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vestenet (full of bones)

@vestenet.bsky.social

1.9K followers 150 following 2.7K posts

ANN contributor and boozy anime women appreciator. she/they 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈

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vestenet (full of bones)

@vestenet.bsky.social

know your roots

photo of a flyer in Seattle that says

BREAK
BEZOS'
'BALLS'

MAYDAY2018

overlaid on top of an illustration of Saya (from Saya no Uta) stepping fiercely onto a man's crotch

November 24, 2025 at 2:21 AM

vestenet (full of bones)

@vestenet.bsky.social

the girl being named "mary sugaki" is taking me out

steam page for Zako no Ahiru

"ZAKO NO AHIRU" is an exasperating climbing action game where you aim for the summit with a peculiar-behaving duck while being taunted by the cheeky girl, Sugaki Mary.

November 23, 2025 at 1:40 AM

vestenet (full of bones)

@vestenet.bsky.social

okay i know there's no reason to suspect crunchyroll will not continue enshittifying itself in the long run, but i'm going to take credit for this small w

screenshot from episode 8 of This Monster Wants to Eat Me, wherein all the onscreen text is subbed (although not stylized)

concluding paragraph of my review for episode 7 (taken from https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/review/this-monster-wants-to-eat-me/episode-7/.231047):

Those are my thoughts on this episode, but I'd like to conclude with a comment on Crunchyroll's localization efforts. While there was some brouhaha at the beginning of the season that has since died down, This Monster's subtitling has been consistently barebones. The quality of the translation itself is fine, but the omission of subtitles for the onscreen text has grown from glaring to inexcusable. For example, when Miko explains that her co-managers can't help out that weekend, both girls appear in chibi-form with text explanations of their excuses. There are two complete sentences on the screen for several seconds, yet no translation is provided. I may personally appreciate the opportunity to exercise my kanji recognition (and for the curious, I believe that Girl A has to attend a memorial for her grandma, while Girl B's cousin is getting married that weekend), but a paid subscription service dedicated to localizing anime shouldn't be putting that onus on its users. This is not an “internal system problem.” This is a change in workflow that's affecting the quality of the product, and Crunchyroll's upper management should answer properly for these failings.

November 22, 2025 at 3:31 PM

vestenet (full of bones)

@vestenet.bsky.social

good new nazuna sketches too. always appreciate when kotoyama lets her go wide (x.com/cot_510/stat...)

an assortment of nazuna sketches from kotoyama's twitter)

November 21, 2025 at 6:55 PM

vestenet (full of bones)

@vestenet.bsky.social

also very predictable of him (x.com/cot_510/stat...)

kotoyama draws purah from tears of the kingdom

November 21, 2025 at 6:50 PM

vestenet (full of bones)

@vestenet.bsky.social

anko tropical (thanks kotoyama x.com/cot_510/stat...)

anko with longer hair done in a braid, dressed in a loose blouse, short skirt, and sandals

November 21, 2025 at 6:46 PM

vestenet (full of bones)

@vestenet.bsky.social

the matching panda express and kfc caps are doing a lot for me

chisato wears a panda express cap while mahiro wears a kfc one

November 18, 2025 at 1:04 AM

vestenet (full of bones)

@vestenet.bsky.social

dude, hell yes, that stereolab shirt owns

mahiro and chisato cheering for yet another dumb reason

November 18, 2025 at 12:45 AM

vestenet (full of bones)

@vestenet.bsky.social

lou reed transformer t-shirt in baby assassins. this movie is basically a perfect balance of stupid and cool

November 17, 2025 at 11:52 PM

vestenet (full of bones)

@vestenet.bsky.social

Binnie's afterword is great, too. a snapshot into the era and spaces, online and off, that shaped her book. but also, like, man, having it laid out like that. none of this shit is simple.

The first half of Nevada is about Maria and then the second half is mostly about James because I wanted to interrogate both the "before transition" and "after transition" stories.

