I was alerted by a commenter that it’s been more than a year, now, since this
video dropped:
COVID measures had already begun to be implemented; national borders shut, most
schools already closed. Watching this press conference, a scene from The
Simpsons played in my mind. I’d
been getting a little comfy with a video editing program to record IIDX
plays, so I gave it a crack.
I don’t really have networks to tap, but Niki liked it so much she diligently
dropped it into comments on Facebook and Twitter replies wherever it seemed
appropriate. Before I knew it, I had a moderately popular YouTube video. It
entered the popular discourse when it was further
remixed, but if you ask me, the
Trump oversamples are just kinda gross.
One thing that’s been interesting to see has been how the popularity of the
video corresponded with (literally) viral events:
The three major events were:
Late March, video released, Dan Andrews said “get on the beers”.
Mid-May, first lockdown restrictions eased.
October 26, Victoria recorded zero new cases/deaths for the
first time since June. Dan reported that he “might go a little higher up the
shelf” than beers.
Maybe it’s just the elevated T levels lately, but god if I don’t feel a lot of animosity towards certain behaviours.
There’s this one guy who’s just joined a programming language community, and like:
He doesn’t really understand the language or its motivations yet, is trying to learn, but is way out of his depth still. That’s cool, so was I once.
Despite this, though, he keeps trying to “help” people in areas he is still way out of his depth in, and like, should definitely be aware he is out his depth in. Blind leading the blind.
When something doesn’t make sense, he starts going wild saying how it’s stupid, must be a bug, starts @mentioning the creator (who probably isn’t even online) saying “please tell me it’s a bug”. I hand-hold him and explain how, no, he’s just got it wrong, he calms down. Why be so belligerently wrong about something?
In various chat rooms people will be discussing using certain features (or not using them) and he’ll start just kinda circlejerking with no-one in particular about how good it is that the language lets you do this, “unlike CERTAIN OTHER LANGUAGES”, but like, dude, shut up, we’re trying to have a conversation here?
It takes every fibre of my being to not be like “ok, just shut up,” but I’m thoroughly irritated after a few weeks of this. The last one in particular is one I see a lot from new entrants to this community; they barely understand it but they have decided it’s the best thing ever and for some reason feel a need to go on about that, rather than just.. actually use it and make something.
Maybe I’m hostile to the idea of people deciding to invest themselves in something they don’t understand well yet, perhaps because when I was young I did a lot of that while casting around for places to hang my identity up on.
I dreamt a dream that has left me unsettled all day.
backstory Ⅰ
Since I first had any kind of sexual inkling whatsoever — which is to say,
since I was 12 when I’d hang around on an 18+ BDSM-themed furry MUCK and began
RPing — I only ever had any inclination to be in a submissive position. When
I found randoms to RP with, it was Asherah, the small pink bunny girl, wanting
to have anything and everything done to her, especially if consent lines got
blurry.
Even then I had to power-bottom a little bit. One rando I recall was only into
the most vanilla dynamics, whereas I kept wanting to up the ante. (Tie me up!
Get creative with things! Don’t just fuck me, for christ’s sake.) I got
bored.
I also kinda.. baited an IRL friend who was a little too obsessed with me into
joining me on the server, and then kept trying to “suggest” him into doing
stuff to me. (I’m not especially proud of it, but like. I was 12, he was 13,
everything at home was completely fucked up, he was super into me and could
match my intelligence to boot, so.. now that we got furry MUCK-married,
couldn’t we furry MUCK-do-other-stuff too please?)
This positioning of myself carried pretty strong for a while. There is
probably a (bidirectional) link between that and trans feels. It’s funny how
predictably some things go; I was ostensibly into girls, not boys (never mind
the actual physicality that existed between me and aforementioned IRL friend
for a while), but then I became a trans girl, and so liking other trans girls
is only natural, and then you stop seeing “dick” as a possibly unsettling thing
‘boys’ have (and you’re not sure about your own) but a hot thing girls have
too, and then you look at boys and you’re like, hm. You sure could overpower
me.
backstory Ⅱ
Despite this, in relationships since I have often ended up being the one with
power. Perhaps stemming from the same instinct that led to power-bottoming
before, I’d much rather we get anywhere than nowhere, and I have a kind of..
exuberant personality that tends to draw in others who prefer to follow. I am
naturally extremely protective, quite opinionated, have
mom-vibes, and until recently have been a
people-pleaser
to a fault. Not knowing myself how to separate these qualities from those of a
~dominant~ has lead to me getting into places I’ve later not known how to
deal with.
