pretty sure.

And me being undiagnosed is not for lack of trying. Also in April was my first appointment at a local public mental health unit that I had been referred to over a year prior for an A.D.H.D. assessment. I calmly explained how much I struggle day to day and what I have to do to cope with it, which the doctor seemed to take as me managing pretty well. I realised from this conversation that doctors are basically just like dogs: They don’t really understand what you’re saying they just hear tone and maybe a few basic keywords. The health service is a paternalistic, condescending trap and you need to ritually humiliate yourself to them until they deign you worthy enough of the charity they so magnanimously bestow. I dropped the masks, let myself unravel and started sobbing in front of them.

This got me another appointment. They wanted to dig into my childhood, interview my mother. Quite frankly I don’t give a shit if I had A.D.H.D. as a child. Requiring that as part of diagnosis seems utterly pointless. I do not have a time machine with which to go back several decades to when that might matter. I am struggling now. That interview never happened, anyway. Appointments got delayed, doctors were busy. I got given a multiple choice form to fill out about my childhood again, some of which asked multiple questions as a single item which don’t necessarily have the same answer. Was I a good student and did I do well in tests? No, I was an awful student who ignored her teachers whenever I could get away with it and just read ahead in the book myself because I found that more interesting and I did will exams. I struggled massively in university when I finally hit a wall of subject matter that did not come easily to me as I had never learned how to study properly.

I of course got fucked around for another few months before being finally told I have A.D.H.D. and they are not going to treat it. I guess I’m functioning too well, though I don’t have any of the specific reasoning because the doctor who told me this was one I had never seen before and was just paraphrasing a letter that she refused to give me a copy of. I am still waiting on the results of a Freedom of Information Act request for my documents from these appointments that is almost two months overdue.

I started singling lessons in April but I failed to keep going with them. That’s far from the only thing I have failed to keep at since then. I’ve been struggling a lot as the year has worn on. I hope I can get back to the energy and spoons I seemed to have last spring again in the coming months. Going back over my diary for the year it’s a stark reminder of how much things were looking up then. April was also the last time I saw my friend Hellen. She had moved away and was around for a visit. I had a lovely time with her. I didn’t speak to her much after that and she died suddenly in August. I did not make it to the funeral, it was overseas, but some other friends did at least. Back here we had a memorial picnic for her.

Before that the summer was pretty damn good, though. Got closer to the new partner, got to see the old partner. I tried ritalin that was given to me—by a friend, not a doctor—and wow that does certainly help a lot. I wish it was possible to actually get treatment through the medical system. Oh well! I rationed them for bad days and they helped me get through a lot of shit. I also marched in a pride parade for the first time. I also met some kink people in person who were lovely.

Well. They were certainly lovely at the time. In August I learnt that one of the people I had met there had be accused of repeatedly spiking drinks at other events. Hellen died, as established, and then in September it was announced that Cohost was shutting down. I hope it doesn’t come across as callous when brought up in the same breath as my actual friend dying, but I also have grieved for that website. I was devastated. Cohost helped me a lot in this last year to embrace more parts of myself, be more open about certain things and it was also just a place that was actually fun and a bright spot in my life. I wouldn’t be posting on my own site if it wasn’t for it. It sparked creativity in a lot of people and reminded us that we can be thoughtful of how we use the internet and communicate with people. This site existing in its current form is because of Cohost.

I visited Copenhagen in October with some friends. I had a lovely time but I find travelling exhausting. I think I was a bit run down afterwards and got sick a few times. I might still be recovering from it all. My cat also got out and was missing for a few days, which didn’t help, and coming up to the Christmas holidays I had the most stressful time I’ve had in my current job. I’ve had two weeks’ holidays and I feel like it really wasn’t enough.

I did have a lovely Christmas with my newer partner, though. We had Christmas dinner with a group of other local trans people, played Mario Kart and watched Doctor Who. Ideal Christmas.

And now. I guess I still need to recover and heal. As I’m writing this my back pain is flaring up again. I need to get up and do some stretches before this year’s Celeste race this evening. We’ll see if I can keep my crown. I haven’t done much practising but I don’t think anyone else has either. It’s just a bit of fun.

Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X

Doing another one of these. I still intend on doing rebogs as well and I’ve added some more styling to make reposts stand out from my own words and make a more clear divide between them.

