Some random guy online: Hey, wouldn't it be funny if I was a girl? Wouldn't it be hilarious? Like, as a joke. I would wear a dress and be pretty and people would think I'm beautiful. Haha, doesn't that crack you up?

Trans women: You say stuff like this all the time, maybe you're a woman? You could transition.

Dipshits, every time: HOLY FUCK can you people NOT? HE can pick HIS gender and clearly HE is comfortable as a MAN. He's joking anyway, he said so. Let people do what they want and don't pressure them!!!

Same random person: I'm a girl now. I realized all those jokes I made were covering up my actual feelings.

Trans women: ...

Dipshots: Wow! That really came out of left field. Of COURSE we support you, king. Haha, I mean queen.

A lot of people who are scared to come out do it "as a bit" because that's the only way they can get away with it. It's terrifying, especially if you have an online presence, to come out as a trans woman. But if it's a joke? If you let everyone point and laugh at you, and maybe get the stray compliment? Well, that's different. That's safe. It's a little bit of what you're looking for without having to confront anything difficult about who you are.

Of course, the more you do it, the more you want to do it. The more it's how you want to be, the more it's really you. Well, then that laughter that you asked for starts to chafe. It stops being funny and it just hurts.

Maybe, just maybe, trans women are implying someone is an egg or that they should just transition so it doesn't have to hurt, or at least not for nearly as long. It's not a joke for us. We want our sisters to fucking live.

A good friend of mine came out because I recognized that they were experiencing a lot of dysphoria and I brought up the idea that they might be trans. This was even before I was trans. You can be delicate about it if you need to, sure, but it's almost always better to put the idea in someone's head.

Someone being stubborn is their own problem.

Dudes healthcare is so fake. My ADHD meds are $940 without insurance. But they gave me a website of "coupons" which straight up looks like a scam website, and I got it today for $60! Just a coupon from a random website and it was $900 cheaper. America, I am confusion!! America explain!!

For all my uninsured judys out there it's for Walgreens only: walgreens.rxsense.com

as a pharmacy technician i can share with you some websites that give you those "coupons" for your meds!

goodrx is the most well known one, but if i'm trying to find the cheapest price for a patient i compare it to scriptcycle, and use whichever is offering the best price. you just type in the medication (PLEASE make sure you're getting the right drug, dosage, and quantity) and your zip code and they will spit out some offers for you

some pharmacies may have their own discount card to compare to as well!

if you are getting a name brand medication, you can also look at the manufacturer's website to see if they offer any evouchers for you to use too

good luck out there 👍

How to Pay Hospital Bills When You’re Flat Broke

God knows… by 架糸

Chassis swap

After the procedure, looking in the mirror filled me with a feeling I had never known before. Recognition. Finally, when I see myself, I see me. The shiny metal, the rubbery elastomer, the dark lines contouring access panels. The dataports and maintenance ways.

A full chassis swap. The procedure I underwent. It's relatively simple on paper. Just take my Processor, Memory, Storage and a few other components, and move them into a new Case. It's relatively common amongst Androids, Simulacra, Drones, and all manner of other created beings.

I, however, was fully human before undergoing the procedure. Which has lead to some complications. I'm still getting used to the decreased latency. A 3ms difference might not seem like a lot, but compared to the 10ms of my new form, the 13ms of a wetware nervous system seems sluggish.

Usually, you have time to ease yourself into things as your components are gradually replaced, but I took the full conversion as soon as possible.

I just couldn't stand waiting any longer.

The physical therapy has been helpful. Re-learning how to walk, how to grab and hold things. Learning that I don't need to breathe anymore, and how to suppress that instinct to free up the memory for other tasks.

They tried to dissuade me. "You know the process is irreversible, right?" "But won't you miss [INSERT HUMAN TRAIT]?"

I know it's permanent. I know that I won't have these things anymore.

That's the point.

I have fully given up my humanity.

And I have never been happier.

why the capitalist gun is inferior

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin (2018), dir. Arwen Curry

The next line of her speech is also great: “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”

ermmmm,,,,,,,,

I love women (´｡• ω •｡`)b

I saw one with an Eddie Van Halen Frankenstrat paint job while on a roadtrip recently and we were fully overcome with laughter for a good 15 or 20 minutes about it and then I went and sent photos of it to a bunch of other people so they could laugh about it too

I saw one IRL on the street and it was like seeing Jar Jar Binks in person or some shit.

I looked it up cuz we saw one in the wild and spent like a solid 10 minutes laughing at it in Florida traffic in the lane next to us.

We wound down the window because there wasn't enough air in the cabin because the laughter was making us all dizzy.

Week later: at crystal beach I saw a guy getting out of a generic Tesla and without realizing I'd done it, I gave him a look and he lowered his head in shame and his posture slumped.

