AnarchistArtificer
@AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
- Comment on 'This is definitely my last TwitchCon': High-profile streamer Emiru was assaulted at the event, even as streamers have been sounding the alarm about stalkers and harassment 13 hours ago:
Thanks for the additional context; I appreciate it. I was already feeling solidarity with Emiru, and I’m glad to learn more from her perspective
- Comment on 'This is definitely my last TwitchCon': High-profile streamer Emiru was assaulted at the event, even as streamers have been sounding the alarm about stalkers and harassment 13 hours ago:
“To tell you honestly, I am a lot more hurt and upset by how Twitch handled it during and after the fact.”
Man, I hate how hard I relate to this. I’m so used to creepy guys that it often becomes part of the background noise of being in public. I remember the first time I went to a kink nightclub, I was startled by how infrequently I was randomly groped; being in such a consent aware space made me realise how many people in a regular nightclub will use the crowdedness as plausible deniability in trying to cop a feel. That stuff is honestly so prevalent that the individual instances hardly bother me anymore (though thinking about how often it happens and how powerless women are to stop it does get to me)
However, sometimes, something happens that goes beyond this, and makes me feel genuinely unsafe and violated. Often, it’s scary because it represents an escalation of harassment, such as a coworker who becomes increasingly invasive. There have been enough times where reporting harassment or an assault has gone ignored (or worse) that now when it happens, I feel desperately anxious in not knowing whether to report a thing.
Beyond the effect of the harassment on me, I feel that it’s my ethical duty to report things like this. It would obviously not be feasible to report everything that was sus, but some things cross the line and need to be reported. However, my greatest fear in reporting something is that it may reveal the organisation to be shitty. The betrayal hurts more than the harassment. Even if it’s a big company like Twitch, which you wouldn’t necessarily expect to be giving a fuck, there’s still the desperate hope that “the system” will respond to flagrant violations of codes of conduct (and also the law). It’s demoralising when those in power act like sexual harassment and sexual assault don’t have laws against them. This undermines the law, and makes it as though it isn’t even there.
- Comment on Mom they're fighting again 14 hours ago:
A paper I quite enjoy is “Queer Theory for Lichens” which argued that queer theory is genuinely a useful framework for studying lichens; Lichens resist categorisation in a manner that feels like they’re actively mocking our taxonomic efforts.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 day ago:
“gimmick shoes you wouldn’t wear for more than an hour”
Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? Do you mean that the light up shoes look like they’d be uncomfortable, or are you getting at something different?
- Comment on One of those days 1 day ago:
It’s reasonable to assume that this assignment wasn’t specifically on fractions, based on the meme itself; the rage only makes sense in a world where they weren’t instructed to present their answers in a particular format.
Online assessments can be pretty jarring because for paper assessments marked by a teacher, you’re usually fine to present whatever format is most convenient. The exceptions include: if the question asked for you for a specific format; if you gave a rounded answer where it wasn’t appropriate (e.g. giving the answer “1.57 (3s.f.)” instead of “π/2”); or rounding an answer to the wrong level, or not being clear about what level of rounding you’ve done.
Whilst it is possible that the online assessment specified what format answers should be in, I’ve seen plenty of assessments where it doesn’t make that clear, and then is overly rigid in what it accepts. I’ve even seen assessments where I go “okay, I guess I shouldn’t give my answer as a decimal”, and then I give a fraction for the next answer, only to be told that the correct answer is what I said, but in decimal form. It would be logical that if in doubt, one should present answers in the same format as what the question itself uses, even if the question doesn’t specify you should use a particular format. Unfortunately, even this is not a safe strategy. I cannot emphasise enough how shitty the Pearson online assessments are, and I am baffled at how they are able to continue existing when they’re effectively scamming maths departments into paying for this trash.
- Comment on One of those days 1 day ago:
I love Khan academy so much. I don’t know how good it is nowadays, but it’s one of the things that shaped my perspective on the internet as I was growing up alongside the changing web; Yes, there is all sorts of awfulness online, and so many complex harms, but there are also so many awesome learning resources and enthusiastic people who want to share their knowledge. Khan academy did a lot for democratising knowledge, and is a concrete answer in the discussion of “what might ‘learning outside of the academy’ look like?”
The key difference between Pearson’s shitty maths thing and Khan academy’s equivalent is that Khan academy was started by a dude who was genuinely interested in bringing learning materials to people, and exploring online teaching as a new medium. Pearson is a soulless entity that exists to wring money out of everything it can.
- Comment on Nobody ever remembers Gen X 3 days ago:
I agree wholeheartedly
- Comment on Nobody ever remembers Gen X 6 days ago:
I feel like Boomers’ jokes about hating their spouse is thinly veiled suicidality jokes. Like, they’re giving big “I did everything I was meant to and I hate my life” energy
- Comment on Was the fall of Rome this stupid? 1 week ago:
Something that I find interesting with Rome is that arguably one of the ways it managed to keep going for so long is that it was continuing to push its borders outwards through conquest. Assimilating a land and its people into the Republic/Empire is one way of dealing with the problem of invading “barbarians” (even if that is just transmuting the problem such that your external threat is a new group of “barbarians”, and the old potential invaders potentially pose a threat from within).
Continuing to push outwards is a way to continue developing the military though, and to distract the military from the potential option of seizing power for themselves. There’s only so far you can push before the borders you need to secure are too large to do effectively, and the sheer area to be administrated is too large, even for Rome.
As you highlight, it’s a common misconception that people don’t realise that the Fall of Rome was far more protracted and complex of a process than a single event. I think that’s a shame, because I find it so much more interesting that historians can’t even agree on when the Fall of Rome even was.
- Comment on Was the fall of Rome this stupid? 1 week ago:
“Marked by opulence and a distracted upper class, depending on foreign born nationals and the impoverished to defend them from the mob.”
I’m not sure how linked to the Fall of Rome these things are when they existed throughout basically the entire history of the Roman Empire (and even the Republic before it). The “secession of the plebs” was effectively a general strike of the commoners that happened multiple times between the 5th venture BCE and the 3rd century BCE — many centuries before the Fall of Rome.
- Comment on Was the fall of Rome this stupid? 1 week ago:
Commenting to echo my agreement. Rome was bloody huge, and it was hard to administrate. Things like high quality roads and advanced administrative systems help to manage it all, but when you’re that big, even just distributing food across the empire is a challenge. Rome only became as large as it was because it was supported by many economic, military and political systems, but the complexity of this means that we can’t even point to one of them and say “it was the failure of [thing] that caused Rome to fall.”
An analogy that I’ve heard that I like is that it’s like a house falling into disrepair over many years. A neglected house will likely become unliveable long before it collapses entirely, and it’ll start showing the symptoms of its degradation even sooner than that. The more things break, the more that the inhabitants may be forced to do kludge repairs that just make maintaining the whole thing harder.
Thanks for the podcast recommendation, I’ll check it out. I learned about a lot of this stuff via my late best friend, who was a historian, so continuing to learn about it makes me feel closer to him
- Comment on Don't forget the drugs and alcohol! Maybe that is the photographer in this meme 1 week ago:
To anyone who resonates with this meme: Try to be kind to yourself. You have the wisdom to understand that you’re engaging in maladaptive coping measures, but remind yourself that these are choices you make under duress — an attempt to survive despite adverse circumstances.
It is possible to develop healthier coping measures that may better help you to cope with the world and all its strife, but this takes time and careful cultivation. We can do ourselves harm by trying to do too much at once, so remember that maladaptive coping strategies. I know that it feels demoralising to have to unhealthily immerse oneself in vices, but remember that you’re not failing to live, you’re succeeding at surviving, and for now, that’s enough.
