David R. MacIver

@DRMacIver

Software testing R&D, mainly Hypothesis. My mandate includes weird bugs. I have resting villain face. 🦄

Joined April 2008

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  1. Pinned Tweet
    Jan 14

    I wrote a crash course in having feelings for a friend, and thought it might be useful for a wider audience:

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  2. For example I think bell hooks is reliably pretty good in this space. I've not yet read enough of her work (currently only "All About Love", and "Feminism is for Everyone". I've got "The Will to Change" sitting on my shelves but not got around to it yet)

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  3. What are some feminist texts that you would recommend to men who are resistant to the idea of feminism? (Please note that I am not the target audience for this - I've read a lot of feminism and am not at all resistant to it - and please don't tell me the question is problematic)

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  4. 58. I'm also very annoyed with the SGC for their handling of the Orbanians. I'll grant their culture is... Problematic, but they're an advanced human civilisation with an incredible technology base. The future of the galaxy definitely belongs to the Orbanians.

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  5. It's called duck typing rather than goose typing because it doesn't cause problems *on purpose*

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  6. 57. Not to mention Fifth. Dear god, fifth. Everything that happens in the replicator war after that point is your fault, Jack.

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  7. 56. A persistent source of annoyance for me in SG1 is Jack's bigotry against artifical life forms (this is a pet peeve for me in sci-fi in general). The situation with Reece could have been handled much better, and the way they handled their Altairans duplicates was appalling.

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  8. Prime Explorer: "Pick your favourites and we'll show you similar videos" Prime Explorer: *lists a dozen things all of which Amazon has the data to know that I have never watched and none of which appeal, with no ability to pick outside that list* Me: Thanks?

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  9. Impressive. Amazon's new "Prime Explorer" manages to have even worse usability than their normal recommendations.

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  10. If nothing else, it supports my biases that the cult of positive thinking can get in the sea.

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  11. I don't know if this model is true, but it seems potentially useful.

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  12. A lot of therapeutic techniques (but most centrally coherence therapy) are essentially there to help you isolate out a single lesson that you've learned, so that you can activate it on its own without the storm of negative emotions, and start to address it.

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  13. In order to start to undo this you have to resist the initial urge to suppress. Sometimes you will feel bad, and sometimes that will be the appropriate response to the situation. If it's not the appropriate response, you can use the situation to start to unlearn the bad feeling.

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  14. In the system working as intended you can unlearn the lesson by working with it and going "OK, that didn't work" when it didn't. But when your brain is just full of negative static it's not even clear what the lesson you're trying to address is.

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  15. On top of that, because now when bad things happen you end up in a snowstorm of distinct negative responses, you can't really deal with any of them because they're so intertangled.

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  16. The biggest problem though is that this gets harder and harder to deal with over time because these lessons keep accumulating. You learn not just that a situation will be bad, but also that your mind will react badly to it, and everything just kinda snowballs.

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  17. This has problems: 1. You cannot modify the lesson when it's inactive, so shoving it down makes it go away but it'll just come back the next time. 2. More and more of these keep accumulating, so you end up playing a sort of mental whack-a-mole with your negative emotions.

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  18. Because we haven't learned to healthily deal with "negative" emotions we go "argh no bad wrong" and try to suppress the whole thing, shoving it down.

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  19. You pick up a small lesson that a situation is bad. The next time something similar happens, your brain goes "Hey, remember the thing?" and you feel anxious / attacked / etc. This isn't a big deal and is the system working as intended, BUT...

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  20. Tentative hypothesis about how a lot of trauma and trauma-like things work: Accumulation of mental resources that we don't want to deal with.

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  21. Retweeted
    Feb 1

    99 smartphones are transported in a handcart to generate virtual traffic jam in Google Maps. Through this activity, it is possible to turn a green street red which has an impact in the physical world by navigating cars on another route!

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