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This one is probably going to catch me a lot of heat from both the extremes, as it touches on that most sensitive and landmine-laden of topics: gender identity and the expressions thereof.

First, the parts which are going to piss the TERFs off: I am a proudly cisgender, XX-chromosome-having ("womyn-born-womyn" as they'd say) lesbian, with a strict policy of dating only other lesbians (after some bad experiences with bisexual women)...and I am also trans-inclusive. This is going to draw the usual predictable howls of outrage, and might even get me called "traitor to the lesbian race."

*Again.*

Because yes, that is a thing that happened once. Satire sometimes writes itself.

Incidentally, if someone knows where the lesbian race lives, please by all means send me a couple of plane tickets; I'm getting married soon and would love to have the reception there. Hopefully it's somewhere with nice beaches!

And now the parts which are going to annoy non-TERFs: some of the TERF arguments hold more water than their detractors give them credit for. In particular:

1) There are biological differences between the sexes. Note that this does *not* mean I believe transwomen and transmen are deluded or faking their lived experiences; it means that gender is not purely a "social construct," that one's brain structure and hormones play heavily into it. Incidentally, this is *not* an anti-trans argument. If anything, this is the reason I support trans* people in their transitions. Nature screwed up somewhere and put the wrong sort of mind/brain in the wrong sort of body. I can't imagine what that's like, but I can take their word for it, and having seen the real, positive changes in trans* friends of mine once they started hormones only cements this support.

Again: not being a gender essentialist here, and certainly not committing that stupid "physical sex and/or chromosome cohort *is* gender" fallacy. I'm on your side, I'm just not going to fall for the stupid, mush-headed "thinking" that attempts to reduce something as complex as gender to "just a social construct." Real data has borne out that this is not the case.

2) Trans* people do not have the lived experiences of cisgender people of the sex they are attempting to pass as. Transwomen: you do not bleed, you did not go through female puberty as a child/young teenager, you will never be pregnant, and you were not seen by society at large--this is different from "not seen by molesters and paedophiles!"--as potentially and primarily objects of convenience, sexual and otherwise, for men.

3) Expanding on 2 above, I support cisgender-women-only spaces. This does not mean I don't view you, transwomen, as "real women." Your experiences are your own, and if you feel so badly mismatched to your body that you want to change it, to me, that is enough to qualify you as "real women." Just...not cisgender women. Again, different life experiences.

So please, if some of us want *some* space that's not dealing with trans* issues, please, please, give us that. You can be in the inclusive spaces, and even start transwomen-only spaces; I will not intrude on those, because I do not have your lived experiences, and can't imagine what you've been through. I only ask that you extend us the same courtesy.

4) Having a genital preference does not make you anti-trans* or transmisogynist. I am a lesbian. I like ladybits. This means I'm not going to date a pre-operative MtF, no matter how well she passes otherwise. We can be friends, but we're never going to have sex. Of course, this one is a moot point *anyway* since I'm already taken, but even hypothetically, it's not going to happen. It's not personal, but it's also not negotiable.

5) Surgery does not change your chromosomes or your lived experiences. This is actually not anywhere near as important as TERFs make it out to be, since at least to my mind, most of gender and gender identity is performative anyway. I'm also not saying to feel invalid or less of a human because of who and what you are. But at the same time, understand that history is history, and it can't be retroactively changed.

Just understand that the social transition is going to be bigger than the physical one for you. We can spot otherwise well-passing early-stage transitioning MtFs very well based not on any physical cues, but based on behavior. It takes time to lose that male privilege, and understandably, some of you are going to be reluctant to let it go. It sucks on this side of the gender divide sometimes.

6) Please understand that much of the backlash from the TERF camp is because women have always, always, always been marginalized and shoved aside for mens' interests, and some of us feel that men are intruding *even as they become women.* There's hardly any discussion of FtM people compared to MtF, and I don't hear hardly anything about FtMs having trouble integrating into groups composed of cisgender men the way MtFs tend to kind of stomp all over womens' spaces sometimes (in my observation, mostly early in transition).

The reasons for this are probably complicated. They likely have something to do with male being the "default," so FtMs are basically going from other and different to default, if not "normal." And the MtF friends i have, both of them, both told me there was a tremendous backlash against them for abandoning being male, mostly backed up by "WHY would you want to be a chick?!" with the unspoken corollary being "womens' lives suck."

I am, again, not a TERF, and I will defend you against them in all arenas. In return, please keep the above in mind.

This all sounds reasonable enough, right? In the end, doesn't it just boil down to the golden rule, treating others as they want to be treated, taking their basic humanity (a level well below gender expression, mind you!) into account? But I'm sure this is going to catch me more flames than a California wildfire. So be it; I'm wearing my asbestos nightie. Have at it.

Exclusive: Florida Public School Teacher Has A White Nationalist Podcast

Crystal River teacher hosts white nationalist podcast, HuffPost reports

Meanwhile:

Here Are 911 Transcripts of Some of the Times Apple Employees Walked Directly Into Glass Walls

I ran out of work to do

I fixed a panic only I could reproduce, tagged and built a release, rolled an installer then put it where QA was sure to find it

I marked my panic Resolved in the bugbase

I sent out an email

The VP of engineering stepped into my office to ask "Do you think this is ready for our customers?"

"Yeah"

"Cool" then he stepped back out

I hung out on the tubes for two hours. Having gotten bored with that I left work two hours early

What did I expect? A ticker tape parade?

To appear on CNN a _second_ time?

I'm finished

And quite likely unemployed. The VP said there was no market for what was to be my second project. They haven't mentioned any others

Aren't I supposed to celebrate this?

I feel strangely let down

The L3+, its sold-separately power supply and DHL shipping set me back $2,295.

I at first intended to set it up this evening, then decided I'd put it off until tomorrow evening because I was too tired. CryptoCompare's LiteCoin Mining Profit Calculator yielded the insight that putting it off that way would set me back $9.35 that I would have otherwise earned.

Or rather, that my L3+ would have earned.

I bought their LiteCoin rig rather than the Antminer S9 BitCoin miner because the S9 requires 220 volts. The L3+ can use 110 volts.

I puzzled over ways I could safely power it from my electric stove outlet. I was widely advised that if I didn't electrocute myself I'd burn my apartment building down. Despite all that I am confident that I could have made it work - safely and reliably - but in the end decided that doing so would be a huge pain in the ass.

I have the hope that I can provide for myself purely through mining. But that's not likely to happen anytime soon:

I ordered my L3+ in December, during the Irrationally Exhuberant Cryptocurrency Bubble. At the time the mining calculator said it would make me ten grand a year.

I live in a very modest way. Were I to buy three of them - and I really did have enough money, which I've since spent on hookers and blow - they would make thirty grand a year, which is far more than what I require to live comfortably.

I once earned $120/hour as a contract programmer but oddly never had any spare cash. My current monastic lifestyle is facilitated by having moved out of state then having changed my cell number.

(If the issue ever comes up I can truthfully claim never to have declared bankruptcy.)

To my great dismay that same mining calculator now tells me that my L3+ will produce just $2,900. That's the result of LiteCoin's fall in price after the bubble burst.

Try it yourself:

504 MH/s - Hash Rate

$0.0816 - per kilowatt-hour of electricity (cheap because Pacific NorthLeft)

800 watts - power consumption

$208.12 - LiteCoin Price

I'm not in a pool yet so I don't know what the pool will charge me. But the pool fee isn't really significant.

This is puzzling - the first time I tried today the calculator said my L3+ would mine 19.6 LTC per year. The second time it said 19.3. Now it says 16.65.

I'm going to try a different calculator...

WhatToMine sez it's 18.3, for an annual profit of $3,200.

Were the LiteCoin price to stay like this it would have been a far, far better investment to have bought a second macintosh. That would enable me to write OSX drivers without using my client's equipment.

Really the only way to know is to actually mine some LTC for the next little while as I follow the exchange rate.

I'm going to post this then play with my new toy.

Hi-Rez president compares new ‘Overwatch’ hero to a ‘Paladins’ protagonist

Just bookmarking so I can check out the videogamedunkey video later.

Nintendo Holds Off on Switch 2.0, Looks to Peripherals for More Sales

It would be bizarre to release a new version of Switch so soon. They talk about a slimmed down version (rather than a mid-cycle upgrade like PS4 Pro or Xbox One X). Compare to PS4 (Nov 2013) and PS4 Slim (Sep 2016), and Xbox One (Nov 2013) and Xbox One S (Aug 2016). In fact, the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X didn't come out very long after the slimmed down versions.

What they could do is drop in newer ARM CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. Even if they underclock and keep performance almost the same, the console would benefit from lower power consumption since it is battery-powered in handheld mode.

AC thinks I'm a creep. I wouldn't want my bad reputation to go to waste

Which of my posts is your favorite?

He livestreamed his own murder on Facebook in a North Carolina town

Man fatally shot on Facebook Live had been outing suspected drug dealers, sources say

LiveLeak.

Subject: Need to take Tuesday off work

Why time off?

The onset of Manic Depression, Schizophrenia and my own Schizoaffective Disorder typically occurs when one is a young adult. In my case it was in the early Spring of 1984, when I was a sophomore at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California.

I left in January 1985, and eventually earned my Physics degree at UC Santa Cruz.

I have had very, very little contact with anyone or anything that are connected to Caltech since I left. I was in a profoundly altered state of reality my last few months there. My Bipolar-Type Schizoaffective Disorder was diagnosed during a psychiatric inpatient admission in July 1985.

It happens that if one has ever been psychotic, simply thinking about psychosis will cause one to become psychotic again. This gives me the odd ability to start hallucinating just by thinking about it.

(I discuss this in The Heebie Jeebies.)

It's best that I not do that.

For me, Caltech is Powerful Voodoo.

I was recently invited to join the Caltech Alumni Facebook group. I have never been a member of the Caltech Alumni Association - again that would be Powerful Voodoo.

I explained my mental illness to the Caltech Alumni Facebook group.

When I was still a student there I found that none of the students, faculty or staff had the first clue about any form of mental illness. That no one else knew how to help me made my Schizoaffective Disorder far, far worse than it would have been had I been attending some other school when I experienced its onset.

None of the Facebook group members were at the Institute when I was. Most of them are quite a lot younger than that.

I didn't expect their response: an outpouring of support for me.

I've been thinking quite a lot about Caltech today.

It's best that I not do that.

I actually prefer not to use version control, or rather, my preferred form of version control is to roll a tarball every day then make multiple off-site backups.

svn commit --message "These should have been checked in before building the 1.0b9 installer. However I am confident that the installer has the 1.0b9 binaries. Before I checked these in were some other coder to build the installer they would have done so with out-of-date binaries."

Melania Trump re-emerges amid marriage scrutiny

Can Trump succeed where FDR and Bill Clinton failed?