True, but also annoying bc gender was a perfectly good word for that. Imho we conceded too much by allowing "gender vs sex" to be seen as a dichotomy, rather than the former just being a more sophisticated understanding of the latter, kind of like heliocentrism is a better framework than geocentrism

A peculiar look into the algorithm: an American nutjob who apparently gets recommended every single video with "gun" in the title.

Some of my closest friends are American, so I like to think of myself as someone who is able not to be dismissive of their hopes and fears, but the elephant in the room here is how wrong it feels to see Brazilian history treated as a cautionary tale. 1/

A somewhat known private provider of HRT refers to "gender identity" vs "sex assigned at birth", and it drives me nuts. For the record, I quite like the idea that sex is assigned (and not, as GCs would say, "observed") - it's simply false that sex is a base, pre-social category. (1/3)

For a work thing, I find myself recruited against my will to help with a gender identity glossary/guide, and it's gruesome. I have nothing against all the demiboys and girls on Tumblr! You do your thing! But we don't need a SEO-manager-requested article about how to talk to your demigirl coworker.

I'd been meaning to post my favourite live moments of 2025. You can find the full concert audio at the Internet Archive, but these are the songs I keep coming back to: #1 Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band - New Threats from the Soul archive.org/details/ryan...

Relatedly, the most asinine thing of all is how transphobes call themselves "gender critical" when they really are gender conservatives. There's little more critical of gender than putting your money where your mouth is and being transgender.

the (trans)feminized, penetrable "boy," is a classical acceptable object of HETEROsexual desire within this regime. nothing new there. what they're policing when they say it's gay to love your wife is that it's "effeminate and ridiculous" to treat your sexual property (women, children) as equals

They keep saying Linux is now very simple to use, and that might be true if you just want to browse the Internet, but I haven't done as much computering since DOS days, and I don't even mean all the terminal fiddling, just how you need some sort of trick for every little thing you need your PC to do

This, and I feel like I can't stop bringing this up because it truly makes life worse.

The thing about LLMs and games is that in a different political environment you COULD make use of them in creative, essentially non-generative ways. E.g. text adventures from the 70s were so frustrating not because we wanted them to go off-script, but because they couldn't parse your input very well

They don't even bother making sense anymore. If age verification keeps children safe (dodgy claim in the first place, but let's run with it), then it does so by stopping children from getting verified. Adults refusing to undergo verification don't harm anyone because THEY WOULD HAVE PASSED ANYWAY.

Niche pet peeve: people shooting music videos during the day - or even more "professional" footage like sideline cameras at a football match - using a really low aperture for bokeh, and then lowering the exposure to compensate instead of a ND filter. It looks so awfully choppy, do they not notice

In my late teens/early twenties, while getting some education in philosophy of science and p. of mind, I was really interested in the question of what a mind is in the first place - and for a variety of reasons, a physicalist perspective was what made the most sense to me, despite it appearing to..

Slightly diminish a band Neutral Milk Motel

Is it just me or has the Internet Archive been "down" for a couple of days in the UK? I thought it was just down, but it's fine on a VPN.

google is straight up fucking evil for putting the "ai mode" tab at the leftmost position so my faulty muscle memory will accidentally click on it

Genuine question: when/if the EHRC guidance comes into effect, what do we do other than try to get the guidance revoked? I mean, in the immediate aftermath, do we pressure organisations to turn all segregated toilets into gender neutral ones?

If they have no thoughts or intuitions on a subject at all, what makes them think they should be tackling it in the first place? The "AI for brainstorming" types ("I wrote it, I just used it to come up with an idea/direction!") really weird me out for giving up on what makes them human.

In my forever Minecraft server (which I started pre-Caves & Cliffs), I've just left everything I had in my main base and started a "new" game somewhere far off the map. It's just dawned on me that I've never run a mining operation with the new terrain generation. All the iron is gone lol

I got to talk to Ross on my Stream a while back about the Stop Killing Games initiative, and it's a shame the traction has stopped, so even if I'm a relatively tiny streamer, let's see if we can't give this another push? If you're in an EU citizen, it'll take 2 mins: www.stopkillinggames.com/eci

A few years ago I often looked up Unity tutorials, so PirateSoftware started coming up in my recommendations a lot, and I thought it struck me how his persona was so meticulously crafted. Long hair and a smooth face, paired with a really deep voice to subtly stave off any queer allegations, ...

Not usually a fan of remasters, and I'm happy to play the originals and enjoy what they were trying to do with the limitations of the medium, but Oblivion might just be an exception because I could never get over that awful bloom.

This petition is well intentioned but I'm done with gender recognition we need abolition now. No more legal sex. The only reforms we should accept should be steps towards dismantling the violence embedded in sex segregation.

US fascism is all the more depressing when you know Labour are doing every single thing they need to do to ensure that's us in a few years time, deliberately and eagerly.

Google used to be so good as a quick corpus search when you were working on a translation - I would wonder if a translation of mine sounded natural enough, so I'd run a search and see if there was any actual RL usage. Now the results are littered with machine translations, absolutely useless.

When you hate trans people, you don't have to actually be a feminist to be a "feminist" in the newspapers. You just need to put some suffragette bunting on the most heinous far right shit imaginable and call for the eradication of trans rights in law.

“Why do you need to transition, we should simply abolish gender instead” is such unserious, disingenuous wordplay. We should abolish gender so you can transition. I'm not overly concerned about what transitioning means – HRT, different presentation, allegiance to unexpected groups and other roles...

Always on the lookout for couch co-op games, and I often get recommended It Takes Two, but I can't get over the mental hurdle of playing a married cishet couple — not just as an incidental bit of character building but as the main premise. For all I know it's a great game, but my body screams no lol

It's so funny how I have almost no social media presence, and zero interest in amassing a following (even if I did, I doubt I'd get one), but whenever I say anything on specific band subreddits or discord servers, there's always someone who goes, "Are you THE Rairun??" lol