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

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

justice-turtle:

brin-bellway:

shedoesnotcomprehend:

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.

….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”

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”.

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?

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.)

Tags:

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

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

shedoesnotcomprehend:

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.

….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”

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”.

Tags:

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

{{next post in sequence}}

Just out of curiosity: How do you talk to yourself? Answer in tags (if you want).

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

aegipan-omnicorn:

1. I give myself pep talks in the first person, a la “The little engine that could.”

2. I chide or berate myself in the first person: “I’m an idiot.”

3. I give pep talks in the second person: “You can do this, [my name]!”

4. I chide myself in the second person.

5. I narrate what I’m doing in the third person, as if I were the protagonist in a story: “They rolled  out of bed, early in the grey morning, thinking only: Coffee!”

6. Discuss what I’m doing with someone who isn’t there (either someone from history, my own past, an imaginary friend, etc.)

7. All of the above.

Tags:

#I won’t swear I’ve *never* done 5 but if I do it at all it’s rare #other than that all of the above #though when there’s chiding to be done it’s mostly first-person #and when there’s pep-talking to be done it’s mostly second-person #(which makes a lot of advice on the subject weird because they assume it’s the other way around) #second-person thoughts don’t address me by name that much though #(in early February my brain adopted a habit of calling me ”love”) #(I remember the time period because I thought at first it was some kind of celebration of Valentine’s Day) #(but it hasn’t stopped) #(it’s kind of nice though so I haven’t tried to get rid of it) #((…wait hang on are we talking about thoughts in general or specifically talking aloud?)) #((I don’t talk to myself out loud much)) #((I think when there are pronouns for those they’re usually first-person (sometimes singular sometimes plural))) #((but more often (”often” being a relative term) it’s pronoun-less stuff like ”wait no not that have to do this first”)) #reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #in which Brin somehow manages to be among the most singlet people she knows #tag rambles

chill

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

nostalgebraist:

There is something really wonderful about the word “chill.”

Long long ago, I was telling a friend that I didn’t like certain of my parents’ behavior patterns, and doing so in very formal nerdy language full of phrases like “behavior patterns,” and after a lot of verbiage he just replied, “you wish they were more chill.”  And I said, “huh, yeah,” and he said something about how it’s great that colloquial language can be so efficiently expressive, and I nodded along, and it seemed like one of those feel-good sentiments that’s true but not all that deep, and that was that.  But maybe it was deeper than I gave it credit for?

So, a few things about “chill.”  First, the boring one: it’s a positive thing.  Describing someone as “chill” is almost always praise, and when someone tells someone else to “chill out,” they are telling them “do this good thing you aren’t currently doing.”  So far, so obvious.

But “chill” is unusual as terms of praise go.  It has a certain contextless quality; it doesn’t feel like something you can discard the moment some other value becomes more important.  Sure, you can have arguments about whether being chill is appropriate – if your house is on fire and someone tells you to chill out, you’ll probably say this isn’t the time for that.  But the very concept of “chilling out” contains the notion that we are frequently less chill than we should be – that there are lots of times when our minds are telling us our houses are metaphorically on fire, and we need to see them for the liars they are.

I’m not just talking about anxiety here, although it’s a clear-cut example of the dynamic.  The bigger point is that by treating “chill” as a generically good thing – by taking “they’re chill” as praise even if nothing else is said about “them” – we’re acknowledging that stepping back, taking a wider perspective, asking whether you maybe should chill out, is a good thing to do in virtually any situation.  Sure, sometimes you ask the question and the answer is “nope, my house is on fire.”  But you don’t get to circumvent the question entirely because the matter at hand is just so serious; that itself is un-chill.

Compare this to something like “kindness.”  Kindness is also a “generically good thing.”  But while we have the concept of kindness as generally good, we don’t have the concept of “making sure to ask whether you ought to be kind, even if it seems like you shouldn’t” as generically good.  (We could have a word like “chill” for this, but I don’t think we do.)  Chill isn’t just a state of relaxation, it’s the trait of being able to notice when relaxation is called for, even though we didn’t realize it at first.  Hence “chilling out”: if it were just a matter of having a high average level of relaxation, we wouldn’t have this special associated verb for becoming more relaxed, because there would just be relaxed people (who never have to “chill out”) and non-relaxed people.  (Back in the kindness comparison, there’s no analogous term like “kinding out.”)

