An open thread for everyone sick of talking about the orange monster and/or other crappy news stuff. No trolls, MRAs, etc. Yes kitty pics, capybara pics, ponies, stuff you’re reading or watching, etc.
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Time Out For Kitties: Non-Election Fun Stuff Open Thread
My FB photo is me with a bearded lizard. Thing was so cute!
(Photo is a bit old now though…)
@Numerobis: post it on Gravatar! I’ll still be the bearded dragon hiding under a rock 🙂
Oh yeah! I watched this BuzzFeed thing yesterday where two dudes went out to the Winchester Mansion, and The Island of Dolls and a haunted house in Kansas (it’s supposedly really famous, but it’s just so tame that I can’t be bothered to remember it).
They went to a priest and got some information about how the church deals with hauntings and possessions and got a water bottle blessed, and one guy got super scared, while the other was like “Lol ghosts aren’t real!” and it kind of turned into a comedy sketch with one guy being super tense and jumping at every little thing and the other guy egging him on. But the locations were a little interesting, save for the Kansas house.
The Winchester Mansion was super interesting and they discussed the reasons why Sarah Winchester would build her house that way, and the Island of Dolls was super spooky and they talked about all the spooky shit that went on there, and then there was the house in Kansas where they had some typical haunting shit go on in the 90’s. Scratching, dolls and stuffed toys being arranged into creepy circles, lights coming on when they were definitely turned off, etc.
And then. THEN. There was the bit that even made my believing-in-ghosts ass roll my eyes and go “Yeah, I’m done”.
Apparently, after the first family moved out, another family moved in. The landlord stepped in for an inspection, went down to the basement and found a pentagram on the floor, an altar, a knife, and a black robe.
For those of you wondering why my eyes rolled back so far I saw a synapse fire off, back in the 90’s there was a huge scare about satanic cults and shit. I was a wee babby, but even I remember some of the scaremongering that went on.
Here’s the video if you want to see it for yourself.
Getting back to Black Mirror; I just finished watching the new episodes today. I really, really recommend Season 3 Episode 6: Hated in the Nation. It’s about online hate and harassment and terrifying automated honeybee drones. It stars Kelly Macdonald and Faye Marsay (the Waif on Game of Thrones). It’s an hour and a half long so it’s basically like a feature film. It’s dark and disturbing of course. But it’s really good and very scary!
@Verständnis
Hiya, I’m Axe! That’s quite a breakthrough. Hugs and/or love. Hope everything works out. Welcome package on the right side of the page 🙂
Everyone is watching Black Mirror, therefore I should procrastinate until it is almost concluded as a series. :U I’m like a reverse hipster. Why am I like this? (I also have no way of watching it because my shambling computer isn’t working and I only have a phone with no virus protection.)
I made a playlist of 125+ songs that are not too disruptive so I can listen to them as I work while everyone is asleep. It’s a night time/quiet/chill work playlist. It’s mostly alternative rock, chamber music, folk, electronica and combinations of those with a touch of alternative hiphop/triphop (I’ll add more as I discover more, and I need to listen to the new Angel Haze album). I balanced slower thoughtful stuff with motivational upbeat stuff. I recommend turning on shuffle or you’re just going to get clusters of the same artist/s.
https://play.spotify.com/user/12141123916/playlist/6kZFsBfq6tJw5oTliu1h9f
I’m into playlist curation at the moment. It’s fun to collect songs that have nothing to do with each other, but still feel like they go together. You do have to set some sort of arbitrary limit or pick a theme, or else you’re just going to get a bunch of songs you like. That’s not a bad thing, it but it can cause a lot of mood whiplash.
I’ll take recommendations for this thing.
Interesting. Sad and pathetic, but interesting.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/male-contraceptive-injection-successful-trial-halted-a7384601.html
@Jesalin: yep, sad and pathetic sums that up.
I can’t believe we’re still doing ‘trials’ on this. Male contraceptive injections were a proven technology when I was a first year medical student, for chrisakes, and that was almost a decade ago.
