cassie 🐺

Can also recommend looking into local HEMA clubs as a step in that direction depending on your goals. Generally they tend to be queer friendly (if not queer themselves) and can help you learn some melee combat basics, which may be more relevant depending on your environment. I learned a lot from axe-and-shield fighting, even though it’s not directly applicable in most real world situations. But the silly Viking shit was fun enough to make me really love showing up and practicing, and it helped me get confident using an axe. So now I feel comfortable open carrying a utility axe for self-defense with a lot of plausible deniability. Also taught me how to deal with a riot shield :3

Excellent answer and I’ll also jump off this to say this applies to marginalized groups just as much as anyone else, in a way I see a lot of people forget all about. Some percentage of marginalized people, through being in the right place and/or putting themselves there, do experience upward mobility through capitalism and therefore identify with it.

People forget that queer conservatives exist, but think about a gay couple with a lot of wealth, living a fairly standard nuclear family existence with an adopted kid or two, integrated into a society that probably still doesn’t fully trust them but sees enough signifiers of “normality” that they’re willing to let it slide. Which side of the political divide benefits them the most to align with? And what ideological principles will they come to internalize in the long term? Might they come to see themselves as somehow different or better than others in their marginalized community?

I’m getting tired of the fluff pieces expressing shock at the fact that some % of black voters are conservative, clutching their pearls at the thought of that number increasing, and speculating about black churches and “social conservatism.” While also completely disregarding the fact that black voters have always leaned left yet are also affected by some of the same political shifts that every other demographic is. Our first loyalty is generally to our class.

Best description of this I’ve read, thank you. It’s not a question about men directly, it’s a question about how women have to navigate a world with a small percentage of men that will hurt them given the opportunity.

My answer too.

And also for the benefit of anyone who’s just played the base game: the DLC is basically a sequel, and I found it even more impactful than the base game!

That’s been my experience with GPT - every answer Is a hallucination to some extent, so nearly every answer I receive is inaccurate in some ways. However, the same applies if I was asking a human colleague unfamiliar with a particular system to help me debug something - their answers will be quite inaccurate too, but I’m not expecting them to be accurate, just to have helpful suggestions of things to try.

I still prefer the human colleague in most situations, but if that’s not possible or convenient GPT sometimes at least gets me on the right path.

While this is true to an extent, from experience this line of thinking has its limits and is very easy to misapply. On the one hand, yes you can tell people their ideas do not gel with the vision of the project, and sometimes that’s the right call. And sometimes doing this a lot is best for the project.

On the other hand, even if a majority of the work is coming from one person, not only does your community learn your project, they also spend time contributing to it, fixing bugs, and helping other people. I feel it’s only to a project’s benefit to honor them and take difficult suggestions seriously, and get to the root of why those suggestions are coming up. Otherwise you risk pissing off your contributors, who I feel have the right to be annoyed at you and maybe post evangelion themed vent blog posts if you consistently shut down contributors’ needs and fail to adapt to what your users actually want out of your software. And forking, while freeing and playing to the idea of freedom of choice, also splits your userbase and contributors and makes both parties worse off. It really depends on the project, but it pays to maintain buy-in and trust from people who care enough to meaningfully contribute to your project.

To be fair, Bluesky does have “blocklists” maintained by other users that you can opt into, and quite a few popular ones exist with active maintainers who take and act on reports pretty quickly. So you still can delegate moderation responsibilities. One advantage to this is that you can opt into a few blocklists based on what you personally want to block - separate lists exist for hateful bigots, crypto pushers, and so on. I gave it a shot out of curiosity and haven’t run into any issues yet, but that’s just me.

I still prefer Mastodon for broader AP integration, and I think blocklists aren’t discoverable enough outside of word of mouth, but I am curious to see how that turns out for Bluesky. Certainly an improvement over Xitter imo.

Yep absolutely!

For me, it felt like my life was quickly progressing away from a youth I was not ready to leave for inexplicable reasons. In the end I ended up taking a nuclear option once I realized how uncomfortable I was with my future, and while it’s not been easy it’s been absolutely worth it.

Even though you may be stuck in the same habits and mistakes, they can be rewritten and you’ll be surprised how quickly life changes once you find what makes you authentically happy. A lot can happen in 3 years and I guarantee you’ll still be young at 24. You can still be young at twice that. There’s a lot of life ahead of you, especially once you take calculated risks to improve your future and make the most of the youth you still have. You may not know what exactly will make you happy, but trust in yourself and your judgement to find it as you go.

Well ultimately, someone’s age is (generally) a pretty easily verifiable fact with little room for argument. Whether or not someone’s actions constitute an insurrection is not something you can read off a birth certificate - it relies on a subjective standard of what constitutes an insurrection. And given how many different forms that could take, I feel the 14th has to be as vague as a it is about what constitutes an insurrection. Jan 6 very obviously qualifies imo, but making a bulletproof legal argument to that effect is a whole other matter, especially considering how much scrutiny this decision will be under. Remember how wrapped in dog whistles this whole thing was - getting up on stage and vaguely suggesting to an angry mob to take their country back then going home and quietly muttering “nooo don’t break the law or hurt anyone pls go home nooooo” gives a very annoying level of rhetorical wiggle room to those responsible. It’s an intentional strategy to make this exact kind of argument as difficult as possible.

