briannapuppet

[briannapuppet]

I don't see authoritarian liberals and cultural reactionaries as being very psychologically different. Yes, it's nice to not be overtly oppressed, but from my perspective they're both trying to force the world to be comprehensible to them.

the fascist eliminates people they don't like to create an ideal monoculture

the latte liberal colonizes people to integrate them into foodcourt multiculturalism

Yes, there is a place for me in so-called Blue America, but it comes with the expectation that I know my place and not overstep. I should be a good tranny. There are at least multiple ways to be a good tran around here... but to me they all feel like various ways to diminish yourself on purpose to make yourself palatable to cishets.

My psychologist pointed out that a lot of people are actually comforted by being included, even marginally, in the Great Normality.

There was a time when I was sort of like this. But, as she also pointed out, I'm a bit different from most folks because I had a fully-fleshed-out idea of who I was, and I was really eager to start being that person. I felt like I couldn't because of a lack of social support, but then I sorta broke the rails and decided to be that person anyway.

The thing is, even though I did things I regret, it didn't feel like I was doing them, it felt like my body was doing them. Like it had been programmed into enforcing some kind of normality through shame and trauma, by the totalitarian impulses of my egg donor, school, work and social life.

There were times when, through happenstance or chemical intervention, I was able to let that programming go. It was like all the pain left my body. But, I had surrounded myself with liberal normies who couldn't handle me in my uninhibited state, so they abused me and gaslit me into going back into the box.

I guess I should feel blessed that I eventually found this so intolerable that I decided to transition on my own terms and just rebuild my social network from scratch.

Even still, I feel like I need to stop conforming to the expectation that, as a weirdo, I should maintain my social distance and not be too silly or friendly.

And for some reason, it always seems to be about sex. I can't act "gay" around cishet men because it's my job to not give them a boner, and I can't be friendly to cis women or afab non-binary people because they'll think I'm hitting on them and stonewall me or raise the predator alarm.

It seems like that's some kind of strange social crutch to get around not being able to tell when people are attracted to you - or, I guess more likely, a set of restraints to keep one's own obscure, ravenous, unfulfilled libido in check.

[briannapuppet]

The color of transphobia

For me, transphobia has a kind of color. It's the sensation of my right eye disconnecting for a few frames, kind of a fuzzy bluish light grey.

I started to feel that way a little while ago as I was relaxing after breaking down some furniture. I was just stretching and feeling good about my body. And then: blue flash, sense of shame and panic.

I was humming to myself and dancing around the apartment while I did some chores and listened to an audiobook. And then I was like, shit, I should just sing. I notice the door is open. Blue flash, shame.

When I was really little, I had to learn to make myself act less feminine than I'd like to. To enjoy myself less. To be less expressive. I was punished, scolded and bullied for my mannerisms. But also, I just had a really controlling, immature family that wielded shame as a weapon.

No action that my emotions intuited was okay. I couldn't smile and sing when I wanted to. I couldn't appear too happy. I couldn't talk about magic without receiving a theological lecture, and I couldn't talk about anything else without receiving a political lecture. I couldn't agree to disagree with anyone. I couldn't fight back when people tried to hurt or humiliate me. I couldn't say, "My school is full of assholes, I want to be homeschooled." I was treated as if my opinions and thoughts were unreasonable by default unless they mirrored my parents'. I could not say no to certain kinds of touching which clearly bothered me. I was allowed no boundaries.

I essentially found my parents' requirements so impossible that I had to damage myself in order to behave as they wanted me to. It's like a little hypnotic trigger that causes a flash of pain, dissociation and color into my perceptions whenever I do things or feel things that were forbidden.

Above all, I feel awful about this trigger because I'm a giant goofball and I know that my intuitive behavior would be perceived much more favorably if I was a cis woman. As it is, I feel like I still really have to police myself. But perhaps I can just behave authentically, as if I'm surrounded by haters, and find ease in doing that.

