Day: June 17, 2025

moving right along

I just realized, Amphibian was only about 3 weeks in the making from start to release. Nice.

That Nulea M505 trackball is… fine. I feel like it might have been designed with a smaller hand in mind, but after some time I find it’s comfortable if I just rest the right side of my hand on the desk. Everything else falls into place comfortably. I find myself having to think about what I’m doing a lot less than with the Adept.

I’m still playing with speed/acceleration settings, finding that nice compromise between being able to move 2560 pixels across the screen in a single motion vs. precision. I’ve tried Custom Curve from mouseacceleration.com off and on, and I think the trick for me is going to be just to leave it at its default curve (ironically enough) and get used to that. It is definitely better than Windows’ internal “enhanced precision” feature, at least for the needs of a trackball.

My run in GW2 continues. This may be the longest I’ve kept playing it before deciding to drop out and do something else.

I leveled and geared a Vindicator — giving up my “free” slot I was using for key farming — and she’s probably the best of my characters in terms of performance, even better than the Willbender. Then I decided to abandon my Tempest (forgetting that they had a Jade Bot core that doesn’t show up in regular inventory, so now I have to get my jeweler to build another new one) and raise up a Barbarian — too early yet to tell how effective this will be, but probably not a super tank. I went with a cute Asura who is technically male but has a feminine face and hairstyle; that race has basically no sexual dimorphism in body shape by human standards.

Which brings me to the book I’m reading now: Talia Mae Bettcher’s Beyond Personhood: An Essay in Trans Philosophy. It was mentioned by someone on a forum and I thought, sure, why not.

My experience with reading philosophy and philosophy-adjacent books has been very mixed. Some authors assume you have an education in philosophy (and maybe fluency in 4 or 5 languages… the showoffs). Some write for a layperson, clearly lay out examples and reasoning, and are merely trying to share fascination and wonder (this is great). Some are more of a guide for living.

In this case, the reading is not necessarily easy, but it’s not elitist either. The author is interested in liberatory, resistant philosophy meant specifically for trans and nonbinary people and friends (“I do not believe in wasting my breath on transphobes,” she writes). The point of the book is to find an understanding of both trans oppression and “trans gender phoria” — her term for both dysphoric and euphoric experiences. It’s impossible for this not to also be a feminist project, because no matter how you slice it, transphobia has its roots in the worst parts of heteronormative sexism. It also would would have been nonsensical and irresponsible to not include racial oppression because it’s very much tied together. (A major part of colonizer thinking was that “savages” were not “properly” masculine or feminine, thus not proper men or proper women, therefore not proper humans. Jim Crow era public restrooms came in Men, Women, and Colored; even in the present day nonwhite cis women are often targets of transphobia and “transvestigation.”)

There is a lot going on here, and I’m finding it hard to summarize. If it was that simple it wouldn’t need a dense 312-page philosophy book. Probably some brilliant writer could condense things a bit more than Bettcher did, but I’m not that person.

But it’s providing a lot of food for thought. I am starting to think about my own identity at a different depth now, so it’ll be interesting to see where this goes.