I came because of the _loophole_. As reactionary as it might seem in the current year, I am spiritually a child of the 20th century, and I do not _crossdress_ in public. That would be _weird_. (Not harmlessly weird as an adjective of unserious self-deprecation, but weird in the proper sense, _out-of-distribution_ weird.)
-But to cosplay as a fictional character who happens to be female? That's fine! Lots of people are dressed up as fictional characters at the convention, including characters who belong to categories that the cosplayer themselves does not. That guy dressed up as a vampire isn't actually a vampire, either.
+But to cosplay as a fictional character who happens to be female? That's fine! Lots of people are dressed up as fictional characters at the convention, including characters who belong to categories that the cosplayer themself does not. That guy dressed up as a vampire isn't actually a vampire, either.
Conventions are actually _so_ boring that the loophole alone wouldn't have been enough to get me to come out to Fan Expo (been there, [done that](/tag/cosplay/)—seven times), except that this time I had a couple of new accessories to try out, most notably [a "Taylor" silicone mask by Crea FX](https://www.creafx.com/en/special-make-up-effects/taylor-silicone-mask/).
So on the night of Friday 25 November, I threw my [2250s-era Starfleet uniform](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Starfleet_uniform_(late_2230s-2250s)) in my backpack, put my breastforms and wig and mask in a box, and got on the train to San Francisco. (My ticket to the con was Saturday only, but it's nice to get a hotel room for the night before, and get dressed up in the morning within walking distance of the event, rather than taking the train in costume the day of.) Carrying the box around was slightly awkward, and the thought briefly occured to me that I could summon an internet taxi rather than take the train, but it was already decadent enough that I was getting a hotel room for a local event, and I had recently learned that my part-time contract with my dayjob (which had started in April as a Pareto improvement over me just quitting outright) isn't getting renewed at the end of the year, so I need to learn to be careful with money instead of being a YOLO spendthrift, at least until dayjob IPOs and my shares become liquid.
-Arguably, just the _time_ was more of a waste than the money. Focusing on [writing my memoir of religious betrayal](/2022/Jun/an-egoist-faith/) has been a stuggle. Not an entirely unsuccessful struggle—the combined draft [mss.](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ms.) are sitting at 74,000 words across four posts, which I've been thinking of as parts 2 through 5. (["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) being part 1.) But having 74,000 words isn't the same thing as being _done already_ and back to the business of being alive, instead of enjoying a reasonably comfortable afterlife—and even a single Saturday at Fan Expo instead of being holed up writing (or pretending to) puts an upper bound on my committment to life.
+<a id="memoir-of-religious-betrayal"></a>Arguably, just the _time_ was more of a waste than the money. Focusing on [writing my memoir of religious betrayal](/2022/Jun/an-egoist-faith/) has been a stuggle. Not an entirely unsuccessful struggle—the combined draft [mss.](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ms.) are sitting at 74,000 words across four posts, which I've been thinking of as parts 2 through 5. (["Sexual Dimorphism in Yudkowsky's Sequences"](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/) being part 1.) But having 74,000 words isn't the same thing as being _done already_ and back to the business of being alive, instead of enjoying a reasonably comfortable afterlife—and even a single Saturday at Fan Expo instead of being holed up writing (or pretending to) puts an upper bound on my committment to life.
Worse, in the twelve-day _week_ between Fan Expo and me getting this boring Diary-like post up about it, OpenAI released _two_ new GPT variants ([text-davinci-003](https://twitter.com/janleike/status/1597355354433916928) and [ChatGPT](https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/)). It's not a _timeline_ update (and most days, I count myself with those [sober skeptics who think the world is ending in 2040](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/AfH2oPHCApdKicM4m/two-year-update-on-my-personal-ai-timelines), not those _loonies_ who think the world is ending in 2027), but it is a suggestion that it would be [_more dignified_](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy) for me to finish the memoir _now_ and go on to sieze the possibilities of another definitely-more-than-five-you-lunatics years of life, rather than continuing to mope around as a vengeful ghost, stuck in the past to the very end.
---------
-Later, I would force myself to read _TransCat_ Vol. 1. I don't want to say it's bad.
+<a id="transcat-review"></a>Later, I would force myself to read _TransCat_ Vol. 1. I don't want to say it's bad.
I mean, it is bad, but the fact that it's bad, isn't what's bad about it.
-What's bad is the—deficit of self-awareness? There are views according to which my work is bad. I can imagine various types of critic forcing themselves to read this blog with horror and disappointment, muttering, "Doesn't he" [(or "Doesn't she", depending on the critic)](/2020/Nov/the-feeling-is-mutual/) "know how that _looks?_" And if nothing else, I aspire to _know how it looks_.
