Hot Girl Alert

D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, the first indigenous actor nominated in any lead category, attends the 2024 Emmys with a handprint over his mouth, a symbol representing Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW). September 15, 2024.

theres something so beautiful about things becoming dirty from their job. like a painter's desk being covered in paint stains, or a gardeners pants having mud stains that wont wash out, or a cutting board being stained from all the foods that have been cut on it. just a clear, distinct telling of "this was used as intended and it shows" an object clearly showing it's been used and loved

so many of the transfems i know spent their time pre-transition performing a kind of lifelong exercise in self-deprivation. the goal, for them, was to find out exactly how little a person needed to live. they starved themselves, dressed carelessly, shunned friends, and hollowed themselves out so as not to be burdens on anyone but themselves.

i see it now, too, in the girls around me. i'll ask if they want care – a home-cooked meal, relaxed company, sex without the expectation of reciprocation – and they say no, no, thank you, i don't need it; what would you like, what do you want, because in their head they're still doing that awful calculus, still training themselves to disappear in the eyes of the people around them.

i don't think i'd have died without transition – not in the conventional sense, at least – but to take that leap, i had to stop thinking of myself as a human experiment in fuel-efficient living and start nurturing the anemic, atrophied flame of desire in my heart. i had to learn to eat well, to exercise, to style myself beautiful, but harder than that, i had to learn to ask the people around me to work on my behalf in order to enrich my life and give me the things i wanted.

and i did it; i learned. and it was agony, but courage is a muscle you can train, and every day i get better at accepting gifts with the hungry gratitude i never learned in my years and years as a sad, scared, lonely boy.

so be patient with the trans girls in your life. better than that: be proactive, attentive, generous; be forceful, if you have to, and learn to distinguish real discomfort from the terrified reflex of self-deprivation that so many of us learned to rely on.

and if you are so lucky as to love a trans girl, you must insist upon her. you must insist upon her happiness, her comfort, her pleasure, and her rest, because she may still not yet know how to make those demands for herself. if you can devote any amount of energy to becoming an engine that nurtures the flame of even a single tgirl then there is a place for you in trans heaven, which as far as i'm concerned is the only one worth going to

whenever my sister, cousin, and I are into new media, we play a game where we assign each other a husband, wife, and a best friend from the show/game/series etc.

it's fun bc we have to justify our choices with everything we have, because the husband my cousin assigns to me from some series might not be the one I see myself with, so she has to basically orate her thesis on why I'm getting married to that guy. over all it's a fun glimpse into how your friends see you and think of you etc.

highly recommend this game. also, get funky with the gender however you like. we do a husband and wife for most mainstream media that is extremely gendered, but do whatever. spouse works as well.

above all, it's about submitting your friends to the mortifying ordeal of being known via betrothal.

He's right tho

"I- I don't understand," I stammered. It was like looking in a mirror. I backed away from my duplicate, edging ever closer to the roof's edge. "Where did you come from? Why are you here? What did I ever do to you?!"

The other me laughed, a slightly manic tone to it as she pointed the knife at me, blade shining in the moonlight. "You stole my whole life! My job, my house, my friends, my wife! What, are you going to pretend you did it by accident?"

"I- I don't know what you're talking about!" I backed away again, but tripped, falling backwards, my back now to a sheer three-story drop. "I've lived here for fifteen years! I met Lilith on our first date five years ago! I remember, I- I thought-"

"You LIAR!" My clone shouted, and dove at me, knife in hand. I screamed in pain as the blade sliced open my cheek, and again as it plunged into my shoulder. I struggled to get control, but I could feel my arm losing its strength as the blade trembled between the two of us. I didn't want to hurt her! I didn't want to die! What could I-

"Drop the knife! Both of you!"

Lilith had made her way onto the roof, finally, and in her hand she held the gun my clone had dropped during the chase. She gripped it hard, pointing it in our direction.

"Lilith," said the clone, "Lilith, it's me, it's Kathrine, you have to believe me, I got kidnapped, I haven't been here for months, you've been living with this impostor-"

The safety on the gun clicked, but the muzzle wavered. "I said, drop the knife."

Slowly, she released her pressure on it, and so did I. When she let go, I knocked it off the roof. I gasped, bleeding, barely able to rise to my knees. "Lilith, I don't know what's going on. I've been here," I gulped, gasping against the pain, "the whole time. The cats know it's me, you know how they get with strangers-"

My clone snarled at me. "The cats? You even managed to fool the cats?! You bitch!" She grabbed my dress, hauling me to my feet. I hung on desperately to her hands, all too aware of the drop behind me.

