I saw this post and sent it to some friends, then wrote them a quick encounter beginning for funsies that I figured I would share here.

“As you enter the recently harvested field you see movement, and suddenly a cascading warbling gobbling begins, choral at times, with harmonies spilling into cacophony that makes you think you’re going mad. A male turkey with five heads rivaling the size of dragons you’ve heard of in song steps into the field from the trees on the opposite side. You can tell that it has already spotted you by the way its heads take turns spastically turning sideways to better see you, and it scratches at the dirt with one of its four talons and ruffles its feathers to appear even larger. The gobbling starts again, more voices joining the fray far beyond the heads you can count, and the creature’s eyes glow red as the call digs into your brains.

It sets itself to charge at you across the field. Roll for initiative.”

Is it? Because I’m a transwoman and my levels are all within cis woman ranges for going on a decade now, yet I’m basically full-time Chandra, Awakened Inferno unless it’s subzero temps outside.

If I could go back and talk to a younger me at the start of her transition, we’d talk about how this is the chance to ACTUALLY learn about myself and to really take time and care to not sweat the details or get stuck in a rut. Try everything and figure out what’s actually you and what is just some baggage or ideal you’re trying to live up to. Don’t be afraid to say yes. Also, don’t be afraid to say no. Keep both open as your options for everything: clothing styles, makeup (if you wanna), hair stuff, sexuality and attraction, etc.

To be clear, I still feel like I managed my way through it and found my way to a rough approximation of what’s right for me eventually, but I was often too hard on myself and placed restrictions where there really weren’t any beyond what I was enforcing on myself. It really is Puberty 2 in so many ways, and you really need to lean into the lessons about how much any of it actually matters from Puberty 1… if at all possible.

Ye cannot get ye flask.

Is this still available?

Hey, I can take a swing at this. It’s basically just a question of understanding how fractions work (which is fumbled horrendously by teachers, at least where I’m from - I basically had to teach myself fractions all over again when I went back to school).

So, if you look at the terms on the left hand side, we have “x”, which is the same as saying “1x”, so the whole number “1”, we have a whole number “3” as part of “3x”, and we have the fraction that’s going to cause us to do a little work, “1/2” as part of “1/2x”.

Now, a whole number can be rewritten as a fraction, and this makes the most sense when you see fractions as little division problems unto themselves. For instance, the “1/2” could be read as “1 divided by 2”, or “0.5”. A whole number like “1”, then, could be rewritten as “1/1”, or “2/2”, or “3/3”, and so on.

Now, in order to add fractions together (which is what we’re trying to do since our ultimate goal is to get the variable that we’re solving for alone on one side of the equation), we need the denominator to be the same for all of our terms, i.e. the “common denominator”. Because we already know the denominator we likely need, the “2” in “1/2”, we simply need to transform both of our whole numbers into fractions with 2 in the denominator.

For “1”, this can be rewritten as “2/2”. Dividing 2 by 2 gets us back to 1, so that works out.

For “3”, we need to determine what number divided by 2 gets us to 3. In this case, that’s 6, which leaves us with “6/2”.

The equation now looks like this: 2/2x + 6/2x + 1/2x = 45

We can, of course, pull the “x” out like this: x(2/2 + 6/2 + 1/2) = 45

Then, when adding fractions, we only add the numerators (the reason we were looking for the common denominator in the first place). So, 2 + 6 + 1 = 9, leaving us with “9/2x = 45”. It’s then just a question, as you can see in the posted solution, of multiplying both sides by the reciprocal to solve for x.