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

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

harrysgucciteam:

tumblr_pjmkcyqpr31qd21xv_540

 

biggest-goldiest-fish:

Bottom left

 

aliaitee:

top right

 

rainbow-mcgee:

I’m not even an adult, but top left

 

aliaitee:

i’m not an adult either

 

chicken-burrito-official:

bottom left

 

chicken-burrito-official:

i’m looking through the notes and generally what i see:

top left and bottom left: mellow, fun, think this is kinda interesting

top right: very rare, mysterious folk who don’t explain their opinion much

bottom right: “FUCC You All!! bottom right is the one true god!!! AAaah let’s Fight over this!” kinda responses.

no opinion really: yeah they didn’t know this was such a thing

 

bundleofnervousenergy:

Bottom left

 

toomuchdickfort:

I’m just bottom right Bc right hand and also left is for put things out of the way…

 

awkward-scarfy-boi:

Bottom right

 

dreamhunterwolf:

i’m not an adult but bottom right

 

justasheepinwolfsclothing:

Bottom left

 

coffiero:

top right (i’m not an adult)

 

thnksfrthmania:

Bottom left, it gets hotter fastest on my stove

 

thetimeoftheoath1777:

Mine has only 2, but I like the left burner

 

het-cats-mustaches:

Bottom left. It’s in perfect placement

 

somepretty-things:

In my old house it was bottom right… but my apartment now it’s bottom left because of the layout of my kitchen for some reason. Idk why it changed for me, but the bottom right just doesn’t feel right now. 

 

delightfully-thomi-posts:

Top Left!

 

belindapendragon:

Bottom right

 

sufficientlylargen:

Flamethrower by the stove.

 

fermatas-theorem:

bottom left because it’s the one that changes size so I never have to change any of my habits for cooking different things

Bottom-right is clearly the best burner, because you don’t have to reach as far and the larger burner size heats the pot more evenly. Bottom-left is okay for boiling pasta and stuff like that, but I’ve *tried* making popcorn on the bottom-left burner and it *doesn’t cook right* because that burner is too small.

(results not applicable to stove designs in which the burners are not of different sizes, or designs where the sizes have a different pattern; possibly also not applicable to people significantly taller than 5′3″ or equivalently shorter stoves)

Tags:

#is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #long post #reply via reblog #meme

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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sigmaleph:

@brin-bellway not reblogging the whole post but

The method of addition described in the OP [adding 7+6 by observing that 7+3=10, 6=3+3, so 7+3+3=10+3= 13] is implicitly being contrasted with some “normal” way, and I’m curious what that normal way actually is. Anyone know?

I don’t know if this is the “normal” way, but I do mental arithmetic by having all the single-digit additions cached (so 7+6=13 is a one-step result of the method), and doing stuff similar to the OP if I am unsure/forgot/dealing with longer numbers I don’t want to do digit-by-digit. Note that OP is implicitly doing some results caching of their own to remember that 7+3=10 and 3+3=6

[previously on]

—

I find 3+3=6 much more intuitive and cache-y than 7+6=13, because the first one isn’t overflowing into another digit.

The way you echo back the description of the method, while not wrong really, makes it sound a lot more abstract than it feels in my brain. It feels more like the numbers are made of something with the consistency of dough or soft clay, and I tear a chunk off of one number and stick it onto the other one, then look at the sizes of the resulting two piles of number. Or maybe pouring water from one jug to another until it’s full and then looking at the amount leftover in the first jug, kind of like that puzzle in Die Hard with a Vengeance†. (I always did like that movie as a child, though I would tend to forget that not all of the movie was puzzles and end up unpleasantly surprised by the beginning and end.)

—

Quite possibly caching everything is the normal way, yeah. I know it’s the normal way to do 1×1-digit multiplication. The kids in my Girl Scout troop made fun of me for not having the times tables memorised: I never bothered and just worked them out on the fly as needed. Some of them have ended up ingrained through sheer use, but I never did put any deliberate effort into ingraining them.

(ingrained-through-sheer-use rather than through any deliberate effort is also how I learned to touch-type [link])

—

†For those of you unfamiliar: you get a 3-gallon jug, a 5-gallon jug, and a fountain (from/to which you may both take and give water). Measure out 4 gallons. (also do it in two minutes or a bomb goes off, because supposedly this is an action movie and not edutainment)

Tags:

#my childhood #math #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #death mention #bullying mention

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

naxzella:

finding out people dont usually add numbers by first adding something to make a ten (for example 7+6= 7 plus 3 is 10 plus another 3 is 13) & that its actually an adhd thing is the WILDEST shit literally ive lived like 10 years (or however old i was when i learned to add and stuff) thinking thats how everyone does it. what the fuck

 

cabronallorona:

What

 

overherewiththequeers:

It’s also an autism thing, apparently.

 

teaboot:

W H A T

 

leap-yeap:

Oh yeah! This is also part of why autistic people/people with adhd struggle in math classes. Our brains process math and numbers in a totally different way. Many people on the spectrum struggle with the “show your work” part of math because we can’t exactly tell you why it works/how it works. We just kinda do it

 

black-infinity-parked-outside:

It’s also a maths dyslexia thing!

 

maryellencarter:

So I don’t innately do this but I was taught to do it? Now I’m really confused.

(I wonder if a disproportionate number of people who homeschool for primarily religious reasons, and/or of the people who create curricula marketed to that audience, are autistic or ADHD or otherwise neurodivergent. It would sure explain the absolute scathing scorn for the idea that children need “socialization”, and possibly the popularity of theme-integrated “unit studies” and self-directed “unschooling”… and it could evolve pretty easily by those originally being the kids who did a *lot* better homeschooled than in public schools… hmm.)

(Every so often I circle back around to the question of whether any of the things that make me think I’m autistic are inborn or whether they all come from my upbringing. Because my sperm donor is definitely autistic and also an abusive asshole, and my bio-incubator may be autistic or ADHD or something else along those lines but by *god* does she have the executive dysfunction in spades. And they’re both controlling as fuck. So the only way to socialize Correctly was his way, and the only way to get anything done was her way, and given childhood neuroplasticity… does it really matter if I was born autistic or whatever I am? Am I just irreversibly whatever-it-is now and I should be learning to work with it, or am I accidentally meandering back toward neurotypicality (and what does that mean for my online friendships if so), or was I actually neurodivergent all along and it’s just the extroversion confusing me? :P)

Not sure about fundies as such, but FWIW I was in secular homeschool groups (though this included a fair number of relatively laid-back religious types who didn’t mind hanging out with the rest of us) and they were very autistic. And they got distilled to increasingly high concentrations of autism the older they got, because allistics were a lot more likely to leave for public school. Groups of homeschooled teenagers tended to be upwards of 50% autistic, and a lot of the rest had autistic siblings.

—

The method of addition described in the OP is implicitly being contrasted with some “normal” way, and I’m curious what that normal way actually is. Anyone know?

Tags:

#autism #homeschool #my childhood #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #abuse cw #math #reply via reblog

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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archonofquandaries:

kitswulf:

brin-bellway:

michaelblume:

feotakahari:

People complain a lot about the “hot political takes interspersed with anime girls” Tumblrs, but I find them less jarring than the “hot political takes interspersed with GIFs of ejaculating penises” Tumblrs.

I am once again reminded that other peoples’ experiences of the internet can be very different from mine.

Now I’m wondering how many people reading this fall into the “this is a reminder of how different other people’s experiences can be” camp and how many into the “god, do I know that feel” camp.

(Personally, I’m in know-that-feel.)

I am also in know-that-feel territory.

I have literally never encountered pornography during my use of tumblr as a content aggregation/blogging site. 

Oh, don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t the *pornography* that was the unwanted interruption.

Possibly I should have put the rest of my original reply in the main text body rather than the tags:

#there is a time and a place for reading hot political takes and it is *not* while looking for porn #look I get that you want to demonstrate your SJ-ness in order to reassure people that #just because you write *fiction* about women getting brainwashed doesn’t mean you support The Patriarchy in actuality #but you could just *link* to your politics blog from your porn blog

—

(I mean, the penis GIFs *per se* are also annoying, but I accept that a search for porn will involve wading through some of those. Plenty of people *are* in fact into that sort of thing, even if I’m not.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #nsfw text

Accounting terms as a metaphor for life

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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swimmer963:

brin-bellway:

swimmer963:

I just had a conversation about the difference between conceptualizing your own life as something like a balance sheet, versus something like a profit & loss statement, and I’m finding this a surprisingly fruitful analogy. 

Balance sheet: You are tracking assets and liabilities – a snapshot overview of your position in the world. Assets might be literal money and stuff, intangibles like skills, youth, attractiveness, family ties, or even more nebulous, like memories of good experiences. If you’re looking at your life from a balance sheet perspective, you are a collector, trying to gather and hold onto as much of the good as possible. Surveying your life and noting that you’re holding a good-sized pool of equity (of all types) will feel safe and successful. Giving up possessions, forgetting childhood memories, or drifting away from friends and family, might feel like losing a part of yourself. I associate this model with a diachronic sense of self. 

(There is probably some possible analogy here re depreciation on assets, that I’m too tired to unpack right now). 

Profit & loss: You are tracking revenue and expenditures – the rate of change over time, and whether your trajectory is positive on net. Recent good experiences, learning and personal growth and skills gained, and literal money-earning potential feel like success and safety, as does having more than enough energy and motivation to fuel your ongoing day-to-day life; putting in unsustainable amounts of effort, spending yourself to stay afloat, feels like the worst kind of failure. Your absolute position, and where you were five years ago, both matter less. Noticing that you’ve left something behind (friends, family, an old sense of self) in your race for forward momentum, probably doesn’t hurt as much. I associate this viewpoint with being more episodic. 

I tend toward the profit & loss (which makes sense, I’m more episodic than many people I know), and I think I’ve moved even further in that direction in recent years, an adaptation to the life I’ve chosen – it doesn’t feel like I have the luxury to sit around accumulating assets and stability and a comfortable position to survey my life. The categories of revenue I’m currently pulling in are totally different from what I was tracking five years ago, when I was a nurse in Canada, and that seems fine. I’m not the same person as I was then. 

I think this does make me more vulnerable towards vicious spirals in bad times, and over-updating on how things have gone recently. 

I was unfamiliar with the terms “diachronic” and “episodic” sense of self, so I looked them up and found this [link].

The post mentions diachronics often “pitying” episodics, but I find my main emotion is not *pity* but *defensiveness*. The web of associations I’m getting is mostly people (they usually call themselves Buddhists; I don’t know enough about Buddhism to know how central an example they are) who think that [lacking a sense of a cohesive, continuous self] is both the objectively more true and subjectively superior way to live, and that the highest goal in life is to obtain it. IME, the one being pitied is usually *me*. I wonder what kind of circles 2012!RONBC travelled in.

Interestingly, given your examples, for much of my life “how much money do I currently have saved up” has been a *much* larger factor in the strength of my financial position than “how much income am I likely to make in the near future”. I’ve spent a *lot* of time over the years living primarily off of savings, and these days I do sometimes tend to view income, not as directly going to expenses, but as a way of acquiring savings that one then *actually* uses.

And come to think of it, this isn’t even the first time that someone has connected that with me having a stronger continuity of self [link], though not in quite the same sense that you’re talking about.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this, but it’s interesting stuff.

Fascinating! I haven’t experienced much pity or judgment from either direction on the episodic-vs-diachronic spectrum, and I don’t think I’ve interacted with the Buddhist type much. I’m also not all that extreme on the episodic end, and both styles make a lot of sense to me. 

Reading your post, I’m reminded that 10 years ago, I was a *lot* further on the “income is a way to acquire savings that you then live off” end of the spectrum. At some point in the last 5 years or so, I passed a threshold from most of my resources being in literal savings, to most of my resources being in my ability to keep obtaining resources in future. (I guess, in this handwavy model, a nursing degree is sort of an intangible asset? On some level I would be *delighted* if I had to fall back on this; I miss nursing.) I think most of my personal resources are in the form of “reputation in my community as a skilled ops person”. That’s also a sort of intangible asset, if you squint at it sideways… (I am starting to stretch the accounting metaphors pretty far here). 

In any case, at one point I considered it mandatory to have 1-2 years of runway in savings (back in Canada, when a year’s living costs were like $30K). Then, later on, I spent down those savings in order to get married, move to Australia, later move to the Bay Area, and generally have my life go in completely unexpected directions. I spent a while being *terrified* by the instability and chaos of it, and I’ve become ok with it by reminding myself that my security and ability to survive the future rests, not on my current pile of resources, but on my accumulated skills, social capital, and resilience/ability to land on my feet. 

