Blog on Michaela Sue writes posts

My dream...

Fri, 01 May 2026 08:51:02 -0500

My dream, naturally, is to develop an especially simple way to measure manganese and market it as ManganEasy!

(All my business ideas are really just puns)

Circular gradients with central focal points

Thu, 30 Apr 2026 21:56:06 -0500

When OpenAI’s sphincter-like logo became successful, it created a template that said, “This is what serious AI looks like.” Now, any new AI company that doesn’t resemble a colorful anatomical opening risks being seen as unserious or unprofessional.

Why do AI company logos look like buttholes?

Proactive

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:16:37 -0500

Lots of people study reactive oxygen species. My dream, obviously, is to discover a proactive oxygen species.

Why I'm not in charge of things

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 13:10:19 -0500

We have a mentor/mentee seminar series. If I was in charge—and this is why they don’t put me in charge of things—we’d have a mentor/mentos/mentee/manatee seminar!

Sharing jokes

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 13:05:33 -0500

I saw a goofy joke about polyamory online and realized that being in a polycule means I always have several people I can share goofy polyamory jokes with!

Doomsday Clock Artist-In-Residence

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 19:46:14 -0600

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is proud to announce the appointment of Kronos Quartet as its first ever Doomsday Clock Artist-in-Residence.

The Bulletin’s post

I guess I just never imagined a “Doomsday Clock” artist-in-residence, the world is, as always, full of surprises.

"Transcritical" Meaning Thermodynamics

Sun, 27 Jul 2025 18:05:45 -0500

Having an interest in refrigeration in general I’ve sort of wondered how R-744, carbon dioxide works in more detail since it’s going to end up being a supercritical fluid in at least part of the cycle.

Turns out this is described as a “transcritical cycle” and I’m just really pleased to be seeing “transcritical” meaning something thermodynamic rather than an attack on human rights, happiness, and flourishing!

So anyway the carbon dioxide ends up above the critical temperature and pressure and rejects heat as a supercritical fluid before being brought down below the critical pressure and turned into a liquid and gas mix, the liquid sent to the evaporator(s) for cooling and the gas passing directly back to the compressor.

The Sun Moved Back

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 21:13:34 -0500

I wrote this on 2024-10-18:

This time of year there is a short bit of road on my drive to work where, if the sky is clear, I get the bright rising sun glaring into my peripheral vision from the left and the bright reflected sun off the windows of a building glaring into my peripheral vision from the right! It’s an experience!

That stopped after a few weeks when the whole thing with the seasons caused the sun to be rising farther to the south and no longer lining up. But now, it’s back! The sun is moving back the other way, due to the seasons thing!

This is one of the most predictable things in the world and yet it’s still an amazing new thing every time!

The Two Sides Of Tumblr

Sun, 09 Mar 2025 20:25:44 -0500

The two sides of Tumblr are like, Queer Tumblr is

you are a ✨valid✨ queer person even if you have long hair

and Horny Tumblr is…stuff…like…

everyone’s always like ohhh the bottoms sexual fantasies are always so fucking compilated and convoluted they always wanna be like some kind of European wild hamster digging through the undergrowth and you have to be the relentless bird of prey that is hovering over their den and ready to strike with deadly talons, and maybe the bed is a sand dune thats allows for the predator to take maximum advantage of the terrain. What about the top’s fantasies huh when does the top have something to say about all this. Sometimes I wanna be President Nixon in the last days of the administration and someone else is Erlichmann showing ass to comfort me. sometimes the top wants to get weirdly specific with it too okay

PZL Mielec M-15

Tue, 11 Feb 2025 19:15:57 -0600

From Alexander the ok:

Again, I do feel that once you’re fitting thrust reversers onto your crop duster, it’s probably time to take a step backward and ask yourself what you’re trying to achieve.

Of all the aircraft ever designed the M-15 was certainly one of them

New Moon

Thu, 30 Jan 2025 19:49:30 -0600

Newest sliver of new moon that I’ve seen in a long time!

A Dream of Talking To Mom

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 19:47:18 -0600

Mostly, any locations in my dreams that are recognizably real places are from my childhood, by far the most common recognizably real-life people are my parents, and very little that is recognizably from the recent real-world makes it into my dreams. Even now there have only been a couple dreams in which respirators make any appearance. Even the place I’ve now lived in for 29 years is a very rare setting compared to my childhood bedroom. Mostly, my dream locations and dream characters are not apparently drawn from real life at all.

But I am a woman in my dreams now whenever anything makes it apparent if I am or not. I never was in pre-transition days.

I had a really amazing dream last night. I was sitting on the family room couch in my childhood home, with my dad (who died in 2004) sitting at the other end of the couch. My mom (who died in 2017) was doing some sort of minor cleaning in the room while I talked to her. Dusting furniture that has now been in my living room since about 2000. I was telling her that living as a woman is wonderful, and I wondered what it might have been like to have been able to grow up as a girl. What things might she have taught me, what things might we have done together?

It was a really nice dream.

Fire Extinguisher Collector

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 19:42:17 -0600

So I was watching this YouTube video of a guy showing off his fire extinguisher collection, because I love looking at people’s collections. It then dawned on me, huh, fire extinguisher collectors, I hadn’t really thought about it but I’m sure there’s a whole community, complete with weird drama and everything. I’m not judging, not only did I watch the video, I have, for example, a collection of radioactive items, I understand weird collections.

After going through all the fire extinguishers on display in his display case, he moves on to showing the various extinguishers that are in working order and scattered around his house for use in case there’s a fire. I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise that a fire extinguisher collector is very prepared for fire, has a lot of fire extinguishers all around his home. But, uh, I looked up at the fire extinguisher I have in view of where I was sitting and remembered that if I lean forward there’s another one at the other side of the room, and there’s two others in two other rooms. It’s not a very big apartment. Maybe I’m on track to become a fire extinguisher collector myself?

Wine Inna Box

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 15:04:58 -0600

I took the week of Christmas off from work and I bought a box-o-wine since I figured, living in Wisconsin, I’d want to drink. I used to buy bag-in-a-box wine quite a bit but more recently I have not because I’m not drinking as much as I used to. (I’m happier now, as a girl.)

So anyway as I got toward the end of it I experienced that box wine problem, trying to get the last of the wine out of the bladder. It’s as if the wine has prostate problems!

You are welcome, for this observation. I’m here to help.

On Rereading the Morgaine Stories

Mon, 30 Dec 2024 09:51:47 -0600

After reading Maya Deane’s Wrath Goddess Sing and realizing that reading novels feels different to me now, I pulled my very yellowed copy of C.J. Cherryh’s Gate of Ivrel off the shelf just to see what I thought of it now.

I feel emotions now, on estrogen, in a way I never did before in my life, so that’s one thing that makes reading stories feel very different from before. Also, it’s been probably near 35 years since I’d read Gate of Ivrel and it’s interesting how while I remember the general concept of the series I remember very very little of the specifics after all these years! And now I’m part way into Well of Shiuan.

I remember liking the Morgaine stories, but I think now I’m realizing why in a way I did not understand as a teen.

Vanye did not exactly have a happy childhood, did not get along well with people generally, and ends up forced out entirely alone, where he meets Morgaine, who is completely alone. They end up setting off together and barely talk to each other, and Morgaine pretty well never explains anything to him, he can only obey whatever scattered instructions she gives him. Along the way here and there they’ll meet someone whose life is going downhill so fast they feel that joining this pair is their best option, going on some painful, frightening mission that they don’t understand.

That is to say, it felt very realistic! Just like real life! The usual stories always had all these people constantly talking to the protagonist, telling them stuff. Totally unlike how real life worked for me. I assumed it was a story-telling thing, you have this very unrealistic thing of everyone talking to the main character constantly, and maybe all the characters always talking to each other, so that the reader has something to read.

Now, as a woman, people actually do talk to me, tell me what’s going on. It’s very strange to suddenly realize that maybe the part of the story where people are telling each other what’s going on was not meant to be basically like the part of the story with the dragons, as far as how similar to the reader’s real life it is.

commemorative experiment

Sun, 22 Dec 2024 20:36:25 -0600

Wake up babe, new Carl Willis video just dropped

Fission products: a commemorative experiment

A Visit to Argonne

Sat, 21 Dec 2024 11:54:33 -0600

A long time ago, when I was still a kid of some age I don’t remember with any accuracy, but it had to have been before high school, as part of some sort of organized program that was probably a summer sciencey thing of some kind, our class went to Argonne National Laboratory in suburban Chicagoland (not far from my home at the time) and we got to see a research reactor there. Now and then I remember this and wonder which reactor that was exactly.

