May 2025

dungeon-moss:

unashamedly-enthusiastic:

Tried to tip a tumblr blog at 1am and it was such a suspicious transaction it immediately put a full fraud freeze on my account

Fortunately, banks no longer just ask ‘did you make that transaction’ they want to make sure you weren’t scammed into making that transaction and 5mins after their call will give away all your money anyway.

This is an honest to goodness life saving movement and I cannot be happier banks are adopting it

Unfortunately, it meant I had to have the most embarrassing financial call of my life

-

Me: Ah yeah I was just trying to tip a tumblr blog

Cash: right and were you directed there by a Facebook link? An Instagram advert?

Me: no I was just on tumblr…on purpose

-

Caah: and this person asked you for money?

Me: oh no they just had a funny story, which happened to be about money and I thought, “wouldn’t it be funny if I tipped them”

-

Me: * covering a reblog by reblog update on the adventures my mutual was having *

Cash: okay I don’t think that can actually happen though..

Me: It might not have, but i was happy to tip them just because it was funny

-

Cash: and how well do you think you know this person?

Me: *considers explaining how much I know about a beloved mutual without ever knowing their name or face* … I have no idea who this person is

I think in the end Cash decided there was no saving me from myself

piralea:

cannibalchicken:

sentient-tent:

nyancrimew:

bwaaaah

batmanisagatewaydrug:

absolutely not? more like fapsolutely nut

everythingfox:

Hello

(via)

bamsara:

some narilambs i made in recent magmas

i crave soft narilamb…

miscwitchling:

When I got Leshy in my cult for the first time I immediately dressed him in the spring tunic and all his horrible little baby monster noises just fuckn stole my heart

He is my son and he hates it when I do this

bonniecupcake:

They have their own taste

bites-stuff:

Got reallllly good photos of my leshy cosplay done!

Photos by Seckora Photography

laserbobcat:

Mermay is over soon and I haven’t draw my yearly mermaid, so I threw this together quickly hehe

I stole @vicaly ’s Leshy sea serpent idea hehehe

monsters-n-mangoss:

nudist bush crawls menacingly towards you, wyd

badexe:

itmeansalot:

Small clams court. Sand dollar lawsuit. Who gives a fuck

supreme-leader-stoat:

gay-lawyers:

gay-lawyers:

gay-lawyers:

You know a few different times I’ve been asked what my biggest regret in life is and I usually say “I don’t know” but that’s a lie. A fat lie. My biggest regret is one time in 7th grade I broke a glowstick and drew a heart with Sasuke’s name in it on my bedroom wall but if that’s not bad enough you know glowsticks usually fade after a day, right? Well not this one- this one stained the wall so even at a grown ass adult there’s Sasuke’s name in a goddamn giant ass heart on my wall as erasable as the shame in my heart.

My new biggest regret is this post

Do not start reblogging this again I swear to god it hasn’t gotten notes for months and now suddenly it’s back in my notifications. I’ve moved out of my house and I am finally free. Let me be free.

No freedom.

henstomper:

impossiblepackage:

henstomper:

hard cider was invented when someone decided to make beer that tastes good instead of bad

stupid fuckin post. People have been making beer since before they even knew how to write and you think that they don’t like the way it tastes?

damn all that time and it still tastes really bad. huge L tbh

basyacriptid:

xphaiea:

clay figures from Bab edh-Dhra, near the Dead Sea

lucarioguy15:

nattousan:

smilepuppydotjpeg:

wowwforever:

They’ll never do a Hitman level set in a Furry Convention because gamers would absolutely ruin it but imagine. like the target isn’t a furry he just owns a hotel that happens to have one every year but you can disguise yourself in a fursuit and some guy will ask you “what species is your sona” and 47 would be like “a wolf. i always felt a connection with…hunters.” and then diana would be like “let’s see if you can sniff out some information, furrty-seven” and then he comes to my house and kills me for writing this

ok but imagine being the fursuit artist that he contracts to make his costume tho

He contacts you via an anonymous email and is very exacting and precise in his request. Money is no object, which isn’t uncommon in your line of business, you’re a professional and more than a few customers have been in the 1% range.

So you ask if he’s local so you can meet and take measurements and he says no but he will meet you at (conveniently close local craft store) tomorrow after work (you did not mention where you live)

You’re a little shaken but you meet him anyways because daddy needs to pay rent, and he’s probably not a serial killer, right?

