That’s her right arm, not left. Are we onto something here? Is the true gender divide that men want a badass left arm and women want a badass right arm?
Edit: I just checked and Noble-2 (from Halo: Reach) has their right arm as the badass prosthetic too.
It’s not about dispelling any ulterior motive. The idea of anti-monopoly enforcement actions is that if the “business ecosystem” is good and healthy, then other companies who don’t own Chrome will be able to compete with whoever owns Chrome, giving the consumer choice that people who like the free market say will reduce consumer exploitation. (If you can’t tell from my tone, I am dubious, at best, of this logic)
I read somewhere that someone’s attitude to furries is a great litmus test for how tolerant that person actually is (assuming that person isn’t a furry, of course). I’ve always found myself mildly confused by furries (and I used to be somewhat weirded out because I mainly knew of furries because a friend bought a house from drawing furry porn). Hearing the litmus test thing helped me to chill out a bunch and recognise that seeing lots of furries in and adjacent to my community was a sign of a healthy social ecosystem, so to speak
I hope the job treats you well, and you have enough time and energy for chasing your silly passions
I used to do leathercraft commissions. My best customers were LARPers ordering armour, scroll cases etc., and kinksters buying fancy collars, cuffs and harnesses. Sometimes these were the same people
Nah. Some humans saw that and thought “if we can con enough people into working 40 hours weeks, I can buy a holiday home here”
starting to write and then cancel my post.
I get what you mean, I do a lot of that myself. Although it’s unfortunate that I often find it easier to hit send when replying to internet strangers than I do when messaging my friends. I suspect it’s because online feels far lower stakes, even though my friends would be far more charitable to a poorly articulated idea than the internet would.
If it helps, I don’t think you should feel bad about cancelling unwritten messages. Maybe sometimes you don’t actually know enough to have an opinion on a topic, so refraining is the wise thing. Maybe other times, you have Thoughts, but they’re still sort of fermenting in your head and they’re not quite ready yet. Or maybe you’ve distilled your Thoughts down so that you know what message you want to convey, but you don’t think that this particular conversation is the right time or place for them (possibly due to realising you’re in conversation with someone who isn’t arguing in good faith and continuing would be unproductive). These (and more) are all valid and good reasons to not actually submit a post or comment you start writing.
The advice that I try to give myself is that we’re under enough pressure as it is without helping more on unnecessarily. Sometimes that pressure is because we have something that we desperately want to say, but it’s hard to articulate it in a way that doesn’t feel like we’re dishonouring the meaning of what we intend. That pressure is hard to counter because it’s coming from the weight of the thing we want to say, but I ease it by reasoning that the important ideas will find their own way out of our heads and into the world, if given time, and that they will still be important.
I figure that there’s an infinite array of conversations on the internet that could’ve happened but didn’t. It’d be a shame if we let the conversations that never ended up happening distract us from other conversations that we’re actually having. Which is all to say that it’s okay if you start replying to this comment and cancel it. Maybe in the next life thread, eh?
I tend to play it at my friends’ New Year holiday, which is a context where we have like, 12 different decks of playing cards to pick from, which helped with that scoring issue. Regarding the cards taking a beating, that scans with my experience — there was a sort of communal pool of cards and games during the holiday, so it was fuzzy about who owned what, there were a couple of sets of playing cards that weren’t meant to be used to play racing demons (they did seem pretty fancy).
I seem to recall that an issue we faced somewhat (even with a pretty large diversity of playing cards styles) was that some styles were harder to read than others (such as due to stylised card designs, or low contrast colour etc.). We had 3-4 decks that were equally easy to read, yet visually distinct enough for scoring, so we were good most of the time. If there were more than 4 at the table, it’d start getting trickier and people would have to start using decks that were harder to read (I.e. decks like this. We tended to rotate the decks each game, so if there were awkward decks in play, it wasn’t the same person using it each time at least. I wonder if the other issue you describe with playing cards is this contrast/readability problem that arises when having to find cards with different backs.
I got a hell of a lot smarter when I allowed myself to not have opinions on things. Like if a friend asks me if I have heard of [thing], I am nowadays much better at saying “No, I havent, tell me more” or “I’m not sure. It sounds familiar though. Remind me?”. A big part of this is being in spaces where it feels safe enough to be vulnerable in saying “I don’t know”.
Yeah, I think this is fairly common. I’m pretty good at not being overly adversarial online, but that takes me a bunch of active effort. Sometimes that means taking a big breath and moving on.
I think it’s admirable that you care about contributing through commenting; I saw a similar stat when I moved to Lemmy and I have also been more active in commenting. However, if you’re not enjoying how you’re typically engaging, perhaps a different framing could be useful: rather than (or in addition to) thinking about commenting as you contributing to the community/platform, think about it as something that you’re doing to enrich yourself. For example, sometimes when I do get into spicier discussions, it’s because I am responding to someone I disagree with, but whose points have caused me to think differently. Or maybe I am enjoying the practice in articulating my views on a complex matter. Or maybe it’s cathartic. Thinking about what I hope to gain from a discussion helps me to avoid unproductive discussions where it’s just mutual attacks.
If you can’t find a middle way, it’s also okay to not comment on things. My opinion is that we do owe a duty to the communities we inhabit, and in the online world, that might imply that it’s good to be contributing via commenting. However, informational self-care is incredibly important nowadays, and it’s so easy to become burnt out. It’s okay to not engage in behaviours that cause you harm (or aren’t encouraging you to grow in the way that you would prefer).
