#it becomes less statistically significant

[gxlden-angels]

how do i stop my internalized homophobia?

Ngl anon, it's less stopping it and more talking over it. If you were raised in a strict, homophobic environment, that little voice is still going to be there cause it was a part of your development. So you shout over it instead with new data

"Being gay is a sin" okay I hear you but my friends are gay and I can't really see them as sinful people

"You're broken/wrong/living in sin" okay speak your truth bestie but I'm happier living my life authentically so I'm okay being wrong for now

"You're going to Hell" cool cool but what about now? Am I happy right now? Am I living this life in a way that benefits me now? I'm focusing on this life, not a potential afterlife

I'm very STEM-oriented so my therapist and I refer to it as "Plotting new data points" You kinda just have to listen to the internalized homophobia, say okay okay I hear you but have you considered this new data point that suggest a positive correlation between being openly LGBTQ and my own happiness? Yea I know this was regarded as a sin before but statistically speaking the chances of it actually being sin are insignificant. Yea it doesn't even have a 95% confidence interval. Loving who I am seems to have a positive outcome though but I'll need more positive queer experiences to be certain

[locusfandomtime]

Doing the maths: Grian's failure at getting a mending book

lots of talk about maths and probabilities below the cut! but there's a graph and simple explanation at the end if you want to get the gist of it and are bad at maths.

(I am still young and learning maths, critique/advice always welcomed)

What are the odds of getting a mending book in Minecraft?

(I am assuming Grian has been doing all his fishing with Luck of the Sea 3)

The probability of a mending book is actually a bit annoying to estimate. The Minecraft Wiki lists fishing up an enchanted book as 1.9% chance. This is for ANY enchanted book. The Minecraft wiki talks about how the chance of an enchantment being selected is calculated. Mending has a weight of 2. Using the table, mending has a probability of 2/135.

However, Grian is looking for any book with mending, not just a pure mending book. Additional enchantments are calculated in a different way, involving RNG, which means it won't be as easy to model. Due to this reason, I'll just be using the odds for a pure mending book throughout.

TLDR: a mending book has a 0.028..% chance (2/135*0.019*100)

Grian's Data

According to this screenshot, Grian has used a fishing rod 5679 times. This number may not be fully accurate, as it includes the times he's fished other players, rather than just fished for items, but it is a good estimate.

To help visualise this data, with a median waiting time between catches of 17.5 seconds, Grian has spent over 20 hours fishing so far! He may have a problem.

Is this statistically significant?

Hypothesis testing (p-value approach):

H0: p = 19/67500 (the null hypothesis - he has no mending books because of chance)

H1: p < 19/67500 (the alternate hypothesis - he has no mending books due to different odds)

5679 trials, 0 mending books

X ~ B(5679, 19/67500) (binomial distribution, 5679 tries with a probability of a mending book being 19/67500, where X is the number of mending books)

p(X=0) (what is the probability the number of mending books being 0)

p = 0.2021473392

Now, the point at which data becomes significant is subjective. For instance, you *could* get a million heads in a row flipping a coin, it's not impossible, but at a certain point, you can begin to say "okay there's something not normal about this". For this approach, the closer the p-value is to 0, the more evidence there is against the null hypothesis . The p-value here is far above a significance level of 0.01, or 0.05, or 0.1. There isn't a clear line between significant/non-significant, but this is answer is quite a bit far from 0

With this, I cannot reject the null hypothesis.

Personal conclusion: this is not statistically significant, Grian is just unlucky.

Are other values statistically significant?

Gem's proposed 9000: results in a p-value of 0.079... more significant than Grian's number but I don't imagine Mojang would be too concerned. As said though, it's all subjective.

I am bad at maths, what does all this mean?

Here is a graph, showing what number of mending books you might have after 5679 tries. The height of the bar represents the probability of getting that amount. The numbers at the top are the (rounded) numbers I used in my calculation

The pink column is 0 mending books - like what Grian has! As you can see, it is less likely than getting 1 or 2 books, but not too uncommon to happen.

End conclusion: Grian has bad luck. Like, not as hilariously bad as he thinks, but still bad. If he keeps going, chances are he will get a mending book, but I think he should probably stop fishing because at this point he has a problem.

[qqueenofhades]

The 2025 project seems to reflect that the Republican Party is becoming more and more fascism, but it actually reflects the growing number of extreme nationalists, misogynists, and racists among ordinary Americans. US is a democracy, and politicians rely on votes to stay in power. The fact that the Republicans dare to draft such a project shows that they are confident it will gain significant public support. Politicians aren’t fools; they wouldn’t pursue something that only a small group agrees with while the majority opposes it. The global rightward shift is evident, and though I’m not American, my country is also deteriorating in many ways. Why is this happening? Because the economic base determines the superstructure?and in recent years, the global economy has been in decline?

Mmmm, I'm gonna have to challenge you here.

First of all, it's just flatly not true that there's a "growing number of extreme nationalists, misogynists, and racists among ordinary Americans." That movement has become more vocal and visible in post-2016 America, but there's absolutely no evidence -- and indeed, a lot of evidence to the contrary -- that their numbers are growing instead of shrinking. The Republicans got lucky with Trump's win in 2016 thanks to a combination of decades of anti-Hillary smears, extensive Russian interference/psyops, the anti-democratic Electoral College, and general misplaced complacence that he was never going to win and people didn't need to bother voting for two disliked candidates. They've flatly lost every competitive nationwide election since then -- 2018, 2020, 2022, and very probably 2024. In between, their hand-picked Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade (guaranteeing the right to an abortion in all 50 states) and set off a titanic tidal wave of voter support for abortion rights, even in very dark red states like Kansas and Kentucky (which are not liberal by any stretch of the word). In fact, the Republicans' (flatly false) excuse that they just wanted to "return [abortion rights to the states]" has been unveiled as another lie due to their desperate attempts in this election cycle to ratfuck voter-approved abortion questions off the ballot in Arkansas, Missouri, Florida, and elsewhere. This is a badly losing issue for them, even in deep red states, and they don't want people to vote on it, because they hate democracy. We'll get to that.

Likewise, polls of "culture war" issues like LGBTQ+ rights, abortion rights, immigrants' rights, etc., consistently get much more support among ordinary Americans than not. The ordinary public is becoming more liberal, not less, even in the face of constant aggressive and reactionary attempts to undo the sum total of social and civil rights movements from the 20th century. Republicans' views are getting less popular, not more, and this is also driven by the ongoing demographic change in America. Within a generation or two, whites may be in the statistical minority, and that deeply terrifies people whose entire political and social identity is built on ethnostate white supremacism. The reason Republicans are getting so extreme and antidemocratic now is because the electorate is getting younger and younger, more diverse, more accepting, and less tolerant of their age-old bullshit. As such, there is a very visible window of time outside which the Republicans will not be able to win competitive nationwide elections, even despite all the advantages they're building into the system and have always had. That terrifies them. It is also why they have decided to destroy democracy.

Which leads us into your next assertion that "US is a democracy, and politicians rely on votes to stay in power. The fact that the Republicans dare to draft such a project shows that they are confident it will gain significant public support. Politicians aren’t fools; they wouldn’t pursue something that only a small group agrees with while the majority opposes it." Yes, maybe, in some exceedingly generic logic that doesn't take any account of the actual situation in the US and the fact that the Republicans have made their hatred for democratic free and fair elections very, very clear. This is why Trump pushed the "election fraud" Big Lie in 2020 and sent a mob to attack the Capitol in an attempt to prevent the certification of Biden's win. This is why states controlled by Republicans have frantically enacted as many voter suppression and voter-removal laws as possible and conducted constant purges to get voters (especially the mysteriously missing 1 million Democrats in Florida) off the rolls. This is why they talk approvingly about Trump being "a dictator on day one." This is why they have pursued a decades-long strategy to capture the federal judiciary (by installing extreme right-wing hacks to the bench and then funneling extreme-right legislation into their courts to get a favorable ruling and/or send it to the extreme-right Supreme Court). And on, and on, and on. The Republicans are explicitly aware that their ideas cannot win in a free and fair election, because their ideas are terrible, and as such have been taking massive, ongoing, and coordinated efforts to disenfranchise American voters, expose them to lakes of sordid Russian propaganda/psyops in favor of Trump, double down on the xenophobia and white nationalism to stoke Fear Of The Other, and everything else they possibly can to prevent voters from voting for their opponents. They hate democracy and they are not counting on democratic methods to implement Project 2025. They intend to do it by secretive oligarch methods funded by right-wing billionaire dark money and their Russian friends. That's the whole point.

Indeed, you can see that in the fact that as soon as Project 2025 became widely known and therefore widely hated, the Republicans were thrown into a panicked fluster of disavowing it and insisting that Trump didn't actually know about it (which is a lie, but that's all the day). Because it is electoral kryptonite, they are trying every single method they can to lie to voters long enough to get into power and do it anyway. Authoritarians can often come to power through democratic elections, but once there, they do their utmost to degrade, erode, or otherwise destroy the institutional safeguards that prevent them from keeping power forever. Trump is a literally textbook example of this and he has made his intentions very clear. He flat-out told a group of Republicans at an event earlier this year that "we'll fix it so you won't have to vote again." He already tried a coup and somehow the Republicans nominated him again, because of the deep corruption of the party on every level, but the Republicans are not doing Project 2025 because they think it will organically generate popular support (and they know it doesn't.) It's a blueprint for a tiny group of extreme right-wing theocrats and fascists to get their way regardless of what the broader public says about it, and represents the culmination of decades of far-right power-play strategies related to exploiting economic, racial, social, and cultural grievances. They're doing this now in order to lock in their power before long-term demographic changes make it impossible for them to win another democratic American election. So their solution is to get rid of democratic American elections, the end. This is explicitly a project for permanent minority rule. They know that and that's what's driving their strategic choices here.

