gaydarade

thinkin about my sexuality.

i was mulling over thoughts about sexual identities being about your relationship to sex and attraction, and like how that can put people at odds or bring them together - stuff like:

1. pride is meant to bring together and celebrate the differences and unity of a huge group (that includes & is arguably centered around sexual identity), arguments about it basically just being an assimilationist event notwithstanding
   1a. Taking pride in your sexual identity means taking pride in your relationship to sex, and you also have to do so for your neighbor, even if they are different from you.
   1b. An obvious conflict is between sex-negative and sex-positive groups, but both feel entitled to pride, because they both have a deviant relationship to sex that craves protection and solidarity from other deviants
   1bi. e.g. a sex-repulsed person usually doesnt draw a lot of respect from fag & freak "youre not queer unless youre having weird sex" spaces, unless they can frame their sexual repulsion as like "stone" or "gray-ace" or something that conveys "im sexual but don't touch me".
   1bii. likewise, puritans kick up kink at pride discourse (haven't seen any this year and i don't want to, inshallah), presumably (Big Presumably) because they want to feel represented and attached to pride, and there's a threat and tension when they feel pressure to conform to a concept of horny.
   1c. another obvious conflict, i think, is between, idk how to phrase this, queer-active and queer-passive identities, and i think the same desire to be entitled to pride exists in both groups.
   1ci. thinking of queer-active being like the "visibly a faggot" thing, where queer-passive would be the "bi girl brought her straight boyfriend to pride" strawman. (probably not good terminology tho, cuz i feel like queer-passive may convey the common bi complaint of "just because im dating an x, doesn't mean i'm not bi")
   1d. so many people still show up to huge pride events, and the worst that usually happens is a fist fight here or there, a bunch of heatstroke and alcohol poisoning, the same shit as any festival; as if the above conflicts don't really bear out in reality as much
   1di. How is that possible? Is this like a disability-invisibility thing, where the groups that are excluded are just not there to conflict with / be accommodated for?
   1dii. Or does is there actually a kind of unity there, even if it's fraught?
   1e. why the fuck did my friend's gay manager rat them out for calling in sick so they could go to pride? (rhetorical question, i'm still pissed about it).
   1ei. wild that poverty selects who can or cannot be represented in public life.
   1f. i get unprompted harrassment for gender reasons, sometimes in philly, not so much for weird sex.

thinking about the arc of my sexuality in whole:

1. Ages 5-8: specifically aware of and drawn to beautiful women in a variety of weird ways (no labels, no understanding of anything, presumed straight)
2. Ages 9-13: puberty hyperdrive, lots of internet porn, learning about masturbation, & hiding it. (bisexual)
3. Ages 14-20: sexually active online and in person, fairly exploratory and destructive in equal measure. smut, sex, kink, cybering, all A Lot (tortured bisexual)
4. Ages 21-29: same as above just less destructive. stableized, sexually. lots of dating around and hooking up, less risk-taking. (bisexual, lesbian, bisexual-lesbian)
5. Ages 30-32: post bottom surgery degradation of my libido to Low. the cravings for sex basically gone at this point, rare dates or hookups. cubering/sex is mostly a social, bonding activity aside from rare flares of libido. service-sexual, i guess.

i'm rereading some smut that i was crazy for when i was in middle school, Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake series, and it's nostalgic, funny, interesting. There's a lot going on in it that wouldn't appeal to a 2020+ audience, but there's a bunch of cool tech that like, reminds me that people are just crazy horny. idk. nikolaos rules.

anyway, done thinkin.

its the springtime of an election year in the US, which means there's a lot of sanctimonializing about how important it is to vote. obnoxious. every year the same but worse.

i wrote a bunch of thoughts, idk, whatever

things i like about signalis:

• gorgeous
• flavorful
• robot girls having a bad time
• the implication

things i dont like about signalis:

• its not very enjoyable to play
• i got to the halfway point and realized that the plot hooks hadn't hooked me

so i read about the endings and realized that even if i played through the whole game and got to any of them (and i'd probably get to whichever one you get from dying a ton - which is an annoying paradigm - i really don't care for games that corral high player death counts into one bucket, and lower player death counts into another bucket), i probably wouldn't really get it? i didnt feel any appreciation about what it was going for based on the synopses.

i think its probably a me thing. i have trouble caring a lot lately. i think my brain is broken in that regard.

itemized list of things i noticed and liked:

• general vibe and aesthetic
• as conveyed through things like the posters
• that one biorez replika who didnt get infected
• the biorez library, how they like books, the library vending machine
• robot girls in uniform
• the tension of going into first person mode in elevators and fearing a jumpscare that never comes
• scanning around on my radio for number stations
• the infected mindcontrol girls just want to listen to the radio
• adler as a villain(?)
• the one mynah who was bleeding out, was very nice
• the stcr who refused to leave the security room on principle
• basically any of the one-off npc's like those were doing something i found interesting

itemized list of things i no longer remember, but liked:

• the different replikas having the sense memories that make them relate to each other in specific ways. bunch of things i liked there. adler and mynah, i feel i probably enjoyed but i dont really remember.
• i liked that one dorm room where the worker girls were. there were also some funny notes in the upper floors, with, like the work orders and stuff.

itemized list of things i didnt like:

• enemies dont stay dead, so you cant make areas safe
• enemies are slow moving and meant to be sidestepped, but they scream whenever you come close
• lots of areas with lots of backtracking meant i was constantly getting screamed at.
• savespots also fucking scream at you
• the puzzles largely didnt feel good
• boss fights didnt really click with me.
• i kept getting introduced to People and Mystery, but at no point did i ever feel grounded enough to care about what i was doing or why.
• adler being introduced as a villain and then not having much subsequent presence in the story after ive been asked to think about him so much.
• the first eprson sequences are a mixed bag. its important to have them, but as they are, i dont like them. i think they need more love and dynamism. i think they should be tonally different.

i had a fiction professor who said that the two plot progressions are: the strange interrupts the familiar, and the familiar emerges from the strange. i feel like signalis was all strange all the time, and never took much time to properly convey the familiar.

like truly excellent.

the mangadex front page ads have had some real gems mixed in lately.

the things i like about it:

• solid exploration of puberty, lesbian sexual desire and shame through a lens of "Boy" A going "oh god, i have a dick now, why are all these girls so hot" which is fun because "Boy" A is sharply cast as biromantic-homosexual, noticing lots of girls sexually but still nursing a romantic crush on a boy in her class.
• solid explorations of gender deviance, through this fantasy framework of "Rapid Onset Sex Change Syndrome". I love that "Boy" A, who is an FTM-type, still serves as a very good analog to the MTF experience in that she always thought of herself as a girl but now her body is suddenly betraying her in ways she doesnt like and she's trying to find how to cling to her prepubescent girlhood. Contrast this with Boy B is also an FTM type, but his gender experience is a little more traditionally FTM as his transition to manhood has come with a lot of relief, but he still has struggles with people trying to assign his former girlhood onto him.
• the cultural positioning of transgender personae, as recognized through celebrities who have transitioned very visibly, is really cool. while its presented in a very medical framework, i think the idea that a teen today would be like "oh, youre a trans guy now...... like elliot page!" comes through in a very believable way.
• the supportive single dad with his hot, famous, absent wife is the perfect man.