Just Jessica

So it's been x years since I dressed!

2009-04-06T18:12:00.002+01:00

Not sure how long, a long time anyway, not sure if I'll bother again.

Here are some of my favourite moments...

t|Identity Theft

2007-12-18T00:03:00.000Z

If you've got some time please go and pester this low life to close their account and stop stealing my pics :(

Proper Portraits

2007-11-28T16:04:00.000Z

Just a quick post to remind people that my lovely girlfriend Sophie is a brilliant artist, she can do a portrait to order from any photograph. She does a range of styles and even offers a full satisfaction guarantee! You can see her website here.

Here's a painting she did of me!

I like this pic

2007-08-29T00:15:00.001+01:00

I should wear this out some time

Some recent pics

2007-04-24T15:26:00.000+01:00

Just felt like giving this blog a poke and drawing your attention to some new pics I uploaded recently (since that's pretty rare!) They're over in the gallery. I think they're some of my best pics yet, Sophie did my makeup and took the pics, isn't she lovely? :)

Transgender muslims

2007-03-09T00:49:00.000Z

While looking for something completely unrelated (images using the golden ratio) I stumbled across an article about a tribe in southern Iraq, that are apparently quite accepting and sympathetic towards transgendered people, it's part of their ancient traditions. They call them Mustarjil, women can live as men, they can marry women, and they fight in wars, they get all the special treatment and respect that muslim men do, and people born male can live out there lifes as women, receiving the same treatment as muslim women.

Here is the excerpt from pp. 168-170 of The Marsh Arabs by Wilfred Thesiger

One afternoon, a few days after leaving Dibin, we arrived at a village on the mainland. The sheikh was away looking at his cultivations, but we were shown to his mudhif [guest house made of reeds] by a boy wearing a head-rope and cloak, with a dagger at his waist. He looked about fifteen and his beautiful face was made even more striking by two long braids of hair on either side. In the past all the Madan [Marsh Arabs] wore their hair like that, as the Bedu [Bedouin] still did. After the boy had made us coffee and withdrawn, Amara [one of Thesiger's boat boys] asked, 'Did you realize that was a mustarjil?' I had vaguely heard of them, but had not met one before.

'A mustarjil is born a woman,' Amara explained. 'She cannot help that; but she has the heart of a man, so she lives like a man.'

'Do men accept her?'

'Certainly. We eat with her and she may sit in the mudhif. When she dies, we fire off our rifles to honour her. We never do that for a woman. In Majid's village there is one who fought bravely in the war against Haji Sulaiman.'

'Do they always wear their hair plaited?'

'Usually they shave it off like men.'

'Do mustarjils ever marry?'

'No, they sleep with women as we do.'

Once, however, we were in a village for a marriage, when the bride, to everyone's amazement, was in fact a mustarjil. In this case she had agreed to wear women's clothes and to sleep with her husband on condition that he never asked her to do women's work. The mustarjils were much respected, and their nearest equivalent seemed to be the Amazons of antiquity. I met a number of others during the following years. One man came to me with what I took for his twelve-year-old son, suffering from colic, but when I wanted to examine the child, the father said, 'He is a mustarjil.' On another occasion I attended a man with a fractured skull. He had fought with a mustarjil whom I knew, and had got the worst of it.

Previously, while staying with Hamud, Majid's brother, I was sitting in the diwaniya (brick guest house) when a stout middle-aged woman shuffled in, enveloped in the usual black draperies, and asked for treatment. She had a striking, rather masculine face, and lifting her skirt exposed a perfectly normal full-sized male organ. 'Will you cut this off and turn me into a proper woman?' he pleaded. I had to confess that the operation was beyond me. When he had left, Amara asked compassionately, 'Could they not do it for him in Basra? Except for that, he really is a woman, poor thing.' Afterwards I often noticed the same man washing dishes on the river bank with the women. Accepted by them, he seemed quite at home. These people were kinder to him than we would have been in our society.

via quench zine

It's a Boy/Girl Thing

2007-02-26T11:25:00.000Z

I decided to download "It's a Boy/Girl thing", another body swap movie. There's always some tranny inspiration to be found in them. The pirate copy was actually pretty crap for a change, they always say they are on that anti-piracy ad but most of the stuff you download is top quality HD DVD. The film itself is a pretty lame teen rom com. So I thought I'd just edit some clips of the more interesting bits and stick them on you tube! So here they are.

t|Nose-ify

2007-02-23T19:33:00.001Z

Nose-ify
Originally uploaded by Jessica Shannon.