So why does Maria show up in James's half? Well, it's a separate thing, but it's because one of the most common ways for trans women to self-flagellate is with a whip labeled "I should have come out sooner." It's not fair to ourselves. It takes as long as it takes to figure out what you need to figure out, and to figure out what you need to do about it. But we still do it. I thought it would be funny to make that explicit: what if, while you were still unaware / in denial about being trans, some trans woman fairy godmother had shown up and not only told you to your face that you were trans, but tried to convince you.

Would that have made you come out sooner?

November 16, 2025 at 8:37 PM

vestenet (full of bones)

@vestenet.bsky.social

writhed and winced all the way through Nevada. even cried a little. and loved it. Maria's just a great character, full stop, and the trainwreck between her and James is compelling to watch. but moreover, it made me feel a little less alone and insane as I continue to re-process my entire life. nbd.

is totally bullshit, man, and we wear these clothes because they're comfortable, not for any kind of fashion statement, and we're just trying to communicate, not be cool, and then you transition and realize, oh shit, there is going to have to be some intentionality in the way I present my body and my actions. I am going to have to break the patterns of clothing and voice and hair I've had in place all my life if I'm ever going to be read the way I want to be read. Like, it would be nice to believe that you could just exist, just be some true, honest, essential self. But you only really get to have a true honest essential self if you're white, male, het and able-bodied. Otherwise your body has all these connotations and you don't get the benefit of the doubt.

Because look it's not like James doesn't think about whether he's trans too, right? To be totally honest he thinks about it all the fucking time, he just can't imagine actually being trans in the real world. Does he wish he was a girl? Fucking-obviously he wishes he was a girl. You don't spend twenty-nine hours a week thinking about being a girl and masturbating without wondering, like, I wonder if this pattern is trying to tell me something. And to be honest he probably hasn't committed to it either way. Like there are a million reasons why he obviously is not trans or is not the kind of trans person who transitions. He has never said it out loud or even explicitly thought it but he is probably kind of genderqueer, so he doesn't even know what to think about it. He's looked at a lot of people's websites and blogs and read up on autogynephilia and what hormones do and don't do and he knows that if he's transsexual he's definitely not, like, a normal kind of transsexual, normal transsexuals all fucking know they're transsexual when they're little kids and fucking tell their parents and get yelled at for it or else start hormones when they're thirteen and don't fucking spend every night of their lives jacking off and reading embarrassing as hell pornography that is stupid and boring and repetitive and, like, just an entirely different avenue of gender and sexuality

Plus the world has moved on from the narrative that says being trans is something to be avoided at all costs; it's moved on from the narrative that says the only way to be trans is to be young and tiny and pretty and into men and to transition and then disappear. There's a much better understanding of what it means to be trans now: you just are trans. The fact that your transition might not go smoothly because of the shape of your body or the shape of your family or the shape of your personality or the way that your sexuality has been shaped does not mean that therefore you can just decide not to be trans. You can't will it away. Deciding to will it away is a defense mechanism that is inevitably going to fail and you'll be back where you started: trans. Just older and more entrenched in a life that itself is not much more than a coping mechanism designed to keep you from having to be trans in the real world. If you're trans you're trans and if you're obsessed with whether you might be trans you probably are trans.

I get through and the dude, the radio host, introduces me. He goes, We have a caller on the line, Dr. Zucker, who says she's a trans woman from Pennsylvania and she strongly disagrees with your perspective. Maria?

And I'm like, yeah! Here it is! I'm gonna solve this shit once and for all! Except I open my mouth and nothing comes out, right. I had thought, maybe I'll get all carried away and flip out on this asshole! And I'd thought, maybe I'll just rationally lay out the contradiction inherent in this guy's argument, right. But I hadn't thought of a first sentence to even start out with. If I had been like, Hello Dr. Zucker, I probably could have started. But instead I froze up in the face of institutionalized patriarchal misogyny, ageism and transphobia and I couldn't say anything. There was this long pause and then Ira Flatow was like, Maria, are you there? But I still couldn't say anything and I guess they cut off my call but not before you hear me let out half of this one pathetic, desperate sob. You can listen to it online, I checked.

She stops and James kind of wishes she'd go on.

Fuck, he says.

