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Things are slowly getting better.

I am continuing to wrestle with my insurance to get towards a point where I can cut down the cost of my treatment considerably. It has been an agonisingly slow process and I'm still nowhere near the end of it, but I do now have the bit of paper that says I am Officially Trans.

Work continues to be very difficult but it has been for years at this point. It is also necessary that I stick with it until the insurance has sorted everything at a bare minimum. Nowhere else offers this level of coverage in the UK, so I'm locked in with this company for the foreseeable. Which is fine. I've started taking steps to make myself more secure here, and if this is what I wind up doing for the next 5 years or so as I milk this policy for everything it is worth ... I can live with that.

It helps that work have also given us a generous two year pay deal and an extra £500 to cover Christmas. Financially, things should ease up for me a lot next year, especially if the insurance works out.

Holiday season is going to be a nuisance. Housemate's partner is coming to stay from the 5th Dec - 5th Jan and we do not have the room to comfortably sustain that. They are also really pushing hard on the 'I want to socialise and do tons of things all the time' angle. Which would be fine under normal circumstances. But I am very tired, I mostly want to hermit and get through the season. I may have to try and explain this diplomatically.

I haven't made any progress on writing or reading projects. But I am still here. I have a plan. I'm going to stick to it. Things will get better.

There's been a lot of stuff but I feel like the Tory Party Conference deserves a shout-out.

We've had:

The Prime Minister says misgendering trans people is common sense.

Trans women don't deserve hospitals.

And six ministers promising to be more transphobic.

The big one in those last 6 - IMO - is that they are going to try and prevent sex offenders from legally changing their name or gender. It's worth noting that all sex workers convicted of sex work are also 'sex offenders' and that survival sex work is extremely common in the trans community.

It is reaching the point now where most people are quite aware that the issue is being used purely to distract from the fact that huge numbers of people can't afford rent or food and there are absolutely zero proposals from any real party to change that.

But they'll keep doing it. Because addressing systemic problems is beyond us, but innovating new ways to make the lives of minorities miserable? We've been world leading in that for centuries.

Love to live on Plague Island.

Turns out making all the doctors and nurses flee to Canada and Australia and then making our immigration system so impossibly frustrating and difficult that no-one wants to come here was not a winning strategy. Who knew?

Try and keep well the best you can, though. I'm sure you've heard it before and know what to do, but fluids and rest, rest and fluids. 4 weeks is quite the ass-kicking, so hopefully it passes soon.

Yeah its been pretty brutal.

Think I'm finally past it now at least. Lingering cough but I'll just have to live with that.

Genuinely horrified at the state of the NHS right now. Hard to see what they're actually going to be selling off when they do finally put it on the auction block.

It has been at least 4 weeks since the bout with covid started.

Housemate and I are still fucked by it. Whenever we think we're turning the corner a few days later it goes right back to the start.

I have tried to get an appointment with the doctor countless times, it is impossible. Call in the morning, get told there's too many people calling to even get put in a queue, get disconnected. Call in the afternoon, get told you can't have an appointment because you need to call in the morning.

And calling in the morning is so hard when all I want to do is sleep.

So as far as I can tell, I just don't get healthcare any more.

Love to live on Plague Island.

Over the past few weeks (not necessarily in order because I honestly don't remember the timeline)...

I met my landlord for the first time. He made a homophobic remark, complained about his washing machine being broken and my decor, then arranged an inspection to measure the place up and create floorplans. So. Looking forward to the eviction notice.

My Dad was told he is dying within the next 2-5 years and it's not going to be in a good way. He is not handling it well. Understandably.

Close friend of mine has been scammed out of £700 they could not afford to lose.

The CEO of my business has announced they intend to replace my role with AI within the next 3-5 years. I'm expected to help the project team work on the large language model that will replace me starting in a month. Though this is stressful, it is also the one situation which has an opportunity to be fun.

Every customer I deal with has had some kind of horrific crisis. Most self-inflicted but being made our problem.

And then I got covid.

Interspersed with the usual frustrations about healthcare being completely inaccessible, having to talk people down from hurting themselves and continuing to deal with the fallout of the charity collapse.

I am so, so tired.

I get all the experience of being annoyed by American libs on Facebook without being American or on Facebook, it really is quite something.

Oh, no.  I think you'll find me FAR more annoying in real life.  Like 50 times+ more annoying.  I am a veritable typhoon of annoyance, especially to right wingers and leftists, but really to everyone, even other liberals.  I'm like Jesus, only it's Jesus that tells dad jokes all day instead of parables, both before and after I get us thrown in jail.  In Southern Arizona.  In August.

Now, there are some who have met me - and when I'm in someone else's city, I'm on my best behavior - who say at the time that everything's fine, but later say that it wasn't, and they didn't even wind up in jail.  This makes me wonder why Eastern police are so nice.  Like those charming lads on the NYPD.  Think Chelsea cops with extra amphetamine.

So ignore the castanet noise.  That's just me shaking my liberal ass while I work on the Shiny New War Crime.

Boom shaka laka.

Maybe. If we ever have a chance to meet up I'll let you know how many multiples of Mythos you rate.



Scribbly Update: I'm gonna be scarce for the foreseeable. I've taken some heavy hits over the past couple weeks and they just keep coming.

See you when the storm has passed.

I'm marking all as read.

I get all the experience of being annoyed by American libs on Facebook without being American or on Facebook, it really is quite something.

