Sorry for the long post.

I was committed to a trans man for 30 years (we got together in 1989). We couldn’t get married for most of that time because it was illegal, but we represented ourselves as married since about 1991, which tbh in some cases meant breaking the law on legal documents to try to get fair representation, so I wouldn’t be excluded from ‘married’ benefits in healthcare, housing, etc. Once he was able to ‘pass’ and we lived in a new state where people wouldn’t out him, he stayed in the closet, and almost nobody knew he was trans since the early 90s. We just wanted to live a normal life. The only people who really knew were our healthcare providers, because that was the only place it was an issue.

We had a mostly happy marriage and raised a wonderful son – he’s 27 now – until about 15 years ago when my disability started getting really bad. I was born with Ehlers Danlos and an autoimmune disorder, which I was mostly able to compensate for until it started getting really bad in about 2010. I had built a career in software development and UX design, but I developed Dysautonomia and started having seizures, major heart issues, and GI intolerance to the point I couldn’t process food. I worked for a couple of years after that, but it became impossible and I had to give up the career I loved and go on disability. We were pretty well off – not rich, but comfortable – and my inability to work didn’t jeopardise our financial stability that much. Between the benefits of my career and his (he was a regional director in university housing), we had been doing okay.

It took several years for me to be diagnosed, since what I have is extremely rare. It’s also degenerative, and there’s no treatment or cure. It only gets progressively worse. I’ve never liked sex, but I did it because he liked it. But the sicker I got, the more I just didn’t want it. It’s very hard to force yourself to have sex when you feel like you have the stomach flu 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year.

He started getting annoyed with that, and angrier at the sex situation the sicker I got. At first, he’d leave pamphlets and books around the house with titles like ‘How to enjoy sex when you’re disabled’. It felt very passive-aggressive, and I started feeling resentful. Eventually it turned into him shouting at me in public, and I couldn’t take it anymore. Between my progressive disability, the constant pressure, and feeling increasingly alone and worthless, I became suicidal. I found myself holing up in the toilet, crying for hours, and just wishing it would end. I asked for a divorce. He was clearly deeply unhappy with me, and I loved him too much to do that to him. I still do.

Partly because we’d only been legally married 4 years before that when it finally became legal (still not in my state; we travelled to a legal state to do it), even though we’d been representing ourselves as married for 30 years, and partly because my divorce lawyer basically snubbed me after he got my husband’s legal records – clearly because he didn’t approve of the relationship (he didn’t even show up for court and stopped returning my calls, but I couldn’t afford the retainer for a new lawyer), I was left with nothing. No alimony, no savings, no retirement because we’d cashed out mine in favour of his (yes, I was stupid, but he controlled the finances and I never thought our relationship would end), I was left with literally nothing but half the debt.

My ex-husband was married again within a year of our divorce (to his high school sweetheart who he had kept contact with – their friendship never bothered me, because I am not a jealous type) and they make 6 figures. I now live on nothing but disability, am overdrawn every month, and have to choose between medicine and basic necessities. I’m supposed to drink ensure and pedialyte because of my digestive issues, but I can’t afford it.

I’m homebound and completely alone now, and I have no social network because all of my friends and most of my family have died in the last few years. I’d kept my son away from my ex-husband’s family for his entire life because they are abusive, narcissistic sociopaths and I valued my son too much to expose him to that, but since the divorce, my son moved to be near his father and connected with them. They always hated me, partly because they blamed me for ‘enabling him to become trans’. They literally had said that. After a few months’ exposure to them, he visited me to have a short conversation in which he told me I’d always be his mother, but he didn’t want to be around me anymore. We’d always been very close with a great relationship, and this broke my heart. I don’t think I can recover from that.

I don’t know what to do. I can no longer afford to live, and Medicare is wholly inadequate for my healthcare needs, but I can’t afford the gap insurance. My teeth all need pulled now since I can’t afford dental care, and all of them hurt (sjogrens syndrome rots my teeth). I can’t afford even Medicare’s copays. Every month, I am staring down homelessness, and the stress only makes my dysautonomia worse.