History and science fiction

On Bread and Circuses — Bret C. Devereaux

Devereaux digs into the origin of the phrase “bread and circuses”.

So the surface reading seems clear: he is putting the Roman people on blast for letting their authority over public affairs be taken away, usurped by emperors who promise them bread and circuses (we’ll come to if this is an accurate representation of the history in a moment). They used to have all of this power, the power to bestow offices and armies, but now they cower fecklessly in the wake of imperial slaughter and arbitrary rule.

Except, of course – wait a minute – isn’t the theme of this passage that power is an unwise thing to ask for? The theme of the whole poem is that you shouldn’t be asking the gods for these sorts of things!

The Problem with Sci-Fi Body Armor — Bret C. Devereaux

Also from Devereaux.

Instead, where real armors evolve against threats, fictional armors evolve as a visual language, borrowing the design elements of other fictional armors far more often than they dip into their own historical exemplars, with the result that the whole thing sort of devours itself.

Fiction referencing exclusively other works for fiction rather than looking to the world is something I think about as well from time to time.

Book Review: War with the Newts — Nathan Goldwag

Goldwag reviews a book from the man who coined the word “robot”.

The novel starts with Captain van Toch, a Czech sea-captain in the service of a Dutch trading company, stumbling upon an isolated community of giant amphibians in the Dutch East Indies, living on a single tiny island, their numbers culled constantly by sharks. Van Toch realizes that they’re trainable, and extremely intelligent, and has the idea to plant colonies of them across the Pacific to work as pearl divers. After his death, the Pacific Export Company transitions from luxury goods to mass labor, selling newts across the world as an undersea work force capable of hydraulic and maritime engineering, which results in Newts settling most of the world’s coastlines and becoming an integral part of the global economy. “So now we find the salamanders on the road to their finest flowering; but the human world, too, is enjoying unprecedented prosperity. New continental coasts are being feverishly constructed, new dry land is emerging from where shallows used to be; artificial air support islands are springing up in the middle of the ocean.” (Newts, pg. 165). For all the absurdity, however, Čapek treats his topic seriously. We’re given footnotes, citations, discussions of legal dilemmas and cultural disputes, discourse on the economic impact of newt labor and how it affected different nations and groups, taxonomies on newt evolution and biology. It doesn’t feel like a cheap trick or a gimmick because it’s all done with such care.

Gender

Degendering and Regendering — Talia Bhatt

In short, to acknowledge transmasculinity, a society would have to first admit that manhood—just like womanhood—is a social class and not a ‘natural’ category. Its people would have to acknowledge that the desire for independence and self-actualization exists within all of us and is not, in fact, stored in the balls.

My Doctor Emailed Me Back — Abigail Thorn in Trans Writes

Thorn outlines very well the fundamental ideological problems in the N.H.S. and how trans healthcare is handled that I think apply very well to the H.S.E. here in Ireland as well.

There are even more serious charges. The coroners’ reports into the deaths of Sophie Williams and Alice Litman said lack of gender affirming care contributed to their deaths. That is to say, it is a matter of publicly recorded fact that the NHS’ failure to provide gender affirming care has contributed to the deaths of patients. Nobody at NHS England has resigned or faced consequences.

Of course panic, misinformation, and mistrust take hold in these conditions! Of course people come to believe the NHS are making secret plots behind closed doors! These conditions are entirely of the NHS’ own making. Slapping a famous trans person’s face on a new outreach program does nothing to address them. As I told Colonel Korn, if the NHS wants to increase trust they should start by apologising.

But the Colonel expressed his bind to me the same way every other NHS senior official I’ve spoken to has. The Department of Health and Social Care tells the NHS how they have to spend their money. The mandate they get from the Health Secretary tells them what services they have to commission: if it says “Ten more transplant wards,” they need ten more transplant wards, and that’s that. If it says “Spend £90m pathologizing trans people,” that’s what he has to do.

This point bears underlining: every single person I have spoken to in the NHS- from local GPs to the National bosses- told me they are powerless. There is nobody at any level of the organisation who takes responsibility for the state the service is in and the suffering it is causing. Every single person blames the person above them, even the man at the top.

Technology

Hitachi Hacking, part two! — Kore

Followup from the first of these posts.

