As a fellow European who's also working on a similar move, I would just like to note that it is absolutely surreal that we have to consider this.
I wish it was motivated by pure patriotism (give our money to relatively local businesses), but it's motivated by uncertainty, something I wouldn't have expected from the USA in my younger years.
Well, my guess is that OPML is underrated. And I understand that, because it's so different from the social media that we are used to. On my homepage (link in bio) you can find all the feeds that I follow, available as an OPML file. It might be of interest to you, it might not (probably a lot of blogs you know from here, at least half of my 2000 feeds).
One 'dream' of me is to have OPML be the discovery-glue between all kinds of individual personal websites and blogs. But this requires critical mass to have enough to discover and explore, and it needs some fun/interesting software way to do that.
I'm a trans woman who's had a lot of electrolysis. Almost all of us get permanent hair removal on our face if we can afford it. Laser is far cheaper and quicker, but not everyone can get it since it needs specific hair and skin colour combinations.
Electrolysis on my face and neck has cost me tens of thousands. Think $100 per hour, and it taking 100-300 hours to complete typically. Full body hair removal would easily run in to hundreds of thousands, but very few people will be able to afford that.
I also don't see the aesthetics behind it, but I guess that's the hetero guy speaking.
Women are expected to not have beards, and having one or any beard shadow will get you seen as "a man" very quickly. It's both for safety, and reducing the amount of dysphoria we experience.
I looked at the arm hair in the video, than at my grizzly arms and totally forgot about facial hair!
That sounds super expensive, isn't there a trend to do that abroad?
I remember seeing Istanbul airport full of hair transplant patients, apparently people go there to have more hair at an affordable cost, maybe the opposite is also available at less than $100/h?
Electrolysis is something that needs to be done roughly every 6 weeks, as hairs regrow. Each hair can need multiple treatments to fully kill off, too. There's probably some countries where you can hop over the border to get it done cheaper as a day trip, but I doubt most people will be able to do such a long trip every few months.
There's cheaper places than where I go, for sure, but operator skill is a big part of electrolysis. It's the difference between getting scarred or not, and it's the difference of a hundred hours time spent because the operator wasn't using enough power.
The reality is that it's just time intensive, and there's not many good experienced operators around where I live
> Laser is far cheaper and quicker, but not everyone can get it since it needs specific hair and skin colour combinations
Laser is also often (usually?) not permanent (I am the right combination of fair-skinned and dark-haired). And hella painful from personal experience, though I can't compare to electrolysis.
FWIW, as a trans woman, I assumed that was for demonstration purposes to avoid showing anything intimate or identifying. Though some of us do remove essentially all hair south of the eyes.
Thicker and longer arm hair is still a masculine trait. Testosterone thickens hair all over your body. Feminising HRT does revert body hair for some people (but not facial hair, it's a biological quirk), but usually not enough to where cis women are if you started out hairy
I feel like harrier arms on women isn't that uncommon, but that could also just be the people I hang around (they tend to be more punk/hippie than the average)
Also a hairy man. I got a small amount done about 20 years ago because I didn't want to end up with "old man ear hair" like my relatives (TMI, sorry).
At the time, a visit was $60. It wasn't painful but I did feel a twinge/shock for each hair. Multiple visits are required because of how follicles work - they grow hair in phases. The technician would treat the ones she saw, but then I had to wait until the next growth phase to return for her to get the next batch. About 10 trips in all.
Typically not everywhere, but places with really coarse and dark hair like the face and chest are pretty common. Also, you need some done down there for some PIV vaginoplasty (though, some surgeons remove hair in other ways. in general a lot of mtf bottom surgery varies from surgeon to surgeon though)
Yeah, I tend to think of body hair as an adult trait, not a masculine trait. Aesthetically I see this kind of like a badass custom tattoo gun, where the tattoo is your own skin without the parts you don't like.
I think she meant that going to a place to get it done for the whole body costs that much. It still sounds expensive, but who knows.
Though, I have no idea who would want to sit through something that takes ten seconds per body hair. I got a light hair removal device and it's waaaaaaaay faster and cheaper.
That happens in most speech to text systems, even Superwhisper, Monologue and Wispr Flow. I read somewhere it comes from training on YouTube audio and happens when there is silence. I guess it depends on the model but most of them are based on Whisper which has this problem
Ha, I also have this happen all the time in response to mouse clicks. When playing with Apple Foundation Models + Whisper I noticed that it happens so often that I had to explicitly filter this out before acting on transcriptions.
This is so dystopian. I've been buying paper books for years so that my future kids will have something to hold onto.
I'm really hoping I will have the patience to discuss with them and pay attention to their imagination and not numb them down with this crap. Sorry for being harsh. This just made me sad and angry.
I wish it was motivated by pure patriotism (give our money to relatively local businesses), but it's motivated by uncertainty, something I wouldn't have expected from the USA in my younger years.
reply