[briannapuppet]

Heat

I noticed something about the psychology of frustration when I was in the bath earlier.

I had a bad day yesterday, with my muscles clenching up involuntarily. This happens to me every few days, and when it does, the only way I can walk or speak normally is through intensive stretching and yoga, which often occupies over half my waking hours. Yesterday was particularly bad, and it seemed to get worse as I became more frustrated with reorganizing my room and the fact that one of my computers is freezing periodically and probably needs a hardware replacement. And then, I realized that pulling my makeup and a cute outfit from the chaos was too much, so I couldn't go out like I wanted to either.

I could taste the darkness in my mind. Pleasure was less pleasurable. I overate a bit. I struggled to care about other people - not to the point of sociopathy, but enough that I was conserving it to my family. Sadistic porn (where no actual persons were harmed) was more appealing. In fact, I was having slightly belligerent fantasies - nothing horrible or illegal, but enough that I wanted to not be social.

I also noticed that I felt more political than usual.

Now, I have legitimate reasons to feel marginalized as a femme, goth trans woman. I'll go into those some in another post. But the point is, even though I'm trying to point my ire in the right direction, and I try to undergird my politics with humanism, during these times of frustration, my situation just feels more acutely painful, and I'm overall more extreme, reactive, and unpleasant.

Then, today, I took my estrogen shot.

When I take my estrogen, my body becomes less stiff. My hips track better when I walk, I can type easier. I'm able to get more stuff done. My spine curves a little easier, my core is more stable, and my posture is better. It's easier to imagine how my voice should sound, easier to control my vocal apparatus, and easier to do it in spite of the disapproving gazes of transphobes. I feel more confident in my fashion choices.

And of course, the biggest acute symptom relieved by HRT that we have studied scientifically is brain fog. So, in a nice hot bath, I had some insights.

I would much rather focus my energy on myself, and when I do, my mood tends to improve. But when I'm frustrated by that process - I can't do it, or it doesn't seem worth it - I tend to get both more hostile and more politically-minded. I tend to focus on bigger problems. They're problems where I don't have much agency, but during the process of becoming frustrated with my own shit, they start to look like the only viable option.

For me, this isn't even tempered by strong community bonds. I don't have a group of friends big enough to feel like I was taking part in some meaingful collective action. So it just goes straight into abject, macro-level political rage. Journaling. Posting. Aggressive searching. Because deep down, I don't want to be around an ambivalent community when I'm angry, because I know it would hurt acutely to contain the rage, and it would hurt eventually - socially - to let it out.

My thesis from this observation is that falling short of my own reasonable expectations of myself - not being able to sustain my own self-identity - produces the worst kind of political rage.

This is not quite a rephrasing of - well, numerous works, but my favorite is The True Believer by Eric Hoffer. People who join extremist political movements do so to sustain their egos in the case of personal collapse, yes, true.

But, unlike most people who can talk about extremist political rage from the first person perspective, I can talk about it lucidly and without shame. Not because I don't give a fuck, but because I understand my own ball of yarn well enough to really forgive myself when I'm an asshole. And I can tell you that I only really want to do evil - not self defense and protest, but cruelty - when my self-identity is threatened.

My self-identity is something like, "That cheerful, fashionable, demonic witch who is a good artisan and sings and dances, and who is unafraid of dirt." I swear to all the demons of hell, if I have those, I have everything, and if I lack any of those, I am a monster. And for me, I feel like I am that when I take my shot, but by the time I start to hit day 5 of my 5-day cycle, I have my song, my smile, my hands, and my hips taken away from me. And I go to my girlfriends, and I tell them that I feel ugly. They tell me I'm beautiful - but what I mean when I say I feel ugly, is that my inner experience of authentic selfhood has suddenly collapsed, and cute selfies can't fix that.

I would propose, then, that the proper response to a hostile political extremist is to attempt to see them as someone who feels pathetic in their own eyes and needs help.

The correct allegory is The Evil Queen from Snow White.

