untitled

sometimes I watch tv and need somewhere to emote about it. sometimes I'm just in it for the shitposts. also embroidery! if you want to see every show I've ever been to: https://ticketstubs-and-pits.tumblr.com

[thundergrace]

WOW I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS IS MY FAVORITE TELEVISION SERIES OF ALL TIME (it's not out yet)

[probuccalfat]

i still believe we should let kesha gut dr luke on stage with a longsword or a greatsword whichever one she prefers

[podcastwizard]

you don’t realize how important lunch is until you’re wandering around thinking about how unloveable and untalented and uniquely cursed you are and then it’s 4pm and you finally eat lunch and you go Oh. oh right.

[podcastwizard]

lot of people commenting on this post like "who eats lunch at 4pm that's a terrible time to eat lunch" yes. that is the point. 4pm lunch is inadvisable. 4pm lunch is not the ideal. 4pm lunch makes the mind demons real.

[pollsforadults]

You get transported into the universe of the last media you consumed. How are you doing?

This is better than my real life

I'm doing well

I'm doing fine

I'm not having a good time

I'm absolutely cooked

There is nothing different about this universe and my own

Voting ended onMay 29

[lionofchaeronea]

If anyone's feeling sad today, here's a newly discovered species of octopus. Found in the waters off the Galapagos Islands, this little critter can fit in the palm of your hand.

[antislice]

see also: this artist rendition from a guy i follow

S.S. Julian (@octopolis.bsky.social)

Initial study of our adorable new Ecuadorian octopus 🐙🇪🇨 microeledone galapagensis #sciart

[twiststreet]

She got the idea for the study while walking with her advisor at Stanford to discuss her thesis topic, and the paper she eventually published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology in 2014 is sharp enough that it should have ended the seated meeting on the day it came out.

She ran 4 experiments on 176 people. Same person tested twice. Once sitting, once walking. The creativity tasks were the standard ones psychologists have used for decades to measure how good a brain is at generating novel useful ideas.

81% of participants in the first experiment produced more creative ideas while walking than while sitting. In the second experiment, 88%. In the third, 100%. Every single person walked into a more creative version of themselves. On average, people generated 60% more novel useful ideas the moment their legs started moving.

The skeptical question is the obvious one. Maybe it was the fresh air. Maybe it was the scenery passing by. Maybe it was the change of environment doing the work, not the walking itself.

Oppezzo killed every one of those explanations with one experimental decision. She put people on a treadmill facing a blank wall. No scenery. No fresh air. No environmental change. Just legs moving in place while staring at white drywall. The 60% boost held.

Then she ran the experiment that closed the case completely. She took participants outside in two conditions. Half of them walked through a Stanford courtyard. The other half were pushed through the exact same courtyard in a wheelchair. Same outdoor stimulation. Same scenery passing at the same speed. The only difference was whether the legs were moving.

The walkers produced dramatically more novel high-quality ideas than the wheelchair group. The outdoors did almost nothing on its own. The walking did everything.

She also tested the opposite kind of thinking. Convergent thinking. The kind where there is one right answer and you have to narrow down to it. Word puzzles where 3 words share a hidden fourth word that connects them. The seated participants did slightly better on these. Walkers got slightly worse.

Walking is not a general intelligence enhancer. It does one specific thing. It opens up the divergent search inside your brain. The part that generates options. The part that produces unexpected connections. The part that takes a problem and finds five ways into it instead of one.

When you need to converge on the single right answer, sit down. When you need to find the answer in the first place, get up.

The mechanism is now well understood. Walking selectively activates what neuroscientists call the default mode network, the system inside your brain that runs when you are not consciously focused on anything. The DMN is where mind-wandering happens. Where memories cross-reference each other. Where ideas that have been sitting in separate folders inside your head finally bump into each other.

When you sit at a desk and force yourself to concentrate, you suppress the DMN. When you walk at a natural pace, the executive part of your brain gets just busy enough handling the walking that the DMN comes online and starts doing the work that focus was blocking.

The most useful finding in the entire paper is the one almost nobody quotes. The boost did not turn off the moment people stopped walking. Participants who walked first and then sat back down stayed elevated. Their next round of seated creativity work was still significantly better than people who had been sitting the whole time. The rest lingered for at least several minutes after the legs stopped moving.

You do not need to do creative work while walking. You need to walk before the creative work. The brain holds the state.

Edited down a long tweet. (x)

[starrieslight]

Here's the link to the actual paper, in case someone wants to read the whole thing

[apolladay]

Before you are two magic buttons. Button A: you will never have to clean your kitchen again (dishes are automatically done; floor swept and mopped; etc). Button B: you will never have to clean your bathroom again (toilet & sink & tub/shower cleaned and sanitized; etc) Which button do you push?

A

B

Voting ended onJun 3

[puppygirllaika]

Could you personally navigate a cross-country road trip, door to door, without your electronics (phone/computer/tablet/etc)?

Yes

No

Voting ended onMay 29

[cheaphalloweencostume]

this ad has me so fucked up i can’t even decide what to be tired of

[trans-girl-nausicaa]

[yesornopolls]

Have you had a hot beverage today?

Have you had a hot beverage today?

Yes

No

Voting ended onMay 28

[heycallmered]

people will really come into kink spaces and say you can't forcefem women like there wasn't a feature length movie about an elderly gay man forcefemming a woman as part of scheme to thwart an elaborate assassination attempt before the killer even determined their target

[llama2237]

What... What movie is this.

[heycallmered]

[heycallmered]

ain't no way in hell this post even breaks 500

[marmoset-marmoset]

i was trying so hard to remember the nonexistent assassination subplot in My Fair Lady

[theunsubtleknife]

Sci-fi short stories are so efficient; they take 15 minutes to read and then you think about them for the next 5 years

[bonediggercharleston]

Hey guys, what if *puts the most horrifying mindblowing concept into your head with about 15 pages*

[broken-horn-of-equius]

[leothil]

Oliver: don't call Buck a dad! He's just fostering for now! We don't know what the future holds or how it will look for him, but there are some really big questions that should be answered, like what happened to Theo's other family and why is Buck the one taking care of him? I also think maybe Buck looked too happy there at the end. But Tim told me Buck would probably have to lean on Eddie and I imagine he'd have to be a big part of that, helping and supporting Buck and Theo.

Ryan: I don't think Eddie has ever even considered another option with Buck, you can't see what you can't see, you know? But Buck and Eddie's relationship continues to evolve, and Eddie cares about him in a very very deep way. To commit to one side might be limiting the tension from a writer perspective. Buck will be leaning on Eddie in trying to understand all this though.

So in summary...

Oliver: Tim buddiebaited me so I accepted the child storyline for now

Ryan: Eddie loves Buck but Tim loves buddiebaiting more for now

(X)(X)(X)(X)

[unforth]

how long have you had the houseplant you've had the longest?

I have no houseplants

under 6 months

6 months to 1 year

1 year old

2 years old

3 years old

4 years old

5 years old

6 to 10 years old

11 to 15 years old

16 to 20 years old

20+ years old

Voting ended onMay 14

All the people reblogging the plant poll from me like "yes I'm great at plants I've had this one for three years" and meanwhile I'm over here and the majority of my plants are over 10 and a like at least 4 are over 15 so here have a poll. I have a Christmas cactus, currently blooming, that's a cut of a friend's that I got 21 years ago, hers was from a cut of her parents, idek when the parents was from, that plant is probably 40 at least but even just my cutting is old enough to vote.

[sooperlative]

I wanted to come back to this post now that donor baby’s (fondly referred to as Unethically Sourced White Baby, or USWB, by the server I’m in) return has occurred, but haven’t be certain on how to formulate my response. I tried. So, in a (long) defence of USWB:

I think, as a donor conceived person, that the discourse regarding the TheoandBuck of it all so far is just missing some context? People may just not know what it’s like to be donor conceived and/or adopted, have forgotten how Hen’s family is constructed, and/or be ignorant to the vast amount of ethical issues surrounding sperm- and egg-donation. That’s fine. I’ve just been seeing a lot of accusations of bio-essentialism and found family dismissal (which the show doesn’t do), and personality retconning (the behaviour is consistent with the plot’s introduction in season 6) all to give Buck a baby, and I’m not sure I agree.

I viewed a lot of Connor and Kameron’s behaviour during the dinner, in addition to their reasoning for seeking out Buck for help in season 6, as pointing to Theo being an attempt at a designer baby. Sperm- and egg-donation exists in a precarious position that can shift into eugenics rather easily: though people with genetically hereditary diseases are often barred from donating for health reasons, more and more people are pointing out that refusing donations based on mental disorders may be related to the eugenics (and thus, creation of ‘designer babies’) driving the industry, and I’m inclined to agree. Connor and Kameron largely didn’t seem to be asking for help in handling Theo (other than the “Could we speak to your mother?” comment), and instead sought out someone to blame. It didn’t come from my side of the gene pool, you better not be a criminal, he’s absolutely your kid, we’ve visited a number of professionals and none of their suggestions have helped and he might be [said ominously] Diagnosed with Something so we must ask if you are too and withheld it from us.

It’s no secret at this point that disorders like ADHD and ASD may be hereditary. It’s also no secret that it doesn’t have to be: realistically, Theo could’ve exhibited the same behaviours and symptoms if Connor had been his biological father. There’s fine line between ‘it’s okay if you’d rather your child didn’t have this’ and ‘it’s okay to pick and choose genetics to have The Best Child’: you cannot truly remove ‘a person with autism/ADHD shouldn’t donate sperm or eggs’ from eugenics, and you especially cannot disregard the optics of Connor and Kameron specifically choosing a white man to donate when Connor isn’t white.

Prospective parents should, of course, be able to make an informed decision, but as my mum put it: Buck’s behaviour, to Buck, does not include symptoms of ADHD. It’s just his behaviour. He helped them make an informed decision with the information he himself could provide, based on the questions he was asked. To go to his house and essentially blame his DNA for Theo’s behaviour (great parts of which are not solely caused by undiagnosed ADHD, because there is such thing as permissive parenting, especially if none of the four experts they consulted could come up with even slightly helpful solutions and methods) is very plainly weird. Any parent worth their salt of a donor conceived person wouldn’t blame all their child’s ‘bad’ behaviour on genetics. They’d be removing their own hand in raising the child. That, specifically, would be bio-essentialist.

The show doesn’t have a habit of using that line of thinking. Mara and Denny are not biologically related to Hen and Karen, but there’s no doubt they’re not their kids. The fandom keeps comparing Chris’ behaviour to Buck’s, Buck’s to Bobby’s, May and Harry’s to Bobby’s, and nothing is written accidentally. The show itself even has suggested Buck’s impulsive streak comes from his parents’ emotional neglect: the flashbacks of Buck Begins are steeped in the idea that he was desperate to receive their attention, and getting hurt was the only way he could.

I could go on like this. Had Bobby’s father not been an alcoholic, Bobby likely would not have drunk the whiskey after his death to connect with him. Had Ramon Diaz not had a job that had him away from home for such long stretches of time, Eddie likely wouldn’t have been so insistent on what a father’s role is in a family, and might not have joined the army after Shannon got pregnant. You’re coloured by your environment and the way you grew up, not just by your genetics. My own behaviour is most similar to that of my legal father’s: nurture, not nature.

Of course I’m not ignorant to the show’s potential implication that Buck may be better at handling Theo because they’re related—or at least, because he understands his own mind and behaviours, and as such would understand Theo’s. But then he wasn’t shown to be better at handling Theo. He was shown to be somewhat capable handling him whilst babysitting, which is different from parenting: when he can’t give Theo all of his attention, Theo almost sets his kitchen on fire.

Disliking this storyline doesn’t mean it’s inherently an amoral depiction of something, much like enjoying a storyline doesn’t mean it’s inherently a good portrayal. It ultimately exists in a grey area in a reasonably progressive show that, from time to time, proves itself as one of the more democrat-aligned shows of American procedurals. But as someone donor conceived, I simply don’t see this storyline as particularly problematic, as Buck doesn’t even want to be Theo’s parent—he’ll (perhaps only initially) be a foster parent at most, underlined by the show (and Buck himself) differentiating between ‘Buck’ and ‘next of kin’. And if anyone could encourage Buck to foster, it would be Eddie, as Eddie’s been concerned with people falling through the cracks of the safety net the entirety of season 9. That would be the found family you’re looking for: choosing to help and to love.

So before you write this storyline off as fridging, bio-essentialist, or out of character, please remember that the show has a habit of relating a child’s behaviour to how they’ve been parented. Remember that Buck doesn’t consider himself to be Theo’s dad. And remember that in season 6, Connor and Kameron were pushy, stepped over boundaries, and chose Buck because he was Connor’s tall, handsome, heroic, (white), friend without a criminal background. Their behaviour hasn’t been retconned since; it’s just been built upon. If that means some viewers therefore see Buck of all characters as the better option, then so be it.

[antislice]

[bloodsoakedbuckley]

eddie sending his parents a replacement son.... hes free. girl who is going to be okay!!!!