Third Time I Wore A Binder. It Was More Comfortable Then The First Time!

So I wanted to have the Nonbinary flag as my hair and since I am crazy like that I thought it through with my girlfriend (how we should arrange the colors, my original plan was to do it with horizontal lines) and then just let my sister do her work!

We had to do it over the corse of two days since on day one we bleached, cut and dyed the purple, yellow and white (color correction) parts!

Then on the next day I bought some more bleach and we bleached the white a third time (rip my hair) and dyed the black.

I love it so much! And even though people might not recognize it (someone thought I was a huge basketball fan XD) it is great to wear a part of my identity on my head!

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I am all of the days That you choose to ignore You are all I need

(All I Need - Radiohead)

I'm fairly new to rebloging so I hope it's okay I'm adding to your post.

I just wanna share my experience with top surgery and having doubts before hand:

I started working towards getting top surgery when I was around 18 and because I was still in school and live (plus the fact this shit just tends to take forever) I only slowly got everything together for the surgery.

That meant I started the process 4 years before my actual surgery date. When I started I was fairly sure but the closer I got to the surgery the more doubts started to occupy my brain. I had a lot of therapy in the meantime and started liking myself more, which is good. However it unfortunately had the negative side effect of a part of me using this as an argument against top surgery. Because if I can learn to like myself I can learn to be okay with my boobs right?

I still don't think that's wrong, I think that yes I could have learned to be okay, be neutral towards my boobs instead of the major dislike that fueled my decision 4 years prior to walk down this path.

However despite that argument I decided to stick with my decision and get top surgery. And let me tell you: I'm so glad I did.

Because after nearly 8 months I can say with no doubt it was the right decision for me. It was the right decision not because I couldn't have accepted my boobs at some point but because without them I'm happy in a way I didn't know I could be with my body.

I look in the mirror and I get this happy giddy feeling in my stomach of seeing myself in a normal ass T-shirt but flat. I am overjoyed at dressing up fancy because it means I get to wear all the cool dress shirts I aquired over the years that finally look exactly how I also wanted them to look like.

Even my friends and family told me that the way I look makes more sense kinda. Like I look more like myself than before. Which yeah I do because I didn't feel comfortable with my boobs but also because even if I would have been alright with them I would never felt as enthusiastic about them as I do about my flat chest!

Having had top surgery made me happy and feel home in my body in a way that I didn't fully grasp beforehand. And I am so happy I stuck with my decision and didn't let the doubts get to me ^^

the good news is this *probably* won’t actually push back my timeline for top surgery, but I still let myself have a little tantrum about it because we respect all feelings in this house

like there comes a point where you think something is fundamentally wrong with you. and then it turns out it’s just Friday and you haven’t washed your hair in three days and maybe you’re also just a little lonely and the combination of all three of those things is whittling a hole into your chest every time you breathe. but also the sun’s up. and you’ve survived everything so far, so you’ll survive this too, even if it hurts, even if you have to survive it many times.

a collection of motivational insights regarding content creation and creative hobbies

and of course the classic

The 2023 Gender Census is now open!

[ Link to survey ]

The 10th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 9th May 2023.

It’s short and easy, about 5 minutes probably.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful - it’s what helped us get 40,000 responses last year.

Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

For the curious, you can also spy on some graphs and demographic data for the incoming responses here.

Thank you so much!

[ Link to survey ]

Image credit: Avery at Tradescantia Hub

Do people really care about tags on ao3? Like I understand tagging content warnings and genres and such, but when it comes to additional tags, how much should I tag? I’ve noticed the funniest common tags that just make me wonder if anyone’s really interested in filtering fics by “inspired by music”, “North America” or “umbrellas”. Especially in smaller fandoms, like most of mine, it just seems kind of pointless bc you can’t afford to be picky anyway. Do you think additional tags are useful?

I think…

Actually, I’m going to take this as an opportunity to nerd. So there’s a phenomenon in linguistics called a sprachbund. A sprachbund is basically an area where a bunch of languages that aren’t from the same family have been rubbing up against each other for a very long time. When this happens, these unrelated languages start to pick up features from each other in a kind of linguistic crosspollination.

Example: Romanian is a Romance language, like French or Spanish. But it has a bunch of weird phonetic and grammatical features that no other Romance languages have. Why? Because it’s been living next to a bunch of Slavic languages for so long that it started to act like a Slavic language.

What does any of this have to do with your question? Well, I think that there are a bunch of websites that form a kind of internet fandom sprachbund. Each has its own features, but those features bleed into the other sites, even though they don’t belong there. Think about how ff.net style “legal disclaimers” (that actually have no legal meaning or function) sometimes show up on works written for ao3, which is designed to offer legal protection that makes those disclaimers irrelevant. Or how that ao3 tag generator started getting used as a prompt generator for tumblr drabbles. And on, and on, and on. Internet fandom is an enormous cross-platform sprachbund.

So what does that have to do with tagging on ao3? Well, I think ao3 picked up that style of tagging from tumblr. Because of the way tumblr is structured, it’s considered bad form to add non-constructive comments on your reblog of a post. Otherwise, you get dozens of reblogs just saying “wow” or “mood” and the post becomes unreadable. So people started putting their reactions to a post into the tags they added to their reblog, which prevented the post from accumulating nonsense. But then people were used to thinking of tagging as a mode of expression rather than purely functional, so the expressive use of tagging spread to ao3, even though it doesn’t serve the same purpose there.

The cool bit is that the weird tagging conventions ao3 got from tumblr have come to serve an entirely different and still valuable purpose on ao3. Since author’s notes aren’t visible in search results but tags are, the tags can be used to signal a set of things about the fic that a summary might not get across. For instance, if a fic is tagged “hurt/comfort”, that tells you the genre of the fic, but not its tone. But if the author then adds a tag like “but really mostly comfort we’re all about the comfort here”, you have a much better sense of what kind of fic you’re about to read. So even though no one would ever filter by that tag, it’s still conveying important information.

Isn’t human communication amazing?

Happy Halloween! Here’s a silly and slightly spoOOooky magicstone doodle comic to celebrate! The other one is still WIP but this idea jumped me and, uh, well, it’s done now! So here you go :D

Read the whole thing full size here on my website, or the rest is right here!

Best read in new tags or at least full size bc tumblr makes things crunchy… hope you like it anyway!

this little freak keeps sneaking into my garden and rubbing himself all over my flowers??Hello?????