https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/elon-musk-photo-chest-stomach/

Definitely feels like we’re being thrown back into it. I’m in an at-risk category, so the despair is much worse for me this time, and maybe as a result I’m not even letting myself feel things yet. Too much to do, no time for grief.

Yes, that was my bad. I fixed my comment - thank you for catching my error.

Here’s the quote from Wikipedia my brain auto-corrected when I read it:

On November 22, 2022, Donald Trump hosted Fuentes and Kanye West at dinner at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida. The meeting was at West’s request. West said that Trump was “really impressed with Nick Fuentes”.[73] Trump released a statement saying that after contacting him earlier in the week to arrange the visit, West “unexpectedly showed up with three of his friends, whom I knew nothing about”, with whom Trump dined, and that “the dinner was quick and uneventful”.[74]

honestly I think it is less about health or safety and more about the disgust people feel - it really might just be irrational and nothing more

Fair enough, if you ever get curious here’s a tl;dr behind a spoiler:

for the uninitiated and lazy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Fuentes

even so, I would prefer my typo go to DuckDuckGo and then I choose among those options than be auto-corrected and directed to an irrelevant website Firefox chose (which is what happens to me). That said, I’m not usually going to a top 250 website, so - your use case might be different.

“Experimental archaeology” might be a good search term for finding resources on how to make and use an atlatl.

I think you just accidentally articulated the theory of virtue ethics. How do you know what you should do? Do what you think a good person would do. 😆

I use Firefox Focus as well, but I had to disable the “top 250 websites” recommendations when typing in the URL bar, it’s like adverts to my mind.

I usually felt this way about the Christian families with lots of children who would come into the restaurant after church and treat everyone rudely and make a huge mess. They did it every Sunday, and it never changed over a period of years. I know they were probably just exhausted and miserable themselves, but lots of exhausted and miserable people out there aren’t so entitled, inconsiderate, and rude to workers. Still, it didn’t make me feel like not working, I just didn’t want to serve those people.

My problem is with associating it with feminism, it’s offensive to me and factually inaccurate. TERF talking points are usually gender essentializing in a way that is contrary with radical feminist viewpoints, for example, and lots of TERFs now distance themselves from feminism intentionally as they coalition with the right-wing. “Gender critical feminism” is not feminism at all, and better characterized as fundamentally anti-trans rather than fundamentally feminist.

Oh, sorry - it was hard for me to follow your comment as well, but here’s my understanding:

We read about OP sharing nudes with a friend.

TERF warns OP that they are sharing nudes not with a fellow woman, but with a man (TERF is assuming friend was a trans woman, assumes OP is a cis woman).

We expect OP to reveal they are actually a trans woman, but instead we learn OP and his friend are cis men.

Does this seem right?

Sorry, these moments make me feel like I must be autistic or something, lol

I’m not sure I understand what the transphobe is saying (I don’t want to call these people radical feminists, they’re not).

She sees an exchange where two people talk about exchanging nudes, and she assumes they were both trans women, so she thinks she’s exposing them as men because they aren’t acting like women (who would never share nude photos of themselves)?

It’s honestly confusing to me (lots of cis women share nude photos, though not usually to their friends AFAIK).

awww 🥹

Oh boy.

First of all, form good “sleep hygiene” habits, read: https://health.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/data/Sleep Hygiene.pdf

A lot of it is obvious, like go to bed at the same time every night (set a timer to get yourself reliable at first!), and wake up at the same time every morning. Give yourself more “sleep opportunity” than the hours you want to sleep so you actually get enough sleep (e.g. if you want to sleep 8 hours, maybe give yourself 10 hours in bed with the lights out).

Don’t use screens several hours before bed, don’t do anything but sleep in your bed, and wind-down before bed with something like reading a book (again, in a chair in another room, not in your bed).

Now for more advanced tips I’ve learned from dealing with insomnia:

A problem I have sometimes had is that tasks like meditation can actually cause me to become more alert, and it turns out meditation actually does cause insomnia.

When struggling with meditation related insomnia, I got lots of practice navigating falling asleep.

