Interesting Links for 20-11-2025

[andrewducker]

1. Town's Huge Christmas Mural Was Generated Using AI, Resulting in Ghastly Chthonic Horrors

(tags:AI Christmas epicfail )

2. The 10 most important life lessons to master in your 30s

(tags:life advice )

3. Building on Ruins: The Russification of Mariupol, One Apartment Block at a Time

(tags:Ukraine Russia OhForFucksSake )

4. UK Supreme Court rules Christian-focused RE taught in NI schools is unlawful

(tags:law UK religion christianity GoodNews NorthernIreland )

5. Worrying about UPFs is extremely premature

(tags:research food health )

6. Christian school objects to children singing about demons. Even about the hunting thereof.

(tags:singing christianity religion uk )

7. The U.S.'s first out trans diplomat was once considered a hero. Now she may never come home.

(tags:LGBT transgender USA bigotry OhForFucksSake )

8. Pfizer's mRNA flu shot outperforms standard flu vaccine in late-stage trial

(tags:flu vaccine )

9. The Patent Office Is About To Make Bad Patents Untouchable

(tags:patents usa OhForFucksSake intellectual_property )

10. Aging Out of Fucks: The Neuroscience of Why You Suddenly Can't Pretend Anymore

(tags:women age psychology )

Comments

[nancylebov]

10. I've seen some discussion that it's more of a cultural shift-- women not under pressure to be nice-- rather than life stage.

[cmcmck]

7. And I know how it is feeling in this country too- we are discussing getting out seriously now.

10

[channelpenguin]

I didnt need to age out of it. I have never given that sort of fuck. Yes, I got challenged and I often said things like "if I were a man, nobody would blink at this".

What I DID age INTO is actually MORE empathy, kindness and caring - the real and non-toxic kind.

I am truly glad that i never lived the horrible-sounding people-pleasing overthinking existence described in this article - is it truly "the norm"? Is it genuinely typical? I am really asking because I don't think I have lived, worked or socialised with women like that - maybe that is a selection bias on my part :-)

5.

[channelpenguin]

Maybe the panic is overblown but I found this article of itself hypberbolic, defeatist and patronising.

It is entirely possible to eat very little processed food without cooking every day and without spending heaps of money (in general, I have always found it cheaper). I tend to batch cook. Once/twice a week. Soups, stews, oven full of various things all at once. I eat porridge made with fruit and nuts for breakfast. Usually I make a huge pot of that every 10 days too. I DO need a freezer and microwave though to pull this off properly.

I don't fret if I buy bread - but honestly, I lived years not eating bread very often because UK bread is crap. German bread is oK for my taste but more dense for sure.

[mountainkiss]

Interestingly I am becoming more and more sensitive to social cues and more of a harmoniser as I age, rather than the reverse.

[nancylebov]

2 is somewhat contradictory-- have boundaries to avoid people who are bad for you may not be consistent with being solidly connected to your family.

Maybe people are happier is they're with their family if their family is decent people.

I'm not sure how common really awful families are, but I suspect they're around 5%.

[juan_gandhi]

Thank you! Lots of good stuff.

[anna_wing]

10 is very culturally contextual. Most Southeast Asian societies are hierarchical along the age and social status axes more than the sex axis. So younger people of both sexes will be more deferential than older ones, and an older woman has more status in relation to men than a younger one unless the younger one is high-status ( either personal or familial).

[simont]

#6 (demon hunting):

The idea of "mustn't sing about demons even if you're clearly labelling them as the bad guys and singing about hunting and killing them" puts me in mind of the thing where WW2-themed videogames have trouble in Germany with the law against Nazi symbolism. Similarly in that context, you're not allowed to show pictures of the Bad Guys, even in a context where they're clearly marked as Bad and the player character is killing the hell out of them left and right.

(OK, not all WW2 videogames unconditionally take that attitude – some let you choose to play as the Axis. But as I understand it, the German law on the subject takes no account of whether that's the case or not.)

I don't know whether German lawmakers thought carefully about that kind of thing and decided to still forbid it. It would be easy to imagine that they might not have, and then once the law is made it has enormous inertia, both procedural (changing laws at all is hard work) and political (don't want to be seen as relaxing an uncompromising anti-Nazi law). But on the other hand they might have thought it through carefully and have a good reason!