i am a transgender woman. i love bottom surgery and dating lesbians and using the women’s restroom and gender affirming care for children. trans women face substantial discrimination at the intersection of womanhood and transness. everywhere, and especially on this godforsaken website. i dont speak politically nearly enough on my blog so i feel like reminding everyone that i am one of the annoying gross perverts that wants to invade women’s spaces and trans your children. i am continually appalled by the transmisogyny i observe and experience here. it would be really nice to see more outrage from people people who arent themselves transfem. have a great evening.
easter sucks i don’t think we should have widespread christianity events permeating our neighborhoods. however, i like that somehow this became a rabbit-centric time of the year. i propose we overturn easter and replace it with a celebration of bunny girls. give it to the trans furries. they can like, graze on fields of grass and do freak sex stuff or whatever. let’s go lesbians
that happens already. oviposition commissions spike every time
happy oviposition commission weekend
Reblogged
cis people will call a character "mommy" like its their given name. in a sex way. talking about "i want milk" and shit. and its all well and good apparently. theyre cis men. theyre cis lesbians. its normal and orderly to want to fuck your mom. freud said that. everyone loves that guy, right? i mean cis men like it so its gotta be ok. but two trans women want to call eachother "sis"? we have to kill them quickly. the fantasy of your beloved being a sister? we have to swat your house. can never be too safe. youre a tranny afterall. might be on of the bad ones.
Reblogged petricorah
Fuck it at this point can y’all actually start supporting indie animation and indie games made by black artists/creators because I’m really getting sick and tired of everyone hyping these racist phase mediocre white people that get 90% of their humor from 2000s newgrounds animations
For the people asking “How am I supposed to find them?” Look them up, it’s that easy.
Here is an entire youtube playlist by Mannof1000Thoughts with a ton of indie animation videos AND a livestream he did where he watched some with the creators!!!
For games, there are TONS of lists out there like these:
Reblogged
I gotta say, everyone reading Dawkins for filth over the Claude thing is VERY funny.
"People who believe in gods, spirits or a conscious universe are falling prey to a litany of common cognitive fallacies. Here's a book where I clearly outline how easy it is to misunderstand probability, intent and determination, and to reach these conclusions. Let me explain just how easy it is to mistakenly believe in concepts of magic or a conscious force in an unconscious world, and show how it is wrong. This book will be a worldwide bestseller that will get me, a famous biologist, recognised the world over by non-biologists, and will define the sort of person I am seen as forevermore."
"Also I spoke to this computer for three days and it is definitely a person."
#to the surprise of absolutely no one who knows a) the history of science b) the philosophies of the folks in Dennett's circle#this is literally the most normal development I've seen in that area#completely on brand#and Dawkins specifically is just plain the weakest thinker of the lot when it comes to religion and cognitive things#but having someone who spends their lives scoffing at something fall into it is the most normal thing in the world#as is the career path of spending one's life on something and eventually recognizing that said work was empty#two sides of the same coin
I think the problem with Dawkins is that he genuinely is an extremely insightful biologist and excellent biology writer, and his biology books did massively influence evolutionary biology for the better. And he made the mistake that a lot of people who are really good at thinking about one thing make, which is that he kind of assumed that he was really good at thinking about everything. I watched a lot of people in the rationalism community make this exact mistake; they'd cut their teeth on something that was easy for them to understand, be told how smart and insightful they are, and eventually start assuming that they were too clever to be wrong and that their initial impressions of something are actually reasoned responses and definitely the truth, no further analysis needed, because they're Smart Rational People.
Look, I'll trust you on that one, because from the very beginning of Dawkins starting to write anything about the humanities, he became a sort of perpetual annoyance, because students would bring him up and colleagues would just have to go, with varying degrees of being diplomatic about it, "Guys. You're talking about a dude that has, at this point, read less than you all have about the subject and doesn't have the introspection to understand that. He needs a 101 course. It's that bad.
"He's an arrogant idiot who maybe has the cred in his own field--maybe, because we're not the same kind of arrogant idiot, and we're not going to assume his field is giving him credit for nothing--but in our field, you are not to treat anything he is writing as anything other than a particularly bad, if eloquent, student essay."
It's been how long, twenty years since The God Delusion? That's how long people in the humanities and social sciences have had to deal with undoing Dawkins' outsized influence; and how long I personally have been wondering if something like this would pop up eventually, or if Dawkins would luck out and get to die before winding up at the logical endpoint of his philosophies.
