Dion Starfire

Funny thing is, a real life Metaverse has existed for over 20 years. The term Metaverse comes from a book called Snow Crash. The game Second Life was designed explicitly to be the Metaverse envisioned in Snow Crash, complete with it’s own economy tied to real life money (as in, if you made enough money in-game, you could cash it out for real-world USD). Companies used to build headquarters in the game world similar to how some do in Fortnite now, even going so far as to hold actual real world business meetings in-game as a form of teleconferencing. After a few high-profile events where live TV broadcasts of in-game events got swarmed by flying dicks, the media lost interest in the game, and companies abandoned the game and moved on to more business-oriented solutions.

You realize that most trans women undergoing HRT have less testosterone in their systems than many of their cisgender competitors, right? Women naturally have some testosterone in their body; if they have PCOS, then they have a lot (in comparison to other cis women). Trans women on HRT take medicine to block testosterone, so while their body might generate the most of all, the amount bioavailable to them after the medicine neutralizes it is less than non-PCOS cis women have. If the sports debate was about testosterone providing an unfair advantage, then we would ban cis women with PCOS from competing, but we don’t.

In the case of teenagers, it’s even simpler - contrary to propaganda, very very few doctors are willing to put a minor on HRT. Instead, they simply give them puberty blockers to delay the onset of puberty until they’re over 18 and can decide for themselves whether to go on HRT or not. So, a 17yo trans girl is developmentally equivalent to a 10yo boy - her muscles are massively under developed compared to any of her cis competitors.

So whether adult or teen, a trans woman winning at sports is not someone with an unfair advantage; rather, it’s someone with a massive disadvantage managing to win despite her handicap.

I saw one of these at Target the other day in the $5-and-below section. Except it wasn’t a full phone, it was a nostalgia grab designed to be a wired “headset” for a cell phone with a headphone jack.

Have you looked into Rebble? I’m still wearing my Time Steel as a daily driver. I’ve yet to find a newer smartwatch that hits all the features I care about.

It’s more than just voter turnout. The deck is stacked. Like many red states, most of the blue voters in Texas are gerrymandered into a small handful of districts. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas’s_35th_congressional_district for an example.

It was an old school revolver where you have to manually cock back a spring loaded hammer. If you pull it back part way and then gently guide it back to normal position, the firing pin will just rest against the primer (the part of the round that sets off the gunpowder) and nothing will happen. If you pull it all the way back, the hammer locks in place until you pull the trigger, at which point the locking mechanism is unlocked and the hammer is freed to slam the pin into the primer, firing the round. The problem comes if you pull it most of the way back and then lose your grip. In that case, the hammer slams into the round just like if you fired it. Because of the physics involved with pulling back the hammer against a heavy spring (ironically a safety against kids pulling it back), the end of the gun usually gets levered upwards during the act of cocking. So, even if you started pointed directly at the ground, you often won’t be by the time the hammer locks in place. It’s your job as a gun owner to make sure that nothing you don’t mind shooting is in front of the gun at any point during that arc.

Add to this that it was a blank round, meaning there was just gunpowder but no bullet. Usually in a round, the gunpowder is trapped between a big slug of lead (the bullet) and the primer. In a blank, a thin layer of paper and glue is used in place of the bullet to keep the powder from falling out. A lot of people think blanks are 100% safe because there’s no bullet, but at very close range that tiny bit of glue still gets shot out with enough force to penetrate skin.

Thus, the guy is still an idiot for pointing the gun in an unsafe direction while cocking it, even if it’s a blank, but it’s easy to see how a 62yo could lose his grip on the hammer and have the gun go off accidentally in a direction he didn’t intend. And because it was a blank, he likely wasn’t following full gun discipline like he should have been. This doesn’t excuse his behavior (gun owners are literally taught to treat every weapon as loaded and deadly), but it might explain both his behavior and why the article chose the passive “it slipped and it shot” voice. Because basically, he was getting it ready to use as intended and it did magically “go off”, and it also is quite possible that it wasn’t pointed at the kid when grandpa started the task.

Originally the machines were going to use human brains for processing, but apparently the explanation was deemed too technical, so they changed it to some mumbo jumbo about power, which also let them use the nickname Coppertop.

A partner of mine has an above-range microwave with the worst implementation of this that I’ve ever seen. When you mute the button beeps, it mutes the entire microwave. Food finished cooking? Silent. Manual timer set? Hope you’re looking to see when it hits zero. There’s no way to silence the buttons without muting all alerts completely.