"I don't-" I started, at the same time Lilith shouted, "Put her down! I'm warning you!"

My clone's eyes were wild, deranged, panicked, darting back and forth between Lilith and I. As her eyes settled on me, she stared at something on my face. "I can prove it," she breathed. "I can prove it!" She shouted to Lilith. "Watch! I'm the real Kathrine!" She reached up towards the cut in my face and dug her nails in. I screamed, closing my eyes, Lilith shouted something, and then...

And then it was quiet. It didn't hurt anymore. I heard my clone breathing rapidly in front of me. I slowly eased my eyes open to see her staring at me in fear and victory. I glanced at Lilith, gun pointing more at our feet now, mouth open in shock.

"Jig's up, impostor," said my clone. She let go of me, and held something up to my face. "Your disguise is busted."

The thing she was holding... it was like a mask. Floppy, sort of rubbery in the way that it hung.

A mask of my own face.

I grabbed at my own face, my cheeks, my eyes, all of it felt smooth, cold, metallic. I felt raised bumps in regular patterns, weld marks, maybe, or small rivets. My mouth opened in shock, and I could hear the hum of tiny servos. "W-what-"

My clone - no, Kathrine, the real Kathrine - looked at me with surprise and distrust. "You can't tell me you didn't know."

"I- I- I had no idea!" I turned to Lilith. "I remember our first date! We were both so nervous, and then you infodumped about amusement parks at me for an hour, and I thought I had to see you again! I remember our wedding! I thought, she looks so beautiful, I could die right here and go directly to heaven and I wouldn't notice the difference!" I started to cry at the memory, at the situation, at learning who and what I was...

Lilith stared at me, raising the gun again. "You never told me that."

The look, the betrayal in her eyes, it nearly made my heart break. I slumped to my knees. Had it all been fake? My whole life?

Then, suddenly, standing in front of me, arms wide, was Kathrine. I looked up at her in shock, but she was facing the other way, towards Lilith, who hastily pointed the gun at the ground. "I never told anyone that," she said. "It sounded too sappy, even for me." She turned to face me. "You're not just an evil clone. You are me, aren't you?"

I sniffed, and looked up at her. My voice quivered, and reverberated oddly through the metal of my face. "I thought I was me."

She dropped to her knees, and embraced me. A moment later, so did Lilith. I hugged both of them as tears erupted from all of us.

After a while, I sniffed and let go. "Hey," I said, my voice still wobbly, "if I'm not the real Kathrine, does that mean I don't have to go to work on Monday? Or file taxes?"

Kathrine looked at me. "Oh. Uh, I guess not?"

"Oh thank god," I said. "Being real was fucking exhausting."

f-feral women... feral therians fighting me for food? h-hehe :3

ordered pizza from a small local place and they didnt actually cut it so i've chosen to revert to a wild animal and begin ripping it apart instead of just using a knife to portion slices

the more i try to explain gender to cis people the more i understand plato's allegory of a cave

The Engineer

I catch a glimpse of the pilot as she is wheeled towards the med bay. Her eyes have that telltale glaze of just having been wrenched out of herself.

I've never spoken a single word to her, but for a brief moment as the gurney slides by, those eyes briefly clear, ice blue pinning me to the spot. She raises an emaciated arm and her hand almost seems to beckon to me before something in the gurney clicks and whirs and she slips back into catatonia.

That brief moment of clarity, that piercing gaze, unsettles me. She recognized me.

It's neural bleed. I know it has to be. She doesn't know me, but Morrigan does.

Good god. In the pilot's present state of post combat haze, she probably doesn't even know where she ends and the machine begins.

Does neural bleed work both ways? Is it her head that I'm about to climb into?

My wrist strap buzzes. I have a job to do and I am late.

The pilot is a problem for the med team and the psychs.

The machine is my problem.

I hurry down the corridor, keeping my head down, avoiding the eyes of every passerby.

I don't like people.

I don't like how their eyes follow me. I don't like the whispered gossip that follows me.

One of the techs is waiting for me at the vestibule.

I don't know his name.

All clear, he says to me. Time to work your magic.

He says it without sarcasm. Others have been less kind.

