I appreciate that your title makes it clear that this is an old article. Certainly it’s still relevant, but going into the article with knowledge of its age calibrates my mindset

Your comment has caused me to re-evaluate my perspective; thanks for sharing. The situation is more nuanced than I realised.

Perchance do you have autism and/or ADHD? I ask because I experience the same thing as you do, and for me, it feels like it derives from my autism/ADHD. Like, sometimes the first cue that I am severely dehydrated is that I get a headache. I get a similar thing with hunger, where I could legitimately go for multiple days without noticing I’m hungry if I don’t get reminded that food is a thing.

I really love how Technology Connections is just living his best life, being so iconically nerdy that he has masses of adoring fans, despite the topics he covers being so ostensibly dull. I remember scoffing when I first stumbled across him; I thought “a 40+ minute video on [boring stuff I didn’t care about] — who would watch that?”. I think I probably started watching it with the expectation that after a few moments my disdain would be validated, and I’d move on. As it happens, I was enchanted by the magic of “passionate nerd explains something in depth”.

This is also useful as a visual cue for “the dishwasher is finished and needs to be unloaded”. My ADHD means that visual cues like this are super helpful

I think it’s plausible that there are more people here that are neurodivergent. However, even more significant than this is a culture where neurodivergent people are more visible. At Reddit, calling someone or something autistic would usually be an insult. Here, it’s more often that we are recognising each other and existing in solidarity.

What’s the context of this photo? I.e. what were you making/processing?

Courage the Cowardly Dog is crazy

I have never had to Stop, Drop, and Roll

This isn’t really relevant to your question at all, but you reminded me of a (male) friend who is a gynecologist and married to a woman. I expected that the professional context would nullify any potential arousal towards his patients, but what I was curious about was whether this might bleed over into his personal life — i.e. did he still find his partner’s vulva arousing, or does it put him into doctor-headspace. Apparently his profession causes no problems whatsoever in his sex life, because the compartmentalisation is so strong.

He said that it feels almost like conceptual homonyms. For example, in the sentence “up past the river bank is the bank where I deposited my money”, the word “bank” appears twice but means two very different things. Similarly, a vulva is a vulva no matter the context, but the meaning of it differs so much depending on the context that his brain literally doesn’t parse them as being the same.

Like I say, it’s not related to your question, but I thought you might find it cool nonetheless. I would expect that firefighters would show a similar ability to compartmentalise, but perhaps the high-stress context of smelling human flesh may cause it to work differently.

I think that’s okay, because that just means your answer is something like “take some time to breathe and introspect about what I care about when I am given the space to care about stuff”, or “try out a bunch of stuff I didn’t have time or money for before, to see what seizes my passions”.

I mean, it’s not okay — it’s a fucking injustice that so many of us are deprived of the opportunity to explore what we would do if we were free to live as we chose, but it’s okay in the sense that it’s not your fault, in case that’s what you were feeling

I’m not at home at the moment, but I actually have this small one to hand. These three photos are the same tesselation, just viewed [from the front/from behind/backlit]

front back backlit

Yeah, Volition is usually the one telling me not to kill myself

I share this view. Someone elsewhere on the thread said that the best covers are ones that recontextualise the original, and this song/cover feels like the perfect example of it. I just can’t directly compare the original to the cover because they’re going for such different things

Oh, I love this version of Bad Guy.

Your playlist sounds fun, would you be willing to share a link?

I have a bunch of origami tesselations stuck on my window. They’re made with translucent paper (similar texture to tracing paper, but lighter), so they catch the light beautifully

I was telling a friend about him the other day. She said she found it odd how it seems like he became a martyr for his ideals, in that the way that he is remembered is almost like he’s a mythological figure, more ideal than man. I agreed with her that the loss of humanity due to such a high profile death is tragic, but that it wasn’t the internet who turned him into a martyr, but the FBI (and whoever else was pushing for his prosecution).

They threw the book at Aaron Schwartz because they wanted to set a precedent. They wanted to turn him into a symbol, and that led to his death. I’m proud of how the internet rallied around him and made him into a different kind of symbol, but like you, I feel sad to think about what could have been if he hadn’t been killed (I know that he died by suicide, but saying that he “died” felt too passive). It sucks that he’s just a part of history now.

A huge aspect of this also is that it disproportionately benefits academics and students in parts of the world where there is less institutional access to journal subscriptions. That is to say that SciHub has been a significant force for democratising knowledge and countering historic inequities.

“I’ve now had multiple bosses try to court me to return after I’ve left roles”

Describing them as courting you is an excellent use of the word

I had a girlfriend who had the inverse of your problem — her feet were far too large for shoes aimed at women. She ended up becoming friends with a bunch of drag queens, and finding that the specialist store they got their shoes from was the best place for her