Tina's not-so-secret diary 📓🔓

[10:51] R never saw the messages I deleted B"H! Oh that's such a relief... Also C gave me the sweetest compliment, I'm beaming right now!

[10:53] Incidentally, R, if you're reading this: your song is ready.

[12:45] THEY LIKE IT. THEY DONT JUST LIKE IT, THEY LOVE IT. THEY LOVE THE SONG. I AM SO RELIEVED AND OVERJOYED!!!
😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

[12:48] Another day, another opportunity to cry over my own music. C wanted me to work in a motif from Deltarune into his and R's wedding song, so I complied. It went from me putting it into NoteWorthy Composer to learning how to play it, to coming up with a chord progression, to adding instruments, to crying so much that i left a puddle on my desk. When I combined it with the hardcore punk stuff... oh, I hope other people have this same reaction to this song. Though I doubt it, mostly because mine is a funny kind of brain, all oestrogenised and unlocking emotions that I'd taken great care to lock up when I was masculine. Also, I have a unique kind of attachment to my music because it's mine. I wrote it. Still, if I can at least get R to cry, I'll call that a success.

[12:51] I hope I can keep it together long enough to re-do a couple of lyrics that I changed yesterday.

[13:20] Seriously, spuds. I was crying as I was recording MIDI data. Apropos of nothing, did you know that you can combine Deltarune's Freedom motif with Pachelbel's Canon? Neither did I until I did it.

[15:52] Jesus, Tina, learn to read a room! Shit! Let the newness wear off first, huh? Give them a chance for the whole "marriage" idea to sink in before you start bothering them with domestic problems like that! It's not like I'm her real sister, I can't just say that kind of thing. God, i feel so embarrassed right now.

[16:47] And as if all of that wasn't bad enough, they're moving out of #1 again. I just can't take this day. Ugh, I need to ki— [remembers April 9th] uh, I need to kiss a pretty girl.

[14:32] Further to songs I've cried at, the song I wrote for my best friend's wedding. I've been crying at a lyric that I wrote for it for, oh, a good 45 minutes at this stage. The so-called "love song" I wrote for [REDACTED] back in 2009 pales in comparison to the lyrics I wrote for the 2nd verse of this song. After that buildup, I'm almost sorry (but not really) to say that I'm not going to tell you what the lyric was. If you want to know, then you'll need to get invited to the wedding, but I'll spoil the title. It's called "Come With Me". I'm off to add that to the list of songs now.

[10:33] This felt too stupid to write about. Like, Star Trek isn't that deep, Tina. Come on. But at a couple of points, watching Voyager 619-"Child's Play" last night, I almost started crying. Not because of the story (which was pretty bland, as most of the 6th series was), but the fact that Seven of Nine went from spending her entire day alone in the cargo bay or astrometrics to basically becoming a foster mom to 4 orphans. Last week, she stepped out of her alcove to a cold, utilitarian storage bay. This week, the last thing she sees before regenerating at night is a kadis-kot board, textbook padds, and a stabilised bike, and she thinks, "Holy nanoprobes, I'm a mom now. She looks at all 4 alcoves full up and it's not a lot of Borg drones, it's her kids. Well, delayed reaction I guess, because I'm ugly-crying right now. You never took her as the nurturing sort, at least until Icheb, Mezoti, Azan, and Rebi showed up, and now you almost have to stun her with a phaser to separate her from them. The fact that the episode's whole jeopardy involves Seven discovering that her maternal instincts have started up just drove that right into my heart like a me'vaq dagger. I'm feeling a little betrayed, also: because I've seen these shows every year since 2010 so I know that Rick "Asshole" Berman is going to come into the writing room next year and say "Hey, Marley McClean's boobs are coming in, we've gotta write these kids off the show" because his fragile ego can't stand kids or women.

Anyway, that episode's made me think about some things that I'm gonna have to sleep on for about a month.

[05:37] Hang on, I need to know what U+1FAA7 is. 🪧

A picket sign. Huh. See, the only reason I was thinking about it at all was I just memorialised one of my moots' pets on the neocities microblog and I needed a gravestone and a prayer rock. That's a Jewish thing. Rather than flowers, we leave small rocks at gravesites to represent prayers. So, to have U+1FAA6 (HEAD STONE 🪦) and U+1FAA8 (ROCK 🪨) so close together makes one think that whoever assigned these emoji their BMP co-ordinates might be Jewish. It depended on what was in between them, and it's a picket sign. Officially U+1FAA7 (PLACARD 🪧). Let's see what's at U+1FAA9... 🪩 A disco ball. Oh well, I don't know. It could just as easily have been a co-incidence.

