Source: https://mastodon.world/@exocomics/113998460425875829

• Panel 1: Rabbit chef at a counter with utensils, smiling. Text: "WELCOME TO COOKING WITH CRIMINALS."
• Panel 2: Rabbit chef holding a raw steak, grinning. Text: "STOLE THIS STEAK."
• Panel 3: Rabbit chef holding a dish of cooked potatoes. Text: "STOLE THIS POTATO DAUPHINOISE."
• Panel 4: Rabbit chef gesturing to a finished dish on the counter. A small cat watches. Text: "STOLE YOUR HEART."

Last night I had a dream where I was socially interacting as male, had male anatomy, etc. - it usually disturbs me when I wake up and realize my unconscious is operating this way, it feels like I don't see myself as a woman, which is true on a conscious level but it's painful when I don't even see myself as a woman in my dreams.

Sometimes even before transition trans women see themselves as women in their dreams, and I marvel at that. I think part of my denial was integrating every internal part of me that felt female as being actually authentically male, that all men are actually feminine in this way or that. So the authentically feminine parts of me still feel "male".

Anyway, I just wanted to do a quick poll and see:

(if any transmasc folks or enbies are reading this, I would love your input too, even though I'm using gendered language, I don't mean to be excluding)

• did you have dreams where you were a woman before you transitioned?
• what was the process like of your internal concept changing as you transitioned?
• when did you start appearing as a woman in your dreams post-transition? (did the frequency increase post-transition, what was that change like?)
• how do you relate to your self-conception, does it disturb you to be a man in your dreams, is it a relief to be a woman in your dreams?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/25556008

Early 30s CD looking for advice on where to travel. For a holiday

Hii everyone! I'm a 32yr old CD from Australia. I'm really wanting to book a 2 week holiday overseas (solo trip) that I intend to spend completely en-femme. Where would you suggest I look at? I would prefer a more urban environment rather than beachy, I don't really have that kind of confidence yet.

Pick is of me, sorry I couldn't think of anything else to put there.

Also sorry if this isn't the right place to be asking, I didn't know where else to ask. TIA

Hii everyone! I'm a 32yr old CD from Australia. I'm really wanting to book a 2 week holiday overseas (solo trip) that I intend to spend completely en-femme. Where would you suggest I look at? I would prefer a more urban environment rather than beachy, I don't really have that kind of confidence yet.

Pick is of me, sorry I couldn't think of anything else to put there.

Also sorry if this isn't the right place to be asking, I didn't know where else to ask. TIA

Hi, every morning I have breakfast with unsweetened soy milk. My cats kill me if they can't empty my bowl, but because I add stuff like raisins which include sugar, I give them some plain soy milk instead. The vet said it's "probably fine", but I want to know for certain. Does anyone know for certain soy milk is or isn't bad for cats? Thanks!

cross-posted from: https://discuss.online/post/16244242

What the Dragonmarked Houses Study

@rpgmemes

Hello! I realize the title sounds a bit clickbaity, but it's not hyperbole.

The short explanation is the nutritional facts on pet food includes its water weight, which makes the other percents like protein and fat on the packaging effectively pointless and impossible to compare from one product to the next, and they almost never include the ash and carbohydrate content. What you need is the dry matter basis, which is the percent breakdown excluding the water.

So what to do?

Well if you want a simple answer, just use https://catfooddb.com/ which has already done most of the leg work for you. Go find your preferred brand and check out the foods you're already feeding and pay attention to the pie charts to see how much protein, fat, and carbohydrates there are in the food you're currently using.

Is your food not listed? Don't fret!

If you are taking your pet food choices seriously, you can repeat her findings (often more accurately due to finding newer and more accurate data) on your own by figuring out the most current dry matter basis values for the particular food you’re looking at.

The math behind calculating dry matter basis

https://endocrinevet.blogspot.com/2014/01/how-to-calculate-carbohydrate-and.html

An online dry matter basis calculator

https://balance.it/convert

The catch is unless you know the exact ash content, which is almost never listed on the packaging sold to consumers, you have to guess, which greatly distorts the total carbohydrates. The best way I have found to get the exact ash content it to just go to chewy.com (not an endorsement. I use them strictly to get at information not disclosed to consumers) and look at the consumer questions because someone has likely already asked and use that value, or ask the question yourself and chewy will respond within a day or two.

So what do these values even mean?

At the end of the day these dry matter basis values are completely arbitrary unless you have something to compare them against, I recommend looking at data sheets put together by zoos where they have identified the dry matter basis of various prey species for use in feeding at zoos.

https://www.rodentpro.com/informationcenter/resources/nutrient-composition-of-whole-vertebrate-prey

https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/NUTRIENT-COMPOSITION-OF-WHOLE-VERTEBRATE-PREY-FISH)-Dierenfeld-Alcorn/9119b1ba4e298635227d69da95636d920eb4b6e9

I am just a regular consumer like you, but my take on the subject is you want (in dry matter basis) a breakdown of something like 66-75% protein, 25-33% fat, and as little ash and carbs as you can get. Wet foods typically don’t have much ash while dry foods have a lot more. For the record, ash is the amount of bones burned into ash during the manufacturing process 💀. Cats are obligate carnivores so they should have zero carbohydrates.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

I can't believe how much she has grown in the last 6 months! She's the sweetest little thing you can imagine, and such a little princess. She never bites or scratches people, even if she is getting fed up with me clipping her nails. If she isn't playing with Boudica then she is cuddled up on my lap or chest purring away. Both kitties purr as soon as someone starts to pet them, but Nini has such a squeaky purr that makes her sound like a squirrel. It's been a great 6 months (aside from her nibbling on everything in my pantry when i leave) and I'm excited for the next 6

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/21928256

Hello girlies and other folk,

my boyfriend is programming a desktop app that displays your current voice input's frequency in Hz over time with a real time graph, similar to the app "voice tools" many of us use for voice training.

