I conclude that Yorkshire should become an independent country

The crow was probably just a witches’ familiar and thus was able to use magic to transmute the oily cheeto into actual food

Trans masc friends tell me that one of the things they miss most about presenting as women is drunk girl solidarity in nightclub bathrooms. Until I was a part of that conversation, I didn’t realise how much I cherish these moments. Hearing this helped me to understand the loneliness of being a man far more than I did before.

I think that there are men on the left who leverage their platforms to reach out to men as you describe, but the problem is that their reach is far more limited because compassion doesn’t sell as effectively as outrage bait; Manosphere content is incredibly skilled at creating a vicious cycle in which they incite anger in viewers, and, having nowhere to channel this anger effectively, it threatens to turn to despair, leading emotionally vulnerable viewers to return to the Manosphere, to “re-up” their rage. In the short term, it seems to offer some catharsis, but it fosters an odd dependence. The compassionate men on the left are more likely to resist this kind of dependence cycle (such as through taking steps to avoid unhealthy parasocial relationships with viewers, even if said relationships would make sponsorships more lucrative.

I don’t think that sounds crazy at all. I wish that this sentiment were discussed more freely in society, because I hate the stereotype that men only care about pure physicality in sex (and the corresponding stereotype that women only care about emotional connection).

You’re not wrong here about how a dummy designed to “the average male” proportions" is going to exclude men whose proportions exist in the statistical extremes (and likewise for women), but a phrase that comes to mind is “All models are wrong, some are useful”. Whenever we are making a model for gathering and analysing data, it’s because the real phenomena we’re studying is too complex to be able to effectively analyse without a model. Even if we had a wide array of anatomically correct crash test dummies for many different body types, it would still be a huge simplification of reality. A huge part of research is about trying to always be mindful of this tension, and to be constantly evaluating whether our model is a good enough for reality.

The stats for injury rates in women indicated that no, our model was failing pretty significantly in this area, so we designed different dummies, effectively updating our model. There will be more research that looks at other kinds of variation between people, and that will mean trying to account for extremes while not overcomplicating our model.

Previously what was used was a male crash test dummy but sized down. The word “dummy” makes it easy to overlook, but they’re pretty technologically impressive bits of kit. They take into account the density of different tissues and their relative distribution in the body, and there are strategically placed sensors to measure the force distribution at different levels. It doesn’t encompass all women’s body types, in much the same way that the male dummy doesn’t encompass all men’s body types.

Lots of little differences between male and female bodies cumulatively result in the vehicle collision injury stats that others have quoted elsewhere in this thread. Things like the centre of mass being different, the outline of the pelvis/hips (which also affects the way one sits), women having a greater body fat percentage, that body fat being distributed differently to men’s, women have less muscle. Then there’s boobs, which aren’t just something that can hinder seatbelt placement, but they can also be heavy, and bouncy, which means that the forces involved in a collision can be multiple times more than their weight, which contributes to whiplash and other injuries. On top of this, there’s probably a bunch of other factors that we aren’t aware of yet, but a more comprehensive testing process could help us to understand what differences between male and female bodies actually matter when it comes to vehicle safety. For example, on average, women tend to have longer hair than men, but I don’t expect that would particularly impact injury rate in a vehicle collision. Women having larger breasts than men however, is most certainly a factor that contributed to the stats for women’s injury rates being so much higher than men’s.

On top of all this, before a dedicated female crash test dummy was designed, the downsized male dummy they were using was laughably small — the male one was designed to be the size of the average man at the time, whereas the downsized male one was so small that it only represented the smallest 5% of women at the time. That just seems absurd to me, but it’s what you get when 50% of the population are treated as an afterthought, I suppose.

On the question of does an anatomically correct dummy help, it’s a complex question because it takes time for the developments in car safety to actually make it out to the consumer, and even now we have a better crash test dummy for women, some manufacturers have been sluggish in implementing it into their testing — though now at least it’s possible to apply pressure and say “hey, why are you not using this in your testing when women are at much higher risk when in one of your cars”. Previously, manufacturers who were challenged on this could just shrug and blame the lack of an anatomically correct female crash test dummy, and development of one of those took a lot of time and research expertise, so wasn’t something that could be done trivially. Now the resource exists and the industry has less of an excuse.

Thanks for the heads up. Fortunately it’s only a minor spoiler, and it’s nested quite deep in the overall thread.

