This is an area where failure is not a binary. As bad as things are now, it can always get worse. The more people give up, the worse things will become.

That makes sense. Although for what it’s worth, I don’t recall having any problems with Deep Rock Galactic, so whatever issues you had with that may be specific to your particular set up

Something I laugh at myself for is that before I realised I was actually bisexual, I did consider myself to be faking it. I was a teenager who had heavily internalised the male gaze, and set too much of my self worth according to the attention I got from the opposite sex (which was not very much — I was an undiagnosed autistic with bad anxiety). I was aware of the trope (mostly in media) of (usually implicitly straight) women making out with other women to be titillating to men. I concluded that this is totally something that I would do, when I got to university.

I later heard about how problematic this trope is, and felt really guilty because even though I hadn’t participated in it actively, I felt like I was contributing to the ambient societal biphobia. I later learned that many straight women would not enjoy making out with another woman, even if it was to get male attention. In hindsight, I think perhaps that it was in fact, me who was titillated by the idea of me making out with another woman (but it took me a while of digging through internalised biases to realise this)

It always makes me laugh when animals sit like this. It also makes me envious

This is going to be a pretty fast and loose definition of blog, but I like sharing cool stuff. Some of these links will link to a particular post on that blog — this is if there’s a particular post I really like there, or what first led me to that blog.

“A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry” by Historian Brett Devereux. https://acoup.blog/2019/05/10/collections-the-siege-of-gondor/ He’s especially good at military history, which is why I linked to his series on the Siege of Gondor from Lord of the Rings. I also enjoy his series on pop-culture misconceptions around Sparta

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/ It’s a blog by the Statistician Andrew Gelman (and others who guest write). This is one of the more academic ones, so only likely to be fun if you’re a particular kind of nerd

https://gsllcblog.com/2019/08/12/part1statblocks/ Tabletop roleplaying games and law crossover blog

https://scatter.wordpress.com/2022/01/30/sex-as-a-social-construct/ Sociology blog. Quite academic, but still fun. Found it through Andrew Gelman’s blog above

https://www.bookandsword.com/2022/04/16/science-as-verified-trust/

https://www.edwinwenink.xyz/etc/web_paleontology/ Unsure if this site is a blog, but certainly this post has many links to old-school web pages that are cool

https://gretzuni.com/ Dense philosophy stuff about technology. This person is an academic. N.b. I am a scientist, not a philosopher, so I am less good at vetting philosophy takes. I enjoy it though

https://explorationsofstyle.com/2011/02/09/reverse-outlines/ Blog by an academic who specialises in teaching writing to university students. I like her stuff.

https://www.bookandsword.com/2022/04/16/science-as-verified-trust/ I think this person is a historian too

https://thetechbubble.substack.com/p/the-phony-comforts-of-useful-idiots Blog by economist Edward Ongweso Jr.

https://www.cantgetmuchhigher.com/ Blog about “the intersection of music and data”. Also has a podcast.

https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/ This post went viral last year. Some people don’t like this tone of writing, but I found it quite cathartic, and have enjoyed other posts from the blog

https://datacolada.org/ “Thinking about evidence, and vice versa”. These guys do a lot of cool stuff on science methodology, like meta-analyses. They were so good at their job that they got sued. I really like them

https://karl-voit.at/ Blog about personal computing information systems. This guy was the one who first piqued my interest about Emacs a bunch of years ago (Emacs is a very old text editor with an insane amount of customisability and an even more insane learning curve)

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/essays/ “Web dev at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland”

https://meaningness.com/ It’s kind of blog that some would call pretentious as hell, but I like its vibe

https://wordsmith.social/elilla/deep-in-mordor-where-the-shadows-lie-dystopian-stories-of-my-time-as-a-googler There’s not too many other posts on this blog, but I really enjoyed this one

https://theluddite.org/ “An anti-capitalist tech blog”

https://blog.thea.codes/winterblooms-tech-stack/ Cool resources on DIY music synthesisers

https://www.math3ma.com/blog/what-is-category-theory-anyway Maths! Especially category theory. The difficulty ranges from “pretty darn accessible” to stuff that’s way above my level. I like the pretty diagrams though.