And, good on the article for highlighting the life-threatening complications of OCP’s: a very small risk for clots, and a sizeable risk for breast cancer.
And, that’s about all I can say about it. As a geriatrician, I’m not often called on to prescribe contraception.
@Jesalin
I’m so angry right now after reading that.
@Kupo: Yes, I find it quite… frustrating myself, so I can only imagine how infuriating someone who is directly harmed by this would find it.
Here we have a perfectly valid form of male contraception, and we don’t use it. My family practice colleagues tell me it’s not even covered by insurance, and that their male young adult patients don’t even ask about it. WTF.
Do you know what my first thought was hearing about this in medical school? I was excited that my half of the population could finally do something productive about unwanted pregnancies beyond wearing condoms (which work better than the average person thinks when used correctly) and helping to pay for abortions or the morning after pill (personally, I think the dude should have to front the whole cost of both, as it’s the gal who is going to suffer the physical effects. Least he can do). As an added benefit, the formulations we learned about then were active for up to ten years, so it’s not like the men would have to remember to take a pill every day, but they’d still wear off, so the dudes could still have kids later if they wanted to. It still seems like an almost ideal contraceptive.
And it still has not materialized.
PS: I’m hoping its appropriate to use gendered terms here, as we are speaking specifically of contraception.
After reading that article (and face-palming a few times) I said to my partner, ‘Wouldn’t it be neat if, upon conception, a sympathetic psychic bond was created that would allow/cause the (soon to be) father to experience the pregnancy, every step of the way (including the water retention, morning sickness, etc), right up to experiencing the birth itself’.
Not exactly an original thought, but I needed to distract myself a bit after reading that article and we got a bit of a giggle out of my scenario.
(Particularly the thought of ‘mom’ pushing like a trooper and ‘dad’ writhing and crying due to the pain.)
@Jeselin: I just shot a text off to my residency classmates asking if any of them at academic hospitals are still looking for a research topic. This looks like research that needs to be done.
Edited: there actually is a psychiatric syndrome where the male develops all the signs of pregnancy along with the woman, right up to contractions. I don’t recall what it’s called, but it’s real. Uncommon. But real.
@joekster
That’s truly interesting, I wonder what’s behind it. I’ll have to see what I can find on it!
@Jesalin: Good luck. I’m afraid I can’t help much. All I’ve got is a passing reference in my psych courses in med school.
Don’t read the comments. It’s a bunch of men whining. I thought we lived in a gynocracy because men have no birth control and that’s not fair. But as soon as a woman author points out that women have to put up with side effects, so men can too, all of a sudden male BC is mean to men.
@joekster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Couvade_syndrome
I think I found it. Definitely interesting.
@WWTH
I started to read the comments but gave up in disgust.
@Jesalin: That’s it. FWIW, the psychologists who taught at my medical school thought it was a real syndrome, but there appears to be some controversy.
@WWTH: Comments? what comments? I don’t see any comments. At least, not any comments worth noticing /s
I can’t believe men can be such crybabies. And I am one.
Ohmigosh, that article.
I mean, the article’s fine – not surprised in any aspect of its story. Women are mysterious fey-creatures who are half-human and half-elfin, with strange and wonderous biology that are beyond the ken of man, after all. If men can create a copper coil that stops pregnancy when they jam it into one of them squishy woman-parts, it’s a miracle that it works at all and doesn’t just, I dunno, make her shriek like the banshee and turn her into a shower of twigs and autumn leaves. So women should just be grateful period, and take the side effects. But mankind is, well, it’s mankind! Precious! When you’re dealing with mankind you have to consider that each individual is an ethical actor and not just, like, a rock, or a sheep, or a woman. You can’t take the same risks. It would be immoral!
I am apparently filled with sass today.
No, the article’s about what I would expect for the medical profession and its’ male-as-default way of looking at the world. But those comments.
