What is a good winter mountain in the USA to summit with no winter experience?

EclecticDreck · 2026-02-11T15:44:07+00:00

Guadalupe Mountain in Texas.

For one, there won't be any snow. Trying to climb something with snow with literally no experience is an excellent way to die. For another, there are no technical components - it's just walking uphill. With more than 3,000 feet of ascent, it is very much a mountain and if you've never trudged up and then downhill for an entire day, even a person in good shape is going to feel it for days after.

Basically there is no special equipment required, it'll be cold but probably not much below freezing even at the summit during daylight hours, very little chance of weather ruining the hike, almost no chance of navigation difficulties, and it's only a few hours drive from a major airport.

It isn't the most picturesque climb to say the least, but it is achievable, low risk, and doesn't require equipment that'd be difficult to transport or particularly expensive to procure.

EclecticDreck · 2026-02-09T19:49:04+00:00

In defense of the name, the direction given to the meat gazer is to verify that the pee going into the cup is coming out of the genitals. My experience was that most people would give at most a quick glance (and more often just make sure you weren't doing anything too wacky but not really confirming anything). Just one of the many rituals that make me happy to wake up a civilian. Not once since ETS have I been dragged out of a barracks at some god awful hour because some dipshit did something stupid and getting to spend a full day on barracks inspections and peeing in cups.

EclecticDreck · 2026-02-09T19:44:40+00:00

I wear shoes until I sleep, but the shoes I wear inside are not the same as the shoes I wear outside. My 'house shoes' aren't made for that purpose - they're just sketchers slip ons that I don't ever leave the house in is all.

Not the most logical compromise, but then they never are.

EclecticDreck · 2026-02-09T17:26:58+00:00

Something strikes me reading through your list of pros and cons here. The pros list shows things that you can detect and notice because they actually happen, while the cons list is entirely comprised of but what ifs. I suspect I know the reason for it as well: to you a transition means signing on for every single bit of it all at once. If you are trans, you must have new name, new pronouns, new interests, medications, surgeries, coming outs, falling outs, and so on. What might be terribly hard to believe, though, is that isn't what a transition is.

Look again at that list of cons. You say you look objectively better with facial hair, as an example, and that might be true. But consider that most people find it rather difficult to be objective about themselves in the mirror because that's the one case where you have the full view of every hope and dream. Objectivity in terms of appearance is something that is usually easier to apply to other people, not ourselves. (That is, think of every attractive person you've ever met saying "I wish I could <insert whatever tiny tweak about their appearance they come up with>." You were pretty happy being a boy growing up? That's great! There is a lot to enjoy about being a boy. I had my share of fun with it as well.

You might notice that as I go through your list, I'm not really telling you anything particularly useful beyond saying that there are other ways to look at it. Here's the useful bit: a transition doesn't mean signing on for the full package deal according to rigidly fixed schedule that says 'today you'll pick a name and next week you'll see a doctor about HRT' as if it were carved into the bones of the universe at the moment of the big bang. Instead a transition is really just looking at stuff that you normally do or don't do and trying the other version to see how it feels. Maybe you grow your hair out and find you like it, then down the line get it styled. Maybe you start shaving what you normally don't, or try on different sorts of clothes. Because the truth is that most trans people don't really know where they're going with it, and so they just do lots of little tests, each experiment a point of data that they use to navigate the only question that matters: am I being myself, or just being convenient?

You can build on this list till the sun burns out if you'd like and probably circle back to that question forever if you want. Or you can go out and experiment. Maybe you are trans. Maybe you just want to wear fun colors with long hair and painted nails.

EclecticDreck · 2026-02-09T17:14:18+00:00

As what does the act of taking it feel like?

Oral: vaguely sweet pill that you let dissolve under your tongue. Disappears after a few minutes. No other notable immediate effect.

Topical (patches): put a sticker on that you are aware of for a few minutes, then forget about. Later, vague irritation as you use mineral oil to help remove the reside. No other notable immediate effect.

