selFTMade man

*home depot theme* christian, leftist, transgender man loving healthy masculinity

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Begging and pleading and pissing and shitting and crying for there to be toxic yuri of no exit the satre play. The only thing I could find is some normal ass manga about a love story.

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I really appreciate the themes of looking in no exit. The symbolism of the forced gazing on yourself (which given that Sartre was writing this while being part of the anti fascist resistance in france during nazi occupation was probably wish fulfillment) and reckoning with who you actually are. Like it starts off with the valet, who brings the three to their room, specifically being mentioned as not blinking and talks about how there is no darkness or sleep or even blinking after a time as the valet's eyelids literally atrophied away. Like hell truly is a literally unblinking look at yourself, although its interesting that this unblinking look is through other people. There are no mirrors, you can't see yourself, but you have nothing but time and all you can do is think about your past and see yourself through the eyes of others (being both the people in the room looking at you and the effects you have on the still living).

Also cool note that the bbc's production removed Inez's sunglasses when she entered the room as her torture was the slow realization that just deciding you are innately a bad evil dark and scawy person is not absolution for your actions. She sees herself as innately evil and wears that like a mask because she believes she knows the truth about people being dark and evil and ugly. While she seems to pretend to like being sadistic, I at least read her actions not as sadistic but rather as a defense mechanism. She was mostly cruel to others when she felt pain either through Estelle's rejection or jealousy of garcon. If she just enjoyed her cruelty, she would be cruel always, but rather she is mostly cruel when she is hurt in a very "reject them before they can reject me" way. I think the sunglasses metaphor is so powerful because her entrance to hell literally strips her of her pessimistic dark and evil veil. She saw the world as innately dark through these lenses and wears them to obscure her soul, but by taking these glasses off she must confront the true nature of the things around her and allow people to see her as she is (eyes are the windows to the soul and all that jazz). Her torment fundamentally is realizing that she is not an innately evil person predestined for damnation, but rather a person who is bad because she consistently chose to cause pain. Her torment is that her torment wasn't inevitable.

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Chronicle love post: a part of Chronicle that I found personally devastating (other than the destruction of my beautiful city Seattle) is the scene where the three kids are fucking around.

For those who haven't seen it (please do its live action akira but with angsty teens and weirdly good sfx for a low budget movie) the kids have telekinesis for reasons that don't matter and because they are highschool guys they just use it to fuck around. This part i found really engaging because hey I was a teenager just fucking.

It starts with them moving a cart so a waitress drops her plates, then moves a shopping cart away from a woman and throws random shit in it, and reparks someone's car in a different spot. All annoying but relatively harmless pranks people are doing because they are stupid teens. The part that really fucks with me is where andrew, the socially maladjusted weirdo escalates these pranks and pushes a car that was bothering them off the cliff and gets yelled at because I weirdly relate to this.

Obv I would never do that shit but like I have absolutely been in situations where I see how our behavior is escalating and inadvertently take it too far because I dont read social cues well and i felt the fear and the embarrassment and anger andrew had. Like yeah we were all doing dangerous and stupid shit (matt tries to take someones gum out of their mouth but kinda hits them in the face) and I was comfortable with y'all, what makes what I did so different from what you were doing? Now obviously its the scale like what andrew did ended someone in the hospital while matt and steve just freaked people out and mildly inconvenienced them, but wow I could feel the panic and embarrassment and anger andrew was feeling. Like I have totally had the reaction of "woah I am just doing what yall are doing this is unfair" before.

Hope this isnt just a self report I would never engage in a telekinetic battle around the space needle please don't call Katie Wilson on me

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Pissing my girlfriend off by calling Tumblr posts "tumbles" which is probably not new but is very funny to me

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Hope post of the day:

My girlfriend is a computer scientist which is currently really shit for anyone who doesnt care about AI. Her coworkers are kind of dumb (mostly because the company clearly is trying to get the cheapest possible workers and her boss just wants people who are brown nosers since she has made him sick of her questioning his terrible decisions) and of course because they are dumb both need their hand held whenever they do any work.

Recently we found out that her coworkers have been using copilot to write comments for them on her code change comments and she was lamenting how the company doesnt value integrity or intelligence, but rather just pure output.

What makes me hopeful about all this is that despite her coworkers using what I consider cheats and despite them being cheaper, they are nowhere near as efficient. Her 3 coworkers combined have less output than her even using AI to do their job for them and I think that's really powerful

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This might be a "white boy discovers empathy" moment but I think its really easy to go through watching media and getting desensitized to the conditions these characters are in, which takes away from the story. I've been intentionally trying to get myself in the headspace of the characters and man it really changes the media.

