There are limited examples of this effect working in reverse. Take the word “Nice” for example. Nice back in ye old medieval times used to be a synonym for “stupid” or “simple” so saying someone was “nice” was insulting. Then there was this prolonged long fad where things being very plain and straightforward was considered a good thing and “Nice/simple” gained a positive connotation. Saying someone is “simple” or a “simpleton” retains this original sort of vibe but “Nice” now just means pleasant.

Reminds me of my partner and I’s story of “Two Knives Guy”

So we’re looking for a place for dinner downtown at dusk and this kind of guy starts following us. We are just outside one of those bustling Italian places where there’s this outdoor seating lit by brewer’s cable and there’s like a whole bunch of people milling about waiting for tables or drinking. We are just at the edge of the crowd when behind us the guy calls for our attention.

We turn and he has a knife in each hand, one trained on either of us. I tense thinking that okay - it’s a VERY short run to safety but I am not leaving my partner, if this guy attacks I’m protecting my man. The mugger gives us his best glower and goes “GIMMEYRMMMMERRGGR”

My partner blinks as though confused by his intentions “Umm… What?”

I feel like face-palming.

"GIMMEYRMMMMERRGGR!!! "

“I… sorry what are you asking?”

The guy just looks at us like we’re complete idiots he turns to me and I just shrug. He tries one more time and my partner just goes “I don’t understand…” and the guy, who realizes somebody in that busy establishment is gunna notice what’s going on eventually just growls, feigns a slash at my partner and runs away.

When we were talking about it over dinner we broke the interaction down and we were like. The guy had a knife in each hand… If we tried to hand him something how would he take it? I dunno if we rolled a 20 or if the guy rolled a nat 1.

As a Set Dresser/On set dresser - any set build before a director sees it/ wideshot films it.

How it generally works is we get a bunch of stuff and… Something. This something can be as exact as a blueprint (techpack) that clearly marks where furniture is supposed to go or as vague as a one sentence long description of what the set is supposed to be. We are usually given a bunch of options for virtually everything that is used. Then we make up the set.

Then the waveform goes nuts. The Heirachy goes Set Decorator, Production Designer, and then Producer. They will randomly visit or call in sometimes separately and whatever plans that existed immediately cease to matter. The set may completely change a random number of times back and forth as anyone above us in the hierarchy demands unless it countermands a specific demand made by someone above the demander in the hierarchy.

That is until shoot day. Once the Director has the floor all of that prep goes immediately out the window and the director may change whatever they please about the set and while there’s usually too much time constraints to change everything it could mean getting rid of anything. The waveform only collapses to depict a singular reality once the wideshot is in the bag which means there is now a continuity that must (okay “must” is a strong word) be obeyed.

Ohhh no… As a person who regularly builds random shit for film and television, the single slotted screw is the bane of my bloody existence. Some designers fucking love em for the aesthetic but the cam outs on them are terrible. Is it technically easier to produce? Yes, is it viable to use for construction purposes comparitively - fuck no. Every time you cam out ( lose traction on the screw) you risk accidentally damaging whatever medium you are screwing into.

Locally there is an insane institutional preference for the Robertson screw (which is basically a square) because it doesn’t cam out much, drives in well and arguably resists stripping better than a Phillips… This is believed in so much that any screw not seen by the camera is a Robby (usually size 2) while anything that is perceived by the audience is a phillips or a single slot screw. Given a choice nobody wants to handle single slots and chances are good you only find them in period specific builds or when the designer is a psychopath.

I theorize this is because she’s had to adapt to code switch to speak a rhetoric specific for wider media coverage. Since the attention span of the general reader is fairly narrow and so many readers demonstrate confusion at perfectly correct terms (or the right wing coverage co-opts things in a very specific pattern) there’s a certain way of looking at language utilized in short, quotable format as a unique tool. In those instances it’s more useful to approach language from the aspect of what is the specific choices being made doing rather than saying. It’s not always correct to believe the person saying it believes what they are saying is strictly literally true. The reasons for an intentional error are many, it could be phrased that way for a personal political reason, to attempt (though not always successfully) to make the quote more legible to someone with only a passing understanding or to achieve some kind of specific desired result in the reception of the audience.

