Weasely Goodness

Because I just keep finding out people don't know these things!

Most boobs "sag."

Actually, on that note: very very few people have the stereotypically perfect breasts that are round and perky and don't touch your ribcage/belly. Here is an entire gallery of non-sexualized, perfectly normal breasts. Here is another one, but in one image. There's an incredible range of size and shape!

Also related: very few people fit those molded foam-cup bras. Because very few people have a boob that shape. "Then why are those kinds of bras everywhere??" Because they're cheap to make and they hide your nipples.

Your "armpit fat" is probably not armpit fat. It is probably your tail of spence, and you have lymph nodes there. Some people have a bigger or smaller tail of spence, and it has very little to do with how fat you are or how big your boobs are. (Some bras can press on it or pinch it uncomfortably, like balconettes.)

When you lie on your back, your boobs will go into your armpits. That is true of EVERYONE WITH BOOBS, with the exception of some implants. Boobs are squishy! This also means that like, lying on your side will cause them to flop over. If that's uncomfortable when you're trying to sleep, there is such a thing as "sleep bras."

Lots of people's boobs get bigger and/or painful before their period starts. Some people gain an entire cup size every month.

Whether or not you wear bras has no effect on "sagging." The one "study" on this that was written about everywhere extremely badly done. The one exception: If you do the kind of exercise that has you jumping around/jogging a lot, and you don't wear a supportive-enough bra, it's possible you can injure the cooper's ligaments. But also: that would hurt, a lot.

Bras also have no effect on whether you get breast cancer.

Everyone has one boob that's bigger than the other. It's just a matter of degree.

The size of your boobs has nothing to do with whether or not you've had sex???? I'm stunned that there are people that believe this, but I've heard multiple people say they had relatives who absolutely believed this--refused to buy teenagers the correct size bra because "only sluts wear D-cups," or insisted a thirteen-year-old was "fast" because of breast growth during puberty...good lord.

It's possible for AMAB people to breast-feed--they have the same mammary glands AFAB people do! Some hormonal issues can cause people (both AFAB and AMAB) who haven't given birth to lactate, but also there's a few cases where transgender women have been given the same hormones that AFAB people's bodies make during pregnancy/lactation, and voila! Breast milk!

• it's common for people who start off with cis male pattern chests for their nipples to be further apart on the chest than with cis female pattern boobs, so it's common for us to grow boobs that have a wider gap and don't do cleavage naturally - and this is natural (but you can get them tweaked if you want to and if you have the money or insurance or whatever in your country)

• it's also common for our boobs to grow in looking pretty conical for a while, before they fill out more over time, and this is natural - many cis boobs that come with adolescent puberty do this too, and it's worth remembering that cis puberty takes up to ten years to complete itself in terms of body shape changes, so be patient with your trans puberty

Fun fact! When I was googling to find this citation to make it easier to add the text id, google auto-completed "Stormy Daniels" to "Stormy Daniels real name" with her full legal name in giant letters right below the question!

There's also this very insightful bit from her right before the above passage:

"One of the things I want to do, because of what happened to me in court, is to use [my] platform to lobby to change the rule about being able to discriminate against sex workers. Because as a director, all these years in the business, I saw so many girls come in and not want to be stars. They just wanted to make money to go to school, and they didn’t buy purses, they didn’t do drugs, they didn’t party, they didn’t do anything fucking stupid, right? I really got to know these women on a personal level because I was directing at least once a month for 10 years. And so I saw these girls come in, do everything right, get a degree in nursing, leave the business—but then a year or two years later, they’d come back because they got fired over and over and over because they got recognized at work.

1. In every version of the myth, Medusa is born a human and Athena turns her into a monster

2. Hestia, goddess of the hearth and family, willingly gave up her place as the 12th Olympian to make room for Dionysus

3. Persephone chose Hades and wandered into the underworld of her own free will

4. Pandora didn’t know what was in her jar and unleashed evils on humanity by accident

5. During the voyage of the Argonauts the huntress Atalanta beat the hero Peleus the father of Achilles in a wrestling match

6. King Midas of Phrygia decided to give up his golden touch after turning his daughter to gold

#5 is the real one. You can find a reference to Atalanta wrestling Peleus at funeral games while on the journey of the Argo in The Library by Pseudo-Apollodorus.

This is an artistic depiction of the event from a piece of pottery currently being held in Staatlishe Museum Berlin.

Ovid invented the version where Medusa was originally a woman and Ovid hated most of the gods on principle. Also, he was Roman. The earliest versions of gorgon myths depict her and her sisters as being born as monsters.

There's no reference in ancient mythology to Hestia giving up her spot. In some regions she was one of the 12 Olympians, and in others Dionysus was on the list instead. The idea that she stepped down was invented by modern writers who like to have coherent logic in their stories.

Explained above. A bit of creative writing.

