/all/ — Overboard

wanting long hair/earrings/feminine clothing as a young child, only having close friends who were female through start of puberty, wishing i was a girl since early childhood. sobbing when i grew facial hair/compulsively shaving multiple times a day till i gave up, when i was 14 i started feeling like i had no physical existence/like i'd rather not exist physically only a disembodied head, as i got older i just started telling myself i didn't feel my gender identity was important and that i just wouldn't let myself be limited by it. started wearing womens sweaters in high school in ways that i felt i could get away with, but i was extremely withdrawn and disconnected from myself at that point. classmates clearly did not know what to make of me, everyone thought i was a gay boy and that was it. started butchering my hair myself, haircuts were too upsetting. in my 20s i started wearing "unisex" clothing from womens sections at the store exclusively. hermit most of 20s, socially withdrawn due to trauma and difficulty making friends. eventually got married somehow, now-ex wife took me for first haircut in a decade and i had a panic attack and started sobbing but didnt know why and couldn't explain it>figured shit out. every day is so much easier now, anxiety fell by like 60% (i use to be a lot worse lol). i am very outwardly emotional often to a fault, but it's really important to me to try to be true to myself, and i'm in a very supportive place now which also helps

the first time i had thoughts... it must have been puberty? i don't think gender ever occurred to me until my body started changing in a way that felt wrong. i just repressed that feeling for a long time. hit the gym, tried to solve my body issues that way. did not help. 2/10

it wasn't until i dated a trans girl that i learned that was something you could be. i saw what it did to her, and i realized that i had to try. because i guess deep down i maybe hoped it could be the solution to my pain?

transitioning was immensely difficult for me. it made life harder, objectively speaking. not everyone will take you seriously, jobs are harder to get and hold on to and some will look at you weird. and it's a lot of work too. it takes a long time. it's not always rewarding. but you know, i don't regret it at all. i can at least live with myself this way.

i often don't find i fit in the typical narrative of unhappy false self to realized and fulfilled. i'm very tall, i have broad shoulders. just on that profile alone people will put you in a box. thats not all that matters, but if you hope to pass to strangers, then its tough.

i dont hope to live to appease strangers. the people that love me do so because i'm me. the community of similar people helped me live in a way that felt less untrue to myself. but never fully true.

so on some level, i think i doubled down on being an other. i couldn't reach my initial goal of just being seen as a girl, so i settled for somewhere in between. i guess that does make me non-binary in some way. but that's not usually what i communicate to others. its okay. i can accept being this way. i managed to massively reduce the pain i feel each day when i look in the mirror. 7/10

it could be worse.

if there's one piece of advice i could give you, it's to not wait. experiment with it now. most of the changes come gradually, are reversible and happen so incrementally you can feel it out. everything won't change overnight. it's a journey.

when I was in elementary school I hung out with girls and thought I was like them, but as time went on I and they realized I was different, and this was crushing to me. And so lonely, I had nothing in common with boys, and the girls wouldn't talk to me like an equal. I googled how to turn into a girl when I was in probably 5th grade ish, and saw a bunch of scary stuff about surgery and decided that I must not be trans cuz I was not serious enough to get surgery. In middle school I got to have girl friends again by being kind of faggy so they would trust me, and I just pushed everything down because I knew if anyone found out (lived in extremely homophobic place) it was over for me. Finally moved away and found out about informed consent hrt and it was enough to get me to do something. Yea I wish it was sooner but I'm happy now

Returned and collected some samples for further investigation. Looking at them now its pretty clear theyre a Pleurotus sp. The stipes a dead giveaway. Gonna pan fry em with garlic and butter.

Amanita muscaria var. flavivolvata
Saw this massive guy on my hike today. There were a couple more but they were deeper in the brush and innaccesable for photos. I love seeing these guys. They're massive and have a striking appearance.

This was one of the more interesting finds on my hike today Appearance wise it resembles Lactarius fallax but it did not produce any latex when cut. It's really pretty though and I find the contrast of its black cap and white gills is beautiful.

Coprinus comatus. These ones were right next to a busy road so it's not safe to eat. I might return in a day or two and collect them to make ink or dye as an experiment.

>>3mzzfst67wk2u
I stumbled upon similar mushrooms a month or so back. I came back to the same spot two days later and they were gone.

>>3mzlcx6vtsa2r
Awesome. I find that when a subject's face is just out of frame or obscured in some way, a piece becomes a lot more interesting (^_ლ).

messing around with palettes since i don't know how to color. drew a guy i like a lot

>>3mzlcugqpim2f
>>3mzlcx6vtsa2r
the way the subject is presented here is really bold and i agree that having a face obscured can enhance a piece. depending on the work it heightens coolness, action, emotions or (and in this case), eroticism

non-linear comic

macy

I've hopped between various distros and landed on Ubuntu 24.04.5.
For the few other distros I tried, there would always be some deal-breaker issue like shoddy tablet support or micro-stuttering. I'm still a Linux newbie, so attempting to resolve these issues always ended up being more hassle than it was worth.

