The Distracted Feline

This is my side blog. I post whatever I want here. Maybe kittens, maybe science, maybe angry rants, just depends on the day. My main blog is lunaiz4.tumblr.com (I post art and aesthetic things there.)  About me: Panromantic, Demihomosexual, she/her/hers. I live in a studio apartment with my kitty Jasper, my roommate, and his kitty Hazel.

[lunaiz4-misc]

Lesser-known cooling tech

Hey! I have heard it's really hot in parts of the world where it is. Not supposed to be hot. I have also heard your local news is full of advice on how to cool your homes (as much as you can), avoid heatstroke, etc., so this is not that post. Instead, allow me to introduce a couple of technologies that aren't as commonly known.

Shade cloth.

Shade cloth comes in two main varieties - absorbent (black) and reflective (silver). Meant for protecting part-sun crops from the full wrath of the summer sun, this blocks sun without blocking air flow, and the silver stuff will actually reflect the heat. Use it to cover parked vehicles (you can secure it with magnets), or to create canopies. Throw it over a tent in place of the rain tarp, and you have a shelter that won't hold in heat. If you're willing to look a bit silly, you could probably make a parasol out of it.

Cooling necklaces.

Three main varieties here. Evaporative cooling necklaces, like the one on the right, are filled with water-absorbing polymer. As they dry out, the evaporation cools them down, the same way sweating would. They're not very cold, and they are wet, but they do work and they don't need power. Phase change material (PCM) necklaces are, essentially, ice packs. Some contain water, but most contain gel that solidifies at the temps found in a fridge or cooler. They melt only a touch more slowly than they cool, so most people get two to rotate. The third type is a battery-powered wearable fan. Some of these also have mist, or are combined with one of the first two types. Cooling necklaces are particularly effective because they rest against your carotid arteries. They're portable and can be used during physical activity. Notably, they also work on pets.

These are all fairly inexpensive, in the US at least. Maybe they'll make your summer a bit less miserable.

[pervocracy]

How to hack any hospital computer

-Use the password taped to the monitor

How to hack any hospital computer (L337 version for advanced security systems)

-Use the password taped to the back of the monitor

[dysgraphicprogrammer]

As a computer guy: This is what happens when you have too much security. It reaches a tipping point and then suddenly you have none. Security at the cost of convenience comes at the cost of security.  

[pervocracy]

This is true of so many things in healthcare.  Example: our software is designed to automatically alert the doctor if a patient’s vital signs are critically out of range.  If someone has a blood pressure of 200/130, the doc gets a pop-up box that they have to acknowledge before doing anything else.  It makes sense, in our setting.

But then some mega-genius upstairs realized something: the system was only alerting for critical vital signs, but not for all vital signs that could possibly be bad.  Like, yeah, 200/130 is potentially life-threatening, but 130/90 is above ideal and can have negative effects on health.  Should the doctors be allowed to just ignore something that could negatively affect a patient’s health?  Heavens no!

So now the system generates a pop-up for any vital signs that are even slightly abnormal.  A pressure of 120/80 (once considered textbook normal, now considered slightly high) will create the pop-up.  We have increased our vigilance!

Well, no, what we’ve actually done is train doctors to click through a constant bombardment of pop-ups without looking.  We’ve destroyed their vigilance and made it much easier for them to accidentally skim past life-threatening vital signs.

But you can’t tell that to management, because you’d have to confess that you are a flawed human with limited attention resources.  They’d tell you “well, all the other doctors take every abnormal vital sign seriously, it sounds like you’re being negligent.”  And if you’re smart, you back down before you start telling the big boss all about your habit of ignoring critical safety alerts.

The end result is exactly the same as if we had no alerts at all, except with more annoying clicking.

[hiccup-queen]

its called alarm fatigue, and its very real.

The monitors in our ED are at the charge desk and the admin desk. They have a ‘beep’ for ‘out of whack'and a higher-pitched ‘beep-beep’ for ‘the monitor says theyre dead’.

The PROBLEM

Is that the beep-beep sounds if no breaths are detected for 10 seconds (common in sleep apnea, not an emergency), if a cardiac lead comes off (machine interprets this as “heart rate 0”, common in anybody who moves in the bed), if the pulse ox reads below 85 (bending your finger will do that), or if your blood pressure is above or below a certain threshold (common if you move your arm).

As a result, when we hear the beep-beep, someone will glance at the monitor, say “that isn’t real”, and silence the alarm. If it looks like it might be real, we’ll holler for someone to poke their head in the room.

But it beeps constantly. Literally every ten seconds a new alarm is going off.

And the fire alarm - it goes off at least every other week. One time it went off for six hours straight, then was off for two hours, then back on for three. Thats another alarm we’ve learned to tune out, because it’s never a real alarm. We’ll close the doors like we’re supposed to, but if we ever have an actual fire, we’re going to die, because we’ve been trained to ignore it.

But the everyday beeping? That becomes routine. And when emergency notifications become routine, you stop paying attention.

[lunaiz4-misc]

Not to derail the alarm fatigue thing (and yes, security fatigue too) but "taped to the monitor" is more secure than one might think. The monitor is inside the physical secure area, where in theory only staff should be. Could someone unauthorized gain access? Probably, but they would have to do so in person, which limits their ability to do so without being detected. "Password on the monitor" is most vulnerable to inside man attacks, ex. a staff member using a different staff member's password.

Better places to keep the password include a password manager (obviously), or anything the user keeps secure/private. A wallet, for example, should be just fine.

As far as alarms. In IT world, we have "logging levels" for errors. "Trace" (everything ever), "info" (the most relevant info), "warn" (might be a problem), "error" (for sure a problem), and "fatal" (a BIG problem.) You can occasionally convince admin that "fatal" errors would be "more visible" if they had their own separate category. You're not ignoring warn and error - of course not, you would never! - it's just that you want "fatal" at the very top of your to-do list. If "visibility" isn't their jam, try something like "improve resource management" or "keep priorities aligned."

[zacianv-deactivated20230815]

if i was a fine, fragile linen would you handwash me 🥺 or put me in that damned maschine 😑

[livingdeadpoetssociety]

[lunaiz4-misc]

Which machine? Linen *isn't* fragile when it's wet, but it very much is when it's dry...

[aquarian-sunchild]

Every time I see that "Don't give 100% at your job. Only give like 70% at most." I think about human service jobs.

I'm an early childhood educator. I work to keep ten two-year olds safe, healthy and psycho-emotionally enriched. I don't think only giving 70% of my effort to do that would be good for anyone.

My mom is recovering from a stroke at a rehabilitation center. I would really like the staff there to give their 100% caring for residents.

If you're in a cubicle, yeah sure. But if you're primary job responsibility is to keep vulnerable people alive and comfortable, then I don't think discount effort is a good idea.

Discuss?

[itsabear]

This is legitimately why teachers on strike often demand smaller class sizes. They want to give all their kids their needs but if the classes are too big that's killing the teacher to do that. If you have nothing left for yourself at the end of the day of working with the kids, you owe it to them to organise with the other teachers and make demands of your business, otherwise you burn out and screw the kids over.

Likewise, nurses need more co-workers. As a society we need to demand steep rises in healthcare spending.

[lunaiz4-misc]

The reason we only give 70% is not just to avoid burnout. It is also so that we have more to give in an emergency. The rehab center your mother is at should be staffed such that, on a normal day, all of the necessary tasks can be accomplished with 70% human effort. This way, if something goes wrong, someone can take your mom to the ER to get checked out, and sit with her so she's not alone, and the rest of the staff have bandwidth left to pick up that person's responsibilities.

If they were all giving 100% all of the time, they wouldn't be able to adapt to a situation that needs more from them. And that is why they strike - because they care. They understand that, if they're all pushed to their limits all the time, they may eventually reach them, very possibly in a moment when their charges need them most.

Admin, who is looking at numbers on a page and not real people, doesn't always realize the importance of this buffer. They see that they can push and push and work still mostly gets done, and if there are a few more mistakes, well, who cares? The patients were fine! Only the front line workers say the quiet part at the end: the patients were fine this time.

[lunaiz4-misc]

Our world didn't used to be real. In fact, there is still quite a bit of scholarly debate on that subject. You see, unlike a lot of worlds, we knew exactly when, and how, we came to be.

The story goes like this.

Before I was born (but not long before I was born) this world was just a game. A game beloved by a little girl in the meta world -- the world that ours rests within. The little girl made a wish. Some stories say it was a genie wish, or a wish upon a star. Others argue it wasn't magic at all, and that we're living in a simulation coded by some person or AI who loved her very, very much. There probably is a real answer, out in the meta world, but they seem to think telling us that information will cause us to have some sort of worldwide existential crisis. As if we haven't already done that ten times over, and come out of it just fine, thank you very much.

The stories all agree that she made a wish, for her favorite game to be "real." The wish was granted, and our world was born, already fully formed with people and towns and a whole backstory that was significantly less real than the world itself now was. I'm told it was utter chaos for a while.

In a lot of ways we're lucky it was a little girl, and not an adult or a little boy. She wasn't interested in the violent bits of the game, preferring to live out her fantasies of being a powerful, influential adult. She played on kid-friendly mode, where you can do and be whatever you like and where nothing can truly hurt you.

