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What's something you're passionate about?
hello!
what's a topic, thing, item, person, action that you really enjoy/interested in?
This will be like my 4th post today in ~talk, sorry.
hello!
what's a topic, thing, item, person, action that you really enjoy/interested in?
This will be like my 4th post today in ~talk, sorry.
Right now it’s bail reform in my State. The point of bail is to incentivize people show up to court, but it’s now used to keep people who haven’t been convicted of a crime in pre-trial detention and to force people to plead to charges to get out. Which is insane. It disproportionately impacts poor people. I’ve seen so many people plead no contest to charges they could have beat because if they plead, they get out immediately. If the fight it, they stay in jail until trial, which can be a very long time and ruin their lives (lose their home, job etc.)
We’re close to making supervised release the default for certain felonies and all non-violent misdemeanors. Fingers crossed.
My uncle had this happen to him. Two years in jail because they gave him a stupidly high bail. He's a normal guy, lived alone, family 95% in town, no reason to try to "escape", but they posted a really high bail anyway. He just now got out.
It’s tragic. Bail is often used as a way to keep people in jail, but that is the opposite of what it’s supposed to be. It’s supposed to be so people can be released pending trial but have an added incentive to show up for court.
Bail should always be something people can pay and get back after trial. Add in the bail bondsmen trade and it completely defeats the purpose. If they already lost their 10%, there’s no incentive for them to come to court other than the incentives that exists without bail. It’s gotten out of hand.
Group dynamics and communities.
I facilitate a lot of groups, usually skill-building or emotional regulation groups or something of the sort. Watching groups of people interact and change at the loss or addition of new participants can be really cool, and being able to take people and form a cohesive discussion is really great, especially when those topics echo in later one on one discussions.
Stuff like that tickles a weird little bone inside me, I kind of am interested in it, but don't know much of where to observe it. You do that for a job?
Yup, I work in a psychiatric hospital that has a drug rehab wing as well. I have a very low-level direct service job. If you want to observe it, you might seek out a community group or support group. Those groups tend to be more open, whereas what I do is protected by HIPAA and not easily observable without getting permission from everyone.
This is a really interesting topic. Are there any books or others mediums that you would recommend on it?
I would start with the work of Erving Goffman. I stumbled onto his "On Facework" essay many years ago and have been utterly taken ever since. He has many other very interesting works in this area. For larger group dynamics, Irvin Yalom is consistently cited as seminal - I am only now beginning to study his works. For community, I like the organizing and social action aspect, which means that Alinsky's Rules for Radicals is a must read.
I've become increasingly more passionate about biking, primarily street/road biking. It makes you see where you are in a new way because it feels like you're much more aware of both the roads and the greater layout of the city.
What bike do you have?
I've had a Sole single-speed bike for over two years now, it's pretty light and easy to disassemble. I'm not sure they still do it but they used to give a nice discount if you provided a student email.
Well said! I've enjoyed cycling my whole life but it's only been about five years since I adopted cycling as my primary means of getting places. In that time I've come to realize how U.S. cities, especially cities established in the last 70 years or so, are laid out principally for cars. This has made me appreciate older cities as more accessible both by pedestrian and cycle traffic. As a cyclist I've come to adopt the mantra: "cities are for people". I wish we'd design our cities with that in mind.
I'm really interested in education as a means of social justice. I think education can be a powerful tool for equity, but largely, universities are only beginning to introduce policies that allow for greater access to underprivileged students. Along this vein, I'm interested in optimizing the student experience while in university. In my mind, an ideal university experience should primarily be practical (providing skills relevant to a career), but should also include a variety of growth opportunities (exposure to topics and projects both within and outside of one's area of study). The idea that students leave school with crippling debt is awful in my mind, and I believe universities should do more (see: multi-billion dollar endowments) to cover the cost for lower and middle class students. I think >25% of students dealing with mental health issues and large numbers of students being the victim of sex crimes is absurd. University should not be damaging to students. Universities should promote independent research projects and entrepreneurship. Some of my ideas I have more practical ideas about, while other are more in the naive optimism stage, but it's something that I care a lot about.
