A thing I have noticed. 2 decades ago, there was decent pharmaceutical knowledge in the trans community. We knew what GnRH agonists were and how they work. We knew that for trans girls, if you couldn’t get them, then a cocktail of spironolactone and finasteride would do a pretty good job as a replacement. We knew that cyproterone acetate worked even better than spiro, but was hepatotoxic, so be careful.
I feel like that’s all been … lost?
I suspect that until this sentence, most currently transitioning people won’t even know that GnRH agonist is the proper term for what is frequently and misleadingly called a “puberty blocker”.
How did we let all this knowledge get lost? We, as a community, used to know how to outflank attempts to stop us accessing medication.
Now the British government just go, “we’re banning prescription of puberty blockers” and everyone throws their hands up and goes, “oh well, no alternative but unopposed testosterone I guess”.
Just saw this via the London Reconnections blog and, oh my god, I think you could not do a worse job of redesigning the tube map if you tried.
“Paint all the lines the same colour. Send a train into London centre from Zone 6. Which identically coloured line does it emerge from on the other side? Fuck knows. Good luck!”
I mean, look at Oxford Circus? Which are the through lines? No? Me neither.
And this is promoted as “accessible”. God help us all.
@girlonthenet who needs to know where they’re going when they can tell at a glance which lines were built using cut and cover, which are deep level tubes, and which are national rail loading gauge? EVERY TOURIST MUST KNOW THIS VITAL INFO
Why are people surprised that cassettes are still made?
It should be obvious why they’re still around.
Cassettes are the cheapest form of music media out there. Anyone can buy one blank cassette and start recording. Equipment is cheap: all you need is a boombox.
If you want good analog recording, you can use them on a Tascam Portastudio 4-track machine—and it will sound great.
I went to a music store the other day and saw the same album on vinyl, CD, and cassette. Guess which one I bought?
It was the cassette. It was C$12—thus C$28 cheaper than the vinyl.
Here’s the kicker. If you have a good tape deck, and a quality recording, cassettes can sound better than vinyl. Even a type 1 cassette theoretically has better dynamic range than vinyl.
@atomicpoet@imabuddha@upmultimedia And probably last longer. Found out the hard way in the early 2000s that all my CDs from the 80s had succumbed to bit rot and were unplayable.
@atomicpoet@imabuddha@upmultimedia I mean, these weee kept in a proper CD rack and looked after. It’s just that where the join between the two plastic halves was supposed to not allow oxygen in to corrode the aluminium, it … allowed it in.
@atomicpoet Glad you’re getting enjoyment out of these, but with a childhood where VHS was all that there was (no, Betamax, I see your hand up but you may not speak), I have to say I have minimal desire to go back to it.
Also, I loathe optical discs. Feel like the entire industry spent the late 80s and whole of the 90s lying to us about tech that is ultimately fragile and cruddy.
I totally get the desire to own a physical thing, especially under late stage capitalism, but I reckon I’ll leave VHS (of which I once had a substantial collection, which I threw out) and DVD (same) to those who get joy from collecting them.
@wonka Put water in kettle. Pour in hydrochloric. Add no heat. Pour out hydrochloric. Kettle is descaled. No residual taste. Entire process: 15 seconds.
I don't trust anyone who sneers at service industry employment because those workers are disproportionately women and minorities, which is also why those jobs tend to pay poorly.
But there's nothing wrong with someone working at a fast food place and having a comfortable lifestyle and it's only your internalized racism, misogyny, and classism that makes you think otherwise.
@gwynnion This is very similar to my life philosophy which is, in a nutshell, “how a person treats service workers is how they would treat everyone if they thought they could get away with it”
Me, in southern Portugal: you seen that Spain and Morocco are contemplating a rail tunnel?
@zoe, also in southern Portugal: But they won’t build a rail line to here? WHY EVEN IS SPAIN?
Me: That would be HARD, Zoe. They’d have to build a rail line over at least THREE KILOMETRES of line across land nobody lives on and construct a bridge of about TWO HUNDRED METRES.