Monster’s Wedding

Me and my dude have a relationship.  Been together close to 19 years, if I got that right.  But we never got married, because a bunch of reasons that were not wholly clear to me until now, when the plan is in place.  We’re gonna make it official October 13th.  This is important for reasons of legal protections and whatnot, and also to get what we deserve, which is recognition for this thing we got.  But, this is kind of a bad time.

We have little money and incredibly few family and friends, we aren’t going to reproduce, and we’re not young.  Marriage as popularly conceived heavily leans on those things.  It’s to have a day of expensive shangri-la decadence?  No.  It’s a way to celebrate the merging of two families and sets of friends in a great big… there’s a guest list of officiant, wedded, and three other people.  It’s a way to make holy or legitimate the birth of your… nope.  It’s two wacky kids starting life together as…  nope.

If you put this question to the masses, the usual answer is “don’t bother” or “just elope.”  But our self-respect won’t let that stand.  We deserve a genuine ceremony, not scratching paper with ballpoint pens under fluorescent lights in an office space.  The thing is this – as you take away all the things of marriage as currently conceived, either because you can’t afford them or don’t want to do them, what do you replace them with?  Eventually, you have nothing left, and have to reinvent marriage from scratch.

One could wonder how we ended up with so few friends and family.  I have the stereotypical broken home, my dude just had a single mom from generation of socially maladjusted people who couldn’t stay married or get married in the first place, half of whom are now dead.  My dude has health problems that have him socially isolated, I just don’t feel the need for friends outside of my most important few, and I let the others all drift away.  I don’t think about this most of the time, but it does have us looking like a pair of quasimodos living on a blasted margin of human society.  A wedding of monsters.

It’s kind of darkly funny.  I had an internet homie read one of my unpublished novels and she said it struck her as incredibly wrong the main character didn’t have a lot of friends and family, a community around her.  It never occurred to me to write that for her, because I don’t think of life as having a lot of people in it.  A little failure of my imagination.

ALL THAT’S TO SAY,

I am trying to reinvent the wheel of Marriage between now and October 13th.  Any suggestions that don’t involve additional invites or thousands of dollars may be welcomed.  The officiant is my brother, the witnesses my father and my dude’s mom, and my home boy Jeremy.

Ideally my bro will leave his daughters at home because they are about 6 and 4 and would almost certainly misbehave – less of a problem with a wedding crowd to disappear into than it would be in our tiny condo living room.  But he might not have a choice but to bring them and not his wife, so having her tend them is not a workable solution at the moment.  Maybe Jeremy can play croquet with them on the dead grass behind nuestra casa.

Meanwhile, what do we do or say at this thing?  How to make it feel like a ceremony instead of an awkward tea party of people who don’t know or necessarily like each other?

I’ve been pondering ritual magic.  My dude once had a hallucination as a small child, possibly a seizure, where he saw a small donkey go into his house.  He pursued it but could not find it.  In studying demonology, I found there’s a demon called gamigin or samigin (plus many variant spellings) that is sometimes depicted as a small donkey.  This tells us, if there’s anything in occultism, Sammy Gene is my dude’s patron spirit.  Who is mine?  I find Acar from the Fasciculus rerum Geomanticarum interesting.  Also our house is full of random arthropods, and Acar helps you control those.  Lambes, on the other hand, has male pronouns, appears as a woman, and causes people of all sexes to fall in love with the conjurer.  So much higher queer points.

Anyway, Acar and Lambes did not have Ars Goetia-styled sigils so I had to make up my own.  Sammy’s is as depicted in ye olde grimoire’s tho, save an update on the name.  How do you like me now?  Or as some transphobic catholic tweeter once famously said, This is the Age of Sin. Reject the order of creation.  Revel in the annihilation of Man as the image of God.  DESTROY.  Plot designs of death.  Disfigure the face of Man and Woman.