+<a id="knowing-how-that-looks"></a>What's bad is the—deficit of self-awareness? There are views according to which my work is bad. I can imagine various types of critic forcing themselves to read this blog with horror and disappointment, muttering, "Doesn't he" [(or "Doesn't she", depending on the critic)](/2020/Nov/the-feeling-is-mutual/) "know how that _looks?_" And if nothing else, I aspire to _know how it looks_.
I don't get the sense that _TransCat_ knows how it looks. Our hero is a teenage boy named Knave (the same first name as our author) in Mountain View, California in the year 200X, who discovers a cat-ears hat that magically transforms him into a girl when worn. While transformed, he—she—fights evildoers, like a pervy guy at Fanime who was covertly taking upskirt photos, or a busybody cop who suddenly turns out to be a lizard person. Knave develops a crush on a lesbian at school named "Chloie" (which I guess is a way you could spell _Chloë_ if you don't know how to type a [diaeresis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_(diacritic))), and starts wearing the cat hat more often (taking on "Cat" as a girl-mode name), hoping to get closer to Chloie. Cat and Chloie find they enjoy spending time together, until one day, when Cat makes some physical advances—and discovers, to her surprise, that Chloie has a penis. Chloie punches her and runs off.
And just—what does any of that _mean?_ What is an "identity"? How can you "be trans" _without hormone replacement therapy?_ I was pretty social-justicey as a teenager, too, but somehow my indoctrination never included this _nonsense_: when I was a teenage boy fantasizing about being a teenage girl, I'm pretty sure _I knew I was pretending_.
-Is is an East Bay _vs._ South Bay thing? Is it of critical importance whether the _X_ in the year 200X equals '4' or '8'? Or, as a friend of the blog suggests, is the relevant difference not when you grew up, but whether you _left_ social justice, or continued to be [shaped by the egregore](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/) through the 2010s?—the author anachronistically projecting elements of the current year's ideology onto the 200Xs that we both experienced.
+Is it an East Bay _vs._ South Bay thing? Is it of critical importance whether the _X_ in the year 200X equals '4' or '8'? Or, as a friend of the blog suggests, is the relevant difference not when you grew up, but whether you _left_ social justice, or continued to be [shaped by the egregore](/2019/Aug/the-social-construction-of-reality-and-the-sheer-goddamned-pointlessness-of-reason/) through the 2010s?—the author anachronistically projecting elements of the current year's ideology onto the 200Xs that we both experienced.
And just—there are _so_ many interesting things you could do with this premise, that you can only do if you admit that biological sex is real and "identity" is not. (Otherwise, why would you need the magic hat?) The situation where Knave-as-Cat is pursuing Chloie as a lesbian, but Chloie doesn't know that Cat is Knave—that's interesting! I want to know how the story would have gone, if Chloie (cis) found out that her girlfriend was actually a boy wearing a magic hat: would she accept it, or would she feel betrayed? Why would you throw away that story, but for the ethnic narcissism of an ["everyone is [our sexual minority]"](/2021/Sep/there-should-be-a-closetspace-lease-bound-crossover-fic/) dynamic?
(The conclusion to Issue 1 establishes that the hat's sex-change magic doesn't work on Knave's male friend, at which our hero(ine) infers that "it was meant for me." But is the power sponsoring the hat as kind to other [(sufficiently)](/2017/Dec/lesser-known-demand-curves/) gender-dysphoric males? If so, I'll take back my claims about "identity" being meaningless: whether the hat works for you would be an _experimental test_ demonstrating who is really trans.)
-My favorite scene probably is the one where, after watching [_Fight Club_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club) at Cat's behest, Chloie admits that it wasn't bad, but is cynical about the educated middle-class bros of Project Mayhem thinking themselves oppressed by Society as if they were an actual persecuted minority. Cat is impressed: "you actually have stuff to say about [the film] too! You can be critical about it without trashing it. That's kinda rare". And maybe it is, _kinda?_ But just—there's so much _further_ you can go in that direction, than basic bitch social-justice criticism of basic bro movies. It's like putting "Microsoft Word skills" on your résumé (in the 200Xs, before everyone started using Google Docs). It's not that it's bad to know Word, but the choice to mention it says something about your conceptual horizons. _Do you know how that looks?_
+My favorite scene is probably the one where, after watching [_Fight Club_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight_Club) at Cat's behest, Chloie admits that it wasn't bad, but is cynical about the educated middle-class bros of Project Mayhem thinking themselves oppressed by Society as if they were an actual persecuted minority. Cat is impressed: "you actually have stuff to say about [the film] too! You can be critical about it without trashing it. That's kinda rare". And maybe it is, _kinda?_ But just—there's so much _further_ you can go in that direction, than basic bitch social-justice criticism of basic bro movies. It's like putting "Microsoft Word skills" on your résumé (in the 200Xs, before everyone started using Google Docs). It's not that it's bad to know Word, but the choice to mention it says something about your conceptual horizons. _Do you know how that looks?_
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff