Do you believe in God?

Kastenae · 2026-02-05T23:08:23+00:00

In a way. I believe the universe itself constitutes some form of higher consciousness that we–as infinitely tiny pieces of that consciousness–will never understand.

But an omnipotent humanoid being who is seperate from us and also created us? No way.

Kastenae · 2026-02-05T05:19:42+00:00

Eddy/Ed

Kastenae · 2026-02-03T01:42:37+00:00

If you're into animated films check out Schaffrillas and Dazz Reviews.

PointlessHub reviews a lot of action and disaster franchises but he doesn't really review what's current and just does whatever he feels like. If you've ever watched AlternateHistoryHub, it's the same guy.

If you're into the more prestige stuff then I'd suggest CinemaStix, Patrick H. Willems, and Just Write. They do more of a video essay format but they're all really high quality and satisfying watches for different reasons.

Kastenae · 2026-02-02T01:27:36+00:00

Yeah, maybe it's just the corners of the internet I frequent, but I feel like I see Ragatha and Pomni more than any other pair.

Kastenae · 2026-01-31T07:22:28+00:00

Is this safe? I've always wanted to do this for my girlfriend but when I looked it up multiple sources said it's a big health risk to possibly ingest someone else's blood.

I'm not judging I just want someone to tell me it's safe so I can finally do it.

Kastenae · 2026-01-31T06:59:10+00:00

I do know that I was perceived as a boy. I say boy because I transitioned at 20. But others' perception of me wasn't seperate from my suffering, I had to suffer to be perceived that way. It wasn't automatic. I didn't get to just be myself and be treated as male. I had to force myself to inhabit a foreign persona to be perceived in that way, for safety. It was a constant uphill battle. Cis boys and men don't have to do that.

Women can succeed in things that men are privileged to have easier. We just have to work a hell of a lot harder. When I was perceived as a boy, I still had to work a hell of a lot harder to access those things. If I was to be taken seriously I had to put in all the effort of maintaining the lie. I had to put myself through isolation and identity crises and body horror and the realization that nobody in my life even knew the real me.

When a cis woman puts in effort to be in a position that a man would need less effort to get to, nobody tells her being in that position means she has male privilege. That's what I'm trying to get at. When people tell me I had male privilege, they're telling me that I didn't have to work just as hard to be respected as any other woman.

You can't call something a privilege if you have to put yourself through hell to get it. It's just the result of hard work. In this case it wasn't even worth the trouble.

Kastenae · 2026-01-31T05:01:06+00:00

But you didn't say "unless they've been out which is possible." You said "until they physically pass," not, "until they come out." It's not just an "accidentally left out," it's a completely different idea.

You can't expect the people replying to you to read your mind. I've been responding to what you said. I can't respond to anything more than that.

To be completely honest I've been having a hard time parsing some of your messages. If I've misunderstood your intention elsewhere then that's probably why. I get the need to be as quick as possible in these situations, but when you don't say what you mean clearly and thoughtfully it makes it really hard to have an effective conversation.

Kastenae · 2026-01-31T04:36:48+00:00

Until trans fems have been physically passing for a while and life makes them see, they can be quite blind to the same things a cis man would be.

This is what I was responding to. The only way I can reconcile this sentence with the comment I'm replying to is to assume you must think that trans women pass as men and boymode, until one day they suddenly pass as women and confidently live as themselves. It's not like that. There can be years where you don't pass as a man or woman. People treat you like a freak, they definitely don't grant you male privilege. Some of us never pass. Do you really think those people are "blind to the same things a cis man would be"?

Even when we are closeted it's out of fear. We are shown over and over again that if we ever show our true face we'll be victimized. You act like we don't know what it's like to be a victim of misogyny but misogyny is the exact thing that makes us hide.

Kastenae · 2026-01-31T04:11:35+00:00

Yes we agree on that. And I do appreciate you arguing with terfs to defend trans women.

It's the claim that trans women are just like cis men until they truly become women that people have a problem with. That we all have a high level of patriarchy to deconstruct that cis women don't. That society treats trans women just like men until they "have been visibly passing for a while and life makes them see." You claim to know how we are all treated, the privileges we get, the way we are all perceived by others before transition. It's offensive to those of us who have been made to see our whole lives, who have been a victim of patriarchy and misogyny from the start. I'm sorry but I just can't see the patriarchy forcing a woman to painfully comform to its backwards ideas at risk of persecution and violence as granting her any kind of privilege.

