I'm feeling really grateful today and just wanted to share that feeling.
I'm grateful for... * Living in a time when HRT is available * Having easy access to it even though I live in the state of Texas * Being blessed by the boob fairy (46B after 6-months when most trans-femmes are lucky to hit A-cup after 2 years... insert suspense tone for what that means for later) * HRT absolutely demolishing body/hair growth and making everything very manageable * Liking pickles before HRT so it's not as confusing * HRT feminizing my face enough that I feel comfortable going out without makeup * My hair, which was just a short mess before... now just magically grew into a cute bob with zero effort (and this is it's maximum length... I do lament not having longer hair though) * Having an incredibly supportive adoptive family * Skirts, dear god the skirts I've got now are so damn comfy * Randomly knowing how to adjust my voice properly so I skipped voice training entirely * A work from home job that allowed me to easily transition before ever worrying about work * A Christian boss (also owner of the company) who was baffled at the idea I even had something to worry about with coming out at work... in a traditionally conservative industry * Being born it Illinois which makes it trivially easy to update my birth certificate (just waiting on the legal name change documents first so I can do both at the same time)
* being a grower and so small that I don't need to tuck in 90% of cases and couldn't if I wanted to * being grey-ace and not phased by the shrinkage * not really having bottom dysphoria... that shit's expensive AF
I don't 100% love the platforms I'm on 100% of the time but calling one or more of them evil seems inappropriate/disproportionate? I don't get people who think Fedi or Bluesky should fail.
My first post. Been looking into Friendica lately so decided to give it try. My post will be mostly related to TV and Movies, climate issues, food security. Personally I have a nihilistic view of the world, do not think the future is bright...
@Shiri Bailem thank you for the warm welcome. I am still trying to figure out how to use Friendica , as the info is not displayed like in Mastodon or Pleroma. Any good clients for iOS?
Original post is too long for Bluesky. Click this to read.
Someone on fedi decided that they'd use their Fedi account as a syndication feed for their blog and switch to Bluesky because nobody (t)here respected her boundaries, which is sad but perfectly understandable. Then some clown replied that they would be blocking her now because Bluesky is pure evil or something and it's like bitch that's what she was talking about. That's the boundary violating behavior.
I was reading a Bluesky post by Roxane Gay about how Rx drug commercials are weirdly upbeat and that unearthed the memory of this haunting commercial for heart failure meds that used old folks singing "Tomorrow" from Annie and that activates my fight-or-flight response to this day.
You know what's great to learn at 38, right before bedtime one night, after a whole life time of struggle...
That your mother traumatized you with ADHD to the point where actually pushing myself against ADHD is a trigger... making it so no amount of coping skills can help me push myself for any real length of time...
I'd try and do something that requires a push, even a little one... and be crying... and I thought it was just the feeling of hitting my dopamine... but nooooo... now I'm unpacking that it was me getting triggered at the feeling of pushing my reserves at all...
That explains so damn much and makes me feel so damn hurt and angry...
I was forced to push myself so far so often as a kid and she didn't ever relent when I was critically over-extended on dopamine... usually around cleaning. I'm remembering so many times crying and sobbing on the floor because she demanded I clean to an extreme standard and I wasn't allowed to do anything else until I met her approval...
And I've been running my whole life fucking kneecapped by this... I thought I just had it worse than most (with ADHD) on my ability to push myself on tasks... but no... it's because I realize now I can't fucking push myself at all because my fucking brain just jumps straight to that extreme pain and trauma right away...
Now I'm fucking crying when I should be trying to sleep...
i spent a sizeable portion of my childhood shut in my room with "you're not coming out until it's clean!" And without guidance on how to clean it.
I push through hard things like this as an adult with the mantra "something is better than nothing" and just chip away at things.
And I sit with my kids when cleaning their room, talk through my process and coach them. That's been really healing, coaching my kids and also my ADHD friends; it's like re-parenting myself!
@contradogma friendica definitely follows more of the facebook format style, one of the reasons I chose it for this instance. That and the fact that it is basically the swiss army knife of social, attempting to support everything it possibly can.
Biggest downside is the poor UI and that's the entire reason it's not my default recommendation for the fediverse.
@contradogma it's mostly things being in weird places, easy to get lost... if you're even a little bit of a tinkerer it's no big, but for the casual computer user it gets really frustrating really fast.
ie. try and find where to go to change your profile picture.
