2018 – Boy, Interrupted

Favourite music: game scores

26th August 2018 Red

I love listening to music, and I like a wide variety of genres. My favourite genre is scores from film, TV and games, partly because they’re awesome in their own right, but also because it lets me add soundtracks to ideas in my head, and when I do write, it makes excellent background music. I’ll even happily listen to music from otherwise shite media (Steve Jablonksy’s scores from the Michael Bay Transformers films being a stand out example of terrible to watch but with great music).

As much as I love music, I’m usually pretty terrible at writing about it, so I thought I’d try sharing some of my favourites as a bit of practice. I’m going with game scores (mostly because that’s what I’ve been listening to while gaming lately), and I suspect this is more an insight into my gaming tastes more than my music tastes.

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My experience of being transgender

17th August 2018 Red

Some of you are probably aware that I’m currently waiting for a surgery date for a hysterectomy. Because this is being trans on the NHS, this means lots of long waiting lists and getting second opinions. I saw the specialist at another Gender Identity Clinic for the second opinion at the end of May, was given the okay, and told the letter would be in the post within the next few weeks. End of July, my GIC gets in touch for a checkup, and baffled that they hadn’t had anything through, so set about chasing it up. I’ve had a letter through from the other GIC to say the doctor I saw is off for the foreseeable future (I read that as ‘signed off sick with stress because the NHS is stretched to the limit, GICs even more so) and that letters would be dealt with upon their return. Basically, I’m in limbo as I’ve no idea if or when that letter will turn up, or if I need to see another GIC for another referral. I’m not upset, as this is for purely medical reasons (I’ll get into that later), but fed up with waiting because I’d like to be organising things like the odd holiday without worrying I need to drop plans for a GIC appointment. The actual surgery I could reschedule, because it’s routine with lots of options. GIC appointments are gold dust – if you reschedule, you can be waiting many months longer, so you reschedule plans instead.

Anyhow. With that news, I thought it was time I pulled together one of the posts about me being transgender that I have in my drafts. This one is about my personal experience of being trans and transitioning. The other will come at a later date and is about my relationship with feminism as a trans guy, so I won’t be dealing with that subject here.

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Triffids of the Damned (I think my camera is now possessed)

8th August 2018 Red

Dad recently cleared the pond after it got neglected for a while (seriously, ducks walked on the surface) and I’ve now verified the fish survived and they didn’t adapt to the environment by developing legs or shovel hands. It did mean that a whole bunch of water lily rhizomes got pulled out, and I was able to take pictures. Man, these are fascinating and creepy. Some of them look like they have faces screaming out from them. Nature is very, very freaky, and my camera is acting suspiciously strangely today. Seriously, these triffids host the souls of the damned. See the others on Flickr if you want to risk demonic possession of your computer, phone or tablet.

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Flower photography, crafts and playing with alcohol inks

29th July 2018 Red

The UK heatwave has fizzled out (for now, with the current climate who knows what will actually happen), it’s under 20°C, grey and windy. I am a very happy bunny as far as that goes, just feeling generally tired. Being able to sleep without wanting to climb out of my own skin to cool off will probably help. Creatively speaking I got a few photos taken before it rained again, so I’m sharing a few here, the rest are up on Flickr. Photos below, along with crafty bits.

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Not a photography post, just a frazzled Red

27th July 2018 Red

Ugh. Heat. Reds are not built for anything much over 20°C, so you can imagine that with the current heatwave in the UK, my productivity levels are low. I’m managing to work, feed myself and shower. Sleep isn’t fantastic. Creative thinking is high, energy and motivation to turn that into action is low. In fact, it’s too hot right now for me to even want to play a video game.

Currently there’s a lot of thunder about, and we had a brief downpour earlier. More forecast for later, but right now it’s unpleasantly hot and humid and I exist only in a puddle of sweat.

Basically, I’m not dead. I’m counting that as a win and going to flail hotly until normal service resumes.

