I’m really sorry that I still see anyone defending Julian Assange in fucking 2022.
Apart from the sexual abuse (a big thing to gloss over), he was a willing agent of the worst countries on the planet. There is a lot of evidence he worked with Russia’s FSB in essentially destabilizing operations.
He belongs in jail.
photographed this tree a lot with a lens not wide enough for it so I tried to put it back together from the photos.
Twitter exit, mental health
I’m exiting twitter, at least for this summer but probably long-term.
I’m in no danger of lack of awareness of issues in the world right now, and I prefer to focus on things I can affect, here in Austria.
I just wanted to share this as a cautionary tale: it’s ok to let go sources of anxiety - it doesn’t mean you don’t care: it means you do what you can in your locality without stressing yourself over things you can’t change.
Twitter exit, mental health
It’s been one crisis after the other since 2015: Brexit, the rise of american fascism, climate change doomerism, covid, ukraine.
Pretty much the only time Twitter was useful was with covid, where actionable information was hard to come by from anywhere else, but apart from this it’s been looking at various disasters from a distance. Who needs to hear even more about guns or abortion in the US? I get it, you’re struggling with a fascist takeover in your country.
Twitter exit, mental health
I had a mostly read-only twitter account for over a decade, and openly speaking it was a mistake to use it as a tool to keep up with current events.
I like to be informed, and it’s reassuring to be aware even if that mostly relates to problems. However, being aware should not mean deluged by issues that I can’t change or affect in any way - this was my mistake. Twitter is mostly the latter.
We can broadly classify the types of #exoplanets we've found like I've done on the graph below, compared to the Solar System planets
Most interestingly there are these classes of planets called Sub-Neptunes and Super-Earths which are bigger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. These are the most common #exoplanet but we have nothing like them in our Solar System! (And these are what I'll talk about next week for the Habitability #SpaceTalkTuesday!)
Extended #SpaceTalkTuesday (17/)
Simulation sandbox
I’m not saying we live in a simulation, but IF we were to live in one, then:
- a slowly escalating russian-ukrainian war
- US fascist takeover by republicans / Trump
- climate change triggering runaway global warmin due to permafost methane thawing
- pandemic resuming
…all converging around 2023-24 would be how I would build a sandbox universe where you fuck everything up just to see what would happen.