Uh... I hate to tell you this but people absolutely dress as mermaids and do conventions... There's a whole home industry of people who make custom silicon tails.
Nope, different nerd culture entirely. Seriously, they have their own conventions, instead of fursuits they do custom silicone tails and train to swim in them, have contests and pagents and things. There's basically no overlap between the two communities. Scaleys are folk in the fursuit community who do dragon and lizard personas.
I have odd connections. Being in the film industry I have friends through props depts who do furry cons and one of my coworkers does underwater photography for people in the Mermaid subculture.
When I was living in Japan and using public baths cycling between hot and cold baths a couple of times this way was my favorite thing.
Appearantly it basically causes blood to do some neat stuff by dilating and constricting blood vessels to move blood to the core or the extremities.
All I knew is if you cycle about three or four times and drink one beer it's the cheapest drunk you will ever be.
Consider that those shootings are getting way more frequent. We get a Columbine about four times a year now and around 43 other shootings where there might be only injuries or singular casualties. Kids grow up in the States with lockdown drills. That entire voting block is going to be old enough to vote in 12 years.
I expect anti gun sentiments are growing now as each year new voters are growing up in that system where these events aren't considered rare anymore. Where parents who came of age in the 2000's have kids and are now front row to that milliterization and afraid because their families have skin in that game.
These laws are gunna happen one day.
I am sorry, but this take is founded on a lack of knowledge about the spoiler effect in first past the post voting systems. Until more representative forms of voting are introduced this is an idealistic but ultimately misinformed take.
The spoiler effect is a system powerful encumbant politicians use to manipulate populaces at large in part by taking advantage of your better nature and belief in a flawed system. Voting your heart will just not be enough and it's got hidden dangers. Pressure needs to be applied after this election to change the voting structure to a more stable and open system.
https://youtu.be/3Y3jE3B8HsE?si=qCvPLnk4u6FJ0ec2
Here's a video that explains fairly susinctly what the spoiler effect is and how alternative voting systems disrupt it.
Sounds a bit like attention economy burnout. It's tuned to young adults level of brain plasticity and as a lot of us are aging the cycle is wearing us out. In some ways you might need to start finding time to actually be properly bored again. Not like a constant semi-entertained state or stimulated by work that is dull... just actually properly bored on your own time by choice.
Find some low attention calorie things to do. Read books, chill out in a park or a coffee shop with your phone off, set timers and take 30 minutes of a nap and hit the snooze button for as many times as you want. Win back your high points by expanding the low end resting rate. Unplug from things that don't give you satisfying returns and see how that makes you feel.
And sometimes it's okay to lose a bit of sparkle. We get older and it's a little harder to find things that feel like an authentic fresh experience.
Gideon the Ninth?
Takes like 5 chapters for it to find it's feet but it's lesbian necromancers and swordfighters in space with a very snarky point of veiw character.
It's kind of more scifi fantasy but a good time.
" What happens when you mistype an email requesting a Point of Sale System to be installed"
Yeah it's where we get a lot of purity doctrine as well... But when you read it you get the sense that Paul is a sex repulsed asexual. He's like "well if you gotta do it be married... But also like just don't if you can."
Paul just comes across as an opportunistic narcissist riding on Jesus's popularity and codifying things in a way people will do whatever he wants. "Give me (err mean my church) lots of money and listen to me and do what my most loyal friends tell you to and you'll... Go to heaven... Yeah!"
So intersex reassignments of babies born with ambiguous characteristics?
Some Teamsters are wild man. One guy I rode with went on a whole thing about how he thought "Swamper" was such an outdated thing to call my position and I brought up the whole thing about how he wasn't driving horses either and he went on a 40 minute tyrade about how very dare I/ it's still called "horsepower" / proud history of the union....
Cocaine is one hell of a drug.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swamper_(occupational_title)
Old devilry. The same sort that has union truck drivers called "Teamsters" even though most of them have never been near a horse or mule.
The trucker I swamp for has swapped rhetoric from "Kamala laughs like a hyena/ Trump is fine" to declarations about how he doesn't care about politics and how maybe we should all just stop talking about it.
