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

tremorbond asked: can you explain why you’d like to be famous? it sounds like a lot of work, for just a little bit of emotional satisfaction

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

winged-light:

I could try, but I don’t know how to explain it to someone who doesn’t want to be famous. Not being famous is just painful – like, it makes me feel sad and small and unimportant whenever I think about it so mostly I try not to think about it. If you don’t experience that then I’d guess you probably wouldn’t want to be famous, but I can’t necessarily explain why I experience that to someone whose mind is different enough that they don’t get it. Most of the time I assume everyone desperately wants to be famous but some of us are doing better/worse jobs of processing and dealing with the fact we’re unlikely to make it?

I think it’s partly a sense that things can’t be important if they’re not witnessed and remembered. If I do something really cool but nobody knows about it, then what was the point? It’s the sense of emptiness when you make a funny joke and then realise that yeah, that was clever and cool and you were terribly witty, but there’s only one person around to hear the joke so it’s kind of wasted.

Humans are like, the only important thing in this world. Making people happy and making them laugh and improving their lives is the only thing worth doing. That means ‘did humans like the thing’ is the only worthwhile measure of ‘was the thing good’. And I know that, say, donating money to charity is doing better on that metric than writing popular songs, because the recipients of charity like Being Alive more than the average human likes good music. If you measure by happiness caused, Bill Gates is way way more famous/popular than any singer. But my monkey brain is not very good at directly measuring happiness created, and therefore measures by number of fans and loudness of appreciation, and my monkey brain is basically never going to let me be happy unless I achieve at least some of that.

Being famous often involves also being rich. If you’re not rich already by the time you’re famous, you can rake in money by charging people to come to stadiums and listen to you talk. And being rich is really important to me. Partly so I can donate lots of money and make the world better. Partly just… I know in an abstract sense that, across the population, money doesn’t increase quality of life beyond a certain point, but I do think that varies a lot person by person. I have a ridiculous amount of financial anxiety that often means I don’t buy things that would improve my quality of life even if I can afford them, because I’m like “omg if I buy too many things I will RUN OUT OF MONEY AND STARVE AND DIE”. And I also have an annoying tendency to develop expensive taste in things, extreme executive function issues which would be really improved with the application of Enough Money That I Don’t Have To Do Things, and some amount of trauma that causes me to equate money with safety. So I end up really caring about money, even though I feel like this is deeply unvirtuous and I’m a bad person for caring about mere things and bank accounts and I should be a better socialist and etc etc.

Sometimes it’s about feeling powerless. A lot of people seem to think that the limiting factor on “speaking up about things that are wrong” is courage – like, if you’re brave enough to speak out, you’ll fix everything. Well, sometimes I speak out against things I think are wrong even though it’s scary, and …. nothing happens. Like literally I can submit articles but they won’t get published, my social media posts won’t get any meaningful number of notes / likes / responses / whatever, and there’s a limited number of people I can reach with face to face conversations. I can view things happening in society and want to be like “hey don’t go there” and I’m just…. completely voiceless in things that are so much bigger than I am. I do not understand people who do not get a sense of Lovecraftian horror from this.

I’ve had small followings in the past. One time I was in an RPG group that got a bit out of hand and there were 40-odd kids who considered me their leader and conducted ‘warfare’ at my command (where ‘warfare’ meant ‘invade other people’s threads and shout about how great we are’, yes I know this is stupid and embarrassing and bad, we all had that 13 year old phase), another time I ran some clubs in my sixth form and I had 30-odd students who went to all the different clubs I ran and jokingly called themselves my cult, another time I was writing a fanfic and had a decent amount of fans (which I subsequently abandoned and I think the site got taken down). And it’s incredibly good and I miss it and I want it back. Like, yeah, partly it’s just a self-confidence boost and it’s nice to have people who pay attention to you. But there’s also other things, like, I always have lots of ideas for projects and it’s nice to be able to give other people quests rather than trying to do everything myself and overloading myself. It makes me a better person when I think I have to be a good role model, and when nobody’s paying attention to me it’s huge how much I slip into being bad because I feel like it doesn’t matter. Always having fans around means you can always get someone to lend a hand with your project, give you feedback on some work you’re doing, compliment you when you need it. Maybe being large scale famous is nothing like that, but I definitely want… that.

I guess I just want to matter on a bigger scale than I currently do.

 

liskantope:

I strongly relate to most of these reasons. But actually, if someone were to ask me why I want to be famous, the first thing that comes to my mind is a one-sentence response: Having only one life to live, I just want to achieve greatness in some sense, and becoming famous would somehow be confirmation of that.

