I feel like I have watched in real time as Y’all has gained usage up in the Canadian Queer community.
I am old enough to still regard “hon” as demi hostile but “dude” seems to be drifting more and more gender neutral. At heart we may all just be ninja turtles all the way down
So he’s fine if we remove all toilet paper from bathrooms. How he wipes his ass is his parent’s responsibility right?
Shelters often share resources and many are more flexible than you would expect. They might not take you personally but dollars to donuts they can point you in the direction of other specialized resources.
You need to call your relatives. If one of my second cousins whom I never met gives me a call saying that they are in your position and don’t know where to turn I am driving out 4 hours to pick them up at the drop of a hat.
It is going to be be hard but there are means to get free. Explore your options once you are safe but right now job one is get safe.
That the tech has evolved to be better actually is an assumption. The novel data problem hasn’t been meaningfully addressed really at all so mostly we assume that progress has been made… but it’s not meaningful progress. The promises being made for future capability is mostly pretty stale hype that hasn’t changed year to year with a lot of the targets remaining unchanged. We are getting more data on where specifically and how it’s failing, which is something, but overall it appears to be a plateau of non-linear progress with different updates being sometimes less safe than newer ones.
That actually safe self driving cars might be decades away however is antithetical to the hype run marketing campaigns that are working overtime to put up smoke and mirrors around the issue.
My Grandmother always called this sort of thing being a “red letter Christian”. Basically like you take a highlighter to everything Jesus specifically did or said and discard the rest.
My Mom’s family all followed this principle since like the 70’s thus saving my trans ass from any hint of intergenerationally inflicted religious trauma so I am a fan. My 92 year old great uncle went to bat to fight for non-binary gender accommodations in his seniors home because one of his nurses is an enby who was getting a raw deal from a number of their paitents. Honestly, though I don’t think the Christian God is what he says he is, his kid seems weird but as a rules for life kinda thing the results seem good. .
Huh. So I imagined the ball on the table immediately as a colorless glass sphere on a white table. Before I even read the prompt to push the ball in my imagination I had already placed my index finger on the ball and was rolling it around it place like a fidgit so I just tapped the ball to push it with my index finger so the person who pushed the ball was me (non-binary) for reasons that I was already interacting with the ball anyway. I imagined this in the first person so I didn’t really see myself in full. The ball itself was baseball sized and rolled a short distance, stopped and wobbled after being pushed.
I didn’t think about what the table was made of but the ball itself was glass that was smooth and cold to the touch. The table was square, waist height and dining room table sized. The room these objects were in was featureless and visualization was instant upon reading.
To be honest no… Because I think I violently expunged it from my memory and mind as my brain probably interpreted it as some kind of threat to my cells.
I read a bunch of those books because my roommate was in love with them. It established an idea of a writing flaw in my mind that I called “The Heirachy of Cool”. Basically the guy practically has an established character list of who is the coolest. Whichever character in any given scene is at the top of the hierarchy is mythically awesome. They have their shit together, they are functionally correct in their reasoning, they lead armies, they pull off grand maneuvers, they escape danger whatever…
But anyone below them in the Heirachy turn into complete morons who serve as foils to make the people above them seem more awesome whenever they share page time together. These characters seem to have accute amnesia about stuff that canonically happened very recently (in previous books) so they can complicate things for the hierarchy above, they usually make poor decisions due to crisises of faith in people above them in the hierarchy… But because that hierarchy is infallible it’s predictable. Less cool never is proven right over more cool.
… Until that same character is suddenly alone and they go from being mid of the hierarchy to the top and all of a sudden they have iron wills and super competence…
Once I caught onto that pattern it became intolerable to continue.
“The Cat Who Walked through Walls” by Robert Heinlein…
Now Heinlein is usually kind of obnoxiously sexist so having a book that opens with what appears to be an actual female character with not just more personality than a playboy magazine centerfold, but what seems like big dick energy action heroesque swagger felt FRESH. Strong start as you get this hyper competent husband and wife team quiping their way through adventures in the backwoods hillbilly country of Earth’s moon with their pet bonsai tree to stop a nefarious plot with some promised dimensional McGuffin.
Book stalls out in the middle as they end up in like… A swinger commune. They introduce a huge number of characters all at once alongside this whole poly romantic political dynamic and start mulling over the planning stage of what seems like a complicated heist plot. Feels a lot like a sex party version of the Council of Elrond with each of these characters having complex individual dramas they are in the middle of resolving…
Aaaand smash cut. None of those characters mattered. We are with the protagonist, the heist plan failed spectacularly off stage and we are now in his final dying moments where we realized that cool wife / super spy set him up to fail like a chump at this very moment for… reasons? I dunno, Bitches amirite?
First time I ever finished a book and threw it angrily into the nearest wall.
