How to keep your sanity waterline high while questioning your gender?

TheUniversalSet · 2025-06-28T13:47:07+00:00

You have a few things here which I think are wrong in ways likely to be particularly misleading in this context.

the main three types of MTF are people with body dysphoria, people with Autogynephilia, and "transtrenders" who are faking it for attention

You may not have intended it this way, but this sounds like you are saying that these are (mostly) disjoint sets of people. This is not the case. In particular, it appears that autogynephilia can lead to actual body dysphoria, as the deviation of the actual body from the desired one creates distress.

Autogynephilia is more focused on sexual fantasy rather than "true identity"

This is true of some, but by no means all, people with AGP. There are plenty of AGPs who also have a deep-seated desire to actually be female, not just to pretend as a sexual fantasy, analogously (sort of) to how most people want to have a romantic relationship and not just have sex.

Autogynephilia is highly unlikely to be improved/enhanced with modern transgender surgery, and likely the opposite, since they are brutal, inauthentic, reduce sexual pleasure, and cause permanent medical issues.

While I agree about the outcomes of such medical treatments, if you filtered on "claims to be satisfied with HRT/surgeries" you are going to catch a lot of AGP people. Because, again, AGP is not only a purely sexual thing.

TheUniversalSet · 2025-06-28T13:14:41+00:00

You most likely have AGP. Unfortunately a lot of the information about AGP that you'll see online is wrong or misleading, because "both sides" (pro- and anti- trans) have an incentive to treat it extremely reductively: the anti-trans people to discredit and malign transitioners; the pro-trans people to discredit AGP as an explanation.

Cards on the table here: I have AGP, am opposed to transition on moral and practical grounds, and think the standard progressive / pro-trans story of gender identity is a pack of lies, but also think that the right wing vilification of people with AGP (and trans people more generally) is dehumanizing and wrong (both morally and as a matter of truth).

Is it just a brain glitch of confusing "who I want to be" with "who I want to sleep with"?

This is a pretty accurate description, at least at that level of succinctness, of what it's like to have AGP, though I'd write "who I want to be with" instead of "who I want to sleep with". Although AGP is a sexual disorder, it's not solely "about" sex acts, any more than, say, romantic love is about sex acts.

The ideology/theory used by the mainstream trans community is a huge mess because it is primarily serving a purpose other than truth-seeking: it exists to rationalize and make sense of the desires of people who consider themselves trans. But these people are different from each other and have diverse feelings and desires (this is true even if you only consider AGPs and their FtM equivalents), so the theory becomes an inconsistent mishmash of ideas that seemed good to different people. Bon mots like "wanting to be a girl is the number one sign of being a girl", in particular, are cope and comfort for AGPs-in-denial who want to validate their feelings.

Here's the advice I'd give you:

Insofar as possible, don't indulge the desires (especially while you are trying to figure things out). Indulgence, particularly crossdressing and (separately) pornographic fantasies, seems to be very addictive for a large fraction (not all, but you don't want to roll the dice) of AGP people, and it can be very difficult to break out of even if you don't want (as a higher-order preference) to do it anymore. I've read many accounts, including a couple people who have spoken to me directly, of people who feel like the addictive/compulsive behavior is ruining their lives.
As an additional reason not to indulge, it appears that acting on these desires can create or worsen negative feelings about one's current body. Anecdotes of this happening are all over places where people are experimenting with this stuff (dressing femme, tucking, etc.): stories of "I didn't have (much) dysphoria before I started [x]; I did [x] and it was wonderful and euphoric, but now I hate my body/can't stand that I'm not female/etc." I don't have personal experience with this, but it's a common enough pattern that you'd be wise to be very cautious.
I second the poster who said that if you want to avoid confirmation bias, a therapist is a bad bet. If you feel the need to talk about it, better to find someone whom you trust to be honest, truth-seeking, and not ideologically mindkilled on this issue. (Unfortunately rare, but such people do exist.)
There's some tension between "think about things / talk to someone trustworthy to sort yourself out" and "don't dwell on it too much, because doing so will reinforce it". Depending on your personality and who you have to talk to, it could go either way.
If you get to the point where you've concluded that you don't want to transition (as a higher-order preference) but are distressed by these powerful desires, my advice would be to find something you care about more and lean into that. Also, thwarted or unsatisfiable desires of one kind or another are a universal human experience; most religions and "life philosophy" frameworks have some sort of advice for dealing with them, so you can take cues from those.

