Category: current events

Surf’s Up: Riding the Blogging Wave of 2020

Hello everyone and a very warm very belated Happy New Year 2020.

There has been a revival, in my milieu, of the blog as a form of communication superior to Social Media and particularly twitter. Kickstarted by Gordon White’s Blog post on the subject, but he himself refers to an already building chatter and hubbub over the form. Nevertheless many friends have took it as a call to arms, and I would like to do the same.

What I will say is that All of us who us twitter are perhaps most keenly aware that it is a terrible place, but we love it so. I think the enlightened aptitude to twitter is that it is entertainment, and not the best place to convey knowledge.

Therefore a return to the BLOG! I started returning to the Blog last year. This Blog had lain dormant since 2016 and was resurrected in late 2018 by my posting and updating a post from my old tumblr blog:

Gender in the Mushroom Kingdom

I could easily list every post I wrote in 2019 here, since I was not as prolific as some. But I am nevertheless mostly pleased with my output. I am proud of every piece I wrote here and few as they were they represent a starting point. I can hope to beat my record in 2020.

I think special note should go to my pride piece:

Pride Sucks now, and that’s why we should all go to Pride

And to my short story which I started publishing in the manner of the old serial, chapter by chapter. 6 chapters in total, and yet many to come:

Daily Ritual

All in all that makes for (…calculating…) 10 posts in 2019. So that’s the number to beat. And this post will count as #1, despite it’s meta nature. Writing is writing.

I’ve been wanting to post something, anything, to start surfing on this wave of Blogs. Saturday is my writing day, and devoid of a better idea last Saturday I started writing a post reviewing every movie I saw last December (13, a personal record) and I got 2000 words in, with 6 movies to go before I just couldn’t go any longer. This week, I wasn’t even going to write, since I am presently in the middle of a job hunt and decided to dedicate my writing time to teaching myself the Ruby programming language instead.

Nevertheless I could not bear to allow the whole month of January to pass without an update. Once my employment situation is sorted, believe it or not, I believe I should have MORE time to write, not less. Certainly I shall be a lot less stressed. In the meantime, I hope this little update helps to keep me in your mind, and to build expectation for things to come, and for those new followers that arrived with the wave, I hope you’ll enjoy a look back through the archives. Do it know whilst it’s still possible to catch up in a weekend. Who knows how difficult it will be by 2021.

Finally, I will share a ritual I’ve roped some of my twitter followers to contribute to:

It’s a sort of combination of Law of Attraction / Lynne McTaggart Intention tech. Feel free to contribute if you’re keen. Remember, the sooner I can stop looking for work, the sooner I can free up at least my weekends to write.

That’s it for now, Happy Surfing Everyone!

Gender in the Mushroom Kingdom

This article was written in 2015 (whew, that was a while ago huh) and posted on my tumblr, which has since been abandoned. Since gender on the mushroom kingdom has become a hot topic as of late, I figure it was time to repost and revisit it.

 

First, the original article:

The inhabitants of the mushroom kingdom, widely known as Toads, are indeed monosexed. They all have the same sexual characteristics and reproduce asexually, like fungi. This does not mean they are monogendered, they may have been at one point, but perhaps by the influence of other creatures have developed a concept of gender, as demonstrated by several toads who take on human genders, such as:

image

Toadette, who takes on a female gender. And uses she/her pronouns. And

image

Toadsworth, who takes on a male gender and uses he/him pronouns.

Most toads are genderless and are often confused for male.

image

Possibly because in English they use male pronouns as the default. It is currently unknown if Toads have their own language and what they use for pronouns, or if they have adopted pronouns for adopted and new genders.

It is indeed possible for toads to take on completely different genders than humans take, including genders exclusive to Mushroom society.

To contrast, consider the Dwarfs of Discworld, who are polysexed and reproduce sexually, however are monogendered and apparently lack secondary sex characteristics that would help them differentiate. Indeed, they all use he/him pronouns and traditional male monikers such as King and foreman. More research is necessary to ascertain how this relates to their own language and it’s attitude towards gender.

In short, Toads are monosexed, but polygendered, however, often genderles. Whereas Discworld dwarfs are polysexed, but monogendered.

ETA (Apr 2016): This Article implies a distinction between sex and gender that the author now understands is a harmful concept since, at least in humans, sex and gender are social constructs that denote the same thing.

 

ETA Jan 2019:

So now, onto this week’s news. As mentioned above, there’s a new powerup that has been causing a stir in the mushroom kingdom gender discourse for months now, I’m talking of course about the super crown.

Long thought to be a gender transformation item, the revelation that it can only be used by Toadette, reveals more details about the nature of the item. It is not a gender or sex change item, it is a species change item. It transforms toads into humans.

This is actually good news for Luigi (Luigiella? Lugiette? Gina? She hasn’t picked a name yet). As many have pointed out, she doesn’t need the super crown to be a girl, she’s already human, the rest is presentation and hormones should she want them.

But what about other Toads, why cannot they wield the crown? Maybe there’s something special about Toadette, but being a fungal person, how different can she be from other Toads? I believe the answer lies indeed in her chosen gender. As far as I know she’s the only playable character in this game who identifies as a female toad. It is untestable whether another toad woman, such as Tayce T. from paper mario would undergo a transformation should she wear a crown.

The Super Crown is a magical item, and magic is as much inside us as it is outside. Princess Toadstool, the eternal regent of the Toad People, is someone nearly every girl in the mushroom kingdom would have grown up looking up to. Whereas Toads who opt for a more male identity might instead look up to Mario, the kingdom’s hero. So the super crown would allow female toads to become their ideal. Who’s to say there isn’t a super cap out there that could turn Toad into Mariotti?

super mario hat

We can only wonder.