In my last post, I succesfully made a bluetooth/wifi Magic Wand Plus. Unfortunately, though, I completely bypassed the original Hitachi board, which happens to be where all the buttons and LEDs are attached, so it was only usable remotely. To make the physical controls work again, I could either make my own copy of the Hitachi’s board, with buttons and LEDs in the same places, or somehow reprogram the original board and make it do my bidding.

The first option requires a lot of measuring, which I find really annoying to do. So, let’s hack the Hitachi’s microcontroller!

React, Electron, and LLMs have a common purpose: the labour arbitrage theory of dev tool popularity — Baldur Bjarnason

I love economic forces.

MongoDB’s popularity among managers during its peak was largely down to the idea that you no longer needed a database expert. Just throw the data into the document DB puddle and let your existing less-specialised developers handle it. The promise of the document database during the peak of their hype was that you didn’t need to employ as many specialists.

Electron, PhoneGap, and React Native promised to let companies replace their expensive platform specialists with more commodified generalists.

Standardisation in web development lowers costs, increases predictability, and makes the various browsers more interchangeable. It’s a hedge that reduces the individual market power of each browser, but usually in equal degree while increasing the value of the overall web, leaving each browser vendor better off as a result. Their market share might not increase but they have a bigger cut of a larger pie. Incompatibility tends to drive developers and companies to other platforms, reducing the overall pie.

Standardisation of labour, conversely, does not benefit labour.

Open source maintainers are drowning in junk bug reports written by AI — Thomas Claburn in The Register

Everybody hates A.I! Here’s another reason to.

Whatever happens to Python or pip is likely to eventually happen to more projects or more frequently. I am concerned mostly about maintainers that are handling this in isolation. If they don't know that AI-generated reports are commonplace, they might not be able to recognize what's happening before wasting tons of time on a false report. Wasting precious volunteer time doing something you don't love and in the end for nothing is the surest way to burn out maintainers or drive them away from security work.

Seth Larson

Palette swaps — Mabbees

Seeing as I dusted off Pico-8 again recently here’s a little post about doing palette swaps in it.

The concept of a palette swap is drawing something with a different set of colors. It’s a good way to get more mileage out of your PICO-8 sprites. There are a bunch of things you can do with palette swapping

• create variations on a character
• make simple looping animations
• fade in or out of a scene
• simulate day/night cycles

But what does this mean for us as programmers? How do we represent the concept in code?

Scrapers I block (and allow), with explanations — Seirdy

Technical website bullshit, but something I’ve been meaning to look at setting up for this site too.

Bots I block fall into one of the following categories:

• Bots that only serve to power adtech on other sites. My site has no ads, but I allow bots such as Google’s AdsBot.
• Intellectual property snitches. I forbid robots that scan for plagiarism, trademark/copyright violations, brand protection, etc.
• Robots that power invasive background checks that border on cyberstalking.
• Scrapers that build datasets to train Generative AI (GenAI), such as large language models (LLMs). I don’t block search clients used by GenAI research assistants; I only block scrapers used to train GenAI models.

Everything else

Saying Gaelic / Gaeilic is ok

I used to be one of the people who “corrected” people about the word Gaelic. I am sorry.

The Irish Language was referred to as both Gaelic and Irish until the Republic was formed. “Irish” was mainly used by academics; “Gaelic” was used by the common people.

The Republic chose “Irish” over “Gaelic” for political/nationalistic reasons.

Pornhub Sees Surge of Interest in Tradwife Content, ‘Modesty,’ and Mindfulness — Samantha Cole in 404 Media

Dahl started an Instagram account in 2023 that parodied tradwife content creators, after her own account was banned by the platform multiple times. Tradwife content (short for “traditional wife) is fetish content, even if the “wife” isn’t showing skin. It’s a fantasy, and always has been, even when it was used to sell ovens to 1960s homemakers.

Laziness Does Not Exist — Devon Price

Kim is the person who taught me that judging a homeless person for wanting to buy alcohol or cigarettes is utter folly. When you’re homeless, the nights are cold, the world is unfriendly, and everything is painfully uncomfortable. Whether you’re sleeping under a bridge, in a tent, or at a shelter, it’s hard to rest easy. You are likely to have injuries or chronic conditions that bother you persistently, and little access to medical care to deal with it. You probably don’t have much healthy food.

