Damn, I didn’t expect to get a soundtrack accompaniment to my science meme. I really enjoyed this, thank you for sharing it with us.

Nice. How long did it take you to write this comment? Whenever I attempt stuff like this, it takes far longer than expected because I overcomplicate things

🤘🔥🔥🤘 This is why trans people are metal af

Regardless of gender, if there is a prisoner who is likely to perpetrate sexual violence, then the great care needs to be taken to ensure the safety of other prisoners. Cis people are plenty capable of committing sexual assault. Trans people are far more likely to be victims of sexual violence than perpetrators of it.

That’s part of what their protest is getting at — as you highlight, even “biological sex” is pretty complex (In science, I have heard that the “three G’s” (Gonads, genetics, genitals) model is the standard definition, but scientists who research biological sex seem to consider this an extreme oversimplification). Fuzzy definitions like this are fine in science, but things get much messier when we try to write these things into law. One of my problems with the recent Supreme Court ruling on transgender rights is how they use the phrase “biological woman”, as if it is a simple matter.

I find this especially striking because I’m a cis woman who has plenty of experience of being treated poorly due to being a woman, and I feel like my “biological sex” (as in gonads, genetics and genitals) don’t factor into it much; far more significant is whether I am perceived as a woman, and this is why “gender” can be far more useful than “biological sex” in these discussions.

I had a look further into this, because I wanted to better understand what factors might cause an act to be considered indecent exposure (or outraging public decency). This led me to some guidance on naturism and other non-sexual nudity, from the crown prosecution service.^[1] It appears that having an “intention to cause alarm or distress” may be relevant for protests like this — arguably the entire point of the protest is to use the shock value of the nudity as a protest.

That being said, I think it’s a bold move and possibly an effective protest. Even if public indecency laws are gender neutral, it would still be a strong message if any of these women got arrested for this — the reason why these women are capable of causing alarm or distress by going topless is because these are “female presenting nipples” (to use a heavily-memed phrase from the Tumblr porn ban era)

There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who don’t.

What’s the context of this photo? I.e. what were you making/processing?

I’ve found that erring on the side of underwatering is a decent strategy for most houseplants. People ask me what my trick to caring for my houseplants is, and a huge part of this is that I made up a big bucket of well-draining soil to use for my plants. This means that I need to water them more frequently, but they’re far less likely to succumb to root rot

Because it would cause too much societal whiplash to, all at once, we see a transformation from a world where information like this is closed away, to a world where it’s all public. Often the accessibility of information depends on logistics like where data should be stored, and whether something counts as “public” if some information can only be accessed by, let’s say, booking an appointment to see paper records only available at an archive.

FOI are a concession. Legislation that allows them is how we bridge the gap between the abstract political ideology of “this information should be public”, and the pragmatic challenge of information infrastructure. That is to say that you’re entirely right, and that information obtainable via FOIA should just be public info. However, submitting skillful FOIAs can be a powerful tool towards making more information free generally — more FOIA requests being made can encourage organisations to revamp their information management such that they can fulfill FOIA requests more easily (perhaps even making information available to pre-empt such requests). Repeatedly non-compliant organisations may be forced to comply, if held accountable by an effective information commissioner or ombudsman. (That’s a big “if”).

In short, they’re a step towards pushing for more widespread, public information

This image saved my life once: [image] (https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/89e6fccc-0aea-4791-8f53-27a24ef51fe5.jpeg)

Image description: Roughly written graffiti on a wall that says “I’m fucking fed up and tired and I want to die but living is the most punk shit I’ve ever fucking done”

Courage the Cowardly Dog is crazy

Is there a particular cut of beef that’s ideal for this?

I agree with both your original comment and the edit, but especially the bit about cast iron. Neglecting mine for an extended period led to uneven patches of seasoning, but when I got round to giving it a proper scrub, it was like hitting a reset button. I’m going to try to be better at basic seasoning/maintenance this time, but the joy of cast iron is knowing that it’s super forgiving if you do mess it up.

Tangential to your edit: I enjoy being able to sharpen knives, but that’s mostly because I’m a nerd who has other tools I need to sharpen anyway, so I already have the stones. Something that I found striking though is that when I was learning how to sharpen knives, I asked if I could practice on various friends’ kitchen knives. Most of them were poor students, so I sharpened many cheap knives, and I was impressed by how well some of the cheaper ones performed compared once they were sharp. They held their edge for surprisingly long too.

I’m quite fond of my Wusthof chef’s knife, which was a bit of an indulgent treat for myself, but I am utterly baffled by the gear acquisition syndrome that so many seem to fall into. It’s not just that prospect of someone who barely cooks buying a $300 knife that perplexes me, but that so many of these people keep acquiring more knives. If they said that collecting knives was just their hobby, and that they were never intending to actually use them, then I’d shrug and say fair enough. That’s pretty rare though — the underlying implication that these people seem to operate under is that the fancy knives make you a better cook (and that the perfect knife will make good cooking into an effortless, joyful endeavour). It’s an odd culture that’s developed.

I disagree with the “complaining about young people” line having coolness increase proportionally with age: when I was a young adult, I often joked about kids these days in a way that seemed to get a lot of laughs. The humour was in the fact that I was a young person talking about young people as if I wasn’t one of them (and beneath that was me making light of the text that, likely due to being autistic, I have always felt isolated from my peer group).

Anyway, I got good at leveraging this for humour, but as I aged, the joke potential expired: I was too old for there to be any irony in saying “kids these days”, but not old enough for it to be cool to complain about young people.

On the bright side, I am sufficiently old to be able to torment young people by misusing their slang. It’s most likely effective if you use the slang in a mostly right way, so I enjoy the challenge of needing to actually understand correct usage of new slang. Amusingly, studying current slang as an outsider is a skill I’m well versed in, given that I had to do this even when I was young.

Damn you all, because I’m now emotionally invested in this

Maybe the whole trope of “Vampire Lord manipulates thralls by promising to turn them into vampires, but never actually does it” is actually just because of ADHD causing them to never get round to it.

The thing about labels is that their usage depends on the particular context at time of use. I have a friend who is non binary, for example, but finds herself weary of explaining how someone can be femme presenting, use she/her pronouns, and be non binary. This means that when talking to people who aren’t LGBTQ, she finds “lesbian” is the most effective label to communicate, even though it’s a label she has largely outgrown the truth of. For some people, how they engage with identity labels is quite straightforward, and they present the same labels out to the entire world. For other people, more nuance is needed, and that’s okay too.

That is to say that if you read the above comment and thought “bi but with a type sounds like me, but I don’t want to call myself bi”, that’s fine. Labels like “bi” can help make oneself be more legible to the world at large, but you do not owe the world that. You are allowed to have complexity that doesn’t neatly fit into simple labels, and even if you did strongly identify with a label, you’re not obligated to divulge this freely.

I have never had to Stop, Drop, and Roll

Whilst I broadly agree with your sentiment about people being weirdly judgy about some coping measures as opposed to others, I can’t help but sympathise with the people who express concern; I do think there are some coping measures that are better than others, in terms of giving us the best chance to grow and potentially thrive. I’m reminded of a couple of words that a chronically suicidal friend of mine coined to describe this kind of thing: “vivagenic” and “vivalytic”, roughly meaning “life promoting” and “life destroying” respectively.

For me, there are times when indulging in substances like cannabis is vivagenic. However, I know that I am also prone to chasing an unhealthy kind of escapism sometimes, resulting in substance use that’s vivalytic in nature. Although sometimes the solitude of smoking alone is sometimes exactly what I need, I have found a decent correlation between solo smoking and the vivalytic kind of smoking. My own ADHD probably plays into this.

It’s not for other people to decide what is vivagenic or vivalytic for you, but I wonder whether some of people’s judgemental comments are because it’s harder for people to see how you’re doing when your coping measures are skewed towards more solitary activities. Beyond their concern, they may also be coming at this from a sort of selfish angle of preferring when you were doing the dance stuff because they may have perceived you as being more of a member of that community — even if they weren’t directly interacting with you in that context, it’s reassuring to see the people we care about appear to be coping, and community dance is much easier to fit into a conventional model of “coping”.

It can be difficult to discern what comments are worth listening to when there’s so many: some may be perceptive friends struggling to articulate their concern about potentially vivalytic coping measures; others may be unproductively projecting their own values onto your life and feeling unwarranted concern at things that are working well for you; and then there are people who are just assholes who don’t care about your wellbeing but will judge you whatever you do.

This comment got longer than I planned, so I’m not sure how to end this. I suppose the thing that caused me to start writing is that I related to your comment a little too much, and I felt compelled to share my well wishes. I don’t know what is best for you, and I know we’re all just doing what we can to get by, but you seem like a pretty cool person, so I hope you don’t become too isolated, regardless of whatever your coping strategy is. I’m not suggesting you should be doing the dance stuff instead, because God knows I understand how ADHD can lead to a rocky relationship with moderation. I don’t know what I’m suggesting. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ I’m just a random internet stranger who was surprised by an emotionally impactful thread on a meme post, but I wish you the wisdom to recognise what strategies could help you live, rather than just helping you to survive. I also wish you strength, because it’s exhausting to have to constantly fend off others’ judgement in order to carve enough thinking space for oneself.