I’m looking for magical girl manga where the girls discover and learn magic by themselves instead of it being granted through some contract

Witch Hat Atelier has girls learning magic by being taught it. It's not really the magical girl genre -- and their mentor is a guy and there are plenty of male witches in the background -- but the overall focus is on a small group of young girls learning magic.

Not sure if that's really what you're looking for, but its at least adjacent! (Also, the art is lovely.)

e: Oh, and there's an upcoming anime of it, here's the trailer

I had something vaguely (very vaguely) similar happen a bit after I started taking progesterone. At around that time, I started getting a random stiffness/weirdness/almost-pain at the front of my right leg, maybe a third of the way down. It did feel a little bit like a muscle cramp, but localized to a very specific (and consistent) area. I only ever noticed it when walking.

Touching and massaging that area didn't hurt or feel any different, and there wasn't anything visibly different either, other than it being the location of a fairly noticible vein. Since it wasn't a particularly strong sensation, I never went to the doctor. In the end, it just kind of stopped happening at some point.

This probably isn't that helpful to you, but wanted to describe my experience since it at least had a couple things in common!

There's definitely just some variance in terms of how much it bleeds and whether it hurts. I haven't really noticed any pattern in terms of injection site; I think there are a lot of factors. Holding the vial and maybe rolling it between your hands can help warm up the liquid, which makes it a little bit easier to both draw and inject.

The needle size will affect these things too -- the thinner the injection needle the less blood I've seen, but then it takes a little longer to inject. Do you know what gauge you're using to inject with?

I found the whole process very stressful for the first several weeks, but eventually it just became routine!

When you're ready to make big changes, definitely look into threading as an alternative to waxing, a lot of folk find it less painful in the long term. (But it still really stings at first! :) )

Having thick/full eyebrows can be an advantage, since you have more to work with. I have the problem that my upper eyebrows are a bit too sparse, which makes them much more difficult to shape.

Sure, that's kind of tangential to the point I'm making. Something can reflect transphobic ideas without explicitly being about trans folk.

I'm curious how these modern takes on One Piece will deal with the Okama and related characters (assuming they get that far!)

I haven't read the manga, but the anime at least comes off super-transphobic in how they're played for laughs at times. I think that'd necessarily be cut from the live action version, but less hopeful about this for another anime adaptation.

This is a weird grey area for me. I see it as a silly episode where bender does some reprehensible shit, sort of learns his lesson but than continues being a shitty person.

That episode really bothered me -- decades before I realized I was trans it was my least favorite episode of the entire run. It just came off as too mean spirited, and relied too heavily on the man-in-a-dress "joke".

I've always read that it's because many light novels started online, and the way they were listed meant you needed the title to really grab folk's attention.

(I actually really like this particular anime; the animation is often iffy but art and story really appeal to me!)

One kind of interesting twist on that is Fincher's The Game. It remains unclear until the very end of the movie whether the main character is in a convoluted game where people are pretending to conspire against him, or an actual conspiracy using the game as cover.

They also tended to say the changes made it 'hard to follow' or 'ruined the pacing' or other things, but as an anime-only that just flat wasn't true. I actually really loved the kind of elliptical feel of the story in S1.

I honestly kind of felt that source readers were border-line brigading posts about the anime on reddit. It certainly didn't make me any more inclined to check it out!

You should probably have made some of the questions optional -- "distribute a 100 points" is just not something I'm going to bother thinking about.

Bofuri is surprisingly good! Not in any way serious in tone, since it all takes place in an MMORPG, but some good action scenes, especially in the first season.

Pretty sure it's completely kid friendly (no fan service or other anime weirdness.)

One issue I've seen is that the bot's empty posts tend to flood out other more interesting stuff from my main feed.

I've thought about removing the community from my feed for that reason, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

I think Shield Hero and Goblin Slayer have mixed review because the content/story is much more mature than Frieren.

Hmm, the former two shows always seemed extremely juvenile to me.

I mentioned this in another recent thread, but I spent a lot of time looking through reddit threads where transgirls talked about body hair.

What I thought was interesting is that:

• while you do get a lot of responses that say it only somewhat reduces body hair
• there were several folk who said it eventually did pretty much stop growth in many places (especially the torso), but that it took 3-4 years.
• One thing generally agreed on was that no matter what, hair on the legs/forearms will stick around; that's typical for cis women as well. (There's a lot of variability where cis women will have noticeable hair, but almost always on the legs/forearms.)

In online spaces you'll generally see a lot more folk in the 0-2yrs range of HRT (because they're newer and have more things they want to talk about.) So my guess is that the long term reduction in body hair is larger than you'd think just skimming threads like this one.

I'm at a bit more than 2 years, and it definitely has reduced a lot on my chest/shoulders/back/butt/upper arms, but I still have to shave occasionally (especially chest/butt). For now I'm content to see if the rest goes away on its own.

Will I be able to go more than one day without shaving my body hair without looking at my chest and arms in disgust?

I've previously been curious about this, and I waded through a lot of reddit threads looking at all the anecdotal answers.

A pretty fair number of folk said they eventually saw a large reduction in body hair on the torso especially, but that it took 3-4 years.

You'll also see a lot of folk on 2 years of HRT saying it gives only a little bit of reduction.

Hard to draw a strong conclusion here, but it seems hopeful! (I'm two years in and see some reduction, but I still have plenty of hair. Pretty sure it grows back much more slowly now, but since I didn't shave my body pre-HRT it's kind of hard to tell.)

I've watched four this season:

• Seven Spellblades: I assumed going in it would be fairly generic, but it's turned into my overall favorite, mostly on the merits of the story itself. It does a surprisingly good job of maintaining a relatively large ensemble of MCs. (Also, given that the setting is kind of "dark anime harry potter", I can't help but appreciate the implied "fuck you" to JKR in one subplot.)
• Helck: not all the humor lands for me, but enough does that I really enjoy the show! The slowly unfolding plot is kind of neat too.
• Undead Girl Murder Farce: I really like the sense of humor and style in this one. At the start it seems like it's going to be a bit like In/Spectre in terms of slow-paced mystery solving, but the action starts to pick up ~half way through the first cour.
• The vending machine iskei: I wouldn't say it's exactly a good show, but it's been watchable enough I made it to the end of the season!

What I'm pretty sure is the creator's name is watermarked in the top left -- "Sangled".

That let me find this post: https://www.deviantart.com/sangled/art/I-Made-a-Picrew-805976802

It says it was made private, but that you can still access it via this link: https://picrew.me/ja/secret_image_maker/GWQo0ayzr7bd5eKF. (I checked and it has the sunglasses and lips from your pic, so presumably it's the right one!)

it seems to kind of match the manga's art style, though.

You might want to start by looking at common last names for a region you identify with.

e.g. here's a list of common surnames in England/Wales (Picked because I'm British myself)

If I had to pick from that particular list, I might go with:

• Valentine Yates
• Valentine May
• Valentine Frost

(also several borderline puns such as Valentine Hart, Valentine Rose, Valentine Day)

e: Oh also, I honestly didn't think my full name flowed very well initially. But I got used to it over time!