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What I find frustrating is we know what complaints will be made about this data in advance of doing the study, so why did they do this study? I get that they brought something new by articulating it well and bringing some data sources together in a slightly different way and so on, but what meaningful, tangible change is there to our knowledge with this study?

To be clear, no shade on the researchers, they did the best with the system they have. I mean the system as a whole. When we have study after study which shows that saturated fat is not the cause of heart disease and one side of the argument just refuses to change their mind to match the evidence it seems the scientific system is broken and will not move forward.

A conference on an issue like this would also not work because those same issues would turn up. A panel with 10 researchers would include many who are directly funded by industry. They can't leave that baggage at the door and think clearly. That simply isn't human nature. We can't expect people who have a vested interest in the outcome going a certain way to act with detachment and clarity. They are and always will be biased.

Cis guy here, but I work with a few trans people as a support worker and have heard a lot about their experience that may apply to you.

Puberty is dodgy for everyone. The levels go up and down over a few years for all of the growth hormones, not just estrogen and testosterone. The level of change this causes varies person to person and the timeline is not the same for everyone.

The same applies to behaviours. Some people become very interested in presenting as a given gender fairly early on, others start that later, and some don't end up settling on a gender presentation at all or have multiple attempts to find something comfortable.

Voice training is a skill building exercise and it is really fun. Viewing it as a fun skill to learn will make it way less awful and may help to not generate dysphoria when it doesn't make you sound fem in the first ten minutes. I don't know how far along puberty you are and how much that has impacted your voice box but once you change the growth hormones the growth of your voice box will shift as well. It will take time for the physical shape to settle, so you need to learn how to use what you have to feel comfortable in your body. I would also recommend singing if you can as it gives you way more catchy ways of practicing a fem voice and is more fun than many of the more basic voice training exercises.

As for the fear of pushing yourself back into not doing things, yeah, it is hard. There will probably be days where it feels like that no matter what you do. There isn't a perfect way to do it. That said, you are doing something way harder than typical puberty, you are doing puberty+, the extension course in growing up. It is harder and it will suck sometimes, but you can do it.

Hey. Just a quick anatomy check here. A lot of women and other vulva havers have never actually gotten a mirror and image out and mapped their parts to their names. In some cases people have been mistaken, trying to push things inside their eurethra rather than their vagina. This can cause a lot of pain and does not generally result in sexual enjoyment.

Secondly, mechanically, this is supposed to be a fairly wet process. Dry fingers are really good for causing damage, but absolutely terrible for pleasure. They can cause abraisions in the soft tissue and even draw blood without any malice or significant force. Try using a lot, and I mean what feels like too much and then some, water based lubricant. I would recommend KY as a great starter as it is more jelly like than many others and lasts a bit longer.

Remember, if choosing between more lube and less more is always safer, more comfortable, and lower risk. It doesn't reduce sensation, it increases it, so making sure everything is wet is important.

Water is not lubricant. Water removes all the gel features of lubricants and will dilute and wash away water based lubricants. Silicone lubricants are water resistant and can be used vaginally, but generally people find water based lubricants more comfortable and enjoyable for vaginal penetration.

Also, spend time yourself with the lubricants and a small dildo. Get to know how it feels on your own. A partner is fun, but learn singleplayer before joining a multiplayer game, you need to know what works because your partner can't feel how it feels for you, it isn't their body, they need your feedback. There is nothing wrong with enjoying your own body, it is natural and healthy and really enhances partner play as well. I guarantee you if you are with a male partner he knows a lot about what his junk needs, so it is a good idea to get that understanding for your own bits.

