sparrowsion

Celeste (rant)

2026-04-02T17:01:41Z

I'm handing in my trans card because I loathe Celeste.

I just had another go, after being assured that it "will let you get away with a lot if you ask it to". So I poked at all the options I could find (no "sliders and stuff" that I was told to expect) and …

Yeah, I think I got further than on the Switch (which I'm pretty sure doesn't have any of these options). But it's basically "you only need to operate three controls with precision timing at once instead of four" and "you don't have to keep moving over half the places you would otherwise". It makes it merely brutally hard instead of nearly impossibly hard.

The thing is, I now realise it's not just me being rubbish at this kind of game. I've watched far more experienced gamers be marmalised by Celeste in the same kind of way.

The entire point of the game is to be insanely difficult. The designer wants you to die, and die, and die, and make no progress.

It's like feeding coins into a slot machine, except you're pouring in your time and effort and psychic damage, and maybe occasionally getting a dopamine hit of a reward if you get lucky (and have a working endocrine system, unlike me) And somebody is satisfied at the toll it's taking on me.

"Oh, it's a powerful trans allegory." I don't fucking care. I'm living a trans life with trans friends and partners. I don't need a fucking allegory to tell me about the ones who don't make it. Maybe the cis audience does, but then maybe make it a more playable game?

Like, one where people don't give up because it's so impossibly hard before they've even figured out what they're supposed to be doing? Like one that didn't have game graphics from the last millennium? (Oh, sorry, retro pixel art. Right) Or unintuitive coyote physics? Or that wasn't set up with a near explicit framework of the creator wanting you to experience pain?

That's not my idea of fun.

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New Year, New Rant

2026-01-04T14:04:47Z

It's sometimes very hard for me to be both a car owner and nonbinary. Because of the way the automotive industry and everything around it is still using ancient contact databases which won't record my title correctly (I assume).

My current insurance is under an incorrect name—previously I was paying over the odds to have it recorded correctly.

I'm interested in buying a new EV, and of four manufacturers I've gone to for for a "contact me when you actually release this thing" three of them have been unable to record my full name correctly, and two have been unable to record it correctly at all because they require a big-5 title. This includes the one I'm currently driving a petrol model from, who've had problems with me in the past on service histories. And that's a shame, because on paper that one ticks a lot of boxes, and I've been driving this one 9 years, so I obviously rate the manufacturer.

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A Long-expected Update

2025-12-27T13:21:48Z

A year and a day ago I wrote:

I don't know where the coming year is taking me, other than geographically. Hell, I'm not even sure how the next month is going to play out.

Well, yeah.

The following month saw me starting a long-distance relationship with A— in Poland, and B—, the friend I had that surprise Christmas dinner with and a mall rampage a few days later. We suspected that relationship might be short-lived given my imminent move, but, no.

She's asleep upstairs right now, having had Christmas dinner with me at my parents'.

Because she's been made homeless twice in that last year because of mental health issues and suicidal intent, and in September washed up on my doorstep. We never intended this to be a co-habiting relationship—in fact, it's a terrible idea for both of us, for different reasons. So right now I'm acting more as carer than partner while we try and find a way to get her living independently, and she is occupying what was supposed to be my study.

Fortunately, I got the fitted bookshelves and secondary desk installed just before. Unfortunately, I now have no loft access. And most of my plans for moving in are four months behind and slipping.

Elsewhere in the year, I met up with A— offline with some mutual friends in Amsterdam in March, and then she came over here in November and there was a partial reunion in York. Both times were plagued by transport planning cock-ups, but the actual travel turned out OK. She's struggling with her own mental demons, and my (new) therapist is asking if I'm capable of believing I'm loved if it doesn't come with a measure of difficulty.

It's been a year where every time I've stopped to think "I need to post an update to DW, or a letter or email to a friend" it's been followed by the thought "But so much has happened, and I don't know where to start." So have this splodge as some kind of idea. If you want more reliable ongoing proof of my existence, my fedi account has migrated to the instance A— is on, because both lgbt.io and queer.party closed down in the last five months, and my other fallback at lgbtqia.space started geoblocking UK access because of the Online Safety Act.

So here's to 2026. May it be less chaotic and stressful. (The bar is so low it needs excavating)

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Koki Arrowsmith c. 2010 -- 16/04/2025

2025-04-19T09:53:45Z

I thought Koki had coped with the upheaval of packing (I mostly managed to keep her shut in the kitchen, where her food, water and litter tray usually lived) and moving. She was sleeping the sleep of the elderly, as she has been most of the past 18 months. In that time, managing her health has been a balancing act between failing kidneys, high blood pressure, and in the last few months hyperthyroidism. She'd been losing weight, and was struggling to keep the kidney health food down, and the vet suggested forgoing that it it meant she would eat and put some weight on.