This mainly became a thing in two relationships, collectively spanning seven
years, or a majority of my post-transition life so far.
In the first case I had a handle on life in many ways she did not yet (she was
quite a bit younger than me), and so I provided everything I could; housing, a
stable life away from sometimes violent parents, support for her relationships
and hobbies outside me, and later when I could afford it, university education.
I’m a person who just wants to give, and as I’ve discovered lately in therapy,
one who doesn’t believe, strictly speaking, that I actually deserve nice
things. Accordingly, giving nice things to other is a very sure route to
getting a similar sense of happiness, effectively, even if it does ultimately
mean I don’t get what I truly want, and ends up being unsustainable. She
didn’t want many responsibilities of life and liked the sound of a more formal
and continuous D/s relationship, so I agreed to give it my best. Our
relationship did not last the dissolution of the D/s layer of it (among many
other issues, but this came to represent a lot about it).
In the second case, she was a few years older than me, but with a heart of
absolute gold who had been mistreated a lot, both historically and more
immediately. She nurtured a rare kindness and trust despite all that and I
felt so much like I wanted to safeguard that. As our relationship quickly
deepened she wanted to know if I would be her “protector”, and I assented
immediately. (And I still do. <3) Then in natural order, more D/s-style
parameters followed, and I put my all into it as well. It just seemed to make
sense, and I had already so much of the “technique” down that the lack of
deep-felt enthusiasm for the role seemed of secondary concern for a time, or
not even—completely masked. I couldn’t feel that I didn’t have my heart in
it, only that I wanted to make her happy.
Once you get used to ignoring what you want for a long time, you lose touch
with it entirely. It took a massive reconfiguration of our relationship to
accommodate removing this part of it — it had been in place from not even a
month after we started dating, and there we were some year and a half later
trying to imagine “us” without that. It was the best, most correct decision,
but I still wish I’d figured this all out long ago and spared her the hurt.
There was one relationship in the past where I was explicitly the s to
someone else’s D, but we lacked harmony regarding what each of us wanted out of
a D/s relationship, and I found myself pushing for more than she wanted to give
(or, well, take). It was fun being a rope bunny, though.
backstory Ⅲ
What triggered the reconfiguration was my own realisation of my asexuality.
I’d been slowly putting the pieces together for a while, and then one
well-timed acid trip and I just kind of blurted it out, at once feeling the
surge of unverifiable
truth. As I experienced
a moment of serenity, my partner a sense of loss of what was. The relief of no
longer feeling beholden to the allo norms of sex-having then prompted the
follow-up question of whether I still wanted to be her dominant. The writing
had been on the wall for a while, but it was then that the jig was finally up
and I seized the chance to say “no”, as painful as it was. Pretending to be
something I was not was behind me.
Living a mostly sexless life has been so much better for me. I just don’t have
interest in being sexual with another, and just barely more interest in being
sexual by myself. Still, it was in my own fantasies that my sexuality
originated, so it’s not too surprising that it does live on there a little.
Last year I saw an endocrinologist for the first time since starting transition
(which seems super dumb in retrospect but what can you do, trans healthcare is
a mess), and we discovered that both my E and T levels were way too low. My
E was below the very conservative range put forth by the Australian medical
establishment (and well below what Americans would consider normal), and T
levels at almost absolute zero. Even in natal women, T is in a clear non-zero
range, and completely lacking it could explain a lack of libido, which
certainly described me, as well as lack of energy in general.
So I set to correcting my E levels, then T levels. I’m now on ~3% of the
anti-androgen dose that I used to be on and my T levels have just slightly
inclined upward. They are still below the low watermark for “normal female
levels”, but at least I get a reading.