Our game was a superhero game, you see, and it very much did have villains. Everything from your basic goons, essentially cannon fodder, to full-on mad scientist supervillains. But they didn't do any real violence, not in kid mode, so whatever woke us all up on Creation Day made them less pure evil and more schemers and pranksters. Most of them are more liable to put soap flakes in all the public fountains than blow up buildings. (The fountains where this might cause a real inconvenience have long since been disconnected from the water lines.)

The kid grew up, and while she still visits from time to time, we mostly get other visitors now. Scientists, who hole up at the university trying to learn more about our world (while telling us as little as possible about theirs.) Tourists, who keep getting copies of the game somehow despite the scientist's best efforts (and who sometimes let tantalizing crumbs slip). Some of them come in thinking that this is all still a game, with no consequences. Luckily they usually come in at level one, weak as kittens and with no idea how to use their powers. We throw those in prison, and they tend to lose interest pretty quickly when they realize that's all they're going to see of our world.

Since I already told you I was born here, you know we can have kids. That was a big question, at first, and once the initial chaos settled people quickly set about trying to answer it. There were a lot of babies born around the same time as me. We even get powers, sometimes, though only from the "villain" table. (A few years after C-Day, one of the devs snuck in our entire source code, at what I am sure was great risk to themself. They haven't been seen since. I hope they're okay out there.) I haven't gotten one yet, and I'm not sure if I want to or not. Whoever wrote the villain table had a sick sense of humor - most of them are downright weird.

The question that caused the most panic was whether the world might cease to exist if all the players log off. It doesn't, thankfully. They were worried about that in the meta world, too, and kept someone logged in at all times for the first few years. Then some hacker group that, I guess, didn't believe we were real or had a right to exist, figured out how to boot everyone out at once and shut down the servers. It took them hours to get back online, and absolutely nothing happened, except of course that the city devolved into complete pandemonium. And there was a toilet paper shortage for months. Apparently the world possibly ending means we need to loot all the toilet paper from the grocery store. Don't ask me why, I was four.

So, yeah. Definitely here. Debatably real, but real enough, as far as most of us are concerned. You should come visit sometime.

[starpains]

on “the blond,” “the older man,” and other crimes against third-person limited

You know that thing where a story is written in tight third person limited — we’re meant to be inside someone’s head, seeing the world through their thoughts — and then suddenly the narration says “the blond frowned” or “the shorter woman sighed” about a person the POV character knows really well?

That’s called antonomasia — using a descriptive label instead of a name. And it’s fine when we’re talking about strangers: “the cashier handed her the receipt,” “the tall guy blocked the door.” The POV character doesn’t know their names, and we just need a quick way to tell people apart.

But the moment it’s used for someone the POV character already knows, it breaks immersion. Because that’s not how our minds work. We don’t think “the older man smiled at me.” We think “Mark smiled.” Or maybe “my boss” if that relationship matters in the moment.

Third person limited means the narration sits inside someone’s perception. Their inner monologue is the story’s voice. So when you switch from “Mark smiled” to “the blond smiled,” you’ve pulled the camera away from their mind and turned it into an outside shot.

If you want to create distance or irritation, you can do it on purpose —

“The idiot from accounting emailed again.”

That’s character voice. That’s judgment. That works.

But otherwise?

As soon as your POV character knows someone’s name, use it. While we do tend to worry about repetitions, names rarely register as such to the readers.

If you need variety for rhythm, use relational or emotional identifiers that make sense in their head: her friend, his partner, their teacher, the person they loved.

Because inside someone’s thoughts, there are no “blonds” or “brunettes.”

There are only people they know.

[wisteria-lodge]

Really good explanation of the fundamental problem with this type of writing.

(and why it's one of my huge pet peeves)

[lunaiz4-misc]

It might be an interesting exercise to write a character who perpetually forgets names. Because they aren't just "the blonde!" They're a specific blonde, whom the character does know, but doesn't recall the name for. They're also perfectly capable of dyeing their hair.

I tend to go social group + physical characteristics + behavioral characteristics, in that order, when talking about someone whose name I can't recall. But that's probably not universal, and would also get unwieldy.

See also, "local fixtures," who are distinctive enough and public enough that nearly everyone has seen them, but few people actually know them. Mustache man (full-on styled and curled mustache). Barefoot skateboard guy. Skirt girl (wore miniskirts even in winter). The same every time they're said, like names. Specific person, like a name. Not names, not really.

[sandersstudies]

I feel like in the rush of “throw out etiquette who cares what fork you use or who gets introduced first” we actually lost a lot of social scripts that the younger generations are floundering without.

