Scribbles and Bits

We will be tabling from 5-9 PM on Friday, July 11th (TONIGHT!) at EmVision Studios, 131 Essex Street, Lynn, MA 01902. We'll have comics and zines, including floppy copies of our Crisis Planning zine!

Check out the Eventbrite link here!
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Hope to see you there!

We’re getting followed by folks from elsewhere on the Internet and seeing sentiments along the lines of “eep, I don’t know the social rules here,” so here’s how we conduct this blog!

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Hello, friends! Has the current political climate got you down? Then come celebrate Pride with LB with a FREE showing of the Japanese musical theater show, Baddy: The Bad Lot Come From The Moon!

When: 6 PM Saturday, July 5th
Where: NESFA clubhouse, 504 Medford Street, Somerville, MA 02145

Plot summary (from TakaWiki): The story is set in the capital of Earth, Takarazuka-City. The peaceful planet Earth — a united world where war, crime, and all evils have been overcome — receives a visit from Baddy, a vagabond rogue from the moon. Baddy is a super-cool, elegant, and a heavy smoker. But he soon finds that smoking is outlawed across the face of the Earth. Baddy, accepting no limits, leads his gang and engages in all sorts of wrongdoing to make the dull world more interesting. His final goal is to steal the planetary budget guarded in Takarazuka Big Theater Bank. But all-mighty female investigator Goody is gaining on him!

The Takarazuka Revue is an all-female cast, performing male and female roles both, and Baddy is a confection of silliness, lobster costumes, public queerness, and passport forgery. Be here, be queer!

(This event is open to the public. But ain't nothing saying we can't have a multi contingent here to enjoy it...)

Hey everybody, it's that time again: time to vote for which stuff gets the LiberaPay/Patreon money this month!

As always, anyone can vote (please do!), but LiberaPay and Patreon patrons get double weight for their votes.  (Due to Patreon's porn purges, I really encourage you to use LiberaPay, if you get a choice.) If you want to see the blurbs for any of these works, those are here!  (You can also leave your requests there; requesting a story or essay is always free!) If you don't have a DW and so can't do the poll, that's okay; just leave your vote in the comments below; anon comments are turned on.

Which works gets the money, and thus posted this month?  YOU CHOOSE, readers!

Mori: as a reward for getting through some crummy medical shit, I trawled a used book store for lady speculative fiction! (We’ve realized that it’s a lot easier to let ourself buy it with the glee that even if WE don’t enjoy it, the sci-fi library insures OTHERS will! And while the sci-fi library is well-stocked with “traditional” sci-fi publishers, it is really lacking in speculative work for queer and women’s presses and such.) I have taken on three of the four now...

1. “Sultana’s Dream”, by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. 1905 Bengali Muslim biting satire about a carless future society where women rule and all the men have to stay indoors and never be perceived by humans outside their servants and immediate family. The edition I had shared the short story and then all the historical, cultural, and personal context as to WHY the story got made, who the author was (a feminist who fought hard for women’s rights in now-Bangladesh) and why it matters. Very historically interesting and edifying! (Also, for real, I do love the fantasy of Garden Future where all roads look like gorgeous garden paths because cars don’t exist and everyone moves by walking or floating helicopter/zeppelin thingies! In 1905, a carless future was imaginable! When the narrator regrets treading on such pretty flowers, another character tells her not to worry, these are special street flowers that can’t be harmed by feet!)


2. Return to Isis, by Jean Stewart. 1992 lesbian separatist post-apocalyptic matriarchy story. Didn’t finish; everyone was just kind of unpleasant to each other, and if you’re going to write evil rapist men, I damn well require you understand how misogynist rape works. (I am probably the equivalent of the lawyer going “ugh” whenever they have to watch a courtroom drama, when it comes to the study of human sexual douchebaggery, though.) First book of five book series; maybe she got better as she went on, but I have other books to read!


3. Madame Aurora, by Sarah Aldridge. 1983 historical novel about two girlfriends in their seventies at the turn of the last century who, struggling with money and disability, decides to set one of them up as a spiritual advisor, and the events that follow. I really enjoyed this one! Old ladies who still bang! Sordid history! Is it psychic or is she just really intuitive? What’s the deal with that scabby old Colonel? Aldridge does a good job, I think, of writing even unpleasant characters with an understanding of why they are how they are. Refreshing!
   

