How often do you sit cross legged on the floor? A lot of stretching routines are basic maintenance but getting to actual comfort is a different thing entirely. Getting up regularly and relaxing into floor sitting while watching tv has done me wonders personally. The first while is rough though.

Don’t get an SUV or Raised truck. They might be comfortable but they are dangerous to other vehicles on the road.

It might be more about what vehicles share the road. SUVs and pickups tend to cause the majority of fatalities in crashes because their bumper height basically being non compatible with cars and vans and their larger blindspots… That design might not play particularly well with the Keis in crash situations.

But that being said SUVs and raised pickups are menaces to road safety across the board and we should be looking at phasing them out.

I mean it could be using the percentages of another number. Like if there’s 20 ingredients and you drop one it’s a 5% reduction or if you added other non natural ingredients that would cause the percentage to drop… But whether it’s less or fewer would depend on information we don’t readily have because we don’t know if it’s ingredients by volume or of it’s a reformulation of ingredients… and may be at the crux of this grammatical problem depending on what you assume is going on?

It depends on context. If you are dealing with a percentage of overall types of ingredients by volume without changing the variety of ingredients you would probably use “less”. Like if you reduced the mix of milk related ingredients. You would use “fewer” to indicate that the number of individual ingredients had changed. Like if they got rid of two of the ingredients of an original ten.

This could be a category error?

Yes it does suck on your end but on the other side of the phone your perspective date is probably having a whole mental breakdown about it. For a lot of trans folk disclosure is absolutely nessisary as early as possible and preferably for safety reasons not when you are face to face…

Buuuut they also are very likely to get really vile transphobic backlash from a perspective date as much as they are honest rejections based on genital preference which sucks to be rejected for but is nobody’s fault. There’s a lot of trans people out there who feel like they are never going to be given a chance. Either way steeling themselves for one form of rejection or a vile reminder of the awful people out there who think you are subhuman and are offered up a nice juicy target on which to let loose their bigotry does tend to make for disordered social niceties. Once someone has been burned enough they get pretty damn shy and the procrastination is more of a case of battling personal traumas until the last possible second where one absolutely must do the right thing.

I would advise not taking it too personally.

Yeah… If anyone starts talking too much about the shape of the human skull as if that means anything whatever they are selling ain’t worth the pitch

As a Socialist that subscribes more to the historical strain of Saint Simone and Robert Owen that broke out and away early from Marxism to become the Chartist movement and the history of American non-Marxist socialism … I am often tired of how one note Tankies are. They seem obsessed with a sort of internal purity which denies a rich history of socialism other than Marx and Engles. Once one of them goes off about Stalinism or Maoism I basically just disengage because at that point they are basically so enamored with the aesthetics of communism that they aren’t going to be listening to anything. They want to be devout to the ideology while whitewashing the bloodstains of past failures. I understand a collectivist mindset is more or less what Marx aims to cultivate in his work but it seems often at the cost of tolerance of any level of apostasy.

The flattening of a mass of political thought into cardboard cuttouts to snipe at and sneering at the range of Socialism hybrids with No True Scotsman flavour condescension as political ideologies simply not complete worldviews in their own right has got me rather depressed in dealing with the average Communist on here. People in general often just seem to want to find something simple and easy to hate.

Social democracy is a subsection inside the umbrella of Socialism. So she’s both.

A lot of it is applicable in many different places.

Whenever someone holds something you desperately need out of reach unless you conform to their very specific formula to make that happen you end up with situations where bad system design alters people’s behavior to a specific degree. If you fail the test of being the correct sort of risk for the system to call “a success” your story doesn’t end or go on hold. If your conditions for living are to live on your terms you either have to find other ways to get around the system or you die. Misery is deadly and a lot of the problem with being trans under extremely stigmatized terms is that life sometimes doesn’t become a quest for happiness - it becomes a choice of which type misery is the most compatible.

I was too young to purchase cassettes (though they were a vibrant part of my childhood I spent every penny of allowance on penny candy and saving up for game carriages) but I am definitely old enough to never be emotionally ready to part with those mini cloth binders full of CDs.

My first paycheck paid for a Sony Walkman that played disks.

May I suggest Abagail Thorn’s video “I Emailed my Doctor 133 Times - A Crisis in the British Healthcare System” : https://youtu.be/v1eWIshUzr8?si=MLG5nLhD2GrXS07v

She mentions trans DIY and moreso outlines the systemic issues of oppression which have lead many to take their own healthcare into their own hands due to failures and bottlenecking of trans care.

As an incredibly and habitually nerdy kid none of my nerd shit had been an obstacle to my parents thinking I’m rad. I taught and ran my Mom through a D&D campaign over Covid…

Also I don’t think a parent who adopts the 'Is your kid cool" mentality is looking to make it another vector to disparage kids but to open adults minds to actually appreciating their kids as people not just little self congratulatory vicarious vindication of success. My parents are not fans of my Brother-in-Law’s family because they refuse to look at their son and my sibling as success on any other metric than acedemic or career related successes. They look at their careers in slightly lower paid but fulfilling careers doing things they feel make the world a better place makes them “the dumbest smart people we know”… The fact their son is just fucking awesome in his own merits just never enters their heads (and makes my Mom mad enough to bite through steel.)

Having parents who are cool is a blessing.

Maltheism or Dystheism might be your bag. Dystheism is the idea that God(s) are not all good and may be evil and Maltheism is a more recent addition that posits a strong belief that there exists only a categorically evil divinity.

Seriously right?!

What chances have I without

My motorized steed?

It’s become the habit of leftist spaces since the first sign of the poisoning of a space by the right is usually in the humor. The cycle of “Oh I was just saying this racist thing to be edgy, I didn’t mean to be serious!” to “Oh you’re too sensitive you’re ruining everyone’s fun” to driving vulnerable minorities out of spaces because it’s just bloody toxic to explain when something is sucky and courting vicious attacks for being “political” when trying to stick up for themselves thus making what remains hotbeds of ever deepening unironic racism/sexism/queerphobia etc… Yeah. It does mean that any spaces with leftists left in them tend to be very corrective in the way they engage with memes and jokes.

I suppose it’s a little of a “this is how you get ants” situation in moderation.

I lived in Japan for a year. Travelled and set up a new vase of operations every 2 months or so… and I rode a car exactly 4 times over the full year. Once was in a single day there and back again during a company trip. Once was in a cop car when I got so very lost on my way to my destination in the boonies that the bus driver I was trying to talk to waved over the police who decided to just give me a lift… And once was a taxi I took because I just decided I was too tired to huff my 60 lbs worth of possessions to board a boat in Tokyo Bay.

It was brilliant. Now I am back in Canada and it’s basically just Australia but cold.

Yeah, I am on team “Fuck Car Dependance” because I hate everything about em - driving, the ecological impact of cars and the society wide inequalities created and reinforces by designing space around them.

But I would be virtually unhirable in my field if I didn’t drive… And there is zero way to fix that even if we managed to dismantle the system of strodes, massive parking lots, low density suburbs, inadequate public transit etc…

Gods… I thought the reverse and that I hadn’t encountered as much rape apologism on here as compared to reddit. Maybe I’ve somehow managed to buck a trend with my subscriptions or something? Anyway you alice it I hope that things just generally get better.

Rape apologists are just… Bleaaahg…

Thank you, it’s my own weird headcannon. History is often very good at sweeping queerness under the rug particularly when someone is admired.

I think it’s his fairly deep friendships with women that I wish I knew about. I know that for many of us there’s a sort of external recognition factor of “these are my people” where we best empathize and folks of our birth sex can feel a little alien by comparison. Misogyny can be a fairly limiting factor in self exploration though and the options available to women in his time were generally fairly dismal.

I have a bizarre and completely unprovable theory Leonardo Da Vinci was a trans woman based largely on a recognition of my own behaviours and desires as a trans person and the convoluted history of the Mona Lisa.

Many people have posited that the picture, while supposedly a commissioned portrait of a patron, is actually a self portrait of the artist but your run of the mill scholarship tends to be a little stumped why he would do that… But look at the history of the painting and it was in his possession for a very long time “unfinished”. Layers of the painting show jewelry had been added and subtracted from the painting over time becoming more austere as both portait and painter aged. The title of the painting originally basically translated to “the happy one” supposedly for that enigmatic smile… but what if this painting was actually “the happy one” smiling at the artist who struggled in their own body gaining what wistful euphoria there was to be had meeting the eyes of his ideal physical form, carried around as a wish and temporary escape from the mirror.

Da Vinci had a complicated sexuallity as we know it. As best we can figure he was repulsed by heterosexual intercourse but adored the male form sexually. He had a number of very strong friendships with women but he tended to not render their forms sexually in his art preferring to focus on male genetalia… But his art also featured numerous themes of sexes with poses, characteristics and so on intermixed into androgyny or with subversive femininity. He veiwed women as paragons of grace, dignity and quite frankly I think he pined for motherhood.

As a trans person who has decided for reasons not to physically transition I know that wistfulness. Staring at the genderswap snapchat filters of yourself during a moment of low spirits or the pictures of youth where you actually properly passed as your gender and thinking “if only”.

At the end of his life the Mona Lisa was not passed on to it’s supposed commissioner but instead to Leonardo’s long time apprentice and known gay lover. Perhaps a final sentimental bequeathal of a cherished object

The more I read and see of the artist’s works and life the more I see a distinct queer identity emerge. Perhaps not worth much to scholarship but the idea that maybe the most popular and highly valued picture in the world could be of a trans woman’s encapsulated self conceptualization and the true self portrait of a genius hidden from veiw only by the veil of cis blindness that cannot recognize the distinct behaviour patterns and dearly held desires of trans people… Would be immensely satisfying.