MOOP!

Dang, today was really good!

And like......I've been saying for a while now that my hypersimplified political stance is "community is good". And while it wasn't the first thing I did today, it was pretty early in the sequence that I looked at the young woman with the small child standing in Park Street station and looking _extremely_ confused about the lack of a map, and so went over with my phone and helped her identify the station she wanted to be at and which train to get on. Then I sat on a bench and did some knitting until my own train arrived. This wasn't the entirety of the day, but it did set the tone really really nicely!

Before that, I had a lovely long phone chat with my mom as she was driving to her sister's to do more work with their dad's stuff --we organized when and how I'll be going to MD to visit this summer, and then chatted about many lovely inconsequential things. And I visited the post office to mail off a book for a friend (I was point person for a kickstarter a bunch of folks on my discord were excited about). And then it was off to bells, where I arrived halfway through but had a jolly time ringing everything after. Not going to bells very frequently means that we suddenly have an all new crop of skilled ringers and that's quite neat to observe!

Bells lunch was lovely, and taking the T home with Laura lovlier still --I got to hear some of her exciting upcoming plans for adventure! And then I was home long enough to change my clothes and take a quick rest and then off to my work-bestie's old house to help him move a bunch of boxen out of his attic. Originally the plan was three of us and I think he was expecting it to take 2-3 hours. The two of us were handily done in well under an hour and I near melted in delight as he said "you being the stupendous badass you are"¹.

(His attic ladder broke right before moving out, so he'd rigged a quite nice pulley setup with a little handmade cargo net. But I don't think he realized how strong I am, and subsequently how quickly I could get things out of the netting and stacked up in the room downstairs. It was a very jolly time!)

Afterwards, I got to see his new house, which is absolutely gorgeous in every way except that it's diagonally opposite our principal's house (which like, isn't an inherent flaw but is very very funny). And he treated me to dinner, which we did at a nice sushi place on Mass Ave that has set out their outdoor seating --it was just warm enough to be happy, and I think we spent the entire time joyfully discussing Taskmaster. I'm real lucky!

Home again home again, and I managed to kick my brain into enough order to get started the newest bit of knitting project (or rather, the first in a series of swatches for thus) before getting into the car(?!) and driving to the airport. It's Magus and Keira's car, on loan while they were overseas, so we can do grocery runs in exchange for giving them rides to and from the airport.

It was my first time hanging out in the cell phone lot, and that was actually quite jolly as well. "Take your time", texts I, "I have music and knitting" and I did and they were both quite good, which was especially good because their airplane did not have access to any stairs for quite a long time and so what could've been a 45 minute errand had everything worked optimally was actually about two hours. But again, I had music and knitting and that was _lovely_. I only had to work on two of the projects (and listen to my CD twice through) and then suddenly we were back at my house and I was handing them the keys.

Dishes properly done *before* coming upstairs to fuck around, and that's where I am now. I have a few hours before bed, I expect, and while I can never guilt-free do things (there is grading and my desk is a disaster) today really was enough that I feel like I can really relax into whatever else I decide to do with my evening.

Community is good! I am so happy I am a part of mine.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: Call me pretty and I will smile, call me useful and I will melt. I know what I'm about. (5'2" and carrying classic oldest daughter trauma)

Hey did you know what happens when two highly ADHD nerds get engaged?

They forget to tell people for ages and then drop it into casual conversation and are confused that people are shocked. So uh. Yeah. Tuesday and I are gonna get married sometime!

I am not particularly good at dramatic romantic gestures, and I'm definitely not good at like. Sharing romantic things in my life with the rest of the world. There's a lot of things that make me nervous and weird about it. Tuesday doesn't make me nervous¹ though! They make me happy, over and over and again, and have been doing so for many years now. And are gonna do so for many years to come, is at least the plan! I'm very happy about it!!!

The most likely time for the wedding is "Iunno, maybe 2028?", for both obvious and non-obvious reasons. We're currently in an opposite-of-race with our respective younger siblings about who can get married last, which is very funny. Tuesday has rejected my offer of "okay but hear me out, let's do like twenty weddings" but then countered with "what about one wedding per person we want to invite?" because the two of us are in love with each other but also very much in love with the bit. You'll get accurate details about how many we actually plan to have closer to when we actually decide to have it. (them >.>)

We do intend to get photos at some point, but in the meantime just keep taking cute selfies of us at places --I'll drop a nice one that she took at Pinewoods last summer in the bottom of this post. I want to get them a pretty ring, but we're doing it slow to figure out something they actually want and would wear regularly. In the meantime we've got a lovely pair of matching fidget rings we got at the Rennfaire last October. I really like wearing mine!

