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apollo

@the-homo-romantic

e/em//they/them • queer 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️ • un chico gatito • gay space communism enthusiast and wannabe art student • profile photo from 'Waking' by Gilbert & George
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that post calling ppl "mentally slow" for using chatgpt was v weird. while i think u should be learning & not getting chatgpt to write ur papers (tbh it's not even good at writing papers), i get that school is v demanding, esp when u have disabilities and/or a lot else going on. here's a couple tools to help take off some mental burdens of studying:

goblin.tools -> excellent site full of tools

  • magic to-do: AI breakdown of tasks into sub-steps
  • formalizer: in the name! changes text to formal language
  • judge: can tell u about the tone/subtext of ur writing
  • estimator: judges the length of a task for u
  • compiler: turns a braindump into a to-do list

researchrabbit: input a source u have already found to create connection webs (through citations) to other literatures -> ensures higher relevance in the sources u find vs digging thru ProQuest or JSTOR for hours

connectedpapers: same function as above, however it's limited to only 2 free articles

in case the hyperlinks break, direct links are below the cut

Apologies for the format and need to zoom, but I thought this response was wonderful

Image is a picture of page 42 from The Sunday Times in the UK (undated). The page is called Style Voice, and the segment is called Dear Dolly, subtitled: “your love, life and friendship dilemmas answered by Dolly Alderton.” At the bottom of the page, there is a note that says “To get your life dilemma answered by Dolly, email or send a voice note to deardolly@sundaytimes.co.uk or DM @theststyle.

Text of the segment reads:

[submission]

Dear Dolly,

I was already a little overweight, but things spiralled during lockdown. As a home-schooling, working-from-home single parent to two children, there was little time for contemplative yoga or solo mini-marathons around the park. After contracting the virus (it dragged on and on) and then not being able to leave our tiny flat much due to the lockdown, the only excitement of the day seemed to be a gin and tonic at 6pm, rounds of Netflix and peanut butter on toast.

I eat when I’m stressed and when I’m bored, and I was very stressed and very bored. And now the buttons are popping off my jeans. My clothes don’t fit, I don’t want to spend a fortune buying pretty new things in “L” when I have to get back to “M.” And how will I ever feel glamorous and attractive again after piling on the pounds and covering my face with a mask? Please help. I don’t want to be single for ever.

[response]

As I read your letter, the first thing I thought was what a challenging time you’ve been through in the past six months. You’ve had to educate, entertain and care for not one but two young children, all day, every day, without the help of a partner, while being mostly confined indoors in a tiny living space. You contracted an illness that was largely unknown and potentially debilitating. All this happened during a time when you couldn’t see friends or extended family, or go to the pub, or go away, or go anywhere for that matter. I want you to read that back and acknowledge what a difficult set of circumstances you’ve been living through recently.

With that in mind, I’m going to present you with a possibility: you haven’t overindulged at all. You haven’t eaten too much, you haven’t messed up a routine. You have been giving yourself exactly what you’ve needed in a time of immense stress – you have been in complete communion with your mind and body. You’ve allowed yourself the gentle anesthesia of a cold gin and tonic after a long day with kids, and restful nights with a comforting and familiar food as you prepare for the following morning. You’ve used your few spare hours to recuperate, instead of flinging yourself around your small flat in front of a YouTube exercise video or making complicated kale salads. All of this makes complete sense. You have not made any mistakes.

A clever thing the diet industry did to the collective consciousness is attach morals to eating: certain foods are bad (peanut butter on toast), certain ways of eating are bad (in front of Netflix). And if we are to believe the fallacy of “you are what you eat,” every time we put food in our mouths, we give ourselves permission to rate our morality. But our chosen meals aren’t proof of our goodness or badness. Deprivation or hyper-control doesn’t equate to health and virtue, appetite isn’t something feral and dangerous to be disciplined. Food is an inanimate object that we can use as we like – to nourish, energize or comfort. How we eat will always be in flux depending on our circumstances, whether that be emotional or physical.

I think the best thing you can do is acquaint yourself with the idea of intuitive eating. It’s a seemingly simple concept that many of us have to relearn at some point in our lives. Intuitive eating is about tuning in to your body, listening to what it wants and responding compassionately. It’s about quietening the chatter you’ve been absorbing your whole life – all the contradictory rules and convoluted calorie counting – and instead focusing on the requirements of your appetite and tastes. We are all born with an innate ability to do this (you never see a toddler leaving 20 per cent of its meal on a plate because it read an article saying this is what French women do), but tragically it is a skill that is stolen from so many of us.