🌶️ August 22 2025

[04:37] Last night I was suddenly reminded of an old memory of lying on my gran's couch when I was 10 and watching Cartoon Planet to take my mind off the fact that I was desperately horny but I couldn't do anything about it. That may have been my very first puberty experience. Around about the same time, I also remember being in the shower and brushing a loose hair off my chest only to discover it wasn't loose, it was actually attached to my right boob (though I would have called them "pecs" back then). Back to the couch, though. Why couldn't I do anything about it, then? Because I wouldn't learn how to masturbate until I was 12 and I wouldn't have sex for the first time until I was 19. The only reason this memory came up at all was because, once again, I found myself lying on the couch watching Cartoon Planet to take my mind off the fact I was desperately horny. This time, though, I was able to do something about it.

[04:54] Incidentally, gamers— I think I definitely like men now. Not to the point I'm willing to take down my pansexual pride banner, but like. Yeah.

[02:48] I'm worried about G, one of my Neocities mutuals. Their blog entries made it pretty clear that they were having a very hard time feeling human most days. They made reference to their partner occasionally, so I'm taking that to mean they had someone who was present in the room with them to validate their humanity and keep them grounded, prevent their going off on dangerous flights of fancy that would lead to their certain death. That having been said, their most recent blog entry was not encouraging. I can't say any more than that without pointing an arrow to them, but I'm worried. They went from updating their blog every week to going silent for 2 months. So far as I know, G hasn't touched their site since June. I'm worried. I may not have been their closest friend (and, honestly, i don't think they saw me as anything other than a name in a list), but they were hurting worse than anyone should ever have to, worse than most people ever will, and then they talk about feeling like they want to smack their head against something so hard that they see analogue TV static and smell blood. My dear guest... I don't think G is still alive. Even though it's equally as likely that they simply have not bothered to log in and write anything, there are too many signs. I hope time will show me to be mistaken about this, but I feel it in the pit of my stomach: G killed itself.

I hate the whole Schroedinger's cat aspect to this host. People who haven't updated in months are simultaneously dead and alive until proven otherwise. But, what if the box never opens? At what point is it proper to assume that the cat is dead? You've kept it in a box for 2 months without any food, water, or waste disposal facilities. Am I to assume that the cat simply dug a tunnel out to the street and has escaped? Am I just to assume that Commander Tuvok mind-melded with G to quiet their suicidal thoughts and provide stability to their life? Like it said in its last post, society is getting worse, not better; therefore the people affected by it will get worse, not better. Certainly this American life has not improved in the 2 months since their last posting. My imagination often gets the better of me, in that I spend far more time than is healthy looking out the window trying to find things to get sad about. I project my own biases onto people I see in the carpark and assume that I can determine everything about their lives at a glance. Am I doing that here?

[00:22] My friend A has discovered the interesting property of MTF HRT; crying at music. I never used to cry at music until I started the stuff, but now I do. Kinda routinely, actually. Let's see if I can name all the songs I've cried at over the past 2 years...

•My own song, "Get to You", viola section take 1

•"Follow Me" (Fraggle Rock 101-"Beginnings", by Phillip Balsam & Dennis Lee)

•Dr. McCoy's theme (Star Trek TNG 101-"Encounter at Farpoint", by Dennis McCarthy)

•"Rainbow Connection" (The Muppet Movie, by Paul Williams)

•"One More Sleep" (The Muppet Christmas Carol, by Paul Williams)

•The harp solo (The Bishop's Wife, by Hugo Friedhofer)

•"Toad Highlands" (Mario Golf 64, by Motoi Sakuraba)

•My own song, "Kiss Sim Me (Rosenthal's Canon in C)"

•"Archer's Theme" (Star Trek: Enterprise, by Dennis McCarthy)

•Opening theme (Star Trek DS9 101-"Emissary", by Dennis McCarthy)

•"The Enterprise" (Star Trek: The Motion Picture, by Jerry Goldsmith)

•"Bad Stuff Happens" (Bob's Burgers 819-"Glued, Where's My Bob?", by Loren Bouchard & Tim Dacey)

•"Gitchi-gitchi Goo" (Phineas & Ferb 104b-"Flop Starz", by Dan Povenmire, Jeff "Swampy" Marsh, and Danny Jacob)

•"Wanderin' & Ramblin'" (Cartoon Planet, by Andy Merrill, Pete Fortier, and Eddie Horst)

•"September" (Earth Wind & Fire)

•"Celebration" (Kool & The Gang)

•Yamaha PSS480 demo song (composer unknown)

•(EDIT: August 28 2025) "Come With Me", my own song written for my best friends' wedding

•(EDIT: August 29 2025) Orchestral intro to "Come With Me", my own song written for my best friends' wedding

As I encounter others (or remember ones I've forgotten), I'll update this list.

