cyborg-of-color

[cyborg-of-color]

Imagine being on a walk or something, just generally minding your business, when some sort of an apparatus poofs out of thin air right next to you, and two oddly dressed teenage girls peer out. Through some sort of a translator, they ask whether you are the person they're assuming you are, using your full government name. Once they have verified that they have the right person, they ask whether they could ask you a question that might be quite personal and sensitive to you. At this point you figure that you might as well, today's already taken the weirdest turn it probably ever will. So they brace themselves to ask you this very important question:

In the contemporary terminology of your time, do you consider yourself left-handed, right-handed, or ambidextrous?

It takes you a minute to process this, and the girls look like they're just about to burst into an avalanche of apologies when you nonchalantly just tell them which one you are. You're somewhat vaguely aware that there's a vague spectrum of it, like some people who are adept with both hands but have enough of a natural preference to one hand over the other, but you, personally, can name your own handedness quite well.

Hearing this, one of the girls triumphantly turns to the other girl, pointing at her with her finger and yelling "SEE I FUCKING TOLD YOU-" before the translation device clips out and the apparatus poofs into nothing, gone as quickly and without a trace as it appeared.

[cyborg-of-color]

internet politics and real-world politics have gotten so separated, and pretty soon all this internet weirdness is gonna come crashing into real life and politicians are gonna start throwing around words like “SJW” and “anime communist” and “dark enlightenment” and it’s just gonna be the most ridiculous fucking thing

[cyborg-of-color]

always remember gay men are the reason we dont have to pay for public bathrooms in canada

[cyborg-of-color]

genuinely wild to me when I go to someone's house and we watch TV or listen to music or something and there are ads. I haven't seen an ad in my home since 2005. what do you mean you haven't set up multiple layers of digital infrastructure to banish corporate messaging to oblivion before it manifests? listen, this is important. this is the 21st century version of carving sigils on the wall to deny entry to demons or wearing bells to ward off the Unseelie. come on give me your router admin password and I'll show you how to cast a protective spell of Get Thee Tae Fuck, Capital

[cyborg-of-color]

Feel good inc is the craziest thing that can happen to a fourteen year old

[cyborg-of-color]

on Planet Where Everyone Can Teleport the first person on the moon went there by accident and promptly died. The next dozen or so people also went by accident, and also died. Number 14 figured out that people who go to the moon die and very cleverly brought a sword and six weeks of travel rations. This did not help.

No one on Planet Where Everyone Can Teleport ever figured out why people die in space because they don’t need airplanes and never found it particularly interesting to climb tall mountains. Astronomers use telescopes to take pictures of the ever-growing pile of corpses on the moon.

[cyborg-of-color]

like, okay, consent does literally just mean agree. which is what enables this little rhetorical trick. because there's all this cultural emphasis on sexual consent, which is just expressed as consent, a lot of phrases whose intended meanings are "rape is bad" can be taken literally to mean "i should get to agree to everything that happens in my vicinity."

[cyborg-of-color]

a wizard is going to turn you into a random animal! whether you like it or not! how nice of them! spin the wheel to find out which class your new species belongs to (and then probably do a google).

[cyborg-of-color]

in honor of black history month 2025, i’ve put together a list of books written by black sapphic authors for you to read in the month of february

non-fiction essays/memoirs:

all about love: new visions by bell hooks

black lesbian in white america by anita cornwell

sister outsider: essays and speeches by audre lorde

mouths of rain: an anthology of black lesbian thought by briona simone jones

blues legacies and black feminism by angela davis

does your mama know?: an anthology of black lesbian coming out stories by lisa c. moore

fiction:

the color purple by alice walker

loving her by ann allen shockley

the gilda stories by jewelle gomez

in another place, not here by dionne brand

pomegranate by helen elaine lee

the summer we got free by mia mckenzie

these letters end in tears by musih tedji xaviere

dead in long beach, california by venita blackburn

young adult:

honey girl by morgan rogers

escaping mr. rochester by l.l. mckinney

this ravenous fate by hayley dennings

faebound by saraa el-arifa

so let them burn by kamilah cole

where sleeping girls lie by faridah àbíké-íyímídé

adult:

the deep by rivers solomon

sweet vengeance by viano oniomoh

come back (love concealed) by terri ronald

house of hunger by alexis henderson

short stories:

girl, woman, other by bernadine evaristo

the secret lives of church ladies by deesha philyaw

additional info:

-> “why wasn’t this book listed?” probably because it wasn’t black sapphic-centric, the author isn’t a black sapphic themself, or i just simply haven’t heard of it! so feel free to add on if it meets those two criteria

many of these books require trigger warnings, especially some of the older ones that are more likely to feature racial struggles of the time. please do your due diligence and search for tws if you want to read them!

please feel free to add onto this list in the rbs or comments! happy black history month

[cyborg-of-color]

Laptops are always so much more Fucked than phones in my experience. A laptop is like a beautiful horse that wants nothing more than to break all of its legs. A decently solid android phone will act normal

[cyborg-of-color]

Sections of the Alphabet, a guide:

ABCDEF - The Grade Quarter. For obvious reasons these letters are associated with rank and quality. Though E is not a common grade it nevertheless is part of the territory.

GHIJK - The Working Class Neighborhood. In English these letters do a lot of grunt work. Their proximity to the grades make them overlooked but what would we do without them?

LMNOP - Midtown. When learning the alphabet this section gets a lot of attention due to its distinctive landcape and how it rolls off the tongue. Its vista of peaks and hills make it stand out as well.

QRSTUV - The Support Town. A land of contrasts. The heavy lifters in this area draw a sharp disparity with Q, which is unique for its specialist role.

WXYZ - The Outlands. A stretch of unusual landscape that is distinct for its cuisine. Everyone knows what kind of dish you're eating when it's got some of these letters in it.

[cyborg-of-color]

I know I have messages and asks from you all, and I promise I intend to answer them. It's just been scheduled posts for a few days, and things will probably continue in the cadence of "I'm super active on here" vs. "scheduled posts are carrying the blog," for the foreseeable future because I'm offline doing a lot of work.

Currently organizing some things across local organizations, revamping the image and rhetoric of my local Democratic Party chapter, collecting clothes for a gender-affirming clothing swap, participating in multiple cities' planning and city council meetings, and distributing some of the guerilla literature I mentioned previously.

On the subject of the last: I have some things I'm ready to show you.

The first one I hesitated to share because I think it comes off as Republican-apologist. For what it's worth, that is exactly the point. It's a zine I've written to be distributed in red areas with content/language that is sympathetic enough to conservatives that it may be able to act as a first step in the deradicalization process. I finally decided to publish and distribute it on the grounds of "Well, it might help deradicalize some conservatives. And it might piss off any leftists that find it enough that it moves them to action, so win-win I guess." If you find yourself mad at the content of this one, just know it is written with a very specific audience and purpose in mind. I'm not exactly sympathetic to what the MAGA conservatives are allowing to happen right now, but I'm familiar with and understand their perspectives (at an information-level, not an empathy-level).

The second is also directed at conservatives, but it's more pointed, and it's based on a response I get in a lot of conversations with "moderate" conservatives. The phrase is "I'm fine with it. I'm just sick of seeing it," which they frequently apply to LGBTQIA+ people, and they seem to genuinely think that that makes them accepting enough to get them out of conversations about queer issues. This zine is about the implications of saying something like that, i.e. "The I'm fine with it," part does not cancel out the fact that what you're advocating for in the second part of the sentence is the erasure of an entire demographic of people for your comfort. The reason I wrote something to state this directly is because based on good-faith interactions with a lot of people who think like this, I don't think most of them understand that that's what they're advocating for, and I also don't think anyone has ever confronted them about it.

