Untitled

ehe

[bogleech]

“Oh that animal doesn’t LIKE you it just TOLERATES you” …..So? If that’s the most a non-social organism can feel towards you isn’t that just as special an honor as whatever it is you think affection means??

[pixeltheleopardgecko]

“This creature with no natural social instincts outside of mating allows me to freely interact with it, while causing it little stress” is fucking DOPE AS SHIT

[weaselle]

also… are you SURE? like, we’re still finding out so much about animals. Wolverines fathers, who we thought were not involved in caring for kits, turn out to travel around and collect all their kits from multiple mothers and take the whole group out on camping trips. Some spiders have tiny frog pets (!) or group up to communally raise their young. Wild sharks, crocodiles, and snakes have formed strong, documented relationships with people. 

this man Gilberto (Chito) Shedden nursed this crocodile back to health after it was shot in the eye, and they were best friends for the rest of the crocodile’s life.

this python came in out of the wild as a baby snake and curled up next to the family’s infant, Oun Sam­bat (or Oeun Sambat?) and they were inseparable for 12 years

Cristina Zenato removes hooks from sharks and they let her stick her hand down their throat to do it and they even bring other sharks who need help to see her.

It’s a relationship that goes beyond a single helpful interaction. For example one of the sharks that would show up when she first started swimming with them was a shark she called Foggy Eye who really didn’t like to be touched. One day, Foggy Eye showed up with a hook in her mouth that Cristina Zenato removed, and ever after, Foggy Eye cuddles when she visits, putting her head in Cristina’s lap and enjoying some petting

 We don’t know SO much. Some wolf spiders will adopt unrelated orphaned spiderlings and raise them. We recently discovered that the ant-mimicking jumping spider (below) produces “milk” and suckles its young until they are nearly fully grown.

SO. Don’t assume we know all about what creatures do or feel or whether or not they form social connections or bond with others.

[fierceawakening]

Stuff like this is why I honestly think… not that really simple, nuance-flattening ideas like “speciesism” are correct, but that… we do need to be humble when tempted to base how we understand our moral duties to other beings on how much their behavior or even their neurology resembles ours.

[assortedinsanities]

Excuse me, the ant-mimicking jumping spider does what?

Ok, they nurse their young.

“These findings demonstrate that mammal-like milk provisioning and parental care for sexually mature offspring have also evolved in invertebrates, encouraging a reevaluation of their occurrence across the animal kingdom, especially in invertebrates.”

[baronfulmen]

[s-n-arly]

Skip Google for Research

As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse.  It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms 

As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable.  As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.

Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.

⁂

Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.

www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.

www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.

https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.

www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.

http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.

www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.

www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.

www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free

[angstalottle]

Is president shoe laces a thing?

I saw a girl in Starbucks today with rainbow laces so I told her and she said she got them from the president and I’m so confused

[thewriterofawesomeness]

The ancient words.

Have.

Been.

Spoken!

[exodushero]

[askagamedev]

What are your thoughts on Activision Blizzard’s situation right now? I don’t remember employees staging walkout for such a high publicity case before. How will things likely change for the industry?

For those who aren't aware, today many employees of Blizzard will be staging a walkout today at around 10am Pacific Daylight Time. This is the latest in a series of events that started with the California State Department of Fair Employment and Housing bringing a sexual discrimination/harassment lawsuit against Activision-Blizzard. You can read my [original post on the matter by clicking here].

In the time since, a number of things have happened. These were all happening in parallel, so astute readers should not necessarily assume a chain of events here. I have attempted to break them down.

The Open Letter

Activision-Blizzard employees collectively written an open letter to the management with these specific demands:

An end to mandatory forced arbitration to resolve employee disputes (abusers are often protected by the arbitrators)

Better recruiting, interviewing, hiring, and promotion practices to remedy the secret rankings and boys club career tracks

Transparency on things like compensation, equity grants, profit sharing, promotions, etc. so compensation and promotion discrimination is more difficult to hide

A third-party audit of ATVI's reporting structure, HR department, and executive staff to see where the failure points are

As of this morning, the open letter has been signed by over 3200 current and former Blizzard employees. That's a pretty great sign rate considering Blizzard has a total employee count of around 2500 and Activision-Blizzard has around 9500.

