Everything that ever happened to me is just hanging—crushed and sparkling—in the air, waiting to happen to you. Everything that ever happened to me happened to somebody else first.
— Mary Ruefle, from “Saga,” in Trances of the Blast
Prof Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained one to me. He said “your brain can only produce one or two thoughts” in your conscious mind at once. That’s it. “We’re very, very single-minded.” We have “very limited cognitive capacity”. But we have fallen for an enormous delusion. The average teenager now believes they can follow six forms of media at the same time. When neuroscientists studied this, they found that when people believe they are doing several things at once, they are actually juggling. “They’re switching back and forth. They don’t notice the switching because their brain sort of papers it over to give a seamless experience of consciousness, but what they’re actually doing is switching and reconfiguring their brain moment-to-moment, task-to-task – [and] that comes with a cost.” Imagine, say, you are doing your tax return, and you receive a text, and you look at it – it’s only a glance, taking three seconds – and then you go back to your tax return. In that moment, “your brain has to reconfigure, when it goes from one task to another”, he said. You have to remember what you were doing before, and you have to remember what you thought about it. When this happens, the evidence shows that “your performance drops. You’re slower. All as a result of the switching.”
This is called the “switch-cost effect”. It means that if you check your texts while trying to work, you aren’t only losing the little bursts of time you spend looking at the texts themselves – you are also losing the time it takes to refocus afterwards, which turns out to be a huge amount. For example, one study at the Carnegie Mellon University’s human computer interaction lab took 136 students and got them to sit a test. Some of them had to have their phones switched off, and others had their phones on and received intermittent text messages. The students who received messages performed, on average, 20% worse. It seems to me that almost all of us are currently losing that 20% of our brainpower, almost all the time. Miller told me that as a result we now live in “a perfect storm of cognitive degradation”.
I highky recommend the book Stolen Focus by Johann Hari.
marnz reblogged
Being kind isn't actually about how much shit you can quietly take. You can be kind and still shut down people who attempt to use and manipulate you. Kindness is about treating others well whenever you can, not about how much you're willing to suffer for others. So don't confuse being kind with being a victim and a pushover. No one with your best interests at heart will claim that it's the same thing.
marnz reblogged
doeberman-moveddd-deactivated20
moment of silence for everyone who's just like their dad but a girl
please enjoy my which famously unhinged woman are you quiz that i worked tirelessly on
marnz reblogged
the difficulty of writing is often due to something you won’t say, whether because you can’t or think you can’t, because it’s too simple or straightforward, or because you’re trying to revivify the thing in reference by giving it different rhetorical form. many documents are thus records of a thinker’s circumnavigation around this unsayable thing or a series of them
y’all
a mutual of mine
suddenly has posts on their blog
with links to “find women to have sex with”
my mutual is NOT POSTING THESE
tumblr just got even worse
on that note PLEASE let me know if i’m suddenly posting random pictures of women with a link underneath the photo. don’t click the link, just FYI.
i do suggest reblogging this in case someone sees this happening to someone else they follow
marnz reblogged
femmeharlequin-deactivated20240
Idiots on tumblr: GOBLIN CORE! I’m a goblin I protect,,, shinies… I am disgusting… WANT SHINIES
My Jewish ass:
soft-riddler
I’d actually appreciate it if people could reblog this! Goyim especially but don’t add anything!
marnz reblogged
Me: I’m sorry
Someone: What are you sorry for?
Me:
#stop oh my god#today at the vet there was only one receptionist#and i wanted to do something but didn't want to bother her#but she wanted me to bother her#and it just devolved into us saying 'sorry oh my gosh sorry' back at each other repeatedly#yikes#being a woman in this world means apologizing for something that isn't your fault!!! upside down smiley here#CURRENTLY#queue it
marnz reblogged
Don’t just accept the new Terms of Service
Tumblr’s at it again, thanks to the new European Privacy Laws. There’s probably nobody who will read this, but it pissed me off so much that I decided to make a post about it. (Ignore the weird language mish-mash, depending on your country the language might differ.)
OK, so many of us get this screen when we try to access our dash:
Realise how the ‘OK’ button is a nice, attention-grabbing blue? If you’re like me, you’re not exactly into reading a 100 pages document and tend to just click it.
My tip? DONT. Instead click on ‘Manage Options’ right next to it:
Now you’ll see this page:
Still pretty harmless, right? That ‘Accept’ button is looking really attractive right now. Instead, click on Verwalten (Probably something like ‘Manage Options’ or something in english) and you’ll get to this page:
Now that’s not too bad, right? I just switched all the buttons to ‘off’, because I’m jealously guarding my personal information and don’t want Tumblr to go off and do who knows what with it. Looks like we’re done! But wait: There’s a SHOW option.
When we click on that one, what we will get is this:
A HUGE list with OVER 300 ENTRIES of companies that can use your data by default if you’d just clicked ‘OK’ on that very first page. Coincidence that this list is hidden that much? Me thinks not. They’re all switched on by default, but I am still a petty bitch that doesn’t want to give out her data, so I switched them all off. All 300+ of them. There is no option to switch them all off at once, and even if you disable all the options above, the companies are still switched on.
(If you wonder how i got that number, I copied the list into excel and looked at the cell number. No way am I actually counting all those entries)
I too, am a petty bitch who unticked every single one.
marnz reblogged
i’m watching the social network for the first time since 2012 and it is a RELIGIOUS experience oh my god i can’t believe it’s been so long fjkdshkjfsdkhjf
you know what, there is truly nothing better than watching fandom source material with your best friend, who was in the fandom as long as you, because you can be talking while watching the movie, pause to hear an iconic line, and both burst into wild laughter
and that concludes my ted talk
marnz reblogged
Before I go on I should mention that a group called Insurge Intelligence published a report a few months back on thousands of military and intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act which showed unbelievably extensive involvement of US defense and intelligence agencies in the production of popular Hollywood movies and TV shows. Just from the information this group was able to gain access to, the scripts and development of over 800 films and 1,000 television titles were found to have been influenced by the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA to advance the interests of the US war machine. We’re talking about big, high profile titles you’ve definitely heard of, from Transformers to Meet the Parents.
So it’s an established fact that these depraved agencies of destruction and domination are balls-deep in Hollywood production. You can understand my discomfort, then, as it became evident that the movie I’d sat down to watch with my family was set on US military bases for no reason whatsoever.
[…]
As far as the film in question is concerned, “the way the military is portrayed” could not have been more propagandistic. The heroines were constantly drooling over the handsome, sexy servicemen, there was nonstop saluting, flag-waving and patriotic “thank you for your service” lines, the lead cast did an entire number dressed in camouflage, a lesbian character said she wanted to enlist “now that they let gay people join,” servicemen were portrayed as charming heroes and protectors of women, and life on a military base was portrayed as a fun party where you get to go to awesome concerts and have a great time. You could not possibly pack more glorification of the US war machine into a movie if you tried.
Air Force Captain Meredith Kirchoff, a public affairs officer at Dobbins Air Reserve Base where the film was shot, gushes over the movie for the way it “humanizes” (read: normalizes) the human resources used to power the American war machine while US civilians are deprived of the basic social safety nets accorded to everyone else in every other major country on earth.
marnz reblogged
Folks with CPTSD can often exhibit the outwardly signs recognized with PTSD such as anxiety and avoidance behaviors, but they have literally developed their identities within the containers of trauma and neglect, unable to make external changes to their environments to bring relief. Because there was an inability to create external changes to protect or remove onesself, the person learns to make deep internal changes, often absorbing as fundamental truths the insidious lies of the traumas in order to survive.
Because of this, relationships can be some of the most challenging and in fact terrifying things to navigate as they are the actual battle ground where the original traumas occurred. Imagine if all the ways you learned to understand yourself, what you can expect from others and your role in the world was shaped through neglect, gas lighting, manipulation, shame, physical, sexual and psychological boundary violations and isolation. At the core of CPTSD is the very real struggle for trust, especially trusting yourself. The primary relationship that is most damaged in ongoing developmental trauma is the relationship we have with ourselves AND it is the one we have to fight the hardest to get back.