Just Trying To Live

Books

Fat and Queer: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Bodies and Lives edited by Bruce Owens Grimm, Miguel M. Morales, and Tiff Joshua TJ Ferentini

What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Fat by Aubrey Gordon

Fat Gay Men: Girth, Mirth, and the Politics of Stigma by Jason Whitesel

The Other F Word: A Celebration of the Fat & Fierce by Angie Manfredi

Nothing Is Okay Poems by Rachel Wiley

Catrachos by Roy G. Guzmán

Wow, No Thank You. Essays by Samantha Irby

Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton

Speaking Wiri Wiri by Dan Vera

Fiction

I’ll Be The One by Lyla Lee

Putting Makeup On The Fat Boy by Bil Wright

Soft On Soft by Em Ali

Faith: Taking Flight by Julie Murphy

If It Makes You Happy by Claire Kann

Here The Whole Time by Vitor Martins

Undead Girl Gang by Lily Anderson

Untouchable by Talia Hibbert

A Harvest Of Ripe Figs by Shira Glassman

Private Eye (The Spies Who Loved Her) by Katrina Jackson

Three romance/erotica novellas by Xan West:

Nine Of Swords, Reversed, Eight Kinky Nights: An F/f Chanukah Romance, Their Troublesome Crush

Xan’s work centers kinky, trans and non-binary, fat, disabled, queer trauma survivors. It leans more towards centering Jewish characters, ace and aro spec characters, autistic characters, and polyamorous networks.

Featured list from LGBTQ reads: Sapphic Plus-Size Protagonists!

The Summer of Jordi Perez by Amy Spalding

Leah on the Offbeat by Becky Albertalli

Bearly a Lady by Cassandra Khaw

The Seafarer’s Kiss by Julia Ember

Knit One, Girl Two by Shira Glassman

Final Draft by Riley Redgate

Articles

Being Queer When You're Fat, Femme and Gaysian by Mark Mariano

Black, Fat Queer Bodies: Receiving Pleasure And Demanding Respect by Darian

Cool People I Know: Fat Folks in Kink on Fashion, Femme, and Community by Shaan Lashun

CLAIMING MY NON-BINARY IDENTITY by Madeleine

How I Navigate Masculinity as a Fat Queer Woman by Hannah Schneider

Proudly Black, Fat, Queer and Making a Home for Myself in Cosplay by Briana Lawrence

Interview: Out Of The Closet With ‘Plus Size Trans Guy’, Shane Stinson by DapperQ

What it’s like being Fat, Queer, and Asexual by Michael Paramo

How Being Plus Size Affects Presenting As Non-Binary by Gina Tonic

I Am The Plus-size Transfemme You Stared At For Too Long. by Rori Porter

Mixed-Race, Non-Binary, Queer Fat Femme: How I Fail and Succeed in Finding Liberation by Cicely Blain

I’m Fat and Gay. Here’s What I’ve Learned. by Sean Bennett

What It’s Like to Be A Fat Black Queer Femme— With Cancer by Taylor Crumpt

A Brief History Of The Gay Bears And Big Boys Scene by Gay Star News

The Fat, Black, Femme, Queer Chronicles by Tina Colleen

Dissertations

"Fat is a Queer Issue, Too": Complicating Queerness and Body Size in Women's Sexual Orientation and Identity by Hannah R. Long

More Fats, More Femmes, And No Whites: A Critical Examination Of Fatphobia, Femmephobia And Racism On Grindr by Matthew Conte

Fat Activism: A Queer Autoethnography by Charlotte Cooper

Spatial Awarishness: Queer Women And The Politics Of Fat Embodiment by Adrienne C. Hill

Fat Mutha: Hip Hop’s Queer Corpulent Poetics by Mecca Jamilah Sullivan

Other

A Queer and Trans Fat Activist Timeline by Charlotte Cooper

hey guys- i’m very sad to share the news that i am no longer a part of drawfee going forward. you’ll keep seeing me around as i move on to new things! but please understand the privacy and difficulty around the matter.

Free Harvard courses. Free Courses from Stanford. Free Courses from MIT. Free courses from Yale. Free courses from Princeton.

Free courses on Coursera.

Free Courses on EDx Free Courses on Alison

For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.

And I also wanted to mention that humanitarian organisations have free courses too, like the Red Cross on international humanitarian law.

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.

she slaps augustine across the mouth and he spits out his teeth, despite the fact that he is a ten thousand year old lyctor who should have had ironclad shielding. out of all the necros that swore themselves to god, she was one of the remaining ones, one of the last lyctors to survive the resurrection beasts.

she vaporized god. she vaporized god. she unwound the most powerful necromancer she knew on the fly and reduced him to his base components because she just. had the knowledge in her brain. mercymorn turned a man running on the souls of ten billion into fine red mist on a fucking impulse.

she spends all of htn trying to kill harrow out of some bizarre attempt to live up to her name. she’s kind about it, even. she draws weird little squiggles that look like everything but monsters. she fantasizes about putting her idiot boss in acid jail. she worries about her dress making her look like a melon even though she literally seduces god and also a guy who hates her.

and nobody really likes her. g1deon is g1deon, by which i mean he is being tortured and weird about everything on account of being two people and thus has little to no opinion on what she does. augustine fucking hates her unless they’re working together to honey trap god (no i will not stop mentioning this) and it wasn’t even her fault that alfred died, not really. ianthe follows augustine around like an evil little duckling - does she even have strong opinions on mercy except that it’s gross she’s having a three way with jod and augustine? she was supposed to mentor harrow, but she got the defective one - the one that didn’t even make to lyctorhood properly (does she wish she could’ve done what harrow did? sealed cristabel away forever, even if she had to butcher herself to do it?). and jod. jod loves her, of course, but he’s just so. so. he doesn’t fucking listen is the thing. he deflects and he jokes and he doesn’t say “mercy, i didn’t meant to, mercy, i’ll fix it, mercy, please, forgive me.” he says everything but that.

"Jeremy, I'd really like my orbital sander back ^_^"

"... didn't know it was yours..."

(Legit excited, no sarcasm) "Someone ELSE has the original Box 20-Volt Brushless Cordless Detail Sander with Dust Management?!?!?!?!"

"...no..."

Teacher walking up like "Miss Woods, is that a nail file"

(Elle, blasting compressed air to get rid of the nail file sand)

"Actually, its an emery board. But yes! :D It's a finer grit than what we have, and I've always found these easier to handle"

"...Ok, fair enough."

Elle making friends with the 6 year old daughter of one of her classmates. (Child care ain't cheap, I get it. Bring your kid to class)

Elle learning how to drive a forklift/motorcycle/semi-truck

Elle giving an impromptu lecture in the break room about what gifts to give their wives/girlfriends/mothers

Fucking laser cut "bless this mess" sign on her locker (I lied. It would totally be live, laugh, laser)

Elle's car breaks down and 20+ dudes coming out to show her how to fix it. (And realizing her mechanic is ripping her off)

Every single guy in the building filled with instant despair when she gets with one of the butch lesbians in the program.