Hey. It's been a while.

I'm on month number ... 6 (and a half) of unemployed/CERB. In that time I have

- learned python3, including pandas, some numpy (mostly pyplot and seaborn), and some machine learning stuff to predict future patterns in data (mostly economic).

- learned basic SQL

- started to work my way through JavaScript

- written most of a novel (still working on it)

- released my first short fiction with a price tag attached to it (2 bucks - if you're interested in a smutty WLW romance let me know)

- had a poem accepted to a local zine called "Kill Your Lawn"

- written some other shorts that will need some editing but that can be sent out to submission calls.

- replaced the clutch in my car (my dad was a huge help)

- had, and recovered from, an orchidectomy ( a kind of bottom surgery for trans women)

- learned how to sew

- Had one roommate break lease and leave early (My other roommate and I said Yay!)

- Had another roommate move in, then promptly die of a heart attack. (this was very unfortunate)

- helped coordinate said roommate's family's access to the townhouse so that they could take their time moving out his stuff (he had a lot of stuff)

I'm sure there are other things, too. Despite the length of that list it feels like I've not done all that much. It's been very hard to play music lately, especially the bass. I've been playing cello at socially distanced baroque jams on a friend's patio once a week - potent potables required, seriousness discouraged.

As other writer friends have said, if I wrote a year like this into a book it would be dismissed by editors as unbelievable and unrealistic. A lot of things are really wrong. To grasp at any silver lining at all, at least this pandemic has highlighted the stark distance between those who can make a living in my country, and those who can't, and how much our disability system and employment insurance (our version of unemployment) have suffered a death by 1,000 cuts over the years. The need to reinvest in ourselves, as a country, has become obvious.

Hope you guys are surviving. Things are hard everywhere.

In a way his Trumpism is understandable, because I know he is continually annoyed by having to attend seminars about pronouns, sensitivity, etc., as part of his medical training. I think his perspective is that the majority of people don't know what sacrifice is and wouldn't be so concerned with political correctness had they ever been exposed to the real underbelly of the world (in a way that a Ranger with war experience has been).

This is, and has always been, the most bullshit excuse I've ever experienced.

Seminar presenter: "Maybe just don't treat people like shit?"

your bud: "Fuck that, these trans people who get disproportionately murdered and have often been completely disowned by the people who are supposed to care about them through thick and thin, are overrepresented in the military, and are disproportionately likely to experience homelessness, abuse, sex work, etc have never seen the real underbelly of the world like I have! They've never made any sacrifices ever! They can't possibly know what real life is like! They just need to toughen up!"

The inability for people like your friend to see past their own nose is astounding. My brother is a veteran with some pretty ugly PtSD, and he had been one of my biggest supporters, because he gets it. He doesn't want other people to feel the shitty things he's felt. He'd rather no one had to.

It costs your friend literally nothing to treat a trans person as a person, and treat them with respect. Instead he and his ego choose to create further suffering in a shitty world because he doesn't believe they've suffered enough to demand his pity.

Idunno what happened to make me stop coming around. I think it was just a very stressful time to be a trans person online. I use social media a lot differently than I used to now - I spend more time on things like discord and twitter, and less time on places like reddit.

Since this is the second time I've been brought up her in the past few months, I figure I'll give the ol' gal another try, and see what's up on hubski these days.

If you work at a company that actually supports you, then hustle can be a good thing. If you work at a company that needlessly exploits you, then you should be using your hustle somewhere else.

I work at a bakery. I do 10 hour shifts that are almost all hustle and hard work. It is by no means my dream job, but you know what?

- I have benefits, and I get paid pretty fairly.

- I have a positive work environment.

- I have a boss that has my back.

I am more than willing to hustle for her, pick up extra shifts, help out, come in for meetings on my days off. Good companies give back.

It's been a while.

doing my Artists's Diploma in early music in Toronto. It's going okay. I did an audition for a local baroque group, and they liked me. hopefully I'll get some work out of that.

Went to a poetry writing workshop series for femmes and trans femmes last november. I've been writing a lot of poetry since. I think Lil is sick of reading it, tbh.