November 16, 2025 at 8:31 PM

vestenet (full of bones)

@vestenet.bsky.social

augh

from Nevada

No big deal but Maria is kind of popular and famous on the internet, but so is everybody, so it's not very interesting. She's been blogging since she was a tiny little baby, like eighteen or nineteen years old, when being online was just starting to be demystified into something Rupert Murdoch could make money from; she figured out that she was trans by blogging. Awkward.

an example of Maria blogging:

Oh man. Can we talk about stereotypes and staring at the computer? Okay. I imagine that you're familiar with the stereotypes around transsexual women: that we're all sex workers, that we're all hairy, potbellied old men, that we're all deep-voiced nightlife phoenixes, that we're all drag queens, that we're all repressed, that we're all horny shemales with twelve-inch cocks. Sometimes the stereotypes are contradictory. Those ones are weird. Can we talk about what the actual stereotypes around transsexual women should be? The ones that hit a little too close to home to be funny.

1. We are not sex fiends, we are internet fiends.

November 15, 2025 at 7:33 PM

vestenet (full of bones)

@vestenet.bsky.social

oof

from Nevada

She felt weird when she was little, but she assumed everybody else did too. She didn't figure out what kind of weird until she was like twenty. She'd known something was messed up, that she was distant from everything. She'd known that Those Kinds of People were out there somewhere, but it felt like there was nothing but us normal people in here. This is what everybody thinks. When she was twenty she figured out that she was such a mess not because she was trans, but because being trans is so stigmatized; if you could leave civilization for a year, like live in an abandoned shopping mall out in the desert giving yourself injections of estrogen, working on your voice, figuring out how to dress yourself all over again and meditating eight hours a day on gendered socialization, and then get bottom surgery as a reward, it would be pretty easy to transition.

November 15, 2025 at 7:01 PM

vestenet (full of bones)

@vestenet.bsky.social

Drakengard has a really well-edited/cut trailer

November 15, 2025 at 5:33 PM

vestenet (full of bones)

@vestenet.bsky.social

i didn't get a picture of it, but our hotel was also right next to this mall

from the end of girls band cry episode three. a big outdoor mall with a grass plaza and a stage in the middle of it

close up on the band warming up

announcer: "a three-piece girl band hailing from kawasaki!"

November 15, 2025 at 3:30 PM

vestenet (full of bones)

@vestenet.bsky.social

oh yeah when i was in tokyo i saw the place where nina met momoka

nina walks up to momoka after hearing her busk by kawasaki station

photo of the irl glass wall they're in front of in the show

November 15, 2025 at 3:08 PM

vestenet (full of bones)

@vestenet.bsky.social

from Nevada by Imogen Binnie

Trans women in real life are different from trans women on television. For one thing, when you take away the mystification, misconceptions and mystery, they're at least as boring as everybody else. Oh, neurosis! Oh, trauma! Oh, look at me, my past messed me up and I'm still working through it! Despite the impression you might get from daytime talk shows and dumb movies, there isn't anything particularly interesting there. Although, of course, Maria may be biased.

November 15, 2025 at 6:44 AM

vestenet (full of bones)

@vestenet.bsky.social

drakengard 3 concept art >>>

illustration of zero facing down an army

November 15, 2025 at 4:21 AM

vestenet (full of bones)

@vestenet.bsky.social

while i appreciate all the kanji practice in This Monster Wants to Eat Me, it sure would be nice if crunchyroll could facilitate subtitling onscreen text again. y'know, like they did for years

two girls providing excuses for missing training camp. one has a memorial for her grandma that weekend, and another's cousin is getting married (i think)

November 14, 2025 at 4:54 AM

vestenet (full of bones)

@vestenet.bsky.social

shiori to hinako: "perhaps you should remove your top layer?"

November 14, 2025 at 4:37 AM

vestenet (full of bones)

@vestenet.bsky.social

she was very erudite

mahiro: "life wouldn't be the same without porn."

November 11, 2025 at 5:34 AM

vestenet (full of bones)

@vestenet.bsky.social

watched the one episode of princession orchestra available on the official youtube, and i was immediately met with a sailor uranus-type butch senpai who transforms into a fencer knight and attacks the heroines. you have my attention