I was looking at some Argonne history recently and tried to figure it out, and I think it had to have been Juggernaut. It was built in 1962 and shut down in 1970, and I wasn’t even born yet then, but it wasn’t dismantled until 2004. It would have had to have been idle for something over a decade if it was what I saw. My hazy memory is that they said it wasn’t being used anymore. They also said it contained graphite blocks reused from the very first (human made!) nuclear reactor, Chicago Pile 1. Juggernaut, indeed, contained graphite from CP-1. Memory is hazy after all these years, but I think this photo looks about right. I remember our teacher went up to the upper level to take a look at the top, but we could not because although the radiation level up there was very low the rules for exposing children to radiation for no good reason are very strict.

Lots of detail about Juggernaut: Design Summary Report On The Juggernaut Reactor

An old overview of operations of several reactors at Argonne: History of Argonne Reactor Operations

Period Piece

Sun, 15 Dec 2024 17:08:19 -0600

If you don’t feel quite like watching a period drama, perhaps you can find a semicolon piece instead.

Youtube will recommend anything at this point

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 20:04:18 -0600

I was looking through my Youtube recommendations and saw a video titled “Youtube Will recommend anything at this point” so I had to watch it:

https://youtu.be/6qrOmM6Wt4c

Things of The Year

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 08:34:38 -0600

hot take

Posted 5 December 2024 by Natalie

December should not be the month for talking about “X of the year” or “Y wrapped” or anything like that. All those discussions and summaries should happen in January. The year is not over yet. Get your act together

It’s even worse than that, I feel that it’s like Christmas, gradually creeping earlier and earlier in the year! I saw end-of-the-year-wrap-ups back in November! Soon, like Christmas, the end of the year will be co-existing with Halloween!

Trip Thoughts

Sun, 08 Dec 2024 00:00:00 -0600

Last week I drove around an hour and a half into the suburbs of the city just over the state line for a work thing. Back pre-COVID I drove into and through that area all the time, but since early 2020 I’ve only been around there once in summer and this second time now. It’s funny driving the very very familiar highways again after all this time.

The last time I did a work trip of this sort was pre-COVID, something like six plus years ago, and it’s interesting to think about how things have changed. I was well into transition then, but I had not done any sort of body modification so I had a weird honorary-woman status that went really well for me but was always a bit unpredictable and I was always nervous about how people might react to me. So I remember deciding what to wear for one event, wanting to be nicely dressed up like some sort of serious professional, but also wanting to be careful to not be too weirdly visible, avoid attracting too much attention. I was never very good at estimating how that might work out. I certainly could see how women dress for such things, but there were not exactly examples of professional dress, feminine version, but for people with beards. That was just me.

So I decided that I’m not obligated to be maximally bold at all times, I wore pants instead of a dress, tried to be a little less visible. And then in typical fashion for trying to be less conspicuous, had a relatively baffling encounter with the cleaning guy apparently being very surprised to see me washing my hands in the men’s room. And then two women organizing the event would be on stage wearing bright floral-print dresses and I felt like maybe I was drabber than I needed to be, although again aware that it worked differently for them.

These days picking out clothes feels a lot easier. It feels amazing to be able to just do the usual things other people do and have that seen as just totally ordinary.

I’m also gradually unlearning the lifetime of social anxiety now that interacting with people goes so nicely and so easily. Everything is nicer but traveling to some event and meeting people is just so much easier now. I’m also starting to understand how now as a woman I’m usually much more an actual part of a group discussion, get real turns to speak, am no longer trying to slip in a few words here and there in gaps hoping I won’t be too disruptive but trying to at least participate in some way.

Have to wonder what it would have been like to live all these last decades like this.

Wrath Goddess Sing, and books in general now

Sun, 01 Dec 2024 15:54:15 -0600

I finished reading Maya Deane’s Wrath Goddess Sing and it’s a heck of book, loved it, can’t recommend it enough.

I think this is the first novel I’ve read in a long time. I’ve got shelves full of the usual fantasy and sci-fi novels I read in the late eighties and early nineties. Looking through them now, quite a few written by women, for some reason (some reason) I guess their books appealed to me back then.

I didn’t get to talk to people a lot earlier in life. It was hard to pretend to be a boy, and I wasn’t very good at it. (I had no idea how bad at it I was until now looking back!) I suppose I always sort of assumed the novel thing where everyone is always talking to the protagonist, telling them stuff, was just a writing trope. Gives the reader something to read. It’s how you write a story. But really the part of the fantasy novel where the protagonist is talking to other people was similar to the part with the dragons or the time travel gates or whatever, depending on the story.

Now, as a woman, I actually talk with people. All the time. It’s weirdly easy. People at work keep me informed, tell me stuff, seek out my input, credit me for my contributions, and just hang out and chat with me sometimes. Women just…say things to me these days, since I’m a woman too. And I can just…respond, it’s weirdly easy now that I can just relax and ‘be myself’ and somehow as a girl being myself goes over well.

So, that part of the story feels so much more realistic now! Like maybe that talking to each other thing wasn’t really meant to be part of the “fantasy” part of the fantasy novel!

Also, I have emotions now, on estrogen. Like, yeah, I always had emotions, to a degree, sometimes. I could sure as hell feel anger and people made goddamn sure I felt fear sometimes. But I wasn’t reading a novel, or looking at a painting at the art museum, and feeling strong emotions. If I was feeling strong emotions it was because something fucking bad was happening to me. It is such a different experience. I had all these feelings reading this book. And now curious, I found my old, very yellowing copy of C. J. Cherryh’s Gate of Ivrel and now forty-odd pages into rereading it I’m pretty sure it did not fucking feel like this reading it the first time decades ago. Did cis people feel emotions reading novels when they were teens?

The general concept of Wrath Goddess Sing is it is a story set in the world of the Iliad, the Trojan War. Our protagonist, Achilles, is a trans woman in this story. For me, as a trans woman, this is an extremely interesting story, and Maya Deane is a trans woman, this was written by one of us. And wow does it show.

And so Odysseus tracks her down and finds out she’s a girl now, and drags her off to war as in the older story. Honestly the reactions people have to her being a girl now in the book feel so much like the reactions I get, people vary, but, mostly, people have heard of this, oh, one of those people.

She meets a ton of people in the run-up to the war, and, again, now that I talk to people, feels pretty realistic. And, yes, the thing where she’s trans and meets so many people who knew her in the old days, I am old and have a long history full of people who knew me in my old days, and her meetings feel not just possible but entirely realistic, relatable, even familiar. There’s the people who were terrible to her. A lot of us, we were bad a pretending to be boys, and there were guys around us who were downright eager to volunteer to take on the task of making sure we knew, good and hard, that we were not doing it right. And others who were not terrible. Maybe you wish they could have actually defended you, but at least they didn’t join in on calling you slurs, better than the rest anyway. People who didn’t know her. People who didn’t know her back in the old days and honestly she’s not sure if anyone at some point mentioned her past to them or not. That’s an interesting situation, when you don’t know if someone you are getting to know better knows. Should you mention it? Is it better not to? It’s not at all clear what the best choice is sometimes. There’s the guy who fucking wants to talk about genitals. I’m going to remember her response to that, I might use it someday. Make them regret bringing it up! Somewhere in there was a scene in which someone said, I don’t remember exactly what it was, ’that thing,’ to her, I’ve been there, someone said exactly that thing to me, I too had to decide what to say in response, and now the demigoddess Achilles also has to pick from the range of possible responses! The fun knowing jokes with real friends, about how you somehow happen to know certain things, or your abilities as a shape-shifter. (Back at one time I was not much of a shape-shifter at all, and then, somehow, I suddenly became a very good one, I have no idea how to express how weird and amazing that is. Achilles had a goddess help her out in the story, I mostly had my electrologist, it’s not the same magic but it’s magic all the same.)

This novel is very fantasy, very supernatural. It is not at all a sort of lightly fictionalized memoir of growing up in Joliet, Illinois in the late nineteen-eighties. And yet, for all the gods and goddesses showing up in this story, it’s the first one I’ve ever read where I’ve been thinking, oh, I’ve been there! I know what that fucking feels like! I’ve had to come up with a response to that, what response is our protagonist going to have! It’s genuinely weird for such a very fantasy story to be by far the most specifically familiar, relatable one I’ve ever read in my life.

UPS

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 19:15:21 -0600

We had a power failure the other day (car crashed into the pole!) and the five-year-old APC UPS on my computer only had a couple minutes of battery. The sealed lead-acid batteries aren’t really expected to last any longer than 3-5 years so that’s not unreasonable. I ordered a replacement and installed it today, seems to be working fine again. I decided to just order the “official” replacement pair of 12V batteries linked together into a 24V pair with connectors and straps to lift them out of the well in the UPS and so on for $100 instead of trying to be creative because it’s just not worth it to me. For the Linux people like me, you want to then stop the apcupsd service and run apctest as root to reset the date on the battery and run the battery calibration and the the self-test, then restart the daemon.

just one month before

Sun, 24 Nov 2024 19:11:11 -0600

I just saw another Facebook “memory” from literally a month before what I later came to think of as my “coming out” as some sort of trans, in which I was saying something like “as a man, (I identify as a man, seriously I do) I just don’t understand…” and like, sweetie, dear, really, you’re a girl. Really you are.

Being social

Sun, 17 Nov 2024 11:52:51 -0600

The local filk gang has been holding basement gatherings and I went last night. It’s a group that is at least aware that COVID exists, and while it’s the worst air quality room I’ve spent any significant time in since pre-COVID days, they do require a negative COVID test before attending. I’m pretty sure I’m the only one using a nucleic acid amplification test (I use Metrix) and a negative on a rapid antigen test is pretty meaningless, but at least we’re trying to avoid people who are just obviously ill showing up, which is more than pretty much anyone else is doing, and I wear a Flo Mask and bring my portable Clean Air Kits Exhalaron air filter and friends don’t hassle me about it.

Also bonus to wearing the Flo Mask is I could play with these adorable kitties without any allergy problems!

Anyway it’s super nice to actually see people and get to chat in person and to hug friends, it’s really nice to get some touch. And hang out with one of my old trans friends from way back and have that kind of chat you can have with someone who really knows.

And of course singing, I’ve been away from it for a while. Aside from needing more practice making music I’ve realized I used to try to sing as far down toward the bottom of my range as I could, because, uh, you know, but as a woman now I don’t really want to do that so I’ve been doing some exploring of where in the range I want things.

It was super nice to hear some songs I hadn’t heard in a long long time, and do some singing again. I think everything I sang was written by Cat Faber, what can I say, she’s written a lot of good ones, everyone likes them!

Nonbianry Heterosexualty?

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 22:20:15 -0600

So this video, Theories of Nonbinary Heterosexuality, Carson Olshansky is hilarious.

I always feel a bit uncertain about how to relate to this sort of thing, because, after, uh, literally a decade now of trying transition stuff, I guess I’ve figured out that I’m pretty much a woman. We women, we are all unique individuals, though, to be fair, some of us, maybe more “unique” than others… But also I spent much of the first Trump administration (fucking hell I have to say which one) going about life as, I’m just gonna say it, a dude in a dress, so, like, I’ve got some very real genderqueer enby experience.

Also a reminder that I guess I’ve never kissed a boy. I mean, I’m basically a lesbian, but, like, if you are a queer boy who has known me a while and might want to kiss a queer trans girl, like, if you asked nicely I’d consider it…

Next up

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 20:16:04 -0600

Sick of all these watch repair channels

Posted 14 November 2024 by Natalie

sick of all these watch repair channels. I want to watch someone fuck a watch up in new and inventive ways

This is much funnier than it ought to be!

“Next up on Wristwatch Rev—no, wait, it actually says “revile.” Uh, next up on Wristwatch Revile, I guess we’re gonna fuck this sucker up!”

Some clothing for the colder weather

Thu, 14 Nov 2024 18:20:16 -0600

One thing about winter is a short skirt becomes modesty when worn over leggings!

This cozy turtleneck also seems to tend to emphasize that the hormones fairy has been pretty good to me!

Additionally, dig the curls responding to rain all day:

Remembering Seven Years Ago

Tue, 12 Nov 2024 19:17:02 -0600

I saw a Facebook memory from seven years ago about my trip to Arizona to take care of things when my mother died. By then I was far enough into transition to be wearing dresses at work and so I had decisions to make about how visible I was going to while traveling and in unfamiliar places, and I figured it would be easier to dial back on the femininity and attract less attention.

And then I had a series of mostly basically nice, occasionally confusing, sometimes baffling, experiences in which I was clearly getting noticed. I was not very good at boy mode, and honestly had rather little idea how people perceived me. I guess if you have long hair, wear a floral print shirt and bright colored pants, carry a purse, and have a beard, you still get noticed, even if back at work I’d probably be wearing a dress and compared to that I felt like I was being much more careful. I figured wearing a dress at the airport would be taunting the TSA! But I still got a comment expressing some sort of surprise (though no actual problems going through).

I’d look at the other women around me and not really know what to expect my experiences might be like. As much as the Tumblr enbies wanted to insist that “passing” is bullshit, and as complicated a thing as it is, it still is really a thing. The cis women around me overwhelmingly got seen differently from me, that one guy who was so feminine he was more-or-less an honorary woman. And now that as far as I can tell I’m nearly always seen as an actual woman rather than a man who is sort of an honorary woman, I can tell you, it really is a different experience. As well as the honorary woman experience went for me, it’s a different experience.

Markdown

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 08:34:08 -0600

I don’t think I’ve ever written a link in markdown correctly on the first try. It’s brackets and then parentheses, because it’s backwards from what you might think from the usual precedence, right? First the link then the text, or the other way around?

The Sun Has Moved

Fri, 08 Nov 2024 08:26:27 -0600

I wrote this on 2024-10-18:

This time of year there is a short bit of road on my drive to work where, if the sky is clear, I get the bright rising sun glaring into my peripheral vision from the left and the bright reflected sun off the windows of a building glaring into my peripheral vision from the right! It’s an experience!

We’ve had some clear mornings lately and I noticed I was not being blasted by the sun from both sides like this, and it’s because of the whole thing with the seasons and now the sun is rising farther to the south and it doesn’t line up with the windows like that anymore!

Thinking about my reactions to movies and books

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 17:46:05 -0600

I’ve long had a bunch of unwatched or just very partly watched DVDs and Blurays and I’ve been thinking about what I find uncomfortable about watching movies, but I’ve gotten a bit sidetracked because I finished I Saw the TV Glow and that’s a heck of an emotional experience for a trans person. I’ve also started reading Wrath Goddess Sing.

I keep saying it’s an amazing joy to be able to feel emotions now, on HRT, in a way I never did before in my life, and I am still getting used to it. Something I noticed fairly early on was having very strong feelings listening to songs that have long been familiar. That’s now become a familiar and treasured thing. But I think it’s one thing to have these feelings listening to a four-minute song with lyrics I memorized decades ago, now experiencing an hour-and-twenty minute movie by a trans woman telling a trans story and just designed to induce strong feelings in trans viewers, this is a different thing. I’m not used to this. It’s an intense experience. And similarly now about 50 pages into a 450 page trans story by a trans author.

Really in the previous decades of my life, I only felt this sort of emotional intensity when something bad was happening to me, or something dangerous, or at the least frightening. I’m still learning to understand the feelings. It’s still new to me. It’s amazing, it’s so amazing, things I never experienced, never imagined earlier in my life.

Surprised by the dark

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 14:41:53 -0500

I went into my closet and turned on the light and … no light! I was mystified. I flipped the switch up and down, wondered if the power had failed and looked back into the room to see that the rest of the lights were on, and then I realized that probably the bulb had failed.

I grew up with incandescent bulbs, they failed all the time, I don’t remember it being a surprise or a mystery. Flip switch, no light, oh, bulb burned out. These days, it doesn’t happen very often, and every time I’m weirdly confused that the light isn’t working for some unknown reason!

I climbed up and removed the globe, which very much needed cleaning, and found an old tiny spiral-tube compact fluorescent that must have been in there for a long long time now. I often write the date of installation on bulbs and batteries but didn’t on that one, unfortunately. It’s got an LED now!

The complexity of sound transmission

Fri, 01 Nov 2024 12:10:18 -0500

From Energy Vanguard, Soundproofing a Wall - The Basics

Sound is a wave. Unlike light or magnetism, this kind of wave needs physical matter, a medium, through which to travel. That property of sound waves, of course, led to the brilliant tagline for the 1979 movie, Alien: “In space, no one can hear you scream.” There’s nothing to vibrate and carry the sound waves in space; hence, no sound transmission.

So, the best way to reduce sound transmission would be to live in a vacuum. You’d have a short life but you wouldn’t be bothered by noise. In addition to being dead, you’d also be broke because turning your house into a vacuum chamber wouldn’t be cheap. Therefore, I’m going to take a leap and assume the vacuum technique won’t work for you.

So a bunch of actually useful information follows this.

Your boobs called

Tue, 29 Oct 2024 19:24:03 -0500

Due to having purchased some items in the past I’m now getting marking e-mail with subject lines like “your boobs called.”

Over the course of my life, I’ve been subjected to a lot of advertising that one way or another evoked breasts, but now I’m a woman (I mean, kind of always was but it’s different now) who in fact has breasts (that’s one of the differences) and this was an ad for bras, which I do in fact buy.

It feels weird for this blatant message about boobs to actually be a pretty reasonable, pragmatic thing. You know, I’m a runner, maybe I want to buy a sports bra? I have a growing collection of bras, having growing breasts.

How high?

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 15:42:08 -0500

what is the highest floor of a building that you have ever been on?

many reasons it would be nice to have comments here but one reason in particular right here right now is because i want to know: what is the highest floor of a building that you have ever been on? if it is the top floor of a skyscraper and… then what is the second highest floor. or, alternatively, the highest floor of a building you have been on for a reason that is not “going to a high floor in a building”.

This is a great question! Back in college I lived on the 13th floor of a building. We had many a false fire alarm (college students….) and so many trips down and back up the stairs. It was, if I remember correctly, a 16 story building so I might have at some point been up a bit higher for some reason.

I’ve been to the observation deck of the Sears (or whatever now) Tower, the John Hancock tower, whatever floor the tourist thing at the top of the Eiffel Tower counts as, been up to the top of that weird arch in St. Louis, lots of weird high places purely to go up and look around (after paying the fee…) but as far as going up to some high-ish floor of a building because I had some reason to go to some office up there and not as a tourist thing, it’s hard to say. I don’t remember the floor but back pre-pandemic I did one time visit someone who lived a good ways up, probably was well higher than 13th floor, might very well have been the highest floor I’ve been on for a reason other than just to look.

There’s lots of fourth floor, sixth floor type heights at work. The one building has a weird ninth floor meeting room with an outdoor deck, sometimes one department or another holds a sort of party up there, putting that in a weird zone between being at work but also it’s edging closer to being up there for the view.

When Home Goes Read-Only

Sun, 27 Oct 2024 15:06:43 -0500

This is quite a post

When the site closed, everyone kinda scattered. Some set up their own blogs and sites, some went to Bluesky, some are just gone forever. Everyone carried a handful of folks they met on the site forward with them through various means. Some of those connections might last a bit, some might well last forever, and some are already lost in the wind.

It is a thing now that someone I’d see a couple posts a day from on cohost I’ll now see a post a week from, it’s great to still see them but it’s different.

Thinking about growing up unknowingly trans

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 19:00:00 -0500

One of the things about transitioning has been feeling things I didn’t expect, didn’t previously understand. Learning about myself.

It was so amazing when I first started expressing any sort of femininity how it felt like I was, somehow, finally, doing the same things as the other people around me always had been, as if somehow I was allowed to be ’normal,’ too. I started to realize how much I really somehow felt the (other) women around me were somehow ‘my group’ that I was supposed to be part of. Unfortunately, I couldn’t be, really, earlier in life. More recently on HRT and having gotten near the end of electrolysis on my face, again it’s amazing how much I feel like I just sort of look ’normal’ like the other people (women) do. I did look ’normal’ as a guy, I understood that thinking about it, but only now do I really understand how I didn’t feel that at all. Only now that I do feel it do I even know what it is to feel it. I never knew you could feel it like this.

I remember lots of things from high school, I have some memories of the middle school years, 6th through 8th grade, when I was, well, the only way I even know is I was 17 when I graduated high school, so (I had three years in high school for reasons) 14 at the end of 8th grade, so 11 when I entered the new school in 6th grade. And here and there just scattered fragments of memories from earlier.

I wonder now what some of those early experiences were. The ones outside of memory.

Thinking about it now it seems like I must have tried joining in on whatever the other kids, meaning the other girls of course, were doing and that didn’t make people happy. If I was many decades younger, a kid now, probably people around me would recognize what was going on, for better or for worse, but in nineteen-seventy-something probably no one had a clue, and certainly no one told me anything I was able to understand in any useful way. So I guess what I learned was not really so much that I was looking to the wrong people as much as that I shouldn’t look to other people at all, that I was supposed to do what I was told to do and ignore the other people doing their other-people things for whatever mysterious other-people reasons they had. It’s not like anyone was going to explain what they were doing or why, it was all just an unknowable mystery. And I imagine the adults were not unhappy with me coming to the conclusion that the one key to getting along in life was to do whatever they told me to do.

I switched schools going from 5th to 6th grade. I didn’t have great expectations for how things might go in the longer term, but I really wondered what the short term would hold, what it would be like to be a new kid who no one knew. Would people talk to me? At first at least? Maybe in time they’d decide they didn’t want to anymore, but surely the first few weeks or maybe months would be different from before, with people not knowing me yet, not having an opinion about me yet.

Didn’t work that way, was exactly as always right from the first instant. Looking back, I’m sure I wasn’t any good at talking to people, I’d never had any practice, after all. And I wonder what sort of a weird mix of personality I might have had. I probably knew a few dozen things I was supposed to do, knew of a dozen things that I shouldn’t do because they were ‘girl things,’ and then had a million other things I was entirely unaware of, that I would have picked up unconsciously from the girls, but of course not as part of friendships with other girls but only what I noticed from a distance. I’m sure it was special.

I went to a residential nerd high school (the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy) and I actually talked to people, had friends, and even dated. We didn’t describe ourselves as autistic back in the late eighties, but I think it’s fair to suggest it was not uncommon. It was a very different environment from when I was younger, and I probably changed a lot, and similarly in college, and things seemed to be going fine for me as an adult.

When I began experimenting with a social transition, wearing ever more overtly feminine clothing while not changing anything about my body other than letting my hair grow long, eventually typically wearing dresses while still having a beard, I was of course surprised to not really get any harassment. But I was more surprised that what I really experienced, on the whole, was people being friendlier, nicer, and politer to me as as an obviously genderqueer person than they were when I was ostensibly a straight dude. I’d have all these nice little social interactions with women, I’d get those little compliments women give each other, about my hair or clothes. Aside from the constant worry that at some point I’d run into someone overtly hostile (which happened an amazingly small number of times, but more than zero) I worried that even if someone wasn’t overtly hostile they’d maybe ignore me, not help me, not take me seriously, but, again, honestly it felt like people treated me better than I’d been used to. People noticed me, everywhere I went people remembered me, but it never felt like it was in a bad way.

I’ve become a great deal less visible, a great deal less memorable, since the start of the pandemic, when, with my face covered, people just switched from “sir” to “ma’am.” It’s taken a long time for me to really get used to it, to really believe it. It’s weirdly comfortable. I get to just be like the other people, as if I’m allowed to be normal, too, and to go almost unnoticed as some ordinary person, no longer noticed everywhere as someone boldly doing ‘other-person things.’ It’s been hard to get over the lifetime of anxiety about talking with people even as I discover it’s weirdly easy now. It’s amazing to realize I can relax and act natural and people around me are not just willing to tolerate that but it goes much better than anything before.

The real mystery to me is that everyone knows men get taken more seriously than women. And yet, things are going great for me at work, first as by far the most visible gender weirdo around, and even more now, as a woman who is widely known to be trans since so many people know me from the old days. I’m being kept informed about stuff, I’m being asked for my input. I do science, and in the core lab mostly we do fairly routine work. Now and then I’ve been named in the little acknowledgments bit at the end of a paper. From time to time I’m more involved in a project and am one of the coauthors. That is a far more significant credit. When I look at how many papers I’m a coauthor on under my new name, which I only started using professionally early last year, and under my old name, which I used the previous 27 years I’ve been working in the labs, it sure doesn’t look like I’m not getting taken seriously or given credit. If anything, I’m getting taken more seriously, getting more credit.

So, what did people see me as in the old days? I suspect it was pretty variable, and people who actually knew me might have had different impressions from first impressions. People who knew me at work maybe different from people who knew me outside of work. Some of the weirder or more frightening experiences in life might have been from people who saw me as some sort of queer, with me having had no idea that might be a thing. I understood myself as shy and awkward, but maybe I was a lot more awkward than I realized. Probably you don’t get great results if your big lesson from childhood was that you shouldn’t look at how other people act, shouldn’t imagine you can do as they do. And if you’ve learned not to look to the examples of others then whatever you experience is what it is, nothing to meaningfully compare it to.

All quiet in the mass spectrometry lab

Wed, 23 Oct 2024 13:50:10 -0500

They are shutting the power down briefly in the building my lab is in early tomorrow morning for work related to the new building construction. In preparation we have shut down and vented all the mass spectrometers. It is so weird for the mass spectrometry lab to be quiet! No vacuum pumps! No fans! No recirculating chillers! Very weird!

Hopefully everything powers back up successfully tomorrow morning!

The waning egg days

Mon, 21 Oct 2024 14:04:32 -0500

I had a Facebook “memory” from ten years ago in which I described joking about business casual dress saying I’d wear a skirt, but probably people would have a problem with that, too.

I was really getting like that, around then. It was only a few months later I decided I really was trans enough to try some transition things.

Also, turned out I could just show up at work wearing skirts and dresses and such an everyone was fine with it. I was not expecting it to go like that!

Sociable Web

Sat, 19 Oct 2024 19:29:53 -0500

This is a wonderful post from Natalie Weizenbaum

A Sociable Web

It’s a truism that you can’t solve social problems with technology, but social media has made it just as clear that technology does shape the social dynamics that emerge in the spaces it mediates. This drives me to wonder: as more of my friends and friends-of-friends move to individual websites and blogs, what social dynamics does this give rise to? And what different technical designs could improve those dynamics?

I think it’s most interesting to approach this question from the social direction rather than the technological. Our first priority should be a set of social goals for interacting on the internet, and only with that understanding firmly in hand can we start usefully interrogating the way technology gives rise to or fights against the sort of interactions we want. My ultimate aim is to articulate a clear vision of a way to interact with people’s websites that’s not just a pastime or a research process, but that can meet social needs—to imagine what I’ll call a “sociable web”.

Signs of Fall

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 21:30:29 -0500

At work the landscape contractor has shown up with one of those towed air compressors to blow the water out of the underground sprinkler system before winter. It’s kinda fun to see bits of the process, air and water mist blowing out of the sprinkler heads. I was out for a walk after lunch in the usually warm afternoon and saw one of the guys working on that, said it’s a sign winter is coming, when they are out doing this job.

Some people have underground sprinkler systems at home for their yards, do you have to hire a landscape contractor in fall to blow them out? I never thought about that when I was a kid! We didn’t have one of those systems but some of the neighbors did. I never saw them being “winterized” though.

Sun from both sides

Fri, 18 Oct 2024 08:20:00 -0500

This time of year there is a short bit of road on my drive to work where, if the sky is clear, I get the bright rising sun glaring into my peripheral vision from the left and the bright reflected sun off the windows of a building glaring into my peripheral vision from the right! It’s an experience!

Seasons

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 19:12:00 -0500

I saw the full moon in the dark sky out the window, when I woke up well before sunrise this morning. It was -1°C outside. Just one month ago I saw the previous full moon while out camping, in much, much warmer weather! The daytime was longer back then, a month ago! It was warm enough to see my bare tits in moonlight!

Seasons!

nope

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 18:40:00 -0500

New US Chemical Safety Board video dropped!

I have to say I feel a low level of enthusiasm for torquing down bolts on a thing made out of graphite while it’s filled with pressurized HCl gas, and I wouldn’t really want to be nearby on a little work platform 70 feet off the ground while someone else does it!

No Way Down: Chemical Release at Wacker Polysilicon

toot toot-toot-toot-toot ... toot-toot

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 20:00:00 -0500

I’m a bit of a train person but no expert, so while I’m not certain, I’m fairly sure that the Shave and a Haircut rhythm is not a Federal Railroad Administration-approved whistle signal, so props to the engineer who uses it anyway, I hear it in Tosa occasionally as they pass by.

October 16

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 18:30:00 -0500

I took this photo today, October the 16th, 2024. I don’t know how long this Christmas display has been up in Kohl’s, but even today is possibly a bit early for Christmas, some might say.

RSS feed fiddled with

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 16:10:00 -0500

I have fiddled with my RSS/Atom settings and I think it’s serving the full text properly now.

RSS

This has potential as a prompt for some very weird art

Wed, 16 Oct 2024 00:00:00 -0500

From bcj:

Observation: A shower is a much tinier room

Observation: A shower is a much tinier room than a person would normally be comfortable being in

Theory: We could build much smaller and more efficient homes if we had them constantly spray hot water on the occupant

I don’t know…

Pros:

warm
relaxing

Cons:

impossible to do fucking anything
wrinkly skin
risk of drowning in your sleep
idk probably would be a form of torture after a while

Reflected in the chrome

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 14:55:00 -0500

I did a bunch of household cleaning over the weekend and at some point at the end of the weekend was using the sink in the bathroom and noticed my tiny, distorted reflection in the clean and shiny chrome faucet spout and my first thought was, well, look at that, I have boobs, even viewed in a weird distorted faucet reflection.

HRT is magic, is all I can say. I did not appreciate how much this would feel right.

Flo Mask

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 00:00:00 -0500

I was picking up a package today, I had one of my cuter Flo Masks on (old photo of me with it here)

and one of the people working there asked me what kind it was. It’s always nice to have a friendly question even if it’s hard to say what to make of it now that nearly nobody is doing anything at all to even attempt to make the disaster any less bad even directly for their own immediate selves .

Buy chalk!

Sun, 13 Oct 2024 00:00:00 -0500

I saw this on Friday in the parking lot at Village Pond in Brown Deer when I went up there to run:

Also, I took this photo after running 10km, I guess I really do just look like this now:

I dream of chemistry

Sat, 12 Oct 2024 00:00:00 -0500

Last night I dreamed that I was in some sort of mass spectrometry lab and was telling others how I got my start in protein analysis, doing protein sequencing by Edman degradation and got into an explanation of how it works, the phenyl isothiocyanate reacting with the N-terminal amino group, cleaving off the modified amino acid with trifluroacetic acid, which leaves a fresh N-terminal amine for the next cycle and the freed derivatized amino acid is then sent to an HLPC where they separate under pretty normal reverse phase conditions and show up on UV detection.

I haven’t done this in a long time now, but a girl never forgets her first protein analysis method!

Here's why physicists love rubidium

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 16:20:00 -0500

In this video Angela Collier explains why rubidium is so dang popular in physics experiments:

why is it always rubidium?

Now I understand the great thing about having your own blog

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 16:00:00 -0500

It turns out I hardly have to actually write anything to spend lots of time working on my blog! I can just mess around with the formatting and fiddle with the tag display and try to get h-entry metadata added and puzzle over why things aren’t working the way I expected and basically get lost in the computer toucher thing where you constantly fiddle and compile and test and google for documents and repeat endlessly!

Coming out day

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 00:00:00 -0500

I guess this is “coming out day.” It’s a funny thing for me to think about now, after years of being very visible and now not being so visible. Now and then I think about how these days there are people I work with who may or may not know that I’m trans, I honestly don’t know if they know. That didn’t used to be a thing! I was that person with a beard who wore dresses, everyone, you know, noticed that.

I think it was last year that for the first time I consciously made the decision to go ahead and out myself to someone selling things at an art fest in order to make a comment about a trans interpretation of their items. It didn’t used to be a decision like that!

It’s also been recently dawning on me that mentioning my girlfriend now constitutes outing myself as a lesbian, which is not at all how that used to work!

I had some really fun experiences being very visible—little kids said the cutest things sometimes—but it was also stressful at times and being, as far as I can tell, basically invisible is just amazing. Even if it does lead to me pondering whether I really want to mention something to someone now and then.

Looking back at summer

Thu, 10 Oct 2024 00:00:00 -0500

In recent years of course I haven’t done many of the things I’ve usually done in the past due to the ongoing pandemic. I’d been imagining that the situation would improve in time as measures to control the disaster would be taken. Yeah, that’s sure as hell not happening. It can easily get even worse though! There’s mask bans being passed, so far I’m able to protect myself with the respirators but that might not last. Plus other diseases are taking off. May be far more dangerous to go out in the near future. I got out some this summer because who knows if there will be more chances to go out anytime soon.

Also, I’m getting into a surprisingly comfortable phase of transition where I’m no longer the very memorable genderqueer person everyone remembers, as far as I can tell I’m pretty invisible. It feels more comfortable going random places as a woman. I’m so invisible I can use public toilets without it being an adventure, which also makes going places a great deal easier! I’ve gotten the formal name change things done, I have a driver’s license and passport with photos that look like me now and a name that doesn’t surprise people now. Who knows if I’ll still have documents in the future though, given what Florida and Texas are already doing. Again, maybe should travel while it’s only as dangerous as it is now.

So, while I still can, I did go to some fun places. I went to Illinois to my high school reunion plus a walk around my childhood neighborhood. First trip to Illinois since the very start of the pandemic.

I went to Bastille Days here in town, which I have done before these last few years. I went to Illinois again to the Illinois Railway Museum for Diesel Days, which I last did in 2019. I went to the Boernor Botanical Gardens at the south end of the city for the first time in many years. I went up to Baraboo for the Badger Steam and Gas Engine Show, which again I last went to in 2019. This time with a Flo Mask no problems from breathing the dust around the threshing machine demonstrations!

I went to the Make Art MKE event in Wauwatosa again, and this year for my first time up to the Holy Hill Arts and Crafts Fair, and saw the Basilica inside for the first time, plus the climb up the tower.

I have been getting out to some of the nearby state parks in recent years, but this year made it up to Harrington Beach twice to swim in Lake Michigan and hang out on the beach and walk around the trails. And to generally get to enjoy being a girl in a bikini at the beach. I did three trail runs up at Pike Lake plus swimming in the lake, as well as one more visit to swim and to just walk up to the tower. I went to my most local state park, Havenwoods, a number of times.

And also something I enjoyed a lot, my first camping at a state park in nine years. Pre-pandemic I’d camp at Oshkosh for the show, but that’s a very different style of camping. Taking a week off and hanging out in a very quiet park in the northern Kettle Moraine and going hiking and swimming every day was a wonderful time. As a very outdoors and mostly alone thing it feels pretty safe. It was also really nice to do this for the first time while living comfortably as a woman. Even though it was mostly a quiet alone time every social interaction I had was the easy comfortable sort they are now. I’ve been taking estrogen long enough and am close enough to the end of electrolysis that I’d crawl out of the sleeping bag at sunrise, put on a old fleece top I bought when I assumed I was a man that’s ugly and won’t be missed if damaged while camping, and then feel my smooth face and look down and see the shape of my breasts, and realize that I really do just look like this all the time now.

In early pandemic days when the advice switched to wearing any mask you could improvise, I went out with my face covered and discovered that people would actually just say “ma’am” and then…stick with it. Didn’t apologize and start saying “sir” a lot the moment they actually looked at me. I liked that a lot and it was a bit frustrating to experience it while mostly not being able to be out and around people much at all. I wondered how this would work out in the longer term.

Honestly it was a long process to get used to it really working reliably, even though it was reliable right from the start. And at the time I thought electrolysis would be primarily to make this “passing” work even if someday masks were no longer going to be necessary (imagining not needing masks was optimistic!) and at least to a degree hormone therapy as well. I really had to experience it to understand how much I like this, how happy it makes me when I’m all alone seeing my reflection or just looking down or just feeling my smooth face. There are some very very nice social interaction advantages to just looking like this now, but a big part of the joy really is just for me. I used to think I was just the usual amount of unhappy with my body, but that was actually dysphoria.

So a lot of this summer’s travel was some of these formerly familiar trips but now done as a woman. It just feels comfortable. It’s so much easier for me to talk with people now. And it feels much more predictable than my high-vis genderqueer days of the few years pre-COVID. But even thinking back to my “boy days,” as I call them, it’s just so nice now to feel like I know how to talk to people. It turns out I already knew how, I just needed to be seen as a girl for it to work right!

To be determined what the future holds, but honestly it was a nice summer this year.

Decorative Gourd Season!

Tue, 08 Oct 2024 00:00:00 -0500

What season is it everyone?

Say it loud!

It’s decorative gourd season, motherfuckers!

I feel like a woodland spirit

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 00:00:00 -0500

This new dress is very green and has a lot of loose fabric.¹ It makes me feel like some sort of woodland spirit who somehow ended up in the basement working on a mass spectrometer…

I didn’t roll the office chair wheels over it but did sometimes step on it while getting up out of the chair. Also, the kind of dress such that when you go to the toilet there’s just all this fabric to pull up out of the way! ↩︎

Estrogen Thursday

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0500

I do my estrogen injections on Thursdays, and I was not making regular Thursday estrogen injection update posts but I mentioned it now and then, and it’s the last cohost Thursday, so, it’s estrogen injection Thursday!

Today is 90 weeks on HRT. (I have notes in a spreadsheet, totaling it up that’s 662 milligrams of estradiol valerate. It does not take much!) Aside from transition in general, starting HRT is one of the best things I’ve done in my life. My dysphoria has always been mostly subtle and non-obvious, and only becomes apparent when I try something and realize how very nice it is, how much I actually didn’t like how it was before. At the start the clothing envy was the most obvious. I started out transition with trying out more feminine clothing, and it felt great, and I ended up spending a few years living as a person with a beard who usually wore dresses, and it went well far beyond my dreams, getting shockingly little harassment and tending to get treated as a sort of honorary woman, always going to be called “sir” or he/him, but somehow getting treated much as a woman.

I was more than four years into transition before I found trans women on Twitter and got away from the Tumblr enbies, and started seeing those transition timelines, with a before photo that looked like me and a later photo that looked very very different. That seemed appealing. And I started hearing about the emotional, mental health effects of HRT, that sounded appealing. And then the pandemic started, I went out with my face covered, and somehow had been instantly transformed from That One Guy everyone remembered everywhere I went, a weird sort of honorary woman, to just another random women. I liked that a lot! I started thinking some body modification might be really nice.

It’s amazing. For one thing, I feel emotions now. I can cry now. I’ve never felt emotions anything like this before, it’s amazing, this alone is worth everything. I love all the subtle physical changes more than I ever imagined, my skin is softer, my hair is growing longer, I smell different, I’m not as greasy and sticky all the time. I’m just over 63 hours into electrolysis and we’re at the final stage of getting the last straggling hairs, my face is a slightly different shape thanks to HRT influencing the fat layer under the skin, I’m so very happy with how I look. Just over a year ago I saw a women in the mirror for the first time, it gradually become more common, and now, I just look like this. There’s some less subtle changes, too. Having breasts is fantastic, I cannot get over how happy I am with how I look with them, I love all the sensations of having them, somehow it just feels like they should be there, they should have been there all along, and now I finally have them. I can tell you from experience breasts alone don’t necessarily make or break how people see you, but they sure doesn’t hurt if you like being seen as a woman. And it’s nice just remembering an experience on my recent camping trip, I got up just after sunrise, it was still pretty chilly out, I put on some very random clothing to walk to the toilets including a blue and black fleece pullover I bought ages ago in my boy days, not remotely trying to dress up all nice, and I looked down and saw I obviously have breasts. I just look like this now, all the time, even camping and putting in less than zero effort first thing in the morning I just look like this now. I had no idea how much I’d like it.

Topless

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0500

On the first day of my camping vacation, after setting up in the afternoon, I ended up with a sweaty sports bra under my tank top and decided I really did not need to be wearing it, and, since I was pretty out of sight in my campsite and there was pretty well no one around on a Monday in mid-September, I decided to do the top swapping outside instead of awkwardly in the tent. In a certain, very significant sense, this was the first time in my life I was “topless” outdoors. Wasn’t at all the same in the past as a dude with a beard and no breasts!

I’ve talked about my vacation with some (cis) women I know and I’ve told this little story because it’s funny, and everyone giggles because it’s funny little thing. A few also commented to the effect that now I have to be careful about that, can no longer take my shirt off randomly, and generally welcome to yet another thing women have to deal with. And, sure, I get it. But my feelings about it are more complicated.

When I was a kid I was very uncomfortable with having my shirt off in public. Thinking back now, of course I was really a little girl and it’s not surprising I’d have picked up that that wasn’t something I was supposed to do. But I didn’t understand that and neither did anyone else, and since I was supposed to be a boy and boys are not supposed to be uncomfortable being shirtless, how I actually felt about it was of no concern, so it was something I was going to have to do now and then. Now that I’m thinking about this I remember one experience and have some vague memories of some others. I don’t want to sound like this was too terribly distressing, really my childhood trauma wasn’t any particular awful events, just the endless experiences of an unknowing, unsupported trans kid. On the other hand, I was a kid being made to partly undress in ways I was very uncomfortable with, that does sound like a known category of unpleasant experiences.

As I got older, people could no longer make me take my shirt off, and I did get more comfortable with it, at least under certain circumstances. I think that was mostly a matter of becoming more comfortable with nudity in general. Once I figured out I was trans I understood my feelings a lot better. And I started wearing a tank top while swimming because that felt better, really.

So now, having very real breasts, it doesn’t feel like a loss. It feels like at long last everyone else agrees that I ought to be modest about it, having at times in the past not even allowed it! Now, it went from mandatory to forbidden never stopping to ask how I actually feel, society sucks, but my experience wasn’t really the same as the cis women’s.

I guess normal people do talk to each other?

Tue, 24 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0500

Along the lines as this thought from five years ago, lately I’ve been thinking about what I had always considered to be one of the most common of fictional tropes, the thing where the other characters are always telling the protagonist things. Indeed, the character are always talking to each other. It makes the story something interesting to read, if this was more like real life, the audience (and the characters) would have no idea what’s going on. Which is how real life works, but who wants to read that story? (I get that there are stories with unreliable narrators and complicated puzzles of narrative structure and some great classics of literature are like that but your typical TV show or fantasy novel trilogy not so much.)

I guess it’s dawning on me that people talk to each other a lot more than I’m used to being a part of, and more recently I’ve found talking with people to be a lot easier than when I was trying to be a man, even in my genderqueer weirdo days, which I sure did not expect, and now easier still as a woman.

Maybe some of that ‘protagonist of the fictional story’ interaction isn’t meant to be so totally unrealistic? I’ve been wondering while watching some things which parts the writers thought of as the really properly fictional parts of the story and which things they figured people might actually say to each other in real life. Sure, the dialog is polished up, the timing just so, everything is a bit neater than reality, but intended to look vaguely familiar to the viewer rather than just being the protagonist off having fictional protagonist adventures.

