I was thinking the other day that it’s funny, Matt Smith was a twenty-something, who in the role of the Doctor felt fucking ancient, but Peter Capaldi is fifty-something and feels in the role of the Doctor like a twenty-something undergrad whose skipped every single class of their anthropology course in favor of eating a month’s supply of ramen and playing “Blitzkrieg Bop” 17 times in a row.
This is fascinating, and from what I remember pretty accurate (although the opening, which is primarily green, is so evenly split it should be some kind of chequer-board). What’s mostly interesting is how little there is that’s pure red or pure green, which is how I remember it. Christmas, as they say in New Mexico, in answer to the State Question. It’s also why we were so unimpressed by anyone who thought they could tell us who wrote what, because when they cited things, they were mostly wrong.
Using a training set of texts by Pratchett and Gaiman, I used the R package Stylo to analyze Good Omens. (Specifically rolling nsc classification with 50 features and 5000 words per slice). The figure below shows my results. The words of the novel progress along the x axis. The pattern below the horizontal white line represents the signal from the author to whom the program attributed the majority of the authorship (Gaiman is in red and Pratchett is in green). The top, fainter pattern roughly shows how much signal there is from the other author. Together they add up to 100% in each section of the text.
I was amused to see a tiny sprinkling of me in Moving Pictures. Because there was a sprinkling of me in there. Terry would send me the book as he was writing it, and call to bounce ideas off me, and I’d cheerfully suggest lines and ideas. (There’s a sprinkling of me in Guards! Guards! and Moving Pictures, with a lot of me in Pyramids and Eric.)
So here’s a thing. I went to Lush a while back to check out their bath bombs etc, having acquired a bathtub for the first time in over a year. (Verdict: most smells are indiscernible to me, bath bombs take more patience than I have, bubble bath bars make the bathwater feel weirdly gritty or maybe I’m just using too big a chunk of one, but I am intrigued by the glitter body bar they had and may eventually go back to buy one.)
The thing is, every time I see people talking about Lush, it’s “yeah the products are great but ONOES THE STAFF they descend upon you like locusts!” and I’m like… yes? I walked in and the sales gentleman was very cheerful and answered all my questions, of which I had a fuckton, and demonstrated bath bombs and bubble bath bars for me and explained the bath oil melts, and then let me sniff everything at my own pace and did not upsell me. And to me the *best* part was that I did not have to go to an effort to get his attention and make shy little gestures trying to catch his eye and indicate that I wished to be helped, I walked in and he was right there being like “Have you been here before? Do you know what you’re looking for? Here are bath bombs!” and I was like “I heard your glitter is not microplastics” and he was like “Let me explain SYNTHETIC MICA GLITTER to you”, which admittedly is the way to my heart because geochemistry! But like… I liked it. I did not find it overwhelming or Oh The Horror. He got me a hand towel so I wasn’t mixing glitters everywhere, and then let me go methodically down the row of shelves sniffing everything while he restocked the other side of the store. It was neat.
So like. Is this just an introvert/extrovert thing? Is it simply that the introvert wishes to achieve bath bombs with no human interaction whatsoever, and a “how may I help / I’m just here for this specific thing / ok cool let me know if you need help” is too Much? Or do they force conversation if you haven’t already spent fifteen minutes being fascinated by product demonstrations?
>>And to me the *best* part was that I did not have to go to an effort to get his attention and make shy little gestures trying to catch his eye and indicate that I wished to be helped<<
That doesn’t tend to be my experience.
Now that I’ve worked in fast food, I am…maybe not more *reluctant*, I still do it roughly the same amount, but I feel guilty when I enter a store without a clear intention to buy something. Because I know, now, how fucking *awkward* it is from the staff perspective to have a potential customer you aren’t actively helping (waiting in line *mostly* doesn’t count). You can’t just go about your business cleaning and restocking and so on: you have to orient yourself around them, ready to spring into action at a moment’s notice if/when they end up wanting your help.
(Plus you can’t *just* hover around them, because that is Pressuring and also Wasting Company Time. You have to find things to do that allow you to be productive while *also* keeping an eye out for any sign of their wanting help, and that allow you to drop everything and immediately help them if/when that happens.)