As such, essentially saying that the Republicans aren't really fascist, and/or the real problem and/or are just giving an increasingly fascist American population what they want, removes any moral responsibility for their deliberate choices and legitimizes the populist claim to be acting "for the people" instead of a corrupt institutional system. Everyone knows the many, MANY problems with American politics and government; we don't need to go through them again. But even if they were "just giving the people what they want," which as noted above they're not, it still wouldn't make it okay or defensible. To use the obvious example, just because Hitler was popular and democratically elected in 1933 doesn't make what he did right, and the social forces that propelled him to power weren't just a passive "reflection" of The People's Will but were shaped by the larger fascist-curious interwar 1930s. In fact, America also had a burgeoning fascist movement in the 1930s, driven by WWI and Great Depression fallout, but Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal explicitly created extensive government mechanisms to support society, provide new jobs and welfare, and other integrative and restorative economic methods. This crucial difference in approaches -- the New Deal vs. the Nazis -- is why America remained democratic despite the challenges and Germany fell into autocratic genocidal fascism.

This is because populism and dissatisfaction with democracy rises when people feel that the government is not listening to them, is not responsive to their needs, is ignoring them, or otherwise not doing what they want. It is driven by multiple factors, primarily but not only economic, and it is stoked by powerful interest groups who have a vested interest in using the fissures to discredit democratic governments and movements. It is also by no means limited to America, as you note at the end. Think of the decades-long campaign by the British media against the EU, driven by British isolationism and exceptionalism and a sense that the petty bureaucrats in Brussels had no right to be telling the almighty British Empire what to do. This created and stoked existing social grievances which were often domestically caused (since as Margaret Thatcher destroying the British social-welfare state in the 1980s) and turned that grievance against an external opponent who was easier to blame. As such, as we know, it led to the country voting for Brexit in 2016 despite what a whopping, overwhelming, incredible own goal that was and continues to be for the UK, especially economically and socially. It was obviously dependent on many contextual factors from British history, politics, and culture, and there were certainly many people who actually thought it was the right thing to do (and not just about racism, which uh, hmmm), but it's very difficult to think that this organically or naturally came about without a direct and extensive popular-pressure campaign designed to do just that.

People often vote against their own interests because they have been convinced that democracy is corrupt or ineffective or "just as bad" as authoritarianism, which allows illiberal populists to rise to power. These populists often use racial, religious, or cultural grievances, especially against perceived "outsiders," to artificially stoke existing prejudice and justify crackdowns and/or consolidations of their own personal power and destruction of institutional systems and safeguards meant to stop them from doing that. That's how we got Erdogan in Turkey, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Orban in Hungary, and Trump in the US. Other authoritarian movements around the world are also driven implicitly or explicitly by the massive autocratic and antidemocratic global influence disinformation machine headed by Putin in Russia. As such, it's not accurate to insist that this just represents a simple passive "rightward shift" among the global population overall. It is happening because it has been designed and manipulated and pressed into happening. It can still be electorally resisted, which is also the most effective strategy for removing authoritarians, but if we fail to vote out Trump once and for all in 2024, it will be MUCH harder and much more deadly.

Overall, to simplistically claim that the Republican party is just giving the increasingly fascist Americans what they want and expect it to derive broad popular support is, as I have demonstrated above, a diametrically backward conception of the problem. The Republicans are deliberately and increasingly fascist because they realize that very soon, if allowed to continue operating in its accustomed fashion, the American democratic system and American public opinion is going to make them obsolete. They're racing the clock to cement permanent super-minority rule, and to change the rules overall, before America's shifting demographic composition and ideological mindset locks them out. That is why they are throwing so much misinformation, fearmongering, lies, Russian propaganda, and everything else that they can think of at this election, to get Trump and loyal Project 2025 footsoldier Vance into the door before the door slams shut for a long time. That is why this election is so fucking existentially important and why it is so crucial to accurately conceptualize and describe the problem, what it is, and how to respond to it. As such, while I otherwise don't do this much anymore because I no longer have the desire to argue with the people who are likewise brainwashed in the opposite direction and insist it's a Pure Leftist Moral Duty not to vote against fascist authoritarianism (as, uh, also happened with the fragmented and infighting German left-wing opposition in 1932 and good thing nothing bad happened next):

The end.

[centrally-unplanned]

We have results of the "Denver Basic Income Project" targeted at homeless groups in the region, which from their lens must be quite disappointing:

Groups A and B are the experimental groups, receiving $1k a month for a year or the same amount as a lump sum. Group C got $50 a month, a "compliance" payment to make sure they show up for data collection essentially. Hilariously, the website is pretending Group C is not a control group, since they got the pennies they dug out of the sofa cushion, and saying this is all a success!

"Statistically significant across all groups" this is a hate crime against data science. But it is so laughable that it isn't really worth getting into; what else can you say?

More substantially, what you are observing in this data is that the homelessness population is a little bit bimodal between the chronic and the temporary. Not fully ofc, but it's normally evident in the data - the median person is homeless for ~12 months, but ~1/3rd are chronically homeless while another ~1/3rd are generally only homeless for a few months, and then the rest bleed out in the middle. With no UBI the results above are what you would expect - half the group found income sources, found housing, and returned to being poor-but-housed, that is the default. For the other group, homelessness is a combination of the "willing" homeless and the structurally excluded, from drug problems to actively violent behavior to track records of similar that disqualify them as too high risk, or those who simply loathe all bureaucratic systems and refuse to comply (mood).

$1000 a month is pretty substantial, you aren't realistically going to have UBI higher than that. And it is not like recipients were excluded from SNAP/food stamps or anything. Giving radically more could maybe shift things, sure, but I think you are seeing close to the "cap" here on what you can realistically shift with lump sums.

For a certain kind of UBI proponent I could see this being a failure, like "oh why did money not fix this". I sort of view it as the opposite? Why would I expect money to fix this in that way? UBI is a consumption subsidy, the entire point is that it's no-strings. If people want to spend their consumption differently than I would expect, good for them? UBI is about broad based income support; it is not targeted at specific social ills by design. I think it can have structural changes in the economy - UBI permanently shifts bargaining power between workers & employers a bit for example - but I wouldn't expect it to say close the educational achievement gap outside of marginally.

I do think this should be a check on a sort of naive "poverty" lens for social ills; ~50% of homelessness is about money churn. This paper actually does a bad job of showing that, because it tracks everyone at "time zero" when they are all homeless. If you look at other studies where housed and unhoused alike get UBI, you see that they are less likely to become homeless to begin with. And it is just one study of course - additionally 2021-2022 was a bad year for housing as temporary Covid eviction & rent control measures expired, and this pilot started in 2022, while meanwhile it was a *really* good time for the poor-but-working income-wise as low-end wages increased dramatically, so it was a big dip combined with big churn in the poverty rates. Still, with all those caveats poverty is probably not the lodestone for that other ~50%. If you want to address those social ills you are going to need more involved social programs - or be a libertarian about it and let them do as they wish. Your call, as long as the limits of "throw money" at a problem is understood.

[mcntsee]

— ★ Her voice

↳ Summary: It’s been four years since her death and Spencer is struggling with the fact that he can’t entirely remember what her voice sounded like.

↳ Warnings: Death (oop— you are dead), grief, angst, sadness, mood swings. Not proof read. No use of “Y/n”

↳ Author’s note: This was requested by a lovely anon that is going through the same situation as Spencer. Anon, and anyone else who might need it, you are not alone. Grief is a bitch, yes, but soon enough it will get better. Don’t ever doubt asking for help.

* ੈ✩‧₊˚

Since the night they lost her, Spencer has undergone significant changes. His demeanor shifted, not entirely transforming him into a new person, but certain characteristic traits that defined Spencer had certainly faded away.

 

The confidence she had helped him build vanished entirely, leaving him a mere shadow of his former self. His hard-to-understand jokes became less frequent, and the statistical facts he used to effortlessly share with the team seemed to fade into the background. Though they knew he still possessed the knowledge, his once vibrant presence now felt subdued and distant, as if a vital part of him had been lost along with her.

 

Losing her didn't entirely change him; if anything, it returned him to the twenty-four-year-old they had once known.

 

Appearance-wise, he remained largely unchanged. Though the passage of time had left its mark with subtle signs of aging—darker bags under his eyes and a paler complexion, suggesting increased time spent indoors—his essence remained the same.

 

But if there was one thing that underwent a complete transformation for Spencer, it was his choice of accessories. While he had always worn a watch, in terms of fashion accessories, that had been the extent of it.

 

Now, however, his hands were usually adorned with rings—rings that appeared slightly too small for him. It was only when Penelope noticed the gold heart ring she had gifted her on her birthday among them that the team realized those rings had belonged to her, not Spencer.

