Hoeing is a time honored human tradition!

Excessive overnight caffeine intake and adhd hyperfocus. Part of it was also before the bus arrived since I get out of work riiight after the previous bus leaves and have to wait 30min for the next one with nothing better to do.

I also do a lot of stuff like this so I've gotten pretty quick on my swype keyboard.

You should see my nursing notes when the bullshit happens. I've gotten a lot of praise for the amount of detail I add to explain why I had to do whatever I had to do to get a situation back under control.

tbh I might not have bothered getting licensed if not for the pay (and getting ditched out on the unit w/ violent pts & no meds or restraints).

Yaaas. Let's uplift each other people! Your fellow workers are NOT the enemy!

Friendly reminder to people in similar positions that the fact I barely make a living wage as a nurse doesn't mean the techs with less education than me that I supervise shouldn't. In fact, if they're making a living wage, that leaves room for me to advocate to make even more myself. This fight is about us taking from the rich, not from each other, and I refuse to let them control the narrative like that.

He looks like an emo twink and his daddy dom just told him he's been a very naughty boy.

I always wanted to be an interesting person when I grew up but now I'm here I rarely find it fulfilling. It turns out 98% of the things that result in an interesting person are highly unpleasant to do or experience.

It probably really helped people who learned to type on a typewriter make the first changeovers, and now it's what everybody learns to type on for the most part so it hasn't budged. I've noticed at work that my gen z coworkers often struggle to type out a solid nursing note (most of them learned to type on a phone screen) so I wonder if this is maybe an opportunity for more of those alternative layouts to start taking hold as typing becomes a less common thing people need to learn early on.

The short version is, as a pseudo-trans person, being born female makes a lot of it ok to most people. People born male who act more female get a looooot of backlash.

I LOVE comments like this from people who clearly cared enough about what I said to interact with my comment TWICE in two different ways (downvote PLUS comment) JUST to try to convince me they don't care, and right below another commenter who has emphatically expressed the opposite. It's fascinating both in the sense that they might actually internally believe it AND that they're deluded enough to think I might as well.

Oh hey I'm AFAB but more or less NB at this point and let my gender presentation flux with both people's perceptions and whatever seems to be working best in the moment, especially career-wise so I actually have a LOT of thoughts on this. A looot of this discusses societal stereotypes on gender, so while I think it's shitty, the fact that a lot of people (wrongly) perceive trans people as their birth sex is of relevance to my perspective on this discussion. So, trigger warning: prejudice / transphobia.

Background:

• I'm AFAB so most of my upbringing was femme oriented

• I also come from an autism / ADHD HEAVY family so I still missed some of the social aspects of gendered upbringing

• my parents WERE fundies however, so my attempts at more feminine presentations (makeup, heels, etc) resulted in a lot of sex-shaming from my parents, but there was also a looot of pro-birther nonsense and everything about pregnancy just freaks me out. There's probably a looot to unpack there as to how I wound up nonbinary, but ultimately I am what I am now, so it is what it is.

• I spent the first few years of my career working on a psych unit for criminally insane men so the formative years of my young adulthood were spent learning how to speak from my chest and not look like a target

• my current presentation is that sort of "no gendered features" / look like a clean shaven young man / lesbian (vs the beard AND boobs / "aaaall the gendered features" look). The only surgery I've had is my tits chopped off + tubes out. So I don't look ooobviously trans, but a lot of people also can't really tell what genitals I have at a glance which some people find ...distressing. for some reason.

• I'm also white which I think lets me "get away with more" than others.

Thoughts:

• I usually use the women's bathroom. Sometimes I bring a she-wee to work but all the unit bathrooms are singles so it's more just because I work with animals (male and female) who don't know how to put the seat up when they pee standing / squatting. This is mostly because whether it's reality or trauma based (see above work history) I don't trust most men around me with my pants off vs women will be socially awful but I likely won't have to come to blows over it. I do get some weird looks though, and some have stopped me, but then they just get this really confused / uncomfortable expression and ultimately leave me alone. But as far as your question goes, I do think I would get less backlash as a AFAB going into the men's room than an AMAB gets doing the reverse, so there's definitely an aspect of my vagina being inherently less threatening in vulnerable contexts... somehow?

• sexually, I can be a top or a bottom (penatrator OR penatratee) and pussy vs bussy doesn't matter too much to me other than that fitting things in the backdoor takes a lot more prep work (but I'll talk more further down about how that flexibility is convenient for me personally). As far as gender relations go, I feel like I get more "girl power" brownie points for strapping on and pegging my male partner vs how men who receive anal penetration are perceived despite the fact that I'm essentially letting him do almost the exact same when he fucks my ass. I even typically use a "strapless" strapon (they still realistically need a harness to stay in) so I am actually being physically stimulated by the act, it's not even (necessarily) a dominance thing.

