Tootfinder

How popular media gets love wrong
Now a bit of background about why I have this "engineered" model of love:
First, I'm a white straight cis man. I've got a few traits that might work against my relationship chances (e.g., neurodivergence; I generally fit pretty well into the "weird geek" stereotype), but as I was recently reminded, it's possible my experience derives more from luck than other factors, and since things are tilted more in my favor than most people on the planet, my advice could be worse than useless if it leads people towards strategies that would only have worked for someone like me. I don't *think* that's the case, but it's worth mentioning explicitly.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
When I first started dating my now-wife, we were both in graduate school. I was 26, and had exactly zero dating/romantic experience though that point in my life. In other words, a pretty stereotypical "incel" although I definitely didn't subscribe to incel ideology at all. I felt lonely, and vaguely wanted a romantic relationship (I'm neither aromantic nor asexual), but had never felt socially comfortable enough to pursue one before. I don't drink and dislike most social gatherings like parties or bars; I mostly hung around the fringes of the few college parties I attended, and although I had a reasonable college social life in terms of friends, I didn't really do anything to pursue romance, feeling too awkward to know where to start. I had the beginnings of crushes in both high school and college, but never developed a really strong crush, probably correlated with not putting myself in many social situations outside of close all-male friend gatherings. I never felt remotely comfortable enough to act on any of the proto-crushes I did have. I did watch porn and masturbate, so one motivation for pursuing a relationship was physical intimacy, but loneliness was as much of a motivating factor, and of course the social pressure to date was a factor too, even though I'm quite contrarian.
I'm lucky in that I had some mixed-gender social circles already like intramural soccer and a graduate-student housing potluck. Graduate school makes a *lot* more of these social spaces accessible, so I recognize that those not in school of some sort have a harder time of things, especially if like me they don't feel like they fit in in typical adult social spaces like bars.
However, at one point I just decided that my desire for a relationship would need action on my part and so I'd try to build a relationship and see what happened. I worked up my courage and asked one of the people in my potluck if she'd like to go for a hike (pretty much clearly a date but not explicitly one; in retrospect not the best first-date modality in a lot of ways, but it made a little more sense in our setting where we could go for a hike from our front door). To emphasize this point: I was not in love with (or even infatuated with) my now-wife at that point. I made a decision to be open to building a relationship, but didn't follow the typical romance story formula beyond that. Now of course, in real life as opposed to popular media, this isn't anything special. People ask each other out all the time just because they're lonely, and some of those relationships turn out fine (although many do not).
I was lucky in that some aspects of who I am and what I do happened to be naturally comforting to my wife (natural advantage in the "appeal" model of love) but of course there are some aspects of me that annoy my wife, and we negotiate that. In the other direction, there's some things I instantly liked about my wife, and other things that still annoy me. We've figured out how to accept a little, change a little, and overall be happy with each other (though we do still have arguments; it's not like the operation/construction/maintenance of the "love mechanism" is always perfectly smooth). In particular though, I approached the relationship with the attitude of "I want to try to build a relationship with this person," at first just because of my own desires for *any* relationship, and then gradually more and more through my desire to build *this specific* relationship as I enjoyed the rewards of companionship.
So for example, while I think my wife is objectively beautiful, she's also *subjectively* very beautiful *to me* because having decided to build a relationship with her, I actively tried to see her as beautiful, rather than trying to judge whether I wanted a relationship with her based on her beauty. In other words, our relationship is more causative of her beauty-to-me than her beauty-to-me is causative of our relationship. This is the biggest way I think the "engineered" model of love differs from the "fire" and "appeal" models: you can just decide to build love independent of factors we typically think of as engendering love (NOT independent of your partner's willingness to participate, of course), and then all of those things like "thinking your partner is beautiful" can be a result of the relationship you're building. For sure those factors might affect who is willing to try building a relationship with you in the first place, but if more people were willing to jump into relationship building (not necessarily with full commitment from the start) without worrying about those other factors, they might find that those factors can come out of the relationship instead of being prerequisites for it. I think this is the biggest failure of the "appeal" model in particular: yes you *do* need to do things that appeal to your partner, but it's not just "make myself lovable" it's also: is your partner putting in the effort to see the ways that you are beautiful/lovable/etc., or are they just expecting you to become exactly some perfect person they've imagined (and/or been told to desire by society)? The former is perfectly possible, and no less satisfying than the latter.
To cut off my rambling a bit here, I'll just add that in our progress from dating through marriage through staying-married, my wife and I have both talked at times explicitly about commitment, and especially when deciding to get married, I told her that I knew I couldn't live up to the perfect model of a husband that I'd want to be, but that if she wanted to deepen our commitment, I was happy to do that, and so we did. I also rearranged my priorities at that point, deciding that I knew I wanted to prioritize this relationship above things like my career or my research interests, and while I've not always been perfect at that in my little decisions, I've been good at holding to that in my big decisions at least. In the end, *once we had built a somewhat-committed relationship*, we had something that we both recognized was worth more than most other things in life, and that let us commit even more, thus getting even more out of it in the long term. Obviously you can't start the first date with an expectation of life-long commitment, and you need to synchronize your increasing commitment to a relationship so that it doesn't become lopsided, which is hard. But if you take the commitment as an active decision and as the *precursor* to things like infatuation, attraction, etc., you can build up to something that's incredibly strong and rewarding.
I'll follow this up with one more post trying to distill some advice from my ramblings.
#relationships #love

A while ago the media reported that most of the long-distance "suburban" trains between #Wrocław and #Poznań will be discontinued, and instead one will have to change trains midway. Irrespective of whether it's actually going to happen, let's consider it.
As you can probably tell by now, I'm not a stranger to changing trains. In fact, there are some direct connections that I do criticize. For example:
• Poznań — Szczecin — Świnoujście, where arriving at Szczecin Główny and turning back to leave the city is a waste of time. It's better to change trains at Szczecin Dąbie.
• Poznań — Krzyż — Kostrzyn, where instead of using a single railbus, you can use a larger EMU for the Poznań — Krzyż segment, and a smaller DMU for Krzyż — Kostrzyn (in fact, only recently the "direct" Poznań — Kostrzyn train involved just that, but it was supposed to be temporary).
However, good matches are the key. Say:
1. Max 10 minutes (when there are no delays) from one train to the other.
2. "Door-to-door" transfer — without having to carry all your luggage across platforms.
3. Reliable connection — if one train is delayed, the other train waits for it (or there are so many alternatives that it doesn't have to).
Can such a thing happen on Poznań — Wrocław route? I have my doubts.
I've been using these trains for years, and I can say this: there is no effort to match train from/to Poznań with other trains in Wrocław. Sometimes the trains depart 10 minutes before the first train from Poznań arrives, sometimes I need to transfer in 10 minutes, and sometimes I have to wait over an hour. And the same in the other direction.
Perhaps things would actually improve if the route is split. Perhaps people would actually care. Maybe even the trains would be fitted better to the timetable in Wrocław. But I find it hard to believe.
EDIT: One final thought — since there is no real reason to split these connections (except for profiteering), why make travellers' lives harder?
#rail

How popular media gets love wrong
Had some thoughts in response to a post about loneliness on here. As the author emphasized, reassurances from people who got lucky are not terribly comforting to those who didn't, especially when the person who was lucky had structural factors in their favor that made their chances of success much higher than those is their audience. So: these are just my thoughts, and may not have any bearing on your life. I share them because my experience challenged a lot of the things I was taught to believe about love, and I think my current beliefs are both truer and would benefit others seeing companionship.
We're taught in many modern societies from an absurdly young age that love is not something under our control, and that dating should be a process of trying to kindle love with different people until we meet "the one" with whom it takes off. In the slightly-less-fairytale corners of modern popular media, we might fund an admission that it's possible to influence love, feeding & tending the fire in better or worse ways. But it's still modeled as an uncontrollable force of nature, to be occasionally influenced but never tamed. I'll call this the "fire" model of love.
We're also taught (and non-boys are taught more stringently) a second contradictory model of love: that in a relationship, we need to both do things and be things in order to make our partner love us, and that if we don't, our partner's love for us will wither, and (especially if you're not a boy) it will be our fault. I'll call this the "appeal" model of love.
Now obviously both of these cannot be totally true at once, and plenty of popular media centers this contradiction, but there are really very few competing models on offer.
In my experience, however, it's possible to have "pre-meditated" love. In other words, to decide you want to love someone (or at least, try loving them), commit to that idea, and then actually wind up in love with them (and them with you, although obviously this second part is not directly under your control). I'll call this the "engineered" model of love.
Now, I don't think that the "fire" and "appeal" models of love are totally wrong, but I do feel their shortcomings often suggest poor & self-destructive relationship strategies. I do think the "fire" model is a decent model for *infatuation*, which is something a lot of popular media blur into love, and which drives many (but not all) of the feelings we normally associate with love (even as those feelings have other possible drivers too). I definitely experienced strong infatuation early on in my engineered relationship (ugh that sounds terrible but I'll stick with it; I promise no deception was involved). I continue to experience mild infatuation years later that waxes and wanes. It's not a stable foundation for a relationship but it can be a useful component of one (this at least popular media depicts often).
I'll continue these thoughts in a reply, by it might take a bit to get to it.
#relationships