A post shared by Adam B (@redcognito) on Jul 27, 2018 at 9:39am PDT

Photos of a few butterflies and flowers

18th July 2018 Red

Not as many butterflies around as I’d like there to be, hopefully they’ll make more of an appearance as Summer wears on. Yesterday an area around some Marjoram/Oregano was being visited by a bunch of Gatekeepers (female and male, some flirting going on), a few Small Coppers, a Ringlet and a Small Tortoiseshell. There were also quite a few bees, but they weren’t hanging around on a particular flower long enough to get many useful shots. The flowers are small, so I suppose it makes sense. There are some photos of flowers mixed in, along with Jake. He took up residence on the old bench yesterday, haven’t worked out where he’s been today. Enjoy, and find the rest up on Flickr!

All caught up on photos (for now), I’ve got some new pens to play with and swatch, so that’ll keep me occupied for a bit.

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Final batch from the photography backlog

17th July 2018 Red

Final batch from the backlog all sorted and up on Flickr! This lot are all from the garden in the past week, most of them an evening shoot so the sun did nice things with the flower petals. I took a lot of photos today (mostly some butterflies and bees, if they turn out okay), but will sort and post those tomorrow. I hope you enjoy them.

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Photography backlog, batch the second

16th July 2018 Red

Second batch of photos! Almost done, last batch tomorrow. A few of ‘name the daisy’ titles because there are so many varieties that they’re easy to mix up, and I’m an idiot who failed to take a photo of the plant label. I took the melon pics yesterday on a whim. Definitely prefer them to the watermelon pics. The rest of this lot are up on Flickr for your perusal.

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Backlog of photography, batch one

15th July 2018 Red

I’ve been quiet, but I have been taking photos over the past week (the furthest they go back is the 7th), I just haven’t started to sort through them until this weekend. It’s actually been a bit of a chore, because I had over 200 to winnow down, and I’ve still got 60 to do a final sort through and upload (it’ll be less than that, but not much less, just removing pics that have a glaring fault I only notice as I go in to crop). The heat is making me very sluggish, and my lethargy is not helped by the fact I took my meds last night and discovered I’d somehow missed two days of pills. I could have sworn I’d taken them, but evidently not. I decided the sanest thing to do would be batches over a couple of days, so this is batch one, and there will probably be two more.

To add to the meh, I did the watermelon shots and I’m not entirely happy. Most of them got ditched, the lighting was generally crappy, and I basically had way more fun eating the thing than taking photos. I may or may not try again at a later date. As always, there are more up on Flickr.

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On the subject of the London Pride parade hijacking by TERFs

9th July 2018 Red

For anyone not aware, the London Pride parade on Saturday, 7th July 2018 was hijacked by a group of Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs¹) who were protesting the existence of Transgender people. They claimed they were protesting the erasure of lesbian identity, but the fact of the matter is that these claims are (for the most part) complete and utter tripe. Aside from the fact that they plain don’t like us, they’re getting up in arms about the Gender Recognition Act and don’t seem to grasp that everything they want to prevent trans women from doing… they can already do². All the GRA essentially is is a way to make getting a Gender Recognition Certificate³ a much less painful process for those of us who would find the thing useful to have to live our daily lives like the rest of society.

The propaganda leaflets the TERFs were distributing were full of misinformation and twisted words, and the behaviour of these women was deplorable and frankly criminal, and potentially could have been dangerous. They won’t get prosecuted. They’ll just get a slap on the wrist, because crimes like this against trans people are rarely taken seriously. On the positive side, it did spark outrage in the lesbian community, with so many cis⁴ women coming out in support of their trans sisters and decrying the actions of the TERFs. Genuinely heart warming to see, and I have so much love for these women right now.

I’m pretty angry about the stunt in general. Trans issues aside, these women crashed a major event to push their issues, heedless of the disruption. They also displaced the NHS staff who were supposed to be leading the parade, and screwing over the NHS is a reason all by itself for condemning these actions. Respect our NHS, people. But I’m mostly irked by the lying contents of that leaflet. I’m going to take a few points from it and go through them.

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