It was indeed a coffee Renoir. The 24hr supermarket I acquired all my loot from has an extremely well stocked baked goods section, with loads of super fresh and tasty stuff. I used to live near this particular shop, and the coffee renoirs were one of my favourite items to buy, when they had them in stock. They’re so good

Yeah, like I say, it’s more healthy than a lot of meals I eat. I tend to crave basic, fresh stuff when I’m tripping

Yeah! You get it!

It did indeed. That’s part of why I found it funny enough to snap a picture — to me, in the moment, it was the most glorious feast I could possibly imagine.

Not really — even assembling this pushed my focus to its limits. It didn’t help that I was also pretty physically tired from an eventful night out. But even if I could cook, I don’t think I would; I tend to strongly crave basic foods like this — most of this was actually stuff I bought when going to a 24hr supermarket on my way home (I spent way more than I should have, but I have no regrets)

It’s one of the reasons why I really enjoy the occasional psychedelic trip. I find that it makes me much more present in the moment, and in my body.

For instance, I am prone to not noticing how I feel, whether that’s pain, temperature, tiredness, etc… I need to manually check in with myself and basically ask “am I hungry right now?”, and then ponder that for a moment. Often, once I do, I am hit with sudden and extreme hunger that I am only just feeling, despite not having eaten for a long time. Or when it’s too warm, I might only notice that I’m overheating when I say something unkind due to heat making me grouchy, or when I feel like I’m about to pass out.

When I am tripping however, responding to basic needs demands my full attention. I might suddenly feel an extremely strong instinct of “I need to be warmer, and I need it now” — and because I am a responsible tripper, there is usually an assortment of warm cozy things to hand, should I need them. Sometimes what I notice is more vague, like “my temperature needs to change right now, because it is not right”, and I am not sure whether I’m too warm or too cold. However, I can use a blanket as a litmus test for that — if I’m too warm, when applying a blanket to myself will give a viscerally strong sense of “bad”, and so I know I should open a window or get an ice pack.

I like how decisive it makes me. I find that existing in this mode for a few hours helps me to live a bit more like that in the days and weeks following the trip.

I don’t usually peel avocados when I eat them raw, I just score the skin in a circle around the midpoint, hold each half and then twist, before eating the avocado with a spoon. Not included in the picture was the knife that I use to do this: here is my parcel knife.

NOT ESPECIALLY, BUT NONETHELESS, I CONSIDER THEM TO BE MY CULTURE BECAUSE I HAVE AUTISTM

Yeah! Nerd party!

That’s what makes it so beautiful to learn what I can. I do sometimes feel overwhelmed by the enormity of it all, but what grounds me is taking the time to feel joy at each wonderful little thing I do have the opportunity to learn, as well as the opportunity to share my learning with others.

Throughout my life, I have accumulated a heckton of random knowledge, all tied together by my subjective perspective. There are things that I know that no-one else can know — insights that come from a particular arrangement of facts and experiences. It gives me a sense of clarity because it reminds me that one of my duties is simply to just “hold the camera”, so to speak — to be the anchor for my particular, situated perspective

It’s less about the ability to find the clitoris, and more about the will to do so. I think that it is more than a meme, but in the sense of “men seem so oblivious about the clitoris that surely they must not be able to find it”. Some women do seem to genuinely believe this to be the case. I guess that, as absurd as it may sound, it may be more palatable to believe than “most of my partners don’t give a fuck about my pleasure and I’m functionally little more than a fleshlight to them”

There have been a few times where I have been a bi woman’s first experience of sapphic sex, where they have told me that the sex was so good that it basically redefined for them what sex could be like.

I don’t know if it makes it more or less grim that I have slept with plenty of men who were invested in my pleasure enough that they actively enjoyed helping me to have a good time. I guess they have just been fairly unlucky with their partners.

Personally, I found myself a lot more fulfilled in my hobbies when I learned to stop holding myself to the standards of people who don’t work the way that I do. In my case, that meant embracing the fact that I’ll always be a generalist, because I’m in it for the love of learning, and thus chasing novelty is a part of the fun. I need to be mindful that I do try to actually finish some projects, but I found that much easier to do once I stopped holding myself to competency standards that don’t map well onto why I engage with my hobbies.

It sounds like my experience is going to be quite different to your own, but I wonder whether part of your problem might be a similar thing of trying to chase after a model of hobby fulfillment that’s incompatible with why you do this stuff. I’d wager that fulfillment and accomplishment may still be possible for you, but they may come from a different source than your partner’s

Yes! I resonate so hard with your comment.

Sometimes my friends ask me what my secret is to learning the absurd number of skills I’ve acquired over the years, and my genuine response is “hubris”; I often start out with an overambitious goal which inevitably leads to a poorly executed result — however, one that I am always very satisfied with.

