[-] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

I loved I'm Glad My Mom Died! It was my favorite memoir of 2022 for sure.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I'll list two, nonfiction and fiction.

For nonfiction, I'd have to say How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair. It's a memoir of a woman who grew up in a strict Rastafari household in Jamaica. Safiya is a poet and she has a beautiful command of language that makes her descriptions lyrical, haunting, or painful as needs be. However, if you generally need content warnings I would highly recommend looking them up for this book because she does not pull any punches.

For fiction, my favorite would probably be Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett (Storygraph went down in the middle of me writing this lol, will edit the link in later). It's a lovely fantasy novel set in an alternate Earth where fae are real. You follow a Dryadologist as she works on documenting a rare type of fae while she works on her encyclopaedia of faeries (hence the title lol). I enjoyed being in Emily's head as she worked through the problems presented to her, and as she interacted with her colleague.

25
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Any format counts (audiobook, physical book, ebook, graphic novel, article, essay, etc).

10
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Just finished reading something and want to share some thoughts, but don't want to start a brand new thread? Feel free to post your mini-reviews here!

If you'd like to start a more dedicated discussion, you are still free to begin a stand-alone thread.

Please post any spoilers behind spoiler tags!

TitleLike so

TitleLike so

[-] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I was actually repeating what was said in a video I watched yesterday so I went to look at their sources - here is a relevant study that supports this conclusion - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1743609515339060

However while looking it up in google scholar I did find another study that concluded the opposite, that there's no significant difference between identical and fraternal twins. That study is here. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-17749-0

So it's possible that I was misinformed.

As a bonus, here's an interesting analysis about what even is gender and gender identity in an academic setting. https://academic.oup.com/analysis/advance-article/doi/10.1093/analys/anad027/7204699

[-] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Gender expression and gender stereotypes are societal constructs. A person's sense of their own gender is (probably) not. There have been many times where people have tried to raise their child as a different gender than the child was assigned at birth, and the child 99% of the time identifies with the gender assigned at birth, at the same rate as the general cisgender population. There have also been studies of identical twins where if one twin is trans, the other twin often is as well, at a much higher rate than fraternal twins.

There is a genetic component and a constructed component to gender.

Edit: wording.

Edit 2: See my comment below with sources on the twins study - it's possible I was misinformed on this. The results of studies are mixed.

[-] [email protected] 9 points 2 years ago

I have been reading the Wheel of Time series for the first time (by Robert Jordan). Currently starting Crown of Swords, book 7.

Recently placed a request in my library for the following, hopefully they'll be coming in within the next week:

  • How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler

  • Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

25
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Hey Beehaw (and friends)! What’re you reading?

Previously I had these thread labelled as monthly threads, but I have had an incredibly busy few months and had not been able to keep up with it. So this is now going to be a general sticky that will be replaced "every so often" when the previous thread gets overly full :)

Novels, nonfiction, ebooks, audiobooks, graphic novels, etc - everything counts!

61
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Hey Beehaw (and friends)! What're you reading?

Novels, nonfiction, ebooks, audiobooks, graphic novels, etc - everything counts!

11
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/books/t/223208

Perhaps the most surprising thing about prolific queer erotica author Chuck Tingle—who, talking via Zoom, wears a bubblegum pink bag over...

4
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Hey Beehaw (and others)! Whatcha reading?

103
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

[Image decription: A round, light-reddish-brown loaf of bread on a wire cooling rack. There is a split down the center of the bread where it expanded in the oven while baking, called an "ear". The top of the bread is lightly dusted with flour except in the split area.]

I started learning to bake about a year ago with bread. Lately I've mostly been making cookies and recently been learning to make pie, but I felt an itch to come back to the basics.

Recipe:

  • 400g bread flour
  • 260g warm water (65%)
  • 2g instant or active dry yeast (about 1 teaspoon) (0.5%)
  • 8g salt (2%)

This bread was made with a poolish, not sourdough starter. A poolish is a preferment, and gives you a flavor similar to sourdough without the need to care for a sourdough starter. Poolish is the traditional way to make french baguettes, so if you know that flavor you know what to expect from a poolish.

Make the poolish:

  • Mix 200g flour, 200g water, and a pinch of yeast (seriously, a tiny amount). Cover and let stand at room temperature for 12 hours. After this time the poolish should be bubbly and smell nice and yeasty, maybe slightly alcoholic.

Make the dough:

  • Pour the remaining 60g of water into the poolish and mix to loosen it up. Then add the remaining 200g flour and mix thoroughly to combine. Let sit for 20 minutes to autolyse - this hydrates the flour and makes it stronger.

  • Add in the yeast and salt and mix to combine. At this stage it's easiest to mix with wet hands in a pinching motion to combine in the salt and yeast.

  • Optionally, knead for about 5 minutes by hand or about 3-4 minutes by stand mixer with a bread hook attachment. If kneading by hand, be sure to have a dough scraper handy, it will be sticky. You can skip this step entirely. Kneading will make it rise better in the oven, if you skip it may be a flatter loaf.

  • Cover and let the dough stand in a bowl for 15 minutes, then stretch and fold it. Repeat, including the wait time, until you've stretch/folded 4 times total.

