@stormsummoner / stormsummoner.tumblr.com
i put an image of carla on teepublic to see if anyone is interested in dumbing of age tshirts without me having to spend more then three seconds or invest money in an actual tshirt run, go check it out
also there are three other shirt designs
so there’s a voiceline for horizon lunar colony that just got added in the PTR where tracer talks about emily
IM CRYING
so I read the comments on my last picture and here you go, they are competing on who can make it flashier, not shown above Solas conjures a giant fade stone hand and Dorian raises the dead to flip him off for him, Viv joins in at some point, it goes on for hours
TACTICAL VISOR ACTIVATED
PASS INTO THE IRIS
I’m going to tell you something I’ve been afraid to say for basically ever. And it’s gonna be messy, and it’s gonna go to some dark places (including eating disorders so pls be advised) because I’m barfing my heart out onto the page and hoping I can do it fast enough that I won’t reconsider, or hold back. I can’t say all this without first pausing to say this is only my story, and it’s a privilege that I am able to share it. I want to gently remind people that I’m only trying to speak for me and my own experiences, and in no way does that change or speak to others’ realities. I’m coming out (holy shit typing that made me anxious), so this is just my story.
My entire life I’ve not been a girl or a woman.
Growing up, I’d have hissyfits over being talked to or referred to as a girl. People have had to remind me that they see me as a girl or a woman my entire life, because it doesn’t exist in my head. All that ever has is “this isn’t me”.
When I was 12, I started smoking cigarettes because I thought they’d make my voice lower, and I was tired of hearing a high alien pitch come out of my face. About a year later, I started starving myself because i wanted to look like anything other than a girl, and because I didn’t identify with being a boy either. The closest thing I could find to what looked “right” was the waif thin androgynous body type, and when combined with my hatred of my own body I developed a full on eating disorder that I never told anyone about. At one point, I hovered around 100lbs, despairing that my hips were still wide, my shoulders and chest still broad, and that I’d be an hourglass no matter how much I starved.
I managed to recover, mostly, but the hatred of my own body remained, strong enough that I still can’t objectively see myself in the mirror with any sort of accuracy. I found out recently I’ve been wearing the wrong size of everything, always overestimating, always going baggier, always trying to hide what I’d been so ashamed of.
I knew I loved women early in life. It wasn’t any major revelation, because to me, gender seemed to be such an arbitrary line to draw between what you were and weren’t attracted to. It was a non-issue, because I legitimately didn’t think in those terms. But there was an easy model for this, a name I knew, I was Bisexual and that was fine. I fell in with the local lgbtqa+ folks and I started learning about other letters. I’m painfully aware of how misguided I was initially when I started listening to trans people, because the concept of switching one gender for another made no sense to me. I didn’t understand how anyone could “feel” like a man or a woman, because I didn’t feel like either and was projecting. Thankfully I stuck to listening and not talking, and after a while the reality sunk in for me - it’s not them, it’s me. Gender wasn’t a thing to me, any more than infrared light is, but that doesn’t make those things any less real, it just means my eyes don’t work on that spectrum.
Unlike Bisexuality, I didn’t have any easy models. I didn’t know anyone who felt the same way, I hadn’t seen anyone like that in popular culture. I had dated trans people and while we could bond over some of the ways that our bodies felt like aliens to us, it felt like they knew how they would change themselves but I didn’t know where to start, and I didn’t want to add more gender-based exhaustion and work onto my partners so I just… never said anything about that part of myself. I never said anything to just about anyone because I felt caught between people who wouldn’t understand and would likely treat me with fear or disgust, or people who knew all too well what it’s like to look down and see someone else, but already had to put up with entirely too much shit and didn’t need me taking up spaces for people who needed them more.
So I just kind of stuffed it down, assuming I was just weird and everything was likely tangled up with my eating disorder and general internalized misogyny in a gordian knot too thick for me to cut. But it leaked out regardless. I did drag shows with friends where I’d dress up as an aging used car salesman with sequined flame boxers. Another friend said she had a welcoming speech ready for whenever I was gonna come out as trans just in case. But still, I didn’t want to be a man. That wasn’t the missing puzzle piece for me.
