Of the Air (cele/celes)

pronouns: cele/celes

Plural. Trans{gender and species}.

We aren’t human, thank you!

Do not tell us you/y&/you&/y’all love us until we are close emotionally, nor guess at our emotions currently or in the future.

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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: July 20th, 2024

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  • For anybody having difficulty reading the text:

    Anti Acknowledgements

    There have unfortunately also been people who have been less than helpful in my journey here. I wanted to acknowledge those too, because I know I am not unique in this experience.

    No thank you to the physics study association that made me sing songs about how women couldn’t study physics without sleeping with the professor, the day I stepped into university life. No thank you to the 5th year physics student that decided to assign me a ‘stripper name’ within the first minute of meeting me in the physics coffee corner in my first year. No thank you to the technician that was responsible for onboarding me on the use of the cluster in my third year who raised his eyebrows and asked me if that meant I was some sort of “computer girl”. No thank you to the senior researcher that sent me utterly inappropriate texts after a conference, then proceeded to ‘apologise’ months later by telling me they had not been meant for me anyway so “no hard feelings remain hopefully”. And no thank you to him for attending every conference I’ve been to since. No thank you to the people who told me that it was “surprising” that I was doing a PhD since I was a girl. No thank you to the man who mistook me for a coffee lady at a conference, and after having to correct him two times that I did not work there, responded with “you should consider it”. No thank you to the researcher that asked me what I was wearing underneath my outfit during a conference. No thank you to the physicist who declared to a room full of other physicists that biologists “don’t know how to design an experiment”. No thank you to the people who have called me scary instead of strong and intimidating instead of intelligent. And finally, no thank you to the executive board of the TU Delft, whose knee-jerk reaction to being held up to a mirror about the social safety at the university, was to sue the party holding up the mirror instead of looking at the problems they highlighted.

    I wish I could tell you this has all made me stronger somehow but in reality it has only shattered my confidence. You have made me feel like I do not belong in science and I cannot forgive you for that.

    -Rachel








  • Not yet, it lacks a lot of the features Signal has and does not even have a proper ipad ui yet, nor proper profile syncing between devices.

    If it ever has these it might be useable by the masses, until then it’ll be only the interest of privacy nerds.

    Though really the most important thing is its lack of audits and a transparency report like Signal has. How can we be sure that its encryption/other security is up to standards or they don’t hand over anything to cops/courts without these two things? These are what most messengers fail at, especially open source decentralised ones to be fair.





  • We have never come across one that is as easy to use as Signal and has no problems with encryption, either that it can have its encryption turned off, it breaks easily or that it makes dubious claims with few-no audits to back them up.

    Plus the common person enjoys the fun features of Signal or other easy messengers, most decentralised messages do not have these features, are indefinitely working on them or make them not as easy to use, leading to most being uninterested in those messengers.

    We have tried most if not all of them, than most and they are definitely lacking as much as we wish they were not. Decentralised encrypted (or partially encrypted) messengers always seem to have problems whether it’s with their encryption, moderation tools, connectivity or the lack of other features.