Very funny how fast that disengage happened.
It's hard to deal with other's androphobia but realizing that it's founded so often in personal experience is kind of the big step a lot of cis guys need. It's not about making folk feel guilty it's people stating that these things are problems and brainstorming ways to make things better so in the future there is less fear.
Cis Men are INTEGRAL to this process. So often the reasons things are the way they are isn't anyone's individual fault. If your workplace is all guys chances are folk just hired people they knew they would be comfortable around. That's totally understandable! But If nobody takes the minute to realize that if everybody stays in their comfort zone then society doesn't change.
A lot of the work of the feminist movement is a shifting target of a multitude of different spaces. Like black feminism and trans feminism had to fission off because certain aspects of privilege were keeping certain voices buried. Where a lot of the discussion is these days is where feminism failed men and they need men's voices to discuss things in earnest while being understanding and accepting of the trauma that exists in those spaces.
Honestly I can see it. Working in male dominated workplaces for so long (I am trans but they didn't know that) taking any kind of physical or procedural shortcut, or ask for help even if it was common practice would cause my coworkers to assume that I couldn't do it things the regular way or make them treat me as less competent even if I had done it alone or the more physically demanding way where they could see at some point in the past.
The general assumption of guys is that women are less capable and they don't change their minds easily. There's a big difference between regular competence and the sort of self protective over performance of competence which is nessisary to get a lot of cis guys to actually realize their assumptions are bullshit and to stop treating women like they are precocious children.
Usually doing one big thing that shatters their preconceptions does the trick. I once, in frustration at being treated like a china doll demonstrated I could lift a 200 lbs coworker and walk the length of the warehouse with him on my back. But doing that only creates me as an "exception to the rule" and they will resume that behaviour with all of my female coworkers.
If you aren't given a chance to prove yourself capable in one big flashy way that gets the guys to shut up it can cause all manner of disordered overwork practice as you have to constantly perform for an audience of the disbelieving in small ways and hope they figure it out that they are being assholes.
You see but here's where how you're putting this works together with other things. You are looking at trans people on the whole as a safety issue to the population at large. The framing of trans people on the right always places us as a problem l. That is an outright dehumanizing tactic and the answer is always left kind of purposefully vague because the answer is "we aren't supposed to exist."
The outcome of all this discussion is basically to raise the hurdles of being trans in a pubic space. To be frank, they know that basically making life miserable enough for us will solve their "problems" because when life gets too hard and devoid of joy and relief death becomes viable.
So they frame us as a public safety problem, a categorical problem, a mental health problem, a medical problem, a "ruining your fun" problem, a freedom of speech problem because they know every time they do so that you will think of us as a group a little less in terms of being people and a little more as a sacrifice that deserves what we get.
It doesn't matter that prisons don't change their design to fit us because as long as we're the ones getting raped the system is fine.
It doesn't matter that public toilets don't change their design to make everyone safer as long as we never go out in public long enough to use one.
It doesn't matter that basically it only takes six months to dial in what your dosage of hrt and from then on it's just a prescription like every other you pick up monthly for any other medical condition . As long as we're interpreted by the system as an 'undue medical burden' we can basically just allow stress to ruin our bodies so we die faster and voters can feel like they've saved resources.
It doesn't matter that we have kids of our own because us "not being safe to be around children" means that we are banished from parental and teaching spaces and the child protection services can be empowered to take our children away to raise them "safely" .
The arguements that never frame systemic solutions that include trans people are paving the way for our genocide. They are designed to get you to stop thinking right before you ever consider us worthy of accomodation. You are supposed to look at us as taking YOUR resources away, making YOUR spaces less safe, ruining YOUR culture so that you feel unsafe and attacked even when those things aren't actually happening. This effect is called creating a "Moral exclusion" and it is the first steps to creating outcast sections of society who you are not supposed to question where they SHOULD exist because you are primed to only think about them as in terms of where they should NOT exist.
There is good reason why we do not soothe your fears about evil creepy cis men in women's bathrooms. Because it's bad faith rhetoric designed to give us no recourse to argue that we should have as much a right to be safe. The fact is the numbers are in. In the ten plus years in my city where trans inclusion is the norm there has been no uptick in stalking incidents regarding bathroom use. Just because you are being engineered to feel less safe by politicians doesn't mean you actually are less safe but you are making US less safe. But that's not a problem because you aren't supposed to value our safety or comfort even a little. Your not caring is useful to specific people so they are going to keep training you to do that and to never ask where the trans people went. Because unless you have the misfortune of being one of us or loving one of us enough to care we are just a problem.
That's the thing, I am not so sure. Like ask for what the reason behind that discomfort would be and a lot of the time it still has it's root in other people's perceptions. There's a lot of muddling factors, internalized misogyny and the need to project "manliness" as a distinct comparison is still basically an external training to feel that way about that feature. Things like fatphobia work off of external training to social body standards and a lot of that dynamic is at play in cis spaces...but doesn't well graft one to one with the trans experience of dysphoria /euphoria.
It's a difficult knot to dig down to it's source but I think it's a way more of a distinct difference of operations than people think hence why it's so gorram hard to explain to most people what is going on.
To confirm this would require a bunch of study which isn't really happening because cis people don't really deeply examine or know where to start even into exploring what being cis actually is. They don't really have to think about it. The only reason we trans folks have to do so much introspection is because we can't just be left to do what we need. We have to quantify it and examine it to self advocate... And then when cis people render our situation back to us in completly dismissive nonsensical ways it prompts one to wonder. Maybe there really is a physical difference, some chunk of development that created an inflexibility where normally there is flexibility. A trans brain might exist in a subset of cis people and align internally (I have definitely met folk like that) but unless cis people talk to each other we might not be able to confirm.
That's not quite what I mean. A lot of people basically just equate sex and gender as the same thing.
But what I am talking about is demonstratable this way : ask this to a cis person pick a sex characteristic, any physically dimorphic sex characteristic. How does the existence of having that physical characteristic make you feel? Your answer cannot include how comfortable physically the ownership of that characteristic (like if we're talking something that causes physical discomfort like period cramps as example) is or an evaluation of how attractive or not to other people that characteristic is. It is not an evaluation of the individual nature of how yours compares to other people's. The rubric is just its pure existence of that characteristic in isolation. What emotional reaction do you have to possessing that characteristic?
Cis people generally return an answer that those sex characteristics don't really cause them to feel anything. They just have those things. Like they might have learned reactions to their characteristics if they don't fit a beauty standard and are made to feel deficient by other people... But otherwise on their own those things don't make them feel either happy or sad . The possession of those features have a neutral value.
They also don't seem particularly attached to their innate characteristics in theoreticals. Ask them what they think it would be like to swap to the opposite sex phenotype and they don't tend to report back any anticipated bodily sense of horror or loss. Most often they just display curiosity and a tabulation of things they would be able to suddenly experience or would change. More often than not their primary initial concern would be whether they would be attractive or not.
I think what makes most people cis is actually a lack of ability to care about which body phenotype they are riding around in. Their sex characteristics don't actually mean anything to them on their own.
After damn near a decade of discourse with cis people I think I have an insight into the problem.
We as trans people assume cis people have an internalized gender that matches their sex... But in talking with cis people I actually think it's something else. I think the vast majority of cis people's experience of gender only comes from external influences... I have met cis people who recognize what we're talking about when I talk about this sort of internal compass that sends feedback completely isolate of any social influence but like it's actually rare.
So we are in the unfortunate position of having to explain an internally experienced phenomenon that cis folk literally do not experience to a bunch of skeptical people who's entire experience of gender is performance based... So they fill in the gaps with motives that makes sense to them that involve the nessisary involvement of some kind of external social or stimuli because they cannot conceptualize anything different while we have to render the problem using analogs cis people are likely to understand... But are also based off of externalized influences and thus completly imperfect.
Stonehenge was been sprayed with orange paint by climate activists on Jun. 19 demanding action on fossil fuels just one day before summer solstice.
Transgender activist Henry Tse’s ID card dominated his world for the past seven years, the center of a lengthy court battle and a fight for recognition.
