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  So, it occurred to me last week, after having a bad week at my current job, that I don't actually know how many people truly enjoy the work they do. So, I'm taking a very scientific poll. What is your attitude toward your work? If you work multiple jobs or gigs, consider the one that's the biggest portion of your income. If you have worked in the past but aren't now, consider your most recent job.

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  I'm not possibly creating Yet Another Goddamn Online Account to leave a comment, but of course this Ars story had to mention that the shooter was trans, a detail which is completely irrelevant to the rest of the story. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/lawsuit-demands-openai-pay-for-new-school-after-chatgpt-used-in-shooting If the shooter were Black or Jewish or any other category of person, they would be rightly excoriated for bringing race into a story which has nothing to do w...

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  So, I have a bone to pick (so to speak). There's this idea running around that in trans women, breast growth stops around the 2 year mark. That idea is completely incorrect. (Note that, for the sake of simplicity, I'm going to refer to "cis girls" and "cis women" a lot, but what I really mean is "anyone who went through an estrogen-primary puberty and had roughly normal breast development" which is a lot to type out every time. And by "trans women&quo...

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  The manufacturer of this microwave, Whirlpool, understood in 1996 that the American microwave-buying public had exactly one special interest.

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  Question for the assembled brain-trust. What's a good author/writer-focused, or even romance-focused Mastodon instance? I created an alt for my writer stuff, but am realizing I may want it on a more purposeful server. It has to have moderated sign-ups, an active admin/moderation team, and should ideally have a much higher than stock Mastodon character limit (the instance I'm on right now limits us to 640k characters, I think, because of course no one should need more than 640k).

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  Behold! $94.75 worth of groceries!

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  Any time you see "New package, same great product!" marketing on something in a store, I guarantee they just shrinkflationed you hard. This package used to hold 56 pads for the same price as what now gets you 40. The individual pads are not materially different.

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  I've been a skilled benchrest shooter, motorcycle racer, wilderness hiker, airplane pilot, daily driver on US roads, bicycle commuter, worked with lasers and high-voltage electronics, and probably a half dozen more similarly dangerous things. I never would have imagined that telling a bunch of people "I'm a girl actually" would be the one thing that made me nearly certain it was going to kill me.

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  This is a long shot, but just in case: anyone have experience with AlloClae? It's a cosmetic filler which is very new on the market, introduced in 2024, so there's not a lot of actual accounts from actual patients out there. I'll spare you descriptions of how it's made, iykyk. My surgeon is proposing she could use it as an alternative to liposuction for an upcoming procedure, which would pretty substantially reduce some risks I have due to a clotting disorder (lipo is not a ki...

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  The internet: Stupidity as a Service

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  Any catgirls in the audience should give this a listen. It may be enjoyable even though it's old person music (it's me, I'm old people). https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P_n4eeQE2OY

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  Just in case you were wondering how orbit was going these days... https://platform.leolabs.space/visualization

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  Anyone have recommendations for organizations that are supporting trans folks in the prison system in Washington or California? A coworker just mentioned they have a lead on a granting organization that's looking to get some cash out there in that space.

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  Someone shared this in a memes channel, and I think you all also need to see it. CW for a mildly distressing and very funny image of a cat's tongue.

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  Wait, is the "I want to get a good grade at . This is perfectly normal and ok" urge just a praise kink in disguise?

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  I don't suspect a lot of the people I'm connected to here need this reminder, but just in case: "yes" is consent. Anything else: "maybe" or "umm" or "I guess" are not consent. They mean NO. "Yes" based on incomplete or inaccurate information is not informed consent, and thus not consent. "Yes" given under duress, while intoxicated, or under any kind of threat, no matter how insubstantial it may seem to you, is not consent. &q...

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  Mastodon (and fedi) instance sign-up idea: Allow instances to use an arbitrary external system to qualify new account requests. The idea is, the current account application process on Mastodon is essentially unworkable, in the age of AI, and the coming age of agentic AI. It's far too easy to bury admins/mods under a barrage of almost-real-looking applications if there's any new-account moderation. This used to be the reasonable balance point between "open registration" and &qu...

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  @alice this little guy is so pleasing.

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  I was discussing sexuality on Discord, as one does, and an observation popped up: trans femmes seem to either be hypersexual, or asexual, with relatively few "just normal, I guess" folks. I was wondering why this might be (I have my suspicions, the big one being that people who have an experience that's further from the average have more need or desire to discuss it, simply because it's not as well-known). Anyway, it's time for another highly-scientific poll. Please only...

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  I can't help feeling like that American kid who contributed 12k incorrect Scots article translations to Wikipedia was just a preview of our glorious LLM-based future.

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  Hey fellow USians: tomorrow is a general election in most parts of the country. Please vote while it still means anything.

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  One of the best human design elements I've ever seen in a UI is in the Loop Habit Tracker app. There's an option that's called "Extend day a few hours after midnight" in settings. What it does is shift the "it's the next day" logic to trigger at 3 am instead of midnight. So when I lay down to sleep at (usually) about 1, the habit stuff I'm recording is for the same day that's current in my head, even though the clock officially says it's tomorrow....

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  Just in case you needed to know, Orly (the nail polish brand) has a line of Harry Potter colors out right now, in the year of our beleaguered goddess 2026. I strongly recommend letting them know how you feel about this with your dollars and your commentary on any websites or online surveys they might offer.

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  Just in case you needed to know, OPI (the nail polish brand) has a line of Harry Potter colors out right now, in the year of our beleaguered goddess 2026. I strongly recommend letting them know how you feel about this with your dollars and your commentary on any websites or online surveys they might offer.

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  I made a very silly thing.

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  I had this conversation deep in a thread, but realized I need to make it a primary post as well. When I started my transition in early 2022, I had a couple weeks of massive gender euphoria, then dropped into the worst depression and anxiety I've ever experienced in my life. It lasted more than a year. I don't know why, but I can guess. I think I spent almost 50 years packing away bad feelings, and carefully ignoring them. I think I did that about a variety of things: my feelings abo...

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  Ah yes, the bane of women's clothing: "high waisted" jeans that resolutely refuse to stay up where they're supposed to.

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  Interesting. Went looking for a trans-as-hell license plate frame, just out of curiosity. There are a few "ally" type frames on Etsy. And almost nothing that indicates the driver is trans. It's almost like... marketing to trans people who can afford a car is... pointless? Gosh, whatever could that mean. 🙄

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  I was thinking about this last night, and realized I should actually ask the question. Poll time! So, I decided a year or two ago that I was probably asexual, based on the evidence I had at the time. Since then, it's become clearer that this is the case. However, this has not done anything particularly good for me, aside from giving me information to pass to any theoretical new relationship partners. I feel worse about myself, I think because I'm no longer getting the flirty interactio...

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  @caraplayingstuff Well, I suppose correlation is not causation. It could be they dropped away for other reasons that just happened to coincide with my exploring my aceness more vocally. I suspect that one of my problems may also be that I'm letting the label define me instead of the other way around, which is something I'm prone to if I'm not careful.