• work / patient care: I work high-acuity psych so every patient has to have their skin checked for injuries and contraband (particularly weapons). I usually count as female for the purposes of keeping things same-sex. As far as your specific question though, it's also usually fine for me to count as female when searching men, even if the other person is also a woman. I usually try to have a male staff member with me as well, but nursing is pretty female dominated and I've noticed both in terms of patient comfort and working policy, two women searching a man is NOT as frowned upon as two men searching a woman. Do with that what you will. Same also goes for care / cleaning of genitals / breasts when patients require that.

• In terms of responding to violent patients: it depends and I'll change my demeanor as needed. If a patient seems like they'll respect a man more I'll stand taller, drop the pitch of my voice / speak from the chest, and be more directive. If I think they'll respond better to me being more gentle / nurturing I'll do that (although I'm not as good at it) but again as far as your question goes, I don't think an AMAB person would be trusted the same way were they witnessed going back and forth like that.

• That said, this raises the most important advantage to looking / acting masc - the high violence patients who respond better to gentleness are fairly few and far between. Patients who perceive me as more masculine are far, FAR more likely to cooperate with me being directive when I need to be. It's also in most cases not a fear thing in that they perceive me as stronger / more powerful, it's that they perceive me as more equal and worth listening to. I've had (usually boomer age) dementia patients in particular who gave every female nurse before me absolute hell for every single part of their treatment plan including the stuff the nurse has 0 control over but just went along with me saying the exact same things, then halfway through the shift they tell my coworker that "oh yes that nice young man has been so helpful!" It happens a lot actually, and I have a muuuch easier time with the sexist patients than most of my female coworkers. I recently did have one patient with homosexuality related delusions who targeted me a little, but that's pretty rare (they commented on him mostly going after men in report last night and I was like "hey he came after me the other night!" and one of my coworkers actually turned to me and was like "I don't think that counts as him targeting a woman...")

I guess my ultimate statement on it is thus: my particular combination of transness (including my race) is highly favorable considering, and I've heard that's often true for transmascs which I think is highly reflective of societal prejudices based on birth sex. I still get the weird looks and called mean names, but I'm sitting in exactly the least taboo combination where most people can assuage their prejudices by categorizing me as a "tomboy." People also often assume I'm a lesbian which is a little less favorable, but much more favorable than being trans (which is closer to the truth, I'm surgically confirmed and actually tend to prefer men).

I've actually arguably been able to use my gender presentation to avoid violence in many cases, which almost universally cannot be said for transwomen or AMAB NBs or men or any other AMABs who find themselves with any kind of femme aspects in their gender presentation. I'm also fortunate that the dysphoria I did have tended towards removing gendered aspects vs adding them because that also gets a lot of backlash.

I'm also almost entirely uniquely fortunate in that I don't have any dysphoria that causes me inherent distress based on how others perceive me or how I'm personally acting outwardly. That makes my ambivalence an asset almost, since I can just do whatever seems to make any given situation go smoothest, and I don't experience any emotional distress from doing so. I've noticed that lack of omnipresent dysphoria is almost unheard of in trans communities, especially for someone who got surgery (to the extent that I'm often actively unwelcome for expressing my unusual combination of lived experiences; I've actually felt far less welcome in trans spaces than pretty much anywhere else; and that includes on lemmy, a lot of my comments like this get removed with transphobia cited as the reason).

Anyway that's my garbled post 12-hour-night-shift stream of consciousness that I wrote and re-wrote a couple times on the bus ride home. Hope it was interesting but imma tap out and go nap before I have to go back tonight.

Oof I was way off! See this completely changes what I'm looking at for me! Looks like the racoon is much more similar.

I trim my cats claws every few weeks, she gets a treat for every paw she sits still for. I can tell she needs it done again when she can't knead on me without it feeling prickly. It's been a minute this time because I think I misplaced the trimmers. For a while I had to restrain her in one of those mesh bags, which was an upgrade from an old towel, but at this point she's learned there's food in it for her and she's very food motivated, so as long as I'm firmly holding each paw and go quick it's pretty straightforward. Haven't had to use the sack in years.

I accidentally traumatized the dog at a young age because I had difficulty visualizing the quick through her darker claws, so we've been having a groomer do them for a while to help her understand that it doesn't usually hurt before I try again. She thrashes and howls every time I try (she's part husky), so it's also important to have someone who knows exactly how to snatch her up and get it done quick.

I wish domestic housecat was on here as a scale example most people would have seen in person but I would think the smallest lynx bobcat or the fox is maaaybe comparable if perhaps a bit larger?

Edit: I had meant to say bobcat, not that it made me much closer. Sounds like the raccoon is much more comparable.

