Reading

Current Mood: exhausted

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Many-Selved Family Portraiture

Okay. It's still November for 45 more minutes, so I'm still technically within deadline for this! (Our desktop broke. Those posts you've seen the past week were made on a broken old smartphone. Today I got a new desktop and frantically tried to finally get up the Patreon writing I've owed y'all all month.)

Many-Selved Family Portraiture has been uploaded to archive.org, in textual transcript form (of what I originally hoped to make, and then due to technical lack of savvy had to cut down), plus the 78 slides. The files are big!

I swear I will upload them to hm.com later. I am so tired.

Look! I remembered to post before December started this year!

Hello, friends! It's about to be December again, and you know what that means: the fact I am posting this actually before December 1 means

karzilla reminded me about the existence of linear time again. Wait, no -- well, yes, but also -- okay, look, let me back up and start again: it's almost December, and that means it's time for our annual December holiday points bonus.

The standard explanation: For the entire month of December, all orders made in the Shop of points and paid time, either for you or as a gift for a friend, will have 10% of your completed cart total sent to you in points when you finish the transaction. For instance, if you buy an order of 12 months of paid time for $35 (350 points), you'll get 35 points when the order is complete, to use on a future purchase.

( The fine print and much more behind this cut! )

Thank you, in short, for being the best possible users any social media site could possibly ever hope for. I'm probably in danger of crossing the Sappiness Line if I haven't already, but you all make everything worth it.

On behalf of Mark, Jen, Robby, and our team of awesome volunteers, and to each and every one of you, whether you've been with us on this wild ride since the beginning or just signed up last week, I'm wishing you all a very happy set of end-of-year holidays, whichever ones you celebrate, and hoping for all of you that your 2026 is full of kindness, determination, empathy, and a hell of a lot more luck than we've all had lately. Let's go.

Current Mood: excited

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Thunder Shaman, by Ana Mariella Bacigalupo

We were trawling the used section of a local bookstore, as we do, when we found a 2016 anthropology book from a uni press about a machi (shaman) of the Machupe in Chile named Francisca Kolipi. The back cover mentions “how she remade history through multitemporal dreams, visions, and spirit possession” and our ears pricked. Multi? Multi? (Or rather, cultural forms of personhood/selfhood that have nothing to do with mainstream America’s presumption of singlethood as the default norm, but that’s a mouthful?) so we flipped through, and how convenient, this was on page 4:

This multitemporality is expressed through machi’s unique ability to share multiple relational and individual personhoods with beings from different worlds and times and through machi’s inherent ambiguity, which allows them to cross boundaries. Like many indigenous people (Oakdale and Course 2014; Strathern 1992), Mapuche persons are multiple. They expand their personhood by incorporating aspects of others in a variety of contexts. At the same time they condense those aspects into a concrete, singular person with a fixed destiny. Machi complicate this process because they are never singular persons. Minimally, those who are machi are double persons: humans permanently inhabited by a machi spirit who preordains them as shamans and shape their everyday lives and actions. By virtue of their shamanic destiny, machi are simultaneously collective ancestral persons and historical individuals whose personhood is embodies in material objects and living entities (Bacigulupo 2010, 2013, 2014). Machi also share this personhood with spirits, animals, and deities in diverse ways during both ordinary and altered states of consciousness. In trance, machi can become multiple beings at once—simultaneously shaman and spirit, human and divine.”

How refreshingly straightforward! For once, I don’t have to wade through a lot of “the individual perceives herself to be” or “she thinks she is,” it’s just a blunt: they are double/collective persons. Sweet!

I bought it for reference. Business expense, baby!

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When bad analogies are outlawed, only outlaws will have bad analogies

“Jews will not replace us” assumes continuity of self between parents and children, such that your children aren’t a replacement of you. This is false. Your children aren’t you, some Jewish person’s children aren’t you, and the only way for you not to be replaced is to live forever.

“Land back” assumes continuity of self between parents and children . . .

(no subject)

Every once in a while, I remember Infra and go “It sounds like a fun game. It can’t be as shit as I remember” and then redownload it.

I have nothing new to play without spending money, so it’s Infra again. Pray for me.

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(no subject)

[07] X-Men
[01] Spider-Man

ice ice baby....

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feo is easily annoyed

(no subject)

In another room, my parents are talking about all the Nextdoor posts from people whose cats have been missing for weeks or months. My mother wonders how these people convince themselves the cats haven’t been eaten by coyotes yet.

Keep your fucking cats indoors.

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Vagueblogging

Let’s say you have a view of how the world is, should be, can be acted upon, etc. And it’s possible for you personally to be happy and satisfied under that worldview. It will lead to you hurting other people, but you won’t think of it as hurting them, so that won’t bother you.

Let’s say you have a view of the world where you recognize when people are hurt. It’s impossible to completely fix the world and get rid of every hurt, but you can at least minimize hurting people yourself. However, seeing all that pain makes you unhappy.

I resent people whose life advice boils down to “have the former worldview and not the latter.”

I'm playing Old Skies

If your clients pay you to change the timeline, but other timeline changes can kill your previous clients before they came to you, does that retroactively remove their money from your bank account?

Current Mood: content

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Photographic Evidence Forthcoming

Sneak: there is a little old lady cat on my lap. Who knew such a little cat could make such big purrs? Where do they come from? Where does she fit them all? It is a cosmic mystery that can only be pondered, never solved!