Other than very minor issues and the occasional application crash, I'm pretty content with Ubuntu 24.04.5. I was going stir-crazy using Windows 10, so it's definitely a step up.

switched to linux almost a year ago. hopped around for a bit but for now i've settled with endeavouros. it's easy when you got a friend to help!

there's a learning curve but i'll take it over the invasiveness of windows. you're never going to see monetary services or news be plugged onto a linux desktop environment

>>3mv2sqx2k4k2z
i havent found a replacement for feeddemon that i like more but that's unfortunate because it was abandoned like 10+ years ago and has this annoying bug where occasionally the only way to clear out a feed is to resubscribe to it

I'm using freshrss it seems pretty good. provides its own web frontend but you can hook it to any app

liferea

ive been using "feedbro" and its been good enough, nice little browser extension for firefox that has a badge icon when there's a new item optionally

i use newsboat because i'm a unix autist. it's easy to work though, just put the URLs of feeds into a config file and it will show them when you run newsboat in the terminal

holy shit

>>3msaiagwk3e2k
excellent use of dithering effects and madoka <3

don't remember why i threw this together but the file name cracks me up

i eat worms most days

attempt to recreate a scene from a dream we had last night. the thing on the left is supposed to be the POV character's mom. I guess the dialogue here is trying to push the mom to give up her humanity to embody her self as the goddess of flesh

sup atchan, i come bearing more collage. i've been making them nonstop lately but this one is a recent favorite [kao]0u0/kao]
>>3munl7tvx5m2t
this rules btw

last night i dreamt that disney hired me to make a licensed watamote game for the wii. it followed tomoko as a junior in american high school after she'd already made a few friends. the gameplay mostly consisted of "run around and complete quests and minigames in a 3d environment", except everything was summer themed and you played as tomoko kuroki. she would draw the disney channel logo during every loading screen. i recall wanting to take the story in a darker direction after tomoko realizes something about yu when they go on a Suite Life on Deck cruise, but the higher-ups weren't very enthusiastic about it.

last night I dreamt I was with my friend Rainer, my main person for enjoying literature alongside. We were at a dinner hosted in the recently discovered private library of some recluse who'd just died. We shared a table with some Chinese undergrads. They were very sharp and funny and we were planning to continue hanging out with them after the dinner. Then another friend came through and passed us an herb called Clearing Clearingbreath. It didn't taste like anything except it gave the sensation of inhaling cool air.

i had a dream last night that i ended up in a giant, Danganronpa-style academy or mansion with a bunch of other trans people (some of whom i know IRL and/or follow on Bluesky).

i was a professional bowler for some reason and, after playing a really good game at the school's bowling alley, a hot girl walked up and started making out with me, spitting a peeled grape into my mouth that i thought was an eye. then she giggled and said her heart wasn't for me.

then i was at a grocery store, adjacent to or inside the school. my mom and stepdad were there, and we started checking out all the weird products on sale. there were tamales wrapped in plastic, a tiki torch with a strange corn monster on the top, and one of those toy pool guns filled with fake blood. my stepdad picked it up and accidentally shot a huge stream of fake blood across the aisles.

then there was an AVGN impersonator called The Nerd, who emerged from a bathroom and walked up to John Cena (who was also at this store for some reason) and pulled some kind of prank on him. my stepdad asked him why he put up with such pranks, and Cena just shrugged and said "to see the nightless".

I woke up at 4:00 AM to a dream where I was happily browsing a supermarket in Qingdao, China. They had a strange cultivar of fig, and some pomegranates. I was shopping around for novelties to bring home to my treasured people, too.

I struggled to find check-out and I wound up briefly leaving the store looking for it, which caused an alarm to go off. A very displeased security team showed up, and they addressed me as A-1 — I asked if it was a reference to the steak sauce, and they shook their head and said, "American — One brain-cell."

I had a nightmare today, after coming home and attempting to sleep off a headache.

They had taken me naked out into the winter cold and hooked a moderate-intensity electric current to me. All of my muscles contracted so I could not move them meaningfully, and I remember feeling my eyes dry, but being unable to sleep because the electricity filled me with this internal 'crawling' sensation.

They told me they were going to let me die of exposure to the cold, but that they wanted me to be both conscious of the experience, and powerless to stop it.

