2022-02-12

warning: spoilers for detransition, baby

today i found out there really are trans lady picnics, thanks to mojeek.

=> https://www.mojeek.com/

duckduckgo failed me on this, and i didn't want to resort to google. i've been trying out some independent search engines, after reading this post:

=> gemini://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes.gmi

if i figure out what the hills of brooklyn's prospect park look like, and flip back to where reese, amy, and iris are described, i'll probably make some art of a picnic. i haven't seen any fanart of the characters at all, even after checking tumblr - the people who rush to make fanart of everything and always tag it!

i also learned that xtina is just what christina aguilera calls herself, that's slightly better than what i assumed. still corny.

the book got better with vocabulary as it went on, and i finished it! i haven't read a book in less than 10 sittings in a while. this book took 2, or 3 if i count each individual attempt to read. in the second sitting, i started at the very beginning.

it was pretty good. last quarter of the book wasn't that moving though. all the characters reflect the bitterness of /tttt/ers, and most of what tttt says about transness is easily just summarized or better said than they ever do in this book (even with peter's slightly off-putting writing style), within that fictional story. today i even saw a thread that has a joke about trans careers, almost exactly what she wrote. it was interesting seeing the terminally online ideas i see daily represented in this professionally published book, which is also why i don't have much new wisdom to share from this read.

well, i didn't know what "disassociation" exactly entailed before this, but i've experienced it before, to a lesser degree than ames. i didn't know about the most interesting man in the world commercials either, really great punchlines. i wanna read more books that integrate terminally online-ness into them.

for one of my classes, i have to read kate chopin's the awakening. i've only gone through maybe 6 pages and a plot summary so far. it's my main novel in recent memory, so i've been that one meme throughout detransition, baby:

guy who has only read the awakening, reading his second book: getting a lot of the awakening vibes from this.

at one point, reese is a parakeet, trapped in a closet, like the implicit metaphor that edna is a parrot, trapped in a cage, right on page 1 of the awakening. the voice of the sea calls to both of them, they both descend into the sea. one commits suicide, and the other is thought by others to attempt to, but in reality, she is just trying to surpass her grief with the wim hof method. the way she mentions pockets filled with stones reminded me of gaiman's down to a sunless sea. but i didn't think peters was trying to reference that. now i know that down to a sunless sea references virginia woolf. and that is it for my comparisons, with my limited edna lore.

time to read the masker, or something.