Notices by Cait the Proud Trans Woman (oldladyplays@wargamers.social)

Been watching *Andor* with the boy. Saw S1 together a few months back, now binging S2. And OMG. It's SO GOOD.

I still have three episodes to go, so I'm not going to have any spoilers here please. Just general gushing about the acting and the writing and the extended metaphor and the inspiration and that kind of thing.

If you think you can stick to that, and not spoil people without clear warning (that is, use a CW cover, and make sure you say that there are spoilers in it), then go ahead and talk about it here.

But please, please do not spoil this show for me or others. It's too good to make it less fun for other folk.

A thought about public transit.

Why do we have to pay for it?

We built it. It was our tax money and our labour and our commonly-held land. The buses and trains we bought, we paid for. The people who drive them? We pay that.

So why do we charge people to use it?

We don't charge road users to use the roads. "We pay for them," the drivers say. "So do we pay for them," say I. "We have to have insurance!" "So do transit vehicles."

"We have to pay for our go-juice of choice!" "Us too."

"We have to pay to maintain our own vehicles." "Yep, that's a pain for us too."

So why, exactly, do we provide use of the roads free to people who have the money to have their own vehicle, but NOT to the people who *don't* have that money, or choose not to spend it on a car for all kinds of society-benefiting reasons?

It's ridiculous. In order to facilitate the fare collection, we have to have MORE POLICE in our lives, people going up and down the LRT trains, bothering people trying to journey, and writing expensive tickets if they find someone forgot to tap their card on the out-of-the-way pedestals for such. How many hundreds of thousands are we paying in the salary for that couple of dozen people? Do we come even CLOSE to recovering that money by catching so-called "fare cheats"? No. Nothing like it.

It's a big ripoff, in favour of individual car use, and allows them to underfund our public transit so that it can take me an hour and a quarter to get to an appointment a private vehicle could reach in fifteen minutes, because it's about five km from my apartment. But in our rattletrap system, that's 3 buses.

This kind of thinking is burning our planet and our people alive. And still we hem and haw about whether it's worth the expenditure, and make it easy for people to live 100+km from their place of work - and yet still attend every day.

Madness!

@Natasha_Jay

https://www.cbc.ca/kidsnews/post/watch-ttc-blames-12-year-old-boys-for-jokes-about-its-new-poo-crew

Yep. Confirmed.

@StillIRise1963

It is. It'd be funnier still if Mme. Macron weren't spreading so much transphobia in making her lawsuit.

I mean, calling "they called me trans"="one of the most hurtful things someone can say to a woman" is...well, it stings, let's say.

@imp3tuz

Totally get this. I would be sorry and sad if you were to leave here, but I'd absolutely get it. I try my best to bring white people along, but I can't help but notice that my posts about Black-written novels, and Black history, and how the struggles are one, and so on...well, they just don't do as well here.

Which is not why I do it, and that's why I keep doing it. Because it's the right thing, and it helps build a Fedi I want to be on, where Black people are welcomed and celebrated and loved just as anyone else is.

But if other white people don't join me in making an active effort to include Black Fedizens, then it's going to remain a very colourless place.

We have the onus, because *we are the reason Black folk're not comfortable here*. We have the onus because we are the majority here, and have to *remember* to make space for people who don't share that privilege. Actively. We need to seek out and follow brave Black voices who *criticise* us, so we can get better at all this.

If we don't, we get what we've encouraged: an all-white enclave of smugly satisfied leftists, sadly unaware of who's not in the room.

So I hope you won't go, my sister, but I will totally support your doing so if that's what you need to do.

Hey, anyone out there got any law-readin' experience in the US?

I'm hearing talk about maybe pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell, and I'm trying to game out what that might cause to happen.

I have this idea that if she's pardoned, she's pardoned for *all she has done up to that point*, isn't she?

Which would then mean she *couldn't* use the Fifth Amendment to dodge questions, as she'd be already immune, wouldn't it?

I realised something this afternoon, in talking with a friend.

I have reached my limit of cis people telling me how to be trans. Or not to be trans. Or choosing what we're called. Or really having any kind of control over our lives at all, for any reason. I don't care if they're professional sexologists, or transvestigators, or whatever they're going to call cis people who colonise our space academically. Or doctors, or politicians, or anyone else, ever.

I'm done. Cis people, there's a bunch of ya I love, but I swear, the next cis person who tells me how to do trans is probably going to soon regret it, when the sharp side of my tongue has finished tearing them various new orifices, metaphorically speaking.

We get to choose what we call ourselves. Be it trans, nonbinary, hijra, two-spirit, travesti, ladyboy (kathoey), whatever someone identifies as. If they feel they have a claim on that label, it's no one else's place to tell them they haven't. Least of all cis people.

Magneto was right.

Was watching video of the MAGA Meltdown about the Epstein files, taking a little bath in the Schadenfreude, when I came across one video in particular. And it got me thinking.

The speaker was a young woman. I recognised her immediately, of course, as any trans person in the US probably would, she's Riley Gaines, that Very Important Swimmer, who came fifth one time in that race, tied with Lia Thomas?

And I thought, wow, what a great grift. I mean, you're a mediocre university-level swimmer, right? You're never going anywhere in the sport, you don't win events, and so when uni comes to an end, you'll go and get a job like everyone else and just drudge your way through life.

But no! She came FIFTH that one time! And the fifth-place she got was STOLEN FROM HER by a TRANS WOMAN who's REALLY A MAN and is FAR TOO DANGEROUS AND PHYSICALLY OVERWHELMING for poor cis women swimmers! PROVEN by her finishing (checks notes)...also fifth. Behind four other cis women. Hmm.

But now, voila! See her shiny new career? Making well-compensated "speeches" at conservative hate rallies, bemoaning that ruinous trans woman and how she ruined everything for her.

Of course, Thomas did no such thing. She *also* finished fifth. Both got medals, and were listed as fifth. If Lia Thomas weren't there, Gaines would have finished...fifth. Which they were. She didn't get moved down a spot. She wasn't denied anything.

She simply had to share.

And this OUTRAGE was sufficient to earn her a multi-year speaking career as a professional victim of the EVIL TRANSES.

Just in case you needed a stunningly clear example of how the right-wing outrage machine works. She went from being a fifth-place middle-talent swimmer, to being a well-paid C-List celebrity in the Bigotsphere. She will live comfortably for years on her weaponising of her (checks notes) complete lack of harm in that race.

Astroturf victimhood as business model.

I just had the greatest idea for fighting climate change. It's foolproof. I'm gonna send a letter to Trumpy proposing it.

It's like this. We get an alien civilisation to come along and vacuum all the air off the planet. Without an atmosphere, the climate can't get warmer.

Bingo. Solved. No notes.

Just thinking about something here.

Trump, we all know, is very thin-skinned. He reacts badly to being insulted, or disrespected, or even thinks that someone might do those things.

He also seems to direct his foreign policy based on his love of autocrats.

And when faced with any kind of block to his power, he rages.

His defence secretary, the former TV host, went to a press conference and spent most of it shouting at reporters for not fawning on the Dear Leader enough.

I guess I'm wondering...when do we get to the part where someone says, "I really don't think we can afford a male President. "

"They're simply too emotional."

We need to work on our legal system.

I've heard WAY too many people who simply know better saying things like "well, this is an 'act of god'" about flash flooding.

No. It is not. And we need to fix the law to get rid of that ridiculous ancient construct. There are no "acts of god", according to the law, or there shouldn't be. I have freedom of religion. How do I have that if my insurance company can say "act of god" and I'm not allowed to collect on the insurance? When I acknowledge no such entity?

Flash floods, wildfires, mudslides, polar vortices, all of this. None of it is an "act of god". They're all acts which are the direct consequence of HUMAN BEHAVIOUR.

We have to stop allowing people to say "oh, well, sky daddy did it" and shrugging when it comes to helping people live through climate change.

Time we bloody well grew up.

Got my translation done on the Russian kids' story. It was cute, and i'm quite pleased that i was able to do it with just two passes. One by me doing the translation, and then a kindness from Lona in reading both and helping me fix a few small mistakes. One inconsistency, one connotation failure, one misread of who did what. That's pretty good for my first work in several years.

