#metastudies

[our-queer-experience]

what is autismgender?

I saw someone talk about it once but lost the post. So I figured I’d ask here, so I can get a human answer (google uses too many long words)

so a lot of autistic people are transgender. there’s been a few studies on this and one metastudy, and we don’t know too much about this correlation. some autistic people, quite a lot actually, feel disconnected from the idea of gender in the first place. whether this is genetic and biological or the product of being raised autistic in our society, we have no idea. a lot of people find that the way they experience their gender is so heavily influenced by their autism and since that’s their defining experience, they call themselves autigender or autismgender. it’s mostly a thing found online, but it’s completely valid and should be respected.

as an autistic trans person, my gender and my autism arent correlated at all, but that’s just one experience. there’s a book that’s a collection of case studies that i recommend for a more in depth experiences

[uncanny-tranny]

how old were you when you started testosterone? i want to start before i’m 18 so i don’t have to deal with that while applying to/starting college. i want to have it all figured out by the time i leave home. i thought 16 would be a good age because i also want to start while i’m in high school so i can catch up to the other boys and pass better. but my mom has been reading studies and she says it interrupts brain development and doesn’t want me starting hormones until i’m at least 18. but i don’t know if i can make it that long and i really don’t want to have to wait.

I started when I was an adult since it can be simpler, so I don't know on that end if it will be easy for you.

However, it is odd to me to say it will interrupt brain development as though hormones can stop your brain's development. Your brain will still develop, and indeed, it will continue to do so even after you are over eighteen. I won't contest that hormones might alter your brain in the way it responds to stimuli, but it won't be stunted. Like... you've already got testosterone in your body, and what HRT does it raise those levels to what is more "typical" as if you were a cisgender, perisex (i.e., not intersex) man.

Here's a 2020 metastudy I found about this if you want to read on your own, which includes studies done on those seeking both testosterone and estrogen treatment.

Much of these discussions are hindered by small sample sizes. However, with data, it seems as though hormone treatment isn't drastically reducing cognitive abilities, as much as I've seen people act as though it does. Your brain will continue to develop well after any puberty because that's what brains do. Hormones can surely influence your brain, but it is not like it will kill it.

[freebroccoli]

"In this house we believe science is real" mfs when yet another metastudy says the opposite of what they want to believe.

[kvibe-test]

Steuerliche Anreize als Innovationsmotor nutzen

Die Bedeutung von steuerlichen Anreizen zur Förderung von unternehmerischen Innovationen ist allgemein anerkannt. In Deutschland hat sich die steuerliche Förderkulisse im Bereich der Forschungsförderung in den letzten Jahren erheblich gewandelt, um Unternehmen zu motivieren, in Forschung und Entwicklung (FuE) zu investieren. Seit 2020 stellt die Forschungszulage eine attraktive Option für Unternehmen dar, um 25% ihrer Aufwendungen für FuE-Personalkosten bis zu einem Höchstbetrag von einer Million Euro abzusetzen. Dieses Werkzeug steht Unternehmen jeder Größe zur Verfügung und soll zusätzliche Investitionen stimulieren.

Effektivität steuerlicher Innovationsanreize

Forschungen bestätigen die Wirkung solcher Anreize. Eine Metastudie des ifo Instituts zeigt, dass steuerbasierte Maßnahmen die Investitionsbereitschaft in Innovationsprojekte merklich steigern können. Steuerliche Anreize bieten durch ihre weitreichende Anwendung und Anpassungsfähigkeit Vorteile gegenüber direkter Projektförderung, insbesondere für kleine und mittlere Unternehmen (KMU). So tragen gesenkte Unternehmenssteuern zu verstärkten Innovationsaktivitäten im privaten Sektor bei.

Spezifische steuerliche Anreize

Forschungszulage: Ermöglicht es den Unternehmen, 25% der FuE-Personalkosten geltend zu machen.

Investitionsabzugsbetrag (IAB): Gestattet die vorgezogene Abschreibung von bis zu 50% der geplanten Investitionen.

