The Spoils Of Boredom @musemarauder - Tumblr Blog

the rubber duck

For anyone curious what they mean by the rubber duck, rubber duck debugging is a tactic used by programmers to figure out bugs in the code. To do it, they explain the code, verbally, line by line, to the rubber duck until they find it.

It’s also very useful for writers, and I’ve used it multiple times with rubber ducks, stuffed animals, and my friends.

brunhiddensmusings

“when i say it out loud i realize where the stupid was”

irtenyev

when w. h. auden said “evil is unspectacular and always human” and ursula k. leguin said “this is the great treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain”

treethymes

when toni morrison said “i just think goodness is more interesting. evil is constant. you can think of different ways to murder people, but you can do that at age five. but you have to be an adult to consciously, deliberately be good – and that’s complicated.”

azbukivedii

when simone weil said “imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.”

luisonte

One punch man

dzamie

THE FLOURISH AND SHEATHE

yumearashi

"I felt nothing for the child, it was like an object to me."

This is so important, stories like this need to be told. The cultural insistence we have that parenthood is some kind of magical bonding that happens every time without exception does real harm to both parents and children, as you can see from some of these stories:

My father recently told me he never wanted kids, but my mother wanted them. She thought he would love us when we were born.

and

I didn’t realize that a maternal instinct is not universal. You know how you see parents in the delivery room and they are crying tears of joy? I felt nothing. […] My boys are well cared for and I am always here for them, but it feels very unnatural and fake and unenjoyable. It is a bit like a retail job you don’t like where you put on a fake persona and slog through it the best you can. I don’t get to leave this job, though.

and

I also thought I wouldn’t mind missing out on all the partying and holidays because I would have the ultimate gift, a child.

and

I always said I would never have children. I hate kids..I do. I am just not that type of nurturing person. I was always very careful to make sure protection was in use (condoms, birth control) but I am that .1% and apparently very fertile. I do not have that natural motherly instinct that all women seem to have, you know..that one that kicks in the moment they know they’re pregnant. I have to work really hard at it and it’s exhausting. I miss my solitude and being able to “check out” of reality from time to time.

and

Because kids aren’t the life completer we believe they are.

Are there people for whom having children completes their lives? No doubt. Are there parents for whom the downsides like sleeplessness and loss of personal time are outweighed by the love and joy they feel? Of course. Are there people who change their minds about wanting kids once they have them? Sure. But that’s not true for everyone. It doesn’t happen every time, it’s never guaranteed, and the consequences are grievous when people who don’t want children have them anyway trusting that they will love the child and be happy.

We need to dispel the starry-eyed myths around pregnancy, childbirth, and marriage and create more realistic expectations. Parenthood is too important a choice for people not to go into it with their eyes open.

abyssopelagic-alexithymia

“It doesn’t happen every time, it’s never guaranteed, and the consequences are grievous when people who don’t want children have them anyway trusting that they will love the child and be happy.”

your-url-is-problematic

There’s a book on this topic that was groundbreaking when it came out, called Regretting Motherhood: A Study by Dr. Orna Donath. The backlash was insane. This is a topic that simply wasn’t discussed, and as the book became more famous (was translated into multiple languages, received a lot of public attention), the responses also became more incendiary. I had the utter honor and pleasure of studying with Orna - she read us some of the death threats she received, in her calm and measured manner, using them to further show just how deeply society expects motherhood of women.

I haven’t read the book myself, but knowing Orna, and having read some of her other work, I wholeheartedly recommend it.

evavalor

underrated trope: “i’ve lost my memory and idk who you are but i just have this feeling that i’m supposed to trust you”

meg-moira

This - but the feeling is absolutely, completely, 100% wrong.

Person 1: “I don’t know what it is about you…I just know that I can trust you.”

Person 2, their actual, literal worst enemy: “Excuse me, what?”

Cue enemies to friends to lovers speedrun.

unbotheredmuse

monsterbi

pathologising

actually you will not enjoy hearing this but you literally have to abandon your self deprecating humor. besides the fact that it can drive people away you literally are only hurting yourself by constantly making jokes that further cement the idea in your head that you are not good enough. I do not care that you think its a good coping mechanism it is absolutely not and you need to start challenging negative thoughts instead of feeding into them.

guooey

I gradually stopped doing this over a couple years and it took some getting used to, but you weren’t born hating yourself, it was taught by family members or it was pushed onto you by bad experiences growing up. you are the only person you really have at the end of the day, and there will always be someone out there putting you down. you shouldn’t be helping them out

afloweroutofstone

ky-ju-deactivated20231122

I feel like practicing any skill would be way more fun if I could have a lil level increase thing that pops up in front of me every time I do good like in Skyrim

ky-ju-deactivated20231122

“Push ups increased to level 5”

“Writing dialogue increased to level 37”

“Coping mechanisms (healthy) increased to level 18”

against-stars

my father said to me once that one of the things he deeply regretted was not putting music on for his father while he was fading away. he told me that grandpa would just sit in his old armchair in the quiet, and not until after he’d passed did my dad think of how he could have played of his favorite classical music tapes for him so grandpa could listen to something while he still could. i was very young when this happened and not much older when my dad told me this, but it always stuck with me as something important.

my mother died at home in a hospice cot, slowly shutting down over the course of about a week. when she had stopped responding, i remembered what dad told me about wishing he’d played music for grandpa, and i put the radio on her favorite country music station and kept it on for her until she died.

daddy died in hospital. no cassette players, no decent radios. the day after he was brought in, i thought again of what he told me, and i bought a little portable bluetooth speaker. even though he never woke up, was never aware, i played music for him too.

there’s no real significance to sharing this, not really. my motivation is selfish, again: i just want to hope that someone might think of this when their loved one is stuck in silence somehow, and maybe they’ll play music for them, and they won’t have to regret not doing so. i want to hope it helps someone. and i want to hope that someone will remember my dad with me, even in just a “story i read on the internet” way.

eirianerisdar

Hey, OP, you actually might have done a very significant thing for your parents indeed. Hearing is the last sense to go when someone is passing away. It’s why palliative care doctors tell patients’ relatives to continue speaking even if the patient stops responding. So even if your mother and father could not wake or respond to you or those around you, they perhaps could have heard the music they so loved, and perhaps were comforted. So what you did wasn’t selfish at all, and I’m sorry for jumping on to your post, but it’s likely that playing music for your parents as they passed away did much more for them than you might have known at the time.

gaynfl-moved

oh my god

gutter-adonis

That was timed so well oh my god

amaraqwolf

Are you trapped on tumblr right now?

Is there something you planned to do before you got trapped in the endless tumblr scroll?

Are you yelling at yourself to get up and do the thing, but you can’t, because you’re trapped in the endless tumblr scroll?

Consider this your save point.

Put tumblr down, stand up, stretch, and go do the thing you planned to do. Future you will be incredibly grateful.

amaraqwolf

Things people in the notes have been able to do thanks to this post:

eat breakfast

go to bed

get out of bed

take a shower

write

practice

watch Superman Returns and write a paper on it

retain shreds of sanity

I need y’all to know that you’re doing amazing, and I’m so glad that I was able to help you break out of a procrastination loop you did not want to be stuck in.

beeceit-deactivatingsoon-deacti

Also, this is a check to make sure you’ve taken any meds you need to, taken care of any medical equipment, or some any exercise your doctor wants you to

studentlifeproblems

divineirony

To say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger.

“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”

This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions?

Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.

While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.

But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:

Navigation and Pormpuraawans In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.

Blame and English Speakers In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.

Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.

Gender in Finnish and Hebrew In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)

damelola

5 examples of how the languages we speak can affect the way we think.

askpredetor

>Morning shift

>Customer is angry that we disabled his card

>calm him down because it is a security measure

>We had to block his card because he spent 5k on Genshin Impact at 4AM and almost drained his entire bank account

>The instant we unblock his card he spends 200 more dollars on Genshin Impact

deepermadness

I've seen this happen before in Duel Links, Arknights, Fate and now Genshin. The people who indulge like this are called "whales". Check this out:

He eventually sunk around $1,500 just for a weapon. This is gambling addiction.

cushfuddled

Pretty much every big game these days relies on addictive hooks. James Stephanie Sterling did a great video on the way game companies prey on “whales” by filling their games with gambling mechanics. I honestly can’t recommend it enough if you haven’t seen it:

despicableplankton

that video destroyed my mood for a good few days

really made it seem like we’re fucked and there’s no way to do anything to make video games better for people

like we’re all just fucked forever

I know that wasn’t the intention, but holy shit it’s bleak

sableweiss

Hey so Genshin Impact and mobile games like Fate Grand Order, Honkai Impact, and Mr. Love Queen’s Choice are great examples of what’s currently got gamers in a chokehold. This video is really really good. It forces you to look at the fact that gaming companies are intentionally creating gambling addition to keep you paying hundreds, if not thousands, into an otherwise FREE game.

They are intentionally going after people who have these types of behaviors and exploiting it, and creating it in people who didn’t have it before by making the games look absolutely fucking amazing and giving them just enough to make them want more.

Stay safe ya’ll. Take a break from games if the urge becomes too much. Read books, watch tv, paint, craft, skateboard, build a doghouse, knit, play sports, make a game yourself, do literally ANYTHING other than the freaking game because entire teams of people are working their asses off to get you to cave and pay out.