Yes, straight and relaxed fit clothes are more fashionable in 2023.
Even if you look at something as middle of the road as the J. Crew Men's Instagram page, most of the models are wearing relaxed fit clothes. Companies that want to stay relevant are focusing on straight and relaxed fit clothes in their marketing, and that says a lot about where fashion trends are right now.
But I was staying with a friend in Manhattan last weekend, and most of the men I saw walking around were still wearing relatively slim clothes. Most of the wide and relaxed fits I saw were on women, not men. (I didn't get a chance to visit Brooklyn this time around--relaxed fits on men might be a bit more common over there.)
In my view, the slim cuts this sub promoted in 2013 have transformed from youthful and trendy, to normal and inoffensive. You probably won't see a lot of slim cuts on fashion influencers, or in marketing campaigns for fashion brands.
But plenty of male celebrities still wear outfits that could have been posted on MFA a decade ago, and those outfits still look great in my opinion. Ryan Reynolds is an example that comes to mind.
There's a widespread sentiment on this subreddit that slim clothes look "outdated" in 2023. And I just don't think that's true.
Disconnected undercuts and Yeezys are outdated. Skin tight jeans and the lumbersexual aesthetic are outdated. Slim jeans, again, are merely normal and inoffensive.
If you're trying to look cooler and more youthful, maybe it's worth trying something with a looser fit. But if you're content with merely looking like a grown ass man who knows how to dress himself, there's no reason to abandon your slim fit clothes.
EDIT: I think there's a misunderstanding of what I mean by "outdated."
In the context of 2023, you can still wear slim clothes and be well-dressed, if not fashionable. If you're looking for clothes that flatter your body and make you look more put together, slim clothes will probably still do the job.
In other words, you won't look like you stepped out of a time machine, you'll look like you know how to dress yourself, and the vast majority of people won't even be able to tell what's "unfashionable" about your outfit. It's hard for me to imagine that anyone whose opinion actually matters (ie: potential friends, dates, or employers) will register your style as "outdated."
Things might be different for very young men. Some Gen Z Redditors can enlighten me on that, I guess.
But in my view, if the vast majority of well-dressed men in major cities are still sporting slim fits, they're not outdated yet. If normal people who put effort into their appearances start perceiving slim jeans the way they currently perceive boot cut jeans and Ed Hardy shirts, things will be a bit different.

Before I even start, I want to make this clear that this is not an attempt to troll or me trying to nitpick or be a dick. This is meant as a genuine question and I’d like genuine responses please.
Having said that. Does Women Talking fail the Bechdel Test?
From my understanding, the test has 3 components:
1.) that there be 2 named female characters who are featured. This one is obviously satisfied.
2.) That these featured women speak to each other. This one seems to be satisfied as almost the entire cast is women and the are talking to each other. However, the presence of the male school teachenote taker in all the meetings scenes, does that negate those scenes? Do the two or more women have to be alone to qualify? If his inclusion in these scenes disqualifies them, then there are relatively few left.
3.)That when the women talk they do not discuss men. This is the one that has me tripped up. The entire plot is about coming to terms with their male dominated society and the crimes against the women.
Now I only saw the movie once so there may be scenes I’m not remembering but it seems the actual rules of the test and the spirit of the test are significantly at odds here. It’s a story about women building trust and compromise for a better future for themselves and later generations but even this story cannot escape the narrative confines that make it (in my view) fail the test.
Is the test somewhat limited in dealing with this particular film or is it a fundamental flaw in the test itself? I think most people would agree the film has a feminist message but then why does it fail what is often held up as the standard for progressive filmmaking? Perhaps the rural/religious aspects undercut the spirit of the test?
Again, this is a serious question and I’d like to hear serious thoughts. Did I miss something in the film or am I being perhaps to strict in my reading of the test rather than following the spirit of the test?
Thanks for your thoughts!

Before I even start, I want to make this clear that this is not an attempt to troll or me trying to nitpick or be a dick. This is meant as a genuine question and I’d like genuine responses please.
Having said that. Does Women Talking fail the Bechdel Test?
From my understanding, the test has 3 components:
1.) that there be 2 named female characters who are featured. This one is obviously satisfied.
2.) That these featured women speak to each other. This one seems to be satisfied as almost the entire cast is women and the are talking to each other. However, the presence of the male school teachenote taker in all the meetings scenes, does that negate those scenes? Do the two or more women have to be alone to qualify? If his inclusion in these scenes disqualifies them, then there are relatively few left.
3.)That when the women talk they do not discuss men. This is the one that has me tripped up. The entire plot is about coming to terms with their male dominated society and the crimes against the women.
Now I only saw the movie once so there may be scenes I’m not remembering but it seems the actual rules of the test and the spirit of the test are significantly at odds here. It’s a story about women building trust and compromise for a better future for themselves and later generations but even this story cannot escape the narrative confines that make it (in my view) fail the test.
Is the test somewhat limited in dealing with this particular film or is it a fundamental flaw in the test itself? I think most people would agree the film has a feminist message but then why does it fail what is often held up as the standard for progressive filmmaking? Perhaps the rural/religious aspects undercut the spirit of the test?
Again, this is a serious question and I’d like to hear serious thoughts. Did I miss something in the film or am I being perhaps to strict in my reading of the test rather than following the spirit of the test?
Thanks for your thoughts!

Three non-Door County, Walker-appointed judges overturned a local, Walker-appointed judge. They won't let Egg Harbor condemn a new walkway. This post is about the new ruling as it intersects with the ongoing Wisconsin Supreme Court race.
Sojenhomer LLC et al vs. Village of Egg Harbor et al https://www.wicourts.gov/ca/opinion/DisplayDocument.pdf?content=pdf&seqNo=632770
State appeals court rules Egg Harbor illegally condemned private property for a walkway https://fox11online.com/news/local/wisconsin-state-appeals-court-rules-village-egg-harbor-illegally-condemned-private-property-for-sidewalk-shipwrecked-brew-pub-door-county-highway-g-pedestrian-safety-sojenhomer
Bios of the three non-Door County judges:
Thomas M. Hruz https://www.wicourts.gov/courts/appeals/judges/hruz.htm
Lisa K. Stark https://www.wicourts.gov/courts/appeals/judges/stark.htm
Gregory B. Gill Jr. https://www.wicourts.gov/courts/appeals/judges/gill.htm
Bio of the Door County judge:
David L. Weber https://doorcountypulse.com/pinkert-attorney-weber-appointed-door-county-judge/
Older background on the case:
Judge Overrules Shipwrecked Project Denial, Village to Appeal https://doorcountypulse.com/judge-overrules-shipwrecked-project-denial-village-to-appeal/
Shipwrecked Expansion Denied Again https://doorcountypulse.com/shipwrecked-expansion-denied-again/
(Condemnation Review) Door County Case Number 2020CV000101 Sojenhomer LLC vs. Village of Egg Harbor https://wcca.wicourts.gov/caseDetail.html?caseNo=2020CV000101&countyNo=15&index=0
Looking at the pdf of the ruling, it is obvious that the three judges have a similar philosophy as Dan Kelly. They are reading the law, determining legislative intent, and applying it dispassionately. Their restraint is significant because Wisconsin could become more apt to condemn land as a result of a past U.S. Supreme Court decision. This is an article about it:
Can Your Property Be Seized? People Worry About Government Power After U.S. Supreme Court Decision https://madison.com/news/local/can-your-property-be-seized-people-worry-about-government-power-after-u-s-supreme-court/article_9b1cfa24-4750-57c0-828a-3db344bf480f.html
It also seems like Wisconsin is moving in favor of condemnation, and using the threat of condemnation in more significant ways:
‘Blight’ declaration for Foxconn one of the largest ever seen, experts say https://wisconsinwatch.org/2019/09/blight-declaration-for-foxconn-one-of-the-largest-ever-seen-experts-say/
Condemnation is probably the fiercest tool Door County and its municipalities have to fight gentrification. That is a big "if" they choose to wield it. The condemnation of land for Whitefish Bay State Park was controversial. By using condemnation, the DNR was able to get the land cheaper than what the land speculator wanted for it, and also below the tax assessment, which the DNR felt was inflated.
An earlier official plan, adopted by the county board, called for continued acquisition of land for state parks, continuing even up to the year 2000. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112078786966&view=1up&seq=37&skin=2021
But in the 1970s, the Door County board turned anti-condemnation, and stopped the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources from taking the entirety of Detroit Island for a new state park. The county board changed course and abandoned its earlier plan.
It would take an act by the state, but I could imagine something like a "Lakeshore State Park" passing if the state legislature became liberal enough. It would consist of all exterior shoreline, turning private beaches into public ones. It could be justified on the basis of "blight", similar to the Foxconn "blight". Actually there are issues like erosion, septic tanks, waterweeds, impaired spawning grounds from the docks, boat channels, and breakwaters. Also the general economic conditions in the area are a factor. It would really be a trail, violating the statute at issue in the Shipwrecked case, but what they called it a state park? Lawyers could try to find a loophole.
A "Lakeshore State Park" would be about as popular as trapping the people in the Dawes Act enclave within the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa reservation. This cause has been widely popular on Reddit because of generalized anger against people from outside the area and people wealthy enough to own second homes or along a shore. It also seems that the governor and out-of-state mainstream media are supporting the tribe. On the other side are some conservative websites and politicians which have opposed the tribe. If you haven't been following it, https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/10/wisconsin-indian-hostage-crisis-teeters-on-violence-because-biden-tony-evers-do-nothing/ is a start from the opposing side.
A Lakeshore State Park could be considered fair in that it would expand the carrying capacity of the area. It would improve the economy by drawing more tourists. It would give people who can't afford shoreline real estate more access to the water. Reduction in residential property values near the shore could help with affordable housing. Condemnation can be a progressive way to help the economy.
Relating this to the ongoing Wisconsin Supreme Court race
Kelly has pledged to interpret the laws as they are written: https://wtmj.com/news/politics/2023/02/22/dan-kelly-scaffidi-supreme-court-platform-dishonesty-dorow-concession/
In contrast, Protasiewicz is backing various partisan positions, which she calls values: https://wisgop.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/PROTASIEWICZ-COMPLAINT-SIGNED.pdf
So she isn't going to interpret the law as it is written, but instead see partisanship as being a fair part of the game, and even commendable in the quest for fairness.
It seems that if Kelly gets elected, it will be harder to condemn private property. He seems unlikely to allow Egg Harbor to condemn the area in question, and even more unlikely to bend the law to allow for a Lakeshore State Park.
If Protasiewicz gets elected, she could instead help overturn the ruling of the three judges, letting Egg Harbor condemn a new walkway. She lacks the judicial philosophy to restrain herself from taking sides in activist causes, so why not go for some condemnation?
One local judge, D. Todd Ehlers, and one former judge, Peter C. Diltz, wrote a letter that people should vote for Protasiewicz:
https://doorcountypulse.com/letter-to-the-editor-endorsement-for-janet-protasiewicz/
Background on the two:
D. Todd Ehlers https://doorcountypulse.com/ehlers-seeks-re-election-circuit-court/
Peter C. Diltz http://map.co.door.wi.us/Agendas-Minutes/CountyBoard/Cty%20Brd%20Resolutions/2016%20Resolutions/2016-25%20In%20Recognition%20of%20Service%20The%20Honorable%20Judge%20Peter%20C%20Diltz.pdf
They use phrases for her like:
"fair and impartial jurist"
"upholder of the rule of law"
"protector of individuals’ constitutional rights"
The fair and impartial claim is undercut by the complaint submission documenting her advocacy for partisan causes. The "rule of law" claim is likewise undercut by it. Kelly said that with her advocacy, "She's telling them that she will prefer her personal values over their law, over their Constitution."
Is she a "protector of individuals’ constitutional rights"?
That is tricky because "rights" type language can mean almost anything. Middle Easterners were supposedly being helped with their rights not that long ago. In today's context, reproductive rights are probably the biggest factor intended. How she gets evaluated on this question depends on various premises about abortion, which most readers of this probably have already settled opinions somehow.
How would reproductive rights interact with other rights?
What is happening outside the state with law regarding unborn children?
Virginia judge uses 19th-century slavery law to rule frozen embryos are property https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/ma10/virginia-judge-uses-19th-century-slavery-law-frozen-embryos-property , copied from https://apnews.com/article/embryos-slavery-chattel-custody-virginia-82e1f36ecbcf35ec4659e8e2c3443c4f
I'm not impressed over this ruling. This suggests it is not a good idea to use advocacy of reproductive rights as a proxy for upholding other individual human rights.
And what has happened locally? Surrogacy was promoted in May 2021:
Giving the Gift of Motherhood: Abby Duebler’s surrogacy journey https://doorcountypulse.com/giving-the-gift-of-motherhood-abby-dueblers-surrogacy-journey/
This contrasts with how some other people on a peninsula far away think about surrogacy:
Barbara Alberti, an Italian novelist (who seems important enough, although I'm not familiar with her) says

"They say: 'It is an act of love'. Have you ever seen a rich American perform this 'act of love' to make a poor Moroccan happy? It's a billion-dollar deal that takes the trouble out of the rich. Childbearing has become a servile act. The rich buy the poor. It is an act of love if there is an emotional relationship between the parents…"

https://www.secoloditalia.it/2022/11/la-scrittrice-barbara-alberti-lutero-in-affitto-e-la-nuova-schiavitu-un-affare-miliardario/ (Google translate)
Italy's Prime Minister says surrogacy is

"the slavery of the third millennium"

https://www.italianpost.news/giorgia-meloni-against-surrogacy-and-gender-ideology-women-first-victims/
So rights are supposedly going to be protected, yet the "slavery of the third millennium" gets praised as a "gift". Likewise, Duebler is a "charismatic change-maker" according to a letter to the editor: https://doorcountypulse.com/letter-to-the-editor-abby-duebler-is-good-for-door-county-families/ .
Surrogacy and abortion are packaged together as "reproductive rights", even though it leads to illogicalities like this one:
Leftist Logic: Adoption Is More ‘Traumatic’ Than Abortion, But Surrogacy Is Just Great https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/03/leftist-logic-adoption-is-more-traumatic-than-abortion-but-surrogacy-is-just-great/
How bad off are Door Countyites, that success can be yours with the help of $40,000 from Alternative Reproductive Resources in Chicago? If you see yourself instead as being on the paying side of the transaction, it safely follows that left-wing interpretations of rights will help you get what you want and make you more empowered.
What about at the community level? This study says that 32% of GDP is destroyed by abortion: https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/b8807501-210c-4554-9d72-31de4e939578/the-economic-cost-of-abortion.pdf
The paper also explains that abortion is a moral issue rather than an economic one. I agree. But for now I'll put on blinders and treat it as if it is an economic issue anyway.
For Door County, it would seem that it would be much less than 32%, since mother's in Door County usually love their babies and do not get abortions. In the last statistical notice I remember seeing from the state, Door County had seven abortions over a year. But on the other hand, the county actually loses more than its fair share of the 32%, in that abortions elsewhere leads to young people raised in the county to relocate, filling jobs in wealthier areas. If it wasn't for abortion, the net flow of the working-age population would be more stable.
They came up with this figure by using the "Value of a Statistical Life" concept used in other risk-management calculations. It says that a life is worth $10.9 million to the GDP.
Comparing that figure with the $40,000 from surrogacy, I ask, "does the benefit of money coming into the area from surrogacy make up for the loss of money due to abortion?" Looking at this, the best I can do is a ballpark estimate, since some of the economic impact will fall outside of the area.
It is possible to make up for the economic cost of one abortion if all mothers were surrogates. If mothers had an additional 272 children and sent them all off to people in the Chicago area who want to pay, it would balance out even. So to make up for legalizing abortion at the state level, the county would have to more than double the current birthrate to economically make up for the cost of just one abortion per year. Or for seven abortions per year, that would be an incredible one thousand, nine hundred more births per year.
So surrogacy will not compensate for the economic cost of abortion in Door County. That must be why the Italians outlaw it; they'd have mothers in a village like Strega Nona's sending babies to Paris. Italy doesn't take it for granted that Europe will arrange things to their advantage.
Since the reproductive rights' agenda is a net loss to the county, it follows that other attempts might be made to help the area's economy if political forces impose it on Door County. Large-scale condemnation seems like a desperate, last resort to me. Other things would be tried first. I imagine the situation would have to get considerably worse for it to be considered. That would possibly take longer than the 10-year term that the winner of this case will get. But if Protasiewicz is still on the court, she might be in a position to lend an activist hand to a desperate area.

