unbibium

I had a dream that I was taking my first trip to Europe in 20 years. and for some reason i was with my dad and my brother.

I remember a few points where I questioned if I was in a dream, because I didn't remember the plane ride, and didn't see any Italian text anywhere. but I dismissed these.

The city, I never learned the name of.

We went to some grocery store for provisions. The brands looked unfamiliar but that was it. We went to a restaurant and watched someone play a piano.

We checked into a hotel and I got my own room. I had the same luggage as I took to Europe in 2002, which I still have in real life. at this point it all started to fall apart.

I opened my luggage and realized I forgot to pack most of what I needed, especially clothes. Then I left my hotel room and realized I didn't remember my room number, and wasn't sure if I had my key. I rummaged through my pockets, thought I felt a key card but it all turned into random business cards when I looked at it. I found my phone but it was displaying nothing but red numbers, I guess my SIM card didn't work internationally. And at some point I wasn't wearing any pants. I wondered if my room was still open and entered another room but it wasn't mine. It was empty but clearly someone else's. I figured I'd make my way to the front desk, there were so many escalators but finding a "down" one was impossible. and instead of finding the front desk, I ended up outside. I didn't even know where the hotel was or what it was called.

when i was out there i heard a loudspeaker announcement, and it was in English.

today was albinism awareness day and I have albinism and that's one of the reasons antivaxers bother me especially. lemme explain.

This coming decade, an mRNA vaccine for HIV is entering human trials. If it's effective, it will finally put an end to outbreaks around the world, especially in Africa. and I just know that there's going to be campaigns against it, big huge scare campaigns, suggesting that the vaccine is a dangerous colonialist plot or something, and encouraging the public to stick to alternative medicine.

One of the alternative medicines for HIV is the bones of humans with albinism, particularly in Tanzania. People have been killed for their bones.

This hasn't happened in America yet, but after seeing how we handled the COVID pandemic, I'm not completely sure something that horrific would never happen here.

So people asking me all the time "when did you know you were cisgender" and I think the first time it really hit me was when I was 12 years old, and I called the video store on the phone to see if they had "Short Circuit 2" or something, and the clerk called me "ma'am" and I felt this shame about my voice and rage at the clerk. And sure enough, when I got older and my voice changed and people called me "sir" on the phone I felt so much better about myself. so I thought "yeah I'm sticking with this".

Earlier this night, I had a dream that my cats had knocked over the large flat screen TV in my living room and damaged the picture. but I woke up and had to pee.

then i had a dream that it was early in the morning and I heard a human voice call through my door. I went to my living room and the door was open, and some couch cushions were placed near my front door. there was a delivery vehicle assembling a large console television on my lawn. I told them I didn't order this stuff, and they must have the wrong address, but I couldn't get anyone's attention. I went inside and tried to figure out what to do, but the next thing I knew they were done... and in record time they'd replaced my entire living room with new furniture, three massive tube televisions of different sizes in a row, on a new stand, new cabinets everywhere, and for some reason some 2-foot-tall candy dispensers filled with the kind of pectin-based fruit chew variety candy that I don't really eat anymore. And they left a receipt. I couldn't find an amount, or whether it was paid or not, or my address, but I did see my own name on the bottom, which indicated that someone had ordered this stuff specifically for me. anyway I spent some time trying to get help before I woke up

so that's two times I woke up and had that relieved feeling of it all having been a dream. my nightmares are lame

Hey, remember that "First They Came" poem? It's eight lines about four times they came for people. The first three times, he follows up with why he said nothing. The fourth time, well I won't spoil the ending.

Without looking it up, can you remember who they came for, and in which order?

For bonus points, did they come for anyone before that first group? Someone the author might not have even noticed, or thought worth mentioning after it was all over?

so, there's two versions of feminism out there. If you listen to feminists, their biggest issues are control over their own bodies and just the most basic assurances of safety in public, and equal pay for equal work. If you listen to conservatives, they all hate men, they want men especially fathers to have no rights, they want to be able to make men disappear by simply accusing them of something, equal pay to men even if they take "easier" jobs, etc... Classic strawman technique.

