Tina's not-so-secret diary 📓🔓

[15:16] I said I'm aromantic. Maybe that's the wrong word. It's not that I don't want a partner, it's that I don't feel like I should need to perform a social media rain dance like I'm 16 again in order to divine someone's feelings for me and end up getting the wrong idea anyway. Subtext doesn't work on me. If you tell me to go away, I'm going to go away. I'm not going to assume you meant you actually wanted me to do xyz other things, I am going to assume that something I was doing was bothering you and I will immediately cease that behaviour. Hints don't work on me either. If you tell me that you were planning to go to the freshman mixer with someone else, I will assume that I logged my request too late and you are truly intent upon going with this other person. I will not assume that you want me to ask you again in a different way. English speakers have a tendency to couch everything we say in subtext or metaphor, Americans in particular have such confusing mating rituals that one would be better off not trying to understand. I want someone in my life, I don't want to go back to practising divination to figure out how to get them here. But if that's what it takes, then I'll just stay alone. I can just assume since it was so hard to find a partner when I still looked like a man that it's got to be impossible now.

[16:30] "Are you sure you want to be posting about that on here?" Yes. This is my website, I can say what I like. "Well what if a kid sees it?" Well, what if a kid sees it? What, are they gonna explode? Don't you think they've already had to do the mating dance already? Shut up.

[15:25] Yep. PMS'ing again. Same shit as always.

[01:36] In case i never mentioned it: no diary entries is a good thing.
I haven't had anything happen in most of 2 weeks that would make me want to come on here and talk about it. Like, it's pretty clear at this stage that this is the section of the site i update during an Episode (which me and R have decided is probably tgirl PMS'ing). So, yeah. Everything going on is strictly technical. Stuff to write blogposts about, rather than diary entries.

[02:56] I'm just going to keep this here until i can write a larger blog entry for it.

Supper Mario Broth sure has a lot of interesting stuff on it. For instance, an orchestral arrangement of "Beware of Forest Mushrooms" from Super Mario RPG. The first time I heard that song I was in between 1st and 2nd grades. Understand something: to me, the song always sounded like that. The Super NES didn't sound cheap or lo-fi or anything else to me. As far as I was concerned, "Forest Mushrooms" was always an orchestral song. The Memoría arrangement just let my ears hear what my brain always understood. I cried about it like you wouldn't believe. I'm still crying, actually. I don't really care what they did to the music in the Switch re-make. I've never heard it, I'm never going to hear it. Nothing will compare to the first day I heard that song and being fascinated by the forest setting. Everyday thereafter, a patch of dirt in a grassy field was a clearing, the grass was the forest, and Mario was walking around in there, finding stuff and stomping enemies. I would be a terrible companion to take to a game music concert! Part the way through the first song, I'd be ugly-crying. Anyway, I'm sure there's more to that album, but I'm not sure that I'm ready to hear it.

[00:41] Never have I felt more useless than last night. It's only midnight, it's still last night. Whatever, no one cares what time it is. The point is that I'm the one who always talks about mutual aid and co-operative action against the corporate feudal state, but when it came right down to it, I dropped the ball. I had no answers, the only solutions I found weren't solutions so much as corporate greed and government overreach. Where was I? Where did I go? What happened to all that wonderful T1na Badgraph1csghost wisdom we've all come to expect and appreciate? This isn't about me, I'm trying not to make it about me. So let's talk about the corporate feudal state instead, shall we? Let's talk about websites for government-subsidised transit companies that break down when you try the most basic of searches, other websites that break down the moment they smell a VPN, and everywhere, unregulated pricing became unbridled greed. At the same time i was fumbling around in the dark, looking for answers to a test I never studied for, the person on the other end of the phone is now facing homelessness. "Centrist politics" only exist in a properly balanced system. In the American 2-party where Democrats are conservatives and Republicans are fascists, centrism is far-right lunacy. As though this man's political views informed his decision to threaten his own daughter with a visit from the police. As though politics informed his decision to spy on her, call her names, and abuse her for her whole life. This man is a dictator in his own home, ruling with an iron fist, or attempting to do so and then getting big mad when it turns out he hasn't got as much power as he thinks. She rang me up, tears in her voice, hoping to find at least a glimmer of hope that tomorrow would be better, and instead we all come away disappointed. In the end, all I could do was sit on the line, listening to her cry, and wishing for divine intervention. All I can do now is hope that someone else will be more help than I was.

[09:14] Ok, well, i can sit here feeling sorry for myself for not knowing what to do, or I can start looking for the answers. It's not like this isn't going to happen again to anyone in the country. What I need to do now is stop focussing on computers, software piracy, and datahoarding, and start looking at the physical plane. I need to start compiling lists of resources for people who have been forcibly displaced from their homes; privately-funded non-proselytising charities and shelters, food banks, clothing drives, stuff that a trans girl who's just walked out on an abusive relationship can use to get back on her feet. I'm following 3 people on tumblr right now who have access to that kind of information, so the implied duty there is to either concatenate that into a new list or link to existing ones.

[21:43] "See a problem, find a solution." That's always been my modus operandi. Seems fairly straightforward. But, what are you supposed to do if there IS NO solution? What if the problems were ENGINEERED to be unsolveable? What if the people behind the scenes keep moving the money around to prevent any action being taken at all, except for the action that needs no discussion?

[11:35] I figure that since I have Mullvad again, I can use Redlib to look into NBE. My clinician says there's "not really anything" I personally can do to affect the size of my boobs, but that's the same kind of gatekeep-y thinking that almost killed my transition before it started. While I don't have anything against medical science, I think personal bias can get in the way of research sometimes. Also, Dubya was wrong about stemcells and all the doctors who were in training from the 2001-2006 period of time haven't gotten over that, especially the ones who go to church every Sunday and regard disjointed bible verses as Absolute Divine Truth. Sorry, but Christian fundamentalism and objective scientific research are mutually exclusive. Anyway, this isn't about that. The point is, nothing I've read so far about NBE is harmful; it's all pretty basic stuff that would ordinarily be obvious: increase blood flow, stimulate lymph nodes, activate stemcells. I need to do some more reading and datahoarding on the subject, but like. What have I got to lose except money? If it doesn't work, it doesn't work and I've wasted no one's time but my own, but I feel pretty good about this.

[11:45] Also, having a VPN again means I can carry on with my game preservation. Ubisoft seems to be shooting itself in the nuts on a regular basis; first by saying that people "have to get used to not owning games anymore", and now with a new proviso in its end-user agreement that says the player forfeits their ability to continue using the game software after the company has terminated support for it. Yeah, they genuinely expect you to Linux-shred your game files when they stop selling that game! It's unrealistic and unenforceable to be sure, and it probably has something to do with the Stop Killing Games movement in the EU right now, but I'm tempted to download repack versions of all Ubisoft games ever made out of pure spite. I'll never play any of them because none of my computers can run them, but datahoarding is not about using your hoard, it's about having it. Anyway, I'm sure I'm not the first one to have this idea.