Doing drag felt like an act of catharsis - to perform gender, to be something else for a while, to do it in such a tongue in cheek way to hide the very real vulnerability I felt going down that route whatsoever. I started to wonder if it would work the other way - if I could feel okay if I approached femininity as a performance too. I started wearing makeup when I was in my mid-twenties after this clicked into place for me. Performing femininity felt like doing a bit just as much as performing masculinity had, but performing femininity was rewarded in my everyday life. Performing masculinity didn’t feel entirely safe, but I would just play it off as being butch that day if ever asked about it. But being able to perform it at all - to play with it - was a huge step towards lessening my dysphoria and self-loathing. Looking at my gender presentation, my fashion, and my body as something to be worked on or decorated, to try to re-write it to say something, took a lot of the sting out of my hatred of it. In customizing it, it felt like something that was “mine” a bit more than the alien meat suit I had been trapped in. It was the power I felt the first time I dyed my hair an unnatural color when I was 13, but with more understanding. Departing from the “natural” body I’d been given and eschewing it for something that I had *created* let me start to see myself a bit more there, even if it was through a tattoo symbolizing something that mattered to me, or an outfit that I would design for a character who was feeling the way I was feeling that day, or makeup that had the color scheme of a poisonous animal whose intimidation I wanted to borrow that afternoon. So much of creativity and expression is rooted in empathy, and this outside-looking-in approach allowed me to empathize with myself.
Then I became a game developer, and while I could never escape being labeled a girl or a woman (or a fag on days I really passed as male) how people saw my gender suddenly mattered more than ever. The moment I became controversial, I felt the door to further exploration of what gender I actually was slam shut on me. Being a woman was hard enough, nonbinary-ness seemed like a whole other layer of abusive shit to stare down, especially when you’re at a point where if someone asked you “what are you”, you wouldn’t have a good answer. It was hard enough to try to get my foot in the door as a minority that people actually understood somewhat, I didn’t want to give people more excuses to look me over and shut me out. I don’t want to make this be about the suffering that not-cis people face in the games industry though, so I’ll move onto the other side of the coin - the support.
All the women and girls who had told me they’d looked up to me or found something inspiring in my stubbornness to continue making games despite gendered bullshit thrown my way, what would I tell them? It seemed so important for other people that I continue to be read as a woman, and I didn’t want to piss on the parade of people who already are being pissed on from nine other directions.
I feel this heavy burden of being a semi-public figure when I’m really not fit for mass consumption. Politicians, actors, other people who are pursuing a dream of living in the public eye probably prepare for this sort of thing, but it just kind of happened to me (In fact, my ex who kicked off GG actually tried to out me but it didn’t really stick, thank god, so that kind of complicated my feelings on coming out ever). It happened to me the way it can happen to seemingly anyone the way that our current information age works. The hypervisibility I had suddenly gained meant that playing and exploring had heavier consequences than ever. Not just for me, but for people who follow my work - taken out of context, someone experimenting with their gender presentation can absolutely look like they’re coming from the same place as every hack writer who wrote a “lol dude in a dress” sketch. I didn’t want to do that to anyone, least of all the people who would feel betrayed by it. Without divulging everything, I would be leaving the edges to be interpreted by the masses, and I wasn’t ready to come out and correct people and didn’t think that if I did, it’d be good enough.
But who you are inevitably slips out. I bought my first binder two years ago, after asking a couple closest trans friends, awkwardly, where someone might buy something like that. I took a huge step and posted a picture of me in boymode for the first time ever. My dad even liked it on instagram, successfully making me break down and cry in public. I worded it ambiguously enough that people who knew me at all would maybe start to see me a bit clearer, and people who didn’t care would see a tomboy.
And again, it grates. In arguments over how an unnamed company was going to present my work, they balked at my criticism of making the color scheme of their materials malibu barbie pink, saying “you’re a woman, you’re a feminist, this is on brand” essentially, as if they knew how to represent me better than I did. A women in games group I organized events with told me that I came off “too masculine” at times (no I never got clarification on that). And yesterday, a well-meaning friend told me someone was going off on twitter about how I was secretly Chuck Tingle and thus Problematic because I was a “cis straight lady” making gay books that had absurdity in them (though the absurdity was always about time travel and handsome living objects existing alongside dinosaurs, not that gay people exist and have sex).
