kiestan

Saw this from bluedreaming's post and it looked fuuun. Did this with my digital shelf of books as I'm abroad and lacking access to my bookshelves at home. I miss them.

1. Take five books off your bookshelf. I picked the fiction novels that showed up in my most recently opened section.
2. Book #1 -- first sentence: It was like my dad always said, squinting at the endless, golden fields stretching to the horizon: “You catch them Sandhill cranes singing overhead, following the crick up north, then you know it’s spring.” --Names for the Dawn written by C.L. Beaumont.
3. Book #2 -- last sentence on page fifty: Griffon’s gay. --Notes from a Regicide written by Isaac Fellman.
4. Book #3 -- second sentence on page one hundred: He’s big, his muscles tight against his T-shirt, and he looks tired. --Evander Mills 4: Mirage City written by Lev Ac Rosen
5. Book #4 -- next to the last sentence on page one hundred fifty: In fact, he quickly forgot about his dinner. --Under My Skin written by A.E. Dooland
6. Book #5 -- final sentence of the book: That’s enough. --Some Strange Music Draws Me In written by Griffin Hansbury
7. Make the five sentences into a paragraph:

That's enough. Griffon’s gay. He’s big, his muscles tight against his T-shirt, and he looks tired. In fact, he quickly forgot about his dinner. It was like my dad always said, squinting at the endless, golden fields stretching to the horizon: “You catch them Sandhill cranes singing overhead, following the crick up north, then you know it’s spring.”

lmfaoooo

A while ago I wrote a media roundup for November. When I got to the part about novels I'd read that month, I started typing and typing and it got a little long. When I decided to split it into its own post, my comments per book got a tad long too. So I'm just going to dedicate a small post to each book instead!

We Both Laughed in Pleasure by Lou Sullivan

This is an edited collection of personal diaries by a gay ftm activist born in Wisconsin, who moved to San Francisco. He started writing his diaries when he was 11 in 1961, and he kept up with it until he died from AIDs in his late 30s, in 1991.

Lou wrote with incredible clarity for a horny, depressed teenager.

( Cut for several nsfw references in his journals )

I highlighted a bunch of quotes from his diaries, but I really liked this one, written 3 years after receiving his AIDs diagnosis, which he spent anxious that he wouldn't be able to publish his books/diaries in time:

So here I am, forty-two minutes into 1990, and "thankful" is not really what I am feeling. What I am feeling is amazed, inspired, relieved, amused. Here I am, long after I ever imagined. I remember telling Sasha Alyson that I could wait to be placed on his publication schedule, because there was no way I would be around in 1989. And now I've left 1989 behind! How funny! I feel such a sense of power and control over the future... that, a word I've hardly dared to utter these past three years.

He died a year after writing this entry. Memoirs and diary collections like his made me think about how non-linear the progression of your life is, how unpredictable and indifferent fate can be, and how there isn't a grand plan to follow, just a narrative you create when you reflect on and make meaning out of your personal history.

I've joked throughout the past few years that "argghhh i'm burned out at work" but only recently did I realise it wasn't a joke, haha! So I read about it and I found this interesting way of defining job burnout that helped me clarify my experiences better.

Dr Christina Maslach gave a talk about Maslach Burnout Inventory (MBI), a survey developed by her team that you can fill in.

Here's a free copy on Scribd, though officially the paid version on Mind Garden's costs ~50 USD.

( How to do the burnout survey, profile yourself, and the 6 organisational factors causing job burnout according to Dr Maslach )

That's my infodump of the day 😼

My lack of reading in Oct frustrated me so I may have overcompensated this month… I’m still halfway through a few books, but I’ve had this written up for a while, so just gonna post it!

It also occurred to me that the majority of my media consumption this month is trans-related. Until I get it out of my system, please have my gender fucky media recs wahaha.