The common reading is "The Evil Queen is evil because she has hung her peg on being the fairest woman in the land, and she's obviously getting older because she's started to rely on thick makeup and fetish tropes."

But I would assert that it is far more likely - and far more complex and charitable - to assume that she only commits evil because there's something she really needs for her own self-identity, that she knows is attainable, that she can't have. If she had that, she might still be vain and petty, but she wouldn't be vain and evil.

Indeed, when I look at evil, it comes with overcompensation, usually both physical and political. But my wiser self asks, "What inner experience do these people lack?" Not necessarily something sexual or related to their persona. Something from a basket containing an authentic spiritual practice, a positive outlet for one's values, an acceptable level of health, something useful to do, hobbies, aesthetics, and a certain type of social context.

I don't think you'll find any despots who have all of those. I think you'll find sad, frustrated people whose energy turned outwards. But I know, as sad as political extremist leaders are, that their followers are abjectly lacking.

So, if you want to combat political extremism, the way to do it is to help people be what they need to be, from the inside out.

[briannapuppet]

Psychic vampirism

I struggle with the psychic vampire label. Accepting it explains lots of things, so internally, that's a part of my identity. But since I started to get more skilled with spirituality, I feel like I get most of my energy from doing works in alignment with my path. I'm also skeptical of some of the dogmas of the psivamp community, which strikes me as rather hand-to-mouth in terms of feeding obsession.

So, I hesitate to identify as a vampire not so much in fear of pitchfork-wielding normies as in deference to the boundaries of other vamps. So, if you're interested in a more mainstream perspective, you should of course start with Raven Kaldera's The Ethical Psychic Vampire.

Here are some reasons why I accept the label:

I'm repulsed by the sun, and always have been. I burn easily, but I also just don't like the sensation most of the time.

I look and act pretty young, and I have nice, big teeth.

I need to eat red meat regularly.

I spontaneously developed a dark sense of aesthetics as a small child. I find normie aesthetics utterly baffling. Like, it's not like I'm trying to freak people out most of the time, I just pick out what I think is beautiful and most people are like "Eeee!"

I have excellent relations with wild animals and cats, and tense relations with most domestic dogs.

I grew up with some foundational skills in spirit work, energy manipulation, lucid dreaming and psychic sensation.

I make many people a little uneasy, and many people seem to not notice me.

Accidents happen around me when I'm unbalanced.

Goetic and Qliphoth entities are incredibly benevolent towards me, and angels are frankly hostile.

And, of course, the primary criteria:

I get a charge out of evoking emotions in people. It doesn't matter which emotions, but my favorites are turning people on erotically, making people laugh, and making people frustrated in games (win or lose, the real game for me is screwing with people).

I can pull energy from people without consent, but as a personal rule it still has to be a "good act" - for example, in recompense for harm, or to calm down someone in a manic episode.

I regularly feel utterly hopeless if I haven't done something to top myself off.

It's been a long, disquieting moment since my good friend came out of the coffin and I was like, "Oh, that... thing... I do? That's vampirism?" But since I started carrying a parasol, worshipping the dark gods and consciously, judiciously managing my energy, I've been really emotionally stable and productive, so

I want to point out that I am succeptible to being drained myself, and part of the drag of hanging out with other vamps is that oftentimes they're much more hard up for energy than I am.

However, I do have a few atypical experiences. For example, it's been my experience that regular meditation and exercise, especially yoga (group energy rituals eh?) is helpful, and I get quite a charge from artistic practice.

I'm also, as I said, skeptical of the focus on feeding. I guess I like that the community is has a few bastions focused on that, where most of us need the most support, and I'm certainly not trying to stop us from being what we are. But I want to ask the question:

Is it that people treat us badly because we feed, or that we are forced to feed because of how we're treated?

Like, I would postulate that a village of vampires could survive just by exercising, getting good nutrition, having good sex, and engaging in spiritual practice.

