drinking clay slip

I read comments and reblogs, I listened to what trans women were saying about the whole thing and read about how they were (are) tangibly impacted by the movement. Even when it was uncomfy and made me feel weird. Even when it felt like a woman was being unnecessarily mean or said something that felt unkind (bc what happened beforehand that pushed her to that?? Why wouldn’t she be angry when discussing her own oppression?? I know how this goes).

Under the seemingly reasonably surface of some of these transandrophobia posts, I found, overwhelmingly, transmascs refusing to take accountability for their harmful actions, denying their privileges (esp the white ones), intentionally degendering transfems, leading harassment campaigns against trans women who dared to disagree with them. (A woman was mean to me! Get rid of her! Be so ffr. The male fragility and violence is on full display here). I saw trans women disappearing from this site in droves for daring to be angry, daring to stand up for themselves, daring to be slightly annoying, daring to simply exist and be visible. I have since seen a version of this happen to a trans woman in one of the irl queer organizations in my city. This is NOT an exclusively online issue. This is having real impacts on real trans women IN REAL FUCKING LIFE. AT EVENTS AND IN SOCIAL GROUPS.

The most important lesson in all of this though? FUCKING LISTEN TO WOMEN ABOUT WOMEN’S ISSUES WITHOUT MAKING IT ABOUT YOU. LOOK at what is ACTUALLY HAPPENING AROUND YOU. Your brothers are intentionally tearing down and socially murdering our trans sisters.

1) Those who would have absolutely been the types to attend Michfest and would act as if trans women were being unreasonable on calling them out on it.

"Baeddel" is the Old English etymological root of the word bad, and is thought to have been an early word for various gender-variant groups of people, primarily transfeminized and/or intersex ones, at a time when knowledge about the distinctions there was necessarily pretty lacking.

Its modern usage on Tumblr is basically a classic "there's a version of this human rights movement that goes TOO FAR" applied to transfeminism. Baeddel accusations usually come from not prioritizing trans men's issues over trans women's issues, and responding to transmisogynist harassment in any other way than bending over backwards to placate the harassers.

The reason why "baeddel" has taken on this usage traces back to some shit that happened on tumblr in 2014. Now, in 2014 I was busy repressing so hard I failed to see the lesbian reading of Madoka, so I wasn't in transfem spaces on Tumblr at the time, but my understanding is that there were some trans women talking about transfeminism, and they had incomplete political analysis like basically anyone who does politics online. Apparently someone associated with that group was racist, because any nascent political movement online will eventually have to deal with a weird racist trying to get popular among them. I don't know whether they handled that problem well or not, I just know that accusations of racism exist.

Some women are expected to be strong at times when they can't. Her feminism would involve reassuring her that it's okay to not be strong.

Some neurodivergent people are raised to believe that they're too stupid to ever amount to anything. Their disability activism would involve reassuring them that they're capable.

Some neurodivergent people are raised to believe that they're smart and gifted, and are expected to live up to impossible standards. Their disability activism would involve allowing them to fail, make mistakes, be stupid, etc.

Some children are constantly reminded "you're the child, I'm the adult" in order to deny their autonomy. Their youth rights activism would involve treating them like an adult at times when they feel ready for it.

Some children are treated like adults in order to justify increased expectations or to downplay abuse against them. Their youth rights activism would involve allowing them to be a child.

So, I was almost going to say “we have never been trans femme,” but I think a better way to say it would be that actually we have and we are, but we lack the vocabulary to speak that to the larger phobic culture in which we live, or even to ourselves, intramurally. And I’m thinking of that not as two nonbinary people sitting at my dining room table talking over coffee, nor as two transsexuals, but as two faggots who are in love, both of whom are gay in different ways. Our situation eclipses the taxonomies we are led to believe are both operative and describe reality in ways that are juicy and delicious between you and me, but lack wider legibility. One of the things we often joke about is that we would drop dead if a straight person thought we were straight too, since that’s not what it means for a masc and a femme to be together as two faggots."

If you send someone a message, they're going to respond to the message and the contents within that message. You didn't just express an opinion, you sent that opinion to me, expecting a response. I responded.

People took issue with your rambling screed because of what the words said in the order you said them. If you were making a different point than what the words said, you should have proofread before hitting send.