Those who know better usually find it frustrating to interface with but if you are speaking to a large group you are actually speaking to multiple audiences and usually your target is to capture those at the bottom of the engagement curve. As an informed audience member target wise you are far more likely to understand what is being implied and are thus not the ideal target for the potential language tools being employed. In many ways as an audience type you can be safely ignored in favor of outreach to people who are generally not so literate or aware.

Wow, your name is pretty accurate huh?

Wow, lucky you.

While I won’t argue that the media is causing a number of problems thinking it’s a storm in a teacup is your privilege showing. Even though I live in one of the most trans accepting places on the planet I have had the unique experience of having to sneak past protesters who are trying to remove people like me from public life, using slurs over megaphones and openly marching hundreds strong in the streets… And again this is rated one of if not the most trans friendly place in the world. There is no safer place to go.

It’s a lot harder to see it as a storm in a teacup when the world is dramatically becoming a smaller place for us personally because laws keep passing that people do not understand or do not care how they actually impact us. The media doesn’t report a lot of us who are murdered even when it’s a hate crime. This year in the US there was 41-ish such hate motivated crimes which is near double 2023’s total… But we can’t be sure of the actual number because a lot of the time the transness of the victim and the nature of the motive is obscured by the media reporting. Some of the media shenanigans only gets caught only by loved ones as media frequently uses vagueness and dead names that friends and community members don’t recognize because that person hasn’t gone by that name for decades.

Your opinion comes from the fact you don’t personally have a horse in the race so whether you engage with it or not is a choice. The safe places are radically shrinking. The next government projected to win federally here is known to be openly hostile to trans people and I know that at least one of my friends will die directly as a result from them removing the supports currently in place. So enjoy the storm you aren’t living friend but realize saying it doesn’t exist is really crass to those who cannot find shelter.

You do you. Everybody’s circumstances are different and if you think that they give no positive value to your family life then that’s the way to go. This would only be a potential strategy if you didn’t want to give them up.

Baptism is also a hard line a lot of Christians get on because they think it’s basic hell proofing moreso than the average rituals. It’s not like they will stop their general pressures if you agree… but on this particular point people have been known to risk it BIG because they believe the mortal soul is imperiled and it comes at a point when the kid is at their most physically vulnerable being practically newborn.

Risk assessment should be holistic. It’s not necessarily compromise and framing it that way risks it becoming more about a battle of egos. it’s about recognizing and having a real situation assessment free from personal emotional triggers about how best to respond to potential dangers that center the baby’s safety first in a way that can stop the police from getting involved because faith is not reasonable.

While I realize that hard boundry setting is the new norm sometimes harm reduction is a better strategy. While a lot of folk have religious trauma to deal with that makes them want to do exactly zero church stuff one aspect of not believing in God is that a lot of the ritual aspects are pretty low stakes once one you strip away the mysticism. One way to handle the worry of your Mom wanting to do something dangerous to essentially just splash water on your kid is to participate in the silly ritual safely so that it’s done with minimum risk.

There definitely are hills to die on but if you give an order you know won’t be obeyed because the stakes from your Mother’s perspective are incredibly high then one way to look at it is baby’s safety comes first. Not because of the possible existence of the soul but because risking kidnapping to perform at end of day a boring nothing ceremony that ultimately means nothing isn’t a good idea. If it is distasteful to participate because of trauma then recognizing that you can deputize somebody you trust to get the hurdle over with is an option but realistically, your kid will never gain that same trauma from this. They will grow up with a completely different belief system as their basic. If them simply being baptized is a personal trigger it is wise to unpack exactly why because whether they are or not isn’t something your kid is likely going to care about. Having grown up in an agnostic environment and having a number of friends in the same situation some of us were baptized for the sake of family peace but for everyone I know it’s a complete non-event. One advantage of these things actually meaning nothing is that there is no change of state. A baptized baby and a non baptized baby are the same.