Some of my current sense of security comes from other fall-back assets, like having family who will let me live rent-free in their spare room for three months on a week’s notice. Knowing I have that luxury gives me a lot more willingness to take risks and optimize less for security. But I’m definitely not optimizing for financial security right now – it would be madness to live in the Bay Area on a nonprofit salary if I was. And there are unlikely-but-not-that-unlikely scenarios, like getting seriously ill and being unable to work for a while, that I’m not really protecting against.

Hmm. I can imagine someone looking at this exact situation more from a balance sheet perspective, and focusing on the overall status of “intangible assets” like job skills and social networks, rather than mostly looking at their impact on the profit & loss statement and the delta over recent time periods to judge how well things are going. This spectrum reminds me a bit of Spencer Greenberg’s post on Stability vs Acceleration as different life strategies: https://www.facebook.com/spencer.greenberg/posts/10104091893110202

Tags:

#(December 2018) #conversational aglets #adventures in human capitalism #adventures in University Land #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #amnesia cw? #(I just now read that Stability vs Acceleration post and yes it does remind me a lot of diachronic vs episodic) #(in that I am so accustomed to being pressured towards an acceleration I don’t want that #merely *mentioning* the existence of a continuum immediately makes me feel defensive) #(since I know what people who bring it up tend to say next) #((in a PM a while back I described myself as #”tending to measure my life’s progress in terms of the number of potential disasters I’ve mitigated #and the extent to which I’ve mitigated them”)) #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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kitswulf:

brin-bellway:

michaelblume:

feotakahari:

People complain a lot about the “hot political takes interspersed with anime girls” Tumblrs, but I find them less jarring than the “hot political takes interspersed with GIFs of ejaculating penises” Tumblrs.

I am once again reminded that other peoples’ experiences of the internet can be very different from mine.

Now I’m wondering how many people reading this fall into the “this is a reminder of how different other people’s experiences can be” camp and how many into the “god, do I know that feel” camp.

(Personally, I’m in know-that-feel.)

I am also in know-that-feel territory.

Tags:

#(November 2018) #conversational aglets #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #sexuality and lack thereof #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #nsfw text?

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Anonymous asked: would be good if individuals could just easily adjust their own sex drives up or down as wanted, really. I mean, I know there are medications with either effect, but I don’t mean like that, I mean like you’d adjust a setting in a piece of software.

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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theopjones:

brin-bellway:

theopjones:

brin-bellway:

argumate:

it would indeed be very handy!

I think like most emotions it would be kind of self-reinforcing, in that once you’re at one end of the scale the other end seems unappealing, but it would still be good to have the option available.

…do people normally find a given level of libido self-reinforcing?

Only middling-libido!mes want to stay that way long-term; I get sick of high libido after ~1 day and of low libido after ~1 week. (Unless I’m too distracted by other things to notice the vague sense of being incomplete that happens when my libido is too low for too long, which is how I spent the month of April. But even that is more “being sufficiently fucked up that your damage-assessment mechanism is also damaged”, rather than actually being okay with it.)

Mind you, when I see other people complaining of loss of libido, they’re almost always talking about practical effects and not the inherent badness of having an ego-syntonic part of your psyche go missing, which makes me wonder if maybe ego-neutral libidos are more common than typical-minding would lead me to believe.

Kind of my feeling is that I often get the feeling of IQ reduced by 25% around hot woman + weird effects on inhibitions (both reduced and increased. Which is sort of self-reinforcing. 

But is also why I agree with the anon that I don’t really like a lot of my sex drive. 

I would kind of like it if I could turn off my feelings of sexual and romantic attraction 2/3rds of the time. And thats a lot of the reason. I often don’t like a lot of the effect that it has on me.

And I also wish I could shut off a lot of inappropriate times I’m attracted to someone or a lot of the feelings of unrequited crushes and such.

…okay, in hindsight I guess I should have figured my other divergences would imply divergence here as well. I had…kind of forgotten that sex drives could have interpersonal effects, since mine doesn’t really.

(I wish you good luck and good coping.)

Yah. 

For me its very difficult to separate any feeling of sex drive from attraction to particular people that I find hot.

While I haven’t actually had sex yet, even when jerking off, its pretty difficult to separate the feeling of sex from individual attraction. Its pretty much inseparable from fantasizing about the people I find attractive.

Tags:

#(October 2017) #conversational aglets #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #asexuality

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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jadagul:

Growing up, I would often read people describe “the spot on your back that you can’t reach.” Generally in the context of, like, putting on sunscreen.

