ada

The airport “Marriott” in Santiago de Chile. That place was a hole, and a tiny one at that.

If it we weren’t Google, I’d be ok with paying too. As it is, the content creators will have to get by with their individual sponsorships, rather than getting ad revenue from me.

There is no tolerable amount of ads, because not only are they an awful experience, they explicitly drive user hostile growth and decisions in the future (ie enshitification).

I used to pay for YouTube to avoid ads, before I got sick of Google and refused to give them any more money. Now I use a pihole and a browser based adblocker, as well as 3rd party front ends, because fuck Google. I don’t give a shit if I’m denying them income.

It takes time. You’re undoing a lifetime of transphobia on the path to self acceptance. Even when you know who you are, the entrenched stuff takes time to undo. You’ll get there though.

That being said, I’ve got aphantasia, so no mental images of myself, past, present or future. It took me time to accept myself and feel comfortable with my labels, without a future self image to work towards. But, I got there.

It changed. Back when this all went down, instance bans did not automatically issue community bans. This was a problem in the case of spammers, because it would mean that if an admin banned a user with post removal turned on, their posts would only be removed locally, and the removals wouldn’t federate to other instances.

Around a year or so ago (maybe a bit earlier?) lemmy instance bans were changed to also issue community bans for any local community the account had interacted with. This meant that when an account was banned with content removal, those removals would federate to other instances for communities that were hosted on that instance.

There’s no one size fits all answer. Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

Women are around twice as likely to attempt suicide than men in western countries, but men are more likely to succeed by a large margin. It’s scary

Archaea and Everything Else (I can’t remember the other domain)

It’s entirely possible to host an instance that doesn’t require emails to sign up. Blahaj lemmy and piefed don’t for example. We don’t have a spam problem though, because we require manual approvals of new accounts. Lack of email verification is only a problem when it’s combined with open signup

I make an exception to that rule for the /c/superbowl. I love seeing a bunch of owls suddenly appear in my feed :)

We don’t have any stickied posts on lemmy at the moment, so there is nothing to sync, but as I understand it, they will sync fine

That being said, another thing you can do is turn on notifications for the community itself. That way, you’ll get a notification whenever someone makes a new post (not comment) to the community. You can do the same thing with individual posts too, and get notifications whenever someone replies to a post, even if you didn’t make the original post!

because studies range from showing HRT helps a little to not at all at preventing suicide.

No they don’t. There are a couple of studies that are deliberately misrepresented by transphobes to imply this, and they often get passed around as fact, by people who aren’t familiar with the studies in question.

Firstly, there was this Finnish one https://mentalhealth.bmj.com/content/27/1/e300940

You can see more about the hatchet job that the New York Post did on that one here https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/56772/does-gender-transitioning-do-nothing-to-help-suicidal-ideation

Then there is this one https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3043071/. It’s older, and it is misrepresented to claim that the suicide rate of trans folk doesn’t change after transition. The thing about that study is that doesn’t even assess the impact of transition. The entire cohort of trans people in the study were post transition, and questions were asked about their lifetime suicide attempts, without comparing before/after transition data. So because 41% of trans people in that study had made at least one suicide attempt at some point in their lives, the claim was made that transition doesn’t help, because “41% of post op trans people have attempted suicide”. The lead author of this particular study has spoken out several times on the misuse of the study by transphobes with an agenda, but to this day, it keeps happening…

So, let me give you the actual data…

https://whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-well-being-of-transgender-people/

This is a consolidation of the findings of research on trans health care, and the impact of transition on the well being of trans folk. To summarise, they looked at 55 studies on the impact of transition. 51 of those found transition to be beneficial, and 4 of them contained mixed findings.

You’ve stumbled on one of the tools that transphobes use. Deliberate misrepresentation of the facts, so that they can push for trans folk to be cut off from transition related healthcare, all whilst sounding reasonable, and sometimes even supportive. That, and trans people in sports, were the two main wedge tactics that they used to open the door to the wave of transphobia now sweeping the world.

Lets just say I don’t agree. I find paper so frustrating. I lose it, or I can’t decipher what I’ve written. I forget it on some sessions… It’s an ADHD disaster. But with a laptop, even if I forget it, I can still use my phone to access the character.

I even use digital dice rollers when it’s not a PITA to share the results with the rest of the table.

Hey, you. You’re finally awake. You were trying to cross the border, right?

Why would it be banned?!

I honestly can’t remember the last time someone in one of my groups used pen and paper. Mostly (but not always) the dice have remained though!

I learned as a GM to set expectations.

“I don’t want to have to fight and force you in to making this game work, because even though I’m GMing, I’d like to enjoy myself too. You need to create a character that will want to stick around with the rest of the group. You don’t have to all get on, or have deep attachments, you just need a character that I won’t have to railroad”

That’s not common in Shadowrun… 30+ years playing and running that game, and I’ve never encountered it!

Exactly. I’m not running to chrome with it’s defanged ad blockers and Google stink.

Are they amazing, or are they superb?

People see the same ideas echoed over and over again, and eventually it shapes how they think. That’s why regular, everyday people, people who aren’t even political start parroting right-wing talking points. Even my kids and their friends are saying this stuff.

You are 100% correct on this part.

The problem is, arguing with them magnifies that effect, it doesn’t challenge it.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t push back. I don’t mean smile and agree, or just ignore them. Deplatforming works, protests work, proud visibility works, civil disobedience works. Responding negatively works. Making it so that there is a social cost to being a transphobe works.

But debating them isn’t any of those things. Debating them is engaging with them, and in the act of arguing with you, they actually solidify the beliefs they already hold, and this is especially true of heavily polarised issues. Here’s some research on it https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-023-01623-8 (PDF link), and an article that goes in to the topic a bit https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/why-is-it-that-even-proven-facts-cant-change-some-peoples-minds

As much as it feels right to argue with them, all you are doing is strengthening their already held beliefs when you do. It might feel like its helping, but it isn’t. You’ll read my response, and you’ll likely go “screw that, you’re wrong, I’m going to keep arguing”. And that’s the exact effect I’m talking about at play. Every time you argue with someone, they have that same internal reaction to your comments, no matter what you say, or how strongly you believe it.