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I know we are all used to hear bad news from the USA or UK when it comes to trans rights but this time Germany wants to play in the same league.

Our idiots at home ministry came up with the fucking idea to start a register for all transgender and nonbinary people which would mean every person working at some public position could always at any given time see your assigned gender at birth, your deadname, your address and who knows what else.

We had been there in the past. Hitler Germany called it the "Travestite Law" back then. Our politicians didn't learn.

We all know this is unacceptable.

Please, if you are German, sign it. If you are not, spread it wide and far.

This had been stopped once a few years ago. It needs to be stopped again.

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And that’s that on that.

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After System Collapse and Rapport, I can't help thinking about how completely and utterly insane ART and Murderbot's first meeting was from ART's perspective.

UplandGatewayOne, the station where they met, is ART's home station. In Mihira and New Tideland's system. Which is deeply anti-corporate. SecUnit even notes at the time that there aren't any security or bond companies there, so nobody should be looking for escaping SecUnits. Iris and Matteo, for all the anti-corporate missions they've been on, have never even seen one, which means Perihelion most likely hasn't either. They're not deployed on transit rings except in GrayCris-paying-to-murder-people situations, and when they are, it's a big deal accompanied by a lot of alarms and screaming and panic.

And one just kind of strolls across the private docks without setting off the weapons scanners. Wholly unnoticed.

So there was already no legitimate explanation for a SecUnit being here. That's point one. Which means it has to have an illegitimate reason.

And ART's paranoia is easily on par with Tarik's, generally speaking. Even though it's never encountered a SecUnit before it has to be aware that this could be an attack by a corporate. Except the SecUnit's got no drones, no additional weaponry, no armor, and it's wearing cargo pants and a hoodie. Which would seem to suggest that it's supposed to be mistaken for a human -- okay, maybe that explains how it got across the transit station a tiny bit? Not really. But at least it accounts for the lack of screaming.

But there's no point in it trying to pretend it's a human now, if this is the prelude to some kind of attack. It's not like ART is a passenger transport, and these are the private non-commercial docks. It can't get on board without trying to hack the lock, and it can't get too far from its handler without frying itself, so it has to do whatever it's doing before ART leaves the transit ring. Whatever attack is coming, it has to be soon. Like, right now, soon.

And it just pings ART directly.

Not even... trying to hide its presence as a potential hostile MI a little.

That is... possibly the most stupid prelude to a code attack it could have made? And if it had been trying to pretend it was human to persuade ART's crew (who aren't even here anyway) to give it access to the ship, it just blew its cover. What the hell is its human handler thinking? They're really bad at this.

And then it asks for a ride--which, again, is hilarious if it thinks it can gain entry that easily--wait. What the fuck? It's offering several hundred hours of entertainment media as a trade.

There is no human handler.

ART doesn't even have to check the governor module at that point. No human would imagine that transports watch television. Possibly, no other bots besides transports would know that they do, because transports are famously not-communicative. Nobody could have instructed it to say that. The only way the SecUnit itself could have gotten the idea that this approach might work is if it tried it before and it was successful.

Okay, so what we know for sure is: This SecUnit is a rogue, and it talks to transports.

And apparently it's hitchhiking?

This raises so many more questions than it answers.

Where the hell did it come from? How did it get across the station without setting off any alerts? Why was it chatting up transports before now? How did it even get several hundred hours of entertainment media downloads? And why the hell would any sentient being, let alone a rogue SecUnit, want to hitchhike to RaviHyral? A crummy little moon which has nothing on it except for mines.

ART's explanation of, "I was curious about you," for letting Murderbot on board is the understatement of the millennium.

This is the equivalent of a frigging walrus ringing your doorbell.

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Something I think about sometimes as a transmasc is the contrast between the stereotype of how transmascs and trans men are so often viewed through the lens of “girls (or ‘girls’) who want to be boys”, and my experience growing up of feeling like a boy who wished desperately that he could be a girl. But, knowing deep down on some level that I wasn’t one and couldn’t be one, no matter how much I wanted to be. And perhaps my experience is complicated by growing up intersex, and not really going through what people think of as a complete “normal girl puberty”, so that’s something to consider when looking back on my experiences with gender.