As for "biological sex", I've been arguing that sex is a social construct all day, anon. The construct of sex is the thing that decides which bodily traits are sexed and prescribes that modifying them has a special status as something requiring extra scrutiny in the first place.

Blocking does not have to be some big gesture. I block people for being assholes but I'm also willing to block someone for giving a dumb take about my fav character. I've blocked people because I was tired of seeing their posts in a tag I'm browsing. I've blocked people who had opinions I agreed with but they were an ass about it. I've blocked people simply because I didn't like their personality or the vibe they gave off.

in an effort to make this ttrpg more accessible to people who hate the idea of rolling a dice and adding a number to that dice roll, we've completely removed all the depth of the character customization.

you still have to add a number to your dice roll, but you've got less ways to influence what that number is and less ways to make meaningful decisions on your turn.

we did this because we're absolutely desperate to appeal to someone who's still turned off by having to evaluate 12+4=16 in their head.

digital automation tool to help people who struggle with arithmetic?

Like I could make a post saying "hey idk who needs to hear this, but two things can be true at the same time, and you should only correct people when what they said contradicts what you know is true. A person saying something that isn't incorrect doesn't need to be corrected even if you don't think that the way they worded it is The Most Correct Thing. Someone saying that a horse is a large mammal isn't denying the existence of elephants or whales, and there is no need to inform them that there are bigger ones."

That controversial paper was born of the Cold War. To listen for Soviet submarines, the U.S. Navy installed chains of underwater listening posts in the Pacific and Atlantic. This network, known as the Sound Surveillance System, or SOSUS, picked up a deluge of oceanic noises. Some were clearly biological. Others were more mysterious. One especially enigmatic sound was monotonous, repetitive, and low, with a frequency of 20 Hz—an octave below the lowest key on a standard piano. This hum was so loud that people doubted it could be coming from an animal. Did it have a military origin? Was it produced by underwater tectonic activity? Did it come from waves crashing on some distant shoreline? The actual source only became clear when Navy scientists started following the sounds to their sources, and often found a fin whale at the end.

Human hearing typically bottoms out at around 20 Hz. Below those frequencies, sounds are known as infrasound, and they’re mostly inaudible to us unless they’re very loud. Infrasounds can travel over incredibly long distances, especially in water. Knowing that fin whales also produce infrasound, Payne calculated, to his shock, that their calls could conceivably travel for 13,000 miles. No ocean is that wide. Together with oceanographer Douglas Webb, Payne published his calculations, speculating that the largest whales “may be in tenuous acoustic contact throughout a relatively enormous volume of ocean.” The response was brutal. Leading whale researchers told him that his paper was pure fantasy. Colleagues hinted that critics had been questioning his mental health behind his back. “When you get to distances like that, people just refuse to believe that it’s true,” Payne tells me.

Payne’s work made a more positive impression on Chris Clark. A young acoustician and former choirboy, Clark was recruited by Roger and Katy Payne to be a sound technician on a 1972 trip to Argentina to study right whales. It was a thrilling and formative time. Camped on a beach beneath the Southern Cross, with penguins bumbling past and albatrosses wheeling overhead, Clark began listening to whales. He placed hydrophones in the water to eavesdrop on their songs and found ways of assigning specific recordings to individual whales. He went on to compile libraries of whale calls, recorded all over the world, from Argentina to the Arctic. And all the while, Payne’s idea of giant whales talking over oceans stuck with him.

In the 1990s, with the Cold War over and the threat of Soviet subs diminished, the Navy offered Clark and others a chance to observe real-time recordings from their SOSUS hydrophones. Amid the spectrograms—visual representations of the sounds that SOSUS picked up—Clark saw the unmistakable signal of a singing blue whale. On his first day, Clark saw that more blue whale vocalizations had been recorded from a single SOSUS sensor than had been described before in the entire scientific literature. The ocean was awash with their calls, and those calls were coming in from enormous distances. Clark calculated that one individual was 1,500 miles from the sensor that recorded it. He could listen to whales singing in Ireland with a microphone situated off Bermuda. “I just thought: Roger was right,” he says. “It is physically possible to detect a blue whale singing across an ocean basin.” (...)

