Bodie A. Ashton

Grant applications: the most tedious things. OTOH they want you to take 40-odd pages to account for what your results will be for work you by definition have not yet done (otherwise why would you need the grant!) but they ALSO want you to describe your entire career path in five characters or fewer.

Walked out of doing some writing into a gorgeous day, and thought “maybe I’ll call mum, I haven’t in a while.”

…fuck.

Be safe, friend. Take care of yourself and reach out whenever you need.

I've a headache the size of Austria, but there's too much still to do. Hopefully tomorrow I can take it easy a little.

It is 4.30am so of course I am awake and continuing drafting because insomnia waits for no one.

I humbly suggest that, instead of emulating the Nuremberg trials, the US might actually want to do something to get rid of all the Nazis eventually.

Look I'm all here for enemy-crushing, so I guess I should get on to this, huh.

I've been working hard all day and am pretty thrilled with the progress I've made.

I've also forgotten to go to the supermarket to get food for dinner.

I...should probably do that, huh.

Support actual real artists, you jerks. Midjourney or whatever has about as much soul as you do if you're willing to undercut talented people by feeding their work into the bullshit hallucination machine.

Besides, supporting the arts makes you 28,000% more attractive. FACT.

Look why not. @lgmsam.bsky.social says it gives “Murder, She Wrote” vibes. I’m just thrilled the shirt involves cats.

(Though I feel like I get my hair from my Nanna; I feel like a fluffy puppy.)

I really love your work, Sandra, and here particularly the "echoes of Section 28" article. I'm angry about the occasion that led to it being written but I'm very glad you wrote it.

Also also I wish I had a decent full-length mirror in this apartment because today involves absolutely rocking an outstandingly comfortable floral skirt.

I've dropped between 15-20kg in a handful of weeks. "You're looking slim" is meant well, I'm sure, and I'm not complaining about the things it's letting me fit into, but the fact is I've been stressed and grieving so I just stopped eating and it's alarming...and definitely not a tip for weight loss.

(Even in grant writing, it's such a joy to reference people. Today @sandraduffy.bsky.social has made it into my notes and I'm so grateful to be able to read incisive and clever work like this.)

a man is playing a guitar and singing into a microphone while another man plays drums Alt: a man is playing a guitar and singing into a microphone while another man plays drums

Today I'm grant writing and I'm actually enjoying it, god help me.

Also, "American Idiot" was a fucking incredible album, and "21st Century Breakdown" is criminally underrated, and Billie-Joe Armstrong was, along with Dave Gahan (and, specifically, his voice) one of my formative queer awakenings.

Pals I need all your thoughts and prayers and caffeine tablets because today I need to write like I’ve never written before. At stake is an unexpected future and a glimmering small possibility of something good coming out of this godforsaken year.

I’m here to absolutely support you in the endeavour to track this down and absolutely rock it.

Okay I’m mildly obsessed.

There’s only one thing for it (Mettbrötchen).

Trans rights are civil rights. If you aren't willing to die on the hill of trans rights, then you aren't willing to die on the hill of Black rights. Of Jewish rights. Of disabled rights. Of gay rights. Of anyone's rights. Human rights.

It is extremely telling that these people identify the rights of a minority to exist as “not popular with voters” (when the evidence for such a position is…tenuous at best) and their conclusion is “well, fuck that minority then.” Gleeful bootlickers and collaborators cosplaying as the good guys.

Jesus fucking Christ these people are pathological.

Thing is, I’m usually a very loud critic of the (over)use of Niemöller’s poem, given the whole who-he-was-as-a-person, but in *this* instance it would be extraordinarily fitting!

Marcel is excellent!

So much of political discourse now, across the West, boils down to "Be realistic, our policies have to have SOME evil in them!"

And if you say "No they don't", you're a dangerous extremist.

So no, mate. Gavin Newsom is no great liberal hero for throwing trans people under the bus while “resisting” Trump. And while I try not to make vapid historical comparisons, please look up all the establishment politicians who compromised while “opposing” fascism. The story tends not to end well.

And that’s before we get to intersectionality. No one fits into one box; that too is fascist thinking. Curtailing trans rights is an attack on literally everyone and we don’t even need to get to the tepid “imagine if this affects cis people too!” arguments to see that very clearly indeed.

Listen, friends. Guy might’ve blocked me but the point stands. You don’t best fascism by surrendering the rights of people you don’t think are a big deal. On the contrary, that’s literally how fascism wins.

“Transgender issues are not the hill to die on” is an easy thing to say if you’re a person apparently happy for trans people to die, on a hill or otherwise.

It's like all the reactionaries who claim that 1984 was absolutely definitely a book they read and loved and understood, except Badenoch is more ambitious than that, and will gleefully misrepresent an author's *whole entire oeuvre.*