Yayyyy serious topic time. If you've seen a handful of my story posts, you probably know where this is going. TL;DR of the situation that spurred this on involves a person at my LGS. I go every Tuesday to play the Gundam TCG (usually with my partner). It's a good time all around typically. The stereotypes of some TCG players are true though. Some of them do not smell good. Which I can I guess rationalize, but do better. The other stereotype I've experienced first-hand is that some of them are misogynists. And I fear that GCG is significantly worse than some other TCGs. I've played MTG a fair bit, and the far more positive stereotypes about trans women loving MTG are true, so at least there I am surrounded by others I can relate to on that front. Value Vintage players are the bulk of MTG players I've interacted with, but I have gone to pre-release events and been pretty well welcomed there as well. Pokemon and GCG happen on the same day, and it's nice to see a bunch of kids playing the TCG still, and I love the moms that hang out there in support of their kids LOL. I have very minimal interactions with One Piece, Yu-Gi-Oh, Digimon, and Union Arena players. One Piece fans are misogynists by default, Yu-Gi-Oh players are... ok, Digimon is a game people play, and I have heard that Union Arena players also stink, but I've witnessed a pretty steady female player base.

In comparison, I have been the only "female-presenting" person at every single GCG event I've gone to since launch. Every single one. And for months, that was fine! I became well-acquainted with the regulars at my store, have a pretty friendly relationship with a few of them, and all was well. Until like a month ago. He will be referred to as "ZAFT Guy" from here on out. ZAFT Guy is loud. ZAFT Guy thinks his red-white ZAFT deck is the best thing ever. ZAFT Guy is pretty well disliked by the regulars. I was not at this event because every single Newtype Challenge (higher level store tournaments) are on Saturdays when I work. But according to my source (my partner who witnessed it first-hand), ZAFT Guy got creamed in his first match up and stormed out of the store. The next Tuesday, everyone was laughing about it. That's how disliked he is. Back up a bit to... a few Tuesdays ago now. I play a red-white Neo Zeon/Cyber Newtype deck. At the time, it was pretty par for the course and I've been playing it since about November. Basically as soon as Set Two came out and I could play with Haman and her Qubeley. I'm minding my business, playing as normal. I think I went 2-1 that week. ZAFT Guy comes over, wants to look through my deck. OK. Goes through it and starts making comments about what he would put in and take out. Unsolicited. He had done this to a couple of other players, as in looked through their decks, but I heard no commentary that was as man-splainy and chiding as mine was. Blah Blah Blah, "why are you playing Sinanju instead of [BAD ZAFT UNIT]?" "You should switch it for this because it does the same thing [NO IT DOESNT]". Just a bunch of shit like that until I was like, "I don't have any plans to change it beyond adding [two cards that came out in the brand new set]". I guess he realized that I'm a real person who actually knows what I'm talking about, and he gave me back my deck and left. Not too long after, I hear him drop the R slur. Real classy. I let out an audible "woah", but I don't think he acknowledged it, or at least chose not to. Did I mention he's loud and annoying? While he was spectating other people's matches, he's hovering over the table in between the two players, which is generally seen as bad manners in the TCG space. By the end of the rounds, I don't think anyone is actively listening to him. Which was so, so beautiful.

Now we're back in the recent past. As in yesterday. I very inconveniently got my period (a whole other issue that I'm having trouble addressing. Been on T for 5 years and had a birth control implant for 3 #BTW), so I really wasn't feeling great. The previous weekend, Emile and I won a 2v2 tournament and got a box of Set 3 cards. In that set, I opened up an LR+ (basically an Alt Art) of Providence Gundam, a ZAFT unit. At the time, it was a $40 card, but it has since dropped to $35 (still not bad). I basically decided right then and there that I was going to pawn it off on ZAFT Guy for full price. No local discount here. I Don't Like You. So come the next Tuesday, I bring it, and ZAFT Guy is there. I really didn't feel like talking, so I let Emile offer it to him. Conviniently, this was the one week he didn't bring his trade binder, but he apparently only needs one more of the LR+. And then, without turning to me, or acknowledging me, he speaks directly to Emile and says "...unless they want it for their deck, because it's better than Sinanju." Immediately, "No, I don't want to play it.", and I shut that conversation down. For those unaware, here is what Sinanju reads, and what Providence reads. THESE ARE TWO FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT CARDS. WHY WOULD I PLAY A CARD THAT TARGETS ZAFT UNITS WHEN I DONT PLAY ZAFT BECAUSE IT SUCKS. JUST BECAUSE YOU WANT TO PLAY ZAFT DOES NOT MEAN EVERYONE ELSE DOES.

