If I post once per hour around the clock, assume it's queue. If I post thrice per minute, assume I'm in pain. For anything inbetween, I'm enjoying a space where I don't have to pass as a human. @sugarelemental.bsky.social
Meanwhile, no person ever: âYou should think about giving up your insulin/antiretrovirals/beta blockers/anti-rejection drugs/prosthetic legs/daily multivitamin, because using those your whole life is bad for some reasonâ
People who are fully healthy, fit and neurotypical seem to think they are that way because theyâre doing something right that the rest of us havenât thought of, and not just because they got lucky
Speaking of the luck of the non-disabledâŚI once terrorized a Karen who was using me to teach her entitled kid that disabled people are Other and should not be treated with respect. I told her (truthfully) that until I was twenty-eight, I wasnât visibly disabled. Then a defective chromosome that I hadnât known about kicked in. So my luck ran out. But until then, I had been normalâjustâŚlikeâŚher.Â
The sheer terror on her face as the concept of âYou mean Iâve just been lucky so far?â seeped into her brain was a thing of beauty.
People who are fully healthy, fit and neurotypical seem to think they are that way because theyâre doing something right that the rest of us havenât thought of, and not just because they got lucky
âYou are one stroke of bad luck, common viral illness, or traumatic event away from being just like meâ is honestly the most terrifying thing you can tell an abled person - and you should. I was healthy and fit and doing everything ârightâ too - right up until some inner switch flipped and my body crumbled right out from under me.
âPeople with disabilities are a group that anyone can join at any time for reasons you may or may not be able to explain and due to circumstances you may or may not have ever been able to do anything aboutâ
- an extension of a quote Iâve heard somewhere on the internet
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used to live in a college town that was huge on sports. 80% of small talk was sportsball and so i developed an Evil Habit: whenever the conversation inevitably turned to the upcoming Big Game i would act excited and then confused. I would earnestly insist they had the details wrong. "the game next Saturday? don't you mean the Thursday after? playing against the [predator species]? no we're playing against the [other predator species]." And so on. i would draw this argument out for as long as feasibly possible, until eventually someone would pull out their phone to prove to me my wrongness. At which point I would squint exaggeratedly at the screen, slap my forehead in an eureka moment, and exclaim "oh you meant the MEN'S team!!! are they doing a game? that's nice."
used to live in a college town that was huge on sports. 80% of small talk was sportsball and so i developed an Evil Habit: whenever the conversation inevitably turned to the upcoming Big Game i would act excited and then confused. I would earnestly insist they had the details wrong. "the game next Saturday? don't you mean the Thursday after? playing against the [predator species]? no we're playing against the [other predator species]." And so on. i would draw this argument out for as long as feasibly possible, until eventually someone would pull out their phone to prove to me my wrongness. At which point I would squint exaggeratedly at the screen, slap my forehead in an eureka moment, and exclaim "oh you meant the MEN'S team!!! are they doing a game? that's nice."
Itâs been a hot minute since I posted art so hereâs this weird parrot I drew:)
Based on a recent publication about Sinopterus and the color of its integument and head crest, the feathers being a dark iridescent with greens, blues, and purples throughout. The crest being horizontally striped and with magenta pigments, the soft tissue elements around the eye and coloration on the chin are speculative. It is such a striking and unique animal and further cements my love for pterosaurs.
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They've eaten everything they can reach around the base of this tree. So now that I can see what I'm doing, it's easier (and less painful) to get in there with the clippers and knock more down. This is all juniper, Chinese privet, multiflora rose, and invasive honeysuckle. I'll only leave the juniper, which they don't eat anyhow. Oh. And some poison ivy, for spice.
Munching.
I'm sitting in the shade recovering and contemplating whether I have the energy to spare to cut more fodder, or if I should save it for walking back to the house and watering all the plants and trees.
Hey if you're coming to Washington DC for the Fourth of July: don't
We're having our turn in the heat wave and reports from the National Mall are brutal already this week. That screenshot is today's forecast (courtesy of the Capital Weather Gang) and tomorrow and Saturday are confidently going to be worse than this is.
The national Mall has no shade on the grass and you will be exposed to the sun constantly while also experiencing extremely high humidity. You will not be allowed a bag over a certain size to enter the mall and it has to be clear. You cannot have an insulated water bottle, it has to be clear. Reports are that there are two entrances to the area so you'll have to wait in line to even get in. I cannot find a number on how many cooling stations there are, except that it's "few" to "none" depending on what accounts I read online. Vendors are allegedly charging more than the posted prices and seem to be unprepared for actual crowds - these are the official vendors not the scam food trucks that park all around the edges of the mall. And that's the extent of the planning done because it was not a priority to make sure attendees don't pass out.
