redbeardsghost

[redbeardsghost]

Hi! I don't think anyone follows this account, but I'm moving my main usage to @by-the-grace-of . I'll be keeping this account, but not posting anything here until I have something to say about my writing.

[redbeardsghost]

I have to disagree with @jabberwockypie ‘s opening point. My child, who I am not linking because they haven’t given me permission to embarrass them with this, knew how to cook before they could talk, and as a toddler would invent new sandwiches that actually tasted good. 

Everyone else, though, yeah, they have to learn it through trial and error, no matter how many classes they take or books they read

So many people think they’re incapable of cooking but like, you absolutely can cook. Everyone can. It’s a learned skill that takes time and attempt to get better at it. “I can’t even cook eggs” buddy as simple as cooking scrambled eggs might seem if you’ve never done it before it’s got potential to get messed up. Some of us struggle with different things. “I can’t even make toast” I know you’re being funny but: if it’s too burned for your liking, turn the setting down, if not burned enough, turn it up.

You are completely capable of cooking. Don’t sell yourself short just because no one taught you or because of frustration. Cooking is an artform we can all do and you are capable of cool stuff.

[redbeardsghost]

This reminds me of a conversation I had recently with one of my children on the Autism Spectrum, who struggled with mindfulness meditation because it was always presented as following the breath, or paying attention to the breath, or call it what you want, but always coming back to the breath, and that’s not the point of mindfulness meditation.

The point is to have something, some small narrow sensation, that you can return the mind to whenever you notice that your mind has wandered. It really doesn’t matter what that sensation is. But for people on the spectrum, it kinda does, because sensitivity issues are so integral a part of the condition, and you don’t want to pick a sensation that will not play well with whatever your particular sensitivities are.

So what do I recommend? what has worked for this person, which is to stim, and then focus on the physical feeling of the stim. Your stim is something that your body knows, and is comfortable with. It doesn’t matter at all whether this means you are moving during the meditation, honest. What matters is whether there is a physical sensation you can return your mind to when you notice that your thoughts have wandered. Period. So stim away, and if anyone (rude family members or teachers) tell you to stop, tell them you are doing a mindful meditation technique. It should shut them up.

10. Mindfulness I

I remember hearing several years ago that people were getting burnt out on the overuse of the word “mindfulness”, which is super unfortunate. I hope it doesn’t have too many negative associations for you, because it’s a super practical skill!

[redbeardsghost]

OK, story time.

In a past life, when I was a freshman in high school and determined to be a different person, I went out for the wrestling team. I won most of my matches by forfeit, but if I ever got in the ring, I lost, because the lowest weight class was 98 pounds, and I weighed in at less than 70. But this story isn’t about me.

It’s about my teammate Stu. I had known Stu for years, because he lived near me, and had a brother my age. He joined the team soon after I did. Stu wrestled in the 168 pound weight class, meaning that all his competitors were within about ten pounds of him. But Stu was unique in the class, because he had MD.

He had no muscles in his legs. The year before, he had had his legs fused. His knees no longer bent, he was basically a couple of twigs from the waist down, and got around on crutches.

He would hobble into the ring, and the coach would take the crutches away, and he would balance there, waiting, while his opponent got within range, when he would just pick him up completely off the floor, turn him over, and drop him on his shoulders. He never lost. HE didn’t practice against his own weight class, when he practiced, it was against the heavyweights, who outweighed him by around a hundred pounds. The kid was strong. But opponents who didn’t know who he was would generally underestimate him because he used crutches to get onto the mat.

He is part of why I always assume that there’s a trick coming.

[redbeardsghost]

Happy Jackie Robinson Day!

There’s no baseball, obviously, but today still matters.

[redbeardsghost]

So, I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of days, (Not Magnus Archives, I’m not even sure if that’s a shoe or a podcast or what) but cringey isn’t something that you just find distasteful, and especially not something that other people like but you don’t.

Cringey is when my dad, upon hearing about struggles one of my kids is going through, says “Bless his heart.” My kids are southern. None of them has ever been outside the south longer than a few months. If you bless their hearts, you are insulting them, not showing solidarity for them, and I know it, but it doesn’t stop my dad (who lived in Texas for years) from saying it to show sympathy for them.

That’s cringey. If my kids hear it, I only hope they can keep the “OK boomer” silent, but if they don’t that wouldn’t be cringey, just appropriate.

Not gonna lie I don’t have any patience for “I see Magnus Archives everywhere, I’ve decided it’s cringey!” or “this got suddenly popular so I hate it for no reason” stuff, jokes or no.

