I dunno how many folks on Beehaw are into Knocked Loose, but this album is blowing me away. Every track is incredible. I was worried that the singles would be all of the good songs and the rest of the album would disappoint, but that isn’t the case at all.
So IMO nothing has really ever topped the old Asmik Ace/AKI wrestling games from the N64 era. I played a ton of WCW/NWO Revence, and WWF No Mercy is still considered by a lot of people to be the best wrestling game ever made, and apparently still has an active modding scene.
I tried to substitute tea for coffee a while back because the coffee I was drinking was giving me really bad anxiety in the mornings, but the higher caffeine teas were honestly just as bad or worse, and the tannin content would have me all jittery. I think I’m particularly sensitive to tannins, though. I couldn’t really ever find a tea that was a good balance between enough caffeine and low tannin content, while switching from a blonde roast to dark roast pretty much solved my issues with coffee…
I sympathize with you. I didn’t grow up catholic, but rather evangelical, but I can understand the realization that the people who taught you to love others have an ideology that is profoundly hateful. I remember the bewilderment and confusion that goes along with that realization. I didn’t leave the faith altogether, although at times it felt like I would, but I’m in a dramatically different place than I was a decade ago for sure.
All that to say that I understand at least a little of what you’re going through, and I’m sorry you’re grappling with this. It helped me to realize that there are believers out there that think differently, and that the transphobes, homophobes, racists, and reactionaries don’t own the faith.
Hi @FfaerieOxide. Beehaw has one rule: Be(e) Nice. This kind of personal attack isn’t really in the spirit of Beehaw, and I’d like to ask you to please reconsider how you interact with users on this instance. You can disagree with someone without being insulting or demeaning.
It’s decent for generating ideas or names for fiction. I’ve used it for tabletop stuff a couple of times to give me NPC names or lists of personality traits, and it’s good sometimes for breaking writers block when I get stuck on some detail and I can’t figure out what word I want to use or what to name something. You can usually get it to give you some sort of okay suggestions, but the volume of ideas is usually enough to spark a better idea for me. The only weird thing I’ve noticed is that GPT4 (or whatever flavor bing/copilot is currently using) REALLY likes alliteration to a degree that is downright corny. It’s kinda weird but sort of funny honestly.
Hi @hedge, we’re starting to ask users not to paste full articles in the description or comments, there have been some concerns about this practice and we just want to try and head it off. I have no issues at all with linking to one of the several archive sites that will allow users to bypass paywalls, though.
I haven’t seen a lot of details about this program. What I’m most interested in is which forms it will support. One of my frustrations is that a lot of tax prep services advertise “free” efile, but almost all of them only allow it for the 1040EZ which is very narrow, and most adults will have to file at least a 1040 and probably will need additional forms as well.
The “experimental” label is most regularly levied against puberty blockers, probably because the average person isn’t familiar with them. However, they’ve been used to treat precocious puberty since the 1980s (Comite et al., 1981; Mancuso et al., 1989) and to stave off unwanted endogenous puberties in trans youth since the mid-to-late-1990s (Cohen-Kettenis & van Goozen, 1998; van der Loos et al., 2023). For anyone interested in learning more about them, I’d recommend Giordano & Holm’s 2020 accessibly written scientific review “Is puberty delaying treatment ‘experimental treatment’?” as it answers the most commonly asked questions about the method, its efficacy, potential side effects, and so on.
Giordano & Holm’s review also addresses another common claim levied against gender-affirming care, namely, that there aren’t any “high quality studies.” In actuality, there are many high-quality studies: sound methodologies, significant sample sizes, published in well-respected journals, etcetera. When trans-skeptical people argue this, what they really mean is that there aren’t any randomized controlled studies — where neither the doctor nor patient know whether they’ve received the medicine in question or whether they’ve received a placebo. While this certainly is the “gold standard” for medical trials, it is not logistically possible in cases such as this, as both doctors and patients would quickly surmise which group they were assigned to based upon the changes (or lack thereof) in their bodies. The review also delves into ethical issues regarding withholding this treatment that make controlled studies impossible.
The second paragraph delves into the claim that there are no quality studies on the effects of delayed puberty. We actually have a good number of high quality studies, what we don’t have are double blind, randomized controlled studies because of the practical and ethical difficulties of doing so. This, of course, gets twisted into labeling puberty blockers as having no evidence or for being “experimental”.