Mandy Sastrous
"... is... well... Mandy Sastrous."
Journal Entries for Mandy Sastrous
Profile Backup
February 23rd, 2008 10:58 am MST
Repost (of a backup of a backup...) - because, as i just learned the "hard" way, user-generated content such as all Journal entries, article comments and guestbook entries on URNA expires after two years and simply vanishes into the ether. Sigh.
Link node/hub to my online profiles (well, the relevant ones):
M2F transvestite - from latin "trans" = "across, beyond, so as to change" and "vestis" = "clothing, garment". There is no other meaning to this word, and at least in my case no other applicable implication (so please spare me your assumptions, thanks). This text shall be my "Hello World" bit on the net, since I really don't feel like maintaining a proper website just about me (me me me!). Other than that, I'm not looking for anything here.
I tend to receive a fair amount of feedback through various channels, and I thank everyone for their kind and thoughtful words and comments. Not sure how I deserve it, but it sure is greatly appreciated. :-) Update: Okay, no matter what I write here, it seems to have potential for being misunderstood. Oh well. So let's adress a couple of constantly reappearing things a bit more bluntly. (Ugh! Text! ... Yes, text - read it, I'll notice it when you haven't...)
-Yes, that's my own hair. All of it. Yes, it did take long to grow. Think in years and decades. And yes, those legs are mine too. They start at my hips and go all the way down to the floor, where they have a foot at each respective end. They're cool, I use them every day.
-No, I am not on hormones, and I neither plan nor intend to go that way either. Nor did I ever have any sort of plastic surgery or other permanent cosmetic alteration, and I sure don't want that either. I really like this body here in its current condition, and that attitude is unlikely to ever change.
-I'm not fulltime, and I don't necessarily want to be either. I'm fortunate enough that my living circumstances have made me quit caring about "dressing vs. not dressing", so I "dress" in one way or another "a lot of the time", but that's not the same by any stretch. Call it what you want, "gender queer" or whatever label there might be, I call it doing what I want and enjoying the best of both worlds, just as I see fit at a given time. What could possibly be better?
-Yes, I am in fact German, and I live in Germany. Not an expat. I just happen to speak English.
-I know quite well who I am and what I am, and fortunately I have never experienced periods of self-denial or doubts (never "purged" either). I am perfectly comfortable with myself, my condition and my situation. I'm not transitioning, because for me there is nothing to transition to. I've found myself at the end of a journey, if you want to put it that way; I know this is my status quo. And when I say "I'm not looking for anything", I mean just that. I'm not looking. Seriously. I prefer finding. Notice the subtle difference.
-Yes, I obviously do like leather fashion. It's a personal preference of mine, like everybody has one (or many). That's not to say it's a fetish for me in a sexual way, or by any other definition. If it is one for you, good for you, but don't assume that has to apply to everyone else as well. It certainly doesn't apply to me.
-I'm really not into the BDSM scene as such, the concepts there really don't work for me personally. (Again, if they work for you, that's great, enjoy!) That vinyl dress you might have seen me in is really nothing but a nice dress. Honestly. Also I'm not a "domme" and most definitely not a "sub". I meet people at eyelevel or not at all.
-On a related 'fetish' note, this whole TG thing is not a fetish for me. I don't "play" this. I don't do this for a sexual kick. It's one of many facets of my personality. This *is* me. It's fun for me because it's self-expression, not because it's playing dress-up doll or because it would turn me on. This is not dissing people who dress for a fetish, but again, don't assume it applies to others only because it applies to you.
-That said, the entire T-stuff is not the center of my life. I do in fact have other interests too, imagine that! (Far too many, in fact...) And I have the habit of doing things my way, whether that's the conventional way or not. I usually loath clichés.
-If you want an advice: stop worrying about labels and categories. The world isn't just black and white. Neither are people. Neither are you.
-If you want another advice: join URNA. :-) (Jon, where's my check?) You won't find a place quite like this elsewhere, trust me on that. This is largely due to the devotion and dedication that the folks who run this site invest into making it good, and the quality people their efforts thus tend to attract.
And that said, a heartfelt hug to all you wonderful people I've got to know here on URNA in the past - you know who you are. I count you by the dozens by now, but I cherish each and every one of you individually. You've enriched my life more than you can possibly imagine. I'm not sure if I'll ever be able to make up for that.
To those asking for more pictures, scroll up to the Flickr link. It's not much, but it does have pictures. ;-)
Random rants, ramblings, bitchings, pet peeves:
-A "hun" is a member of an ancient nomadic central-asian tribe. The meaning is not unsimilar to "vandal". The name "Attila" might ring a bell. "Hun" has also been used as a propaganda term in both World Wars, to paint enemy (german) soldiers as brutal slaughterers. There is nothing flattering in calling each other "hun". If you mean "hon", use that instead.