In that chronically uncomfortable, over-stimulating context, needing a drink or some cigarettes makes fucking sense. As Kim explained to me, if you’re laying out in the freezing cold, drinking some alcohol may be the only way to warm up and get to sleep. If you’re under-nourished, a few smokes may be the only thing that kills the hunger pangs. And if you’re dealing with all this while also fighting an addiction, then yes, sometimes you just need to score whatever will make the withdrawal symptoms go away, so you can survive.

Playing Both Sides — Mike Egan

A cute story about Star Wars: Battlefront.

But it wasn’t just that it was super difficult and took a long time. The hilarious part of all of this is that the fact that there was still a battle going on outside meant that the number one reason we didn’t get to destroy the shield bunker was that the match had ended. The AI armies we were ignoring went on fighting their war and reached a conclusion before we were able to deal enough damage to the damn thing.

The movie’s tone is a bit all over the place and I found the more light hearted parts a bit hokey but when it’s serious it works for me and the climax is absolutely glorious. I love Ryu and Nana.

Went out with partner for fancy burgers last night and then went back to her’s and cuddled on the couch and I suggested watching the trans episode of Dirty Pair as I had started watching the show and while I knew that there was a happy couple in it where the bride was a trans woman I did not know that they were also burger freaks.

Vols.: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X

As Cohost shuts down I have been making a fuss about moving away from social media and I am not the only one. We are in the final week before it goes read-only and people have been sharing blogs and websites and my RSS reader has been filling up. So here I will share some things I have been reading lately, both from Cohost people and just other interesting articles.

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Makeup

vampy lipsticks — Tulip

There is going to be a lot of more typically nerdy stuff in here so let’s start with something else. I don’t wear makeup much these days but I am not immune to black lipstick recommendations.

as fall approaches, my craving for deep, dark lipsticks increases… my dark metamorphosis.

OK, well, technically it’s Vampire Season year-round here - i don’t need Halloween as an excuse to embrace black clothes and dark lipstick. but still! i thought it would be appropriate to showcase some of my favorite vampy lip colors from my personal collection.

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Hardware

The Working Archivist’s Guide to Enthusiast CD-ROM Archiving Tools — Misty

Misty digs through CD-ROM preservation and touches on why the history of the CD as an audio format first and data format second makes it more complicated than it might seem.

CD audio isn’t a file-based format, and instead uses a series of unnamed, numbered tracks. CD-ROM extends this by making it possible for a track on a disc to contain data and a filesystem instead of audio. Since CD-ROM extends CD audio, the two formats aren’t mutually exclusive: a CD-ROM disc can still contain multiple tracks, and it can even contain more than one data track or a mixture of data and audio tracks.

Hacking a Hitachi Magic Wand (Plus) — Kore

This is just cool.

So: the Hitachi Magic Wand is a very good device. It, however, has very little granularity in how strong it is. Even the newer Magic Wand Plus only has four, non-customizable settings.

I don’t like this and want to fix it. In the process, I’ll also be adding bluetooth connectivity, because I thought that was pretty funny.

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Software

software rendering is awesome — erysdren

i fuckin love software rendering. the act of creating a fully realized 3D scene entirely in your own program, without the aid of OpenGL or DirectX or any GPU whatsoever. something about that is so charming to me. it leads to so many interesting technical design decisions and shortcuts taken to get it to run fast (if that is the goal).

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Social media

RIP Cohost — Mike Egan

I had to have at least one R.I.P. Cohost article in here.

From a design perspective, compared to all other social media, Cohost was a paradise. No numbers, no algorithm, no global feed, no discover page, and a lot of really useful ways to curate what shows up in your feed. Having a reverse-chronological feed of only the things I wanted to see from the people I asked to see them from has done wonders for my brain.

It was never about the numbers — Aurahack

Also somewhat of a reflection on Cohost but also on how numbers and stats make you worse.

The close friends I made there motivated me to get better because they were further in their art journey than I was. I looked up to them not because they were my favorite artists but because they would create alongside me and it would inspire me! I wanted to grow like they were visibly growing. Over time, I did, and my following would start to outpace theirs and… I think that’s where it started getting kind of nasty.