Okay, that’s all that are coming to mind right now

Out of curiosity, what games? I’m not going to throw unsolicited advice at you — I’m just wondering because all of my games have been astoundingly easy to get working on Linux.

Thanks for sharing this. I’ve still got quite a few chapters to go, but I wanted to comment this thought before I forget it: it’s so incredibly striking how powerful the small acts of kindness are. I’ve cried more at the little gestures of kindness than at all the cruelty.

You should almost certainly go to a tailor. It makes a world of difference if “professional” is your goal. It can be tricky to find a good one, but when you do, it’s incredible. It can be surprisingly cheap too (although building a wardrobe that has high quality piece that are worth tailoring can be quite expensive. This is best done gradually)

I think that this is especially true if you’re on the larger side, because a greater amount of body mass means that qualitative differences in where we store that mass will be more apparent.

Something I liked about going to a tailor is I could show them clothes that I liked versus ones I didn’t (or explain what had been bothering me about certain clothes). They were able to suggest alternatives.

Good recommendation. I tend to be most comfortable rolling up sleeves to my forearm, but I wonder whether this might also help.

Do you have a favourite pair of cufflinks?

Despite not owning one, I really like the Steam Deck because I suspect it has made my transition to Linux far smoother (for a while, I dual booted because I was fearful that gaming on Linux would be difficult.)

I don’t know too much about this area, but I do know that this kind of task involves a bunch of complex processing in the brain. The more “Mechanical” aspects of vision could be described as visual acuity (sharpness of vision). However, gauging whether something is wonky would be a visual discrimination task, which involves more work by the brain. It’s an area in which one’s skill can be improved through learning, and some occupations have a lower discrimination threshold (I e. They can detect smaller differences).

Thanks for sharing this. I’d heard of this before, but being reminded of it bolstered my spirits a little.

Damn, that’s pretty dangerous, right?

I don’t think we’re awful as a whole. To some extent, I need to believe this, in order to avoid breaking down and killing myself. However, I do think it counts for something that there are so many people who want humans to be better, and are doing what they can. I think that resigning oneself to humans being awful will lead to a world with more awfulness.

That was wonderful, thank you for sharing. When it’s done well, I really enjoy this style of prose.

“I’m looking for a role where I can make good use of the skills I bring to the table” (because implicitly, the 299 places that didn’t email back don’t have a role where you can fit in and be useful (even if that’s only true in the sense that they didn’t hire you so therefore you can’t contribute there))

Apparently the average radius of the Earth at its equator is 6,378,000m. This means that in a day, someone sitting on a couch at the equator would travel (2 * \pi * 6378,000)m, which equals 40053840m. There are around 86,400 seconds in a day, so the equatorial couch sitter travels at 464m/s (rounded to 3s.f). That’s 1040mph.

I think the average walking speed is 3pmh. Amusingly, the mph figure I calculated above is 1037 if rounded to 4s.f. rather than 3, so the speed difference between the walker and a couch sitter is literally a rounding error.

The conclusion here is something that everyone here already knew before I wrote this comment: it’s hard to make any sense of individual human health progress if we try to think of it on a planetary scale.

I know someone whose daughter is a particularly passionate teenager who enjoys going to protests. My friend long ago acknowledged the limits of forbidding his daughter from going to these things, and instead tends to go with her to protests. This openness has also had the beneficial side effect of his daughter trusting him more when he says “No, this one is too dangerous. I don’t feel comfortable with you going, even with me”. Despite trying to stay away from anything too dicey, I know there have been instances where things have escalated quicker than expected and they’ve been caught in the fray.

These guys aren’t American, so it isn’t directly relevant here, but my point is that someone being there with their child isn’t too outlandish.

My cat would sometimes act as if she was anxious for our wellbeing while we were eating (this started after she surreptitiously tasted some food that she clearly did not enjoy the taste of.)

“if you can accurately call it “scraping” then it’s always fair use.”

I think you make some compelling points overall, but fair use has always been more complex than this. The intent is taken into account when evaluating whether something is fair use, but so is the actual impact — “fair use” is a designation applied to the overall situation, not to any singular factors (so a stated purpose can’t be fair use)