diary

i'mma keep my silly little entries here.. probably thoughts about politics and uhhh whatever else i'm thinking about idk.

entry list

• February 16, 2025 — bougie chocolate review: Dehn Spring in Central Park Coffee Chocolate Bar
• February 1, 2025 — brainworms = profit?
• January 10, 2025 — why is Sekh-net's capitalization like that?
• December 26, 2024 — the actual intro to this page
• November 20, 2024 — Trans Day of Rememberance... & the people who forget

February 16, 2025 — bougie chocolate review: Dehn Spring in Central Park Coffee Chocolate Bar

this was originally a discord message that i wrote because my friend Michael likes eating bougie chocolate. i happened to score myself some at the Met so i decided to tell them about it. unfortunately i accidentally threw it away so i didn't get to finish it, but i enjoyed what i did get to eat. this is also loosely inspired by the tea reviews on my friend Rachel's site. check both of them out!!

summary: a decent chocolate bar that definitely has a different flavor profile than your usual Hershey's bar. at $6.50 per bar, it's certainly not the most expensive either... although that price doesn't include how much Met tickets cost.

pros:

• nice wrapper with a pretty painting on it
• genuinely tastes like if a chocolate bar had coffee in it
• nice crunch to it, and I feel like it's good at not melting
• survived being stuffed in my little backpack for like 3 hours

cons:

• the bitterness from the coffee gives it a bit of a dark chocolate taste... a con for some, a pro for others
• doesn't come in easily breakable pieces, which means i have to bite into it like a heathen (/j) instead of snapping off pieces and letting them melt in my mouth
• very easy to bite into a little coffee bit (ground up coffee beans, I guess?) and taste just pure coffee. again, a con for some and a pro for others

conclusion: to be honest, i was surprised by this chocolate bar. i was expecting a totally sweet milk chocolate-y flavor, because i'd forgotten that I'd bought a coffee flavored chocolate bar but this surprise wasn't exactly unpleasant. the bitterness isn't my favorite thing ever, but if coffee is your jam then this chocolate bar will be too.

February 1, 2025 — brainworms = profit?

as the previous diary entry and the various khS words scattered around this sight may imply, i'm really into linguistics. i started studying it in college recently and it's wild because the knowledge i've gained from conlanging is very useful in the field, but it blurs the line between real life and my internet activities somewhat. i think people who only know me online wouldn't be able to find my real identity easily, but i'm not sure the reverse would be true.

how do i put this on my resume? do i really want employers to know that my conlang is connected to a setting with many queer, neurodivergent/disabled, characters of color? what if my boss finds my Bluesky and sees my old Deltarune fanart?

these questions don't actually need answers right now. but someday they might, and that's a little nerve-wracking. if push comes to shove, maybe i can make a whole new conlang and put that on my resume instead... i been wanting to make a beatboxing language for a while now. i can beatbox so making the sounds is easy, it's just a matter of figuring out how to transcribe them, especially when it comes to beatboxing and humming at the same time. i don't think the International Phonetic Alphabet accounts for that!

January 10, 2025 — why is Sekh-net's capitalization like that?

edit (3/3/2025): an updated, in-character version of this entry is now on the page about kemharSekharu. just keeping this entry around for posterity.

whenever i get around to making a page explaining kemharSekharu i'll copy or move this explanation there, but in the meantime i've been wanting to talk about this and it's easier than figuring out how to summarize an entire language-in-progress, so:

words are capitalized in a specific way here to reflect kemharSekharu's capitalization rules. it has a unique alphabet, but no upper- or lowercase. here are the rules about how kemharSekharu should be romanized:

• the first letter in a sentence is not capitalized unless it's a proper noun. proper nouns are capitalized even if they're in the middle of a portmanteau (e.g. the "S" in kemharSekharu).
• the letter "H" is always capitalized regardless of its place in a word or sentence (e.g. "khajaHu") because it represents the /ħ/ sound, unlike "h," which only represents /h/.
• similarly, the letter "h" is always lowercase even if it's the first letter of a proper noun.
• pronouns are not capitalized.
• acronyms may be capitalized (although i think i've been inconsistent about that... oops). abbreviations are lowercase, but if they're short for words with a capital letter in the middle of them that letter should stay capitalized (e.g. dhS = djuharSekharu, the indigenous word for khS's alphabet).
• honorific adjectives like Duwa'e (compare sama in Japanese or xiansheng in Mandarin) are always capitalized.

despite all these rules, if you've seen any of the user profiles you'll have noticed that none of them follow the rules at all. this is because i also want to reflect their personalities through how they write. but i and the Sekh-net UI do write in khS-case to create some sense of immersion.

