..::VERSIPELLIS :: JOURNAL::..

i've been waking up super early, lately, for no particular reason other than my body wants to. so while i'm sitting here waiting for my husband to rise, i figured i'd take the time to casually opine about the new Dragon Age game, since i've finished my first playthrough and the melodrama with which people have been talking about this game is making me feel insane

needless to say there's gonna be spoilers in this post, if anyone reading this cares.

so, i've been a Dragon Age fan since 2012, and my feeling about the franchise has pretty much always been "you gotta try this, dude, it sucks!" because, like...these are not fantastic games by a long shot lmaooo. i love these games but they've always been kinda bad. and that's why i love them— they are cringy and goofy and awkward and that's why they're fun. it's like fantasy-flavored junk food to me. so imagine my surprise when Veilguard comes out and everyone is freaking out about how Dragon Age is ruined or this game is somehow particularly bad compared to previous installments, and suddenly we're all acting like the previous games were all super deep pieces of perfectly-crafted Art. huh? have we all been playing the same games???

that's not to say there is nothing of substance or value in previous DA games, because when they hit they hit. but...one of the most popular mods for Origins removes the entire fade portion of the game, plus it's ugly as shit and the combat is exhausting. DA2 also has painful combat, and then there's the reused maps. Inquisition has several problems, the writing being the worst of them in my opinion...what i'm saying is Veilguard does the exact same thing all previous DA games have done, which is "great in some areas but bad in others". it's average. Dragon Age as a franchise is average. and that is okay because i am still having fun! sometimes things are neither the best or worst piece of media to ever exist and we can still have a good time with it.

anyway. i'll start with some things i dislike about Veilguard: 

• the biggest issue for me is the way slavery gets completely glossed over, when we're in Tevinter, the slavery and racism capital of Thedas, for a huge portion of the game lmfao. since elgar'nan and ghilan'nain are spending their time recruiting groups of people desperate for power to their little personal army, i feel like it would have been really easy for them to cause a slave revolt by just saying "we're your gods and we're totally here to free you and reclaim the world For All Elves, we prommy", and that would have been a much more interesting and morally/ethically challenging enemy than the Venatori, who i've always found to be super boring, one-dimensional villains. i know the slave population in Tevinter isn't entirely elves, but it's majority elves, and tbh even the non-elf slaves would be easily tempted by a promise of power and freedom. so not only is it a big missed storytelling opportunity, but it's also just...weird? odd? that this thing that's always been a huge part of Dragon Age lore goes almost entirely ignored.
• i completely agree with the criticism that the companions need to shut the fuck up during combat. the "MOVE!! ON YOUR RIGHT!!! ON YOUR LEFT!!!! WE'RE TAKIN' FIRE!!! GET OUTTA THERE!!!" is so constant during combat that the voice lines can't keep up with the gameplay, so the companions are giving me directions that aren't even relevant to what's happening onscreen
• more challenging puzzles, please! and i say that as someone who loathes a game where you must solve a difficult puzzle to progress the story (looking scornfully at Origins as i say this) but the puzzles in Veilguard are, first of all, few and far between, and also are laughably easy. i would like a nice middle ground of puzzles that make me think hard without totally pulling my hair out.
• the romances are veryyy meh. what scenes i did get with the two romances i witnessed—Taash and Davrin—were good, but i was like "that's it?" you can't even kiss them whenever you want :tears: and then what was even the point of giving me a nudity option in the character creator...there's nothing steamy at all, from what i saw. BG3 let me see penis, Bioware. where's all the penis!!!
• hit-or-miss voice acting. some characters had great performances, others were kinda awkward. Davrin stands out as one of the best performances in the game, Solas and Morrigan ate/left no crumbs/etc, but Neve has some weird, shaky delivery, and sometimes Bellara sounds very Voice Actory, for lack of a better word. Many side characters had that classic awkward Dragon Age NPC delivery.
• i liked most of the side villains a lot, but there wasn't enough of them? especially the Butcher. for how much he was spoken about and built up as a big bad, he barely got any screentime and his boss fight was a huge letdown that took me like five minutes. Aelia had a cool boss fight, and the buildup to it with the people being puppeted by blood magic was cool, but she also had barely any screen time for how much Neve spoke about her. The Dragon King felt like a missed opportunity to show us several scenes with him being a jackass so that i was itching to beat him up, but he just shows up for one scene and kills Taash's mom and you don't even fight him directly. idk i just wanted more of all of them!!

