The funny thing is, I probably wouldn’t have had gender surgery if it wasn’t a legal requirement. I barely had anything and could pass topless anyway. I just needed to be able to get a job, which was proving difficult with the non matching ID. It is 100% legal where I live to fire someone for being trans, and it had happened at multiple times by that point.
My current plan has an exclusion, which fucking sucks. I want to get bottom surgery and move across the country so that I don’t have to deal with this shit anymore.
When I had top surgery (getting the fat sucked out of my tits so I could put an “M” on my drivers license, funny how many jobs fell through right I9 verification…), I did a lot of research into what I needed to do to get it covered. I got letters from doctors and therapists, I’d been in hormone therapy for a while, and my policy said it covered it. I checked with a rep, they said yeah, you just pay for it up front and submit for reimbursement.
So I took out a $5500 loan, had surgery, and then attempted to file for reimbursement. Turns out that my specific policy, from my step-dad’s employer had a rider that exempted it. Somewhere buried in the fine print, didn’t come up until after I had taken out the loan.
It’s pretty common for trans people to end up turning to sex work to finance their medical care (and tbh, survival in general). That’s how I joined that statistic.
Teenager I was traveling with couldn’t figure out how to use the turnstiles at the metro. Random French guy, in English: “you disgust me.”
Also got scammed by an Uber. The Louvre was worth it though, we hated Paris so much we spent the entire day inside the museum.
I have fairly severe social anxiety; when I went to France, the negative response to the French I was able to stutter out ensured I’d never try to speak French again. (I read it fairly well, because Candide was good enough to read ten times)
In high school, I had an assignment to go to a local Chinese restaurant and order in Chinese. The response to my “我要broccoli 牛肉” was so enthusiastic that I still do a set of Chinese flash cards everyday.
There has to be a motivating force for you to learn something. Whether that is social approval/encouragement, needing to be able to ask for certain things… Some people can be motivated by an intrinsic love of learning things, but for most I think this is confined to specific topics.
For language, I think you need a show that you want to watch, a space you can navigate by only using that language, something that gives you meaningful feedback and places to go that a grade simply doesn’t.
In this video, she’s using a nice chunky yarn, so it’s easier to see.
The good thing with blankets is that the size is whatever you want it to be. Just stop making your chain when you get one dimension right, and then finish with whatever row makes you happy. A single skein of the cheap SuperSaver/RedHeart can make ~8 sq. feet of area - a nice 2’ x 4’ baby blanket is a good size for a beginner. Blankets are also very forgiving of fuck-ups - which in crochet is usually forgetting a count (as a stoner, this is usually why I knit)
Single crochet is a stitch type. Crochet is about making chains, and then doing different stitches back into the chain. Single crochet is the most basic stitch. (There’s also double/triple/half-double, but these mean different things depending on where you are from).
The Woobles are a little pricey, but having that kind of cute project and video help can be a good motivator. I think starting with amigurumi can still be a little ambitious though. I’d suggest starting with a blanket of single crochets to get comfortable with the hook - all you need is the right size hook and yarn. No need to spend more than $6 at Walmart or Dollar Tree.
It’s frustrating, because you can tell they spent a lot of time making the words weaselly enough. The one about climate models especially enrages me, because yeah, they’re predictive tools with limitations (which I’ve discussed with students when I’ve taught with climate sims). But I know my old department head (who used to compliment kiddos for forgoing masks in 2020) is going to have those “uncertainties” do a lot of work.
The Franklin Standards need to be on everyone’s radar. They don’t want your kids to learn about climate change.
Explain how and why Earth’s climate changes over time.
Climate changes continually at all time scales and Earth’s climate has never remained constant.
The Earth’s climate has varied greatly between glacial advances and retreats that correlate with cyclical oscillations in Earth’s orbit around the Sun (Milankovitch Cycles, precession).
In addition to being affected by the climate, the biosphere also has a significant effect on the climate, including self-regulation and resiliency (carbon-oxygen cycle, hydrological cycle).
Humans are just one of the many influences on Earth’s climate (urban heat island effect, wetland drainage, deforestation, agriculture).
Computer models of climate are simplified simulations of the real world, and make prognostications that are inherently uncertain.
Global weather forecast models (short term) and climate models (long term) are quite different in their design, their strengths, weaknesses, value, limitations, and uncertainties.
The wording is subtle, but you can see how they are attacking the idea of anthropogenic climate change. (There’s similar fuckery with evolution and some subtle anti-trans stuff.) Oil and gas companies have a lot of money and can afford a lot of propaganda. No states have adopted these standards yet - we think Florida and Texas will go first, then Oklahoma will follow. But this information warfare.
The story of the woman who accomplished this is pretty interesting. Maryam Khatoon Molkara wrote a bunch of letters to the Ayatollah Khomeini asking for advice with her dysphoria. He told her to dress in woman’s clothes and encouraged her transition. Learning about her can be the positive part of this story - one person was able to improve the situation for people like her.
As others have pointed out, it’s not really a win for queer rights on the whole - you can transition from one set of strict enforced gender roles to another. You can’t be gay/lesbian. It might be coercive and fixing the distress of having the wrong set of hormones in your body is kinda the point of HRT.
I have to use a windows 11 machine for work, and it genuinely surprises me how terrible it is. I don’t understand the opposition to local accounts - if I’m working somewhere with public WiFi/capture portal, I have to use my phone as a hotspot first.
The PIN log in seems to roll a random number and decide each morning whether it is going to work or not.
I also got a laptop with 11 on it for gaming. So much spyware I’ve had to uninstall, configuring anything is a nightmare. I was trying to adjust my mouse sensitivity/figure out why the scroll wheel is either 0 or to the moon, but even when you dig into the control panel, half the settings are missing.
I also had to turn off my WiFi and google commands to make a local account, because otherwise Microsoft accounts are mandatory.
Every change seems to make the experience actively worse for the user.
It feels like cancelling someone for not understanding the political leanings of a porn star is kinda dumb. I guess I’ve never thought of him more than someone who was used in memes.
I wish people knew more about Lou Sullivan and Alan Hart. We’ve got the U2 guys kid, Elliot Page (who is pretty cool), and a weird transmedicalist who simultaneously thinks that bottom surgery is mutilation (and did porn).
The reality is that most people are terrible people, especially when we look at them years later, once the dust has settled.
(Look into what Dr. Seuss did to his first wife)
The PPP program forgave more than 700 billion in loans. But the $50k I took to become a fucking teacher, well by George I better pay up.
Which makes me wonder - getting stung by a scorpion makes more sense than getting bitten?
(From that same list, my favorite was “brewing beer.”)
The nostalgia boner is that it was a very unique game, and nothing has come out quite like it since. It’s not even like Daggerfall or Arena. For someone looking for that experience, Oblivion and Skyrim were massive disappointments.
Going from a volcano that is spewing flesh mutating disease while riding giant bugs around to Tolkienesque Medieval Fantasy Landscape #3045 gave me whiplash. (The Shivering Isles and Knights of the Nine save the package though.) And losing the ability to kill whoever I want? Spears???
Skyrim is better. It mangles what could have been a good story by retconning lore and making Alduin into big evil bad, just as Oblivion was about basically Satan invading the world. Morrowind’s villain may not be right, but his motives are 100% understandable and he has a good point. (In Oblivion: why would you join a cult dedicated to killing everyone for no reason?)
As a Morrowboomer, I’m willing to accept the series changed, but there just hasn’t been something to replace what I hoped for ES4. They don’t make games with that vibe anymore. The closest thing I’ve had to scratching that itch would be Planescape Torment, Pathologic, or Zeno Clash.
I read this as talking about BadBIOS at first - did that ever turn out to be real, or was it just paranoia?
They don’t play well with Linux. Occasionally my HP laptop will turn back on SecureBoot with no warning. There’s also like a full minute of delay between opening the thing and keyboard strokes registering. (Iirc, HP is so Linux hostile it’s not really supported by Arch)
I don’t get when a fancy restaurant does it. If it’s not a Cajun boil or similar vibe, please don’t try to make me look polite deconstructing seafood.