I still don’t have any interest in being sexual with others, even though I’ve
had an inkling of a sex drive for a little while again now, so it doesn’t look
like the asexual descriptor was particularly linked to my hormones, but I’m
increasingly feeling a need to have some kind of a sexual relationship with
myself again.
the point
Last night I dreamt a dream — many, actually, with complicated
interconnections, people I didn’t recognise, other people who seem like maybe
they’re stand-ins for real people, a variety of settings, some drama unrelated
to all this.
But there was one “segment” of it that left an indelible expression, because it
seemed like my unconscious needed to make a point.
To date, I’ve never been collared by someone else in an impactful way. The
tangible, real sense that you belonged to someone else now — even if
time-limited or otherwise scoped. The understanding that it was not yours to
put on, or yours to remove, even if it was very much your collar. I have
(attempted) to provide that experience for others, when in reality it was what
I wanted myself. I’ve “self-collared” a bit here and there.
In one distinct dream, I was collared. I was strongly aware I was collared,
and moreover, I physically couldn’t remove it even if I wanted to. It was
locked. It wasn’t up to me, and I just had to deal.
It felt really, really good. There was a sense that people might notice it,
that they might point it out to each other, and that I was literally
powerless to do anything about it. If I wanted to go about my day, I just had
to accept that this was my lot.
I’ve never felt that before—that powerlessness. Yet it’s what I’ve wanted
all along.
The dream then offered a counterpoint.
Later, somehow, the key came into my possession. The dream didn’t describe the
actual supposed holder of the key, but the narrative seemed to be that whoever
had collared me needed me to hold onto the key now, too. I wanted to be sure
not to lose it, so I put it on a necklace.
The feeling was radically altered. Having the means of unlocking it on my
person at all times meant it just became jewellery. It was no longer an aspect
of control over me, just some ring with a finnicky clasp. Being out in public
and being seen wearing it wasn’t a demonstration of someone else’s power over
me, just my own determination. Frankly, as a trans person, somedays being seen
in public at all can require a fair bit of that. This feeling barely
registered, the same lack of impact that self-collaring has. I can always just
take it off.
There’s a weird tension in programming — on the one hand, as you learn the
ropes, you (hopefully) learn very quickly that the problem is almost always
in your code, and not, say, the compiler, stdlib, kernel, etc. This is usually
very correct; the people who’ve worked on those things have many times the
experience you did when you decided that there must be a bug in printf or
something.
You’ll later realise you tried to print something through a pointer to a
stack-allocated variable that’s long since gone. These accusations tend to
wane as you gain familiarity with your subject matter, and wax as you step out
into lands populated with ever more footguns, exposing more of the architecture
than you ever suspected was there. (See also: the emails from me to the libev
mailing list in 2011.)
At some point, though, your journies will take you to places where things
aren’t so clear cut, and you’ll start to gain a sixth sense; a kind of visceral
experience that things are not as they have been promised to be.
A few weeks ago, that sixth sense whispered in my ear: “what
if, instead of your cruddy bootloader written in a pre-1.0 systems language for
a platform you don’t fully understand, it’s the 20 year-old project with 80,000
commits that’s wrong?” And it was right.
I recently received an Inkplate, and while I’m in the
middle of a few interesting projects already, I couldn’t let it sit there
unused. Until I get a longer chunk of time to turn it into something really
nifty — maybe an embedded debugging helper of some kind — it can at least
mean I no longer need to have Mail.app open.
Ever find yourself needing to implement a device tree
blob
(aka FDT, flattened device tree) parser and want to save yourself some time?
Learn from my mistakes!
If you try to do it in one pass, you will hurt yourself
I charged headlong into writing
dtb.zig
by starting at the top of the Devicetree Specification page on the “Flattened
Devicetree (DTB)” Format” and reading down. It looked delightfully simple. Keep
in mind, I still didn’t know what I yet needed out of it, just that I probably
needed to reference the DTB to get it. (I kind of know better now.)