[sandersstudies]

A lot of tough situations where we now feel like we “don’t know what to do or say” had social scripts just a couple of generations ago and they might have been canned phrases or robotic actions but they could still be meant sincerely and unfortunately we haven’t replaced them with any more sincere or easier new script.

[beemovieerotica]

a lot of people are giving examples in the notes of things they just find annoying like not using headphones in public, but OP is talking about actual literal scripts of things to say in awkward situations

if you have a date or two with someone and you don't see a relationship developing? most millennials / gen Zers just end up ghosting. but a social script that might have been taught and rehearsed in the past could be:

"I really appreciated getting dinner with you the other night and I enjoyed your company, but I'm afraid I didn't feel a spark. I wish you the best, and hope you find that special someone!"

like it sounds kind of trite but it was at least something to say and it can still be meant with kind sincerity. it also communicates in 2 sentences that you don't want to see them romantically again, but there aren't any hard feelings about that. that's it!!! that's all it takes!!!

[misfit-toy-haven]

Another example is that at parties a lot of people talk about how awkward it is to mingle or talk to people they dont know. But at old timey parties that was traditionally the HOST'S job, and there was a specific scripted way of doing it that eased the process! The host would bring you in, introduce you and maybe even a little bit about you like what you did for a living, and then guide you to a group you could talk to. They didn't just let you in the door and then ditch you to fend for yourself in a sea of strangers. That would be unthinkable and no one would be surprised if a get-together like that wound up being awkward.

[demonprincex]

I still do the party-host thing and yall can, too! (Thanks Mad Men for teaching me a lot of outmoded social scripts... no really tho)

Remember things about your friends! Ask people about their weekends, hobbies, holidays, studies, and jobs! Listen for the concerns people have and what they are working on! Draw connections between one person and another to get the ball rolling. "Oh, Maura, you just got your first cat! You should talk to Felix, he used to work at a rescue. Felix, please tell Maura all the new-cat-guardian pointers."

"Bill, Sheila, Xan, this is my friend Kale. Kale is really into Star Trek, Bill you and them should talk about it!"

Orrr whatever! After you make the introduction and draw the connection you just float on into the next interaction with someone else at the function. Just listen, care about your friends, get our of your own head, and think of how you can bring other people together and you will feel 100% less awkward.

[3liza]

hi i am so excited about this post because i have posted this exact thing MANY times on here, often in the specific context of how formal etiquette is so useful for autistic people especially, but also for everyone. even if you come off a little bit formal, which you will sometimes, having Old School Manners (or just knowing what they are) for various common scenarios is like having a magic ticket that will just sail you through all kinds of social iinteractions, gatekeeping, social weirdness, and as is pointed out in the above posts about introducing people to each other, can make you into a really valuable and helpful person for an entire gathering or group of people.

i also want to point out that knowing what the polite thing to do in all situations makes you a lot more effective at being rude and obnoxious when the situation calls for it, which is also a valuable and necessary adult skill

[dailymanners]

#things to write#but also#things to do#I could certainly benefit from a manual...

If you're looking for a manual on these sorts of things; social etiquette, social scripts, how to handle difficult and/or awkward social situations, etc. then I highly recommend picking up any book by Miss Manners. Her books really are the gold standard for learning the types of skills this post is talking about. I should also mention that Miss Manners is witty and hilarious so her books are also fun to read.

The best book by Miss Manners to get started with would be Miss Manner's Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior. This one is probably the best starting point because it gives the best overview of all the basics.

If you're the type who likes to listen to podcasts, I recommend checking out "Were You Raised By Wolves?" and/or "Awesome Etiquette". Both are also great tools for learning the type of social skills this post is talking about. I'm personally a fan of "Were You Raised By Wolves?" because not only are they pretty funny and informative, they also bother to try to teach the underlying social intelligence behind various manners and social etiquette so that you can have the skills to solve social dilemmas on your own. However, "Awesome Etiquette" is also pretty fun and informative.

[dailymanners]

#long post#I feel like 'i dont do small talk nobody cares about the weather' had a negative impact on social interaction#I mean yeah sometimes small talk about nothing gets awkward. but often it leads to the most interesting conversations#just asking 'what kind of music do you listen to at the gym' or 'have you read any books lately' could be such a lovely subject#I'm sometimes socially awkward despite being a huge extrovert. that's why etiquette is such a great thing#if you don't know how to act around people just stick to the etiquette rules. if they have a problem with it they're not for me anyways

Sorry @darlingdear but I couldn't let this stay in the tags.

I say this as someone who is neurodivergent had grew up very socially awkward, but recently I find the "screw small talk, I wanna get to know the REAL you" attitude to be pretentious as well as a demonstration of a lack of boundaries.