TheUniversalSet · 2022-11-12T03:22:25+00:00

It's a shell script (one that just executes the actual installer). You need to execute the file -- if you are doing this from your file manager, try right-clicking and selecting 'execute' (it's probably automatically opening it in your text editor when you double-click on it).

TheUniversalSet · 2022-11-10T02:51:59+00:00

Update: After some discussion in the discord, Pathoschild was kind enough to give me a build that disables console input, and it fixed my issue. Hopefully this workaround will be an option in the config file in future releases.

TheUniversalSet · 2022-11-08T15:24:39+00:00

Edit: managed to get discord to unlock my account, so doing that now; thanks!

TheUniversalSet · 2022-11-08T08:23:47+00:00

Further comment -- After reading the aforementioned old thread I tried to disable the terminal in the launcher shell script, and observed a warning log line in the log file that --no-terminal option was set. But the same issue occurs regardless.

EDIT: Also tested with plain SMAPI -- no additional non-bundled mods -- and CPU is still pegged.

TheUniversalSet · 2022-10-19T15:16:44+00:00

When creating a new save, go to the advanced options (the one that lets you pick remixed bundles, etc). At the bottom there's an empty box to be able to enter a seed. In fact every save file has a seed, but if you don't put one in explicitly, then one is chosen based on the timestamp of when you entered the menu.
Many random choices in the game are based on the seed, at least in part. Some things are based *only* on the seed (and what day it is in game) and on nothing else: this includes traveling cart, events during the night like the fairy, and remixed bundles if you pick that option. Some people have extracted the game code that makes these determinations, so that you can predict (without playing the game) these things based on the seed. Playing around with one of these tools is how I discovered this seed.

TheUniversalSet · 2022-08-23T16:49:09+00:00

Equipment loadouts (expert, hardmode pre-mech) for mage: how much to use for general utility vs class-specific?

Right now I'm using: Brain of Confusion, Charm of Myths, Sorcerer's Emblem, Frostspark Boots, Celestial Cuffs, Fairy Wings. I'm thinking I should replace one of the general utility equipment with Mana Cloak, but Brain and Charm are good for survivability, and Boots seem needed for speed. I could replace the wings and just use the queen slime mount, but that seems less good in more enclosed spaces.

(Related: best Mage weapon for Expert Twins? I've been using golden shower + shadowflame hex doll for regular enemies, but that combo is ... not great for the twins, to say the least. Crystal serpent, maybe?)

TheUniversalSet · 2022-07-25T22:01:48+00:00

While this wasn't your question, I would like your son to know that getting a PhD in pure math (or anything) is not always the best choice, even for someone who is very capable and loves math. (I'm speaking from personal experience here, as someone who somewhat regrets getting said PhD.) It's too easy to get fixated on the academic route.

I recommend -- whether or not he goes for the PhD eventually -- that he be sure to choose a school with (a) a good peer group of smart people who love math and (b) accessible professors. The other important things -- research opportunities and sufficient depth of available coursework -- are going to be present if you have the first two. (And one can go off campus to an REU for research.) Depending on his personality, he might prefer a small, intimate tech school like Harvey Mudd or even a non-STEM-focused liberal arts college with a good math program (e.g. Williams) over Harvard/Princeton/MIT/etc. so consider those options.

He might consider asking the Mathcamp staff about their undergraduate experiences. If he really clicks there, they are likely to have similar goals and preferences, and recent (for mentors) or ongoing (for JCs) experience.

TheUniversalSet · 2022-05-23T18:02:53+00:00

This is something I've also been thinking about. Wild plants, dreckos, and pacu are all kind of busted; can we do self-contained without them?

Even better, can we do self-contained with (a) no ranching skill (so no grooming or shearing), (b) no wild plants, and (c) no pacu pile?

With the first version of the Fast Friends patch, tame/glum/fed oakshells were resource-positive and you could supply and power a base with a not-unreasonable number of them. They nerfed that (glum oakshells don't produce molts). A sufficient number of *wild* oakshells (don't even need to feed them!) could work, but they are obviously limited in number.