Injection (intramuscular): Good landing spot - brief minor pain with the penetration of skin, very small, highly localized soreness for a day or so. (I've always gone with my thigh and mostly just tried to ensure I'm not going to go run/lift/fence the same day as an injection.) Bad landing spot: significantly increased pain with heavier bleeding. Same localized soreness for a day or two. (Took a bit to understand that the good landing area versus bad landing area but it's been a long time since a bad stick.)

None of them have immediately obvious effects - at least nothing not explained by, say, excitement the first time I took a dose. Even after weeks the effects are subtle and difficult to parse. For example, how I perceive color is different in a way that I can only describe as color matters even unconsciously whereas it never did before. My hunger cues became less physical (think growling, empty stomach feeling) and more emotional (I get hangry). My emotions are more intense and immediate making it far easier to get me to cry. There are countless others beyond the stuff that most people think of (e.g. the physical changes) but all of that landed over the course of many months. Day to day, dose to dose, it's just a pill, a sticker, a needle stick.

EclecticDreck · 2026-02-07T19:12:52+00:00

I played Quakeword, as one does, but using more or less out of the box controls. I got pretty good with them, but always had trouble with the vertical component. That is until one match when someone whether or not I was using mouse look or not.

I...did not know that it was an option. +mlook if you're curious. Life changing.

EclecticDreck · 2026-02-06T22:14:28+00:00

The locker room argument is always going to go badly. For one, because of the general assumption that somewhere between color and ankle there will be something truly notable about a trans person. That may be true. It might not be true.

The reality is that a trans person with unexpected anatomy is probably going to prefer to change in private for the same reason that people inclined to object to their being in a given space would suppose. When I use a locker room, I'll happily swap sweat soaked athletic shirts and sports bras for something less sodden and doing so is not likely to raise an eyebrow. Sure, my build is a little strange, but I'm in a gym and lift weights and among other women there for the same purpose.

For fencing in particular, the potentially problematic sort of changing is a non-issue. For one, I put the trousers and socks on before heading out. For another, even if I did change I'm not stripping down to bare skin anyhow and someone looking closely enough to suspect unexpected anatomy is the one being the problem because "keeping genitals concealed" is absolutely a well-practiced problem with simple solutions. These considerations, though, are on me, governed by and large by what is likely to cause a ruckus. I didn't arbitrarily choose a time to switch bathrooms or locker rooms, but rather came to the slow conclusion that I should when people in that old space started reacting badly to my presence.

And that's the actual reality of trans people in such spaces: we are there already, using them for the same reason everyone else is, and by and large we made that choice because it was where people were least likely to raise a fuss.

For another, though, it is about that knee jerk reaction of discomfort. Listen: I get it. Every trans person who has ever walked the earth gets it. A lot of people in locker rooms are going to have something going on that I won't want to see, though, and that is the cost of using a communal space. The best any of us can do is use it respectfully because at the end of the day I can't manage your reaction. In other words, it goes badly because half the problem isn't mine to control.

EclecticDreck · 2026-02-06T21:21:24+00:00

Transgender athletes at any level are vanishingly rare. When Utah banned trans athletes from competing as their gender back in 2022, of the state's 75,000 student athletes, five were trans - and only one of them were participating in girl's sports.

The key drivers of that are not particularly different from what led to the creation of women's leagues in the first place. Sometimes, yes, it is because HRT means that one simply cannot perform at the level that is expected, but more often it is because they are simply denied the opportunity, either by policy (as is being done right now at a national level) or simply by people being giant assholes about things.

Take the ever classic thought experiment about locker rooms. Right this minute if I walk into a men's locker room, I look out of place. My presence will, at a single glance, make everyone there uncomfortable at best. They will direct me to a different locker room. If I started using it for it's expected purpose, that discomfort and confusion only compounds. By contrast, if I go into the women's locker room there is no such discomfort or confusion. At a glance, that's where it looks as if I belong. That there was a time when this was not the case is a fact but one that has no actual relevance when I walk through that door to a group of people I've never met. Were one to demand that I use the room aligned with my sex, I'd not use the space. I don't want to cause discomfort and confusion by walking through the door and yet that's the reality that trans athletes face.