Three non-Door County, Walker-appointed judges overturned a local, Walker-appointed judge. They won't let Egg Harbor condemn a new walkway. This post is about the new ruling as it intersects with the ongoing Wisconsin Supreme Court race.
Sojenhomer LLC et al vs. Village of Egg Harbor et al https://www.wicourts.gov/ca/opinion/DisplayDocument.pdf?content=pdf&seqNo=632770
State appeals court rules Egg Harbor illegally condemned private property for a walkway https://fox11online.com/news/local/wisconsin-state-appeals-court-rules-village-egg-harbor-illegally-condemned-private-property-for-sidewalk-shipwrecked-brew-pub-door-county-highway-g-pedestrian-safety-sojenhomer
Bios of the three non-Door County judges:
Thomas M. Hruz https://www.wicourts.gov/courts/appeals/judges/hruz.htm
Lisa K. Stark https://www.wicourts.gov/courts/appeals/judges/stark.htm
Gregory B. Gill Jr. https://www.wicourts.gov/courts/appeals/judges/gill.htm
Bio of the Door County judge:
David L. Weber https://doorcountypulse.com/pinkert-attorney-weber-appointed-door-county-judge/
Older background on the case:
Judge Overrules Shipwrecked Project Denial, Village to Appeal https://doorcountypulse.com/judge-overrules-shipwrecked-project-denial-village-to-appeal/
Shipwrecked Expansion Denied Again https://doorcountypulse.com/shipwrecked-expansion-denied-again/
(Condemnation Review) Door County Case Number 2020CV000101 Sojenhomer LLC vs. Village of Egg Harbor https://wcca.wicourts.gov/caseDetail.html?caseNo=2020CV000101&countyNo=15&index=0
Looking at the pdf of the ruling, it is obvious that the three judges have a similar philosophy as Dan Kelly. They are reading the law, determining legislative intent, and applying it dispassionately. Their restraint is significant because Wisconsin could become more apt to condemn land as a result of a past U.S. Supreme Court decision. This is an article about it:
Can Your Property Be Seized? People Worry About Government Power After U.S. Supreme Court Decision https://madison.com/news/local/can-your-property-be-seized-people-worry-about-government-power-after-u-s-supreme-court/article_9b1cfa24-4750-57c0-828a-3db344bf480f.html
It also seems like Wisconsin is moving in favor of condemnation, and using the threat of condemnation in more significant ways:
‘Blight’ declaration for Foxconn one of the largest ever seen, experts say https://wisconsinwatch.org/2019/09/blight-declaration-for-foxconn-one-of-the-largest-ever-seen-experts-say/
Condemnation is probably the fiercest tool Door County and its municipalities have to fight gentrification. That is a big "if" they choose to wield it. The condemnation of land for Whitefish Bay State Park was controversial. By using condemnation, the DNR was able to get the land cheaper than what the land speculator wanted for it, and also below the tax assessment, which the DNR felt was inflated.
An earlier official plan, adopted by the county board, called for continued acquisition of land for state parks, continuing even up to the year 2000. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112078786966&view=1up&seq=37&skin=2021
But in the 1970s, the Door County board turned anti-condemnation, and stopped the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources from taking the entirety of Detroit Island for a new state park. The county board changed course and abandoned its earlier plan.
It would take an act by the state, but I could imagine something like a "Lakeshore State Park" passing if the state legislature became liberal enough. It would consist of all exterior shoreline, turning private beaches into public ones. It could be justified on the basis of "blight", similar to the Foxconn "blight". Actually there are issues like erosion, septic tanks, waterweeds, impaired spawning grounds from the docks, boat channels, and breakwaters. Also the general economic conditions in the area are a factor. It would really be a trail, violating the statute at issue in the Shipwrecked case, but what they called it a state park? Lawyers could try to find a loophole.
A "Lakeshore State Park" would be about as popular as trapping the people in the Dawes Act enclave within the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa reservation. This cause has been widely popular on Reddit because of generalized anger against people from outside the area and people wealthy enough to own second homes or along a shore. It also seems that the governor and out-of-state mainstream media are supporting the tribe. On the other side are some conservative websites and politicians which have opposed the tribe. If you haven't been following it, https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/10/wisconsin-indian-hostage-crisis-teeters-on-violence-because-biden-tony-evers-do-nothing/ is a start from the opposing side.
A Lakeshore State Park could be considered fair in that it would expand the carrying capacity of the area. It would improve the economy by drawing more tourists. It would give people who can't afford shoreline real estate more access to the water. Reduction in residential property values near the shore could help with affordable housing. Condemnation can be a progressive way to help the economy.
Relating this to the ongoing Wisconsin Supreme Court race
Kelly has pledged to interpret the laws as they are written: https://wtmj.com/news/politics/2023/02/22/dan-kelly-scaffidi-supreme-court-platform-dishonesty-dorow-concession/
In contrast, Protasiewicz is backing various partisan positions, which she calls values: https://wisgop.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/PROTASIEWICZ-COMPLAINT-SIGNED.pdf
So she isn't going to interpret the law as it is written, but instead see partisanship as being a fair part of the game, and even commendable in the quest for fairness.
It seems that if Kelly gets elected, it will be harder to condemn private property. He seems unlikely to allow Egg Harbor to condemn the area in question, and even more unlikely to bend the law to allow for a Lakeshore State Park.
If Protasiewicz gets elected, she could instead help overturn the ruling of the three judges, letting Egg Harbor condemn a new walkway. She lacks the judicial philosophy to restrain herself from taking sides in activist causes, so why not go for some condemnation?
One local judge, D. Todd Ehlers, and one former judge, Peter C. Diltz, wrote a letter that people should vote for Protasiewicz:
https://doorcountypulse.com/letter-to-the-editor-endorsement-for-janet-protasiewicz/
Background on the two:
D. Todd Ehlers https://doorcountypulse.com/ehlers-seeks-re-election-circuit-court/
Peter C. Diltz http://map.co.door.wi.us/Agendas-Minutes/CountyBoard/Cty%20Brd%20Resolutions/2016%20Resolutions/2016-25%20In%20Recognition%20of%20Service%20The%20Honorable%20Judge%20Peter%20C%20Diltz.pdf
They use phrases for her like:
"fair and impartial jurist"
"upholder of the rule of law"
"protector of individuals’ constitutional rights"
The fair and impartial claim is undercut by the complaint submission documenting her advocacy for partisan causes. The "rule of law" claim is likewise undercut by it. Kelly said that with her advocacy, "She's telling them that she will prefer her personal values over their law, over their Constitution."
Is she a "protector of individuals’ constitutional rights"?
That is tricky because "rights" type language can mean almost anything. Middle Easterners were supposedly being helped with their rights not that long ago. In today's context, reproductive rights are probably the biggest factor intended. How she gets evaluated on this question depends on various premises about abortion, which most readers of this probably have already settled opinions somehow.
How would reproductive rights interact with other rights?
What is happening outside the state with law regarding unborn children?
Virginia judge uses 19th-century slavery law to rule frozen embryos are property https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/ma10/virginia-judge-uses-19th-century-slavery-law-frozen-embryos-property , copied from https://apnews.com/article/embryos-slavery-chattel-custody-virginia-82e1f36ecbcf35ec4659e8e2c3443c4f
I'm not impressed over this ruling. This suggests it is not a good idea to use advocacy of reproductive rights as a proxy for upholding other individual human rights.
And what has happened locally? Surrogacy was promoted in May 2021:
Giving the Gift of Motherhood: Abby Duebler’s surrogacy journey https://doorcountypulse.com/giving-the-gift-of-motherhood-abby-dueblers-surrogacy-journey/
This contrasts with how some other people on a peninsula far away think about surrogacy:
Barbara Alberti, an Italian novelist (who seems important enough, although I'm not familiar with her) says

"They say: 'It is an act of love'. Have you ever seen a rich American perform this 'act of love' to make a poor Moroccan happy? It's a billion-dollar deal that takes the trouble out of the rich. Childbearing has become a servile act. The rich buy the poor. It is an act of love if there is an emotional relationship between the parents…"

https://www.secoloditalia.it/2022/11/la-scrittrice-barbara-alberti-lutero-in-affitto-e-la-nuova-schiavitu-un-affare-miliardario/ (Google translate)
Italy's Prime Minister says surrogacy is

"the slavery of the third millennium"

https://www.italianpost.news/giorgia-meloni-against-surrogacy-and-gender-ideology-women-first-victims/
So rights are supposedly going to be protected, yet the "slavery of the third millennium" gets praised as a "gift". Likewise, Duebler is a "charismatic change-maker" according to a letter to the editor: https://doorcountypulse.com/letter-to-the-editor-abby-duebler-is-good-for-door-county-families/ .
Surrogacy and abortion are packaged together as "reproductive rights", even though it leads to illogicalities like this one:
Leftist Logic: Adoption Is More ‘Traumatic’ Than Abortion, But Surrogacy Is Just Great https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/03/leftist-logic-adoption-is-more-traumatic-than-abortion-but-surrogacy-is-just-great/
How bad off are Door Countyites, that success can be yours with the help of $40,000 from Alternative Reproductive Resources in Chicago? If you see yourself instead as being on the paying side of the transaction, it safely follows that left-wing interpretations of rights will help you get what you want and make you more empowered.
What about at the community level? This study says that 32% of GDP is destroyed by abortion: https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/b8807501-210c-4554-9d72-31de4e939578/the-economic-cost-of-abortion.pdf
The paper also explains that abortion is a moral issue rather than an economic one. I agree. But for now I'll put on blinders and treat it as if it is an economic issue anyway.
For Door County, it would seem that it would be much less than 32%, since mother's in Door County usually love their babies and do not get abortions. In the last statistical notice I remember seeing from the state, Door County had seven abortions over a year. But on the other hand, the county actually loses more than its fair share of the 32%, in that abortions elsewhere leads to young people raised in the county to relocate, filling jobs in wealthier areas. If it wasn't for abortion, the net flow of the working-age population would be more stable.
They came up with this figure by using the "Value of a Statistical Life" concept used in other risk-management calculations. It says that a life is worth $10.9 million to the GDP.
Comparing that figure with the $40,000 from surrogacy, I ask, "does the benefit of money coming into the area from surrogacy make up for the loss of money due to abortion?" Looking at this, the best I can do is a ballpark estimate, since some of the economic impact will fall outside of the area.
It is possible to make up for the economic cost of one abortion if all mothers were surrogates. If mothers had an additional 272 children and sent them all off to people in the Chicago area who want to pay, it would balance out even. So to make up for legalizing abortion at the state level, the county would have to more than double the current birthrate to economically make up for the cost of just one abortion per year. Or for seven abortions per year, that would be an incredible one thousand, nine hundred more births per year.
So surrogacy will not compensate for the economic cost of abortion in Door County. That must be why the Italians outlaw it; they'd have mothers in a village like Strega Nona's sending babies to Paris. Italy doesn't take it for granted that Europe will arrange things to their advantage.
Since the reproductive rights' agenda is a net loss to the county, it follows that other attempts might be made to help the area's economy if political forces impose it on Door County. Large-scale condemnation seems like a desperate, last resort to me. Other things would be tried first. I imagine the situation would have to get considerably worse for it to be considered. That would possibly take longer than the 10-year term that the winner of this case will get. But if Protasiewicz is still on the court, she might be in a position to lend an activist hand to a desperate area.