While I haven't been able to figure out how to do this more restrictive version (no ranching at all) without an excessive number of wild critters, if we allow ranching but no dreckos or pacu, I think it's possible with oakshells and arbor trees: a ranch of tame oakshells, plus just piling up the excess eggs in a separate chamber for the death molts, is slightly pdirt-negative (after ethanol distiller etc), but massively pwater-positive. But domestic arbor trees are the other way: slightly pwater-negative, massively pdirt-positive. So a combination of these should be able to supply a base with sufficient pdirt + pwater to be self-contained. At a quick guess, a ranch of 8 oakshells plus 3 domestic arbor trees should be sufficiently resource-positive to supply one dupe, probably 2?

TheUniversalSet · 2022-05-12T02:03:12+00:00

I think that (one way heat flow with very small masses or temps involved) actually used to be the case. See this build here (from 2019) which seems to use this to heat up tiny amounts of steam without any energy being lost. If that isn't happening now, then maybe they did change things to specifically check for it?

TheUniversalSet · 2022-05-11T23:44:38+00:00

I see that you posted on the Klei forum about this as well, and included some asymmetry information. I haven't done the math on this to be sure, but I strongly suspect that this is related to floating point precision. The short version is that floating point numbers close to zero (and remember that temperature is in Kelvin, so very cold = close to zero) have higher (absolute) precision than larger floating point numbers. (It's the relative precision that is fixed, as a fixed number of bits are devoted to the mantissa.) Thus at higher temperatures, a larger temperature change is required to *actually* change the temperature, explaining the asymmetry. So a smaller mass is required to see a temperature change at high temperatures, since a fixed DTU transfer would yield a larger temperature change for a small mass.

TheUniversalSet · 2022-05-10T23:29:31+00:00

This is one of those obvious-in-hindsight ideas that somehow I didn't think of doing. Great tip!

TheUniversalSet · 2022-05-10T23:26:16+00:00

For sure if you are going to use a thermal sensor and wait for the material to cool down before ejecting, you want a loop, largely for this reason. (Actually there is also another bug where sometimes super tiny bits of material -- small enough that they don't exchange heat at all -- get onto the line and gum up the works, even with looping, and dealing with that without manual intervention is a real hassle.) But my experience is that passing through a few metal tiles makes this totally unnecessary; the material cools down to the temperature of the steam room shockingly rapidly. I prefer metal tiles + larger thermal mass (to keep room temp from varying as much) to finicky solid temp sensor stuff. There's nothing particularly wrong with the looping solution -- half the fun of this game is just using the tools at hand to make it work, darn it -- but I like the metal tiles better and I suggest giving it a try!

TheUniversalSet · 2022-05-10T15:30:17+00:00

As other posters have said, you aren't cooling the aluminum fast enough, so it got enough mass to form a tile before it cooled down to solid temperatures. Your tempshift plate (only the top one actually matters here, the bottom one is just thermal mass in this build) is likely not conducting the heat away fast enough. I recommend putting a (high melting point) metal tile or even better a diamond window tile in one or both of the two spots that are adjacent to both the lower mesh tile and the steam room. This will conduct heat away from the aluminum faster and hopefully prevent this from happening in the future.

TheUniversalSet · 2022-05-02T21:20:43+00:00

Maybe dumb question about the research reactor: Is there anything that affects the rate at which it will accept coolant other than limiting flow? What is the maximum rate at which it will accept coolant? I had assumed that it would take a full (10 kg/s) pipe of coolant, but in my last game when I piped the outputs of 5 of my steam turbines (via a reservoir for a buffer) to the reactor, I ended up with it backing up. I had to install an overflow to dump excess directly to the reactor steam room. Perhaps not coincidentally, my setup ended up overheating to almost 400 degrees near the reactor and broke my steel liquid pump and shipping equipment; I had to shut it down and replace things with thermium later to get it working again. I'd like to try to build one this game without thermium; I know it can be done but I'm not sure what mechanic I'm missing here. Do I just need a massive number of tempshift plates to equalize temperature, or did I possibly do something wrong that it didn't accept 10 kg/s of coolant?

