Friday Update #33: Break on Through (To the Other Side) (Patreon)

I may be 28 years old, but spiritually, sometimes physiologically, and in my musical tastes, I am a grandpa.

Howdy folks, CaptainCaption here with a long and interesting Friday Update.

So, to put it lightly, this Patreon's been doing Iron Man numbers in the past six months. As Graphteon shows, the 4 months of delay between 0.9.2 (November 16, 2021) and 0.10.0 (March 18, 2022) definitely killed some of the momentum the page had, but it's more than rebounded since then. As stated before, I was sick with some chronic lung condition for months (more on that later) and bit off way more than I could chew for a single update (also more on that later).

As of writing, this Patreon sits at $2,771 per month, which is wild. What's even wilder is the $3,000 per month goal, which states:

I, CaptainCaption, despite being a cis male, will pledge to take an  estrogen and antiandrogen combination for at least one week. Those of  you with a forced feminization kink, eat your hearts out!
This could  potentially be a long-term treatment for my early-onset Parkinson's disease and other hormonal issues, so it's not just for the meme  (consult Friday Update #21: The Mother of All Omelets for the full details).

That goal is close to being met, but certain recent complications have forced me to... "accelerate" that timetable, so congrats on meeting the goal, everyone!

Using estrogen to treat PD is a 235 IQ play, by the way.

So... remember that lung condition I mentioned? I finally got that diagnosed in the middle of July: viral induced asthma.

As my doctor explained it to me, I got a viral infection in my lungs that my body had never seen before (somehow, that wasn't COVID-19, but I later got that and had to reschedule that doctor's appointment and a whole lot of other stuff). I got over that respiratory illness in about a week, but my immune system never "shut off" afterwards, meaning that I became hyper-sensitive to environmental irritants.

Thankfully, this is treatable. I just take an inhalant steroid every morning for six months, and the conditions should go away. Sure, the $400 I'll need to spend on this medication isn't ideal, but it beats having constant shortness of breath and completely passing out in the shower from a coughing fit and waking up with bruises on me because I collapsed; plus, I used to spend twice that a month on a Parkinson's medication called NEUPRO, and while I am no longer on that medicine, my budget still accounts for up to a thousand dollars a month on medications.

So... here's where things get interesting. Steroids can have a bunch of side effects, one of which is negatively affecting the neurotransmitters in the brain that regulate dopamine. Given that I have Parkinson's disease, the primary culprit of which is a lack of dopamine produced by the brain in the part that controls movement, that could be really bad for my health if it ends up happening... which it did.

So, taking this steroid is already working to curb my asthma and eventually get rid of it, but it has come at the sharp cost of a lot less dopamine in my brain. The primary way you manage Parkinson's disease is via dopamine reuptake inhibitors, which essentially extends the lifespan of dopamine molecules by preventing neurons from absorbing them after they're "done" and makes them do more work. As Parkinson's disease progresses, increasing the dosages of DRIs is important for symptom management as dopamine starts to become scarcer and scarcer as the brain cells responsible for producing dopamine degrade. Increasing the current dose of my PD meds (Parlodel and Abilify, the latter which isn't a DRI on its own but "supercharges" the former) is a stopgap measure as those drugs have nasty side effects of their own.

This leaves me stuck between a rock and a hard place, as my options are to just live with chronic asthma or to bite the bullet for six months for this course of steroids while making my PD symptoms much worse.

To fully clarify, I am terrified of my PD. I hate having it, and I genuinely get panic attacks when I can't control my symptoms. Part of that reason is because of my initial experience with the disease. My grandpa had it, and I watched him wilt away from a vibrant and cheerful old man into a husk of his former self who was in constant pain within the space of 8 years before it just finally put him out of his misery. On my 21st birthday, I reached the culmination of a series of appointments for a persistent issue I had with stiffness and slight tremors in my right hand. I had assumed I just had RSI from writing a lot in college and getting into speedrunning not too long ago, but I was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease out of the blue. Not only that, I had the disease badly explained by a doctor not really qualified to understand the differences between a young adult and an old man having Parkinson's, got handed some pamphlets designed to explain the disease to older men that used language roughly on the level of "making most of the time you have left," and then I got a surprise birthday party by the people on my dorm room floor that night where they shoved me full of terrible vodka (my first time drinking, by the way!) as I tried really, really hard not to burst into a sobbing fit because I thought I had been told I had less than a decade left to live.

That awful experience completely took the wind out of my sails with college, and I basically just gave up and came home. Once home, I saw doctors who specialized in cases of PD affecting younger people (that in itself is a long story, but I'm not down to a single doctor instead of 6 because of some drama about them wanting to publish my case that I wasn't okay with). PD progresses far slower and more mildly with younger patients, but I was told that my life expectancy was definitely not a decade, but I should expect a sharp decline in my quality of life past 40, will need help with my day-to-day life by 45, am going to be heavily disabled by 50, and am going to be dead by 55 at the absolute latest.

When you get that kind of grim news, you start looking for as many forms of treatment as you can. I've been focusing on my general health (walking for at least 45 minutes most days), specific diet changes (eating more mushrooms, which can help with PD symptoms), and really keeping an eye on stressing my right hand as I get RSI at the drop of a hat now (so basically, no more speedrunning high-APM games like Devil May Cry 3/4/5). The results are... mixed, but hey, it beats doing lines of cocaine every morning, as cocaine is a DRI that could technically be a valid way to manage PD.

A few days after taking estrogen as a "haha, isn't this such weird author research?" thing and getting some not so "haha" dysphoria and depression from it (as documented in Friday Update #21: The Mother of All Omelets), someone shared that estrogen therapy to treat PD could be an avenue worth pursuing. I was of course, fucking livid about this news and treated it as a divine bitch-slap of cosmic irony from God Himself, but the study seems quite valid (from my admittedly limited ability to parse it).

I brought it up to my doctor when I saw her again in January. She was really surprised I knew about this as the study was still fairly new and the research hadn't been fully done, but then I pressed her on if it could work for me.

What followed was an embarrassing conversation a few minutes into the checkup I have every 3 months, so I'm going to give you the quick recap (although my memory is a bit fuzzy as it was 8 months ago):

Me: So, I heard estrogen can be used to treat PD.

Her: That's still being researched, but it looks promising. How did you hear about it?

Me: A friend who knows I have PD told me about it being used on mice with good results.

Her: Are they a med student? That paper was fairly recent.

Me: No, she's trans, and she DIYs, meaning she self-doses.

Her: And she told you to "self-dose" your PD treatment with estrogen?

Me: No, she just said I should bring it up, to explore all possibilities.

Her: Your treatment is working fine for now and not all the data is out yet, so I don't think it's worth seriously considering.

Me: Yeah, I thought so. Besides, that stuff's pretty scary.

After I said that, she stared at me for a good 3 seconds. At this point, the spaghetti started to fall out of my pockets. I recall thinking "this is my doctor, I should make sure she know this" before I told her why I knew estrogen was scary.

Me: I, uh, tried some.

Her: You tried some? Do you mean estrogen?

Me: Yeah. This girl's weird, and I owed her money, and she decided that taking estrogen would be an acceptable form of repayment.

Me: And... I was curious.

Her: Okay, you shouldn't shove hormones into your body like they're a recreational drug. That's really dangerous.

Me: Yeah, I know that now. I got hit with body dysphoria and was depressed for a week.

Her: You should have expected that to happen. You're a man, and...

She paused for a second as she started to reevaluate that statement.

Me: I'm not trans.

Her: I don't think you are, but since it affected you so badly, you shouldn't try taking estrogen for your PD.

Me: Well, she and a few other people I know think that dysphoria might have been a rebound effect from my high testosterone counteracting the estrogen.

She was visibly confused that I had apparently been consulting with people on this issue.

Her: It's possible.

Me: And they said that if I took antiandrogens to lower my testosterone levels, it might work. What do you think?

Her: You shouldn't change your medications without talking to me about it. We're going to have to adjust you medication in the future, but there are better options than taking female sex hormones that made you reacted so badly too.

Me: Oh, okay.

When I checked out a few minutes later, I heard by doctor say to the receptionist scheduling me for 3 months in the future to make "their next appointment" instead of "his next appointment" like she usually did.

Admittedly, I was going to ignore her medical advice and take the HRT combo once the Patreon goal was met since having high testosterone levels causes me other health issues (also, I'm the guy who sticks the fork into the wall outlet who doesn't think "that hurt, so I shouldn't do that again!" but rather "I wonder if that happens every time?"), but when I started taking the steroids, I noticed a rapid decline in my symptoms within 2 days.

I called the clinic in the middle of July to see if they could move my appointment forward from the middle of September, but the best they could do was late August (the 29th); however, I managed to get a short phone appointment with my doctor that week.

Not knowing the cause, I briefly told her how my symptoms were declining rapidly, but we quickly determined the cause to be my new steroids. She was able to prescribe me a double dose of my usual PD medicine, but she couldn't give me anything else until I had seen her in person. She warned me that this was not a permanent solution given the side effects of those medications, but they would be a good enough stopgap measure until I saw her again.

At this point, I mentioned the estrogen and antiandrogens again. Her words were, and I quote "Take them if you're desperate enough."

I was, so that's what I did. I finally met up with the pinkpill pusher last Friday and took the AA, 25mg of cyroterone acetate (Siterone) that evening.

Within 30 minutes, I felt as docile as a newborn kitten. It was like every urge to act or think aggressively was being blocked by my brain.

Here is my (slightly redacted) log of that evening:

Day 1 (Friday, August 12, 2022)

• 8:02 PM - Siterone 25 mg taken. Slightly nervous, but nothing yet.
• 8:04 PM - Genuinely getting a shriveling sensation down there, and I feel calmer. It's like the opposite of an erection.
• 8:06 PM - I feel docile, like I'm just nicer.
• 8:09 PM - Mood has stabilized. I'm not noticing a change in where I am right now, which is feeling like there's a physical block on my brain preventing me from being aggressive, passive-aggressive, or even snarky. It reminds me of higher doses (25 mg and up) of Abilify, except without the brain frog and inability to feel emotion.
• 8:10 PM - Going back to work, although it feels like it's kind of impossible to get an erection now.
• 8:12 PM - Just feeling kind of serene?
• 8:14 PM - Getting that sucking feeling on my balls again.
• 8:46 PM - A noticeable improvement in my mood. It feels like I'm getting excited and about to have an erection, but I don't.
• 8:48 PM - And it's suddenly gone...
• 8:50 PM - A brief and fuzzy sort of hot flash around my kidneys.
• 9:03 PM - Popping 2 mg of estradiol valerate (Progynova) because my hand is starting to get a bit stiff. Trial by fire time, baybee!!!
• 9:07 PM - Getting anxious as I wait for the sledgehammer to hit.
• 9:09 PM - God, I keep making so many typos. My typing is like my speech in that the more nervous I get, the more mistakes I make.
• 9:10 PM - Maybe?
• 9:12 PM - Nope, still nothing. Based on last time, I'm assuming it'll hit 15-25 minutes after the dose, probably on the later end of that range given that I just ate a relatively big meal.
• 9:13 PM - Oh no... I'm starting to get uncomfortable in an all-to-familiar way.
• 9:15 PM - Fine for now, but I feel very apprehensive.
• 9:18 PM - Where the fuck is the spike? I just checked the Discord log from last time and it only took 9 minutes until it hit.
• 9:24 PM - I think it's finally hitting. Noticed it right on the minute change.
• 9:25 PM - It feels shockingly mild so far.
• 9:26 PM - Definitely feeling a bit blissful, but it's not at all like the giddy high from last time.
• 9:28 PM - The high feels gone, but I'm getting that hypersensitivity in my lips again. Lightly rubbing a wet finger against them feels pretty nice...
• 9:29 PM - My nipples feel sensitive, but not as strongly as my lips. It's just tightness, and I'm not even sure it's not psychosomatic.
• 9:32 PM - Motherfucker... my hand feels a lot less stiff... the body dysphoria hasn't hit yet (if it's going to hit at all), but I think I'm dreading staying on HRT more than either getting gender dysphoria and hating the next week and a half or getting giddy gender euphoria that makes me crack the eggshell I never knew I had which will change my life forever.
