Once again reminding everyone that Politico was bought by Axel Springer three years ago, a German right-wing tabloid company that has support for the USA and Israel as its stated core values. Even if they have nominal editorial independence, they know what their employer wants to hear.

Content warning: Physical health (negative)

I'm undergoing a root canal treatment at the moment and it's really painful, all in all. I've had the 3rd of 5 appointments today, my painkiller has worn off and I can only take one more today, so I'm just suffering mild, but absolutely constant and insistent pain. The worst is when I get a sort of nauseating flashback to the moment when the dentist bored into my nerve. Like, that's not just a feeling of pain, there's also the deep discomfort of getting a hole made in your skull. And I've never been good at distracting myself, so I'm really hoping everything just clears up by tomorrow.

I've got a question for all of you: What's the best way to run a leftist reading group? And where to start? For context, this is going to be a small number of young people who do not habitually read, so my academic instincts are useless here. Someone suggested reading during the meeting, which is maybe more approachable but I don't see how would this work logistically (do we read out loud? Do we wait for the slowest reader to finish and then talk?). And I need to suggest a text. Presumably, people would get intimated by Capital, so something introductory with short chapters might be better. Any ideas?

Thinking back on it, it was very strange that the "Interview with the Vampire" TV series included both anti-Communism and apologia for Nazi collaborators in the same season. I feel like that's not something you really have to add in an adaptation.

Well-meaning people keep asking me my pronouns. I am taking this as a sign to once again change my gender presentation and start actually dressing femme and not just androgynous. Now I only have to learn about fashion and maybe then I'll be a bit happier

I've always wondered why people were so ready to convert. Like, if I was some ancient Roman and some guy came up to me offering a new god that's even better than the old ones and much easier to worship, I wouldn't just immediately fall for it. It just seems like a scam.

It's not this one, is it?

My favorite memory of the two Pathfinder games, and I mean this unironically, is doing that infamous quest in Kingmaker right near the start where you have to fight swarms. Level 1 combat against enemies immune to weapon damage – you have to actually consider your options and possibly accept turning down the difficulty. That interplay of character options and enemy immunities is, in my opinion, the core gameplay of CRPGs.

Anthropology has a lot to answer for. Back in the 90s, a transphobe named Serena Nanda turned the gaze of the university onto the issue of gender in India and we are still living with the consequences. With the power of imperial knowledge-making behind her, she has laid down the dogma that only (educated, middle-class, white) Westerners claim to be trans women while those Indians we call hijra are actually a third gender. All the cis academics since agree with her and even the Indian courts cite her, so it must be true, right? So if you see photos of a protest with signs like "Hijras are women" or Indian trans women saying that they're trans women, you can rest assured that's that just our malign colonial influence. The exotic truth, on the other hand, is safely preserved in the centers of power of the Anglophone world thanks to the daily labor of cis academics everywhere – preserved from the colonial force of white trans women who threaten to extend their reach everywhere.

Bluesky is almost acceptable in terms of transphobia, but they should remove the part where you're put on a new list of evil trans women every day

I'm feeling very depressed this evening and I genuinely cannot tell whether it is because of dysphoria or because I lost at some meaningless video game

I miss him. We could all do with some more hatred for mainstream popular culture. Otherwise, what's even the point of being a communist?

If I had some time, I'd try and find out where our "common sense" notions of art come from. Like art being subjective, which is taken to mean that it is something like a kaleidoscope where no two people can be sure to see the same thing in it and every statement about it is just based on fleeting, un-shareable impressions. Obviously that's nonsense, but if you try debating people on the internet over whether something is well-written or if it negotiates a certain theme, they bring out clichés like this. Or the idea that art is produced by an individual in a semi-mystic, almost unconscious act which broods no further analysis or introspection – though just as often you see this as a strawman attributed to an author's opponents. In any case, I assure you that no notable Romantic ever believed this and that the concept of "genius" has never meant this in any serious author. These are just common sense clichés that come from nowhere and are seemingly everywhere.

I was about to say that this account cannot be real, it's obviously fake for hitting so many stereotypes and controversies at once, and then I saw that she's posting videos and everything. Sometimes reality is crueler than our imagination.

The Matrix chat is already going so strong that Element is unable to display all new messages after a few hours lol

Here's a kind of sweet and sour tofu that's easy and I find tasty

Someone I followed on Twitter once joked about starting the "Transsexual Review of Books" and I keep thinking that should be a real thing so that the idea of trans literature could become institutionalized (and so we no longer have to search in the most desperate places for any intelligent discussion, obviously).

I hate you for showing this to me

The idea of "chat rooms" is strange and new to me, personally, but I'm trying it out now.