https://brin-bellway.dreamwidth.org/24837.html
Tags:
#oh look an original post
Month: July 2019
I’m cleaning out my notepad program in preparation for a move to a new† laptop††, and I found this Tumblr draft dated March 10th, 2016.
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One of the worst non-obvious things about prosopagnosia is that it *reduces the amount of serendipity in your life*.
All else equal, I have far fewer chance meetings with old friends and colleagues than a non-faceblind person would. I have witnessed my mother having chance meetings that I would not have had in her place. I abandoned Orphan Black partway through the first episode because it disturbed me too much, knowing that if they’d based the clones’ on *my* genetic structure instead of hers, the entire show would never have happened. Sarah and Beth would have walked right by each other and never known. How many plot hooks (let alone easter eggs) have I missed out on in my own personal narrative?
(I went bowling on my 22nd birthday. In the group playing on the lane next to my family, there was a girl who looked just like I would if I didn’t wear glasses. I assume it was a coincidence. I assume she was not a secret clone or long-lost twin. If I am wrong in that assumption, I will never find out. If one day I passed someone I assumed to be a stranger, and they were actually a former acquaintance who would have given me some life-changing piece of information had I struck up a conversation with them like old times, I will never find out. Almost certainly, I have at the very least passed by acquaintances who would have given me non-life-*changing* but life-*enhancing* pieces of information, had I only known it was them.)
(This post inspired by CORDYCEPS [link], another story whose plot is dependant on one person recognising another’s face. I like the mystery and I like Benedict’s writing, so I’ve been reading it anyway for now.)
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†And by “new”, I mean “seven years old, but significantly higher-spec than my current seven-year-old laptop”. Dad’s laptop broke, so we agreed that I would buy a “new” one for me and hand my old one down to him. Back in the day, *I* used to get *his* hand-me-down computers, but my computer requirements have now outpaced his (fortunately not to the point where my usual laptop budget of ~USD$300 is an insufficient amount of money), so.
††My backups are generally pretty thorough, and it wouldn’t have been a disaster data-wise if I’d woken up this morning to find my laptop permanently unable to boot (which did happen to me one morning in my mid-teens! no warning, no particular reason AFAIK why that motherboard chose that night to fail, it just did!), but I’ve found a couple overlooked spots.
Yeah, I find that plots that depend on recognizing people’s faces under extreme conditions are so weird to me. Like… humans can do that? Really? You saw this guy one time on the news and now you run into him in real life and you know who he is? Just because his face was shown on the news once? How is that even possible? I often question the legitimacy of such plot points even though I know my personal experience is not normal for human beings, because it just seems so completely implausible. Meanwhile, here I am not recognizing my own daughter when I drive past her on the street. (Or worse, walking up to her guests at her birthday party and addressing them as if they’re her.)
Honestly, I’ve never wondered how people could not realize Clark Kent was Superman. Take your glasses off and wear tights and a cape, and I wouldn’t recognize you either. Also I’d be too busy staring at the cape because WHEE CAPE! :P
One thing I find unrealistic about stories is when someone is telling someone else about a conversation they had and they remember everything WORD FOR WORD, in the exact order that it happened. If it was me, I’d be like “and then we talked about penguins for a while, and then he told me this story about…oh wait, before that, he told me someone broke into his office and moved a bunch of stuff around!” I’d make a horrible detective.
Tags:
#(June 2018) #conversational aglets #prosopagnosia #embarrassment squick #amnesia cw #cordyceps tcftog #Superman
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#food #overly literal interpretations #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog #(I *have* eaten cardboard-flavoured ice cream though) #(if you leave the opened carton in the freezer too long the cardboard flavour seeps in) #(it’s not very good)
proposal: unaging humans that don’t have an ongoing population crisis – instead, norms approach “spend at least 50 years learning who you are and getting settled” and “a child really needs several parents who all have stable relationships with each other, at least two of whom are willing to do full-time parenting, at least in the early years”, and nobody who would have had children because “well, if I don’t have them now I can’t have them later” or an interest in perpetuating the bloodline or an interest in support in old age has kids
additionally, the lower rate of childbirth fails to prevent children from socializing, because of denser housing and better transit, so even if everyone in the city only has a thousand kids they can all meet up, or people temporarily moving to raise kids, or whatever
“but this would make boring science fiction” just have the kid-friendly cities be oversurveilled suburbia that children are weirded out by and teenagers hate. or, like, some kind of extended metaphor where a “working parent and nonworking parent” household has as much trouble raising kids as a single-working-parent household does today, or something.
anyway, since everyone uses science fiction as an oracle now apparently, we should be a tiny bit concerned about the total unavailability of a concept in sci-fi.
Or, the central conflict actually has nothing to do with the kids and how they’re being raised; rather, the kids’ situation in the world is a background to the existing story.
When I was in eighth grade, I wrote a story that took place in a dystopia where they had rejiggered human sleep/wake cycles to give everyone more waking time, and then forced children to spend half that time in school and half that time working for a war effort, which was kind of a “we have always been at war with Oceania” kind of war effort. Except that wasn’t what the story was about. The story was about three kids who find a treehouse that contains gateways to other dimensions, where they go to escape their miserable lives in the dystopia.
