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

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

justice-turtle:

fried-demon-potato:

dreyma-fyrstr:

xmoonlilyx:

andercas:

I feel like when you’re writing, organizing chapters and dialogue is easy

but jfc, the amount of time it takes to constantly keep people moving and make sure they’re in the right spaces and trying to come up with wording for it is always such a shock. 

Like, fuck, I made you pick up a coffee cup, you need to put it down at some point. also I can’t remember what I dressed you in, can you push up your sleeves? I don’t remember if you even have your shirt on.

and YOU. YOU OVER THERE, you got out of your chair earlier, but did you come back yet? Are you coming back? Where did you even go and why’d you get up? Fuck, I can’t make you sit down again already, you just stood up, go…over there. go get more coffee. Did you bring your mug with you? fine. bring the pot to the table and—wait, wasn’t the coffee pot already over here? shit, hold on, I need to go back and re-read and re-write

The worst decision I made in my current novel was to give my protagonist a back pack.

I’m laughing so hard, but this shit is so legit it hurts.

okay so you guys all need to get out of there, and go over here.

BUT HOW THE FUCK DO YOU GET THERE.
You just said something, is that like you? shit he already answered that question.
*IRRITATED WRITER SCREECH*

…the where-things-are problem always confuses me, because I see my stories like a movie in my head. Figuring out what emotions go with the actions, why somebody is leaving the room or whatever, that’s hard; remembering what they’re wearing and holding and drinking, that’s the easy part.

Does… nobody else write this way? O_O

Even amongst people who have mind’s eyes (not everyone), there’s a lot of variation in how detailed mental images are. Personally, my visual imagination is towards the low-detail end of the spectrum. Just because I’m watching a daydream unfold, it doesn’t mean I have any idea what the characters are wearing.

Tags:

#is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #someday I should use that tag for something other than mind’s eyes #I’m sure there’s plenty of other things that it would apply to #reply via reblog

whereismyphoenix asked: You know how people can “hear” their own thoughts? Do you know of any research on how “loud” they perceive their thoughts to be and if this correlates with personality? My guess would be that this varies tremendously among people, from not hearing anything, to having it almost indistinguishable from the real thing.

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

slatestarscratchpad:

My impression had always been that most people heard their thoughts only metaphorically, with the exception of psychotic people who literally hear them as voices. But given Galton et al’s findings on the visual imagination, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some (non-psychotic) people literally heard them.

As for psychotic people, it can be anything from a whisper to a loud scream.

 

uncrediblehallq:

For me, the experience of thinking is usually much like the experience of talking to myself, minus moving my vocal parts. The exception is if I make a conscious effort to think in pictures. And I think Ozy sees their thoughts as text?

 

ozymandias271:

I don’t think sees is the right word? My thoughts are, like, the platonic ideal of text.

 

nihilsupernum:

my thoughts arise from the murky depths through a series of filters. at the beginning, they aren’t even noticeable to my conscious mind, but the second-to-last layer is something like the platonic ideal of text and the last layer feels like speaking without the moving my lips part. i get most of my actual thinking done at the second-to-last level, and this is the level at which i am actually thinking when i speak or type, although when i type i also “hear” the words in my head at the last level and when i plan what im going to say i also “hear” the thoughts at the last level, but not while i am actually speaking. i “hear” thoughts on the last level when i am reading but i can shut it off with significant effort and then my reading speed goes way up. when i am trying to actually think at the last level, what im going to “say” is already planned out the second-to-last level, and i get annoyed with how slow the last level is. the murky depths are something like a graph of associations, with nodes connected with various strength to other nodes and connections being invoked causing sparks.

when i was little i would draw diagrams of this process and try to make philosophical conclusions from it (i remember drawing when i was like eight or ten of a set of partially shaded concentric circles, with labels for each layer of thought (the last two were labeled properly, below that i said that i didn’t know how many there were because they weren’t observable, and the center was labeled something like “me? what is here?”—i didn’t have a model of the association net thing until a couple years later))



i also have a separate mode of thinking dedicated to mathematics, but it isn’t actually all that good for things beyond like arithmetic and some geometry (construction problems) and spatial reasoning problems and plotting derivatives and antiderivatives in my head and i do real math in my normal mode of thinking. it looks like a grey space where everything happens visually though.

