5434a
1mo ago
all of the physical changes can also be reversed in short order if you desist [...] Can reverse it later by stopping them whenever.
Voice breaking and breast development won't be reversed just to name two. That physical changes aren't reversible is pretty much the entire basis for puberty blockers. If physical changes were reversible the kids with gender misidentification could develop without interference until they were 18, or any age thereafter, then decide they weren't happy with their body and change it without any issue.
I want to add on that this kind of thinking seems to only occur around the trans-osphere. Nobody thinks that the 5'0 weakling with the weak chin can become a gigchad by taking some extra testosterone. At best he'll get bigger muscles (and smaller balls). Women and men around the world want bigger tits and dicks respectively, but the tits require surgery which produces ugly Frankenboobs and we still haven't cracked dick embiggening. But we tell trans identifying people that yep, with a little medicine, a bit of routine surgery and a ctrl-H to switch M and F in their paperwork they can slide into a whole other body. It comes over as somewhere between wishcasting and denial of reality.
5434a
1mo ago
Arrange an event and invite the people you want to get to know better.
The main ingredients are an easily understood distracting activity or two that promotes interaction (cooking/eating, watching sport on a screen, simple table games, whatever suits you and your group), somewhere to rest and an informal atmosphere.
If you don't want to arrange something yourself look for similar low stakes events around your area and ask if they're thinking about going, then if they're open to the idea suggest meeting there.
5434a
1mo ago
Indelible mark that communicates to an exclusive group one's belonging to that group - A tattoo is a natural choice.
Art that wouldn't work if it wasn't on a body - Could have done the same thing without making it permanent.
Fine art that could have been hung in a frame - Just hang it in a frame.
Humour or material that only means something to you - Just stick it to a pin board.
A design that you want people to see you wearing - Just print it on a t-shirt.
Incredibly niche specific purpose, like disguising blueprints so that you can smuggle them into prison or enacting a strategy to deduce who murdered your wife despite persistent amnesia - You're a character in a screenplay.
I think people are getting distracted by considerations of class and aesthetics but I don't think it's purely those factors as you said that you're okay with little nose studs and non-face tattoos. I don't like jewellery, piercings or tattoos but I don't have that visceral reaction you're describing.
Maybe it's along the lines of being bad with the sight of blood. Most people would flinch if they saw someone with a rusty bit of metal sticking through their hand, so seeing an eye-catching and sizeable piece of foreign matter penetrating a facial feature might be triggering the same reaction even if it's intentional and meant to look "good". Or maybe it's a bit more of a body horror thing where you're uncomfortably aware of the chance of the piercing catching on something and causing a horrible accident. I get quite uncomfortable when I watch power tool videos on YouTube where the people are carelessly changing over blades without disconnecting the power. I know it's not going to happen because the video was uploaded without a bait title and thumbnail, but it's unsettling nonetheless.
5434a
1mo ago
How to Build an LFS System
The LFS system will be built by using an already installed Linux distribution
I suppose it's Linux all the way down. Unless...?
5434a
1mo ago
It's Valerie.
I'll try to remember to check Scott's post about the edits after I've finished.
5434a
1mo ago
Can't offer any input on my end, I was unaware there were different versions and I'd rather avoid seeing any spoilers by reading up on the changes.
5434a
1mo ago
"I shat my pants recently. I was pretty bummed about it. But after reflecting I realised that the need to buy a tub of White'n'Brite Max Stain Remover provided an infinitesimal benefit to the institutional shareholders of Big Chem Industrial Synthesis Corp, and by losing control of my bowels I'd helped contribute to a faceless pension fund supporting wealthy retirees and their fund managers. The total happiness in the world increased, so whatever!"
"I have a tiny excuse for a penis and I get off by pressuring my wife into having unprotected sex with other men, but even I wouldn't violate by proxy the sanctity of a hotel's lost property cupboard. What if that scarf belonged to a real man with a raging trouser truncheon? OP should have waited until half a dozen virile rugby players could watch him shivering outside his own bedroom window, begging them to let him rent his date's panties to wear as a comically ineffective neck warmer. It's pathetic."
"My ADHD made me so late that I ended up taking a bike I'd found dumped in the canal because keeping my date waiting was giving me unmedicated anxiousness. When I arrived he'd been waiting for me outside getting cold so quick as a flash I went into a hotel reception and pretended to be the purse inspector. When I came out to give him the £400 I'd conned out of some woman's husband he was gone, and so was my bike! Twitter, AITA?"
5434a
1mo ago
You can't make a display of enlightened magnanimity out of shitting in your own pants.
5434a
1mo ago
Score specializes in photographs of women with large breasts, either naturally larger or augmented. Voluptuous features busty women who have had no breast augmentations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Score_Group#Magazines
Marketed with the strap line "All Stacked All Natural".
5434a
2mo ago
How narrow are your goalposts? Does it need to be on a par with Shakespeare's sonnets to qualify or is anything more intelligent than Love Me Do good enough?
