(biologist - artist - queer)

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You’re the only magician that could make a falling horse turn into thirteen gerbils

  • 3 Posts
  • 162 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • You didn’t mention it, but have you considered how it would feel if you had a bad day and didn’t live up to this standard?

    You’re framing it like a moral philosophy, but feeling anger is not a morally bad thing. Neither is jealousy, or selfishness, at times. It’s just part of the human experience, and we can avoid it most of the time, but occasionally we’re going to need to focus on ourselves and our needs and our feelings.

    Similarly, it’s impossible to avoid having an ego 100% of the time. Honestly, it sounds like this quality is part of your identity-- would you like yourself less if you lived up to this standard imperfectly?

    I don’t think it’s unusual to want to be a good person and to want to control our worst impulses. But to describe it as “trying to act like a saint”, and saying you’re “deaf to your own needs”-- those are concerning statements.

    I don’t think anyone can speak for you or guess what’s going on from the outside. But if I were you, I’d be exploring if there’s fear underlying these impulses. Fear of judgment: how do you think the world would perceive you if you stopped being so strict about it? Fear of badness: how does it feel when you have a bad day and you fail to be perfect? Do you resent yourself? Fear of impurity: do you feel like other people are bad when they have these natural reactions? Do you fear being like other people who are experiencing and dealing with normal feelings?


  • Disclaimer: I am not an expert in this and this is just my understanding of how to answer this question

    You may or may not realize that most voters don’t usually go out well in advance and research all potential candidates, selecting the one they feel represents their values the best. Many of them don’t even check in to the conversation until the primaries are over and they can make a simple red vs. blue choice. Among voters that do participate in primaries, they mostly rely on information they learn about those potential candidates by watching advertisements, endorsements from other well known politicians, clips from debates, news and social media coverage, etc.

    Creating that information (ads, debates, news coverage, social media, etc.) requires two things: money and momentum. Money comes first, and is disbursed according to the process the other commenter described-- the party talks with its donors and collectively they decide who to fund.

    In Bernie’s case, he was systematically deprived of money by the DNC as described above, in addition to his moral philosophy of not taking money from big donors. Instead, he funded his campaign through small donations-- which he earned a LOT of-- but he still had fewer funds to generate advertisements, to host events, to “get the word out”.

    Without this funding and support, Bernie couldn’t generate momentum as effectively. The fact that he is as popular as he is despite the lack of support from the party illustrates how popular his platform is, but that isn’t enough to get disengaged voters interested. Further, in his case, other party members actively wanted him to NOT be the nominee, so there were fewer endorsements, more intentional maneuvering by the party to convince voters to vote for other candidates, etc.

    In essence, the idea that having the purest moral and policy philosophy is the most important element to winning the nomination is naive: it takes money and support from institutions, or else no one will ever even know what that pure philosophy is.




  • I want to point out that in the article/interview you posted,

    1. the expert disagreed with the interviewer that the causes of the gap are biological in nature, and

    2. that they both agreed that the causes of the gap are undergoing rapid change due to social factors from the covid pandemic, and they bet it will be decreasing over the next few decades

    Figured I’d clarify in case anyone read your comment and got confused about what the expert was saying :)



  • I want to warn anyone thinking of trying this: don’t.

    Obviously there’s the don’t commit suicide part, and that’s the most important part. But also, as someone who has unfortunately spent time considering various methods, I can tell you: don’t even consider doing it this way.

    Genuinely sorry to be contradictive, but you absolutely would have been in a painful situation if you’d continued. The only explanation is that you didn’t get to the point that your body 100% takes over from you and forces a desperate, painful, writhing attempt to get air.

    You would die of increased CO2 concentration in your blood long before you actually ran out of oxygen. That increased CO2 would be very painful. Like, lizard brain stem absolutely taking over, full panicking levels of painful. Don’t try it!



  • Not the original commenter, but why couldn’t it be more like “John sleeps from 12-20:00 and is usually working from 21-5:00” and “Stacy sleeps from 8:00-16:00 and works from 17-1:00”, so Stacy and John decide to plan their video call for 6:00-7:00? Like I don’t super care what light schedule it is, more what my friends schedules are specifically, right? And the question could just be, “What times are you available?”






