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You KNOW classic SF used the limited displays of CRT television and the static of transmitted signals the way theaters use stage makeup and lighting to make inexpensive props look great fine— take advantage of the medium! But it's hard to imagine how it looked if you've only seen Blu-ray HD restorations.

You WILL be racist. You WILL do racist things. You have ALREADY done both. Learn and move on. There's no ideological purity you can hold on to, i promise. Proving you can take the criticism without making it a big deal and practice what you preach is better than any clean slate.

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.

^“At the bottom of the image is the segment of the flag cut for the St. Patrick’s Cathedral protest. Photograph by Mick Hicks”

O Human Star: my 2012-2020 webcomic about an inventor who wakes up in a robot body after being dead for 16 years and seeks out his former partner and the young android who shares a copy of his mind.

Meal: an aspiring chef moves to town, meets a cute girl, and tries to get hired at a restaurant that specializes in insect cuisine. Written with my friend Soleil Ho.

Across a Field of Starlight: two nonbinary teens from two very different spacefaring societies meet by chance and stay in touch even as a galaxy-spanning war threatens them both.

Adversary: A former women's self defense instructor stumbles into a messy relationship with a former student who has since transitioned. My covid-era feel-bad book. Adults only.

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

Anti-blackness in the indie scene is a serious issue and we should always call it out even if it seems like a "nothing-burger," but at the same time you should always uplift and support black indie creators regardless. Solely bringing them up when some popular indie creator gets called out for racism will only lead them to being forgotten when the controversy dims down and everyone moves on to something else.