sparksbet's recent activity

  1. Comment on Some thoughts on cleaning up my shitty apartment in ~talk

    sparksbet
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    I'm going to echo the recommendation for How to Keep House While Drowning, but I'd like to point out that while iirc the author has ADHD and people with disabilities are a huge target audience for...

    I'm going to echo the recommendation for How to Keep House While Drowning, but I'd like to point out that while iirc the author has ADHD and people with disabilities are a huge target audience for her book, it's not exclusively targeted at them. She wrote the first edition back before she was diagnosed iirc, and it was targeted at women who were overwhelmed by housework, especially women with kids. She's definitely pivoted to more disability-focused content due to her own life experiences since, but it's worth remembering that advice like that isn't necessarily limited to that subset of people

    3 votes

  2. Comment on Some thoughts on cleaning up my shitty apartment in ~talk

    sparksbet
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    I'd like to push back on this a little bit. "Cognitive distortion" as described in CBT isn't intended to be used when you know something intellectually but feel differently. Cognitive distortions...

    P.S. I think the name for what you're feeling might be "cognitive distortion." You know intellectually that it's not that hard of a problem, but it feels like a hard problem.

    I'd like to push back on this a little bit. "Cognitive distortion" as described in CBT isn't intended to be used when you know something intellectually but feel differently. Cognitive distortions are thought patterns, not feelings. The difference may seem pointless, but CBT is all about the relationship between your emotions, your thoughts, and your behavior. So it's important not to conflate them.

    An example of a cognitive distortion that could contribute to the feelings of overwhelm when it comes to cleaning would be thoughts like "If I can't even keep my house clean, I'm a complete failure". But the emotion of being overwhelmed and upset at the state of your house is not the cognitive distortion, and CBT doesn't approach thoughts and emotions identically. You shouldn't treat an emotion like something you're wrong for feeling. Rather, CBT would focus more on automatic thoughts that are leading to these emotions.

    It's also possible to feel overwhelmed by a task for reasons other than negative thought patterns (though negative thought patterns will still not help). For example, I have ADHD, and the resulting executive function issues make it easy to get overwhelmed by tasks even if practically I'm capable of doing them. Avoiding negative thought patterns around it can absolutely help to an extent, because those would further hinder me. But it's not going to magically improve one's executive function either.

    1 vote

  3. Comment on The 100 games that taught me game design in ~games

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    I've never heard of any of these! But I'm a fan of point&click, even retro stuff, so I think I'll look into that last one.

    I've never heard of any of these! But I'm a fan of point&click, even retro stuff, so I think I'll look into that last one.

  4. Comment on Meryl Streep: it’s ‘hardest thing’ for men to see themselves in female characters in ~movies

    sparksbet
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    Personally I really liked how her social anxiety was made very obviously distinct from generic shyness. Plus it's fun to have a depiction of social anxiety that makes me look like I cope super...

    Personally I really liked how her social anxiety was made very obviously distinct from generic shyness. Plus it's fun to have a depiction of social anxiety that makes me look like I cope super well lol.

    4 votes

  5. Comment on The lonely work of moderating Hacker News in ~tech

    sparksbet
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    ah lovely, that sounds toxic in a totally different way than I even expected.

    ah lovely, that sounds toxic in a totally different way than I even expected.

    12 votes

  6. Comment on The lonely work of moderating Hacker News in ~tech

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    In my experience it's worse than the most mainstream subreddits if you're a woman or queer, especially once you scroll down in the comments. Any topic relating to "diversity" is a shitshow. Reddit...

    In my experience it's worse than the most mainstream subreddits if you're a woman or queer, especially once you scroll down in the comments. Any topic relating to "diversity" is a shitshow. Reddit has worse places, but you have to go hunting for them, and it has far better places too.

    I've never heard of TeamBlind, and given your description I think I'm safe steering clear lol

    28 votes

  7. Comment on Meryl Streep: it’s ‘hardest thing’ for men to see themselves in female characters in ~movies

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    to be fair, I think this varies on a different axis from gender. I went through "female puberty" and my experience was mostly just being pissed off at everything all the time. And I can confirm...

    to be fair, I think this varies on a different axis from gender. I went through "female puberty" and my experience was mostly just being pissed off at everything all the time.

    And I can confirm that being smart but not willing to let people cheat off your homework is significantly less useful socially.

    3 votes

  8. Comment on How makers of nonconsensual AI porn make a living on Patreon in ~tech

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    I guarantee Starbucks doesn't do a background check on everyone who owns their stock. The issue with this comparison is that the creators on patreon aren't employed by patreon. They're customers...

    I guarantee Starbucks doesn't do a background check on everyone who owns their stock.

    The issue with this comparison is that the creators on patreon aren't employed by patreon. They're customers of patreon -- patreon makes its money off fees. They don't want to make it more difficult for creators to sign up because of a small percentage of bad actors because that affects their bottom line just as much as patrons.

    3 votes

  9. Comment on Meryl Streep: it’s ‘hardest thing’ for men to see themselves in female characters in ~movies

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    It's one I've seen recommended all over but haven't gotten around to, so maybe I'll use this conversation to remember to put it on my watchlist.

