#Standard Work Methodology

[beemovieerotica]

in guarani there's a standard greeting that literally translates to "are you happy" (ndevy'apa) and the natural reply is "i'm happy" (avy'a) and as americans learning the language we were so distressed like "but what if we're not happy....." and our teachers were like "that's so not the fucking point"

we kept trying to think of any other way to reply but our teachers kept trying to get it into our brains that it's an idiomatic greeting, it literally is not the time or place to traumadump, and as usamerican english speakers we are not some special exception for saying "what's up" with the reply being "not much" instead of "the ceiling"

but anyway while i was working in paraguay -- the country with the largest population of guarani speakers -- i got sent an article by some friends back home like "look! they're saying that paraguay is the happiest country in the world!"

and the methodology was "we went around and asked paraguayans if they're happy and recorded their responses" and i was like. oh. of course you did. and of course you got a 100% positive response rate.

[local-hellhound-steals-spaghetti]

Let's talk about zoo animal welfare for a second...

(And I want to preface this by saying I have a 4 year Bachelor degree in Animal Science (focusing in welfare and behaviour with a major in Canine and Equine Science) before I got sidetracked into zoo animals and did 3 internships working with wild canids, ungulates and marine mammals - this involved both hands on behaviour modification/desenitisation as well as hands off behavioural observation and welfare study. I worked for 2 years as a marine mammal specialist and worked specifically in facilities to improve husbandry, behavioural training and welfare practises.

I also worked in a facility in the Asia Pacific, working to improve welfare standards for bottlenose dolphins and continued to work with cetacean welfare researchers after this. I also did a course in zoo management, husbandry and welfare and this involved working in an accredited zoo facility learning things like exhibit design, behaviour management and husbandry with multiple species.)

So a few points to say about zoo animal welfare when discussing zoo standards and practises:

The average person does not have the expertise to do behaviour observation and welfare evaluation in zoo animals - that's why when the general public visits a zoo and says "the animal looks sad" it's worth being skeptical of that claim. But it doesn't mean a gut feeling about a zoo's quality can be completely invalid. Just that it might be worth researching further or seeking more information.

However, with experience, it is possible to analyse behaviour in the context of welfare. And context to that behaviour is always important (for example, Moo Deng showing stress related behaviour towards the specific context of being touched or followed around by her keeper - very much an indication of poor handling practises)

Poor animal husbandry and welfare is not limited to specific countries or regions, however it can be more normalised and accepted under the influnce of cultures and laws. Or even just the culture of the zoo itself such as the "this is the way we've always done it" places.

Being an accredited zoo is a start to good welfare, but it doesn't make any sort of welfare concern obsolete. And accreditation is supposed to ensure that welfare concerns are addressed but because they are mostly run as a volunteer based organisation, they often don't have resources to check into every concern (unless it's a government funded organisation)

A zoo contributing to conservation research is great, but not if it is at the expense of the animals' welfare - welfare should always be prioritised, with research and conservation efforts to follow.

Welfare is a state that is in flux. So a negative welfare state can move into positive welfare state under different influences.

There are multiple factors that influence zoo animal welfare: enclosure/habitat, expression of natural behaviour, guest interaction, diet, enrichment, water quality, hygeine ect. It'll rarely just be one factor, though it does depend how salient that factor is.

Just because a keeper or management of a zoo have been there for a long time, doesn't mean they can't be criticised - it is possible to be still using outdated practises and believing in methodologies and management practises that need updating - that's the whole point of continued education

Having limited resources can often impact welfare. Giving a facility the resources they need to improve is a good start to improving welfare.

Even if an animal is being handled in an inappropriate way for a short time, that doesn't mean that can't have long term implications for welfare eg. if every time your dog jumped on you when you got home and you smacked him in the face once before going on with your day, that doesn't mean that your dog won't learn negative associations with your arrival just because it was one time.

Best practise husbandry of zoo animals involves:

Use of positive reinforcement based voluntary husbandry and health care

All interaction based on choice and voluntary interaction that is reinforced with primary reinforcement such as food

Mostly hands off approaches for the species that require them (ungulates, large primates, large carnivores)

Relatively stable social groups with aggression only in specific situations/contexts that are normal for the species

Back areas for animals to rest outside of public view

Species appropriate habitats to meet species specific behaviour requirements

Five freedoms of welfare being met but goes above and beyond the bare minimum

Poor zoo animal husbandry involves animals:

Being forced into anything such as presentations, education programs, medical procedures/gating

Any use of physical punishment such as chasing, slapping, pushing or poking - negative reinforcement such as bull hooks are also fairly outdated in handling species like elephants

Being excessively handled, chased and touched/restrained for no reason (eg. for social media videos)

Showing signs of avoidance and aggression constantly towards their keepers

Have constant conflict happening in their social groups

Are living in enclosures that are not suitable for their specific specific needs - size is only one factor in this. Substrate, habitat design, water quality ect. are also things to consider.

Are too close to the public/at risk from the public

Have no areas to retreat from the public/rest away from potential stressors

Have no enrichment program/no daily enrichment

Those are all flags that there could be some poor welfare happening and that a zoo is not prioritising welfare

Okay there's the ramble of the day done. Feel free to ask questions for further clarification if needed.

[reasonsforhope]

"Doctors have begun trialling the world’s first mRNA lung cancer vaccine in patients, as experts hailed its “groundbreaking” potential to save thousands of lives.

Lung cancer is the world’s leading cause of cancer death, accounting for about 1.8m deaths every year. Survival rates in those with advanced forms of the disease, where tumours have spread, are particularly poor.

Now experts are testing a new jab that instructs the body to hunt down and kill cancer cells – then prevents them ever coming back. Known as BNT116 and made by BioNTech, the vaccine is designed to treat non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common form of the disease.

The phase 1 clinical trial, the first human study of BNT116, has launched across 34 research sites in seven countries: the UK, US, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Spain and Turkey.

The UK has six sites, located in England and Wales, with the first UK patient to receive the vaccine having their initial dose on Tuesday [August 20, 2024].

Overall, about 130 patients – from early-stage before surgery or radiotherapy, to late-stage disease or recurrent cancer – will be enrolled to have the jab alongside immunotherapy. About 20 will be from the UK.

The jab uses messenger RNA (mRNA), similar to Covid-19 vaccines, and works by presenting the immune system with tumour markers from NSCLC to prime the body to fight cancer cells expressing these markers.

The aim is to strengthen a person’s immune response to cancer while leaving healthy cells untouched, unlike chemotherapy.

“We are now entering this very exciting new era of mRNA-based immunotherapy clinical trials to investigate the treatment of lung cancer,” said Prof Siow Ming Lee, a consultant medical oncologist at University College London hospitals NHS foundation trust (UCLH), which is leading the trial in the UK.

“It’s simple to deliver, and you can select specific antigens in the cancer cell, and then you target them. This technology is the next big phase of cancer treatment.”

Janusz Racz, 67, from London, was the first person to have the vaccine in the UK. He was diagnosed in May and soon after started chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

The scientist, who specialises in AI, said his profession inspired him to take part in the trial. “I am a scientist too, and I understand that the progress of science – especially in medicine – lies in people agreeing to be involved in such investigations,” he said...

“And also, I can be a part of the team that can provide proof of concept for this new methodology, and the faster it would be implemented across the world, more people will be saved.”

Racz received six consecutive injections five minutes apart over 30 minutes at the National Institute for Health Research UCLH Clinical Research Facility on Tuesday.

Each jab contained different RNA strands. He will get the vaccine every week for six consecutive weeks, and then every three weeks for 54 weeks.

Lee said: “We hope adding this additional treatment will stop the cancer coming back because a lot of time for lung cancer patients, even after surgery and radiation, it does come back.” ...

“We hope to go on to phase 2, phase 3, and then hope it becomes standard of care worldwide and saves lots of lung cancer patients.”

The Guardian revealed in May that thousands of patients in England were to be fast-tracked into groundbreaking trials of cancer vaccines in a revolutionary world-first NHS “matchmaking” scheme to save lives.

Under the scheme, patients who meet the eligibility criteria will gain access to clinical trials for the vaccines that experts say represent a new dawn in cancer treatment."

-via The Guardian, May 30, 2024

[mecachrome]

📊 LANDOSCAR AO3 STATS (may 2025)

notes

sorry this literally took 2 weeks to write... unfortunately the data was retrieved april 28 and it is now may 12.

other work: i previously wrote a stats overview that covered landoscar's fic growth and breakout in 2023 :) i've kept some of the formatting and graphs that i showed there, while other things have been removed or refined because i felt they'd become redundant or unnecessary (aka they were basically just a reflection of fandom growth in general, and not unique or interesting to landoscar as a ship specifically).

methodology: i simply scraped the metadata for every fic in the landoscar tag (until april 28, 2025) and then imported it into google sheets to clean, with most visualizations done in tableau. again, all temporal data is by date updated (not posted) unless noted otherwise. this is because the date that appears on the parent view of the ao3 archives is the updated one, so it's the only feasible datapoint to collect for 3000+ fics.

content: this post does not mention any individual authors or concern itself with kudos, hits, comments, etc. i purely describe archive growth and overall analysis of metadata like word count and tagging metrics.

cleaning: after importing my data, i standardized ship spelling, removed extra "814" or "landoscar" tags, and merged all versions of one-sided, background, implied, past, mentioned etc. into a single "(side)" modifier. i also removed one fic entirely from the dataset because the "loscar" tag was being mistakenly wrangled as landoscar, but otherwise was not actually tagged as landoscar. i also removed extra commentary tags in the ships sets that did not pertain to any ships.

overall stats

before we get into any detailed distributions, let's first look at an overview of the archive as of 2025! in their 2-and-change years as teammates, landoscar have had over 3,409 fics written for them, good enough for 3rd overall in the f1 archives (behind lestappen and maxiel).

