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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I don’t suppose you have access to a sewing machine? Skirts are one of the easiest things in the world to sew, and while fabric from a craft store might not be cheap, there are options for thrifted or secondhand fabrics that are more budget friendly.

    I’m transmasc so I don’t have great advice on fit, but here’s a short on skirt placement that sounds like pretty solid advice to me. If you fit the skirt around your “new waist” like they suggest (right under your ribs), you might not need the belt, and you’ll be able to hide any weird sewing on the waist line with your top. Then the only thing you really need to sew properly is the hem, which is dead simple on a machine.


  • I’m job hunting right now and turning over a lot of similar questions, about how much I should be asking for.

    A few years back I got over 80% by switching sectors - I was underpaid at a public sector job I loved, and switched to a private sector job in the finance industry and a higher COL area. Similar to you, they offered more than I asked for because corporate had specific pay brackets for that position.

    I think your pay depends a lot on the specific area/tech stack you’re working in and who you’re working for. Some tech stacks just pay more on average than others, bigger corporations can usually pay more than smaller companies, and private sector will always pay more than public sector (but usually with worse benefits). You can check Glassdoor or similar sites to see what people with a similar title make at the company you’re applying to, but that’s only helpful at really big companies where there are enough employees reporting to give a good average.




  • Trans guy here. There was no masc version of my deadname, and my parents didn’t have a name picked out for if I’d been AMAB, so those routes were closed to me. I initially tried to pick something where I could keep my initials, but the only names I liked were already “in use” in my social and family circles, and it didn’t feel right.

    So I looked at the popularity of my deadname in my birth year, then started from that same rank on the boy name charts for the same year and worked my way out. I found a name of very similar popularity that I really liked, and met my other self-imposed criteria (nickname I liked, no nicknames that I hated, not easily misspelled or confused with a femme name). The benefit of looking at birth year popularity ranks is that I ended up with a name that doesn’t sound “too old” or “too young” for me, which may or may not matter to other people.

    My parents did something similar when they named us, so that we’d have names that were recognizable, but we wouldn’t share our name with five other kids in our class. (My mom had a very popular name for her age group and she hated it.)

    For my middle name I picked a name I always loved but that I didn’t want for my first name, for practical reasons (easily misspelled, gender neutral, much more popular for younger kids than for my age group). In my area, nobody ever knows your middle name unless you go out of your way to tell them, so I let myself have more fun with it.

    It’s been close to a decade and I still love both of them. I “tried it on” with friends for a few months before starting legal paperwork, and I’m glad I did. Some other names I tried out didn’t stick.


  • I’ve never personally watched Steven Universe, but my understanding (supported by my boyfriend who did watch it) is that the queer rep comes in three categories:

    • Members of an all-female alien species have romantic relationships with each other. Aspects of these relationships are allegorical for challenges faced by queer people (for example, the “purist” aliens persecute the romantic aliens because of their relationships), but the characters in-universe don’t explicitly acknowledge the relationships as queer.
    • Word-of-god from the creator that is not explicitly acknowledged in the text - for example, that a character is nonbinary.
    • Under-the-radar references that would be easily missed by a conservative who didn’t know what to look for.

    For that reason, Steven Universe might be an easier sell for conservative parents, especially for your sister. (I could see some parents getting upset at their son watching a “girly” show - presumably that’s not an issue for you here.)

    I’ve watched all of Owl House and loved it. Spoilers below about the nature of the queer representation, for those who want to watch it (which I highly recommend!).

    spoiler

    The earliest representation I remember is a few episodes in where a mainish character mentions her two dads, which everyone treats as very normal. They don’t come up often, but you can’t forget about them either. Later on in the second season (I believe), the main character starts a same-gender relationship that continues to the end of the series and is much more visible on screen (hugging, kissing). I don’t remember the characters specifically talking about the queerness of the relationship very much, but they do come out as bi in a montage in season 3. Mentioning it because if your parents heavily monitor her media consumption, that might be a riskier bet.