Zero22xx

I don't want to turn this place into my personal journal, so hopefully this is the last post of its kind that I do here (I do have a general question in mind to also post here though). Although I do wish this place was busier so that people could discuss their journeys without feeling like they're taking over, or feeling too exposed.

On the subject of labels. I am sticking with non-binary now and deciding to make the conscious effort to stop thinking of myself as an imposter or invader, whether I ever actually take any steps towards HRT or not. I feel 99% sure that if all of this stuff was openly discussed and accepted in my country when I was a kid, I would've read the definition of non-binary and been "Yup! That's me!" Just like when I finally read the definition way too late in life. And if that had been the case, I feel like a lot of things in life would've been better and made sense or felt fairer to me.

As far as HRT goes, I am very open to trying, mostly to see how it feels. I feel like as long as I have only ever known having T in charge of things, and have never experienced E driving me, part of me will always feel like an imposter. Reading up on the effects of switching to E, almost all of it sounds beneficial to me. Except for one of the two irreversible effects, breast growth. This is the difference between doing this without needing to explain anything to anyone and publicly coming out. I have seen people report that it starts fairly early. And I already have a kinda prominent chest and reason to believe it would end up being quite hard to hide.

Either way, it's not on the cards soon due to finances, living situation etc. And either way, I would still be non-binary because I am also 99% sure that if I was AFAB but still had the same personality and experience in a binary world, I would've also read the definition of non-binary and been "Yup! That's me!"

So for now, I'm actually happy owning this body and by extension the way society looks at me for a while longer. I'm happy being GNC at most for now. And I'm going to use this time to work on my mind, work on a regular income, work on my general health, work out, and prepare for what the future may bring.

If anyone responds here and I don't respond and / or upvote and stuff right away, it'll be because it's currently 2am here and I've finally fallen asleep. Although I am planning on another joint and cup of coffee.

Hoping that this doesn't get too long (spoiler: it got long). Not sure where else to dump all of this. It was either here or the non-binary community because I might mention aspects of that. I feel like most of my problems are self inflicted, so I'm not even looking for sympathy or even acknowledgment here, just a space to put this shit out into the world, for whatever that might help.

I am stuck and have been for years now. My 20s were spent fucking around and my 30s have been mostly spent wishing I'd done a little less fucking around in my 20s. I dropped out of varsity and something one could call a stable career for stupid fantasies and life has pretty much just been chaos and uncertainty since then. Especially financial security.

And I'm stuck in this world now. Taking whatever unskilled blue collar back breaking soul sucking job I can get. That I never last too long in. And actually I've been unemployed and making scraps from odd jobs for a little too long now. And that's not even for lack of trying, my CV / resume probably just looks like one big red flag to employers at this point and I don't think my age helps the spotty and all over the show job experience look better either.

Now to actually get to mental health. I have been trying to work on myself and become who I am supposed to be and I'm finding over and over that while it might not necessarily be the source of happiness, the biggest obstacle to happiness is money.

For one, I highly suspect that I have some lifelong undiagnosed neurodivergence and tried going through the government system to get to the bottom of things. But so far I found that route to be nothing but actively worse for mental health and I get the impression that unless I have visible tics or 'act' like something is wrong, I'm not going to get very far there. And yet going to professionals on a private basis would cost a small fortune, on top of every other basic worry.

And as far as gender identity related stuff goes. I need money for basically everything that could be regarded as gender affirming care. And space and privacy which, surprise surprise, require money too. I need to be able to afford to live alone. And in the city where I can disappear into the crowd and not a town with all the pearl clutchers.

The biggest conundrum right now as far as being both unemployed and feeling close to exploding point at wanting to take the mask off and be my non-conforming self is that I'm waiting for the day around the corner where I have to cut my hair and put on a fucking golf shirt and brown pants or some shit for the next minimum wage job that I can't say no to and that doesn't actually improve your life in any way.

So here I am, stuck. I don't even feel like I deserve friends these days, I've cut myself off from all of my old ones and I feel too much like a loser in life at this point for new ones. Everyone has careers and marriages and children and shit. And here I am, taking what I can get, and spending Friday night smoking cheap weed and watching cartoons.

On that note I'm boring as fuck these days too. All of my good stories start with "years ago" and I barely feed my soul with the things that it needs anymore. I don't make any art, barely read or listen to new music anymore. I feel blank and burnt out and broken and somehow helpless to fix any of it. And I'm tired of being stuck here.

Thanks for reading, or not reading. Thanks for the space for me to post this garbage. Other people have serious problems, mine feel selfish and as I said, self inflicted. Just wanted to get this all off my chest though.

An example that I can think of is Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL), which requires a relatively short online course (for a fee, of course) and entails teaching basic english to kids from non english countries online. I've usually known of older and elderly people doing this but I don't think that's a requirement or anything lol. As far as know, the only requirements are high school English and the teaching English course.

Are there any other of these sorts of online jobs that maybe require a short course, and at least potentially bring in enough to pay for the groceries?

First I just want to say that I wish this community was busier. There's still major things missing from R*ddit around here on Lemmy. Namely, actual discussion. In all areas, like even the punk subreddit was great for actual discussion and not just dumping links and shit. And as far as gender identity goes, I'm not sure how different my mindset would be right now if it wasn't for the non-binary and genderqueer subs on R*ddit being around and just having other people's stories to read and interact with.

But to the actual post. Not so long ago, I boldly and confidently declared that I'm agender. And I truly felt it at the time. Which honestly has just made it so much more obvious just how many times daily and for how many reasons I wish I was afab. And it can't be exactly true that I'm no gender if this is how things are.

However, I remain under the non-binary umbrella because I know that I will probably never* take steps to change my physical body or even start asking people to address me in a certain way. Not going to even share these thoughts and feelings with family, or even a therapist. And I haven't even been in contact with a lot of my friends for years and in this already religious conservative leaning country that I'm in, I have no doubt that a lot have gone down Joe Rogan looking rabbit holes in the years since. I've even had one old friend catch up out of the blue, which I was quite happy about at first, who then sent me a Jordan Peterson link and I kinda ghosted that conversation and haven't spoken to him since. So I've told exactly one (1) person in my life, a decades long online friend that I've never even met in real life lol.

So based on societal pressures and various other things, not excluding imposter syndrome, I begrudgingly accept my shell despite my inner feelings. I begrudgingly accept being something 'other' or 'in between' and that I will never be either. And anyone that wants to claim that this is some sort of fad is out of their god damned mind. Because it's actually kinda shit. The world is full of "men" and "women" labels on arbitrary, cultural and non-biological shit. And being man shaped but also not only pretty much disgusted with the current state of 'masculinity' but also yearning to be surrounded by things and people with the 'women' label is shit. And I think a double source of guilt and imposter syndrome is being man shaped, feeling this way but also being attracted to women shaped people.

So yeah, it's all fucked up. After a couple of years of this journey and thinking that I had answers, turns out that I still don't really know who I am or where I belong. Or if this state of being just dooms me to be alone and seeking connection in random corners of the internet in a binary world. But it's also all good because actually life has always been this way and I've got this far.

I think I might finally be on the road to getting some sort of diagnosis and learning how to live (although it's still talk right now and who knows if I don't just end up with an appointment 6 months from now). At this point I'm 90% sure it's autism or ADHD or some combination thereof. But I'm also aware of the possible folly of reading into things as far as self diagnosis goes. But I've been lurking and spending time in these sorts of communities for a couple of years now and feel like I've been learning more and more about myself. And I'm pretty sure now that I'm not just stupid and lazy and unreasonably defiant and depressed. I think I just haven't learnt how to function in a world that wasn't made for me.

I'm hoping to ask some advice on if I should do some homework or start making notes about my perceived reasons or symptoms before starting anything official and official. I started out terrible at doing homework and it's got worse as I got older but if there's any important literature that I should read, it would be awesome to know about it and I could push through reading it. And notes, should I start taking notes of things to speak about or bring up?

Thank you in advance. Might only start replying and stuff later became I'm feeling a little scrambled right now and only slept about 4 hours last night.

Having just experienced my first comment removals without any sort of notification or explanation, I was suddenly reminded of how things went down on Reddit during the API thing and people's attitude towards it.

Do you know why the API thing failed to cause a mass exodus? Because the moderators were spearheading it. The same people that have been doing things like setting up automod with buzzwords because they're too busy collecting subs to control to actually do their jobs, and silently removing non rule breaking comments without notification or explanation, and being cold unfriendly dickheads whenever you questioned them; suddenly these assholes were asking us to all join them in solidarity and feel sorry for them over their lost modding tools in 3rd party apps. In fact they did a fantastic job of making it all about themselves without giving many good reasons for the end user. And honestly people cheered when Reddit forcibly removed them.

And it made me realise that a good majority of these moderators that spent years on Reddit campaigning for less transparency and helping to turn it into the shit hole it is now, are probably here on Lemmy.

I don't know where exactly I'm going with this other than to say that I'm seeing things here with new eyes now. Just wanted to get these fun facts off my chest and remind everyone about who we're actually dealing with here.

I hope that this is the right place for this, please let me know if there's somewhere more appropriate because I'm not sure where it actually fits.

Let me just start this off by saying, I recognise that these are kids movies and I also thank these movies for bringing me back into the franchise and revisiting such a big part of my childhood. In fact what's great is that it's introducing a new generation of kids to it.

Just finished Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and after spending the last 6+ months (re)watching all the animated adaptations and (re)playing the games, I really don't think I enjoyed it as much as the first two movies. And I've realised that Sonic has actually been characterized pretty badly here and completely tamed and watered down. And even more so, I feel like this displays a larger problem in mainstream media right now.

Sonic in the '90s and 2000s:

Back in the '90s when I was a kid, we had two Sonic cartoons running at the same time. In both of them, Sonic was an anti-authoritarian "freedom fighter", trying to topple Robotnik's tyranny. One of them had little PSAs like calls to respect those who are different from you or warnings about scammers and false info. It was woke before woke was a thing. The other one involved Robotnik, the tyrant, stomping out free thinking by turning people into robot slaves. A not so subtle message.

