Damn, that’s grim.

Times when I or someone close to me have needed to hire artists, we’ve been able to find the right person for the job through professional networks. It’s sad to think that due to real artists struggling to find work, that many of these professional networks are liable to collapse, making it harder to find the remaining artists who are still working

I don’t understand what your issue is here. If it was a political post, then I’d agree that we should be cautious of a new account, but this is super innocuous. What reason is there to be suspicious of a new user in this context?

The joke is that a single egg is obviously not a meal, and as such, the person in the comic was reasonable to say “needs something more”. However, a single egg with a lone slice of cheese on top doesn’t much improve the situation.

The humour is in the anticlimax of the only addition being the slice of cheese, as well as the ambiguity of not knowing whether the person added the cheese because that’s all they had available, or because they genuinely felt that the cheese was the “more” that they had been hoping for. If it’s the latter case, then that recontextualises our original assessment of this person as being reasonable.

When I was sad and didn’t have much in the fridge, I cut a few slices of red Leicester and melted them in the microwave until it was just a gooey pile of cheese. Before eating it, I noticed the chives growing in a pot on my windowsill, and sprinkled a few chopped chives on top. I liked the absurdity of a garnishing such a basic “meal”.

Same energy as the meme

Is the video series you’re thinking of the Alt-Right Playbook, by Innuendo Studios? Because that was something that really helped me to understand how conservatives think — I hadn’t realised just how central “zero-sum thinking” is to their ideology

Glad you liked it. I always appreciate an opportunity to practice my science communication skills (I JUST WANT EVERYONE TO FIND THIS STUFF AS DEEPLY FASCINATING AS I DO. I AM EXTREMELY NORMAL.)

Yup. A friend of mine almost died last year from bladder complications that ultimately stem from being assaulted almost 20 years ago.

To an external observer, rape may not seem likely to leave lasting physical trauma, but that’s because the injuries aren’t as likely to be visible, or things that peopl feel comfortable speaking about openly (plus society has a bad track record on how it treats survivors of SA)

My point is that the whole psychological Vs physical trauma question is a false dichotomy when we’re talking about sexual assault. Rape can and often does leave a person with lifelong physical trauma

So until around 1902, it was near unanimously agreed that light was a wave, because it does all the stuff that waves do, like diffracting — we wouldn’t have rainbows, or the cool Pink Floyd album cover with a prism splitting light into a rainbow otherwise.

What changed in 1902 is that an experiment (called the photoelectric effect, if you’re curious) produced results that would have only been possible if light was a particle. The photoelectric effect had been observed a bunch of times through the 1800s, but in 1902, a variant of the experiment produced results that would be impossible to explain if light were a wave. So then people start asking “okay, maybe we were wrong, maybe light is actually a particle”. Except that didn’t square with the centuries of evidence showing that light was a wave.

It turns out that light is both a particle and as wave. Or maybe neither. Because the key concept here is that particles and waves don’t exist. They’re just conceptual categories that we made to put boxes around phenomena to make them more understandable, much the same way that binary gender is a simplifying framework that works until it doesn’t.

Now, this doesn’t mean that the underlying phenomena, like light being diffracted, or the photoelectric effect, aren’t real. The problem was in our framework of how we labelled them. Once physicists got their head around the possibility that light could be both a particle and a wave, they realised that there were a bunch of other situations where we could model light as a particle and discover interesting stuff. Most people don’t need to understand this, because the simplified model of everything being either a particle or a wave works well enough that even if it’s not correct, it’s still useful — these categories developed for a reason, after all. By analogy, it’s like if I said “women have breasts”. It’s true in most instances, so it can still be a useful observation, even if it’s not strictly accurate.

However, it gets even more interesting. At first, scientists thought that light must just be a special kind of phenomenon, able to exhibit both particle and wave characteristics. But then, in the double slit experiment, they found that under certain circumstances, electrons (which were near unanimously considered to be particles) could diffract — i.e. act like waves. This was the result that really drove home the notion that when we’re studying stuff that are super small and specific, our existing rules and categories sort of fall apart. It’s even been suggested that other things that we squarely consider to be particles could show wave nature too, but the larger you get in scale, the harder it is to observe quantum phenomena (which basically just means that our rules work well when they’re applied to the circumstances we developed those rules under. “Quantum phenomena” mostly just means “shit that happens when we’re so zoomed in that our existing frameworks stop working”)

In a sense, we could say that light behaving as a particle is analogous to a non binary man, and electrons behaving as a wave is analogous to a non binary woman. Maybe it would be more sensible to dispense with these categories entirely, but there are many phenomena and many people who find the terms useful.

Indeed, and I’m glad you highlighted these things. It’s something I have been trying to do, as well as increasing people’s awareness of these choices. It feels like it makes so little difference, but it’s not nothing.

“(assuming no HIV etc)”

That’s not a safe assumption though, and the dread of waiting to find out whether you’ve been infected with something awful is a part of why rape is so traumatising. It can take weeks for tests to come back.