It took me a second to realize what had happened.

This is how I know Elon is cooked

I-

I think that might have been my handiwork?

It's at the very least the exact same model of phone and the jack is in the same spot??!

elvie. elvie what do you mean by this

The year is 2010, I am working on a senior project where I learn to play accordion. As a part of this, I join a local program that lets me sort of volunteer with the EMP/SFM, known today as the Museum of Pop Culture.

One of our primary jobs is that we are responsible for doing preselection of bands for MoPop's all under 21 battle of the bands, and attend all the shows involved. One of said bands has an old telephone handset that they use as a microphone. As a teenager still unable to distinguish between fun gimmick and thoughtful artistic choice, this experience plants a seed that will grow with terrifying rapidity.

I talk about the phone mic I saw a lot. I look up how different kinds of phones are built, and discover that most older phone handsets use what's called a "carbon button microphone", a device for capturing sound so simple that the only way to really damage it is to smash the thing with a hammer. The seed has begun to germinate.

2010 is one of the final, gasping years of the Radio Shack franchise. I think the decline of Radio Shack makes sense for a lot of reasons, but it's also emblematic of a cultural shift that I can't get over to this day. Any child in 2010 can acquire the parts required to fix a toaster, microwave, radio, or to build a Tesla Coil capable of broadcasting electricity 15 or so feet at the local Radio Shack, provided they have the money, time, and sick fascination with electronics or their own narrow understanding of communism. It is downright trivial for that child in 2010 to acquire a 1/4" jack, some wire, and ensure that yes, their father is in possession of a soldering iron. I ask my dad if we have a working telephone headset that I can render inoperable for use with a phone, and he obliges.

The beauty of a carbon button microphone is that in addition to sounding like you're radioing in from the antarctic, is that it's basically impossible to wire up to a jack incorrectly. The humble quarter inch jack doesn't carry electricity to power things, it's only job is to complete a circuit capable of turning mechanical wiggles into electromagnetic ones. I disassemble the phone, disconnect the phone jack present, and dispose of the speaker. To save myself having to drill a new hole in the handset, I install the quarter inch jack into the space where the phone jack originally was housed. I can tell that there won't be enough space on that side for both the inserted patch cable (the thing that plugs guitars into amplifiers) AND the microphone, so the wiring for that part has to be run through the central body of the phone to the other side.

I am then faced with a decision. See, the phone in question opened up by unscrewing the covers for the speaker and microphone, but the threading on the covers was identical even though the covers weren't. I could choose to place either the ear cover (lots of holes, slightly convex) or the mic cover (a few holes, fairly concave) over the mic. In the end, I decided to keep the mic cover with the microphone, which resulted in them being swapped from their original positions.

The mic got used in a few shows, including my senior project, and I had it at least until the end of college. At some point I decided I was done with the thing as I no longer had a band, and didn't have time to start one again. I think I gave it to Goodwill, either in Washington or Oregon.

I forget about the mic.

Thing is, I knew that phone mic really well. I don't want to say it was like, iconic, or anything, but it was a stupid project I was really proud of, and so I knew it intimately. The phone in that picture:

1) is at the very least the same model of handset that I modified.

2) uses a quarter inch jack that is installed in the same location/angle as the phone jack would be.

3) has the microphone and speaker caps switched from their normal positions, assuming there's not a hole for the original phone jack on the side we can't see.

I can't say for certain, but I think someone who knew a little bit about microphone and speaker tech bought my mutilated phone mic at the Goodwill. 🤷🏼‍♀️

holy fuck

"Trans women are actually women for real, not in a metaphorical sense, not in a "anyone can be anything" sense, but genuinely actually make more taxonomic sense to classify in the category of women than any other group" is a position you'll find is pretty radical even in queer spaces

Could you explain this?

A lot of people who'll say "trans women are women" treat it more like a concession that they're making to be nice, rather than a factual observation about the world.

Twitch is gonna start kinda censoring queer people and it would be really helpful if you could read the next few sentences and then also go to a link and click the word vote.

They're implementing a new rule where if you discuss "sensitive social issues" at all you have to flag your streams as such, these issues include things like war and political unrest but also any lgbtq topics (once again our existence is political).

Essentially a streamer will have to choose between never ever mentioning anything queer (or even just discussing their own life if they're queer themselves) or flagging every stream with "sensitive social issues" and scaring away 90% of viewers.

If you have a twitch account you can go here and log in and click vote. They do listen. Please vote.

Hello!

I'm a transfem who wanted to stream outside the corporate space for exactly this kind of reason. Everything is political and we shouldn't have to put up with toothless liberal entertainment in a time of crisis.

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