Sonderabschreibungen: Erlaubt Unternehmen, zusätzliche 20% der Anschaffungskosten in den ersten fünf Jahren abzuschreiben.

Rücklagenbildung: Gewinne können steuerbegünstigt zurückgelegt und für zukünftige Investitionen genutzt werden.

Strategien zur Nutzung steuerlicher Anreize

Um die Möglichkeiten steuerlicher Anreize optimal zu nutzen, sollten Unternehmen strategisch vorgehen. Eine langfristige Planung der FuE-Aktivitäten ist entscheidend, um alle Förderpotentiale auszuschöpfen. Die Verbindung von Instrumenten wie der Forschungszulage und dem IAB schafft zusätzliche Spielräume. Ebenso empfiehlt sich, ein Innovationsmanagement einzuführen, das förderfähige Projekte systematisch identifiziert. Unternehmen sollten Rücklagen strategisch verwenden, um Innovationsvorhaben in wirtschaftlich schwierigen Zeiten zu finanzieren.

Vorteile für große Unternehmen

Auch große Unternehmen können erheblich von diesen Anreizen profitieren. Sie sind nicht auf KMU beschränkt und ihre größere Investitionsfähigkeit ermöglicht es ihnen, besonders von Instrumenten wie dem IAB zu profitieren. Die Möglichkeit, verschiedene Förderinstrumente zu kombinieren, maximiert die strategische Flexibilität und erlaubt umfassende Innovationsstrategien.

Herausforderungen und Lösungen

Dennoch gibt es Herausforderungen, denen Unternehmen bei der Nutzung solcher Anreize begegnen können. Die Förderlandschaft kann komplex sein, weshalb es nützlich ist, auf Expertenwissen zurückzugreifen oder die Fortbildung der Finanzabteilung voranzutreiben. Der Nachweis der Förderfähigkeit erfordert klare interne Prozesse zur Dokumentation der FuE-Tätigkeiten. Es ist zudem notwendig, steuerliche Planungen in die übergeordnete Unternehmensstrategie zu integrieren, um konsistente Ergebnisse zu erzielen.

Zukunftsperspektiven

Mit Blick in die Zukunft könnte eine Erweiterung der steuerlichen Förderung auf andere Kostenarten als Personalkosten in Betracht gezogen werden. Auch die Förderung von Kooperationen zwischen Unternehmen und Forschungseinrichtungen könnte zunehmende Beachtung finden. Insbesondere Digitalisierung und Nachhaltigkeit könnten stärker in den Fokus der Innovationsförderung rücken und neue Möglichkeiten bieten.

Fazit

Steuerliche Anreize bieten eine wertvolle Möglichkeit zur Förderung von Innovationen innerhalb eines Unternehmens und zur gleichzeitigen Steueroptimierung. Unternehmen, die diese Instrumente gezielt einsetzen, können ihre Wettbewerbsfähigkeit stärken und langfristigen Erfolg sichern. Es ist wichtig, die verfügbaren Fördermöglichkeiten genau zu kennen und diese in die individuelle Unternehmensplanung zu integrieren, um das volle Potential auszuschöpfen und eine zukunftsgerichtete Innovationskultur zu etablieren.

#Innovation #Steueroptimierung #Innovationsförderung

Optimieren Sie Ihre Finanzplanung: https://bloggerfy-test.webflow.io/

[korrektheiten]

Ergebnis Metastudie: Einfluss Sozialer Medien auf Wahlen wird stark überschätzt

Tichy:»„Niemand wurde durch Manipulation dazu gebracht, für Trump zu stimmen.“ So titelte das Polit-Portal „Politico“ vor drei Wochen, um dann zu erklären, „warum die Desinformationspanik vorbei ist“. Das klingt so ganz anders als die in der Tat panikartigen Warnungen vor dem „Ende der Demokratie“, die in der EU, da vor allem in Deutschland und hier Der Beitrag Ergebnis Metastudie: Einfluss Sozialer Medien auf Wahlen wird stark überschätzt erschien zuerst auf Tichys Einblick. http://dlvr.it/THXKdy «

[catgirl-facts]

Catgirl biology - Childhood.