There's a certain ceiling as rap is based on simple loops and unpitched AAAA BBBB rhyme schemes and the further you go beyond that the more you risk a counter of "that isn't rap".
Stan by Eminem is a fairly easy example of something that surpasses the guns, drugs, whores and gold stereotype without having to reach for a laboured meta analysis that the guns and whores are a reflection of those artists' social environment akshually and are being held up as an ironic means to confront society's hypocrisy ("I was only pretending to be a violent greedy thug!"). On the other hand a vast amount of rap genuinely is wilfully degenerate so I can understand why so many people condemn it and write it off wholesale.
5434a
2mo ago
I've never used a Kindle, the Nook is my first and only e-reader and jail breaking it was the first order of business. If I couldn't sideload pirated files and had to view (spits) ads I'd have stuck to acoustic books.
Those features are so essential that I take them for granted and so forgot to include them in the OP. Is there a reason you haven't jail broken it? I only did a quick search but it seems doable.
5434a
2mo ago
Little by little my Nook ST is beginning to wear out so I'm thinking about what I should look for when it's time to buy a new one. What are some of your must have features / biggest annoyances / missed opportunities in e-readers?
It's table stakes but I still love having an instant dictionary. Instant translation would be nice. Instant wikipedia would be good too. The more quick-look-up reference resources the better.
I like the idea of bookmarks and highlights/margin notes but I don't use them as they're not well implemented, for example when moving books between devices and different software. That raises the issue of software and hardware. Call me old school but I'm a firm believer in removable local storage as a means to preserve data should the device fail.
Not once have I wanted to install additional apps. I also don't particularly care about having a fancy OS/UI since I spend 99.999% of the time inside the book, not outside. I guess that audiobooks could be a relevant feature but I never listen to them and it's a slippery slope to podcasts, music, and just using a fully featured tablet. Ideally there would be a read-out-loud feature that used the ebook as the source rather than a separate audio file, and I imagine it's not far off if it hasn't been done already but again it feels like that would require a much more powerful device for only marginal benefit.
5434a
2mo ago
You've predicated your scenario in adversarial terms. Are those the only terms in which you can think about this?
No, and I showed as much by offering post-scarcity as another way of thinking. However scarcity along with defectors and adversaries are perennial elements that don't go away through wishing it were so. You recognise that people can be perverse, greedy, wilful and psychopathic (and worst of all it's often to their limited benefit to be that way). How are we going to stop them depriving others of resources or compel the dispossession of what they have deprived others of without resorting to force or the credible threat thereof?
Like yourself I'd prefer a more humane system, but appeals to humanity pale. Addressing this problem is a prerequisite for forming an alternative.
5434a
2mo ago
Ownership is possession that is maintained via power, whether that is de jure or de facto, de jure just being de facto by formally distributed means. You can't create an alternative because you can't nullify possession.
Set aside legalities, if someone has possession of a piece of property and doesn't want anyone else to have it what are your options for taking it from them? Overpowering them. If you successfully overpower them and take possession yourself, how meaningful is it for the first person to say that they "own" that property while it's in your possession and they lack the power to deprive you of it? They could say that they're the rightful owner, but without a greater power to grant, recognise and enforce those rights they're not worth the paper they're not even written on.
I'm not a poli sci nerd but surely this has all been covered centuries ago. Hobbes, maybe?
The only plausible alternative I can think of is something like gay luxury space communism where there's such abundance that the value of material goods has come down to basically zero. Even then certain things can't be replicated, such as standing space at the top of the Eiffel Tower. At that point your faced with the problem of assigning that limited resource, and no matter what system or philosophy you come up with it will rest on you having the possession of that resource to enact your preferred method and defending it from others who would deprive you.
5434a
2mo ago
those that wield great authority or wealth would be held to a higher standard of morality
What's the deal with the people I've seen around here saying that the elite should have greater licence?
Seems like on the one hand there's the argument that they're our betters and should be exemplars of virtue, on the other hand there's the argument that they're our betters and they should be enforcers of virtue because even if they fail to embody the same virtues the rot of the masses is a worse outcome than the transgressions of the elite.
Presumably it's a reaction to the feeling that they're neither exemplars or enforcers and have allowed standards to decline at both ends of the social spectrum. That then raises the question of whether they wanted that outcome and used their power to achieve it or whether they were either powerless or too unwilling to use their power to prevent it.
That's pretty much why I chose it, I like reading the seminal pieces of genre fiction to see how they compare to their popular depictions.
Unfortunately the subsequent Bond films slowly regressed closer to the mean and I gave up on them entirely after watching Skyfall.
If you mean what we call studded football boots then the only time I can imagine someone wearing them off the pitch would be if they were under 12 and so excited about their amazing new boots that they couldn't wait until football practice.
The main reason nobody wears football boots off the pitch is that the studs are hard and provide zero grip and maximum damage on hard floors. I'd expect you would get an immediate request to change them if you wore them at a gym. It's not a matter of bad taste, visually they're no worse than most trainers, they're just anti-practical. It's like wearing golf spikes at a bowling alley.
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