Month: February 2019

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

mugasofer:

brin-bellway:

justice-turtle:

this is me thinking out loud some more, not exactly replying, but.

“kindness costs nothing” is a popular saying for why you should be nice. but if you give what costs you nothing, what merit is there in that? if you give only kindness and empathy without material, measurable help, are you giving anything at all?

it comes back to christianity, again. it always does for me. talk about brainwashing.

specifically: the widow’s mite. (a coin, like a farthing or a centime, not a bug.) the story goes – jesus was chilling near the donations box at the temple, and these rich holier-than-thou people came and put big bags of money into the box and made a big deal about how much they donated. and then this poor widow woman came and put in two halfpennies, or mites as some version of the Bible translated it.

and jesus said “see you should be like her. those other people all gave money they didn’t need, and they made a big deal about it so people would think they were holy. she gave god all the money she had, and she didn’t make any fuss about it, because she loves and trusts god That Much. y’all do that too k?”

so, yanno, i mean, brainstuff. giving more than you can afford is How To Be Good. give money, time, gifts, food, but always give what you need for yourself, not just the stuff you could spare or didn’t want anyway; that stuff is no good cos you’re not giving it From The Heart. this is the mindset.

“faith without works is dead.” i think that’s from the book of st james. it’s a Really Big Thing in the catholics vs protestants headbutting match, bc if you boil them both down to a reductio ad absurdam in the bottom of the stockpot (i might be getting sleepy and overextending my metaphors), protestants say “if you have faith you are saved! doesn’t matter what you do!” and catholics say “if you do good things you are saved! doesn’t matter what you believe! although you should still be catholic cos of reasons.” ^_^ so – like brin said, we have no concept of supererogation (i.e. where is the mark that when you go above and beyond that you are going Above and Beyond), you have to do all the good things. and if you catholic this thing in your brain, you cannot be a good unless you are always doing the good things. (idk how that psychological part works if you are protestant. i never really talked religion with any observant mainstream protestants.)

so but like. there’s a line from hamilton the musical, i see it on gifsets. “(death) takes and it takes and it takes”. and i feel like… you give and you give and you give, and there’s a void out there of infinite… it’s like an infinite sponge. it can soak up everything you give it, your whole existence, and you won’t have even made a tiny little difference to the infinity of need. you give and you give and you give, and when you’ve given everything you are, it’s just like you never existed at all.

i know it’s late and i’m getting morose. i had thoughts about dying for a cause too but i’m not sure what they were yet. and what stuntmuppet said about revolutionary selfishness, ethan would like to expand on that at GREAT LENGTH. not tonight tho.

i will mention though cos i think it fits here. i keep feeling like a good way to do assisted suicide, like officially incorporated into society and everything, would be to drain out the person’s blood, put it all in those donation bags like the red cross uses, and then you could give the blood to other people who actually wanted to stay alive. it would be nice. if that was available i would probably do it. and i suspect part of why it seems so appealing is that you can literally give your life helping others live. (also it wouldn’t hurt much and you could just quietly slip off and stop caring.)

The thing is, food still has nutrition regardless of whether you gave it From The Heart. A dollar buys a dollar’s worth of stuff, no matter how small a percentage it is of the donator’s net worth*. And someone who gives a smaller, sustainable portion of their wealth can end up donating more over the long run than someone who goes out in a blaze of glory.

Blood donation is actually a very good example of that. An adult human body contains somewhere around 10 pints of blood, depending on the individual. The regulation quantity and frequency of blood donation is 1 pint every 8 weeks. Someone who donates every 2 months for 2 years has donated more blood than someone who gave every drop in their body, and can still donate again in another 2 months. (And, you know, they’re alive, for whatever that’s worth.) (Some people take longer to recover and can’t sustainably/safely donate every 2 months, but even if you can only do every 4 months, or every 6, all you have to do is live 6 years to outproduce a one-time 10-pint donation.)

I’ve never met a cause worth dying for, but some causes are better served by living, anyway.

(This argument does assume a basically consequentialist mindset, that the amount of help you provide is more important than how you felt while you were doing it. As you described above, there are moral systems that don’t accept this assumption. That’s something fundamental enough that I don’t think I could really talk you in or out of it: if you think “things would go better if you became a consequentialist” is a good reason to become a consequentialist, you already are one.)