General childhood is not too disimilar from that of human children excluding the fact that for most beastfolk is a lot shorter. In the case of catgirls, among all beastfolk, they have the longest childhood, not entering puberty until the age of ten, as previously discussed.

The main difference with humans is that we take care of our own children or of those that have been trusted to us. For most beastfolk (excluding wolfkinds) this is not the case. Care for a beastfolk child by their parents, or at least by the mother ends entirely upon getting out of the first stage in their development and they're able to walk and talk fully on their own.

Normally, upon reaching this age, young catgirls are given to families that are able to adopt them and take care of them until they reach adulthood. It may sound kind of inhumane to us, but it's deeply ingrained upon their culture, and it has been found that it deeply helps to socialize them and also for them to reach cognitive adulthood significantly faster.

Of course, since a couple of decades ago, as human-beastfolk couples flourish, it's becoming increasingly more frequent to see catgirls being cared for by their human fathers.

It should be noted that upon reaching around the age of 6 or 8, many catgirls (around 60%) lose their tail. This is a normal part of their development, often dependant on if the father is human or not, but not necessarily. However, it can be a deeply traumatizing experience, if a non-painful one, and it's recommended for parents and guardians to both sign the catgirl to therapy and to have her see a doctor that can close the wound as quickly as possible.

This last piece of advice is important, do NOT simply leave it untreated, as it can get easily infected. In the past it counted as chief cause for 80% of childhood deaths among catgirls.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

For extra reading:

Takahashi, H (2004) Brief Care Guide for the Guardians of Beastfolk. Vol 1, Childhood and physical development.

Weiss, J T (2018) Handprints and Pawprints - An pedagogical guide on the care and early education of catgirls.

Stapleton, K. Jackson, N. et al (2020) Responses and trauma to the loss of tail in beasfolk, a metastudy. BPI Foundation Journal of Therianthropology.

[crazy-pages]

Abuse is about what behavioral permissions a person gives themselves to control another's behavior. It's not typically sadistic hateful glee or an inability to control themselves (though neither of those is great in a parent either).

The thing is that parents do have to behave in ways which control their child's behavior. So you can't just draw a clear red line in the sand about what makes a parent an abuser. Heck, not even with corporal punishment! The research clearly shows that it's never a positive thing and typically bad and sometimes very bad, but all that automatically makes it is a bad parenting behavior which should be changed. Not all spanking is abuse, and not all kids form traumatic responses to it*.

And this is complicating because it means there's no easy way to automatically identify abusers. Instead you need to do a hard look at what kind of control they think they're entitled to over their children and what actions they're willing to take to enforce that. Which means doing a hard look at the specifics of other people's parenting and judging them for it (and sometimes the answer is obvious, it's abuse, but sometimes it's subtler than that). And it is a huge taboo to do this in most contexts. It's an even huger taboo to do something about it by directly intervening in someone's parenting.

So it's easier to just imagine that abuse doesn't require that of us.

*None of this is justifying spanking, the research is very clear it's bad. But bad =/= abusive in all cases. See: The big definitive metastudy.

Problem #1 regarding child abuse is that a lot of people seem to struggle to imagine normal, respectable-looking parents and other authority figures ever doing it despite the statistics so instead they do the stranger danger panic and completely overlook some of the greatest threats.

Problem #2 is that even when people understand, even if in an abstract way, that parents can be abusive they just... don't seem to actually register that as something that can apply to real life. It's just hypothetical to them and doesn't actually guide their ideas of how to prevent child abuse.

Problem #3 is that even after overcoming the above biases a lot of people have a very narrow image of what abusive parenting is where they imagine like... people doing violent things basically out of sadism and without provocation. They don't seem to think it's "real" abuse if the victim did something that "justifies" punitive violence, like disobeying the parents.

In fact, most people think parents have a right to do a whole lot of awful things to their children beyond just hitting them, like violating their privacy, controlling their access to information, and deciding what/when/if they eat, among other things.

