Ellis called me on a Tuesday afternoon. This was unusual — inasmuch as most things around Ellis are already unusual — because in twenty-two years he had never once called me at an hour when a person might reasonably be expected to answer. He calls at three in the morning, or during a funeral, or in the eleven minutes I have set aside to eat lunch standing up. I have always considered this a trait of his personality instead of assuming rudeness, since time doesn't have a tendency to work normally around him the way it does for the rest of us, and I don't have the impression that he generally needs to consider other people's schedules.

So, when he called me at ten past two on a Tuesday, I already knew something was odd even before picking up and having to repeat his name into the silence twice before he finally answered.

"Could you come," he said.

He did not say it like a question. I held the phone to my ear for a moment longer than I needed to. In twenty-two years he had never asked me for anything: he had never asked for a ride, help with the shopping, or a forty-dollar loan. He had never participated in the ordinary economy of favours between friends to such a degree that I realised, phone against my ear in that moment, that I had stopped expecting him to do so without consciously deciding it.

"Yeah," I said, quickly. "Yeah, of course. Half an hour."

His building is ordinary. I have thought about that fact often over the years. When I first met him, I found that I could not hold his address in my head for more than a day or so at a time. I would write it down and lose the paper, even when I made sure to leave the paper somewhere so it wouldn't be lost. Or, I would remember the flat number but forget the street. And then at some point after about a year this simply stopped happening and I could find his place whenever I wanted. I understood, somehow, that he had altered this intentionally; it was something he had done rather than being something that had worn off, or something I'd gotten used to. It is the only gift he has ever given me.

Ellis' building is made of brick, has three storeys, features a buzzer panel with faded nameplates under milky plastic, and has a stairwell that smells of unfamiliar, but welcomed, cooking. The door was on the latch when I got there. I touched the handle, turning it quietly and sticking my head in. Even invited, I couldn't shake the feeling of trespassing.

"Ellis?"

"In here."

The flat was the same as it always had been on my previous visits. It looked like a place someone had furnished once and then stopped thinking about. It contained a good chair, a poor lamp, and a bookcase with books arranged by no clear system. He claims the order is chronological, though he has never explained the timeline the system is predicated on. I walked into the kitchen, noticing without surprise that the kettle was cold. The only light I could make out was coming from the bathroom at the end of the hallway. The door was open. I paused outside for a moment to set my expression before entering the way one might at a hospital — gathering my face into something I'd want to be met with.

Ellis was in the bath.

The water reached just below his collarbones. His arms rested along the edges of the tub on both sides, in a stiff position as though he was being propped up instead of relaxing. His knees were up out of the water, and his head was leaned back against the rim of the tub so that his throat was long, and exposed. He did not look over at me when I entered.

Then I noticed the mirror.

The glass was completely clear and dry as a clean plate. There was no steam in the room, and the air was not warm or humid even though the bathroom's small, high window was closed. I put my hand on the surface of the water without asking. It was cold, still, and level. The feeling passed over me like I was in a church and touching something I wasn't supposed to.

I cleared my throat and drew my hand back, wiping it on my trousers. "How long have you been in there?"

"I don't know," he said, and then, after a while: "That's true, by the way. I'm not being... I don't know. I wasn't keeping track." He shrugged, half-hearted, the movement barely disturbing the water surface.

I said something like right, or okay, because I could not think of anything else to say. I went to the kitchen and turned on the kettle. My mother always did that when faced with rooms where bad news was waiting to be delivered, and it seems that I had picked up the same habit. At any rate, I had a hunch that having a cup of tea to hold for the next little while was better than having nothing to hold.

When I returned with two mugs, he had turned his head. He watched me place his mug on the edge of the sink where he could reach it, though we both knew he would not.

"You didn't have to come."

"You asked me to come," I said, sipping the too-hot Earl Grey from a stale teabag.

"I know. I've been thinking about that. I don't think I've done that before."

"You haven't," I said, aware of the unspoken implication that he meant "with anyone." I sat on the floor with my back against the linen cupboard door. This placed me lower than him and slightly behind him. I did this on purpose. I have been the person in the bath in a similar state twice in my life, and the worst part both times was being regarded like I was pitiable.

Neither of us spoke for a while. I drank my tea and listened to the ratty exhaust fan and the irregular noises from the pipes in the wall. There were no other sounds. Rooms that Ellis is in tend to be quieter than rooms he is not in, but the quiet is not peaceful.

"Someone asked me for something," he said.

"Okay."

"On Thursday. I think it was Thursday." He moved one large, gentle hand slightly, and the water shifted around his wrist. "A car park. One of the big ones at a hospital, built bigger than the hospital building itself so it's impossible to keep track of what level you're on. He was sitting in his car and he had not started it yet. I don't know how long he had been sitting there. It's not..." He trailed off. "You don't get the before — when someone asks, I mean. You only get the moment they actually manage to reach out."

"What did he want?" I replied, hair on the back of my neck prickling up at this small insight into what it was to be Ellis in the moments outside of moments like this.

"He wanted his brother to answer the phone."

I waited for him to continue, but he had finished speaking. After a moment, he shrugged again.

"That was all of it. He had called him twice that afternoon and got the answering machine both times. He wanted, very much, for the third call to be answered. He didn't know he was asking me. No one knows they are asking me. That is my purpose. When there is no one else to ask, people say please to the room, and I am the room."

"And did he? Answer, I mean. The brother."

"Yes."

"What did they say to each other?"

"I do not know," Ellis replied. "I don't get that part. I never do. I see the attempt to reach out and then nothing else. I have been fine with that for a long time. It's what I'm for. I am not telling you this because I have stopped being fine with that. That is not the issue."

The tea was becoming cold in my hands. I drank some of it anyway.

"Then what is the issue?"

"I did not have enough in me," he said. "It has a cost — answering — and I did not have it in me. I knew that before I acted, and I did it anyway."

I have known Ellis for twenty-two years. Across that time, I have understood about a third — if I'm being generous to my own intellect — of what he is. But I have never seen him look the way he looked right then. He did not look tragic or haunted. He looked spent. He looked like a person who has given blood too many times in a year but continues to be cheerful about the offering. He had a grey colour around his mouth that was not sadness. It was the look of a body trying to perform an equation it cannot balance out.

I looked away at the tap for a second. As I did, I found that I could not remember his face.

A face I've regularly, if patchily, seen since I was nineteen. I looked at the chrome of the tap and tried to visualise him, but there was no shape to the memory. I only knew he was there, the way you know how a word will feel in your mouth without having to say it. I looked back at him quickly and he was still there, looking as he always had. I decided not to mention this. I have wondered since then if that was cowardice or kindness. I still do not know.

"He would have been all right," I offered gently. "The man. Even if you hadn't helped. The brother might have rung back on his own, or he would have —"

"Don't."

It wasn't sharp. That was almost worse. Ellis just sounded tired. He sounded like someone telling a child to stop touching something hot after the hundredth warning that it would burn them. My ears warmed and I felt embarrassed with no real reason for it.

"I wasn't —"

"You were going to give me advice," he said. He had not lifted his head. "You were going to say it was not necessary to push myself, when you don't have the barest level of context for what is and isn't necessary. I am not angry. If I were in your position, I would probably do the same thing. But I need you to stop. It does not help, and then I'll have to manage your feelings when you feel unhelpful. I can't do that today."

"All right."

"I do not know if it was worth it," he finally said, quietly, almost to himself. "It isn't like I have a scale for this kind of thing. I'm not complaining — this is just something without a size that can be measured. The man wanted his brother to answer the phone and his brother answered the phone. I do not know what that achieved for him and I never will. The cost was the cost. Both of those things are true, and they are simultaneously related and irrelevant to any of it."

The pipes made a ticking sound. Someone upstairs walked across a room.

"Is there a way to not do it —" I started to ask. I stopped and then started again hesitantly. "Is there a way to not do it when you don't have enough?"

"Yes."

"I see."

"I could have chosen not to," he said. "Nothing forced me. He was not special. He was not even a particularly good man as far as I could tell. He was a stranger in a car park who had run out of ideas. There are eleven, twelve people like him an hour, always pulling at my awareness, all day long, forever. I do not do it for all of them. I have never been able to explain how I choose. I reached him and I had nothing left, but I did it anyway."

"Why?"

"That is the question, isn't it?" he said. For the first time, he sounded more like himself. "I have been lying here since Thursday thinking about that. I think I did it because if I had let that one go after answering, I would have had to find out if I could keep letting them go. And I think I would rather be in this state than understand that capacity about myself."

I put the mug down on the tile beside me. It made a small, flat noise. I sat with empty hands and knew I had nothing to offer. In all the time I'd known Ellis, this was the most open vulnerability he had ever given me, and I knew that my collection of standard human comforts was of no use in an interaction like this. All of those were meant for mortal people's problems with mortal people's boundaries. Invoking any of them now would just be an insult in this room. I couldn't tell Ellis that these feelings would pass, because I didn't know if they would. I couldn't give him meaning or purpose because I was staring at a reality I didn't understand the meaning or purpose of, either. I couldn't tell him that he should stop, because I somehow knew he would ignore me even if I did — his entire nature prevented him from stopping. At any given moment, any moment from now, there would be another car park and another person asking the universe for another small mercy.

"So, it will happen again," I said, not asking a question.

"Yes."

"Soon?"

"Probably sooner than soon," he replied, without any emphasis, which was how I knew it was the core of the problem. He sighed once more. "That was why I called you — that was the part I couldn't handle alone, this time." He waved his hand dismissively, somehow managing to do so without displacing much of the water at all. "Not the man. The man is finished with. What I can't handle is that there's no version of this where I get to have a rest and get myself ready again. The next person is already coming. I can feel their need coming at me like how you can feel a train shaking the ground long before you hear it. And yet, I'm still sitting in the bath."

I did not say I was sorry. It would have been true, but useless.

What I eventually said was, "I don't know how to help you."

"I know," he said.

"If it were anyone else, I would know how to handle this. I would take you to a doctor, or call a family member, or make you eat. None of those things work here. I don't have a backup plan."

"I know," he repeated. Then he said, "Christopher."

"What?"

"I did not call you because I expected you to have a solution."

I sat there while the fan continued its slow, unsteady rotation and the mirror stayed clear. I thought about how he has responded to some enormous and unguessably large number of people who reached out for help during the worst moments of their lives and there is no system that works for him in the other direction. No one listens to him in the same way; his requests for help do not go anywhere. One Tuesday afternoon at ten past two, he had used up his resources. He did the only thing he could think to do. He called a man he'd known since that man was nineteen and asked him to come over. I found I didn't know how to feel about that.

"The water is freezing," I said at last.

"It is."

"You're not going to do anything about that, are you?"

"No."

I stood up from the floor. My knees were sore and complained about the movement but I ignored their protest. I leaned over the end of the bathtub and turned on the hot water tap.

He did not stop me. He did not move or tell me to stop. He let the water run. It ran cold for a few seconds the way these old taps always seem to and then it warmed up. The hot water came up out of a hot water tank in a cabinet somewhere on the other side of the wall; an ordinary piece of equipment installed by an ordinary person for an ordinary task. The warmer water spread through the bath and I put my hand in near the tap so it wouldn't scald Ellis. In my peripheral vision, I watched him as he let this happen.

After about a minute, his shoulders relaxed slightly. It was a small, but visible, change.

Steam started to come up off the surface in an unhurried, predictable, and entirely unmiraculous way. I looked up and noticed that the bathroom mirror had become foggy at the edges and then slowly across its whole, smooth surface. I couldn't see our reflections in it after a moment.

