NCC-1701-D.Va

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.

Here's some additional screenshots from the show that I think further illustrates my point (every single person in each if these pictures is a trans woman on the show)

I think many marginalised people have had the experience of starting to say something, and then seeing everyone's heads turn away to listen to someone "more important". And even if you refuse to give way, and you manage to make the "more important" person back down, you'll notice that when you stop speaking no one will respond to you, but everyone will immediately turn back to that "more important" person as if to say "Sorry, you were saying?"

And, of course, the specific social dynamics of the group will affect these things, like friendship, enmity, sexual and romantic attraction, or if one person is specifically sucking-up to another for some purpose like securing a job offer. But if you pay attention to this over several groups over a long time, you will pick up on patterns that repeat and repeat and repeat.

For example, normally if a man and a woman start talking at the same time, the man will draw the group's attention. And on those occasions where he doesn't, it's generally because there is some other marginalisation involved: race, class, disability, immigration status, sexuality...

I think many marginalised people have had the experience of starting to say something, and then seeing everyone's heads turn away to listen to someone "more important". And even if you refuse to give way, and you manage to make the "more important" person back down, you'll notice that when you stop speaking no one will respond to you, but everyone will immediately turn back to that "more important" person as if to say "Sorry, you were saying?"

And, of course, the specific social dynamics of the group will affect these things, like friendship, enmity, sexual and romantic attraction, or if one person is specifically sucking-up to another for some purpose like securing a job offer. But if you pay attention to this over several groups over a long time, you will pick up on patterns that repeat and repeat and repeat.

For example, normally if a man and a woman start talking at the same time, the man will draw the group's attention. And on those occasions where he doesn't, it's generally because there is some other marginalisation involved: race, class, disability, immigration status, sexuality...

PLEASE ask your transfem friends what you can do to help. Maybe she's doing fine, I'm sure one (1) of us is. But it's probably not your friend. And your friend probably wants to exist peacefully, because so much of her life is conflict already. A lot of us learn to shrink to avoid inconveniencing others. To get by with as little as possible because community, affection, care, help? All conditional in ways that are so much thinner than they are for other people within our demographics.

BISEXUALS GROW FROM THE GROUND

purity politics