If U Interact With My Posts, Just Know I Respond Like This:

Why don't you take Spiro anymore? (You mentioned this in a recent post)

My T is sufficiently suppressed without it. Estrogen and Testosterone inhibit each other through indirect pathways- both signal the hypothalamus and pituitary, which in turn signal the testes/ovaries to produce more or less of their hormone. Unfortunately, T is a more potent suppressor of E than vice versa, so a blocker is needed to drop T levels at first (usually), which then lets E get high. Once E is high enough, then it can suppress T production on its own. For me specifically, I've never had a problem suppressing T, especially later into HRT when my E was getting somewhat higher. Even after quitting spiro, my T has never gotten above 20 ng/dL, and is mostly around 15 ng/dL, which is on the low side of normal even for cis women. AA in general are theoretically unnecessary once E is high enough to suppress T on their own, but this varies strongly dependent on the individual hormone metabolism from person to person. Fun fact, this is also why masculinizing hormone therapy is way simpler than feminizing hormone therapy- T is potent enough to inhibit E right off the bat without extra help.

Personal consideration to add here: I'm quickly learning that I'm a rapid metabolizer, along with about 20-30% of the human population. Essentially this means that most medication has shorter effect periods on me, and I believe it also has had an effect on how effectively my T got suppressed. My T levels were low almost immediately when I started HRT, and I started with spiro. But, the price I had to pay is that its taken forever for my E to go up. With that in mind, I realized that for me specifically, I didn't have to worry about my T going back up if my E wasn't high enough yet.

The above are about why I felt spiro was unnecessary, but why not take it just in case? Simple- side effects. I was having very noticeable diuretic side effects to the point where it interfered with my usual routines, so I tried to quit as soon as I could. Once I quit, a brain fog that I didn't even notice was there, lifted. I was having a lot of issues that I now realize were due to low sodium- my energetics were fucked, my vision was getting hazy when I stood up, and my heart pounded in situations it didn't need to. When I quit spiro, these stopped almost immediately, and I realized that these were side effects that I hadn't even registered as side effects.

These were considerations I made based on my own personal situation, but hopefully it helps. I haven't been on an AA since February or so. I actually just got a levels test back (spreadsheet update pending) and it confirms that my T has been within cis female ranges since early October, and on the low side of cis female ranges since early November.

In my personal opinion, AAs should be used more conservatively than it currently is, but are still necessary for HRT. My ideal HRT based on papers I've seen, personal experience, and conversations with my provider is essentially: brief period of E monotherapy-> E+AA until T is suppressed and E levels are high -> E monotherapy -> additional considerations (like prog). This is not coming from a medical perspective, though, just an anecdotal one.

Fuck.

I just thought to myself ‘wait are capacitors used to hold charge in devices’ then thought ‘no that’s stupid the charge would run out near instantly’ then thought ‘but wait the time constant might be really really big’ then thought ‘no because then it would take ages to charge’ but THEN thought ‘WAIT BUT YOU COULD HAVE ONE CAPACITOR THAT QUICKLY CHARGES AND THEN ONCE THE CHARGER IS DISCONNECTED IT DISCHARGES INTO CAPACITORS WITH REALLY LONG TIME CONSTANTS SO THEY RELEASE THE CHARGE OVER A LONG PERIOD OF TIME???’ But no just use a rechargeable battery

You, a human, can also do this! It’s surprisingly comfortable. Try it at your local treebranch today!

Yknow the thing where red pandas just lay down on a branch and let their legs hang and they’re just like vibing

made this tiny edit to this work by @​mxsparks@oulipo.social, so now it's a very convoluted dual language pun

guess this is an art blog now /j

Reap - To terminate a child process that has previously exited, thereby removing it from the process table.

Until a child process is reaped, it may be listed in the process table as a zombie or defunct process.

Zombie (process) - zombie process or defunct process is a process that has completed execution (via the exit system call) but still has an entry in the process table: it is a process in the "Terminated state".

Daemon - a computer program that runs as a background process, rather than being under the direct control of an interactive user.

bring back the era of whimsy that gave us "reap", "zombie", and "daemon" as technical terms in CS

mobile-friendly personal websites

@agentreynard wanted to hear more about how I made my website mobile friendly, so here's what I did:

First, crucially, I already had a one-column website that used css to style the HTML.

This made it easy to adapt to smaller screens...as soon as I learned the following three things thanks to Christopher Heng's How to Make a Mobile-Friendly Website: Responsive Design in CSS:

1. You need this magical incantation in the HEAD section of every page:

2. You need to tell your images to simmer down and not be stretching out the screen by being as wide as they want. They can be 100% wide and no more!! Add this to the css:

3. And then you'll probably need to give the page special instructions on how to act if it's being displayed on a small screen. This is the fiddly bit. What you put in here will be specific to your website, but it'll all go at the end of your css, tucked inside one of these:

That's what's known as a media query and it can take a variety of forms. This one says that if a screen is 320px wide or smaller, these rules apply. You can also use "min-width" if you want to tell it what to do if a screen is larger than a set number, and you can put whatever numbers in there you want.

Mine looks like this:

Those were all classes I used for the original layout, only now I want them to display differently on smaller screens. So I shrunk all the margins to remove white (and pink) space and now that same page looks something like this on mobile:

I did the same thing for the story files themselves, shrinking the margins so there's more room for text, but that took a different set of rules because they've got a different structure. I also added "back to top" links to the bottom of all my navigational pages.

Now, this is clearly not a foolproof or comprehensive plan. Everything I know about HTML and CSS I learned through trial and error, so I am barely qualified to say even this much. But these were the three things I needed to know before I could stick my hands in there and really shove stuff around.

Happy pride! 🌈

every software is like. your mission-critical app requires you to use the scrimble protocol to squeeb some snorble files for sprongle expressions. do you use:

libsnorble-2-dev, a C library that the author only distributes as source code and therefore must be compiled from source using CMake

Squeeb.js, which sort of has most of the features you want, but requires about a gigabyte of Node dependencies and has only been in development for eight months and has 4.7k open issues on Github

Squeeh.js, a typosquatting trojan that uses your GPU to mine crypto if you install it by mistake

Sprongloxide, a Rust crate beloved by its fanatical userbase, which has been in version 0.9.* for about four years, and is actually just a thin wrapper for libsnorble-2-dev

GNU Scrimble, a GPLv3-licensed command-line tool maintained by the Free Software Foundation, which has over a hundred different flags, and also comes with an integrated Lisp interpreter for scripting, and also a TUI-based Pong implementation as an "easter egg", and also supports CSV, XML, JSON, PDF, XLSX, and even HTML files, but does not actually come with support for squeebing snorble files for ideological reasons. it does have a boomeresque drawing of a grinning meerkat as its logo, though

Microsoft Scrimble Framework Core, a .NET library that has all the features you need and more, but costs $399 anually and comes with a proprietary licensing agreement that grants Microsoft the right to tattoo advertisements on the inside of your eyelids

snorblite, a full-featured Perl module which is entirely developed and maintained by a single guy who is completely insane and constantly makes blog posts about how much he hates the ATF and the "woke mind-virus", but everyone uses it because it has all the features you need and is distributed under the MIT license

Google Squeebular (deprecated since 2017)

ended up demotivated for months on a personal project... but we're so back, exciting things are happening. I implemented a functional, fairly readable json parser in 12 lines of code using my new library. more to come. eventually.