Hope all is well with y'all.

It's meeeeeeee

I think this was definitely expected, though as forwardslash said, not this soon. In a lot of ways I think Pao was a scapegoat - Not just for the community, but also for those who run reddit. Basically, I see her job to have been:

1.) Do things that would make the investors happy, that they knew would make the community unhappy

2.) when the community inevitably hated those things, take the fall and the hatred.

3.) leave, golden parachute in tow.

After having Pao leave, they may "fix" a few things, but all of the changes will stay in place, but the community will be happier. Win-Win for the people who run Reddit. When I said that I was surprised she's leaving this soon, I'm mostly surprised that they didn't try to get a few more changes out of her - maybe they figured they'd gotten as much out of the situation as they could.

I've never been so glad for Hubski to not be mentioned in a news article.

I'm sorry artie, this turned into a monster.

'sp00ns

_____

you know what the fun thing about the history of Jazz is? The way I see it, it's basically the same story as classical music, condensed into 150 years or so. The story of a continued "harmonic breakdown" - basically things get more chromatic over time.

This is, of course, incredibly simplified and leaves out a lot - but the parallels are there.

We start off with a rigidly structured music, the Blues. Even though there are improvisatory elements in Blues music, the chord progression is almost always identical: I--IV-V-I. If you're not musically literate, those roman numerals won't make sense to you, but they're essentially the building blocks of all western art music.

This mirrors, in a lot of ways, the earliest periods of music in Europe that are in the scope of Classical tradition - Gregorian Chant. You know, this stuff:

very harmonically simple, and the words are the most important part. Blues is the same - a repeating chord rhythm, where the words are what differentiate each song.

After this, Classical Music had this intensely complicated period called Baroque. I'm no scholar of Jazz specifically, but as far as I know, Jazz never had a whole lot like that, but this period does have one element in common with baroque - the solidification of group sizes, and the creation of musical "forms"(like blueprints) . In the 1800s, The US gains Louisiana and Florida in a series of diplomatic sales and land grabs. On this land are slaves previously under Spanish and French rule - Creole (some of whom have been absorbing traditions from their owners, or even playing European Classical music to entertain them) -, and a group of people who had been expelled from Upper Canada in the 1700s - Acadians, or as we know them, Cajun. Over time, with lower class intermingling, Blues music begins to absorb all of these traditions. This is where we get this:

At the same time, after the Civil War, dance halls are becoming popular. African Americans, having more free time since, you know, not being slaves, begin to blend their music with dance culture. Musicians, employed to process in funerals, start to form bands.

You'll notice harmony is still pretty simple, but has a little bit more going on. There's even a few short solos. Armstrong was a relic of an older kind of Jazz. Even though he lived a long time, and performed until quite late in life, his style is always very reminiscent of 20's Jazz. Indeed, his style of trumpet playing defined how trumpeters played in Jazz for a long time, until he wasn't cool anymore. Because he was so popular with white audiences, he unintentionally became a kind of "Uncle Tom" figure in jazz late in his life, at which point people really began to pull away from his playing style. Just like Haydn, he started ahead of his time, and ended as a relic.

Cue: The Great War, the subsequent depression, and WW2. Music, and dancing fuelled by Live bands in particular was cheap and popular. Prohibition also helped things along, giving lots of venues for bands to play in. Majority white audiences are starting to catch on to this Jazz thing. Jazz composers such as Ellington start to appear (I'm jumping over a lot here to try to keep this short), and they begin creating larger bands, to give themselves more music tools for composition. To pander to Audiences, "Big Band" jazz is much more... genteel?

Like Beethoven before him, Ellington is not content to simply walk in the back entrance like a servant. He wants for be treated like the musical genius he knows he is. He and his band might be going town to town in beat up old cars, but damn if they don't look fine doing it.

We've moved into Jazz's " romantic period" here (depending on how one defines "romantic period" in classical music) the first threads in the sweater of Jazz's tonality are being pulled, and solos are getting longer, becoming more integral to the music.