In fact even without the cartoons, from the first game it's a pretty easy assumption to make that the little blue guy with the mohawk / spikes that runs around smashing machines and freeing the animals is supposed to be some sort of rebel. I promise that it wasn't too much for my little 7 or 8 year old brain to handle back then.

Then we get to the Modern era of Sonic, which gave us Sonic Adventure with wall to wall heavy metal and cool guitar solos. And little surprises like weed leaves placed in certain locations. And the defacto animated adaptation of this era was Sonic X, where Sonic blatantly shows no respect or even disrespect to authorities fairly regularly. But always with the message of doing the right thing. At one point, he inspires the 'freedom movement' which sees people quitting their jobs by the masses, dyeing and spiking their hair and just living their lives their way (I'd love to know where they got their income from though).

Sonic the Hedgehog movies:

Which brings me to these movies. I had fun watching all of them but now I am realising just how watered down and wrong a lot of the characterisation is. Instead of being about rebellion, it's about 'family'. Instead of heavy metal and weed leaves, it's top 40 pop and McDonald's references. Apart from an Easter egg thrown in here or there like a bone.

And I realised that the characterisation of Sonic, Knuckles and Robotnik are more like Sonic Boom than any game or other adaptation, except with all the adult references and humour removed. And Sonic Boom isn't known for its faithful representations either but still at least has some edge.

The Declawing of Media:

When I look around at the world today, I think that we need anti-authoritarian icons like Sonic the Hedgehog more than ever. But all of the movie studios and all of the artists are beholden to fucking suits that don't want to take any risks in case their precious money flow gets harmed.

And so we're left with a world where the art that used to inspire kids and teenagers to rage against the machine and keep it real has all become safe and boring and paint by the numbers. And so they're being attracted by douchebag podcasters that give them something to rebel against instead.

I feel like the Sonic the Hedgehog movies so far are a great representation of just how stale and corporate everything has become. I believe they call it enshittification. And I'm thinking that maybe Hollywood and the music industry are just as much to blame for the state of affairs today as social media. And not because of the wOkE agENdA but because no one has a fucking spine anymore and everything is trying to chase numbers on charts that go up and down. Enshittification is more than just social media design IMO.

It was suggested that I post this idea to the community proper. So I'm just copying and pasting the comment that I made, edited to make it clear which post I'm referencing (which is the next most recent post here anyway). I hope I got the link right in order to work with all of this federation mumbo jumbo.

I’m too new to be making these kinds of suggestions and I’m far from the moderator type myself but multiple times throughout this week, I’ve been thinking that it would be pretty cool if there was an AskBlåhaj. Or even just general Ask Lemmy based here, that could be asking for unwanted attention from shitty people on other instances though.

Not even 24 hours after seeing this post, I’ve seen someone else getting the snark and a non answer for a simple question. And also a Blåhaj user.

As much of a public bathroom as it could be, AskReddit was pretty fun for ‘silly’ questions and general chatting. And a nice place for new users to hang around and gain karma and confidence. But with the gatekeeper neckbeardy types around, maybe what it needs on Lemmy is to be in an instance with rules that promote friendliness and good vibes.

Just an idea to throw out there anyway.

I hope this isn't a question that's already been asked to death, in app search for "mbin" isn't all that helpful.

I'm still in the stages of looking for a permanent home here in the fediverse. So far mbin has really caught my eye because it's basically Lemmy+ for all intents and purposes (at least for mine). I'm not all that happy with what looks like the only Android app though.

So I was wondering if there were any plans to add mbin functionality to any existing Lemmy apps? Even if I used a Lemmy app solely for the 'Threads' or Lemmy section of mbin, then used the web page or only mbin app for everything else, I would be fine with that.

I tried to see if I could sign in with the app that I'm currently using (Eternity), with the kbin.earth instance and no luck. So obviously the API is just that much different.

Are any devs here thinking of expanding their apps in future? Or is there one I've missed? I've seen more than one app with the description "For Lemmy and the Fediverse", but what exactly is meant by "and the Fediverse" is unclear.

First the bugs:

• Trying to edit the top tabs such as rename or rearrange seems to do absolutely nothing, although the changes that you make in settings seem to stick.

• Changing the default server for the 'Anonymous' account also seems to do nothing. Once again, the setting does stick though.

Observations / suggestion:

I notice that there is a placeholder for 'multicommunities'. And I think I came across one or two other things that are placeholders / leftovers from Infinity. So it's all good, everything from app to the platform itself is WiP.

My suggestion is that for now, while we can't create or add multicommunities and have a bit of variety in our feeds, what about being able to add the local feeds of other instances? So that regardless of which instance I'm signed up in, I can have my Subscribed, Local, All tabs, as well as for eg. a 'World' tab, 'Blåhaj' tab etc. Is this something even remotely possible? Don't think I've seen other apps with this idea either.