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

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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rusalkii:

sdhs-rationalist:

brin-bellway:

I’ve been thinking about awe lately. I’m wondering if maybe it’s not that I can’t feel it, but that I don’t feel it in response to the standard stars and sunsets and religious rituals.

(Probably the thing that got me thinking this was telling @justice-turtle​ about how I can’t feel emotions that I’m under too much pressure to feel. Rituals and sunsets and fucking stars have so much baggage regarding how one ought to feel about them.)

Maybe awe is the feeling I get sometimes reading about mental experiences that are foreign to me, neither good nor bad but different. Maybe awe is in headspaces and phantom wings, the feeling like seeing the multiverse spread out before you and you’ll never leave your own little patch of it but it’s enough, it’s enough to see it and to know that there are people walking the paths you’ll never take.

Maybe awe is the feeling of reading really well-done porn for a kink that you’re completely not into. The words are filled with some foreign kind of power, power you can’t quite directly perceive but you can hear the whoosh as it flies over your head. You’ll never feel it yourself but it’s enough to know it’s there and to know that there are people who can, who can feel the power in those words and take it into themselves until their bones hum with it and their nervous system sparks.

Sometimes it’s enough, and maybe that’s what it means.

For me, awe is that feeling at the moment right before I comprehend something far beyond myself, that moment where unconscious realization shapes my perspective before conscious understanding has the chance to go in and blind me with outcome bias.

Awe is the rare moment I get when, for just a second, I can really see what I am looking at.

The closest I’ve ever come to understanding religion came from me meta-ing the concept of identity into a spiritual mess. I just kept thinking how I was me but I could be not me but then I wouldn’t be me until I felt, just for a moment, that I understood it all. I chase those feelings whenever I can find them.

Tags:

#(February 2016) #conversational aglets #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #the wondrous variety of sapient life

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

maryellencarter:

senator-mon-mothma:

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

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

itsbenedict:

Shorts! They’re Like Small, Shitty Pants, That Allow Bugs™ To Feast On Your Leg-Meats.

One of the nice things about Canada is that it’s almost always cold enough that I can get away with leggings without overheating. I own a couple pairs of shorts, but pretty much only wear them for exercise and when travelling to warmer climes.

(Mind you, bugs routinely bite through my leggings, so I’m not sure shorts would actually make things much worse on *that* front. But I own mosquito-net pants now, so that’s a thing when necessary.)

I don’t get people who actively like shorts: clothes are (if done right) comfy, why do you not want to be covered in them? If temperature weren’t a concern, I would wear turtlenecks and hoodies and sweatpants, like, all the time. I feel more confident and better able to handle stuff in long sleeves: I think it might be similar principles to weighted blankets.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #bugs #clothing #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #our home and cherished land

Letters grouped according to how similar the lowercase version is to the uppercase

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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aeiously:

  • Smaller version, the ideal situation: Cc Oo Ss Uu Vv Ww Xx Zz
  • Quite similar, pretty good!: Bb Ff Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Pp Tt Yy
  • OK, I guess can see how they got that: Dd Ee Nn Qq
  • ????????: Aa Gg, Rr

 

the-real-numbers:

Ordered from worst to best

 

sigmaleph:

have you ever tried to write something case-sensitive by hand (e.g. the password to the office wifi)

lowercase-uppercase similarity Is Bad Actually

 

brin-bellway:

#idk maybe people can make their handwritten letters look different in different cases  #i cannot but my handwriting is notoriously bad

I don’t think I have much trouble with case-sensitive handwriting? At least if I’m actively trying to be clear about which case is which.

3828b2bd2cb863ebc1acdcf35bd85e7a4ca94ed3

^ a randomly-generated mixed-case string

I do often blur the distinction between f and F if I’m *not* actively trying to be clear, though.

 

sigmaleph:

yeah i can’t do that

(without a lot of effort and possibly multiple tries and honestly at that point why don’t i just text you the password)

Tags:

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

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

asexualactivities:

Catching up on the prompts from this week. Kind of long.

—

I have sex dreams, or at least, I have kink dreams. I tried to write an explanation, but I kept feeling like I was just recreating a bit from an email I wrote in August 2015. I might as well copy that here instead.