Right?

You had no idea what kind of person to expect, but a 6'2 bald white guy built like a fucken shit-brickhouse with a “FurCon2023” shirt wrapped around his brolic frame was rather on the shorter end of your list. His cargo shorts and pure white sneakers looked like they’d just been picked up off of the shelf and his glasses looked too small for his massive head.

You jump because you don’t even notice him until he’s tapping you on the shoulder and introducing himself. How did he know it was you?? Alarm bells are going off everywhere but there’s cameras all over, he wouldn’t try something in public right?? You take his measurements and look at fabrics together.

You ask about his fursona and he very seriously produces a laminated folder with several crudely drawn pictures of a polar bear suit. Well, you guess you shouldn’t be mean, they were clearly drawn from references but you could tell this was someone who did not draw often. It didn’t even have any accessories, it was just a normal polar bear… But the notes surrounding them were so neat they looked printed! And so in depth! There was one page solely dedicated to the visibility needs, with advanced notes on the camera and display system he wanted in the head. You’d only seen this sort of thing at the national cons, just who the hell was this guy??

You haltingly ask him if he was sure. You tell him this is really advanced stuff and he was looking at at LEAST 10k with all the specific modifications on it. When you first started making suits you would have never been this firm on pricing, lowballing and trying to make up the difference so as not to upset the customer with a hefty price, but you’d learned eventually that undervaluing your work was a waste of your time and effort so even though you couldn’t gauge his reaction, you figured being upfront about the price would at least be a test to see how serious the guy was.

He nodded silently and reached into the fanny pack around his waist to produce the cleanest stack of hundreds you’d ever seen in your life, like straight printed from the treasury mint. He places it in your palm and you almost drop it out of shock.

“Will this be enough to get you started? I included some extra to compensate for lost wages as I do need this suit fairly quickly” he says, tone unreadable.

You stammer and try to look professional thumbing through the crisply banded notes and would you look at that, you think this will do just fine!

He nods again, shakes your hand and leaves without another word.

You exit the store, just trying to comprehend what in the hell you’d just gotten yourself into, zoning out so hard that you didn’t even realize someone was yelling at you until the word “-fuckin furry faggot” pierced through your thoughts. You were looking at your phone so you didn’t notice the band of truck bros creeping up behind you in their suped up pickup truck. There were three or four in the bed of the truck, dangling out over the side in between giant “TRUMP 2024” and “Lets Go Brandon” flags. They have their phones out, recording you and shouting slurs.

You raise double birds at them and turn to walk quickly in the opposite way, hoping you wouldn’t see them as you walked home. You’d heard of a couple beatings happening locally and you didn’t want to be around if that’s what they had in mind.

So when you hear tires screeching and and engine roaring behind you, you break out into a run, hoping to make it to the bus terminal across the parking lot.

But they catch up to you before you’d made it halfway. They all get out and one grabs your phone that you held out to record with. He smashes it on the ground and shoves you into the pavement. Hard.

They all stand over you, jeering and laughing and you try to escape but your limbs won’t listen to you. You always figured if something like this happened you’d stand your ground, maybe get in a couple of hits yourself, but in reality you could barely breathe and your chest felt like it was collapsing in on itself, so your attempts to scream for help end up coming out as breathy wheezes. One of them levels a crowbar at you and thats when the screaming starts.

You curl up into a ball to protect your face but the pain never comes. You hear screaming and sneakers skidding across asphalt and oh god, wet crunchy impacts followed by something warm and wet being splattered across your arms and legs.

Its suddenly silent except for the drone of the truck engine but eventually you crack open an eye to get a look around, and for the second time that day you almost lose your lunch.

Its straight up something out of a video game, just absolute carnage surrounds you. All of the tall frat bros are out cold in varying stages of fucked up. You do actually start to hurl a little when you see one with his nose completely sideways like a gory Picasso.

And in the center of the carnage is -no fucking way- your fucking fursuit client, calmly wiping his hands of the blood with some baby wipes from his fannypack.

He looks over at you when he sees you’re up and for a second there you see something, a slip in the mask, something angry, something violent. You flinch as you realize it, but oh fuck, this guys like.. killed people before. like, for fucken sure.

He walks towards you and you suddenly feel like a very small animal being stalked by a tiger. You try to stumble away but the mask is back on and he just looks down at you and offers you a babywipe.

