A Fan's Playground

one

recently I was telling someone about crop milk and it is such a delightfully cursed bird fact that I have to share it here too!

did you know that mammals aren't the only living things to produce milk? a select few bird species have independently evolved it too! pigeons, flamingos, and emperor penguins all secrete milk from their crop to feed their young! lactation is even stimulated by prolactin, the same hormone that causes lactation in mammals!

crop milk has fat and proteins, like mammal milk, but no carbohydrates. it's also got the various immune boosting stuff and other similar intangibles

In pigeons, crop milk is....not quite a liquid. it's a pale yellow semi-solid that has been compared to cottage cheese.

flamingos have liquid crop milk! but it's bright red that looks like blood!!

(the colour fades over time though, it only looks like blood for the first week or so after hatching)

all I've been able to determine about penguin crop milk is that it is "thick"


two

I love being able to just go into the css stylesheet for my website and alter a detail about how lists are formatted....and then that change is automatically enacted for every list on every page of my site! it's so cool. coding is cool!


three

just finishing up listening to a podcast episode about pterosaurs and *dreamy sigh* pterosaurs are just so cool you guys


four

me spitballing funny fic ideas with a friend, and oh shit now I really want to write one of them!

it's amazing to me now that I used to struggle so much with coming up with fic ideas to write...these days I have far more than I can actually get to!


five

something I learned recently: it does not matter WHAT name I changed my irl name to, a certain type of cis people will find a way to hear a feminine name no matter what your name is, if they read you as female

I thought I had just insufficiently considered what my name could be misheard as! but no the problem is not with me.


posting about pterosaurs DOES mean I had to update my dinosaur tag. bc pterosaurs are not dinosaurs and I needed my tag to be actually inclusive!

wow I thought I was going to be short on thoughts to crosspost this week but I just have SO MANY that you're getting a bonus sixth thought, instead of the usual five I constrain myself to


one

last week I looked over my spreadsheet of short stories/novelettes I've read, and my rate so far for 2024 is that of the 195 stories I've read (or started to read and then DNF'd bc no thanks), I liked 13 of them enough to rec

which is 7% of the stories

WHEW.

now, there are a few other stories in there where my notes read something like "this is a well written story but it's not for me" so the rate of GOOD stories is slightly higher than the rate of stories I personally enjoyed.

but still!!


two

tfw you go to a pride themed thing with a bunch of vendors and you leave without having purchased so much as a single sticker. The marketable local queer aesthetics appear to be: witchy, goth, cutesy, horny, or combinations of the above

no shade on those aesthetics! but they are not what I personally go for


three

do any of you have recommendations for a good podcast on the history of korea? the more ORV I read the more I'm like....yeah I Would actually like to add korea to my list of east/southeast asian history podcasts I listen to.

I did give a try to the one Korean history podcast I found when searching around, "The History of Korea" by Allen Lee, but I listened to 45 seconds of the first episode and had to bail.

1. his "favourite" piece of history is a violent conflict: my eyebrows are up and I'm worried he'll be one of those dudes who thinks about history solely as a series of wars to obsess over, but I'll keep listening for now, I might be pre-judging too hard

2. refers to the "medieval" era all around the world as being essentially the same: uh oh, I have significant concerns, especially after the first point. I'm highly wary! I don't trust this guy!

3. refers to "peasants and lowborns meekly accepting their lot" as the way things were in that worldwide medieval period: ok now I'm done. immediately. goodbye!!


four

god my linkding is devolving even more. I just restarted my server and the pages loaded nicely for like... less than 5 min and now I'm getting errors again. I really do need to make the time to try updating the version like betty suggested trying!!

maybe tonight?

ALSO I need to get around to making the rest of aviansoph.com work! see if I can figure out the FTP after my disheartening failure last time

but that's probably going to have to wait till like. July.


five

in almost every respect I appreciate that canadian culture is largely a shoes-off-in-the-house culture. HOWEVER. when I'm wearing cute shoes that are an important part of an outfit I've put together, I am personally victimized by this expectation!!


six

listened to a catbird singing in my dreams last night; listened to a catbird singing while biking to work this morning. life imitates art!