But when I write that “out loud”, it doesn’t sound nearly as reasonable as winged-light’s explanation.

 

winged-light:

No that sounds totally reasonable, and honestly it captures what I mean a bit better.

 

intrigue-posthaste-please:

I think the third paragraph is basically that, yeah.

This is super interesting. One of my favorite things is to read a good explication of some feeling or desire I can’t relate to. I realize now that I had been typical-minding and assuming that people who said they wanted to be “rich and famous” were just saying that because everyone else said it, because it was the Thing to say… because no one could actually want that, since I don’t want that.

 

wirehead-wannabe:

See, I have the desire to be significant and accomplished and whatnot, but I don’t intuitively connect that to fame. Being on the front page of a tabloid sounds like an unpleasant experience, and I’d rather just see my name at the top of the Giant Cosmic Leaderboard, even if few people know who I am.

 

plain-dealing-villain:

Agree. Fame is an unfortunate symptom of excellence.

 

another-normal-anomaly:

I’m mostly with wirehead-wannabe and PDV on this. “Did humans like the thing” is the only measure that matters, but for a lot of things my own liking it counts for more than a hundred randos liking it. But I’m not gonna deny that my heart warms a bit when kids ask my coworkers and I how they can be like us when they grow up. It’s less wanting to be noticed and more wanting to be aspired to, the tangible reminder that what I’ve got is by the standards of the current world something worth striving for. I wouldn’t want to be noticed by *lots* of people, though, because it would lead to stuff like people making up rumors about me and scrutinizing everything I said.

Tags:

#interesting #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #I’m not sure about my own feelings on the matter #except for a sense that fame is so *dangerous* that any positive aspects it has can’t possibly be worth it #better to be a peasant and have nobody care whether you live or die #than to be a monarch and have lots of people actively *trying* to kill you #and that this mostly generalises to other lower-stakes hierarchies #I’m not sure to what extent I endorse that sense #at least somewhat #I guess that probably puts me in the same category as the people later in the reblog chain #(edit: I definitely understand the miser issues though) #(and while I am not *especially* prone to developing expensive taste) #(I have occasionally been known to avoid trying expensive food specifically because I was worried I would like it and want to buy it again)

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

justice-turtle:

ok so i’m pretty sure i know at least one or possibly two people in toronto

so one of the players from my d&d group has a question for y’all

she says “me and my gaggle of rich white friends are planning a road trip to canada, toronto is only like 8 hours from chi town so like not terrible, i was wondering what’s like fun stuff to do besides niagara falls and excessive drinking”

so uh, yeah. any suggestions? :-)

The CN Tower is neat if you’re okay with heights. (The elevator hurts your ears a bit, though. Try to swallow a lot or otherwise relieve the pressure.) There’s a transparent panel in one part of the floor. I’m not sure if my Girl Guide leader ever gave me the picture she took of me lying on that panel, with the ground far below as the backdrop, but that exists somewhere and you might like to do the same.

Casa Loma could be good, but I’m not sure what it’s like when they’re not hosting a big Girl Guide event.

There’s a biggish† amusement park in Vaughan (just outside Toronto) called Canada’s Wonderland. I’ve been there, like, once, over a decade ago, but I think it was decent?

—

I’m guessing from the Niagara Falls mention that it’s more of a “general Southwestern Ontario” thing than a “just Toronto” thing, so further out stuff:

Hmm. I mean, I went on a lot of field trips in my teens, but I feel like a lot of them are…like, they’re nice, but not in a *distinctive* way. (Also, some of them were *only* for school and school-like groups: the Woodlawn Memorial Park cemetery in Guelph would be pretty dull without their (great) school tour.) There are plenty of other museums in other places that are just as nice. Still, a general “always check out the local museums when touristing” policy will serve you pretty well here as it will elsewhere.

Some exceptions and possible exceptions to the general “check out museums”:

Last I heard the Ontario Science Centre (in Toronto) was kind of overpriced if you don’t already have a reciprocal membership with another museum††, but I think they’ve added more stuff since then and might be worthwhile now? And you might be rich enough not to care in any case.

The Canadian Medical Hall of Fame (in London) is basically just their website given physical form (a bunch of plaques and some screens with videos). If you’re interested in their stuff, just read the website (…if your computer can handle it): don’t bother showing up in person.

You note that most-to-all of the people in your group are white, so probably don’t go to any archaeology museums (the one I’m thinking of is the Museum of Ontario Archaeology in London) unless you’re the right kind of woke masochists (or are on the opposite end of the caring spectrum and aren’t bothered by Let’s Talk About These People Your People Oppressed at all; you do you, none of my business how many fucks you actually give about people as long you treat them okay). It’s too awkward otherwise to qualify as “fun stuff”.

