now that you can pin posts i thought i'd make one :)

as of 2023 i am a thirty year old living in Aotearoa New Zealand! i have a nice wife and a nice life! my wife and i and my two cats are crammed into a small moldy but cheap one-bedroom in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. she writes and teaches art and does illustrations. i muck around online and teach programming and web/game/interactive technology and even sometimes make games occasionally. i also have a Second Life job as a lounge hostess, security and virtual fashion model. no, really, i do.

one of my Neopets is like 23 years old and my Tumblr account is old enough to make its own Tumblr blog, but i don't really use it anymore. if you want to see what i'm up to and maybe even partake in it, the best place to find me right now is Mastodon!

if i end up with any other online presence to host longer-form, less ephemeral stuff (i'm working on it) i will link it here.

ciao, shalom, cheers!!

i'm fleeing trans genocide in southern appalachia and i need your help.

hi, you might know me as Nate or Nel. i'm a local East Tennesseean, born in a tiny mountain town and living in Knoxville to attend school.

i love southern Appalachia more than anything in the world; i love the cool hollers in whose woods i ran barefoot as a child. i love the flora and fauna i went to school to try to protect. my heart is here.

and i have to leave. i am going to have to rip my heart out of my chest and run.

i'm visibly trans. even before i ever transitioned, when i was a small child, people called me names and hit me in public for looking gender non-conforming, even when i tried to conform. there was a small break from this once i transitioned and no one knew what trans people were, but after the trans awareness tipping point, my home has become unlivable for me. even other local trans people are flabbergasted at how much i am targeted. thanks to the media wanting a buck, everyone knows.

i have had:

all of these are because i don't pass as anything in particular in public. i just don't. whether i grow my beard out ZZ Top style or put on a dress, i'm not gonna pass as something comforting for these people either way. no choice that i can make here will save me. in t-shirts and jeans, people stare at me like i have three heads. i have to leave.

my long-distance partner's gotten into a prestigious school in LA, got an apartment, and is moving to attend there. i finish school in December, and am going to try to make it out there. I have no family support whatsoever, and I am disabled and struggle to work enough to save up money. my only chance to have a livable life is to pack up everything i own and drive west.

i'll tweak the expenses as we go, but so far it seems like:

this fundraiser isn't done, but i wanted to go ahead and get something started. i will of course also be saving up from my own part-time job, and add more details as time passes.

i wanted to end on an example of the treatment i get (this was left as a note for me at my campus), but i think i'd rather end on a high note and show you all some images of my partner and i. they're one of the main reasons my life is still worth living right now, and in their arms is one of the only places where i don't feel like a freak.

so yeah, there's the tumblr version of my post. if you think you could get more reach from the tiktok or insta version, let me know.

I don't wanna release personal details, but I've been doing advocacy work in the community since I was 15, and at 28 I am tired. I'm tired, and very unsafe.

first update 06/12/23

I'm amazed at the response this has gotten so far. It helps me have a little bit of hope for the future, even if it's just a little.

I cried a lot today. I cried every few hours at best, thinking about how little I've been able to keep in my life. Not just personal dignities stripped away from me through surviving abuse, and not just the loss of my mother and my cat, but also the loss of my home itself. I want to live with my partner; I don't want it to be in a big, hot city far away from anything I've ever known, with no clue if it will ever be safe for me to return.

I'm autistic and I don't like change.

I've also undergone such a long journey. I grew up deeply poor and Appalachian, in an impoverished farming family, and I grew up with internalized classism embedded just as deep. It took me so many years, in probably one of the hardest and fiercest and proudest arcs of my life, to unlearn it and come to love my home, my folk heritage, and my ancestors for surviving.

And now I'm hacking off my roots in a frenzy, and abandoning my old family farm to an abusive and evil man, abandoning my neighbors during a genocide, and abandoning my home region to a rising wave of alt-right self-professed Nazi grifters moving in.

I just keep trying to remember that if I can survive this amputation, I can maybe be happy and safe one day.

Long time no see! Remember my three posts on whether Pokémon can be kosher to eat under Jewish law, and which ones (here, here and here)? 

Today I was teaching a class on using Flask (a Python web framework) with databases so as an example for the students, I decided to make a web app to tell you which Pokémon are kosher. For now, you can visit this at https://koshermon.herokuapp.com/ or look up individual Pokémon by adding “mon” and their national dex code to the url, like https://koshermon.herokuapp.com/mon/420 for Cherubi. Not every Pokémon has its notes put in yet so more details are forthcoming. 

The latter half of the class I’m teaching brings in Javascript for interactive web apps, so if I have time I’ll add JS, sorting methods, and other features.

Also, I’m currently hotlinking all my image sources from Bulbapedia so they may or may not want me dead for that. Rehosting the sprites is on my to-do… eventually…

PATCH NOTES: Added logic to only display blocks if there’s something to display. No more “Alt types: none none” nonsense. 

PATCH NOTES 2: (SORRY I HAVE NO IDEA HOW BEST TO REPRESENT THESE ASIDE FROM REBLOGS, JUST CLICK THROUGH TO THE OP IF YOU WANT) added last mon/next mon and home buttons to each individual mon, fixed gross vertical alignment issues with differently sized sprites on the main page

Long time no see! Remember my three posts on whether Pokémon can be kosher to eat under Jewish law, and which ones (here, here and here)? 

Today I was teaching a class on using Flask (a Python web framework) with databases so as an example for the students, I decided to make a web app to tell you which Pokémon are kosher. For now, you can visit this at https://koshermon.herokuapp.com/ or look up individual Pokémon by adding “mon” and their national dex code to the url, like https://koshermon.herokuapp.com/mon/420 for Cherubi. Not every Pokémon has its notes put in yet so more details are forthcoming. 

The latter half of the class I’m teaching brings in Javascript for interactive web apps, so if I have time I’ll add JS, sorting methods, and other features.

Also, I’m currently hotlinking all my image sources from Bulbapedia so they may or may not want me dead for that. Rehosting the sprites is on my to-do… eventually…

PATCH NOTES: Added logic to only display blocks if there’s something to display. No more “Alt types: none none” nonsense. 

hey its been a while but i’m 29 now so this is due for an update

married! 

teaching 3 classes at university! 

working on making an interactive online map of all kosher pokemon but please be patient with me

still way more active on twitter https://twitter.com/tenderhooves

hi

December already? Time to headcanon random characters as Jewish.

“Wait if I sheath my sword will he not attac-DID THIS TWINK JUST SLAP ME?!”

Hey, spiritual Jewish kinfolk:

I feel like the predominant narrative in the spiritual therian and otherkind community is that of neopagans or spiritual atheists, most of whom are culturally Christian. I’d love for there to be more conversation about and between spiritual Jews in the community, especially among those of us whose identities are influenced by our Jewish spirituality.

I want it to be more known among the ‘kin community, and in particular the spiritual side of it, that Jewish culture and spirituality can coexist with nonhuman identity. There seems to be a mindset that the only spiritual beliefs that allow for these identities are pagan ones.

So I’ve coined a term for us. If you are otherkind, therian, or otherwise alterhuman and feel that your identity is, at least in part, influenced by Jewish spirituality, theology or philosophy, here’s something I came up with to use to talk about it: nephesh mavar. “Nephesh” is Hebrew for “soul” and “mavar” translates to “beyond,” so the term would mean “soul beyond,” or a soul that is beyond human. Switch the order of the words, and “mavar nephesh” means “transcendence.”

My idea here is to use this as a tag for posts that are discussions about Jewish otherkinity, therianthropy, any kind of alterhumanity really, and maybe this will shed light on our place in the community and be something we can use with pride.

THIS IS AMAZING!!! i don’t have much to add aside from i’m Jewish, nonhuman and love this term ;-; 

in prayers saying that God rested after creating the world, the word used is “vayinafash” - i always love this word because it doesn’t literally mean rested, it means something more like being “re-souled.” 

in the same way, when we wake up we say:

Modeh/Modah ani l'fanecha melech hai v'kayam shehehezarta bi nishmati b'hemlah rabah emunatecha.

The tradition is that we are thankful for having our soul, or our breath (nshamah) “restored” to us because we float around in the night. I have often tried to explain my feeling chronically out of place to my Rabbi by using language of having a new soul or a foreign soul placed in my body, sometimes a different one every day. 

I have a complicated relationship with spirituality in general and may be a totally psychological/atheist otherkin, I’m not sure. But the Jewish framework is so culturally important and beautiful to me and I’m always grateful to have it there.