Imagine that everywhere in the mechanical engineering world suddenly got infatuated with lasers.
Lasers have a lot of uses! Measuring things, heating things, cutting things, entertaining cats, particle physics. Lasers are pretty cool. Very versatile, very useful, potential to be very powerful.
Someone shows up one day and says "I have developed a never before seen technology! I call it a Death Star."
And it's a 3.4mW laser. Well no, we haven't seen this exact size of laser much since that's not really standard, but that's a bit of a misnomer, and I wouldn't call it new -
"HOLY SHIT GUYS! This Death Star is so entertaining! My cat loves it and it has such a nice color!" The Death Star becomes a viral novelty, and is mildly entertaining, as laser pointers often are.
Somehow, seemingly overnight, this leads to mania. "Lets stick lasers in EVERYTHING! The public loves them!"
More companies make 3.4mW lasers to jump on the bandwagon. Everyone that makes anything vaguely mechanical starts sticking lasers into their designs.
Everyone is calling them Death Stars. Any time there is a "Death Star innovation", it is just that they made a bigger laser.
Ford's next truck comes out and it has "Death Star integrated headlights", where they have just stuck giant lasers in place of their previously functional headlights.
An electric toothbrush is now "Powered by Death Stars" and shoots a laser at the tooth its cleaning. You think that maybe this could have actual applications as a sanitizing device if you're being generous, but when you actually look at the product, its laser has no purpose but to point at the tooth and drain the battery.
Mechanical products across the board get noticeably worse as everyone starts stuffing lasers in places where lasers have no right to be.
The lamp business gets in on it. "Here's a Death Star powered lamp!" These guys haven't even tried to stick a laser in their damn lamps. They've just started calling their light bulbs Death Stars and hoped you bought it before you could tell the difference. You at least appreciate that they haven't ruined their lamp about it.
Death Stars are lauded as the solution to all the world's problems. If it's not working, you should stick a laser in it! That'll fix it, everyone says. Once in a blue moon, it's even true! Weather prediction is really good now. But most things are garbage. Like "Death Star powered washing machines". What the fuck does that even mean?
Meanwhile, since all functioning mechanisms are being replaced with lasers, problems start showing up. All mirrors now cost $1000+ dollars, because the whole supply is being used up to make more lasers. The earth heats up, because everyone's blasting lasers at everything. People keep going blind, on account of all the lasers.
You, in fact, study optical mechanics. You know what a laser is, and how it works, and that it was invented many years before any of this nonsense actually started. People keep asking you about Death Stars, since surely you must know so much about them.
You explain that this is not really what lasers are for, except you have to call them Death Stars now, and that they're causing a lot of harm, so you don't like them much.
"Oh, but they're still such new tech!" they reply. "They'll figure out how to make Death Stars that don't burn your eyes out soon, and then it won't be an issue anymore!"
Somewhere, deep and buried, you remember lasers being used in particle accelerators, or in telescopes, or in laser cutters, or funny cat videos. They are, in fact, still interesting. Still cool.
But by this point they have replaced roads with "Death Star Powered Pathways", which are just laser pointers propped up on tooth picks pointing vaguely through the forests.
GLaDOS voice: "Would you like to see some artwork I generated? I've heard from other test subjects that AI-generated artwork produces an uncanny valley response in human viewers because they can't perceive it as fully real. They've told me that it looks absolutely hideous to them, that they can't imagine anything more disgusting than AI art. But, well I've been practicing and wanted your honest opinion. Feel free to let me know how ugly you find this by ranking it on a scale from 'vomit-inducing' to 'eye-bleeding'."
A robotic arm lowers from the ceiling holding a hand mirror up to Chell's face
how is trump alive?? like hes rlly gone thru his whole life like That …. and no one has ever just fuckin decked him?? gave him the ole one two? knocked his lights out??? incredible
People just becoming politically aware are never going to appreciate just how fucking hated this guy was before he was in politics. He was hated for over half a century. Everyone aware of him mocked and derided him as a cheating, greedy corporate asshole and mindless bully and this is by far not the only time anyone clocked his ass but it is probably one of the only times it got caught on video.
Hatred of him was bipartisan all my life and it just goes to show how easily right wingers can be suckered by anyone who kisses their collective asshole on their pet agendas.
Never forget that the reason Trump seems like an over-the-top stupidly villainous antagonist from a 90s movie is because half of them were based on Trump and making fun of him.
