Heh, yeah they can get pretty dark… There are definitely a few gateway ones if you were ever curious without it getting too full on.

I don’t think it ever left… Its not popular with Gen Z that’s for sure but I love my side parting! Give it a go for her.

Well yeah, gotta have a nice purse, its too useful, didn’t mean it as a separate thing just that apparently crossbodies are apparently a very millennial thing…

I thought it was crossbody bags and side partings that gave us away?

They are absolutely fascinating. Sure, I’m certain a lot of videos ham it up a bit because of the way they look around and do certain things but generally animals with that much visual acuity have a lot of processing power to deal with the info so its not a far stretch at all to imagine there is something more to their intelligence.

Spiders in the genus Portia show behaviour which is really fascinating, not only do they use their eyes to actively hunt but they ‘plan’ attack routes - they can see their prey, plan a route to get closer, which involves breaking line of sight for extended periods yet still remember where to go and where the prey was. They also exhibit strong learning traits and pattern recognition. Absolutely fascinating, and adorable, things. I really want to get a pet jumping spider, one of the big ones.

2003 1.2 Vauxhall Corsa (which I still own!), yeah had to hit that boost button, god it was slow with aircon on.

Yeah it was interesting but honestly I just kind of found Gideon a bit too much on the cringy side of edgy… There was a lot to like but I found a lot of it very grating somehow.

My favourite book when I was a teen was Bloodtide by Melvin Burgess. It an imagining of the Icelandic Volsunga Saga (so lots of Norse gods and myths) but set in post apocalyptic London controlled by ganglords.

I think my overall favourite it probably Shogun by James Clavell - people are probably more familiar with it now because of the recent TV series but the book is huge and goes into huge amounts of depth along with a gradual shift in focus and character as you migrate from being thrown into this alien society with strict but unclear rules to large scale political outmanoeuvres

Right now I’m reading Her Majesty’s Royal Covern by Juno Dawson - about milennial witches operating in secret in modern society (think nature, earth, pagan witches, not the ones from the series that must not be named). Written by a trans woman with trans topics in the plot.

I also want to read a new series I only discovered a day or two ago called Custodians by Dan Alexander. I don’t actually know a huge amount about it other than it is a detective mystery that involves magic and queer representation. I only mention it as, in a bizarre chain of events, I met and spoke to the author and the actors involved in the audiobook and tv pilot.

Looooove fourth wing, I got far more into it than I thought. I tried ACOTAR but… Eeh, don’t really get it. I currently like the slightly edgier ones, A Rain of Shadows and Endings (Legacy series) is one I was a bit obsessed with and really want to get on with the rest of the series. I also have some of the really dark romance books, the kinds that make my friends worry about me, that I need to get on and read (Twisted Heathens is first on that list).

I don’t think its cancel culture to not want to indirectly fund fascism. The guy is one of the CEOs so if you subscribe then it goes into his pockets

Online skews things a lot. Often due to how they are raised in childhood you might find more trans women online as being terminally online was more socially acceptable and the norm with their, at the time, peers. Also you tend to find a lot of trans women seeking community to be themselves before coming out whilst trans men are often able to explore their gender more in person so the idea of presenting as the ‘opposite’ gender before or at the start of socially transitioning means trans men might not be seeking that extra level of community and support - there are generally less things to learn from scratch.

Its tricky to say when it comes to that. How do you tell if neurodiversity results in more likely to be trans vs neurodivergent people are more likely to break the taboo and are more likely to come out vs remain closeted? (Which is a feasible thought if there is actually a meaningful disparity and the way that autism can present in childhood?).

Either way its a really dangerous subject because it already gets vastly misused to claim that gender affiming care is abuse of ND (mainly autistic) people - simultaneously removing their own agency and treating them as simpletons who don’t know what they are as well as indicating that trans people don’t really exist because its all some kind of delusion from being autistic.

The more interesting statistic I saw was prevelance of gender diverse people with EDS - up to 17% (https://www.eds.clinic/articles/transgender-and-non-binary-identities-in-eds-community) but could actually in theory skew numbers towards more trans men… Its all a bit wooly unfortunately.

If only a vile disgusting bigot didn’t profit from it

I use it. Nothing but positive experiences so far.

Pfft, wait until millennials are in nursing homes with no responsibilities and we will get those numbers through the roof. Us old girls will be single handedly propping up the cheap sweet rosé industry.

It broke my knife…

Its so confusing. My friend gave me permission to share her slides on it, its just a few but I think it helped me understand.

My friend is a palaeobotanist and recently tried to see if I (a microbiologist) could understand her presentation on taxonomy for ancient plants. I found it very weird to find out that the different parts of the plant retain the names they were described as even when integrated into the plant as a whole.

Like if you find a dino skull and call it ‘skullosaurus’ then somebody finds a femur and calls it ‘femurdon’ then later finds both in the same fossil, ‘femurdon’ gets retired and the whole thing is ‘skullosaurus’.