most landoscar fics are completed one-shots (although note that a one-shot could easily be 80k words—in fact they have about 30 single-chapter fics that are at least 50k words long), and they also benefit from a lot of first-tagged fic, which is to say 82.3% of landoscar-tagged fics have them as the first ship, implying that they aren't often used as a fleeting side pairing and artificially skewing perception of their popularity. in fact, over half of landoscar fics are PURELY tagged as landoscar (aka otp: true), with no other side pairings tagged at all.

this percentage has actually gone down a bit since 2023 (65.5%), which makes sense since more lando and oscar ships have become established and grown in popularity over the years, but it's also not a very big difference yet...

ship growth

of course, landoscar have grown at a frankly terrifying rate since 2023. remember this annotated graph i posted comparing their growth during the 2023 season to that of carlando and loscar, respectively their other biggest ship at the time? THIS IS HER NOW:

yes... that tiny squished down little rectangle... (wipes away stray tear) they grow up so fast. i also tried to annotate this graph to show other "big" landoscar moments in the timeline since, but i honestly struggled with this because they've just grown SO exponentially and consistently that i don't even feel like i can point to anything as a proper catalyst of production anymore. that is to say, i think landoscar are popular enough now that they have a large amount of dedicated fans/writers who will continuously work on certain drafts and stories regardless of what happens irl, so it's hard to point at certain events as inspiring a meaningful amount of work.

note also that this is all going by date updated, so it's not a true reflection of ~growth~ as a ficdom. thankfully ao3 does have a date_created filter that you can manually enter into the search, but because of this limitation i can't create graphs with the granularity and complexity that scraping an entire archive allows me. nevertheless, i picked a few big ships that landoscar have overtaken over the last 2 years and created this graph using actual date created metrics!!!

this is pretty self-explanatory of course but i think it's fun to look at... :) it's especially satisfying to see how many ships they casually crossed over before the end of 2024.

distributions

some quick graphs this time. rating distribution remains extremely similar to the 2023 graph, with explicit fic coming out on top at 28%:

last time i noted a skew in ratings between the overall f1 rpf tag and the landoscar tag (i.e. landoscar had a higher prevalence of e fic), but looking at it a second time i honestly believe this is more of a cultural shift in (f1? sports rpf? who knows) fandom at large and not specific to landoscar as a ship — filtering the f1 rpf tag to works updated from 2023 onward shows that explicit has since become the most popular rating in general, even when excluding landoscar-tagged fics. is it because fandom is getting more horny in general, or because the etiquette surrounding what constitutes t / m / e has changed, or because people are less afraid to post e fic publicly and no longer quarantine it to locked livejournal posts? or something else altogether? Well i don't know and this is a landoscar stats post so it doesn't matter but that could be something for another thought experiment. regardless because of that i feel like further graphs aren't really necessary 🤷‍♀️

onto word distribution:

still similar to last time, although i will note that there's a higher representation of longfic now!!! it might not seem like much, but i noted last year that 85% of landoscar fics were under 10k & 97% under 25k — these numbers are now 78% and 92% respectively, which adds up in the grand scheme of a much larger archive. you'll also notice that the prevalence of <1k fic has gone down as well.

for the fun of it here's the wc distribution but with a further rating breakdown; as previously discussed you're more likely to get G ratings in flashfic because there's less wordspace to Make The Porn Happen. of course there are nuances to this but that's just a broad overview

side ships

what other ships are landoscar shippers shipping these days??? a lot of these ships are familiar from last time, but there are two new entries in ham/ros and pia/sai overtaking nor/ric and gas/lec to enter the top 10. ships that include at least one of lando or oscar are highlighted in orange:

of course, i pulled other 814-adjacent ships, but unfortunately i've realized that a lot of them simply aren't that popular/prevalent (context: within the 814 tag specifically) so they didn't make the top 10... because of that, here's a graph with only ships that include lando or oscar and have a minimum of 10 works within the landoscar tag:

eta: other primarily includes oscar & lily and maxf & lando. lando doesn't really have that many popular pairings within landoscar shippers otherwise...

i had wanted to explore these ships further and look at their growth/do some more in depth breakdowns of their popularity, but atm they're simply not popular enough for me to really do anything here. maybe next year?!

that being said, i did make a table comparing the prevalence of side ships within the 814 tag to the global f1 archives, so as to contextualize the popularity of each ship (see 2023). as usually, maxiel is very underrepresented in the landoscar tag, with galex actually receiving quite a boost compared to before!

additional tags

so last time i only had about 400 fics to work with and i did some analysis on additional tags / essentially au tagging. however, the problem is that there are now 3000 fics in my set, and the limitations of web scraping means that i'm not privy to the tag wrangling that happens in Da Backend of ao3. basically i'm being given all the raw versions of these au tags, whereas on ao3 "a/b/o" and "alpha/beta/omega dynamics" and "au - alpha/beta/omega" and "alternate universe - a/b/o" are all being wrangled together. because it would take way too long for me to do all of this manually and i frankly just don't want to clean that many fics after already going through all the ship tags, i've decided to not do any au analysis because i don't think it would be an accurate reflection of the data...

that being said, i had one new little experiment! as landoscar get more and more competitive, i wanted to chart how ~angsty~ they've gotten as a ship on ao3. i wanted to make a cumulative graph that shows how the overall fluff % - angst % difference has shifted over time, but ummmm... tableau and i had a disagreement. so instead here is a graph of the MoM change in angst % (so basically what percentage of the fics updated in that month specifically were tagged angst?):

the overall number is still not very drastic at all and fluff still prevails over angst in the landoscar archive. to be clear, there are 33.2% fics tagged some variation of fluff and 21.4% fics tagged some variation of angst overall, so there's a fluff surplus of 11.8%. but there has definitely been a slight growth in angst metrics over the past few months!

—

i will leave this here for now... if there's anything specific that you're interested in lmk and i can whip it up!!! hehe ty for reading 🧡

[contemplatingoutlander]

How Trump is reshaping reality by hiding data

Curating reality is an old political game, but Trump’s sweeping statistical purges are part of a broader attempt to reinvent “truth.”

Trump appears to be turning the federal government into its own 1984-style Ministry of Truth.

This is a gift 🎁 link so there is no paywall to read it. Below are some excerpts/highlights.

By Amanda Shendruk and Catherine Rampell | March 11, 2025 The Trump administration is deleting taxpayer-funded data — information that Americans use to make sense of the world. In its absence, the president can paint the world as he pleases. We don’t know the full universe of statistics that has gone missing, but the U.S. DOGE Service’s wrecking ball has already left behind a wasteland of 404 pages. All sorts of useful information has disappeared, including data on:

[...]

[See more under the cut.]

Three cases of legerdemath and other tricks up Trump’s sleeve

Deleting data isn’t the only way to manipulate official statistics. Trump and his allies have also misrepresented or altered data. Here are a few examples: 1. Incorrect data

Witness DOGE’s bogus statistics on its supposed government savings. The administration counts as “savings” some canceled contracts that had already been paid in full. Some canceled expenses were created out of whole cloth, such as $50 million supposedly spent on sending condoms to Gaza. 2. Misrepresented data

One of Trump’s favorite charts on immigration is riddled with errors. For one, it does not show the number of immigrants entering the United States illegally, as he claims, but the number of people stopped at the U.S. border. Similarly, when Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was recently asked how much DOGE funding cuts might reduce economic growth, he suggested that the agency might decide to change how economic growth is calculated so that the usual GDP report strips out government spending altogether. This would be an abrupt change to the standard GDP methodology that has been used around the world for nearly a century, but it would certainly make the DOGE cuts look less painful. 3. Altered data

When data doesn’t tell the story Trump wants, he fabricates it. In what became known as “Sharpiegate,” Trump notoriously altered a map of Hurricane Dorian’s path in 2019.

Likewise, before Jan. 30, a National Institutes of Health website documenting years of spending data included a category called “Workforce Diversity and Outreach.” That line item is now gone — even though the money was, indeed, spent.

Taking cues from authoritarian illusionists

Such actions are straight out of authoritarian leaders’ playbooks. Research suggests that less democratic countries have been more likely to inflate their GDP growth rates and manipulate their covid-19 numbers. Statistical manipulation is also more common in countries that shun economic openness and democracy. [...] To be clear, efforts to rewrite reality via statistical manipulation often don’t work. If anything, China’s data deletions reduced public confidence in the country’s economic stability. (No one hides good news, after all.) The Trump team’s efforts to suppress nettlesome numbers have similarly eroded trust in U.S. data. Only about one-third of Americans trust that most or all of the statistics Trump cites are “reliable and accurate.”

Meanwhile, missing or untrustworthy data lead to worse decisions: Auto companies, for example, draw on dozens of federally administered datasets when devising new car models, how to price them, where to stock and market them and other key choices. Retailers need detailed information about local demographics, weather and modes of transit when deciding where to locate stores. Doctors require up-to-date statistics about disease spread when diagnosing or treating patients. Families look at school test scores and local crime rates when deciding where to move. Politicians use census data when determining funding levels for important government programs.

And of course, voters need good data of all kinds when weighing whether to throw the bums out. Many of us take the existence of economic or public health stats for granted, without even thinking about who maintains them or what happens if they go away. Fortunately, some outside institutions have been saving and archiving endangered federal data. The Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine, for instance, crawls sites around the internet and has become an invaluable resource for seeing what federal websites used to contain. Other organizations are archiving topic-specific data and research, such as on the environment or reproductive health. These are critical but ultimately insufficient efforts. At best, they can preserve data already published. But they cannot update series already halted or purged.... Some private companies may step in to offer their own substitutes (on prices, for example), but private companies still rely on government statistics to calibrate their own numbers. Much of the most critical information about the state of our union can be collected only by the state itself. Americans might be stuck with whatever Trump chooses to share with us, or not.

[creature-wizard]

I keep thinking about the post talking about how scammers will try and tell you how they're going to prove they're the real thing, where the "proof" they will offer you is actually meaningless because it doesn't actually mean what they claim this means, and how this is essentially the way witch hunters operate.