 and here's things i like about this game:

• i absolutely love the new visual style. the environments are beautiful and the more stylized approach to the characters is very appealing to me, and i think it will age well. DA2 took a stylized approach, and i think the characters in that game aged much better than Inquisition's characters did. i will always prefer style over realism, especially in a fantasy game.
• the dialogue is not nearly as cringeworthy as people made it out to be, and i found all of the companions very likable. i heard so much pissing and moaning about this that i was bracing myself going in, but it's...fine, a lot of the humor made me laugh, and i love that Rook actually has a personality— they feel a lot like Hawke, who is my favorite player character of the franchise. the Inquisitor had the personality of a smooth rock, and Rook is a huge improvement. they actually feel like just some scrappy guy that had greatness thrust upon them. it has some corny moments but overall the dialogue really does not feel too drastically different from previous DA games, idk. 
• while it is true that the companions don't bring the same level of conflict and drama as in previous games, i'm fine with that. i actually really like that this game is more about Good Vibes, because we live in hell and i'm glad to play with my little virtual friends and save the world in Escapism Land. also, i distinctly remember people always whining about the companion drama being annoying in Inquisition and DA2 so we gotta pick a struggle, guys. also, this is the first DA game where i really struggled with some of the decisions in companion quests! like, Bellara and Emmrich in particular, i was not expecting those decisions to have me racking my brain about which was the better choice, and even after making the decision i was doubting myself. i felt like i was right there alongside the characters, struggling with a situation that had no "correct" answer.
• speaking of choices, the big decisions you have to make in the final act of the game are stressful in the best way. the choices you make in DA games usually don't have that huge of an impact that you can immediately feel, and rarely do they feel like a difficult choice, or a choice where i'm like "oh fuck i don't know how this is going to work out for me". this game nailed that part.
• the final act as a whole, really. everything about it was cool. the action was great, and i really felt like i was charging into my last stand. it  felt like Dragon Age finally being able to show us a big bombastic third act at a scale and quality it hasn't been able to do before because of technological or budget restraints. the twist with varric was something i legit did not see coming. as boring as the Inquisitor is to me, i did love that they came back and had a hand in saving the day. everything just came back around and wrapped up in a satisfying way.
• the combat, but everyone seems to agree that that's a high point. dragon fights and the darkspawn hordes are my favorite combat scenarios; they're fun even if i suck at video games and am getting my ass beat i also love not having to deal with companion health— the way companions work in combat seems to be a somewhat controversial point but personally i'm a huge fan of not having to deal with making sure my party members aren't dying all the time.

there's more i could go into, but you get the idea. there's some great things and some not so great things. it's a Dragon Age game.i had a lot of fun with it. and it actually came out! that's the best part. i fully did not expect this game to ever actually release, lol.

one more thing i need to talk about, though: Taash is an excellently written trans character and i will die on this hill. their emotional immaturity, the anger issues, their awkwardness— if these things seem like "bad writing" to you, you have not spent nearly enough time around trans people in real life, and you also seem to have completely missed the part about their mother being overbearing and infantilizing them. and i'm talking about people who aren't just being reactionary transphobes, here; i've seen so much bitching from self-proclaimed allies about the dinner scene with their mother, when Taash sits down and awkwardly says, "so, i'm nonbinary," and when i finally saw the scene for myself i was like "this is the realest coming out scene i've seen in recent memory" lmao.

coming out is painfully uncomfortable like that, and SO many trans people are "immature" just like Taash because we spent our childhoods repressed and struggling with who we are, and coming out is often the first time we wake up and begin to allow ourselves to be fully realized human beings. that's often a messy, ugly process, and i think a lot of players just weren't ready to see the unsexy, uncool parts of the trans experience tbh. we're not fun when we're being real people with real problems. cis allies want trans characters like Krem, who give you sanded-down, inoffensive answers to your invasive questions, and who the game lets you be a transphobe to with zero consequences. and i'm never one to be like, "the way you engage with fiction is a direct reflection of who you are as a person," but i gotta say i'm extremely wary of people who hate Taash on the basis of their maturity or the way they talk about their identity, because if that's how you react to a fake trans person, i can't imagine you'd extend much grace or kindness to a trans person feeling and struggling with the same emotions in real life. and that's that on that!

but i do think the Dragon King was a shitty villain though lol

it's been a while since i updated my site, so i figured i'd write up what's been occupying my time lately!

first of all, my husband and i had our big wedding ceremony! we were legally married in the middle of summer, but last month was our ceremony with friends and family present. i'll have to compress some of the best photos to go in the gallery, but here's one of my favorite shots:



we had our ceremony at a venue called The Cloisters in my husband's home state. it's a historic home on a beautiful wooded property and even though it was like 2 billion degrees out (our fault for scheduling an august ceremony ) everything was perfect. we kept things small and lowkey, with a small guest list and without much of the "traditional" wedding stuff— we walked the aisle together, for example, because we've been together for so many years that it felt more appropriate to do it as a pair rather than the traditional one-at-a-time way. our reception was a simple dinner without a big dance party or drunken festivities because we're old and boring but we did have this very pretty cake, which i only got to sample a small bit of but i'm told it tasted great. and it had matching cupcakes, which stained everyone's tongue blue!




unfortunately, after the wedding, we and most of our guests ended up getting covid, so that took my husband and i out for about a week afterward. he had a much worse time of it, with a fever and all the whole gamut of flu symptoms, but in my case i just had the absolute worst sore throat i've ever had in my life. it legitimately felt like i swallowed and gargled crushed glass and i hope to never experience that again. i still haven't entirely recovered; i've had a persistent mucusy throat ever since.

then, immediately after covid, the medical fun continued with a minor wrist surgery for my husband. it was just to remove a ganglion cyst, so nothing major, and he's recovering well he did have a yucky little case of contact dermatitis from the steri-strips, though, so that was a Thing that we had to deal with.

then, after that, we got to be extras in a music video, so that was a cool experience! it was for a side project of King Dude's, so we were background goth clubgoers. i got to be "guy who goes to the bathroom" because they needed someone to cross in front of the camera. gotta add that to my resume i wore the same shoes that i wore to the wedding because those are my nice goth shoes lol.



and then, the day after the video shoot, i had to go to in-person jury duty selection for a first-degree murder trial, but they didn't select me because i said i don't trust cops but it might also have been because of the way i was dressed— jury duty was from 8 AM to 4 PM, and at 6:30 PM i was going to see Sisters of Mercy, and i wasn't going to have time to run home and get ready, so i just wore basically the same outfit as the picture above, but with much more black eyeliner. can't imagine why they didn't want my weird ass on the jury for murder

Sisters was really good, btw! never seen them before. i've always heard they have a reputation for sucking live, but i really enjoyed it and the crowd energy was great. we were on the barrier, and a couple of the people in our friend group ended up leaving because they were just there to see the opener (Blaqk Audio, which i also enjoyed) so we made a space for this young girl to get on the barrier, too. she couldn't have been older than 15 and she was going CRAZY for Sisters. like, Andrew Eldritch would come shambling his skeletal ass over in our direction and this girl was screaminggggg like it was 1965 and the Beatles were singing to her directly, it was so funny. at the end of the set my husband caught her a pick from Kai and she was like "THANK YOU OH MY GOD I'M GOING TO REMEMBER THIS MOMENT FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE" and gave him a big hug. very cute, good vibes all around.

so yeah that's all the stuff that's been keeping me busy lately! also, i've been reading a lot of horror novels lately. i've been going off of what r/horrorlit recommends, but to be honest the taste level on that sub is...questionable, lmao. Incidents Around the House by Josh Malerman was fun, i liked that one. i also enjoyed Penpal by Dathan Auerbach, although i felt like the ending fell a little flat. but Come Closer (Sara Gran) and Stolen Tongues (Felix Blackwell) were so fucking bad, my god. i didn't even finish Stolen Tongues, it was making me cringe so badly i just couldn't do it lol. Come Closer made me feel insane because people gassed that book up like it was the scariest thing they'd ever read and i didn't like a single thing about it. it was so bad i get angry thinking about how much ass it sucked. anyway, currently i'm in the middle of Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill and i'm liking that a lot so far.

and that's the end of my big life update— tl;dr i am not dead, just doin stuff

the gayest sequence of events in my life!

