The Thief King

Honestly, for a fandom this large? We’re a stunningly well-behaving fandom.

Of course, there will always be bad apples but that’s the case for every single fandom out there and judging the entire fanbase by a few select cases is not very accurate to say the least.

And see, I know we have some issues, we have some overzealous fans, some younger fans or immature people in general who cannot take part in polite discussions, and some salty fans which like to hate very specific parts of the anime (or the fanbase). And we’ve also had situations in which many people stopped thinking rationally (the “Love on Ice” situation comes to mind), but we managed to get over those, many people even apologizing for their misjudging of the situation. And knowing all of this, I can still say that we’re fine.

No fandom is perfect.

The YOI fandom also has some problems.

But it also has tens upon tens of amazing artists, dedicated (fan)translators, thoughtful meta-writers, amusing meme-creators, interesting headcanon-makers, inspired gif-makers, professional figure skaters and much much more.

I’ve been in this fandom since the day episode 1 aired. I’ve seen everything, the good, the bad and everything in the middle. And I can confidently say that Yuri on Ice has thousands of intelligent individuals following and enjoying it.

No, we’re not perfect.

Yes, we’re aware of the issues within the fandom.

I extend my apologies if you’ve been hurt by the YOI fandom.

A lot of people have turned down their invitations to Friday’s inauguration of president-elect Donald Trump. Caitlyn Jenner reportedly is not one of them.

Last week, Us Weekly reported that Jenner will attend the inauguration of America’s possibly most dangerous and certainly least qualified president in history, although Jenner’s publicist couldn’t confirm the claim “at that time.” (So there’s a chance it’s not true, but based on her record of supporting Trump, we won’t be surprised if it is.)

Jenner, the Olympic gold medalist who chronicled her high-profile life as a transgender woman on the now-canceled E! docu-series “I Am Cait,” has expressed support for the president-elect.

On her show, the conservative Republican declared that she didn’t like Trump’s macho attitude, but “I think he would be very good for women’s issues.”

Jenner told the outlet STAT that Trump “seems very much behind the LGBT community” after he disagreed with North Carolina’s anti-LGBTQ bathroom law (though he later walked back his criticism).

I saw this clip from Darkside of Dimensions movie and all I can think was: that cat might be Bakura…

Fairytales on Ice?

Hi! Are you a CAMAB transfeminine person who’s sick of only ever seeing resources for CAFAB trans people on your dash? Are you just coming out to yourself and struggling with Peak Dysphoria? Are you a CAFAB trans person who wants to support the people above? Then here’s a post for you!

This is a post about tucking!

Wait Erika, what the fuck is a tuck?

Glad you asked! For those who don’t know, tucking is a technique for achieving a flat groin area. It’s a time-honored tool of CAMAB trans feminine people but, unfortunately, the tradition doesn’t seem to have been communicated very effectively to the current generation. 

So what’s the point of tucking?

Tucking has lots of awesome benefits! These include:

Being able to wear pants & shorts marketed to women more comfortably

Seeing yourself with a flat front often reduces dysphoria (it did for me!)

Referring to the previous bullet, it is one of the easiest ways to lessen your dysphoria when you’re still closeted, since you can wear a tuck under your normal pants/shorts and no one has to know

It can help us reduce some of the risk of being outed in public

Oh neat. How do I tuck?

The basics of tucking goes like this:

Push the testicles up into the inguinal canals

Pull the rest of the junk between the legs

Secure the arrangement with very tight underwear (or some other method)

Wait wait wait… What the hell is an inguinal canal?

Alright, so…. this is gonna require some body exploration on your part if you can stomach it. Basically, the inguinal canals are little tunnels in your pelvis above the testicles. If you push your testicles directly up into your body from their resting position, they should slide pretty neatly into the inguinal canals.

Yeah… this is what the TW was mostly for. Sorry, but the visual is helpful.

Ok…. So how do I secure it all in place?

Ok so first thing’s first: do not use tape. A lot of tutorials online (particularly ones for and by drag queens) recommend using tape, but that shit hurts and it’s super unnecessary!