With that said, I fully agree on the rationalists, and generally on the "lots of people who are really good at thinking about one thing". People have clowned a lot on physicists being the poster children for this, but this happens in every single field. E.g., I don't think the humanities or social sciences are exempt from this, to the contrary--even in relatively closely related fields. Historians can't do contemporary fact checking to save their lives; anthropologists think they can do deep work in wildly different cultures without knowing languages; sociologists don't know the historical context and reinvent the wheel every single damn time, et cetera. (And the less mention of how badly we all do when we venture further out, the better. It's stupid.)
As a general phenomenon, this makes me about as melancholy as the inevitability of death. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that will guarantee avoiding this specific trap. Trying to avoid it explicitly makes you more likely to fall into it, and the numbers of people who are just never famous enough that we learn about them doing the same thing openly are staggering.
But I would be lying if I said it weren't personally satisfying to see a wider recognition of Dawkins not being an authority in the area of religion, but rather a primary source for colleagues specializing in that area. It's twenty years past time, and I'm looking forward to the conference papers about it.
When The God Delusion came out I was so excited for it because his previous books were so so good and then I read it and was like "oh. Oh, this dude ONLY knows biology." Which is completely fine, it's great to have a specialty, but boy was it tiresome to see him constantly driving outside his lane with such arrogance. Like watching a world class violinist start obsessing over playing the kazoo really badly, never improving (because he's such a great musician so why would he need to learn anything) and taking over every radio station with his Terrible Kazoo Music. And you grit your teeth through it because someone out there is trying to ban all music and replace it with fart noises and the kazoo nonsense is technically on your side in that particular fight even if he's doing other bullshit but like. If he stuck to the violin and we gave the kazoo to someone who could play it (or if the violinist bothered to learn the kazoo properly) then it'd all go a lot better.
incredible subset of autistic/adhd person out there who thinks that “neurotypicals” don’t have inner worlds/thoughts /interests
comments under a post about autistic hyper empathy. like you can’t really believe that 80% of people don’t wonder or care or think about anything can you
A thing that is maybe ultimately harmless but also kind of… not exactly a pet peeve but it just makes me feel iffy, is assuming if someone has somewhat unusual interest(s) that in and of itself is equivalent to an autism/ADHD diagnosis, so therefore someone who doesn't fall under that can't possibly be interested in anything outside of the normal.
like yes that is one of many possible symptoms, I myself am diagnosed with ADHD, but I dunno, I don't think I'd be a completely different person with zero likes/interests if I didn't have it. Neurotypical people have weird fascinations too. Just talk to a "normie" long enough. People don't need to be born a certain way and have an innate neurodevelopmental condition to be curious about the world around them. One of the most rewarding parts of education and science communication is finding ways to reawaken curiosity in a wide range of different people, something everyone had as kids but some of us have been conditioned to ignore.
Invention of bread is weird bc it’s like some Neolithic ppl were like “hey you know that tall grass thing that’s sorta edible but not really how about we take it and grind it into a very very fine powder which is extra backbreaking right now bc the wheel won’t be invented for awhile and then we mix it with water and heat it up and you know what let’s also toss some mold in there just to see what happens”
there are a number of distinct steps though, each of which can be observed in isolation. “grind tough seeds to make them edible” is practiced with other foods besides grains (like acorns). the natural next step after that is to add water, which gives you porridge: a common ancient roman meal was puls, very similar to modern cream of wheat. once you have that you also have a simple dough, and baking it to preserve it is a logical experiment (as is baking some you forgot about and left out for a few days, just so you don’t waste it... voila, leavened bread)
there could have been, and probably was (though i’m not an archaeologist) a substantial time between each of these innovations. it’s not too hard to imagine people being chill with “grind seeds for soup, select plants for bigger seeds” for a good while
Do you ever wonder how many amazing things are fated to go forever uninvented because each step necessary to invent them is a completely unintuitive thing to do?
Okay, that's not how bread was invented. I wrote a potted history, I could try to dig that out if anyone is interested?
Please do
I'm putting this on my bread blog, because of course I am. Also tagging @appendingfic who I think expressed interest.
Tens of thousands of years ago people foraged and hunted for their food and ate whatever they could. Among their forage were wild cereals, which included the ancestors of modern cultivated wheat, barley and others.
People like sweet things. Grains are starchy, but if sprouted they start converting those starches to sugars, so people would've left grains in water to sprout. These sprouts are also easier to digest, thus more nutritious, which bestowed an invisible advantage on those sprouting their grains.
If grains are left in water too long, however, they begin to ferment. Alcohol is produced. People like alcohol.