-"Gurl" is the sound that pigeons make, particularly during mating season. "Grrrl" is at best an interesting way to spell "grill". If you mean "girl", use it. Anything else smacks of giggly stupidity.
-"Shemale" is a porn industry term, and widely perceived as derogatory in the TG-world at large outside of it. If you're comfortable with calling yourself that, fair enough. But at least be aware of its meaning, and of who you call what.
Roadwork ahead
March 7th, 2007 6:52 pm MST
Testdriving Dan's new "Best Friends" feature for profiles, as per his kind request. If you drop by and my profile suddenly looks all messed up (not sure I like this ... yellow... either...), I probably stepped into something volatile and it exploded. Duck & Cover - you have been warned.
Aflac.
Reports of my demise are greatly exaggerated
March 28th, 2006 12:58 pm MST
The number of people who wonder why I seem to have gone AWOL apparently increases daily, based on the amount of e-mails I get asking me why I'm not in URNA chat anymore. Just so you know, I'm not gone or anything, just very very busy with family stuff at the moment and have precious little time for other shenanigans, so some priorities had to be set (yes, I'm hilariously behind with answering e-mails too...). I'll be back around and more visible again in the not so far future (consider this a warning... mwuahahahaha...).
To give you something to play with in the meantime, how about we geek around a bit with browser technicalities? (And you, dear TG profile reader, you just love geek babes. Admit it.) So let's dish out a quick article hack and have a look at my Firefox, which is my "second primary" browser so to speak, the "first primary" being Opera. Firefox is generally superior to Opera in terms of page rendering, while I otherwise prefer Opera's ergonomics and useability. In Opera 8 (I have several versions of it installed), I use a bunch of UserJS scripts and -when I have the time- tinker around with a few I've written myself. In Firefox, where I never got around yet to learning how to create an extension, I'm using a few nice ones that I like (or currently evaluate) and that I feel like recommending now, plus I might have a look at Greasemonkey features sooner or later. I'm never using any sort of theme or skin or wallpaper anywhere, so don't look at me for those...
Oh, and I'm never using Internet Explorer either - and no one should really, it's so inherently unsafe that calling it dangerous to any user's privacy is in order. Don't use it. Just... don't. (And don't come whining to me if you do and you managed to get it hijacked, have been phished, or got your PC infected with any sort of worm or trojan or other malware through it. It's your own friggin' fault. You have been warned.)
Installed Firefox extensions:
- DOM Inspector
Duh. Integral part of Firefox. - Adblock
This is vital, if not marvelous and brilliant. There's just too much advertising, banners, popups, tracking, profiling and other bloated, annoying or dangerous crap out there that you encounter while websurfing. Adblock enables you to get rid of it all just fine. I'm using my own list of filters that keeps evolving, not any of the downloadable ones out there, to keep the overhead of filter entries I never need low. I also have a monster of a HOSTS file that blocks a bazillion of servers already at system level, but having Adblock sit on top of that at browser level makes the whole blocking thing more slick. Swish, baby.
- CustomizeGoogle
Very neat. It expands your Google experience by a variety of nice functions, blocks their ads and clicktracking, and protects your privacy by randomizing the GUID stored in the cookie with every search request (and thus saves you from being profiled). The only thing I'm missing here is a way of directly managing the Google Preferences (they're all stored in the cookie too, so this extension would be perfect for it). No idea why they don't implement that. - Tweak Network
This gives you easy access to a few config settings that speed up browsing (number of server connections, pipelining, etc.), which is a bit more convenient than plugging through them all via "about:config". As such it's a better and simpler alternative to the widely and wildly overrated "Fasterfox" extension, which mostly relies on voodoo and placebo effects as far as the perceived speedup is concerned. - ShowIP
Puts the target server's IP adress into the status bar, with options to query for it in a variety of lookup services. Kinda nice to have if you're geeky enough to care. - Extended Statusbar
Adds a couple of output options to the otherwise rather bland status bar, like load time, number of images and amount of loaded data, making it generally more Opera-esque (I always strive to make my Firefox more like Opera in terms of functionality). It doesn't work as well as the Opera status bar, but it's better than nothing. - Wayback
Adds a link to the Wayback Machine to the context menu, to directly look up old versions of a target webpage. Pretty neat in theory, but I'm using this so rarely I might just as well kick it out again... - Open link in...
Greatly expands the ability to control where to open a link if not in the current window/tab, which is another thing I'm used to from Opera that I badly missed in Firefox, which originally can only open a link either in a background tab or a foreground window - who on earth ever conceived this stupid limited choice? Firefox Team, I'm looking sternly in your general direction. - Paste and Go
Yet another "Opera-izing" extension. In Opera, if you have an URL copied to the clipboard that you want to paste into the adress bar in order to go there, you can right-click and not just "Paste", but "Paste and Go" immediately without having to hit Enter or click Go. In Firefox, you can't - unless you install this extension. A small but quite convenient detail. In general, I wish the Firefox designers would take a lot more ideas from the long-standing and well refined Opera ergonomics and UI/customization design ideas. In many ways, Firefox is a newbie in the browser scene and still does a lot of things wrong, and this is one of them. - User Agent Switcher
Gives you easy and full control over the user-agent that you pass on to the target server with every request. Some websites give you a different output based on the browser and OS they detect you're using, or use that data to control access or even completely prevent you from accessing it. This is a way of getting around that. Very simple example case in point, go to the Google Preferences page pretending to be some Mozilla, then switch to some Opera and try again (or reload). See anything different? - Tamper Data
Hooks into the HTTP/HTTPS GET/POST command communication with a remote server and lets you watch, log, analyze and modify any request, if you're so inclined. (It can mess with the user-agent too.) If you're geeky enough to understand what I just said there, you're geeky enough to use it and maybe actually have a use for it... - Web Developer
This is seriously awesome. The number of ways this extension offers you to look at the intestines of a webpage and how it's built and control how it works is impossible to sum up in a short description like this. Anyone with the slightest bit of web geekiness should try it, chances are you'll never uninstall it. The only gripe I had with it is a minor config setting detail (defaults to CTRL-SHIFT-A for one of its functions, which is already used by Adblock - easy to reconfigure though). - Download Statusbar
Let's face it, the Downloads window in Firefox blows chunks. I mean, royally. I hate it. This is a much nicer and nicely configurable alternative that lets you control your downloads in a small status bar insert. Still not quite up to par with Opera and its nifty downloading ways, but it's an improvement. - AJAX Yahoo! Mail [Viamatic Webmail++]
I'm using a bunch of unimportant Yahoo! Mail accounts for a variety of minor purposes, and this extension expands them with a few interesting and nicely implemented AJAX functions. Also available for Opera as a UserJS version (I'm not using it in Opera myself though) and as a Greasemonkey script from their website, which apparently they didn't submit (yet?) to the userjs.org repository, for reasons unknown. (It is on userscripts.org though...) - Update Notifier
Automatically checks for updates to your installed extensions and themes, and offers enhanced control over the notification and installation process. Not like the regular Extensions window in Firefox wouldn't work well, but it's a kinda nice extension to have. Doesn't seem to hurt at least. - Server Spy
Adds a readout to the status bar showing the server brand and possible server extensions that the remote site reports it's running on. Which sometimes is kinda interesting to know. If you're that geeky. Which I am apparently. - Reliby
Reloads all your live bookmarks/feeds with a single click, which I found was an intriguing idea when I installed this extension (out of the box Firefox can only do it individually for a single live bookmark entry), but I'm almost never actually using it, so it might get kicked out again sooner or later. I'd much rather be able to control or cut down on the way that Firefox automatically schedules the whole live bookmark loading/reloading as such, considering it's my one and only RSS feed client. - Options Menu
Sums up access to possible options pages of all the extensions you have installed and puts them under a single options sub-menu entry for easier access. Again, it's not like the regular Extensions window wouldn't work well, but... - Download Embedded
Puts an icon into the status bar that indicates embedded objects on a webpage, and enables you to download them directly if you want. I have yet to use this to actually download something, I'm mostly using it to see more clearly what exactly any embed on a given page is (and possibly block it through Adblock). - Domain Details
Adds a context menu that points to domain detail lookup pages, so that you can easily access a target website's statistics and owner information. For The Interested Geek Babe Who Has Everything Already™. - View Dependencies
Expands the View Page Source/View Page Info context menu with an overview about which parts of the current page are called from where exactly, which to me seems to be something that belongs into that same window by design already. Also very useful for the ambitious Adblock user who likes to get a grip on what is what. - X-Ray
Puts the HTML markup tags right into the webpage rendering view, to make you see in context what a page element is made up of. It's not exactly transparent and thus of limited usefulness, I'm still playing with it and contemplating keeping or kicking this extension.
So there you have it... By gosh, you've read this up to here? Wow, you must be seriously bored. Thanks for reading nonetheless though.
hugs, Mandy