How many men out there learn the conservative definition of feminism, and then become feminists anyway because the conservative position remains so much more repulsive?

I remember a guy online about 20 years ago who really hated himself super-hard, and I remember he brought up "male gaze" a few times but I wasn't sure what he meant by context, like it's a buzzword he was repeating. I later learned that this just refers to any media where the camera presumes a male's perspective, by looking at things men are interested in, like boobs and cars and stuff. It's not always inappropriate, as sometimes that's what the media's about, or maybe the director's emphasizing a certain character's point of view. But when it's inappropriate, having a name for it is pretty useful for critiquing. But if you don't know what the name "male gaze" means, you might interpret it as the thesis "men oppress women by looking at them".

and, it's not like NOBODY believes that thesis – back then, just as now, there are women who go out in cameras and confront men who even glance at them.

but, like, on the opposite side of that, you have Jessie Gender, who takes 2 hours to get out a single point because she absolutely must cover all angles of her opinion every single time, lest someone listening in good faith accidentally get the wrong idea, accidentally walk away with the wrong definition of "male gaze"... and she still gets skewered because conservatives argue in bad faith and ignore all that shit.

no time for a conclusion, i have to go to work

What's the best way to get ChatGPT to riff on the parable of Darth Plagueis the Wise?

there's a movie coming out where Colin Farrell plays a guy whose best friend suddenly can't stand to be around him, and the trailer is like "oh what a wacky premise"

and Colin's character was being really needy and clingy about it, trying to ask what he did wrong, trying to win him over to come back.

and I thought "wow, that's probably what I looked like the first five times that happened to me."

then it dawned upon me that this might not be a normal experience for most people.

most of the people I care about get sick of me and tell me to go away eventually, stop answering texts. I've been kicked out of groups.

Sometimes I can understand why. for example, sometimes I'd be consumed with anxiety and unable to get out of it, and I used to be really selfish and try to reach out to healthier friends of mine to talk me down and help me through it. But now I just ride it out, maybe talk to a therapist about it a week later. It's a good thing I stopped bothering people about it because it's happening WAY more often now.

but sometimes it's just like, I cobbled together some friends that I'd see in person, and get some regular chill TV night going, and they seem to enjoy themselves really enthusiastically, and I even feel human again for just that one night a week... but then they cancel 10 weeks in a row. the first four it's like "out of town" and "got COVID" but by week 10 it's just "i'm tired today" and I'd be a moron to ask again for an 11th week. well, back to square one.

so if the King continues the tradition of addressing the nation on TV at Christmas, it's going to happen during a winter energy crisis that everyone saw coming and the Tory government refused to do anything about.

It will absolutely include footage of his mother's giga-expensive funeral and a paragraph about how we're all grieving someone who died of being 96, no matter how many of his subjects are dying of being poor.

When I was in eighth grade and started learning algebra, we learned from the Saxon algebra textbooks, the one where the whole front cover was the letters in the word "ALGEBRA", gigantic and packed in like sardines.

And I seem to remember that textbook laying some important groundwork, like the concept that numbers are a human invention, totally made up.

and I kind of want to verify this, and just see how far down the philosophical rabbit hole it went.

but, it might explain why suddenly math textbooks are among the textbooks under scrutiny in Florida schools, because their culture war requires the public to believe that "social construct" is some postmodernist buzzword, a meta-bogeyman that only invites the deconstruction of all the things conservatives use to maintain the status quo. But if children realize that the very numbers that govern our entire society are a social construct, that could demystify the whole concept.

After all, though numbers are a social construct, that doesn't mean they're useless or that the whole system's going to be thrown out for something new and confusing... right?

like, everyone in Europe used nothing but Roman numerals, for centuries. But we're all using Arabic numerals now. That must have been a rough transition.