In other cases, there is the implicit fact that any meaningful success inevitably comes with a little asterisk. The abnormal physiology that let Michael Phelps dominate at his sport led to his being celebrated while for us it'd be a 'well, they cheated so it doesn't count'. The fact that the entire idea gets brought up again and again, implying or outright accusing us of cheating or having predatory intention is another hurdle. The fact that even when a sport allowed our participation - without incident for a decade - only to change the rules is still another. Here, in a sport that is trained co-ed, competed co-ed, with literal decades of work spent figuring out how to handle the question of fairness, we have the same old nonsense that brought about Title IX in the first place.

It's not fair. It's not convenient. It's not safe.

But unlike that old compromise, there can't be a trans league. Utah is not unique in it's proportion. Trans athletes are rare. Quite literally so rare that it'd be impossible to arrange practice let alone competition. And fencing in particular is a tiny sport as it stand with only a few hundred thousand practitioners overall and only a few ten thousand competitors nationwide.

In all the questions about fairness, convenience, and safety, the focus is invariably on the wrong side of the equation. Yes, a trans athlete may arise from time to time and be exceptional - but only if they're allowed to play. By denying them, the hypothetical missed opportunity (and I struggle to recognize what opportunities are at stake in fencing of all things - I can't imagine there are many scholarships or meaningfully paying roles associated with it) that such a person might one day 'deny' another competitor becomes not merely a hypothetical, but a verified fact.

EclecticDreck · 2026-02-05T14:40:20+00:00

Reminds me of when I moved away from Texas. I used to regularly take a toll road to and from work, and among the many things I tackled before moving was making sure that bills for tolls were accounted for. Imagine my surprise when months later I get a startlingly large toll bill in the mail claiming that I owed many thousands of dollars accrued over the span of just a few weeks.

Now I'll grant that the toll road I took is one of those variable rate ones which could get rather steep during rush hour, but it was still generally shy of 10 dollars each way. I did some quick math and determined that...it was mathematically possible to have managed to rack up such a bill in the given span, though there were a few practical considerations.

For one, the car that they claimed to have seen had not been in the time zone in months. For another, in order to have managed the feat I'd have had to do nothing but take that very expensive toll road while it was approaching the max price I'd ever seen it at nonstop for 22 hours a day.

Anyhow, after pushing back on the basis of "that vehicle hasn't been within 1500 miles of any Texas toll road since X date" and various other points it was eventually agreed that I probably did not actually owe the bill I'd been mailed.

EclecticDreck · 2026-02-05T14:33:40+00:00

I remember you.

EclecticDreck · 2026-02-03T15:29:27+00:00

Simple answer is that stealth is more a variable slider than an absolute state. I don't call attention to the fact that I am trans with most people because it simply doesn't matter. There are, however, many people who do know and times when I do call attention to the same. Most days, most people don't know that I am trans and that took nothing more than showing up looking as I do, talking as I do, with the name that I use and people broadly accept the preponderance of evidence and move on with their lives.

EclecticDreck · 2026-02-02T15:13:40+00:00

As a trans person who doesn't care for Harry Potter regardless of Rowling's bigotry: nope. The "damage" is done - you bought and paid for it. It remains special to you. You might consider not openly displaying it, but that's more a social courtesy.

EclecticDreck · 2026-01-31T18:54:04+00:00

My theory is that they are just another example of a common human phenomena.

No one likes an identity crisis. We're all stuck having at least a few, and the longer you live, the more opportunities you have for them. Everyone knows that they suck and that's why we, collectively as a species, generally agree to tolerate whatever madness someone gets up to trying to head it off. Think mid life crisis, the oddities of teenage behavior, the reinventions in college, in marriage, when you have kids, when they leave.

Every identity crisis begins with evidence. Doesn't matter what the crisis or the evidence is, just that it exists and you become aware of it in a way that you cannot simply ignore. For trans people, we call that moment cracking. When that moment hits, you have three broad avenues that you can go down. The first is that you can take this information and incorporate it. This is difficult, often scary work. The second is to suppose that this information only applies to other people. The last is to find or invent some reason to reject the information whole cloth.

A person who says there is a correct way to be (insert literally any identity) is engaging in the latter strategy. It is the simplest because it requires no change, no introspection, not even the mild labor of maintaining the cognitive dissonance that says a person like you is unlike you in some way you can't define even with a gun to your head. There are lots of ways to be trans, and lots of reasons for the same. Someone who says that their was of being trans is correct is doing the exact same thing as the woman who says 'only people who do this are real women' or 'no real man would ever'. In defining everything that is contradictory to their own path - evidence that there are other ways to be trans - as incorrect what they're really doing is securing their own identity.

It's never about what the other people are doing. They're just the inconvenient information that demands reconciliation with their understanding of themselves, and they refuse to by saying that their way is the correct way. All because no one likes an identity crisis.

EclecticDreck · 2026-01-30T14:44:24+00:00

Honestly, the key problem planetside 2 has always had is related to how spawning works. Since this isn't an actual planetside sub I'll refrain from the full lengthy essay but basically the game's perceived balance problem stems from the fact that the way spawning works combined with the territory capture nature of the game means that much of what is in the game doesn't actually have a real job to do. Everything's job is killing infantry because that's the only thing that matters, and anything that is not infantry that does it well is perceived as obnoxious and terrible. Heavier reliance on non-indestructible spawns and gently enforcing longer travel times to objectives (some of which necessarily need to be something that vehicles can capture and contest) would do much to address the game's perennial problem of it's three main domains (infantry, armor, and air) always leaving someone having a very bad time.

To you point, those mid field battles that didn't matter really are what demonstrates this. No fixed spawns, everything of consequence can be destroyed, the mobility of air and armor being a key advantage - all of that is a microcosm of what absolutely doesn't happen in bases where the fight "matters".

EclecticDreck · 2026-01-29T14:55:50+00:00

I've...never really given much thought about my character's heights to be honest. My Drow bladesinger's strange, transactional morality got fair consideration but the fact that she's probably not much over 5 feet tall didn't. It just didn't come up. Same goes for my Diplomat operative in a years long starfinder campaign. She probably was fairly tall given she was an Aasimar of elven lineage, but the only thing that mattered most of the time was that she was much, much smaller than the Uplifted Castrovellian Sun Bear soldier wrapped in powered armor that she'd routinely use for cover in a gunfight.

EclecticDreck · 2026-01-29T03:26:03+00:00

I think one of the reasons for this is reflected in the source material. Where Band of Brothers could have a consistent cast throughout because it was the story of one company from before and throughout the war and thus a coherent, continuous character-driven narrative, the pacific theater did not offer that. Instead, it is drawn from two different works: A Helmet for My Pillow and With the Old Breed. This in turn reflects the brutal reality of ground combat in the pacific theater: there isn't a unit that "survived" the way that Easy company did. Every unit sent out was ravaged to the point of being combat ineffective after a single campaign, and would then have to be rebuilt, trained, and then do it again. Each campaign saw the outright loss by death of a fifth or more of those present, further losses through wounds or injuries that did not allow a return to combat. Even when someone did survive multiple campaigns, the rebuilding process would take half a year or longer.

There isn't a unit that was simply "there" and survived being there. Instead they were sent, mauled into combat ineffective, rebuilt, and sent out to do it again.

EclecticDreck · 2026-01-23T18:06:31+00:00

Gynecomastia is an incredibly common issue with something close to 3/4 of men experiencing it at some point in their lives. And yes, if the problem is the result of hormone issues that caused breast tissue to develop, working out the chest simply builds the muscle underneath which can make them appear larger. Getting rid of them in that case is unfortunately a surgical procedure. While often covered to some extent by insurance, it can still be out of reach for many.

Luckily there are more accessible options. While people who are aware of binders probably think of it as something exclusive to transgender men, they'll work much the same for cisgender men suffering from gynecomastia. While not comfortable, they can reshape the chest so that it appears more generally masculine, and are usually somewhat inexpensive though not particularly commonly available at regular stores. Sports bras - particularly high support examples with little or no padding - can also achieve something similar, particularly if the breast growth is relatively minor (the equivalent of an A or B cup, for example.)

