the sisko kirk hero worship homoeroticism would be entirely reversed if kirk ever showed up on ds9 thru his own time travel circumstances because the first thing that would happen is he would meet quark and the thing about kirk is there is nobody in the entire space and time of the universe that would annoy him more than quark it would immediately be like the worst day he ever experienced it would be like nonstop torment trying to understand why these things keep happening to him and then he would see sisko tactfully handling quark or god forbid see him getting quark to kiss the nagus scepter and like it would be over for him like sisko handling quark related paperwork would be the single most heroic thing hes ever seen like he would become immediately obsessed and bewitched
I love Spock I love him soooo much they were like let’s make a character that’s nerdy and a pacifist and a vegetarian and he’s also a mommas boy and a sensitive musician. But he should also be. A straight up Bitch
love island should introduce a "scheming eunuch" islander who is like a smart and completely asexual islander exempt from being kicked off or being made to participate in any challenges and they're just there to provide advice and be a sort of sounding board for the other islanders when they need a disinterested party to talk things through with. but the scheming eunuch has secret goals unbeknownst to anyone e.g. a cash prize for talking a certain couple into breaking up etc.
So I wrote a piece for the pride edition of a literary magazine that my former classmates now run, on how the animated movie Astro Boy (2009) is an under-appreciated queer coming of age that shows the very real danger of being kicked out by parents who are mad that you aren’t the person that they made you to be, acknowledges that it’s traumatic, and presents an ending where those parents will risk themselves so that you can be who you want to be. Very fun, and I think I did a good job.
Problem is, I had the idea to write this way after the deadline ended. So I emailed one of the editors, and she was like, “okay, just get it to me in a couple days.”
So in my haste to bang this thing out, I named the document a really bullshit title, because I like to make myself laugh when I’m under a deadline. I submitted it, and then later came up with a better title in an email.
Luckily, the editors think it’s as funny as I do, and they’re letting me keep the title. I’m also allowed to post a section of the essay, so if you want to read part of “alright motherfucker money where your mouth is on this astro boy thing,” it’s below:
I have a passion for flops. Specifically, kids’ media flops— for two reasons. First, no matter how commercial, how overproduced it is, you can always find someone on the crew who actually had something they wanted to say with the story. Second, there will always be at least one kid that perfectly sees what that person wanted to say, and feels it resonate within them.
My all-time favorite movie as a kid was Astro Boy. Astro Boy, for those unaware, is a series that is hailed as the beginning of the manga and anime genres. Created by Osamu Tezuka during the Japanese cultural depression after World War 2, the series skyrocketed its way to international fame, and has been given several anime and manga adaptations which have, themselves, found individual fame. And in 2009, an American computer-animated movie adaptation was released, starring Freddie Highmore, Bill Nighy, Donald Sutherland, Nathan Lane, and Nicolas Motherfuckin’ Cage. It bombed miserably, putting the animation studio behind it out of business.
The plot to most Astro Boy adaptations is this: a brilliant scientist, Dr. Tenma, loses his son, Toby (or Tobio), in a tragic accident. Grief-stricken, he builds a robot that looks like his son to replace him. However, when the robot does not act like his son did, he rejects it, selling it to a robot circus run by shady ringmaster Hamegg. Eventually, the robot is rescued and adopted by Dr. Tenma’s coworker, Dr. Elefun, and it– or he– begins fighting crime under the moniker “Astro Boy.”
The 2009 movie more-or-less follows those beats. Toby Tenma is a brilliant thirteen-year-old boy living in Metro City– a floating city occupied by the ultra-wealthy to escape the polluted Surface. The city runs entirely on disposable sentient robots, whose parts are dumped with the rest of Metro City’s garbage down on the Surface once they begin to deteriorate. Toby’s father, the stern Dr. Tenma, is the head of the city’s Ministry of Science, too focused on developing robotic weapons to pay much attention to his son. At the order of the war-hungry leader President Stone, Tenma commandeers Dr. Elefun’s new discovery– polar opposite Red and Blue Cores which he believes have the capability to restore the decimated environment– to use in a robot called the Peacekeeper, as a weapon against the Surface. Desperate for his father’s attention, Toby sneaks into a military test of the Peacekeeper, which goes berserk once powered by the Red Core and attempts to destroy the indestructible glass separating it and the scientists, killing Toby in the process.
Overwhelmed by guilt, Tenma throws himself into recreating his son in a robotic body powered by the Blue Core, transferring his memories through DNA remnants and arming him with the most advanced weapons systems available, so he won’t lose him again. After he is reanimated, Tenma quits his job and throws himself into parenting the new Toby, only to be unnerved when Toby is rebellious, playful, and free-thinking– a far cry from the Toby that Tenma remembers. Even worse, Toby relates more to the household’s robotic servant, Orrin, than to his own father. All of this causes Tenma to reject the robot as an imperfect copy of his perfect Toby and kick him out of his house, leaving him a target for President Stone, who wants the Blue Core that powers him to wage war on the Surface.
I could go on about this movie for twenty goddamn pages. I watched it for the first time when I was nine, so I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. For a box-office flopping studio killer that is hated by most Astro Boy franchise fans, it has way more to say about class, environmentalism, and identity than you would expect. I haven’t even gotten to talk about the robot communists yet. But, because this is the pride month issue, and because the editors at Porn Star Martini are very kindly allowing me to impulsively rant here, I will calm down and focus in on identity.