But also, I think a lot of people who have this attitude don't actually really know what does qualify as small talk. The definition of small talk is any topic that's of no real consequence and includes topics like food, pets, sports, music, whatever show you're currently streaming, whatever book you're currently reading, and yes, the weather. A lot of people who have this "I hate small talk / I don't do small talk" attitude probably think it's only reciting a bunch of secret scripts about the weather, and don't realize how much they engage in small talk whenever they talk about their pets or their favorite foods or the really cool show they're watching right now.

Small talk is just about boundaries and getting to know someone *before* you move into more serious and personal topics. The older I get the more I learn you really can't just trust anyone with more serious and personal subjects. Small talk first is important to gauge if they're someone safe and trustworthy first before moving into more serious and personal subjects. If you really genuinely refuse to get to know someone before immediately discussing serious and personal subjects you may have an issue with boundaries and should consider working on that.

[littlehouseontheaerie]

Oh my god, so much the last point. All of them, but especially the last.

Small talk is a way of sounding out a person’s attitudes. It’s about finding out if they’re a rabid asshole or someone you want to spend more time with.

I had a professor who got angry at a group of (mostly women), from five countries, all of whom met yesterday, for talking about daytime TV. He basically insulted us and called us shallow.

Dude, we were figuring each other out with a safe topic! We were the best of friends three weeks later. We could broach harder topics because we understood each other’s boundaries better. If you immediately demand people bare their souls, you’re not likely to get them to be honest.

[roxanedrawing]

also it's always polite / a good idea to balance the conversation out between yourself and the other person. By which I mean, if they've asked you several questions, turn it around: "and what about you?" / "what has your experience been in [topic]?" I used to be too awkward to do it but noticed conversations would bleed to death. Then I overcompensated and only asked the other person question upon question. This was also Not Ideal because guys would end up thinking I was super interested in them and get confused when I shut off my interest / social battery later on. So, balance: I try to talk about 50% of the time and share something that is either useful or relatable to the other or important to me. And by being interested and asking real questions you can get to know someone better and they will also know you a little, which can be really lovely.

[dailymanners]

Due to me seeing this post again, I decided to start re-reading Miss Manners Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, and all I can say is, this is a book Tumblr is really sleeping on.

It's not just the fact that this book is perfect for those of us who are neurodivergent, who can really benefit from having a book which kindly and patiently bothers to explain social rules and norms that people just expect you to know without ever telling you themselves.

It's also the fact that, despite this book being nearly 45 years old, Miss Manners makes it clear in the preface and opening chapters that she is explicitly against classism, sexism, and homophobia. She also makes it explicitly clear in the preface that her personal belief in the importance of good manners and etiquette has nothing to do with a desire to return to "the good old days", because those days were not actually good for women, LGBTQ+ people, poor people, and people of color.

What really made me re-fall in love with Miss Manners though was right in the opening chapter she addresses using sexualized threats and insults to debase and degrade others (you know, like "get fcked", or "suck my genitals", or "yeah well that's not what your mom / sister / other female family member had to say last night") because if sex is something that's supposed to be good and pleasurable, why are we using it as a threat to debase and degrade others? Honestly I love her so much for calling out the inherent sex-negativity of using sexualized threats and insults like that, and nearly 45 years ago at that!

Miss Manners has never been a stuffy old fashioned fuddy-duddy. She has always been a deeply compassionate woman far ahead of her time, whose sole mission is to make the world a kinder and more considerate place.

[ilsa-fireswan]

I have read Miss Manners multiple times! For fun! She is so fun! The Correct Way To Eat Shrimps With The Tails On is 100% rent free brain material. But also! Knowing the correct order in which to introduce people, and also knowing that the people I am introducing have no idea… truly my favorite way to be mildly petty while getting all the social credit for being the polite one. A win-win scenario because even if they know, they don’t know that I know!

[magicratfingers]

damn ok i'll do it like a man

[homunculus-argument]

If any part of your plan involves the words "nobody could be that stupid", please be prepared to be proven wrong at any minute at a moment's notice. Pay in mind that the person determined to prove you wrong may already be aware of this assumption, and is already approaching your current location at an alarming speed.

[the-real-seebs]

"it will be fine if people just"

people will not just

[alarajrogers]

In 2011 I attended an event called Bmore Fail, in which entrepreneurs in Baltimore talked about their failures and what they learned from them.

What I learned is that there is an inflexible rule about how people interact with systems. If your system would work perfectly if people Just Would, and yet they Don't, then your system is bad and you should feel bad. Systems must be built with an eye toward "will people actually do this"?

