Alex, Sweetheart of the Internet

Get it? Like an atom smasher, except a name. Not my name though, I'm Alex. 38 year old they/he in Philly.

[adamsmasher]

[thickness-protection-program]

Trump at the G7 summit surrounded by seemingly competent world leaders

[mxtomituck]

Big Bird, sweetie, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry that an ugly-ass bitch like this would even say that. Oh, my God.

[elbiotipo]

More than "here in the Southern Hemisphere we have inverted seasons :)" thing, which is TECHNICALLY true, I would go a step further and encourage to think about that "much of the world does not exactly has a spring-summer-fall-winter season sequence as they show in cartoons"

[paperdragonsong]

I will scream about this to anyone who listens forever. AUSTRALIA DOES NOT HAVE "ENGLISH SEASONS BUT BACKWARDS" and the insistence that it does creates a massive layer of alienation from the natural world.

I never really realised how much difference it makes until I went to England and realised that here the change of seasons is an obvious, visible, physical change in the world. Like, everything REALLY IS orange and foggy in autumn! In spring there are flowers EVERYWHERE, so much more than any other season, and the trees really do have all blossom and no leaves. Even if it doesn't snow, in winter there's frost all the time and the trees are bare and the sky is visibly greyer all the time. You don't need to be told "this date is the first day of spring", you can SEE IT (although this is getting way messier and less precise due to climate change).

By contrast, most places in Australia the seasons we're taught feel like arbitrary categories - and is it any surprise considering they're colonial constructs? Orange-leaved autumn and blossom-covered spring is a cartoon stereotype with no relevance on a continent where ALL NATIVE TREES ARE EVERGREEN!! Snowy winters are a joke in the desert, and even sunny summers don't ring particularly true considering that much of the country is in the tropics, where summer means monsoons - not that I've ever seen the concept that WE HAVE A MONSOON SEASON taught at an Australian school.

Most Indigenous nations around Australia had six or more seasons, revolving around wet and dry times as much as hot and cold, and marked by the appearances of certain native animals and flowers. Schools need to start teaching the real seasons, and explaining that climate cycles are too complex to generalise globally, or else we will keep raising generations who view the natural world as hostile and unpredictable and climate predictions as generally irrelevent and frequently wrong - and I'm sure I don't need to spell out why that's a problem in the era of climate crisis.

[tiredtransgal]

i want to add that 40% of the world's population lives in the tropics, and the 4 season model just doesn't make much sense for a lot of places in there. usually it's just the wet season/monsoon season and the dry season. it's often hot year round.

the 4 season model as you and i know it is a european invention, though 4 season models aren't unique to europe! most notably china has the same type of season subdivision.

in general the way humans define seasons is largely subjective and varies across cultures. the one you were taught is not at all universal!

[chaotic-archaeologist]

BREAKING NEWS: screenshots from your phone not an appropriate format for submitting work in college classes.

[json-derulo]

my partner was a TA for an intro-to-subject course in grad school. finals week rolls around and the students are required to submit this big module assignment they've had like a month to do for a decent chunk of their grade. if you've submitted everything, you'll see a summary screen with a star beside each module name showing it's been completed.

an hour before the assignment deadline, he receives an email from a student claiming they completed the assignment, but the system is not allowing them to submit. there's an image attached to the email. partner goes to open what he assumes is a screenshot of that summary page.

instead, he sees that the student has taken a photo of their laptop from about 2 feet away, with that page open. strange, but it wouldn't be the first time a college freshman has lacked the tech literacy to take a screenshot. he almost doesn't look twice at it, but he realizes something about it just feels a little bit...off. so he zooms in.

the student had CUT STARS OUT OF CONSTRUCTION PAPER and TAPED THEM TO THEIR LAPTOP SCREEN BESIDE EACH MODULE NAME. you could see where they actually had completed the first couple of modules, but the stars for all the subsequent ones were like, double the size of the first two and exactly as uneven/irregular as you'd expect if you were freehanding them with scissors.

probably would've been quicker and easier to just photoshop them in but no, this student took a refreshingly creative, arts-and-crafts approach to getting an academic misconduct case

