Happy Thanksgiving, to everyone who celebrates it! And a very merry Thursday to everyone who doesn’t.
Because I haven’t provided a health update in a while (outside of the comments) I just wanted to reassure everyone that I am still here, and still trying to sort through a bunch of medical issues with the help of assorted doctors, some very competent and others not so much.
The issues I’m facing aren’t lifethreatening, but they are still debilitating enough to keep me from regular posting here. Sorry to be so vague; I’ll offer more details once some of these issues are sorted out a bit more. I’ll return to posting as soon as I am able but I cannot predict when that will be.
I appreciate everyone’s patience and continued support. Thanks!
@Brony
Much to consider here, thank you for the long reply! 🙂
Just an acknowlegement first:
Don’t need to imagine that, mine is stuck in the on position both from my inherent natures and usual environment. It gets rather tiring, to say the least. It does, however, have it’s benefits. I’m usually too tired to dream – that helps a lot. 😛
I have a couple of rules of people (they’ve held constant over 3 continents and 50 years) that might help you, or give you food for thought at least:
1/ Everyone breaks. Theres no shame in it, it’s just how it is.
2/ Everyone has a price. It may be incredibly high, but it’s there except for the next rule.
3/ Everyone has something they’ll defend until death. This is usually a personal secret, not an abstract ideal.
4/ Find a person’s real dealbreaker in terms of social interactions and you find the one thing they are incapable of doing themselves.
Now, specifics 🙂 :
It has a significant effect
This one is tricky, because people. Everyone is different, and everyone reacts differently. However, the three main tells for overload in my experience are:
Withdrawl: Probably the most common response and by far the hardest to recognise since other things can mimic this. It can mean actual withdrawal from the situation, or, more commonly, evasion of a situation by substituting another more benign action in it’s place. In my world, cooking seems to be the most popular displacement activity (edible food being a major obsession of most of my collegues).
Increased aggression: This one is also common. Slightly more obvious, since aggression is by it’s nature more obvious. However, it’s perfectly normal and natural to become more aggressive when the same stimulus/situation happens over and over again (see troll responses here for a fine example!). I think the best indicator I’ve found that the aggression increase is due to overload rather than irritation is that the person feeling it starts to see ugliness everywhere.
Offsetting: This one can be actively dangerous. The person creates an alt personality to deal with the stress. Not an alt persona, that’s common in all walks of life, but a fully fledged personality. Happens maybe 1 time in 10000 (at a guess – it is rare) and never without the seed of the other personality already being present, but it’s there to be wary of.
All three you can spot before they become problems. However, that does require you knowing the person well, talking to them constantly (and about small shit too, not just the job) and them being self aware and honest enough not to hide them. That last step is a doozy!
Again, there’s a few tells. The biggest is they don’t get mad. Irritated, yes, but they don’t get actually angry. Their belief is so strong that attcking it is like a kitten attacking an elephant – more amusing than anything else.
Include self blackmail in this.
Salud!
There should definitely be a limit on how many jumps can go after the halfway point. The backloading just looks hideous to me.
I also think the mandatory deduction for a fall should be something like 5 points instead of 1 point. It’s ridiculous that the deduction for a fall is the same as in gymnastics when the overall point totals in a skating program are 4 or 5 times higher than the overall points in a gymnastics set.
I tend to think the artistry of the Russians is overrated by judges. They were superior once upon a time, but these days I feel like in both skating and gymnastics arm waving and pantomime have become a crutch to fake artistry when it’s not there. With the exception of Anna Pogorilaya, I get kind of bored with the Russians. I enjoy watching Carolina Kostner, Wakaba Higuchi, Ashley Wagner and Caitlin Osmond more than I do Zagitiva or Medvedeva. That could just a personal preference though.
@Mish
Not at all! Informative, not in the least bit squelchy 🙂
(totally unrelated thought:
Figure skating – never my thing EXCEPT for the amazing wonderful Duchesnay siblings who maybe broke the mould.)
Wow. Good for John Oliver: Dustin Hoffman confronted over abuse allegations by John Oliver at public Q&A. He wasn’t prepared to let Hoffman weasel out:
waaaayyyyyy… off-topic, here’s a “portable” computer, 1950’s style….
@Surplus
That was the most epic takedown of CTV that I’ve ever seen. Perhaps it’s my rose-tinted nostalgia glasses, but I miss the old kitchy days of CFTO World Beat News at 6PM with Tom Gibney and I want to say Christine Bentley but I can’t remember exactly….
This is still probably one of my favourite Air Farce sketches ever:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3nIqnswryI
“Aw who cares, Dale?” is still a line I find myself using IRL. 😛
So, uh, is David still alive?
@Mish
I’m a little gobsmacked that they actually did that. I’m getting shades of Shirley Sherrod here. Either that or Andy Lack really wanted to get rid of Seder and finally had an excuse. I think it’s going to backfire on them though… far too many of us know how awful Cernovich is.
RE: Figure Skating:
So… who else here has seen Yuri On Ice? (Actually, I think someone posted an image from it here some time back, so the answer is ‘at least somebody’.) It’s an anime about male figure skating, obviously done by people who love the sport, and the skating scenes are very well done. One reviewer joked that it should have been called ‘Yaoi On Fire’, though it never got too blatant. (The most egotistical asshole skater was actually the Canadian.)
I’m old enough to remember when Toller Cranston was big in the figure skating scene.