December 26, 2024 — the actual intro to this page

my first diary entry was about TDOR because that's how everything lined up for me. but i didn't actually explain why i made this page. it's not much i guess, i just have a lot of thoughts that i would rather put on my website than on the socials. other times they're thoughts that i wanna share with other people and this'll be like a rough draft so my words are more coherent later. or they're thoughts from a conversation i've already had and i wanna express them more concretely. there won't be many updates — i started writing this entry on November 28 and then forgot about it for a whole month... oops. anyway, here are some of my thoughts from the past month:

• Kendrick Lamar dropped GNX last month. it's a great album. man at the garden made me realize Lamar has a big ego, which is normal for rappers and celebrities in general, but also he's kinda weird about it. i think it's less common to compare yourself to Jesus the way he does. he's still one of my favorite rappers to be clear, he just a lil quirky.
• also Drake accusing UMG and Spotify of inflating Not Like Us streams is CRAZY. very mixed feelings on him accusing Lamar of falsely asserting he's a sex offender. messy, messy...
• i checked out this book called The Circle by Dave Eggers. it's a dystopian near-future novel about this tech monopoly-ass company that the main character gets a job at, but it turns out it's real cult-y, and then she has to escape or sumn. so far i love the premise and the dialogue; one character has big Larry energy and i'm the kinda guy that loves imagining my OCs in whatever media i'm enjoying so this book is feeding the brainworms. i don't love how the main character is one of those straight white women whose life sucks compared to her (also straight and white) singular bestie who's more attractive and smarter and priviledged and blah blah blah. it's super unrelatable to me... i have more than 1 friend, i'm not straight or white or concerned with hookups, and like... i've noticed with this narration style the MC tends to spend paragraphs talking about how cool her bestie (and other characters) are compared to her. my writing style kinda the opposite; i'd rather let the readers figure that out themselves via dialogue and actions, and i like it when other stories do that too. so i keep getting annoyed at how much the MC narrates about stuff that i feel could be explained more naturally. but. i really like that premise... so i'll keep reading. i heard this book was good so i wanna see where it goes.
• ok so i wrote that last bullet a month ago and i'm keeping it in because this next part is really funny: at about the same time i checked out annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer, and got super obsessed with the Southern Reach trilogy instead. it's way better, and i'm on the surprise 4th book now — although i ended up getting distracted and reading a bunch of other books. i do this a lot lately lol. i will probably never finish The Circle at this rate.
• Noname and Tyler, the Creator are feeling like some of my favorite rappers rn. Chromakopia goes hard and I went and listened to Noname's albums again, and just. I love her sing-songy voice and how you can tell she used to do slam poetry, and i love his production and his flows and lyricality. them two and kendrick are now my top three. not sure about the order though.

i have one big thought that won't really fit in a list: i think tumblr is better for building community than bluesky, honestly. i feel like i've gotten less engagement from other oc artists, writers, etc. — you know, the kinda people who would be genuinely interested in my account — in the past month or so than i did when i first made the account. most of my followers don't interact with my posts at all, which i expected, but i got more notes on tumblr for my art than i do on bluesky, which i did not expect. i only expected the attention on my writing to drop bc bluesky isn't meant for longform media. to be fair, 20-something notes was a lot for me, but on bluesky it feels like a lot if i pass 10 likes. i've been wondering why this is happening and i think it's a few reasons.

• bluesky has a lot more people who are in way different demographics than me and who have different senses of humor. tumblr was more insular for sure.
• i got added to five (5) blocklists for people who are toxic, fascist, etc. even though i'm obviously none of those things like. if you've made it to this page you know that's not true. the person who did it is one of those trolls who does stuff like this for fun but i do wonder if that's tanking my visibility... i'm not enough of a bluesky wizard to know for sure.
• i don't really participate in art shares, "mutuals lemme draw your ocs!" challenges, etc. occasionally i'll do a qrt chain but the fact of the matter is i just don't have enough art for that shit. my backlog is small because i've only been drawing for 2 years and i don't like a lot of the older art lol, and i draw relatively slowly. a lot of my free time is spent writing or coding, too. i could just repost the same few pieces that i do like but... i don't wanna...
• i don't retweet* my own stuff very often. not as much as i used to anyway. i literally just learned you can undo retweets and then retweet something again, as in halfway through writing this sentence i got curious and tested it. so i really thought bluesky was making it super difficult to retweet stuff until now.

well anyway, on bluesky it really is just me and the mutuals out here. it was like that on tumblr too actually, but on bluesky it feels... different. and i'm not totally sure what to do about it, outside of reposting my stuff more so people don't forget it exists. i don't wanna get too stressed about this anyway. there are some positives, like i'm on a list for photographers, a list for people who its creator thinks are cool, and an OC artist list (i don't like how people tend to follow everyone on a list at once without checking to see who they might actually be interested in, leading a bunch of "ghost" followers who don't interact with my posts at all, but whatever). nekoweb added a site statistics page and it's telling me about 1,000 people have looked at Sekh-net, which is awesome. and i don't wanna be internet famous anyway because that would make my brain melt.

i just want a bit more engagement than i'm currently getting... but that's probably the devil talking.

