autistic love story: swings!! they provide repetitive movement while also engaging the whole body and providing extra stimming with the feeling of wind and momentum
the absolute funniest thing in madoka magica to me is that all of the girls have magical weapons that they summon from their soul gems, right? so madoka has her bow, sayaka has a sword, mami has musket rifles, and kyouko has a chain spear thing.
but homura doesn’t have a “weapon” persay, she has a shield, so she just fucking. steals military grade weaponry from the yakuza and cooks her own pipe bombs. you see her obtain these things on camera. this anime magical girl is running around with realistic military weapons and she’s the ONLY character to do so and that’s fucking hysterical to me
What makes this better is that Mami’s main weapon isn’t the rifles, it’s her ribbons. She had to study how rifles work to learn how to conjure them out of ribbons, which meant she studied rifles for countless hours.
Yes BUT. This specific desk is in a library so a parent that needs to use a library computer can do their work and have a little ease in managing their kiddo. In a library environment this is less productivity culture bullshit and more ‘oh this is a fantastic solution to a difficult situation library staff see 8 times a day’. Is it still productivity culture bullshit because this parent may not have affordable childcare or internet available to them? Yes. Am I glad it exists in a library environment to fill a demonstrated need? Hell yeah.
and keeps library staff from having to act as babysitters…
dear GOD we could use a couple of these. we keep crayons and coloring books on hand for the ones old enough for that, but the wee ones squirming and fussing in laps while the parents are fighting with job applications or convincing gmail’s current 2-step verification to let them in so they can print off a return label (both of which i have seen)? this would be SO NICE.
library groups have been loving this & are spreading the word & actively trying to purchase/create similar things in different systems
You know how back in the pre-Internet days, it was nearly impossible to watch a TV series in its entirety because the local affiliate stations would deliberately air the episodes all out of order, then do some sort of statistical sorcery to figure out which particular episodes gave the
advertisers the best return for their dollar and just run those ten or twelve specific episodes in an endless semi-randomised rotation, and that was why every time you channel-surfed across a particular show it always seemed to be the same damn episode?
Twitter’s algorithm is literally the social media equivalent of that.
In middle/high school I put all the music I had on an off-brand mp3 player and would just set it to Shuffle All. I quickly realized the player’s shuffle fuction wasn’t purely random–it was weighted towards my favorite songs (aka the songs with the most plays).
Only I had never chosen those songs. They were just the random few to pop up the first time I shuffled everything, and they started playing more and more frequently as this horribly short-sighted algorithm fed itself bad data, until I was so annoyed at those few songs that I stopped listening entirely.
Anyway a few years later Facebook did the exact same thing with my friends list, siphoning me off from seeing most of my feed because OBVIOUSLY I interacted with them the most, therefore they must be my besties. But really they were just the only people showing up for me to interact with in the first place, until I was down to just a few people I never really talked to from high school, a college prof, and my racist uncle I kept calling out.
And shortly after that, YouTube followed suit, replacing “Subscriptions” with “Recommended” as the default category, and trying to find “things I liked” when it was really just whatever three channels I’d watched last, whatever unrelated viral vid it wanted to push that week, and weird perennials like Whose Line clips or lockpick reviews or YTPs that seem to hibernate for months at a time then return like locusts.
All this to say: the big mysterious algorithms that now run all the major platforms on the internet are never acting in your best interests. They’re just that junky mp3 player’s Shuffle All with a fresh coat of paint, and, to be clear, this is by design. They are VERY good at what they do, which is funneling users into nice predictable pockets of content that advertisers can exploit.
everyone come over i made chocolate chip cookies only two dozen though so some of you will have to fight to the death in the street. sorry. unlimited tap water