Not explicitly about equality, but: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vsCAM17O-M
I'm actually interested in making that a reality. Open source, obviously, because if it doesn't catch on, no one cares anyways, and if it does, I want it to be available to everyone. How would a early, viable prototype of such a program look for you? For me, a initial step would be basically a customized-to-the-student recommender system that figures out which material works good for whom. But for that, we need testing, or at least self-assessment.
I personally prefer equality of opportunities much more than equity, which means equal outcome. I also oppose the idea of "social justice" in favour of "justice". Societies in the west are built around the principles of having a fair justice system, and each individual having equal opportunities. I think these are very important aspects and should remain as they are.
That said, I agree that some groups, especially lower class people in areas like USA, do not get the same opportunities as higher class people. They oftentimes cannot afford to get an education of a similar level due to financial constraints, and I think this should be dealt with. Changing the way the loan system works, or have government assistance to bring education costs down could help here.
I also think educational institutes should primarily assist the student in gaining the skills they look for in order to perform their job, while at the same time try to expand their mental/philosophical horizons. This can lead to better understanding of society, politics and other persons individually. I do not get the idea from many educational institutes tat they achieve this. Especially not on the latter part. Most educational institutes seems to abhor the thought of students thinking freely and making up their own minds. They seem invested in pushing only a single narrative, which they often propose as being "progressive". One of these things is "feminist" or "gender" studies, which portray society as a hierarchy of victims, which I strongly disagree with. These are in line with social justice theory, which I strongly oppose for this reason.
On victims of sex crimes in universities, these numbers are meaningless without context. When we look at reported incidents, the number drops astonishingly. Given that a core aspect of justice is innocence until proven guilty, we should look only at actual reports with actual, proven victims. This differs from social justice, which likes to use different terms as to what constitutes a sexual assault, and believes every story without clear evidence. This is why I seperate "social justice" from actual justice.
Universities indeed should not be damaging to students, but we disagree on what damages a student, I believe. I believe pushing social justice narratives on them, as is happening in some countries, to be damaging to the student and society itself on the long term. Universities should not push a single political agenda, nor make certain ideologies mandatory to learn about. The only exception to the latter would be if they make both sides of the ideology mandatory, and present a fair position on both of them. I'd still prefer all educational systems to not be allowed to force ideologies altogether.
Universities should indeed promote independent research, and I would like to add critical thinking skills to this as well.
Gonna preface this with the statement that I also have issues with identity politics that prove to be pigeonholing and divisive, and the idea of the "progressive stack" and similar ideologies being used to run roughshod over reasonable discourse. Also, I agree that critical thinking skills seriously need to be taught more widely full stop - the fact that the Educational Board of Texas declined to implement this in public school because the sentiment was that teaching critical thinking skills early on would "undermine parental authority" is pretty heinous imo.
Certainly equal outcome for every single person is not possible, not should it attempt to be forced through draconian methods. However, how is the equality of opportunity determined? Consider the study linked to in the first sentence of this Atlantic article, with this quote.
By employing women and men on the sales team and allowing them to work, the company provided them with an even opportunity on paper. This did not mitigate the backlash and pressure they received from their male cohorts and indeed, said negatives did not diminish until they reached a larger representation within the department.
Ok, please clarify: what would be the criteria for an actual report, and an actual proven victim?
Consider that someone who is sexually assaulted is likely under extreme duress, and the way that communities have retaliated against victims who make a report, up to and including ostracization and death threats, such as those abused by clergy or influential figures in large industries a la Weinstein. Might there be valid external and internal pressures that drive the lower number of reports filed vs. victim accounts?
In the Steubenville case, the woman's assault was captured on photo and video, and the perpetrators bragged about it on social media, but she was still subject to blame for "casting a negative light on the team and town. Given the clear-cut nature of the evidence and the persons responsible admitting to the actions taken, do you think this would discourage victims who were violated but have less visible evidence (and perhaps an abuser who denies anything ever happened) from reporting?
In forensic terms, there is currently an astounding backlog of rape kits that are still waiting to be tested.
