Neat! This was so fun to learn about, thank you for sharing. Xiaolin Wu did not live in vain after all, because of nerds like us

Sliwa being tacked on like an afterthought was hilarious to me for some reason

I’m not sure how well this works for a bingo square, but something that I thought of was about how nigh every paywalled article has an archive link either in the post body itself, or in the comments.

I find it heartwarming that such considerate behaviour seems to be the norm here. It inspires me to be one of those helpful people adding an unpaywalled link in the comments in the rare case of finding an interesting post where that hasn’t been done yet. It makes me feel like I’m part of a community.

Ah yeah, I got mixed up. Thanks for the correction

Online dating as a bi woman is grim. It’s annoying, because in certain contexts, I’d be up for casually fooling around with a couple, but when you think you’re going on a date with a woman and then her surprise boyfriend shows up, it’s gross and predatory

A term that I find useful is “platonic aesthetic attraction”.

It’s a term that I learned through the ace community when I was going through the common bisexual experience of “am I bi though, or am I just asexual?”. It turned out I was bi, but I find the split model of attraction is a useful framework.

Platonic Aesthetic attraction is when you’re able to see someone and go “now that is a beautiful man”, but not experience any attraction in the conventional sense of the word. I personally find it useful because even though I do experience sexual or romantic attraction to people of all genders, that doesn’t mean I experience that for everyone. Sometimes a beautiful person is just a beautiful person.

Edit: got mixed up, and said “Platonic attraction” when I meant “aesthetic attraction”. Thanks to @gerryflap@feddit.nl for the correction

I mean, Labour aren’t too great on trans rights either, due to capitulating to the right as centrists with no beliefs often do.

I’ve heard climate scientists argue that most estimates they see are bullshit that isn’t grounded in the science and seems to exist purely to properly up the fossil fuel industry

For a while, I was subscribed as a patron to Elisabeth Bik’s Patroeon. She’s a microbiologist turned “Science Integrity Specialist” which means she investigates and exposes scientific fraud. Despite doing work that’s essential to science, she has struggled to get funding because there’s a weird stigma around what she does; It’s not uncommon to hear scientists speak of people like her negatively, because they perceive anti-fraud work as being harmful to public trust in science (which is obviously absurd, because surely recognising that auditing the integrity of research is necessary for building and maintaining trust in science).

Anyway, I mention this because it’s one of the most dystopian things I’ve directly experienced in recent years. A lot of scientists and other academics I know are struggling financially, even though they’re better funded than she is, so I can imagine that it’s even worse for her. How fucked up is it for scientific researchers to have to rely on patrons like me (especially when people like me are also struggling with rising living costs).

The communist study group was amazing. I didn’t meet them in my first play through, because I was too much of a noncommittal ~~centrist liberal ~~ moralist, but I made sure to go extra hard commie on my second run.

I laughed so much, because they reminded me so much of people I literally know. No-one I know directly lines up with the characters; it’s more like if we took the commie essence out of all my friends, distilled it down and then crafted two characters out of it. It feels almost cliché, but it’s not an inauthentic depiction

Part of the Millennial experience is the neverending cognitive dissonance that arises from growing up in a “you must never use your real name on the internet” culture, only to find ourselves here, where that is normalised and in some cases required.

Edit: cognitive dissonance is probably the wrong phrase. It’s jarring is what I mean

I was talking about this recently with someone (read: ranting as they nodded sympathetically) and I finished up by saying “what’s the point of ‘smart’ tech if the humans who use it are steadily disempowered and ultimately, made less smart?”

I’ve recently been dabbling in HomeAssistant and learning how to set things up properly feels like it’s been making me more smart.

“TIL i do women people things. lol”

The point of “you don’t have to hold your farts in to be a woman” isn’t to suggest that only women fart, but that farting is a thing that people do, and that given that women are a subset of people, women fart (and that farting doesn’t make someone less of a woman)

There’s a balance. I have known plenty of women who felt it was not permissible to fart around people/in public ever. One would not even fart around her husband of 10+ years. Another would only fart when they were at home, in the bathroom. Another felt it was inappropriate to ever fart, even when she was pooping (as a result of this, she once was so constipated that she had to go to the hospital).

Whilst these are particularly extreme examples, they’re just instances of a general trend where women farting is stigmatised more than men farting. I interpret the image in the OP to be resisting that excessive pressure and unrealistic standard rather than advocating for disregarding basic courtesy and farting with impunity

I was in the yolk

I keep meaning to switch to Voyager from Sync, but I’m lazy and bad with change

You’re making a wise choice. When we feel a moral duty to stay up to date on things, it’s difficult to avoid burning out. In times like these, self care is more important than ever; if we don’t look after ourselves, it becomes harder for us to both support our community, and to receive support.

I disagree, on the basis that sometimes when I want to cause my friends (the majority of whom are ex-emo-kids) to start singing that song, the trigger phrase is for me to go “Wake me up” in that somewhat rough way that the male vocalist does it, and then my friends are often compelled to singing Amy Lee’s part. It’s a simple spell, but quite unbreakable

Kitty!

They think the hands are too masculine to be women’s hands. To me, they just look like hands.

Aside from the absurdity of them transvestigating a statue, it’s just more of their usual nonsense. Sometimes they pretend that they care about protecting cis women, but their stringent criteria on what traits it’s valid for a woman to have makes it obvious that they only care about hurting trans women. They’re pretty transparent about it.

Though despite it being obvious to many of us, I’ve found that when talking to people who aren’t actively transphobic (but may have some poor takes and may never have met a trans person), it’s useful to highlight the mis.atch between the transphobes’ stated aims and their actions. For example, I, a cis woman, have been a victim of transphobic violence a few times. But then, I suppose that oppressing all women is likely the actual aim of many of them, so this would be seen as a feature, not a bug