But, I’ve seen a lot of people, transmascs and (occasionally) non transmascs alike talk about the transmasc experience of Wishing You Were A Boy and rarely seen anyone else talk about the transmasc experience of Wishing You Were A Girl, and frankly, I feel like a lot of cis allies are unaware that this is a thing for some transmascs. I’ve seen people talk about internalized transphobia broadly a bit more often, sure, but this is a slightly more distinct feeling than simply wishing I was “normal” and able to blend in, and therefore not trans, and therefore a cis girl by default. I’m not really sure how to describe it. Like, before I even knew that being trans was a concept that existed at all, before I consciously ever thought “I feel like a boy” or knew that was something I could be, I remember thinking often “I wish I could be a Real Girl” but knowing that I felt like an imposter. There was an intense yearning for Girlhood, but a knowledge that Girlhood was on a shelf just out of my reach- despite not having any idea whatsoever as to why, at the time.

Maybe this doesn’t make a lot of sense, I only slept 4 hours and my head isn’t exactly screwed on straight. But I’m sharing this anyway, hoping that someone else out there will see it and resonate and know that they aren’t alone. I also think it’s worth mentioning that I find it interesting how gender dysphoria can manifest so differently for everyone who is affected by it.

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“Do it scared” “do it badly” it’s time to drop the guide for do it alone

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“I asked ChatGPT-“

Yeah? Well I asked this random refurbished SecUnit I found and it told me that Sanctuary Moon was a premium quality TV show, which is weird because it’s MEDIOCRE AT BEST-

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“laughter is the best medicine” WRONG. hormone replacement therapy.

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The murderbot excerpt that is making me want to eat glass today:

"Did I really care what an asshole research transport thought about me?

I shouldn't have asked myself that question. I felt a wave of non-caring about to come over me, and I knew I couldn't let it. If I was going to follow my plan, such as it was, I needed to care. If I let myself not care, then there was no telling where I'd end up. Riding dumb transports watching media until somebody caught me and sold me back to the company, probably, or killed me for my inorganic parts."

Right in the SOUL.

Sure, on the face of it, "Why should I care what some asshole thinks about me?" is affirming, self-assured, a release from the impossible task of controlling how others behave. There's a certain amount of it that's necessary to survive being alive.

But it's also a refusal to engage, to try, to be heard, to be true to yourself. And it can go too far, reach a point of just making yourself so small and self-contained that you barely exist. Never express yourself, never tell anybody what you think, just quietly write people off pretty much immediately and never let anyone get to know you.

Murderbot has been technically free for aaaaaages, and it just stayed with the Company anyway, because it didn't know what else to do. It has a bad fatalism habit it really needs to kick.

Asshole Research Transport is going to be its best friend one one eleventy exclamation mark one. But that wouldn't have happened if Murderbot had just succumbed to that wave of not giving a shit.

Connection isn't always gentle, sometimes it's just honest. Being vulnerable enough to let someone in sometimes involves telling them they're pissing you off.

Or. Uh. About that time that you killed a bunch of people.

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Petted some goats

she was very polite

saw a video that was like “everybody comment what you did today so we can see how everyone experienced something different” and the comments have me tearing up on this train. what the fuckkkk. the human experience

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Saw a stag beetle fight off a magpie today it looked like this

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nothing better than the wrong capitalization of Sie

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A fantasy story starting with the protagonist minding her own business gathering firewood, when a demon appears out of nowhere announcing that she belongs to him now. The protagonist demands to know on what grounds, she's never signed no damn contract. The demon is kind of baffled by this, and awkwardly explains that just now her father had promised his firstborn for something, and she is his firstborn.

The protagonist digs her heels in and says no, she never knew her biological father and by the way the demon explained the situation, evidently her father also doesn't know that he already has a daughter, so therefore the man who had made no contribution to her life after he bred and fled has no claim to her as something he could barter.

Not giving a shit about the fact she's gambling her life in doing so, the protagonist makes contact with the local woodland fae, asking them to negotiate on her side. The fae think that this is fucking hilarious and go with her. So, having lawyered up and with a reluctant demon in tow, the protagonist heads off on a quest to find her father and do whatever it takes to wrangle everyone involved into unmaking the contract.

