This comment is for Gedhun Choekyi Nyima, who was abducted by the Chinese government after he was selected as the 11th Panchen Lama. The Panchen Lama is the 2nd most important figure in Tibetan Buddhism, after the Dalai Lama.

He was 6 years old when he was taken. He and his family have not been seen for 29 years. I think about him often.

I always find the “rational self-interest” folks funny, because they always seem to imagine people’s inner nature to be anti-social and ruthless. Over the last few years, I have been working on being kinder, and I am the primary beneficiary of that work. Trying my best to not be an asshole is me at my most rationally self-interested.

Thanks for that link, I have sent it to a friend who I know will love it.

Gosh, you must have been startled by that. Tempered glass terrifies me because it feels like it has demons inside (that’s why it explodes so violently when the seal is breached)

I feel quite anxious trying to make sense of geopolitical events like this, especially given I’m ashamed of how little thought I gave to Palestine before Israel escalated from apartheid to all-out genocide; as you say, this is a ridiculously complex situation, and the snippets we get on the news are ridiculously oversimplified at best, and egregiously biased at worst.

Syria seems like a far away, foreign land where conflict is the inevitable norm. But it feels like that’s something that I’m meant to think, because it’s politically useful for people like me to think that way. Unfortunately, simply knowing that you’re subject to propaganda is far easier than actually gaining a more full and nuanced understanding of a conflict.

Oh I struggled most of all on the sand twins. I’m mildly claustrophobic and those caves freaked me out (especially as I tend to think poorly under pressure, so running out of time made me panic and get lost more).

I really liked this snippet of the article

“When people claim there’s no one to make peace with because the Palestinians hate us, I always say that as an Israeli I can only change my own society. But I want this act of refusal to resonate among Palestinians as well, so that they hear our messages and understand that we want peace. I know from conversations with Palestinian friends over the years that this is something they deeply value. I’m not doing this for them; I’m doing it for myself, but I want a continuous connection with them so they don’t give up on the struggle.”

People like this are a minority, but they exist, and that makes me hopeful

Tips! Many ADHD medications have the side effects of appetite suppression. Because of this, it can be a useful routine to eat something when you take your meds, to reduce the likelihood of going too long without food.

This goes doubly if you also have autism and/or other problems with interoception (knowing how your body is feeling/feeling hungry)

The testes themselves aren’t soft ime, but if we’re talking about the overall (scrotum + testes), then I would say it’s pretty soft.

Though I’m going to take this moment to soapbox about the importance of regular testicular self examinations: https://www.macmillan.org.uk/cancer-information-and-support/testicular-cancer/how-to-check

The key thing is checking regularly enough that you know what’s normal for you, and thus can see a doctor if there are any unexpected changes in shape or texture. (Apologies for lecturing in reply to what was probably a joke)

I think one of the really neat things about games as a medium is that “the experience” is inherently a super malleable concept. Gaming blows my mind when I think about how adaptive you need to be to run a tabletop roleplaying game, like Dungeons and Dragons — no matter how elaborate your plans are, players will always find a way to throw a spanner in the works. Video games have the same unpredictability of how players engage with the world you’ve made, but a much smaller ability to respond and adapt to ensure that they’re getting the correct “intended experience”.

In some respects, I agree with you, because when I play games, I care a lot about the intended experience. However, the reality is that I bring too much of myself to any game that I play to be able to think of my experience in that way, and I think that’s probably one of my favourite aspects of games as a medium — a dialogue between gamer and game developers. Especially because sometimes, the intended experience of a game isn’t well executed; there are plenty of times I have gotten lost or confused in games because the game didn’t sufficiently communicate to me (or other players with similar experiences) what it expected us to do. Part of the role of the game designer/developers role is to be guide the players so they get something resembling the intended experience.

Honestly, part of why I am on the pro-accessibility side of this issue is because I’m a bit of a snob — I think that being able to adapt a message or experience to a diverse audience shows a singularity of vision that’s more powerful than experiences that target a much smaller audience.

For example, let’s say that the subjective difficulty level of a game (the “experience”) equals the “objective difficulty level” of a game (the difficulty setting) minus the player’s skill level. For the sake of this example, let’s imagine that 10 arbitrary units is the correct level of the subjective difficulty level, and above/below that, the experience is degraded; also, let’s say that player skill ranges from 1-10, with most people clustering in the 4-6 range. In that world, if a game could only have one difficulty mode, 15 ish would probably be best, because 15 (objective difficulty) - 5 (average player skill level) = 10 (intended subjective difficulty level). I don’t begrudge game Devs for targeting limited audiences if that’s what they feel capable of, but I do massively respect the craftsmanship of being able to build a game that can serve a subjective 10 to a wide range of people, by having a range of difficulty settings.