This is all pretty abstract, so I should give you the concrete example that got me thinking about it, which was this @porpentine​ post:

the most important advice i give to people who write me about being in abusive activist cults / hot allostatic load situations is to dis-identify with their language and leave their universe …getting invested in that po-faced neo-1950′s pious language and the culture makes you a huge target…i don’t know if i made that clear enough in the original but yeah…then resist the urge to join some polarized faction that vaguely hates the thing that hurt you but for different stupid reasons, and make friends who are real people and know how to chill the fuck out lol

And like, I can imagine a version of this post that ends with some theoretical language about why it’s important to value a certain kind of “asking whether one should relax” in all contexts even highly fraught contexts because you see etc etc, and ends up sounding like it’s taking some “political” “position” … but porpentine just says “know how to chill the fuck out,” and we all know what that means.

…I don’t think I’m familiar with this usage of “chill”.

Or, I mean, I *am*, but I associate it strongly with trolls, the kind of people who think that people who have ~opinions~ or ~emotions~ about things deserve only contempt. In my own experience, “chill” has a positive connotation mostly among assholes (and even then, only a certain subtype of asshole).

Like, I was kind of nodding along with the advice in that quote *until I got to the part about chilling the fuck out*, at which point I recoiled, went on my guard, thought “this is likely not a person I want to be taking advice from, I ought to be more suspicious of what they said”.

I guess if starting from high levels of anxiety, it could be *useful* to try to inhabit the mindset of a “lol who cares” troll in an attempt to counterbalance that. But I’d want to be cautious about doing so.

(To me, “they’re chill” doesn’t connote pure praise, but rather a mixed bag: they’re good as a casual conversation partner, because they won’t drag you into a political debate or anything like that, but don’t let them see you upset or passionate, because they will respond with at best incomprehension and at worst contempt.)

—

(This was originally a tag ramble, but I think it should remain part of the thread if reblogged, so I will convert it to a suitable format.)

I suspect it’s relevant that I hail from a culture that generally errs *heavily* on the side of giving too many fucks. But like, IME “people who use phrases like ‘chill the fuck out lol’” are *themselves* a polarised faction that vaguely hates the thing that hurt me but for stupid reasons. I’m not gonna backlash straight to the other end of the fuck-giving spectrum: the goal here is to allow my own choices and/or inclinations to determine what I care (and don’t care) about rather than forcing myself to care about things because I was ordered to, not to ~chill the fuck out lol~.

(although I suppose it might be *mistaken* for ~chilling the fuck out lol~ by an outside observer, given how many passionate subjects I’ve had to fake over the years)

Tags:

#our roads may be golden or broken or lost #reply via reblog #language #I’m not sure this *exactly* fits but it feels close enough that I’m going to include it: #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #discourse cw? #(I’m not trying to Start An Argument here) #(but I worry it might turn out that way) #([wryly] possibly I should chill)

Libido

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

asexualactivities:

Do you have a libido?  What is it like?

What is a libido, anyway?

When I talk about my “libido”, the main thing I’m usually referring to is the frequency and intensity of my sexual fantasies.

During high-libido times, I think a lot more about (loosely defined) sex, and how good it feels, and how much I’d like to be having some right now. Even when I’m not focusing on it, if my libido’s high the fantasies and the longing will often be kind of running in the background.

I’ve heard other people describe feelings of “pent-up sexual energy”, but in my own context that feeling manifests as more of a fatigue.

I wrote a tag ramble about this ages back, which I still mostly endorse. (Unlike past!me, I at least have the *option* of masturbation now, even if I’m not especially good at it and often don’t get around to it anyway.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #sexuality and lack thereof #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #(in this case: no) #people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me #nsfw text

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

Injygo Icon

@injygo

replied to your post

“(This post is inspired by @industrialbruise‘s post here on pollution…”

I don’t get this

In fact, when I’ve touched something like poison ivy where I literally can’t touch my face until I’ve washed my hands, it’s really hard to remember not to touch anything

*nod*

I don’t get the tingling in all cases. I think the main factor is whether the contamination is…I’m not sure what the right phrasing would be…exceptional? Like, if I’m in a grocery store, there’s a single flag in my brain for “have I touched *anything* public yet†”, and once I’ve done so touching additional stuff doesn’t affect me unless I have some reason to believe it’s *unusually* dirty. The tingling is usually if I’ve touched a *single* contaminated thing, especially if I wasn’t expecting in advance that I would be doing that. Poison ivy would *probably* qualify, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually encountered any myself.

—

Even when I don’t *feel* it like that, I’m usually pretty good at keeping track of “is this clean”. Not always: during Dad’s recent cold, at one point it didn’t occur to me until far too late that I was using the same leash to take the dog for a morning walk that he’d used to take the dog for an evening walk, and was turning on the light switch that he had turned off. I seem to slip up a lot less than most people, though (and in any case I got away with those particular incidents).

While I do consciously place a higher value than most people on keeping track of this stuff, it’s also just higher-salience to me. I once spotted the expiration date on a juice box at a *glance*, when Mom had deliberately searched for a date and couldn’t find it. To her it blended in with the cryptic production code right next to it, but to me it stood out. Almost like an Ishihara test.

(…now I’m thinking about Amentans testing a person’s pollution sensitivity with things like “how long does it take them to spot the red in a Where’s Waldo picture”.)

—

†This flag is checked when processing questions like “my nose is itchy; should I use a fingernail to scratch it, or rub my nose against the sleeve on my upper arm instead?” or “they gave me an Oreo as a free sample; should I pick it up with my bare hand, or use the paper cup it came in like a mitten?”

Tags:

#injygo #Amenta #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #in which Brin has a food poisoning phobia #(and related issues) #replies #food mention #illness tw #@roleplayers: feel free to use me as inspiration when describing what getting polluted feels like #(especially if the character believes in a theory of pollution such that) #(”this specific patch of my skin is polluted but I can still keep it contained” is a coherent statement) #((does point-of-contact allow for that with *people* or just objects?)) #((there’s probably a schism over that somewhere))

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

(This post is inspired by @industrialbruise‘s post here on pollution hyposensitivity, but is not itself a roleplay post.)

Does anyone else reading this get the thing where after touching something you suspect to be germy, the part of your body that touched it feels a little tingly? Like your brain’s way of setting a reminder to be careful what that bit touches until you get a chance to clean it.

(I saw the bit about “it’s kind of like. everybody else has a whole section of their brain devoted to ‘is this clean’ and i’m just tryin to process it along with everything else”, and I thought god, I think I might actually *have* that section, it’s the one in charge of that tingling thing.)

Tags:

#Amenta #(sort of) #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #oh look an original post

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

shitifindon:

shedoesnotcomprehend:

shitifindon:

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.

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?

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…)

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’.)

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.

Tags:

#is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #reply via reblog #unreality cw #embarrassment squick #dreams #Extremis

{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

sinesalvatorem:

Why are there people whose upon-waking selves cannot be trusted to act in accordance with their before-sleeping selves

I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it

Burn it down with CRISPR

I am never letting anyone talk me into waking them up again let them handle their own motivational structures I CANNOT

I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it

 

extrakatamiba:

I’m confused because I thought this was the purpose of alarm clocks.

 

extrakatamiba:

Like in the very recent past when everyone did not have portable alarm clocks in their pockets 24/7, I can understand asking someone to wake you up at a specific time. But that problem now seems completely solved.

 

sinesalvatorem:

I would also expect this, but here we are.

 

h3lldalg0:

Alarm clocks don’t exactly work on me because I can turn them off before I’m fully awake. I even had one that made me solve a math problem and sleepy Mack would do it and fall right back asleep.

I have to put my phone across the room wrapped in a piece of paper that says WAKE THE FUCK UP and make sure I have like five alarms in a row set at times that will surprise my morning self but not spaced far enough apart that I can get back to sleep between them.

My mom used to have to bribe my siblings to wake me up on weekends or I would sleep nearly sixteen hours.

 

jadagul:

Yeah. You ask someone to wake you up because your before-sleeping self doesn’t trust your upon-waking self.

The job of the person you’re asking to wake you up is not to disturb you out of sleep. It’s to be annoying enough that you can’t just go back to sleep.

Personally, I’m not particularly difficult to wake up or in a particularly bad mood when I do, but I still prefer having people wake me up. This is because I only rarely need to wake up at a specific time, which means I’m not *accustomed* to alarm clocks, which means I don’t *trust* alarm clocks. Sapient alarms are smart enough to know if their first attempt has failed to wake me, and can then try various things until they succeed.

Would an alarm clock successfully wake me? Probably. But I’m not *confident* of it (because I don’t have a long track record of success), so the am-I-going-to-sleep-through-my-alarm anxiety means I don’t sleep nearly as well. (I’d also *probably* wake up on my own slightly before the alarm (regardless of what form of alarm), but again not confidently.)

(It occurs to me that you don’t actually need full-on sapience to be smart enough to know whether your first attempt has failed, and that we’ve probably reached a tech level where computers can do this (if you’re wearing a monitor bracelet, anyway). But I don’t own a monitor bracelet, and I don’t think I’d bother getting one just for this (the whole reason I’m *having* this problem is precisely because it’s not something that comes up much).)

Tags:

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