I’ve long had a bunch of unwatched or just very partly watched DVDs and Blurays and I’ve been thinking about what I find uncomfortable about watching movies, but I’ve gotten a bit sidetracked because I finished I Saw the TV Glow and that’s a heck of an emotional experience for a trans person. I’ve also started reading Wrath Goddess Sing.
I keep saying it’s an amazing joy to be able to feel emotions now, on HRT, in a way I never did before in my life, and I am still getting used to it. Something I noticed fairly early on was having very strong feelings listening to songs that have long been familiar. That’s now become a familiar and treasured thing. But I think it’s one thing to have these feelings listening to a four-minute song with lyrics I memorized decades ago, now experiencing an hour-and-twenty minute movie by a trans woman telling a trans story and just designed to induce strong feelings in trans viewers, this is a different thing. I’m not used to this. It’s an intense experience. And similarly now about 50 pages into a 450 page trans story by a trans author.
Really in the previous decades of my life, I only felt this sort of emotional intensity when something bad was happening to me, or something dangerous, or at the least frightening. I’m still learning to understand the feelings. It’s still new to me. It’s amazing, it’s so amazing, things I never experienced, never imagined earlier in my life.
I went into my closet and turned on the light and … no light! I was mystified. I flipped the switch up and down, wondered if the power had failed and looked back into the room to see that the rest of the lights were on, and then I realized that probably the bulb had failed.
I grew up with incandescent bulbs, they failed all the time, I don’t remember it being a surprise or a mystery. Flip switch, no light, oh, bulb burned out. These days, it doesn’t happen very often, and every time I’m weirdly confused that the light isn’t working for some unknown reason!
I climbed up and removed the globe, which very much needed cleaning, and found an old tiny spiral-tube compact fluorescent that must have been in there for a long long time now. I often write the date of installation on bulbs and batteries but didn’t on that one, unfortunately. It’s got an LED now!
Sound is a wave. Unlike light or magnetism, this kind of wave needs physical matter, a medium, through which to travel. That property of sound waves, of course, led to the brilliant tagline for the 1979 movie, Alien: “In space, no one can hear you scream.” There’s nothing to vibrate and carry the sound waves in space; hence, no sound transmission.
So, the best way to reduce sound transmission would be to live in a vacuum. You’d have a short life but you wouldn’t be bothered by noise. In addition to being dead, you’d also be broke because turning your house into a vacuum chamber wouldn’t be cheap. Therefore, I’m going to take a leap and assume the vacuum technique won’t work for you.
So a bunch of actually useful information follows this.
Due to having purchased some items in the past I’m now getting marking e-mail with subject lines like “your boobs called.”
Over the course of my life, I’ve been subjected to a lot of advertising that one way or another evoked breasts, but now I’m a woman (I mean, kind of always was but it’s different now) who in fact has breasts (that’s one of the differences) and this was an ad for bras, which I do in fact buy.
It feels weird for this blatant message about boobs to actually be a pretty reasonable, pragmatic thing. You know, I’m a runner, maybe I want to buy a sports bra? I have a growing collection of bras, having growing breasts.
many reasons it would be nice to have comments here but one reason in particular right here right now is because i want to know: what is the highest floor of a building that you have ever been on? if it is the top floor of a skyscraper and… then what is the second highest floor. or, alternatively, the highest floor of a building you have been on for a reason that is not “going to a high floor in a building”.
This is a great question! Back in college I lived on the 13th floor of a building. We had many a false fire alarm (college students….) and so many trips down and back up the stairs. It was, if I remember correctly, a 16 story building so I might have at some point been up a bit higher for some reason.
I’ve been to the observation deck of the Sears (or whatever now) Tower, the John Hancock tower, whatever floor the tourist thing at the top of the Eiffel Tower counts as, been up to the top of that weird arch in St. Louis, lots of weird high places purely to go up and look around (after paying the fee…) but as far as going up to some high-ish floor of a building because I had some reason to go to some office up there and not as a tourist thing, it’s hard to say. I don’t remember the floor but back pre-pandemic I did one time visit someone who lived a good ways up, probably was well higher than 13th floor, might very well have been the highest floor I’ve been on for a reason other than just to look.
There’s lots of fourth floor, sixth floor type heights at work. The one building has a weird ninth floor meeting room with an outdoor deck, sometimes one department or another holds a sort of party up there, putting that in a weird zone between being at work but also it’s edging closer to being up there for the view.
When the site closed, everyone kinda scattered. Some set up their own blogs and sites, some went to Bluesky, some are just gone forever. Everyone carried a handful of folks they met on the site forward with them through various means. Some of those connections might last a bit, some might well last forever, and some are already lost in the wind.
It is a thing now that someone I’d see a couple posts a day from on cohost I’ll now see a post a week from, it’s great to still see them but it’s different.
One of the things about transitioning has been feeling things I didn’t expect, didn’t previously understand. Learning about myself.
It was so amazing when I first started expressing any sort of femininity how it felt like I was, somehow, finally, doing the same things as the other people around me always had been, as if somehow I was allowed to be ’normal,’ too. I started to realize how much I really somehow felt the (other) women around me were somehow ‘my group’ that I was supposed to be part of. Unfortunately, I couldn’t be, really, earlier in life. More recently on HRT and having gotten near the end of electrolysis on my face, again it’s amazing how much I feel like I just sort of look ’normal’ like the other people (women) do. I did look ’normal’ as a guy, I understood that thinking about it, but only now do I really understand how I didn’t feel that at all. Only now that I do feel it do I even know what it is to feel it. I never knew you could feel it like this.
They are shutting the power down briefly in the building my lab is in early tomorrow morning for work related to the new building construction. In preparation we have shut down and vented all the mass spectrometers. It is so weird for the mass spectrometry lab to be quiet! No vacuum pumps! No fans! No recirculating chillers! Very weird!
Hopefully everything powers back up successfully tomorrow morning!
I had a Facebook “memory” from ten years ago in which I described joking about business casual dress saying I’d wear a skirt, but probably people would have a problem with that, too.
I was really getting like that, around then. It was only a few months later I decided I really was trans enough to try some transition things.
Also, turned out I could just show up at work wearing skirts and dresses and such an everyone was fine with it. I was not expecting it to go like that!
It’s a truism that you can’t solve social problems with technology, but social media has made it just as clear that technology does shape the social dynamics that emerge in the spaces it mediates. This drives me to wonder: as more of my friends and friends-of-friends move to individual websites and blogs, what social dynamics does this give rise to? And what different technical designs could improve those dynamics?
I think it’s most interesting to approach this question from the social direction rather than the technological. Our first priority should be a set of social goals for interacting on the internet, and only with that understanding firmly in hand can we start usefully interrogating the way technology gives rise to or fights against the sort of interactions we want. My ultimate aim is to articulate a clear vision of a way to interact with people’s websites that’s not just a pastime or a research process, but that can meet social needs—to imagine what I’ll call a “sociable web”.