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—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 eight-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 try to count myself with those sober skeptics who think the world is ending in 2040, 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 eighteen (not five) years of life, rather than continuing to mope around as a vengeful ghost, stuck in the past to the very end.
+Worse, in the nine-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 try to count myself with those sober skeptics who think the world is ending in 2040, 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 eighteen years of life, rather than continuing to mope around as a vengeful ghost, stuck in the past to the very end.
Anyway, Saturday morning, I got myself masked and padded in all the right places, and suited up to walk from my hotel room to Moscone West for the convention! They had a weirdly cumbersome check-in system (wait in line to get your QR code scanned, then receive a badge, then _activate_ the badge by typing a code printed on it into a website on your phone, then scan the badge to enter the con), and I dropped my phone while I was in line and cracked the screen a bit. But then I was in! Hello, Fan Expo!
Superficially, this comic was clearly made for _people like me_. Who better to appreciate a story about a teenage boy in the San Francisco Bay Area of 200X who can magically change sex, than someone who remembers [being a teenage boy in the San Francisco Bay Area of 200X who fantasized about magically changing sex](/2021/May/sexual-dimorphism-in-the-sequences-in-relation-to-my-gender-problems/#beautiful-pure-sacred-self-identity)? (Okay, I was _East_ Bay; this is _South_ Bay. Totally different.)
-But I can't, appreciate it, other than as an anthropological exhibit—not just because of the bad art, or the bad font choices (broadly construed to include the use of ALLCAPS for emphasis rather than **bold** or _italics_), or the numerous uncorrected typos, or the unnecessarily drawn-out pop-culture references that I didn't get—but because the author is living inside an ideological fever dream _that doesn't know it's a dream_.
+But I can't, appreciate it, other than as an anthropological exhibit—not just because of the bad art, or the bad font choices (broadly construed to include the use of ALLCAPS for emphasis rather than **bold** or _italics_), or the numerous uncorrected spelling errors, or the lack of page numbers, or the unnecessarily drawn-out pop-culture references that I didn't get—but because the author is living inside an ideological fever dream _that doesn't know it's a dream_.
The foreward by Tara Madison Avery mentions the subset of transfolk "whose gender journey involves hormone replacement therapy." The "episode zero" primer tells us that the hat brings out our protagonist's "True Form". "[A]m I a straight boy with a girl on the inside? Or am I a gay girl with a boy on the inside?" Knave wonders. When Chloie's former bandmate misgenders her behind her back, Cat tells him off: "Chloie is a woman, even without the pills and surgery! You don't get to decide her identity based on her looks, or what she did to attain them!"
And if you _do_ want to go the ethnic narcissism route and make Chloie trans, why assert that Cat and Chloie are equally valid "even without the pills and surgery"? It seems to me that Cat's identity is more legitimate on account of the magic! How would Chloie (trans) react if she found out that her cis girlfriend was actually a boy wearing a magic hat? Would she _die of jealousy?_ Would she bargain to try to borrow the hat—or even just steal it for herself?
(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.)
-
-[TODO: tie up—the scene about art criticism, social justice in general]
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / blobdiff