marching at pride is a yearly event; my husband does it with his job and i join him. so that was on june 29th, then on the 2nd of july we had our courthouse wedding! we originally wanted to get married during pride month proper, but there was no availability— probably all the other gays with the same idea the courthouse ceremony was tiny, just us and two friends as witnesses. in august we have our "full" wedding at a nice venue, with family and friends present. the august ceremony is being held in maryland, where my husband's family is, so it made more sense for us to be legally married in our home state rather than getting our marriage license over there. tiny as it was, the courthouse ceremony was still lovely. the judge was very nice and it was a beautiful day outside. we exchanged miniature vows and silicone rings, and in august we'll be reading our full, unabridged vows and upgrade to our nice pretty metal rings. i think the only thing keeping me from crying was the fact that my vows were so short...i may not survive the full reading with my makeup intact

then, the day after the courthouse, my mom took us to disneyland to celebrate! a little weird that my mom was present for what was technically our honeymoon, but we all had fun, lol. it was fucking hot as balls out though. and it was SO crowded on the 4th because they had a special fireworks show that people were very aggressive about seeing. we saw way too many people screaming and swearing at the park staff, one guy even had security called on him because he was being so aggressive toward a female cast member. like...dawg chill the fuck out it's a 10-minute fireworks display. this 20 year old employee is not responsible for you failing to show up until after the show started. other than that night, though, the trip was super fun. we ate a disgusting amount of food and my husband cried when he met spiderman

all this stuff is why i've been mostly absent from the internet lately. this is the most exciting summer i've had in a while!

yeah i have to Post about this discourse but i don't want to put it on tumblr because nobody there knows how to read. it's a hot topic right now because of BG3 and now the new Dragon Age game. this post will not be coherent and i will not be engaging in debate i just need to VENT

anyway. the concept of "playersexual" romances in games will always prioritize straight players first and you can't convince me otherwise. if bisexuality, or queerness in general, only exists in the game if the player opts in to seeing it (by choosing to play a queer romance) that's not bisexual representation, it's table scraps! it is not queer representation if a bigoted player can go through the entire game with minimal, or zero, exposure to The Queers!!!

it's also not some kind of diversity win to just like....erase gay identities in the game's universe lmao. where are the lesbians. where are the gay men. like holy shit can we get a game with an extremely butch dyke companion Please. the fact that karlach is playersexual makes me insane, the ONLY way that woman is taking interest in a man is if she's at the club and has a very funny misunderstanding with a twink. astarion talks about nothing but men, he literally can't shut up about boys (wyll in particular) just...let him be gay??? it would be so raw and real for him to realize he's allowed to just be gay after having no control over his sexuality for 200 years, like, that's something gay men go through in real life Very Often. the realizing you can be gay part, not the 200 years.

at least BG3 has a canon lesbian couple with quite a bit of screen time but otherwise it's like....what, that dwarf chef NPC who talks about his husband for 2 seconds? amazing. that's the thing for me, right, is that if the game world at large has other visible, unavoidable gay relationships with more than 2 seconds of screen time, i'd be much cooler with playersexuality. like, show me that you haven't just slapped bisexuality onto this whole world like a bandaid.

what's funny is Dragon Age has had incredible queer representation already, so this feels like a step backward. dorian is a great fucking queer character. the way his experience with his father isn't an exact 1:1 mirror of real-life homophobia, because it has to fit within the context of the fantasy setting, but it's still an extremely relatable gay story that so many people will be able to see themselves in. AND you can't avoid his queerness! if you don't romance him yourself, he starts a fling with iron bull, which also makes bull's bisexuality unavoidable. THAT is how you do queer representation. it needs to happen onscreen outside of me, the player, pressing the Queer Button.

at the end of the day, whenever a game employs playersexuality, i'm just kind of like.....ugh okay i guess? because okay, cool that i can romance whoever, but...by making everyone "playersexual" you're sending the message to me that you think it would just be more convenient for everyone if all of us were just bisexual. bisexuality is just a solution for you. the bi characters' identities are also cheapened, in my opinion, because the distinction between bisexuality and homosexuality is like....a pretty huge part of being bi, you know? tell me a story about a character figuring that distinction out for themself and then we can talk. but i don't think the people writing this playersexual shit are even interested in telling relatable bi stories; they just don't want straights to be mad they can't fuck a gay character. remember when DA:I came out and people immediately started making straight dorian and sera mods? it's giving that.

