SirenAlpha

Just somebody who has been here way too long

[roycohn]

the thing about being a homeschool abolition hardliner is that people always want to come to you with some bullshit sob story about how you hate disabled people because they were bullied for being autistic and homeschooling was so amazing for them. and it's just like well unfortunately homeschooling is also a widespread tool of coercive control in child abuse used by christofascists to raise kids without the tools they need to function in the world so that they will always be afraid, dependent, and unable to think critically and discern right from wrong and truth from lies. so unfortunately i do think this is a situation where in order to prevent enormous harm to untold numbers of children those bullied kids who just don't wanna go to school are going to have to suck it up. (and in reality what i always propose is a more robust system of alternative/magnet public schooling set up for kids who are basically on grade level but who DO struggle to thrive in a mainstream setting, but nobody ever wants to hear that, they just want to guilt you for not thinking anyone who ever gets picked on should just get to stay home and play vidya and do all their lessons on zoom. and it's like honestly i don't think you're having this argument in good faith bc you are very much centering hypothetical discomfort you MIGHT HYPOTHETICALLY have experienced over, again, widespread child abuse and neglect. so.)

[roycohn]

so i watched the netflix documentary about piper rockelle yesterday and i would like to once again humbly suggest that homeschooling be permanently abolished and perhaps even criminalized

[desertmarble]

It’s so frustrating that when there’s an overwhelmingly common and dangerous phenomenon related to something so you say “Hm, seems like a sane and responsible society should ban or regulate this.” And you get hit by a million responses that amount to…

“Oh? [X thing] has a documented extremely negative impact on a large group of people?? And you’re critiquing it? Well I did [x thing] and that horrible thing never happened. I guess you’re just PERSONALLY ATTACKING me.”

“Have you considered the nuanced reality that if something is beneficial to me in any way then everyone who has been deeply harmed by it should simply eat shit? Also if they criticize it it’s because they hate me specifically?”

“What about those of us who actually ENJOY AND LIKE [x thing] and also feel entitled to never have access to something that I like restricted? Hmm? What about us?”

It’s not actually possible to have a functioning society where everyone does whatever they want all the time. You can’t just trust that your populace is going to do the best possible version of everything. I’m absolutely sure there’s a lot of responsible gun owners in the US — unfortunately, the negative societal impact of guns means that in a sane, effective society (which ofc the US isn’t) they’d still be banned. There are some things that are more important than you and what you like and what is beneficial to you. Some things are worse than other things, like objectively worse. Some things are more important than you.

This is the very definition of hyper-individualism. If something is working for you, it must continue. No one else matters. No one’s suffering could ever be more important than your own.

[sirenalpha]

the you need to name five female athletes before you can talk about women’s sports people are hilarious

because they’re very often completely science denialist and ahistorical when it comes to the existence and creation of the women’s sporting category and women’s sports leagues

those people specifically actually need to write an essay on both the latest research on female athletes AND on the history of whatever league or sport they want to talk about before they can go spouting disinformation all over the internet

also women’s chess exists because women and girls wanted and made for themselves a competitive environment where they didn’t have to deal with male chess players’ misogyny and sexual harassment

if you don’t like that or don’t feel women deserve to have the leagues and competitions they made exclusively for themselves or that they’re stupid for doing this

I literally and truly want you to die mad about it

[kvothes]

a good thread

[habitant]

it's pou being speechless for a moment at the sheer amount of people that showed up, it's ann bursting out crying when they turned the corner on saint-catherine street and saw the crowd for the first time, it's the girls being told it was a gathering or a celebration and not a parade bc they weren't sure the turnout would qualify and then 20 000 people showing up, from montreal and elsewhere, taking the trip, showing up hours early for women's hockey, for the victoire. it's the girls on the bus looking behind as a sea of people followed them cheering and singing with love

[existentialterror]

Sometimes I’m looking for something online - often “how to” articles - and I want to filter for - like - a website that was clearly built in 2010 at the latest, which may or may not have been updated since then, but contains a vast wealth of information on one topic, painstakingly organized by an unknown legend in the field with decades’ worth of experience. I don’t want a listicle with a nice stolen picture in a slideshow format written by a content aggregator that God forgot. I want hand-drawn diagrams by some genius professor who doesn’t understand SEO at all, but understands making stir-fries or raising stick insects better than anyone else on this earth. I don’t know what search settings to put into Google to get this.

[greenjudy]

thank you for articulating this cri de coeur for me

[jumpingjacktrash]

ngl these days i’m just happy when it’s not a video

[averixus]

search.marginalia.nu is the search engine you want!

The search engine calculates a score that aggressively favors text-heavy websites, and punishes those that have too many modern web design features.

This is in a sense the opposite of what most major search engines do, they favor modern websites over old-looking ones. Most links you find here will be nearly impossible to find on a regular search engine, as they aren’t sufficiently search engine optimized.

[ashby-santoso]

“It is a search engine, designed to help you find what you didn’t even know you were looking for. If you search for “Plato”, you might for example end up at the Canterbury Tales. Go looking for the Canterbury Tales, and you may stumble upon Neil Gaiman’s blog.

If you are looking for fact, this is almost certainly the wrong tool. If you are looking for serendipity, you’re on the right track. When was the last time you just stumbled onto something interesting, by the way?

I don’t expect this will be the next “big” search engine. This is and will remain a niche tool for a niche audience.“

[ms-demeanor]

i clicked around for a few minutes searching various things and I now have two fourteenth century pie crust recipes and an apple filling recipe i want to try, so thanks!

[ms-demeanor]

it has been twenty minutes and I am deeply in love with this search engine.

INCREDIBLE. I *do* want to know how to test Windows 95 for Y2K Compliance and I am glad that someone is still hosting step by step instructions for that.

[workfornow]

tl;dr: search.marginalia.nu for the old or old looking and just plain serendipitous stuff that google or Duck duck go are gonna not find/bury on the 20th page. For perfectly good reasons, but …

[existentialterror]

My absolute favorite part of having made this post - other than causing people to be introduced to this site - are the people in the tags/comments talking about their interests and stuff they found about their hobbies.

Good luck out there surfing the cyberweb, you crazy cats. I love the shoelace website too - Ian’s Shoelace Site [link], unless there’s another. My personal favorite old-school site is Alysion’s string figure collection [link].

[talahui]

pou being banished to accept the playoff mvp award she thinks should go to ard victoire @ charge | 5.20.26

[puppygirllaika]

i think we as a society lost when we collectively accepted that the things we make won't outlast us.

[puppygirllaika]

like, well-built wooden furniture can last well over a century, if properly cared for, but trends come and go, so everything's made of particle board and veneer, and breaks down in under a decade. knives and hand tools and kitchen gadgets are stamped out of cheap sheet metal and are built to be disposed of instead of cared for, and only last a few years before wearing or buckling or chipping. houses are built as increasingly short-term investments, made of OSB and squeezed onto tiny lots, with the intention that they be redeveloped in a few decades.

i remember hearing an economics professor comment on roman bridges still being used by cars today, saying that if you over-engineer and over-build a bridge to the point it can still be used 2000 years later, then you've just waisted public funds and labor. and i remember how i grated against that. against the idea that something could be designed to last not only past the builders lifetime, but past the life of a civilization.

l'm not about to stand up and say that industrialization is an inherently bad thing. i think it's great that clothing doesn't cost thousands of dollars and people can basically furnish a home in their 20's for under ten grand, but like. i feel like there has to be some kind of social-psychological shift in knowing that the things we make now won't be around after we die. they won't be passed on and looked after. they won't be loved.

I write code. I send emails. I write documentation. the things i create will be garbage in a couple years, if I'm lucky. I'm drawn to bookbinding as a hobby, because i wish my words would last. i wish they would sit on someones shelf, be pulled down again and again, and live a life of their own. I enjoy woodworking because i can have some hope that maybe, if i make something good enough, it'll be passed from person to person, and maybe, one day, outlive me.

i think a hundred years ago people could expect to leave a tiny, physical legacy in the lives of dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people. I think today most of us can't imagine that. and i think that's kinda sad. idk what to do about it. but i think it's fairly new, and wish i could make a chair that someone will sit in a hundred years from now, and feel comfortable. that i could still touch their life, and make them happy, even if they'll never know who i was.

