Tatakau Shisho, First Episode, Review

Okay, so I decided to give this anime a shot.  It opened up pretty well, with nice almost chilling atmosphere as a person repeats answers in a sort of empty, brainwashed manner to a phonograph. 

Except then, it ruins the somewhat morbid mood of the show with these:

Meet the Boobs.  You will see them more often than her face.  Seriously, this character's face is not shown when she is introduced, only her extremely large physics defying breasts.  This show takes every excuse to pan up her body to show her chest, including a hilarious sequence where she's talking to a woman telepathically and all you see is her breasts.  Shit, I don't know, maybe they are telepathic boobs.

We get a neat battlescene with a lot of action and some gore.  Which is going well, but then the Boobs show up again to kill the mood.

Yes, her shirt is wet.  No, that's not particularly important to anything in the plot.  This show actually has a lot going for it, the story seems interesting overall.  We've got human bombs, brainwashing, cults...but the cheap excuse to show those Boobs is a total buzzkill.  I can like this anime, the one with somber images and hints at an underlying nasty of social systems and torment:

Not this one, which is gratuitous images of ecchi boobs:

This is about how I'm feeling in regards to my schoolwork at the moment

(Image from Crepuscule)

Queer Babies

Sometimes, I wish I bought into the idea that queerness and transness were genetic.  I have a certain fondness for the notion of having and raising queer trans babies, of being able to share queer and trans cultures and community ties with them, of having.  Maybe it would be enough to tip the scales and make me willing to face the social hell that would be heaped on me if I ever had kids if I could know that I'd be able to have little queer trans aspie kids.  I could read them Feinberg for bedtime stories, help them learn the eyebrow codes, and show them queer movies.  They'd grow up knowing their history, Compton Cafeteria Riots and Lawrence v. Texas. And dysphoria sucks, but if my babies had dysphoria, I would get them treatment, I would fight for them.  Because we already have cures for a great deal of dysphoria.  We've got hormones and surgeries.  It's one of those things that transphobes don't think of when they suggest we need "cured".  We've been working on that, and we've made a shit ton of medical progress, and if people would stop getting in our way, we'd make even more.  It's just our version of what we need is totally fucking different from what they imagine people should need.

Of course, in real life, you wouldn't know, and in real life, the trans or queer kids of a genderqueer queer person might tear themselves up and tangle themselves up because of social pressures to not be like their queer parent(s).  It's not okay to pressure kids to have a certain sexuality or gender.  Of course, the rest of the fucking world brutally forces everyone else, but still.  And of course if I had a child that was hetero and cis and neurotypical, I would love them too.  Though there's still a part of me that, when reading studies of "same sex" parenting and they emphasize that the kids won't turn out queer, is rather disappointed by that news. 

Yet another reason to get rid of those things...

Sometimes, when I am not binding and I eat crumbly food, crumbs get in my cleavage.  Stinking boobs, I want rid of you so much.

On "Safe Spaces"

There are some debates around the notion of "safe spaces" and here are a few of my thoughts:

A space cannot be safe for oppressed people and, to some lesser degree, their supporters if it does not have a general atmosphere and understanding of working towards not engaging in oppression against them.  A safe space for a queer person must be a non-homophobic space, a safe space for a trans person must be a non-transphobic space, a safe space for a black person must be a non-racist space.

Can any place with privileged people (especially with them in the majority) be a completely non-oppressive space?  We all internalize and participate in oppressions, but this is especially true for privileged people, as they benefit from the oppression.  Yes, there are privileged people who work on trying to stop engaging in oppression/combat oppressive systems, but this is often a hard issue with a lot of struggle.

However, if you make it an exclusive space, you end up risking having to police the boundaries of the oppressed class.  Also, it's obvious that even without that issue, you can't just set aside issues of making safe groups which will be mixed by their nature, as well as the issue of multiple axis of oppression.  If I can only have a group of low income (or low income raised), disabled, queer, genderqueer, atheist, etc. people for any activity, that's going to make it really hard to organize any groups at all.

That's not to say that I think there's never any value in exclusive spaces, I just don't think they are an ideal solution in many situations.

I tend to feel that "safe space" like coalition, is something that you build as a part of an ongoing process.  You can't just declare that something is safe, or tell someone something is safe if they express concerns about things going on. 

Maybe it would be better to try and work on building safer spaces rather than declaring safe spaces.

Well, That Was Helpful Information

So, I've been playing this zombie third person shooter I got for free way back when playstation gave out a small selection of free games as part of their apology for getting hacked and shit.  I don't have anything better to play at the moment, and, for some reason, I'm growing a bit tired of playing Dragon Age Origins over again.  So, I decided to give this thing a try, but I set it on the easy mode "braindead" instead of the regular "undead" mode, because, hey, I usually don't play either shooters or action games, being more of an strategy/turn based rpg preferring person in general.  And, it's been tolerable, even though it makes me squint to see things even on my bigger tv (a combo of issues with the game's visibility and my shit vision, but, hey, medicaid stops paying for glasses after 21, so there's no hope on the latter front).  Well, while it was loading, the game too the liberty of informing that "Real men play on undead mode".  To which I thought "well, then for us non-"real men", can we play on any mode we like?", also, in rolling my eyes at its presumed maleness of the player, I recalled that I am playing as the female PC.  This game assumed I was a gender insecure man even while I was playing as the female character.  Way to go on that one.

Look, Talking Boobs (a.k.a. Sexual Objectification is Still Totally a Thing)

This is an actual panel from the Ao No Exorcist manga:

Female characters are depicted as sexual objects.  She is reduced to nothing but a pair of waterballoon breasts.  By the way, reading this manga will also teach you that her boobs and top do not obey the laws of physics.  Of course, the bikini has to be magic to keep them from popping out.

I've been sick

I have been sick, but I am starting to feel a bit better.

When I am sick, I have even stranger dreams than usual.  Last night, I dreamed that I was a member of an traveling RV camp and that I kept having to rescue an android from zombies.  Why?  This makes no sense.  Why would an android even need protected from zombies?