sorry i'm still not planning on really coming back to tumblr because my brain has different needs now but i need you all to know i'm still finding new aishas. this is Li-Sha she was added to the site as a trading card in the year 2000 and she's some kind of freaky angel sphinx thing? i'm madly in love with her we will be married in the spring

I do get why you'd make this leap, even if it's not true. Like I said in my original post on the topic, the timing of my firing would make total sense if leadership thought they were eliminating "the mole," but this is not something I've actually been told myself and I don't want to start the rumour that it was. I don't expect to be able to convince you otherwise (how do you prove a negative?), but I will correct a couple of things here.

I'm not certain if you are another member of staff or just an interested lurker.

If you are staff, I just want to say I apologize if responding to this blog has brought any more negative attention/scrutiny to you. I do not support any attacks on specific members of staff. I am making the decision completely under my own power to engage with the posts that have been made here about me, and I wish you the best. Even though things were really tense in my last week there, you were all really sweet and I'm glad I was able to at least dip into voice chat occasionally! The VPS community is very small, so if circumstances change or you move around within sites, I hope I get to work with you guys again someday.

If you are an interested lurker... well, good luck! I have no idea what's going to happen next with the site either! I certainly don't plan to be a familiar face on this blog or on Tumblr again in general (and frankly I think the admin has indulged me enough by allowing two asks about me through in such a short time) but you are totally welcome to contact me somewhere else if you want to brawl me, or whatever.

Hi! I can try to answer this -- I'm Zelda on Santae! I don't use tumblr anymore aside from occasional cross-posts from my Mastodon, but I was told that I ended up on the salt blog again and I thought it would be better to clear this up here, as I don't feel like it would be appropriate to do so on site.

I was a moderator for about twenty days and I can honestly say I did my best. The rest of the team was really lovely to me and seemed pretty chuffed about how I was performing, which was cool.

Yesterday, I was in the middle of a conversation with the other mods and I was suddenly removed from the staff Discord. I received a message confirming my firing about a minute later. The only reasoning it gives is a shift in strategic direction. I was still given pay for my first two weeks (sanCash).

I can only speculate what might have happened, and I really don't want to contribute to any stress that the rest of the staff might be experiencing right now by harping on about it publicly; I know some might be upset that I chose to interact with a vent/drama blog at all. A few former teammates have reached out to me since my firing and have all been really sweet, but I don't think they have been given any more details than I have.

And to head off the obvious... no, I was not "the mole," and I have no evidence anyone else thought I was either. It did occur to me that this would be the reason you'd unexpectedly fire someone right now, but I haven't been accused or anything :)

I'm not totally sure what I'll do on Santae now, because every time I try to play I find myself automatically going to do staff tasks and that's not a thing anymore. Probably take a break and go back to coding? But I appreciate the people who have asked about me in the Discord and elsewhere, I had fun!

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.

I got married today. 

Hi. A lot of stuff has happened. Here’s some pictures of my bunny on the Kujata server of bad game Final Fantasy 14, but watch out, she’s limited edition (because we’ll get an oceanic server eventually). You can add me if you want: BAD MOON

Here’s my life updates: 

My cancer went away but then it came back. It’s probably going to be easy to get rid of again so I’m chilling.

I’m taking a break from school and applying for jobs instead. (Right now I’m coding a VR educational environment for slightly over minimum wage. It’s good fun.) 

Bo and I are getting married in 3 weeks.

My cats are very cute.

I participated in Game Jam Aotearoa over the past 48 hours and you can play my very small game from that: https://denzelle.itch.io/flat-white-mage

I’m still WAY more active on Twitter than I am here! https://twitter.com/tenderhooves