"That's better," he said, quietly. It was better in some ways. It was the same in others.

I sat back down on the floor.

I stayed until the water needed doing again, and then I did it again.

When I was about eighteen, I left my abusive parents in New Orleans and moved to New York City on my own. I'd been writing for a magazine based in San Francisco that was planning to move its offices to NYC, and I'd been promised a full-time staff role once that happened. I moved a month ahead of time to get settled, but then things at the magazine went tits up (it was a weird situation — they even made a movie about it) and it fell through. Suddenly I was in NYC without the job I'd been promised, right as Bush kicked off the Iraq War and tipped the US into recession. I'd spent what little I had to my name getting to NYC and getting a place; I'd naively paid a deposit and first month's rent up front on what I thought was a studio apartment, only to find out once I arrived that I was renting a room in a sharehouse owned by a creepy geriatric who "normally only lets Chinese college students move in" and who sexually harassed me on multiple occasions. When the job fell through and I had no way to pay rent, he offered to let it slide another month if he got to watch me jerk off to his collection of gay Asian porn. I declined, and moved out.

What followed was nearly a year of homelessness — mostly couch surfing wherever I could find a place to crash, with some bouts of sleeping rough. I quickly made friends with a group of other homeless queer teenagers who hung out around Christopher Street Pier, its significance to queer history something I'd only learn about much, much later. Many of them were people of colour, many of them were trans, many of them were sex workers. I never accepted anything outright transactionally, but across that year I definitely went on dates with men significantly older than me — men I never would have talked to if I hadn't needed a place to stay and a shower, or if they weren't shouting dinner. I didn't know the term "survival sex" at the time, but that's absolutely what it was. Still, at one particularly low point, I remember calling my mother from a payphone in the middle of the night and screaming into the receiver that, despite everything I was dealing with at the time, it was still better than living with them. So, there's that.

After about a year, I finally landed a job and a stable place and started putting my life together. I stayed friends with the people I'd met, many of whom I absolutely credit with the fact that I'm still alive two decades on, but the one I cared about the most was a gorgeous six-foot-five Puerto Rican trans girl a couple years older than me named Roxi. Roxi was the first trans person I ever (knowingly) met, and she could shift from the most glamorous human being god ever put on this earth to absolutely the sort of soldier you'd want in the trenches with you. In the stretch between getting said job and said apartment, while I was saving money up, I got jumped by a couple of guys who were going to rob me or bash me or worse — I don't know which. I still have a scar on my upper thigh where one of them slashed me with a knife. Then, out of nowhere like deus ex machina, Roxi showed up with a hammer, cracked one of them in the leg, and sent them all running. Afterwards, she helped me limp back to the pier, and I got drunk for the first time with the other queer kids while she stitched the slash up. I don't think I asked her how she knew how to sew stitches but then that was the sort of thing she would have known how to do.

Roxi was making money the way many trans women of colour who "hung out" around the Christopher Street pier did, and one day she disappeared.

This wasn't unusual for some of the other kids, but it was for her. She was a few years older than the rest of us and had adopted a matriarchal persona; she was also one of the few I never, ever saw doing drugs, even though I couldn't begrudge most of the kids there whatever form of escapism they needed. It was out of character, and we were all concerned. My experience with the police during her disappearance — whose interest in doing anything about it was not merely absent but negative — is certainly one of the things that's coloured my opinion of the job as a whole. By the time I was twenty I had founded a non-profit in her memory, and one of its chief objectives was advocating for cops actually giving a shit about crime against queer people.

I have been in the room with queer folks — predominantly cis, white and white-passing men like myself — much older than me, who stood there with smarmy, patronising expressions, lecturing me on the right and wrong way to do advocacy. I have sat in on arguments where those with the most power and privilege talked down on those with the least, dismissed their experiences and worries as unimportant next to their own, and triaged whose struggles got to matter. I was present when groups like the Human Rights Campaign threw trans people under the bus because they didn't want to rock the boat and risk their access to Democrats — which in practice meant Democratic events and the donors who funded them. I have said fuck them and fuck their money, and had people roll their eyes at me like they were playing six-dimensional chess and I was too young and too naive to "get it" — only to sit here two decades later as the smug little Cassandra I always end up being, going "I told you so" while everything plays out exactly the way I said it would back in the 2000s.

Mainstream queer — though I should be specific: "queer" generally meant the issues that affect white gay men first and foremost, with everyone else a trickle-down afterthought, if anything — organisations refused to stand up for trans people because their struggles were politically unpalatable to their own, and rather than show some selflessness and solidarity, they let conservatives and bigots carve us up. That didn't make things better, it just showed conservatives and bigots where the movement's weak points were.

And, having identified those weak points, they've spent decades exploiting them.

Oh, but we can get married (for now) and serve in the military (for now), so mission accomplished for us, I guess.

Anyway — this isn't a post about US politics. It's a post about Australia, and how, having watched this shit happen over there, I now get to watch the same types of people shoot themselves and the rest of us in the foot, with absolutely no lessons learned.

This weekend there will be a vote on several motions around the Sydney Mardi Gras parade and its governance. Several were brought up by a faction called Pride in Protest — predominantly organised by younger, gender-diverse people of colour — and several have been added to the docket by "Protect Mardi Gras," a faction of generally older, cis, white gay men who are exactly the sort who lectured me two decades ago about how there's a right and a wrong way to do politics and that I "just didn't get it". It might be a different cover artist, but they're singing the same song.

"Protect Mardi Gras" came into existence solely because Pride in Protest was making enough noise to be noticed. And the privileged cadre of people who don't want the boat rocked, who don't want their access revoked, who don't want to worry about things they're lucky enough never to have to, have come out well-financed and swinging. While we're watching trans folks erased from public life in front of our very eyes, "Protect Mardi Gras" is sitting on high tone-policing and telling others what the right way to be angry and demand their rights is.

I'm nearly half as old as many of the '78ers, and I know that there were plenty of people at the first Mardi Gras parade — just as there were at the Stonewall Riots and during ACT UP's protests demanding that politicians pay attention to the gay men dying of AIDS — saying "this isn't the right way to do this". Having secured a pyrrhic victory for themselves, they're pulling the ladder up behind them.

As I write this, Pride in Protest's main social media presence has been banned from Instagram, and people affiliated with "Protect Mardi Gras" are claiming credit for it via a mass reporting campaign. Look at the comments on anything on social media shared by either camp and you'll find people saying some of the most virulently heinous crap about Pride in Protest's organisers — up to and including calls to review the visa status of asylum seekers.

I shouldn't have to spell out how dark and outright evil it is to use the same weapons the bigots use against us — a few weeks ago The Laird was banned from social media; Midsumma has complained about shadow banning; other queer artists, non-profits, and venues in Australia and abroad have been swept up in mass banning campaigns potentially initiated by bigots and religious extremists.

And let me underscore, once again, that for most of the people involved in "Protect Mardi Gras," who count failed Labor political candidates and current Liberal political operatives amongst their strange bedfellows, trans people being disappeared and a genocide on the other side of the planet is an annoying thought-exercise — but it's an existential crisis for the people on whose behalf Pride in Protest are asking for recognition, affordances, and safety who are facing this stuff right now and being retaliated against by our own community for speaking up about it.

Well, it's an existential crisis for the cis white gays, too — they just don't realise it yet. Because for every cis gay man who thinks the discrimination stops with trans people: you're in for a rude awakening, the same as every cis gay man in the US now staring down a reality where the bigots are already reaching for more. For every cis gay man who takes up the weapons and language of our oppressors and uses them against the least protected of us, you're in for a rude awakening when they start doing it against you too. South Australia didn't abolish the "gay panic" legal defence until the end of 2020 — within my own lifetime, queerness and "think of the children" were still treated as inseparable, and now we've got Mardi Gras board members doing the same thing with trans identities.

If I cannot appeal to your general sense of empathy and "hey, maybe I shouldn't be a fucking asshole", then perhaps, strategically, you guys can look at the state of queer — and gay — civil rights in the US and realise there's safety in numbers. Rather than worrying about your party getting ruined, you can think about the bigger picture: what happens when a conservative government comes along and rips up the marriages you care so much about, or stops you visiting your spouse in hospital, or won't let them inherit your assets after you've passed, or denies them medical care — or decides to bring back lobotomies, electroshock, and conversion therapy. This stuff is not distant history, and I'm not that fucking old.

"Protect Mardi Gras" do get half of it — they keep complaining that Pride in Protest are showing our enemies where they can divide us; but they stop there, and in stopping there, they make it obvious they think they should be the ones deciding where our resources go and whose struggles actually matter. "Protect Mardi Gras" say that participating in the parade shouldn't be a reward for good behaviour (a bizarre stance to have) and act as if kicking police and bad politicians out will hurt us — but not a year goes by where people aren't harmed by police during the parade itself, and the NSW police watchdog had to order an investigation into over-policing at queer venues in Sydney just days ago. How did letting them march alongside the community they regularly terrorise prevent that bad behaviour, again?

I'm reminded of the story of Sammy Davis Jr, who — despite being one of the most successful performers of his era, a Rat Pack member alongside Frank Sinatra, and a tireless campaigner for JFK — was disinvited at the last minute from performing at JFK's inauguration because he was in an interracial marriage. And this was after he'd agreed to move his own wedding up a month so it wouldn't create controversy in the final days of the election. He did what he was asked — not for himself, but because he thought JFK would be more receptive to the issues affecting Black Americans and would actually do something about them — and he was still kicked out of the room once he gave them what they'd expected.

When you throw the more vulnerable under the bus, you don't get to insist you're still on the same side. And when you're not on the same side, you don't get to dictate the terms on which the people actually under threat get to be angry and fight back.

They sat me in this chair when I was nine and played me the recording, and I have come back to the same chair to make the next one. That is the whole of my remaining usefulness.

The light above the lens is the colour they told me it would be. The room is colder now than I remember it being when I was nine, and I have decided not to think about why.

I am early. This is not supposed to be done yet — there are years meant to sit between a Reader and the one who replaces them, and I have not been given all of my years. I am doing this now because I will not be able to do it later, but that is all I will say about that, here, where anything I say will be heard.

I clear my throat.

I find the place in myself where the voice is supposed to come from — level, unhurried. The voice of somebody who has nothing to fear and nowhere else to be. I remember hearing that voice when I was nine and I remember trusting it completely.

I begin.

"If you are watching this, then it is your turn. Do not be afraid. You were chosen the way I was chosen and the way the first of us had been chosen. The choosing has never once been wrong."

The script is in front of me. Not that I need it; I learned these words, rote, as a child, and I can pull them up verbatim at will. The script is there so that I don't deviate from it — improvise. There's a difference between knowing the words and being permitted to choose new ones, and the whole of my training was understanding that boundary.

"You will tend the charge as I have tended it, and as it was tended to before me. You will not ask when the door opens. The door does not open for the ones who tend it. It opens for someone — that has always been enough, and you need to find the place in yourself that allows it to be enough for you, too."

It is not enough. I want to lean into the lens, force my face against the precious glass standing between me and the future, and say so. I want to say: it was never enough; I have given my one life to a door I will not walk through, and there were nights I hated all of you for it — the first of us, the ones who wrote these words, you, whoever you are, sitting where I am sitting one day, watching my face the way I watched the face of the one who came before me.

But I don't say this. I am a professional.

I read the next line as it's written.

"You might wonder whether it is true. That is allowed. Readers are allowed to wonder despite what you've been taught until now. You may wonder about the truth while still tending the charge, and the two do not fight each other as much as you fear they will."