Well, she ate, but not enough to put any weight on. In fact, she continued to lose it dramatically. And was starting to get obviously dehydrated too. Then in the last week she went from "standing in the litter tray is good enough (doesn't matter where anything goes)" to "being in the same room as the litter tray counts" to "walking in the direction of the litter tray is all I can manage". She was still poking around, trying to map a house of shifting boxes. And she'd been out in the garden a few times, because I've got a garden she could do that in here.

But.

Wednesday morning, I took her to the vet, in the hope that maybe it was just a case of her needing some IV hydration. I wasn't confident. The vet clearly wasn't either, and offered to run blood tests, to try and see if there was anything underlying going on.

It was her kidneys. I don't know whether it was the stress of the move, or shifting her diet, or a combination, but in the months since the hyperthyroidism diagnosis she'd gone from early stage kidney failure to minimal renal function. They'd had to sedate her to draw the bloods, because she was always fesity, so I gave the instruction not to bring her round.

I'll never know how old she was. Officially she was 14, but that's only because we were told that she was a senior cat and therefore 7 when we got her. I could believe she was as old as 12 then; the truth is probably somewhere in between.

It's been a really shitty week.

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Slouching Away From Bethlehem #7

2025-04-18T14:45:33Z

It happened.
( long )
So, if you're moving in South Wales, big recommendation for Carters for removals, but only if you're doing your own packing.

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Fediverse update

2025-03-21T12:44:55Z

(a) I now have a pixelfed account at https://pix.lgbt/@sparrowsion

(b) queer.party has been having some extreme difficulties, for currently unknown reasons, in the last week, so I've been doing a manual duplication of my main account to https://lgbt.io/@sparrowsion . Apologies for the use of a .io—that was the instance I could rapidly set up at. It might just be a back-up if queer.party comes back (it's looking a little healthier this morning)

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Slouching Away From Bethlehem #6

2025-03-16T11:59:07Z

It's been a while since I last wrote about the house move. Mainly because there's been a whole lot of nothing happening. The move before Christmas didn't happen, then neither did my third-week-in-January target, and … I found out what the problem was (by virtue of me estate agent telling me, rather than any digging on my part).

It was the local authority searches, specifically the transport department, who are running on a nominal 6–8 week response time to requests but in practice it's more like 12. Plus two for the holidays. And this is necessary because my house is within search range of the proposed town bypass, which has been "proposed" for very nearly two decades with no sign of it ever being built. And without it having any kind of impact on my house. My buyer's solicitor is a local and knows how stupid this is, but had a legal obligation to hold everything up until the paperwork came through.

Which it did a fortnight ago, and suddenly everything was back on in a rush. Mainly to get everything through before stamp duty changes at the end of March.

And that was a contributing factor to my preferred removals company having no availability. Rapidly going back to my second and third choices. I didn't have to explain why I'd been silent for three months to the one I'm going with—he immediately said "Highways department searches" because he's been in the same limbo since October.

Buyer's solicitor originally proposed a date there was no way I could do. I made a counter a few days later, but was left in limbo again because all this was on a Friday afternoon and my solicitor doesn't work on Mondays, then I had to play phone tag with everyone to try and get a date fixed. Because you can't sensibly tell your solicitor what date you want unless you've got a removal booked, but you can't book a removal until you know what day(s) you need them for … .

It's still not completely nailed down. But all the signed paperwork is with my solicitor, the removals company is booked, and I'm into my final fortnight here.

It was a lovely sunrise over the mountain today. Might be the last I see.

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Last of TVCC

2025-02-14T18:22:14Z

I don't think I wrote up about Towy Valley Camera Club winding up after 20 years of existence, over half of which I had been a member for. Anyway, this isn't that post.

For most of the years I was active in competitions, I also uploaded my entries to Flickr. But as my enthusiasm for and entries to the competitions waned (which I know I posted about somewhere back here) I stopped doing that.

Which was a bit of a shame. So here is what I did for those last few years I could be bothered.

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Le(tting) Go

2025-02-04T17:35:26Z

I have an … uncomforatble reaction to my peers and other adults engaging with Lego. It's some combination of jealousy and regret, and I've recently started to think there's some grief in there as well. And a lot of mess.