I get some bullshit conspiracy theory made up out of internet nonsense daily, but this one sent me down a rabbit hole of feeling horrible about myself. I fell down a bad rabbit hole where I didn’t feel like I was *enough* - queer enough, open enough about my feelings of having a lack of gender, anything “enough”. It also puts me in kind of a no win position, where I felt like I had to either speak up, be more “out”, and risk that becoming a Whole Big Thing, or quietly feel awful about the whole thing. Normally it’s no contest, and not engaging with someone who is *likely* acting in bad faith is always the best option for me, but this time it really messed me up, probably because it was riding on so many years of baggage.
I hated that a rando had this much of an impact on my day. I think I have the self-awareness now to realize that it’s only because of the repression and living in fear that gives others that kind of power over me. I hate living with this big secret, I hate not knowing who I have in my life now that wouldn’t be around if they knew it. I hate feeling alone, and not knowing how to figure myself out more and find other people like me. And if there’s one thing being aggressively vulnerable on the internet despite people trying to take you down for it at every turn has taught me, it’s that it’s always been worth it to me because I’m never alone, and that there’s usually so many people like me with the same fears. If I now no longer count as a “woman in tech”, maybe that’s ok, because maybe there’s other people who aren’t men or women that need to feel less alone too. Maybe the fact that I’m still treated as a woman in tech is enough, and my actual gender doesn’t detract from that.
So here it is:
I don’t know what I am yet, but I know what I’m not.
I’m not straight. I’m not cis, and I don’t think I can keep pretending to be cis just to get by. I’m not a man. I’m not a woman. I don’t want to be a man. I don’t want to be a woman. I don’t ever want to have the pronouns conversation because I feel equally apathetic to being called “he” or “she” so I guess if you just want to be accurate go for “they” but I won’t be offended by any. I’m not a crossdresser. I do have gender dysphoria. I don’t have an ideal self in mind. I don’t know if I want hormones or surgery, but I don’t think so because I don’t think that they’d help me move forward, since it still seems like you have two options there. I’m not well versed in what comes next, and I’m not immune to fucking up, but I’m not going to shrug off that responsibility and will do everything I can to do this the right way and make up for it when I failed at that. I’m not ever willing to speak for anyone else’s experiences or lives, unless they’ve specifically asked me to.
And despite so many people’s biggest wishes, I’m also not Chuck Tingle. Sorry.
I would, however, like to start working toward capturing a fraction of the magic of David Bowie or Prince or any of the number of the queer genderfucking icons we lost last year. There are some extremely stylish shoes that need filling.
Anyway, I’m not gonna be mad if someone doesn’t know, or if people have a hard time with this. I don’t really know what comes next. I mean, I’m sure the assholes of the internet will do the thing they always do, but that’s no different from any day that ends in y for me - I mean, after people have so recently combed my grandfather’s obituary looking for dirt on me or my family, how do you go down from there? Anyway. I feel some weird mix of fear and relief at the same time, even just writing all this down. All I can hope for is that the people I’m close to will be honest with me, won’t be afraid to ask questions, will respect me if I can’t answer right then, and still see me as “me”. I’m hoping I can talk to other people who feel similarly, especially people who feel similarly and feel as alone as I do. I’m hoping people can show some mercy if they take issue with me talking about this stuff, because I’m new to it and willing to learn but I fully accept I don’t know enough yet. I’m hoping people actually listen and don’t write me off as “crazy” or any of the other meanspirited ignorant stuff people say about anyone who isn’t in line with traditional gender roles corresponding to what they were assigned at birth, but if they do, I hope it’s nobody that important to me. I’m hoping I can summon the courage to post this. I’m hoping that the only response I get from people is just “okay cool”.
All I really want is to not have to pretend anymore, for people to understand, and to see me as me. Not a man, not a woman, just me.
Some gross goofy nerd who looks like an anime regent of dubious gender that can’t stop making terrible dad jokes.
Okay, so there’s this app called “Couple” in the app store. ((I think it may have been called “Pair” as well, but I’ve got the AT&T version.)) Let me tell you about this cute little motherfucking app.
Okay, so you have this icon
Not all that impressive, but still cute nonetheless.
Then you open it up, get yourself and your adorable-as-fuck significant other registered with an email and password. You get “paired” and have this little facebook chat sort of thing that only the two of you are able to see.
