EMERGENCY COMMISSIONS !!!

hey guys so, i dont normally share personal heavy details abt my life but there's not a lot of options right now esp when i cant land a permanent job despite my efforts;;;

DM me if interested !! which you can also contact me through:

PLEASE REBLOG AND BOOST !!! I'D REALLY APPRECIATE THE HELP ;w; !!!

check below for my TOS and commission process/rules!!!

you can also donate to my ko-fi for any addtional funds :'DD !!!

Small werewolf comic. To be continued?

Blu dude

Rosalina

A master post of Thomas Romain’s art tutorials.

There’s not enough space to post all of them, SO here’s links to everything he has posted (on twitter) so far : 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12. 

Now that new semesters have started, I thought people might need these. Enjoy your lessons!

I’ve seen these separately but masterpost is awesome.

LAYERS IN MSPAINT OUT NOW!!! 🎨

[check reblogs for links!]

i dont know why tumblr makes me hide shit in reblogs but. here we are.

download: talonzane.itch.io/mspaintcompanion

source code: github.com/TalonZane/mspaintCompanion

patreon: patreon.com/talonzane

Me: I should write something

me : … or I could spent 78 hours straight making a miniature library with a working LED chandelier

@themiraculousec

Pics!

The lights are working now!

everyone look at my friend's tiny library she's so talented

Skeleton of Urizen from A Small Book of Designs. William Blake, 1794

[ID: a painting of a skeleton curled up in the fetal position. end ID]

rb to protect prev from burnout

Taking T didn't ruin my singing voice, and frankly I'm sick of folks panicking and ignoring the fact that cis boys go through two or three years where their voices are fluctuating and cracking and changing before they settle.

Your voice isn't ruined, it's changing.

If you want to make that transition easier, you gotta keep using it. Sing! Even if your voice cracks in goofy ways. Even if you have trouble placing your voice comfortably. It gets easier, I promise. Get a voice teacher (if you can) who has experience with vocal changes for pubescent cis boys if it's really making you anxious or if you're having a hard time controlling it.

To be clear, I'm not trying to be dismissive of people's emotions, nor am I trying to tell you about your own experience. If you feel something intensely, that's fair and valid. Respectfully, you should unpack that with a therapist or supportive peers.

However, when one of the main TERF tactics against transmascs is convincing trans guys that T makes you Worse in a Variety of Ways, and that you'll be ruining your body if you take it, I am EXTREMELY dubious of how many people online report any part of their body being ruined by T. Sounds suspiciously like TERF shit. And, yes, even Actual Trans People can play into TERF talking points. I'm begging y'all to stop the rampant fearmongering surrounding T.

So, after nearly a year being on T, I'm here to say that YES my voice cracks and YES my voice fluctuates and YES sometimes it feels like I have to relearn everything I knew about being a vocalist, but goddamn if I won't have fun figuring it all out, because I know this is just one stage of the transition I'm going through, and it's worth it.

thank you so much for this. i’m a professional singer who’s wanting to go on t but it’s IMPOSSIBLE to talk about it bc even other trans men and mascs keep peddling this “t ruins your voice you’ll have no range and will never be able to sing again” garbage. and it’s infuriating because i’ll make posts asking specifically people who are singers what their experience was, and people will show up to fearmonger about how their voice is ruined when they themselves admit they didn’t sing before t, didn’t have any training during the transition, and haven’t done much singing afterward.

and when i try to point out that i know several trans men who are still professional singers after transitioning people are always like “what makes you think you’ll be one of the lucky ones?” what makes you think i won’t????? i have over a decade of training and performance experience under my belt as well as teaching experience, which requires knowledge of the anatomy of changing voices. and tbh i’m furious that i was put off t for so many years because i was told i would have to give up singing when apparently what’s more likely is that i’ll just have to take some time off while my voice changes to retrain.

basically, there’s a shit ton of fearmongering around “t voice” and it’s kept me from going on t for literal years when t could save my life and i’m very mad about that.

There are multiple articles out there and all of them say going on T as a singer is safe, as long as you train your voice to change with you.

