PERFECTION

The Atlantic

Scolding Beachgoers Isn’t Helping

People complain that going to the shore is a careless act during a pandemic, but the science so far suggests otherwise.

I strongly recommend the entire article.

there’s a thing that happens in internet apology discourse that i want to address.

‘when someone calls you out, it is your job to immediately apologize. do not defend yourself, apologize.’

this is a reaction to people who say racist/sexist/transphobic/classist/misogynist/etc things, and then instead of examining what they’ve said and trying to take a lesson in self-awareness and humility, get defensive and resort to tone-policing, gaslighting, derailing, good old-fashioned patronizing, or any of a number of other possible rhetorical postures designed to make the injured party sit down and shut up. to that degree, encouraging self-examination as a first instinct is important.

and how this works depends a lot on who receives this discourse, it really does.

HOWEVER.

i see ‘shut up and apologize’ being used as a general, universal rule of thumb, the law of how to engage with being called out.

and i believe that it is also wrong to encourage people to assume that because someone on the internet has told them they are wrong, they must necessarily be wrong, must necessarily owe an apology. it is wrong to preach ‘shut up and apologize’ because call-out culture can very easily function as a form of bullying: by adopting an ostensibly righteous political position and using the terms of what passes for ‘social justice’ discourse, one person can easily set themselves up as an authority in a way that does not give their interlocutor any room to maneuver. the caller-out might be wrong. ‘shut up and apologize’ dismisses that possibility.

'shut up and apologize’ discourages active, continuous critique. kneejerk political correctness stands against engaged thought.

but above all it enables the accuser to disregard their own blindspots. the accuser needn’t be a careful reader. the accuser needn’t consider the multiple axes of power and meaning at work in a given statement.

'shut up’ might be a good first step. do not react immediately. sit with your discomfort for a while. ask yourself why it is uncomfortable. what specifically is this person reacting to in what you’ve said? disregard their tone for just a minute, and ask yourself what the content of what they’ve said conveys about what you might not know or understand, what experiences might not be available to you. take that time for thought, because thought takes time, and because you owe yourself the opportunity to learn something.

but don’t apologize as a first instinct. even if an apology is due (and admittedly, it’s not unlikely that an apology is due), it only matters if you know what you’re apologizing for. i often find myself saying to people, ‘i don’t want you to apologize, i want you to think about this. i want you to not do it again.’ i don’t care about the apology. i care about the thought, the learning.

and it is possible that you do not owe an apology. it is possible that you are being bullied by a call-out artist who is using the framework of ‘social justice’ to leverage some authority for themself. it is possible that they are being just as thoughtless as they are accusing you of being.

accusation and apology are shitty tools for a rhetoric of justice. ‘shut up and apologize’ does not look to me like a path to liberation.

Skinsuit mindset, or how Buddhism gets pwned too

1. Identify a respected institution. 2. kill it. 3. gut it. 4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.

-@iowahawkblog

(The full tweet in question adds #lefties, but I’ve increasingly come to feel that the left wasn’t the monster itself, just the most prominent suit worn by the Skinsuit Monster at the time.)

Today’s case of skinsuiting comes to us courtesy of the MIT Technology Review, which posted this dumb tweet:

Originally I was just going to share it with my friends on ephemeral media and have a small chuckle about how this was omnicide-bait and MIT Technology Review really should have thought out their phrasing better. No man, no problem, as Rybakov put it. (often attributed to Stalin)

Then I read the full article, “What Buddhism can do for AI ethics”, and had a feeling of [screaming internally] before falling into cynicism. It’s not just the twit who tweeted omnicide-bait. The full article repeatedly tees up the case for omnicide and hardly seems to notice.

Buddhism proposes a way of thinking about ethics based on the assumption that all sentient beings want to avoid pain. Thus, the Buddha teaches that an action is good if it leads to freedom from suffering.

The Buddha also taught a way of thinking about how best for everyone to die and stay dead (not reincarnate), because all life on Earth would inevitably involve suffering. A substantial chunk of Buddhist meditation is oriented to becoming a zombie of sorts: walking dead, not feeling suffering because you’re not feeling life. If you gave an archetypal Buddhist a lasting killswitch for Earth, he’d press it. I contend this would be an important subject to cover in an article on AI ethics – if you gave a fuck about Buddhist teachings rather than being a monster wearing Buddhism as a skinsuit, doubly so when you’re halfway to making the case for the killswitch yourself.

Keep reading

제딧/Jedit          -          https://twitter.com/9Jedit

I'd elect you as president

This would indeed seem to require a substantial amount of coordination on the part of other candidates

hey what if we didn’t combine dozens of unrelated political positions into two color-coded options

For anyone who wants a free pose-able human reference for drawing

The other day I came across this awesome program by accident (I don’t even remember what I was actually searching for, but on the several times I’ve looked for a program like this I’ve had no luck). It’s cool enough that I wanted to share it.

It’s called DesignDoll (website here) and it’s a program that lets you shape and pose a human figure pretty much however you want.

There’s a trial version with no expiration date that can be downloaded for free, as well as the “pro license” version priced at $79. I’ve only had the free version for two days so far, so I’m not an expert and I haven’t figured out all of the features yet, but I’ve got the basics down. The website’s tutorials are actually pretty helpful for the basics, as well. 

Here’s the page for download, which has a list of the features available in both versions.

There are three features the free version doesn’t have:

Can’t save OBJ files for export

Can’t download models and poses from Doll Atelier (a sharing site for users; note that the site is in Japanese, though)

It can’t load saved files

The third one means that if you make a pose, save it, and close the program, you can’t load that pose/modified model later. You have to start with the default model. I found that out when I tried to load a file from the day before (this is why reading is important…). Whether saving your modifications (and downloading models and poses) is worth $80 is up to you. 

But, the default model is pretty nice and honestly if all you’re looking for is a basic pose reference it should work fairly well as it is. Here’s what it looks like:

There’s a pose tag that lets you drag each joint into place and rotate body parts. The torso and waist can be twisted separately, and it seems like everything pretty much follows the range of movement it would have on an actual human.

Even the entire shoulder area is actually movable along with the joint! See, like how the scapular area of the back raises with the arm:

The morphing tag is one of the coolest features, in my opinion. It lets you pick and choose from a library of pre-set forms for the head, chest, arms, legs, etc. It has some more realistic body shapes in addition to more anime-like ones. Don’t like the options there? Mix a few to get what you want! Each option has a slider that lets you blend as much or as little as you want into the design. 

So you, too, can create beautiful things like kawaii Muscle-chan!!

The scale tag lets you mess with the proportions and connection points of different joints. This feature combined with the morphing feature not only allows more body shape variations, but it also means that you can do things like make a more digitigrade model if you want. (The feet only have an ankle joint, but for regular human poses that’s all that you really need, so whatever.)

Or you can make a weird chubby alien-like thing with giant hands and balloon tiddies if that’s more your thing.

The ability to pose hands to the extent it allows is far more than I could have hoped for from a free program. Seriously, you can change the position of each finger joint individually, as well as how spread out the fingers are from each other. Each crease on the diagram below is a point of movement, and the circles are for spread between fingers. 

And to make it a bit more convenient, there’s a library of pre-set hand poses you can pick from as well, and then change the pose from that if you like. 

In both versions, you can also import OBJ files from other places for the model to hold, like if you wanted to have them hold a sword or something.

Basically, this program is awesome and free and you should totally check it out if you want a good program for creating pose references.

And did you know that talking like a pirate derives from the dialect in a certain part of England that was a particular hotspot for, and exporter of, pirates? The “West Country” I think it’s called. In all probability you could go there and they’re still all talking like pirates

I said this long ago, but it is still true, and is posted here because you might need this knowledge.

I said it in the notes on the last post but I’m gonna say it again.

I’m married to someone with severe memory problems. Automation of household appliances & systems helps him a lot and helps me a lot because it reduces the number of things I have to keep in my brain at all times. I love doors that lock themselves, being able to schedule dog food being delivered, a thermostat I can manipulate from wherever. Beyond my little bubble it should be noted that voice controlled appliances can be really good for people with mobility concerns. Appliances that can measure and talk and remember little tasks can be such a blessing for people.

I will never forgive Amazon and Google for taking technologies that could be really helpful and weaponizing them, and fuck everybody who acts like its some kind of conspiracy theory that those devices are spying on you. You absolutely should be distrustful of those devices but just make sure you’re getting angry at the right people.