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The Ones Who Come Back to Omelas

The Ones Who Come Back to Omelas Asikea Ngansuril This is the second part of an earlier story I published, which you can read here . I spent many months living by the seaside. I transferred jobs – still clerical work, though now in a department situated by the docks – in the hopes of never again having to see the Mausoleum of Prosperity. But no matter what I did to distract myself, I could not fight off the images that played in my mind: a bowl of cornmeal next to a pile of human faeces, skin stretched taught around swollen organs, the bones of a hundred children crammed in a tiny mass grave. To tell you the truth – and perhaps you may feel the same – I never really enjoyed work. One day, when I could bear the images in my head no longer, I said to a co-worker, ‘Do you have fun here?’ I thought better of my words the moment I said them. It wasn’t normal to say such things. Perhaps I was just flustered; she was disarming, approachable – as if she were fashioned from th...

Is There A Future for Dysphoric Trans Women?

05 March

For several years now, I have suffered periods of total hopelessness. I often lose weeks at a time to this feeling that my life can never get better. Hopelessness has become my default state of being; but, in those sublime few days in a given month where I can move through the world without being brought to tears, I am able to see a future where I am liberated. The hopelessness does not come from nowhere. I am a trans person. What is a trans person, or transgender, person? Dictionary definitions point to transgender being a feeling: “ transgender : of, relating to, or being a person whose gender identity differs from the sex the person was identified as having at birth “ gender identity : a person's internal sense of being male, female, some combination of male and female, or neither male nor female” (Merriam-Webster) Perhaps transgender , then, must refer to a variety of feelings. A trans person could be someone who was born with a penis, but wishes to be...

The Southron 'Ah'

22 February

By far the trickiest thing to master for imitators of a southern English accent is when to use a short, front 'a' and a long, back 'a'¹, which I will henceforth transcribe as A and Ah . A long time ago, southern English underwent a sound change called the Trap-Bath Split; the language now uses both of these vowels, and they're not in free variation; if you use the wrong vowel in a word people will think you're weird. So what's the rule here? How do we know when to say A and when to say Ah? Perhaps it has something to do with sonorance? If you listen to a speaker from London, you'll notice they'll always say cat, bag, gap and dad, but never caht , bahg , gahp and dahd . If we consider only monosyllabic words ending in stops, it seems that there's a rule here regarding 'softness'; a hard ending in a segment leads to a hardening of the vowel. But this all falls apart when we consider fricatives: the southern 'grass' is alway...

Akira: A Strange Disappointment

22 February

I can already hear your retorts of, 'But Akira is the perfect movie! It's a classic!', but hear me out. Every medium and every genre has its classics; the works that everyone must see, or read, or perhaps smell. Akira is a classic of the cyberpunk genre and of the medium of animation. It is one of those works of visual art that is referenced in so many other works that experiencing it firsthand feels like unlocking some kind of secret code. Akira is a notable contribution not just to the visual design of the cyberpunk genre*, but arguably to the design conventions of the medium of film as a whole. * Players of Cyberpunk 2077, itself a pastiche of the genre, will recognise Kaneda's bike (Jackie's bike) and the Harukiya Bar stairwell (Afterlife entrance) One would expect such a visually influential film to also be highly insightful. Watching this film for the first time today, I personally was expecting, at the very least, to find the plot elements quite familiar. ...

500 Hours of Mind-pumping Action

14 February

500 Hours of Mind-pumping Action image source It's a new year, and shortly after the Christmas period I found myself the recipient of an Amazon gift card. Since I've been trying to read more, it seemed a good idea to spend my gift card on some books. But what to buy? I thought it a fun little experiment to ask an LLM to recommend me books, based on ones I've read in the past. The LLM's recommendations were fine – even uninterestingly so. What really struck me instead was the LLM's use of language; the way the recommendations were framed. One of the books I've recently read was a fantasy novel of considerable length; the LLM took this to mean that I favour long books – books with plenty of 'content', one of those nü-web words which have drawn some mockery in recent years. In truth, I have never felt particularly drawn to long books. I am, in fact, an impatient 'consumer'. I like to engage in creative works which respect my time. There is somethi...

Children of Omelas

08 February

Children of Omelas by Asikea Ngansuril When his existence was first described to me, he was named only as the Child. The Child was not he; the Child was it. I was one among few who had seen the Child with their own eyes. I matured a little faster than my friends, many of whom were told about the Child years after I was. Early in the morning of my eighth birthday, I was escorted by Council bureaucrats to the city plaza. There, at the heart of Omelas, stood the Mausoleum of Prosperity. It was a monument to the happiness of Omelas; the happiest city in the world, so we all said. I was led silently into the Mausoleum, through corridors and down flights of stairs, until we came to a little door somewhere in the basement of the building. Wielding a set of keys, one of the adults flung the door open, and there it was. What first stood out to me was not the smell, not the festering sores on its backside, nor its abject nakedness; it was the fact that it wasn’t much younger than m...

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