Men and women aren't two completely different species. It's not like a trans guy experiencing voice crack is something cis boys don't go through. Just because afab teenagers don't experience it, doesn't mean it's catastrophic for a trans guy.

Cis boys have the same issue and usually stop singing for a while, but continue singing after.

(I love this thread. All the educators are really careful and use affirming language for the kids they teach. A lot of them also say boys can be treated very harshly during this period, and it's probably very sudden for the kid. The belief (I fear) is that he's "becoming a man" so he shouldn't be helped or treated kindly anymore.

I think this is cis women panicking because they'd never want to change their voice and feel the need to project on us, like always. And then it spreads to transmasc circles.

^^^^!!!!!!!!!

Start to finish. I sound great and I sound like myself.

hey i'm going to chime in (ha ha) as someone who hated singing as a woman and who still doesn't sing well as a man: T gave me a singing voice i like to sing with. i sang in the car all the year my voice was changing, and it was terrible and it was fun, and i sound like if kermit the frog fucked the decemberists and that's cool with me, actually.

not everything T does to you is a blissful upgrade, but it sure as hell hasn't ruined any part of me. it's nice. this whole thing has just been nice.

I’d like to chime in as a music educator/voice teacher to just add some tips and tricks here!

Taking T in no way “ruins” your voice — that’s not what testosterone does to the body! Inside your larynx (your ‘voice box’) you have what we call the vocal folds, which are two flaps of skin that are very thin on the inside. They’re shaped kind of like a V, and when you put the folds close together and push air through, they vibrate and create sound! When you stretch them, the sound is higher, and when you loosen them, the sound is lower.

What testosterone does to the vocal folds is thicken them, which lowers the pitch of the sounds you make! When moving from thinner folds to thicker folds, there’s always going to be a period of adjustment — you have to remember, these are muscles, and new ones! They can often struggle to hold a certain pitch because your muscles are changing and functioning in a new way. This is what leads to voice cracks — your body is trying to put a pitch in head voice or chest voice when the new musculature indicates it should be elsewhere. The voice ‘cracking’ sound is literally just your voice switching rapidly between chest and head voice!

The period of time in which your vocal folds are still thickening and haven’t quite settled, you are referred to as a cambiata — essentially, an in-between voice. But that doesn’t mean you should stop singing! In fact, you should absolutely KEEP singing in order to get used to your new musculature and passagio (the places where your voice switches from chest to head and head to falsetto).

Tips for singing through your voice change as a cambiata:

1. It’ll take a while. Don’t rush it. It could be up to a couple years before your voice really settles

2. Don’t push your voice! There may be notes you could hit before that you no longer can or low notes that you’re almost able to hit but not quite — don’t force them! This is what actually does damage to the voice, because you end up grinding the vocal folds together, which can create friction and eventually callouses! If a note seems out of your reach, let it be! It’s better to not sing a note/switch octaves for that note than force it and end up damaging your voice.

3. Ranges! While you’re going through a voice change, it’s best to stick to the cambiata range of ~F3 to ~F4, and move lower/higher as it feels natural. Here’s a little video so you can actually hear what I mean!

4. Most importantly: keep singing! Your vocal muscles are like any other muscles, and they get stronger/weaker depending on how much you use them. It may feel awkward as you adjust to the changes just because you can’t actually see them, but I promise you it’s completely normal for your voice to do the things it’s doing! I mean hell — I’m a cis woman and my voice was lowered by testosterone during puberty, and I’m an opera singer now! It’s your body’s normal and natural reaction to testosterone, and it’s not going to ruin your voice.

Also just a side note while I’m here because I’m passionate about this — the human voice is not as gendered as people want it to be. I won’t rant on it here, but there as cis men who sing soprano (countertenors!) and cis women who sing tenor or lower (contralto — this is me!). Singing is absolutely not “boys are this and girls are this”, it’s a spectrum with a whole lot of overlap. If you’re a pre-T/no-T trans man? You’re a countertenor. It’s a real voice part, and is highly sought after in the world of classical singing. Just listen to this — it’s John Holiday, masculine as all hell, and he’s a countertenor.

