@axonsandsynapses

a) This is terrific

b) Have some more! (Most of these are traditional, a few of them are more contemporary)

c) I’ve put them all in an actual YouTube playlist, here, for your listening convenience

Oh, hey! My favorite genre! I hope you all like shanties and Irish:

English (but not shanties): Hills of Connemara - Gaelic Storm Shady Grove - Crooked Still (a good band for this sort of thing) The Elfin Knight - Kate Rusby

Shanties/shanty-style sea songs: Ring Down Below - Storm Weather Shanty Choir South Australia - The Kilkennys Barrett’s Privateers - The Real McKenzies (modern but you’d be hard-pressed to tell) Blood Red Roses - Storm Weather Shanty Choir 10,000 Miles Away - The Seadogs

Irish: Dúlamán - Anuna Nil Na La - Solas Óró Sé do Bheatha Bhaile - Seo Linn ’Si Do Mhaimeo I - Méav Ní Mhaolchatha and Mairead Nesbitt

Instrumental: The Landlord’s Walk - Blair Douglas Gravel Walk - The Rogues (WOW what a jam!) O’Sullivan’s March - (Linked is The Chieftains’ version, here’s the Boston Pops version I grew up on) Bonus Macedonian song: Sto Mi et Milo - Kitka (a great group if you’re interested in Eastern European music)

Thank you for this post. This is amazing.

It also helped me find the video for the herding call that brought all the cows to the singer. Link here.

Bellowhead do a version of The Parson’s Farewell that goes even harder than Bear’s, if that’s possible. (It is possible because Bellowhead.)

I’m glad that someone mentioned Bellowhead’s version of The Parson’s Farewell because honestly when I first watched Black Sails and heard that version I thought ‘well it’s good but it’s not as good as Bellowhead’.

I could easily disappear down a Youtube hole and never return with this subject but here’s some of mine:

Lady of the Woods - Jamie Smith’s Mabon (because this list needed more welsh folk music. Also this is a serious earworm, just to warn you now)

The Ballad of George Collins - Sam Lee (which has a delightfully weird video)

Slaves - Faustus

Cobblers Hornpipe - Eliza Carthy and the Wayward Band (I always love watching Eliza play and the way her and Saul Rose play off each other is really fun to watch)

Fair Margaret and Sweet William - Jim Moray

Marching Through the Green Grass - Lucy Ward

Child Owlet - Kathryn Roberts and Sean Lakeman (with bonus bloodthirsty video made by their daughters)

Skewball - False Lights

The Lass of Glenshee - Cara Dillon

Cold Haily Rainy Night - The Imagined Village

Silbury Hill - Phillip Henry and Hannah Martin (now known as Edgelarks)

Gentleman Jack - O’Hooley & Tidow (because the world needs more songs about Anne Lister and I love them)

Lady of the Rose/High Street Rose - Seth Lakeman (two for the price of one here as it’s a live video and he used to do this as an encore which almost killed me)

All of Bellowhead’s instrumentals are also brilliant but particularly Frog’s Legs and Dragon’s Teeth, which I exhausted myself a few times trying to dance to at gigs.

A lot of my favorites are already on here. As for those that aren’t yet:

a friend of mine told me once that Dalinar should’ve used a massive tiger’s eye stone instead of a ruby to capture Nergaoul, because then “it’s the eye of the tiger and the thrill of the fight”, and to this day that’s both the best and the worst cosmere joke i’ve ever heard

One thing that stands out to me about my current job in the private sector, relative to my previous life in academia, is that there is a lot more implicit recognition of the importance of structure for getting things done, and a lot less reliance on any individual’s supposed ability to “just do it” through an act of pure heroic will.

Like, I know that “meetings” are not a part of corporate culture that people tend to have warm feelings about – and I’ve already tasted, a few times, the unique frustration of having so many meetings about the thing I’m supposed to be doing that I have no time left to do that thing – but they have their uses, and this fact was downright wondrous to me when I first arrived.

People would talk about a potential task or project, and then – rather than acting like it’ll just happen because we’re all supposed to be Heinlein protagonists here –  they would bring in other people at the company with relevant expertise and ask them stuff, and would start blocking out an ad hoc structure for talking about the thing every week, and would ask things like “how does this stack up against the other priorities of the people who’d be working on it?”, or “what level of imposed structure is necessary to make sure this actually happens, given that people have other stuff going on?”, or "can we commit to a date when we’ll either have a minimal proof-of-concept or dismiss this as too costly for the expected benefits?”

I was like, you can just do that stuff?  You can acknowledge that some structure is necessary and helpful, and that every task trades off against other competing tasks, and then talk about the tasks as though you actually want them to get done by real humans in the real world?