“My erotic dreams are about hive minds, mind-control magic, the occasional sedative, and, increasingly, mundane hypnosis (sometimes partnered, sometimes not). Genitals are rarely involved, and when they are they aren’t really the point. The dreams’ consent status tracks the stories I’ve been exposed to in waking life. When I was young and had only ever encountered non-con stories, I only ever had non-con dreams. Age 18 – 20, when I had a little bit of consensual stuff but mostly still had to resort to non-con, I had the occasional consensual dream but still mostly non-con. The past year, I’ve consumed mostly consensual stories, and had mostly consensual dreams. Some people are fundamentally disturbed by having rape dreams and worry what it says about them, but I’m not one of them. (Well, okay, I was at the *very* beginning, but I got over it quickly.) I prefer the consensual dreams for purely practical reasons: all else being equal, it is better to feel happy anticipation than terror at any given moment (even when I’ll be completely over the terror in twenty minutes), and when my response to figuring out what’s going to happen is to run away, about half the time I *succeed* in escaping. Wasted opportunities, those.

A few months back, I was curious how often I had erotic dreams, so I went through and counted how many were in my dream journal. I then divided this number by the number of days since I started keeping the dream journal, and came up with one day in 70. That’s the average over about 4.5 years.”

Since my libido varies with menstrual phase, I started wondering whether the frequency of erotic dreams also correlated with menstrual phase, and cross-referenced my dream journal with the menstruation marks on my calendar. Oddly, the main result was that I have erotic dreams during periods ~50% more often than I would if they were evenly distributed. (Menstruation is a “wildcard” time for me: my libido’s all over the place from period to period. I was expecting more dreams during ovulation, the consistently high-libido time, but it was only slightly higher than chance.)

Despite not “blooming”–my sexuality doesn’t seem to have changed all that much since my earliest memories, though I do understand it better now–I didn’t have my first erotic dream until I was 15. (It was about being assimilated by the Borg.)

When there are other people involved, they’re usually random NPCs, occasionally established fictional characters. (I don’t see their faces, but–being faceblind–there aren’t normally faces in my dreams anyway.) I don’t think I’ve ever had an erotic dream about real people. Sometimes I play myself, sometimes someone else.

—

I can enjoy porn, but damn is it hard to find good porn when you’re turned off by intercourse. (For extra “fun”, I’ve found myself being turned off by non-con these days too. There is consensual hypnosis porn out there, but most of it is still non-con.) I usually have to skim bits even at the best of times.

Once in a blue moon I’ll enjoy a still image, but I almost always use text-based porn. This is probably an extension of preferring text-based media in general (even non-sexual videos get overstimulating, and audios to a lesser extent), plus it’s easier to skim the squicky bits with text, or pause, or go back and savour a particularly good bit.

—

In subject matter, my fantasies are much like my dreams. I’d say their frequency and intensity varies with libido, but I pretty much *define* libido as the frequency and intensity of sexual fantasies, so that’s tautological. If I’m idly daydreaming in the background while I do other things, I won’t get turned on, but if I focus on it I usually will.

(Re: this post, I usually deal with the problem of getting bogged down in negotiation by having most or all of it happen offscreen. A lot of the problems you describe kind of sound like a mixture of not skipping over enough stuff and trying to have very visually detailed fantasies without having a detailed enough visual imagination to run them on. My visual imagination is towards the low-detail end, and I deal with this by just not having a lot of visual detail in my fantasies. There’s some visual aspects, but mostly I focus on verbal and touch/kinesthetic stuff.)

Okay, so the reason I couldn’t find that last paragraph for a context-link is because it was never on my blog at all. Fixing that.

(you’ve probably figured it out by the time you read this far, but I wrote the OP)

Tags:

#(October 2016) #conversational aglets #oh look an original post #sexuality and lack thereof #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #dreams #nsfw text

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

overlordtulip:

A few months ago, it came to my attention that, for many people, helplessness is a central cause of anxiety, such that a good way to reduce their anxiety is to reduce their sense of helplessness.

This is deeply bizarre to me. For my part, I tend to find helplessness actively comforting, and situations of helplessness to be among those where I have the least anxiety. If there’s a situation whose outcome I’m unable to affect, then I can just relax and let it resolve itself, rather than worrying about exactly what actions to take and how they’ll affect the outcome.

(For example: asking for things from people who I’m not accustomed to asking for things from is often a high-anxiety activity for me; but waiting for a response after asking, when there’s nothing more for me to do, is low-anxiety.)

