I will do something I normally never do here, and make my first ever blog post on the topic of, long sigh: tech. I’ve already talked about Google a number of times on Mastodon which is, blessedly, by design, not discoverable; but I’ve decided to commit the full story to print. Hopefully this won't come back to bite me in the ass but eh it’s the apocalypse, who cares at this point. At least Wordsmith Dot Social is half-abandoned and has no comment system, so I won’t have to deal with techbros batting for billionaires or preaching the power of Open Source (™ Open Source Initiativeⓡ).
But if you clicked this, Dear Reader, then you wanted the tea; and I am nothing if not forthcoming with tea-spilling. The fact that Google fired me with shut-up money only makes it more fun to do it. So go get some chamomile and sit comfortably, for this is an old woman reminiscing; let’s talk about capitalism and anarchism, about the precariat and surveillance, plush dolls and churrascarias and gay argots; let us go back in time and space, and journey to tropical Brazil in the distant time of 2007…
My lesbian experience with topping without testosterone
Content warnings for this one: Text addressed at transfeminine folk; explicit discussion of sex and kink, including sexual experiences, intended as informative rather than erotic but rich in detail; discussion of HRT, surgeries, genitals, gender feelings; reports of a lively sex life; discussion of low libido when perceived as a negative, and of girlcock as positive; corny 5th-grade humour.
Focusing on things that come up frequently and I don’t see explained that often.
Here’s the lede: You can’t ever see or search everything posted on mastodon. You can only see the content that your instance knows about. This has some fascinating, positive, non-obvious implications. For more info on what’s ‘your instance’ and how does it know about stuff, keep reading.
(beta; comments welcome @elilla@transmom.love . thx queers from @embracing.space, @plural.cafe and others for help, if you want to be credited in public just ping me.)
(current version: 2022-10-28, with minor updates 2023-06-19.)
The following spells face dysphoria heads-on. #3 deals with the deepest insecurities one may have about identity. This practice can feel very uncomfortable, sometimes downright terrifying. Please take care, and be sure to have access to your support network before trying your hand at mirror magic.
Noh theatre has shamanic roots, and the ‘mirror room’ before a performance is still a place of adorcism. Photo credits: Kanzan University Kanze Club.
Binary femme perspective on the psych ramifications of gendering for people with strong gender feelings. Originally written to self on a bad night as an exercise in positive self-talk, lightly reëdited.
Dear enbies, ladies, eunuchs & everybody who’s curious about what does an orchiectomy look & feel! I have made you 〜illustrations〜
Content warnings first: This is personal, diary-like, with me going on and on about my own feelings and experiences; because I think that’s, in a sense, more informative than a bare objective report, and it’s the kind of thing I missed when I was researching to decide whether I should do an orchi. This text has nude photos, including detailed images of convex genitals. I am (mostly) not dysphoric about my genitals, and will use positive words about them. There’s a discussion of genital dysphoria, marked. I’m not posting lewd videos in this space, and I tried to make the photos illustrative rather than erotic, but some stuff came out somewhat lewdish anyway because I love my body and what can a girl do? There are close-up photos of the healed scar, and broad discussions of surgeries; but no pictures of blood or graphic details about medical stuff. I will discuss sex stuff in a clearly marked section at the end. The list of topics is: looks and anatomy, panties & tucking, dysphoria & walking, hormones, sex stuff.
And here’s an unrelated picture so that scrapers won’t put a photo of my genitals in preview thumbnails.
In She-Ra and the Princesses of Power season 1 episode 2, we see a door locked with a password readily available in a First Ones inscription, Moria-style:
‘Eternia’.
In season 2 episode 2, we see in the floating ruins of the Watchtower a variant, not just of the same word but of the same design – recall that the First Ones Script (FOS) allows a significant degree of æsthetic freedom – except it reads not quite Eternia, but ‘Etelnia’:
Note the lack of the dot in the ‘r’ lozenge glyph, rendering it ‘Etelnia’. The inscription is also upside-down in this photo, which is easily explainable by the fact that it’s shown from the point of view of a horse.
We can hardly imagine that the technologically advanced, highly literate First Ones would have misspelt the name of their home planet (a name of obvious cultural importance since it’s used a password etc.). Moreover, the FOS for /r/ is the same as /l/ plus a single dot; were it a mistake, it would be easily fixable ad posteriori. No, there is absolutely no chance that somebody somewhere has simply forgotten to add a dot to this design. We must assume the variant is real.
‘Eternia’.
Note the lack of the dot in the ‘r’ lozenge glyph, rendering it ‘Etelnia’. The inscription is also upside-down in this photo, which is easily explainable by the fact that it’s shown from the point of view of a horse.