Pals..it’s okay for things that aren’t owned by Disney to be popular without you hating it on some sort of hipster principle.  No, something that trends once a week after being small and niche for four seasons isn’t on par with Homestuck just cause your friends got into it.

And let’s not even get started on the “let’s call a series with an ace main character and largely aspec fandom cringey” train.

[redbeardsghost]

I thought this had moved on. I’m getting really damn tired of this.

[redbeardsghost]

So, I haven’t used Instacart since the strike started, but I have not seen any updates. My google-fu, which is always bad, is at historically sucky levels on this. I can find that the strike started, that the company responded with insufficient concessions and then said that the strike wasn’t affecting them in the slightest, and then, nothing. No word at all.  Is it still ongoing? is there a competing service I can use, if I don’t have a handy car or family member to grab something for me? Does anyone know? Is the world outside my window real, or am I a brain in a jar?

Checked my inbox and one of my recent emails is “Instacart’s Commitment to Safely Serving Its Community” which pretty much just lines up with the half-measures reported in the CNN article

Look not to armchair-quarterback this on main because I feel helpless and angry, but,,, as a Guilty Disabled With No Car who lives paycheck to paycheck and relies on people like Instacart shoppers for access to basic necessities, I’ve spent a lot of time reading about shoppers’ experiences and grievances so I can try to be a good customer.

This is horseshit. And it’s horseshit that customers who care about other human beings should also be getting loudly, publicly angry about.

“This new feature remembers your last tip selection and will, going forward, default to that percentage instead of another fixed amount.”

This is A) not what the strikers are asking for, and B) not going to accomplish anything. Those of us who want to tip well, and understand how to accomplish that in the Instacart app, are already doing it.

But if you’re used to systems where the default tip is around 20%, and/or if you assume Instacart is not a tipped service, and/or if navigating technology does not come naturally to you, it’s incredibly easy to overlook that little 5% default!

I cannot think of a single reason for Instacart’s stubbornness about this issue (which has been going on since long before the pandemic) that doesn’t boil down to greed, spite, willful incompetence, or a combination of the three. In my opinion based on everything I’ve read over the past few months:

they don’t want to turn off customers who might be irritated by having to spend “extra money” on mandatory tips

and/or they want to keep their shopper base broke and dependent

and/or they simply don’t want to pay for someone to upgrade the app with a more functional, straightforward tipping system.

“[…] we’ll be bringing 300,000 additional shoppers to our platform over the next three months. If you know anyone who might be looking for a flexible way to earn, please send them to [website redacted].”

In context this is pretty blatantly code for “We’ll be bringing 300,000 people to our platform who are suddenly jobless and desperate, and who don’t know or can’t afford to care about our history of mistreating employees and gig workers.”

Anyway support the strike if you can by:

1. Using other means to get your groceries until the shoppers get the very reasonable measures they are striking for.

2. If you can, reach out to any shoppers in your area to find out if you can help support them directly during this time.

3. If you must use Instacart, make sure you tip well and remember when you’re prompted to “rate your experience” that your rating affects the shopper, not the company!

4. If you’re ready to quit using this service forever (and are prepared to risk blacklisting even if the strike ends favorably), contact Instacart directly from the email address associated with your account and tell them why.

If you use a different grocery delivery service, please find out as much as you can about how they’re treating their own workers and if anything like this is going on.

And one last thing: non-shoppers, don’t get combative or preachy at shoppers who are not striking. That’s not our place. We’re all doing what we must to get by. Just don’t let the existence of non-strikers lull you into a false sense of “everything is fine and the strikers are over-reacting.” Decide for yourself.

[redbeardsghost]

Ride my bike East to see @rainingmoondrops and my brother in Georgia and anyone else I run into on the trip. Depending on weather, timing, and money I might come home by way of San Diego and LA and Vegas, or not.

my friends and I had a prison-esque “what are you gonna do when you get out” conversation about when quarantine is lifted, mine is going to this fabulous club in Boston that has salsa dancing and the best margaritas in the state, tell me yours in the tags

[redbeardsghost]

I've had this done for the flu. It sucks. They stick the swab in, spin it, and pull it out and it's miserable.

I've had the COVID test done (yesterday, I don't know the results yet). They stick the swab in, and then it has to stay there for fifteen seconds, which is longer than most of y'all are really washing your hands, and almost as long as you're supposed to be washing them, and only then can they pull it out, along with the contents of your sinuses. So yeah, you won't like the test, and you absolutely don't want to do it yourself, or risk it being messed up and have to do it again.

my entire body seized up looking at this lkjalsdfkj

[redbeardsghost]

Or if fight is your speed? Get a stress ball and throw it. Hard. I live in an apartment with units on both sides of me, but that still leaves two sides without neighbors, because I don't really want to knock their pictures off the walls. Just yeet that stress

[redbeardsghost]

So, I taught my children that whenever they need to take a risk, there are two independent factors to consider. One is the cost of trying and failing, and the other is the benefit if the gamble pays off. Using @ms-demeanor s example of home-produced insulin as an example, the potential payoff is high. I mean, insulin is ridiculously overpriced in the US, and insurance means that just getting permission to pay these ridiculous prices is sometimes impossible, and always more trouble than it should be. But as she points out, the risk is really high, if you mess up it could kill you. To me, the cost of failure is so high that, even were the chance of failure low I wouldn't risk it.

I can't judge for 3D printed respirators. I don't have enough information. But people who do have the information seem to be saying that the likelihood of success is small, the cost of getting it wrong is high. That is enough for me that I would have to be pretty desperate before I would try it, unless I had some strong countering information from extremely trusted sources.

someone just came into the xkcd chatroom trying to recruit for that open source medical equipment movement.

I have serious concerns about this because as someone with deep respect for engineering complexity, medical equipment scares the shit out of me.

I was taught to have a great deal of respect for engineering standards and regulations. I’m studying an engineering degree. I think that building codes, design standards and design theory handbooks are some of the most high value parts of engineering that serves the general public. It’s why you can trust that most buildings you go into won’t collapse on you, and why you can be sure that your prosthetic limbs won’t dig into your skin and cause an infection.

I have written about this before

When I see one of those “this person couldn’t afford a wheelchair so a high school shop class built one for them” I think about how in 8 years that person might get nerve damage. Or fall down an ADA standard ramp.

Here’s the list of standards the FDA puts out for respirators. It’s actually pretty short, but testing each one of these takes ages, and a lot of expertise. No less than four of these are specifically about body-compatible materials for use in medical equipment. That’s not to mention the ergonomic, machine-compatibility and general safety requirements.

the vast majority of 3D printers are not suitable for medical equipment. They produce materials that are not only unsanitary right out the box, but also almost impossible to sanitize. They’re frangible, made of body-unsafe materials, liable to outgas or leach into the bloodstream. They provide ample porous surface for bacterial growth. Using 3D printed parts in place of injection moulded single use plastic will only occasionally help and, if you’re dealing with people with weakened immune systems, may actively hurt and do more damage than nothing.

there are lots of places where fast hacky solutions are a good idea. If you’re trying to spring up a telecom network after a flood, throwing some routers together and putting everyone on one LAN is better than nothing.

Medicine is not like that. Large public works are not like that.

I just get mad when people are like “if this college student could make a prosthetic arm out of lego and clay, why don’t we use that for everyone” is because we used to do this and we found out it’s extremely bad for you.

<griffin mcelroy voice> The built environment is, a trust box, that I step into, and form a silent contract with whoever’s name is on the design papers.

[redbeardsghost]

Can I just say how tired I'm getting of earthquakes? In the past week or ten days, there have been as many within ten miles of me as this state usually gets in a year, and frankly it's getting old.

[redbeardsghost]

During the bush years, this was Rolling Stone, which started writing serious news stories that other news magazines wouldn't touch.

Okay but what’s even more badass about Teen Vogue is that the editor in chief is a black woman. Her name is Elaine Welteroth and she is the second black woman to hold this title within the company and is also the youngest. So expect some more ugly truths to be told with Teen Vogue because they are not fucking around. There will be no sugar coating with them, there will be no “giving trump a second chance”, the editor-in-chief is a black woman and she will make sure this particular media outlet spits the truth. 

[redbeardsghost]

“If you look very closely at just one wire in the cage, you cannot see the other wires. It is only when you step back, stop looking at the wires one by one, microscopically, and take a macroscopic view of the whole cage, that you can see why the bird does not go anywhere.”

— Marilyn Frye

Because, yeah. Every single bar is solvable, but all of them are not, not from the inside. And those who preach bootstrapping can't see that they only have to get past one or a few bars, enough to build a ladder perhaps, but not enough for the all-to-real cage that many of us find ourselves in.

[redbeardsghost]

This, but as I'm much less likely than the spider to be found by a huge person in their space unintentionally, it deals with interpersonal interactions. I really wish that if something I do is offensive, someone will tell me so I can change, not just block me as not worth the effort.

[redbeardsghost]

It's better if you look at it as the meerkat throwing down the nut first, as a spell to break the branch