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Nature is cruel; see illness and death, see animals eating each other. See extinctions and starvation and catastrophe, White Nose Syndrome in bats, Alzheimer’s in humans.

By Nature, I mean God. God is cruel. How can we accept that, and why should we?

God is not held to the same standards as humans because God is not human, and humans are not God. If a man kills another man, it is a sin. But God kills men all the time; indeed, God kills ALL men. God makes disease; that is Nature. If man makes disease and unleashes it on ...

Why I am returning to my regular dose of Prozac after 2 years of tapering off.

A few days ago, at a candy store in another town, I asked if I could buy some empty chocolate boxes. The co-owner came out and said no, “we’re a candy store, we want you to buy candy not boxes.” I gave her the 4 homemade saffron-cardamom chocolates I had brought for her — she tried one right there, saying “ooh, funky!” I assured her I was just needing a few boxes to give away my culinary experiments to friends ...

I listened to a 2-hour video of this academic saying that Reality isn’t real, there is no reality without someone to perceive it, while I attempted to hand-animate a fat Earth goddess I called “Reality,” because that morning I had imagined praying to Reality, who doesn’t care about my feelings, and also to Mystery, who might. Reality and Mystery, sisters. Systery. My animation failed but I still wanted to draw Them. Is Mystery the snake that twines around the Goddess? Is Mystery Reality’s backside? Is Reality that which can be illuminated but seldom is, while Mystery cannot ...

A few days ago a TERF Sister and I were texting about being demonized by family members. Finally she wrote:

there’s endless assholes in the world and you know? I can just be one, if that’s how people gonna see me, then… fine, they CAN

and it’s fascinating just how much people do NOT want to hear that

(Ex-husband) definitely didn’t

and your brother doesn’t want to hear it either. They want to change you, they want you to feel you NEED to change because they’re mad or they disapprove or whatever

but fuck ...

Writing is painful because of everything I think, I can only get a wee little bit on the page. I want to get EVERYTHING down and instead I squeeze out 1 to 2% at best.
I procrastinated writing my 2024 Year In review for this reason. How could I do this year justice? I would forget so much.
After several hours captioning photos, I realized forgetting is the point. Only getting 1 to 2% is the point. If you want EVERYTHING, you live Life itself. If you want writing, you recognize a few ...

People assure me AI art is “soulless,” that unlike human artists AI can’t be “original.” It can only copy. This reflects a widespread misunderstanding of how human artists work: we copy, and there’s no such thing as “original.” I understood this 16 years ago. 

We draw from more or less the same pool of culture that AI does, only our pools are necessarily smaller as humans simply don’t have the capacity for exposure to as much stuff. No matter, because all works carry the influences and language — be it verbal, visual, or musical — as the works around ...

I have no desire to animate. Add my work to a media stream already full of fascinating hallucinations? The creativity of AI exceeds my own, with its innumerable fingers and multiple arms and morphing cat heads. Things turning into other things used to be magic worthy of hard work and years of study. Now it’s a mere artifact, a waste product generated in pursuit of the more mundane.

All my work will be forgotten, because there is so much work. Art used to be diamonds the future could sift from the dust. Now the dust is made of diamonds ...

So much of my past lives on fecebook. People who believe in more than 2 sexes; the same “scientific” and “compassionate” articles on this subject keep getting re-shared by my former friends and acquaintances. Also denunciations of Twitter and declarations of moving to Bluesky.

I feel so disconnected from my past now. Who even am I? Young me might be aghast. Every article about policy responses to “climate change” makes me scoff. You’re 20 years too late, I think. NOW you’re trying to fix it? We knew back then it would be unfixable by today, but here you ...

The temptation to self-loathing, like the temptation to drink or use drugs, is social.

When women of a certain age (mine) gather, as time passes and trust develops, the conversation often turns to plastic surgery. This is a bonding ritual: a display of intimacy and offering, because plastic surgery is hidden as much as possible from the general public. Apparently it is much more widespread than a casual observer would believe. Countless women you know have “had work done.” Over wine and good food, cocktails and snacks, in comfortable living rooms and hotel bar lounges at the end of a ...

“Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”

In George Orwell’s 1984, the past is altered, but war is constant; the names of the combatants are changed retroactively, but combat is continuous. 