[05:46] that tg feel when you start crying at super mario 64 for no good reason. i think i need more sleep.

[17:00] On my blue WD disk attached to my Windows 7 computer, I have a folder called "At Last the 2009 Playlist". I'd been earnestly trying to assemble a playlist of recognisable songs from high school (hence 2009, the year I graduated) for about 10 years at this stage. But, what it's ended up becoming is basically a list of songs that I can't listen to as a unit without breaking down. I should rename it to "Torture Tina with the Ghosts of Her Past" because that's what it's turned into. I'd been considering putting "Archer's Theme" by Dennis McCarthy in there, but I guess I decided either I didn't have enough TV music to justify putting it there or it was too short or something. Well, I've been watching Enterprise lately for the first time in almost 3 years. I only started watching it because I wanted to test out Cineby and that was (confusingly) the first show that came up when I typed "star trek" into the search box. So far, I haven't been moved by it... except today. I finally cried at "Archer's Theme" today. I thought it was fine, that I was over my abandonment issues, but delayed reaction I guess.

[17:03] What else is in that playlist? Nothing that anyone would feel held any particular significance. Game music mostly. Oh, incidentally, I discovered quite by accident that the 007 NightFire strings ensemble is from the Digidesign SampleCell II library. I don't know why the tremolo articulation was missing from the archive I downloaded and made soundfonts out of, but it was. Steve Duckworth had apparently done the same thing I did: combined the staccato and sostenuto articulations to create marcato strings. But, we've got stuff from SimCity 3000, SimCity 4, The Sims, 007 NightFire, Mario Golf, Scrabble CD, things that wouldn't be particularly important to anyone but me. I wanted to put top 40 hits in here too, but the fact I couldn't remember any of their titles was a bit of a stumbling block. What do you want from me here? I was listening to film soundtracks, Italian baroque, disco, and Devo back then. I didn't really care what pop-punk song was trending at the time.

[19:46] Someone I follow on Neocities brought up whether people look back at what they were doing 10 years ago by scrolling all the way back on their profiles. I haven't been on here that long, so scrolling all the way back only takes you as far as my first blog entries in May of 2023. However, I was on Tumblr for that long. Longer actually. The only problem there is, looking at my Tumblr archive from August 2015 doesn't reveal much about what I was doing. While I've either forgotten or compartmentalised most of what was going on back then, I do remember a few things.

• I was at school for what would prove to be the final time. No one else wanted me because of how rubbish my transcripts looked, so I had to go to the community college in town. While I did better this time than I ever had in my entire history of school, they would refuse to give me a Pell grant for the spring quarter and try to strongarm me into taking out a $15.000 loan. Had they not done that, I would have been a high school English teacher by 2021.

• My phone at the time was an Apple iPhone 6, which I went with over Android so I could play with the Fairlight CMI app. I had some pretty crazy apps on that thing. Apart from the Fairlight, I also had GarageBand, an app for putting text onto photos (something that MS Paint can do natively but apparently you need an expensive app for on any given mobile device), an app that made videos look like they came off an old camcorder from the '90s, and a voice recorder app that I would also use to record song lyrics and voice acting in my isolation booth (er, I mean, car). I also had a meme-creator app so I could do old-style macro text without needing to involve iTunes and Powerpoint. The last meme I ever made with that app before switching over to my current phone (a Samsung Galaxy Note8 that I got in 2018) was a political thing about Roseanne Barr's then-recent tweet about Valerie Jarrett: "If blaming muslims doesn't work, blame drugs instead." See, she had originally blamed muslims for her joke, then she decided to blame Ambien instead, hence the meme.

• I was mired pretty deep in Donald Trump meme hell, mostly making disparaging memes about him on tumblr. I guess, those are pretty well documented, since I never deleted any of them. My personal favourite that never gained any traction at all was a pastiche of his interview with Matt Lauer where he said his father gave him "a small loan of $1 million". I drew stickfigure mockups of Matt and Donny on my drymark board and used Meme English in their speech bubbles. This was less about making fun of people who truly write or talk that way and more about how ridiculous the entire interview was, like it came out of some 2nd grader's imagination.

• 2015 was the last year I saw my mum's brother and his youngest son. I sorely wanted to avoid them, but I didn't have a choice. My cousin had just been discharged from the Air Force and— hoo boy did he ever come back from Fairbanks talkin' like Donald Trump! Neither of them know I'm trans today.

• I wrote a song on my Fantom X called "Transhuman". I was going to release it on my long-term WIP, Backwards, but I decided I didn't want to deal with Warner Media Group, considering the song uses the drum pattern from "The Super Thing" by Devo (specifically, by Bob Casale). This was the first time I ever considered that gender transition was possible, though I discounted it as being too much work, too expensive, and I would be leaving myself too vulnerable.