Anyways I have been drafting and redrafting a 10000 word essay on why doctor who is a christ-like figure

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Hot take about I have no mouth and I must scream: the ending is not really that depressing. This whole story builds up Ted (our narrator if you havent read it) as this paranoid delusional hateful person. AM messes with his head to make him believe he is the one person who has his mind intact and everyone else is conspiring against him. He is tormented by the torture AM has put him through and truly believes everyone hates him. He especially hates ellen because he feels rejected by her and also desires her and spends a good amount of time talking about how he hates how she prefers Benny. Yet at the end, when given the choice to finally put himself out of his misery, he makes a choice that is beyond just self sacrifice. At the end, AM is distracted by benny and gorrister fighting and Ted and ellen kill the other 3 survivors. In the last second that Ted has, he has the choice between killing himself, ending his own eternal suffering, or killing Ellen. And despite all the pain he has suffered through for the last 109 years, his distrust of his companions because of AM's meddling with his mind, and his acute and misogynistic hatred of Ellen, he choses to condemn himself to an eternity of torment exclusively focused on himself and spare Ellen.

I think this ending features a positive view on humanity, even if it is in the most grim circumstances. Most heroic sacrifices in media often feature characters who end up getting a reward, even posthumously. Their sacrifice will result in being honored as a hero by those they save and often there are beliefs about an afterlife where they will get a more cosmic reward for their bravery. IHANMAIMS flips this on its head. After Ted kills ellen, there will be absolutely no reward. He won't be able to die thus cannot go to heaven for his sacrifice and in fact is experiencing probably a fate worse than hell as he is not only physically tortured but his mind is being altered. He is the last human alive and the last sentient being other than AM that he knows of so he won't live on as a hero in the memories of others. Yet in the seconds Ted has to make a decision to save himself or Ellen, a woman that he hates, despite all the meddling AM had done to his brain, Ted's instinct is to save another. This ending is so optimistic not because of the indomitable human spirit, but because of how fundamental our instinct for kindness is. It is so fundamental that no amount of torture or brain surgery or hatred of others can stop us from resorting to kindness on instinct, and that is beautiful

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Just watched the green mile and its such an excellent and well done movie. Tom hanks really sells that he has a UTI cause holy shit I have been where he has been and it sucks MAJOR shit and he does basically exactly what I have done when I had to go so stuff with one. Anyways please pee after sex y'all

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I love interacting with my coworkers because I am probably the first autistic trans person they have interacted with and truly every single thing I say is really fucking funny to them. Like as a white guy *tm* i do need constant validation and to be told I am funny so its feeding me

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A true beautiful christmas story from my beautiful transgender girlfriend.

She has been very hesitant to go visit her family for the holidays because her parents haven't been particularly supportive of trans people and the Christmas visit usually is 2 stops: one in Georgia and one in Missouri. She has been pretty nervous to travel and sad she has to dress more androgenous so this has been a dreaded holiday.

This morning I got a text from her that apparently her cousins in Missouri called her (she's still in Georgia) and told her that her grandparents knew. When questioned how they knew her grandmother responded "I have eyes"

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A true beautiful christmas story from my beautiful transgender girlfriend.

She has been very hesitant to go visit her family for the holidays because her parents haven't been particularly supportive of trans people and the Christmas visit usually is 2 stops: one in Georgia and one in Missouri. She has been pretty nervous to travel and sad she has to dress more androgenous so this has been a dreaded holiday.

This morning I got a text from her that apparently her cousins in Missouri called her (she's still in Georgia) and told her that her grandparents knew. When questioned how they knew her grandmother responded "I have eyes"

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Its crazy to me that anyone actually dislikes Carol in PLUR1BUS. Like maybe this says a lot about me but every step of the way I am shocked and appalled at the hivemind and the survivors that are okay with it. I feel like the term "gaslighting" is used too often but PLUR1BUS actually provides a great example of what gaslighting really is, which is isolating someone and making them think that reasonable reactions to the world around them are crazy and absurd and have them doubt their own perceptions.

Also I need to rant on this blog about the scientific accuracy of this show because *as a microbiologist* there was so much attention to detail in this show to the scientific process that would occur if this situation were to happen that I get so excited even thinking about it

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amazing digital circus theories:

jax absolutely killed a kid with his car and I think is generally being used by Caine. I think his mind is severely messed with by him to the point that he got those flashbacks, panicked, and hit the button. i think he killed a kid with his car after coming home from a shitty food service job and got disowned by his family/friends. I think he was homeless and maybe squatting in the C&A building, and that's how he found the headset. Also I think all the polaroids Caine has of the macroverse are from Jax's memory because Jax likes to take polaroids/use polaroids as memories.

