Doreen Michele

No wheels, no kiln Making primitive pottery in the city How to center clay Almost anywhere kiln How to make clay at home

I like running my big fat mouth via keyboard and internet. I like sharing what I know in hopes it improves things for someone and I'm very socially observant. I've spent a lot of years trying to find ways to mitigate problems like: 1. People feeling like I'm dictating answers to them rather than just trying to add information to their decision-making process.  2. In online forums, people squeeing at me like I'm a celebrity, thereby sucking the life out of the conversation and promoting drama. 3. People lining up in two groups as either strongly FOR my "position" or strongly AGAINST it! I would rather we all tell our story to create a database of experiences so the person asking the question has options.  4. Trying to account for the internet having a highly diverse audience, so no matter what I say, some people are likely to misinterpret something. I work very hard at including provisos, warnings, links to background information and other safety things. I like...

The existence of trans people speaks directly to the defects in heternormative culture. I am trying to: 1. DESTROY heternormative culture.  2. Install something less dysfunctional in its place.  The site Formulary of Life exists at all as a power play political move to say FUCK YOU DONALD TRUMP.   Donald Trump is openly transphobic, homophobic, racist, hates Native Americans, has a wife more than twenty years younger than him and in a nutshell represents everything wrong with heternormative culture which actively promotes subsistence culture  and actively turns sex into a negative experience we should fear and loathe. Heternormative culture is a paradigm that insists that there's one and only one correct lifestyle: A nuclear family with a breadwinner father, homemaker mother and dependent minor children. This encourages old farts like him to marry much younger women under circumstances that make it a negative experience for everyone involved resulting in Ameri...

Trump has said that no further attacks on Venezuela are imminent but that they may become necessary if the country’s interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, does not acquiesce to U.S. demands for access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves. France has nuclear power because it's the only way to secure adequate energy, a national security issue, without being someone's bitch.  The US isn't that savvy and has decided to be the schoolyard bully taking your lunch money because we can't adequately manage our affairs in a civilized, competent fashion. 

I write about social stuff. I do so hoping to better understand social stuff and hoping that my effort to figure it out is valuable food for thought for others trying to figure it out. I'm not dictating morals. I'm a blogger with an incurable genetic disorder who has been celibate for medical reasons for over twenty years as a personal choice. I'm not religious. I'm not interested in being judgy in the way people routinely seem to project onto me. I'm probably far more "live and let live" than most people in the world.  I don't really have any desire to moralize per se and this is an endless source of social friction with other people for seemingly two reasons: 1. They are judgy assholes and things I talk about conflict with their desire to moralize and dictate morality and dictate social behavior to a degree I think is unreasonable.  2. People routinely want to insist that because I read about a particular subject and blog about it, they are entitled ...

I know why bastard has negative connotations. Historically, if you were born out of wedlock, life was going to be extremely tough. On Cyburbia, there was a conversation once about "Special is the new retard." They routinely rename economic recessions and the new word soon means the same as the old. I spent years baffled by why "fuck you" or "go fuck yourself" is harsh language. Why would get laid and masturbate  be expressions for jacking your shit up? And then I recently wrote this piece . Someone once said to me "I'm the fucker. You're the fuckee." because it was a heterosexual relationship and I'm a woman.   My former sister in law would be in her fifties and raised three children by an alcoholic boyfriend who never married her. The third child is probably the product of rape and it may not be the only one. She's probably still fucked. Her life has never recovered.  I'm sixty and did marry the father of my children and had...

I used to track data about demographics on Hacker News and sometimes blogged about it. I stopped because I had no audience and my relationship to people on Hacker News mattered to me, so I chose to mostly keep those observations PRIVATE.  As far as I can tell, I'm the only cis woman on the leaderboard. My understanding is one individual on the leaderboard privately identifies as nonbinary but isn't out about it on Hacker News. At least one member of the leaderboard is openly a gay male. I have reason to suspect two MAY be trans but aren't saying that publicly. At least one is Greek nationality. At least one is Polish nationality. At least one is Asian American.  One extremely pasty White WASP lived in Japan for a lot of years and married a Japanese gal. To my knowledge,  none of them LIES about any of that but they tend to not harp on their ethnicity or nationality or culture or other demographic "identity" details. Some are uncomfortably open about being Christia...