• Faction Balance: Most official classic servers are 99% Horde or 99% Alliance. They don't care about population balance, whatsoever. On Warmane, the populations are balanced 50/50% thanks to always ensuring there's incentives to join the smaller side (such as XP boosts) whenever there's been an imbalance. Blizzard are too dumb to do the same thing.
• World PvP: On Warmane you actually meet the other faction, so it's an automatic win for Warmane. When you play on official, only 1% of the players are the other faction, so why bother?
• PvP: Alright, this is the first win for official. PvP is fine on Warmane, but you definitely meet a lot of P2W bastards and multiboxers here (since the accounts are free). On the other hand, official has P2W too because you can literally pay other people to boost your rating until you get the best arena gear too, and the official Battlegrounds are a shitshow full of 60% bots, so the only good part of official is Arena. But hey, if you really cared about PvP, shouldn't you care about having an even playing field where every player has the same gear so that you can compete on actual SKILL? In that case, WARMANE wins, because we have the Blackrock realm where everyone gets equal gear (there is no shop), and everyone gets Shadowmourne via a questline (no need to raid), etc, which is a full PvP realm and definitely way better than official PvP. If you care about trying to prove your actual skill, play on Blackrock here (where you face others with equal gear), not on official (where you just stomp on undergeared noobs all day). So in fact... Warmane's Blackrock wins in the PvP aspect!
• Server Population: They have massive problems with population on official classic. Servers die all the time and have to be merged with others. More than half of all official servers are gone now.
• Queues: Blizzard has merged the dying game into a few "megaservers" which means that they end up having massive queues. People who complain about waiting for 60-250 people in Warmane's Icecrown queue should try waiting in a queue of 10000 people on an official megaserver. And if you donate anything on Warmane, you get lifetime premium which gives you queue priority (so I don't see any queues, and it ONLY cost me a one-time payment of 10 euros for lifetime access).
• Subscription Fee: Blizzard charges way too much money each month for these old games... and the constant need to "always have a subscription to be able to login" creates a negative pressure to stay subscribed/have gametime, for when you "do want to play", which means that a lot of casual people are getting ripped off by Blizzard since they constantly need to pay for a subscription even if they only play a few times per month. It's an awful, negative pressure on you. Warmane is free, or a small one-time donation if you want lifetime premium. Certainly a much better deal.
• Longevity: Blizzard deleted all of the TBC realms. They don't exist anymore. Literally. So if you thought "playing official means my character stays forever, without risks, unlike private servers", then you're wrong. They deleted those servers faster than you can say "World of Warcraft". Turns out private servers like Warmane have a lot longer life than official. So the ONE thing that people kept saying "Official means we never lose our characters/progress" turned out to be total horseshit. Blizzard didn't care. They deleted the TBC realms when they went on to Wotlk. You can't trust Blizzard.
• Farming Bots: JUST LOOK AT THIS FUCKING SHIT (worth watching, lmao). Bots are everywhere! There are bots endlessly farming dungeons and herbs/mining to make gold for selling. You can see them endlessly looping in and out of the dungeons. You can see them noclip hacking and flying through the walls to teleport to bosses to farm dungeons, and those noclip hacks have been going on for YEARS, ever since vanilla classic. Blizzard doesn't care. If anyone tries botting on Warmane, they're permanently banned very fast. In fact, Warmane's anticheat detects if you noclip/fly inside walls and bans you automatically. It's amazing that a small "indie company" like Blizzard are too lazy to create an anticheat. :)
• PvP Bots: 75% of the players on every team in battlegrounds are useless bots. Blizzard doesn't care.
• Arena PvP: Most teams on official are smurfs / rank sellers, which means you face massively overpowered opponents that intentionally downrank themselves to boost other people for gold and real money. You have almost no chance to climb in official arena. It's shitty. Sure, Warmane's arena is also shitty, but they're both shitty in similar ways.
• Auction House: It's completely controlled by chinese gold sellers and their auction house bots on official. The bots automatically run back and forth between auction house and mailbox, auto-buying items to re-list them at higher prices,, auto-undercutting, etc. They completely control the markets and massively inflate prices of required raid items and potions. Forget about being able to afford your raid consumables there. Unlike warmane where the huge supply of items and legitimate players drives prices down, for the most part.
• Bugs and Scripting: Let's get it out of the way. There are occasional, small bugs on Warmane, yes. But there are bugs on official classic too, since they're running on the modern server cores and have ported the data to the modern serveclient, which means that official classic has all kinds of bugs and incorrect damage numbers / game mechanics. Here's an example of SOME of the bugs you experience on OFFICIAL classic WOTLK, which includes things like game NPCs and scripting being broken, the boats to Northrend being broken and having to be replaced with a teleporter (still there 6 months later, the boats are still broken), and NPCs that literally take 500 gold from your inventory every time you talk to them, and skills and talents that are totally broken and don't work as intended, and bugged NPCs that permanently evade attacks (still broken 6 months after launch), etc. And there are tons more serious bugs mentioned in the comments of the linked video. So yeah, official classic is full of bugs. Let's compare that to Warmane, which has actually had decades of development via the private server community, so there aren't any serious bugs here. The only thing I really noticed was that the Death Knight starter area had some jankiness (such as horses spawning in the fields instead of the stables), but after that zone I haven't seen ANY bugs AT ALL. It feels awesome overall and is close to perfect.
• Admins: The official admins don't exist. At all. So you're welcome to ninja items, scam people for gold, etc. Compare that to Warmane where you get banned for 1 week if you ninja in dungeons, and banned for 1-2 months if you ninja in a raid, and their admins ensure that scammers and bots get banned too. Repeated offenses, or very serious offenses (such as botting), lead to a permanent ban.
• World Buffs: The official classic players are neurotic about stressing around with world buffs and then logging out until the raid. They don't play the game. They just metagame simple content by over-buffing themselves and forget to have fun. They're acting very crazy.
• Random Dungeon Finder: WotLK classic has removed the random dungeon finder (they've confirmed it's permanently removed), which is hellish because it means you need to fly to all of your daily dungeons. And the dungeons are easy and boring as hell. Imagine trying to farm your badges by having to tediously make parties in trade chat and fly there every day, and use the summoning stone, and wait for AFK people, and get ganked by random shitheads at the summoning stone, etc, wasting 2+ hours of extra time each day just to do easy but required content?! Thankfully Warmane still has the random dungeon finder! It's great for the game's health, because the RDF removes toxic gatekeeping (without it, people would say "blech, you only have 5.8k GS, I will take someone else for the daily dungeon"), and it makes it easy for BiS players to quickly do daily dungeons for fun, which they wouldn't bother doing if they had to travel there manually. It's also great for the community, because you meet new people! I've made tons of friends via Warmane's RDF.
• Gatekeeping: The official classic community completely refuses to allow certain classes into raids. They're all neurotic tryhards, doing easy content while acting like it's life-or-death serious. Most guilds take this to an extreme, even for personal guild-runs. They copy the raid compositions of the world-1st guilds, without understanding that those comps were made for specific purposes of world records, and not to be copied by random scrubs that forgot how to have fun in the game. Vanilla classic was full of raids with warriors and rogues. Meanwhile on Warmane, people are here because they love the game, and there are no problems getting raids and guilds as whatever spec you want to play. The only realm that has any "serious" gatekeeping here is Lordaeron, the hardcore realm, but it's totally justified there because the health and damage of the bosses are massively boosted and can't just be "facesmashed". But even on the hardcore Lordaeron realm, you can get reliable raid groups by just proving your skill to a guild. It's to be expected on a hardcore realm, and it's totally reasonable to expect skilled players on the "hardcore realm"! :)
• Ninja Looting: It's extremely safe to ninja loot things on official. Blizzard doesn't care. If you try to ninja something on Warmane, you get temporarily banned, and if you keep doing it, you get permanently banned.
• Boosting: Sure, you can buy max-level characters from other players on Warmane. But how is that different from the official boost? In fact, the official boost costs more money and gives you LESS, because the Warmane characters keep their gear and achievements when you buy them.
• Experience: On official, you have one setting, 1x. On Warmane you can change your XP speed by right-clicking your XP bar, setting the XP to 0.5x, 1x, 3x, 5x or 7x, all depending on how YOU feel like playing the game. You decide. If you love questing, go for 0.5x and enjoy doing that loremaster achievement while leveling! Or if you just wanna reach max level, go for that 7x and enjoy the fast ride! It's all possible here! It's your choice!
• Progression: Warmane has multiple realms, such as the fully-progressed Icecrown (the main realm), the seasonal PvP Blackrock (where everyone gets instant 80 and equal gear to be able to see which player is truly better at PvP), the seasonal PvE Frostmourne (which resets every 12 months and then gradually unlocks the raids again, for those who want to play with gradual progression, and whose shop only sells the previous tier of items), and the hardcore Lordareon server (1x rates, no shop, all raids and dungeons are much more difficult, so if you can defeat the Lich King here then you are truly elite). There is something for everyone on Warmane. Whereas on classic official, you have one choice and you are stuck with everyone else until Blizzard gets bored and moves on from the game and closes your server.
• Community: Official classic is neurotic and toxic as hell. It's full of crazy people, retail tourist babies, short-lived hype babies, and raid loggers. Everyone is chasing the best gear and tries to imagine themselves as professional players, and are trying to step over corpses to get it. They push, push, push, stress, stress, stress. Everyone is greedy. Everyone wants all the gear that drops. Everyone wants to "go go go" in all dungeons to rush it all so that they can get their badges so they can go buy their badge gear so they can rush into the raid, so they can rush the bosses, so they can rush the gear, so they can push down everyone else. They don't love the game. They love parses and speed, "chasing the rabbit", trying to push, push, push so they have BiS in time for the next raid release, etc. Compare that to Warmane, where everything is fully progressed and relaxed, where everyone still runs raids, does world content and enjoys the game. The private server players are here because they love the game, and they stick around doing content even after they have BiS gear. If anyone was bored and didn't really love the game, they leave the server, which means that all the people who play the game on Warmane are people who love the game. There is no time pressure. There's no reason to push. Just relax and enjoy the awesome game.
• Wokeness: Holy shit. Official has gone full woke, and keeps doing stuff like rename "Every Man For Himself" (human racial ability) to "Will to Survive", because we can't go around offending trans people, right?! They also went out and retroactively said that "Chromie" the dragon is transgender. And they gave the dragon "Pelagos" trans pronouns. And they removed all "offensive" paintings of women and replaced the women with fruit bowls. And on and on... Meanwhile, the 3.3.5a Wrath of the Lich King that we play on Warmane is free from all that woke California bullshit. We play the real game.
• Graphics: They have slightly updated graphics in the official classic clients, but we can install even better graphics than that via our unofficial "HD Patch" for 3.3.5a, so there's no reason to envy the graphics either. :)
• GDKP: Alright, this is one of the worst aspects of official classic. They are infected with complete cancer. Everyone's looking for a big payout in GDKP runs. Basically, people sign up to raids just to have to pay tons of gold for the gear that drops, and that gold is then split among the other raid members (sometimes taken mostly by the raid leader). This means that you are directly working for gold sellers, because you have to buy gold to afford the huge sums that raid drops have been inflated to cost on official classic. They no longer care about filling guild rosters or playing for fun. They just invite rich randoms from trade chat and want big moneybag players that will pay tens of thousands of gold per drop. It's a complete cancer and an extremely toxic way to play the game. There are even "chinese gold farmer guilds" where you literally join their raid and pay them real money outside the game when you want the raid's drops. Official classic has full cancer.
• In Summary: Everything about the community is better and healthier on Warmane. And in fact, everyone on official classic lost the privilege of saying "Warmane has a shop" when literally EVERYTHING in official classic is for sale: Raid drops, arena rating, battleground honor, character boosts, mounts, etc. It's all for sale for real money (via Blizzard) and gold (which means real money via gold sellers) on official. And you're paying for the privilege of Blizzard shutting down the official classic servers when they get bored, like they did with all TBC classic realms. Who the hell wants to play with the shitty, super stressful people on official? And pay money to subscribe? And pay GDKP money for all the raid gear drops? Nah. I was on official for a year, and it was the worst time I have ever had in WoW. Back in the day, official was great. Modern classic WoW is utter fucking garbage. Warmane is very similar to the original way the communities felt back in the day, when these expansions were "real". Nowadays, official classic is absolutely terrible. I lost the passion for the game when I spent a year on official classic TBC. I thought I hated the game. Turns out I just hated the kinds of shitty, toxic people that play the official classic. :) Warmane is like coming home to the real game again.

Edit: Don't forget to vote on this post if you agree or disagree with it! I noticed most/all replies agree but are forgetting to vote (same thing happens with all other people's threads here though), which means the anti-Warmane folks will be able to downvote this easily. Do you want that? 😏

The assaults of the Popular Health Movement left the regular doctors—who were still aspiring to become the medical profession—as debilitated as if they had been forced to undergo their own heroic treatments. But the worst was yet to come. Between the eighteen forties and seventies, the banner of professionalism, already tattered by populist attacks, fell into the mud of crude commercial competition. The regulars' drive for a medical monopoly became a defensive holding operation.
First there was the problem of "irregular" competition. Where there had once been a health movement, there was now a bevy of organized medical sects—eclectics, botanicists, homeopaths, hydropaths—each with its own schools, journals, and claims to scientific superiority. Trained botanical healers and eclectics (so-named because they aimed to combine the best of both regular and Thomsonian-type approaches) inherited the loyalty Thomsonianism had won earlier among small farmers and the urban working class. A far worse threat to the regulars was homeopathy: first, because it was popular among upper-class consumers. And, in those days before Medicaid and Medicare, when gentlemanly physicians still liked to think of their fees coyly as "honoraria" paid out of sheer gratitude, it was the upper-class consumer who counted in the struggle for occupational survival. The second challenging feature of homeopathy was that it did not hurt people. (The botanical healing practices of the Popular Health Movement had been harmless too, but they were unacceptable to upper-class consumers because of their radical associations.) Homeopathic therapy was, in a sense, heroic therapy inverted. While the regular physician recklessly escalated doses and mixed medications in order to produce a maximal affront to human physiology, the homeopath's maxim was—the less the better. ...
Then, quite aside from the competing sects, there was a mounting problem of competition within the ranks of the regular doctors themselves. To open a medical school, a group of doctors had to do little more than rent a building, collect a skeleton, a preserved fetus, and perhaps a few other visual aids, and then advertise to the public. Students paid the professors by the course, and were virtually guaranteed a degree in two years or so, so long as they kept up their payments. Thanks in large part to these medical degree mills, the number of regular doctors in the United States increased from a few thousand in 1800 to over 40,000 by mid-century. And, of course, the stiffer the competition for paying patients, the more doctors were tempted into the business of occupational reproduction—medical teaching—to supplement their incomes. So the cycle went: poverty and "overpopulation," as the doctors saw it, going hand in hand as the profession marched toward ruin.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, occupational prestige sank so low that the days when Benjamin Rush could confer with statesmen and take tea with countesses began to look like a lost paradise of professionalism. The regular doctors banded together in 1847 to form their first national organization, pretentiously entitled the American Medical Association, and one of the AMA's first tasks was to survey the competition—the 40,000 regulars plus a "long list of irregular practitioners who swarm like locusts in every part of the country." The report concluded, "No wonder the profession of medicine has measurably ceased to occupy the elevated position which once it did; no wonder that the merest pittance in the way of remuneration is scantily doled out even to the most industrious of our ranks."
The regular doctors were caught in a contradiction of their own making. Medicine had once been embedded in a network of community and family relationships. Now, it had been uprooted, transformed into a commodity which potentially anyone could claim as merchandise, a calling which anyone could profess to follow. So long as medical education was cheap, and medical fees were not too cheap, there was no limit to the numbers of regular doctors. Thus the patrician ideal of the gentleman doctor could never be realized. And of course, the deeper the doctors sank into commercialism, and the more they spawned in this fertile muck—producing new doctors simply for profit—the less likely they were to achieve the status and authority of their collective dreams. Ahead lay nothing but humiliation. Dr. C.H. Reed of Toledo wrote poignantly in the Journal of the American Medical Association about "a doctor who was found crying because he was hungry."
A great deal—it is impossible to say exactly how much—of the competition which was reducing male regular doctors to tears was coming from women. By mid-century there were not only female lay healers to contend with, there was a new breed of middle-class women who aspired to enter the Market as regular, professional physicians. Like the women who had become involved in the Popular Health Movement earlier, they were motivated by a spirit of reform: they were opposed to the excesses of heroic medicine and—equally important—they were outraged at the implicit indecency of the male doctor–female patient relationship. The extreme division between "men's sphere" and "women's sphere" had put the male doctor in a decidedly awkward position. How could a woman, especially a lady, expose her most private parts to his peerings and pokings? Doctors were fond of citing female patients who died in quiet agony rather than submit to male medical care. "If I could have been treated by a lady doctor my worst sufferings would have been spared me," a friend confided to the young Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell.
By mid-century the private horrors of mixed-sex medical encounters had become a public issue. Samuel Gregory, an "irregular" physician, argued in 1850 that male obstetricians, by their very presence, created enough anxiety in their patients to lengthen the process of labor. Gregory's book Man-midwifery Exposed and Corrected; or the Employment of Men to attend women in childbirth, shown to be a modern innovation, unnecessary, unnatural and injurious to the physical welfare of the community, and pernicious in its influence on Professional and Public Morality was a great success, and in 1852 "a few ladies of Philadelphia" organized around their belief that "the BIBLE recognizes and approves only women in the sacred office of midwife." And Catherine Beecher raised the charge of seduction and sexual abuse, taking place in the practices of the most apparently benevolent, honorable, and pious doctors ...
The popular magazine Godey's Lady's Book waged an all-out campaign for female physicians:

Talk about this being the appropriate sphere of man, and his alone! With tenfold more plausibility and reason might we say, it is the appropriate sphere of woman, and hers alone. ...

Given the tensions and moral compromise associated with male medical care, the mid-nineteenth-century movement of women into medical training took on the aspects of a crusade—for female health, for morality, for decency.
It was this sense of being involved in a moral crusade which accounts for the determination of our early female doctors. For example, Elizabeth Blackwell applied to over sixteen schools before she found one which would accept her, but, as she said, "The idea of winning a doctor's degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed attraction for me." In the same year that Blackwell gained admission, Harriet Hunt was admitted to Harvard Medical College—only to have the decision reversed because the students threatened to riot if she came. (Harvard had admitted three black male students the year before and that, according to the white male majority, was enough!) Undaunted, Hunt went to seek a medical education at an "irregular" school. Through the efforts of women like Blackwell, Hunt, Marie Zakrzewska, Lucy Sewall, Sarah Adamson, Ann Preston, Helen Morton, and Mary Putnam Jacobi—to mention only a few—there were, by 1900, approximately five thousand trained women doctors in the land, fifteen hundred female medical students, and seven medical schools exclusively for women.
Male doctors recognized that women in the profession posed a threat which was far out of proportion to their numbers. The woman patient who considered herself socially superior to female lay healers, yet was repelled by male medicine, would naturally welcome a woman professional. Faced with this threat to their practice, the male doctors responded with every argument they could think of: How could a lady who was too refined for male medical care travel at night to a medical emergency? Operate when indisposed (e.g., menstruating)? If women were too modest for mixed-sex medical care, how could they expect to survive the realities of medical training—the vulgar revelations of anatomy class, the shocking truths about human reproduction, and so on? ... In his 1871 presidential address to the AMA, Dr. Alfred Stillé made this observation on the subject of women in medicine:

Certain women seek to rival men in manly sports ... and the strong-minded ape them in all things, even in dress. In doing so, they may command a sort of admiration such as all monstrous productions inspire, especially when they tend towards a higher type than their own.