Although blue and fin whale songs can traverse oceans, no one knows if the whales actually communicate at such ranges. It’s possible that they’re signaling to nearby individuals with very loud calls, which just happen to extend further afield. But Clark points out that they repeat the same notes, over and over again, and at very precise intervals. A singing whale will stop calling when it surfaces for air, and come back on the beat when it submerges. “That’s not arbitrary,” he says. It reminds him of the redundant and repetitive signals that Martian rovers use to beam data back to Earth. If you wanted to design a signal that could be used to communicate across oceans, you’d come up with something similar to a blue whale’s song.

Those songs might have other uses, too. Their notes can last for several seconds, with wavelengths as long as a football field. Clark once asked a Navy friend what he could do with such a call. “I could illuminate the ocean,” the friend replied. That is, he could map distant underwater landscapes, from submerged mountains to the seafloor itself, by processing the echoes returning from the far-reaching infrasounds. Geophysicists can certainly use fin whale songs to map the density of the ocean crust. But can the whales do so?

Clark sees evidence in their movements. Through SOSUS, he has seen blue whales emerging in polar waters between Iceland and Greenland and making a beeline—a whaleline?—for tropical Bermuda, singing all the way. He has seen whales slaloming between underwater mountain ranges, zigging and zagging between landmarks hundreds of miles apart. “When you watch these animals move, it’s as if they have an acoustic map of the oceans,” he says. He also suspects that the animals can build up such maps over their long lives, accruing sound-based memories that lurk in their mind’s ear. After all, Clark recalls veteran sonar specialists telling him that different parts of the sea had their own distinctive sounds. “They said: If you put a pair of headphones on me, I can tell you if I’m near Labrador or off the Bay of Biscay,” says Clark. “I thought that if a human being could do this in 30 years, what could an animal do with 10 million years?”

The scale of a whale’s hearing is hard to grapple with. There’s the spatial vastness, of course, but also an expanse of time. Underwater, sound waves take just under a minute to cover 50 miles. If a whale hears the song of another whale from a distance of 1,500 miles, it’s really listening back in time by about half an hour, like an astronomer gazing upon the ancient light of a distant star. If a whale is trying to sense a mountain 500 miles away, it has to somehow connect its own call with an echo that arrives 10 minutes later. That might seem preposterous, but consider that a blue whale’s heart beats around 30 times a minute at the surface, and can slow to just 2 beats a minute on a dive. They surely operate on very different timescales than we do. If a zebra finch hears beauty in the milliseconds within a single note, perhaps a blue whale does the same over seconds and minutes. To imagine their lives, “you have to stretch your thinking to completely different levels of dimension,” Clark tells me. He compares the experience to looking at the night sky through a toy telescope and then witnessing its full majesty through NASA’s spaceborne Hubble telescope. When he thinks about whales, the world feels bigger, stretching out in space and time.

Whales weren’t always big. They evolved from small, hoofed, deer-like animals that took to the water around 50 million years ago. Those ancestral creatures probably had vanilla mammalian hearing. But as they adapted for an aquatic life, one group of them—the filter-feeding mysticetes, which include blues, fins, and humpbacks—shifted their hearing to low infrasonic frequencies. At the same time, their bodies ballooned into some of the largest Earth has ever seen. These changes are probably connected. The mysticetes achieved their huge size by evolving a unique style of feeding, which allows them to subsist upon tiny crustaceans called krill. Accelerating into a krill swarm, a blue whale expands its mouth to engulf a volume of water as large as its own body, swallowing half a million calories in one gulp. But this strategy comes at a cost. Krill aren’t evenly distributed across the oceans, so to sustain their large bodies, blue whales must migrate over long distances. The same giant proportions that force them to undergo these long journeys also equip them with the means to do so—the ability to make and hear sounds that are lower, louder, and more far-reaching than those of other animals.

Back in 1971, Roger Payne speculated that foraging whales could use these sounds to stay in touch over long distances. If they simply called when fed and stayed silent when hungry, they could collectively comb an ocean basin for food and home in on bountiful areas that lucky individuals have found. A whale pod, Payne suggested, might be a massively dispersed network of acoustically connected individuals, which seem to be swimming alone but are actually together."