The worst thing you can do, as someone who has recently realised they are transfem, is to let terves and transphobes convince you cis women will never accept you.

I was told that when I came out everyone would reject me. That I would find myself isolated from the world, and from other women especially, who would react to me with horror and revulsion.

In reality, within the first months of coming out, in no particular order:

My sister's reaction on my coming out was, "Right, so I have a sister instead of a brother. Cool. I'm taking you clothes shopping tomorrow."

A friend, when she learned I am a woman, immediately invited me to her women-only, girls-night-out birthday party the following week.

Another friend, when a friend of hers expressed doubts about my gender, immediately shut them down and reaffirmed I am a woman.

I went camping with a group of friends, and we had two tents, one for the boys and one for the girls; I was unsure as to which I should enter, to which a girl friend responded by grabbing me and physically dragging me inside the women's tent.

In the women's bathroom at a movie theatre a random woman, whom I'd never seen before and haven't seen since, stopped me as I was going into a stall, to warn me there was no toilet paper in there, because she'd just used the last of it.

All of these, and more, some from friends, some from complete strangers. All within a few months, as a trans woman who hadn't started medical transition yet, and was very visible as being a trans woman.

I've had some people reject me, true, but the vast majority, including almost all cis women, accepted me as a sister with open arms.

Cis women are cool. It's terves who are bigots.

I needed to see this today

after art research and multiple drafts I kind of lost the plot on this... was supposed to be shoelaces. 😅

so I'm gonna weave this off right quick and have a do-over with less than half these cards... ten tablets of no. 10 cotton should be in shoelace range:

oh man, that gradient sky plus variegated green was an outright contrast disaster. just gross to look at.

so I cut it free, cannibalized it on the fly, swapped all the sky threads and cut new green ones, re-threaded, and bam, lil trees:

one down, one to go!

I have started listening to this sherlock holmes podcast and it's kind of like if BBC Sherlock was....good? And accurate to the source material? And not so far up its own ass that it's an ourobouros of Steven Moffat managing to suck his own dick from within?

And it's weird, because I can feel it building its characters and relationships and a modern complexity in the way it presents different aspects of classic characters and their personalities, and it's just a surprisingly fresh and pleasant interpretation. I didn't know how completely my faith had been destroyed in the notion of a modern Sherlock interpretation, but it's nice to have it somewhat restored. The idea of a podcast as an analogue for Watson's first hand accounts of their cases works surprisingly well, and Sherlock as a character has more warmth and humanity and kindness to him than the BBC version, while still being played with a nod towards neurodivergency. He has some of the same joy that Elementary's Sherlock has, which is desperately missing from the BBC version. Watson himself is an endearingly awkward dork. "Mrs. Hudson" is allowed to be a character who actually makes a material contribution to cases and is if not quite an equal member of this little trio yet, is given a respectable amount of air time and isn't just a bit character.

for some reason I've only very recently realized that many of the smart, thoughtful people I know are forming their opinions on the basis of nothing but vibes. no fact checking, no data, just whatever feels right given their particular ideological leanings. had someone today express surprise when I told her that no, the majority of Taiwanese people did not in fact support unification with China. she presumably just heard this at PSL or something and decided it sounded good without ever checking. now I appreciate that I am the guy from the average familiarity xkcd when it comes to cross-strait politics, but I generally think it is bad practice to form opinions about geopolitics without doing the minimum legwork to figure out if your geopolitical intuitions are true. like at least check before you decide that the only reason Taiwanese people haven't returned to the embrace of the motherland is American imperialism!

I actually feel like it's reasonable for most of your opinions and beliefs to be low-information and vibes-based? Just because there are a zillion things to have opinions and beliefs about, and so you want the majority of them to be as low-cost as possible. I don't think that in itself is the issue; I don't think any of us has checked more than a small fraction of the assertions we've heard, even in geopolitics, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we should act exactly like we'd never heard them.

The ideal I think is that you formulate very cheap beliefs for most things, but you have the correct level of confidence in them -- usually meaning "very low" -- and you do the research as needed, to the extent that it's needed. The less consequential your opinion is, the less it matters if you're right, and most of our opinions are extremely inconsequential! It is very rare out here in the throng for the consequences of being wrong to be more severe than a momentary embarrassment.

