Break on thru to the other Side Blog

Julien // 26 // she/they/he

[eldergoblin]

Healing Hands

.

[blessyouhawkeye]

forever thinking about that girl at my uni orientation who, after being told to pour out her water bottle before entering an event, looked at me and said "they tell us to stay hydrated and then make us pour out our water, this is like totally kafkaesque" and then poured out what was very obviously an entire water bottle full of whiskey. hope she's doing well.

[unification]

*torturing you* dude trust me, something really cool happens. you just have to reflect on it for a bit. i'm doing this because i want you to reach your full potential okay?

[killxbunnyyy]

i be like “it is what it is” then be pissed off for like 4 years

[lesvegas]

passing in public makes me feel like white shrek

[lesvegas]

literally how it feels

[welpnotagain]

[wyrmicelli]

me tongue-deep in a sandalwood candle: 🤤

the tjmaxx employee loading a fourth tranquilizer dart into their blowgun: i need backup

[snowown]

[mangonetics]

I thought we were good as gravy, but you just wanted to get your pey wet

[nobrashfestivity]

Via amandapourlesintimes

[spinecutter-archive]

my writing gland is purple and swollen

[spinecutter-archive]

my friendship gland is black and shriveled

[tanadrin]

angela collier had a pretty fun video recently about lk-99 and how impressed everybody on twitter was with it and how scientists ignored it because it was just so obviously bullshit to them. and one of the things she talks about, which i thought was pretty interesting, was all the sort of like. social/formal signifiers that immediately sets off alarm bells to a working scientist that some random paper uploaded to the arxiv is nonsense.

and she's quite up front i think about the fact that, in theory, things like bad chart formatting or weird file formats or whatever do not (in terms of strict logical necessity) affect the content of a paper. the correctness of a physics claim is not dependent on whether you typeset it in microsoft word or not. but it's a very useful heuristic, and if you have not one or two but like a half-dozen of these superficial signs of amateurishness or unseriousness in your paper, the heuristic that nobody who actually does condensed matter physics needs to bother with the contents of your paper has--in the real world--a 100% hit rate.

and this looks like smarmy gatekeeping to outsiders who want to complain that scientists don't take their crackpot theories seriously, but this isn't actually a gate being kept (it got uploaded to the arxiv! physicists are not required to respond to your paper just because you uploaded it to a preprint server; they get to choose how to spend their time). for all the failure modes scientific academia has, and even all the formal institutional barriers to access like scientific publishing (her video on academic publishing is pretty interesting--i didn't know contributors *paid to have their work published,* and quite a lot, too!) don't prevent outsiders from getting published in journals or being taken seriously.

but the crucial difference between your average crackpot and the non-scientist getting taken seriously by a peer-reviewed publication is that the latter is generally in dialogue with the field, and is able to be in dialogue with it. one thing collier always points out is that it's often obvious crackpots haven't done the reading--and in the case of LK-99 didn't notice that some of their data was characteristic of their sample being rich in copper (and thus ferromagnetic), because they just did not know enough about chemistry to recognize what was (to a chemist) obviously happening when they tried to synthesize this material.

this matters because in almost every domain of practical human knowledge we are so far from the point where a lone genius could reinvent everything they needed to know based on first principles that it's hilarious. nowadays you often need huge teams of experimental physicists collaborating on projects that cost gajillions of dollars to push forward the frontier of knowledge; you are very unlikely to do so in your garage, and still less so if you can't engage with the larger state of the field.

and wrt the leverage thing i think it's interesting that the founder and so many people involved seem to be people convinced they can reconstitute whole fields of human knowledge from scratch. i do not think you actually gain anything by trying to reinvent psychology or epistemology or any other branch of knowledge from first principles; even if that field deeply dissatisfies you (and i don't blame anybody for being rather dissatisfied with the state of psychology as a field) the odds that a person or small group operating completely out of conversation with a field is going to revolutionize it seems to me very unlikely. and even if you do nail it, you will mostly be retreading other people's work, when you could have saved a lot of time by just getting up to speed on the existing material.

[crabussy]

how come they make you reinvent the concept of dinner every evening. I have to make dinner come true every evening like some kind of unpaid genie intern

[likearumchocolatesouffle]

I know this is just a silly little post, but as someone who super relates to this, I have some tips:

Make more dinner than you actually need. Tomorrow, free dinner that you only have to microwave!

Assign dinners to days of the week. Some examples to get you started: If it's Monday, it's some kind of rice bowl. If it's Tuesday, it's some kind of taco. Wednesday, soup. Thursday, big sandwich. Friday, pasta. Saturday, casserole. Sunday, breakfast for dinner.

Make a big batch of some kind of protein and throw that in everything all week. Since proteins are usually the most time consuming part. Next week, different protein.

Just eat the same thing every day until you get sick of it.

Just eat snacks for dinner. Snacky plate. Crackers and cheese and deli meats and pickles and fruits. A little of this and a little of that.

Very big very late lunch and then a bedtime snack. No dinner.

Swap dinner responsibility back and forth with the people you live with, so it's not you every night.

Find a new food that you're super excited about, so that preparing it is fun and not a chore.

Pretend you're hosting a cooking show.

[twilanore]

i refuse to hear any catherine mcafferty slander about this episode

she figured it out so quickly, climbed her way back to the top so well

its not her fault she thinks the louvre looks like a city block or that she doesnt know what spaghetti is

[ruidusgays]

i believe her

[godaweful]

catherine might be the first game changer player who understood the assignment, immediately failed the assignment, figured out the assignment better, told everyone else the assignment, and then failed multiple times cause she truly cannot describe pictures (or name songs). player of all time. i love seeing someone who clearly gets and loves game changer and is just plain bad at games. representation for all of us.

[beguilingcorpse]

immediate top 5 game changer episode btw there’s just so much to love. the slow reveal of the rooms. ify being the first to lose in room 1. catherine mccafferty being the episode’s main character and breakout star. the set design for all of the rooms but ESPECIALLY the spot the difference ones. 25 grants. the friendship(?) between hannah and the bouncer for room 2. demi accidentally plotting his own downfall by saying pop goes the weasel at the same time as hannah. sam trying to fill time while waiting for a player to win their way back up. the pic pong got him. a true fucking delight all the way down and back up again

[wizard-loving-wizard]

my mvp of the episode 💖💖

[huggingtentacles]

Being knocked out for more than 5 minutes means very serious brain damage but humans not having a turn-off button would do immense damage to our collective storytelling. So many films and books and videogames just wouldn't happen if writers stopped bonking their characters on the head. Insane.