[puppygirllaika]

and to be super clear, that's not to say shitty stuff wasn't made a hundred years ago. it absolutely was. cheaply made things that fell apart have been a thing as long as humanity has been trading. some crappy copper comes to mind. my point is more, if you worked manufacturing, building, creating stuff, and you cared, and you put that care into your work, you could expect a legacy of it. not all of it, things will break, things will be lost, but like. some of it. at the very least.

[liberalsarecool]

"That’s what makes Zohran Mamdani’s election in New York so unsettling to the old order. New York City is not just another municipality; it’s a sovereign-scale entity. Its population surpasses 38 states. Its metropolitan GDP trails only Texas and California.

It is, by any metric, a small country masquerading as a city.

It governs more lives and more wealth than most nations. If democratic socialism — housing reform, public banking, equitable taxation — functions here, it obliterates the myth that such governance can’t work at scale. The fear isn’t ideological. It’s empirical. Because if Mamdani can keep the lights on, reduce homelessness, and maintain economic growth without catering to Wall Street, then the capitalist gospel collapses under its own dead weight.

What terrifies the establishment isn’t failure. It’s feasibility.

If it works in New York, there’s no reason it can’t work in Nebraska. If it works in Queens, it can work in Kansas City. And once proof exists, belief becomes irrelevant. The ship of democracy, fully refitted, will keep sailing — and no one can claim it isn’t American."

- Jackie Summers

[weetweetie]

This has merit, but note that social democracy has already proven itself in the Nordic countries, societies on the same scale as New York. I sense a bit of Not Invented Here here. Never mind that today, the same destructive forces on the right as in America are working hard to dismantle the Nordic model. Way too successful, way too dangerous as an example.

[porcupine-girl]

People like to claim that it only works in those countries because they're so homogenous (ethnically and religiously, mostly, but also politically and economically). That excuse, at least, doesn't hold up for NYC (although they can always fall back on the "small geographic area" line, as if that has anything to do with any of this).

[creature-wizard]

I recently saw an actual news article censor the words "sexual" and "molest." Fucking shit hell fuck shit fuck.

[angiethewitch]

ooooh, storytime!

for a while, my husband worked as a call handler for the ambulance service. during his training, they had a talk from someone wanting to introduce new policy and he wanted to use my husband's group as a tester group. fun, right?

well, the talk was about how saying suicide was triggering. if a caller says theyre suicidal, the handlers should say "unalive" instead, because saying the word might actually trigger the suicidal person.

if the caller says they were raped and need help, the handler should say "S A" instead, because rape is triggering.

I don't know about you, but if I phoned up the ambulance service to ask for help because I want to die, I wouldn't want them using tiktok speak and trivialising the issue. I think that would make me less likely to ever ask for help. SAY THE WORDS. how are we supposed to address the problem if we can't even name the fucking problem.

luckily, my husbands main instructor literally said "well, that's fucking stupid" to the man wanting to introduce this policy and it hasn't been implemented. but it might. we are watching language be erased. NAME. THE. PROBLEM.

I wish I were making this up, I wish I could say I was exaggerating. I'm not.

[handsaniti]

So fun fact, people who are trained in helping to deescalate suicidal people will always say to put it bluntly.

“Do you want to kill yourself?”

A, it has the benefit of making sure everyone is on the same page. Self-harm and attempting suicide are two different things. You can want to harm yourself without wanting to kill yourself. It can also let you know if the person is passively suicidal or if they’re in the process of killing themselves.

B, stigmatizing suicide leads to more suicides.

C, you will not cause someone to kill themselves by saying the word suicide. It is not a magic word that speaking the name of will cause someone to jump off a roof.

[breelandwalker]

Also, speaking to causation on this trend (separate from issues of censorship), lay people need to learn what "triggering" actually means.

Because way too many people do not understand the difference between "This word is an activating reminder for something traumatic in my brain and it has a rapid and deeply negative impact on my mental health which may result in dissociation, flashbacks, spiraling, panic attacks, or similarly serious reactions" and "ewww that word makes me UNCOMFYYYYY."

[sonpat-rides-again]

[ihavenocluewhatiwanttobecalled]

Can someone who understands psychology explain why this makes someone "rude"?