I swear I have seen writings from charity nerds about how (and why) to avoid burning yourself out, but I’m having some trouble finding them. Perhaps the charity nerds among my followers know of some?

*Although sometimes a dollar can buy more than a dollar’s worth of stuff if you have enough of them, because of bulk discounts. This is why–though food donations are certainly better than nothing–food banks generally prefer monetary donations: they get excellent discounts and can stretch your dollar farther than you can.

It’s worth noting that, in both Mark and Luke, the story of the Widow’s Mite (from the KJV, which translated the relevant copper coin into the then-contemporary mite) is immediately preceded by a passage condemning … well:

45 While all the people were listening, Jesus said to his disciples,46 “Beware of the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and love to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets.47 They devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. These men will be punished most severely.”

These are clearly part of the same anecdote, and some commentators argue they should be interpreted as the same passage – rich people take from the poor, then laud themselves for being generous with their money. The widow hasn’t helped more than anyone else; she’s been cost more than anyone else.

Of course, Jesus was famously in favor of people selling their possessions and becoming wandering monks who may or may not get murdered for their troubles – it was, after all, his own career path – so maybe this theory is wrong, and it’s just a feel-good message.

Still, I think it’s important that Jesus never advocates starving. Letting people stab you in the face, sure, but not starving. Wandering preachers get fed. (And there’s a limited market for them, and it’s hard to build a movement entirely out of penniless wandering preachers; which is one reason I tend to lean toward interpretations where it’s decidedly not meant as a universal calling.)

The Widow is merely cutting things rather close, not sacrificing her life, even in the standard interpretation. 

No, I think the closest thing to the standard interpretation would be the also currency-nicknamed Parable of the Talents.

In the parable, with which I daresay most readers are familiar, different servants are given different amounts of money to look after. Two servants invest them and make good returns, and thus are rewarded; one merely holds onto it and then gives it back, and is punished.

If you just give what was given to you, then what’s the point? You’re supposed to invest it, to make more.

One person can’t save the world. Ten pints of blood is nothing against the darkness. But invest it? Use that life wisely? And that can become a whole flood of blood in what is an increasingly sticky metaphor.

Of course, even that probably isn’t enough. A servant given two talents isn’t going to make the same amount of money as one given five. But it’s better than handing back your seed money with nothing to show for it.

catholics say “if you do good things you are saved! doesn’t matter what you believe! although you should still be catholic cos of reasons.” ^_^ so – like brin said, we have no concept of supererogation (i.e. where is the mark that when you go above and beyond that you are going Above and Beyond), you have to do all the good things. and if you catholic this thing in your brain, you cannot be a good unless you are always doing the good things. (idk how that psychological part works if you are protestant. i never really talked religion with any observant mainstream protestants.) 

Many but not all Protestant denominations regard supererogation as a Catholic heresy.

Focusing on the bottom line is important. But there are two opposite, but related, mistakes in effective altruism that stem from focusing on it too much.

One is, of course, the rich person who goes “oh I saved fifty lives this year, why not buy another yacht?” TBH I have never encountered this mistake, but it definitely happens with non-EA charitable movements, and I don’t know a lot of rich people, it probably happens. 

But the other mistake is the opposite. 

Most people aren’t rich. It’s easy to look at your bottom line and say this is too small, I’m not doing enough because you don’t have very much to give.

But this misses the entire point. 

Utilitarianism not about getting the bigger number. It’s about getting the biggest number. Whether this is larger or smaller than the other guy’s number, whether it’s large or small on an absolute scale (probably small), is not a concern.

If you only have two pennies, and you invest them wisely, then you are a better investor than the rich guy who has an enormous amount of money and spends half of it on a yacht. Simultaneously, he has more money. But you’re still better.

Tithing is a good idea, and I’m glad EA has adopted it. 

But you have to apply that to other things too. Giving more than 10% of your blood, of your life, is definitely supererogatory.

I’m not saying that sacrifice is bad, but for most people, you run into diminishing returns after the first few sacrifices. Being smart about what you do with that sacrifice is far more effective.

And yeah, sometimes that involves “wasting” time making yourself better; using the perfume instead of selling it, being Mary instead of Martha.