Yes, there should be a clear delineation between legal terms and common discourse. I don't think a blanket approach of belief should be extended, but within the context of psychotherapy and groups that work to support victims (in terms of overall physical and mental well-being, not legal advocates necessarily), the importance of allowing a person to feel they are trusted and not under a constant spotlight of scrutiny when they talk about a traumatic experience cannot be underestimated.
What is the criteria for clear evidence?
I do think they were given equal opportunity, but that the team itself was being discriminatory. These are seperate issues, and should be handled as such. There's already laws in place to protect from discrimination, and what happened was in conflict with them. The company handled the situation incorrectly by not addressing this particular issue, but this is no case of inequal opportunity.
Any lawful report that recognizes a victim of assault or rape as defined by the law.
Perhaps, but that is no reason to just start gathering random numbers and providing that as evidence that there are huge numbers of assault. I acknowledge that victims are likely to be under stress, but to me that sounds like a very bad argument to not report it. You do not have to post the details on Facebook or anything, you're reporting it to the police, who take extreme care when it comes to rape cases.
Don't forget that the inverse is also true, people accused of sexual assault or rape are also ostracized by communities. I don't think there is any sane group of people that condone sexual assault or rape.
According to the article, this was done by "some members", and those people are of the group that I'd define "not sane", as compared to the other people I describe in the previous paragraph. I think these people should be called out by people with a better sense of morality. I don't see how you would reasonably improve the situation here.
In any case, it seems the victim did report it, and the perpetrators were convicted, and this is how the justice system works.
I'm not sure if I'd limit it to just having DNA evidence of the assault. There are professionals in mental care who could probably deduce whether someone was a victim of sexual assault or rape as well. There might be others who could be specialized in these cases as well that I don't know about. In any case, I think that DNA evidence is pretty reasonable evidence, but are not necessarily the only kind of evidence.
Furthermore, I'd like to know the reason DNA could not be recovered from half the kits, is this because there simply was no DNA evidence, or is this a limitation of the kit itself?
I am not familiar with the "statutes of limitations" (I'm not from the USA), so I can't comment on this.
The 20% on positive hits on offenders already arrested, I think should still be prosecuted and held accountable, given that they were not arrested for this particular case already (otherwise you're going to arrest someone twice for the same crime).
On the last 10%, I believe the last two groups, unwilling victims or unreliable evidence, should not be counted into sexual assault or rape statistics, as there is no proven victim.
In case of missing victims, the they should be counted, and they should be assisted by law enforcement to be found. This sounds like a more grave situation than just rape, but that's beyond the discussion.
As said before, I don't think DNA is the only possible evidence, but I am not a legal expert either. I am not sure what should and should not be considered clear evidence. I believe medical personell has the means and skills to determine it, and trained psychiatrists would also be a viable source of evidence.
As stated above, victims who are unwilling to move forward should not be counted in my opinion. This is mostly to ensure the legal system doesn't alter the way it functions, as I think it's principles are mostly correct. I also prefer having set standards on the definitions to be included in statistics, so that we don't get the situation we have now, where random people can make up random statistics and pose a certain idea, in an attempt to push a (corrupt) agenda. If we could secure a set definition that clearly defines what is and is not included in such reports, and it would include her case without being willing to move forward, I would also not oppose it.
Finally, I agree with your preface, and I appreciate it's inclusion to make your stance clearer.
I'm not adding anything useful to the conversation but threads like these are make this site so great!!
First note, two thumbs way up for your well-thought out replies and clarifications. I'm extremely pleased to see neither of us got crapped on for talking about topics that touched on bias, discrimination, and abuse that can be controversial.
With this clarification, we seem to be on the same page. Cool beans. Didn't know you were from outside the US, so I'll try my best to fill in the gaps relevant to the topic.
The statute of limitations (SOL), roughly speaking, is a time limit on prosecutors charging someone with a crime that was committed, to ensure the evidence, testimonies/eyewitnesses stay "fresh". Some offenses have statutes of limitations, others do not (like murder, arson, kidnapping). Each of the 50 US states has different laws on whether sexual assault has a SOL.
