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And now for my monthly linkspam:

Psychic Ferns EP – My brother is in this psychedelic doom metal band!  And the EP is available for free (or name your price).  Naturally, I think they are the coolest thing ever.

Aces in the Church – A collection of aces’ personal experiences with Christianity.  If you’ve ever speculated on the interaction between Christianity and asexuality, I’d ask you, are you ready to confront some real stories?  Coyote themself has some of the best writing in here but the snippets are important to show the diversity of experiences.

[cn: rape, rape apology] A Feminist Magazine’s Hypocrisy On Rape Made Me Love Feminists Even More – Chris Hall talks about an incident where a feminist magazine published a sympathetic account of a woman raping her male partner.  Although this was a feminist fuckup, Chris was grateful for the response of other feminists, and mad at MRAs for making the conversation more difficult.  MRAs upset me for similar reasons, particularly since I started being out about being a rape victim.  I still remember that time that a gay guy tried to sell me on the men’s rights movement by telling me gay men were lucky to not have any consent culture.

What I learned as a hired consultant to autodidact physicists – Basically, it’s a consulting service for physics cranks, run by a professional physicist.  I get e-mails from cranks too, and have seen them at conferences.  Most of them seem like nice people, and the notion of helping some of them has an appeal to it, however pointless.  But I could never justify the time investment, nor do I think I could truly help them.

Qualities of Well-Written Puzzles – I recently found this article which I think accurately summarizes things you want in a puzzle.  It also makes me reflect with anger on all those puzzles that were clearly designed by people who don’t get it.  Like that infamous puzzle from Gabriel Knight 3 (which I’ve never played, but I know the genre).  Incidentally, I’m familiar with the puzzles used as examples (SpaceChem, Snakebird, & Nikoli) and would recommend all three.

Trigger Warnings – This is an old article by Ozy, but I link it specifically for the suggestion of how to handle triggers in an academic context.  Clearly, Disabilities Services should routinely contact professors to ask if their courses will have any triggers relevant to the enrolled students.  This goes a long way to address the more legitimate concerns people have about trigger warnings in academia.

Trigger warnings are such a basic measure, and hardly constitute a comprehensive strategy for addressing mental health.  But because of politics, we’ll be stuck here for decades won’t we?  It’s like marriage equality all over again.

Let’s Talk: The trans/cis binary – Some of you may remember when I talked about people who have a nonbinary gender but aren’t trans.  This is a first-person perspective from Vesper, my favorite YouTube vlogger.  (Granted, I don’t watch many vloggers, but)