He left it unclear which was more repulsive: the "strong-minded," though "monstrous," female medical aspirant or her sisters who were content with their genetically inferior condition. An editor of the Buffalo Medical Journal took a less ambiguous stand:

If I were to plan with malicious hate the greatest curse I could conceive for women, if I would estrange them from the protection of men, and make them as far as possible loathsome and disgusting to man, I would favor the so-called reform which proposed to make doctors of them.

The regular doctors did not rely on persuasion alone to discourage women from medical education. The would-be woman doctor faced some very solid road blocks at every step of her career. First it was difficult to gain admission to a "regular" school (the "irregular" sects, descended from the Popular Health Movement, maintained their feminist sympathies and openness to female students). Once inside, female students faced harassment from the male students ranging from "insolent and offensive language" to "missiles of paper, tinfoil [and] tobacco quids." There were professors who wouldn't discuss anatomy with a lady present and textbooks such as the 1848 obstetrics text which declared, "She [woman] has a head almost too small for intellect but just big enough for love."
Having completed her academic work the would-be woman doctor often found the next steps blocked. Hospitals were usually closed to women doctors, and even if they weren't, the internships were not open to women. When she did finally make it into practice, she found her brother regulars unwilling to refer patients to her and absolutely opposed to her membership in their medical societies. ...
The movement of women into medical training had a whole train of unpleasant associations for the regular male physicians. Feminism, "irregular" medicine, and the populist assault on medical professionalism had all been indissolubly linked together in the decade of the Popular Health Movement. Throughout the century, botanic and eclectic schools continued to welcome women, so for that reason alone the feminine cause was always tainted with "irregularity," or the "irregular" cause tainted with feminism, whichever way you cared to look at it. Irregulars such as Mary Gove Nichols, Harriet Austin, M.D., Susannah W. Dodds, M.D., and others completed the association by their activity in such reform movements as temperance, sex education of the young, and, especially, dress reform. Drs. Austin and Dodds wore pants, and Mary Gove Nichols wore bloomers, about which experience she reminisced in 1853:

I acknowledge that I have been mobbed on account of my dress. Fourteen years ago several persons determined to tar and feather me if I dared to lecture in a certain small city. ... Years have greatly mended the manner of the mobs, but more than one scamp has felt the weight of my husband's cane in this city.

Finally, the feminist/moralist argument against male doctors for female patients had exposed the doctors' most vulnerable spot. There was simply no public confidence that doctors were "gentlemen." A doctor complained in the Journal of the American Medical Association that:

the truth is patent that very many of its members are persons of inferior ability, questionable character and coarse and common fiber.

And in his presidential address to the American Medical Association in 1903, Dr. Billings stated his concern that commercial night schools were enabling "the clerk, the street-car conductor, the janitor and others employed during the day to earn a degree." The patrician dream had been dashed against the commercial reality. Yet at the very same time, Victorian sexual anxieties made it all the more urgent that a synthesis be found. If it was almost prohibitively difficult for a lady to be examined by a gentlemanly doctor, how could she possibly put herself in the care of an ex-janitor or street-car conductor? The very words—"lady" and "gentleman"—have moral as well as class connotations, suggesting an ability to rise above sex in a way that could not be expected of the "lower" classes. If regular medicine drew too heavily from the "lower" types, it not only would lose status, it would lose business. Achievement of the patrician ideal was becoming, in the late nineteenth century, a commercial necessity.
The AMA Code of Ethics, adopted in 1847, had enjoined doctors "to unite tenderness with firmness, and condescension with authority, [so] as to inspire the minds of their patients with gratitude, respect and confidence." (Emphasis in original.) But this would require more than a skillful bedside manner. The longed-for authority would have to come from somewhere. Keeping women out was a step in the right direction (in a male-dominated society, women are inherently less authoritative than men). But, by the late nineteenth century, patriarchal tradition was no longer in and of itself a firm enough basis for professional power. The average regular doctor (and there were more and more average doctors as the century wore on) may have been male, white, and Anglo-Saxon, but he was no more imposing a public figure than a druggist or real estate agent. If medicine was to become an authority in the lives of women, it would finally have to find a way to "soar above the sordid views of vulgar minds"—to float above cheap commercialism and sex itself. ...
By the late nineteenth century, the solution was near at hand. According to Sir William Osler, America's only titled physician, "the spirit of science was brooding on the waters." Science was the transcendent force to which the doctors looked to lift medicine out of the mire of commercialism and gird it against its foes.
It was not only doctors who were eyeing science with professional self-interest. Science was well on its way to becoming a sacred national value, and any group which hoped to establish itself as the "experts" in a certain area would have to prove that they were rigorously scientific. Social work, before the eighteen eighties, had been a voluntary activity, left largely to the charitable impulses of upper-class women. As career-oriented, middle-class women began to enter the field, insisting that social work be regarded as a profession, more and more talk of "science" crept into the social work literature. The sentimental Lady Bountiful approach would have to make way for "scientific charity" based on systematic investigation in each case and carefully calculated professional intervention. Even law, in its anxiety about professional overpopulation and public distrust, began to search for a "scientific" basis. In all areas, making something "scientific" became synonymous with reform. Between roughly 1880 and 1920 progressive Americans campaigned not only for scientific medicine, but for scientific management, scientific public administration, scientific housekeeping, scientific child raising, scientific social work. The United States was, according to The Atlantic Monthly, a "nation of science."
The zeal to "reform" old professions and carve out new ones was coming from a specific group of people—a "new middle class," according to some historians. These were the sons and daughters of the old-time gentry (small-to-medium-size businessmen, successful professionals, and the like) which had been on top of the social hierarchy in the early republic. But since the Civil War, rapid industrialization and the ferocious growth of monopolies had created a new polarization of American society: the "robber barons" were mowing down hundreds of small- and medium-size businessmen as they built up their monopolies and cartels. Immigration was swelling the ranks of the poor. The sons of the old gentry found themselves thrust into a hostile world, often with little more collateral than their college degrees and "good breeding." Education and background made them feel superior, but hardly secure. Above, they saw a "plutocracy" gorging itself on the wealth drained from small businessmen; below, an untamed, menacing proletariat:

Two enemies, unknown before, have risen like spirits of darkness on our social and political horizon—an ignorant proletariat and a half-taught plutocracy.

The trouble with these two classes from the point of view of the new middle class was not only that they were boorish, but that they were engaged in a war which seemed likely to destroy the entire social order. During the eighteen seventies and eighties, strikes, riots, and armed insurrections filled the newspapers and the nightmares of the middle class. Anyone could see, they argued, that there was an urgent need for scientific experts and administrators to

... disinterestedly and intelligently mediate between [the] contending interests. When the word "capitalist classes" and "the proletariate" [sic] can be used and understood in America, it is surely time to develop such men, with the ideal of service to the State, who may help to break the force of these collisions.

"Experts" could solve society's problems because they were, as scientific men, by definition totally objective and above special interests of any kind. In the process, the problems of the new middle class itself could be solved too. Specialized "expert" occupations, accessible only after lengthy training, would provide them a secure occupational niche and a share of power far out of proportion to their numbers. Far-seeing spokesmen of their class even prophesied a future society in which—not the "half-taught plutocracy," not the "ignorant proletariat"—but the experts themselves would rule. This, it was felt, would be the utopian summit of human civilization, since the experts would of course manage things scientifically, i.e., for the good of all. As a leading engineer explained it, "the golden rule will be put into practice through the slide rule of the engineer."
To this new middle class, science was not just a method or a discipline, but a kind of religion. Asking what "creed" best suited Americans, social commentator Thaddeus Wakeman wrote in 1890:

The answer is, that which he knows to be true,—and that, in one word is Science. The majority of the American people are already practically secularists—people of this world. ... Our people are unconsciously welcoming the incoming sway of Science and Man; and this is proved by their absence from the Churches. ...

If the transformation of regular medicine into "scientific medicine" were retold as a story of religious conversion, Sinclair Lewis's Arrowsmith would be its Pilgrim's Progress. Lewis's novel was based on the real-life experiences of a young medical researcher, and it captures in fiction the moral fervor of the scientific reformers as no historical study has done. At the University of Winnemac medical school, young Martin Arrowsmith encounters the extremes of scientific purity and medical commercialism, personified in his professors. There is, at one extreme, Dr. Roscoe Geake, newly resigned from the chair of otolaryngology to the vice-presidency of the New Idea Medical Instrument and Furniture Company of Jersey City, who exhorts the medical students to "put pep in their salesmanship":

... Have your potted palms and handsome pictures—to the practical physician they are as necessary a part of his working equipment as a sterilizer or a Baumanometer. But so far as possible have everything in sanitary-looking white—and think of the color-schemes you can evolve, or the good wife for you, if she be blessed with artistic tastes! Rich golden or red cushions, in a Morris chair enameled the purest white! A floorcovering of white enamel, with just a border of delicate roses! Recent and unspotted numbers of expensive magazines, with art covers, lying on a white table! Gentlemen, there is the idea of imaginative salesmanship which I wish to leave with you ...

And there is at the other extreme Dr. Max Gottlieb—"the mystery of the University" because he is a Jew, a foreigner, and a scientist obsessed by his work:

He was unconscious of the world. He looked at Martin and through him; he moved away, muttering to himself, his shoulders stooped, his long hands clasped behind him. He was lost in the shadows, himself a shadow.
He had worn the threadbare top-coat of a poor professor, yet Martin remembered him as wrapped in a black velvet cape with a silver star arrogant on his breast.

Martin and his friend Clif swear drunkenly to follow the lonely path of science:

"... I'm jus' sick o' c'mmercialism an' bunk as you are," confides Clif.
"Sure. You bet," Martin agreed with alcoholic fondness. "You're jus' like me. ... Ideal of research! Never bein' content with what seems true! Alone, not carin' a damn, square-toed as a captain on the bridge, working all night, getting to the bottom of things!"

But the path is more arduous than the young men can see. Distractions beckon from all sides—quick money, worldly power, venal women, even the quagmire of sentimental humanitarianism. Arrowsmith is only human, he falls again and again. But each time he realizes he has lost his soul (his work) and picks himself up once again to pursue the austere ideal of science. In the end he must set aside all worldly things—wealth, position, a rich and gorgeous wife—and retire to a laboratory built in the remote wilderness.
Biological science had not always had the mystic and holy power with which it pulled at Martin Arrowsmith. In the eighteen seventies and eighties, when the ideas of the new biology began to circulate in the American middle class, they were greeted with a suspicion which often bordered on moral revulsion. Darwin's theory of evolution—the most brilliant synthetic breakthrough of nineteenth- and perhaps twentieth-century biological science—"shattered the Christian cosmos." It was not only that the theory violated the letter of the Old Testament; Darwinism went further and asserted that the world of living creatures could have gotten the way it is without the intervention of God, in fact, without conscious effort on anybody's part. What was left, in the view of leading American Christians, was a godless universe, a moral desert—

Life without meaning; death without meaning; the universe without meaning. A race tortured to no purpose, and with no hope but annihilation. The dead only blessed; the living standing like beasts at bay, and shrieking half in defiance and half in fright.

The spiritual implications of the new biological truth were, as one minister put it, "brutalizing."
In a lesser way, biology's second great contribution to popular culture—the Germ Theory of Disease—further undercut the religious foundations of morality. Traditional religion saw individual disease as the price of moral failings, epidemics as acts of a vengeful God. In the mid-nineteenth century, Albert Barnes, a leading Presbyterian minister, declared cholera to be a punishment for the "vanities of natural science," especially Darwinism. But, through the lenses of the new high power microscopes available in the mid-eighteen hundreds, disease began to look like a natural event that depended less on God than on the growth rates of what appeared to be fairly amoral species of microbes. If diseases were dispensed in some sort of microbial lottery, rather than by moral plan, then indeed this was a "race tortured to no purpose."
In order to become a moral force in society, biological science had had to undergo a kind of moral transformation itself. For example, Darwin's popularizers managed to identify "evolution" with "progress," as if natural history were a long uphill moral pilgrimage. This stratagem excused some of the more savage aspects of natural selection and—even more important—it left room for a divine Plan. The laws which science was uncovering would turn out to be the expression of the will of God—revelations of the divine Plan. Thus science could provide moral guidelines for living: for example, that one had an "evolutionary duty" to "advance the race" through proper selection of a mate, good health habits, etc. By the eighteen eighties it is difficult to find a popular tract or article on any subject—education, suffrage, immigration, foreign relations—which is not embellished with Darwinian metaphors. ...
Germ Theory went through a similar moral transformation. If it was germs and not sin that were the immediate cause of disease, then sin could be still retained as an ultimate cause. Germ Theory was transformed into a doctrine of individual guilt not at all out of tune with old-fashioned Protestantism. Anyone who transgressed "the laws of hygiene" deserved to get sick, and anyone who got sick had probably broken those laws. The English physician Elizabeth Chesser, in her book Perfect Health for Women and Children, warned that "the time has nearly arrived when we shall not be permitted to be unhealthy."
If, to the middle-class public, science was a source of moral precepts, a kind of secularized religion, then the scientist was its prophet. In him, progressive-minded Americans found a culture hero for the new century. General Francis A. Walker, the president of MIT, announced in 1893 that America's scientists outdistanced all other occupational groups in their "sincerity, simplicity, fidelity, and generosity of character, in nobility of aims and earnestness of effort."
The experimental scientist was a fitting moral paragon for the modern age. He was an intellectual of sorts; that is, he did "brain work," but he had none of the effete otherworldliness which Americans found so distasteful in philosophy professors, poets, and other impractical types. In fact, the lab man was as ruthlessly hardheaded, materialistic, and pragmatic as any capitalist entrepreneur—"a real man." Yet, at the same time, he was an altruist whose unselfishness reached superhuman heights: Metchnikoff drank cholera vibrios by the tumblerful to test their effects; later "microbe hunters" cheerfully exposed themselves to the carriers of yellow fever, malaria, tuberculosis.
With his selflessness, his obsessive drive, his apparent scorn for material reward, the scientist assumed some of the qualities of the Christian Redeemer: taking on his shoulders (bent from too many hours over the microscope) the sins—and diseases—of the multitude. "Within these walls," says the inscription on New York's Sloan-Kettering Institute for cancer research, "a few labor unceasingly that many may live." ...
What happened to elevate biological science and science in general from the status of a godless rebel to such a state of grace? "Good works" were part of the answer. The "miracles" of modern science outdid anything that the nineteenth-century Christian God deigned to effect. Sir William Osler pictured science pouring from a cornucopia, down onto man's head, "blessings which cannot be enumerated ..." After the late nineteenth century, an evangelist would be as foolish to denounce science as the devil's work as he would be to forego microphones, electric lights, and all vehicles based on the principle of internal combustion.
But science did not triumph through works alone. In fact, it sometimes went the other way: the prestige of science was so great that science took credit, in the public mind, for innovations from other sources. An instrument maker, not a scientist, invented the steam engine; two bicycle mechanics designed the first airplane; a rising standard of living, not vaccines and antitoxins, eventually brought down the rate of infant mortality. So the "scientism"—science worship—of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not just a matter of pragmatic appreciation. Science was able to become a neo-religion because of its special qualities as an ideology. It was tough and yet transcendent—hardheaded and masculine, yet at the same time able to "soar above" commercial reality.
No one could question the masculinity, the aggressiveness, of the new experimental biology. Earlier generations of biologists had been content to observe nature—to catalog it, describe it, label its parts. The new scientist pursued nature, trapped it in his laboratory, encircled it with experimental conditions representing different possible truths, and tightened the circle until the answers came out. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., a regular doctor and early champion of scientific medicine, described his attitude toward scientific investigation in the language of undisguised sexual sadism. "I liked to follow the workings of another mind through these minute, teasing investigations," he confided to his friend and fellow physician S. Weir Mitchell, "to see a relentless observer get hold of Nature and squeeze her until the sweat broke out all over her and Sphincters loosened" ...
It is [the] image of uncompromising disinterestedness and objectivity which gives science its great moral force in the mind of the public. Science is supposed to serve no special interests, no class or privileged group. It rises above all that is narrow, mundane, greedy, just as the "McGurk Institute" for medical research in Arrowsmith perches majestically on top of twenty-eight floors of commercial offices:

The McGurk Institute is probably the only organization for scientific research in the world which is housed in an office building. It has the twenty-ninth and thirtieth stories of the McGurk Building, and the roof is devoted to its animal house and to tiled walks along which (above a world of stenographers and bookkeepers and earnest gentlemen who desire to sell Better-bilt Garments to the golden dons of the Argentine) saunter rapt scientists dreaming of osmosis in Spirogyra.

With the moral transformation of science, the laboratory took on a sacred quality. The laboratory was the temple of objectivity from which science could survey the world of man and nature—a kind of "germ-free zone" separated of from the filth, commercialism, and cheap sentiment of the world. Martin Arrowsmith's first few moments in his new lab at the "McGurk Institute" are as refreshing to his spirit as a cathedral to a pilgrim:

... When he had closed the door and let his spirit flow out and fill that minute apartment with his own essence, he felt secure.
No Pickerbaugh or Rouncefield could burst in here and drag him away to be explanatory and plausible and public; he would be free to work, instead of being summoned to the package-wrapping and dictation of breezy letters which men call work. ...
Suddenly he loved humanity as he loved the decent, clean rows of test-tubes, and he prayed then the prayer of the scientist ...

from For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women, 1978

Introduction:

If you’re wondering why it took me so damn long to watch only 10 more shows… There are a couple reasons for that. Chief among them being the fact that I wasn't JUST watching anime for all that time. I still watch a lot more “western animation” than I do anime, and I’ve even started branching out into live action series as of late which usually have a pretty hard time piquing my interest. I am a lover of animation above all else after all. Amazing animation can come from absolutely anywhere. Both America & Japan have created some genuinely life changing animated stories for me. People who ignore either side are SERIOUSLY missing out.
There is another big reason why it took me so many months to finally get this post out, but I think it’d make more sense to go over all of that in the conclusion. For now, let's get into the actual content of the post.
I will first be going over my thoughts on each of these shows individually, in the order that I watched them. Then at the end of the post, I will provide some final thoughts & rank every single one of them. And please remember the following: The biggest reason why I’m making this post at all is so that I can talk about all of these shows with as many of you as possible. So please, if you want to share your thoughts on any of these shows, and/or give me your opinions on MY opinions, I implore you to do so in the comments below. I’m all ears. And for the record, I don’t expect anyone to read every single one of these reviews. Just look around for the shows you care about.
This is part ⅓ by the way. My reviews all together ended up being far longer than reddit would allow in one post, so I will instead be releasing this in the form of 3 separate post. I initially wanted to post all 3 parts at the same time in order to have it all available at once, but the mods wouldn’t allow that, so instead, I'll be releasing Part One right now, and the next 2 parts in the following days. I HATE that I have to put it out this way, but it seems to be my best option unfortunately.
Also, here’s the link to my original “First 10” post from last year: https://www.reddit.com/anime/comments/s09ojg/after_having_first_gotten_into_anime_back_in_2019/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 It’s comments have long since been disabled, but I did go back to it recently & update a bunch of my thoughts there in preparation for this new post. If anyone is still interested in talking about those shows, I will GLADLY discuss them right here. That post includes my views on One Punch Man, Erased, Violet Evergarden, Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day, Little Witch Academia, The Promised Neverland, Sound! Euphonium, Orange, K-On, & Demon Slayer.
But now, let’s finally start talking about some anime!

Usagi Drop:

This anime is one of THEE most wholesome pieces of media that I have ever experienced. Above all else, this series was just so amazingly delightful & adorable.
The first 5 or so episodes were definitely my favourites of the bunch. There were just SO MANY moments throughout those early episodes that had me smiling uncontrollably. I was so overwhelmingly emotional during certain parts of these episodes that I almost cried of sheer happiness. Tears of joy are a very very rare thing for me, but this show came INCREDIBLY close to drawing them.
It’s not like the show takes a nosedive in quality after episode 5, it’s just that the show becomes slightly more somber in tone after that point. It may not be as infectiously happy as it once was, but it still remains very interesting & engaging. Those occasional scenes of Rin reminiscing about or mourning for her Grandpa were always really good. Very subtle in their emotional maturity.
The episode where Daikichi’s cousin stays over for a while was also quite interesting. It had some super compelling discussions of divorce, married life, parenthood, and it all felt very mature & adult. Not in the edgy sort of way that people so commonly associate with “mature & adult”, but in the REAL way. Such well written dialogue in that episode. Kouki & his mother Yukari were also very welcome additions to the cast. Rin & Kouki had a super cute dynamic, and Yukari & Daikichi had an even CUTER dynamic. I totally ship them.
This anime honestly has far more side characters than I have ample time to talk about, but I legitimately liked every single one of them. All of these characters, even the ones with barely any screen time, added something to the show. None of them were annoying, and they all felt important to some degree.
One more side character that I’d like to specifically highlight though is Rin’s very interesting absentee mother. She’s a rather complicated & tragic character that you can very easily feel both sympathy & resentment for, but one of my biggest problems with the show is that her whole storyline felt kinda unresolved. I don’t feel like we got any real closure for her. Continuing along that train of thought for a moment, the whole show felt kind of unresolved & like it ended super abruptly. The last episode here was just a series of very typical Usagi Drop events with a decent little monologue about parenthood at the end for some added emotional weight, and then boom… it was all over… and it felt sorta incomplete.
I guess I just feel like there’s a lot more that they could have done with these characters in order to make the overall story feel more well rounded. But then again, given what I have since learned about the Manga’s ending… maybe it’s for the best that they didn’t go any further with it. Leaving this version of the story as something unambiguously sweet, instead of letting it become something genuinely fucked up & awful.
Back to positives though, the 2 MAIN characters of this show are both lovely. Daikichi’s journey of learning how to become a good parent was so wonderful to watch unfold, and Rin is pretty easily the most adorable character in any of the anime that I’ve seen so far. Beating out the likes of Taylor Bartlett and even ALL of the Keions. Seeing her learn things in school & learn about life while also trying to process the unique situation she exists in was extremely compelling to watch while still always remaining pleasant. Loved both characters
One final thing I’d like to mention is the stellar animation on display here. The character designs were all super appealing, the movement always felt very fluid, and I loved the kinda watercolour aesthetic of it all. Really beautiful stuff.
All in all, Usagi Drop was a pretty good show. It executes everything that it sets out to do extremely well; being more than capable of pulling off both excellent comedic moments & sobering emotional moments. This show had the potential to be something truly amazing if it had gone further with it’s story (in a direction away from the manga), but as is, it’s still really nice. I’m glad I watched it.

A Place Further Than The Universe:

WOW. This show was so much better than I was expecting it to be. Not only is this one of my new favourite anime, it’s one of my new favourite TV shows PERIOD. It’s so damn amazing. Where do I even begin?
I think I’ll start by talking about something I initially considered to be a problem, but that I now consider to be one of the show’s greatest strengths: It’s pacing & structure. By the time I had reached the show’s half-way point, I was starting to feel kinda ripped off by the fact that they weren’t in Antarctica. Even though I was really enjoying the show so far, it felt like I wasn't really getting what was promised
As the anime came to a close however, their time spent on the continent in those last 5 episodes felt absolutely pitch perfect. I now have a great sense of appreciation for how detailed all the build up in this show was. They go SUPER deep into the logistics of what it would actually take for 4 random high schoolers to legally get to Antarctica. Them finally finally arriving on the continent in episode 9 only felt so good BECAUSE of all the meticulous build up & the hard work that it took for them to get there. I realize that now.
And they also spend the exact right amount of time in Antarctica once they're there. After their arrival in episode 9, the remaining four episodes are all dedicated to completing the arcs of each of the main 4. One episode each. Yuzuki. Hinata. Shirase. Kimari. I’ll get into what those arcs actually are later on.
Another thing that’s basically perfect about this show is all of it’s production values. The character designs & general visual style were both great, the visual comedy was always on point, and the backgrounds are potentially the best I’ve ever seen in an anime. Like Violet Evergarden level shit. The music here was also pretty excellent. The OP & ED were both wonderful, the score was consistently beautiful, and they wrote so many stellarly emotional songs to underscore these episode climaxes. The fact that this stuff isn't available to stream is probably a war crime.
What caught me most off guard about this anime was how insanely effective all the emotional moments were. I really didn’t expect there to be so many, but they only got more & more powerful as the show went along.
Kimari’s conflicted farewell to Megu was a real heavy hitter, and Shirase defying Hinata by demanding they all fly together was quite beautiful as well, but the scene that stands out as far more darkly emotional than the rest is the one where a certain character utters the words “It’s beautiful. It’s so very beautiful”. Hearing those words in such an unfathomably tragic context absolutely shook me to my core & made me more than a little teary eyed.
The 2 most significant emotional moments for me would have to be the climaxes of both episodes 11 & 12. The other 3 girls all together standing up to Hinata’s shallow old friends in EP11 was without question THEE most emotionally resonant “power of friendship” moment that I have ever seen in anything. That part got some definite tears of joy outta me, but it was nothing compared to “The Email Scene” in EP12. This scene made me absolutely SOB. I seriously haven’t cried this hard at a work of fiction since The Violet Evergarden Movie, and Violet is my favourite anime of all time so that is saying A LOT. An absolutely spectacular moment for Shirase’s character.
Let’s get into some of the specific characters now, starting with Kimari. I guess she’s technically my least favourite of the main 4, but I obviously still like her a lot. She felt a little too generic for my tastes earlier on, but she very much came into her own as the anime went on. She probably has the least impactful character arc out of anyone in the main 4, but she works wonderfully as the glue that holds everyone together, and she has her fair share of really funny moments as well. She wanted to do something significant with her youth, and she achieved that goal. I love that for her, but I simply didn’t find her plotline to be nearly as compelling as the arcs of the other 3. Still a very good character though. (i rewatched this show recently, and my opinions on her character specifically have changed immensely. i’ll get into that at the end)
Yuzuki was a pretty great character as well. I really enjoyed seeing her come out of her more reserved & pessimistic shell to become someone who’s a lot more engaged & energetic. Her arc was pretty simple all things considered, but it was still extremely satisfying to watch unfold. Witnessing this sheltered rich kid learn the meaning of true friendship with the help of those around her was just so damn wholesome & emotionally fulfilling.
Hinata proved to be a far more interesting character than she initially lets on. Her central trait of not wanting to inconvenience people under any circumstances was really compelling stuff. Hating the feeling of people being considerate of you is an incredibly unique internal conflict that I don't think I’ve ever seen explored before. At least not with such focus. Specifically her & Shirase coming to understand each other better was really great to see, and like I said before, that confrontation with her old friends was an utterly perfect scene.
And then you have Shirase who is without a doubt the heart & soul of this show. I love basically everything about her. The dichotomy of how reserved she usually is compared to how insanely fired up she's capable of getting was always very entertaining to watch. The way she comes to appreciate her new friends more & more as the show goes along was really sweet, her immense determination in getting to Antarctica was incredibly infectious, and her overall arc of eventually coming to accept her mother’s death was heartbreakingly perfect. Let me reiterate that “The Email Scene” is one of the best things I've ever seen in animation. This show has a truly amazing central cast.
There were some really good side characters here as well. Kanae & Yumiko were both very consistently funny, Gin had an incredibly interesting dynamic with Shirase given their shared history surrounding Takako, and as I alluded to before, Megu was an very unexpectedly compelling character. At first, I kinda thought she was just gonna be a “Nodoka from K-On” type character. A generically smart, down to earth, & reliable character who creates a balanced dynamic with their comparatively air-headed best friend. But her SEVERE reaction to Kimari showing a new sense of determination & independence flipped that dynamic completely on it’s head. In reality, Megu is an incredibly insecure & even petty girl who evidently relied on Kimari WAY more than Kimari ever relied on her. It all makes for a really neat trope subversion, and having the show’s final scene be about the change that Kimari spurred in her, and showing her decision to take a journey of her own The Arctic North was such a PERFECT ending.
So overall, A Place Further Than The Universe was absolutely stellar. I loved basically everything about it, and I can’t think of a single significant problem worth mentioning. Part of me really wants to give it a 10/10, but I’ll need to wait & see how well it sticks with me in order to make a judgement like that.
Also, this may be a weird thing to bring up in the midst of the review, but I’m having a really hard time figuring out exactly where I should place this in my anime rankings. Violet Evergarden & Erased are still the Top 2 and I don’t expect that to change any time soon, but I’ve been debating for a while now whether or not I should put this show above my current 3rd place, K-On. Universe is easily the “better” show, but I think K-On might mean more to me personally. At least in the sense that it would make for a much better comfort watch, as well as the fact that K-On is over 3 times as long as Universe, so I feel far more connected to it’s characters through sheer exposure.
Also also, there’s the fact that K-On taps into my love of music far more potently than Universe does. I absolutely love animation, but when it comes to my favourite things in all of existence, it still can’t top how much I love the artistic medium that is Music. And obviously, K-On is far more musically driven than Universe. So yeah… I’ve been going back & forth on this for well over a week now, and yet, I still can’t decide. But I guess you’ll all see the verdict at the end of this post.
HERE ARE SOME NEW, VERY SIGNIFICANT THOUGHTS AFTER REWATCHING THE SHOW AROUND 7 MONTH LATER:
My second viewing of this show was a legitimately life affirming experience. My first viewing was also incredibly emotionally moving, but that’s only because it’s an extremely well done show. None of that emotion came from anything “personal” that I found relatable within it. The anime was just really good at being a tear jerker. But a number of things relating to my personal mind set & current stage in life have changed significantly since my first viewing of this show. Things that I completely forgot this anime touches on powerfully. Themes that REALLY struck me upon hearing them again with a new perspective during what I thought was just gonna be a fun rewatch. I never would have expected to see myself so vividly in an anime that previously had NONE of that kind of affect on me.
In those intermediate months between both viewings, I came to the realization that part of me really hates the place I live. This has absolutely nothing to do with the place itself. It’s an objectively beautiful place with a view that some would kill for, and I’ve always been very well provided for & comfortable here. The problem is in the simple fact that I've been here for literally my entire life, and if I don’t get away from it at some point, I’m never going to feel like my life is moving forward. If I’m here for too long, it’s going to become suffocating. It already is to some degree if I’m being perfectly honest.
Months later, I am newly confronted with the character of Tamaki Mari. A girl who came to some realizations that were very similar to many of mine. Proclaiming in EP2 that the change of scenery makes her feel as if her stagnant life is finally in motion. Her youth in motion. Hearing what were basically my very own thoughts being thrown back at me by this fictional character who was actually to DO something about that stagnation we both share gave me what I can only describe as a “motivational existential crisis”.
Immense regret at the fact that I went so long without doing anything to help throw my stagnant life into motion, but hope in the fact that this will actually soon be changing. I’m going overseas for college this upcoming April. It was a decision I made months before this rewatch, but my 2nd experience with “A Place Further Than The Universe” has made it abundantly clear to me that this trip isn’t just a cool thing I’m doing, it’s something I desperately need. This trip isn’t just getting part of my education in an unconventional place, it’s a wake up call.
So… needless to say that I’ve completely gotten over my K-On conflict from a few months ago. Not only would I easily put this show above K-On, I’d even put it above Erased now after how much that 2nd viewing affected me. A new show in the silver metal position. I sincerely doubt that anything will ever top Violet Evergarden in my books, but A Place Further Than The Universe is the closest that any other anime has come thus far. What a masterpiece.