 

That, or the dagger necklace he now always wore. While the rings constantly changed—every day a new set—the necklace remained constant. It became pretty obvious to all of them that Spencer probably never took it off, especially when the gold edges started to tarnish.

 

With the 4th year anniversary of her death quickly approaching, the team had been anticipating a change in Spencer’s mood. Typically, Spencer became grumpy and irritable as the two-week countdown to the anniversary began. However, this year, his demeanor was more than just that.

 

He was angry. He had snapped at all of them more times than they could count, often for seemingly stupid reasons. He had gotten little to no work done since last week, and most of the time, unless explicitly required, he kept his distance from them as much as possible. Usually, he could be found sitting at his desk, staring at the files in front of him while either tugging at his hair or pulling at the necklace around his neck.

 

They had all tried to talk to him, asking him multiple times what was wrong or offering help, only to be met with Spencer's yelling.

 

It wasn’t unusual for him to distance himself and become grumpier around this date, but this was different. They had never seen him this angry before.

 

So when the day arrived, Hotch called for a meeting. They waited patiently for Spencer to sit down, with JJ closing the door behind her. There was a tense silence in the room, lingering for a moment longer than they wanted, with their faces constantly shifting between each other until Rossi finally spoke, and all eyes landed on Spencer.

 

“What’s the matter, kid?”

 

Spencer, who had previously been looking down, his hands toying with the necklace around his neck, snapped his head up in Rossi’s direction, meeting his eyes with anger.

 

“Is there a case?”

“No.”

“Then, what is this?”

 

Rossi's mind raced, searching for the right words, but his mouth moved ahead, unable to keep pace. Only hesitant filler sounds escaped as his lips repeatedly opened and closed in search of words.

 

“Talk to us, Spence. What is going on?”

 

Spencer’s hand ceased its relentless movement on the jewelry. His eyes were moving around the room, scanning the faces of his team; his family as they watched him.

 

He wanted to yell at them as he had for the past two weeks, to scream and curse them for profiling him without his consent, but tears had already begun to form in his eyes before he had a chance to pick who to yell at first. Shortly after, his head fell into his palms as sobs wracked his body.

 

"Oh, my boy genius." Penelope's embrace was warm, enfolding him completely. Drawing him close until his head found solace against her chest, his arms instinctively encircling her, fingers seeking comfort in the softness of her touch as her hand gently caressed the back of his head.

 

They waited in silence, their hearts heavy as they watched his body tremble with sobs, while Penelope spoke softly, whispering words of comfort, her head resting gently on top of his.

 

After a moment, his sobs became softer, his hands coming up to wipe his face as his back stretched back up again. “I can’t—“

 

With a sigh, he cleared his throat, his eyes unable to meet his teammates’. “I’m not sure I remember her voice.” He whispered with a trembling voice, cracking once while he spoke as fresh tears formed in his eyes. “I think I remember it, but I’m not sure if my brain is just tricking me into believing that’s what she sounded like.”

 

“I don’t know what’s true and what is made up by the grief in my mind,” he confessed, his voice barely above a whisper. With a deep breath, he found the courage to face his friends. “Please help me.”

 

“Alright. What do you remember?”

 

With a slow nod, his eyes closed briefly, a couple of tears escaping without permission as he dove deep into his memories. “I remember her voice had a rasp,” he said, a small frown gracing his features. “I—I think.”

 

His eyes opened once more, scanning the familiar faces, searching for some sort of reassurance in their understanding gazes.

 

It was only then that the team started to realize that, much like him, they couldn’t really recall what her voice sounded like. "I don’t remember her voice being raspy," said Hotch, breaking the silence that had fallen upon them.

 

“No, Spence is right. It was there, not overpowering, but distinct enough to hear.”

 

The comment was only followed by Morgan shaking his head in disagreement, causing doubt and fear to consume Spencer once again. Hearing them talk about something he was sure about only furthered his growing doubt. "I, uh—her tone was soft and patient," he interjected, hoping to quell the uncertainty gnawing at him.

 

At that, Emily perked up, her head nodding rapidly. “Yeah! It sounded like someone explaining something to a child without using an exaggerated baby voice.”

 

It seems like the discussion had been prolonged, spanning over an hour, yet instead of alleviating his worry, it exacerbated it. Rather than providing reassurance, it seemed to have fueled his uncertainty, amplifying his doubts about his own memory.

 

As his frustration mounted, any traces of tears dried up, leaving behind a lingering desire to lash out at his friends for exacerbating the situation. And perhaps he would have succumbed to that impulse, if not for the fact that when he looked at them again, he could see the pain etched in their faces as they struggled to recall.

 

In all the years since her death, he has not once stopped to think about how it would have affected the rest of them too. He had been too consumed by his grief to realize that he hadn't been the only one to lose someone.

 

Emily had lost her best friend, the one steadfast presence throughout her entire career at the BAU. She was the only person among them who had opened her arms and accepted Emily into the team as soon as she stepped foot into the office.

 

Hotch had lost the godmother of his son, the one person who was always there to lend a helping hand, keeping Jack safe and cared for. She had been the first to hug and congratulate him when he announced they were expecting, and she was the one who would always listen and reassure him when he doubted his abilities as a husband and parent.

 

Penelope's sweet tooth flourished with each treat the girl brought for the tech analyst. With endless creativity in her choices, there was never a dull moment when they gathered in Penelope's office, engaging in lively conversations about anything and everything under the sun.

 

Rossi had essentially lost a child. She was the only person he willingly allowed into his kitchen, the sole recipient of his culinary wisdom without the need for her to beg for it like the rest of the team. Rossi was the one she would turn to whenever she and Spencer had a fight, and he was the one she would seek solace in when pained about one of his ex-wives.

 

JJ and Morgan had always been closer to him than her, but they had loved her nonetheless, just as she had loved them. They would often act like siblings, going out clubbing together or bickering about any trivial thing they disagreed on.

 

Looking at his friends' faces now, he realized that, although this whole ordeal might not have helped him at all, they were all trying their hardest to remember her voice. And maybe he shouldn't have told them because, only now that he took in the pain in their faces did he realize that they probably remembered even less than he did with his eidetic memory.

 

The meeting was dismissed shortly after his realization. Now, they were all back in their respective spots, unable to focus on work as they were lost in thought, much like he had been for the past two weeks.

 

His phone vibrated on his desk. With a quick glance at the screen, he saw a text from Penelope. His hand swiftly moved from the necklace to the phone, quickly reading the message that urged him to go to her office before standing up and making his way over there.

 

Once there, he saw Penelope browsing through her personal laptop, sniffing as her hand came up to wipe her cheeks. Slowly, he made his way over to the chair she had dragged in for him to sit on. "Penelope?" he called softly, concern evident in his voice.

 

"I have something that might help you," she said, not meeting his eyes as she clicked on an audio file. With a nod of his head, he encouraged her to continue. "Before she died," fresh tears gathered in both of their eyes, Spencer being the only one successful at holding them back. "She asked me to record a message for you."

 

Spencer felt a surge of anger at Penelope’s admission. "Garcia, after four years, you're only telling me now?" His voice grew louder with each word, and his fists clenched tightly as he struggled to contain his frustration.

 

“I know. I know, but she asked me to only play it for you when the moment was right.”

 

“Then do it.”

 

Penelope gave a slow nod, her index finger gliding across the mouse pad, tapping her finger once when the mouse cursor reached the play button.

 

The computer's speakers filled the room with the sound of shaky breaths amidst static, the interference momentarily intensifying before fading away completely. “Are you—is it... God…”

 

The sound of her voice filled his ears once again after so many years, the tears in his eyes now freely flowing as his heart swelled with warmth at the familiar sound he had desperately yearned for so long to hear again. “Are you recording?”

 

"Yes, but, please, just save your breath. They are on their way there.”

 

“No, I—“ more labored breaths followed as she once again cut herself off. “Spence, I am so, so sorry, love,” she choked out, her voice trembling with emotion.

 

The once-warm feeling in his heart was quickly replaced by a sinking sensation in his stomach. As he listened to the pain in her voice, he understood why Penelope had been hesitant to show him this.

 

“I love you, Spencer. So, so much.” By now, he knew she was crying, her words mingling with the soft sobs and sniffles that escaped her.

 

“I’m offended. You only love Spencer?”

 

Before he could get angry at Penelope for teasing her while she was dying, her soft laugh—something he thought he would never hear again—reached his ears, restoring warmth to his pained heart. “I love you too, Pen.”

 

He had been looking down, but when those words were uttered, he looked up to find Penelope’s face. A soft, trembling smile graced her lips, her tear-stained cheeks adding a poignant depth to her expression as she kept her focus on the computer before them.

 

"I love all of you," she coughed, wincing in pain as she took another shaky breath. "A lot. I love you guys so much."

 

“They are almost there. Hold on, please.”

 

With a sigh, she said, “I’m sorry I broke my promise, Spence. I know I said I would never leave you, but I—” there was a puse as she coughed, “I’m proud of you.”

 

His hand, which had unintentionally been spinning the ring around his finger, was quickly engulfed in warmth. As he shut his eyes, he quickly gave Penelope’s hand a squeeze that was returned.

 

“I love you, baby. Always have, always will.”

 

There was silence after that; the air of that night was the only sound coming from her side as Penelope desperately called out her name, begging her for a response before the sound of his own voice yelling her name reached his ears. The recording ended shortly after the sound of someone’s knees hitting the ground beside her played.

 

There was a moment of silence as the two sat there, hands still in each other's as they stared at the screen. As Penelope turned to look at him, she was taken aback by the soft smile on his lips. “I knew her voice was raspy.”

 

 * ੈ✩‧₊˚

 

As the 7th anniversary of her death quickly approached, Spencer had undergone significant changes since the day they talked about her. His demeanor shifted, not entirely transforming him into a new person, but certain characteristic traits that had been missing from Spencer had returned.

 

The confidence that had once disappeared was slowly starting to return, and the team found themselves once again struggling to keep up with his jokes and to grasp all the new statistical facts he effortlessly shared with them.

 

He didn't completely revert back to the genius they had grown accustomed to, but he was no longer the twenty-four-year-old version of himself either.

 

Appearance-wise, he hadn't changed much. While he had continued to age, the dark bags under his eyes had become fainter, and a light tan had returned to his complexion.

 

His hands were still usually adorned with rings—rings that seemed too small for him. And the dagger necklace still hung from his neck; its original gold color has now faded to almost silver from daily wear.

 

The only new change the team had noticed since that night was the little iPod and earphones that he now carried everywhere he went. He always kept them close, often putting the earphones in while working on files or during flights.

 

When they had asked what he was constantly listening to, he had responded with his characteristic tight-lipped Spencer smile and said, "Her voice."

[avelera]

So I don’t plan to become a political blog here but I was a poll worker and regularly volunteer as a poll worker at elections in my ward. And I want to push back on two assumptions I see on here, one that is comforting, one that might not be.

First, the perhaps comforting one.

1) Jill Stein did not get any votes. I live in a blue ward in a purple state. Harris got about 2,200 votes, Trump got about 700. The Libertarian candidate got like 24 votes. Jill Stein got 12.

Yes, even in a very blue town, no one was giving their protest vote to Jill Stein in any significant numbers. Obviously I can’t speak to all states, but I think that the shadow of the 2016 third party votes is misapplied here, ie stop yelling at Jill Stein or third party voters for losing this, they don’t exist in any significant numbers.

2) Palestine protest votes were also a negligible percentage during the Primary. Biden wasn’t even on the ballot in my state (NH) but there was a significant write in campaign that netted him some 70k votes I want to say, which was significant since they were all write in. That’s very unusual. He got about 700 in my town and there’s a lot less turnout in an uncontested federal primary. Literally there was no reason to show up except to write him in and a lot of people did.

But we also got protest write in votes for Free Gaza and From the Rivers to the Seas (which I had to explain the meaning of to older Democratic volunteers there) and that number was 22.

Literally nothing was lost to show up and cast this protest vote and it was also a negligible number, despite what you might think from being on social media.

I mention this to bring perspective to how widely held a view can seem online, when you can collect and converse with other like minded people around the world, vs how this manifests even in areas that align with your politics in the real world.

I say this too because I hope it offers some perspective on these percentages we see in elections. Everyone you will ever know and agree with us still a small percentage and not enough to swing an election usually. That’s why big coalitions are needed. That’s why politicians must often appeal to people you don’t agree with, because you’re adding up all those little percentages.

Perhaps this is inherently obvious, but I hoped to offer a sober, statistical view of how what seem like vocal movements online often don’t make any sort of waves in the ballot box, at least not without significant organization efforts, which often take years if not decades to pull together (ie, decades of civil rights or accessibility organizing). This is also not to belittle the Free Gaza movement, not at all, but to offer perspective on how that online vehemence did, or didn’t, manifest at the ballot box.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Social Security is class war, not intergenerational conflict

Today, Tor.com published my latest short story, "The Canadian Miracle," set in the world of my forthcoming (Nov 14) novel, The Lost Cause. I am serializing this one on my podcast! Here's part one.

The very instant the Social Security Act was passed in 1935, American conservatives (in both parties) began lobbying to destroy it. After all, a reserve army of forelock-tugging plebs and family retainers won't voluntarily assemble themselves – they need to be goaded into it by the threat of slowly starving to death in their dotage.

They're at it again (again). The oligarch-thinktank industrial complex has unleashed a torrent of scare stories about Social Security's imminent insolvency, rehearsing the same shopworn doom predictions that they've been repeating since the Nixonite billionaire cabinet member Peter G Peterson created a "foundation" to peddle his disinformation in 2008:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.O.U.S.A.

Peterson's go-to tactic is convincing young people that all the Social Security money they're paying into the system will be gobbled up by already-wealthy old people, leaving nothing behind for them. Conservatives have been peddling this ditty since the 1930s, and they're still at it – in the pages of the New York Times, no less:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/26/opinion/social-security-medicare-aging.html

The Times has become a veritable mouthpiece for this nonsense, publishing misleading and nonsensical charts and data to support the idea that millennials are losing a generational war to boomers, who will leave the cupboard bare:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/27/opinion/aging-medicare-social-security.html

As Robert Kuttner writes for The American Prospect, this latest rhetorical assault on Social Security is timed to coincide with the ascension of the GOP House's new Speaker, Mike Johnson, who makes no secret of his intention to destroy Social Security:

https://prospect.org/economy/2023-10-31-debunking-latest-attack-social-security/

The GOP says it wants to destroy Social Security for two reasons: first, to promote "choice" by letting us provide for our own retirement by flushing even more of our savings into the rigged casino that is the stock market; and second, because America doesn't have enough dollars to feed and house the elderly.

But for the New York Times' audience, they've figured out how to launder this far-right nonsense through the language of social justice. Rather than condemning the impecunious olds for their moral failing to lay the correct bets in the stock market, Social Security's opponents paint the elderly as a gerontocratic elite, flush with cash that rightfully belongs to the young.

To support this conclusion, they throw around statistics about how house-rich the Boomers are, and how much consumption they can afford. But as Kuttner points out, the Boomers' real-estate wealth comes not from aggressive house-flipping, but from merely owning a place to live. America's housing bubble means that younger people can't afford this basic human necessity, but the answer to that isn't making old people homeless – it's providing a lot more housing, and banning housing speculation:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/

It's true that older people are doing a lot of consumption spending – but the bulk of that spending isn't on cruises to Alaska to see the melting glaciers, it's on health care. Old people aren't luxuriating in their joint replacements and coronary bypasses. Calling this "consumption" is deliberately misleading.

But as Kuttner points out, there's another, more important point to be made about inequality in America – the most significant wealth gap in America is between workers and owners, not young people and old people. The "average" Boomer's net worth factors in the wealth of Warren Buffett and Donald Trump. Older renters are more rent-burdened and precarious than younger renters, and most older Americans have little to no retirement savings:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2023/10/28/the-new-york-times-greedy-geezer-myth/

Less than one percent of Social Security benefits go to millionaires – that's because the one percent constitute one percent of the population. It's right there in the name. The one percent are politically and economically important, but that's because they are low in numbers. Giving Social Security benefits to everyone over 65 will not result in a significant outlay to the ultra-wealthy, because there aren't many ultra-wealthy people in America. The problem of inequality isn't the expanding pool of rich people, it's the explosion of wealth for a contracting pool of rich people.

If conservatives were serious about limiting the grip of these "undeserving" Social Security recipients on our economy and its politics, they'd advocate for interitance taxes (which effectively don't exist in America), not the abolition of Social Security. The problem of wealth in America is that it is establishing permanent dynasties which are incompatible with social mobility. In other words, we have created a new hereditary aristocracy – and its corollary, a new hereditary peasantry:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#caste

Hereditary aristocracies are poisonous for lots of reasons, but one of the most pressing problems they present is political destabilization. American belief in democracy, the rule of law, and a national identity is q function of Americans' perception of fairness. If you think that your kids can't ever have a better life than you, if you think that the cops will lock you up for a crime for which a rich person would escape justice, then why obey the law? Why vote? Why not cheat and steal? Why not burn it all down?

The wealthy put a lot of energy into distracting us from this question. Just lately, they've cooked up a gigantic panic over a nonexistent wave of retail theft:

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/10/31/the-retail-theft-surge-that-isnt-report-says-crime-is-being-exaggerated-to-cover-up-other-retail-issues/

Meanwhile, the very real, non-imaginary, accelerating, multi-billion-dollar plague of wage theft is conspicuously missing from the public discourse, despite a total that dwarfs all retail theft in America by an order of magnitude:

https://fair.org/home/wage-theft-is-built-into-the-business-models-of-many-industries/

America does have a property crime crisis, but it's a crisis of wage-theft, not shoplifting. Likewise, America does have a retirement crisis: it's a crisis of inequality, not intergenerational conflict.

Social Security has been under sustained assault since its inception, and that's in large part due to a massive blunder on the part of FDR. Roosevelt believed that people would be more protective of Social Security if they thought it was funded by their taxes: "we bought it, it's ours." But – as FDR well knew – that's not how government spending works.

The US government can't run out of US dollars. The US government doesn't get its dollars for spending from your taxes. The US government spends money into existence and taxes it out of existence:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/14/situation-normal/#mmt

A moment's thought will reveal that it has to be this way. The US government (and its fiscal agents, chartered banks) are the only source of dollars. How can the US tax dollars away from earners unless it has first spent those dollars into the economy?