I hope that things get better for you and me and everyone else who relates to this meme. I hope that we can both stick around long enough to find better modes of being. Until then, I hope that you find the occasional nugget of joy in your quest of escapism in the name of survival.
- Comment on If you lose your memories, are "you" dead? If a close relative/friend lose their memories, are they still "your relative/friend"? What the hell even is memory? How sentimental are you about memories? 1 week ago:
I hope this doesn’t sound trite, given that I’m just a random stranger on the internet, but I’m proud of you. Whilst I haven’t experienced depression in the way that you describe, I know how suffocating of an experience it is. It takes a tremendous amount of strength to endure that, especially when there are concrete life circumstances exacerbating things, as you describe. I am glad that you get to be alive again; you deserve it.
- Comment on If you lose your memories, are "you" dead? If a close relative/friend lose their memories, are they still "your relative/friend"? What the hell even is memory? How sentimental are you about memories? 1 week ago:
I recently played Signalis which explored these themes in an awesome manner. (It’s a survival horror game, but speaking as someone who isn’t great with horror, it wasn’t too bad on that front.)
- Comment on If you lose your memories, are "you" dead? If a close relative/friend lose their memories, are they still "your relative/friend"? What the hell even is memory? How sentimental are you about memories? 1 week ago:
Oh man, I relate to this. I have a somewhat similar experience which I have recounted in a long comment elsewhere in this thread that you may be interested in checking out.
My conclusion is much the same as your own. In some ways, I think I had to believe that I was the same person, because otherwise, I’d be living out the rest of my life feeling like an imposter who had stolen another person’s life. I imagine it might’ve been harder to believe that I’m still me if I had experienced personality changes as people who experience head trauma sometimes do.
- Comment on If you lose your memories, are "you" dead? If a close relative/friend lose their memories, are they still "your relative/friend"? What the hell even is memory? How sentimental are you about memories? 1 week ago:
Story time!
I once bumped my head and got complete retrograde amnesia. I lost basically all of my episodic memory — that is, the memory of all my past experiences. My semantic memory appeared to be intact, which meant I retained my general knowledge of the world, such as who was prime minister. However, I basically lost all sense of my identity for a while. I didn’t even remember my name at first. Honestly, I don’t know if I can say that I ever truly remembered my name after the fact; I was fortunate that my memory did return to me gradually over the course of many days, weeks and months, but because I was told my name many times over that period, I never got that sense of remembering my name (I’m going to use the psuedonym Ann for the sake of this story)
Anyway, it was terrifying at the time, but now that I’m past the dread and trauma of it all, I can reflect on it as a cool experience. A few days after the accident, when I still had very little memory of who I was, I went to a Christmas party with many of my friends. However, it felt like being in a room full of strangers. It was awkward at first when I arrived; people didn’t know how to act towards me, and seemed uncertain of whether I was still the person they knew. That was a fear I shared. However, they seemed to ease up quite quickly, because it seemed that my personality was still authentic to the person they knew, even if I had to start from scratch in getting to know them. It’s a bizarre experience to reflect on, because now I have two sets of memories of meeting some of my dearest friends for the first time.
The most distressing part of it all was when I had gotten to know some of the people in my life, and had put together many of the fragments about who I was. I wasn’t sure that I was that person though. I felt like an intruder in someone else’s life, and I was terrified that I wasn’t the same person. All the wonderfully supportive people around me — how could I call them my friends when I wasn’t the same Ann that had earned their friendship. Apparently I still acted like her, but if I was her, why was there such a stark division between the two versions of Ann in my head: there was the Ann who existed before the accident, and the Ann that I was afterwards — I didn’t know whether I could consider them to be the same. If we were the same person, why was I talking about “her” rather than “me”?
Some months after the accident, a romantic relationship started between me and my best friend. We had been close friends for a few years prior, and he later confessed to me that a part of him was anxious that maybe we wouldn’t have been together if not for the bump to my head. I was surprised to hear this, because my friend was a super charismatic guy and this kind of anxiety seemed out of character for him. I understood where he was coming from though. I told him that it would be nice if I could tell him that his worry was a silly one, and that of course the amnesia wasn’t the only reason we were together. However, I didn’t actually know whether I was the same person. By then, it felt like the vast majority of my memories had returned, and no-one reported any discernible personality change to me. However, I had no way to know what significant memories, if any, were still missing to me. I didn’t think that his fears were true, but ultimately, I had no way of knowing, and I just had to live with that — and unfortunately, so did he.
One of the most disconcerting aspects of it all was how it felt to rediscover a memory. Have you ever had something remind you of a memory that was tucked away so deep in your mind that you didn’t even know you still had it until something brought it to the surface? A foggy fragment from childhood perhaps? Well that’s what regaining my memories felt like. In the early days, it was extremely vague bits that I remembered.
The first fragment was in the hospital waiting room, when I remembered that the friend who was with me was someone who reuses day old tea bags (they will take the mug they used the previous day and add a new teabag in with the old one, and pour in new hot water). Bear in mind that this was a person who I had initially thought had drugged and kidnapped me, because my first memory after the fall was feeling dizzy in a room, surrounded by complete strangers who claimed to be my friends. I was so overjoyed and surprised to have something come back to me that I loudly exclaimed this revelation in the half full hospital waiting room. The first thing I remembered of my best friend was snow, because of a road trip we’d taken together the previous year. The next fragment about him was barbeques (he enjoyed getting people together for one in the Summer), and the next bit was Lord of the Rings. At first, it felt like I was receiving loose, disparate fragments about a person, but over time, it began to feel more like I was filling in the final pieces in a mostly complete jigsaw. But then, that’s not far from how it feels to be close friends about a person, and to discover new facts about them, despite having known them for years.
Nowadays, when I have that feeling of a long forgotten memory returning to me, I’m unsure of whether it’s another fragment returning to me post amnesia, or if it’s just the regular kind of remembering stuff. It’s been around 6 years since the accident, so I have a heckton of new memories on top of that. A few years ago, I had that peculiar feeling of a memory returning, and I assumed that it was another amnesia thing returning, but then I realised that this particular rediscovered fragment happened after the accident, so this was just normal, run of the mill forgetting. That was jarring to realise that memory has always been fallible like this. Whilst yes, complete retrograde amnesia is a super rare experience, nothing had really changed.
Memories are always slippery things. I’ve read neuroscience research that suggests that when we remember a thing, we’re sort of rewriting the memory. It’s like if every time you checked out a book from the library, you weren’t allowed to return that specific book, but instead had to write out the book and return a new copy of the same book. Even if you try hard to be accurate, there’s inevitably going to be some errors in transcription (just look at transcription errors in manuscripts before the invention of the printing press). This means that the more you check out a particular book, the more likely it is to be changed. Trippy stuff, huh? That’s what I mean when I say that nothing had really changed. The amnesia made me feel unstable because I didn’t have my memories to rely on to build my sense of reality, but memories will always be fallible. We like to pretend they’re not, but everything we perceive is filtered through our own subjective filters, and then each time we reflect on our recollections, we pass those memories through the filter again. Even before my amnesia, my memories were not an accurate reflection of reality — that’s just a lie that makes us feel more at ease with the inherent instability of our own perceptions and experiences. That fact was brought to my attention in a rather abrupt way, but it’s one of the reasons I’m oddly glad for this absurd experience. It was certainly philosophically interesting.
I could talk forever on this topic, because it was a hell of a ride, but I’ll stop here, because this comment is long enough already. I’m open to answering any questions that y’all want to throw at me though, because God knows there aren’t many people with an experience like this. You don’t have to worry about being overly intrusive or about upsetting me, though be aware that I might not get round to answering your questions.
