Me fucking around in chat gpt until I had something good to repeat to myself in times like this. It turns out it’s actually pretty good at common meter rhyme, the trick is to ask for 5 iambic pentameter couplets at a time, then split them at the eighth syllable into those 4 8686 syllable lines. I also usually specify “casual language” and “natural word order.” You ask for five or so options for each verse so you have some ideas for words to swap around until something sounds good. I’ve been thinking I need to write a proper ballad about some characters at some point but I haven’t got round to it.

Forgive yourself for past mistakes,

and things you did not know.

Your errors guide your victories;

they ache so you can grow.

Honestly just paying people $25/h to literally just do this would actually do some great things for the mental health crisis. The most you would need to do is maybe throw in an 8hr “mental health first aid” class and give them a line to refer out to if the person expresses anything more severe than a passive death wish. I would totally support my tax dollars paying for this on a WIDE scale.

Edit/btw: the official term is a “warm line” as opposed to a “suicide hotline” for people who aren’t in crisis but just need to talk to another human for a bit, possibly to even help avoid a crisis developing in the first place.

…you realize generations are longer than five years…right?

I have never heard the term “don’t name your gods” but it’s my new favorite phrase of possibly the whole fucking year. Thank you.

…she wasn’t wrong tho!

Yeah like. They’re already covering up enough stuff that is both stupid AND awful all at once you don’t need to make up extra shit.

I remember reading somewhere that while a western audience would perceive this as utterly farcical, a Chinese citizen is at least more likely to perceive it as the government taking their safety and security seriously enough to be thorough about it. While I’m sure there was some person somewhere in the chain of command who thought this was a good and important idea and that they needed to check the pigeon butts for explosives, there’s no way all of the people involved in doing those searches thought it was likely to uncover an actual weapon, but the cultural context makes it important to err in that direction. Meanwhile in the US, the government is more successful in hiding abuses by “protecting freedoms.” Powerful people all around the world have basically the same playbook, but a big part of that strategy is knowing their audience.

You can also utilize the somewhat covert bribery and diversion systems to this end. As long as everybody thinks everybody ELSE is following the guidelines, and that they’re the only ones really getting away with things / reporting that they’re following guidelines when they’re not, you can get the same result and all you have to do is not look too closely, which is probably what you’re doing with most other things already. In the US you don’t even need to bother doing that because aside from not culturally having enough shame to do so, actively hiding our idiocy in any way would be considered a restriction on freedoms. Around these parts its your god given right to be a dumbass and the gubmit can pry that from your cold dead hands.

We’re stupid, but at least we’re honest about it. They’re stupid, but at least they have the decency to not act like it out in broad daylight. Neither is better and both can easily be a tool of the bourgeoisie.

Well you can’t not do that, especially not if you’re already known for doing that kind of thing anyway for other things.

I once heard of a pediatrician who successfully convinced a concerned mother that anti-vax ideology was likely a psyop by the Russians to weaken the health of the American populace starting with our children. Doesn’t hurt that it’s probably true.

EDIT: My personal conspiracy theory is that the Chinese government did engineer (or at least selectively cultivate) COVID, but not to kill Americans. In the early days of the pandemic there was some speculation that it affected some blood types more than others, particularly type A. While no link to blood type specifically was found, type A is a more common genetic trait as you move out of Asia and towards the middle east. China has been heavily persecuting the Uyghurs (Chinese Muslims), and those who have managed to get out of the camps have reported medical experimentation and being injected with unknown substances. In addition, the virus would also kill a significant number of the older population, which is important because of the population crunch they’re about to experience due to one-child policies resulting in a high amount of female-specific infanticide. They’re about to have a bunch of old people and a massive shortage of able bodied young people to care for them. Even if they didn’t directly “engineer” the virus in a gene-sequencing manner, they have a lot off motive to just generally cultivate and spread (you can’t really “breed” a virus) an infectious disease targeting people of middle eastern descent and elders.

Thank you for coming to my tinfoil-hat Ted Talk.

Shit rolls downhill; profits roll up. Source: fellow nurse.

My psych unit is having a pretty severe pants-in-the hall deficiency tonight and I’m definitely not getting paid enough for any of it.

They did have arcs, but more in that way older star trek did where you get a blurb about it during the rest of the episodes self contained content then a dedicated episode at the beginnings and ends of the season with 1-2 dedicated episodes somewhere in the middle. Well balanced for multiple watch styles.

A better star trek than anything released in the 2010s onward. I’m not even kidding, they handled many more current sociopolitical issues and with far more wit and a frankly shocking amount of tact considering its a Seth McFarlane comedy.

I’ve been waiting for algorithm-senpai to notice me…

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The number one thing I love about Randall Munroe’s particular brand of nerd humor is how genuine he is. His fascination with the natural laws of the universe is just that. It’s not something he uses to hold himself over other people or to create in-groups and out-groups of people who know and people who don’t. Even when his content is too complex for the average person it never has that subtextual “well you just wouldn’t get it because you’re not smart enough” vibe that so much other nerd humor has (looking at you big bang theory). He’s genuinely inviting the reader to learn about whatever it is, whether they ultimately do or don’t. He doesn’t have that weird inferiority complex people get sometimes where people feel the need to defensively push others away from their interests to feel better about the fact that their interests happen to be niche in some way. He doesn’t use it as a vehicle to fuel his ego. I’ve joked before that he’s my “celebrity crush” but it’s really just that he truly, genuinely wants to show you something he thinks is cool (and at least a little humorous) and as someone who’s met a LOT of snobby nerds, I’ve always deeply respected that he isn’t one. - sincerely, a professional vibe-checker (like, actually).

History joke I heard once: if a history book says an object was used for “ritual purposes” that means they haven’t got a clue, unless they specify “fertility rituals” which means they know exactly what it was used for but can’t write that in a highschool history textbook.

It just occurred to me a few days ago that AI could make for a pretty trippy fae dream world game of some kind.

Nothing directly for any individual, but you can host, moderate, and / or participate in more apolitical hobby spaces.

One of the biggest ways delusions keep a hold of people is by disconnecting them from supportive / positive social relationships. The deeper down the rabbit hole they go, the more people they argue with, and the less non-delusional friends they have. Try to figure out what those beliefs and social groups replaced, then get them back into supportive social groups around that. Often it’s a hobby like gardening, book clubs, cars, sports, hiking, etc.

That’s why all of this took off so hard during COVID, people got ripped away through all of those things and Russian disinformation bots were right there and ready to replace that sense of connection with a sense of being part of a larger movement. Sometimes it’s spiritual or religious groups which has been difficult because so many of those groups have just become completely overtaken and become vehicles for the delusions, so we also need to work on ways for people to express their religion and spirituality in non-delusional ways, but that’s a whole other discussion.

The short version is: make the delusional stuff subtly less accessible (encourage them to get away from the computer and TV) and try to get them into other positive activities that connect them with other people and help them move their focus away from the delusions without directly confronting them.