i can actually see things in my head, but i dont generally generate sounds that aren’t in Default Mental Voice and it’s hard to although i can sometimes do it. i can’t hear music on command, but i can sometimes hear music (this is very enjoyable when it is music i can control and annoying when it’s music that’s just stuck in my head).

i have smelled things, felt pain, tasted things, felt non-pain sensations, seen color, had thought processes, etc in dreams. i haven’t practiced lucid dreaming but it happens rarely but regularly on its own (as in, i realize that i am dreaming)

Your thought layers sound very much like mine! There is the possible exception of the “without the moving my lips part”. While I generally don’t *actually* move my lips for the last layer, it is often accompanied by the *imagined* sensation of the appropriate mouth movements. This has either been happening more lately or I’m just noticing it more.

My mind’s eye is not all that detailed, but it is there and, under normal circumstances, in frequent use. (I say “under normal circumstances” because when I’m in a novel environment–museums, campsites, family reunions, etc–my ability to visualise pretty much shuts down. I presume this is to encourage me to devote more attention to the here and now when it is in particular need of attention.)

My mind’s ear is distinctly less detailed than the real thing (also distinctly internal, to be clear), but maybe not to as great an extent as with vision. I’ve noticed that the level of detail on an imagined song goes up when I’ve heard that song earlier in the same day (increasing more sharply on songs I haven’t heard very many times), with sleeping resetting the level of detail and sometimes which song is playing by default. (I woke up this morning to Poets of the Fall’s “Dreaming Wide Awake”. I don’t know why; I haven’t listened to it in a couple of weeks.) I can’t control the volume of music, silent reading voices*, or any other sound-based thought: it’s always at a neutral volume, not particularly loud or soft. I share aguycalledjohn​‘s tendency to end up thinking in other people’s voices for a short while after listening to them a lot.

On nitrous oxide (100% legal dental anesthetic, ftr), I found that my thoughts didn’t reach the last layer or two (I didn’t distinguish between the last two back then, though I think the distinction was there) automatically. It took a small-but-noticeable amount of effort to think in voice, and when I did the voice sounded flat. (Note: I get the impression from the anecdotes I’ve seen that there are two basic types of reaction to nitrous, and that I respond in the characteristically autistic manner.)

*Other branches of this thread indicate that this is the technical term.

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#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #stuff about thought processes is fascinating

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

cosmic-llin:

hhertzof:

madenthusiasms:

drinkingcocoa-tpp:

thursdayj:

What we need is a new platform that has both private and public posting options and handles text, images, and videos. And then we need a mass migration. MeWe has some potential. Anyone have any other ideas??

I’m trying to think if there’s any way in which LiveJournal doesn’t meet your requirements.  I greatly prefer LJ and I never left.  I resisted tumblr until I had to get one for TPP,  and I have never acclimatized.  But then, by tumblr standards, I am quite old.

I’ve never entirely understood why Live Journal or its cousin Dreamwidth fell out of favor.  Okay, it’s *much* easier to post images on tumblr.  But it’s far, far easier to hold a conversation on Live Journal.  I never left it either, and neither have my fandoms; both Holmes and Doctor Who have active newsletters aggregating all the LJ content for/from the fans.

I don’t post as much there anymore because it’s been so quiet, but it seems to be picking up again a little bit. I’ve even hit skip?=20 some days on my flists. I do miss the conversations.

It makes me sad how quiet LJ/DW are now, and it also makes me sad that, although people ARE still posting, I only have time and energy for so much fannish-leaning social media, and it usually ends up being Tumblr. I do think that, although it’s very possible to have conversations and make friends on Tumblr, the mechanisms for that were simpler on LJ/DW.

The thing is, I miss the conversations on LJ/DW, but Tumblr works so much better for the way I like to engage with fandom and fannish media. Like, I love to obsess over the little details and small cute moments in my shows, and gifsets with commentary and text posts are perfect for that. On LJ/DW, in my own experience anyway, you could pretty much only have that level of detailed discussion and have people actually care/join in if you were in a big fandom that was currently airing, or if most of your flist/circle was into the exact same stuff as you and happened to be around to talk about it near the time of posting.

Like, I miss LJ/DW but a photoset or rambling meta post about a less-favoured character from an older show would barely get noticed there, whereas on Tumblr because of how tagging and reblogging works, the people who are interested will likely see the post and get involved in the discussion even if you don’t move in the same circles. That’s valuable to me.

Also, aside from the question of engaging with other fans, because I’m deeply obsessed with my main fandom (Star Trek) I’m constantly looking for new ways to experience it, other than constantly rewatching, which takes up a lot of time and isn’t always practical. When I was a kid I collected magazines and merchandise, bought tie-in books, etc. Tumblr is great for me because it’s the perfect way to constantly be experiencing the thing(s) I love in small chunks that let me indulge my obsession and remember my favourite bits while still having time for other stuff.

So yeah I guess what I’m saying is, LJ/DW are great platforms with a lot going for them, but so is Tumblr. Would be nice if we could have the best aspects of both in one place!

I actually like Tumblr because of its conversation mechanic.

See, I have a lot of trouble initiating conversations. Because of the focus on reblogging, I can more or less fully participate in Tumblr life without ever having to bring myself to create a post. Everywhere else, I’m just a commenter. Here, I’m a blogger. I never thought I would be able to have a blog before Tumblr, and I still don’t think I could have it elsewhere. (Not any elsewhere I’ve seen so far, anyway.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #Dreamwidth

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

nuclearspaceheater:

brin-bellway:

I’m not either of those people (though, fittingly enough, I suppose you’ll have to take my word on that), but I might be able to help with your curiosity.

I’ve never understood the idea of an identity one isn’t invested in. It doesn’t matter to me, emotionally, whether people are insulting me-under-a-temporary-name or me-under-a-long-term-name. They’re still insulting me. I was, according to both memories and external records, much more nervous about interacting with people under the Brin name when it was new than I am now. (I think this is mostly because I didn’t have as much experience yet with the communities I was in, so didn’t have as good an idea of what would get me yelled at and how to avoid it.)

“What gets me is that people completely squander the potential of the Internet by building a unified identity on it. Like, you can do that in meat-space?“

To me, the potential of the Internet is a world where communication is text-based by default. Sure, I could build an identity in meatspace, but I’d have to communicate in voice all the time: always scrambling to keep up with the pace, no time or opportunity to correct “typos” (or to decide that the thing is better left entirely unsaid), often not even getting to speak at all because of meatspace’s utter lack of support for cross-posting (which means I have to either crowbar my way into the conversation by talking over people until they shut up (this rarely works), or (more likely) waiting for everyone else to spontaneously decide to stop talking so I can get a word in edgewise). (Apparently neurotypicals have some kind of Asking for a Turn to Speak ritual involving staring at the current speaker’s eyes, but I’ve never managed to find out the details.)

I’m also faceblind, which makes unification of meatspace identities a lot harder. I dislike the assumption that meatspace identities are naturally unified, because it leads to things like my former art teacher thinking he doesn’t have to introduce himself to me before trying to strike up a conversation at the park. (He does have to introduce himself, or else I’m going to give him the cold shoulder, as is customary for unaccompanied* adolescents approached by adult strangers. (Especially when the adolescent is female and the adult is male, but I come from a culture with very strong talking-to-strangers taboos such that that would be frowned upon regardless of the genders.)) People might wear several nametags on the Internet, but at least they don’t expect you to recognise them unprompted when they’re wearing a different nametag or none at all, and they don’t have to switch nametags when entering a new environment.

Hanging out with Australians is neat too, and something that’s often cited as being the potential of the Internet, but it’s more of a bonus to me.

*I was with my mother, but she was in the bathroom at the time.

I can definitely see now how someone such as yourself would see different potential in the Internet.

Though, one part that jumped out at me was, “I’ve never understood the idea of an identity one isn’t invested in. It doesn’t matter to me, emotionally, whether people are insulting me-under-a-temporary-name or me-under-a-long-term-name.“

I suppose an implicit part of not being invested in an identity is to be able to wear that identity, and the things you do with it, without deeply considering it to be you in the first place. Like, somebody’s not insulting me-under-the-name-NuclearSpaceHeater, they’re insulting NuclearSpaceHeater. If it becomes inconvenient to be NuclearSpaceHeater, I will go be somebody else. If you don’t mind my asking, do you feel that you’re capable of imagining what it is like to be a spy?