It's 0130. I'm trying to confuse my brain into letting me sleep by looking at a directory of radio stations. I click on the page listing ones out of Denver, Colorado. I scroll down to the Internet Only section and become curious. I clock the link to it, thinking it is a normal webpage. I let the tab launch itself. Soon my eardrums are assaulted by the autoplay. I'm scared shitless even though I have earbuds in because what if the other people in the house heard me jump? I'm able to kill the tab and return to what I was able to listen to, but now at a much lower volume.
So, fellow butterfles, remember when I mentioned Friendica yesterday? Instances running the latest version let you post to ActivityPub, the in-house DFRN protocol, and ATProto. You'll have to give it access to a preëxisting BSky account but there you go.
You can also have multiple sub-accounts as well as puppet accounts for a variety for platforms (say if you want to also use Tumblr), let me know if you have any questions!
After one of the owners died, work has been struggling with not having admin access to some of our systems, namely Google Workspace.
We finally got that access... so now I've sent the email to my boss about my name change. I verified with my boss a month or two ago that he's not going to fire me for being trans (it's actually a cute story...), that way I could safely start the legal name change process... but I've been holding off on otherwise being "out" at work because of this account thing...
So finally sent an email to my boss about the new name... it's the last place where I wasn't out!
I made something to scratch an itch that's been bugging me for years... will save me a lot of time and trouble on some of my work (and possibly personal) projects...
(For anyone wondering my current use case, I have a tool I wrote for work that's sitting on top of peewee and sqlite and it's been a massive pain to expand it out... this isn't something super special, but for the 20k-40k or so entries this should do just fine searching/querying/etc, even before adding indexing... and it'll make rebuilding my toolkit faster as well as easier to maintain since there's no firm structure to the resulting database)
Want to learn real quick that "leftist" does not automatically mean "good person" or "free from bigotry"?
Call them out on body shaming or misgendering monsters.
It's also a painful reminder that so much "acceptance" is just performative.
If you think I'm valid for being fat, but then insult a monster for being fat, it tells me that you never actually saw me as valid.
If you think my gender transition is valid, but then purposefully misgender an awful trans person, it tells me that you never saw my transition as valid.
Because if these things are true and valid, then being an awful person wouldn't matter!
So the temporary system had some sort of failure, I'm not even 100% sure what caused it to be honest. It went down sometime yesterday and some of the virtual drives got corrupted, which caught the database and the virtual gateway device.
I was able to restore the system... most of the way. Thankfully there are backups of the database, but some of them were also flawed as well, the most recent intact one was from 5/16, so 5 days were lost.
To be clear, this problem was exacerbated by the fact that there's not as much redundancy in the temporary setup (sadly it looks like it'll be a few more months before I have a place of my own and can spin up my own hardware again). But I'm going to still look at how I might get those in better shape.
As far as how long it took: I had a busy day yesterday and didn't see that the server was down until I was too exhausted to do anything about it, so it had to wait until I got off work today... each attempt at restoring the database takes around an hour, so that took *a while* to get restored.
ADHD is a very complicated thing, and it is very hard to explain, especially to those without it. This film takes you through common experiences that come wi...
What do you do when your capacity for pain is getting used up faster than your capacity for love?
(* for those unfamiliar with the saying: loving someone inevitably means pain at their loss, pain at their suffering, and general vulnerability. In my case, mostly loved ones struggling and being traumatized by various systemic injustices...)
The raw surrealness that hits you from time to time when transitioning...
I thought I was a guy... now I'm thinking of myself as a woman.
I used to look in the mirror and always feel blah, and unmemorable unattractive face... now I see a face I genuinely recognize and remember, a face that I can feel attractive wearing (even if I'm not my own type and will never really see it myself)
My hair which was always just an uninteresting mess... turns out it likes to naturally grow into a cute bob (though I'd still like to try styling it more).
I have seen a lot of people use anime gao kigurumi as a mental help and encouragement with transitioning, just because the hadatai covers imperfections up, and with shapewear, people see what they would like to have.
Shiri Bailem
in reply to Shiri Bailem • •* being grey-ace and not phased by the shrinkage
* not really having bottom dysphoria... that shit's expensive AF