“My 11-year-old, who is autistic, keeps talking about it,” Destiny told Kare11. “He was talking about it all night. I couldn’t sleep because I was scared.”

When I was a kid, someone threw a brick through my bedroom window as I was heading off to sleep. It scared me so much that I had trouble sleeping for literally years after that. I can’t imagine how much worse the trauma of this must’ve been.

God, my heart hurts to hear these stories. I’m not in the US, so all I can do is spectate with growing dread and horror.

I’ve been trying hard to not let myself become numb to this though, nor become too focussed on the big picture of thinking about US’s descent into fascism. I’m equally powerless on that scale of things as I am when witnessing stories like this, but I’ve found it’s better to keep my focus on the small stories. It hurts to hear them, but that hurt is one that is fundamentally good, because it is compassion for my fellow humans. In an odd way, the hurt feels grounding because it’s meant to hurt, because what is going on are crimes against humanity. I’d rather feel this than nothing because it reminds me of the humanity I share with the people who are being oppressed.

You’re right that car accidents happen pretty frequently, and carry a high risk of lasting harm to those involved. This is why people have to pass a test in order to be allowed to drive, are legally required to have insurance, why speed limits and other road safety features exist, and why one of the roles of the police is to monitor and respond to dangerous drivers. Despite all these measures, road traffic accidents happen all the time, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do these things to try to reduce the likelihood and severity of car accidents. None of these precautions are airtight, but they do reduce the risk that road users face. We don’t ignore the risks of car accidents, we just do what we can to mitigate those risks and get on with our lives as best we can.

That’s how things are for the majority of women. Most of us are far from petrified of unknown men, we have just learned that there are things we can do to reduce the risk of us being harassed or assaulted — many of which don’t take much additional effort and are entirely reasonable precautions to take. Having to do these things is just a background annoyance for most women, because it sure would be nice if we didn’t have to spend time or energy of these things, but most of us have enough lived experience with having to interact with predatory men that it would be irrational not to take precautions.

There certainly are some women who do feel a much higher level of fear, but this is often associated with specific trauma, and is no different to how someone who had been in a bad car accident may feel uneasy driving at first. Risk exists everywhere, and learning what precautions you can easily take to reduce risk, and incorporating them into our lives isn’t us being controlled by fear, but quite the opposite. It can become harmful if it dominates too much of our thinking, but dynamically responding to mitigate risks is something that we all do, every day, to keep ourselves safe and well.

A fun probability fact I like is around the question “what is the likelihood of consuming any given water molecule twice?”, so like, consuming that water molecule, then excreting it somehow (sweating, urine etc.), and then consuming that same molecule again. The probability of that happening for a given molecule is so ridiculously small that it’s basically zero.

However, the probability of that having happened at least once in an adult’s life is effectively 1, — i.e. it’s almost certainly happened. This is because one cup of water contains around 144,531,378,240,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of water, so we get a lot of chances to consume a water molecule twice.

The chances of being kidnapped or otherwise assaulted or harassed is quite low for any given interaction, but despite this, it’s something that a concerningly high proportion of women have experienced. I think for most women, it’s not a case of literally being terrified, but more than we take a wide variety of steps to reduce our risk, given that it is neither possible nor desirable to isolate oneself from every man who could possibly assault them. It’s no different to how people of all genders will often do things like taking a slighter longer, well lit route, or refraining from listening to music through headphones when walking through a city at night.

If I had a husband or partner who was available to go pick up something on my behalf, then that’s a straightforward and trivially easy thing I can do to reduce the amount of unnecessary risk I’d be exposing myself to. If that wasn’t something that was available, it wouldn’t necessarily mean I wouldn’t pick up the item myself, but I would be a bit more cautious.

The culture of fear you describe does feed into how individual women perceive and manage risk associated with unknown men, but it’s also important to realise that that culture of fear exists in large part because of the direct lived experience of women who have learned that these kinds of precautions are necessary. For my part, whilst I’ve never been assaulted when picking up items from online sales, I have had a few instances of men being extremely creepy in a way that made me regret not being more careful. I had to change my phone number once because an Uber driver kept sending me dick pics, and a friend once had to get a restraining order against a delivery driver who kept coming back to her home and lurking outside her window. It’s only a small minority of men who do these things, but because our daily lives expose us to so many people, then it ends up being a very rational choice to take precautions to protect ourselves.

Edit: my comment cast a wider net than just “risk of being kidnapped”, because that felt to me like a hyperbolic euphemism designed to avoid saying the much more likely forms of harm that women face from predatory men. However, I want to add that the number of traffic accidents I’ve been involved in is non-zero, and equal to the number of times that an unknown man has attempted to kidnap me.

That’s unironically a good way of thinking about it.