My local friends and I have reached a consensus that tourists are going to get extremely sick and none of us know what the EMT response or planning is on the mall this year. People are going to die.
Please stay out of this. It's not worth your health. Get your relatives and family to stop. I can give you recs for so many DC museums and things to do if you want to make the most of your trip. Any other local can too.
I cannot convey to you how much I do not want literal goddamn children to die. Also frankly, how I do not our local emts to have to watch any tourists die on their watch.
There is historically an assumption that attendees will have access to planned amenities. It's not in place this year of all years. There is a very real risk here and I'm trying to warn people, because people simply don't know how awful this is about to be.
Get fucked. This is very clearly a post trying to help people instead of rubbing my hands in glee.
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CARDiac, syntax coloring, view source and vibe code
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
In the mid-1970s, my dad â then a budding computer scientist, subsequently a math teacher â brought home my first computer: the CARDiac, a Turing-complete, all-cardboard papercraft computer that you could write and execute programs on:
CARDiac stands for "CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation," and it was created in 1968 at Bell Labs as a way to teach high schoolers how computers worked. I wasn't anywhere near high school age (I think I was in third grade?) but the CARDiac was revelatory. The year before, I'd had access to a teletype terminal and acoustic coupler that let me operate a PDP machine at the University of Toronto, and I'd been endlessly fascinated with the possibilities. I wrote simple BASIC programs, chatted with ELIZA, and messaged other system users, one keystroke at a time, all on paper (the terminal didn't have a screen, just a printer, and we fed it 1,000' rolls of paper towels my mom brought home from her kindergarten classroom, which I then rolled back up so she could put them back in the bathroom for the kids to dry their hands on).
Interacting with a computer in real-time was captivating, but it wasn't until I assembled and used the CARDiac that it all snapped into place. With the CARDiac, you composed simple programs with pencil and paper, then followed instructions that directed you to move paper tokens in and out of various slots representing memory cells and an accumulator. All an electronic computer does is repeat these crude mechanical operations, millions of times per second, using microscopic transistors. None of that action can be observed with the naked eye, of course. If you had a very sensitive multimeter and a very good microscope, it's conceivable that you could indirectly watch this intricate dance, but only on very early processors, and only if you drastically slowed down their operations.
Much later, I learned a word for what I got from the CARDiac: legibility. Together, the CARDiac and I made a working digital computer, with me standing in for the physics that propels electrons down the endless labyrinth of a microchip, like a pinball triggering various blooping, beeping bumpers. Though the computing we performed was sub-trivial (adding one and one was a major undertaking!), the physical performance of that computing imbued me with FingerspitzengefĂźhl ("fingertip feeling"):
This stood me in great stead in the years to come. To this day, when I think about my computer, I sometimes imagine those little cardboard tokens, shuffling in and out of the slits in my paper CARDiac. There's something very reassuring about this imagery. No matter how many levels of abstraction sit between me and the nanoscale transistors ranked in their billions beneath my fingertips, they are all undertaking those familiar operations I painstakingly performed on my child's desk all those years ago.
(This is one of the things that makes Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works such an amazing kids' book! By illustrating how a computer's operations are built up from simple boolean logic that can be represented as physical switches, the comic performs that same legibilizing magic that I got from the CARDiac:)
Not long after my CARDiac experience, my dad brought home an Apple ][+, which came with a schematic that revealed the inner workings of the machine in ways that I found visually striking, if significantly less accessible than the CARDiac:
(For me, at least. For the legendary hardware hacker Andrew "bunnie" Huang, it was the start of a journey that turned him into one of the world's virtuoso reverse-engineers and science communicators):
The Apple ][+ did very little when you took it out of the box. It came with a few floppies' worth of demo programs, and we bought a few more down at the local computer store, but most of the programs I ended up using with that machine were ones I typed in myself, from magazines I bought at the corner store (I spent half my magazine budget on Cracked, Mad and Crazy, the other half on computer magazines full of BASIC program listings).
Typing in a program, keystroke by keystroke, was another FingerspitzengefĂźhl-generating exercise. I wasn't much of a typist, so it was slow going, and of course I made a lot of typos. What's more, BASIC had already fragmented into several dialects by this point, so even a correctly typed program could fail to run until it had been adapted for the BASIC that shipped with the computer. Getting a program to run on my computer required me to hone my typing skills, but even more so, my problem solving skills.
