None of us are free until all of us are free. I have faith that this fight is winnable because I used to be the kind of cis person who wanted to consider herself a trans ally, but who didn’t really know what that meant. In hindsight, I was too concerned with avoiding saying or doing the wrong thing, feeling like I was walking on eggshells around the topic of transness I don’t mean in a virtue signalling kind of way, but because I didn’t want to cause any harm, whether to an individual, or to trans activism in general — it wasn’t my cause, so I believed that the best thing to do was to be respectful and stay back. There are many cis people who aren’t necessarily disgusted, but confused and anxious about how to react (people on the left do this kind of transphobia a lot, in my opinion).

It took a partner coming out as trans to kick me out of that. I learned a lot about trans reality very fast, including how foolish my previous approach had been. It was admirable, in a way, to be so keen to help but not knowing how. It was also cowardly and ignorant. Ultimately though, I’m glad for this experience because it has shown me not just that it’s possible to change, but also that this change was super beneficial to me too. Being in community with trans people has made me more comfortable and happy in my own assigned gender — turns out that gender euphoria isn’t just relief from gender dysphoria, and that cis people can experience gender euphoria too. That journey has also helped me to unpick a bunch of my internalised misogyny — solidarity is one hell of a drug.

Trans people are a much smaller demographic, it’s true. However, when I reflect on how it felt to change my understanding on this topic, and how impactful it was on me, it makes me feel like progress is surely inevitable, because of how much this felt like puzzle pieces sliding together as a definite step to discovering Truth has been found. This is absolutely my fight, and whilst it’s not easy to cause someone to have the self growth journey that I did, the prospect of exponential growth increasing our fighting numbers gives me faith. Iirc, a similar thing happened with gay rights — as more people came out, then more people became aware that they had a gay neighbour, or colleague, or sister, or uncle. Whilst unfortunately there were some who became estranged from their loved ones due to this, there were others whose families became advocates for gay rights. The town I used to live, at one timr believed itself to have no gay people living there. Then one guy came out. Then a few years later, we’re up to 5. Then a few years later, it’s at 50.

The small number of trans people will mean it will take longer to get this fire to roaring temperature, but I actually do feel confident that we’ll get there. Perhaps it’s because I think we will make progress on trans rights because that’s literally what’s necessary for the world — climate change and patriarchy and classism and so many other things latch together so intricately that I don’t think we can meaningfully extricate any one piece enough, so we will have to reckon with the fact that none of us are free unless all of us are free.

I think some of the people who are freaking out are scared because it feels like we’re regressing. Things definitely are better now than they were, but what if we continue on this trajectory and things get back to being that bad? I am too young to have been alive in the era you’re describing, but what gets to me is that I can remember that there was a feeling of progress when I was a teenager. Any given step forward didn’t solve homophobia by itself, but it didn’t need to when there were many small steps being made. Now it feels like we’re taking strides back.

I remember I’ve had problems finding android auto settings before. I thought I might be able to help, but (On a Ulefone running mostly stock android).

I think the other person who replied to you has a good suggestion though. For me, I can find it at “Settings” -> “Apps” -> “All apps” -> Android Auto -> “additional settings in the app”

They sure don’t make it easy

This says it well. I also like how the character’s fucked up backstory is inescapably linked to the fucked up backstory of the world he lives in. It it were just that he was a fuck-up, then it wouldn’t be as compelling. What I really love is that whilst he certainly is the victim of his own choices, it’s much more the case that he’s a victim of his material circumstances (rather like how I am currently still in bed due to a combination of poor choices, and material circumstances making consistent good choices very hard)

I enjoyed it because many RPGs are a power fantasy, where you’re an epic hero who saves the world. Some of them present you with a blank slate character you can shape however you wish, and whilst that can be fun, I find I have more fun when I’m playing a character with some history.

In Disco Elysium, you’re playing as someone whose history is fucked up, so good choices often aren’t an option. He’s not a typical hero, and he’ll be lucky if he can save himself, let alone the world — the world is even more fucked up than he is, riddled with scars from a long dead, hopeful era. Even though at the start of the game, both the player and your character have no knowledge of history, you can’t escape it.

A huge part of why I like it is because I can see what it’s going for, and I’m here for that. Even if I didn’t personally click with it, I think I would respect it for having things to say and committing to it. What’s an RPG that you have clicked with or loved what it was going for? If you’re not into Disco Elysium, then I suspect that your answer might be a game that would pull me out of my comfort zone in interesting ways.

“dialog choices appear to have been written by or for people with traumatic brain injury.”

I think this is a pretty harsh statement, but it did make me laugh, because part of why I vibed with Disco Elysium so much is because a couple years before, I actually bumped my head that I lost my memory and couldn’t even remember who I was.