Me fucking around in chat gpt until I had something good to repeat to myself in times like this. It turns out it's actually pretty good at common meter rhyme, the trick is to ask for 5 iambic pentameter couplets at a time, then split them at the eighth syllable into those 4 8686 syllable lines. I also usually specify "casual language" and "natural word order." You ask for five or so options for each verse so you have some ideas for words to swap around until something sounds good. I've been thinking I need to write a proper ballad about some characters at some point but I haven't got round to it.

Forgive yourself for past mistakes,

and things you did not know.

Your errors guide your victories;

they ache so you can grow.

the part that really wows them is that I do actually have a car that I use for other things, I just avoid using it as a daily thing because I find that too stressful. I still use the car for large grocery trips or taking the dog to the vet, but using it for a daily commute sounds like a lot of stress to me.

People at my job are SHOCKED that I take the bus to work even after we had a ten minute discussion one night about increasing road rage incidents. I just wanna get on the commute box and zone out until I get there, LOL.

Honestly just paying people $25/h to literally just do this would actually do some great things for the mental health crisis. The most you would need to do is maybe throw in an 8hr "mental health first aid" class and give them a line to refer out to if the person expresses anything more severe than a passive death wish. I would totally support my tax dollars paying for this on a WIDE scale.

Edit/btw: the official term is a "warm line" as opposed to a "suicide hotline" for people who aren't in crisis but just need to talk to another human for a bit, possibly to even help avoid a crisis developing in the first place.

...you realize generations are longer than five years.....right?

I have never heard the term "don't name your gods" but it's my new favorite phrase of possibly the whole fucking year. Thank you.

...she wasn't wrong tho!

I'm one of those that sees a purpose for AI in doing some of the grunt work of information processing and some creative tasks (like an old school painters apprentice, put some grass over in that corner while I work on this face, upscaling images without blurring, or making sure all the formatting and pronouns / perspectives match in a written work), or in increasing accessibility by describing images for the blind or audio for the deaf, but what in tf does it need to be in a browser for? It definitely has some uses but they'll really slap that label on anything these days!

Yeah like. They're already covering up enough stuff that is both stupid AND awful all at once you don't need to make up extra shit.

I remember reading somewhere that while a western audience would perceive this as utterly farcical, a Chinese citizen is at least more likely to perceive it as the government taking their safety and security seriously enough to be thorough about it. While I'm sure there was some person somewhere in the chain of command who thought this was a good and important idea and that they needed to check the pigeon butts for explosives, there's no way all of the people involved in doing those searches thought it was likely to uncover an actual weapon, but the cultural context makes it important to err in that direction. Meanwhile in the US, the government is more successful in hiding abuses by "protecting freedoms." Powerful people all around the world have basically the same playbook, but a big part of that strategy is knowing their audience.

You can also utilize the somewhat covert bribery and diversion systems to this end. As long as everybody thinks everybody ELSE is following the guidelines, and that they're the only ones really getting away with things / reporting that they're following guidelines when they're not, you can get the same result and all you have to do is not look too closely, which is probably what you're doing with most other things already. In the US you don't even need to bother doing that because aside from not culturally having enough shame to do so, actively hiding our idiocy in any way would be considered a restriction on freedoms. Around these parts its your god given right to be a dumbass and the gubmit can pry that from your cold dead hands.

We're stupid, but at least we're honest about it. They're stupid, but at least they have the decency to not act like it out in broad daylight. Neither is better and both can easily be a tool of the bourgeoisie.

Well you can't not do that, especially not if you're already known for doing that kind of thing anyway for other things.

I once heard of a pediatrician who successfully convinced a concerned mother that anti-vax ideology was likely a psyop by the Russians to weaken the health of the American populace starting with our children. Doesn't hurt that it's probably true.

EDIT: My personal conspiracy theory is that the Chinese government did engineer (or at least selectively cultivate) COVID, but not to kill Americans. In the early days of the pandemic there was some speculation that it affected some blood types more than others, particularly type A. While no link to blood type specifically was found, type A is a more common genetic trait as you move out of Asia and towards the middle east. China has been heavily persecuting the Uyghurs (Chinese Muslims), and those who have managed to get out of the camps have reported medical experimentation and being injected with unknown substances. In addition, the virus would also kill a significant number of the older population, which is important because of the population crunch they're about to experience due to one-child policies resulting in a high amount of female-specific infanticide. They're about to have a bunch of old people and a massive shortage of able bodied young people to care for them. Even if they didn't directly "engineer" the virus in a gene-sequencing manner, they have a lot off motive to just generally cultivate and spread (you can't really "breed" a virus) an infectious disease targeting people of middle eastern descent and elders.

