Jul (they/she)

It’s not that a friendship is a separate thing, though. And many of my flings or shorter term romantic relationships end up in platonic-only relationships. But it’s the developing of those platonic connections during the other relationships that ends up being valuable later. Something as simple as having a good conversation as you cuddle in the aftermath can trigger a bond.

And topping is definitely a burden in some senses as it requires you to act first, but I usually see it more as pleasing the other person rather than taking pleasure from the other person. Equally, bottoming requires giving over control, but should include more than just receiving the actions of the top. There needs to be some amount of comfort in communicating while in the act so you both are getting your needs met. The bottom is responsible for creating that comfort and opening the communication by responding honestly to the acts of the top. And the top then adapting what they take.

My point being, as a switch myself, I rarely find good tops or bottoms, but with the right person it is actually a dynamic role. I find the best sex is with other switches where we take turns. Of course this requires a more “feminine” type of sex that estrogen made more easy for me to get into where sex is an opera, not a single scene. That’s where building the platonic connections can help a lot. It takes time to write not just an opera, but a good opera.

And yeah I agree. I have a therapist who is also non-binary and neurodivergent like me, and that helps a ton. I never got anything out of therapy until I understood these things existed in me and sought out treatment by those who understand it at least in part. These traits require much different kinds of therapy, IMHO.

And as for what types of men, I’d say, those who are good at communication of their needs as well as listening to mine. Or at least the lack of open communication about emotions and needs is the most common reason I don’t date cis-men.

Yeah, I’m aggressively non-hierarchical in my relationships. I feel like hierarchy breeds resentment, so I don’t have relationships beyond acquaintanceships with people in hierarchical relationships, so anchors don’t generally work well in that. Not that it’s not possible in some senses, but it’s unlikely to manifest in a healthy way IMHO.

Makes it really difficult to find others who have similar views. Plus being AuDHD creates issues with my socializing style.

But it results in more emotionally driven support when you don’t have to prioritize one person when another is in desperate need of something I could otherwise easily offer if I hadn’t spent all of my spoons on an explicit primary or anchor partner. But that’s just what works best for me.

It’s rough when you’re in a needy phase. It may be worth reducing the number of partners so you have some energy to create a real partnership which requires more effort. I like to break relationships into components. Usually acquaintance/platonic, romantic, and sexual. Each relationship can be any combination. Acquaintanceship is just general hanging out without really caring deeply about the other person. The platonic/friendship part replaces that and tends to be the hardest because it’s more about solid connection, really caring what happens to the other person, supporting them and being supported by them when things get difficult as well as enjoying the connection when things are good. This is something I’ve noticed most cis-men don’t have with each other due to societal toxic masculinity.

Romantic is then more about individual acts of romance, planning romantic dates, making out for long periods, that kind of thing. And it requires some level of physical and/or emotional attraction usually and is about fulfilling those kinds of needs over a medium term. It is best when the types of needs of both parties align, so you’re fulfilling theirs at the same time they’re fulfilling yours.

And sexual is obviously more fleeting and is better with physical attraction and matching needs, but mostly is just about fulfilling very immediate needs.

Each relationship has some combination of those things. But I find that I need at least one with strong platonic connection or I get lonely. That requires energy in both directions over the longterm to work, so it’s the most rare. These you really need to nurture as they are the most valuable IMHO, and easiest to lose if you take more than give. Sexual you can find easily in clubs or whatever and can be fleeting, and romantic takes a lot more to find, but tends to be easy and shorter lasting without the platonic.

So dating cis-men tends to lack the platonic part in my experience due to toxic societal norms. So although I’m pan, I also tend not to date cis-men.

Didn’t see mention of it for sure but are you neurodivergent? Seems typical of big city friend making issues for neurodivergent people. I’m AuDHD with very good masking skills, even from myself for most of my life. Getting treatment for the ADHD has helped a lot vs just treatment for generalized anxiety which was just a symptom. But that’s a bigger conversation.

Overall, the best thing for me was finding an extrovert who created groups and latching onto them making sure to put a lot of effort into showing up for their events so I would get invited regularly and eventually become an essential member of the group. I had 3 of them going for a while. I stuck with the group that had been around for a long time and they mostly survived COVID. The other groups, one is coming back, sort of, but timing has been difficult with all that’s going on with my transition.

The one that survived happens to be a Wiccan group. Most are atheists, actually, and so the ceremony is more just a way to bring people together and connect with nature a little rather than the supernatural stuff and is always optional with this group. But Wicca is also very feminist compared to all of the major religions, which is a positive. And this group in particular doesn’t enforce gender roles. They don’t care if a man or woman or enby becomes the ceremonial May Queen or King for example. I’m agender even though I’m transitioning to feminine physical parts due to physical dysphoria issues. So not having strict gender categories helps me a lot.

Anyway, my point is, find a group with a strong extrovert at the center that has regular meetups whether that’s Wiccan sabat holidays or monthly meetings, or whatever, try to find one that is already meeting regularly. It might be harder to make your way into an established group, but it’s more likely to stick around longer term which is more important. Then be very careful to show up for events early on. Plan things so you’re sure to have enough energy for mingling. And most important, make sure you show up if you RSVP. Bring reliable will make you an essential member of the group over time.

As for the group itself, it may take attending several to find one that is accepting of you, but keep trying and don’t get discouraged by the first time. It takes showing up a few times and building familiarity for it to feel more comfortable.

Yes, and that applies to minorities as well. Trans people don’t hate cis people in a way that they want to forcibly convert, torture, rape, and murder cis people like the outspoken groups of cis people do to trans people. They just want to live a peaceful life.

All valuable data should be backed up off site in “cold storage” type places. It’s not that expensive compared to the production storage.

I have a pretty aggressive ad blocking and reddit, YouTube, etc. Don’t like that. Also, I dumped most of the social media that explicitly spies on you or implemented policies that LGBTQ+ and immigrant hate speech is excluded from their moderation topics and thus allowed. That all was motivation enough for me.

I do still often need to see some posts for information that is only there for the most part. So I use the LibRedirect plugin for Firefox/Ironfox so i don’t have to log in for read-only purposes.

It’s been used as an excuse to lay off people, but not the real reason. They were looking at ways to short term boost stock prices since stock buy backs caused their stock prices to increase, but that boost is fading, they needed another artificial boost to profit to maintain those stock prices.

I can’t do it this year (recovering from some surgery), but last year I did a punk, Anime inspired bunny girl. Big pufy 80s rock styled wig, spiked collar, ripped black shirt with tulle under, tight black pleather pants, and chonky combat boots I added chains around. There also was a belt with silver grommets all around and I hung a chain all the way around. And hanging from that were a couple of potion bottles that I filled with booze and purple food coloring and cake glitter. And had floppy black and purple ears and a black bunny tail. Plus dark makeup.

Came out really well. I like to make my own costumes like that rather than buying, but sometimes it’s a mix of bough and extra accessories.

I mean that applies yo a lot large corporations. They’ve mostly stopped innovating and started cutting costs in order to squeeze out some money from the company before it dies. And I’m sure she knows that. It’s likely that she’s there specifically to destroy the remainder of the company. After all, true information is bad for fascism. Gotta keep the people in a constant state of poverty and lack of services, and then blame all of that on some other small, vulnerable group, so their followers will stay distracted and one-issue voters will vote for things that are bad for them as long as were torturing ,murdering, and/or deporting the people they think are the cause of their problems rather than the ones they voted for.

It’s an ideological issue. Some people need someone they feel superior to to distract them from how the people who consider themselves to be better than them are abusing them, by saying that some other group is actually responsible for the problems they are actually causing.

Thus the rich, conservatives in charge who are cutting jobs and creating immense inflation by allowing anticompetitive behavior by large corporations they make money from, blame the losses on immigrants. And immigrants have no way to fight back as they have no rights.

Ideological issues are more difficult to use as a distraction these days. It’s just harder to convince people that their inaction in failing to repress or murder people who are just trying to live their life will cause their deity or whatever to be disappointed or disown them and keep them out of paradise or whatever they believe. So, it’s not as effective to just say they’re evil, anymore, they need to invent things those people are doing to them even if they aren’t doing anything in reality. Problem is it’s becoming more and more apparent that trans people aren’t actually a threat, so they need to invent things like statistics saying that 50% of major mass shootings are done by trans people by inventing criteria to make only 8 or 9 of the thousands of mass shootings to be considered “major”, and thus the 4 mass shootings they found that were by trans people become 50%. As long as they keep repeating those numbers and isolating their audience from real statistics, it’s easy to maintain control that way. But the internet makes that difficult these days. Plus the economic issues are much more common among conservatives than having trans children. And trans people aren’t quite as historically repressed as POC who were slaves or immigrants who were running from horrible conditions, so its more difficult to keep them repressed. Same was true of gay, lesbian, and bi people a couple of decades ago. They were repressed, but not as economically repressed as POC and immigrants making them more likely to fight back and easier for conservatives to identify with.

And the US supreme court is about to start hearing some cases that will allow them to declare state laws banning conversion therapy to be unconstitutional. It’s really sad that conservatives will torture and murder children to create an enemy for fascism to bring people together against whether its LGBTQ+ children or immigrant children.

Not really my thing. I definitely want to have as natural of a body as close to what it was supposed to be as possible, but with the way the fetus’s life is now given priority over a mother’s, it’s just not worth it to me.

When they absorbed their only real competition and instead of using their advantages, just got rid of them, I knew it was the end of good subs and dubs very soon. I don’t want literal translations I’m subs without explanations or AI voiced dubs with poor acting ability or plain monotonous speech like they used to be a few decades ago. I want people to be there translating more than just j individual words.

Probably just to try to make Garmin’s product less useful in the short term while the case drags out. Or as a way to get Garmin to acquire them. Strava basically seems to have bought up some competitors that were failing and they have been on the way downhill. So at this stage usually these companies start cost cutting and using any means necessary to increase their perceived value for sale. This gives Garmin an incentive to buy them as that would end the lawsuit and they’d then acquire some additional defensive patents.

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Yeah, software patents in the US especially, have become a way for companies to either kill competition, or make buying up ridiculous patents and suing for infringement their primary source of income.

Primary issue is the patent office has few officers that are technical enough to understand the overlap of the specific industry and software. So, they tend to just allow anything, especially from larger companies that they’re told to assume have the expertise if they don’t since their load is too large to have time to learn new stuff and truly research if something is obvious or not.

Make sure to do a test during peak and a test during trough.

I do that and then average them. They are always significantly different and i use patches which give a more steady dose than injections.

Also, I’m not entirely convinced that the values most doctors who are not specialists use are correct for trans people. If you aren’t seeing an endocrinologist with at least a little specialty in sex hormones, I’d do that and see if they can recommend the right levels for your body rather than the general numbers that were always very conservative, and came from cis women’s levels rather than what trans people need since there’s usually no funding to research trans people.

I was lucky enough to start HRT with a general practitioner with a lot of experience with trans people during her residency and most of her career. But she moved on to another specialty due to the difficulty making ends meet as a good doctor. I’m on the lookout myself for an endo with good experience to consult one of these days.

Then that should be the questions asked, not some arbitrary “sex” question with only some of the possible answers as options.

It should be apparent, especially now, that those things never were never enough to determine these things anyway. There are tons of types of intersex people which are not an insignificant percentage of the population.

So, there are some things that loosely follow AGAB for the majority of people, but the assumptions made based on that, end up causing more trouble for those whose bodies don’t conform. And that’s not a small portion of the population. Basically between intersex people and trans people who have had HRT and/or surgery are at very, very conservative estimates, around 3%, but since there’s no finding and it’s now unsafe to track even in the US and UK and other western countries, it’s likely much higher in reality. These people are poorly served by the current system of AGAB only.

For me, many of my lab tests show abnormal because it should ask what is my body’s primary sex hormone or ask to select for the specific test, what range is normal for my body if they want to get it really right. And honestly, body weight is more impactful on a lot of things anyway, why aren’t we asking that of every person (rhetorical question, but essentially asking if you were born with or the doctors modified your body at birth to have something that looked closer to a penis than a vulva, should be just as uncouth)? Also, insurance won’t pay for gynecology/urology kind of stuff or mammograms or prostate cancer screenings even if you have the right body parts to need it, if your AGAB is wrong without a long and drawn out process each and every time to prove you have the right part. Heck it’s not even good for marketing if you have the wrong one listed because it has to be your AGAB rather than the gender you present as and thus the high profit products you’re most likely to use.

So it really has a low usefulness compared to asking more relevant questions whether for medical or commercial reasons.

Again, adverse effects doesn’t mean death, the fact that the description you posed has that last sentence is the alarmist thing and only applies to certain drugs, of course.

The difference in absorption rates between oral and rectal administration can be as much as double or triple or more in some cases. For example I remember reading a study from the 70s or 80s on methylprednisolone. The absorption rate orally was about 90%, but rectally was only around 35% likely due to bacteria in the rectum decomposing the drug before it could make it into the blood.

So, over the long term the difference in dose could have a significant impact on health. Getting 3 times more or less of any drug, even something relatively safe, will likely mean “adverse effects”. With estradiol this could mean greatly increased side effects for overdose like nipple soreness or mood swings, or greatly decreased effect for underdose meaning testosterone takes over again and hair loss and body hair growth restart. These are “adverse effects”, but are not likely to be deadly, but still considered overdose/underdose.