Washington Science Fiction Association. Along with the similarly-named World Science Fiction Society (WSFS) and Science Fiction/Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA, no I don't know why), they were kinda on the other side of the Sad Puppies on the whole Hugo Award wars from a decade ago. Some stories are written 'for' a specific space, and just as you don't give a dog-lover a Newbery Medal-winning story, a lot of people who found Gentleman Jole annoying won't like The Tainted Cup.
Each of the three has a certain flavor of story that really glues into their particular social environment - WSFA tends heavily toward a lot of vaguely neuroatypical mystery stories with box-checking social awareness checks - whether because the author likes that sorta thing themselves or because they were trying to cater to their awards or both. I'd expect more the former here, since WSFA's mostly a short story place and The Tainted Cup isn't, but it's one of those things that pulls you away from the world-building when you see the pattern.
gattsuru
8hr ago
Finished The Tainted Cup. Good, prose quality fell off a little toward the end, resolution was reasonably clever. It's got WSFA syndrome, but only to the extent it's obvious why it was written that way, rather than suffering from being written that way.
Bell's And We Are Not Saved. I bought it a few years ago when having a discussion with ymeskhout, as a crux example of how a lot of things that Rufo gets accused of being dishonest about actually happened, but largely left it on the shelf. Was going to try a deep crunch into how this sort of work smuggles false or misleading claims by clown-nose-on and clown-nose-off between academic work and 'popular writing', but my notes aren't really coming together in any real readable narrative, even presuming anyone else would care enough about it. There's some value to seeing what tools of persuasion are being used, here, to distinguish the honest from the malicious or misleading, but I could have done that with Rufo's writing for free.
For fun, Eldridge and Deveau's Game Over, from this discussion. It's so heavily and clearly written for women -- weirdly, despite a front cover that looks like standard male gaze smut -- that it's not that sorta 'fun', but looking at how the prose and social interactions work is still enjoyable.
gattsuru
8hr ago
self_made questions the generalizability of what I describe but in my experience it's universal.
I wouldn't say universal: there's no few people who either don't feel it at all, only feel it to the sense that it's a fun psychological (or erotic) toy to play with, or actively enjoy the sense of being desired by someone 'better than them in all the ways that matter' or being able to support someone who's 'traditionally' masculine to do things that wouldn't work otherwise.
((And, conversely, I've absolutely known cisgender straight women who have complexes about their men being too much taller than them, and straight guys panicking about a prospective wife making more money than them, which is still seen as a masculine trait despite everything else going on.))
I understand it well enough that the stereotypical version can be a fun kink, but either it's transmuted into 'we're good at different things' - I'll do the home defense and house repair/troubleshooting, pretty much anyone else on the planet will do better than I can at spatial layout and almost any guy will beat me in an arm-wrestling contest - or I don't really grok it at the same level that most people do. And I sub for women, too, so not exactly representative for the gay ethos.
That said, I do recognize that a lot of people feel it, and a lot of more masc and masc-seeking gay guys feel it a lot more often.
gattsuru
1d ago
There's going to be some very interesting questions here in regards to the interactions of CDA230 and these lawsuits. Roommates says that CDA230 doesn't apply where the service provider actively solicits the content or actively creates it, but does where they merely provide a conduit, but it's not clear if that's good law rather than good-for-this-case law, and whether the AIgen is a 'creator' or a 'conduit' under modern analysis gets even uglier.
(There's another exception for NCII specifically under 8 USC 223(h), but that was only recently signed into law, and I don't think it would apply to xAI in these cases even were it in force.)
But I'd expect that this gets shoveled under the rug, one way or the other, instead.
For a while I assumed that the big AI companies would permit porn generation eventually. They might want to act high and mighty now, but a time would come when they needed to show revenue, public perception be damned.
I'd expect, regardless of the ability of AIgen tools to avoid Legally (or Socially) problematic smut, that the Visa and Mastercard situation means that the revenue argument will long favor not doing it, at least for any of the larger providers. Textgen sites have had similar problems. Itch.io has similar problems.
Disallowing generative editing of user-uploaded images seems like a no-brainer.