    It's one I've seen recommended all over but haven't gotten around to, so maybe I'll use this conversation to remember to put it on my watchlist.

    2 votes

  10. Comment on Meryl Streep: it’s ‘hardest thing’ for men to see themselves in female characters in ~movies

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    I think a difference I see here is that your description of these character struggles are very specific to the surface plot of the movie. But there are aspects of these plots that are more...

    I think a difference I see here is that your description of these character struggles are very specific to the surface plot of the movie. But there are aspects of these plots that are more universal that I think can be relatable. For example, Turning Red is indeed very much about going through puberty and is very focused on that experience as a tween girl. But the emotional conflicts the character is experiencing because of that can still be relatable to a boy or man -- the fear and confusion of going through puberty as a tween is not gender-specific. Similarly, I can relate to her experiences despite not being remotely interested in boy bands growing up, and even though I don't have immigrant parents I can relate to many of the underlying emotions both she and her mom are feeling in their conflict because I have also had conflicts with my parents over differing expectations.

    I don't necessarily thing it matters whether this particular film was relatable to you, but I think the grand scheme of things, where boys and men can struggle to feel any sort of relatability with any female characters, is tragic. It feels to me like whatever socialization makes this systematically more difficult for men is cutting them off from really great, valuable experiences. That combined with the cultural and economic forces that result from this affecting which stories get told in popular media is what I think is tragic.

    I think part of learning to relate to characters who are different from you is learning how to tie their more specific experiences and resulting feelings, which you might not share, to more universal human emotions and experiences that you do share. That's part of why I suspect exposure to characters who are different from you more in fiction when you're younger can help you develop this as a skill.

    11 votes

  11. Comment on Meryl Streep: it’s ‘hardest thing’ for men to see themselves in female characters in ~movies

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    I find this kinda sad. Not because I think you're obligated to relate to Turning Red or even that you can control that. But most of the issues and perspectives in that movie (and in other media...

    This became even more apparent to me when I watched Turning Red, which focuses a lot on girls issues and their perspectives. I spent the entire movie unable to relate, by the end I just couldn’t figure out if it was a good movie or not.

    I find this kinda sad. Not because I think you're obligated to relate to Turning Red or even that you can control that. But most of the issues and perspectives in that movie (and in other media that focuses on female characters) is not gender-specific. Some are influenced by her being a girl, but they're still built on fundamental struggles with that stage of life for someone of any gender.

    Similarly, the movie focuses on the main character's experiences as a Chinese-Canadian, and her struggles with her mother and other relatives are HUGELY informed by that. I'm wonderbread white but that doesn't prevent me from relating to parts of that experience that are universal or things I can empathize with and learning from the parts that aren't.

    To be extra clear, I'm not blaming you for not relating to this particular movie. I just find it kind of tragic that one could not develop the ability to relate to characters who are different from you in this way (and maybe others?) and I wonder what we could do to prevent that. Women don't systematically have trouble relating to male characters, so I think there simply must be something in how we're socialized that makes men struggle so much with this even into adulthood.

    I wonder how much of the inability to relate to many female characters is based in being raised without the expectation of relating to characters who are different from you in that way. When I was a kid, I read tons of books and watched tons of movies and tv shows with male and female main characters. But often only those of us raised with young girls were encouraged to read or watch the works with female main characters, even ones that are famously very well-made. No one hesitates to recommend a coming-of-age novel with a male protagonist to a girl, but I've never seen a boy recommended a coming-of-age novel with a female protagonist. I wonder if exposing young boys to works with more variety in main characters is likely to improve their ability to relate to main characters who are different from them later in life.

    25 votes

  12. Comment on The 100 games that taught me game design in ~games

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    The guy looks pretty young when I've seen his face in videos. I doubt he's much older than me, and I was born in the late 90s. Doesn't take much effort not to have played games that came out...

    The guy looks pretty young when I've seen his face in videos. I doubt he's much older than me, and I was born in the late 90s. Doesn't take much effort not to have played games that came out before you were born -- if anything it takes effort to go back and play influential titles from earlier days of gaming.

    5 votes

  13. Comment on Tildes Book Club Discussion - The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin in ~books

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    "Untranslatable" phrases are definitely translatable, but sometimes they require a bit more description in one language than in another. I'm definitely of the understanding that we all feel the...

    "Untranslatable" phrases are definitely translatable, but sometimes they require a bit more description in one language than in another. I'm definitely of the understanding that we all feel the same things and just describe them differently. And yeah, the ultimate benefit is that if you struggle to describe something in a pithy way in a language, you can always borrow or coin a word for it.

    For example, I definitely think English-speakers could feel and even express Schadenfreude before we borrowed the word, they'd just describe it differently using other English words. Borrowing the German word just gave an opportunity to have one pithy way to refer to that very specific thing.

    3 votes

  14. Comment on Tildes Book Club Discussion - The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin in ~books

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    I haven't read the books we're discussing here, but yeah I can absolutely weigh in on the linguistics discussion side of things. @syllo hope you don't mind. I find it interesting when books delve...