Pandora according to Hesiod was the first woman and perfectly aware of what was in her jar. She was created as part of the punishment for mankind. Human women didn't exist before Pandora according to Hesiod. But because Hesiod was misogynistic even by ancient Greek standards, writers and artists after the ancient Greek religion died out re-characterized her as stupid and curious rather than evil.

5. As explained above, real.

6. This version was invented by Nathaniel Hawthorne. In the original myth, Midas just got hungry. No Daughter involved.

Misrepresenting what other people actually believed in historical periods: Misinformation at best and fucking lying at worst, because that's history involving actual people.

In terms of actual history, we can only argue based on what we actually find evidence of. Because those were real people, not imaginary constructs we get to move around to justify our current desires.* And that's a shitty thing to do to real people; they are not dolls.

oh.

ohhhhhhhhh no

"That's why [magic] was left to wizards, who knew how to handle it safely. Not doing any magic at all was the chief task of wizards—not "not doing magic" because they couldn't do magic, but not doing magic when they could do and didn't. Any ignorant fool can fail to turn someone else into a frog. You have to be clever to refrain from doing it when you knew how easy it was. There were places in the world commemorating those times when wizards hadn't been quite as clever as that, and on many of them the grass would never grow again."

You can't claim to be an ally to neurodivergent and disabled people and then shit on us for our symptoms. If you actually care about helping us, why aren't you listening when we say we struggle with something? It's never okay to tell disabled people they should be able to do something they can't, that it's not that hard, but it's especially not okay if you do so while pretending to support disabled people.

Also, in addition to the "it's not that hard" statement being ableist, it's utter bullshit. There are so many tone tags to keep track of and memorize. I did a quick google search and one of my top results had ninety one tone tags. That's a lot. That's probably a lot even for a neurotypical person, and I'm not a neurotypical person. I struggle to remember a lot of basic, necessary tasks, so I really can't memorize ninety one tone tags.

Especially when some of them are incredibly ambiguous- only one letter? Acronyms or abbreviations at least give you some clues, one letter tone tags are so incredibly confusing. Like, what does /t mean? There are a lot of words that start with T! (This is a rhetorical question. I know /t means "teasing," but I only know the answer because figuring that out was a memorably frustrating experience.)

And /t is just one example of a tone tag I learned because I kept seeing it in conversation and not understanding and being really confused and frustrated. I can't tell you the number of times I've been messaging someone on discord, and they say something with a tone tag I don't recognize, and I just open a new tab to google the meaning, which is where I find lists like the one above. I usually rely on google instead of asking the person what they meant, because I feel stupid and embarrassed for not knowing this code that everyone else seemingly gets.

Which is exactly how it feels when I don't understand someone's tone in real life! Confused and frustrated and ashamed. And tone tags were supposed to help neurodivergent and disabled people not feel that way, so I don't know how we reached a point where they cause those feelings in many of us.

I can't deny that tone tags are a useful accessibility tool for some. If you find them helpful, it's genuinely good that you have that resource. But they're not accessible for all of us. It's incorrect to act like tone tags are a perfect way to communicate, and it's ableist to disregard our struggles with them and tell us to just try harder.

I personally don't use tone tags mostly for three reasons:

I'm from a post-USSR country, and first joined social media 10 years ago. Tone tags were not a thing on dominantly-Russian side of the internet at that time, and I have developed other accomodation strategies for myself

I probably have alexithymia, it's really hard for me to identify and describe my emotions in words (however, I'm somewhat capable to match an emoji or a meme to my feelings)

Tone tags are often difficult to identify just by logic, without learning them, especially when English is not your first language

Those reasons lead to me mostly utilizing emojis and memes as an alternative to tone tags. And switching to actual tone tags is really hard for me, because 1) it's breaking already established accomodation pattern, 2) I genuinely struggle with learning them, and 3) to use a proper tone tag, you must know exactly what emotion you want to express, and I'm incapable of it.

For example, /gen. Is that supposed to be /genuine? According to the link, yes. But my brain always starts on /general, then /gentle, and then finally gets to /genuine. Meanwhile if you just type a few more letters it completely avoids that confusion.

In one of the communities I was in, we put in a list of 4 most common tone indicators in the announcement section to establish a common baseline, and with every other slash tone indicator we assumed it will not be understood.

The idea behind tone indicators is not new in general:

A win for abortion rights today! Mifepristone remains available.

Paraglider and black vulture chilling

“Replicated food is not as good as real food.”

In a blind taste test, nobody, but nobody, can tell the actual difference between replicated food and “real” food. (Think back to our youth and the New Coke vs. Pepsi taste tests, only worse.) BUT, humans being What We Are, the human Starfleet members insist that “real” food is better than replicated food for reasons including, but certainly not limited to:

1. Hipsters have survived even into the 24th century. “No, you just can’t make good curry from a replicator! You gotta toast the spices yourself right before you cook it or it’s not the same, maaaaaan”

2. All military and para-military members everywhere always grouse and bitch about the food and sigh over What We Get Back Home. It could literally be the same replicator recipe you use at home when someone has to work late or just doesn’t feel like making the effort to cook, but people are people everywhere so they’re going to complain about it.

3. Humans tend to think we’re smarter than we actually are and we can totally tell when something is going on; as a result, human crew members insist they can “taste the difference” because their minds are making shit up, as our brains do.

4. One could presume that, generally speaking, a replicator recipe programmed into a starship or base replicator database would come out the same every time. This is perhaps the 24th century equivalent of mass catering. (I won’t try to account for the nuances of replicator tech that might allow for variances, and leave aside for the moment the fact that some people probably tinker with the standard “recipes” to suit their own taste.) The single thing that would be different in this case about “real” food is the variation, since of course the “real” dish will have slight variances every time due to the whims of the cook, the oven temperature fluctuation, freshness of ingredients, etc.. And since we are an easily bored species who really, really hates boredom, I bet people would jump all over that to lament the lack of “real” food when they’re out exploring strange new worlds and new civilizations and whatnot. (This is the only reason I can think of that might hold up to scrutiny.)

The replicator or replicator + holodeck combo can’t recreate the experience of cooking, nor can it recreate the experience of being cooked for. And that experience makes food taste better. 

Cooking is what makes us human. No other species on this wet rock cooks its food–only us. 

First: if you’re making lamb stew, or phở, or mole, or curry goat, you spend hours puttering around the house doing chores in a cozy sweater, periodically petting the cats and playing with the kids, waiting an anticipating the hour in which you get to eat the soup. All the while: your house smells like lamb stew, or phở, or mole, or curry goat. 

You get a tamale from the replicator: it’s pretty good. You wish it came with a green olive with the pit still in like the kind your abuela puts in her tamales. 

You get a tamale from the tamale lady on the way to work on a clear, crisp fall morning. It’s so hot from her steamer that it nearly burns your fingerprints off and it smells divine; you use all of your Spanish to tell her how good it is and how grateful you are that you pass her every day. On a whim, you buy 30 more tamales to share with the office; they’re still warm at lunch and they taste like friendship. 

You get a tamale from your abuela. It’s Christmas Eve, your entire family has spent the last seven hours making them, your tio Juan just busted out his tuba and it is definitely too hot outside for the fake snow  your baby cousins have started throwing at each other in between begging to open just one present and if you don’t hurry up you’re all going to be late for mass. 

The tamale tastes like home. 

You get a tamale from the replicator. Its neural network reviewed your order against every known tamale recipe and variety and decided that your addition of “green olive, pickled, pit in” was a mistake, and omitted it. 

Your tamale tastes like homesickness. You ball-up the corn husk and 

Second: The replicator is probably not accounting for regional variations in ingredients for its base foods. 

The ingredient library may have jalapeno, red; jalapeno, green, jalapeno, (color slider), (heat slider). It probably does not have: jalapeno, Hatch new mexico, USA, earth, sol system; or jalapeno north face Olympus Mons Mars, sol system. Replicator Parmesan is very likely a scan of a Parmesan and doesn’t duplicate regional variations between, say, a Parmesan from Mantua vs a Parmesan from Parma. 

Did your grandmother use san marzano tomatoes that were actually grown in san marzano in her red sauce (, canned, peeled, whole in juice)? Sucks to be you, the replicator scanned a hydroponically grown plum-type tomato which environment was carefully controlled for optimal nutritional value and “pretty good” taste. 

Is the replicator cilantro a kind bred or genetically engineered for maximum palatability across the broadest spectrum of individuals? Is it missing the gene that makes some people taste soap when they eat it? Is that gene the one that makes it taste good to you, so that the replicator chimichurri is always missing something, some particular specific type of freshness, a unique vegetal taste that you can’t put your finger on, and it’s not important enough to track down when you just like the chimichurri you make at home, from cilantro your grew yourself, much better? 

Third: The recipe database is probably sourced from hundreds of thousands of recipes written over centuries’ time – and then averaged using a combination of median and modal averaging to come up with something that’s Pretty OK to most people, but which is going to leave others wanting–no matter how much they tweak it. 

And then you have many, many people in a state of, “yes but I like my/mom’s/spouse’s/grandparent’s/aunt’s/uncle’s/best friends better”. And that’s OK.

I mean, really. Think about this for a minute.

Fourth:

You go to get a cup of tea from the replicator, because everything is terrible. You know in the darkest depths of your soul that everything will still be terrible with a good cuppa in your hands, but it will be terrible and you’ll have tea, which is a marked improvement. 

The replicator gives you a glass of brewed, iced sweet tea. 

It takes you three more tries to get a cup of hot earl grey. You decide you’ve finished pressing your luck with this positively infernal machine today and don’t even bother asking for a lemon wedge.