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I'm procrastinating my way through The Canterbury Tales and will likely do the same with Sir Gawain And the Green Knight to come. At least Beowulf was neat to reread, and I have Paradise Lost to look forward to.


In terms of shit I actually want to read? ...I have the Et Cetera and Metaclysmia Discordias and the Chao Te Ching collecting virtual dust among the 33 tabs open on this browser, if that counts for anything.

Awesome to see a story of a blanket turned into a lovely piece of HoNo. Now if I can just find the time to write something, myself 


In other news, I was late for my first class this morning, but fuck Geoffrey Chaucer, I just met an actually-good endocrinologist (as far as I can anecdotally tell, at least) and have a sweet 3mg of estradiol in my body. Also the weekly gay agenda meeting was neat as always.


Things are Happening, and that's weird in the good way right now.

That's awesome, Null!


Now to slowly but surely buy more of them and craft the blanket fort to end all blanket forts.

Real glad to hear everything's slotting nicely into place, QGP! Definitely a pleasant surprise to know that, with the possible exception of point 3, things have been going pretty smoothly overall.

I got so sick I called out of work and spent the entire day wobbling between bed and bathroom with a small half-mile detour to get some ginger ale because I have no respect for my ailing carcass.

Well, at least ginger ale is good for any nausea that might come up, so I've experienced. Glad to hear things are sort of getting better though.

Gotta say, Bobby, if VCR tech hadn't been a dying art when I was that age, I totally would have experimented with ways to record my favorite shows.


But then, I suppose that's why I'm so damn lucky to understand how these magic boxes, how this series of tubes filled with cat videos, actually works, and circumvent the need for recording things myself.


Good stuff as always. 

Small life update: Got blood drawn today. Ironic how they take less vials from me now that I'm seeing (read: in like a week or two) an endo for Trans reasons, as opposed to seeing one for Prematurity And Its Childhood Complications reasons. That may be coincidental though. But either way, one step closer to Doing some Things with myself, literally.


Also, fasting is a bitch, and I have a newfound appreciation for my Muslim peers who are willing and able to enjoy life while maintaining a fast for more than a day (er, evening and early morning). Ended up having a big breakfast this morning as a result of said fasting and blood drawing; my usual protein shake, my first egg cream, and 1 1/2 of the best blintzes I've ever had.


Today has been neat.

So, just went on a walk around a bit of the neighborhood, and remembered that out in the front of the house of some nice couple I've never met is a tree. This tree is being marketed as a "Poet Tree", and has a few strings strung up for people to put poems on. There's some nice stuff, and...needless to say, methinks it's high time for some nonsensical holiness to grace that plant's clothespins.

One of the papers I ended up writing in that class was not only a neat hypothetical situation in working with a Chinese person and an Indian person on a project, but also ended up being the way I came out to my mother months later. So that was neat.

Always good to find a real world application of your new skills.

(I'm just assuming it went well)

It did indeed.

Did you class cover what to expect from different nationalities or just general trends? It sounds interesting even if you're not getting much use out of it.

Yeah, it was lots of looking from continent to continent (country to country if some had specific trends that deviated from the larger trend of their continent), things like Americans wanting to go into detail with a lengthy conversation vs Japanese expecting the full breadth of detail to be conveyed with simple instruction. The overall focus was on teambuilding, on finding out how and why you can stuff people in a room with different specializations, skill levels, sexes, and yes, nationalities, and end up with a successful product, or building development, or whatever.


One of the papers I ended up writing in that class was not only a neat hypothetical situation in working with a Chinese person and an Indian person on a project, but also ended up being the way I came out to my mother months later. So that was neat.


Meanwhile that same quarter, I took an art class where an old Brit with tattoos taught me to laugh at the butts and janky proportions in old French paintings.

I have been completed on being very patient and professional over email when that wasn't my intention so I might need that style guide to translate to American.

Ooo, my knowledge from a business team-management class a couple quarters ago finally comes in handy.


Basically this comes down to trends among cultures. Do they tend to lead, or follow? Are their work conversations thorough and complex, or simple and to-the-point? Do they tend to respect authority and do as told, or challenge it and go their own way?


All these dichotomies and more add up to the general fact that, in certain situations that require certain skills (forethought, quick action, etc), groups from certain countries will excel, others won't, and both will either compliment or ruin the work of their other-cultured teammates. We're all so stuck in our routines that our brain craps out when we find out other people are Doing It Wrong.


More than that, too, signal A only means B to so many people. Shit gets lost in (sometimes literal) translation real easily, hence your email kerfuffle.


One of the examples I still remember was a situation where the Thing To Do was in Mexico. The Mexican team was struggling, so they either brought on, or were offered help from, some companions from Europe (Germany specifically, iirc). The Germans wanted to delegate and command the operation. The Mexicans wanted to keep things their own way.


Eventually it boiled down to:
Germans, grumbling: Damn buncha lazy slobs don't even get that they're the problem."
Mexicans, also grumbling: "Fuckin micromanaging assholes, we're not gonna cave to their bullshit authority."

Video's a few years old, and is really more of an overview and surface level analysis than anything, but it's not every day a thread as topical as this shows up.
https://youtu.be/Y8RigxxiilI

Good luck for both of you with your transitions, seriously. I know a little about it, it seems like a daunting prospect at the best of times (and these are clearly not that).

I'm looking into the freelance copywriting and content creation industry. Plus: setting my own hours, working from home, I'm a fast enough writer that I can output 1500 words a day on subjects I know nothing about, no problem. Negatives: convincing myself to write things instead of trolling politicians all day on Twitter. Some of the sites in question are also in America, which can only mean good things given the current exchange rate.

Luck is appreciated. We'll see what good it does in the face of the American healthcare system, but at least I'm lucky enough to have been born in California.

I demand meaty tooth eyes and I demand them right fucking now!

You should grow them on your arm. Along with a penis.

Combine the two and men will at long last have an answer to vaginal dentata.

Meat teeth and arm dicks? That's way too much effort for a male vagina dentata equivalent. Steal the obsidian teeth from the vagina of the Maori night goddess who killed Maui...then build an arm dick!

Medical science is crazy. A few years back a replacement eye was made from a wad of meat and a tooth. I'm not joking.

It looked like Resident Evil and gave about the same visual acuity as the artificial options currently available, but those options took decades and this was an experimental first time thing. So given a few decades and some dedicated people, meaty tooth eyes might be the thing, and you'd never know, and that's fucking awesome.

My brain just misread "tooth" as "toothpick"...and either way, that is fucking awesome.