I met a somewhat old man on a Greyhound a few years ago who was pretty delirious and drifting in and out of sleep. Turns out he had been traveling non-stop for three days, heading from Georgia to his home in Oakland. He had been on a roadtrip with his friends in (what he described as) a cursed Mitsubishi which broke down a final time some 2500 miles from home. All his friends took flights back, but our protagonist did not bring any kind of ID with him and couldn’t take a plane. So there he was, having not slept much at all in 3 days, on the i-10 between Tucson and Phoenix.
He also borrowed my phone to call his wife, who it seemed had not sanctioned his roadtrip at all and was very mad at him. She eventually hung up on him. Handing my phone back to me, he assured me that she wouldn’t stay mad at him after seeing his baby-blue eyes upon his arrival in Oakland.

I don’t remember so many of the details, but hearing this guy’s life story and about his impulsive cross-country roadtrip was kinda strangely inspiring.

Probably my favorite anime
Also, it was directed by Hideaki Anno (Evangelion, Gunbuster)

Half-Life, Half-Life Opposing Force, Half-Life Blue Shift

The fact that people so often use the past tense instead of the past participle is perhaps evidence that it doesn’t really matter, descriptively?

Chinese and Japanese would have so many. My favorite is probably 緑 which means green. I also like the simplified Chinese horse: 马. Special shoutout to 凸 meaning convex, 凹 meaning concave, and 凸凹 meaning bumpy (not sure if this is true in Chinese). There’s thousands to choose from so of course there are a lot of other handsome one-character words, but those are the first few I thought of.

A bunch of other people have mentioned Ghibli movies and since I’m in the middle of a binge through every Ghibli movie I think I’ll recommend one that I hadn’t seen before a few days ago: Only Yesterday or Omoide Poroporo.
It’s Isao Takahata, not Miyazaki, but it’s easily my favorite Ghibli movie and one of my favorite movies of all time. It feels so real and relatable, the whole movie is essentially a really slow-paced series of flashbacks to the main character’s 10-year-old self and every detail is so well-thought-out and interesting.
Very worth watching, although I’ll mention as a disclaimer that all the friends I was watching it with thought it was super pointless and boring.

Love & Pop the Hideaki Anno movie? I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody else mention it online before

I love archaic inconsistent Japanese. 今日 (obviously きょう) used to be pronounced the same way but spelled… けふ. There’s a Wikipedia page on historical kana orthography and the example the use on the page’s main image is やめましょう spelled as ヤメマセウ. The old kana usage sticks around in pronunciation of particle は and へ. There also used to be verbs ending in ず that turned into じる verbs like 感じる. Here’s a post on Japanese stack exchange where somebody explains verbs that end with ず, づ, ふ, and ぷ.
Honestly I’m glad I don’t have to learn historical inconsistent spellings, but part of me thinks that it’s really cool and wishes it was still around.

People are such perfectionists when it comes to buildings. I love this image; the patchwork aesthetic needs less hate. Yeah it looks silly, but why should it look serious? I wouldn’t be upset if a building built today were to have an awkward attachment added in 500 years that was built to the design standards of that time period.
Somebody showed me recently the rebuild of the Augusteum building of the University of Leipzig which had a hyper-modern redesign like 180 years after it was first built (look it up, it’s pretty cool). And the building in this post is like a lower-effort, more earnest version of that idea. Is it bad real estate? Sure. But it’s good architecture. “Authenticity” be damned.

Sorry for rant
There’s a thing in sociology (or social psychology? I don’t really know the difference) called “identity salience” that I think explains gender really well. Basically, people have any number of identities that describe them and they are of varying importance/salience. For example, it can be a big part of somebody’s identity that they are a “father,” but not a big part of their identity that they are a “driver” or “consumer.” Maybe all those words can objectively be applied to this person, but he would likely identify strongly with one over the others. Similarly, right now I’m a “commenter” because I’m leaving a comment. That’s something that objectively describes me, but I don’t consider it to be an important part of my identity at all. Gender is just like any other identity; it’s more or less important to different people. There’s already a distinction between sex and gender, even colloquially to an increasing extent, and gender is widely understood to exist as a spectrum or multiple spectrums. It’s reasonable to believe that people who don’t consider a traditional gender to be an important part of their identity could consider themselves non-binary.
It’s true that gender stereotypes exist, but there are plenty of positive characteristics that are also associated with gender like “men are confident” or “women are understanding.” If somebody doesn’t identify with any of those characteristics or even stereotypes, then they might just feel like they’re not accurately described by gendered words. Of course, somebody who doesn’t fit the stereotypical idea of a certain gender can still be of that gender; it’s all subjective.
If you’re interested in simple, objective, binary gender, it’s called sex, not gender. And even sex isn’t simple, objective, or binary when you really get detailed.

They do include the effect size of including non-binary students when they write “(nb. Non-binary students account for 0.3% of this total)” etc. so the impact on the actual data is shown, if you’re concerned about the statistical analysis. It also does make sense to group them together in this context as they are both minorities in STEM. However the way the article is written makes it clear that including non-binary students was an afterthought; if it was clear in all the data and headings that the data is for both non-binary and female students with the interpretation that they are looking at just “students who aren’t men” then it would have been a lot better.