“You alright?” He asks plainly.

Turns out the guy is “ex-military” and he hurt himself so he’s back in the states and bored out of his mind. His daughter is a furry and wanted him to go with her to FurCon and insisted he get a suit as well. You keep on glancing at all the deep scars running up and down his arms and wondering how the hell you didn’t see it before.

He’s saying something to you but you only snap out of it when a phone is being placed into your hands. You look up and suddenly you’re standing outside your apartment building (did you tell him where you lived???)

“This is a secure line, if anything happens to you or you have questions, I’ll answer immediately.” He says, pale blue eyes drilling into your skull with their intensity.

The tears start bubbling up in your eyes before you can stop them and you just lean forward, bumping your head into his chest and choking out a thank you as you clutch the phone to your chest like an amulet.

As you figured, his body is make out of steel and he stiffens at the contact, unsure of what to do.

He just lets you cry it out for a bit before eventually placing a heavy hand on your shoulder, pulling you off but he keeps the hand gentle.

He’s not looking at you this time but he clears his throat and murmurs a quick “Take care” before turning around and disappearing into the night. You unlock your door and collapse into bed.

“What the fuck” you murmur to yourself as you pull out your tablet, and you start to sketch…

I dunno what I expected to find when I logged into tumblr today. Certainly not Hitman furry con fanfic. But I did. And it was glorious.

official-linguistics-post:

kkachi-serica:

belphegor1982:

azeofspades:

zocomi:

official-megumin:

queen-mihai:

skopostheorie:

This meme is inescapable on French insta so I’m posting it here for all to enjoy

Always reblog flash debate

on it boss

reminder that the presenter says “oh, shut up” not “can it”

Native French speaker here. “Ta gueule” is actually more like “shut the fuck up” in terms of level of disrespect

also worth noting is that the “are you happy” is the correct gender

a screenshot of tags which read as follows: the trans man gets the correct pronouns but he also gets the formal you (vous) while the guy he tells to shut the fuck up gets the informal (ta as the possessive of the informal tu). this is a concise put down the likes of which we simply cannot achieve in English. ALT

official linguistics post

technofeudalism:

autogynecologist:

kylenesusan:

kendrixtermina:

theriu:

randomslasher:

weirdcultstuff:

I love being an adult because you know what actually happens when you run your car into a curb and scratch up the bumper?

Nothing. You get it fixed, or you don’t. Whatevs.

You know what actually happens when you are depressed or sick or on your period and don’t cook dinner?

Nothing. You still get to eat something, nobody scolds you, it doesn’t have any real bearing on your future success, and you don’t get soft shunned for a week by your family.

You know what actually happens when you break stuff, forget stuff, get sick, fall asleep, are rude, miss a flight, don’t know how to do XYZ thing on fixing cars or canning food or whatever, lose things, get lost because you can’t read a map and forgot to charge your phone, buy the wrong groceries, plant the wrong plants, not make your bed, make your bed wrong, jump on your bed, sleep on your bed, eat crackers in your bed, have emotions literally anywhere?

Nothing.

Nothing happens.

No one is mad.

No one can hurt you, and if they do there are laws saying they can’t and that it’s an actual crime with legal consequences.

All there are are outcomes and different paths and different problems and different situations and you just bumble your way forward into dealing with those and that’s it. That’s the whole thing. It’s not the wrong choice, having problems isn’t indicative of your inherent badness or inadequacy or lack of applying yourself. It’s just life, and it’s happening to literally everyone.

I’m not even kidding.

You just do stuff and nothing bad happens. Walk around existing? Nothing bad will happen. Wild.

You can cry. In public. And the most likely outcome is not that you will get taken away to receive the beating of your lifetime, it is that people will mostly ignore you and some will be kinder to you. 🤯

On Saturday I got pulled over because it turned out I’d been driving on expired tags for a year and hadn’t even noticed.

I got told to “take care of it soon please” and let go with a warning. Today I went to the DMV and paid a $5 late fee along with the 2-year fee for registration, got new plates and stickers and that was that.

A year late. No big deal. No one was shocked or appalled. It was just a thing that happened and then I took care of it. No biggie.

Turns out, people expect you to make mistakes because they’re people and they make them too. More often than not, you can just fix them and move on.

Thank you for this lovely positive post!

No one ever yells at you just for entering a room, especially not when you just want to get food or tp. 