I've been thinking some more about my gender presentation of late. I mean, thinking about how I dress and present myself to the world is kind of medium-key on my mind all the time, but this year I'm trying to more deliberately work on figuring out what kind of wardrobe and styling makes me feel happy and comfortable with myself.

And I've been making great progress with that, and it's very exciting, when I look at myself in the mirror and go "YEAH!!!" instead of just being like "well I have no arguments with this outfit."

When I was in my late teens, I stopped wearing pants. Full stop. Skirts or dresses all the time, for every occasion, in every weather. And I kept this up for....dear lord I just did the math and I think it's 10 or 11 years of absolutely no pants, with a couple years on either side with majority-skirts but occasional pants. At my peak I had a collection of over 50 skirts, most of them real statement pieces. I did the skirt-wearing for a number of reasons, some of which I was able to articulate at the time and some of which I wasn't.

But I think that ultimately one important facet of it (which I absolutely did not understand at the time) was that if I wore something so distinctly female-associated as a skirt, was known for it in fact, then I could experiment with gender in other ways without being concerned I would be seen as rejecting my assigned gender. I was wearing a big ol' flag of femaleness on my bottom half at all times! So I was able to inch towards a more masc presentation in other ways without totally freaking out and shutting myself down. (I mean, I still freaked out. I have a dreamwidth post from 2016 about how scary and forbidden it felt to wear men's button-up shirts, and get a more masculine haircut. Even with my skirts! But I was able to make those forays, despite the difficulties.)

But as I grew in my confidence in wearing more masc clothing, the skirt-wearing eventually fell by the wayside. By 2019, I was wearing pants one day a week, on fridays, feeling daring at the pants-featuring outfits I put together. And then the pandemic began, and I spent multiple years being able to wear anything on my lower half and not have anyone outside my household see me, and never having to use public washrooms. And freed of having to worry about what opinion people would have of my gender, I found myself almost never wearing skirts anymore. My default became men's pants and men's shirts, and I only bothered pulling out a skirt with the thought that I really ought to make more use of my excellent skirt collection, which by this point had been pared down to only the very best skirts.

But with my new default of men's clothing, I kind of ended up wearing just any old thing. Especially in the first year or so of the pandemic, I did not want to venture out into shared public spaces, so going to stores to try on clothes was right out, and I just ordered a few things online to fill in the basics of what I needed, based on what fit me and looked respectable and wasn't too expensive.

These outfits didn't exactly spark joy, but they were easy enough to wear, and felt comfortable, both physically and genderwise. And eventually I realized that it no longer felt comfortable to put on a skirt.

(did I maybe cry a bit at the realization that it was time for me to pack away my skirts? look, obviously I did, they were a huge part of my identity for so long, and I still love them, even if they're not something I want to wear anymore!)

But one of the other big things my carefully curated collection of skirts did for me was that they allowed me to dress in ways that were dramatic and visually interesting and off-beat, they enabled me to make statements with my clothing, and standard-issue men's clothing is uhhhhhhh not that.

So I've been working, of late, to develop a coherent and consistent and more me-feeling style and way of dressing now that I don't wear skirts. It's a work in progress, not least because the kinds of clothes I want to wear are hard to find! There are some significant gaps in my wardrobe to be able to fully make the clothing statements I want to all the time. But already I'm making enormous strides.

And dressing myself is FUN again, the way it used to be in the heyday of when I most enjoyed wearing skirts! I think I've spent the last 5 years at least not having fun with my clothing, when I always used to love putting together outfits. I thought it was just a casualty of growing older, but NO, I just needed to figure out a new approach to clothing that would make me happy again!

I don't know whether my current gender presentation will be a long-term or permanent thing for me. I used to derive a great deal of genuine joy from my wonderful skirts, after all! And it's impossible for me to have feelings about clothes that are siloed from society. I exist in a society, and my sense of how people see me based on my clothes is an intrinsic part of the collection of feelings I have about the clothes I wear. At least, it is right now. Who knows what will happen in the future! But for now: I'm having fun.

I have been working towards getting top surgery for multiple years at this point, and this week it finally happened! Starting the new decade RIGHT!

I was surprised how nervous I was going into it, both in terms of how the surgery itself would go, and also how I would feel about the results on my body. I was a little bit of a disaster in the days leading up to it, and I'm so grateful to my partners, housemates, and friends for their support, both emotional and tangible.

