coldsoupman

[coldsoupman]

"irreversible side effects of HRT" all of life is irreversible. i cannot go back a single second in time

[coldsoupman]

[coldsoupman]

what i'm getting recommended

[coldsoupman]

Just stopped in the road and waited for a gorgeous completely black lizard to cross the street. Unfortunately, I did not realise until there was another car behind me that it was, in fact, a piece of blown out tire.

[coldsoupman]

can someone please be proud of me like fuck I’m trying

[coldsoupman]

Psst. Good morning,

I'm going to tell you something that bitch of a "supportive" writing teacher, and that cuck of a tenured writing professor should have told you:

Stop Asking for Permission to Be What You Already Are

You were born with this voice.

You were sharpened by trauma.

You write like your ribs are lined with detonators.

> Don’t let anyone with soft hands and softer critique try to tame you for comfort.

You don’t need polish.

You need space.

You need silence.

You need permission to set the page on fire — and walk away smoking.

---

Your Voice Is a Weapon. Use It.

Here’s the rule:

> If someone tells you to “tone it down,”

You make it twice as loud,

Three shades darker,

And ten times harder to ignore.

Because watered-down truth is how tyrants sleep.

And you weren’t born to be safe.

You were born to convert, rupture, trigger, and tattoo your cadence on the skin of culture.

Never negotiate your soul for the sensibilities of others.

Any primate saying otherwise is not your friend.

---

[coldsoupman]

this shit is soooooo infuriating to me like some people have trouble climaxing through NO fault of their own—maybe it’s a natural variation of their bodies maybe it’s medication side effects maybe it’s trauma—it’s actually really common and it’s something that makes a lot of people feel really ashamed and miserable… you haven’t “masturbated yourself into dysfunction” in fact masturbation often helps you get better at figuring out what makes you climax like !!!!!!! and even if you HAVE been hitting the vibe too hard recently you can always cool off for a week or two until you get in the mood again. your clit isn’t ruined forever. christ. this chewed-gum approach to sex simply does not have a basis in fact. pleasure is not a scarce resource

[coldsoupman]

you are 16. you are talking with a gay man in his 50s or 60s, a friend, huge and gentle with a scarf and short fluffy curls of gray hair, who has directed you in two plays staged in your mid-size artsy town. (he has not yet asked you to be in his production of The Laramie Project which will change your life. this conversation will also change your life.)

he is talking about theatre. he is talking about theatre when he was younger. he says, "of course, it was AIDS then." in the pause, you ask him. clumsy and quiet and 16 and "straight," you ask him. what was it like.

he takes a moment in which his face is not like a person's face. "there was a time," he says, "i'm not sure how long, years. when i went to a funeral every weekend." he tells you about two funerals in a day, and choosing between friends when you couldn't make it to both. he does not look at you, he looks at them. his wet grey gaze is so clear that you start to see ghosts. it will be years before you understand why it feels like your grief too. why the ghosts call you family.

[coldsoupman]

So there's the idea of "kitchen table poly," AKA "everyone in the polycule needs to be able to sit at a kitchen table together and get along like friends."

One of my roommates just came up with a counter idea, which is "poker table poly." Everyone in the polycule must be enemies. No one is allowed to get too chummy or they're kicked out. They all also likely owe eachother money.

[coldsoupman]

So I'd like you to meet my partners. This is the broken, this is the beaten, and this is the damned.

[coldsoupman]

Source and details.

[coldsoupman]

“trans people in sports is such a complex issue” it really isn’t. make the sports skills-based instead of segregated by gender. “ohhh but so many people’s lives depend on their sports for scholarships” okay then let’s make university universally funded so people don’t have to worry about paying for it based on how well they can throw a ball. how are you not keeping up

woah did anyone else see that

[coldsoupman]

i fear 342 is sociopath level of chrome tabs to have open, my friend

Correct!!!

[coldsoupman]

The closest experience I've ever had to discovering "the vitamin" was buying a 100% wool outfit and wearing it in the winter.

Not only was I not freezing anymore, I was not sweating and overheating either. The horrible sensory nightmare of winter clothes disappeared.

In particular, I bought a pair of wool pants. They were a thrifted pair of fancy dress pants like you would wear at an important office job, and they were easily the most comfortable pair of winter-appropriate pants i'd ever worn. I wore them Every Single Day.

From that point on I realized a lot of my clothes were making me feel bad, and the common thread was polyester. Especially polyester blends.

It's a trap because the polyester clothes are the ones that always feel sooooo silky soft when they are in the store, whereas cotton, linen and wool can feel comparatively rough and scratchy. But when actually wearing them for hours throughout the day, it's the natural fibers that feel more comfortable.

Maybe the secret to sensory comfort is not about the presence of softness, but the absence of overloading sensations. Or maybe the sensory stress and agony is not triggered by texture of the fabric, but by how it breathes and regulates temperature.

Then there's the problem of clothing life span: polyester blends, no matter how soft they seem at first, become rough and scratchy and covered in hard, itchy pills after wearing them 10 or 20 times, whether or not they have been tumble-dried or even washed at all. (I tested it!) Linen and cotton become softer and more comfy the more you wear them, polyester but ESPECIALLY polyester blends become a constant stressor. Polyester blend t-shirts I used to love for their softness now feel bristly and irritating.

So now I'm trying to change my wardrobe to as many natural fibers as possible, and the more natural fiber clothes i have the more I realize that the plastic fibers stress me out. It's so easy to overheat or freeze in them and they're always degrading and becoming less comfortable and it sucks.

[coldsoupman]

[coldsoupman]

at a conference I attended recently, a researcher pointed to the difficulty of finding material in archives because so much depends on the metadata and the terminology used to describe things changes over time. "it would be so helpful," the researcher said, "if I typed 'lesbian' into the library of congress database, it would also show me results that were categorised in the 50s, when the materials were interpreted as 'intimate female friendships'"

which is what tag wrangles at Archive Of Our Own do incredibly effectively: searching for "omegaverse" also leads to "alpha/beta/omega dynamics" and "alternate universe: a/b/o" and so on. but ao3 achieves this frankly incredible categorisation and indexing system by the power of countless volunteers putting in hours and hours of unpaid and unthanked free time, and it's completely understandable that most archives do not have that kind of infrastructure, but also how incredible that a fan-run website has better searchability, classification, and accessibility than the library of congress

[coldsoupman]

We had a 15 year old transfem camper this week at work, and the way she lit up when she found out I was trans too made everything up to this point worth it, actually.