Not speaking about pastor Kate in particular, we'll likely never know, but I think NitW as a whole does explore the question I think you're asking, about the possibilities when you confront the lack of answers.
I ended up among the artsy weirdos, the queers, etc - some secular, some religious. For how much of an atheist I am, it's funny how some of my favourite music is adjacent to religion (Sufjan, Julien Baker, mewithoutYou). Anyway, imho, the Angus stargazing scene touches on neighbouring themes?
I did try and get rid of all that baggage. For a while there I'd hang out in online skeptic forums - and though to this day my 'theology' is very secular, very atheistic, what I quickly noticed was that I made zero friends in those spaces. I found the culture weirdly manly and traditional.
I grew up in what was essentially a new agey pseudoscientific cult, and I worked my way out of it pretty young (18/19), while my brother took an extra 10-15 years. The reasons are many, but as a queer kid I just became keenly aware that they had no answers for my suffering or that of my friends.
I think that to get that kind of answer you basically have to explore your own writing and your own art lol That said, a character that struck a chord with me was Angus, and in a roundabout way, I think there's a thematic continuity there?
My lowest-stake regret is probably how I no longer stim like I used to. It was never deeply meaningful to me, and had I stopped on my own, I probably wouldn't miss it. But the fact that I was berated by a person I trusted (as an adult!) makes me feel like I was robbed of a little piece of myself lol
devo estar com muito sono porque eu li "gato católico" e fiquei 10 segundos tentando entender
Got one of those little Chinese Android handheld consoles for emulation not long ago, a model that had just come out, and now the 12GB version has already been discontinued due to RAM shortages. What a fucking mess.
Forget about conscious knowledge, even - how exactly does my brain learn how to move my legs so I don't fall? How does my brain model it in secret (to me)? How does it move data around? Etc. Incredibly complex stuff. What does the brain do when it feels like we're associating ideas in our heads?
I say this less to defend AI creation/usage (fuck AI), and more because it'd be really cool to understand what those things we do every day break down into. The difference between AI and us isn't really the use of intentional language, but a deeper structural one.
Not disagreeing with your overall point, btw - we do learn very differently from AI even if we just consider the fact that we are embodied creatures, we have senses, we have all sorts of feedback processes embedded into us, and the way we provide training data to AI is wildly different from that.
I feel like you're comparing two different levels of abstraction, i.e. the lower-level mechanisms behind the way we guess context, etc would surely look like producing multidimensional statistical representations, if not in how it functions, at least in how complex and depersonalised it looks?
My old employer never collected their laptop, so it's a Linux machine now, and I found a used mini-PC for 1/3 of the price (£180). Got a portable Android console for some nifty emulation (including Windows/Switch). I'd like more storage redundancy, but I can get by with what I have. Still sucks.
I've never been one to consume and hoard a lot of tech - I buy a pretty expensive laptop and drive it to the ground (the last one lasted 8 years before the GPU gave in) - so I hate how I've been making contingency plans and buying stuff I don't REALLY need when I find a good deal now.
The neighbour bugged my landlady for years, and today he finally got his wish: they cut down the perfectly healthy, 36-year-old pine tree in my garden. Fucker.
Sometimes you even stick with them in some capacity and see them through, and they put in the work to have a workable (and even valuable) relationship with you, but that doesn't change the fact that what you describe is exactly what they did for way too fucking long, and you can't change the past.
Like, did I agree with everything she was saying about womanhood? Absolutely not. Did I see her being hounded for going public about the exact messy/human web of reasons that made her realise she had to medically transition to occupy a specific relational space she identified? Yeah.
I haven't kept up with her, but I remember people going really hard on her for being a transmed after an early video that was essentially a messy exploration of gender and sexuality, trying to decode "womanhood" through her own desires and the position she wished to occupy while carrying them out.
True, but also annoying bc gender was a perfectly good word for that. Imho we conceded too much by allowing "gender vs sex" to be seen as a dichotomy, rather than the former just being a more sophisticated understanding of the latter, kind of like heliocentrism is a better framework than geocentrism
A screenshot of the youtube comment section for a video I posted (a performance of the song "Guns Are For Cowards" by Bonnie "Prince" Billy). A random guy says, in all caps, "IM SO THANKFUL YOU DONT MAKE THE LAWS".
A peculiar look into the algorithm: an American nutjob who apparently gets recommended every single video with "gun" in the title.
As a person, not a business, I've wanted to get a domain and point it to my gmail account (while I slowly change all the accounts registered to the gmail email), so at some point I can give google up. Any registrar suggestions? I have links to the UK, Portugal and Brazil (residency and citizenship).
The American project, of which atrocities in South America are an important part of, has been built on cross-party support. This isn't a fall from grace, and Moura rather pathetically overlooks this so he can continue moving in those circles and having an international film career. 5/5
Our dictatorship was US-backed and sponsored, and this has not been reckoned with. No amends have been made. It's one thing to criticise one US administration that half the country is against; it's another to point out that this is no fall from grace, that this is just US violence turned inwards. 4/
I like Wagner all right, but it's ironic how he speaks against Brazil's 1979 Amnesty Law while, in a way, granting America "amnesty" in this interview, while failing to mention that we are more than a cautionary tale for their consumption, that they have our blood in their hands. 3/
Don't get me wrong, I'm not beyond relating to foreign art because I see myself in their struggles. It's just strange to see how this type of film now resonates with American audiences, but only inasmuch as they feel victimised too, and all without mentioning their role in what was done to us. 2/
Some of my closest friends are American, so I like to think of myself as someone who is able not to be dismissive of their hopes and fears, but the elephant in the room here is how wrong it feels to see Brazilian history treated as a cautionary tale. 1/
The general state of the medical institutions meant to help trans people (I know, a naive framing) is dire. (3/3)
But that's not what they're implying. If it were, we wouldn't have "gender vs sex (assigned at birth)" - they'd be the same thing, or different aspects of the same thing. But no, their copy makes it clear that they might as well just say "biological sex", but are too chicken to. (2/3)
A somewhat known private provider of HRT refers to "gender identity" vs "sex assigned at birth", and it drives me nuts. For the record, I quite like the idea that sex is assigned (and not, as GCs would say, "observed") - it's simply false that sex is a base, pre-social category. (1/3)
... in way people explore and try to find one another and themselves. But to see the hardening of our language, the institutionalisation of it, to the point they assume these are types of people who survive across cultures and languages - and for what? Money? The prestige of allyship? Pisses me off.