Tags:

#(October 2016) #(I have decided to queue aglet posts; queue is currently set to four times per day) #conversational aglets #death tw #suicide cw #scrupulosity cw

Anonymous asked: pure curiosity, what would a future child call you instead of gendered parent terms? or like… would they alternate?

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

cptsdcarlosdevil:

there are no good choices

if no one comes up with something better I’m going with “zaza”, on the grounds that all nonbinary words include z’s or x’s

 

towardsagentlerworld:

Can they just call you Ozy?

(I may teach my child to call me by my first name, because (1) that’s what everyone else calls me, and (2) I’m going to call my child by their first name, so it’s only fair that they get to do the same for me)

(In India, there are specific titles for “older brother” and “older sister”, such that younger siblings typically don’t address their elder siblings by name. Elder siblings, however, do address their younger siblings by name. It eventually started to feel to me like the main purpose of these words was to enforce age-hierarchical relationships, and so I was happy that English doesn’t do that. But American English still has the norm of not calling your parents by their first name, and while I don’t think most parents have the intention of using this to enforce a hierarchical dynamic, I wonder if it has the same effect.)

(This is a really tentative hypothesis, and even if it’s true, I imagine the effect would be really small. And so I don’t think that teaching your kids to call you “Mom” or “Dad” [or “Zaza”] is wrong. But I personally don’t see a good reason for the terms “Mom” or “Dad” to exist, and I definitely want my child to know that they can address me by name if they’d like.)

 

coffeespoonsposts:

My stepmother specifically said that she wanted her son (my half brother) to call her ‘mum’ to enforce a hierarchical relationship. She’s generally very liberal.

 

towardsagentlerworld:

huh, okay, datapoint.

 

warpedellipsis:

When parents get pissy that their child called them by their first name, you know it’s a dominance thing. Most parents get pissy about it. It’s not just convention. I’ve never met any that haven’t.

 

sinesalvatorem:

I once called my mother by her first name and she looked at me like I’d started speaking a foreign language. She didn’t, like, say it was wrong, or something, but she did seem to think it was hella weird.

And, like, it felt weird in my mouth, and no other kids did that, so I immediately switched back to “mummy”. It feels more natural.

But, now that you mention it, I think most parents do get upset about it. Yikes, even more hidden dominance shit.

OTOH, not having any special way of referring to one’s parents (or *children or other relatives) feels even weirder to me. Ideally, every relationship relative to the speaker should have a lexical title, for ease of sorting people. Maybe I could go by “Mother Alison”, the way nuns do?

*The child title in my culture is “Likl [name]”, from English “little”. I also like how our community has settled on “Baby” for “Baby Andromeda” and “Baby Merlin”, though that probably won’t last throughout childhood.

This reminds me that, earlier today, my cousin asked me if he could call me ‘Aunty Alison’, since that’s the adult female familiar title. I am So Touched.

 

warpedellipsis:

All other relatives, at least American-style, do go by title/relationship-name though? Like, Grandma Jane, Uncle Phil. Parents are the only ones that don’t, I think. Cousins don’t because that’s an equal relationship, not a powered one. 

I wonder how much of the resistance to alternate family structures, like multiple and blood-unrelated parents, is because of this. If you don’t have ownership of the kid, then you have no title, and if you don’t have a title, a separate title, then you have no way to know who the kid is referring to. And no way for other adults to refer to you. It’s all very set in 2-opposite gender parents for each kid, zero flexibility. If there were other names or flexibility, there wouldn’t be so much reason to resist. 

What’s the neutral name for a parent, that isn’t parent? It just sounds way too formal to go “Parent Haley”. Maybe that would work for places like schools to address the family, and I think that’s how they’ve handled same-sex relationships, but I don’t think a kid could do that. Are there other languages or cultures that have some kind of Name-(affectionate additive) or Title type thing that would fit this? Make one up?

 

sinesalvatorem:

My maternal grandmother is “Granny”, my paternal grandmother is “Grandma”, my maternal grandfather is “Granddad”, and my paternal grandfather is “Grandpa”.

I was 10 by the time I learned it was possible to use language such that The Four Grandparents might be ambiguous.

