• 0 Posts
  • 17 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: November 26th, 2023

help-circle





  • Anecdotally, I joined Mastodon, found it difficult to find people who I personally know that were on different instances, kind of lost interest and thought kbin might be a better solution for both forums and microblogs all in one place, then my Mastodon instance shut down, and then kbin died too. Hence me being on lemmy.world, as default and stable of a server as there is here.

    Bluesky felt fun and familiar right off the bat, my only issue was that it was still so small when I joined. Now that there’s an influx of new users, many of whom I followed on the bird site, it just feels like Twitter 2, which I suspect is what most people want.

    FWIW I have a highly technical job and consider myself pretty tech literate, so I don’t think any of the issues I had with Mastodon weren’t things I could’ve figured out or worked around, I just didn’t feel incentivized to bother. I suspect they’ve smoothed out a lot of the federating issues I saw before, but at this point I’m happy enough on Bluesky to stay put.


  • Nope, the movie takes place in Utqiagvik (formerly known as Barrow), Alaska, which is one of the northernmost populated areas on earth. From the Wikipedia page:

    When the sun sets on November 18, it stays below the horizon until January 23, resulting in a polar night that lasts about 66 days.[37] When the polar night starts, about 6 hours of civil twilight occur, with the amount decreasing each day during the first half of the polar night. On the winter solstice (around December 21 or December 22), civil twilight in Utqiagvik lasts a mere 3 hours.[34][38] After this, the amount of civil twilight increases each day to around 6 hours at the end of the polar night.

    Edit: to OP’s point, most depictions of the Arctic aren’t that far north. 30 Days of Night happens to be one that really does have that level of continual darkness. Even so, while it’s night for several months, it’s really just the day shortening to the point that you don’t see the sun with that civil twilight reducing to a few hours, and then as the “days” get longer eventually you start to see the sun again. The reverse happens for the summer, where eventually the sun doesn’t set enough to be out of view.





  • At the risk of being dogpiled, I’d like to try to have some discussion on this.

    Up front, I want to say that Ohio does a lot of dumb shit, trans rights are human rights, and weaponizing random laws against queer people is bullshit.

    It seems clear to me that:

    • There is a reasonable motivation for requiring reporting of recent name changes, and the exception for marriage is due to this being extremely common. The article states that this usually came up in the past when people wanted to run with a nickname rather than their given name.
    • Not stating this requirement on the form is stupid and bad.
    • This is compounded by the lack of a box for a former name, practically guaranteeing that this information is omitted.
    • All of this is a problem that should be fixed. The Republic governor has acknowledged this, according to a quote from the article.

    What isn’t clear to me is that this is selectively enforced against trans people. We only know about the cases where it has happened to trans people because those are the cases that are being reported on. It is not surprising that a cis person encountering a bureaucratic annoyance because they put the name they go by rather than their birth name on the form was not considered newsworthy.

    The vibe I get from this is that this is ragebait where the headline invites the reader to jump to conclusions while the contents of the article suggest that this is actually just a stupid case of the government being bad at making a form (something I have personally encountered a lot).

    I’m totally fine with being proven wrong, it wouldn’t be surprising in the slightest if there is malicious intent here. Is there evidence of selective enforcement here?


  • Believe me, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case, and I 100% think this is wrong.

    My take here is that filling out a government form and having it be rejected because you didn’t put required information that isn’t stated as required into a box that the form doesn’t have and getting denied/made to redo it is an extremely plausible scenario. In the case of a cis person being denied this way, it’s a mundane bit of bureaucratic nonsense that nobody would blink an eye at.

    The article states:

    The law has been in place in some form for decades, though it’s rarely been used and usually arises in the context of candidates wishing to use a nickname.

    The fact that this law has been identified as a real problem for trans people and that there is a quote in the article from the (Republican) governor saying “this is bad, we should fix it” strikes me as acknowledgement that this dumb rule is disproportionately affecting trans people and should be fixed.

    We have a depressing number of real examples of malicious use of the law against trans people, so all I’m saying is that this one doesn’t seem worth getting fired up about unless there is evidence of actual malicious intent here.