Minneapolis! Event tips! A really good owl!

Hey friends,

Hope you’re all hanging in there. I was hanging out with Mattie & Jaya’s cat last night so life could be worse, is what I’m saying.

Photo: Frog, who is a little tabby cat, sleeping belly-up on a colorful chair

Speaking of Mattie, the ticket link for our Minneapolis Gender Ordeal show is live now! Minneapolitans, NOW IS YOUR TIME TO SHINE!!!!! Plenty of tickets for the Chicago show as well. (Minneapolis show is being announced publicly tomorrow, and we’ll start promoting both shows on social media next week, so consider today your patreon presale window!)

And speaking of tomorrow… that’s when we’re dropping this month’s Gender Reveal episode, featuring Producer Ozzy in conversation with philosopher Talia Mae Bettcher! I also ask a couple questions at the end, but Ozzy’s in the driver’s seat for this one because they are the one who understands philosophy, lol. That said, Talia and Ozzy did a great job of breaking down complex philosophical concepts into accessible ideas for normal people (me), so I’m hoping you’ll get a lot out of this episode regardless of your general ability to parse this kind of stuff.

Thanks to everyone who has planned a Trans Day of Having a Nice Snack event so far! If you applied for funding, hold tight, I’ll get back to you as soon as I hit a bunch of quickly approaching deadlines (help). If you’d like to apply for funding, you can do that here for another week or so. A couple notes for folks who are still cooking up events:

• We are specifically looking for public events! If it’s not open to all trans people, that’s totally fine and cute for you, but we are going to feel weird about funding it.

• When choosing your location, keep in mind that cis people love free food, lol. For example, if you’re setting up a “free cupcakes” stand inside the cupcake shop, there’s a good chance that people who come in to buy cupcakes will simply take free ones instead. So, just like, have a plan, I guess, to handle that without being the gender police?

Okay, let’s do Links & Stuff.

Organizing & privacy:

• Kim Kelly on the do’s and don’ts of mutual aid, for Lit Hub

• Wired’s new guide to getting the most out of Signal (you’re using Signal right??)

• Margaret Killjoy on distinguishing between our aboveground, underground, and demiground lives; the latter is “where, under an authoritarian regime, most of your socializing and online life ought to probably take place”

Watch:

• Jaya showed us all this 2000 Robbie Williams music video last night and now it is haunting me (cw: guy rips off his skin lmao)

• This guy Wile E. Coyote’d his Tesla into a painted wall for “science” (content)

• I broke my very strict “no earnest multi-paragraph Letterboxd reviews” rule for Eephus, which is humiliating; anyway, if you’re a baseball sicko, go see Eephus!

• I also saw a screening of the wonderful 1996 documentary Transexual Menace, which you can watch right here for free.

Everything else:

• Please take a moment to support this 19-year-old Palestinian refugee and his family during Ramadan. Even $5 helps!

• For absolutely no good reason, I recently reread Ann Manov’s pans of Lauren Oyler’s No Judgment and Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo (weird link due to paywall, sry) and they both slap.

• Terrible news for assholes :(

Tuck’s Creature Corner

• Sometimes an owl is just two eyes and an attitude and that's beautiful

That’s it for this week. Here’s your weekly Rhubarb, courtesy of my roommate.

Photo: Ruby the cat looking beautiful and fluffy on her heating pad 

And my roommate also wants you to see this pic of our foster cat so here he is.

Photo: a VERY close-up, blurry photo of a black and white cat laying on the chest of the person taking the photo

Xo,

Yr resident gender detective