The bad habits always look far worse in details, when one is forced to deal with them, and that's a powerful disincentive to working seriously on one's bad habits. One must first get over the self-conscious feelings and take things stoically, and that's difficult to manage under pressure and with tinnitus screaming in your ears and all the rest of it.

Establishing a pattern of good habits disturbs the ecosystem of bad habits. The gremlins and ghosts in one's cognition like things the way they are; their simple needs are periodically met under status quo so they don't like changes.

It's been ridiculously difficult, like... embarrassingly so. It's taken years of trying to get any good habits established.

@Owlor I find myself thinking of Myst and Riven and the little details you get from the second game, hinting at specially prepared papers and inks for the creation of the "Ages" through making books.

@wizardneedsfood @alina are you sure you want that sort of boss? that's the problem with the job

As soon as I drew the eye from this angle, this is what I thought of.

It's the same picture.

Dragons are celestial bodies confirmed.

@PhilipPugh good work! sometimes we think of making a journal of the sunspots but there's so many other such projects to juggle. how often do you get an observation of sunspots (or the lack of them)?

Okay well I’m going for it.

She said bye to her extremely “generic white girl” college friends, and I’m not gonna lie: while I prefer to be an amazing late in life trans woman who is more than a vapid basic bitch, I mourn the absence of the world in which trans people are so safe and accepted that I transitioned at 12 and grew up to be a totally un-self-reflective woman who had none of my strength, had learned no lessons about the world, just got married to another white-picket-fence lesbian and baked cupcakes for the PTA while drinking wine from an insulated tumbler with a beach pun on it.

That world would be such a wonderful place. It wouldn’t put us through a genocidal gauntlet just to be recognized as who we really are.

#ThePrincessDiaries2 #WatchParty

@floatybirb it's true, Watergate killed the Nixon Presidency. yet it's clear that merely getting Nixon out of office was not sufficient: Nixon really was just a symptom of far worse trouble.

@colorful10printbot2 I gotta say I love this sort of thing. just what is it that makes the successful procedurally generated artpiece succeed so brilliantly?

#bot #cgi #10print #maze #labyrinth

What more can I say? Journalism still means something, as it happens. The safety of #journalists is a life and death matter and I vaguely recall that there used to be some general agreement that it was illegitimate in warfare to target the media. But we do not trust "international law" to mean much, right now.

@Darkphoenix @noondlyt oh, er, thank you!

@mxchara @noondlyt your point is valid, and I am looking from the outside.
I wish you strength on your path.

Let's cut to the chase: #Israel and the IDF would not have gotten itself into a decades-long habit of murdering journalists if there weren't a fundamental power in the trade of #journalism.

The cynical and deceitful forces of social reaction and extremism from multiple quarters (Israel, Christianity, Russia, etc.) have attempted to pretend that journalism merges with propaganda. Thus has Israel felt herself entitled to murder journalists by pretending they're really murdering antisemitic propagandists, peddlers of dangerous ideologies, and so forth.

What's on my mind right now? I'll tell you straight out: it's the uncertainty about whether the sort of journalism that you see practiced in All the President's Men is even possible anymore.

My older sibling Frisk and I...we idolized that movie. No kidding, we latched onto it as a model of what was possible if you tried hard enough: we both wanted to believe that the American Republic (in which we still believed in the 1980s) could be saved by journalism. We could make ourselves believe in the premise behind the "Fourth Estate" talk, i.e. we could make ourselves believe that journalists were a fourth fundamental stratum of "Western civilization" like the other Three Estates (aristocracy, clergy, commoners.)

Guess we were wrong about that, huh? Or were we?

@Darkphoenix @noondlyt I only hope that we can collectively struggle towards a new standard of journalistic objectivity. yeah sure there's the "gonzo" method of discarding objectivity but...well I don't think that's proved to be a valid style of journalism, has it? there's only so far and so much you can get if you involve yourself in the process, like Hunter Thompson and his imitators did.

am I alone in thinking that "journalistic objectivity" does actually make sense? as a practical target, a standard worth honoring? I disagree with Thompson et alii on this point.

@mxchara @noondlyt they lost the whole ideal of being an investigative journalist, that overwhelming NEED TO KNOW THE TRUTH. They are less than shadows of the best.

@noondlyt it's not like the current gang of White House Correspondents are very good at hitting their targets. They should be blasting away at politicians with both barrels, they should be expecting lies, and they shouldn't be mere couriers for official statements.

I fucking can’t stand Li’l Marco. He can take that Bible verse and shove it up his keester already, the little bitch.

@futurebird @akamran aaa I feel that every time I see a stray ant, or I'm in a situation where I know an ant (or other colonial insect) will be separated from their home, e.g. by hitching an accidental ride on a car. I'm a smart person (I think), I know what that separation means...I always feel troubled by such sights, troubled without any idea what to do about it. I might cross myself at such moments

Trump fires all 24 members of the U.S. National Science Foundation’s governing body
https://www.science.org/content/article/trump-fires-nsf-s-oversight-board?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Posted into News from Science @news-from-science-SciMag