While Covid certainly doesn’t help, the trend started well before then, and none of the research points to this being a factor at all. Unless there is a atudy linking the two, or some other evidence, just blaming Covid for every new health phenomenon is misinformation at best and dangerous at worst, as it implies that the factors listed should be disregarded.

Cis and transgender people, as well as intersex and other gender nonconforming people, not just women.

Trans men are being denied hormones and used as a template to remove access to reproductive healthcare for people who need it. Intersex people are being denied bodily autonomy and used to make official policies that determine people’s gender for them. Gender non conforming people who may not ID as trans are being punished for appearing outside the norm and used to fearmonger about social contagion.

I am not trying to say trans women don’t need support, they absolutely do. But this also impacts more than just them, and focusing on only women when many other people who are often erased are also affected adds to that erasure. If something affects more than just trans women, then the other people suffering should be included in statements made about it.

The price of eggs in particular I haven’t noticed. I have been vegan for ten years, so I am over here trying to give people tips on how and where to replace eggs with other, cheaper stuff. I do anlot of baking and cooking, so I have tried all the swaps the internet recommended and have a pretty good idea which ones work.

However, the price of food as a whole is going up as well, and I don’t expect it to stop anytime soon. I am hoping to set up a ‘victory garden’ to try to help. If anyone else is looking into this, I recommend looking for an official victory garden guide that would have been issued for your particular area. I found one that was written by an agricultural professor at the University of Ithaca in NY, for example, and it goes over what crops and food preservation methods will work in my area. It will give you important information about temp tolerances, which is about to be more important than ever.

I am short with a somewhat femme figure, sparse but obvious facial hair, a flat chest, and a voice that sounds somewhere between a very gay man, a 13 year old boy, and an older woman. I am very visibly crossing many lines that people look for when trying to figure out how to address someone. Meaning, in a time when attacks on trans people and our rights are very quickly ramping up, I am in more danger of harassment and assault than I have been in the last few years.

As far as who is looking out for me: I am, that is part of my goal, but I also have a husband and a few friends who I can ask for help. However, I am in a slightly better position in life than most trans people in this country, since I live in a blue state that is (probably) unlikely to strip me of my rights. Hence my focus on helping others. There will probably be a lot of people coming here for medical treatment, and I want to make sure I help in any way I can.

As a visibly trans person: survive, and help as many other people survive as I can.

Having two dinners this year. My mother in law came over on Christmas Day, we had a Field Roast, garlic smashed potatoes, mushroom gravy, brandied cranberry sauce, and boozy nog, with plenty of cookies for dessert. It was a nice time, though a bit bittersweet as this is the first Christmas since my father in law passed.

This Sunday we are having friends over for another dinner, and I am making veggie pot pie, fondant potatoes, green beans in garlic butter, the rest of the cranberries, and ricotta cheesecake for dessert. It won’t be a huge crowd, just doing dinner and some board games, so looking forward to that.

Great! When can I get one installed?

Semi-serious here. I have the absolute worst sense of direction and would be thrilled if I could get an update to fix it lol.

Thank you! We are on the opposite coast, but we are working with ministers like yourself to make sure we have plenty of options for people to choose from. Best of luck over the next years, and here’s to many more happy weddings!

My husband and I did this after the Dobbs decision came down and cited ‘future reconsiderations’ for Casey and Obergefell. Called a handful of friends and family and told them to meet us at the courthouse in two weeks.

Now, we are bracing to help people who may have to travel to our blue state to get married, just like they had to 15-ish years ago. We may not be able to leave, but we have some means to help others, so we are doing what we can.

I was in NYC for Pride the other year and got a sample of a cannabis drink made by a new-at-the-time company Cycling Frog. Flavor is good for a seltzer type drink, and the inebriation level is tailored to be about equal to 1-2 alcoholic beverages, which makes it easy to dose. Hubby and I loved it and bought a couple of cans on the spot. They are now available in dispensaries near us, and we still pick up a case every few months.

When I was about 12 and searching the local paper to learn local rent costs. I was looking with the plan that I would move out at 16 and take my sister with me so we could escape the abuse we were suffering from our mom.

As a short dude (5’ 0"), you give short dudes a bad name.

