Pronouns: They/Them

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • Satisfactory is a fairly good example of it (and also a game I am obsessed with). Games differentiate areas with biomes often, but the position of biomes often follows no climate logic. Having a rainforest and high desert and boreal forest, each maybe 1km x 1km within a 5x5 km area, with stark borders between them would be utterly bizarre on earth. Satisfactory does it’s part to hide this by having such a maze like layout, broken up by the steep karst landscape, with no clear line of sight across the whole map most of the time, but a lot of games just let that be something we suspend our disbelief for in order to have more variety in the game. Satisfactory also can do some hand waving of it through the implication that it’s some sort of alien garden world as well, and might be ecologically influenced by an entity which may be pursuing variety (that said I haven’t gathered all the mercer spheres, that’s just the vibe I get fairly early in the game). The bizarreness is reduced by not having a taiga or frozen desert in that same 5km x 5km region, something some games will include so they can have a snowy place as well.


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  • I think they are saying that the model is flawed on a more basic level, since workers are the source of all value, and thus workers are the wine bottle. Of course trickle down economics is accurate if you view it as value trickling (or rather being siphoned) from the poor to the rich. Essentially refuting the ideology that views jobs as a resource that is provided for society by the rich, when the reality is that jobs under capitalism are workers creating value and the rich siphoning more than their fair share from the workers’ output and returning a pitance.



  • I get where you are coming from, but this event is pretty much entirely the fault of Crowdstrike and the countless organizations that trusted them. It’s definitely a show of how massive outages are more likely when things are overly centralized and proprietary, and managed by big, shitty, profit driven organizations. Since crowdstrike operates in kernel space, it doesn’t matter which operating system it’s on, it can break it if it does something stupid. In fact they managed to break some redhat machines not too long ago, and some Debian machines not long before that. It’s just the impact wasn’t as far reaching as this recent utter fuckup, just because fewer critical machines were affected, so we didn’t hear about those smaller fuckups in the news.


  • I think that the Democratic Party is hated both from the left and the right, and calling them the Democrat Party makes some sense if you don’t view them as aligning with real democracy. Kind of like when one calls pro-life people “pro-forced-pregnancy” or “anti-abortion”.

    Like there’s probably plenty of astroturfing out there, but I don’t think this is a strong sign a particular account is astroturf. Since we are all exposed to everyone’s discourse, that way of referring to Democrats could fairly easily hop between different groups that don’t like Democrats. Like I wouldn’t be surprised if “scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds” makes its way to the right somehow just because it’s anti-liberal, even though it originates from the left.

    Despite its origin on the right, I think that type of phrasing makes a bit more sense coming from the left than the right, because the right does not actually care at all about democracy, except when they equate it with capitalism, and democracy is like the left’s whole deal.


  • I was gonna answer that most animals don’t live as long and reproduce faster than humans (so populations survive despite increased cancer risk), but when I looked into it I found a deep rabbit hole. In the case of wolves, I’m sure plenty died early on, because the populations present appear to have some genetic immune adaptations that protect them from cancer. I know other species (like frogs) have dark skin because the melenin increased the survival rate of the darker frogs at the time of the accident. So that is to say probably a lot of wildlife died, and that natural selection lead to some critters that are pretty resistant to radiation.


  • I don’t think that’s the actual etymology. From what I can find it was an onomonpia about the sounds turkeys make, and a word for gunk. The second part of it is pronounced differently from the racial epiphet (with a more middle vowel like book rather than a forward vowel like boot), and which I understand to be a separate word with a separate origin. I avoid that one due to its spelling and nearness to the slur, but in a compound word it’s less likely to be misunderstood. The original use case of the word by the person who supposedly coined it was for needless verbosity. I could see some English speakers retroactively egg corning it and using it as a pun, or maybe it has an older origin than is recorded or the coiner was dishonest, but I can’t find an example or evidence of that having happened. If you have an example or personal experience it being used like you describe I’d definitely be interested. It’s also possible that I am misconstruing your claim to be one of etymology when it isn’t.


  • Interesting! Most I know were either born in the US or have been in the US since they were kids, primarily communicate in english, and discovered their transness while here. You might be right with the cultural/language translation being a factor. But I’ve also seen “Transexual”, “Transgénero”, “mujer/hombre trans” used by Spanish speakers which tracks not that far from common English usage. I wonder if there’s a different distinction being made or if it’s intertwined with the particular individuals’ conservative ideology in some way.


  • It’s interesting to me that your experience is so vastly different from mine given we live in the same area (SF bay area). Most trans people I know, including myself, fall on the far left, and at significantly higher rates than the cis people I know (Queer or not). I’ve also never heard the term “t-female-presenting” before, it is completely foreign to me. I mostly hear and use “trans women” or “transfeminine”.

    I wonder if there’s another demographic factor, or you are in a unique community of trans people. The people in my circle are generally 20-35, nonreligious, working class, often living paycheck to paycheck, and are actively and primarily in community with other trans people, as a support structure. How would you describe your circle?




  • Risks of medical intervention always should be weighed against risks of nonintervention. If there is a significant probability a child is trans, delaying puberty may be the least intrusive option. There is a chance of negative effects, like with all medical interventions, but if they are most likely trans forcing them to undergo puberty is much more likely to have long term negative effects (including suicidality). Why is this specific medical decision equivalent to kids having sex? Do you view other procedures, like deciding to have braces, the same way? What about much riskier treatments with a muddled short/long term prognosis, like some heart surgeries?