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Has anyone else heard of the word "bipping"? Pretty much cognate with "beefing" semantically speaking, I think, though also you could use it to mean "having a go/arguing/starting a spat".

Uses as a verb or noun:

"I told my Mam I would be out on Friday after all and she started bipping at me about my finances"

"In town there were two lads bipping outside the pub earlier."

"Me and Gareth have had our bips, but he's tidy deep down"

This is a recipe I've adapted from various soda breads to make it as easy as possible when I'm dealing with high fatigue, low spoons, and/or no appetite. It has the appeal of warm, soft fresh bread, but the oats make it a bit more substantial.

You will need: Oven (not a microwave) Mixing bowl Spoon Cup or 1/2 cup measure (or something of similar size) Baking tray

Ingredients: 1/2 cup whole oats (not instant) 1/2 cup self-raising flour (or plain flour + 1/2 tsp baking powder) 1/2 cup whole milk A pinch of salt

Instructions: Literally just mix everything together in a bowl, then dump it onto a baking tray in a rough approximation of a round bread roll. Bake at 180C for 15-18 minutes. Allow to cool and eat with whatever you would normally have with fresh bread.

Notes: It doesn't matter exactly how big your measuring cup is as long as the three main ingredients are equal, but you'll need to extend cooking time for a larger piece of bread (or divide into two).

When you've mixed your ingredients you should get something like thick porridge, NOT like dough. If you make a dough you can shape with your hands, it'll come out too dry. This stuff should be sticky and blobby, thick enough that it holds its shape on the baking tray. You should be able to spoon it out and mash it together to make a rather un-aesthetic mound.

If it's too thin, wait a couple of minutes for the oats to absorb the milk. If it's still too thin, add a bit more flour.

I like to mix in some grated cheese to make something a bit like a cheese scone. You could also lean more into sweet flavours to make a muffin-like end result (particularly if you spoon it into cases).

This does NOT keep well, it goes stale very quickly. It's a bake-and-eat thing. I don't know if it freezes.

I haven't tried making it with non-dairy milk. The milk is providing both liquid and fat so you'd want to make sure you were using something that HAS a good amount of fat.

I don't know why the authors of PoliLingua act as if Trump's verbal misogyny and racism wasn't very much part of his "original intent".

put off getting a spinal fusion surgery until you’ve exhausted literally every other treatment you can try

the long-term complication rate of spinal fusions is through the roof

they will not warn you that you will probably need more spine surgery within 10 years. multiple revisions are on the table in your lifetime. it’s not the fast fix orthopedic surgeons sell it as. I can guarantee you won’t be pain-free either.

For example, I've had students ask me (in good faith) how it was possible for international medical bodies to report different counts of COVID-19 cases during the early years of the pandemic. And one of the answers is that you need to first define what you mean by a "COVID-19 case." Do you include self-reported incidences? Waste water data? Geo-fenced social media posts about people complaining about their coronavirus symptoms? Federal estimates? Hospital data? How do you compare countries/territories/substate entities with mandatory reporting mechanisms vs countries/territories/substate entities that rely only on voluntary self-reported cases? And what combination of these do you use? How you construct what you mean by "case" is going to impact the outcomes you report. These different counts of COVID-19 cases can all be true simultaneously, not because numbers are made up, but because they all come out of different methodologies that can be equally valid.

And this is true across all science, not just social science. Bill Clinton said it best lol: "it depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is." This feels obvious when you look at scientific research that uses "skull measurements" as their object of analysis - the concept itself is white supremacist, regardless of how "sound" the research is. But even something as apparently self-evident as a COVID-19 case still requires a definition, and how you define your variables is necessarily going to impact how the research goes and what conclusions are drawn.

These definitions are always embedded in political & social assumptions. And again, this does not mean that science is all made up or nonsense or whatever. There is a widespread fetishism of "objective knowledge" that is itself ideological - the idea that knowledge can be divorced from all historical and political contexts, that you can scrub bias from research and simply report the facts. Valuable, well-supported, well-constructed scientific research is always embedded in these contexts. Not just as a result of researcher assumptions, but of the material context it exists in - what research resources are available, how & what research gets funded, the academy's relationship to the state & non-government bodies that both provide data and use that research to inform policy, the historical relationships universities often have with settler-colonialism and imperialism that give them access to "foreign" research subjects, etc etc etc.

I was trained in the dark arts of the cover letter by my mother, who is a hiring manager. And her training has paid off: I've been consistently told my cover letters are excellent. Let me pass on the wisdom.