I wish that our culture’s stock of standardised customer/staff interaction phrases had one for “I waive my right to prompt, responsive service: please go about your business as if I were not here. I understand that I will need to actively seek out your help if I find I want it, and that you might not be available right away.”. I’ve been trying out telling the staff of stores I wander into that I am “just looking around”, and I think this is at least *somewhat* effective, but I’m not sure it’s strong enough.
(maybe I’ll add a “don’t mind me”, that might help)
Tags:
#reply via reblog #scrupulosity cw? #in which Brin has a job
There’s either no sexting on Discworld because all faster-than-postal communication must be manually encoded by a human (or other species) person, or there IS sexting and some poor clacks operator midway to Pseudopolis is out here Suffering like, broo…not again bro… just send her a letter, bro… a letter in the —ing mail…
Tags:
#Discworld #headcanons #nsfw text? #I didn’t actually laugh aloud but it still amused me enough to reblog
Apparently most people don’t have the thing I have where my non-dominant hand is stronger than my dominant hand. Throughout my life, I’ve always found the intuitive distribution of labor, hand-use-wise, to involve using my right hand for any task which involves precise movements or quick reaction times (writing, mouse-movement, fencing, et cetera), and my left for any task which involves brute force and can afford to sacrifice precision (opening tightly-closed bottles and jars and heavy doors and so forth, probably some other categories of tasks I’m forgetting right now).
I wonder if this is related to the thing where, despite doing most two-handed activities in the prototypically right-handed fashion, I’ve always done minigolf and baseball batting in the prototypically left-handed fashion.
I wonder how common this is. All I really know about it is that I have the thing and my mom does not. (I found out when she expressed surprise at me opening jars with my left hand.)
I’ve never played baseball; I am not sure how I hold a mini-golf club, or for that matter what the prototypically right/left-handed fashions of mini-golfing would be.
Tags:
#is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #reply via reblog #handedness
Me “I can raise the temperature of a space by 5 degrees (Fahrenheit) per success” DM “Okay.” Me “And that’s 6 successes, so 30 degrees…” DM “Okay…” Me “And ‘inside the human body’ is a space, right?” DM “…I don’t like where this is going.” Me “So I’m going to raise the temperature inside his body 30 degrees.” DM “Yeah, so he’s dead now. He was fine, and then went through all the stages of heat stroke in half a second before his body went ‘No thank you’ and just shut off to stop it from being so hot. Good job.”
This is set in the same universe as #5: Build, but features a completely different species and set of characters.
Rrahe’nek stared at the tiny, coatless creature looking up at him, its teeth bared but its digits bereft of weapons. Instead, there was a rich-smelling ceramic dish in its hands, hot, steaming and wrapped in a cloth. It spoke incomprehensibly.
He had come here expecting a battle. Hoping. The newest species to enter galactic territory was a protégé of the Diwar, and Rrahe’nek despised the feathered ones. They were arrogant, but pathetic. Their weapons were superb, no one denied that, but their warriors were cowards, planting bombs and running away. Rrahe’nek had heard that their proteges had far inferior technology, were smaller, and had no natural physical weapons. Either they were the weakest prey-sapients the Kai had ever encountered, or they had ferocious battle techniques to make up for their biological inadequacies. When one had come alone toward the Kai encampment, Rrahe’nek had been delighted, assuming it was the second option. He had come out alone himself to meet the alien warrior in battle, take its measure… and defeat it, of course, no aliens had ever defeated a Kai warrior in single combat, but the contest would be exhilarating before Rrahe’nek won it in the end.
Instead, here he was faced with a small alien with a curled mane, but no fur elsewhere on its body, holding out what smelled like a dish of cooked food.
He poked his tongue into the bead at the back of his mouth that activated his voder as a communicator. “Warrior Fifth Rank Rrahe’nek to den.”
“Den here, Warrior Fifth. Heat signature says you’re in range of the alien, but have not engaged?”
“That’s correct. It – it seems to be trying to give me food.”
A moment of silence. Then, “What.”
“Its teeth are bared, but it has no weapons, it’s made no threatening moves, it isn’t running away, and it’s trying to hand me a dish that smells like fish.”
“Hold position. We’re getting eyes on your location.”
Brinens and Things 