[wachendlichauf]

Was eine Metastudie über Handystrahlung verrät https://www.zeit.de/gesundheit/2024-09/handystrahlung-hirntumor-krebs-handy-studie/seite-2

[our-queer-experience]

HOLD ON so the transphobe i was arguing with two days ago got blocked because… the convo wasn’t worth it, they weren’t really engaging with me, but one of my followers started arguing with them and they said we have no scientific support on our side? i cited the APA and SEVERAL METASTUDIES at them??? literally in the same thread?

[a-minke-whales-tale]

Sorry to take over your post Muzzleomleum, but this narrative and post really annoyed me, not for you but frustration over this narrative.

Jan Dirk Blom seems to be the source for this 13 number as he has written several metastudies on the topic in the early 2010's. However this number refers only specifically to werewolf delusions and excludes most of the case literature.

(Blom 2014)

In broader case literature a total of 56 cases were found and described searching over a range of around 160 years (Blom 2013) (It is in Dutch sorry but google translate should make it okay enough). That is still not a lot but a lot more than 13. It should also be noted that most of the CLCZs here do not describe werewolf specifically delusions and would thus be excluded from the case literature.

One of the main things to note in Blom (2013) is that it is expected there is very significant underreporting

Translation via Google Translate:

Incidentally, only 56 case descriptions are known from the overarching class of clinical zoanthropy, which amounts to a frequency of one description every three years worldwide. However, a significant underreporting is suspected based on two case series. Keck et al. (1988) conducted a retrospective study at the McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, in which they asked colleagues whether they could recall cases of clinical lycanthropy. They then consulted the relevant medical records and, where possible, interviewed the then treating physicians and the patients themselves. This resulted in 12 cases of clinical zoanthropy over a period of 13 years in a single hospital. A prospective study by Younis and Moselhy (2009), in two hospitals in Iraq, yielded eight cases of clinical zoanthropy in just under 20 years.

This is three hospitals reporting a case range between 0,2 and just under 1 per year. It is still not a lot, but when you consider for how many hospitals there are across the world and that many of us have been going through this for a pretty long time it really is not so farfetched.

In my country there are around 20 proper mental hospitals and the number of general psychiatric wards is somewhere between 30 and 90. If we take those numbers and apply them at the low end 20 x 0,2 gives us 4 cases a year to at the high end 110 cases per year. It becomes on the order of one in a million each year. Extremely rare, but there are potentially dozens of others in my country alone. Even taking that lowest incident rate of around 0,3/1M, that would produce around 2.000 people per year worldwide. Now sure tumblr is mostly Anglosphere with some Europe but that is probably still a range of 600M meaning maybe a total of 180 people which can probably be narrowed further on ages and who is likely to use tumblr - I have had schizophrenia seven years before coming here. Over the years I have met maybe a dozen zoanthropes, and when you consider how other platforms tend to be less accepting of us and my own experiences desperately searching for others, there being a dozen of us or so here seems really not so unlikely.

The accuracy even of this order of magnitude approximation is honestly pretty poor taking a single datapoint from a collection and extrapolating it to the world, and it does not include those who might have never gone properly to a hospital but handled through outpatient systems which from reading stories on my fellow zoanthropes seems not uncommon.

The brain struggles to comprehend such large numbers that a rate of 0,3/1M is indistinguishable from 0, but if you do something billions of times it still shows up. The concentration of Uranium 235 is 0,02ppm in the earth's crust, one tenth this very coarse estimation, and yet there is enough of it to power mine and millions of other people's homes - or to bathe to world in hellfire should the swords win instead of the ploughshares.