• 2015 is actually when I did the bulk of the work on Backwards. I wrote "Computer Heaven" this year, "Toxic Leader", "Red State", "Group Think", "Illegal Human", and "Nothing Ever Happened". "Nothing Ever Happened" was going to be the last track on the record. It uses the same chord progression as the love song I wrote in 2009, though with only 3 instruments where the original had 5 and a string orchestra. Also, I left the melody line out. The idea was that, since nothing ever happened, the song was lonelier than the original one was. Ugh, I'm so glad I'm not that person anymore. I genuinely would have been the weird guy playing the Steinway in the middle of a crowded park with a sign reading "[NAME], WILL YOU MARRY ME?" standing on the lid. "Nothing Ever Happened" was lonely, but it also said, "maybe I don't really care so much about that anymore".

• Even though I didn't consider myself transgender back then, I came out as bisexual in 2014. When I learned what the bisexual pride banner looked like, I decided to see how often I could use it in stuff before anyone caught on. I did several internal graphic design jobs for the state government to put in its offices that had the bi pride banner gradient in them, including some Pac-Man inspired GUI elements for a fundraising progression kiosk display that got put in the lobby of the main State office building!

This is all I could verify from just looking at my old files. I'm sure I was doing other stuff, but I can't remember what it was. Maybe it'll come up, maybe it won't, but this is a sampling of what I was doing 10 years ago.

[22:35] I didn't sleep very well this morning. I was worried sick about my friend. She'd had an argument with her sibling and said her boyfriend was starting to get distant from her. We talked on the phone for about an hour late last night about various things: the argument, the future of her relationship with her boyfriend, netplay over Mednafen, crappy landlord behaviour, loads of stuff. It went well, I think. I don't want to recount the entire story here, but the thing that made me worry was how she said she was thinking about killing herself that night and I felt that cold, prickly feeling in my shoulders that reminded me how much physical space is separating us. At least 1000 miles. I needed to be there in the room with her, but I couldn't be in any way other than as a disembodied voice on the phone. At one point, I started crying. I remembered how worried she and her bf had been about me back in April, and how I logged into my email account to find 3 messages from her frantically searching for a response because she thought I was going to kill myself. That was more than anyone had ever done for me before. Try as I might, I can't see any of my extended family caring that much. But, even though we've never met each other, she cared enough to reach her hand out to me. I thought about this and how much she means to me, and I just couldn't see how I would be able to go on without her in my life, even in this sort of limited capacity. I love talking to her, I love reading her blog posts, and the thought that all of that was about to go away overcame me at the time and I just started crying on the call. I hope she didn't think I was trying to be manipulative. I realised, I've never loved any of my friends more than her. Platonic love is often seen as a watered-down version of romantic love that people just settle for, but it's not. It's not about getting into their pants, it's about playing ToeJam & Earl over Mednafen netplay, it's about listening where others just swat them down, it's about letting them vent without worrying about censoring anything. It's the realisation that you can't imagine how you got along without them, and neither can you imagine what you would do if they left. It's sort of like being a boy in 1st grade and you suddenly realise that the girl with the long brown hair can play with you in the sandbox, you can play Mario Kart with her at the weekend, and you can hug her goodbye for the day. I care about this girl and I care what happens to her. I didn't sleep well, because even though I hope I helped with her immediate stress, I couldn't ultimately solve anything. I also worried that I would fall asleep so soundly that I wouldn't hear her ringtone if she needed to ring me again. So, I slept with my phone in my hand.

[23:05] It's interesting: I used to be the girl who would tell you to turn your phone completely off unless you absolutely needed it. My phone hasn't been on flight mode since May. I mean, it's good advice unless your best friend is living with abusers.

[10:18] I actually used the phrase "my favourite lipstick" in casual conversation yesterday. I'm a girl now, no question. 💄

Unfortunately, the conversation in question had to do with my accidentally shutting the cap without remembering to retract the lipstick first, so I accidentally smashed it flat. Whilst I was able to do a certain amount with a pocketknife, carving the smashed bits off and restoring the angle, it's not the same as it used to be.

[16:35] For the first time in a grand long while, I'm writing an erotic fic that isn't a fanfic. Sami, Gabe, and Katie are all my OC's and they live in the same city I do. I don't really have images in mind for Sami and Gabe, but Katie ended up looking like a girl I made in The Sims 4. I don't really want to say any more than that because A: this is a very long story that I've only just started writing, B: certain details are still being worked out, and C: there's only 1 sex scene so far and I don't want to spoil it. "And, D, you don't want a kid to read it, right?" Nope. That is not one of the reasons.