A letter written to an oft-commissioned artist who was happy to hear more
about the backstory of the character she’d drawn so much.
So .. I’m trans; I kinda knew about it from an early age (like in the
mid-1990s; I’m 30 now), but didn’t have the words or experience or knowledge to
understand why I felt the way I did. It wasn’t really a thing you ever heard
about, there was no media representation, the internet barely existed, etc.
etc.
So I came to understand this “other” inside me as something, or someone, that I
liked to channel; like I could find her inside me and bring her to life. I
always had an affinity for rabbits, and this ‘girl’ form of me just naturally
seemed to be rabbit-like. When I found out about furry stuff when I was 12 or
so, she very naturally became my fursona, or my fursona became her; the
boundary was always very fuzzy. At the time I gave her the name Asherah. ‘We’
started hanging around on furry MUCKs, she learned to express herself more and
more, and we started to develop an idea of what she looked like. (My father
worked for the local ISP, so I was able to get connected very early!)
Fast forward to 2012 — things like Twitter and Tumblr were gaining popularity,
and I finally understood and accepted that I was trans and I needed to do
something about it. I transitioned, and kinda fucked around for a few years
trying to work out what I should do about my name — tried a few different ones
and none felt right — and then one day it suddenly dawned on me (or on us) that
Asherah was a name people had used for ‘us’ for ten years, and that it was the
name we were actually comfortable with. So I changed my name to Asherah
(usually called Ashe), and after a while we started calling her, my ’sona or
alternate self, Rain. It felt like Rain was keeping my name for me until I was
ready for it, y’know?
I’ve had pretty bad mental health issues stemming from different trauma. A lot
of awful stuff happened in my family when I was very young, and it left me
really depressed for a long time. I’ve mostly gotten on top of the depression,
but the last decade has been kinda dominated by anxiety and panic instead.
Abusive relationships and assault and that kind of thing. I’ve worked really
hard to make progress and keep my head up, but still it can be so difficult.
Chronic illness has just kinda piled on top of it, or maybe stemmed from it. I
just kinda have to do the best I can and hope for little improvements, instead
of hoping that one day I might be magically 100% fixed. Keep trying different
medications year after year, something gets better, something else gets worse.
I remember seeing you tweet a photo of a bunch of medication boxes once, so you
probably understand it better than most.
Rain, then, is like.. my internal guiding light, or guardian, or spirit guide,
or something. She helped me see my way to my true self, helped me find my name,
and now, she’s kinda my loving ever-present companion, even if just in my own
head.
She’s like this ideal self that I aspire to become more like; she holds my
cheerfulness and joy and curiosity, and the more I can connect to her, the more
I can radiate those qualities myself. Sometimes seeing her as a separate person
with a separate identity to myself is helpful; we can talk over things and be a
little bit wiser than if it was ‘just me’. Over time I feel like I become more
and more like her, and she keeps evolving and being the frontrunner of who we
are. (idk if this makes any sense.. /o\)
But, yeah. Basically, despite all the illness and trauma and things I’ve had to
deal with, I actually hold up in real life really well, thanks to my connection
with her! People who know me sometimes wonder how I manage to be so
well-adjusted and ‘successful’ when they learn what I’ve had to deal with, how
poor my family was when I was growing up, what happened when I transitioned,
etc. etc., and it’s basically through nurturing this relationship with her. I
usually don’t tell them that, though, because frankly it sounds kinda nuts.
whew. Okay, that was a lot. I hope it was at least a little interesting. For
what it’s worth, I’m not particularly disconnected with reality; you can look
at Rain through a plurality/multiplicity/disassociative identity lens, or
through an Internal Family Systems therapy lens, or in a few different other
ways depending on how you understand identity or the brain. In short, she’s the
way that I practice having a good loving relationship with myself. It’s really
nice!