I no longer have good days. A few years ago, I wrote a scifi novel, but I don’t feel well enough to promote it. I have no energy for social media, and that’s needed to sell books. I’m pretty good at writing and am working on another novel, but I’m so consumed with stress over finances that I can’t focus. I honestly feel that all of society right now just wants me to die.

What’s worse, I feel like my inability to just conform and have sex is what led to this. If I had just been able to suck it up and do the deed, I’d not have lost my marriage, my husband, my son, and everything.

e: 15 yrs, not 10 – I’m bad at numbers

F = {P} ∪ {F_i | i ∈ I}

V_P = {v_i | i ∈ J}

v_i = |v_i| * u_i

What if life naturally evolves towards time-travel as it begins to understand the geometry of the universe? What if the way to travel more than one direction in time lies in our ability to perceive time in the first place? That’s biological, universal, measurable, and therefore quantifiable – and so far, most things we can quantify, we can manipulate.

Physicists have struggled to understand the nature of time since the field began. But a new theoretical study suggests time could be an illusion woven at the quantum level.

Time may not be a fundamental element of the universe but rather an illusion emerging from quantum entanglement, a new study suggests.

Time is a thorny problem for physicists; its inconsistent behavior between our best theories of the universe contributes to a deadlock preventing researchers from finding a "theory of everything," or a framework to explain all of the physics in the universe.

But in the new study, researchers suggest they may have found a clue to solving that problem: by making time a consequence of quantum entanglement, the weird connection between two far-apart particles. The team published their findings May 10 in the journal Physical Review A.

"There exists a way to introduce time which is consistent with both classical laws and quantum laws, and is a manifestation of entanglement," first author Alessandro Coppo, a physicist at the National Research Council of Italy, told Live Science. "The correlation between the clock and the system creates the emergence of time, a fundamental ingredient in our lives."

Article continues at LiveScience

My cat needed to be euthanised last month, and I just received her ashes. They came with a round black sticker. What’s the purpose of this sticker?

They mentioned my chosen urn was suitable for sprinkling cremains (I don’t plan to do that) – maybe it’s related to that?

Thanks.

A team from TU Dortmund University recently succeeded in producing a highly durable time crystal that lived millions of times longer than could be shown in previous experiments. By doing so, they have corroborated an extremely interesting phenomenon that Nobel Prize laureate Frank Wilczek postulated around ten years ago and which had already found its way into science fiction movies.

The results have been published in Nature Physics.

Paper abstract – Robust continuous time crystal in an electron–nuclear spin system:

Abstract Crystals spontaneously break the continuous translation symmetry of free space. Analogously, time crystals lift translational invariance in time. Here we demonstrate a robust continuous time crystal in an electron–nuclear spin system of a semiconductor tailored by tuning the material composition. Continuous, time-independent external driving of the sample produces periodic auto-oscillations with a coherence time exceeding hours. Varying the experimental parameters reveals wide ranges in which the time crystal remains stable. At the edges of these ranges, we find chaotic behaviour with a lifted periodicity corresponding to the melting of the crystal. The time crystal state enables fundamental studies of nonlinear interactions and has potential applications as a precise on-chip frequency standard.

Back in Apollo, we had a feature where you could long-press on mobile and save a screenshot with options to include usernames, number and levels of parents, and original post, amongst other things. Those were the ones I used. I also remember there was a checkbox for watermark, which defaulted to on, and which I never touched but always respected, because it never condescended to me.

Anyway, I used that feature so much that there was no Apollo without it before the ensittification.

As a user experience designer, Apollo had done a lot right that the big tech names had been doing wrong, and I’d floundered on Lemmy until the Voyager team started from that foundation.

I appreciate everything this team has done for me, but I do miss this feature. It seemed aimed straight at me, so I almost hate to bring it up, but it was beautiful and I loved it.

(I’m sorry for not saying this on Git, but I just can’t right now)

eta: you guys are the best. I love everything you’ve done. <3

This only works by phone. Be nice, but firm. Don’t be satisfied with their first answer – make them escalate you to the retention department. They’re often authorised to give much larger discounts because it’s cheaper for them to retain customers than to recruit new ones.

Removed works include Saul Bellow’s ‘Herzog’ and ‘Black, White and Jewish’; no individual reasoning given for books' removal.

….

The purge of books from Orange County Public Schools, in Orlando, over the course of the past semester is the latest consequence of a conservative movement across the country — and strongest in Florida — to rid public and school libraries of materials deemed offensive. While the vast majority of such challenged and removed books involve race, gender and sexuality, several Jewish books have previously been caught in the dragnet.

Article continues…

Removed works include Saul Bellow’s ‘Herzog’ and ‘Black, White and Jewish’; no individual reasoning given for books' removal.

JTA – A global bestseller by a Jewish Holocaust victim; a novel by a beloved and politically conservative Jewish American writer; a memoir of growing up mixed-race and Jewish; and a contemporary novel about a high-achieving Jewish family are among the nearly 700 books a Florida school district removed from classroom libraries this year in fear of violating state laws on sexual content in schools.

The purge of books from Orange County Public Schools, in Orlando, over the course of the past semester is the latest consequence of a conservative movement across the country — and strongest in Florida — to rid public and school libraries of materials deemed offensive. While the vast majority of such challenged and removed books involve race, gender and sexuality, several Jewish books have previously been caught in the dragnet.

Article continues…

Misinformation was extremely popular in 2023, as bad science often made global headlines. Learn the truth behind these 10 dubious stories.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• While there have been huge scientific advances in a wide variety of aspects of physics and astronomy, there have also been wild headlines that do not reflect at all what's true in this Universe.
• No, we haven't found a room-temperature superconductor, overturned the expanding Universe or Big Bang, discovered that the cosmos is twice as old as we thought, or discovered alien technology on the seafloor.
• There has been a lot of fiction permeating science news this year, and the frustrating thing is that these untrue stories are posing as actual facts.

Here are 10 lies you may want to learn the actual truth behind.

[Article continues…]

Misinformation was extremely popular in 2023, as bad science often made global headlines. Learn the truth behind these 10 dubious stories.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• While there have been huge scientific advances in a wide variety of aspects of physics and astronomy, there have also been wild headlines that do not reflect at all what's true in this Universe.
• No, we haven't found a room-temperature superconductor, overturned the expanding Universe or Big Bang, discovered that the cosmos is twice as old as we thought, or discovered alien technology on the seafloor.
• There has been a lot of fiction permeating science news this year, and the frustrating thing is that these untrue stories are posing as actual facts.

Here are 10 lies you may want to learn the actual truth behind.

[Article continues…]

The visual artwork for the Eurovision Song Contest 2024 has been revealed by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and Swedish broadcaster (SVT). The visual identity is inspired by the northern lights and sound equalizers.

Slovenian broadcaster RTVSLO has just revealed their artist for the Eurovision Song Contest 2024.

Raiven will represent Slovenia at the Eurovision Song Contest 2024.

The song that Raiven will sing on the Eurovision stage is titled "Veronika" and will be released on 20 January.

Dutch broadcaster AVROTROS has just revealed their artist for the Eurovision Song Contest 2024.

Joost Klein will represent the Netherlands at the Eurovision Song Contest 2024 after being selected internally from over 600 potential participants.

The song that Joost Klein will sing on the Eurovision stage in Malmö will be released at a later date.

Excess oxygen is actually harmful to humans, but all the climate warnings are about losing oxygen, not nitrogen edit: but when we look for habitable planets, our focus is ‘oxygen rich atmosphere’, not ‘nitrogen rich’, and in medical settings, we’re always concerned about low oxygen, not nitrogen.

Deep sea divers also use a nitrogen mix (nitrox) to stay alive and help prevent the bends, so nitrogen seems pretty important.

It seems weird that our main focus is oxygen when our main air intake is nitrogen. What am I missing?

edit: my climate example was poor and I think misleading. Added a better example instead.