  • So the plant you have there is a Maranta leuconeura. I have one that looks just like it!

    There’s a couple things that could be going wrong. In general, here are the conditions it likes:

    1. It likes indirect light. I keep mine by a south facing window that has an awning cutting the harsh light outside. Additionally, I have it behind a sheer curtain.

    2. It likes to be kept in moist soil, and in a humid place. I don’t let mine fully dry out before rewatering it, and I live in a place where the ambient humidity is often 60-80%. If you live in a dry place, water it often and maybe keep it in the most humid place with enough light (kitchen or bathroom is usually more humid)

    3. and this is key, it does NOT like hard water. I honestly think this could be the problem with yours given what you said. Hard water has a lot of minerals, and over time, they build up in the soil. The plant might have been fine with tap for months, but now the soil could effectively be too “salty” for it.

    If I had this plant, I’d do one of two things.

    Option 1:

    • buy fresh potting soil
    • gently remove the plant from its pot
    • shake off the soil from the roots
    • rinse and scrape off any residue on the inside of the pot
    • replant in fresh soil
    • water with RO/soft water from now on (see note below), keeping it moist, in whatever spot it already lives

    Option 2:

    • buy or obtain real reverse osmosis (RO) water (see note below)
    • water the plant so thoroughly with RO that the mineral salts dissolve and are carried away. This means soaking the pot in a large volume (like more than a gallon) of RO water for an hour or so, or watering it so water flushes out the bottom 5+ times in a row. You can tell if you flush the minerals out because there should be no grey dusty residue left on the soil or sides of the pot!
    • add a small amount of balanced fertilizer (like follow miracle grow instructions or something)
    • water with RO/soft water from now on (see note below), keeping it moist, in whatever spot it already lives

    As backup, I might also try and root a cutting (again, in RO water) just in case it still dies anyway. Hopefully with these efforts it will revive, though!

    Note on soft/RO water:

    If you are looking for soft water, don’t use water from a water softener (confusing, I know). This is because water softeners for humans replace the minerals with sodium ions. In essence, water softener water is just as “salty” as hard water, it’s just different salts.

    Instead, try and get deionized (DI) or reverse osmosis (RO) water.

    Ideally, this would come from an RO system, which is a common kind of in-house water filter. If you live by a college, you could maybe ask for some from their science departments (especially biology or chemistry). You can also buy it online and have it shipped to you, but this is really expensive, especially considering that the maranta needs so much water.

    Instead, I would buy a TDS meter (available on Amazon for like $7). It’s a little stick device that you put in the water and it tells you how hard it is. With this, you could test a few brands of bottled water (avoid “spring water”, or “remineralized” water-- go for “filtered” or “purified”) until you find one with less than ~30 ppm / ~75 µS/cm dissolved solids. My grocery store sells water in big machines out front that reads 15 µS/cm, and it costs $2.50/5 gallons!

    Honestly, I cheat and get lazy sometimes with mine and water it with tap. You saw yourself how long it takes for the solids to build up, and watering it with RO dissolves some of those over time. It’s not like tap will kill it right away, but these guys sure are picky! :)







  • Oooooh I have some ideas! Some of these are paid/premium (but NOT micro transactions) and some have mild ads. But I share the distaste for data-mining, money grubbing, brain-melting-ad-ridden games, so I’m certain they are on the least intrusive end of the spectrum.

    I really love biology (I’m a biologist…) so these are both pet games and usually breeding/evolution games!

    • Fish Tycoon – This one specifically. A classic! Breed and care for cute fish!
    • Niche breed and evolve – so neat and pretty educational about evolution/genetics. There’s a slightly more complicated/difficult pc game if she decides she likes the nichelings/universe.
    • Pocket Frogs – Simple, low stress collecting game. it would take years to collect all the frogs, and there’s a relatively active community of people who trade sets of frogs to other people to help them complete collections. Would be fun to play with her friends at school!
    • Reigns Her Majesty – a game about running a kingdom as a queen. When you die, you become your heir and retain some progress from your last lives. It doesn’t fit the exact criteria you mentioned, but I think she might like it anyway!