You can pick what brands of stuff to buy!

You can cook all the foods without raisins, or leave out any other ingredient that you just don’t like. 

You can have people over. You can be loud! Or you can stay inside for days and not talk to anyone. You can have ice cream any time you want! You can decorate your living space with all the weird stuff you love! You can decide not to decorate at all and embrace minimalism.

You get to choose who and what enters your home!

My question now is “why is it okay and Normal to treat children this way to the point where having things not be a big deal and not being scolded for stuff and not being made to feel like you’re bad or not living up to someone’s idea of what you are, is all part of being an adult?”

glassshine:

Seawing sculpt but I forgot the wings

nick-nonya:

terreurs:

butch-king-frankenstein:

spaceybread:

@terreurs :)

ooh thank god

accelldraws:

sing, kitty, sing! 🎤🐱🎸
he is a little catboy and he meows directly into the mic….

nick-nonya:

unpeeled-human:

unpeeled-human:

webp. more like wet ppee.

also on bsky

ok so hopefully this doesnt annihilate the servers of this poor website but, what i use to convert webp’s is https://ezgif.com/

it has converters for myriad file types including video to gif, webp to png/gif/jpeg, png to pdf, and more; different ways to make and edit gifs, including special effects and adding text; there’s a resizing tool, clip splitter (only for animated gifs and such), and some more doodads. i love this website

they even added a sprite sheet creator ?? i think it extracts a sprite sheet from a gif but i havent used it yet

ezgif is the only converter site that doesn’t spam you with ads in my experience (i use an adblocker tho so maybe that biases it). helps that the interface is geared towards actual use too, you can chain tools without needing to upload the file again and again.

on android theres also a very cool foss app called Image Toolbox that has basically everything you need to handle images. it even has OCR!

jesskasb:

bitt-better:

bitt-better:

I SHOT THE HEAD OFF THE CPR MANNEQUIN WHAT THE HELL

IM GONNA PISS MYSELF JFC

ok so the last time i got cpr certified was when i was a tiny lil thing in high school to be a lifeguard for the kiddie swim lessons we taught. so its been a minute, yeah?

i am required to be cpr certified in my position at my job, smth that has not been brought up at ALL in the last 3 years ive been here, so i went to retake the course and all that. I went with a coworker, we partnered up and named our dummy Charles because we’re cool like that. ended up having to use the table instead of the floor because of my bad knee and recently healed ankle, so we’re above everyone else. We get charles ready, and i end up going first as the first responder, so i’m going over the process in my brain. 30 compressions at 100-120BPM, two respirations, AED, etc. etc. I was also remembering how hard it was to do proper compressions in my tiny little body at 14, so I knew it took more force than i thought to get the compressions deep enough, so i prepared to have to use my body weight and fucking send it. But! it turns out, since im not 4'11" anymore it was in fact Not Very Difficult to get past 2 inches, so it was fine and the instructor actually told me to ease up. I did awesome, compressions were deep and at proper rate, gold star for me.

however, my brain did not connect the dots that if the compressions would take less force, so would the respirations. Me at 14 had to use my full lung capacity to get the chest to rise at all, so I, with my full adult lung capacity and 10+ years of competitive swim, vocal training with breath support, and occasional dabble into brass instruments as I make my way around an orchestra, decide that I need to still full blast for the thing to work. i have to save charles, after all, so fucking send it ig. two very fast, very HARD breaths.

charles’s chest plate lifts off and resettles incorrectly, i am none the wiser because i am (wrongly) focusing on the fucking little LEDs on the dummy being green instead of actually registering the movement of the chest like youre supposed to. My coworker, however, has noticed that charles might be A Little Fucked Right Now, and tries to get my attention, but i am FOCUSED because you gotta do the full two minutes and all that. so i switch back to the compression.

the chest plate, no longer in proper position to hold the head in place, clicks weirdly, and next thing i know the charles’s head fucking LAUNCHES off into the fucking wall, nearly missing another person’s head. his chest flipped up off his body and his head is gone and trailing that little plastic bag that the air you breathe into, completely deflated.

