#E.G. Records

[danwithouttheplan]

’s <- not used to make something plural

[weirddreamsandfish]

I fucking loveeeeee languages and linguistics. Nothing more human than creating a language

[dying-suffering-french-stalkers]

gamer poll

If you're sitting here saying, "Well, I prefer one way, but many games don't offer that, so I taught myself another way instead," I am asking about the first part! How would you play if the games you had to change your style for had just let you play it your way in the first place?

If you voted or are interested in the results, please reblog for a larger sample size. :)

[weremoose]

been playing clangen again after learning there was an update which has me thinkin about my mutant apocalypse run again. so here's som old art of my favourite gay ppl from that run < 3

[bardnuts]

on Astarion deciding to try and seduce you - if his approval is high, he genuinely likes you. You've known each other for just a few days but this is also the first relationship he's had in more than 200 years that wasn't based solely on fear or deception.

"It was easy ... instinctive." He wants to lock it down, to hold onto it, but he doesn't know why. On the surface he sees you as a point of security--you're providing blood and physical protection. The only way he knows to be able to secure that, to keep from losing it, is to seduce you.

"Seduce you, sleep with you, manipulate your feelings so you'd never turn on me." His intentions here aren't malicious. They're selfish, yes, but there's an earnestness to his selfishness I find refreshing, because he's not really being deceptive or dishonest.

[absolute-immunities]

🥲

[girltakovic]

the downside to having a film degree that i don't use (besides the obvious) is that i get too worked up about diegesis in my character playlists

[queenerdloser]

so i bought a record player and not to suddenly turn into this huge music snob or w/e the fuck but like. as much as i will die defending streaming music (bc there IS something to be said for having literally any music at your fingertips! digital downloads are valid! really fucking hate the way older millenials+ will complain about streaming like it destroyed music) like no one is wrong to say that there really is something different about physical music. like. turning records is different than streaming. putting a little cd in a cd player is different than streaming. something something the connection of physicality really does make the practice of interacting with art different. not better necessarily but different in a visceral way.

[cynicalmusings]

guys… what if i expressed an interest in returning to that spirited away!cyno au…

[unproduciblesmackdown]

speaking of everyone like where's the story songs where's the songs about specificass situations where's songs about anything that's not generic romance or generic i want to hook up tonight, what a great time i had the other night just ending up on a thread going Sure Show Me That One okay now Sure Show Me This One nyc cabaret videos lol. that usually whatever show things were from will have its own overarching theme but individual songs will probably have this standalone quality to them & be bangers while also probably getting surprising, funny, odd, have Specificity. obviously being youtube posts of live performances of nyc cabaret like singers who are also Actors left & right, songs that are written for live performance with a story, musicals, musical theatrey concerts, cabarets, standalones. going like well i don't have specific context for what might be a larger work this was developed to be a part of but damn if i don't need that to follow gists & enjoy shit anyway. damn if some songs take situations that could be framed in a more "relatable" mundane or [remove disambiguating details] way but makes a point to clearly put it in some really specific Situation & lord knows please with sense of specific character(tm)

[aeolianblues]

How the hell is an insurer, someone that studies finance and specialises in insurance, qualified to make medical diagnoses??

“It seems like almost all of those people don’t have HIV,” said Jennifer Kates, HIV policy director at KFF, a health-research nonprofit. “If they did, that would be substandard care at a pretty severe level,” she said.

Ya’ll. United Health just got accused of $17 billion in medicare fraud.

Basically they made up diagnosis which are improbable or impossible, “forgot” to remove ones which had been cured, and overall allegedly stole billions from taxpayers.

The government pays insurers a base rate for each Medicare Advantage member. The insurers are entitled to extra money when their patients are diagnosed with certain conditions that are costly to treat.

… About 18,000 Medicare Advantage recipients had insurer-driven diagnoses of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, but weren’t receiving treatment for the virus from doctors, between 2018 and 2021, the data showed. Each HIV diagnosis generates about $3,000 a year in added payments to insurers.

… He said internal company data for 2022 showed a treatment rate for patients UnitedHealth diagnosed with HIV of more than triple what the Journal found. He said the pandemic disrupted care, lowering treatment rates during the period analyzed by the Journal, and that the analysis failed to account for patients who started treatments in future years.