Likewise, if I had two parents of each gender, they’d be “mummy”, “mama”, “daddy”, and “papa”. Do other varieties of English not have two kid words for each parent-gender? This certainly wouldn’t be a problem for someone who grew up with my variety.

Although, really, now that I’m aware of the potential creepy ownership stuff, I think I’ll just have [title] + [name] for all relatives; people of equal or lower social status included.

I need to learn, and raise my kids with, a language that handles all this stuff better. Language nerds!, any suggestions?

 

brin-bellway:

I, too, distinguish the four grandparents by using different variants of “grandma” and “grandpa” rather than by name. There doesn’t seem to be a consistent mapping among families that do this, though: mine are “Gramma” for maternal grandmother, “Grampa” for maternal grandfather, “Granny” for paternal grandmother, and “Grampy” for paternal grandfather (though by the time I was old enough to talk Grampy was dead, so that term never got a whole lot of use). The lack of consistency always annoyed me a bit, that if I were speaking to someone outside my family, I couldn’t just say “Gramma” to communicate that I was talking about my maternal grandmother.

(Region notes: my grandparents lived in Massachusetts, part of New England. My parents moved to New Jersey after marrying, which is too far south for New England but still part of the broader Northeast.)

“Mama” and “Papa” sound slightly foreign or old-fashioned (I think I’ve only encountered them in historical novels, people from the South, and possibly-Brits-but-those-might-have-also-been-historical, never from speakers of my own dialect), but not so weird that they wouldn’t suffice if “Mom” and “Dad” were taken.

—

Another difference I’ve seen is in how a child refers to parents of other children. Apparently “Mr/Mrs X” is very common, and in many places the only polite form of address. I never did that: if I knew the parent through the child, I called them “[Child’s] mom/dad”, and if I knew the parent directly, I called them by their first name.

 

justice-turtle:

In my childhood subculture, addressing any adult by first name, or by terms other than “Mr/Mrs X” or (if they hadn’t been introduced) “sir/ma’am”, was very explicitly Against The Rules for the specific reason that it defied that hierarchical dominance structure. (The term used was “disrespectful”, which in the subculture’s jargon was interchangeable with “insubordinate”. Right-wing Murrican culture is verrrrry military. I could probably write an essay on that when I’m not trying to get to bed on time.)

 

shadesofmauve:

Kids like @justice-turtle weirded my mom out, btw. She always introduced herself as “Mary, Shades’ Mom”, and then getting called “Mrs. Mauve” was like ‘WTF did that come from’. She always taught me to call people by whatever they introduced themselves as. Isn’t THAT showing respect, since they presumably gave you their preference? It still baffles me whenever people have a conversation about what to call Party X without asking the Party X involved. o_O

I’ve also known LOTS of kids who have a phase of calling their parents by their first names, and the parents don’t get upset about it. It’s pretty common for kids to do it for awhile when they first realize their parents HAVE names! It’s novel, so they test it out. 

Also, for lots of families using a first name instead of a familiar form of ‘mom’ or ‘dad’ (or some other-gendered word of your choice) feels distancing. Kinship terms can be terms of endearment.

I use first names when talking to my aunts or uncles (I use “Aunty X” when talking about them, but not to them), but I’d never call my grandparents by their first names because it’d be like if they stopped calling me ‘sweetheart’. 

That’s not saying that it’s never a control/dominance issue – it absolutely IS in lots of situations! Teachers, doctors – using last names there is an intentional choice. In some families it’s a dominance issue, as demonstrated above. But it’s not ALWAYS a dominance issue, by a long shot. 

I’d hazard a guess that the use of kinship terms in a family reflects their underlying strengths or issues; it doesn’t define them. 

 

virusq:

I called my mom “mom”. I refer to my dad by his first name. I refer to my uncles by their first names. I referred to all of my grandparents by their first names.

My parents never had a beef with it. Other adults expressed that it was disrespectful, or implied that my father was a step parent because I refused to call him “dad”. Most people were polite and just accepted it.

But I also referred to my friend’s father as “mommy”, in a completely respectful way. I made a mouthy comment and he told me that children in his presence would behave better. I told him he was not my mother, so he could not set my rules. He loomed over me, and in complete authorative seriousness said: “I AM your mother.”

Oh. Okay then. Sorry mom. I’ll clean up.