To my crew anyway a lot of us our parents aversion or reactions to church stuff seems out of proportion due to them having a history. Theirs is a more volitile strongly opinionated atheism as opposed to the more passive naturalized one we developed because we do not feel betrayed by belief. Sometimes their aversion causes them to do things which from the outside display that they are still letting their rejection of religious upbringing effect their judgment in an outsized way because they didn’t ever really heal.

I dunno if it is much a right of passage as it used to be. Where I am we’ve had bathroom freedom for a long while now and since we have a larger than usual trans population (Vancouver BC) folk transition bathroom use a little earlier than double take type passing but like anybody who crosses into the other side at minimum definitely looks properly trans. Abroad I have been bodily chased out of bathrooms by women when I was younger and passed for more androgynous even though I am an AFAB who never went on T. I ended up using the gents for awhile just because it meant nobody tried to clock me in the head with a purse but like… it sucked worrying that someone would clock me the other direction while I was waiting for a stall. Never personally happened so I never figured out how that experience shakes out but I was definitely trying to lay low.

Even with it being a city that puts “trans people welcome” over the bathrooms us enbies / non physically transitioned folk tend to have a pretty brutal self assessment of how we clock before we pick which restroom to take. It’s really sucky how people take the whole “We don’t owe you presentation” quote to infer like the way we personally choose to present doesn’t actually factor into how we make choices or navigate the world… Like we still don’t want to make people uncomfortable! Half of us enbies are so socially anxious that causing social friction gives us the bloody horrors and we accommodate other people at our own expense more often than not.

Like really… It boggles the mind how so many straights seem to think we operate as some kind of all powerful gender authoritarians who can force people to unquestioningly not even glance at us sideways or else we trot them to the censorship guillotine!

Hi, trans person here.

So what gets left out of these arguments a lot or misunderstood about being trans is not that this is a ‘belief’ based system. We are very individually aware of what we look like to other people and how we are being “clocked” by others. Take me, I am trans masculine but bodywise I have opted not to transition because of specific reasons. I don’t automatically feel comfortable using the gent’s washroom.

All of us are looking to find the path of least resistance in this binary that wasn’t designed for us. Trans women I know who don’t seemlessly pass often get stares regardless of what bathroom they use but while women might be horrible, going to the mens means that transphobes can follow you to a secondary location to assault you. If there’s an individual third non gendered option that’s often what we use because for me, I feel weird about being in women’s spaces even if they don’t hassle me and my clockable trans grildfriends don’t have to deal with the anxiety of other people staring.

If I did go on hrt though it would be a different story. I, like all of us, want to use the option that makes everyone around me the most comfortable and the whole thing pass by without any incident.

Under a system that allows trans people to make the call to use what allows us to make the call about what is safest and the least path of social resistance you really don’t find trans people who look like big scruffy men entering women’s washrooms and claiming to be a women because that isn’t a path of least resistance move. It’s not that we “believe” we are our preferred gender and just automatically switch to everything right away. We are very aware that we do not fit in but why we’re doing what we are doing is that our brain looks at our natal sex characteristics as abhorrent which means visually speaking we do dress so that other people can pick up on our deal and don’t keep reminding us in language.

Non-binary folk are kind of the standouts but generally speaking we make the exact same sort of social risk assessments and do our business in the bathroom that other people tend to clock our gender as, not nessisarily the one we feel closest aligned with.

So really under a situation where bathrooms are a free for all a fully masculine looking and coding person wandering into a women’s room not making any attempt to pass IS still a red flag worthy of heightened caution… But if you are in a place where trans men are forced to use a women’s room then more than likely that’s a person following the law and in following that law is risking getting the security or police called in because they had to pee and then spending the next hour being treated like a sex offender while they have their documents checked all because they weren’t permitted to make the bathroom choice of social least resistance for themselves.

Even if you trained relentlessly to preserve your original tone - lean muscle mass, fat distribution, bone density and skin thickness are all tied to your sex hormones and your cells are constantly being replaced. The oldest a muscle cell (exempting heart cells) gets is like 15 years with the average being more like 10. The good senator has been on HRT for over a decade. There’s not any even negligible physiological advantage of experienced testosterone puberty left.