Oh, hey, and what’s this little thing?
Yeah. There’s this button you can press to gently tell your S.O. that they’re on your mind without having to say much more. How fucking cute is that?
Alright, so you’ve got a wall you two can share. Now there are other little features too such as a place you can draw on the same screen damn near to real-time.
And then you can take that shitty little drawing you created together and post it up on that wall so neither of you will forget how crappy phone screens are to draw with, but damn if that isn’t cute.
Lastly, you have the thumb kiss. Now this feature is unique because no matter where you are in the world, you can use this app and know that you’re both doing the same stupid thing and giggling like an idiot all the while. With a thumb kiss, you press your finger to the screen and your S.O.’s will show up once they do the same.
Then once they get close and/or touching, the screen changes a little
And after a second of touching, the screen turns red and vibrates to signify your “kiss.”
And if that’s not the cutest shit that a dumb little app on your probably-a-piece-of-crap-phone can offer, then you need to get out of my face and go try this app because it’s totally free and will have you smiling for a week.
Highly recommend. 10/10
Rebloging for all my followers out there with long distance relationships… This could help so much!
Also for anyone in a relationship who just want to feel closer whenever they’re apart.
Aww this is so cute! XD
@offbrand-oreos THUMB KISSSES??? THIS IS SO CUTE WE SHOULD GET THIS!!!!
@xenon-exe !!!!!!!
@dainty-littlelesbian u and ya girl might like this
for anyone who needs it.
@jhaernyl something we need.
@peachgukkie !!!!!
Today I heard the last shitty joke in passing I can handle about my mental illness without speaking up. Not about the people making the joke, or even the joke itself, but about the illness - it’s extremely poorly understood, partially due to media presentation of it, and partly thanks to the internet hijacking the terminology of one of the symptoms and extrapolating it so far from it’s original, highly specific meaning that most people have no idea what they’re referencing.
I don’t blame anyone who doesn’t know the first thing about PTSD, because I didn’t know what PTSD was until I was diagnosed with it. Not really, anyway. I had the same pop culture version of the illness most people have - it was something soldiers had, and flashbacks were hallucinatory caricatures about as accurate as most portrayals of what taking LSD is like in pop culture - with the character and the writer equally divorced from reality.
When my doctor handed me the preliminary screening inventory sheet to fill out while I was mid-sentence during our first meeting, it seemed so obvious. So many things that I’d chocked up to having depression and going through a… significant amount of stress, but that weren’t getting better and seemed to just kind of linger unwanted in my head, ready to flare up and shit all over whatever I was doing made sense. He explained to me what flashbacks actually are, that it wasn’t simply a hallucination and more a spiral down a memory well of horrible shit you’ve gone through, of feeling like you’re mentally and emotionally “unplugging” in response to something bringing all that up, and the feeling that everything is just as fragile and fight-or-flight as it was when you were actually in danger. He explained that the most common sufferers of PTSD aren’t soldiers, but survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, and were more often women than men. He even explained the changes to my body that had occurred, that the acrid, metallic taste that would pop up in the back of my throat was *adrenaline* - that I was physically tasting the flood of “oh shit” that my brain was producing because parts of my body had a hair trigger for locking into survival mode.
I scored a 73 out of 100 on the inventory, and later my doctor would categorize my ptsd as “severe”, but told me with trauma-specific treatment I could hope to see that number lower into the teens. It’s been over a year since then and it’s taken *so much work*, but he was right. I’m a lot better than I was several years ago, especially before I knew what the hell was going on with me.
I’m a comedian and can find so much to joke about in my mental illness. When my doctor added a C for “complex” onto the PTSD I felt that combined with my ADHD, I had started collecting an alphabet. My doctor laughed when he prescribed me the medication that would take my extremely vivid, constant nightmares away and told me that it would also take my regular dreams with it, and I responded with “I’m sorry doctor I’m an artist you can’t just phrase things that way without spawning a million insufferable conceptual pieces”. Anything can be joked about - being a dick about it is more related to how you do it.
