When I was younger I was very right-wing. I mean…very right-wing. I won’t go into detail, because I’m very deeply ashamed of it, but whatever you’re imagining, it’s probably at least that bad. I’ve taken out a lot of pain on others; I’ve acted in ignorance and waved hate like a flag; I’ve said and did things that hurt a lot of people.

There are artefacts of my past selves online – some of which I’ve locked down and keep around to remind me of my past sins, some of which I’ve scrubbed out, some of which are out of my grasp. If I were ever to become famous, people could find shit on me that would turn your stomach.

But that’s not me anymore. I’ve learned so much in the last ten years. I’ve become more open to seeing things through others’ eyes, and reforged my anger to turn on those who harm others rather than on those who simply want to exist. I’ve learned patience and compassion. I’ve learned how to recognise my privileges and listen to others’ perspectives. I’ve learned to stand up for others, how to hear, how to help, how to correct myself. And I learned some startling shit about myself along the way – with all due irony, some of the things I used to lash out at others for are intrinsic parts of myself.

You wouldn’t know what I am now from what I was then. You wouldn’t know what I was then from what I am now.

It distresses me deeply to think of someone dredging up my dark, awful past and treating me as though that furiously hateful person is still me. It distresses me to see others dredging up the past for anyone who has made efforts to become a better person, out of some sick obsession with proving they’re “problematic.”

The obsession with finding shit in someone’s past and then claiming that a questionable or even sordid past negates all possibility of a good present needs to become extinct. Gold-star activism and purity culture are bullshit and we need to collectively reject the fuck out of them.

We really need to start asking where this purity bullshit came from. I’m not  Christian and was not raised Christian but there has been a lot evidence that much of gold star activism and purity culture originated in of evangelical youth movements and then infiltrated progressive left-wing and center-left politics when those youth left their churches but failed to leave behind the black-n-white puritanical “you’re going to hell if you stray one inch from the righteous path” style of thinking they were taught.

I distinctly remember some conversations I had in the late 00s and very early 2010s with long time social justice activists who were baffled and disturbed by the new crop of youth activists who were practicing something that was decidedly NOT social justice despite stealing that phrase from us.

In the decade and a half that has passed since then, all of this gold-star activism and purity culture has done exactly what I predicted back then: empowered the far-right while sowing division everywhere.

Your partner since you were young goes on a mission to save your dying planet and doesn’t return as expected. He is assumed lost in space, and everyday things get more dire on the surface. You miss him terribly. And then one day, an ALIEN SPACECRAFT shows up with not only the solution to your dying planet but also your partner.

And you’re probably thrilled but also thrown for a loop because what do you mean 1. Aliens are real 2. They breathe highly flammable gas and 3. Your partner made friends with it. And said alien looks like nothing you’ve ever heard, and has a sense you don’t have at all and is also apparently dying of nutritional loss? And your partner is like codependent as hell with it, and suddenly your entire life changes overnight. Also your partner is himself but also completely different in ways you don’t understand, in ways that are sometimes scary because all that time in space changes a person.

I don’t know how anyone would react to that, cus damn that’s overwhelming, but I think that’s an interesting dynamic to have with an alien. Your partner’s closet companion besides you is an alien. It feels like the alien knows your partner better than you do some days. The alien also helped save your entire planet.

The problem is that everyone has to work 8 hours, pretty much no exceptions, and with getting ready time + (unpaid) lunch + commute, “8 hours” is actually anywhere between 9 and 12, every single day, with more work to do when you get home because our society and culture was built around having one member of the household home full time and nothing has changed now that almost everyone works.

"I don't have a choice, I'm just following orders"

The study that found pesticides like Round Up acceptable for human consumption in the amounts they were sprayed on crops was overturned very quietly in December of 2025. This study was used to deny cancer patients funds for treatment and payments for hundreds of thousands of people negatively impacted by Round Up

Several of them are dead now so there’s no way to get them justice

20 years since the first broadcast of Life on Mars (9. January 2006), and the start of the greatest bromance/romance in the history of television (biased opinion).