Well hello.

Hello. Morven isn't my official name but it's the one I've used online since 1991; I prefer a persistent identity, and this name is tied to my real life one in multiple places (i.e. don't be worried about "outing" me).

I'm 42, born in 1973. I was born in London, UK and lived in the country until 1997; I lived in California until 2012, and in Seattle, WA since then. Mental differences weren't really diagnosed in 1970s/80s England, but the psychiatrist I was seeing for depression and anxiety in the 2000s gave an in-passing, off-the-cuff diagnosis of Asperger's / autism-spectrum, and I think that's quite likely to be the case. He said he didn't see the need for a formal diagnosis since I'd obviously learned to deal with the world reasonably well on my own, which is true. It just helps explain a lot of my weirdnesses, and why I seem to get along best with people somewhere on the spectrum, or otherwise non-neurotypical.

Gender is one of those complicated things with me. I was assigned male at birth and have never really had the courage to ever look otherwise, but I've never been happy with it. The reason for not taking any steps toward any kind of gender-ambiguous or feminine appearance comes down to my anxiety and social paranoia, really. I already feel uncomfortably under scrutiny, and am horribly afraid of social embarassment; I can't even deal with it second-hand in movies and TV shows.

And the thing is, also; for a long time I didn't really realize there were options other than "stay male" or "be so unhappy and unable to live as a male that I'd be OK with the trauma of transitioning", especially since I am not physically very androgynous looking and there's no way I'd ever be stereotypically feminine, and in the 1980s/early 1990s it seemed that you couldn't be accepted as transsexual unless you were. At least from the info I was picking up. So I never did anything really about it. I never found it impossible to live as my gender assignment, just unsatisfying.

So I think I'm somewhere tending toward female "on the inside", but it sort of swings between feeling somewhat neutral about it and dysphoria. So IDK what that really counts as. It's notable that whenever I create an online identity, I feel very uncomfortable identifying as male, though, and in video games I never feel at all right playing a male character. I tend to use feminine to neutral avatars.

I'm a stereotypically aspie transportation geek, obsessed with trains primarily. I'm a computers nerd, but doing it for a living (I'm a UNIX sysadmin) has kind of burned me a bit in the fandom of it. Doing what you love for a career can sometimes kill your love. I'm an obsessive speculative fiction reader; I especially love the works of C.J. Cherryh and P.C. Hodgell, but lots more. I try to write but am a bit too undedicated at it. Trying to fix that. I love Warhammer 40K more for the lore than the game. My video-game obsessions are World of Warcrack and War Thunder Ground Forces.

Oops, that's a novel. What would be called a dash-buster on Tumblr. Sorry!

 

Oh, and I was very involved in Wikipedia for a long time (I ended up doing a 3-year stint on the Arbcom, basically the Wikipedia "supreme court") and am now a forum mod on TV Tropes.

 

Hey, lookit that, a local. (Or, a hometowner right now, I suppose.) o7 Tacoma native here.

I feel you on the gender thing - "there's no way I could pass anyway why I prefer "girlshaped" as my AFAB identifier, rather than the jargon, because it more accurately describes my experience. There's no way I could pull off androgynous and I'm scared to even attempt full-on masculinity (though the fact that I have Too Much Testosterone and get what I assume is dysphora over facial hair is also part of it, though not sure if gender based or just this-isn't-me based, but that would still seem to point towards Not A Dude? Gender is weird).

Hells of respect for herding tvtropes around, though. I can only imagine that place gets to be a pit sometimes.

 

As a casual tvtropes user I salute you.

 

I had thought that fixed, but will check. The site's being run by new owners/coders for the last few months and they're working on improving the frankly terrible code they inherited.

(I'm a moderator, not coder, at the site and can't fix it myself).

 

Yeah, they've fixed it. The login cookie appears to now have an encrypted value there, not a plaintext password. How well done it is I have no idea, but at least it's not in plain. Still no SSL, though, so don't place any private information on the site, including in private messages. (Besides, even if it was in SSL, site owners can always read PMs, have a duty to cough them up if subpoena'd or given a warrant, and may accidentally leak them, so it's generally a good idea to act as if any of these things may happen).

 

@jacktrash, I'm tempted to add a trains thread to the sperging sub-forum, to try and communicate why. It's not easy to explain why obsessions to someone without them, except that as someone with some related obsessions it might at least make sense by comparison. Something to do with the sheer visceral presence of a locomotive, the way it fills all one's senses, the sheer power of the things, the way they feel in a sense "alive". And then there's the super spergy aspect of minutae, of classification, of "collect them all", of a railway system being such an intricate mix of all of these moving parts and rules and the like. Signalling systems were early computers, after all, even if not really thought of that way; a complicated interlocking is fascinating to study, in how it will not permit clashing routes to be set up, and how it does that.

 

TVTropes was where I started on the Net, and did most of the things I'm embarrassed about now. Which mostly involved my enthusiasm for my fave character and my younger self's very ridiculous interpretation of them (a Draco In Leather Pants, basically). Yet, slightly indirectly, the name I use here and the name I use on other sites, come from my experience there.

 

I think some of that is just inevitable; all of us will make twits of ourselves in public on the Internet at some point.

 

Haha yeah. And compared to the twits I've seen doing SJW stuff on Tumblr, messing up on TVTropes wasn't that bad. Like, at least I wasn't being dumb about social justice back then. (Though, later on Tumblr, I did have a mini-SJW phase.)

 

eh at least you didn't nearly become an otherkin.
*shudders*
like if it's part of their spirituality it's cool but i nearly become one of the neopronoun using oppression grabbing otherkin because i couldn't find any other place that was really accepting of afab genderfluid people.
isn't that terrifying.
then i found seebs so it's all good.

 

Roleplay circles in general tend to be more accepting of that sort of thing, I find. Though every group has its toxic batch (hi, wankgate!), I've definitely found, as a whole, that I'm more comfortable with RPers than any of the other sub-communities I fit into, except possibly my recent forays into the Not Wiccan Witches subcommunity.

 

actually... i sorta did before tumblr.

was a young kid, thought I was half-fairy. then i just stopped believing in it, like when i was 11 or 12.

which i think might've made me immune to becoming a neopronoun-type otherkin. like, already went through it and disproved it. i am not half-fairy, even if being half-fairy would be really cool. XD

 

i think if i'd become an otherkin i would have gone with unicorn?
or cat?
or something with wings?
but the unicorn thing is because that's what i do when my genderfeels are too complicated for the day.
so
"screw it, today my gender in unicorn!"
though obviously i'm not really serious.
being half fairy would be amazing.

 

rpers are generally pretty cool.
that's why i got so pissed when someone in my email sherlock/doctor who rp circle started using the extensive lists of emails we had all collected to send phishing emails.
because you don't DO that.

 

yep. magic.

i think i became that kind of otherkin 'cause of o.r melling's golden book of faerie, and a book series for little kids about fairies that represent stuff like colours and flowers - with Jack Frost as an opponent. the second was influential 'cause my cousins were reading it and we (plus my brother) had a game - which i took completely seriously and they didn't - in which we were all half-fairy.

 

it's like how a friend and i started playing a game about how there was a vast magical conspiracy against us.
i took it far too seriously for a while heh.
ah young uses.
oh holy shit 8 year old me was like, seven years ago.
?????????