Yay learning

Do you apply toppings right to the edge? I've never had this problem despite using an absurd amount of cheese, and I was puzzling to figure out why. I think it's because the crust rises up to act like a boundary that encloses a big lake of cheese.

I agree that sometimes it's possible to separate the art from the artist. Sometimes that's pretty easy to do, but sometimes it's pretty ambiguous.

A grey area for me is the philosopher Martin Heidegger. He was a Nazi, and this definitely comes through in some of his philosophical work. Some of it doesn't seem to be informed by his Naziism, but I'm still pretty averse to reading it, because how do we separate the person from the Naziism? If I were a philosopher, my own political viewpoints would inevitably permeate everything I wrote, even if the texts weren't directly political. Perhaps I'd be better able to discern the line in Heidegger's work if I were a philosopher.

I always worry about missing bad vibes in text, because especially as an adult, I have discovered many areas in which I didn't even notice problematic things in media (antisemitism being one such area). I cringe when looking over Harry Potter as an adult, for example, and not just because of its author's awfulness since the books were published.

I think we need to allow people the benefit of hindsight, as well as the space to have complicated feelings. Like, sometimes there might be some news that's comes out about a person, which causes us to look over their work with a more critical or more mature eye. Without this space, people are much more likely to dig their heels in and refuse to change.

I've heard from a few transfem lesbian friends that one of the hardest parts of coming out to themselves as trans was that it would also mean acknowledging they're not straight, because if you're someone who feels like you're failing at being a man, attraction to women can be pretty grounding. "It was the one normal thing about me" - whole lot of internalised misogyny/transphobia/homophobia.

But that's our assumption, it's true that it might just be a dude that likes being feminine, no trans involved.

Quite right; labels like straight get pretty wibbly in situations like this. I find it sad because the current prevalence of homophobia and transphobia makes it hard for us to collectively understand what would it mean to be a cis-het femboy who takes HRT — for us to conceptualise of a world where that isn't a contradiction. Bigotry makes it harder for people to explore their true selves, regardless of their gender or sexuality.

Something I find annoying is that being effective at SEO means being in a constant war with people whose literal job it is to be good at SEO to trap me in useless crap.

That's a mood. I came to the conclusion that to do a lot of the big and difficult tasks I've been needing to, I need to start by putting some tasks on my to-do list that were just for me, because whenever I did have free time, I'd piss it away and not even feel rested; I needed to carve out some active self-enrichment time. Unfortunately, burnout and concrete time limitations make that pretty hard to do, so ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯

I saw your comment and desperately wished I could give some advice that could help, but how much is reasonable to expect a person to be able to do to resist a fucked up system when simply surviving is A Lot? Surviving is resistance though, especially when the system doesn't like people who understand how fucked the system is. So in lieu of advice that would rely on metaphorical bootstraps we don't have: Solidarity, friend. I'm sorry that you're going through this and I'm sorry that I understand.

This fungus is metal as hell. I love it

Bloody hell.

As someone who grew up hearing about the [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster](http://www.Hillsborough.com/ Disaster), this is terrifying. There's nowhere near enough crowd management in place, which means that a panic could be tremendously dangerous. I don't remember the people-density above which a crowd basically starts acting like a fluid, but I'm pretty sure this is above it.

I just skip the in-between stages — I'm a botnet pretending to be a woman

I really respect people who edit comments to acknowledge when they're wrong, but leave the original mistake intact (but usually strike through). Like this:

~~I delete my comments when I'm proven wrong because it's embarassing and I don't want to perpetuate misinformation~~

Actually, I'm leaving my mistake up, because then people can follow the conversation easier and see how I came to realise I was wrong

I'm not clear on what data you would want more of. In terms of having a group to compare against, we're sort of losing that ability because nowadays, around 90% of young women in Scotland are vaccinated in school. I might be missing what point you're making; stats has a tendency to cook my brain when I'm not doing it on pen and paper

I cannot count the times that I have gone through the legitimate path to read a paper, by clicking "AcCeS tHiS pApEr ThRoUgH yOuR iNsTItUtIoN" and I log in through my university, faffing with 2FA, only to be told "nah, you don't have access". I just go straight to scihub nowadays.