Not my nails, obvs.
Some (beginner-focused) tips for painting your nails:
Lighter colors and solid colors are easier to work with. Pick a good color or few, you don’t need to start too fancy.
Don’t shake nail polish, that can mess it up. Roll it slowly if you ever need to mix.
Don’t just do the coloration and call it a day, put clear nail polish on first, and put it over the color. That will protect your nails.
Consider getting nail polish remover when you get your nail polish, mistakes are easy.
Put your nails down on a flat surface, clean your nails (maybe with that nail polish remover?), and apply the clear base coat (doesn’t need to be perfect). Stroke from the base of the nail to the top, until the nail is covered. It might get on your skin, that’s normal, anything on your skin can be dealt with at the end. Let it dry, like you would any other kind of base coat.
Now that it’s dry, do like what you did with your clear polish for colors. Base to tip, going from the center outwards. If you can still see through after it’s covered, wait for it to dry a little, then do another layer.
Then apply your top coat to make smooth, shiny, and somewhat protected painted nails. Wait for it all to dry (very important), which could as long as normal working hours + commute. Don’t mess it up. If you do, you might have to restart on some nails.
Now that it’s dry the polish on your skin should act sorta like glue, where you can just peel it off, but if it’s stubborn you could use a cotton swab with nail polish remover to carefully remove it (don’t let it touch your nails!).
Now you should have nice smooth nails.
Join our public Matrix server!
https://rentry.co/tracha#tracha-rooms
As a reminder, please do not discuss current struggle sessions in the mega. We want this to be a little oasis for all of us and the best way to do that is not to feed into existing conflict on the site.
Also, be sure to properly give content warnings and put sensitive subjects behind proper spoiler tags. It’s for the mental health of not just your comrades, but yourself as well.
Here is a screenshot of where to find the spoiler button.
guy who is trying desperately to convince his trans son not to get his legal gender marker changed to M while making it abundantly clear that while he does support his son’s transition and views him as a man, they need to keep his legal gender as “F” in order to keep the car insurance payments down
Please never stop posting
I did it chat! I went to a show on my own and had a wonderful time! Anxious as fuck at the beginning but by the end i was doing quite well. Had way too many cigarettes unfortunately… And i had just quit smoking like a month or two ago… But it was one night, im not beating myself up, because i went out and conquored my social anxiety!!
Be proud of me hexbear, ya girl did good
good pup!!! am so pwouds of uuuuu!!! :D
On the behalf of hexbear, I am proud of you 👏 🥰
Yay! Good job
Tyyyy!!
Wow!!! Good job, Im glad you went~ and it sounds like you didnt even get shut down
Yeah! Apparently the property owners dont really care.
fun facts from my neo-pagan studies:
in some mythologies the Goddess Ishtar would put on makeup and fancy clothes before battle. like she would do this instead of using armor or gearing up.
combat is the “dance of Ishtar” and basically if she blesses you it’s like having a spidey sense. you don’t become supernaturally strong or anything, it’s like being completely in the zone and rolling natural 20s
but yeah she’s a fucking queen i love it. (so paint your nails before war)
more fun facts to come i’ve been doing research and plan on getting some books on Mesopotamian mythology
She’s just like me frfr
she’s so cool
yeah lately i’ve been like “is this what faith feels like”
Last night, we had a patient who is a woman and her nurse was a dude. She wanted to be placed on a bedpan. She didnt want the guy to do it, so he came and got me 🥹. And then she said “oh Terminal! Im glad youre here, Ill need help wiping after” (gross but Im glad I passed!)
They gave me a firmer answer finally for bottom surgery! 8 to 12 months lol. Well, it is firmer than “eventually, hopefully within a year”
happy for you
This is the tragedy of Carl Jung—the woman inside of him didn’t burn nearly as bright as the two guys in him.
Sometimes I would like to retreat into a queer country, with no cishets allowed. No more bullshit.
The bullshit would follow you, even there, I do fear…
After one single generation, the straights would outnumber the queers again.
I dunno, straightness might be a social construct. Or maybe at least not as dominant as an orientation as its presented anyway. Way more people are somewhere between the two poles of the Kinsey scale (and in Queer Country/Commune, its only the one tick of the Kinsey scale that matters anyway). Historically, being straight wasnt like a thing. You might have had to make a family, that was a thing, but you could do whatever else. Maybe living in a queer commune your entire life makes people more likely to be bi or pan even if they can only make another generation of babies the ol fashioned way.
I think you’d have more problems with people bringing in that shit to start with, cause we can’t really help but be influenced by the hegemonic culture we grew up in and that cultural inheritence has a lot of gross shit.
Well chat, I did it. Told my irl friends my name and asked them to use my pronouns, told them my old ones upset me, etc. One friend has been trying, correcting himself or just outright using the right ones.
She has not however :/ has not gendered or named me correctly, maybe half the time she’s kinda muttered off like, oh yea… Sorry… After dead naming me or smth. But doesn’t use the right ones after. Obviously today was only day one but idk. That’s where we’re at.
