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@sigmastolen

wait please do tell us your frozen yogurt nationalism thesis, actually

Okay, so there are two extremes of fast food service: what I'll call 1. the Pret a Manger, & 2. the Subway.

Speed > choice: "Pret a Manger" literally means "ready to eat," and that's exactly what you get. You walk in, you select one of ~6 types of premade lunch, and you pay at a kiosk (Pret early-adopted the kiosk POS system). You interact with 0 employees, you make ~0 choices. It's a huge hit in the U.K.

Choice > speed: In a Subway, you choose every single ingredient and every single aspect of your sandwich, from its temperature to its precise quantity of one of 8 different dressings. You have a whole 15-minute conversation with an employee in the process. At its peak, it had over 20,000 U.S. stores.

The difference reflects cultural values. There's this truism in the food service world that Pret will never get a proper foothold in North America because Americans want maximal freedom, even at the expense of inconvenience, and hate not being able to modify their meals. And Subway has never gotten a proper foothold in Europe because Europeans hate the idea of doing all that cognitive labor just to get a damn sandwich.

And then, waaaay over on the "choice > speed" end of the spectrum, further even than Subway, you have Pinkberry and Sweet Frog. Where a genuinely clever food-fuser said "what if I could maximize maximal choice by forcing customers to make their own meals?" And Pinkberry was born. TCBY was the dominant frozen yogurt model when I was a kid; they prided themselves on elaborate parfaits that looked beautiful, would've been a hit on Insta if such thing had existed then, and were created entirely by employees with limited modification options. Pinkberry is the dominant model right now; your parfait won't look pretty, but you'll get to choose Every Damn Part of It.

However, working in a Sweet Frog* in college taught me that there's another drawback to "the customer chooses everything": the customer isn't an expert. This means that:

The price of self-serve fro yo is always more than you expect it to be; those cups are huge and you can't judge how full one is

The calorie count of self-serve fro yo is always more than you expect; see above

Not to knock anyone's taste, but people regularly miscalculate by (e.g.) combining mint candies with peanut butter; those TCBY parfaits were R&D tested and your creation is not

Tipping is so SO weird, even before demands for tips became a POS default — technically you're being served food, but you also just did all the work yourself, and the worst thing you can do is ask the employee if you're meant to tip them

Anyway, maximal choice means the loss of expert input. And the offloading of executive functioning onto the customer. And the continued interchangeability of humans and machines.

Because infinite freedom has advantages, like making it easy to avoid allergens or be The One Person who wants mint and peanut butter together. And it has drawbacks, because freedom also means cognitive load.

Ergo... [gestures at U.S. today].

*it wasn't a real Sweet Frog but a knockoff, and it was actually a great place to work

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Gender is a performance and it’s time to play the music it’s time to light the lights it’s time to meet the muppets on the muppets show tonight

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Please forgive me for ranting, but...I am so tired of AI. Just so tired. I don't want Microsoft Copilot, or Google Gemini, or Meta AI, or whatever other energy-sucking, water-wasting, mediocrity-spewing LLM is currently being thrust upon me. I just want to be left alone to create in peace.

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I Know I'm Late As Fuck To The Party, But Hunger Pangs By Joy Demorra Is Genuinely SO GOOD

GODDAMN

This book breaks ALL the rules and it's still one of the most entertaining things I've read all year!

Hunger Pangs is shamelessly self-indulgent in the very best of ways. There were multiple times where I swear I heard an echo of the author laughing to herself as she wrote.

And I don't know what I should call it, but the closest thing is fanservice I guess? Butter? Whimsy? Well, what ever it is, Hunger Pangs is chockfull of it and here's a non-exhaustive list:

An cunty autistic vampire called Vlad fucking Blutstein

A disabled werewolf beefcake sweetheart

A woman so powerful she could kill you with her pinky (Can I get a Hell Yeah to that?)

the vampire is such a giant fucking nerd like peak blorbo material fucking hell I want to chew on him

BOTANY SAVES THE DAY

somehow slice of life, epic quest to save the world and political intrigue all at once? HOW?

OH and the smut is SCRUMPTIOUS

BALLS

LIKE THE SOCIAL FUNCTION NOT THE BODY PART

Galadriel doesn't have shit on Ursula, beautiful, ancient, powerful Ursula, I love her, I love her so much, my only complaint is that there was so little of her

🌟Absinthe🌟

HOT SPRING HOT SPRING HOT SPRING HOT SPRING HOT

I take back the previous point, there was no on screen hot spring and I am STILL mad about that (in the sequel perhaps? (pretty please?))

