Quite a few things that were in the hopper - Late February 02024

To begin, If you give your fucks to the living, and make giving a fuck about the living, that often means that you receive the fucks of others when they give a fuck. Giving it to things that will not give a fuck about you means you end up out of them, eventually. But you can prolong and share and circulate fucks to give by giving them to people and causes that can give a fuck.

In the department of how far out of touch I am for not being on the latest social media sites, the practice of looksmaxxing, a concept from incel and PUA spaces with the idea of making someone's face as sexually attractive as they can, whether through styling or surgery or other such things. The fact that this is a thing that has escaped a place where it should have stayed, that most of the people who promote this idea are very quick to say they're not on board with the space where it came from, and that this is yet another way of enforcing the toxic idea that masculinity is dependent on whether or not the men around you agree that you're being manly, well. This is certainly not a trend that I want to see continue. I suspect that it does lead a lot more people back to the toxic spaces and actions from where it came. The idea itself that your looks can carry you into and through a relationship is laughable, but it seems attractive to people who want to believe there's nothing wrong with their inner selves or that they don't need to do the work unlearning the toxic stuff before they'll become anything more than a first date.

It's this time period's version of the Charles Atlas advertisement, just with less DYNAMIC-TENSION.

After an accident moved women surfers to the Banzai Pipeline to finish out their competition, the women have been proving equal and excellent to the task of taking on one of the most gnarly breaks in surfing. Which is another of those "if you actually give women a chance to excel at something, they will prove more than adequate to the task" moments, and there's still far too much of thinking that women could never so they don't get the opportunity.

( And all of the rest that I meant to post before today inside )

Last for this post, when a lead or a leader, a possible framework to allow your subordinates to excel and find the answers to their questions without your needing to be directly involved. Mostly in the idea of training yourself out of reacting to everything. On the flip side of that, advice for someone coming into a new work environment to build trust and then be seen as a person who can get things done, which involves a lot of taking notes and observing and figuring out where the pain points are and then figuring out how the pain points might be fixed, if they can be fixed, and then checking in a whole lot of times to see whether it's something that's worth fixing and that people dislike. I suppose something like this could have been more useful to me when I started at my own institution, and in some of those situations, I did actually succeed at things right from the jump, but there was definitely a lot of bureaucracy and a lot of people who I could have tried harder to win over to my own cause, (Except for the part where they weren't really interested in what I wanted to do, so.)

(Materials via adrian_turtle, azurelunatic, boxofdelights, cmcmck, conuly, cosmolinguist, elf, finch, firecat, jadelennox, jenett, jjhunter, kaberett, lilysea, oursin, rydra_wong, snowynight, sonia, the_future_modernes, thewayne, umadoshi, vass, the meta_warehouse community, little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)