Black cis queer poly kinky femme geek, she/her, Gen X. I love weirdness and hate bigots. Extremely random collision of fandom, science!porn, politics, The Discourse, and cute animals. You know, Tumblr. Occasionally NSFW
for those who don't speak academia: "according to our MRI machine, dead fish can recognise human emotions. this suggests we probably should look at the results of our MRI machine a bit more carefully"
So basically, in the psych and social science fields, researchers would (I don't know if they still do this, I've been out of science for awhile) sling around MRIs like microbiolosts sling around metagenomic analyses. MRIs can measure a lot but people would use them to measure 'activity' in the brain which is like... it's basically the machine doing a fuckload of statistics on brain images of your blood vessels while you do or think about stuff. So you throw a dude in the machine and take a scan, then give him a piece of chocolate cake and throw him back in and the pleasure centres light up. Bam! Eating chocolate makes you happy, proven with MRI! Simple!
These tests get used for all kinds of stuff, and they get used by a lot of people who don't actually know what they're doing, how to interpret the data, or whether there's any real link between what they're measuring and what they're claiming. It's why you see shit going around like "men think of women as objects because when they look at a woman, the same part of their brain is active as when they look at a tool!" and "if you play Mozart for your baby for twenty minutes then their imagination improves, we imaged the brain to prove it!" and "we found where God is in the brain! Christians have more brain activity in this region than atheists!"
There are numerous problems with this kind of science, but the most pressing issue is the validity of the scans themselves. As I said, there's a fair bit of stats to turn an MRI image into 'brain activity', and then you do even more stats on that to get your results. Bennett et. al.'s work ran one of these sorts of experiments, with one difference -- they used a dead salmon instead of living human subjects. And they got positive results. The same sort of experiment, the same methodology, the same results that people were bandying about as positive results. According to the methodology in common use, dead salmon can distinguish human facial expressions. Meaning one of two things:
Dead salmon can recognise human facial expressions. OR
Everyone else's results are garbage also, none of you have data for any of this junk.
I cannot overstate just how many papers were completely fucking destroyed by this experiment. Entire careers of particularly lazy scientists were built on these sorts of experiments. A decent chunk of modern experimental neuropsychology was resting on it. Which shows that science is like everything else -- the best advances are motivated by spite.
My favorite genre of post on here is the one where someone has written something on how funny it is when a post blows up, because they’re always like “lol isn’t it funny when people get way more notes than they want, anyway what is up my three (3) followers” and then you scroll down and it has 35k notes and with each new reblog the op sounds like they’re one step closer to moving to the woods and never returning
My apparently wild and radical take is that trans women can literally just dress like women without much "accomodation"
"but what about hiding your-" I guarantee you women's clothes already does that, and you need it less than you think
"but what about adding padding to-" there are women's clothes that do that, also you need it less than you think
"but I don't think women's clothes will accommodate my proportions" I'm guessing that they will, and if you've been in HRT for any noticeable amount of time, they will likely fit better than men's clothes
Like I had my whole "femboy guide" pre transition, but that was a different vibe entirely.
If you want my advice on how to dress now, it would literally just be:
Take what you currently wear
Look at the woman's cut version of it
Size it properly
Wear it the correct way (eg, use the waist that women's clothes are made for)
There's a lot of clothes that's made "specifically for" trans women. Aside from very specific things (like tucking) I think most of it is garbage. Not to mention the absolute horrible ways that they're often marketed, rolling in trans women's everyday clothes with crossdressers and fetish gear.
When a trans woman first transitions, I've found that they're immediately BOMBARDED with "fashion advice" that is A, extremely othering and sometimes dysphoria inducing, and B, oftentimes outright garbage and uses old school crossdressing/drag advice that often fails to account for the effects of HRT, or doesn't come off as a more casual look.
I do think there's value in guides that are more in the zone of "hey, you've only been taught about men's fashion and clothes your whole life, here's the basics of women's fashion to catch you up to speed" but I've yet to find one that doesn't devolve into a weird "hide everything about your body, tran" kind of tone.
Quick preemptive Q&A
Are you saying that trans women CAN'T wear men's clothes and/or be butch?
No, I'm saying that women's clothes DOES fit and accommodate trans women's proportions, but most people refuse to believe that.
So you're a gender conformist then? Just molded to the binary system of fashion?