After the war, Big bands start to lose steam. Trying to keep a 20-piece band employed is a lot more difficult than keeping a 4-piece employed. When you've just got 4 or 5 dudes, it's also a lot easier to experiment.

Then, just as Jazz is getting intensely chromatic and complicated, it simplifies - Like Classical, it's "neoclassical" period hearkens back to an earlier time. In concept, this piece:

and this piece:

have a lot in common, hearkening back to old music, old traditions. It's reactionary to the increasing chromaticism and complication. the chord progressions are simpler (though still tinged with more modern harmonies) and so are the forms. This strain still exists in a lot of ways, just like neoclassical music never really went away, even through the seriously avant-garde shit.

avant gard shit like this:

and this:

or alteratively this:

(the singing is out of tune on purpose)

It's really in this avant garde stuff that has the elements you're talking about - extreme technicality, "free" chromaticism, and stuff that is kind of hard to understand if you're not steeping yourself in it constantly. A lot of jazz being played right now is not like that - just like a lot of classical Music is not like that.

Regarding Buddy Rich: Buddy Rich was a great drummer. He was also a supreme asshole, who grew up in a time when conductors and band leaders were god when it came to the ensemble. Arturo Toscanini is the most egregious example of this in the 20th century - Messiah Complex if there ever was one. So he acted like God, and bossed a lot of people around. So did Stevie Wonder, so did Billy Joel - They made a lot more money, and were at least as good musicians.

Well, that's not entirely true. Google is better at search than anyone else, for sure. However, just because they are good at one service doesn't necessarily mean that they are good at other services (see Google Plus). When they use their platform as a dominant search engine to push their other products to the disadvantage of other, smaller companies, they are breaking anti-trust legislation that's been around since the time of the Robber Barons in late 19th century America.

Basically it's against the law for people (and by legal similarity, companies) to use their size and muscle to push other services out in anticompetitive ways. We've made our laws this way because we had to learn the hard way that this created Monopolies, and was disadvantageous not only to us as consumers, but also to our societies and our governments.

Now, if Google's shopping service pushed other services out by being significantly under the cost of all of the other businesses, that's one thing, because they are supplying a better price or service to consumers. This is what places like Walmart do. It's shady to run everything as a loss leader, but not illegal. But they weren't doing that, they just took all of the advertising - that those other companies bought from them, remember - and buried it underneath their own advertising, or put it in smaller fonts than their own advertising, etc. That's anticompetitive, and breaks antitrust laws worldwide.

Maybe reddit is exactly what the front page of the internet is. Want to see what the internet looks like outside of oases like Hubski? Reddit's a pretty good example -Pseudoscience, photos of conventionally attractive women in photos they may or may not have consented to, racism, complaints of censorship on what is effectively private property. Oh, and the occasional cat pic.

Forgive me if i seem jaded, but Reddit isn't "the problem". Reddit is just a very good example of a cultural problem, as well as what happens when

1.) opinion is as good as fact

2.) anonymity is paramount.

I don't think it's 100% fair to say that the Steam platform is not, or at least has previously not been healthy for the gaming industry.

While greenlight is not a perfect system, or even a good system, it and Xbox Live Arcade have exposed thousands of games and the people who made them to a huge, receptive audience. Steam is one of the biggest engines that moved the indie game market forward to become what it is now. All I buy, for the most part, are "Indie" games, from little "i" indie like Night in the Woods to the occasional "Triple I" indie like the Binding of Isaac.

Yeah, Valve is not your friend. No shit. they're a corporation and their goal is to suck you dry just like every other corporation and company. But credit where it's due, their attempts at expanding their market and profit margins inadvertently created an environment that helped indie games thrive, and also helped expand games outside of the PC space into Mac and Linux (because SteamOS is a unix based system and they require support for a lot of their games).