Go and Nose-ify yourself for red nose day!

Hey look at me!

2007-02-06T23:20:00.000Z

I'm at the top of your blog rolls! Well I went to transpocalypse, the drive was a total nightmare (the M4529whateva an all that) and the hotel was filthy (the maid was just fucking lazy), the food was good though, I really enjoyed the aftertaste of superglue in my noodle bowl. And it was lovely to see everyone! (Even though I hardly knew anyone there and didn't really speak to the people I did know, sorry). Do I get a link now bex? ;)

I've been really busy and this whole jessica/tranny thing I used to do seems like a distant memory now, I just log on now and then to check my stats and feel loved! Oh yeah and the money from those adverts is nice.

I reckon in a few months I'll get an urge to come back to this, I do log on to ASOS now and then. I've just gone fulltime... working for myself (funny tranny joke), so my major concern for the time being is paying my mortgage and other such important things (like buying coco-pops, brie and posh ham).

Ciao for now

Congratulations

2006-12-16T02:14:00.000Z

Can I be the first to say congratulations to a couple of people :) I was a bit shocked, but it makes perfect sense of course, I don't want to say anymore till the news has broken. Details will follow I'm sure :)

Real Life

2006-12-11T17:58:00.000Z

This is a Second Life avatar, created from one of those rapid prototyping machines I used to dream of owning when I was a kid, I think I first saw one on tomorrows world. It uses a lazer to melt a layer of resin type stuff and builds it up layer by layer, new ones can do it in different colours somehow. I spoke to a guy at a business networking event a few months ago who worked for the university, they had one of these machines and they were trying to come up with business applications for it, I wish I'd had the idea of making and selling avatars from MMPORPGs like Second Life.

Basically what these guys are doing, have a look at their flickr set too.

Imagine being on telly

2006-12-08T00:46:00.000Z

A friend of mine got her virtual self on telly! Along with some of her work, congrats Siobhan :)

Hello!

2006-12-05T21:28:00.000Z

It's been a while since I've posted on here. I've been working pretty long hours the last few months, work just gets crazier and crazier. So I decided to set up, I've gone into business with a friend, we're still building it up and in our day jobs, looking to quit in the new year. I don't want to piss off my current employers as they may be important allies in the future, so I've got to make sure I don't give them any reason to say I've let my work suffer when I finally tell them what's been going on.

I set up another blog where I've just been posting about lots of tech stuff, it always helps to come top in google for your name when the web is your business, and also speaking at any conferences I can get in to.

We've managed to secure a few decent sized projects already, but we always need more. So if you know anyone who needs a website, bespoke web software, search engine optimisation, online marketing, usability analysis, etc, then please get in touch.

As for dressing up, I'll get around to that at some point ;)

A rockumentary

2006-10-11T00:41:00.000+01:00

I got an email the other day from a guy at John Moores Uni here in Liverpool, he's working on a documentary about transgendered life and is looking for a volunteer. Now the exhibitionist in me thought it was a great idea! And she can be pretty persuasive when she wants to be, but it doesn't really fit with what I'm trying to do right now, so I'm going to have to pass. If any other local girls are interested then just email me and I'll pass on details! Here's what he said:

At the moment we are in a research stage of the documentary. Basically we would like to look deeper into the world of tv and ts if possible. We want to find out their story. For example, why there is an urge to dress up how often do they do it, has it effected their life and others who surrounded them, what difficulties they have had to over come. I�m looking for groups where people meet and also go out socialising. The sort of visual would be hopefully a singular person getting ready telling about their lives and how it has changed and how they feel. It would be a serious documentary showing difficulties and the life of the transgender world.

