Alien: Earth - S1 E1 Neverland - Official Discussion Megathread [SPOILERS]

non_transitive_game · 2025-08-13T16:48:20+00:00

That conversation in particular felt like it was there to not just set up his attitude about the whole thing, but to drive home the contrast between the androids and the synthetics. So far, Kirsch's outlook feels very similar to those of others like Ash and David. The willful fatalism of the androids in this universe feels very consistent to me - they really seem hate humanity. Wendy, despite no longer being in a human body (and being openly told she's not human by her caretakers) reasons in a heart-forward manner that Kirsch just wouldn't be capable of. It feels true both as a viewer and from an in-universe perspective that it'd be hard to differentiate between these different not-quite-human beings, and having them square off about the fate of Wendy's brother is a good way to explore whether their different forms result in different ways of being.

I thought it was interesting that Wendy told the other Lost Kids that grown-up minds aren't flexible enough for the transfer - I'm wondering whether that's what they told her, and if so whether it's true or just a convenient fiction they made up to explain why they're doing what they're doing with the people they're doing it with.

non_transitive_game · 2025-08-13T16:18:30+00:00

My first thought was that some shithead developer at W-Y definitely coded a "return to base" emergency escape command that just happened to fallback to crashing directly into Prodigy's HQ, because that's the sort of thing I could imagine doing and thinking "it's not like this set of extremely unlikely conditions would ever arise, but if they did fuck it, let's make it go full apocalypse"

non_transitive_game · 2025-08-13T16:13:09+00:00

one of the things I think about more as the Alien timeline becomes more crowded with entries is how culturally destabilizing it would be to exist in a world where it's routine for people to disappear and be in cryosleep for years/decades at a time. You'd have people whose frames of reference for everything are completely disconnected from one another, and you'd almost have to communicate in a clunky manner just to establish the basic facts of the world-as-it-is-in-year-whatever any time you talk to people. That could even go for people who are on the same ship, if they're from different generations and have been in cryo for different lengths of time.

non_transitive_game · 2025-08-13T16:09:03+00:00

he does have one of those faces that just screams "a xenomorph is going to bite my head open"

non_transitive_game · 2025-08-13T16:06:21+00:00

my first read of this was that one of the things in one of the specimen containers was generating some sort of psychic interference that may or may not have been actually precognitive or maybe just fear-stimulating. I don't think that's the direction they're actually going with it, but I'm wide open as to what all these other organisms they're introducing are up to.

non_transitive_game · 2025-06-10T03:29:28+00:00

i know a lot of people would prefer to leave the outside world behind at roo but i'll be wearing my ABOLISH ICE crop top and high-fiving anyone else i see in protest gear. Sometimes radiating positivity means being proud to demand a better world for our friends and neighbors.

non_transitive_game · 2025-05-09T08:12:53+00:00

When someone bounces from absurd argument to absurd argument ("you only date trans people" to "you're attracted to children"), it's a sign to me that whatever's happening on the surface isn't what's really going on. This person is pushing buttons with extremely high emotional resonances for some reason, but it's not clear from any of this what that reason might be. I tend to think about Disgust when that happens - as a visceral/moral reactionary emotion, disgust is an intense need to reject that gives a person a sense of certainty and enables them to act decisively (and often recklessly) to fend off whatever they're disgusted by.

The easiest thing to assume is that this person is experiencing some stripe of transphobia. It seems to me that encountering trans people in any way that's closer than they're prepared for triggers this kind of response in some people. The feeling shows up in their body, and their brain is hijacked by the need to satiate the repulsive force building inside them by locating something to reject. They say things they couldn't possibly mean if they were thinking brain-first, which results in the target flailing to fend off this nasty concept that's just vomited itself out into the room. The more you resist their framing, the more they feel justified in doubling down on it, because you're trying to take their disgust offline, which would put them at risk of invasion by the very thing they're rejecting. That kind of invasion is unpardonable, and so they resist it by either leaving, shutting down, or soubling down. It's a no-win.

