Today's Gender Realization: As A Kid I Was Teased When I Acted Like A Girl AND When I Acted Like A Boy.

today's Gender Realization: as a kid i was teased when i acted like a girl AND when i acted like a boy. teased when my hair got long, teased for playing in the sand, teased for going down the "wrong" toy aisle, teased for going down the RIGHT toy aisle, what do you want from me??

as i grew older it only got more complicated: i had very few role models in my life outside of TV, which often depicted men as violent, women as temptresses, and positive qualities as punchlines.

and, ugh, my parents explained NOTHING about puberty. it was all just more teasing!

multiply all that by autism and is it any wonder that my gender identity was so repressed? that i started at nonbinary because i was so confused by everything and everyone?? that even now i worry my boy feelings are """toxic""" and my girl feelings are """lustful"""???

it's only as an adult that i've seen positive reflections, depictions, and discussions of gender in my life… and they're all queer.

every. single. one.

(i could say the same for relationships, honestly…)

Get The Bananas, Rivers 🍌

Here's a belated treat for Mario's 35th anniversary: an isometric maze built atop Mario's running animation from SMB1! Use the pipes to travel between the different layers and make your way to the finish.

This maze is a full overhaul of one that I drew on graph paper for Mario's 25th anniversary, a whole decade ago! Once I came up with the idea for the pipes, I just *knew* I had to digitize this one, heh ✨

you know what they say about assuming: it's a natural and fundamental aspect of communication

when you talk to someone else, you are making subconscious assumptions that you both have:

similar definitions of words

trustworthy info or advice

a grasp of what is or isn't a joke

fully expressed thoughts

a clear understanding of all key points

all of these, and especially the latter, are frequently untrue! and there is often no way to know unless you spend five times as long discussing the fine details of every single point, which is simply not feasible... especially when you don't know what details are missing.

this is where assumptions come in, because once the speaker is done talking, the listener needs to fill in the bigger picture somehow. and those details are often filled in subconsciously via quick decision making – by instinct, if you will.

it was the speaker's job to either fill in those details, or expect the listener to do it instead. but when the listener gets it "wrong," the speaker gets to... blame the listener for making independent decisions, aka "assumptions"?? how is that fair at all???

and after the listener hears this again, and again, and AGAIN, the listener eventually learns that they cannot trust their own decision making, instincts, or ability to communicate... even when the real issue was the speaker's miscommunication and lack of clarity.

and sure, the listener may have misheard too; communication is a two-way street, and both parties can get it wrong. but assumptions themselves are not the issue – assumptions mean there's a lack of communication that needs addressing. focus on that!

you know what they say: people who assume everyone else is bad at communicating, are probably bad at communicating themselves

if you missed last night's stream, these innovative watercolor paintings are in fact still frames of the video quality from the new stream setup. it wasn't always this bad, but it was often enough to be really distracting. (luckily, most of us were playing, not watching~)

this quality reminds me of back when i used to stream from my laptop, and that probably means it's being encoded on my laptop after all (while streaming); the whole point of the new setup was to offload the encoding to the capture card itself, so this is pretty disappointing.

i need to look into alternatives to make this setup work, but it might not be feasible outside of getting a new computer.

in the meantime i've still got my old desktop, so i can stream as long as i don't mind filling the room with hot air (and i don't just mean my commentary...)

Redraw of my winter pfp of Rivers!

Turns out drawing bigger helps way more than I thought it would, hehe~ ✨