Out Of Mana

Wanting something requires dopamine signaling, but liking something doesn’t.

If you have a mental illness/disorder that affects dopamine, you might feel that you don’t want to do the things that you like. You do still like them. You will appreciate having done them.

Let your likes guide you.

(If you want to read more, here’s one experimental paper about it. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5171207/ This theory called the incentive-sensitization theory was originally created to explain behaviors in addiction but can be applied elsewhere as well)

It's once again Witch Hat Monday!

I don't want Qifrey to become a Brimmed Hat, but if he did, this is the design that would cause me the most emotional damage. My headcanon is that Olly made the tassel glow to keep Qifrey warm, despite it all...

The frustrating part is that huge companies have scraped so much from the Internet that the stuff it writes is pretty indistinguishable from human written text.

On the Wikipedia page, it cites various habits of AI writing — use of em dashes, its meticulous and often superfluous way of bolstering the points it writes, and its love of the Rule of Three.

It’s not just these three, but also how it expands and bends its vocabulary to avoid repeating itself too often, like this example.

And I hope you appreciate that I’ve deliberately used a lot of the examples from the linked page while writing this.

And I’d hate for the takeaway here to be that you have to sand the corners off your own writing style to avoid being accused of writing with AI.

Humans are wired to love the rule of three, I love the Oxford comma - and sometimes I’ll use dashes just for the sake of it.

In an age where people are cruel, people will try to paint kindness as weakness. In an age where people are greedy, people will try to call frugality tacky.

I tracked down a copy of this invaluable classic and somehow got my hands on a near pristine copy secondhand from the 4th printing. It’s lost the dustjacket, alas, but that means I got it for like £5 and not the £4200 a first edition printing in fine condition goes for.

(Who’s the author? *looks at smudge on spine* uhhhh Mkkhill Montanann)

It looks right at home in my bookcase 🥰

Under the cut: a look inside at what the book holds:

"amab" and "afab" are not euphemisms for "male" and "female." not even a doctor should be using "afab" as shorthand for "has a vulva, uterus, high estrogen levels, low testosterone levels, etc," because HRT EXISTS! gender affirming surgeries exist! intersex people exist! you can be afab and change, remove, or not even have been born with any of the above features!!

you cannot use "amab" and "afab" as a shorthand for "has this or that set of features!"

it's not about using progressive language, it's about accurately accounting for people who exist outside the sex binary. those of us who do are under-studied, and the medical system is poorly equipped to handle us, often lumping us in with our agabs and failing to account for how our bodies actually work. this is a PROBLEM that cannot be papered over by finding new euphemisms for "male" and "female"

We had a web system where people were basically automatically triaged for certain conditions and when I was hired there was a question for UTI symptoms that asked are you a man or a woman, routing women to same-day nurse practitioner appointments (because they usually had uncomplicated UTIs) and men to physicians (because they usually had STIs, and if they DID have UTIs they were more medically complex) but this meant that trans people were getting sorted wrong. A committee of me, a doctor, one or two nurses, and another administrator sat down and talked through what that sorting logic actually needed to do, what the risks were of sorting wrong, and what language would be acceptable.

We did not need to know their gender, their sex assigned at birth, their transition history, any of that. What we needed to know is how long their urethra is, because a short urethra means the likeliest situation is an uncomplicated UTI where the top priority is getting antibiotics into them as fast as possible to prevent kidney involvement, and a long urethra means the likeliest situation (in our clinical population) is an STI, but if it IS a UTI kidney involvement may already be a factor, so either way they need a doctor. The language we came up with was "do you have a penis?"