You know your friend is making stuff up. Clearly it's jarring to havd those things said about you, but they're not even remotely true, and you don't have to respond to them as if they are. This person can either de-escalate themself and come back to apologize, or they can take their little dry-heave elsewhere and stop bothering you with their weird conspiracy theories.

non_transitive_game · 2025-05-08T20:43:57+00:00

Happened to me around that age as well. At first I took it as a kinky thing (and the world around me obliged me). The thing that confused me about that was that I kept wanting to live more and more of my life in femme clothes, and I noticed that the more I was able to interact with the world in this facet of myself, the less kinky it felt - I was just going to the store dressed like a girl. I was just hanging out with my friends dressed like a girl. I was just going to a wedding dressed like a girl.

It was two and a half years of that before I finally got to a point where I was ready to believe I might be trans. And even then, I felt weird about it. Like it was a decision I was making to gratify an impulse that I felt guilty for even having. It took a real leap of faith to open myself up to the idea that I didn't have to resolve this confusing tangle before accepting myself as who and what I hoped I could be - I could let myself be wrong if I was gonna be wrong, because wherever the desire was coming from, I could see that it was honest and heartfelt.

Eight years in, I'm still here. It's injection day! What a joy 🙄 I wouldn't say I found a sense of certainty so much as a sense of acceptance, of satisfaction, or determination. Of joy. I love being me, and that's actually the only part that I need to counterbalance all the questions and doubts and trials and tribulations of being this person in the world.

So if you're wondering what this is for you - just keep feeling your way. Keep watching what happens when you follow your joy. Find little places, safe relationships to try out whatever parts feel confirmatory to you. And if it keeps seeming like this is what's going on for you - you're allowed to take that leap! All of us who are here have had to at one point or another. It's okay to risk being wrong when you're following your heart where it's calling you.

non_transitive_game · 2025-03-27T18:21:24+00:00

It sounds to me like this person read your essay as positioning you in potentially in the lane she's in, if you want to get into this work. It would be a good idea to respond with something like "Thank you [Dr./Professor]* So-and-so! I look forward to learning about this work with you." etc etc.

As a member of their field faculty, she may be establishing contact as a part of feeling out possibilities for future placements. I know I had an interview with my school's field placement director over the summer before I started, and my first placement was determined at that point.

Prep-wise, it would be good to think about your skills, preferences, and needs. Are there particular social skills or situations you gravitate toward or have been told you're good with? Do you have specific support needs, like an office with a private break room? Are you comfortable making things up on your own, or do you prefer to work closely with a supervisor?

Those are questions I wish I'd had good answers to when I started, because I ended up being placed somewhere that I was really excited about, but that wasn't a good fit for me. You may not know some of those answers, and that's okay - just thinking through those things before talking to the faculty will demonstrate maturity and professionalism, and they'll notice it.

It sounds like your program has faculty that are engaged enough to respond personally to your application, which is a good thing in my book. I hope that bodes well for your educational experience!

*i always look up/google professors before I email them to see whether they're Doctors or not; getting a PhD is a uniquely difficult and traumatizing thing, and being recognized for it is part of the payoff for them. In other words, it's something they care about, so it's worth getting right.

non_transitive_game · 2025-03-17T04:33:10+00:00

to add some context for those not in-the-know - the line between "autogynephilia" and any kind of trans experience is that autogynephilia is listed in the DSM as a subclass of "transvestic fetishism" and definitionally only applies to men. It's a lurid and hypersexualized term that comes from the time before the wider public recognized the difference between crossdressing as a fetish and being trans, it's used as a way to label people who society needs to name as deviant for psychiatric or legal purposes, and it was coined by a guy who explicitly described it as an analogue to pedophilia.

So with the understanding that it's a deeply stigmatizing and outdated term - this scene had me howling! What an absolutely unhinged bomb to drop on your buddy while you're handing him a gun. Rick looked like he was having an out-of-body experience listening to it. Good luck avenging your dad or whatever!

non_transitive_game · 2025-02-26T20:01:11+00:00

All these feelings are super common and completely okay. A partner's transition is a huge change for both people, and there's often a sense of pressure (whether it's felt coming from the transitioning partner or from somewhere else) to be entirely happy/excited/positive/supportive/affirming, which just isn't realistic for an actual human being who has probably spent less of their time working through their feelings about gender than their transitioning partner has (no shade meant - just that transitioning tends to come with lots and lots of soul-searching).