As I'm learning Dutch, I'm reminded that the idea that there are people who believe that the bible is to be taken literally. The idea that a several hundred year old translation of a collection of texts in multiple languages, that were themselves translated multiple times between languages, before the whole thing was translated to Latin, then being translated to English, could somehow perfectly reflect the original text... Yeah, it's only possible to believe that if you have no idea how languages work and have never learned another language.
Like, just from linguistic drift alone if the bible were written in King James English you're losing *so* much context. But Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek translated to Latin, then to English, then to English again?
There are so many things that erg can't be translated, even as a beginner. Dutch and English are two of the closest languages that exist, they're both Germanic languages and they're the closest to each other (other than Friesian). You can't really be much closer, and yet, there are so many things you can't mutually represent. Hebrew and Latin, Aramaic and Latin, Latin and English, Greek and English, these aren't even the same families at all... They're extremely distant. There's absolutely no way to represent concepts from one to another without another book's worth of explanation.
And that ignores all the cultural context, which is mostly lost and a library and decade of education to get the stuff that we *do* know.
Only monolingual Americans could come up with an idea so incredibly asinine.

#Blakes7 Series A, Episode 02 - Space Fall
JENNA: You think he's been caught?
BLAKE: No. No, there would have been an alarm. [Looks at the access hatch] I'd better get in after him.
https://blake.torpidity.net…

Blakes7Bot | Search
Companion site to the Blakes7Bot Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts. Automated lines of Blakes 7 dialog. Includes a script search facility.

There's no Top of the Pops #TOTP tonight because some people are sitting in a field in Somerset, but of course I'm not going to let a little thing like that stop me from wittering on about Old Time Music.
Anyway I've just relistened (for the first time in about a bazillion years) to Ballroom Blitz by the Sweet. And however much we laugh about glam rock, you can't deny it's a glorious joyful piece of music.
#70sMusic #GlamRock

If I reply to a migrated account it will never reply to me and I might not ever notice it's migrated unless I view the profile on the source server.
Here is a mastodon suggestion issue with a few ideas to make it more clear the account has migrated.
If you have ideas add them to the issue as a comment!
https://

#Blakes7 Series A, Episode 02 - Space Fall
JENNA: You think he's been caught?
BLAKE: No. No, there would have been an alarm. [Looks at the access hatch] I'd better get in after him.
https://blake.torpidity.net…

Blakes7Bot | Search
Companion site to the Blakes7Bot Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts. Automated lines of Blakes 7 dialog. Includes a script search facility.

Personalized 4D Whole Heart Geometry Reconstruction from Cine MRI for Cardiac Digital Twins
Xiaoyue Liu, Xicheng Sheng, Xiahai Zhuang, Vicente Grau, Mark YY Chan, Ching-Hui Sia, Lei Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15203

Personalized 4D Whole Heart Geometry Reconstruction from Cine MRI for Cardiac Digital Twins
Cardiac digital twins (CDTs) provide personalized in-silico cardiac representations and hold great potential for precision medicine in cardiology. However, whole-heart CDT models that simulate the full organ-scale electromechanics of all four heart chambers remain limited. In this work, we propose a weakly supervised learning model to reconstruct 4D (3D+t) heart mesh directly from multi-view 2D cardiac cine MRIs. This is achieved by learning a self-supervised mapping between cine MRIs and 4D ca…

@… I don’t think I know quite enough either.
I do know that the cloud providers seem to outsource “function” to the sysadmin, and provide a bag of tools you can use, or not, to make your hosted thing secure and available, or not.
There is no one-size-fits-all solution out there, so I’m not expecting them to provide one. However, there are totally broken conf…