Uh… I hate to tell you this but people absolutely dress as mermaids and do conventions… There’s a whole home industry of people who make custom silicon tails.

https://aquamermaid.com/blogs/news/mermaid-convention?srsltid=AfmBOoofN82kC8kQ_774E8rKcE1-Mi9CBZXEfvIqLckEK1cq7bXWHFum

https://www.themernation.com/silicone-tail

Nope, different nerd culture entirely. Seriously, they have their own conventions, instead of fursuits they do custom silicone tails and train to swim in them, have contests and pagents and things. There’s basically no overlap between the two communities. Scaleys are folk in the fursuit community who do dragon and lizard personas.

I have odd connections. Being in the film industry I have friends through props depts who do furry cons and one of my coworkers does underwater photography for people in the Mermaid subculture.

When I was living in Japan and using public baths cycling between hot and cold baths a couple of times this way was my favorite thing.

Appearantly it basically causes blood to do some neat stuff by dilating and constricting blood vessels to move blood to the core or the extremities.

All I knew is if you cycle about three or four times and drink one beer it’s the cheapest drunk you will ever be.

Consider that those shootings are getting way more frequent. We get a Columbine about four times a year now and around 43 other shootings where there might be only injuries or singular casualties. Kids grow up in the States with lockdown drills. That entire voting block is going to be old enough to vote in 12 years.

I expect anti gun sentiments are growing now as each year new voters are growing up in that system where these events aren’t considered rare anymore. Where parents who came of age in the 2000’s have kids and are now front row to that milliterization and afraid because their families have skin in that game.

These laws are gunna happen one day.

I am sorry, but this take is founded on a lack of knowledge about the spoiler effect in first past the post voting systems. Until more representative forms of voting are introduced this is an idealistic but ultimately misinformed take.

The spoiler effect is a system powerful encumbant politicians use to manipulate populaces at large in part by taking advantage of your better nature and belief in a flawed system. Voting your heart will just not be enough and it’s got hidden dangers. Pressure needs to be applied after this election to change the voting structure to a more stable and open system.

https://youtu.be/3Y3jE3B8HsE?si=qCvPLnk4u6FJ0ec2

Here’s a video that explains fairly susinctly what the spoiler effect is and how alternative voting systems disrupt it.

Sounds a bit like attention economy burnout. It’s tuned to young adults level of brain plasticity and as a lot of us are aging the cycle is wearing us out. In some ways you might need to start finding time to actually be properly bored again. Not like a constant semi-entertained state or stimulated by work that is dull… just actually properly bored on your own time by choice.

Find some low attention calorie things to do. Read books, chill out in a park or a coffee shop with your phone off, set timers and take 30 minutes of a nap and hit the snooze button for as many times as you want. Win back your high points by expanding the low end resting rate. Unplug from things that don’t give you satisfying returns and see how that makes you feel.

And sometimes it’s okay to lose a bit of sparkle. We get older and it’s a little harder to find things that feel like an authentic fresh experience.

Gideon the Ninth?

Takes like 5 chapters for it to find it’s feet but it’s lesbian necromancers and swordfighters in space with a very snarky point of veiw character.

It’s kind of more scifi fantasy but a good time.

" What happens when you mistype an email requesting a Point of Sale System to be installed"

Yeah it’s where we get a lot of purity doctrine as well… But when you read it you get the sense that Paul is a sex repulsed asexual. He’s like “well if you gotta do it be married… But also like just don’t if you can.”

Paul just comes across as an opportunistic narcissist riding on Jesus’s popularity and codifying things in a way people will do whatever he wants. “Give me (err mean my church) lots of money and listen to me and do what my most loyal friends tell you to and you’ll… Go to heaven… Yeah!”

So intersex reassignments of babies born with ambiguous characteristics?

Some Teamsters are wild man. One guy I rode with went on a whole thing about how he thought “Swamper” was such an outdated thing to call my position and I brought up the whole thing about how he wasn’t driving horses either and he went on a 40 minute tyrade about how very dare I/ it’s still called “horsepower” / proud history of the union…

Cocaine is one hell of a drug.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swamper_(occupational_title)

Old devilry. The same sort that has union truck drivers called “Teamsters” even though most of them have never been near a horse or mule.

I mean at this point he probably has a phobia of adept legal professionals. She probably gave him the Prosecution stare and he damn near wet himself.

The trucker I swamp for has swapped rhetoric from “Kamala laughs like a hyena/ Trump is fine” to declarations about how he doesn’t care about politics and how maybe we should all just stop talking about it.

Very funny how fast that disengage happened.

Nope. Just boobs. Bottom surgery is actually all told not a super popular option since it has a long recovery process. Only about 14% of people who identiffy as trans actually go in for it.

There’s a bit of a risk reward calculation to make regarding how the options turn out and a lot of us compromise based on other life factors. It really is a very personal process and the general conception of transitions following a checklist to full surgically isn’t an accurate representation in the slightest. Most transitions are sort of composites of social engineering techniques combined with psychological practices of avoiding triggers. If you can get by without a surgery generally speaking you do.

In parlance we generally prefer that to be referred to as a “questioning phase” as saying it’s a “trans phase” tends to be in active use by some of the sort of anti-trans rhetoric peddlers like Abagail Shrier and Jordan Peterson. In the activism scene it’s a little “nails on a chalkboard” ish when you come across it .

Also generally speaking gender care for minors in the US and Canada is a four professionional team. A psychologist, a pediatrician, a social worker and an endocrinologist. In the UK it has extra personnel through their kind of arcane structure of gender clincs… So it’s already pretty well covered.

Well the whole “minors” thing is a little overblown. There is one surgery available for 16 year olds with parental consent covered for trans affirming care. Top surgery.

Every other surgery is only available when a person is basically voting age and can make their informed decision as a legal adult.

All in all the surgery is basically aesthetically reversable via silicone implants and formula exists for anybody who has trouble lactating for any reason so it is pretty low risk all told.

It’s hard to deal with other’s androphobia but realizing that it’s founded so often in personal experience is kind of the big step a lot of cis guys need. It’s not about making folk feel guilty it’s people stating that these things are problems and brainstorming ways to make things better so in the future there is less fear.

Cis Men are INTEGRAL to this process. So often the reasons things are the way they are isn’t anyone’s individual fault. If your workplace is all guys chances are folk just hired people they knew they would be comfortable around. That’s totally understandable! But If nobody takes the minute to realize that if everybody stays in their comfort zone then society doesn’t change.

A lot of the work of the feminist movement is a shifting target of a multitude of different spaces. Like black feminism and trans feminism had to fission off because certain aspects of privilege were keeping certain voices buried. Where a lot of the discussion is these days is where feminism failed men and they need men’s voices to discuss things in earnest while being understanding and accepting of the trauma that exists in those spaces.

Honestly I can see it. Working in male dominated workplaces for so long (I am trans but they didn’t know that) taking any kind of physical or procedural shortcut, or ask for help even if it was common practice would cause my coworkers to assume that I couldn’t do it things the regular way or make them treat me as less competent even if I had done it alone or the more physically demanding way where they could see at some point in the past.

The general assumption of guys is that women are less capable and they don’t change their minds easily. There’s a big difference between regular competence and the sort of self protective over performance of competence which is nessisary to get a lot of cis guys to actually realize their assumptions are bullshit and to stop treating women like they are precocious children.

Usually doing one big thing that shatters their preconceptions does the trick. I once, in frustration at being treated like a china doll demonstrated I could lift a 200 lbs coworker and walk the length of the warehouse with him on my back. But doing that only creates me as an “exception to the rule” and they will resume that behaviour with all of my female coworkers.

If you aren’t given a chance to prove yourself capable in one big flashy way that gets the guys to shut up it can cause all manner of disordered overwork practice as you have to constantly perform for an audience of the disbelieving in small ways and hope they figure it out that they are being assholes.

You see but here’s where how you’re putting this works together with other things. You are looking at trans people on the whole as a safety issue to the population at large. The framing of trans people on the right always places us as a problem l. That is an outright dehumanizing tactic and the answer is always left kind of purposefully vague because the answer is “we aren’t supposed to exist.”

The outcome of all this discussion is basically to raise the hurdles of being trans in a pubic space. To be frank, they know that basically making life miserable enough for us will solve their “problems” because when life gets too hard and devoid of joy and relief death becomes viable.

So they frame us as a public safety problem, a categorical problem, a mental health problem, a medical problem, a “ruining your fun” problem, a freedom of speech problem because they know every time they do so that you will think of us as a group a little less in terms of being people and a little more as a sacrifice that deserves what we get.

It doesn’t matter that prisons don’t change their design to fit us because as long as we’re the ones getting raped the system is fine.

It doesn’t matter that public toilets don’t change their design to make everyone safer as long as we never go out in public long enough to use one.

It doesn’t matter that basically it only takes six months to dial in what your dosage of hrt and from then on it’s just a prescription like every other you pick up monthly for any other medical condition . As long as we’re interpreted by the system as an ‘undue medical burden’ we can basically just allow stress to ruin our bodies so we die faster and voters can feel like they’ve saved resources.

It doesn’t matter that we have kids of our own because us “not being safe to be around children” means that we are banished from parental and teaching spaces and the child protection services can be empowered to take our children away to raise them “safely” .

The arguements that never frame systemic solutions that include trans people are paving the way for our genocide. They are designed to get you to stop thinking right before you ever consider us worthy of accomodation. You are supposed to look at us as taking YOUR resources away, making YOUR spaces less safe, ruining YOUR culture so that you feel unsafe and attacked even when those things aren’t actually happening. This effect is called creating a “Moral exclusion” and it is the first steps to creating outcast sections of society who you are not supposed to question where they SHOULD exist because you are primed to only think about them as in terms of where they should NOT exist.

There is good reason why we do not soothe your fears about evil creepy cis men in women’s bathrooms. Because it’s bad faith rhetoric designed to give us no recourse to argue that we should have as much a right to be safe. The fact is the numbers are in. In the ten plus years in my city where trans inclusion is the norm there has been no uptick in stalking incidents regarding bathroom use. Just because you are being engineered to feel less safe by politicians doesn’t mean you actually are less safe but you are making US less safe. But that’s not a problem because you aren’t supposed to value our safety or comfort even a little. Your not caring is useful to specific people so they are going to keep training you to do that and to never ask where the trans people went. Because unless you have the misfortune of being one of us or loving one of us enough to care we are just a problem.