Recycling was a thing when I was a child. (The 70's.) In my home in New York State, you could carry recyclables to a recycling center. Nobody did. Now in 2024 Baltimore there is a trash truck that comes every week to pick up my recyclables, and I and my neighbors fill our cans with objects that can be recycled, because a system was developed that was easy for busy people to do, and there's a lot of social pressure to do it -- but the social pressure wouldn't exist if it wasn't easy to do. Only the most crunchy granola people bitched at you if you didn't recycle in 1979, when it required a lot of effort. Now it is considered kind of on par with spitting in the street or leaving a dirty diaper on the diaper changing table in the bathroom instead of throwing it out, if you don't recycle.

Your job as the system creator is to make it as easy as possible for people to do the right thing, and as hard as possible to do the wrong thing. This is why web forms have data validation (but too much data validation actually makes the forms harder, so hit the spot in the middle.) And if you want people to adopt social change, whether it's environmentalism, accepting gay people, or whatever, make it as easy as possible. And don't guilt people about not doing it until it's as easy as possible; instead phrase things more like "wouldn't it be cool if". It's not the fault of the individual that they can't get things done in a bad system. Fix the system.

[the-real-seebs]

if users regularly fuck up using a tool you made, and your answer is "you're holding it wrong", the next question you should ask is "why did i make this tool so it's easy to hold it wrong?"

[reasonablywittyatbest]

And then you're tech support begging the development team to change something very small that would make the user experience so much better cause they made the tool too easy to hold wrong and development will whine at you because they're very busy with the back end stuff and hey you're the customer facing side why can't you just make them, and no you can't just make them, please development please I'm begging you make the tool less easy to hold wrong.

[gamergunk64]

sorry what was that about how "accepting gay people" is on the list of things we should "make easier"?

@alarajrogers what did you mean by this?

that the onus is on gay people to be more palatable?

[alarajrogers]

No, the onus is on whoever is building the system. Most of the time that's not the gay people themselves, because people who are marginalized are rarely in a position to build systems that affect their own marginalization; that's what allies with privilege are for.

A small thing. If you want to support trans and nonbinary people, then on government forms, if they require gender and you can't get around it, allow "other"; better still, don't require gender. If you're building a medical system, and the patient's gender is M, do not gray out all the "female" problems he might be presenting with on the grounds that a man can't possibly have menstrual problems, be pregnant, or have issues with his uterus; likewise if the patient presents as F, don't make it impossible to enter a diagnosis of prostate cancer for her.

Don't set up validation rules that prevent someone with gender M from having a husband. Better yet, let "husband" and "wife" both be covered by the term "spouse", because that is inclusive of non-binary spouses as well.

Because I'm in IT, I think in terms of IT systems. But there are government systems and insurance systems and financial systems and all sorts of systems out there, that should be set up so that a gay person will be able to navigate it as easily as a straight person, and a straight person will see that the available options don't privilege them at the expense of everyone else... a subtle reminder that no, you're not the center of the universe and gay people exist. Why do you think the right wing fights so hard against there being Spanish on forms that are also in English? You'd think, it doesn't harm anyone using the form for there to be both Spanish and English. But they know, the presence of Spanish reminds English speakers that the world doesn't center around what works for them; other options exist. That's what they want to get rid of, the subtle reminder that someone besides them is important too.

This is a discussion about how to make systems work in some way other than If People Would Just, making them easier to promote the result you want, so I'm not sure how you even got "the onus is on gay people to be more palatable", and I get the feeling you don't understand the context of the discussion. I am not even sure how you could devise a system that incorporates "gay people should make themselves more palatable" because that sounds exactly like a thing that People Should Just... meaning, you're relying on humans to behave in the exact specific way you need them to for your system to work, and the whole point of this conversation is that doing that dooms your system to fail. Gay people will never Just Make Themselves More Palatable To Straights, as a cohort, so if your system for getting gay people to be better accepted relies on If Gay People Would Just, your system will fail.

Unfortunately, reading comprehension is also one of those things that If People Would Just, so posting about things on Tumblr is also a system that's doomed to fail. :-)

[lunaiz4-misc]

I am a back end dev, and any time I try to suggest we design a thing so that people will be less likely to use it properly, I am met with bafflement. Surely they will use it in the way we intended? No, no they will not. If you want people to use the thing the way you intended, the way you intended must be either the path of least resistance, the most obvious path, or both. I have worked data entry, I have seen some of the shit our overworked, underpaid staff will pull just so they can call a job done.

We don't usually bother training people on these things, and when we do they usually ignore it, so the software must also train the user on how to use it properly. Ideally we have a team for that, with enough technical expertise to write good requirements and enough people skills to accurately predict how real users are going to behave. User experience, or quality assurance, or business analysis, or SOMEthing. But management likes to pretend we don't need any of those, and be shocked when people use the software "wrong."