I think the difference here is that I’m emphasizing the part of identity that consists of what the locals think about you. Hence why maintaining different names is liberating: there’s no worry about the locals changing how they think about one identity based on everything you do everywhere else. Which yudkowsky may have had a problem with in regards to people having a lower opinion of HPMOR based on his LessWrong work. (But, of course, possibly easier to use LessWrong social capital to get readers of HPMOR, and vice versa. Tradeoffs, as there are.)

Hmm. I suppose I can imagine being a spy, but not being someone with an aptitude for spying. Doing my mission in spite of caring about my infiltration persona, rather than not caring.

“I think the difference here is that I’m emphasizing the part of identity that consists of what the locals think about you. Hence why maintaining different names is liberating: there’s no worry about the locals changing how they think about one identity based on everything you do everywhere else.“

I was confused by this at first, but upon closer inspection I think you’re using a narrower definition of “local” than I was thinking of. You seem to be referring to people who are local at the present moment. I might well describe myself as caring what the locals think of me, but I’d mean that I care about the thoughts of everyone who is at least sometimes local to me, simultaneously.

Tags:

#reply via reblog

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

nuclearspaceheater:

wirehead-wannabe:

funereal-disease:

theunitofcaring:

I’m not a fan of hateblogging/hatesites. 

I had a whole bunch of elaborate justifications here, but the real true reason is that if someone ever did that to my writing (which, admittedly, isn’t that good and has lots of Problematic tropes in it and of which you could probably come up with a quite biting mockery) I would never write again.

Every piece of art posted to a ‘delusional artists’ site was drawn by an artist- sure, a bad artist, but if you think that’s morally relevant here I honestly don’t know what to say to you – a person who might see it and watch their work circulate to be laughed at and that hurts. Some of them will give up on drawing forever.

Every terribly written fanfic on fanfiction.net was written by a person. And your nastiness will make them hesitate next time they try to put something they care about on paper.

This is true even if your nastiness is brave and clever and snarky. This is true even if the artist ‘thinks too highly of themselves’ or is ‘popular’ or is ‘more popular than they deserve’ or is an ‘attention [slur]’. This is true even if the artist reacts badly to criticism. 

I don’t like the idea that a thick skin is mandatory to post art online, and that the lack of one is an extra thing to mock the artist for.

I don’t like the idea that, when an author says, ‘what you’re doing really fucking hurts me, and it would mean the world to me if you would just not talk about my work,“ “lol watch them have a public breakdown lol they can’t take criticism’ is a remotely appropriate response.

Tearing people down is not a superpower. 

See also: exactly how I feel about GOMI

(Directed at both of you)

How do you guys feel about mocking smut? Both in the sense of “wow this exists” (Khal Drogo/Barney the Dinosaur crossover fics) and technical skill (“he shoved his big funstick in here moist meat cavern”).

What gets me is that people completely squander the potential of the Internet by building a unified identity on it. Like, you can do that in meat-space? In fact, having a single identity there is a very “opt-out” sort of situation! Whereas I’ve written things, drawn things, and sold physical fan-merch, but I’ve done it all under different names, all of which are different from the names I use when commenting on blogs, the emails I give to people I meet in meat-space, et cetera.

Looking back, I’ve never worried about having my work mocked, but if my Internet presence was just me, then I wonder if I might! Hell, I wonder if I’d have ever done any of the weirder projects I’ve done if they would automatically be associated with all of my other aliases or even my True Name, instead of being a single-project DeviantArt page I can abandon and resurrect at will if I close the project or want to give it another go.

Which also ties into something nostalgebraist said in this thread about the response to HPMOR, “Instead, the criticism is largely driven by things that people also dislike about EY’s nonfiction writing:“ Well, what if yudkowsky had published that story under a different name with no discoverable links to his other work? Why was it necessary to associate it with his True Name? And the key word is necessary. This is the Internet. The default should be anonymity and pseudonomity. If he didn’t have a specific, good reason to tie together the identity of “Less Wrong admin and writer of the Sequences,” and the identity of “author of HPMOR,” he should at least not have done so by default.