I’m now kind of curious how many other people have the arrangement I have rather than the apparently-default helplessness-increases-anxiety one. And also how the apparently-default one works, because my model of its internals is currently pretty weak.

I’ve thought about this too, and I think the way it works for me is that *uncertainty* increases anxiety. Helplessness decreases uncertainty about *what to do next* but increases uncertainty about *the outcome*: which of these effects is bigger depends on the situation.

Waiting for a response to a difficult email is worse than writing it, because if I haven’t sent the email yet I *know* there’s been no response and I at least theoretically have ways I can tweak the phrasing and such to make them more likely to respond well, but if I’ve sent it the response *might* arrive at any time and *might* be bad, and I have no further methods of weighting the probabilities in my favour.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

prokopetz:

Any time somebody posts a video of some outlandishly large classical instrument, there are always comments to the effect of why would they go to the trouble to make such a large instrument when it just ends up sounding terrible?

Let me explain you a thing.

The sound that comes out of your speakers or headphones sounds awful because your computer is not capable of reproducing what such instruments sound like. Its audio hardware does not have a resonanting chamber large enough nor an electromagnet strong enough to even approximate it.

You know how, when something is deeply known, one might poetically say that it’s felt in the bones? When somebody starts rocking out on one of those puppies, you can literally feel it in your bones. These devices are capable of achieving the resonant frequency of the human skeleton.

What they sound like to the ear is very nearly beside the point!

Tags:

#okay but counterpoint: the feeling of a sound resonating in your bones *is* terrible #I avoided the fireworks shows on Canada Day in large part because I can’t stand the resonance of the explosions #when I go to concerts I am always careful to get a seat way in the back so I can just hear it and not have to *feel* it #pretty sure I’ve been known to *leave* some concerts because they didn’t have anywhere far enough back to be safe #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #music

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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gasmaskaesthetic:

brin-bellway:

gasmaskaesthetic:

Why does anger feel good? Most of my undesirable emotions are painful in addution to themselves, so I actively want them to stop. Anger is the one I hesitate to soothe. When I’m angry, it makes me angrier to try to talk myself down instead of letting the rage play out. I can still do it, but it takes a very different kind of effort compared to sadness, or anxiety, fear, or irritation.

Sadness is something I impulsively indulge in, sometimes, but my natural tendency is to do so by seeking comfort, so it’s self-regulating.

When I’m anxious or afraid, I want to get out of that state immediately. This doesn’t always generate *effective* behavior but I’m not resisting the attempt to feel better out of an active desire to stay that way.

Irritation isn’t the same thing as anger. It’s excessive sensitivity. It can turn into anger, but I never want to remain irritable.

Anger moves me to take action. It’s satisfying to direct anger at a target. It feels *good* to rail against some real or imagined wrong. Some of the clearest thinking I’ve ever experienced has been at the peak of justified anger. The risk of indulgence here is pretty obvious. Given how much satisfaction I get from anger, I think I do a pretty good job of staying away from rage-bait. I’m also lucky in that I’m not easily driven to anger in the first place. Most of my anger-management is preventative. I’m not sure what I’d do if that got, say, 40% harder.

I’m curious about other people. Answer all or just some of these, if you want:

Do you work yourself up over things, intentionally or otherwise?

Do you seek out material that triggers anger but does little else for you?

When you are angry, do you ever want to stay angry?

Does that ever change depending on why you’re angry?

Do you find it difficult to notice that being angry is making you less effective?

*Does* anger make you less effective, and how do you tell either way?

Do you ever want to stay angry even after acknowledging that it would be better (for whatever reason) to stop being angry?

>>It’s satisfying to direct anger at a target.<<

Personally, I find anger the *exact opposite* of satisfying.

Anger, for me, is very much about violence. Anger is a desire to hurt the entity that wronged me; if the entity that wronged me is not capable of experiencing pain (like if a rock fell on my foot) or I don’t expect I will be able to successfully hurt them (so, always; violence is far too risky for me to seriously attempt it), this will often spread out into a more generalised longing to cause pain. Getting angry tends to wind up as a period of feeling intensely unfulfilled regarding the utter lack of beating-people-up in my life.

When angry, I tend to feel conflicted about ceasing to be angry in much the same way that I feel conflicted about any other attempt to deal with unfulfilled desires by ceasing to want the thing.