Members of nations at war bond more tightly with their compatriots. War offers a shared dream of triumph over a common enemy. Thus, continual state of war is an effective means of social control. It doesn’t really matter who Oceania is at war with, as long as Oceania is, and always has been, at war.

1984 illustrates how supporting wars is a sucker’s game. War ...

What does one wear to a $20,000-a-dose drug infusion? At least one person suggested a tiara and evening gown.

One Skyrizi intravenous infusion dose is 600mg, or 2.1164 .21164 ounces. At $20,000 per dose that’s $9,450 $943,333 per ounce.

CORRECTION: my math was off by a factor of 10. Via JO 753 in a comment below:

“There are 28.3 gramz per ounse. 600 milligramz iz .6 gramz, so an ounse iz 47 dosez. Thats 943,333$ an ounse.

No ...

Depression is the mind attacking itself. It’s been called a “psychic autoimmune disease.”

This morning, part of me woke up asking, what can I fix?  What problem can I attack?
I know — ME!

My motives are good: what can I purify and improve? But the target is wrong.

My impulses — to fix, to cure, to control — may be overactive and delusional, just as my immune system is overactive and confused. My Crohn’s disease is treated with immunosuppressants, designed to calm down the immune system.

My mind, over time, has learned to calm down ...

When I was a child I wanted to be sick, because when I was sick I got to stay home from school. Sometimes I was effortlessly sick and got to stay in the oddly quiet house with its peculiar mid-day creaks and sounds and winter light through the windows and extremely lame daytime TV. But at least once I sat near the heat register before school, then asked my Mom to feel my forehead, and with grave worry she said I should stay home. SCORE! But I suffered ...

The post Protected: My Former Brother appeared first on Nina Paley.

Corinna, my friend and podcast co-host, is a man to me. I don’t think it’s because I’ve been using sex-based pronouns for him, as I do for everyone. He does pass; the majority of people read him as female. When I first saw him in a video, I thought, “he passes, he’s cute.” And once I mistook him for a mom, from a distance, while he was unloading his bike parked right next to a dad unloading more bikes with his kids. I read them all as a family unit, didn’t recognize Corinna, and rode ...

When I lived in New York, I knew two very talented and driven artists who had abandoned their children. One had left her son with her parents so she could move to NYC and pursue visual arts. The other had simply ditched his kid with his ex-wife, to devote his life to stage performance. Both told me separately (they didn’t know each other) that, had they stayed to raise their offspring, they would have killed themselves.

I always took the prospect of parenthood very seriously. I believed anyone who had a child needed to prioritize them, and if that ...

I hated my parents. I hated my school. I hated the cops. I hated all authority. 

I hate anything that imposes limits on me, that gets in my way.

I hate disease, I hate that death is inevitable, I hate the laws of Nature. We all do. We all hate our parents, we all hate our Mother.

What goes up must come down. Hate that!

I hate that people form mobs and go after scapegoats. I hate that I have been a scapegoat, and may be again.

Hell is other people. I hate ‘em.

I hate suffering. Life is suffering ...

When I learn a new song – something I do unconsciously, every time I am exposed to new music – is some other song erased in my memory to make room? No. I seem to have unlimited capacity for memorizing music, even as my memory is like a sieve elsewhere. How does my brain do that? Does it re-use existing pathways, or create ever-more byzantine new ones? I imagine my mind’s architecture as ever-expanding fractals, filling the same space with more and more curves and crevices.

The older I get, the more byzantine my mind’s labyrinth, all to store the ...

I’m about to hit my 5,000th bike mile for 2020, and I’m buying yet another new-to-me used obscure recumbent, a rare Easy Racers Ti Javelin. A friend in an online chatroom today asked,

Have you always been this into cycling? Or is it something you developed as an adult?

Always somewhat, but this year I’m doing it way more. I have the pandemic to thank. No travel, and I’m not spending money on anything else really, so why not. Most of my socializing is happening on rides with friends; it ...

The COVID-19 pandemic is a miracle.

I mean this in the biblical sense. Biblical miracles are horrific, bringing death and destruction. The Ten Plagues of Exodus were miracles, or at least “wonders.” The miracles of Revelation are even worse.

A miracle isn’t a fluffybunny event. It is an act of God.

The COVID pandemic is a power greater than ourselves. We can’t stop it; we understand very little about it. It brings us to our knees.

I am in awe of it. I have watched humanity killing the planet my whole life, with obvious warnings of dire consequences ...