*i KNOW you're supposed to say repost, or even reskeet now, but the former can be confusing and the latter sounds like cum. i swear skeet meant cum when i was in school and i'm not cumming i'm posting. i am NOT changing my mind on this

November 20, 2024 — Trans Day of Rememberance... & the people who forget

i uploaded this late in the day because i had a lot going on. part of that including reading this poem-speech-thing for a TDOR event. i'm putting it separate from the stuff in the archive bc it's too serious for that page.

Privacy

I’m a private person. I don’t take or post selfies much, I don’t go to parties.

And I extend that private mindset to how I treat other people. When I see someone exit a bathroom stall, my first thought isn’t “What’s in their pants?”

It’s “Damn, they took forever! Now I can finally go!” I don’t care what they look like, or what they were doing in there. I just wanna do my business and dip.

So tell me why these reactionaries, these politicians, these pundits can’t do the same thing.

Tell me why they scrutinize every aspect of trans bodies, intersex bodies, black and brown bodies. Tearing us apart to prove that we don't produce enough of the right chemicals to be legitimate human beings.

Tell me why they teach their kids to bully their peers to the point of suicide simply for having a gender presentation that’s more complex than “girls wear pink and boys wear blue”.

Tell me why they ban us from every activity they can think of, from playing volleyball to reading books to children.

Tell me why they even passed a bathroom ban in Ohio declaring that trans people can't use their preferred bathrooms on public or private college campuses.

Actually, I know why.

It's because they feed off of division; when we're too busy fighting against each other we don't notice the types of oppression that we do share.

It's because they fear what they don't understand — and let me tell you, they don't know shit about our complex histories and the communities we've created.

It's because they can't fathom that they live in a world where gender is more complicated than what they learned in middle school.

But you know what? We been fathomed that complexity. We been taken the time to build each other up, to shelter each other, to fight back, to commemorate those of us who didn't make it. And you know what else? Every connection we've built, every time we've accepted other's differences unconditionally, every day we wake up and face a world filled with people who hate us — all of that makes us stronger than the transphobes who want to destroy us. We’re strong for coming out here tonight. We’re mourning our fallen, yes, but we’re also saying, “We’re not gonna sit back and let this happen again.” Thank you so much for displaying that strength.

hope you enjoyed reading that. the use of AAVE was deliberate — incorporating it into my writing is something i'm always striving to improve at, and given how Black trans people (especially women/transfemmes) face a disproportionate amount of violence compared to the rest of the population it felt appropriate to like make our presence known through the poem's grammatical choices.

that's the nice part of this entry. the upsetting part is that i got angry that Sarah McBride, the first trans congressperson in the US, said she'd "comply" with a new ban on trans people using bathrooms in the Capitol that fit their gender identities. i feel like the people who'd find their way onto this page are also aware of the wave of transphobic legislation and violence in general lately, but this really ground my gears cause it's another trans person just... refusing to do anything about a law specifically targeted at HER (and any other trans people who may be in the Capitol, for that matter). talmbout some "I'm here to fight for Delawareans"... girlypop forgot there's other trans people who would probably like her to fight for them too.

eh, well it's a bit more complicated than that... for her campaign this year she accepted donations from Microsoft, JP Morgan, and The Liberty Group (a Texan real estate company), among other groups. you know, the sorts of large companies that don't care about marginalized people at all and would rather keep driving the capitalist hell machine. also she's a zionist. look at this stupid tweet she made on April 13, 2024:

I am closely following the news of the direct attack on Israel by Iran and its proxies. This is a dramatic escalation that endangers lives in Israel and throughout the region. President Biden is right to reinforce our collective commitment to support Israel’s self-defense, which, today, has resulted in nearly every missile being intercepted and countless lives saved.

All those with concern for the protection of innocent life must stand against these attacks and this escalation. I join with leaders from democratic nations around the world in condemning these attacks and the effort by the Iranian government’s alliance of authoritarianism to plunge the region into further death and destruction.

(source)

and also this article which has more info about the zionism (i'm a thorough ass nigga i gotta link everything!!) oh, and her official priorites page doesn't even mention trans people but she does show support for cryptocurrency?!?! look, basically what i'm saying is that despite being trans, just like every other politician the issues she cares about are directly influenced by who's funding her. she doesn't see trans people as worth fighting for because we're not the ones giving her campaign thousands of dollars. also, we a polarizing topic that could scare away potential (non-trans/non-ally) voters.

idk if i'm disappointed by her. to me to be disappointed also implies i'm surprised, but my expectations for every congressperson are very low. that being said i wasn't expecting her to be this much of a pushover. it's giving... whatever the trans version of coon is. although that would imply she feels some kinda guilt over this and erm.. idk if she does. impossible for me to tell — i can read through politicians' bullshit but i can't read their minds! whatever the case, the fact of the matter is she sucks ass and cannot be relied on to save trans people from the legislative hellstorm we in rn.

so let's go back to that poem. we don't have Sarah McBride, but we do have each other. please don't forget the people we've lost and support the people we still have. trans liberation now and forever and ever ✌🏿