Capo Ferrero Roche

in 2010, a camp counselor goon logged on to the somethingawful forums asking for help with the zipline he build from scratch, and with no engineering knowledge, that didn’t seem to be working right. when he tested it with a sandbag, it continued to gather speed during the entirety of the 143 foot drop (19 degree slope) until it slammed into the wooden platform at the bottom at a speed of 65mph, presumably creating a child paste that would have to be scraped off to be sent home. there were pictures.

And some visual aides

TOMORROW IS HALLOWEEN!!!

TOMORROW IS HALLOWEEN!!!

TOMORROW IS HALLOWEEN!!!

TOMORROW IS HALLOWEEN!!!

TOMORROW IS HALLOWEEN

It has been literal years but every time I see Martin’s tweets posted somewhere and his word is shared as truth while her post is not shared it sort of reiterates the fact that we trust men to speak about feminism more than we believe women who experience it. 

Adding screenshots of her post. His whole post is there without needing a link. Hers should be, too.

As a Scottish person, I need to say this:

ESTABLISHED TITLES IS A SCAM!

You cannot become a Lord/Lady in Scotland by owning land of any size. The title of Lord or Lady are titles of Peers in the House of Lords, who are members of the House of Lords, the Upper House of the British Parliament. You get a peerage by donating a fucktonne of money to the Tory party being appointed as such by the British Government, not by owning Land in Scotland. If owning land was enough to get you a peerage, my parents would be Lord and Lady Stabbii. They are not. In fact my Dad is banned from any official honours.

There are better ways to support tree planting, rewilding or natural landscape projects in Scotland, namely by donating to either the National Trust for Scotland or the Scottish Wildlife Trust. Both of these charities are trusted, well established and reliable charities that carry out rewilding, tree planting and nature conservation all over Scotland. If you want a cool title, make one yourself.

Now, they're fast and strong

Now, they rule the world

-Instead of buying coffee each morning, make your own at home before you leave for work. Those dark roasts really add up! Buy just one drink per week and make it a special occasion to savor and look forward to.

-Stop costly ‘vampire power’ drains by unplugging appliances when not in use. Use power trips when possible for east turn-offs and avoid plugging things into the wall.

-Employ the ‘30 day rule’. If you want to make a purchase, put it back and wait a month—if the urge to buy it has passed, it probably wasn’t worth it.

-Use grocery lists and stick to them.

-Prepare your own meals whenever possible instead of going out to eat—and host your friends at home!

-Cancel unused gym memberships and automatic subscriptions.

-Learn how to sew and cut your own hair. This saves a buttload if money if you’re not replacing new clothes or going to expensive trips to the salon.

-Use poison-testers efficiently. Paying someone to test your food for you can provide peace of mind and a sense of security, but it’s an expensive service, especially if you have many determined enemies! Buy, store, and prepare your own food in a room only you have access to, vary your diet, eat unpredictably, and you will only need to employ a poison tester for special occasions, like weddings or diplomatic missions.

-Learn to enjoy cold showers! Not only do they build character and increase endurance, but they’re good for the skin—and cut on electricity costs!

-Sell your guns! Bullets are expensive and extremely difficult to make, and subject to legal restrictions. In contrast, a good sword and a whetstone can last generations with proper care and be repaired with comparative ease. If ranged attacks are important to your home defense system, arrows are reusable and easy to make. Watch free YouTube tutorials instead of attending a class.

-Coupons, coupons, coupons!

-Dogs are high-maintenance, expensive, and can be difficult to train. They need high levels of attention and are vulnerable to bribery and treachery—even a dog that’s aggressive towards strangers can usually be thwarted with food or a familiar face. Spiders, on the other hand, are exceptionally low-maintenance, can go days or weeks without feeding, and can act as pest control. Allowing large, recognizable spiders to build webs over windows and door frames inside your home will serve as a strong deterrent to most intruders, and broken webs can act as warning clues that something is amiss.

-Quality over quantity. It’s fair cheaper to buy one pair of high-quality $300 shoes that will last you a decade than to buy thirty pairs of $30 shoes that fall apart after a few months.