It may all seem inconsequential, but just keep in mind he does not speak like this to anyone other man at the store, just to me. All other players are cis male presenting. Some of them even come in to the LGS with half naked women on their protein shaker bottles, on their deck boxes, on their card sleeves, on their playmats, all of it. And I'm expected to sit there as a person who, despite identifying as transgender, I'm still going to experience plentiful amounts of misogyny due to my appearance and perceived identity. I would place money on the demographic breakdown of GCG players easily being 1:1,000 in favor of male players. I know Gundam is a male dominated fandom (despite it's female roots), but that doesn't excuse the vapid misogyny that I see not only aimed at the female characters within, but to the female fans themselves. As if it's impossible for women to put together a plastic model or understand the ecological impact of war. Ironically something I see the male fans struggle with more.

It's nothing new to me, I've been involved in sterotypically "male" hobbies all my life, but it doesn't mean that the feeling of being treated as less than due to my perceived gender identity is welcomed or should be tolerated. I think that's all I really wanted to talk about. Hopefully next post I make won't be so negative LOL.

I normally loveee winter but we just had a huge winter storm about two weeks ago. And some of the roads are still not cleared. Like lanes that I travel every day are not fully plowed. Turn lanes are the worst. DelDOT you are the bane of my existence right now. I genuinely haven't seen a snow plow since last Wednesday. It's not like we don't get snow here (in fact we get huge storms like this every 3 years or so), so it's a little astounding that the roads are still in such poor condition. Whatever. Now it'll take a year for them to fill all the holes they made from breaking up the roads with the salt and their speeding ass snow plows I did see.

Anyways. I haven't been getting up to too much recently. I built the MG 1/100 Wing Gundam Zero EW Ver.Ka kit. And then I dropped it and broke some of the wing feather pieces. Literally fuck my stupid baka life. I have yet to make it to the hobby store to get some hobby cement to fix it, because I tried with (nail) super glue with little success. I need a few things anyway so I might as well make it more of a trip. I want to try and panel line it and my Qubeley, and to do that safely you need a sealant, and I have shaky hands so I should get one of those fun clip holders you can get that clip to your desk to hold your pieces steady... I've been getting inundated with Gunpla content on Instagram, so I'm getting influenced unfortunately.

Some other important things have happened though. I recently celebrated my 3 year anniverssary with Emile! It's crazy to think we've been dating for 3 years, officially making this my longest relationship. We went out to dinner at one of my favorite restaurants, and as a late anniverssary date (since we didn't get to spend the full day together on our anniverssary), we picked out Gunpla to build together. It's gonna be an interesting moving process when we move in together with their Lego builds and my Gunpla and anime figures.

Another important thing was... I was awarded the outstanding customer service award at my job! And like... not just for my park... for the entire Division. I was flabbergasted by it LOL. It is really nice to receive recognition from the higher ups and from my colleagues. It's only been a day since and I have received countless "Congratulations" from the coworkers I have seen today.

Happy New Year! Oh am I glad 2025 is over lol. Like I said before, it was an interesting year and I'm ready for a fresh start. Of which the first thing I did was get a new desk and redo my setup. I got a 52" Husky adjustable workbench, which I kept seeing reccomended by people as a great PC setup desk. I do have to say it is pretty nice, and it's much better than the repurposed Kallax I was using as a desk LOL. Great storage solution but man was it uncomfortable to sit at. It fits well with all my other furniture (which is mostly light oak and white) and it's adjustable and has casters, so I can sit and stand at it and move it around when I need to grab something from the bookcase next to it, or get behind it and cable manage.