MRAs and their fellow travelers gabble on about how wimmens suppress male birth control, and how women are sabotaging manly-mans by chaining them down with babbies by, I dunno, poking needles in their condoms. (couldn’t possibly be that the jerk put it on wrong or something, after all. Has to be a woman’s fault).
Well, here you go, guys. They’ve been working on that injection you’ve wanted, and – oh, wait! The medical research profession put a halt on it! You know, those STEM dudes you venerate?
Give’m a day or two, it’ll be a woman’s fault again. I’m sure they’ll find a way to twist it. I believe in them.
Hey, Java’s done updating, hooray! Perfect timing.
Oh boy, those comments. Ugh. What in Katie’s name is wrong with my gender?
My favourite was the dude who insisted that “stories like this fuel the gender divide.” Apparently his view is that the gender divide is made of pixie dust, in that if you don’t talk about it then it doesn’t exist.
I would dearly love to have a male form of birth control available to me. It’d just be more convenient all around as well as providing an extra layer of security. It might have some side effects at the moment, but early versions of medication often do, and I’m happy to be a guinea pig if it means furthering the cause of science.
Can I ask everyone a question (at the end)?
It turns out that I’m still looking to change my career. This is not surprising as the current job follows a long period of unemployment and I needed something to get my resume looking better (it’s really complicated). I had hoped that mental health technician would work out but there are some pretty serious structural problems related to that. I’m 39 and the best people doing the job are in their mid 40’s and have been there for over a decade. This job will be rough on me as I age.
They tried to make me, an inexperienced person, the only permanent tech on a unit for males aged 13-17 with anger and impulse control issues. That puts me in the position of being the primary authority figure when it comes to guiding their activities and assigning consequences for actions. I can be authoritative, but learning how to properly be authoritative in that environment has no appropriate training manual. I can’t do that as a “green” tech, you have to have an experienced person for the new person to be role-modeled by. Even the pros say that it took them over a year to get comfortable with the job. So I’m looking again as I do what I can.
I’m having a terrible time taking my degrees, work experience and aptitudes and turning them into something. It’s honestly been wrecking my mental health over the last 7 years. What I am really good at is what I did in the comment here.
It’s embarrassing to say that I really really enjoy dissecting apart the communications of irrational, aggressive, impassioned people. That sort of behavior is causes problems for the people I like here and it actually gets difficult to think creatively about it. I’m constrained by what I thought I would be doing at this point in my life.
So to put it simply, what should I do with my life?
Also here is something I’ve been working on as a teaching tool. The “scroll of memory”, a kind of “conceptual work space” for representing things that may become important for other writing projects. It’s an “alpha version” thing though. I need to make sure its all working together like I think.
http://i.imgur.com/fAmbmai.jpg
I’ll have a reply for you in a little bit, Brony. Got some errands to run, but I’ll try to help!
Four university dudes are debating the patriarchy on the next table over. It’s going… well. My heart is warmed. The next generation will improve society.
My favorite was the dude who said nobody is forcing women to take hormonal BC, so how dare the author even mention side effects? Women can’t win. If we want affordable and safe birth control, we’re mooching whiners who want special treatment. But if we get pregnant and have the kid and need assistance from the government or need time off work to take care of the kids when we’re sick or need maternity leave, we’re mooching welfare queens sluts. If we get pregnant and have an abortion, we’re baby killing whores. We shouldn’t have sex unless we’re prepared to raise a baby with no help. But if women actually refused to have sex until they wanted kids, we’d never hear an end to the whining about how the mean wimmenz won’t fuck them.
@brony:
It sounds to me like what you actually enjoy doing is taking apart things that don’t work, examining them in the context of a well-structured set of rules for how they should work, and putting them back together so that they do work. You’ve chosen to do this with words and ideas, but it can be applied to anything.
Have you considered software development?
What a spectacular failure to grasp the point. No one would be forcing men to take the injection, either, if it were approved as-is.