However, short statues of limitations can allow rapists who would have otherwise been convicted to avoid having charges brought against them even with strong physical evidence and witnesses. Lavinia's family promptly notified the police after their daughter was assaulted by a home intruder at knifepoint, and a forensic kit was taken, but despite DNA evidence and the perpetrator already being in jail for other offenses, she could take no further action because the SOL had run out.
This is certainly a point we both agree on, and I see the "witch hunting" of people accused as something that feeds the cycle of victim blaming when it comes to dissuading victims from reporting assault (i.e. "don't ruin his/her life with an accusation!"). There needs to be a better balance struck between supporting victims and preventing "tarring and feathering" of the accused on the public stage in response to allegations.
Unfortunately it has been an ongoing process to ensure that the interactions between law enforcement and victims are sensitive to how reports are handled.
The fact that many sexual assault victims do not act like "typical" victims can make their stories doubtful in the eyes of investigators, and make it easier for defense attorneys to target the credibility of the accuser.
This Slate article uses terms in the beginning of the article and an ideological slant I do not necessarily agree with, but includes descriptions on the neurobiological findings in the fifth paragraph. I'm still trying to chase up the links to the exact studies being mentioned.
I agree that better statistics should be collected on crime. My aim is to provide points of evidence that better illuminate why there is such a discrepancy between victim accounts of sexual assault and what is formally reported through legal channels due to an unfortunate confluence of institutional bias, the deeply violating nature of the crime, and how trauma can deaden/interfere with the victim's ability to convey what happened to them in a constructive manner for both them and law enforcement, and systematically, to seek justice.
Same to you. You're the first person on Tildes that I try to discuss with that used the term "social justice" who is actually interested in discussion. All others that I speak with simply break down, tell me to stop posting and call me my arguments are in bad faith, but never attack my arguments themselves. I am very pleased to see that you are here for discussion as well.
I think I understand why this idea exists, but I don't think I agree with the terms on which they apply. I could understand this for petty crimes, or crimes without a victim. If authorities would have to work on every case until they catch and convict an offender for it, they'd be swamped and not get to the real cases that matter. But this should, in my opinion, not affect "serious" crimes, where victims suffer life changing (sometimes life threatening) trauma. There are other circumstances that would also count as "serious", but those are outside of the scope of this discussion.
I agree, but I'm not sure how to improve the situation. I think this is something that we can't fix by throwing a couple laws at it, it seems to be deeper. In a healthy society, laws represent the morals of the people, but in this situation, it seems that the "morals of the people" are questionable. They simply want to protect their friends, or villify other people to feel better about themselves.
This seems like a failing in the training of the professionals involved. Law enforcement should train their people to deal with certain crimes, as they do for other criminal activity. If rape and assault victims require a vastly different skill set to work with, they should train people dedicated to these cases.
I think this would greatly reduce the number of victims who are not believed when their story is true and number of victims believed when the story is not true. If more investigation is needed to find out whether the story itself is true and requires attention of other law enforcement units, these specially rape and assault units can dedicate themselves to doing just that.
Also, lawyers targetting credibility could be an issue. If there's hard evidence in a case, credibility should be considered established. Cases like this should be about evidence, not who's word holds more value. What constitutes evidence is something we already discussed before, and I think neither of us has a hard answer to this.
Fair goal. My aim was to ensure we, as a people, don't just take random numbers without context as a basis for enforcing certain ideas, laws or other effects that I consider to be harmful. (That is not to say I find laws in general to be harmful, but pushing laws based on incorrect information is harmful.) I think both of us strive for a goal based on what we think is best, and both goals align a lot. I think most of our differences come from the way we represent our goals in words initially.
[aside: My posts in this thread have all gotten a lot bigger than I anticipated, though I have enjoyed reading your responses and writing mine as well very much. This is possibly the most interesting and respectable discussion I've had on Tildes thus far, and would like to see respectable, thought out discussion more around. I highly commend you for this.]
