This is where I post things that tickle my fancy and blog about the books I'm reading. Some of the books I read contain adult content which may be included in a post and some reposts may include mature content, proceed with care. Book posts may include spoilers with little to no warning, you have been warned!
Look we have records of Medieval Knights crying out in their sleep, having emotional outbursts or flinching at the sound of clashing metal. We have records of people all through history who were treated badly by people who should have loved them, and having problems knowing who to trust. We have years worth of artists putting their human pain at broken hearts and broken promises into music that makes us cry.
Yes people have been traumatized by awful things for all of history and just like them You didnβt deserve to be hurt either.
Where's that post about how Van Gogh didn't make art because he had depression, he made art because he had a brother who loved him and tried his best to support him and keep him alive through his depression.
My ancestors are primarily Scandinacian, and I have always been told that in my parents' youth it was common and normal for Scandinavian men to cry. There are all kinds of old texts and stories that include men weeping from the strength of their feelings. Strong feelings were viewed as just that: strong.
So I think my grandfather would consider men being sensitive to be normal and positive. A man with no feelings is a man without a purpose.
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As a chronic "good heavens" sayer, and as a casual rhyme enjoyer, it's been really hard not to pepper in the phrase "good heavens six sevens" into my vocabulary. It would be so much fun to say, but it would immediately alienate both young hip people and old antiquated people and really only be enjoyed by whimsically autistic transgender women, so yeah :/
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"if you take testosterone youll look like your DAD!! DO YOU WANT TO LOOK LIKE YOUR DAD?!! YOULL LOOK LIKE A GROSS UGLY MAN YOULL LOOK LIKE YOUR DAD!" nope! adoptedπ
shoutout to the guys saying "my dad is awesome itll be cool if i look like him" but especially shoutout to the guys saying "i will/do look like my dad on t and i am making him suffer for it. he is evil and he HATES that i look like him. im like him but better" yall have a powerful aura
I want a video game with realistic dick and balls physics not for any prurient reason, but... okay, so you know how in some games with boob physics, there's a palpable delay after a character model is instantiated before physics start to apply to the boobs, so it's like *pop* ... *FWOMP*? I want to see the cock version of that. Penis-having character spawns in, there's a beat, then the physics engine tries to play catch-up and applies a full second of gravitational acceleration to their junk all at once and they just randomly start helicoptering.
Our friends and niece are on a brief layover in our neck of the woods heading to Taiwan. We decided to go to dinner on their seven hour layover. At the table our six year old niece was trying to get us to play a number game on our hands and struggling to explain the rules.
It took several parental additions until the rules became clear to my wife and I. In theory it seemed like the game was designed to help hone her math skills but it was far more elaborate than the run of the mill hand game kids play.
I asked North where sheβd picked up the game. She told me it was a variation on something sheβd played when she was little.
βI did add to it because we wanted the rounds to last longer.β
I nodded with narrowed eyes and told her, βI thought so. This reeks of your influence.β
She threw her head back laughing and did not contest the allegation even a little bit.
we have dandelions EVERYWHERE, they are basically our State Weed, it is absolutely impossible that my mom has never interacted with a dandelion before, this requires further investigation
So after extensive interrogation I have an update:
my mom is in fact aware that dandelions exist. she temporarily forgot the name and there was some miscommunication.
the truth is actually weirder
sheβs aware dandelions look like this
she is familiar with this flower. she knows the name of this flower. she declines to believe, however, that these are also dandelions
she does not believe these are the same plant. I tried to explain, and she thought I was either misinformed or lying. so I asked her what exactly did she think the yellow ones were called?
she answered, with complete confidence: Daffodils.
βbuttercupsβ is a name applied to MANY flowers. in my part of the south it was this one:
imo thereβs correct identifications of dandelions, daffodils, easter lilies and marigolds in this thread, but buttercups are simply impossible to agree on and the only solution is for everyone to post pictures of their local buttercups
This disability pride month, I think it needs to be widely acknowledged that
a fundamental principle of disability justice is being able to recognise when someone might be more disabled than you.
[plain text: a fundamental principle of disability justice is being able to recognise when someone might be more disabled than you]
It's easy to point at ableds who will refuse to acknowledge others disabilities, not notice inaccessibility, or cringe away from catheterisation, stomas, hygiene problems and all the troubles that come with disability. It's simple to recognise that that's not okay.
But sometimes within the disabled community people don't do that well. And it's hard because there are of course many people fighting the internalised ableism that demands they downplay their disability. But the answer to that is not saying "nobody is more disabled than anyone else". This is not true. This has never been true.
You will not be able to work towards disability justice if you can't recognise that not all disabilities are equal. Even two people with the same disability - two people with SCIs, two people with autism, two people with EDS, etc. - may have wildly different levels of difficulty. And if you can't recognise that, you're being ableist. I'm sorry, I know that might be hard for some people, but you cannot have any kind of real understanding of disability if you cannot acknowledge when you are more or less disabled than another person.
