Emergency: Laptop Broke

Hey folks.

I am a thirty-something disabled trans guy from Germany currently doing my second masters degree. And I have a little problem right now.

I normally do not ask for money on my tumblr. But right now I really could use a bit of help. My laptop broke very unexpectedly, even though it was just 14 months since I bought it. And it broke in a way that it is not really fixable.

I had to buy a new laptop to be able to participate in university and stuff. While I had some money saved up, I still have to pay up with my landlord, because my former roommate refuses to pay the dept she has with the landlord. While I hope I can eventually sue for the money back... Right now I do not have it.

And I just had to spend 750 bucks on a new laptop.

So, if you have any money to spare, I would greatly appreciate it if you left some on my Ko-Fi or PayPal.

It would really be appreciated. 🙏

Thank you so much!

Something that bothers me so much about those self-proclaimed "radical feminists", who might be radical - but not actually feminist - is that they claim to care for certain groups, but actually could not give two shits about them.

Radical feminists will very often utilize certain groups in their arguments. They will argue about those poor confused autistic "girls", when they talk about trans people, mainly trans men and trans nonbinary folks. They will becry the "lost lesbians", too, when it comes to trans men. They will argue about the fate of girls being forced to wear the hijab or other headdressed by their evil patriarchal religion. They will also argue of course about those poor women being forced into sex work. But they do not care about any of them.

The autistic girls, like pretty much all disabled women, get left in the dust by them, because their definition of femininity is very stringent and a lot of disabled women will not meet this definition. They might also be too dependent of men and such, aka not be "girlboss" enough to be respected by radical feminists. And of course, those self-proclaimed feminists will also just ignore the studies showing that simply put, a lot more of neurodivergent people will just identify as queer in all kinds of ways, because neurodivergent people generally struggle with fitting into systems that do not make sense. Examples for such systems are the gender-binary and heteronormativity.

When it comes to lesbians, radical feminists will readily exclude and discriminate those, as soon as they do anything the radical feminist disapproves of. You are a lesbian who loves to have strap-on sex? Oh boy, you are totally like worshipping the penis, which is like soooooo anti-feminist, says the radical feminist. Also, you are not really a lesbian if you like penetratice shit. You are just pretending. (There is a reason why despite how radical feminists love to frame it, there is indeed no queer sub-group as anti-radfem as lesbians.)

When it comes to the Muslim girl, they will of course not care about her maybe just wanting to wear a hijab, because for her it is a form of self-expression, or because to her it is important to the way she reads her own religion. (That religion is evil either way, says the radical feminist. You are not a good woman if you follow it.) Just as they do not care that if there is a father, grandfather, husband or any other man forbidding the woman or girl to leave the home without a hijba, that same father, husband and so on, will forbid them to leave the home without the hijab, even if the hijab gets banned. Meaning the girl just has less ability to leave the home at all (and for example get help for potential abuse).

And when it come to sex workers. Well, what endangers sex workers? Right, outlawing sex work. Because it will not make sex work go away, it just will drive it underground, where a lot more abuse can happen. Be it, because people are forced to work for pimps. Be it, because the clients who will come have already now broken the laws (this is true for the nordic modell as well), and hence have a higher likelihood to maybe do some other crime as well. Which is sex workers will tell them. But let's face it, radical feminists do not care for sex workers. In fact, they will fucking discriminate against them and what not. And of course, if any sex worker who actually for one reason or another likes their job says so, the radical feminist will go: "Oh no, you have no idea what you are talking about. I KNOW MUCH BETTER WHAT YOU ARE FEELING ABOUT THIS THAN YOU!"

Like, fuck those people. They are not feminist. They do not care about women. They only care about their won superiority complex.

Old Depts & New Beginnings [Neve & Rook Hurt/Comfort]

The Day 02 story for @veilguard-appreciation-week, this time with the Waves prompt. :P

Old Depts & New Beginnings

Fandom: Dragon Age - The Veilguard Relationship: Rook & Neve Genre: Hurt/Comfort

Curiosity Killed the Cat [Emmrich, Manfred, Harding & Taash Humor]

I decided that since I am sick this week, I will just do the @veilguard-appreciation-week this week, though starting a day late. Because I love these characters, I guess.

Curiosity Killed the Cat

Fandom: Dragon Age - The Veilguard Characters: Emmrich, Manfred, Harding & Taash Genre: Slice of Life & Humor

Finding Home - Final Chapter

I kinda did not around to post the new chapters here last week - but due to being sick I have the time for it this week!

Finding Home Chapter 10: Future

Fandom: Castlevania (Netflix) Central Character: Isaac Genre: Character Study

Are we too obsessed with robots?

I recently realized an interesting thing about the Solarpunk space and specifically what little Solarpunk media we have - at least the Solarpunk media that goes into Scifi. (I will once more reiterate: No, I do not think that Solarpunk necessarily needs to be science fiction. You can have both historical Solarpunk and Fantasy Solarpunk, no problem.)

There is a surprising amount of Solarpunk stories that do include at least one important robot character. This might not be true as much for those short stories, but very much for longer form stories and comics. Some sort of robot is always there - often a cute one, mind you.