The point of taxation isn't to fund programs, it's to reduce the private sector's spending power so that there are things for sale to the public sector. If we only spent money into the economy but didn't take any out of the economy, the private sector would have so many dollars to spend that any time the government tried to buy something, there'd be a bidding war that would result in massive price spikes.

When a government runs a "balanced budget," that means that it has taxed as much out of the economy as it put into the economy at the start of the year. When a government runs a "surplus," that means it's left less money in the economy at the end of the year than there was at the beginning of the year. This is fine if the economy has contracted overall, but if the economy stayed constant or grew, that means there are fewer dollars chasing more goods and services, which leads to deflation and all kinds of toxic outcomes, like borrowing more bank-created money, which makes the finance sector richer and the real economy poorer.

Of course, most governments run "deficits" – which is another way of saying that they leave more dollars in the economy at the end of the year than there was at the start of the year, or, put another way, a deficit probably means that your economy got bigger, so it needed more dollars.

None of this means that governments can spend without limit. But it does mean that governments can buy anything that's for sale in their own currency. There are a lot of goods for sale in US dollars, both goods that are produced domestically and goods from abroad (this is why it's such a big deal that most of the world's oil is priced in dollars).

Governments do have to worry about getting into bidding wars with the private sector. To do that, governments come up with ways of reducing the private sector's spending power. One way to do that is taxes – just taking money away from us at the end of the year and annihilating it. Another way is to ration goods – think of WWII, or the direct economic interventions during the covid lockdowns. A third way is to sell bonds, which is just a roundabout way of getting us to promise not to spend some of our dollars for a while, in return for a smaller number of dollars in interest payments:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/08/howard-dino/#payfors

FDR knew all of this, but he still told the American people that their taxes were funding Social Security, thinking that this would protect the program. This backfired terribly. Today, Democrats have embraced the myth that taxes fund spending and join with their Republican counterparts in insisting that all spending must be accompanied by either taxes or cuts (AKA "payfors").

These Democrats voluntarily put their own policymaking powers in chains, refusing to take any action on behalf of the American people unless they can sell a tax increase or a budget cut. They insist that we can't have nice things until we make billionaires poor – which is the same as saying that we can't have nice things, period.

There are damned good reasons to make billionaires poor. The legitimacy of the American system is incompatible with the perception that wealth and power are fixed by birth, and that the rich and powerful don't have to play by the rules.

The capture of America's institutions – legislatures, courts, regulators – by the rich and powerful is a ghastly situation, and to reverse it, we'll need all the help we can get. Every hour that Americans spend worrying about their how they'll pay their rent, their medical bills, or their student loans is an hour lost to the fight against oligarchy and corruption.

In other words, it's not true that we can't have nice things until we get rid of billionaires – rather, we can't get rid of billionaires until we have nice things.

This is the premise of my next novel, The Lost Cause, which comes out on November 14; it's set in a world where care and solidarity have unleashed millions of people on the project of maintaining the habitability of our planet amidst the polycrisis:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

It's a fundamentally hopeful book, and it's already won praise from Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben and Kim Stanley Robinson. I wrote it while thinking through and researching these issues. Conservatives want us to think that we can't do better than this, that – to quote Margaret Thatcher – "there is no alternative." Replacing that narrative is critical to the kinds of mass mobilizations that our very survival depends on.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/intergenerational-warfare/#five-pound-blocks-of-cheese

This Saturday (Nov 4), I'm keynoting the Hackaday Supercon in Pasadena, CA.

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Revision Notes

The lead-up to exam season can be a stressful time for many students. Figuring out when, where & how to revise all the information you've covered throughout the year can feel overwhelming, especially if you haven't started any initial plans for revision.

Make a Revision Plan

To ensure your revision notes are as effective as possible, start with a plan.

Create a study schedule that outlines when you need to start making your notes so that they become a valuable revision tool leading up to your exams.

Begin by filling in your timetable with exam dates, allowing you to work backwards from the definitive end date.

Break down each week into study days for each subject you need to revise and make notes for.

Outside of school, experts recommend dedicating an hour per subject per week, gradually increasing as exams draw nearer.

Chunk your exams into subjects and topics for a specific, workable timetable.

Remember to allocate time for social activities, hobbies, and other commitments to maintain focus, stay committed to your revision plan, and achieve your goals.

Collate Your Notes

Once your revision plan is in place, gather all your notes for each subject into one central location.

Avoid the hassle of sifting through old notebooks by decluttering and consolidating notes from various sources like school textbooks, homework, personal reading, and tutoring.

Remove duplicate content and have everything in one accessible place. Whether you prefer handwriting or typing, maintain a consistent format for each topic.

This stage may be time-consuming, but having all your information in one place sets the foundation for effective memorisation.

Add Detail from Textbooks and Guides

Refer to reliable revision guides and textbooks to ensure comprehensive coverage and fill any knowledge gaps. These recommended resources should align with your syllabus, providing clear explanations at your learning level.

Delve deeper into less familiar topics for better understanding.

Add any crucial details to your existing revision notes, ensuring clarity and coherence. Avoid mere copying; instead, focus on key statistics, dates, phrases, or explanations.

Leverage end-of-topic quizzes in revision books to test your grasp of the material.

Establish a Uniform Style

Maintain uniform formatting across different topics and subjects to enhance focus and aid memory recall.

Consistent use of colours, fonts, and styles fosters a conducive learning environment. This creative aspect of formatting can provide a welcome break from the monotony.

Summarise Everything

Once you've settled on a format, begin summarising your notes for easier reference. This process requires significant time allocation, especially for subjects like GCSEs where you may have numerous topics.

Transition from verbatim copying to concise summaries by eliminating non-essential words and using symbols.

Opt for topic keywords followed by brief explanations.

Reflect on the content's clarity and refine further if needed.

This step, while time-intensive, yields a refined set of revision notes for each subject and topic, preparing you for the revision process.

Keep Condensing

Maintain active engagement with your notes by continually refining them.

Aim to distill long-form notes into shorter, memory-triggering documents containing essential keywords, numbers, equations, and phrases.

This process prompts your brain to focus on crucial information.

While the ultimate goal is to memorise without reliance on notes, having condensed versions as a reference can serve as a helpful memory aid.

By following these steps, you'll have a well-organised set of revision notes ready for your exams. Remember, the key is to make the material your own through active engagement and condensation.

Source ⚜ More: Writing Notes & References ⚜ Tips & Advice

[clanwarrior-tumbly]

Could we get some ummmm jealous!Vanessa and reader hcs mayhaps? 🙏

"There you go, handsome. You're all set for your show."

"Thank you, Superstar. You're very kind..Officer Vanessa's lucky to have you as a significant other." Glamrock Freddy smiles after you finished up some maintenance work on him. "You've improved her daily mood by 90% since you two became an official couple."

"....you can calculate our exact moods by percentages?"

"..erm...no, I merely made up that statistic. I'm sorry-"

"I'm just kidding, silly bear. You can head back to your green room." You laugh, gently patting his chestplate before sending him on his way-

Only for him to nearly collide into Vanessa as she barges into the P&S room, impatient.

"A-Apologies, Officer. I did not see you-"

"Of course you didn't. Just get going. You're already running late."

You raise an eyebrow at your girlfriend's attitude, and when Freddy leaves she's just standing there brooding.

"His solo doesn't start for another ten minutes-"

"Yeah, but it's gonna take him at least five to get back to his room." She scowls. "And maybe longer if the brats keep stopping him along the way."

"Okay, I get it." You sigh, turning back to the computer terminal to log out. "You seem to care an awful lot about Freddy being punctual today, Nessie.."

"..well the less time he wastes flirting with you, the better."

You pause.

"Wait...you thought he was..?"

Suddenly, it all made sense.

You knew Vanessa was always kind of moody on the clock, taking almost every little inconvenience to her work personally.

But for her to be outright jealous?? Of a robot, of all people??

You had to hold in your laughter, especially as you see the look on her face as she slowly realizes that her assumptions were indeed kind of stupid..

It's not like you could go and date the bear, anyways, and she damn well knows this.

But she needed to ask what Freddy said that made you laugh..because that's all she saw when she was looking through the window.

Plus she wishes she could make you laugh like that sometimes.

You explain the joke he made, and she becomes flustered...and surprised.

"So he...wasn't making fun of me?"

"Of course not! He thinks highly of us..he wouldn't try to break us up. He's our biggest supporter, if anything." You chuckle as you bring Vanessa into a hug, kissing her cheek. "But if you need any reassurance..there's nothing going on between us, okay?"

All she can do is nod, her smile slowly appearing and her jealousy disappearing.

She'll be a little less harsh on Freddy from now on...but she's gonna feel embarrassed about this for a while.

[irawhiti]

kia ora! i would like to suggest the coining of a term that would hopefully help a large demographic of mostly-forgotten-about māori to connect with each other and share our experiences to feel less alone, congregate around a concept regardless of country of origin and upbringing, and organise as activists.

i politely ask as many people to spread this as possible to help indigenous people organise with each other and to get the largest amount of interactions possible.

anyway, with all that being said,

i would like to coin the term "ngāti rangiātea" for māori who do not know their iwi to use.

this is based on the well known whakataukī/proverb, "i will never be lost, for i am a seed which was sown from rangiātea." i chose this whakataukī due to the spiritual significance of rangiātea as a place in māori culture, as well as to emphasise that no matter how it feels, we are not lost, we can find ourselves in each other, we can experience strength and self-realisation, and that we will exist with mana and without whakamā as rightful tangata whenua.

i've put my reasoning, personal experiences shaping my viewpoints on the matter, and various statistics under the cut to make this post reblog-friendly and i would suggest fellow māori read it regardless of whether or not they know their iwi. i also ask for the opinions of other māori, ESPECIALLY AND SPECIFICALLY other māori who do not know their iwi. in fact, i politely ask māori to share this with their whānau and people in general to share this with māori they know, especially any they know who do not know their iwi. a wide reach is what i am going for to get the largest amount of voices, critiques, and opinions on the topic and to avoid this from just becoming a very small thing that stays in an online echo-chamber.

to begin, the 2018 aotearoan census shows that, of the 775,836 people identifying as māori in aotearoa, roughly 17% are unable to identify their iwi in the census. this has gone up by 1% since 2006, showing that we are a considerably stable percentage of people. along with this, there are more than 170,000 māori living in australia and, while there are no solid statistics, there are an estimated 8,000 māori living in the UK, 3,500 in the US, 2,500 in canada, and 8,000 in other countries where there's no option for māori or any polynesians on the census.

this number adds up to 967,816 total māori and while there's no census in these countries asking for your iwi, i would go as far as to assume that there's a larger number of diaspora māori who are no longer able to identify their iwi than there are in aotearoa. of course, this is just speculation based on my lived experiences and conversations with other diaspora māori, however even assuming that it's the exact same amount globally, 17%, this is roughly 164,532 māori worldwide who do not know their iwi. nearly one in five māori do not know their iwi.

regardless of the specific statistics, the hard fact here is that there is a large percentage of māori who are unsure of their iwi for whatever reason. it's extremely easy to feel unsure of yourself, lost, disconnected, and uncomfortable speaking on issues regarding te ao māori when you're unsure of your iwi (or your hapū, whānau, waka, or anything else, but there is heavy emphasis on the iwi) and it's very easy for whakamā to take hold, especially when many māori who can recite their whakapapa aren't very polite or understanding about your situation to say the least.

and there are a lot of those people.

unfortunately, i've spoken to many māori who are of the opinion that not knowing your iwi due to colonialism, assimilation, forced disconnection, etc. means that you should not, cannot, call yourself māori. this is a disgusting viewpoint to have and in my opinion it spits on the fundamental concepts of māori culture and worldviews. thankfully this is a small yet vocal group of people, but even so, they add to the collective experience that makes it extremely difficult to navigate a world while full of whakamā and internalised racism. it can feel like there's no space for you, no term you can use, nobody you can relate to, no mana you can claim, nothing. when you cannot recite your whakapapa, it can feel like there's a part of you that's fundamentally missing.

as well as this, even when people mean well, when you are in this situation, you're usually told to just do some genealogy work, do some research, ask your family what they know. sometimes, these steps are simply not possible. other times, we've already done everything suggested over and over and over again. we're generally told "oh, that sucks, but one day you'll find out, keep looking!" in response to our lack of iwi. sure, they mean well, but i have never once been told anything along the lines of "that's okay, some things are lost to time through no fault of your own. don't beat yourself up over something your whānau had to hide to survive, what you do now to uphold your family's mana, what you do know about your whānau, and who you ultimately become is more important than what you no longer know."

and why? why is it seen as shameful to say matter-of-factly that i don't know my iwi? i'm not looking for comfort, i'm not looking to be told that, aww, there there, i'll find it eventually. i'm stating a fact. i do not need pity, i need my mana and voice to be respected.

this concept is what i want to emphasise by coining ngāti rangiātea. some things are lost to time, but we aren't. our loss of knowledge does not mean that we are unworthy of being māori, that we are unworthy of basic human respect. it does not mean that we have lost everything that our whānau knows. it is a scar, a reminder of what colonisation took from us, yes, but we cannot allow it to continue to be an open bleeding wound. we will not be lost to time and we should not bow our heads and act like we do not exist, that we're inconvenient, that we damage the "image" that māori have. in fact, we are an important aspect of māori culture and ignoring our existence does harm to everybody.

and of course we can't speak on some topics regarding te ao māori. this seems to be a topic that comes up frequently as a strawman. yes, there are some topics that would be irresponsible to speak on when we have no experience with them. this doesn't mean we can't speak on anything. having a collective identity, an "iwi" to congregate around even just politically, would help us speak on topics that we are more qualified to speak on than māori with knowledge of their iwi (yes, those topics exist, shockingly.)

we will never be lost, for we are a seed sown in rangiātea.

by identifying as ngāti rangiātea, i wish to emphasise that it's important to accept that sometimes, someone just won't be able to find every piece of information. loss of family knowledge is literally one of the primary goals of forced assimilation! we all went through it as colonised peoples, why must we continue to attach shame to those of us who were forced to obfuscate our history to keep our children alive? it's not a personal flaw, it's not a dirty secret, it's a fact of life that must not continue to be kept quiet out of shame, and the sooner we can focus on healing this subsection of our community, the stronger māori as a whole will become.

so, this is why i'd like to coin a term for māori who are unsure of their iwi. this is what i intend to achieve by giving us a name, our own "iwi" to congregate around, to identify ourselves as. instead of hanging my head and saying "i'm not sure what my iwi is, i'm sorry", instead of feeling inclined to beg like a dog to be treated with respect, i would like to look people in the eye and tell them that i am ngāti rangiātea. i would like this label to be synonymous with strength and not shame, that i refuse to let my whakamā swallow me, that i am just as worthy of calling myself māori as anyone else, that there are many others in my iwi (or lack thereof). i would like other people to have that as well and i would like those like me to feel less lost when all they've been told is "well, you'll learn your iwi eventually!" as if that's going to help someone feel better if they can't find their iwi.

and even if a person finds their iwi eventually, it's absolutely disgraceful that people are treated that they're not allowed to access many basic parts of te ao māori until they discover something they are not even 100% destined to find. i think that this view contributes to a lot of people who eventually find their iwi becoming unnecessarily arrogant towards those who truly cannot find this information, that they're just not putting enough effort in. if a person finds their iwi after identifying as ngāti rangiātea, they are fully welcome to continue to identify as this political label along with the iwi they now know they belong to as i wish for it to be a term that describes your experiences, your upbringing, and your community. you don't suddenly lose your whānau or your lived experience when you discover your whakapapa.

finally, this hopefully goes without saying, but ngāti rangiātea is not meant to function as a real existing iwi does. the term will hopefully be used as a way to identify yourself and other people and organise but i don't expect nor do i want this to be treated like a coordinated iwi. i expect and hope for this to be a decentralised way of identifying and experiencing community to make it easier to organise as a people. think of this the way the terms ngāti kangaru, ngāti rānara, ngāti tūmatauenga etc. are used.

-----

so, the tl;dr is that i feel like coining a name for a phenomenon that nearly one in five of all māori experience in quiet shame, to make it easier for us to congregate and find each other, speak on our experiences, organise as activists, feel less lost, and ultimately give us the ability to regain our mana as a community with shared goals and experiences. i have spoken to many māori who feel this way and my suggestion for this term is ngāti rangiātea, to show homage to the well known whakataukī, "i will never be lost, for i am a seed sown from rangiātea", to give us a community to work with, and to give us an "iwi" to list when asked instead of fumbling for words and feeling whakamā.

i would like to take the emphasis off of constantly looking to the future for what you may or may not even find with this identity. we are not broken, we are not lost, for we are seeds sown in ngāti rangiātea.

tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā tatou katoa, and if you got this far, thank you for reading.

[mariacallous]

I read the NPR article about Richard Reeves and the 2024 election and masculinity etc and I'm once again where I always am with him - there are a few things I sort of agree with but overall I want him to shut up.

“The irony is that this was supposed to be an election about women and about women's rights. And of course, it still is.” Reeves says, “But it's striking to me how much of the debate and so much of the performance, almost of the election so far, has actually been about competing views about masculinity and manhood.”

This summer, philanthropist Melinda French Gates distributed $1 billion to causes supporting women and girls. Reeves was surprised when his institute received some of that money.

“What she's come to realize is that a world of floundering men is not likely to be a world of flourishing women, and that we do have to rise together. And that actually, if men really start struggling to do their bit on the home front or in the labor market, it's not like that women end up unscathed from that,” he told Morning Edition.

According to the American Psychological Association, boys tend to perform worse in school than girls, statistically, and are now less likely than girls to attend college. Reeves, in his analysis, says that boys go on to live unhealthier lives as well.

Is the issue that schools and jobs and modern relationships are causing men to struggle? Or is it that misogyny and sexism are contributing to why school performance is down for boys, why college enrollment is down for men, why women are, in some fields and areas, doing better/advancing more?

Reeves says Republican demonstrations of masculinity have become more performative, with increased bravado and machismo. This shift is evident in who has introduced Trump at past Republican National Conventions. Trump’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, introduced him at the last two conventions, but this year he was introduced by Dana White, the head of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

On the Democratic side, Reeves says the fact that Harris is a woman gives her more “permission” to speak on the issues of boys and men.

He also highlights the significance of Harris choosing Governor Tim Walz as her running mate to contrast Trump’s style of masculinity. “It'll be interesting to see if they follow this up with any policies. But a high school coach, a high school teacher—there’s a way in which Tim Walz is embodying a more service-oriented form of masculinity.”

Reeves points to memes about Walz that praise his masculine traits.

“There's all these memes now he'll fix your car. He'll make sure you get home safely. Like he'll put his arm around you. Be a coach.”

I don;t necessarily disagree with this analysis, but it's very surface-level and anodyne, and doesn't touch on how much negative masculinity is embraced and portrayed by the Trump campaign.

When asked what actions and beliefs define masculinity, Reeves was initially reluctant before sharing his perspective.

“There are very many different ways of being masculine. But I would say that the longest and best established definition of masculinity that I found as I've done this work is really of being of service to others, of being of for more than yourself.”

Reeves explains that historically, what has distinguished a man from a boy is the ability to “generate more of something than you need for your own survival.” It conjures up the idea of the “breadwinner” of a family, though Reeves says it doesn’t necessarily mean that.

“I think the idea of a man who exists only for himself, that's actually the opposite of masculinity. And so there's a certain selflessness to all of the definitions of masculinity that I think is positive, that I think should define what modern manhood is.”

"the longest and best established definition of masculinity that I found as I've done this work is really of being of service to others, of being of for more than yourself.”

Okay...

Recent polling from the Pew Research Center shows that more men tend to vote Republican. But even among the younger demographic of Gen Z, women are heavily Democratic, while men are more likely to lean Republican.

“It really is more driven by the movement of young women to the left than of young men to the right, although it is now both,” Reeves says, “But what's interesting about this is that if you look at the attitudes of young men, of Gen Z men towards gender equality, for example, there is no evidence that they are in any way less supportive of gender equality than previous generations. If anything, they're more supportive.”

He goes on to say, “I think it's a real mistake on the part of people on the left to see the move of young men towards the right and see that as a turning towards the right when it could just as easily be a turning away from the left, because they don't see themselves in the rhetoric and aesthetic and politics of the left.”

Reeves says that many young men feel “quite homeless politically,” and that sense of not belonging makes them open to the right if they feel that they are being heard.

“The problem is that on the right there are absolutely no policy solutions to help young men.”

“But what's interesting about this is that if you look at the attitudes of young men, of Gen Z men towards gender equality, for example, there is no evidence that they are in any way less supportive of gender equality than previous generations. If anything, they're more supportive.”

I think that's actually very incorrect? In fact, haven't we seen the opposite?

"I think it's a real mistake on the part of people on the left to see the move of young men towards the right and see that as a turning towards the right when it could just as easily be a turning away from the left"

A distinction without much of a difference if it ends up in the same result, and even he is qualifying that that's what's happening.

Reeves says that many young men feel “quite homeless politically,” and that sense of not belonging makes them open to the right if they feel that they are being heard.

“The problem is that on the right there are absolutely no policy solutions to help young men.”

So it's almost like policies aren't the problem?

I am so tired of him and his shtick, and the fact that his argument is based on very cherrypicked and personally biased thinking (would we have written "Of Girls and Women" if he'd been the father of three daughters and saw how things were shaping up against them? Doubtful).

@thecardiganqueen @larkandkatydid et al

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved on our archive

They are also at higher risk of depression, anxiety and insomnia

COVID-19 survivors show signs of significant cognitive deficits which could become dementia even a year after having the virus 1 . They also have an increased risk of depression, anxiety and disrupted sleep.

People who have had COVID-19 should be subjected to close monitoring and regular check-ups to ensure early detection of cognitive impairment and timely therapeutic interventions, says a team of researchers at the Bangur Institute of Neurosciences in Kolkata.

Previous research has suggested that the coronavirus may enter the brain through the olfactory system but little is known about how the virus affects the brain.

To find out, the scientists, led by Atanu Biswas and Madhushree Chakrabarty, did brain scans and assessed the mental health of COVID survivors using phone and in-person interviews. They then matched these with a control group of people who had not contracted COVID.

The team, which included researchers at the Indian Statistical Institute in Kolkata and the Burdwan Medical College in Purba Bardhaman, found that more than 80% of people tested reported at least one of four symptoms – depression, anxiety, stress and insomnia – ranging from mild to severe.

Patients with higher socioeconomic status experienced less anxiety. At least 6.1% of the patients were diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment and 4% developed dementia.

More than 60% of the patients experienced a loss of taste and smell during the active phase of the infection. This could alter the function of brain areas linked to cognitive ability and emotional well-being, the researchers say.

doi: doi.org/10.1038/d44151-024-00168-7 www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychiatry/articles/10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1370085/full

[willknightauthor]

I'm so stoked! I've had so many breakthroughs simultaneously on this system!

I've been churning through RPG after RPG, trying to find everything useful, see every way it's been done. It's been a whirlwind, and I'm still in the middle of it, but I've been surprised at how little variation there is. Even the free form, "roleplaying forward," GM-less jam games do a lot of the same things as each other. Even if the mechanics are technically different, using different dice, the goals and ethos of the designs are identical. And we're all aware of the hoard of OSR/NSR games.

It started out with my fascination with balancing simulation and character-driven storytelling in a fun way, eventually becoming a desire to fix my frustrations with the World of Darkness. While I enjoy the campy, B-movie side of horror in the World of Darkness, I myself am more of an A24 type of writer (e.g. Midsommar, The VVitch, Under the Skin). The worlds I like to build, even when surreal, have solid internal logic. I crave that balance between the impossible and the gritty, between the beautiful and the horrifying.

I figured out how to tie everything to one health system, which itself is tied to one 10d6 dice pool. Now stress and health are one thing, and it directly affects what type of dice you roll, which changes odds and side effects. Your stats and your combat exhaustion determine the number of dice rolled, which means the more you do in combat, the fewer dice you have, and the lower your odds of success.

Because it's a d6 pool with success on one 6, the probability changes roughly linearly compared to other dice pool systems. Because there's only one vector for probability--more or less dice--difficulty is an easy thing for the GM to determine, and the probability of the roll quickly judged.

By tying actions to the dice pool via fatigue, I realized I can encourage scrappy, gritty, tactical combat by rewarding players with a second wind, meaning they get dice back. Now there's momentum between attackers and defenders. If you get backed into a corner with no options you start getting exhausted, but if you find a way to scramble out of it, jab them in the eyes, utilize the environment, make them hit their ally, then you recover and turn the tables. Even the initiative system ties into this scrappy back-and-forth, since initiative changes non-randomly during combat. And this is all in a zone-based “theater of the mind” combat system.

I've completely eliminated experience. Instead when you do difficult things and take risks, you get temporary boosts to that skill for future rolls. To permanently advance it you must engage in training, either as a side activity or during down time, over a realistic amount of time. At the highest levels you have to go on personal quests to advance your skills. Thus your skill advancement is tied to roleplaying.

Going up a single point in anything is very difficult though. Most of the "character advancement" instead is about character change. You gain new skills and abandon others, and via your new skills you can acquire a new "class." Basic advancement is quantitative, but all significant advancement is qualitative, using skills themselves as currency. You don’t just advance, you adapt.

Your "class" is advanced through a customizable narrative achievement tree. Thus to become a better mage, you must pursue life goals, narrative turning points, and personal transformations, based on their own ambitions and your ambitions for them as a character.

Almost every stat is an abstract representation of the character's internal qualities and state. Those internal states then have mechanical effects during the game if you can roleplay them: goals, passions, memories, knowledge, social ties, reputation, etc. It's conceptual, but it's not the loosy-goosy LARP style. There are mechanics with numerical and statistical effects, they're just tied to qualitative stats driven by roleplaying.

Importantly, there are many hooks for alternate or additional systems, especially weird and supernatural ones. I hate it when "magic" just amounts to a list of very narrow spells and their usages. Now there are many mechanical hooks for supernatural things tied to capabilities, knowledge, motivations, social role, self-image, core memories, etc.

I designed it backwards from multiple future games which will be very weird and abstract. The system as it stands represents the gritty foundation of any number of future games emphasizing social intrigue, personal horror, heart-pounding combat, and Lovecraftian worldbuilding. It's the ruleset for the regular, mortal humans, doing possible things in the real world… but with mechanical possibilities for much more.

Here are the games which inspired or influenced the design. I think it gives you a sense of how diverse and specific the design choices are.

Wraith: The Oblivion

Alien RPG

Over the Edge

Heart

The Wildsea

The Burning Wheel

Fate

Thousand Year Old Vampire

Na Ratunek Marsowi

Feng Shui

Barbarians of Lemuria

Mythras

Exalted

Fireborn

Delta Green

Reign

Gumshoe

Shock: Social Science Fiction

The True OSR: Obsolete Shitty Rules

The Devil, John Moulton

Cyberpunk RED

Dune RPG

Mothership

Streets of Peril

His Majesty the Worm

The Cypher System

Next I need to look into more (genuinely) experimental systems, especially ones involving memory and investigation. "The Between" and "Brindlewood Bay" are next on my list. The closest vibe design-wise I've gotten is from "Broken Empires" (which I'm so stoked for).

