you can tell a lot about someone based on their phone background. it shows what’s most important to them
Reblog this and put what your phone background in the tags
Tags:
#the prettiest of the available default backgrounds on the first smartphone I ever owned #(waves rolling across a water surface) #I saved the image file and have been copying it to each new smartphone #it’s amazing how much home-ier a phone feels once it’s got the right background on it #…yeah tbh it *does* say a lot about me doesn’t it #meme #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #(I have actually decided to keep the old smartphone) #(we’ve been finding it useful to have a spare Android device around) #(but that’s a category tag and I’m not planning to change it)
I just missed the J key and hit K instead for the first time and it scrolled up a post
Is that new or has it always done that
Is there a list of hotkeys for this site anywhere? I don’t want to just start randomly pressing keys because it might bring the whole site down
Press ? to bring up the list
(K has always been there as far as I know, it’s the same keybindings as vi)
Incidentally, pressing ? brings up keyboard shortcuts on basically every website that supports them. Try it on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Gmail, GitHub, really, any major site.
J and K are also pretty consistently “down” and “up” on any website with keyboard shortcuts. (Except Danbooru, which uses WASD!)
Tags:
#Tumblr: a User’s Guide #this is probably at least the third time I’ve reblogged something along these lines #but it’s good to reiterate occasionally #and that bit about ? being common across websites is new to me and important
man this has been said before by cleverer folks than me, but sometimes you have to sit down and let the sheer size and age of the storytelling tradition just completely overwhelm you, ja feel?
like— think for a second about how mind-bogglingly incredible it is that we know who osiris is? that somebody just made him up one day, and told stories about him to their kids, and literally thousands and thousands of years later we are still able to go “there was a god whose brother cut him into pieces”, it’s so arbitrary, it’s so incredible
that in talking about scheherazade and her husband, you are doing something that someone in every single generation has done since it was written— you are telling stories that have lasted an impossible amount of time
can you conceive of telling a story, and then traveling into the future and hearing that same story told— with alterations, and through media that you could not possibly conceive of, but your story— in the year 3214?
the fact that we! as a species! have been telling the same damn stories for so long— the fact that we’ve seen homer’s troy and chaucer’s troy and shakespeare’s troy and troy with fucking brad pitt because we never fucking stop telling stories! never ever ever!
we never stop caring about stories, or returning to the same stories, or putting our own spins on stories. we never stop talking about the characters as if they were real, or asking what happened next, or asking to hear it again.
generation after generation, they never ever ever stop mattering to us.
Tags:
#history #my past self has good taste #yes this #I feel like also relevant is the post I reblogged a while back #in which somebody makes a joke that relies on knowing who Ea-nasir is #(for anyone who doesn’t already know: he was a merchant ~3750 years ago) #(the earliest surviving complaint letter we know of is complaining about his substandard copper) #(and now you too know who he is and can understand the abovementioned joke)
The other day, I went to an event hosted by a psychological/philosophical research organisation I’d ideally like to work for. While I was there, I spoke to one of the staff about psychometrics, and he recommended I take a Big 5 quiz occasionally to track changes in personality as I go about self-improving.
So, the next day, I took a test on Open Psychometrics. Today, since I decided I should give Tumblr some updates about my life, I thought I should probably post the results. This is what my personality looks like these days, according to this measurement, at least:
Or, in more familiar OCEAN terms: Openness at the 93rd percentile, Conscientiousness at 80th, Extroversion at 96th, Agreeableness at 83th, and Neuroticism (reverse of Emotional stability) at 9th.
If someone had told me two months ago, when I started down the path of self-improvement, that in that much time I could have an OCEAN of 93/80/96/83/09, I would have thought they were crazy. But, no, these results seem to fit with my lived experience. The only thing that makes it hard to be confident is how little time has passed, despite my subjective experience of it having been over a year.
The only thing that really surprised me is that my extroversion still scores so high, now that I spend far more time with myself. However, the test seemed to mostly base extroversion on how interested I am in other people, how much I care about their well being, and how socially competent I am – all of which are high enough to justify a 96th percentile result.
Definitely, far and away the thing I’m most pleased by is the conscientiousness result. Before I used to be consistently below average. Now I’m on the cusp of the top quintile. I’m absolutely thrilled, but I think I’d still like to improve it. In conscientiousness, I’m still significantly lagging behind my father, my grandfather, my great grandfather, Elon Musk, and other similar people. That’s where my target lies, and less than 95th percentile definitely isn’t cutting it.
I anticipate my neuroticism continuing to drop as I continue to cultivate stoic mental habits. However, I doubt it will drop much farther, or at least not for long. That’s because I also want to cultivate conscientiousness, which requires some amount of intolerance for substandard states.
In this chart, my Openness is reported as slightly reduced, but that’s only due to the aforementioned appearance of standards. I’m being more careful about which experiences to have (in the short term), because I care about directing myself through a long term growth arc. However, I am in a sense maximally open to experience. That is, in the long run, I want to inhabit the broadest range of possible human experiences. I want to understand the extent of the human mind, to the degree that I can, and part of that is investigating the range of qualia it can instantiate.
The only thing popularly considered good that I’m trying to bring down is Agreeableness, which seems to be somewhat working, as my agreeableness is now in the ‘mere’ 80s. I think that my target level is about 70th percentile. High enough that I consistently lean toward cooperation and good faith and treating others well. But I don’t want to be hyper conflict averse and I don’t want to take shit. Being small and inoffensive and never taking up space is no longer my aspiration.
Also, shout out to a few weeks back, when I was posting on Tumblr about looking for a therapist who might help me to develop a healthier approach to life over the course of a several weeks. At the time, I thought that hoping to have my life on track after three months of therapy was overly optimistic, even though I needed to improve at that rate.
And now, one month later, I’m fist-pumping to my top-quintile consientiousness, while going about setting my life in order in all directions. Oh, and I kind of got distracted priority-wise during this time, so I still haven’t found a therapist. Whoops. I still think it would be a good idea for me to find one. It’s just – apparently once I was the kind of person who would systematically look for a therapist, I became quite capable of healing myself.
At first I was leaning against saying anything, but since this post you’ve made a second one in which you also treat conflict-aversion as a form of hyper-agreeableness, so:
I was so surprised by this that I wondered if maybe we’d taken different OCEAN tests, but your link looks like it may in fact be *exactly* the one I took.
The questions on that test that look like they might be involved in the Agreeable stat pretty much boil down to “How much do you want to fight people?” and “How much do you care about others’ well-being for its own sake?”
I said that I often want to fight people† and that I’m uncertain whether I care about other people’s well-being for its own sake††, and that’s how I ended up with a 12th percentile Agreeableness score despite being highly conflict-averse.
(I tried again using your link, and this time I got 14th percentile.)
—
†Too cowardly and low-pain-tolerance to actually *do* it, but they didn’t *ask* *that*.
††But I’ve never *needed* to be certain of that: I want to live in an environment where people are nice to each other because then they’ll be nice to me, and to have any chance of getting that I need to do my part. It’s hard to tell whether I care about them per se precisely *because* it never actually comes up. (My attempts to use thought experiments to control for this tend to result in my brain going “I refuse to ever be sufficiently confident that being mean to someone won’t bite me in the ass later. There’s always the risk of having *misjudged* the level of risk.”)
Tags:
#reply via reblog #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see
2. Birthday: I’m gonna leave this one blank for anonymity reasons.
3. Sign: Scorpio (I always feel like I don’t fit Scorpio descriptions at all, cause they’re like “sexy and mysterious and confident and super organized” and I am like the exact opposite of all of those things, but it is what it is)
4. Height: Five foot five and three-quarters inches, barefoot and if I stretch. The orthotic sneakers and inserts add a fair bit, though; when I’m walking around I’m functionally about five seven.
5. Hobbies: I’m not even awake enough to word the requisite terrible pun, so I’m just gonna headbutt @camshaft22 here ❤️ (Reading, writing, knitting, singing, karate. I’ll learn basically any craft to a fair level of competence and then never do it again, but those are the ones I can think of that have stuck)
6. Favorite colors: Blue. Royal blue especially. Some shades of green, but there are a lot of green shades I dislike (especially the more brown-shaded ones) and only a few blue ones I dislike (mostly for reasons unrelated to the actual color). Jewel tones and neons in general, I like very vibrant colors.
