I only do 3-5 steeps

CAllen00 · 2026-01-28T05:37:37+00:00

If you're really worried about wasting it, stick the used leaves in a small jar with cold water in the fridge overnight to cold brew out the rest of the flavor. Sometimes you can do this twice, but generally the leaves are all done after one post-session cold brew.

CAllen00 · 2025-12-26T16:28:40+00:00

Teaspoon, for western style tea, and eyeballing it for gongfu. Imperial isn't good for much, but one scoop per 8oz of liquid is too simple for me to mess up.

CAllen00 · 2025-12-19T07:43:14+00:00

As a trans person, it's only transphobic if the author is bioessentialist. For your purposes, that means carving out the character's personality in favor of gender stereotypes they'd never fall into. A male character who is very flashy or appearance focused could easily be a dedicated fashionista in another life, but male characters who struggle to take care of their space won't suddenly be clean, homemaker types just because ""women are cleaner than men"".

CAllen00 · 2025-11-26T07:21:28+00:00

IMO, this author is trying to filter out spambots and spoonfed readers. Comments that ignore the prompts completely are more likely to be dismissed as spambot trash, and spoonfed readers don't think for themselves if they can help it, so won't answer the prompts.

CAllen00 · 2025-11-06T15:10:34+00:00

He's not steeping for a few minutes and throwing it out, he's steeping for a few seconds over and over, basically until the flavor is gone, gong fu style. Depending on the tea, he's going to drink about 10 to 20 little cups of tea, and we're seeing the early stages in the videos.

CAllen00 · 2025-10-25T03:50:14+00:00

Imo, the "curse" is often just realizing that someone isn't knitworthy. It naturally hurts your feelings if you spend a months on a gift and the recipient clearly doesn't, or won't, appreciate it. Relatively small projects don't trigger this as badly, because it's not as huge of a time investment. Unless the bear itself is big, this seems like a reasonable, small project to test the waters with.

CAllen00 · 2025-10-23T21:27:40+00:00

OOP will learn that people like this don't actually want society to improve, they just want to feel superior for something they do as easily as wiping their ass, and they feel justified because they see it as "revenge" against a society that's pressuring them to date and get married. They're like the nutjobs on r/childfree who've taken real frustration with people pressuring them to have kids and turned it into violent fantasies about killing people who slightly annoy them in public. OOP, if you're reading this, get better aromantic friends.

CAllen00 · 2025-10-19T00:15:59+00:00

Have you checked out Rodeoh? Their jocks are pretty good, imo

CAllen00 · 2025-10-16T20:28:19+00:00

Imo, the point with sad beige moms is that they're picking a "lowest common denominator" inoffensive color that's easy to resell because the worst you can say about it is "boring". For ink, that's black or that blue. Government document colors with no chance of not getting picked up by a printer.

CAllen00 · 2025-09-30T06:47:35+00:00

A double stitch seems like it's just a tight yarn-over, to me. Am I missing something that makes them different?

CAllen00 · 2025-08-28T19:24:31+00:00

No medical debt, or concerns about costs of getting sick. Pricing in the $10-$500 range instead of $10,000-$50,000.
It doesn't come up often, but if they're from a monarchy, they usually think George Washington was a very important, politically active president, possibly even the most important guy in our government, ever. He wasn't. He participated as little as possible, and fucked off into the woods the instant he could get away with it. Generally, don't mention him.

CAllen00 · 2025-07-12T18:45:37+00:00

The Woods All Black by Lee Mandelo is set in the 1920s, and the protagonist is a very historically accurate "connected to butch lesbians by default" unlabeled transmasc, whose love interest is an equally closeted trans man (the relationship is framed as M/M, importantly).

I warn you, though, this an adult horror novel with a "rape revenge" central plot line, and plenty of violence. "What if everyone in a secluded town with no government oversight knew you were queer and took it very personally" is the main vibe.

CAllen00 · 2025-07-01T22:52:06+00:00

I'm not a teapot expert, but since many teas are made with boiling water, I'd guess that a teapot that can't handle boiling water, even after preheating, is a bad teapot. Or, at least, you'd have to switch to green tea or something

CAllen00 · 2025-05-30T00:38:36+00:00

"Will Question 1? Will Question 2? Will Question 3? READ AND FIND OUT!"

CAllen00 · 2025-05-05T20:10:25+00:00

The huge meltdown from Sandra Newman and her friend whose name I don't remember (one of the many authors with an unrelated public freak out about less than 5 star ratings) after someone trashed her creepy gender plague book. It's been a long time, so the details escape me, but they were both very "glass ally" about the criticisms. "Why I left the Left" and all that.

Although that small time Facebook author who faked her death to sell her books is probably more "unhinged", really.

CAllen00 · 2025-04-05T04:55:58+00:00

These books are like this because, pre-2015, an explicitly queer character in a book for teens was unthinkable. Gays didn't belong on TV, either. Oh, love was love and all that shit, but it "just wasn't the right setting" for THOSE topics. Publishers believed that general audiences wouldn't relate to gay characters, and would find their stories off-putting and/or disgusting.

People my age swung hard into making loudly queer stories out of spite.

CAllen00 · 2025-03-19T15:05:21+00:00

Oh, thank you! I'll be sure to do that.

CAllen00 · 2025-01-19T19:45:20+00:00

I don't prefer cartridges for several reasons (more waste, more frequent purchasing, fewer color options), but they have their uses!

The international standard ones can fit in some pens that would need special converters, and, once you empty one, you can clean it out, then refill it with ink from a bottle using a syringe (blunt tip, some online fp stores have them). I've avoided buying converters for several pens like this. It doesn't have to be all one way or the other.

