Recently I saw my friend’s dog scratching his ear a suspicious amount, and the first thought that came to mind was “~follow for more flea-avoidant speciesism~”
I blame @ilzolende.
Aww, thanks!
Is there a Speciesist Tumblr? There should be. Then you could blame that.
~follow for more rabies-avoidant speciesism~
Tags:
#(October 2015) #conversational aglets #dog #high context jokes #(looks like *two* of these next three are about old in-jokes)
How come I haven’t seen anyone talking about the end of dashboard nested reblogs except in future tense? I’m already seeing the new design. Am I actually in the first wave of a gradually rolled-out update for once?
I’m hopeful about it, really. Sure, every change takes some getting used to, and it’s a little annoying not being able to see at the beginning of a thread how many entries it has, but I do like actually having people’s names next to their writings.
shipwrecklight-blog said: I am a bad person for thinking it looks swank! Or, so has it been widely implied.
Tags:
#(September 2015) #conversational aglets #replies #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse
My second Crawl win! (The first was with a Spriggan Enchanter of Okawaru back in February 2013, in version 0.11.)
(For those of you unfamiliar with Crawl*, I’m called a “Politician” because I’m very good at backstabbing. (Only in the literal sense, though.) For those of you unfamiliar with roguelikes in general, Crawl is not an easy game to win. There was a statistic on the dev-blog a little while ago that 98% of games played on the online servers end in a loss, and that’s lumping the games of uber-players in with everyone else.)
Now that I’ve finished my current Crawl game, I’m going to give Rogue a try. I’ll be using this browser emulator, which was making the rounds on Tumblr a while back. I was catching up on @Play today and found a link to this Rogue guide, but I won’t use it right away: I want to see how much of the game I can understand using only my (slightly rusty) fluency in Nethack (plus the occasional thing I remember from reading @Play).
*Which might be all of you. I know comparativelysuperlative and amaranththallium both speak a couple different dialects of Nethack, but I don’t know what else they speak.
comparativelysuperlative said: I’ve only ever played the two biggest Nethack variants, but beating a new roguelike is hard! Congratulations on Crawl.
Tags:
#(June 2015) #((I know the picture says July 1st I think it’s a timezone thing)) #Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup #roguelikes #games #conversational aglets #replies
This is my home! This is my home! How can you sit here within it and tell me that nobody lives here?!
(and say it like it’s obvious, say it with condescension, I am so fucking sick of my lived experience being met with condescension and casual declaration of impossibility, or at best saying that it may well have happened but I should still shut up and just let the first-generations speak, their problems their experiences are more numerous more important the only ones worth public acknowledgement)
(You say you want a world like mine, a world with people like me in it. You say you work to achieve it, to achieve us. Decide now how you will react to us when we come to be, for we are already here. You cannot afford to wait until you deem the tide to be turning in your favour, for the world is vast and contains multitudes and the tide is always in your favour somewhere, even if those places are small. Even if those places are small, they may still be big enough to raise a child.
Decide now. Decide wisely.)
This is kind of how I feel about a lot of SJ/feminist discourse about what men are like.
Context of that: Brin-Bellway was raised in liberal social circles and is talking about how SJ makes her feel, and I’m a man, basically cis though I suspect I’m at least a little gender-weird.
I think my System 1 is sexist, but its sexism is more like misandry. I don’t think I have an intuitive feeling that women are less competent and intelligent than men. I don’t think I have an intuitive feeling that women owe me service, deference, or sex. I do have an intuition that women are nicer and prettier than men and kind of basically are better people and make better companions. I think I empathize with women more easily, see them as more vulnerable and sympathetic, and am more likely to imagine sympathetic motives for them when they do something I consider bad. I think female characters tend to feel more emotionally alive to me. I think I’m more driven to make social connections with women. I think I probably am less deferential to women, but this is a function of me having more fear of men, not less respect for women. Being very unpopular in school made me into a fairly timid, deferential person who tends to try not to take up too much space. I do feel I have an obligation to support women in a “chivalrous” way, and I think the guilt and anxiety I feel about still being supported by my mother is partially a gendered feeling of this kind. SJ/feminist descriptions of the entitlement and confidence men are supposedly raised to feel don’t feel like descriptions of my condition at all, but something in my brain shivers in dark rapture at the “I will stay and be thy husband / though it be the death of me” line in The Maiden and the Selkie. Empathy for women’s arousal and pleasure is a pretty big part of my sexuality, and I think I’m low-key sexually submissive.
I don’t think I have what SJ/feminism thinks is typical male socialization; either I didn’t get it or I didn’t “properly” internalize it because I have a weird brain.
