I Remember The Ghost, It Smiled

Happy TDOV!

"intrinsic gender," on the other hand, is what I used to refer to the sense of the word "gender" that a lot of trans people are talking about when they discuss social gender dysphoria and euphoria. it's the internal sense of category that's resistant to external impositions

but then we also use the word "gender" to refer to subconscious sex, which is the term Julia Serano coins in Whipping Girl to name the phenomenon we're talking about when we talk about bodily dysphoria. it is the "gender" being "affirmed" by gender affirming healthcare like HRT and bottom surgery

The story goes like this: gender is constructed socially via constant reinforcement, reified across many different cultures, as a sort of means to class sex and apply a sort of normative template for behavior that a person is expected to adopt (mostly). This is the social construct: it's performative because we know there is no relation between having a vagina and being bad at driving or having a penis and liking bacon, or whatever; these norms change and shift over time. Critically, though, the template -- the expectation -- gets applied at birth based on apparent sex (with caveats for intersex individuals whose presentation of intersexedness and parental and societal desires are I think too complex to break down here).

However, some individuals either consciously or unconsciously find themselves mentally aligned with the other template, or both templates, or no templates. They struggle with the social norms of their assigned gender applied due to their sex. This is the intrinsic gender -- the feeling of dysphoria or euphoria when behaving in an way that aligns or not with the expected performance of gender.

Concurrently, people as a whole are always aware of the way their presence in the world reifies their identity in that world -- humans, being social creators, are (to some extent) made real by the observation of others. And as we noted, the gender template that is assigned arbitrarily to you is one based on sex characteristics. When one's internal alignment of engagement with a particular gender template does not match their assigned gender, it is rendered visible by their body, which over time and on a individual basis can generate feelings of dysphoria in a body that betrays (or might/could betray) their original assignment into the gender they do not feel aligned with on the basis of their assigned sex at birth.

Which I think leads to two points:

First, all forms of transness are a means of reasserting the dominance of the internal conception of one's gender in defiance of the mechanics of all conflated forms of gender as a term, but not necessarily all of them at once, and the distinction _does_ count -- something for us to be mindful of when discussing this.

godot seems much more object-oriented. one of the things i read was somebody's inventory tutorial where they were like, okay i have an Item node and those are placed as children of Slot nodes and there's an Inventory scene that has a big grid layout of Slot notes, and i was just like, what are you talking about. or this thing where somebody admits that they're having performance issues drawing a whopping ~100 things in their 2d pixel art game because each thing is like five transforms layered over a dozen different effect nodes that each do some aspect of rendering & at that point there was enough bookkeeping to meaningfully impact performance. and i'm like. an inventory is an array and maybe you gussy it up all fancy in a render function if you like, but that's fundamentally not how godot operates

Fundamentally, Godot is Object Oriented, but there is _no_ reason that has to extend beyond the base Scene node. This is because you can just define properties on your classes that represent all of those things and they can be primitives and other objects as well. An inventory absolutely _can_ just be an array.

Where I think you're getting mixed up is that you're thinking of an ECS-style implementation where raw data gets slung around to various servers which do their things to that data, and then seeing that Godot doesn't really support that out of the box, thinking it must be the exact opposite and Godot Demands that Everything Is A Node.

Here's the trick: the only things that actually need to be nodes are the things that get represented in screen space! You can (and should) use Resource classes to represent your data! Using your inventory example -- you can specify a Player class that has an inventory which is an array of Items, e.g. @export var inventory: Array[Item] = [], and Item then extends Resource instead -- it's just a collection of @export fields defining what an Item's properties are. And you can, of course, extend the Item class and add them to the array. Critically, those properties can be things like models and textures and other data used for your code to know how to render the items dynamically.

Or, if you want, you can still use a Scene to represent each item, and the inventory property will still work for that Player to hold references to those Items.

Another spot you might be getting tripped up is "okay, a player has an inventory of items which are data, and I have a bunch of items, how do I get the Player instance to add an Item to their inventory?" Which goes back to Globals and Signals.

Globals are singleton classes which are accessible anywhere. This means you can break object oriented design completely by relying on them. You can make a single giant GameManager Global and every Node and Resource you create can just call methods on the game manager. I don't recommend it because when you get the hang of Signals it just feels inelegant.

Signals are just special functions that allow one Object's script to reach out to another Object's script. This is mostly done in the UI to "wire" behaviors, and tutorials on this are clear. Since you're thinking code-first, and using the inventory and assuming you have a Globall StageManager that holds a reference to the Player:

Let's say you have an Item class which extends Resource, and an InventoryItem class which extends Node3D and is built as a typical node tree -- it has children which represent its model and its boundaries, and it has an @export var item: Item , so you can set the item in the UI to a presaved item representation or create the representation of the data right there.

You can then go to the Area3D representing the object boundaries, click on the signals pane, find the input_event signal, and hook it up by double-clicking. That connects input events of all kind to the function that gets created. Then in there you could do something like, StageManager.player.inventory.append((get_parent().item) . Et voila!

But to connect a signal in code is just "object.its_signal.connect(other_object, 'func_on_that_object')". To emit a signal in code is "object.its_signal.emit()". If you're familiar with the Pub/Sub pattern, it's literally that. So another way you could do the above:

Add func add_item(item: Item): inventory.append(item) to Player.