—

>>Do you seek out material that triggers anger but does little else for you?<<

Only under orders. Eventually I learned to treat “pressures you to experience anger” as a major red flag.

—

I can also be conflicted about ceasing to be afraid: yes, I want to be unafraid, but I specifically want to be unafraid *because the scary thing is gone*. Deep-breathing exercises and other such techniques, things about trying to trick your brain into feeling safe independently of whether it actually *is* safe, are repulsive. The closest I get is fear also increasing my desire to defend against *other* bad things than the one I’m actively being menaced with: to use the most recent example, I tend to be more interested in making my smartphone resilient against loss of Internet if I’m experiencing a lot of financial anxiety, even though my level of Internet access is effectively unrelated to how much money I have (I don’t expect to ever be poor enough to lack home Internet (it’s profitable on net!), nor rich enough to be comfortable buying [a personal mobile data connection with plenty of buffer]).

However, I usually *do* endorse ceasing to be sad even if nothing about the thing that was making me sad improves.

The bit about fear is really interesting! I tend to believe that I’ll be better able to handle whatever I’m afraid of if I’m not experiencing the physical symptoms of fear.

Tags:

#(September 2018) #conversational aglets #not sure why I didn’t get this one during the first pass #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #violence cw #anger management

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

hugintheraven:

exigencelost:

Okay look. Stephanie Meyer contributed four (4) cool things to the contemporary fantasy genre, which I shall now list here in the hopes of getting it out of my system. In descending order of importance:

1. Writing a story about a girl who wants something. Plot driven by a woman’s (non-vilified) desire. Truly dreadful execution but still a good idea, sort of a literary incarnation of the “he a little confused but he got the spirit” meme.

2. The fact that when Bella becomes a vampire she can still breathe but “there’s no relief tied to the action” which I remember verbatim because it fucking slapped. The idea of human physical sensations being partially defined by our mortality and the sensations still exist after you become undead but your experience of them is fundamentally different because you no longer need any of it? Extremely cool. The closest Meyer came to taking an interesting stance on vampires being dead.

3. Werewolves are immortal but they can literally stop whenever they want. That shit’s hilarious. Curse of immortality who.

4. The fact that vampires don’t sleep or get tired so their communally-raised baby doesn’t have a crib because she is always in someone’s arms. That was extremely cute and there’s a different, better book contained somewhere in that specific concept.

5. Depression being represented by like 6 blank chapters titled with months.

…wait, did you guys never lie awake at night as kids wondering what breathing would feel like if you didn’t *need* to do it

practicing holding your breath, partly to expand the *total* length of time you can hold it but also to try to expand the time length of the initial segment, of neither breathing nor feeling the lack

(though all too aware that feeling it for a few seconds at a time is probably a very different experience from feeling it indefinitely, from *knowing* that you can feel it indefinitely)

—

(I remember I started at a total length of around thirty seconds and managed to work my way up to about sixty, maybe sixty-five. I haven’t practised in ages, but just now I tried it and was able to do sixty seconds on the first try, and might have been able to squeeze a few more seconds out of it. Is it like riding a bike? Does puberty do something to increase your lung capacity relative to your oxygen consumption?)

Tags:

#Twilight #death tw #asphyxiation cw #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #reply via reblog #my childhood #(for anyone with their proofreader goggles on or otherwise paying close enough attention to notice: #there are two different spellings of the verb form of ”practise” in this post and both of them are deliberate) #(child!me spoke American and adult!me speaks Vaguely Canadian Mishmash) #((although I did start experimenting with Canadian spelling fairly young #–I knew from the age of 8 that one day I would live in Canada– #and that time period probably did overlap)) #((but I think ”practise” was among the later ones I adopted)) #(((I started off with ”favourite” and ”colour”))) #tag rambles #our home and cherished land #(((also I played a lot of Neopets and Runescape so some Britishisms leaked through from there))) #(((but there was definitely an aspect of ”I’m going to have to get used to it someday and might as well start now”))) #language

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

rustingbridges:

So in movies and shit people are always getting really angry and flipping tables and smashing their own shit. Not to spite anyone or anything, but just because they’re all mad or something.

Is this supposed to be relateable? Do people actually do this? Or is it just supposed to be dramatic shorthand?

Violence against entities that can’t feel pain is entirely unsatisfying, so eventually I stopped bothering with property damage because it wasn’t any better than repressing it.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #violence cw #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see