Unsolicited Advice

So I went and read the J K Rowling thing everyone has been howling about.  Just for some context, I am not part of the HP fan community. I bought and read the first three books in one weekend. They were cute. I liked them okay. I bought the fourth in paperback and read that, too. It was... long. I looked at 5-7 and didn't bother. I have not seen any of the movies, because I don't care. The internet, and the fans among my friends, have filled me in on the relevant plot points. I know a lot of people have a lot of feelings about the world of Harry Potter, but I have no emotional investment in Rowling or any of the things she created. Forget, for the moment, everything you know about gender identity, gender presentation, and gender transition. Pretend for the sake of argument that the world works in all the ways suggested by Rowling's essay. Rowling wants women to band together for safety. She mentions a number of charities -- good on her for supporting good causes, but the li

Hello, all. It has been a rough pandemic. As you may have figured, since I am in the performing arts, I have been completely out of work since this shitshow began. The earliest venues will open up here in MA is September, which is not helpful for me, because I need to be out of my current place by 8/31. No one will rent to me on my Patreon income, so I've been trying to figure out how to supplement that with other online work. My first thought, frankly, was camming. I'm attractive and I know that, and I don't care about being naked in "public". I have a lot of opinions on the legitimacy and legalization of sex work, but making a statement would be a convenient bonus; I'd be in it for the tips. As the appliance menagerie on the Flintstones used to say, "Eh. It's a living." The best camera I currently have is attached to the slightly-less ancient laptop. You know, the one with the broken hinge that won't hold the screen up on the right. Only th

I find it ironic, in a I-want-to-punch-something sort of way, that people whose entire public speaking career is based on explaining why "just say no to drugs" is unreasonable and will always fail are first and loudest to shame people who don't "just say no to parties". If you:  were outraged when the response to the AIDS pandemic was 'well this wouldn't be a problem if those queers would just stop fucking, they're doing it to themselves' derided "abstinence-only" sex education for assuming that if you just don't tell people how to do it safely, they won't dare do it at all are aghast at the rationalization that sex work is outlawed because otherwise people (read: men) will spend all their money doing anything that moves, and then bring home horrible diseases to their pure, innocent womenfolk campaign against people who criminalize drugs on the grounds that drugs are a death sentence, and if they're not you'll inevitably

I am so fucking over this plague thing. More accurately, I am so fucking over everybody being paranoid of this plague thing. Leaving the house isn't giving me panic attacks because of covid, it's because of all the goddamned people. Look. I understand why people are afraid. When covid goes bad, it can go really bad, like 'intensive care with invasive ventilation' bad. It's just that this amount of fear is incompatible with also getting on with your life in any meaningful way, not to mention it's out of proportion with reality. Hospitalization rates of people with a confirmed case of COVID-19 (so, not counting people who never bothered to get tested, or people who have been exposed and fought the virus off, or people who have never been exposed) is about 82 per 100,000, or 0.082%. Condoms, when used properly, have about a 2% failure rate. If you trust in condoms to keep you childfree, you can trust reasonable, non-paranoid precautions to keep you from dying of co

I quit Facebook a few weeks ago. Shortly after the lockdown protests began in Michigan, I posted an explanation of what their mindset was, why the protests were inevitable, and how bad an idea it was to pretend we could keep them from happening. I was dog piled by a load of people trying to explain to me in tiny words why the best way to keep the novel coronavirus from spreading was to keep people inside and away from each other. The only reply I could give them was yes, I know  what science says , I'm telling you what people are actually going to  do . This exact thing has happened during every pandemic in recorded human history, up to and including the fictional Corrupted Blood debuff in World of Warcraft.  It is a horrible idea to predicate your public health plans on the assumptions that 1) people will behave rationally all of the time if you just shout at them loudly enough, or 2) people looking at the same data set will always draw the same conclusions. All things in life inc