I fucking hate it when you’re in such a fantastically giddy mood and then you see one simple little thing that makes you think, “oh” and then you just get this empty feeling in your chest and you get nauseous and the world just crumbles and you want to just lay under a blanket and close your eyes and fall asleep and never wake up. 

From what my therapist told me, this happens because our emotions aren’t really on the ‘opposite’ ends like we tend to think of it. Happiness is not ‘up’ and sadness is not ‘down’-. In a way they’re actually right ‘next’ to each other.

If you’re super happy, it can turn into super sad very easily, because your emotions are already highly elevated and it’s only a very minor shift as far as your brain is concerned.

Knowing this can help you fight it, and it can help you be more aware of what’s going on while you’re happy and help avoid shifting towards misery.

I used to always wonder why it seemed like my happy days ‘couldn’t last’ or that bad things would ‘always’ happen when I was happy. It’s not that happiness is doomed to fail, it’s that emotions are volatile. I hope that helps people who experience this too- when you understand what’s going on more it’s easier to manage.

Your pupils contract in response to visible light, but not all of the sun’s light is visible. During an eclipse, your pupils widen because it’s dark, but there’s an outer layer around the sun that mostly only puts out light that’s not visible to us, but that can still damage your retinas. Thus, looking at an eclipse makes your pupils open up like it’s dark, which lets more of the invisible damage beams in.

The sun doesn’t get a critical multiplier on its damage when HP is low. Equipping the moon gives the sun a bonus to backstab.

a conversation i had with a 96-year-old woman

I once made the mistake of asking a 96yo lady what she liked to watch on tv as a kid and she got a good laugh out of that before saying loudly, “I REMEMBER WHEN RADIO WAS INVENTED.”

technology compression gives current generations weird benchmarks they live through, but those at the beginning of the tech crunch, when it all started happening in a single generation for the first time… wow.

First you have to realize the long slow beginning. Back when our tools were made of rock, the form our tools took changed slower than our bones were evolving. Okay. For most of humanity’s time on this earth, our tools and technology stayed almost exactly the same for lifetime after lifetime, with upgrades and innovations coming in rare bursts. 

My grandma tho. In her lifetime, she went from the invention of radio, to television, to desk top computers, to smart phones. As a child they would gather to sit around the radio and listen to their favorite programs in the evening. As a great-grandmother she had a picture frame that showed a slideshow of pics of her family that we would all upload to from our phones whenever we snapped a shot we thought she’d like. Can you imagine living through that change? Like first they had to invent television, then they had to colorize it, then they had to create the brand new animated show The Jetsons, and then that fictional futuristic shit started to be out in the world

She remembered crank-cars (where you had to wind a crank on the front bumper to start the engine) and she lived to see the first experimental cars that you could put a wireless sensor-filled hat on and THINK hard and the car would start (you know we made that happen, right? It was like 15 years ago)

She saw the space program unfold. When she was a baby, some people in town still used horses to get around, when she died, the sky was full of satellites. An explorer-souled lady who could pilot a plane herself, the progression of our traveling abilities was of special interest to her.

One of her first jobs, a restaurant, she told me they used to wash the dishes in the creek out behind it.

Speaking of restaurants, she remembered the check amount for the first fancy dinner date she went on. She remembered because it was a very nice place and she was real embarrassed at how much money he was spending on her: $10. That included several drinks, apps, dinner, dessert, and tip. Ten bucks.

Me, I was in a very awkward generation. Starting when I was 13 we had a computer in the house, but I didn’t ever live in a home with internet access until I was almost 30. Like, in my high school they had a classroom full of computers, and all freshmen were required to take the mandatory class held there, where they taught us… typing. They ONLY taught us typing. I look at my life now, and I think, christ it would have helped me if they had taught me anything about how computers actually worked. They were good models for learning the basics, those old clunkers, all black screens with a glowing DOS prompt in either orange or green. There was no such thing as a mouse, no desktop with folders, no drop down menus, just a blank black screen with a flashing cursor, and if you wanted to open the typing program, you had to type in the line of DOS code that would do that. Which was the only line of code they taught us.

The administration had no idea wtf computers were either – those computers? they were networked. To EVERY computer in the school (there was no such thing as the internet yet, so networks were very new and tricky things). Anyway, it turned out some kids figured how to get into the files that had the print-ready report cards and change the grades, because nobody new shit about shit and you could just type the line of right code to open the relevant files, and guess the most common passwords for administrator access (which as I recall, was “admin”) and then change your grades. A few hackers were born that month, I can tell you. Then they tightened up network security enough, but never did teach us anything about how computers worked.

Anyway, from 1900 to 2000 was a wild and weird time for technology. It’s going to get super crazy now, of course, but my niece and nephew and a lot of you have grown up with the concept that the technology is ever-evolving year to year, month to month, AND THAT SHIT IS BRAND NEW, CONCEPTUALLY, technology having sweeping changes every single year has never ever ever happened before, never, in over two million years of human tools and tech.

that’s why boomers and gen x are often so bad at tech. They were raised to believe that a new technology came out, you learned it, and then that was the only version of that technology you would need to know how to use for the rest of your life. Us millennials (I juuuuust make the cut on that one, on the oldest side) we grew up going from boombox to walkman to discman to ipod to spotify and pandora, and it gets tiring relearning such large shifts in the simple act of how I listen to music. But that’s just a mindset I was programed with, because for my niece, it’s just the normal way technology happens. And that’s super cool.

I really like how this ended with “And that’s super cool.”

We need that kind of positivity not often

TRM Round 1: Digimon (Tyrannomon) vs. Prehistoric Kingdom T. rex

Digimon (Tyrannomon) – If you’re wondering why Tyrannomon and not Greymon, it’s simply that Tyrannomon is explicitly inspired by Tyrannosaurus and Greymon…isn’t. While its role in the original series is fairly limited, mainly serving as a lackey to Etemon and other villains, it isn’t a malicious Digimon by nature and makes numerous appearances in other Digimon media. It also has a Virus-attribute counterpart named DarkTyrannomon that is notably seen in the service of Myotismon and the Digimon Emperor.

Prehistoric Kingdom T. rex – Since I have Jurassic Park T. rexes elsewhere in the poll, we’re skipping the Jurassic World Evolution games and going to the indie paleo-park simulator instead. The T. rex in this game has the behaviors and needs one would expect of a giant carnivore, and it is available in multiple skin options, including one with feathers. It’s been a part of the game since the beginning, as is befitting such a beloved and famous dinosaur.

A good test of the value of any given religious belief is how it impacts your actions. Does this belief make you a better person? Does it make you kinder, more generous, more understanding, more dedicated to creating a fair and just society for both people like and unlike you? Or, does this belief make you more judgmental, tighter-fisted, narrower of vision, and cause you to only value people exactly like you?

Have you explored the impacts of this belief on others through their eyes and listened to what people who do not share this belief have to say about how it effects them?

A good test of the value of any given religious observance is, were you to find out later beyond a shadow of a doubt that the underlying specific theological claims were not literally true, would you be upset to have lived a religious life the way you did? Or would you still value the time spent in prayer, in study, in ritual, in meditation, in community?

Does your faith and/or the texts it is based on have to be literally true for it to still carry meaning for you?

A good test for the the validity of any given religious intuition is what it encourages you to do. Does this spiritual experience move you to examine yourself carefully and work to be a better person and to better society? Or does it move you to seek to serve your own interests, even if it wears the sheen of piety?

Do you truly believe that G-d would ask you to harm other people, other beings, or the environment, or is that your yetzer hara talking instead? Is that a G-d you would even find worthy of worship?

Space, universe and science related special interests...

Are really cool.

In fact, all special interests are cool.

a lot of you hate historians and archaeologists, and i think that’s a problem

look, i fully recognize that there are reasons to be skeptical of history and archaeology. i am very on board with criticizing academia as an oppressive institution, and the way that researchers take their bigotry and bias with them to their work. i also recognize that academia does a pretty bad job of communicating what it does to the public, and that’s a part of why people’s hostility to it is able to flourish.

but i am disturbed by the pervasive narrative in online leftist spaces that people who research the human past are ignorant and bigoted, and i think we need to do more to combat that narrative.

historians being homophobic has become a whole meme, and it feels like people are just using historians as a homophobia scapegoat, when in reality the humanities are overwhelmingly left-leaning. people also keep blaming historians for erasing the homoeroticism of fictional literary characters, which is just… not what historians do. homophobic biases and erasures in the interpretation of history over the past few hundred years are a very real thing that’s important to learn about, but scholars have radically shifted away from that approach in recent generations, and these memes are not helping people outside the field to understand history and reception. instead, a lot of people are coming away with the impression that…

(source… really? nobody?)

this thread gets bonus points for the comments claiming that modern historians argue about whether achilles was a top or a bottom using homophobic stereotypes, which i can only guess is a misunderstanding of the erastes/eromenos model (a relationship schema in classical greece; i think people have debated whether achilles and patroclus represent an early version of it). also a commenter claims that the movie troy invented the idea of achilles and patroclus being cousins when no, they were also cousins in lots of ancient sources.

