EldritchFeminity
@EldritchFeminity@lemmy.blahaj.zone
- Comment on Why are they different shapes? 1 week ago:
Combine the two ideas and make cheesy garlic bread with them.
- Comment on it's right there 😖 1 week ago:
Put a bucket over his head and you can take the entire set.
- Comment on Being Trans Isn't Normal or Part of Nature...or is it...? 1 week ago:
Gay, lesbian, etc. are sexualities, which has nothing specifically to do with gender per se. Gender is a performance we do based upon what our culture expects of us based on specific labels and (often physical) traits. Think “goth girl” or “punk” or something. When given a label like that, you probably thought of a specific set of physical traits and behaviors, including fashion, hairstyle, and makeup. That’s gender in a nutshell. Sexuality is more “if not attractive, then why x shaped?”
It gets complicated because people really like to put things into an either/or box when life is so much more than a or b. Originally, sexualities were defined as two states: heterosexual and homosexual. Hetero, meaning other, means an attraction to the other sex (generally thought of as the opposite sex/gender due to a lack of information on intersex folk and the aforementioned two boxes appeal in the human psyche). And the opposite would be homosexual - an attraction to people of the same sex. But this is an elementary level of understanding, like when we teach kids about the 3 states of matter and leave out things like plasma.
Because people have preferences and all straight men aren’t attracted to 100% of women, and then there’s lesbians and gay men and bisexuals and then there’s how gender presentation plays into our attraction like with butch vs femme lesbians or how men and women both can appreciate a girl who could bench press them. And then some people are into femboys and women only while some are into men that belong in the Scottish Highlands wearing kilts and claymores and women who own fainting couches and ball gowns and wouldn’t even glance at anything outside of those 2 groups, and then some people are only attracted to specific body parts (dick or pussy) but are less strict on who those parts are attached to, and then there’s the people who don’t care about anything beyond personality, and then…the list goes on and on.
And then it gets even more complicated when you start talking about romantic attraction, because that’s entirely its own spectrum as well. People can be romantically attracted to the same or different genders compared to sexual attraction. Some people are sexually attracted to multiple genders but could only see themselves dating one specific gender, some people experience no romantic attraction at all or no sexual attraction, or even both together. The human brain is a massive mess and there’s simply no way to easily quantify the human experience - if we even can at all. I saw a post recently that went something like “the brain is 3lbs of mostly fat puppeting a meat suit by using less electricity than a light bulb, and if it can hallucinate algebra into existence then I’m fully willing to believe that it’s also capable of identifying its own gender” and I think that sums it up pretty nicely.
- Comment on Circumcision classed as possible child abuse in draft CPS document 2 weeks ago:
I completely agree and experienced it myself (missing what you don’t have). I just meant in the terms of a bunch of replies that I’ve gotten in here to the tune of “I’m a cis guy who was circumcised at birth and it doesn’t bother me at all.”
There’s the possibility of something akin to how some trans people experience permanent low-grade dysphoria and it affects their frame of reference. Basically, if we were to map the feelings of dysphoria out on a scale from 0 to 10, the average person would be at a 0 under normal circumstances, but some people are born at a 2 or a 3. So to them, a 5 would be the average person’s 3, and experiencing a 0 would be like getting glasses for the first time and realizing that trees have individual leaves and this is how everybody else sees the world. If you can only reach a 6 on a scale of how enjoyable an experience is while the average person can hit a 10, how would you have the frame of reference to know that you are or aren’t missing something when you’ve never felt a 7 or above? So these people saying that they weren’t negatively affected could just be mistaking a 6 for a 10 and there’s no way for us or them to know for certain.
- Comment on Circumcision classed as possible child abuse in draft CPS document 2 weeks ago:
I’m trans and I brought it up for a couple of reasons: first, Weevil brought up gender affirming surgeries in regards to trans people as part of some slippery slope argument. Secondly, trans medical issues tie very well into my exceptions that I mentioned in the second part of my comment - medical necessity and consent.
You may not have any issues with being circumcised, but there are plenty of men out there who do. To the point that there’s a “foreskin restoration” process that involves using clamps and rubber bands to yank on the skin of your penis until it stretches into some resemblance of a foreskin. It doesn’t reverse any of the consequences of circumcision, but some men at least feel less dysphoric after doing it. I myself thought that my dysphoria was related to being circumcised before I learned words like “transgender” and “gender dysphoria.” Still not a fan of what was done to me, though. Enough to weigh in on conversations around the subject in the way that I have.