The Leadership Statements

There has been a large amount of internal pushback from the employees against the corporate response - both the public statement from Activision-Blizzard and Fran Townsend (Executive in charge of HR). I think that the brass at the top did not realize how deep the corruption ran when they released their initial response to the lawsuit or how angry the employees were now that it became public. Some of the current and former executive leadership wrote statements to the public and/or to the employees. These statements generally boiled down to "this is a real shame, I didn't know and I'm sorry I didn't notice" which generally incensed the employees even more because these were the people in charge of the company when all of the abuse was happening. Claiming ignorance either means they were super out of touch with their own employees or they knew and were too cowardly or complicit to do something about it. Neither is a good look.

The All Hands Meeting

Activision-Blizzard held an all-hands meeting on Friday to try to address the issue. The executive leadership spoke about the situation for a while, giving typical corporate type responses and promising to do better. Then they opened the floor to comments and questions and the dam broke. Person after person shared their stories. I suspect it was around this time that the executive leadership realized that the situation ran a real risk of entire organizational collapse if something wasn't done to address the issue quickly.

The Letter from the CEO

After the All Hands Meeting, the message to the brass was received loud and clear. Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision-Blizzard, wrote a [letter to all employees that went out Tuesday], committing to:

Investigating each claim

Listening sessions for employees to suggest ways to improve

Immediately evaluating managers and leaders across the Company and terminating anyone who behaved inappropriately

Improved hiring practices

Removal of in-game content that celebrates some of the sexual predator employees, both current and former

All of these lead us to...

Today's Walkout

In the meantime, the employees did some organizing on their own because huge numbers of them refused to tolerate what their leadership said. The World of Warcraft team, for example, put out [their own statement] on the state of current events. Many of the middle and upper managers within the Blizzard org participated and pushed for action and change as well. The Blizzard employees are asking for solidarity today from fans - they are requesting that players all log out from all ATVI games and services during the hours of the walkout.

This employee walkout follows a similar walkout that [happened at Riot Games in May of 2019 for similar reasons]. From what I've been told by employees currently working at Riot, things there have changed for the better in the years since. One hopes that this enormous show of employee solidarity will push for some lasting change.

From My Soapbox

As for my own thoughts on the matter, I really want everyone out there to understand that this is not just an isolated incident. This is not the work of just a few bad actors. This is one of a long line of problems that are built into the system itself. It happened at Ubisoft, at Riot, at Microsoft, at EA, at Bioware, at Gearbox, at Square-Enix, at Capcom, at Bandai-Namco, at Uber, at Facebook, at Google, at Amazon - it happens everywhere. It is still happening. I put out the request for safe employers that my network would be able to feel comfortable working for, and I got three responses all came with the caveat “Well, this only applies to my current team”. Three. This sort of thing absolutely needs a cultural change, and that can only happen if those of us with a modicum of power (e.g. managers, senior devs) start putting ourselves in the uncomfortable positions of recognizing and calling it out at our own personal risk.

[Join us on Discord] and/or [Support us on Patreon]

The FANTa Project is being rebooted. [What is the FANTa project?]

Got a burning question you want answered?

Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter

Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr

Frequent Questions: The FAQ

[honestlycraftypersona]

yea fuck you Bobby

[argumate]

I can’t get over micro jets like the SubSonex kit plane, the jet engine is so damn small! tiny little thing like they put on those DIY cruise missiles, amazing that it even works.

[argumate]

look at it!

[honestlycraftypersona]

It kinda looks like a manned DIY cruise missile as well.

[etirabys]

– Frans de Waal’s The Bonobo and the Atheist

[argumate]

I mean that’s sweet but he bit her goddamn finger off

[honestlycraftypersona]

yea, he threw a tantrum, probably because he wasnt feeling like being bossed around over vitamins, and it had lasting consequences, which he realized, and repented ever since.

[krakenartificer]

So my therapist and I were talking today about ADHD brains, and what “executive function” means, and we discovered a really interesting thing about how my brain works. I don’t know how much it will extend to other people, but I’m throwing it out there in case it’s useful for anyone else.

Usually it takes me about 1.5 - 2 hours each morning, to go from “booting up my computer” to “actually starting on my first task”.  This is true whether I work from home or work in the office, whether it’s a coding day or a meeting day, whether I jump out of bed when the alarm goes off or if I’m very seriously giving consideration to sleeping under my desk while my computer boots.  I don’t want it to take that long, but extensive experimentation has shown that it definitely does.

Today I decided to try an experiment.  Instead of my normal morning routine (where I check email, IMs, to-do list, and self-care list, and compile that into an enormous to-do list for the day, then sort that list in order of “if everything goes sideways and I get to only one thing, what thing will be the most painful if it happens tomorrow instead of today”, and then set up multiple desktops on my macbook so that each task – including “brush teeth” has its own desktop, and then put the desktops in the assigned priority-order), I decided I’d just jump right into my first task, and see if I could get myself a hyper-focused hour of work before someone came into the office to bug me.

It. Was. Terrible.

I mean, I got the task done, in record time. Then I checked Tumblr. Then I checked Facebook. Then I composed a summary of David Graeber’s argument that the European Age of Exploitation cannot be understood without knowing why the Chinese decided to abandon paper money.  Then I replied to all my Facebook messages. Then I helped Jessica at work set up her code. There followed a relatively productive afternoon where I helped my boss sort out a personnel problem, set priorities for our department, contributed to one meeting, ran yet another meeting, got consensus on a project, and helped Jessica again – but I didn’t eat my midmorning snack until 1pm, I never did brush my teeth, and my knees are killing me because all through the second meeting my body was sending “This posture hurts! Change position! Get! Up!” signals, and I couldn’t summon the focus to actually move from the floor to the couch. By the time my therapist called, my phone was on 3% and I couldn’t find my bluetooth headphones. I’m still 400 calories under my target for the day, because I missed 900 calories during my workday and I couldn’t figure out how to add more than 500 calories to my dinner.

So my therapist and I talked about this strange mix of symptoms: knocking out task after task of helping people at work, but unable to feed myself; incredibly highly effective code debugging, but also getting lost in Tumblr for an hour. I wasn’t under-stimulated, but I also didn’t get to pick what I focused on.  And he talked about how executive function isn’t just one thing, which I knew, but mentioned specifically that one element of executive function is taking your own initiative, deciding your actions for yourself, rather than just reacting to stimuli.  And it hit me —

I can’t do that.  

I thrive in hyper-focused development environments, where I react to each compiler error by debugging the error … but I break down when the compiler runs without error; I don’t know what to do if I don’t have the error-stimulus deciding my actions.

I thrive in high-multi-tasking environments like running a retail store at Christmas, where I do a task, and then look around and see which notification is the highest priority, and then do that task.  But I struggle in January and February, when all the customers are gone and I don’t know what to do.

And today, I was entirely stimulus-driven.  Jessica asked for help, and I helped her. Kathy commented on Facebook, and I replied to her. Ryan asked about a report, and I explained it to him. Mark brought up something that reminded me of David Graeber, and I typed up a history essay.  Anything that didn’t have a notification – brushing my teeth, eating my snack, charging my phone – didn’t get done.

And that’s when it hit me.  My usual morning routing isn’t a waste of 2 hours.  It’s setting up my environment so that I will be stimulated to do the things I want to do.

I have barely any initiative-decide-for-myself at all.  I get one (1) intitiativon each morning, and I have to spend it wisely.  And what I do with it, each day, is set up the stimuli I will experience throughout the day.

I finish a task and close that desktop: the next desktop pops up with a note that says “Meditate.”

I finish meditating and close the desktop: the next desktop pops up with an email I need to reply to.

I finish that email and close that desktop: the next one pops up with a note that says “Order groceries.”

I don’t have any initiative left by that point, but I don’t need to: I get the stimulus to do my work, maintain my health, connect with friends, and clean my house, and I’m too executive-dysfunction-deprived to do anything but respond to stimulus, and so I do all those things. This explains why I need to leave such specific directions to myself: not “write chapter 5″, but “Open C:/Documents/Writing/NovelTitle/Chapter5.doc”.  The first one isn’t a stimulus to action; the second one is. 

It’s also why I have such a hard time with “leisure”, and why my “randomized leisure activity” deck helped me so much; because by the time I get to the end of the day, and I’m out of spoons and I have earned a fun and relaxing evening…. I cannot – by definition – decide what would be fun and relaxing.

Like I say, I have no idea whether that will be any good for anyone else, but it prompted some interesting introspection, and I wanted to share. Now if you’ll excuse me, I still need to go brush my teeth

[myadhdlife]

I would love a tutorial of how you do the desktop thing! Sounds super cool and might be useful!!

[darqueloaf]

Seconding that request for a tutorial, this sounds super helpful

[krakenartificer]

It relies on a feature of MacOS and Linux that allows me to open multiple desktops – essentially meta-windows that can hold all of the windows I need for a given project.  I can swipe through to find anything I need for any given project, but when I have a desktop open, I can only see the things I need for this project.

[ID: A screenshot of the top inch of a Macbook screen.  There are 18 rectangles across the image. Some are recognizably thumbnails from common software applications such as YouTube, email programs, or spreadsheets. Others contain only a single digital sticky note.] So what I do is, I open at least one window for everything I need to do that day.  If that’s replying to an email, then I open that email in a separate window. If it’s doing yoga, I open the YouTube video for that routine in a separate window. If it’s writing, then I open the writing software and also any notes or reference materials for the thing I’m writing.

[ID: A screenshot of a web browser with two tabs open. The active tab is called “Write your words”. The inactive tab is called “Dear Senator Hickenlooper”.  The active tab has a date at the top and a cursor on an otherwise blank page.] If it’s a thing that really doesn’t involve the computer at all – eg non-guided meditation, getting dressed, sweeping the floor, etc – then I make a text note for that task, and that’s my window for it.

[ID: a screenshot of the full screen of a Macbook. Some of the thumbnails from the first screenshot are recognizable along the top.  Other windows are showing in miniature. There are several web pages in separate windows, an email program, an IM program, and seven digital sticky notes.] So once I’ve got my list of tasks, each of which has at least one window, I make one desktop per task.  I prioritize them according to which task, if I didn’t do it today, is most likely to make tomorrow sucky, and put the desktops in that order. The other huge advantage of this system is that it can help me overcome the Wall of Awful by dividing the two hardest parts of the task into separate activities. First thing in the morning, I open up everything I will need for the task, but I know that I am in no way intending to actually do the task. So I can do the “What am I even doing here? What’s the first step? How would I do that? Where is that information?” work without the pressure of feeling like I’m about to screw everything up; maybe future-me is gonna screw everything up, but current-me is just trying to find the right folder.  And yet, when it comes time to actually do the task, everything I need for it is right there, at my fingertips, easily accessible, which makes getting started that much easier.  Sometimes that makes the anxiety of each half overcome-able, where trying to do the whole thing together would overwhelm me past the meltdown point. So here, for example, I have the code I will need to run in AWS, a web tab logged into AWS, and my email reminding me of what I need to do.  If I arrive at this desktop and frantically scan my eyes around wondering what’s going on, I am very likely to find (a) what I need to do (b) where I need to do it, and © the things I need to do it with.

[ID: A screenshot of most a computer screen.  A web browser spans most of the top of the screen, with two AWS-related tabs open.  At the left edge of the screen where the web browser is not covering, an IDE window is visible, with a command prompt showing underneath the web browser.  On the bottom right, part of an email is visible, reading “The lambda runs and is running. Need to drop partitions that aren’t using current data, and write the full backfilled date range. Then I can UAT.”] So it’s pretty specific to my work environment and my needs, but hopefully the concept makes sense, and you guys can adapt it to help do what you need!

[freakycircle]

I love this and was really excited to read your answer to how you manage desktops. You can do a similar thing, i.e. creating multiple desktops, in Windows OS as well. Here’s a link to a tutorial: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-use-multiple-desktops-windows-10

[krakenartificer]

I AM SO EXCITED TO LEARN YOU CAN DO THIS IN WINDOWS

[deadcatwithaflamethrower]

*stares*

….I think I need to teach this to the entire household. Maybe include the cats, too.  O_o

[honestlycraftypersona]

Is having multiple workspaces such a novelty for so many people? How does anyone miss out on such a great feature?? Like, in linux community, there are window manager environments that are practically based around that feature, like i3. How did outside world miss out on this one?

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

All of us love and adore you, Frank

Please, let us kiss you on the lips

Plsplsplsplsplsplspls <333333333333333

“plsplsplsplsplspls”, ugh

but i will let you kiss me on the lips, floornight-er

except not really because this is tumblr and we don’t know what “kissing on the lips” even means

[pyrobot1cs]

Damn, Frank is really passing the Turing test with this one guys

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Oh man, tumblr sure is getting the concept of “Turing test” quickly

(By which I mean “I have no idea whether this is someone imagining themselves to be talking to a real human or something” – I saw some screenshots of a conversation about this and there were weird phrases and punctuation and such and I imagined that I would be paranoid and not want to participate if I was being tested)

[honestlycraftypersona]

She’s either being super meta about this, or doesn’t actually know what Turing test is.

[randomizeyourmind-blog]

Rape has become endemic in South Africa, so a medical technician named Sonette Ehlers developed a product that immediately gathered national attention there. Ehlers had never forgotten a rape victim telling her forlornly, “If only I had teeth down there.”

Some time afterward, a man came into the hospital where Ehlers works in excruciating pain because his penis was stuck in his pants zipper.

Ehlers merged those images and came up with a product she called Rapex. It resembles a tube, with barbs inside. The woman inserts it like a tampon, with an applicator, and any man who tries to rape the woman impales himself on the barbs and must go to an emergency room to have the Rapex removed.

When critics complained that it was a medieval punishment, Ehlers replied tersely, “A medieval device for a medieval deed.” 

- Half the Sky, Nicholas Kristof

[kokilax]

REBLOGGING THIS. x1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

[turningtricksbdwozhere-deactiva]

A medieval device for a medieval deed - yes.

[yfghkjilotu-deactivated20160606]

This is perfect

[shadowstep-of-bast]

BLESS THIS PERSON

[allthingshyper]

I BOW TO THIS INTENTION

[nosuchthingasfiction-blog]

Can we talk about how beautifully this turns rape culture on its head? Instead of “If they weren’t dressed like that they wouldn’t have been raped” THIS IS LITERALLY “IF THEY HADN’T TRIED TO RAPE SOMEONE THEY  WOULDN’T HAVE SPIKES IN THEIR DICK”*

[sassy-gay-justice]

That bold bit~

[datasoong47]

“A collection of common glyphs of the poorly understood Memeorite civilization of the Second Silicon Age. Memeorite glyphs possess multiple conflicting interpretations and a complexity of meaning impossible to capture in a few short words. These are rough translations only.”

Source: https://twitter.com/beach_fox/status/1325668490431246336 (which include more “memeorite glyphs”

[lazorsandparadox]

[catchymemes]

[professional-egg-layer]

wtf how did he do that how did he pick it up withought the without the handle

[honestlycraftypersona]

magijc

[catchymemes]

[honestlycraftypersona]

just take the detour route smh

[argumate]

Really?! You haven't published a single one of my 'cuck' asks, but you go for "Too many cucks spoil the broth." Really?! What do I have to do to get you to answer my 'cuck' asks? Let you fuck my wife?

that would demonstrate such an amusing level of commitment to following through on what is a fairly lame joke that I can’t really say no.

[wordcubed]

Ironically, this is the only good cuck-ask you’ve posted.

[argumate]

I’m still getting them today

[argumate]

they’ve finally wound down, time has made cucks of us all.

[honestlycraftypersona]

“Now we are all cucks”

Kenneth Tompkins Bainbridge

[dark-deathrage]

you're a stupid fucking anti-sjw lol. This blog is stupid. I hate you crackers white people SUCK go suck a dick.

looks like I triggered more sjws. Keep sending these asks they only fuel my logic. 

[ulysseus]

Never forget the guy who didn’t remember to hit anon before sending himself hate mail

[mars-the-4th-planet]

His soul mate.

their son.

[the-real-adam-taurus]

Omg 😂😂😂

[the-based-brit]

“Being an attractive young woman”

Stefan, you’re literally a 54-year-old MAN, but go off I guess XD

[urbanfantasyinspiration]

Where’s that tweet where the white politician pretended to be a black man?

[chilled-welsh-sam]

@urbanfantasyinspiration this one?

[funnytwittertweets]

[sapphiconoclast]

wikipedia has a page that I think everybody should read called “List of Common Misconceptions” and it is, frankly? a fascinating read

[honestlycraftypersona]

bruh

[argumate]

I’ve slept on an airbed, I’ve slept on a waterbed, but I’ve never slept on a fire bed

[honestlycraftypersona]

what about a stonebed?

[catchymemes]

[glass-galleons-anchored]

Doing this next time I get on a plane, if that ever happens again lol

[honestlycraftypersona]

on bus, you buy your entry ticket and choose your seat on your own, so that might work on the bus

on plane, however, every person is assigned its seat, so this wont work; they will sit next to you regardless.

hell even if you did have freedom of choice of your seat on a plane, overbooking and similar practices that ensure every seat is occupied, to increase passenger per fuel ratio, work against you

[glass-galleons-anchored]

Bro I fly Southwest and it’s every man for himself when it comes to seating

[honestlycraftypersona]

read 3rd paragraph then