• 9:34 PM - Still way too early to tell, but I feel faint pangs of something being "off" in a way I can't describe. It's more perplexing than anything else.
• 9:36 PM - Mmm... nope, actually a bit uncomfortable right now.
• 9:40 PM - Feeling jittery and visibly shaky (not from PD but from nervousness).
• 9:41 PM - This is weird. I am still thinking as logically as I normally do, but I can't stop trembling slightly. It's like I want to feel existential terror, but there's a thing in my brain blocking it (likely the AA).
• 9:50 PM - As the pinkpill pusher described, her first dose of blockers made her feel "docile as if like a domesticated animal." I'm inclined to agree. It's like every mean bone in my body has vanished and I have been changed into a significantly nicer person. Even while deliberately trying to think of things or people that make me mad, I am just incapable of getting upset. Not just emotionally, but my brain refuses to form thoughts in that direction.
• 9:53 PM - Okay, well the trembling stopped, and I'm just feeling... empathetic?
• 9:56 PM - I'm inclined to think that the dysphoria isn't happening, but it's really hard to focus on work.
• 9:59 PM - The word that keeps hitting my brain when I try to describe what is happening to me is "soft." I feel softer physically, my rough edges of any sort of aggressive thinking are gone, and things that might make me upset are bouncing off of me. The pinkpill pusher said my "amygdala" is being affected by lack of testosterone. Wild, because I wasn't expecting the AA to be the star of the show tonight.
• 10:07 PM - Said aloud to myself, "What the fuck? I can't get upset about anything right now."
• 10:09 PM - The "feeling of being nicer" is now intertwining with "a nice feeling."
• 10:11 PM - I keep spacing out from how nice I feel. I'm softly but audibly moaning every 20-30 seconds and I close my eyes.
• 10:14 PM - I finally figured out a good comparison for how I feel. Last time was like being drunk after doing shots on an empty stomach; now, it's like I'm smoothly and pleasantly drunk on a full stomach, without any of the sharpness I felt last time. There may not be that same peak of euphoria that literally made me burst out into a fit of giddy giggles, but this smooth burn feels sooo much nicer even if it's not as intense. By the way, typing this was incredibly hard because I kept losing my focus and spacing out from subdued delight.
• 10:22 PM - Fuck, even breathing feels distracting right now. There's no way that cis or trans women feel like this all the time because society would never be able to function if that were the case, but the arousal I feel is like an emotional blanket over me. I feel in control of it (somehow), but it's making me want to lose that control and go wild. Even the slightest trigger is enough to send me into a tizzy, but I feel like that is only accentuating the intensity of my thoughts rather than dominating them.
• 10:26 PM - I could actually just sit here for hours basking in this glow.
• 10:30 PM - Yeah, there's no way I can focus right now. Taking one of the 7 progesterone pills right now.
• 10:31 PM - Fuck, I can't stop smiling. Just gonna lean back in my chair and close my eyes for a bit.
• 10:36 PM - Spend five minutes doing that. I still feel all dreamy.
• 11:07 PM - Trying to get back to work, but I feel like the personification of the :woozy_face: Discord emoji right now.
• 11:14 PM - Feeling kinda tingly, but I think I have a handle of this. Working without issues now.
• 4:00 AM (roughly) - Went to bed, but I felt so snuggly for some reason. On a whim, I cuddled Mr. Blahaj, and it felt so good... Like, what the fuck? Maybe that meme has a kernel of truth to it.

So, far from getting gender dysphoria, I had gender euphoria. This is damning evidence that means that 'ol Humpty Dumpty finally fell off his great wall, right?

Well...not exactly.

While that first night was insane and reduced my PD symptoms to next to nothing, that effect seems to have tapered off really quick. I've been dosing on this for a week, and by Day 4, I felt absolutely nothing like euphoria from taking these pills. If anything, my level of discomfort has increased since then, and I feel so... numb. It's like I am facing a floodgate of being depressed and anxious, but the AA is the only thing holding it back.

The pills still provide some benefit to my PD so I'll keep taking them, but it's clearly diminishing enough returns to where I will relieved to stop taking them and get on proper medication after discussing things with my doctor. Y'know, before I grow breast buds I don't want.

Yes, sorry to once again disappoint people, but I have once again recklessly proved to myself that I am a cis male by doing some incredibly not cis male stuff.

If you were curious, "Riders On The Storm" would also have been a fitting name for this Friday Update.

I think this will put the estrogen saga to rest once and for all after I stop noticing any benefit from it, but if you're feeling unsatisfied about the news that I didn't turn into a woman, I have some good news about a guy that did.

So, Zach has sprites now.

His artist has asked to remain unnamed due to wanting to market themselves as an all-ages artist, which is a shame as they did such a great job on him.

As you can see, he's got a comparable body shape to Zoey...

And very similar facial expressions.

The shocking part is how accurate they were to emulating TiltSHIFT's style of making Zoey's sprites. I provided the Clip Studio Paint file for Zoey's sprite and this artist got it almost right away.

I say "almost" as their first attempt made Zach way too hot and masculine.

As a happy coincidence, "Hot Zach" will still see use in the dream sequence, but I told the artist to crank the "twink" and "femboy" dials to max on their second attempt.

You can check out that "Feminization Arms Race.mp4" that I made to explain this because I'm weird; also, if you're curious, drawing Zach's sprites was primarily a low-risk test for this artist to see if they could draw Rich in the future, and that test was passed with flying colors. Expect him to get sprites in early 2023.

Zach's sprites are going to show up in a short intro afternoon to give a glimpse of what Zach's life was like before he found re:Dreamer, but if you scroll way back up, you'll find that "I learned not to bite off more than I could chew for a single update" line. I originally thought I would be doing that intro afternoon this update, but making Zach's sprites and other related tasks are making me push that to the update after this one as I wouldn't have enough time in the remaining week to give Zach's sprites a proper showcase.

To show what else I was working on... Zoey's bunny costume sprite outfit is finally in the game.

I had to do remarkably little correcting on this outfit (and its variants) from Myumi, but the issue came from the fact that Zoey needed to be taller. Zoey's sprite code had to be heavily adjusted and all of her sprites layers had to be remade to account for her bunny ears being taller than I had cropped her sprites to. In the zoomed version of her sprites, they're too tall to appear fully on screen, but those ears are still there.

A cool opportunity presented from this was something I'd been thinking about for a while, and that's having a way to adjust the height of characters based on the shoes of their current outfit. As an example, Zoey is 160cm/5'3" and Britney is 161cm/5'3.5", but in almost every scene, Britney is maybe a pixel taller than Zoey despite her usually wearing short heels while Zoey wears flat shoes.

I was previously unable to do this as the bottom of the screen was the bottom of any character's sprites (yalign = 1.0), but while remaking these sprites, I added a buffer of a few pixels to make the girls taller or shorter as needed.

Now, Britney is noticeably over an inch taller than Zoey in many scenes, and I think that's hot.

Another thing this does is give me a buffer for Zoey and Britney during animations when they need to walk into the background, rotate slightly, and so on for.

Now, all of this was complicated and took me a long time to figure out to make consistent (the answer, if anyone was curious, was to make a function that read the current outfit and returned an integer for how much it would add or subtract from the "baseline" height, making a transform that read the value of that function 'on start' to make the yoffset which was independent of any other yoffset specified in the 'show' ATL, and then making the layeredimages for the character apply that transform with the 'at' statement). I also had to check the entire script to make sure it worked since it liked to break on Composite() images I made, remaking some of the arcade game flattened images, and trying to future-proof the code in case Ren'Py Tom decides that the code trickery that makes this work is an unwanted feature.

In lieu of Zach's sprites debut in the story, I'll be finishing the mall date with Britney since I will soon need to cover the preliminary legwork she does on the next day to get permission from her local pastor to hold a cookout fundraiser on the church property for the theater club, or else the theater club meeting I want to write after the events of 0.10.10 isn't going to make much sense.

That being said, Zach is in the game right now in the form of the sprite viewer.

As that "Zach And Zoey Expression Overlap Example.mp4" attachment shows, if Zoey is on screen, her expressions are parsed to give the closest possible match to an expression Zach's sprites are capable of making and showing him with that expression in the sprite viewer.

While not relevant yet, the converse of Zoey grabbing Zach's expression also works.

I think it's a really neat feature that highlights that yes, this character used to be a guy, and here he is.

Before I go, I have an update on Zoey's beach outfit sprites that I showed the reference sheet for earlier.

Myumi is still working on these and they're still clearly WIP, but they're getting very close to completion. I know I shouldn't skip ahead several months in the story to start writing a beach scene, but boy, it sure is tempting...

re:Dreamer 0.10.11 drops on Friday, August 26, likely in the late evening. As stated, it will conclude the Britney date that I stepped away from.