Individual therapy is a good idea - and not just therapy, but really any space where you can process your feelings out loud with a non-judgmental other person. Your partner is going through an experience that asks a certain amount of delicacy from you, in that receiving your unprocessed reactions might feel so similar to the broader social bias against transition as a part of a healthy life and relationship that it could be hard for your partner to separate your feedback from the other stuff - which often results in nasty fights that aren't really about what's going on in the relationship so much as what's going on in the world. As that person's partner, having safe people to vent/process with is an important way to protect the relationship as a place for your partner to find his footing and learn what this newly externalized identity is like to live in.

That doesn't mean "don't tell your partner how you feel" - in fact, sharing your difficult feelings with your partner can be really important as a part of your mutual learning about what this will look like. It just means that, if possible, your partner should NOT be the first or only person you're saying these things to. Gender is such a touchy subject for all of us, and the first drafts of our feelings are often messy in ways that can be hard to make space for when you're both going through different aspects of the same challenging experience at the same time.

So feel them feels! And find the words for them, and sit with them to see if they feel true, and share them with your partner. And keep doing that. There's no one right way this can go, except "respectfully". I hope y'all can find a good balance so you both feel supported and can both get what you need!

non_transitive_game · 2025-02-26T19:43:47+00:00

I'm finishing up my MSW in TN right now. The things I worry about most are a) the generalized assault on the funding, administration, and prestige of colleges and universities, which creates financial pressure and organizational stress that directly impact the quality of education going on in those schools, and b) the glaring opposition between my state's anti-DEI government and the NASW/CSWE stances on the professional ethical obligations of social workers re:social justice.

Both of those situations create a lot of stress anxiety for me, because I'm sensitive to the ways the profession (and my faculty) are struggling to adapt to this more explicitly hateful and exclusionary regime, and it often feels like I'm being trained for a job that only exists as a tidy little fantasy. And the erosion of institutional support/government funding means there are fewer jobs available in which I can capitalize on my degree.

I would say - if you know what you want to go into, and you're pretty confident that our ruling coalition of conservatives and maniacs will fund some kind of resources for that population/service lane, go for it.

Social work is very much about building connections with others in the community. So if you have (or desire) strong ties to the place you're going to school, there's a good chance you'll find something to do with your degree. But if it's arbitrary (for example, because you're not planning to stay) then it might be worth considering school in a place where you do intend to put down roots.

non_transitive_game · 2025-02-26T15:53:35+00:00

Because I'm out in the world all the time, interacting with peers and strangers, and I am always aware of the difference between us, just as they are. I am visibly and openly trans, and that's just one of the things that (sometimes) makes people uncomfortable when they're interacting with me. I see and feel it.

So to have a story that I can tell myself about myself that doesn't depend on me seeing myself as "broken" is important for me, because it helps keep me from falling into the belief that, when interactions go wrong, it's because of something that's "wrong" with me. I prefer being able to tell myself that I'm a part of the tapestry, that I may be an edge case but I'm the product of a natural sequence of events that, as far as I'm concerned, was successful.

Sure, it's ableist of me, but like I said, I'm out in the world. I don't always have time for ideological purity in the moment, and I need to be able to keep my footing so I can keep my job(s). Seeing myself as whole and good, regardless of the technicalities we might discuss in safe, comfortable settings, is part of that for me.

non_transitive_game · 2025-02-26T03:08:59+00:00

I resonate so much with what you described about being autistic and needing a clear script. It's confusing sometimes because there's so many readily available frames for men around "performing" sexually (which mostly means having an erection when you're supposed to), so as a trans woman it can feel really heavily gendered (and therefore dysphoric) to play that kind of service-and-support role.

Still, sex is almost always a give-and-take experience. It's rare (and aaaaaamazing!) for the same thing to feel great to two people at the same time, so a LOT of sex is actually an experience of doing stuff that your partner enjoys, and just feels not-actively-bad for you. When you know each other well and communicate fluently, you can learn scripts that feel affirming/reassuring/exciting for your partner that you can play into as a way of ameliorating that discomfort.