Oh it happens. We as a community aren’t all angels. Some of us get very VERY warped by religious or cultural trauma where because the base assumption is that we are monsters already by virtue of being something shameful there is a lowered boundary to other shamed behaviours…
But what stops that shame spiral is normalizing queer identities and creating good community with good praxis. Consent is king in so many queer spaces where I am because we’ve all basically had to imbibe the lessons of therapy to rescue people out of the dark. We discuss gold standards of sexual health and behaviour and conduct with frankness and lack of shame because generations of us were abandoned to places where we were vulnerable to exploitation. To become a pdf file is to lose your community as nothing is so disgusting to people in queer spaces as someone who would cause that kind of damage as it is expected that you know exactly what the knock on effects of that act are.
There is a fair amount of speculation that being bi is actually way more common than is generally thought but because current cultural rules of compulsory heterosexuallity codes being bi as being something you must act on to actually be considered that identity a lot of people believe that they are straight simply because they never acted on the attraction.
For guys the comp-het mindset also tends to discount basically any situation where they feel dominant because “straight” and “masculine” to them basically means that as long as they are the petetrative element in a place of absolute control via power dynamics or violence then it doesn’t count as “gay”. Essentially since as long as it holds no emotional attachment to them it doesn’t count. As long as they can’t code their behaviour as “feminine” it doesn’t count.
Which to the rest of us is fucking bonkers…
I would say less than on reddit but still a thing. Being cisgender still is treated as a norm and the sort of folks who openly display misogynistic tendencies are fewer and farther between… But any innocuous mention to being trans will very get you a couple of dedicated downvoters or people who use gender essentialist arguements, silencing tactics (oh you’re just being devisive) or transphobic rhetoric.
Not to say that it is bad comparatively. This is one of the most trans neutral places on the internet. It’s not “trans friendly” mind you, I would categorize that as places where concensus about trans people being a normal thing to be has been reached and attention has shifted away from our basic rights as being up for debate… But trans neutral spaces are important too. We need holding spaces away from places where trans people talk openly where people can get to know us where the majority of support shuts down open hostility towards us prompting more nuanced interaction.
A lot of trans hostile spaces exist out there where being openly trans or advocacy for our needs invites a lot of death threats, calls for suicide, doxxing attacks and so on. If you see a comment section on youtube on a queer creator for instance that’s overwhelmingly trans positive that generally means there’s heavy moderation at play because they are trying to create spaces safe for their queer audience to interact with each other. What you as a casual visitor generally don’t see is the mental cost being taken on by that moderation team to artificially create the illusion of that positive space. Here on this instance that level of moderation is unnecessary because generally speaking the volume is manageable.
A demonstration that the person is not interested in a conversation, they just want to grandstand and use rhetoric tricks to feel like they are superior and are strictly aiming to used the conversation as a way to inflate their sense of self worth at the cost of treating you like a human being.
“No way I am reading all that” on a average sized post while expounding their opinion in an equally lengthy paragraph is usually the same start of the end. These people are generally not actively trolling they are just up their own ass. If they cannot demonstrate basic intellectual mutual respect after having this pointed out to them blocking them is both for best of us.
A particular pet peeve is people who quote every bit of a post in sections to refute it. It’s lazy and I have witnessed it from people in my life who are extremely narcissistic. Writing your own brief is respectful. Essentially writing over someone else’s entire post with red pen isn’t. It’s not a block, but it’s a contributing factor
If it’s someone using very bad faith rhetoric like moving goalposts or extreme cherrypicking - basically any stuff that demonstrates obvious trolling I don’t block, I counterpunch. My goal becomes making sure you do not leave the arguement with what you come there for.
All in all I have blocked about 3 people. I believe in second chances so someone has to show no signs of improvement after about an average of 7 replies.
Dunno what to tell yeh mate, it’s about as oldif not older than Furry culture. Weeki Watchee springs started a whole thing with their Mermaid shows and the subculture basically took off from like the early 60’s… And was probably about as horny as a lot of other subcultures that started around the same time.
Uh… I hate to tell you this but people absolutely dress as mermaids and do conventions… There’s a whole home industry of people who make custom silicon tails.
Nope, different nerd culture entirely. Seriously, they have their own conventions, instead of fursuits they do custom silicone tails and train to swim in them, have contests and pagents and things. There’s basically no overlap between the two communities. Scaleys are folk in the fursuit community who do dragon and lizard personas.
I have odd connections. Being in the film industry I have friends through props depts who do furry cons and one of my coworkers does underwater photography for people in the Mermaid subculture.
Consider that those shootings are getting way more frequent. We get a Columbine about four times a year now and around 43 other shootings where there might be only injuries or singular casualties. Kids grow up in the States with lockdown drills. That entire voting block is going to be old enough to vote in 12 years.
I expect anti gun sentiments are growing now as each year new voters are growing up in that system where these events aren’t considered rare anymore. Where parents who came of age in the 2000’s have kids and are now front row to that milliterization and afraid because their families have skin in that game.
These laws are gunna happen one day.
Gideon the Ninth?
Takes like 5 chapters for it to find it’s feet but it’s lesbian necromancers and swordfighters in space with a very snarky point of veiw character.
It’s kind of more scifi fantasy but a good time.
There’s a hidden usage of “hon” from the history of the toxic trans communities message boards to mean “trans women who don’t pass” and is used condescendingly. That usage is basically dead in the water and barely known outside of a pretty narrow sliver of the queer community but it can still get you a side eye in some places.