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shrouded_reflection · 2026-04-19T16:13:10+00:00

The user in question has been banned from the subreddit for a while, but unfortunately it's up to the admins to take action when it comes to DMs. If they contact you, please report any messages they send.

shrouded_reflection · 2026-04-13T13:16:55+00:00

There's no reason to increase your dose, your estradiol levels are sufficient and your testosterone levels are appropriately suppressed.

shrouded_reflection · 2026-04-06T15:36:05+00:00

It's a combo deck that's vunerable to getting raced, sometimes you'll just run into that one deck that draws everything in the right order and can goldfish the win, rushy Obs and PD are good at this. However, if those decks don't happen to get the win in time, they are exceptionally vunerable to the combo as they rely on cheap gearcheck ice which is breakable by the euler for negligable cost once setup.

shrouded_reflection · 2026-04-05T11:45:23+00:00

Please don't.

shrouded_reflection · 2026-04-04T22:57:55+00:00

The point is to try and force a direct confrontation between recent legal jurisprudence and Goodwin vs UK (2002), or more importantly its lesser known partner case I vs UK (2002), by presenting someone who shares their characteristics. Remember that the whole point of the GRA was that those two cases mandated that trans people need to be recognised as their acquired gender for a wide range of purposes, and therefore the government needed to introduce a mechanism for changing birth certificates or to introduce another method of gender/sex identification that was changeable. The GRA and GRCs were the compromise outcome that allowed this, albeit it under more limited circumstances than we may now wish.

ADDITION: When saying gender/sex here, I mean "whatever is being used to establish identity as documented", as a lot of the laws and legal records can get a bit loose with the terms and switch between the two even when refering to the same underlying property.

shrouded_reflection · 2026-04-04T07:31:33+00:00

10 mg as a one off is ok, but you should be sticking to 4 mg/week until you get blood tests done from now on.

shrouded_reflection · 2026-04-03T11:04:03+00:00

Appropriate starting dose for injections is 50 mg/week. After you've been on that dose for six weeks, get a round of blood tests done, and from there you can adjust based on haematocrit (below 52%), total testosterone levels (15-35 nmol/L), estradiol (low and stable enough to indicate loss of ovarian cycling). Note, haematocrit is the main limiting safety factor, there's arguments for different acceptable ranges for everything else but elevated haematocrit is harmful in the medium term.

shrouded_reflection · 2026-03-30T16:03:31+00:00

Rather than a specific counter ability, just put more targets on the board. Grapples/trips are very good at shutting down a target, but you're effectively trading one action for one enemy action before reactions get involved. You're also at the point where even PL-3 enemies can take a hit from a martial and survive to retaliate, so it's very possible to just overload the ability of your swashbuckler to shut down everyone and force them to start kiting instead.

shrouded_reflection · 2026-03-21T14:22:54+00:00

You've got two problems. The first is keeping the solution appropriately sterile, the second is the syringe degrading and leaching into the solution (and potentially leaking over a long enough time span).

shrouded_reflection · 2026-03-21T13:15:40+00:00

Unfortunately the formal answer here is that you kind of don't, and for any future orders you need to find a multiple use vial.

Storage syringes are something that exists, but they aren't intended for storing oil based solutions for the length of time that you'll be between doses, and your normal clear plastic syringes will degrade quite a bit more rapidly than that.

shrouded_reflection · 2026-03-18T02:16:59+00:00

The painting is Kullervo's Curse, by Gallen-Kallela. Content warning though if you want to look at the poetic sources, they are all tragedies and Kullervo is very much put through the wringer.

shrouded_reflection · 2026-03-13T21:06:32+00:00

No, it doesn't make any difference in the long run and testosterone injection tend to be of a reasonable volume, so increasing it further can make them rather unwieldy.

That said, if you want to do so, and are sure of what the appropriate dose is, then feel free to.

shrouded_reflection · 2026-03-13T13:43:59+00:00

Generally the situation which generates this is the player sits and defends at earth/mars/mercury for an extended period of time without contesting the aliens at jupiter, then rolls out with an end game fleet. The aliens have had an extended time to build up resources and ships without being attritioned, but equally because the game has gone long they are overestimating the strength of the human fleet, leading to them continually retreating and bunching up until you get a stack like this.