But still, one of the invitees -somebody we have to live with- is christian, so overt hostility to god jeezups is not gonna do.  I’ll just slip these bad boys under the rug.  Feel like I’ve lost track of the purpose of the post.  Back to business…

Invitees show up at small condo with tiny living rooms and dining rooms in which to hang out.  There is a back yard, which is not fenced off from our closest neighbors, but possibly also a place to be.  We have some minor refreshments and chit chat, then

THE INVOCATION

Some kinda preamble to the marriage.  Normally middle class people would feed everybody foie gras on platinum spoons or something, I don’t know.  I feel like we should try to fill ten to thirty minutes with this, whatever it is.

THE UNION OF QUEER PEEPS

Some kinda marriage.  Normally an able-bodied dad walks a daughter down an aisle, I guess a man gets escorted by a home boy?  Then a preacher says jesus is cool, asks if we wanna do some slam poetry vows, then asks the do you do you, then it’s I do, rings, mandatory public display of affection, and you are forcibly escorted out of the building.  I’m not sure how we’ll do this at all.  PDA would be super-awk outside of a chaste smooch.  Even standing for the ceremony is kinda dubious in our small space and general comfort.  I feel like the run time for this should be ten minutes-ish?

POSTAMBLE

If we were outside, we stay outside for a minute to do some kind of a thing.  If we were inside, we go outside, because one of the things my dude is into is getting confetti chucked at us, but he doesn’t wanna clean it out of couch cushions.  Normally the woman one of us would chuck flowers at some nerds, then we get rice bukkake’d.  I don’t know, this could be pretty short.  Oh yeah, and my dude is cool with cutting a cake together, so this could end in a dining room, perhaps.

EVENING ENTERTAINMENTS

I just don’t dig board games, for the most part.  I like scrabble but that’s because I’m better than average at it, and people don’t love losing to me, and I don’t wanna give anybody a bad time.  Uno feels low stakes and foolish.  Penny ante poker?  I don’t know.

After that I think we’re good.  Any ideas?

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Kids These Days

So I’m out and about today, manmoded testosterone-maxxing in hoodie and hoary facial roughage.  This morning we went to a garden market in semi-rural suburbia, my mans to shop and me to stagger around looking at wildlife while doing my weekly call to busted old paternal unit.  I beheld a swarm of tadpoles in a planty tub (idk from garden people lingo), cliff swallows, killdeer, white-crowned sparrows, anna’s hummingbird, goldfinch (i know, u see them all the time, but I don’t, so it was cool), less positively IDed barn swallows, and very remote big-ass birds at high altitude, I think two herons and a bald eagle, but hellifino.

As we get to the counter I was reminded of the differences between the generations.  Mild-mannered elders were the main run of customers, well-off and engaged in potentially expensive hobbies.  People my age had a bit more aggressive energy.  I feel like we’re the ones to blame for this edgy bullshit marketing like “big cock farms” products, and “hot shit” sauce.  And then the youngest people were, of course, working all the service jobs.

At the counter, as at all the salvage yards and thrift stores from Ballard to Olympia, the staff had colorful hair and pronouns.  Mind you that in this more rural locale they lacked the boldness of a pronoun name tag, but you got the vibe.  The gentle and conventionally attractive youth that rang us up had a gender-neutral name, u kno how it be.  We also visited one of those thrift stores today.

Later I had to return some junk at the mall, and it’s hard to go out there without wanting some kind of treat for my efforts – a frozen coke, mozzarella sticks, tiny hotdogs wrapped in buttery pretzel dough, u kno, pigs in a blanket.  But I felt full and had already had treats to spare today, so what could I do?

I settled on visual treats.  The American mall is a dying institution, they say, but the lower rent businesses that are better able to afford devalued storefronts are fascinating.  Catholic art and gifts, a barber shop, a nail salon, gluten-free fried foods, a shop that sells freaky homemade fan art products…  I used the smartphone to find out that saint with the unicorn horn and Flava-Flav medallion was St. Jude.

