ashinadash

Sorry about my last post.

Estrogen is pretty expensive when you don't have health care coverage from your job. I was shocked to learn that prescriptions aren't covered at all unless you have a job, myself, and I've been eating the cost on prescriptions up to now but I've been cleaned out. Total is $98.

Ko-fi is here

Not /j, /srs.

I was looking back over my posts, and that was my honest reaction. It's not very nice to keep autistic children around as your goofy lolcow, you know. Friends don't let friends post cringe. In your own words, I want to know why you thought it was fine to act like the kind of fuckin internet posting I do was fine, and that I should continue to do so, more, worse. Does that really seem like a good idea to you? Go look at those comments and say it to my face, fucker.

If you didn't, you are obligated to share with the class why you didn't offer even an ounce of dissent about it. There's a point past which politeness becomes condescending, and many months ago you could have saved everyone a ton of trouble, if you'd just said "this is terrible" or maybe even "lol cringe" at some point. It would have been mean, but it would have been less mean than sitting back and alllowing the high volumes of horror and embarrassment that ensued to happen. I mean, really.

If you disagree, I'd like to invite you to consider that you're wrong, and whoever gave me the ability to think and transcribe those thoughts with a keyboard has a lot to answer for. I looked at the megathreads today, and seeing people even partially attribute the 2500+ comment threads to my repulsive disaster posting is awful. There are people who actually post things of value in those threads.

It's been a good while since the contradictions sharpened hard enough for me to just be like "I changed my sex this past year" and start putting my entire self under the label "nb". This rules, btw, it's been very healthy for me. It was distinctly not a Very Special Episode

I think it has presented some terminology and labelling/word trouble though, as much as internal re-sexing of the body is awesome and cool and rad. One of the best examples I can think of is that I kinda wanted an alternative for "wife", on account that my partner is agender. Between us, we didn't really come up with anything good, though? I do like saying "my beautiful better half" a lot, but there are many sentences where that doesn't sub in 1:1 for "wife", and tbh we might also continue use of that...

I was also big into saying things like "girlkisser" and being a really annoying lesbian all over the place, (I am still into that) and I mean, I could still do that... but there's not really an equivalently snappy meme to indicate the sort of t4t I am an enjoyer of, I guess. It feels weird, and I just started leaning on saying "t4t" a lot.

I'll probably get laughed at for this tiny mindpalace, and it does feel a lot of the time like I arrived at being nb backwards, or via incorrect thought or lacking in theory or something. Ripping out and replacing all the gendered terms I use for myself was awesome, it fucks! Trying to change the gendered terms I use to express attraction is painful! Nobody else seems to have this problems though, so y'know, doesn't feel that good distressing! Unpleasant! What do I read to fix this!!

and it’s often viewed as a truly ancient artifact. It’s a common thing you see with many older games, including basically any cRPG made before 2000 and many text adventure games. As poser-in-need-of-a-haircut Jason Graves succinctly puts it, “It’s immune from any and all criticism because it’s so ancient, it’s so old, it’s so groundbreaking, and it’s so simple that it’s downright charming. Any sticks and stones that might be hurled this game’s way, it’s immune from all criticism.” And Jason Graves is one of the few RETRO GAMERS who can be seen going to bat for the game…

But I’ve been playing progressively older RPGs. Be afraid

I can’t fully disagree that Dragon Quest is interesting as an artifact. It's historically important, the way it chops both Wizardry: Proving Ground of the Mad Overlord and Ultima I: The First Age of Darkness precisely in half and glues them together, in the process creating both the console RPG and “JRPG” while totally cutting anything like character building. (from Wizardry it takes the first-person turn-based combat, cursed items and rude dungeons; from Ultima it takes the overworld, commands menu and the king being your home base) I also think it’s worth it to look at the technology of the time and cross-reference that with interviews with Yuji Horii and the gang, to see how games evolved back then. Dragon Quest is a basic CNROM game, a tiny lil cartridge with 64kb of total space, equally split between program and character data. When the devs talk about not being able to include multiple characters due to “memory constraints”, you know they don’t mean RAM, they mean storage space. There aren’t any fancy mapper chips used for the Famicom Dragon Quest releases either, no special RAM or anything on the carts, which makes it even easier to appreciate that when the cart size doubles with Dragon Quest II’s 128kb UNROM cart, the game design way more than doubles in complexity.

