The Wireless Witch of the West @diodelass@cybre.space

there are a few productive ways to interact with transphobes.

you could try to damage them, but we're too soft at heart to manage that.

you could try to change their mind, but this is an immensely demanding process which takes careful preparation and a penchant for emotional manipulation, and we're good at neither

so that leaves shunning them, and hoping that if they get no attention, they'll get lost.

it feels weak, but there's not much else to do. everything else comes out worse for us and better for them.

this is why we only ever write these posts as choir-sermons, as it were

if we tried to engage the actual transphobic assholes, we'd get nowhere, because we're The Enemy and they will neither seriously listen to anything we say nor lend us any sincerity in their own arguments

but you, you sometimes actually listen to us, because you are willing to believe that we aren't trying to fool you into believing lies. sharing our thoughts with you is a far better use of our energy and time, and a far less demanding one at that.

one of the most important lessons we've learned over the last few years is that logic is not appropriate for use as a weapon

if your goal is to win a debate, then you're not using logic; that's deceit you're holding

if you're actually trying to convince someone of what you know to be true, then logic will never help you unless they already want to believe you from the start

nobody actually thinks they have to understand everything all the time, but as soon as they think they can successfully shout down people whose existence makes them uncomfortable, they act like clear, prompt understanding is a basic human right that they are owed

it's not impressive

electrons tunnel across barriers when the electric field is strong enough: "wow, weird right? we might never know why that happens but it's pretty cool and you definitely can't ignore it"

some people don't neatly fit the arbitrary set of criteria that attempts to sort every person who ever lived into two categories: "I'm sorry, you need to provide me with rigorous theoretical and philosophical justification for this under my terms, or I'm going to assume you're lying"

or quantum electrodynamics, which despite being tenuously understood at best, describes mechanisms that are fairly important to modern semiconductor IC design

there's a certain willingness to say "heck the fundamental theory, it's good enough if it works" for this sort of thing

except when it comes to the bodily autonomy of people who make them uncomfortable, suddenly they all become staunch believers in the ~Objective Nature of Reality~

so do these Insightful Cis Intellectuals also dismiss quantum field theory as a reality-distorting cult ideology because it contradicts basic facts they learned in middle school and appears to be very inconsistent with certain measurements of the physical world when taken in specific contexts?

after all, compared to something as simple as gender identity deviation, QFT is on pretty shaky theoretical ground

We wish we had remembered to do this bit on April Fools' Day.

this was the immediate aftermath

it happened the moment we stuck a stir rod in to try to keep the bubbles from exploding.

whoops.

once we made a joule thief out of a low-threshold surfacemount MOSFET and two very loosely-coupled discrete inductors (increasing the coupling actually made it worse; if you brought a piece of mu-metal near, it would shut down entirely). it ran at too high a frequency to hear or see, and could keep an LED lit all the way down to 0.1 volts. we lost our circuit diagram for it, sadly, and don't remember how exactly it worked.

guess we were only destined to make the one, for now.

it now stands somewhere in the electronics lab at the university we once attended, attached to a D cell and, to our knowledge, still glowing.

got bits of it between the keys <_>

it was a very small explosion, much too small to be dangerous, which scattered little gobbets of titanium dioxide all over our room

absolute agony to clean up

we guess we know what a "steam explosion" is now,

JESUS FUCKING METHYLDICK

dreaming of one day being the weird old hat in a lab or shop who is held in high esteem and always gets along well with the team, but always insists on using a very fancy, very old analog oscilloscope for everything, with a few handmade external modules to add on certain DSO features here and there - never a digital scope unless that's really the only option

bold of you to assume that air is composed of non-interacting neutral point masses

bold of you to assume that the string is massless and infinitely flexible

bold of you to assume that the current in the coil can be approximated as a thin current sheet with density K

why does the TILP package shipped by Debian have the rom dumper explicitly patched out?

did they get strongarmed by TI or something