New Year; New Home

 So last year was pretty shit, huh. And this year ain't looking much better neither.

But we keep holding on.

 I wanted to title this post after the chorus to Holding Back The Years, but that's because I misremembered it as "I'll keep moving on", and the actual lyrics didn't quite match what I want this post to be about.

Anyways...Hi! I hope you've been well, and you haven't missed me too much. Things have been busy. And there's something I've wanted to write forever, but it's just never a good time. And there was the move. And there's work. And between you and me, I'm looking for an exit strategy because I'm not happy with where I'm at, and the company's going to heck. But moving across the country, plus the economic repercussions of the elections, has made the jobs picture exceptionally bleak.

 But I don't want to be a total downer, so I want to share some fun stuff. I've started working on some personal projects. Including a swiss-army-knife toolset for bottoms/submissives/sissies: 

TrackHub

 The name isn't necessarily Official Forever TM but it is good enough for now, and it works because it does what it says on the tin: it's a hub for tracking things (like chastity!).

I started it because I got tired of having to use a crappy apple shortcuts to track my chastity sessions, edges and orgasms, because it was complicated and there was no good/easy way to look at all the data. So I decided it was time to make a web dashboard. It started, strangely enough, with a dashboard to track my weight - I was using MyFitnessPal but it got so enshittified in pursuit of monetization that it lost its value for me, and I decided to make my own. From there I decided to also collect information on best practices for anal cleansing (because as every man I've talked to on grindr knows: my bowels hate me).

From there I realized I had already started the foundations of a chastity tracker. The problem was that these dashboards were all local - they ran on my pc and the data would not communicate to my phone, for example. So I decided: "what the heck, Imma bs my way through setting up a website for this.' And through duct taping and assistance from Claude I was able to do exactly that! Now TrackHub.gay  is a reality and people can use it to track their chastity, orgasm/denial, hypnosis, and even anal training (and soon oral training too!). Even better, people can show off their numbers!

In the future I also want to add a Dom-facing side of the service that will allow Dominants to track submissives at a glance! I also want to add support for chastity enjoyers to use combination locks for their sessions. And if the site gets big enough, who the heck knows, we can add social components - I want to have leaderboards, pillories, all sorts of fun things.

It would be nice to be able to turn this into a revenue stream, I won't pretend it wouldn't be, and it would be especially nice if it would allow me to quit my heckin' job and focus on this 100%, but it would need to operate under a donation/patreon type setup with maybe extra goodies (advanced dashboards maybe) for people who contribute. But always with all the important functionality available to everybody for free for as long as I can afford to keep it running.

I don't want to sell peoples' data, I don't want to advertise, and I don't want to enshittify - this is a tool I wish existed in the world, and I'm building with that principle in mind: if something makes me not want to use it, then it doesn't belong.

So even if it only generated enough money to pay for the services it runs on (surprisingly not that expensive!), that would be an absolute win. However, at the moment there's 0 actual plans for monetization (even the patreon thing is just conceptual as of this writing, though I should put on my big boy pants and really look into it sooner than later).

 Anyways, if you, or anyone you love, likes caging their penis, or they want to see how much willpower they have over their orgasms, or track how big their hole gets, share TrackHub with them! It's free, it's fun, it's simple, and it's private. The only people who have access to a user's data are the user, myself (for moderation and bugfixing purposes), and anyone they share it with. (Just let them know it's in active development and I do tend to break its interface a bit sometimes (but just the interface, their data remains safe)).

More projects:

I'm also working on other projects. Now that I'm not as intimidated by webdev as I was before I started, I'm also working on moving off blogger. My primary motivation is content moderation. I miss tumblr, ok? I miss being able to write things and post sexy pics. And as cool as blogger has been, it still has strict content policies, even for 18+ blogs. So I'm building myself a new blog at femboicharlie.com which is not quite ready yet (right now it sends you over to trackhub). I want to learn how to use eleventy to make it nice and indie with a neocities/original myspace vibes.

I'm still not sure how the whole pipeline will work for content publication, but I'll figure it out. What this means for you is that you'll get better content, though you will have to go out of your way to see it, maybe. I'll still be posting links on my bsky to it, and I'll see about adding an rss and even an email subscription service.

One thing that worries me about going self-hosted is that I will have to pay for the domain name and other services out of my own pocket, so if at any point in time I am no longer able to afford this, the content might be lost. BUT there's good news - I'm hosting it all on neocities (except the db for trackhub, that's its own service) so even if I have to cut back on emails and other services, the blog can still survive for free.

 Even more projects: 

 I'm daydreaming concepts for a sissification game, as well as minigames for the future of trackhub (when/if it becomes a grand genital panopticon). For the game, think of something like trapquest but more focused, more personal and rpg like; for the minigames think chance games (e.g.: roulette, slots, etc) and small skill minigames (e.g.: a game in which your char is working a gloryhole) that can offer rewards for kinky activities (e.g.: pillory tokens)

 But this daydreaming time is shared with more sfw projects, because I understand that this is all nice stuff and it's highly unlikely to provide enough revenue to make a living off it and I need to cast as wide a net as I can.

On detransition and sex:

The former's going well, sort of. I've been using a mix of identities since moving - depending on who's asking I'm [male name], [female name], or [femboy name]. And frankly it's not terrible; it's just that detaching from your past, and reinventing yourself, when you've been around as an adult for a while is trickier than when you're just starting out.

On the plus side, CDing is something I feel comfortable doing! I got a new, more demure, pair of breastforms that are neat and give the illusion of having a female chest without being overly large or in-your-face. Unfortunately there's no photos in it yet because [expletive] work has been a massive pain.

Which is why the sex part hasn't been going great lol. Part of it is, again, my bowels hating me (though it seems I've finally cracked the code to be more regular, thanks to that web project) and the fact that I put on like 10kg of stress weight, but the biggest part is work stress. It's very difficult to feel sexy when I am constantly overworked and underpaid relative to my responsibilities/workload, and when it feels my skills are not easily transferable outside of the industry.

It also doesn't super help that there aren't a ton of men on grindr here, nor that they're so impossibly boring and generic. I've chatted with a few interesting guys, but it's been hard to arrange to meet up. 

On a lighter note:

I always try to end my posts on a lighter note, and that feels a bit difficult right now, but there is one thing that has been 100% nice about moving out here to the north: a proper winter. There's snow outside! Sure, it's a bit of a pain to blow the snow out of the driveway, and sometimes it can be a bit scary trying to brake when the roads are slushy, and I'm still not super comfortable with highway speeds when the temps are really low; but I did my very first proper snow angel, and watching the snowflakes fall while drinking something warm is nice, and having the opportunity to be decapitated by a stalactite when going out the front door gives you a pretty unique rush.

So it's not all bad, I just have to be better at stepping back and remembering that~!