Somatic Fix

poems, prose and ramblings

[thememedaddy]

[dragon-in-a-fez]

so much of the "research" on "phones bad" is just statisticians congratulating themselves in a circle

[dragon-in-a-fez]

example: I am right now reading an article on "phubbing", which is apparently the term for ignoring people you're with in order to pay attention to your phone. we'll slide right past the claim that this is a normal word people use.

the authors have developed a "phubbing scale" and demonstrated that it has strong correlation with the existing "maladaptive technology use" scale. from this, they conclude the "phubbing scale" is a valid and useful metric.

the "maladaptive technology use" scale, if you go and read that paper, has shown strong correlation with the "problematic smartphone application use" construct.

have you caught the problem yet? nowhere has it been proven that scoring high on any of this is actually bad for you.

imagine someone told you "if the ground is wet it probably rained recently". then you talked to someone about rain and they said "if it rained recently there were probably clouds". yeah okay sounds reasonable. then all three of these people told you their research proves clouds, rain, and wet ground are all signs of demonic possession in giraffes. you'd be like hold up, I think you lost me somewhere

[ollievion]

I don’t need a study to know using my phone makes me feel like shit

[dragon-in-a-fez]

do different things on your phone then. I'm guessing you haven't written off paper as a technology just because tax forms make you want to cry

[weeknightbrutal-deactivated2026]

It's fair to be skeptical of research into problematic mobile phone usage on the basis that while some studies have shown it to be correlated with anxiety, insomnia, and depression, correlation is not causation and it is difficult to establish a causal relationship when studying this kind of problem. It's also fair to be skeptical of psych research in general due to the problems that are pervasive in the field.

But being not just skeptical but confident that you've debunked all the extant research on the basis that...the dumb statisticians never even bothered to check if this was actually bad for you LMFAO IDIOTS is just plain anti-intellectual though.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

> spend 5 years getting a PhD in youth and digital media

> express annoyance with a common failing of academic writing in your field

> get called anti-intellectual

[dragon-in-a-fez]

now reading a paper where the researcher:

asked students to volunteer to take a "screen-free challenge" where they didn't use electronic devices in class for a semester

recorded students' views on the challenge at the end of the course, and found that most of the students who participated had positive views while most of the students who didn't participate had negative views

completely ignored that this might just mean "people who thought something was a bad idea didn't do it", and instead concluded "the screen-free challenge leads to more positive views on the learning experience"

I'm getting whiplash from all the looking into the camera I am doing here

[allore]

Just to clarify, they only recorded the students’ views at the end of the study?? They didn’t ask the students what they expected at the beginning or ask why they participated??

That seems like such a basic step to mitigate your #3!

[dragon-in-a-fez]

the thing you have to understand is that "screens bad" research gets published so easily you can basically make every research mistake ever invented and be fine

[probablyasocialecologist]

“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”

What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us

[wire-smith]

I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.

I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.

And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.

[hydrachea]

> turns on my computer

> disables a new AI feature that was turned on by default

> opens my email

> disables a new AI feature that was turned on by default

> launches a software

> disables a new AI fea

[volach-deactivated20230326]

“When the handle has snapped off the basket that held all your eggs…” gone girl tier monologue

[maaarine]

@W_Asherah

[aidashakur]

[librarychair]

As much as I want to support ethical farming practices I will be buying the cheapest bag of frozen chicken thighs as much as the next frugal/poor person which is why animal welfare needs to be legislated, not left up to the invisible hand of the free market or some bullshit. Invisible hand of the free market finds itself around a lot of throats.

[niamhermind]

"Invisible hand of the free market finds itself around a lot of throats."

That is such a line.

[kvetchlandia]

Uncredited Photographer Anti-fascist Partisan Member of Tito's National Liberation Army of Yugoslavia Albina Mali Hočevar. The Scar on Her Cheek is From a Combat Wound She Received Fighting Fascists on Her 18th Birthday in 1943 c.1944

[dragon-in-a-fez]

said this as part of a larger point in a reblog but I'm gonna make it its own post:

humans have the right to do things that are mildly bad for us sometimes.

[dragon-in-a-fez]

you have the right to eat way too many pierogi and make yourself a little sick. you have the right to go skydiving. you have the right to pull an all-nighter building the Imperial City of Tamriel in Minecraft. you have the right to get drunk in your living room watching football.

life is not about making the safest most logically correct choice at all times. you're a blob of salty meat piloting a flesh mech and you get to act like it.

[problemnyatic]

This is called dignity of risk and it's a big topic in disability rights spaces. id elaborate but im fuckin wiped

[fedorahead]

it's always funny how people will advocate for bodily autonomy when it comes to certain things but then shy away from anything they personally wouldn't do to their own body. like yeah, that's why it's your body buddy. i can do what i want with mine.

[debelice]

One 0f the greatest and hardest dance scenes ever recorded......

[the-haiku-bot]

One 0f the

greatest and hardest dance scenes

ever recorded……

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

[tyrograph]

Cab Calloway and the Nicholas brothers! I don't think I've ever seen the colorized version of this before!

[bunsunbunny]

I haven't seen it in color either! It's a fantastic dance scene!!

[hyrude]

is the world really such a terrible place? yesterday i asked if oat milk was extra and the barista said yes so i said ok just regular milk then and when she gave me my chai latte she whispered “i used oat milk ;)” doesnt that make u want to live another day?

[hyrude]

here is my life philosophy: next week there might be someone ahead of you in line at the store who’s short a quarter and you have a quarter and you can give it to them. if you weren’t there, they’d have to put something back. the week after that you could be getting lunch and the waiter might ask if you want some pancakes someone else ordered and never picked up. you could find someone’s lost cat. you could watch someone’s bag while they go to the restroom. there are so many ways you are going to touch other people’s lives and they are going to touch yours and there’s no way to know when it’s going to happen. so you have to keep living!!! i wouldn’t want to die knowing that tomorrow the barista will give me free oat milk just to be nice. 

[elaninrecovery]

When I was 11 years old - we went to Sea World for my birthday. This was to avoid the realization I had no friends, and no one to come to a birthday party and probably because someone gave my mother free tickets at work. It was kinda a shitty day despite being at a theme park full of cute animals. There was a new roller coaster there that had just opened so we decided to go on. I was nervous. I’d never been on a roller coaster.

A group of 6 college kids were ahead of us in line and started chatting with me. Full on just having a fun conversation with someone literally going through the beginning of a very awkward middle school period. I was so shocked they wanted to talk to me. I think my mom mentioned it was my birthday. They were very nice about it. When we got on the ride they told us to go ahead of them so we could sit at the front of the car since it held 8 people.

Now the ride (called Journey to Atlantis - I believe it is sadly no longer there) started with a slow ride of beautiful visuals of dolphins and oceans and computerized images of this imaginary Atlantis before going up the hill to the beginning of the coaster, where it paused for about 30 seconds, and then the ride started. The college kids must have known there would be a pause. Maybe they’d ridden it before I’m not sure.

But as we sat there on that peak, 6 people I’ve never known, and will never know again, sang a very very lonely 11 year old happy birthday. Loudly. And with gusto. They were happy and laughing and joyful. And it made me feel less alone in the world.

I am 29 years old this year, and I still remember them. I still remember that kindness. It is so important. It doesn’t go into a vacuum. It exists beside me in my daily life. And I love the idea that I have been that person to someone else too.

It’s stunningly lovely to be human when we’re kind to each other.

[shutyourmoustache]

If you have the means to donate gifts to toy drives or shelters, please keep the above tips in mind so you can help meet people’s wants and needs! 💓

[artistformerlyknownasbutttrumpet]

i just started listening to hozier (ik, like over a decade late, whatever), but bruh. some of y'all did this dude so dirty. everything i've ever seen of him on here has been like "uwu magical forest man" and so my black ass goes into it expecting white boy indie music, but instead i get this radical leftist irish guy straight up singing the blues, like?? (singing the blues/having a lot of blatantly black musical influences, BUT crediting his influences in the process, which is a an important distinction)

like y'all. has anyone told tiktok what kind of music this man actually makes? bc some of them might be shooketh to find out their precious forest man is actually telling them to dismantle the oppressive institution of colonialism while actively paying homage to artists of color

well, that and also to eat pussy, but same thing tbh

[wizardarchetypes]

had a dream this morning that I left my phone open for 13 hours by mistake to a tiktok of an AI watermelon dancing over a black background to an obnoxious children's song. my friend brought it to me and she was like "duuuuudddeee your algorithm is gonna be fucked" and i started scrolling through tiktok and every single video was AI fruit dancing to different children's music and i was like "oh man i'm gonna have to delete the app to undo this" and my friend said, "dude it's gonna be worse than that" and i opened up instagram and tumblr and all of my social feeds were dancing AI fruit so i had to factory reset my phone

[imsobadatnicknames2]

I want slower packages delivered by transportation workers who are paid more to work less and I'm not kidding

[theparadigmshifts]

@mortuarybees​: #i think its deeply important for all of us to come to terms with the fact that its actually fine to be mildly inconvenienced

[morriganwarrior]

ThriftBooks take 12-18 business days as per their own site. I've had it take longer. I survived. You do not need next-day delivery.

[punkitt-is-here]

its tough out there but so am i