Captain Barker

2006-09-11T14:55:00.000+01:00

Google recently announced a new news archive search, which allows you to search and read articles from a load of publications going back 100 years or more. So what was the first thing I should search for? I thought of maybe trying to find some articles about early computers, or something that happened on the day I was born, but I decided to go with transvestites :)

The oldest story I could find was from 1929, about an army captain who turned out to be a female to male TS/TV. I can't believe how progressive the whole article reads, perhaps thats a compliment to Time Magazine? My favorite line though has to be "He ascribed his difficulty in throwing the ball to War wounds". I wish I could have gotten away with that excuse at school! Another interesting one was referring to prisoners as "1,000 male and female Britons, most of whose vocabularies do not even yet contain the noun transvestite, the verb transvestize, the adjective transvestile, the adverb transvestily." It doesn't make clear why he was jailed, other than "contempt of court".

Read the full article here.

Trannies?? In Liverpool!?

2006-09-06T20:57:00.000+01:00

I just found out there is a tranny support group that meets in Liverpool right outside my flat! How come I never knew that? Maybe I should glam up and pop in there sometime? :)

If anyones interested, they're called Spirit Level. And if you're really desperate there is also a group in Birkenhead, but I don't really have a lot to say about them.

t|Ben Metcalfe

2006-09-02T19:28:00.000+01:00

If Web 2.0 has an asshole, Ben Metcalfe is it: I think I'm going to have to agree with that, the guy just won't back down from an argument, he still thinks he was right to tell everyone about those feeds and encourage their use just because they were in JSON or RSS. The things is, his girlfriend Sophia is really nice, I had a good long chat with her. Why she's moving to the states with the blue haired fool I don't know :)

Hello from Writely

2006-08-18T13:06:00.000+01:00

Hey look at me, I'm blogging from Writely , Googles latest attack on Microsoft's desktop dominance. The editor itself is pretty basic, it's got all the things you get on the rich text stuff on your fave web mail or blogging app, those features are unfortunately limited by the browsers built in editor (which all those things use). The spell checker gives you nice squiggly underlines like word, but doesn't recognise the word "Writely".

Where this really comes into its own though is the collaboration features, like google spreadsheet you can have multiple people viewing AND editing the same document at the same time, you can even subscribe to an RSS feed of document changes and roll back changes at any time. Then your finished work can be download as HTML, Word doc, RTF, ODT and PDF! Not to mention made public as a web page on writely or published to your blog.

I started using google spreadsheet for things like organising everyones food orders for the office night out, since an excel file on the network gets locked. I think I'll be able to find a few uses for this thing too :)

Update: It didn't add a title when I published, even though I had one set.

Dr Who Box Set

2006-08-15T18:07:00.000+01:00

A friend of mine at work has been very pleased with himself today, he's just had his artwork finally accepted by the BBC for the new Dr Who Box Set, he didn't do the cover, he's done a set of illustrations for the booklet. He was just showing them to me and I asked if I could post them on my website, but he said they have to remain top secret, so sorry, you'll just have to wait till it comes out!

AOL users are weird

2006-08-09T00:32:00.000+01:00

There's been some chat recently on tech blogs about AOL "accidentally" releasing 3 months of search query logs. Since we do a lot of SEO work at our company I thought it would be worth downloading to see if I can do any useful analysis on it. Of course before I started that I had to have a little look through. Here's a small selection that made me smile, (or grimace).