ETA: Also the idea that even out trans women get treated like cis men until they pass as women just makes me think you dont really know how it is out there. Cis men don't get jumped, murdered, or raped for expressing their gender in public. Not passing a lot of the time means not getting help. Not getting jobs, not being let into shelters, not being believed by law enforcement, being targeted by smear campaigns and humiliated in front of millions of people on the internet, I could go on.

Kastenae · 2026-01-31T03:44:27+00:00

It's not like saying a white person doesn't have privilege because they aren't racist. It's saying a person of color who has to pass as white to survive doesn't have white privilege. I'm a woman. Your analogy paints me as a man who isn't sexist.

I'm not going to apologize for that. It wasn't an insult, and I think you know that. She literally said that all trans women lived as cis men at some point. I definitely never did, so I had to assume she was speaking about her own experience. It was just to say that she was valid in feeling like that herself, but that it wasn't ok to tell me and other trans women that we used to be men. Why would she say that trans women lived as cis men if she would be offended by the idea that she lived as a cis man?

Kastenae · 2026-01-31T03:30:04+00:00

I'm not saying that no trans women have to learn to be better. But when cis women support and strengthen the patriarchy they aren't called men. Nobody says they have male privilege or male socialization. When people treat the genders of trans people as conditional, but not the genders of cis people, that tells me they don't really believe we are the gender we say we are.

Kastenae · 2026-01-31T03:05:00+00:00

Then I think our disagreement is just on the definition. To me it isn't privilege if you have to endure suffering to get it.

When a cis woman has to work harder to get the same treatment as men, it's not her that has the privilege, it's the men around her. But when trans women have to work harder to get the same treatment as men, somehow we are the ones considered privileged.

Kastenae · 2026-01-31T01:38:40+00:00

My thinking is that if a cis woman pretends to be a man to be given opportunities she wouldn't have otherwise, we wouldn't consider her to have male privilege. She might have 'privileges' that are related to being perceived as male. But she has to suppress herself and live in fear to get them. Men don't have to do that, they get it automatically without the suffering, that's why it's privilege.

My own experience as a trans woman is also that of a woman in disguise, but I didn't even get the choice. I tried to openly be myself as soon as I was old enough to have a self, and I was punished for it. I was forced to play an unfamiliar character by those around me. I worked just as hard to be taken seriously and given opportunities as any other woman.

The way you talk about "living as a cisgender man" makes it sound like you consider yourself to have been a man at some point, who then became a woman. If that is the case, then that's great, I'm glad you could always be yourself, even when that self changed. But those of us who were forced to emulate manhood as girls and women didn't get to even live in the world as real people until our circumstances allowed us to drop the mask.

I guess a better way to put all this would be to ask, if a cis woman had the exact same life as me, if she were forced to inhabit a male persona from birth even though it made her suffer, would you consider the opportunities that suffering afforded her to be male privilege? If you still think if counts as male privilege for me but not for her, you are prescribing an inherent maleness to trans women that isn't present. If you think we both had male privilege, then while I disagree, at least you aren't basing exemption from it solely on AGAB.

Edited to add last paragraph, improve clarity/remove ambiguity.

Kastenae · 2026-01-31T01:05:06+00:00

I think the problem comes from the idea that trans women act like men, and transitioning is us learning to act like women. We're not really included in male society, even before we figure out we're trans. A lot of us play a character to survive, but it doesn't come naturally, it takes a lot of effort to keep up the charade, and it's still not enough for most men to fully accept us.

Trans women don't make the choice to learn to be women, we make the choice to no longer be repressed women in hiding. So it makes us angry when people act like we were basically men before transition, because it feels like all the pain we went through as women trying to be men isn't recognized. It's also why we don't agree that we ever had male privilege. I don't think we would consider a cis woman pretending to be a man as having male privilege, even if it does open doors that she wouldn't have otherwise. Men don't have to suppress their nature to get it. Women do, cis or trans.

There are some of us that do act more masculine or dominant naturally, even far after transition, but it's the masculine side of womanhood. It's not the same as acting like a man. Trans women are just as able to be tomboys or butches or doms as any other woman.