The rest of the developed world is just going to have to accept that if they want to move forward on anything, they just have to do it. If the United States wants to play ball, they'll come along, and if not, just don't even bother trying to court them. I think the G7 relies, and has relied too heavily on the US leadership in the past, and it's just not going to happen right now - the GOP is very "stay the course or regress" at the moment, and Trump himself is more interested in playing to his base and distracting from scandal than anything at the moment. His strategy of "well I'll just take my ball and go home" is has to lead to the rest of the world moving on without him, or we will literally get nowhere - it's not worth any political capital to try and convince the current administration of anything.

When I was young, my dad was away a lot fixing airplanes. He'd be gone for weeks at a time to Goose Bay, or Gander, or Labrador.

But at the same time, he was never "absent" in my life, and when my dad was home, he made every effort to be at any event any of us kids were involved in. He was a Beaver (then Scout) leader, he took us camping, canoeing, built us a tree house. All the while, he and my mom both were working and running a home business to try and make ends meet in 1990s Newfoundland - where one had a hard time buying a job.

Yes my father was away, but his return was the spring that kept all of us (my mom included) through the winter of his absence.

Be the spring, KB.

Humans being idiots? I can't imagine that.

edit: In seriousness, Tesla has hit upon the fundamental problem: there can't be an intermediary step between fully human controlled, and fully automated when it comes to passenger cars. Basic autopilot works in planes because pilots have extensive training, and there is constant monitoring and communication between the pilots and various air traffic controls - Everyone knows, or can know (mostly) where everyone else is in their local sky area.

Neither of these things are true of cars. As a result any measures to "bridge the gap" between human and machine are going to fail. Leave emergency measures to the machine? Safer, but it will pull control when drivers "feel" they are still in control, and no one will use it. People will cry nanny state and robot apocalypse. Leave emergency measures to the driver? Increase in accidents, because any driver relying on Autopilot is probably focusing on something else. If you ask someone who is not focused on the road to suddenly take the wheel in an emergency decision, it's gonna be a bad time.

Full automation, or full human autonomy, is what I'm saying.

First full week of HRT complete! last month was just anti-androgens, this month I have those and a lower dose estrogen. I've also lost about 20 lbs since I got home in May, so I hate myself less.

Audition for early music program at U of T went well. My teacher was very happy. I am concerned that my masters degree grades hadn't shown up by the time of audition, but we'll see.

I also have an early music concert in Toronto this Sunday. Maybe lil or someguyfromcanada or other toronto peeps want to come? It's by donation, and it's not too snobby - there are some amateur viola da gambists playing (including myself). The set of 12 Fantasias for viola da gamba by Telemann was only recently discovered, and I believe this is their Canadian premiere.

could be fun, right? right?? just me, huh?

Trying out Intermittent Fasting to get my weight more under control. Not looking to lose a ton of weight, just better control what I eat and when.

Congratulations, Q! I hope that moving forward with this part of your life brings you happiness.

Keep in mind, you just dropped a pretty big bomb on your mom. I remember when I told my mom, she was totally supportive, but started to question me about it. sort of "Are you sure?" "you know life as a girl is not easy", etc.

This is a totally natural thing. She's scared for you, for your future. You've decided to play life on hard mode. What I told my mom was "It's time to stop questioning whether or not this is a thing, and start questioning how we move forward with the knowledge that this is, in fact, a thing." That made a big difference in the tone of our conversations.

Good luck, Q. My inbox is always open if you need help, and I have lots of articles and sources to back yourself up if you ever get into an argument.

Instead of being a performing bassist, I'm currently embracing the possibility of being a musicologist, or maybe going back to be an early music musician.

I'm still gonna be a lady, tho.

The thing about this article, and articles like it, is that they look for the most extreme people that they can find at a place like Oberlin, and then write about them as if they represent the entire student body. That's like going to a Republican rally and looking for the people who are both KKK and NRA, then writing about the whole 40% of america's voting population as if they were all so. It's bad writing, it's shit generalization, and it screams "get off my lawn".

It railroads over the fact that if you look through the babying, and the unrealistic demands, these people have some serious points.

At Yale, the associate head of a residence balked at the suggestion that students avoid potentially offensive Halloween costumes,[...] her remarks were deemed insensitive, especially from someone tasked with fostering a sense of community...