As I finished my few minutes of foolery, a child of ten or eleven approached me, and asked “English or Spanish?”  I said Ingles and he issued the challenge.  “First one to move is gay.”

I was in a bit of a hurry and was like, “It’s cool, I’m gay.”  He was like “whoaa” and either him or one of his homies said, “it’s cool” as I walked away.  Nice to get the nod of approval u little weirdos.

Kids these days.

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It’s a Me

On my most recent May Flowers post, I commented with AI-assisted illustrations for the entries.  The last m’flower was a poem written in first person, that included a section wherein I blast on some creepy bugs with guns.  So my illustration was chosen from a set of midj images like these…

And how did I make these greatamericansatanesque clowns emerge from an AI mo’ chine?  By feeding it this terrible screen capture from my rap debut video (at right).  Like many artists, I find the image of myself – or the idea of the image – to be intellectually interesting.  It makes me feel some kinda way, like who is this creature that is I?

The way it works is called “image prompting.”  Your prompt in an AI art program is the words you use to tell the AI what you want.  When it is just words, it’s referencing the tagging system of the program.  When it’s an image, well, I don’t really know what it’s doing.  AI art is the work of a “denoising algorithm” that uses statistical probability to place pixels, with those odds altered by the prompt.  There’s an explanation out there for how image prompting works that I ain’t bothered to dig up because I don’t care that much.  I figure it’s one of two things:  Genuinely using the image to nudge probabilities, or just reverse engineering the image into a verbal prompt and using the undisplayed verbal prompt to control the AI.

So welcome to my jungle.  I gots fun and games.  Wherein the fun is masturbatory omphaloskepsis and the games is art that nobody asked for.  I’d lead in with the cliche of “you asked for it” but you very much did not.  I hope you get a chuckle or divertingly creepy vibe from the display.  Proceeding thus,

This first set was just putting my image as the prompt and running my “pretty girl” style filter over it.  I’ve posted these girls in comments somewhere, I kinda love ’em.  But are they mees from another mother?  Would this love be a thought crime against nature?

Another time I mashed my selfie up with the “glitchcore” AI art from that one post, and again, I did note them in the comments.  It’s like dollar-store replicant daryl hannahs.  Getting a little less transgenda lookin’, which is a shame, from my point of view.  I think passing is a scam meant to drive trans suicide rates, like dieting is for… everybody at this point.  Whatever.

This one was mixing my selfie with an image derived from a crappy old version of stable diffusion, 2022-style.  You can see that image on my bloge in a Spooktober post.  Closed eyes are the sensuousness, when equipped with horse eyelashes.  Gothique.

The next set is the least passing trans gals in human history, courtesy of mashing myself up with a random pretty-ass 19th century painting lady.  Think she was a nymph or something, don’t care enough to dig up the original pic.  Again, I love ’em.

What’s the most obvious lady pic in human history to mash oneself up with?  The Mona Lisa.  This produced a character that looks very much like NaNoWriMo dot org’s most imperious mod of yore, so I viking hatted her ass, and it was a wild success.

Remember that part in Blue Velvet where Dean Stockwell lipsyncs to Roy Orbison’s In Dreams?  Fucking epic.  This was mashing my selfie up with him.  Kinda reminds me of Phil Hartman, aww.

Here is where things got really interesting for me.  I used a strange painting of Salome in a Babylonian throne room.  The style might be called expressionist or symbolist, I think, and had a fuzzy and drippy effect almost like you were seeing the scene through rain – despite the golden glow.  Cool piece, again, I forget whodunit, but I was very intrigued to see the AI interpret that as motion-blurred degraded VHS!  This is me as tour guide at a desanctified cathedral or castle…

I took that set and mashed it up with an image of a demon from a funky grimoire, and a cool pic of the dudes from The Damned, resulting in these fucked up Marilyn Manson hillbillies.  Very amusing.

