not entirely human

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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: April 20th, 2026

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  • I think you’re imagining the difference between them from a technological point of view to be much bigger than it actually is.

    I have debit and credit cards, Visa and Mastercard for both. Using them feels identical; one draws from your bank account balance and the other goes towards an invoice sent to you at the end of the month.

    When you pay with them, the vendors themselves don’t see any private information about you, other than the card number and the way your name is written on the card. Some of my cards only have my first initial and my last name.

    They can, however, track that card number across multiple purchases or with partners to build a profile.

    Visa and Mastercard themselves can see a lot more, but that’s a given if you use any kind of banking services anyway.

    In terms of where they’re accepted, I’ve used them all over the world and the only time it mattered which type I use, is this one flight where Ryanair was not accepting debit when I was trying to buy water… Somehow you have to borrow money to eat/drink on board, which is just silly.




  • There’s no easy way to put this, but some cultural traits are bad. Your homophobia is rooted in broader social pressures imparted onto you by your environment/community. These pressures can mess with your sense of self-worth, but they are usually ripple effects from decades of clinging to religion in dire/traumatic circumstances. You can and should be better.

    If it makes any difference to you I’m middle eastern myself






  • I haven’t been able to post to reddit in years now, because I refuse to browse it without a VPN, and while it still lets me in, any account that I make immediately gets shadowbanned as soon as I make a post or a comment.

    I can’t tell if it’s because their bot filter is just terribly implemented, or because they don’t want me on their platform if I don’t surrender my public IP address.

    I’m pretty sure they just use a “how many different accounts under the same public IP” type of logic, because even if I create an account on a 4G network (no VPN) and post, this happens. Cellular networks often use double NAT (unique internal/carrier IP, shared public IP) to avoid allocating a public IP to each mobile device.

    I’ve given up a long time ago. My only exposure to reddit now is when a search results page links me to a post. The most helpful stuff is usually from a decade ago or earlier.



  • Trans man here, IMHO being nonbinary can be paired with being trans, but not necessarily, i.e. they are not inherently the same thing.

    If they have dysphoria and want to transition to alleviate it (irrespective of whether they can), then yes, they are trans.

    If the extent of a nonbinary person’s journey is to go by they/them, or they/them + the pronouns associated with their AGAB, then I would not categorise them as trans. To be clear, I am not saying that this is not a valid stance - just that the experience is not the same as being trans, though there may be some overlap.

    Obviously you cannot work this out without intimately knowing the person, and it isn’t really anyone else’s business anyway, but to answer the question explicitly, I would refer to them as a nonbinary person (in the absence of further information, and where the ‘nonbinary’ descriptor is relevant otherwise I would just say ‘person’), not a trans person.



  • Just putting it out there, because I have been silenced every time I have tried to talk about my negative experiences with minoxidil:

    I was on a 10% topical formulation (so 2x the strength of regular Regaine/Rogaine) and the stuff destroyed my skin on a permanent basis. About a month or 2 in I started noticing lines and wrinkles where I previously had none, my eyes were really puffy, and I started to look like the ‘after’ photo in those PSAs about doing drugs. I had to come off the stuff and take collagen supplements daily to even slightly reverse that. I’m not back to baseline and likely never will be; that shit aged me by about 8 years in the span of 6 months. It was honestly much worse than hair loss itself.

    Before I came off it, when I told the ““clinic”” that prescribed me what I was experiencing, they said it was placebo. Meanwhile, other hair loss sufferers online told me that I was making it up because I was jealous of other men’s gains (???)

    I am by no means saying this will necessarily happen if you take minox, but it wasn’t even a reported side effect on the leaflet (where it lists common/uncommon/rare/very rare side effects), and I was genuinely trying to get it on there so people could be aware that this is a risk.

    I would be super cautious of oral administration. When I was on the topical, it was only in contact with my scalp and any part of my body that would touch my pillow while sleeping I guess. Can’t imagine what it would have done going through the digestive system instead.

    Sincerely, fuck the hair restoration industry and the way it preys on desperate people.

    Sorry that this isn’t necessarily super on-topic (or uplifting), but seeing/hearing about minoxidil brings up a really bad experience.