today in "why do I still go on twitter, ever": I tell someone not to act like mental illness = evil and dangerous, they apologize, and *in their apology* they say that being evil and dangerous should be in the DSM.
@guerrillarain I am happy to be on fluffy animal provision duty for anyone who needs it!
Since Masto seems to need a bit of good fluffness today - here's a variegated fairy wren. They are very pretty :)
I've met some great roleplayers from witches.town, so you might consider an account on dice.camp? That is where I put my rpg stuff.
Hey, people leaving witches.town! lgbt.io is, as you'd expect, super trans/enby friendly, and as you might not, not purely focused on LGBT issues. We talk about all sorts of things. :)
📣 PSA 📣
❗ ❗ ❗ ❗ ❗ ❗ ❗ ❗
If you know any #photo #photography or #photographer types on witches.town please direct them our way.
Their admin just announced the service will shut down 2018/04/30 and we'd like to help their users find a good home.
Please boost this.
Hey everyone leaving witches.town as it shuts down!
pentacl.es will be up soon, I've already registered the domain name! Hang tight!
hi I'm not leaving mastodon.at but I made a wandering.shop account because 1. I like their local feed and 2. the witches.town implosion has me thinking maybe it is a good idea to have a home in more than one instance, just in case
anyway if you want to follow @polyplacophora it's going to be exactly the same as here but it'd be nice because then I could primarily use the wandering.shop account
@ghost_bird Sorry about your instance. The whole situation looks like a mess. Let me know where you move to so I can follow you there?
"Non-Binary people aren't valid" is a transphobic statement
Solidarity, friends
You can learn more about our home in the Fediverse at http://home.kitty.town, and request an invite at http://home.kitty.town/registration.
tenforward.social is open for registrations if anyone is looking for a new home.
I am the only moderator/admin there so if anybody has questions about such feel free to ask.
(9/9) Anyway I'm nonbinary. It was really hard to figure that out. I had to fight for it, and put in a lot of work, and learn who I was all over again. It was one of the best things I've ever done in my life and I'm *still doing it*. I'm still finding words for things and sorting through feelings and putting myself together after a long, long time of thinking I was just broken.
Nobody is going to take that away from me. Nobody's going to tell me that's not real.
(8/?) But binary gender, like the original Linnaean taxonomy, vastly oversimplifies and misinterprets in favor of both meshing with how its culture of origin sees the world and being easy to organize. (These two things are, to some extent, related; although humans seem to like systems and models for understanding things in general, our society is obsessed with easy clear-cut categories *because* we're obsessed with easily enforced hierarchies.)
(7/?) Anyway. Point is. Categories, in general, are things humans make up to better make sense of their world. That doesn't mean they aren't *real*. There's a definite, tangible difference between a snail and a clam, and an even bigger difference between both of those and a bird, which is accurately reflected by Linnaean taxonomy.
fixed, with apologies for the doubleposting of a lot of long stuff
(6/?) When genetic sequencing became a thing, taxonomy/phylogeny in general was thrown into even more chaos when it turned out that a lot of our organization was based on two false assumptions.
1. life always proceeds from less complex to more complex
2. living things that are more similar to each other must be more closely related than things that are less similar
We already knew both these things were false to some extent, but the sheer scale of it was revealed by genetic sequencing.
(5/?) I'm not going to weigh in on the existence of God here, but real life is not a filing system. Real life is *fucking weird*. Real life throws whatever pops up at the wall to see if it sticks. And because real life is not so easily and neatly labeled, Linnaean taxonomy is a *mess*. Infra-orders and species complexes and all sorts of other complications to the straightforward Domain-Kingdom-Phylum-Class-Order-Family-Genus-Species system that has changed very little from Linnaeus' time.
(4/?) Here is a story about a man named Linnaeus and his attempt to categorize the entire world.
Linnaean taxonomy is still our most common method for organizing species in ways we can understand. We use it for scientific names, to show relationships between organisms on different scales, etc.
It was invented by a Creationist who thought that God organized life the same way we would organize a filing system, and his job was just to figure out that system.