The reason The Simpsons and a handful of other comedies ‘predicted’ the Trump presidency was because he kept saying he wanted to run and nobody could think of anything funnier than a President Trump.
I think I’m literally never gonna be sick of this masterpiece. I think watching it on a loop for eight hours could fix me. Dancing’s what clears my soul. Dancing’s what makes me whole.
I just love that this very video is an accumulation of thousands of years worth of art made by people who have never met each other. The concept of this video was so completely unfathomable to every single artist who made the sculptures and yet they’ve all put something toward the creation of it.
GLaDOS voice: "Would you like to see some artwork I generated? I've heard from other test subjects that AI-generated artwork produces an uncanny valley response in human viewers because they can't perceive it as fully real. They've told me that it looks absolutely hideous to them, that they can't imagine anything more disgusting than AI art. But, well I've been practicing and wanted your honest opinion. Feel free to let me know how ugly you find this by ranking it on a scale from 'vomit-inducing' to 'eye-bleeding'."
A robotic arm lowers from the ceiling holding a hand mirror up to Chell's face
I’ll try my best to describe this. It’s a video with a mash-up of a bunch of different Disney movies, set to a song that’s a mash-up of a bunch of other songs. That in and of itself wouldn’t make it praiseworthy, but this is DONE SO WELL that just, holy cow.
What’s better— the thread is filled with people giving some good advice on how to respect a woman’s boundaries and how to ask what she would be okay with, publicly. Lots of trans girls thanking him for being so patient and thoughtful with his words, and lots of people cautioning him that his purpose as a boyfriend would be to keep her safe, even from his own friends and family if need be. A+ shit right here.
hey, trans girls who are into guys? THIS is what you deserve. don’t you ever believe that you have to bend over backwards for men to like you, that you have to accept being disrespected and mistreated, that you’re something to hide or be ashamed of. you’re beautiful, you’re a fucking princess, and you deserve someone who sees that and loves you deeply and unconditionally, who will choose you over the world and fight the world for you. THIS is the kind of guy.
I had a very interesting time in the leadup to the release of Estro Junkies, the novelization of Ranked Competitive Breast Growth (sort of!). I got contacted early and was given an early copy in exchange for my thoughts and I was more than happy to oblige. RCBG is a story that has become pretty near and dear to my heart in the short amount of time it's existed in my life, and being given an Advanced Reader Copy made me so giddy that I read the entire damn thing in just a day. I wrote up 2,500 words in my thoughts alone on the book just while reading it, and I prepped myself to sit down and write a proper review of the book.
...and then tech rehearsal for an indie film I'm helping with started up and I was working WAY later nights than I thought. So! Didn't get this out before the book could release. But I can make up for that by writing a long-ass thoughtpiece on it.
If you want a short review of Estro Junkies, here it is: It's a damn good book that I like a lot. It's not perfect, but if you like RCBG you will absolutely enjoy Estro Junkies. I can highly recommend it to anyone who has been a trans person on the internet, which means if you are reading this you will probably like it. I have like six cis people reading my blog at this point and the number only dwindles the more I post. Probably even fewer if you read Estro Junkies! Anyway, book good, buy it and support Talia and Beth.
Now, if you want my LONG review of Estro Junkies, here it is:
(Spoilers ahead! Starts out light and gets heavier at the end.)
Estro Junkies has a very simple premise in regards to its existence: RCBG started out as a joke before evolving into a much more detailed, tightly-written serial, and Estro Junkies takes that initial first arc and polishes it up as to fit in easier with the latter parts of the story. It's a pretty common thing to do with online serialized work. If I had a nickel for every time an online creator went back and remade early parts of their work I'd have. a lot of fucking nickels.
And Estro Junkies is that. For a time. The first handful of chapters deftly condenses a lot of the meandering the original serial did and makes everything read much smoother. If there's one huge, overarching compliment I can give EJ is that it is a fun read. Words glide across the page like well-oiled machinery with prose that never catches on anything. It is a blast, so much so that, once again, I read it all in a fucking day. The book is over 300 pages!! That is not a small amount of book to read in a day! The early chapters of RCBG are a fun time, but EJ polishes it to a diamond shine. A lot of new foreshadowing and call-forwards are places in the first four chapters in a way that rewards long-time serial readers while making the transition into the later material much easier on any new members of the audience.