Beautiful carnivorous plant children

The universal autistic experience of needing the flirting equivalent of a sledgehammer to the face to be sure what's going on

Political commentary with all the subtlety of Mickey 17, case in point:

"It was all just so frustratingly simple. The government needed to stop levying crippling taxes on the lower classes, they needed to stop waging wars they couldn’t win, and they needed to focus their efforts on relief aid. It was plain as day. They needed to just… do the right thing. The problem was, they just kept choosing to do the wrong thing, over and over, and then they had the audacity to act surprised when the working classes kept finding novel ways to liberate the ruling classes of their heads."

Okay, this list is getting long and I could go on and on and on, but I think we're reaching the point of the review where I put it down and wait for the energy drink to wear off, see you in two hours. Toodles!

Whelp, okay.

Hunger Pangs is an ode to people that refuse to give up their gentleness in face of the world's atrocities and great personal hardship and make a hell of a lot of difference doing so. It's a reminder that even if the world is on fire, there is still love and joy to be found.

Nathan, a werewolf veteran whose decades long deployment ended when he was shot in the shoulder with a silver bullet, should be dead according to all doctors. And he's not alive either, he's just dying very very slowly, poisoned by fragments of the silver bullet no doctor bothered to look for. As a result he's deaf and has lost much of the function of his shoulder. And even after the fragments are removed, while he gets better, he still is disabled.

And where a lesser author would have come up with some magical cure for his illness, made him "whole" again, Demorra gives him hearing aides.

I don't know if Vlad is canonically autistic or if I (auDHD and retired theatre kid) am projecting, but he resonated with me deeply. I've never read anything that got masking so right. His opening of the second ball is a brilliant example of how sometimes, in measured dosages, autistic people can and do enjoy being the centre of attention. Sometimes the line between acting and masking blurs in a way that can be really fucking fun.

I wish we saw more of Ursula in this book. Her tragic background and the responsibility she shoulders must be crushing. What Demorra does brilliantly is contrast her bone-deep fatigue to how much energy and vibrance she can exude.

You can get the ebook on payhip or through your local bookstore. (While I'm very much not the target audience for it, there's also a closed doors version.)

I very much recommend getting it local. For reasons.

OH, before I forget, Demorra is an esteemed hellsite member! You can find her right here, she's a joy to have on your dash: @thebibliosphere

<<monster-fuelled book review episode one

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as a person who uses either public bathroom on a toss of a coin i gottta say its kind of ridicuous that people are so attached to them being seperate facilities. youre not usually gonna see anyones dick at the urinal and youre not usually gonna be able to spy on any women. the stalls are the same except one has a little tampon bin. we would lose nothing if all bathrooms were unisex and i'll die on that hill.

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i’m going to hold your hands when i say this and i am only going to be kind about it once: ai does not belong in fandom spaces, ever. not in writing, not in art, not in video, not at all. it does not matter how bad you want to see your favourite characters kiss, or how much you need a bit of help finishing a chapter, or whatever.

make friends with artists. commission somebody. learn to draw yourself. ask for a beta read. try a writing partnership. fandom spaces are communities, so engage with them! it is about the journey and the fact that we all love something enough to create and build together about that thing.

spending 30 seconds to kill a tree and get an AI to push out some soulless empty piece of “content” is antithetical to the entire point of being engaged with fandom, and if you’ve taken to doing this you should really reconsider if you belong in these spaces with the rest of us.

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pride month!!!

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i let the furby skins soak in fabric softener after i washed them and my sis found them and sent me:

and i have never laughed so hard x’D

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So a few months ago there was the discourse about would you rather meet a man or a bear in the woods. I didn't want to touch it while the discourse was hot and everyone dug in hard because those are not good conditions for nuance, but I waited until today, June 1st, for a specific reason.

I'm not going to take a position in the bear vs man debate because I don't think it matters. What is really being asked here is how afraid are you of men? Specifically, unexpected men who are, perhaps, strange.

People have a lot of very real fear of men that comes from a lot of very real places. Back when I was first transitioning in 2015 and 2016, I decided to start presenting as a woman in public even though I did not pass in the slightest.

I live in a red state. I knew other trans women who had been attacked by men, raped by men. I knew I was taking a risk by putting myself out there. I was the only visibly trans person in the area of campus I frequented, and people made sure I never forgot that. Most were harmless enough and the worst I got from them was curious stares. Others were more aggressive, even the occasional threat. I had to avoid public bathrooms, of course, and always be aware of my surroundings.

I know how frightening it is to be alone at night while a pair of men are following behind you and not knowing if they are just going in the same direction or if they want to start something - made all the worse for the constant low level threat I had been living under for over a year by just being visibly trans in a place where many are openly hostile to queer people. You have to remember, this was at the height of the first wave of bathroom law discussions, a lot of people were very angry about trans women in particular. My daily life was terrifying at times. I was never the subject of direct violence, but I knew trans women who had been.

I want you to keep all that in mind.

So man or bear is really the question "how afraid of men are you?", and the question that logically follows is "What if there was a strange man at night in a deserted parking lot?" or "What if you were alone in an elevator with a man?" or "What if you met a strange man in the woman's bathroom?"

