Latest Posts by punkpegan - Page 6

*wakes up during ball removal* hey doc- can you put those in a jar for me?

BCBS: Yeah if your surgery takes longer than our admin staff with no medical training thinks it should, you have to pay out of pocket for the anesthesia.

UHC CEO: [assassinated in the street]

BCBS: ... You know we were just joking about that anesthesia thing ha ha we would never. We love keeping our brains inside customers happy.

flirting with transfems is so hard because (and I say this with love) we are all losers. if I'm upfront, she thinks I'm joking. if I'm subtle, she doesn't get it.

I tried to get her to talk about her interests and 2 minutes in she goes "sorry, I rambled off a little bit there" as if the joy in her voice wasn't worth all the worlds wealth and made me look towards the future with hope instead of dread

they should invent legs that don't ow ow ow ouchie ow ow aaaaaaaa owww waaaahhh

You'd be crying either way.

got turned down for the job at the onion. turns out they write satire or something and don't need a guy to peel all the onions. crying my eyes out.

there isn't much to draw about fat fish tail

Does @narcissistcookbook have a fursona? And can my boyfriend draw us hanging out? 👉👈

!!! @narcissistcookbook

Look at my fuckin tat

its always "pissing me off" and never "pooping me off". Now why is that?

If something is ‘old as fuck’ then it’s about 1.2 billion years old because that’s when life evolved sexual reproduction.

Skyrim mods becoming too immersive

what if there was a snabbit. just consider it

what about the throat sack

Normal transgender dysphoria:

Chest too big

Chest not big enough

Facial balance wrong

Muscles too prominent

Skeletal structure too dainty

Incurable secret dysphoria

Not enough eyes

No tentacles

Teeth too dull

No halo

No bioluminescence

On Celeste and Transness

I wrote this originally as a comment under a YouTube video about Celeste, but then it turned into a short essay so I think I'll just post it here instead. The video was very good, but missed the trans allegory inherent to Celeste's story. A lot of what I talk about isn't really news here, but might be helpful to those unfamiliar with trans identity and the struggles that accompany it.

Celeste is a game written, produced, and even scored by trans women. There's conclusive evidence (including commentary by the creator, Maddy Thorson) that the character Madeline herself is a trans woman. And overall, the experiences metaphorized in Celeste are extremely relatable particularly to trans people. While there are a lot of valid readings of Celeste's themes, I think the most cohesive and defensible reading is as trans allegory. This can be recognized by examining each story beat in turn and how it contributes to the overall narrative, which is at its heart a story about making peace with one's self.

- Broad themes of overcoming hardship:

Transitioning is hard. It is a years-long process of self-acceptance, self-improvement, and self-assertion. At the end of it, trans people are faced with a brutally hard world that is in most places completely opposing us at every step. Even in the most progressive and accepting places, trans people are usually the last people to receive any of the benefits of that progress. This is the reason trans people suffer extraordinarily high rates of homelessness, addiction, unemployment, poor mental health, and suicide, and even those horrifically dark facts are often used as jokes at our expense. The act of transitioning feels a lot like climbing a mountain, and I think there's a good case to be made that that's where the premise of this game comes from in the first place. The monument at the base of Mt. Celeste is a solemn reminder of this fact. Not all who walk this path survive.

- The dark reflection:

The relationship between an egg and their transness tends to be very adversarial. Trans women are extremely over-represented in the military (transfemme Americans are 3 times more likely to have served in the military than the average American) for this reason; we seek a way to prove to ourselves that we are in fact men and not trans women, so we find the most masculine persona we can possibly adopt and cling to it like a life preserver. It never works. Transness, like Madeline's dark reflection, is not something you can make go away. When you try to, it makes you bitter, often drawing out cruelty and toxicity. Trans people pre-transition have this part of themselves that they hate, that they need desperately to go away, and it hurts them and usually the people around them for as long as they refuse to accept it as a part of them and not a defect.

- Oshiro and the hotel:

One can often recognize a pre-transition trans person by distinctively poor hygiene and appearance. Eggs tend to wear baggy clothing, take very poor care of their bodies, and live unfulfilled, miserable lives because they are dissociating from their bodies to avoid their dysphoria. (As a side note, this is why some trans people suspect that Kurt Cobain may have been a trans woman.) Oshiro's hotel is in disrepair, full of clutter, and part of the journey toward fulfillment (for him and for Madeline) requires cleaning it up a bit. Self-care--cleaning out the rubble and the clutter of that past life--is a necessary step before a trans person can go on the journey of self-actualization that must follow. Additionally, the presence of Oshiro as a ghost is very appropriate to this chapter. There's a reason most trans people refer to the name given them at birth as a "deadname." The identity they had before transition kind of dies, replaced by the true self.

- Theo and the eyes:

Theo's whole experience in the mirror world revolves around feelings of exposure and vulnerability. The eyes always watching him have paralyzed him. He is too self-conscious to even move when we find him. This, too, is a common experience among trans people. Existing as a trans person, particularly in cultures that aren't friendly towards us, often leads to fear, anxiety, and paranoia surrounding how people perceive us. For one thing, there is a very real safety concern. Trans people are statistically very likely to have suffered violence, SA, or just garden-variety discrimination and harassment. I personally have experiences in this, and besides the trauma I also get tons of dirty (and sometimes threatening) looks when I just exist where people can see me. This is a pretty unavoidable part of transitioning. You're going to stick out, and there are going to be people who very vocally hate you. It can be paralyzing, and trans people sometimes become shut-ins, refusing to leave their homes or go in public out of fear of that backlash. A trans person must make peace with this and learn to live in spite of it before they can reach the summit.

- Rejection of the Self:

The "Starjump" scene (in the dream after the mirror temple) is something nearly every trans person has probably experienced. The false catharsis of identifying that which we wish to destroy, to divest from ourselves, only to learn the hard way that we can't just wish for it to go away. The fall from this point goes very far down. This is another moment not all survive.

- Confrontation with the Self:

The chase scene/bossfight in Chapter 6 (Reflection) is such an emotionally powerful sequence partly because it stands contrary to the rejection of Self that came before. The false catharsis of the Starjump is met with the real, powerful catharsis of chasing after that injured, scared, angry part of us, reaching it despite all its efforts to run away, and giving it a hug and telling it "it's okay. I see you, I acknowledge you, I accept you, I love you." This is the coming-out moment, the apotheosis, escaping the Matrix and entering into the Real World. (The Matrix, by the way, is another piece of media written by trans women that strongly echoes the experience of transitioning.)

- Acceptance of the Self:

The difficulty of existing doesn't magically go away when a trans person has made peace with their transness, but life does become a lot better when we do. We see this in the game in the form of Madeline "leveling up," becoming stronger and more capable, finally able to reach the summit. The music here ("Reach for the Summit") is triumphant, elated, filled with implacable determination. Her positive relationship with her inner self literally empowers her. This happens in real life too. When a trans person accepts who they are and begins the work of transitioning, they often undergo what we refer to as "second puberty." This is partly literal, for those of us who take HRT or undergo surgery, but it's also a very appropriate metaphor for what happens to our psyches. Trans people who survive past the hardship of the egg phase often have very dramatic transformations into a self that is more fulfilled, more authentic, and fundamentally happier than when we were in conflict with our selves.

Anyway, I think all of that is why Celeste rings so true for us. Thanks for reading.

That's 100% on point

radical statement here but people in red states aren’t subhuman and they don’t deserve to suffer and die because they have shitty state governments

Can I take the Chicago rat hole estrogen

running into a trans girl while you're out and about makes the entire miserable errand worth it, whatever it was. like glancing upward at just the right time to see a shooting star. I spot a trans flag and it sincerely ceases to matter that the bus is crowded and it rained unexpectedly and my shoes are soaked through and my headphones are dead. I am happy to be on that specific bus on that specific day, because you're there too.

sapphic yearning hits hard this time of the month

a trans woman expressing love freely and openly to everyone in her life. a beautiful thing

If you made me think about markiplier's pillowey man-bosoms again, I'm making everyone else think about them too.

trans women r literally so cool theu get tits AND a prostate?? i thought only markilpler could do that

oh so when the final boss‘s phase transitions, gamers love it, but when I, a trans woman,

so many of the transfems i know spent their time pre-transition performing a kind of lifelong exercise in self-deprivation. the goal, for them, was to find out exactly how little a person needed to live. they starved themselves, dressed carelessly, shunned friends, and hollowed themselves out so as not to be burdens on anyone but themselves.

i see it now, too, in the girls around me. i'll ask if they want care – a home-cooked meal, relaxed company, sex without the expectation of reciprocation – and they say no, no, thank you, i don't need it; what would you like, what do you want, because in their head they're still doing that awful calculus, still training themselves to disappear in the eyes of the people around them.

i don't think i'd have died without transition – not in the conventional sense, at least – but to take that leap, i had to stop thinking of myself as a human experiment in fuel-efficient living and start nurturing the anemic, atrophied flame of desire in my heart. i had to learn to eat well, to exercise, to style myself beautiful, but harder than that, i had to learn to ask the people around me to work on my behalf in order to enrich my life and give me the things i wanted.

and i did it; i learned. and it was agony, but courage is a muscle you can train, and every day i get better at accepting gifts with the hungry gratitude i never learned in my years and years as a sad, scared, lonely boy.

so be patient with the trans girls in your life. better than that: be proactive, attentive, generous; be forceful, if you have to, and learn to distinguish real discomfort from the terrified reflex of self-deprivation that so many of us learned to rely on.

and if you are so lucky as to love a trans girl, you must insist upon her. you must insist upon her happiness, her comfort, her pleasure, and her rest, because she may still not yet know how to make those demands for herself. if you can devote any amount of energy to becoming an engine that nurtures the flame of even a single tgirl then there is a place for you in trans heaven, which as far as i'm concerned is the only one worth going to

Dark Eco

I love how there's a thick, dark substance deep within the earth that was formed by the deaths of billions of lifeforms and has been trapped there for millions of years, that when harvested can weild such great powers that leaders are willing to start wars and slaughter millions just for it, however using said powers causes the very weather of our world to become corrupted, and yet we decide to name it after fucking olive juice.

big things happening on twitter

"Ok, ma'am that'll be $226.03."

I take my wallet out of my pocket and unfold it. It is empty other than a single moth that lazily flies out. The moth lands on the tap point of the card reader. There's a beat, and my payment is processed. The moth flies back into my wallet and I put it back in my pocket.

they want you to make fried rice

2024 is a terrible year to be a henchman. The word "minion" is barely usable and you can't even say "goon" anymore.

Have a great day everybody

tumblr please stop telling me to wd40 a mouse