Your early modern witch hunters would always be able to "find" witches because they had easily-filled criteria for what constituted evidence of witchcraft - things like bad weather, strange symptoms and seemingly incurable ailments, night terrors, etc.

Of course, they had no evidence that there was a causal link between any of these things and witchcraft. They just said it was evidence of witchcraft, and a lot of people just assumed they knew what they were talking about.

And so it is with claims that hypnosis and various trance states can help people remember past lives and repressed memories. People with actual doctorates claim that hypnosis can help you uncover repressed memory, even though its ability to do this has never been demonstrated. In fact, the more you start looking into cases where hypnosis was used to help people remember something, the more you find that people can "remember" nearly anything - including, very famously, alien abductions.

In Ritual Abuse and Mind Control: The Manipulation of Attachment Needs (essentially pro-Satanic Panic literature, for those who haven't read it), Valerie Sinason acknowledged the people who seemingly remembered alien abductions, then proceeded to try special pleading for people who "remembered" satanic ritual abuse. Sinason's defense was that SRA was more plausible than alien abductions, therefore we should believe it's actually happening.

Of course, "more plausible" does not equal "actually happening." Just because it's more plausible that I have the skeleton of Elvis Presley in my basement than an alien skeleton, doesn't mean I have the skeleton of Elvis Presley in my basement. And when your methodology for obtaining your so-called evidence is this deeply flawed, you might as well just say "it's true because I want it to be true" and then try to locate all the cultists in your town with dowsing rods.

Indeed, when other people start setting higher standards for evidence, SRA proponents' ability to find witches (or cult programmers, as we're calling them today) vanish. All they can do is try to guilt trip people for allegedly betraying survivors and claim that the critics are part of a malicious conspiracy.

I've both studied and personally been involved in controlling and manipulative groups long enough to recognize this song and dance for what it is - it's fundamentally an assertion that you're betraying the good guys and letting the bad guys win. It's always an act of desperation.

Many Christians pull this when someone tries to leave the faith. It often goes like this: Jesus loves you so much, how could you deny him like this? Also everyone who refuses to become Christian has been deceived by the Devil, and some of them are even working for him on purpose!

Many neopagans do it whenever someone questions or disagrees with whatever dogma their personal group has. It often goes like this: You're betraying the gods (whom you owe your loyalty because they're the gods), and you're letting our Christian oppressors win.

Many peddlers of woo and conspiracy theories do it like this: You're being closed minded (and therefore you're being rude to nice open-minded people like them). You're also just brainwashed by the people who don't want the truth getting out, and you're basically doing their bidding.

Anyway, since I think most of us here can agree that the witch hunts were unjustified and that thousands of innocent people lost their lives, I want you to picture someone saying:

"When you say the Devil's Sabbath wasn't real and the witch hunts targeted innocent women, you're invalidating and erasing the pain of everyone who suffered from the torments of witches. I agree that some innocent people were burned, but there were absolutely real witches working with the Devil to cast evil spells."

As you can see, this rhetoric can be used to defend and justify any bullshit-driven atrocity. Let's try this with another conspiracy theory I think most of us can agree is bullshit - reptilian aliens:

"When you say the Reptilians aren't real and they're based on antisemitic tropes, you're invalidating and erasing the pain of everyone who suffered at their hands. I agree that some innocent people have been accused of being Reptilians, but there are absolutely real Reptilians out there torturing people and killing them to drink their blood."

So in conclusion, we must always think critically about what people present as evidence, and not let them guilt trip us into lowering our standards. Remember:

Efficacy of the evidence-gathering methods must be demonstrated. The methods must be shown to be reliable, unlikely to produce false results.

Causal links must be established. Assertions that X causes Y must be backed up with empirical evidence.

Other explanations must be ruled out. Do not assume the most sensational explanation without ruling out more common ones. As the saying in medicine goes, if you see hoofprints, think horses, not zebras. Do not consider zebras until horses (and any other common equines) can be ruled out.

[seriousbrat]

how can lily be a good person if she married a bully?

I'm going to break this down because it does legitimately seem to be an issue for so many people. I received quite a few asks about this a few days ago so I'm just going to address it generally here. Apologies for the length of this, I tried to cover everything I could think of. Let's get two things out of the way first:

Firstly, if you truly believe James was an abuser, and you're seriously asking how a woman could ever marry an abusive man, this is indicative of a fundamental lack of understanding about how abuse works. This is victim-blaming rhetoric. Abusers are predatory, manipulative, and often extremely charming, and they have a specific methodology for ensnaring their victims. I highly recommend Lundy Bancroft's book Why Does He Do That for further reading on how abuse works. The reality is that women marry abusive men all the time, and it doesn't make them bad people. If you believe otherwise we simply have nothing to talk about here.

Second, the question of whether or not James ACTUALLY changed his behaviour is irrelevant here, so I'm not going to directly address it either way. The main thing is that Lily BELIEVED that he had changed, whether or not he actually did, and we know this from Harry's conversation with Remus and Sirius. We also know she wasn't aware of the full extent of the bullying, as she didn't know the details about the prank.

For the purposes of this I'm going to adopt the perspective that James never changed, had 0 character development, and was secretly a terrible person the whole time. To be clear this isn't what I believe-- but I think it's helpful to start from a similar place.

Onto the main points:

An overly forgiving nature can be a flaw, but it doesn't make someone a bad person.

Nor does it make them selfish. Even if I concede that James was irredeemably evil as a person, the fact that Lily believed him to be better than he was, even if she was wrong, makes her at worst naive, not selfish. In fact, I'd argue that it's a sign of empathising with someone too much, which is sort of the opposite of selfishness. We know that Lily had an overly-forgiving nature, because she demonstrates that with Severus when she's willing to overlook his associations with the worst people of all time. And as we know from the fact that her friends were openly critical of it, and that she suffered as a result of it, her friendship with Sev was hardly 'convenient' for her. That she forgave him and overlooked his behaviour, and defended him, despite the fact that it was actively inconvenient for her, indicates empathy (and probably too much of it) not selfishness. Being overly forgiving is an established character trait of Lily's, as she tells us she "made excuses for [Sev] for years." Making excuses for someone you love is a flaw, but not one necessarily rooted in selfishness. Again, it was actively inconvenient for Lily to make excuses for Sev. It's also a very human flaw, not one that makes her a bad person-- especially when you consider that Lily's capacity for forgiveness had its limits, as she demonstrated with Snape.

To forgive is an act of compassion... it's not done because people deserve it, it's done because they need it.

anyway with that buffy quote out of the way, lets move on

Lily owes Snape nothing.

I'm sure people will disagree, but, objectively, she just doesn't. They are not friends at this point. He has demonstrated consistently that he doesn't have enough consideration for her to stop rubbing shoulders with people who literally want to murder her, including a boy who attacked her housemate. So why is Lily expected to take into account his feelings and his history with James? Which leads right into:

It's a massive double-standard for Lily to be blamed for marrying James when Snape isn't afforded the same for associating with Death Eaters.

I mean, think what you want, but to me being a mass murderer intent on exterminating an entire subset of the population (talking about Voldemort and other DEs here, not Snape) is like, maybe, a tiny bit worse than being a bully in school. But what do I know. Snape willingly joined up with such people, knowing perfectly well what they wanted to do to Lily, the woman he loved, and everyone like her. If Lily's choice in husband makes her a selfish person, then by your own logic Snape is completely irredeemable and you should probably delete your blog about how misunderstood and babygirl he is.

Sometimes people marry or befriend terrible people.

Similar to the first point, lack of judgement is a flaw but not one that directly indicates selfishness. Again, remember, Lily believed James to have changed. She believed, whether or not she was wrong, that redemption is possible. It's extremely common for women to date and marry terrible men, unfortunately, and to be blinded to their flaws. There are many possible reasons for this. I guess you can argue that the desire to be loved is inherently selfish, but that still wouldn't make Lily notably selfish at all, rather just a normal human. Plenty of people have had the experience of dating someone who is terrible or being friends with someone who is terrible at some point in their lives, and it doesn't automatically make them terrible themselves. People make mistakes and have poor judgment occasionally. Her actions in SWM suggest she would not have tolerated nor validated any cruelty from James towards others, had she been aware of it. Anyway, once again if you're holding Lily responsible for James's actions you need to also hold Snape responsible for the actions of his buddies. If it's selfish for Lily to associate with a bully (who she believed to have reformed) it's straight up devoid of any humanity whatsoever for Snape to KNOWINGLY associate with people like Mulciber, Voldemort, and Bellatrix. I don't actually believe this btw, I'm just following the logic through.

Furthermore, it's completely unfair to blame Lily for, in particular, the past actions of her husband.

As we clearly see in SWM, she did NOT tolerate his behaviour during the years before they started dating. James's behaviour is simply not Lily's responsibility, and neither is Snape's. It's not her job to fix them nor pay for their mistakes, nor should she have to investigate and tally up all their past wrongdoings when making her own choices. If James was actively being a menace and Lily was just watching going 'teehee' I'd understand this more, but again, she was NOT aware. Based on her behaviour in SWM, this would be out of character for Lily.

Someone having a moral stance you personally disagree with doesn't automatically make them a bad person.

If your moral stance is that James's past actions are completely unforgivable, and you could not personally date someone who did what he did, no matter how he evolved as a person, that's perfectly fine. As I've established, Lily was not aware of any continuing wrongdoing, nor would she have validated or supported it had she been aware. Lily's belief was that the person she was currently dating was a good person. She believed in redemption and second chances. If you personally do not believe in redemption or second chances, I'd question why you even like Snape, but ultimately that's your prerogative. However, believing otherwise doesn't make Lily a bad person nor selfish, even if you personally disagree or think she was wrong. People are allowed to be mistaken.

Snape was probably less relevant to their lives than you think.