Let's face it, no one actually thinks that the "Taco with sombrero and moustache" costume is actually funny anyways, and what does being a "Sexy Indian" have to do with a spooky holiday? These costumes are inappropriate, and always were - but now the people to whom those symbols belong are calling us on our shit.

Adams believes that the Oberlin board’s denunciation of Joy Karega’s Facebook posts shows hypervigilance toward anti-Semitism and comparative indifference toward racial oppression.

That's a good point. Should the teacher be disciplined? Of course (of course in my country Free speech does not work the same way as if does in America), but you have to make sure that you are also being the same level of strict with any other kind of racism - Because that's what anti-semitism is, just another form of racism. Jews were seen as a distinct race of people for so long that there is a cultural concept of the jewish people as more than a religious group, but a race - thats why it was so easy to lump them together and hate them.

“There’s been a shift from explicit racism to implicit racism,” she says. “It’s still racism. But now you’re criticized for complaining about it, because you’re allowed to go to college: ‘What are you complaining about? There’s a black President!’

This is the sort of thing, tucked in towards the end of the article, that the article should be written about. When we talk about Black Lives Matter, when we talk about Trans Lives Matter, maybe we should be looking at the broad spectrum of what they're saying and think "Hmm, got a point."

As much as America in particular sees protest as part of its civil lifeblood, nobody likes protestors and it's easy to focus on how privileged these kids are. We can't forget though, that it is just this group of people - those who are privileged but feel powerless - who've been moving and shaking for good and bad for over a hundred years. Vietnam protests? Rich kids. Affirmative Action? Rich kids. Minimum wage? Rich kids. Suffragette Movement? Rich kids. Anti-Slavery? Rich Kids.

Bolshevik Revolution? Kids of Russian Nobles whose roles had been slowly made redundant by the tsar - and the educated noble women who were told they could never use that education.

French Revolution? Rich Merchant class people who wanted a voice in politics, and women of all classes who wanted the same.

As you can tell by my examples, some of the things they've done are great, some of theme are terrifying. The last two examples in particular are what happens when you let this shit hang out in a pressure cooker, getting worse and worse until it explodes. Ignore them at your peril.

I've taken anti-depressants for the better part of 5 years. I found that it took about a month to have a measurable result, and then It took probably about 2 years before my doctor and I got the right dose. In contrast to many, I've had pretty good success with them, but in my opinion many people have unrealistic expectations of what they are going to do and what they are for.

1.) For most people, they will not be a permanent fixture of your life. Many people just need a leg up to get out of a particularly bad period in their life, and when that's over, they no longer need the medication. You can't just stop taking them however, because your body has adjusted its brain chemical levels over time to work in sync with them, so you have to slowly wean yourself off, or you're probably going to have a serious drop in mood, which makes you think that you need them still.

2.) If you're numb, you're either on too much, or on the wrong medication. many people, especially those who took medication at a young age, have this experience. The truth is, when a doctor prescribes antidepressants to you, they're throwing something at a wall to see if it sticks. If not, they've got a whole bucket full of other drugs that they can throw at the wall to see if they stick. We don't know nearly as much about brain chemistry as we'd like, so it's a little bit of an educated guessing game.

The other truth is that antidepressants are not always useful for teenagers, and occasionally make them worse. Just because they didn't work when someone was 16 doesn't mean they won't work when someone is 26.

3.) Antidepressants don't make you feel happy. If they do, again, you're on the wrong shit or too much shit. What they do, broadly, is allow you to be in a headspace where you can DEAL WITH YOUR SHIT. Your mood will usually be neither too high nor too low, and they allow you to be able to get your ass out of bed in the morning, instead of not being able to get out of bed until 3:30 and you've already missed two of your classes today so what's the point of going to the other ones and dinner is soon so you should eat something because you haven't eaten all day but you don't want to go outside because you haven't showered in 6 days and maybe if you order from your usual pizza place the delivery guy won't judge you if you pretend to be doing a hardcore cram for an exam the next day...

antidepressants help with that, but they're not a pancea. They need to be combined with a desire to deal with your shit, a desire to have a healthier diet, and a healthier active life.