As others have noted, this would drastically reduce a lot of the underlying use cases for a lot of image generation tools. Even prohibiting uploads containing real-life pictures of people - previously a very hard problem, now 'just' a simple inference run - would still have massive impact.
I'm also not convinced that either would avoid the problem. Is it still NCII if you merely describe a person in significantly precise detail and sufficient attempts that a third party could reasonably confuse a purely text-to-image generation for a 'real' photograph? I wouldn't want to bet a company on it!
Elon fucked up and now he's under the scrutiny of people who have the power to make life miserable for him.
gattsuru
1d ago
The thing I don't understand about the autism/trans link is that in my mind autism is partly characterised by the kind of rigid psychological orthodoxy that gets agitated by things like having different kinds food on their plate touching, or a familiar TV show getting a new theme tune.
Just because you've developed rituals doesn't mean that they're correct or useful rituals, or even comprehensible to anyone else. Doesn't even have to be a full autism thing, the Smile Like You Mean It problem's well-enough known there to be diagnostically useful.
gattsuru
1d ago
gattsuru
3d ago
Of course not every meaningfully trans person will have had a changed license, and perhaps many of them would have left Kansas before this anyway so there could be a selection effect but even if we doubled or tripled, it's an incredibly small number of people who actually meaningfully transition in that way.
I will caution that there's some selection effects going on: in addition to a lot of trans people going to the coasts, many Red Tribe states require or required significantly more documentation of interventions than one might expect. Kansas wasn't the most extreme, there - some other states mandated certain types of surgical intervention - but even before trans stuff became a culture war lightning rod, it was well-known to be enough of a hassle that even some eligible people dodged it.
The numbers in California are probably closer to 1-in-400.
Someone like Imane Khelif who for basically her whole life has lived in the context of being a woman...
Probably not a great example: there's been leaked information claiming Khelif to have 5a-reductase deficiency, which would have been detected as an (ironically, false) doping incident at least as of 1984.
gattsuru
3d ago
I've found SweetHome3d helpful for doing layout and design work at the casual level. Unfortunately, I've only really used it for remodeling work or fooling around with a hypothetical hyperefficiency tiny home, so don't have any interesting outputs. Even in Minecraft, I've got a bad tendency toward the 'giant open cube' design mode that'd be absolutely abominable to live in.
gattsuru
5d ago
The cynical possibility is just Buy American focus, using whatever tools are available. There are American-'manufactured' and non-Chinese manufactured network infrastructure, this rule gives a very easy tool to make it extremely risky to sell the banned routers at a storefront in the US, tada.
((The really cynical possibility is that, plus some stock trades or donations, and maybe a little fucking over of international shippers for funsies.))
The more charitable is that router vulnerabilities are Pretty Big Deals, and a lot of the ugly questionably legal tools to use against domestic manufacturers to get them to turn of uPnP or implement randomized default passwords or maintain a five-year support period with automatic updates is not available for manufacturers that get 99% of their sales through Amazon as CE-marks.
I wish that had been enough to make me entirely sanguine, it almost was, and if he's happy why should I care what anyone else says?
Bit of a tradeoff where the strength of other connections can make it hard to grok, rather than merely believe, when someone close says that they trust them.
(Out of curiosity, do lesbian fujoshi consume yaoi, or just yuri?)
I think a lesbian going after yuri only gets the title weeaboo, if that. Fujoshi are pretty much defined by the M/M bit, lesbian or straight woman alike.
I kinda went down a rabbit hole looking up what you meant by "unicorn". It seems I am not as terminally online or up to date with gay culture as I imagined. Huh. I guess I see the appeal?
It's been around a decent time and not really limited to or even central for gay stuff -- cfe 2014 M/F + F -- but it's not the most common term. I don't want to undersell the risks and downsides to it as an option, but it is an option, and compared to some of the other compromises he might have, not necessarily as bad as it seems from the horror stories. There are still horror stories, and searching for a long-term relationship like that is hard.
I don't think I can make an LDR work, from some experience, but my brother hasn't really tried. Who knows, maybe he'll change his mind. I just don't think a bi, severely conflicted man is the right choice, even if I like him myself. I see you also mean other LDRs, and sure, I guess if he does meet someone as appealing, I think he might give it a good shout.
