Drawing a one-to-one correspondence between media consumption and behavior is always dicey—and never more so than when a high percentage of the audience is consuming a very different text than the one that is there. And it’s important to take a step back and check for alternate interpretations of the media we’re criticizing. All too often, feminist critiques of heterosexual porn wind up saying more about our views of women and sex than they do about the porn itself.

In conclusion: porn research is very bad and we don’t know anything. So it goes.

via: https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/polysemy-and-porn

OR: why you should sell onions on the internet

Ben Sparks explores hidden depths of a seemingly simple game.

Tic-tac-toe on a magic square. Hella neat, and hammers home how important representation is in mathematics.

If you want to be dead, that’s your own business. But if you would like to continue to be alive, it’s a bad idea to set goals for yourself that boil down to “try to get as close as possible to being a corpse while continuing to respire and consume nutrients.”

Something I can hopefully internalize.

Not self-applicable, but definitely amusing.

If a straight woman has made a somewhat blatant indication of interest—she’s put her head on your shoulder, or given you her contact information, or asked you to a movie—you might freak the fuck out, because a woman being interested in you is an impossibility, a violation of the previous laws of social interaction and perhaps reality.

Also why universal healthcare matters. Gotta maintain all parts of a system!

via: https://mit.edu/6.1800/www/readings/01-wrong.shtml

A comic about two black kids sitting on a box and wondering what’s inside.

via: https://madwomb.com/tutorials/ComicsLiterature_MIT.html

see: https://madwomb.com/tutorials/comicsDesign/literature/RichiePope_ThatBoxWeSitOn.pdf

What do the female fantasies of bad boys, danger, violence, and taboo all have in common? Permission to be horny.

Technology advances forced the Census Bureau to use sweeping measures to ensure privacy for respondents. The ensuing debate goes to the heart of what a census is.

This is a great article on a big-name application of differential privacy: it even features an interview with Dworkin! This, to me, seems like a pretty necessary change to preserve the privacy of folks.

via: https://mit.edu/6.1800/www/tutorials/01-intro.shtml

Ed Copeland goes deep as we explore how we cracked an infinite sum relating to black holes.

Lots of great techniques.

Ed Copeland continues from the main video

Lots of great techniques.

Not really sure where this video came from, I came downstairs in the morning and it was already fully uploaded. Dan doesn’t know anything about it either. Doesn’t seem like it’ll get me in trouble though so F it, we’ll let it rock. Weirdly enough it sounds like he’s listening to Shoegazer Watched The Stars from NMH2 for most of the video. With a brief appearance by 1811 from Lost Judgement.

Absolutely hilarious.

Apparently a classic in certain circles.

The main issue is that, by the time you get to the frontiers of math, the words to describe the concepts don’t really exist yet. Communicating these ideas is a bit like trying to explain a vacuum cleaner to someone who has never seen one, except you’re only allowed to use words that are four letters long or shorter.

Merging the Trump and CHH personas together: How would I talk about my Substack if I were Trump? / This 15-minute, one-take improvised Trump impression brought to you by mental illness.

This has no right to be this good.

The 2010s messaging that women never wanted men to talk to them was driven by a minority of extreme introverts. Modern-day singles are paying the price.

It’s not that I’m afraid of rejection — it’s that I assume it. That’s what I was really mad about as a kid. Why do I have to be the screw-up? Why do I have to be all of these things that I wouldn’t want, either? Emotionally fragile, socially shut-in, in equal parts sexually perverse and timid — and worst of all, self-loathing. That self-loathing has fed avoidance, which has led to a failure to express my needs and desires, which has led to dysfunction in my relationships, which resets the cycle.

On the terrible system dynamics of dating and sensitive young man syndrome. Beautiful cycle depicted.

Or; “Diptych, Panel I: The Mote in His Eye.”

A nice discussion of het dating norms and a useful script for treating people.