Christopher Phin

@chrisphin.bsky.social

140 Followers 35 Following

Uses language suitable for miners rather than minors. Proud xennial. Podcasting, tech, publishing, ebikes, art and design, queer shit. (I did warn you about the language.) 💙💜🩷

There Are No Heroes Here, Only Survivors You told me: you might never have come out  were it not for me What monstrous honour! How can I make friends with such a truth? To accept it is surely hubris? Kaiju-scale conceit? That I could ever have been so fundamental to someone! But to reject it? —  more monstrous still! Maybe some behemoths we cannot chunk down and swallow Perhaps we are enjoined to merely see them, acknowledge them, towering over our landscape, without diminishing them to human scale Shall we share a hug, miss, you and me, safe in the lee of this truth’s shadow?
Me apparently holding a clip from Cabaret in which Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles is having a cigarette lit for her by a man who has clocked her green nail varnish. She smiles, flashes her nails, says “Devine decadence!” and blows smoke out. My own nails are painted in a similar shade.
Selfie with my beard dyed with vertical rainbow stripes
Me holding a postcard-sized piece of watercolour paper which has had a cyanotype wash applied, and a picture of a smiling young man in glasses exposed onto it. The image is monochrome, but it’s a deep blue rather than black. (You can post-process cyanotypes into different colours.)
My phone lock screen showing a bunch of vertical gradient bands mixing two shades of pink, two of blue, and a dark purple
A navy peaked cap sits on a car dashboard on a sunny day. There is a shield on the front centre of the cap which contains the pride flag, and on it in white, in a characterful serif face, it says “PRIDE RIDES TAXI CO.”. Underneath that, in a script face it says, “Where the customer always comes first!”
An aerial shot of a meandering dark river cutting through a green and rolling landscape on a sunny day.
An aerial view of a river with parkland in the foreground, on a beautiful sunny Spring day
An aerial shot of a handsome stone pavilion in green parkland.
An AirPort Extreme and an Apple Time Capsule sit side-by-side on a white surface, beside an old BT HomeHub.
A slowly panning shot of farmland, woodland and the coast, from an altitude of 120m, in southwest Scotland.
The drone rises sharply vertically, slowly spinning, rising from inside a ruined circular castle to an altitude of 120m, seeing it set in green countryside.
One of the two fans inside the laptop, with the vanes of the fan almost entirely gunked up with dust.
Two small but perfect pancakes on a plate with sugar and lemon juice — from a plastic lemon dispenser, sat behind the plate beside a cup of black coffee.
View of my feet skating moderately well on an ice rink.
View of my feet skating moderately well on an ice rink.
The view out of the front of a car on a motorway, with a Osmo Pocket 3 mounted on a Joby Gorillapod filming the view.
Me holding a large crocheted blanket. It’s in squares, with cream borders, and concentric squares of Pride-adjacent but not exact colours.
Selfie in a mask
Selfie on a bus in an open-necked white shirt and dark jacket, sunglasses, pearl necklace and ‘diamond’ earring, holding a Keep Cup of black coffee. The early morning sun is bathing me in golden light.
I worried for years that being nice, being helpful, being generous, being useful came from a broken place inside me — A place where my value could only be articulated & assured if I was useful — I don’t think that any more. Generosity of spirit; joy; compersion — give I instruct you (me, and you): love wildly and love widely And if it were ever true that that love wells up and pours forth through a crack in your soul that deserves care & repair, accept that repair when it is tenderly offered but never again question its value
An orange iPhone 17 in the orange case, next to a still-packaged blue iPhone 6S case. The hole for the camera in the latter is TINY compared to the ‘plateau’ aperture for the 17.
A group of five people sitting around a living room, laughing as they play Mario Kart.
I don’t need to be reminded that the world is beautiful. I know. I need to be gifted the opportunity to sink into its beauty.
A pretty young Caucasian woman with long hair sitting on a mat on a beach, smiling Mona Lisa-style at the camera. She wears a deep pink silk dress adorned with smatterings of opalescent sequins (actually the dress she got married in) and a dark denim jacket.
The scene from The Thick Of It where Peter Mannion MP says ‘I’m bored of this, I’m going for a Twix’, but the last word is patched with ‘twink’
They want you to think ‘protest’ only looks like marches and Molotov cocktails because that’s merely thousands of people in one place at one time whom they can crush with force. They love that. They can’t crush a protest that’s a billion people over a dozen generations feeding friends and neighbours, creating truthful and unapologetic art, being the safe person someone knows they can unmask with, ‘letting the soft animal of your body love what it loves’, having joyously affirming sex, or making yourself quietly kinder and softer year after year. They hate that. Both protests have value. But one is ours.
A laptop open in a car with a small screen in the dash showing the standard Mac System Settings. Outside we see the mouth of the River Tay, and Broughty Ferry castle, a squarish, boxy building.
Two enamel pins stuck to the lapel of a berry coloured corduroy jacket. One reads ‘TERFs suck’ and the other ‘queer joy’ with a smiling cartoon character underneath spreading its arms, with joyous squidgy ribbons of colour emanating from it.
White text on a blue sky with bubbles floating across it which reads “If you feel defeated, we've already lost. Instead, feel joy. Pride 2025”
A bee with bulging pollen sacks feeds upside down from tiny blue flowers
A screengrab of a conversation between me and a customer support representative: Them: Apologies, however, your warranty has expired. And, sadly, we cannot send you a replacement marker. Me: I appreciate the clarity. I guess my first step is to take some legal advice under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, as a premium stylus failing after less than two years does't mesh with my conception of 'acceptable quality’. Them: Oh, of course! Please allow me a moment to consult this with my superior and I will be right back! Please allow me a few minutes. Me: I appreciate it, thank you, Jan. :) Then: Thank you very much for your patience. Indeed, I can send you a free replacement.