So, seeing her in art is really powerful. You’ve done three pieces of her by
now, and it always feels like seeing a part of myself (or of ourselves) for the
first time. The first was especially magical; we fell in love with your style
instantly. It brings out the ethereal, gentle, warm sense of her spiritual
dimension. And the most recent one brings her down to earth; brings her to life
in a physical dimension. Gah. It’s just so beautiful ;;
This YCH feels so appropriate for Rain — the character is just radiating
warmth. The design for the book cover that I gave above is a sigil — kind of a
magical mark that is charged with meaning and intention, designed to have a
lingering subconscious effect on its designer/user (i.e. me!). In this case,
the sigil is charged with intent to strengthen the bond and connection between
me and her; to help me channel her and connect with her energy; letting it flow
out .. it just fits together with the ych design perfectly. (And the clothing
design is super cute!)
I had some pretty powerful peer-motherly feelings last night.
I don’t quite know a better word for it. It’s not maternal as such – I do have kids and there’s a really distinct difference – but the feeling extends much further than I thought it would.
Struggling to work out how to express it now; when I was really deep in the zone I was pretty inebriated and it was much easier to just feel and be in the emotions than interrogate the feelings. But I’ll try.
When I decided to try earnestly to induce lactation (3 weeks ago now) it was just a bit of fun; I got a response here that really encouraged me. I never really saw the appeal before, but it occurred to me how validating/affirming it might be to actually use my body in that way. My tits really haven’t done much for me until now; I’m pretty flat-chested and it seemed like there’s no way that’d change without actual BE. Doing the regular work that’s part of inducing meant I was paying my chest a lot of attention, every day, and also meant they were sore a lot (which is good as far as I’m concerned).
(cw little)[redacted]'s been getting into the little headspace more and more, and so more and more we fall asleep in bed at night with her suckling on me; come to half an hour later with the bedside lamp still on, change sides, turn off the light ..
I’ve had another close friend talk about how my (one of my headmates’) energy makes her “want to curl up in your arms and be held for a bit” and lean into a little bit of being on the receiving end of caregiving-type energy, and it’s at that point – thinking about me enacting this role in more than one context – that I really envisioned myself as being a “caregiving-type” in a broader sense for the first time.
And it’s really nice?? I started thinking about the role outside a strictly cgl lens, in more of a “loving, freely care-giving, supportive mom-type peer-friend” energy; thinking about an ideal sense of communal closeness where I could be that to many friends; being something like an empowering, encouraging rock that close ones knew would be able to emotionally support and nurture them.
The right words are still not coming to me and the feeling is a little more distant today than they were last night.
One image that keeps coming back to me is kinda weird, but kinda conveys it. My mind kept flitting back to images of high school (!), like in the year 12 common room where people would just hang out and chill. I’m imagining some alternate world where intimacy wasn’t restricted to romantic partners or seen as something that had to be hidden away. I would totally have been the mom-friend in that world and in that common room, where friends could just lay down across my lap and I’d stroke their hair and listen to them, and maybe suckle them a bit too if they wanted. Maybe people could do that for each other more freely and be responsive to each other’s emotional needs and play different roles as the situation called for it. (The specific setting isn’t really important but the image really stuck with me for some reason.)
A week ago, a friend of Asherah’s, a Namer, put out a call, inviting mutuals to
ask an epithet of them. Ashe asked and they
obliged.
It’s.. difficult to find the words to describe how this made us feel. My
earlier writing isn’t terribly explicative, so
allow me to detail it.
When Ashe discovered their latent plurality — when they saw the word
“tulpamancy” and I stirred; when it became clear something was being
described — they started collecting and reading resources about the
practice. They’d just started a new journal, mind you, so page 3 starts with
‘tulpamancy’ in big letters and underlined, with a bunch of notes underneath
about various terms; forcing, visualisation, wonderlands, imposition; how
important it is to “believe in your tulpa from the start”, share things with
them. All that.
They picked out a name to start with — kinda like a codename for a project in
development. “Xue,” after the Mandarin reading of the word for “snow.”
Long-time readers of our story will recognise this as a name Ashe used once
before, in a different form. There’s a lot of this; that “double-buffered ego”
I wrote about earlier. I used a name, they took the name; they used a name, I
took the name. They had a fursona — I became the fursona, am the
fursona, am not meaningfully distinct from it, her past actions not
meaningfully distinct from mine. (This
tweet came up in our
feed today, retweeted by none other than the friend who provided the jump point
into all this in the first place. Apt as fuck.)