Even so, he can't quite hide the leer as I strip down to the skinsuit. I don't have the physique of a pilot. My body hasn't been subjected to the stresses that ravage their bodies. Unlike them, I have fat and muscle and the skinsuit clings to every curve of my body.

I force a cursory smile and try to forget him as I walk barefoot to my destination.

The vestibule is small, windowless. It's impossible to assess the scale of the machine from here. The only part visible to me is roughly four square meters of pitted and scarred metal plating framing the access hatch and the pilot's cradle beyond.

B0-987T the stenciled lettering reads. And below, in flowing script, is “The Morrigan”.

She's a Javellin class, medium weapons fire support unit. She isn't meant to be on the front lines in a skirmish, but one-on-one, she can hold her own against a Wraith. Which is exactly what happened only a few hours ago.

I place a bare palm on the bulkhead. She thrums with some distant vibration. Her reactor is still online, still in the early stages of drawdown as she transitions to dock power.

“Hey beautiful,” I say to her.

I think of the pilot. I think of piercing blue eyes and I think of neural bleed.

I flinch my hand away.

The tech looks at me, asks if I'm alright. I'm fine, I tell him.

I climb through the hatch and into the cradle.

I feel like an interloper here. The cradle isn't calibrated for my body. Everything still smells like the pilot. Mingled with the smell of the machine is her sweat and her adrenaline and the particular scented soap that she prefers.

There is a faint whirring as her cameras track my movements from a dozen angles. The access ports open to receive me.

Against my better judgment, I imagine eagerness for this exchange.

This is immediately followed by an all too familiar sense of inadequacy. The engineers’ rig is not nearly as all encompassing as a pilots’. It's only the most basic neural interface. No haptics. No neurotransmitter feedback. No access to the suite of sensors studded throughout her hull.

I can't interface with her the way her pilot can.

My rig is a remnant from basic training. The pilot corps wanted me for my exceptional ratings in synchrony and neuro-elasticity, but after serval training exercises, they determined that I didn't have the temperament for the battlefield. I froze up too easily.

A neural rig is a massive investment and removing one will fuck a person up a hell of a lot more than installing one. The selection process is designed to weed out washouts before we even get to installation, but some of us still slip through the cracks. Most end up reassigned to logistics, operating loader mechs or piloting long haul supply frigates. But my aptitudes made me ideal for the engineering corps, so here I am.

Morrigan senses my mood and the cradle shifts slightly, aligning itself to my dimensions. Her eagerness to connect morphs into a sort of tender reassurance. It's a slippery slope, ascribing human emotions to these machines, but she does seem genuinely happy to see me.

I can never be part of what she and her pilot have, but I can be part of something in my own way.

The pilot knows about me, she would even without neural bleed. Does she envy the relationship I have with her mech? Does she envy that I can exist both together and apart with the machine?

Is she jealous of us?

Morrigan slips her jacks into my rig and my mind enters hers and I feel tension leave my body. Some dull ache that I wasn't even consciously aware of ebbs within me.

My senses dull and my visual cortex is fed a series of diagnostic logs and telemetry streams. The techs have access to the exact same data, but Morrigan highlights particular data points that she and the pilot flagged. I log them in the engineering report.

A wireframe schematic of the battlefield spreads out in my awareness. Green markers for our battlegroup. Red markers for the pack of Wraith interlopers.

I hear the ghost of music, strange and ambient, like whale song. The first time I heard it, I asked the techs about it. They had no idea what I was talking about. One even suggested I get an eval for some psych leave.

Later I realized Morrigan was singing to me. Or rather she was interpreting tightbeam comm links as something my brain could process. A human mind can't possibly interpret the full datastream, but with Morrigans's rendition, I can suss out the basic meanings. The battlegroup is a choir and Morrigan is playing me their song.

I caused quite a stir when I first made that connection and started flagging battle events the analysts had missed.

I survey the battlefield before me, reconstructed from feeds from TacCom and all the individual mechs.

Morrigan and I have done this enough times that she knows my preferred display layout, but she holds back, allowing me to pull off the virtual displays on my peripheral vision. There's an odd sort of intimacy to it, her letting me take charge like this.

God-knows how many tons of metal and ceramic and miles and miles of wire and optic fiber and see waits eagerly for me to start the playback sim. She wants to show off. She wants me to assess the actions of her and her pilot and tell them they did well.

Other engineers, few as we are, have mentioned similar experiences with their assigned machines.

“Alright,” I whisper so that only she can hear. “Show me the dance. Sing me the song.”