Why are you trying to conflate Canadian Liberals and the Democrats? They aren’t remotely the same party, the systems of government don’t look anything alike and they aren’t in cahoots.

And the Canadian Conservatives are fronting a guy who has stated his support of American style “Right to Work” legislation and other Americanizing government initiatives who went into politics immediately from going to school for international affairs against a guy who has spent years as Governor of two National Central Banks and created a number of international contacts across the Commonwealth in the international financial sector that can be leveraged and yet Conservatives are trying to paint themselves as “better for the economy”. Pollievre has been utilizing anti gay anti queer dogwhistles in his rhetoric for the past ever as well. Fuck Right to Work bullshit and fuck anybody who wants to roll back civil protections. There’s not a lot of places in the world as safe as Canada for queer people to exist so it’s not like there’s much better places to escape once the fortress falls.

There’s actually kind of a funny history behind the Eggplant emoji. Emoji are Japanese in origin and around the time they were taking off there was this Survivor like gameshow where one guy was confined to his apartment and he had to try and survive past the basics by applying for and winning sweepstakes items from various promotions from newspapers and magazines.

The participant’s shortened form name was Nasu - which means “eggplant” so since the guy started the challenge with literally nothing including clothes they put a little Eggplant over his junk in post. That became a Japanese cultural meme that translated over once emoji became more widely adopted.

You probably won’t see actual dick emoji in the actual set because emoji are an all ages access thing and exist on an international level. It’s actually kind of funny how different cultures use the same finite set. Like in China how the angel emoji is construed as “I’m going to end you”. One could see the things as becoming essentially a hieroglyphic set where they gain their own full individual linguistic meanings.

Yeah, the unvarnished answer is usually about that ugly isn’t it?

I have been privy to people’s reactions to watching videos, even grainy distorted ones of executions or accidental death. While adults are generally fairly innocculated against depictions of death that are known to be fictional the same is not true of the real thing. There is good reason why even barely legible death caught on film is aired on news broadcasts with warnings and particularly graphic ones are not broadcast at all. While I think I sit somewhere on the less effected side (effected but very good at compartmentalization) a lot of the people I have personally witnessed veiw footage have been generally very perturbed to the point where the mental disquiet lingers for days after the fact.

Young children are generally perturbed by depictions of theatrical or even loosely conceptualized death in print. While some might seem brave in the face of fictional gore it’s basically just playing brave and flouting their idea of being tough when what they are being tough against is a safe little fiction. People who like slasher movies aren’t immune to being traumatically impacted when exposed to real death on film.

I find it very telling that there is this mental disconnect that children being “exposed” to the depictions of same sex relationships which are often depicted in the same chaste presentation heterosexual relationships are for age appropriate audiences is somehow “disturbing” while something legitimately traumatizing to the average adult is somehow something kids should be exposed to in the most graphic way possible.

I don’t think this man should be permitted to be around children much less advocate for what constitutes an initiation into adulthood.

Writing and playing tabletop RPG horror one gets a real sense of what horror is just a little too personal to be fun. There’s a whole lot of safety tools the community has developed (actually crossing over a bit with the BDSM community’s tools for safe consent when acting out a fiction). It’s really common to survey all players with an exhaustive list of all the potential horrors one could potentially bring to a table. The top five that are people’s no gos are sexual violence, harm to animals, reproductive horror, harm to children and body horror.

A lot of horror movie fans are not prepared for how you having agency in the situation of tabletop storytelling can make something you can easily handle watching suddenly effect you even when it’s just being described and can misjudge their level of chill and need to tap out mid game. Typical advice on reproductive horror a’la Alien is don’t even bother writing a reproductive horror that directly effects a player character. Damn near every table taps out for that, if not the player targeted then someone else at the table.

Alien de-gendering that horror was definitely a masterstroke. There’s good reason the chestburster reached cultural saturation.

Umm… I hate to tell you this but this is propagating some pretty harmful misinformation…

The reactions to medications are actually more closely tied to the hormone balance and body fat distribution of a person than their sex. It’s a common issue in the trans community where birth certificates are non-updatable that a doctor will prescribe meds for a person’s birth sex but because they are fully transitioned through HRT they get the effects more common to their phenotype presentation. This means that treatment is more commonly in line with their gender identity because of their hormonal medication and other procedures like an orchiectomy that make a person more similar to where they transitioned to then where they transitioned from.

With trans paitents by and large the safer way to behave is to go with the “if it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck and talks like a duck… If you are in a pinch and can’t ask them for specifics because they can’t talk - treat them like a duck.” While a lot of doctors aren’t super well versed in trans specific healthcare it remains a huge problem inside the community for trans women particularly being dosed like cis men which often means they respond like cis women to a lot of different things which is on average a little more scary because meds often linger longer than is expected in trans women’s tissues just like cis women. Sometimes this causes some cascading problems.

Pharmacology wise the way trans folks react to different medications is still a bit of a frontier science… But dollars to donuts “just treat em like their birth sex and call it a day” is way too simplistic a take. The lived experience and often physical nature of gender do not stay nicely behind a cordon marked “politics”. Trans ignorance in healthcare can be very scary for someone whose endocrinologist has informed them what they should be given and treated like and then some hotshot resident could just decide to not listen should the trans person in question be placed in a position where they are in extreme distress and have to self advocate and educate the person caring for them on what may be the worst day of their life.

Info dumping is a love language.