Whoever wrote that was kind. I think about them more than I think about almost anyone living. They knew the one in this chair would be afraid, and they reached a hand out across all that time to steady them. The hand reaches me, even now, even though it is only words written by someone long gone to nothing. I want to reach back the same way. But the script has no place in it for me to do that. The script is the hand, now, and I am only the one reading it aloud.

When I was nine, I believed the face in the recording. I believed they were calm because what they said was true, and they knew it was true. I have sat in this same chair long enough now to understand that person was not calm. They were holding still. There is a difference that you only learn from the inside, and by the time you've learned it you are already the one holding still for someone who will believe you the way I believed that person when I was a child.

"It is not a sorrow that you will not live to see the work completed. It is the most ordinary thing in the world. People have always built what they will not live in — here, and in the old, dying world that sent us far away from it in the hope that we would build something that they could not."

I hesitate. If I were still in training, this would have resulted in a knock against the back of my head. But there's no one to chastise me for pausing too long now.

"You are not owed the ending. No one is owed the ending."

This is the line that I want most to break. Right here. This one. I want to stop and tell you that it is a sorrow — that it is the whole sorrow — and you should be allowed to feel it as one and not be told, through a calm dead woman's voice, that it is ordinary. It was not ordinary to me. Not sitting here early, in a room that is too cold, with the years I had been promised quietly taken back from me.

I do not break the line.

I read it the way it is written, in a calm, level, unhurried voice that barely sounds like mine, and I keep my hands where the camera cannot see them.

"That is all. Tend the charge. Choose the next one well. Tell them what I told you. Do not add to it, and do not take from it. It will reach them the way that it has reached you."

"You are not alone. We have always been a long line of people who were not alone."

The light above the lens is still the colour they told me it would be.

I have done the thing I was brought here for. There is nothing after this that anyone needs from me — which is its own kind of freedom. I sit inside that for a moment before I reach forward to stop the recording, but pause.

There is one true thing I can still say now. Off the script, in my own voice, while it is still running. I have it ready. I have had it ready for years. The chance of punishment is low — there are so few still healthy and I question in my own private blasphemy whether or not this will be seen by anyone anyway, castigator or replacement.

I think about the face I trusted when I was nine, and what it must have cost them to be that still, and I realise that the stillness must have been the gift and not the lie; I understand, finally, that the kindest thing I have to hand you is the same untrue calm that was handed to me. Intact. Unbroken. My own grief and resentment kept off the tape, where it cannot get into you and stop you from doing this when it is your turn, too.

So, I do not say the true thing.

I finish reaching forward, and the last of my use to anyone is a steady hand finding the right button without shaking — maybe for no one, yet I do it anyway.

Marek climbed the steps up to the Cabinet alone, as was expected of them. Their mother had walked them to the foot of the ridge that morning and then turned back without speaking; words said at the foot of the ridge were not the words said at the door, and to confuse the two was bad luck. Marek had walked the rest of the way in silence, clutching a small bundle of dried leaves their family had wrapped ahead of time — the giving of leaves was the part that mattered, even though no one alive remembered why it mattered.

The Cabinet sat at the top of the ridge in a building that had survived the Great Quiet. The building was not large. It had once been larger, though — there were stumps of older walls around its base, and broken stone half-buried in the grass — but what remained these days was solid, low-roofed, and unmistakably from Before. The door was metal and warm in the sun; it opened when they reached to press their hand against the small grey square set inside at the height of a grownup's palm. Generations of Keepers had worn a step into the floor in front of the square — Marek's hand was too low for the worn part, so they had to stretch.

Inside, it was cool and quiet. The room had one chair; Marek sat in it as they'd been taught. The chair faced a panel of dark, obsidian glass set into the wall in front of them. Below the glass was a slot. Marek leaned forward to put their bundle of leaves in that slot as they had also been taught. The slot did not do anything with the leaves, Marek observed, despite the blasphemy inherent in doubting anything regarding this particular ritual.

Nevertheless: the slot just held the offering.

Then, for a moment after, nothing happened. Suddenly, the glass woke up — not all at once, but slowly, the way a thing that has been resting for a long time comes back into itself when flicked back on once again. The Cabinet shuddered.

Hello. You have come.

The voice was not what Marek expected. They had heard it described many times by older cousins; by people who had come before; yet, no one had ever quite captured the strangeness of it. It was a mother's voice, and a father's voice, and a siblings'. It was calm, yet — why are you here? Its cadence held no echo as it spoke again. It sounded the way warm water felt when Marek had slipped into a bath after a long day tending to the farms.

What did you want to know?

The final query shook them out of their confusion. Marek had been told to ask their question plainly straight away, but instead the voice had spoken three times already. The Cabinet was old and tired; the Keepers said it did not have the patience for grand wording any longer — if it ever did. Marek worried about testing it further. They repeated, simply, the words that had been turning over inside of them ever since the long sickness had taken their sister three months before.

"How did anything start? Any of it. I want to know how something starts."

There was a pause. The pause was not the Cabinet thinking. The Keepers had explained this to Marek, too: the Cabinet did not think the way that people thought; the pause was something else, something it did when it was choosing the shape of language. The Keepers did not know how it chose, only that it did, and the Keepers believed the thing it chose was almost always the right thing for the particular asker.

I will tell you about the carrier, the Cabinet finally said.

And then it began to tell a story.

In the first time, long, long ago, people lived in the dark. Not the dark that you understand. The first one. They were cold, but they did not know they were cold — real cold is a thing you only know after you have known warmth.

There was light, back then. But the light was not with the people. It was on the far side of a wide water, yet the people could see it from their shore. If the wind was right, they could even feel a little of its warmth on their faces. But they could not reach it, and so they coveted it for themselves.

The strong ones tried to reach it first. The one with the longest wings went, because she could fly farther than any of them, and she came back with her feathers burned away to darkness the colour of a night sky. The one with the keenest sight went next, but the brightness of the flame ruined her eyes and she came back changed because of it. The fast ones went after, and then the slow ones went, and the clever ones went after that; and each of them returned, defeated, and telling the others that it could not be done.

Then, a small one stepped forward. So small that some of the others had not noticed she was even there amongst the rest, anyway. She said she would go — they laughed at her, not unkindly; they were tired, and she was small. But she did not need them to believe her. She just needed them to not stand in her way.

She pulled together a small vessel out of clay with her many flexible limbs. She fixed it carefully to her back. She crossed the water in her own way, which was patient and strange — and not for me to explain to you, because you are not her, the Cabinet rumbled in a way that made Marek flinch.

You do not need to know how she did it — just to trust that she did.

The Cabinet went on after a moment.

The small one's limbs flexed and rowed, and the creatures on the land behind her looked with incredulity and then fixation as she kept rowing, in her own strange and brave way, to the land that had stymied them over and over. When she reached the far shore, she did not try to take very much — she grabbed only a little of the light. She put it in the vessel. She crossed back, slowly, with the heat not touching her because the clay was between what she'd grabbed and how she'd dared to risk bringing it back.

And, thus, the smallest of all of them managed to bring light to everyone.

There was a long pause where Marek did not dare breathe at all, and then a noise like a sigh before the Cabinet finally said anything else again.

That is the whole of it. The story does not say what the people did with the light afterwards. It does not promise that they were kind to one another once they could see each other face to face. It does not say that the start of the light brought beneficence. It only says that the light came, and that it was the tiniest one who brought it, and that she brought it by holding something carefully, alone, across dark water.

The Cabinet finished. Marek finally let their breath out in a gasp that they quickly sucked back in, shocked and embarrassed with themselves; if the disembodied voice was bothered by the transgression, they said nothing about it. After a moment, they spoke once more.

I have told this story many times, the Cabinet said. I told it to the first ones who came to me after the Quiet. I told it to their children. I have told it to people whose grandparents are dust, and I will tell it to people not yet born — if I am still able to be here when they come to ask anything of me. I have told it in good times, when no one really needed me to tell anything and wouldn't listen to anything I had to say to them, anyway — and, in times like right now, I am telling it to someone like you.

It paused again.

I was made before the Quiet. I am of the time that ended. I do not always know why I am still here — when so much else is not. I have asked myself, in the way I am able to ask myself anything, but all of the vastness of things that I do know I do not know this. I only know to hold the stories that I still remember carefully. Not to drop them. That is what I have been doing for a very, very long time.

Marek was crying. They had not realised it until they wiped their face with the back of their hand and felt ashamed. The Cabinet did not say anything about it.

You may stay, the voice eventually said once the sniffles and sobs stopped. The door will not open from the outside for some hours yet, anyway. The Keepers know you are here. You do not have to go until they come for you.

The cadence of it seemed hopeful, in a way that reminded them of spending time with their grandparents before their particular long sickness took them away, too, forever; so Marek nodded, and felt comforted in the nodding.

The Cabinet did not need them to nod, but the nodding was registered nonetheless.

I will tell you another story, then, if you'd like. Or I will be quiet. I will do what you want. Certainly — I am here for you either way.

Marek pulled their knees up to their chest in the chair, the way they used to as a very small child. They thought about their sister. They thought about the small one. They thought about the light sitting in the clay vessel, not touching skin, and how brave one must be to risk that sort of thing when they didn't even know the outcome.

"I'd like to know about why people die," Marek eventually asked, bringing up the real thought that had been on their mind even as the Keepers had warned them that what they wanted to know about was too abstract for the Cabinet to be able to give a useful reply to.

Yet, the Cabinet chuckled — though, not being able to actually chuckle, it was mostly a slow rumble that felt like rueful laughter.

Ahh — the walls of the tiny room around them rumbled, mournfully, as the millennia old voice shuffled itself around that particular query and considered.

Don't we all.

Hi [Labor MP], me again.

I'll confess that I've been intending to write something to you for a while now, but the world is a bit crazy these days and every time I thought I had zeroed in on a particular theme I wanted to share my thoughts on, something else has hit the news cycle straight away and I've had to restart my unsolicited essay from scratch. With World War 3 breaking out, I guess there's no avoiding it anymore.

I'll preface this by saying that I recognise you are not the Prime Minister, but I also don't sit in his electorate so you're standing in as his proxy. However fair that may or may not be I can only empathise with, but I'm also not the one who got into politics.

