Queer Without Gender

The Age of Mindfulness

Today I found a half-size water bottle. I bought it because my full-size water bottles (one green, one purple) are too heavy for me to carry in my satchel, because it was only a dollar fifty, and because it was green and purple. This bottle also just happened to have the coolest spin-up twist top, at which point I stood in front of the heater for a few moments just twisting the top open and…

Know Me for a Little: The Heroic Protagonist

I’ve been trying to articulate, for a friend, the problem I’m finding in the depiction of a protagonist who does not appear, some sixty thousand words in, to be on the path of personal change. This is a vague accusation to be levelling. I’d be heartbroken, though, if someone told me that, after sixty thousand words, my characters still read as the same people they were at the beginning of the…

Not Only the Label

Before I came back to writing and posting it here (for me a profoundly terrifying thing) I was considering whether or not I should just build a new website from scratch. I’ve got a lot more .org experience now, thanks to my work on the Twilight School website, and I would definitely have fun building my own self-hosted blog where the CMS allows me more control over certain elements and I’m not…

I dread customers who inquire about our Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. I’d sooner deal with ignorant customers who look at my body and decide that I don’t know anything because girls don’t game. I’d sooner tell the teenage boys on the computers to stop using “gay” as a slur for the five millionth time. I’d sooner scrub the toilet, wipe down the keyboards and sweep the floor, even after the day a…

All The Puzzle Pieces, Please

I have a roller bag/trolley. It’s a battered railway-issue bag I’ve had for a little over a year, and it goes almost everywhere I go. People comment on it as though it’s funny: they can’t imagine why I need to take it everywhere. I consider it an accessibility aid for anything that involves leaving the house. I have things I need to take everywhere with me. My wrist and thumb splints, because my…

The knock sounds just as Klirran places her brush and comb on the bed, careful not to touch the rough outer blanket, in a line beside her soap, washcloth and toothbrush. She scowls, glances at the washstand—the soda is right there and it’ll take an instant to grab it and finish the line—but the second knock is louder, followed immediately by a third. Impatience. Not Inmera, since the Cloisters…

A Dialogue in Good Faith

I haven’t said it here, yet – there are a great many things I’m yet to speak about here on the matter of finding my way back to myself – but I started freelance work this year designing event flyers and administrating the Twilight School website. The Twilight School, run by Bruno Lettieri (of Rotunda fame, one of the most amazing and generous people that ever lived) is the community outreach…

The Agency of Hardwiring

A friend sent me this article on the correlation between transgender identities and autism spectrum disorders. (Please read on before clicking.) I don’t ever want to say that being trans is an autistic thing – although it happens that all the trans people I know are also autistic, which is a bias most likely explained by the habit of like-minded people flocking together – but when I look at the…

A Philosophy of Natural Movement, Part 1

This is a long multi-part essay on the experience of being autistic, the process of gaining the label, and the nightmare (especially the last two years, especially especially the last nine months) it’s been being an undiagnosed autistic person being treated for depression, anxiety and chronic pain in the Australian healthcare system. So, of course, I’m going to start with my ongoing love affair…

Me in the car to the relatives: “The copy-writing part of this job is basically taking on-theme articles the client likes and rewriting them, but it's all the super obvious stuff everybody already knows.”

Me after a pause: “Oh my god, it's the literary version of A Current Affair.”

On the one hand, I'm working on a series of stories where the main character snarks on ACA every chance ney gets to the extent where everyone else snarks on nem for snarking.

On the other hand ... money. Can't eat without it. Can't pay for my Office subscription and domain registration without it. Can't play Magic without it.

(Yes, those are my priorities. Especially when Wizards announces Eternal Masters. Not that I have any intention of drafting it, because I can’t justify buying the boosters, but all the singles I’m hoping they’ll reprint, singles that I want to get my hands on for Commander? Yes, please.)

I have a lot more respect for those journalists, now. That might have to be something my character too will learn once ney's faced with ... well, the real world. Mostly because it’ll be hilarious to have nir go through that same moment of glorious realisation.

Forgive me, though, but I'm never going to stop despising Tracey Grimshaw.

In positive news, somebody is finally paying me to write, and something about people paying me to do stuff makes it easier for me to do the things I’m not being paid to do. Possibly a thing called self-esteem?

Dear Wizards of the Coast,

You are officially forgiven for the fact that you returned us to Zendikar with no sight or sound of my beloved Token-Producing-Artifact-Bad-Arse-Ancient-Kor-Lady-Who-Is-Totally-THE-Stoneforge-Mystic Planeswalker Nahiri and the peculiar absence of my appreciated good-and-evil-and-terribly-pragmatic-all-at-once vampire-vampire Planeswalker Sorin Markov.

(Nahiri is like the Kor Elspeth. Of course I love her. Especially since she’s, y’know, alive. Hopefully. Although if Daxos gets to be one of the Returned ... well, I can hope, right? Without pointing out the fact that a not-all-that-interesting dude Legendary gets to be Returned while our lady of amazing, already one of a minority of female Planeswalkers, kicks her heels in Erebos’s clutches?)