It’s interesting because the spoiler displayed properly on my phone, so I wouldn’t have known if you’d not said. It’s probably unsurprising that my app uses the Reddit style spoiler, given that it’s Sync for Lemmy that I’m using. I’ve been meaning to switch to a different one (preferably one of the FOSS ones), but inertia is a bitch.

We were fortunate in that there was a weirdly shaped nook where a decently large cage could fit naturally. It also helped that it had a large blanket draped over it. I imagine many people would struggle to find space for a sufficiently large cage (depending on how large the dog is), or to make it look unobtrusive.

I was less arguing in favour of dog cages, more arguing against the misuse of them.

This is a tangent but I find it so sad when crate abuse happens to dogs, because my family’s dog loved his crate as a safe space. My dad was really firm that the kids weren’t allowed to cuddle the dog while they were in their crate, because it was important that the crate remained a safe space for the dog. It was cute to see how she would run there when scared by something like thunder and how it really seemed to help her anxiety.

The return comes from more future promises filled with ever increasing hot air. OpenAI is especially bad for this — In 2024, they spend $9 billion to make $5 billion. They’re losing money each year, but they drum up venture capital investment by saying “invest more money because some day we’ll be profitable”. Then they build larger, more complex GPT models to continue fuelling the hype machine, even though those models cost even more to run. But as long as OpenAI and the like can sustain the hype machine, venture capital will keep pumping money in. They have to, because they’ve got too much money in the system already, and when the bubble pops, the hot air will escape.

If they invested into something cool or meaningful, their returns will be limited. Tech seems to be especially appealing for venture capital because it facilitates the illusion of infinite growth being possible. The super rich don’t really trade in money, because they borrow against their assets. Imagine if you owned a fairly modest house that was worth 500k, but you wanted to sell it for more. If you and a bunch of other people constructed an elaborate fiction that led to your house being valued at $10 million, then you could borrow multiple millions of dollars against the inflated value of your house. Even if early investors in a bullshit project wise up and realise their mistake, they haven’t necessarily lost money as long as other investors still think the bullshit is worth investing in. So the cycle of venture capital means that everyone has a vested interest in keeping the hype train going.

It’s an absurd bubble, and it’s going to be absolute chaos when it bursts. Ed Zitron’s analysis explores it really well.

I loved playing as a Malkavian. My late best friend said that it might not be best to play as a Malkavian for one’s first run at the game because of all the weird shit, and I replied “oh, now that’s sealed it for me, I’ve got to pick Malkavian”.

I like how a perceptive player of a Malkavian can pick up so many hints and clues. Like how >!spoiler [minor spoiler][your character refers to Therese and Jeanette as “daughters of Janus”, or how the thinblood Malkavian near the start of the game says “don’t open it”]!<

Edit: formatting

“it’s just postponing the problem!!1!one” The thing of including a “one” to make the irony of your exclamation abundantly clear is a delightful bit of internet-ese. I always find it funny when I see it

I do think that this makes you weird (affectionate), and I hope you never change, because your weirdness is wonderful.

I don’t know whether it’s better, but every few years when I get a craving to play RuneScape, it’s coming from a place of nostalgia; Old School Runescape scratches that itch whereas modern RuneScape would not.

Thank you for this explanation. Having dabbled in vector graphics, I guessed that it was something like this after a moment’s thought, but my first thought was “this sounds good, but I’m not sure how”. Even if I didn’t end up needing this explanation personally, I appreciate your helpfulness — it’s the kind of thing that makes this place feel like a community

Yeah, it’s pretty fucked up rhetoric that feels like it’s making people less safe in two ways: it builds the impression that people with vaginas don’t assault people, and it treats penises (and the people who have them) as inherently dangerous. Bioessentialism is gross on so many levels

I think Personally, I don’t know. However, I am a cis person who has had body dysmorphia. Even when I was unhealthily thin, I perceived myself as disgustingly fat. I genuinely believed that things would be better if I just lost “one more kilo — just one more, and things will all be fine and I’ll start seeing myself as a human deserving of respect rather than just a disgusting lump. Yes, I know I said that 5 kilos ago, but just one more will do it”.

