not dead, just sleepy

okay now that thats out of the way ive always wondered why i could never really relate to the sentiment of wishing you grew up as your actual gender. its one that i think i totally understand but it never like. gripped me? it was never something id ever thought about myself and felt bad about. it felt weird to have this spot where grief should be and then it just wasn't there.

i think i've realized lately that im not sure my childhood would have really been any different if i had grown up a girl. like, i was a weird little kid raised in the mountains away from most people my age aside from, like, school, and all my friends who i did hang with were weird little kids as well. i had a lot of female and male friends growing up and i wasn't very good at being a boy but by god i wouldn't have been good at being a girl either. the role of boy was one that i performed as best i think i could have while still being me, and i think that would have also been about as good as it could have been if i was a girl, too. like, growing up as a strange autistic kid isolated from a lot of the populace with parents that are chill with a lot of stuff just makes you a bit unorthodox. i didn't like a lot of the things you were expected to be as a boy, but i also wasn't attracted to a lot of the things you were expected to be as a girl, either.

i think when youre a kid is partially when you're gendered the most as, like, this person that isn't allowed to be a fully autonomous being. if you're perceived as a boy, you're raised as one, and vice versa. and society has more control over you than ever, so there's this sort of crushing expectation regardless of gender, just angled differently. you don't have the freedom to define what being a boy or a girl means, you're sort of sequestered off to these little zones with all the other boys or girls because its easier and schools and families are managing a lot, see, and its really just better if you get slotted into this neat little societal category. i got a lot of "boy" gifts as a kid from well-meaning grandparents that just didn't actually know me, and I don't think that would have changed if i'd been gendered as a girl as a kid. I got a bunch of RC cars and transformers and monster truck toys, but i had about as much interest in those as i do, say, barbies or practice makeup kits or polly pockets. i think as an autistic kid who wore sweatpants every day with a bizarre obsession with like, romhacks of mario world and newspaper comics and plankton, i wasn't easy to fit into a neat little box and i think the neat little box that a "girl" was defined as in that time and place wouldn't have been good for me either. i still would have gotten those gifts that were for the Boy instead of Mason, but its the Girl this time who receives it. really a "different packaging, same gift" sort of mindset in a funny way.

i think i like being a woman now because it's something i can choose and define for myself. if i was a girl, like, a teenage girl, i would have had to deal with teenage girl bullshit and teenage girl expectations and ideas and all of that seems pretty miserable. i was a teenage boy and despite having what i would call a pretty Nice Time Growing Up Compared To Most, i'd still never go back. My childhood was, by all accounts, really nice! my parents rock and are really supportive, i got to be in nature all the time, i thankfully had a pretty nice social life once i found my spaces, but i'd still never ever go back to being a minor. being a kid and a teenager just kinda fucking sucks sometimes, and the autonomy and self-discovery that came with adulthood really made growing up less scary. it made my transition better because i got to choose what i liked and didnt like about my previous "maleness" and bring that forward into my transition and not pick up the parts of being a woman that i didn't like.

anyway, this is all just rambling. theres a lot of common experiences that people discuss that i don't really fit into, even excluding trans-specific experiences, and that's always made me feel a bit like an outsider in some ways. as i've grown up its been nice to understand that there really is no clean template to adhere to to be a person. commonalities will be commonalities, but im not worse or less human for being an outlier. i hope some rambling in a text post can help soothe those worries for some other folks too.

also, not saying that yearning for a childhood as your correct gender is bad, btw, wanna make that clear! its an extremely understandable yearning and that grief is real as anything, this post was specifically about me feeling weird that i didn't have that grief and why.

are you defending (in this instance) Irish Catholics as a proxy to give yourself grace, to lump yourself in with "the good ones?"

what you're actually doing is absolving yourself of action and self-reflection. that discomfort you feel about white people perpetrating racism is asking you to do something to bring your actions into alignment with your values. instead, you're discarding this feeling by doing some feel-good mental gymnastics to ensure that there is a narrative that gives you an escape hatch, an assurance that there are good white people in the world (ones with whom you identify).

instead, let your discomfort guide you to do something real because if you're not actively standing up against fascism and its children, you're laying down to get stepped on. here are some real things to do:

donate to support the people who have been attacked, displaced and traumatized in racist attacks in Belfast:

don't have money to spare? find local organizers, join them, triage immediate needs in your community, then play the long game to move the Overton Window towards inclusive values. i do not want to hear any wailing about how nothing you do matters, no one will do anything, etcetera, etcetera; these are more mental gymnastics that allow you to give yourself permission to to do nothing

don't have time, money, or energy to spare? go to your local library and pick up a book to educate yourself and build empathy:

no access to a library? do the internal work and pick apart your own internal biases about race (i'll give a starter question for reflection: why did you feel compelled to respond to a post about violence against Black people and immigrant communities by centering white people?)