Add a "signal item_clicked(item: Item)" to InventoryItem.

Add an on_tree_entered to your InventoryItem that has a signal_item_clicked.connect(StageManager.current_player, "add_item", item)

Then in the input_event handler function on your InventoryItem, after verifying whatever, you call "item_clicked.emit(item)"

Nigerian Pride 🏳️‍🌈🇳🇬

Originally, I went in worried the opposite would happen. Growing up, I've been taught that Nigeria, the country, is homophobic. (I was born in America.) But over time, I learned that there's tons of other queer Nigerians; some are out, and some are in the closet 😭.

I'm also not used to this much attention, lol

apparently the murder happened in 2023 after doing some research but the murderer has been found not guilty.

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Howdy, howdy, folks.

For many years (ten now, about which, more soon) McMansion Hell has featured many prominent and diverse atrocities from all over these great United States and sometimes beyond them. However, most of these posts have consisted of houses built during the McMansion Era proper -- from the 80s up through around the early 2010s.

This is for a number of reasons. First of all: I like these houses because they are insane. Second of all, they are indeed quite different from one another -- they represent the owner's idiosyncratic if poorly rendered desires and fantasies. They are heavily psychologically loaded buildings. One family dreams endlessly of Tuscany, another wants to recreate the mall. All interiorize previously exterior forms of consumption.

These houses were also very expensive to build compared to their contemporary iterations: all real, solid wood cabinetry and trim, wrought iron railings, marble floors, elaborate murals - none of this is cheap. This is not to say that I'm nostalgic for the classical McMansion (though many are) only that it, like, most other facets of architectural and everyday life, have become progressively cheaper and more bland.

The McMansion never truly goes away. It merely changes shape over time. One of the shapes it currently takes is a particularly loathsome imitation of contemporary high architecture (specifically the kind of houses architects love to build for celebrities in California) executed in the most wretchedly parsimonious manner possible. It feels cheap to use the word 'slop' but their indiscriminate nature - the way they have no regard for why or how the things they imitate even work - allows it. Of all the building forms that could be generated with AI, this is the most likely. At any rate, behold:

Yes this is a real house. Yes you can buy it for $6 million in, yet again, Barrington, IL. It has 5 bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms totaling 11,600 square feet. But most importantly, it looks like dogshit. Ten layers of Photoshop have been used to gussy it up which makes it appear entirely ersatz. Were it not for the interiors, I myself would have trouble trusting my own eyes. Part of the reason it looks so unreal is because the design itself is absurd, as though someone created four equally ugly vessels and threw them up one by one.

In 2017, in a now-deleted essay for Curbed (RIP - they destroyed the archive) I called these types of houses McModerns, simply because they were McMansions dressed up in modernist garb, which they wore no differently than they would Neo-Tudor or Mediterranean (broadly construed.) These houses don't warrant a new neologism, but they do feel like a degraded or perhaps even gonzo version of even that old concept. Slop works fine too, especially because half of what's in these images isn't real.

Much fascinates me about these houses, however one of the most unique elements vis a vis the last 30 years of building is how overtly and almost hostilely masculine they are. Anything that can be construed as feminized - color, softness, ornament - has been ruthlessly purged. They also rip off tech industry minimalism which only ads to their bro-ey nature. While previous iterations of McModernism (think new builds in Colorado with fake wood exteriors) scream dads with IPAs, these houses scream Reddit to me. They are Elon Musk-adjacent in sentiment.

By the way, this is what that room looks like without the fake furniture. It's basically a sunroom.

Whole Foods would like to call in a robbery.

Because these houses are designed by men, for men, no one involved has learned how a kitchen works. Many are calling this setup the "grindset tiktok video kitchen." This is the kitchen you see in those day in the life of an AI startup founder videos your algorithm forces you to watch against your will.

Virtual staging is actual literal slop. In fact, one can say that they were one of the first iterations of the ontological crisis we now face, one of the first instances where one is forced against one's will to question reality, what one sees with one's own eyes. Beyond that, I think virtual staging is literally a form of lying. You can use it to make a space look bigger or smaller than it is. In this it also has a lot in common with AI. This dining room has nothing to do with the world I'm living in. These chairs are not my problem.

It's actually AMAZING how much of what's in this house, beyond the furniture, is fake. Every single material is fake. The stone is aluminum paneling. The plants are plastic. The concrete is printed on some kind of surface (as evidenced through its repetitive pattern), though it's hard to say from just pictures. I don't even trust the floors!!

Ok if you haven't read Kelly Pendegrast's amazing essay "Merchandizing the Void" about how houses are all like stores now, HERE IS THE LINK. Some ideas never die, they just evolve, king. Like you.

Please, I'm very cold.

Unfortunately there are no pictures of the rear exterior of this house, so this is where we will have to conclude for today. That being said, these houses and their antecedents are developing a design language all their own that will, in time, be as culturally rich to us as the houses of yore. The problem is they are less visually interesting. They are houses made to scroll in and scroll right by. Expect to see more of them here, but only if they have something, anything to say.

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