Bringing this back for 2026 with a reminder that when I say it's a fundamental principle of disability justice, I'm not just saying that.
Disability justice is a framework and movement that builds on the disability rights movement, and has ten core principles. The second is "leadership of those most impacted" - being led by the people of our community who most know the subject and systems at hand. You can't practice leadership of those most impacted if you don't stop to consider who they are. You can't practice it if you aren't always ready to recognise when it may not be you. You can't practice it if you don't work to uplift the disabled people around you so that their voices can be heard.
This principle is what made the disability rights and independent living movements so powerful. We remember names like Judy Heumann and Ed Roberts as figureheads of these movements (with their work not limited to the US), but one look at their work shows they deliberately and always put in the work to uplift others in their community. From community consulting to practical assistance to recognising that we all have different needs that we deserve to have met - as simple as just waiting for someone to finish their sentence if they speak slowly, and not demanding everyone meet arbitrary communication standards - they understood that there is no disability fight without a deliberately built "us" to fight together.
If you're someone who prides yourself on advocacy, being a voice for the disabled community, fighting for equity: make sure you aren't fighting alone. Make sure you're remembering the disabled people around you, and make sure you're noticing when there are people missing around you and why. This solidarity doesn't mean "shut up". It means bringing together diverse experiences so people can be heard together.
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just learned americans have different standard paper sizes than everyone else. what do you MEAN you donβt have A4 as the standard. what do you mean your standard paper size isnβt even the same size as an A4. apparently itβs like. βletterβ and βlegalβ and whatever else. help!!!
So I work in engineering; and always wondered who used these weird βAβ sizes Iβd see in large printer settings that Iβve never seen any company even have paper in stock for. Now I know.
And now I have to be one of those obnoxious US Americans because WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU USE THESE WEIRD UNEVEN DIMENSIONS!? Even in metric most of the βAβ settings are an annoying ratio! 210x297mm? 594x841mm!? Whatβs the point of using such small units of measurement if youβre not going to make sensible sizes!?
because the largest standard paper size is A0 which is exactly one square metre of paper with an aspect ratio of the square root of two. this gives us a nice simple measurement of area for the paper as well as allows us to do the halving/doubling magic. A1 is 0.5mΒ², A2 is 0.25mΒ² etc.
The halving/doubling magic that psychaun refers to is the fact that you can get each paper in the series by cutting the previous one in half. I fold some A4 paper in half, I have an A5 booklet. I tape two A4 pieces together along their long side, I have an A3 piece. Each piece of paper is half the area of the previous and half the width of the previous' length with a length the same as the previous' width. The aspect ratio is exactly the same for every size. This makes it very easy to resize things, fold things inside each other, and calculate the size of paper you've never used before based on its name. "I can resize this to fit any other paper size because the aspect ratio is identical," "I can fold a standard size in half to get the next standard size down" and "the area I'm working with can be multiplied up to fit into a metre squared without any messy fractions of leftover paper" are all far more practical considerations for a paper size than "the millimetre length of this paper size isn't a round number".
The US doesn't "have to do things different" for the sake of doing things differently, as your words imply, nor is the sentence above about who uses what paper fully correct, either*.
The reason that the US (and Canada, most of Central America, Chile, and the Philippines) use different standard sizes* from Europe is probably pretty easy to figure out when you think about things like "there's a big fucking ocean between two of those places, but not between all of the countries in Europe."
The standard size of paper, according to the American Forest and Paper Association, comes from the days of manual paper-making, and their assertion that 44" is about the length of the average experienced vatsman's comfortable grasp. So a sheet is 1/4" that length. The US standardized its own paper according to what legacy equipment it had, and keeps those standards because even today, paper tends to not be shipped back and forth between Europe and the US unless it has to be, because paper and books are really fucking heavy, so why should either one of us change our standards? Doing so would require massive amounts of capital investment, and frankly, we like our paper sizes just fine. It's really not to our detriment at all. We don't really import a lot of paper, and in fact, we export a lot of it.
American paper sizes are also half of each previous size, it's just that our base is a rectangle, not a square, uses imperial measurements, and reaches back to measurements based on manual paper-making. Sure, we could spend billions of dollars changing our standards to meet that of countries that don't supply us with this good, creating a massive amount of industrial and consumer waste as everything from paper manufacturing mills and industrial printing presses to plastic binders and hole punches at schools all become garbage, but... why? We also use different standard sizes of snack food bags, based on how our industries developed, but there's no actual reason for those things to be standardized, so why, exactly, should they be? Because it bothers someone who doesn't use our machines and didn't know until today that it was different? That's not a real reason. That's just "haha the US sucks and is dumb and irrational."