i fucking OVERINFLATED the bag to the point where when i did a compression it fucking POPPED and sent the head flying. the class had to stop for a full fucking 15 minutes to get itself together while i melted into my chair in embarassment i wanted to DIE

the instructor was fucking dying she was all like, ‘ok you remember when i was giving the list of instances when you can stop cpr? you can stop now because he’s dead’ AND EVERYONE WAS LAUGHING AT ME AND MY COWORKER WAS FUCKING HEAVING AND WHEEZING HARD ENOUGH TO FALL OUT OF HIS CHAIR AND IM SO FUCKING MORTIFIED

I DECAPITATED CHARLES IN A CLASS ON HOW TO SAVE SOMEONES LIFE SOMEONE FUCKING KILL ME

anxeious:

flowersforabel:

anenbylittlepotato:

autistichalsin:

Actually no one should be having sex. All of us are aged-up minors and the passage of time is inherently problematic

The worst part about this is that some people genuinely have this take:

Oh god this being on my dash is like seeing my own corpse dragged through the town square

beemovieerotica:

people who are just finding out about internet tracking and data mining in the year 2025 and that your special robot friend does not respect your privacy lol

koboldlittlesister:

kvothbloodless:

Is pain bouba or kiki?

All pain is bouba

All pain is kiki

My pain is bouba but not all pain is bouba

My pain is kiki but not all pain is kiki

What the fuck are you talking about

see results

See Results

A wound is kiki and the pulsing of muscles after working out is bouba

apocalypse-polakiewicz:

tozozozo

ikwtfts:

Just a reminder that I bake 😁

Lemon cheesecake with a mulberry compote swirl and chocolate graham cracker crust.


And yes. It was delicious 😋.

circumgutter:

gsirvitor:

sandersstudies:

sandersstudies:

Anybody else have no idea how their personality is perceived by others? Like am I nice? Am I mean? I have no idea.

When people tell me stuff about me I literally think about it nonstop for 3-5 business days.

seagles:

micromontage:

how expensive it is to be anything at all

danwithouttheplan:

Please explain that to me again the exact same way. I’ll get it this time for sure, I promise.

fuckyeahchinesefashion:

OP: Now that’s what you call a dimensional strike.

qqueenofhades:

sekkitsune:

qqueenofhades:

sekkitsune:

nudistcat:

qqueenofhades:

santapau:

saanah:

ishalltakeyourknees:

necromancelena:

necromancelena:

Die temu ad die

Hmm. Accidentally looks like latin.

It accidentally is latin

Accidental latin is my new favourite thing.

Found this in the margins of a medieval manuscript.

This is a very charming illustration and I do approve of Accidental Latin, but unfortunately, that is not what this (Fake) Accidental Latin actually says. Google Translate seems to think “temu” is identical to “timor” (infinitive, “to fear”), which would then be conjugated in first-person singular as “timeo” (“I fear”). “Temu” is not a word in Latin. So that is a very weird leap on Google Translate’s part to turn gibberish into… something vaguely etymologically similar sounding? Hmm.

Next, “die” does mean “day,” though nominative singular is “dies,” i.e. “dies irae.” It could be conjugated “die” if it was in ablative or locative case, but “die ad die” would mean something more like “day to day.” “Ad” is in a “to” direction and “ab” is from, i.e. “ab urbis,” and ablative case is used to indicate the movement of a thing. In short, “by” is not really a way to translate “ad”; we might want “per” here? (Through, by means of, etc.)

Not to mention, it would be weird to put one “die” at the start and another at the end The verb also usually goes at the end in Latin sentences, just for that extra bit of fun. So yes, in short, this is not actually Latin, and Google Translate is very bad at Latin in particular. Nonetheless, still charming.

@theshitpostcalligrapher

Agree, @qqueenofhades, except on the matter of breaking “die ad die” apart. It’s a common structure in poetic and oratorical Latin to jam one phrase in the middle of another. I can’t think of an example exactly parallel to this construction, but I could believe a Roman poet would write it!

Ah, that is true. My Latin is of the reading-medieval-documents (particularly charters and/or chronicles) variety, where the sentence and usage structures are often more formulaic and there is less poetic license to move words around. There is obviously far less fixity for word order in Latin, since the conjugations explain how they grammatically relate to each other rather than placement in the sentence. (Coincidentally, this is why I used to say that the best feeling in the world was walking past a Latin classroom and not having to go inside it. Ahem.)

