And still the haters and transphobes claim that people are becoming trans just to do bad stuff. NO ONE is going though the grueling stress and mental hardship of being trans for anything other than being therselves. I can promise that.

Also, due to the extreme 7 year wait i'm looking at for access to a gender clinic, I will mostly likely have to pay out of pocket for sessions with a private gender specialist to get an official diagnosis of dysphoria. I feel like a dolphin trapped in a zoo doomed to jump though hoops forever.

To get a GRC I have to be able to prove i've lived in my affirmed gender for 2+ years, have a note from my doctor, a note from a psychiatrist and then i'm STILL at the mercy of a mystery board of 'gender specialists' who will judge if i'm actually trans or not. It's really scary.

This cost me £50 and then another £85 for the passport which sucks, but I guess it's progress. The next step after this is a Gender recognition certificate which is partially why i'm making this post because it's honestly a very depressing and sad thing to have to deal with.

Oh, and I also decided to move the domains I own to Njalla since it's very privacy focused and I can pay by crypto (although I didn't).

A little (and mediocre) breakfast at Starbucks. It’s somewhat of a tradition for me. In other news, my giant translucent bag got though security because my cosmetics don’t fit in their small clear ones. Yay!!

To keep all my new accounts secure, I chose to create an encrypted keypack with all my recovery keys. I've written this to 5 cheap flash drives so I can always get one if needed. Finally, i've been running Incogni for a few months to get rid of my data from brokers. I'm feeling quite confident now.

But after importing roughly 280gb worth of memories, I can confidently say everything works great. They have on-device deep learning for face detection and tagging which works almost as good as Google's. And they show photos on a map using Open Maps which doesn't use outside services.

Importing from Google Photos wasn't too difficult. I used takeout to get all my photos which is split into seperate images and metadata file. Luckily, Ente can parse this so I can maintain metadata. I had to import 1 year at a time to avoid duplicate file names having wrong metadata parsed.

Proton Drive has a photos app but it's quite terrible compared to Google photos. I want everything in an easily searchable gallery. So for Photo storage I chose Ente.io. It's end to end encrypted and well priced. The apps work great and so far i'm really enjoying it.

Proton pass is excellent and a much better service than Lastpass which I used before. It supports passkeys and 2FA codes too which is really convenient.
Proton Drive seems great but lacks the office suit built into Google Drive as it's only downside. I'll use Libre Office locally as it's open source

I went with the Proton Unlimited package which ends up being just over 100 euro a year. Importing existing emails from my multiple Gmail accounts was easy with their automated process and setting up forwarding was equally as straight forward. I just have to spend time changing my accounts now.

My criteria will full end to end encryption. So even the companies who host the accounts can't view my data. As such I went with Proton for Email, VPN, Storage and password management. They are hosted in Switzerland and subjected to absolute privacy laws.

This is truly a novel of all time. It has everything. And it makes me really excited to start the next book which I will post about soon. I have some initial thoughts already.

By the end, you feel as if the characters are family
members. You feel part of the Ninth house. And that makes what happens in the end painful and deeply saddening. I won’t elaborate as to avoid spoilers. Suffice to say, I cried immediately and felt lost for a good day after finishing the book.

As the story unfolds, it’s easy to build up a vivid mental picture of the world which is being described in exquisite detail. And every chapter brings you closer to understanding but holds just enough back to keep you on the edge of your seat, ravenous for more.