I make jokes because comedy can take the sting out of having a nasty knot of pain lodged inside my skull that my ex planted there when I took away his ability to hurt me himself. If I didn’t have the jokes, all I’d have is the anger and violation I feel at being someone who can go from joking with friends in a UPS store to a crying mess because someone grabbed my arm and spoke to me in the same place, the same way, as that ex the last time I saw him, before I had a friend stay with me for a while because I was so afraid he’d come back. I hate that I’m like this, and that even with all the work I put in and the therapy I do, there are still these little, extremely specific things that cause that familiar ember in my brain to ignite and immediately need to be dealt with. It’s a nightmare to feel like there’s any part of you that seems so frail where it was once strong, to be someone who has to be tough enough to put up with an enormous amount of shit but still have these things out there that can immediately pierce any armor you have, like the shittiest version of magic words. The sheer irrationality and the sense of lost control is such a deep and frustrating violation, it’s hard to write about without seeming too melodramatic.
There aren’t many things that will send me down that rabbit hole anymore, or make me taste adrenaline and feel the same fear that everything I have is about to be destroyed again. But they exist. They’re extremely specific, innocuous to everyone else but poison to my peace of mind. I’ve calloused over a lot of the minor ones, but there are two or three big ones that feel like a crack across my skull and immediately knock me on my ass seemingly no matter what I do.
You’d think the specificity of these things would make them easy to avoid or to tell people in my life about, but it’s kind of the opposite. I largely don’t bother, because the language around it has been so completely and utterly demolished and politicized in a way that makes it nearly impossible for me to use in a productive way without having to take on the additional, exhausting work of explaining my illness to people.
I’m talking about “triggers”. It used to be that only anime nazi assholes used it as a joke, but then “trigger warnings” became a cultural battlefield over imaginary “political correctness” and a ton of other shit I don’t remotely want to get into. I don’t want to talk about other peoples’ experiences when it comes to triggers, and I know triggers aren’t limited to PTSD - but speaking for myself, as the Discourse evolved, I felt completely left behind. My mental illness doesn’t have any political affiliation, it just exists. Now I see obnoxious “trigger” jokes just about everywhere, even people who are just parroting a “meme” 20 steps removed from the anime nazi assholes who send me the corresponding Junkrat UI image along with their misguided efforts to actually trigger me. It’s to the point where even nice people say shitty things without realizing it.
And that fucking sucks, man. Having a very real aspect of your mental health made into a meme and a joke that has seemingly worked its way into nerd culture at large helps make it feel impossible to actually talk about my mental health, especially when it’s an illness that pop culture constantly misrepresents. The last thing anyone needs when they’re trying to speak up and identify something to someone as being bad for them is to be made fun of. It’s like showing someone a knife in your back and asking them to pull it out for you, only to have them kick it a little to see if it’s real or not first.
Hearing “triggered” jokes is grating and tiresome, especially since bringing up what being triggered actually feels like makes you a huge no-fun killjoy (not to mention the inevitable backlash of people with underdeveloped empathy glands actively trying to trigger me after saying this), but here we are all the same. If it sounds annoying, trust me, I am *way* more annoyed that I have a mental illness than you are. I’m tired. I want to be able to explain to people what is going on with me without the baggage of other people misusing a word for cheap jokes with hidden costs, simply so I don’t have to do all the heavy lifting of educating people just so I can get them to understand that a specific thing messes with me. I’m not about to tell anyone what to say, and I largely feel that plenty of otherwise well-meaning people legitimately just don’t know any better (I know the people who want to continue being little shits will continue to be little shits, water is wet, don’t @ me about it). I want you, dear reader, to know all this so you know what you’re actually making fun of.
I want you to know all this so you know why I’m not laughing with you - it’s because you’re laughing at me.
(in b4 bland peepants hacks respond with lazy “triggered” jokes)
Glad to see my lifelong disinterest in golf is paying off
let me tell you about golf
i grew up in a little desert valley called Tucson, Arizona, where it only rains 2 inches a year on average. the majority of the city’s water is pumped from an underground aquifer, which took millions of years to fill. one of the biggest conservation efforts in our city was for water, naturally, and i spent a lot of time learning about low flow toilets and 5 minute showers. i learned that filling your sink basin and washing your dishes in that water is less costly than running the tap. i learned that it only takes 2 days without water on the desert for someone to die
the city was sinking as the aquifer drained. neighborhoods fell into flood zones that didnt exist 10 years ago
there’s a road called Golf Links in the city and it is lined with golf courses. miles of green grass where grass doesn’t grow, in a valley where it doesn’t rain. why? because the rich white retirees who moved there to stop the aching in their joints decided they should also get to play golf. meanwhile our public schools taught small children like me that taking long showers would kill the world
let the golf industry burn
There are 15,500+ golf courses in the United States alone.
Each one consumes ~312,000 gallons of water per day.
That consumption is equivalent to 55+ million humans per day in the United States… roughly 1/6 the entire population.
We simply cannot sustain this frivolity, especially for something 99% of us will never use.
Destroy golf courses and plant wild grasses and butterfly bushes in their place.
I knew I hated golf for a reason.
Golf courses, I’ve always thought, are an extreme expression of nihilism. Huge open empty spaces, with holes in them.
1) they expensive bruh 2) none of us kno the dif btwn a fucking diamond and some fancy ass glass ur capitalist rock hierarchy has no control over us
3) mostly mined with slave labor
4) we get excited when our date buys us an appetizer, we don’t even comprehend people buying us rocks that would force us into debt for ten years
5) They aren’t actually that rare and the price is artificially inflated.
Pro tip from a former Jared’s salesperson: You want a sparkly white rock that will look like a diamond to the untrained eye and will literally cost the price of a nice dinner for two? Created white sapphire. They’re lab grown and cost *pennies* to make, so you can get a 1 or 2 carat white sapphire for like… $30-80 probably. You can get one as huge as you like, perfectly clear, perfectly flawless. And no one will ever be able to tell the difference except a professional appraiser. Also, sapphires are the second-hardest gemstone (right after diamonds) so they are very durable! Very unlikely that they’ll chip or crack. Get that bitch set in sterling silver and you are GOOD TO GO. Whole thing should cost you less than $200 unless you get a fancy band with a lot of extra stones. Of course, created sapphires come in every color of the rainbow, so if you want something more exciting than plain white, you TOTALLY CAN.
Created sapphires and silver: The poor Millennial’s engagement ring.
THANK YOU EX-JARED’S BASED GOD.
engagement rings: HACKED
D.Va rig
junkrat rig
So I found a site that does a subscription box for your period- it sends you basics like hygiene products, pain medication as well as snacks and pampering stuff to make you feel good,
but the best thing is they have a specialty boxes, like vegan or kosher only snacks but also
they specifically offer boxes for menstruating guys and nb folks.
which is pretty darn cool.
it’s called bonjourjolie and I think it’s 1000% awesome tbh
i think this is the best thing omf
@mygenderadventures, don’t know if this is content you’d put on your blog, but I think this is fantastic.
I don’t tend to post non-art stuff but thanks for the shout-out anyway!!! I’m sure this will be of interest to a few people here :)
All of their specialty boxes.
Their website says it’s $16 a month plus shipping which varies.
Overall it looks pretty great! If I still used tampons I would love to use this tbh it looks so nice and convenient and also a really cute gift
They have liners, pads, and menstrual cups as well as tampons.
Also you can order just one box if you want to try it out.
Happy discount shopping weekend, friends!
From now until 12:01 AM on Monday, all Shapeshifters binders at the new store are 10% off with the discount code BF16BIAD.
Furthermore, thanks to Spoonflower’s own sale, all Spoonflower print binder orders are an additional 10% off for the weekend! If there’s a fancy print you’ve been meaning to get, now is the time.
Wishing you a safe and healthy weekend, a recovery and a rest.
The world is worth fighting for.
If anyone is currently confused on what’s happening, JILL STEIN (in a shocking turn of events, I know) has put together a campaign to raise enough money to call for a recount in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Very recently, a number of analysts have reached out to the Clinton campaign to urge them to request a recount. Why?
THE STEIN CAMPAIGN NEEDS TO RAISE $2 MILLION BY FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 25TH AT 5 PM EST. THIS IS VERY TIME SENSITIVE. She’s already raised quite a bit in just a few hours, but that doesn’t guarantee that she will get enough. Here’s a direct statement from the website:
I LOVE HIM!!!
Petition to give zenyatta a passive ability of if he’s on critical health he can get on his legs and sprint away