The Medicare data, however, show UnitedHealth’s patients with insurer-driven HIV diagnoses were on the antiretrovirals at low rates even before the pandemic, and hardly any started the drugs in the years after UnitedHealth diagnosed them.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/medicare-health-insurance-diagnosis-payments-b4d99a5d

I bet United Health really wishes it was a different week right now.

[mortalityplays]

This is a fantastic linguistics paper – the researcher observed the artificiality and social pressure imposed on kids when they're asked to produce language on the spot, so instead had them talk to a rabbit in a room with a tape recorder. He found that when talking organically, without an adult authority figure around, their speech was exponentially more sophisticated, socially fluid, and creative.

As someone in the twitter thread points out, this has obvious implications for situations in which cued language production is used in diagnosis e.g. for autism. I'd add that (while this particular paper's remit is limited to children) it should also make us think about situations where adults are pressured to speak by authority figures: court hearings, police encounters, benefit assessments, asylum interviews, etc. If the presence of power hampers your ability to advocate for yourself, these are all rigged propositions.

Anyway, you can read the whole piece here (taken from a talk on his research, so it's very readable):

e: sorry, I should add the context that this is a language study situated in Hawaii in 1970 so there are also some very significant racial socio-linguistic politics discussed here that might be distressing to read about. I don't want to discount that aspect of the power dynamic studied here either.

[slavabogu]

got me at ancient civilizations, lost me at aliens

[kiralamouse]

I mean. The reason I stopped trying to fully engage with the trolley problem? Is that I fundamentally can't believe that there are only two possible outcomes. Intellectually, I know that sometimes the possibilities are limited, and it's feasible that the only possible action to affect the outcome would be pulling a lever (or failing to do so). But trying to imagine the scenario, I just imagine myself desperately looking for a third possibility until it's too late. How do I know I can't go save that person? How do we know there's nothing else present to help the trolley stop, or flip it off the track by putting the lever in between? Only what I've been told by an unknown source that I haven't had time to verify.

And honestly, very few crises are so fast-moving that you can't take time to evaluate whether you've been appraised correctly of all the possibilities! How many cop shootings happen because the cop didn't see an alternative besides "shoot the suspect" and "risk everyone else"? How many of those shootings are valid cost/benefit analyses and how many are the result of fear and tunnel vision?

This isn't me changing the subject - it's similar to a longstanding version of the problem!

Suppose that a judge or magistrate is faced with rioters demanding that a culprit be found for a certain crime and threatening otherwise to take their own bloody revenge on a particular section of the community. The real culprit being unknown, the judge sees himself as able to prevent the bloodshed only by framing some innocent person and having him executed.

Abstracting away the emotional impact of bearing responsibility for a human death - that's a vital skill if you're in a position of peril, where everyone can't be saved, or enough power that (again) everyone can't be saved and some WILL suffer harm. But it's a skill I've never needed, and I've given up trying to develop it solely for the case of a hypothetical with an obvious intellectual answer. (I'd be open to trolley problem variants where the intellectual answer is tricky enough that just trying to figure it out would let me abstract everything away.)

The root of my frustration with a lot of trolley problem discourse is that 'What does it mean to act ethically in a world where shitty luck and the actions of strangers you'll never meet have left you without any purely good options?' is, like, possibly one of the most relevant and universally applicable questions moral philosophy might help answer.

Saying it's a bad question because it's the negligent trolley engineer's fault literally exactly misses the point - yes how to deal on a personal level with systems and infrastructure that designed without much care for human collateral damage is an incredibly useful thing to think about!

[aromanticduck]

*As in you deliberately putting on music you wanted to listen to, not things your parents/siblings etc played for you

[jonnywaistcoat]

I have several friends who’ve fallen asleep listening to you read statements in Magnus. And I mocked them until I also fell asleep listening to the Magnus archives (on my re-listen though not the first time round).

Have you encountered people using the archives as bedtime stories before?

And have you ever considered reading other things (e.g the original fairytales) purely for that purpose?

I'm sorry to have to break it to you, but falling asleep to podcasts, audiobooks, etc. is extremely normal and a very common way to listen. I'm told I have a good voice for it (which I choose to take as a compliment) and while I don't have anything deliberately designed to be soporfhic, I have recorded a couple of small collections of old ghost stories that I'm told are very good for the purpose.