Orion Scribner @frameacloud@dragon.style

@zebratron2084

I don't think either of those things are bad. Men who sincerely commit to taking care of their families instead of being a deadbeat are great because they meet the low bar of decency that few men meet. I just notice that men whose Twitter bio says "husband and father" have a strong correlation with men who tweet that they only realized that women are people after they had a wife and daughter.

I feel kind of wary about guys with social media profiles that mostly just consist of the phrase "husband and father," because maybe they're really into the Nietzscheans in "Andromeda".

The most interesting thing about learning to use a spinning wheel is that noticing that all historical or fantasy movies that have spinning wheels in them show the wheel being used in all sorts of bizarro wrong ways around, even backwards. In a lot of movies, they decided the yarn must come out of the drive band. They don't even know what it *looks* like to use a wheel.

Nobody's used wheels for so many generations that even historical reenactment experts for movies never seem to have a clue where to start with them. Spinning wheel enthusiasts had to figure out the process from scratch in the 1960s, because it hadn't been passed down. It's always a little spooky to see old skills get culturally lost.

Like knapping. I wonder why poor people in rural parts of Europe didn't keep knapping stone knives-- just to be cheap-- after metal-working became common. Shouldn't it have kept on being useful to improvise one to fix a meal, or when you can't be bothered to go into town and buy an expensive bronze one from the smith? Instead, knapping became such a forgotten skill that people didn't even recognize stone arrowheads they found in fields as having been made by human hands. Folk thought those arrowheads came from lightning or elves.

@monsterblue

Here's my favorite documentary about the history of perspective drawing. It explains a lot about how it works, why it matters, and why it's a hassle to figure out how to do.

https://youtu.be/Ny3vYIh1a5Q

Learning to do perspective drawing is one of the weirder skills you can learn, because essentially you're installing 3D rendering software in your head.

Or, even worse, reverse-engineering the 3D rendering software that came factory-installed in your head. And then getting it to let you do some things that it was not meant to do.

Perspective drawing is all about learning to consciously notice a lot of things that you weren't made to notice things about the unconscious process involved in how seeing works.

In global art history, it's relatively rare for people to invent perspective drawing. It gets lost and rediscovered a lot. Even then, it takes a while for people to invent different types of it. It's not all intuitive, and there can be some fairly complicated geometry involved. Actual 3D rendering software is based on it. We wouldn't have that software if people hadn't spent centuries working out the best methods for it on paper.

Sometimes painters who would go to rural areas to paint landscapes would end up getting chased away by locals who saw the paintings and thought it was witchcraft for stealing the hills.

Imagine being such a prankster that you're remembered a century later *as* a prankster.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_de_Vere_Cole

D&D tip: "Every social encounter is better if one or more of the human NPCs in the scene actually is a dragon in disguise. [...] The DM does not need to know which NPC is a dragon until it is revealed later."

https://oldschoolfrp.tumblr.com/post/635232834668380160/dungeons-and

@OldRedSun

Oh, that was a bit of a chemistry experiment!

@corv

Oh goodness! That's almost like breakfast cereal with milk. As long as it's still edible, it's not too bad of a cooking goof.

I feel like learning from some mistakes. What are the most amazing cooking mistakes that you have made or encountered?

It's a healthy and functional hand, it looks fine, other people use that hand, so why does it bother you the whole time you try to use it?

When you switch back to using your dominant hand, you feel a sense of relief. It feels comfortable, right, intuitive, and natural to you. Even if you've spent so many years using your off-hand to write that you're pretty good at it, it still feels better to switch to your dominant hand. You can think more clearly when you write with your dominant hand, because you're not having to expend conscious effort on fighting your intuition.

The feeling you get when you switch back to your dominant hand is almost exactly what relief from dysphoria feels like.

This isn't a perfect metaphor. Two main caveats:
1) Innate handedness doesn't change, but people can adapt to using their off-hand enough that it bothers them less over the years, whereas dysphoria tends to get worse over the years. You notice it more as you grow up and go through life-stages.
2) Things simply feel easier when you switch to your dominant hand, whereas in some ways transitioning feels like things are harder. Transition is a learning curve that society has made unsafe to explore. It's still a huge relief anyway, and it feels easier and more intuitive in other ways, so we feel it's worth pursuing.

"Darby the Dragon" is a point-and-click adventure game from 1996. The "King's Quest"-like gameplay is meant to be very easy, and it's for early readers. The art, stories, and music are surprisingly excellent, and cute as can be. Here's a link where you can play it in browser via an emulator.

https://classicreload.com/win3x-darby-the-dragon.html

I've never actually *needed* to know the difference between a stalactite and a stalagmite, so far.

@kistaro

That's a very good point!

What if there was something like Etsy, but instead of being a centralized site, it was more like a webring or a federated service for finding the exact indie sellers/products/services you want?

@salameleon

It's a good question without a great answer. English doesn't have a widely-known neutral equivalent of ma'am or sir. It's a lexical gap. Ma'am and sir are honorifics, whereas Ms and Mr are titles. Mx has been emerging in popularity as a gender neutral or nonbinary title, but no neutral honorific has come up.

Not counting honorifics and titles that refer to specific roles, jobs, and qualifications, like Captain or Doctor. If you know who you're talking to, you can call them by their job title instead of an honorific.

Supposedly "sir" is coming to be a neutral honorific (and I mean in real life, not in sci-fi), but that's not totally widely accepted. Neutral language that uses masculine as default doesn't feel very neutral to most people, and can result in equivocation.

Sir and ma'am are derived from words meaning father and mother. Maybe there's a very, very neutral word for parent ("parent" itself is masculine-as-neutral, being derived from the word for father) that could be used as the root for a new honorific. Or maybe other family terms could be used, instead of parents.

Some other possible honorifics or terms of address that are more informal: friend, buddy, cousin, sibling, coworker, comrade...

This gov document (about when they were adding X) seems to suggest that WA might not have a blank option: https://www.dol.wa.gov/about/docs/driver-rules/308-104-x-ces.pdf

TransEquality.org doesn't mention a blank option: https://transequality.org/documents/state/washington

I don't see anything in this WA DOL page mentioning a blank option, and the gender change request form doesn't have a box for requesting a blank: https://www.dol.wa.gov/driverslicense/genderchange.html

However, each link has contact info where you could ask about if it's a thing.

Do any of you have information about how to get the gender marker on driver's licenses or other government ID left blank in the state of Washington?

I've only seen the official sources for WA talk about M, F, or X, but some states like Massachusetts offer the option to leave it blank. That means you still have a legal sex marker in the system, but it's just not shown on the card. Possibly you don't even have to be trans or intersex to leave it blank. Does WA offer a blank option, too?

When someone says things like "I want to transition, but I'm too old, so I won't," it's sort of like saying "I won't brush my teeth, because I've already gotten some fillings."

That's the kind of perfectionism that tells you to accept defeat before you even start. If you've had some body changes that you don't like, that doesn't mean it's time to give up on taking care of your body. You can start taking care of yourself and taking control of your health any time. It may not be as close to your ideal as if you'd started earlier, but it'll be better than if you had continued not taking care of it.

The best time to plant a tree is thirty years ago. The second best time is today.