I really like being able to do basic tailoring. Like, I grew up surrounded by media that made me view my body as flawed because of all the ways it deviated from the norm. The combo of broad shoulders and big boobs made it impossible to find fitting clothes that weren’t a tent on me. Being able to modify garments that I find, and repair the few items that fit me perfectly has been a big confidence boost.

Missing out on seeing this stuff on social media is probably for the best - a lot of craft content on social media tends to be very “influencer” shaped, where the goal is to make beautiful things look effortless, and that can be demoralising when it’s all you see.

I wish you well for whatever remains of recovering from the illness, it sounds like you’ve had a rough time.

I think you’ve excellently captured the difference here. I didn’t get heavily into Elite Dangerous, but on one of my longest journeys, I scanned a few things that no-one had ever scanned before. I didn’t discover any awesome looking space phenomena that would be worth sharing (at least, none that hadn’t been discovered before), but the prospect that I could was exciting.

Even just the idea that my name would be on other people’s screens if they came and scanned the same things I did, because we were all sharing the same world.

I don’t generally like AI generated images, but this is great

I don’t think you’re necessarily missing anything. Lower Decks is probably my favourite Star Trek series by a decent margin, but I think that people’s varying tastes is part of the Trek experience.

Like the first Star Trek I ever watched was TNG, with a partner who hated DS9 because of how far it was from the much more utopian tone of TNG. My best friend, however, loved DS9 most of all for that exact same reason. I can’t tolerate The Original Series because of how campy and cringe it is, but I have friends who love it for that.

If you hate Lower Decks, then your perspective is one I can’t really relate to, but that just feels like regular old Trekkie solidarity to me - with a show so varied, inevitably there’s going to be diverse viewpoints. That in mind, I’m not going to try and change mind, I’m just going to highlight why I love Lower Decks.

My favourite bit about Lower Decks is that it feels like a love letter to Trek, in all its forms. There’s a lot of references I don’t get, but I don’t need to get them to feel the warm fuzzies of knowing this show was made by people who are, first and foremost, fans of Star Trek. I like utopian sci fi because the state of the real world means that I can find real hope in the fantasy because in my heart, I believe in humanity.

Alongside all of that idealistic space exploration though, Lower Decks doesn’t shy away from the more pernicious aspects of Star Trek, and Starfleet/the Federation. The humour isn’t always my taste, but I think they use it well to poke fun at Star Trek, the show, but also the world within. The sometimes critical lens that is taken is part of why it feels so much like a love letter to Trek - if you truly love something, you’ve got to take the bad with the good and not pretend that everything is perfect.

This is a great list for ableist terms . https://www.autistichoya.com/p/ableist-words-and-terms-to-avoid.html I’m disabled in multiple ways and there were a few on here that caused me to re-evaluate my lexicon.

A list has limited use because language evolves, and so do people, and on top of that, context is everything — but it can be a good place to start

To be fair, in many cases, the observable behaviour of things is different at scale. A single water molecule has different properties to a cup of water, in much the same way that a high density crowd of people (greater than 4 people per square meter) starts to behave as a fluid.

I study biochemistry and I’ll never stop finding it neat how when you get down to the teensy tiny level, all the rules change. That’s basically what quantum physics is, a different ruleset which is always “true”, so to speak, but it’s only relevant when you’re at the nano scale

I suppose what I’m saying is that I agree with you, that fathoming scope is difficult, but I’m suggesting that this is a property of the world inherently getting being a bit fucky at different scales, rather than a problem with human perception.

Badly. I have an awful short term memory, so my priority when making notes is capturing fleeting thoughts I’d otherwise lose. This means I end up with snippets on random pieces of paper or a random note on whatever is the default app on my phone. Then, every so often, I have a big clear out where I aggregate and process all these fragments, usually when I am finding fragments everywhere.

I need to have an inbox of sorts, and make processing things from there a more routine activity. Alas.

My domain is more bioinformatics than GIS, but the way I imagined it was that if one was arguing that [thing] data is better, they’re arguing that if more people recognised the innate benefits of [thing], we wouldn’t have to rely on software that uses [other thing] so much, and that to properly utilise [thing], it would take a bit of radical reworking of workflows, but there would be significant long term net benefit.

Basically, I think arguments like this tend to be more grounded in the socio-cultural practices of a research field than the absolute technical merits of an approach. Like in my domain, a DNA sequence is just a long sequence of 4 different letters (A, T, G & C), but there’s a bunch of ways we can encode that data into a file, many of which have trade-offs (and some of which are just an artifact of how things used to be done)

Ea-Nasir has got to be one of my favourite internet phenomena

Explainer link for people who are blessed enough to be hearing of this for the first time: https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/who-is-ea-nasir-and-why-are-people-complaining-about-his-copper-the-viral-complaint-tablet-meme-explained

Not the person you were asking, but I can provide an answer. Pansexual generally means attraction to people regardless of gender - sort of gender blind. A bi person (like me) might find that the attraction they experience to different genders is shaped differently, qualitatively — or the magnitude of attraction may be different — like if you were a 1 on the Kinsey scale, which means “predominantly heterosexual, only incidentally homosexual”. Someone who’s pan is more likely to be a 3 on the Kinsey scale, but also, it’s possible to be bi and a 3, and that’s subtly different.

There aren’t set rules on this, it mostly comes down to what terms resonate with people. I’m someone to whom pansexual as a label could apply, but I identify as bisexual because that was the word that made me go “wait, this is a thing that’s possible?”. The terms people use are often rooted in history, personal or otherwise.

It’s trickier to explain the lexical niche when I myself am not pan. It’s like if you’re working on a project and have someone passing you tools, and you reach a step that needs a particular spanner, of which you have two. You ask for one of those spanners, but despite it fitting many of your requirements on paper, it isn’t quite right for what you’re trying to do. You try the other spanner and it’s perfect. Keeping both spanners is probably useful because on simple jobs, they are interchangeable, but when getting into nuanced, complex situations, having the choice is useful.

By this, I mean that I have also had the thought that “[Pansexual] seemed a meaningless term because bi already covers basically everything”, but when you’re talking to someone about different spanners and they say “that one isn’t the same as that one. I need the other one”, it’s generally wisest to assume that this person has some insight that you don’t have on these spanners, or their particular use cases — who am I to tell people what tools are most useful for them, after all? Like a lot of identity stuff, it’s hard to explain, but it matters a lot to some people.

God, I love the internet.