>>3mv6tyhqgrd2k
i've definitely struggled with this myself, and i often feel like my works are neutered usually to the point of non-existence by some internalized shame that doesn't even surface in my conscious mind. for a while i maintained an identity of 'not being a creative person', ie STEMming the hell out as my only form of personal expression, but recently i've been trying to pick up artistry again. i don't have any answers as im still a novice and still struggle with finding a unique voice, but i think routinely creating art and engaging with your creativity is rly the only way to expand and further it, as emr also said. i think even copying or attempting to copy the art of people you look up to can be useful to this end--in any case i would say it would be a mistake to worry about being derivative, as that is the case for all art ever made

wanting your art to be good is what made me stop making art for years, and sharing it for even longer. most of my irl friends are professional artists who are all really amazing compared to me and went to college for it and shit and i help them table at cons and shit to sell now and they're all just ... so burnt out in comparison ......... they don't seem like they enjoy it at all...... it just sells well...having fun Making anything regardless of quality, just enjoying the process of creating, and talking to other people who enjoy the Process of creating (regardless of quality) is the thing that changed me back to wanting to make art again. a very 'good' art piece that doesn't convey anything might get notes online but leaves me feeling unfulfilled, pointless, unhappy. art as a tool of social expression makes me feel like the quality of the work doesn't matter at all. is there an easy way for you to work together with your artist friends (who already like your stuff) to draw for fun without the end result being the point, so that the creativity becomes a byproduct? challenges you can make up and play with each other creating? we make and decorate really godawful ugly cookies together sometimes. i go to cafe's in small groups to task people to make terrible poetry in 2 minutes and then read it out loud. we had a halloween gingerbread house decorating contest last year and someone put a AAA battery on the roof and i put slenderman on the back and then someone else set it on fire. is that art, maybe not, but it was creative! i can spend 30 hours trying to make one image look amazing and it never feels as fun as that. art is a never-ending process that will make you feel lousy as soon as you view it as a static representation of yourself and your potential, i think. you're not finished Making or Being a person ever, so there is no one narrative of your life that you missed out on by not drawing for years. i hope you can refind that joy and excitement and recklessness.

I lived with an abusive partner for a long time who used to ridicule what I made, and I found a roleplay community where I started floating some of my more unhinged ideas half out of spite and half to kind of hoist a flag and see what sort of response I'd get: if someone tolerates a real freak design at a tabletop / roleplay setting, you know that you have the capacity to be a little vulnerable and sincere about the kind of fantasies you want to experience.

I struck out a few times, but then a place was like, "We'd like you to never leave and to keep making weird freaks. We'd like to consult you if we ever need a freak. We'd like to consult you for any NPC that is supposed to be compelling, provided you're comfortable designing a character with limited context."

Knowing that I could produce slime, but in a positive capacity, was really good for me. I started penning-out ideas and then I started drawing those ideas to help convey them, and then I was just kind of like, making stuff.

I think finding a decent community where you feel 'heard' is good, permitting yourself to sometimes be inspired and a little derivative is also good (there's a weird push to demonize taking inspiration from something as trite, and I feel like that is unfair...) and y'know.

Be a little greedy with it.
The creative process should be a little self-indulgent!

A long time ago, i participated in a small contest where several friends of friends submitted a piece, and a combination of seeing how good their stuff was, disliking how bad my stuff looked alongside theirs, and being constantly told my submission was good actually made me bitter and i began to curse and dismiss art. Around the same time those insidious "turn yourself into anime" AI filters were first starting to become popular, and foolishly i ran a bunch of my drawings through them, making myself only more pissed at my perceived lack of talent. It was hellish, and it took a long while and lots of active effort to get out of it.

I can suggest a few things to make the process a little bit less painful. Don't listen to people who tell you quality doesn't matter and you shouldn't worry about technique or whatever, if that's what you want then that's what you want. Of course you'll want your art to look good. Just keep it separate. Technical practice is that, just practice. Assign no emotional value to those pieces, judge purely your progress. Then, when you make something your heart aches for, completely ignore technique. If you internalized them good, if not then so be it. Sometimes I'll go out of my way to intentionally make something as bad as I can make it, so if i end up disliking it afterwards, I can tell myself I succeeded, and if not then I've failed successfully. Try to get some distance between you and your art before you judge it. I'll usually write or draw something, leave it for a few days or a week, then come back with my hater hat on and analyze the hell out of it, what the author was trying to say with this, what techniques she used, how well she employed them. Remember art is all about what you're trying to say and how you say it. You're already an artist, act like one!

been hanging out in gmod listening to music while i edit ren'py

>>3muypsk7eas2g
yoooooooo thats cozy af

Photo-walk in LCD Dream Emulator

Airwalk glitch in Remember Me

>>3myr5bfpu4c2d
Extra

>>3mxxhcvxnsc2h
Made me smile

>>3mupkchliff23
>>3mupkdya26l2i
>>3mupkfckojc2x
>>3mupkioogj523
extremely kickass

suspiciously fawn-like branch on fallen tree

>>3mw36qffblc2r
i need to bring my good camera when i go hiking this dynamic range is pmo (´～`)

twee