And if he hadn’t (or rather, if you hadn’t, Eleizer, because I’m honestly curious as to how you imagine yourself to have felt if you hadn’t, because otherwise I’m only going on my own internal experience with this) would it have made it easier for him to take the harsher criticism of HPMOR? Would you, theunitofcaring or you, slatestarscratchpad, perhaps be able to continue writing if you did not so much have your work brutally shot down, but were merely pretending to be an author whose work got brutally shot down?

Maybe you’d still have the same problem. I am curious, though, because I know I’m a lot more confident and experimental in the creative things I do on the Internet, because I do it with identities I’m not overly invested in.

I’m not either of those people (though, fittingly enough, I suppose you’ll have to take my word on that), but I might be able to help with your curiosity.

I’ve never understood the idea of an identity one isn’t invested in. It doesn’t matter to me, emotionally, whether people are insulting me-under-a-temporary-name or me-under-a-long-term-name. They’re still insulting me. I was, according to both memories and external records, much more nervous about interacting with people under the Brin name when it was new than I am now. (I think this is mostly because I didn’t have as much experience yet with the communities I was in, so didn’t have as good an idea of what would get me yelled at and how to avoid it.)

“What gets me is that people completely squander the potential of the Internet by building a unified identity on it. Like, you can do that in meat-space?“

To me, the potential of the Internet is a world where communication is text-based by default. Sure, I could build an identity in meatspace, but I’d have to communicate in voice all the time: always scrambling to keep up with the pace, no time or opportunity to correct “typos” (or to decide that the thing is better left entirely unsaid), often not even getting to speak at all because of meatspace’s utter lack of support for cross-posting (which means I have to either crowbar my way into the conversation by talking over people until they shut up (this rarely works), or (more likely) waiting for everyone else to spontaneously decide to stop talking so I can get a word in edgewise). (Apparently neurotypicals have some kind of Asking for a Turn to Speak ritual involving staring at the current speaker’s eyes, but I’ve never managed to find out the details.)

I’m also faceblind, which makes unification of meatspace identities a lot harder. I dislike the assumption that meatspace identities are naturally unified, because it leads to things like my former art teacher thinking he doesn’t have to introduce himself to me before trying to strike up a conversation at the park. (He does have to introduce himself, or else I’m going to give him the cold shoulder, as is customary for unaccompanied* adolescents approached by adult strangers. (Especially when the adolescent is female and the adult is male, but I come from a culture with very strong talking-to-strangers taboos such that that would be frowned upon regardless of the genders.)) People might wear several nametags on the Internet, but at least they don’t expect you to recognise them unprompted when they’re wearing a different nametag or none at all, and they don’t have to switch nametags when entering a new environment.

Hanging out with Australians is neat too, and something that’s often cited as being the potential of the Internet, but it’s more of a bonus to me.

*I was with my mother, but she was in the bathroom at the time.

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{{next post in sequence}}

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

“There’s more to life than just what science covers, you know! Like this emotion you don’t experience! Or this other emotion you don’t experience!”

Tags:

#oh look an original post #based on a conversation I had this afternoon #though that particular instance didn’t mention romance #he just said stuff that was obviously dancing around ‘religion’ while maintaining plausible deniability #(he’s Catholic and he thinks I’m Jewish) #((*don’t* start in on not having to be capable of awe to be Jewish)) #((you don’t get to decide that Judaism should be important to me)) #(anyway that’s probably why he thought he ought to be super vague about it) #(because Christian normativity and/or supremacy is insulting) #(and implying that the best parts of life are things I’m not capable of is…not? somehow?)

Apparently it’s that kind of day.

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

Because I feel like it, and because the occasional precedents I’ve seen elsewhere seemed to work out well, I am going to answer all of the questions in this ask meme.

How badly will I twist the questions? How many of the questions even make sense? Join us below the cut to find out!

A. If you could get away with one murder in your lifetime without any legal, social, or emotional repercussions, would you kill someone?