But the surgery was yesterday and everything went smoothly. I had to wait around the clinic for a couple extra hours before they took me to the operating room, because the person getting surgery before me ended up taking longer than expected. It was nice to see that proof that the surgeon is willing to do what is necessary to get good results instead of rushing to meet a timeline, but it was also hard to just....sit there and wait.

But once the waiting was over everything went well!

This morning I was back at the clinic for the post-op appointment, and I got to see my new chest for the first time when the nurse changed my dressing - and you guys I am so HAPPY! I mean obviously it looks kind of terrible right now, all bruised and taped up and stuff, but I can see how it's going to be when it's healed and it's just what I was wanting. Such a relief.

Recovering from surgery is hard work though. I'm exhausted whenever I have to do anything more strenuous than lying flat on my back on a couch or bed. Driving all the way home from the city where the clinic's located was hard work even though all I was doing was sitting there in a reclined seat.

Anyway, I have three weeks off of work to recover, now, so I can do all the lying about on couches I need. Here we go!

Yooooo so latest gender update! Is that I have been experimenting with pronouns irl and have realized that they/them pronouns make me a lot happier than she/her. So please use they/them for me going forward. Thanks!

(for ppl who know me irl: please continue to use she/her for me in front of people who don't know I'm agender, because I am not ready to be out to everyone.)

The thing that's surprised me most since figuring out I'm agender is discovering how many constraints on gender presentation I've always felt - and still feel, much to my dismay! THANKS SOCIETY FOR THE BRAINWASHING I GUESS.

For years I've had people tell me (mostly admiringly?) that I dress very me, that I don't pay attention to what I "ought" to wear, but wear what I want. And I always thought that was true!

But....it's not true. I've experimented widely, yes, but always within the bounds of certain rules I had no idea I was working so hard to follow.

For example: a few months ago I decided to switch to wearing button-down shirts on my top half, mostly mens-styled shirts. I've always loved that look, but before my breast-reduction surgery there was no hope of such shirts fitting so I never bothered trying. But it struck me suddenly that now I COULD, so I did. And I discovered this vast and intense feeling that I'm not allowed to wear clothing that doesn't accentuate my feminine shape. That wearing these men's shirts make me look slovenly and unkempt because they're baggy or whatever. The mirror tells me otherwise! The mirror tells me I look great! And I love wearing these shirts! But my feelings are all NOOOOOOOO HDU.

And yesterday I went to get my hair cut. Usually my mom cuts my hair, because that's free and salons are EXPENSIVE. Mom's entire haircutting education is having cut mine and my sister's hair since we were tiny children, so although she's competent enough at what she knows, she doesn't know anything fancy. So she gives me a pretty straightforward cut that mostly just says "short". But she's out of the country right now and I needed a haircut so I went to a professional, and described the haircut that I actually want that Mom's not capable of giving me. And I got it, and I look great, it's exactly the cut I've been low-key hankering after for years and I love it - and then I proceeded to spend yesterday evening in an emotional meltdown because this haircut is too masculine and I'm not allowed.

So this is something I'm working on: giving myself permission to present myself the way I actually want to. But it's hard! And I hope I don't discover other "not allowed" areas in my continued experimentation, because it's really not fun.

I had a lot of feels, reading this book. I'm not good at feelings so I have no idea WHAT my feels were but I definitely had them. I spent a reasonable portion of the book in tears, but I think in a good way? It's just so - ....reading an entire book by and about two people whose identities don't fit in the gender binary was a really affirming experience, I think. It's like, my experience doesn't exactly line up with either of these two people but it's SO MUCH CLOSER than any other published works I've read in my life. Also Rae and Ivan are both very good writers/storytellers so it was a very good book as well as being a very personally-relevant book. I liked it a LOT.

Moar books! This is a whole bunch at once because my thoughts for these books aren't quite as in-depth as what the other ones inspired.

( Snuff, by Terry Pratchett )

( The Will of the Empress, by Tamora Pierce )

( A Morbid Taste for Bones, by Ellis Peters )

( Sarah, Plain and Tall, by Patricia MacLachlan )

( The Hundred Penny Box, by Sharon Bell Mathis )

( Skylark, by Patricia MacLachlan )

( The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green )

( The True Meaning of Smekday, by Adam Rex )