No, and being on fire is a great goose suppression system.

Ooh, cool idea, I’ll try that!

Damn, that’s grim.

Times when I or someone close to me have needed to hire artists, we’ve been able to find the right person for the job through professional networks. It’s sad to think that due to real artists struggling to find work, that many of these professional networks are liable to collapse, making it harder to find the remaining artists who are still working

I don’t understand what your issue is here. If it was a political post, then I’d agree that we should be cautious of a new account, but this is super innocuous. What reason is there to be suspicious of a new user in this context?

The joke is that a single egg is obviously not a meal, and as such, the person in the comic was reasonable to say “needs something more”. However, a single egg with a lone slice of cheese on top doesn’t much improve the situation.

The humour is in the anticlimax of the only addition being the slice of cheese, as well as the ambiguity of not knowing whether the person added the cheese because that’s all they had available, or because they genuinely felt that the cheese was the “more” that they had been hoping for. If it’s the latter case, then that recontextualises our original assessment of this person as being reasonable.

When I was sad and didn’t have much in the fridge, I cut a few slices of red Leicester and melted them in the microwave until it was just a gooey pile of cheese. Before eating it, I noticed the chives growing in a pot on my windowsill, and sprinkled a few chopped chives on top. I liked the absurdity of a garnishing such a basic “meal”.

Same energy as the comic

An accident involving a high speed tennis racquet

If you like medieval marginalia, go play Pentiment. I played it with a friend who was a medievalist, and ze said that all of the weird marginalia were ones ze recognised from real manuscripts. Very cool

Is the video series you’re thinking of the Alt-Right Playbook, by Innuendo Studios? Because that was something that really helped me to understand how conservatives think — I hadn’t realised just how central “zero-sum thinking” is to their ideology

I agree with your choice to include the author’s name. Even without reading the article, it seems significant that Doctorow is writing in such a mainstream publication. I’m glad to see it

A point that I want to raise is that sometimes people who are trans don’t necessarily want to present in a straightforwardly binary way.

To give an example of what I mean, I had a friend, who I met when she was presenting as a boy, in school. Whilst she liked hanging out with girls more, she was never much of a girly girl, in terms of her interests. For a couple years after she transitioned and began presenting as a woman (we were adults by this point), she spent a while dressing in a conventionally feminine way. She later said that this was probably in part due to how gatekeepy gender affirmation care services can be if you don’t present in a straightforward manner. But also she said she was (in hindsight) trying to jump through hoops to be what she thought a woman should be.

Eventually, as she became more comfortable, she leaned into a more tomboyish aesthetic that suited her, and picked up old hobbies that she had dropped due to feeling too masculine. Someone very unkindly once told her “I don’t see what the point of you transitioning was if you’re just going to go back to where you started”. This was a silly perspective, because her adopting a lightly more masculine presentation wasn’t a regression, but progress. It’s honestly analogous to how I, a cis woman, had a phase as a teenager where I hated all things pink and girly, but now have a more mature view, where I can engage in femininity in a more healthy manner. It’s growth.

This is all to say that your son may identify as masc, but give him space to explore what that means for him. There might be times where he enjoys more stereotypically feminine pursuits or aesthetics, but this doesn’t diminish his identity in any way. Terms that he prefers might change as he grows to understand himself better, but if you keep an open mind, you can be there with him for it.

“Eventually I realized that I was suddenly seeing a kid I hadn’t seen in years, he had been very depressed even self harming at times, but with therapy, and gender affirming care it was like we got the kid we had lost back.”

Damn, this has got me tearing up. Thanks for sharing this story. I’m glad your son has you there to support him.

This is incredible! I love how the natural irregularities in the lines give a real sense of texture, especially on the fabric

I feel you. I struggle with this too. I’ve got better at it in recent years, but it’s still tough, and I’ve found that when circumstances get rough in a manner that makes me need more help, it becomes harder to ask for help.

It’s weird to think of “asking for help” as a skill that can be trained, but that’s certainly my experience. Thinking about it that way helped me though, because it pushed me to try asking for help on smaller, low stakes things first, which made things easier in the future.