I'm back from Iceland.

It was gorgeous, and I had lots of fun.

"It's got a light side, a dark side, and it holds the universe together" - Or, alternatively, "If women don't find you handsome, they can at least find you handy"

The problem is that absent any cues for affinity, anonymous communities will rally around their aversion to "the other."

Absolutely 100% correct. This has been discussed at length by Hegel, Sartre, and many others less famous. If it wasn't fat people, or trans people, or black people, or arab people, it would be someone else. It seems that humanity is in constant need of an "Other", a bogeyman.

Much of this has to do with how we define ourselves. It is actually a difficult mental task to define ones self by what they are, and significantly more simple to define ourselves by what we are not. "I don't know what I am, but that is NOT it," as it were. As a Canadian, it is interesting to see how much of Canadian culture is built on the premise of "Not America", or "Not the UK". Our "Others" represent what we see the need to define ourselves as not being. It is even easier to do so when that "Other" is a faceless thing, a caricature.

I don't know if this is because of, or if the two concepts are related in how they are treated by the brain, but language has a similar problem.

without visual context, how do you explain what the word "Large" means? when it comes down to it, "large" generally means "Not small". "Small", on the other hand, means "not large". Large could also mean "heavy", but what is heavy but "Not light"? A lot of our descriptive adjectives are defined by what they are not, rather than what they are. Just like us.

Edit: mk, I'm still getting a lot of 502s these days. Is it my connection?

First I'll address the fact that the whole article calls Jenner a man, which is bullshit. The American Medical Association and the American Psychological Association, as well as the vast majority of the medical communities in the developed world all agree - Trans women are women, and trans men are men. Just because you don't understand the research doesn't mean it is somehow false impossible - Just like even though you don't understand astrophysics doesn't mean that getting a man-made object to pluto is impossible.

Trans women are women, trans men are men - Shit ain't complicated.

moving on from that -

I don't think Jenner deserves the award - But I don't think that the soldier in the meme image deserves it either. Terminal Lance made a great comment on the subject:

My brother's a vet. He did a job, he went overseas, lost some friends, gained some psychological trauma, and got paid. When he returned home Like any government employee, he received (and continues to receive) medical care - surgery number 4 on an ankle the army fucked up - as well as psychological help. He's not a hero, he's just a guy who got paid good money to go into a dangerous work environment. The way I see it, benefits for soldiers are just a dedicated wing of WSIB

Where I'm from, we respect veterans, and honour them - they are given extra respect, seen as members of standing in their communities, and often drink for free - But we do not idolize them, like you folks seem to in the US. I always found that odd considering the number of veterans on the street in America. I see the US treatment of vets much like the way the Viennese treated Mozart - Generous with their applause, stingy with their wallets.

More than anything, that's what bothered me about this article - more Hoorah USMC to the detriment of all others, all the while conveniently glossing over the fact that the vast majority that the US public does for their service people is thank them for their service and spit in their hands as payment.

My heart goes out to the friends and families of the deceased, and also to the European Muslims (not to mentions Sikhs, and pretty much anyone else wearing a turban or looking too brown) who are going to get a lot more hate than usual in the upcoming weeks.

I have my suspicions that this has less to do with IS proper and more to do with people who want to show the millions fleeing Africa and the middle east that Europe is no safer. That there is no escape from their tormentors.

Psychological warfare.

A good companion piece.

No one hates the American poor more than the American poor. I've said it before, and I expect I will have to repeat it.

I did my undergrad in Northeastern Ohio, not too far from Cleveland, In what is a pretty seriously economically depressed area aside from the University in the centre of town. The attitude that I saw there among low and middle class people towards poor people was astounding to me.

"I'm in this welfare line because I lost my job in the recession, and my wife is too sick to work. I'm in a rough spot, but I'll get out. But that guy behind me? He needs to stop sucking on the government tit so hard - I see him here every week! Why doesn't he just work harder?"

better?

I'm sorry lil, ILY <3