No, it's actually super fucking rational when you remember that most European countries are smaller than US states, and we're standardized across the places where paper actually moves back and forth in massive bulk on a regular basis. You know: our own states, and Canada, and not Europe, on account of this being a huge fucking continent and paper being incredibly heavy and expensive to transport across oceans. That's why it's governed by the American National Standards Institute, which also governs or governed stuff like thread standards for nuts and bolts & exposure standards for film. The latter had the ANSI standard become the ISO standard, which is a great example of technology which was developed more recently and more specialized and thus not so deeply rooted and hard to change being much more possible to standardize.
tl;dr: all industrial standards like paper sizes have valid and long-argued reasons why they're like that, and unless you're coughing up the solution for changing something with hundreds of years of built-up infrastructure without breaking all of the industries that depend on that standard, the cash to do it, and the reason why all the old equipment that can't be converted should become garbage... fuck off, man, and leave us alone. There are real problems in the world, go solve those.
*While many Mesoamerican countries have officially adopted ISO standards, ANSI standard paper is most commonly in use day to day.
#you could use the same reasons to justify the us still using standard instead of metric #which is stupid and counterproductive as hell #I don't think anyone seriously believes the us just does things their own special way for it's own sake
#however they do double down on doing it their way even when there are other (arguably better) ways
#out of weird american exceptionalism #so I think that people getting frustrated and saying that America just insists on doing things in dumb ways #is a shorthand for all of that
THOSE ARE THE SAME! FUCKING!! REASONS!!! WE DON'T (FULLY, MANDATORILY) USE METRIC
Holy fucking shit. People could literally spend 30 seconds looking this up instead of repeating "bluh bluh bluh America dumb"
The U.S. does not use the metric system due to high conversion costs, inertia, resistance, and historical reluctance.
The US has actually used a hybrid of metric and Imperial for decades, with changeover occurring where it's both necessary and economically viable, and has not fully switched over because of the prohibitive cost and ingrained habits. Literally trillions of dollars worth of equipment, road signs, documentation, like... I genuinely think y'all don't have any concept of how fucking big this country is, or how much this shit costs to change.
Let's take one single easy thing. Ready? Speed limit signs. How much would it cost just to change the speed limit signs, very very approximately?
Okay. So. To keep ourselves from going fully insane, let's limit this question only to interstates. This is the network of federally-managed roads which, you know, goes from state to state. There are 48,890 miles (sorry! 78,680 km, but I'm still mostly calculating in miles, because it's easier to find numbers this way) of interstate roadway in the US.
There are between 1 and 4 speed limit signs per mile, depending on traffic density. For simplicity, let's say 2 per mile.
It costs about $400 per sign to replace a speed limit sign. This is just speed limit signs. We'll get to other signs in a minute.
So that's $39.11 million dollars just for the speed limit signs. But hold on! You can't even get to replacing exit signs until you replace mile marker signs! Those are approximately every 1/10th to 2/10 of a mile, again on average, bc you don't want someone to have to walk very far to look for a mile marker if they've been in an accident. Let's go with every 2/10 of a mile. It costs $200 to remove a sign and $550 to place a new one, bc you have to get surveyors out to measure them and place them properly.
So let's see, that's 244,450 signs removed... $48.89 million... and then let's say we're placing kilometer markers every half kilometer just to make it nice and even, okay? 157,360 new half-kilometer markers at $550 each. $86.5 million.
So we're already spending about $174.5 million dollars, about $15 million more β on just replacing those two kinds of road signs just on interstates, which are a tiny fraction of the actual number of miles of state or federally-managed roads β than it costs the Federal Housing Authority to oversee the processing of every mortgage in the US for a year, just to pull a random line item out of the 2026 budget. We haven't touched any of the other signs on those or any other roads, let alone literally anything else.
And for what, exactly? Why? Because it fucking bugs people who don't live here? What is the purpose of spending a bunch of fucking money to change our shit up and just confuse people who think in miles?
We use metric when it both makes sense and is financially feasible to switch. My medication is measured in metric. A lot of precise machinery is measured in metric, especially new things that were created or invented in the last few decades or are used in scientific fields. Grandma's recipes and the roads and our paper are done the way that works for us in our big weird country that is actually 50 smaller and extremely proud little countries wrestling for elbow room in a giant lumpy trenchcoat, and it's not hurting you, so you don't have to be a dick about it.
Trans activist Jamison Green's passport photos before and after HRT. Left he's age 32 (1980) Right age 41 (1989) after being on testosterone for one year (x)
updated the link to his autobiography because it was broken! here's some more pictures of him (first is mid 90s, second 2013 and last 2024)
there's an interview with him from 2017 along with some information about his life and activism. and he was interviewed on a podcast here. he's not super well known but has been a really important trans activist for decades
I'm playing correspondence chess with my brother and don't feel like making a move tonight but wanted to make sure I did it tomorrow, so I wrote "move against brother" in my TODO list before realizing that sounds kind of insane.
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