Nice, I love a good battle jacket

A few years ago, I read about how Mary Molony was an Irish Suffragette who disrupted a speech Winston Churchill was giving in Dundee by ringing a bell every time he tried to speak. She wanted him to apologise for remarks he had made about the women’s suffrage movement.

I remember when I read this, it reeked of something awesome that you find online that’s actually false (the story was shared on social media via a captioned photo with no sources), so I went digging for a proper source to check. I found some newspaper articles from 1908 and I learned that this event did happen, but also that people fucking hated Molony for this. There was a lot of “see, this is why everyone hates the Suffragettes”. (Sorry for saying this and then not sourcing)

It makes sense that people would be salty - Churchill was an asshole, but also a great orator, so I can see why one might be disappointed in missing the chance to see him speak, but I was shocked at the level of vitriol aimed at Molony and other Suffragettes from the time. Until this I hadn’t realised just how unpopular they were at the time. It’s drastically changed my perspective on protests and public perception.

I think you’ve excellently captured the difference here. I didn’t get heavily into Elite Dangerous, but on one of my longest journeys, I scanned a few things that no-one had ever scanned before. I didn’t discover any awesome looking space phenomena that would be worth sharing (at least, none that hadn’t been discovered before), but the prospect that I could was exciting.

Even just the idea that my name would be on other people’s screens if they came and scanned the same things I did, because we were all sharing the same world.

Yay, learning!

I think “satanic” is being used in an adverbial sense, rather than as an adjective. By this, I mean that worship that is satanic in manner, which in this sense, means not Christian. By contrast, satanic (adj) worship would be something that actively involves worship of Satan or Satanism.

That being said, I’m probably thinking about this more than he did.

How many leftover working parts were there, or was it a perfect fit with no surplus?

That is the sweetest story, thanks for sharing

I don’t think you’re necessarily missing anything. Lower Decks is probably my favourite Star Trek series by a decent margin, but I think that people’s varying tastes is part of the Trek experience.

Like the first Star Trek I ever watched was TNG, with a partner who hated DS9 because of how far it was from the much more utopian tone of TNG. My best friend, however, loved DS9 most of all for that exact same reason. I can’t tolerate The Original Series because of how campy and cringe it is, but I have friends who love it for that.

If you hate Lower Decks, then your perspective is one I can’t really relate to, but that just feels like regular old Trekkie solidarity to me - with a show so varied, inevitably there’s going to be diverse viewpoints. That in mind, I’m not going to try and change mind, I’m just going to highlight why I love Lower Decks.

My favourite bit about Lower Decks is that it feels like a love letter to Trek, in all its forms. There’s a lot of references I don’t get, but I don’t need to get them to feel the warm fuzzies of knowing this show was made by people who are, first and foremost, fans of Star Trek. I like utopian sci fi because the state of the real world means that I can find real hope in the fantasy because in my heart, I believe in humanity.

Alongside all of that idealistic space exploration though, Lower Decks doesn’t shy away from the more pernicious aspects of Star Trek, and Starfleet/the Federation. The humour isn’t always my taste, but I think they use it well to poke fun at Star Trek, the show, but also the world within. The sometimes critical lens that is taken is part of why it feels so much like a love letter to Trek - if you truly love something, you’ve got to take the bad with the good and not pretend that everything is perfect.

In the past, with similar issues, I’ve had good success with requesting the book on Zlib, especially newer books.

“as asexuality to the manosphere is like Antarctica to a flat earther”

Damn, this quote is fire.

That’s a good quote. And by good, I mean helpful in understanding the cycle of assholery.

This is a great list for ableist terms . https://www.autistichoya.com/p/ableist-words-and-terms-to-avoid.html I’m disabled in multiple ways and there were a few on here that caused me to re-evaluate my lexicon.

A list has limited use because language evolves, and so do people, and on top of that, context is everything — but it can be a good place to start

I think I would probably be a jerk a few times, and it would escalate until I hurt someone unthinkingly, and seeing the results of that would shock me back to reality and I’d feel so uncomfortable with myself that I’d hopefully go back to being less of a jerk.