Other people have obviously pointed it out, but this is one of the many areas in Linux where the command line is so much easier than an interface that the people who write GUI tools just don't bother. The tool you need for a command line approach is called dd (I imagine it stands for direct data because that is what it does). Using dd you can take data from one place and put it into another. This means you can put zeros all over a drive, wiping it in full, using

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/targetdevice

That will fill the whole drive with zeroes, but you could also do it with random noise first, using the below

dd if=/dev/random of=/dev/targetdevice

In the case of your ISO image there is someone who has included all the options including block size and so on, but the step you really need is to be sure you get the right device. Execuse the command below

ls /dev

Then insert your device, wait a few seconds, and run it again. You will have a list of all of the devices that were connected before and after plugging your drive in, so your drive will be the new one. It will probably show up as something like

/dev/sdc
/dev/sdc1

Notice that there are two. The first is the device, the second is the partition on the device. If you tried to put the content of an ISO image into an existing partition it would look like it had all worked but it would actually fail because the ISO is a full rip of a device, not a partition. Instead use the device itself, in this case sdc.

dd if=/path/to/image.iso of=/dev/sdc bs=4M; sync

The last bit will make your system write things to the disk and make it safe to eject it. Once that is all done it should work as a bootable USB.

It seems super complex but once you have done it a few times it becomes so easy you will regret the time spent getting a GUI installed.

If you still want a GUI you could try Gnome Disks, but I never enjoyed using it.

Yes and no. I had a heart issue a couple of years ago and stopped taking my meds during that process because they can interfere with heart function in theory. That said, I think I am living up on part of your anxiety. Are you afraid that if you get used to them, get used to functioning with them on board, and then they get taken away you will be unable to function but be expected to based on recent performance?

I have had some of that anxiety and it is reasonable. People do tend to see your "new normal" and "normal" after a fairly short time. Their expectations change and their tolerance for you struggling goes down in some ways because they start relying in your performance at that higher level.

It is really unfair but that is something that happens. I have however found some ways around this anxiety. I have built better systems while using my meds that work better for off my meds too. I have automated some things, make others easier to do, and honestly stopped doing a bunch of things I used to do at all. By doing this I have reduced the demand on me on the other days.

If you can use your meds to make life easier for when you are off the meds I think you will feel the anxiety lessen.

Also, depending on where you are and local laws, stockpiling a very small amount, maybe one month ahead or something, can be very helpful. I try to buy my next dose as soon as I can and have ended up with about one month of buffer. Now if my meds are unavailable at the pharmacy I can just not stress and use my backup. Because I rotate through they never get stale and I am never holding more than two months of meds, so I am not in a weird situation of having years of meds to explain away. Be careful of your local laws and so on, it is legal here but may not be there, so don't get yourself in trouble.

Also, consider non medication supports. For me that is heavy work like weight lifting as well as eating far less sugar. Consider having a reasonable source of caffeine available and keeping your usage down so you don't built a tolerance to it. If you are out of meds caffeine can help for some people such as myself, nowhere near as good as meds but much better than nothing.

Yes, but not immediately. I am seen as obviously odd, but friendly, like a very big dog. I frequently have people stop me in shops to get help getting something off a shelf or finding something in the store, though I don't mind at all, I enjoy helping people. I also get asked for directions all the time in public, a couple of times a week on average, and according to other people I know that is far more than they have. I guess I just have that "open face" people talk about, and I also make more eye contact than NTs because of masking, so I think people take that as an invitation.

Also, once people talk to me for a while, and I mean like 15-20 minutes, they tend to clock that something is up. I know a lot of things in many areas thanks to the ADHD interest in just about anything, so I can speak from a relatively informed position on many more topics than people expect. They think I am just like them because I know a comparable amount about their favourite topics as they do, so obviously it must be equally important to me as it is to them. Given a fairly short time they will watch me interact with someone else and see the same thing happen and have that moment of confusion because I am interested in too many things.

After a little while of knowing me people refer to me as a wikipedia on wheels or google with a face. If I don't know something I am always prompt to say so, but if you ask me again later that day I have likely gone and fixed that hole and have something useful to say about it, and sometimes people do exactly that. I feel like a very odd LLM in a body running on 40 watts and being surprisingly efficient.

No. Just no. Barely anyone drinks it, it is an export beer for the most part. Gross.

I mean, yes, they are clearly individually bad, people making bad choices because they do not value the life of a dog above any risk to themselves or even fairly minor inconvenience.

At the same time, this is a bad job. Not a bad job to have, a bad job for society to make. There should not be cops. Cops are way to mixed as a profession.

Investigators of crimes? That is a reasonable job.

Dispute resolution specialists? Sure.

Someone to step between people having a domestic altercation? Yes, of course.

But just like you wouldn't want an emergency room doctor to also be a mortician you shouldn't want the traffic enforcement person to be the one to deal with a mental health crisis. The role has grown too large and cannot reasonably be performed well. It needs to be divided.

I think it is important to recognise that cops do way too many things which are very different. A reasonable job has rationally related responsibilities. For example, a technical support worker may also do some account admin work because the cause of a problem may be related to billing, a hairdresser may take payments, a bartender may assess the inebriation of a customer and cut them off. Cops?

The do parking enforcement. They arrest people who are drunk and disorderly. They execute search warrants. They do traffic enforcement. They attend domestic disputes. They record and process allegations of sexual assault. They do paperwork for insurance claims. They separate protestors and counter protestors. They take in lost property. They shoot dogs.

If your hair dresser had this many responsibilities you would think they would have multiple degrees and a big support team, or you would assume they would be incompetent in all of them.

A person who does mental crisis support uses very different tools to someone doing traffic enforcement. They are in many ways incompatible skills and those roles should not be mixed at all. The idea that the solution to cops being shit at their jobs is to increase training is insane.

Cops should be reduced to a single, well defined role. Most of their job should be broken into other roles and handled by people specialised in those specific things. A mental health crisis should have a mental health professional involved. A drunk altercation should have an officer of the peace who attends, deescalates, separates, and documents everything. A parking inspector would do just that, no more, no less. An investigator for SA would be a specialist in the topic, have strong mental health and trauma awareness, and not be a total creep. And I think we can just not have a person who's job involves shooting dogs.

If you took all those jobs and separated them out being a cop would be a much more simple thing. It would also be much easier to have a fairly good understanding of the law because you wouldn't have spent time learning about how to wrestle people to the ground, treat everyone as a threat, and shoot dogs, so yoh would have plenty of time to learn about law. Maybe you could even afford to have a uni degree in law and community services.

You haven't described diet at all and that is the most likely issue. You have said you use energy drinks to get through the day which suggests you are experiencing significant sleep debt and also clouding your ability to see true energy issues. I would recommend dropping the caffeine as soon as is reasonable and then see how you feel. Until you can do that I would recommend making sure you are getting enough iron, B vitamins, and calories. It is fairly easy to end up iron deficient and same for B vitamins, but both are readily solved. The calories is actually the hard one, if you have drifted down to low calorie intake it can be hard to pull back up.

I am an explainer of things. I love working with kids and helping explain the world to them, with a special interest in the places where the answer is that we don't know. I absolutely adore taking a question or comment and finding the full exploration which can bloom from that moment of curiosity. I do this on Lemmy too, and before that Reddit. Sometimes someone will post an article and it will be way too complex or not really answer any real questions and I will go ahead and explain it in much more simple English with analogies and simplifications which don't lose the important details.

If you want you can dig into my comment history and find it, but my favourite complement ever is someone who said I took a kegstand on the font of knowledge. If absolutely jives with my excitement and joy at learning while also being way less serious and stodgy about science and knowledge.

Some things I have noticed.

It looks like the Red Sea is also filled in.

It appears that other areas at the north of Europe have had some areas filled.

Sri Lanka now appears to have a land bridge to India.

Lake Victoria and Lake Malawi are both also filled in.

Sudan and South Sudan are just one country, which makes sense given that change was only recognised in 2011.