Dion Starfire

Both you and the dress look gorgeous. Awesome job!

Funny thing is, a real life Metaverse has existed for over 20 years. The term Metaverse comes from a book called Snow Crash. The game Second Life was designed explicitly to be the Metaverse envisioned in Snow Crash, complete with it’s own economy tied to real life money (as in, if you made enough money in-game, you could cash it out for real-world USD). Companies used to build headquarters in the game world similar to how some do in Fortnite now, even going so far as to hold actual real world business meetings in-game as a form of teleconferencing. After a few high-profile events where live TV broadcasts of in-game events got swarmed by flying dicks, the media lost interest in the game, and companies abandoned the game and moved on to more business-oriented solutions.

I know several people in the kink community who would congratulate and be enthusiastically happy for someone who said the first, but would only politely say “congrats” to the second.

You realize that most trans women undergoing HRT have less testosterone in their systems than many of their cisgender competitors, right? Women naturally have some testosterone in their body; if they have PCOS, then they have a lot (in comparison to other cis women). Trans women on HRT take medicine to block testosterone, so while their body might generate the most of all, the amount bioavailable to them after the medicine neutralizes it is less than non-PCOS cis women have. If the sports debate was about testosterone providing an unfair advantage, then we would ban cis women with PCOS from competing, but we don’t.

In the case of teenagers, it’s even simpler - contrary to propaganda, very very few doctors are willing to put a minor on HRT. Instead, they simply give them puberty blockers to delay the onset of puberty until they’re over 18 and can decide for themselves whether to go on HRT or not. So, a 17yo trans girl is developmentally equivalent to a 10yo boy - her muscles are massively under developed compared to any of her cis competitors.

So whether adult or teen, a trans woman winning at sports is not someone with an unfair advantage; rather, it’s someone with a massive disadvantage managing to win despite her handicap.

With root, YouTube URLs will open in the app by default. Without root, they won’t. Otherwise, there’s not a huge difference.

I saw one of these at Target the other day in the $5-and-below section. Except it wasn’t a full phone, it was a nostalgia grab designed to be a wired “headset” for a cell phone with a headphone jack.

This is clearly humor, but for anyone wondering what the actual connection is, it’s that Mark Shuttleworth, the billionaire founder and CEO of Canonical (the company that maintains Ubuntu), is from South Africa. He liked the word, and decided to name his new Debian fork after it.

Now, to figure out how to get an invite to Tildes…

Have you looked into Rebble? I’m still wearing my Time Steel as a daily driver. I’ve yet to find a newer smartwatch that hits all the features I care about.

Simple solution is “resistant damage” - damage taken by burning your life force to power spells can only be healed by natural healing, not magical healing. It’s tracked separately, and similar to subdual damage, you add it together with normal damage to determine if the character reaches 0HP. If you choose to go this route, I suggest that HP not be your primary fuel for spellcasting, but rather have the patron grant a class feature that allows “overcasting” by burning one’s life force to power additional spells after you’ve run out of normal spell slots.