Leaving out the cathedral set to only have my selfie mixed with the demon, we get… wigbeard!  Amazing.  I love it.  This is also a good example of the strange things that happen when you mix a photo and a drawing in AI art.

The first image below on the left is actually from artbreeder, which is kind of a fun website.  I added some human “DNA” to an image of a cute puppy, creating an abominable bog mummy standup comedian.  On the right you can see what comes of that mixed with my selfie – some kind of queer grunge bassist who wasn’t cool enough to OD.

Mixing my selfie with a beautiful AI pic yielded these VC Andrews -styled queer cuties, who I mixed with some other stuff to get the characters from this other one.  Anyway, by my affectionate words you may be starting to get an idea of which ones I find genuinely appealing.  Ignoring the fingers, of course.

The one on the left below was mashing myself up with the edgy angel from the cover of the Kult TTPRG, and to my great amusement, it became some kind of hair metal groupie from the late eighties.  Mashing her up with another image full of homunculi yielded this bumper crop of selfcestuous cultist little people.

Those lil’ gals became bigger and gayer and sleepier in subsequent iterations.

it’s a good time, but has this narcotic quality about it… soporific… think im gonna fall asleep now… gnite.

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250 Words on the Topic of Hugs

Got some gentle sympathies in donation message, but again, barely anyone has been suggesting topics to write about.  Makes me wonder if I should be running a different incentive scheme.  Anyhow, Hugs.

When is a hug appropriate?  The USA is one of the more physically removed countries in the anglosphere.  Broadly speaking, people here don’t hug anyone they don’t know outside of full-on emergencies, like consoling a person whose baby got blown up in a car accident.

And the people who are allowed to hug?  Women.  It’s gendered.  (Queerness definitely complicates the picture, but bear with me.)  Men can’t express physical affection for each other outside of Arnold Schwarzenegger / Carl Weathers arm-wrassles.  One can get unused to physical contact.  That was me, for a long time.

If I’m not expecting to be touched, I jump.  If that happened to me when I was a kid, it was going to be violence.  As an adult, it’s my boyfriend being affectionate, not noticing that I wasn’t noticing his approach.  Then he feels bad about it, and I’m like, aww no boo, it ain’t you.

So I got to where the only way I wanna be seen, when I can control the circumstances, is lady-presenting.  I don’t do it at a grocery store or the office, but I do it at remote meetings, the FtB Poddish Sortacast, and my pics around the internet.  This being what people see of me, I find some people are treating me the way they might treat a lady, which is kinda cool, but also can make me jump when I don’t expect it.

Pay it no nevermind.  Hug on.  Especially cyber-hugs.  Why should I balk at that?

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Another Bad Creation

Look upon my works ye donors and despair, for reaching the stretch goal on this fundraiser was rather like losing a bet…


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EDIT to add:  The lyrics so you can sing along, or see where I fucked up, or see where I used the word you paid for:

I’m not even trans so ~ Don’t genocide me bro
Ever since it was the ’80s ~ I wanted to be one of those rap ladies
Roxanne Shante, The Lady of Rage ~ Or Igloo Australia up on my white page
I need an umbilical Hernia sewed up ~ Time to get lyrical, My people showed up
I offered to rhyme one Word per donation ~ But some don’t care for My rap oration
Cutty Snark and Monkat Offered well wishes ~ Which implies my rap Can sleep with the fishes
Meanwhile Trixie Gave in her quiet way ~ And left not a single word For me to rhymesay
At least other donors gave Words to make use of ~ So now I commence against English abusove
I’m not even trans so ~ Don’t genocide me bro
Ever since it was the ’80s ~ I wanted to be one of those rap ladies
Rhyming like this re-Quires some strategy ~ You can play it safe and Avoid a tragedy
But then my bro asked for Salpingooophrectomy ~ That son of a bltch thinks That shlt will get to me
Someone asked me To make a rhyme for orange ~ This they tasked me To make it oh so cringe
Shlt could make my Brains tapioca ~ Ricky my Martins ’til This vida goes loca
I rap so wack I Say whoopsadaisy ~ So I’ll just slack then Be ghost like Swayze
Peace

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TDoV Fundraiser, White Rap, Cringe On

GOAL ACHIEVED – FUNDRAISER CLOSED
This post will remain for historical purposes.

