What Cis People Say To Trans People Vs. What We Hear

I made a game!  It’s a text-based adventure about living with mental illness.  I pulled a marathon coding session yesterday and ported it to javascript, so it’s now you can play it in a browser without having to install anything.  Yay!

As the subject matter might suggest, it’s a little on the dark side.  Writing it was an emotional but very rewarding experience.  Self-expression through code!

Let me know what you think! 

Stanley Cup Playoff Drinks

Here are some drinks to celebrate the Most Wonderful Time of the Year! Just like the playoffs themselves, playoff drinks have to strike the tricky balance inherent to a winter sport being played in June, like seriously why did we ever let the California teams get good enough to make it into the later rounds it’s like a million degrees what the hell are we doing trying to play scoot and shoot on ice. These are some of my favourites for watching the Cup while in your cups.

The PIMs Cup

By Ethanbentley at en.wikipedia [FAL], via Wikimedia Commons

A playoff version of the classic British summer drink, prepare a fruit cup per your favourite recipe, but serve in a glass with a salted rim. Discretely brush off the salt before drinking, it’s just there to provoke horrified looks. Celebrate bright fruity spring flavours and your favourite heavily-penalized dillhole at the same time

Toast: To a different little shit who has his own towel in the penalty box each time you take a sip. Toasted players should be unique, unless toasting Brad Marchand, who is unique enough on his own. Like a proverbial river, you can’t step in the same Marchie twice

Garnish: A smug look at your friend having a shrieky meltdown that you would celebrate such a classless goon

The Playoff Beard

By Chris huh [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons

Mix a sex on the beach or a tangerini or similarly coloured drink and then serve in a scotch tumbler with a single pretentiously-large ice cube.

For some people loving sports means sometimes having to pass as Totally One Of The Guys, Nothing To See Here. This drink gives the option to do that while remaining true to an identity as a smouldering queer dumpster fire. Looks like a manly drink for manly men but tastes like an afternoon cackling at a matinee performance of one of the funny tragedies at Shakespeare in the Park

Toast: The patron saint of smouldering queer dumpster fires in the NHL, Tyson Barrie. Alternatively Tyson Barrie’s dignity, which needs all the help it can get, or the boat his cardiologist gets a little closer to buying every time he hits on a teammate on camera and then isn’t sure if they’re going along with it jokingly or are actually into it

The Flannel Shirt

Mostly I go for fruity drinks to celebrate playoff joy, but sometimes you need a soothing wintry drink for playoff heartbreak. The flannel shirt can be an excellent balm for postseason hard times. Feel free to play around with the spice mixture (allspice in the above recipe, but other mulling spices can also be good) for comforting nostalgia suited to you.

Toast: Those halcyon winter days when you happily doze by the cabin woodstove wearing nothing but Hilary Knight’s cozy flannel shirt. You hear the shoothing rythm of firewood being chopped outside and wait for her to come to come back in, face red from the cold, to cram herself into your chair and unwittingly light up your whole spine with her icy hands on your warm neck. The shirt smells like her and no one has even been mathematically eliminated yet, let alone blown 4-1 leads in the final minutes of game seven, been swept (or reverse swept), or knocked out by the same division rival for the second year in a row. You’re safe.

Codex Callistius, a 12th century “travel guide” to Santiago di Compostela. 

Book of Hours, Initial, Walters Manuscript W.202, fol. 37r by Walters Art Museum Illuminated Manuscripts http://flic.kr/p/DbvRSn

Yeah man it's a huge fucking waste! Rain falling on me and waterlogging all my pretty feathers when I'm just trying to live my little life. The worst and most wasteful part? The fucking seagulls don't even mind! Those smug fucking bullies flap about and get the good garbage while I'm huddling under this tree, the saddest crow that ever lived. At least the fucking owls, may all their flight feathers fall out, take it much worse than I do and are forced to reveal their hideous inner and outer selves to the world. Rain should fall on them but not me. Huge waste tbh.

You Are Not Wasting Time; It Was Given To You As A Gift, Freely and Generously; Is Rain Wasted Because It Falls On Gardens, Grass, Disgruntled Birds, and Umbrellas All The Same?

How parental support can make a world of difference for a trans* youth. Learn more. Retweet. Share on Facebook.

I think the CD is a shield.

                                                         Michel Ney

                                                  Marshal of France

                                                First Duc d'Elchingen

                                           First Prince de la Moskowa

                                 (January 10, 1769 – January 10, 2016)

                                              Happy 247th birthday!

Unfortunately for safety planners (but fortunately for arson fantasies) not all of the ISS is expected to vaporize in orbit. From NASA's ISS end of life FAQ:

Most station hardware is expected to burn up or vaporize during the intense heating associated with atmospheric re-entry, whereas some denser or heat-resistant components like truss sections are expected to survive re-entry and splash down within an uninhabited region of the ocean.  

What is left of the surviving components will be very hot and could certainly burn down the goat if placed next to it. The trouble here is that this scrap does not have predictable aerodynamic qualities and the atmosphere is a chaotic place. The debris field when the Russian station MIR was deorbited was 1500 km long and 100km wide. The American Skylab missed the target of the Pacific Ocean and dropped debris on Australia as a little whoopsie doodle. So hitting a target the size of the goat would sadly be imposible.

As for missing a target the size of a goat, NASA has concerns:

...a random re-entry cannot ensure that any surviving debris lands in a remote, unpopulated area. The risks to the population associated with an uncontrolled re-entry for space station are not acceptable.

They're still a little twitchy from the media response to that time they dropped debris on Australia I think.

theoretically if we convinced NASA to deorbit the international space station into gavle that would probably light the goat on fire

Wouldn't it burn up in the atmosphere?

A present I made for my dear friend @ave-puella.  You may recognize it as a short Temeraire fic she posted a little while back.  It’s done entirely by hand, and was my first time attempting borders and illumination.  I’m still figuring out gold leaf, but it was super fun to work with (there’s also some gold work on the border of the third page).  For those of you unfamiliar with the Temeraire universe, there are dragons, hence the second page border.

It was a heck of a lot of work, but was entirely worth it for her face and incredulous ‘what did you do?!’