So yes: true that poetical Latin might be more at liberty to split the “die”-s up that far, though “timeo” (verb) is still more likely in most cases to go at the end, which would place them together anyway (“die ad die timeo,” “day to day I fear” if translated in strict word order, which would make sense to an English speaker and sound more poetic anyway). Keep in mind, however, that my Latin is a) fairly rusty and b) mostly used for said formulaic legal document reading rather than freeform verse, so don’t super-hard quote me on this.

I saw that ablative “die” and that final -u on “temu” and thought of the ablative supine (as in “mirabile dictu”) but as you observe, there isn’t a verb that “temu” could be, and then also, the ablative supine requires an adjective, as far as I know.

But perhaps “temu” is a hapax legomenon (in which case we would need the rest of the text to gloss it) or a scribal error for temeratu, from temero, “I defile or disgrace”. In that case, and in true Tumblr form, I might translate it as “daily I disgrace, in the manner of the day”, with some errors attributable to the scribe.

….oh my god. You might be a genius. Because what else does Tumblr do but daily disgrace [itself, oneself, and/or numerous others] in the manner of the day, and make numerous scribal errors.

craycraybluejay:

allthesepurplelights:

funny-tik-toks:

i want to add this 🥲

Amazing addition

langernameohnebedeutung:

bus-halte-folie:

langernameohnebedeutung:

I bring a certain Europeanness to saying “ma'am/sir this is a Wendy’s” where I don’t really know what a Wendy’s is.

“Sir, this is a Wendy” <- me, when the Rentner at the Kiosk asks why the Feuilleton is full of horses today

sparrow-va:

sparrow-va:

WHY DOES POOB HAVE ME BLOCKED LMAO

poob DOESN’T have it for me. they’ve had ENOUGH of me

sometiktoksarevalid:

sour-charity:

foone:

foone:

3liza:

wumblr:

3liza:

aaaaaarchive:

can you get out of here

thank you

I thought that was chicken little 

kosmogrl:

undr:

Ernst A. Heiniger. Rope team on the Bianco ridge, Grisons. 1941

pangur-and-grim:

pangur-and-grim:

pangur-and-grim:

pangur-and-grim:

-_- apparently the cut-off for this thing I want to submit to (which closes tomorrow) is 70k words, and I’ve got 67k

I need to think of three thousand words of bullshit to pad this thing. like a chapter where everyone goes for coffee, or something. 

image

okay there are 42 chapters in the book, and dividing 3000 by 42 = ~72

so I’d have to write the chapter titles like this:

Chapter 2: In Which an Elf Is Concussed, but it’s Not Really My Fault Because What Would You Have Done? Would You Not Have Concussed the Elf? No, Of Course You Would Have. We All Would Have Concussed the Elf. Besides Which, I Am Very Sorry for Concussing Her and Will Try to Make Amends Later If She Stops Trying to Kill Me. Also, Her Intent to Kill Me Was a Highly Relevant Factor In My Decision to Concuss Her

image

and who will stop me? God?

TWO YEARS LATER! Titan Books is publishing this, and every chapter title takes up a third of the page. god didn’t stop me after all

(you can pre-order here: Barnes & Noble, Books A Million, Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.co.uk, Indigo, Waterstones, Forbidden Planet, Bookshop.org)

sliceofdyke:

isn’t it so crazy that 51 is divisible by 17. because 51 is such an ugly number that based on vibes alone i would 100% think it’s prime 😭😭 like who in the world would even WANT to divide that shit? 17 and 3 i fucking guess…… 🤷

coldcrashpictures:

cookietastic:

cookietastic:

cookietastic:

We need to bring back the athletics body type post

This one

Tumblr has 10+ image limit had to add these on too

This photoshoot unlocked something in me the first time I saw it. The idea that EVERY body here is what “peak physical condition” looks like.

genderkoolaid:

genderkoolaid:

genderkoolaid:

genderkoolaid:

MULTIGENDER LORDE MOMENT???!!!!

From her Rolling Stone interview:

There were expectations placed on Lorde about how a girl becoming a young woman should act. It was another way she made herself small, trying to please the world and be good. But as she oozed, she redefined herself, and she saw that her gender identity could get bigger, too. On Virgin‘s opening track, she lays the tale of her rebirth bare: “Some days I’m a woman/Some days I’m a man.”

I ask her how she identifies now, what it means and what’s changed. “[Chappell Roan] asked me this,” Lorde recalls. The pair have become close friends over the past year. “She was like, ‘So, are you nonbinary now?’ And I was like, ‘I’m a woman except for the days when I’m a man.’ I know that’s not a very satisfying answer, but there’s a part of me that is really resistant to boxing it up.”