weird post today: i want to share the story of the time my roommates and i stopped what seemed to be an attempted kidnapping. seriously!

also, i apologize to all my smallweb buds for being MIA for a long while i've just been overwhelmed by Everything lately, between wedding planning and the state of the world, and haven't had any "being social online" energy. but i am fine!

now, onto this crazy-ass story.

it happened a few years ago, outside our old apartment. it was late, close to midnight, and we had a friend over to watch something-- i think it was Drag Race? and we were having a normal time, just sitting around the TV and chilling. i'll refer to this friend by his initial, G. the other people present were my partner and two other friends, who i'll call E and K.

G got up to use the microwave, which was next to the window. the windows in the frontroom faced the street, so if anything was going on outside you could hear it if you were standing there. if you were on the couch, you couldn't really hear outside noise, especially not over the TV. so, suddenly, while waiting for his food to heat up, G was like, "hey, mute the TV real quick, i think i hear a domestic violence incident happening outside?"

we did as he as asked and listened. he said he had heard at least one female and male voice screaming at each other, but by the time we all started listening, it had stopped. we peeked out the blinds (which looked funny, all of us huddled around the window like the seven dwarves lmao) and saw a girl sitting across the street, on the curb, with her back facing us, and she was alone and hysterically sobbing.

so, obviously this was fucking weird, because there was no reason for some random girl to be crying alone outside in the middle of the night. there were no apartments or houses on that side of the street, so we figured she probably hadn't come outside from her house just to cross the street and cry. whoever the male voice was that G heard had apparently gone away, because we watched her for a few minutes and she was definitely alone out there.

we all looked at each other, like, "uh. should we do something?" and agreed that we should check on her. the neighborhood we lived in at the time was pretty safe and quiet, but it was dark, the particular corner we lived on was a blind spot prone to car accidents, there were train tracks right next to the road, it was cold out, and she was in a "going out" outfit with no jacket.

myself, G, and K all agreed to go check on her while E and my partner stayed behind. we went in a group just in case this was something sketchy (we've all heard the horror stories of young girls being used as bait to abduct or rob people) because the three of us are all fruity transmasculine queers, so none of us are particularly threatening or capable of fending off an attack on our own. this turned out to be a really good call!!

going outside, we crossed the street and asked if she was okay. immediately we could tell she was drunk, but she seemed more than just drunk— she was almost incoherent, like she was on something else, and she could barely stand. she tried to get up from the curb to talk to us but we were like "it's okay, you can sit, do you need any water," etc. etc., and she explained the situation as coherently as she could: she had been in a car with "her friends", and they had kicked her out of the car for no reason and drove away, stranding her there. she didn't know what part of the city she was in or how to get home, and she'd been trying to call someone—i think it was her boyfriend, but she was having a hard time communicating clearly so i'm still not really sure—but they weren't able to help her for whatever reason, they were asleep or out of town or something like that. this person being unhelpful was just upsetting her more, so we got her to just hang up and we could try something else.

we were able to calm her down a bit and asked if she had anybody else she could call, and she wanted to try for her mom, so we told her to try that and we'd wait outside with her until we figured something out.

now, this is where the really weird shit happens. she called her mom, who thankfully answered the phone, and i remember one of us talking to mom as well just to clarify that her daughter was safe. mom said she'd come pick her up, but she lived a little far away so it would be about 20 minutes until she arrived. we assured her that this was totally fine, ended the call, that was that. made sure the girl didn't need food or water or a blanket, she said she was fine, kept thanking us for helping her.

so while we're waiting, some random white boy came walking down the sidewalk, quite literally out of the darkness because there weren't a lot of streetlights on this road. he was sorta young, maybe late 20s, looked clean-- hair was cut, beard was groomed, was dressed in a black t-shirt and sweatpants or something like that, but it was all black. definitely wasn't a homeless person; he looked like some regular college student. so he walked right up to us, with this weirdass smile on his face, and just said, "hey guys, what's going on?" as if he knew us. and we were just like "...we're just helping this girl out, do you know her or something?"

