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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I share your frustration. I went nuts about this the other day. It was in the context of searching on a discord server, rather than Google, but it was so aggravating because of the how the “I know better than you” is everywhere nowadays in tech. The discord server was a reading group, and I was searching for discussion regarding a recent book they’d studied, by someone named “Copi”. At first, I didn’t use quotation marks, and I found my results were swamped with messages that included the word “copy”. At this point I was fairly chill and just added quotation marks to my query to emphasise that it definitely was “Copi” I wanted. I still was swamped with messages with “copy”, and it drove me mad because there is literally no way to say “fucking use the terms I give you and not the ones you think I want”. The software example you give is a great example of when it would be real great to be able to have this ability.

    TL;DR: Solidarity in rage


  • The early-mid game is one of my favourite gaming experiences of all time. It’s usually the most part of a survival/crafting game, but I was surprised by how well Subnautica was peppered intrigue.

    As you and many others on this thread have said though, a mobile port seems odd. Even if the UI were reworked, I can’t imagine that players would be able to feel the same sense of awe that I associate with the game.



  • No. I’m pretty burnt out.

    Everything I read on burnout says that the best (only?) way to treat it is to reduce or remove whatever is causing such chronic, disproportionate stress. Unfortunately, much of my burnout is caused by the most basic aspects of living (partly because I have disabilities that make it hard to reliably fulfill my basic needs, even with support).

    Given that cutting out the bad stuff isn’t an option, I’ve been trying to instead add more good stuff to my life, in hopes that it will increase my capacity and thus reduce my relative level of burnout. I’m so tremendously tired though. I’m trying so hard because I do want to live, and there are things I feel I can offer the world. However, sometimes, in my exhaustion, I find myself thinking wistfully about the depression I felt as a young adult — it was simpler when I genuinely and wholeheartedly wanted to die. In some ways, it was easier to be hopeless and merely staying alive for other people.

    I’m just tired.





  • I agree with both your original comment and the edit, but especially the bit about cast iron. Neglecting mine for an extended period led to uneven patches of seasoning, but when I got round to giving it a proper scrub, it was like hitting a reset button. I’m going to try to be better at basic seasoning/maintenance this time, but the joy of cast iron is knowing that it’s super forgiving if you do mess it up.

    Tangential to your edit: I enjoy being able to sharpen knives, but that’s mostly because I’m a nerd who has other tools I need to sharpen anyway, so I already have the stones. Something that I found striking though is that when I was learning how to sharpen knives, I asked if I could practice on various friends’ kitchen knives. Most of them were poor students, so I sharpened many cheap knives, and I was impressed by how well some of the cheaper ones performed compared once they were sharp. They held their edge for surprisingly long too.

    I’m quite fond of my Wusthof chef’s knife, which was a bit of an indulgent treat for myself, but I am utterly baffled by the gear acquisition syndrome that so many seem to fall into. It’s not just that prospect of someone who barely cooks buying a $300 knife that perplexes me, but that so many of these people keep acquiring more knives. If they said that collecting knives was just their hobby, and that they were never intending to actually use them, then I’d shrug and say fair enough. That’s pretty rare though — the underlying implication that these people seem to operate under is that the fancy knives make you a better cook (and that the perfect knife will make good cooking into an effortless, joyful endeavour). It’s an odd culture that’s developed.


  • The thing about labels is that their usage depends on the particular context at time of use. I have a friend who is non binary, for example, but finds herself weary of explaining how someone can be femme presenting, use she/her pronouns, and be non binary. This means that when talking to people who aren’t LGBTQ, she finds “lesbian” is the most effective label to communicate, even though it’s a label she has largely outgrown the truth of. For some people, how they engage with identity labels is quite straightforward, and they present the same labels out to the entire world. For other people, more nuance is needed, and that’s okay too.

    That is to say that if you read the above comment and thought “bi but with a type sounds like me, but I don’t want to call myself bi”, that’s fine. Labels like “bi” can help make oneself be more legible to the world at large, but you do not owe the world that. You are allowed to have complexity that doesn’t neatly fit into simple labels, and even if you did strongly identify with a label, you’re not obligated to divulge this freely.









  • This isn’t really relevant to your question at all, but you reminded me of a (male) friend who is a gynecologist and married to a woman. I expected that the professional context would nullify any potential arousal towards his patients, but what I was curious about was whether this might bleed over into his personal life — i.e. did he still find his partner’s vulva arousing, or does it put him into doctor-headspace. Apparently his profession causes no problems whatsoever in his sex life, because the compartmentalisation is so strong.

    He said that it feels almost like conceptual homonyms. For example, in the sentence “up past the river bank is the bank where I deposited my money”, the word “bank” appears twice but means two very different things. Similarly, a vulva is a vulva no matter the context, but the meaning of it differs so much depending on the context that his brain literally doesn’t parse them as being the same.

    Like I say, it’s not related to your question, but I thought you might find it cool nonetheless. I would expect that firefighters would show a similar ability to compartmentalise, but perhaps the high-stress context of smelling human flesh may cause it to work differently.