Though Lorde still calls herself a cis woman and her pronouns remain unchanged. She describes herself as “in the middle gender-­wise,” a person more comfortable with the fluidity of her expression. In some ways, she feels like her teenage self again, back when her friends were mostly boys and there was a looseness in how she dressed and acted.

In 2023, she went shopping at clothing store C’H’C’M’ and tried on a pair of men’s jeans. She sent a picture to Stack to get his opinion. “He was like, ‘I want to see the you that’s in this picture represented in the music.’ This was before I had any sense of my gender broadening at all.”

Toward the end of that year, she went off birth control for the first time since she was 15. “I’ve now come to see [my decision] as maybe some quasi right-wing programming,” she admits, presumably referring to years of far-right influencers pushing anti-contraception disinformation. “But I hadn’t ovulated in 10 years. And when I ovulated for the first time, I cannot describe to you how crazy it was. One of the best drugs I’ve ever done.”

She wrote the album’s opening track soon after, as well as “Man of the Year.” She felt like she had superpowers, like being off birth control had peeled a film off her life. But the “best drug” came with bigger crashes than she had ever experienced. She would be diagnosed with premenstrual dysphoric ­disorder, a severe form of PMS that causes debilitating mood swings, among other ­symptoms; she has since inserted the IUD visible on her album cover. The experience opened up an avenue of discovery she hadn’t anticipated. “I felt like stopping taking my birth control, I had cut some sort of cord between myself and this regulated femininity,” she explains. “It sounds crazy, but I felt that all of a sudden, I was off the map of femininity. And I totally believed that that allowed things to open up.”

When Lorde wrote “Man of the Year,” she was sitting on the floor of her living room, trying to visualize a version of herself “that was fully representative of how [her] gender felt in that moment.” What she saw once again was an image of herself in men’s jeans, this time wearing nothing else but her gold chain and duct tape on her chest. The tape had this feeling of rawness to her, of it “not being a permanent solution.”

“I went to the cupboard, and I got the tape out, and I did it to myself,” she tells me. “I have this picture staring at myself. I was blond [at the time]. It scared me what I saw. I didn’t understand it. But I felt something bursting out of me. It was crazy. It was something jagged. There was this violence to it.”

We talk about the Trump administration’s war against the trans community. While opening up about her own identity terrifies her, she knows she has less on the line than people whose gender identity does not match what they were assigned at birth.

“I don’t think that [my identity] is radical, to be honest,” she says. “I see these incredibly brave young people, and it’s complicated. Making the expression privately is one thing, but I want to make very clear that I’m not trying to take any space from anyone who has more on the line than me. Because I’m, comparatively, in a very safe place as a wealthy, cis, white woman.”

Also while nonbinary people can also identify as cis, I can’t help but wonder if her saying her identity isn’t “radical” is some internalized exorsexism. Like, Lorde my friend Lorde, you are describing a very raw and real genderqueer experience, you don’t need to add a disclaimer that you aren’t Really Radical because you are still comfortable being a woman as well. The answer “I’m sometimes a woman and sometimes a man” IS a satisfying answer to people who care about multigender folks.

Also this is a really good example of why I as a nonbinary person really dislike defining “transgender” as “not identifying with your identity assigned at birth” because it’s a definition that really prioritizes binary trans people above all else, as opposed to the older definition which emphasizes genderqueerness in all forms.

Anyways! Really cool to see!!!! We are in such desperate need of mainstream multigender representation.

also it’s so incredibly cool and swag to see lorde not just calling out anti-contraceptive right wing propaganda as being what it is, but also saying that going off birth control made her realize she’s also a guy. given how there’s whole conspiracies around how the rise in BC is using artificial hormones to warp good cishet girls minds into scary leftist dykes it’s soooo cool and sexy to say that ovulating for the first time in years “cut the cord” of regulated femininity. what a great fuck you to the people who think that the “natural” state of the “female” body is heterosexuality and cisgenderism.

sorry ALSO i love seeing her talk about going out and buying men’s jeans. its a little detail but people still act like crossdressing doesn’t mean anything for people assigned female. i love seeing people talk about wearing men’s clothes and the freedom and intensity that it can create.

overthink:

Dimitris Makrygiannakis