It's getting to the point where the overall rules are all set enough that I can drill down to specific numbers for everything, make some premade characters, and start playtesting. Fuck yeah.

[anarchotahdigism]

"

This narcotizing blanket of small lies, slowly nudging us toward acceptance of fascist policy, has also functioned by being distinct from the more blatant, bizarre and openly violent right wing culture wars, which have served as a convenient ideological cover for the Biden admin's slow dismantling of the Covid safety net.

The archetypal move here, I think, was the CDC stopping tracking and collating Covid data at all. After 40 years of preaching transparency, studies and "more information", liberals have made the distinctly fashy pivot to "less data, more vibes" (see also Democratic governor of New York Kathy Hochul saying that subway crime is "not statistically significant, but psychologically significant" in justification of deploying soldiers to the MTA). This has gone hand in hand with the dismantling of the journalistic apparatus, which seems to be reaching its apotheosis over the last 12 months. Not to mention the rise of AI and the collapse of internet searchability.

While the right has been busy attacking the institutions and idea of history itself, in book bans, school board and university takeovers, the liberals have been engaged in an active campaign of forgetting the very thing we're literally experiencing right now." ... "They want us to forget that, a mere four years ago, the president of the United States cowered in a bunker underneath the White House as rioters shook the gates and destroyed the guardhouse at its entrance. They want us to forget what it felt like to take the streets with one another, they want us to forget that we fought the police and won, they want us to forget the promises to defund the police, they want to forget that ACAB became a slogan on every lips, that the burning of the third precinct in Minneapolis had higher approval ratings than either presidential candidate, that few things have ever been so beautiful as that hideous building given over to the flames." ...

"We can not afford such comfortable forgetting. In an age of mass gaslighting and mass misinformation in the name of mass disablement and death, where the state offers us nothing except the comforting lie that this is normal, the simple stating of the facts, standing up for our own memories, becomes an act of resistance.

Do not forget what you know. Do not forget who you are. Forgetting is an active process, and it's one we must resist and refuse."

[langernameohnebedeutung]

I can't believe that this is a debate that we seriously have to humour at this point but since this is clearly the level of (trans-)misogyny we're at: The reason that men outperform women in chess is mathematics. It is not some "biological" advantage. It is a collective advantage, not an individual one. Not even an advantage of averages or median:

There simply are more men who play chess than women, especially at a professional level.

And if we assume that the necessary skills to succeed as a professional chess player are arranged on a bell curve across the population, that means the people at the very top end of that bell curve are going to be a very small number - and the simple mathematical odds dictate, that you are most likely to find this small group of people or at least the majority of that group within in the bigger group.

Let's say you have a group of 5000 AMAB people and a group of 500 AFAB people. Statistics dictate, that 1-2% of either has red hair. This accounts for 50-100 AMAB people and 5-10 AFAB people

Stupid conclusion: There is a correlation between gender and hair colour because there are more red-haired men

Logical conclusion: We have differently sized sample groups returning misleading data. When corrected for sample size, the results are about the same. This implies a lack of correlation between sex and hair colour

And this becomes even more evident if instead of a close-ended question (red hair: yes or no?) you have a Likert scale (e.g. performance): If we look for people with an Elo rating of say....2500 or up, it is very likely that we find more of them in the largest sample-size and fewer of them in smaller sample size. We are also likely going to find more horrible chess players in the larger sample-size. Except we are not testing for bad chess players or holding competitions for Worst Chess Player, preventing the reading that men are actually worse at chess than women.

The idea of excluding trans women from women's chess is actively cementing misogyny (the idea that being AMAB gives you some superior brain power and logical-strategical reasoning) and feeds the narrative that there is a biological reason for the distinction that is being made - when there isn't. It is, in fact, the oldest story in the book: Having a misogynistic expectation already planted in your head and using whatever data you can find (more male Grandmasters) while allowing only for one possible answer: If data shows that women are at a disadvantage, it is because women are inferior. If data shows that women have an advantage, the study has an agenda.

It is straightforwardly anti-scientific and rooted in misogynistic bias. It erases the studies that show us that there is no indication of a significant biological aspect to an individual's chess performance. It's erasing the data we have in favour of the deeply misogynistic narrative that women are less intelligent or strategically minded than men. The solution here is not to ban trans women - it is to teach your afab kids chess and to motivate them and have them play in atmospheres that are welcoming to them. So that one day, chess is no longer socially viewed as a male-sphere and a male interest and that maybe we have comparable sample sizes.

Trans women make up 0.6% of the human population, as far as we can document - that is 1.2% of women. They have no mathematical advantage over cis women, cis women are outnumbering them significantly. Banning trans women from women's chess is on the same level as banning the aforementioned red-haired women - WITH an additional helping of sexism and discrimination, anti-scientific sentiment and medical misogyny reasoning.

[multi-fandom-lunatic]

Representation in Keeper of the Lost Cities: A Critical Analysis

NOTE: This essay was written was originally a rant on the KotLC fanbase Discord. I copy-pasted my points into Chat-GPT and asked to make this into essay format. This is an AI assisted piece. Please don't think, however, that my points are any less valid. NOTE: This is also on the Keeper of the Lost Cities reddit.

Please add your thoughts!

Introduction

In discussing representation within Shannon Messenger's Keeper of the Lost Cities (KOTLC) series, it's imperative to address the nuances and complexities of how various groups are portrayed. While the series enjoys widespread popularity, it also reveals significant shortcomings in the representation of People of Color (POC), LGBTQ+ individuals, and other marginalized groups. This essay explores these issues, highlighting both the problematic aspects and potential areas for improvement.

Representation of People of Color (POC)

One of the most glaring issues in KOTLC is the limited and stereotypical portrayal of POC characters. The primary POC characters in the series—Tam, Linh, Wylie, and Maruca—are few, especially considering the statistical likelihood of a more diverse population. Even more concerning is how these characters are represented. For instance, upon their introduction, Tam and Linh are compared to anime characters and K-pop idols in Sophie's mind. This reinforces harmful generalizations and stereotypes about East Asians, which is both insensitive and problematic.

Moreover, despite elves in KOTLC not having countries or distinct cultures beyond "elven culture," which is portrayed in a predominantly European manner, there are inconsistencies in how racial representation is handled. For example, official artwork by Laura Hollingsworth depicts the Song family in front of an Asian temple, despite the series' premise that elves do not adhere to human cultural practices. This selective representation is problematic and reflects a lack of cultural sensitivity.

Stereotyping and Racism

Tam and Linh's characters fall into several Asian stereotypes. They have strict parents, a common trope for East Asian characters, and Linh is depicted as a bubbly, sweet girl without much depth, until her sudden, seemingly random outburst in "Stellarlune." These characterizations do not allow for the full depth and complexity that POC characters deserve.

The portrayal of gnomes in the series is even more troubling. Described as brown-skinned, unpaid workers who do manual labor for the elves, this depiction carries disturbing parallels to historical and contemporary issues of racial exploitation. The gnomes are presented as happy to serve their white, elf masters, which echoes deeply racist narratives. Despite being able to leave, the gnomes have no viable alternatives, essentially forcing them into servitude.

If Shannon Messenger chose not to include queer characters, it wouldn't necessarily be harmful, just lacking positive representation. However, employing Laura Hollingsworth (LH), known for her homophobic views, exacerbates the issue. LH, a conservative Christian, has openly opposed queer identities and followed white supremacist accounts. Her biases are evident in her work. By continuing to collaborate with LH, Messenger not only excludes queer representation but also tacitly supports an artist who opposes it. She has even addressed this. This perpetuates homophobia, and Messenger should be held accountable for her choices in supporting such a figure within the KOTLC series.

LGBTQ+ Representation

As an LGBTQ+ individual, the lack of queer representation in KOTLC is particularly disappointing. While it is not inherently homophobic to exclude queer characters, in a series as character-focused as KOTLC, it becomes a notable omission. Early books could have integrated queer characters naturally, but introducing one now might feel forced and tokenistic.

Characters like Linh and Marella have been perceived as queer-coded by some fans, but there is little textual evidence to support this. Queer audiences should not have to read subtext to find representation. Additionally, the series employs an artist, Laura Hollingsworth, who has expressed homophobic views. Shannon Messenger's response to concerns about Hollingsworth's involvement was minimal and failed to address the deeper issues.

Body Image and Ableism

KOTLC also perpetuates harmful beauty standards. The elves are depicted as perfect, which often translates to being slender, muscular, and fitting Western beauty ideals. This can negatively impact young readers who already struggle with body image. Additionally, the series lacks representation of disabled characters, implicitly suggesting that physical perfection is an elven trait, thereby excluding those who do not fit this mold.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Shannon Messenger's Keeper of the Lost Cities series falls short in its representation of POC, LGBTQ+ individuals, and other marginalized groups. The series reinforces stereotypes, perpetuates harmful beauty standards, and fails to include diverse identities in meaningful ways. Addressing these issues requires a commitment to sensitivity and inclusion, such as hiring sensitivity readers and reconsidering collaborations with problematic artists. By doing so, Messenger could create a more inclusive and representative world that resonates with all readers.