is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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overlordtulip:

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.

 

brin-bellway:

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.

 

rustingbridges:

I mean I also open jars and so on with left hand, but I think it’s just because I typically hold jars and bottles with my right. I know my right has a stronger grip.

I’ve been trying to teach myself to do things like that with my left hand, so I can intuitively have my right open for more important tasks, but it’s kinda hard to remember.

 

poipoipoi-2016:

Yeah, that feels about right to me. 

Also, my left shoulder is about twice the size of my right one, and if doing literally any shoulder work in the gym didn’t instantly result in injury, I’d probably spend some time/effort on that.

Tags:

#conversational aglets #handedness #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

overlordtulip:

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

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

asexualactivities:

If you’re an ace who masturbates regularly, what happens if you don’t?

In the short term, I’ll be very tired all the time [link]. I’ll sleep an extra hour a day and still be exhausted. (Since masturbating takes me *less* than an hour a day†, this makes it strictly superior in terms of time, in *addition* to being more effective and more pleasant.)

In the medium term, nothing. I have a menstrual-phase-linked libido, so in general any given level of sex drive will go away if I wait a few days.

In the long term, it’s hard to distinguish the effect of not masturbating *per se* from the effect of whatever’s preventing me from masturbating. Being overwhelmingly busy is unpleasant, of course. So is ignorance of the outlets available to you: *believing* that there’s nothing you can do about sexual frustration, or that what you can do isn’t much [link].

—

†It’s important that I not feel rushed, so I give myself as long as I want and don’t check the time until afterward. However, “as long as I want” invariably turns out to be between 25 and 40 minutes.

Tags:

#nsfw text #sexuality and lack thereof #people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

Anonymous asked; I’m ace (and libido-less) but the whole aces with kinks/fetishes thing has always been hard for me to wrap my brain around. Is it just a sex drive/libido thing? Is it more of a fascination/appreciation? I’d enjoy a topic on that so I could learn and better support my fellow aces!

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

asexualactivities:

One way I’ve heard it explained is that it’s not necessarily about sex at all. It’s often more about the power dynamics, the role play, things like that.

However, I personally have no experience with any of that, so would anyone who is more involved care to field this one?

*

I had an anon ask me a very similar question a few years back. Here’s what I told them.

Tags:

#asexuality #reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text? #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

paxamericana:

tumblr_prbhw9hxyv1qzeo2zo1_500

Okay, but now I have to know how self-aware this article is. I have university access to Wall Street Journal, brb.

…

Definitely at least somewhat:
“The charges regularly hitting our credit cards have expanded far beyond video and music-streaming services and, yes, newspapers.”

—

“Step 1: Audit. Log in to your credit card and bank accounts and make a list (or, better yet, a spreadsheet) of all your monthly and yearly subscriptions, along with their charges.

[…]

Step 2: Consolidate to family plans. Have your partner do the same and then cross-reference the lists. I quickly spotted some duplicates in my household.

[…]

When signing up for new services, look out for the ability to disable any auto-renew function, and if there’s a free trial, set a reminder on your calendar just before the trial period ends, so you can consider canceling before you get charged.”


I…I guess it’s good that there are people pointing this out to those who haven’t thought of it? Today’s lucky ten-thousand and all that. And of course, as the beginning of this thread points out, people subscribed to the Wall Street Journal are going to be disproportionately people careless about which subscriptions they’re on.

(even if I *personally* cannot comprehend the kind of mind that would sign up for Amazon Prime without first checking whether their spouse had it already, or for that matter the kind of mind that would not think to inform their spouse that they had Amazon Prime

also, the kind of mind that would not think long and hard about signing up for a $15/month *anything*, let alone this:

“Here’s a hilarious story. For the past three years I’ve been paying $15 a month for an electronic fax service I’ve used… twice. That’s $540. For the same amount, I could have bought 20 rolls of fax paper. Or 10 real working fax machines. Or a plane ticket to Ireland to visit the museum where the world’s first fax machine is on display.”)

((I’m trying very hard to be open-minded about this: I know everyone thinks their own talents are easy))

—

P.S. If I fed it into my financial calculator right, that $10/month service for 5 years has cost you ~$663, if you count lost interest at 4%.

Tags:

#now if you’ll excuse me I have an accounting exam to study for #adventures in human capitalism #juxtaposition #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

data point

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

carnalisation:

balioc:

oligopsalter:

As a reader, I like worldbuilding, even (and sometimes especially) the expository parts. I read SFF because it’s the genre that most delivers that. It feels actively annoying when I have to sit through Plot that I’ve seen a million times before to get to soak in a world that I haven’t, or even to look at (say) extruded D&D fantasy in fine everyday detail with new eyes.

I feel like this should be obvious, but I still see, pretty regularly, appeals to authors to stop so much worldbuilding and focus on what obviously really matters to presumed readers, the story. I’m sure there are plenty of readers for whom that’s true! Good for them! But it’s not universal and we’re living in a long-tail world. Unless you’re right on the edge of being able to write full-time and writing to market means the difference between having a day job or not, don’t let The Average Reader become a sort of imperative-issuing Big Other. I would guess there are many more readers who love baroque expository worldbuilding than there are people who are really into, I don’t know, mpreg werewolf fanfiction, but there’s a thriving audience for that and more power to them, so don’t let them hog all the fun!