Porn
dirty rice recipe
beer and sex
dog sex
horse in the butt
chinese bootie bang
beauty and the beast disney porn

Just plain weird
mold on humans
half dragon
making your own pocketbike
the holocaust naugty
found finger at indiana's tgi fridays

Bizarre questions
how to change a flat tire on a 2001 toyota corolla
how do you get a curl to stay in baby fine hair
how big do you have to be to go shark fishing

And this poor guy
"penis size enhancement" awww bless :)

And of course lots of searches for tranny porn, more than I would have expected actually! Including such classics as "fat shemales naked" and "yahoo google porn transexual"

Going out at home

2006-07-24T14:23:00.000+01:00

Since finally getting out again at sparkle, I've felt like I should do it a little more often. I've never been one of those trannies who sticks a skirt on every evening, or even every weekend, and in recent years it's not even every couple of months! No diss to everyone else who does, but I feel like I've been growing out of it, like perhaps maybe my mum was right and it was just a phase. But I still get the urge to doll myself up now and then and get some attention! And I'm quite happy to do so.

For whatever reason me and Anna decided to have a night out in Liverpool this weekend, I've not done it since about easter and Anna has never done it. She's from round here so it's a big step really, the fear of bumping into someone from work and so on. It was the perfect opportunity to meet up with Jeni finally too! I'm not going to get in to where we went and what we drank and blah blah blah. I'll just say Jeni was really cool, always nice to meet someone you've got things in common with and any American who's travelled outside of america is automatically totally cool! I think Anna was pleasantly surprised at how easy going and tranny friendly Liverpool is, and the bars really aren't that bad!

The trans community out and about in Liverpool is pretty small, I think I probably know most of the regulars (even if they might not actually know me!). The whole gay scene isn't that big either, but even so the trannies are often a bit thin on the ground. I know quite a few of them are online, they crop up on gaydar now and then. So I thought I'd set up a little group, to help us all keep in touch and so new girls just coming out on the scene can make friends and gain from all our experience. So if you're a regular out in Liverpool or you want to start getting out more or if you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit, join our club!

http://groups.google.com/group/liverpoolscenegirls

Girls only, no admirers :)

Just what I wanted

2006-07-24T00:09:00.000+01:00

I just received a lovely email from Youtube

Paulacd wants to share the following video with you:

Video Description
I took this as i had a wank while wearing my wifes bra

That guy should be in marketing or something, perfect sales pitch :-/

TV Chix introduced a great feature on their site, if someone wants to send you a message they have to answer a simple question of your choosing. You can ask them about a detail in your profile to show they read it properly or just ask "Did I say I wanted to be contacted by admirers with nothing but cock pics? Yes or no"

I'd like to see that as an option on flickr and all the other social sites.

One hot sunday night

2006-07-23T23:33:00.000+01:00

I was bored so I thought I'd do some framing :)

These pictures are pulled straight off my flickr stream, anything with the "frameit" tag. Just a slight rehash of the code I wrote for Becky, just needed to add scaling.

I might stick it on the gallery page, but then again it's a bit chintzy looking!

For the Tranny Geek who has everything

2006-07-21T14:37:00.000+01:00

Angel Kitty - An 85 key keyboard and maids outfit? For some reason I saw this and thought of Becky

Owwww

2006-07-21T00:32:00.000+01:00

I'm in pain, I've bruised my wrist and it's all swollen. Went snowboarding at castleford tonight, not been on a board since april. Very first run down I decided to go for a kicker (boarder speak for a ramp or jump) Came down hard on my arse which hurt the most for a while, then that pain gave way to my wrist. I decided to have a couple of warm up runs before hitting the kicker again.

While I'm here, I thought I'd post up something I was working on the other night. It's a bit techie, I have actually been meaning to set up another blog for my more techie things, seperate from all this tranny stuff, but the world decided to fight it! Do you ever find yourself wanting to send someone a link to something half way down a long page of text, and if they had the proper #something anchor you could use that, well I wrote my first firefox extension to let you link to things in a page by including a bit of text to be searched for. You put #find:something on the end and it jumps to the text "something" in the page. Well it's here if you wanna see.

Once it's installed just click try a link like this
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hereford/worcs/4277176.stm#find:Perpetuating%20illusion