But, if you are going to quote a paper, you should at least read the paper and the context and have some understanding the limitations of these sorts of studies. A lot of rare conditions are underreported because people are told they are rare and so even if the thing before you is a zebra, you might indeed believe it is just a weirdly striped horse, if you know even what a zebra is. Even far more common conditions like Dissociative Identity Disorder which has a prevalence of 1,5% I once had a doctor shouting at me ask diagnosed me with that because it was extremely rare (my psychiatrist to be clear, before my diagnosis was changed to schizophrenia). But on top of that, for these documents to enter scientific literature a person would then have to publish on those cases. 56 cases in literature (from this study there was another noting 80+ cases in literature from a year or two ago but I cannot find it now) does not mean that this has only ever occurred 56 times, it means that it has been written about, stored, maintained, and retrieved, in a relatively narrow selection of languages and terms 56 times (ignoring that some papers discuss multiple cases in a single document).

Read the papers you want to quote and understand their limitations, science is a tool not a god.

~ Kala

Genuinely just saw a TikTok today of someone saying that clinical lycanthropy is this super rare diagnosis that only 13 people have gotten ever in the past however many years and that means that anyone who says they have it is lying and I just want to say that while I know that person was probably a teenager, use your fucking critical thinking skills and actually look up why that is. The reason people aren’t actually diagnosed with it is because a lot of psychiatric professionals either don’t know what it is or don’t believe in it, and out of those that do know what it is and believe in it there is a VERY small percentage that would actually diagnose someone with clinical lycanthropy due to the fact that it is a syndrome caused by an underlying condition not its own separate disorder typically it’s caused by psychosis, bipolar, schizophrenia, a TBI, seizures or other conditions and those would most likely be the diagnosis over a diagnosis of clinical lycanthropy. That however doesn’t mean that people don’t have it or don’t suffer from it and saying that because only 13 people have been officially diagnosed with it that means that everyone who says they have it is lying is putting way too much fucking trust into the mental health system which is systematically flawed, broken, and abusive. I personally do not have clinical lycanthropy, however it does frustrate me when people pick and choose to bully and spread misinformation about an entire group of individuals just because you feel superior as a “regular” therian. Also not everyone who calls themselves a clinical lycanthrope relates to the actual clinical diagnosis of it being a delusion and uses it more as a term to describe their experiences. Either way, acting like an entire group of individuals is faking just because you have a superiority complex and can’t do a bit of research is pretty fucking shitty.

[seekerslearnings]

Metastudie: Geistige Anstrengung ist immer quälend - science.ORF.at

[vegansforfuture]

Eine neue Metastudie beschäftigt sich mit den gesundheitlichen Aspekten von Pflanzenfleisch und vergleicht diese mit Tierfleisch. Die Vorteile sind größer, als gedacht, vor allem für die Herzgesundheit! 👍😎🌱

Vegconomist dazu: "Ein im Canadian Journal of Cardiology (Elsevier) veröffentlichter Übersichtsartikel über die verfügbaren Studien, in denen die Auswirkungen von pflanzlichem und tierischem Fleisch direkt verglichen wurden, deutet durchweg darauf hin, dass die pflanzlichen Alternativen die kardiovaskulären Risikofaktoren verbessern.

Die Autoren des Artikels haben die von 1970 bis 2023 veröffentlichten Forschungsergebnisse zu PBMAs (plantbased meat alternatives), ihren Inhaltsstoffen, Nährwertprofilen und Auswirkungen auf Risikofaktoren für Herz-Kreislauf-Erkrankungen, wie Cholesterinspiegel und Blutdruck, untersucht.

Ihre Analyse zeigt: 1.: Die Inhaltsstoffe und Nährwertprofile von PBMAs sind sehr unterschiedlich.

2.: Im Durchschnitt haben PBMAs ein herzgesünderes Nährwertprofil als Fleisch, obwohl der hohe Natriumgehalt einiger Produkte Anlass zur Sorge geben kann.

3.: In mehreren randomisierten, kontrollierten Studien konnte gezeigt werden, dass PBMAs einige kardiovaskuläre Risikofaktoren, einschließlich des Cholesterinspiegels, verbessern.

4.: Trotz des hohen Natriumgehalts einiger Produkte hat sich gezeigt, dass PBMAs den Blutdruck nicht erhöhen.