Wouldn’t the whole point of killing someone be to cause the repercussions? Or do you mean only the repercussions specifically focused on me?

Even using the generous interpretation, nobody really springs to mind.

B. What is your first thought when you receive a message on Tumblr, are you excited for the idea of someone from potentially the other side of the world wanting to talk to you or fearful that someone will criticize you?

If I’ve said something controversial lately, fearful. If not, slightly excited, but mostly thinking it’s probably a spambot.

C. Have you ever looked down on someone because you thought your religious views were superior?

See question Z. (No.)

D. Would you rather know everything the universe has to offer but in exchange lose all emotions or remain the way you are now?

My first impulse is to do it, then spend the rest of my life recording the information not currently known to Terrans, in descending order of projected usefulness.

Possibly I have been spending too much time around utilitarians. Possibly I have been spending just enough time around utilitarians.

(I’m not sure whether I actually would go with the first impulse, though.)

E. If you could live and be healthy without sleeping or eating/drinking, which would you cut out of your life?

Due to being relatively prone to digestive issues, I have spent more time wishing I didn’t need to eat than I have wishing I didn’t need to sleep. There are also potential complications of being rendered incapable of sleep.

On the other hand, 8 – 9 hours (depending on whether you count dreaming) more consciousness out of every 24 is quite a lot of effective lifespan extension, and it never actually says I would be incapable of sleep at all, let alone incapable of dozing. Given the information provided, I would rather go without sleep.

F. If you could take on the exact body and form of anyone else on Earth, who would it be?

I would need more information on the potential forms available, in order to determine which one would have the best balance of maximum health (both quality and quantity of life) and minimum dysphoria.

Given that I’m currently 21 years old, with basically no dysphoria and no chronic health problems save for severe nearsightedness, it’s very likely that the best body is in fact the one I currently have.

That’s all assuming that the legal issues of getting a new body are magically dealt with, of course. Otherwise it’s even more likely to be best sticking with my current body.

(This question is supposed to be about beauty, isn’t it? I already look plain in a vaguely pleasant manner, what more could I want?)

G. Would you rather burn or freeze to death?

Rumour has it that freezing hurts less, and also has a better chance of being revivable.

H. If it meant it would solve all world hunger, war, disease and bigotry, would you spend the rest of eternity in Hell?

The most effective way of doing that is to kill everyone (solving the first three) and mind-control their immortal souls (solving the last; I assume that since Hell is involved, there are immortal souls in this scenario). That’s not worth going to Hell for.

(Was anyone else surprised that humanity did not go extinct (save for the two people in the eye of the reality storm, of course) during the world-peace part of The Lathe of Heaven?)

I. Was the first crush in your life something you had or something someone had on you?

Presumably something someone else had, though if so I have remained blissfully unaware of it.

J. Could you live without having sex ever (again) in exchange for eternal youth?

See question E above re: complications. It would only take a bit of definition-twisting for this to result in me dying horribly of magically enforced sleep deprivation, leaving an eternally youthful corpse.

(Also, to confirm, “eternally youthful” is still fully grown, right? I don’t want to end up in a baby’s body forever, especially if my mind is adversely affected by having to fit into a baby’s head.)

One needs to define “sex” very precisely for a question like this to be answerable. Like, never mind my fetishes: what if I accidentally do something to fulfil someone else’s? There are all sorts of potential issues here.

If we go with a strict definition, something like “genital intercourse between two or more people, with full knowledge and consent of all parties, for the purpose of inducing sexual pleasure in at least one party”: yes, in a heartbeat. Sounds like a sweet deal. Wasn’t even planning to do that anyway.

K. Have you ever watched a full length pornographic movie?

Nah, videos don’t do it for me.

L. The Beatles or The Rolling Stones?

Neither. I dislike both of them. *dodges thrown tomatoes*

M. If you could have the ability to manipulate matter or energy, which would you choose?

To what extent is that even a meaningful question?

N. What was the worst nightmare you ever had?

Measured in terms of “how long did it take me to calm down afterward”, probably the one with the serial killer.

O. Would you rather spend one year with your one true love just to never see them again or the rest of your life with second best?

Okay, that’s definitely not a meaningful question.

P. All the sequels/remakes/adaptations/rip-offs in movies nowadays, good or bad?

I don’t consider it inherently good or bad, but rather judge on a case-by-case basis.

(Also, I am informed by Shakespeare nerds that this tendency towards sequels/remakes/adaptations/rip-offs is not a new phenomenon.)

Q. Would you rather be dirt poor and emotionally fulfilled in life or be rich beyond imagination and emotionally dissatisfied for life?

This is a very similar question to D, but replacing “think of what I could teach!” with “think of what I could give to charity!”. The same answer applies.

R. Do you have any (secret) feelings of bigotry to any group of people?

I refuse to answer this question on the grounds that it may force me to incriminate myself.

(Besides, then they wouldn’t be secret anymore, would they?)

S. Would you rather be the only person in the world that can read minds or have everyone else in the world be able to read minds except for your own?

If I can turn it on and off at will, me. Mostly to keep it from falling into the wrong hands. (I can’t entirely guarantee that I’m not the wrong hands, but giving telepathy to everyone would definitely cause it to fall into some wrong hands.)

T. If everyone in the world would automatically only know one language, which language would you choose?

I seem to recall that English is currently the most widely spoken language, which means that choosing English would minimise the extent and number of horrific mind-alterations performed on people. I’d really rather not have to do it at all, though.

U. If you were old enough and not in a situation where it would be inappropriate, would you sleep with one of your (past) school teachers/professors?

There is no situation in which having sex with your mother is appropriate. I’ve never met any of my other teachers in person, though come to think of it, I don’t actually have to have seen them in order to say I wouldn’t have sex with them. It’s a safe assumption in general.

V. A world without religion, good, bad, neutral?

Impossible, unless you kill everyone (again). Unlike maggots, religions can reproduce via spontaneous generation.

W. The men’s rights movement, legitimate cause or laughable, and why?

Last I heard, there were multiple causes calling themselves “men’s rights”, of varying levels of legitimacy.

X. You can eliminate one of your five senses to substantially strengthen the others, which one and would you do it?

I would need more information to make that decision. Getting rid of smell will normally impair taste: am I magically protected from this? Will my senses be strengthened to the point of painful overstimulation?

(I probably wouldn’t do it, especially since I’m having a hard time seeing how the answer to my second question could be “no”.)

Y. Do looks mean anything to you? Don’t lie, could you fall in love with someone you thought was ugly?

Well, aren’t you pushy.

Current evidence suggests that I cannot fall in love with people I think are ugly. I also cannot fall in love with people I think are pretty.

Z. Can you understand the mindset and logic used by the opposite spiritual opinion? An atheist understanding the belief in a higher power and vice versa.

The only reason I don’t “belie[ve] in a higher power” is because I haven’t encountered any evidence for it. Unlike most people who say that, I am willing to accept subjective spiritual experiences as evidence. I haven’t had any such experiences, and may not be capable of them.

(So, yes.)

—

Well, I think we’ve all learned something here, and it’s that I have spent too much time reading genie stories.

(Or possibly just enough time reading genie stories.)

Tags:

#Brin talks about herself for no particular reason #(I don’t think I’ve ever done a readmore before) #(I hope it works) #anyone else want to join me in answering all the questions? #so I don’t feel as alone in this? #and also so I can see what your answers are? #meme #oh look an original post

Video ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

runescape:

BTS – December!

Find out all about why RuneScape is the place to be this festive period, including:

– A brand new Elf City task set.
– Dominion Tower improvements, including new ‘Rumble’ mode!
– Premier Club 2015. 
– Winter Weekends.
– All our Christmas events – including Community Crackers, our Snowman Boss, and a Snowboarding event!

Which are you most excited for?

Tags:

#Runescape #…oh god what do I do #so many video games so little time #(I can’t just play Mass Effect part of the day and Runescape part of the day) #(my brain doesn’t work like that) #(I have to ‘pick’) #((some conscious influence over a mostly subconscious process)) #(one game to be in the mood for at a time) #(…fuck it I’m going to play Runescape) #(I’ll play more Mass Effect sooner or later) #(and it’ll still be Enjoying My New Computer because the 15R runs Runescape noticeably better)