- Comment on Why are fruits and berries healthy, even though they are mostly just sugar? 1 week ago:
People have spoken a lot about how digestible the sugars are, but in terms of overall healthiness, the fibre is an important component even beyond its impact on sugar absorption. Many people do not get enough fibre in their diets.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
It does look pretty comfortable
- Comment on 1 week ago:
Gosh, that’s… a lot.
“When I was an alcoholic” I hope that the “was” in your comment means that you’re in a better place now. I also hope your best friend is still your friend and/or that he didn’t end up ruining his life (or that he was able to rebuild a half decent life from the wreckage of his mistakes)
- Comment on Meh, I'm more of an Aragorn fan... 1 week ago:
Did you show this image to your girlfriend and ask her if she got the joke, only for her to give you this oblique reply? If so, that’s hilarious
- Comment on Winner winner! 2 weeks ago:
Same. At least we won one game today.
- Comment on Tesla Is Sued by Family Who Says Faulty Doors Led to Daughter’s Death 2 weeks ago:
A sad testament to the fact that safety regulations are written in blood. Even before tragedies like this occurred, there were people saying that this would be inevitable with how difficult it is to access the manual door releases.
It’s fucking disgraceful that this happened
- Comment on Being a dude sucks 2 weeks ago:
This is just anecdata, but something that I find really funny is that of all the lesbian couples in which there appears to be a butch and a femme, people seem to expect that the more “masculine” of the two will be the one to dispatch spiders and other scary critters, but it always seems to be the more feminine one.
This is a sample size of 6 couples, so it’s obviously not representative, but I find it funny nonetheless
- Comment on Ah yes that's my bad 2 weeks ago:
Oh damn, you’re the moth person. I am bad at names, so I didn’t remember. I really appreciated that silly period — I have a friend who likes moths, and they were delighted at all the moth memes I was sending them.
- Comment on And the pre-peeled containers for 4x the price are a ripoff 2 weeks ago:
I saw a friend do this and I was so impressed. Although she didn’t beat the slices.
Tangentially, the bowl of pomegranate seeds was for snacking on during a movie. I found it hilarious because it felt like it was middle class popcorn (I grew up super poor, and pomegranate was one of the many foods I didn’t try until university)
- Comment on Is Star Trek Discovery that bad? 3 weeks ago:
I’ve been doing a complete rewatch of Deep Space 9, and it really underscored why I didn’t enjoy Discovery and Picard. My favourite parts of DS9 are the character driven moments, whether they’re big and dramatic, or lightweight and silly. I like that the show has enough space for that. The show has more Plot than previous Star Trek, but that Plot still serves the characters. Discovery is not nearly as bad as Picard on this front, but I still found myself wishing for more opportunity to get to know the characters.
- Comment on New "symbolic image compressor" posted in r/computerscience turns out to be AI hallucinated nonsense 3 weeks ago:
Wow, that’s super impressive. The compression is so efficient that it’s like I can see the original image in my head. Truly, we are living in the future.
- Comment on Shakes pear 3 weeks ago:
My favourite example of it is Ben Grosser’s edit of Andreeson Horowitz’s “Techno-optimist Manifesto”. It takes something gross and makes something beautiful out of it, by distilling Horowitz’s masturbatory prose into something more honest. It’s a long document, but it’s a refreshingly speedy read, what with entire pages being blacked out.
- Comment on Microsoft blocks Israel’s use of its technology in mass surveillance of Palestinians 3 weeks ago:
Mass surveillance was definitely okay with them though, as long as they could hide behind flimsy plausible deniability; I remember one of the early 972mag pieces about this that called bullshit on their claim that they have no knowledge that they are supporting mass surveillance — if military/intelligence services come to you and say “hey, we need servers to store terabytes of audio files”, then it’s bloody obvious what the point
- Comment on UK is ‘worst country in Europe’ for drug prices, says Mounjaro maker 3 weeks ago:
I’ve heard it’s gotten worse since Brexit
