Reblog This Post To Charge Up The Contraption

Mental Crop Rotation

When farmers grow the same crop too many years in a row, it can leave their soil depleted of minerals and other nutrients that are vital to the health of their fields.

To avoid this, farmers will often alternate the crops that they grow because some plants will use up different minerals (such as nitrogen) while other plants replenish those minerals. This process is known as “crop rotation.”

So the next time you find that you need to step away from a project to work on something else for a while, don’t beat yourself up for “quitting” that project. Give yourself permission to practice “mental crop rotation” to maintain a healthy brain field.

Because I’ve found that when that unnecessary guilt and pressure are removed from the process, a good mental crop rotation can help you feel more energized and invigorated than ever once you’re ready to rotate back to that project.

I think people on here operate on a very weird definition of "conventionally attractive" where anything humanoid is already too normal for them. When society at large is like "if you're not skinny and white and able bodied and cisgender you're basically unfuckable"

last night i had the craziest fucking dream

there was this island off the coast of los angeles called thelena iirc. (sidenote, i didnt know what it was called for the longest time. i pulled out my phone in the dream and used google maps and saw all of the city names and ferry routes) iirc it gained significant popularity and acted as a refuge for many people after some climate disaster killed a lot of the usa, but i also remember the usa being bustling, so thats a continuity error in my dream. the other part of thelena was as a massive experiment by the united states government, as they wanted to see if they should switch the usa over to a socialist nation, as well as switch over to public transit/walkable cities because thelena was relatively small (iirc around the size of los angeles), and was isolated from the mainland, it was a perfect testing ground.

unsurprisingly, thelena socially blew up, with many thousands of people migrating to it, and being a hub for scientific and technological advancement, all in perfect harmony with nature

*sigh* i wish thelena was real

also, some whacky shit happened in that dream.

- there was a pizza hut on thelena and one of the toppings was whole brains

- i had a derelict boeing 737 with broken cockpit windows which i flew around in and fucked around with

- i fought ganondorf (from the legend of zelda) but with horse legs at the beginning of the dream

- one of the ways you can tell if you're in a dream is by noticing text, and if its all weird and moves due to the fact that your brain cant render text, you are in a dream. my brain just didnt do this. thats how i knew it was called thelena (although i might have forgot the exact spelling)

- my brain somehow almost perfectly rendered google maps on my phone? there were a few graphical glitches with nonexistent islands filling up ocean bays and it looked really weird, but other than that my brain perfectly rendered google maps text, zoom, roads, and ferry routes

The Independent

How two trans women ran a legendary underground surgical clinic in a rural barn

The neighbours had no idea. The medical equipment came from eBay. But in a dark time for transgender people, these anarchist medics treated

extremely cool article you should read if you haven’t already

half baked morning rant

I do want to make it clear that the reason I talk about HRT and its biological effects so much is not because HRT or medicalization defines your gender.

Its because, for me personally, the interface of my biology education and my transition was mostly centered around figuring out what sex hormones do. I learned about basic biology principles like DNA organization, gene regulation, cell biology, and physiology in high school and undergrad. Taking that understanding and extending it to the mechanisms that hormones use to change gene regulation, and by extension, the rest of your body broadly, was something I did as my understanding became more complete in later undergrad and grad school. It was the key to me starting my own transition.

Why?

Because it was the first time I realized that the "basic biology" arguments of transphobes were complete and utter bullshit. From that point, it was a cascade. As in, wait, if dynamic changes in gene expression are considered "biological" to them, and I know that isn't true, then why am I believing anything they say about anything else? When they talk about gametes, and try to include infertile cis people in their definitions of biological sex by talking about what gamete you're "intended" to make, what do they even mean? Why does my current gene expression not define that "intent"? And wait, back up, why is the brain suddenly not considered part of our biology? Why are neurological differences suddenly not "biological"? Why can we say someone's thinking patterns aren't "biological"?

Backing up even further, why does any of this matter more than psychological gender, or sociological gender? If the way we navigate society is gendered, that affects a lot of our lives, and we're just throwing that away?

Basically, being educated about how deep the biological changes of HRT really go was the first domino to fall when I worked through my internalized transphobia.

This is one of many reasons why I hate, hate HATE the concession that uninformed allies and even many trans people themselves give: "well NO ONE is saying that you can change your biological sex, sex and gender are completely unrelated, sex is binary and gender isn't!!!!!"

Well. I am saying that you can change your "biological" sex, I am saying that biological sex isn't binary, and I am saying that misunderstanding of those points has set back transgender advocacy. It makes medical decisions surrounding us less informed, it poisons conversations about how we interact with society, and it makes trans people feel like their gender and sex are less "real" than cis people's.

Not to mention the horrific way it discards intersex people from the conversation entirely.

Recently, I've seen this point enter the mainstream a little, by using intersex people and variation of sex in other species as a "counterargument" to "binary biological sex" thinking. It still doesn't sit right with me. One, because it uses intersex people as a prop for trans advocacy while not actually addressing the needs of either group. And two, because it completely disregards that your current biology and physiology is not 100% predestined from birth, and using people who were "born this way" as a prop does absolutely nothing to increase people's acceptance of trans people who change their biology later in life.

Ugh. This got away from me but yeah. That's my sipping coffee ramble for this morning. If anyone wants to add comment or correct me on discourse here, please do. Especially if you're intersex- this is all the observations of a perisex trans woman.

He made her an offer she couldn't refuse

I don’t like being referred to as a boy

Credit: @pet_foolery

Maybe I should embrace the robotgirl vibe and make myself an ordered list of priorities as a decision tree. And then when I am struggling I can look at it and try to use it to decide on a better course of action.

more people would exercise if this culture didn't make it absolute hell