Programming and programming-related subjects. I love discussing code quality and debating best practices, learning about interesting architectural approaches to complex problems, and useful workarounds to common limitations, among other things.
For that matter, interesting and novel problems are also fun to discuss, especially their solutions. One such problem that comes to mind is a set of puzzles in the game FFXIII-2, specifically the clock puzzles in the temporal rift portions of the game. I realized after struggling with some of the harder puzzles that what I was looking at was essentially a masked directed graph where the solution is a Hamiltonian path. I still had to use some deductive reasoning and gradually redraw the graph to simplify its representation so I could easily brute force the remainder, but it was pretty fun to figure out that such an approach was available to me at all :)
In fact, most things that could be represented as a graph theory problem tend to be fun for me. Viewing problems in terms of nodes and directed edges has helped me in more ways than I can count!
I take it you have knowledge of programming languages? If so, which languages are you familiar with, and what are the aspects upon which you think these languages could improve? For Python, for instance, it's next to impossible to cleanly do multi-threaded applications, even though pretty much everyone has multi-core systems nowadays.
Unicode is also a dominant standard (with good reason), but less than a handfull of languages can deal with it properly. Most languages still count bytes in a string, in stead of counting the actual characters.
I've had experience in PHP, Java, JavaScript, C, C++, and Python mostly.
Honestly, my biggest gripe is that most languages just have a lot of tedious boilerplate. That being said, you don't really want to add too much to a language, anyway, which is where good libraries and frameworks come in to manage that problem.
Apart from that, I don't really have any major complaints. I view each language as a separate tool with its own strengths and weaknesses that makes it more suitable for some jobs and not so much for others. For instance, you can do things like multi threaded programs in C, but unless you really require its lightweight and efficient properties e.g. for an embedded system, it's probably better to work with a language like C++ or C# to save yourself a massive headache.
Why would you not want this? Having a reasonably sizable core language would eliminate having a need for modules for every simple task, like you have with Javascript. A "big" language doesn't require you to use every feature, you just get them for free if you need them. It could help to greatly reduce boilerplate code in the form of import/use statements as well, or library configuration.
Having less 3rd party modules also makes it easier for other people to use a project you made in the given language.
One downside of a "batteries included" language is that those libraries shipping with the language must fulfil guarantees about stability, which can slow down improvements. This goes even more for languages that aim to provide lots of guarantees, like Rust compared to Python. Even in the Python ecosystem, there are situations like urllib (standard and meh) vs requests (third party and great) or perhaps asyncio and trio.
I'd call that an upside, having many features that are guaranteed to be stable, but it's all perspective I guess.
My understanding of why JS has a small stdlib is that it would need to go through a lot of buraucracy and get good browser support to be of any use. May as well run with the flexibility of effectively using libraries like ramda as third party standard libraries.
That's browser JS specific, of course. Backend JS seems to be ten different languages that all call themselves JS.
This is an excellent question, and in general I agree with you. The problem I tend to see, however, is that too much breadth to a language often comes at the expense of depth--it's often difficult to obtain finer control over the language because there's no official interface to support what you want to do.
As an analogy, sometimes you really just need to buy gumballs in bulk, but you're only provided a way to obtain gumballs in the form of a gumball machine with a simple one-at-a-time quarter slot interface and no key to just open up the top and dump quarters directly into the machine (of course, you wouldn't want to allow someone to do that, but that's beside the point).
Granted, this isn't an inherent limitation, but too much scope in any project will typically have this problem of lack of focus. Third party libraries, on the other hand, have programmers who are specifically dedicated to the particular problem space that their libraries are designed for, so that issue with broadness of scope doesn't really factor in. It's like having a bunch of free external teams working on expanding the language so that the main team's focus can be on the core language.
I think that there's a happy middle ground, though: Focus on extending the parts of the core language for the most common, error-prone, boilerplate-heavy functionality e.g. multi-threaded programming and thread-safe data structures. In this way, you focus on quality of core features over quantity.
Regarding JavaScript, though, it's not really a good example to use here. JavaScript support is largely going to depend on the web browser someone is using, rather than a deployed executable that the JavaScript itself is packaged with, and even with the fairly minimal core language there's not even consistent support or behavior. Trying to throw on too much additional functionality would be disastrous at best, so leaving development of additional features to third parties is pretty much essential.
I do think that there needs to be a better way to manage third-party libraries, though. Having to juggle multiple package managers is a bit of a headache, and figuring out where you need to install something can be a frustrating experience, especially if the documentation on the subject is sparse, garbage, or completely non-existent. I'm a pretty big proponent of tools like Vagrant and Docker for this reason, as you can provide an identical environment to everyone with a few simple instructions for setting up :)
I'm not sure I follow, is the gumball machine in this analogy the "big" language? Because if it is so limited in it's features, it's a very bad analogy to a big language. I see the gumball machine in your language more in line with Python, there is only one way to interact with it, and if you dont like it, too bad. This is something a bigger language avoids, by giving you multiple ways to do a given thing, so you can use the best method for the context you're working in.
I think it's doable to have both high quality and a high number of features in the core of a language. But you'll need to have a dedicated team, and not focus on fast releases. I much prefer slow, but very good releases, over fast releases that hardly improve the language. For me, Perl 6 hits a very good spot, though the original release was very slow, which put a lot of people off. It does have an enormous number of features in the core, and they're all well thought out, and the language itself is very consistent in the way it handles things. But building this all correctly took about 15 years(!) for the first stable release. Now, they're releasing on a monthly basis, though.
Having a standard library would be great for browser support. Now suddenly you don't have to worry about the browser's implementation for every little detail, because there's a standard that guarantees something works the way it's described in one place.
I find these terrible ways to distribute applications, as they add yet another dependency that aren't technically required to run the application in the first place. It also seems to be a step back from having package managers deal with packages, which are a battle-tested method of acquiring programs. It's becoming a trend to just download a Docker image and run it, even though Docker images are not curated in any way or form. They're not signed either. To me, being told "just run this docker command to download and run the image" is just as bad as "just run
curl http://some.script | sudo bash".No, the gumball machine is more to represent a tool within the language--completely built out with a specific interface that you're meant to work with.
Doable, but not practical. Your point about taking 15 years is precisely the sort of problem that the scoping issues involve. You'll either spend a great deal of time working carefully on every piece, or the individual pieces won't be of high quality or won't be very flexible. If you have the time to put into it, that's great, it's just not practical for all languages.
Take a look into ECMAScript to see why this is just a little bit too optimistic.
They're not really dependencies, though. You could set up your own dev environment just fine without them. The point in using them is for convenience and ease of setup, both of which aren't requirements for the project to run at all, as well as guaranteeing that you're testing the same code on the same setup so that issues can be limited to code modifications rather than ensuring that the other person's setup isn't screwy.
You would still use package managers, e.g. you could run a provisioning script for Vagrant that automatically pulls in the desired packages. The provisioning script just automates the setup process for you.
This is a problem with the outside programmer, not the one who sets up the Docker image. I haven't used Docker myself, but with Vagrant you could select a preconfigured Hashicorp box and simply use a provisioning script that outside programmers could review before they even run it. It's just a VM anyway, so unless a zero day is being used to exploit hypervisors to access the host system, there really isn't much of a risk. Worse, if you run a Docker image or Vagrant setup without reviewing it first, you're probably engaging in other unsafe habits that will lead you to an infection pretty quickly.
The part that follows directly after it, is that it now releases every month. It may have a larger build-up, but it doesn't mean that development has to be slow at all times. Having a larger initial development time is completely in line with simply having a bigger codebase.
Indeed, but then you will have to setup all the other stuff manually again. Both have negative side-effects, just different ones.
But this problem wouldn't even exist if everything was available in the repositories already provided by the OS, which are curated and already available. I agree that running unsafe code is an issue of the sysadmin, but why even make this (optional) issue when it's not needed in the first place?
Comedy. Be it in film, tv, writing, stand up, conversational, whatever I've always loved to laugh. It's always interesting to me to enjoy a joke or humorous scenario then to dissect and analyze what makes it work. Is it Silly? Unexpected? Smart? Weird? Situational? Physical?