And if you’re a trans woman? Well then you’re one of the beautiful and rare contraltos, women with deep voices who are ALSO very rare and highly sought after (not to brag or anything, but welcome to the club lol), just like the gorgeous Korneva Julia.

People really want voices to be binary, and they’re just…not. Real people who study the voice know that it’s SO much more complex and beautiful than that. Okay rant over lol

From this interview with trans singer/songwriter Mal Blum:

"Interviewer: [...] There’s this whole narrative around testosterone and what it does to your voice. As someone who loves to belt at karaoke, I know it was something on my mind when I was deciding to start HRT. So I can only imagine how it impacts folks who sing professionally. Could you talk a bit about how those two things—making music professionally and going on T—affected each other?

Blum: Even people who aren’t singers for work or people who are just casual singers, like you’re saying with karaoke, they’re worried about losing their singing voice. It’s interesting just because I feel like transition is so much steeped in this cultural understanding of all the things that you stand to lose if you medically transition, but we don’t really think about as a larger cultural idea the things that you gain. [...] I can’t tell anybody what the right thing to do is for them. I did lose my old singing voice, but I got a new one. It’s hard because you don’t want to lose the thing that makes you happy. But for me—I don’t know, it wasn’t really making me happy."

[Emphasis added.]

update: currently almost 8 months on t and i fucking love my voice.

Whole-heartedly BEGGING writers to unlearn everything schools taught you about how long a paragraph is. If theres a new subject, INCLUDING ACTIONS, theres a new paragraph. A paragraph can be a single word too btw stop making things unreadable

Ok So I’m getting more notes than I thought quicker than I expected! So I’m gonna elaborate bc I want to. 

I get it, when you’re someone who writes a lot and talks a lot, it’s hard to keep things readable, but it’s not as much about cutting out the fat(that can be a problem) so much as a formatting issue. 

You are also actively NERFING yourself by not formatting it correctly, it can make impactful scenes feel so, so much better. Compare this, 

To THIS. 

Easier to read, and hits harder. 

No more over-saturated paragraphs. Space things out.

@s1ld3n4f1l​ WAIT WAIT WAIT SO TRUE LITERALLY LITERALLY 

Paul Delvaux (Belgian, 1897-1994), D'après nature au musée d'Histoire naturelle [From nature at the Natural History Museum], July-August 1942. Gouache, watercolour, ink and wash on paper, 98 x 68 cm.

would people be interested in a post about DIY hrt from a harm reduction perspective

okay fabulous i love being trans and love harm reduction so this is great. usual disclaimer that this is not medical or legal advice. this is drawn from my own + community experiences plus internal resources from the org I work with.

DIY HRT and Harm reduction

Most important things to know: DIY HRT is one possible way to access hormones, and there are safer and riskier ways to DIY HRT. In the context of increasing transphobic legislation in the US, I think it's important that people know their options and can discuss this without having to deal with our community putting moral judgments onto DIY HRT. I'm not going to spend a bunch of time getting into super specific information about dosage, methods of HRT, or where to find HRT, because a ton of that information is on this website which I highly recommend! Instead I'm going to be focusing on how to make informed decisions about DIY HRT and how to understand the risks.

Source Safety

When getting HRT without a prescription, it's important to consider the reliability and safety of your source. When at all possible, finding a healthcare provider who will provide HRT under the table is a good way to ensure that what you're getting is actually legitimate HRT. The next safest option is buying from a legitimate online pharmacy that provides pharmaceutical-grade hormones. This is where research + community knowledge comes in. Reading reviews, talking to other trans people, or buying from known sources in your community is a way to help reduce the risk of getting a product that is not legitimate HRT. When buying without a prescription, there is always some risk that what you are getting includes other chemicals, is for veterinary use, or has other contaminants. Checking your hormones before usage for anything odd, like bits floating in the liquid instead of pure liquid, for example, can be a good way to reduce risk. Overall, it's important to know that there are some risks involved with how you source your hormones, which is why talking to community members, reading reviews, and learning about trusted sites + people can be an important step for safer sourcing.

Injection Safety

If injecting your hormones, it's super important to know safe injection practices, especially if you have challenges accessing a consistent needle supply.

Legal Safety

Estrogen, spironolactone, and other anti-androgens are not controlled substances. They are legal to buy online in the United States.

Due to the absolute bullshit that is the Controlled Substances Act and the War on Drugs, Testosterone is considered a Schedule III substance. This means that it is illegal to buy and sell testosterone without a prescription in the United States. Realistically though, the risk of conviction for possession in a DIY HRT situation is currently incredibly low. A study following Anabolic Steroid Cases in US district courts from 2013-2017 found that there were only 63 cases in those 5 years, and that most cases were for selling steroids online or in the context of other criminalized substance convictions. (Decrim now for all drugs, including testosterone-check out this resource to learn more about decrim)

So, what that means is that the legal risk for buying DIY testosterone is relatively quite low, but it is still good practice to be intentional and considerate about what information you share publically, especially if you live in a state with gender-affirming care bans. To reduce risk, it can help to share information privately among trans circles, not admit DIY HRT use to any law enforcement, and not bring unprescribed testosterone through security checkpoints on planes, for example. We don't really know how new transphobic laws are going to affect prosecution right now, so it's good to be cautious without fearmongering or overexaggerating risk.

Miscellaneous

Regular blood testing is a good way to keep an eye out for any medical complications and also adjust dosage when needed. For intersex people, much of the available information online about DIY HRT is likely relevant to us, although we might have some additional needs or concerns. There isn't any widely available data that really explores what gender-affirming HRT looks like for us, but anecdotal community evidence suggests that we usually get all the same effects, but will often experience a different timeline than dyadic trans people. Depending on our variation, we might need a lower dose than dyadic trans people because of our existing hormone levels. Blood tests can help track our levels and signify to us if our dosage is too high and our testosterone is converting to estrogen, for example. When doing DIY HRT as an intersex person, it can be important to research the other medications we might be on and understand the role they play. If we are already on an anti-androgen medication, that's really important info to know before adding more HRT.

Overall I want to link this harm reduction guide specifically for HRT, and just affirm that DIY HRT has a long history in trans communities, and that this is something we have always done. HRT is absolutely not a necessity to be valid as a trans person and there are so many ways to exist as trans. However, it's important for us to acknowledge that DIY HRT is a method of HRT that can sometimes be more accessible for us, and that it's important for us to have access to accurate information that helps us make decisions about what's right for us. hormones are fun and fabulous and i support trans people getting them in whatever way works for us!

reblogging so the actual post shows up in the notes even with the links :D

Saw a post like this with negative outlook so I asked for it to be fixed

Controversial Truths About Ancient Egypt Masterpost

I can’t believe I forgot my favourite Hill to Die On

Hats off to the few of you who’re reblogging this with tags saying you’re going to check my claims later. You make me not entirely despair of this hellhole.

Here are some vetted Egyptological books/sources (that are by and large appropriate for a lay-audience) you can find most, if not all of the above:

Guys do me a solid and reblog this version instead of continuously asking for sources on the other versions thanks

You’re doing the good work, friend.

ok but can we go back to the ancient erotica pls

We sure can!

University of Chicago made a free tool to mask your art from AI generators.

Edit: Cool that this left out the link when I first posted this. Very cool. Very useful.

- A Psalm for the Wild-Built, Becky Chambers // kagonekoshiro

The tweet: https://twitter.com/Lionhearted_ben/status/1629919975203848192?t=HfF1j3BVqZMgZEIHgVnz3w&s=19

And in case Twitter is being a fool, here's the PDF itself: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PiO5JAc2_erXL9rEPU-Gj4DXQ3N0dTbe/view

Shout-out to a friend for showing me this!!

I completed tattoo certification in Portland, Oregon this past year! “ @punchbowlfrog ” is a new account on which I will be sharing many of my tattoos and tattoo art ideas. @punchbowlfrog here and punchbowl.frog on Instagram!