(Sort of) Middle-Aged, (Sort of) Middle-Class, Trans Women Day of Talking to Katy 3CR did a remarkable job getting their Trans Day of Audibility programming online by the next morning. You can find my contribution to it at the above link or, for convenience: Download I haven't so enjoyed a creative collaboration with lovely people in a long time. This was a delight. The lovely people in question…
New Year's Day 2026 Katy Swain Mon, 01/05/2026 - 14:53 The Capital City Trail : My Everest. Well, maybe Everest is overstating it, but it is quite uppy-downy, and at 29km in length is quite a lot to ask of a lady of exponentially advancing years. Image Source: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=15/-37.79898/145.00494 © OpenStreetMap contributors My first assault from Federation Square to Victoria…
Gender Euphoria Monday: One Serve of Bread Please, Hold the Roses The brilliant, beautiful, indefatigable, and legendary (and I am in no way implying she's old) Cait Glasson recently floated an idea that I think touches on something very important: Here's your prep work: think of something in your weekend that gave you gender euphoria. Anything. Whatever made you glad you are who you are, whatever…
Learn to Love Classic Doctor Who the Katy Way™ [Spoilers ahead, obviously.] I was asked recently how somebody familiar with 21st century Doctor Who might best approach the 20th century back catalogue. A comprehensive answer to this is more a book than a blog post. The short answer is: not chronologically. The 1960s black and white stories were produced on a treadmill of forty-odd episodes a year,…
Destroying Your Country, Part 2: Poverty is Wealth In the first part of this series , I looked at how the Trump administration's blend of ignorance and unscrupulousness has led them to consider a cryptocurrency stockpile as a win-win for both scammers and the public being scammed alike. Or perhaps they're being a bit disingenuous there. Here I go on to look at how their profound misunderstanding…
The Terrifying Ordinariness of Queer People A while ago my online chum Miriam, whom I have officially dubbed The Sunniest Girl on the Internet™ (because she is), posted this : my cohort of trans girls, the girls who transitioned about a year before or after i did, give or take, all seem to be looking, and i dont mean this disparagingly at all, so profoundly normal. just regular women. half of them…
How to Pay for Destroying Your Country [Note: this post suffers from my slow writing speed, and since doing the bulk of the writing of it, has been overtaken by events. I will catch up in subsequent posts.] I've been trying to avoid reading too much on the Trump administration's governance by imperial fiat, in an effort to preserve some measure of mental health. In ordinary times I've an…
The Logic of Total Culture War You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views, which can be uncomfortable if you happen to be one of the facts that needs altering. - The Doctor, the Face of Evil . In many countries which have enjoyed (if that is quite the word) half a century of…
Learned uselessness Katy Swain Sat, 12/28/2024 - 21:09 Damn it! Every other time I have curry for dinner I end up with a dollop of yoghurt in my lap. This was a new skirt. Well, not new, but new for me. I tried paper towel, but the skirt is more absorbent, so I was just working it in, then I tried a damp sponge. Now I'm just cold and damp in the groinal region, and have no idea whether I've done…
Katy's Krismas Kacophony Back in a past life, I found myself in the habit of making little video mixtapes to listen to and glance at while doing jigsaw puzzles and overeating at Christmas, or to fill in embarrassing conversational gaps when entertaining visitors. These would run to anywhere up to 70-some videos, which I'd pull from various online video sharing platforms (multiple services are…