Tags:
#(OP from June 2015; response from December 2017) #conversational aglets #rants #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #(I feel like I don’t deal with nearly as much of this sort of thing as I used to) #(I think I’ve gotten a lot better at avoiding the sort of people who would do it) #((also I dug this one out of a force-safe-moded blog by scrolling down until I found it)) #((fortunately random-thought-depository didn’t post all that often))
(my Internet was out for most of the day, so it’s quite possible there are already posts on my dash along these lines that I just haven’t caught up with yet, but anyway)
Tumblr what are you thinking
I have already liked three of those four posts
(I was kind of hoping it would be all four so I could say “all of those posts”, but no, turns out I didn’t hit the like button on the Civ post. Still, three out of four ain’t good.)
theunitofcaring said: yeah, this one seems to be singularly useless at best. but. posts you’ve already /liked/ is a bit crazy.
Tags:
#(April 2015) #conversational aglets #replies #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse
Hello, fellow citizens of The Future! I am writing this from my smartphone, because I can. I just bought it this afternoon.
I’ve never owned a smartphone before. I have a lot of waste-not-want-not issues about technology, and I was never quite able to justify a smartphone to my satisfaction. Even after my then-7.5-year-old MP3 player’s clickwheel began to fail four months ago, taking two clicks forward and one click back (or, worse, the other way around), I still tried to keep using it.
A few days ago, though, after a talk with my parents, I came to terms with the fact that it was time to move on. (Besides, I can give my old Sansa to my brother anyway, and he might be able to get a bit more use out of it. It’s still a step up from his current utter lack of handheld non-GBA computer.)
At that point, the question wasn’t so much *why* to get a smartphone as why *not*. I could get an MP3 player *without* Wi-Fi and camera and variety of other goodies, or I could get one *with*, in either case for less than I paid for the Sansa.
So, I bought an Alcatel Idol Mini. I haven’t set up the phone plan yet, but there’s a lot it can do without the SIM card. Almost everything I want it to do, really.
Of course, I can’t play around with it much yet, because of the whole school thing. Soon, phone. Soon, once all this pesky schoolwork is out of the way, you and I will spend some quality time getting to know each other.
(After all these years of gazing longingly from afar, I’ve finally got a smartphone. It’s beautiful and wonderful and *mine*, *finally* mine.)
P.S. (from laptop): Today is my Hebrew-calendar birthday. I didn’t intend for the phone to be a birthday present from myself, but it’s nice how that worked out.
depizan said: Happy birthday! And enjoy your phone. :)
Tags:
#(November 2014) #conversational aglets #wavered on whether this was worth agletting #but fuck it who said it had to be ~substantial~ #this is my blog and I will build a beautiful archive out of it #if you are uninterested or wish not to be caught off guard by blasts-from-the-past there is a conveniently blacklistable tag #(fun fact: I still don’t have a phone plan) #(my parents are almost never both using their phones at the same time so I just borrow one of those if I specifically need cell access) #(I have a VoIP account for making calls from Wi-Fi zones (and usually know where the closest Wi-Fi is at any given time)) #(if I trip and break my leg or something while walking alone I can still call for help: you don’t need a SIM card for 911) #(so overall I really don’t think I’d get $7/month of value out of having my own phone plan) #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #adventures in human capitalism #tag rambles #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #replies
Hello from my new (well, refurbished) Dell Inspiron 15R M5110! (Wow, Dell nomenclature has gotten complicated.)
My crappy old Latitude D620 was finally starting to die of old age, so I got this one instead (for less than the D620 cost me three years ago; after researching used computer prices I’m beginning to wonder if the brick-and-mortar used computer store I bought that one from ripped me off). It arrived Monday morning, and this morning I pretty much finished setting it up how I want it. It has six gigs of RAM and a Radeon HD 6480G graphics card, and do you know what that means?
Masssss Effff—
Wait, no, I have a final exam next week to study for, plus one and a half school projects and two articles to complete by the end of the month. I don’t have time to get into a new game. (No matter how tempting justice-turtle is making Flight Rising look.)
December 1st, maybe sooner if I manage to finish early:
Masssss Effffectttt
MASS EFFEEEEEEEEECT :D
Yay for being responsible! I’ll be here to cheer you on on December 1st! :D
(Lots of rambling advice under the cut because Mass Effect yay – no spoilers here though)
Tags:
#(November 2014) #conversational aglets #(realised yesterday that I didn’t check my OPs) #Mass Effect #(I got a few missions in before wandering off and never really got back to it myself) #(I *did* end up getting into Flight Rising though) #(failed one of the projects because I suck at rock identification but still managed an A- overall) #(and A+ for the other course) #(but those grades are probably never going to matter because they don’t fit into an accounting degree) #(oh well‚ at least I learned stuff about rocks and computers and compensating for failures) #adventures in University Land
Star Wars never really explores the cool time-keeping situations that you can end up with in a society that spans multiple planets:
- planets with no moon that don’t have a time increment between days and years
- planets with a dozen moons where understanding their cycles involves university courses
- multi-planet star systems where the position of the other planet features prominently in calendar systems
- tidally locked planets with no days (or years, really, because even though they’re orbiting a star they wouldn’t have significant changes in seasons)
- and not only do they not have days or years, they have no cultural concept of those things and are bewildered by the rest of the galaxy’s obsession with measuring time
- planets with years so long that they’re useless as a way of measuring age, so people give their age in months instead
- planets with like 6 hour days where people are used to sleeping frequently for only a couple hours at a time
- the space equivalent of jetlag involves adjusting to a new day length, not just a new time zone
- when two planets have slightly different day lengths, the days shift relative to each other, so if you travel frequently between two such planets, sometimes the days line up perfectly and sometimes you have to deal with 12 hours of “jet”lag
And there are tons of interesting cultural implications that go along with using Coruscant time as a standard throughout the galaxy:
- standard Coruscant dates have basically no correlation to seasons on planets with different year lengths, so to even guess at the weather during a historical date given in standard time you need to do calculations
- everyone has a different age in local years and standard years, and a different birthday
- some planets have days much longer or shorter than standard days, so your standard birthday might be spread over a few local days or vice versa
- stuff like being old enough to drive – it tends to go in round numbers of local years, so even on planets where the rule is “about 18 standard”, you have some planets where it’s actually 17.36 standard years, or 19.1, or whatever works out nicely in local years
- planets that follow Coruscant standard time and totally ignore natural phenomena on their own planets
- up to and including days – they force themselves into sleep cycles with nothing to do with the sun rising and setting
- planets that refuse to use standard time even in official settings, and pilots hate having to travel there because the space port is always chaotic because no one knows what time it is
- the Separatists try to switch to another time system than Coruscant standard and it’s a total mess but it would be embarrassing to switch back
- the Rebellion learns their lesson from this and doesn’t try to change the standard time system even though the New Republic government is no longer based on Coruscant
- people pay less and less attention to standard time as you get farther from the core
- planets with similar natural time cycles to Coruscant have more prosperous economies and produce more prominent and successful people, although the effect is subtle enough that it goes unnoticed until someone randomly decides to check for correlation
Apparently there’s an entry in one of the official Legends atlases that says Taanab has a 46-hour day. Literally nothing else in canon that I know of does anything with this. I’ve occasionally pondered using it in something, but I always come back to the same question: how the fuck does a farming planet settled by humans function if its day doesn’t match up to human circadian rhythms? Changing the length of day-cycle your body expects is fucking *hard*. Now, a 48-hour day I could see working okay with some adaptations, but 46? No. You’d have weeks where half the planet was farming in the dark.
(I wonder if anyone has ever done experiments on small babies to check whether a circadian rhythm is nature or nurture. Probably they have.)
IIRC it’s “generally mostly nature, but different proportions of nature and nurture in different individuals”. “What time of day you expect to sleep”, “what day length you expect to have”, and “how flexible each expectation is” are all axes along which people vary.
(Most people expect a day length *slightly* longer than 24 hours but by a small enough margin that it’s not a big deal (I guess once it’s close enough to be not-a-big-deal there’s not much pressure to fine-tune it further? maybe?): expecting a day length significantly different from 24 hours sucks about as much as you’d think.)
Depending on the timescales involved and how common moving between planets is, you might wind up with slightly different strains of human adapted to each planet’s length, or maybe just end up selecting for flexible circadian cycles.
(Personally, I suspect I have a baseline noticeable-but-weak circadian cycle masked and/or reinforced by general autistic routine-loving. I strongly prefer to sleep at a consistent time in the short term but have only a weak preference for diurnality in the long term, and pay more attention to artificial cues than to natural ones. I wonder how I’d do on one of those planets that follows Coruscant time and to hell with its own world’s rhythms.)
Tags:
#Star Wars #reply via reblog #circadian rhythms #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #evolution
Bad joke time
It can be frustrating when people confuse “aromantic” with “aromatic”, but hey, you know what they say: Aros, by any other name, would smell as sweet.
Tags:
#puns #aromanticism
Brinens and Things 