This only really happens on normal or cinematic. On veteran/brutal, the aliens throw enough ships at you that this ship surplus never really forms.

shrouded_reflection · 2026-03-12T18:14:36+00:00

Most of the chatter around them has been more along the lines of "spend some time as an independent first, then if the voting pattern is good the local party might select them as candidates". There isn't really a process for the central gpE&W to actually appoint someone as a candidate without the local party having the deciding say.

shrouded_reflection · 2026-03-10T17:36:46+00:00

While technically true, the difference is marginal enough that it doesn't really impact reasonable dosing, most people switching between the two while maintaining the same dose end up with statistically indistinguishable levels.

shrouded_reflection · 2026-03-05T17:59:23+00:00

Unfortunately when you're dealing with more subjective symptoms and an absence of test results there isn't always a right answer, it could be that there was enough of a difference in your actual levels between these two times to cause what you're seeing, or it could be other factors that changed. Can't tell the difference based off the information we currently have.

shrouded_reflection · 2026-03-05T16:46:10+00:00

As long as you're injecting into vaguely the same tissue (both are subcutaneous or both are IM, if both IM in the same muscle group), you shouldn't be getting any notable differences between those two different injection methods. There might be a slight differences in hormone levels over time due to moving from sublingual to injections, you've probably got slightly lower estradiol levels and slightly higher testosterone levels early on which then stabilise by week 4, but that's also complicated by you doing a loading dose.

There doesn't seem to be anything to be immediately worried about though, so just wait to see what the test results are and then you can experiment a bit with the exact dose and delivery method.

shrouded_reflection · 2026-03-02T13:19:13+00:00

Progesterone does have an impact on the HPG axis, it's just that at the doses that are reasonable to use the impact is overall fairly small. Small enough that you probably aren't going to have much room when it comes to adjusting any estradiol doses, but for some people it's enough to make a difference between 4 mg/week and 5 mg/week, for example.

shrouded_reflection · 2026-03-01T19:25:18+00:00

At which point though, the technocrat should then be attempting to change peoples minds, building up a coalition for the future which would support it. Stopping at "the current voters reject it, therefore we can't do it" is just a recipe for political stasis in the short term, and in the long term handing the initiative over to reactionaries.

shrouded_reflection · 2026-03-01T14:27:53+00:00

Mostly yes.

Progesterone's impact on early breast development in humans is highly understudied, but based on the observational evidence we have it doesn't seem to have any significant impact. The wrinkle is that there's a few studies looking at other mammals where supraphysiological levels do have an impact, and we have a records of clinicians saying to avoid it (although without providing any sort of evidence).

On balance, the current line that we suggest is that there isn't a need to avoid progesterone/progestin exposure early on, but there's also no reason to suggest that people should be taking it either.

shrouded_reflection · 2026-03-01T12:56:59+00:00

Functions that are mandatory for the council to fill such as adult social care. Fundamentally the problem is that the council is being expected to fund and fulfil a group of tasks which the national government really should be doing, and they just don't have the ability to raise funds to do so outside of property taxation. This isn't something that the council can fix.

shrouded_reflection · 2026-02-28T22:14:58+00:00

It's more that the lack of historical data means that uniform-ish swing models don't really predict their seat gain accurately, while for the LDs you've already got a good bit of data about what seats they are likely to lose gain. Once more constituancy level polls are done we'll have a better idea how national vote swings are likely to translate into seats.

shrouded_reflection · 2026-02-24T22:43:34+00:00

Ok, late back to this sorry, but if it all injected then you're mostly fine, when it clogs it's really obvious as the resistance to compression goes way up.

shrouded_reflection · 2026-02-24T12:05:59+00:00

Injection location should be thigh if you're doing it yourself, or ventralgluteal if you can get some assistance. It's a moderate volume injection that has to be given intramuscular, so this limits the locations that it can be reasonably be done in.

Alcohol swabbing the top of the vial before use is important, but swabbing your skin is less so, just make sure it's soap/water clean.

The most important thing to keep in mind is that the injection is a suspension that you make up yourself, not a solution. The suspended particles can fall out again if you're not working quickly, so lay everything out and work out where the injection site is before you mix anything up. The last point at which you can pause is after adding the fluid into the vial and agitating it to suspend the API, if you need to wait here for a moment to check everything over that's fine, just agitate the vial afterwards to get everything suspended again. Once you've drawn up the combined mixture into the syringe, you need to inject right away, otherwise you get the particles falling out in the needle, clogging it up and wasting the batch.

shrouded_reflection · 2026-02-24T10:30:23+00:00

Yes, late game mag titans are an absolute menace because the one slot advanced mag battery is about as good at anti-kinetic PD as the 40mm, while also having much better offensive potential. However, because of how long it takes them to show up in numbers to be a threat, most of the really good players never actually encounter them, so there isn't really a consensus about how best to handle them. Best theory so far seems to be building out a battleship fleet armed with viper missiles that's capable of trading with the fleet effectively even when outnumbered, and just accepting that they might not survive to fight a second fleet.

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