It’s official. I am coming out as transgender.

This show talks about some pretty heavy stuff, including cannibalism. I’m also going to be showing certain images from the show. While I don’t think there’s going to be anything overtly disturbing in this post, I thought you should have fair warning.

The pilot of Hannibal has a strong opening five minutes. A crime scene, the conclusion of a murder, is shown; then, time reverses. Blood droplets fly in slow motion off the walls, as an expressionless man reverses his way out the door, passing police standing guard outside the door. A beam of light flashes across the screen, and the street is silent. Calmly, the man walks forward, kicks down the door, and shoots a man coming down the stairs.

In the pilot episode of The Sopranos, protagonist Tony Soprano tells his therapist about a dream in which his penis falls off and gets carried away by a bird. Crude imagery aside, this dream pulls strongly from our cultural conception of a man’s masculinity as being tied up with his potency. Even though, in the rest of the episode, Tony does not lose his, ahem, “manhood,” he is deeply afraid that he is losing his grasp on his family.

I’m going to be talking about the pilot, but part of that discussion will include a discussion of its foreshadowing. There may be minor spoilers for later seasons scattered throughout.

An analysis of the pilot for Breaking Bad for UHON 395H.

The last few months tore away the curtain for me; now all I can see are the things I can’t fix.

Because we need another thinkpiece from a white person about how we should talk about racism and bigotry.

In which we come to the obvious conclusion that a game about building giant factories might have some anti-environmentalist messages.

In which we solve problems by adding more code.

Since I started this website, it’s been hosted on Github Pages. Originally I was building the site using Jekyll, so this made sense at the time. As I made more and more changes to my theme and began using more plugins, it became untenable to use the regular Github Pages build process. I switched over to building the website locally and then pushing that to the master branch. This works, but it’s extremely hacky and unsatisfying to me.

At my internship, I’ve been spending the past few weeks overhauling the authentication and authorization for all of the company’s internal applications. The new authorization system uses a third-party service that handles all of the niceties of logging in, two-factor authentication, synchronization with Active Directory permissions, and all the other fluff. All we have to do is set up authentication with OpenId Connect and receive access and id tokens from our third-party provider.