Games

• it sucks to be us by tofurocks: Interactive fiction about a closeted transmasc enby and a trans guy who was forced to detransition meeting at a sapphic event. It’s a short, thoughtful game even if it took me half a dozen replays to get to a positive ending… is this why I’m a single pringle irl? t_t I’m too cowardly to rack up enough courage points to befriend queer people even in fictional games? Help
• Gang Beasts by indie studio Boneloaf: This was SO fun, a 10/10 battle royale party game. Someone I know bought it on Steam and we punched / kicked / picked up and threw each other around by pressing playstation controller buttons. Pressing random buttons guarantees you at least one win in a series of battles. Watch the videos in the link, it’s super cute.

Short stories

• Everquest by Naomi Kanakia: Set in India, a transfem person plays video games. Sad and hopeful. <3
• Slavebreaker by rezingrave: Gothic erotic horror and space opera fiction set in a TERF lesbian empire, featuring unreliable narrators, brainwashing, parasites, genocide and rebels. This was insane and I loved it. Reviewers on AO3 and itch.io called it "tboy yaoi psychosis" and a pulp pastiche. Nsfw. <3
• The Shape of My Name by Nino Cipri: Time travel story about forgiving family, transitioning to find yourself, and Illinois' oil fields... it made me cry. <3
• To Balance the Weight of Khalem by R.B. Lemberg: Achy soft fantasy story about immigration driven by war, as well as about the comfort of food, the desire to be seen, and the search for a home. By a bigender author from Ukraine, who has novels! <3
• Small Changes Over Long Periods of Time by KM Szpara: Trans guy gets bitten by a gay vampire. Fun and campy. Nsfw!
• Of Warps and Wefts by Innocent Chizaram Ilo: After marriage, a person lives as a husband by day and as a wife by night, or vice versa. By a Nigerian author. This had a lot of characters, but the story stayed with me.
• Chokechain by Andrew Joseph White: Teen trans boy finds out his parents bought a robot who looks like his pre-transition self. Entertaining if a bit edgy.
• I sexually identify as an attack helicopter by Isabel Fall: A pilot transitions from the gender of "woman" into the gender of "attack helicopter" to get better at fighting wars for their AI government. The military references flew (hehe flew) over my head, but in the end I found this a thoughtful subversion of the derogatory "haha if you identify as x gender can I identify as an attack helicopter?" meme.

Comics/manga

• Becoming by ND Stevenson: Quiet comic about the author discovering he's bigender and transmasc. <3
• Haikei, Seken-sama | Dear Society by Kanzaki Shin: About the protag realizing he's ftm while growing up. Apparently it's based on the mangaka's real life, and if so it sounds like it was traumatizing. Actually one of my worst nightmares sketched out in manga form. T_T Good read even if the ending didn't resonate with me... but if that's how it went down irl for the author, good for him, aha! <3

Books

• We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961–1991 <3
• Some Strange Music Draws Me In by Griffin Hansbury <3
• Crawl: Stories by Max Delsohn
• The Lilac People by Milo Todd
• You Weren't Meant to Be Human by Andrew Joseph White
• Captive Prince by CS Pacat

Initially I started writing about each book, but they became wordy, so I'll put them in a different post. :D

Been looking for a new theme for a while, one that's not too harsh on the eyes, I hope, especially with the stark purple of the previous theme. I also like the tags, calendar, etc. being tucked away at the bottom of the page. The profile icon per post also looks minimalistic.

I'm pretty happy looking at this new theme :)

Edit: oh no, it seems rather mobile unfriendly

Edit 2: Okay, I’ve tossed out the idea of having the tags and calendar being at the bottom of the page on desktop. That theme was Ice Chic by krja. I’ve settled on Bluebird, also by krja for Practicality instead. It looks nicer on mobile, but I’m uncertain about the readability of the text’s colors against the dark background, so let me know if it’s difficult to read!

Edit 3: Switched the theme to Frozen Sky by dancing_serpent, using the base style Blanket by sforzinda. I fiddled with Dreamwidth's journal style customization configs, e.g. removed the mobile-unfriendly navigation bar and chucked it under the links list module. It looks cleaner now. The dark text on a white background seems easier to read too.