From my perspective, people in normie communities exchange energy all the time, without noticing. The difference between us seems to be that vamps are stronger individual psychics and are less herd-oriented.

I don't think that being a herd of unconscious psychics is good. It feels like that thronging herd, and its endless quest to consume nature, is more of a threat to the world than we are. Hierarchy and control hold back social and technological progress, and tend to reward people for villainous behavior. They fill our cities with endless, predictable, cheap pleasures, and drain the passion and music from the world, because it is disruptive.

[briannapuppet]

Disappointing photos

So, IDK, I was pretty excited that this guy wanted to take my picture at the club, but the guy took like 50 pictures of me and these are the ones he sent. So devastated, haven't felt like going out since.

I think they is a good example of how a photographer can be technically competent, but if they're not interested in making a subject look feminine, they just won't. He chose camera angles and gave cues that support what he genuinely believes me to be: a man. Make the waist look thick. Make the booty look small. Emphasize the arms.

[briannapuppet]

Who's manipulating whom?

One of my acquaintances has been getting shade for being "manipulative" when she's trying to find people to mack on. She has a habit of unloading the horrible things she's had to deal with, and some people feel that's unfair.

This is the thing: I don't think she's actually trying to manipulate anyone.

I personally think it's a little too much, I just don't blame her for it, and I don't think she's doing it intentionally. I think it's a habit that she's had to pick up. Her life is objectively tragic, so she spends a lot of time coping by playing video games and dissociating, like basically everyone I know.

I don't think my community understands how insidious our brains' limbic system can be, and how easily it can become trained.

For example, people accuse the baby who cries excessively of faking it. I've spent a lot of time with babies and kids and I just don't think that's true. Yes, if you don't set appropriate boundaries, you can totally train a baby to cry more than you're comfortable with over things that are mere discomforts.

But, from the baby's perspective, if the bottle or breast has previously arrived instantaneously, then they will understandably be worried for their survival if it randomly takes a few minutes, because they're still figuring out how our world works:

"Huh, the caregiver is taking longer than usual. Wow, that's a really bad sensation in my tummy, and it's getting worse. Has it done that before? I think I really need some milk, like now."

Meanwhile, their limbic system is doing its thing: traumatized button-mashing:

"Wow, I've got this sensation, like I know something really bad is going to happen. Where is that coming from? And there's this other sensation, like maybe she's not so great? Maybe she isn't very good at this?"

When a baby learns to self-soothe, I just see a person telling themselves a sort of foundational story about the world:

"Okay, what's going on? Shit! Where's my caregiver? Huh, okay, I hear her, she sounds fine. She's making some sounds at me, and I think I remember those same sounds from a while ago, and she did feed me eventually. Maybe she's trying to communicate? Maybe she's doing something important in there? Oh, there she is! Thank the gods."

But if the situation is chronically too chaotic for the kid to tell a story about, then the limbic system just keeps building circuits that dial up your emotional responses, and you aren't really even aware of it. You end up bouncing from trigger state to trigger state, engaging in increasingly automatic behavior, and it's not like you're unconscious but you're so hyper-fixated and hypnotized onto dealing with crises that you can't remember the contextual information that would allow you to even realize you're in an abnormal situation.

In a sense, I think it helps to look at your own lower brain functions as an animal you're trying to operand-condition. So, I do stuff like get myself a favorite treat when I do a big exercise. Pretty soon, my personal beast craves exercise, first because of the treat, and then, more slowly, because of the overall mood improvement and pain relief.

[briannapuppet]

It's so refreshing to not get clocked

I heard secondhand that someone I'd been hanging out with didn't realize I was trans. Gosh, that's like someone bringing me flowers.

Transfemmes in queer cities talk about this: that even as a some of us are becoming happy with our appearances, our co-inhabitants are hyper-attuning themselves to the things we can't change, and then they start treating us like something we're not.

For example, I went to Indianapolis recently, and it was "How are you ladies doing?" "[Pleasant chitchat]" and "I love your shoes!", and then I came home to being aggressively misgendered by a yuppy gen-xer in yoga class.