The key to it is that when I buy tools or materials for a new skill, I think of it as my learning being the end product, rather than whatever item the project aims to produce. Once I’ve immersed myself in a hobby a little, it gets easier to find a balance of pragmatic ambition that results in usable items, but for that first stage, I’ve found it’s better to assume I’ll almost certainly fuck it up. I’ve been able to have a lot more fun since properly understanding that

I bet you’ve learned a lot though!

Because it’s so repairable, you might be able to find a 3rd party to fix it for not too much. I don’t know what that would do with your warranty, but I figure that attempting the repair yourself would also void the warranty.

High availability of parts and repair guides tends to lower the price of repairs, even from 3rd party people. It’s why right to repair is so important

Oof, yeah, that’s gross as hell. I imagine that must make the already pretty demoralising experience of online dating even worse. Guys like this get super defensive if you call them out on this transphobic bullshit too.

If you’re a fan of Sagan, you might be interested to hear that he considered that “science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality”.

Religion might be noise for you, but for countless people across history, it has been what has helped them to cut through noise. Religion unequivocally does not contradict scientific thinking — what we understand as scientific thinking wouldn’t even exist today if not for religion.

Things don’t have to be a binary of religion vs science. Religion has so often been the driving inspiration for brilliant scientists across the world, for much of recorded history. And in parallel, there have been religious scholars who find spiritual awe and fulfillment in seeing scientific advances.

That definitely doesn’t mean that everything is always great between religion and science — I’m very much not a fan of things like evangelical Christians who claim that dinosaurs weren’t real, or the Taliban who prevent women from being educated. Those are examples of religion being used as a cudgel against science, but if we want to genuinely resist that kind of thing, it’s not productive to instead try to use science to bash religion. Our best resistance is to embrace the fact that science and religion can and do coexist, in many different shapes and forms.

Part of my stance here is pragmatic — I’m a scientist myself, and I am filled with dread when I see how anti-science rhetoric is flourishing nowadays, and I am resentful as hell towards the many religious assholes who are feeding that. However, if I direct my beef towards religion as a whole, then that’s a heckton of people that I’ve given up on trying to convince. I believe that the scientific method should be a tool that everyone has available in their toolbox, even if it’s not something their daily life often requires — it’s a useful perspective to have on hand no matter your background.

However, I’m realistically never going to convince someone to give up their faith in exchange for this tool, especially as I am not religious myself and thus don’t properly understand what purpose religion serves them. I can make a far more compelling case for science if it isn’t framed as something that seeks to displace their faith. And you never know, once someone does have scientific thinking as a tool in their toolbox, and they know how to use it, they might end up relying on it more and more. I personally know many scientists who have experienced this kind of journey. Though giving up on faith entirely isn’t required, as evidenced by the many excellent scientists I have known whose religious faith drives their passion for research — the best biochemistry tutor I ever had was even a reverend.

Science and religion are not incompatible, and there is evidence of that strewn across history and society. To ignore that fact would be to betray the principles of empiricism that the scientific method is built upon.

Is there a particular instance you’re referring to here? Because contrary to popular belief, the church has historically been big on investing in what we now call science.

For instance, although the trial of Galileo is often characterised as “big bad church holds us back because religion is opposed to heliocentrism”, there was actually a lot of legitimate scientific beef against Galileo. Although he ended up being right about heliocentrism, he didn’t really have good evidence to support his claims; He didn’t understand Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, and his telescope produced so many aberrant artifacts that astronomers who use it were reasonable to be dubious of his claims.

If you’d like to learn more, here’s an excellent video by Dr Fatima, an astrophysicist turned science communicator. The philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend also uses Galileo as a case study in his book Against Method

I’ve had a good experience on Feeld, as a bisexual woman. I’ve found that there are far fewer deceptive unicorn hunters on there (I say this as someone who is open to being someone’s unicorn, if they are open and candid about their wishes. I once went on a Hinge date with a woman whose profile said she was a lesbian, but at the date, she ambushed me with her boyfriend. She said she lied because she didn’t think I would have showed up to the date if she said she wanted to bring her boyfriend. Gross behaviour)

I actually had a partner utilise this to excellent effect by writing on my body while I was tied down (tip: using a whiteboard pen means it washes off easily).

We stumbled upon this idea after discussing the mild degradation kink that I had, and realising that most degrading language we could think of would likely make me feel sad. So instead, we ended up having him ask me for nice things about me that he could write (and for each one I gave, he would also add one of his own).

It was a really interesting experience, because it did end up scratching the degradation itch I had felt — the act of writing stuff on me while I was tied up helped a lot. I’m not actually too bad at taking a compliment (I’m much more someone who is desperate for affirmation more than someone who struggles to take a compliment — although both of those instincts within me come from the same crippling insecurity)

Vive la France