Thanks for this comment, I hadn’t thought about it this way before. I had realised about how being gay is framed as a thing you do rather than a thing you are, because I have a friend who is an ex-benedictine monk, and they explained about how their vow of chastity meant they were basically “one of the good ones”. A large part of why they left was because their rhetoric was “everyone has sinful desires in them and turning away from those is an important challenge”, but the unspoken part was that his gayness made his desires extra bad, like there was just some innately bad thing in him.

And of course they would apply this same logic to gender. As you say, it makes more sense when you try to see it from their angle. I think that’s important to do if we hope to ever refute them

A few posts above this one, I saw a post about how German bridges are falling apart, so your comment has done me psychic damage. Man, things feel grim.

Finland is very good for people who hate smalltalk.

I love stories like this because it makes me reflect on random people I’ve seen who have stuck in my memory for years who probably never noticed me. Makes me wonder if anyone remembers me for something random like this

They were never going to let this man be Prime Minister

“vendored my library”

I’m unfamiliar with this phrase, are you able to explain what it means (or point me towards an explanation)? Is it relating to forking?

The message is “we are heading towards complete climate collapse and The Powers That Be are acting like things are fine”.

I wonder what would facilitate people to make their own solutions in this way. Like, I have made a few apps or automation things myself, but if I look at my “normie” friends who don’t have the level of tech familiarity that I do, they struggle with whatever out of the box solutions they can find. Poor IT education is a big part of this, and I’ve been wondering a lot about what would need to change for the average “normie” to be empowered to tinker

Comments like this remind me of how I felt, as a Brit, to learn about Irish history, way after I left school.

That there is no silver bullet, no quick fix, no “Eureka” moments that happen without work. “Progress” is less an exciting event, more a rhythm made by the repeated struggling against entropy; when you’re doing it well, you’ll come to hardly notice its beat until one day you look around and everything’s different.

You’d think that recognising this progress might be motivating, but it’s often demoralising because it demonstrates how unglamorous the work of self-improvement is. You hardly get time to enjoy your achievements, because as you grow, you become aware of how much more there is to do; the burdens on one’s time and energy tend to expand as our personal capacities do, so even if one makes incredible progress it can feel like you haven’t moved at all — in both your “before” and “after” snapshots, it can feel like you’re still barely staying afloat in life, even if objectively, you have massively improved your coping skills.

And the worst part of it all is knowing that it’s okay to be feeling like this. You’re tired because it’s a lot of work, and you’re demoralised because the work doesn’t end. You’re not the only one who has the stake in your life and your wellbeing, and as you grow, this will be underscored by a greater sense of duty towards the systems and people that depend on you; When I was young and very depressed, I stayed alive for my family and I resented the fact that they cared about me because it bound me to life. (Un)fortunately(?), over the years, my attempts to stick around to avoid hurting the people I care about has led to a bunch more people being invested in my wellbeing and I ended up loving those people too. How privileged I am to have such wonderful people in my life, who give me hope for the world and embolden me to keep fighting. And yet, I resent these people too. I have to allow myself that, at least a little bit, otherwise I’d collapse under the pressure of a duty to a world so much larger than I am. The worst part of it all is that I wouldn’t have it any other way.

So here I am, still plodding along, despite everything, hoping to make my existence a tiny little monument to resistance, as I stubbornly push back against all-consuming entropic decay. I know that in the grand scheme of things, nothing I, as an individual, does will matter, nor will it last, but I don’t care. Well, I do care — the enormity of it threatens to swallow me whole — but I don’t care that I care, because what difference does it make? The hardest lesson I’ve learned is that everyone feels this way, to an extent, and I’m nothing special. In that truth is terror, but also the comfort of solidarity. I may be scared and exhausted, but I know I’m not alone in this. For better or for worse, my life isn’t just for me.

I tried to think of a witty response to your funny joke but I’m apparently too tired for that, so instead, I’ll wish you good luck for next week, and the weeks that follow it; getting a diagnosis as an adult is often cathartic in the short term, liberatory in the long term, and in between those points is a long period of introspective untangling a web of messy feelings and possibly internalised ableism. I wish you the strength to endure and to emerge with a better understanding of who you are, regardless of the outcome of the assessment.

I think the “Moved from Jekyll to Hugo” dot has an implicit catchment area around it, which includes people who don’t technically fit that description, but they’re close. I’ve used neither Jekyll nor Hugo, but the fact I understood that archetype meant I felt pulled in by the gravity of that point.

I hadn’t thought about it from that angle, thanks for sharing your perspective, it’s really interesting

A tension that I find very interesting is how YouTube creators with a decent but not huge subscriber base (I’ve mainly seen it in video essayists, but that’s just what I watch more of) grapple with the sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit dichotomy of “content” vs “art”, where “content” is what the algorithm wants and what will pay their bills, and “art” is the weird stuff they actually want to make.

It’s nowhere near a full replacement to Spotify, but something that eased my switchover was Listenbrainz for open source music recommendations. It’s not as good as Spotify’s Discover Weekly playlists (yet!), but the greater transparency is worth it imo. I have the app from fdroid and it tracks what songs I’m listening to (especially useful if you connect it to a streaming app) and gives recommendations based on that.

One of my favourite biochemistry tutors at university was also a reverend. We never spoke about the overlap but I’ve read his books since graduating and it’s interesting to see how his faith augments his science and vice versa.

I’m familiar with edging, but I’m not sure I see the joke. That might be because “edge” feels somewhat semantically separate to “edging” in my mind. As a clearer example of what I mean, if the word “edgy” came up, I would be way more likely to think of it as describing someone or something that tries too hard to be dark and provocative. I’d be very confused if someone used “edgy” as an adjectivified form of “edging”.

Besides that though, I’m sure that edging was a thing 15 years ago; the Wikipedia article for “edging(sexual practice)” dates back to 2006, for one. Part of why I didn’t get the joke is because I can’t think of any logical link between edging and 15 years ago, so I think I concluded that the meme wasn’t about the sex thing.

Is there still something I’m missing, or am I just being supremely autistic about this?

I was wondering where the weird w-like symbol formed by the brownie pan means something.

I don’t understand this joke, is anyone willing to explain it for me?

I think I mostly just wanted to be in the "so rich I never have to think about money again. Growing up super poor left its marks on me and now even though I am relatively secure and comfortable, I still have a background anxiety about whether I’ll have enough.

There’s an instinct within me that screams that I shouldn’t share resources with other people unless I’m sure I have more than enough for myself. If I indulged that instinct, that would mean that in a situation where there’s enough for everyone, I’d feel most comfortable with 3 or more shares, because then even if I gave away one of my shares to someone else, I’d still have what I need, plus some buffer. There’s a reason I work very hard to not indulge that instinct though, because I don’t want to hoard at the expense of other people like me.

Like I say, it’s just part of a wish of not having to think about money at all. I had some very rich friends in uni, and sometimes they’d shop in places where the clothes didn’t have price tags, the kinds of places where if you had to ask, you couldn’t afford it. I envied the fact that they didn’t have to think about money more than I did the material luxuries they could afford