subject to interpretation

Which said a lot, actually. I've never had a psychiatric professional involved in my care state or imply that they're safe, beneficial places. I've been lucky, yes, but the sheer number of people I am talking about...of the ones I've spoken to about this, if none of them want to send people there or think of it as a good thing, that's really saying something. I had one say "If you are in crisis, do anything else you can before going to [clinic name]; if someone tries to have you sent inpatient, have them send you anywhere else; but do not go to [clinic name]. Just...please trust me." It was the place where he did his residency, and the hospital extension of the place he now worked. (Low income clinic, he was a sweet man doing good and necessary work, but the place overall was 1/5.)

The psychiatry system has treated me well, but I have been careful and I have been lucky and I am privileged in that my issues don't manifest in ways that tend to put me at risk, and in that I am extraordinarily deft at putting medical professionals at ease and advocating for myself and covering my bases (bring an advocate into the room if I plan on disclosing thoughts of self harm or suicide and make sure the people know that this person is there to make sure I am safe, referring to where I am at on my safety plan and what I plan to do next, doing remote appointments when possible and using fake background filters telling them about a partner/family member/friend who is being regularly updated on my current status -- but a lot of that shit requires composure on my part, an ability to mask).

Today my new psychiatrist said I should try talking to ChatGPT for fixes to my insomnia and I just. I don't fucking know, man. I didn't say it but in my head all I could think is, "So you're admitting you're so fucking stupid that the same program that gets basic shit from the second paragraph of an article it reads wrong is more intelligent and useful than you? Then wtf am I paying you for? Why do you have this job?!"

Everyone insists that it's so helpful and so smart and so useful and I honestly feel like I must be in an alternate dimension than other people. People talk about the dangers of it being addictive and they might as well be talking about how fun snorting bleach is for how much that makes sense to me. The computer thing that spews out its' bullshit in 2 sentence microparagraphs, says 'if' about objective reality in order to be 'cautious', whines that you're doing a "call out" if you correct it when it makes mistakes you wouldn't make while drunk, this thing, this goddamn nightmare, this is addictive? How?! I was forced to use this thing and it felt like when you're trying to talk to a friend high on Benadryl who's tuning out chunks of the conversation, tuned in for others and imagining the last third of it. Genuinely I went in predisposed to thinking it'd be boring but unremarkable, a needless extra step no one asked for or wanted but not an ordeal, and came out nursing a tension headache every time.

After my psychiatrist appointment, I tried to retreat to fanfic, my happy little reprieve from stress. First fic in the AO3 tag for my OTP is "co-authored by ChatGPT". I am so confused and tired. Is it me? Am I too brain-broken to get the appeal? Is it a neurotypical thing?

--

No, it's not a neurotypical thing: it's what happens when people have outsourced their brain for a while and stopping feels like going backwards.

Hans Christian Andersen was gay, and in between writing such heartrending masterpieces as The Happy Prince and The Little Mermaid, along with some beautiful works of satire, had a fairytale romance with a German nobleman, and successfully annoyed the fuck out of Charles Dickens.

The Ugly Duckling is a fable about his acceptance of himself as a gay man, after a struggle to see his own value as a person who didn't fit expectations.

Then there's Tove Jansson, who wrote the Moomins, internationally popular for over 80 years. She and her partner of 45 years at one point lived down the street from one another and built a secret passageway through the attics of houses so they could visit one another in secret. The stories are rich with the accepting and loving compassion of the Moomin family, in spite of their own flaws and those of the people they meet.

And how about a modern one? Julian Clary, groundbreaking gay comedian and presenter, created a series of children's novels called The Bolds, about a family of hyenas who have taken on the identity of a couple of human tourists who died while on safari, and live in a house in an English suburb, raising their twin children and working in a factory that makes jokes for Christmas crackers, keeping the fact that they are hyenas secret from the humans around them through cunning disguise. They become aware that others around them are also animals disguised as humans, and gradually form a supportive and caring, secret community. At a glance it's a sweet and funny tale of a ridiculous situation, but to an adult, it's a clear parallel of queer subcultures, written by a man who lived through the aids crisis as a figurehead of his community.

The glittering image, taken by the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope, heralds a new age of planetary discovery

The dazzling sight of more than 60m stars at the heart of Earth’s galaxy has been captured by a space telescope designed to reveal the mysterious dark forces that shape the universe.

Astronomers used the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope to capture the largest, most detailed image ever taken of the visible light pouring from the centre of the Milky Way. The telescope’s camera is rare in being sensitive enough to separate individual stars in the crowded region known as the galactic bulge.

The enormous image marked the start of a new age of discovery of planets outside Earth’s solar system, researchers said. The number of known worlds is expected to rocket beyond the thousands already spotted around faraway stars.

Dr Eamonn Kerins, an astrophysicist at the University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, said of the Euclid telescope: “It was never built with this science in mind, but it has proved to be a superb facility for the work.

“This data fires the starting pistol in a new age of exoplanet discovery, where we go from knowing about 6,000 exoplanets to finding more than 100,000 across the galaxy.”

The €1bn (£862m) telescope launched in 2023 to construct the most accurate 3D map of the cosmos and shed fresh light on the mysterious dark forces that shape it.

According to the most popular model of the universe, only 5% is made from ordinary matter. About 70% is said to be dark energy, the force that accelerates the expansion of the universe. A further 25% is called dark matter, an invisible substance that appears to clump around galaxies.

Astronomers took the snapshot of the stars in March last year after pointing Euclid at the centre of the Milky Way for 26 hours of observations. The image is a mosaic of nine “pointings” taken with the probe’s visible light camera. Each pointing covers an area of the sky larger than the full moon.

Beyond its visual appeal, the image will boost the hunt for exoplanets, or worlds that form outside the solar system.

[Full scale of image]

One way to spot an exoplanet is to observe its parent star as it moves in front of a faraway star. Through a process called microlensing, the nearer star’s gravity bends the light from the more distant star, making it appear brighter. When a planet orbits the nearer star, its additional gravity can create a spike in the brightening.

In August Nasa plans to launch its Nancy Grace Roman space telescope, named after Nasa’s first chief of astronomy, who died in 2018. Astronomers expect it to find about 1,500 microlensing exoplanets.

The Euclid image will transform that work because it shows the same stars before they overlap. This allows astronomers to measure how fast they move and to confirm the existence of the planet and its mass.

“The Euclid snapshot will improve those measurements possibly by up to a factor of three, which for a single image is quite something,” said Kerins.

The Roman telescope aims to spot a further 100,000 exoplanets as they move across the face of their parent stars, causing a slight, momentary dimming of the starlight.

What’s also crazy is that he’s throwing a bunch of money into studying her menstrual cycle because she might have endometriosis.

Do you still believe water is unnecessary for life to evolve?

Laura Boswell（British）

There's worse to come, folks. Strap in and stay strapped.

Me at 10 years old: