#Which I'm sure means nothing right

[peppermintmochafem]

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[etz-ashashiyot]

Friendly reminder that A Land for All is an excellent organization that is still, even now, working to create an equitable resolution to the conflict. Please check them out:

I also strongly recommend reading through their full proposal here.

[clowndensation]

there’s a question to be asked i think about to what extent “getting out” can be conflated with “being saved” in this show, and what freedom actually means to any of these characters.

like you can argue that shiv saved ken by voting against him on gojo, but what if your intent behind saving someone is to inflict a worse punishment than if you’d just left them trapped? can a child weaned on poison survive on milk, or are you just sentencing them to a death by inches, starved of the only thing they know? and if you save someone specifically because you know that being saved is the worst thing that can happen to them, is that kindness or cruelty? at what point does a good thing become a malicious act?

and you can say that roman is finally free, but what exactly is he free from? the company? his father? does unlocking a cage mean saving a dog, or are you allowing him out on the street knowing there’s a kill shelter nearby? if the driving anxiety behind roman is that he’s an idiot and a failure—that he’ll never amount to anything, and trying will only lead to pain—and he’s finally cut loose once all of those anxieties have crystallized into cold hard fact in his mind, what has he actually escaped from? if the cage is in your mind, is it even possible for somebody else to unlock it?

the fundamental truth of a tragedy is that even being saved can be a death sentence, if the characters are incapable of escaping the thing doing them the most harm (themselves and their childhoods)

[thinkanamelater]

Sometimes i remember the way some people talked about Hank Green on Mentopolis and, i don't think i read anything outright gross but a lot of the posts were kinda icky ngl. Like "oh he was flirting so hard with Brennan ;)" no i'm sure that was the role playing part of the role playing show

[outlying-hyppocrate]

well. did you fucking miss me.

[ilovedthestars]

i understand and appreciate the sentiment behind them but god, as someone in the process of getting an art degree and intending to pursue a career in art, those "don't get a job doing what you love because you'll start to hate it" posts are depressing

[unproduciblesmackdown]

also "textless" versions of these, wahooo

[seafoam-taide]

Guys will literally do anything other than admit that they. Yeah

[saminthea]

Is it appendicitis or just fibromyalgia and a stomach bug? Guess we'll see in the morning!

[itwoodbeprefect]

flashbacks to dialogue that happened less than a minute ago are annoying and a little insulting for obvious reasons, unless it's in bad buddy episode 5 [2/4] and pat is having entirely serious sepia toned flashbacks to fifty seconds ago while almost shoving a set of drumsticks he hasn't even paid for yet up his nose. then it's brilliant and world changing

[tardis--dreams]

Me panicking because i have 9 missed calls and 5 emails talking about my absence and how "a colleague could take over for me" vs. Me knowing it's really not that important no matter how pushy a client is and that on top of it I'm underpaid and have way to much overtime so i shouldn't even care

[oveliagirlhaditright]

Back to an earlier point about Buffy Season 7 having way too many Potential Slayers, tbh, last night I learned that there was a Colleen and Caridad who also became full-fledged Slayers and survived the battle of the Hellmouth.

And in reading the "Chosen" novelization, I remembered the Potential "Shannon," and in Googling her, I guess she survived, as well.

I feel like when people are talking about the Potentials who survived season 7 as full Slayers, we always talk about Kennedy, Vi, Rona, and Chao-Ahn (but I think even Chao-Ahn is sometimes forgotten about), but I've never seen anyone mention Caridad, Colleen, or Shannon.

There are also some unnamed ones who made it, too:

[sweetdreamspootypie]

There's a habitual focus on person's last words.

But a much more relevant question is what are the last comforts and joys that can be squeezed in before an oncoming death

In hospital, it's things that healthy people don't seem to notice much

A flannel wash with really hot water, feels so much better than just a functional wash. It reminds you of hot baths and hot pools.

The taste of a sweet lolly you can suck on without worrying about choking or getting nauseous

The drop of water to wet your tongue, even when you can't drink safely

The feeling of the morphine or midazolam kicking in, and easing the breathlessness

Being repositioned in a way that helps the ache in your back

Your favourite people just being there, listening to them talk and laugh with each other while you rest

The cool cloth and ice block and fan until the fever comes down

Knowing that there's someone there who will come to you

[figuringitoutasigoalong]

One of the older ladies in my Sunday School class stopped me after class and said she was praying for me, and asked how I was doing and I'm not gonna lie--

It meant so much that she had noticed that I'm not myself. That she had noticed that I'm struggling in a silent way that I can't even quite identify.

I don't think she can ever know just how much that means to me, because it just means so much.

[bimbinis]

I remember seeing this post circulating about a year ago or so and I'm surprised it's making the rounds again because back then I smelled bullshit and when I checked the notes I saw multiple people pointing out the exact kind of bullshit it was. the irony is that in order to substantially disagree with the article you have to be the kind of person who bothers reading articles people link on tumblr. if you do so while also applying some scrutiny you'll notice that it's pure and simple boomer circlejerking. the majority of it is Hari giving a negative Yelp review on his own vacation experience interspersed with paragraphs of him (allegedly, we'll get to that) citing scientists and academics that seem like they are echoing the same sentiment but are really just saying unrelated things. To start with the quote highlighted

as someone else already said in the replies, it's already concerning from the get go to operate under the assumption of the existence of a "normal brain" as a thing that means anything, but the concentration time estimates are also meaningless without anything to compare to from before whatever it is that Hari is estimating to be the "point of collapse". You can't draw an unfavorable comparison without having anything to compare to!

but beyond that, this one paragraph is the one time one his quotes actually constructs the problem as some type of measurable change to the brain (and even then the actual numbers he presented don't even show any kind of change at all because we have nothing to compare them to). every following expert he's supposedly quoting is simply discussing how concentration works and what might get in the way of it. one of them argues that multitasking isn't actually real and that what we're actually doing is changing focus really fast, which makes our performance at all tasks we're trying to perform in the moment that require concentration suffer.

but it cannot be extrapolated from these quotes that this is a long lasting change to the brain itself. the tests that are mentioned in this section are measuring attention applied to a single current task.

the following scientist is just describing how focusing works.

for the rest of the article he just talks about how the evidence seems to point towards the factors making it harder to concentrate being systemic conditions: workers are not being allowed to fully disconnect from work because we're accessible at all time from our phones, we undersleep, are constantly stressed, etc. and that all negatively affects capacity for concentration. this is all pretty uncontroversial, however its clear that the entire thesis of this article is hinging on the idea presented early on that this is a problem that profoundly altered your brain in a measurable, physiological way, which once again, has not been meaningfully substantiated!

this may seem like a nitpick because a lot of the rest of what's said (how attention span works, how it's bad that our bosses increasingly encroach on our free time, that we're stressed and tired and need a fucking break etc etc) is pretty uncontroversial and agreeable. dare I say, to the point that it doesn't even need to be said, perhaps.

which is where the problem lies to me. if it's an article that just says "you can't afford to focus on things that would take more work and be more fulfilling to you because the way the world is structured demands your constant attention for bullshit you don't care about" that would probably be more of a manifesto (probably one much more explicit about the names of the systems that cause this state of affairs, too, like the one about literacy going around a few days ago) and much less of a "scientific" article that also gets to promote your shitty book. it would have much less of the sense of urgency Hari is trying to invoke by gesturing in the direction of the brain thing because for some reason people are much more easily alarmed by the idea their brain is secretly being tampered with than the idea that their lives already suck and they can already tell, and we should do something about it, despite the fact that the article depends on you basically already believing all this in order to agree with it and not scrutinize it very deeply. that fabricated sense of urgency is what enables him to go

and this should ring like 1000 alarm bells to everyone because any time anyone writing a "science article" goes "some scientists say this, others say that, who's to say what's true or not? (but here's why you should definitely treat this side as the right one)" without elaborating on what really is the disparity between these two sides that are seemingly on equal footing, its probably because they're trying to deceive you. in fact the particular invocation of alarm to justify "acting without perfect evidence" reminds me of how the MMR vaccine scare was constructed in the same way (luckily Hari is just trying to sell you his shitty book and his proposed solutions are also quite benign, hopefully it doesn't segue into him asking for needless invasive procedures to be performed on children just to prove his theory or anything).

and keep in mind who it is that is trying to sell you said book bc this is what his wikipedia page looks like

and if you go in that last section here's what it says about the book in question

which is what I meant when I said he allegedly quotes the academics he mentions.

it's clear that this article continues to get spread around despite the fact that it doesn't say anything of substance because people already believe what's in it. it's probably not a very big deal, as I said the article is mostly not even wrong, just kinda trash, but there is something supremely ironic about people reinforcing their preexisting beliefs about shrinking attention spans by using an article they must not have read or paid much close attention to cuz if they did they probably would have been turned off by the sheer amount of privileged whining that his expensive vacation was ruined bc his godson watches too much porn

Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen by Johann Hari

[fuckingrecipes]

I'm trying to make a good pot roast in my crockpot, but after I take it out it gets dry. It's on "low" (whatever that means) for 8 hours. I've tried searing it before and still dry. It's submerged in plain water with some herbs and spices for that time. Am I over/undercooking it? It's a cut with low fat %, is that why?

I love you. I think you learned how to make pot roast from someone on Opposite Day, or perhaps April 1st. The only thing you got right is 'low heat for 8 hours'.

Choose a fatty cut of tough meat. Look for lots of fat marbling on a Chuck roast or Shoulder roast. Tough meat has a ton of flavor, and the fat keeps the meat from drying out. The long cook time on low heat, plus acids will make 'tough' meat into a pull-apart, melt-in-your-mouth glory.

Make sure the meat is completely thawed, NOT frozen.

Plain water and nothing else except herbs/spices is.... not what I'd do. A lot of flavor can come into the broth when you add whole carrots (minus the carrot top!) and quartered onions in there. I'm a fan of adding some big chunks of pumpkin or butternut squash and chunks of turnip as well.

I think using red wine for part of the liquid base, and adding a hearty helping of worcestershire sauce will also help the flavor and making the meat 'melty.' The acid and alcohol will draw more, and different flavors from the meat and vegetables that water alone cannot do. Makes it richer.

For my very best pot roast recipe, which had my wedding guests fuckin' clamoring to get the recipe; I cheat. I'm not ashamed of that fact. For the richest, most face-punchingly meaty tasting broth, go to an asian market (or online) and find a mushroom hot pot soup base. It'll be a thick liquid inside a bag, which you then dilute with water. Use THAT as the liquid base (remember to dilute it!), and add your wine and wocestershire sauce to it, along with those herbs & spices. Your whole face will be blown off with flavor. It's the best.