(I should note, I'm writing this review mostly from the perspective of someone who loves RCBG and is familiar with it going into Estro Junkies.)
And then you get to Chapter 5 and everything gets flipped on its head. It is the Scott Pilgrim Takes Off of Ranked Competitive Breast Growth. This is the Eva Rebuild of competitive mammogenesis. Chapter 5 starts with a familiar premise to the original book but introduces characters way, way earlier in a way that had me frantically writing all-caps notes. It's a genuinely exhilarating read if you're caught up on the serial and I can imagine it flows very naturally for new readers as well. The book plays with pre-existing character dynamics (or even brand-new ones) in ways that are so, SO captivating that I'm sometimes sad that they can't retroactively exist in the serial.
For example, Emmy. Emmy is one of my favorite characters in RCBG, in no small part because of her ability to somehow manifest as a walking, talking crashout. She starts out as a somewhat more put-together parallel to Nichole and Katherine and as we peel back the layers of her character we realize she is fuuuuuucked up. And I really love that about her. And in EJ, she gets a brand-new level of focus and relationship with Katherine that has me gnawing at the bars of my cage wishing for more of that in the serial. She's a lot more well-adjusted in this novel, at least by my metric, but she's still absolutely fucked in the head and the story makes me feel so bad for a character that drew so much of my ire in the serial by giving her three-dimensionality and respect that the original serial only hinted at in the first arc. The story gives her a friendship with Katherine that feels real and grounded and intoxicating to read that I can't give enough of. Her friendship with everyone's favorite chuuni shows vulnerable sides that Emmy only keeps to herself in the serial, and retroactively makes her a more compelling character in the web version. I don't want to delve too deeply into EJ spoilers here, but god I love Emmy. Fuck!!!!
RCBG is one of my favorite stories because it allows its transgender characters to be people in ways that stories who only have one or two trans characters can't allow. It's clear to me that Beth and Talia have an iron grip on the types of brainworms that chronically online transgender woman are forced to deal with every day and weave that into every character interaction in a way that feels way, wayyyy too real. The story might be parodic in nature, but it has a laser-precision pin on the ways the environment around you affects you as a transgender woman. It's fucked up reading a story after nearly seven years of transitioning that really makes you feel seen as a woman. It's part of why I latched onto the story so heavily; finally having a story written by and for transfems feels like a breathe of fresh air in world where a lot of the fiction surrounding us is either tepid in its showcase of our existence or scornful of our image. I think one of the best showcases for that is Rashmi.
Rashmi (or Kyle for 99% of the book) is neck-and-neck for my favorite character in RCBG, and this book might just eek out the win for her. The idea of filling an apartment with terminally online women and having one girl disconnected from all that shit is funny enough, but Rashmi ends up being a lot more than that. She's haunted by her guilt of what she's doing to Rupali, she's unable to find the language or tools to help her navigate her current situation, and she can be truly kindhearted but is often trapped by her own self-loathing. I think the changes made to her and Mona's relationship make this book worth reading, if nothing else. Rashmi getting with Mona in the serial felt like a meteor crashing directly into the plot and setting the entire living room on fire; just a complete shattering of any expectation that things were going to go alright. It's almost unbelievable how Rashmi would willingly get with someone so goddamn insufferable, but the serial does good work to showcase the fallout of that kind of relationship and it makes sense as a narrative tool to discuss racism in LGBTQ spaces and highlight just how deep Rashmi's self-loathing is.
It wasn't really an issue in the moment, but the book really does highlight how cartoonishly racist Mona is. It's part of the joke! And the joke is also part of the theory. And I'm genuinely glad that Mona exists as a means of discussing the way the trappings of comphet can influence relationships even when they're already queer and the way racist ideologies rot things to the core. However, Mona might have been too good at that in the original. She comes across as basically evil in the serial at some points in ways where it might be a little hard to wrap your head around what Rashmi was even thinking hooking up with her.
