daydreamer

Transfem Butch Books:

The Scales of Seduction by Rien Gray [historical fiction, retelling, erotica]: An erotic lesbian monster novella reinterpreting the Medusa myth. Romance between Medusa and a basilisk warrior. Transfem butch protagonist.

Reverse Tomboy by Auto Anon [literary fiction, autofiction, essays]: A novella about a trans woman who struggles with relationships, familial dynamics, and reclaiming her masculinity after transitioning. Comes with an essay on transfeminine butchness and masculinities. Transfem Jewish butch protagonist and author.

Hot Girls with Balls by Benedict Nguyen [litfic, satire]: A contemporary satire novel about two trans lesbian volleyball players, who have to grapple with the anxieties of stardom as well as their their own off-court relationship drama. Transfem Asian-American protagonist. Transfem author.

Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) by Hazel Jane Plante [litfic]: A trans lesbian mourns her straight trans friend, and comes to terms with her death by writing a personalized encyclopedia/love letter about the latter's favorite obscure TV show. Transfem soft butch protagonist. Transfem author.

Herculine by Grace Byron [litfic, horror]: A disaffected and traumatized young woman arrives at an all-trans girls commune founded by her toxic ex-girlfriend, only to discover something sinister afoot. Transfem butch love interest and side characters. Transfem author.

Our Monsters by Jemma Topaz (mystery, erotica, satire): In a futuristic city inhabited by monsters, a human woman tries to solve a series of grisly murders, while romancing several monster girls. Transfem butch love interest (poly romance, not the only love interest). Transfem author.

Always open to recs. Transfem butches are loved and appreciated, and I don't tolerate invisibilization of transfeminine people when speaking of butchness and lesbian masculinity.

how to troubleshoot by yourself when you have a technical problem

what common file types are

some very basics on how to use ""developer tools"" on your computer (because i cant think of a better way to refer to them) like task manager and command prompt (and their mac equivalents, terminal and activity monitor ofc)

how to read and understand a privacy policy and what your personal data is, as well as what it being collected actually means and steps you can take to keep it private

how to understand terms of service (hey. if you have trouble with reading legalese and worry about being able to understand these policies anyways, here's a site that gives basic summaries of privacy policies and ToS)

what a cookie actually is

internet privacy and your digital footprint!! seriously i dont know why we stopped teaching people that they shouldnt be putting their entire real identity online in a world where your online actions can ruin you irl

basic safety measures like antivirus software (and why you should use it or if the built in one on windows or mac is enough for you) and backing up your computer (also a mac guide)

common keyboard shortcuts (and on mac)

as an additional note: things i think everyone should know on computers and the internet but schools may bit hesitant to teach about for whatever moral/legal standards schools pretend to operate on

vpns and adblockers! (btw for most of these where you can pay for things im purposefully not recommending any specific software but seriously just use ublock origin for an adblocker)

how to not get a virus while pirating something

what a temporary email is and when to use one

red flags that you shouldn't trust a website (and how to quickly check the security of a site)

an online compiler so you dont need to download anything or worry about running code directly on your computer if that makes you nervous

a basic video guide to introduce you to python and walk you through beginner steps

a guide to some syntax and commands you should know (this was literally my lifeline in my first CS class)

The woman in question wears only a blue head scarf, signifying she’s married. She clutches just below her right breast, which exhibits several telltale signs of breast cancer, as the experts noted. He areola is not visible, and her nipple is puckered, in a manner her other one isn’t. Two lumps also emerge. One is visible on the right side of the breast in question, just above an area of orange-hued discoloration that appears to be “an artistic effect rather than a typical peau d′orange,” the study stated. The other is visible just before her armpit, indicating she may have swollen lymph nodes, another common side effect.

incredibly good stuff from the medical side on other representation of breast cancer in michelangelo's sculptural work:

The Breasts of “Night”: Michelangelo as Oncologist

Published November 23, 2000

N Engl J Med 2000;343:1577-1578

C.J. Cherryh

Gender: Female

Sexuality: Lesbian

DOB: 1 September 1942

Ethnicity: White - American

Blood Music (1985), by Greg Bear, explores a similar concept - cool stuff!