It seems like, when it comes to just chatting or Posting, the most likely consequence is that other people will use your statements to structure their beliefs, and so it's "bad behaviour" to overstate the confidence of your positions in a context where they're likely to be interpreted as reported facts or authoritative statements, and that obligation gets stronger the heavier the latter conditions weigh.

This relates to something that comes up a lot in the context of criminal charges or accusations, where people will often try to impose the same standards required for conviction to public opinion -- judges have high standards because their opinions are very meaningful, but private individuals have very low ones because their opinions are usually irrelevant! Lots of things are like that, and of course it's a continuum and not a binary.

I think the actual ideal skillset here is, like:

New Species Added: Basselope!

It's time to finally to announce a secret I've been keeping for weeks: the addition of an incredibly elusive animal to the repository collection!

Meet the basselope: a rare species that was thought to be extinct until a last surviving individual was rediscovered in 1986. Thanks to some incredible breeding successes in the subsequent years, the basselope population rebounded successfully. Now found in all continents but Antartica, modern basselopes have proven to be a highly adaptable species, and populations in different regions display a wide range of phenotypic variability.

Meet.... the basselope!

Basselope, while not domesticated, regularly choose to den in human homes. The North American population has a particular fondness for couches.

The "jungle" phenotype has lost their antlers over time, likely due to ease of movement through dense plants and vines. They are known for their habit of swinging their ears through the air as they move: while the origin of this behavior is unknown, it's theorized this adaptation may be both a form of enhanced thermoregulation and a way of communicating with conspecifics.

One isolated population of basselope has begun to shed their antlers seasonally, and they have begun a new annual tradition of posing against a backdrop of their previous year's accomplishments.

One of the most elusive morphs is the "arctic" basselope. Despite sharing a range with other basselope populations - which is not all that far north - they're known for developing a strikingly colored and oddly jingly winter coat. The genes responsible for this seasonal color expression are as of yet unknown.

More super-rare, never-before-seen basselope photos can be found here!

Artists creating derivative or transformative works (without AI) have blanket permission from the basselopes to use these and all photos of them in the repository as references, including for works that will/may be sold.

The Animal Photo Reference Repository is an independent, permanently open-access project and funded entirely by donations, which allows me the creative freedom to have way, way too much fun on April 1st.

I feel like the big push for AI is starting to flag. Even my relatively tech obsessed dad is kinda over it. What do you even use it for? Because you sure as hell dont want to use it for fact checking.

There's an advertisement featuring a woman surreptitiously asking her phone to provide her with discussion topics for her book club. And like... what. Is this the use case for commercial AI? This the best you could come up with? Lying to your friends about Moby Dick?

One of the big pushes tech companies are making for AI is entirely in the tool of convenience. Take Gemini for example, one of Google's really big pitches for it is in features like Help Me Read and Help Me Write, which are like the lowest tier use case for deep learning models but are also the two AI features that the average consumer will actually care about. Sure they advertise the GenAI stuff Gemini Advanced is able to do, but they've woken up to the idea that the average consumer does not care about GenAI and non-AI Bros fundamentally loathe GenAI.

Every company with a language model got sucked into the venture capital pitfall of AI and now have to market the one set of features the general person actually cares about.

I work in advertising and the culture shift surrounding AI even from January until now (end of March) has been drastic. At the beginning of the year, the company I work for was using AI to design most of their assets. Clients started coming back and requesting that we no longer use AI generated images or videos for copyright liability reasons. Basically, there's no way to tell whose art or photography was scalped to make an image, so as companies who are trying to make a profit using potentially stolen images, it puts them in a gray area, legally.

Also, companies do look at their comment sections. Anti-AI commenters on social media ("this is not a real image" "I don't trust companies who use AI" etc) are seen by higher ups of a company. Basically, keep bullying brands who use AI, it's working. Now my company uses almost no AI for deliverables, which is a huge win.

Finally, some good fucking news.

Two Legends.

The story isn't kind to either one of us. It's not fair. It's ok to cry.