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TIL that the English word “Lord” in the sense of the head of an estate comes from an Old English word of Germanic origins, hlāfweard, later hlāford, later lord. 

Normally I wouldn’t remark on my romps through etymology, but “hlafweard” is a compound of hlaf, or loaf, and weard, which means guardian (see also Ward or Warden, etc). Meaning that when you call someone a lord you are calling him an esteemed keeper of the bread. 

HEY THERE BREADBOX PETER WIMSEY. LOAF GUARD PALPATINE. BREAD CLIP VETINARI. 

Lady also derives from hlaf, but in this case hlafdige or bread kneader. She makes the bread, he monitors it. Women have to do all the work as usual. 

Now, the reason I was looking this up was that I wanted to develop a gender-neutral analogue to lord/lady; there are analogues already out there naturally, but the Shivadh must be different and anyway I didn’t like the ones I’d seen suggested online. 

Given that the origins of Lord and Lady aren’t all that strongly gendered anyway (they’re about what the person does, not what their gender is), I decided that if a woman is a bread-kneader and a man is a bread-guarder, a nonbinary person should be A BREAD EATER, which would be Hlafetan.  

Thus I present to you the gender-neutral analogue to Lord or Lady: Ledan.  

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yesterday in economic botany we were learning about plant based oil compounds and stuff and my botany professor was talking about lynn seed oil, which in woodworking is rubbed on over furniture as a varnish. this oil has an exothermic chemical reaction with oxygen, meaning that the reaction creates heat. what often happens, apparently, is that woodworkers will finish rubbing on the oil with a rag and then will ball up the rag and throw it away, but because the reaction is taking place and the heat can’t escape (like it would on a piece of furniture where it can be cooled) it gets trapped in the rag, which gets hotter and hotter until it reaches the temperature where it bursts into flame. apparently many woodworking shops have been burned down by this. the proper way to dispose of rags with this oil is to hang them up on a clothesline, so again the reaction never gets enough heat to start a fire. im telling you this because im a writer and ive never heard of substance that will just…spontaneously combust conveniently like that so long as it’s in a confined space. my botany professor tried it in a trash can in his driveway and it did indeed burst into flame after 45 minutes, which is an exceptionally convenient time delay. im sorry im tying this so fast my laptop is on 2% battery and theres no outlet an

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Language is universal

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In the same vein of cave paintings having children’s handprints higher than their height suggesting them being lifted up or sitting on the shoulders of adults, there’s footprints in Australia dating to the Ice Age showing a group of adults and children walking to a body a water, and one child breaking away from the group to seemingly skip in a wavy path until rejoining the group

This is like 20 thousand years ago! And the joy and happiness of going to water made this child playfully skip along! It’s universal! Dancing their way back to their family!

In a language we will never hear, a culture we’ll never know, with thoughts and ideas we can only imagine! There are millennia of untold moments of happiness, of human connection and warmth that are gone forever. But they still happened! Did that family even notice the tracks they left? How could they have known that that one day their impossibly distant descendants would be able to see the imprints they made?

Another set of tracks in the same area shows three men hunting a giant kangaroo, running at incredible speeds, but one of them had only one foot! They jumped along on one foot, every so often an imprint from a stick appearing. How did they lose their limb? An accident? A fight? A predator? Was it completely gone or maimed? Was it from birth? Either way this person was cared for by their family and was able to heal and participate fully in life! They most likely felt grief when their family member lost the use of their limb! Who cared for them? Who gave them the stick to help them walk? What kind of joy did their family feel when they made a recovery? Did someone shape and carve the stick? They certainly worked all of their other wooden tools, something as essential that would have been too.

This was during the ice age when Australia became a brutally cold, dry desert. Their entire food system had to change. By all indications it should have been a stark and difficult life of little resources. But no! They worked together! They looked after their wounded and sick! The speed that these hunters were running at was incredible and means they were well fed and healthy! A millennia of helping one another and caring for one another and all we can get are tiny glimpses of these moments did they catch the kangaroo did they laugh and congratulate each other when they did how happy were they to bring it back to their families I just