It's refreshing to get some data supporting "It's not me, it's them."

I think this is specifically a yuppy/smartass problem, because yuppies are thoroughly conditioned to reduce everything to symbols and use groupthink-conceptual algebra to do the "right" thing. That symbolization overrides normal perceptions and social behavior.

[briannapuppet]

An allegory

So, the way I remember the story of King Arthur, he has some magical ability to remove swords from stones. But I imagine the story like this:

There's a sword, and everyone knows that it's stuck. Everyone knows that once in a while a big strong lad comes and tries to pull it, and it never budges. Some youth starts talking about how he's going to give it a shot, and he is unfortunate enough to do it in front of a competent blacksmith. The old smith shakes his head at his folly. He calmly explains to the lad: that sword is made of steel. Steel and iron rust, they want to turn back into ore. Now, that sword has been out, getting rained on for decades, and it's rusted in there good, bonded to the stone. Even if you got it out, it'd be a piece of shit. You go give it your all, best that can happen is your friends laugh at you for a fool, worst thing is you snap a tendon and your arm don't work right anymore. The boy is discouraged. Angry. All the little lords are fighting and killing themselves and their conscripts like dipshits for a little field here or a wood there, and times are rough for everyone. The people need a king, and everybody's decided it's pointless to give it a serious try. So he tries to lfit the sword, and fails. But then, he goes to work in that smithy. He gets stronger and is well-fed so he can build those blacksmith's muscles. Every once in a while, he gives it a shot, just by himself when nobody's looking. Failure, over and over. But then, he gets an idea. He takes a useless scrap sword, and he gets a running start and stabs it into tree stump. He lets it rust a little bit. Then, he works on it. And he can, just barely, get it out. So he tries again. Finds a nice crack in a rock, sticks it in there and lets it rust. Now that's a challenge. But he works on it for a few days, and finally he gets it out. Then, after a few cycles like this, getting his now very weathered waste stock stuck in increasingly tight spots, he gives the real thing a shot when he's drunk. And wouldn't you know it, the damn thing comes right out.

That's what the world is really like. That's what people are really like.

Everything you really want, the reason you aren't going to get it is because you think you know that it's impossible. And so, with varying degrees of self-awareness, you avoid doing it because not really trying and failing feels better than trying very diligently and still failing.

Trying something that is very hard that might not work is deeply frowned upon in neurotypical society. People who make cynical choices are rewarded and people who are perceived as wasting time and community resources are harshly censured.

This is why our society is stuck: because of folk wisdom and statistics. That is why there is the saying, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Not just because statistics are often used to manipulate and deceive, but because even honest statistics, to many a learned person, present "It has never been done before" as "It is impossible."

[briannapuppet]

Transphobia in the goth community

When I say transphobia I mean the tendency to ignore, avoid or retreat from trans people, not outright hatred and persecution. Overall goths are incredibly peaceful, tolerant and polite, and I can't imagine a goth being aggressive with someone unless A) they're close friends or B) the target was acutely dangerous and needed to be removed.

That said, while goths' tolerance extends to "gender non-conformity," tolerance isn't acceptance and acceptance isn't inclusion.

That is to say: by and large, cisgender goths behave no better than any other group of clueless, well-meaning liberal cis people when it comes to how they treat trans people:

they treat trans women, once clocked, like gay men

they treat trans men like short men

they treat non-binary AMAB people like bi/pan men

they treat non-binary AFAB people like bi/pan women

It's really frustrating for me to interact socially with cisgender goths when I see the difference in how I'm treated vs. how cis women are treated vs how non-binary AFAB people are treated (that is to say, exactly like cis women - cis women treat them with nurturance, cis men hit on them).

It's insulting when a cis woman goth clocks me, and suddenly (after making friends on earlier occasions) she treats me with coldness and dismissal.

