Ell @cincodenada@cybre.space

Also: I am always weighing how to balance jargon vs overexplaining, because I am wordy as-is, and jargon is useful for expressing common things within a field concisely.

The problem is jargon is also exclusionary, and I want anyone who is curious to be able to understand. I firmly believe that it's not about being "smart enough", it's about having the necessary context, and I can help with that!

So, If my posts don't make sense because of jargon or whatever but you're curious, please ask! I'm happy to elaborate, I love sharing understanding starting with whatever level of familiarity folks are coming from 🤗

"Ferengi" is a reference to a species in Star Trek that are a satire of capitalism and sexism in a larger society that is (purportedly) socialist and egalitarian.

In particular, Quark saying "females" in a particular disdainful tone, from this scene that really lays out the Ferengi views on gender roles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtGwsVM-ud0

Which led to this meme/image macro to capture what it often feels like when people refer to humans as male/female in casual conversation:

Haven't figured out exactly how to talk about past-me, only that rewriting all of past-me's gender to be present-me's gender doesn't feel accurate and I do not like it!

Many trans folks would totally describe themselves as having always been e.g. a girl/woman, which is totally legit, it's just not my experience, and that's rad because everyone's experience of gender is different!

What that means for me is that "when Ell was (presenting (as a dude/man)/masc)/going by Joel" all feel fine to me, at least right now. Using "male/female" I dislike mainly because referring to humans by "sex" in general just feels a little...Ferengi to me 😅

Anyway, see above, I'm not striving for comprehensible here, but I am happy to entertain good-faith questions and curiosities all the same!

This of course is to say nothing about deadnames (or pronouns) in general, best to assume a past name is a deadname unless explicitly told otherwise, and deadnames stay dead, speak of them not. (And, use the pronouns people tell you to and not random new ones, obviously!)

What that is is telling you details about my experience and desires around names/history/gender/pronouns, namely, that in my case "Oh yeah this is Ell, fka Joel" kinda stuff is totally fine.

On that note, finally got around to updating my name on here, yes I am the poster formerly known as Joel, no I don't consider it a deadname at this point, more like deprecated. Also, they/them or she/her 'nouns are great. And like, feel free to try your fave neopronouns on me too, I'm still trying those on!

Self-affirmation that fell out in my journaling today: I don't owe the world a comprehensible gender 😄

From the docs, Ctrl-C *interrupts* the current command. Looking at the mode-specific docs (v_<Esc>, i_<Esc>), Esc *ends* the current command, which means it sometimes finishes things that Ctrl-C will not.

Most notably in my case, it means that if you're doing an insert on a vertical selection, Ctrl-C will only edit the first line, whereas Esc (or Ctrl-[, which *is* the same as Esc) will edit all selected lines, as expected.

After using #Vim for over a decade, I have just now discovered that Ctrl-C and Esc are not *quite* the same. Always learning, I guess!

Oh it looks like they do already have a check, but it is pretty simplistic (doesn't adjust for the differing perception of each channel) and thus still results in some poor contrast. Perhaps I will mail someone, I know this is the bikeshed site, but standards are the solution to bikesheds and WCAG2 says we should pick different colors 😄

Just got totally played when loading https://bikeshed.com/ to link it for my coworkers.

I was like "hmm, I'm not sure this is the best background color..." and then refreshed to see if it was something weird with my caching and then immediately

Well-played, altho for accessibility I do think there should be some minimum-contrast checks 😉

Update: While I was composing the first post my cat came sauntering back into the living room with a series of short yells, so maybe my tripod baby did hear and came in to make sure I wasn't making any rash toe-related decisions.

Only after ensuring all was well, I'm sure, did he divert to drinking his living room water.

Today in things I've said out loud to no one, even my cat was in the other room and probably didn't hear me: "toes!! who likes 'em? who wants toes???"

Most excitingly: the Red Cross and others are currently running a pilot study attempting to provide evidence that deferring based on individual risk is at least as effective as a blanket time-based rule! Currently the study is running in SF, LA, DC, Memphis, New Orleans, Atlanta, Orlando, and South Florida.

So if you're MSM, live in one of those cities, and would otherwise be disqualified, check it out, you may be able to help move the FDA into the future: https://advancestudy.org

#redcross #blooddonation #study #msm #fda

So @harris indirectly reminded me I've been meaning to get back into the habit of donating blood again, and I realized I didn't know if HRT affected your eligibility...turns out the Red Cross has a very nice LGBTQ+ Donors info page: https://www.redcrossblood.org/donate-blood/how-to-donate/eligibility-requirements/lgbtq-donors.html

As expected they justifiedly does a lot of official grumping at the FDA, and generally do a pretty good job I think! In short:
- Being trans is not cause for deferral
- FDA says you do still gotta pick a binary gender, but as of 2020 it's explicitly expected to be self-reported
- MSM deferral is down to three months now
- FDA officially says trans men are men and trans women are women vis a vis "MSM" 😎

They also include a section for ace folks that basically says *not* having sex with people is not cause for deferral, which I found to be endearingly inclusive.