#Tumblr traditions #oh my god it’s been an entire year since the last time this post was going around #(it *has* been nice out today) #(I did in fact go for a walk wearing a light jacket)
You know, the Meta was a human being? He had to get food? Where do you think he got it? You think he ransacked Freelancer’s salad bar before he went on his rampage or what? what about after that? Did he buy it? Where’d he get the money? Did he do some mercenary work before he started hunting down freelancers?
Where did he sleep?
You work at a grocery store on some random outer-colony planet. There is a seven foot tall bald person who has been scarred to shit standing in front of you. His eyes are red and ringed with darkness. He has possibly never slept in his life. There are several carts behind him. He is purchasing an entire aisle of beef jerky. You say ‘have a good day’. He responds with a grunt that sounds like gravel being put through a woodchipper. You don’t know what he is going to do with all that beef jerky. You don’t want to know.
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#Red vs Blue #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog
why does america write the date wrong and why don’t they feel bad about it.
I suspect animate-mush knows the real reason, she knows everything, really. But personally, I think it’s because of the way we say the date. We say “April twentieth, two-thousand fifteen“ not “twentieth April…”. Which isn’t to say that we never say it that way. But it’s rare. So, we write it 4/20/15. Because that’s how we say it.
I actually don’t know why, but if I had to speculate I’d say it either just happened to be codified differently in two different places and times with no particular communication between them OR it was a deliberate choice by Noah Webster et al. to distinguish us from Britain enacted at the same time as all the other spelling reforms.
The botanist I worked for actually didn’t let us write number/number/number for dates because you could never be sure which convention the collector was using. I will use the American convention when I do number/number/number, but if I write out the month I will typically put the date first, because having letters separate the two groups of numbers is more aesthetically pleasing to me, and also then I don’t have to write the little superscripts. But then, I also cross my sevens and my <z> s, and I used to cross my zeroes as well, so I do have a number of European conventions in my handwriting anyway, picked up from my mother, who picked them up from her mother, who was Italian and came by them naturally. But it was really sloppy physics writing that made me cross my zs so as to distinguish them from 2s.
So the short answer after all of that anecdotal rambling is I really have no idea, but I would expect that any appeal to either order being more “natural” or “logical” is just plain wrong.
When I sign things or name folders of photos or otherwise can choose, I say 2015 Apr 20 (spacing/abbreviations vary). Otherwise MLA.
I like “Written on this the twentieth day of April in the Year of Our Lord MMXV.“ Preferably attached to something as inconsequential as possible, like a cat photo.
Tags:
#anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #look dates are very important to me okay #(tagging it that because that’s what I tagged the last thing about date ambiguity)
I’m not either of those people (though, fittingly enough, I suppose you’ll have to take my word on that), but I might be able to help with your curiosity.
I’ve never understood the idea of an identity one isn’t invested in. It doesn’t matter to me, emotionally, whether people are insulting me-under-a-temporary-name or me-under-a-long-term-name. They’re still insulting me. I was, according to both memories and external records, much more nervous about interacting with people under the Brin name when it was new than I am now. (I think this is mostly because I didn’t have as much experience yet with the communities I was in, so didn’t have as good an idea of what would get me yelled at and how to avoid it.)
“What gets me is that people completely squander the potential of the Internet by building a unified identity on it. Like, you can do that in meat-space?“
To me, the potential of the Internet is a world where communication is text-based by default. Sure, I could build an identity in meatspace, but I’d have to communicate in voice all the time: always scrambling to keep up with the pace, no time or opportunity to correct “typos” (or to decide that the thing is better left entirely unsaid), often not even getting to speak at all because of meatspace’s utter lack of support for cross-posting (which means I have to either crowbar my way into the conversation by talking over people until they shut up (this rarely works), or (more likely) waiting for everyone else to spontaneously decide to stop talking so I can get a word in edgewise). (Apparently neurotypicals have some kind of Asking for a Turn to Speak ritual involving staring at the current speaker’s eyes, but I’ve never managed to find out the details.)
I’m also faceblind, which makes unification of meatspace identities a lot harder. I dislike the assumption that meatspace identities are naturally unified, because it leads to things like my former art teacher thinking he doesn’t have to introduce himself to me before trying to strike up a conversation at the park. (He does have to introduce himself, or else I’m going to give him the cold shoulder, as is customary for unaccompanied* adolescents approached by adult strangers. (Especially when the adolescent is female and the adult is male, but I come from a culture with very strong talking-to-strangers taboos such that that would be frowned upon regardless of the genders.)) People might wear several nametags on the Internet, but at least they don’t expect you to recognise them unprompted when they’re wearing a different nametag or none at all, and they don’t have to switch nametags when entering a new environment.
Hanging out with Australians is neat too, and something that’s often cited as being the potential of the Internet, but it’s more of a bonus to me.
*I was with my mother, but she was in the bathroom at the time.
I can definitely see now how someone such as yourself would see different potential in the Internet.
Though, one part that jumped out at me was, “I’ve never understood the idea of an identity one isn’t invested in. It doesn’t matter to me, emotionally, whether people are insulting me-under-a-temporary-name or me-under-a-long-term-name.“
I suppose an implicit part of not being invested in an identity is to be able to wear that identity, and the things you do with it, without deeply considering it to be you in the first place. Like, somebody’s not insulting me-under-the-name-NuclearSpaceHeater, they’re insulting NuclearSpaceHeater. If it becomes inconvenient to be NuclearSpaceHeater, I will go be somebody else. If you don’t mind my asking, do you feel that you’re capable of imagining what it is like to be a spy?
I think the difference here is that I’m emphasizing the part of identity that consists of what the locals think about you. Hence why maintaining different names is liberating: there’s no worry about the locals changing how they think about one identity based on everything you do everywhere else. Which yudkowsky may have had a problem with in regards to people having a lower opinion of HPMOR based on his LessWrong work. (But, of course, possibly easier to use LessWrong social capital to get readers of HPMOR, and vice versa. Tradeoffs, as there are.)
Hmm. I suppose I can imagine being a spy, but not being someone with an aptitude for spying. Doing my mission in spite of caring about my infiltration persona, rather than not caring.
“I think the difference here is that I’m emphasizing the part of identity that consists of what the locals think about you. Hence why maintaining different names is liberating: there’s no worry about the locals changing how they think about one identity based on everything you do everywhere else.“
I was confused by this at first, but upon closer inspection I think you’re using a narrower definition of “local” than I was thinking of. You seem to be referring to people who are local at the present moment. I might well describe myself as caring what the locals think of me, but I’d mean that I care about the thoughts of everyone who is at least sometimes local to me, simultaneously.
Brinens and Things 