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HEY!  I had a telework meeting earlier this week and since I wouldn’t get harassed on the bus by doing so, I dressed like a lady.  Little did I know I was two days early for the Trans Day of Visibility.  I’m visible, babes.  Be the fat middle-aged white lady you want to see in the world.  I’m lovin’ it.  But still..

image of your blogger great american satan

Like many trans folk today I come to you with cup in hand.  I’ve had medical issues burning up my leave at work, and for some abdominal surgery in late April I’m going to use at least a week of leave without pay.  To make my bills less ouch, I’d like to fundraise.  Here is the incentive:  Donate at all, and you can choose a word I will rhyme in a rap.  If five people choose orange, I’ll try to come up with five shitty sorta-rhymes for orange.

This will be strictly words on digital paper, maybe starting below and then compiled in a blogpost, unless we reach goals.  At $500, I will do an audio performance of the rap.  At $600, I will do a video.  These productions, if they happen, will be lo-fi as all hell, because I just don’t have the time for big effort.

I will run this through midnight April 21st, so I have time to make the audio or video if necessary.  If you like my terrible styles and enjoy cringy embarrassment, please give me a ko-fi, as it were.  And if you like donating to FtBloggers, throw our recently unemployed mans Brinkman a bone too.

link to my ko-fi

 

 

On Genital Preference

My conquest of the categories of FtB articles continues apace, with this rip-roaring number about Feminism Gender and Sexuality.  I don’t know if I’ve posted my thoughts about genital preference before, so I’ll lay out the main points.

It’s OK to have a genital preference, when it comes to doing the sex.  When it comes to casual conversation, less so, but it’s a situational thing.  I’d say a good rule of thumb is this – express your love for the genitals you want to get with, never express disgust for the genitals that you’d prefer to avoid.  Somebody has those genitals, and doesn’t deserve to have to feel disgusting, right?

There are a lot of ramifications of this.  Don’t equate your genital preference with your orientation, even if it makes intuitive sense.  “I love vag because I’m a lesbian.”  There are lesbians that don’t love vag for any number of reasons, there are lesbians who don’t have vag and don’t deserve to think of themselves as undesirable to lesbians for that reason – even tho it’s valid for that to be true in your case.  Does that make sense?  It’s complicated.

I find a very, very useful way to think of this is like fatphobia.  It’s OK for you to not find fat people attractive.  You can’t control what your instincts tell you, and they’ve been warped by simmering in global fatphobia your whole life.  You shouldn’t have to force yourself to be with a person you can’t physically love, and much more importantly, no fat person deserves to be stuck with somebody who cannot physically love them.

But wearing a “no fatties” t-shirt or dropping that preference in anything but the most hushed and apologetic tones is a fucking vile thing to do.  Likewise, unless a transbian makes a pass at ye, vag-requiring lesbian, don’t feel the need to bring it up.  It just isn’t necessary, until it is, which is sure to be an extremely rare occurrence.  (Ditto in reverse gay dudes in cis/trans situations.)

This is one way terfs ruin shit for everyone.  Lesbians should be able to yell about how much they love muff as much as gay men yell about dick.  It’s still an option, of course, but thanks to terfs identifying AFAB parts with their hate movement by way of their internet handles and slogans, any lesbian reveling in their genital preference may result in a nearby trans person of any stripe feeling unsafe or unsettled.  Is this person going to try to harm me?  Don’t know.  Non-nazi dykes don’t deserve to have to think about that every time they put on the “I Love Pussy” hat.