To make things a bit more awkward, I ha e the same name as one of her old friends, idk if that’s why she doesn’t want to use it or what. She’s generally not super woke either. Idk.
spoiler
god fucking damn it I hate this ts. Need to fucking shave too. If only I’d just been born… you know…
Im proud of you for telling them! Its super daunting and you doing it shows your courage and bravery in the face of a transphobic world
that was very brave. We can’t control other people but we can choose our own destiny and you chose yourself and I love that for you so much. Hopefully your friend will come around!
I keep bumping into shit with my hips at work on accident. Guess I’m thicker down there than my mind realizes
I bought a bunch of scrubs before nursing school for prep for clinicals. That was 5 years ago, I dont fit any of em. Butt and hips and breasts too big. What a waste, wish I could have handed em off to someone going the other way.
I love my gf.
Also check this shirt::
The megathread probably shouldn’t be started off to such a negative tone, but I’ve been putting off putting my feelings into words for too long.
CW: sui
I’ve been thinking about death, and my own death way too much recently. I even had a vivid dream where I was forced go drown myself at gunpoint. I feel as if I wasn’t built for living, and that I don’t really care about being alive as much as I am just afraid of dying.
I genuinely believe that this is the result of all the wars and fascism in the world right now. I feel like sooner rather than later, I too will be on the chopping block. My only options are to repress myself and live, or to assert myself and die. And in either case, there are no guarantees.
I tell myself that the closet does not provide me safety. It’s 4 walls surrounding my heart will not protect me from bombs or fascists. So I should just be myself. But then all I am telling myself is that my life will be short regardless of what I do. And that isn’t very comforting.
Basically, in a round about sort of way, my brain is forcing me to confront my own mortality. I don’t like this. I’m not even 25. My thoughts are too jumbled and I have no answers.
Get a load of this girlfailuire and her dumb hormonal outbursts
spoiler
I don’t have any advice or anything but I’m in the same boat and know how it is. I’m sorry.
Sucks that you are feeling the same way. You deserve better.
You too comrade :meow-hug:
Taking my trans woman friend shopping today. It’s her first time potentially wearing/buying women’s clothes. What type of store should we go to? First thought was the pro-trans vintage clothing store I like and letting her raid my male/androgynous closet (have some women’s shirts in her size, as a baby step). Also the local trans org has a community closet, I thought that would be more chill than being in a public store.
Pre hormones, pre everything. She’s black if it matters for recommendations, around age 30. She has not tried cosmetics yet, either.
Additional info: In men’s sizes she wears large T-shirts. Approx 6 ft tall.
As far as style, she has said her eventual goal is to look/dress as feminine as possible. I haven’t gotten much more info.
How lovely that you’re helping your friend it’s going to make things so much less scary for her!
The options you mentioned are all really good. You didn’t specify size but I can say that Torrid is a godsend for the tall and plus sized girl. Old Navy has super cheap tv shirts that are really cute. Most of my wardrobe is from Goodwill, I live by one and it’s consistently full of treasure.
Yeah I think showing up is the most important thing! Thank you for the advice.
My thought was that Goodwill might be intimidating because it’s so wide open and exposed, but undoubtedly there are wonderful clothes to find there. Budget is definitely a major consideration, though.
Definitely do the vintage and org, those two are great environments to start acclimating yourself in. I’d probably do a check-in after those two to ask if she’d like to try going to any actual stores in person or if she’s content and then follow her lead and bring her to a mall or smth
Regarding sizing, general rule of thumb is a women’s size is a men’s size +1, so she’s probably extra large or in the plus sizes depending on her exact measurements, so anything in those sections ought to be okay I think. Admittedly I am tiny (women’s small) so I have little experience with the higher end of women’s sizes so ymmv.
General unedited recommendations for clothing: if she gets any skirts make sure she tries them on high waisted (at the thinnest part of her waist, a bit above the bellybutton usually) since that helps with making a femme figure and also just looks good imo, neutral colours are a good starting place but she can do whatever she likes, avoiding 90° angles in sleeves is helpful to make shoulders appear less broad, and I’d recommend pushing her to pici up some accessories along with the clothing, I neglected them for a while but they also really help with feeling euphoric.
Can’t help with makeup I only just started doing mine literally last week and I started with goth makeup lol.
Thanks!
down with cis
Down with cis
Down with cis
down with cis
down with cis
down with cis
So, how do you approach astrology? I have a lot of people in my life who believe in it, in more than a pop-faith way. It seems a lot of queer people are really into it. And i find it fascinating in the way that belief systems are systems and systems are really cool. But, how do i interact with this? Especially when people apply this totalizing idealist belief structure to me (e.g. my day was bad and they say its because mercury is in retrograde). Like, i dont want to offend people, but also like i dont like people applying this shit to me, and it rubs me the wrong way when e.g. scheduling doesnt work out for our group game night and its blamed on planets. Like, no, its because of the scheduling of everyones jobs, which in turn are due to the arbitrary (or nonarbitrary) decisions of management, etc. etc.