Because where I came from, it wasn’t like that.  Where I came from, the only meetings that happened with any regularity were one-on-ones between a professor and a grad student or postdoc, and in those meetings the professor would talk about what they wanted to happen, and the student / postdoc would talk about what they had recently done, and the entire thing was always about the content of the project and never about process.  The process was that someone was told to do something (perhaps something specific, perhaps something vague like “look into this”), and they’d go off by themselves, and do whatever their own personal process was, and then they’d come in next time and stuff would just be done (or ought to be), and no one would talk about how this happened.

And it felt embarrassing to bring up issues of process, because it felt like an admission that you weren’t good enough, that you couldn’t “hack it,” that you hadn’t done the work (which was your own responsibility, not anyone else’s) to develop good organizational structures for your own private activity, structures so good that you could be safely approximated as this primal agent of creation, always capable of going away to your desk (or wherever you work, no one cares, out of sight out of mind) and Just Doing It.

But if you know anything about people, you know that this isn’t actually a good system for getting things done.  And you can do things a better way.  You can do things as if you really cared about the end result, and not just about your own personal virtue.

Reading this has made me rather less terrified of having just dropped out of my PhD program to go into industry.

Does this mean a baylleddin?

Probably not, unfortunately. My metabolism runs too hot for that latitude, and my girlfriend lives in the Idaho panhandle.

One thing that stands out to me about my current job in the private sector, relative to my previous life in academia, is that there is a lot more implicit recognition of the importance of structure for getting things done, and a lot less reliance on any individual’s supposed ability to “just do it” through an act of pure heroic will.

Like, I know that “meetings” are not a part of corporate culture that people tend to have warm feelings about – and I’ve already tasted, a few times, the unique frustration of having so many meetings about the thing I’m supposed to be doing that I have no time left to do that thing – but they have their uses, and this fact was downright wondrous to me when I first arrived.

People would talk about a potential task or project, and then – rather than acting like it’ll just happen because we’re all supposed to be Heinlein protagonists here –  they would bring in other people at the company with relevant expertise and ask them stuff, and would start blocking out an ad hoc structure for talking about the thing every week, and would ask things like “how does this stack up against the other priorities of the people who’d be working on it?”, or “what level of imposed structure is necessary to make sure this actually happens, given that people have other stuff going on?”, or "can we commit to a date when we’ll either have a minimal proof-of-concept or dismiss this as too costly for the expected benefits?”

I was like, you can just do that stuff?  You can acknowledge that some structure is necessary and helpful, and that every task trades off against other competing tasks, and then talk about the tasks as though you actually want them to get done by real humans in the real world?

Because where I came from, it wasn’t like that.  Where I came from, the only meetings that happened with any regularity were one-on-ones between a professor and a grad student or postdoc, and in those meetings the professor would talk about what they wanted to happen, and the student / postdoc would talk about what they had recently done, and the entire thing was always about the content of the project and never about process.  The process was that someone was told to do something (perhaps something specific, perhaps something vague like “look into this”), and they’d go off by themselves, and do whatever their own personal process was, and then they’d come in next time and stuff would just be done (or ought to be), and no one would talk about how this happened.

And it felt embarrassing to bring up issues of process, because it felt like an admission that you weren’t good enough, that you couldn’t “hack it,” that you hadn’t done the work (which was your own responsibility, not anyone else’s) to develop good organizational structures for your own private activity, structures so good that you could be safely approximated as this primal agent of creation, always capable of going away to your desk (or wherever you work, no one cares, out of sight out of mind) and Just Doing It.

But if you know anything about people, you know that this isn’t actually a good system for getting things done.  And you can do things a better way.  You can do things as if you really cared about the end result, and not just about your own personal virtue.

Reading this has made me rather less terrified of having just dropped out of my PhD program to go into industry.

I also don’t really notice my breasts. Not so much because of their size, but because I’m not inclined to think about them. Every now and then I’ll notice and be like “huh, boobs. kind of weird.” But, like, overall, pretty indifferent.

Like, I’ve seen lots of TV shows in which a guy is transformed into someone with a female body and his first reaction is to play with his breasts, which I don’t really get. Like, they’re just breasts? On your body? They’re not arousing; they just hang out there.

I wonder if any other queer or trans women have ever been particularly interested in their own breasts. I suppose it would be a convenient hobby to have so close to home. I’m just sufficiently uninterested to not remember them, most of the time.

I am indifferent to my own breasts but I am also indifferent to other people's breasts, which I understand to be unusual for gynophilics.

Oh, but as far as the actual issue of “transsexual” vs “transgender”:

Early on in my time on the trans internet, I had a very strong preference for “transsexual” over “transgender”. As far as I was concerned, people like us were defined by the fact that we wanted to transition, which would mean changing sexual characteristics such as breasts. However, there was no change of gender going on, because our gender would always be the same.

(At the time, I thought that all trans people had the same life history that I did, in that they were asking to be classified as their preferred gender since almost as early as they developed speech (2yo, in my case). I actually only learned that there were trans people who hadn’t been transkids at seventeen, and I blogged at the time about how shook I was to learn someone’s gender could just change like that.)

But then I considered “transgender” from the position of transitioning between gender roles, and that seemed to fit better. I decided that, since the desire to change one’s sexual characteristics springs from a desire to be socially reclassified into the correct role (I also didn’t realise that other people experienced body dysphoria directly, rather than just as an extension of not passing), the word “transgender” got to the root of things better than “transsexual”.

However, I still find it less aesthetic as a word. In particular, I find the shortening of ‘TG’ to be vastly less aesthetic than ‘TS’, so I continued writing ‘TS’ online until switching over to using ‘trans’ as my abbreviation. (I always hated the use of ‘trans*’, though. At one point, there was a push to say that people who didn’t use the asterisk were being offensive, because we weren’t respectful of the fact that different people might prefer to expand that term as “transgender” or “transsexual”, but I always thought an extra character there was pointless.)

Oh, I also remember when we coined “cis” and how gradual the adoption of it was, and how I still sometimes had to code switch between saying “ciswomen” in one place, “natal females” in another, and “genetic girls” (GG) elsewhere.

Also, fuck, all those signaling spirals about who had the most “realistic” set of interests/feelings/behaviours, and the fact that every week one trans lesbian would accuse another trans lesbian of being an autogynephile, get accused in turn, and then drag an entire forum into a brawl. I kept well clear of any toxic-looking threads like those, but they really soured the culture. Luckily, the femmer-than-thou social bullshit seemed to go down a lot as transition gatekeeping reduced, so I suspect it was largely a response to pressures from a cissexist society.

The early trans internet was a mess, and you kids who didn’t have to deal with it are p lucky, tbh.

The early trans internet was a mess, and you kids who didn’t have to deal with it are p lucky, tbh.

ENDORSED

diabetics can self-sufficiently manufacture their own insulin!

astigmatics can self-sufficiently grind their own eyeglasses!

artists and writers can fucking give up because they’re going to be too busy farming to do anything useful.

there are reasons why we don’t want everybody “to be self-sufficient” by working the land themselves!

“oh but we have tractors now-” no we don’t, all the people who were building tractors are self-sufficiently back in the dark ages again.

And we can solve that with everyone having iron furnaces in their backyards!  Or wait, I think the new thing is 3d printers. 

get a load of who just dissed Mao you guys!

Mao did a bunch of really shitty stuff, but for some reason “Let’s have everyone live in small self sufficient towns/villages/whatever“ is one that annoyingly keeps recurring, and not just from the left.

*Gandhi bursts through the door*

are we discussing condescending ideas about village self-sufficiency??

tbh i am also totally for small self-sufficient towns/villages/whatever

that's why we need to invent molecular assemblers

new cryptid: tumblr users who have never changed their url

I have never changed my URL or my avatar, and I don’t think I’ve ever changed my blog title either.

Me either

I’ve only changed mine once

I have changed my URL and avatar once each. (At different times; I’m not a psychopath.)

I have never changed my url. (And I am hylleddin everywhere else I don't use my real name.)

I have updated my avatar, though it's still pretty recognizably similar to my old one.

EMOJI WARFARE

First image of Elon Musk’s city on Mars (2025)

@argumate in space no one can hear you 😭

burning man is out of control

Er, does anyone else see the Mask of Yawgmoth?

Do white people have even an ounce of chill

IIRC she to “sue” (it was like a dollar) because her insurance wouldn’t pay for the cost of the hospital stuff until there was a law suit to address damages. Hence her smiling like it’s a goofy thing.

Oh well jeez. >:/ MEDIA RAGE

Yeah, it emerged afterwards that this was a lawsuit to try to trigger a homeowner’s insurance claim to cover medical bills, and that Connell remains on perfectly good terms with her nephew with no actual stress or tension within the family.

Yeah, this is a case of someone getting fucked over by health insurance and using their own loophole against them.

The media loves this narrative of people filing “ridiculous” lawsuits but actually MOST of those stories are distorted bullshit.

Wow, I never knew the full context of the story. I just heard it vaguely on Buzzfeed or wherever and thought “Wow, what a bitch.”