Although there is a SERIOUS expectation that Shadows over Innistrad gives me another awesome Sorin. (I win, albeit casual, games with Seige Rhinos and Anafenzas and Managorger Hydras and the two Den Protectors I can afford. Sorin, Solemn Visitor just makes it more fun to be me. Sorin and Liliana, Defiant Necromancer - and I wouldn’t have two of her, let alone any, save for the fact I pulled both - just make it really fun.) I mean, it’s supposed to answer the question of where the fuck Sorin and Nahiri (or at least one of them) got to, right? Right? It’s not going to be mostly about Liliana and Garruk and the Chain Veil? It’s not going to have Jace rock up, be smug and annoying and mind-rapey, and help Lili and/or do something about Garruk? (Because Lili does not need a man to save her.) And what’s with the blood-dipped feather in the teaser trailer? Is something attacking angels? Is it thematically related to the Duel Deck? WHAT?

(Because if a dude needs to do something about anything that’s going on, as opposed to any number of capable lady Planeswalkers, well, at least Sorin is an interesting morally-ambiguous arsehole. Not to mention the fact that Innistrad is his baby plane. Jace just makes me hope for his immediate death via pissed-off dragon Planeswalker.)

Okay, you’re not forgiven until I know we don’t get stuck with more Jace. Because he’s bad enough being an arrogant snot in Zendikar. I just want to see Ugin disembowel him, seriously.

Love,

A feminist queer genderless crazy geek who likes vampires and despises Jace and whose current profession involves wholeheartedly convincing people to give their time and money to your enterprise.

P.S. More queer characters, please. Queer lady Legendaries. What if Odric has a trans boy/man apprentice or something? Please? Please?

Before I begin, a tangent. Last time I got wordy, you may remember, I wrote about geek feminism. Or feminist geekism. Either way. Three weeks after writing that post, I went to the Sunday pre-release event for Battle for Zendikar (the latest Magic the Gathering release). As I was early, as the shop was quiet, and as I’d almost finished my current creation on the way up, I got out my…

This will be the shortest post I ever write: We have a new Prime Minister. No more Tony Abbott. No more fucking homophobic, misogynistic Tony Abbott! Now, Malcolm Turnbull, walk your talk with regards marriage equality (because you have been recorded as making sensible, rational comments on the subject) and I might even stop despising everything the Liberals stand for. No, I’m never going to…

Your geeky, my geeky, girl geeky

This is long. Also, as of time of posting, Wizards’ website is down for maintenance, so links may or may not work. You may or may not know that I have two major fandoms. (I like a great many books and most things that are European melodic metal, but they’re not fandoms for me; most of the time I don’t discover that Eluveitie or Dark Tranquillity released their new album until six months after the…

For any Melbournian (Australia) public transport users (a la yours truly), I'm asking you to please be patient for the upcoming stop work/industrial action (Friday August 21). Yes, it's really inconvenient (and as I start work at 2 PM, you bet I'm inconvenienced) but this is the culmination of months and months of Metro screwing around its workforce, and that isn't making it into the media coverage. It's not about pay rises (which is all the mainstream media mentions); it's about the appropriate training and treatment of drivers, the provision of appropriate work conditions and a non-hostile workplace, and the union has been left no other choice (after months and months of Metro delaying negotiations).

(I'd say more but I need to be careful with details.)

Given Metro's treatment of customers - shortening scheduled services on the fly, skipping stations, delays, cancellations, lack of information, manipulating line start/end locations so that trains appear to be running to timetable - I think its really important that we stand behind the union, whose members aren't the ones who make the decisions about shoddy service, and who are taking action in order to protest most of the things that piss us off as customers and impact our safety as passengers. Don’t we want our drivers, who are responsible for our arriving safely, as well trained as possible?

So please, please, don't hate on the drivers and the station staff. Don't hate on the union that's trying to protect them. Acknowledge that this situation is shit, because it is, but it’s a whole lot more than pay rises that’s driving the union to take such desperate action.

Hate on Metro who pushed the union to action that's going to earn them the hatred of customers and the Victorian government.

And hate on our incredibly biased media who isn't telling the whole story.

(TW: references to suicidal ideation, depression, anxiety)

I’m going to try and do the whole psychological self-improvement thing by keeping record of all the good/hard/scary accomplishment things I do. I know half those things are ridiculous to anyone who’s not trying to recover from severe anxiety, but I also know that they’re very real and big to those who are, and I’ve gained the most from the people I know who are honest and real about themselves, so I want to get back to being that person. Cool?

I’m still struggling with looking at comments/commenting. Quite frankly, it’s amazing that I’ve been able to post this much at all given that I’m so damn terrified of it. I’m trying; please be patient with me.

So. Today I...