I'm trying to garner interest for such a desktop app and would appreciate input about it so I can show him that it's not something only I would want.

I would also be interested in the OS you would be using, since currently it's only on Linux (as we use arch btw).

The image shows what it's currently looking like and the settings window. The entire point is for it to be always on top of everything else so you can always see how you're doing.

And for the other nerds: it's written in Python (making it quite large, about 2GB, he's trying to port it to Rust (based) and make it smaller)

I dole out level-ups somewhat more sparingly than most, operating under more of an actual-play cadence of one level-up per 'chapter'. The adventure structure that has come out of this mini-boss midway through the adventure, mid-boss guarding the adventure goal, and then adventure boss after level-up.

This time, they beat the dungeon boss, gathered the treasure (a relic crossed with a spell heart, giving them access to higher ranked spells than they 'should' have), and now they're facing... basically all of the enemies (and potential allies) in the dungeon that they bypassed.

This isn't an easy fight. This is a custom-tooled run of the Forge of Fury. They wiped out the Orcs on the main floor, by bypassed almost all of the Troglodytes, and almost all of the undead.

They befriended the Duergars, at least.

I've given everyone control over the Duergars (9 in total), so everyone is playing 4 characters this fight. They got through a couple of rounds of combat last session just fine, and everyone was into it.

Then last night, one of the players -- my partner -- managed to roll a 1 on every. Single. Damage roll. Like, her dice just decided they could not stand the sight of her anymore. It got to the point where I started to let her just re-roll her first roll if it was a 1, and about half the time it still came up a 1.

So, near the end of the session, as this well established itself as a giant cosmic joke, I pitched cascading damage dice to everyone, triggering off of a 1. They all agreed -- though one of the kids was sharp enough to ask if enemies would get the same benefit (of course they would) -- and we finished off the session giving it a try.

My partner rolled a lot of additional dice in the last halaf-hour of play. I let d4s trigger a second d4, but didn't let the secondary die explode. The mood at the table lightened considerably. The damage output increased negligibly, as 1s begat more 1s.

I've never played with exploding or cascading dice before. I don't have the bredth of system experience to have come across it organically. I was pleasantly surprised with how it added tension to damage rolls, and everyone else really loved how it softened the disappointment of rolling strong on their d20 only to find that they actually struck their enemy with a wet noodle.

I'm looking forward to next week, where I'll get to see how this plays out over a longer period of time. I think the kids are going to get a lot out of it, if they ever start rolling 1s.

In 2012 the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) took effect. Among other changes, we all have annual classification hearings in which we’re asked a handful of questions about how we identify and whether we’ve been sexually assaulted. Though I’ve been openly gay for a very long time now, each year during my PREA hearing I identify myself as heterosexual.

PREA sorts people into three categories: “predator,” “victim” and “neutral.” Someone who is heterosexual—on paper, at least—gets to be “neutral.” Whereas someone whose paperwork shows them to be anything other than heterosexual is much more likely to be classified as “victim,” even if they’ve never been assaulted.

Compared to heterosexual prisoners, LGBTQ+ folks are many times more likely to be assaulted—not just by other prisoners, but also by staff. Many who’ve been assaulted don’t report it, and so it’s a good thing that however you need to answer they take your word for it, even if there’s no record in the system. But a problem that arises with this system is that a “victim” and a “predator” can never be housed together. This probably sounds like a good thing, and in many cases it is. But labels can be misleading.

Many “violent sexual predators” are LGBTQ+ folks classified that way because they were sex workers living with HIV, or teenagers who’d had consensual sex with other teenagers. In my experience LGBTQ+ people in prison are just as often classified as “predator” as they are “victim.”

[Bolding added]

Archived at https://archive.is/YGbj7

This cute furry gremlins name is Alastor and if you can believe it my face only got one scratch!

i honestly think mine was sometime in 8th grade when i realized that i didn’t just admire this guy, i wanted to go out with him.

i got jealous when he jokingly flirted with guys, but at the same time hoped that he was hinting that he was queer and not just joking around.

She acknowledged that I did talk to her about it beforehand, but hasn't been able to properly process it yet.

We're OK, I'm just venting.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/29420970

Extra Ordinary Comics.

I am neuro-divergent. I struggle with remembering minutia that aren't, coincidentally, just luckily the minutia that I glimpse, once, and never forget. I state this not as an excuse but as a statement of fact and I am terrible at remembering people's pronouns. I cannot even remember people's names. When I see people I know, I can remember who they are, what we have done together, where we have been, what we have seen and even the tone of voice they might use to exclaim at an occurrence or upon some eventuality but – yet – I often cannot remember their names. Pronouns are like parts of their names.

And, so, I tend to address everyone with "they" / "them".

In my limited experience, this only tends to annoy the anti-woke conservative types who renounce the very concept of pronouns and believe that one should only ever be addressed as "he" / "him" – assuming that a penis hangs between their thighs – or "she" / "her" otherwise. (A musing: How do they know? Also, what if it's cold? Or they're upside down? Quandaries within quandaries!)

BUT... I am open minded and I can believe that others, too, might be offended by my cop-out, including open-minded, non-mysoginist, non-bigots who do understand why people elect to be addressed under non-Victorian pronouns.

I have recently had reason to pause and wonder about this. I struggle with pronouns but I do try my best and so, I'm asking: for which reasons might someone object? Tell me, LGBTQ+ community.

Black and white cat looks out the handle hole of a fruit box that has a "handle with care" sticker.

No traps here. Noki is always up for some belly rubs and it's never a claw trap🤷🏼‍♂️