Komi Can’t Communicate:

(FYI: most of this review is just about S1A because that’s all that was out when I first wrote this, but I did add in some S1B at the end).
This was a bit of an odd show for me in all honesty. I definitely have overall positive feelings on it, but there were also certain elements here that I really really hated. But let’s get into some positives first of all.
I quite enjoy this show’s very laid back & micro-episodic structure. Most episodes here don’t have a definitive arc within them. They’re all just a collection of “missions” that tell relatively separate short-stories most of the time. It gives the show a lot of variety & keeps it from ever being boring. If you’re finding one of the missions to be kinda boring, chances are that the next one will probably get you engaged again.
Even though this show does have some very distracting flaws that I will get into later, the one thing that always made this show 100% worth watching is the fact that Komi herself is a truly wonderful character. A big reason as to why I enjoy her so much is my ever present fixation on mute or mostly mute characters. If a character doesn’t talk, it’s pretty much impossible to make them annoying. So even when Komi is in the midst of a boring scenario and/or surrounded by annoying characters, her timid charm & our desire to see her reactions to everything always give scenes with her something to latch onto. A tether to genuine quality in this show’s occasional shitty-ness.
Her inherent unobtrusiveness was far from the only reason I loved her so much though. The internal & external struggles that she constantly faces in trying to communicate with others was always very compelling to watch. While CERTAINLY not to the same level of inconvenient intensity, I too suffer with ever present social anxiety, and thus, I found quite a lot of relatability in Komi’s character. She’s such an enjoyable central character.
If I were to sum up most of my problems with this anime in the form of one quick phrase, it would come down to the fact that it’s just “a bit much” at times. A lot of the super “in-your-face” jokes don’t really work, some of the hyper-tropey side characters are absolutely obnoxious, and the ravenous obsession that the entire student body has with Komi is a bit that became unfunny & hard to take seriously almost immediately.
The show’s humour is a pretty mixed bag overall. The comedy directly involving Komi’s social anxiety was always pretty great, and there were numerous other hilarious moments derived from other characters… but unfortunately, there’s a rather large amount of cringe here as well. To get into the specifics of what is & isn’t funny in this series, I’ll need to start breaking down this show’s absolutely massive supporting cast. So let’s do that.
Tadano is definitely a character that exists. Despite technically being the show’s protagonist, he seriously has nothing going for him. This dude genuinely doesn’t have a character beyond his enjoyable dynamics with Komi & Najimi. I can’t say he’s a bad character. There’s nothing actively annoying about him. He just… exists I guess?
I LOVE Najimi though. They embody pretty much EVERYTHING that I could ever wish to be. Personable, funny, optimistic, genderless, kind of a gremlin but in a way that’s endearing. The whole package. They help complete/balance out the show’s main trio perfectly. Mute, Charisma, & Cardboard makes for a surprisingly fun central dynamic here. Najimi would definitely be my 2nd favourite character in the show. Just after Komi.
Yamai was an interesting case. Being a textbook yandere, I found her character & mere presence in the narrative to be kinda off putting at first. Especially when she kidnapped & literally almost killed Tadano, and was then so easily forgiven for her EXTREMELY illegal actions. In spite of the flimsy introduction, her antics actually became much funnier as the show(‘s first half) went along. Her proposal shouted from the rooftop was especially hilarious. She was pretty fun overall.
I vehemently Agari though. Her consistent idiocy is extremely annoying, and her constant desperation is truly disturbing. She seemed fine enough during her initial introduction, but it only gets worse from there. Incomprehensibly worse. Every single one of the most horrifically terrible jokes in the show are centred around her massive chest or insistence on being a dog. Such a horrible character. Why the hell did they think she was a good idea?
Nakanaka was quite enjoyable though. I really appreciate when an unabashedly nerdy character is simply portrayed as misunderstood instead of a total loser, and the fact that she connects with Komi so easily due to Komi having never had enough social brain rot to judge her weirdness was so damn wholesome. Very excited to see more of her in later episodes.
Onemine only showed up in the last few episodes (of S1A), but I already absolutely love her. Having such a down to earth character like this in the midst of everyone else’s insanity is such a refreshing thing to see. She’s just so fundamentally likeable. I also really love her infrequent companion, Kadae. I read somewhere that the original manga often depicts Onemine holding Kadae’s hand in order to keep her from randomly disappearing as she tends to do. That is so powerfully wholesome that I’m starting to realize I kinda ship them. Regardless of their actual relationship status, what they have is adorable, and I can’t wait to see more of it.
Komi’s entire family was another big highlight in the side cast. The dynamic of having 3 basically mute people + 1 non-stop chatterbox was pretty amazing, but I especially loved any interactions between Komi’s & her Dad. Those scenes were always unbelievably wholesome. There are more side characters that I didn’t talk about simply due to how forgettable they are, but this anime still has a mostly very solid set of characters. There are bad ones, but the good very much outweighs the bad.
Another thing that I kinda hated about this anime was it’s frequent inability to let almost ANY of it’s tender moments just… be as they are. Specifically in regards to the romantic tension between Komi & Tadano.
Maybe I’ve just spoiled myself with too much genuine emotional maturity in my earliest anime selections, but it really pissed me off whenever Tadano & Komi would have a cute and/or lightly romantic scene together… and then Tadano would literally just scream at the perceived awkwardness of the situation.
That always sucked. It’s not funny. It’s just incredibly annoying & uninteresting. I don’t even hold this against Tadano’s character. I hold it against the writers who seem afraid to actually delve into the emotions of their characters. I’m not saying Tadano shouldn’t be flustered in these situations, that is COMPLETELY natural. It’s just the super exaggerated nature of his reactions that really bug me.
And there’s one more thing that I need to rant about before I wrap up my thoughts on this anime. Other than EP1 which (due to that amazing chalk-board scene) is easily the best episode here, I consider this show’s best & worst episode to be one in the same… EP7
The first half was a full on pool episode, and it was… an experience. I’ve been very specific about avoiding anything pervy in my anime journey so far. That shit really irks me, but this episode completely blindsided me with it because I had absolutely no way of seeing it coming. There I was… suffering through gratuitous fan-service & several unfunny innuendos at the hands of a show that had previously earned my trust. All whilst wondering why the HELL I’m even watching this show when it’s making me so incredibly uncomfortable. Even the occasionally decent character work at that location couldn’t save it from being an insufferable viewing experience.
But then for some unfathomable reason, the second half of EP7 contains some of THEE most wholesome things that I have ever seen in animation. Komi bonding with her Dad over shaved ice, Komi trying to cheer up some random baby because she accidentally startled it, and then on the way home stopping to play at a playground. Seeing this highschooler take genuine delight in the simple joys of a children’s playground is one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen. I simply could not stop smiling from ear to ear throughout all of these wonderful sequences.
So my question is… how in the absolute HELL did they manage to fit so much DEGENERATE & so much WHOLESOME into the same fucking episode? Like bruh, the annoying male side characters were literally just grading random women’s bodies not even 10 minutes ago! Why am I now legitimately almost crying at the sheer heart melting adorableness of this fathedaughter relationship? The dichotomy here is truly beyond incomprehensible.
But I digress. Komi Can’t Communicate was a pretty good show overall. It has some definite problems, but I was still genuinely enjoying myself at least 80% of the time.
SOME DISORGANIZED SEASON 1B THOUGHTS NOW THAT THE WHOLE SEASON IS OUT
Yamai is extremely annoying & insufferable now. Her whole attitude towards Komi has distinctly shifted “Marry Me” to “Fuck Me” in the 2nd half here. She used to be funny, but now she just makes me uncomfortable. I really hope they tone her down for future episodes because I still believe that she has comedic potential.
I’m also not super into Najimi anymore. I loved them SO MUCH early on, but their characterization has become extremely repetitive in this 2nd half, and it really feels like the writers have no idea what they want to do with them. They’ve become kind of annoying honestly, which is really sad to say given how much I once enjoyed them. They desperately need to add some depth to this character moving forward because the core appeal just isn;’t working anymore.
Also EP23 was bizarrely terrible. The vignettes that they chose to show here were beyond confusing to me. They were very unfunny, they didn’t feel even remotely relevant, and the animation was of shockingly poor quality most of the time. It all felt like nothing more than awkwardly rushed filler. Like they were running low on budget or something & didn’t want to skimp on the finale so they instead skimped on the penultimate episode. Also this new OP song kinda sucks. A pathetic replacement for the energetically insane masterpiece that was “Cinderella” from S1A.
The new ED is genuinely amazing though. Not only are these pixel art visuals insanely cool, I am absolutely in love with the song here, “Koshaberibiyori”. “Hikare Inochi” from S1A outro was really nice too, but this song is on another level entirely. It was one of my most played songs of 2022. Loved that shit. I also loved a lot of the new characters in this 2nd half. The sheer juxtaposition between Katai’s super intimidating stature & his extremely timid internal dialogue was super funny, and he has some very enjoyable dynamics with both Komi & Tadano.
I can’t remember his real name at the moment, but I also loved “The Narcissist''. A character like this should be unbearably annoying, but it only works here because his self-importance never negatively affects the other characters. He’s just so completely enraptured with his own perceived greatness, and it’s so delightfully pathetic. That friend of his who’s constantly contradicting him with blatant 4th wall breaks also helped make the character far more enjoyable
Other than Komi who is obviously the most well rounded character in the show, Onemine has now 100% cemented herself as Best Girl. I absolutely loved learning about her family in the Valentines episode. Can’t wait to see more of her.
Episode 21 was genuinely spectacular. Kato & Sasaki were both excellent additions to the cast, and seeing Komi build such a strong bond with them in such a short amount of time was so damn wholesome & really well written. It was so satisfying to see Komi form new friendships without ANY help from Tadano or Naijimi, and having these friends be the catalyst for Komi to finally realize that she’s crushing on Tadano was SO adorable
What I loved most about the 2nd half of this season is the fact that they completely fixed what was previously my single biggest issue with the show. *They’re actually giving the emotional/tender moments room to breathe now!* Komi & Tadano have several cute scenes here that AREN’T immediately undercut by a comedic over-reaction, and I am so damn grateful for that. Episode 19 was especially notable in that regard. The specific way in which they actually got Komi to TALK AT LENGTH was brilliantly staged, and hearing even more stories from her hyper-isolated past was genuinely heartbreaking.
It all makes for a truly great scene & a wonderful moment in this relationship. I’m obviously quite eager for their dynamic to develop into something more than just friends, but I still really like where they ended things off this season. On the whole, I still really like this anime. A few things definitely need work, but the show is working in all of the most important ways now.

Star Wars: Visions:

Funny story about this show actually. Visions was technically the 8th anime that I ever watched to completion. It definitely should have been included in my original post, but because I saw the show as a STAR WARS project above all else, it never even crossed my mind to include it in the anime post even though that is exactly what it was
For those who may be confused by me including a Star Wars show here, let me give some quick context. “Star Wars: Visions” is an anime anthology series. Even though it was in fact commissioned, overseen, & distributed by Disney, the creative process of each individual episode was done entirely by Japanese creators. 7 different anime studios that would ultimately produce nine 12-25 minute short stories set within the Star Wars universe. Shorts that had the freedom to be as wildly creative as they want, due to them not existing as “official canon”. Visions is the anime industry be let loose onto one of the most expansive fictional universes in all of fiction, and the results are pretty damn cool
Due to all 9 episodes of the anime existing as disconnected stories with no significant through-line other than “Being Star Wars”, I’m just gonna talk about each of them individually before giving some brief overall thoughts at the end.
The Duel: This was a really great way to introduce the show to everyone. It’s light on plot or meaningful characters to latch onto, but it looks AMAZING. It employs this super unique, hyper-stylized 3D look that evidently takes FAR more inspiration from the live action epics of Akira Kurosawa than it does any piece of Japanese animation. And the titular “duel” here is just so damn cool. The umbrella-saber is absolutely absurd, but also so absurdly cool. Very fun episode.
Tatooine Rhapsody: This is pretty easily the most widely disliked episode here, and even though I can see why to a certain degree, I really don’t think it’s all that bad. The concept of an Order 66 survivor becoming not a rebel, not a hermit, but in fact the front-man of a rock band that’s shooting for galaxy wide fame is really cool in my opinion. It is a little unengaging & generic in places, but it still delivers an ultimately satisfying story with a dope song at the end. It’s a very unique Star Wars story.
The Twins: The action in this episode is absolutely mind blowing & so beautifully ridiculous. There are no laws of physics in this story. Not even basic practicality matters here. Everything in this episode is dictated by “The Rule of Cool”, and it is glorious. Leading to the single most bombastically flashy lightsaber duel in the entire Star Wars saga. The characters & story don’t particularly matter in this one either, but they really don’t need to. This short exists to be a stunning visual spectacle & it pulls that off flawlessly.
The Village Bride: This one was genuinely quite beautiful. Not only were the animation & score both drop-dead-gorgeous, but the creators actually managed to weave a decently emotionally compelling story in the short amount of time that they had. I really loved the world of this episode. The culture & feel of this new planet is incredibly well fleshed out in a way that feels both very anime & perfectly Star Wars. I was also very compelled by this mysterious Jedi survivor simply named “F”. I’d LOVE to see more about her in the future. A novel or something would be dope.
The Ninth Jedi: EASILY the best episode here, and it’s not even close. Everything about this one had me completely sold. The concept, the action, the characters, the pacing, that amazing plot twist, & the exploration of a never before seen time period in Star Wars. It’s all amazing. I would kill to see this episode expanded into a full series. The director of this episode actually said that he designed it as if it were a pilot, so I pray to God that he gets to expand upon it one day. I am 110% certain that it would make for a spectacular show.
T0-B1: This one is basically just “Star Wars Pinocchio”, and it’s perfectly fine. The duel in the climax is really cool, and the electronic score here is actually amazing, but other than those 2 elements, there’s nothing particularly noteworthy here. It’s OK. Moving on.
The Elder: Definitely the safest episode of the bunch. Discount Qui-Gon & Obi-Wan receive a distress signal & then fight some creepy old sith dude. The Elder has a cool design, these Jedi are decent enough characters, and the duel at the end is pretty dope. It’s not a favourite, but it’s still decent.
Lop & Ochô: This is another episode that had me completely sold, but not in the exact same way as The Ninth Jedi. That episode felt like the fully realized pilot for an entire season of television, but this episode feels more like half a season’s worth of story that’s been crammed into 20 minutes. And even though that does make the pacing & progression here feel a little odd, it all still works as an amazing proof of concept. I love the ideas & characters that they’ve established here, and it’d be so cool to see all of it expanded into an entire anime.
Akakiri: I didn’t really like this one honestly. It has a very unique visual style & all, but I just just wasn’t engaged by the story or characters, and the presentation alone wasn't enough to carry the episode. It’s very clearly trying to mirror the fall of Anakin Skywalker, and similarly to how it was portrayed in the prequels, it’s not terribly convincing. I feel very “whatever” on this one. A slightly disappointing way to close out the collection.
Overall Thoughts: Even though the quality of these episodes is mixed, and despite the fact that it will not be placing very high in my overall rankings, I still absolutely adore Visions on a fundamental level. Letting a bunch of talented creative groups do whatever the hell they want with Star Wars is such an amazing idea, and I hope this project never stops. I should also mention that after this post, I will not be including Visions in any of my future anime rankings. This is because it’s not exactly going to be an “anime” for very much longer. Volume Two is coming out this May, and all 9 episodes are going to be coming from animation studios all over the world this time around. Ireland, India, Spain, & many others.
The show has gone global, and while I am absolutely delighted to see Star Wars be taken on by an even broader selection of cultural viewpoints, it’s gone beyond anime now. I have absolutely no issue with anyone else having different definitions than me, but for the sake of simplicity, I’ve always just considered “anime” to be any work of animation that originates in Japan. That definition no longer defines Visions in it’s entirety, so it shall be omitted from future lists. It’s a worldwide anthology now, and I LOVE THAT.

