Last week I stood up patanor. I’ve been dreaming of having a personal blogosite for a while and now feels like the time.
My biggest goal is to reach out, to see and be seen by other interesting people.
I was raised on one side of the culture wars, lived on the other for a while but honestly I’ve been waking up to how the conflict is fucking stupid and is going to defeat our society from within if we let it. And it threatens to pull me apart too, on one wing a theologically conservative Christian, on the other a queer leftist.
Mid 30s, disabled, there isn’t really a word for what this age feels like. In a permanent relationship, in a society that can’t recognize it as marriage. (We have marriage equality, yes, but not for disabled people.)
Sometimes I can write. Or translate. Or code. I’m almost okay at human and computer languages. The big accomplishment this week was setting up patanor.
I subscribed to Tangle News — in order to get my toes back into the right-wing media sphere. Or right-center? Anyway, the free edition is four issues a week, but only two this week because of Thanksgiving break.
- transgender bathroom bans
Well, I have trauma from being attacked in a bathroom. And I’m transgender. So I might have a perspective on this, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to write it.
- nominated Sec’y Labor Chavez-DeRemer
Look, someone has to do something about working-class rights. I really, really, really doubt the Trump administration will be a net positive. People like Musk and Bezos are profoundly un-American — it’s hard to get more un-American than bullying Americans into having to pee in water bottles at work. And that’s who Trump has been taking money, favors, and phone calls from.
So anything less than horrible news is positive news, and Chavez-DeRemer might even be good news?
Outside of politics I’ve been watching Dungeon Meshi, which is deeper than I expected. I came for cozy, quirky camp cooking and got a story about human dignity struggling with the realities of survival. But mostly I’ve been polishing up my Japanese so I’m ready to tackle, say, Frieren.
Oh, and I read some Pokémon Special (aka Pokémon Adventures) — now that’s a weirdly good manga. It feels a lot like fanfiction did back at the time, the grittier, darker ones in which there’s a whole conspiracy revolving aroung catching Mew and bioengineering Mewtwo and you don’t know which gym leaders can be trusted.