    I haven't read the books we're discussing here, but yeah I can absolutely weigh in on the linguistics discussion side of things. @syllo hope you don't mind.

    I find it interesting when books delve into language and culture in this way, but in general the idea that language shapes thought is overplayed. The idea that languages have a built-in ethical framework is so much further down that path that it veers into very worrying territory anthropologically. Language is hugely influenced by culture, which hugely influences one's ethical framework, but the idea that there is some inherent ethical framework to a language itself is dicey -- especially if it's a natural language. But I haven't read that Ian M. Banks book, so I can't really weigh in on more than what you've quoted here.

    The idea that language shapes how we think is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. There are "strong" and "weak" versions of this hypothesis, and the strong version, that language determines how we think, has been entirely debunked. That you bring up color is very useful here -- studies have shown people can divide beads by shade even when their language doesn't make a distinction between the color words for two different shades. The weaker version of Sapir-Whorf is that language has some influence on thought. Here the evidence is still flimsy, but there's evidence of a very minor influence. Going back to color, studies have shown that speakers of a language that distinguishes light and dark blue (like Russian) are faster at sorting things by those color categories than languages that don't distinguish those using basic color terms (like English). But it's worth qualifying that "faster" here is on the order of milliseconds -- statistically significant iirc, but not something you'd actually notice much in practice. Color is fun to study like this because dividing up the color space is something that can be done a ton of different ways -- you'd be surprised how subjective and wobbly colors and color distinctions in particular can be.

    As for the article in the Scientific American, it does what a lot of pop sci does in that it vastly overstates things at best and just straight up fudges at worst to tell a good story. And it's a fun story! But the vast majority of actual differences seen are due to cultural and other non-linguistic factors that in turn influence language, rather than language directly influencing thought. It's true that different languages will express information differently, and that in some circumstances it's easier to be vague in one language or specific in another. But the idea that language determines how we think because of these features at more than an extremely subtle level? It's just bunk, scientifically.

    I'm about to go to bed so I'm not gonna delve into all the examples in that article individually though. Let me know if that's something you're interested in me doing later when I'm more awake. Or if you're more interested in talking about language and culture in general, 'cause that's super fun.

    4 votes

  15. Comment on Fifth American tourist arrested at Turks and Caicos airport after ammo allegedly found in luggage in ~travel

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    And it would be the same situation -- the punishment is cruel and doesn't fit the crime, but I would have been an idiot to travel somewhere where that's a potential consequence without being way...

    And it would be the same situation -- the punishment is cruel and doesn't fit the crime, but I would have been an idiot to travel somewhere where that's a potential consequence without being way more vigilant about what's in my bag.

    1 vote

  16. Comment on Students invent quieter leaf blower in ~engineering

    sparksbet
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    Oh yeah the only reason I know what a muffler is is from hearing my parents complain whenever we passed someone who'd "broken" theirs.

    Oh yeah the only reason I know what a muffler is is from hearing my parents complain whenever we passed someone who'd "broken" theirs.

  17. Comment on I am a witch. Well, a well witcher... in ~talk

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    We got married in Denmark, where they kindly let you opt for the ceremony to be done in English, and the officiant actually pronounced it that way then. Made the whole thing that much more fun.

    We got married in Denmark, where they kindly let you opt for the ceremony to be done in English, and the officiant actually pronounced it that way then. Made the whole thing that much more fun.

    2 votes

  18. Comment on Students invent quieter leaf blower in ~engineering

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    Forgive my ignorance, but isn't this what a muffler is? Honestly you'd be surprised how much car noise comes from the tires. There has been work on engineering "quiet pavements" that cut down on...

    And then a mute button for the exhaust systems of all of the cars that drive through my neighborhood?

    Forgive my ignorance, but isn't this what a muffler is?

    Honestly you'd be surprised how much car noise comes from the tires. There has been work on engineering "quiet pavements" that cut down on this noise, but unfortunately it's not in use in many places yet.

    3 votes

  19. Comment on What is your opinion on Dan Brown novels? in ~books

    sparksbet
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    I think "realistic fiction" as a genre is typically meant to identify works that aren't speculative fiction (aka scifi and fantasy) or historical fiction -- "realistic fiction" is usually used for...

    I think "realistic fiction" as a genre is typically meant to identify works that aren't speculative fiction (aka scifi and fantasy) or historical fiction -- "realistic fiction" is usually used for works set somewhere close to the modern day at the time of writing in a world that approximates our own. Dan Brown's books definitely aren't accurate or realistic, but they're set (partially? I haven't read much of it) in the modern day in a world that's at least supposed to be the one we live in, which I think it what could get them categorized as "realistic fiction" the genre even though they're not very realistic.

    7 votes

  20. Comment on I am a witch. Well, a well witcher... in ~talk

    sparksbet
    Link Parent
    Not much "the husband" though. Maybe it's the extra syllable. In Norwegian the word for husband is just "the man" whereas there's a whole separate word for wife (though it's also said with...

    Not much "the husband" though. Maybe it's the extra syllable. In Norwegian the word for husband is just "the man" whereas there's a whole separate word for wife (though it's also said with definite marking commonly as well).

    I say "the wife" and my wife says "the spoose" all the time.