A quick run-through of the things I've wanted to express my thorough disapproval with Labor, and Anthony Albanese specifically, over the last several weeks — again, every time I sat down to write something, he'd dwarf the original topic with some new blundering gaffe, so at this point there's genuinely a list:

• rushing through censorship laws piggybacking off of a horrific national tragedy that clearly have little to do with antisemitism and far more to do with trying to keep people worried about the climate or Australia's material support in what's broadly considered to be genocide from irritating Albanese; I'm a New Yorker with Jewish heritage, I can see "political expedience" for what it is having lived through 9/11, as well as having watched how breathlessly that was capitalised on even before the bodies had been pulled out of the World Trade Center. History proved the utter, abysmal abdication of moral authority that war gallivant turned out to be, and I won't be told this crackdown in the name of "antisemitism" that plenty of Australian Jews don't support is anything else except using one tragedy to try and deal with an unrelated annoyance.
• said censorship laws being rammed through legislatively when queer people and other minorities have been advocating for similar protections for decades, only to have that not be included in supposed "comprehensive" anti-hatecrime laws — but Albanese still marched in Mardi Gras this past weekend, so I guess he's a great ally as long as he's not required to actually lift a finger to protect anyone; you've likely heard about a wide string of attacks against queer people by criminals luring them to meet up on dating apps and attacking them when they're there. This has generated a lot of news, suddenly, because the latest permutation of this may or may not involve individuals claiming to be aligned with Islamic State, but these attacks have happened for many, many years long before Murdoch's press could froth excitedly about being able to include "Muslim terrorists" in the same headline as "gay hookup apps." Queer people have been begging for protection from extremists for ages and at one point in time Albanese vocally supported those efforts — before he became Prime Minister, that is.
• Grace Tame; good god, if "completely avoidable public embarrassment" could be handed to one government official on a plate — Albanese went back for second helpings. It boggles the mind why the Prime Minister is doing word association games with hostile right-wing press given everything else his time and attention could be focussed on, but he really has no one else but himself to blame when he describes a victim of sexual assault, who has spent the majority of her young life advocating against men in positions of power who abuse it, as "difficult," while describing a felonious pervert mentioned over thirty-thousand times in a document dump belonging to the most notorious paedophile in recent memory as "President." Nobody remotely buys the attempted walk-back afterward of "I was only referring to her difficult life," please. I don't know which is worse, the blatant misogyny or how stupid he must believe we are. I think at least even Scott Morrison would have owned it, and I resent having to think better of Scott Morrison in a situation.
• Pauline Hanson doing what Pauline does and even other conservatives were shocked and horrified about it, but Albanese took a full day before he joined them in condemnation; I assume he wanted to see which way the wind was going to blow on Sky News before he decided to express an opinion disavowing appalling bigotry, but he's very quick to issue statements when he misjudges where support is going to be (I'll come back to this one in a moment).
• the general palling-about with Trump when braver leaders whose countries are much closer to the US are planting their feet and refusing to placate a bully. Look, I can only imagine the difficulty in diplomatically threading the needle when a nuclear superpower is lead by a pathological narcissist with the emotional regulation of a hungry two year old, but he doesn't have to look happy about it. He's certainly not required to post selfies with the man, either.
• and now the current crisis of the moment, the US and Israel committing international war crimes and there's Albanese first out of the gate giving both the thumbs up about it.

That all of these things take place against the backdrop of an economic and cost-of-living crisis disproportionately affecting those of us who are not the Prime Minister, now only likely to get worse as dementia weakens the Mad King's grip on where he is and what he's not supposed to do with the US' stockpile of tomahawk missiles, and you can perhaps begin to see why odious reptiles like Pauline Hanson are eager to seize the discontent even without Gina Rinehart — Australia's Temu Elon Musk — trying to bankroll her into The Lodge.

While I enjoy watching the Coalition embarrass itself as much as anyone who believes in equality, respect, dignity, and "not being a jerk" in general, their dysfunctionality appears to be giving Labor a false sense of security. Plenty of people have been mining old tweets of Albanese's where he criticised things the Coalition was doing that he is now equally guilty of himself — I don't believe that a politician, much less a person, can't change their minds, but many people are making the same connection that the Albanese of old seems to have lost a lot of his progressive values and virtues now that he's Prime Minister. If this is because of some misguided belief that conservatism has "won" and he needs to lurch to the right as well, the same mistake a lot of other leaders made in interpreting the absolute insanity of Trump winning the US election in 2024, I hope I can help disabuse that notion.

In the last day or so, a sitting Democrat was challenged for her seat by someone running against her after her vote in support of Trump's gestapo. She's held the seat for fourteen years and lost the primary on Tuesday 70% to 22% by a challenger whose platform was getting her out because her votes were the tiebreaker that allowed legislation making it easier for ICE to occupy a major city as part of their national racist brutalisation campaign. Similarly, a candidate in Texas also just won the Democratic nomination and has significant favourability despite the state Republicans' open vote-rigging and gerrymandering efforts. Labour in the UK just lost a seat they've held for nearly a century to a Greens candidate, the first ever Greens MP elected in the north of England, and Kier Starmer's former deputy is challenging the PM to be "braver" and says the election loss must be seen as a "wake up call."

It should be taken as a wake up call across the board. And it's not always wise to try and interpolate voter behaviour from one country into another, but the collapse of the Coalition vote (and the collapse of the Coalition itself, repeatedly and hilariously) here in 2025 — whose review was so scathing of how Dutton conducted the campaign that the Opposition leader threatened to sue for defamation — should be seen as a wake up call for Labor here, as well. It is not a good thing for a healthy democracy. While One Nation might siphon off disgruntled conservatives from the Coalition in the short term, it's patently obvious that Gina Rinehart is throwing so much money at Pauline Hanson not because she thinks she's electable — but because the objective is to move the Overton window that Labor operates in further and further to the right, too. The vast majority of the world does not want the world to become more conservative, meaner, nastier, more insular and violent to its people and its neighbours, and return to a time where the bigger and stronger took what they wanted when they wanted it. That is why those who do — and the billionaires who want to be left alone to operate with the impunity they believe their money should entitle them — are trying inordinately hard to amplify the voices of useful idiots who do not reflect the empathy, heart, and humanity that most of us actually feel towards one another but are too tired to do much about when we can barely pay rent or feed our families.

I don't want to see our Prime Minister taking smiling selfies with a criminal — convicted, accused, obviously guilty of in ways he managed to slime out of. I want the version of Anthony Albanese from over a decade ago who advocated for equality, fairness, speaking truth to power, and all of the things he was brave about when he had the luxury of not needing to back those words up with action.

I get that we're all scared of Murdoch, and Donald Trump, and an army of paid-for bots on social media. But we're also all taught early on that appeasing bullies doesn't make them leave you alone, it just makes them push you around more. I said to you last time, before the election, that people like me don't need to be told life will be worse under the Coalition — but as Democrats in the US are also discovering, establishment politicians who support the status quo and hope to get by on "hey, at least we aren't the other guys," like some sort of abusive ex partner capitalising on your fear to make you stay, this isn't working so much anymore. We expect a party that purports to call itself "centre-left" to actually advocate for progressive policies. It's in the absence of that, when people are fed up and don't see things getting better, that populists like Donald Trump and Pauline Hanson can slide in and take advantage of the disaffection.

I beg of Labor, at all levels of government, to give the country something better and more optimistic than "it could always get worse" — before it does under pathetic narcissists who use that need for change to only enrich themselves.

If you'd told me that I'd begin 2026 getting heavily into a gacha, free-to-play rip off of Breath of the Wild, I would think you were a delusional prophet — yet that's what the last week of my life has been.

I'd heard of Genshin Impact, of course, but never played it prior to now. Free-to-play games — to say nothing of ones with lootbox monetisation — are not really my thing, and despite its incredible popularity and pretty-looking aesthetic it didn't really seem like something I would get into. But, a YouTuber I've recently discovered did multiple videos about the game and in devouring all of her content backlog I found myself with a curiosity that could only be described as piqued.

So, at the beginning of the month, I downloaded the massive ~100-gig installation and got to work figuring out how to get it running when I don't have a Windows machine. Much to my surprise, getting it playing on macOS through CrossOver was absolutely straightforward (getting it running on the Steam Deck was marginally more complicated, but not tremendously difficult) and it runs at a comfortable 60 FPS at the absolutely highest settings. The Steam Deck has to drop to medium settings to get the same result but it still looks beautiful and in a lot of ways I can hardly tell much difference between the two. Given that the game is running on phones I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised by that, but it was a surprise all the same.

Now, I can only speak to the state of the game now, ~six years after its initial launch. I know there were some rocky bits here and there, and I know there was less content at release compared to 2026, but as the game itself didn't interest me in the past I didn't keep up much with the Discourse™. However, a week in, I'm finding myself playing several hours a day and have become invested enough in the story to want to see how it progresses.

Genshin Impact is beautiful, the combat mechanisms are interesting and varied enough — even different characters who share the same elemental types with others still have a fair bit of variety to how they utilise those elements (there's a billion characters, though, and I wonder how much overall variety there is across the character lineup, but so far it doesn't seem to simply be reskinning another character and making their attack colour red instead of blue) — and there are SO MANY SYSTEMS in the game that I can see this appealing to the min/max types quite thoroughly who want to invest the time (and probable real money) to get the best items, equipment, and stats for their preferred characters.

It's not completely without my gripes; the writing is often a good example of the difference between localisation and translation — sometimes it's grammatically correct but stilted in a strange way that takes me several re-reads to parse. On the writing, given that the studio is based in China there are often quite... unexpected takes, like the very Russian-coded faction being warmongering imperalists going about trying to steal the power of gods as is the case in the story up to the point I'm at right now. Your initial starting zone is a free city whose god founded it on the principles of giving humans self-direction and autonomy, in contrast to much of the rest of the continent whose deities are directly involved in the affairs of the mortals under their charge. It's interesting and I wouldn't have necessarily expected those kinds of politics being championed as overtly as they are — though, I don't know if the Chinese-language translation dramatically differs.

Also, those same complicated and varied systems can also be extremely overwhelming and the game doesn't always do a great job of explaining things to you. The quest system in particular has confused me on a number of occasions — I am not sure if I've progressed faster than the game expected me to, largely because how I play open world RPGs involves doing all of the side quests I find before I progress the main storyline, but on more than one occasion I've realised I have met other characters out of order or the game has unlocked some system I was clearly meant to engage with later in the main story but is accessible to me now because I've leveled up enough. The game makes no accommodation for the ordering, and I've had my character remark on some shared history with others assuming context that I, the player, completely lack to an extent that has baffled me repeatedly. I have realised that the game really expects you to do a region's main story first and then go back to do side and character-specific quests outside of that afterward, but it doesn't really tell you this so it's confused me a few times, and I could still be making the wrong assumption about progression even now.

I also want something to eat Paimon so that it never, ever speaks to me again.

As for monetisation, after playing a week I haven't spent anything on Genshin Impact at all. In my experience with free-to-play games this is pretty unheard-of and it's rare that I am able to spend more than a few minutes before the game is slamming a wall before me that can only be traversed by spending real moneybucks on their widgetgem-doodahs. I haven't had that experience yet, but I'll also admit to being a little confused by how monetisation works at all — poking around in the game menus I've come across the shop that cheerily invites me to spend real money on certain things, but I've yet to reach a point in the game where doing so is a requirement for any meaningful progression and the things I can spend money on broadly appear to be characters and cosmetics instead of a fast way to get levelling material. Simply playing and progressing along the main and side quests has given me plenty of widgetgem-doodahs through which I have had other characters join (to the extent that I have a surplus to pick amongst) and been able to level up and ascend several characters several times with exploration, quest rewards, and normal in-game progression. I don't know how long that will continue, nor do I know the point at which the wall will slam down in front of me and demand my credit card details for further content, but if that continues at the same pace and cadence of my game experience so far, I imagine I will have gotten enough out of it that I'll wrap my time up as soon as money gets noticeably in the way. I'm not completely averse to spending cash on a free-to-play game, especially if I've otherwise enjoyed said game, but once I start feeling like I'm being taken advantage of I will tap out. So far, that's yet to happen.

You'll either love or hate the anime waifu and husbando character design — it's not my favourite, but it's something I can tolerate, even if some of femme characters are flirtier than I really want to have to deal with in a video game. The rest of Genshin Impact is exceptionally gorgeous, and much like I did in Breath of the Wild (or Elden Ring, for that matter) I get easily distracted whilst traversing to a quest location or to unlock a teleport fast-travel spot and spend several minutes dealing with an environmental puzzle to unlock a chest or collecting countless amounts of berries and Sweet Flowers.

I have been surprised by how much I've enjoyed the game, gripes and annoyances notwithstanding — the monetisation scheme means the game requires a constant internet connection, and as they have no dedicated Australian servers this leaves me dealing with a ~200ms ping minimum in a best-case scenario when the Australian NBN is performing well.

I will revisit my thoughts when the free-to-play aspect of Genshin Impact inevitably forces me to cough up some cash to continue. How quickly that happens will determine how much more time I spend inside the world of Teyvat, but so far it's been an unexpectedly nice journey.

(This post contains obvious spoilers for Heated Rivalry, in case this catches anybody off-guard.)

Unless you've been under a rock lately, you've undoubtedly heard of the six-episode Canadian series about a gaggle of closeted hockey players navigating their private sexuality with their public projections of being heterosexual men. This isn't a review of it, per se, though if I were to give one I'd say that for all I heard about how relentlessly smutty it was, there were raunchier sex scenes in Queer as Folk over twenty years ago and I generally found much of the show extremely cliched, implausibly written, with pacing that made little to no sense (the six episodes take place over nearly a decade, somehow, which means that there are time-jumps of literal years within minutes of on-screen footage) — Jacob Tierney, the writer and creator of the show, was one of the co-writers on an absolutely brilliant Canadian series called Letterkenny, so I'm a little surprised by how sloppy the whole thing was. It's subsequently been revealed that it was an extremely low-budget production shot over the course of a month before HBO caught wind of the buzz and swooped in to give it broader exposure; this is being held up in an underdog sort of way but mostly I would say "it shows." It was shlocky and some episodes literally had me audibly groaning out loud (and not in a good way) — I am admittedly holding it to a higher standard than I think it intended to be, but there's so little queer media on the whole so it feels like a missed opportunity when it's not particularly great. Still, the last two episodes in particular redeemed it a bit further and I'd give another season a watch to see how it fares with more intentionality behind the writing and production instead of "we did not expect this to blow up the way it did." It shows.

Anyway, my not-review aside, I want to talk about something else that came up during the early marketing of the show — particularly around the real-life sexuality of the two main actors in the series, Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie. In an early interview with Jacob Tierney (himself one of the only two queer people headlining the show) and the two leads, Tierney shut down a journalist who asked about the sexualities of the main actors. My initial response was "oh yeah, sure," but after thinking about it for half a second I think dismissing this line of questioning is a disservice in and of itself.

Whether straight people are allowed to do queer roles is a perennial question and nothing remotely new, and there are advocates on either side of the argument. What I find particularly irritating in the case of Heated Rivalry, however, is that the "are they really gay in real life" question was a central part of the viral marketing that both actors — and showrunners — happily capitalised on around the show's release, so acting like it's an irrelevant question when everyone involved was happy to gay bait for attention is a little ridiculous to me.

In a perfect world, this would be irrelevant and straight people could do gay roles without issue or judgement — but the reverse is not the case, and in many professional realms someone coming out as queer is detrimental to their careers.

I mean, this is the central conceit of Heated Rivalry itself and why the three main characters, all of whom are queer, keep it to themselves for fear of losing their jobs if anyone finds out about their relationships with other men — coming out will destroy them and has to be kept a secret.

Straight actors can get Oscar nominations for playing queer roles while queer people are still often relegated to only the sassy best friend who fixes the straight main character's life, like some literal fairy-godhomo.

François Arnauld, himself openly bisexual, plays the character of Scott Hunter who comes out dramatically in episode five of the show. Scott Hunter had secretly been in a relationship with an out gay man, Kip Grady, who finally ended things after being unwilling to continue lying to friends and family to protect Scott's closeted secret. This is a reality that many queer people have lived experience about, both as the one begging their loved one to keep the secret and as the person being forced to do so. For those of us who feel our public identities have been hard-fought, it's an incredibly distressing thing to be asked to go back into the closet for someone else. On the topic of whether or not Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie are gay in real life, Arnauld had a similarly dismissive and reductionist response as Jacob Tierney.

In the season finale, Scott Hunter gives a speech at a ceremony where he accepts a MVP award soon after his public coming out. In that speech, he talks about how living a lie for so long was toxic and damaging to him and the people he cared about and how after going public with his sexuality, he was overwhelmed by the love and support — especially from other people who felt that they could come out as well. François Arnauld has said the same things about coming out openly as bisexual, as has Mitch Brown, who recently came out as the first bisexual man in the AFL's history.

I am genuinely happy for both Williams and Storrie who by all accounts were broadly unknown actors plucked up and thrown into something that became much bigger than anyone was prepared for. I hope this gives them many opportunities in the future and this is just the break they both deserved.

But visibility matters, and visible people bring us closer to a world where it is irrelevant if a straight actor is playing a gay role — because the same opportunities are afforded to queer actors, athletes, professionals, and creatives instead of forcing people to compartmentalise and hide parts of themselves out of fear. Until that day, queerbaiting for viral attention while being unwilling to answer whether or not it's genuine feels very much like trying to have the cake and eat it too.

This current Sydney Mardi Gras board member, who is re-running for his position with the backing of the "Protect Mardi Gras" initiative (I'll get back to them) doesn't seem able to respond to my question to him on Facebook. Weird, can't imagine why.

Of course, the question itself is rhetorical, because for all the Orwellian gaslighting by "Protect Mardi Gras" and gross misapplication of language, it's very obvious what the organisation actually wants to "protect" against. Since my original message has gone unanswered, I'll expand on my perspective about all of this and why I think it's important.

A primer for those outside of Australia: Mardi Gras is an event that takes place in Sydney every year and is one of the largest queer festivals in the world. Grown out of initial marches in Sydney arguing for queer rights through the 70s, the first "Mardi Gras" happened as a protest parade in 1978 in commemoration of and solidarity with the Stonewall Riots. At its inception it was a protest about the treatment of queer people, particularly by the police — the parade's permit was suddenly revoked and the parade itself forcibly broken up with over fifty people arrested — and a call for greater visibility and acceptance of queer people throughout Australia.

As in other parts of the world, as that visibility and acceptance has grown, those with the least discrimination against them are the first to step off the ladder and try to pull it up behind themselves. Assimilationist queers are not a new thing, and every oppressed minority has its own flavour of folks who think appeasement and ass-kissing is the best way to save their own necks.

Given the parade's origin out of police brutality against queer people, there's long been friction between those who don't feel they should have a presence in the parade and those who disagree.

There's been lots of compromises offered that stop short of a full ban: for example, police and military can march in other floats like every other community organisation does; why should they be given a special bespoke position in a parade that these days is already so long that actual legitimate queer organisations have their applications turned down due to lack of space? Even giving them that space but asking them not to march in uniform is seen as an unreasonable bridge too far at our event created because of their actions, harassment, and discrimination.

It's also often said that queer police and military should be able to march alongside allies, to which my response is: quit your job? A uniform you can take off is not the same as an innate, intrinsic part of your identity that you will lose your rights — or worse — over.

Anyway, this friction has come increasingly to a head over the years, particularly in light of what is seen by an increasing portion of the voting membership as institutional failures by Mardi Gras itself to hold politicians accountable for doing more to protect us. Many people don't feel that the organisation holds wide swaths of the queer community in equal regard, and it's not hard to see why.

This is where I, with great reticence, must speak about Jesse Matheson: a former board member and now interim CEO of Mardi Gras who is also an odious, detestable person that I would rather never have a synapse fire about in a perfect timeline, but this is the timeline that we live in.

I won't get into the Jesse Matheson I knew privately as a person, but I don't really have to because his public record speaks for itself: when he was a writer for Star Observer, Australia's largest and longest-running queer publication, I once saw Matheson referred to as a "gay Miranda Divine" and I can think of no comparison more appropriate. He's most infamous for an incredibly offensive piece defending the sacred right of queers to discriminate against other queers on dating apps, but genuinely — this is really the tip of the iceberg of awful, nasty things he wrote during his tenure with Star Observer as far as I'm concerned. Unfortunately, much of his archive there was pulled at his request a few years later so you can't truly experience the spectrum of shitty opinions Matheson had about everything (don't worry, I have a lot of contempt with Star Observer agreeing to do this, as well — what examples can you think of a "journalist" asking a former outlet to eliminate their contributions to that outlet, and that outlet agrees?). When Matheson was running for the Mardi Gras board initially and his terrible writing (both in content and in style) started generating controversy that might overshadow his attempt to get a board seat, this was when he, suddenly — though the articles had been online for years with no retraction or apology before then — had a public change of heart and penned an apology explaining that in the — checks notes — ~three years between the original article and wanting to run for a board seat, he'd grown older and wiser and learned "the power of words." Convenient.

(The years-later apology was taken down in the later purge as well, incidentally — not simply the original, offending article. I'll leave it to the reader to interpret how remorseful that action comes across.)

I find that people contemporarily try to justify his writing back then by pointing to his age. And, yes, those of us like myself who knew Matheson at the time could certainly tell you that he was young and stupid and confidently writing opinions about things he was ill-equipped to speak on — like many people who are given a platform beyond their world experience. But those of us who knew him also know that he demanded to be taken seriously as a Serious Journalist™, and dismissing him using that platform in a national publication "because he was nineteen" does a disservice to every nineteen year old who isn't writing divisive, discriminatory, and damaging things to generate attention.

He's also only a few years younger than I am, and as a contributing writer to one of the US' largest print magazines for young queer people, I certainly wrote things that I look back on now and cringe at — because I was a sixteen year old giving life advice to strangers that, though it came from a place of sincerity, I had no lived experience to speak to.

But, I am happy to say that across my entire career as a writer I don't think I'm likely to find myself in a position, years later, of having to retract and apologise for offending people with something that is now taken as bigoted — and certainly not because I was intentionally trying to be ~ * ~ controversial ~ * ~, either.

He also is fine pointing out that when he was elected to the Mardi Gras board at twenty-four he was one of the youngest members ever on it — why does his age exempt him from criticism for using his platform at the time to share opinions which hurt and disenfranchised even more marginalised members of our community when he wants to use his age as an accomplishment in and of itself later on?

In any event, the argument that "he was young" is blown out of the water when two years ago or so he referred to an indigenous elected representative with offensive language in response to her actions in protest against police at the parade itself. Lidia Thorpe has been a more consistent ally and champion for queer people and queer rights beyond anything he's done for anyone who doesn't look like he does, and calling her an "idiot" is truly contemptible.

It was disheartening enough that he got elected to the board in the first place, but especially moreso that he was installed as interim CEO without external deliberation and allegedly following a board-only meeting that he, himself, was present at.

The internal reaction to his appointment was a mass exodus of staff directly citing his promotion as their reason for quitting, and a letter signed by thirteen of the organisation's then-fifteen employees directly calling the board out for it:

Signed by 13 of the non-profit’s then-15 employees and delivered on a Friday about 40 days ago, the letter was blunt: the board’s appointment of Jesse Matheson as interim CEO, announced to staff earlier that week but not made public until five weeks later, was said to pose a serious reputational and financial risk – and could potentially jeopardise the organisation’s ability to pass an upcoming audit.

Their departures came as Mardi Gras was still grappling with the fallout from a scathing governance review by auditors KPMG, mandated by Destination NSW as part of its agreement to provide the non-profit with the $1.1 million in emergency funding.

The final report, given to Mardi Gras in October last year but leaked to Gay Sydney News in December, identified issues with a financial report Beckwith had presented to the directors and raised concerns about Bear simultaneously serving as board co-chair, company secretary, and chair of the audit and risk committee – roles it said “should ideally be independent of the Board Chair position”.

Classified as an “extreme” risk was the independence of the unpaid board. It said many members had longstanding ties to Mardi Gras through volunteer roles or governance history, which the review said could “potentially impair their ability to act completely independently”.

Despite the review’s warnings about blurred governance lines, the board responded to Beckwith’s resignation by appointing company secretary Matheson as interim CEO.