So does anyone have tactics for navigating social interactions with people who are deep into this? I dont want to go off on them, i dont want to deny them their faith, but i dont want their belief structures applied to me, and i dont feel terribly welcome when they are applied to the group as a whole because then its like idk its just difficult and alienating when im the only one who doesnt hold a faith structure within a group.
Most often people who use astrology this way are just looking for a way to assert a feeling of pattern and recognizability to what cannot be controlled. You may not be able to assert control over the universe, but you can assert that there is meaning to it, and so while scheduling conflicts (in this example) are out of your control, you can control whether you see this as an arbitrary coincidence or as the result of chartable and “predictable” as a way to wrestle a sense of non-existent control. This is pretty true of all belief systems.
Now as to your question: people will always apply their belief systems to you. It is how they structure their world. Just like you will always apply your belief systems to the world around you and the people you know. Even if your belief systems aren’t spiritual or religious. If you are friends with a Christian, they will apply their understanding of God and sin to you. If you are friends with a believer in karma, they will apply that to you. Astrology believers will apply astrology to you. Marxists will apply their material/dialectic analysis to you. Feminists will apply their understanding of gender-based oppression to you. Trans people will apply their belief in the social structure of gender and cisnormativity’s hegemonic strangelehold on you.
That’s a part of being in relationship with other people: they will at all times apply their belief system to you as they apply it to the world at large as they attempt to understand the universe around them. And you will do the same right back. You either accept that other people order their reality differently than you, or you stop being friends with people whose belief system is too incompatible for you to spend time with them. You may have a relationship where you could ask them to not speak to you about their belief systems, and depending on how important those belief systems are they may be okay with that. But they’ll not stop applying to it you either way, because that’s how they make sense of the world, just like you wouldn’t stop applying your belief systems to others even if you were okay about keeping it to yourself for their comfort.
Ok while i dont like this it makes a lot of sense, thank you. I hadnt thought about my application of materialism to other people and my application of my faith to other people. I guess this makes sense, and like you say is just part of interfacing with other people. Its just frustrating. Thanks for laying this out for me
It’s bullshit. But lots of people, including myself believe in some bullshit. Handle it with the care and nuance you would handle any belief your friend holds that you disagree with, or don’t. There’s no right or wrong way to go about disagreements about things like this with your friends, as long as you keep it respectful.
I just try to ignore stuff like this as much as I can.
Not the point of your post but mercury is always in fucking retrograde. Planet means wanderer because they were weird ass stars that moved around unlike most of the rest. The ancients didnt know why the drifted across the sky or even weirder why they sometimes went backwards. Anyway, its cause we’re all orbiting the sun. Mercury is close so it moves very quickly around the sun, so its the one that ends up in apparent retrograde the most often.
I looked it up. It happens three to four times for a year, usually for 3 weeks at a time. So like, 20% of days most years.
It’s also an optical illusion caused by relative changes in perspective, so it’s really hard to justify it meaning anything.
I’m stuck inside the future and life is chaotic
The government is psychotically racist and robotic
The matrix of entrapment is socio-economic
Erotic conspiracy theory becomes reality
Life is war, and every day’s a battle to me
I’m on the brink of insanity, between extreme intelligence and split personalities
But I elevate to the point of reversing gravity
Revolutionary conceptuality spitting out of me
Even the dead people in my family tell me they proud of me
Stupidity’s not allowed by me
Cause I don’t got time to play
I’m the black whole lyricist that’ll take your shine away
Darkness at any time of day
I’m the Technique and your nobody so what you trying to say
Stellar density becomes your physical alignment
1.8 billion tons per square inch confinement
this song often comes to mind, but I usually just play along. ig it could be kind of alienating to some people, but idgaf so its fine. plus they should be impressed at my delivery. i may not be able to freestyle well, but i can spit decently.
if they seem open to actually talking spirituality i’ll bring up santa muerte, but it can be equally uncomfortable.
If youre trying to make a comment about astrology or how i interface with it through social structures it was not communicated; I dont undersrand what your comment means.
Edit: oh i just saw your edit, its a song. Ill give it a listen but tbh im still a little confused… Could you elaborate?
I mean basically, just be yourself. if there’s spiritual stuff that you’re interested get into it and share that or just play along with astrology if you aren’t interested in pushing against hegemonic monotheism. I like to challenge people and push a polytheistic worldview, but I’m also comfortable with not being accepted so it isn’t for everyone.
I mean, i avoid “being myself” quite a bit, cause it makes other people uncomfortable and they shouldnt be made uncomfortable… I express interest in astrology sometimes but mostly just stay quiet about it. I guess thats all i can do? Im not about to go off about my worldview, like you say thats not conducive to an aligned social interaction, and tbh im just now finally making some true friends and i dont want to alienate them.
I’ve had to rebuild my social circles a bunch of times in my life (my family moved around a lot and I’ve kept up the tradition as an adult) so I’d rather just put it all out there so I can find people I click with sooner. To each their own tho.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