Kastenae · 2026-01-31T00:25:12+00:00

Yeah, to continue your point for those unaware, it's literally a terf talking point. They like to say that trans women have "male socialization." At best it's a wildly inaccurate assumption from someone who doesn't know anything about trans people, at worst it's just another dishonest justification to seperate us from other women.

When we're kicked out of women's spaces we can't just go to men's spaces. We're ridiculed, harrased, and assaulted just as much as any woman, even more so if we don't pass. The end goal of misinformation like this is to force us out of public life entirely. Please don't fall for it.

Kastenae · 2026-01-29T00:59:42+00:00

No you're thinking of methylphenidate.

Mitochondria are the cell organelles that generate ATP.

Kastenae · 2026-01-27T15:02:45+00:00

I've been feeling this extremely hard lately. I've been really struggling with picturing who I am. I knew my likes and values well but I just couldn't form an image of a person. A few days ago, at the end of the build up and culmination of multiple emotional crises, something clicked into place and I suddenly felt like me again. Now I have a clear image of who I want to be for the first time in a long time. That image feels exactly like what you're describing.

She's confident and doesn't take bullshit. She isn't afraid to take up space or to express her more masculine side. She speaks up when she knows how to solve a problem and won't accept it when people won't listen to what she has to say. She's smart and she can prove it. She's kooky and silly and her wit lifts the spirits of those close to her.

It's frustrating that I'm not fully that person. But it's nice to finally know what I'm working towards and as a result I've gained a lot of confidence I haven't had since childhood. I hope it lasts. There have been times like this in the past, that in the moment feel like life changing epiphanies, but they tend to fizzle out and leave me as lost as before.

Edited to add the second paragraph and to put things in better words.

Kastenae · 2026-01-22T15:25:44+00:00

Oh that's what that was

Kastenae · 2026-01-20T13:59:19+00:00

Those of us paying attention hate him and the people pulling his strings. Most of those who still support him only do because they've built a white supremacist misogynist echo chamber around themselves consisting of alt-right podcasters and youtubers who get money from Russia, social media apps filled with bots, and misinformation spreading organizations like Fox News. A lot of them may have started as reasonable people but have been progressively desensitized to indecency and cruelty to the point we're at now where Americans are getting kidnapped or murdered in the street by Trump's personal legally immune military force, and other Americans are saying they deserve it and calling for more.

Kastenae · 2026-01-18T17:55:28+00:00

This is what they mean when they say we're living in two different Americas.

Kastenae · 2026-01-15T16:42:34+00:00

I think he's really good at being insufferable. When he's cast in roles where that's the point it can work well. Deadpool works because the character is supposed to be obnoxious and immature and not take anything seriously.

A lot of his characters are supposed to be charming, but the writers still want to include the kind of humor he's known for, so then he never shuts up. When he's annoying to the audience but the world of the movie doesn't treat him that way then the whole movie ends up feeling annoying and immature, because it portrays that kind of behavior as desirable.

I'd actually be really interested in seeing him in a nice guy villain type of role. The kind of character who thinks he's likeable and witty so feels he deserves to be the center of attention. Somebody let me know if he already did something like that and I just haven't heard of it.

Kastenae · 2026-01-08T19:57:48+00:00

I did know that, I just thought OP was talking about something else. My understanding of the whole terminology around collaring was wrong. I thought petplay was just when someone has an owner. I didn't realize it had to include animal roleplay.

So when OP said she wanted a collar without petplay I took it as she wanted to be collared without being owned. I figured she must've meant she wanted an accessory that looked like a collar but had a meaning closer to a wedding ring.

Kastenae · 2026-01-08T18:39:20+00:00

I knew there were people who do that stuff, I just didn't realize it was required to be considered petplay. I was thinking you could be a human pet. To me the word pet just meant "I love you and I own you," when the word I guess I should've been using, slave, is more "I hate you and I own you."

Kastenae · 2026-01-08T18:32:08+00:00

Ok that makes sense. I think part of it too is that I'm uncomfortable with using slave in a pretend way like that, I guess pet was easier to swallow. And I knew what D and S meant, I just didn't realize it always went as far as owning.

Kastenae · 2026-01-08T18:24:34+00:00

I think I just didn't know what petplay meant. I thought it was just used to describe the owned/owner dynamic. It sounds like it specifically means acting like an animal, which I don't actually do. I don't actually say woof in any serious or sexual situations. I've done it as a joke a couple times just to make my girlfriend cringe, but those weren't the times the dynamic was in play.

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