Musings

An alien trying to understand humans.

[bisexualwario]

[hunter-rodrigez]

So I do 3D modeling and printing as a hobby, and a few weeks ago I designed wheel guards meant to prevent office chairs from running over cables and clothes... or your pet's tail.

I got the idea from cowcatchers old locomotives used to have.

Anyways, yesterday I uploaded the model to Thingiverse, and just hours after uploading it, the Community Relationship Manager of the whole website left a comment suggesting I enter the model into a competition that's currently being held on the site.

So I did... and now it's in third place not even a day later. First place is $500, but the competition still has a month to go.

Then the Community Manager contacted me again, telling me they want to feature my model in an upcoming design promotion.

Just, what is happening? I mostly made this thing for myself in, like, an hour, and now it's suddenly super popular? This is all a little bit overwhelming 😵‍💫

Other models I worked on for weeks didn't get nearly as popular. I swear, it's impossible to predict what people will like.

Anyways, if you want to print the wheel guards yourself, you can get the model here or here.

I also made a quiet version you can stick furniture felt pads on.

[these-violet-delights-fic]

People love simple, extremely practical things. I hope you win!

[sluttyquarantinetheory]

The concept that married people live longer is interesting. I'm sure there is some merit to the idea that if you're married there is someone there to nag you about going to the doctor, but I think much larger factors are having the finances of dual incomes and access to an immediate support person.

Surgeries require having a designated person to look after you. Many injuries require driving to somewhere like an emergency room which can be hard to do if you are the one injured. If you're home with the flu, it's hard to tell when it's bad enough to go to the hospital without another person checking on you. And if you pass out it requires another person to find you like that to get medical aid.

You can prop it up as the benefits of marriage, but I think there's a much deeper discussion to be had about how we've built society around marriage as an inevitable conclusion and neglected to build support systems that function outside of romantic pairings.

[sluttyquarantinetheory]

thinking about this further, people often cite this as a sort of See It's Better To Be Married and mostly accept it as a fact that being married is better for you overall and proceed to breakdown why marriage leads to longer lives. Instead I think we need to be looking at why the system is failing single people and what we could do to close that gap. What structural societal changes can we make to help single people rather than treat it as a Well Obviously foregone conclusion that everyone will eventually pair up.

It's not Why Are Married People Healthier? It's Why Aren't Single People as Healthy? And then actually examine the causes rather than hand waving it away with whichever stereotype of being single or half remembered memory of the last time you were single in your early 20s.

[mikkeneko]

AI tool use is becoming mandatory for more and more roles at my company, unfortunately including mine, so I've spent the last week or so undergoing training courses and practice exercises for Claude Cowork, and here is my conclusion:

Congratulations, you made a computer that cannot successfully count to ten.

[mikkeneko]

claudd Cowork perfec t size for put personal financial data inside for a\nalysis! inside very Safe and Convenient financ data consume put data in Claude Cowork. Put Personal Financial Data In Claude Cowork. no problems ever in clode cwork because Anthropic is Friend who will take sososo good care of your data trust <3 Cowwork yes a place for a data health data put financial data in cowok mouth can trust claud for giveing good work to data. friend cowork

[appendingfic]

so as someone who isn't required, how do they know you used ai to do work?

[mikkeneko]

Each person's account is given 'credits' which are centrally tracked and if you aren't using any they ask why not.

[canuckerrant]

[tiktoksthataregood-ish]

[1lluminae-files]

UNMUTE!!

[teaboot]

POV u are delicious

[cages-boxes-hunters-foxes]

every conversation on here increasingly feeling like this tweet

[shamesonlydaughter]

it doesn’t have to be good it just has to be done

[fiyero3305]

The phrase "They don't want it perfect, they want it Friday" does wonders for my productivity.

[blueindeed]

I tell this story all the time but I'll tell it again! When I taught kindergarten full time, we had a working bee one weekend where we did a bunch of gardening/landscaping in the outdoor area. One of the dads put up a bit of fencing, then stood back and had a look, kind of frowning like he wasn't sure. His wife then came along, and the following conversation ensued:

Wife: GETMO? Husband: (after a moment, with a sigh) Yeah, GETMO. Me: GETMO? Wife and husband, in perfect unison: Good Enough To Move On

Absolutely LIFE CHANGING acronym, friends and enemies.

[lovewithagirl]

image description: a gif of a small white puppy with its ears trembling. / end description

[killer-buzz-queen]

Today is the only day you can reblog this

[dittography-direwolf]

Totally normal for a legitimate for-profit company to refuse to reclaim or stop running their products even after they're no longer being paid to do so. I'm sure it's very normal to just keep running your service for free when your contract's been terminated. Spending money to continue running cameras that supposedly no one is looking at is definitely not an indicator they are just run by the federal government to spy on everyone and only a wacko conspiracy theorist would think so.

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

‘Heroic actions are a natural tendency’: why bystander apathy is a myth

Modern research shows the public work together selflessly in an emergency, motivated by a strong impulse to help

“The notion that people panic and run screaming for the exits is a Hollywood fiction,” said Prof Stephen Reicher, an expert in group behaviour at the University of St Andrews.

“Characteristically, people stay and help each other,” he said. “We found this during the 7/7 attacks on the underground and the 1999 attack on the Admiral Duncan pub in London, where people looked after each other even though they feared other bombs.

“In our own research on the Leytonstone tube attack in 2015, there was an amazing level of spontaneous coordination by bystanders: some directed others away from danger. Some distracted the attacker. Some confronted the attacker. Each was able to act because of the others. Heroism was a feature of the group, not just the individual,” he added.

Prof Clifford Stott, a specialist in the psychology of crowds and group identity at Keele University, agreed. Modern research, he said, showed “bystander apathy” was a myth. Instead, strangers often work together in emergency situations with highly sophisticated unity.”

[cephalopodvictorious]

Bystander apathy is a myth invented by the New York Times to cover up that the police were called by several residents of the building, but the cops refused to act. The cops then told the Times that 38 people just watched her die (a seemingly arbitrary number and a physical impossibility based on where the attacks occurred), and the Times ran with it. In fact, Kitty was alive when the cops got there, and was being held and comforted by one of her friends who lived in the building because one of the people who saw her get attacked from across the street called her friend to go get her. Because people care.

The Bystander Effect Started from a Lie

You have just been attacked. How likely is it that someone will come to your help? If you remember the infamous case of Kitty Genovese in 19

[moosepower]

I will always re-blog this. The story of Kitty Genovese’s murder has gone down in history as a story about everyone watching it happen and doing nothing and none of the story is true.

[memesandmylife]

hey jsyk while hellofresh is dummy expensive and i wouldn’t reccomend it if you already know how to cook (if you’re a beginner like i was when i had it for 3 months, then it’s worth it), you should know that ALL OF THEIR RECIPES are free on their website and they all fuck hard

i will say that all the cooking instructions for veggies are pretty much the same (season with salt + pepper and roast on the top oven rack at 425F), but if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

that being said, it also introduced me to methods i wasn’t at all expecting. i would have never thought to use cream cheese in my meat sauce, and now all my friends are constantly asking me to make my special rigatoni.

happy cheffin! :)

[bemusedlybespectacled]

I am a person who uses Hello Fresh for realsies because it is a bit cheaper than groceries here and definitely cheaper than takeout, but we also remake the recipes when we want a specific one and don't want to wait for it to come around in the rotation again, and therefore I know The Secret Translations of Proprietary Ingredients:

"Cream sauce base" = make a roux, add milk according to how much cream sauce base you're supposed to have (ex: 4 oz cream sauce base = 4 oz milk)

"1 packet stock concentrate" = either one tablespoon Better than Bullion or, if you want to be really accurate, Savory Choice Broth Concentrate packets are available on Amazon and allegedly that's what they use

"Italian Heat Spice"/"Blackening Spice"/"Fry Seasoning"/etc.: I promise you someone on Reddit has figured out what spices they use and in what proportions for each mix, if it's not just a straight up branded mix (like McCormick Grill Mates Brown Sugar Bourbon spice mix)

"Roasted Garlic Herb Butter" (and other compound butters, like truffle butter) = they're literally Epicurean branded butters, they do not hide this, you can buy them online

"Sweet Soy Glaze"/"Ponzu sauce"/"Hoisin sauce" = literally Kikkoman brand condiments: they don't hide that, either

"Sweet Thai chili sauce" = any sweet Thai chili sauce from the grocery store will do. We use Blue Dragon or Taste of Thai because that's what we can get in our grocery store.

[unpretty]

blue apron also has recipes on their website! i use it regularly to steal ideas when meal planning for the week.

[yamada-ryo]

"Explaining binary search to a cop" should've caught on as a saying tbh.

[kalichnikov]

I forgot about the context to this. God this is so funny

Image description: screenshot of two paragraphs that read, "Afterward I found a chat room thread among Cambridge computer scientists, one of whom had also been told that unless he could pin down the moment of the theft no one would look at the footage. He said he tried to explain sorting algorithms to police - he was a computer scientist, after all.

"You don't search the whole thing, he said. You use a binary search. You fast forward to halfway, see if the bike is there and, if it is, zoom to three quarters of the way through. But if it isn't there at the halfway mark, you rewind to a quarter of the way through. It's very quick. In fact, he had pointed out, if the CCTV footage stretched back to the dawn of humanity it would still probably have only taken an hour to find the moment of the theft. This argument didn't go down well."

[proustianrevelry]

more orgs need actual webpages. i shouldn't have to log in or create an instagram account to find out when your meeting is

[anarchistmemedistro]

[isuggestrevolution]

i have a suggestion

[i-suggest-murder-offical]

me too

[viralfrog]

[solarpunk-nightbird]

Do the kids these days know that the traditional payment for "having your friends help you move" is "order everyone pizza after"?

Feed your friends. Feed your loved ones. Feed the people who help you. Feed your neighbors. Feed your community.

Seriously though, with a lot of people, especially friends, you shamelessly and blatantly trade pizza / food for help and labor <3

[angstsplatter]

Okay, no, but REALLY, can we talk about the fact that Goat created a game that's not segregated by sex!!! Like the hero our protagonist looks up to is a female player!!! And she's the best in the game!!! And she didn't earn a special place as the only female character by being super special amazing. She's one of many female players and just happens to be the best because someone has to be the best. I cannot overstate how important and impactful a decision for the writers to have made, especially in this day and age where the anti-girl-power sentiment has been so successfully eroded in the campaign against trans people. And Goat went there and didn't have any debates about it. Just: it's about the players and the team, and that's it. Anybody can be a great player. A smaller player will have a harder time against bigger players, but it's not determined by gender. It's just about skill.

And can we appreciate how the female designs are NOT weirdly or overly sexualized!!!