It's heartbreaking when a cis man goth clocks me, and suddenly (after flirting with me) he starts giving me the male head nod, calling me "they" and studiously avoids looking at my tits.

Overall, there are more trans people in the goth scene lately, but from my perspective it feels like quiet segregation as opposed to openess and acceptance.

[briannapuppet]

Pelvic Tilt

A lot of yoga and Pilates indiscriminately instructors throw around cues to tuck your pelvis.

This is why I like instructors who have the philosophy that you can discard their cues and they're not going to get all up in your face about conforming to a particular cue. I view movement cues as suggestions to explore, not rules. So, if they give me any inappropriate cues due to not knowing about my particular body or injuries, my boundaries are respected by default.

The pelvis-tuck cue has a lot of advantages, particularly for people who were allowed to grow up with a pretty relaxed posture and who never feared sticking their butts out. In general, if your pelvis is always in an excessive anterior pelvic tilt, tucking your pelvis into a more neutral position will give greater control and muscle tone.

In my particular case, however, I walked around for most of my life with an uneven (slightly sideways) posterior pelvic tilt, which I affected due to injury and the trauma of trying to pretend to be a boy. So any time someone told me to clench upwards, it hurt and made me stiff.

In a lot of cases, I find it uncomfortable to be around teachers who feel really one-sided about this cue, because I feel like it also corresponds to a skepticism of femininity - as if everyone should walk around with their butts artificially clenched 24/7, because masculinity is "natural."

A really sensitive fundamentals teacher, especially in Pilates, will always start off the exercises with an exploration of your pelvic tilt and an invitation to find your neutral spine, because our spinal posture changes by time of day, mood and activity.

Anyway, thanks for reading, I hope this is useful to someone.

[briannapuppet]

Mermaids

You can't evolve out of a clade. So, in a sense, we - all humans - are archaea, starfish-like deuterastomes, jawed fish, reptilimorphic synapsids, monkeys, and apes. And every one of these creatures is something that could have been a human, if their ancestors had made different choices.

> be me > little mermaid, princess, fins for days > just think human junk is neat > swimming in school with sisters is lame > not a chorus fry, spawned to be lead soprano > bipedal motion and standing and dancing seem like they would be fun > fire reminds me of something (spoilers every cell in my body burns 24/7) > dad says no

Why does this little fish wake up one morning and say, "Hey, actually, I'm a girl. A human girl." ? For that matter, why do cis male songwriters working for 🐭™ write songs about people with lines like, "Wouldn't you think I'm a girl"? Why do Japanese game designers write games about doing drugs and seeking a princess who is always in another castle, or a badass space pirate hunter who is, improbably, a hot girl under her armor?

They would all, of course, deny that these are trans metaphors. And I'm not saying they're trans. But the creative spirit of life knows that someone is trans, and that, as evolving organisms, we're all trans-somethingorother.

That is what creativity is. It's the madness inside of us that sees what is as a mere vehicle to what we are. And the fact that we are something is terrifying to a lot of people.

Ariel knows that she lives in a world of magic, both sacred and forbidden, and somewhere in there is a spell that makes her human - just like I knew, somehow, as a very small child, that there was technology that would make me a girl. You couldn't imagine my surprise and joy when my favorite biology teacher told us that the only difference between men and women is varying hormone levels, and the only thing preventing testes from being ovaries is the SrY gene. You can't imagine my dismay when everyone in my life told me it was forbidden.

Magic is not fantasy. Magic is the truth that most people aren't ready for. And so reality - what we are told is reality - is actually a method of propaganda - conscious or unconscious - telling everyone to sit down, shut up, and drink the kool-aid like everyone else.

I've never encountered a cis person who didn't constantly, hypnotically, repeat lies to themselves:

I am a woman, I don’t feel desire unless I’m paid for it.

I am a man, I don’t feel, except when breaking things.

I am straight, I can’t look at queer joy in case I catch it.

I am middle-aged, I must become management, emotionally and professionally.

