Katherine Alejandra Cross

@quinnae.com

14061 Followers 442 Following

Sociologist, Mistress of Information Systems || Techy TransLatina Ph.D Candidate @UW iSchool || The Saturday Paper VG Columnist || Contributing Editor Liberal Currents ||📍Seattle || 🏳️‍⚧️ || Author of LOG OFF; order here! https://www.littlepuss.net/shop

An X-Files "I Want to Believe" poster but with Ms. Met's head crudely photoshopped over the UFO.
A still from a TV program of a young man in a brown dress shirt, speaking, and subtitled "Just when Spain is gonna teach Argentina a lesson in football."
I’ve shared this theory with a friend and colleague who supports England. “JINX NO JINX JER,” they text-shouted at me. I don’t think that by writing this, though, I can jinx England. If I could, I would, mind you. I’m writing this in a Kylian Mbappé jersey. I want England to fall. As proved by IShowSpeed, though, you can’t jinx a team you actually want to see lose.
James Bond getting electrocuted by supervillain Gustav Graves, Bond gritting his teeth while a speech bubble point to him, putting Faine's words in his mouth. From Die Another Day (2002)
A quote post of my recent Graham Platner essay by Anne Norton which reads: ‬ "Why I so dislike liberals: rule bound, censorious, gleefully repressive, unforgiving, elitist, Puritans. I’d vote for Platner before I’d align myself with that." The pull quote from my essay, to which she's responding so critically, says the following: "They want desperately to believe that the burly white man cosplaying as a working class Ron Swanson, a bit rude, crude, and something of a bad boy, is the formula for winning back America, because it validates everything they prefer to be true."
Anonymised skeet saying "Beg pardon. Dems/liberals are not the left of anything except capitalism."
A photo of TMobile Park after the Mariners won.
Skeet reading "DSA has won a handful of national elections and the democratic party establishment are already providing cover for the far right to start cracking down on the left"
"To The Unknown Joke" memorial marker from a Monty Python skit.
Manny Torres, as played by Diego Calva, in Babylon (2022) trudging up a hill to help deliver the iconic set piece that starts this rollicking, dark gritty reboot of Singin' in the Rain. Moar like singin' in the Poop amirite? (I actually love this movie, don't @ me).
"When we finally got intimate, I was lying my head on his chest and like the well informed leftist I am but the swooning young woman I was, I asked him point blank: "Uhhh omg crazy question but is that a totenkopf tattooed on your chest? Hahahah no worries if not lol." I remember this plain as day. He sighed and put a hand to his forehead and pushed his hair back and said "Yeah," He explained he didn't know what it was when he was younger but his leader of whatever military variety was big into WW2 history and suggested he and his team all get it. My obvious response was "wow omg that's like so so crazy lol why didn't you get it fucking removed!?" He provided what at the time was a pretty convincing explanation. That when he finally returned from war and private contracting and had settled into leftist ideology, he kept it as a reminder that the USA and by extension himself were the bad guys. A blood brand of sorts that would serve as a constant reminder of his growth and change, but a mark he would always carry.
Me touching grass in SF's Washington Square Park.
I'm Doing My Part gif from Starship Troopers.
Hannibal Buress "Hahahaha this sucks, man" meme.
Google's scoreboard for Game 2 of the NBA Finals showing the Knicks over the Spurs 105 to 104.
I predicted, in sketching an anti-Sikh panic, that political parties would cave to pressure “Enthusiastically in Reform’s case, awkwardly and abjectly in Labour’s.” Just as I was finalising edits to this article, Andy Burnham, currently the party's preferred successor to Starmer, was asked about removing the exemption that allows Sikhs to carry small ceremonial knives. “I think it needs to be looked at” the supposedly centre-left alternative replied. He even managed the “awkwardly and abjectly” part, waffling about how forcing a minority to choose between a religious duty and leaving their homes would have to be done “carefully.”