You could have a story about a future where humans have incredibly lengthened lifespans and there aren’t many kids and the kids that there are tend to live in specific kid-friendly places so the story is about a kid whose parents take them traveling a lot so they’re used to being in places for adults and then they move in with a more stable unit because they think the kid needs stability and the kid is bored shitless by other kids and “kid friendly” stuff. Or the kid is neurodivergent in a world that’s a lot more accepting of adult neurodivergence than child neurodivergence because kids are so much rarer than before. Or the family dynamics when your older brother is 40 and you’re 10. Or something totally unrelated, like the kid’s emotional reactions to one of the parents having a dangerous job. The conflict doesn’t have to be about the existence of the longer lifespans and the relative rarity of children but they are raised in places where children are denser than in other areas; you can follow through extrapolations of that to think, what kind of challenges would they have? Or come up with something barely related. Cory Doctorow’s “Down and Out In The Magic Kingdom” gives us a post-humanist world where people back themselves up and death isn’t permanent and currency is popularity and reputation, and then writes a murder mystery set in that world where the main character is trying to solve his own murder after being restored from backup. The conflict isn’t about being in a post-humanist society where death is a minor inconvenience, but the story couldn’t exist without that background.
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#story ideas I will never write #death tw #there is probably some other warning tag I should put on this but I am not sure what
Okay, we were talking and got curious, so I’m going to post this sample and ask for your input.
From what you can hear in this recording, where do you think this person is from?
(Apologies for poor audio quality.)
@injygo replied: ‘instinctively, I think “lives in Minnesota but family is Irish”’
Huh, interesting. That is not any of the answers I was expecting.
(Everyone else: please submit a guess first before reading below the cut, as there are spoilers.)
justice-turtle said: I couldn’t understand enough of the words to venture an opinion on the accent (probably a combination of poor audio quality and my known auditory processing troubles), but knowing you’re interested in the weird ways brains work, it might be relevant to note that the *tune* was immediately and obviously Irish to me (having scrolled down and seen that it’s Phil Collins, that makes sense), and that once I caught the line “we came from the north and we came from the south”, my brain decided (cont’d)
justice-turtle said: (cont’d) decided that was an extremely Canadian-folk-specific line and therefore you must be the singer. (I have no idea what song this is and therefore whether that assessment is true, though I assume I could google the line.) I don’t know if *you* actually sounded more Canadian once I decided that or whether my brain was just doing brain shit, but I’d suspect the latter on principle.
Tags:
#(February 2018) #conversational aglets #replies #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #accents #home of the brave #our home and cherished land #(it is not a folk song: he wrote it himself)
Also, I have acquired a new appreciation for AO3’s download function, which is great at facilitating archiving.
And I have acquired a new opposite-of-appreciation for fanfiction.net, which goes so far the other direction that you are *not allowed to copy text from a fic*. I did a couple of small fics by *going into the page source*, finding the fic *there*, pasting it into a LibreOffice document, and *manually replacing the br tags with line breaks* (there was probably some way to automate that last bit). Then I hit upon the solution of simply saving the entire page as an HTML file, which seems to have worked. Good: I was not looking forward to manually inserting line breaks in Chanson de Geste.
https://alanhogan.com/code/text-selection-bookmarklet
is what I personally use to copy/paste things from sites that don’t want me to. It doesn’t work on all sites, but it works on a lot of them.
Ooh, this looks promising. Thank you!
I use http://ficsave.xyz when I want to download a fic off fanfiction.net
You could also use a text editor like sublime
Tags:
#(OP from January 2018; responses from May 2018) #conversational aglets #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #the more you know #(I don’t think I’ve come across any opportunities to use these since then)
The official Times Square livestream crashed at 11:59:50, presumably overwhelmed by all the viewers.
The version of Auld Lang Syne Mom picked out was screechy and failed to have a Scottish accent.
That one Scottish guy came through, as he has every year.
I try not to read prophetic symbolism into things, but this reads as “some rough patches (mostly poverty-related), but things will work out okay in the end”. I suppose that’s not so bad.
Happy New Year, everyone!
happy new year
i didnt catch on until now that the central question of auld lang syne was rhetorical. i didnt pay too much attention to it, but tacitly assumed that the song had a similar intent as a section of the opening music of revolutionary girl utena:
Take my revolution. Let’s go on with our lives.
Reality approaches now, frantically.
What I want is to find my place in life and my self-worth,
taking who I’ve been up until today……and heroically stripping her down until she’s bare,
like the roses whirling in freedom.
But even if the two of us should be separated,
I will change the world.that is, if everyone you know leaves you and you have amnesia and forget that they ever existed, you can still exist and do good things in the new year
i think i also kind of bundled this with a generalized category of being lost
lost: erasing {people that know you, memory, ‘sense of self’}
and being able to {find out, work on} what you value regardless
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i think this notion was reinforced by
And we’ll tak’ a cup o’ kindness yet,
for auld lang syne.i didnt know that auld lang syne was used to communicate ‘times long past‘ and my mind constructed a ritual in which humans collectively would drink something to induce amnesia and kindness towards each other. kind of how alcohol sometimes works
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i want to be able to witness the birth of these hallucinations; my brain is such that high [complexity/(seed evidence)] worlds appear often and i dont have a ~systemic practice to differentiate them from hallucinations entangled with more magic reality fluid
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#(January 2018) #conversational aglets #New Years #amnesia cw #unreality cw?
I would like to thank @kaylin881 for providing all the fun of stalking people on the Internet without the ethical issues.
(spoilers regarding Kaylin’s Amenta characters follow)
Eeeeeeeee! This is delightful! I’m so glad you were interested enough to look into this.
You’re right, and this information has been discussed OOC on the amenta discord chat. It’ll be revealed IC at the same time Cat finally reveals his caste. For now, you just get a little bonus enjoyment.
And, no, I didn’t add that tag to make comparisons easier. I added it because both of them are the sort of person who would have a tag for that.
Tags:
#(November 2017) #conversational aglets #Amenta
Brinens and Things 