If you find either one of these compelling or practical, you have my full permission to get them printed and do you own guerilla distribution in your area. I've gotten a handful of these to various groups in my roaming territory, and from what they've told me, they've been doing stuff like shoving them in the pockets of shirts at thrift shops, under boxes at grocery stores, in the pages of books that conservatives would be interested in at the library and bookstores, etc. If you do want to do this, you'd be helping me spread the ideas and increasing the difficulty of finding the original source (giving me more plausible deniability irl). Be sure to look up any local laws/ordinances related to flyer distribution in your area though. Ex: One city I lived in had a law against putting things on people's car windshields, which for the longest time I thought was like a state/federal thing when it was just that city. People skirted it by putting things in car door handles instead. Additionally, do not put anything in a U.S. mailbox. I'm told it is illegal to put anything in there without postage. If for any reason, you're concerned about being caught by any of the places you're planning to leave zines, leave very few at a time and only in one place per day. Since they probably won't be found and noticed the same day you distribute them, that gives you a temporal spacer that makes it harder to tell when they were put there and therefore who could have done it. Putting them in many places in one day increases the likelihood they will be found faster, and then it's easier to narrow down who is doing it through combinatorics, i.e. "Who was in all three of these places on this date?" You'll notice also that both zines are handwritten in all-caps. It is traditionally thought that all caps handwriting is less identifiable to a specific person than cursive or regular print (there are fewer unique graphology characteristics).

You can access a printable copy of the first zine here and the second one here. You print them, cut them out, and then cut and fold them as shown below by this zine making guide from Thomas Tallis School:

I'd also be very proud of you if you made your own. The fact is, most of these probably will never receive significant media attention, so there's room to just try things here. By which I mean, get out whatever anti-MAGA perspective you have in whatever words you know how to use and don't worry if it's perfectly polished because these are not presentation pieces made to grab widespread attention. They're getting one person at a time at max most likely. Put thought into it but don't worry over perfection; it's more important to break the echo chamber.

[cyborg-of-color]

So this is a totally useless rant, but as a skinny girl, I’m getting extra, extra tired of fat-shaming.

I work for a corsetier at a Renaissance Faire. We sell corsets. Not flimsy bullshit costume corsets; like real, durable, waist-training corsets. Today a woman came in with her boyfriend, so I helped her pick out a corset and try it on. While her boyfriend—who was decidedly enthused about the whole corset thing—sat watching me lace her in, he told me, grinning, “Of all the good jobs at the Renaissance Faire, I think you have the best.”

I shrugged in agreement. “I touch butts and reach down cleavage all day; I mean…” Because we like to be a bit rakish at the Faire, and, y’know, it’s true. Tying people into corsets pretty much invariably requires getting handsy.

The couple laughed at that, and the boyfriend said, “That’s the job I would want!” But then he chuckled again and said, offhand, “Or maybe not; while we were looking at the racks, there were some pretty big sizes on there!”

Our sizes are all done in inches, and the biggest we make is a 46. And you’d better believe our large sizes sell. For a second I wasn’t sure what to say to the guy’s comment, but I answered him casually. “We get a lot of beautiful big ladies in here.” Because we do. “We make corsets for real women, not Barbie dolls,” I added. Wasn’t trying to be smart, just kind of tossed it out there because that’s the line we like to use when people ask about larger sizes, and because, again, we do.

The boyfriend went quiet at that; I didn’t think anything of it, I just kept on lacing. A moment later, he said, a little awkwardly (but sincerely enough), “Didn’t mean to be offensive.”

I quickly smiled and brushed it off, said he wasn’t, said I was just saying. (Don’t want to make the customers uncomfortable, you know?) And that was the end of it. His comment had rubbed me the wrong way, but it wasn’t a big deal. Now, I wear a 20-inch corset. I’m a few cup sizes short of being one of the Barbie dolls. Like his girlfriend, I’m one of the “hot chicks”; he doesn’t have to worry about offending me by implying that I wouldn’t be fun to poke and pull at.

