Spyke

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Tarot cards

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I (AMAB transfem) definitely wouldn't go into anything expecting to have an idea of the end result. I certainly didn't. I started with changing my clothing, my hair, tucking, painting my nails, and experimenting with my voice. I started voice therapy, trying to get the tools not to specifically sound feminine (at this point I called myself agender and/or nonbinary), but to have better control over my voice. I only started HRT on a low dosage after feeling how good trying out a more feminine gender expression felt. Those changes felt very good, and very affirming, so I upped the dosage. I added medications. Eventually, I got surgeries. I never had some clear image or path laid out for me. I just did each next step one at a time, whatever felt right for me.

You don't need to start with some big decision of the final state that will "fix" your dysphoria. Just start by experimenting, finding what feels right, and as more parts click into place, figure out what sticks out. For me, that was my voice. Then it was my figure. Then it was my face. Etc. Start not with finding out how to fix what's bad, but finding what does feel good. I had to try plenty of things I ended up not liking on my path to finding what's right for me. The rest will come.

Don't think of your gender expression, figure, or presentation as a problem to be solved as a whole. That's approaching it from the wrong direction. Start with gender experimentation, and when you find things that feel good, that's a sign to keep experimenting in that direction. If you are able, I highly recommend therapy with someone that has worked with trans people before. You might be able to find programs in your area that can help you find that if you aren't able to afford or find it on your own.

You got this <3

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Tragically, as many as 9625 out of every 10k individuals may be neurotypical

Now obviously this is satire, but even so, 3.75% seems staggeringly low. Does their definition of neurotypical just mean "not diagnosed autism?" I feel like even in our satire, we should be a bit more progressive. Those with autism diagnoses are relatively low compared to those undiagnosed autistic people and other forms of neurodivergence. ADHD alone contributes another several percent.

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Literal Hostage Situation

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I don't know if the format really applies. Complaining about one corporation stealing your data while using another's product that does the same seems a bit pointless, especially when there are cheaper, better alternatives. The putting a stick through your own bike tire format seems more appropriate.

movies

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Box Office: 'Backrooms' Becoming A24's Highest Ever At Global Box Office

I liked it. I saw a lot of negative audience reviews, and I think they're from children that were excited by the pop culture backrooms craze. It isn't fast paced Hollywood horror, they didn't use jump scares, and you need to have some amount of media literacy to understand what the backrooms represent and how each of the characters interface with it. A bunch of kids showed up just wanting spooky scary liminal spaces and monsters, and while the movie is suspenseful, it isn't Hollywood blockbuster horror. I think the movie is much better for it. I highly recommend watching it. It takes a while to reveal the real themes at play and what the backrooms is a metaphor for, but I found it very rewarding. 9/10 for me.

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Trans people often suffer from voice dysphoria. The right kind of coaching can change everything.

I did vocal training for a few months, and my voice is very feminine. I haven't been misgendered in years, in no small part thanks to the voice training. I cannot recommend it enough to anyone with voice dysphoria (or anyone that wants to sing well too!). It also taught me the tools to modify my voice to sound however I want, which has lent me a lot of versatility in running ttrpg games. I can play several characters in the same scene, masculine and feminine, and it's immediately obvious who is speaking. 10/10

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I've honestly never quite realized up until now how utterly ridiculous it is that people (especially in the US) regularly demand that their food be chauffeured to them.

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I drove down doordash for a while. Trust me, every driver knows how much they're getting screwed. You'll never be more class-conscious than having 30+ interactions with people as broke as you every day, and seeing every possible angle of fellow working class jobs. You do it for one of several reasons: you want some tiny modicum of control in your life through your schedule, you desperately need the money and it's easy as fuck to get a delivery job, or you started it for one of those reasons or something similar, got good enough to be ahead of the curve, and it's now more appealing than finding something else. The last one was where I was at.

I had done the job enough that I was making $18 an hour, well above the average in my area, and despite needing to pay for gas and taxes on a 1099a, it was still more appealing to keep control and flexibility over my life than to do something else. I could take days off whenever I wanted, see friends during the week, and coordinate my schedule with my fiancee easily. You're very aware that you're getting screwed, but you choose the devil you know, as they say.

