Sage Anastasi
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sageanastasi.bsky.social
Sage Anastasi
@sageanastasi.bsky.social
890 followers 1.2K following 2K posts
Pākehā, dream avatar of gender magic. PhD student working on political & social polarisation, trying to make data scientists read Laclau. Opinions mine. he/him 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 Mastodon, where I am not active but there are DMs: @[email protected]
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sageanastasi.bsky.social
(economichardship.org/2017/04/what...)
Always falling into a hole, then saying “ok, this is not your grave, get out of this hole,” getting out of the hole which is not the grave, falling into a hole again, saying “ok, this is also not your grave, get out of this hole,” getting out of that hole, falling into another one
November 25, 2025 at 4:16 AM
sageanastasi.bsky.social
Practise Guide for computer Adapted from Ron Miller's Advanced Improv Practise Guide. Before starting your daily practise routine, read and carefully consider the following: A. DAILY AFFIRMATIONS 1. How fortunate I am that in this life I am one who has been allowed to create beauty with computer. 2. It is my responsibility to create peace, beauty, and love with computer. B. I WILL BE KIND TO MYSELF 1. IT IS ONLY COMPUTER. 2. No matter my level of development in computer, how good or bad I think I am, it is only computer and I am a beautiful person. 3. I will not compare myself with my colleagues. If they do computer beautifully, I will enjoy it and be thankful and proud that I am in fellowship with them. 4. There will always be someone with more abilities in computer than my own as there will be those with less. C. REASONS TO DO COMPUTER 1. To contribute to the world's spiritual growth. 2. To contribute to my own self-discovery and spiritual growth. 3. To pay homage to all the great practitioners of computer, past and present, who have added beauty to the world. D. RID YOUR SELF OF THE FOLLOWING REASONS FOR BEING A PRACTITIONER OF COMPUTER 1. To create self-esteem. 2. To be "hip". 3. To manipulate. 4. To get rich or famous.
November 14, 2025 at 8:25 AM
sageanastasi.bsky.social
Five for silver Six for gold Seven for a secret never told
November 9, 2025 at 6:23 AM
sageanastasi.bsky.social
One for sorrow Two for joy Three for a girl Four for a boy
November 9, 2025 at 6:22 AM
sageanastasi.bsky.social
Legs (2025)
A digital painting of the broken statue from Ozymandias, on a beach, from the game "Such Art! Genius Artist Simulator". The style is very simple and childlike
November 5, 2025 at 6:01 AM
sageanastasi.bsky.social
Thank you! This is how small the crochet hook was lol (0.6 of God's own millimetres)
A metal crochet hook held up against a fingertip. It is extremely tiny.
November 3, 2025 at 7:14 AM
sageanastasi.bsky.social
Made my first ✨️teeny tiny wizard hat✨️
A knitted miniature of a goblin wizard. The hat is the same size as the row counter next to it, slightly over 2cm.
November 3, 2025 at 7:07 AM
sageanastasi.bsky.social
A pixel art dark grey sword with a gold crossguard
October 17, 2025 at 2:19 AM
sageanastasi.bsky.social
Yesterday I crossed the fibre crafter's horizon of madness (started making socks)
The first quarter of a blue and green striped knitted sock, sitting on top of the book Imagining Decolonisation.
October 15, 2025 at 5:07 AM
sageanastasi.bsky.social
😬(from the end of this piece, feel free to skip the body of it lol asteriskmag.com/issues/11/wh...)
1. If your relationship with a person or a group consists mostly of discussions about human psychology and social dynamics, that is a yellow flag. It is a red flag if: a. The conversations are many hours long and displace other activities in your life. b. The conversations generally focus on group members’ feelings and interactions, rather than social science or philosophy. c. The conversations are tense, stressful, and not fun.
October 13, 2025 at 11:02 PM
sageanastasi.bsky.social
I think I annoyed the stranger who I told "hey look, baby swans!" but in my defense: there were baby swans
A black adult swan and a grey fledgeling swan. The fledgeling is the size of a large duck or maybe a goose.
October 1, 2025 at 11:24 PM
sageanastasi.bsky.social
A photo of an Eastern Bearded Dragon lizard
September 28, 2025 at 11:42 PM
sageanastasi.bsky.social
This is why I flinch at "trans men are men".
“If this person complained about the abusive conditions or even when people asked for personal protective gear or equipment when working with dangerous chemicals, the response was always, ‘If you wanna be a man, I'll treat you like a man’, or ‘aren't you strong enough? Aren't you a man’,” Decker said. “So clearly there was something more diabolical going on.”
September 27, 2025 at 8:47 PM
sageanastasi.bsky.social
An obvious photoshop of "The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money", changed to say "The trouble with earrings is that you eventually run out of your own ears."
September 26, 2025 at 4:34 AM
sageanastasi.bsky.social
Yeah, even though it came out in 2002 I think "The Will To Change" by bell hooks has a bunch of good stuff about protecting boys from this phenomenon. E.g. this could have been written yesterday:
“Teens are often the most unloved group in our nation. Teens are often feared precisely because they’re often exposing the hypocrisy of parents and of the world around them. And no group of teens is more feared than a pack of teen boys. Emotionally abandoned by parents and by society as a whole, many boys are angry, but no one really cares about this anger unless it leads to violent behavior. If boys take their rage and sit in front of a computer all day, never speaking, never relating, no one cares. In Lost Boys therapist James Garbarino testifies that when it comes to boys, ‘neglect is more common than abuse: more kids are emotionally abandoned than are directly attacked, physically or emotionally.’ Emotional neglect lays the groundwork for the emotional numbing that helps boys feel better about being cut off. Eruptions of rage in boys are most often deemed normal, explained by the age-old justification for adolescent patriarchal mis-behavior, ‘Boys will be boys.’ Patriarchy both creates the rage in boys and then contains it for later use, making it a resource to exploit later on as boys become men. As a national product, this rage can be garnered to further imperialism, hatred, and oppression of women and men globally. This rage is needed if boys are to become men willing to travel around the world to fight wars without ever demanding that other ways of solving conflict be found.”
September 25, 2025 at 10:15 PM
sageanastasi.bsky.social
LMAO look who's an example of AI misuse in Wikipedia!
Examples of misformatted wikipedia talk page contributions, as evidence of mistakes that indicate AI use, from the Independent Together (Wellington local body election campagin group) page
September 1, 2025 at 3:50 AM
sageanastasi.bsky.social
🥳
The Dark Souls victory screen, but it's "Thesis Submitted"
August 30, 2025 at 6:00 AM
sageanastasi.bsky.social
People were dunking on this article for being too nice about Rationalism, but honestly? This is a pretty good set of red flags at the end, and having written about radical feminist anti-trans conversion practices I think they apply pretty well beyond rationalism asteriskmag.com/issues/11/wh...
For individuals concerned about joining a dysfunctional group, I suggest: 1. If your relationship with a person or a group consists mostly of discussions about human psychology and social dynamics, that is a yellow flag. It is a red flag if: a. The conversations are many hours long and displace other activities in your life. b. The conversations generally focus on group members’ feelings and interactions, rather than social science or philosophy. c. The conversations are tense, stressful, and not fun. 2. Try to do things where there is some external gauge of whether you’re succeeding at them or not. Similarly, try to test your beliefs against reality. 3. Maintain multiple social groups. Ideally, have several friends who aren’t rationalists. 4. Keep your work, housing, and therapy separate. 5. Before assuming that something is true because everyone else seems to believe it, either check the argument yourself or talk to someone outside the friend group and who wasn’t introduced to you by anyone in the group. 6. The longer and more abstract a chain of reasoning is, the less you should believe it. This is particularly true if the chain of reasoning concludes: a. That it’s okay to do something that hurts people. b. That something is of such overwhelming importance that nothing else matters. 7. Be cautious about joining high-demand groups if you have nowhere else to go.
August 19, 2025 at 12:40 AM
sageanastasi.bsky.social
Maybe. The other slice I would make is the doing-it-as-if-you're-doing-it of camp, i.e.: slate.com/human-intere...
I would say that cheesiness often falls into what this taxonomy would call kitch (high aim, low achievement) rather than camp (low aim, high achievement) web.archive.org/web/20070217...
In my opinion camp is simply a matter of doing things AS IF you are doing them. Diving into a swimming pool? Throw your arms heavenward and give it the full Greg Louganis/Esther Williams treatment. When you dive into a pool as if you are diving into a pool, as opposed to executing an earnest quotidian plop, the result is magical: That pool is transformed from a grody Band-Aid-strewn chlorine bath into a veritable LAGOON! My as if theory applies to all actions, great and small. When a camp person enters a room or eats an apple or reads Hello! magazine, the camper performs the action as if he/she is entering a room/eating an apple/reading a copy of Hello! magazine. While the noncamp person always comports her-/himself apologetically and anonymously and sincerely (as Kate Winslet does in the new Mildred Pierce), a camp person, in sharp contrast, purposefully and glamorously and knowingly plays the part (a la Joan Crawford). The results may be less subtle, but the resulting emotions, no matter how drenched in artifice and sentimentality, are always more memorable, emphatic, and communicative.
August 18, 2025 at 5:34 AM
sageanastasi.bsky.social
Added as multiple screenshots because of microtransaction chaff in between. Checks out, except that I hated the interface of Elite: Dangerous and have a total of 8 minutes play time.
Three purchases on 27 Sep, 2015: Binding of Isaac Bundle, Goat Simulator + GoatZ, and Borderlands 2 Game Of The Year 27 Sep, 2015. Elite: Dangerous 21 Apr, 2011. Portal 2 - Two Pack
August 15, 2025 at 7:15 AM
sageanastasi.bsky.social
I find it easiest to approach geometrically. Assume all groups must be equidistant. In n-2 dimensions, as the nth group moves away from one group it must move towards another group. This prevents equidistance.
Three drawings: 1) A line with "A" at one end and "B" at the other. It has an arrow in the middle pointing to both ends labelled "distance maximised" 2) the same line but with "C" added in the middle. There is an arrow pointing between B and C labelled "distance not maximised" 3) A triangle with the points labelled "A", "B" and "C". There is a label "D" inside it, with an arrow pointing between A and D labelled "distance not maximised".
August 13, 2025 at 9:33 AM
sageanastasi.bsky.social
Speaking of PhDs, here's a section of mine begging us to stop using clustering for measuring political polarisation!
Methods for detecting polarisation through clustering focus on measuring distances between the clusters. A large distance between the clusters can indicate polarisation between the groups if the clusters also have low internal variation [?]. This means that in theory it is possible for many groups to be polarised against each other; however, I believe there are reasons to restrict the definition of polarisation to only the two group case. In order for all n groups to be the same distance apart (i.e. to dislike all other groups the same amount), there must be at least n−1 dimensions in the space that the clusters occupy. For example, while two groups A and B could reach polarisation in a 1-dimensional space, the introduction of a third group C would make it impossible for all three groups to be polarised as it would not be possible for A, B and C to all be equidistant from each other. As such, a second dimension of measurement must be added in order to allow equidistant separation between three groups, a third dimension for four groups, etc. Each added dimension increases the total amount of space in between the polarised positions, which creates more possible ways for the groups to be in positions other than equidistance (i.e. more ways for them to be “not polarised”). Since the likelihood of all groups becoming equidistant decreases as dimensions of measurement are added, and since it is impossible for n groups to all be equidistant in a space with fewer than n−1 dimensions, I think that the definition of ”polarisation” should be restricted to the two-group case. As discussed, this presents problems regarding how to categorise group membership in democracies with more than two parties or a complex left and right bloc division.
August 13, 2025 at 8:58 AM
sageanastasi.bsky.social
Good to see that the Chathams are getting some much-needed Reverse Rain
Metservice's national map. The Chatham Islands|Rēhoku/Wharekauri have an icon of a water droplet, but upside down.
August 6, 2025 at 8:45 AM
sageanastasi.bsky.social
The Dark Souls "Victory Achieved" screen, but it's "Civil Society Defended"
July 31, 2025 at 8:12 AM
sageanastasi.bsky.social
Boooooo
A job application text box, outlined in red with the warning "This field cannot contain the following characters: semicolon".
July 15, 2025 at 6:21 AM