5.: Derzeit gibt es keine Langzeitstudien, in denen untersucht wurde, wie sich diese Alternativen auf das Risiko eines Herzinfarkts oder Schlaganfalls auswirken können.“

Fazit: Pflanzenfleisch ist besser als sein Ruf und wir sollten endlich auch mehr über die gesundheitlichen Vorteile gegenüber Tierfleisch sprechen. Bleibt die Frage, was überhaupt noch für Tierfleisch spricht - und warum wir nicht einfach alle umsteigen?! 😊🌱💚

Quellen: ➡ LINK 1 ➡ LINK 2

CHANGE IS COMING! 😊💚

[jimothy-g-brooks]

Kitchen Sink Urbana: Magic (Part 0)

Part 1 Part 2

A broad overview of Magic in this setting and the goals I sought to achieve structuring it this way. I recognize these methods weren't the only way to achieve my goals but what I came up with was the way I enjoyed the most, as well as achieving other goals as well.

This is a copy-paste from a post I made on the TVTropes forum, and therefore has links to it.

There is no Masquerade. Magic is well known to the general public.

Magic can be pretty potent, just like you'd imagine in a fantasy RPG setting for example.

Despite all that, magic is not a part of normal everyday living and is not incorporated into global infrastructure.

Despite all that, magic is something that's been a part of the world for a while, since pre-historic times until the Now of the Information Age. The Magic Comes Back, it did not.

"In my setting, there are two types of magic. Actually, three and a half, but the third one shares all the problems of the first two, albeit to lesser extents, and the fourth one is more of a metastudy of the first. It comes down to two factors, Reliability and Replicability."

Witchcraft: Wild Magic, Black Magic, Wishcraft

The art of ritually constructing a wish. You put together a ritual with a number of ingredients that includes "occult paraphernalia", which can be just about anything but some things are, of course, more potent than others. Along with the physical objects as you might expects, this can also be runes and sigils, dead languages, blood sacrifices and mystically significant dates, times and events. You also needs things having to do with the wish you're trying to make and if you can link the two, having occultic things related to your wish, all the better. You also need emotion and/or willpower, though you can crowdsource that which makes having a coven backing up your ritual a pretty good thing to have.

This one has the advantage of Replicability and the flaw of Unreliability. Anyone can do it and it's relatively simple with its very vague parameters. As long as you put together enough "oomph", your wish can be granted. But you're calling upon the raw Will Of Magic to intercede on your behalf and warp reality to your request, and Magic, the entity, has an agenda of its own. Namely, it wants a story and it will gladly turn your wish into an Inciting Incident and you will be standing at ground zero. It seems to enjoy punishing hubris most of all but it is almost always compelled to cause Conflict that needs to be Resolved. Unless it inscrutably judges that enough conflict has happened already and now is the time for the Dénouement, your wish will be twisted in some fashion. It's not necessarily a Jackass Genie but it's not not��one either.

The most common example brought up in-universe is "man brings back dead wife". Almost invariably, she Came Back Wrong but the "almost" is important and so it doesn't stop some people from trying over and over. A more contemporary example is when a game developer struggled to fulfill their promise for a fully immersive VR MMO RPG and tried to fill all those cut corners with magic. The tragic end result was when tens of thousands of people ended up trapped in the game where if they died in the game they'd die in real life, unable to escape until its final boss was defeated. "Sprinkling on the fairy dust" is a common slang term for engineers, scientists and developers of varying stripes trying to cheat with magic and hoping they can patch it out before something goes terribly wrong. Thing is, you never hear about the ones that actually succeed in doing so because they sure as Hell aren't going to admit to it.

(Tangentially related, this setting also has what are officially labelled as "Wild Magic Zones" but tend to be more commonly called "Cursed". Places becoming haunted due to deadly tragedies taking place there is one of the most common form of these Cursed Places. The prevailing theory is that whatever took place in these area constituted a form of accidental and unaimed witchcraft ritual, allowing wild magic to just spill out and turn the whole place into a problem.)