That on its own is no reason to not pursue invoking the 14th, because imo this is the exact situation in which it should be used, and it specifically does not require the same level of proof as in a criminal trial. But it is a significant complication we will be dealing with at all stages of this process and it remains to be seen how many are willing to stake their political careers on it.

Do consider this doesn’t actually happen - but this hypothetical point is often repeated and signal-boosted above the bad things that actually do happen to trans kids, and people who simply don’t want us to exist fully believe it’s real, discuss it as our agenda, and even threaten institutions and doctors who may or may not actually provide gender affirming care.

Wasn’t really allowed to harbor or express anger as a kid. Now I can’t summon an ounce of rage, even when it’s appropriate and helpful. It’s not ideal, so I spend a lot of time meditating, dropping away other emotions in hopes of finding a spark of something in there. Nothing yet, but I’ve found a number of other useful things in the process.

Mindfulness is a great skill to build to debug issues like this. It’s slow, painful sometimes, and doesn’t always feel worthwhile, but it’s definitely worth taking the time to try meditating to get closer to your base emotions and how they appear.

Worth remembering too that what you’re looking for probably isn’t a huge shift in thinking, at least in the short term. Incremental progress over time is all it takes. Some people are shades of tightly wound and that’s okay. You’re who you are for a reason and it’s worth being kind to yourself when unhelpful thoughts appear. Not to excuse yourself of behavior you don’t want to maintain, but to care for and guide yourself toward a simple step in the right direction.

There is the unregulated gambling market running off Counterstrike and Dota etc items that valve technically doesn’t run, but does facilitate through its community market and does profit from. Probably the biggest problem I have with how the company operates.

That being said, generally I do agree.

different flavors of weird for sure. Depends on which type you’re more comfortable around.

Whatever their flaws, as an ex-ruralite I have to disagree that the problem is just stupid rural people being stupid. It’s an oversimplification of the problem. Rural communities tend to be more tight-knit, more politically homogenous, and the risks of going against the grain can include ostracization and violence. In places where the church has influence, well-funded youth groups bring kids into a certain view of the world before they even have a chance to see it themselves, and enforce adherence to it through the same ostracization tactics. It’s a culture that breeds resistance to change and resentment of the unfamiliar. People caught by this often aren’t necessarily stupid, and in fact many, many smart people are victimized by it and then later reinforce it. They’ve internalized a bunch of ideological poison from a young age, and can’t step out of line or support others who step out of line, out of fear of losing their community.

Well said. We’d be so much better off if people generally had a better understanding of ©PTSD. Everyone has a responsibility for how they act, but maladaptation is a hell of a thing and takes lots of time to address, especially when people know these triggers and weaponize them because they want to see you hurt.

Yeah, I think that’s pretty much all that is generally needed. I’ve had people assume but ask me first, just asking “she/her?” as a question, I respond yes, we go about our business. If you don’t want to assume, you can also pretty much universally use they/them in passing, or if it’s someone you interact with more frequently, people really don’t tend to mind if you ask.

I mean I’m trans, I get around quite a bit in queer spaces, I haven’t met anyone who would get super mad about initially assuming pronouns rather than just saying “hey I prefer XYZ” and moving on. Generally when people react strongly to being misgendered, it’s due to ongoing conflict over their identities, having to deal with people who use pronouns to casually disregard your Identity, familial abandonment, etc. It is often a response to complex trauma from elsewhere. That’s not really your responsibility, but I’ve been there and if you can offer them any grace in those moments, it’s extremely helpful.

Personally, it’s nbd when people slip up - especially people who’ve known me for a very long time pre-transition. Oftentimes they correct themselves, and I usually feel worse that they feel bad about it. It’s pretty easy to tell when it’s intentional or not, and I reserve my ire for people who clearly mean disrespect.

Though, I should say, that’s now - early on in transition, it was certainly a bit harder to take. It reminded me of very fresh family abandonment and abuse over my identity. That’s not on the people who accidentally called me by the wrong pronoun, but it certainly could put me in a pretty bad place and I’m sure I wasn’t the friendliest in those moments. The more that trans folks are supported by their friends and family, the more secure they feel and the less likely they are to react strongly to being accidentally misgendered, imo.

the singular use is so old, when it was first introduced, “they” was still spelled with a fucking thorn!

You start out in 2005 by saying “t----- t----- t-----.” By 2023, you can’t say t----. That hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, parents’ rights, bathrooms, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about nicknames, and all these things you’re talking about are totally superficial things and a byproduct of them is, queer folks get hurt more than cishets… “We want to know about kids’ nicknames” is much more abstract than even the parents’ rights thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “t------ t------ t-------.”

Borderlands?