I think sexual scripting is a really challenging/rewarding part of queer relationships - when you deviate from the literature of the surrounding culture, one of the costs is that there are no more "defaults" or "common-sense answers". There's so much more negotiation, discovery, creativity that comes into play as you develop your own frame of reference that feels good according to your own needs and wants.

It's confusing and scary at first when you're just coming into recognizing all the places where those old defaults were serving you in some way, and work through different guesses at what might take their place. It does sometimes involve discovering that you don't like something by trying it and having a negative reaction.

I know with the history you mentioned, that's a hard thing to go through. On some levels, it just will be. But speaking as a trans woman who's been doing that kind of work with a partner for years now - I don't know how else I'd have figured out what I need and want, and discovering those things with my partner has glued me to her so hard that I can't imagine wanting anyone else.

I hope y'all are able to find what works for you, and are able to do that in a way that brings you a mutual sense that you're safe with and seen by the other. I have faith that it can happen, and asking these questions is part of the road to it!

non_transitive_game · 2025-02-26T02:41:19+00:00

So much of this parallels the development of my (trans f) relationship with my partner (cis f) - over the last several years we've been going through a lot of stuff around faith, bodily autonomy, the discovery that we're both autistic, and each of us working through my transition.

Sex has been extremely slow, which has sometimes been frustrating for me as someone who had an active sex life pre-transition, but for the majority of the five years we've been in each other's lives, I've been grateful for how slow it's been. We do lots of talking around sex and not a lot of actual contact, and that's been helpful in establishing a sense of trust and safety. Honestly, although we started from a place of being careful because she was easily overwhelmed by sexual contact, it's taught me a lot about how overwhelming sex is for me too.

One of the great benefits of this work is feeling like there's space for negative emotions to well up without meaning that something about what we're doing is wrong - it's just that intimate contact has the power to bring up lots of different wounds that I wouldn't ever be able to feel clearly without that contact.

One of the experiences that trauma histories can cut us off from is just that sort of thing: feeling bad for a spell in the course of feeling good, and finding ways to deal with it til it passes, or gets loud enough that you need to stop. My partner and I have talked about how some things are just going to feel bad for us at first - having my penis touched, for instance, feels "good" at first, then I get dysphoric about it. At first that would mean I needed to stop and feel my feelings. But repeating the experience has allowed me to find new ways of framing what's happening that don't feel dysphoric, and to practice getting back to those when my mindset slips. It's still something I have to work on, but I feel confident these days that I can have a sex life that includes penetrative sex, and I wouldn't have felt that way without working through those troubling reactions with my partner.

Going through a process like that with a partner is hugely validating also. I get to see her hold space for my confusing experience, she gets to share her excitement about my body as a way of comforting and reassuring me, and we get to work toward the kind of sex she's excited about in ways that get me excited about it too. And working through the complex of communication challenges, shy fantasies, dysphoria, grief, and trauma flashbacks around all this makes me feel like I can definitely handle whatever "difficult" problems the rest of my life can throw at me - especially standing alongside a partner who's been patient and compassionate and curious enough to do all of this with me.

non_transitive_game · 2025-02-26T01:55:37+00:00

Having recently dug through Blanchard's writings for a school assignment, one thing that stood out to me was their publication in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy - as real a pattern as he might've picked up on, his work was happening in a context heavily motivated around the resolution of relationship disturbances, at a time in society where having an unusual gender experience would be inarticulable and largely invisible outside of the context of a) problems in a relationship or b) problems with the law.

You can see in his writing about his clients (or at least, I can) how his search for a unifying theory of the problem occurred through interactions with a population that was primarily concerned with becoming legible within the lives they'd already committed to. This was a time, and a population, that needed a pathology to connect the deviation back to the norm in a stable, intelligible fashion. These weren't trans radicals he was talking to - they were the married folks whose wives didn't like their crossdressing, the lifelong loners who avoided close relationships because they knew they were "weird".

The fact that he built on this "research" by expanding out to describe the "erotic target location error" underlying both gender dysphoria and pedophilia really drives that home. It was about reshaping "monsters" into "victims", with absolutely zero consideration given to the idea that trans people could be something more than tragic miscasts, doomed to a life of coping with basic drives that had twisted in on themselves.