Dismissing the 1795 French constitution as a “schoolboy’s exercise,” he lays out a series of reasons that this constitution does not, in the parlance of our time, have the mandate of heaven. He does so in a conveniently numbered list. For instance, point 6 (78). The more that is written, the weaker is the institution, the reason being clear. Laws are only declarations of rights, and rights are not declared except when they are attacked, so that the multiplicity of written constitutional laws shows only the multiplicity of conflicts and the danger of destruction. This is why the most vigorous political system in the ancient world was that of Sparta, in which nothing was written. These arguments seem to reach back to the antiquity he fetishizes, but the call to RETVRN here is as contemporary as that very reference. Save for a few rhetorical flourishes, his essay could easily be the script to a YouTube video. In the breezily worshipful sophistry of his never-happened history, we see the fundamental elements of a deeply contemporary obsession: the hatred of democracy. For a man who so despised the 18th Century, he was deeply embedded in the logics of the future it sired. In the centuries since, Fortune has rolled her dice and found GREAT REPUBLIC on her d6 loot table many times. Would that this were enough to dispose of the likes of Maistre; but his progeny have a vote too, for they dearly wish to ensure no one else will, ever again. Even their list of enemies comes, more or less, direct from Maistre and this, too, is strikingly current. Maistre saw himself as the enemy of an eclectic cast of characters he called ‘la secte’ in his native French; la secte was devoted to the destruction of his beloved world order, dominated by the beautifully irrational mystery of the Church and Crown, which could keep the great unwashed in their place. Who was la secte? See if you find a familiar thread in the litany I recite from Berlin’s lecture: “Jansenists and Calvinists, and…
Maistre loved nothing so much as the Executioner, save perhaps God Himself, whose perfected representative—the “sword of justice [that] has no scabbard”—is this bloody-handed man. To pretend otherwise was hypocrisy, and to protest for fear of the innocent falling beneath his axe or being broken upon his wheel was to miss a fundamental truth: all innocents die, it cannot be helped. And, in any case, “a man punished for a crime he has not committed has actually merited it by another completely unknown crime,” (193). Two hundred years later, a gaggle of anonymous internet users would coin the word “moralfag,” defined by DayumNiggaDude on Urban Dictionary as someone who joined 4chan and “is typically this relatively new member that think [sic] he is part of the community but shit his pants when he gets out of his safe space.” Wiktionary defines it a little more soberly as a pejorative for “A person who expresses moral disapproval or moral opinions.” The term took off as 4chan turned on its famous Operation: Chanology protests against the Church of Scientology, which would forever associate the V for Vendetta Guy Fawkes mask with a certain flavour of dipshit edgelord protester. But the original protesters, organizing on 4chan, at least had an ethos. And that was a problem. Morality was a cloak, a mere signal of one’s pretense to virtue that masked the true will-to-power beneath. This is the red thread that connects a stalwart Catholic monarchist to a gaggle of miserable trolls who would move into the heart of government. A man who wanted to repeal the 18th Century became the philosophical father of a discrete byproduct of the 21st. Joseph de Maistre would hate his children, and that’s a fitting epitaph for him.
AL West standings, showing the Mariners at the top with a .500 win/loss percentage.
What the plain text suggests here is that even though—by dint of their own ruling!—transgender men are legally women, they cannot participate in women’s sports if they look too manly or have taken testosterone. So trans women must be excluded from large swathes of society because they are supposedly men, and trans men must be similarly excluded because they are trans. Paragraph 221 of the ruling reiterates this idea, once again saying that discrimination is “proportionate” where a “reasonable objection” is made to their presence “because the gender reassignment process has given them a masculine appearance.” Suddenly, gendered appearance matters a great deal for defining gender, in a way that relies on wholly subjective judgment. Far from introducing clarity, this ruling suggests that—by law—transgender men in Britain are two sexes at once: whichever one circumscribes their rights the most will be the legally salient one.
Baseball Conga Line from Bugs Bunny.
On Sunday night, University of Washington Police responded to the Nordheim Court Apartments, an off-campus student housing building, and found a woman stabbed to death in the laundry room. The victim, identified by officials as a 19-year-old transgender woman, was identified by the King County Medical Examiner's Office as Juniper C. Blessing on Thursday.
Most people engaged in this discourse genuinely don’t understand how the State Department policy on visa applications will actually affect trans immigrants and what we can then do to support trans immigrants. This whole discourse takes the focus away from the people most at risk of ICE which are undocumented immigrant workers. Lilith in Seattle with a 150k dollar tech job is not at high risk being detained by ICE. Believing otherwise prohibits people who are actually safe and secure from using their wealth and status to support others who do not have the same safety provided by status or wealth, whether they’re transgender, an immigrant, or both. Misleading articles and the larger panic driven information economy encourages people with financial or legal security to be scared into paralysis because they believe that any amount of opposition to the government will result in being disappeared to a concentration camp. This justifies a retreat from the world by framing it as safety, allowing one to focus on maximizing their own power and wealth to achieve security. Retreating solely into the role of the victim achieves a sort of emotional catharsis, but this also alienates you from the world and ends up doing propaganda for the enemy.
A skeet talking about the Trump Admin's bitterly anti-trans counterterrorism strategy document over a screen from V For Vendetta showing a lesbian woman sitting alone in her apartment as fascist goon squads charge in to snatch her, guns drawn. "It wasn't long till they came for me," reads the closed-caption.
A Swallowtail Mech from Lancer, which looks like a tank with four legs, slowly shifting into stealth; its pilot, a tea-drinking sniper, sits perched below it.
A disc horse bot post saying "I'm here you fuckaas bitch" over an image of a neo-Classical Revival building labelled The Hater Building.
Former Prime Minister of Australia, Paul Keating, speaking at a podium circa 1989. He was famous for inveighing against the "godawful cultural cringe" of his fellow Australians who he regarded as too ashamed of their Australianness against American and British cultural hegemony. I believe he would like Bluey. Do not fact check me on this.
But the structure of Twitter and the way it rewards a constant escalation of emotion makes it exceedingly difficult to just back down, to say, “I thought I was doing the right thing, but I hurt somebody very badly in the process.” Many of those who criticized “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter” on the grounds that it was harmful operated with the absolute best of intentions. I have talked to many of them at great length. I believe them when they say that they earnestly thought the story was a false front for bad actors, because being trans on the internet turns your alarm sensors all the way up. (It’s not like the internet isn’t teeming with awful people hiding in plain sight. Why give anyone the benefit of the doubt?) I believe the story’s detractors were hurt by the title or some of the content or the very idea of the story. I believe they truly feel that trans stories should only be written by trans people and that Fall should have had to out herself before publishing. I believe they believe — still — that they did the right thing. They still destroyed a woman’s life.
"When gambling was the craze of the fashionable world, when ladies filled their homes with card parties which they advertised in the papers and men sat up until dawn at Brooks' betting huge sums on the turn of a card or in meaningless wagers about tomorrow's rain or next week's opera singer, when fortunes were easily lost and debt was a normal condition, how did such men, as [government] ministers, adapt themselves to the unforgiving figures of supply bills and tax rates and national debt? Noble circumstances did not nurture realism in government.
A still from Network (1976), a tuxedoed Frank Hackett slumped in his chair saying "We need that Saudi money bad" as Diana Christensen, wearing a white ballroom dress, looks on like an angel of death.
Why would you say something so controversial yet so brave?
Mr. Incredible meme; first bright and sunny panel, Me Checking the Mariners Score. Because they won! We're .500! Mid Team Mid Team Mid Team! Second panel, bleak, desolated face: Me when I check on the Mets. The less said the better.
Google alert saying the Mets have a 69% chance of defeating the Rockies.
"Now That's What I Call Praxis" in the style of Now That's What I Call Music album cover.
Red Sox vs. Orioles score showing a final tally of 17 to 1.
tweet from Lauren: "I’m not falling for that hot take that’s clearly someone with a fetish for getting yelled at I refuse to participate in that kind of perversion"
Glamour shot of the protagonist from Divergent (2014). I don't know, I think she's a divergent? They went pretty fast, which is pretty turbo. Look, this is funny, okay. Don't expect me to remember every lore detail from Temu Hunger Games.
Still from Sailor Moon depicting an "embarrassing" but actually adorable photo of Sailor Mercury being surprised by the camera as she's eating a burger.
A panel of a Mattie Lubchansky comic where her self-insert avatar is glowing and righteously ascending to heaven as she pronounces "I'M NORMAL."
Me turned away from the camera, my hair done up in a red scrunchie that perfectly matches the red rosette I'm wearing.
Two lit red signs in a dim bar that say DRINK BOOZE.
Anonymous skeet calling everyone opposed to or critical of AI a mediocre creative or scholar or professional.
Photo of my copies of Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower and The March of Folly.
Zhang Ziyi, splendidly dressed, leaning moodily against a wall, holding a phone receiver away from her face, (From "2046")
Lemon (noted Thomas the Tank Engine fan) from "Bullet Train" looking serious as a car crash with a speech bubble at the bottom of the image.
Return of the King projected on a movie screen, Eowyn saying "I am no man."
Grant Gustin peace sign over grave meme, with Gustin's face replaced by the EU flag, and the grave marked with the Fidesz party's logo.
The flight deck of the USS John P. Murtha viewed from a distance, aft of the ship, the golden light of a California sunset draping its starboard side.
The Integrity capsule surrounded by floatation devices and Navy divers, with three astronauts on the "front porch" liferaft alongside the capsule.
Capsule in the water, three parachutes released and floating off.
Integrity capsule over the Pacific with three parachutes cleanly deployed.
Last shot from the Integrity capsule as it begins to hit Earth's atmosphere, flame beginning to wreath the capsule.
Still from Moonraker (1979) with Q saying "I think he's attempting re-entry, sir" in Mission Control while the big screen displays Bond and Dr. Goodhead having weightless extreme cuddles behind him.
View from Integrity capsule of Artemis II looking out onto Earth, filling the lower end of the window as it gets larger and larger.
European Space Agency Control Centre in the Netherlands, showing a lot of people looking at computer screens.
Chrisjen Avasarala from The Expanse, grinning sarcastically and dressed to kill, with a speech bubble photoshopped under her.