But with plants you can separately describe a female organ as ‘femonia’, a male organ as ‘maleonanthus’ and a leaf as ‘leafopteris’. Then somebody finds they belong to the same plant and not only do you just get to pick what to call the plant somewhat arbitrarily based on the organ prevelance, age, leaf or even an entirely new name but the original parts still keep their old names as separate taxa. I still can’t get my head around this ‘whole plant hypothesis’ thing…

Uggggh… I only watched the 13th doctor episodes a couple of years ago to catch up to David Tennant’s return and I totally forgot about all that… I don’t mind weird ‘missing’ incarnations like the war doctor and even the one at the lighthouse had she either fit in or was ambiguous as to what ‘number’ they are but yeah, the timeless child stuff was awful and weird and just made the doctor feel so hollow… Instead of being this flawed character trying to do good they suddenly are important in the universe because of their nature and not their deeds… It cheapens the doctor so much… Can we not just pretend that 13 never happened? I’m still yet to watch the 15th doctor series because of how awful the Chibnell era was…

I very much enjoyed the 5 hour video by Jay Exci on it because it really showed how poor it really was. I was never that keen on some of the Moffat era when he got too Moffat-y for his own good but I would have had that in a heartbeat.

Exactly my point. Let it be personal. I don’t understand why you would do this without a toggle and without being clear to users.

Err… what? That wasn’t my point at all, you just took the words and decided to say something totally different. I’m talking about the line one draws in what is seen as obvious, objective or morally responsible. Which is exactly what you then go to totally misconstrue here:

Also, you only said Stormfront or Infowars (now a The Onion site). If it was only extreme right stuff that’d be one thing (still bad if it’s not made clear, in my opinion). It isn’t though. It also includes some less radical right stuff, but also some left stuff.

I made no comment on the filter list in this part. I said it as my own opinion on what I see as morally correct, not them. I made the comment as a set-up to the next part of the comment; I would think nothing of filtering those two items out as way of demonstrating that few people would object to them being blacklisted as hateful sites of no useful substance. The entire point was to demonstrate that my moral compass in that regard is less controversial yet ultimately it is the same concept - the developer chose to filter what they likely think is hateful or fake, they just have a different idea of what that covers.

(And thank you so much for the “UMMM ACKCHULLY” on Infowars. I’m well aware of the situation with it but it was clearly done as a way to pick an obvious website that few would have cared about blocking).

I don’t care that you don’t use Piefed. If you’ve seen it before and didn’t know about it, you’re in the same position as most users.

Aww, I’m sorry for offering up information that was entirely relevant to the question that you asked me:

Were you aware of this before the post? If the answer to those is not very high and/or no, it’s not being forward with what it’s doing

I know you apparently don’t care about answers to questions you ask but I’ll make it clearer for you - Why would I be aware of the features of a piece of software I don’t use???

If he’s supporting the status quo by hiding Israel genocide information from users, that’s bad, right?

Yup. But that’s up to them. Don’t like it? Don’t use it.

t’s a piece of software that should be designed to facilitate what the user wants, not what the creator thinks.

Absolutely could not disagree more. You do not get to decide on their behalf what they produce - it is no difference in that sense than creating art, or writing a book or running a website. What the creator puts out is up to them - you don’t like it then you stop using it or you change it. Would allowing more user control over stuff like that be preferable to me? Yes. Would it make it more popular? Probably. Can we or should we force or pressure them? No. It is entirely their choice, you have no right to try force their hand to make it more palatable to your sensibilities. They create it that way because that is what they think is best. You can question that choice, you can hold that choice against them, you can attempt to change their mind, ask to re-think it, object to it, submit your own changes to it with justification, do whatever you want but implying that they have some kind of obligation to anyone but themselves to make them do what you think is best is absurd.

The only option is to fork it, which is possible, so he isn’t stopping this, but purposefully chose to make this not clear so people won’t. It’s an attempt at thought control by being hidden and sneaking it in.

Aah yes, genius-level thought manipulation and level 100 sneak achieved by *checks notes* leaving the list in a plain text format in a publicly accessible repository, fully indexed, copied & replicated online &offline and integrated right into the most popular AI models. What a galaxy-brained master of subterfuge.

It isn’t hard-baked into the code. Instance owners can adjust it as needed in the software they want to run and the community they wish to create. If this is such a moral injustice then I’m sure we are going to see a fork of this with filtering removed and the original one will fade into irrelevance…

This is such a non-issue blown out of the water as some kind of evil mastermind carefully crafting the media landscape rather than just one person making a thing they like and blocking out the things they think are bad. This literally is freedom of speech and it couldn’t be more free than “don’t like what I’m doing? Go and do it yourself then, here are all the instructions, no strings attached”. Trying to force somebody’s hand because you don’t like what they are doing will only have the effect of driving the developer away entirely.

There are loads of projects and pieces of software I have seen that are either created by hateful people or people who tolerate bigotry in their community but it is my right to ignore them and pretend they don’t exist. Likely all they are doing is hurting themselves and I can live in hope that it doesn’t work out in the long run. I’m happy to make my distaste for it known and make it clear that i object to it but to say they have some kind of duty to cater to me or anyone else??? No, but hopefully if people get the message, agree and stop using their software or fork it and make their own then that’s a win.