Dear UK residents. I’m sorry to be tedious, but I’m going to do the trans Cassandra thing again.
The government is now moving towards regarding trans people as effective children until the age of 25.
This will be established as precedent and then used to screw over any and all young adults who can’t escape from abusive parents, especially young women.
If you want to do anything about this, you need to fight for trans people. Yes, you. Now.
We all know that isn’t going to happen to any significant extent though.
As you were.
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Sweet pepper is the most disappointing vegetable (yes, I know it’s a fruit).
It’s like someone was, “what if chilli, but shit?”
@Adam probably the best use for it tbh.
It’s marginally less dismal than carrot for dipping in hummus, so there’s that too.
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After about the first night or so it’s amazing how you get used to sleeping on a boat. The rocking motion and creaking sounds of the lines just become the comforting background rather than the thing that keeps waking you up.
Reminds me of a holiday where the B&B was right above the platforms of Lancaster station. The noise of trains quickly became the background. So much so that when there was engineering works in the last night it was eerily quiet and hard to sleep.
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Trans women, 6 months on HRT: “My breasts must have stopped growing now and I’m only an AA cup! WOE!”
Trans women 18 years after transition (e.g. me, now): “Aw fuck, I gained a cup size last week.”
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After watching Oppenheimer the other week, I just rewatched Dr Strangelove.
For the love of god, will one of the nuclear powers announce it’s destroying its hydrogen bombs? These things are psychotically evil. Just get rid of them. Now, before the kill us all.
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Apropos of a conversation elsewhere c, I’ve always been given the creeps by “Jonathan Pie”. It’s always struck me as “manufactured outrage click bait culture for left wing people who think they’re too clever to fall for that.”
The sceptics in the pub crowd had the same sort of attitude and it made them really really easy marks for the alt right to use as useful idiots in their culture war.
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Do Americans realise just how much it looks like they’re trying to speedrun “imperial power collapsing into failed state” to the rest of the world right now?
Guys, sort your shit out FFS.
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@Ghost of Hope I think that’s a stress timed/syllable timed distinction more than anything else (stress timed languages tend to swallow syllables to make them fit, so if you don’t know to listen for the tonic syllables it’s really hard to get the words).
Curiously Brazilian Portuguese is syllable timed, which is the biggest difference. That I wouldn’t mind. What made my ears bleed was rendering all the consonants as “tch”.
A few years ago I was on Scarlet (the yacht of @Sarah Brown and @Zoë O'Connell ) and noticed mid morning that I didn't have the bloating sensation I was used to having some time after breakfast. The reason for this, of course, is that Scarlet runs on lactose-free milk. Evidently I was slightly lactose intolerant, started buying lactose-free milk at home, and everything was better.
It shouldn't have been only today that I extrapolated this experience to cover a large takeaway banana milkshake.
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Observant viewers will note the presence of hydrofoils. Each one of those is an INTERPLANETARY SEAPLANE!
Also, not a single expendable launch in this game.
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(Teeth themselves are good, no fillings ever, but that doesn't really help.)
The remaining ones seem more secure though, gums have improved a lot.
@Alan Braggins there are things they can do about the bone. I needed bone regeneration because it was 4 years since the tooth was pulled. My surgeon specialises in it, and the X-rays when he put the implant in (covered over with gum) and then 4 months later, were quite different. The first showed an implant protruding into the soft tissue between the jaw and sinus, barely held in place. The second showed the same implant utterly surrounded by brand new bone.
It might be worth talking to someone who specialises in it. We get a lot of dental tourism here in the Algarve because it’s cheaper but you’re still getting top notch EU trained doctors and surgeons (mine studied in London and spent the start of his career doing surgery for the NHS before returning home to Portugal and a decent climate).
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What I would have liked to have learned in English classes at school:
- Grammar.
- The history of how the language evolved from one with a rich conjugation and case system into the vastly structurally simpler one we have now.
- Points of convergence and divergence with other languages, closely related or not. How did that happen?
- How to speak and write beautifully and precisely with rhetorical flourishes if needed
What I actually learned in English classes at school:
- Thomas Hardy really hated women.
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On top of that, once you're required to write essays, you aren't actually taught how to do it or given any examples of one looks like (IIRC) which probably explains why I've always been bad at them.
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Had to look it up to be sure (I mean I have C64s and I have a MiSTer, but YouTube had to suffice for now:)). That title music on the C64 is fantastic, and the main theme is so much better to me.
I often wonder what would have happened if the SID hadn’t been crippled and would have been the 16 voices that was intended. Would have been bonkers 😀
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Christians: This Friday we celebrate!
Non Christians: Cool! What’s the occasion?
Christians: Our god died. Tortured to death quite horribly, in fact.
Non Christians: You celebrate that?
Christians: There are sound theological reasons.
Non Christians: Bit weird, but ok.
Christians: We call it “Good Friday”
Non Christians: …
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In fact the word good stood for "holy", not the modern meaning:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Fri…
And of course christians don't celebrate good friday, but commemorate it. It's like say that jews people celebrate Holocaust_memorial_days.
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Completely agree!
The use of eth in Anglian and Brythonic names seems to imply a soft 'th' sound, whereas the use of thorn seems to imply a harder one; and my understanding is that the same is true in modern Icelandic (Seyðisfjörður, Egilsstaðir vs Þórsmörk, for example).
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I see GamerGate is in the news because it’s coming up to the tenth anniversary. Ten years ago, I was in the middle of a nervous breakdown caused by transphobic harassment from TERfs organised on social media. They were using the same tactics that, months later, would be the hallmark of GamerGate.
And yet the surviving narrative is that this sort of organised, “culture war” harassment originated with GG.
It didn’t. They did it to trans women, and probably others, first, and we raised the alarm, and nobody thought it mattered enough to do anything.
And then they came for the rest of you.
They keep doing this. We keep raising the alarm. We keep being ignored.
Maybe one day people will learn.
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Job hunting, oh my
I'm looking for work again, after the most recent temporary thing came to an end. (Arguably I did it all too quickly!).
Apart from the challenge of persuading myself that I'm actually good enough to do _any_ described job, I find I haven't a clue what job titles mean these days. Cambridge University hides everything under a "Computer Officer" blanket, and I know I'm a system administrator (who does networks and other stuff too), but the job market is full of "Thing Analyst" and "Site Reliability Engineer" and "DevOps" and I haven't a clear idea what boxes if any I fit into.
Trying to imagine the culture shock immigrants to the UK get when, for the first time, they encounter someone like an accountant asking for their electricity bill.
Because, fellow Brits, I have to inform you that that's a bit weird.
It is though.
I arrived in '96 and the first thing my bank did after opening an account was to issue me a cheque book. The last time I'd seen a cheque in Germany was at least 10 years prior...
Later that year I wanted to transfer money to someone (I can't remember the reason) so went to my bank and they told me that was only possible if they had an account with the same bank... Bank transfers had been the standard in Germany since the 60s.
@Ozzy My UK bank keeps asking me, “what’s online banking like in Portugal compared to ours?”, presumably expecting effusive praise about their app, and their face falls when I say, “it’s at least a decade ahead of anything you have”.
So many Brits think they’re living in high tech utopia, when actually it’s backwards as hell in so many ways.
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BOLA be like, “I saw geese break someone’s arm”
Did you though?
Geese cheat code: they’re bullshitting. Make it clear that you know this and they will fuck off. Run at them screaming “Dinner!” and flap your arms. They fuck off incredibly quickly.
If that doesn’t work, grab the squawky cunt by the neck and practice Olympic hammer throwing. It’s funny, and it won’t give you shit again.
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@Sesquipedality It's an interesting exercise in attempting to express the reasoning in accessible language. To me it seems a little patronising but it's been a long time since I was 14 so I'm a poor judge of that... and was never very typically 14 anyway.
Problematic how?
“Turbo cancer”?
The fuck is “turbo cancer”?
Dear god, yer racist uncle on Facebook says the most stupid shit.
You know goats have those excellent rectangular pupils in their eyes? Well apparently they give the goat an excellent field of vision to detect predators. They also swivel in their sockets to ensure that the pupil remains parallel to the ground.
Justiina Jumpsunen
Unknown parent • • •I would raise that age to 65. Need to live a little so that one can put it into perspective.
Jax UK
Unknown parent • • •Bore off you absolute giraffe.
Alexandra Lanes
Unknown parent • •Alexandra Lanes
in reply to Alexandra Lanes • •Llwynog
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Seán Fenian
Unknown parent • • •Jinshei
Unknown parent • • •Jax UK
Unknown parent • • •Fuck off.
kæt
Unknown parent • • •@crocket2001
I think it's easy to underestimate how far most people have moved on this already. (Not that *most* makes it safe). There seem to be two groups pushing this:
1. boring folk who moan about the metric system, car parks, youth of today, ULEZ, "they're all as bad as each other", immigrants, etc.
2. Westminster-y policy type people, both left and right, professional dinner-party attenders, columnists, writers, wonks, essayists, student union types.
The (dangerous) difference now is that these groups -- our society's loudest, most boring, dull, dim, and reactionary, who only differ in social class -- are united on one subject.
The public don''t need to "come round".
People think Guardianista idealists lay out liberation's groundwork -- surveyors going ahead. But they're just apologists hanging on the coat-tails of emperors, minting excuses for comfortable lives at court. The powerful, their "clients", are moving right, so they're representing them, coining theories and writing reports.
Jinshei
in reply to Jinshei • • •