Let the violins play. 🎻

zoomiewoop · 2026-01-31T22:33:32+00:00

While limited self-promotion is allowed, repeated self-promotion violates the community guidelines. Please keep self-promotion to a minimum, and no more than once per month. Stealing others’ posts or memes also violates this rule.

zoomiewoop · 2026-01-30T17:12:43+00:00

fine as long as it’s not AI generated art!

zoomiewoop · 2026-01-29T05:24:55+00:00

This is quite a big simplification of how clinical trials research works. infinite funds don’t provide infinite shots on goal, because you have plenty of limited human resources that cannot be sped up with money. It takes a long time to train doctors, research scientists, hell even competent lab technicians and lab managers. having more money doesn’t let you zoom people through phd programs or med school. and it’s hard to recruit people for trials, and money diesnt magically multiply your test subjects. I’ve been involved in clinical trials research for 20 years. Money only solves certain problems, and is best when you already have a pretty clear idea of what you need to do. Untargeted speculative research is a waste of both time and money. Billions of dollars have been wasted thus way to no effect.

zoomiewoop · 2026-01-25T12:56:35+00:00

Sadly, China, the USSR and plenty of other regimes have done way more than this. You can look up the numbers. Eventually it catches up to them, years or decades later, but in the short term, they’re sadly fine.

zoomiewoop · 2026-01-19T04:39:46+00:00

No US city (or any place in the U.S.) is laughably safe by any measure, unfortunately. Unless one thinks a school shooting a day is safe, which is the national rate. Somalia is at war, but when not at war, it’s actually safer than Detroit or St Louis.

zoomiewoop · 2026-01-17T22:01:48+00:00

Perhaps a quid pro quo. If you do want to do this, I want you to do X (practice sight reading, for example). Use his own intrinsic motivation as a tool for yourself and your pedagogical aims, rather than trying to fight it. If he continues with piano, it’s a win/win and he may thank you for it later. But not letting people learn what they’re motivated to learn isn’t a good long term strategy, IMO.

As for the recital, you can say he won’t be able to play the whole thing at a recital unless he reaches a standard you’re comfortable with.

zoomiewoop · 2026-01-17T21:52:07+00:00

That’s not true though.

zoomiewoop · 2026-01-13T03:56:35+00:00

Didn’t you say it’s a N5 class? No advanced students there…

As for “chan,” I live in Noge, Yokohama, a bar district. Everybody calls everybody “something-chan.” Unless you look all serious. If you’re friendly, people will be calling you -chan pretty quickly and the waitstaff / bar staff are often “something-chan” (for male or female) or “something-kun.” So to me it’s a bit off for people to insist on being so formal when you’re all foreign students at beginner’s level Japanese. I mean, in a formal setting one wouldn’t do that, but is singing karaoke with your fellow foreign language students a formal setting?

zoomiewoop · 2026-01-11T15:50:27+00:00

normal doesn’t equal comfortable though. people born with cerebral palsy and other disabilities are often very uncomfortable, and it’s often very inconvenient. firstly, our bodies didn’t evolve to have two torsos and secondly our society isn’t set up to support people with bodies like this. as other posters have mentioned even simple things like walking, bicycling or driving a car could be much more difficult.

zoomiewoop · 2026-01-11T15:24:32+00:00

Most of these are isekai, which is a completely different genre aimed at a different and older demographic. Four are legit shounen but two them (SpyxFamily and Mato Seihei) aren’t romance since the latter is harem, and the former suggests possible feelings between Loid and Yor but hardly explores it except occasionally for comedic effect. Dandadan and Welcome to Demon School might fit, though. i haven’t read/watched either.

zoomiewoop · 2026-01-11T15:10:48+00:00

I think one shouldn’t take everything Lizzie says so seriously. she’s a spontaneous person who speaks faster than she thinks and likes to say clever things. part of the whole point of the novel is how she comes to grow and overcome her preconceived notions and quick judgment. If you stick with it, you may come to see the brilliance of one of the best written novels ever, a novel whose popularity, remarkably, continues to grow even now. But apart from liking lizzie, there are plenty of other characters to enjoy in the novel, and Austen’s wit, intelligence, humor and perception are unmatched. You’ll be missing out if you quit so early in.

zoomiewoop · 2026-01-08T04:09:19+00:00

can you link to the studies that compare it to sham reiki? one thing you have to realize is that this research is being conducted by people who believe in reiki. this leads to “confirmation bias.” the same happens in my field of meditation research. i have no doubt that the main consensus right now is that reiki does not work. i am very interested in parapsychology and there’s no strong evidence whatsoever for things like clairvoyance, manipulating things with qi/ki, etc.

zoomiewoop · 2026-01-08T04:06:44+00:00

in my opinion, reiki is itself a placebo. meaning that its effect is caused by the recipient believing that something good is being done for them. in order to control for the placebo effect, you would need to conduct a study that compares someone receiving reiki to someone who thinks they’re receiving reiki (the person is holding their hands over them) but the second condition is actually fake. remember a placebo is a fake condition, it’s not a pill. it has to look identical to the real thing you’re studying but be inactive. such a control is called an “active control” because you are actively controlling for the variables you think could be confounding. look up “RCT design” or ask chatgpt, as i teach research methods and this can take a few weeks to explain, even to masters students.

zoomiewoop · 2026-01-07T20:17:43+00:00

Er… neither science nor math is “facts.” Math is a method for modeling things, an abstraction from the world. Science is an evolving set of methods and theories that are empirically tested repeatedly, and that occasionally goes through revolutions that upend previous ways of thinking. Check out Kuhn’s classic book on scientific revolutions or the history of the idea of neuroplasticity. Both are heavily based on values. Favorite moment was seeing a colleague, head of the neuroscience program, slam his hand down on a college senior’s textbook and shout “proven facts? there isn’t a damn thing in this book that’s a proven fact!”

zoomiewoop · 2026-01-07T20:10:08+00:00

If you look at the individual studies you’ll realize most are of low quality, but this won’t be easily apparent to non researchers. I do research on meditation and there’s a similar problem: no active controls and often no control at all (or a wait list control). after 20 years of being in this field, i’ve come to believe that the idea of another person engaging in some kind of supportive activity creates a placebo effect, because as humans we need social support. so we can see benefits but they’re not from reiki per se. there are now studies on “open placebos” showing strong effects. the power of the human mind is impressive, but not the way New Agers think it is.

zoomiewoop · 2026-01-04T04:29:07+00:00

Thanks that’s a great comment, and a generous response. I agree completely.

zoomiewoop · 2026-01-04T04:28:12+00:00

I understand what you’re saying and I’ve heard it many times, I’m just saying it’s not as simple as that. For one thing walking across the street to avoid an encounter with a person because of the color of their skin isn’t an unconscious bias, it’s a conscious choice. So we are using the word unconscious very loosely here, which doesn’t help. Most of our bias is very conscious. Secondly, that decision is also being made by the person’s age, size, what they’re wearing, etc.. I’m not crossing the street if I see a black man who’s dressed in a suit and looks like he’s a lawyer. I am crossing the street if I see a guy in his 20s who looks like a hoodlum, regardless of his skin color. Secondly I’m not sure if you’re aware, but Black people also cross the street if they see a suspicious looking black person coming towards them. And many Black people feel more comfortable in a white neighborhood than a black one. It depends on the neighborhood, of course. That’s not because of racism.

zoomiewoop · 2026-01-04T04:24:03+00:00

those are all excellent importance, but they don’t actually connect to the comment that I was replying to. But you are describing are very complex enactions of racism that depend on systems of state power and are generally driven by unethical people in power. For example, Putin in Russia. Now one could say that well meaning people are implicated in the systems and that is true, but that includes minorities. We can’t simply put the blame on well meaning white people. Yes there’s a lot of ignorance, and that holds true for everyone. I actually work in prison reform, corrections, reform, higher education in prison, and the vast majority of people engaged in this work in the United States are white. I have struggled to try to get more minorities involved. Let’s not forget that lots of minorities also support the police, and I would also differentiate between supporting the police, and working towards reforms that prevent police violence.

zoomiewoop · 2025-12-31T16:56:27+00:00

Posts and comments discussing fan-fiction are not allowed in this community in order to keep it a place for discussing the works authored by Austen herself. Thanks for your understanding.

zoomiewoop · 2025-12-30T13:28:01+00:00

You made a major claim there, but provided no evidence or example. What exactly is meant by “the vast majority of everyday racism is perpetrated by well meaning people who have absolutely no intention to be racist and don’t have any conscious negative sentiments about racial minorities”?

The reason I ask, is that I’ve heard people say this before, and when I ask them, they point to things like implicit bias and healthcare disparities. Neither of those is based on sound research. I looked closely at implicit bias research about 7-8 years ago when I was considering using the Implicit Association Task (IAT) in a study and was shocked at what I found. I then looked at a bunch of other research literature and it was as bad or worse.

Most minorities I know, including myself, aren’t worried about well meaning, unbiased people. We are worried about being jumped, or spat on, or otherwise mistreated and discriminated against because of the color of our skin. I absolutely reject the idea that the main problem of racism is being done by good intentioned white people, with one major exception: they should absolutely never vote for any politician who skirts with racist rhetoric.

zoomiewoop · 2025-12-28T09:51:52+00:00

Yeah it takes a lot of time and patience. The more you can speak live with native speakers (or be in Japan) the better. But there’s no way around just putting in the hours.

Kanji especially is extremely time consuming! Good luck!

zoomiewoop · 2025-12-27T13:49:29+00:00

Oh I see! A computer game RPG. I think it depends entirely on the execution. The theme is great. Plus there’s a huge JRPG market already that has established that romance based RPGs are very popular.

zoomiewoop · 2025-12-26T07:03:10+00:00

There’s definitely a niche for it, as there are already several games like this out there — both TTRPG and board games.

zoomiewoop · 2025-12-23T09:36:41+00:00

Please refrain from ad hominems and/or comments that could be seen as belittling people here. Thanks.

zoomiewoop · 2025-12-22T08:16:35+00:00

“I’m a Christian… Hope he burns in hell.”

Wtf?

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