I don't know what else to say here. It's 2026 and America is miserable. We're both queer and every day we don't get forcibly removed from the country is a success. We are joyful and happy together and we have families that like each others company --we've started overlapping our holidays in a way that feels real successful! We still don't live in the same place, but that's a longterm plan that we want to make happen, and I like thinking about the ways my life will be like when that happens. Sometimes I'm terrified to even believe I'm allowed to have a future. I'm terrified to try and think about what might happen because all of it is just overwhelming and scary and depressing.



....But at least we'll be fighting the scary stuff together. That's pretty cool.

~Sor (and Tuesday <3)
MOOP!

1: ke does make me weird, but that's definitely on the "pro" column :3

Oh hey, it's April 4th! That means my babymost sister --the one who loved Lord of the Rings way more than any of us other kids-- is finally coming of age, hobbitwise! I'm so pleased for her! Happy birthday Alys!!!!!

And I remembered to check in earlier today, and I know exactly what I'm getting her for her birthday, and it's something you could get her too if you want: the preorder link for The Stolen Women is finally active and the book has a drop date of October 27th! There's gonna be an audiobook (!) version and an ereader (!!) version!

It's "a retelling of the Sabine Women myth 'for those who love Gladiator but hate the patriarchy'"! It's real good sister feels! It's got queer characters! It has a character who I largely want to punch in the face because he's so annoying and also one hundred percent my favourite! I last read it in the back half of 2023, so it's going to be three years of better edits and more refined since then! I am SO EXCITED FOR ALYS!!!!!!!!

I will be purchasing several copies. I might not be joking when I say "oh yeah, I'm going to order a copy from every local bookstore I love". I already started with PSB, I'm sure I'll be able to from Harvard Square bookstore, and probably Sidequest, and then where else. Does Rodneys let you order new? If you want a copy, please hmu and I'll get you one, if you can't get yourself one. Pretty sure I'll see if NESFA lets me donate one to them.

Happy Birthday, Alys! You're so fucking cool! <3

~Sor
MOOP!

We will go to space today!

I'm rewatching the last T-3minutes of the NSF stream, mostly because I really want to hear the guy shout "LET'S GO TO THE MOON!!" again, because that was so charming! Of all of this, that was the part that made me most gleeful, hearing his glee!

I smiled so hard my face nearly started hurting, starting maybe at T-30seconds? Crying too, obviously, I have been crying on and off this entire afternoon as I watch different parts of the stream.

I'm sad Grandpa Perks didn't get to see us go back. I'm distraught ShadowKev didn't live long enough to get to appreciate a manned moon launch. He, at least, lived through one in the past. It's my first.

I'm thirty-six and a half years old, and it's the first time I've ever gotten to watch us launch our way to and towards and around the moon. We're not even landing on it yet (sounds like Artemis IV is aiming for 2028) but it's far and away the closest we've come in fifty-four years.

My favourite-least-favourite-favourite xkcd comic is 65 Years. It is fantastic to think that it's going to be wrong.

We will go to space today. And tomorrow. And next year and the year after. And again and again, over and over again. Somebody will, someday.

~Sor
MOOP!

Austin is over for his usual Monday datenight, made harder by both of us being very _very_ worn out.

(the weather is not helping. the fascism definitely not)

We had a little bit of a "blaaaah what do" and then Austin asked "what do you want to do" and I paused a long while and admitted that what I wanted to do was play video games and not think. And so he pointed out that Slay the Spire 2 has just come out in early release and maybe we could try it? I hemmed a little (I don't like the idea of playing games in early release) and we read some of the literature, and I decided "sure, let's give it a shot".

(I still have steambux from my da, and certainly Slay the Spire original is one of those games that I have put a staggering number of hours into¹ so I do not at all begrudge giving the makers another round of dollarbux in thanks)

And so we went ahead and hit play and cooperated and chatted and balanced our different playstyles and charged on through. And won! We won very satisfyingly, by mostly creating a good deck vibe (all combos around casting vulnerable) and then immediately blowing that up when given a super powerful artifact at the end of act II.

It was a really lovely balance between "this is extremely familiar" and "this is new and exciting". It's very funny playing my obsessive games with other people, because like, I don't think of myself as being an expert in this game or anything, but I suppose yes, I do immediately know what the cards do or which cards are new. There's definitely some intriguing new options popping up and I look forward to doing some replay.

The timeline is going to be absolutely lovely to find out more about --I like me a little bit of explicit lore sometimes! I mean, I do enjoy the scraps and fragments of the story that you get in the first game, but it's _so_ barebones sometimes that there's nothing really to hang onto.

And it's nice that being cozy and silly and collaborative was able to really turn my mood around at least, and hopefully Austin's as well. Now I can go to sleep feeling a little bit better about my universe (in which my last two workdays were 9.5(today) and 12.5(Fri) hours of active work, and the rest of the week is not looking milder.)

