Sophie Jane @ghost_bird@mythago.space

The Gender Construction Kit has come on a long way since the last time I visited. If you’re looking for info and resources on transitioning in the UK then it’s a good place to start:

https://genderkit.org.uk

“An authoritarian party, which aims at capturing power to impose its ideas, has an interest in the people remaining an amorphous mass, unable to act for themselves and therefore always easily dominated... But we anarchists do not want to emancipate the people; we want the people to emancipate themselves.”
- ibid

It’s true for some people, but I didn’t “always know” I was trans. With hindsight, though, there’s stuff I missed, or ignored, or explained away over the years that I can interpret as trans feelings now, and I think it might be helpful to write about that. There’ll be a little biography involved but I’ll try to keep it to a minimum.

(Private hrt cost me about £800 to set up, in two instalments, plus another £150 every six months for monitoring appointments. They have a shared care agreement with my GP so prescriptions and blood tests are on the NHS. That’s not a negligible amount of money, but it’s possibly more affordable - or crowdfundable - than you might think from hearing about American medical bills.)

(I should say these are non-human not-Romans being set up as enemies for a big war, if the GM wants one. They’re probably laying it on thick to make the conflict more interesting)

…actually, credit to them, they don’t do the centurion thing. Their regular soldiers are super-effective because they’re “motivated beyond simple greed, or survival, or hatred” as citizen-soldiers though. I guess having centurions would have raised uncomfortable questions of officer class vs enlisted class?

Are we going to get centurions in our fantasy not-Roman culture? Are they going to be tremendous badasses for no obvious reason? Stay tuned…

“Not until the time of the Roman Republic we’re political and psychological conditions ripe for a warrior using a weapon essentially by himself; the Roman of the republic was a citizen rather than a subject” 0_o

(That’s an unattributed quote in the sourcebook - not the authors’ own text. But that just makes it worse)

I’m reading a bunch of old TTRPG scans (Palladium Fantasy, from the Bundle of Holding) and, uh, that’s a very American take on the Roman Republic

Semla, from the good Swedish bakery

So many of the dreams I remember feature busy public spaces, since the pandemic. Not crowds but a sense of bustle and activity around me

Today’s card is the Six of Wands, wishing you the rewards of victory today. Your successes deserve celebration, even if they’re minor

Had a dream that involved both having to pack too much stuff when it was already past checkout time at the hotel and having to escape the city because of a War of the Worlds-style Martian invasion, for extra combo points

Today’s card is the Nine of Cups - comfort, stability, luxury. Perhaps a touch of smugness too, but you deserve good things - this is a day to treat yourself, if you can

Good morning. Another chilly day and I think the small birds are hungry. I swear I saw a blackbird fly over to look at me through the kitchen window, then fly over to the empty feeder and look back at me pointedly again

@n Just about to send a copy of Biological Exuberance your way - is the existing address still good, or are you moving soon?

(I’d prefer different terms for those tendencies too, but that’s because I think there’s more radical potential in queer happiness than queer misery and she thinks the opposite. But neither is much use without the other to contextualise)

I read a thing by Elizabeth Sandifer yesterday where she was talking about “scab picking” vs “hugboxing” as two opposed types of queer literature. And really, I think it’s a dialectic and anything worthwhile partakes of both?