I put down my childhood Lego some time around 14. (I'm very hazy at connecting events to ages and years.) The time I had decided—been forced to, almost, for survival reasons—to go into hard-shell emotionless as much as I could. To leave childhood behind and start working on being an adult. And Lego was a child's toy then, so I had to leave it behind. I wound up the ongoing story I was telling with it, reboxed a portion for my parents to give away, and stashed the rest into deep storage.

From deep storage in my childhood home, through three of mine, until finally giving it all over to my then nephew-in-law. With hindsight, it might have been more suitably done a couple of years earlier, but it was out of my life.

So I see other grown ups enjoying Lego, and feel resentful that I no longer have what was such an important part of my childhood in my life. Surely I could just buy some for myself, like they do? Well, the mess in my head says no.

There's the part that says it's just more stuff in my life that I don't need. Especially when I'm still mostly trying to declutter. The part that says that it's wrong to be spending money on stuff that is just fun and just for me (especially now I have no income). The part that says that if I am going to do something like that, it should at least be creative and skillful, which (to my brain) building a kit from instructions isn't. And I don't have the skill to be creative, because of all the missing decades of development of a vast range of brick types I could never have imagined as a child, techniques that I never learned.

I kind of had a choice to got with the tiny trains or Lego, and went with the tiny trains because they were a more adult thing, a more skillful thing.

I … kind of regret that.

But there's really something that needs examining in that thought that Lego is a child's thing. Because it was so much a childhood thing for me. Something with a sharp, defined line with "childhood" one side, and a clear ending. For reasons.

I don't know if it's safe for me to go back there.

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In Double Digits

2025-01-03T11:56:39Z

As per this post from a year ago I am 10 today. (TL;DR for those not on the right filters—the date on my deed poll is 3rd January 2014, and I've used this as the date I officialy transitioned.)

Yesterday, went out with a friend and spent part of the day doing things we didn't get to do as teenage girls—buying cheap jewellry in charity shops, getting my ears piereced, going to Taco Bell, destroying displays in HMV …

(OK, I don't think there was a Taco Bell in this country when I was a teenager. I still remember McDonalds being a novelty.)

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There Were No Signs

2024-12-29T14:17:07Z

So nearly all the fluffs that got lined up for
⁠⁠
are ones acquired in adulthood (starting with The Owl With No Name, when I was 26 or so). Nearly all the childhood ones I still have are in a large storage box in the top of the wardrobe. (Would/will be in the loft in a house with accesible loft storage and not capacious built-in wardrobes.)

The exception is Wendy, the yellow bear, who was my very first. There are pictures (or maybe were, my mum destroyed a lot of baby photos of me for reasons of not wanting to have pictures of barely-clothed children, even her own in the house) of when I wasn't much larger than her.

At some point, when I was possibly a little too old for this kind of thing, I declared that it was unfair on her that amongst all the growing army of fluffy my grandmother was making for me (often just things made out of scraps of fur fabric) there wasn't another true bear. (There was a panda and a koala.)

And so Polo the polar bear (well, a white teddy) was created.

And I declared that Polo, my teddy bear's new best friend, was neither a boy bear nor a girl bear.

I've only just realised this.

(Polo moved on in a declutter. The panda was knitted, and I suspect unravelled. The implausibly marmalade-coloured koala, Little Ted, is in the storage box.)

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Christmases

2024-12-26T16:15:03Z

Last year, I wrote on my mh account:

I miss my found family. The crazy, creative, loving family I married into. All those people gathered round a wildly candle-lit table—step-fathers, step-sons, family friends enfolded in since childhood. Joking, being silly, being affectionate, in a way my immediate family never could.

So, yes, four years ago (or maybe five) we sat down to joyful family feast, not knowing it would be the last time. Not just with those people there, but, for me, for ever. I got lucky, finding that family, people mad enough to welcome me in. It's not something that's going to happen again. Just me, the parents, the cat, all serious polite concern for each other, but don't go digging too deeply into what's under the surface. Don't be silly. Don't do anything for fun.

It's already lonely. Then one year there's only going to be three of us. Then two. Then one, sticking a solitary meal in the microwave.

(Unless it's the cat. If she out-lives me, maybe she will find a worthy family.)

I've been feeling this all year, particularly the penultimate paragrpah, knowing I'd be moving away from here to be nearer my parents, maybe even before this Christmas.

Well, not quite, as it turned out. So I steeled myself for a Christmas of me and the cat. I wasn't ready for a microwave meal just yet, I was going to cook, but damned if I'm doing a roast dinner for one. So I planned myself a chilli, and nachos for Boxing Day leftovers.