‘Frivolous lawsuits’ are a myth invented by unethical corporations to discredit the consumers and laborers they’ve screwed over.

See also: The McDonald’s coffee story, which corporate lawyers managed to spin as the ‘frivolous lawsuit’, but was actually about systemically unsafe practices, a history of harm to dozens of people, and some truly horrific burn injuries. 

@marcusseldon

Bioethicists oppose life-extension research because dying is good, actually. In general, bioethics can be summed up as “deliberately diverging from the status-quo of current human genetics is morally wrong”.

Is this actually true though? Bioethics is a topic, not a set of views. I always took bioethicists to just be applied ethicists who focus on biotech and medical issues.

It’s certainly possible to disagree with the consensus within a field to a degree sufficient that one has cause to feel the work done in the field in general is mostly invalid. Think of, say, how a lot of Marxists think of modern neoclassical economics.

How consistently bioethics is as described, I couldn’t really say. I’ve definitely read some bioethicists who’ve made me roll my eyes, but I don’t have anything like a holistic view of the field.

Ozy has a brief review of a bioethics anthology here, which is basically "good at informed consent and confedentiality, bad at basically everything else.

Personally I ignore any bioethicists that say 'dignity of life' with a straight face.

I feel claustrophobic in forests, specifically forests where I can’t see more than ~40 meters out, and where if I walk ~40 meters out, I still can’t see more than ~40 meters out. That, combined with the difficulty of finding the sun (the canopy covers a lot, and forests also often have clouds because they’re humid) make them disorienting, and I feel like I’m in some kind of psychological death trap.

I can do open woodlands and savanna, especially if there’s some relief, since then it’s possible to go to an overlook and see far. I just need to be able to see the sky and the distance.

I grew up in the Flint Hills in Kansas, which before European settlement were covered in tallgrass prairie (albeit more scrubby than classic tallgrass prairies, since the hills made it rocky and drained moisture from hilltops). While forests have been sprouting there due to fire suppression and whatever mysterious factor is driving woody encroachment worldwide, the forests don’t have thick canopies. And I spent a lot of time in the areas of prairie that remain (on reserves and in the country, where ranchers preserve some semblance of prairie for their cattle).

My manager’s boyfriend, who grew up on a ranch in Montana, apparently also feels uncomfortable in forests. I wonder if an aversion to forests is common to people who grow up in steppes, savannas, and scrublands.

Anecdatum: I grew up in scrubland/farmland (outskirts of Blackfoot Idaho), but I quite like forests.

Er, additional anecdatum, my girlfriend also grew up in scrub/farmland, and dislikes places with too much green.

I feel claustrophobic in forests, specifically forests where I can’t see more than ~40 meters out, and where if I walk ~40 meters out, I still can’t see more than ~40 meters out. That, combined with the difficulty of finding the sun (the canopy covers a lot, and forests also often have clouds because they’re humid) make them disorienting, and I feel like I’m in some kind of psychological death trap.

I can do open woodlands and savanna, especially if there’s some relief, since then it’s possible to go to an overlook and see far. I just need to be able to see the sky and the distance.

I grew up in the Flint Hills in Kansas, which before European settlement were covered in tallgrass prairie (albeit more scrubby than classic tallgrass prairies, since the hills made it rocky and drained moisture from hilltops). While forests have been sprouting there due to fire suppression and whatever mysterious factor is driving woody encroachment worldwide, the forests don’t have thick canopies. And I spent a lot of time in the areas of prairie that remain (on reserves and in the country, where ranchers preserve some semblance of prairie for their cattle).

My manager’s boyfriend, who grew up on a ranch in Montana, apparently also feels uncomfortable in forests. I wonder if an aversion to forests is common to people who grow up in steppes, savannas, and scrublands.

Anecdatum: I grew up in scrubland/farmland (outskirts of Blackfoot Idaho), but I quite like forests.

the three kinds of autistic/autism-adjacent people:

- literally could not give less of a fuck about aesthetics when it comes to clothes, appliance design, etc. all that matters is function, practicality, and comfort

- aesthetics are SO IMPORTANT and possibly tied up with sensory bullshit and/or special interests; will spend huge amounts of time and energy getting something Just Right, or even dedicate their life to pursuing a certain aesthetic sensibility to the point that it becomes almost performance art

- aesthetics are super important, but also they’re really lazy, so you end up with the sort of person who doesn’t like it when other people wear sweatpants out in public but has been living in the same pair of paint-stained jeans for a week; loves looking at pictures of colorful, pleasingly organized hipster apartments, but “cleans up” mostly by just arranging the stuff all over their floor into stacks instead of letting it stay spread out and intermingling. most likely to loudly insist that they have a SYSTEM, dammit! if anyone tries to help them out in that department. deffo the most likely to become a hoarder

I’m type one and the other types bother me on a deep level

I am also type one. I wish neat shaved heads were more of a rationalist thing, but bad optics i guess.

