J. Ng (she/they)

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Rosalind Franklin died at 37 of ovarian cancer attributed to radiation exposure from the methods she & her assistant used to photograph a cross-section of the DNA double helix.

Meanwhile, Watson won a Nobel off that work & survived to the ripe old age of 97 by simply: stealing those notes!

Netflix's "Bon Appetit Your Majesty" is my 1st 사극 (sageuk). I'm not normally into kdrama. Only seen a few shows, not counting Squid Game.

Been having fun noting the similarities to cdramas.

But ep 6 has the worst spoken Chinese dialogue I've ever had to sit through... since Firefly.

Photo of a kid's workbook where they must complete the line "Grown-ups are WEIRD because" and the penciled answer is "every one of them says how are you? And you always have to say good even if you're not good."

This is why I'd say the dislike of small talk is rarely an objection to, or a misreading of, scripts. It's from regularly seeing such scripts deployed perfunctorily.

Small talk is about form; genuine care is about intent. But folks can't mindread intent.

For example, out of the mouths of babes:

I've had to do this a lot for an undiagnosed friend who's often written off as a 'concern troll'. He comes to me with very earnest questions and it breaks my heart watching him try to understand others, when others won't give him that same grace.

IOW, we live in a society. But we don't live in a society that treats all of us equally. Especially not in the ways that most matter.

I took a train ride from NY to FL last weekend, and the farther south we got, the more small talk became less about rapport and more about risk management.

What that question highlights is how small talk is 1) functionally an act of compliance to someone else's stage, and 2) cishet white men are the most fraught to navigate when you're not them.

The good ones expect you to guess their good intentions; bad ones exploit civility to center their comfort.

Same.

There's also just so many: Reboot, Denver the Last Dinosaur, Hammerman, Woody Woodpecker, King Arthur and the Knights of Justice, Double Dragon, The Mask, Beast Wars, the whole Disney Afternoon block, etc.

I just wanted to highlight my fav least mentioned.

Absolutely, but small talk isn’t the only option, and bypassing it doesn't mean oversharing is the only alternative.

My concern here is: what kind of community gets birthed from a small talk framework? To me, it feels too much like the places that gave us "Minnesota nice."

Ngl, that last bit totally gave me Tobias vibes.

It shouldn’t be forgotten that a big piece of Mamdani’s campaign was simply “cities are cool and lots of people enjoy living in them” which in and of itself dismantles alot of rightwing talking points

*high 5s* I only knew one person who ever saw it and it was my BFF. I love those characters so much. And the educational shorts at the end of each ep were like nothing else at the time.

Sigh. Once again, things you think are ridiculous or wasteful are often meant to or happen to help disabled people. Forearm pan holder? Not because people are lazy. Tide pods? Have you tried pouring detergent with a tremor?

Don’t get me started on the damned pre-cut ingredients.

4am is for asking my spouse if he can powerwash poop stains on our toilet with his pee and him going 'why are you like this???'

(Duh.... cause I don't have the equipment or I'd try it myself!)

Reddit is for finding out that the answer is yes: www.reddit.com/r/DoesAnybod...

I got blocked on the hellsite once by a Steve Rogers fanfic writer who lives in Brooklyn, cause I tagged Hank Green when citing him to her in a quote about microplastics.

She went ad hominem on me, said I was simping for his attn, then said I was swatting her cause he has a big following.

Bonkers.

I can't believe a CUNY polisci prof posted this like it's some great insight when NYC IS A CITY OF IMMIGRANTS and 38% of the population.

"If you voted for Mamdani chances are you were NOT born in New York City and you didn't grow up here. A real New Yorker would NEVER vote for a guy like that"

Share a cartoon from the past that kids today probably never heard of

youtu.be/oaA-dMLG-1E?...

I've learned my lesson long ago, That "How are you?'s" are just for show, But you do really want to know me, don't ya? Or we could do it like this instead, "Hello"; "Goodbye". Just nod our heads: "Fine"; "Thanks"; "I'm doing great, now how about ya?" So why don't ya? So why don't ya? How about ya? How a-bout-out ya? (Apologies to Leonard Cohen.)

But is "a serious 'but how are you doing?" still small talk anymore? That's usually an invite to segue to a deeper talk.

I wrote a song about this once.

Photo of a kid's workbook where they must complete the line "Grown-ups are WEIRD because" and the penciled answer is "every one of them says how are you? And you always have to say good even if you're not good."

2/2 For the longest time, when I witnessed small talk, I felt like the kid in this meme:

Small talk isn't all pleasantness though. It can be wielded defensively (to suss out bad actors), but also offensively (to socially coerce or enforce conformity).

IOW, it can build or block rapport.

How one feels about small talk, probably depends on how they tend to use it. Or seen it used. 1/2

Oh man, I feel folks need to define what 'small talk' even means cause I consider myself a hater of 'small talk', but your examples aren't things I'd consider 'small talk'.

To me, 'small talk' is what shuts down rapport rather than building it.

I think unconfrontational would've been a comment rather a qt, which is like putting her on blast.

That said, all her takes are quite self-indulgent and amounts to 'I like this cause I like it'. Which really brooks no argument.

She's also been blocked by more folks than she's blocked herself.

New York rabbi criticizes Jewish infighting over Zohran Mamdani | The Jerusalem Post Rabbi Angela Buchdahl addressed growing turmoil within New York's Jewish community over the upcoming mayoral election.

I haven't seen her speech, but looking at the news coverage, it didn't seem so bad. She still refused political endorsements. She strikes me as someone who'll do or say anything to keep her community together.

www.jpost.com/american-pol...

I think a thing we'll learn tonight is that people fucking hate what is going on and they will straight ticket vote against anyone involved in starving people while pillaging the country and kidnapping their neighbors. I don't think it matters at all who that person is.

Mamdani: "New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants, and as of tonight, led by an immigrant."

SAY. THAT. SHIT!

I like how they just have this binary of "we either protest in a peaceful and well-behaved fashion" and "we go full civil war armed revolution like"

As if there's not a ton of folks who have already shown alternatives to both.

But the alternatives do all involve organizing more *personally*

People definitely need to learn the history of how strikes actually work. You definitely have to address how people are going to get their needs met. For the Montgomery bus boycotts, they organized car pools to get people to work. You can't just say "don't go to work".

When I talk about white people, I'm talking about a culture. No individual person can fix this. Or even make a huge dent in my opinion. That's not an expectation I have of anyone. The cultural problem with Whiteness is it's very hard for y'all to start thinking collectively.

A year ago, I got an email that a friend of mine had subscribed to my substack.

I DM'd him, extremely unsettled, to say I didn't HAVE a substack account, let alone a newsletter for him to subscribe to.

Please get your stuff off Substack. I will not read it while it's there.

You know the "Dark Web"? We need to start our own "Light Web" that has all of the awkward charm of the early Internet and none of the monetization. Leave this one to the birds 'n bots and return in secret to sillier times.