That game looks pretty similar to a game I know as “Racing Demons”, played with regular playing cards
Yeah, I agree. Like in this case, I’d argue that the “common sense” approach to crime is the punishment model that’s prevalent. The measures that failed are common sense when you understand how the prison system actually works, but I don’t know how common that knowledge is
I feel like I’m haunted by linear algebra because it keeps cropping up in all sorts of places
A friend of mine had a partner accidentally draw blood when he (consensually) bit them. It got infected and they needed quite serious hospital care. I suppose that counts.
“They go low, we go high” is a phrase I associate with the Obama era.
Oh, I love the vicarious enjoyment from introducing a friend to something I love. It feels like the closest I can get to re-experiencing something afresh without losing my memory. I am envious of Drag for this opportunity.
I don’t know how much the UK collectively regrets Brexit yet. I come from a heavily Leave voting area and it was depressing as hell being a part of the vote count. Leave, Leave, Leave, Remain, Leave, Leave, Remain. Now in the most recent election, Farage’s Reform party got a concerningly high vote share, especially in areas like where I come from.
I was glad to see the Tories go, but I can’t be too happy about the UK election when I consider Reform. I think back to how UKIP were like at local government level. They’d campaign on absurd promises like “we’ll slash council tax and increase public services funding. Lots of things are possible if we get rid of those fat-cat Labour councillors”. Then they’d get enough councillors that they could cause real harm to their constituents by obstructing progress; it helped their cause to make the Labour majority council look bad. They could promise the world because they knew that they were never going to get enough councillors to change much, so they could blame their utter failure to do anything useful once elected on Labour (in my area at least. Apparently the same playbook works in Conservative majority areas too)
Brexit was unambiguously a political disaster. Many of the people who voted Leave have been actively harmed and I can’t even feel any schadenfreude at them because they haven’t connected the dots there. Like, I see people having their faces eaten off by the leopards they voted for, and they’re going “this is really hurting. See, this is why we needed the leopards eating faces party”. It’s honestly heartbreaking to witness.
If I wanted an autistically over-literal answer, I’d either ask myself (or come to Lemmy)
Stochastic parrots is an excellent phrase.
To some extent, I don’t.
Which is to say that in and around my field (biochemistry), I’m pretty good at sort of “vibe checking”. In practice, this is just a subconscious version of checking that a paper is published in a legit journal, and having a sense for what kind of topics, and language is common. This isn’t useful advice though, because I acquired this skill gradually over many years.
I find it tricky in fields where I am out of element, because I am the kind of person who likes to vet information. Your question about how to identify work as peer reviewed seems simple, but is deceptively complex. The trick is in the word “peer” — who counts as a peer is where the nuance comes in. Going to reputable journals can help, but even prestigious journals aren’t exempt from publishing bullshit (and there are so many junk journals that keeping up even within one field can be hard). There are multiple levels of “peer”, and each is context dependent. For example, the bullshit detector that I’ve developed as a biochemist is most accurate and efficient within my own field, somewhat useful within science more generally, slightly useful in completely unrelated academic fields. I find the trick is in situating myself relative to the thing I’m evaluating, so I can gauge how effective my bullshit detector will be. That’s probably more about reflecting on what I know (and think I know) than it is about the piece of material I’m evaluating.
In most scenarios though, I’m not within a field where my background gives me much help, so that’s where I get lazy and have to rely on things like people’s credentials. One litmus test is to check whether the person actually has a background in what they’re talking about, e.g. if a physicist is chatting shit about biology, or a bioinformatician criticising anthropology, consider what they’re saying with extra caution. That doesn’t mean discount anyone who isn’t staying in their lane, just that it might be worthwhile looking into the topic further (and seeing who else is saying what they are, and what experts from the field are saying too).
As I get deeper into my academic career, I’ve found I’m increasingly checking a person’s credentials to get a vibe check. Like, if they’re at a university, what department are they under? Because a biochemist who is under a physics department is going to have a different angle than one from the medical research side, for example. Seeing where they have worked helps a lot.
But honestly a big part of it is that I have built up loose networks of trust. For example, I’m no statistician, but someone I respect irl referenced a blog of Andrew Gelman’s, which I now consider myself s fan of (https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/). Then from that blog, I ended up becoming a fan of this blog, which tends to be about sociology. Trusting these places doesn’t mean I take them at face value for anything they say, but having that baseline of trust there acts as a sort of first pass filter in areas I’m less familiar with, a place to start if I want to learn about a perspective that I know the rough origin of.
In the context of news, I might start to see a news outlet as trustworthy if I read something good of theirs, like this piece on 3M by ProPublica, which makes me trust other stuff they publish more.
Ultimately though, all of these are just heuristics — imperfect shortcuts for a world that’s too complex for straightforward rules. I’m acutely aware of how little spare brain space I have to check most things, so I have to get lazy and rely on shortcuts like this. In some areas, I’m lucky to have friends I can ask for their opinion, but for most things, I have to accept that I can’t fact check things thoroughly enough to feel comfortable, which means having to try holding a lot of information at arms length and not taking it as fact. That too, takes effort.
However, I got a hell of a lot smarter when I allowed myself to be more uncertain about things, which means sometimes saying “I don’t know what to make of that”, or “I think [thing] might be the case, but I don’t remember where I heard that, so I’m unsure”, or just straight up “I don’t know”. Be wary of simple and neat answers, and get used to sitting with uncertainty (especially in modern science research).