This version of Astro Boy is a queer story, regardless of intention. Toby– or Astro, as he is called later in the movie– is a child who is rejected by his father because the person that he really is does not align with the person that his father believes he has created him to be. It’s not the fact that he has laser eyes, or flight, or plasma cannon arms that causes his father to ultimately reject him– after all, that stuff was Tenma’s choice. Instead, it’s his personality, his joys, his reservations. All of these traits, we see in the “real” Toby before his death. And we see the alive Toby repress them when he and his father speak over the phone, matching Tenma’s detached attitude towards him. Only after the death does that detachment disappear, but its absence is unnerving to them both.
Hey y’all, I’ve got some super exciting news I can finally talk about. I’m going to be collaborating with the Freedom of Form Foundation on some upcoming projects related to species affirming body mods!
For the time being, I can’t give a ton of details. But I’m sure y’all can imagine that a group of biologists and engineers collaborating with me on species affirming body mods is going to create some pretty spectacular things. Most importantly, open source things :)
Expanding on the vagueness a bit, we are still researching a lot of the stuff. Beyond that, we agreed that it would be best not to go public with some of these things until they’ve been thoroughly tested (and chittered at). As excited as we all are, I don’t want to hype everyone up in the event that something gets delayed or doesn’t work out initially.
Stay tuned though, I’ll be posting a guest article I wrote that was featured in the FFF monthly newsletter. I also have some very fun stories about hanging out with Zennith (the founder of the FFF) this past week.
We are a scientific organization with the vision to make safe and customizable body alterations possible. Read more about who we are.
Hey y’all, here is my guest article for the FFF newsletter! A lot of it is going over things from the Furlandia presentation, but I figured you might enjoy seeing this featured in the FFF. It’s honestly surreal how much this has all taken off.
One thing I will mention: Typically, the FFF features their newest newsletters and research on their Patreon channel. That said, we agreed to post this segment publicly a bit earlier.
If you are interested, they do have a donation/patreon page here:
As y’all know, I’ve never wanted to make money from any of the things I do. I genuinely enjoy just being able to come on here and talk about doing fun stuff with people/creatures in my community. I don’t need to get paid to do something I enjoy.
But the FFF genuinely does do some pretty awesome things with the limited funds they have. Anything they do make will be completely open source as well. Similarly, I agreed that anything I create while we collaborate will be open source.
I think this is important to mention because ultimately, none of us want to be some kind of social media influencer. We’re just a group of alterhumans researching/implementing species affirming tech.
Getting off that soapbox, they have patreon subscriptions for as little as $1 USD per month and for greater contributions, they’ll mail you some pretty awesome souvenirs.
As I mentioned in the previous post, I spent a lot of time hanging out with Zennith, the founder of the FFF, this past week. For those of you who don't know, Zennith has a PhD in biomedical science from Harvard. Before founding the FFF, they contributed extensive research to the fields of neurology and genetics. They've authored/co-authored numerous publications. They later worked in the biomedical industry developing assays for clinical trials and gained important knowledge about working in a more applied science environment.
When Zennith originally founded the FFF, they continued to work in industry as their day job. However, they recently took a significant leap of faith and are working with the FFF as their full time job. Needless to say, I was initially a bit nervous meeting them for the first time. After all, I'm just a raccoon girl from Portland.
Despite some initial nervousness, we kicked it off almost instantly. We went on lots of fun adventures throughout the week. I really enjoyed getting to show them some of the less common aspects of Portland I've learned to enjoy. I also gifted them a jar of Winco freshly ground honey roasted peanut butter. That's an important gift in raccoon diplomacy. We even had a peanut butter tea party out in the park.
We were hanging out a few nights ago and I told them how I was initially nervous to meet them. To my surprise, they told me that they were also a bit nervous to meet me, and that they looked up to me. I'd have to say that was one of the most wholesome and adorable moments of my entire life.
We both have pretty similar feelings on our roles within the alterhuman community. I get so much love and support from y'all. Likewise, Zennith has experienced that same love and support from the work they've done. But with that support comes immense internal pressure for us to put in our best work as we collaborate on these upcoming projects. After all, this is our community.
Zennith also accompanied me while I got that latest glowing scarification mod done. That was a ton of fun. Despite having immense anatomy knowledge, Zennith is very new to the body modification side of things. They had a lot of questions and absorbed a lot of information from seeing me get this procedure. Most importantly, Jer over at Valkyrie Tattoo and Piercing was super informative and happy to answer questions. That's often a real rarity in the professional body modification scene.
Ultimately, these exchanges of knowledge are what make spectacular things get done. I've learned so much from working with Zennith, and I can genuinely say they learned a decent bit of knowledge from me. I can't wait to give provide more updates on our progress. This all still feels surreal.
I think it was very intentional that the still lifes have extra fingers and that the backrooms distorts text when it copies it over, both things that “AI” is notorious for.
Backrooms is about a lot of things, but I think it’s in part a reflection of modern anxieties about AI. The film is all about uncanny facsimiles that are soulless husks of the things they’re depicting. An amalgamation of recognizable features without regard to function or meaning.
“When we were kids, the Phonics Wizard came to our town to show off how the letter E can change the sounds of vowels. He turned a can into a cane, a pin into a pine. This one kid had a cap and he changed it into a cape, that kind of thing.
“And we loved it, we were all having a great time, but then he saw my sister and I, and he just got this - this look in his eyes, and then-”
She hesitated, worrying the coarse material between her fingers. “Things got pretty bad after that,” she muttered. “I know it’s silly, but I try to keep - her - comfortable. We don’t know if she can still hear us, or see us, or if she’s even still in here, but I like to think she is. I talk to her when I can, I leave music on when I’m out of the house. I tried to convince my parents to bring her with us when we went to Disneyland, but they didn’t - didn’t really take that well.”
After a moment, she put the ball of twine back onto its pillow. “Anyways. They tried to arrest the Phonics Wizard, but he had a plan in case something went wrong and he turned it into a plane and flew away.”
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