he was smiling through this whole interaction btw. like the entire time. none of us were smiling back so we were all thinking "the fuck is this dude so giddy about??" but it was such a faux friendliness, like...you know how you can just. sense when someone's vibes are off? the vibe was ROTTEN from this man. i've had plenty of interactions with creeps and weirdos before, but this is the only time i can say i have ever seen a genuine "creepy smile" from somebody.

anyway, he turned to the girl, who had gone back to sitting on the curb and kinda zoning out, and he started ASKING HER TO COME WITH HIM. he got all personable, like "haha hey yeah it's time to go, everyone's waiting!" and gesturing for her to get up and follow him. she was like ???? and looked like she was about to listen to him, but K had the foresight to say "hold on, do you know each other? do you know what her name is?"

whiteboy couldn't come up with her name but he kept pressing her to come with him, and then the girl said "you kind of look like i've seen you before but i don't know..." and K was like "okay, yeah, if you two don't know each other for sure you need to leave us alone now, we've got someone coming to pick her up already." the girl seemed to realize at that moment that she definitely didn't know this person, so she started telling him to fuck off, too.

so then, without saying another word, whiteboy turned to leave, started walking back down the sidewalk the same way he came, and then once he got to a distance where he must have assumed we weren't looking he started sprinting and disappeared into the night. just straight up booked it out of there, and it was too dark to see where he ran off to.

so obviously after that we were like what the fuuuuuck was that and decided to call police in case he came back or something. fuck cops but this was all extremely weird and we were suspecting that something very shady was going on. mom and the police showed up at about the same time; mom was a pleasant, suburban minivan type of lady.

first thing we did was ask mom if she or her daughter knew anyone matching the description of the guy, and we explained our bizarre interaction with him, and she barked out a very incredulous "WHAT THE FUCK? NO WE DON'T KNOW ANYONE LIKE THAT" and we were all just like....what the actual hell!!!! mom was also extremely thankful that we had stepped in for this whole situation.

the cops took information from us and then asked the girl what she had been doing that night, and this is the part that really set off all of the alarms: she said she had been at a bar in another neighborhood with her friends, they had "met some guys", then she couldn't remember how she ended up in the car or whose car it was, she didn't know where the friends had gone, and the next thing she could remember was being on the curb talking to us. like she had just completely blacked out from point A to point B.

so...what we think happened is that whoever she met at that bar had drugged her, and kicking her out of the car was the setup for whiteboy to come pick her up and do.....whatever sick shit he was planning to do with her. maybe because she would have been less likely to put up a fight if this guy was coming to "rescue" her? maybe because dropping her for him to pick up makes it harder to track where she went, if you don't want her to be found? maybe "we kicked her out of the car" would have been the driver's cover story if they were to be questioned about her disappearance. who knows!

it was just too fucking weird how he came right up to us and tried to take her, there's no way it wasn't related, in my opinion. we definitely did not live on a street where a friend of hers (who didn't know her name) would have been taking a casual stroll down the road at midnight waiting to pick her up....on foot. i forgot to mention that part; if this guy had arrived by car, it certainly wasn't parked anywhere we could see it. there was plenty of parking space on this street, too, there actually was a parking lot right next to the curb she had been sitting on, so why would he have parked his car far enough away that we couldn't see or hear it and then gotten out to go pick her up on foot? and the way he literally ran away without saying anything just confirms to me that he had sinister intentions. like, if you knew her, you would have argued with us about it. also, the way she said he looked like someone she'd seen before— was he at the bar that night?

also, why the hell did her "friends" drive all the way to this neighborhood to kick her out of the car? and why did they even kick her out!!! this neighborhood was pretty much entirely residential; there were no bars or businesses or anything around that would have given them a reason to be in the area. maybe one of them lived there and they were there to drop someone off, but if that was the case, i feel like the girl would have known that and brought it up to us. and that still doesn't explain why they would have dumped her there. i have so many questions about this night!!!

so, once the cops took everyone's info, the girl's mom thanked us again and left, and that's the end of the story. never heard anything more about it and to this day i wonder what the hell was actually going on that night. i also hope that girl is doing okay. it's crazy to me that if G hadn't needed to use the microwave we would never have known she was out there. i guess the moral of this tale is that if you see someone in distress it's always a good idea to check on them, because shady shit like this happens all the time and you never know whose life you could be saving by stepping in.

