Absolutely No Gravitas Here

Vivi, 31F. EDM producer. I also do Blender art. Говорю по русски. Your ideology needs to build more housing and more trains. 2nd gen USian with Kharkiv-born parents. 🇺🇦🌻❤️

[fourthoverfifth]

anyone know how to stop taking massive psychic damage every time I hear a flawlessly passing trained voice

cause sometimes I think I'm doing OK - I walk away from a conversation thinking "oh I actually kept my fem voice up there without slipping" or I listen back to a recording during a voice training session and think "...hey I actually don't hate this for once?"

...only to open instagram to respond to some message, where my feed flashbangs me with an absolutely perfect feminine voice from some random trans woman. which vaporizes my confidence in about 32 nanoseconds. coughing dysphoric trans woman vs. algorithmic hydrogen bomb.

I've been doing this shit for so long and still can't crack it. Like I'm 80% of the way there, can autopilot short chats and small talk, but it doesn't fly in extended stress testing. Long chats, hard topics that make me think, stressful settings, it all puts me in "oh god oh fuck keep your voice up keep your voice up" manual panic mode.

When a conversation gets tough, I can keep going with conscious effort, but eventually I tap out and have to either rest or just facetank severe voice dysphoria from dudevoicing the remainder of the chat.

How the hell do people do this effortlessly like they were born with it? What's the secret? Because I am this close to throwing in the towel and rolling the dice on Femlar.

[fourthoverfifth]

Happy Avril 14th day to all who celebrate

[nasa]

Earthset

The Artemis II crew captured this view of an Earthset on April 6, 2026, as they flew around the Moon. The image is reminiscent of the iconic Earthrise image taken by astronaut Bill Anders 58 years earlier as the Apollo 8 crew flew around the Moon. The Apollo 8 mission was the first crewed spacecraft to circumnavigate the Moon.

For more imagery from the mission, visit our Artemis II Multimedia Page.

[fourthoverfifth]

The skyscrapers that NIMBYs and zoning couldn't stop : Planet Money

LIVE SHOW TOUR INFO HERE. New stories, live tapings, special guests, book signings and more. What would you build on a piece of land when al

In 2003, the Squamish Nation won 10.5 acres from the Canadian government in a lawsuit, recovering land that British Columbian officials had seized from them in 1913, razing the local settlement to the ground in the process.

They decide that, given Vancouver's housing crisis, building lots of housing on their recovered land is a great idea. A project that could both meet a basic need for 6000 people (with many units subsidized for low-income renters) and make some money to help people of the Squamish Nation escape generational poverty.

Lots of Euro-Canadian NIMBYs get upset that a First Nations group is building modern housing instead of conforming to some weird noble savage fairy tale ("Why aren't they building longhouses?"). Despite the opposition, the project successfully gets approval and started construction in 2022.

A great case study of landback policy in action; hopefully we see more successes like this in the future.

[millionsknives]

gun to your head what are your top 3 albums of all time. no honorable mentions, no ties for third place i want to know your TOP 3 ONLY.

[fourthoverfifth]

In no particular order:

Mezzanine (Massive Attack)

Ooh Rap I Ya (George Clanton)

Последний герой (Кино)

[eightyonekilograms]

How far back in time can you understand English?

An experiment in language change

Nifty little language game here.

I can read back to 1500 with basically no difficulty

at 1400 I have to read slowly and carefully, but I can understand all of it save a couple words

at 1300 I can still comprehend most of it if I read slowly, but a much larger percentage of the words are unfamiliar to me, even with context

1200 and earlier are almost totally unintelligible

[fourthoverfifth]

What several centuries of Norman occupation does to a language. Fr*nch. Not even once.

In all seriousness, it is fascinating how English has diverged much from its Germanic relatives, to the point that it's actually easier for native English speakers to learn a Romance language than another Germanic one, simply because most of its Germanic grammar structure was simplified dramatically, and so much of the vocab is Latinate now.

