khichdi

just another pea brained gita hater. used to be a dedicated blog for mythology, history, folklore, etc but now it's just whatever

[mayasaura]

Also shout out to Gurathin, who had the funniest opinion arc ever re: Murderbot, from "Am I the only one remembering that this thing is a lethal and untrustworthy weapon?" to "Yeah, yeah, you hate my guts. This kid is fucking hilarious."

[whumpster-fire]

Love the moment in System Collapse when Ratthi makes a joke about round hatches being scarier than square ones, SecUnit decides to fact check this by searching its entire media library for scary things coming out of doors and doing statistical analysis on the shape of the doors and discovers he's right, and ART goes "You wasted processing space on that?" And then ART gets sucked into participating in the inane conversation within seconds.

[serialparoxysm]

Three on its first unsupervised trip

[qcharlie]

i wish we were able to talk about women's rights without someone mentioning how much they do or don't want to have sex with them. i don't care if you're a lesbian Stop finding worth in women purely from their perceived attractiveness

[qcharlie]

"I think women should not be expected to shave for societal respect / to avoid discrimination" "yeah🤤 i love bush" ok well that's not what we're talking about is it.

[qcharlie]

i hate how many posts about trans women deserving respect always devolve into "I love girldick" or "trans rights but I don't want to date a trans person" because that's entirely unrelated to the topic at hand. you should not respond to feminism with "YESSS I loveeee you because I see you as nothing but a sex object" you people sound like other men I get stuck talking with that end up saying "free the nipple so I can see boobies in public" and thinking they're feminists. why can't we just respect women regardless of your attraction to them or not. why does it need to be brought up in every conversation regarding their rights

[katamine01]

ART and Murderbot off to rescue their humans

[ladycrimsonandblack]

absolutely insane that murderbot says this in the exact same novel in which it creates a child that argues with it.

[artchivary]

"But it said it with so much force in the feed I sat down hard on the bunk."

[chelathy]

I saw a man rise from the Abzû.

[unidentifiedspoon]

network effect.png

[suckunit]

synonym challenge...

my fill for the @mutualrapport event! tysm to the organizers & everyone who submitted a prompt, this was super fun to work on 💖💖

ao3 mirror

mutual rapport ao3 collection

[rishabhaa]

last post + it's a mutual relationship. both people want to know each other and be invested in making it work

[eroscestlavie]

I need to stop replying to “how do you make friends in your 30s?” threads because all my answers boil down to “you have to want to know people instead of have friends” and I don’t think people wanna hear that

[eroscestlavie]

It’s like. People can tell if you don’t really like or connect with them. If you aren’t truly enamored with someone you will have a hard time coming up with activities to do together to deepen the friendship. Because you don’t really like that person that much.

[specialagentartemis]

follow up though I would kind of be interested to know what Grace’s dissertation actually said. Because you can’t get a dissertation out of “water is not a necessary requirement for life,” you would at the very least have to propose some alternative molecular structures or something, and some experimental results that show why you think this is a viable structure for life; or make an argument for why exoplanet research should be giving more focus to exoplanets with XYZ atmospheric and temperature composition, which I imagine is what “The Goldilocks Zone is for Idiots” is about, but you still have to loop around to making actual arguments about what is required for life and what actual chemical traits you’re proposing as viable alternatives at some point, including arguments for why anybody should care when it seems like water is actually all over the place, galactically. You can’t propose let alone defend a dissertation that says “X isn’t true” without saying something about what IS true instead. Ryland Grace what did you spend 180 pages on that everyone was so unimpressed by??

[mossy-muncher]

I'm not a good person (remembers morality isn't binary and neither am I) I'm barely a person at all (remembers I shouldn't be self negative) but someday I'll be perfect (remembers that I'm human and I make mistakes) and I'll make up for it all

[communistkenobi]

I had a lot of/still have some vestigial arrogance about quantitative methods over qualitative ones, probably in a combination of scientific misogyny + STEMlord superiority. But doing regression analysis and quant-heavy data analysis makes me realise more and more that you can justify basically any claim with numbers, and that you can construct your research in such a way as to output the numbers you want. which does not mean that all data are made up or that quantitative knowledge is all false. I think stories about scientists straight up inventing numbers or fudging experiments on purpose prove that there is a real difference between fraudulent and non-fraudulent research. but those data must always be narrativised & are always already narrativised. The act of presenting numbers itself is doing some of that narration because you’re already arguing that these numbers are worth presenting

[communistkenobi]

People in the notes are rightfully pointing out common issues with data manipulation and pre-loaded conclusions in scientific research (i.e., the academic version of asking "so, how often do you beat your wife?" and so on), but I should have clarified that I'm not really talking about that. I'm talking about completely legitimate, above-board scientific research.

For example, I've had students ask me (in good faith) how it was possible for international medical bodies to report different counts of COVID-19 cases during the early years of the pandemic. And one of the answers is that you need to first define what you mean by a "COVID-19 case." Do you include self-reported incidences? Waste water data? Geo-fenced social media posts about people complaining about their coronavirus symptoms? Federal estimates? Hospital data? How do you compare countries/territories/substate entities with mandatory reporting mechanisms vs countries/territories/substate entities that rely only on voluntary self-reported cases? And what combination of these do you use? How you construct what you mean by "case" is going to impact the outcomes you report. These different counts of COVID-19 cases can all be true simultaneously, not because numbers are made up, but because they all come out of different methodologies that can be equally valid.

And this is true across all science, not just social science. Bill Clinton said it best lol: "it depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is." This feels obvious when you look at scientific research that uses "skull measurements" as their object of analysis - the concept itself is white supremacist, regardless of how "sound" the research is. But even something as apparently self-evident as a COVID-19 case still requires a definition, and how you define your variables is necessarily going to impact how the research goes and what conclusions are drawn.

These definitions are always embedded in political & social assumptions. And again, this does not mean that science is all made up or nonsense or whatever. There is a widespread fetishism of "objective knowledge" that is itself ideological - the idea that knowledge can be divorced from all historical and political contexts, that you can scrub bias from research and simply report the facts. Valuable, well-supported, well-constructed scientific research is always embedded in these contexts. Not just as a result of researcher assumptions, but of the material context it exists in - what research resources are available, how & what research gets funded, the academy's relationship to the state & non-government bodies that both provide data and use that research to inform policy, the historical relationships universities often have with settler-colonialism and imperialism that give them access to "foreign" research subjects, etc etc etc.

So my overall point (which I didn't communicate well) is that data can always say what you want to some extent, for good and for ill. And research results (at least in my experience) tend to surprise you in ways that require explanations, which themselves can be fully justified, but again, exist within many different contexts that influence how you interpret them - and not just the results themselves, but your own surprise at your results

[chelathy]

Let's be colourful together!

[gailynovelry]

The fastest way to accomplish The Project is to cease being afraid of The Project. The Project cannot maim you. The Project cannot kill you. The Project is more afraid of you than you are of it. It is okay if The Project turns out differently from how it was in your head, and it is okay if it has flaws. You are capable of engaging with The Project.