Love that buton with the funny arrows

Because you can't recruit people to willingly jump out of mid-flight passenger planes for science, you redesign the study to engineer a scenario where the risk to the control group is minimsed. The plane is landed.

And then, because you've removed the main reason to use a parachute, you find that parachutes have "no effect" on mortality or injury.

The constraints of performing an ethical RCT guarantee this result. A result that we obviously know is dangerously wrong to extrapolate to the real-life uses of parachutes.

Now here's the thing: The people insisting that "evidence-based medicine" says we need RCTs of trans healthcare know this is what they're doing. It's extremely well established that you can abuse these "standards" to engineer incorrect results.

As in, how would an RCT look like that attempts to create misleading data, when it comes to HRT or trans healthcare in general?

1977: Star Wars is released, featuring, of course, Darth Vader

(Pictured: Darth Vader)

1984: Director Todd Durham releases his Star Wars parody movie, Hyperspace, featuring Darth Vader inspired villain Lord Buckethead.

(Pictured: Hyperspace poster featuring two Jawa-esque aliens flying through space in a shopping trolley.)

1987: Hyperspace is released on video in the UK, under the new title Gremloids.

(Pictured: Gremloids cover in the style of the original Star Wars poster, featuring Lord Buckethead.)

To promote the film, Mike Lee, the owner of the distributing company, ran for parliament as Lord Buckethead. He ran in Margaret Thatcher's constituency, Finchley, in order to get on TV. Lord Buckethead was representing the Gremloids party.

(Pictured: Lord Buckethead on TV with Margaret Thatcher.)

1992: Gremloids is re-released. Lord Buckethead rides again, this time against prime minister John Major in Huntingdon. (Here's a fun fact about Huntingdon: I was born there! :D) 87/92 Buckethead seems to have leaned pretty hard into the space supervillain thing, with campaign promises including 'demolish Birmingham to build a spaceport'.

(Pictured: Lord Buckethead on TV with John Major. Other notable candidates include Screaming Lord Sutch of the Monster Raving Loony Party.)

2017: comedian Jon Harvey, having recently watched Gremloids and learned of Lord Buckethead's candidacy for parliament, decides it's a great bit. He runs against Theresa May in Maidenhead. 2017 Buckethead seems to have a wackier and also more political approach, with campaign promises ranging from nonsense like 'nationalise Adele' to gesturing at actually sensible policies with stuff like 'lower the voting age to 16 and restrict voting after age 80'.

He also made an appearance on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. As with his previous incarnation, he was a member of the Gremloids party.

(Pictured: Lord Buckethead dabbing on stage with Theresa May.)

2018: Director Todd Durham asserts his legal ownership of Lord Buckethead. Jon Harvey opted not to go to court over Buckethead and handed over the reins. Todd Durham extended an invitation to anyone who wanted to be the 'authorised' Lord Buckethead.

(Pictured: the new Lord Buckethead.)

2019: Lord Buckethead, now played by journalist David Hughes, stood against Boris Johnson in Uxbridge and South Ruislip. He ran for the Monster Raving Loony Party, the UK's pre-existing gag candidate party. He ran with a similarly silly manifesto as the 2017 incarnation, but with a bit less of a political edge. His promises included 'All doorways to be increased by 1 foot (30 cm) in height' and 'Nigel Farage to be sold for parts'.

(Pictured: Lord Buckethead and Count Binface square up.)

Meanwhile, Jon Harvey in his new persona Count Binface, also ran against Boris Johnson. Buckethead and Binface face off! Binface ran as an independent with a manifesto once again blending silly and semi-serious promises such as 'nationalising model railways' and 'giving £1 trillion a week to the NHS'. This was also I believe the debut of his promise to 'move the hand dryer in the men's toilet at Uxbridge's Crown and Treaty pub to a more sensible position'.

(Pictured: Count Binface presenting the offending hand dryer, inconveniently close to both the sink and the urinals.)

He has a point.

2021: Count Binface runs for the position of Mayor of London for the first time, with promises such as 'London to join the European Union'. He notably finished ahead of far right party UKIP.

2023: Count Binface runs in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election following Boris Johnson's resignation. He once again gets more votes than UKIP.

May 2024: Count Binface once again runs to be Mayor of London, debuting his now iconic 'build at least one affordable house' promise. Notably, he finished ahead of far right party Britain First.

(Pictured: Count Binface with Rishi Sunak. Also pictured: Monster Raving Loony Party candidate Sir Archibald Stanton with a ventriloquist's dummy.)

July 2024: Count Binface stands in the general election, running in Richmond and Northallerton against prime minister Rishi Sunak. He debuts his promise to cap the price of 99p flakes at 99p. This is his most successful election to date with 308 votes.

(Pictured: Count Binface with Andy Burnham. Also pictured: independent candidate Robert Pownell, dressed as a fox for his own reasons.)

June 2026: Count Binface stands in the Makerfield by-election against Andy Burnham, (recently) former Mayor of Manchester running for parliament with the intention of standing in the Labour Party leadership contest.

(Pictured: Count Binface on BBC's Newsnight.)

An idea I had for Blood of Eden propaganda/recruitment posters featuring some of our favorite guys - combo of digital-print cyberpunk graphic design style with oldschool Saturday Morning Post covers like you'd see Leyendecker paintings on

I was gonna post these ahead of tabling at a small con and selling prints of them but ended up not tabling because turns out grad school is hard

Hey, folks! It's that time again. If you aren't familiar with my story, posts going into the situation in more detail can be found here and here. The short version is that I am a queer, trans, severely disabled person, attempting to rebuild my life while living in poverty after escaping domestic violence at the hands of abusive family who nearly killed me. Currently I have no reliable income, and for the last six months or so I have been almost entirely reliant on donations to survive.

To update on things so far: I've made it safely to the other place, and have been mostly recovering from the move and getting settled back in. I am happy to report that, with functioning A/C and a clean environment where housemates aren't incentivized to be awful, I am already doing much, much better than I was, and I am feeling immensely hopeful about what I'll be able to get done to pull my life together with a year of not having to worry about where I'll be living next month.

However, for that to continue being a reality, I'll still need help with covering rent and bills until I can get some meaningful financial aid in order. As things are I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but if I lose my housing that will all come crashing down, and I will be extremely unlikely to survive long if it does; even without the nerve damage, physical frailty, and extreme autoimmune heat sensitivity, outdoor temps where I live at this time of year reach 100°F+ on the heat index most days, and without a roof I will have zero protection from any of it. The killing heat is here, and will likely be here for most of the year yet.

To that end, I am once again asking for donations. I have significantly more spoons to put into art than I did before the move, if anyone would like doodles in return for a donation (though my workspace is still limited), but anything at all helps; I would not be alive without the kindness of strangers online, and as much of a nightmare as things are in the broader world right now I'm finally starting to feel some hope. Please help me stay alive and keep fighting. 💜

My goals are:

$750 (Rent for this month, due by the 26th)

$280 (Bills, meds, and groceries for this month; will need to start paying my own phone line, since that's being cut off this month)

$650 (Rent for next month; however much of this I can get a headstart on will be helpful)

-

Current Goal: $130/750

But in 200 years’ time it is more than probable that that dog will be dug up from somewhere or other, minus its legs, and with its tail broken, and will be sold for old china, and put in a glass cabinet. And people will pass it round, and admire it. They will be struck by the wonderful depth of the colour on the nose, and speculate as to how beautiful the bit of the tail that is lost no doubt was.

We, in this age, do not see the beauty of that dog. We are too familiar with it. It is like the sunset and the stars: we are not awed by their loveliness because they are common to our eyes. So it is with that china dog. In 2288 people will gush over it. The making of such dogs will have become a lost art. Our descendants will wonder how we did it, and say how clever we were. We shall be referred to lovingly as “those grand old artists that flourished in the nineteenth century, and produced those china dogs.”

Like there's no way they're peeling skin and writing on it, and it would be awful for that. There's no way of doing that and getting a texture that crumples and uncrumples like paper, or rather, no way outside of the one below and then why would you only use the skin? That's extra work for no benefit.

But they ARE absolutely taking and processing human corpses and basically speedrunning it into oil / whatever and turning that into plastic products. Probably not only human parts—I'm sure there are parts of plants they don't have much use for, animal byproducts, etc—but absolutely a high volume of human parts. Gideon's mostly-polymer clothes are surely also a high volume of human parts for that matter. They don't waste resources in the Dominicus empire! :)

So on one hand, nah the "skin mags" aren't just sheets of skin, and the slang term for porn exists independently, but liiiiike... they're not NOT-skin, you know?

And on one hand, it could easily vary by House, but at least on the Ninth it seems like bodies do get to be buried for a while and then exhumed later for use. But then, that might just make it easier to work with? Let them rot in boxes and once everything has broken down you're working with pure thanergy. Allow a "respectful" grieving period and also not waste more effort on converting resources than you have to, win-win.

And! 👀 You make a great point about it not "registering" as organic(/human). Could be a chemical thing, or the non-human elements could typically dilute it too much. Though there IS also Corona's off-hand mention of Ianthe's shuttle class requiring the good stuff, "thalergy-enriched, not just hydrogen blend." Maybe necros CAN basically like, oil-bend. Pal's barrier sure looks like it and necromancy is so incredibly Fossil Fuels 2.0 in general. Maybe flimsy just doesn't carry enough to be useful for anything but reading psychometrically.

Maybe part of the process extracts as much thanergy (and thalergy if there's any left to be had in any materials) as it can, and/or there's just not enough left compared to how rigid the material is to affect harder plastics. Bone is like, THE thanergy-retaining substance and honestly as small as the Houses are I imagine more bones go into manufacturing of different kinds (everything from decor to war ships too!) than made into servants, especially outside the Ninth. They probably only have to replace constructs as they wear out every so often, they don't need a constant influx. But that's a tangent, I was saying because even Harrow is like, absurd with bones, possibly the literal greatest non-Lyctor bone magician in history prior to her ascension, and even with her whole being 200 souls advantage, forming a key out of THE thanergy substance is basically unprecedented and difficult to achieve. So that's another reason even if it's Technically organic it wouldn't be surprising necros don't really interact with it.

my personal read on thalergy-enriched was literally just 'we put blood in tha oil', which, y'know, way to literalize the metaphor jod >_<

It's not so much the book itself, as much as it is that it's not Level One Antiracism. Like, Dr. Kendi is speaking on like... Level Six. Which, I'm cool with that! The problem is, if I hand this book to a Level Zero racist, they're gonna look at some of the things in the book and go "see!! He said that you CAN be racist to white people!!!"

And it's like. Okay. What he's saying is in context to a larger conversation, almost... How would I put it. Manifesto like, in nature. Like, what he's describing versus where we currently are, sometimes are not always on the same page. And again, if you're someone that has already been doing the reading and you already understand how to critically break down what's being discussed, okay!

But to a beginner? I can already find the spots where they're gonna get tripped up or feel validated in the worst way possible. So to me, it is not beginner antiracist reading, despite positing itself as such. I almost feel like you have to have either read Stamped or watched the documentary before reading this, if you had never consumed anything of antiracist theory nature before.