Re: Type 3

i feel called out

I tried to make a sexual identity generator but it’s glitchy and I’m not sure how to fix it.

I got “topheavy cishet”

Parallel parking bisexual

“foxy”

normal gay ghost

like all generators, i hit it a couple of times but I stopped when i got “swamp witch bisexual”

first try: “monstrous fanfic writer“

I cackled so loud that @luminousalicorn looked over and asked what I was doing, so I explained, and she blinked and said, “Fair cop!”

“Ill-begotten cosmonaut”

"subversive detective"

man i wish

collapsedsquid

Yeah, some of the more hard-line Objectivists would probably fall into that category. That said, they don’t seem all that numerically prominent compared to atheists/misotheists (Athar), transhumanists (Godsmen), practitioners of softer libertarianism/anarchism/classical liberalism (Indeps), or weirdos who want to have cat ears, a shark fin, and experience of being seventeen different sexes sequentially and perhaps eventually simultaneously (Sensates).

I don’t quite get Godsmen as transhumanists, I always saw them as Totally Not Christians. Sensates are who I’d call the transhumanists.

Oh wait, I was mixing up the Godsmen with a different sect. (Can't find what that other one was, though)

Also now that I'm rereading the lore, I notice I have veered heavily Bleaker in the past few years.

collapsedsquid

Yeah, some of the more hard-line Objectivists would probably fall into that category. That said, they don’t seem all that numerically prominent compared to atheists/misotheists (Athar), transhumanists (Godsmen), practitioners of softer libertarianism/anarchism/classical liberalism (Indeps), or weirdos who want to have cat ears, a shark fin, and experience of being seventeen different sexes sequentially and perhaps eventually simultaneously (Sensates).

I don't quite get Godsmen as transhumanists, I always saw them as Totally Not Christians. Sensates are who I'd call the transhumanists.

In math there’s a thing called an “open” set (list of points that does not contain its own boundary) and a “closed” set, (the part of the plane that is not the set is open) but it turns out this is a terrible definition for “closed” because something can be both closed and open. So rather than re-name it to “complement open” or redefine “closed”, they just gave sets that are both the designation of “clopen” and if that’s not damning evidence that Mathematicians are just out to fuck shit up, i dont know what is.

honestly my least favorite thing about mathematics has always been trying to understand what people are writing for basically this reason. they really can’t name shit and really simple ideas end up appearing extremely confusing.

My personal philosophy when learning math is to consider my own notation and vocabulary if I’m not happy with the stuff that exists.

Both ‘open’ and 'closed’ are perfectly good terms that capture the relevant intuitions correctly! It’s just that some spaces are weirder than R!

This is *blatant* defamation.

I basically agree but R totally has clopen subsets. (R itself and the empty set)

Modern websites are the worst.

You open the link, and the first thing you see is a full screen of some color and just the name of the website in the center. You think, “Thanks so much, website, for telling me only information I already have.”

Then you scroll down a whole page worth, and then there still isn’t any content! What you get is an inspirational quote that fades into focus as you scroll. But of course your computer’s screen resolution isn’t as big as the website designer predicted, so it only reaches full focus after it is half cut-off at the top of your screen. Whatever.

You keep scrolling, hoping that eventually you’ll find an archive page so you can browse the content, or maybe an about page that explains what the site is about, but no! You are faced with only vague business-lingo bullshit for several screens worth. “Promoting synergy!” “Building a better tomorrow!” “Fostering innovation!” Now you’re feeling pretty annoyed.

You scroll more, wondering whether you’ll ever actually find any good content on this site, but now you’re faced with a bunch of headshots of people contributing to the project. You’d care more about the creators if you had any idea what they were creating, but at this point you still have no idea.

At this point you have given up hope of this website being worth anything to you directly, but you’re curious just how unhelpful it can really be. You keep scrolling, and find yourself faced with a request to subscribe to their newsletter. “Newsletter for what?”, you wonder, and keep scrolling.

But wow, there’s still more! Now you see a full screen of sponsors, lots of companies you don’t give a shit about helping out some project that does something, but you have no idea what.

Finally, you get to the bottom of the screen, where they have a list of links to pages on their site. At last! This is what you’ve been looking for: a way to browse thru the site’s content and find out what they are about.

None of the links look interesting, so you hit the back button and go looking somewhere else.