Games and Trips

2017 and later: Whatever I feel like. Lots of reposts from my other blog, rinsemiddlebliss.com. 2011-2014: Games and related cultural criticism from a related point of view

[gamesandtrips]

Why Women Need Iron

Women need iron. Not the vitamin. The barbell. 

We are trained by the world around us to have fucked up ideas about our bodies; iron unfucks them.

We are supposed to be as thin as possible, as small as possible, perhaps until we disappear; iron teaches us to take up space.

We are taught that the only good direction for the scale to go is down, and to agonize ritualistically when it goes up. Iron teaches us the power of gaining weight for strength and gives us another weight to care about – the weight we are lifting.

We are taught to eat small amounts daintily and treat food as sin and pleasure. Iron teaches us to eat heartily, to see food as fuel for life, and to seek out nutritious food rather than avoiding sinful food.

We are taught to think of our bodies as decorative, an object to be looked at; iron teaches us to think of our bodies as functional, our own active selves, not passive objects for another's regard.

Whole industries exist to profit by removing from us our confidence and selling it back as external objects. Iron gives us confidence from within through progressive training and measurable achievements.

We are taught to be gentle and hide our strength or even to cultivate charming physical weakness until we start to believe our bodies are weak. Iron teaches us how strong we can be.

[squareallworthy]

Everyone will not just

If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.

[ef-1]

My favouritest sport fact ever is that in 1990s 2 cardiac surgeons watched an f1 race to save the lives of countless kids. The Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children (GOSH) kept losing the lives of patients after successful heart surgeries. Specifically the 10-15 minutes after a bonefide clinically successful surgery patients would die:

And so the two surgeons filmed a handover after heart surgery and sent it to the Ferrari pitcrew who were told to critique and improve handover process

And from this:

we got this:

The error rate during patien handovers dropped from 30% to 10% with the F1 informed protocol.

I literally love this fact so much because being an pitcrew member is such a thankless job because theyre underpaid and overworked mechanics and they literally saved lives in this instance.

[mondengel2]

When Formula 1 Met Medicine: The F1 Pit Stop That Saved Lives

Doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital turned to Formula 1 for answers. By studying Ferrari’s pit-stop teamwork, they redesigned how patien

I love this!

And it that it wasn't a one and done.

The doctors went to the race tracks to watch the car changes and the pit crews went to the hospitals and watched a live transfer and offered suggestions and they kept working with them to improve.

After there was a successful improvement of the most vital metrics of a handover of a patient from surgery to ICU, the pit crews also worked with other hospitals for other procedures and it's now a whole thing of trying to apply the specialized, streamlined and speedy teamwork and nonverbal coordination of pit crews to other high-risk fields.

This is a perfect example of how two very different fields of knowledge meeting can make a huge leap forward in progress.

[lamignonette]

[blech]

How To Deal With A Laptop Cat

About a year ago, AK and I were chosen by a cat to be their new humans. You can read more about Shinjuku in her three month review (there's also some follow-up FAQs), but she continues to become more and more comfortable with us over time.

About four weeks ago, Shinjuku changed her explorations in my study (if that's the right word for a work-from-home desk plus a ludicrous amount of Lego) from jumping on boxes and the top of shelves to instead trying my desk and the laptop, and chose the latter as her new favourite daytime nap spot. That's now become so much of a preference that I'm sitting here, with her in front of me, on a long weekend Sunday, typing away.

The main issue with a cat on a laptop is, of course, unwanted inputs.

Since I just had to go through a couple of steps to help to be able to use my personal machine despite it being a cat bed, I thought it was worth writing them down. This assumes, by the way, that you have an external keyboard and mouse (or trackpad). If you don't, you probably can't get anything done anyway. Try putting the laptop to sleep before your cat (or dog, or hamster; that's up to you) climbs on it, maybe?

The easiest device is to ignore is the trackpad. Apple loves to hide input (and output) settings under System Settings' Accessibility pane, and this is another. Switch on "Ignore built-in trackpad when mouse or wireless trackpad is present" and your cat can happily sit on the trackpad and click away to their hearts content.

The keyboard, sadly, has no such built in preference (or at least, I'm not aware of it if it does). Luckily, there's a free, public domain tool called Karabiner-Elements that can take care of that for you. Installation is fairly straightforward, but it does require some system settings modification to grant it permissions.

Once installed, open Elements, then Devices, and you'll see a number (probably four) of input methods. Choose the external keyboard, and toggle "Disable the built-in keyboard while this device is connected".

I've noticed a couple of drawbacks to these settings. One is that, when using Touch ID to log in, I can't use the built in keyboard to hit "return" - I have to use the external keyboard. The other is that, if I take my laptop elsewhere, I have to remember to switch off or disconnect the external input. Finally, be aware that, even with the settings above, Touch ID or a power button will be active - if your cat goes right up to the corner, prepare for a forced reboot.

Still. it's now easier for your cat to happily curl up and sleep in the warm spot that is a churning processor, while you can get some work done - or at least read some internet. That is, assuming you have an external monitor, or only want to look at the top half of your screen.

[onetwofeb]

[kleefkruid]

My cats have this meow that means "please come with me to fix this" after which they'll lead me to the problem in question, usually a empty (or 'empty') food bowl or a closed door they want open. They look at the 'problem', they look back at me, clear message.

What fascinates me is how this illustrates what they percieve as being in the realm of my 'power.' I control the food, I control the door, sure, but my cats love to sit on the balcony in the sun, and it has happened plenty of times that on a rainy day they come get me, go to the balcony and show me... the rain. "Please fix this" they say. "Please get rid of the wet"

"Silly kitty," I say, "I can't control the rain." I then walk into the shower and turn on the rain.

[adverbian]

My cat absolutely does this. What’s more, she has learned that she can demand that one human fix the behavior of another human.

I was in the bathroom one day. The door was closed, which is of course a Crime Against Felinity. The cat had been complaining about this for several minutes. I told her I would be out in a few.

I then heard the “follow me” meow from down the hall, and my husband saying “what?”

The next thing I heard was my husband’s voice at the bathroom door. “The cat just led me right here, and now she’s looking at me like, ‘Here. You talk to her. She seems to listen to you.’”

Yes. My cat has learned to speak to the manager.

[depsidase]

[foone]

Hey you know that thing you're good at? That thing you think makes you valuable? The way you are, or the thing you do, etc?

You can be and deserve to be and will be loved and cherished even without it.

You're not worthwhile because you help, or you are good at making your art, or your skills at your job. You're worthwhile inherently, as a person, even without all that.

And I want you to internalize that because otherwise there might come a day where you can't do The Thing You Think Makes You Valuable. You'll get sick and can't draw, you'll burn out and can't do your job, you'll be emotionally unable to do your regular helpfulness for whatever reason, and you'll start to feel like you have no worth anymore.

But that's not true. You have worth, you deserve comfort and companionship and happiness, and that's not a conditional thing. You deserve that, even if you can't be Useful and Productive and all that shit.

It's an easy trap to fall into to justify yourself as "well, at least I help/make art/work hard" and have that be entirely too much of your self-esteem. Being proud of your work is fine. Being proud of yourself solely through your productivity is not, because you're making it conditional. And conditional on something that can change for reasons completely outside your control!

You gotta stop thinking about it like you gotta justify the space you take up on the planet. It's great if all those things make you happy: just make sure they're not the only things that make you feel like you are justifying your existence, or you'll crater if they get taken away.

You are lovable and likable and you have value as a person and a member of society, even if you never can be productive again. You are enough.

[nyancrimew]

i wanna add that internalizing this has been a really big part of how i have slowly been rebuilding my life after burnout and trauma basically stopped me dead in my tracks after 2021. entirely defining my self worth based on the work i do put so much more pressure on getting productive again, on at the very least being a good friend, making it completely impossible for me to actually bear either for most of 2021 and 2022.

the more i internalize that it doesn't actually fucking matter what i do the more i've been able to stand on my own again and start working towards my future. i needed that basic level of self respect and self esteem to build upon to just get to where i am now.

[mythosphere]

"Blorbo from my shows" no. Blorbo from my BA. Blorbo from my major. Blorbo from my primary source document.

[mythosphere]

I expected the weird answers like machiavelli and napoleon but the amount of people naming their real life university professors is unprecedented

[notjusthespongenextdoor]

[tikkunolamorgtfo]

I don’t think a lot of people understand that no matter how progressive or well-read you are, there are always going to be moments in your life where somebody pushes back against something that’s so culturally ingrained you never even considered it before. And you’ll say “Huh, it never occurred to me to challenge this but you’re right,” and that doesn’t mean you were “morally toxic” before, it means you’re a non-omniscient human capable of growth.

Also, some preferred terms for things will change and evolve, and terms we prefer now might eventually be considered gauche or even offensive, and that doesn’t mean you were a bigot at the time for using them. It means we evolved as a society and chose new terminology to reflect that change.

Nobody is a fully formed realisation of progressivism that can predict all shifts and modes of thought. The world will always change, and hopefully you will, too

[cannibalize]

best career advice i've got (as someone in their early 20s at their first office job, take this with a grain of salt) is identify what tasks make you a happy little freak—tasks you're already doing in your personal life anyway. then talk to people about what a day in their role looks like and match your Freak Instincts™ to a job that rewards you for acting on them.

yesterday i spent upwards of 30min trying to figure out how to remotely connect my laptop to the main computer of one of the big machines in the lab. asked one of the software engineers what i was doing wrong and he got me in no problem, which made me realize if i had this much trouble remoting in, i bet the other tech writers on my team have struggled too. so i spent the rest of the day fleshing out my scrappy personal notes into a neat multi-step document with screenshots.

like lemme be clear, i have actual projects to finish but instead i burned a whole work day to make an internal document about remoting in bc i'm an anxious little freak who copes with the uncertainty of being alive by leaving myself notes for all kinds of things: grocery lists, remember to call the bank tomorrow, hey we should text that friend of ours who was sad last time we hung out, here's our convoluted process of downloading music from YouTube and adding album title and track listing metadata.

at our weekly meeting i showed this document to my teammates AND GOT PRAISED for burning a whole day on it! bc actually I didn't burn that day, I used it to fill a knowledge gap with a handy resource.

find out what makes you a freak and pivot that into a paycheck

[dioptre-hertz]

I had a very interesting discussion about theater and film the other day. My parents and I were talking about Little Shop of Horrors and, specifically, about the ending of the musical versus the ending of the (1986) movie. In the musical, the story ends with the main characters getting eaten by the plant and everybody dying. The movie was originally going to end the same way, but audience reactions were so negative that they were forced to shoot a happy ending where the plant is destroyed and the main characters survive. Frank Oz, who directed the movie, later said something I think is very interesting:

I learned a lesson: in a stage play, you kill the leads and they come out for a bow — in a movie, they don’t come out for a bow, they’re dead. They’re gone and so the audience lost the people they loved, as opposed to the theater audience where they knew the two people who played Audrey and Seymour were still alive. They loved those people, and they hated us for it.

That’s a real gem of a thought in and of itself, a really interesting consequence of the fact that theater is alive in a way that film isn’t. A stage play always ends with a tangible reminder that it’s all just fiction, just a performance, and this serves to gently return the audience to the real world. Movies don’t have that, which really changes the way you’re affected by the story’s conclusion. Neat!

But here’s what’s really cool: I asked my dad (who is a dramaturge) what he had to say about it, and he pointed out that there is actually an equivalent technique in film: the blooper reel. When a movie plays bloopers while the credits are rolling, it’s accomplishing the exact same thing: it reminds you that the characters are actually just played by actors, who are alive and well and probably having a lot of fun, even if the fictional characters suffered. How cool is that!?

Now I’m really fascinated by the possibility of using bloopers to lessen the impact of a tragic ending in a tragicomedy…

[asymbina]

If we shadows have offended

Think but this and all is mended

[skatalite]

there should be a day honoring gen x djs who upload their entire record collection to youtube

[hannahp0calypse]

(girl with adhd voice) yeah i just love in fiction when a character has a superpower thats also a disability. like a power that changes how they interact with the world in exciting ways but also has terrible drawbacks to their daily life. no real reason why

[shieldfoss]

[marisatomay]

Happy Pride