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Star Wars is an ode to the stupidest use of battle lasers

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SW is for children is not a great take. It's just not sci-fi, and shouldn't be judged as such. It's a space fantasy, and it leans into the camp and the suspension of disbelief. They use wings and aerodynamics in space. Destroyed ships "sink." The good guys never get hit and the bad guys die in one shot. Now, the new movies were absolutely disappointing, but Star Wars was never sci-fi, at least not in the ways this discussion is defining the genre.

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Unified Theory of American Reality

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Intelligent, compassionate, and a vessel for the author's racist worldview.

Don't mind me. I hate that book, and I hate that it's taught in every school as if it has anything important to say. We've run the Lord of the Flies experiment, both accidentally and very intentionally. Every time, we've demonstrated that humans are better than that, and the author's beliefs about human nature were both very incorrect and very racist.

I still resent being forced to debate my classmates about whether human nature was intrinsically "good" or "evil," directly after reading that book, even though it was 25 years ago. I was the lone voice on the side of "good," for lack of a "good and evil are subjective terms, but nonetheless humans are empathetic and this book is horseshit" team. I got dogpiled by 20 some other students for about 45 minutes. Fuck you Ms. Brown, and fuck you William Golding. That book has nothing important to say other than exposing its author's racist insecurities.

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All of it

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Allegations of ski jumpers using penis enlargement injections in order to get more surface area during their measurements for their suits. As far as I know, no credible evidence of this actually happening though.

linux

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NVIDIA announce DLSS 4.5 with Dynamic Multi Frame Generation, plus DLSS Updater gets Linux support

I personally am really sick of frame generation and scaling being the only way modern games are playable. The graphical improvements are minor, but the performance cost is enormous. Your average person shouldn't need to buy a GPU worth as much as a used car just to squeeze out average performance. Scaling and frame generation are never seamless, and it can't create information where none exists. Especially in PvP games, I've noticed how much worse the graphical fidelity is with distant targets or people peaking around corners. I'd genuinely rather play the game at a lower framerate or resolution than be losing vital information in my computers attempt to make sense of the handful of pixels representing the gun of my opponent peeking the corner, and turning it into a blurry section of wall instead.

In singleplayer games it's not as bad, but I have found that a game that isn't chasing perfect true-to-life graphics but has a gorgeous art direction looks far better to me personally. I'm just sick of AAA and tired of having my super computer from 4 years ago struggle with the latest releases in native resolution. Slightly more realistic lighting and realistic hair and cloth simulation are not nearly as important to me as good performance and visual style.

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North Carolina Republican lawmaker wants the state to police what transgender teachers can wear

This dumb bitch used to go to my parents' church. She left because the church decided to support their queer members. My mother, a veteran teacher in Wake County, is going to speak at the legislature to give her a piece of her mind, especially due to her harassment of a trans teacher in the county. The teachers here overwhelmingly do not support her or the conservative bullshit this legislature tries to force (much to their disappointment). They enforce the messed up rules intended to harm queer kids with cis kids, to get the parents motivated to push back (like refusing to call a cis kid by their nickname unless the parents have submitted the right paperwork for an alternate name), and will not out children to their parents. Stand by our teachers and help them resist legislation like this.

edit: the entire reason for her introducing this law is because she's awfully pressed about a trans music teacher existing.

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Why do we have shampoo, conditioner, and body wash soaps?

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As a woman with long, curly hair, if I don't condition, I go from having nice curly waves to a ball of unmanageable frizz. I've also had to experiment with different shampoos to get the results I want, to clean my hair without damaging it. It definitely isn't engineered for marketing purposes. Ask anyone with long, curly, or kinky hair and they'll tell you how important their hair routine is. If you have short, straight hair, it probably doesn't matter nearly as much. Your hair is fully replaced in a few weeks. I need to keep my hair healthy for years. My hair is down to my sternum, and it took years to get this long. If I didn't take very good care of it with the right soaps and conditioner, it would not be able to be this long or this nice.

Reducing it to just chemicals and chemicals is well, reductive. Basically everything is a chemical. Your natural oils are chemicals. Sweat is a chemical. Dirt is chemicals. We need to wash out some chemicals, but we don't want dry scalps or damaged hair, so we need to use the right soaps and the right conditioner to remove those bad chemicals and replace them with chemicals to mimic our natural oils until they build back up. Most people probably don't need to wash their hair as often as they do, but conditioning is definitely not a marketing scam.