While I understand that the quote way up there is more of a statement on its legacy than its quality, I also think the mindset kind of dismisses both historical and normal game analysis (as much as any "game analysis" can be normal ) of this goofy little 64k Famicom game and the ways it was a strong piece of design. Designed by necessity to get the most out of what the team was working with and could do at the time.

Dragon Quest is in fact a game that is extremely simple—there’s not much strategy to one-versus-one turn-based combat, and there are literally two damaging spells—but that simplicity in some respects has made it shine progressively brighter, I think. I was driven to these games after playing Final Fantasy IV (PSP) and VI (GBA) and really, does the fourth game play that fundamentally differently to the first two Dragon Quests? It has more robust magic and character stats and its presentation is a step up, but fundamentally most of these games are just Dragon Quest with extra steps (ATB exempted). Except, Final Fantasy IV is kind of slow, right? When you select Cura from the spell menu, first the textbox fires off, and then Cecil steps up and does a little animation, and then the spell effect fires off on whoever you targeted. In DraQue, you select Snooze, the text appears, and then the enemy is put to sleep. (or not)

I actually think the speed at which Dragon Quest plays is pretty essential to its easy playability. I doubt it was intentional, but the lack of overwrought (or any, lol) attack animations or elaborate field-to-battle-transitions that load for a few seconds or slow text or whatever feels great. It seems like small stuff, but all RPGs have you fighting stuff all the time, so even shaving half-seconds off of it is really important. Any more added fluff would upset the careful balance that makes fights fast n fun. Even though it’s no-frills, bonking a Dire Werewolf or whatever still feels pretty good because it happens so FAST. Press button, text pop, Famicom noise channel static and BAM! You can be into and out of that battle in under five seconds if you’re strong enough, which rules.

They say Dragon Quest is Grind: The Game, (“they” being basically everyone I’ve ever seen talk about DraQue) but is it really though? I dunno about that. There are a few reasons I disagree: for one thing, if an RPG has good combat that doesn’t suck and is fun, I am compelled to want to play it, obviously. I had no problem just beating the hell out of Starman Ghosts in Earthbound because it was fun! Rush to throw up the Psi Shield and start crushing those assholes with your best Psi techniques – I find Earthbound’s combat is fast, furious and satisfying, so I did it a lot. DraQue’s combat is a LOT simpler, but when you level up it makes a HUGE difference to the damage you do, and smashing enemies that were giving you shit before feels great. The other thing is that I’ve taken on a policy of not running from fights the first time I waltz through any area. I think most old console RPGs are designed around the assumption you’ll do this, because I pretty much blitzed through those two Final Fantasy games and a few others by doing this.

DraQue does have one or two chokepoints where you really need to grind excessively, though; one is when you go south to Mercado to get the Sword of Loto and the Mirror Shield. You end up in a situation where the monsters around the previous town of Rimuldar are too weak to justify the time spent for the XP, and the Green Dragons, Grand Mages and Star Chimeras around Mercado run a high chance of killing you in a few turns. I had to grind out a few levels risking constant death to these nerds, which was kind of frustrating but didn’t take long. The other is the final boss and dungeon, which honestly is expected and I was only two levels under for that. Since DraQue is pretty simple, there aren’t really battle items to tilt the odds, and statistically you either have to roll 24/7 crits or be level 20. Disappointing The grand total of grinding in this entire game, for me, (I counted) was an hour and twenty-six minutes though, of a sixteen hour playthrough. Again, I was probably underleveled.

The reason you can end up so underleveled at all is that in contrast to almost every JRPG that supersedes it, DraQue is a game that absolutely lets you off the leash to mess around. The goal is to kill the DracoLord in his castle, but that’s it. Speedruns for this game are wild, partly due to the fucked-up input handling but mostly because there’s technically nothing stopping you from walking up to the final boss right from the start. You’ll get your ass kicked badly, obviously, so the goal is basically to get strong enough and gather enough gear to challenge the castle and win. It’s like Breath of the Wild, smh cannot believe Nintendo stole that…

How you go about this is pretty much up to you, though. You aren’t actually required to save the missing princess, or get Loto’s big gear, or even go to most towns, honestly. I did go pretty much everywhere and do pretty much everything because I thought it was fun and wanted to see what the map looked like, but being allowed to just wander on my own was very refreshing. It’s fun to venture around unguided and see what areas there are, what enemies live where and how badly you’ll get your ass kicked. I think one of the reasons the Super Nintendo Final Fantasy games feel so effortless is because they often will not let you go get pummeled. (that and they’re always dragging you by the nose into another cutscene) I had a lot of fun heading south toward Rimuldar early in DraQue and just challenging high-level monsters like Goldmen and Iron Scorpions early. It’s a high-risk-high-reward proposition, which makes it both engaging (will I score this hit with a high enough damage roll? ) and satisfying (fuck yeah 120 xp ) to mess around in dangerous areas. As much as it’s a relatively small game world with simple mechanics and not much dialogue, it does truly let you adventure around.