(I kind of want to check out an archaeology museum in Europe someday. I bet they’re less awkward.)

—

I can’t give a whole lot in the way of restaurant recommendations, because my ability to take pleasure from food is somewhat limited. (Like, I *can* enjoy food, but I don’t really enjoy fancy food much *more* than plain food, and it never gets to the waxing-rhapsodic kinds of levels I’ve seen other people reach.)

—

The fact that you phrase it as “a road trip to Canada” implies you aren’t already in Canada, so maybe some more national-level stuff would be useful.

If you haven’t had Tim Tams before and are curious about them, they sell those at Zehrs (a grocery store chain of moderate fanciness/pricey-ness). Imported from Australia and everything.

If you haven’t had Mars bars before and are curious about them, they sell those pretty much anywhere with an impulse-buy rack. I don’t think they’re imported from Britain, but it probably doesn’t matter. They’re basically the same as Milky Ways in America, though. (to be confusing, Milky Way in Britain refers to what both America and Canada call “3 Musketeers”)

The best flavours of Tim Hortons bagel are Tomato Asiago (not as pizza-like as you would expect, but a different kind of good) and Garlic Parmesan, with Chive getting an honourable mention. Get them toasted and buttered for best results. They’re not available all the time in all branches, though, and tbh I don’t actually know if they carry them at all anymore; it’s been a while since I ate there. The fruit slushies are good too, and the muffins are decent. I don’t tend to buy anything else there (I don’t drink coffee).

(In general–and this might seem obvious to you already, I don’t know, but just in case–keep an eye out for interesting-looking food you wouldn’t be able to get in your normal location. I’ve lived here long enough that it’s kind of hard to dig through my memory for which things struck me as strange at first, though I could probably go “oh yeah, that was one of them” if somebody presented me with one.)

—

(JT, let me know how this goes if you can; I’m curious.)

—
†I went googling to confirm the name and Wikipedia calls it “the country’s largest”, so maybe I’m just spoiled by having seen Disney World.

††If you travel a lot and like museums at all (and haven’t already done this), maybe look into whether any of your local museums are part of a reciprocal-membership agreement and get a membership there. Back when I was an upper-middle-class South Jerseyan, my family had a membership at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, and it served us well throughout the East Coast. (Would probably have served us well out West, too, if we’d ever gone there.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #our home and cherished land #the more you know #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #long post #food

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

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.)

Before seeing your response, I’d have phrased the real answer as “southern New Jersey (far enough south not to be Joisey), moved to Ontario but late enough not to have much effect, subconsciously overcorrecting her accent and ending up more British than the British guy whose song she is singing”. (Although to be fair, British guy is probably at least somewhat attempting to sound American, so that gets complicated. And everyone sounds American if I listen to them long enough†, so I’m likely to underestimate how British Phil Collins sounds anyway.)

(The “we” in “we were talking” is me and my, ah, *friend*, as in “so my, ah, *friend* is having this problem…”. I just wanted to make it slightly less obvious that it was me, to encourage people not to factor in stuff they already know about me when deciding.)

What does a Minnesota accent even sound like? *looks up some examples*

Apparently it’s similar to “rural Canadian”. Hmm. Possibly Ontario has had more influence on my voice than I thought? I wonder if my brain is doing the “this voice is familiar and therefore normal and therefore American” trick to its own sound output.

(I wonder if I should try doing the accent meme again…)

—

†I think my brain gets like “ah, this voice is familiar, so therefore normal”, but without changing its definition of what “normal” means.

Tags:

#replies #accents #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #(the following category tags were added retroactively:) #home of the brave #our home and cherished land

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

identicaltomyself:

tilthat:

TIL that some people can voluntarily control the tensor tympani, a muscle within the ear. Contracting these muscles produces vibration and sound. The sound is usually described as a rumbling sound.

via reddit.com

TIL that not everybody can work the “rumble muscle” in their ear. I just assumed that everybody can do it, but nobody ever talked about it because it is so useless.

Update: apparently I *can* do this? At least for short bursts. Huh.

Tags:

#oh look an update #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #kind of hurts to force it like that though

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

somnilogical:

evolution-is-just-a-theorem:

I really want a How To Solve Common Life Problems wiki. Usually when people have a Common Life Problem (not sleeping well, depressed, no motivation, whatever) they ask someone for help, they get a suggestion or two, and none of them work because people are weird and idiosyncratic.