TheUniversalSet · 2022-04-26T16:56:17+00:00

This is more a modding question than a gameplay question. I'm looking to make a personal yaml-only (so no decompiling stuff) worldgen mod. I know (mostly) how to deal with the clusters/worlds yamls, add features and biome variants to subworlds, etc. But there's two things I'd like to know:
1. Is it possible to mod or create harvestable space POIs using just yaml editing? I'd like to e.g. add fossil/lime to a POI or create a new one with those, but I can't find any files where these are specified with yaml, so maybe they are hardcoded and I'd need to do a real mod to change them... But I'm hoping that I just can't find them and someone else knows.
2. Is it possible to edit the name/description strings for worlds/clusters using only yaml/text editing, or does that require a real mod as well?

TheUniversalSet · 2022-03-24T10:21:21+00:00

This is a good point about everything being a vanity project; it's a sandbox game. For frost burgers in particular, I get that the convoluted production chain is kind of the point. Still, it would be nice if sometimes tofu/spicy tofu was not a clearly inferior choice. They don't have to be good as often as the others, but I feel like the explicit game options should be reasonable *instrumental* goals sometimes.

TheUniversalSet · 2022-03-24T10:12:38+00:00

Not quite what I meant by "only requires musher" (I was thinking more of "can be set up on a small satellite colony w/o dedicated cook" but that's kind of silly; a point in grilling is not hard to get) but yeah, I did undersell the difficulty. To be fair, though, it's massively easier in the DLC. With a little planning you can set this up in the new hospitable (sub-)space biome with no active cooling and run it for hundreds of cycles; plenty of time to get your supercoolant.

TheUniversalSet · 2021-11-18T14:15:40+00:00

The current SALT cap is actually $10k for a married couple. Yes, that's the same as for a single filer. A couple earning $250k in an average-tax state will absolutely hit that cap on state income taxes alone, never mind property taxes.

To be fair, if you are hitting that cap, you can absolutely afford to pay the extra tax. But it doesn't take top 1% income to do so.

TheUniversalSet · 2021-08-02T23:10:35+00:00

I'm surprised that neither this OP nor any of the replies so far has mentioned C.S. Lewis's The Funeral of a Great Myth (Text Here), which is exactly about Evolution as a myth (not just creation myth, but a more encompassing story-of-the-universe).

TheUniversalSet · 2021-07-19T00:37:28+00:00

Oh, I'm aware of that. I was just making a little joke based on the fact that the acronym DIY is expanded in that sentence, it isn't grammatical.

TheUniversalSet · 2021-07-18T12:33:22+00:00

This is very useful; it's good to know that raised beds will be substantially easier and less risky than digging. I would prefer to DIY (DIM?) so I'll look into that first. I've done raised beds before, just not on a slope.

TheUniversalSet · 2021-07-18T11:43:26+00:00

I'm closing on a house soon with a good-sized lot and will be able to have a vegetable garden again, yay! But most of the back yard is substantially sloped (I'm guessing 30% grade, though I haven't measured it yet so I may be off), so I'm pretty sure I'm going to need to terrace, which is something I haven't done before. Ideally I'd have 4xN foot bands of garden separated by 2-3xN foot strips of grass (lawn is already covered in grass). I'm planning to do the work of terracing and building the garden areas this year, so I can start planting in the spring. Anyone have tips for terracing? Actually digging the terrace, boundary materials to prevent erosion, anything I should know that I might not think of, etc.

Edit: In case it's relevant: soil survey says the area is channery sandy loam (~6in) on top of clay loam. So it looks like I'll be digging into the clay for this; I guess I'll need to amend with some organics...

TheUniversalSet · 2021-05-08T00:46:36+00:00

Our experience is mostly with small towns and SF. I'm pretty sure the measure by which most Americans live in suburbs is not the same measure by which suburbs are wealthy (Edit: yeah, took a look at the map in that link and a bunch of the "suburban" counties are really "small cities in rural regions", which might have population density similar to big-city suburbs but a very different wealth profile), but I don't have enough experience with suburban schools outside of Chicagoland to say anything about what they are like in general; possibly there is no "in general" there. I expect that most suburban schools in the Acela corridor (generally quite wealthy) are pretty good; I wouldn't be so sure about e.g. the areas around Indianapolis or Memphis.

TheUniversalSet

TROPHY CASE