Amen.

This can be applied more generally to showing-versus-telling, I think.  If you’ve got something that’s more interesting than the beat-by-beat progression of your yarn, you should tell us about it, rather than slicing it up into little pieces and embedding those pieces in the unfolding plot.

…but then again, I read splatbooks for fun, so maybe I’m not the best person to ask.

…but I’m probably not the only one who does that kind of thing.

Regarding “show don’t tell” – I went through books at an immense speed as a child. Real-life social interactions were mystifying, but books offered me all they lacked: they explained what was happening, why it was happening, what people felt when it happened, and how their reactions related to their feelings. It was a cheat sheet for human behavior, and it made little me more empathetic and interested in people even when my experiences with them were unpleasant.
When I encounter books that took “show don’t tell” to heart, they confuse and sometimes anger me. What do the characters mean by raising an eyebrow, or blinking slowly? Why are they reacting with anger here, and nonchalance there, and why do your other characters treat that as meaningful and informative?
It’s like dramatic face shots in movies, where the actors stare blandly at something and there’s emotional music and it’s obvious it’s supposed to convey something, but I never know what that is.
There’s a weird opposite phenomenon of characters reading facial expressions and narrating their readings “the look in his eyes told me he was deeply troubled by what he just saw” – they’re eyes! They’re orbs with lenses and people use them to see. How can you tell?
Obviously reading facial expressions is not magic for everyone. Still, I miss being catered to by writers allowing me to get a good view of the inside of character’s heads without having to throw up my hands and say “well I guess these people have reasons and emotions but I’ll never know which, thanks a lot”.

Tags:

#re: OP: #yes this #I looked in the notes and found this branch #which is not *as* pure in its Yes-This-ness as the OP #but is interesting and definitely has its moments of relatability #(I distinctly recall going on a similar rant about ”the look in their eyes” in my early teens) #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #autism

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

tigerator:

tumblr_pelvb7etjw1qebzbio1_500

 

ourobraxas:

parthenogenon:

OP WHO’S “WE” ??
WHO THE FUCK IS “WE”?
OP???

tumblr_inline_pfz8arnhrt1sylpc9_500

Tags:

#I don’t really want the where’s-waldo meme in the second image #I feel like it detracts from the first two posts #but it’s hard to find a branch that doesn’t have it #anyway this post sounds like something that ”half-human” probablybadrpgideas character would say #(and more indirectly like it’s poking fun of those news articles about neurological conditions) #(that refer to neurotypicals with the inclusive ”we”) #(no matter how likely it is that there are going to be some people with the condition in the audience)

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

brin-bellway:

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.)

Keep reading

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)

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

brin-bellway:

I’ve been wondering this on and off, and I figured I might as well get around to asking:

Are other people’s imaginations shut down or impaired when they’re sick?

Mine is: I pretty much don’t have visualised fantasies at all when I’m sick, and what fantasies I do have are much fewer in number and much less vivid. I can think of possible explanations that lead to both “this is a very common experience” (maybe it’s part of the cognitive issues that come with the brain’s convalescence mode) and “this is a very rare experience” (maybe it’s my brain’s way of resolving the conflict in the instinctive How to Respond to Illness code between “get lots of rest” and “avoid getting pregnant”, forcing a loss of libido by rendering me incapable of sexual fantasies (and, as a side effect, non-sexual fantasies)).

Anyone know how common imagination impairments are when sick? Failing that, anyone have anecdotal experience about whether this happens to them?

Still curious about this.

justice-turtle said: I know my whole conscious brain always feels kind of slow when I’m sick, like it’s not getting a supply of spoons to do anything. I still have exhaustingly vivid weird dreams, though.

Tags:

#(December 2016) #conversational aglets #replies #illness tw #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

Lizardywizard Avatar

lizardywizard

replied to your

post

:

In hindsight, I probably should have known that an…

wait I’m confused, what is a star worshipper and why does this make you feel broken (don’t have to answer if you don’t wanna, just curious)

I was using “star-worshipper” to mean people for whom looking at the night sky inspires awe. They tend to go on about how light pollution is bad for the soul and I’m not complete as a person until I’ve seen the Milky Way with my own eyes. I’ve heard this sort of thing enough over the years that I’m now sensitised to it: even things that, taken on their own, are value-neutral or only mildly charged statements about stargazing and the absence thereof tend to make me bristle because they invoke all these other memories of proselytising star-worshippers. (There have also been at least one or two statements in the textbook that were more than mildly charged.)

Now that I think about it, making the entire link and only the link italicised might have obscured the fact that it was a link. The last couple paragraphs of the linked post explain why it makes me feel broken.

(Later reflection suggests that I can feel awe or something in that neighbourhood, but only about people, not things, and especially not things that have been hyped up as awe-inspiring.)

lizardywizard said: ah yeah I was on mobile and that didn’t even show up as a link for me for some reason! (no offence taken!)

Tags:

#(June 2016) #conversational aglets #(I’m going to start queueing these again) #(there seem to be quite a few of them) #replies #adventures in University Land #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see