Also Caine absolutely fucking hates Kinger jesus christ. I am not sure if Kinger was a dev but he definitely did computer stuff and used that to do better at the circus, hence why Caine nerfed him. I think he nearly got all his friends out of the circus but was stopped for some reason and lost everyone and Caine (in AM fashion) kept him alive but made him pretty crazy but only when in the presence of light so it's technically a temporary status that doesn't fundamentally change his mind and cause him to abstract. But its so obvious that Caine is doing his best to keep the guy who knows what is going on from being able to talk to everyone by keeping everyone busy with bright lights and crazy adventures and all sorts of distractions and then when this adventure was devised he made sure to keep Kinger from hanging around everyone. also notice how when Kinger was in the dark in the horror adventure caine went out of his way to torment him? Like he saw Kinger was going to be lucid for a long period of time and went "well lets torture him with a story that will remind him of how he's the reason his wife is dead"

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matthew lillard as cerial killer in hackers (1995) is my actual girlfriend

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reposting one of matthew lillards most iconic characters. also absolutely love the movie hackers its gender fuckery at its finest. I have also personally headcannoned this character as gender queer because its fun

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idk who needs to hear this but just because you are a member of a minority group doesn't mean you can't be bigoted against that group. in the same vein, yes personal experience is important in informing how we understand oppression, but also like you need data to back it up as well. there is always gonna be token members who will have opinions that shit on other members of the group to prop themselves up and we have to be able to inform whose experiences we listen to with the evidence behind those experiences

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rbing myself to say that this applies to me as well. we all have biases against ourselves. I won't lie and say I don't cringe at other autistic people who don't mask well or trans dudes who don't pass. While being part of a group makes you face the pain that causes and understand it, it doesn't mean you don't perpetuate it as well.

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shout out to terfs like my MIL who think that just existing as a woman and succeeding in life is feminist activism and trans men are undoing it by being themselves. It pisses me off so much because like

1) Im a feminist I love and support women and women's rights despite also being a transgender man who is very much not a woman

2) just being a woman and succeeding in life is not activism, especially when you are using your success to shit on other women. my mil is terrified her son (genuinely nice guy) is going to get metoo-ed because bitches be lying. like get out of here with that "im a feminist" crap

3) stolen valor ong. I am the proud descendent of a lot of badass women.

my mom turned her repeated rejection by ghe patriarchy to push for equality for women. she dedicated the latter half of her life pushing for better workplace standards and ending workplace harrassment. she pushed for good comprehensive sex ed for our state. she served on the board of our local planned parenthood for a decade

my grandmo was an abuse survivor and definitely a closeted lesbian. she and her "bff" i called Grandpa until I was 5 divorced their husbands and eventually moved in together. she put herself back through school raising 4 kids, fighting my much richer abusive grandad in court so my intellectually disabled uncle wasn't getting sent to an institution, and eventually became head of the local hospital and was the reason nurses could wear pants and routinely threatened doctors with her very real gun when they got too handsy.

anyways it makes me mad when these "radical feminists" claim to be feminists when all they do is bitch and whine and complain about trans people rather than actually important issues women deal with.

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I'm not saying Hereditary was intentionally made as an allegory for the trans experience (it definitely wasnt) but the parts I find the scariest are the ones where you can feel the powerlessness, fear, and pain of being blamed by a parent for the nonexistence of their other child and the terror at seeing this drive said parent crazy, thinking up conspiracy theories about demons and acting against your best interest to resurrect your dead sibling.

Like even from a narrative perspective, Peter was basically not a character for the first half of the film, mostly existing in the background at home and being kind of a stereotype of a teen boy at school, while we actually see interactions between charlie, steve, and annie. the two siblings (i would argue the two identities, one of the awkward daughter seen at home and the happier and more socially adjusted boy at school) then are forced to interact together at a social gathering until, orchestrated by some demonic cult, the teen boy kills the little girl, which at least reads to me like a conservative transphobic parent's idea of their child coming out. Like both of them are literally possessed by a demon who is at least coded in mythology as a transgender man (demon with a feminine face but who is a man and feels discomfort when inhabiting the bodies of women). then, rather than support the surviving child, this mother rejects her son who suddenly is involved in the narrative and becomes a full 3D person in the story in favor of blaming him for the death of her daughter and then goes to extreme lengths to resurrect her daughter, despite it being painful and dangerous for her still alive son. at least to me this reads as the common idea that transphobes have of their children who are transgender having "killed" their child. anyways I thought it was cool. Ari Aster you sick little freak

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Rewatched the movie recently and holy shit how could I forget the conversation between Annie and Charlie right after the funeral where Annie just out of nowhere starts trying to relate to charlie and says "you know when I was your age I was a tomboy. I hated girly things and pink"

Like if you arent a trans man maybe you dont know this but this is the exact type of argument you will have from older female relatives who are trying to debate you out of your gender because they think you identify as a guy because you like blue or man things rather than it being a way of interacting with the world