Traverse Fantasy

I was reading the so-called ‘Blue Book’, a cheeky nickname for Fight the Constitution , a collection of essays published by Cosmonaut , the magazine of the Marxist Unity Group, a Kautskyist caucus within the Democratic Socialists of America. Whew. You get all that? Anyway, I didn’t particularly care for it. The essays kept feeling like they were explaining the same concepts over and over again, so they lacked systematic cohesion in contrast to (say) the Little Red Book (which is impressive in that it accomplishes more despite being... littler). I joked with Ènziramire that I was tired of Marxist groups saying they would offer a practical program when instead it just vomited more theory. I don’t know that “We need to recruit more people” is a strategy as much as what you’d want to accomplish with a strategy. It felt less stupid than PSL’s Socialist Reconstruction , at least, but only in as much as it didn’t suggest outright stupid things. But it gets no points for lacking ambition. Ènz...

Consider this a late entry to Prismatic Warren’s (look, we need to distinguish the blog and the guy) cleric blogwagon. Or don’t. I meant to write something for it because I loved the movie Conclave , but ended up having a crazy month where I thought less about this blog than I had for the other months of this year. This has nothing to do with Conclave or D&D though. Bon appetit. I was talking to a friend and her boyfriend who were recounting their recent adventure while church hopping, the result of the boyfriend getting kicked out of his church band because his girlfriend (my friend) moved in to live with him. A fourth person in all this had invited them to their church, a Lutheran one, and the couple was totally surprised by what they had encountered. Never mind the support dog the congregation just had around as a conversation starter (“Did you meet this dog that’s gone out of its fucking mind?”). They were surprised that the church, despite being ‘Christian’, was very ‘Catho...

While writing my review of Leslie Feinberg’s Transgender Warriors , I sketched a model of patriarchal ideology and society. It can be read top-to-bottom as a model of patriarchal relations as they descend logically from its atomic social categories (comparable to Marx’s logical derivation of the money form , which has little to do with the historical genesis of money as a unit of account which already implies a socialization and valuation of labor), and bottom-to-top as a model of how patriarchal ideology arises from material relations upon which it imposes increasingly abstract social notions. Naturalization of sex as immutable essence. Enforcement of gender roles and expressions on the basis of sex. Institutionalization of sexism and heterosexuality. Enclosure and exchange of women within and between families. Assignment of women to domestic labor / social reproduction. This is not new or insightful, but it helps me contextualize works I’ve read to understand on what level of...

I read Transgender Warriors by Leslie Feinberg around December 2023, and I’ve vaguely gestured towards having opinions about that book in the two years since. I didn’t write a “review” (loosely speaking) of it because I started devaluing my own time spent writing then, and I felt that my feelings about the book could be boiled down to me not being the primary audience (or, rather, the subject about whom Feinberg speaks). These feelings did inform a certain analysis I wrote of trans discourse , and a FAQ but I did not refer to Feinberg or her work directly. So, this is a chance for me to actually get into the book, which solidly had me in the first half. It’s also a chance for me to exercise writing again, since I feel like I’ve lost some capability since I stopped blogging actively, especially in the context of what they call critical theory (makes jerk-off motion with my hand). Trans History The first part of the book is REALLY good. I was constantly gagging at the wealth of histo...

This is based on two recipes on Damn Delicious and Cafe Delites that were relatively quick and easy but I felt like didn't taste enough. My partner asked me lately whether I prioritize the heat level of a (spicy) dish over its actual flavor, and I think it's a false dichotomy. I love the taste of spice! I'm not a freak about eating the hottest peppers possible or whatever. I just think spicy things taste good and I love the warm feeling in my mouth and stomach when I eat spicy food :) So this is my chicken tikka masala recipe! It's not authentic, but neither is tikka masala. I know what I am and what I like. I'd love to add paneer to it, which was a suggestion by my partner to make the best tikka masala of both worlds (iykyk lol), but I need to figure that out first. No investigation, no right to speak! Chicken Marinade It's best to marinade the chicken overnight, but I've done ~2 hours before. Just marinade for any chunk of time at all tbh. You'll be ...

I'm working on aggregating the posts on this blog into a big book so I can eventually delete it for my personal safety, considering the state of our world. There were some things, though, I wanted to share while I still had a soapbox here. This will be a short revisit of bite-sized dungeons , which in sloppy fashion I over-complicated. This is basically copied from Cinco! , my personal campaign book. You don't need preset patterns of rooms and connections! Just have six circles, each numbered: Entrance Monsters with treasure Monsters without treasure Treasures without monsters Random shit Random shit Roll D6 six times to draw connections from each of the rooms to another, re-rolling results equal to the current room or those which have already been rolled. If you want, you can also roll D6 for which connections have special attributes like being lengthy (requiring 1 turn to traverse), difficult (requiring some check), or hidden (requiring foreknowledge). And that's all!