I recently listened to the Behind the Bastards series on the history of the Illuminati. It is 6 hours long and the last 3 hours or so focus on Discordianism, with a more in-depth history of Hill and Thornley than I had heard before.

In particular I didn't know that Thornley was accused of pedophilia back in 2003, nor the extent of his psychological break or his involvement in a number of other cults both as leader and follower. Which, as someone who got stuck in a cult herself for a while, was interesting to hear.

There's a lot of interesting stuff in there in general, particularly around the way Operation Mindfuck pioneered many of the tactics that have since been picked up by the alt right.

I think it is interesting to note that Thornley locked himself into a toxic mindset that hurt the people around him and Hill ultimately warned people away from such thinking and drank himself to death after entering the corporate workforce.

Wilson said that if you enter Chapel Perilous you leave as an agnostic or a paranoid. But Wilson was also locked into his biological evolutionary worldview and could not escape that (Prometheus Rising has some wild bullshit in it in retrospect). He still very much had his grounding principles and they were wrong.

I've spent a lot of this year reassessing my relationship with Discordianism and I am coming to the conclusion that nobody leaves Chapel Perilous truly agnostic. Everyone ultimately imprints a schema. What it does do is throw you into a mindset where it is easier to be manipulated by charismatic or persuasive individuals into accepting their schema over your prior conceptions. Which is something that the alt right have taken advantage of to lead people towards the comfort of paranoia.

I think the basis of Discordianism - the irony, deliberate obfuscation, and baked-in conspiratorial antagonism - ultimately undermines the useful truths. When we look at what the legacy is, we have to reckon with the fact that we are in some sense responsible for some of the most damaging memetic weapons that have infected the modern internet. And one of our founders did massive harm directly in the real world too, because this way of thinking left him open to getting caught in his own delusions.

Which is not to say that there are no good ideas within Discordianism, but I also don't think those ideas are unique to it or need to be expressed within the existing Discordian framework.

2023 might be the year it is time to kill the joke by overexplaining it and start again.

Anyway, that's where my head is at - thoughts sparked by a bunch of stuff but crystalised by this podcast. If you have six hours(!) spare I think it is a good listen. Discordian specific stuff begins, I believe, around episode 3.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruCpCOnhArI

you what mate?

I feel like I can't express myself lately.

Over the past few months even basic points that should be easy to get across are constantly causing misconceptions and arguments at work, in my personal life, everywhere.

I haven't been able to write fiction in years and now it feels like I'm losing nonfiction too.

Ever since I was a kid I kind of considered words to be my thing.

I don't really know what I've got left without that.

I feel you there on the fiction thing.  I haven't written anything more than a couple of pages since late 2015.

It has been tough. Maintaining focus is a challenge and I think there's a lot of reasons for that.

But.

A friend pointed me in the direction of some really interesting philosophy. The sort of thing that is making me reevaluate everything. And I am writing again, just to try and get my own thoughts in order.

I don't know where this will end yet but it is good to have that feeling again. Having to really try to understand something difficult and new might be just what my brain needed.

Giving this a bump.

Someone pointed me at a quote from Deleuze which I was surprised I hadn't seen before in a Discordian context. Did a search to see if anyone has discussed his stuff before and came across this, which seems to be(?) the only engagement with his philosophy on the site.

I also hadn't seen (or at least don't remember seeing) the OP before.

There's a lot in there. I think I need to reread it a few more times before I'm confident in my thoughts on it.

But it feels worth revisiting.

(Different subject but I've included the Deleuze quote below which includes several terms I think may be worth investigating from a Discordian perspective but I want to read the full text before I expand on that)

The essential point is that in this way we do not reintroduce any form of common sense[,] quite the contrary. We saw how the discord between the faculties, which followed from the exclusive character of the transcendent object apprehended by each, nevertheless implied a harmony such that each transmits its violence to the other by powder fuse, but precisely a 'discordant harmony' which excludes the forms of identity, convergence and collaboration which define a common sense. This harmonious Discord seemed to us to correspond to that Difference which by itself articulates or draws together. There is thus a point at which thinking, speaking, imagining, feeling, etc., are one and the same thing, but that thing affirms only the divergence of the faculties in their transcendent exercise. It is a question, therefore, not of a common sense but, on the contrary, of a 'para-sense' (in the sense that paradox is also the contrary of good sense).

-------

ETA: I badly underestimated how long this is going to take. Even after just a day looking into it I can see that 1) I need to do a large amount of reading and 2) This is forcing me to reckon with a lot about Discordianism which I haven't examined in a long, long time.

Excited to see where it goes but this is not going to be a quick thing.

Barbie was very fun and about as subtle as a brick to the face.

Hugely improved by walking out behind a couple and hearing:
"So you gonna do your own washing now?"
"Fuck off" (affectionate)

I feel like I can't express myself lately.

Over the past few months even basic points that should be easy to get across are constantly causing misconceptions and arguments at work, in my personal life, everywhere.

I haven't been able to write fiction in years and now it feels like I'm losing nonfiction too.

Ever since I was a kid I kind of considered words to be my thing.

I don't really know what I've got left without that.

Just finished Volume 8. It was as good as the rest. And they released the subtitled version of the trailer for the anime, which also looks wonderful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwr1aLEDpe4

I'll probably review some more stuff here eventually but wanted to share the Frieren love. If they pull it off I strongly believe this will be the best piece of media released this year and it won't even be close.

I'm so sorry, that's awful