Request: Seattle has Mayoral, County, and City Council elections today, polls close at 11pm Eastern.
Mayoral race, Bruce Harnell vs Katie Wilson, is a neoliberal vs Socdem/'Progressive' matchup that sets the tone for the whole election - that's how it is for the city council seats, too, including for the President of the Council's seat.
Could be interesting. Could see a socdem sweep tonight in Seattle, same night as Mamdani likely winning.
People DO do Bartitsu still, yes, in the HEMA (Historical European Martial Arts) community. It's a small minority, though. Most of them are focused on reconstructing historical sword martial arts from surviving manuals and manuscripts.
Amusingly, the Bartitsu is probably one of the things you could learn in a HEMA club that's most practical - in addition to the cane stuff, which is useful with any stick, they combined a bunch of Japanese and European wrestling and boxing styles that were popular at the time, so it's kind of OG MMA.
After that it's the medieval wrestling, which works fine if your club actually trains it well (no ground game but that's not hugely relevant in street fights a lot of the time anyway). After that the general knowledge of how to use a weapon is useful with any improvised weapon you can get your hands on.
Still one of the least 'practical' martial arts, but as far as I'm concerned the most practical martial art is the one you'll actually do for an extended period instead of trying it awhile and then dropping it. The historical element appeals to a lot of people (like me) who have no interest in normal martial arts for their own sake. Plus culturally they tend to be a LOT better about queers and women than pretty much any other martial arts subculture, which is very relevant for a lot of us. I'm not eager to go train BJJ with chuds as a visible trans girl, but my local HEMA club has multiple trans woman instructors, and they train the wrestling material - so this is the most realistic option I'm actually going to enjoy and practice a LOT, which is what matters most at the level of normal person combat with people who might maybe be medicore boxers or BJJ guys at best.
Everyone else has covered the important stuff, so I'll cover something less important that is an area of interest of mine.
The toy industry would be devastated - plastics are an incredibly useful material for toys, pretty much all of the technical innovations in the world of toys that don't have to do with electronic components are drawn specifically from the increasing capabilities of plastics over time. Something as simple as the modern action figure would be far more difficult to produce to the same level of quality if they were forced to use wood or metal exclusively again - the articulation would suffer, the durability would suffer, the ability for that articulation to hold tension over time would suffer, the ability for paint to stay on the figures would suffer, and there'd be a lot more difficulties with avoiding sharp edges and breakage from the forces you can expect children to put their toys through.
Problems like this would exist for basically every single toy on the market - they've all benefited massively from plastics, and if there is ever restrictions on the use of plastic (as there probably ought to be) then we'd see a massive devolution in what toy manufacturers are capable of.
Obviously this doesn't actually matter - the world was fine before action figures and would be fine after them, much as some people like them, and physical toys are arguably on the way out anyway in favor of screen-based entertainment for children (I consider this a bad thing, but, it's pretty clearly happening.) so a plastic ban may not change much in the end.
This reading is also true, but my intent was to communicate that I literally don't believe the Etsy Witches do anything when they're paid to do something. They're like an Anglerfish - sitting there waiting for someone to press money into their hands for existing because of their evidently-appealing-to-some lure.
Goodness. Right. I'm not going to bother quoting you, I'm just going to go down the line of what you're saying here.
Why are you assuming that I am operating under a framework that's at all similar to you? Decrying these Etsy Witch types as the obvious charlatans they are means nothing regarding my respect levels for the beliefs of even people who follow hegemonic religions - indeed much of my practice is fundamentally derived from a hegemonic religion, that being Christianity. I criticize religions for their effects in the real world, like maintaining hegemony, and when I think they follow entities that while real are Not Good - meaning that yes, I do think that their magic works, it's just different frameworks and lenses and methods. This is a massive simplification, naturally, but I do not have the arrogance to believe I am special, as you baselessly and very rudely put it.
If that is a requirement of materialism (it is not except in the most vulgar sense of the word) then oh well, I am not a materialist. I am not going to deny my own experiences for the sake of being socially acceptable in internet communist circles.