ugh i feel bad that i've been away from the internet, aside from mindlessly scrolling tumblr, for like a month. i just haven't had energy for socializing online lately; i haven't really had energy for much at all i did finish a couple art pieces that i'm super proud of, but i'm not ready to share those yet because i intend to use them in the store i want to open in the future.

the lack of energy is physical as well as mental, too— i've been dealing with pretty bad pain in my back, worse than usual. i wonder if my (alleged, undiagnosed) scoliosis is getting worse as i get older or something. i noticed a while back that one of my shoulders is very visibly lower than the other but i have no idea if it's always been like that or if that's a new thing. i don't think my insurance would cover getting it checked out, but i also don't think a doctor would tell me anything other than "have you tried losing weight" lol. anyway there's nothing more to this post, i just needed to complain about how so very very sleepy and tired i am

this is more of a rant than a coherent blog, but lately i've just been thinking a lot about the way i exist in a weird invisible inbetween as a fat feminine trans man...what prompted me to post about this was seeing a cute picrew and thinking about how, despite how queer and trans-centered so many picrews tend to be, i've never been able to join in on the fun when my friends share them around because it's just...not possible to make myself on any picrew i've ever seen, lol. not that being able to make myself on a picrew is something that affects my quality of life, but it's just a microcosm of this thing i've noticed where i seem to be floating alone on my own lonely little raft in the Sea of Queers, isolated by the specific venn diagram formation that is me.

nobody wants to see fat people. nobody thinks about fat trans men because we aren't the cute and palatable waifish men-lite that they want us to be. other trans men don't even think about fat tboys. and fat men, in general, are gross, of course. especially if you're hairy or have male pattern baldness (i do.) i fit an aesthetic considered desirable in gay bear spaces, because i look like the kind of man they want, but when it comes out that i have a pussy and like to wear makeup and women's pants, it gets risky real fast. same thing with cishets: if i conform to the accepted style of dress and behavior for a fat man it's fine, but if i'm my real self it's "you should have stayed a girl". they don't know that i never was a Girl; not in the "trapped in a woman's body" sense, but because i've had a beard and a receding hairline since i was 12 years old and stopped menstruating more than a decade before i started taking hormones.
other trans men might be more accepting of my femininity in theory, if i can describe myself in text, but in person i look too much like a cis man if i don't out myself, and that signifies me as a threat because oooh you look like you have a penis and that's scary. i'm perceived as a crossdressing fat cis man by both cis and trans people, and both groups are put off by that. i've been threatened with violence on public transit by a man who hated to see a "fat faggot". i wasn't sure if i would have preferred my transness to be the the center of his attention.

all of that said, i don't want this post to be a big downer or anything, i just needed to get this rant out. fellow fat tboy fems out there, if there are any of you reading this, i love you

holy crap! what started as a simple urge to change my domain name turned into a big project in which i switched hosts and revamped my whole site! i kept the same content and layout, but spiffed up several things i wasn't previously satisfied with. so it's more like a refurbishment than a total overhaul, i guess i think i was inspired by the big changes that 32-bit is making, with the migration to discourse. not that this is anything close to the scale of that project, but the Spirit of Change took hold of me.

but do you see that smiley up there? that's what i'm most excited about— this blog is running on serendipity, which comes with a smiley plugin i've been trying to find a way to get smilies to work on my blog for like 3 years now so like aaahhh finally lmao. they should work for the comments, too, if there's anybody out there reading this+desiring to comment on it (unlikely lol). if you are out there reading this, though, and want to follow my blog, it does have an RSS feed, i just haven't stuck the little icon dingle up in the header yet. here's the link though!

regarding my new domain, i chose the latin adjective versipellis, which means:

shape-shifting, capable of transforming itself or altering its appearance

this word reflects both my nature as a gender nonconforming trans person as well as the ever-changing nature of the site. plus it sounds cool. also it can be used to refer to werewolves or lycanthropes so like....werk

i've got a couple posts from my old blog to repost here (namely my top surgery one) and then i'll be fully moved in. and then i have to bring my partner's site over to the new host, which is actually going to be way more work than my site was because his does need a lot of overhauling. oh, and i also need to make a new 88x31 for myself...why do i put myself in these situations