I also updated my PC setup as well! Somewhat... since RAM and GPU prices are still high and showing no sign of going down (and I never grabbed them before the AI surge, even though I was already planning on upgrading), I moved much of my existing gear into my new case. Which BTW is a Fractal North case. It also fits nicely into my room and it's a bit smaller than my previous case, which I don't mind at all because I got like a total of 5 inches of desk space back from it. I upgraded to an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, which I had read from multiple sources as one of the best gaming focused chips out there. It was a bit cheaper than it normally was (and I got a free CoolerMaster pump out of it), so I just grabbed it post-Christmas. My new motherboard is a Gigabyte B850 AORUS ELITE. Obviously, I'm going for a mostly white build. I was terrified my current 4070 wasn't going to fit in my new case, but luckily, it just does. It won't be finished finished for a while, but I'm not going to be picky in the current PC part economy. Even Facebook Marketplace is feeling it.

The other tech related thing I've done is get a NAS up and running. I'm not immune to YouTube sponsors, so I got a UGreen DH2300. So far, I've had very little issue with it. It has beeped at me with a "system reset" warning more times than is comfortable, but I haven't noticed any serious issues. I am running a 4TB WD Blue HDD on it, not a WD Red, their NAS optimized drives, but I had it lying around and it wasn't getting used, so whatever. I'm not gonna drop $100+ on a new HDD when I already have one. Anyways, I got Immich up and running on it, so I was able to cancel my Google Storage memberships. I was paying like $24 a month for extra Google Drive and Photos storage! That's nearly $300 a year!! That's insane!!! A NAS is absolutely more of an upfront cost in both money and time, but 1. I'm tired of tracking all my subscription costs every month 2. I'm tired of my data being fed to tech overlords and 3. I like learning new tech skills. I still have to clean up and back up my OneDrive (which I also pay $10 a month for), I'll be cloud storage subscription free (although technically I have a Proton annual subscription that has storage included, but I feel fare more comfortable paying a GDPR-compliant company and using their services than any American based company right now. It's good to have some cloud storage for an additional backup.)

Here's some pics of my new setup! With the extra desk space, I also put my "newer" gen consoles up there and hooked them up to my monitor through an HDMI splitter. As much as I still love my TV, I did not enjoy playing Xbox 360 and above games on it. LCD screens were the popular choice when these consoles came out anyways, so my gaming puritan brain allows me to enjoy them on a new screen. The Wii is still hooked up to the CRT though. I exclusively played the Wii on my brother's Panasonic CRT, so it has to stay that way. Everything from before then too is still hooked up to it.

While I'm at it, I'll do a comprehensive list of all my current consoles for fun (italics detonate modded status):

• Sony:
• PS1 SPCH-5501
• PS2 SCPH-50000 Sakura Pink
• PS2 SCPH-75000 Slim
• PS2 SCPH-90000 Slim
• PS3 CEJH-10008 FFXIII Lightning Edition
• PS4 ???
• PSP 1001
• Microsoft:
• OG Xbox 1.6
• Xbox 360 Jasper (w/ RGH)
• Xbox 360 Slim Corona (w/ Kinect)
• Xbox One Forza Motorsport Edition (retired)
• Xbox One X
• Nintendo:
• GameCube Silver (w/ GameBoy Reader)
• Wii RVL-001
• WiiU WUP-101
• 3DS Ocarina of Time Edition
• Nintendo Switch
• Nintendo Switch 2
• Sega:
• Dreamcast

It's only a little insane. I did not do the RGH on my Jasper I'm still too scared to do soldering stuff. New Year's resolution is to learn how to solder. I have so many old motherboards of shit to practice on, I just need to Do It.

I think that's all I wanted to ramble about today! I'm looking forward to what 2026 will bring and I hope it is love and happiness. In fact I will make sure that it is.

I don't want to acknowledge that 2025 is almost over but i sure am constantly reminded of it.