In ancient Mesopotamia the fermented grains were experimented with, resulting in an early form of beer. The process of making that beer was quite complicated and involved a combination of sprouted and mashed grains.
People wanted beer all year round, but early beers did not have long shelf lives and the grain could only be harvested at certain times. So the ancient Mesopotamians invented a way of storing the ingredients for beer.
It was made of the grain mash, honey, dates and spices that were fermented to make beer. For storage, prior to fermentation, the mixture was baked dry, cut into smaller pieces and baked again to remove all water. This produced bapir, a product very much like biscotti, which could be stored for later rehydration and fermentation. Sometimes it was eaten instead.
I've made bapir, and I've eaten it. It is brittle but delicious. It's also a form of unleavened bread.
Bread was invented as a way to store the ingredients for beer, which was most likely a development from a chance discovery. Leavened bread (that is, with bubbles) may well have been discovered when a mixture like that for bapir was accidentally allowed to ferment before baking. Yeast is responsible for both alcohol production and leavening.
There's a lot more to it, in terms of the cultivation of grains and the development of milling, than I've written here. It's been a process of millennia to go from chewing sprouts to eating soft white bread like that pictured. But every step along the way was small and simple.
I never would have guessed that beer pre-existed bread. I've always just assumed that beer was an accidental discovery by breadmakers.
Nope, beer came first. Mead is also very old.
Thanks, ancient humans!
Australian First Nations people developed their own bread making culture independent of the beer-base route. As far as I'm aware, pre colonial Australia had little to nothing by way of fermented drinks at all, so the likelihood of beer being part of the evolution of native breads is unlikely. Their breads, made from native grasses, are both leavened and unleavened. There's also different bread making practices using different grains, dependent on location - Australia is big and Indigenous culture over here is no more a monolith than it is anywhere else. Kamilaroi bread is different to Yuin bread, for example.
The colonization of Australia actively suppressed Indigenous knowledge, and creating an image of the idle wandering tribes was required to justify taking Aboriginal lands. This means a lot of the archeology of how First Nations people developed their breads has not just been lost but deliberately suppressed. The idea that they were settled enough to have ovens, let alone a bread-making tradition, is only now really being examined. I wouldn't be surprised if the grains-porridge-bread route was true for Aussie breads, though.
There is something sooo deeply American going on with Seattle Children’s Hospital that I think would brick the minds of everyone outside of the United States.
The CHILDRENS hospital has to restrict helipad landings because of noise complaints from the wealthy home owners living next to it. Only the most urgent patients can land directly at the hospital. While the other kids have to land a mile away and are taken to the hospital via ambulance. Which is an unnecessary risk to the child’s life and also makes the families pay for the helicopter AND ambulance.
Apparently this has been going on for decades and is only getting traction because a pilot complained on Twitter.
For those who don’t know, my son had cancer and did all of his medical treatment at Seattle Children’s Hospital. When He had a medical emergency, he would be taken 72 miles north to Seattle Children’s because he was too medically complex to treat locally.
A neighborhood complaining about emergency helicopter use is going to lead to a child’s death. Minutes matter, especially with the medically complex children who are seen at that hospital.
Landing in a nearby field to then be transported by ambulance to the hospital is too much of a delay in an emergency—especially if the child is coming in from a hospital outside of King County, WA.
Reblogged rainbow-femme
The thing about being trans is that once you come to terms with it it’s really just whatever but The Cis People insist upon being weird about it
Once you’ve been out of the closet for a while and are surrounded by people who are at the very least neutral and respectful about the trans thing it just becomes a whatever part of your life and all these people claiming that you’re ruining society and passing laws against you kinda feels like a swat team storming into your house while you’re just eating spaghetti.
Bro why are you banning me from using the bathroom I’m literally just eating spaghetti
riseofthecommonwoodpile-deactiv
“I love the way the player’s body moves in Bloodborne: You can fly in any direction like that, like a nervous little bird. If you want to be close, you are instantly close, and if you want to be away, you are instantly away. What a gift. Of course everything is violent and wants to touch you, but if you are perfect, you will not be touched. There is a little secret here which perhaps you can notice: When the ugly monster’s limbs reach out to touch the small human’s body, there is about a tenth of a second—maybe less— where her body is invincible. It doesn’t even matter if she’s geometrically in harm’s way or not. She is safe because she timed it right, was perfect. See, even in this very hard game, there is something wonderful and fair: The game doesn’t care about the way bodies actually intersect. If your timing was correct, it agrees: “You were not touched.” Many games hide that tiny moment of invincibility within quick movement, and it feels so kind just knowing, no mater how bad you are, that if you could fit every moment of pain in that one tenth of a second you could be invincible for the rest of your life. Sometimes I wish I had this power in real life. If I had it would mean never having to say ‘no’ in so many words, nor the confrontation that sometimes comes with saying no. But that perfect, flawless dodge is not sustainable—you have to be devastated so many times to get the timing so flawless. And here’s my bad secret: when I killed this one monster, I didn’t do it by dodging flawlessly, but by mashing some awful weapon in her side while her limbs were flailing and she could not hit me back. Unfair and problematic of me, I know. So often, games’ expressive qualities are limited to the violent motion of virtual bodies, yet they can be extremely articulate within that vocabulary. As much as I want to be an untouchable angel of forgiveness and grace with a bottomless well of compassion for all living things, I keep messing up that dodge and I think it’s making me a bitch.”
— Aevee Bee, “I love my untouchable virtual body” (via goodbyemisery)
Reblogged nerves-nebula
the human brain is so cool, if you're tired and stressed enough, your brain will go, "don't worry, I got you" and shadows will start moving
and what's the genital situation on the shadows
oh this is my post
Ya’ll might wanna grow some hyperaccumulators (such as sunflowers, oyster mushrooms, mustard greens, vetiver, etc) around your house and/or in your garden for a few years before you plant leafy vegetables so you don’t end up consuming heavy metals.
terminal-burrowing-deactivated2
If you’re uncertain, most state universities have soil testing labs that offer cheap, easily understood soil tests that can tell you for sure whether you’ve got lead, arsenic, etc. in your soils.
searching for “university extension soil test [your state]” will probably turn up helpful info!
This is a good thing to note, (also sunflowers are very pretty and easy to grow when you’re first learnign how to garden) but also searching “(nearest university) Extension” and “(your county) Extension” is GREAT because there’s ALL KINDS of cool services out there if you want to get into growing your own food or helping the local enviornment or installing solar panels on your house or buying livestock or- There’s a lot, it’s AWESOME, it’s usually stunningly low-cost and it’s veyr, very solarpunk so I encourage all of you to take a gander at the programs offered.
The Cooperative Extension System is run in each state by the state’s land grant university/ies (which might not be the ones you think, in NY it’s Cornell rather than any of the SUNYs): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_State_Research,_Education,_and_Extension_Service#Cooperative_Extension_System It’s also where all 4H programs are based!
Some also offer classes! They’re taxpayer funded, so that means the wealthy ones can offer tons of resources. If you can’t find much going on in your state, nearby states may also have excellent info that can apply to your area. Some of the famous heavyweights are Cornell / New York and UC Davis / California, tons of research, plant breeding programs, and all around useful info coming outta those places.
As a botanist I’m contractually obligated to add this any time I see posts about phytoremediation–if you do this you CANNOT let the sunflowers/msuhrooms/etc decompose back into your garden. You cannot add them to your compost pile. That just puts the heavy metals right back into your soil!!!! You need to bag them up and dispose of them elsewhere–traditional landfill waste is probably going to be easiest for most people.
These plants ACCUMULATE metals. They do NOT break them down. You’re pulling them up from the ground and storing them in the plant tissue, so, don’t consume or compost that tissue afterwards.
Reblogged redfoxraccoon
Fuck hostile architecture, I want unhostile architecture. I want benches to be designed to be as easy as possible to sleep on. I want little places for pigeons to nest to be purposefully put on buildings. I want people designing public spaces to think about what they'd be like to skateboard on. I want "Please loiter" signs. I want people to be kind. I want...
We need cities that do not resent the fact that people live in them
Reblogged queer-cosette
There is something sooo deeply American going on with Seattle Children’s Hospital that I think would brick the minds of everyone outside of the United States.
The CHILDRENS hospital has to restrict helipad landings because of noise complaints from the wealthy home owners living next to it. Only the most urgent patients can land directly at the hospital. While the other kids have to land a mile away and are taken to the hospital via ambulance. Which is an unnecessary risk to the child’s life and also makes the families pay for the helicopter AND ambulance.
Apparently this has been going on for decades and is only getting traction because a pilot complained on Twitter.
Reblogged muffinlance
This is true
Reading tip: https://www.amazon.com/Einsam-war-nie-Lutz-VanDijk/dp/3896560972#detailBullets_feature_div. It's published in at least German and Dutch, don't know about english. Günter Grau does have some other English (translated) publications that might be worth reading but I have not read those myself.