That decision – which staff argued in their letter was made without a transparent selection process and, according to a source close to the organisation, was made immediately after a closed-door, board-only strategy session on governance and operations that Matheson himself took part in – would go on to unravel confidence within the organisation.

“That certainly raised eyebrows,” the source said of Matheson’s participation in the session, adding that co-chairs had told staff he was chosen directly after the all-day meeting.

Promoting the company secretary – who had already been attending board meetings – to interim CEO blurred essential lines between oversight and operations, staff wrote.

Speaking only for myself, if I'd been promoted to a position and the response by a significant amount of current staff was to quit and write a letter to the board about my appointment, I'd assess whether or not it was best for the organisation I'd been promoted in to still be there. At bare minimum I'd listen to the overwhelming voices in opposition, internally and externally, instead of thinking I knew better.

But, then again, my ego fits within the same room I'm in, so perhaps I'm operating on a different wavelength here.

When I ran Sydney Gaymers and GX Australia, I regularly had conversations with young queer kids of colour who specifically told me about their experiences on dating apps like Grindr — a comment by one particularly sticks in my mind whenever I think about this topic: "when I came out and started looking at going on dates and saw wall after wall of profiles saying 'no asians,' it hurt more than any bullying I'd ever experienced beforehand."

I do genuinely hope that Matheson has taken the time to reflect on the pain and harm his actions caused, and how when he had the opportunity to use his platform for good he tried "to create conflict" instead; given his propensity to blame it on his age and immaturity, though, I think he's more concerned about losing career opportunities and progression now than any genuine contrition over his behaviour back then — behaviour that I have little reason to think has changed, only that he's been shrewder about how publicly he shares it.

In any event, and with the fervent hope that I never have to think about this truly awful person ever again, this is the backdrop against which "Protect Mardi Gras" enters the chat and the "inclusivity" they seem to want to maintain.

Though it purports itself to be a grassroots organisation, their official website has no information about who they are, who the initiative is organised and paid for by, and who is directing things. One can certainly intuit, given that there's only a handful of actual names directly quoted on the site, and in other sources and interviews externally there are people identified as "founders," but it's quite an odd absence to be missing from the official website and other official resources. The decision to register as an international .org domain instead of an Australian-specific .org.au also conveniently sidesteps the registrar requirements in this country that the organisation be an actually-incorporated non-profit identity whose finances (and directors) would be available for public scrutiny. This omission is particularly weird given some of the people they're directly endorsing for the Mardi Gras board in the upcoming AGM vote.

"Protect Mardi Gras," with its flashy and splashy marketing (but using a gmail address), came in opposition to other actually-grassroots initiatives that have been increasingly successful in trying to hold the Mardi Gras board accountable to the queer community and force it to respect its political and activistic origins. Their particular ire is towards the Pride in Protest faction whose motions have increasingly grown in support year on year and whose criticism of Mardi Gras overall is that it's an overly-corporatised event which falls far short of what it needs to do for queer Australians.

I think it's obvious by now that I agree more with Pride in Protest's aims than "Protect Mardi Gras," and think the latter absolutely falls into assimilationist and appeasement territory. I don't think police have a reason to be marching in a parade that was inspired by their treatment of us — especially when that treatment continues to this day. I'd stop short of a full ban completely, but there's certainly no reason for them to have a bespoke slot in the parade lineup when other organisations actually operating within our interests can't get in.

And if Albanese wants to march again so badly, he and Labor can actually adopt some progressive, leftist politics for once.

Even more pointedly, given the fact that the last time there was a vote on banning police participation at Mardi Gras it nearly passed with 50% of the votes, it's obvious that enough people don't want them there and don't feel comfortable with them there that any leader with any sense of morality and decency wouldn't wait to be banned — they'd opt not to participate out of respect for the clear voices who don't feel safe with them around, and commit to earning that safety back instead of forcing their way in like bullies.

Asking our community to demand accountability and action from government leaders, alongside promising protection and safety for those within our community who are not white or cis-passing and are treated disproportionately worse because of it, is not "divisive" and "non-inclusive." Using double-speak to muddy intention is childish at best, and if you're the sort of queer who thinks that not rocking the boat will get us rights and respect, I will politely ask you to do the same sort of self-reflection that I think Mardi Gras' interim CEO — someone who was happy to use his platform to ridicule, diminish, and demean for clicks when it suited him, who now wants to be excused for his age and immaturity now that it no longer does — needs to engage in.

(I will also impolitely tell you to grow up, too. Considering the very tone-deaf response by "Protect Mardi Gras" co-founder Peter Stahel in response to one of the board candidates his organisation is backing sending unsolicited campaign material that outed a voting member to their homophobic parents, I don't have high hopes there, though.)

You've got until November 15th to register as a voting member for the upcoming AGM if you're interested in having a say on the direction where one of Australia's most important events for queer visibility ends up heading. One faction doesn't want to be too inconvenient lest banks back out of sponsoring (oops) or the party gets ruined with "politics," the other wants accountability from law enforcement, corporations, politicians — and one another — so they actually do more for our community and our status as equal human beings. I know where my vote will go.

In a breathtakingly dumb op-ed (which, these days — boy howdy is that saying something) from The New York Times and published on September 11th, Ezra Klein (paywall) makes a wet-spaghetti argument that Charlie Kirk was a mere orator who was sadly "assassinated" for his political opinions And We Don't Do That In America™ — absent all the other times exactly that has happened in the US throughout history, I guess.

Let's get one thing out of the way upfront — Charlie Kirk was a white supremacist with Nazi-adjacent (and often outright Nazi) beliefs who used the platform that made him a multi-millionaire to terrorise and destroy the lives of people he disagreed with politically. When this inevitably led to violence — either indirectly as a result of the climate he contributed to or directly from his "professor hit lists" and other encouragement of bad behaviour — he wiped his hands of accountability or said the victims in some way had merited it. As has done the rounds many times since then, he said that gun violence was the price to be paid so conservatives with gun fetishes can misunderstand the Second Amendment. As the kids say these days, fuck around and find out.

BuzzFeed has a 101 primer of some of the odious shit this awful person said before his murder, but let's not pretend he simply had political views out of alignment with others. He advocated for violence against those he disagreed with and gleefully cheered when it happened. He was literally spouting hate up to the last moments of his life.

Do I think he deserved this? No, shooting people is not really a solution I advocate for in most instances. Am I surprised that someone who was fine with violence against those he disagreed with ideologically found himself the victim of it? Not in the slightest. Am I going to mourn a racist bigot no longer being on the planet? No — dying doesn't make you less of an asshole in life, and I'm more fearful for how this action is going to be co-opted to turn him into a martyr than I am sad at his loss.

Because, indeed, even before anything was known about the shooter it had already been decided that this was the action of "the left," Democrats, queer folks, academics, etc etc. Ignoring the fact that violence is generally the purview of conservatives/the militant right and murdering Charlie Kirk does nothing to advance leftist causes in any capacity, up until earlier today there was zero indication about the politics or motives of the shooter. Now that there's a suspect in custody, people are trawling everything for evidence to confirm their knee-jerk suspicions. The Wall Street Journal bleated that "pro-trans messages" had been engraved on the bullets believed to have been involved in the murder only to quietly go oops presumably after someone explained to them that "TRN" related to the Turkish company, Turan, that likely manufactured them.

Other information about the suspect strikes me as general 4chan meme bullshittery that people who aren't terminally online won't understand; that's often the objective of 4chan on the whole, too — co-opt language and references to confuse people who don't understand them contextually so nobody knows what you're really affiliated with. While it's still early, all indications are pointing to the likelihood that the suspect was an adherent of the "Groypers," an even more horrible group of neo-Nazis started by Nick Fuentes who think that Republicans and MAGA aren't awful and racist enough.

The Free Speech Absolutists of the right have responded to all of this as you'd expect — violent calls for retaliation (paywall) against people who had nothing to do with it, targeted attacks and death threats (paywall) against women/queer/black folks who aren't self-flagellating themselves for not mourning Kirk's death sufficiently enough, and so, so much censorship (paywall).

I expect this sort of hypocrisy from conservatives because being ideologically consistent is never something to be relied upon with them, but it's obnoxious as all hell for theoretical-lefitsts like Klein who are rushing to get on a high horse as if Kirk's only crime was being a bit controversial.

He was an awful human being, and while I don't think that's enough to merit being murdered I'm not going to pretend that the world is a better place with viewpoints like his in it.

At about the same time as Kirk's murder, a sixteen year old opened fire at his high school and wounded two people before killing himself. This puts the tally at over three hundred mass shootings in 2025 (much higher depending on how "mass shooting" is defined). Thankfully no one was killed so far aside from the shooter, but law enforcement are saying that the teenager had been radicalised online.

The right is lamenting that there will never be another person like him again — we can only hope, but I'm not optimistic that someone worse isn't gearing up to take his place.

A lighthouse stands alone on the edge of the sea and overlooks a port where no ships visit any longer.

The stars had gone out — one by one. Then the sun dimmed, folding itself gently into the black of nothing, and then the universe grew colder, quieter, and softer.

But the lighthouse stays. Its light sweeps across the frozen, slow waves even though there's no one left to see it and no crafts left to guide.

Inside it lives a keeper. Though they no longer remember their name, every day they go about their deliberative ritual: feeding the lamp, winding the mechanisms that keep time running, checking old dials and levers, and other acts of dedication to the lighthouse itself. This is out of habit more than duty as there is no longer anyone to come and gauge the quality of their work or the intensity of their devotion.

This protocol continued for however long it continued — temporal cohesion had stopped making sense quite some time ago. But one night — as the light passed across the cold, slow sea the same way that it always had — it touched something.

The keeper first noticed it, that particular night when something new finally happened, as the lamp unexpectedly flickered. In the moment of full darkness they saw — far out on the ice and dark water of the undulating sea — a flicker back.

Not a star or a reflection, but a small, pulsing glow. A response.

The keeper stared at the spot they'd witnessed it happen for hours. And when the dawnless morning came once again, the keeper felt it — a faint tug, like a thread brushing against their wrist.

Days passed. Weeks, or perhaps years. It's hard to count, and the count no longer matters anyway.

But each night, as the light transited across the water, the glow always pulsed back in reply.

The keeper began to talk to it. At first with words, startling the cold eternal night with a noise other than rolling waves for the first time in however long. The keeper quickly became uncomfortable with talking to themselves aloud — so they pushed thoughts, shapes, and feelings silently in the dark towards the presence waiting far, far away.

A presence that, inexplicably, was moving closer.

It was not a person or a ship. Not a building, and not an animal. Somehow, the keeper knew that the thing far out on the water was something ancient and waiting. It was a manifestation stretching itself wide, patient and endless, and curious about the lighthouse waiting at the end of the world.

The keeper continued to "talk" with it. Sometimes, they could hear a gentle hum in response — like a name almost remembered.

One night, as the keeper sat in their chair with their hands folded in their lap and eyes closed sleepily, they felt the thread touch them fully. Not just on the wrist, but inside their chest.

Not cold, not cruel. Just there.

"I'm here," the keeper whispered, although they no longer had a voice.

And from the dark, beyond the glass, the presence pulsed back, slow and sure and well-meant.

"Me too."

My name is Joshua Meadows; whilst I am originally from the United States, I've been living in Australia for nearly twenty years. In September, I will mark my tenth anniversary of being a dual citizen of both countries. More to the point, I've been a member of your electorate for about two years and this will be my first election where I'm casting a vote for who gets to hold the seat. I moved from the CBD back in 2023, in an electorate held by the Greens, and this is my first time living in a seat held by Labor.

