now that you can pin posts i thought i'd make one :)

as of 2023 i am a thirty year old living in Aotearoa New Zealand! i have a nice wife and a nice life! my wife and i and my two cats are crammed into a small moldy but cheap one-bedroom in Te Whanganui-a-Tara. she writes and teaches art and does illustrations. i muck around online and teach programming and web/game/interactive technology and even sometimes make games occasionally. i also have a Second Life job as a lounge hostess, security and virtual fashion model. no, really, i do.

one of my Neopets is like 23 years old and my Tumblr account is old enough to make its own Tumblr blog, but i don't really use it anymore. if you want to see what i'm up to and maybe even partake in it, the best place to find me right now is Mastodon!

if i end up with any other online presence to host longer-form, less ephemeral stuff (i'm working on it) i will link it here.

ciao, shalom, cheers!!

I've ported PART 1 of my "Which Pokemon are Kosher" series to my personal blog. Just like my original thoughts on it from 2018 (wow!) I suspect it's going to require three separate parts for the three possible kosher classifications I was thinking about. Take a look!

only had three posts in the "flagged" queue on this blog, and they're good ones

justice has been served

judge these very old posts for yourself: were they pornography? i need to bake bread again

how's it going

all good answers in these replies. i hope you're all doing ok :)

i'm here because i spent the last week playing inscryption way too much and my mastodon audience won't understand if i start posting things like "leshy is my little meow meow but he did several things wrong" and it's more likely some of you would

i'm fleeing trans genocide in southern appalachia and i need your help.

hi, you might know me as Nate or Nel. i'm a local East Tennesseean, born in a tiny mountain town and living in Knoxville to attend school.

i love southern Appalachia more than anything in the world; i love the cool hollers in whose woods i ran barefoot as a child. i love the flora and fauna i went to school to try to protect. my heart is here.

and i have to leave. i am going to have to rip my heart out of my chest and run.

i'm visibly trans. even before i ever transitioned, when i was a small child, people called me names and hit me in public for looking gender non-conforming, even when i tried to conform. there was a small break from this once i transitioned and no one knew what trans people were, but after the trans awareness tipping point, my home has become unlivable for me. even other local trans people are flabbergasted at how much i am targeted. thanks to the media wanting a buck, everyone knows.

i have had:

all of these are because i don't pass as anything in particular in public. i just don't. whether i grow my beard out ZZ Top style or put on a dress, i'm not gonna pass as something comforting for these people either way. no choice that i can make here will save me. in t-shirts and jeans, people stare at me like i have three heads. i have to leave.

my long-distance partner's gotten into a prestigious school in LA, got an apartment, and is moving to attend there. i finish school in December, and am going to try to make it out there. I have no family support whatsoever, and I am disabled and struggle to work enough to save up money. my only chance to have a livable life is to pack up everything i own and drive west.

i'll tweak the expenses as we go, but so far it seems like:

this fundraiser isn't done, but i wanted to go ahead and get something started. i will of course also be saving up from my own part-time job, and add more details as time passes.

i wanted to end on an example of the treatment i get (this was left as a note for me at my campus), but i think i'd rather end on a high note and show you all some images of my partner and i. they're one of the main reasons my life is still worth living right now, and in their arms is one of the only places where i don't feel like a freak.

so yeah, there's the tumblr version of my post. if you think you could get more reach from the tiktok or insta version, let me know.

I don't wanna release personal details, but I've been doing advocacy work in the community since I was 15, and at 28 I am tired. I'm tired, and very unsafe.

first update 06/12/23

I'm amazed at the response this has gotten so far. It helps me have a little bit of hope for the future, even if it's just a little.

I cried a lot today. I cried every few hours at best, thinking about how little I've been able to keep in my life. Not just personal dignities stripped away from me through surviving abuse, and not just the loss of my mother and my cat, but also the loss of my home itself. I want to live with my partner; I don't want it to be in a big, hot city far away from anything I've ever known, with no clue if it will ever be safe for me to return.

I'm autistic and I don't like change.

I've also undergone such a long journey. I grew up deeply poor and Appalachian, in an impoverished farming family, and I grew up with internalized classism embedded just as deep. It took me so many years, in probably one of the hardest and fiercest and proudest arcs of my life, to unlearn it and come to love my home, my folk heritage, and my ancestors for surviving.

And now I'm hacking off my roots in a frenzy, and abandoning my old family farm to an abusive and evil man, abandoning my neighbors during a genocide, and abandoning my home region to a rising wave of alt-right self-professed Nazi grifters moving in.

I just keep trying to remember that if I can survive this amputation, I can maybe be happy and safe one day.

Long time no see! Remember my three posts on whether Pokémon can be kosher to eat under Jewish law, and which ones (here, here and here)? 

Today I was teaching a class on using Flask (a Python web framework) with databases so as an example for the students, I decided to make a web app to tell you which Pokémon are kosher. For now, you can visit this at https://koshermon.herokuapp.com/ or look up individual Pokémon by adding “mon” and their national dex code to the url, like https://koshermon.herokuapp.com/mon/420 for Cherubi. Not every Pokémon has its notes put in yet so more details are forthcoming. 

The latter half of the class I’m teaching brings in Javascript for interactive web apps, so if I have time I’ll add JS, sorting methods, and other features.

Also, I’m currently hotlinking all my image sources from Bulbapedia so they may or may not want me dead for that. Rehosting the sprites is on my to-do… eventually…

PATCH NOTES: Added logic to only display blocks if there’s something to display. No more “Alt types: none none” nonsense. 

PATCH NOTES 2: (SORRY I HAVE NO IDEA HOW BEST TO REPRESENT THESE ASIDE FROM REBLOGS, JUST CLICK THROUGH TO THE OP IF YOU WANT) added last mon/next mon and home buttons to each individual mon, fixed gross vertical alignment issues with differently sized sprites on the main page

Long time no see! Remember my three posts on whether Pokémon can be kosher to eat under Jewish law, and which ones (here, here and here)? 

Today I was teaching a class on using Flask (a Python web framework) with databases so as an example for the students, I decided to make a web app to tell you which Pokémon are kosher. For now, you can visit this at https://koshermon.herokuapp.com/ or look up individual Pokémon by adding “mon” and their national dex code to the url, like https://koshermon.herokuapp.com/mon/420 for Cherubi. Not every Pokémon has its notes put in yet so more details are forthcoming. 

The latter half of the class I’m teaching brings in Javascript for interactive web apps, so if I have time I’ll add JS, sorting methods, and other features.

Also, I’m currently hotlinking all my image sources from Bulbapedia so they may or may not want me dead for that. Rehosting the sprites is on my to-do… eventually…

PATCH NOTES: Added logic to only display blocks if there’s something to display. No more “Alt types: none none” nonsense.