Instead you need two things:

A tight pair of panties (preferably more, so you can do this frequently without wearing the same undies every day)

Control briefs

…. Control briefs?

I know, I know, so many new words tonight! Ever heard of Spanx products? They’re mainly marketed to cis women for “tummy control”, but they have another awesome use as well - tucking! Here’s an example at Target.com (you should be able to find them at any store that sells women’s underwear, but if you’re afraid to go buy them in the store that pair is pretty cheap and you can order it online if you’re in the U.S.)

If you get the right size of control briefs (I would recommend buying a size down) they should fit very snugly over your junk. To hold your tuck in place, simply hold it between your legs, pull up your undies all the way, and pull the control briefs over them. Assuming you’ve pulled everything up as much as possible and kept everything tucked between your legs correctly, you should now have a snug and smooth tuck! Congrats!!!!!!

But wait, I can’t get that stuff! What do I do???????

Hey, that’s ok! Couple of ideas here:

Get a pair of tights (possibly old ones from a friend) and cut off everything but the stretchy part at the top. Congrats! Those are basically control briefs (albeit kinda messy ones)

Contact me and I’ll try to get you a pair of those control briefs from Target (if you live outside the US im sure we can find another website)

Ok…. So is there anything I should worry about with the tuck?

Unfortunately, yeah - mainly discomfort. Here’s a few ways discomfort occurs when tucking and how to avoid it:

Tucking with the inguinal canals can be painful at first. I spent weeks practicing using them before ever getting my first tucking materials. If the pain is too unbearable for you, dom-the-destitute suggests just tucking everything back and continuing from there.

After a few hours of tucking (varies depending on how active you are) things are probably gonna start to feel a little out of place. Part of the prevention here is practicing lots to get as tight a tuck as possible. Other than that, it’s something you’ll have to get kind of used to dealing with - I usually excuse myself to the bathroom when a tuck becomes too uncomfortable and fix it in the stall.

After even more hours you’re going to feel a pretty general aching. Much as people who bind shouldn’t do that for too long, you shouldn’t tuck for too long at once. Usually 4-8 hours (again, depending upon activity level as well as experience) is gonna be all you can stand before getting some longer lasting aching. I don’t know if there’s any long-term harm that can occur from tucking too long, but it’s best if you’re not the first to find out.

Generally I find that more & longer pubic hair can cause discomfort and generally make your tuck less effective. Definitely look into shaving down there, or at least trimming up a little bit if you don’t already (I’m not going to go into details about pubic shaving but send me a message if you need help in that department).

Congrats! You now know how to tuck! Go get those cute white capris you saw at Macy’s the other day and ROCK that shit!

If you have any questions or need additional help, feel free to send me an ask. If you have any additional suggestions to add to this post, please go ahead and reblog it with comment or send me a message about it!

Wikihow also has a good article on the topic to check out for some more visuals! (Make sure to skip to the “Tuck without Tape” section)

I used to work for a call center and I was doing a political survey and I called this number that was randomly generated for me and the way our system worked was voice-activated so when the other person said hello you’d get connected to them, so I just launch right into my “Harvard University and NPR blah blah blah” thing and then there’s this long pause and I think the person’s hung up even though I didn’t hear a click

And then I hear “you shouldn’t be able to call this number.”

So I apologize and go into the preset spiel about because we aren’t selling anything, etc. etc. and the answer I get is

“No, I know that. What I mean is that it should be impossible for you to call this number, and I need to know how you got it.”

I explain that it’s randomly generated and I’m very sorry for bothering him, and go to hang up. And before I can click terminate, I hear:

“Ma’am, this is a matter of national security.”

I accidentally called the director of the FBI.

There was no MS Dos involved. Instead, there was a proprietary type-based OS and an actually-uses-transistors refrigerator-sized computer with switches I had to trip at certain times during the night as I watched the data flow from six pm to six AM on Fridays and weekends. If things got stuck, I reset the server. 

The company handled everything from low-end data (hotel and car reservations) to flight plans and tower information. I was weighed every time I came in to make sure it was me. Areas of the building had retina scanners on doors. 

During training. they took us through all the procedures. Including the procedures for the red phone. There was, literally, a red phone on the shelf above my desk. “This is a holdover from the cold war.” They said. “It isn’t going to come up, but here’s the deal. In case of nuclear war or other nation-wide disaster, the phone will ring. Pick up the phone, state your name and station, and await instructions. Do whatever you are told.”

So my third night there, it’s around 2am and there’s a ringing sound. 

I look up, slowly. The Red phone is ringing.

So I reach out, I pick up the phone. I give my name and station number. And I hear every station head in the building do the exact same. One after another, voices giving names and numbers. Then silence for the space of two breaths. Silence broken by…

“Uh… Is Shantavia there?”

It turns out that every toll free, 1-900 or priority number has a corresponding local number that it routs to at its actual destination. Some poor teenage girl was trying to dial a friend of hers, mixed up the numbers, and got the atomic attack alert line for a major air-travel corporation’s command center in the mid-west United States.

There’s another pause, and the guys over in the main data room are cracking up. The overnight site head is saying “I think you have the wrong number, ma’am.” and I’m standing there having faced the specter of nuclear annihilation before I was old enough to legally drink.

Seriously, this is legit.

In December 1955, Sears decided to run a Santa hotline.  Here’s the ad they posted.

Only problem is, they misprinted the number.  And the number they printed?  It went straight through to fucking NORAD.  This was in the middle of the Cold War, when early warning radar was the only thing keeping nuclear annihilation at bay.  NORAD was the front line.

And it wasn’t just any number at NORAD.  Oh no no no.

Terri remembers her dad had two phones on his desk, including a red one. “Only a four-star general at the Pentagon and my dad had the number,” she says.

“This was the ‘50s, this was the Cold War, and he would have been the first one to know if there was an attack on the United States,” Rick says.

The red phone rang one day in December 1955, and Shoup answered it, Pam says. “And then there was a small voice that just asked, ‘Is this Santa Claus?’ ”

His children remember Shoup as straight-laced and disciplined, and he was annoyed and upset by the call and thought it was a joke — but then, Terri says, the little voice started crying.

“And Dad realized that it wasn’t a joke,” her sister says. “So he talked to him, ho-ho-ho’d and asked if he had been a good boy and, ‘May I talk to your mother?’ And the mother got on and said, ‘You haven’t seen the paper yet? There’s a phone number to call Santa. It’s in the Sears ad.’ Dad looked it up, and there it was, his red phone number. And they had children calling one after another, so he put a couple of airmen on the phones to act like Santa Claus.”

“It got to be a big joke at the command center. You know, 'The old man’s really flipped his lid this time. We’re answering Santa calls,’ ” Terri says.

And then, it got better.

“The airmen had this big glass board with the United States on it and Canada, and when airplanes would come in they would track them,” Pam says.

“And Christmas Eve of 1955, when Dad walked in, there was a drawing of a sleigh with eight reindeer coming over the North Pole,” Rick says.

“Dad said, 'What is that?’ They say, 'Colonel, we’re sorry. We were just making a joke. Do you want us to take that down?’ Dad looked at it for a while, and next thing you know, Dad had called the radio station and had said, 'This is the commander at the Combat Alert Center, and we have an unidentified flying object. Why, it looks like a sleigh.’ Well, the radio stations would call him like every hour and say, 'Where’s Santa now?’ ” Terri says.

For real.

“And later in life he got letters from all over the world, people saying, 'Thank you, Colonel,’ for having, you know, this sense of humor. And in his 90s, he would carry those letters around with him in a briefcase that had a lock on it like it was top-secret information,” she says. “You know, he was an important guy, but this is the thing he’s known for.”

“Yeah,” Rick [his son] says, “it’s probably the thing he was proudest of, too.”

So yeah.  I think that might be the best wrong number of all time.