Sorcery: Mild Magic, Bound Magic, Ruled Magic

Sorcerers are rare individuals with innate magical talent that resonate with a "Magecraft". A Magecraft is a magical system with its own rules, limits and implied metaphysics and cosmology. This kind of magic has the advantage of Reliability but is difficult to Replicate on a wide scale. Sorcerers are already rare individuals and are split among different Magecrafts, so two or more Sorcerers will likely operate under different magical systems with incompatible rules that make collaboration difficult. You may even run into interpersonal conflict: Learning a form of Sorcery often involves at least a certain amount of buy-in to its cosmology. If you ask two people with two different ideas of how the universe works when their job is each using their knowledge and power over these universal functions to work together, it's possible it ends in a fist fight.

And this is if a potential Sorcerer even discovers their talent, pursues it and is able to find the correct Magecraft they resonate with and the material they need to learn it. The global population explosion since the Industrial Revolution has not necessarily helped. Although many Magecrafts experienced a population increase, more often there was an increase in the number of different Magecrafts instead, being spontaneously created or rediscovered. Sorcerers are more splintered among dozens and dozens of competing magical systems than ever before. Would-be sorcerers may have a difficult time finding which magical system they resonate and are never able to fully explore their talents, though other forms of Magecraft involve enough of a degree of intuition and/or spotlighting.

There may be locales such as towns, cities, regions or small nations, which have a dense enough concentration of a particular breed of Sorcerers and have had such for a long enough time that their magic is incorporated into the local infrastructure. These places are relatively uncommon but not unheard of, often attracting some tourism just for the novelty of watching how the locales work with their locale brand of magic. However, in this increasingly globalized world, shared standards outweigh most magical convenience and science and technology reigns supreme.

(Sorcery and Witchcraft are usually thought to be binary and functionally are for the most part. However, some forms of Magecraft tend be vague and wibbly with their ruleset, running on inconsistent or nonsense logic, having a more fairy tale vibe to them. Practitioners of these forms of Sorcery have a Witchcraft-esque presence of narrative nonsense that follows them around, collectively and/or individually.)

Shamanism: Spirit Magic, Pact Magic, Blessed Magic

This setting has a number of entities, presences, forces and artifacts that may be called upon, tapped and/or wielded under the right circumstances. These various Mystical Things™ have their own various idiosyncrasies, dramas and variably logical prerequisites to their use, although they can usually be trusted not to cause problems on purpose. They're relatively rare and so are the people that meet (or are willing to meet) whatever standards they demand for the usage of their powers. These can range from someone making a Deal with the Devil to someone managing to get a Choosy Magical Artifact on over to a number of other possibilities.

(Like with Sorcery, you might have relatively small locales where some mystic power is worked into the infrastructure, resulting in weirdness. Some breed of Sorcerous Magecraft have Shamanistic elements. Some powers a Shaman may potentially tap have properties of strongly being of Wild Magic, and calling on them is basically considered Witchcraft.)

Wizardry: Studied Magic, Warding Magic, Kinda Magic

"Wizardry" is more the archaic and informal name for the science and study of magic outside its actual practice. It has its disciplines in the categorization of Sorcery to the spirit anthropology good for Shamans, but most well-known to the lay people, the one most likely to saddle you with the archaic title of "Wizard" by the public is the study of Wild Magic, and the things that veer close to it. Their jobs are often to try and predict how any given example of Wild Magic is going to explode in everyone's faces next and what we can do about it.

Many professional wizards will pick up various tricks on their trade, wards and seals and things of that nature. Much of these things are essentially witchcraft in theory but usually aren't treated as such in practice, by other people or by Magic. Using Wild Magic to compel an example of Wild Magic to go away or stay put doesn't usually have the same narrative fall out as other forms of Wild Magic. At worst, it often only delays or decreases the danger, though it's not unknown for things to blow up spectacularly either.

Wizardry gets a little bit of leering suspicion, not necessarily for the Warding Magic itself but for how well in synergizes with more conventional Witchcraft. There's an obvious advantage for any practicing Witch to also study Wizardry, in the hopes that they can get all the magical power they ever desired while mitigating the price they will have to pay.

