From what I’ve heard about the upcoming arc, I’m glad they’ve done it this way. Although S2 is shorter than expected, I’ve heard a lot of good things from manga readers about how well these episodes have fleshed out what, for many, was a rather forgettable string of chapters.

When I wanted to outsource my imagination when telling my little brother bedtime stories, I just told half remembered Greek myths ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

There are plenty of Israelis within Israel who are opposed to Israel’s war crimes and other crimes against humanity. If you doubt this, I recommend checking out the journalistic outlet +972, which has an editorial team of both Israelis and Palestinians, and have been speaking out against the Israeli state since 2010. They’ve written at length about how hard it is to operate within Israel when journalism such as theirs is heavily suppressed, but much of their work is also available in Hebrew, because they aren’t just writing for an international audience

There is a limit to what people are able to understand without direct lived experience though. I agree that we shouldn’t shy away from educating people — in saying that, I hold my experience as a cis person who learned about gender by being in community with trans people close to my heart. However, although I can “simulate” gender dysphoria by imagining how I would feel if living as a man (something I have reflected on a couple of times due to experiencing misogyny as a woman in science), it can’t give me the perspective of someone who had grown up experiencing it, for example.

I think there’s a balance to be struck, where we can educate and explain things to people, but we must also not expect that this will always be possible. It’s okay to sometimes shrug and say “I don’t get it, but I don’t need to”. Through understanding and internalising this, we can leverage the power of relevant situated perspectives.

To give an analogy, most of my scientific expertise is in biochemistry, and I don’t know tons about most topics in climate science. Having a background in the sciences means that I’m probably more able to quickly parse the scientific literature than most interested laypeople, but this barely scratches the surface on some incredibly complex topics. However, it’s not necessary for me to understand all of this in order for me to be able to understand where my expertise fits into the big picture (and when I would be wise to take a step back and yield the stage to someone who knows more than me)

To some extent, I agree. However, making up new words and terms can be the beginning of the “social” part of the social construct. For instance, part of why I’m so attached to “bisexual” as a label rather than terms like pansexual is that learning of bisexuality was the first time I realised that it was possible to be attracted to more than one gender; previously, I had thought that because I had experienced attraction to boys, that I must be straight. This led me to not even notice the attraction I felt towards other girls until I learned that bisexuality was a thing

Smart if so. Israel’s only been able to keep up its campaign of aggression because of US support (and I’m not just talking about this most recent war), and this seems like it could help drive a wedge between Israel and the US

It sounds like you’re in the affected area. Please accept my well wishes if that is indeed the case. What’s happening right now is disgusting beyond words, and I appreciate you giving your perspective

You weren’t missing much by stopping there. I wish I had. She still doesn’t realise that she’s been a useful idiot to them all along.

Toum is so good. It forever ruined garlic mayo for me.

For anyone who doesn’t know toum is a Lebanese sauce that uses garlic as the emulsifier, rather than eggs. This means that it’s also vegan. Garlic is also a weaker emulsifier than eggs, so it’s insanely garlicky. Any vampire hunters should consider getting Lebanese food before their next hunting trip for this reason

I suppose it wasn’t all in high school. It was between the ages of 10 and 18, which would mean that it was from Year 5 to Year 13. In my country, secondary school is from year 7 to year 13; I said “in high school” because that’s when the majority of it took place

I am a freak who really enjoys linear algebra. It’s actually quite heartening to discover that even amongst my friend group of weirdos, there are still freaks

Speaking as Brit who is salty as hell at Brexit, I really enjoyed “Not Tonight”. It takes the Papers, Please mechanical framework and applies it to a new socio-economic context for some really effective satire. If you hadn’t mentioned it, then this is the one that I would have commented to add

Thanks for the recommendation about his Dev blogs — I didn’t know he had done these, and they look really cool; Papers, Please is one of my favourite games, so I’m always keen to peer behind the scenes

Here’s a link, if anyone else is interested. This might not be the specific post OP was talking about, but you’ll be able to find it from here if not

Thanks for the recommendation of Moida Mansion. I hadn’t heard of it before, but I loved Papers, Please so much that I’m already sold on trying it.

