My friends are my power 💅

Okay. cracks knuckles. I was exaggerating a bit about falling in love, what do I know about the internal experience of the octopus? But it was fucking cool as hell. This is what happened, as accurate to my memory as I can manage.

My family was visiting Australia for about a month, in Northern Hemisphere summer/Southern Hemisphere winter (June/July?) of like... 2013? I think it was just before one of my years of law school, or right before law school in general. We spent a week of this visiting Sydney, where we stayed at a place right on... Manley Beach? Is that something? I'm not looking it up, so if that's not a place name, that's just my memory failing me.

It was winter but the weather was gorgeous and we decided, fuck it, let's go swimming. The water was Ice Fucking Cold. This wasn't a huge problem given the warm weather. I was submerging slowly in the rocky area, like, down at the left side of that stretch of beach? Left side when you're facing the ocean. It wasn't just tide pools, it was pretty deep, up to my waist. The bottom of it was large rounded rocks with some vegetation in between, the occasional fish. The water was also super clear.

I was kind of bouncing around in the water when I felt something wrap around my ankle.

Knowing Australia's (we're not going to debate about whether it's deserved or not) reputation for horrifyingly deadly wildlife, I yelped. My mom was close by, and she was like, what is it, and I conveyed the situation to her. She said that it was just seaweed, don't be silly.

The next time I felt something curling around my ankle I actually saw it. It was an octopus with a body bigger than a baseball but not much bigger -- what's slightly bigger than a baseball? A mango? And its tentacles were like a foot to a foot and a half (1/3 to 1/2 meter) long. So it was little, and it was scooting away across the seafloor, and it was clearly tentacled, and right in front of my eyes it turned into a damn rock.

"That was NOT seaweed," I remember saying.

I kept still, and the rock uncurled a tentacle and then another, and it crept back across the rocks towards me. At this point I could see it really well. It reached out to me again, and at this point my curious ape tendencies took over and I reached into the water when it reached up to me. Its tentacles wrapped around my hand and fingers. It's so hard to describe. It was almost velvety, if rubbery ocean skin could be velvety. Its little suction cups were so strong and they were moving, they were alive. The whole tentacle felt like pure muscle. This was all fucking wild. And I was by far not the only one in this rocky area -- there were my two parents, there were some other people further in. This octopus was clearly curious about me. It was tasting and thinking and then it played a little tug of war with me.

Someone yelled something about 'does it have blue rings' which it did not. I had no idea how good that was at the time. Except for the size, I just think it matched what a Pacific octopus looks like, which is to say: it had no color, and it was grey, and it was all colors.

Some dudes were nearby and I think they had a camera on me? And they were like "How are you not freaked out, I would never get in the water again" and I was privately thinking this is so fucking cool I'm having a cosmic experience but what I said was "DO I NOT LOOK FREAKED OUT." So I guess I was also a little freaked out.

I went over on a solid rock ledge and sat up out of the water and it attached itself to the vertical rock surface under the water and reached tentacles up and out of the water for me, like "where are you going???" So I held its tentacles some more.

At this point, my mom tried to take some pictures. They look like me with some plain boring rocks. You cannot see the octopus in a single one of them.

Eventually we had to go, but like. Holy shit. The interaction was so clearly sentient that I have not been able to even consider eating octopus since. It wanted to know what was up with me and hang out. It was detecting something about me that was interesting that was not apparent to anyone else there, so its senses must be wildly different.

Insane happening.

The dumbass conclusion to this story (not that dumbass because it involves an artist getting Cash Money) is that my father, in his infinite wisdom, decided to spend Two Thousand American Dollars on commissioning a wood sculpture of me with the octopus from the artist James Phillips.

AND THEN HE JUST LEFT IT WITH ME.

Please note I was not a child but a whole ass adult for this. I sent the artist a description of what happened and this explanatory drawing:

I've been resource gathering for YEARS so now I am going to share my dragons hoard

Floorplanner. Design and furnish a house for you to use for having a consistent background in your comic or anything! Free, you need an account, easy to use, and you can save multiple houses.

Comparing Heights. Input the heights of characters to see what the different is between them. Great for keeping consistency. Free.

Magma. Draw online with friends in real time. Great for practice or hanging out. Free, paid plan available, account preferred.

Smithsonian Open Access. Loads of free images. Free.

SketchDaily. Lots of pose references, massive library, is set on a timer so you can practice quick figure drawing. Free.

SculptGL. A sculpting tool which I am yet to master, but you should be able to make whatever 3d object you like with it. free.

Pexels. Free stock images. And the search engine is actually pretty good at pulling up what you want.

Figurosity. Great pose references, diverse body types, lots of "how to draw" videos directly on the site, the models are 3d and you can rotate the angle, but you can't make custom poses or edit body proportions. Free, account option, paid plans available.

Line of Action. More drawing references, this one also has a focus on expressions, hands/feet, animals, landscapes. Free.

Animal Photo. You pose a 3d skull model and select an animal species, and they give you a bunch of photo references for that animal at that angle. Super handy. Free.

Quantum Transceiver Antenna and Method for Construction

Applicant: Q-Net, LLC

Okay so I spent literal hours doing research on this to figure out if it was viable, only to discover that the two listed inventors, Marianne Veronika Sandor and Edward Michael Porrazzo, had their assets frozen by the SEC and were subsequently fined over $1.2 million for fraud related to a similar claimed invention back in 2018. In short, they claimed their “quantum transducer” would serve as a revolutionary 3D technology for tablets, backing their statements with expired patents and technologies that either didn’t exist or were manufactured by unrelated companies. They then funneled over half of the investor funds raised from these fraudulent claims into their own accounts, spending it in comically lavish ways, as shown below.

Moddha is the name of the company they used for this fraud.

With that in mind, let’s look at the paragraph that gave me the greatest pause when looking at this.

All in all, this paragraph seems to misrepresent basic facts about antennas in an effort to further its own claims. For example, as I’m typing this, I’m getting cell phone signal in a closed-off room, which this implies shouldn’t be possible. In the same vein, basic TV antennas have been usable inside for decades, and the same goes for radios. Yes, the reception indoors is going to be worse than outdoors, but in most buildings you’ll still get decent reception unless you’re underground, near the center of a larger building, or in a Faraday Cage.

Riku: Just not a morning person, has insomnia Definitely not annoyed someone is talking to Sora Sora: Idiot who doesn't know what's happening but copies Riku anyway

When Life Gives You Corpses is a brilliant YA about a cursed praying mantis who falls for a young witch. Yield Under Great Persuasion is a raunchy, but surprisingly sweet story of two men repairing their relationship. Fabulous Bodies is a horror story about a queer rockstar rising from the dead.

This is Where the Future Bleeds is a fantasy set in a vividly imagined land, where two women (who happen to kiss) are the key to healing the broken sky. You're No Better is a story about a teen struggling in the shadow of his murderous parent. Oil on Canvas is about a woman who finds disturbing paintings in the home of her dead mother.

Me before I came out, when I did pageants and modeling.

This was me the day of my junior prom. The dress weighed around 20 lbs, was the first one I tried on, and my makeup was done by someone who still thought brown lip liner looked good on white people. I spent the entire day being photographed and generally hating how I looked and wishing I could figure out why, when everything was technically perfect.

Came out in 2016, here's nine years of transformation (in reverse order, sorry)

Turns out I'm neither a Normal Guy nor a woman, but a much weirder type of faggy masc thing.

In my lifestyle lolita egg era. Somehow getting to dress like a princess gave me the will to get up in the morning

granted being a big ol goth doesn't really fit the bill of "socially acceptable heterosexual femininity" but i was HYPER feminine when i was closeted, especially in the years between when i FIRST tried to come out (age 16 - around the time of those first photos) and when i actually made the jump (age 19 - about a year after the last photo)

you can tell in that second to last photo i literally got a tattoo that said "MAD GIRL" which was an exercise in many things, including abstract self-harm, a visual reminder that i had given up on myself, and wildly underestimating the number of dudes who would misread it as BAD GIRL and take that as a cue to say gross shit to me while i was at work

anyway never kill yourself

haha yeah 🫣

consciously dipped my toes into the gender fuckery pool at around 15/16 but I was pentecostal at the time and well. took them out real quick

i tried very very hard to be “femme” for a LONG time but during covid lockdowns I didn’t have to perform for anyone and I slowly started to let it all go and now I’m a silly little man 😌