After months of this, I (re-)invented the debugger, from first principles, coming up with lots of little tricks and gimmicks (many of them horribly inefficient) for identifying and solving my programs' errors. In later years, I had lots of opportunity to work with real debuggers, created and maintained by trained programmers who'd forgotten more than I would ever know about writing code, and my own cack-handed efforts to build my own version of their tools conferred a confidence and intuitive understanding that I could not have achieved otherwise. Figuring out the need for a debugger and then rolling my own (crude, inefficient) one made all debuggers more legible to me.
I think that "legibility" is an underrated trait. If a system is legible to you, then you have a superior basis for understanding it, improving it, and making it work again when it breaks down.
There's an old joke that goes, "physics is applied math; chemistry is applied physics, and biology is applied chemistry" (I've also heard versions that start with "math is applied philosophy" and carry on to "sociology is applied biology," etc). While this isn't entirely true, there's something profound in it: we understand and manipulate our complex reality by wrapping it in abstractions that package up a writhing, shuffling, vibrating machine inside a smooth, serene membrane with a sturdy and easily grasped handle. You could do chemistry using the tools of physics, but it would take hours to perform the kind of calculations a chemist does in seconds (just as it takes an eternity to add one and one with a CARDiac).
Nevertheless, there are times when it is useful for a biologist to think about chemical processes, and for a chemist to think about interactions at the level of physics, and for a physicist to do math. The membrane and the handle are essential, but sometimes you have to decap the sealed package and inspect and manipulate its internals directly. Problem solving, improvement and maintenance all require the ability to move up and down the stack of abstractions to figure out where to stick your probes and stage your interventions.
This is where legibility comes in. Interacting with physical processes improves your mental model. In Broad Band (a magisterial history of women in computing), Claire Evans talks about how the first programmers were women who did the "unskilled" labor of physically cabling components together, developing powerful FingerspitzengefĂźhl, with such high-fidelity, trans-abstraction mental models of the machines' operations that they became the world's best programmers and debuggers:
My early adventures in programming were so powerful and instructive because nearly all the programs I interacted with on my Apple ][+ were written in BASIC (not just the ones I keyed in, but also the demo software and much of the packaged software we bought). That meant that I could get a listing of any program I was using, peeling open the membrane to look at the machinery underneath. I could even laboriously trace the operations of that program using my toy debugger. This, too, was legibility: the ability to flip between the effects of the running code, and the instructions themselves (and then to mentally map those instructions onto the movement of cardboard tokens in my CARDiac).
This affordance was repeated later on the early web, thanks to the "View Source" function that came built into every browser, acting as a velcro tab for the membrane that separated rendered web pages from their underlying instructions. In my early years as a web developer, I copied, pasted, adapted, probed and traced HTML in ways that would have been instantly recognizable to the younger me, keying in those BASIC programs and ripping apart the commercial software on my computer.
I read somewhere that the Bell Labs scientists who created the CARDiac were worried that, thanks to transistorization, the next generation of programmers wouldn't understand the physical, material processes that unfolded when their programs ran, and that this would mean a loss of legibility and intuition and FingerspitzengefĂźhl. I can't track down the reference now, but it stuck with me, because the CARDiac is such a perfect way of preserving those virtues.
Modern computer science curriculum includes some chip design for just this reason (just as chemists study physics and biologists study chemistry). But there are plenty of programmers â better programmers than I ever was or will be â who taught themselves and never had a CARDiac or gave much thought to chip design. They work at different layers of abstraction and in different ways to solve different problems. Maybe they could improve their art by tinkering with FPGAs, but there's always something even the most skilled artisan can do to round out and incrementally improve their craft.
In the same way, there are plenty of programmers â better ones than I ever was or will be â whose journey started at higher abstraction layers than a teletype terminal or a CARDiac. Maybe they started with a browser's View Source, teasing apart other people's Javascript to create weird Myspace customizations. Maybe they tweaked a programmable block in Minecraft. Maybe they modded a Scratch game. Or maybe they recorded macros using Applescript or Hypercard or Visual Basic to automate a routine task, only to later open up the source code generated by the macro recorder to make fine adjustments.
Whether you're pasting source from Stack Overflow or recording a macro in Excel, you are just one operation away from unwrapping the membrane and exposing the code beneath it. And with the modern internet, with Wikipedia, with endless tutorial videos, you are one further operation from penetrating the high level code to get at the code beneath it, and the code beneath that, and the code beneath that, all the way down to the bare metal.