Like to be quite honest, they were fighting a war and priorities had shifted, as they often do in adulthood. Lily ended her friendship with Sev, and after Hogwarts James and Lily almost certainly had no association with him whatsoever. Is Lily expected to continually self-flagellate over Snape for the rest of her life? Is she expected to take him into account in every decision she makes, forever? Believe it or not James and Lily existed separately to Snape, rather than as extensions of his character. They moved on. Snape didn't, that's what makes him beautiful-- and yes there's a reason why Snape couldn't move on, but, again, that is not Lily's responsibility. It seems reasonable to me that, particularly given the extreme nature of her circumstances, Lily would take into account first and foremost the actions she observed from James in the present, rather than what he did in the past. See above re: Lily owes Snape nothing.

Being selfless, kind, or a good person doesn't make one perfect.

When I say Lily was selfless, I do NOT mean that she was flawless. If this is your takeaway I worry for you. Also, enough about the Virgin Mary lol. Anyway, humans are complex, and selfless people are capable of selfishness on occasion. Everyone is. A certain amount of selfishness is not only normal, it can be a good thing and necessary for protecting yourself. When Lily ended her friendship with Sev, it was something she was doing for herself, so in the most technical sense (and it's still a huge stretch) it can be viewed as selfish. Nobody is or should be 100% selfless all the time. So even were I to concede that she was selfish in marrying James (which I don't) it doesn't preclude her being a selfless person in general.

Being selfless, kind, or a good person doesn't make a female character 'unrealistic.'

What even is this argument, honestly. Like do you just not believe in the existence of good women irl? Suspicious. I would gently suggest that if you find it unrealistic (or boring) for a woman to be a good person, that's maybe something you should take a closer look at. If your automatic assumption about a woman is that she must have married a man for his money, I would also interrogate that belief.

idk she was a teenage girl, pls develop some empathy

once you come down from your podium in the unholy tribunal, it might be worth considering female characters (and women in general) as human, and not just avatars who simply react to the emotional turmoil of men. At absolute worst you could assume that she was tricked by James (which I still disagree with, but it's a slightly more generous reading) or was blind and naive. All of which are more understandable than, for some reason, assuming she was a conniving bitch who wanted to hurt Snape and selfishly marry into wealth. Ultimately her decision to marry James probably had nothing to do with Snape at all. She was 21 when she died. Bad judgment is common at that age, and it's not necessarily a product of selfishness at all. Look, I'd understand this whole thing more if everyone was in their 30s. But is it not the teenage girl experience of all time to date an asshole? Do you have no empathy for that situation? Like I said, I'm arguing this based on the idea that James was completely irredeemable; would an abuser not abuse his girlfriend too? Would someone who is evil and cruel in all respects not also display cruelty to his wife? Can you not summon up an ounce of empathy for a 17 year old who might have thought, as many young girls do, 'I can fix him?'

To conclude, I think that the idea that Lily marrying a bully makes her a bad person is just rooted in lack of empathy for her as a character. Despite spending hours dissecting every last thought process a man might have had, there's no attempt at all to try and understand Lily's motives, rather they're considered exclusively from the perspective of Snape's emotions. This is unfair.

I don't doubt that it hurt Snape's feelings for Lily to date and marry James. But Snape's feelings are no longer her concern. She owes him nothing. Sev called his best friend a slur publicly and joined an organisation that wanted to murder her, with no respect for her feelings at all. They are no longer friends, and he has no right whatsoever to expect her to consider his own emotional needs anymore, and her choices no longer have anything to do with him. Nor should they have.

Whether or not you think it was a mistake for Lily to marry James, that's Lily's problem. Not Snape's. If you truly believe James was a monster, logically it's Lily you should be feeling sorry for. The fact that there's no empathy for her to be found, and that people revert so quickly to the Top 100 Misogyny Classic of 'she must be a gold digger' speaks for itself.

[h-sleepingirl]

Essay: Hypnosis is Irrational

For PSYCHOSPIRITUAL: A Spirituality/Hypnokink Essay Jam

This is an essay about bonfires, Quaker meetings, Judaism, and the entirely transcendent nature of hypnosis. I'm sorry in advance to philosophers and scientists. Don't come for me until you've seen God in the ceiling through your fluttering lashes!

--

Rationality is a core value of modern western society. Materialism and objective, evidence-based science are seen as the gold standard for how to view the world around us. It’s easy to see why -- this approach has catapulted humanity forward over a relatively short period of time, technologically and philosophically. Finding the truths of the universe through hard evidence and math is extremely compelling and much more logical than basing our views off of conjecture or old religious texts.

Hypnosis entered public western consciousness in tumult. Franz Mesmer’s animal magnetism clearly worked, and he had theories of why, but they didn’t hold up to scientific rigor. Really from its inception, hypnosis has been fighting to be seen as legitimate as a medical practice, and as compatible with evidence-based science.

It’s not that it doesn’t make sense that hypnotherapy fights so hard to be accepted as a “real” discipline, or that it needs to go through studies to be practiced on patients. We value medicine that is objectively safe and effective -- for good reason.

That being said…

I am not anti-science. But I do think if we don’t acknowledge the methodology’s limitations, we are being dishonest and misleading -- with ourselves and with those we teach.

Here’s the thing: We are not doing therapy with our partners. We don’t need to be beholden to these limitations. Not in our theory, and especially not in our practice.

We are free -- more free than any other practitioners of hypnosis -- to accept and celebrate its irrationality.

And when we stop trying to shoehorn our experiences into being understandable, we are free to explore and experience unbelievable things.

--

In terms of spiritual beliefs, I would describe myself as a skeptic-leaning agnostic. I think that how you are raised is a major religious influence on you, and I happened to be raised in an atheist household. Despite branching off from my family and taking spiritual exploration seriously, I would never confidently say “I believe in God” or “I believe in magic,” nor that I am even particularly convinced by my handful of difficult-to-explain experiences.

While my spirituality intersects with hypnosis, I am not here to tell you that hypnosis is the result of God or magical forces -- and I’m not here to define how hypnosis fits into “magic” or vice versa. I think that too is a kind of rationalization -- it’s trying to explain something nebulous in a concrete way, trying to fit it into a box.

I don’t think that calling hypnosis irrational should cause us to seek alternative, definitive answers outside of science. I think that we as humans need to be comfortable not knowing, not labeling -- a space that can be very uncomfortable for us, but one that ultimately allows us to have less-filtered subjective experiences.

Subjective experiences are the core of hypnosis. No matter what method is purported to be “objectively” best, the one that you should actually use is the one that makes your partner feel trance most intensely. Science simply cannot anticipate, direct, or account for the subtlety of the subjective experience of hypnosis.

Scientific tests cannot accurately measure anything about hypnosis, because hypnosis relies almost entirely on the softest variables: the interpersonal relationship and biases we have, the way a person is feeling or primed on a given day, the slightest changes in tone or delivery or nonverbal language. We might say that standardized hypnosis is a completely different activity from the hypnosis that we practice with real partners.

A brainwave-measuring machine cannot communicate the intricacies and depth of a trance. I would not be surprised, if I was hooked up to an EEG, that many of my “trance states” would not produce expected effects on the device. Even physically observable signs of trance do not tell the whole story -- I can be having an intensely hypnotic internal experience while appearing completely awake. There is simply not an objective way to tell when I am hypnotized -- it is completely based on my own feelings.

And yet, with shocking accuracy, my partner can tell the exact moment that I slip into trance, even if I give no discernable outward response. When pressed, he often can’t identify what the signal is -- it is very, very subtle, if anything.

It is a moment where his focus on me melds into my experience, into my mind.

Really, there have been countless times in hypnosis that I feel with total certainty that my mind is being read or that I am reading my partner’s mind. It’s shocking, and sort of maddening, and I have heard from many others that they’ve experienced the same thing. Our urge is to say, “Well, that’s a result of unconsciously reading microexpressions, of knowing a person’s nonverbal language intimately, of having a robust internal map of a person, being good at anticipating hypnotic responses, linguistic cold reading tricks.” That’s rationalizing, and it’s all very logical and certainly has some element of truth to it -- but it causes us to say “OK, case closed,” and sigh in relief that we can dismiss the question and no longer be faced with it.

The reality is this: Those are guesses. They are probably pretty good guesses, but I believe we fall into this trap of assuming the logical-sounding guesses we make are objectively correct, even in the absence of evidence.

Ostensibly, the vast majority of “answers” we have about why hypnosis works are just that -- theories, models, best guesses. Science doesn’t even have a singular accepted answer on whether hypnosis is an altered state. Often, working within a given theory (or two) gives us structure and allows us to perform more effectively. But when we really think about the nature of hypnosis, the truth is that we really don’t have much of a solid idea why and how it works.

That’s uncomfortable. I’m not pushing that because it’s the cold, hard truth, or because accepting it is some form of mental asceticism (nor spiritual gateway). I’m saying it because living in that liminal space of irrationality will actually change the way you do and experience hypnosis -- because it frees you from the limitations of feeling like everything we do has to make sense.

--

I have my own theory about why we want to make those logical guesses: Because it feels embarrassing to say we are hypnotists and yet there are things we don’t understand. Because we are afraid of judgment if we say we are actually mind-reading or doing magic, even as a shorthand for a complex invisible process. I think these are unconscious biases -- a result of seeing ourselves as rational people in a rational world. Spirituality is seen as lesser and fake -- entertaining the idea of magic gets you labeled as immature or crazy.

But when you try to remove your biases and think about it, it is crazy that we use just our words to make people forget things, hallucinate things, have orgasms, experience dissolution of the ego. And we don’t really know why.

True curiosity and wonder are hypnosis’s best friends. New subjects who struggle to experience trance or suggestions often are stuck because of their expectations -- they feel like they know what is supposed to happen, so when their experience doesn’t line up, they perceive it as failure. It’s why one of the best ways you can set a person up for “success” in hypnosis is to really cultivate a sense of curiosity, of not being judgmental of their experience, of not assuming they know what is happening.

