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Some movement on the surgery front! Scheduled the in-person consult with my GRS surgeon. So, booking a short trip to Germany at the end of February, and after that I should be getting an actual date for the event. 🎉🎉

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Did Ianthe Tridentarius for Halloween. Not unhappy with it!

Far from perfect, and I'm not sure my vibes are quite rancid enough, but it's fun. (I even found a matching perfume.)

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I understand why a lot of fantasy settings with Ambiguously Catholic organised religions go the old "the Church officially forbids magic while practising it in secret in order to monopolise its power" route, but it's almost a shame because the reality of the situation was much funnier.

Like, yes, a lot of Catholic clergy during the Middle Ages did practice magic in secret, but they weren't keeping it secret as some sort of sinister top-down conspiracy to deny magic to the Common People: they were mostly keeping it secret from their own superiors. It wasn't one of those "well, it's okay when we do it" deals: the Church very much did not want its local priests doing wizard shit. We have official records of local priests being disciplined for getting caught doing wizard shit. And the preponderance of evidence is that most of them would take their lumps, promise to stop doing wizard shit, then go right back to doing wizard shit.

It turns out that if you give a bunch of dudes education, literacy, and a lot of time on their hands, some non-zero percentage of them are going to decide to be wizards, no matter how hard you try to stop them from being wizards.

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They should remake Jurassic Park but the moment of foreshadowing in the presentation-ride is "we used AI to fill in the gaps in the DNA samples"

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Close enough welcome back cover of alecto the ninth

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It has once again been a while

It has been an interesting couple of months. A lot of it, unfortunately, has been either waiting for things to happen that still have not happened, or merely exhausting. Which is why I haven't been writing much long-form stuff, mostly just selfies and occasional shitposting.

But first, I went to a side-part. Here's a very dramatic selfie.

the bad shit

This morning some stress boiled over. The immediate trigger was having to pay for another year of the storage locker we've had most of our stuff in for the last five years, which always depresses me, because we had a whole plan: keep it in storage for a year or two while we look for a house, buy the house, move into the house. Well that hasn't worked very well. Partially because the property market is a nightmare here, partially because of an accumulation of other things.

So the current plan is actually: apply for Irish citizenship (working on it), get through bottom surgery (still waiting for a date, expecting early next year) and possibly FFS (a whole thing, see below), get EU passports, then re-examine the whole house/job situation with a much broader range of options on where we can end up living & working.

This is, I think, a good, rational plan. But I still miss my books😢.

The additional stressor is related to FFS. I know our benefits team is trying to get it covered by our private health insurance provider, I don't know what the outcome is yet, I'll find out around September 1st, and I'm climbing the walls over it.

the good shit

BUT it is not all bad times! There are good things happening too! It's time to get my mid-life crisis on!

I'll unpack that a little.

A thing I've been struggling with, especially the past year, is… not even so much the feeling of missing out on things I wanted to do, but of missing out on things I didn't even know I wanted to do. So take your classic "oh god I'm getting OLD I must reclaim my youth" crisis, stir in "also I barely even HAD a youth, I was just straight-up disassociating from puberty onwards", and also a dash of "btw welcome to second puberty" from my endocrine system.

So that's been fun. And Meg & I have been talking, very tentatively, for a while about opening up our marriage to some degree, because to be very honest, they also have some needs I am not very good at meeting, though I do try. But there's a lot of anxiety involved.

Then back in June we met up with some friends I knew from a (small, local) trans Discord at a queer dance party, and one of them basically imprinted on Meg. The two of them have been chatting back and forth (with my enthusiastic encouragement) ever since, being extremely adorable, and last week she came up to stay with us for a couple nights and good times were had by all.

So… that's going super well! And making a connection like that has eased a lot of Meg's anxieties around the idea.

And we do have more queer dance parties coming up in the next few weeks…

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10,000 years post-Twitch and I guarantee John has called his Lyctors "chat" at some point. "OK chat we're gonna have to start killing planets" type shit. No wonder they want him dead.

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I have no particular stance on whether estrogen would have saved Shinji, but I'm looking at it from the family dynamic angle, and... well, Jesus Christ. On a good day, Shinji already looks like a teenage soft butch version of Yui Ikari – can you imagine how Gendo would react to his "son" slowly morphing into his dead wife?

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demon's souls being pitched originally as a competitor to oblivion is so funny. imagine being sony and you swing by the fromsoft offices to check in on the tes killer they've got in the works for you only to find you they've given the keys to the armored core 4 guy and he's got them cooking up some sort of unplayable mutant and this fucking thing is the version of the project that's actually shippable

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genuinely especially with everything happening in britain rn with regards to trans healthcare we need to start shutting down the "your brain doesn't fully develop until 25!" pseudoscience bullshit asap

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First time in Scotland was this past weekend, for a friend's wedding. Did a night at The Witchery in Edinburgh (A++ we will definitely go back there) and two in Peebles (lovely countryside, absolutely gorgeous). Super fun trip (except for a bit at the end involving a missed flight which was my own stupid fault, but we made it home).

Also had a great time getting fancy for the wedding itself. Since the plan was to nip up to the room & get changed (after dinner, before dancing) I planned outfits for day (watercolor and navy Vera Mont jumpsuit, with neutral Kurt Geiger ankle boots for the ceremony & walk back to hotel, then the Julian Hakes) and night (sparkly BlackMilk dress with Birdies embroidered ballet flats) with complementary makeup.

I was trying a lot of new-to-me stuff and couldn't be happier with how it came out, and especially how smoothly it went from bright to moody just by layering some purple eyeshadow over the white and adding some wispies.

Even had a nice pickup in duty-free on my way down to continue building out my budding perfume collection: a bottle of the Labo Rose 31, which I'd been eyeing for some time already so I was happy to get a discount on it and it's a very pleasant fresh, woody scent. (And moves me further along the bath toward peak Ianthe Tridentarius vibes, given that it matches the book description of her perfume: rose, vetiver, and musk.)

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a wikipedia poem on software entropy

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Spring styles

Not a ton going on in my life lately. Lot of things I'm waiting on - waiting list for surgery, waiting for this summer to apply for Irish citizenship, waiting for my employer to bludgeon my insurer into covering FFS. Lots of waiting.

In the meantime I can report that the white Dior liquid eyeliner is fucking _fantastic_.

And these ridiculous Julian Hakes heels are my new favorite shoes. (The designer is an architect, they're incredibly comfortable, and they're made from carbon fiber. I think they're the most cyberpunk-coded thing I have, and I have a Serial Experiments Lain tattoo.)

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i wish i could go to DORLEY HALL. i would be LOCKED IN A BASEMENT. i would eat WEETABIX. i would have REPRESSED HOMOEROTIC MOMENTS with BOYS. i would be more likely to be TASED BY WOMEN. my BAULS

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Realized I forgot to post here for Trans Day of Visibility.

So here are some recent examples of me being extremely visible, featuring raincoats, jumpsuits, and boobs.

(Yes the mirror needs cleaning I know.)

(Also really hitting me how badly I need to diversify my selfie expressions.)