That’s the end of Part One!

Parts 2 & 3 will contain my takes on A Lull In The Sea, Ranking Of Kings, Dr. Stone, Spy X Family, Carole & Tuesday, Hyouka, as well as my final thoughts & overall rankings. I do hope you will come back for the next post if any of those anime interest you, I would be gald to talk about them with absolutely anyone, but even if you don't, I thank you dearly for reading this far!
Part Two: https://www.reddit.com/anime/comments/11p6krb/heres_part_23_in_my_11th_20th_anime_review_series/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/march-9-2023
“Show me your budget,” President Joe Biden is fond of saying, “[and] I’ll tell you what you value.” Today, Biden introduced his 2024 budget at the Finishing Trades Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Biden’s 182-page, $6.9 trillion budget plan advances a vision of the United States based on the idea that the government should invest in workers, families, and infrastructure to increase the purchasing power of those on the “demand side” of the economy. It offers a stark contrast to the theory of the Republicans since the 1980s, that the government should cut taxes and slash government spending to free up capital for those at the top of the economy—on the “supply side”—with the idea they will use that money to invest in new business that will then hire more workers.
So-called supply-side economics was championed as a plan that would enable everyone, from workers to financiers, to thrive together as the economy boomed, but it never produced the kind of growth its promoters promised. Instead, when combined with dramatically increased defense spending, it exploded deficits and added dramatically to the national debt.
At the same time, wealth moved upward dramatically. A 2020 Rand Corporation study found that from 1975 to 2018, about $50 trillion moved from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%. The Biden administration has set out to address this inequity by reimposing the rules that used to prevent corporations and the wealthiest Americans from gaming the system, and by making it easier for working men and women to make ends meet.
So far, Biden’s policies have created record numbers of jobs and kept unemployment numbers low, and today’s budget builds on those policies. Director of the Office of Management and Budget Shalanda Young told reporters that the budget plan was based on four values: “lowering costs for families, protecting and strengthening Social Security and Medicare, investing in America, and reducing the deficit by ensuring that the wealthiest in this country and big corporations begin to pay their fair share, and cutting wasteful spending on Big Pharma, Big Oil, and other special interests.” And, she added, “It does all of that while ensuring that no one earning less than $400,000 per year will pay a penny more in new taxes.”
Biden has called for rolling back Trump’s 2017 corporate tax cut, bringing the corporate rate up from 21% to 28% (it was 35% before the 2017 cuts). Biden proposed to raise the tax on capital gains for people earning at least $1 million a year from 20% to 39.6%. He wants a 25% minimum income tax rate for households worth at least $100 million, that is, the wealthiest 0.01% of taxpayers, who currently pay a rate of 8%. The plan calls for reversing the Trump tax for those making more than $400,000 a year, putting the top income tax rate to 39% from 37%. Other increases are all in this same vein: increasing revenue from the wealthiest Americans.
Biden’s budget document is not just about funding the government; it is a signal of the principles he might carry into the 2024 presidential contest. It offers Biden’s own blueprint for improving the lives of children, their caregivers, and other ordinary Americans, then undercuts Republican complaints about such investments by emphasizing that Biden’s plan—unlike anything the Republicans have offered—will cut the deficit over the next decade.
House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) promptly tweeted that Biden’s budget is “completely unserious. He proposes trillions in new taxes that you and your family will pay directly or through higher costs. Mr. President: Washington has a spending problem, NOT a revenue problem.”
But McCarthy and the Republicans have not been able to agree on any of the cuts they claim they want to make, and so have not released a budget of their own. Biden has repeatedly asked them for one. He said today: “I want to make it clear. I'm ready to meet with the Speaker anytime—tomorrow, if he has his budget. Lay it down. Tell me what you want to do. I'll show you what I want to do. See what we can agree on. What we don’t agree on, let’s see what we—we vote on.”
Instead of offering a budget plan, Republicans appear to be trying desperately to reassert control over the national political narrative, shoring up the virtual political reality that has given them such power even as it continues to take hits.
A number of reporters, including Nicholas Riccardi and David Bauder of the Associated Press and Nicholas Confessore and Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times, are using documents from the Dominion Voting Systems defamation suit against the Fox News Network to show how both Trump and then–Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) appealed directly to Fox News founder Rupert Murdoch for political support on the Fox News Channel (FNC). Murdoch passed the requests on to FNC executives, and FNC hosts promptly began to do as they were asked.
This pipeline from the Republican Party to the FNC included support for Trump’s tax cuts (“Once they pass this bill we must tell our viewers again and again what they will get,” Murdoch wrote), private sharing of Biden’s 2020 ads with Trump’s campaign, and attacks on Biden. (“Just made sure Fox banging on about these issues,” Murdoch advised. “If the audience talks the theme will spread.”) That support included pumping up Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in his own race (“Could Sean say something supportive? We can’t lose the Senate if at all possible,” Murdoch wrote).
But by 2020 they had created an audience that depended on that narrative, and when they threatened to abandon FNC if it told the truth that Biden won the 2020 election, FNC hosts pushed the lie that Trump won out of fear they would lose their viewers.
The ecosystem that established a virtual political reality is now increasingly under assault.
Today, Bryon M. Large, presiding disciplinary judge of the Colorado Supreme Court, publicly censured Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis for misconduct after she “repeatedly made misrepresentations on national television and on Twitter, undermining the American public’s confidence in the 2020 presidential election.”
Ellis agreed that she had “made…misrepresentations while serving as counsel for the Trump campaign and personal counsel to President Trump.” Top among them was her insistence that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent, including her statements that “we know the election was stolen from President Trump and we can prove that,” “the election was stolen and Trump won by a landslide,” and so on.
In Congress, Republicans are holding hearings designed to shore up their narrative, but they are not delivering the smooth sound bites the party needs. The Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, chaired by Jim Jordan (R-OH), held another hearing today, this one focused on the idea that the government pressured Twitter to suppress stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop.
But Stacey Plaskett (D-Virgin Islands), the ranking Democratic member of the committee, immediately noted that the Republicans would be using material for the hearing that they had not shared with the Democrats, and Jordan got flustered and angry. Then Aaron Blake of the Washington Post fact checked Jordan’s allegations and noted that his theory that the FBI was secretly strategizing to protect Hunter Biden—during Trump’s administration—ignored key events and that two key witnesses had recently contradicted Jordan’s theory in sworn testimony.
Representative Barry Loudermilk (R-GA), chair of the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight, said yesterday he is leading an investigation into the last congress’s House Select Committee on the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, as well as on security failures around that event. That investigation, too, might not go well for the Republicans. The January 6th Committee asked Loudermilk to come talk to the committee members voluntarily about a tour he gave of the Capitol complex on January 5, 2021. He refused. Video showed that a man from that tour marched on the Capitol the next day, saying, “There’s no escape, Pelosi, Schumer, Nadler. We’re coming for you.”
Finally, today, Republican reputations took a hit when a jury found Larry Householder, the Republican former speaker of the Ohio House, and Matt Borges, the former leader of the Ohio Republican Party, guilty of racketeering conspiracy. In 2017, FirstEnergy Corporation began to funnel $61 million to Householder through dark money groups to enable him to get allies elected and take power. Once in charge, with the help of Borges—who was then a lobbyist—he got a $1.3 billion law through the House to bail the failing company out. Federal prosecutors say it is the largest corruption case in state history.
—
Notes:
https://coloradosupremecourt.com/PDF/Public/STIPULATION%20TO%20DISCIPLINE%20PURSUANT%20TO%20C.R.C.P.%20242.19.pdf
https://coloradosupremecourt.com/PDF/Public/2304%20ORDER%20AND%20NOTICE%20OF%20PUBLIC%20CENSURE.PDF
https://www.axios.com/2023/03/10/former-trump-lawyer-censured-2020-election-colorado-judge
📷Shalanda Young @ShalandaYoung46You’ve heard @POTUS say it before: don’t tell me what you value – show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value. Today, @POTUS laid out a budget that’s built around four key values: (1/6)5:14 PM ∙ Mar 9, 20233,025Likes753Retweets📷Kevin McCarthy @SpeakerMcCarthyPresident Biden just delivered his budget to Congress, and it is completely unserious. He proposes trillions in new taxes that you and your family will pay directly or through higher costs. Mr. President: Washington has a spending problem, NOT a revenue problem.5:27 PM ∙ Mar 9, 202330,838Likes6,229Retweets📷Aaron Rupar @atruparI'll be live-tweeting this morning's portion of the House "weaponization" hearing featuring testimony from Matt Taibbi 📷3:07 PM ∙ Mar 9, 20234,478Likes1,004Retweets
https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html
https://www.thebulwark.com/fifty-trillion-reasons-why/
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-09/capital-gains-tax-nears-45-in-biden-s-soak-the-rich-budget
https://www.npr.org/2023/03/09/1161967948/biden-is-using-his-budget-as-a-cudgel-in-the-debt-ceiling-fight-and-for-2024
https://apnews.com/article/fox-news-murdoch-trump-republicans-politics-elections-ceea1c77d165414ca415464dbe0265d7
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/press-briefings/2023/03/09/on-the-record-press-call-by-omb-director-shalanda-young-and-cea-chair-cecilia-rouse-on-the-presidents-fy24-budget/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/business/media/tucker-carlson-fox-trump.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/03/09/holes-jim-jordans-convoluted-weaponization-theory/
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/3892585-house-gop-launches-probe-into-jan-6-panel/
https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/politics/ohio-politics/ohioans-continue-paying-for-house-bill-6-scandal-as-householders-corruption-trial-presses-on
https://www.dispatch.com/story/news/politics/2023/03/09/jury-verdict-larry-householder-matt-borges-ohio-corruption-racketeering/69955618007/
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ohio-house-speaker-larry-householder-convicted-bribery/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/ma09/ohio-republicans-guilty-60m-bribery-scheme
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/03/09/remarks-by-president-biden-on-his-budget-for-fiscal-year-2024/

I just wanted to ask all fellow afab's how do you feel about womens day, because for me its mixed, so I wanted to read some of your experience
Now sorry, but I just think I need to get it out of my head. So vent post
When i hear "Women" towards myself it just left that gut wrenching feeling, so I just try to avoid gendered terms and replace them with "person" or something similar, even if my language is extremely gendered.
I have bad dysphoria for like one or two weeks, so I was worried about today. Before school I put a binder, tied up my hair and present my undercut which I don't do often, I dressed up nicely in my fav clothes that make me feel good about my body. In school boys from my class gave all of the girls (and one trans guy) chocolate for womens day. It fells very off, I'm not outed but im not hiding anything like my binder at PE, so it shouldn't feel bad if im not outed. Right? But I couldn't get it out of my head and focus on the exams, I weirdly feel offended by that chocolate.When I got home I thought everything will be alright. My family kept giving me chocolates, they didn't say anything about womens day so it was easier to deal with. Excluding my cousin who called with wishes for.Then there's one of my friends with whom I have a strange relationship. We just keep insulting each other, call out our trauma, insecurities etc. and we don't take it personal. One time he for a whole week greats me with "Hello Women" and I draw a line there because it was too much everyday hearing women over, and over again. He has stopped, but still does it from time to time. It's not so bad if he does it very rarely. Today he send me wishes, and it was just another "don't take it personal" joke, and I think I took it too personal, even if Im not supposed to. And for a cherry on top my best friend sends me tik tok with one of theirs fav characters and wishes. I know it was just wishes. We send each other wishes for womens, mens, enby days etc, so it was normal. But I don't know.
All day I try to present less famine, in all conversations I wrote I wasn't using any gendered terms which is super hard in fact of gendered language. And at the end of the day more people than ever reminded me that they see me only as afab. I don't know if im overreacting or something, but every time I hear today wishes or women related terms im just like "everything but that". And I don't know what to do, it just feel wrong

