The Mad Muse

may you feel them as the wind rustles the leaves

may they be heard in the trickle of water from the roof after the rain

may you find them in the dirt as you plant your garden

Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality,[2][3] risk of growing political bribery, and potential national decline.

tech news today is that Mullvad VPN has gone mask-off about being the major funding source for the Swedish Orebro party, who are racist nationalists. unfortunately all discussion of this is occurring on fucking Mastodon instances i can barely load

if you are a mullvad customer (as i am) and want to get out, here is guidance from this guy

Over fifty years of data show a peak in PFAS (also known as "forever chemicals") content in seabird eggs in the 90s, followed by a decrease as regulations went into effect. The most recent findings show a 70% decrease of most common PFAS.

We are making genuine progress! Producers are dramatically altering how much they use PFAS and how much gets released in effluent, but also there's a lot better understanding of how to remove PFAS from the environment!

A little book.

A dried yellow rose to symbolize our friendship, specifically.

Clear stones that refract rainbows, like quartz, diamonds, or moissanite. I have quartz.

Gold, which I don't have in copious amounts, but evidently this is the most traditional offering I could give.

Silver, although I'm not sure if I have anything thematic.

by Keziah

The Otherworld is a realm not quite separate from our own, all around us and yet not always accessible or visible to us. It has been interpreted as one expansive world and as having numerous realms and kingdoms within the one Otherworld, and is home to many beings – gods, fairies, and spirits of all sorts, along with some of the most honored and beloved dead.

It is described in ‘the Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries’ by W.Y. Evans-Wentz:

‘But this western Otherworld, if it is what we believe it to be – a poetical picture of the great subjective world – cannot be the realm of any one race of invisible beings to the exclusion of another. In it all alike – gods, Tuatha De Danann, fairies, demons, shades, and every sort of disembodied spirits – find their appropriate abode; for though it seems to surround and interpenetrate this planet even as the X-rays interpenetrate matter, it can have no other limits than those of the Universe itself.’

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

I don't expect you to have just... figured out a solution to this or anything. I just wanted to check up on how you've been doing, if the feeling has faded in any way (or otherwise become routine, which would be sad news)

Thank you for asking. I’ve been sitting on this question for a bit because, unfortunately, the loneliness has become routine, and chronic.

But I couldn’t tell you how much of it is strictly due to being a man since there are a lot of other factors involved:

I moved to a new state where I don’t know many people.

This is the first time I’m interacting with the world as myself since I was a kid, and I’ve been very slow to open up due to how new and taboo it feels.

I’m struggling to put my life in order after giving up who I used to be, so as much as I want to go out there and make friends, I feel really unfit to do so at the moment...

Post-pandemic socialization is just kind of a weird bag, man. Idk.

However, I do think the fact I read as a Cishet Straight White Guy™ makes overcoming these things harder. People seem to offer much less emotional support compared to when I was perceived as a woman, so I’ve had to be my own source of encouragement with it all.

Now, I could easily get around this barrier by telling people I’m trans, but I don’t like doing this because a) I don’t want to out myself, and b) not everyone is normal about learning I’m trans. And I’m not just talking about transphobes; trans allies and queer folks also get weird about it.

Allies generally have their hearts in the right place, but many of them interpret “trans man” and “cis man” as two different genders (they’re not), and will often subconsciously treat me as something other than male when they learn I’m trans. This forfeits all that I’ve done to be perceived as myself.

As for queer people, I’ve met a bizarre number of them who seem to think I’m magically polygamous, pansexual, and interested in fucking them and their partners simply because I’m trans. Not only is this a bold assumption to make about my sexual and romantic preferences (I’m extremely monogamous, gray-asexual, and selectively biromantic), it’s frankly rather objectifying.

So I’m really disincentivized to tell people I’m trans unless it’s clear I can trust them to be normal about it.

But I've yet to discover a solution that doesn't involve outing myself. I’m wondering if dressing in a more gender-nonconforming way would help, but I think my real problem is a confidence issue. The men I felt safe approaching in the past were ones who were comfortable with themselves and who put others at ease with their presence. It’s hard for me to put others at ease when I don’t feel at ease myself. I need to get to a point where I’m not struggling so much in order to do this, and I think that’ll just come with time.

(if not feel free to ignore)

Ime the best environment for easing into socializing (especially someplace new) is if you can manage to find a fairly niche but in-person community, because those are the most likely groups to be actively welcoming of newcomers. Things like crafting circles or less-popular sports tend to have a lot of the sort of people who would love more than anything to share their knowledge with someone who seems interested, and they’ll often be very supportive in helping you get past whatever the typical barriers to entry might be. Larp groups in particular tend to have a combination of crafting, social, and sport elements, so they’re a good place to start exploring different things and find a niche you’re happy with.

And while there definitely are a lot of niche communities that have gotten very clique-y and gate-keeper-ish, a great many more are full of people who are used to feeling a little isolated themselves, or have trouble socializing in other contexts. Being nervous, awkward, or slow to open up around those sorts of people won’t be off-putting to them—if anything, it’ll just remind them of themselves.

And that's fine if you don't have answers to how to get people to be normal about trans things. I think for most people it's really just a lack of familiarity. And for others? Well...maybe they'll have a dawning realization within a few years.

Queer folks really get less of a pass in my book, though. It's already wild to me that someone would assume I'm polygamous and pansexual just because I'm trans, but to get mad to learn that I'm not? Does anyone know where this comes from?

Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.

So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.

You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.

And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.

I explained very clearly to the manager my issue with the meat section not having the price tags listed, and they claimed it was only going to be for the meat, since meat is by weight, and the price of each item is printed on the packs of each item.

Sure. That’s how they get their foot in the door. Fast forward not even two weeks, and here we are:

Bar codes. No prices, no item descriptions. No price stickers on the individual items. Heck, not even the name of the item that is SUPPOSED to be there.

No. The only way to see the price is to scan it on your phone app, which is also recording what you looked at recently, as a way of gauging what you might be looking for in the future.

So here’s what we’re gonna do gang:

Every time you go into a store that has implemented these price-less tags:

Take 1-3 items up to the cash register. Ask the cashier for the price, or hit the price check item on the self checkout, which will likely call over the attendant.

Express that you didn’t actually want it, you just couldn’t see on the shelf how much it was.

POLITELY, AND WITH A THANK YOU FOR THE PRICE CONFIRMATION, Give the items to the cashier or attendant to put back.

When they inevitably try to push the app, politely decline. If pressed for why not, say you don’t want to have to carry your phone in-hand the whole time you are shopping in order to see how much things cost. (Not having cell service or data to use the app is NOT a valid excuse, as stores already often have complimentary WiFi AND more stores will provide WiFi rather than give up on this push for surveillance pricing)

If it’s a shelf-stable item, the cashier will have to set it aside, taking up room in their limited operating space, and eventually pass it off to someone to put in a holding area to put back later. If it’s a fridge/freezer item, it might have to get tossed due to food product sale regulations.

In either case, you are making it a pain in the ass for them to have these digital bar codes. Tie up the checkouts. Give the employees more busywork that the company has to pay them to do. Hurt their bottom line having to toss the pint of ice cream you carried around in your cart for 20 minutes before giving it back to the cashier.