Astarte @0shame@eldritch.cafe

It's crazy that after discovering that dragons definitely used to exist, people started calling them "dinosaurs" and reserved the word "dragon" for the ones that didn't exist.

One of the hot-button questions of our day is whether trans girls should play sports. My opinion? Absolutely not! Here are my reasons:

1. It's a waste of time—Trans girls are usually good at math and science, and they would be squandering their potential if they spent all their time playing sports.

2. They'll get hurt—Trans girls have very low bone density because they use dangerous off-label hormone medications. If they play sports they'll probably end up with broken bones.

3. They'll get their feelings hurt too—Trans girls are known to get dysphoric about the dumbest shit. "Oh, if I were a real girl I wouldn't play Magic the Gathering"—bitch, that's like the least manly hobby I can think of. Can you imagine a trans girl trying to play rugby? It wouldn't matter that she was on the women's team—she'd probably end up becoming a statistic anyway.

4. They'd be lousy players—When they're not inventing insane new kinds of dysphoria, you know what trans girls talk about? "Oh, I wish I didn't have a body," "Oh, I wish my arms and hands were smaller." Yeah, zero athletic potential here.

5. It wouldn't be fair to cis women—They shouldn't have to babysit a bunch of trans girls when they're trying to play sports.

I'm going to continue saying that I live "off-campus" despite not being a student anymore.

Life hack: If you're not ready to adopt a cat, find a roommate who has one.

The most likeable feature of the Jewish religion is that it is practiced by Jewish people.

Future frontend devs are all learning "CS" when they should be learning "CSS."

I find domains ending in ".com" suspicious.

In my youth, everything was all about "male" and "female." Nowadays it's all "fail" and "email." Disgraceful!

Content on the web is ephemeral if you want it to stay around, but permanent if you want it gone.

The court mailed me the order of my legal name change and addressed it to my deadname. Uhh...

Me: Wow, look at this cool recursive function I came up with to solve the problem!

f = (a, n) => n == 1 ? a : a * f(a, n - 1)

**: Am I a joke to you?

One of the underappreciated benefits of being American is that you can act incredibly stupid and arrogant without people realizing that you're just trying to get on their nerves. You can say stuff like...

"So, do you guys make your own laws or do you just copy America's?"

"Wait, so if the U.K. and England are the same thing, why does their government meet in New York?"

"Don't you ever tired of speaking French? Like, when you go home and there are tourists to impress, do you switch to English?"

...and people will just figure "yeah, that's what Americans are like" and then scowl at you.

Overall, I kind of go back and forth about whether money should exist at all. It seems like if we distributed it more evenly (e.g. some people get 2x as much as others, but no one gets 1000x as much as anyone else), it would be a pretty decent way to get people to avoid using more resources than they actually need, and it seems like it could be used to get people on the leftist commune to do the unpleasant jobs like garbage collection instead of everyone doing art therapy. On the other hand, it's alienating for social relations between people to be turned into monetary transactions. Also, if money is used for everything, some people will inevitably make really bad decisions and end up with no money for things they need, and then we'll have to go outside the money system to care for them. So maybe the thing to do is give all the basic necessities freely, but keep money around, with a much more equal distribution, for anything that can be done without.

Also, what's the deal with fucking Ulysses Simpson Grant on the $50 bill? Isn't he generally considered to have been a pretty bad president?

I wish GNU Taler would take off, but it won't. I would reluctantly use Bitcoin if it were possible for me to get it anonymously or spend it, but it's not.

Cash is interesting because to me it symbolizes the oppression of capital and the state – but it's also the only way to buy most things without being tracked, so it also represents a form of freedom. And it's probably going to disappear in my lifetime, which scares me.

It's interesting how the early US currency mostly had pictures of the abstract personification of Liberty on them, whereas now it's all politicians. Harriet Tubman will supposedly replace Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill Real Soon Now™ – but I think it would be better to just stop putting people on currency at all, and instead represent ideas, places, and things. Because pretty much any historical figure has some ugly baggage, and putting people on currency to begin with is a habit inherited from monarchies.

Are there different ranks of landlords? Like, if you rent out enough land, do you become a landduke?

Basically, I want to be treated like the second years in The Sisters of Dorley <https://www.scribblehub.com/series/421879/the-sisters-of-dorley/>.

I kind of wish someone would pressure me to act more feminine. There are some things, like clearing your space, that take work but are also good for you, and there's a level of social pressure to do them. For me, presenting more feminine is like that, except all the people I care about will never judge anyone for their gender expression. Which in general is great! But my current gender expression is fairly androgynous – not because I want it to be – but because I was forced to grow up as a boy, and a lot of habits stick with me.