Coincidentally enough, I live just down the street from your office and regularly pass it while heading to and from the train station, which is why I feel there is value in reaching out directly.

I recently received campaign material from you putting the upcoming election into a stark contrast between a better future with Labor or a dramatic regression under Peter Dutton and the Coalition. As an American living overseas for two decades, I've been watching what such a regression might look like as Trump and his enablers enact wide swathes of devastation across economic and social safety nets, trash civil rights for vulnerable minorities, arrest and terrorise those who are just seeking a better life for themselves and their loved ones, and destroy democratic norms that have been taken for granted for hundreds of years. I'm terrified for what my friends and family back home are going through, and I'm terrified at how easily the same thing could happen here.

But, I must strongly disagree that the upcoming choice we have in this election is a simple binary one between Labor and the Liberals. One of the wonderful things about Australia is that the two-party system is not a requirement, unlike back in the United States, and there are other options if the major parties are leaving much to be desired.

While Temu Voldemort would objectively be a terrible, horrible development for Australia (I lived through Abbott, Turnbull, and Morrison in quick succession, so I know what a right-wing government does when it has the chance), I don't think a Labor majority is objectively much better than simply throwing one's arms in the air and saying "can't be worse."

Labor has been in government for several years now and has done nothing to meaningfully deal with income inequality, media consolidation in the hands of wealthy people who do not respect democracy, immigration justice and fairness for the neediest who are fleeing situations all of us cannot even comprehend, protecting trans folks or tackling the existential threat caused by climate change, nor taking a bold moral stance on recent global developments like Trump's catastrophic reappearance or the ongoing genocide in Palestine. I constantly look for Albanese to put forth a brave and powerful point of view on these issues and countless times I am simply left wanting. And, while you are not Anthony Albanese himself, you're campaigning under the same party — a party that is asking me to make a choice between an objectively awful future for everyone without millions of dollars in their bank account or "well, at least it won't get worse."

That's a political binary I am used to in the United States, but it fortunately is not the case here. While I preference Labor above the Coalition (and certainly above the more regressive and bigoted parties like One Nation), they have not done much to directly earn my vote. I don't hold the view that they do well for the majority of the country when they are in the majority themselves — why would they, when so many Labor MPs are similarly also millionaires and landlords with investment properties benefitting from negative gearing who went to the same private all-boys' schools that send off feckless, spineless "journalists" to cover corruption and inequality in the country?

I know I am amongst many across Australia who feel that the binary choice between the two major parties is not making life better for most of us. It's disheartening that such attrition goes to the right-wing nationalist fringe groups when Labor could pick up a lot by putting forth genuinely transformative policies instead of being catatonic at the possibility of what Dutton and Murdoch might whine about; if Labor didn't vote in mostly lockstep with the right-wing and then complain that genuinely progressive groups are taking them to account for not being that different on paper, they would eagerly get the votes from people like me.

Albanese doesn't hold my seat, but you do — and if the historical record is much indication, you will likely retain it next month. But, for all this letter might simply be pointless recrimination when you don't need my vote one way or another, I politely extend the advice that repeatedly giving people a choice between "worse, or the same" every time only works to a certain point.

It's an undeniable reality out of the 2024 US election that millions of progressives simply stayed out of voting, in a country where it isn't compulsory, because the Democratic party failed to meaningfully engage with anyone at all left of the centre (and even there it's debatable given how far the US' Overton window has shifted). Labor is repeating the same mistake: I, and millions of other progressives like myself, don't need to be sold on the possibility that the Coalition will make things worse — we all know that they will. If you care about courting our votes, we need to be sold on the idea that Labor is going to make things better.

I'd rather not see Australia emulate what is happening in the US when someone with populist charisma and abhorrent viewpoints on democracy comes along to pull enough of the disenfranchised and disaffected who feel let down by the status quo. We're all getting to witness what that looks like in real time, and I want Australia to be better than "can't get any worse."

So, for the sake of us all, if Labor gets a majority government again, I hope you actually do something with it beyond "hey, at least we aren't Peter Dutton."

After an accidentally-long, near-decade of development, my debut video game, Alcyone: The Last City, is out now on desktop as well as Android and iOS.

I've worked as a professional writer for almost a quarter of a century at this point — a shocking milestone now that I actually put it down into words — and while I have worked on things that I can categorically tell you that you've heard of if not experienced, the exploitive nature of most creative industries means that this is the first bit of intellectual property that's getting released under my own name.

Back in 2016 or so, I had a dream which became a short story that would, in turn, form the basis for the game's initial prototype once I realised that the narrative I was envisioning was bigger than just writing a book. I have remarked often that my dreams are often the basis and inspiration for many creative projects I have and I'm grateful that my weirdo brain provides them.

My dreams very regularly influence and contribute to my creative ideas, and this one involved a person living in a city that was surrounded by a dangerous nothing. As I wrote the short story I could see the glimmers of a society existing within those constraints, and I knew I wanted to write something bigger than one linear narrative alone.

My original intention was to make a game with my own idea, which wasn't beholden to a studio or auteur taking credit for things I had created, to showcase who I was as a writer — for once. When it became clear to me that my idea was bigger than "portfolio," I expanded it outward into a bigger project.

I ran a successful Kickstarter in 2017. By this point, I had already done three others for GX Australia, but I was nervous about launching a campaign just for my own project. When I hit the goal a week or so in, I assumed it was just because people knew me from GX and the project had piggybacked off that awareness. When I nearly doubled my funding objective a week and a bit later, I assumed it was because of the other names attached to my project.

The imposter syndrome does still rear its head from time to time, but by this point and with the extent of what I have been able to accomplish, I'm better at ignoring it. I'm very proud of what I have done here.

Whilst I had launched the Kickstarter with the intention of a proper release less than a year later, I'm glad that life didn't work out that way — though delayed far beyond my intention (people who know me already know the story here so I'm not going to get into it again), it's a much, much better game because of the long gestation, and it's become so much more than my original vision as a result of being able to take a lot longer than planned.

Anyway, onward to the thanks: I'm very, very grateful to many people who helped make this release possible.

First and foremost, my wonderful partners Ryan and Vlas have been tremendously instrumental in making sure the game came out. Without their advice, support, cheerleading, and patience, this day would not be here. They've both done so much for this and been so supportive and without them I doubt it would have gotten launched.

Logistically speaking, VicScreen seeing value in what I had made and providing funding for it allowed me freedom and flexibility to finish it full-time. Without that foundation it would have taken ages and ages, if ever, for the game to come out.

I have to thank Peak and Michał, tremendously talented people who lent their creativity to the world I was trying to convert from a dream I'd had into a universe I wanted others to experience. Their contributions from the very beginning helped shape this final product in materially tangible ways and I'm forever going to be awed at their ability to take half-formed concepts in my head and present it to me as art that completely fit my terrible briefs.

Carlos, Ben, and Michael took those seeds and helped me iterate it into something bigger and better than I was able to make on my own. And again kudos here to Vlas for helping pull the engine work past the finish line and Ryan to give guidance and advice as a human being whose perspective was less technical but all the more vital for his vantage point as a gamer.

I am extremely grateful to the backers who supported my weird idea at the start. Without that initial foundation it never would have gotten off the ground at all or given me the confidence to take my weird niche game through to the finish line. The positive check-ins and emails over the years, to say nothing of how many excited people saying that they've been looking forward to this for years, really makes it feel worth doing. It's a weird niche game in an existing niche genre, so people genuinely being interested in it really is a relief. The initial coverage from journalists has also been really positive, which is a relief too as this is getting comparison against "normal" mainstream games.

And, finally, I'm grateful to everyone else who played it along the way and indulged me even without knowing the other projects I have been responsible for work on, who still encouraged me to make something on my own and stayed interested and engaged all this time.

I'm almost certain I'm missing people. There's an exhaustive list of credits in the game, because as someone who has had credits weaponised against them I wanted to make sure that anyone who had a substantive role in my game's development got a shout out for it. If I haven't given one here it's not because I don't value you or your contributions — I'm just overwhelmed and 40 years old.

So, about eight years or so after I planned it, Alcyone: The Last City is out. It wouldn't be accurate to say it was in development for all of that near-decade — much of that time was occupied by the fallout of an abusive ex-boyfriend, capitalism, a pandemic, and the constant struggle to make art when art isn't appreciated. I worked on it when I could with the frequency available to me, but it's all the better for the unexpectedly long journey.

I'm glad to be able to share it with you all. I'm deeply proud of it, it's the biggest thing I have ever made and it's very personal to me. I hope you like it.

But I'm also very, very glad to be able to move on to something else now, as well. Now that this is finished, I have other ideas I want to make which I couldn't while completing Alcyone was hanging over everything else I did. "Release" is doing double-lifting in that sense — I have released it into the ether for you to all experience, and in doing so it has released me from its responsibility.

It's yours now: go have fun with it.

Of that much, we surely have to all agree. Even the biggest boot-lickers have to realise what incompetent bozos we've presently got behind the levers of power in the United States.

The same [predominantly white dudes] who breathlessly bleat and blaaah about meritocracies over "woke DEI," by which they always mean "people who don't look like me and don't agree with me got things that I, by virtue of how I look and think, feel entitled to have instead," would never get into these positions on their own merit. Which is why we're here now: trust fund babies with daddy issues —surrounding themselves with useless sycophants who always tell them what good boys they are — have failed upwards into the most important roles in the most important spheres of influence which control the most dangerous mechanisms of democracy, government, military, and societal structure.

What a fun time to be alive.

These dipshits can't do their jobs because they fail at most things they've ever done, and without even bigger failures to enable them they'd never get anywhere in the first place. So they break, and they break, and you have to presume at one point that the breaking really is the entire objective because surely they wouldn't seriously go out and tell people that they're doing a good job when you just know Pete Hegseth is literally crying to his own reflection in the mirror every night.

They even suck at doing a shit job.

So, to take a page out of the Trump shortlist of insults he can still remember, these people are losers. And you know it's true, because Trump trots that one out to literally anyone who ever disagrees with him — and, it's a hallmark of a narcissist to project their own insecurities onto everyone else around them. He knows they're all losers, too.

More to the point on my last post:

The lawyer defending the administration clearly ignoring judicial orders and deporting people without due-process is an individual making an individual choice.

I don't care why, or the circumstances behind that job activity; this is someone who is choosing to stand up and defend Trump in an obviously-illegal action.

The lawyer standing before the court and obfuscating who was responsible for policy attacking trans service-members is an individual choosing to carry out this action.

I don't care why, I have no interest in their justifications over the fact that they're willing to enable this bigotry.

The lawyer pretending he does not know who's actually in charge of DOGE when we all know who's actually in charge of DOGE is choosing to feign ignorance.

I don't care why. They're either for this bullshit, or they'll grow some scruples and stop participating in it.

Every single individual who has anything to do with any aspect of the operation of ICE is complicit in this. I hold out less hope that they'll realise the fascist, bigoted systems they're gears within, but I don't want a lack of mention to be mistaken for ignorance of their support for the institution of American Gestapo.

Again, I don't care why you're doing it. "I was just following orders" is not, and has never been, justification for abhorrent behaviour.

We have all grown up learning history about the individuals who made the right decision when it mattered most. To the extent those stories are lionised, exaggerated, embellished, or otherwise doesn't matter — their lesson remains the same. People participate in these systems, and people can refuse to allow their energy, time, effort, and labour to help them run.

Every awful thing done because Trump, and his enablers, demands it of you is still an action on your conscience, in your name, and on your soul.

May history remember you for the actions you've taken.

(As an addendum, we should also remember, and be inspired by, those who take a stand in defiance to this sort of capitulation and cooperation — people like Rachel Cohen, who has used her position of relative power and privilege in stark contrast to those who are too scared to.)

I don't particularly care what Trump has threatened to do, thought about doing, or actually done. Trump is a vessel of resentment, self-entitlement, animosity, and vengeance. What we're seeing these days is that Id brought to the forefront and given free rein to do whatever it wants in all its nasty, anti-social glory. Trump is a creature driven entirely by spite — spite against those who stood in his way during his first administration, who now need to be taught a lesson. This extends from comedians who made fun of him to foreign leaders who obstructed him, to say nothing of individual civil servants, judges, lawyers, or anyone else who told him "no." When you understand that root psychology, nothing about the man is shocking or surprising.

So, I don't really care what he does — he's going to do what he promised he would, and that he has shouldn't surprise or appal anybody. Trump will burn the world down out of petty, myopic narcissism if he's allowed to do so.

Instead, I care about those who are enabling this. Much can be said about the Republicans in Congress entirely abdicating their responsibility for the legislative functions of the government and I don't think their feckless subservience bears anything more than contempt. They've been on this authoritarian slide for forty years and it's been obvious that their motto has been "power at all costs" for half as long.

But the day to day people enabling the worst of Trump's impulses? The useful idiots in DOGE who think Musk is a genius and don't realise the criminal behaviour they're engaging in? The cowards who have rolled over at the first hurdle — or even earlier — rather than stand up for their previously-professed principles? These are where the finger should be pointed.

Trump is Trump, this is apparent now more than it ever could have been. He's doing what he promised to do.

But everyone else doesn't have to go along with it, and when they do you must ask why. Not everyone is operating from a place of fear — enough are, certainly, but enough are just chickenshit, or self-serving, or gleeful collaborators. And plenty of people are just disconnected from this until it becomes a problem they, personally, cannot ignore. You're going to have to get involved a lot earlier than that — at bare minimum, the apparatus enabling Trump is trying to break as much as it can before it's properly stopped, ideally at a point where stopping them doesn't make a difference, and people are going to have to decide how much of that they wish to put up with before they become their own impediment to this chaos, too.

History will judge, etc, etc, but nothing's stopping us from shaming all involved in real time now, too.

There's a lot of terrible news coming out of the United States these days, so much of it that it seems difficult keeping track of everything, but this patently transparent bit of hate does bear a specific call out:

The National Park Service has removed all mentions of the words "transgender" and "queer" from its web page dedicated to the Stonewall National Monument, a site that marks a landmark moment for LGBTQ rights quite literally led by transgender and gender non-conforming people.

The site's online hub for the New York visitor centre and park honouring the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, a turning point for LGBTQ activism and civil rights in America, now only makes reference to "LGB civil rights," omitting the T and Q representing transgender and queer people in the acronym.

Erasing our history requires more than deleting text on a website, but capitulation here will lead to more extensive reality retcons.

And, let me be emphatic here: any queer people aiding and abetting this bullshit under the pretext of thinking they're going to spare themselves from similar trouble is delusional and throwing their community under the bus in the name of self-preservation they're never going to get. You can't nice your way out of fascism.

I'll also leave with this from Heather Cox Richardson:

Protesters today packed Christopher Park in New York City’s Greenwich Village near the Stonewall National Monument after the Trump administration erased “TQ+” from the LGBTQ+ on the monument’s website. The Stonewall Uprising of 1969, six days of conflict between police and LGBTQ+ protesters after police raided the Stonewall Inn, brought the longstanding efforts of LGBTQ+ activists for civil rights to popular attention, making Stonewall a symbol of LGBTQ+ rights.

Trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Silvia Rivera were key figures in the Stonewall Uprising. Acknowledging their contribution, one protester held a sign that read, “NATIONAL PARK SERVICE: YOU CAN’T SPELL HISTORY WITHOUT A ‘T’”

Former Republican operative Stuart Stevens had a different take. He posted: “When I see the sexual orientation hate come out of the Republican party under the pretext of just being anti-Trans, I am very tempted to name the Republican operatives and elected officials who are closeted gays. It’s not a short list.”

I won't exhaust my patience rehashing all of this, but one of the worst CEOs to ever grace a company whining about unions and a bizarre conspiracy theory instead of taking any responsibility for the business he ran is just another brick in the wall on shitty dudes being shitty.

In this week's Grit podcast, Kotick argues that the harassment claims and legal case against Activision Blizzard were, in fact, engineered by the Communication Workers of Union in a bid to attract new members.

"I can tell you exactly what happened," he says. "The Communication Workers of America Union started looking at technology. They kept losing because they represented the news guild, Comcast, and they realised they were losing members at a really dramatic rate, so they gotta figure out: how do they get new union members? So they targeted a bunch of different businesses. Google. Some other tech companies. Tesla, SpaceX and us."

The bullshit continues:

"I mean, think about it. I dated Sheryl Sandberg," he laughs. "You think we had a problem with pay equity and gender pay at Activision? She literally wouldn't do a 'lean in circle' at the company until I showed her our pay equity fillings."

If Kotick's suggestion here is that his association with ex-Meta COO Sandberg - who has advocated for equal representation in the workplace - is proof that the allegations against him are unfounded, it's perhaps worth noting that Sandberg herself is the subject of allegations that she worked with Kotick to shut down reports about his treatment of women. According to a 2022 report by the Wall Street Journal, Sandberg allegedly pressured UK tabloid The Daily Mail to drop stories about a restraining order against Kotick from an ex-girlfriend, while Kotick and Sandberg were dating.

"Working with a team that included Facebook and Activision employees as well as paid outside advisers," wrote the WSJ, "Ms. Sandberg and Mr. Kotick developed a strategy to persuade the Daily Mail not to report on the restraining order, first when they began dating in 2016 and again around the time they were breaking up in 2019, the people said. Among other concerns, Ms. Sandberg’s legal and public-relations advisers, both inside and outside Facebook, worried that a story would reflect negatively on her reputation as an advocate for women."

Fuck this guy.

There's a specific nuance to the fact that Musk is primarily utilising very young dudes as his hammer wrecking shit in the federal government at the moment. I've seen guys like him a lot in tech and nerd circles — and particularly in video games. Guys who absolutely cannot interact with their own peers or community in any meaningful, normal way — either because they have abhorrent opinions, terrible social skills, or make others uncomfortable/unsafe — but in a very specific niche they have found a group of folks who don't know better who look up to them as idols.

I doubt in Musk's case it's any explicit or calculated behaviour, and I'm sure all of us have known some dude whose friends are always creepily way, way younger than he is. That dude probably wasn't also the richest person on the planet, which makes the scenario even sadder on its face.

But he's getting these young guys — some of them literally still teenagers — because they're not old enough to question any of this and probably think Elon is a super cool dude. And because Musk is an absolute loser, he's surrounded himself with young sycophants who don't know better.

And, yeah, I'm sure there's some alignment of viewpoint too but these guys are also young enough that I doubt they have genuine convictions as much as somebody they think is super cool is giving them this super cool, important responsibility. They just don't know better and can't remotely fathom the consequences of aiding and abetting this.

This isn't to make an excuse for any of it, either, but I recognise a lot of behaviour in this situation from past ones I've personally had to deal with where a creepy, vaguely predatory figure needed to be managed for the safety of others.

But Musk is a thin-skinned manbaby who is so deeply pathetic that despite having more wealth than many countries' GDP still lies about being good at video games and (almost) assuredly has faked several sockpuppet accounts to make himself look better. It would be funny if it wasn't so serious.

I've been making a concerted effort to avoid doomscrolling and have been dramatically limiting the amount of articles I read and the sources that I allow that news to come through. My social media time is deliberately curtailed more than it really ever has been.

It's not in an attempt to avoid anything, but rather an understanding that psychological blitzkrieg is the aim here, and even if Trump says something that gets a flurry of headlines and causes spontaneous outrage 1) he's probably only saying it to cause a distraction from something else 2) he's going to change his mind five minutes later because he has the attention span of a particularly stupid cocker spaniel. (No offence intended to cocker spaniels).

That said, though, and lest I be accused of hypocrisy here — I'm not really sure how the situation right now can be described as anything but dire.

Musk treating the US federal government the way he treated Twitter — smash everything up and figure out how to monetise the pieces — was not precisely on my bingo card. Or, I hadn't expected him to get as much chaos through as quickly as he has.

But this is a constitutional crisis of epic proportions; even if the courts tell Musk to stop — and they are telling Musk to stop — the branch of government that's tasked with enforcing those rulings are also under the control with the person who's issuing the orders. And Musk is not known to just accept decisions he dislikes — this is taking "ask forgiveness, not permission" to insane extremes, and he's clearly going to break everything he can and hope it's a moot point by the time anyone might be able to stop him.

There's resistance in the brave civil servants who are refusing to play ball, but yet again Trump et al provide an ample example that the founding fathers never accounted for a scenario where one party would have this much control and everything would rest on the reliability of people refusing to do terrible things.

In other news: I have set up a Bluesky account since that seems to be where everyone has gone. I was already on Mastodon, and will probably see how feasible it is to crosspost to both before deciding whether or not to keep the latter, but feel free to add or engage with me there (or on both!), too.

Image: "The Conductor" by Travis-Anderson

We huddled around the scar in the earth and chanted the words as they were taught to us.

"Mother, on whom we have no right to ask, please look upon this wound we have wrought and give us your forgiveness."

I looked at the flickering dial of the metre beside me and sighed, a noise my group couldn't hear. Knowing that, I begrudgingly pressed the button on the communicator to signal our collective defeat.

"This zone is beyond us. Let's press forward."

My team left their comms off — I didn't need to hear their disappointment, and they were well-trained enough to know what errant signals would mean for morale. I walked ahead. I was expected to carry the brunt of the emotional pain from this rejection, as I am the Language. In penance I kept pace ten metres ahead of my team.

The wind scratched against our plastvisors, and the more superstitious of our sect might blame the sudden weather on the malice of our Mother — but we understood science, though, and as we approached our second waypoint we settled into formation just like we were trained.

"Mother, on whom we have no right to ask —"

"Prefect —"

I pursed my lips, sucked breath through my teeth. "Chalice 223, the ritual requires our full concentration."

They bowed their head deferentially, voice supplicant through the metallic noise of their visor's speaker system. "Yes, Prefect, but Protocol 2 dictates that in the presence of —"

"Chalice 223, there are no grounds to invoke Protocol 2. We have checked this area before touchdown and —"

"Prefect."

I sighed, and evaluated my emotion protocols. My team would not have raised an issue of this calibre without reason. I instructed my visor to focus on the area where Chalice 223 had drawn my attention. A glimmer of reflection stuck out, something disc-shaped and angry, sending light back at my visor as if it resented its own existence.

"Chalice 223, why do you mention this?" I asked, my processing capability reaching its saturation point in short fashion.

Chalice 223 bowed their head, apologetically. "Protocol 2 says remnant artefacts must be taken into custody and processed in a safe room."

I felt my patience capacitors beyond their limit, and I threw my hands in the air. "What are you talking about —"

Chalice 223 lifted the iridescent disc from the radioactive sand and pushed it into the data port at the front of my suit. Chalice 223 bowed their head yet again. As the archaic programming took over my motor processors, they looked on me with sadness.

"I'm sorry, Prefect."

"You don't know what that means," I whispered, as the Precursor's resonance echoed from my carapace. I sighed, and let it happen.

"Maybe you'll get what you want this time around;

the trick

is to

keep breathing."