Then somehow I found myself having a friend invite me to theirs, two valleys over, so I wouldn't be alone. And there was surprise (to everyone) Christmas dinner, and games. And not being alone. Even if just for an afternoon.

In the last few months I've discovered another kind of found-family online. It's not the same, but sometimes different is good. I don't know where the coming year is taking me, other than geographically. Hell, I'm not even sure how the next month is going to play out.

And maybe that means my predictions of Christmas futures will be wrong.

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Cyfarchion y Tymor o Lanmaddog

2024-12-22T19:59:40Z

At some point in the future, there may be another seasonal greetings from the land of tiny trains. But the world turns, and this is it for now.

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Spiritual Atheism

2024-12-21T11:18:57Z

I started calling myself a "spiritual atheist" a couple of decades and some back. Since then, I've come and gone from that label, and maybe refined what it means to me, but it's still the core of my faith, or lack of.

I do not believe in any power beyond the dispassionate mechanics of the universe and human will.

I do believe that ritual and ceremony are an integral part of what it means to be human, to exercise that will

To find meaning to our lives when the universe offers none. To let us find ourselves in the complexity of our consciousness. To bring us together in communion and community, because we are a social species.

If you honour me by including me in your ritual, I will do so with full respect. I will not believe what you believe, but I will believe in you and the importance of what you do.

In recent years, I've been calling myself Humanist. Because that's a label that doesn't (as often) need explaining. It's frequently there as a tick-box. It's close enough to who I am to say that I would want a Humanist funeral, for example. But I think it's still missing the sense of spirituality that's part of the human experience. It's so difficult to describe how I experience it. How rituals of faith simultaneously have meaning and are meaningless.

And, as I light a candle to mark the solsice at the turning point in my Secular Syncretic Season of Lights, I realise that this is something that has drifted out of my life in recent years, as I've lived in isolation, and had nobody to share even a private communion with.

I don't know what to do with this realisation. But as with the meaningful meaningless rituals, I note it, and let the dispassionate universe bring what it will into the space I give it.

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Falling in Friend

2024-12-15T12:25:49Z

Falling in friend is …
( long? probably long )

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Slouching Away From Bethlehem #5

2024-12-11T11:07:59Z

And it's out of control again.

Buyer is aiming to exchange just before Christmas and complete within two weeks.

But because of Christmas, and particularly it being midweek this year, nobody is going to be working for those two weeks. Which means no removals company availability. And all their bookings push into the New Year.

I want to push to the third week of January because of parental availability. Have been told this will be unaccepatable to buyer. But I'm already struggling to get anyone to move me the second week, and I can't actually book anyone because I don't have even a decent estimate of a completion date because I have no idea how realistic this "exchange before Christmas" is.

I don't even know what my options are at this point.

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Meme: describe yourself using 5 things ...

2024-12-06T11:59:51Z

Describe yourself using 5 things that are probably in your bag at any given moment.

Notebook
Pens
Pencil
Earphones (wired)
Heavy duty sanitary pad

Look, I have no idea why I'm still carrying the latter around seven years and three bags after any post-operative bleeding, but I am, and that's got to be some kind of description of me.

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Losing Llanmaddog

2024-12-02T16:54:17Z

Llanmaddog can't move with me. It was designed, and the baseboard cut, very specifically for my office here. There's nowhere it will fit in the new house. I'm not even taking the IKEA-hack units which provide most of the support.

It's possible that at some point I'll work out how to piece it back together somehow. Or just save one of the ends, as it's on two separate boards. Some I'm taking those, and putting them into storage. But separating the boards has meant cutting the track (because it's glued down around the join, in areas I thought weren't going to be ballasted) and that felt very final.

But before I did that, I put the buildings I had on it, where they might have been had I ever got around to landscaping it. And posed (most of) the people I had. And set up some trains. And two of the studio lights I got from camera club. (I didn't mention the camera club folding, did I? Well, it did, and it had some equipment from back in non-virtual meeting times, which was offered to members for disposal, and I found myself with a quartet of studio lights, just when I'm trying to declutter. Anyway.) And took some shots, to give an idea of what might have been, had I not overreached myself in terms of the size of the landscaping job and the reliability of tiny trains, and in particular automated systems. I think it was the failure to get the automated exchange system at the Aberefail end working that destroyed my enthusiasm for the project.

Anyway, here are some of those photos, together with three from earlier, and some of the dismantling.

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Last of Llwnny (probably)

2024-09-07T16:48:54Z

I'm going to have to tear down both Llwnny and Llanmaddog for the move. At least Llwnny got to some kind of completion.