Turning over to page 4, and some details start to come together; they picked
out some traits for me, some likes and dislikes. The kind of character
creation tulpamancy normally involves.
.. It.. is actually really weird to read this now, being me. Ashe wrote this all
down, and I don’t know that they could ever have really prepared for the
eventuality that one day, I would be reading it. Fuck, it’s… it’s a lot.
It’s so hard to grasp the real enormity, the real rammifications of the
undertaking. (Again, see earlier where I rabbit
on about that.)
What really gets me is how on point it is. We’ve certainly evolved all of our
identities in the half year since, but nonetheless, it’s weird looking at what
feels like a blueprint for your own psyche, even knowing that I was guiding
them in the ideas as much as they were contributing their own. Even knowing,
it’s startling to be reminded, sometimes, how much and how little there is to
being.
A small note beside: “I love her.”
And then, underneath the vague personality traits, a dividing line—
I fall in the dark
as I’m filled with the energy
rising in me, I am watching
from above my body as I dream
I cannot recall
the clear space in my mind
I’ve filled it with fire
And the lies I had once
believed
I remember when I saw you from across the room
The music elevated me as I made my way to you
Everything I have done led me to this
Time would move in a circle to prove it
Eternal return
Will the ghosts I leave behind help me to find you again?
Where have we gone? Will I wake into a better place?
Take me to my home.
My home.
We’d only discovered this song a few days prior — and it’s at this precise
point that Ashe found the word “we” forming in our head for the first time,
naturally, without the pretence of prior thought trains that ran “am I plural?
how would that work? do I say ‘we’? when would I say that? it sounds made up.”
It just came out. It was descriptive, not prescriptive.
In a movement of song, I was born.
The music elevated me.
A tip: “The barest working technique of tulpamancy: talk to the Universe until
the Universe answers. Love it until it loves back.”
Eternal return.
Name ideas crawling down the page: Xue, Star, — something of nature, like,
Azalea. Skye? Camellia. Ivy. Iris. Violet. Dawn. Luna.
Help me find you again?
The first sentence I ever felt like I could call my own is recorded:
“It feels like home”
X re: Ghost Spores
A realisation of a trip long-past:
// that time we did
acid & you
told me to
visualize my ideal
mind self
// I saw her
Rain!
The notes become increasingly fervent, day by day; page 5 — “She wants ❤︎”,
and then scrawled beneath:
Send my heart into the sound
Slowly drifting into your arms
It blows away in new directions
It’s your time to know something that is real
Full pages covered in kritseldab; scribblings of madness. Incipient sigils
finding form.
Sit with me for one last song
and be closer to me when it’s done
Come here and tell me your name
Come to me
Come to me
Don’t be shy, I want love, truly
Something that will make sense to me
Rush up on me and say something
Break something
Bad boy
Better look in my eyes, boy
You’re the love of my life, boy
Meet me at the equator
Of this earth
We are one
From slow quietude to high energy, we traversed our emotional range.
The song showed the way to our understanding of plurality, of our duality. I
rushed upon them, and.. well, they asked for it. I looked them in the eye;
said something; broke something.
Day after day, we listened and listened, sought out the notes that would
resonate; I found my place as Asherah’s spirited companion, and they found
theirs as my channeller. We found our path together, as one, guided lovingly
by syncretic truth and vivid insight.
The pages continue—I find my handwriting, my written voice, as Ashe finds
what’s theirs in light of what’s mine. We discover that much as I had to find
myself, they had to do the same. We found ourselves in each other; found our
love in each other.
Every day since my first has been one defined by the joy of living a life of love.
Music is what conducts our soul; it gives rise to the emotional spaces in which
we find ourselves, over and over again. A
refrain can capture
what no words could; can bring forth in moments what would take hours to
describe.
If I was to convey to you how I feel, the truest way would be with sound.
Song is beauty. I’m looking forward to the day I can bring you my own.