I was always super confused by this, in a classic case of generalizing from one example. I can still overlap my hands at the small of my back; there’s nowhere on my back I can’t reach pretty comfortably. It still surprises me every time someone can’t do that.

 

shedoesnotcomprehend:

….wait, that’s actually a thing?

I always assumed that when people said that, they meant, like, “the spot on your back that’s slightly awkward to reach so maybe if someone’s putting on sunscreen right next to you they’ll get it for you since you can’t see it anyway”

 

brin-bellway:

Me, reading a story with centaurs that has just mentioned them having a scratching post†: “Huh, yeah, centaurs *would* have large swaths of their bodies they can’t reach with their hands. It’s *weird*, trying to wrap my head around the idea of people who can’t reach every part of their skin with their manipulating appendages. What must that be like?”

Me: “…wait, hang on, there are some humans who are like that”

Me: “my *mom* is like that”

(When it first came up, Mom was likewise surprised to learn that I *could* reach every spot on my back. She brought up age and fatness as possible reasons for us to differ on this, but I remember there’s a Shel Silverstein poem about the one spot on your back you can’t reach that expected children to find this a relatable feel, so I expect it’s not that. Fatness could maybe still be involved.)

†Edit: I mean this in the sense of “a post you rub against to scratch yourself”, not the sense of “a post you scratch”.

 

justice-turtle:

I was always told this was a sexual dimorphism thing – that (cis) girls could reach the middle of their back while (cis) boys could not, and that it was due to some kind of evolutionary thing about girls having specialized baby-holding elbows while boys had specialized spear-throwing elbows. (hence “you throw like a girl” = you throw badly)

I take it this is all a load of bullcrap?

 

brin-bellway:

Probably a load of bullcrap, yeah. Even if it is sex-linked, I doubt those are the reasons for it.

(Mom and I are both cis women, though she has PCOS and I don’t so our hormonal profiles are noticeably different. And I think jadagul (the OP, who can do it) is cis-male, but I won’t swear to it.)

 

jadagul:

Yeah, I’m cis-male, and the partner I mentioned elsethread who can’t is cis-female.

Now, (cis-)women are more flexible on average than (cis-)men, so I would guess that more women can do this than men. But that’s a weak guess—if someone who knew what they were talking about said that more men can reach the small of their back because, I dunno, they on average have proportionately longer forearms or something, I would believe them.

(Side note: your elbow really isn’t the limiting factor here regardless; very few people are limited in how far they can flex their elbows. It’s going to be driven by shoulder mobility and by the relative dimensions of various body parts).

Tags:

#(October 2017) #conversational aglets #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #gender

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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shedoesnotcomprehend:

(i)

A side effect of my sleep disorder is that I have lots of really vivid strange dreams, which I remember well when I wake up.

Last night I dreamt that something inexplicable/apparently paranormal (details not important) happened, and that I posted to tumblr saying “hey, so this really weird thing happened, and I can’t come up with a mundane explanation for it, does anyone have any ideas?”

In the dream, I got several replies to the post, offering potential explanations. I posted again thanking people for their input and saying that, as it happened, none of those could apply in this case.

“Obviously,” I added, “from your point of view, the most plausible explanation at this point is ‘some random person on the internet is lying.’ But I’m curious what the most reasonable explanation is from my point of view, given that I know it really did happen.”

At which point I woke up, making the answer immediately clear: the most reasonable explanation was that it did not, in fact, happen, because I was dreaming – even if I was quite sure it had happened.

(ii)

A while ago I had another dream along the same lines.

In that dream, something had happened that could happen in real life, but happens much more frequently in dreams – I don’t remember what it was, but something like “leaving the house and then realizing you’re not wearing pants,” or “finding out you’re signed up for a class you haven’t gone to all semester.”

Within the dream, I noticed this, and turned to the person next to me. “You know,” I observed, “if I were being strictly logical, I should now conclude that this is all a dream and none of it is really happening. Just goes to show how silly and impractical that kind of thinking is.”

Whereupon, of course, I woke up, and subsequently felt very silly indeed.

(iii)

I’m pretty sure my subconscious is trying to tell me something.

I’m a little concerned that what it’s trying to tell me seems to be “you’re living out Inception; wake up.”

But then, that would just be ridiculous.

 

shitifindon:

huh!

This is fascinating to me because, while I do (very rarely) sometimes consider in a dream whether or not I’m dreaming and come up with a “no”, when I do that while awake there is an experiential/intuitive factor present that makes the answer *super obvious* and that is consistently missing in dreams. (It’s just that in dreams I don’t always retain the information “hey, if you can’t feel The Thing That Means You’re Obviously Awake Right Now, you probably aren’t”.)

And like, MOST of the time, if I’m dreaming and it occurs to me to wonder whether I’m dreaming I can notice the absence of The Thing That Means I’m Obviously Awake. Or if not that I can pick up on another blatant sign, such as having a super hard time visually focusing on objects, or the stubborn refusal of bathrooms to continue having walls when I’m in them, or my mother being alive.

Do you not have a thing like that, or what?

 

shedoesnotcomprehend:

I definitely don’t have a Thing That Means I’m Obviously Awake. (A fairly common experience for me is picking up on environmental/mood cues that correlate with being-in-a-dream, and going “oh shoot I am totally dreaming right now aren’t I? great, the jump scare is coming any second,” and then it turning out that I am in fact awake.)

I do have a good reliable check I can perform, though (like you) I often forget it exists in dreams: I don’t feel pain in dreams, so I’ll bite the side of my hand, and if it hurts a little I’m awake and if my teeth go straight through painlessly I’m asleep. (As a kid I assumed everyone had this and that was what the “pinch yourself to see if you’re dreaming” thing was about.)

Unfortunately, though, this really only works while I’m doing it, because (I don’t know if other people experience this?) dreams don’t just give me invented current-experiences, they often come with fictional memories. This can range from “ah yes I have been searching for this mystical artifact for years” to “I can remember clearly the day I learned to fly” to “oh yeah I’m definitely awake because I checked just a little while ago.” (I first consciously noticed this phenomenon after Inception came out; I tried the remember-how-you-got-here thing, and discovered that my brain was cheerfully willing to spin out vivid memories of how I got there.)

(“Try reading a book” used to also be a good check for me; in a dream, I was never able to. Then one time I tried to use it and my brain cheerfully generated pages of made-sense-at-the-time text, and I concluded I was awake, and was quite startled when I woke up. These days, my second-best check for dreaming is that I can never type in dreams, especially not dialing phone numbers; I constantly hit the wrong keys, and then backspace too far, and then hit the wrong keys again…)

 

shitifindon:

Weeeeeeird. Brains, man!

(If I had to describe The Thing That Means I’m Obviously Awake, I’d say it’s something like… a solidity and concreteness and embodiedness of experience? Dream experiences hit all or most of the right highlights, but fall down on the really minor stuff like ‘this table is at the exact same height every time I touch it’, and the framing stuff like ‘I have functioning vision, hearing, taste, smell, and proprioception all of the time, but cannot ever see the events of my life from a third-person perspective’.)

 

brin-bellway:

I think I’m in between the two of you. One of my big differences in dream-vs-real experience is that my sense of touch (and related senses, like proprioception and nociception) keeps running in the background when I’m awake, but when I’m dreaming I only feel touch/pain/position-in-space if I’m paying attention to it.

This is similar to your experiential/intuitive factor of Obvious Awakeness, yet is almost completely useless for dream testing because of pink-elephant problems. If you try to actively determine whether your sense of touch keeps working when you’re not paying attention to it, well, now you’re paying attention to it.

(I suspect it might be the reason why I pretty much never get false *positives* on dream tests, though (with only one exception I can think of). If I’m seriously wondering whether I’m dreaming, I almost certainly am. But dream!me generally doesn’t find that line of reasoning convincing *enough* to bet on it (do things that will go badly if I turn out not to be dreaming), and I can’t say I blame her.)

I don’t currently have any tests that consistently or even near-consistently work, just some that work sometimes.

—

Somewhat tangential, but kind of related: after watching the Doctor Who episode “Extremis”, I found myself occasionally performing shadow tests in dreams and failing them. I thought it was weird while watching that episode that everyone leaps from “we’re part of a simulated reality” to “we must be a training ground for aliens preparing to conquer the alpha-reality Earth”, without considering other reasons you might be part of a simulated reality, and it seems my subconscious agrees.

 

gasmaskaesthetic:

I was dreaming once and decided to see if I was dreaming…by throwing myself down the stairs. I don’t recommend that test.

(see also)

Tags:

#(August 2017) #conversational aglets #dreams #unreality cw #embarrassment squick #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see