Like anything trained skill and age is more important a factor. Unless either is a trained martial artist the advantage most at play would be that McBride is like 20 years younger. Greene does however give the impression like she has punched out a few people over low cost electronics at Black Friday events so I dunno.

Gunna say it’s a close toss up.

Bit weird to so publicly and enthusiastically proclaim you’d tap that, but whatever I guess.

There’s a hidden usage of “hon” from the history of the toxic trans communities message boards to mean “trans women who don’t pass” and is used condescendingly. That usage is basically dead in the water and barely known outside of a pretty narrow sliver of the queer community but it can still get you a side eye in some places.

I feel like I have watched in real time as Y’all has gained usage up in the Canadian Queer community.

I am old enough to still regard “hon” as demi hostile but “dude” seems to be drifting more and more gender neutral. At heart we may all just be ninja turtles all the way down

It’s not just that.

One thing that the Republicans got real good at was piping the idea of election fraud into their base. Part of what they’ve been doing is getting devoted citizens to target individuals they suspect to be democrat friendly and pouring over their registration paperwork. If they find anything amiss they report it which has made it nessisary to show up and defend one’s right to vote to the administrative bodies on a schedule.

https://youtu.be/CkK3W0lOKcc?si=OT4mOCnlZosTGbld

It’s meant that relatively small wildcat groups of citizens have managed to target literal tens of thousands of voters in swing states to cause confusion and delegitimize voters based on minute errors.

They find new ways to rig the game because they believe that they are owed this.

Yes I do. Because The situation in Gaza was not an election issue for Biden. There was a fantastic amount of campaigning, a lot of it bought and paid for, that turned that genocide into a single issue vote with tis holier than thou reaction of withdrawal from the entire system toted as the answer. It is political suicide to run a mainstream Pro-Palistine presidential campaign in the US. A candidate of one of the two main parties need unilateral support from their donation streams and encumbant systems and the Republicans knew that. They know that’s the devil’s bargain every DNC candidate has to sign to even get a shot.

Republican money supported Jill Stein to serve as a spoiler candidate to engage those with a naive veiw of the system but still wanted to vote and then they helped pipe that message through all manner of socials that if enough people withold their vote then Kamala would have shift her position… Because they knew how enticing that is. The idea that you don’t have to compromise your integrity and that that will be rewarded. They turned this into a single issue campaign for so many people knowing that they didn’t need to shift their position even a little. They could let their Red capped demogogues talk about literally beheading people and those high on this intoxication of absolute righteousness would ONLY care about an issue that Republicans can flaunt their support in favor of.

It was misplaced moral superiority in part that got us here because if you were lulled into not voting or voting third party because one candidate wasn’t “leftist enough” when the alternative is someone popular with an entrenched imobile base of support who wants to make sure leftistism dies dead then you failed to get the assignment.

It wasn’t ‘voter apathy’ it was a misplaced sense of voter moral superiority. It’s the thing leftist rhetoric has been weak to for a very long time. That love of withholding support except for perfection. The idea that compromise or chosing a lesser evil from two bad options dirties you. It doesn’t matter what you lost if you personally took “the high ground”.

This cutting of our noses to spite our face was exploited all to shit this election. They lulled people by appealing to the same zeal of righteousness that they know divides us fundamentally knowing that when push comes to shove people will turn up their noses on principle of not being personally catered to and forget that their ability to help at all is contingent on the freedoms that one party was explicitly putting on the chopping block.

It will be a while before people can admit that they were duped and there’s a lot of fault to go around, particularly in those funded astroturf campaigns designed to bait the hook… The right have been watching us for the past decade they knew how to divide us and it is on US that so many of us fell for it.

Oh, it’s worse than that for Canada. Trump during his last term tanked entire sectors of our economy with executive orders he spat out like tweets. Those “deals” were all taken apart in International court filings but the damage was already done.

Remember we are a very big landmass staffed by only a sliver more people than exist in the state of California. If the US goes under we will be ripped apart as no more than collateral damage.

Uh huh. I hope that continues to feel worth it.