the gold beneath the virtual rainbow

However, to be clear, I am NOT a pacifist and in the words of Nina Simone, I ain’t bout to be non-violent honey.

They’re killing trans women, particularly Black trans women, as they always have and will keep doing in increasingly horrific ways. No amount of protests will keep us safe. Cops definitely ain’t gonna keep us safe - over in Philly they beat and arrested 15 people at a pride event in the Gayborhood while the “official” city pride event was apparently costing $10 per person minimum.

They’re abducting racialized people off the streets and occupying entire US cities like DC and Memphis with the explicit goal of disappearing as many of us as they can, regardless of “citizenship”, visas, or anything else.

Black people are being actively lynched. Black CHILDREN in particular have been found lynched after being “missing”. I can literally go on Twitter or Facebook for less than a minute and discover a new lynching or murder of a trans woman.

We are especially being taken when we are alone, when others leave us alone, when others do nothing.

We have to be willing to protect ourselves and each other if and when needed. We need to get a lot more comfortable with ACTION not just words, with not turning away when we see something happening before we get caught up in it.

Will the person you saw and turned away from go missing?

Will they be dead next, or worse?

Even if you can’t stop it, can you get their name? Can you record it? Find their families?

It cant just be us fighting always, especially as things get worse. You have to start moving too.

this one has been passed around recently from the mayo clinic and that actually makes me so happy because how many of transfeminine people are aware of what their options even look like?

So this is the Panasonic PRONOTE PD CF-62, it's a Pentium 133mhz running Windows 95, released in August 1996. Panasonic did this sort of trick more than once, they did a similar thing with an under-keyboard CD-ROM drive in the PD CF-41, from 1995.

This one is so fancy because that's not just a self-loading under-keyboard laptop CD-ROM drive, it's a HYBRID PD/CD-ROM self-loading under-keyboard laptop drive! It has to be this complex because it takes PD discs (which are the size of caddies) and caddyless CD-ROMs!

So what's PD discs?

They're an optical format by Panasonic, the Phase-change Dual (or Phase-change Disc). They're from 1996, store as much as CD, but are rewritable... much like the later CD-RWs which used basically the same technology, just in a slightly different format. Unlike CD-RWs (which you had to burn (usually), they acted like a hard drive, fully rewritable at any point. That's why the disc is hard-sectored, which you can see through the shutter gap. Those vertical lines indicate where sectors start and end.

So yeah, this laptop has a complex drive that can take both types of discs, and the whole thing folds under the keyboard. Fucking wild.

But the root reason, of course, is that they did this because it's a cool design, and they wanted to do that. Why did they think this was cool, why did they want to do this?

Pervert reasons.