there’s this post about roman dodecahedra (link includes explanation of why the original post is misleading).

there’s this thread about how some thin gold spirals from ancient denmark look exactly like materials used in gold embroidery to this day but archaeologists are stupid and don’t know that because they dont talk to embroiderers enough. in fact, the article says they were most likely used for decorating clothing, whether as a fringe, braided into hair, or embroidered. so the archaeologists in the article basically agree with the post, theyre just less certain about it, because an artifact looking similar to a modern device doesn’t necessarily mean they have identical uses.

this thread has a lot of people interpreting academic nuance as erasure. the museum label literally says that this kind of statue typically depicts a married couple, giving you the factual evidence so you can interpret it. it would be false to say “these two women are married” because there was no gay marriage in ancient egypt. (interpreting nuance as erasure or ignorance is a running theme here, and it points to a disconnect, a public ignorance of how history is studied, that we can very much remedy)

lots of other conspiracy theory-ish stuff about ancient egypt is common in social justice communities, which egyptologists on this site have done a good job of debunking

oh, and this kind of thing has been going around. the problem with it is that there are loads of marginalized academics who research things related to their own lives, and lived experience and rigorous research are different forms of expertise that are both valuable.

so why does this matter?

none of these are isolated incidents. for everything i’ve linked here, there are examples i havent linked. anti-intellectualism, especially against the humanities, is rampant lately across the political spectrum, and it’s very dangerous. it’s not the same as wanting to see and understand evidence for yourself, it’s not the same as criticizing institutions of academic research. it’s the assumption that scholars are out to get you and the perception that there is no knowledge to be gained from thorough study. that mindset is closely connected to the denial of (political, scientific, and yes historical) facts that we’ve been seeing all around us in recent years.

on a personal note, so many marginalized scholars are trying to survive the dumpster fire of academia because we care that much about making sure the stories that are too often unheard don’t get left out of history… and when that’s the entire focus of my life right now, it’s disheartening to see how many of my political allies are just going to assume the worst about the entire field

YES YES YES

I think a variant of it is also present in the very pervasive form of anti-scientist meme-ing you see. A scientific team will spot a Thing that leftists are observing (e.g. it hurts trans kids more to be denied transitioning tools), go to the effort of researching it by talking to huge samples of more than a thousand trans kids and analysing the data and cross-referencing it and reducing variables, and then announce that leftists were right, look, and we’ve scientifically proven it to be the case - and the same leftists go “My GOD I cannot BELIEVE you didn’t just ASK TRANS PEOPLE” when that was very literally what the scientists did. 

I wholly understand that science, like literally every other field, has a problem with researcher bias. I totally understand that biased ‘science’ has been used as a tool of oppression against multiple marginalised groups over the years, including several I myself belong to. But huge numbers of scientists - especially the younger generation coming through - are leftist, and do their best to remove their own bias, and are actually studying these things precisely to give them academic validation. So that when you next say to a transphobe “It literally harms trans kids if you deny them transitioning tools,” when they inevitably say “That’s not true you SNOWFLAKE it harms them if you <insert terf rhetoric>”, you can now go “SCIENCE LITERALLY DISAGREES, PRICKSTAIN” and lamp them in the face with a journal.

Also, I vividly remember that paper that looked into why Indian cuisine has such a complex flavour profile, and someone tweeted it to go “OMG white people just spent all that time researching this and it’s just spices,” and that promptly took off because no one read the article - they just kept repeating this point about stupid white scientists not understanding what spices are.

And then it turned out that, firstly, it was not just “spices lol” - Indian cuisine is, in fact, quite a bit more sophisticated than “IDK man we just put in cumin until it goes brown”, and the reason for the flavour is that, unlike other cuisines, they put contrasting flavours together rather than flavour pairs. But secondly, and perhaps more importantly, THE RESEARCHERS WERE ALL INDIAN. These were scientists from India, researching their own food, and revealing a really cool fact about the culinary science of their country. And leftist westerners fell over themselves to decry the whole thing because LOL SCIENCE.

Anyway, anti-intellectualism is not just a flaw of the right.

Not to mention that the terms in which the activist Left speaks and conceptualizes things have often filtered out from the academic humanities (not always with their useful meanings intact). That includes the phrase “lived experience,” which entered Anglophone academic discourse as a translation of Erlebnis, a term important in the work of the late 19th/early 20th-century German academic psychologist and philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey.