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Currently on the train to Kings Cross, explaining the loud neutral section clunk to fellow passengers. What I don’t know is why this isn’t something you hear on other electrified lines/stock. Pretty sure I don’t remember hearing it on the old 365s. Anyone ( @Garry Keenor maybe?) know?



Was going to be organised and renew my Network Railcard today. But it wants a new photo and I am currently hairy because it’s electrolysis tomorrow and taking a photo of my chin like that currently? NOPE

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"Attacks on charities that support trans inclusion are accelerating, forming part of a wider climate of hostility towards charity campaigning.

In signing the pledge, charity leaders committed to unite against this hate and offer support to those attacked. They stated that the sector must remain a safe place for all trans and non-binary people to work, volunteer and seek support."

#Trans #LGBTQ #Quakers

quaker.org.uk/news-and-events/…

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in reply to Stoat Kate Watson reshared this.

Adding to this 6 weeks later.

Quakers aren't allowing anti-trans orgs to hire their venues, refused permission to anti-trans entryists who tried to start a "GC Quakers" group, no longer stocking a book by a Quaker author because they are anti-trans on social media and they're actively blocking anti-trans people from their social media sites.

#Trans #Quakers

This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to Stoat

There was a GC group meeting at the Quaker Hall in Edinburgh, which I was quite shocked by. I’m pleased to see that they are no longer allowed to meet there 😀

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The frequency with which bars in Porto play 'Africa' by Toto is definitely above any reasonably defined metric.

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in reply to John Bull

It’s the Muzak that follows me everywhere. Airports, auto dealers, bars, hotel lobbies, offices, the recreation center. If Clevelander Saga V was an actual TV series, Toto would be raking in some serious royalties.
in reply to John Bull

Bars in Bangkok play Hotel California and that four non blondes song to the point where I now hate them both.

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I have often seen the question asked, “why are so many trans women so aggressive/combative”.

And the answer is that we don’t start out being, but we quickly learn that expecting people to be decent human beings towards us because it’s the right thing to do doesn’t work.

It only works if we make it harder to not treat us like human beings than vice versa.

I don’t feel like that’s on us to fix.

Unknown parent

Naomi
@markusl @breadbin Laws don't protect people who can't afford lawyers.
in reply to Sarah Brown

Alternative hypothesis:

"Why are all these people who are hurting and sore from the wounds their life has given them so sensitive and quick to bark out in pain when poked in old wounds...?"

Because I see a lot of the same "aggression" from chronic pain people and minority groups and I think it comes from ....

Oh gods I'm just restating what you said. Sorry.


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"imagine if the bad space was developed by a white person, and how the critique would look"

okay,
"hey, this project is weirdly transmisogynistic, and the creator seems to be aswell. this isnt a good thing"

its... its the same critique it's been getting. no serious person in this space is criticizing the project on the basis of the creator's race. it is focused on the very real, very damaging impact it is having on trans spaces that have done nothing wrong.

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in reply to Ember! 🦴

It really says something how critiques of transmisogyny are conflated directly into white supremacy. It doesn't say anything good, but it does say *something*.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Airbus open sourced their new cockpit font. Make it the default for all your embedded projects, because it's REALLY good and has real testing in difficult environments!

b612-font.com/

in reply to Martin Schröder

right. French company, can't even write basic French using this font.
in reply to David JONES

maybe it's because the products this font is intended for are all 100% written in English, even if the company producing it as important parts in France. 😉
in reply to David JONES

@oneiros i have poked about a bit more. The glyph showing on the b612-font site only shows A–Z with no accents, but on Google Fonts, there are a few more accents (maybe Google paid for them to be added?). Enough to do basic French. But not Welsh. *sigh*

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Shoutout to furries who're getting het-jacketed even tho they're mostly LGBTQ; I'm sorry this shit keeps going on.

Shoutout to disabled ppl who been reading my posts & going "bitch at least you got a pogrom; we're not even ppl to this machine and they never STOPPED trying to kill us." You right, I was just busy fighting for my right to exist. I didn't mean to forget who is REALLY first, open fascism or no.

Anti-shoutout to nazis, racists, and ppl who think antifascism is a dominance game.

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in reply to AnarchoNinaWrites

Sorry to bother, what is het-jacketed? (I tried to look it up, but the results were mostly about ammunition)
in reply to ⦺ irick 🐁🐈⚩

@irick being potrayed as straight white men because it suits a larger argument justifying them being blocked from much of the fedi. The persecution is definitely ABOUT them being furries; but that won't wash in an intersectional discourse so they have to be first portrayed as straight white men possessing enormous privilege.

In essence, putting a "jacket" that says "straight white dude" on furries. "het-jacketing."

in reply to AnarchoNinaWrites

Ah! That makes sense now that I understand the metaphor. Thanks so much for clarifying!
in reply to ⦺ irick 🐁🐈⚩

@irick no problem at all. It's a common heteronormative abuse tactic deployed in nominal left spaces to target marginalized queers. Like, consistently. Trans women get the same thing.
in reply to AnarchoNinaWrites

It's strange to hear about TBH. I've been made aware of a large blind spot in my situational understanding. My whole experience in an LGBTQIA+ context has also been in a largely furry one. Even the anti-furry stuff I've experienced is usually pretty explicitly queer-phobic.

To check my understanding: In the context of trans identities, would this take the form of highlighting demographicly common privileged identities in order to justify a transphobic behavior pattern?

in reply to AnarchoNinaWrites

I hadta google what pogrom was... Oh.... ok. I read. We both fight for our right to exist. To each our own fight, both valuable are we. I feel solidarity reading your Toots. No need for one ups (I loathe accusations of such, but I cant practically stop choices that're beyond me in the ideas of another). I dont/wont observe hierarchy, I refuse to play another's dominance games.

We as individuals on similar roads, in different shoes. Fight the fight we all deserve to live.


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Not gonna apologize for being annoying last few days. I know it's really out of character, I much prefer posting about my interests than about gender, last few months it was mostly electronics projects and the like.

But the space we're sharing has a real transphobia problem that way too many people were afraid to bring up because defending your transness makes you racist or some cointelpro shit.

Some of you are/were promoting it. Some I talked out of, others I got rid of. Don't let me catch you being complicit.

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When facing the "All we need is STEM!" approach to education, my usual response is:

Developing the vaccine was the STEM problem; distribution & getting shots in arms was the Social Science problem; getting people to trust it & combatting misinformation was the Humanities problem -- which did we fail?

in reply to Ada Palmer

A bit of STEM ready on the receiving side helps a lot with communicating the facts.

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"So wait, are you say that even IF some trans people are bad, it's not appropriate to engage in public witch-hunts against trans femmes and fash-jacket trans people in the middle of an ongoing anti-trans pogrom?"

Yes, that is indeed, what I am saying.

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My new OU Public Law module is trying so hard to be as eccentric as the British Constitution. To this end, students are presented with a bookmarks collection to put information about constitutional law in, in the form of a graphical bag. I am of course taking this very seriously.

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The Steam games service from Valve was released 20 years ago.

That is the same interval as between Steam's first release and that of Bug Byte's _Manic Miner_ by Matt Smith for the ZX Spectrum.

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in reply to lproven

They've mostly landed at capable evil, not awful, and the various other games stores trying to get a piece of the pie mean they've pulled in their head a bit on "we're a de facto monopoly, we can do what we like".

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it occurred to me this morning that "anyone criticizing Ro is racist" has the same energy as, "anyone criticizing the state of Israel is antisemitic."

in effect, both are co-opting real bigotry in service of obscuring the real power dynamics at play.

Ro is a web developer and consultant. he's a member of the professional-managerial class. he has the ear of the other Big Names in fediverse moderation. The Bad Space is a contributor to the Federation Safety Enhancement Project. dude has a *lot* of power and clout in this community.

meanwhile, the bulk of the transfem people calling Ro out have to crowdfund, do sex work or do artwork commissions just to put food on their damn tables.

this isn't "trans people versus black people." it's an upper-middle-class ego-tripper and his HOA friends crybullying a bunch of powerless, poor, homeless, vulnerable people because he seriously fucked up and was called out on it.

period.

This entry was edited (1 year ago)

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in reply to Rachel, Femme Doux Naturel

meanwhile, the bulk of the transfem people calling Ro out have to crowdfund, do sex work or do artwork commissions just to put food on their damn tables.

this isn’t “trans people versus black people.” it’s an upper-middle-class ego-tripper and his HOA friends crybullying a bunch of powerless, poor, homeless, vulnerable people because he seriously fucked up and was called out on it.


that about sums it up, yeah. it’s what frustrates me most about all this

in reply to meadow

@meadow but far be it from me to suggest that Ro and his professional-managerial-class leftlib clique aren't ready to have a conversation about class politics and how those translate into power dynamics-

...no. no, actually I will suggest that.


in reply to Alexandra Lanes

I have to say that was a line of dialogue I never expected to hear.

On the other hand, it sounds like David thinks you can get an NVQ in it …

#theArchers



“Allies” who would rather be complicit in transphobia than accused of racism. 🤔

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The more I see about this "Bad Space" thing, the more concerned I get. This is like that abortive united federation of instances thingy from last year that was run by the freeze peach crowd, only this one cloaks an apparent trans eliminationist agenda in the language of social justice. Apparently a lot of people find this superficially attractive.

If you are a trans-heavy instance, you might want to consider a fediblock of ubiqueros.com (AFAICS this is the "Bad Space" main instance) as necessary self defence. I am certainly going to.

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in reply to Sarah Brown

Wait, are you talking about The Bad Space project by Ro?

thebad.space/about

I thought that was basically a directory of fedi instances with crummy mod policies. I think I remember the "united federation" drama from last year too. The Bad Space seems more like a blacklist than a badly-contrived rules manifesto.

I've started seeing some posts floating around regarding some "Good Space" thing, but all I've heard so far is the name. If it stands in opposition to The Bad Space I can see how it would be problematic though.

I think I'm confused…

in reply to Acorn Squashbuckler

@Acorn Squashbuckler it appears to be a directory of the sort of instances everyone would want to block, AND instances run by or hosting trans women.

Fair warning, I have seen this shit before and an in a mood to deal with it by creating a fire break. My block finger is very itchy right now.

in reply to Sarah Brown

@AcornSquashbuckler Some context for what's going on with The Bad Space and FSEP: hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/111…


OK, let's get into it. Let's talk about anti-Blackness on this here Fediverse, "civility traps", and "why nazis wear suits."

First: there are some trans folk that love Black people, care about our safety, and want to see the Fediverse be more welcoming to Black users.♥️ These kind folk volunteer considerable time, money, effort, and social capital, to make the Fediverse more welcoming for Black folk. We love them for this.

But there are some trans folk that are super fashy, and hate Black folk.


in reply to Ben Hutchings

@Ben Hutchings @Acorn Squashbuckler Relevant to this, have also seen posts complaining that trans women (particularly) only ever seem to be welcome in spaces as long as we present as resources to be used, and that the idea that we have a right to just fucking exist somewhere seems utterly alien.

And there’s a lot of that sort of tone in the post you just quoted, along with the “you’re either helping us build our widget or you’re with the Nazis” false dichotomy.

This is a thing we have seen time and time again. When I was in politics, we were only ever engaged with when people wanted us to lend legitimacy to whatever they were doing. It pretty much NEVER got reciprocated.

We are used to being thusly shat on, but it doesn’t mean we have to be fucking nice about it.


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I mean I said a billion times, I don't even care about the blocklists?

Newsflash, I'm not even sure anyone else does care either. I think what's tweaking people is that you've got a whole bunch of instances labeled "no description. Hate speech, poor moderation" and at least some of it bullshit.

Then, when folks point that out, this becomes a larger convo about why white trans femmes are dogshit and trans fascists are a real thing, common enough to require widespread education and condemnation.

in reply to AnarchoNinaWrites Sarah Brown reshared this.

Oh and again, all of this is set against a backdrop where the people who are trying to fuck every single person involved here over forever, are actively telling reactionaries with guns that trans people (and especially trans femmes) are pedophile sex criminals who mean to harm their children and do so just by existing.

I must confess, this is also a significant portion of why I'm upset about this.

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Been vaguely aware of the latest Fedi drama. Been trying to ignore it, but it seems to have ended up at “trans people need to stop being so sensitive to people randomly assuming they’re disgusting perverts who the rest of society needs shielding from, it was a MISTAKE you guys”.

And that just makes me sad.

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in reply to Sarah Brown

@cy

Respectability politics, innit.

I'd rather have solidarity with my fellow deviants (read: sex workers, drug addicts, unhoused people). We all deserve liberation, safety and respect.

in reply to CharLES ☭ H

@Charles ☭ H @cyborg I agree entirely. Meanwhile the censors are doing the whole “this navel gazing just distracts us from the real struggle” crap which has been the excuse for transphobia, homophobia and misogyny in liberation politics since the year dot.





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Did I get the R2-D2 Instant Pot instead of the regular one? Yes I did 😂 #cooking #starwars #instantpot

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It is with a heavy heart that I announce that the cis are at it again.


Pilot dies after plane crashes during gender reveal party in Mexico


Alan Francisco Rangel of the Sinaloa Red Cross told CNN that paramedics treated the pilot at the crash site in San Pedro, Navolato and then took him to a local hospital, where he died.



https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/04/americas/mexico-gender-reveal-plane-crash-scli-intl/index.html

in reply to Sarah Brown

Gotta love how several people (including the one shooting the movie) see the plane breaking apart but don’t even react to it, let alone give a shit, because they’re too busy with IT’S A GIRL!!!



I discover (via @Sarah Brown's recent virality) that Republic of Ireland road signs use Transport Heavy even for white lettering. Apart from putting English-language place names in all caps, I'd been wondering what seemed different about them to my English eyes. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_sig…

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My "most schools unaffected" graphic has a lot of people asking questions already answered by the graphic.

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in reply to Nick Barlow

BBC was reporting over 1000 schools haven't yet replied to the questionnaire so I'm looking forward to how this dates.


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Engaging in blatantly partisan fuckery to install a democratic senator in replacement of mitch mcconnell would be the most honest possible way to honor the legacy of mitch mcconnell. nbcnews.com/politics/politics-…

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Man proclaiming to be a ‘classical liberal’ actually just a bit racist newsthump.com/2023/09/04/man-p…

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Please share please Cambridge folk. Someone flytipped two sets of crutches by our home, they belong to Addenbrookes Physiotherapy department. They have no way of picking them up. Is anyone driving down there from Kings Hedges with space for two sets of crutches?

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Unknown parent

Cab
@junesim63 I doubt anyone searches thus but if this doesn't work I'll try that next, ta.
in reply to Cab

@junesim63 Maybe no-one *searches* thus, but people follow hashtags. (I follow both #Cambridge and #Cambridgeshire, but am not able to oblige, sorry.)

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The government's concrete problem is not an abstract one.


Things are pretty good for me. Lots of people care about me and it seems to me that when I spend time with them I like myself a little more. I even had a moment of actually appreciating how I look. Some of my fears about the future have started to seem more manageable and navigable, and I've had a pretty good day today, organising for a day's walking in the Peak District next weekend and lounging around before watching what was a pretty exciting Italian Grand Prix.

And so why do I find myself suddenly feeling slightly low and on the verge of tears? There's nothing to sadden me, I'm sitting in the summerhouse with the laptop and the new bureau I rescued from Ravensworth Gardens. It's a lovely afternoon. And yet there are tears welling up and something catching at the back of my throat.

I've taken antidepressants as usual, per schedule, and similarly hormones. Whyyyyyyy.

in reply to ceb

@ceb Could well be though I rather expected most of that to be over and done with by now! Bloody hell I’ve been on hormones for three years now. How did that happen?

Walking on Saturday 9th.

@ceb
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Is it possible that it's more "moreness" than "sadness"? I think a certain kind of sadness is maybe the most reasonable state in reaction to life, even to its good things. Not the full-grown ravages depression of course. Also, it's definitely the right time of year to feel Septembery. Is it The Waste Land or Four Quartets which starts in the garden in autumn?
in reply to kæt

@kæt The Waste Land starts in the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land. It’s Burnt Norton which opens Four Quartets with a rose garden in the autumn heat.
@kæt
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

Ah yes, the Four Quartets! (Roses in Four Quartets; hyacinths in The Waste Land).

At the start of 4Q I always think of someone a bit like Eliot himself, a bit like someone like Bertrand Russell or Whtehead, wandering through an autumn garden of a dilapidated stately home maybe after some great sadness and shattering, perhaps the great war (1), kicking up leaves, kicking up dust, running your hand along the sheets covering the furniture in the west wing remembering the great Edwardian dances, etc.

(1)via a linking image of my own: the way people can and have dry-drowned in disused fountains filled with leaves, from the CO2 of the decay, like the trenches in the war).

This entry was edited (1 year ago)
in reply to kæt

Sorry for waffling on randomly about images when you were talking about things you were directly feeling. That was insensitive of me.
in reply to kæt

@kæt Really no need to apologise. Feelings often come out best as images for me, and you’ve always had a facility with the metaphorical that prompts rather than challenges, that is never a tangent but always a chord.
@kæt
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

I suppose maybe I just mean feeling things more intensely, but also accessing things previously barred, or synthesising, reflecting, assessing, etc, those kinds of things in that general bucket.

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sure sex is good but have you ever opened a brick of vacuum packed coffee and it goes ssss

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This entry was edited (1 year ago)

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in reply to Garry Keenor

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Welcome to another #RailwaysExplained thread… this is my first completely new thread on Mastodon, and boy is it going to be an epic one.

HOW IT WORKS (AND WHEN IT DOESN’T) – DISCONTINUOUS ELECTRIFICATION

Something I get asked about A LOT is discontinuous electrification. A typical comment on social media will be something like “well with battery technology so readily available we can just electrify the easy bits and run on battery in between…”

#railways #OLE #OCS #OverheadLine

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Unknown parent

arthur

It's not just the monetary issue of rebuilding bridges and tunnels - it is also the disruption that it can cause. Take the electrification of the Bolton-Manchester line, for example. The bridge at Moses Gate caused disruption for months as it was a major thoroughfare for the town's car traffic, contained utilities and the geology underneath wasn't as expected.

If they could have run on a battery through this, it would have saved so much time and disruption.