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Computer games

Everywhere and Nowhere: Emptiness in Level Design — Nat Clayton

Nat Clayton talks about in-between spaces in games both in her work and in other games. She has also made me aware of the Weird Maps series by Whomobile which is great.

There’s a dead-end I think about every single day, tucked away in the back of Half-Life 2’s airboat chapter. It’s a right turn where you’re supposed to go left, a gun turret and a headcrab ambush and some secret crates for those nosy enough to go scavenging. It’s one of a thousand dead ends in Half-Life 2, but this one sticks out to me. As the sickly golden twilight paints the concrete runoff, illuminating basic shanty structures, the sparseness of the space is unavoidable. The roar of airboat fans and chase music given way to gusts of wind and mechanical creaking. Some designer decided that someone once lived here, died here, and painted that scene with an absolute minimum of brushes and textures.

Listening, Watching, Gaming — Chris Hall in First Person Scholar

Not a million miles away from this but in the much more academic side of games writing here’s a piece on the paratext created by submerging oneself in the soundscape and environment of a game level.

As I write this, I have open on another screen, as I often do, one of these ambient paratexts—in this case, an hour-long video from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. There’s no music, no avatar, only a first-person scene at the ground level providing a nighttime view of the exterior of the Graniny Gorki research outpost in Tselinoyarsk, the Soviet Union. Directly before us is a high fence, followed by patches of grass and the concrete façade of the facility. To the far right a guard patrols within the fenced area, as oblivious as the sleeping dog nearby. Presumably we perceive the scene through the eyes of the game’s protagonist, Naked Snake, lying prone, but we needn’t be aware of this, and Snake provides no signs of his presence. The peaceful scene is backgrounded by the ambient sounds of the southern USSR forest, the constant chirping of bugs punctuated by the faraway cries of nocturnal birds.

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Doctor Who

Perverting the Course of Human History (War of the Sontarans) — Elizabeth Sandifer

I have been enjoying Elizabeth Sandifer ripping the Chibnall-era of Doctor Who to shreds as part of her long-running TARDIS Eruditorum series analysing the entire run of Doctor Who from the 1963 to the present.

You figure there’s got to be this entire shadow Chibnall era—the one that exists only in Davies’ head and perhaps some text messages to his mates. No more detailed than the Leekley era, perhaps, but undoubtedly there. Like poor Penny in Partners in Crime we can see its shadows—obviously The Timeless Children would have stuck larger and more mind-wrenchingly than the rest, with Davies at once transfixed by its potential and vexed by its production. Ironically, he’s the one person who seems to have been substantially influenced by the Chibnall era.

The Problem with Doctor Who — Luna

An older post but keeping with on the topic of Doctor Who: Luna points out a problem with the current Doctor Who intro segment that has been in place since the 2023 60th anniversary specials. We can only hope that they fix it by this year’s Christmas special.

But something is seriously amiss in the 2023 specials, and neither I nor my inner child can let it go. And it’s not the [whatever the bigots are angry about this time], nor even the [actually legitimate criticism here]. No, none of that. The probl-

Timing.

-em with the 2023 specials is… oh. Right.

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Serious articles for serious people

AI and the American Smile — Jenka

In the same way that English language emotion concepts have colonized psychology, AI dominated by American-influenced image sources is producing a new visual monoculture of facial expressions.

‘Right to Repair for Your Body’: The Rise of DIY, Pirated Medicine — Jason Koebler for 404 Media

“I don’t know who needs to hear this but I’m scared too all the time of losing the health that I have. I know what it feels like,” he says. “I know what it feels like to not know what’s wrong with your body and to have to go shop for a stranger who has the authority to maybe or maybe not give you what you need. I know what it feels like to know what’s wrong with your body and to know what you need and to be told you can’t have it because the infrastructure has failed and it’s not available.”

The Third Sex — Talia Bhatt

Here is a morbid, maddening irony: anthropological scholarship, distinctly Western anthropological scholarship, that for decades has touted the maxim of ‘binary gender’ being an ‘imposed’, ‘colonial’ concept, has now been cited by an Indian court in an opinion that explicitly third-sexes the hijra and purports that recognizing them as women would ‘violate their constitutional rights’. It is seemingly only imperialism when populations who seek the technologies of transition and legible womanhood are granted access to them, while the opinions of Western academics shaping local politics is merely sparkling scholarship.