Much of my practice is derived from Gnosticism and I mostly agree with you on the subject of the Christian god, although it's a bit complex when one really picks things apart. Anyway, point being, yeah that's fair enough, I respect that you are an equal-opportunity hater in this respect.
My friends, I should note, generally have much more similar beliefs to me than they do to you, and there have been a number of occasions where they've attested that my advice on this sort of subject and my assistance with rituals and such has been helpful. That's good enough for me, bluntly.
Because of personal experiences I have had that I find to be extremely compelling. Obviously if I explained them to you you'd just blame them on psychosis or delusions, as that is the atheistic framework for such experiences, but I did not find such an interpretation of the events satisfactory.
You do realize this is the worst sort of reddit atheist behavior? I'm perfectly fine with criticizing hegemonic religion, but your immediate impulse upon seeing someone talk about practicing magic - a sure signifier, at least in the western context, of engagement in some form of non hegemonic religion - is to immediately jump to an accusatory 'you know that's fake, right?'. Really?
Would you react like this to someone saying they prayed and they didn't like influencers who exploited the idea of prayer for money?
And to give you an answer to your question that may fit with your understanding of the world:
If we accept that 'all magic is fake' then at least someone like me is, for its own sake and those of it's friends if requested, actually doing something with genuine intention to help.
These Etsy hucksters are doing nothing with the intent to make money.
Yeah as amusing as they are they're very exploitative. Such is the long tradition of Occult themed confidence scams going back thousands of years.
I engage in magical practice myself and would be happy to see these Etsy Witch types taken down, finally. There's always going to be 'magic' scams but the Etsy Witch phenomenon is so open and blatant it's particularly predatory and doesn't exactly help the reputation of actual genuine Occultists/Neopagans/whatever.
I think it is entirely reasonable to think that a Democratic administration would not be escalating this hard, this quickly. This is insane and terrifying on a level beyond anything the government has ever done with trans people, in recent memory.
Yeah, they were still gonna shift into a transphobic direction - but that would've taken a much longer time, and personally I value even months before oppression escalates, and I honestly don't know if they would've ever gone this far. I think at worst it would've ended up like Labour transphobia in the UK, this is beyond even that by a significant margin and presents a severe material threat to every trans person in the country.
Maybe it'll be better that it escalates this much this fast - maybe it'll be too much too soon and they're forced to back off on trans issues, whereas with the Democrats maybe it could've been slipped through gradually as 'normal' Maybe. That's not a certainty, I can't blame anyone for wanting fascistic oppression to be enacted slower. Especially being one of their first targets, I am savoring every single day without some kind of escalation.
Yeah, it's really fucking annoying and yet typical. I've never really known gay men to act in any other way, honestly.
Might just be because of my age/time spent in the queer community - I would suspect that in many ways younger gay men who have grown up with much much more social acceptance may actually be WORSE about this then ones who are even 10~ years older.
That said from what I've read gay men have never treated trans women particularly well, as a trend. Unexamined misogyny and in particular transmisogyny seems to have been an issue even in the worst stages of homophobic oppression. Lesbians have always been much better about that stuff, despite the cultural prominence of TERF lesbians.
The amount of times I've had a gay man pull out that condescending 'we' when discussing specifically transfem issues is FAR too many, yeah.
Thank you very much!!!!!!!! 
Thank you for the support, for the record. Figures he was a gay guy - I've seen this sort of behavior from supposed ally gay men way too many times.
I think being gay and subject to homophobia makes a lot of them forget that they are still capable of being misogynistic and acting in a patriarchal manner, and especially still capable of being transmisogynistic, to put it politely.
This seems entirely reasonable to me, I expected WAY more exaggerated. I walk like this naturally because of how my center of gravity and muscles end up working out.
If one is attempting to showcase graceful, smooth movement, then I think this is a reasonable enough walk cycle to design the robot with, it's quite impressive in that regard.