Aster (She/Her)

just a few weeks now until i marry my beloved fiancée!!!

Stand up for trans rights 🏳️‍⚧️

Join me and @GoodLawProject and help us fight the Supreme Court’s harmful decision:https://goodlawproject.org/s/c41bb8

My outfit from a small leaving party went to for a colleague last friday ^-^

And still the haters and transphobes claim that people are becoming trans just to do bad stuff. NO ONE is going though the grueling stress and mental hardship of being trans for anything other than being therselves. I can promise that.

Also, due to the extreme 7 year wait i'm looking at for access to a gender clinic, I will mostly likely have to pay out of pocket for sessions with a private gender specialist to get an official diagnosis of dysphoria. I feel like a dolphin trapped in a zoo doomed to jump though hoops forever.

To get a GRC I have to be able to prove i've lived in my affirmed gender for 2+ years, have a note from my doctor, a note from a psychiatrist and then i'm STILL at the mercy of a mystery board of 'gender specialists' who will judge if i'm actually trans or not. It's really scary.

This cost me £50 and then another £85 for the passport which sucks, but I guess it's progress. The next step after this is a Gender recognition certificate which is partially why i'm making this post because it's honestly a very depressing and sad thing to have to deal with.

New consideration. I have recently started the process to updating the gender on my passport, for which I needed a doctor's note. His requirement for this note was that I get professional management over my HRT, which until recently i've been managing myself with DIY (a whole other story).

Oh, and I also decided to move the domains I own to Njalla since it's very privacy focused and I can pay by crypto (although I didn't).

Now to return to my privacy/security focus. I migrated entirely away from Google to Proton and Ente for email, file and photo storage and converted all my systems to Linux. But this isn't enough. I'm currently in the process of spinning up a SearXNG to mitigate search related tracking.

Had an amazing 2 weeks!!! Met so many new people, some of which I now call friends. And most importantly, I got to spend lots of time with my amazing and beautiful girlfriend and my partner. I even got to meet some of my metas who are lovely!!
I have plans going forward to move there, hopefully!!

A little (and mediocre) breakfast at Starbucks. It’s somewhat of a tradition for me. In other news, my giant translucent bag got though security because my cosmetics don’t fit in their small clear ones. Yay!!

Heading once again to iceland to see my gf and friends. This time for 2 weeks!!!

A little over a week until I can go see someone who is very special to me. I love them so much!!! It’s really hard to be away

To keep all my new accounts secure, I chose to create an encrypted keypack with all my recovery keys. I've written this to 5 cheap flash drives so I can always get one if needed. Finally, i've been running Incogni for a few months to get rid of my data from brokers. I'm feeling quite confident now.

But after importing roughly 280gb worth of memories, I can confidently say everything works great. They have on-device deep learning for face detection and tagging which works almost as good as Google's. And they show photos on a map using Open Maps which doesn't use outside services.

Importing from Google Photos wasn't too difficult. I used takeout to get all my photos which is split into seperate images and metadata file. Luckily, Ente can parse this so I can maintain metadata. I had to import 1 year at a time to avoid duplicate file names having wrong metadata parsed.

Proton Drive has a photos app but it's quite terrible compared to Google photos. I want everything in an easily searchable gallery. So for Photo storage I chose Ente.io. It's end to end encrypted and well priced. The apps work great and so far i'm really enjoying it.

Proton pass is excellent and a much better service than Lastpass which I used before. It supports passkeys and 2FA codes too which is really convenient.
Proton Drive seems great but lacks the office suit built into Google Drive as it's only downside. I'll use Libre Office locally as it's open source

I went with the Proton Unlimited package which ends up being just over 100 euro a year. Importing existing emails from my multiple Gmail accounts was easy with their automated process and setting up forwarding was equally as straight forward. I just have to spend time changing my accounts now.

My criteria will full end to end encryption. So even the companies who host the accounts can't view my data. As such I went with Proton for Email, VPN, Storage and password management. They are hosted in Switzerland and subjected to absolute privacy laws.

Recently, I started transitioning away from Google for my cloud storage, photos and email. I'm quite tired of the data collection and lack of privacy.
Sadly, their products are so good that it's very difficult to find suitable alternatives without downsides. But I am quite happy with my choices.

This is truly a novel of all time. It has everything. And it makes me really excited to start the next book which I will post about soon. I have some initial thoughts already.

By the end, you feel as if the characters are family
members. You feel part of the Ninth house. And that makes what happens in the end painful and deeply saddening. I won’t elaborate as to avoid spoilers. Suffice to say, I cried immediately and felt lost for a good day after finishing the book.

As the story unfolds, it’s easy to build up a vivid mental picture of the world which is being described in exquisite detail. And every chapter brings you closer to understanding but holds just enough back to keep you on the edge of your seat, ravenous for more.

There is many hot scenes throughout the book for anyone with an active imagination. It’s always subtle and never smutty but it’s well implied which is a perfect balance in my opinion. It adds some fun but maintains focus on the plot.

The lesbian vibes are definitely there from the start from the magazines in Gideon’s room to the very first (unfair) fight between Harrow and Gideon which was incredibly hot to picture. Wouldn’t want Harrows face paint to be smudged would we? :)

It’s hard to know from the very start, even with the initial spouts of violence that the characters are very used to this. Growing up in the Ninth houses enough to harden anyone. Especially if you’re not well liked. But it’s much more fun once you realise this.

So my thoughts on Gideon The Ninth. It’s just so incredibly well written and deeply emotional in layers which you unlock as you get further in. On the surface, the characters can seem quite shut off and mysterious. But their true depth is swallowing by the time you reach the end. And you will cry.

Will be posting my thoughts on the first book soon doing my best to avoid spoilers. But just picked up the second. I’m very excited!!