All that remains now is Katherine V. Forrest’s Daughters of a Coral Dawn. Forrest is apparently a better mystery writer than sci-fi (and I read one and liked it!) but I am willing to give it a shot and declare it library-worthy if I can’t stand it.

A successful booking!

Mori: Blessings on whoever scanned a 1947 copy of the lesbian magazine Vice Versa #7 online; it meant I was able to read this fun little short story about a woman who oh noes, is torn between Pat, the butchest of butches, and Flora the femmest of femmes! Whatever is a poor Kiki to do?

Thought other folks might enjoy this. So here ya go! (Sorry, don't think it's screenreadable; I can textually transcribe it if folks want? EDIT from Sneak: pantha did it! Thanks! :D)

(I of course only found out about this thing courtesy of a bibliography of queer speculative fiction at the sci-fi library. WE'RE BACK, BABY!)

Realized we may well have never outright said this, so we might as well make it clear: over the past few years, some of the LB alter family has grown more hivemind-y, and at times with less differentiation, in a way that doesn't bother us.

There are a few demographics in here, and the ones we call the "alters" are all people who split off the original girl who inhabited this vessel (Mori, Rawlin, Gigi, Rogan, Sneak, and Miranda), rather than folks who had their own lives and came here from elsewhere (Biff, Falcon, Grey, Bob, and Mac). The alters are like threads of a greater rope, and we unravel and rebraid ourselves sometimes to achieve our goals, though only while working on corporeal tasks that engross us, such as working on a story. When engrossed in making group art, it can sometimes be hard for us to tell who's doing what! (Other times it is not. Coming In or Staying Out was very much Rogan drawing, while the Rawlin comics are all Mori drawing.) And constantly interrupting ourselves from the work to ask, "who am I?" is pointless and annoying, because in that moment, it doesn't matter.

This has also been happening sometimes while chatting with people or posting. We sometimes don't tag our entries because we don't know who's talking or care so much, or we share enough of an opinion that it no longer matters being like, "all the alters agree on this paragraph though Sneak questions Sentence 6."

Mori, Rogan, Sneak, and Miranda can braid like this without too much trouble, but Rawlin especially and also Gigi are still pretty separate, presumably because they still have a lot of memories and history that remain buried and lost to us. As we deal with that, perhaps they'll be able to rebraid with us easier in the future.

The braiding happens without our conscious effort, and we unravel just as fluidly. We don't think of it or call it fusion or integration, because neither have the right feel or connotations. We were threads ripped from a greater cloth, which can never be remade again. Now we are braiding ourselves in a new way that suits us, when it suits us, a cord and not a cloth.

The winner of the fan poll, supported by fans like you on LiberaPay and Patreon!

We were at the nearby Indian grocery store to stock up on yogurt (only they sell it in the giant quantities we require), when Biff noticed something new: enormous Ziploc bags filled with clearly-homemade momo (Nepalese dumplings). There are a few momo joints around here; maybe it's some sort of mysterious shadow kitchen thing?

Anyway, there were tons of these big gallon-size Ziploc bags, crammed full and tersely labeled in Sharpie as to their contents: (halal) BEEF, (halal) CHICKEN, and... VAG (veg).

It's Pride. We bought the VAG MOMO.

And guys, they were delicious. So flavorful! Cabbage, carrot, (probably?) chickpeas, onion, cilantro (we think), herbs and spices. We've bought bags of potstickers from the (southeast) Asian groceries around town, and they tended to be pretty bland. Nice, but bland, so we took to cooking them with sauces to flavor them up. But these? These packed all the flavor they needed. More support for the "ghost kitchen" idea.

They were expensive ($32), but they were so worth it. That bag will last us a long time; we spent half the bag feeding us and two roommates tonight, and we had leftovers, so that's an easy six meals' worth in one bag, a good treat item. And if I'm going to shell out for food, I'm happy to be giving it to my local Indian grocery and this mysterious momo chef!

Rogan: so, today was rough, but a kind stranger made it much less bad than it could’ve been!

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