And people have been complaining about NBC’s Olympic coverage for DECADES. Most of the people I know who had the option watched the Canadian coverage rather than the American coverage in order to find out what was actually happening. And that’s not even getting into things like them rearranging the opening ceremonies in the re-broadcast from Beijing. (The Olympic opening ceremonies always have the teams enter in alphabetical order, based on the ordering in the native language of the host country. Germany/Deutschland/Allemagne gets moved around a lot. When re-showing the opening ceremonies during North American waking hours, NBC decided to re-cut everything to put them entering in alphabetical order in English, despite the fact that this resulted in some of the early teams entering to an obviously already-full field and other later teams entering to a nearly-empty field.)
Well. This is indeed a long read, but it’s an interesting look at how politics and the MRA/incel movement overlap.
https://longreads.com/2017/12/05/the-consent-of-the-ungoverned/amp/
Personally, I love the Russian style of figure skating. They consider figure skating to be as much an art as a sport. From a young age, Russian skaters cross-train in ballet, which results in beautiful lines, edge control, and musical interpretation. There’s a depth to it that’s hard to verbalize. My all-time favorites were Aleksandr Abt and the Mishin boys (Urmanov, Yagudin, Pluschenko).
Some choreographers don’t work well within that tradition, and end up creating fake “artistic” programs with distracting hand-waving and arm movements that looked tacked on. Quite a few former Soviet bloc skaters fell victim to that when they moved to the US and turned pro.
Maybe it’s just an apples-and-oranges cultural difference, but having competed at figure skating myself, and experienced how much mental bandwidth it takes simply to stay upright and not fuck up the program, it gave me an enormous appreciation for the little details and the exquisite body control Russians bring to their programs.
I also enjoy the ridiculous, flamboyant costumes, though I know that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. There’s definitely a lot to criticize about the fashion aspect. It’s a discipline that can’t decide if it’s a sport or a performance.
On one hand, it’s quite an early holiday present seeing just how the alt-right misogynists will go dragging Lauren S and Tara Mc for being hypocrites but on the other hand.. women still have to combat the notion that we’re people, not incubators that should kneel over and die once we hit 30. Ugh.
I wonder how many more “anti-feminist” faces will be the target of the altright’s bullying campaign. They’re all terrible however this was bound to happen that they’ll start eating each other out of their own vitriol.
Hi
I’m de lurking and derailing yhe thread but I thought you might be able to help with this.
I found out yesterday that in the UK pharmists need extra training to provide the morning after pill for free.
Do you know which official body complain to? (My mp is pushing for a soft brexit right now so I think other requests will be on the back burner )
Please ignore spelling mistakes
@ Victorius; from the linked long read
love it!
I loved that line, too, Weird! 🙂
.
Ok now I feel weirdly accomplished and rebellious to think that I’ve never incubated anything beyond a few viruses, and that at the end of this week I’ll be starting my fourteenth year of refusing to keel over and die (flails arms like Kermit the Frog).
Buttercup,
To me, it seems like over the past two quads the Russian women while they are well trained, are just going through the motions. I think it’s mostly because it takes time to learn to really perform and feel the music and connect with the audience and the Russian program churns out teenage phenom after teenage phenom who with the exception of Evgenia Medvedeva don’t stick around at the top of the program for more than two years. They just burn them out so fast. I mean, they’re doing what it takes to win medals so I guess I can’t blame them, but it’s just not as nice to watch IMHO.
re: Consent of the (Un)Governed, the “long read” that Victorius Parasol linked…
In an article linked by Penny, Caitlin Johnstone muses “Allowing #MeToo To Go Viral Is The Biggest Mistake The Establishment Ever Made”. While I hope this is correct, my biggest fear is that the said establishment, buoyed by the rise of the political fundamentalism that put a misogynistic, bigoted dumpster fire in the white house, will be able to simply say “who gives a shit”, coerce, constrain, and compel compliance until the movement runs out of steam… and continue business as usual.
This cannot be allowed to happen, though I’m stumped to know how to stop it. I’m old, and even with half a century of social conscience struggle, the only thing I’ve found to be effective in bringing about change is “keep on keeping on”.
The response of fundamentalism (both political and xian) in Alabama to “#metoo” is to elect a child molester to the senate… under the guise of the molester being “an instrument of god’s will”. I’m of the opinion that the fundamentalists desperately need a better class of “flawed vessel”.
All of ’em, eventually. No one can survive publicly declaring that there is any room for… … what? For anything other than virulent, blind raging hatred. To be accepted by the alt-right, your public persona must be an unending “two-minutes’-hate”. Witness how they began to rage against even the god-king trump when they thought for just the tiniest moment that he wasn’t being anti-everything enough.
OT, but I need English language advice.
I’m trying to describe in a concise science-y sounding manner that we had plants in pots arranged vertically (from top down pots A-B-C-D-E-F) so that pot A would drain excess water (“drainage”?) into C and C into E, pot B into D and D into F. Here the groups A-C-E and B-D-F are effectively separated when it comes to water flow.
I’m calling these two groups “parallel drainage systems”, if that sounds both science-y and easy to understand to random English speakers around the world.
How about “drainage lines”? Or “drainage series”? Other ideas?
Parallel flow systems? Sounds more sciency. 😛
Vertical drainage recapture?
“Toller Cranston”…
http://e.lvme.me/kdzw08x.jpg
Speaking of Russia and the Olympics, guess which country got banned.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/05/sports/olympics/ioc-russia-winter-olympics.html
I’m completely clueless when it comes to the Olympics and the politics related to this in general. How much of a “fuck you” is this to Russia?
… and the trumpling russopliles will decry the “political correctness” that is ruining our society… out of one side of their pie-holes, while insisting that “it never happened” out of the other side.
‘cuz putin is really the trumpkin they love best… or is it the other way ’round?