There was a fundamental mismatch between my perceptions and reality. As a small aside, your comment mentioned “body dysphoria”, when I suspect you meant “body dysmorphia” (and “gender dysphoria” is what many trans people experience). I’m not highlighting this to be a persnickety asshole, but because I think the (body) dysmorphia vs (gender) dysphoria contrast is interesting. Whilst my experience was rooted in disproportionately magnified perceptions of flaws, gender dysphoria is rooted in reality: consider someone who is assigned male at birth who later comes out as a trans woman. If she decides to go for medical transition (which typically involves hormones and surgery), these are pretty serious changes that wouldn’t make sense if someone already believed they were a cis woman. Rather, the gender dysphoria that many experience arises from an acute understanding of both the biological reality of their body, and the sociocultural reality of how people tend to perceive that body. (I also want to note, as a biochemist, that the way that our bodies respond to hormones is also part of biological reality. Like, if someone assigned male at birth starts taking estrogen, their body will go “cool, guess we’re making titties now”. Human nature, if it exists as a unified concept at all, is fundamentally fluid, and I wish we spoke about this more)

The key thing in distinguishing between gender dysphoria and body dysmorphia is the proposed treatment. Every kilogram I lost caused me to become more miserable, more caught up in my distorted perceptions, and more physically frail. Even before I had lost an unhealthy amount of weight, it would have been patently clear to an outside observer how bullshit my “just one my kilogram” spiel was. For trans people undergoing medical transition though, it’s a completely different story. Whilst I’m told by multiple friends that first starting HRT does feel like taking the red pill in the matrix, the ongoing reality of it isn’t quite so dramatic. Many of the changes are permanent, but they’re gradual enough that with support and oversight from medical professionals who understand trans people, there is so much opportunity to gauge whether this is the right path for a person. Whilst there are some people who regret transitioning, the regret rate for gender confirmation treatments is stunningly low compared to other cosmetic surgeries (I don’t have the number to hand, sorry). In terms of positive treatment outcomes, there are oodles of evidence that show that medical transition is absurdly beneficial — it’s a strong enough case that even if I didn’t care at all about the wellbeing of trans people, there’s a super strong case for the economic benefits of good access to gender affirming healthcare.

To put it simply, the difference between body dysmorphia and gender dysphoria is evident in how they respond to treatment. The therapy I underwent focussed on unwinding and unlearning the false perceptions of myself. In contrast, conversion therapy is not just an inhumane way to respond to gender dysphoria, but proven to be harmful. On the other side of things, indulging my delusions would have just deepened my spiral, whereas medically supported gender transition is proven to save lives and increase trans people’s wellbeing.

(N.b. I have focussed on medical transition here because that’s the angle that naturally arises from your question. However, not all trans people who experience gender dysphoria necessarily want to medically transition, finding that social transition (living as one’s chosen gender) is enough for them. I feel it important to highlight that many trans people I have known have expressed that they feel there would be far fewer trans people feeling they need to undergo medical transition if the world wasn’t so shitty to people who are gender non conforming. Also notable is that not all trans people experience gender dysphoria, and there are plenty of trans people who actively want to get away from thinking about things in terms of gender dysphoria, because they feel that it promotes an overly medical approach that can be harmful, such as how access to trans healthcare is increasingly being gatekept for bullshit reasons (their bigotry is transparent because in blocking access to trans healthcare, they are actively ignoring a pretty strong scientific consensus). Honestly though, I’m not the right person to discuss these nuances; I am in community with many trans people, but there’s a lot that I just simply can’t understand because I don’t have any direct lived experience of being trans. Furthermore, the trans community is far from a monolith, so discussions around terms like gender dysphoria, medical transition etc. ongoing.)

I was averse to Ubuntu when I first got into Linux because I had the impression that it was the most popular or well known distro, and I was somewhat hipster trash around that concept. That is to say that no, at least for me, my disdain towards Ubuntu was not well justified at all

That makes sense. Although for what it’s worth, I don’t recall having any problems with Deep Rock Galactic, so whatever issues you had with that may be specific to your particular set up

Something I laugh at myself for is that before I realised I was actually bisexual, I did consider myself to be faking it. I was a teenager who had heavily internalised the male gaze, and set too much of my self worth according to the attention I got from the opposite sex (which was not very much — I was an undiagnosed autistic with bad anxiety). I was aware of the trope (mostly in media) of (usually implicitly straight) women making out with other women to be titillating to men. I concluded that this is totally something that I would do, when I got to university.

I later heard about how problematic this trope is, and felt really guilty because even though I hadn’t participated in it actively, I felt like I was contributing to the ambient societal biphobia. I later learned that many straight women would not enjoy making out with another woman, even if it was to get male attention. In hindsight, I think perhaps that it was in fact, me who was titillated by the idea of me making out with another woman (but it took me a while of digging through internalised biases to realise this)