Honestly, Tvyek is pretty miraculous. It’s permeable to water vapor but not to water, it’s nearly impossible to tear, but can be easily cut. It’s cheap and made entirely without binding chemicals. In addition to being used for wristbands, it’s used to wrap construction sites to keep out water during construction, for tear-resistant envelopes at Fed-Ex, coveralls for mechanics, and my wallet, actually.
Fun tip, though it looks like paper, Tyvek is plastic, and cannot be recycled with paper.
Me: *makes a post about how proposed canadian mining projects in the Santurbán páramo are threatening to contaminate the drinking water source of my city and 30+ other municipalities (including several indigenous communities) with cyanide*
Guy who creates a new sockpuppet account every time he sees a post about LatAm with the sole purpose of embodying the strawman above:
people on this website be like “it’s actually school’s fault that i don’t know how to read because i wanted to write my essay on the divergent trilogy and that BITCH mrs. clarkson made us study 1984 instead. anyway here’s a 10 tweet thread of easily disproven misinformation about a 3 year old news story and btw, who is toni morrison?”
i KNOW most of y’all are lying about being in the gifted program as children because none of you could pass the basic reading comprehension assessment they give third graders today
this post is mean and I never read divergent or whatever the fuck but 1984 sucks and is rape apologism so if somebody wanted to write about divergent or whatever good for them
this reply is like literally exactly what op is talking about lol. like firstly ops point isn’t “1984 is good”, ops point is that analysing complex stories teaches you how to form opinions and think for yourself. and like secondly in 1984 you’re supposed to think damn it’s fucked up that he’s thinking that way about her, i wonder if this ties in with the central theme of “a society like this will fuck you in the head”? (this is the thinking for yourself part). like do you think orwell just put that in for fun? do you think that just because winston is the protagonist you’re supposed to agree with everything he does?
You know I feel like this post just gave me an epiphany for what is wrong with how Tumblr Fandom/Internet Fandom responds to media-or not *wrong* but makes it very hard to respond to anything but a morally correct, and heroic protagonist.
When an English teacher, or reader, taught or picked up 1984, it wasn’t with the intention they were going to love the protagonist. They picked it up with the intention of reading a whole story and trying to grasp the theme or catharsis from the story. If the protagonist was a *shitty* person it played into the the themes or the story, because it wasn’t about morally judging the book or *liking* or feeling attachment to the protagonist. Sometimes and often times, books were just about gaining another perspective.
No one read Lolita expecting to endear, or like, or be inspired by Humbert. You are supposed to be upset by his behavior, you don’t read Lolita with the intention of being inspired. You read it to learn more about what the fuck is going on inside someone’s head when they behave like that. How children get sucked into abusive situations. Or read “The Great Gatsby” not because they want to fall in love with Gatsby or Nick, but to better understand and analyze the experience of the 1920s or destitution of the American Dream.
A lot of internet and fandom culture has changed that though. When we say something like “I love the Great Gatsby” it comes with the idea or association that means you must *love* or relate to one of the characters. And maybe you do, but the first assumption is not longer about the quality of the work or themes, or cathartic impact-it’s about character admiration. And with that character admiration, in tumblr stan culture, or kin culture, or exalting characters with fanart/romance/so on you don’t just ‘admire’ or find that character ‘compelling’ it now translates to ‘you LOVE that character’ or you ‘DIRECTLY relate to that character.’
You can’t say “I love how Humbert is written, it’s so fascinating and dark”, without it directly translating you somehow relate to a child abuser or condone his actions. Taking in media has become an act of worship and connection. We no longer watch meant to just see the story as a whole, we watch expecting to connect to a character and if we offer them our “worship” as it’s become, as opposed to just attention or interest study as it traditionally was, it means we are condoning the character or saying we directly empathize with all their actions.
I think that’s why there is often now so much fuss over *toxic* characters or not. Or whether that classical novel is showing good or bad things anymore. We’re treating the characters as people we should love or want to draw or write about. Sometimes a story is just about getting the the theme or catharsis or learning another perspective. We don’t NEED to like the character. Or we don’t HAVE to like a character to be impressed by how they’re written or intrigued by their behavior.