However, I suspect the problem is not “people are totally weird and nothing generalizes” but “people are pretty weird and *two* things rarely generalize”. If we increased the volume of suggestions (to 10? 20?), I bet that list would solve the problem for >50% of people who have it.*

Plus if you stick everything in one place you can do cool things like let people approval vote on solutions that seemed to work for them**, and then display the top 5/10/20.

Obviously there are issues. How do you keep out trolls, how do you distinguish between similar problems (e.g. ”I can’t sleep” and “I can’t sleep because there’s loud noise” and “I can’t sleep because of light pollution”), how do you distinguish between similar solutions / prevent the most generic solution from always being the highest voted.

* Even if it’s much less than 50% it may still be worth. What does n need to be such that if you can solve a problem for n% of the population by building a webpage, then building the webpage is worth it?

here is a how to solve common life problems wiki. deposit worldly knowledge below if you wanna. this might save humans redundant thought cycles. i put .3 on this helping more than 10 people with at least one life problem after 60 days. [ https://predictionbook.com/predictions/188640 ]

wiki:
[ http://bring-me-to-life.wikia.com/wiki/Common_life_problems_Wiki ]

Tags:

#interesting idea #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #I am terrible at starting conversations #but I might be able to contribute solutions if somebody else provides problems? #not sure

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

identicaltomyself:

tilthat:

TIL that some people can voluntarily control the tensor tympani, a muscle within the ear. Contracting these muscles produces vibration and sound. The sound is usually described as a rumbling sound.

via reddit.com

TIL that not everybody can work the “rumble muscle” in their ear. I just assumed that everybody can do it, but nobody ever talked about it because it is so useless.

Tags:

#the more you know #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #I don’t think I have this #though I looked at some of the notes and they seem to think it’s the same sound you get when you yawn? #which I do have

{{next post in sequence}}

Anonymous asked: Hi! Those books about kids and their inner worlds seems fascinating; do you remember what they were? I’d love to read them

~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

brin-bellway:

theunitofcaring:

I think one of them was Siblings Without Rivalry, but I don’t know if that was the one with the ice-throwing story. I just read the first chapter because it was free on Amazon and I’m kind of alarmed I read it as a small child; it’s all about horrific intrafamily bullying and parents talking about how much witnessing this makes them hate their kids. Then again, I’ve repeatedly had the experience over the last few years of going ‘wow I read what when I was seven’ (Animorphs, yikes) so maybe small children are just actually pretty resilient.

(please stand by)

Huh, interesting. I tend to have the opposite experience: “wait, *this* was enough to terrify me when I was seven?” (There are a few episodes of mid-series Red Dwarf like that. They were trying to play the suspense for laughs, but back then I reacted as if it were played straight.)

It’s kind of comforting to see how I’ve improved. I tend to think of myself as fairly psychologically fragile, but compared to child!me I’m a goddamn juggernaut.

(it’s…probably for the best I never read Animorphs)

Tags:

#I did read a parenting book my parents had lying around when I was about nine #I don’t recall its specific problems #–and there may not have been anything specific so much as a general aura– #but I thought it was rather patronising and offensive #(as I had suspected it would be) #reply via reblog #my childhood #Animorphs #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

While I do *have* an internal time sense, said sense tends to believe external cues over its own lying eyes.

The upside is, when springing forward I’ve usually adjusted by the end of the first day, and almost always by the end of the second. All I have to do is look at clocks a lot and follow my routine at least somewhat aggressively.

The downside is, every year at falling back I try to shift my sleep schedule back with it, and it never works.

Tags:

#slept 12:30 – 9:30 last night #which is more or less what time I slept a week ago #there was a while there where I was sleeping 12 – 9 and I liked that better #I thought using DST to help would make it easier to go back to that #but no if I’m going to do that it’ll have to be the hard way #(although 12:30 – 9:30 isn’t *all* that bad) #oh look an original post #Daylight Savings Time #(I don’t know how helpful my internal-clock malleability is for non-DST jet lag) #(because I have never left my time zone) #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #(sort of)

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 ~ 4 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

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.)

Tags:

#god I love being ace #(fun fact: when I typed ”god I love being”) #(the ”popular tags” section recommended ”god I love being bi”) #(you almost got it recommended tags! you’re in the right general area!) #nsfw text? #sexuality and lack thereof #reply via reblog #asexuality #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

{{next post in sequence}}

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

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.

Tags:

#I know I know I have a blatantly atypical mind in this area #but there’s no reason to think that the known divergences would indicate a divergence in *this particular aspect* #and it’s not like I can go around with a baseline assumption that people *aren’t* like me or I won’t get anything done #there are so many ways to be not-like-me and no reason to assume any particular one over others #you have to start *somewhere* #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #nsfw text?

{{next post in sequence}}