What I found most helpful was rather than focusing on an object in a meditation like way, to instead allow mind-wandering and rumination and to try to cultivate a lack of metacognitive awareness about that rumination. Basically, the opposite of meditation. Meditators will hopefully know what I mean by this - but basically, don’t pay too much attention to what you are thinking, just get absorbed into the mind-wandering.

Sometimes if the mind-wandering leads to thoughts or feelings that are “strong” or engaging enough it can prevent me from sleeping, like when I’m anxious or my mind is preparing or rehearsing for an important event or the next day. In that case, a little bit of meta-awareness can be helpful to alert you to the need to redirect your rumination to something actively boring or benign.

In the most extreme instances, I visualize myself working in a factory performing a repetitive motion like pulling a level to operate a press. I essentially constantly try to pay attention to that mundane task and ensure that it remains mundane / uninteresting - just keep pulling the lever and keep paying attention to that task. This is akin to the counting sheep method, but I always found counting sheep too interesting or engaging of a task.

After hours of boredom I usually lose consciousness.

Sometimes I threaten myself with getting out of bed, and often in response I feel a resistance and that makes me realize how tired I actually am, and I threaten myself with doing something boring like sitting in a chair and staring at a wall. Sometimes that is enough to kick me out of my energized thinking into a milder / more boring and repetitive mind-wandering that leads to dreams and unconsciousness.

Sometimes I actually do have to get out of bed and do something, often I will stretch and if I’m not feeling overwhelmed with sleep that way, I find it helpful to exhaust myself with forearm planks - just hold until you can’t anymore (you can also use a timer for 30 seconds or 60 seconds, whatever pushes you past comfort but all the way to failure), maybe try this a couple times. You will sweat and it’s miserable the whole time, and you will be tired and want to crawl back into bed. That has helped me fall asleep really well before, and sometimes I think it’s because the blood also gets into my muscles and somehow this helps me relax.

Anyway, hope this helps!

That does assume the kid has the time and resources to hang together a costume even if homemade. I was maybe a preteen when this happened, so that may have played into some adults’ hesitancy to give me candy, but also looking back I just think the people in the neighborhood I was in had bad values. I also had zero time for a costume, I wasn’t planning on trick-or-treating at all, and it was only because my friends were kind enough to invite me anyway.

But I would give candy to teens, adults, or kids regardless of whether they have a costume or not. :-)

Are you, in your estimation, intelligent?

No. Particularly I get the impression other people get things faster than me, and I seem to have to do more cognitive labor than my peers. I guess I would ask what “intelligence” is, that seems like a difficult thing to quantify or answer.

Are you wise in the way you apply that intelligence? (interpretation yours)

No, I generally consider myself unwise. (It takes me a long time to learn from my mistakes or change self-destructive behaviors, etc. - it often feels like I have trouble “adulting”.)

Do you view yourself as unique and individual, or as a data point on the spectrum of humanity?

Both, how else could it be? (We are both subjects and objects, unique but usually only slight variations of a theme.)

The only time I went without a costume as a kid was because I lived in a dysfunctional household and I was super stressed and didn’t have enough time or support to plan a costume - so I threw on an oversized coat and went with my friends; some adults tried to give me trouble and refused me candy, and that was a bummer because I felt like I had failed … anyway - I guess my point is that maybe some kids are being lazy or something, but you don’t really know.

I personally would definitely give kids candy regardless, but I wish people would actually trick-or-treat where I live, it makes me so sad that nobody does.

Yes, in my experience the only people in your life who really struggle are people who have their own issues (i.e. it never actually seems to be about you or your transition exactly) e.g. people who are closeted and who experience pain when reminded of their issues when they see you.

Usually even a bigoted religious person isn’t directly mean to you, it seems like the Christians generally reiterate how much they love you and so on (but they don’t want to talk too much about gender). In fact, I don’t find anyone wanting to talk about gender IRL, lol. Anyway, it’s hard to tell how it will go - I think it’s also different if you’re a minor living at your parents’ house compared to an independent adult. It also depends on who is in your life, and how they felt about you before you transitioned.

Either way, transitioning is like taking medication as a diabetic or someone with hypothyroidism - it really is life-saving and necessary.