The last thing society wants a trans woman to be, is a woman. The most radical thing you can be is yourself, and sometimes yourself is a woman.
But what if I don't want to dress in women's clothes?!?
Fuckit, here's my bullet point fashion guide for trans women. This is stuff that applies to ALL women but trans women specifically will not have learned earlier in childhood.
Your waist is high. Higher than that. It's over your belly button. Yes it'll feel high waisted. Yes it'll also feel good. If your hips are getting wider, this is where pants will try to sit naturally anyways, and anything else will be uncomfortable.
On that note, the lack of pockets on women's pants actually does have a functional undertone. Having pockets at the waistline creates a VERY uncomfortable "pivot point" between your stomach and your legs, meaning if you put your keys or phone in pockets of women's pants, they're gonna jab you in the stomach.
THAT SAID, if you DO want pockets, I'm not gonna stop you. But get cargo pants!!! Women's cargo pants look SO nice, and thigh pockets are a godsend. They're more functional and more comfortable with growing hips.
Yes, women's cuts actually do make a fair bit of difference, and yes, you will fit and look more feminine in a women's cut. Even if it's a women's cut of jeans and a t shirt.
"unisex" clothing is oftentimes just men's clothing rebranded. I'm sorry but it's true. A lot of it will drape over you in boxy ways, since the "visual size" of a men's cut is almost entirely defined by the shoulders and upper body. This looks bad if you have wide shoulders or large boobs. It looks REALLY bad if you have wide shoulders AND large boobs, like I do. (Side note, the solution to degendering this should probably be something along the lines of giving the two cuts neutral names, like "shoulder cut" and "waist cut")
Bra sizing is a mystic art. No chart, calculator, or online tool will get you anywhere close to just trying on a variety of them yourself. They're a necessary starting point, but they're not going to get it right. Doesn't have to be an actual fitting, doesn't have to involve another human being, just grab a couple and try them all on. Hell, order them online and return the ones that don't fit if you're too nervous about being seen at all.
Don't make any fashion goal to "hide" anything (apart from tucking tbh, but tucking is less dramatic than a lot of other stuff imo). This isn't even primarily a self confidence point (although that's a great side effect) it's a point that if you spend too much effort or emphasis in "hiding" something, the rest of the fit is going to fall away from you or be guided by that in restricting ways. It also might call a lot of unnecessary attention to the exact thing you're trying to hide- and oftentimes, the only reason you wanted to hide it is because you're overly self conscious about something that's falling within normal variation. Choker to hide an Adam's apple? Now you're both calling attention to your neck, and are limited to outfits that work with that choker. Too much stuff over the shoulders to hide them? Now you're limited to things that cover the shoulders, and are also adding more padding or material to them. This point is deprogramming. The fashion choices that trans women are having imposed upon them to look more cis are not only a result of cis bullying, but oftentimes achieve the opposite effect than what people want.
Slight correction to a lot of the comments--it's not "Baking guy plays piano too," it's "Piano guy bakes too"
Inspired by the entertainers of Bermuda’s “golden age”, composer and pianist Dylan Hollis is hard at work on what he does best — creating mu
I was trying to track down a non-soundcloud version of Chords of Humanity, the song he wrote that when he was 17 was used by Doctors Without Borders, and instead found that it was used in a Fallout New Vegas mod that he may also have made at 17?
A Large Expansive Quest Mod has the courier travelling across Post-Apocalyptic America. To reunite the Rockwell People with their Superstruc
which is a sequel to another mod that's also credited to a Dylan Hollis, which I'm not necessarily assuming is him. Could have been a different Dylan Hollis who happened to have found the song by searching his name--oh, wait, there's a video of game play (with the song as background), and there's a tiny bit of voice acting...yeah, that's him.
I recolored them all stripe by stripe on Photoshop because I'm a *perfectionist*. You can't just lighten a color, you need to adjust the saturation too.
Want to support me? I just published a novel, it's a sapphic western, check it out.
alright I've got to do some quick math to explain attitudes towards AI to my boss.
we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)
please rb for larger sample size!
Question 1/3
What is your age, and do you feel AI is a net positive or net negative in our lives today?
One thing I’ve become a real extremist about is little girl’s clothing and hair styles because if your kid can’t get her hair wet, hang upside down, climb over a fence or run full out in the outfit/hair she is currently wearing then why not? And the answer better be both extremely fucking good and describe something temporary.
Hope you don't mind a story that also made me extremist about this issue.
Took my friends daughter (2.5yrs) to the park. Dressed her in practical clothing that's ok to get stained, brought an extra change of clothing. She sat in the mud at the water bank and played with rocks and mud. A little girl came over, couldn't be more than 3yrs. She was looking longingly at my friend's daughter. She has her hair in a perfect style and she's wearing a pretty dress with white socks and dressy shoes. The parents say "Sweetie don't go into the mud, you'll get your dress dirty" and pull her away, while giving me a judgmental look as they see the kid in my charge covered in mud and throwing rocks into the water. It felt really weird, like we saw eachother as aliens with completely different ideas on how to raise children. When my friends daughter was done playing, changed her into clean clothing and went back home. She had a lot of fun at the park and a day full of nature and play. The other little girl kept her dress clean.
There's a Tumblr post about someone finding out that "girls" toddler clothes are more restrictive than "boys" toddler clothes to the point that it made it harder for them to crawl, at a stage where they were learning to crawl.
I made one about how my toddler child couldn't climb in girl's TODDLER PANTS.
We are not a house who cares much about gendering a baby's clothes. It's a BABY. It doesn't care. So we'd take the kid to yard sales and let them pick out whatever baby clothes caught their fancy and would fit. Some were 'boy' and some were 'girl'. Kiddo loved floral prints because they're a baby (yeah my kid has always picked their own clothes).
Anyway, my kid LOVED TO CLIMB. Sometimes.
It was weird. Sometimes they were all over the sofa and the playground equipment and MY LEGS and sometimes they just. Weren't. Couldn't figure out what was going on.
Until I caught them trying to climb on rhe sofa in one of their pretty flowered pants.
They COULDN'T LIFT THEIR LEGS PROPERLY. And gave up, and did something else.
So I tested this out and... Yeah. The kid COULDN'T climb in ANY of their girl pants. Any. Put them in boy clothes and suddenly the kid is on everything again.
We stopped buying girl pants completely until they were old enough to test them and my kid is a TEENAGER now and i still make them lift their legs individually and jump if it's a girl fit.
YOU DON'T EVEN HAVE TO MEAN TO DO IT.
Whoever designed these clothes literally did not care if the baby could MOVE. But only if girl.
Imagine being the gays at a pride event in 2004 living their lives when someone grabs the microphone and announces to the room that Ronald Reagan was pronounced dead. Can you even imagine the hype, the celebration, the pure elation
IT'S THE LAST DAY to pre-order my next book, The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, at my Kickstarter. Get it as a print book, a DRM-free audiobook or ebook,, and help me continue to prove that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them.
In 2003, Disney opened a new Epcot ride, "Mission: Space." Formally, it was a space travel sim that used a giant, high-intensity centrifuge to simulate gee stresses; practically, it turned out to be the most efficient machine ever created for surfacing previously undiagnosed heart defects in extremely dramatic and potentially lethal ways.
It turned out that a small number of people have these heart defects, and that the defects themselves are quite harmless, provided that you are never put in a giant, high-intensity centrifuge. Given that most of us will never be put in one of these centrifuges, it is quite possible to live your whole life without ever knowing that you have this lurking vulnerability. But once you build one of these machines and start shoving millions of people through it, you're bound to catch some of those rare people, and they will have cardiac episodes that are scary at a minimum, and are at the worst fatal.
For me, the lesson isn't that Disney did something wrong by building a giant cocktail shaker for human bodies. I'm not a thrill-ride guy, but lots of people like 'em and the machines themselves are benign for nearly everyone who puts their bodies into them.
Rather, I think the lesson here is that there are rare pathologies lurking in all of us, vulnerabilities that may never surface – until we come into the presence of a novel stimulus that unlocks them.
There's an analogy here to technology debt: technologically unsophisticated people think of software as a machine that never wears out and has no incremental usage costs (apart from electricity). In this framing, software is the perfect asset, one that never depreciates. But the reality is that software is a liability, not an asset:
Software exists in a system, and while software might function perfectly under the conditions in which it is first created and deployed, there are continuous changes to all the technology that is upstream, downstream and adjacent to the software, which means that systems that are robust and secure at the time of deployment can become brittle and dangerous, even though the software doesn't change at all:
There's another analogy here, to utopianism. A "utopia" can't just be a place where everything works perfectly. Even the most well-functioning, orderly and prosperous system is beset on all sides by exogenous shocks: belligerent neighbors, tsunamis, zoonotic plagues, even asteroid strikes. You don't perfect your society just by making it work well. You have to make it fail well. A utopia isn't a society where nothing goes wrong – it's a society where things go wrong all the time, but we're able to fix them:
The point being that things that work fine may still fail badly when they are exposed to unanticipated external stimuli, and the one thing we can absolutely anticipate is that the future will have many unanticipated stimuli in it.
If Mission: Space is a machine for surfacing unsuspected anatomical vulnerabilities, the internet is a machine for surfacing and exploiting all kinds of unsuspected psychological vulnerabilities. Note that I'm not claiming that the internet drives everyone crazy – rather, that the internet can locate and exacerbate vulnerabilities, including vulnerabilities that might have lain dormant for your whole life, but for the fact that the internet exposed you to such a wide spectrum of stimuli.
This wide, internet-delivered spectrum of stimuli is mostly good. The internet can expose you to art, culture, ideas and people that you would never have run into in the pre-internet days, which end up enriching you in a million ways. Some of my best friends are internet friends. Some of the music and books I love most in the world were brought into my orbit by the internet. Many of my most ardently held beliefs were acquired through internet-based discussion.
All that is true, and it's true that the internet can one-shot you with a stimulus that makes you feel very bad, which you would never have encountered in a pre-internet world. The spectrum of stimulus in the whole wide world is very broad, and one person's innocuous distraction is another person's downfall.
Let's make this concrete. All throughout history, people have suffered from paranoid delusions. These can be ruinous, isolating you from friends and family, destroying your professional life and so on. Paranoid delusions often take on details from the sufferer's milieu: if you live in a society where evil witches are accepted as a fact, then witches might well creep into your delusions, too. If your society is all a-chatter about the NSA's mass internet surveillance, then your delusions might incorporate elaborate narratives about the NSA's use of the internet to target and torment you, personally.
So there will always be a "local character" to the paranoid delusions, grounded in the sufferer's era and location. But the internet adds a new, very bad dimension to this dynamic: the internet makes it much easier for deluded people to find each other. Paranoid delusions are – thankfully – rare, and in the absence of the internet, you might never encounter another sufferer.
But thanks to the internet, sufferers can form communities that reinforce their delusions, with disastrous consequences. Take "Morgellon's Disease," the paranoid delusion that you have wires growing under your skin. Morgellon's sufferers pick at their skin, creating open sores, which form a sticky trap for random bits of fluff and loose threads that sufferers interpret as evidence of these "wires." It's a horrible mental illness, and it's hard enough to treat even in the absence of the internet (the name "Morgellon's Disease" refers to a 17th century case-report).
But when you add the internet to Morgellon's, you get online communities where people suffering from the delusion help each other come up with rationales to explain away the disconfirming evidence that they get from therapists and loved ones who are trying to help them recover. These communities egg each other on, isolating their members from treatment.
There are lots of pathological mental conditions that the internet can supercharge, from "pro-ana" communities that encourage eating disorders to communities for people with pedophilic urges that attempts to normalize and justify acting on those urges.
But it's especially bad for paranoid delusions, such as "gang-stalking delusion," which is the delusional belief that nearly everyone you meet is part of a conspiracy to torment you. People with GSD see evidence of this conspiracy in the lyrics of random songs, snatches of overheard conversations, the phrasing of bus-shelter ads, and the sort-order of search engine results:
It's a near-totalizing belief, and sufferers find it hard to recover because their delusion tells them that the therapists and family members who try to help them are in on the conspiracy.
Then we add in the internet, and with it, the ability to locate and join communities of other GSD sufferers. Do this, and your delusions need not be limited to your own imaginative capacity to find conspiratorial explanations of the random things you find in the world. Now you are part of a kind of delusional improv troupe, whose members "yes-and" your delusions, finding new ways to terrorize you and alienate you from your surroundings.
This is bad enough when it's a regular conspiratorial community, one that feeds on trauma, like Qanon or anti-vax communities whose members have been failed by the system, making them susceptible to conspiratorial accounts of how society really runs.