Thank you for coming to my tinfoil-hat Ted Talk.

Shit rolls downhill; profits roll up. Source: fellow nurse.

My psych unit is having a pretty severe pants-in-the hall deficiency tonight and I'm definitely not getting paid enough for any of it.

They did have arcs, but more in that way older star trek did where you get a blurb about it during the rest of the episodes self contained content then a dedicated episode at the beginnings and ends of the season with 1-2 dedicated episodes somewhere in the middle. Well balanced for multiple watch styles.

A better star trek than anything released in the 2010s onward. I'm not even kidding, they handled many more current sociopolitical issues and with far more wit and a frankly shocking amount of tact considering its a Seth McFarlane comedy.

I've been waiting for algorithm-senpai to notice me...

The version of "leave room for Jesus" we can all get behind.

The number one thing I love about Randall Munroe's particular brand of nerd humor is how genuine he is. His fascination with the natural laws of the universe is just that. It's not something he uses to hold himself over other people or to create in-groups and out-groups of people who know and people who don't. Even when his content is too complex for the average person it never has that subtextual "well you just wouldn't get it because you're not smart enough" vibe that so much other nerd humor has (looking at you big bang theory). He's genuinely inviting the reader to learn about whatever it is, whether they ultimately do or don't. He doesn't have that weird inferiority complex people get sometimes where people feel the need to defensively push others away from their interests to feel better about the fact that their interests happen to be niche in some way. He doesn't use it as a vehicle to fuel his ego. I've joked before that he's my "celebrity crush" but it's really just that he truly, genuinely wants to show you something he thinks is cool (and at least a little humorous) and as someone who's met a LOT of snobby nerds, I've always deeply respected that he isn't one. - sincerely, a professional vibe-checker (like, actually).

History joke I heard once: if a history book says an object was used for "ritual purposes" that means they haven't got a clue, unless they specify "fertility rituals" which means they know exactly what it was used for but can't write that in a highschool history textbook.

It just occurred to me a few days ago that AI could make for a pretty trippy fae dream world game of some kind.

Probably not ever, but hopefully enough that their accumulation doesn't outpace their use picking up dogshit.

Well they're still macroplastics for now. I'm delaying their conversion into microplastics by about 5-10 years in a way that will prevent the need for more of them.

It also helps clearly define the key interventions for each. All of these kind of apply to all of them but there's a few key points for each it can help to focus on.

"Disappointing:" don't brag about it but also don't try to undersell yourself either - focus on your pregame:

• actively listen for what your target finds appealing, particularly in terms of "the five love languages," touch, praise, gifts, service, and time. Identify the target's preferred top two (ideally top 1) and focus your efforts there. 90% of the average woman's sexual satisfaction is going to occur before her pants even come off anyway and most men completely ignore that so you have the opportunity to really stand out by making that your strength.
• also work on your fingering and oral game.

Average: nail down "the motion of the ocean" (roll your hips) and learning to slow it down.

• if your dick has a curve to it, try to pick positions that will poke the tip of your dick into the g-spot in the front wall of her vagina. If your dick curves up towards your head, you want her facing you, so missionary or cowgirl. If your dick curves down towards your feet, you want doggy or reverse cowgirl (but be careful with reverse cowgirl if she's taking you all the way out and back in too fast / hard she can actually damage your dick. The side curves are a bit tricky so what you wanna do is get her on her side facing the direction your dick curves while you straddle her bottom leg and put that top leg up around your hip on the side she's facing. (y'all gonna get me breaking out the dolls LOL). That said, this is just gonna be your "classic" position. Make sure you still mix it up a bit; variety is the spice of life, and obviously listen to your partner FIRST, if she tells you she's got a fave try to stick with that and just try this one once or twice to see if it does it for her.

• stop masturbating as much except for rubbing one out about 24h before you anticipate having sex. (12h if you're a premature ejaculator, 36-48h if you have ED / difficulty orgasming, although less masturbation should help with that, if you have both, see a doctor). You'll last longer and seem less desperate and have better focus in the leadup.

"Awesome" - you're not allowed to do doggystyle, either of the cowgirls, or put her legs over her head unless she looks like a literal Amazon or has explicitly told you that she is a size queen. You only get to do missionary, reverse missionary (her on top but laying down over you) or lotus (you sitting with her on your lap with legs around your hips). And if you're REAL big, avoid even putting it in all the way if you can.

Yes that's ideal. I would argue most of the "lost causes" you're describing are victims of the current system and we owe then something akin to long-term secure units until they're sick enough of the restrictiveness of even a non-abusive containment system to put in the work to recover, but that's semantics. At the end of the day everywhere should be doing it like that and housing and rehabbing these people, emphasis on the housing since it's a prerequisite to the rehab.