I think if internet culture could learn to view stories as small insights into other lives or single takes of one perspective instead of purposeful moral inspirations we’d be a lot less worried about how toxic or not toxic they are.
things op did not say. pissing on the poor moment. the reading comprehension situation is so dire that half the people in the comments are making things up about op’s opinion on 1984 SPECIFICALLY and they’ll rip each other to shreds about a text with rape in it before they could begin to get the point being made
My weird hypothesis is that sex essentialism (and bio-essentialism in general) is an attempt to reconstruct 7-day creationism in a secular world where evolutionary science has disproven it. Biology is WAY more mutable than many people assume, and sex essentialism mirrors the creationist idea that all species and bodies are fixed in time. That they are machines with a proper functioning rather than dynamic beings in a constantly changing and adapting natural world.
“You shouldn’t can’t change the body nature gave you” is just the new “you shouldn’t can’t change how God made you.” Attempting to moralize normality leads nowhere but cruelty and dehumanization.
You say “you can’t change nature” and I’ll just tell you “change IS nature.”
So I do 3D modeling and printing as a hobby, and a few weeks ago I designed wheel guards meant to prevent office chairs from running over cables and clothes... or your pet's tail.
I got the idea from cowcatchers old locomotives used to have.
Anyways, yesterday I uploaded the model to Thingiverse, and just hours after uploading it, the Community Relationship Manager of the whole website left a comment suggesting I enter the model into a competition that's currently being held on the site.
So I did... and now it's in third place not even a day later. First place is $500, but the competition still has a month to go.
Then the Community Manager contacted me again, telling me they want to feature my model in an upcoming design promotion.
Just, what is happening? I mostly made this thing for myself in, like, an hour, and now it's suddenly super popular? This is all a little bit overwhelming 😵💫
Other models I worked on for weeks didn't get nearly as popular. I swear, it's impossible to predict what people will like.
Anyways, if you want to print the wheel guards yourself, you can get the model here or here.
I also made a quiet version you can stick furniture felt pads on.
@caesarsaladinn I had a whole discussion with a history major who was extremely confident that smallpox is a “common childhood illness” with a very low death rate. Therefore, she believed that historical smallpox outbreaks were either massively exaggerated or used as a cover-up for something else (since “smallpox isn’t that bad.”) I eventually asked if she was possibly confusing smallpox with chickenpox, at which point she said, “aren’t they the same thing?”
One of the less deadly variants of smallpox was called cowpox, and the fact that dairy maids who contracted it tended to avoid the worst affects of smallpox is part of the development of vaccination
Cowpox is actually a separate (but very similar!) virus!
There's a lot of confusion about different "poxes" in this post (which wasn't my intention, and now I feel bad), so here's a general overview (also, obligatory apology for messiness, this was written at like 1 AM):
Smallpox:
Smallpox, caused by variola virus, was a massive problem historically. It existed in the Western hemisphere for thousands of years (genetic evidence of smallpox has been found in Egyptian mummies from ≈1500 BCE, but it was probably around long before then), and it was introduced to the New World during the Columbian exchange, which had devastating consequences for indigenous populations (which were already suffering from colonialist violence, which made epidemics much worse than they already would've been). Historically, smallpox had a case fatality rate between 30-50%, and survivors were often left disfigured or permanently disabled (you've probably seen pictures of smallpox scars, but smallpox can also cause blindness and other complications). Importantly, smallpox only affects humans—it has no animal hosts—which is why it's one of the few infectious diseases to have been completely eradicated. As of May 8, 1980, it officially no longer exists outside of certain designated American and Russian laboratories. (There are, however, concerns that it could be used as a bioweapon, which is why the government still stockpiles smallpox vaccines and antivirals. I wrote my bioethics term paper on this exact issue, and incidentally, it's one of the major reasons why I believe that STEM majors should take ethics courses!)
There were two strains of variola virus: variola major and variola minor. Variola major was much more dangerous, with a much higher mortality rate; variola minor typically didn't cause severe disease. Fortunately, infection with one strain conferred immunity against the other. Both strains are now eradicated. (People sometimes confuse variola minor with other viruses like cowpox and horsepox, but they're different things.)
There were four clinical forms of smallpox: ordinary (classic smallpox, associated with the rash you usually see in pictures), modified (less severe, often occurred in vaccinated people who got infected anyway), malignant (caused a flat rash instead of the usual pustules, associated with immune dysfunction, almost always fatal), and hemorrhagic (caused severe bleeding, and also near-universally fatal.) All of the non-ordinary forms could be difficult to diagnose because they looked so different from typical smallpox. The less serious "modified" form was often confused with chickenpox, and the hemorrhagic form was sometimes assumed to be a completely different disease. Occasionally, historical sources will refer to hemorrhagic smallpox as "black pox," with or without an understanding that it's caused by the same virus as ordinary smallpox.