  • Cover the dough and refrigerate for around 24 hours or up to a few days.

  • About 1 hour before you plan to bake, take the dough out and shape it into a taut ball. Then put it seam side down into either a proofing basket or a mixing bowl lined with a well-floured kitchen towel. Cover with a damp towel and let rise. The dough should grow around 50-66% in size. When you firmly poke it with a damp finger, the spot you poke should bounce back slightly but still leave an indent.

  • Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Place a dutch oven or heavy lidded pot in the oven to preheat it as well.

  • Flip the dough onto parchment paper and slash it on top with a razor blade or a serrated bread knife to give it a weak spot to expand while baking.

  • Bake in the dutch oven, lid on, for 30 minutes. Then remove the lid and bake at least another 15 minutes, or longer if you want a darker crust.

  • Let cool for at least an hour before slicing - this is actually important, the inside of your loaf needs to finish baking from the residual heat when you pull it out! If you slice early it will wind up gummy

  • Enjoy!

[-] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Ooh good callout, I wasn't aware of that.

139
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

With the recent news that the r/blind community has migrated to a lemmy instance, I thought now would be a good time to post a quick PSA on image descriptions.

Blind and low vision computer users often rely on screen readers to navigate their computers and the internet. These tools work great on text-based platforms (when the backend is coded correctly to make buttons and UI elements visible to the screen reader), but they struggle a lot with images. OCR and image recognition have come a long way, but they're still not reliable.

On Lemmy, there's no way (yet) to add alt text to image posts, but one thing that we sighted folk can do to make the website a more accessible place for the blind/low vision community is to describe the contents of the image in text, so screen readers (or braille displays) can interpret the text for the user. This doesn't need to be anything fancy - you can see an example of me doing so in this post here - simply indicate somewhere that you are describing the contents of the image, and then do so in text. If you're transcribing text, it's best to do so as exact to the text in the image as you can (including spelling errors!). If you're describing something visual, it's best to keep it about the length of a tweet, but be as detailed as you need to be to give context to what you write about in the post.

If you'd like a more detailed guide on how to best do image descriptions and alt text, here's a site that describes more specifics - https://www.perkins.org/resource/how-write-alt-text-and-image-descriptions-visually-impaired/

Edit: You are able to add alt text to embedded images, as noted by @[email protected] here. This would only work for images within the text of your comment, not for image posts (topics which link to images).

Edit 2: @[email protected] wrote a post on kbin on best practices in writing image descriptions and alt text.

[-] [email protected] 8 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

Plus, they made it so only non-commercial accessibility apps could use the API for free. So basically, reddit is saying: you can do our job for us and fix the shit we should have fixed on our end over 8 years ago, but you can't get paid for it.

Most blind iOS redditors were using Apollo I believe.

11
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Post a picture or description of your current WIP(s)!

And feel free to continue using this thread after Wednesday.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

Florida was a swing state until very recently.

[-] [email protected] 5 points 2 years ago

For me, a big thing is to not only post about the wins.

Back when I was still using facebook, I made a point of at least once a month making a post talking about my struggles, because I knew that seeing everyone else post only happy posts made me feel like everyone else had a parfect life and I was the only failure. Of course that's not true, it's just that they weren't posting about the bad times.

[-] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

Thank you for the kind words, but it really is almost entirely thanks to the pattern artist that it's so cute! I just did what the pattern said 😊

[-] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

I'm from America so of course our literary classics are pretty widely known in the western world, so I'm going to recommend something a bit more niche: There There by Tommy Orange. It shines light on many different aspects of the Native American experience, specifically in Oakland, California. It covers addiction, poverty, culture, and heritage in a way that I (not Native myself) found moving.

11
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

It doesn't have to be famous, just a work that you connect with that you feel represents your country in some way.

173
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

When I joined this website, I remembered that my favorite cross stitch pattern artist Studio Ansitru had a bee haw pattern, so I had to stitch it. And now it is done.

[Image description: A cross stitch image of a bee wearing a cowboy hat hovering over a yellow flower with the text "bee haw" underneath. The piece is framed in a round embroidery hoop.]

63
submitted 2 years ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

Pattern is by Studio Ansitru

Finished this a few days ago. It's been on my WIP list since last year's pride, so it felt good to finish it during pride month this year.

Still needs a wash and framing (washing in warm water will erase the grid), but just happy to finally finish a WIP!

[Image description: A cross stitch of a screaming opossum, sitting in a flower bed of purple, pink, and blue flowers, holding a bi pride flag. The aida fabric has a faint grey grid woven in to the fabric itself.]

[-] [email protected] 4 points 2 years ago

Your feelings are valid and I hope you are doing well, all things considered.

There is huge value in discussing your feelings with those who are going through the same things as you, or who have gone through it in the past. I hope you do consider coming to [email protected] and chatting there if you are comfortable with it. And, for what it's worth, even if you never plan to come out publicly, you are still valid as whatever gender (or lack thereof) that you identify as, and you deserve to feel supported and loved.

view more: next ›

Kamirose

0 post score
0 comment score
joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF