Patch making, and I’ve no idea why people are surprised about it tbh. It’s really easy if you’ve got access to a printer (or you can trace from a screen) and a pair of scissors.

That said I have a slightly unusual process where I design stencils in fusion 360 and then print them on my 3D printer, they’re durable and reusable that way. I’m still working on improving the final print quality, but I’ve had some really good results like this gigantic Ash Bricky back patch that took me ~20 hours over three days.

The few times I’ve been around for the organising of live streams, we’ve either done it directly to our own socials and/or an independent journo might come and either stream or record some stuff, but I don’t think I ever got their names when that’s been organised ahead of time.

At one I attended, the organisers provided burner phones for people to livestream an action, I believe to their personal accounts? I never saw the footage of it though.

I met a guy called Big Al on a family camping trip and he was pretty cool. He was the first hippy I ever met, living out of a van and trailer, solar panels all over the roof and making some money selling bags made from men’s ties.

I don’t really remember what he did other than maybe teaching me a fishing knot, maybe feeding me and showing me some cool stuff. At the very least, it’s a very positive memory and possibly part of why I love the off grid dream.

No clue where the image is from, sorry.

Yeah, figured it would be something relativistic like that, I was just looking at overall power to do that back of the envelope calculation. Considering how high the energy is at ~0.25c, it makes me wonder what the average particle spacing is in the jet at that diameter.

I expect a lot wider too, the jets will diverge of course so it’s going to depend on how far away from the star you’re measuring. I just took 0.05lyr because it’s a size I had a very shitty source for hahaha.

I did a little snooping and found someone claiming to have a source on the diameter of a jet, but their link went nowhere. I think it’s this though. Anyway, at 0.05 light years across and presumed circular, a human body purposefully over estimated to have a cross sectional area of 2m^2, would be subject to 28.5 gigawatts.

Wolfram Alpha very kindly points out that this is the equivalent of nearly two and a half space shuttles blasting you, boosters and all. Good luck!

I’ve no idea how accurate this is, but googling gave me an estimate of the energy required that suggests it would take a little less than three seconds to vaporize an entire body. If it can create a plasma, that counts as subatomic in my books, but I’ve no idea what that would take.

Nuclear would depend more on the particle kinematics and I’ve got no intuition there tbh. I’m sure it’s certainly possible though, especially if you get close.

Oh sick, I forgot to look this up. I heard a cover of it last year by a ridiculously good highschool punk band.

I have a playlist called “Loud Sleep” I put that on, crank the volume up enough that I can’t hear my thoughts and wait around until I’m so exhausted I either fall asleep or get sleepy enough that I take them off and pass out. I specifically use Skullcandy crushers so I crank the bass waaaaaay up and let it vibrate my skull.

It’s just a bunch of They Might Be Giants’ more aggressive/loud songs and a couple that mean something to me. It’s not really about avoiding feeling stuff, it’s all intended to make me feel more, just without as much thinking. It’s kept me alive on some really bad nights when I felt like all I could do was die.

I’m sure I’ve seen these before, but so far as I can tell they have been taken over by an educational company, as you said. Shame.

I’m saving this post though, if I spot any of these I’ll shoot you a message, but I wouldn’t hold your breath.

Imposter syndrome because the people around you beat you to coming out is real and sucks so hard. It happened to me, I watched a couple of my friends go through the exact same thing after I came out and it happened in reverse to an acquaintance when I heard someone angrily complain about said acquaintance coming out after them (it was unbelievably toxic and nothing I’ve seen before or since).

One of the closest people in my life literally hit me with the “just asking for a friend” to see if they’re allowed to be non-binary without taking hormones like I do. Even with all the reassurance in the world it can take a long time. It’s so so hard, being trans often means overcoming an enormous amount of self doubt and all sorts of internalised nasty things.

You’ve done an amazing job navigating everything. I’m so proud of you and it only gets better from here, I promise.

Thank you for existing ❤️

Thanks, I appreciate that a lot ❤️

I’m going through some really awful stuff at the moment, and it’s hard to feel proud of anything when I absolutely despise myself, but these are things I managed to convince myself are okay:

• Surviving this. I’m working very hard to get better, I have lots of regrets and getting better isn’t for the reason I want it to be, but I will succeed
• I helped start a transgender solidarity network, our first rally was the proudest moment of my life
• That time I tried to stop a coal ship from leaving port (it didn’t work but it did do a lot of other important things for the rest of the protest)
• I make a really mean creamed cauliflower and I always feel super proud when I get to make it and hear all these strangers say how good it is (it’s the easiest dish in the world, people are just addicted to salt)

Haha yeah EEAAO was a trip and I barely understand it either

Sorry to nitpick a bit, dark matter isn’t connected to the expansion of space (as far as we’re aware) but dark energy is probably what you meant. My answer to your question is at the end.

Full disclosure: While I have studied this, my expertise was in a tangentially related field. However a buddy of mine has a PhD in measuring this stuff so I’ve got some second hand knowledge.