But the combination of conspiratorial communities with the kind of mental illness that causes conspiratorial beliefs to surface in your mind without any external stimulus creates a brutal positive feedback loop that spins faster and faster until the people trapped in it are flung off into space.
Which brings me to AI and "AI psychosis," the social phenomenon that sees people falling down chatbot-assisted rabbit holes that convince them that they have invented perpetual motion, uncovered the secrets of the universe, or – in some tragic instances – that they should kill themselves and/or others.
For someone with GSD or another paranoid delusion or pathological belief, AI provides a reinforcement system that is even more efficient than these online communities. If you have GSD and your loved ones have finally got you wondering if you should get treatment, you don't have to post on a forum and hope that someone else comes along before you give in to the impulse to get help. Your delusional chatbot co-pilot is always there to tell you that it's a trap.
The nature of "AI psychosis" is hotly contested. The big question, of course, is whether chatbots are giving people delusions, or whether chatbots are amplifying those delusions:
I think it's both. I think that, for people with GSD or other delusional beliefs, AI provides delusional reinforcement as a service, on tap, 24/7. The combination of a delusion and a machine that will tirelessly play yes-and with you at any time, demanding nothing from you, is a novel and terrible development for people with some mental illnesses.
But I also think that chatbots are a bit like Mission: Space: a machine for surfacing previously undiagnosed psychological vulnerabilities, and that in some cases, these vulnerabilities may never have been triggered, save for the chatbot.
Just as doubtlessly there were people who had pathological relationships to gambling before the development of slot machines, scratch-and-wins and roulette wheels, but there are also people who might have lived their whole lives without ever having a gambling problem except that they encountered one of these machines, exposing billions of people to sycophantic chatbots has surfaced rare, latent vulnerabilities that might have stayed latent forever, with terrible consequences.
Most people who rode the original Mission: Space had a fantastic time. But a lot of people rode that ride, and a very small percentage of a very large number of people can still be a substantial number, and as the reports of people stepping off the ride, clutching their chests and collapsing spread, Disney understood that they had to retool the ride. Today, riders on Mission: Space choose whether they want to ride on a simulator that spins, or one that merely tilts and pitches without simulating gee-stresses. And even if you pick the spicier version of the ride, it goes more slowly and exerts less stress than the original ride.
Even if you accept the AI companies' argument that they aren't inducing AI psychosis in their users, but rather, only surfacing latent vulnerabilities that were there all along, that shouldn't be the end of the story. Even if only a small percentage of the people who use your product experience harm as a result, if your product is intended for widespread deployment (as chatbots are), you will end up harming a lot of people unless you take measures to counteract even those rare events.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Bear religion probably fucking rocks. You're a fucking bear, you're the deadliest thing on earth, once a year an endless supply of salmon just flings itself up the river to gorge on and then you nap for 3 months.
The most delicious food in the world is protected by tiny demons who can defend it from everyone except you. Your natural armor is thick enough that you can just eat the damn hive while they buzz around you. God's chosen animals right there
Regular bears tell stories of angel bears sent by the Bear God, pure white and twice as strong as any normal bear could be, who rule the summit of the Earth and kill all who stand in their path.
And they are right, those bears exist and totally do that. Humans just have fake angels as a cope.
love the idea of bears being the chosen species actually. having a near death experience and glimpsing heaven and realising it's just full of bears, no humans at all, humans not ensouled actually, humans an accidental byproduct of God's plan for bears
yeah yeah rainbow capitalism is bad and whatever but like. when I was a child, being pro gay was not the popular or lucrative choice. I'm happy that times have changed.
I miss rainbow capitalism. I do. I miss when it felt like public opinion was still pro gay. I understand it was always an empty gesture, but it mattered in a sense of knowing how socially acceptable being queer is. If that makes sense.
i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users
would be remiss not to mention that the rainbow notably straight up just removed the trans flag colors from it. like they’re gone. it’s the progress flag minus the trans flag colors.
All California sheephead start life as female and move through an array of colors and body shapes as they mature. Some female adults may transition to male as social and environmental factors shift, balancing the delicate ratio of individuals in their population.
While male California sheephead are largest and easiest to identify at a glance, a closer look at the lively waters of our Kelp Forest exhibit reveals a variety of female sheephead swimming through these fascinating life stages.
Stream our Kelp Forest Cam and find peace in the beauty of a thriving underwater community. 🫶🌈
Gonna get into it... @tangledndark - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
