I'm working on this for a poetry class I'm taking, any criticism is welcome.

Edit: Italicized some text I forgot when I copied it out of Word.
Edit 2: Fixed some phrasing.

Coming Out 2.0

When I first came out
I thought it was over.
Done.
I know myself now,
My life can finally be
worthwhile and fun.

But there was always a mess I dared
not touch. Who do I like? What gaze
makes me blush? I suspected the feminine
but held out hope – only taking up one letter
made it easier to cope.

And some people do change after starting
HRT, so patiently I hoped men would appeal
to me. I had some feelings before, it seemed reasonable
they would grow. But as time went on I realized I had
nothing to show. My feelings for men were entirely gone,
but still hopeful for a straight-passing future, I pressed on.

I had definite feelings for women before,
But at times the attraction seemed a bit more –
Did I want to be them or did I want to be with them?
The former I assumed, as it helped to distract,
focus on my work, brush my desires under the mat.

I’d think “She looks cute”, but “in that outfit”, “with that hairdo” and other qualifiers
I began to append, convincing myself what I felt was normal and, like a
Chicagoland road, no bend. When I began to notice some feelings bubbling up I said
“Female friendships are close, it’s nothing, the end.” But try as I might, they flowered
and bloomed, and soon I could not help but be all-consumed. Maybe I’m bi, I thought,
That isn’t so bad. More options for dating, how can I be mad? I told my friend my feelings, and as
expected, for me she had none. She’s still one of my best friends, so I’d neither lost nor won.

I dealt with the rejection and moved on. I could still be bi, better not
jump the gun. You can’t take back coming out, you’ve got one shot – nail it
and be done. I thought everything would be the same, but the floodgates were open,
my restraints had been broken. I could finally be honest about my feelings
for women (endless, confusing and interwoven) and for men, which were at most
an appreciative token.

A week after confessing to my crush, it was obvious
who won. The Sapphic feelings and desires made
their presence known, their intent to stay,
and more difficult than coming out
as trans was admitting
to being gay.

This thread is posted daily, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!

Grandma is understimulated in assisted living, and while Mom is looking into ways to either bunk with her, or drag her back to our place, I'm exploring other options. Her apartment does have wireless internet, so we could set up some sort of telepresence or video calling device, but even something as simple as a Relay or a KC2 isn't great, because it loses power, and needs to be explained to her.

I'm thinking that we might have better luck with a Tablet or a PC solution, and I do have a Kindle Fire (5th Gen?) and an off brand Windows 10 tablet around, and I am open to a Pi Project or speciality devices, but it has to be simple enough to plug and play, and the dream would be if it could start a video chat without the receiver having to pick up, or at least as simple as a nurse being able to come in and start a call. Any suggestions?

Sorry for the delay, had some personal complications recently and couldn't find the time to post this here this morning hahahahh.

I was gonna make butter chicken today, but since it's good Friday we just haaad go eat a fish dish hahah. The fish we bought ended up being very expensive, but gosh it was worth it. Probably the nicest tasting fish I've ever personally had ! Very buttery and flaky, superb taste...

The curry was pretty good too, but it was similar to a lot of the other mustard seed based curries I've eaten. My dad, however, made this thing after we finished the dish with the leftover sauce. He put a bit more tamarind water in it and let it reduce for a while, which ended up making a richer and more complex sauce that I think beats the one I ate with the fish. If you're going to make this recipe, id suggest giving that a go, maybe you'll end up liking it more !

Overall a fun dish to make, simple, and great tasting. Would've been better if a) I didn't take a nap beforehand which made me completely and utterly tired and b) the fish wasn't so expensive ahahahah.

Picture of the dish: https://imgur.com/a/0j7utl6
Recipe: https://imgur.com/a/ffHqbpP

Question of the day: are there any food traditions that you follow?

Have a great day <3
Tomi, your friendly neighbourhood marshmallow~

I've been organizing my personal collection of ebooks (epubs & pdfs) lately so I've been thinking of possible "best practices" to employ and wanted to open a discussion on it.

There are sources for free ebooks online which are trustworthy such as https://archive.org/index.php and https://www.gutenberg.org/ which provide DRM-Free copies in multiple formats.

These are great but a few of my ebooks are from less trusted sources so handling the security aspects should be considered as well. (Example: An interesting PDF from Hacker News or Reddit)

General:
For general organization and management, Calibre (https://calibre-ebook.com/) has been very useful so far. You can use Calibre to handle converting, meta-data, reading, and organization of your library.

Security:
From what I can research the epub and pdf formats can be both vulnerable to malicious but the potential is much higher for pdf. As you then might expect, pdf exploits are more common.

A few precautions you can take include using your browsers pdf viewer versus a standalone alternative, using an up to date and secure pdf reading with JavaScript disabled, or relying on a cloud service such as google drive that allows online viewing.

An offline e-reader is another easy solution as the malicious code would require a much more specific attack vector.

Reading:
https://us.norton.com/internetsecurity-emerging-threats-is-it-safe-to-download-free-ebooks-online.html
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/epub-javascript-security/

This thread is posted daily, and is intended as a place for more-casual discussion of the coronavirus and questions/updates that may not warrant their own dedicated topics. Tell us about what the situation is like where you live!