(The Papers, Please theme has been my alarm tune for the last few years. Rather impressively, I haven’t gotten sick of it yet — I suspect because every time I am woken to my haze of groggy misanthropy, it just makes me appreciate the song more, because it’s so thematically appropriate)

Interestingly, Québécois French is less likely to use loanwords like “le weekend”, preferring instead to use terms like “fin de semaine” (literally “end of the week”). In terms of vocab used, a French person is still likely to understand a Québécois French speaker (and vice versa). I can’t speak for how much impact accent has on intelligibility though

Source: English person who did 8 years of French in high school, who also has a French Canadian friend

My view is that we don’t have to accept her as one of us in order to leverage her usefulness on this matter. That is, we can continue to condemn her actions while also recognising that on this issue, we are temporarily aligned

Edit: to be clear, I am wholly in agreement with you. My comment is intended in a “yes, and…” kind of way

Remember that Rest is Resistance

Yeah, I share your unease. There have been a few times where I’ve gotten this vibe from some writing and later found out that it likely isn’t LLM generated text, but it’s always striking to me how this doesn’t ease that uncomfortable feeling — because the thing I’m actually uncomfortable about is how the prevalence of slop has made me so paranoid.

If I’m hyper vigilant about avoiding spending energy reading synthetic text, then I risk unduly dismissing something that someone put real time and energy into writing. But if I’m not cautious enough, I risk wasting my own time and energy engaging with content I’d rather ignore. It sucks to be forced into this position

To echo what the other person replying to you has said, I’m going to share with you a way of thinking about this that I find quite useful. It’s something I learned about while studying biochemistry, so it’s not intended to be applied to ideas of personal progress, but I find it a useful analogy. It might not click with you like it does me, but that’s okay — I’m sharing it in case you or someone else finds it useful.

So the background context for the diagram that I’m going to share is that when proteins are first made and need to fold up into the correct shape in order to do their job, this happens in multiple different stages usually. Because we’re talking about chemical stability here, then in this case, lower energy is better, because it means that things are more stable. This means that in contrast to the OP, where upward steps are better, in this analogy, going downhill is good.

The key concept here is the idea of a local minimum. If you’re a ball that wants to get to the lowest point possible, then a local minimum is a ditch that it’s possible to get stuck in. What can be tricky is that when you’re in it, you can’t tell that you’re in a local minimum, because all you can see is that anywhere you could go from here would be worse than where you’re at.

I don’t know how legible the drawn labels on this diagram are, but imagine you’re starting out where the pink ball is, at A. You think you’re doing pretty well, because you’re definitely in a minimum point, but you obviously can’t know the entirety of what is possible.

Then as things start to change, you start moving up the large hill to your right (the arrow labelled B), and that feels like your progress is degrading, because you’re worse off than you were at the start. But you keep trucking onwards, and finally you’re able to reach the peak of the hill, at which point you get to go “Weeeeee!” as you roll down and start making real progress again (arrow labelled C).

But before long, you reach the bottom of that ditch (purple ball labelled D), and you’re dismayed to realise that you’re in a worse position than where you started. You might wonder what’s the point of even trying, if this is the result of all your effort. But you decide to keep pushing forward and exploring what’s possible, moving up the hill labelled “E”, as depressing as it might feel to be regressing again.

After a much shorter climb this time, you’re at the top of that hill, and you get to have a much more fun slide down the arrow labelled F, finally making real progress. You end up in the position of the blue ball, labelled G. On this diagram, it’s the global minimum — the most optimal point it’s possible to be. If you were to reflect on where you have ended up compared to where you started, you’d see that you’re much better off than you were before. You’d be able to look back on all those unpleasant periods where you felt like you were getting worse and understand them as being necessary to get to where you are now.

Now, the big difference between us and proteins is that there isn’t really a global minimum for us — the world around us changes so much that even if we hypothetically find our optimum point, the landscape changes that we need to keep moving to find new optimums. But the key takeaway here is that exploration is necessary to find the global minimum.

Letting ourselves enjoy the stability of sitting in a local optimum can feel nice, but I also find it quite demoralising in a way — there have been times in my life where I have objectively been doing well in a stable kind of way, but wondering “is this is all there is, is it really worth the effort?”. And then when I try to find something new for myself, it hurts because it feels like I’m losing progress. But improving things for ourselves often requires periods of “regression”, even if sometimes that involves realising “okay, I’ve explored much of the available landscape and it appears that my starting point was as close to a global minimum as I’m likely to find for now”.

I made a gift for a new partner this weekend — it was an origami tesselation. I use translucent paper for them, so they look really cool if you stick them on your window. It felt like a safe gift because it was functionally free, and it also doesn’t take up space