Was pleased that my recent practice reading Russian meant i understood probably 90% out the gate, and mostly needed to look up synonyms (like different ways of saying "s/he said") but already knew what the word meant from context. Felt good.

Next i have an actual paid job, being a translation from German of a mathematics paper. I'm no mathemagician, but I've translated some math texts in various languages, so i'm not afraid of the vocab. Will be fun to dip back into German, too. I've been working on that by putting more effort into reading German posts here, and watching more news clips from DW in German rather than English.

And never to forget lovely French, which i get plenty of reading practice in, by reading Le Monde's newsletter every day, and enjoying my Francophone friends' posts too.

Could use more Spanish practice, and probably some Polish would be good too. Unfortunately, i don't read kanji well enough to read Japanese well.

But my pro languages are doing well, at least (RU, DE, FR).

The best job offer i ever got? I had a World War II (a Special Interest for this autistic girl) historian offer to employ me on a retainer(!) to help him with primary sources. Turned out understanding Russian, German, French, and English rather neatly coincided with his needed languages. Being a well-knowledged amateur helped a lot too.

Alas, he found out he had cancer a few weeks after his offer, and retired suddenly to take advantage of his remaining months. Which, fair, but damn that would have been my DREAM job.

Ahh, such is life. Feels good to be working a little again.

@JessTheUnstill

What Microsoft product has been out for years, and isn't terrible?

#Euro25 #Euro2025

Heartbreaking news that Giulia Gwinn will miss the rest of the tournament for Germany. Thankful to hear that it doesn't appear she tore the ligament, but she got enough damage to rule her out for the Euros. A huge blow for Germany, but if there's any team in this tournament that can handle a loss like that, it's the very talented and deep German squad.

Just a quick thought. Please consider not saying things like "so it begins". This isn't the beginning. It's the closing act of a historical novel, 400+ years in the making, of the rise of white supremacy and patriarchy to tyrannical power in English-speaking North America. It began with eliminating Indigenous peoples. With kidnapping and enslaving generations of Africans and their descendants, through means so foul i'm not going to name them here. To the Chinese Exclusion Act. The internment of Americans and Canadians of Japanese descent for the crime of...being of Japanese descent. The mass deportations of Mexican-born residents and citizens. The brutal fightback against basic civil rights for Black folk. The state murders of Black activists. Ruby Ridge. Stonewall. Rodney King. George Floyd.

Any of that ring a bell? Yeah. The fight didn't just begin. We've just been sitting on the sidelines for centuries. While others fought for freedoms we enjoy.

Time we got off our skinny butts and stood up? Yes. Time to say "it's begun"? About 400 years ago.

But welcome to the fight.

Hmm. You know you've been reading too many scouting reports on potential African signings by your football club when you see a headline about "Ebike" and think, "Ebike? who's that? Where's he from? Sounds like West Africa to me."

Without considering the possibility that it might just be an electrically assisted bike.

@GottaLaff

LMAO. Just...LMAO.

Dude drops an insult...then gets mad when you make his insult public?

What, dude, did you think it was cool if only Laffy saw it? Is that how your brain works? Have some pride in your beliefs, pal.

Stand up for what you believe in. If you want to insult someone, have the germline cells to say it out loud.

@GottaLaff

Heh. You are kinder than I. If someone goes out of their way to be insulting to me in a DM? Damn right that bad behaviour is getting called out in public. I'm not letting someone get away with what is abusive behaviour just because they were too cowardly to make their insult public.

If someone's doing that, I owe it to Fedi to let people know that there is someone who thinks it's okay to be abusive as long as they don't get seen doing it.

No missing stairs.

#Euro25

Watching Iceland-Finland in the unofficial tournament opener (it's officially designated Game 2). Have to admit being on the side of the Finns in this one for a tangential reason: Eveliina Summanen, Tottenham's wonderful set piece wizard, is playing for Finland.

@futurebird

He did it absolutely intentionally. Watch his body language when he says it. He did it to distract, knowing the media would run with it like impressionable children and focus on the naughty word instead of the bonkers shit he's been pulling.