To be fair, in many cases, the observable behaviour of things is different at scale. A single water molecule has different properties to a cup of water, in much the same way that a high density crowd of people (greater than 4 people per square meter) starts to behave as a fluid.

I study biochemistry and I’ll never stop finding it neat how when you get down to the teensy tiny level, all the rules change. That’s basically what quantum physics is, a different ruleset which is always “true”, so to speak, but it’s only relevant when you’re at the nano scale

I suppose what I’m saying is that I agree with you, that fathoming scope is difficult, but I’m suggesting that this is a property of the world inherently getting being a bit fucky at different scales, rather than a problem with human perception.

Badly. I have an awful short term memory, so my priority when making notes is capturing fleeting thoughts I’d otherwise lose. This means I end up with snippets on random pieces of paper or a random note on whatever is the default app on my phone. Then, every so often, I have a big clear out where I aggregate and process all these fragments, usually when I am finding fragments everywhere.

I need to have an inbox of sorts, and make processing things from there a more routine activity. Alas.

My domain is more bioinformatics than GIS, but the way I imagined it was that if one was arguing that [thing] data is better, they’re arguing that if more people recognised the innate benefits of [thing], we wouldn’t have to rely on software that uses [other thing] so much, and that to properly utilise [thing], it would take a bit of radical reworking of workflows, but there would be significant long term net benefit.

Basically, I think arguments like this tend to be more grounded in the socio-cultural practices of a research field than the absolute technical merits of an approach. Like in my domain, a DNA sequence is just a long sequence of 4 different letters (A, T, G & C), but there’s a bunch of ways we can encode that data into a file, many of which have trade-offs (and some of which are just an artifact of how things used to be done)

Ea-Nasir has got to be one of my favourite internet phenomena

Explainer link for people who are blessed enough to be hearing of this for the first time: https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/who-is-ea-nasir-and-why-are-people-complaining-about-his-copper-the-viral-complaint-tablet-meme-explained

Because killing yourself would also hurt people, likely way more than your life ever could. I’ve struggled with something similar myself, and my conclusion was that if I truly felt bad for hurting people, the only moral answer is to try and do better and improve.

Often I would resent having people who cared about me, because it would be so much simpler if there were no-one who’d miss me, or be hurt by my death, but it’s too late for that because I have a bunch of wonderful people in my life who care about me, even if I don’t understand why. Sometimes I wish I’d never met them, because that would make things simpler.

A few times, I’ve had the idea that a compromise is to withdraw from these relationships and sort of wean them off of me. There’s a word that captures this approach, decathect: “to withdraw one’s feelings of attachment from (a person, idea, or object), as in anticipation of a future loss.” The logic of this approach was that if I can’t be a good person who deserves the love of the people I love, I could at least reduce their exposure to someone shitty like me.

It didn’t work out, because as I withdrew, living became more untenable and caused me to inadvertently hurt more people. It was the worst of all worlds - I wasn’t really living, but it was still hurting people similar to if I’d just died.

Quarantine doesn’t solve this and neither does suicide. Especially not suicide, which is often a selfish craving in situations like this. I don’t say that in a judgemental way, just straight up, suicide is the simpler option for people like us. It appears deceptively like justice, and there’s a nice closure to it. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to consider selfish options when you’re struggling with life, but it isn’t solace or closure or justice or any of those things we wish it was. If it were so simple, you’d probably be dead already.

It sucks, and I’m sorry, but there is nothing that can undo the harms of the past. Sometimes putting in the work to do and be better can lead to some healing, but also sometimes bridges get burned and you’re trying to be better for the sake of people you’ve yet to meet. If you do truly believe yourself deserving of something so drastic as suicide, then surely the better “punishment” is to continue living through and past the consequences of your actions. Redemption exists in the better world that you stand to be a part of building, by being one more person trying to be better.

Unfortunately, it is as simple as just “do better in the future”, which is frustrating, but makes sense to me - if suicide is a not simple, but easy solution to the problem of harms caused, then redeeming yourself through life is simple, but fucking difficult.