All of those aspects come into play and I can't get enough of watching people that are good at it.
3D printing. I think that I got in at a very good time this year since printers are getting cheaper and better fast.
I think it's just such an interesting thing. If you need something you can just make it at home, don't necessarily have to go out and buy it. I've learned so much from tinkering with it and its settings. 3D printers are pretty neat and will hopefully continue to get better and cheaper.
People reading this thread might also be interested in this previous discussion: "What are you passionate about?
Volunteering. I volunteer as a board member in several student organizations and I think it is extremely cool to see what a group of people can pull off with limited backing and no external incentives. A career day one of those student organizations arranges has gone from hosting only a handful of businesses to now hosting over 50 businesses and earning several hundred thousand dollars that all go back to the student community. This is something I am really proud of.
Maybe it's selfish. But right now I am passionate about not being shitty - to myself, to others, to my community, to my planet. I have lots of things I want to dedicate myself to (activism, the environment, social justice). But I realize that none of that is worth anything if I can't take care of me and my relationships.
What kind of activism are you talking about?
What constitutes "shitty", and what are you actively working on to improve the situation, whether it be about yourself or about others?
How are these things (negatively impacting) you or your relationships?
Especially the last part sounds in contradiction to you earlier statement, being passionate about not being shity to yourself. If it's hurting your care for yourself, is it actually achieving what you were trying to achieve in the first place?
I'm canvassing to raise awareness of utility shut offs on saturday, got signed up for local chapter of Poor People's Campaign on Friday, and I'm trying to get in touch with organizers working tenant's rights, rent control, anti-gentrification etc. But taking it kinda slow til I feel I'm on a more even keel.
Bad sleeping, diet, attitude, self-worth accumulated in college - being selfish and bummed out. Maybe a little substance abuse. Since I'm just graduated, I'm being, first and foremost, more aware of when I'm slipping on any of these. Actively trying to cook for myself more, get on a regular schedule for sleep, practicing gratitude, being more serious about some friendships, trying to rekindle others.
Those all sound like positive things. Keep up your good efforts! :)
Thanks friend! Have a good one
THIS. I am doing the same thing, been very focused on increasing my self awareness, emotional regulation, eating a more plant based diet for health/moral/environmental reasons. I feel like if I can be better for myself i will be better to everyone.
I'm very interested in psychology and law. With psychology, I'm fascinated by human nature and how our perspectives and experiences shape the way we view and interpret the world. With law, I'm very interested in justice and fairness. I know that our justice system in the US has a lot of problems and a lot of ignorance surrounding different legal issues. I would love to some day be able to educate people about our legal system and/or advocate for those who don't or can't understand it.
Game design, particularly for my tabletop RPG of choice, but design in general. I can spend a whole afternoon just crunching specific numbers, probabilities, typing up flavor text... Seeing everything come together just right, with just the right feel, at the end of it all really makes me feel satisfied.
I also enjoy doing this. What's some of the stuff you've created?
In terms of professional stuff, I'm under NDA but involved in a project that's been in development for around 5 years. In terms of personal projects, though, I have a lot of them, with the vast majority being adapting stuff I enjoy into the Savage Worlds system, which is a generic system that works really well with a united set of mechanics. My main projects at the moment are the entire MCU (as noted in the above link), Warhammer 40K (specifically to allow seamless transition between RPG play and wargaming play), Star Wars, Halo, and the Warcraft universe. The MCU is taking priority but there's been a lot of good progress on that front; big updates will be going up on that blog before the end of the year.
People. I just try to help out the next person whenever a chance presents itself. It can be simple things, like holding open a door for someone, giving a beggar a sandwich, or listening to a monologue that will help a person get whatever is depressing them off their chest. I realized quickly that I couldn't change the world (as much as I would like to be able to), but as it turns out, that's not necessary; I just need to be there for the people around me. There's this hope that I have - that if more people help their immediate surroundings, it will gradually turn the world into a better place. To some that may sound naive, but that won't stop me from sticking to my principles.