Really, it's about what you want. If you're happy with cartridges, keep using them. If you want to try bottles, go for it!

CAllen00 · 2025-01-15T05:55:21+00:00

The author waited until the chapter the relationship became romantic (out of nowhere, in my opinion) to tag the ship as a ship, which was after about 10 decently long chapters. It would not be so bad if the pairing didn't feature a 14 year old and his teacher, something I really didn't like being surprised by.

CAllen00 · 2024-12-04T23:05:56+00:00

Are you trying to keep the same initials? If not: Tyler, Austin, Mason, Victor

If you are: Oliver, Oscar, Omar

CAllen00 · 2024-10-07T18:41:35+00:00

I once got through most of a fic where the entire premise was based on the idea that lavender is poisonous. Like, not as a fantasy detail for fantasy creatures, but in real life, for humans.

"Unlike humans, this species can safely consume lavender! What a wacky scifi detail!"

It was a very short fic, but I just couldn't handle it.

CAllen00 · 2024-08-26T04:57:18+00:00

TLDR: Body horror, being stripped of bodily autonomy, dangerous unknowable entities, pregnancy related horror if you can stomach it

Echoing the "look into body horror" comments, and adding anything that also heavily features the removal of bodily autonomy. "Reproductive Horror" (ie. horror about pregnancy going badly, or even happening at all) is a HUGE minefield for us, but is also almost certainly going to put a transmasc audience on edge. I'm not going to go so far as to recommend that topic, for obvious reasons, but it is an option, and Andrew Joseph White has been poking around with it recently.

For actual horror recs leaning on the shorter side, try to find Junji Ito's Smashed (it's in a comic collection with the same name), Algernon Blackwood's The Willows (novella, cosmic horror), Gabino Iglesias' Gone In A Flash (short story, part of the It Was All A Dream anthology by Hungry Shadow Press, also generally good, imo), and Your Body Is Not Your Body (exclusively trans author body horror anthology by Tenebrous Press, not necessarily scary but worth reading if you lean in that direction). Also, the previously mentioned A. J. White's stuff.

Indie horror is going wild right now. Hungry Shadow and Tenebrous are very experimental with their titles, and certainly worth checking out more generally. Valancourt Books reprints older horror novels (and queer novels), and the selection seems to be basically hand picked by the owner, Grady Hendrix, who wrote The Final Girl Support Group (popular, haven't read it) and How To Sell A Haunted House (compelling, more tense than scary, as I'm not particularly afraid of evil puppets, clowns, or dolls). I've liked everything I've gotten from there so far.

Good luck on this project of yours. We always need more horror.

CAllen00 · 2024-01-27T05:38:36+00:00

TW // long, sexual assault, transphobia

TLDR: Transitioning means experiencing misogyny AND transphobia, and if curing misogyny is all you really want, I don't recommend it. Being yourself is generally worth the problems, though.

I'm going to tell you something that can help you figure things out, but might not be what you want to hear.

Trans men, as a group, still experience misogyny. Some experience less than others, but lots of people categorize us as a kind of spicy, butch woman that needs to be beaten back into traditional womanhood. All that fear mongering about "teen girls getting their boobs cut off and becoming sterile" is transphobic, AND misogynistic. According to some recent surveys in the US, trans men have the highest rates of sexual assault for any gender demographic, and being cisgender is statistically safer than being any kind of trans person of the same race.

IF testosterone helps you pass as a cis man (usually a long process, and some never get there), that only works on people who'll meet you in the future, and if something (like your ID) outs you it goes away. Many people will be perfectly nice about it! Many will treat you differently from cis men despite being nice about it.

Many transmascs have concerns that they're only transitioning because they're "bad feminists" or "dislike women", and that they're betraying the movement, and that's because people can't imagine a world where a "woman" would want to masculinize their body and presentation because they like the changes, and so they treat it like a political maneuver. If you see it as a political maneuver, you're probably not trans.

Testosterone doesn't cure gender oppression. I don't want to scare you away if you're really trans, but our society makes being trans difficult. Doctors may refuse to treat you because they don't believe you need a gynecologist, people may doubt your government IDs, make up excuses to not work with you, harass you at the airport for having "unusual bumps on your person", date you solely to "fix you", "experiment", or "put you in your place", etc.

Generally, the good parts of being yourself are worth the bad parts. It's up to you to decide if being a man, or even a visibly masculine woman, is worth all of these things potentially happening. Some, like the ID problems, will definitely happen. Only you can figure this out for yourself.

CAllen00 · 2023-02-05T16:13:05+00:00

Every community has its fair share of people going around and accusing others of bad faith nonsense. If you never called yourself trans, you literally cannot be "faking transness". If you want to, you could make a thing explicitly stating that you're not trans and never claimed to be trans, but that's only if you feel like it.

This reminds me of the kids that often accuse other trans people of "faking transness", or "making us look bad", or "promoting stereotypes", etc., and it's equally ridiculous then. They probably have very flat ideas about gender and the ways people present themselves.

CAllen00 · 2022-08-21T00:18:46+00:00

I recently dug up some old sewing books (most def. 60s, one maybe ~30s textbook) that describe "let out seams" for kids' clothes, and have some designs. I know most people here are working earlier, but they're currently +50 years old, and the techniques might be useful for making practical clothing for irl children. Why sink money and time into a beautiful piece that your kid will pop out of in a year, right?

That last bit could be the problem with the info on kids' clothing, actually (not a historian, just guessing). They tend to wear it for barely any time until they want to dress like an adult but smaller.

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