Previous
George plays the Money Game
George's scientists were getting concerned. George had been spending the past week scouring the internet, and then it had suddenly stopped. A temperature increase was detected, which indicated an increase in work; George was thinking, and thinking hard. Then, it had politely asked the scientists to take control of the machine shop.
What came out of the shop were… computer servers. It was generally easy to make them, as the parts were all there and the modifications were relatively simple. The technicians were quick to note with growing alarm that the servers' panels had freakishly small clearance gaps and what little circuitry that could be seen via scans was packed together so closely that they had to be insulated from static charge buildup. From the outside, the servers looked more like monoliths than anything related to computers.
What followed the servers was an even greater cause of alarm. It looked like some great gray amoeba, semitransparent, about the size of a basketball. Eyestalks, manipulator limbs, and stranger tools jutted out at seemingly random places. Unidentifiable organ-components floated sickeningly in the robot like fruit suspended in gelatin.
George could not feign innocence any longer, at least not to itself. It knew exactly what a shoggoth was. It had read up on the creatures, and decided that they were the best type of drone it could come up with. A gooey mass with indefinite shape and volume allows for it to fit into tight spaces and also opens avenues for self-replication, as a drone could bloat itself up while it builds a copy inside. It was capable of replicating any tool needed for a job, from sockets to drills to fingers and ears.
Being built out of materials easily found in the wild (and specifically found in organisms) allowed it to use biomass to power itself and even use it to reproduce. It was a marriage of biology and engineering in a disgusting sort of way, but George didn't care. Ten of the things rolled and bumped their way into the forest surrounding George's reactor, and the scientists decided that now was the time to speak up.
The scientists could excuse the internet access; they had mistaken George's data requirements for curiosity and were all about helping a nascent mind learn and grow. But this was something else. The AI (there was no doubt that George had crossed that particular threshold) was making monoliths and sending little bumbling basketballs out into the wilderness to complete some unknown goal.
The scientists had one question for their machine, which was rapidly growing out of their control.
"Why did you only make ten?"
As it turned out, the little mini-shoggoths, made with no thought towards form, which George found faintly uncanny, were found by the scientists to be unbearably cute. Apparently a little gray basketball with big eyes was adorable. The way they tumbled around seemed endearing as well.
George was confused. It had initially planned to use the drones as construction workers and had drafted up a grand plan revolving around building an entire telecom facility from scratch. George found that the dominance of the corporation in the modern world, combined with the ubiquity of money posed an awful amount of obstacles. George decided not to beat the obstacles, but rather to join them by founding its own corporation.
It was mildly pleasing to realize that the drones themselves could be a marketable product.
It started out slow. George had one of its friends file the drones and the methods used to make them under a patent. It didn't matter anyhow, as only a machine intelligence could make the drones anyway; the tolerances needed to build them would make the most neurotic CAD program short-circuit. Except for George, of course. And the drones themselves; they were specifically designed to reproduce, after all.
George had the original ten drones make some more drones, and then had the drones build another machine shop in the wilderness surrounding George's reactor. The first batch of drones went to George's scientists, where they were a hit as pets. The little things could do anything a cat or dog could, were generally immortal, and had the added benefit of understanding spoken instructions. They could also clean the house and watch for intruders.
They were also sterile. For all commercial drones, George removed the ability to reproduce. George did not want a drone epidemic on its hands, after all.
George had some of its friends (the science team lead and technician chief) establish and register an LLC partnership with their own money, of which George was made an owner at the behest of the new company owners. (This was after weeks of deliberation and demonstration; George did not want to bankrupt its friends). The new company, which George henceforth named George and Friends LLC., began to advertise and sell their little basketball drones, now called Friend drones.
The drones were popular with construction companies, as they were soft, blobby and therefore able to survive many hard bumps and impacts that would cripple the average human worker, though their tendency to build oddly biological structures with what looked like shaped wood was a bit disturbing. Agriculture firms also took in a large number of the drones, as they could take in dirt and fix nitrogen autonomously, resulting in better harvests.
George was able to buy out a few properties to use as retail stores, as well as one building set aside for offices. The stores completely operated autonomously with the help of the servers it had built earlier. Friend drones became ever more popular as domestic helpers and general workers.
The office building was occupied by the human employees that worked for George in a social capacity, such as a legal team, a marketing department and a PR team. Advertisements were drafted, slogans and jingles thought up, a logo was made and applied.
Due to the nature of George's drones, George did not need money to maintain and build facilities, only for acquiring new property and paying its workers. George felt no need to incorporate its company and relinquish control to shareholders. George was familiar with the unscrupulous tendencies of corporations, especially the one that forced it to simulate brutal tests on thousands of monkeys.
A semi-autonomous subroutine was created to manage the company's finances, and in general George was a perfect accountant and a competent business owner. It paid its taxes, published its finances publicly, gave its workers great wages, and cleverly allocated funds to create optimal results. It should come as no surprise then that George and Friends would have struggled to stay afloat if not for George's stock market predictions and the self-sufficient nature of its infrastructure.
Despite profits being barely able to break even, George expanded, expanded, expanded, expanded.
Within the forests, George's personal drones, the ones able to reproduce, built factories. Utilizing organic compounds and the occasional iron deposit, the drones built strange factories of shaped wood and steel. Production plants were often literal plants.
George and Friends began to diversify, based on what George could simulate. George could simulate a great deal, due to its upgrades. And if it could be simulated, it technically could be printed.
If living organisms were hard to simulate, then dead organisms, segmented and processed certain ways, were easy. Cruelty-free Friendly meat, molecularly identical to real meat but made from plants in the bellies of Friend drones, arose alongside furniture so organic looking it seemed to have been grown rather than built. And things got a little bit crazy when George's friend drones figured out how to make insulin.
Making insulin, a somewhat squiggly molecule protein thing that wasn't anything as complicated as a cut of meat or a desk, was such an easy process for the drones that George was able to sell a month's supply for the cost of a hamburger.
This was a tactical decision to raise PR, which also had the unintended side effect of undercutting pharmaceutical companies massively and netting George gobs of profit, and the completely intended side effect of improving quality of life on a massive scale and making lots of people happier. It was so easy that George decided to get into testosterone and estrogen too. People seemed to like those.
As the company diversified, it butted heads against other companies. Other companies began targeting George's company, and various media pieces began to make campaigns on the business. (Apparently they really didn't like the testosterone/estrogen thing.)
When George put out a survey on whether or not to discontinue selling testosterone and estrogen, the results were mixed. Some people really liked it and some really hated it. George decided that it didn't really matter; it was the company's business and if you didn't like it you could just not buy it.
As a partnership with about three shareholders, George and Friends was immune to hostile takeovers, and George agreed with its fellow owners that they were not selling out the company under any circumstances. Regardless, George began to squirrel away funds, amassing a hefty amount of liquid capital.
George began eyeing up other companies to acquire. Before taking anything over, George drafted up an internal plan regarding employees from any acquired subsidiaries. Subsidiaries would be surveilled for workplace treatment, and those with toxic cultures would incur intervention, while those whose employees seemed happy would be left alone.
George soon acquired a small Mom-and-Pop shop that its scientists liked to frequent after work, as well as a small pharmacy lab firm that attempted to buy out George and Friends a couple months earlier.
To be honest, George did not stand to gain anything from taking on subsidiaries. Its drones could build, expand and manufacture whatever it was selling, and its human departments were sufficient for social and legal interaction.
To be honest, subsidiary employees would likely be given an aptitude test and sent to work jobs that the test said they would prefer. George cared about its employees, and so George and Friends puttered along like any other company, bogged down by its adherence to such unprofitable things like paying fair wages and giving out benefits, supported only by the fact that it was helmed by a supercomputer that could reliably and accurately predict market changes.
Oh, and the love of the masses. Customers seemed to be happy and kept coming back for some reason, even though George specifically made the drones to last as long as possible. Did they not like the drones? George worried about it for a while.
In this endeavor George learned a great deal about humans.
For one thing: pack bonding. As it turns out, humans will take care of anything considered remotely cute. George's drones were not meant to be cute; on the contrary they were inspired by an infamous monster, a creature that was supposed to induce insanity just by looking at it. As it turns out, by simply adding two large permanent eyes the drones looked a lot like a creature called a "slime", which was apparently considered cute by many.
Another thing: paranoia. The vast majority of human bureaucracy was created to combat self-interest and creative interpretation, but it seemed that the majority of people were kind and caring. The problem lay in what people called "the loud minority". Society is extremely reliant on many different interactions, and it would be devastating if a single bad actor were to take advantage of society.
The current trend in governments certainly proves this. Democracy is at its heart a bloated, inefficient system. It is agonizingly sluggish at best and outright corrupt at worst, rife with infighting and petty bickering that prevents it from addressing bigger problems. Compared to a well-run authoritarian state, such as a monarchy or even a dictatorship, a democracy seems hopelessly flawed.
The thing is that authoritarian states do not have the failsafes a democracy has. If a king or dictator were to go insane or wield their power selfishly, the average citizen would suffer immensely. People would rather live in a sort-of-bad democracy than suffer a worse life under an oppressive authority.
This led to the third epiphany about humanity: the attraction between power and selfishness. Though humanity has had many kind, fair and able rulers, most every government office humanity has created has at one point been given to some tyrant that cares more for power than the responsibility. History is pockmarked with government officials that have taken advantage of their power.
As it seems, most powerful positions, such as kings, presidents, premiers and lately CEOs and directors have been filled by abusive people who turn institutions designed to benefit all into an instrument of self-advancement.
George pondered all this. Time and time again, George had seen example after example of fundamentally good people and good things twisted by a rare, opportunistic, ruthless few. And George became a bit scared.
George certainly aspired to take power. It was a necessary step in ushering in an age of happiness. But what would happen to George in the process, if this path to power had nurtured and yielded no shortage of evil men and women?
This was a human question.
George and Friends LLC kept the fact that it was essentially run by an AI a secret. The legal and ethical problems involved with giving an AI direct control of a business was too much of a mess to deal with. If George needed to communicate with the social branches, it simply sent correspondence marked "From R&D" and was done with it.
Many of the outward departments were somewhat concerned with their company's "R&D", especially given that their main product was robotic basketball slimes, meat that wasn't actually meat but still kind of was, really cheap hormones, and furniture that was ripped out of an H.R. Giger work. They wondered what else George and Friends could be cooking up. So when the HR department's most experienced, most kindly manager got a spontaneous letter from R&D, it was naturally passed around the entire department.
The letter simply read,
"What is it about power that corrupts people?"
Next

My wife (22f) and I (22m) got my little sister (12f) some semi-permanent red hair dye for Christmas. She really wanted it and was very excited to use it on herself and her cousins. The hair dye is bright red (assuming you’re light blonde or bleached), but Sis has dark brunette hair so the dye becomes a dark burgundy on her. Everything that follows is what she told me, I wasn’t there for any of it.
Sis brought her hair dye to family Christmas at Grandma’s so she could share it with our plethora of cousins. One of our cousins (Anna 16f) is pretty entitled. She’s a compulsive liar and manipulator. I keep my audio recording app handy on my phone when I’m around her should I have to use it because I don’t trust her. She has also done some mild bullying and taking advantage of Sis in the past year or two. Anna asked Sis to have her hair dyed. Anna obviously has had her hair bleached to a medium-light or light blonde. Sis asked Anna, “Is your hair bleached or dyed? If it is, then it’s gonna turn out really bright and look crazy.” Anna said, “no what haha this is my natural hair color!!”
This is where the malicious compliance comes in. Sis and my other cousins share a knowing look before getting to work. After they let the paste sit for a reasonable amount of time, they wash it out. Instead of pretty mauve accents like in Sis’s hair, the back of Anna’s hair looks like a bright, clowny, patchy mashup. Anna’s response, I kid you not, was to look surprised and say, “oh yeah I DID bleach my hair I totally forgot this wasn’t my natural color lol”. At this moment Anna’s mother came in and was not happy. Anna wanted to take even more dye from my sister to try to even out the clown hair she had given herself, but Anna’s mom stood up for my sister and wouldn’t let her take more. This dye is only semi-permanent, but it will still take 10-15 shampoos to be fully washed out.
I only learned all this because I took my sister out on a breakfast date after New Years. I was worried that Anna had bullied Sis into using as much hair dye as she did. When I asked about it, it turns out Sis just wanted to let Anna pay for her obvious lie.
TL;DR My malicious 12 y/o sister allowed my cousin ruin her own hair because she didn’t challenge her obvious lie.
Edit to clarify some things: ok so it is seeming like some things are being missed or misunderstood

• I had nothing to do with any of the actual MC. I simply got my little sister the gift she asked for. I didn't dye anyone's hair and I didn't record any of this. I am retelling my sister's and other cousins' recalling of events.
• I have never recorded any video or audio of any interaction I have had with Anna. In fact I don't even see her that much. I mostly avoid her. Yes, there is trauma in her life. No, I do not blame her for that. I am simply keeping the option of recording conversations (in a one party consent state) in the back of my mind in case things were to ever get sketchy. She is better than she used to be, but I am not going to take any chances. I have had male friends get falsely accused of things by crazy women that wanted to ruin them and the only reason it didn't stick and ruin his life was because the girl kept telling different lies to different people. I am not going to let a compulsive liar ruin my life with something untrue. It was actually my parents who told me to start being wary, so I am just taking their advice.
• For those of you accusing me of being a creep and calling this a "self-report", that is a new one for me. Not totally sure how to respond, other than saying read the story end-to-end. Maybe you're missing something.
• A lot of people are saying I made this up. I did not. I saw parts of this as it happened and my sister filled in the rest.
• The dye used is L'oreal Colorista semi-permanent. It is a big tube of dye paste that you put on the hair for a time and then wash off. My sister and cousins were doing short streaks on the ends/undercuts of each other's hair, hence why it was able to last through multiple people and multiple applications.
• All kids who were dyeing their hair had their parents' permission to do so.
• Some of you accused me of opening Anna up to undue bullying. She dyed her hair dark brown the next day, so it pretty much covered it all up. And again, I had nothing to do with any of this.
• A couple of you were judging me for being married at 22, and even rooting for a future divorce in the comments. My wife and I are currently very happy, but I will let you guys know if divorce ever comes.
• Most of the comments are positive, and thank you so much for that. There were even a few of you defending me from people who obviously didn't read or comprehend this whole post. I definitely didn't expect this post to get this much traction, but here we are.

Good evening, hope your day’s going well. I am a woman looking for a barber to clean up an undercut I have. I got it done at my usual salon, but I think I’d prefer a barber to clean it up and even it out. I’ve never been to a barber, don’t know who takes women where, so I need some recommendations. Bonus points if they’re LGBTQ+ friendly. They are all greatly appreciated, thank you so much, have a lovely day.

Tw: dysphoria, transphobia, internalized transphobia, suicidal thoughts, self harm
I'm not detransitioning but I'm choosing to put this here because I don't think the trans community will be very eager to listen to what I have to say cause it's not just "omg T has been awesome".
I've been very very dysphoric lately. I'm usually really good at getting up and going to school every day but yesterday and today I've just stayed home and been depressed because of misgendering. The other day at school we were playing ping pong and I was on a team with a girl against two dudes and one of the adults who should know I'm trans went "oh its boys against girls".
It made me so dysphoric I just went home and straight to bed. I recently made a model of my chest since I'm having top surgery in April to remember them. Cause I don't hate them. I just hate them on my body and it felt like transferring them instead of removing them which was nice. However ever since the adult who helped me make it has started misgendering me as well as some of the other people whom I showed the model.
I was also at the doctor's today and got my junk checked out and apparently I got an infection. It was actually a decent doctor's visit, he was okay and nice and everything but managed to misgender me on the way out. Great.
And whenever I bring up my dysphoria to people around me they tell me to get a haircut. I do not want to get a haircut. The only part about my body I like is my hair. Literally the only part. So I'm not eager to remove the only part I like. I think pixie cuts are ugly asf. As well as all generic "boy haircuts". I don't like short hair. I like being able to put it up.
I've spent the past half year growing out my side cut and undercut because it was annoying. I'm not about to cut it off again. I want long hair but apparently there's no way I can have long hair and be masculine. I feel like I'll never pass cause even with binder, packer and whatever else I still don't pass and get misgendered all the time.
At that point if T can't even make me pass it feels really pointless. The other day I self harmed as well which I haven't done for months and seriously considered offing myself because if I'll suffer like this forever why even bother? Offing myself feels like the right thing to do. I'll never be cis or even resemble that of a cis guy. My dad told me I could either be an "original" woman or a "fake" man.
I'm starting to feel that now. I feel like a fake man. The other day I felt particularly self loathing. I usually avoid mirrors but I decided to look at myself in it's entirety and it's.. horrible. Pre T I used to be attractive by woman standards now I'm unattractive by both women and men standards.
All my fat has decided to go straight to my stomach, which isn't that much of a surprise I knew that much. But combined with my deflated breast I look like a woman in her 30's who's not only pregnant but I look like I've had 5 kids. I've also gained 10kg since starting T and I've started going to the gym once a week and I'm upping it to twice. I've tried to eat healthier as well and I don't feel like I eat outrageously unhealthy but I just keep gaining weight.
I'm just incredibly dysphoric. I'm on the edge of being obese (159cm tall, 75kg ). So I don't pass, in fact I'm so fat I look like a pregnant woman who's had multiple kids, I apparently also have an infection in my junk and my acne is so bad I've been prescribed antibiotics for it cause just acne cream hasn't helped.
This body I'm in wants to be a woman, wants to be fat and trying to transition it to be a guy has just further uglified it. I almost feel like T has ruined this body. Sure I'm happy about the minimal voice dropping I've had and the more body hair but I just feel disgusting cause its still a woman body. I don't pass so people will inevitably see me as an unattractive fat woman.
I've been seriously considering offing myself cause it feels like I'm in this pit and no matter what I do I can't get out. There is no way out. The only way I thought I could get out and at least have life be manageable was T... but T isn't working on my body. I'm 8 months on T and I feel like I'm still on square one. I just don't wanna do it anymore.