Adventuring around is also really fun, because by contrast to Wizardry which just game-overs you if you wipe, DraQue simply returns you to the castle with half your money gone. In a game where the final shield is so overpriced this might seem rude, but it’s one of the things the game does to sand down some of the REALLY “rough edges” of its cRPG ancestors, which is nice honestly. I don’t think the intense brutality of the old Wizardry games is inherently a bad thing, but I find DraQue to be relaxing and chill to play.

Even though DraQue is pretty old, it’s not that cryptic, especially not compared to Dragon Quest II. There are one or two things you might want a guide for, and the game came with one in the US so why not keep one around? I honestly got lost more in Final Fantasy VI, though. I found it pretty easy to wander between important points and find cool stuff. The game freely allows that wandering, so why not?

I guess Dragon Quest doesn’t really need defending–I know, this entire spiel is really inexplicable –it is, after all, so ancient that it is immune from criticism. It feels weird though because despite that, it’s a game with kind of a bad reputation in english-speaking gamer communities. Famously Nintendo resorted to giving the thing away to upsell their adver-magazine, and copies of it could still be bought at internal Nintendo sales as late as 2001. Dragon Warrior actually sold within spitting distance of the first Final Fantasy though, about 500,000 units, so I don’t really get how that’s a failure. Pretty good for a NES game, they couldn’t all be Excitebike. Nowadays it’s pretty much treated as a curio, something you study rather than play, and nerds will recommend you go play the (slower, even easier) remakes on Game Boy Colour or Super Famicom. I can at least say that a re-translation patch is nice, because Dragon Quest has funny little spell names (e.g. Dragon Quest V’s wind attacks are named Woosh, Swoosh and Kaswoosh) that the original Dragon Warrior localisation loses entirely. The original english version is of unnaturally high quality for the time though, and if the goofy ye-olde-thou script appeals, go for it.

Honestly though, while it could be that I just have really weird brainrot, I enjoyed playing Dragon Quest a lot. It was breezy and cool! It’s famous even in the west, but I don’t think it gets enough credit as an actual game that is fun. Feels weird that western gamers dismiss this, it would kind of be like if you said the original Super Mario Bros had ‘aged badly’ and wasn’t worth playing, or some shit. The game does have one or two quirks that are just genuinely weird, age-related things; for example the keyboard-spanning commands of Ultima haven’t been condensed into the first Final Fantasy’s single A-button “interact” yet, so DraQue has separate commands for Talk, Search, Door and Stairs. I still think it’s pretty silly to play Dragon Quest (or any retro RPGs, perhaps) without appreciating just how carefully Chunsoft had to handle cutting early cRPGs down to something both technically feasible and enjoyable to play in 1986. Dragon Quest is famous because it’s pretty good.

I try to keep note of games that people say are “aged badly” or “archaic” or other stereotypical things like that, mostly because under a clusterfuck UI, the original Fallout is really good! People will say "oh the UI is too weird why is the interact menu a weird click-drag thing" but Fallout rules! This has also led me to stuff like Tactics Ogre, and I got to Dragon Quest this way as well. Banger games that people will claim are too old to play. DraQue really improved my confidence toward old stinky games again, as each of the other examples has. Surely, if people say Dragon Quest is so ancient and smelly and basic and hard to approach, but it actually kinda rules, I can dig into anything, right? Learn how to work the keyboard controls on Ultima III Exodus? Mess around with Eye of the Beholder? It’s to the point that I take “eugh this game is so old/aged badly/etcetc” as half a recommendation now, and I’m excited to try more old and obscure games once I stop playing so much fuckin Dragon Quest. (send help )

It's like this every year. If you know, you know.

I never really had a fondness for fucking christmas spirit or whatever so it figures I'd have no affection for anything holiday related I guess. But my significant other has both considerable trauma (bad experiences on and around the day) and and a desire for doing something together on the day.

When I moved out a few years ago, I thought finally I'd be able to do cool and original things around it, y'know build up our own little traditions. That's a thing people do, right? But my stupidass job had me working the week of the 25th like every other year if not more, so half the time I wasn't even off. Lmao, no spoons.

I also figured that now I'm fired due to being increasingly deathly ill, I would truly have the time and spoons to do stuff for the holidays! I can use some of that sweet sweet gubmint money what I stole from hardworking taxpayers (what a welfare queen lmao) to do something nice for us, right?? I'm sure I won't be equally if not moreso bereft of spoons due to a multitude of things including eviction hearings, chronic pain and more???

Right?????

It just exhausts me and I hate absolutely fucking everything. That bit post about banning christmas under communism is something I uncritically support. I dunno.

A year or two ago I was playing Final Fantasy VI in mGBA on Windows, and I had put the game down for like six months after saving. I'd reinstalled my OS since then, but I went ahead and put the .sav and rom into my folder and pointed a fresh mGBA at them.

It wouldn't load. I assumed at the time that this was a freak accident and something had messed up on my end, why wouldn't it be?

Cut to a couple months ago and I was playing Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis (pre-squeakwuel to the greatest game of all time) on the Wii U version of Retroarch with the mGBA core, because 160p scales well to the gamepad screen. I got about eight hours in, saved both a .sav (I thought retroarch saved .srm?) and save state and set it down. Now just this week I pulled that save file from the SD card, hoping to check on it in mGBA on a Windoze machine.

Nothing, mGBA pretends it's not there.

For fun, I also tried booting it through GBArunner2 on a Twilightmenu DSi, openagbfirm on a New 3DS and the current desktop version of mGBA in Retroarch. None of these wanted to see it. Out of pure curiosity though I put the file back on the Wii U and it still reads fine. Okay.

Why are GBA save files like this? I understand savestates are proprietary but I've carried save files for other consoles (DS saves, SNES saves, PS1 saves) around to different systems and formats and not had an issue. At one point I took my Playstation Tactics Ogre save from Duckstation format to PCSX-ReArmed format to the weird proprietary format the PSP uses for PS1 Eboots, and then converted it back to Duckstation format and still had it load.

Yes these are all slightly different versions of mGBA but seriously, what kind of emulator breaks save compatibility every time it updates?

EDIT: My FFVI is cooked but I made headway on Knight of Lodis. The solution:

The .sav in your roms folder Retroarch makes is apparently a dummy file made for no reason. My beautiful better half discovered: if you go Retroarch -> Cores -> savefiles you will find the actual SRM files. I have loaded it on a peecee successfully after simply renaming it from .srm to .sav!

Look right, I like a lot of things about the foundational 2007 text Whipping Girl by Julia Serano. But if you've ever been told to read this book without any qualifiers, I'd like to apologise on behalf of the trans community.

Obviously the concepts of traditional and oppositional sexism, the idea of transmisogyny, Serano's analysis of media depictions of trans women, and more are all superb and well worthy of praise. However, Serano is a land of contrasts, as AcidSmiley so concisely put it. She's read both Leslie Feinberg and Kate Bornstein's works, and writes this extremely salient quote:

We must also stop pretending that there are essential differences between women and men. This begins with the acknowledgement that there are exceptions to every gender rule and stereotype, and this simply stated fact disproves all gender theories that purport that female and male are mutually exclusive categories.

Despite all that, Serano has a perspective that's utterly mired in exorsexist* binary-only assumptions, with language to match. On own, describing someone taking estrogen as "hormonally female" or her body prior to hormone replacement therapy as "physically male" would be unpleasantly cisnormative, but just that. I respect fully that the intent of this book is to analyse the ins and outs of being trans in the gender binary, and so the text is focused in that direction. When Serano writes goofy shit like "mtf spectrum" though, you wonder if she wouldn't be better served by thinking a little outside of the two-genders box.

She doesn't want to, though; Julia Serano circa 2007 (the text has not been meaningfully updated to my knowledge) is a brave warrior going against the grain of non binary domination :citation to defend our poor, repressed binary genders. She's taking down those woke non-binary moralists from their ivory towers:

There are many different (but often overlapping) forms of gender entitlement and gender anxiety. For example, one of the most frequently discussed forms of gender entitlement is heterosexism, the belief that heterosexuality is the only "natural," legitimate, or morally acceptable form of sexual desire. Heterosexist gender entitlement ean lead to homophobia, which is an expression of gender anxiety directed against those people who engage in same-sex relationships. Similarly, the gender-entitled belief that all women are (or should be) feminine and men masculine-which some have called cisgenderism-gives rise to transphobia, a gender anxiety that is directed against people who fall outside of those norms. While homophobia and transphobia have both received mainstream attention, thinking in terms of gender entitlement and gender anxiety also allows us to consider less well- known (but just as disparaging) forms of gender and sexual discrimination. For example, many gays and lesbians who believe that all people are "naturally" either homosexual or heterosexual often express biphobia, a gender anxiety directed toward bisexual people because they challenge the presumption that people can only be attracted to one sex or the other. I have also met some people in the transgender community who feel that identifying outside of the male/female binary is superior to, or more enlightened than, identifying within it. Such people often express gender anxiety (binary- phobia?) at people who identify strongly as either female or male.

