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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • My thought was that Geralt and Ciri’s stories were over or decided, and I’m disappointed they didn’t find a way to do a Witcher story either in the future or past that enabled you to pick your own gender, appearance, Witcher school, or whatever else, maybe with creative use of the trial of the grasses or something.

    I’ll happily play as Ciri to revisit the universe and maybe some familiar characters, but I just wish they’d done something newer or more original.




  • Their bed nucleus of the stria terminalis should be twice as large as a woman’s, and that’s what guided their gender identities. Not that I’m a biological determinist, just a strict physicalist with no belief in metaphysical choice superceding determinism, but a lot of times the brain’s development has recursive feedback loops such that smaller choices early on can alter the size of brain structures along with sex hormones and the development environment in the womb or even outside of it for a while, the earlier the more significant. All I know is that the size of the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis is pretty consistently twice the size in men as it is in women regardless of the gender assigned at birth.




  • I mean, being trans is perfectly valid, but I think gender dysphoria itself should be classified as a mental illness so long as it brings significant pain/distress to the individual, the solution there is just gender reassignment, surgery, hormones, etc. I don’t think there should be stigma in calling it such, it needs treatment the same as anything else. People with ADHD have a mental illness and get meds, sometimes therapy, people with poor eyesight have an ocular dysfunction of some kind and get glasses or surgery or whatever, none of it should be that big a deal. The point is it can be diagnosed and treated.

    I think the response to shit like “transgenderism” being a mental disease should be “well at least their/our dysphoria can be treated now, what’s your excuse?”





  • All right," said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”

    REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

    “Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”

    YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

    “So we can believe the big ones?”

    YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

    “They’re not the same at all!”

    YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

    “Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”

    MY POINT EXACTLY.






  • Yep, that’s emergence, where the models of simple systems, interacting en masse, generate complexity/‘chaos’ more easily predicted by different models within that set of parameters/scale. Basically, it’s like modeling the behavior of fractals from their appearance instead of the underlying ruleset, because what the rules generate is unexpected to our human brains, so we need to make new rules that allow us to more easily predict things, even if those rules aren’t as perfect as the ruleset itself.


  • Yeah it turns out a whole bunch of English words are spelled more like a linguistic history lesson than anything approaching a useful system of phonetics. It might as well be pictographic with letters being helpful hints at this point. I wish there could be spelling reform in the anglosphere, but it’s hard enough to get people to agree within any one of the majority English-speaking countries, let alone between them.