Which brings me to vibe coding. As I've written, there's a world of difference between writing code for production and writing "personal software" that solves a problem you have. Whatever deficits that code has (due to the fact that you're not a skilled programmer) are offset by the fact that you're the one making the tool (which means your needs aren't lossily filtered through a programmer's understanding of those needs):
There's nothing wrong with code that solves your problem, even if you don't know how that code works, even if it breaks in a couple of years, even if no one else could maintain, extend or debug that code. Personal software is fundamentally different from software made to be used and maintained by others:
Higher-level abstractions are necessary. Moving tokens between the slits in a CARDiac is a powerful exercise, but eventually you want to do something more substantial than adding one and one, and so you need to package up the mechanics of computing inside a membrane with an easily grasped handle (knowing that you can always open the membrane if need be).
The more automated code you generate â macros, pasted Javascript, Minecraft blocks â the greater the likelihood that you will be failed by a readymade, prefab component. At that point, you have means, motive and opportunity to open the membrane and start tinkering with the internals, and every time you do, you have a better chance of making a realization that improves your grasp on the whole system.
Automated code â whether from an LLM, View Source, Stack Overflow, or a macro recorder â is the top of a funnel. Many â most â of the people who enter the funnel won't slip further down the abstraction chute. They'll solve their problem (a virtue unto itself!) and move on. But the more people we put at the top of the funnel, the more chances our civilization gets to produce another skilled artisan who understands and can improve, iterate and repair the code the rest of us use.
I cannot stress enough that I fundamentally distrust callout posts, and I will distrust you if you send them to me.
Don't get me wrong: I investigate warnings, and I act on them if they're true and relevant. But callout posts are, on a very fundamental level, not about what people say they're about. There are exceptions, but generally speaking they're made for one or more of the following reasons:
OP didn't like the subject to begin with (often for bigoted reasons), and they wanted a reason, and a following, to justify and validate that.
OP wanted to gain popularity, so they made themselves look like either a victim, a hero, or both.
OP wanted to claim victim status in a private falling-out in order to preserve good standing with their own friends/their community.
OP didn't like what the subject was saying, and wanted to silence them (often for bigoted reasons).
OP genuinely just wants "revenge" on the subject, or otherwise wants to ruin their reputation and have them sent harassment.
Again, there are exceptions: there are "callouts" that just unravel a subject's lies, or point out problems in already public actions. If OP is claiming to have been personally victimized in a legitimately serious way, and especially one that indicates the subject might be a danger to others, I'm definitely more willing to believe it- one obvious example being sexual violence.
But oftentimes, callouts are incredibly personal, misleading, emotionally manipulative, blatantly untrue, or all of the above.
This person came to me on anon; I have absolutely no way of knowing what their motives are or how trustworthy they are. There is no credibility or accountability here.
And I did read the post. Lo and behold, it's riddled with emotionally manipulative language, false accusations, and the biggest reaches I've ever seen:
"DON'T READ THIS CALLOUT, IT'S SO TRIGGERING TO EVERYONE, JUST TAKE MY WORD FOR IT. But the proof is here if you REALLY don't believe me"
"Proof" is a scarce handful of screenshots taken out of context that contain emotionally evocative language, but do not support the accusations at all.
Some accusations are genuinely just weird logic leaps with no support, others are matters of personal opinion obviously driven by bigoted motives.
OP themselves expresses very publicly that they believe people who are marginalized in the ways the subject are, who speak on that marginalization, should be silenced.
I try to assume good faith here, and I want to believe this anon was just guilt-tripped and manipulated by the post in question. I don't hold any ill will here.
But anon, I want you to ask yourself:
Are the accusations you're making something you have personally investigated and found to be true?
Does this person deserve the harassment and ostracization they will likely receive as a result of your accusations?
Will you hold yourself accountable for the damage you've caused if you're wrong?
And if you're absolutely certain you're right, come off anon and talk to me as a human being; because I can't believe you're ready to be accountable for these accusations if you won't even put your Tumblr blog behind them.
I've had actual, honest-to-god callout blogs reblogging this post like "yeah I research all the claims here!! they're real and you can trust me (:" as if the entire purpose of their blog is not to encourage their followers not to check those claims themselves, not to think critically about why those claims are made in the first place, & to just rely on random strangers to tell them how to think and who to completely ostracize from potentially vital communities, support systems, and resources.
I cannot emphasize enough that if you spread "callout posts" as a fucking hobby, this post is explicitly about you.
I started thinking about that one post about how from dogs POV humans are beings that live like 500+ years (because I was petting my dog and I was looking at her like âthirty thousand years of cooperation have led to this. our species have spent 30k years building up to the point where you, child of wolf, descendant of noble hunters and wild things, Â would come all the way out of the office and come sit with me in the hopes of letting a souped up monkey rub its paws on youâ)
and then I thought about what it must have been like for the first humans to let a fucking wolf, maybe only a few generations from the wild, behold their infant child. Like man can u believe that? Maybe this alliance is only a few years old and sure youâve seen the wolfâs kids but now youâve got one of your own. And even though youâve seen this wolf tear out the throats of creatures that could kill you, this wolf is your family. This wolf is your friend, you love them and they love you and you gotta show âem the new kid, look, friend, I had a child. I know you are wild and dangerous, but look at this, my most precious thing, sniff him, give him a lil lick, his children and your children will be bound together for thirty thousand fucking years because I love you
Thereâs a set of  preserved footprints from 30k years ago that is a young child and a wolf standing side by side can you fucking imagine? Maybe the kidâs mom was like âhey go get some water from the stream, but take the wolf with you. I trust him, he will protect you.â
Some child, with a handful of wolf fur, still getting to grips with walking, the wolf, older now, older than itâs parent were when they died, with no understanding of how good life is with the turbo apes compared to what it could have been like.
The wolf keeps looking at the child like âok puppy, you still keeping up?â
And all these millennia later, we still let the dogs co-parent our children, the way dogs hand off the puppies to us so they can get some sleep.
#my family does this thing#when we've majorly unfucked a room or done chore that we were putting off#or whatever. Any sort of household Improvement.#'Come brag on me.'#I means come look I cleaned/rearranged/did dishes/put away the laundry#and the scripted response is 'oh nice it looks SO much better in here now'#like my mom did this when we were kids.#'girls comr brag on the garage I finally organized it so I can get my car in there'#and we go and 'ooh' and 'aah' and tell her how nice it looked and how she did a good job#and we could have her 'come brag on' us for like doing the dishes or cleaning our rooms#I do it to my wife now too#it's a dialogue that means#'I did a chore and it feels like an Accomplishment even if it objectively wasn't a big thing. Please acknowledge this.'#and#'Wow you sure did do a thing. It has improved our material circumstance even if only in a small way. Thank you for doing it.'#like yeah scrubbing the pans is my Job and it's a Little Task but sometimes it feels like a Big Task#and it's nice to have an Accepted Script where I can just demand 'I have functioned as an independent adult praise me with great praise' - by @thepioden
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I'm firmly convinced that if Star Trek: Janeway ever happened it would be the last nail in the coffin of JC. However, I still think there's so much about Janeway that would be amazing to see. I'd love a show that would give full agency and voice to older women, I'm talking 70+.
And Janeway is such a great role model because she was fully in acceptance and in love with her feminine side (even though she insisted on that whole no love and martyrdom theme but whatever). She was never trying to me more masculine. She embraced her femininity and led with it, not despite of it. And there is so much Kathryn Janeway still has to offer that I desperately want to see it.
What I'm imagining is something like what The Expanse did with Avasarala. Give me Janeway as a heavyweight galactic diplomat in a room full of admirals and ambassadors.
I want her to tell some raging, male politician "oh I'm sorry, it was not my intention to offend your tender sensibilities, Jeffrie," deliberately forgoing whatever title he holds
Hollywood is terrified of women over 60. Over 70 is basically uncharted territory unless you're Judi Dench or whatever. I want Star Trek, a franchise literally built on the premise that the future is better, to have the guts to put a woman in her seventies at the center of a political thriller and let her be the most formidable person in every single scene.
Don't give me pew pew pew starship exploding pew pew pew the world is ending pew pew pew borg borg pew pew pew
Give me Admirals Janeway with grey hair and and absolutely zero patience for bullshit diplomacy.
And if we're feeling particularly generous, let's not kill off Chakotay and explore a mature love, reclaiming second and third chances at personal happiness. Gimme old people in love.
like did you know that trees lower the surface temperature by up to 19° and grass by up to 24°... access to green space is access to safety in a climate crisis and it is a massive site of inequality because poorer areas tend to have less green space and thus get hotter. urban trees are an equality issue as well as a climate issue. sorry it's not a magic bullet that solves everything but sometimes you need to pick an issue that helps a bit and focus on that. this might not be yours. it's likely going to be mine in the future when my health issues allow me to take it on. if we each pick a thing we can make a difference
Someday I will put here a title @distracteddaintydemon - Tumblr Blog | Tumlook