The world is bad but sometimes escapism can be quite nice! Especially when done in good company! I hope you are finding some of that too.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: According to a quick skim of my steam library:

1st place: Crypt of the Necrodancer, 631.5 hours
2nd place: Slay the Spire, 416.8 hours
3rd place: Stardew Valley, 388.9 hours²
4th place: Heroes of Might and Magic III, 324.8 hours³
5th place: Rogue Legacy - 293 hours

In summation, I am not a _broad_ video game player, I am a _deep_ video game player. This is why I am still running through the steambux from my da from two years ago, I just don't buy games very much.

2: Please do not observe that the first time I played this game was like, end of May 2025. The rest of these times are on much longer timeframes (like, multiple years apiece).

3: Heroes should be much higher, there's been lots of times where I've owned this through GoG and emulators not through steam, and I should get that set up again because I miss having phoenixes (and the Steam version doesn't have the expansions, sigh.) It's basically been incomplete playing since I switched away from my mac, so like, since 2019 since I've played it "proper".

wriiiiite the words

I am very tired and don't wanna write the words.

Work today was pretty good but also hella unsatisfying because there was Serious Bullshit with classroom assignments and needing to last-minute move the classroom. I had like......fifteen minutes of warning in order to pack up my everything I would need for class five and move down to a computer lab. It was awfullllll and I'm not happy about it. Blah.

But focusing on the good stuff...uh....the kids seem to grok the Pythagorean Theorem? That's nice. Tomorrow we're moving into our special rights triangles and it's not totally rubbish as a lesson --we did good work last year! I had a good long talk with my mentee last week about his future (and need to send some networking emails on their behalf). Even though the kids are being forced into super dysregulating situations, they were mostly fine?

And yesterday I got a bunch of things done and also had a nice evening with a friend/comet. I didn't sleep enough, but that's Unfortunately Normal, and at least all my sleep hours were in a bed with the lights off, which is Unfortunately Abnormal right now. I'm working on it?

Went to demo team on Sunday, which was fine, and then dance tonight which was...like...it was pretty decent, both Keira and Beth pick good dances and stuff. But for one of them I was dancing on the larks side with my buddy DJ on the Robin's side. And one of the other dancers made some comment about how we had "switched sides just to confuse her". Which like. Fuck off. Fuck off fuck off fuck offfffff.

I understand that I need to be gracious and kind and help people slowly understand in a non-threatening way but also fuck offff. I know I don't pass. I know I will never pass. I know you don't see me as anything as a woman. But you're wrong and you will never know how absolutely hurtful it is to be told that there is an obvious gender box you think I should be in and therefore if I'm on the lark's side it's "wrong".

It was intermission after, so I didn't have to dissociate for that long, and I could go and sit with my knitting and talk to all the various people who came and sat by me and then Sharon asked me to dance. But it still feels bad. I appreciate that the teachers here are trying to normalize larks and robins¹. But the class does not actually get it, and as long as the dancers as a whole are just treating this as "weird names for men and women" nothing is actually going to change.

There's no wrong side to dance on. There is especially no wrong side for me, a nonbinary person to dance on. There is especially no wrong side for anyone to dance on when the role terms are Lark and Robin and have nothing the fuck to do with anyone's gender.

Oh hey, I figured out why I am so tired and draggy and don't wanna write the words. :/

Anyways, I will continue to quietly dance when and where I can with people who are willing to ignore conventions based on what genitals a doctor thought you had when you were born and instead take into consideration, like, who's taller if the dance has an allemande in it. And even that is negotiable.

I'm gonna snuggle Austin and go to bed.

~Sor (they/them)
MOOP!

1: (I am _genuinely thrilled_ that Beth is restating the terms every evening, and also that she is doing a much-better-than-average job of not using gendered pronouns with ungendered role names. Unfortunately, better-than-average means "occasionally says "their partner" instead of "her partner"" but baby steps!)

I have started occasionally experiencing selective mutism.

And on the one hand, I don't actually think this is all that new an experience to me. I think I've always found it hard to talk sometimes, I've just not had a good language to refer to those times in any useful way. Selective Mutism is good language, and enough people are starting to know it that it kinda even is a useful thing to indicate to others on the rare occasion it matters.

But like everything about me, I don't _really_ have it and should probably not appropriate from other people's struggles just to sound cool. Especially because I don't actually have it. If I need to talk, and am experiencing a no-talk moment, I just step out of the no-talk and do what I need to do until I can return to it.

The phrase "slightly upsetting and marginally poetic" comes to mind, for no reason at all.

~Sor
MOOP!

Because I do not wish this to be my third consecutive Friday without writing my words (with one bonus missed Sunday, siiiigh)¹, I better get these done before getting *too* cozy on the couch. That way, we know from experience, lies sleepiness.

I rounded out my reasonably good-but-exhausting week with a third day that was good-but-weird. I was worried that I was going to be slightly late to school --I ran into Clayton on the path and we walked the back half together, quickly since we knew we were brushing against our contractual start time. Striding around the corner at 7:47 (two minutes after first bell, but still well before final bell), we were startled to find...everyone. Turns out a fire alarm had gone off right around the time of first bell, and so *no one* got into class before about 8:10. Well then.

A couple hours later, I watched in horror as my clock spontaneously fell off the wall and missed hitting a student on the head by 8-10 inches or so. I think that's when I declared that the day had pretty serious Friday-the-thirteenth vibes, despite being a Friday-the-not.

I was able to finish the day without too many hours of distractions, and determined that I would reward myself for a Productive Week with a trip to Make and Mend to poke around. It's the closest I've ever had two visits there (about two weeks), and I was pleasantly surprised by how much churn had occurred, and how many new things were out. My secret plan to obtain every possible knitting needle is going extremely well.

I walked home while chatting on the phone with Veronica, which meant I got to learn her youngest child has the same favourite dinosaur as me (Triceratops, which I decided was my favourite when I was probably pretty close to the age he is now: almost four). I really appreciate that she has initiated an every-other-week or so Friday afternoon call while she's doing daycare pickup. It's always so good to get to know what's going on in her life!

At home I did some important documentation of knitting supplies (so far I have managed to not duplicate any needle sizes, which is _excellent_) and then sat on the bed and listened to music and worked a bit on some of my projects. Hearing voices downstairs, I went down to hang with Rey and her lovely friend Al, who I'd met a few weeks ago and quite hit it off with.

Now they're off to watch the telly downstairs, and I have, as established at the beginning of this post, curled myself up very comfortably on the couch. I have a warm blanket, I have three different knitting projects in reach, I have good conversations going with my sweeties, all is good!

It's still not guaranteed (my brain has been piss of late), but I'm really hoping I make it out to bells tomorrow, since it's been an age. And then I can spend the rest of the day being lazy and quiet and maybe grading and maybe playing video games and maybe knitting. It's a good plan, bront.

I hope you have good plans for this weekend, be they restful or active.

~Sor
MOOP!

1: I don't think I've talked about it. I feel awful. My streak was 1271 days. But right now it is 6 days, and if I finish today it'll be 7, and the way you get to 1271 is by doing 6 or 7 or 8 days in a row, lots of times all strung together. So yeah, "feel awful" but also sanguine.

Today was a nice day!

Tuesday and I played quite a bit of Cadence of Hyrule, which was extremely enjoyable to do. I love Crypt of the Necrodancer very much, and I like playing video games with other people, so this was a good combo. It's exciting to me to get to be the better player at a game, because that is not generally the case. Not that I was doing a flawless job or anything, Tuesday is also very good at games, but I have played a staggering amount of Necrodance over the years, and I'm sure I was extremely charmingly irritating about all the parts where I was like "oh yeah, I know exactly how that mechanic works".

At lunchtime, we swung by the local little Japanese place, and got an assortment of things. Some of it was excellent (their little friend sesame balls were exemplary) and some of it was merely acceptable, which is still a nice situation restaurant-wise. Foolishly of Tuesday, I now know this is quite close and may drag us there on future visits as well.

More video games, then being floppy in bed and doing some parallel play, and finally it was dinner time and we settled in to watch Everything Everywhere All At Once, which I had never seen. We'd specifically been trying to find a time to watch it when we could watch it on Tuesday's properly big television (rather than laptop screens or something else inadequate) and I do think it was worth it.

The movie is absolutely as splendid as everyone said. Some of it was extremely predictable, but in the way that felt right. It felt like the joy of storytelling, the hope of seeing everything come round the way it ought to, while still being beautiful and joyous and just an absolute delight. And the actual visuals of it are astoundingly well done! There was a moment where I realized I want to do the double feature of this with Wizard of Speed and Time. Specific theme: it would be good to watch this on a device capable of going frame-by-frame when necessary.

(I should make sure I've shown Tuesday WoSaT at some point, because if I haven't, that _really_ needs to be rectified. I think she would find it Good.)

Tomorrow we get more being floppy and goofy together. Probably more video games. Certainly more being very much in love. Eventually I get on a train and head back to Somerville (in time for dance, even.)

As long as I ignore the fact that I need to work on grading at some point, I am having a lovely vacation!

~Sor
MOOP!

The world is complicated and there are a lot of things to have feelings about, obviously on a macro level, but for me on a more micro level as well.

But.

I spent the day with various groups of friends, and doing a bunch of knitting work and making things with my hands. And it feels very very good.

I'm happy for that. I hope you can also find things that make you happy.

~Sor
MOOP!