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

more characters with superpowers who look into the whole superhero thing and decide "hm no i do not want to participate in this actually"

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

to be clear i'm not saying they turn to supervillainy. they just look at their superpower-based career options and decide to go in an unrelated direction. dental hygienist. supply chain management. HVAC technician in surprisingly high demand

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

some of them do superpower hobbies on the weekend, but a good portion of them are just "eh. my body could technically do it but this is not fun for me?" like it's literally just excercise. why spend your free time training for a marathon when you could be crafting

a lucky few have highly marketable powers which make for extremely well-paid gig work (standard teleporter hourly pay is insane), but it's not exactly a passion driven career. yeah speedsters can make bank working production lines but that gets repetitive real fast. also that shit is tiring. yeah the agricultural industry is paying you big bucks to control the weather during harvest season but you're going to have back spasms for months after.

[whotooklortan]

One time at my manufacturing job I got asked about what superpowers I would want and I concluded that the most passion driven power/job I could imagine was just knowing the precise location of all sharks. I would be unable to control them or communicate with them. But I am invaluable to conservation work, ocean photography, zoology, lifeguards, etc. I have no idea if I could or would want to profit from this, I would probably still have a 9-5, but I like to think of spending my spare time just answering texts about Greenland sharks and doing horrifying guest appearances on weather broadcasts.

[lunaiz4-misc]

Your biggest market would, 110%, be divers who want to hang out with the sea puppies.

Sure, lots of people are scared of sharks, but the sort of people who are willing to SCUBA dive in the open ocean are generally not those people. Knowing where wild sharks can be found, without needing to lure them or try to predict where they are going to be, would be very valuable information indeed.

They would almost certainly try to steal you away into the ocean, likely by offering things like free air refills and boat trips and just about anything else they thought might tempt you. You would probably end up with a day job of "dive guide" whether you meant to or not.

[zhenya-grey]

Disabled people being taken care of properly isn't a privilege. WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO LIVE.

"if I had your disability in my country, I would die, therefore you're privileged" (paraphrase)

Disabled people are simultaneously the worst off (at the whims of our governments on whether we get to be alive or not regardless of where we live) AND the most privileged, on account of ....being alive at all I guess 😔

[zhenya-grey]

Oh beloved friend of mine. Yes it's a right to exist and live.

The fact disabled people are completely at the mercy of the government, and the medical system and police, no matter what country we're in, but this is somehow normalized so hard people believe we're privileged to be alive at all, IS BAD. EVERYONE SHOULD FEEL BAD FOR THINKING THAT WAY.

Imagine if people said that shit about any other minority, yeah, they'd VERY RIGHTFULLY be called out so hard they'll turn to dust.

[lunaiz4-misc]

Science communication is so, so hard. Namely, getting someone to get off the train at a stop between "totally ignorant" and "panicked." The zone one might refer to as "cautious."

...

We are using cadmium yellow paint in class. I remember vaguely that cadmium might be a Potential Hazard. I look it up - more dangerous the more you have in your system. Mostly absorbed via the respiratory system, and less readily via the GI tract. Low absorption through skin, though it is possible. Not naturally excreted, ever, except through... oh god, pregnancy. Those poor newborns.

I was in STEM long enough to have multiple "understanding scientific research" lessons, so I parse this easily enough. It's a danger that builds over time, like radiation from x-rays. Bad to have on your skin, worse to eat, and even worse to breathe, but not actually cause for alarm until it reaches a certain level.

It is almost lunchtime, and my classmates have snacks. They pick them up with yellow-stained fingers. I cry out "wait! Wash your hands first!"

"Why," they ask, "is the paint dangerous or something?"

Well, yes, and no. Nothing bad will happen today, certainly. Probably not tomorrow, either, or next week. But they are career artists. And so I try to explain. At first, they don't believe me. When they finally do, they panic. They throw out the cadmium yellow, and the cadmium red too, and buy artificial substitutes. They keep their snacks.

The next class we paint with cobalt blue.

[lunaiz4-misc]

Material safety in the arts:

"Hm, this says it's an inhalation hazard, a skin irritant, and is known to the state of California to cause cancer. Guess I had better use it outside! Or maybe just open the window?"

Material safety in the sciences:

"You can't even come into the lab unless you have gloves, goggles, and close-toed shoes. We have installed ventilation that is massively overkill for 90% of what we do in here. These are fume hoods - use them. You should wear a respirator while working with this, those, and these anyway. The eye wash is here, the fire extinguisher is there, and here's how you operate the emergency shower. We know you know this, but we do have to tell you that fire is hot, blades are sharp, and you shouldn't drink bleach."

