watching porn and paying for sex will fix you

If you were studying the human age from the vantage point of a distant posthuman future, you'd still be liable to find:

Artificially shaped bits of glass, terracotta, marble, gold, inox steel, etc. If exposed, these are going to be worn by erosion fairly quickly, but if buried soon enough they will endure pretty much forever. of course, this doesn't mean they're going to be excavated before the bit of crust that contains them is destroyed by tectonic events. Various plastics may survive, although they are close enough to organic matter that I expect eventually bacteria will evolve to eat it.

We're leaving behind a truly bizarre amount of skeletons, thanks to our habit to bury or embalm dead bodies. I'm not sure how much longer the burial itself will be recognizable -- perhaps we'll look just like the boom of Lystrosaurus just after the Permian Extinction. Cattle and chicken bones will also probably abund, and future paleontologists might wonder why these animals increased in size but shrunk their brains and horns/spurs. (Especially since the most abundant skeletons have massive braincases and dainty little jaws.)

Our epoch will be marked in the geological record by a thin layer full of all sorts of weird stuff -- jumbles of rare metals, exotic organic molecules. nuclear fission products -- that future chemists might still be able to recognize, even if any solid object is destroyed. The layer is global, like the iridium deposit left by the Chicxulub impact, so much of it should survive even if erosion and subduction destroy most of it.

It should also be possible to notice atmospheric carbon dioxide fuckery by checking leaf anatomy in plant fossils, composition of layers in ice sheets (if they have existed continuously!), and fossils of calcium carbonate-producing organisms such as bivalves and foraminifera, but it might not be obvious that it was an artificial event and not e.g. a supervolcanic eruption.

I see this rarely addressed in this sort of discussion, but we are absolutely wreaking havoc on biogeography. Paleontologists will see rabbits and camels suddenly appear in Australia, pigs and chicken in America, land mammals in New Zealand, and so on -- and that's not mentioning crop plants! The mysterious appearance of monkeys in South America 30 million years ago can be explained by rafting across a much narrower Atlantic, but this would be far too much all at once.

A couple relevant links:

Stratigraphy of the Anthropocene (Zalasiewicz et al., 2011): properties of the geological layer of our times

louder for the people in the back. this normalization and support of hamas is unforgivable.

every supposedly progressive person and institution that has engaged in this so much Gazan blood on their hands

and if you subscribe to the "horrible people don't deserve to see their rapists face justice/do deserve to be raped" take, then there will be people out there who think those things about you.

That's the thing about human rights: every human deserves them. Every single one. You do not have to earn them by having the "correct" opinions or doing the "right" things. Every single human deserves them, no matter fucking what, simply because they are human.

#this also includes israeli women on oct 7th

#whom plenty of people have condemned as being horrible just by virtue of where they live

#'me too unless you're a jew' hard at work there

If you read the link the company does of course say they’re replacing the existing forums with new ones, and I’m sure no one would say the old ones didn’t perhaps need a lil bit of a glow up, some tech debt fixing… but there’s a few key notes in there:

They are NOT carrying over any history, data messages etc. from the old forums

They are NOT archiving, retaining or in any way saving the existing forums in any way

They have NOT provided any reasoning past ‘as part of continued efforts to support developers’

As an offhand, moderate read, this sounds to me like a desire for some change in the forums but deciding nuking everything is less expensive than rebuilding and carrying over info.

If I’m cynical, and likely realistic? Probably to increase sales of their latest GameMaker software by making it inherently more difficult for someone getting the older software for cheap pushing it to its limits. The amount of institutional knowledge on those forums is absurd.

And even if it is a benign reason, it’s still terrible because what do you mean you’re doing this with no recourse or potential for change? You sell software that runs on community goodwill? In an era where people are pulling away to open source software?? Crazy.

There are yeeeaaars of answers, plugins, suggestion, community built up on those forums - I’ve used the em to learn and grow my own skillet!!! And soon it won’t exist.

At the very least, they gave a ‘heads up’ - the deletion occurs mid December, so archiving by the community is possible from now. It’s just absurd that it needs to happen in the first place.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260000000000*/https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/

https://rpgmakerchat.com/

https://github.com/imraf/rpgmakerweb-archive/

Remember you are a guest in this space. I don’t know a single person who would rather you shit yourself or get assaulted than use the disabled toilet, but please remember that these toilets are built and designed for disabled people after a huge amount of campaigning and activism.

Don’t touch or move things you don’t need to. If you’re not familiar with how things work or why they are where they are just leave it be. The position of a bin might not mean anything to you but it could be really important to a wheelchair user who needs to change their tampon. Don’t touch things like grab rails either – while they’re fairly tough and you’re unlikely to cause any damage it’s not impossible and if you don’t touch it, you can’t break it.

Related, but important enough to have its own point: please don’t touch the red cord. Do not tie it up, do not wrap it around anything, don’t tuck it behind a bin. Don’t touch it (The only exception to this is to untie a cord that’s been tied up) If the cord doesn’t fall freely to the floor it could prevent a disabled person calling for help in an emergency. If you’re worried about accidentally pulling it there’s almost always at least one reset button in there with you. Press that and it cancels the alarm.

If possible allow other people waiting to go first. A lot of disabilities, both visible and less apparent, can cause problems with incontinence, urgency or pain that make it difficult for someone to wait to use the toilet. If there’s someone else in the queue and you are able to do so, offering to let them go first might really help them out.

If you want to get a radar key, get it from disability rights UK or give a small donation to a disability charity (again only if you’re able to). I’ve seen a couple of trans orgs giving away free radar keys and it’s unclear how they are being sourced. Knockoffs are common but only “real” RADAR keys are from Disability Rights UK and any profits help fund their charity work. Bear in mind that most disabled people also have to pay for these keys which are about £5. (Disability Rights UK say their keys are to be sold to disabled people or organisations only, this is a legal thing they have to say about VAT relief. There is no real way of following up how disabled someone who buys a radar key is because you don’t need to claim any benefits to be eligible for VAT relief and keys are a low value item that isn’t worth anyone looking into when things like adapted cars exist. Be gay, do crime, support disabled people having rights.)

Know the difference between a standard accessible toilet and a changing places toilet. Don’t use a changing places toilet if there is any other safe option. These have a different symbol and are bigger and fitted with extra equipment for severely disabled people and our carers. That equipment is more sensitive than anything you’ll find in a standard accessible toilet so if you do find yourself in one touch nothing. Especially don’t move the hoist (lifting equipment) as it can cause it to run out of power and make the whole space functionally useless if it’s not in the right space on the track. (To be fair this is an unlikely scenario as there aren’t that many of these toilets, but just in case)

I'm so tired of articles on intersex variations where the visuals are graphic images of genitals & obviously uncomfortable (semi-)naked people with their faces cropped or blurred out.

It has really been a breath of fresh air to instead have humanizing photos of actual (often famous) intersex individuals as the illustrations for intersex variations, e.g.: