The Hermit in Training

Hello! My name is Sara and I am a medical laboratory scientist still addicted to this hell site. I will post: science, sci-fi, fantasy, cute animal pics, art, books, video games, social issues, ANYTHING I FEEL LIKE POSTING, GOSH.

[huariqueje]

A possibility of an idyll -  Joel Slotte , 2019.

Finnish, b. 1987-

oil on canvas 160 cm x 140 cm.

[mal-studyblr]

hey quick PSA but “reading before bed to wind down” only works if you’re normal about books btw. if you aren’t you are going to end up awake at 2:52am after finishing the whole book just trust me on this one

[monjustmon]

One more sentence never hurt anybody ☝️ but watch out

[doodlebethel]

My day job is analyzing wildlife photos, and I've been getting this strage creature on camera recently... can anyone tell me what it is?

[json-derulo]

having the Aviation Accident Investigations Autism™️ has actually done wonders for the way I process and respond to my own fuck-ups

[json-derulo]

And I don't just mean "oh, my little work mistake is actually nothing compared to a fiery crash that kills people," either. The reason commercial flight is so many orders of magnitude safer than any other form of transportation is because after every accident and incident, an independent regulatory body investigated it with the express goal of figuring out exactly what happened, why, and how to prevent the same thing from ever happening again—not to root out which person deserved the blame or the liability.

It's a simple, shockingly effective idea. It's also worlds away from how most people approach their own mistakes and the mistakes of others.

[json-derulo]

Because it’s never just one person’s fault. And even when it is, it still isn’t. 

The sharpest, best-trained pilots make worse decisions when they're tired or sick or stressed out, so there's two of them. The most dedicated and experienced air traffic controllers garble an instruction over the radio sometimes, so pilots are trained to always repeat clearances back to catch misunderstandings quickly. The best and brightest maintenance mechanic still overlooks a screw or misconnects a wire once or twice in her career, so aircraft systems are built with two or three or four layers of redundancy, and pilots are exhaustively trained to deal with failures safely. 

Everyone eventually has a bad day. Every component breaks down. Every computer gets a bad a Windows update and spirals into a reboot doom loop. If it’s possible for one person’s mistake to domino into a mushroom cloud of a fuckup, then that task is too critical to be one person's sole responsibility. The accident sequence starts with the design of the system—so how do you improve the system to keep it from happening again?

[json-derulo]

oh yeah. The “modern commercial aviation is the safest form of transport” thing only applies to planes, btw. A helicopter is a beautiful metal horse that wants to break its legs and die so so so badly

[malk-with-tea]

Wake

[catasters]

[yourlocalnautilus]

the fact that generative A.I. has created a completely new fundamental doubt in reality (checking to see if an artwork we see is manmade or not) and doubt in the instinct of enjoying art is unforgivable. its sickeningly tragic, and i mean it. NOTHING is worth this price and i hope that everyone will one day realize this.

[velinxi]

The dragon's favorite treasure

[fairy-space]

Rainbow mo

[ostolero]

young old person tip for you all. go get some photos printed (pauses so someone can say bogos binted) and fill out a physical album

[sayaratyriea]

and annotate them with who is in the photos and when and where the photos were taken!!! your extended family 50 years from now will be grateful, and so will you if you end up forgetting any details

[mortimermcmirestinks]

(sprints into room late, looking harried and frantic as fuck) bogos binted. did I miss it

[seeingwitheyesunseen]

Untitled. Pencil, pen, and watercolour. | Copyright © Jackson Howell

[larkandkatydid]

One thing I’ve become a real extremist about is little girl’s clothing and hair styles because if your kid can’t get her hair wet, hang upside down, climb over a fence or run full out in the outfit/hair she is currently wearing then why not? And the answer better be both extremely fucking good and describe something temporary.

[poodletrain]

Hope you don't mind a story that also made me extremist about this issue.

Took my friends daughter (2.5yrs) to the park. Dressed her in practical clothing that's ok to get stained, brought an extra change of clothing. She sat in the mud at the water bank and played with rocks and mud. A little girl came over, couldn't be more than 3yrs. She was looking longingly at my friend's daughter. She has her hair in a perfect style and she's wearing a pretty dress with white socks and dressy shoes. The parents say "Sweetie don't go into the mud, you'll get your dress dirty" and pull her away, while giving me a judgmental look as they see the kid in my charge covered in mud and throwing rocks into the water. It felt really weird, like we saw eachother as aliens with completely different ideas on how to raise children. When my friends daughter was done playing, changed her into clean clothing and went back home. She had a lot of fun at the park and a day full of nature and play. The other little girl kept her dress clean.

[blackmosscupcakes]

When my daughter was getting close to school age, I remember walking past her future school with my mum and noting that all the little boys were wearing the uniform trousers and all the little girls were wearing skirts. And I mentioned that I hoped the uniform policy allowed for girls to wear trousers. My mum asked why, and I outlined several reasons, including "because kids fall over when they're running and playing, and skinned knees are more likely if she's only allowed to wear skirts."

And my mum said "well, maybe in that case she'd learn to be more careful."

Aaaaand I think my resulting reaction of horror at the idea of forcing 50% of children to play more carefully due to clothing requirements made her realise exactly what she'd just said.

(The uniform policy does indeed allow her to wear trousers. She's now 10 and still prefers them)

[kaoinim-deactivated20220927]

[savrenim]

......suddenly struck by the idea for a piece of worldbuilding of "fae don't like iron bc it is the most stable element*"

*as in elements higher you can extract energy via fission and lower you can extract energy via fusion but iron itself there is no excess binding energy to extract at all

[savrenim]

YOU. YOU SEE MY VISION.

[redlipstickresurrected]

Jiang Pengyi aka 蒋鹏奕 (Chinese, b. 1977, Yuanjiang, Hunan Province, China) - Everything Illuminates No.1-10 from series, 2012, Photography

[yvesdot]

Alright, fine, here's the backstory about replacing my Microsoft Copilot key with a picture of a carp. Warning: that's the whole story.

When I bought my latest laptop, which coincidentally is already losing functionality in multiple keys, I noticed that the right Control button was no longer a right Control button. This was a bad sign for me, someone who fairly frequently used the right Control button. Worse still, it now bore the Microsoft Copilot logo and would open, when pressed, Microsoft Copilot. Not having personal interest in that particular robot, I was now in the market to rebind that key to something else.

I initially considered setting it up as my dedicated The Sims 2 button, but not only do I not yet have The Sims 2 installed on this computer, the way I play that game, it takes upwards of 15 minutes to boot up. I knew I would be constantly accidentally hitting this key, and I did not want to be constantly accidentally opening The Sims 2.

My partner immediately suggested that I set it to open "a jpeg of a fish." I Googled "carp," found an image, and set my right Control key to open a tiny browser window with a link to said fish. Though it is a .png file from pngtree labeled "pngtree-rohu-carp-fish-png-png-image_4022775.png", in an effort to display matrimonial piety, I dutifully labeled it "fish jpeg."

I now accidentally open this link multiple times a day, which is great, because it means I have a lot of opportunities to see a fish. Sometimes I accidentally hit it several times in quick succession, which means I get to see several fish! When I close all my open programs to shut down my computer, I usually find at least one forgotten fish. Things are working out beautifully, and everyone is happy.

The other day I brought up this story to a friend and relayed the saga of my success to her through her obvious confusion. At the end of my tale she asked me, "Why didn't you just bind it back to right Control?" and I had to admit to her that it honestly never occurred to me.

[quasi-normalcy]

I think we should all go back to reading newspapers. Like actual newspapers, with the paper. I feel like actual, physical newspapers were a "load-bearing inefficiency" of modern civilization. Also, they can't spy on you like the phone you're currently reading this on is doing.

[deadgenerations]

i read the paper - I actually switched to a digital edition of the daily paper because the waste was intolerable, but - and it definitely changed my life. not super dramatically, but I became much more informed about specifically local issues, became a better conversationalist, became more invested in my city, etc. it's just a much better way of getting news, you end up being forced to engage with stories you aren't naturally inclined to care about, to learn things you wouldn't seek out.

part of the problem with algorithmic news is that it silos people into narrow and non overlapping information ecosystems and even atomisies their ideas of what's going on around them. it's so easy to lose touch with the wider world if you're only being narrowcast via algorithms or even curated feeds (like Tumblr or maybe Reddit) things you already care about and inclined to react to. Specifically, without a shared information bedrock, without people generally operating from the same list of 'things happening around me' that more traditional news formats provides, it becomes increasingly difficult to communicate between one another, and thus to not only talk and understand but to act and resolve. it also allows one to fall into echo chambers which act as feedback loops to reinforce counterfactual perspectives.