7. Favorite books: Lord of the Rings, Starfighters of Adumar, Gone-Away Lake/Return to Gone-Away, The Cricket in Times Square, Digger, Chris Claremont’s original run on Uncanny X-Men (which is technically fifteen years of comics issues, but neener ;S). I read Cricket in Times Square at age two or three and I’m pretty sure it materially influenced the OTP dynamic I’ve gravitated to ever since. ^_^
8. Last song I listened to: Uh. God only knows. The last audio thing I deliberately chose to listen to, as opposed to muzak or ambient TV noises coming through the door, was an episode of Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, which was recommended me by the excellent @ravenskyewalker (I may be mistagging them) many moons ago. I only listen to three podcasts regularly, and this is by far the most structured – no live kitchen beagles at *all*. XD I like it partly because I know and love the source material, partly because Jay is the kind of thinky and articulate person I aspire to be. (Although Jay does a lot less screaming about his personal life on the internet. ^_^)
9. Last movie I watched: Seriously, these memes are designed for people who do a *lot* more media engagement than I have lately. I just haven’t had the spoons to watch movies since I got kicked out. Is there something like extroversion/introversion for visual media watching? Because hanging around live people in realtime energizes me, which I know it doesn’t for a lot of y’all, but I mostly find movies and TV really draining, even when it’s a show I like, like SG-1 or Leverage.
10. Inspiration/muse: You know, my first author I betaed for had a “muse”, which was a little wooden wolf creature that sat on her computer and she wrote little dialogues with him in the author notes. He was intended to herd plotbunnies or eat them or something. His name was Katchi. So that’s *my* association with the term “muse”. Apparently it’s more commonly used to refer to a character one RPs, but that makes mine Wes, and *that* just brings up mental images involving urns, which nobody needs at this hour. ;P
11. Dream job: Proofreader. Just sit in a comfy chair all day and make other people’s words go right. God, I wish. :P
12. Meaning behind your url: It’s a song title. Canadian folk music, less depressing than most. If you YouTube it, be sure you get the Stan Rogers version and not one of the inferior covers. (Apparently most people who know this song and my association with it think of me as primarily the narrator, but I tend to think of myself as primarily the ship, which is sort of distressing by this time because people keep having to rescue me. :P) I’m looking for a new url, to change to if and when I ever get out of this situation, but the only one I’ve come up with that really clicked for me yet was pretty damn personal and also people would have to spell “statistician”. So that’s a project.
>>Is there something like extroversion/introversion for visual media watching? Because hanging around live people in realtime energizes me, which I know it doesn’t for a lot of y’all, but I mostly find movies and TV really draining, even when it’s a show I like, like SG-1 or Leverage.<<
There must be people who react better to visual media, given the existence of things like marathons, and the literal version of Netflix-and-chill, and the ridiculous quantities of Youtube my mother somehow finds the brain processing-power to watch, and the concept in things like anti-40-hour-workweek essays of being “too tired to do anything but watch TV”.
(Well, I mean, I guess I *have* arguably been in states of being too tired to do anything but watch TV, like when I had the flu. But at those times I wasn’t *really* watching the TV either, not consistently. Last time I was that kind of sick there was a Deadliest Catch marathon on, which I found worked well: it was *just* engaging enough to have something to listen to when I couldn’t keep my eyes open but my brain was working enough to be capable of boredom, maybe even open my eyes for a bit occasionally, but also if I fell asleep for an hour I hadn’t missed much. Sometimes when people talk about “being too tired to do anything but watch TV” they *do* seem to mean something like that, but not always.)
I have also heard the occasional rumour of people who find *textual* media draining, but of course one wouldn’t tend to encounter such people when one hangs out primarily in text-based venues, so I wouldn’t know.
Tags:
#if you don’t want me reblogging this let me know and I’ll take it down #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #illness tw
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune courts. WE DO NOT TALK ABOUT THE PLUTO COURT THING. (…There’s a story there.)
Clockwise and Counterclockwise courts
…or Deasil and Widdershins, fine, but the clockwise version is more neutral
Proton, Neutron, Electron courts
you know I could keep going but I think I’m going to stop
This is not as much of an issue as it used to be – to my knowledge no one has been killed over it for a few years, but my advice to humans who must deal with the Courts remains the same: Do NOT ask if there is a Court of Pluto. Do not ask why there is no Court of Pluto. Ideally avoid mentioning the word ‘Pluto’.
The problem is that the story is rather embarrassing to several powerful people and they would really rather it not be brought to mind. Ever.
Background radio at work: *opening notes of “Call Me Maybe”*
My brain: “♪ My name is Nietzsche, hello/A sort of nihilist bro/Hey, God is dead, did you know?/What is morality? ♫”
Tags:
#this actually happened *last* week #but I was thinking about it again because last night they played ”Counting Stars” #and I ended up with the Awakening of the Birds soundtrack stuck in my head #my brain has some firm opinions on what the primary versions of songs are and they are not always the same as the mainstream view #Amenta #philosophy #music #oh look an original post #in which Brin has a job #♪ I gazed into the abyss ♫ #♪ off of that dark precipice ♫ #♪ in existentialist bliss ♫ #♪ it gazed back into me ♫