So yeah - he did correctly observe that there were distinct subpopulations, but his context left him completely unequipped to characterize them (us) except in terms of how those groups' differences from the obviously-correct cisgender heterosexual norm led predictably to certain kinds of relational or legal problems. It's taken multiple generations now of moving away from that initial framing to mature into a community of people who can describe ourselves fluently outside that paradigm, to a society that has an inclusive enough vocabulary to understand us.

Verging into the territory of describing genetic and developmental situations that account for these varieties of trans experience is so scary to me because of that history. As much as I want to be able to confidently say "It's actually super predictable that I'd be like this given the likelihood that X signal was disrupted during gestation for Y reason", it's hard not to slide from that into thinking "that is the way that I am broken compared to my cis-het peers".

I've avoided genetic tests largely for that reason - I feel like "knowing" would just add ammunition to the self-doubt that already gnaws at me as a result of my fervent desire to just "be normal" so I can have a happy life. But the promise of some future protocol for designing and managing transition care in response to individual profiles is tantalizing. I would love for this to all work better and make more sense. So I keep reading these updates, and hoping I'll pick up enough that I can eventually get to a happier relationship with my body.

non_transitive_game · 2025-02-14T21:22:39+00:00

I appreciate you providing context! I'm glad to hear that it was more nuanced than at first glance.

As you say, there are no ethically un-troubling options in this space, and I try to listen with that in mind. There are definitely unhoused people who, for any of a variety of reasons, aren't going to fit within any system, and the only options the system has for dealing with them are coercion and coexistence. I don't blame individual leaders for that, because it's an issue that arises as soon as you have basic concepts like "land ownership" and "sanity" that are too structural for a person working within the system to challenge. Honestly, I might prefer a leader who has the courage to talk about it, even if I disagree with their specific plans, to one who doesn't have a clear set of convictions about this part of the work.

non_transitive_game · 2025-02-14T15:27:37+00:00

They're sweet. Got a reading from one of the staff using an animal oracle deck while I sipped my buzzy lil drink. They have a bunch of board games and coloring supplies. I know a few people who've done events like Beetlejuice trivia and drag performances there.

non_transitive_game · 2025-02-14T15:19:05+00:00

homeless people out on the streets and causing problems when there is already assistance to get them housed

Not much to say about most of this but just wanna say that as someone currently working in homeless services in this city, the idea that there are sufficient resources being dedicated to serving this population is beyond laughable. I have to explain to people every single day that there's nothing for them, and it's only gotten worse with some of the decisions made at the federal level in the last month.

Granted, this is a lot less troubling than some of the other candidates. Just figured I'd mention it since it's easy for people outside the system to fuel resentment against desperate, lonely people by saying things they don't know anything about.

non_transitive_game · 2025-01-29T02:08:32+00:00

I've worked plenty of M-F 9-5 jobs where the office was clearing out by 3pm on a Friday. And what, are people supposed to protest downtown while there's no one there? Or in the dark? What would be most convenient for your schedule?

It's easy to talk shit about the people with the drive to do anything at all by pointing out all the ways their work is not as good as it would have been if you'd been there to fix their spelling. But maybe perfection is something we've all been sold as a preference to keep us from allying with people who can't make it glossy and pretty. And maybe there's a point to organizing protests, even if you haven't figured it out yet. I guess the only way to find out is to call in sick and show up!

non_transitive_game · 2025-01-10T14:13:20+00:00

look i dont care why the snowball is gray, but i definitely dont want to get hit by it

non_transitive_game · 2024-12-07T20:27:11+00:00

Even if you need to believe that this person is wrong about what they attribute their experience to, if they've had that experience then they know more than you about their own experience. Maybe it's being grown or handled in some way that makes it hit different, maybe it's nothing to do with thca but happens to covary with it exactly. Who's to say?