[crazy-pages]

@digitized-clockwork Couldn't find this one but I did find another one which seemed to be high quality and also a metastudy, albeit in the US. (Please for the love of all that is good, cite your damn sources people.)

This study seems to agree with the above proportion, albeit with higher absolute rates because the average age is 28 rather than a survey of K-12. But the meta study below it indicates that exact numbers tend to very pretty substantially based on survey specifics, even stuff as basic as what the age of the people you're asking are, and we just don't have granular enough data to make strong conclusions about what kind of trans person experiences more of what kind of abuse. The metastudy concludes that these kinds of differences are impossible to analyze rigorously with existing data, but that typical sexual assault prevalence of respondents is somewhere around 50%.

Nine hundred ninety-six TGD individuals completed the survey. The mean age of participants was 28 (SD 10). The majority of respondents were white (810, 85%) and non-Hispanic (859, 89%). Seven hundred eighty-seven (79%) individuals identified as transmasculine or assigned female at birth, and 209 (21%) as transfeminine or assigned male at birth. Forty-seven percent of all respondents have experienced sexual assault. Of those that have been assaulted, 362 (46%) were transmasculine and 72 (34%) were transfeminine (Table 1).

While all surveys have found evidence that sexual violence is shockingly common, the proportion of transgender people reporting violence varies from survey to survey. As discussed later, these variations in rates probably result from differences in how researchers conducted their surveys, and we cannot draw firm conclusions on the actual likelihood that a transgender person will experience sexual violence. However, the most common finding across surveys and needs assessments is that about 50% of transgendered persons report unwanted sexual activity. Clements-Nolle et al. (2006) surveyed 515 MTFs and FTMs and found that 59% reported a history of forced sex or rape, Garofalo et al. (2006) also found her/his survey of 51 MTF youths that 52% reported unwanted sexual intercourse, and Kenagy (2005b) found that 54% of participants reported that they had been forced to have sex. The report with the highest percentage of people who reported being either directly involved or secondary victims (i.e., witnesses) of sexual violence was the FORGE (2005) report, which had 66% of their 264 respondents in the mid-west state that they had been the victims or witnesses of sexual violence, and 23% had been the victims or witnesses of five or more incidences of sexual violence (Tables 1 and 2).

Kenagy (2005a) also found a significant difference between MTFs and FTMs, with 69% of MTFs reported having been the victims of forced sex, where only 30% of FTMs reported a history of forced sex. However, only one other study directly tested this difference. Contrary to the Kenagy (2005b) study, forced sexual activity was a larger problem for FTMs in the Xavier et al. (2007) sample: 35% of FTMs responded they had been sexually assaulted compared to 23% of MTFs.

[happinessinselfdestruction84]

depression, Phoenix, veteran, drugs, heavy music, anxiety, pissed at the world

I'm listening to Suicide Silence again, Mitch Lucker is a literal life saver, even in death he's still pulling me from the ledge. It's weird how music has always been there for me, I just find solace and catharsis in the heavy as fuck stuff. It really makes you face whatever you are going through without a break...literally and make an actual effort in working through the issues. It's absolutely amazing, yet it still gets a bad reputation by so many people for being: demonic or causing mental disorders or even suicide; all in the face of peer reviewed studies and now metastudies that say it is highly beneficial psychologically in alleviating those distressful symptoms. Now in combination with say...therapy and medication, it seems to me an excellent therapeutic tool. Maybe these fuckin christian, holier than thou facade of a person should look upon themselves and their judgemental gazes and restrictive tenets and see that their horse shit religious beliefs and doing quite a bit of damage and have been since it's slave mentality inception. Living a particular and suppressive way on the false promises of a better "next" life or suffering for all eternity in hell for not living the way of such a despicable, abhorrent and truely the antithesis of morality that they call god. Fuck living like a slave to the greatest lie in history. Hahaha. No gods no masters is a start to wean them off the literal opiate of the masses. Religion....what a profoundly useless crock of shit in our current era.

Burn It To The Fucking Ground!!!