Honestly though, of all the people I fit sexy technically-undergarments to in a day, fat girls are maybe my favorite people to lace up. Because they are just so damn happy that we have stuff that fits them. They are so damn happy that the corsets we make in their sizes are all the same pretty, shiny colors and cool flower/dragon/skull/etc. prints that the smaller corsets are, not ugly beige and boring “granny” colors. They are so goddamn happy that at least one (of several on the grounds) corset shop carries things that they can wear, that they actually want to wear, and that they look fucking awesome in. This is only my second season working, and we’ve fit 60+ inch waists and double-K busts. The only people we’ve ever had to tell sorry, we don’t have anything that fits them, are twelve-year-old kids.

It’s half-wonderful, half-heartbreaking how excited those women get. Women who say with sad smiles, when we ask if they want to get fitted, “Oh, no, you don’t have anything that fits me,” and then are stunned when we’re 300% confident that yes we do, and we have options. Women who can’t stop smiling and looking at themselves in the mirror after we’ve got them laced in.

I had a lady last week whose waist I measured (cinching the tape tight, as per procedure) at 41 inches—honestly not all that big. So she picked out a 41-inch corset to try on. I could tell halfway through getting her laced that it was going to be a bit big for her, so I mentioned it and said she might do better to try a smaller size. She started crying on the spot. She was so overwhelmed; she couldn’t believe someone had just told her that a 41 was too big. She told me about how hard clothes shopping was for her, how her mother would tell her she needed an XXXL instead of an XXL, how she had recently lost weight but still couldn’t wear certain colors because they didn’t fit or she wasn’t confident enough.

She did end up getting her corset, and after I checked her out she asked if she could give me a hug, so we ended up standing there hugging each other for a minute. While we did, I told her, “Do not ever let anyone tell you any bullshit. You are gorgeous.” She said, “I have a new boyfriend and he keeps telling me that.” I told her he was right, and to just keep telling herself she’s gorgeous; it was okay if she didn’t always believe it, but to keep telling herself anyway. (That’s how I talked myself through shit when I had bad anxiety.)

We all know fat-shaming is bad. The stupidity, fatphobia, and misogyny of it has pissed me off since I first became aware of it. But working with clothing, especially as figure-hugging and precise as corsets, has given me a new perspective on it—how much it affects people and just how shitty it is. Like, what does it say that I had a grown, only average-big woman crying into my shoulder because she was so overjoyed not to be the uppermost extremity of what a manufacturer can clothe?

My job rocks and it’s really rewarding, but sometimes it highlights some of the ugliest shit about society. I’m so glad I work at a shop that’s not bullshit about body types and operates with more people in mind than just scrawny white chicks like me. The fat women I work with are a ton of fun to lace up, and they’re so much more than their size—they’re cool, they’re smart, they’re funny, they’re sweet, they’re great to talk to, and yes, they’re hot. I’m so damn done with them getting short-changed and shamed by petty fucks who refuse to make them nice clothes, who refuse to even try to work for them, who refuse to consider them pretty. This whole rant was useless and won’t get read, but I had to vent because it’s been driving me nuts.

So actually, screw you, random dude. Fat girls are the highlight of my job.

[cyborg-of-color]

[cyborg-of-color]

the first time i ever had an edible i was watching Jersey Shore and i thought i was having a psychic moment because the phone rang on the show and i was like “ 🗿 she is going to pick it up and say Hello 🧠” and was correct

[cyborg-of-color]

All foreign films/shows should have two subtitle options. A localized one that better serves the original intent of the story and dialogue and a more literal one that awkwardly translates phrases in a preserved state, specifically for perverts who want to learn the language (me)

[cyborg-of-color]

went to my best friend’s house last night and saw a little plushie dog and plushie cat that had been sewn together down the middle into a two-headed chimera. I said, “did you do that?” she said, “yes, I saved them.”

turns out at her old job when the last two plushies hadn’t sold and became deadstock, her boss told her to cut them up and throw them out. so she cut them each in half, preserved their heads, and then rebuilt them together.

cannot stop thinking about the way these little plushies were approached with the instinct of a Vampire or some sort of ancient god. “Let me save you [turn you into a monster].”