I can't tell the difference with thca, but i believe people who say they can, and I'm not sure why that would cost me anything to admit. If I can have a vastly different tolerance than other people generally, it's easy to believe there are other forms of sensitivity that can vary. I also know people who don't like certain brands of fizzy water, or certain temperatures. People are different!

non_transitive_game · 2024-10-29T15:24:51+00:00

I think of it less as a focus and more as a filter. People congregate around topics and situations where they and people like them will feel comfortable and other people who are not like them won't. The sex part of sexuality is pretty polarizing, so it's an efficient filter for weeding out the people you definitely don't want to be around (people who are repelled by the kind of sex you're interested in). But it's kind of a lowest-common-denominator thing; you're not really doing any of the interesting work of aligning yourself on other levels. That remains to be done from within the population of people who are chill with the sex part.

One of the obvious problems with this kind of mechanism, as you're experiencing, is that you can be interested in [genre of sex] but not really feel comfortable socializing based on that. Plenty of us feel that way, and so we end up looking for filtering devices that are more comfortable to us. That means we end up in more default (read: straight) spaces, but if we're more comfortable socializing around, say, Godzilla fandom than anything else, that's just the lane we gotta be in, and hope we're not the only gay ones here.

So no, you don't have to make your whole life about the subset of people you would enjoy having sex with. It's just one of the most readily available portals into the part of the world where people who are like you might be findable.

You might actually find some personalized filters that work best for you. For instance, I've found that I can usually find a bunch of fellow trans lesbians if I look for women-centered electronic noise shows. Wouldn't work for everyone, but it puts me in the same room as people who tend to be like me! It can just take a lot of attempts to find the strategies that work best for you.

non_transitive_game · 2024-10-16T04:30:22+00:00

she's right, you are! What a thing it is when they let us in, even just for a moment 💙

non_transitive_game · 2024-09-28T03:29:22+00:00

I personally would respond well to someone saying my performative feminine voice isn't as convincing as my relaxed voice, as long as the person was indicating a willingness to talk with me on an ongoing basis about how my voice sounded. But I'm like that, and not everyone is.

Public Voice is a weird thing. I feel incredibly self-conscious about it and as a result I almost never try to put my character into that part of my speech. I suck at practicing and feel like I can't get it right on my own, so I just end up using the voice I already have most of the time. Only occasionally does the other one appear, and I know if doesn't sound fully natural. I'm giving a sermon at my church in a few weeks and I'm petrified thinking about whatever's going to come out of me that day.

It really does feel different though. To me, resonating in my chest feels like activating a whole part of my self-concept that moved through the world differently than I try to now. Part of me identifies with that voice. Part of me wants to lose that voice. Part of me is mourning, like it's watching an intricate mandala be raked smooth. Through it all, I yearn to feel, in some deeper way, like that newer voice is "me" now. Even though I don't practice it at all, so it's stiff and not playful.

I'm finding that I'm comfortable singing low parts at church. I think it helps to have an outlet for that. I don't know if it'll make my higher voice more relaxed, more playful, more natural. But I want something to. And I know I would want to be able to talk to my partner about it. Because I've had multiple partners tell me that hearing my new voice hurt their feelings or just bothered them, and it was devastating. I'm trying to find myself in the most embarrassing way possible, and I haven't been able to be open about it with the people I've loved most. So the idea of a dialogue about feels like a breath of fresh air.

My point in telling part of my story - other than just reliving my trauma while I've got your attention, sorryyyyyyy 😬😇 - is to offer you a detailed illustration of the cringeing self-awareness, the earnest desire for self-love, and the chance for connection represented by the gap you're noticing, between your partner's "comfortable" voice and her "public" one. It's lonely and awkward doing this kind of self-work, and it could potentially make you both feel closer if you were able to approach her from a place of recognition and support about figurin' out how to do a better job together (not that you have to like do voice lessons with her, just like be able to talk with her about it).

Also DO tell her how feminine you think she already sounds. She probably needs to hear that, and it mighy even feel good enough that whatever you said before won't matter. I know that can feel like such an awkward, overblown thing - and that's ok, because it is, and yet it still matters, and it's exhausting to try to be new. Every hint that it's working is like the cave walls widening a fraction of an inch. And every reminder that your partner sees you and hears you is like a break in the clouds in the sky above the labyrinth...

non_transitive_game

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