My state recently passed an anti trans bathroom bill. The rhetoric they used was about protecting women and children from "strange men", aka trans women.

Conservatives hijack fear for their bigoted agenda.

When I first started presenting as a woman the campus apartment complex was designed for young families. The buildings were in a large square with playgrounds in the center, and there were often children playing. I quickly noticed that when I took my daughter out to play, often several children would immediately stop what they were doing and run back inside. It didn't take me long to confirm that the parents were so afraid of "the strange man who wears skirts" that their children were under strict instructions to literally run away as soon as they saw me.

"How afraid are you of a strange man being near your children?"

I mentioned above that I had to avoid public bathrooms. This was not because of men. It was because of women who were so afraid of random men that they might get violent or call someone like the police to be violent for them if I ever accidentally presented myself in a way that could be interpreted as threatening, when my mere presence could be seen as a threat. If I was in the library studying and I realized that it was just me and one other woman I would get up and leave because she might decide that stranger danger was happening.

Your fear is real. Your fear might even come from lived experiences. None of that prevents the fact that your fear can be violent. Women's fear of men is one of the driving forces of transmisogyny because it is so easy to hijack. And it isn't just trans women. Other trans people experience this, and other queer people too. Racial minorities, homeless people, neurodivergent people, disabled people.

When you uncritically engage with questions like man or bear, when you uncritically validate a culture of reactive fear, you are paving the way for conservatives and bigots to push their agenda. And that is why I waited until pride month. You cannot engage and contribute to the culture of reactive fear without contributing to queerphobia of all varieties. The sensationalist culture of reactive fear is a serious queer issue, and everyone just forgot that for a week as they argued over man or bear. I'm not saying that "man" is the right answer. I am saying that uncritically engaging with such obvious click bait trading on reactive fear is a problem. Everyone fucked up.

It is not a moral failing to experience fear, but it is a moral responsibility to keep a handle on that fear and know how it might harm others.

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The most skinny white person will post themselves in a crop top and be like "omg I'm self conches about my tummy so it took me a lot to post this please be nice" and everyone will clamor to call them cute and talk about how they look so good and they're so hot and give them genuine compliments about their body and tons of attention

And I just wanna know where that same level of hype and affection and love and support is for the people who have fat tummies and rolls and stretch marks and even more so for the poc

Why is it that tummy Tuesday and every other event always turns into skinny white person twink day eventually? Why is that?

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Your yearly reminder that polyamorous people are queer in every sense that matters.

Unsupported by government, unable to marry the people we love. Risking consequences if we come out within our family, if we come out at our work, in custody arguments against a non-polyamorous person because we are considered a danger or bad influence on children. A challenge to heteronormative conceptions of what love and relationships are meant to be.

Most polyamorous people are queer to start with, because once you start questioning heteronormativity, you start asking other questions about what a sexual or romantic or committed relationship should be. But that doesn't mean that polyamory isn't inherently queer in and of itself.

Please don't forget us in your queer positivity posts. Please don't forget us when you think about what queerness encompasses.

I've seen countless people, many who are fellow queers, talk shit about poly relationships because "they never last", as if most relationships last? As if most people don't have several exes? Meanwhile I'm sitting here in my stable triad polycule that.... in a couple years I will have been in this polycule for as long as I was outside of it (you know, when I was a child). It's an open polycule too, we've all had relationships outside of the triad and we're all still good and happy with each other. My triad has outlasted my heterosexual parents' marriage by many many years.

Stop being weird about poly people. We're exactly as queer as the rest of queer people, and we need you to recognize that.

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Cleto Capri - Alla finestra (1895)

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"Pride is not a party"

Yes the fuck it is, stop being a baby

Yes pride is a riot and a fight and yadda yadda yadda but you are not revolutionary for sucking the joy out of queerness. Sometimes, pride is a party. It is a celebration of the fact that we are here, we're queer, and we're not going anywhere. And that is just as important as throwing bricks and fighting cops, actually.

If your activism doesn't allow you to enjoy the fruits of your labors you will burn out babe. Go suck some dick. Hit on that lesbian. Get the faggy haircut!!! Dance, for the love of god.

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I was a woman with stubble and a receding hairline, alternating back and forth between different terrible haircuts before I got laser and bangs and became the woman you see before you today. And when I talk to some of these girls now who get hrt and laser IMMEDIATELY after coming out, it's got me having mixed feelings. On the one hand, I'm happy for them, it's really a testament to how much we've fought to get access to medical transition. on the other hand, they all ask me where I get my confidence from and literally it's because I used to look like a crossdressing faggot before I looked like a woman, and people still gendered me correctly about 50% of the time back then and it made me realize that nobody fucking notices little bumps in your clothes or the spot you missed shaving. An actress who forgets a line can still deliver a memorable performance.

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i must take painkillers. painkillers are the pain killer