[phorusrhacidae-lesbian]

its only unethical forcefem if you make her take spiro

[maplecinnamonbun]

doctors really went “y’know that girl who probably has a socially difficult time using restrooms? yeah her. put her on the piss medication.”

[cowgirl-yogurt]

It's more than the piss medication.

It's the memory loss medication.

It's the make your tits grow wrong medication.

It's the make you more resistant to estrogen medication.

It's the increased visceral fat medication.

It's the benign tumors of the brain medication.

It's the poison medication.

The Case Against Spironolactone

“Not only is there evidence that Spiro may be interfering with the primary goal of HRT, but Spiro may be directly responsible for patient ha

[fourthoverfifth]

It's a goddamn embarrassment to trans medicine that the first-line antiandrogen is a diuretic pill invented in the 50s that just happens to have feeble AR antagonism on top of a laundry list of totally unnecessary side effects.

How is this still being prescribed in 2026 when we have several far more selective AAs on the market specifically designed for androgen blockade in AR-positive prostate cancer????

Stop giving trans women this crap. Bicalutamide is right there, use that. Or like, do estradiol monotherapy via IM injection, that'll reliably crater T levels. Don't need an AA if there's no "A" to block.

[tanadrin]

genuinely sometimes i wonder if about ten years back we just hit some soft co2 threshold that most of the world population is sensitive to but is so minor that it has remained unnoticed by medical science, and it’s making tons of people angry and stupid and cruel. probably too much to hope it’s something that neat and impersonal i guess.

[fourthoverfifth]

Trans women/transfeminine people: Do you voice train?

Yes, and I pass consistently

Yes, and I pass mostly but still want to improve

Yes, but I don't pass consistently, and have a lot of progress to make

No, but I want to start at some point

No, but I intend to get VFS

No, and I don't want to; I like my T voice or am at least indifferent about it

No, my voice never dropped (puberty blockers, intersex condition, etc.)

It's complicated

Not transfem/see results

Voting ended onFeb 1

Asking this out of curiosity. IRL I'd say only 10-20% of the transfems I know (including me) voice train.

[fourthoverfifth]

lmao, priors confirmed. I don't what is it about programming specifically that draws us in. it's not even generic STEM nerdery since the science and engineering fields only have a modest transfem excess over cis people. it's literally just computers.

t. "Life, Physical and Social Science" tran (though admittedly I almost fell for the meme and majored in CS before switching to chemistry)

Paper is "Transgender Earnings Gaps in the US - Evidence from Administrative Data" - NBER

[depsidase]

[runcibility]

[waving] Hi, hello, it's me, the old gen-x'er on your dash! How's it going kids? [bad, it's going bad, I know, sorry for asking]. Let me tell you a personal story of how I watched exactly this play out in my social circles.

Anecdotally, my fellow cohort of gen-x'ers were convinced this was going to be the solution, the ticket, the fucking way. Inevitably, all we had to do was outlive these old mayonnaise white devils, because that's where the racism was societally stored - like a big racism appendix that would get removed someday.

We thought we knew what was up because we were cool white kids who listened to Public Enemy. And because we thought we were largely inoculated against racism, it was just a long cool slide into the Clinton years and we'd be set.

So we didn't question shit like South Park. We didn't question shitheads like 'ironic' (at the time) racists like Weev in our IRC channel. We had zero fucking awareness of how racism shifted, because the only examples of racism we were ever taught either wore a white robe & burned crosses, or sig-heil'd and lived in misery. We shamefully thought racism = southern*, and since we were alt-goth kids living on the west coast, we were fucking sorted out and safe.

It wasn't on our radar. We weren't ready. We hadn't listened to anyone, because we thought we'd learned enough to not be a problem, and wasn't that enough?

We didn't clock or understand the way racist language shifted into a new economic handwringing. We fell into stupid rhetorical traps that snuck racism into concerns about unhoused people and substance abuse. We refused to recognize and realize our own inherent racist attitudes because of the sunk cost fallacy of wanting to believe we really didn't have to do anything other than be cool and wait it out.

I watched some people absolutely lose their shit when called out on this and flounce directly into the arms of right wing philosophy (always some variation on "left wing politics has gone too far!" when it's pointed out how they're upholding inequality with a cherished attitude or anecdote they've leaned on for years to prop up the mythology of their self-worth).

No one was ready to realize they weren't good just by being alternative. And some of them cracked apart.

Racism has a full time advertising budget ready to repackage and rebadge it minute to minute, and you always have to do the work. It never ever fucking stops. And making sure you're always doing the work has the very valuable side-benefit of keeping you in touch with yourself and what you're about.

You gotta do the work. It never stops.

*-this fucking haunts me so much.

[fourthoverfifth]

There's something endearing about how The Culture series was (in part) written as effectively wish-fulfillment sci-fi by the author. When asked if he would want to live in the setting he created - essentially a post-scarcity anarchist utopia - Iain Banks gave an enthusiastic "yes." (even using the phrase "wish fulfillment" in his answer!) Go read The Culture series. It's some of the best science fiction out there.

The narrative and conflicts don't typically take place in The Culture civilization itself (most are told through the POV of diplomatic/espionage agents investigating other interstellar civilizations), but deliberate contrasts are often drawn between The Culture and the societies that Special Circumstances agents are deployed to.

However, I think the overall point stands - the world needs more sincerely optimistic futurist media. So many visions of the future either focus on what not to do (the whole "Don't Create the Torment Nexus" idea), or critique or satirize idealist media. There will always be a place for cautionary tales and warnings against dark futures, and it's always good to analyze and question a given work's portrayal of what is intended to be a "Good Future." But the pendulum has swung too far towards cynicism and endless layers of irony poisoning.

The world could use some more sincere stories - stories that tell us about brighter futures without excessive self-deprecation, or a self-aware fear of seeming too naive, simplistic, or childish.

[fourthoverfifth]

[transgenderpolls]

Trans people: Do you feel that you were "meant" to be trans?

yes, i was blessed with the privilege of inventing myself

yes, i was cursed/i'm being punished for misdeeds in a past life or something

yes, i just feel like i was supposed to have this experience

yes, i was meant to be my gender and my gender is inherently trans

yes, with another explanation

no, i was just meant to be my gender and had a disadvantaged start

no, i was just meant to be my gender. i don't see it as a disadvantage tho

no, i could have had multiple different paths

no, i don't think anyone is "meant" to be anything

no, with another explanation

i'm unsure/it's more complicated

see results

Voting ended onNov 25, 2025

[fourthoverfifth]

I see my transness as an unfortunate accident of biology. Some genetic or biochemical forces we don't yet understand handed me a brain that was expecting to have a uterus, ovaries, thinner vocal folds, no terminal facial hair, etc. It kinda sucks, but I have to play the hand I'm dealt. Such is life.

I know some people loathe the "brain sex" hypothesis of transness, but it doesn't have to imply bioessentialist dogma like "men and women are biologicallyᵗᵐ destined to have roles X, Y, and Z."

It could be as simple as "different genders have different internal body maps," and that's all. Human proprioception expects two arms and two legs; that's why losing a limb in an accident often causes "phantom limb syndrome." The somatosensory cortex stores a four limbed body map, and so the brain can end up hallucinating sensations from the lost limb even as the conscious self is fully aware that the limb is gone.

Perhaps gender dysphoria is caused by a related phenomenon. I hope we'll find out some day. I would love to know why I'm trans.

[fourthoverfifth]

Incredible things are happening in NYC right now, congrats to mayor-elect Mamdani

[cute-catts]

[protoindoeuropean]

Proto-Indo-Europeans be like “*g̑n̥néh₃mi stéh₂tim” and then they take you into the middle of the steppe

[wmb-salticidae]

#proto-indo-europeans be like *word entirely composed of laryngeals* and then they take half your substrate vocabulary and migrate away

@tanadrin

[official-linguistics-post]

official linguistics post