Me, a ceramics artist with a STEM background, causally looking around the studio:

"Okay, so like. Maybe don't eat and paint with that at the same time. Do you guys think we should let the sponges dry out between uses, or like, ever? No? I mean, that's cool I guess. Possibly you should put your shoes back on. You might wanna tie your hair back before you -- oh you already turned it on. Awesome. That causes silicosis if you inhale too much of it, which is why the sign you have ignored says not to dry sand it in a public space. I mean, I guess you can do it outside, but you should really have at least an N95. Please keep an eye on your child so they don't accidentally... you know what, never mind. The first aid kit is in the bathroom if for some strange reason you end up needing it. Did you just stick your BARE HAND in the bin marked 'danger - staff only' and pull out an entire fistful of powdered glaze ingredient? Yes I know you're staff, that's not the point."

[free-and-to-none-accountable]

[lunaiz4-misc]

Oh, they are at a pottery sale! This is funny because a lot of ceramic objects are both decorative and functional, and their function is not always obvious. Smaller pigs, for example, might be paintbrush/chopstick rests! But these pigs have no intended function. They simply are.

I think it's rather rude to the pigs to compare them to cops, as they are very cute and not hurting anyone at all.

[console-pokeballs-rupees]

Penny and her eeveelutions

credit: mikripkm on X

[anarchistmemedistro]

[hillasuo]

you can't even make quality things as easily when you make them yourself anymore. the supplies, especially fabrics are more expensive and the quality drop is astounding. fabrics have been exponentially shittified in the last decade even, thanks to what i'd call the shein-phenomenon (fast fashion practises reaching everything material coulture related). historical fabric mills could make fabrics so fine and delicate that they are almost transparent but at the same time last you decades. i've heard that even wood isn't the same as it was, although i think wood has had a much more prolonged enshittification period than fabric.

[lunaiz4-misc]

Wood isn't the same as it was, and it's at least partially because hardwoods aren't easily farmed. Colonizers cut down wild trees for furniture, homes, ships, even simply to clear land. When the supply of wild trees started to dwindle, they did have the foresight to plant more, but they made two big mistakes:

1. They planted monoculture. Rows and rows of the same exact type of tree.

2. They imported trees from other regions.

It came as a shock to them (though it may seem obvious to us, in hindsight) that this resulted in rampant disease. The most notable and tragic example in recent history is the American Chestnut. Between 1900 and 1940, nearly four billion trees across the US and Canada succumbed to Chestnut Blight, a fungal infection which was likely imported accidentally alongside Japanese Chestnut trees. In a less dramatic, but still tragic, example, Mahogany plantations fell one after another to the Hypsipyla grandella moth. H. grandella only infects mahogany trees, and does not spread rapidly in a mixed-species forest, but was able to absolutely decimate monoculture plantings. By this point, we were well into the 20th century. Considering many of these trees take several decades to mature, populations just haven't had time to bounce back.

Of course, that isn't the only reason. Many of the same factors that gave birth to modern fast fashion contributed to the rise of trendy, inexpensive, and therefore disposable furniture. IKEA popularized hollow core and flat pack construction. To compete, manufacturers needed less rare and expensive hardwood and more fast-growing softwood and composite materials (plywood, particle board, and fiberboard). The free market supplied. I am not a woodworker myself, but I am reliably informed that the wood at the hardware store is just as garbage as the fabric in, say, the Walmart craft section.

[pangur-and-grim]

I think some of the loneliness of autism is that you feel like you hurt people just by Interacting Wrong, but you don’t know how to Interact Right, and the more effort you put into it, the more exhausted you are and the more artificial it comes across (with the end result of people still being upset with you). and it’s not anyone’s fault for not liking Being Interacted With Wrong, and it’s not your fault for doing it so wrong, but it is very, very lonely.

[pangur-and-grim]

anyway, every single book I write ever is going to secretly be about autism

[pangur-and-grim]

in case this was too negative, I CAN sniff out other autistic people like an ant scenting pheromones, and I DO automatically love them right from the outset. honestly, there are some people whose autism doesn’t mesh well with mine, but the base love is still there because I know we’re alike, and I know that have shared painful experiences. so it’s not all hopeless! you just need to find other ants 🐜

[lunaiz4-misc]

NT people actually can learn how to interact the ND way, at least in theory. They just usually don't bother. Their loss, frankly, though it can absolutely be lonely.

I have a friend from work that I immediately bonded with (by repeatedly sending him photos of my cats and almost nothing else) and I was absolutely astonished to discover he considers himself neurotypical. I'm still not entirely sure I *believe* him, because he knows exactly how to interact with me, but he swears it's true. Apparently his school's music department adopted him and taught him their ways, and he works with enough Very Autistic software devs (like me) that he stays in practice.