look at the skill and spirit

So I had a job interview today and there was a dude in the waiting room who was chatting up every AFAB person in the waiting room whether they responded or not, and kept going “Hey I’m real good at Origami Swans you want one?” and then writing his number on sticky notes before making paper cranes and handing them to his latest target before turning his attention to the next lady in his vicinity.  A little sad, a lot annoying, but unlikely to be dangerous.  Whatever.

Dude gets to me.  We have half a conversation where he asks me personal questions and I don’t look up from my phone.  I get my “Swan”.  I’m the last AFAB person in the room so he’s kinda sitting there.

I get to a post about a friend needing moral and/or spiritual support before a medical procedeure, so my ADHD ass goes Oh hey, we have an animal effigy we could sacrifice to the relevant gods! So I take out my lighter and burn the swan roughly 23 seconds after the dude gave it to me, and crush the ashes in my hand because I belatedly realize there’s no sink for me to throw this in.  Oh well.  Purell the ashes off.

I look up.  Dude, and everyone else in the waiting room is staring at me.

“You, uh.  Smoke?” Dude tries.

What I Meant To Say: “No I just carry a lighter as a holdover from survival camp as a kid, and if I’m wearing synthetic fabrics that start to ravel, I can use the flame to melt them a bit so they stop.”

What I Actually Said: “No I just have one in case I need to set something on fire.”

I put the lighter away.  The hiring manager comes out and calls my name.  I go back and have what I think was a reasonably sucessful job interview.  I come back out.

Dude, and half of the other candidates are GONE.

Flora, 24

”I’m wearing an embroidered top from the Rose Bowl Flea in LA with a pair of Levi’s jeans and my favorite Fluevog heels. I’ve been really drawn to cartoons recently, for color and pattern inspiration.”

—

PBS: Language as Prejudice - Myth #6: Women Talk Too Much (via misandry-mermaid)

Every EVERY women’s studies class I’ve been in has had this problem and failed to address it. 

friend whos always available: i can do whenever

friend whos constantly busy: im sorry i have work and then school and then the labyrinth and then more work :( i can do tuesday at 3:00 am for five minutes tho

friend with the randomly generated sleep schedule: (no response)

friend who went missing in the woods behind their house 12 years ago and hasn't been heard from since: (no response)

The answer is: the uterus isn't what causes your period, it is effected by your period. What causes your period and what causes trans women's periods is the same thing: the endocrine system.

HRT changes the sex of your endocrine system. Feminizing HRT makes it a female endocrine system, giving us a 28-day hormone cycle just like cis women. At the end of that cycle, the hypothalamus floods the body with prostaglandins. Those are what cause all but one of the period symptoms, because they make muscles inflame and contract. They are what make the uterus shed its lining, they are what cause intestinal cramps, they are what cause body aches, they are what cause headaches and migraines. The only period symptom not causes by the release of prostaglandins throughout the body is depression, and that is caused by your endocrine system simply not processing as much estrogen and from simply feeling like shit.

So, the only symptoms trans women don't get every 28 days is menstrual cramps, because yes we do not menstruate since we don't have uteruses. But migraines, depression, body aches, intestinal cramps, and the infamous "period shits" don't exactly add up to us having any better of a time. Except we have to pretend that we're fine and nothing is different because no one believes that we get periods, not even cis women.

and she's quite up front i think about the fact that, in theory, things like bad chart formatting or weird file formats or whatever do not (in terms of strict logical necessity) affect the content of a paper. the correctness of a physics claim is not dependent on whether you typeset it in microsoft word or not. but it's a very useful heuristic, and if you have not one or two but like a half-dozen of these superficial signs of amateurishness or unseriousness in your paper, the heuristic that nobody who actually does condensed matter physics needs to bother with the contents of your paper has--in the real world--a 100% hit rate.

and this looks like smarmy gatekeeping to outsiders who want to complain that scientists don't take their crackpot theories seriously, but this isn't actually a gate being kept (it got uploaded to the arxiv! physicists are not required to respond to your paper just because you uploaded it to a preprint server; they get to choose how to spend their time). for all the failure modes scientific academia has, and even all the formal institutional barriers to access like scientific publishing (her video on academic publishing is pretty interesting--i didn't know contributors *paid to have their work published,* and quite a lot, too!) don't prevent outsiders from getting published in journals or being taken seriously.

but the crucial difference between your average crackpot and the non-scientist getting taken seriously by a peer-reviewed publication is that the latter is generally in dialogue with the field, and is able to be in dialogue with it. one thing collier always points out is that it's often obvious crackpots haven't done the reading--and in the case of LK-99 didn't notice that some of their data was characteristic of their sample being rich in copper (and thus ferromagnetic), because they just did not know enough about chemistry to recognize what was (to a chemist) obviously happening when they tried to synthesize this material.

this matters because in almost every domain of practical human knowledge we are so far from the point where a lone genius could reinvent everything they needed to know based on first principles that it's hilarious. nowadays you often need huge teams of experimental physicists collaborating on projects that cost gajillions of dollars to push forward the frontier of knowledge; you are very unlikely to do so in your garage, and still less so if you can't engage with the larger state of the field.

For example, a couple years ago, while learning Spanish, I encountered the word for a store, "la tienda." I thought "huh, that's a lot like tener (tiene) - the word for store in Spanish literally corresponds to 'to have/keep'. How interesting!"