I will always back you up bratan! You and I are bratannoi – brothers. Brothers fight. But when they’re done fighting, you know what they do? They party. They fucking party!

That was a delightful video; thanks for sharing

In many ways, we’re already at that point. Crises often don’t come out of nowhere, and if we think of crisis as a sliding scale rather than a binary, I would argue we’re already in a time of crisis, and have been for a while.

That’s why I agree with you. I am often miserable and demoralised, and I often feel suicidal because of my personal hopelessness. The goodness you describe is a huge part of why I’m still here. It gives me a wider sense of hope, because many of the best people I know are just as aware of the harms caused by the unchecked power of assholes, but the worse that the world gets, the more steadfastly good they are. Most of them are as depressed as me, but they seem to draw strength from the defiance of giving a fuck about morality in a world on fire.

It invokes a sense of duty in me that helps bolster my own resilience. When I was a suicidal teen, I felt like I was staying alive solely for other people, and this wasn’t a productive or healthy way to live. This sense of duty feels different, because it’s not framed as if I am a living martyr, sacrificing my own happiness for other people. Instead, it’s grounded in the recognition that we’re all struggling, and I actively want to stand alongside the defiant good people. Given the shakiness of my resolve, I don’t feel like I have much concrete to add to their efforts, but perhaps I can show them that even when it feels like you’re losing the big fight, the very act of resistance can galvanise the hearts of people who had already given up. After all, I’m still here.

I don’t know what the fuss is about. It’d be a different matter if the person who had drawn the swastika had voted for the AFD candidate. However, clearly this was done in a disparaging manner

Gotta write that shit down for it to count.

Thanks for this, I appreciate it

Despite not owning one, I really like the Steam Deck because I suspect it has made my transition to Linux far smoother (for a while, I dual booted because I was fearful that gaming on Linux would be difficult.)

That was wonderful, thank you for sharing. When it’s done well, I really enjoy this style of prose.

Many people are being forced to use it though — this is where much of the ire is coming from. These people are likely in the minority though. Something that’s much more concerning though is the use of AI that affects us, but we don’t get a say: doctors being made to use generative AI transcription tools (which perform worse than established audio transcription software that doesn’t use AI). The people pushing doctors to use AI are doing it to wring more productivity out of them — more patients in less time. This means that even if a patient doesn’t end up with AI hallucinations in their medical records, their experience seeing their doctor will likely be worse.

Cases like this are becoming less niche as time progresses, despite mounting research showing the harms of these technologies when they’re applied in this way. Increasingly we are being put into situations where AI tools aren’t something to be used by us (which is something you can often opt out of), but things to be used on us. We don’t find out until something goes wrong, and when it does, regular people can struggle to challenge the situation (the example coming to mind here is false positives in facial recognition systems being used by the police. It is leading to more innocent people being wrongfully arrested)

I have a favourite rock

Although I recall that some of them don’t include links to explanations or info about the falsehoods; I like that this aviation one did do that.

Thank you for the learning! Before this thread, I didn’t know enough about altitude to care about this question, but now I’m like “neat! Cool learning!”.

“Guard labour” is a fairly new-to-me phrase that makes a lot of weird things about modern society making more sense.

You’re right that I didn’t sufficiently consider the “was” in that sentence. Perhaps there’s something I’m missing though, because I haven’t seen anything that would suggest X is left. When I put my right hand in the position indicated in the OP, my index finger (Y) points upwards, with my thumb (X) pointing right, making an L shape. My middle finger (z) comes out towards me.

However, most of my experience with coordinate systems is with abstract, mathsy stuff, and I don’t have much experience with any of these softwares; there may be something obvious that I’m missing.

I don’t think that’s correct. Here’s a drawing I did when trying to get my head around this.

drawing

I find that trying to make sense of terms like “to the left” tricky when we can rotate the directional cube any way we want. For example, in my drawing for “Y-up, left handed”, the red X axis is pointed leftwards. However, we could rotate the unit vector cube so that the X axis is pointed right, and the Y axis is pointing up (i.e. the orientation we’re most familiar with for 2D graphs). The Z axis would then be pointing away from us, into the plane of the paper/screen.

In contrast, if we oriented the Y-up right-handed cube in the same way, then the Z axis would be oriented as if to come out of the plane of the screen/page, towards us.

These distinctions only matter when we add a third dimension, so the left or right handedness is basically a question of "when we add the third axis to a 2D square made by the other two axes, does the third axis come towards us or away from us? I apologise if this hasn’t made things any clearer — I am able to make things make sense by imagining the rotations in my head, but not everyone is able to visualise them like that.