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9 comments
My boss at the university is off sick and may be for some time…at the worst time of year too! Of course that’s not their fault, it’s a real illness not a fake one.
Did you ever have to kind of substitute your boss immediately, without any warning, training or preparation ? 😉
If so, how did it go?
The mid autumn festival has come and gone. I wonder why all the mooncakes I’ve seen are basically diabetes gummies.
Speaking of food, what’s with the Ghibli (or Ghibliesque) music on Japanese food shorts on social media? I saw a machine that shaped and fried some sort of scrambled egg mixture into snacks shaped like minimuffins.
Are parsnips popular where you live?
If so,how often do you eat them? What do you make with them?
So, Germany is finally transitioning into a digital patience file system where you can see all your diagnoses, medication etc… But the thing is, now the doctors are accountable. We saw in a news clip that many people are finding some phantom diagnosis in their files which they weren’t aware of and their GP never discussed with them. Many of them are also about psychiatric issues. Basically, it is the doctors squeezing a bit more money out of the system. You would normally not be aware of this, unless you want to have private insurance (then you’re in for a nasty surprise, because a diagnosis can’t just be deleted from the system. You would have to go to the doctor and confront them). Now, everyone will be able to see all their past diagnoses.
Unfortunately you have to jump through many hoops to have access to this (like five different ways of identifying yourself) and I didn’t manage yet (I’m on it), but my husband did, and he saw that the current GP wrote some weird diagnosis on him too (something like anxiety disorder due to high psychological stress or so, which is bs. He’s only been to the doctor once for Covid and once to refresh a vaccination).
That’s a bit cheeky, no? Now we’re thinking about what to do. Let’s see what’s in my file. I’ve been there more often than him, and actually I do like this doctor. Like, they’re not bad people. I guess they’ve just been “playing the game” or something.
ETA yesterday’s prompt was [Pierce](https://www.deviantart.com/tereyaglikedi/art/1249840281?action=published)
Yesterday morning I cut my right hand thumb with the cheese slicer. I am left handed but typing on the phone and many other simple tasks require both thumbs to work properly. Quite annoying
I had an absolutely fascinating conversation with ChatGPT the other day. My prompt was whether non-primates could have evolved into something very similar but unrelated to a human through convergent evolution. ChatGPT, on the other hand, thought what I wanted to know was whether other mammals could evolve into a species with human-like intelligence that could build advanced civilisations.
Apparently, to be a highly intelligent species, you need to a) be omnivorous (oops failed that one), b) be social (oops I think I failed that one too), c) have a highly dextrous body part, d) have few offspring that can be closely nurtured and e) live in varied and unpredictable environments. So according to ChatGPT, in a parallel universe where a primate sapien didn’t evolve, you would most likely have had a “tool-user” raccoon sapien and/or a “trunk-user” elephant sapien (“Elephas sapiens— a culture of trunk-tool artisans, with memory-based storytelling and acoustic language.” whatever the fuck that means). Runners-up would be an aquatic mammal of some sort (most likely a dolphin or a sea lion) that spontaneously evolved hands which it used to construct grand kelp cities with, a rodent or lagomorph sapien that can build large subterranean civilisations, or a bat sapien that can develop a tree-top civilisation and a highly sophisticated language based on echolocation.
Now, ChatGPT claims that a primate sapien could peacefully coexist with an elephant sapien, but honestly I don’t know how that could happen with the intense competition for land and resources that would result. The only way I can see that is if either a) industrialised elephans sapiens society leads to demographic collapse aided by an absurdly long gestation period and the expense required to build elephant dwellings, or b) they exploit the fact that their gestation period is almost exactly one Mars year, a fact they use to become a spacefaring species and resettle on Mars. Coexistence with raccoon sapiens would be a challenge too, but if they remained nocturnal and used our rubbish for resource extraction, it could somehow work out. Coexistence with a rodent and an aquatic sapiens would, on the other hand, be very simple by comparison (primate sapiens don’t live underground or in the ocean, after all), possibly even symbiotic, though I’m sure more antisocial dolphin sapiens might insist on dumping all their kelp city detritus onto our beaches which we won’t be particularly happy about.
So why am I saying all this? Well, because we all read about how ChatGPT is making us all dumber. But if used right, it can be a wonderful creative stimulant. What we have here is a gigantic wealth of worldbuilding content. Maybe I should get back into creative writing again, it’s been too long…
I went to check out a new art exhibition, and there was some interesting sculptures there. They were cast bronze sculptures of hands and feet on white towels, as if getting a manicure or a pedicure with naked pictures of the artist on the nails. The sculptures themselves were placed on pedestals and were surrounded by sheer curtains on all four sides.
Some years ago I read a paper about the commodification of art in the context of new capitalism and how one recent development of art was to try and get rid of any possibility to come up with truly objective critique or analysis. There could be something morally dubious, something horrific, something abject, that made it impossible to talk about the work without inserting yourself in the conversation. How it made you feel, what judgements you have.
This exhibition was I think the first time I truly felt that way looking at a contemporary art piece. The explicit naked photos of this artist printed on the toenails of a gold painted bronze sculpture of a foot were so small you had to bend over and get really close if you wanted to take a look. But doing so while inside the four walls of sheer curtains that seemed to mark the space as the artwork’s own felt extremely voyeuristic. It made me feel like a pervert.
There’s a sausage factory by the ring road and any time I drive past it during the day the whole motorway smells like sausages.
The first round of the Chopin competition is nearly over.
First of all, I am so proud of the Polish people. For every session, the concert hall is packed full. It’s so great that people are so into this. Also for the artists, it must be a much nicer feeling to play to this amount of people who really care.
Second, the comment sections are full of Japanese comments. More so for Japanese artists (of which there are many) but also others. They also seem to love their music. No wonder why there’s so much anime that centers around classical music.