Even still, this model of trance often has the subject experiencing wide-eyed wonder while the hypnotist actually holds the esoteric knowledge of what’s going on behind the curtain. But in my opinion, the real magic happens when both parties are prepared to question everything they know, to be surprised, to not take for granted, and to observe without rationality.

My most treasured memory is one that I keep close to my chest. Briefly: it was at a hypnosis-friendly bonfire on the autumnal equinox. My partner and I embraced and for an hour had a completely shared experience, wordless and hypnotic and bizarrely spiritual. Neither of us were “driving” -- we were both passengers, almost like being possessed. No drugs were involved, just the two of us in the right place at the right time, able to let go of the feeling that we were “crazy” or being illogical, or that we knew what was going to happen. We were both really shaken by it.

That ultimately led us to being able to have trances, occasionally, where we mutually let our guard down and play without the usual “rules.” We can’t do it intentionally, but sometimes we hit on little pockets of magic, and then the trance becomes like spellcasting, and spellcasting isn’t bound by the laws that supposedly govern hypnosis.

We know that hypnosis is influenced largely by how we expect it to work. We give pretalks to set expectations that often function as suggestions, boundaries, and definitions: “All you need to do to be hypnotized is pay attention -- it’s OK if your thoughts drift.” “Hypnosis might feel different from what you expect, like floating or sinking.” Even: “You can always come out of trance if you need to.”

I believe my partner and I are on similar pages about whether magic is “real.” The word “maybe” does a lot of heavy lifting in my worldview. It’s really more about being open to different perspectives, and playing in different models. So if we can dip into a perspective where hypnosis behaves a bit more like magic -- or otherwise irrationally -- then that actually, literally changes the way hypnosis works.

This is the true nature of hypnosis -- it is a shapeshifter. If you define hypnosis as a science or as a spiritual practice, it works either way. So if you can change the beliefs you inhabit, you will experience wildly different trances. And it may be irrational to assign spirituality and magic to it, but it is not absurd.

--

In this way, belief and perspective is actually where a lot of the nature of hypnosis sits.

After the “bonfire incident,” I was motivated to do some spiritual seeking, and I started going to Quaker meetings. Quaker meetings are simple but intense: People get together in a room and sit silently, opening themselves up to “messages” from within their own hearts or outside themselves, and if they feel moved to share a message, they stand up and speak it. There is no discussion, just completely passive listening and speaking.

I found this to be an extremely potent spiritual environment. We weren’t meditating, per se, just going quiet. Sitting silently for an hour with no other stimulation was luxurious, and felt quite a bit to me like a kind of trance.

I went regularly for a few months. I never spoke, but I did listen. There was one meeting I remember vividly where I was sitting and thinking about something, and at that moment, a woman stood up, and shared a message that was very close to what I was pondering over.

Then another woman stood:

“I know sometimes in this room,” she said, “we feel like we are all thinking the same thing when someone shares a message. This is one of those times for me.”

There was no fear of judgment, nor proclamation of metaphysical experience. It was just a statement of fact.

Quaker meetings taught me to be curious. If the bonfire opened the door, Quaker meetings honed my ability to be irrational. There was a period while I was going regularly where I was seeing wonder in the world at every turn -- a leaf falling on my back felt like a tap on the shoulder, the wind felt like a whisper.

And when my partner and I were doing hypnosis, my rigid belief system became so flexible that I was utterly open to suggestions about my experiences. He would tell me things and I believed them completely, almost like being on a drug, or completely enchanted. We were doing serious magic back then, tempting reality to peel back and reveal the “truth” underneath. It was intoxicating, and it certainly had an element of danger.

As intense as it was, I found this magic to be frustrating too, because I wanted to understand the nature of it -- I wanted to understand hypnosis so badly, and I wanted so badly for magic to be real. I thought that maybe there was a facet of hypnosis that I’d been missing -- some spiritual facet -- that would take me one step closer to an objective, unified, overarching hypnosis model.

I was right that I had been neglecting to think about spirituality with regard to hypnosis. But of course the idea that was leading to some overarching truth was a red herring. The real truth is that there is no overarching truth -- hypnosis can be seen from many models and perspectives, but there isn’t a singular “correct” one.

-- 

I have written extensively about how I feel this is core to hypnosis -- both in educational articles, an upcoming book, and in a personal essay about Judaism. My Jewishness is critically important to me, and has taught me a lot about the value of diverse perspectives, including on the spectrum of rationalism versus spirituality or mysticism.

By some, religion is often seen as incompatible with science (or rationality) -- unprovable mystical forces, an unseeable omnipotent creator. But there have been a number of important rationalist thinkers throughout history, across world religions.

Judaism’s most famous is probably Maimonides -- Moses ben Maimon. He lived in Spain in the 1100s, a time and place where Jewish mysticism was thriving. Maimonides was both a scientist and a deeply religious, learned Jew. One of his greatest contributions to the culture was in codifying Jewish law and practice in the common tongue to make it accessible to the average Jew at the time. In doing so, his rationalism made a great impact in Judaism as a whole.

Maimonides brought Aristotalian philosophy into Judaism, which came with a full rejection of the supernatural -- with the exception of God as transcendent creator. (The creation exists, so it must have been created.) One of his major theological tenets was that there was no conflict between the scientific and the teachings of Torah -- that the revelations of God were completely compatible with science. To Maimonides, for example, angels were not supernatural beings, but a metaphorical personification of the natural forces of the world. There are “angels” for why the wind blows, and “angels” for why we are held stuck to the earth.

If something appeared to be at odds with the natural order of the world -- whether it was from Torah or a perceived miracle -- Maimonides said that was our own lack of understanding, both of science and of the “secrets” of Torah. Essentially: everything that seems irrational has a rational explanation.

There are pros and cons to this, in my opinion. First, it’s neat, elegant, and sensible -- and I think it’s compatible with a measured view of hypnosis. Hypnosis is real -- no one is disputing that -- and while it has unknowable parts to us at our current point in history, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it behaves counter to the natural order of the world.

But I think Maimonides contradicts himself. If you claim to be humbled by the secrets of the world and revelation, why would you so vehemently reject that the world might behave differently than you understand or expect?

How can we claim to “know” the natural order of the world in any capacity beyond what we can observe? How can we claim that our observations are universal or objective?

If we can’t know, we can only experience, explore, experiment. It is brutally human -- reaching out to the world with our limited five senses and our remarkable consciousness. By the nature of us being humans, our explorations will all produce different perspectives and models, all of which have an element of truth to them because all of our experiences are “real,” true experiences.

Hypnosis operates necessarily with/on the human brain -- two unique human brains -- so we each see a unique, limited facet of it. By talking, playing, and connecting with each other, we learn about other facets and perspectives which influence our internal models of it. On a larger scale, as a community, we create, bend, and break rules about it as our community experience evolves. We actually change what hypnosis is, how it works, and how to do it.

Even in just 15 years, I have seen firsthand how hypnosis changes as the community changes. If you look back at historical sources about hypnosis, you can see that we do something radically different nowadays -- which we think of as more sophisticated, but then again, historical hypnotists were doing amazing things too.

Hypnosis as a thing evolves as we explore it more -- as we explore each other more -- and push its boundaries.

We can’t pin down what it is. We can’t model it. But we can participate in it.

It is transcendent -- as Maimonides and Aristotle say God is transcendent; utterly beyond us.

--

Part of my experience of being hypnotized really intensely is a deeper acceptance of what I am feeling or thinking, moment to moment. It is a kind of radical acceptance that what my brain is doing is important and real. It’s not that I don’t understand that I’m hypnotized, or that I don’t make any critical judgments about what is happening. It’s just partially that if I feel something “weird,” I don’t dismiss it out of hand.

When I am in deep trances, weird stuff often happens. I get spontaneous sensory hallucinations, I get stray thoughts that can blindside me.

Occasionally, I have this unmistakable feeling that I am “seeing God.” That felt like a crazy thought to me the first time I had it -- like a person of capital-F “Faith” would have. It didn’t suddenly make me believe in a higher power, but I was left with that feeling that I had touched something divine while my partner murmured into my ear and took control of me.

Hypnosis is not just transcendent by nature or in a vacuum -- it feels transcendent. It feels like nothing else in this world; it completely transcends language and the realm of usual experience.

It makes sense that when faced with this kind of experience, it makes a skeptical person like me feel for a moment that there might be something more, something ineffable. It makes sense that when I have spiritual experiences with hypnosis, it feels innately spiritual to me.

But also it is true that hypnosis is simply very weird.

Why do I feel like I am connecting with divinity in deep trance? Why do I feel certain that my partner and I are reading each other’s minds? Why have I felt a quality of presence or possession?

I can believe it or disbelieve it all I want. I can rationalize it in any way I want. You can relate to me, or think less of me and judge me. But none of that takes away from what my experiential truth is.

What hypnosis feels like is not just more important than what it “is,” that is what it is. The subjective experience that we inhabit is hypnosis. 

Humans are moved by weird, irrational, transcendent experiences. Those are the times our worldview is affirmed or shaken. For those of us who are spiritually open to the idea that the materialistic world might be more than it seems, these moments are bright sparks of light, motivating, inspirational.

Hypnosis does this to me all the time. I am constantly amazed by it. I truly believe the only reason we look at it as a mundane phenomenon is because we assume our world is mundane -- we take it for granted.

But it is not mundane. It is two people communicating in such an intimate way that it behaves like a psychoactive drug. It is striving to know another person so deeply that you innately understand what they are thinking and feeling and you don’t know why. It makes the impossible seem possible; it makes magic feel 100% real.

That’s not some perspective that is out of touch with reality. That is the grounded view of hypnosis.

We are allowed to have crazy experiences with this art. Our main job is not trying to sell people on the idea that it is real. We work so hard to portray ourselves as sane and grounded -- we imitate therapists who need to have an answer to skeptics walking into their office. I think that at a certain point when we are doing intimate hypnosis we are allowed to say, “OK, I know this is real, and you know this is real, so let’s drop the bullshit and acknowledge that what we are doing is actually completely crazy.”

Hypnosis is amazing. It is just amazing. I am not saying that it is completely impossible to understand -- I think it is fair to say at this point that my life’s work is trying to understand it and communicate that understanding. I am saying that we need to not cut ourselves off from amazement, from confusion, from wonder, from not-knowing -- those are crucial to understanding, even crucial to science.

It is a form of respect to the art and to our partners to inhabit a space where we don’t know, to relax our egos and say that hypnosis is more than we can comprehend. To listen -- to ourselves or our partners -- when weird stuff happens.

Hypnosis will grow with us as humans if we let it. We have the opportunity to open ourselves to it, to greet it curiously, and to truly surrender to our exploration.

--

Sleepingirl (they/she) is a hypnokink educator with over a decade of experience on both sides of the pocket watch. They’re the author of several books, many articles (patreon.com/sleepingirl), and LearnHypnokink.com (a guide through the foundations of improvised hypnosis).

Their body of work in hypnokink is extremely extensive and spans many mediums -- see everything at https://sleepingirl.info/.

[a-very-tired-jew]

I'm convinced that Ireland's recent petition to the ICJ to expand and change the definition of "genocide" was either pre-planned or waiting for something like the Amnesty International report that recently came out. However, the report is problematic. It buries the lede in its executive summary, the first and maybe only part that many people read, that they disagree with the accepted standard for genocide and are expanding it.

This disagreement with the accepted definition and their intention to change it is on pages 101 and 102. A little over 100 pages later they admit to this action, which makes up the basis for their entire argument. There are four whole sections before this, two of which are their scope and methodology section and their background and context section. When making an argument for changing a well defined and established term and expanding its accepted definition you have to introduce the argument early on and work to establish it throughout your document.

Especially if its the crux of your entire position.

By pushing off this admittance until pages 101/102 and not even mentioning it in the executive summary it comes across as Amnesty International knew exactly that their argument was poor.

Surely when they get to it they provide a good argument backed up with sources and citations that they expand upon and explain and support them, right?

Nope.

One court case that they don't even go into in the section. Also, this is it. This is their entire section admitting that they disagree with the accepted definition and legal standard of genocide, that they are expanding it to encapsulate their standards, don't explain what those standards are, and cite one case that maybe supports their position.

One citation to support changing the definition and the legal framework surrounding it 101/102 pages into an almost 300 page document.

Any lawyer could easily get this argument thrown out. Any professor would toss out your paper for this. Journals, editors, publishers...you'd receive scathing critical feedback for this alone.

One citation to support your position to change the accepted definition and standards of a highly impactful and devastating act because you "feel" that it is happening and the standard is too "narrow".

In fact, the report alludes to other experts and literature that supposedly supports their position, but it is not included in this section that stands at the core of their argument. It's almost like finding people who also feel the same way are not actually evidence in the eyes of accepted standards, precedence, and evidence based practices and policy.

It'd be like someone in entomology saying they think spiders are actually insects because they feel that the definition of insects is too narrow, providing one citation, not explaining why that citation supports their position, and ignoring the whole body of literature that states otherwise.

And that's been my problem with the position of a lot of anti-Israel groups and individuals. It has been a subjective position based upon them feeling like this conflict is the worst thing ever and thus must constitute a genocide. There's a reason even the ICJ deemed it not a genocide but a conflict that could potentially become one.

Creating a report that is predicated on changing the definition of "genocide", burying the lede on the intention of doing so, and then (likely) having another country petition to change the definition based upon your report is shady behavior. We would all call it out if it was some Right Wing organization in the USA doing it towards another country, organization, or what have you. But again, Israel and, by extension and affiliation, Jews are held to a different standard than anyone else. That is what makes so many of these organizations and their actions antisemitic. None of this effort to goalpost and change the rules and definitions happens for any other country or people.

Only Israel, Israelis, and Jews.

And we know what happens when that occurs.

[milk-is-stable]

WELCOME one and all to the first ever Shoot from the Hip HUNGER GAMES

All credit to this post from @suggestegg for this idea! Let's see what happens when we put the SFTH children into a Hunger Games simulator...who will come out victorious? Notes on methodology and how to follow along are under the read more

THE REAPING

From District 1 (Luxury Items), we have Janusz and Alexa! From District 2 (Weapons & Military), we have Caesar and Juliet!

From District 3 (Electronics), we have Johnny and Janae! From District 4 (Fishing), we have Jasper and Julian!

From District 5 (Electricity), we have John Hobson Jr. and Jim L! From District 6 (Transport), we have Benjamin and Clarissa!

From District 7 (Lumber), we have Michael (And So it Begun) and Priscilla! From District 8 (Textiles), we have Jimmy and Scottish Robin!

From District 9 (Grain), we have Hugh and Inga! From District 10 (Livestock), we have Marty and Peter Steven!

From District 11 (Agriculture), we have Pinocchio and Maria Clarissio! And finally, from District 12 (Coal), we have Chip and Sally Xavier!

Who will fall? Who will triumph? Follow along and find out! Happy Hunger Games, and may the odds be ever in your favor!

Tribute Interviews (next)

Masterpost (full story)

More info below:

How this works: The hunger games simulator generates random events/deaths on an in-game day by day basis. I have not altered the settings of any of the characters and left it totally up to chance.

I'll be making a new post for each "day" of the games where I reveal in written form what the fate and status of each character is. Each post will have the previous days linked, and eventually I'll have a masterpost of the whole games for easy access.

Methodology: There are lots of different simulators out there, I used this one from simublast because it was easy to use/understand.

For assigning characters to districts, I followed a rule that if the characters came from the same longform, they'd be from the same district, and then I assigned everyone districts based on what tied in the best to their respective characters/longforms. If anyone's curious about why I chose the districts for each characters, let me know! Maybe I'll write a little explanation post if enough people are interested.

Now, that being said, a standard hunger games roster is 24, and to my surprise, there are actually over 24 SFTH characters who are 18 or younger, so I did have to leave a few out (such as the bartending son from Death for a Dollar, Sam and Justin from Beetroots & Murder, or the siblings from Too Big to be a Jockey), so if anyone else would like to do something this themselves, please do so, and tag me because I'd love to see it!

Let me know in the comments who you're rooting for to win!

[probablyasocialecologist]

The methodology for the Cass review was established by a team from the University of York including Tilly Langdon, who has previously been involved in promoting Gender Exploratory Therapy – an approach which, despite its neutral-sounding name, discourages children from identifying as trans and has been likened to conversion therapy. Her approach included setting a very high bar for evidence to be considered in the review, ruling out 100 of the existing 103 studies into the use of puberty blockers and hormones to treat trans children. The reason given for excluding all these studies was that they did not incorporate a double blind approach – in other words, they did not involve giving puberty blockers to some patients and placebos to others. This might sound like a reasonable objection on the face of it – until one considers that puberty is a dramatic physical and psychological process, and people can easily tell when it’s happening to them, so a double blind simply wouldn’t work in practice. The Cass review called for more research and, again, few would disagree with this. The suggestion that treatment should be withheld in the process, however, is not neutral. It presupposes that the harm done by puberty blockers (demineralisation of bones, which is usually temporary in the short-term treatment recommended and is similar to what occurs in pregnancy) is more severe than the harm done to a trans child by going through the wrong sort of puberty. The latter is linked to high rates of self-harm and suicidal ideation, together with the need, in many cases, for extensive surgical procedures. Confusingly, the review states that children taking puberty blockers showed “no changes in gender dysphoria or body satisfaction”, which suggests that the author didn’t actually understand what puberty blockers do at all. They don’t make children feel better – they just delay a process that makes them feel worse. This is one of several oddities in a report that lacks internal consistency. It states that there is no established definition of social transition, for instance, and does not offer one, but goes on to talk about it as if there were. It also talks about autistic ‘girls’ identifying as trans in increasing numbers, treating this as mysterious and as cause for concern, despite acknowledging elsewhere that more and more girls are being diagnosed as autistic, so one would expect more diagnoses to be present within any subsection of the young female-assigned population.  Perhaps the most worrying of the review’s conclusions – which should concern people far beyond the trans community – is the suggestion that as far as NHS treatment is concerned, trans people should be treated as children until they are 25. The rational for this is that 25 is the age when (on average) the brain stops developing. As any neurologist will tell you, the brain is in fact never static, and within ten years or so of that age, it begins to shrink. Deciding who has the capacity to make decisions based on brain age could have unintended consequences for the likes of Cass (64).  That aside, what would setting the age of true adulthood at 25 mean for everybody else? If we couldn’t allow people to consent to medical treatment at 24, should we ask them to risk dying for us? If not, then at a stroke we could lose a quarter of our armed forces. Likewise, we would have to give serious thought to what to do about a third of parents who might not be considered competent to look after their newborn children.  And then there are issues like contraception. Right-wingers have long contended, on one pretext or another, that teenage girls shouldn’t have the right to take the pill without their parents’ consent. This is where the review’s suggestion starts to look less like a double standard and more like the thin end of a very nasty wedge.

[astrodice]

PAC: you and your imposter syndrome

this reading can tell you about your imposter syndrome and why you're not an imposter

🗣️ take what resonates and leave what doesn't. excuse my grammar/spelling mistakes if there's any.

Pile 1

Your imposter syndrome comes from fear of losing, fear of being not good enough. You might overwork yourself to the point of exhaustion. It's like you're always preparing for worse.

It seems like recently there was a situation where you've planned something ahead, actually put your hopes high for the first time but something went wrong/got cancelled. For some of you it was a rushed decision that you regret now. Basically, something went not according to your plan and that really made you feel more like imposter.

You're not an imposter because no matter the circumstances you always act wisely, you're an excellent communicator. You need to remind yourself that a few mistakes don't make you less of an intelligent person.

key words: exhaustion, fatigue, obstacles, delays, lack of growth, impulsiveness

Pile 2

Your imposter syndrome comes from focusing on negative past experiences. There is an extreme amount of mental angst. I see that there was a connection with someone that have ended on bad terms, or there was someone who made you feel inadequate.

Right now you have an opportunity to move on, to start something new but your past haunts you, causes you anxiety and make you feel unsure about you choices.

You're not an imposter because you're enough. People might judge you, misunderstand you but it doesn't make you inadequate. You bring something new, unique and that makes you stand out of the crowd.

I see luck coming your way after you done healing yourself. Soon you will feel more relaxed, calm and secure.

key words: failure, regret, fear, anxiety, empath, intuitive, endings, depression, healing, independence, success

Pile 3

For this pile I'm seeing a very specific scenario, so it might not resonate with many people here.

Recently some you were promoted, got a raise or become like a team leader. Which made you feel like you need to meet some sort of standard, that is required for your position. You also might feel like there's a pressure from you team members, like you have to do you work perfectly, so other people won't judge you or think of you as an unqualified worker. To sum up, there's a feeling that you don't deserve what you have.

You're not an imposter because you're very disciplined, reliable and practical. You're perfect for your job and your team is very lucky to have you. If you're facing conflict within your team, you have to step up and set rules/methodologies that can help your team work better.

key words: collaboration, authority, mentor, new position/project, public reward, success, burden, partnership

[dufferpuffer]

Claiming it was disrespectful to call off the werewolf essay might be stretch…

A substitute teacher should not deviate from what the regular teacher planned. It’s not disrespectful for Lupin to call off the assignment, it’s disrespectful for Snape to deliver it in the first place. Not because of the subject matter, but because it’s undermining what Lupin planned and deems appropriate for his students to spend their time on. If Lupin is planning to get them to work on an essay or project about anything he has been teaching, it’s distracting and detrimental to his schedule for the kids to be worried about Snape’s spin-off rogue homework. It should have been proposed as optional extra credit at best, but as the main teacher Remus has every right to call it off.

It’s true, in an ideal world maybe Remus would have prepared something (both class and homework) for Snape to deliver, but it’s very obvious by their relationship that Snape was merely trying to gratuitously criticise Lupin in front of his class.

It’s also a stretch to say Snape is a good teacher. As a teacher myself, I see your appreciation for the admin side and for the high standards for results that Snape clearly values, but there’s also an obvious contempt for anyone who cannot keep up with his methodology, which is unfair, discouraging, and results in cases like Neville and Ron, who become completely disengaged and disinterested in learning potions. Harry himself saw immediate progress when Snape’s oppressive presence was no longer in the room - brewing a potion for his OWL examiners in OotP, and seemed to count a lot on Hermione’s help to study. Of the entire Gryffindor year, only Harry, Ron and Hermione made it to NEWT level, and Harry himself was dreading to continue his studies, had it not been for his desire to pursue a career as an auror. He’s not a good teacher that “some people simply don’t mesh with” if he has no patience or plans to bring the students who are struggling up to speed with the rest of the cohort, not to mention his blatant favouritism towards Slytherin and Draco, which only encouraged bullying and rivalry in his class.

Snape as a DADA teacher is surprisingly more reasonable, but still appalling in his relationships with students.

You can write an essay on a 10ft long parchment about how bad of a teacher Lupin is if you want - I am perpetually baffled by the incredibly arbitrary takes people have on pedagogy and learning when it comes to discussing Hogwarts teachers, but you can’t seriously suggest Snape is a good one.

Professor Binns has been teaching for centuries. He is also by no means a good teacher. Snape’s years of experience over Lupin, or Hagrid, have somehow only made him more bitter and dissatisfied with his job.

Remus' disrespect - and Severus as a teacher:

I don't think Remus is a bad teacher. I think he is a good teacher. And for his first year - EXCEPTIONALLY good. Raw talent. I just don't think Snapes observations were wrong. Overly judgemental for a man in his first year? Sure. But not wrong.

I see what you mean about Snapes rogue essay being disrespectful to Remus' lesson structure. He wanted to teach Hinkeypunks next - he's caught one and everything.

...Except this wasn't a rogue substitute lesson. Remus Lupin knows when every single Full Moon will be for his whole life. Fun fact: on his 79th Birthday, 2039, there will be a Full Moon. From the moment he got his schedule he knew when he would have days off and yet he prepared absolutely nothing for Severus to do.

Not only that - he knows why Severus takes Lycanthropy so seriously. He knows Severus is holding himself back under the flimsiest trust that Remus might not be wanting to kill kids. He knows that Severus is brewing him Wolfsbane perfectly to keep him safer - though there's a high risk of error. It's difficult.

Yet all Remus does all year, rather than giving Severus any sign that he is working WITH him, that he ALSO wants to keep the kids safe, that he is being RESPONSIBLE about his condition and his job as an educator... is grind his heel into Severus' toe.

Severus is thinking "If I mess up even one dose of the potion there will be a XXXXX ranked Magical Beast out for student blood. Could be this month, could be next month - I need to be ready and I need the kids to have a fighting chance at defending themselves."

Remus could have been spending the year trying to prove he is working to the same goal. Instead he gives Severus no reason to trust him. He manipulates, blatantly lies, makes Severus play maid with his medicine... he should have been teaching about werewolves early, in case something went wrong. He poses real danger but does nothing to mitigate it and throws away Severus' attempt to fill the hole.

THAT is pretty disrespectful. Severus is doing so much for him and putting far more faith in him than he is earning.

As far as Severus being a good teacher:

He's an ass. His brusque manner doesn't work for everyone and he fails to help sensitive souls, unable to offer anything but 'tough love'. But... I dunno, 3 Griffindors in 6th year seems pretty good...?

Year 6 and 7 are optional. People only pick the classes that might help them get into a career. Others graduate at 5th year. There's <10 kids in every house while Harry was there. <40 kids. Outside Potions 6th year there were a dozen students. 3 Griffindors, 1 Hufflepuff, 4 Slytherins and 4 Ravenclaws.

12 students, out of 40 or less. Over a quarter of the students in Harry's year were choosing to take Potions - thinking Snape was going to continue to be their teacher. To even get into Snapes' N.E.W.T. classes you need an OWL of the highest grade. Which means Snape successfully taught at least 10 students, maybe more, to achieve O's on their OWLs.

Only Harry and Ron didn't have their textbooks for the class - because they got Es and so didn't think they would get in. That means everyone else got Os.

Snape's students learn and they learn to a high standard. His issue is that he has some people fall through deep cracks. But 1/4 of a grade getting O's without any coddling...? When usually 10%, 15% of a class get an A - he has 25%. Maybe more, if they didn't pick to do Potions in N.E.W.T.s, or graduated after their OWLs.

I don't know what to call that other than good teaching. How Snape can be so abrasive and yet drag over 25% of his class into excellence is... it's hard to wrap my around tbh

Hermione specifically does worse without Snape at the blackboard, even though she's a Textbook Tina. His teaching worked for her better than her regular textbook and homework worship.

I haven't seen any examples of him showing favouritism to Slytherin. He might show some favouritsm to Draco, though I don't think in class. Draco is just kinda good at potions? Harry notices him complimenting Draco's work - like maybe he's just good? lol He doesn't actually show house bias as far as I have been able to find. There was certainly no bullying or rivalry in class, he was a no-nonsense teacher who didn't tolerate silly childishness.

So yeah, I struggle to see how Snape is a poor teacher? He is an excellent teacher with a rather deep flaw - he struggles to connect to his students, especially the annoying ones. As a man working three whole jobs though I'm not too surprised. Dumbledore's left hand, Voldemort's right hand, teacher of a core subject... and still drags students into his NEWTs class.

[transmutationisms]

hello! im just finishing up my read of structures of scientific revolutions, which has genuinely been very useful and shifted my understanding of science in a way being around people doing scientific research all day really didn't! i don't have a liberal arts education so i would love to get a sense of (a) what else of the philosophy / history of science canon is worth reading in the original (b) standard review papers or introductory textbooks and (c) critiques of the canon. i understand this is a big ask ofc, so feel free to point me to good depts / syllabi from good courses. thanks :)

yessss such a fun question >:) so, the thing that was so great about 'the structure of scientific revolutions', which i'm sure you've picked up on, is that kuhn pushed historians and philosophers of science to challenge the positivist model of science as a linearly progressive search to 'accumulate knowledge'. the idea of a 'paradigm shift' was itself a paradigm shift at the time; it was an early example of a language for talking about radical change in science without giving into the assumption that change necessarily = 'progress' (defined by national interests, mathematisation, and so forth). this is still an approach that's foundational to history and philosophy of science; it's now taken as so axiomatic that few academics even bother to gloss or defend it in monographs (which raises its own issue with public communication, lol).

where kuhn falls apart more (and this was typical for a philosopher of his era, training, and academic milieu) is in the fact that he never developed any kind of rigorous sociological analysis of science (despite alluding to such a thing being necessary) and you probably also noticed that he makes a few major leaps that indicate he's not fully committed to thinking through the relationship between science and politics. so for example, we might ask, can a paradigm shift ever occur for a reason other than a discovered 'anomaly' that the previous paradigm can't account for? for instance, how do political investments in science and scientific theories affect what's accepted as 'normal science' in a kuhnian sense? are there historical or present cases where a paradigm didn't change even though it persistently failed to explain certain empirical observations or data? what about the opposite, where a paradigm did change, but it wasn't necessarily or exclusively because the new paradigm was a 'better' explanation scientifically? how do we determine what makes an explanation 'better', anyway, especially given that kuhn himself was very much invested in moving beyond the naïve realist position? and on the more sociological side, we can raise issues like: say you're a scientist and you legitimately have discovered an 'anomaly'. how do you communicate that to other scientists? what mechanisms of knowledge production and publication enable you to circulate that information and to be taken seriously? what modes of communication must you use and what credentials or interpersonal connections must you have? what factors cause theories and discoveries to be taken more or less seriously, or adopted more or less quickly, besides just their 'scientific utility' (again, assuming we can even define such a thing)?

again, this is not to shit on kuhn, but to point out that both history and philosophy of science have had a lot of avenues to explore since his work. note that there are a few major disciplinary distinctions here, each with many sub-schools of thought. a 'science and technology studies' or STS program tends to be a mix of sociological and philosophical analysis of science, often with an emphasis on 'technoscience' and much less on historical analysis. a philosophy of science department will be anchored more firmly in the philosophical approach, so you'll find a lot of methodological critique, and a lot of scholarship that seeks to tackle current aporias in science using various philosophical frameworks. a history of science program is fundamentally just a sub-discipline of history, and scholarship in this area asks about the development of science over time, how various forms of thinking came into and out of favour, and so forth. often a department will do both history and philosophy of science (HPS). historians of medicine, technology, and mathematics will sometimes (for arcane scholastic reasons varying by field, training, and country) be anchored in departments of medicine / technology / mathematics, rather than with other faculty of histsci / HPS. but, increasingly in the anglosphere you'll see departments that cover history of science, technology, and mathematics (HSTM) together. obviously, all of these distinctions say more about professional qualifications and university bureaucracy than they do about the actual subject matter; in actuality, a good history of science should virtually always include attention to some philosophical and sociological dimensions, and vice versa.

anyway—reading recs:

there are two general reference texts i would recommend here if you just want to get some compilations of major / 'canonical' works in this field. both are edited volumes, so you can skip around in them as much as you want. both are also very limited in focus to, again, a very particular 'western canon' defined largely by trends in anglo academia over the past half-century or so.

philosophy of science: the central issues (1998 [2013], ed. martin curd & j. a. cover). this is an anthology of older readings in philsci. it's a good introduction to many of the methodological questions and problems that the field has grown around; most of these readings have little to no historical grounding and aren't pretending otherwise.

the cambridge history of science (8 vols., 2008–2020, gen. eds. david c. lindberg & ron numbers). no one reads this entire set because it's long as shit. however, each volume has its own temporal / topical focus, and the essays function as a crash-course in historical methodology in addition to whatever value you derive from the case studies in their own right. i like these vols much more than the curd & cover, but if you really want to dig into the philosophical issues and not the histories, curd & cover might be more fun.

besides those, here are some readings in histsci / philsci that i'd recommend if you're interested. for consistency i ordered these by publication date, but bolded a few i would recommend as actual starting points lol. again some of these focus on specific historical cases, but are also useful imo methodologically, regardless of how much you care about the specific topic being discussed.

Robert M. Young. 1969. "Malthus and the Evolutionists: The Common Context of Biological and Social Theory." Past & Present 43: 109–145.

David Bloor. 1976 [1991]. Knowledge and Social Imagery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (here is a really useful extract that covers the main points of this text).

Ian Hacking. 1983. Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Steven Shapin. 1988. “Understanding the Merton Thesis.” Isis 79 (4): 594–605.

Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer. 1989. Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Mario Biagioli. 1993. Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bruno Latour. 1993. The Pasteurization of France. Translated by Alan Sheridan and John Law. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Margaret W. Rossiter. 1993. “The Matthew Matilda Effect in Science.” Social Studies of Science 23 (2): 325–41.

Andrew Pickering. 1995. The Mangle of Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Porter, Theodore M. Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life. Princeton University Press, 1996.

Peter Galison. 1997. “Trading Zone: Coordinating Action and Belief.” In The Science Studies Reader, edited by Mario Biagioli, 137–60. New York: Routledge.

Crosbie Smith. 1998. The Science of Energy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chambers, David Wade, and Richard Gillespie. “Locality in the History of Science: Colonial Science, Technoscience, and Indigenous Knowledge.” Osiris 15 (2000): 221–40.

Kuriyama, Shigehisa. The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. Zone Books, 2002.

Timothy Mitchell. 2002. Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

James A. Secord. 2003. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.

Sheila Jasanoff. 2006. “Biotechnology and Empire: The Global Power of Seeds and Science.” Osiris 21 (1): 273–92.

Murphy, Michelle. Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty: Environmental Politics, Technoscience, and Women Workers. Duke University Press, 2006.

Kapil Raj. 2007. Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Schiebinger, Londa L. Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Harvard University Press, 2007.

Galison, Peter. “Ten Problems in History and Philosophy of Science.” Isis 99, no. 1 (2008): 111–24.

Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. Zone Books, 2010.

Dipesh Chakrabarty. 2011. “The Muddle of Modernity.” American Historical Review 116 (3): 663–75.

Forman, Paul. “On the Historical Forms of Knowledge Production and Curation: Modernity Entailed Disciplinarity, Postmodernity Entails Antidisciplinarity.” Osiris 27, no. 1 (2012): 56–97.

Ashworth, William J. 2014. "The British Industrial Revolution and the the Ideological Revolution: Science, Neoliberalism, and History." History of Science 52 (2): 178–199.

Mavhunga, Clapperton. 2014. Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Lynn Nyhart. 2016. “Historiography of the History of Science.” In A Companion to the History of Science, edited by Bernard Lightman, 7–22. Chichester, UK: Wiley Blackwell.

Rana Hogarth. 2017. Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World, 1780–1840. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Suman Seth. 2018. Difference and Disease: Medicine, Race, and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Aro Velmet. 2020. Pasteur's Empire: Bacteriology and Politics in France, its Colonies, and the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

i would also say, as a general rule, these books are generally all so well-known that there are very good book reviews and review essays on them, which you can find through jstor / your library's database. these can be invaluable both because your reading list would otherwise just mushroom out forever, and because a good review can help you decide whether you even need / want to sit down with the book itself in the first place. literally zero shame in reading an academic text secondhand via reviews.

[cryptotheism]

Did premodern European alchemists, natural philosophers, etc have a coherent philosophy of science? Like did they have a coherent methodology for finding truth, in the way that we have observations and statistics and hypotheses now?

No, but-

They weren't scientists, and didn't have a coherent theory of the scientific method, but all the pieces were there, and the scholarly/analytical practices of the time were often "very science-like" in that they placed a lot of focus on the induction of new knowledge through repeated experiment.

Like, when I dove into the Islamic alchemists, I was surprised by just how encyclopediac their writing is. The biggest change from the byzantine to the Islamic Alchemists is that the Islamic alchemists were really good at writing things down in a formal, comprehensible way. Some of Rhazes's work damn near reads like a list of materials and their properties, followed by recipes. It's extremely systematic.

And that followed into the retranslation movement when alchemy was reintroduced to Europe. BUT premodern European alchemists were more entrepreneurial in character. They were more concerned with demonstrating practical results than loftier goals like the long-term preservation of knowledge, but they were all pulling from these translated Islamic encyclopedias.

So while they didn't have a coherent theory of science, they had a wealth of standardized, systemized data that they would fiddle with, and when they got good results, they would publish a book about it hoping to get a job. It's not formalized science, but you can see how all the pieces were there.

[neopianbiologyproject]

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to The Neopian Biology Project!

This blog is an offshoot of a series of posts started on my main account. It is run by me, @asterixcalibur, in association with Happy Lab Accidents on @cabletwo. I'm an artist and funny person by trade, but a biologist by tragic BDGilbertian retribution.

The goal of this project is to identify all of Neopia's unique species, categorize them by kingdom and region of origin, and find an ideal specimen for each that can be put into a natural history museum (my gallery on Neopets). As of writing, the project has identified over 2000 unique species of Neopian wildlife.

Our main methodology is scouring item descriptions for helpful information. This process also involves researching and standardizing the taxonomical, ecoregional, and evolutionary timeline terminology of Neopia.

Longer term goals are to obtain the ideal specimen of every identified species for the museum, and renovate the museum into a simulated museum experience through careful application of visual assets and CSS/HTML. Maybe one day we can shoot for the Gallery Spotlight?

On Neopets

My account on Neopets is classypotassium. Feel free to ask to be NeoFriends -- just tell me who you are here!

The Neopian Biological Sciences Natural History Museum itself is here.

Ways to Contribute

1. Donate a specimen

If you'd like to donate or loan a specimen to the museum, contact me so we can discuss attribution and collateral!

The gallery's JellyNeo wishlist is here. It will be continually updated as specimens are identified, so consider it a work in progress. As of writing I also haven't checked anything off even if it's been obtained, so double check the museum before offering donations!

2. Donate Neopoints

You can also "donate" by buying a Plushie Fungus from my shop! These are intentionally overpriced so that the change can be considered a charitable donation.

3. Interact here!

A lot of the posts that end up here are going to be asking for people's thoughts on origin, kingdom, uniqueness, and so on, through polls and direct questions.

You can also submit items, images, links, art, specimens, fossils, documentation, scientific papers, primary sources, etc. and so on, for consideration by the Project!

You don't need to know anything about Neopets to put in your two NP (or cents USD). In fact, sometimes it's better to get a perspective grounded in normal Earth biology, because, speaking as a biologist here in Neopia, I can very well say oh ym god please help ohhhh my god you don't even know

Conclusion

You don't need to be into Neopets to enjoy or contribute to this blog; I'll try my best to write posts so that they can be enjoyed by anyone aware of but not necessarily into Neopets. In my experience, explaining Neopets to someone entirely unfamiliar with it is always fun. This shit runs deep, dark, and as spaghetti as its code. Best part of Neopets, to me, is that the site rewards you for exploration, and some of the most consequential but by far weirdest lore can only be found by happening upon a page six links deep into a chain of site features that have gone untouched since 2009, as part of a philosophy of interaction that runs the entire site and is entirely against modern website design principles.

Anyway,

Thank you for visiting!

Science awaits!