[alex51324]

Phatic discourse, a subset of affiliative signaling.

When Co-workers do things like ask about weekend plans, chat about non-work topics, eat lunch in the same room, they are--subconsciously--reaffirming that they are part of a cooperative (or, minimally, non-antagonistic) social group.

The other primates cement social bonds by grooming each other; we do it by making small talk.

If they solicit your participation in these rituals, and you repeatedly refuse those bids, you are marking yourself out as, at best, an outsider to the group, and thus potentially antagonistic.

This is all happening on the monkey-brain level; they have no idea what they're doing or how they are interpreting your response, so there's no way to clear up the misunderstanding.

To the ape sleeping in your co-worker's DNA, either you are part of the grooming circle, or you are an outsider who, for all it knows, may be coming to steal all the bananas.

Even if you would prefer not to socialize with your co-workers, it's generally worth it to set aside 5 minutes a couple times a week for phatic communication. You don't have to answer your co-workers' affiliative signals every time, but it's less trouble in the long run if you respond to a few of them.

[punkrorschach]

if you are the type of person who really just wants to be left alone to do their work in quiet: it is actually easier to achieve this as part of the in-group. when you enter a new space, in this case, a job, make it your GOAL to make everyone Know Who You Are. introduce yourself to everyone you meet. literally everyone. "hi I'm Jack I'm New." this helps burst the awkward bubble. you are now one of the monkeys.

at some point, either in response to an invitation, or just in the natural course of conversation, you can add in that you are a "quiet type" who "needs their silence" or what have you. customize to your personal needs. i find it helpful to imagine a well dressed elderly woman describing the sort of peace she needs to manifest.

roughly once a week if you see a group of people chatting, engage with them. keep it pleasant. it can be superficial. word will travel that you are Nice and Quiet and Not The Chatty Type protecting you from group lunches etc. if you have an office with a door that you keep closed a lot, putting up any kind of decor will also send positive signals.

humans are monkeys! for better or worse!

[tlbodine]

Pro tip: try to make a note (write it down if you have to) about some inconsequential thing that your coworker mentions so you can ask about it later. Kids and pets are great for This. As are hobbies. One guy in my office zoom called in from his house and I saw he had an arcade game in his office so I asked him about it later and he lit up like a Christmas tree. Another coworker has a pet pig and I ask every couple months how the pig is doing. This is a great strategy for pivoting conversation away from you and will make them think you are the friendliest monkey in the pod.

[sirenalpha]

I've seen people discussing Robby having taken Langdon under his wing and he does call Langdon his best resident and is obviously disappointed and upset with Langdon when he finds the pills and during the ambulance bay fight

but I'm not totally sold that's born out by Robby's actions when comparing his behavior between Collins and Langdon

I'm not saying Robby had no mentorship moments with Langdon, he did coach Langdon with the frat boy's collarbone, and I'm not saying Robby was totally accommodating or a push over with Collins, he overrode her for Otis and with the teen pregnancy

but I do think Robby is more attentive and emotionally open/supportive with Collins than he is Langdon, like he obviously rejects Langdon as a friend while having had a past romantic relationship with Collins, but Collins is the one Robby gives what are basically longing gazes, checks in on her (though granted Langdon isn't suffering morning sickness or miscarriage) and Robby seems like he's willing to be physically closer with Collins and Collins is more supportive of Robby in turn like with iirc talking to the kids of the Alzheimer patient

but it's mostly about Robby getting angry and not handling finding out Langdon has been stealing pills well and I don't just mean emotionally which he definitely did poorly (and it's just the first thing that happened as things really start crashing down) and I don't know hospital policy on this and I do get that he found pills in Langdon's locker but do you not need to do paperwork or investigate properly before you throw someone out? It's a little crazy he was like yep let's just throw the suspected addict out on the street instead of plunking him in HR or something

and I get an abortion is not the same thing at all as stealing pills but if I was going to pick one to treat as a personal betrayal and get mad about it, it's probably the abortion I didn't even know about until just now, but Robby doesn't get mad at that, instead comforting Collins and sending her home even though this is after finding the pills in Langdon's locker so he's already taken an emotional hit

and I'm not sure what to take out of it

is it all down to Robby and Collins having a past romantic relationship and he's still soft on her? How is that not sexual favoritism then if it had any negative impact on Langdon's training and idk how far mentorship over residents are supposed to go in the medical field but Robby at minimum should have been keeping an eye out for Langdon after his back injury and that clearly turned out poorly

Or is Robby just paternalistic and subconsciously has higher expectations for Langdon as he's a man than Collins as she's a woman? He's angrier at Langdon because his transgression is against the career and patients whereas Collins's is just against a baby/family life and she can just have another one (he assumes)?

also the way Robby already knows the policy for addiction off by heart makes me wonder if he's projecting or there are leftover feelings from some other relationship with a different doctor onto Langdon and unable to see the situation clearly

I also wonder if Langdon being married with kids and clean cut made Robby think Langdon had it all together even though it's pretty clear just from what Langdon says that it's not a good marriage/family life and Langdon does ask Robby about the dog first

I just feel like Robby can't have taken that much care to mentor Langdon if he can't even see Langdon underneath assumption and/or projection and has no bandwidth for or interest in making any sort of emotional or personal connection with him

I'm not even sure he took Collins under his wing either, based on Robby's behavior on his worst day ever idk how great of a mentor/instructor he was to either of them albeit in different ways

[kitsu63]

That is a very interesting way to see it, damn. Makes me re-think it under a new possible angle

[sirenalpha]

yeah this post is from when s1 finished, but I’ve written other posts about how this is continued in s2 with Santos and Whitaker

Robby does not have a sexual/romantic relationship with Santos, but they clearly have an emotional connection specifically over Langdon’s addiction and they feed into each other’s negative emotions especially over Langdon, they act very similarly on his return even though as an attending and mentor Robby had responsibilities over Langdon and Santos as they’re his students/employees and he should have been smoothing over that transition, but he’s just as much in his feelings and far more friendly/personable with Santos than anyone else (such as the glove to wake her scene and so on) like he was the season before with Collins

and then with Whitaker, he just gives him the all clear, he praises him and says he’s a great doctor, but he does not train him very much at all and gives him way too much latitude because Whitaker’s an intern and he’s not even asking him or making sure he’s reporting to anyone up the chain of command before treating and prescribing which Santos was criticized for the season before (by Langdon)

there’s no way Robby would have asked Whitaker to house sit to get him away from a former patient’s widow if Santos hadn’t specifically asked him to intervene and Collins would have never been in a position to ask Robby to intervene and help Langdon because she would have never known there was a problem

so we see a repeat of Robby being overly emotionally involved with a female mentee/resident while praising but not really connecting with or mentoring a male resident and both their training suffers for it, but Whitaker suffers less as Robby isn’t leaving him exposed to a trigger without support (which for Santos is a man with authority over her who has shown a willingness to berate her/abuse that authority) and Langdon likely would have also suffered less than Collins and had a perfectly fine career without addiction but that’s the risk Robby was taking if it was indeed sexual favoritism

(also I don’t know how Robby could have been pursuing and in a relationship with Collins outside of R1/R2, s1 is right at the start of her R4 year and they’ve been broken up for long enough that she’s had miscarriages prior to the one she has in s1, her dialogue implies she’s on the last egg of a round of IVF so she probably got pregnant and miscarried multiple times during her R3 so she had to have broken it off with Robby before then)

[tam--lin]

it's pretty easy to imagine that you are one of some fractional holdout against AI while everyone else has fallen into some misguided love affair with LLMs, and I am so happy to tell you that this is not the case.

the US public is deeply suspicious of AI's impacts on jobs and education. Kamala Harris and the Republican party are both polling better than AI. 8/10 gen zers are concerned about AI's impact on education and only 18% are positive about this technology. there is widespread, bipartisan grassroots organizing against data centers. 97% of Britons are against Grok's "undressing" technology. the majority of Americans are concerned about AI in arenas like self-driving vehicles and healthcare. Even polling data from companies centered on AI shows significant concern around generative technology. OpenAI isn't meeting internal growth bench posts. On top of all that, Musk and Altman are currently both making fools of themselves in a very public trial.

[awesomebutunpractical]

"He wouldn't say that" has a beautiful cousin, and her name is "That's Not What This Story is About".