It’s a confusing hurdle for any student of physics to understand that spacetime doesn’t exist inside another bigger thing into which it can expand, it just kinda exists on its own. Mathematically we don’t even treat the expansion quite like growth, it’s a bit easier to understand it as our rulers getting shorter, the labels we give to distances changes over time. Personally I like the analogy of a sheet of grid ruled paper.

If you choose two points and count the number of squares between them, divide that grid into a smaller one and then count them again, the “distance” has gone up. Those squares look smaller to us so it seems like the true distance is the same, but the universe doesn’t have an external view to make such comparisons from, all we have are the squares and physics obeys them. The point is you can cut squares up forever without running out of squares to cut up, nothing runs out this way.

In spacetime maths (general relativity aka GR) we usually start by defining distances, and when it comes to the expansion of the universe we literally just have a number in that definition that changes over time.

This kind of “our rulers and clocks are dodgy and unreliable” is unfortunately the backbone of this sort of physics. It’s a huge pain in the ass, but it’s cool af if you’re a huge maths nerd.

How does it expand?

🤷

Anyone who can tell you how dark energy works beyond “it has a negative pressure” is full of it. It’s a theoretical idea and has never been observed, we just know that if something with negative pressure existed everywhere then it would cause space to expand. Don’t quote me, but it’s kinda like the opposite of how a black hole squishes spacetime down into a singularity, dark energy pushes out on everything everywhere all at once. (Couldn’t help myself it’s a great movie go watch it)

There are a bunch of possible things that fit the bill, it could just be a number in Einstein’s field equation, it could be a specific type of quantum field that has a constant value everywhere, hell I’ve even seen models where it’s just caused by black holes existing. It’s also possible that Einstein got some stuff wrong and that expansion is just what space do. Either way, I don’t think these things require more stuff to be created, it’s just stuff that’s already there.

If I had to make a mostly uneducated guess, I’d say it’s probably just a feature of quantum gravity, for which we have no proven theories. Loop quantum gravity just demands it exists for the theory to even be useful, I’m sure string theory has it’s own crazy nonsense to explain it too. If we ever do work this out, I fully expect it’s just going to be a thing we have to accept exists without an obvious cause, much like how the universe exists but we have no idea why or why the rules it follows are those specific rules and not some others.

I’ve got unclockable’s bra buds and they’re pretty good when they work but it’s been hard to find good bras and they can be a pain to keep in place. I’ve come home a few times only to realise they’d completely left the cup without me noticing.

They’re supposedly like implants and tbh they’re pretty convincing when you get them in something good, I really like them I just wish I had more than one bra for them…

OP You should watch (or read if you like manga) Fire Force. The hook is that people randomly catch fire and society kinda has to deal with it, it’s a fun show.

And yeah it’s cooler than funerals, the Fire Force brings along nuns to pray for the person when they need to put them out.

I’m just being silly, but I mean that if everything can be represented as a matrix then there’s a point of view where things like complex numbers are just “names” of specific matrices and the rules that apply to those “names” are just derived from the relevant matrix operations.

Essentially I’m saying that the normal form is an abstract short hand notation of the matrix representation. The matrices are of course significantly harder and more confusing to work with, but in some cases the richness of that structure is very beautiful and insightful.

(I’m particularly in love with the fact one can derive spinors and their transforms purely from the spacetime/Lorentz transforms. It’s a really satisfying exercise and it’s some beautiful algebra/group theory.)

Matrix representations in general, if that counts?

Complex numbers, polynomials, the derivative operator, spinors etc. they’re all matrices. Numbers are just shorthand labels for certain classes of matrices, fight me.

Looking at it from a quantum field perspective, pretty much. If the only interactions are through gravity then the underlying field’s evolution can’t be influenced by anything else, I have no real idea what the implications of that would be because we don’t have a QFT for gravity.

If you suck at interviews cheat, or get lucky.

I flunked the interview for the job I wanted, did well in an interview for a different position at the same company, new boss loved me and I have no clue why. She got fired the weekend before I started and I got moved into an even better job than I’d originally wanted.

For my only other interview ever, I got in because I literally just googled answers to the coding test on my phone just out of view of the camera, not that they were watching anyway. I’m glad I did too, that company was an unethical hell hole and it’s tragic that it hasn’t folded. I left after a couple of months and got abother job with the company from the first paragraph, no interview at all, and significantly better pay (more than double lol).

I seriously have no clue how people get jobs the normal way. I’ve tried, I’ve been trying for years and can’t get another interview.

Not in the US but my perspective on this whole thing is very mixed. Obviously I’m terrified of the rise of fascism and the exterminatory rhetoric that’s now so common when trans people are mentioned in politics. I’m terrified for a number of my friends, and I can’t help them, I can’t keep them safe and I can’t get them out.

For now I’m focusing my efforts locally, we’ve largely been able to keep that sort of thing out of Australia and have had some incredible support outside of the queer community at rallies and a recent counter protest against some terfs. I think we’ll be okay, we might even make some progress down here, very exciting and it’s keeping me going despite everything else.

I’m not holding up well, but I am still standing. I really hope things turn around in the US and UK soon, my heart goes out to you all. I’d say stay strong, but honestly that’s not on you, just stay alive, it’s okay to not fight.