Because another clever thing the diet industry did was make us believe that our instincts are wrong, that if we ate what we want when we wanted it, we’d live off a mountain of éclairs, a river of Baileys and nothing else. That’s just not true. If you can find a way to eat intuitively, without any cycles of restriction and reward, your body will find its way to the weight where it is naturally most comfortable.

And if all that fails, try this: every time you go to feed yourself, imagine that you are feeding one of your children. Every time you finish a meal and you want to berate yourself for the decisions you made: imagine you are speaking to one of your children. If they came to you – tired, anxious or ill – would you give them a calorie-counted meal, or would you give them what they were craving? If they ate something that brought them joy, would you remind them afterwards that they could have eaten something that was less pleasurable but lower in fat? Would you tell them to take notice of the letter on the label in their clothes and attach a sense of self-worth to it? Would you let them believe that the letter on that label was an indicator of whether someone will fall in love with them?

The sad truth is women are conditioned to feel like physical failures if they don’t conform to an impossible specification, so the language of self-hatred is easily accessible to us. I don’t want to pretend that this propaganda isn’t incredibly powerful, and I don’t want you to feel even more self-hatred for taking it on and believing it. So, for now, try a trick instead: imagine you are your own child and care for yourself accordingly. That might be the only way you’ll allow yourself the logic and kindness you deserve.

This made me cry.

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What fabulous advice this is. Ye gads.

am i insane or should masks be mandated for hospitals as a permanent installation. a forever institution. always. covid is an irrelevant factor when hospitals are always full of both very sick and very immunocompromised people..?

You know, it occurs to me that the known internet phenomenon of Reddit “am I the asshole?” posts having completely misleading headers is actually a really great example of a far less known but far more common practice of extreme journalistic spin in cases where there are large monetary incentives to diminish the story in question.

Like, if you see a Reddit post titled “Am I the asshole for buying my wife a new dress?”, the post is pretty much always something totally deranged like: “I (48) really dislike the way my wife (20) dresses, because I think it’s too revealing and makes her look slutty, which was fine when we started dating five years ago, but it makes me feel like she’s going to cheat on me now that we’re married. I’ve politely asked her to get new clothes multiple times, and every time she refused because she said she liked her clothes, and didn’t want to waste money buying new ones. Yesterday I couldn’t take it anymore so I threw out a bunch of her old dresses and bought her a new one that was more modest looking. She started crying because one of the dresses I threw out had been left to her by her mom who died when she was a teen, but I couldn’t have known that it had sentimental value. She said that I should have asked, but obviously if I asked she’d have just told me not to throw out any of her clothes, including the ones that weren’t sentimental. Also, the more modest dress I bought was pretty expensive, and she never thanked me for it. Am I the asshole here, or is she being unreasonable?”

Similarly, whenever you see a headline like “Woman Wins Millions From McDonald’s Because Her Hot Coffee Was Too Hot”, if you dig a bit, you’ll almost always quickly find out that what actually happened was: A 79-year-old ordered coffee which, unbeknownst to her, was being served extremely dangerously hot, because McDonald’s was trying to have coffee that stayed warm over a long commute without spending any extra money on cups with better insulation. The coffee spilled on the old woman’s lap, giving her severe third degree burns over a huge portion of her body, including her genitals. She got to a hospital and they managed to save her life with skin grafting, but she became disabled from the accident, and her genitals and thighs were permanently disfigured. She tried to settle with McDonald’s for her medical costs, and McDonald’s refused to cover any portion of her medical expenses at all, and so she sued. At trial, the jury discovered that this same exact thing had happened seven hundred times before, and McDonald’s had still decided not to change their policy because paying out individual suits was cheaper than moderately reducing their coffee profits. As a result, the jury awarded punitive damages designed to penalize McDonald’s two days worth of their coffee profits, in addition to the woman’s medical costs.

I think it’s largely the same phenomenon, but I know a lot of people who are familiar with the first case, but don’t know to look for the second. If you see some totally outrageous “how could a person ever sue over this stupid thing?” case, you should immediately be incredibly suspicious that that’s all that actually happened, because a lot of the time, it absolutely isn’t. The people who have the most incentive to make their opponent look not only wrong, but completely crazy for having any sort of grievance at all, are often the actually unreasonable ones. 

Anyway this is all to say that if I see ANY of y’all automatically siding with McDonald’s over the recent case where 4-year-old girl was severely burned by their chicken nuggets because “hurr durr dumb kid didn’t know that chicken nuggets were hot, people sue over anything lol”, I will grab that McBoot you’re licking and shove it all the way up your McFuckingAss.

lawyer fun fact! sometimes you need to sue someone before your insurance will pay for your medical bills (because your insurance would rather the other person pay for your medical bills so they don’t have to)! sometimes you need to sue because what you’d get from insurance isn’t enough to pay for all of your medical bills! sometimes you want to change a specific thing, like a dangerous practice or defective part, and that’s not going to happen if you just ask nicely!

most truly ridiculous lawsuits get screened before they’re even filed (because someone goes to an attorney and that attorney is like “yeah you don’t have a case here”) or very shortly after they’re filed (because judges can toss out cases that have zero merit). 99% of the time, if it sounds ridiculous but somehow it went all the way to someone suing and winning in a jury trial, it probably wasn’t actually as absurd as it sounds.

There should be nationwide solidarity protests for the LGBT folk in Florida.

We need to show we're united and supportive, that we aren't just leaving each other to the wolves.

I have a proposal...

June 1st. The first day of Pride. That's not to far from now.

What if we started Pride with protests in every major city and town that can plan a protest by then. With a matching boycott on everything online/offline for just that one day to match.

The feds and states get taxes on everything after all, it's not just the companies making profit.

And when you protest you need demands. You cant expect a government that historically has not protected you to just suddenly know/do what's best. And they need to be concise and focused on your specific cause.

Hypothetically speaking, what if these were our demands:

LGBT & Queer Rights Be Codified

  • ALL of the same full citizenship privileges that cishet Americans are automatically afforded by age, relationship, or birthright (ex: marriage, medical, spousal, & parental rights) - no longer 2nd class citizens.
  • Including bodily autonomy as a measure to guarantee that we can make our own medical choices & regulate what happens to our own bodies (ex: HRT, surgery, abortion)

Dissolving and barring any and all trans panic and gay panic laws.

Expand On and Codify Anti-Discrimination Laws

  • Barring discrimination against those who present or identify as any gender regardless of whether or not that aligns with their legal or physical sex
  • Religion must be explicitly defined as a non-valid cause for challenging the constitutional or federal freedoms of any specific group
  • Because of 1 & 2(below) we need a process to remove any government official when states systematically prevent citizens from challenging or removing corrupt officials that are directly challenging our freedoms.
  1. "Lower courts reasonably interpreted Supreme Court precedents as holding that unless First Amendment freedoms were targeted directly and specifically, antidiscrimination laws-promulgated at any level of government, and protecting any group-are exempt from normal constitutional limitations."
  2. Florida has no virtually no recall laws for governor

•°•°•°•

If y'all like these I can make some graphics or something for reposts (or you can make them, whatever works best)

As a fellow queer person living comfortably in a protected state I'm happy to do what I can, just lmk #solidarity

Feel free to repost, y'all.

remember, it's imperative to turn your aesthetic preferences into moral ones. you can't just dislike neutral colors, or glass-and-steel skyscrapers, or flat design, they have to be symbols of neoliberal capitalism in decay. it's incredibly important that you make sure everybody knows that the only reason anyone could like the things you don't like is that they're an empty shell of a person.

so my parents speak czech decently, but when they were learning it they were obsessed with the words hedgehog and baby jesus. both words sound similar to each other; "ježek" and "ježíšek" respectively. They used to get them mixed up in their heads all the time. but even after they eventually figured out the difference, as a joke they would still call the baby Jesus a hedgehog. and every time they saw a hedgehog, they would act like it's the most venerable thing in the world and refer to it as the blessed baby Jesus.

my dad pointing to a hedgehog: “ježíšek!!!”

my mom, absolutely fucking going along with it: “little ježíšek !!! beautiful ježíšek!!! who else is worthy of our praise??”

I'm a native czech speaker and I assure you 90% of native czech kids also mix them up and many adults continue with the joke

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Same in Poland