And... I do kind of get it. Because robots make for an amazing plot device to discuss certain issues with. You can use them to discuss both slavery and the general concept of othering. Now, I could go into a whole rant of why it is actually harmful to use non-humans for either of those issues, but I will not do that today.

Instead I do want to talk about something else. Mainly about AI, and about setting realistic expectations. But to start this off, please remember: We absolutely, 100% already have all the technology we need to live in a Solarpunk utopia, if we as a human species just decided to do so. I wrote about this last week.

The AI Issue

Recently I have noticed that I am getting really short-tempered with people who use ChatGPT. Mainly for their reliance on it, but also because they will often talk about it as if it was a thinking thing. They will use phrases like this: "ChatGPT tried to get me to admit..." or "ChatGPT did not like this..." As if ChatGPT had goals or an opinion on anything. It doesn't. It is your mobile phone's text predictions with a lot more abilities, but it does not have feelings, goals, or morals.

And here is the thing: By now I am not sold on AI ever having that.

Look, I love SciFi. I love a variety of stories about sad robots - be it Blade Runner or Cyberpunk - or about people living in computers - be they Pantheon or Digimon. But I do not think this is particularly realistic.

Because... Well, I do not think as long as a computer is digital it will ever be able to actually feel.

And I will tell why: While we humans love to romantacize feelings and stuff, technically speaking they are just our meatbag of a body producing chemicals influencing the transmission of impulses throughout our nervous system in a way that at some point would have enhanced our chances of survival. (Yes, this might have been one of the most autistic sentences I ever wrote.)

Whenever you are in love, it is just your body producing chemicals that make you more likely to feel secure with another person, which might lead to you bonding with this person. And bonding with other humans would have allowed you to survive better for a long time.

Whenever you are sad, it is your body producing chemicals that inhibit some neural transmissions, which probably at some point served for certain information that would be good for your survival to be maintained.

The details do not really matter. What matters: A computer is not a meatbag that produces chemicals that inhibit the transmission of electrical impulses through their chips. And because of this, an AI - as long as it runs on any sort of electrical rather than biological hardware - will not ever feel. It might be able to give a response as if it felt. But it will not actually have this emotion.

And look, I absolutely get that some of you might want to argue with me, because after all, chances are you have consumed media in which sad robots were the racism analogy, and the villain used these exact arguments.

But at this I would ask you to consider: You are not in a story. You are in reality. Nobody is "enslaving" robots, who are trying to rise up. There are no second-class robot citizens. We are just talking about stories about robots, that are not real, and why those stories might have problems.

And I think one of those problems is, that they make us more likely to assume that an AI can feel - which makes us behave kinder to programs, that were created by very rich people to steal our work and manipulate us. And that is not a good thing.

The Realistic Expectation

But I also see another problem with this. The reason why I spoke about the availability of Solarpunk technologies last week. Because in a lot of utopian scifi inspired movements, people are kinda waiting for THE TECHNOLOGY to arrive. See also Star Trek and people waiting for the replicator to arrive. It probably won't. Sadly.

And because of this I am kinda iffy about those feeling robots in Solarpunk stories, because they make people wait for the technology to catch up to thinking robots and other Scifi technology shown in what little Solarpunk media we have. And that waiting makes the people not act.

But the fact is, that we can a perfectly nice Solarpunk future without any robots present. In fact I would argue it actually is better that way, because unless the robots can be 3D printed chances are that whoever develops the robot technology in that hyperthetical Solarpunk future, will hold a lot of power over society. And that is not going to be very good for creating a flat hierarchy in society.

And something that I kinda do see as an issue with Solarpunk really is the people waiting for some magical technological breakthrough, rather than realizing, that the issue we have is capitalism mainly. Without capitalism, we can have Solarpunk NOW. We do not need to wait for anything else to happen.

Which leads back to that one isse. Yeah. You cannot wait for someone else to fight capitalism for you. You kinda have to do it yourself. I am sorry. But there it is. :/

Why it is too late for a Digimon Tamers sequel

Today marks the 24th anniversary for Digimon Tamers and I want to talk about one of those notions, that I see floating around the Digimon Fandom the most: "We want something like tri./Kizuna/Beginning for Digimon Tamers."

I kinda get the notion. After all, Tamers is easily the best written of the seasons. Its writing being quite tight, and the focus of the three main characters making it quite better paced than the other seasons. And while I do not loathe filler episodes these days as much as I used to, I absolutely appreciate how few filler episodes thise show has.

However, I feel that all in all, it just is too late to make a sequel to Digimon Tamers. After all, it has been 23 years now since that show ended. And something that I am fearing is that for the most part making a sequel to it would no longer work for several reasons.

Reason 1: Konaka himself, who originally wrote the show, is just no longer in a good mental place. I will not go too much into details, but there has been a lot of stuff that happened in the last 10 years that made him suffer from mental health issues. If you remember that audio live drama... Yeah, that is partly the place where this came from.

Now, you might ask: "So what? There are other authors, right?" Which brings me to the next issue.

Reason 2: Digimon Tamers has been a fairly Hard SciFi entry for Digimon, which usually tends to balance on the line between Scifi and Fantasy. And I sadly do not have a lot of trust in most other writers who might get handed a potential sequel OVA or movie to do this SciFi-aspects justice. And frankly, a Tamers' sequel that would not do the SciFi stuff would miss the certain something.

Reason 3: Now of course, if you have seen the Adventure-Sequel stuff, you will know that it too tried to tackle a lot of these more high concept conflicts. tri. had the entire Demiurge, Homeostasis thing going, Kizuna the entire Neverland thing, and The Beginning was basically retconning the epilogue centrally. (No matter if Kakudo says different. Because The Beginning definitely went: "Yeah, actually, everyone having their own Digimon partner would be a shit idea.") And yes, Tamers is kinda calling for high concept stuff as well - but the issue is that those high concepts would need a bit more SciFi rooting. I wrote about this before: Yeah, Tamers could easily go into Simulation Theory or something like that. But it would need to be done right. And given how torn the fandom is about anything in regards to the Adventure sequels... Uuuuhm, I don't think those succeeded.

Reason 4: It has been almost 25 years since we got any updates on that timeline. We have not heard anything from the Tamers in a while. In comparison, we got tri. 10 years ago already, priming folks for more Adventure/02 stuff. Which not only makes me wonder if people would show up enough for this, but also... Well, if the actors all showed up. Remember, while Nozawa Masako did some later Voice Work for Digimon, she absolutely did not want to do the work for Guilmon in the Xros Hunters episodes. Also, she is really old, and frnakly might die any time. And sure, you can probably recast, but would people accept it?

Reason 5: Digimon Adventure tri. sucked, and it had lore to work with that was way less complex than that of Digimon Tamers. (Look, even if you like Adventure/02 more than Tamers, you gotta admit that it was a lot more simple in regards to plot and worldbuilding, given it was a very standard Chosen One Hero's Journey.) So, chances are in general, that it would be really hard to write something that would work as a sequel here.

And yes, there are other reasons. Given how few people do right by Ruki in fanwork, I kinda feel like official media also would struggle with it. (I mean, Konaka did in the later audio plays.) I talked about this before. The entire thing about Ruki is that her disdain for "girly things" comes from her struggling with the relationship with her mother. While I do not see her become a girly girl, I also think it absolutely misses the point of her character to have her become a super hardcore masculine adult women.

And frankly, before I have to deal with a sequel-OVA that goes into the same non-sense as tri., I would rather not have a sequel at all.

And yes, I personally will openly admit, that I also just... Look, I spent those nearly 25 years since the show ended coming up with a whole bunch of headcanons (Ao3 Link) of what is going to happen to these characters and this world. And I think so did a lot of others. And frankly, I never appreciated works that after decades went: "Yeah, actually, new canon!"

The same frankly goes for Frontier and Savers as well. While neither of them go quite as high concept as Tamers - removing one of the points - I also would not want to see something that went off the rails with them. With Frontier having the additional challenge, that it is probably the season that has the most definite ending, with the kids giving up the Digivices and what not. While I would argue that it might be one of the more interesting concepts for a sequel (I mean, there are four spirits that never have been assigned), it is also the most limied, given how closed in of itself the plot was.

Savers of course is another thing. Because it has the big difference of Masaru ending the series in the Digital World, which would at least perfectly work as a hook for a movie or anything along those lines. While the general cautions still apply, this is probably the one thing I could see working the most.

Generally though... I think actually for either series I would prefer to just get a couple of shorts that are not that heavy in plot and more heavy on characters. We got those - obviously - for Adventure/02, but for no other season. And yeah, I think just 5 minutes shorts maybe published online... Maybe 5 or so for in fact every season since 02? That would be kinda nice. And I think that could work very well.

Ah, the fun thing of the doctor's having found your fucking X-Gene. With just this one minor thing: "Technically you should have been dead by age 20."

Me: "Obviously I am not."

They: "But you should have been. You might literally die any second because of this."

Me: "... I literally did not have the smallest of symptoms of this sickness. In fact the only symptom I had was the positive one: My wounds heal insanely quickly."

They: "BUT YOU COULD DIE."

Me: "BUT I DON'T!"

So, to make it shortly. I am still not getting my fucking testosterone, because they finally found the genetic reason for my healing factor.

(If anyone is wondering: Yes, I have a healing factor. Not Wolverine insanities or anything, but I usually heal deep wounds within a couple of days, up to a week. I heal broken bones in 5-8 days. They are fairly sure on why this is now, but technically speaking this genetic defect should have just given me a heart attack 15 years ago.)

And once more the old adage holds true: Scratch a SWERF and find a TERF.

Never once encountered someone who is against sex work (anything legal working against sex work harms sex workers - both those who actually like that job, and those who do not have choice but sex work) and is not also a TERF. Both tend to also break down anything about misogyny to "penises harm vaginas". Because we all are basically walking-talking genitals, according to SWERFS and TERFs.