Which is why I think the novel is incredibly smart to switch a lot of the perspectives to Rashmi herself. If you ever thought these two hooking up was unlikely, the book changes and reframes a lot of the relationship to make a ton more sense. The way EJ deals with Rashmi's internalized homophobia, the way she knows Mona's whole deal before it's even laid out to us, the way the two characters both struggle deeply with their own self-image really paints a much more understanding picture of why two fucked up twenty-somethings would link up like that. We're in Rashmi's head when the kiss happens as opposed to Mona's, and the disgust she feels for herself and Mona is so fucking palpable it hurts, but it also makes so, so much sense. It's such a showcase of Talia and Beth's improved writing that I can easily recommend the book solely on the improved Jeff/Kyle relationship. Mona no longer feels like a tool for showcasing how terrible white gay dudes with no ability to self-examine can be towards racialized queer people, she feels like a PERSON who happens to also showcase how terrible white gay dudes with no ability to self-examine can be towards racialized queer people. Hell, I even want these two to be friends or even acquaintances in this version of the story. There's a lot of understanding for the women in these books and I think extending that understanding to Mona makes for a much stronger story for her AND Rashmi. God I love Rashmi, I hope everything goes well for her.
The novel is, unsurprisingly, really good at showing fucked up things happening to stupid, stupid girls in a way that is an absolute page-turner. However, one thing I want to really compliment the book on is the way that it peppers in good things happening. It's only occasionally, but every hint we get towards a better life for the apartment girls (and surrounding folks) hits so much harder than if things just kept spiraling and spiraling over and over; sort of a bait to keep me delving deeper into the waters of people bending over backwards to justify how they aren't girls but simply men pretending to be girls to solidify their position as men. Rashmi has a scene late in the book that hits so close to home, calling back to the first time my friend did my makeup and made me look in the mirror and see a girl. Rupali and Nichole (who barely interact in the first book) have these delightful little hints at a budding early-queer romance that is unbearably cute at times. There is a genuinely beautiful gay sex scene that made me so giddy when first reading it (and I can think of maybe one or two of those happening at all in the entirety of the original serial, so that means a lot) that I had to sit down and do art of it after finishing it. RCBG is about all the shit that sucks about being trans but also about how liberating and free and wonderful it can feel, enough to keep you walking alongside these girls, so curious to see how things will end up that you feel like you might die.
Now, for all the praise I heap on this book, I will note that it's not perfect. Not in any way that would dissuade me (or you, go read it!!!) from picking it up. It's just different in a lot of ways that I feel like are sometimes done better in the serial, and vice versa. For one, I feel like part of the hook of RCBG was how silly it was, and that silly premise evolving into something taken seriously by the narrative is part of the experience. A lot of my friends read the web version flabbergasted that such an absurd premise had them crying at the end, and I think a lot of that can be owed to how the serial plays with reality in ways the novel doesn't. The serial takes place in an ambiguous country in a bizarro world that has shit like "Accord" and "Bluefly" for social media and something called "Swemark" as a real country. It made the surreal nature of the way the characters acted sometimes more believable because, hey, the world they inhabit is surreal. The parodic nature adds a lot to RCBG I think, and part of the fun of reading is going "oh, shit, they're talking about Fire Emblem" when parsing a discussion between Rupali and Katherine about fanfiction and interpretations of childhood friends. A lot of the commentary on being transgender can be a lot stronger in a more surreal world because it can take a lot of the subtle absurdity of transphobia and all the things that come with it and laying it bare by accentuating the ridiculousness of it. In some ways I feel like the decision to limit Estro Junkies to the "real world" means that some characters get a bit kneecapped, like Katherine.
A lot of my favorite bits of hers get cut, like finding out her name and personality is from a World-of-Warcraft-like or her worry that she's accidentally forcefemming her friend and writes a legitimately hilarious AITA Reddit post asking about it. My one big issue with the book is the way that Nichole and Katherine seem to venture off into their own side-plots in place of their weird fucked up childhood friend codependence bullshit means that I worry that their falling out won't hit as well for new readers. As a longtime reader, I have the context needed for their relationship to still hit, but I'm not sure how well it would read to someone who's never experienced this story before. They don't even go to IKEA in this version of the story!
However, none of these nitpicks should stop you from picking up Estro Junkies. It is an expertly crafted look at the absurdities of being a transgender woman filled with a lot of heart and a lot of heartbreak. Talia and Beth really outdid themselves with this one, and I'm excited to see where they go next with the second book. These characters managed to get their hooks in me and at this point I think I'm only getting off this ride when they're ready to let go. If you like RCBG, pick up Estro Junkies. If you like transgender fiction, pick up Estro Junkies. If you like a lot of my own work, well, there's a reason I like this book! You'll like Estro Junkies! Go buy it now! Rahhh!!!!
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