etiragram - Tumblr blog

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here's one of the images from the gallery of woman, which I enjoyed

about once or twice a year I treat myself. I go to an AI generated image website and click the 'woman' category. and then I look at the woman there

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Say that you can find out N days before your death that you will die. You cannot use this knowledge to prevent your death. What is closest to your preferred N?

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love reading asoiaf threads about translation fails

[x]

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only when I block 90% of tumblr will I be truly free to post

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Headley Beowulf translation is just. a treasure.

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My real answer is "when the parent and child hit a steady state, are in a good place, and you can assume they've navigated out of the major dangers of parenting", but this can ground out in multiple different ways in reality.

One conservatively chosen candidate is the point the child leaves home to become an independent adult, because the main part of the parent's job is finished and you can evaluate their work. This would be akin to congratulating someone who's finished walking a tightrope.

Another gut level answer that seems okay to me is at some point around age 14, when I think a child's personality, and a parent-child relationship, are relatively stable. I think if the stresses of parenting were to shred someone morally and psychologically it should already have happened around this mark, so if it hasn't, they'll probably be okay going forward. At 14 the child is independent enough that the parent and child have had some experience with negotiating true disagreements. My guess is that it should be visible at that point how much the parent is capable of seeing their child as a peer and not a satellite (although they will not be exercising that full capacity at this point).

I wrap a strong field of idk around this answer, though. I have very little contact with children, or parents who are parenting their children around me.

a thing about being congratulated on pregnancy is like. if someone did a bunch of math and decided to go for a risky but positive expected value investment that had a 25% chance of ruining their lives, you wouldn't congratulate them, right? you'd wish them well but in a kinda serious and somber way. I haven't had to deal with this yet but when I simulate someone congratulating me my first response is "thank you. but no one knows if I and my progeny will like each other"

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If you masturbate, what percentile skill are you at masturbating (99th percentile means that you're very good, in the top 1% of skill)?

Before answering, pause to think of what true virtuosity in masturbation would look like before thinking it so you don't make the mistake of thinking "eh I like how I do it so I'm pretty good" and clicking a high number.

If everyone is correctly calibrated we'll see a uniform distribution.

after a certain point you have to ask—"what's the point of masturbating, when so many people have done it better than I could ever hope to"

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what are rats doing so many small sniffs for. just do one big one and move on girl

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Buddy Holly, but it's Mr. Meeseeks.

"Ooh-wee-ooh, I'm Mr. Meeseeks, I look just like Buddy Holly!"

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Another thing I've noticed working as a children's librarian is like... kids get so Paralyzed By Choice and the adults in their lives never really register why. Like, for example, we have little scavenger hunt sheets in the children's section and when a kid completes it, they get to pick out a cute eraser from our prize basket. We also have a little toy prize chest as part of our "1000 books before Kindergarten" challenge for when kids complete 100 books--and kids will spend minutes carefully picking through everything while their parents are shooting us anxious looks like "sorry they're taking so long! I know this is silly and it's completely ridiculous that my child is taking so long to choose between a bath toy and a cube puzzle because these are cheap and arbitrary objects! Hurry up, Harper! Just pick something! You're embarrassing me!!" But in the kids' perspective, they already have so little control over what objects come into their lives, and in this case, the object represents labor and effort on their end, so of course they feel they must choose very carefully. I've always been an anxious and indecisive person, so it's striking to see how being rushed really doesn't help that and really only makes it harder for kids to figure out what they want.

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Personally I don't believe this post because I ask out men relatively easily when I decide to (I mean there's some wailing and howling but then I get it over with and hit send), but when I imagine being the same person but male, asking out a woman, my brain produces a noticeably stronger danger signal.

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When I joined twitter two years ago, I was prepared to have it make me a worse person by showing me a lot of content on my feed that makes me angry. So I am very aggressive telling the algorithm I don't want to see pqrstuvwxyz, I block a lot, and I like what I want to see more of. This works well. I read thoughtful and upbeat feed there, which shows me content about disappearing polymorphs and parenting stories and meditation tips.

What I was not prepared for is the sheer volume of random people who talk to you. Mostly not mean people! Merely... people without context. People who are used to a platform norm of glibly commenting on strangers' posts. People who are not particularly filtered for reading comprehension and delicacy.

(Impetus for writing this: a perfectly nice-seeming person quibbled with the premise of a poll I made. To understand their intuitions better before engaging, I asked a simple numerical question. They did not answer it at all, but said "That's exactly my point" and kept saying their thing. I had not made any point. I was asking a clarifying question. I have a disease where I want to kill people who do this.)

I vaguely thought that I would get used to the wave of slightly annoying strangers, but instead my skin seems to be thinner than it was two years ago, my temper more frayed, the rate of curt sarcastic responses exiled into my drafts folder higher.

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Not only did I lose play money by betting 17% that Boeing would be publicly seen as guilty of killing whistleblowers a few months ago, people tagged me in the comments section of the prediction market inviting me to put money on related markets so they could profit off my wrongness. Which was embarrassing.

But also heartening! Like wow, I feel so warm and fuzzy about America right now that people think it's significantly less likely than 17% that several highly suspicious deaths won't be linkable to the megacorporation that stands to profit from those deaths. What a remarkably safe nation.

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(context: just finished a good painting)

it's funny that I'm actually somewhat talented; based on the rest of my personality you wouldn't expect me to be

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trying to get into a fandom in a high modernist way by finding the fandom algorithmically & putting fandom engagement on my todo list and calendar. under the hypothesis that if I do not munchkin joy I will never find it