[ilynpilled]

shipping has a deserved reputation of being able to nuke ppl’s understanding of the source material but i would argue that ppl with intense hate boners for certain ships are very capable of matching them in this regard

[cactusringed]

I think fanfiction as a medium is different enough from mainstream literature in the tools it offers writers that it's a shame that it's not talked about more often. And it's not me saying "fanfic is better than books xD" because that sort of mindset is a symptom of people who aren't particularly well read in either medium. I'm just speaking of like... The little things you get to do with a fanfic that you genuinely can't really do in an original story.

I had a big fanfic in a previous fandom where one of the big reveals was the involvement of a kind of infamous villain, whose presence was built up to and foreshadowed through the whole fic until his reveal without ever mentioning his name, so that the name drop would be a gut punch. It worked especially well because of who the villain was and his presence in that fandom space specifically (it's very complicated) and if it was an original story this reveal wouldn't work at all the way it was written in the fic. Because if you don't have a predisposition to think about that character and his relationship to the hero in a very specific way, then just seeing their name won't do much to you; the reveal and the recontextualisation it pushes upon you hinges on your previous knowledge of the source material.

I think it's an interesting tool fanfic authors are given. One of my favorite fanfic of all time is partially a re-imagining of its source material's canon, and something it does is introduce antagonists much earlier in the story or deepen npcs' stories. It then works to evoke a tragic irony that again wouldn't work if you didn't know the source material, and it's something the author obviously has a lot of fun with.

You could call it cheap or a crutch and I mean, yeah, sure, it is a little bit: the fanfic relies on previously established emotional bonds and stakes to achieve its goal, and in some cases it saves the author from having to 'properly' build up its stakes. But I think it's INTERESTING that it has that tool at its disposal. I think it's a fun thing to play with and I think these built in expectations and emotional bonds are especially why I find story driven aus in particular to be fascinating in the amount of ways you can play with them. You know??

[phoenixyfriend]

I am so tired of having this argument but people who smoke weed genuinely do not seem to register that this is not INNOFFENSIVE and that their pain management does not inherently HAVE to cause actual pain in others

Why is your right to choose smoking as a delivery method more important than other people's right to not develop migraines, allergic reactions, asthma attacks, or as we have learned, fucking schizophrenia. Rare? Sure. But secondhand weedsmoke can be the catalyst for someone developing schizophrenia, a life-altering condition that a person may never be rid of, which they otherwise might not have gotten.

"Some have chronic illnesses and that's why we smoke. You could be considerate." bitch you first

I'm fine with the CBD/THC gummies, drops, patches, creams, whatever. I've used CBD-infused muscle creams before because I also experience chronic pain!

BUT THOSE. DO NOT. CAUSE OTHER PEOPLE TO EXPERIENCE THEIR OWN CHRONIC PAIN

PICK A DIFFERENT FUCKING DELIVERY METHOD

[bethanydelleman]

I have been listening to this podcast called Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal & Society, and it's really reminding me of the main reason that you should listen to experts. It's not because of the reason media usually shows, them having encyclopedic knowledge of their subject (though many do have that) it's their ability to sort.

This podcast demonstrates that ability really well because sex scandals tend to be used as propaganda, so it's difficult to tell if they are true or not. The host will ask the historian guest, "Did he have sex with men?" and the guest will say something like, "Well four sources say so, but three were written after his death and the one from his lifetime was from a dude who REALLY hated him, so I'm going to conclude no."

That is what an expert can do, that we've perhaps forgotten about because we have so much information at our fingertips, an expert can tell which information is good & valid vs. bad & unreliable. An expert can sort much faster than a layman because they've been doing it for years.

It's the same for my field. Some things I am absolutely sure are wrong, like if someone says "We only use 10% of our brains." No, we use all of it and I can even tell you what every part does. But other claims, if I see a news article claiming something that sounds fishy, I can read the research article behind it and judge the validity of the source. I can sort. I know which parameters to sort on. That was the entire point of my education and it was pounded into my head.

Knowledge isn't enough. Researching isn't enough because if you don't know how to sort you'll just be led astray down dangerous rabbit holes. That is why experts are so important.