Vaccination time

Tue, 24 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0500

I got my annual flu vaccine from Occupational Health, conveniently done in the space outside the cafeteria. Since I work in a medical school, it’s mandatory. There was a very brief interval years ago when they also did COVID vaccination but the vibes of doing anything at all about a much more severe ongoing disease disaster are bad, so we’re exclusively worrying about a less-severe problem now and completely ignoring the bigger one.

Anyway, they have to keep records both in the usual anything medical gets documented sense and also since it’s mandatory for employees they have to record that so they know I’m in compliance. This year was special compared to recent years, because now my formal name on the ID badge and in the records system “looks like” a name someone who “looks like” me might likely have. So we just went through the process straight through from the start with no interval of confusion assuming that something must have gotten looked up incorrectly because the name seems obviously wrong!

HRT is magic

Sun, 22 Sep 2024 00:00:00 -0500

One of the things about camping is sometimes you wear some pretty random clothing while hanging around the campsite. It was nice to spend some time just sitting around, having a drink, reading a good old style printed-on-paper book, and in the warm weather wearing just a bra and maybe a skirt or shorts or whatever on the bottom. I have a couple racer-back bras made of stretchy cotton-blend and they way they fit, now at least, is at the top there’s a bit of a gap in the center between the fabric and my skin. So I could look downward and look down my own top. You know, the space between my breasts, the two breasts rising up to meet the fabric that then covered them. This is not an unfamiliar view, I’ve been on very friendly terms with a few women over the decades who would let me look down their tops like this.

I sure as fuck never saw it on myself, though!

I liked seeing it on myself a lot. But also, got to thinking about just what I thought when seeing this view on my partners over the years. Because I always figured it was just sexual attraction, and certainly that was one of the feelings. But also, there were a lot of other things I’d thought, sometimes explicitly thought, sometimes was more trying not to think. Like, just that it felt so very obvious that ideally I’d be able to offer my partner the same sort of look down my shirt, that’s obviously the proper fair thing to do. Except, just kinda sorta couldn’t. Not the same. Surely all the cis-het dudes wished they could do the obvious lesbian same-thing-in-response thing!

Or just wondering what it would be like to get to be a good-looking person like that. Or what would it even feel like to actually have breasts?

There’s lots of beauty standards imposed on women, lots of them basically unrealistic, and I’ve been long aware of that. It’s sort of weird to just now discover that the entirely impossible beyond-the-realm-of-dreams ideals I always tried not to even think about were for me really mostly just having breasts at all, having little-enough facial hair that someone can come up behind me and say “ma’am” and I can turn around and we can talk without them feeling the need to “apologize” and start saying “sir” a lot. I get that not all cis women experience this, but, still, it is pretty common. Honestly having breasts has been weirdly easy, at least I’ve been fortunate enough that getting the prescription for estrogen wasn’t hard (my doctor is, herself, trans!) and electrolysis sucks a lot and takes forever and costs a lot but if you do it, it does work.

I just didn’t know how nice it would all be!

Anything that evokes the monthly cycle

Thu, 29 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0500

A long long time ago, I read in a printed-on-paper magazine, a review of the Luna Bars. It might have been Bicycling Magazine, or, as we called it, Buy-Cycling, since it was mostly stuff to buy. But the thing I remember is the writer saying, to the effect, that they were being marketed to women, and so they named it “Luna,” apparently on the assumption that women are suckers for anything the evokes the monthly cycle…

This, somehow, stuck with me all these years. So, anyway, yeah, I’ve bought some Luna bars, and, yeah, I thought about this old thing about the monthly cycle. I think it’s likely that as someone who didn’t have a discernible cycle until I was fifty-one years old I’m a bit more excited about it than is typical, but, still….

It’s a somewhat overcomplicated bar, with like layers and stuff. Very sweet. Depends on what you are in the mood for, I guess.

(Yeah, I’ve long felt like some things seemed to have some sort of cycle and at one point started keeping a spreadsheet with notes about mood and ran it through some mathematical periodicity-finding algorithms but couldn’t find any pattern. (This is a very cis guy thing to do!) Until I saw a trans doctor (she does my trans health care (and also other general doctoring) and also, is, herself, trans) and started injecting estradiol valerate and then yeah the hypothalamus suddenly knew what to do with the gonadotropin releasing hormone and suddenly I had a whole new appreciation for weirdly-predictable hormonal mood swings!)

Sometimes you have amazing new experiences

Sat, 10 Aug 2024 00:00:00 -0500

Sometimes you have amazing new experiences in the course of gender transition. Today, I was driving a somewhat longer distance and as happens felt a need to use the restroom and so I stopped at a highway rest stop. Obviously, I for one can talk at length about the issues with how we set up restrooms and the gendering thing, but nonetheless, I need to pee and since I’m a woman and also I am about $6000 into electrolysis and have been sticking a needle in myself every week to inject estrogen, I use the women’s side.

So I go in and do the usual things and wash my hands (standing next to a woman washing her hands and paying no attention to me whatsoever—why would she?—and I’m just saying having had a lot of experiences being a very noticeable guy in the men’s room, sometimes even when I thought I was in boy mode, it’s really nice to attract no attention whatsoever) and then it’s time to dry my hands. So I turn to the hot-air hand dryers, which, since this is a highway rest area and not exactly all brand new, are the good old World Dryer from Berkeley, Illinois. The white box on the wall with the chrome air nozzle and the big chrome button to turn it on, and the metal tag with the brand name and the amps and volts and the operation instructions (you press the big chrome button to turn it on). And they were completely unvandalized!!! My entire life, every one of these I’ve ever seen has had the metal tag all scratched up! Back in the old days, they wrote the instructions out in English: 1. Push button 2. Rub hands under warm air 3. Stops automatically. Every single one had some of the letters scratched off to read Push butt/rub hands under arm/stop auto. Newer ones have the diagram of button pushing and hand rubbing, so instead of that specific pattern, one or another message, of some kind, is scratched into the tag. One way or another, scratching the metal nameplate on the hand dryer is clearly a culturally important ritual!

Or, it is on the one side. Over on the other side, apparently women just don’t feel the need to vandalize them! In fact, not only were they unvandalized, they were in beautiful condition, just hints of a bit of normal wear and tear after probably decades hanging on the wall of a public toilet on the side of the highway, but apparently used by people who just wanted to dry their hands and didn’t abuse or damage them in any way! (I am laughing so hard, every time I think of this I laugh, this is such a bizarre thing!)

I’ve got a lifetime of harm from gender stereotypes, so I want to be careful what I say here, but, guys, dudes, fellows: Did you know that you can just not vandalize those things? It’s true! I’ve seen it!

Like a lot of things I’ve experienced in transition, this isn’t exactly a surprise, I’ve talked about the hand dryer vandalism with cis women over the years and all of them expressed surprise, they’ve never seen them vandalized. But, you know, actually seeing it is still a thing!

Vintage

Fri, 05 Jul 2024 00:00:00 -0500

So I was watching this video on youtube from a light bulb collector, “unboxing” a bunch of old fluorescent light bulbs and exclaiming things like “vintage Westinghouse! Made in the USA!”

When I was a kid I sort-of understood the way that a “rare” “collectable” worked is that decades ago it was just a worn-out piece of junk that most people threw away, but somebody kept one in a box for some reason, and now that’s like the last one left and it’s a “collectable,” but now that I am An Old, it’s even weirder, remembering like 1984 and trying to imagine having a shitty light fixture with a shitty bulb that’s fucked up, and getting a new bulb, and instead of throwing the old one away because what the fuck else would you do, instead wrapping it up in newspaper (remember newspaper?) and putting it in a box and keeping it so as to sell it to some “light bulb collector” in forty years who would then video record “unboxing it” in order to “upload” a file like a hundred-thousand-times larger than you can imagine downloading with your Hayes Smartmodem (in four decades that will be nothing!) so other light bulb collectors can admire the burned-out bulb!

Detex Watchclock Station

Sun, 16 Jun 2024 00:00:00 -0500

This is still on one floor of one stairwell at work and I keep assuming that sometime over the years I must have taken photos of it, but if I did I never named them and they are lost in the hundreds of thousands of files. So, here’s a set!

Seeing the Aurora For The First Time

Sat, 11 May 2024 00:00:00 -0500

Last night was cloudy before the thunderstorms moved in, no view of the sky. But at 3AM I woke up to pee and looked at my watch which gets weather via bluetooth from the phone, and it was reporting clear, and I thought maybe I’d go out and see if there was anything to see. Glad I did!

I’m over fifty, many times over the decades there have been predictions of aurora visible far into the south, but I’ve never seen anything at all. Here at 43° north its certainly not visible often. I had no real idea what it really looks like. You see photos but time exposures of dim things in the dark are not really representative of the real experience. There’s lots of things that look a lot more spectacular in person than in a photo, but you can see a photo and have a pretty good idea of what it’s going to look like. This, not so much.

I put on a night dress and slipped on shoes and went out to the back/side yard. The sky was cloudless. Looking around I saw what looked like a few scattered high thin clouds, stars visible through them. When you live in a city you are used to clouds at night being lit up. But they’d fade, and suddenly appear, and move in a way quite different from the steady drift in the wind of clouds. That’s the thing! I put a coat on and spent a good long time out past three in the morning looking up.

Sometimes scattered splotches of light, sometimes many, sometimes suddenly popping into appearance. Often a vertical striped appearance. For an interval it really picked up, I was craning my neck to look up to the zenith, rays of light radiating down suddenly appearing and fading, lower the shimmering flickering effects in the sheets of light. Aurora from zenith to just above tree/house level maybe a third of the way around the circle of the horizon. It looked white to my eyes except for an interval when a segment out of the expanse was in very clear purple.

I was holding my hand up to shield my eyes from the lights on the building, looking up above the streetlights, in a city where we take for granted nighttime clouds are lit up. What this would look like in a dark place!

CRAY Y-MP manual scan.

Fri, 01 Mar 2024 00:00:00 -0600

Hey Beige, I hear you say, now that you are scanning stuff with your fancy sheet-feeder scanner, don’t you have some other weird old documents to share?

Yeah, I’ve got this Cray Y-MP Functional Description Manual that I actually ordered from Cray Research back in, according to the packing list, February, 1991, 33 years ago. I, like, mailed in a check or something, I don’t remember exactly, of course. They didn’t just have a PDF on their web page, in 1990! I guess, you know, I really have always been like this…

Anyway, I scanned it. Here’s the 191 megabyte PDF:

CRAY Y-MP Functional Description Manual HR-04001-0C.pdf

When you have a sheet-feed scanner...

Thu, 29 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0600

Did I feel like I needed a scanner with a sheet-feeder? Not really, but now that I have one you betcha I pulled my copy of the “operating instruction manual for superconducting magnet system” from Cryomagnetics out of the 3-ring binder and fed it through. If you’re the kind of nerd who wants a copy it’s only 29 megabytes. I put a pdf up on a backblaze b2 bucket:

Cryomagnetics 7T Shielded System Superconducting Magnet

Laser

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 00:00:00 -0600

We got our laser (one of the lasers…) replaced in the Bruker timsTOF fleX MALDI 2 (I looked up the official weird capitalization just for you) on Friday. The laser, which costs something like as much as a nice car, looks like a gray metal box with a bunch of random cable connectors plus a flat metal plate that I guess must get Real Hot because a heat pipe and fan thingie gets bolted to it. Which is what real lasers normally look like. But back in the day we had this DNA sequencer that used an argon ion laser to excite the fluorescent dyes used in the sequencing chemistry, and that laser, holy crap, that laser was a shiny black metal cylinder with a bigger cylinder on one end and a gigantic power cable, and it looked exactly like a movie prop laser. Like it seriously looked exactly like a prop from Star Wars or Trek or whatever. The most laser prop looking real laser ever.

I'm just really into assigning peaks

Sat, 20 Jan 2024 00:00:00 -0600

At work I use mass spectrometers to acquire lots of spectra and then use software, which tends to have a very science-software style of user interface, to analyze it. There’s lots of graphs! With lots of peaks! Which can be interpreted to tell us stuff about molecules.

Apparently, I have a new hobby of acquiring gamma spectra of items in my collection of radioactive things (of course I have a collection of radioactive things) and using very science-software type software to plot it and then try to assign peaks in order to see stuff about nuclei in the samples. You know, to get away from work things, relax, unwind. Apparently, I’m just really into assigning peaks. At work the only property of the nuclei I care about is their masses, playing to the strength of a mass spectrometer. It’s only stable ones we want to deal with. (There is an extremely low level of enthusiasm for radioactively contaminating a mass spectrometer, but we can label samples with stable isotopes and then use the mass spectrometer to resolve them.) Decay chains are a whole new thing to me. Plus when you’ve got nuclei decaying and gamma rays shooting around a bunch of physics things happen producing an exciting array of artifacts in the data to consider.

This is the analytical instrumentation version of the computer-toucher thing where you all spend your days locked in struggle with Kubernetes and then come home to relax by reconfiguring your NixOS or whatever.

Looking through the old slides

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 00:00:00 -0600

I’ve been looking through my old photographic slides, so far those from the late 90s, and it fun to look through them. There are a few of my mom in there from when she was roughly the age I am now. It’s funny, the way I would take photos thinking of what was interesting at the time. I visited the old house to do some work up on the roof and have photos of the roof, because how often do you climb on the roof? That’s an interesting subject for photos! I didn’t take any of mom, because mom’s just around all the time, right? Twenty-five years later…I wish I’d taken a couple of mom while I was there, you know?

Holy crap!

Wed, 06 Dec 2023 19:49:30 -0600

From the cockpit voice recorder:

01:53:13.2 HOT-2
there was a fatal accident in the UK and this is exactly what happened there.
01:53:28.9
END OF TRANSCRIPT
END OF RECORDING

The good: The copilot recognized they were in a dangerous situation very similar to one that had led to a fatal accident.

The bad: He said that fifteen seconds before their own fatal crash.

Flight Safety Detectives podcast ep 194

Passing is weird

Wed, 02 Aug 2023 00:00:00 -0500

I picked up a new prescription at a new pharmacy and ended up having the experience of hearing the patient, who is in fact me, referred to as “he” in the third person repeatedly. Presumably the Michael dude who it’s for couldn’t come in, and whoever I am, his wife or girlfriend maybe¹, am picking it up. Whenever this kind of thing happens I think, do I want to explain this? No. No, I do not want to explain.

Honestly I have these thoughts wondering if they know and are jerking me around in some sort of deniable way. Like, they might get into trouble with the management if they actually said a slur or something but if you just act confused what can anyone say? But I spent years being just obviously a person with a beard wearing dresses, and no one hassled me about it, no one pretended to be confused or made anything difficult. So having had that experience, I think people really don’t notice, are actually unaware. I never expected that to actually happen!

Obviously I’m wearing a respirator, but today with two days of fuzz growth all around the edges because tomorrow is electrolysis day. I might have imagined a numbing cream specifically described in the prescription as for electrolysis might hint at the use but who knows, could be for all sorts of things I guess.

“Passing” is the weirdest thing.

To be fair, that dude probably would have liked a girl like me. ↩︎

tired/wired

Sat, 27 May 2023 00:00:00 -0500

Tired: The royal road to the unconscious
Wired: Inner-state highway

In which I find a weird PDF from the past

Tue, 23 May 2023 00:00:00 -0500

“Feasibility Study of Mining Coal in an Oxygen Free Atmosphere; A Demonstration of a New Mining Technique to Prevent the Formation of Mine Acid in an Active Deep Mine: Phase I”

The miner in the proposed process must work in an atmosphere that will have less than 0.1% oxygen and will be at 100% relative humidity. The life support system thus must not only supply breathing oxygen but must remove carbon dioxide all without contributing significantly to the oxygen content in the mine.

The idea was to avoid acid mine drainage by excluding the oxygen that oxidizes the pyrites to produce the sulfates by simple mining in inert gas with the miners wearing life support suits. This has real “guys will write a long proposal for coal mining in inert atmospheres before going to therapy” energy. 1970 was a weird time in environmentalism!

Feasibility Study

web server checklist

Fri, 12 May 2023 00:00:00 -0500

HTTP Strict Transport Security: On
Certificate: Expired

Imagine getting advice from mom

Sun, 23 Apr 2023 00:00:00 -0500

I was trying on some clothes in a shop today and overheard presumably mom-and-little-daughter talking in an adjacent fitting room and mom was explaining something about wearing shorts under a dress to avoid display of underwear in case of gust of wind or sudden urge to do a cartwheel. It was adorable and also on the one hand mom explaining practical stuff to a little kid so they don’t have to just trial and error it out by themselves is great and seems like something that must happen, but also, obviously, my mom never explained any such things to me! Indeed, not explaining such things seemed like sort of the goal of parenting!

Hyperlegible

Mon, 17 Apr 2023 00:00:00 -0500

Atkinson hyperlegible asymmetrical thermodynamic cycle

This came to me in a dream

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 00:00:00 -0600

“I’m in malloc dot h.”

This came to me in a dream. It was a very lesbian dream. I was on my back in bed, a woman was on top straddling me, and … we had all our clothes on and we were telling each other jokes about Tom Scott and, apparently, C. (I know the real transbian stereotype is rust, but I’m old and we lived dangerously back in the day.)