[chaotic-archaeologist]

The one thing I will say for AI is that it's made me much more appreciative of homebrewed bullshit

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[parkchanwoohoo]

[depsidase]

[siliceous-ooze]

when u discover a longtime mutual has a nice dick >>>>>>>

[pigonaphone]

Open to discovery

[indeedgoodman]

[rabbitindisguise]

Me, before I saw this: old timey dancing in cartoons has to be over-exaggerated for effect

Me, now: old timey dancing in cartoons had to be toned down to promote a sense of realism because they were too good at it

[softichill]

I think abt this tiktok all the time

[thesadcyborg9million]

Diversity hire bryson ur absolutely slaying

[cannibalchicken]

[icedoatmilkmatcha-deactivated20]

also

[yeahokayillreblogthat]

Yeah okay Ill reblog that!

[aggressivelybicaptainamerica]

Not a scholar at first, but the guy who wrote Jaws hated that people used it to justify hating sharks so much he dedicated the rest of his life to shark research and advocacy.

[ruffboi-mags]

The woman who popularized gender reveals wishes she hadn't, afaik.

[fall1ngfeather]

(afaik- the woman who popularized gender reveals did so because she had a long history of miscarriages. The reveal was a celebration of the fact that one of her pregnancies had gotten far enough that there WAS a physical sex to reveal. It was never intended to be like... *gestures at modern gender reveals* all that. That same kid later came out as trans and yes, the family had a second gender reveal for that lol.)

[p00pym00py]

This whole thread is so beautiful to me that I can explain it

[my-random-fandoms]

[pouncequick]

K-Cup coffee pod creator wishes he'd never thought of them | CBC News

The man who invented the K-Cup coffee pod almost 20 years ago says he regrets doing so and can't understand the popularity of the products t

[jackironsides]

L. David Mech, who popularised the idea that there were 'alpha' and 'beta' wolves in his 1970 book The Wolf, has spent the rest of his career trying to debunk this. (The original studies were done on captive wolves, and thus didn't simulate an accurate model of wolf pack dynamics.)

Is the Alpha Wolf Idea a Myth?

The idea that wolf packs are led by a merciless dictator, or alpha wolf, comes from old studies of captive wolves. In the wild, wolf packs a

In the wild, researchers have found that most wolf packs are simply families, led by a breeding pair, and bloody duels for supremacy are rare.

“What would be the value of calling a human father the alpha male?” says L. David Mech, a senior research scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, who has studied wolf packs in the wild for decades. “He’s just the father of the family. And that’s exactly the way it is with wolves.”

[logicoso]

to be fair, the Mall one is mostly shitty because one America: it's neither economically feasible nor visually attractive if the only version of Mall is a box you put at the edge of town. putting that in the middle of a city with good walkability and public transport makes Malls pretty neat (look up Shopping City Süd, that one mostly lives off the train track that goes directly into the heart of Vienna, and Donaucity and Westfield Donauzentrum, all of those work)

and for two: because aesthetics aren't as important as economic efficiency, most of them are just blocks. this can be redeemed if public investment also goes toward the look of that huge building. it can turn into a nice landmark (The Strand Arcade in Sydney comes to mind)

[wizardelf]

[enki2]

[thebdelliumlady]

For anyone wondering, the PhD student's name is Myra Cheng.

Here's a link to an article about the study from the Stanford Report: link.

[chapscher]

Across three preregistered studies, participants interacting with sycophantic AI became more convinced of their own rightness and less willing to repair relationships. Yet at the same time, participants rated sycophantic AI models as higher quality, more trustworthy, and more desirable for future use, which may explain why this behavior has persisted despite its harmful impacts.

Myra Cheng et al. "Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence." Science 391, eaec8352 (2026).

[depsidase]

[free-my-mindd]

[summerbluelily]

New philosophy unlocked 💖

[teaboot]

Today I got to say out loud “I am recommending that we do not press charges because they apologized, nobody was hurt, and it was objectively very funny” and contractually speaking that is the absolute most I can say on the matter, but suffice it to say I am in fact living the dream

[teamrocketgender]