This is sort of just a look back on what the year has been like for me, through all it's quirks. I guess the most notable achievement is that I completed a professional development program through my job! It was a fun year-long experience that got me out into the park system in settings I typically would not get to experience, like seeing how our waterpark functions in the heat of summer, getting a tour around one of our campground parks and helping check people in and out (and using my apparently incredibly t-shirt folding skills at the camp store), doing park safety inspections and, my favorite, working with our maintenance team for a day and giving my superiors a story that they love to tell about seeing me mowing the grass outside their office window. I made a handful of friends through the program and strengthed bonds with colleagues from my own park who also participated. With some personnel shake-ups that are about to happen, I do have hope that my participation in this program will give me a leg up, should I interview for any positions that are going to open up.

The other super big and fun thing that I got to do this year was experience my first trip to the west coast to visit Woogi! It was a trip years in the making, though was a little short because it was scheduled around a mid-week Dir en Grey concert, and unfortunately I can't leave work for too long in the middle of our busy Spring season. It was so incredibly fun to be able to experience what I could of California and spend time with Woogi... I hope I can swing it again in 2026 and maybe be able to stay a bit longer to get the Authentic SoCal Experience.

A lot of my life lowkey kind of revolves around my job anymore so that's where a lot of Things come from LOL which is bad because work/life balance is necessary... I've been trying to go out more and spend more time with all my friends, as well as put myself out there to meet new people. Playing the Gundam TCG has helped me a lot with that, and I've strucken up some solid acquaintances with the regulars at my LGS. Funnily enough, a friend I had in high school \(who was the first friend I made there because we sat together on the bus, since his stop was right after mine, and we also were in the same homeroom)\ works at that LGS! He was one of the few people at that school who I could call a friend from literal day one until graduation, which I never attended because I #failed senior year, so I never got to properly thank him for being my friend. It was a really pleasant surprise to see him when I first started going there last year, and we've gotten close again.

This year I also started committing to making more ENYK content again! I got pretty focused on my real life relationship that I kind of neglected Enishi LOL. But I'm back and supporting as many artists as possible and now having to budget how much I spend on commissions monthly. Boooo. My hope is that I can finally "finish" (because nothing is every truly finished) the bulk of their lore from meeting to when they get sort of married. Maybe it'll be done by the unofficial Revishi anniversary date (08/05).

That's about all that's been happening! I'm done (I think) with Christmas shopping and I'll be visiting my family in Jersey for our annual Christmas Eve brunch! I'm excited for what 2026 will bring and I hope everyone enjoys this holiday season!

I've been watching a lottt of anime lately. Since last year, I've been making my way through the entire Gundam catalog, and so far I've watched 18 (i think?) of the entries, starting from the OG 1979 series. I've also been making my way through some shows I had long put off, like Sonny Boy, and trying to keep up with some of the seasonal releases. In doing so though, I've really had to become enlightened to the current anime streaming ecosystem. I've used Crunchyroll for the better part of a decade at this point, and I was a veteran of the VRV days (god rest her soul), and held a simultaneous Funimation membership before and after that. As you may know, Funimation got bought out by Sony (the owner of CR) in 2021 and it was a huge blow to the anime community, with many feeling that we were heading towards a near monopoly with CR. It has taken 4 years (and counting) since the acquisition of Funimation for the shows hosted there to make their way over to CR. I remember when phase 1 of the shift began, a Twitter user compiled a spreadsheet of all the shows that were nowhere to be streamed, and it was a ridiculous number (something like 1000+ iirc) with some high-profile shows among them (according to this list, it's still nearly 200 shows).

As much as I would hate a total anime monopoly (for reasons I'll especially get into in a bit), I do also hate the need for 5+ subscriptions to watch the shows I want to watch. The infamous legal Pokemon streaming guide comes to mind. I don't wish for anyone to have to navigate the legal streaming realm. And I am the first person to advocate for piracy, but I do understand the convinience behind paying for streaming and that the average person doesn't view piracy as moral. To that I say you need to shake the fear of the pre-movie FBI anti-piracy notices. It will all be okay. Buy a 500GB portable SSD and nyaa.si to your hearts content.

Luckily, HiDive and... Disney and Hulu... and others are keeping the ecosystem from falling into the greedy hands of Sony. You might have seen anime commentators talking about CR's current subtitling dilemma, but if you haven't, the gist is that instead of paying for captioners and using the highly customizable and industry standard AegiSub, a program that has been around and used by companies and freelancers since the beginning of time, they are migrating to a far less versatile AI captioning company based in Israel. How many red flags do we need. You can watch Geoff's more in-depth breakdown(which will touch on stuff I've talked about here), but it raises not only a worse viewing experience, but also accessibilty issues and, due to the AI usage, environmental and ethical concerns that I just can't get into here, and, obviously, there's the elephant in the room.

Even the piracy ecosystem is potentially going to be impacted very soon. Kadokawa and other big industry names just won a lawsuit against Cloudflare for copyright infringement because of piracy sites that were hosted via Cloudflare's services. Now. I have big feelings about this. Much like many others, I became such a big anime fan with no small assistance from KissAnime (and all her totally not legit and safe copycats). I watched so many bad yaoi anime over Skype with my friends during our middle school days, but also shows like Black Butler, Tokyo Ghoul, and... sigh... Hetalia... but the point is that my formative years of being an anime fan with no debit card and minimal income was because of piracy sites. The same goes for the manga side of it. Scanlation groups were and are the backbone of the manga community. Hell, just within the past year we saw Love Bullet go from nearly being cancelled to selling out at Kinokuniyas across the English-speaking sphere, all thanks to people scanning and translating, and hosting it on piracy sites. Scanlations are free advertising for these big corporations. And without them, you can expect a sharp increase in unfortunate mangaka facing cancellation and a sharp decrease in profits for these corporations because there is no way for overseas fans to read works that appeal to them, and keep them from discovering and supporting up and coming mangaka. Not even mentioning old manga that just never received any official translation and are only able to be enjoyed on these sites. Kadokawa and others are shooting themselves in the foot by doing this. I like using piracy as a test run for a lot of things. If I enjoy something enough, I probably will end up buying it at some point. I've done it countless times with games, anime, and manga. With the prices of everything right now, I'm not buying a $12-$16 manga volume for it to sit at the back of my bookshelf forever. That is valuable Wawa hoagie and a drink money. I do use the Shonen Jump and Manga Plus apps, which does provide a cohesive library for most popular titles, that's just what it is: popular titles. Titles that have enough demand to be serialized in other languages, with not much room for any discovery. And yet, back in my peak of reading manga, I could find something new to read from the tumblr scanlation tag every week. I do want to jump back a bit to my "free advertising" statement, beacuse it is disineguous. Scanlators are often volunteers who do what they do out of pure passion; same goes for fansubbers of anime, though fwiw fansubbing is a dying scene. Their work should be viewed and respected because it is tedious work and requires numerous skills. That's also why the AI replacement is so heartbreaking because it's stealing these passion projects away from the dedicated fans, using their work to train the models to make infinitely shitter replacements.

Long gone are the days where fans would record onto VHS tapes and utilize IRC to share their efforts with the meek, but growing, anime community. Those endearing translator notes, as silly as they could be at times, were a display o fthe pure love, pride, and care they put into their work. You can typically rely on new anime to be uploaded and translated on streaming within an hour nowadays, at the cost of poorly formatted, typo-ridden, and even missing, subtitles. Even the content of the shows themselves are being butchered, with censored releases and missing episodes. I hate to be that person (not really), but this is why physical media and pirating are important. Shows can and will be pulled at will, but a DVD and a .mkv file on your hard drive can't. And I mean burn your own DVD or, if possible, purchase it secondhand. I didn't even touch on the CR store and their price gouging, but you are better off making your own physical media. The cost of entry is under $50 with the capability to produce years of entertainment. I'm lucky to have an older brother who grew up during the 90s and 00s and I have been given an impressive amount of anime from those years, but I know not everyone is that lucky. If you're tired of the streaming ecosystem, but genuinely don't know where to start, here are some resources:

• For torrents: Nyaa . si
• Personal favorite client: Deluge
• Personal favorite VPN: ProtonVPN
• For streaming/reading: Wotaku
• For burning/watching: VLC
• Alternatively for MacOS: Burn
• DVD Burner (had this exact one when I first started out)
• DVD-R

Hopefully there will be a day where these companies realize that the whims of investors don't equal the desires of their users. That day is not today though, so do whatever you can to hurt their pockets.