February production diary: the fascist creep, and some absolute bangers (Patreon)

Over the past few months, "the gender identity debate" has broken into the Canadian mainstream for the first time. Canada's nascent gender-critical movement is not purely a pseudo-feminist one or a Christian one – instead, it's a bewildering coalition of feminists, edgy populists, the Christian right, Muslim organizations, and honest-to-god neo-Nazis. People who seem like they should have little in common are suddenly finding a lot of common ground in opposing us.

Though trans-exclusionary radical feminists started the gender-critical wave, they're still the faction that leaves me most confused. The (garbage, misguided) ideology has roots in legitimate feminism – how was it possible for the right-wing capture them so completely that the Conservative Party of Canada is banking on it winning them an election? 

My next video, The Feminist to Far-Right Pipeline, is about how the right hijacked radical feminism and fashioned the gender-critical movement into a funnel into austerity economics, anti-immigrant sentiment, and white supremacist conspiracy theory.

It'll be out sometime next month - been held up due to another project in the works + health issues but we're back, baby, and better than ever!

"Lily Recommends Some Stuff" (please suggest a better name for this segment):

I have two BANGERS for you this month.

Perfect Tides: Station to Station

A couple years ago, I designated myself the Personal Champion of an indie game called Perfect Tides. I really liked it and wanted others to give it a chance! Now, a sequel is in the works, and the demo came out today, and it blows the first game out of the water.

This is what many of you look like this very second... coincidence?!

Perfect Tides was a classic point-and-click adventure game set in the  early 2000s. You follow teenager Mara over one school year as she tries  to get her anger under control, develop her craft as a writer, and  build (tenuous, but) deep bonds with the people  around her. It was as clunky you'd expect from a classic  point-and-click, but nonetheless something special by way of its masterful prose and character-building. I cried a lot!

Station to Station finds Mara a few years later, as a college student studying writing in Da Big Apple, Baby. It’s a full-on “writing  undergrad” social sim: you catalog ideas in your flip phone, then mash  them together to like, write papers, or bullshit  your boss. You experiment with being a grown-up, and success and  failure both feel deeply cathartic. The looks and sounds lovely, the  world is overflowing with possibility, and even from the demo, I can tell it’s leading me some emotionally devastating places.

I assume this is a 1:1 recreation of getting a bachelor’s degree. Guess I didn’t need real university after all, huh, mom?! (Kidding, my mom is very supportive of my choices, and also she’s reading this right now 👋)

The demo’s free and 1 hour long. You should play it! (Note: Steam says it can’t run on newer MacOS, but it totally does.)

The Red Shoes

Ballet has always been something I've admired, but I've never really  "gotten it" in the way I figure real aficionados do. As with other "high  art", like classical music or opera, when people discuss the plot or  themes present in a piece, I struggle to understand  where they're getting it from.

Not so for The Red Shoes – a proper fucking movie – one of the best I've ever seen.

This movie's climactic dance sequence had me crying tears of astonishment, repeatedly saying "oh my god, oh my god" to nobody in particular. The Red Shoes makes a case for dance as a universal language, not some stuffy art form shielded from daily life, but an extension of life itself, an examination of what it means to live in a body.

The whole back half had me feeling like Danny Devito in – whoops, back to low art with this reference – that one episode of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

As a high-school-educated person with no classical background, I  never felt anything but deserving of this experience. The movie  communicates so clearly that my cluelessness re: dance doesn't matter: I  move around every day, it's all the same.

Vouch!!

Alright, that’s it for now. Thank you for reading, and for being here. Take care, folks. ❤️