I’d propose simply using your first name with your kids, if you don’t want them to use gendered pronouns. It won’t bother them any, and anyone who is bothered by it with serve as an example of how society forces gender roles onto individuals based on appearances. :)

I also have a few friends who refer to my parents as “the parental processess”, as in, “VQ was generated as the nested node of two parental objects.”

Oh, and my mom went through a phase where she referred to herself as “Helga, VQ’s house keeper.”

Aaand my dad went by “daddy-o” for about five minutes.

So. Yeah. First names for parental units.

 

shadesofmauve:

Heh, yeah – I should’ve said that I was giving examples about what I’d experienced, not what *should* happen. If someone wants their kids to use their first name, go for it! For the kid, it’s all what they grow up with, right?

Of course, for babies there are certain noises that are easier (hence why ‘ma’ or ‘mama’ ’ is really common), but… tell ‘em what you think they should call you, and the kid will come up with whatever version of that they can pronounce, and that’s probably what you’ll be stuck with for life. :P

 

justice-turtle:

“Isn’t THAT showing respect, since they presumably gave you their preference?” @shadesofmauve See, that would be respecting *the person*. This is what I was trying to get at by mentioning insubordination, but apparently didn’t quite: “respect” as used on my side of the fence has nothing to do with individual preferences. It’s all about respecting and reinforcing *the dominance structure*. (If you go around respecting people’s individual preferences, you might start thinking people can choose whether to be pregnant or what church to go to, which is Dangerous and Wrong. ~Real~ respect, like ~real~ love, involves knowing What Is Best for the person – according to the prescribed hierarchical structure, of course – and forcing them to do that, or submitting when they force you if they’re higher in the authority structure.) (Right-wing English and left-wing English are two very different languages by this point. I don’t know if trying to do translations like this is actually helping anything at all, but I try to believe understanding is the first step toward not killing each other, so I keep doing it. :P)

 

shadesofmauve:

Oh, @justice-turtle, you did and do explain it well! I’m sorry my addition came off as ‘not getting it’. I wasn’t intending to argue with you, but to pose a counter argument – and it’s not a counter argument I expect to work with people like your family. It’s one I expect might work about lots of people who are more centrist and haven’t ever really questioned their received wisdom.

The situation you describe is more like the whole idea of “saluting the position, not the man.” (Which is generally portrayed as a good thing, but I’d SUCK at. I’m good at person respect, but suck at authority-respect, heh). It absolutely IS the clash of person-driven vs hierarchy-driven worldviews. I was representing the other end, not trying to argue with staunch supporters of the authority end. I’m… not sure how one would do that.

As to trying to find common ground or at least understanding, that’s incredibly laudable. I suspect there are people with whom it will never work, but it’s still laudable – and I always tell myself that even if the ends can’t budge, the vast majority lies somewhere in the middle, lurking in the comment section rather than posting, listening to the argument rather than joining in, and we frame our explanations for them.

Tags:

#(October 2016) #(this branch feels like it goes far enough afield from the part involving me that #it might not quite count as the same conversation for agletting purposes #but anyway it’s interesting) #conversational aglets #language #long post

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

sinesalvatorem:

brin-bellway:

I can’t remember now who it was (I know @sinesalvatorem has been talking about school lately, but I think it was before that) who was talking about the overly large grip the school system has on society, and gave the example of how “what grade are you in?” is often used instead of “how old are you?”. I was thinking this morning* about that, about my own attempts to navigate the dreaded “what grade are you in” question as a homeschooled child.

At first, when I was very young, I would just freeze in confusion. I had no idea what they wanted from me.

Eventually I learned it was a weirdly convoluted way of asking for my age. I didn’t think in grades, I thought in years. Sometimes, if I could remember the age–>grade translation algorithm well enough (it was hard to keep straight even at the best of times), I would translate for them. Other times I would try to cut to the point and give them my age in years. (Occasionally I’d get persistent people who would keep asking for a grade after being told an age. Usually I tried to explain that that’s not generally a meaningful question when you’re homeschooled**, either in that abstract way or–if I could remember the grade levels involved–saying things like “well, my math and history textbooks are designed for Xth grade, my spelling workbook for Zth grade, my writing textbook for Wth grade…”)

This all got worse after I moved to Canada, because it turns out that by Canadian standards I was born on a different side of the school birthday cutoff. While homeschooled grade levels are, as I said earlier, generally flexible, my parents had taken the lead of the American school system and started me on a kindergarten program at the same time I would have started public kindergarten, shortly before I turned six. While the grade levels of my textbooks soon diversified according to my abilities, there was a rough trajectory based on this starting point. In Canada, the birthday cutoff is in December instead of September, and a Canadian kindergarten would have wanted me shortly before I turned five.

There was no simple translation anymore, not even at the best of times. If I told them my grade, they would think of me as younger than I was. If I told them my age, they would think of me as older than I was. If I told them both, they would think to themselves “ah, she was held back a grade”, lower their estimation of my intelligence, and view me through that lens.

In an attempt to avoid all of these outcomes, I started to use longer explanations more often. For a couple of years in my mid-teens, the explanations began with “I lost count at 9th grade”, because frankly I had. I didn’t bother trying to get a grip on it again; what would it help if I were going to have to do the whole explanation anyway?

When I joined Girl Guides, soon after moving, I was placed by grade. I was placed according to the grade I was “actually in”, not the grade I “would have been in” if I’d been raised in Canada. I was a year older than people expected of me, and it tripped them up, especially in my last year after I reached age of majority.

(”You forgot the ‘parent or guardian signature’ bit on this form.”

“I’m eighteen. I am my guardian.”

“Oh, right.”)

—

This sort of thing seems to be a common problem across a lot of people whose lives are weird in some way. Somebody asks you what they think is a simple question, expecting a simple answer, and you’re like “oh god, do I lie? do I say something technically true but highly misleading? do I dodge the question? do I give a short answer with lots of implied weirdness*** that raises more questions than it solves? do I launch into an explanation of why [it’s not a meaningful question]/[it’s more complicated than that]?”

—

*An hour before waking-up time, goddammit brain.

**Sometimes you get homeschoolers who try to be very rigid and follow a strict grade system, but most of them loosen up before long and the ones who don’t are considered kind of weird.

***Example: “I’m on vacation between Xth and Yth grades,” says a child in October.

This sort of thing seems to be a common problem across a lot of people whose lives are weird in some way. Somebody asks you what they think is a simple question, expecting a simple answer, and you’re like “oh god, do I lie? do I say something technically true but highly misleading? do I dodge the question? do I give a short answer with lots of implied weirdness that raises more questions than it solves? do I launch into an explanation of why [it’s not a meaningful question]/[it’s more complicated than that]?”

I have this problem whenever someone asks me my name, because I have to look down at my clothes to figure out which name to use.

I also stumble whenever I’m asked my age, because my brain uses strong typing, and while words are sounds, numbers are pictures, which means I have to spend a lot of processing time just figuring out which sounds to make if I want to say a number. It also means numbers written in words are hard to parse.

Luckily, people rarely ask what grade you’re in in my culture. Although, the last time someone did ask me that, I said “Well, last month I dropped out of grad school…”

(see also this other branch I was in)

Tags:

#(October 2016) #conversational aglets #homeschool

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

redbeardace:

brin-bellway:

redbeardace:

redbeardace:

Oh, Tumblr, thanks for hiding a really important reblog with some really important commentary from me.  What else are you pretending hasn’t been said?

In just a minute or so, I’ve found two more cases where this happened.

That means it’s happening all the time.

WHAT THE HELL.

Were they all first-degree reblogs of asks? Reblogs of asks, if they are reblogged directly from the OP, show up as commentary-less in the notes regardless of whether they actually lack commentary. Reblogs of reblogs do show commentary. (I don’t remember if the intermediary reblog needs to have commentary or not, but I don’t think it does.)

This is a long-standing and widely known bug, but not always widely known enough.

(Probably we should adopt a social norm of avoiding commentary on first-degree ask reblogs. If one really wants to reblog an ask to respond to it, and there isn’t already a first-degree reblog available, one first reblogs it without commentary (perhaps a small note to one’s followers that one is about to add something) and then reblogs oneself to add the commentary.)

(Is there some sort of centralised wiki or something for unofficial Tumblr documentation? Spreading each individual fact through word of mouth does fit with the general usage style of Tumblr, but the coverage isn’t always that great.)

Yes, I think they all were.  I’ve been dealing with a lot more asks than usual lately, so that would be why it seems like it just started happening.  I’d never heard of this before.  Thanks for letting me know.

Tags:

#(October 2016) #conversational aglets #Tumblr: a User’s Guide #(yes I know rustingbridges also responded to this recently) #(but I haven’t decided yet whether and what to say in response to that one) #(I’ll get it to within the next few days or so)

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

I am reluctant to reblog this, lest I be interpreted as wanting to restart the conversation (which I do not): https://web.archive.org/web/20190205011340/http://fierceawakening.tumblr.com/post/151161204270/brin-bellway-ilzolende-wirehead-wannabe

—

(I think there’s still a thing buried in my drafts where I tried to compose a response to this, but I never was able to phrase it well enough. Something about how I have a very hard time wrapping my head around the concept of [caring about political-type stuff for its own sake, rather than purely to appease people you think might hurt you], and so arguments that casually rely on this concept confuse me, and act as an unpleasant reminder of some of the parts of personhood I am missing.

…I suppose it’s fitting to come across this while my dash is experiencing a surge in voting discourse, which is very similar in that regard.)

—

Oh, interesting: I wrote this post just three weeks later. I guess my fumbling attempts to explain myself in this thread would have been a significant component of the stuff percolating at the time, then.

Tags:

#(September 2016) #conversational aglets #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #discourse cw? #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

ds9vgrconfessions:

brin-bellway:

ds9vgrconfessions:

startrekgifs:

ds9vgrconfessions:

Follow | Confess | Archive

[Does anyone have a list (or better, a gif set?) of all the silliest lines from Voyager over the years? You know, like “get the cheese to sickbay” and “I feel like we’re being pecked to death by ducks” and “there’s coffee in that nebula!” so on and so forth? Cause I need such. Because of reasons.]

This would be a good idea for a GIF set…

Anyone ever make this?

There’s this one?

Yes, yes. Good.

Tags:

#(September 2016) #conversational aglets #Star Trek #Voyager

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

funereal-disease:

Is “identifying foreign words by phoneme cluster” a thing that many/most people have trouble with? It’s something I’ve been instinctively able to do for as long as I can remember, but quite a few people have told me lately what an uncanny ability it is. 

I’ve studied only a couple of foreign languages, and both of them were Romance-based. I pick up languages and grammatical rules very quickly, though. Even when I don’t understand the language being used, I can almost always pick out which language it is, or at least which language family.

This comes so naturally to me that I’ve never thought of it as weird, but recently people have been downright awed that I can, say, pick out the Thai dishes from the Vietnamese ones on a pan-Asian menu. Even though Thai and Vietnamese have totally different phonemic structures! It’s not that hard! People are often frequently baffled when I identify someone’s ethnic extraction by their surname, which, like – I dunno, all I can say is it’s not that hard! 

I swear this isn’t me humblebragging – I am legitimately confused that this does not seem to be a common thing.

 

lenyberry:

I too do the thing. I always figured most people’s lack of ability to do the thing was primarily related to most people’s disinterest in learning even the tiniest bit of foreign languages unless the language in question is going to be directly useful to them in a way they can quantify. But also I’m hyperlexic so, maybe that’s a factor too.

In my case people have more frequently expressed surprise at my ability to pronounce surnames, but that’s directly tied to recognizing their derivation – when you know what language a name derives from, and have a vague idea of the pronunciation rules of that language, it’s generally not too hard to at least come really close to correct pronunciation of the name.

 

funereal-disease:

Hyperlexia nation checking in! @ozymandias271 is the only other hyperlexic I know off the top of my head; do they also do the thing? 

Same re: pronunciation. Weirdly enough, though, that often leads to me pronouncing it incorrectly, or at least what the person in question considers incorrectly. French names are very common where I live, but most of them have been Anglicized to the point where the original pronunciation becomes wrong. 

 

ilzolende:

I’m hyperlexic and okay but not great at this? (I can’t distinguish Swedish and Norwegian, and I can tell the difference between Korean and {Chinese, Japanese} but I can’t tell Chinese and Japanese apart, etc.)

 

sinesalvatorem:

I am pretty good at doing the thing, because I pick up linguistics rules really easily. (My project for the past two days has been teaching myself the grammar of Classical Sanskrit (hence the Bhagavad-Gita blogging), which I expect to take about a week to get mostly-down. I’m not planning to memorise Panini’s entire generative grammar, though.)

However, I am really awful at remembering vocabulary, which is why I’m monolingual. Give me the words, and I’ll successfully make sentences in half a dozen languages. If I’m allowed to make the sentences really simple, I could probably do two dozen languages. However, expecting me to remember any of those words the next day is a lost cause.

 

brin-bellway:

Despite hyperlexia, I’m not all that good at distinguishing languages by phoneme usage.

I’m a lot better at picking up vocabulary than grammar. I mentioned “read[ing] okay Packaging French, but don’t expect me to write it” recently: when presented with an everyday French sentence of the sort one might see on a sign or a bag of food, there’s a fair chance I’ll be able to work out the gist of it. If you ask me what the French word for [insert thing here] is, a significant-though-still-fairly-small amount of the time I will be able to answer. (As long as I am allowed to submit my answer in writing.) I cannot predict the grammatical structure of a sentence that isn’t currently staring me in the face, and I might not recognise it in a sentence that is currently staring me in the face.

Ingredient lists, which have almost no grammar and consist mostly or entirely of terms that any Canadian who doesn’t grow all their own food would be naturally exposed to†, are easiest. I am frequently able to read entire French ingredient lists without any guessing at all.

(One time, I actually understood the French side of the package better than the English.

Me, in grocery store: *looks at chocolate bar*

Me: “Chocolate with marzipan”. What is marzipan, anyway?

Me: *reads French side* “Chocolate with almond paste”. Oh.)

†Though I can’t promise how much attention other people pay.

 

justice-turtle:

I’m not sure what hyperlexia is (and I need to go to bed rather than googling it), but I can pick out the phoneme clusters without any reference to whether I understand the language at all. I can only do it by reading (in Latin alphabet), not by sound or in other alphabets, though.

Tags:

#(September 2016) #conversational aglets #language #food mention

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

comparativelysuperlative:

brin-bellway:

sdhs-rationalist:

rusalkii:

ambivalencerelations:

rusalkii:

Does anyone know of any reason why someone shouldn’t eat exclusively bananas, apple sauce, those round red cheese ball things, and sugar cubes for lunch for three weeks? Uh, asking for a friend.

I would like to meet this… friend.

*waves* Apparently I was too subtle. Look, I didn’t choose the Anxiety Diet, it’s just that going out to buy food at work is stressful, and packing anything but snacks at my aunt and uncle’s is also stressful, and work has bananas and sugar cubes. Hence, my question.

c.f. why my intake of snacks has drastically increased

What’s wrong with fruit and cheese? Totally legit lunch. Surviving exclusively on them for three weeks might run into some difficulties, but if it’s just for lunch that doesn’t seem like a big deal to me.

(Speaking as someone whose non-dinner diet is mostly pretty…I don’t know if “atomised” is quite the right word here. Things that are individual food units in themselves, like “banana” or “peanut butter” or “yogurt”, rather than mixing lots of ingredients together into something meal. My food-unit selection is also fairly limited: there are the basic food groups, “fruit”, “dairy”, “nuts”, “protein” (usually mixed into the dinner meal), “chocolate”, “starch”, with usually ~2 – 3 possible foods in each category (not always the same 2 – 3 over time) and making some effort to cover as many categories as possible on any given day. My nutrition seems to be doing fine.)

I’ve been living on mostly Soylent for the last few months for other reasons. It works great for this too. You’d have to explain Soylent to your coworkers, but then it stays explained. (Mine are a very weirdness-tolerant bunch. You might be less lucky.) And then you don’t have to pack food.

#also apparently you get 50% off your first 12 bottles if someone refers you? #I will totally type in arbitrary emails if people want to take advantage of that #as long as they look like your actual email and don’t end in ’@congress.gov’ or similar

(It looks like the current Soylent referral bonus is $10 off for both referrer and referree. I don’t know whether @comparativelysuperlative is still doing this, but if not ask around and you might find someone else to refer you.)

Tags:

#(July 2016) #conversational aglets #food #disordered eating? #the more you know