Finished it finally. I wanted to see if I could replicate pencil drawings digitally and while I did succeed it's much more fun to do a pencil drawing with real pencils IMO. Next one I do I think will be physical media and not digital.

I will be ordering a print of this for myself, if anyone else has any desire for one let me know and I'll put in a request for more when I order it.

Last call for prints before I send it to the printer. These are giclee prints on heavy cardstock with a matte finish, 9x12'

Here is my plate : Hereon my supper :: Overseas is my plate : Overseason my supper

@elodieunderglass At NO POINT in this video did I know what was going to happen next

Oh wow. Thank you so much for thinking of me!!

submitted by @flemmboyant 💙🧡

Okay, this is pretty incredible. A 3D artist, consulting scholars and archaeologists, worked for a year and a half in Blender to create a reconstruction of pre-Columbian Tenochtitlán, complete with the surrounding landscape. It’s staggeringly beautiful, and—at least to me—gives a wonderful impression of the city as a place where people worked and lived and worshiped

HOLY SHIT CLICK THROUGH THIS IS INCREDIBLE

just wanted to share the National Down Syndrome Society’s message for this year’s World Down Syndrome Day (21st March) 💛💙

Powerful message that lovingly includes multiple disabilities, united. I love this.

submitted by @edwardian-girl-next-door 💙💜

The introvert

First ape to go to the watering hole with a container and put some of the water in it so that they could drink more later without returning to the watering hole must have been lauded as a fucking genius.

Actually, as someone who used to study anthropology (albeit a very long time ago), I think it is generally accepted by now that the ability to Carry Containers Of Stuff is generally agreed to be one of the real tool-using leaps in human development, perhaps as important as fire. I mean, you'll get the impression that people studying early humans are basically spearhead experts, but that's just because spearheads don't decay. (And because for a long time people assumed that hunting was The Most Important Thing, which has a fascinating intersection with implicit bias and sexism and stuff, and yes I am still bitter at things like 2001 for popularizing the idea that the most important part of human evolution was the ability to bash the shit out of a thing/animal/person, but that's a whole other story.)

Carrying stuff is huge.

If you can put meat in a bag, you can carry more meat. If you can put something like nuts in a bag, then nuts abruptly become a food that you can bring back to the tribe or save for later and not a food that you're required to eat on the spot because they are tiresome and stupid to carry by hand. In both cases your ability to feed yourself and your tribe just got a whole fuck of a lot better.

If you can put your baby in a bag, you now have both your hands free to stick a spear into things, pick nuts, fish, dig tasty cicadas out of the ground, etc. Your ability to feed yourself and your tribe just got a whole fuck of a lot better, and so did your ability to defend yourself while you do it. (And let's face it, your babies were already getting downright ridiculous in terms of the time it takes them to be fully walking-ready, due to brain size and being essentially premature; inventing Multitasking With Baby is like, pure survival at this point, and your way to do that is to create a specialized bag.)

If you can put water in a bag (first water containers very well may have been animal bladders or stomachs, not pots) you can bring water to your sick tribe members and they have a much higher chance of recovering.

And then you have elaborations of the basic "thing that contains objects" idea. If you make an exceptionally loosely woven bag and put it in the water, you can on occasion finesse some fish into it. And then you have delicious fish. If you put yourself in a loose and flexible bag of animal skin, your tribe can operate in the cold better, which changes your entire migration pattern and opens up new environments to you. If you make a hard container and fill it with water and put it over your fire, you have invented a new type of cooking that unlocks whole new food types, such as vegetables that need softening in order for humans to eat them. (Of course at the same time your stomach is becoming steadily more dependent on being able to fuck with your food in this way, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing, because the less energy you spend on digestion, the more energy you have to spend on other things, like brains. And big brains are good for unlocking whole new levels of communication, allowing for fantastic new levels of foraging cooperation, passing knowledge through generations, mate selection, and even various sorts of mental recreation where you imagine something that you don't see, and then convey that to your fellow beings.)

Bags are important, is what I'm saying.

I love all of this but I am going absolutely FERAL over the correlation that clothes = person bag. Bc you're so right but I never woulda thought of it like that

i lost it at "put that baby in a bag bc its already taking a ridiculously long time to walk on its own goddamn"