Other relevant viruses:
Cowpox, caused by cowpox virus (an orthopoxvirus similar to smallpox) causes mild disease in cows, humans, and several other animals. Infection with cowpox virus confers immunity to variola—Edward Jenner noticed this relationship and used material from cowpox lesions to inoculate people against smallpox.
Vaccinia virus, another orthopoxvirus, is the source of the modern smallpox vaccine. It's closely related to both cowpox and horsepox (weirdly, it's actually closer to horsepox), but it's distinct enough to be its own species. Infection usually causes mild symptoms, and, of course, confers immunity to smallpox.
Chickenpox is an entirely different thing. It's caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which is a herpesvirus, not a poxvirus at all! Infection with varicella-zoster does not confer immunity to smallpox or any other poxvirus—chickenpox is from a totally different family.
So why are the names so weird and confusing? Why is everything about all of this so weird and confusing?
There are multiple reasons for this, so bear with me.
Historically, a "pox" was any disease that caused a bumpy rash of pustles/blisters. Chickenpox, smallpox, and the other "poxes" all cause superficially similar rashes—thus the similar names. (Even though we know now that chickenpox comes from a completely different family, this wouldn't have been apparent before the dawn of modern medicine.)
Smallpox was given that name to differentiate it from syphilis, which was known as the "great pox" when it first appeared in Europe. (Fun[?] microbiology fact: There are debates about the origins of syphilis, but the most common theory holds that it originated in the New World, and Christopher Columbus brought it back to Spain. In that way, it's kind of the inverse of smallpox.) Historically, smallpox was also known by a variety of other names in different European, Asian, and African cultures. Again, this gets murky, because historical physicians sometimes struggled to distinguish between similar-looking-but-different diseases.
Other poxviruses are often named after the animals in which they were first identified. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, though, and it can sometimes be misleading (for example, monkeypox virus was first discovered in laboratory monkeys, but it more often affects rodents and other small mammals. The disease formerly known as "monkeypox" was recently renamed "mpox" because the name wasn't accurate.) Also, some poxviruses aren't named after animals at all! It's a weird and inconsistent system (but a lot of virus names are kinda weird and inconsistent).
Related to the above: We don't even know where the name "chickenpox" comes from. I mean, we know it was called a "pox" because it causes a pox-y rash, but we don't know where the "chicken" part originated. There are multiple theories about this, none of which are definitive. The disease itself has nothing to do with chickens.
Basically, a lot of the weirdness is a result of historical naming practices—people identified and named these diseases before modern virology existed, and those names stuck, so now we have similar names for superficially-similar-but-ultimately-different viruses, and names whose origins have been completely lost to time. Later, virologists muddied the waters further by naming newly-discovered poxviruses after the animals in which they were first seen, even when these animals aren't natural hosts or reservoirs of those viruses. It's a mess! And, again, all of this is complicated by the fact that some of these diseases were very hard to diagnose (or distinguish from one another) before modern medicine existed. Now, we can sequence viral DNA and figure out what's actually going on—which viruses caused which symptoms, whether those viruses were closely related, and whether being infected with one disease conferred immunity to another—but historical doctors and scientists didn't have those tools, so they were doing they best they could with very limited information, and that led to a lot of weirdness in terms of how these viruses were named and classified. Our current system inherited some of that weirdness, so here we are.
TL;DR: Poxvirus names are messy. Smallpox is caused by variola virus, which has two strains: variola major (the more severe one) and variola minor (less severe). Cowpox and vaccinia are different viruses in the same family, and being infected with one of them confers immunity to smallpox. Chickenpox isn't a poxvirus at all, but a herpesvirus—it just happens to cause a pockmark-y rash that looks superficially similar to smallpox pustules (and mild forms of smallpox were historically confused with chickenpox).
(P.S. none of this is super relevant to the average person, so don't feel bad if you didn't know any of it. Unless you are a history major inventing new conspiracies about smallpox, in which case you definitely should feel bad.)
Sources & further reading under the cut!
