Shira Wolven

i see a dsa logo and a couple of tesseracts…

Not the aerial faith plate

A peach, cream and strawberry coloured Pine Marten (martes martes) is climbing the branches of a birch tree. Stars are sparkling in the crisp winter air behind them and the moon is full. They’re smiling over their shoulder admiring their forest home. Did you know that european martens have unique bib patters that they can be identified by? Like a tiger’s strips or leopard’s spots! Anyway thanls for reading this far! Have a nice day! And if you can, please consider volunteering for your local wildife charity!

Marten! Sketched on the plane home from Helsinki!

I tried a few different things in the known places. Didn’t work for me.

You should ask your friend.

anyway the tl;dr is that they're right.

You should try both transing your gender and using linux. Both are easier than ever to get into, you can change your mind at any time, and even if you don't end up sticking with it you'll learn a lot.

I'm not going to bring up B.F. Skinner's psychological experiments with pigeons and what they teach us about intermittent reinforcement and how this has links to both gambling and superstition...

I'll just say RUNNING THIS BUGGY OS IS AKIN TO PSYCHOLOGICAL TORTURE

and honestly it's worse since it's inconsistent.
If they'd just deprecated the whole "hover over taskbar icon to show the program" maneuver, I'd be annoyed but I'd get over it.

NOPE, they just made it only work 75% of the time

I'M TRYING TO SEND SEX GIFS TO CUTE GIRLS ON THE INTERNET AND I CAN'T EASILY DO IT BECAUSE DISCORD DOESN'T POP UP WHEN I HOVER THE FILE-HOLDING CURSOR OVER IT

this goes for both people expecting me to be a boy and windows not letting me drag-and-drop files between fullscreen applications because they mostly broke dragging to icons on the taskbar back in windows 7 MICROSOFT WHAT ARE YOU ENGINEERS DOING? YOU BROKE THE TASKBAR SIXTEEN YEARS AGO, FIX IT!

Both Windows and the wrong gender are just an irritation that won't go away.
And apparently neurotypical people get good at ignoring irritations to the point they don't notice them anymore?

That's not my experience. I have to consciously ignore them, which takes a small amount of effort.

thus, trans & non-binary autistic people.
and linux/BSD-using autistic people, as Windows and macOS are full of the sort of "you can't do this" kind of rule that's there for someone else's security or someone else's profits

and NOTHING bothers the autistic brain so much as being forced to follow a rule that makes no sense to you

why do boys get trucks and girls get dolls?
why do boys wear pants and girls wear dresses?
why is pink a girls color and blue is a boys color?

EXPLAIN, NEUROTYPICALS

And that latter type of rule makes way more sense to the autistic brain (at least in my and my sister's case: It's a big spectrum, I'm sure other autistic people can be different).

And if you apply this kind of logic to gender, OH BOY

the rule is no longer "sometimes Mom makes me put on a coat to go outside, and I have to do what she says because she's in charge for some reason"
It's now "Look at this device and find out what number it says. If that number is under this clearly specified value, Coat. Otherwise no Coat"

I suggested my mom change the rule to be about the temperature, and show my sis how to read the thermometer.
Now my mom doesn't demand she put on a coat, she instead reminds her to check the thermometer.
So she does, and if it's under 65°F(/18°C), that means it's Coat Time.

my mom would always tell her to put on a coat when she went to play outside, and she'd never agree to this. she didn't feel cold, she doesn't see snow outside, putting on a coat takes time and effort! It was an entire thing every time.

my personal theory for why many autistic people are like this:
We're not good at vague guidelines, we work better with rules that are explicitly defined and we can understand the reasoning behind them.

The example I always use is my little sister not wanting to wear her coat to play outside

(transbian should definitely be a debian flavor)

however thanks to a mixup at the pharmacy my gender/orientation is now Windows 95 and my operating system is Transbian

a common thing autistic people deal with is the "I don't care that 'everyone' does it this way, that way is bullshit and I'm not doing it"

And that applies just as much to gender as it does to operating systems

(to be honest the actual link is probably just autism)

Two similarly designed boxes, white with a red spiral and a red gradient. The left is for PROGYNOVA (a transfem HRT medication), and the right is for Debian GNU/Linux

the ultimate example of this is, of course, the Debian Estrogen

Look, I used to be just like you, afraid to make the change. I'd invested so much in the old way, surely I can't change now? I'm too old, maybe if I'd learned about it as a teen, I could have switched, I could have been happy.

But I did it, and it's made everything so much better for me.

it's not hard to make the change! and you'll be much happier if you do, believe me. there's so much pain with what you're doing now, can't you see it's killing you inside?

sometimes you can't tell the difference between people suggesting transition and people suggesting you switch to linux

(probably because it's often the same people)

There's nothing wrong with choosing to be your assigned gender, and choosing to use Windows.

But both should be a choice, not just a default you stick with because it's the most common. Make an informed decision about your gender and your computing needs!

Vaccines save lives.

That’s it. That’s the post.

Hmm.

Aren’t viscoxites from B-41V3?