-Make your own gifts to give to friends and family. Picking up an artistic craft or hobby may seem superficially worthless, but the social obligation to give expensive presents is a major money-suck. Your loved ones will appreciate the handcrafted, personal quality of your gifts—and customizing them will allow you to create secret compartments in which to hide listening devices, illicit materials, and/or coded messages.

-Only use ATMs affiliated with your own bank to cut withdrawal fees.

-Get a library card and USE it! You can rent books, movies, music, and more from your local library for a fraction of the cost of using other services.

It’s loud and bright and productive and glamorous. It’s fast-paced and things cycle through the environment in hours. Everyone is trying to fight for their position in the food chain and stay Relevant. There are lots of pretty things to look at. If something gets Popular it has an impact on everything around it, for a brief time until the next big thing arrives. To an outside observer it’s chaos but to those involved it has order, reason, a Purpose.

Tumblr is like a deep-sea ecosystem.

An ant doesn’t start babbling when they see a circuit board. They find it strange, to them it is a landscape of strange angles and humming monoliths. They may be scared, but that is not madness.

Madness comes when the ant, for a moment, can see as a human does.

It understands those markings are words, symbols with meaning, like a pheromone but infinitely more complex. It can travel unimaginable distances, to lands unlike anything it has seen before. It knows of mirth, embarrassment, love, concepts unimaginable before this moment, and then…

It’s an ant again.

Echoes of things it cannot comprehend swirl around its mind. It cannot make use of this knowledge, but it still remembers. How is it supposed to return to its life? The more the ant saw the harder it is for it to forget. It needs to see it again, understand again. It will do anything to show others, to show itself, nothing else in this tiny world matters.

Okay. There’s a social interaction concept that I’ve tried to convey multiple times in multiple conversations, so I’m going to just go ahead and make a graph.

I’m calling this concept “Affordance Widths”.

Let’s say there’s some behavior {B} that people can do more of, or less of. And everyone agrees that if you don’t do enough of the behavior, bad thing {X} happens; but if you do too much of the behavior, bad thing {Y} happens.

Now, let’s say we have five different people: Adam, Bob, Charles, David, and Edgar. Each of them can do more or less {B}. And once they do too little, {X} happens. But once they do too much, {Y} happens. But where {X} and {Y} starts happening is a little fuzzy, and is different for each of them. Let’s say we can magically graph it, and we get something like this:

Now, let’s look at these five men’s experiences.

Adam doesn’t understand what the big deal about {B} is. He feels like this is a behavior that people can generally choose how much they do, and yeah if they don’t do the *bare minimum* shit goes all dumb, and if they do a *ridiculous* amount then shit goes dumb a different way, but otherwise do what you want, you know?

Bob understands that {B} can be an important behavior, and that there’s a minimum acceptable level of {B} that you need to do to not suffer {X}, and a maximum amount you can get away with before you suffer {Y}. And Bob feels like {X} is probably more important a deal than {Y} is. But generally, he and Adam are going to agree quite a bit about what’s an appropriate amount of {B}ing for people to do. (Bob’s heuristic about how much {B} to do is the thin cyan line.)

Charles isn’t so lucky, by comparison. He’s got a *very* narrow band between {X} and {Y}, and he has to constantly monitor his behavior to not fall into either of them. He probably has to deal with {X} and {Y} happening a lot. If he’s lucky, he does less {B} than average; if he’s not so lucky, then he tries to copy Bob’s strategy and winds up getting smacked with {Y} way more often than Bob does.

Poor David’s in a situation called a “double bind”. There is NO POSSIBLE AMOUNT of {B} he can do to prevent both {X} and {Y} from happening; he simply has to choose his poison. If he tries Bob’s strategy, he’ll get hit hard with {X} *AND* {Y}, simultaneously, and probably be pretty pissed about it. On the other hand, if he runs into Charles, and Charles has his shit figured out, then Charles might tell him to tack into a spot where David only has to deal with {X}. Bob and Adam are going to be utterly useless to David, and are going to give advice that keeps him right in the ugly overlap zone.

Then there’s Edgar. Edgar’s fucked. There is *NO AMOUNT* of behavior that Edgar can dial into, where he isn’t getting hit HARD by {X} *and* {Y}. There’s places way out on the extreme - places where most people are getting slammed hard by {X} or slammed hard by {Y} - where Edgar notices a slight decrease in the contra failure mode. So Edgar probably spends most of his time on the edges, either doing all-B or no-B, and people probably tell him to stop being so black-and-white about B and find a good middle spot like everyone else. Edgar probably wants to punch those people, starting with Adam.

In any real situation, the affordance width is probably determined by things independent of X, Y, and B. Telling Bob to do a little more {B} than Adam, and Charles to do a little less {B} than Adam or Bob, is great advice. But David and Edgar need different advice - they need advice one meta-level up, about how to widen their affordance width between {X} and {Y} so that *some* amount of {B} will be allowed at all.

In most of the situations where this is most salient to me, {B} is a social behavior, and {X} and {Y} are punishments that people mete out to people who do not conform to correct {B}-ness. A lot of the affordance width that Adam and Bob have would probably be identified as ‘halo effects’.

For example, let’s say {B} is assertiveness in a job interview. Let’s say {X} represents coming across as socially weak, while {Y} represents coming across as arrogant. Adam probably has a lot going for him - height, age, socioeconomic background, etc. - that make him just plain *likeable*, so he can be way more assertive than Charles and seem like a go-getter, *or* seem way less assertive than Charles and seem like a good team player. Whereas David was probably born the wrong skin color and god-knows-what-else, and Edgar probably has some kind of Autism-spectrum disorder that makes *any* amount of assertiveness seem dangerous, and *any* amount of non-assertiveness seem pathetic.

There’s plenty of other values for {B}, {X} and {Y} that I could have picked; filling them in is left as an exercise for the reader.

Add on some example behaviors that fit this. They don’t have to be gendered or something like that. They can be very specific, they can be broad. Just things people can do an amount of and that bad things happen if they do too much or too little of them.

Adam, as an attractive heterosexual man can appear as butch or as femme as he wants within pretty large limits and people are just going to compliment him on it. 

Bob, a less-than attractive heterosexual man can act more masculine without too much fear of reprisal but can’t generally slip into more effeminate behaviours without negative comments about his presumed sexuality. Charles, as a gay man, needs to ensure that he confirms to gendered expectations as much as possible to avoid derisive stereotyping for effeminate behaviours.

David, as a trans man, is pretty much screwed if he acts the least bit feminine, but can occasionally avoid accusations of transitioning poorly if he loads up on balls out machismo.

Emily, being a trans woman, gets screwed over in that she can’t act effeminate without being accused of re-enforcing sexism and can’t act masculine without getting accused of not-being-trans-enough and pretty much gets assaulted with both negative outcomes simultaneously anyway.

Fritz’s graph changes from day to day, too fast for them to make plans that will help them stay between X and Y, plus other people are going to keep saying “why can’t you do that today? you managed it fine yesterday.”

Amy is a fairly good natural student whose parents are paying for half of her education; she works part-time to cover the rest. She studies some, she does some homework, and things go fine. If she slacks off on the studying, she’ll catch up later. If she crams too hard or gets obsessed about one of her classes, she’ll start missing out on her social life, and might show up late for work a few times, enough to get written up. But mostly, as long as she shows up for class, she’s fine.

Brenda is not a natural student. Studying is hard for her; she has to put substantial effort into it, or she starts falling behind. However, she’s got parental help and a scholarship; she works in the student center a few hours a week - if she crams hard for mid-terms, she might lose some sleep and catch whatever bug is going around, but her job will mostly understand.

Carol is a single mom with a full-time job and kids. She’s a mediocre student (a bit better than Brenda, actually), but if she spends too much time on school, her paying job will suffer and her kids’ schoolwork will have problems.

Dawn’s native language is not English and she needs a full-time job to afford school. If she doesn’t put a lot of effort into school, she might not pass; if she does, she misses out on sleep and her job performance suffers. Dawn tries to skate by knowing she’s going to flub a few classes *and* that her employer won’t be happy with her; maybe next year she’ll get a grant or loan and can reduce the job load, or maybe she’ll get a tutor who can help her get learn English faster.