I could be wrong about any of this in any way; I am not up on the current discourse, and have never had a meaningful conversation with genital dysphoria-having person about the subject.
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A Trans Wrath Minute

Content Warnings: Transphobia, Violence, Suicide, Cussin’.  I cuss.

I’m not usually a poet but I woke up with a few lines coming to mind,
and had to spend some time fleshing out the whole thing.
It’s open mic night, babes.  Drink up ~~~

Grab your “Down with Cis” t-shirts and get on the bus

It’s time to bash back before the fucks get to us.

Every fascist from Kremlin to Pittsburgh PA

Has decided that trans is worse now than gay.

Transition’s irreversible so you better not try

Make yourself cishet or make yourself die

And god forbid nature make your gender ambiguous

Carve up your babies, so you can pass off as cis.

Black transphobes think this some “white people shit?”

Marsha was out while you were sucking hind tit

Prob’ly killed by a black guy ashamed of sucking her dick.

So many black queer folk I won’t sully their names

Bringing them down to my white level and rage.

Sick of hearing about queers? Then get our names out your mouths

We can’t be like Bill Tipton and keep our lips zipped when

Your friends in the senate order genital inspections

“I didn’t write those laws, they just reflect my positions.

It’s so many words, can’t do no one wrong.”

Mein Kampf has a death toll ten million strong.

This time’ll be different, you nazi fucks learned your lesson

There’s no need for mass graves when you can just disappear us

Use disgust powered media to make Joe Public fear us.

Pricky Gervais I’mma rip off your face.

Just Kidding Rowling will likewise be howling.

Fuckass Mulaney in such fucking pain he

Won’t know what the hell’s left of David Chappelle.

You think I give a shit about your fucking celebrity?

I’ll slap the whole fucking Oscars but why limit my enmity?

Fuck this whole goddamn world that won’t save a trans girl

And suck my motherfucking dick.

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No More Harry P Shit

I’ve mentioned it before, but it bears repeating:  If you represent Harry P fandom by so little an act as having your “house” in your bio, you’re giving money to transphobia and fascism by advertising the works of an author who puts her royalties to those exact ends.  Don’t take my word for it.  Here are some people who actually liked Harry P at one point in time – indeed, may hold some fondness for that community and those experiences even now:

I was cutting people with Hogwad houses in their bios some slack, but that’s over now.  It has indeed become a new criteria for me in blocking and blacklisting – any mention of Harry P shit that isn’t cancellation or ripping on it.  If you’re promoting her IP, you’re giving her money, whether you pay her directly or not.  No more quarter.  Even if I wasn’t a flavor of trans, even if I didn’t personally know trans people, transphobia is the current wedge issue / hobbyhorse of every nazi piece of shit from Zimbabwe to Kazakhstan, from DC to the Kremlin.

Trans rights have become the line we all need to defend, for the sake of trans people yes, but now for the sake of every decent person in the world – very much like gay rights in 2004.  Let this cancellation be complete.  Let any enjoyment you have of those stories remain private.  Don’t let the Queen Terf claim you as one of her own.  Say no to Harry P shit.

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Got No Memes

I want to do something for International Down With Cis Day, but ideas fail me.  Every year since I started at FtB has gotten materially worse for trans rights and the well-being and safety of trans lives.  I hold the shitbird governor of Texas as especially emblematic of the whole situation – blatantly using open bigotry to score political points, bible bashing while using rhetoric generously provided by terfs, pushing for the worst anti-LGBT policies this side of China or Iran.

So I think, meme his ass.  Political cartoon like this was 1922.  But nothing comes to mind except depictions of him on the receiving end of terrible violence – you know, madame guillotine putting in an appearance, somebody setting him on fire and kicking him off a cliff, etc.  Not funny, not a good look.

Hm…

https://www.google.com/search?q=respect+existence+or+expect+resistance+trans

Not bad, but still feels wildly inadequate to the struggle right now.  We’ll see what we’ll see.

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