Tag Archives: Blogs

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Iain With And Without An M. Banks

I never know what to say when someone dies, even 10 years on. Gala and I joked my epitaph should be, “Fuck you looking at? I’ll knife ya.” Ten years ago, Iain Banks died. Shit joke. Unequivocally my fave author at the time. I’ve read a heap since then and in that specific genre only Tamsyn Muir and Ann Leckie have come close. Yeah, a lot of other writers are amazing and touched my heart, made me laugh, but this is the you can take a tote bag of books to a desert island kind of love and it’s those three with Iain forever first.

Like so many weird subculture scenes, Iain got the attention of way too many straight white dudes. And because he was a nominally straight white dude, with a love of fast cars, whiskey and drugs, he doesn’t get much attention outside that very mediocre bubble of dudes talking. Yeah, Excession is a banger of a space opera, but have you read Feersum Endjinn? Or Whit? That shit has radical, liberatory politics all the way through. He was writing Black, Brown, trans, queer liberation and love back in the ’90s. And he always seemed like one of those so rare, genuinely good, thoughtful, fun, caring men. The kind we need a whole lot more of.

Over the almost twenty years of this blog, I’ve written about or mentioned him in the low hundreds of posts. He even has his own tag, though for that number he should be a category. Here’s some of my faves, chronologically.

Which caused me to read some of my own writing from the last decade and I’m not as shamed or embarrassed as I feared. Which might be me lacking in self-awareness of what I’m missing, but whatever.

And what caused this — I was not paying attention and February 16th was his birthday and it’s 10 years since he died — was a thread by Assoc for Scottish Literature with a bunch of links to articles and interviews I’m going to remind myself of by putting here:

(Not including the Guardian one though. Fuck that TERF transphobe rag. Wouldn’t piss on it if it was on fire.)

Cheers, Iain. I’d have loved for you to scare the shit out of me in the passenger seat of a red F40 hooning the highland roads of Scotland.

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The Only Thing To Celebrate On February 14th

I’ve never celebrated str8 wyt valentine’s day but I always forget it was the day colonialist invader Captain Cook got himself murked for trying to kidnap Kalaniʻōpuʻu on Hawaiʻi. This ten-year-old reminder comes from somos lobos, no ovejas. Fucked around, found out, bro.

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I Only Read Gawker For The Articles

The last couple of years really feels like any culture that isn’t str8wyt dudes is getting shut down. Old Gawker went from cringe and occasionally fucked decisions to the kind of proper journalism the big rags could never do. New Gawker was a tripped-out strange incoherent joy of a group tumblr. In the future, the apparent superficiality of both versions will be recognised for their deeply relevant and incisive political analysis, and for women and femmes going hard for popular culture. For now, there’s Defector, Autopian, and other post-Gawker brilliance, but it’s still sad as fuck to lose another.

Until journalism isn’t beholden to rich white dudes who throw down 1.5 million for Napoleon’s hat, or haul bathroom sinks around like it’s a meme (haha Apartheid Clyde in Dunning-Kruger National Park), whether it’s Gawker or Twitter or OnlyFans or tumblr or MySpace or Lex, the communities served by what should be public services like libraries are going to keep getting fucked over for a buck.

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Ugh Do I Have To?

Twit wants me to know that 13 years ago, on September 12th, I signed up. Happy 13 dumpster fire years.

Well hazy on the details now, but I think I signed up because China banned Blogger / Blogspot / Google, all the China bloggers mass-migrated to Twitter and it was the only way to stay up with them. A couple of years later China banned Twit too.

I logged-on last night for the first time in a couple of years for actual timeline scrolling (OKCupid had shown me enough white cishet couples and TERFs for one night). I love the people who I actively follow, as in go to their profile, read and scroll, and love the communities around them.

But but but. The place fucks majorly with my mental and emotional stability — as do all social networks. It reminds me of addiction and compulsive habits and wakes those again in me. And it’s full, full of nazis and TERFs and fascists and racists and white supremacists and swarming bot networks run by the same. And the people who own and run it are functionally indistinguishable from that, their actions leading from hate crimes to genocide.

I wish there was something else. And more than that I wish all the people I love who use social networks would understand their culpability and find ways of creating and participating in online communities not bound to necrocapitalist corporations. I can’t see that happening though.

And no blogging for six weeks? Longest ever? Like …

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And no blogging for six weeks? Longest ever? Like I gave up my life project? Thanks pandemic amping up transphobia and racism and Islamophobia and general shittier behaviour from the str8s.

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Ms. Monica Roberts

I have to get the emotional part out first. I just want to swear a lot. Around 1am last night finishing my day and heading to bed I saw Raquel Willis’ on Twitter saying Monica Roberts had died.

I’m just fucking gutted and pissed and angry and sad and hurting. And I don’t have words the way other people do who speak so eloquently of a loved one’s death.

Monica Roberts was one of the original bloggers, starting TransGriot way back in 2006, Transistahs-Transbrothas organisation in 2004, and keeping a record of and speaking for trans women and people being murdered. Even then she’d been active as a Black trans woman since the early-’90s and was a strong voice in the blogging community contributing to Pams’ House Blend, The Bilerco Project and other early sites, got on Twitter in 2009, and never stopped doing the hard work of proper trans representation and advocacy in cis space — Black trans representation and advocacy in white cis space.

I’ve been reading her that long, fourteen years at least, and she has been one of the very few constants in my online life and my trans life.

And I wanna say her love of Houston and NFL was always there and as much a part of her and important to her, and I can’t find a place for that so I’m sticking it here.

She was important to me because she was Black, because she was a Black trans woman. There were fuck all trans bloggers or writers or journalists back then, and even fewer of those visible trans people were anything other than white. It was way before 2014’s ‘Trans Tipping Point’ with Laverne Cox on the cover of Time, trans people — especially trans women, and especially Black or Brown trans women — were far from welcome in ‘LGBT’ spaces and pretty much didn’t exist in the cis world.

She was always there.

She did the work.

And like so many Black and Brown and Indigenous and migrant trans women and femmes, she faced unemployment poverty and homelessness.

Every young Black trans woman or femme who has a voice or visibility or presence in 2020 has that because she never stopped. All us older ones are here and seen because she never stopped. There is no speaking our trans history which does not recognise the monumental, tireless, ceaseless work she did.

I loved when she’d come no fucks given for some fool. Her Shut Up Fool Awards deserve a monument. I loved too when she named other trans people who brought racism and homophobia and even, yeah, transphobia along with general piss poor behaviour into the room, especially white trans women riding on their privilege. She never punched down but watching her maul someone who deserved it was as terrifying as it was hilarious.

Every photo I see of her with other trans people I see love and joy for them in her eyes. And every photo with trans women, again especially Black trans women and children, they are looking to her with love. She stepped hard for trans kids for decades and we all saw that.

She was a mother and a Mutha to so many, and an Auntie and a sister and Sistah. And now she joins our Ancestors.

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Done.

Seems that keeping 3000 posts and 10,000 images updated takes about half a blog lifetime.

I moved from Movable Type to WordPress in 2009, and ditched ecto, the old blogging app, about the same time. Over the years, I wrote SQL queries, grepped the hell out of the database, redesigned the whole website (while keeping the same black and white aesthetic), recoded stuff, wrote some hella shonky redirections, and slowly went through all the posts turning images into galleries and using WordPress’ Featured Image, and then gave up on it all a couple of years ago before getting weirdly ‘inspired’ this weekend and doing 1000+ posts over the course of 2 days.

My database queries tell me all the galleries are now correct, and all the single images also. A stupid amount of work I hope I never have to do again, because I know my singular, obsessive focus will do it. Legit, my wrist is going ”WTF, Frances, WTfuckingF.” and if I keep blogging like this, eventually maintenance will take longer than there is days in a year.

After many years of supernaut images being tiny wi…

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After many years of supernaut images being tiny with ragged right background captions, I’ve been slowly ditching it for supernaut teenage Instabanga big images. And finally I cleared out all the old styles and code, made new medium and large image galleries, redid the styles and scripts repeatedly, said goodbye to funky bodges. Kept the blazing deep pink tho’. ???❌?‼️