someone [comrade/them, they/them]

  • 56 Posts
  • 2.46K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: January 11th, 2024
  • someone [comrade/them, they/them]toSoviet•Joseph Stalin - New General Megathread for the 18th-22th December 2024
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    5 hours ago

    I'm doing a Star Trek TNG rewatch start to finish. I'm in season 5 now, just finished "The Outcast". And whoa, does this one hit hard in an era of awful transphobia. I'm not trans myself but I try to support and learn.

    Show

    Spoilers, if you haven't seen it, watch it, even if you've never ever seen Star Trek of any kind before. This one's not about technobabble.

    It was the scene in the shuttle where Riker and Soren are preparing the shuttle's systems for their specialized mission, and the emotional and sexual tension is high bordering on steamy. Soren admits their attraction for Riker. Soren talks about how they had a classmate who was hiding that they were in fact male. And just after Soren says that, they switch the pronouns they use to refer to that classmate from "they" to "he". And I was thinking that was a remarkably interesting writing choice. And then Soren reveals that "they" are in fact "she". And the whole scene is just beautiful. I don't think Frakes gets the respect he deserves as an actor. He is a damn good one and he was on point in this episode. The emotion was so raw and real that it felt almost coital.

    I respect the hell out of Frakes for making it clear that he preferred a male actor for Soren. But I think that making it a "straight" relationship that still had to be kept a tight secret from everyone, it reaches audiences who most need to hear the message by posing the question "What if you had to come out as being straight?" The sad ending just drives the point home.

  • someone [comrade/them, they/them]toSoviet•Joseph Stalin - New General Megathread for the 18th-22th December 2024
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    6 hours ago

    I have a theory that the broader decades-long cycles of mass bans on web forums is concentrating the most effective boat-rockers (of any given interest) from many general-audience forums into a singular niche self-hosted community devoted to that interest. I think hexbear is a perfect example, in the leftist niche. We've seen an incredible amount of mass-bannings and/or self-exodus from corporate-owned platforms worldwide of anyone to the left of Edward VIII. The broader internet posting community is being refined down into a smaller community of people who are (a) leftist, (b) literate, (c) funny, (d) strong queer allies if they're not already queer themselves, and (e) actually fucking paying attention to world events and knows how to contexualize them, and they're making their way here. This is healthy.

    I think we'll see that effect rapidly accelerate in the coming worldwide political climate. I don't buy for a second the moaners saying "hexbear is going to hell, it's dead, it's over, blahblahblah". That's crap. I'm in my 40s, and I've been terminally online since I was 15. I've seen so many forums come and go. I've admin'd a few, mod'd a few, been banned from several for reasons both undeserved and completely deserved, and been happy to see that not even the Internet Archive has evidence of my own past shittiness on specific forums that I now regret joining in my younger days. I've seen forum cultures of all weirdness and politeness and legality levels, I've seen them in all stages from new (I had a 4 digit slashdot ID!) to active to declining to dead. You develop an instinct for recognizing what stage a forum is in when you lurk for a few months before creating an account. I just feel it in my bones that hexbear is nowhere fucking near decline. If anything the global political trajectory is going make this place way more active, it'll be a haven. The recent bluesky thing cemented this for me.

  • someone [comrade/them, they/them]tochat•Is Dirt Owl on drugs?
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    7 hours ago

    It's performance art, they're actually a bored improv theatre kid from Bozeman, Montana who's coping with their multiple rejection letters from Juilliard by constructing elaborate online personas to stay in practice by rapidly improvising dialogue. You should see their spreadsheet on what personality traits those personas have for the dozens of forums where they're doing this. It's impressive how organized they are.