I would be laughing if I weren't actually really mad about this classic, foundational transfeminist text featuring tons of brainworms about anyone outside the binary. It's a punchline, the phrase "binary-phobia" is perfect to sit right next to "heterophobia" or "cisphobia". It's right up there alongside white westerners claiming to be victims of racism when someone calls them a cracker, even. It should be plainly self-evident how ridiculous a claim this is. I want to ask Serano circa 2007 to tell me which genders have legal recognition - binary or non-binary ones?

It is truly incredible that a woman can write so sharply about the cultural/societal hedgemony of cis gender and heterosexuality, about how the concept of anything being inherently gendered is antithetical to feminism, and then turn around and write a deeply unserious aside about how non-binary people are apparently smug moralists commiting discrimination against people of binary gender due to the same gender anxiety**--in itself a smart concept about how queer people disrupt assumed gender/sexual normality--that drives cis people to be transphobes!! I am for real left somewhat speechless.

I don't think Whipping Girl is a book nobody should read, obviously. But I scoured the bearsite to see if anyone had dome criticism of or even qualified their recommendation of Whipping Girl, and I found nothing. Part of me wonders if anyone has made a concerted criticism of this book before, but surely someone has before me. I yap exclusively for your benefit! I wonder if Sexed Up or Excluded are better, but frankly I'm just disappointed and angry. Truly a joke.

--

*Exorsexist, I learned today, is discrimination against people outside the gender binary!

**Serano describes gender anxiety as "the act of becoming irrationally upset or being made uncomfortable by the existence of those people who challenge or bring into question one's gender entitlement." In turn, she describes gender entitlement being "an arrogant conviction that one's own beliefs, perceptions, and assumptions regarding gender and sexuality are more valid than those of other people". She is more or less insinuating that non-binary people are befuddled supremacists who cannot stand... adherence to the gender binary. Cool.

Look right, I like a lot of things about the foundational 2007 text Whipping Girl by Julia Serano. But if you've ever been told to read this book without any qualifiers, I'd like to apologise on behalf of the trans community.

Obviously the concepts of traditional and oppositional sexism, the idea of transmisogyny, Serano's analysis of media depictions of trans women, and more are all superb and well worthy of praise. However, Serano is a land of contrasts, as AcidSmiley so concisely put it. She's read both Leslie Feinberg and Kate Bornstein's works, and writes this extremely salient quote:

We must also stop pretending that there are essential differences between women and men. This begins with the acknowledgement that there are exceptions to every gender rule and stereotype, and this simply stated fact disproves all gender theories that purport that female and male are mutually exclusive categories.

Despite all that, Serano has a perspective that's utterly mired in exorsexist* binary-only assumptions, with language to match. On own, describing someone taking estrogen as "hormonally female" or her body prior to hormone replacement therapy as "physically male" would be unpleasantly cisnormative, but just that. I respect fully that the intent of this book is to analyse the ins and outs of being trans in the gender binary, and so the text is focused in that direction. When Serano writes goofy shit like "mtf spectrum" though, you wonder if she wouldn't be better served by thinking a little outside of the two-genders box.

She doesn't want to, though; Julia Serano circa 2007 (the text has not been meaningfully updated to my knowledge) is a brave warrior going against the grain of non binary domination :citation to defend our poor, repressed binary genders. She's taking down those woke non-binary moralists from their ivory towers:

There are many different (but often overlapping) forms of gender entitlement and gender anxiety. For example, one of the most frequently discussed forms of gender entitlement is heterosexism, the belief that heterosexuality is the only "natural," legitimate, or morally acceptable form of sexual desire. Heterosexist gender entitlement ean lead to homophobia, which is an expression of gender anxiety directed against those people who engage in same-sex relationships. Similarly, the gender-entitled belief that all women are (or should be) feminine and men masculine-which some have called cisgenderism-gives rise to transphobia, a gender anxiety that is directed against people who fall outside of those norms. While homophobia and transphobia have both received mainstream attention, thinking in terms of gender entitlement and gender anxiety also allows us to consider less well- known (but just as disparaging) forms of gender and sexual discrimination. For example, many gays and lesbians who believe that all people are "naturally" either homosexual or heterosexual often express biphobia, a gender anxiety directed toward bisexual people because they challenge the presumption that people can only be attracted to one sex or the other. I have also met some people in the transgender community who feel that identifying outside of the male/female binary is superior to, or more enlightened than, identifying within it. Such people often express gender anxiety (binary- phobia?) at people who identify strongly as either female or male.

I would be laughing if I weren't actually really mad about this classic, foundational transfeminist text featuring tons of brainworms about anyone outside the binary. It's a punchline, the phrase "binary-phobia" is perfect to sit right next to "heterophobia" or "cisphobia". It's right up there alongside white westerners claiming to be victims of racism when someone calls them a cracker, even. It should be plainly self-evident how ridiculous a claim this is. I want to ask Serano circa 2007 to tell me which genders have legal recognition - binary or non-binary ones?

It is truly incredible that a woman can write so sharply about the cultural/societal hedgemony of cis gender and heterosexuality, about how the concept of anything being inherently gendered is antithetical to feminism, and then turn around and write a deeply unserious aside about how non-binary people are apparently smug moralists commiting discrimination against people of binary gender due to the same gender anxiety**--in itself a smart concept about how queer people disrupt assumed gender/sexual normality--that drives cis people to be transphobes!! I am for real left somewhat speechless.

I don't think Whipping Girl is a book nobody should read, obviously. But I scoured the bearsite to see if anyone had dome criticism of or even qualified their recommendation of Whipping Girl, and I found nothing. Part of me wonders if anyone has made a concerted criticism of this book before, but surely someone has before me. I yap exclusively for your benefit! I wonder if Sexed Up or Excluded are better, but frankly I'm just disappointed and angry. Truly a joke.

--

*Exorsexist, I learned today, is discrimination against people outside the gender binary!

**Serano describes gender anxiety as "the act of becoming irrationally upset or being made uncomfortable by the existence of those people who challenge or bring into question one's gender entitlement." In turn, she describes gender entitlement being "an arrogant conviction that one's own beliefs, perceptions, and assumptions regarding gender and sexuality are more valid than those of other people". She is more or less insinuating that non-binary people are befuddled supremacists who cannot stand... adherence to the gender binary. Cool.

Cross-posted from https://hexbear.net/post/3725627 by @[email protected]

Man, I wish it worked

Shut the fuck up

Windows 11 delenda est. Also inb4 "don't".

I feel like bluestacks used to be better but it gives off weird scuffed fremium windows software stink now. What's the best way to run Android apps on an x86-64 computer?

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3433723

This post was inspired partly by @[email protected] , thank u.

I had her famous-unfinished novel-manuscript Otros Valles on my to-read list since I knew it was a thing, (maybe five years ago) but only when I went to look for it did I realise the author had deliberately wiped her presence from everywhere, basically.

Back then I could only find a couple of her essays knocking around pirate sites, nothing more. Coincidentally they are here and here, with Mutual Aid Printing not being listed on her Goodreads page or anything like that.

I guess the question I have is whether or not making a post like this is a bad thing to do? If you read Mutual Aid Printing, the author's intent of wiping herself from the general record as a sort of form of protest is very clear. So I've never really known how cool or uncool it is to even talk about her work. Should I literally not read her stuff, or is the broad statement more the point, and whatever you find is whatever you find? I guess it's kind of semantics, but there's a twinge in my brain that says yapping loudly about Berrout's work may be a foot-in-mouth move.

The other thing, which Berrout also discusses in both linked essays, is that the writers' communities/interlinked social webs/who fucking knows, queer artist's collectives she ran in were often obnoxiously white. I think Ryka Aoki is the only published transfem poc I can think of? Binnie, Peters, Felker-Martin, so on... Please inform me if I've missed anything, I'm not a full historian, simply a dumbass.

So aside from the fact that Berrout represents a rare voice in the space, I like how Otros Valles contrasts and almost critiques Nevada. It has none of the dejected, self-deprecating artifice. I dunno if I'm fit to talk about it but it keeps biting at my mind, and I'm not really sure if I should yap. Thoughts? Opinions? Criticisms? Call me cringe? ✨