1. Look up your rx on Wikipedia and figure out whatever the chemical in it actually is. Navigate to that page.

2. Find the CAS #. This is a universal identifier that will help you overcome language barriers.

3. Go on madeinchina.com and search for ur drug by cas #. If you are very sketched by giving $$ to a company that can be hard to vet, you can also go on like reddit i guess and look for "hrt raw suppliers" with good reputations and see if they also carry what youre looking for but that can be less likely unless its a hormone med. Tbh i usually just trust companies that make a lot of pharmacueticals and that have a digital footprint going back at least five years. Very very common medications and especially things like cialis id be slightly more discerning about sources because theres more profit motive in scamming people over them; running a scam for random pharmacueticals is just...a strange thing to do with a low hit rate.

4. You'll need to actually email a human being to make an order :( confirm the CAS # to make sure ur talking about the right thing. Doing a buying pool with friends can give some insurance in case it ends up being weird

5. Optional IMHO but probably a good move: locate a drug checking service in ur general region. If its hard to find, find your nearest harm reduction group or street medic collective and ask them to shake the phone tree for you. If they're annoying about it find the second nearest. Etc. Ur looking for someplace that has a Mass Spectrometer and will check out a sample for you. Idk why some diy hrt guides tell you to pay for this out of pocket 💁

6. Dosingggg (for oral pills other stuff can get more complicated see note at end): you can get gel caps for cheap on like Amazon or whatever and use a tiny spoon (made with tinfoil) to measure each dose with a milligram scale. It's easier to put a whole pile of powder on the scale and take a little bit off into the scoop and measure by how much the weught goes Down, than it is to try to weigh and then cap each dose. +/-0.5MG is usually an ok tolerance. If ur stuff is dosed by MICROGRAMS look up thr 4theives miso card procedure

6a. I hate doing this so the other thing you can do is look up ur med on pubchem by CAS# and see what its soluble in. Graduated cylinders are cheap and accurate so if its water- or oil- soluble OR ethanol soluble in a reasonable amount (like your normal dose could be dissolved in <5mL of ethanol), you can do oral liquids! Oil solubility you might need to just test at home. Work out an appropriate mg/ML solution (you might need to do some hands-on testing with a small amount of ur powder to see what amount dissolves happily in what amount of solvent), figure out how many doses you want to make at once, mix that much powder and that much liquid together, and dose with an oral syringe. Water solutions you want to keep for no more than 1wk at a time or alternately, the max amount of time you wouldn't be sketched by drinking water left in an unsealed container, bc even tho drug raws & plain water arent the MOST microbe friendly itll grow Stuff eventually. Oral liquids WILL change metabolism, alcohol solutions will change it most, water will change it least. Metabolism is already super duper weird and variable by individual so for a lot of oral rx meds, adding a small variable is not going to drastically change the general variability of the population that that drug has been tested in. However: don't trust internet strangers to know everything about ur situation and do some reading on the pharmacology of ur specific meds and make decisions you think will be good.

7. Keep ur head up and stay thoughtfully engaged with this process. If the reason you take this med has some kind of metric you can test at home, like getting a BP cuff or something, you should be doing that and writing things down. Generally its a good idea to track ur own daily health situation in writing. Apps are bad for privacy, we know this. There are also really interesting consumer health metric items available like little patches that test ur blood sugar over the course of about 2wks.

If ur already financially ok and pay some amount out of pocket for ur rx I think you should strongly consider doing something like this because it is a gamble and if you can better afford to work out the kinks up front AND stop paying that bill every month in the future, congrats, chances are even a fraction of those savings put away for like, a year or less are enough to pay for someone else you know to do it again and snowball into a better situation for everyone.

Another thing to do is look up how the meds you use expire. A lot of dry pills maintain >90% efficacy for a very long time past their expiration dates (the us military did a huge long ass study about this). Syntheroid specifically can be notably worse in 6mos past exp. A few drugs decompose into actually harmful compounds but the only ones I know about are antibiotics, you should check tho

My friend pointed it out first, and then I started noticing too. Why would books that multiple libraries definitely, 100% had digital access to a couple of months/weeks/days ago disappear?

Amazon is getting exclusive rights to them.

Ebooks that the public library once had digital copies of are now only available through Amazon. Audible boasts on their covers about Audible-exclusive audiobooks that did not used to be Audible-exclusive. Entire series and collections are disappearing overnight.

Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief of the Atlantic, has been at the center of a national story after he was “inadvertently” included in a group Signal chat with administration officials as they planned a deadly bombing in Yemen. Much of the coverage has focused on the mishandling of military secrets, rather than the impact of the bombings themselves, targeting the poorest country in the Middle East, which the United States has helped bomb and blockade for over a decade. Goldberg is not just an observer: He is contributing to this disregard for Yemeni lives, and his dismissiveness sheds light on why he was an administration media contact to begin with.

In an interview that aired on March 26, Deepa Fernandes, one of the hosts of NPR's “Here and Now,” interviewed Goldberg about the “group chat heard 'round the world” that included Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, and Vice President JD Vance. During one portion of the interview, Fernandes did something few other journalists are doing. She asked Goldberg about the Yemeni people who were killed in the bombing, which took place on March 15.

Deepa Fernandes: There's little talk of the fact that this attack killed 53 people, as we mentioned, including women and children. The civilian toll of these American strikes. Are we burying the lede here?

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, those, unfortunately, those aren't confirmed numbers. Those are provided by the Houthis and the Houthi health ministry, I guess. So we don't know that for sure. Yeah, I mean, obviously we're, well, I don't know if we're burying the lede, because obviously huge breaches in national security and safety of information, that's a very, very important story, obviously. And one of the reasons, you know, it's a very important story is that the Republicans themselves consider that to be an important story, when it's Hillary Clinton doing the deed, right? So that's obviously hugely important.

But yeah, I think that covering what's going on in Yemen, the Arab and Iran backed terrorist organization, the Houthis, that are that are firing missiles at Israel and disrupting global shipping and occupy half of Yemen, and all kinds of other things in the US, you know, and the Trump administration criticizing the Biden's response and Europe wants Trump to do more. I mean, yeah, there's, there's a huge story in Yemen. But Yemen is, as you know, is one of the more inaccessible places for Western journalists. So maybe this becomes like a substitute for a discussion of Yemen. I don't know.

Goldberg not only seems unconcerned about the death toll and eager to cast doubt on its veracity, but he also appears unprepared for the question. It’s as though it didn’t occur to him that the substance of the Signal exchange itself—the bombing—might be a legitimate topic of conversation, and he seems eager to move on.

This is despite the fact that there is evidence in the exchange itself that the United States hit a civilian site in the bombing. Waltz wrote in the Signal chat that the US military had bombed a residential building. “The first target—their top missile guy—we had positive ID of him walking into his girlfriend’s building and it’s now collapsed,” Waltz wrote in the chat, to which JD Vance replied: “Excellent.”

Yet, as Nick Turse noted for The Intercept, “So far, however, there has been little focus on the specifics of the attack, much less discussion of the fact that one of the targets of the March 15 strike was a civilian residence.”

The story of US belligerence in Yemen should be a huge one. Since 2015, the US-Saudi coalition has used American manufactured bombs to hit wedding parties, factories, a school bus, and a center for the blind. It’s difficult to know the exact death toll, but around three years ago, the death toll from direct and indirect consequence of war surpassed 377,000. Direct bombings by both the Biden and Trump administrations threaten a wider war, and have occurred in lockstep with US support for Israel as it has ruthlessly bombed and attacked Gaza since October 7.

Goldberg, of course, was included in that group chat because he was a contact of someone on the administration’s thread, and his history of laundering the US military’s mass atrocities is a good indicator of why. In the lead-up to the US-led war on Iraq, Goldberg was central to peddling the disproven conspiracy theory that Iraq had ties to al-Qaeda, a key lie of the George W. Bush administration, used to justify the invasion. One month before the US started the war, he went on NPR to discuss “Possible Links Between Iraq and al Qaeda and Evidence That the Iraqis May be Trying to Evade Weapons Inspectors.”

Goldberg has a long career of uplifting the media narratives of the United States and its allies, including a big piece in 2010 where he floated justifications for a possible Israeli war on Iran. Like many of the Iraq War pushers, Goldberg’s lies about Iraq did not harm his career, but marked its ascent. Under his tenure, the Atlantic has shut out Palestinian voices and stories, as the US has helped Israel wage genocide in Gaza.

Goldberg’s dismissal of Yemeni deaths is not a small detail of this blockbuster story, but a central component. One way to get on the speed dials of high-level officials is to have a proven career of doing their bidding.