Music rules my mind

Shadow the Hedgehog: Interesting. It's as if you've been wearing limiters this whole time and you realizing you wanted to live as a woman was what broke the limiters.

Me: Yeah, it's a lot like that.

Shadow the Hedgehog: Hmmm... tell me about this "estrogen."

Caine and Gangle go outside and touch grass. I was thinkin too hard about their Parallels as self-destructive “failed” artists and this was the result.

Brad Bird once said that you can’t create the illusion of life if you haven’t actually lived one, and that’s a line I think about a lot around the Traumatizing Digital Circus. This comic was inspired by: the purpose of making your own art in a world where AI image generators can churn out endless content for you, the way 3D software makes it easy to create infinite spaces but hard to capture authentic hand-drawn human touches, the way all my college art teachers were skeptical of the students’ desire to make anime-inspired stylized 3D visuals right up until it became the new trend in the animation industry—- and how easy it is to get so lost in the technical aspects of art & the consequences of failure that you lose sight of what art is even supposed to be for.

So Oreos! Truly a 100+ year old institution (although we can argue about whether Hydrox came first/are better but that's not what this is about). Oreo was manufacturing using pretty modern equipment very early on right here in beautiful Manhattan in the old Nabisco factory that is now Chelsea Market. But an unfortunate issue with mass producing millions of very thin, very fragile crisp cookies is breakage. A lot of the wafers (the chocolate part) will crack or crumble before reaching the end of the production line. The machinery can be adjusted to reduce breakage but the nature of the wafer means breakage will never be zero. Sometimes the cookie gets to the sandwiching stage & filled with the creme before it cracks, but more often it breaks before then. That's why you have some bits with creme and some without.

So what does a cookie company do with all the broken pieces? The dough is already cooked at that point so it can't be reused to form more cookies. So Oreo comes up with a plan: develop recipes and alternative uses so they can sell the crushed cookies, too. This happens a lot in manufacturing! Leftover bits are repurposed for other products to reduce waste and cost. Probably the most famous example is animal feed; the husks and rinds and cast-offs from human food production often get processed into animal food.

Sadly this means most commercial Oreo dust is a pre-crushed situation. I grew up working in my family's restaurant and the Oreo pieces would arrive in sealed plastic bag inside a big box. We'd use them for pie crusts and dessert toppings. Being a sneaky lil shit, I'd sometimes dip a soup spoon into the Oreo dust and take one big, chocolatey bite as a snack. No need to crush them by hand.

Unfortunately, they find out after Flambae has rested that he has no memories. They argue about it for a while before Mecha Man takes Flambae to a doctor for superhumans. Doc confirms that Flambae doesn’t have his memories, though it seems more like a block than an erasure. They just have to jog his memory

Taking Flambae back to the burnt down mall does nothing, and that’s literally all Mecha Man knows to do. They don’t even have something that could identify Flambae since he obviously didn’t bring his phone and driver’s license with him while burning down public property

You fight for the rights of racialized trans women first and foremost, because they are the most marginalized out of all of us. That's the only way you get rights protected for white trans women, for non-binary people, for trans men, and yes even for cis women.

You cannot guarantee any of our rights if you try to deny the rights of racialized trans women. And I don't mean that as purely a moral statement, I mean you physically cannot do it. If you make allowances for one marginalized group to continue being oppressed, then you've left the door wide open for all of us to continue being oppressed. And the fascists will walk right through that door with ease every single time. Just look how they carved out exceptions to deny trans women bodily autonomy, which then led directly to abortion rights being overturned.

It is, isn't it? It's a lot of fun. Hey just out of interest, have you noticed any other sympt—er, any other things happening? Shadows growing longer in the corner of your vision, sonorous calls drawing you to the dark woods, irresistible urge to pupate?