Edward Jenner and the history of smallpox and vaccination
The History of Smallpox (CDC)
The Triumph of Science: The Incredible Story of Smallpox Eradication
Scientific Background on Smallpox and Smallpox Vaccination (from Scientific and Policy Considerations in Developing Smallpox Vaccination Options: A Workshop Report) <- this article is like 20 years old, but it has some interesting information about the clinical forms of smallpox and how difficult they would be to diagnose accurately
Phasing out monkeypox: mpox is the new name for an old disease <- discusses the renaming of monkeypox to mpox, also mentions issues with other poxvirus names and virus names in general
Poxes great and small: The stories behind their names
"Thought smallpox was the same thing as chickenpox" _stares, hollow eyed, in Native American. "believed that historical smallpox outbreaks were either massively exaggerated or used as a cover-up for something else" WHAT THE FUCK.
@ZubyMusic: Politics can rot people's brains to the point that they'll oppose good ideas if they come from the 'wrong people' and support bad ideas if they come from the 'right people'
Tumblrino: I heard someone say the other day that most people's brains don't separate information into "true" and "false" but rather "us" and "them": will the people of my tribe approve of this? Then it's true. Will the people of my tribe disapprove and cast me out for expressing it? Then it's false.
This grabbed my attention because they're definitely referring to Dan M. Kahan's research on "Identity-Protective Cognition."
This paper supplies a compact synthesis of the empirical literature on misconceptions of and misinformation about decision-relevant science.
Most people think they update their beliefs based on evidence, but Kahan's research suggests otherwise and it's fascinating.
Identity-Protective Cognition is the tendency to selectively credit or dismiss evidence based on what your group believes, not what the evidence actually shows.
Among the ideas in this paper:
Being wrong is often the rational choice
If you change your mind on a "tribal" issue (climate change, gun control, vaccines, etc.) you risk social ostracism, family conflict, loss of status.
(Does that sound familiar?)
Being correct about a global scientific fact, meanwhile, has essentially zero effect on your personal life or the global outcome.
So your brain runs this calculation...and chooses the tribe.
Smart people are worse, not better
Kahan found that higher scientific literacy and reasoning ability actually increase polarization.
Smarter people, he says, are better at cherry-picking evidence and finding flaws in the other side's data. Their intelligence becomes a weapon for motivated reasoning, not a cure for it.
We don't just ignore inconvenient facts, we actively embrace misinformation that flatters us
Identity-affirming misinformation (stuff that makes your tribe look good) gets a free pass. Identity-threatening facts (stuff that makes your tribe look bad) get fought tooth and nail.
Kahan's proposed fix is information decoupling.
He says we need to separate the fact from the identity signal it carries.
Presenting correct information alone is useless and often counterproductive.
Kahan says you have to make the truth feel safe for someone's existing identity without implying they need to defect to the other side to believe it.
But...how?!
What Kahan is really describing is that humans are social animals before they are rational ones.
We evolved to survive in groups, not to optimize for abstract truth (to varying degrees.)
So our brains aren't broken, they're just running software thousands of years old in a world they didn't evolve to cope with.
None of this means minds can't change - they change constantly - but Kahan's research suggests the mechanism of change isn't argument or evidence. It's identity shift.
People change their minds when they find a new tribe, a new role model, or a way of seeing themselves that makes the truth feel like theirs.
And that insight might explain why identity politics tend to backfire
If you organize persuasion around group identity, you deepen the very grooves that make minds hard to change. You grow only rigid ideologues engaged in purity tests who are good at chanting on rhythm. They won't be created, nuanced, pragmatic, diplomatic, or effective communicators.
Yascha Mounk's The Identity Trap makes this case from a different angle.
When well-intentioned people make identity "the all-encompassing dividing line of American life," they aren't dissolving tribal thinking, they're institutionalizing it.
The result, Mounk argues, is an ideology that denies that members of different groups can truly understand each other. It squashes liberal pluralism.
That's precisely the condition that makes Kahan's trap inescapable.
The alternative Mounk points toward is very much like Kahan's: universalism.
Mounk says we need identities large enough to contain disagreement without triggering tribal self-defense.
His argument is that universal values, not group solidarity, offer the surest path to justice, fairness, and enduring social peace.
