Thanks for not deleting your comment

Ah, gravity, my arch nemesis (I have a disability that makes me fall over a lot. I also have boobs)

A few years ago, I read about how Mary Molony was an Irish Suffragette who disrupted a speech Winston Churchill was giving in Dundee by ringing a bell every time he tried to speak. She wanted him to apologise for remarks he had made about the women’s suffrage movement.

I remember when I read this, it reeked of something awesome that you find online that’s actually false (the story was shared on social media via a captioned photo with no sources), so I went digging for a proper source to check. I found some newspaper articles from 1908 and I learned that this event did happen, but also that people fucking hated Molony for this. There was a lot of “see, this is why everyone hates the Suffragettes”. (Sorry for saying this and then not sourcing)

It makes sense that people would be salty - Churchill was an asshole, but also a great orator, so I can see why one might be disappointed in missing the chance to see him speak, but I was shocked at the level of vitriol aimed at Molony and other Suffragettes from the time. Until this I hadn’t realised just how unpopular they were at the time. It’s drastically changed my perspective on protests and public perception.

I wish you well for whatever remains of recovering from the illness, it sounds like you’ve had a rough time.

Pro tip, next time you shave your legs, change your bedsheets. Freshly shaved legs on fresh bedsheets feels divine. Also, make sure you exfoliate

Source: I’m a cis woman who started out shaving my legs because expectations, then didn’t for a while because fuck the patriarchy, then started shaving legs again, for myself rather than expectations.

That is the sweetest story, thanks for sharing

I have also had trouble getting into games like this, but advice from my friends is that it’s actually less about the simulation, more about the stories and hilarity that can emerge from the simulation. In particular, I was advised to name each of my starting dwarves, and also to be less “smart” in how I played. In Rimworld, for example, I would load earlier saves if I lost someone important, and I was depriving myself of the kinds of chaos that these games are best at, like the glorious exuberance of rebuilding a colony from one person after a dreadful invasion.

I didn’t end up with Lae’zel in the end, but I hedged my bets for long enough that I got the Long Rest scene where she wakes you up in the night. The encounter ended hilariously fast, but what followed melted my heart and made it very hard to not choose her.

I also love how quickly Lae’zel changes her entire world view, which happened around the same time for me. Mad respect for such principles and focus

I ended up with Astarion. I was en route to romancing Shadowheart, but I got surprisingly few approval moments or interactions with her throughout act 2. At the same time, my character seemed to be taking the shape of “goodie-two-shoes but sassy bitch to those who deserve it”, which gave loads of Astarion approval.

I ended up learning into it and I’m super glad I did. There’s an Act 2 Dark Urge scene that I felt completely changed the romance dynamic between my character and Astarion - it felt like it put us on a much more even footing, and I was surprised by how sincere and empathetic the scene felt (given that Astarion’s main Cope is a mask of flirting and sass).

I had originally wanted to romance Karlach, but there was a bug that prevented her approval from rising and by the time I discovered and fixed it, I had missed loads of Act 1 approval moments

I don’t think you’re necessarily missing anything. Lower Decks is probably my favourite Star Trek series by a decent margin, but I think that people’s varying tastes is part of the Trek experience.

Like the first Star Trek I ever watched was TNG, with a partner who hated DS9 because of how far it was from the much more utopian tone of TNG. My best friend, however, loved DS9 most of all for that exact same reason. I can’t tolerate The Original Series because of how campy and cringe it is, but I have friends who love it for that.

If you hate Lower Decks, then your perspective is one I can’t really relate to, but that just feels like regular old Trekkie solidarity to me - with a show so varied, inevitably there’s going to be diverse viewpoints. That in mind, I’m not going to try and change mind, I’m just going to highlight why I love Lower Decks.

My favourite bit about Lower Decks is that it feels like a love letter to Trek, in all its forms. There’s a lot of references I don’t get, but I don’t need to get them to feel the warm fuzzies of knowing this show was made by people who are, first and foremost, fans of Star Trek. I like utopian sci fi because the state of the real world means that I can find real hope in the fantasy because in my heart, I believe in humanity.

Alongside all of that idealistic space exploration though, Lower Decks doesn’t shy away from the more pernicious aspects of Star Trek, and Starfleet/the Federation. The humour isn’t always my taste, but I think they use it well to poke fun at Star Trek, the show, but also the world within. The sometimes critical lens that is taken is part of why it feels so much like a love letter to Trek - if you truly love something, you’ve got to take the bad with the good and not pretend that everything is perfect.

In the past, with similar issues, I’ve had good success with requesting the book on Zlib, especially newer books.

“as asexuality to the manosphere is like Antarctica to a flat earther”

Damn, this quote is fire.

That’s a good quote. And by good, I mean helpful in understanding the cycle of assholery.

We’ll just be very disappointed in you.

I have both autism and ADHD, and whilst it’s difficult to draw the line between the two, I do have some instances of inertia that feel more ADHD flavour than autism. I’ve also seen many of my ADHD friends struggling with something like this too, but it seems like it works differently than autistic inertia.

I think that there’s a decent chance that understanding autistic inertia will help us to understand ADHD inertia, even if they’re distinct modes

As someone who has been in that exact same position, be cautious about organisation choices that seem like they’d be beneficial regardless of whether you live, but actually make it easier to die than live.

For me, it was the way that I stored my craft and hobby stuff - I made them tidier and more but in practice, harder to access. I did it this way because I wasn’t actually using my hobby stuff, so they were just in the way. However, part of why I was so passively suicidal was because of the gradual atrophy of all the things that used made me happy, so by tidying away my tools, I was just digging myself deeper.

What I’m saying is that living, and life, is messy. Having a clear out can be good and productive, especially if you’re not in a great place, because it can reveal things that aren’t working for you now, but try not to make the same mistake I did. With the new space freed up by your organisation efforts, look over your stuff again and consider whether there’s anything you could put in a more accessible place to reduce the activation energy of starting. I put some of my crochet stuff near my computer so I can do it while I’m in meetings, for example.

This is a great list for ableist terms . https://www.autistichoya.com/p/ableist-words-and-terms-to-avoid.html I’m disabled in multiple ways and there were a few on here that caused me to re-evaluate my lexicon.

A list has limited use because language evolves, and so do people, and on top of that, context is everything — but it can be a good place to start

I think I would probably be a jerk a few times, and it would escalate until I hurt someone unthinkingly, and seeing the results of that would shock me back to reality and I’d feel so uncomfortable with myself that I’d hopefully go back to being less of a jerk.

To be fair, in many cases, the observable behaviour of things is different at scale. A single water molecule has different properties to a cup of water, in much the same way that a high density crowd of people (greater than 4 people per square meter) starts to behave as a fluid.

I study biochemistry and I’ll never stop finding it neat how when you get down to the teensy tiny level, all the rules change. That’s basically what quantum physics is, a different ruleset which is always “true”, so to speak, but it’s only relevant when you’re at the nano scale

I suppose what I’m saying is that I agree with you, that fathoming scope is difficult, but I’m suggesting that this is a property of the world inherently getting being a bit fucky at different scales, rather than a problem with human perception.

Man, I love internet nerds