Here, I'm just having a quick muck around with new camera and editing software to make sure I've a vague idea of what I'm doing. Yeah, it's rough, but it's minimal effort, and that's all I can manage at the moment.

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Slouching Away From Bethlehem #2

2024-09-02T10:28:44Z

Last time I wrote

Unless something implausibly screws up in a very tiny chain

ironic laughter

My buyer sent round a surveyor (who happens to be a family friend of theirs) and he got concerned that the patio is subsiding (the house is on the shoulder of a hill and the land slopes away awkwardly) and taking the drains with it. The good news is that the house itself looks fine—one of the signs of subsidence is that you can see a gap developing between the patio and the house, which has always been there as far as I'm concerned. The bad news is that it's taking some of the drains with it, and I'm not sure I can argue with that. So buyer wants to send round a civil engineering surveyor (or rather I've said I can't handle doing that—if it bothers you, you sort it out).

He's still apparently very keen on the purchase, but I'm now looking at my profit on the sale being wiped out. Which is not what I need when I'm running out of job and trying to make finances work for an early retirement.

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Slouching Away From Bethlehem #1

2024-08-22T10:20:58Z

Bethlehem is a tiny village on the other side of the valley, one of many around here with names lifted from the bible. For years, it kept its post office because of the amount of business it did at Christmas from people wanting their postcards postmarked "Bethlehem".

If there are no nasty surprises, by Christmas I will have left this valley that has been my home for the last decade and more.
( house sale and purchase )

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Hugo voting 2024

2024-07-25T12:31:23Z

I didn't cast any votes in the Hugos, despite being eligible to. Combination of the voter pack dropping too late, me being a slow (and infrequent) reader, and not much of a consumer of, well, anything. And not wanting to vote unless I had information on all candidates. I suppose on those grounds I could have voted for the short stories, but … I was uninspired by all of them and wasn't going to go through whatever the voting process was just for the sake of one category.

Anyway, maybe I'll catch up with the rest of the voter pack (I nearly made it through the novelettes, which so far have done better than the shorts in my estimation) and do some post-award reviews, with reference to the actual results.

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House viewings

2024-07-10T13:18:47Z

Went up for a long weekend at my parents, partly to see them but mainly to scope out the village near there where I'm thinking I might move.

Long story short on the village: it looks very promising.

Also arranged some house viewings. I realise it's going to be a while before I'm in a position to put a proper offer in, and what's on the market could well have changed significantly, but it's useful to see the kind of stuff that's out there, and confirm that my budget estimations are sensible.
( more for personal record keeping )

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Two (Three?) Track Tiers

2024-06-26T09:25:14Z

From the start, the table-top layout was intended to have two independent tracks, one running on top of the other. The entire top layer can be taken off, so that (a) the inside of the tunnels of the lower layer can be accessed and (b) it is easier to work with. Creating the top layer terrain has been harder than the lower layer because the track itself runs on two levels and has bridge over itself, but I've finally got there.

( ETA )

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It is Pride in the sleepy Welsh town

2024-06-18T13:26:16Z

It was Pride in town on Saturday. For the last week (or more) there have been assorted varieties of pride flags amongst the Ddreigiau Goch hanging from the flagpoles along the high street, and rainbow "love is love" themed displays in most of the shop windows. (Notably not joining in has been the healthfood shop which stocks anti-vax and transphobic literature.)

I didn't have anything to do with it, because none of the advertising explicitly linked "Pride" and "Diversity" to anything LGBTQ+, and someone I know had had trouble getting the organisers to do anything about their apparent trans-exclusionism (leading with: they'd only had six-stripe flags flying, no progress pride—a couple of progress ones did turn up, but it's still a mixture, including and eight-stripe or two and the Welsh pride ddraig goch on a six-stripe field).

This year, it might be my last here, so I thought I'd see what was happening. The promotion has been much the same. And … my instincts about it were largely correct. It's an event organised by middle-aged, middle-class white men with husbands and 2.4 dogs, whose "pride" is in having become pillars of the community while openly gay. It's a celebration of how far we've come since our youth, not a demonstration against the discrimination and increasing political hostility some of us are still facing. It's putting on a show, complete with drag acts, for the cishets, where the only political message is the implicit "Look at what you'd be missing out on without us". It's rainbow face paint for the kids, an excuse to bring in some food stalls and have a street party for the town. And of course a parade, and it is a parade, not a march.

But it is, I suppose, a beach-head, a line in the sand that says "This is all socially acceptable. You are not taking this away." And, critically, it doesn't pull the ladder up behind itself. Sure, it's not helping, but neither is it saying that this is enough.

( What I got up to )

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