There's a relevant bit in The Player of Games from The Culture series. It purports that the book you're reading is actually translated from the original Marain (in-universe language), and has been adapted suitably:

Still with me?

Little textual note for you here (bear with me).

Those of you unfortunate enough not to be reading or hearing this in Marain may well be using a language without the requisite number or type of personal pronouns, so I'd better explain that bit of the translation.

Marain, the Culture's quintessentially wonderful language (so the Culture will tell you), has, as any schoolkid knows, one personal pronoun to cover females, males, in-betweens, neuters, children, drones, Minds, other sentient machines, and every life-form capable of scraping together anything remotely resembling a nervous system and the rudiments of language (or a good excuse for not having either). Naturally, there are ways of specifying a person's sex in Marain, but they're not used in everyday conversation; in the archetypal language-as-moral-weapon-and-proud-of-it, the message is that it's brains that matter, kids; gonads are hardly worth making a distinction over.

So, in what follows, Gurgeh is quite happily thinking about the Azadians just as he'd think about any other (see list above)… But what of you, O unlucky, possibly brutish, probably ephemeral and undoubtedly disadvantaged citizen of some unCultured society, especially those unfairly (and the Azadians would say under-) endowed with only the mean number of genders?!

How shall we refer to the triumvirate of Azadian sexes without resorting to funny-looking alien terms or gratingly awkward phrases not-words?

…. Rest at ease; I have chosen to use the natural and obvious pronouns for male and female, and to represent the intermediates - or apices - with whatever pronominal term best indicates their place in their society, relative to the existing sexual power-balance of yours. In other words, the precise translation depends on whether your own civilisation (for let us err on the side of terminological generosity) is male or female dominated.

(Those which can fairly claim to be neither will of course have their own suitable term.)

Anyway, enough of that.

Kind of a combination of skull and open mouth emojis

Some background on this comic:

Transcript:

Another example of when a cartoon's intent was lost on a lot of people. Very simply, I just meant that we all look a little longer and harder at things that fall upon our particular interests.

Interestingly, different in The Complete Far Side:

Love this strip and still quote it!

I think the joke is that the vibrator is being recommended for use by not the person with hysteria. Something like:

Person: Vet, my pet bird won't stop screeching!

Vet: Here's some tylenol

Person: But birds can't have tylenol

Vet: It's not for the bird

Note, I have no idea if birds can have tylenol or not, just an example. The humor comes from subverted expectations around who the doctor is recommending remedies for. It's not a great joke, but I don't think it was meant to be specifically gendered.

You might be interested in browsing through this site:

https://projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/

It talks about a lot of sci fi tropes from a hard science perspective, and goes over FTL specifically:

https://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/fasterlight.php

It's kind of a downer site in some respects because it does a lot of "here's why your favorite sci fi series is unrealistic", but in that discussion there's a lot of looking at interesting tropes and concepts. There's also a good explainer for FTL specifically here:

https://www.physicsmatt.com/blog/2016/8/25/why-ftl-implies-time-travel

Not really sure. "This is X, where the magic happens" is a phrase you hear during a tour, but it's not really clear why he's doing a tour of his house like that.

You think the doctor's being old-fashioned and diagnosing hysteria, but he's actually recommending the vibrator as stress relief to the husband instead of the wife.

No worries, let me know if you see it again. It might be temporary, or accidentally introduced during migration. Either way, thanks for the heads up (even if it took me a bit to get upheaded)

Are you thinking it's a normal-sized shoe, shown from the perspective of near the viewer? I interpreted it as a giant shoe, aimed at the wolf.

If anyone's wondering why:

>> 0.000005
0.000005

>> 0.0000005
5e-7