the bayesian asian

etirabys's sideblog for bad, boring, long, low-confidence, or inanely chatty posts. Specifically created to escape neurosis about cluttering up people's dashboards with low-value content.

[etiragram]

really enjoying the Hindu spiritual discourse between these two guys

[etirabys]

I read the dump your puppy girl post for stress relief. subsequently:

me, in a troubled voice: am i the puppygirl?

81k, firmly: no. you're way too productive to be the puppygirl.

me: ok.

me a few minutes later, trying to probe my local reality for a heretofore undetected puppygirl: are you the puppygirl?...

[etiragram]

// cw if you were triggered by that essay you shouldn't read this post either

one day out: that essay has been rattling around in my head making gunshot noises (I mostly enjoy this and am not harmed by this psychological experience). it's just so shadowy for me and many people who are terminally online

my brain was doodling around the essay idly while I made lunch and said (here follow more gunshotty brain noises, externalized into a tumblr post), you KNOW there are puppygirls out there who were intensely triggered by reading it and went to their breadwinner partner asking for reassurance. as in fact I micro did in the conversation described in the OP. and the breadwinner (honestly) says no, that's not you, you're nowhere near that bad, you literally had that job until a few months ago and you're kind of looking for another one now, you do all those crafts in your spare time, you pay SOME rent, you don't emotionally pressure me for sex. it's fine!

...but the partner does spend a few extra hours of their life doing emotional labor about this, per the exact dynamic described in the essay. I wonder how many such hours the essay has destroyed thus since its publication

[etiragram]

> about to block someone for being annoying > twitter bio comes up on hover > it/its pronouns > FINE. I will stay my hand

[kata4a]

i feel pretty sheepish about my ai skepticism from like half a decade or so ago, but thinking back on that I time I still don't think any of the arguments people were making were like, particularly good? so i'm not really sure what lesson to take

[etiragram]

so uh dating win

I went on 5 first dates in the past year because I like first dates, but I also told the dates upfront that I didn't have time for a relationship, because two partner-coparents and a baby

and I met one person where I thought "okay. if HE were available and interested I would make an exception and see him twice a month." but he was not available and there was no reason to think he was interested

fast forward, both things changed, and we are scheduled to date sometime soon (for reasons we are delaying starting but have been chatting a bit more and are sort of pleasantly pre-dating). Literally the only person in the world I would have made an exception for. and I got him. wOW. whooping & skipping & pounding the table & floating into the air about this

[etiragram]

I think my humblebrag classifier is bad compared to my other social classifiers. Lots of false positives and negatives. I frequently think something has 10% brag nature (below bad threshold) and say it for the sake of connection/humor/whatever, only to regret it later because I reevaluate and think it's actually 25%. Or I hold back from sharing something relevant and later think it would have been fine, and I missed out on a good moment with someone.

[phaeton-flier]

I did enjoy his work but Pratchett was not actually that deep a thinker, and the Tumblr Treatment of him as one is not flattering.

[phaeton-flier]

“Uphold any pedestrian thought as long as it’s stated in a sufficiently humorous way” is a hallmark of tumblr. Not even entirely excluding myself here.

@witchofanguish

"Tumblr Smart" is the way I've come to (grumblingly) think of it — a sort of blind copying of the voice and surface level qualities of deeper thought, without any underlying rigour. Some counterintuitive idea which can "explained" in a single followup sentence and a dense that by knowing this you're smarter than some outside group

[centrally-unplanned]

I never really thought of his works as even trying to be intellectually deep, right? Clever, certainly - works of pithy phrases and innovative punchlines. But they never aimed to be the kind of books where really deep thought could even find a place to grow. He did not try to enter the genres of Neal Stephenson or Thomas Pynchon.

That doesn't mean I don't know exactly the kind of tumblr/online portrayal of which you speak, I do for sure! Just noting that Pratchett was not that deep of a thinker (complimentary) I guess.

(Though bonus points for the fact that back in the day people got lots of pretty basic facts from books that today you osmosis pretty hard from the generic discourse. He was 10% smarter to a 90's audience than a modern one)

[regina-bithyniae]

I have no opinion on Pratchett, but I've heard the Vimes Boots Theory of Socio-Economic Unfairness quoted as some genius insight enough to find it quite grating.

I'm not sure this is a tumblr thing so much as an internet thing. Internet Smart. Could be Reddit smart just as easily.

[centrally-unplanned]

Yeah that is just one of those "straight up wrong" things that get bandied about. It is true enough in some individual instances of a given product, but once scaled up to an actual person's full spending it falls apart immediately. After all, even poor people spend like less than 1% of their income on shoes! Spending an extra 50 bucks on shoes for long term money saving is absolutely in their wheelhouse. It just doesn't actually save people much money, if any at all, because few goods are like this. Rich people dont wear shoes for 20 years lol, and so on down the line of goods - they absolutely spend more monthly. Their wealth comes from higher incomes. The attempt at being clever here (via an inversion of intuition) is an overreach.

I presume we are just using Tumblr as a catch-all for the internet because we are on Tumblr; I am with you actually in thinking of Reddit first, as Pratchett is a bit of an older gen writer. But I have seen it enough here as well for the substitution to land.

[etiragram]

groggy. nap. wake up even groggier than before. driving to friend's birthday is out of the question, don't trust myself behind the wheel right now. okay call an uber. too tired to call uber, dreading what happens when it deposits me into a strange house. people will want me to say things with my mouth. I need to change my baby stained shirt before I go. howwwww did this happen. NEVER nap NEVER succumb PUSH THROUGH IT WITH STIMULANTS

[wildgifthorses]

Our world still bans many things, but pleasure isn’t usually a central consideration; we are far more indulgent and approving of pleasure. Yet we still do ban a few pleasures, including recreational drugs, dogfighting, corporal punishment, loan sharks, dwarf-tossing, gambling, and sex that is paid or with minors. Drugs, dogfighting, dwarf-tossing, corporal punishment, and loan sharks seem to be about physical harms, and also shame and empathy. Sex has long evoked deep complex opaque feelings.

But sports bets don’t involve shame, physical harm, or deep opaque feelings. We mostly approve of sports, and of people putting lots of time and energy into playing and watching sports. And sports bets complements those activities, making them more interesting, engaging, and better informed.

Obviously not the main point but I don't really think of "being a loan shark" as a decadent Caligulian pleasure type of crime. Maybe I need to open my mind

[etiragram]

#reblogged because lol #written by an economics professor!

[theonion]

Remarking upon the charmed existence he had led since changing his course in life, former illustrator Allan Mansour confirmed Friday that the universe had practically been stumbling over itself to reward him for his decision to stop making art. “Gosh, my bank account is full, my personal life is flourishing, I have the respect of my friends back—and all it took was giving up the one creative pursuit I thought gave my life purpose,” said Mansour, a broad, warm smile spreading over his face as he reflected on how, in the months since he abandoned his decades-long artistic journey, he had met a supportive romantic partner, found a stable job in marketing, moved out of his childhood home, mended a poor relationship with his father, and enjoyed a run of beautiful weather that included a meteor shower, one he couldn’t help but see as the cosmos telling him he was right to finally discard his pathetic teenage dream. 

Full Story

[etiragram]

she'll cry with frustration while succeeding at something... like she'll be in the middle of succeeding and making rageful, incognizant ehhhs... an unpleasant mirror to my own psyche

[northshorewave]

The defining feature K-Pop to me (maybe it's not like this anymore, idk) is just how nakedly openly mercenary it is as a business, the way most pop genres try to not draw attention to. Like yeah, we have 36 guys in a single "band", whatever. They don't do anything, they're just there to look pretty. Yeah we cut 'em loose the minute they turn 25, what about it? Yeah we hammer their personalities into bland archetypes that 12-year-old girls can project onto. Works, doesn't it? And a lot of the fans seem to like it, well, not because of that, but certainly not in spite of it. They make Lou Pearlman look like Woody Guthrie.

One of the teenagers I tutor (a bright kid! moreso than most!) said that the central conceit of The Scarlet Letter sounds like a great idea and wondered why we don't do it IRL. It's gonna be a long, shitty future.

[togglessymposium]

On the Scarlet Letter thing, I'm pretty sure that some kids in my cohort had the same opinion during those desultory 'group discussions' in high school English classes? And even though there was a majority arguing that the punishment was 'bad', most didn't have a clear opinion on why that should be, and the whole thing was at least framed by the teacher as a debate.

And that would have been... what, the turn of the century, ish? A while ago now.

Mercy is hard. Hard to do, and hard to explain. And some people just take a while to learn what the world is, and why we hesitate to hurt one another when we have the chance. They need a little nudge before they get it. That's why the story was written in the first place! And why it's a major theme in world literature- not just The Scarlet Letter, but Les Misérables, and The Merchant of Venice, and like half of Dostoevsky.

It's not that surprising to find young people who haven't internalized that message yet, imo. School is for people that don't know stuff yet, right? Though it's certainly tricky to give them that nudge without overstepping as a teacher.

[etiragram]

hmm. not sure if that would be my takeaway. mercy is hard (to do and to explain), and sometimes, so is norm enforcement

I agree that youth/ignorance is in fact upstream of a lot of teen "why don't we just do that", but I would argue that so is real life experience with harm that might be deterred by public shame, and that's a valid thing to weight when reasoning about this

(the "unsolvedness" of relatively minor domestic violence has weighed on me for a long time, and occurred to me immediately when trying to model the students in question)

[etiragram]

there's an expensive hoodie I've been agonizing about buying for a month and the slow burn is incredible. opening up the site url and staring at it twice a week. feeding an AI photos of myself and saying "put me in this hoodie" and then squinting at the result feeling ambivalent. (All the results look like slightly aged cousins wearing a slightly different version of the hoodie, but this is still useful, grounds me in what this product would look like on real people in non-beautiful lighting.) I have the same hoodie in a less preferred color and I know it's great. And the new

sighing and clicking out of this draft but by hitting post

[etiragram]

all right that was one too many slightly insane posts at 1am, when I shouldn't be up anyway. I love you repressed maletype depression but I need full coverage

[etiragram]

I'm trying to construct a poll on whether I should edit and post a complete novella draft on AO3 (lesbian blackmail & noncon original fic) but I can't think of great a way to word it that won't get people to overwhelmingly vote for doing it. and obviously my goal is to word it such the external vote ratios exactly mirror my internal split. the issue is that it doesn't stick the landing and I can't get it to stick the landing with the amount of time/effort I know I have in me... now I'd normally say to myself that completing something is worth having that thing be shitty, but I was going through my AO3 recently and feeling impressed by the quality of what I did put on there. by the axes of "am I trying to do something interesting" and "am I in fact doing the thing I am trying to do".

and I know that if I posted something I thought failed badly at the latter, it'll just upset me until I delete it. this is a serious weakness as a person who actually launches, but given that I don't know how to change the "miserable until I delete the bad post" feature about myself it does recommend I do other things with my life?...

[etiragram]

the California cost of living shock didn't hit me until I looked up the prices for entering a Magic draft at local game stores

[etiragram]

come to my fuck cottage

is it private

it's a good cottage sir

go to ottawa

all the walls are glass