[X]

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

We Are Here pt 1/?

Clothing company Patagonia is currently sueing drag queen Pattie Gonia for "irreparable” harm to their brand.

To be clear; Pattie named herself after the region in South America.

So Pattie is asking people to politely ask Patagonia to drop the lawsuit.

I'm extending the invitation to all of you, because sueing a drag queen for 'infringement' in the current political cultural landscape is vile. Especially a drag queen who has raised millions of dollars for non-profits, uses her platform to raise awareness for climate activism, and fully aligns with Patagonia's apparent climate-conscious mission statement.

They're claiming they're sueing for $1. They're actually asking her to stop using her name, and pay over $1 million in legal fees. They're straight up harassing her.

In contrast, drag queen Jan Sport has a Jansport bag line. It's that easy to just... work with a queen.

Anyway. Be respectful(ish), but feel free to be annoying on Patagnoia's socials, asking them to 'DROP THE LAWSUIT'

This is being discussed heavily on Bluesky, such as here.

I’m a law student specializing in Intellectual Property, which includes Copyright and Trademark. I’ve studied these subjects and the law is clear that everything y’all said about Patagonia “losing the trademark” if they don’t sue Ms. Pattie is absolute bullshit.

Trademarks are only lost if they are abandoned by the user or if the product made by the company becomes so ubiquitous, everyday, and common that people start calling all types of that product by the trademark name. This is called genericide, because the trademark has become so generic, it is no longer an indicator of one singular source. Think Band-Aid or Thermos; we use those terms to refer to the generic products they’re associated with. We call pretty much all sticky bandages Band-Aids and all containers used to keep things warm in Thermoses.

What Patagonia is doing is actually closer to suing for trademark infringement based on tarnishment, which means the infringer is using the trademark name in a way that makes the company look bad or associates the company with things like drugs or pornography. Queen Pattie Gonia is someone who raises awareness for climate and environmental activism. Nothing about Miss Gonia’s use of the name tarnishes Patagonia’s brand.

The only possible argument the company has is that Miss Gonia’s queer identity could be seen as not “adult-friendly” but that very quickly slides into homophobic and moralistic territory that will absolutely be shot down by the court based on First Amendment rights. People are allowed to use “not safe for work names,” based on caselaw that states that “labels that are disparaging or morally offensive” are a violation of free speech because it’s people’s choice to say and use those names. For example, an all-Asian band applied for the trademark name “The Chinks” because they were taking the racially disparaging name and reclaiming it. The Trademark Office attempted to refuse to grant the band’s trademark, and when the band sued, the Supreme Court sided with the band.

That got off on a little bit of a tangent, but the long and short of it is this: Patagonia has absolutely no basis for a trademark name. Any IP lawyer would say the same. The reason Patagonia is getting away with a frivolous suit like this is because they know their target is a member of a vulnerable minority. Miss Gonia is 100% correct that they are trying to bully her because they know she doesn’t have the money to withstand a years-long expensive lawsuit.

It’s because of idiotic bootlickers who kiss companies’ asses like this that big corporations can get away with hurting independent creators. Patagonia does not have any chance at winning, but they know that just by filing and announcing their lawsuit against Miss Gonia, they are putting pressure on her to give up. If this lawsuit goes on, even if it doesn’t make it to court and just goes to a judge for a quick summary judgment, Miss Gonia would still have to pay for a lawyer to defend her and lawyers cost more money than the average person has. Miss Gonia would win, but because Patagonia set the damages for $1, even if she did win, she’d still end up in debt because in America, the typical rule is that each party pays for the cost of their own attorney’s fees. The only time the opposing side would pay your lawyer’s fees is if you have a contract with them that says so, and that’s usually only used in contracts between businesses or high profile individuals.

That being said, reading Patagonia's actual complaint... they wanted her to not use the words "Pattie Gonia" on any products, regardless of font or logo? Seriously? & it seems the logo shown above was never a product she was selling but rather fan art they wore on social media. He is running a clothing brand, yes, but the clothing he's selling is not trying to look like Patagonia clothes or imitate its logo, & the brand seems fixated on the fact that Pattie wears fan merch of the logo or jokes about Patagonia clothes in a Ted Talk.

Which, sure, I get the claim that people might think they are formally related (their evidence for that is a few Tiktok comments). But, as I (a laywoman) understand it, their claim is based around Pattie selling clothes that infringes on their trademark since they are a clothing brand specifically, yet his merch doesn't imitate Patagonia's to my eyes, and their most compelling evidence is Pattie saying or wearing things that relates to their brand, not the things they are actually selling. Again, the logo shown above was seemingly never being sold by Pattie, it was just something someone made him that they wore in public. If she did sell that logo, why didn't they put that in the complaint? & again the ask of her not using the name Pattie Gonia on merch at all, no matter how it is presented, just seems ridiculous to me? Its a pun based off a fucking geographic range, man.

Regardless, whether Patagonia is legally in the right in the lawsuit, and whether we should give a fuck about the legal rights of a multinational corporation, are two different questions. We will see how this plays out in the legal field, but personally I think even if it comes out in Patagonia's favor, its fucking stupid.

I am also annoyed seeing people in the notes defending Patagonia as this poor innocent company, "owned by its employees," which does so much good work and is being unfairly maligned! & the claim that it is employee-owned surprised me, so I wanted to look it up, and oh boy did I find some interesting information on Patagonia Inc.'s business practices re: human trafficking and taxes!

UK legislation: Online Safety Act 2023

Brazil legislation: Digital Statute For Children And Adolescents

Apple App Store Age Verification

These are not tumblr specific policies. Tumblr is implementing age verification in response to legislative moves that were made months ago.

Tumblr is a failing social media site that has escaped death multiple times already; they do not have the social cachet to defy state regulatory agencies. We know they won't say no to Apple, either--the porn ban on tumblr was in response to Apple's crackdown on explicit content.

If you did not know this was happening, you were behind the curve. That is fine. You're caught up now. The next step is to link up with people in your country who are working to preserve privacy, to roll back these laws where they exist, and to prevent their passage where they do not. In the US the organization you want is Stop KOSA--in the EU you can start with Fight Chat Control.

This one hurt, her work had such a profound effect on my life, thoughts, and politics.

May her memory be a blessing

Corksniffing losers have to sully an awesome new space photo just to erroneously claim film is inherently superior.

I think this version is the original color processed version, which is still not as saturated or contrasty.

That's still an amazing result just from darkroom processing, but the deep blue version in the tweet definitely needed some help from Photoshop. And, personally, I think they overdid it.

The new photo was actually taken in darkness. It is a moonlit photo taken at extremely high gain (ISO 52,000). They did a long exposure to make it appear as if it were as bright as day. But without significant editing, that is going to make the colors less saturated and reduce the contrast.

The same thing would happen with film.

This is another version they did with a more accurate-to-eyeballs exposure.

Film is great.

Digital is great.

But it was not a great medium for space.

Most astronauts are fighter pilots. And there are only a few who are genuine photographers. You can train a fighter pilot to competently use a camera, but becoming a good photographer during the days of film usually took years of practice.

During the Apollo days they would send them up there with the best camera available. Usually a 70mm Hasselblad medium format. But the astronauts proved that the only way to get amazing photos without being a photographer was mostly down to luck.

We see the best photos they took, but those only amount to a handful. And as you saw above, NASA often had to do a lot of darkroom magic to make them aesthetically pleasing.

If you look at the Apollo archives, you can find hundreds of photos like this.

I'm fond of this one.

There was no instant feedback. They didn't have any instincts for settings or focus or composition. Most of the time they were just collecting visual data.

But every once in a while the stars aligned and they took absolute bangers.

That flag one is amazingly composed. But it took them a few tries.

Digital cameras give you a better baseline of quality. They can focus for you. They can meter for you. And they have high ISO gain that film could never touch.

They are... fighter pilot friendly.

With digital, they can look at the back screen and see if they bungled the exposure.

If they take a photo like this...

They get instant feedback and can be like, "Houston, where is exposure compensation?"

There is an undeniable ineffable quality that film sometimes delivers. But the medium is far less important than the skill of the person taking the photo.

Don Pettit is my favorite astronaut photographer. A true artist.

He really makes you forget about whether film is better than digital. He makes one remember that the person taking the photo is the paramount variable.

There is a great interview from Smarter Every Day where Don talks about how he captures amazing photos from space.

Do exactly what you're paid for and nothing more

Absolutely refuse to be available to contact when you're off the clock

Never prioritize work over your own health, wellbeing, or family because that would be insane, it's just a job.

Have a little glass of wine

Take as long as you feel like for lunch

Deeply understand that work doesn't matter

Old Millennial American speaking here. I need you to adopt this mentality as early as possible and hold to it. The older you get, the harder it is to begin this practice and claw back the extremely unhealthy effects of a workaholic lifestyle. I am speaking from 20 years of experience.

This does not mean having a shitty attitude at work, or not doing your job, or relying on co-workers to carry your water.

This means you do what it says above. It also means not making work and productively your entire personality; not tying your productivity to your value; and not becoming so emotionally enmeshed in your work and workplace so that you are living and dying by what happens there.

Little girl teaching her cats how to draw a flower 

*baby voice* “… and if you have any questions, just ask me! And now… yeah. And now you draw the roots. You draw them all twisted up! Got it? A flower? Now draw it. Did you get it, Luis Roberto? Did you get it, Jurandir? Look. Did you get it? That’s how you draw a flower.”