I don’t know if it’s worth it. Sometimes I find myself thinking “I should have killed myself two years ago, and this wouldn’t have happened” when I fuck something up, and then suicide now is tempting in a “the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second best time is now” kind of way, even though that’s twisting the analogy to hell. The world will not be made better by your absence - if you have any sense of duty to the world or your loved ones, then it’s necessary to live with the weight of your past mistakes and move past them. Dying just puts that burden with everyone else, condemns them to a life of wondering "what if I had done Xyz differently.

For what it’s worth (very little, I’m a random internet stranger who has no knowledge of you or your circumstances), I would rather be friends with someone who has hurt me, but knows they’re fucked up and making genuine, continuous attempts to improve than someone who is completely apathetic and hasn’t hurt me particularly, but by fluke only. I think that our actions matter much more than our (stated) intentions (especially in situations where there’s a pattern to behaviour - I have unfortunately lost a few friends in this way), but I do think the intention counts for something. The fact you feel bad about what you’ve done means something. The challenging bit is to prove it. It’s not easy, and it might not even be possible to do such high levels of self improvement, idk even in my own case. I do know that it’s always worthwhile to try.

If life were a game where you lose if your net impact on the world is negative, then it’s not game over yet. If you die, that’s it, you get taken by the score screen and you’d probably not be too happy with what you’d see there. And yeah, it’s possible that you could decide against suicide and live a long life and die of old age, and still lose the game, if the net impact comes out to be not great still, but as long as you’re alive to read or think about these words, there’s still hope of making it through and levelling up enough that you can rack up the positive impact points. Hurt and help don’t cancel out like points in a video game do, but it’s hard to not think of “net impact” when contemplating dying in this manner. This might not vibe with you, but for me, it was and still is insanely motivating to know that there is still a non-zero chance of me winning this game, and what’s more, the possibility of winning is exclusive to paths where I continue living (even if often, I would rather be dead), and trying to be better (even if often, it feels like it’d be better for others if I were dead). Suicide offers control, the ability to decide how you lose the game, but it will always be a loss.

Whatever your struggles or your circumstances, I wish you the strength to steer into calmer territory, and the wisdom to recognise change. It feels weird to give advice when this is very much something I still struggle with, but this is me trying to be better. I might not feel especially hopeful about my own journey, but I do believe what I’ve said here, that meaningful change is always possible

Not the person you were asking, but I can provide an answer. Pansexual generally means attraction to people regardless of gender - sort of gender blind. A bi person (like me) might find that the attraction they experience to different genders is shaped differently, qualitatively — or the magnitude of attraction may be different — like if you were a 1 on the Kinsey scale, which means “predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual”. Someone who’s pan is more likely to be a 3 on the Kinsey scale, but also, it’s possible to be bi and a 3, and that’s subtly different.

There aren’t set rules on this, it mostly comes down to what terms resonate with people. I’m someone to whom pansexual as a label could apply, but I identify as bisexual because that was the word that made me go “wait, this is a thing that’s possible?”. The terms people use are often rooted in history, personal or otherwise.

It’s trickier to explain the lexical niche when I myself am not pan. It’s like if you’re working on a project and have someone passing you tools, and you reach a step that needs a particular spanner, of which you have two. You ask for one of those spanners, but despite it fitting many of your requirements on paper, it isn’t quite right for what you’re trying to do. You try the other spanner and it’s perfect. Keeping both spanners is probably useful because on simple jobs, they are interchangeable, but when getting into nuanced, complex situations, having the choice is useful.

By this, I mean that I have also had the thought that “[Pansexual] seemed a meaningless term because bi already covers basically everything”, but when you’re talking to someone about different spanners and they say “that one isn’t the same as that one. I need the other one”, it’s generally wisest to assume that this person has some insight that you don’t have on these spanners, or their particular use cases — who am I to tell people what tools are most useful for them, after all? Like a lot of identity stuff, it’s hard to explain, but it matters a lot to some people.

God, I love the internet.