The job of a cover letter is to give a prospective employer strictly more information than is on the resume. This is where you take the resume contents and put them into context. You look at the job requirements (you are looking at the job requirements before applying, right?) and look at your resume and ask the question (in your head) "why would a person think this candidate would be good for this job?" and your cover letter is the answer to that question. If you don't answer that question, the hiring manager is going to have to do it themselves, and you have way more information to work with than they do.

This is especially important if you're moving from one industry to another, because then the relevant connections aren't obvious. It's also very important if you're overqualified, because then you can use the letter to say "I know it looks like this job would be too entry-level for me, but I'm interested to pursue it for reasons x, y, and z". You can also use this space to explain away something that might otherwise be disqualifying, like job-hopping or a long break in employment. The tone to strike here is always matter-of-fact and constrained to topic - don't go into detail about health stuff or personal tragedy, just tell them what they need to hear: that this period of your resume was affected by [bad thing] but that it's now in the past and you're looking forward to the next chapter. Remember, one of the things they're trying to learn is whether you'd be content in this role, or whether you'd be miserable and leave after 2 months, which would force them to do all the work of hiring again. You're trying to establish that you will fit right in and not cause problems. Knowing what drew you to this job in particular (and don't just say 'money', that's true for everyone) helps with that.

they post about me every day, multiple times a day, speculating about my income, my family, my medical transition, my disability, and so on. extremely transphobic things have been said. extremely ableist things have been said. I have blocked them, but this has not stopped them from screenshotting everything I post. and when I don't say anything new and interesting, they scroll through my blog history until they can find something worth mocking. it makes feel genuinely unsafe to have this level of obsessive attention on me.

even still, I would love to ignore this person! that's largely what I've been doing. but every now and then, one of their HUNDREDS of posts about me finds traction, and then I have to deal with large numbers of people who spam my posts, fill my inbox, and make very real threats.

and recently, the concentration has been on taking away my ability to make an income. which, not to play the 'disabled' card, but I am not a wealthy or powerful person. I am on immunosuppressants, there are times when I'm housebound or bed bound, and I am very much struggling to scrape by. you are not punching up.

I just don't know what to do. this isn't "healthy criticism". I am open to criticism. I want to have conversations, and look into my blindspots, and make changes about how I write and present myself. even if you can't see me doing it publicly, that IS what I am doing.

that is not the goal of this campaign, though. I genuinely think the goal is bully me into suicide, and hey, it's kinda working!

Paid service with no ads: Well, if they're not funding it with ad revenue, they need to charge us something.

Paid service with ads: Well that's bullshit.

this essay series is old enough to register to vote in the United States, and its author is the same Denise of Dreamwidth who keeps writing new explanations of why KOSA-type regulation of the data thieves will fuck over anybody on the internet who wants to refrain from collecting personal information—for reasons including but not limited to how hackers can't steal and governments can't subpoena data that didn't get collected to begin with—because every time Netchoice sues another government over another KOSA-type law, it is a slightly different law that needs a slightly different explanation of why it is unenforceable for several different pragmatic reasons in addition to being unconstitutional in several different ways

Dreamwidth is still ad-free and venture-capital-free and refusing to do business in jurisdictions that would require it to collect more personal data than it collects now, and therefore Dreamwidth is proof that internet business models do not need and should not have any of ads, venture capital, and data theft; this has been true long enough that my own Dreamwidth account is almost old enough to vote

"The DIY Male Birth Control Taking Over Reddit", Kara McGrath, June 23, 2026.

interesting article in Playboy, of all places, on a collection of practices called thermal male contraception that involves elevating the temperature of the testes to lower viable sperm count.

the one that wants to help people search and filter better by demonstrating how I just realized that the way I was searching was stopping me from finding what I wanted

and the one that does not want to air out my particular interests on a platform of any size 😆

So I was searching for "Jane Foster size queen" at first. But then I realized that putting both the character and the descriptor in the same tag wouldn't work.

In order for that to exist as a single tag, it would need to be a popular enough idea in the MCU fandom for at least three different authors to have used it. And with a fandom the size of the MCU, it's probably closer to 5 or 10.

So then I tried using the search form to find the character Jane Foster along with the additional tag size queen. But that returned zero results, and I realized that size queen isn't a canonical tag, so I was asking AO3 to find Jane Foster fics with the tag "size queen" instead of the concept.

So then I went to the tag search and looked up size queen and checked off the wrangling status as "canonical or synonymous" and that gave me 627 synonyms for the concept I was looking for and the first four results included a character name, but the fifth one was just "also he's a size queen" so I clicked on that and I found out that the canonical tag I could use to find fics with that concept was size kink

so I went back to the search form and looked up character Jane Foster and additional tag size kink and I got 39 results.