One of my proudest achievements in life is having used particle-wave duality to explain non-binary gender to a bunch of cis-het physics-bros, and also using non-binary gender to explain quantum physics to queer folk. I’m disproportionately pleased with having been able to use this explanation successfully both ways.

(I also think it says a lot about me that I have found myself in situations where it isn’t uncommon that I get an opportunity to attempt this. Explaining gender to passively bigoted cis-hets feels like it’s part of my ethical duty to the world, but menacing my friends with quantum physics monologues is just for fun)

There’s actually a lot of trans women in the professional modelling world. One friend told me that due to preferences for taller women with particular bone structure, that the field actively selects for trans women. Like, there’s still way more cis women in modelling than trans women, simply because there’s way more cis women in the world, but trans women are disproportionately represented in modelling

It’s because there’s a significant proportion of people whose preferences are something behind “skinny, white, conventionally feminine woman”, and so when people outside of that demographic are featured in media, it freaks them out because their preferences are limited to people who fit within that narrow description, so wider diversity of people depicted in media is, to them, synonymous with a push for unattractive people in media.

That in and of itself isn’t a problem — they have every right to their own preferences, and I have no interests in trying to convince them of anything. The problem is because they have attached themselves to the idea that their personal preferences are the objective standard. So when they see more diversity in media, and others thirsting for people they would consider to be objectively unattractive, this destabilises the idea that their preferences are The Truth. This means that, rather than just accepting that people like what they like, they contort themselves into believing that this is all a big conspiracy to try to push objectively unattractive people into media. Framing things like that means they end up seeing this as something that is entirely a political push to erode all foundations of society as part of some Woke ploy. They feel threatened and genuinely scared that there will be a future where there is literally no-one who they find attractive represented in media. Which is to say that someone who is accustomed to being the boot distrusts people who want there to be no boot, because surely they must be lying so that they can seize power and be the boot and crush everyone else.

At the heart of this is a zero-sum way of thinking of the world. They have deeply internalised that if one group in society gains rights, or power of any sort, then it must come at the cost of someone else. Some of them occasionally show awareness of the moral awfulness of them using their privilege to oppress others in society, and they briefly have moments where they understand that if the oppressed wished to take our retribution against them, we would be justified. However, they are incapable (or unwilling) to actually reckon with all the cognitive dissonance they’ve built up, and so their fear causes them to become ever more rigid in their worldview.

I find it fascinating, really. I am a fat, queer punk, and my existence is viscerally horrifying to them, because I am the epitome of so much of what they hate, and it breaks their brains to imagine that someone could find me attractive (tbh, it still sort of breaks my brain a bit too, but I’m getting there with improving my confidence). They genuinely believe that THE WOKE LEFT want everyone in media to look like me, even though that would be the opposite of the diversity we actually want.

They don’t believe us when we say this though. Their zero sum thinking combined with their willful inability to acknowledge that their own preferences are as subjective as anyone’s means they don’t believe us when we say this though, and that this is all part of our dastardly plot to seize absolute power for ourselves and make them be the oppressed ones.

It’s quite sad for them in the end. I’ve found that a huge part of what has allowed me to become more confident in myself has been acknowledging and embracing all the non conventional things I find attractive in other people. For instance, I firmly believe that the most beautiful point on basically any human body is the point where the curvature of the calf turns from being convex to concave. And because I don’t feel the need to convince other people of this, I can just let myself like what I like and be free to bite my partners’ calves. Even if their tastes do genuinely align with what is considered to be this narrow notion of “conventionally attractive”, I can’t imagine they feel very free to actually enjoy their own desires and their own bodily potential

I’m the same. I was telling a friend the other day that despite how grim modern tech often is, I feel hopeful when I see how many people are taking solace in making cool things for them and their community, as well as doing valuable infrastructure work to try and make tech a useful tool for liberation.

A good example of the latter thing is this encrypted messaging app that works via a Bluetooth mesh network, providing a way for Palestinians to stay in contact even when the internet and cell service are turned off. The UK is closer than I would like to needing to use tech like this, so it bolsters my resolve to be able of such efforts to resist.

This but pants

Pants often have pockets, but too small even for a normal sized wallet, or a smaller phone. And women who buy pants with shitty pockets absolutely complain about the pockets. Literally just this week, I complimented someone on her handbag, and she thanked me, and proceeded to complain about shitty pockets that necessitate having bags (she wished that she had good pockets, because then having a nice bag could be a deliberate, aesthetic choice, rather than a necessity.

Pants are generally crap, but they’re not the only thing that can have pockets: skirts and dresses can too. I love how often I compliment someone on their dress, and they put their hands in their pockets and say “Thanks! It has pockets!”. When I first saw this meme, I was delighted to see someone describing the exact same thing that I love seeing. Every time I see that posted, I see loads of people commenting on agreement. There is a truly incredible amount of solidarity in the experience of shitty pockets on women’s clothes. When we do find clothes with good pockets, it’s so exciting that we can’t wait to share that fact with anyone who compliments us on the outfit.