The model he holds up as effective is the civil rights movement. It wasn't an appeal to Black identity alone, but to a shared American identity, shared moral values, and a vision of humanity big enough that even those outside the group could feel called to it, not accused by it.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. didn't tell white Americans they were the enemy. He told them (and showed them) that they were falling short of their own ideals.
That's what a large identity looks like in practice. It isn't the erasure of difference, just a framework (built on words like citizen, neighbor, and human) where we aren't defined solely by the groups we were born into, but by what we can build together.
This is super interesting. I’m finding myself interacting fairly regularly lately with MAGA type evangelicals, and whenever I try to nail them down on what’s *actually* wrong with homosexuality or transgender people, the reply I get is that you can’t pick and choose the rules of the Bible, *even if* you don’t know why one of them is the way it is. If the rule doesn’t make sense to you, your understanding is limited. It’s you, not an arbitrary rule. Some of them will even grudgingly admit they see why the “liberal” position seems kinder or to make more sense.
Which makes discussion impossible, because “accept a rule without any justification” isn’t something I can make sense of. The next step is “God made the world with a specific order, which includes reproduction,” but I can’t get much more out of them about how the order works, why the things in it fit together the way they do, how this improves things more than live and let live does, etc.
Some of that is just… they’re actually wrong. There *isn’t* evidence that the order they prefer is associated with better outcomes. I know this because I’ve seen how repressive governments affect LGBTQ people, and I’ve seen that cishets’ lives don’t actually improve because of it. No one is ACTUALLY the Omelas kid.
But it makes a lot of sense that they can’t even get to talking to me about outcomes if I am queer. Because that means (to them) I’m not actually rational. I’m just liking orgasms. So why listen to me, if all I want is more orgasms? I’m selfish and emotional.
Which makes me really intrigued by the “identity politics doesn’t work” thing. It makes sense. But how do we get from a leftism that grounds itself deeply in “we must work for specific marginalized groups, by looking specifically at the things that affect each of them” to a leftism that isn’t about identities?
"...the reply I get is that you can’t pick and choose the rules of the Bible, *even if* you don’t know why one of them is the way it is. If the rule doesn’t make sense to you, your understanding is limited. It’s you, not an arbitrary rule."
Yet these hypocrites eat bacon, wear clothes made with more than one fiber, and turn things on/off during the sabbath.
Their objection has nothing at all to do with obeying the commandments of the Hebrew Bible.
"...Some of that is just… they’re actually wrong. There *isn’t* evidence that the order they prefer is associated with better outcomes...."
Evangelicals are not moved by evidence, logic, or reason. To them, this isn't a flaw, it's the foundational feature of their worldview.
"But how do we get from a leftism that grounds itself deeply in “we must work for specific marginalized groups, by looking specifically at the things that affect each of them” to a leftism that isn’t about identities?"
By recognizing that the left has been co-opted by an omnicause ideology that is virtually unrelated to the supposed bedrock of the left, Marxism.
my most ungrounded and unresearched fear is that so many companies are pushing AI in part because it builds them a pathway towards a subscription model for a huge number of things that should not be subscription, but theoretically could be:
do you want to talk to verizon's help desk because there's an error on your bill? to access a real agent, you have to pay for Verizon Access+, only 5.99 a month.
want to filter out all the fake job postings from the real ones? subscribe to Indeed: Advanced Tactics and only verified postings will appear on your dash.
sick of the infinite ai slop? buy Google Premium; it'll automatically detect ai within a site and gives it a credibility score. with premium plus, you can shuffle high-credibility results to the top.
do you want a "luxury" experience? well, you'd have to pay for that luxury, and since the company sure doesn't want to pay its employees; the cost would fall to the consumer.
when automation has made every experience unpleasant; the experience of genuine humanity will be commodified.
This is already happening – one of the softwares used by a museum I work at only lets you talk to a human help agent if you have their premium subscription. It's such bullshit
the fact you are not the only one in these notes saying "no this is already happening; i have to pay money to speak to a representative" is just... really awesome! you said a software used by museums is doing this shit? okay! great! wonderful!! anybody know where i can scream
the day that lazy/cross eyed and/or drooling characters stop being used as a shorthand for “stupid character” is the day i finally stop wanting to tear people limb from limb for it
She's local to me, so I'm friends with her on facebook and everyone has been SO nice to her about it! I see her at cons a lot and she's done events with the group I volunteer with - she's always been absolutely lovely and I could not be happier for her!