I often saw that when I did ask for help in these smaller things, that the person helping me would often be super happy to be able to help, especially if they have a lot of stuff going on in their life that they’re struggling with. Being able to help me seemed to give them a slice of agency that they desperately needed. Sometimes having helped me with a thing made them feel more comfortable asking for help for themselves, which is a dynamic I’m much more comfortable with. I like to feel useful.

Showing my own vulnerability as a stepping stone towards being able to be of service to other people is some pretty intense mental gymnastics (compared to, you know, just valuing myself and treating myself as inherently deserving of help), but whatever works, works ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Glad you liked it. I always appreciate an opportunity to practice my science communication skills (I JUST WANT EVERYONE TO FIND THIS STUFF AS DEEPLY FASCINATING AS I DO. I AM EXTREMELY NORMAL.)

Yup. A friend of mine almost died last year from bladder complications that ultimately stem from being assaulted almost 20 years ago.

To an external observer, rape may not seem likely to leave lasting physical trauma, but that’s because the injuries aren’t as likely to be visible, or things that peopl feel comfortable speaking about openly (plus society has a bad track record on how it treats survivors of SA)

My point is that the whole psychological Vs physical trauma question is a false dichotomy when we’re talking about sexual assault. Rape can and often does leave a person with lifelong physical trauma

So until around 1902, it was near unanimously agreed that light was a wave, because it does all the stuff that waves do, like diffracting — we wouldn’t have rainbows, or the cool Pink Floyd album cover with a prism splitting light into a rainbow otherwise.

What changed in 1902 is that an experiment (called the photoelectric effect, if you’re curious) produced results that would have only been possible if light was a particle. The photoelectric effect had been observed a bunch of times through the 1800s, but in 1902, a variant of the experiment produced results that would be impossible to explain if light were a wave. So then people start asking “okay, maybe we were wrong, maybe light is actually a particle”. Except that didn’t square with the centuries of evidence showing that light was a wave.

It turns out that light is both a particle and as wave. Or maybe neither. Because the key concept here is that particles and waves don’t exist. They’re just conceptual categories that we made to put boxes around phenomena to make them more understandable, much the same way that binary gender is a simplifying framework that works until it doesn’t.

Now, this doesn’t mean that the underlying phenomena, like light being diffracted, or the photoelectric effect, aren’t real. The problem was in our framework of how we labelled them. Once physicists got their head around the possibility that light could be both a particle and a wave, they realised that there were a bunch of other situations where we could model light as a particle and discover interesting stuff. Most people don’t need to understand this, because the simplified model of everything being either a particle or a wave works well enough that even if it’s not correct, it’s still useful — these categories developed for a reason, after all. By analogy, it’s like if I said “women have breasts”. It’s true in most instances, so it can still be a useful observation, even if it’s not strictly accurate.

However, it gets even more interesting. At first, scientists thought that light must just be a special kind of phenomenon, able to exhibit both particle and wave characteristics. But then, in the double slit experiment, they found that under certain circumstances, electrons (which were near unanimously considered to be particles) could diffract — i.e. act like waves. This was the result that really drove home the notion that when we’re studying stuff that are super small and specific, our existing rules and categories sort of fall apart. It’s even been suggested that other things that we squarely consider to be particles could show wave nature too, but the larger you get in scale, the harder it is to observe quantum phenomena (which basically just means that our rules work well when they’re applied to the circumstances we developed those rules under. “Quantum phenomena” mostly just means “shit that happens when we’re so zoomed in that our existing frameworks stop working”)

In a sense, we could say that light behaving as a particle is analogous to a non binary man, and electrons behaving as a wave is analogous to a non binary woman. Maybe it would be more sensible to dispense with these categories entirely, but there are many phenomena and many people who find the terms useful.

Indeed, and I’m glad you highlighted these things. It’s something I have been trying to do, as well as increasing people’s awareness of these choices. It feels like it makes so little difference, but it’s not nothing.

“(assuming no HIV etc)”

That’s not a safe assumption though, and the dread of waiting to find out whether you’ve been infected with something awful is a part of why rape is so traumatising. It can take weeks for tests to come back.