I have an experience relating to game difficulty and accessibility that you would probably appreciate.

I was playing Rimworld for the first time, and because I was aware of how huge disasters that wipe out most of your work (that you can sometimes build back from) is a part of the game, I felt bad about playing the game on the mode that allows you to load earlier saves; I would find losing progress in this way more stressful than fun, so I wanted the ability to reverse poor fortune or choices, even if it felt like I was “dishonouring the intended experience”.

However, a friend (who was the reason I had bought Rimworld in the first place, and who enjoyed the chaos of no-save mode) pointed out that whilst the no-save mode may be presented as the default, the mode with saves enabled is presented as a perfectly valid way to enjoy the game. This made me feel immensely better about it, and I was able to dispel the silly guilt I was feeling. It highlighted to me the power of how we label difficulty settings and other accessibility settings.

Games are a funny medium.

I enjoyed using phyphox while on a plane recently. I found it fun to track the pressure and to see how it loosely corresponded to my own subjective experience of ascending vs descending.

I can’t recall any “useful” things I’ve used the app for, but I really enjoy having it — it makes me feel powerful. Like, it’s nice to think that if I did have some ideas of experiments to run, I could. It feels fitting to be able to access the sensors, because there are many ways in which our electronic devices nowadays aren’t (or don’t feel like) our own, so this feels like a small amount of clawing back power, even if I’m not using it for much.

I made a few Romanian friends in university. Granted you’re going to get some skewed perspectives when talking to expats, but each one of them said that Romania was a shit hole that they were glad to have escaped. Decree 770 (and other policies that were enacted by the same regime, that have left a scar on the country) was a large part of why.

I used to know someone who worked on Assassin’s Creed 3 (and probably other games, but idk). They told me about how surreal and disheartening it was to work somewhere so bafflingly huge. The part of the game they worked on was small and insignificant, but they were the kind of person to take pride in small things done well, and as such, they were pleased with what they had made. It was insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but this was something that they had made, and they didn’t mind being a small cog.

That is, until the game released and they got to see the rest of the game. They were immensely disappointed to see that clearly many components of the game didn’t have nearly the same amount of care put into them, and furthermore, coordination between different teams/systems was poorly executed. The game wasn’t bad (imo), but it was fairly meh, and it certainly felt undeserving of the effort my friend put into it.

They ended up checking out somewhat from their work after that, because they became disillusioned with the idea of being a small cog in a big machine — part of what allowed them to do such good work was that they immersed themselves in what they and their immediate team were working on, but that approach only works if you can trust that the rest of the project is well managed and resourced.

I fell out of contact with that friend, but I often think about them, and how effectively they captured the dismay they felt to realise that in a big machine like Ubisoft, it’s probably naive to care about your work. One of their colleagues had the thing they made not even feature in the game — it was cut, fairly last minute (and they didn’t even find out until release). This story was striking because it highlights how, even in soulless AAA games, churned out by corporate behemoths, there are people who do genuinely care about their work (until the company grinds that care into dust as they wring their workers dry). It’s quite tragic, actually.

It’s very difficult to say “All Souls College” without sounding like you’re saying “Arsehole’s College”

This isn’t a problem of being pregnant while in law school. This is a problem of someone’s Title IX protections being violated. Your comment implies that you think that Brittany Lovely was unwise to continue at law school while pregnant, but it’s fairly reasonable to expect a law school to be following the law.

When I first switched to Linux, I was nonplussed at why many videos didn’t work. It ended up being a positive learning experience, but it certainly would be nice if the codecs could be shipped directly, as you say.

This is unrelated to the article you’re sharing now, but I read that (I agree thoroughly that the GDPR needs to be a start, but that it’s inconsistently followed/enforced) and then I saw and read your article about apathetic cis people who might be agender. That’s a neat perspective that I hadn’t considered before — I’m cis and very much not apathetic about my gender (and I sometimes experience dysphoria if I am not treated as my gender). However, I have a bunch of other friends who have described their attachment to their gender as being far more “meh”, and I am looking forward to getting a chance to discuss your article with them.

It strikes me that most of my friends are some flavour of LGBTQIA+, but I don’t know anyone who is agender. However, 10 years ago, many of my friends who now are non-binary didn’t know a term for their experience of gender, so identified as the closest they could find (such as lesbian). I wonder how many people I know who might find that “agender” feels like a fitting identity, if it were more prevalent in discourse etc.

The paper mentioned in the OP, ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-024-02067-4 ) (paywalled link)

The Cult of the Red Circle teaches that if you circle irrelevant things, people will be desensitized to aberrations.

Ever wonder why some pictures have useless red circles, highlighting something obvious? This is why.