Generally, I think it’s a situation of “people don’t miss what they never knew they had.” There’s plenty of data from men who were circumcised later in life reporting a loss of sensitivity and difficulty with sexual pleasure and satisfaction post procedure compared to before. And this is why I compare it to being forced through an unwanted puberty. Permanent physical changes that you do not consent to. A baby cannot consent to having their genitals permanently altered. And a trans kid unable to access puberty blockers is as capable of preventing an unwanted puberty as a baby is capable of fighting a doctor/Rabbi/priest/etc.
Now for the exceptions: consent I’ve kinda already talked about, but if you understand the consequences and want to do it, I don’t see why you shouldn’t be able to anymore than somebody who wants to get a Prince Albert or a Jacob’s Ladder. And the big one, medical necessity. There are a number of reasons that it would be medically necessary, and they’re all valid regardless of the age at which they appear. Phimosis is a real thing that can hit at pretty much any age up to post puberty. I once worked with a poor kid who had to get it done for that reason at the age of 18. Although, based on a comment I saw elsewhere in this thread about the number of babies who die from UTIs related to circumcision, there may be some room to talk about what strictly is and isn’t “medically necessary.”
Basically, if your doctor says that you need to for health reasons or it’s your own informed choice, go right ahead. But if you’re forcing it on a baby due to peer pressure from the dead or because of some sense of “my dad hit me and I turned out fine,” then that isn’t right and should not be considered kosher.
- Comment on Circumcision classed as possible child abuse in draft CPS document 2 weeks ago:
They’d probably respond similarly to telling somebody who was circumcised without consent and doesn’t like it that it’s just a harmless cosmetic surgery. Or telling a trans person forced to experience the wrong puberty that it isn’t a big deal/we can’t allow trans kids to go on puberty blockers because they might regret it (despite the fact that all the effects of puberty blockers are reversed by…stopping taking them).
Source: am trans, was forced through the wrong puberty, and was circumcised without consent as a baby and hate it. Did you know that there are people out there so traumatized by being circumcised as a baby that they willingly use clamps and rubber bands to slowly stretch out the skin on their dick until it looks like a foreskin again? The info on how to do it is easily accessible online and the tools are easily purchased. I know this because I discovered it and considered it not long before I discovered words like “transgender” and “gender dysphoria” and found out that there were words for feelings that I did not have the language to understand before.
I used those specific body parts as examples for a few reasons. Namely, they’re all designed to protect mucus membranes and keep them moist, like the foreskin. Removing them would also be permanent and result in negative effects - like how circumcision causes nerve damage and desensitization. There really isn’t a great comparison, and those who had it done as a kid don’t know what they’re missing. We do have plenty of reports from people who had it done later in life, though, and there’s plenty of data on the loss of sensitivity and struggle with sexual pleasure and satisfaction post-circumcision.
I guess the closest thing would be if people were ritualistically shooting lasers into their babies’ eyes to damage the lenses so that they needed glasses or something. Some people just like the way that glasses look. I knew a guy who didn’t need glasses and wore a pair without any lenses in them just because he liked the way that they looked. But given the choice between glasses and 20/20 vision, I’d personally take the 20/20 vision, thanks.
- Comment on Circumcision classed as possible child abuse in draft CPS document 2 weeks ago:
It is not a “harmless cosmetic procedure.” It’s more akin to ritual scarification or removing something like a lip, eyelid, or nose. It destroys nerve endings, causing a permanent loss of sensitivity, and the head of the penis is a mucus membrane that the foreskin is meant to keep moist and protect from damage. Most people had it done before they were old enough to be aware of the difference, but those who had it done later in life often report things like a reduction in the ability to feel sexual pleasure.
Medically necessary circumcision or somebody choosing to have it done is one thing, forcing an amputation onto a baby is entirely different. It’s like forcing a trans person to go through the wrong puberty: unwanted and permanent physical changes that can take years of therapy and medical procedures to heal from.
- Comment on Circumcision classed as possible child abuse in draft CPS document 2 weeks ago:
If you want to go the teeth route, removing the molars or canines is a better comparison. There are medical reasons why this might be necessary, but to rip out a baby’s teeth that have yet to grow in with a pair of pliers for ritualistic reasons is not the same thing at all.
Circumcision destroys nerve endings and can cause permanent scarring, potentially dramatically reducing the ability to feel sensations. The head of the penis is also a mucus membrane and the foreskin is meant to both keep it moist and protect it from damage. Have you ever had dry eyes or the inside of your nose dry out? Imagine cutting off the outside of your nostrils or part of your eyelids so that it was like that all the time.
If somebody wants to have it done, that’s fine. That’s their choice to make, just like getting a tattoo or piercings is. But forcing it on somebody without it being strictly necessary for medical reasons is cruel. It can be very traumatic. If it wasn’t, “foreskin restoration” - the act of using clamps, pulleys, and rubber bands to stretch the skin of the penis out into a fake foreskin - wouldn’t be a thing.
- Comment on 'Microslop' is heading for Edge – major browser redesign is inspired by Copilot, and it's already seriously unpopular 3 weeks ago:
Everybody and their mother will have recommendations on their favorite flavor of Linux, but as somebody else about to make the switch with similar priorities as you, I’d suggest also taking a look at Bazzite. It’s built on the same distro as the SteamOS and comes in at least two flavors for what your use case is. One of its selling points is that it’s an “immutable” version of Linux, which means that it’s a lot harder to accidentally break it as a new user.
- Comment on What's it going to take to truly stop the US? 3 weeks ago:
Netanyahu actually would’ve been another good comparison.
My comment wasn’t a “Russia = bad” deflection, but a comment about world leaders’ response to the invasion of Ukraine and what I expect their response to the continuing aggression of the Trump regime to be: strongly worded letters and not much else.
Also, let’s get our facts straight on the genocide in Palestine. The US hasn’t put any boots on the ground yet, despite Trump’s promises from earlier in the year. As of the time that I’m writing this, the US is enabling the genocide but not an active participant. That could change tomorrow or may have already changed, but we don’t need to make things up about the government when there’s already so many evils to point at. They’re already war criminals, we wouldn’t want them to get off on account of making false accusations.
- Comment on What's it going to take to truly stop the US? 3 weeks ago:
I haven’t watched the Simpsons in over a decade so I don’t get the reference, but my point was the similarity between the world’s response to the invasion of Ukraine and the likely response to continuing US aggression.
A lot of strongly worded letters and not much else is what I expect.
- Comment on What's it going to take to truly stop the US? 3 weeks ago:
What’s it going to take to truly stop Russia?
- Comment on What's it going to take to truly stop the US? 3 weeks ago:
Don’t forget about the Sword of Damocles that is the lack of social safety nets. Also, political ignorance is a feature, not a bug in our political system. A quarter of the American population would kill the rest because they think the regime is “hurting the right kind of people” and not anybody that they care about. This also includes the minorities who will soon learn that being “one of the good ones” just means that they go to the showers later rather than sooner.
- Comment on Humans May Be Able to Grow New Teeth Within Just 4 Years 4 weeks ago:
I’ve seen one of these talked about before, and the mechanism seemed to be in that one that there’s a gene in our DNA that triggers us to grow new teeth (that’s how we replace our baby teeth with adult teeth), but that that gene turns off after we grow in our set of adult teeth. It’s apparently the same gene that allows sharks to grow new teeth. What the drug does is it turns that gene back on, allowing us to grow new teeth to replace lost ones.
This might not be the same study though, as I’ve also seen one previously years ago that was about a drug that turned on a gene in our teeth to allow them to repair the enamel in them and fill in cavities by putting biodegradable gauze soaked in the drug inside a cavity and letting the tooth do the rest.
- Comment on w e a k n e s s 4 weeks ago:
When you ask a Mechanicus player what their type is: 316 stainless.
- Comment on Why Are Cars Getting Rid Of Android Auto? 4 weeks ago:
The bigger and more intrusive screens have gotten, the more sales of new cars have flagged. People are sick of them, and lawmakers are starting to catch up on regulating physical controls back into vehicles.
The last time I bought a car one of my stipulations was a car no newer than 2016 because that was the last year that RAV4s had the small screens in the middle of the dashboard instead of mounted practically on the windshield, and the guy at the dealership that I talked to said that practically everybody who came in looking to buy a car had similar sentiments. People generally hate the big, intrusive screens, it’s just that car makers aren’t making any other options and then claim that that’s what people want.
- Comment on Grindr CEO Says App Will Be “AI-First” and “Not in the Business of Politics” 4 weeks ago:
You beat me to it. I was gonna say “non-political” means “make it harder to spot and avoid the Republicans”.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Freud would’ve creamed his pants were he still alive.
- Comment on Delicious rocks 4 weeks ago:
That just means that you aren’t a fossil (yet). Give it a century or two.
- Comment on Anti-Palestinian Billionaires Can Now Control What TikTok Users See 5 weeks ago:
And Republicans claim that the US is a Christian nation all the time, despite half the Founding Fathers being either atheists or at least agnostic and specifically and expressly stating that the US is not beholden to any one religion.
I am in no way defending Putin or Stalin, but just because he claims to be honoring a former leader doesn’t mean that he actually is. So long as it suits the propaganda narrative, people like him, the Republicans, and Israel will claim whatever they want about history.
- Comment on Anti-Palestinian Billionaires Can Now Control What TikTok Users See 5 weeks ago:
Maybe you should learn the meaning of words before you start using them. Somebody responding to what you say isn’t censorship. Not even close.
Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences.
- Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux 5 weeks ago:
Quite honestly, I don’t think the average person even knows what open source means. They just know that Mozilla, like every other company, is shoving AI into their product, and that AI has either been useless or actively harmful to their user experience.
- Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux 5 weeks ago:
I mean, I bet they’d make a killing off of Firefox themed thigh highs…
- Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux 5 weeks ago:
People don’t trust that it can be truly turned off and that it won’t act maliciously in some way. That’s really the crux of the whole saga. We’re at a point where phone companies are getting survey results that say that 80% of users either don’t care about AI nor use it or find that it actively makes their user experience worse.
- Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux 5 weeks ago:
I think the big defining question is what will the AI features that they will implement do exactly and how will they run. If it’s something that runs in the background (even as unintrusive as the summaries on a search engine like DDG), then it’s opt out by default as it’s constantly running whether you want it to or not. If it specifically and exclusively runs when you hit the button to activate it and doesn’t run at any other time, then I’d say it’s unequivocally opt in. And regardless of what a company says that their software will do, at this point I won’t believe it until somebody has done a full teardown and discerned what exactly it does behind the scenes. I’ve seen enough nonsense like the Epic Games Store accessing your browser history and recording keyboard inputs or whatever the other absurd incident was.
- Comment on Firefox Will Ship with an "AI Kill Switch" to Completely Disable all AI Features - 9to5Linux 5 weeks ago:
If it starts reading pages or doing things without you pushing a button, that’s an issue.
And therein lies the rub. The question is whether or not people trust that it won’t be doing that regardless of whether or not you hit the kill switch.
- Comment on Indie Game Awards Disqualifies Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Due To Gen AI Usage 5 weeks ago:
Except, right now, they absolutely are. The tools are largely as you describe - though thinking about it, I think I’d describe it more as an airbrush vs a paint brush - but that’s not the way that upper management sees it for the most part, and not how the average supporter of GenAI sees it even if they don’t recognize that that’s their view. Both of these groups see it as a way to cut costs by reducing manpower, even if the GenAI folk don’t recognize that that’s what their stance is (or refuse to accept it). It’s the same as in the programming side of the conversation: vibe coders and prompt generators being hired instead of skilled professionals who can actually use the tools where they’re truly useful. Why pay an artist or programmer to do the work when I can just ask an LLM trained on stolen work to do it for me instead.
I read a great post probably a year ago now from somebody who works for a movie studio on why the company has banned hiring prompters. The short of it is, they hired on a number of prompters to replace some jobs that would normally be filled by artists as a test to see if they could reduce their staff while maintaining the same levels of production. What they found was that prompters could produce a massive volume of work very quickly. You ask the team for pictures of a forest scene and the artists would come back in a week with a dozen concepts each while the prompters had 50 the next day. But, if you asked them to take one of their concept pieces and do something like remove the house in it or add people in the foreground, they’d come back the next day with 50 new concept pieces but not the original. They couldn’t grasp the concept of editing and refining an image, only using GenAI to generate more with a new set of prompt parameters, and therefore were incapable of doing the work needed that an artist could do.
A feel-good story for artists showing what AI is actually capable of and what it isn’t, except for one thing: the company still replaced artists with AI before they learned their lesson, and that’s the phase most of the world is in right now and will probably continue to be in until the bubble bursts. And as Alanah Pierce so eloquently put it when talking about the record setting year over year layoffs in the gaming industry (each year has been worse than during the 2008 financial crash): “Most of those people will never work in games again. There’s just too many people out of work and not enough jobs to go around.” These companies currently in the fuck around phase will find out eventually, but by then it won’t matter for many people. They’ll never find a job in their field in time and be forced into other work. Art is already one of the lowest paying jobs for the amount of effort and experience required. Many artists who work on commissions do so for less than minimum wage, and starting wages in the game industry for artists haven’t increased since I was looking at jobs in the field 15 years ago.
- Comment on The AI Backlash Is Here: Why Backlash Against Gemini, Sora, ChatGPT Is Spreading in 2025 - Newsweek 1 month ago:
Also add “-AI” without the quotes to the end of your search. Booleans still work with DDG at least, I don’t know if they do on Google anymore.
- Comment on It Only Takes A Handful Of Samples To Poison Any Size LLM, Anthropic Finds 1 month ago:
So you’re saying that the ChatGPT’s and Stable Diffusions of the world, which operate on maximizing profit by scraping vast oceans of data that would be impossibly expensive to manually label even if they were willing to pay to do the barest minimum of checks, are the most vulnerable to this kind of attack while the actually useful specialized LLMs like those used by doctors to check MRI scans for tumors are the least?
Please stop, I can only get so erect!
- Comment on You could throw a dart blindfolded in 1998 and hit a new legendary game every time. 1 month ago:
