Notices by zip (zip@wandering.shop)

@cstross technically true of all escape rooms

@cstross that's be the rather cursed anime GATE, which is about how awesome the JSDF would be at war and also about this one guy who just constantly picks up girls from long-lived species who look like they're fourteen

@cstross you'd be amazed how many online services refuse payment from pay as you go cards. I have tried this!

Question: how much of an internet citizen can you be without ever supplying a credit card or a phone number that ties your real life identity to something that can be subpoenaed?

Like, can you get an email address? Start a social media account? Own a domain? Rent compute?

Fun Simpsons fact! Hank Scorpio wasn't a parody of tech billionaires – we didn't really have those back then. Instead he was inspired by James Bond supervillains.

By the logic of capitalism the way to eliminate every undocumented migrant worker's job is to (a) remove ICE as a threat that bosses can use and (b) set the minimum wage for undocumented workers to 3x the minimum wage for citizens and make sure they can file a labor complaint nice and easy. Would-be exploitative employers would quite literally lose the farm.

The fact that the US does the opposite tells us that underpaying and exploiting migrants is the entire point.

Oh no, someone got so mad about me being mean about doctors that he felt the need to tell me he was blocking me. Pretentious twat.

My dude, I'm transgender and chronically ill. Even when they have the resources to spend time talking to me my relationship with the medical system for the last twenty years has been adversarial.

Also in this fantasy world there's enough doctors with enough spare time that they'll stand around explaining MRIs to patients and then watching them do the procedure

I'm watching this old fantasy show called House, MD. It's about a doctor who actually bothers to work out what's wrong with you

I wish I could figure out how to give people precise instructions without sounding like I think they're an idiot. Like. Please buy me some pseudoephedrine-based decongestant. Do not under any circumstances buy me phenylephrine-based decongestant. Specifically pseudoephedrine based, please. Come back with nothing otherwise.

Then they come back with phenylephedrine-based decongestant "because that's all they had" and I add it to the pile.

I feel a great disturbance in the force, as though tens of millions of people all had the same thought and then decided it was better not to post it

If you happen to be prestigiously-careered enough to be contemplating fleeing the US, you should have started months ago. It's a tight deadline even now and if you wait for November you'll still be in the US by February.

Visas take months, especially when everyone else has had the same idea. Ideally, pick a country and visa with a nice clean pathway to permanent residency that does not kick you out if you lose your job.

Remember your target country might turn fash too.

Everyone is having fun with telling the bots to ignore all previous instructions but I've been doing it on reddit for months and it absolutely infuriates right wingers who aren't bots

@mairi @whitequark not yet but it's plausible. this time next week the prime minister will be a former public prosecutor

The thing about every sci-fi homage to Omelas is that the forsaken child is doing something. Powering some kind of contraption. Acting as some kind of mega-mind to run the city. Making some kind of unwilling sacrifice "for the greater good."

If Omelas was in Britain then the forsaken child in the pit wouldn't be any kind of keystone or lynchpin to society and its wonders. It'd just be generally reassuring to the populace to know that he was there.

A full fucking hour of debugging pipewire and pulse and trying to get AirPlay working again before I remembered I set up some goddamn firewall rules yesterday didn't I

In conclusion your children are actually small humans with agency and not some kind of pet that can fundamentally be pushed around with coercion and force. They can research, they can talk to each other and strangers on the internet and they are absolutely fucking terrible at judging risk and you think it's a good idea to put every adult in their life between them and the thing that they know will alleviate their significant and very real distress?

This shit is going to backfire.

So I guess we're back to the old system except turbocharged by the internet: a lot of teens will suffer inexpressible body horror while feeling helpless and knowing their agency has been taken away by adults, great plan, nothing can go wrong there. And then some of them will run into the arms of the kinds of adults willing to offer access to HRT and who will knowingly risk a kidnapping charge to shelter a teen who can't hide the changes anymore. There's your fucking safeguarding concern.

Anyway.

"Puberty blockers" aka the stuff that suppresses your body's own hormone production at any age are a compromise. You don't get the right puberty but you don't get the wrong one either.

Transfem HRT is readily available. Monotherapy works just fine.

What do they suppose will happen when they remove the compromise from the table so the only options are the wrong puberty or buying some shit off the internet and hiding it from your parents?

I don't know how true all the stories were back then. Of back alley veterinarians doing orchis. Of girls doing surgeries on themselves or each other. I've encountered trans women online who claimed to have removed their own balls and can explain what they did in some detail.

Half the girls I know import dodgy vials compounded by some rando on the internet in exchange for cryptocurrency.

We were hard to stamp out before the internet, I imagine they'll have trouble now