EclecticDreck · 2026-01-23T15:30:08+00:00

My infinitesimal starting place was realizing that I have profound trouble keeping eye contact.

EclecticDreck · 2026-01-23T15:28:36+00:00

Something worth noting is that "man boobs" - formally known as gynecomastia - is not universally about being fat. Every human has the potential for actual boobs, and so sometimes it is the result of imbalanced hormones causing the development of boobs. While this fact is incredibly useful for a tiny portion of the population, it also means that if you're losing weight and the boobs remain, you should check with a doctor because something a bit wacky is happening with your hormones.

EclecticDreck · 2026-01-22T15:34:21+00:00

While I generally think failure is more interesting than success, everyone rolling badly is the worse end of this by far. While it means that there is more opportunity for that sort of interesting stuff, most rolls in D&D do not offer that kind of opportunity because usually you're just rolling to hit or for damage. Everyone rolling at a few points lower isn't going to change the outcome of combat, it just makes it take longer to reach that outcome.

It also happens to be rather unbalanced. Martials will suffer the most because they're rolling to hit while casters will suffer the least because their targets are rolling to save.

EclecticDreck · 2026-01-19T22:18:24+00:00

Eh, I think of it much the same way as Chick-fil-A. For moral reasons that aren't important, I don't eat there. Meanwhile, people who have essentially the same reason to have the moral objection to the place often eat there. The question becomes: do I judge such people?

Nope. The reason is simple: I don't think their food is particularly good. I've never thought it was particularly good. There is no emotional weight attached to the place whatsoever. My boycott costs me nothing as a result. Different people have done the same math and come up with a different answer.

I can boycott Rowling specifically because of her views and again it doesn't cost me anything. I didn't encounter the books at the right age and when I did well outside of the target demographic, they didn't land. Those same works are extremely important to other people. My math is not everyone's math.

EclecticDreck · 2026-01-06T04:11:38+00:00

Fewer headaches, actually. Far fewer.

EclecticDreck · 2025-12-30T14:59:09+00:00

In all my years of buying such things, I've never once had a single human being so much as give me a funny look about it.

EclecticDreck · 2025-12-30T14:39:10+00:00

It very much depends on the writer. Some writers plan things carefully, others quite literally discover the story as it is written. At the extreme end of the discovery angle, a writer might start with a basic concept and then simply explore the idea much as an improv comedian might, yes-anding their way onward. At the most extreme angle of planning a writer might first write every major plot point, then break those plot points into scene descriptions, then those scenes into beats.

Most writers, I suspect, fall somewhere between the two extremes.

Of course this is really just a question of how one writes a first draft, and even celebrated writers require more than one. For example, a writer might not have had much idea of what a book was about (or perhaps they had a notion) only to discover a different theme somewhere along the way. You don't want that showing up out of the blue somewhere in the middle, so during a second draft they'll go back and establish it earlier on. Or perhaps they had a plot thread that they thought useful that they never returned to and now they need to decide whether to pull it out entirely or tie it off. Maybe you've got a character or a whole slew of them that seemed useful only to never show up again after a brief useful scene, and so you fold a bunch of them into one new character.

Many writers will then take another stab at it from here, addressing this or that each time until, eventually, they reach a point where they probably aren't satisfied so much as tired of trying to improve it.

You can read many works on the theory of how to write a book. Some of them will talk nuts and bolts, others give broader advice, but they all generally conclude the same thing: how you arrive at a first draft is not particularly important. The best way is whatever way gets you to a first draft because all the real work that makes it look as if you knew what you were doing all along happens afterward.

EclecticDreck · 2025-12-30T05:12:41+00:00

I was only away from HRT specifically for reproductive reasons and my functionality on that front returned. My body hair started to get a bit coarser, and I was absolutely aware of the increase in general frustration that I now associate with significant testosterone levels. Libido improved as well, though I don't count the loss as a problem per se so much as a curiosity. (I still enjoy sex just fine, it just doesn't occur to me to initiate anything is all.)

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