Oh, yeah, other LDRs, and specifically looking more broadly to start out. Would not recommend trying to turn an already-stretching relationship into a long-distance one on top of existing stresses unless there's literally no other option. That said, if he's having trouble with a shorter absence, even just long-drive-same-general area LDRs will be painful. I don't get touch starvation, but I've seen what it can do to people.
Hey, he's my brother. He's going to Claude and not ChatGPT if he absolutely must use an LLM for life advice.
You joke, but there's significant risks to the thing telling you your ideas are great and should be acted on immediately being smarter and more rational, especially if you're already lovesick.
I absolutely don't want to watch.
Fair, but not quite what I was trying to caution about.
There's a lot of tiny things that are going to suddenly seem to come in a whole different light, and they're going to show up everywhere. A joke that gets a smirk and could have a prosaic explanation will no longer have that prosaic explanation be the only one. A favorite media, or a style of dress, or haircut, or a guarded behavior around his cell phone or computer browser history, could derive from his orientation. Some of them will be genuine connections; some will be spurious. Some of them, you'll miss even now, and that's the dumbest class of infohazards available, and I'm not going to spell the likely ones out.
Some of them he will need to say outright, to someone.
Given your day job, you'll have heard much, much worse. It's still a little harder to handle when it hits close to home, and even more so when your expression is trying to outpace your actual thoughts. It will be uncomfortable, you will flinch, and you will need to not let that be what you remember from the interaction. Even the small talk needs to be more important, in your mind.
It will be normal again, some other day. It'll be something you don't really think about, no more than you think about his birthday or hair color or his favorite drink. Today, and maybe this week, your pattern-matching side will be oversensitive.
I'm the kind of guy who skips ahead when a porno decides to zoom in on the guy's face or his cock. Who decided that's a good idea??
Heh. It is a weird decision. To be fair, as much as the old Blue Collar Comedy Bit was as much written for its politics as for its accuracy, there do genuinely seem to be some actually-straight guys that do seem to fetishize parts of porn scenes that involve and focus around the men, if only as some way to center themselves within the media.
But I will also say as someone with a healthy (if not exactly red-blooded) appreciation for a nice hefty set of balls and a hefty cock, there's a lot of straight porn that centers them on screen and doesn't do a good job selling them.
Keeping things on the down-low is simply the most pragmatic choice either way, for the foreseeable future. Yet I do not want him to have to live a lie.
One that the may not be obvious to you, or to even him yet, is that coming out is a process, and one that never ends, and for a wide variety of people, it's going to be more painful to be 'honest' everywhere than just being themselves. Coming out to you is a step, coming out to your mom if he does is another step. Even if you broadcast it from a megaphone while doing the full Folsome Street Fair on main street, there will still be people the next day you have to decide whether you need or want to come out to.
The flip side is that it's not a process that's fully under your own control. My brother got outed to our paternal grandmother by Facebook. I had to disclose to my employer once. The more you choose to do it, the less it can sneak up on you.
But that doesn't mean it's always better to be in control either.
Indian gay men are - like gay men anywhere - by my brother's account and my own observations as a regular at a gay pub in Scotland (the people are friendly, the drinks are cheap, and I have a good essay/attempt at ethnography up about it), primarily not looking for that.
I'll caveat that there's a reverse of the lemon problem, here. The people who are always down to fuck are always out on the market, and the people who want a long-term closed relationship aren't on grindr and aren't spending as much time at gay bars. There's places the two spheres meet, but especially given the various preferences and interests floating around, it's not necessarily obvious when you're crossing the boundaries.
There's also some messiness where a number of gay men self-identify as sluts but may not actually have casual sex or even want that high a body count. Sometimes that's because there's sluts-in-every-other-sense, and sometimes it's because they like the identity but don't actually have the drive. Hell, there's even people who love the idea of casual sex, but only with people they know so well and in such limited situations that it's basically just a small-case polyamory (or, hilariously, monogamy-with-named-sex-toys). 'Sapiosexual' is a really obnoxious self-identifier, but it is pointing toward and around a concept with some meaning, just corrupted as a signifier by the mess of people who kinda abuse it.
(I'm trying to write up something more serious for urquan on this, but I need to go into more detail for his use case.)
That may not be the most actionable information -- 'oh boy, tons of eligible bachelors that absolutely wouldn't give you a second glance' kinda sucks as a recognition point -- but I've... found it helpful to know.
I've made gay jokes at his expense, in the past, not knowing. He says he never minded and wants me to act exactly the way I always have, and I've agreed to this, and I'm still a little sorry. He's told me not to be. I think both of these positions can coexist without one of them needing to win.
I'll second other people saying that, especially if they were meant in good spirits, I'd rather people make jokes rather than walk on eggshells. It is kinda funny! It is something that's not really ever going to make 'sense' at a deep level to you! Just throw some self-deprecatory signs hitting your team too, accept a few jokes going your way, and it's how family should treat each other.
((Tbh, the most obnoxious stuff I encountered was were there wasn't any humor intended. There's still a very uncomfortable bit that, no matter how much my father is happy about my brother and his husband now, we'll both remember when he told us, trying to be nice and trying to be paternal, that he didn't care whether we brought home a white girl or a black girl or a hispanic girl, so long as we brought home a girl. The Saturday Night Live jokes were just funny.))
He is too ethical to trick even an eager straight woman into marrying him for the sake of cover, and he wants to be close to his real partner, whoever that turns out to be. He is also less than keen on permanently moving abroad, at least for anything longer than a residency. He wants children, biologically his, and I want this for him too.
That's... a difficult situation, and if it helps, give him my sympathies as someone who's had to make decisions around (lighter) variants of the same problems. A lot of the answers are going to depend both on what he's willing to do, what risk (and what kinds of risks!) he's willing to accept, and how much his biology is going to fight with him. I'll avoid repeating the obvious 'try to have it all' stuff or diving into useless esoteric options (eg: just find a trans guy who wants to get knocked up who cares whether that'd even work for him), but a few unintuitive options:
There are women who you don't have to trick. For a fujoshi or a woman with a very low sex drive, a closed-relationship-focused gay guy can be an even more-desirable-than-normal catch. Sometimes that's a lavender marriage (yes, there are lesbian fujoshi), but sometimes it's just what works for people. Doesn't even have to be a lie; you can honestly say that you married for the sake of kids, but you're great friends: then people who need to know can know and those who don't can decide what they want to believe. This has some good options on having biological children, if some that might make for a few uncomfortable discussions and maybe a bit of a boner-killer moment. There's levels of gay where the flesh might be unwilling but there's no mental objection (or even fingers that might be willing to put in the hard work when required), and on the other side, my brother turned down a threesome he really wanted because the third's girlfriend wanted in the room fully clothed. If your brother's toward the latter end, this probably won't work well even if the woman in questions swears she's lesbian or asexual. On the upside, if you don't particularly care about a woman's appearance, you get to select for personality, and there's a lot of diamonds in the rough.
Ultimately, it's still a polyamorous relationship in the literal sense, if one where there third never gets dicked. It's also putting a massive amount of trust in a third party that you can't love and might grow to love you or need something more from someone, and to be blunt, while having little or no leverage over them. Optimistically, I know a few people who took this path and didn't divorce until after the kids graduated, and one who did and didn't divorce at all. You get a good idea of how much lust and love keeps most married couples from driving each other nuts once you see someone taking this approach. Even if that doesn't happens, it's a secret that has to last decades, and that's a lot of pressure, and I can't speak as to how the kids took it. I also don't know how prevalent fujoshi are in India, nevermind how he'd find one he likes well enough to spend decades with.
Being a unicorn isn't that bad, if you've got the right mindset. Chances are pretty good this makes biological children harder (barring finding a bi guy who likes the idea paternity roulette, tbf a surprisingly common kink) even if the couple in question wants kids, but if they do, you get to be the friendly uncle who's always around while skipping a lot of the bad parts of parenting like having to figure out discipline. There's jealousy in not being someone's one-and-only, but if you absolutely have to make a compromise on that, it can be both easier (they're not direct competition!) or harder (they can do something I can't, they're going to steal him!) where the one exception is a different gender. It's easier to be closeted, like this -- you'd be surprised how many older folk assume you're pining over the wife! -- but it's also even harder to come out.
There are risks, here, even with the compromises: being pumped-(and-pumped-and-pumped)-and-dumped does happen to gay unicorns as with straight women unicorns, like the fujoshi there's a risk of jealousy from the other partner and now it's fucking-polyamory, and this can get into weird legal situations even inside the United States or UK. I wouldn't even bring this up while he's with his current boyfriend, but if he's staying with him even as said boyfriend starts talking more and more as they start settling down, it's worth spelling out that this is a choice, even if he thinks he's not making any choice yet. And it is a survivable one, if not a perfect one.
Long-distance relationships can be both easier and harder than you'd expect. Having a partner that only exists through a VOIP call 300+ days a year sucks when you need a human touch, don't get me wrong, and I know more than one LDR that got really rough when the two long-time lovebirds found that they were only sexually compatible at a keyboard. You have a lot more space to select from, though, and a lot more people trying this stuff care about longer-term relationships to begin with. It's also easier to stay closeted (at least in meatspace), and a lot more compatible with a number of home obligations. On the gripping hand, though, this can turn into a massive psychological pressure such it feels like immigration to the LDR's homeland or emigration of the LDR Will Fix Everything, and that's both not true and can lead to bad decision-making with regret.
Also doesn't help with the biological child focus.
If anyone has practical advice rather than reassurance/validation, I'd be glad to have it. I'm not looking for confirmation that I'm a good person for loving my brother without conditions, which I do not consider an achievement. I want to know if there's something useful I can actually do.
Be a good sounding board. Especially if he doesn't have many meatspace gay friends separate from his boyfriend, it's very easy for a guy to go quite literally nuts as they stew over hard decisions without any external grounding (or falling down the /r/relationships or LLM rabbit hole for said external grounding, which will quite happily work toward driving you even more nuts). It's a really bad situation to be in, and I'm not exaggerating or hyperbolizing when I talk about this like going crazy. Having someone you can be out to, even if they can't empathize fully with a specific problem, as long as they're going to be honest and serious and open-minded about a choice, helps a ton at not getting unmoored or badly fixated.
And that's going to be uncomfortable at times! I'm bi, and I still absolutely know more of my brother's preferences than I ever wanted to know. The watersports joke is not the worst of all possible worlds. It's still better than having family who can't tell if they're obsessing over someone.
gattsuru
7d ago
I have some very bad or very good news for you about the entire kink of orientation play.
gattsuru
7d ago
It's less that you haven't proven it, and more that it feels like people started with the conclusion and then tried to look for any data supporting it. It's not just that this evidence sometimes has other alternative explanations (hell, some of the alternative explanations are a little sketchy themselves!); it's that there's no real 'okay, what falsify this' or even a 'okay, what would explain the same data with fewer epicycles'.
That doesn't make the theory wrong, but it makes it hard to feel any level of confidence.
Have you ever seen a lesbian look like her?
Uh... yes, actually. There's even one at the FRC environment I support, albeit caucasian and taller. For all the Subaru Flannel stereotypes are founded in reality, there's a lot of people outside of the stereotypes still. I have known (cis!) femmes who glorify the Barbie Doll look, obvious implants and all. I'm way too androphillic to get it myself, but different strokes for different folks.
Maybe things are different in China -- meyerlemon's response here seems like it was viewed from a literal funhouse mirror to Western Perspectives. But I don't have good sources clearly saying that it is different this way, either.
gattsuru
7d ago
I've run GLM-4.5 and GLM-4.6 on a desktop computer that set me back around 1.5k USD, including everything down to the power supply and case, just using an nVidia 3090 24GB and 224GB RAM. You get a significant performance penalty going with GPU+RAM compared to a pure GPU run, but it's nowhere near as bad as pure-CPU or CPU+SSD speeds. Not fast enough for synchronous work like a Codex replacement, by a long shot; for something you can set-and-forget a series of prompts to run overnight, it's fine and can churn out 10k-ish words at around 150w power consumption. For GLM 4.6 specifically you do end up needing one of the more heavily-trimmed quants, but you can run it down to 32GB VRAM + 128 GB RAM without cutting too hard on context.
((I will caveat that the heavily-trimmed quants give weird failure modes. I'd naively expected quantization to result in typos, logic problems, or looping, and sometimes that happens, but you also get bizarre focuses on certain names, places, or plot points not present in more-precise variants.))
That said, it cost me 1.5k USD at September 2025 prices, and even then I was making compromises on RAM to keep to budget (hence the bizarre RAM total). Wouldn't recommend it at current prices, since a rough estimate hits around 3.5k-3.8k. Putting more emphasis on VRAM might make more sense... which is a bizarre thing to say.
There's a lot of cases where a faster, lower-parameter model is a better choice, even with this setup. For synchronous work, smaller or MoE-focused models are night-and-day in terms of being able to just throw tokens at a problem. Even for async work, sometimes GLM-4.5-Air's (110B to GLM-4.6's 357B) going to save enough time and energy that it's close enough, and something like Cydonia (24B) can handle longer contexts surprisingly well if you prompt carefully. Hell, I've got a few models I've requantized down so I can run shorter prompts at the higher fidelity with all layers on GPU, and then drop down to a 'dumber' variant for long-context operations that would exceed VRAM.
gattsuru
7d ago
I'd... argue otherwise.
It's especially bad here, where the alleged source was almost certainly a malicious or self-serving motivation behind the lurid claims, but a probable cause affidavit is just that: it's not a claim something must be wrong, but that someone could be wrong. Like a grand jury indictment, the standards for a search warrant are hilariously low, and the people signing it off and executing it have very close to cart blanche. Not everyone being searched will have evidence of a crime, and not everyone being investigated will be guilty, necessarily.
Which makes it a problem when these things are world-upending, without any valid need. There may well be a scenario that requires a six-person team with assault rifles. As with countless other examples such as Malinowski and going all the way back to Ken Ballew, it's very hard to understand what is benefit derived from those tactics here, which look to be optimizing for shock-and-awe at the cost of not just inconvenience to the suspect, but danger to the community and even alleged victims.
That's a criticism that sometimes is delivered with perfect hindsight or expecting clairvoyant police and judges, but I think it applies here even when considering the least convenient world. In an alternate universe where Foreman had been guilty and had dangerous control over kidnapped women, and had been at the residence at the time of the raid, this raid could have easily resulted in the kidnapped women turned into hostages or 'made incapable of testimony' at the first kick at the door.
This is a consideration police do take, before serving even far more strongly evidenced search or arrest warrants.
It's just really easy for them to not, when they're morons. My personal favorite example is the FBI leaking to press the location and time of the search of a suspected mad bomber, presumably not for the purpose of maximizing casualties if he went Molotov, but there's a long and storied set of examples. Some of that's bad-but-at-least-foreseeable motivations -- arrest warrants in particular tend to get served at home despite it being well-known to be dangerous as shit, because SCOTUS hasn't slapped down searches-while-executing-arrest nearly aggressively enough. A lot of it's just how things have always been done.
That's still not reason, alone, to keep doing it that way.
gattsuru
7d ago
People proposed this theory back back when Wu came up on the Old Reddit, along with the theory that she was an intentional CCP op. It's plausible, in the sense that it could happen, be hard to prove, and would have some explanatory power, but there's basically no attempts by those KFers to consider what would disprove it. I'm not going to say either has to be false, but I remain skeptical.
gattsuru
9d ago
No one prints on cotton towels for POD, they are all really terrible polyester microfiber items that the customer also hates.
Polyester's so much more friendly with sublimation, and screen-printing so hard to do on small (and semi-automated) orders, that it's hard to really serve this section. If you were doing them in-house, a DTG printer's surprisingly cheap in those formats and pretty capable for cotton terrycloth, but I dunno of any vendor doing that as a POD service.
gattsuru
9d ago
Designing items myself gives me a bit of a moat between myself and the bulk of the drop shipper industry people who either have to buy designs from other designers or have to sell the same generic goods that everyone else is trying to sell so they must differentiate heavily on marketing, brand positioning, funneling, conversion tactics or whatever.
Hm. I've been looking at side gigging some small run stuff, but I've been worried that this moat isn't likely to survive long, if it's even alive at all, now. The furry fandom's kept a large portion of the previous demand for normal artists, partly because of the various politics, and partly because non-artist furries have awful tastes (myself included)... but there's already content you can get from AIgen in minutes that you can't get from a normal artist in months, if at all.
It is a numbers game. I have made over 40,000 unique designs over the past 10 years or so. In the beginning I didn’t know what people wanted so I made 100 different designs at a time, then had to wait and see what people bought. Out of 100 designs maybe 10 of them would sell at all. I would take the 10 that sold and make 100 more variations of each of those, then just keep doing that.
From the inside, does this feel at all like you're getting Whispering Earring'd? People who go hard onto this philosophy seem like they become little more than conduits for the algorithm -- not just extremes like Mr. Beast or Linus Tech Tips who praise A-B Over All, but even some pretty small-time 'winners' seem to take massive swerves to whatever gets hits. It seems like it should be possible to find a decent middle-ground (eg dejojotheawsome on YouTube seems to be doing a bunch of horror mod minecraft stuff for the hits, and then Vintage Story for fun), but that's hard to tell from outside.
gattsuru
10d ago
I couldn't tell you the last time I saw an obviously trans person in public, and I've never seen a furry despite the fact that they hold a national convention in Pittsburgh every year.
Does this reflect the world, or just your area of it being selected away?
I'm in a suburban/exurban bit of a Red State, and there's a trans woman at one of the local Jimmy Johns, a couple trans men at Kroger. And in addition to me being a furry - admittedly only one that's only visible in terms of stickers or pins - I've seen actual fursuiters at a (local grocery chain) and at the local Ren Faire.
And Anthrocon in Pittsburg is one of the the big conventions, 17k+ people. Even smaller ones like FurTheMore (about a tenth of the size!) in Baltimore you're going to see fursuiters walking to the convention center if you're at downtown and driving at the right time. Or at least I did, and I wasn't even in Baltimore for the convention (or even for fun).
gattsuru
13d ago
Normal commercial flight occurs between 10k and 40k feet (and usually in the 15-25k levels). That's about 0.2 atmospheres outside of the aircraft, and typically 0.7 inside. It's enough to be absolute hell on your sinuses if you have a sinus infection, and you'll go unconscious in seconds without supplemental oxygen, but it's not going to cause any nitrogen narcosis issues worth mentioning.
Aloha 243 is one of the clearest examples where the aircraft was maintaining absolutely no air pressure, and outside of the poor flight attendant sucked out of the aircraft, injuries were limited to debris.
gattsuru
13d ago
To steelman, there's genuine problems with paperwork and compliance overhead, especially in more marginal cases. The United States doesn't really keep centralized databases for a surprising amount of important details. If you need a replacement birth certificate, for example, at best you have to dial into your birth state (and more often birth county's) offices. In rare cases, they just don't have it; either it wasn't filed correctly, or was filed and lost. It's usually not absolutely insurmountable - though it might escalate to a point where you have to get an administrative or court finding that you were born - but it can range from obnoxious to expensive. That's doubly true for people already on the margins: if you're couch-surfing it's a lot easier to lose an envelope of vital records, and a lot harder to give a mailing address for a certified form that can take a month to get there.
Ostensibly, you need these records to do a lot of other stuff: most employers have to get a photo ID and social security card, which generally rounds to the same set of problems. If you're outside of the normal business world, though, there's a lot of people that don't.
gattsuru
13d ago
Officially, every state is 'compliant' with the RealID act, but in practice every state but Washington has a non-RealID (aka 'non-enhanced') driver's license option. Almost every current driver will have had to get a renewal since the switchover, so at this point if you're not using a RealID that's by choice... but the paperwork overhead is genuinely annoying, and I can't find good numbers on how many non-RealID driver's licenses are being issued.
((Most states allow noncitizens to get a RealID-compliant card, but it's specifically marked 'non-citizen'. It's also not supposed to be issued to anyone without 'legal presence', though between the various messes and in-name-only compliance that's a bit flakier.))
That's wrong for any definition of 'intellectually respectable' or 'how government ought to operate' that doesn't mean 'liked by progressives', and I say that as someone with no small number of frustrations with the administration from the right and left.
More options
Context Copy link