Current Mood: accomplished

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Happy Fucksgiven!

Mori: today, we helped a lady clean out her kitchen, and because it was full of great things, we trucked two big backpacks and five big bags of food, staples, and seasonings across town to the community fridge. It was HEAVY! Good thing Kitchen Lady donated a cart to the cause.

There were a bunch of other people at the community fridge, including a church lady offloading turkey dinners and pumpkin pie, and a lot of our stuff got claimed even as we were unloading it. (One Spanish-speaking family wanted ALLLLL the chocolate we had: chips, syrup, and two kinds of cocoa. Don’t know what they’re planning but by god it’ll be fuckin delicious!) The church food containers were neither dated nor labeled, and we had Sharpies on us so we marked all of them for reference. Feeling that we had damn well earned it, we swiped a pie slice and ate it with our hands like pizza, grabbed a pumpkin and some soup, and carted home the bags, backpacks, and new cart.

Biff is so fucking happy. We have fed so many people this month! And a merry fucksgiven to all!

EDIT from Biff (transcribed): I like doing this. I want to keep doing it.

(no subject)

Playing Duet Night Abyss, and presumably freemium games in general, requires a sort of bloody-minded self-satisfaction, a feeling of “haha, you didn’t get me to spend money today despite all your efforts!”

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Book list for Rhincodons

Everyone ignore this; this is a book list for Rhincodons whose email keeps bouncing me.

( Read more... )

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(no subject)

Can we collectively admit “alien decides whether humans should all be killed for being evil” is just misdirected Christian guilt? Or do we have to keep pretending it’s a serious question whether we “deserve” not to be genocided?

Current Mood: happy

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geekdom:tech

Happy (early) Birthday, BSOD!

We own a laptop that is turning 20 years old in January. Named BSOD (for how it treated our father when he was first setting it up), it has proved the doughtiest, most indomitable workhorse ever... kinda like how you name a kid Chastity and they decide to PROVE YOU WRONG.

For nine solid years, BSOD was basically our only computer*. Since 2015, it's been our pinch-hitter during travel, homelessness, and desktop breakdown, and it has now outlived two desktops. Its keyboard and battery have been replaced, RAM has been added, but it hasn't yet needed its little watch battery replaced, which after twenty years is astonishing. It just keeps going! Is there nothing it can't do? (No!)**

Seeing as how hard BSOD has worked for us over the years, it only seemed fair to get it a birthday present! Especially since it keeps getting called out of retirement. Naturally, it outlived the significantly younger drawing tablet it had, so we got an Ebay replacement, downloaded the oldest drivers Wacom still had on its site, and lo and behold, the secondhand tablet worked. Happy birthday, BSOD!

( computer birthday party and footnotes behind cut )

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feo is easily annoyed

I’m playing Type-NOISE: Shonen Shojo

Oh, you did not just Danganronpa 3 the female protagonist for a boy with the personality of rice pudding.

Thoughts on the party members in Demonschool

Fay? Fey? I forget: your standard balanced protagonist. Spam her ult when you can, and swap her elemental resistance skill for whatever you need most.

Nameko: she sets ‘em up, Fay knocks ‘em down. I prefer damage-dealers, but sometimes you need both her defense debuff and Knute/Pangxie’s attack buff against a super-durable enemy. And sometimes it’s worth having her stun an enemy you can’t kill yet. Give her Add Poison if you want her to directly remove foes.

( Read more... )

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lb makes:comics

Comic: How It Was, How It Is (December 2014-January 2015)

Rogan: This comic was the surprise winner of the fan poll this month! I originally made it for Kimball Anderson's Inaction Comics, an (out of print) collection all about NOT doing things. It was also printed in the original floppy version of All in the Family #1, but removed for the collected version, because it seemed a distraction from the main story. Warning for internalized ableism and crushing despair behind the cut, commentary in comments.

( Text-only transcript version. If you don't want/need this, click the cut under this one! )

( Two pages of comics behind this cut! )

Entry tags:

(no subject)

TERF: “Are we gonna pretend all the serial killers that pretended to be women to assault and kill women in public restrooms, or what?”

TERF: lists some serial killers who crossdressed.

None of them assaulted women in public restrooms.

I’m not mad about bigotry, I’m mad about poor argumentative technique.

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'An Act Regarding Free Expression' passed in the MA Senate!

(this is copied from my email; I'm writing my postcard right now, and I hope Masshole readers will too, because this is the stuff that I need if I want to keep selling my darn books)

Hi, local authors!

A project we've been dedicating a lot of our time to this fall at BCAF [Boston Comics Arts Foundation] is working with the Mass Freedom to Read coalition to strengthen the protections that the state of Massachusetts has for books (including comics and graphic novels) and protect them from book bans and challenges, while supporting teachers and librarians in their work.

I'm delighted to say that the law we've been supporting, 'An Act Regarding Free Expression,' came to a vote and passed in the MA Senate last week.

Yay! (And it only took three years!)

Now it's on to the House -- so this is a great time to email, call, or send a postcard to your local house reps to tell them to vote for 'An Act Regarding Free Expression' when it's on the docket.

Here's some info on writing a great postcard or email, from us and Mass Freedom to Read: https://www.massfreedomtoread.org/act

Thanks everyone!

Gina Gagliano
Boston Comic Arts Foundation

Here's what I wrote on my postcard:

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