titanium elemental

My crafting blog is @craftingcreature · they/them · Robbie, some kind of engineer, atheist, cyclist, weird sex person, unrepentant “choice feminist,” fan of specificity, looking out for the in-between people

[filmphotofranz]

I get the importance of the transfem community warnings but sometimes I see shit like girls talking other girls out of trying to get their teaching certificates because of the potential for harassment from conservative parents and idk that's very real but also at a certain point we are just doing preemptive hiring discrimination to ourselves

[filmphotofranz]

Like on the one hand it is very real that societal transphobia would like to see us all unemployed, forced to do survival sex work. But also that's not the only reality available to us at this point! And sometimes I worry that we are self policing in a way by flooding so many trans girls with this message of "your only options are to get super good at onlyfans or be Raytheon's strongest coder" when like, so many of the women I know are teachers, home care workers, nannies, day care workers, postal workers. Not glamorous, but like, idk the world of lower middle class pink collar jobs is available to us more or less at this point. Other girls have office jobs, some girls have to work food service and retail. But we get to exist in some form besides either NEETs or internet famous porn girls. And obvi hiring discrimination is real, and obvi disability issues come into play for a lot of us that makes a lot of the work I just mentioned inaccessible. I'm not saying things are sweet out there. But there is a world out there where you can live. Maybe not in the exact way you want, maybe not super easily, but you can live.

[lawbutch]

I know transfem lawyers, construction workers, professional musicians, bartenders, and academics. You can be the reason that another trans person believes the future they dream of is possible. The more trans people enter new fields, the harder it is to target any one of us or say we can't do that job

[binturong-of-the-day]

The binturong of inquisitiveness

[beemovieerotica]

[elbiotipo]

[micro-usb-deactivated20230625]

[spaghettioverdose-deactivated20]

As a trans woman I can confirm that they indeed found an ancient forest inside a 630ft deep sinkhole in China

[gayweeddaddy69]

cis people can reblog this but keep it on subject, please

[senshibignaturals]

Happy pride month everyone always remember that the sinkhole has an ecosystem large enough to house not only insects but likely several species of small birds or mammals

[makesomenoise]

🌈

[fuer-diesen-sommer]

Information

[chasedbybuildings]

Artwork by Robert Tinney. 1982.

[kellydeal]

There’s a new litter of coyote pups hanging out in the Graceland cemetery in Chicago. They are learning how to coyote.

Sound on!

[holespoles]

Haruka Kawakami

A cat trying its best despite its limitations ↔ A tired cat

かわかみはるか

出来ないなりに頑張る猫⇔疲れた猫

[penumbralwoods]

every time someone realizes they dont have to pick between being a boy or a girl an angel gets its wings btw. and also extremely loud cheering can be heard in the distance from me specifically

[penumbralwoods]

btw if you've ever wondered why i make posts like this and get really obnoxious about nonbinary positivity. this is why

and for all of yall that are still figuring it out or aren't getting the support you deserve:

[paradigm-adrift]

I accidentally did a Wikipedia binge about 1st wave feminism and fashion and stumbled upon the 1890s bicycle suit. Do people know about this? Why didn't anyone tell me about this? This is dope as hell.

It's old-fashioned. It's modern. It's butch. It's femme. It's snazzy. It's practical.

Wikipedia talks about the bloomers and the leg-o-mutton sleeves, but I'm also noticing a lot of these outfits have absolute supervillain lapels, which I also like a lot.

[fizzytrashcan]

[facelessoldgargoyle]

via @yassifiedgollum

[discoursedrome]

One of the many, many stupid things that Microsoft has done over the years was flatten their UI to the point where you could only identify the boundaries of similarly-coloured windows by their drop shadows. The obvious problem here is that the drop shadows are much more expensive to render than borders, so people sometimes turn them off when using remote desktop or working on a weak machine, and then you just can't differentiate windows at all. You can turn the shadows off, but you can't turn the borders on!

What I've come to realize since shifting toward dark mode at work, though, is that the less-obvious problem is worse: in dark mode the whole concept of drop shadows becomes nonsensical! The original idea was that most of the UI was very light, so subtle darkening was highly visible, but in dark mode, even #000000 may not stand out enough to be useful. The only way to get the functional effect of drop shadows is to invert them, as if the backs of the windows and pointers were casting light on the things underneath them. Of course, no one does this, and so an entire universe of interace affordances is gradually decaying.

It's interesting to take it as a sort of fable about skeuomorphism: of course, inverting the drop shadow ruins the entire metaphor, and it's no longer coherently skeuomorphic at all. But the real-world experience you are simulating here is "trying to navigate a messy pile of dark-coloured documents in a dark room"! The skeuomorphism captures the authentic physical experience that this sucks and you would rather not do it.

[everythingfox]

DOG

dog dog dog

dog dog dog

dog dog dog

[nostalgebraist]

I keep thinking about that attempt I made to characterize people I get along with, a few days ago.  There’s a specific thing there but I’m just not sure how to phrase it.

It’s like a sort of … feeling that the world is bigger than you, and very complicated, and filled with things you’d never expect.  It’s not exactly “skepticism,” and not exactly “humility.”  It’s compatible with having a high view of oneself or one’s intellect, though not with certain versions of those things.  It’s compatible with strong and numerous opinions, too, though not with certain ways of having strong and numerous opinions.

It’s having your most instinctive response to the world be “this is billions of distinct things; this is jeweled chaos; this is a buzzing, blooming confusion.”  And then you make models and concepts to try to make some sense of it.  Sometimes you become quite attached to them.  Sometimes maybe too attached.  But if you become too attached it’s not because you think your concepts are reality.  It’s because you feel you’ll be so terribly lost without them.

When I try to think of the opposite of this temperament I think of those sorts of political or culture bloggers who are never surprised by anything, who always respond to every news story with “oh, look, more of the thing I know about, doing the things I know it does.”  It’s not that these people are too political, or too certain.  It’s that their politics and certainty doesn’t feel like a lifeboat they’re clinging to in a vast roiling ocean.  They give off the impression of not seeing the ocean.

And lots of things follow from this.  You have to find ways of living with this ever-present sense – sometimes dulled, but never gone – that reality is too large, grotesquely large, that you’ll never find your way in it.  So you learn to revel in it a bit, to become an eclectic, an amateur, collecting and admiring little bits of jeweled chaos.  You collect #quotes.  You learn to laugh when you see something you don’t understand, so that you don’t instead despair.

You feel wary about systems, you feel wary about things that are top-down and a priori.  You like data.  But not in the sense of “the data is in”; not in the sense that we have measured, so now we know, and now no one can ever question again.  But you are always worrying that you are missing the forest for the trees, because there are so many trees, too many, too many.  You distrust the single event, the dramatic example, because you know that reality has room for everything, because you have enough such specimens pinned and mounted in your collection to prove any claim or its negation.  You want the species, not the specimen – but you feel deep down that that has to be hubris, because all you see are specimens, and the great whirling confusion laughs at your taxonomies.

You come to observation, to experimentation, to something like science, even to something like positivism, not out of a zeal for the general but because you know the particular will wash over you and crush you.  When the concepts are stripped away everything is laughter and awe and horror and you bring the concepts back, not to perfect life, but simply to bear it.  And you tend to your collection.

[ratsquinks]

holding rats feels like i’m wielding a weapon in a first person rpg

[shadowpeople]

I’ve been going on and on for years about how rats are such equippable creatures. Like you look at them and a prompt pops up in your brain saying “Equip rodent? Y/N” Finally a post by someone who understands.