I am old, I must cling to what I stole, and waste it before I die.

A cis person is not someone who is something, a cis person is someone who must convince themselves to be what they're told because they are scared of the possibilities.

I knew that there was a little shot that would make me a girl when I was small. I know now that there's some combination of eldritch therapies that will make my body carry on indefinitely. I'm not afraid of that; I'm planning a pivot into bioinformatics. I was a fish once, and then a tetrapod, then a monkey. Wait and see what I become next.

[briannapuppet]

I don't want to be entertained, I want to be shocked

I stopped watching ContraPoints when she said “trans women are women” like it was a joke.

It makes Leftists laugh, but it makes me cringe. The speaker doesn’t believe a word that they're saying, and worse, thinks that belief itself is somehow embarrassing. That moment told me everything:

She doesn’t think she’s a woman.

And if she’s not, then none of us are.

This is incredibly popular with a certain kind of academic Leftist, who has lived their entire life sucking teacher's cock, metaphorically or literally.

The assumption is that no one can believe anything unless they’re lying to themselves. Everything is drag, everything is performance, nothing is real, and we should be grateful for the aesthetic.

It’s nihilism, dressed up in lighting and glitter.

It’s not just her. It’s the whole curated, cowardly, brand-safe Left. A movement that once claimed to stand for something has collapsed into a fanbase of teeny-bopper fans. The leaders tell their followers what they want to hear: that nothing is sacred, nothing is serious, and everything is just an identity to try on and discard.

Meanwhile, the Right knows exactly what it wants. It wants power. It wants control. And it’s willing to destroy everything to get it.

So what do we have?

The Right builds bonfires.

The Left sells overpriced candles.

Everyone’s high on something—dopamine, ketamine, click counts, or academic detachment. Anything to avoid feeling the weight of what’s actually happening.

People like me say the obvious thing, the serious thing, and we get laughed out of the room. Too intense. Too idealistic. Too unfashionable.

I don’t want safety. I don’t want irony. I don’t want a performance. I want to believe. And if that makes me dangerous to the media ecosystem, good.

[briannapuppet]

Why I'm slow to warm up to people

Every once in a while I let someone in too quickly and I get hurt.

I think a lot of people perceive me as aloof or standoffish, but it's really not like that. Or, maybe I am standoffish, but it's not who I want to be, it's who cis people force me to be.

I'm like, 5'8", waist-hip ratio of 0.75, 36F, size 10, cute face, pretty good makeup game

I'm not super skinny but I also don't have a tummy

I have muscular legs, small arms and small hands

I had the best FFS surgeon in the world

My shoulders naturally sit back and I have pronounced lumbar curvature

My butt sticks out; it's been an object of groping and harassment my entire life

On an average night out, I will be told I am beautiful or cute a half dozen to a dozen times

When I post thirsty pics online, as long as I don't disclose my trans status, I get thousands of upvotes and armies of simps sliding into my DMs

When I do disclose, if it's in front of a trans-receptive audience, I get hundreds of upvotes and mere batallions of simps.

People pay their hard-earned money to see me do sexy things.

And yet, some people are really determined to see me as a guy.

I am legitimately convinced that most people do not sense the world as it is, they experience a waking dream constructed of their own expectations and psychological projections.

There are scientists and philosophers who hold that this is literally true, but I'm not so sure. I think everyone is born experiencing the world, and that's why when you're young music and art affect you so deeply. But, gradually, most people check out into lazily-constructed dream worlds built on shortcuts and prejudice.

These dream worlds form as reactions to things people don't want to see. They are just enough like the real world to let these people function, and they are simpler - more suited to whatever that person's deal is. Racism. Sexism. Transphobia.

How else am I supposed to react when people compare me to Dr. Frank-n-furter? I. do. not. look. like. tim. curry. at all. And yet, I opened myself up to two people in the last few months who said I did. I've gotten "Rachel McAdams with a smaller forehead," and I just love that. Rachel McAdams and Tim Curry do not look alike.