You assume you know everything about everyone, you treat people like walking stereotypes instead of treating them like actual individuals, and you refuse to even consider that people are avoiding you for your personality instead of your height. All the while, you are blaming women for a problem that, even if it did exist as much as you insist, would largely be perpetuated by the men who run the clubs, not the women who can get in for free and usually just want to be left alone so they can dance with their friends.

Are there a lot of areas where we face actual discrimination because we fall outside standard height considerations? Sure, I can think of several. None of them have to do with whether I get into a club. And you don’t make your case by using discriminatory language and being a misogynistic ass.

I can guarantee you that your attitude is hindering your social life far more than your height. There are plenty of women who love short men, but so many of them end up needing to constantly worry about their man’s ego that they don’t think it is worth it.

In other words: men like you, no matter the height, are the reason women choose the bear. Grow up, solve your own insecurities, and stop assuming that you know what is going through people’s minds every minute of the day.

While you are correct that it will likely be expensive, it is important to note that Descovy is an existing PreP pill that Gilead makes. So the cost of the new shot is yet to be determined, but the company has been criticized for the cost of their current PreP medication option.

It is also important to note that anyone with insurance in the United States will pay nothing, as the Affordable Care Act requires insurance to cover all PreP medications at no cost to patients. The pricing will only affect those who have no insurance at all, which makes this criticism all the more important to help this new medication reach those who would be the worst affected if they were to contract HIV.

Two or three years, I think. So far the price has stayed exactly the same, they still have no ads, and they haven’t made any changes to the app to try to advertise features or anything like that. It was (and still is) a nice change from Spotify, Apple Music, and even YouTube to be honest.

I do have the family plan actually, I forgot about that!

And I do occasionally. Certain live albums and more niche stuff can be hard to find, and one hit wonders can be tricky depending on the genre and time the song is from. The song I’m Blue by Eiffel 65 is only available in a longer club mix and not the radio edit, for example.

I will say that, in my experience, it has a slightly larger selection than Spotify for classic stuff and different versions of the same song (covers, remakes, remixes, etc). For example, my husband was very excited that they had the whole readout of How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Boris Karloff (in two parts, but still) because they used to play it on certain radio stations every year around Christmas. On Spotify I was only ever able to find the same version of the song from several different albums of Christmas mixes.

No actually! Napster bought Rhapsody and now runs a music streaming platform.

I get the reaction though lol. That was my reaction too when a friend of mine recommended it. But I tried it and it is actually really nice, and the price hasn’t gone up in the years I have had it.

I pay about that already (~$14 a month), but for Napster, which afaik gives the biggest cut of any streaming service to artists. They also have really good custom playlist management, I never get intrusive popups or emails, and premium means no ads, even with hours of listening. I switched after the Joe Rogan thing happened with Spotify and never looked back honestly.

Interesting. I have not had any issues using their engine even with the issue with Bing’s API, but you are correct that they use Bing’s index. Given that there are only four indexes to choose from, that isn’t too surprising.

I actually switched to them when I saw that DuckDuckGo was about to start providing ‘AI assisted results’. I wanted to ensure I was using an engine that actually respected my privacy and didn’t harvest my data for slop.

Anecdotally, I can confirm that the results I get from SwissCows are very different and usually better than the ones I got from DDG. So I wonder how much of Bing’s API they use.

I picked a good day to switch to SwissCow lol

https://swisscows.com/en/web?query=%s

Free, uses it’s own index, focus on privacy. If there is anything bad about it though, please let me know. It can be hard to find unbiased data on search engines when you ultimately need to use a search engine to find the info, ime.

Disturbed’s cover of Sound of Silence is not only awful, it is an antithesis of the meaning of the song. Anyone who likes that version better than S&G’s arguably doesn’t understand the point of the song, and the fact that everyone holds it up as the gold standard of “covers better than the original” is even worse.

A close second is Postmodern Jukebox and their horrendous tendencies to take tempos to an opposite extreme instead of finding more meaningful ways of changing the genre of a song. I like some of their stuff, but the number of people who love their cover of Welcome to the Jungle is mind-boggling to me.

There are plenty of songs that I prefer the cover of to the original (Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’), or ones that just give the original a modern coat of paint without changing much else (Smash Mouth’s ‘I’m a Believer’), but these songs in particular are just awful imo.