You have been taught that joy, pleasure, silliness are only frivolous; transactionally granted after you have Produced Meted out in meagre amounts (dollop (thank you), dollop (yum-yum), dollop (thank you)) But, my love, Joy is the thing It’s the point And joy is angry Joy is defiant Joy is uranium-powerful Joy is how we win You have been taught that joy is frivolous But be a bad student Skip that class Skip!
A crowd of perhaps a couple of hundred people, many with trans and other queer flags, gathered in an open grass square beside the river Tay
Selfie in warm sun in my garden. I’m doing a cheeky expression, throwing a ✌🏻 sign, and I’m wearing subtle but noticeable metallic eyeshadow, smudgy eyeliner and mascara
Several different kinds of jam, in mismatched jars, some with handwritten labels, stacked on a kitchen counter, backlit with bright light to make them glow.
The original eight coloured Pride flag, striped, from top to bottom, as pink, red, orange, yellow, green, turquoise, indigo and violet.
Me standing in a garden, smiling, wearing a dark green t-shirt which features the following design: a mother and baby possum, where the baby is tucked into the mother’s side, and the mother is hissing at an unseen threat. The baby is coloured in the pink white and blue of the trans flag, and the two creatures at encircled by the words ‘protect trans youth’.
WhatsApp conversation between a friend and me: Friend: Everything going on in the world is terrifying me right now! Me: If it didn't, you wouldn't be paying attention Friend: I feel extremely pessimistic Me: l agree. My solution, fwiw, is not to be deaf to the problems facing us, but not to overlook the good things too - eg, AfD not winning the elections in Germany. That, and focussing on community building and resilience. Friend: Grassroots action I need to get involved Me: Grassroots action is definitely a powerful and good thing, but also It doesn't HAVE to be as fight-ey and formal as that, i don't think I think SOLELY the act of making connections and sharing and inducing joy is a deeply revolutionary act We need to connect to our communities for strength, for love, for hope, and to build the resilience we need and fight the dread and despair the cunts want to make us feel. And sure, there can be practical outputs from this: if you build a network then community organising can be much simpler if you can just broadcast to the network, but also, doing it JUST so that you can feel loved and share love and joy and silliness and bread and wine and everything else? That's still a win. Maybe the biggest win.
A packet of crisps / potato chips which has a flash that reads ‘Now made with 25% recycled plastic’. It probably refers to the bag. Probably.
Me standing in the street glancing innocently off to the side, beside a poster as tall as I am for the Luca Guadagnino’s film Queer.
A child’s drawing of a flower, tattooed on my upper right arm. The original is a chalk drawing, so there’s a quality of that in the rough lines. The head of the flower is a classic cloud shape with a circle in the middle, but the stalk is the clever part: it’s a vertical line with a zig-zag all the way down, going from left to right, forming long triangular leaves on l alternating sides. There are two leaves on the right of the stalk and one on the left.
A closeup of my right forearm, with my hand in my jeans pocket, showing three line drawings of cartoon raccoons arranged and overlapping each other, tattooed in black ink. The design is detailed in a later picture here!
A poster for ‘Footballers Unfiltered’ in Leicester Square in London. It shows the host, Joe Hart, holding a football and smiling. The weather is grey and overcast.
New Year Prayer If we've met (or haven't yet) I hope next year Brings laughter, beer, Friends and lovers. Peace! Joy! Cash! So recommit: Let's fuck the fash.
Selfie¹ where I’m making a shocked expression and holding both hands up, over the lower part of my face, palms towards myself, fingers spread wide. I’m wearing an intense blue nail varnish. ¹ Triggered with a remote control on a five second timer; still technically a selfie 😉
A selfie in warm black and white. The background is l most totally dark, and I’m lit by a circle of light with a soft diffuse edge which creates a vignette, giving the impression of me being almost like a bust, floating in space.
A small blue pill held on my outstretched palm
The dock on my desk with no devices on it. The base is a cone with the top chopped off; there’s an angled MagSafe pad at the front, and an Apple Watch pad sticking out the back.
Today is International Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day founded 25 years ago in response to the murders of Rita Hester and Chanelle Pickett, to draw attention to the continued and disproportionate violence trans people face. If this is news to you, search for ‘statistics on transgender violence’ to see how it has only gotten worse over the last quarter of a century. All the trans people I know are struggling in the face of rising transphobia, and most have shared that the struggle is often too hard. Transphobia doesn’t just kill people directly. Today, remember the trans, non-binary and gender non-conforming people we’ve lost, and tell the folks we’re still lucky enough to have that you love them. Do it now.
Selfie in golden morning sun, wearing squarish sunglasses with thick clear plastic rims, a heavy herringbone overcoat with the collar turned up, and a knotted grey-black scarf.
A small bisque-fired cup with a little ledge sticking out of one side of it, sitting on an open palm
A woman performing in a dark venue at night. She’s middle-aged, white, and has grey-brown curly shoulder-length hair and glasses. She has an electric guitar strung over her shoulder which has a trans flag sticker on it, and there’s a red neon ‘C’ (which represents the venue, but I like that her name is Carrie!) on the wall behind her. In this shot she’s gripping the mic with both hands, her eyes are closed and she’s singing passionately.
A little poem handwritten in white on a saccharine background of pink clouds with a rainbow. It reads: If we’ve met Or haven’t yet I hope next year Brings laughter, beer, Friends and lovers, Peace, joy, cash. So. Recommit: Let’s fuck the fash. love & light Chris x
My cargo bike loaded up with the stuff described, parked at the edge of a path, with trees in the background.