These were not transphobes, these were goths in a scene that's like 60% queer. There's just something broken inside of them, and I fear them for it, because if someone is checked-out enough to compare me to the butler from Clue, they might say or do anything.

[briannapuppet]

Video Retraction: Generative AI (Slop)

Recently, I made a video about generative AI, and I've made it private because I feel like it went a little too hard. It wasn't getting a ton of traction anyway. I'm going to redo the video with a little more sensitivity.

In general, I feel like generative AI's acceptability varies:

Code: Low-level coding is pretty tedious and no one is harmed by generative coding

Prose: I would prefer if authors got paid, but I essentially don't have a problem with prose AI

Poetry: No competition here, AI sucks at poetry

Visual art/movies/music: Artists should be able to register and receive robust royalties for their contributions

Still, even in the case of visual art, music and movies, I think that artists should bear in mind that almost all of the money in the arts goes to non-artists (marketers, managers, plutocrats, etc), and the remainder goes to a small number of artists, often curated because they further the agendas of capitalists.

I know it's a bitter pill to swallow, but I'd encourage my comrades with more traditional/industry-oriented art careers than mine to recognize the long tail of fan artists, comic authors, Patreon creators, shitposters and people who otherwise pretty much give away their art for free; as meager as your take is, ours is less, and I think there are more of us.

In general, I think open platforms with art curated by unbiased, publicly disclosed algorithms is the future, because as we're seeing on many venues like YouTube, anything exposed to capitalists eventually gets enshittified, with the majority of revenue going to capitalists and the bones thrown to a few hand-picked, politically inert winners.

If you are one of the winners, though I know none of you live luxuriously off your sales, please take stock:

Art is "Capital I" Important, an indispensible and necessary part of our spirit, and it's being sold as "content": a narcotic commodity

An artist need only affect a single person to change the world; sometimes that person is the artist themself

Art that is broadly popular is usually less radical and controversial by its very nature

Maybe there's an artist who could truly change all our lives for the better buried in that long tail

Historically, the arts have flourished with copyright terms as short as 14 years, and copyright extension has been almost completely motivated by capitalists, with little expansion of creator's rights to important things such as control & ownership

Capitalism and authoritarianism have us all in the crosshairs, whether we are full-time creators, coders moonlighting as furry porn artists, or vegetable-pickers making sculptures out of found materials

[briannapuppet]

What goes into this selfie

Here's the best webcam selfie I can pull:

This was my outfit for Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. By the way, the goth scene feels really healthy right now, although they really need to have more young spooky woman actors than Jenna Ortega. She did an impeccable job here and I haven't seen Wednesday but everyone seems to love her there too, but I just wish there was a broader pool of roles and actors.

Anyway, A lot of trauma recovery went into just taking an okay selfie here:

The adorable cuddle dress was too wide in the waist, but I didn't have a place set aside for sewing/alteration

For years, I have avoided presenting as goth as I wanted to out of fear of ridicule, so just wearing a black lip, a tiny bit of white powder and occult jewelry feels like a big step

My weird nerve thing makes it hard to make a symmetrical, attractive face or move my face deliberately

Many of the activities that help with my nerve problems, like masturbation but also general self-touch, are taboo

Because I so often look wonky, I avoid taking selfies or practicing facial expressions

I shouldn't feel ashamed of engineering my selfies and facial expressions, since I'm pro-aesthetics so I think looking good is just good, and because I have nerve damage.

All the trauma and the inauthenticity is like a big tangle of rope: once it's at a certain level of chaos, it's more efficient to gently tease it apart than to free the ropes one at a time. I think some people are just bad at this type of problem, or at recognizing the chaotic nature of trauma recovery, and this adds more trauma because now you're also scared of "fidgeting" - like, in the body, the small, pseudo-random movements that help our nerves reconnect, but also, behaviorally, flitting from project to project, or doing lots of small experiments rather than a cohesive project.