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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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inrealityadream:

Who the fuck names horses

 

crystalsoulslayer:

No horse in these races can have the same name as any other horse that has ever entered in the history of horseracing. They had appropriate ones at first. Then, slowly, like profiles on the Gaia forums, all the good user IDs URLs horse names got taken. Currently, they’re being named by rich old white guys. If our generation ever starts participating in this, I anticipate solemn-faced announcers on ESPN498 speculating on the Vegas odds for x_FURY-666-WRATH_x.

 

tkingfisher:

I look forward to TheRealDrizztDo’Urden69 taking the Triple Crown.

 

sinesalvatorem:

Not necessarily. If you’re creative enough, you can invent a euphoninic name that no one has ever used before. Or, if you aren’t, you can just make a computer do it for you like ilzolende did.

 

brin-bellway:

I look forward to Ilzolende taking the Triple Crown.

 

sinesalvatorem:

Can I train you, ilzolende? I want to be the very best, like no one ever was….

 

serinemolecule:

For the longest time, Starcraft the horse was what you got if you looked up “starcraft” on Wikipedia.

Not even a disambiguation page! You just went straight to the horse.

It took so many edit wars to get it to the current state where Wikipedia finally accepted that most people typing “starcraft” into Wikipedia are looking for the video game, not the horse.

@serinemolecule replied to this post with:

@brin-bellway re: “how to fact check” – the change was done here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Starcraft&oldid=27465173 – but idk how to find an argument from 13 years ago

Tags:

#oops forgot to post this #conversational aglets

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

justice-turtle:

Well, it’s not scientific, but I can think of maybe 2-3 people (including me) who started out fairly far to the right and are now pretty far to the left, and one person (you) who started out left a ways and has stayed there. The rest of the people I follow whose… political trajectories I’m aware of, which is maybe a dozen or so, seem to have started out sort of… mildly leftish-centrist and have moved further left with time. Like, there’s – I know there’s a norm of teenage rebellion and finding your own path, but my impression is that wide swings across the ideological center are fairly rare and may involve some kind of conversion/aversion experience.

(Bear in mind here that I’m very depressed, so this next part, I’m probably being more of a catty little bitch than is called for. But – like, I think we’ve discussed, you tend to run into a thing where people are like “Well, nobody is born feminist/whatever, we have to learn, go easy on us?” I genuinely don’t recall if that’s ever been me saying that, and like I say I could be totally wrong, but… like, my completely unsupported impression is, that kind of remark comes more from people who were born centrist, have liked to consider themselves quite left-wing progressive, and are just finding out that they’ve got a long fucking way to go and are feeling defensive about it? Like, pulling an example out of the air, somebody says “you know g*psy is a slur, right?”, and instead of “oh shit! no i didn’t know, sorry!”, they reach more for “don’t judge me! i couldn’t have known!” it’s… like i say, i could be full of shit, but for me myself, that identity-thing of “don’t judge me, i didn’t know any better” got lost somewhere around the same time as “gayness is a SIN”. i mean, i still don’t like being seen as a fuckup, i imagine nobody does, but my mental image of people who say “nobody is born knowing whatever” is of kids who… still have that belief in their own Moral Rectitude, you know? who have never yet had to integrate into their identity the fact that they are A Person Who Can And Does Fuck Up. who feel like they need to defend the idea that they couldn’t have done any better, defend their… their honor, and that’s their go-to excuse because idk it fits their world paradigm or whatever.)

(sorry. i say “kids”. given that this conversation involves a discussion of authors younger than me having their shit together, and that you also are quite a lot younger than me, that’s probably a bad choice of words. but i’m failing to come up with a better one. :P)

again. large grain of salt. possibly a barrel of salt. or a very large crystal. a hunk of salt. i’m tired and depressed and pretty sure i’m not being terribly articulate. but that’s my impression: most people our age have started out pretty centrist, and i’d bet the ones who overgeneralize about “nobody grows up far-leftist” are included in that centrist-moving-leftward group.

Hmm. The thing is–and I know I often elide this–I don’t think I was exactly raised far-left per se. Like, there were groups (the ones that come to mind are black people and gay people) where people talked positively about them, but you never seemed to actually meet any. Trans people were mostly not on our radar, and when they were they were mostly viewed with vaguely benevolent confusion.

But I was raised left enough that when I did meet full-on social-justice folk, they didn’t feel foreign. I wasn’t exactly raised in SJ culture, but the place I was raised was…adjacent, somewhere close enough that SJ proper felt of-a-piece with it.

>>they reach more for “don’t judge me! i couldn’t have known!”<<

For me, personally, while that reaction is correlated with childhood because I hang out on the Internet more as an adult, I think the main distinction is actually speech vs text. Offline!me’s* primary reaction to conflict is fight; Brin’s primary reaction is flight. My first emotion when called wrong is anger, but given a short time (usually short enough that textual communication will inherently give it to you) the anger is overwhelmed by fear. “If I crush the opposition they’ll stop hurting me!” becomes “As far as I can tell, I have never managed to successfully crush anyone, and I have no reason to think this will be the exception. Trying and failing to crush them will only prolong the fight and its associated pain. The only way of ending a fight that reliably works for me is complete and unconditional surrender, so that’s what I should do.” (Now that I’ve spent a lot of time in that frame of mind where my cowardice can shine through, I can even manage flight reactions in offline conflicts sometimes.)

(Apparently a lot of people are more the opposite? I mean, I guess they must be, or we wouldn’t have stuff along the lines of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. In a twisted sort of way, I suppose the existence of opposite people helped me; while I haven’t managed a 100% perfect record, I learned very fast that I could avoid a lot of fuckups by staying very quiet, observing, and letting other people make beginners’ mistakes for me.)

*My legal name would be less clunky, and I wouldn’t mind you knowing it, but I’m writing this publicly.

My commentary tags:

#it’s not really Learning to Accept That I Can Be Wrong #as much as #Learning It Is In My Self-Interest to Pretend to Accept That I Can Be Wrong #(people who are not motivated primarily by self-interest confuse me and I am often tripped up by them) #(what do you mean you’re professing [insert political stance here] because you think it’s correct) #(and not because you fear social repercussions for not supporting it or because it would benefit you personally?) #(how does *that* work?)

justice-turtle’s reply:

re your tags: I have a lot of trouble remembering that self-interest actually exists? as a thing people feel? emotions are *weird*, man. (in other notes, offline!me is extremely quiet and shy, while online!me often talks a big fight, but idk that either of those is “real” at this point. my identity / sense of self is super malleable right now. which might tie into self-interest / survival skills on another level, idek…) *wanders off making thinky faces*

Tags:

#(December 2016) #conversational aglets #replies #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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avatar_f8e1b05d13a5_40

@somnilogical​ replied to your post “About that post a couple hours ago that read “This is a test of the…”

have you looked in to scuttlebutt?

https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/

An interesting idea! Very good fit for the “101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers” tag (use 41: read-write social media).

I see two main issues:

  • There doesn’t seem to be per-post blacklisting or even muting, which combines badly with the system where you automatically see everything friends-of-friends post. Someone who likes my fandom posts does not necessarily want to read my kink posts, and someone who likes my entire blog does not necessarily want to read a bunch of Amenta RP. There’s a block system, but this seems rather extreme: finding a friend-of-a-friend uninteresting does not mean you want them to be unable to read your posts.
  • I am very not an early adopter. I mean, apparently a lot of people *think* of me as an early adopter (”people who made [Tumblr] blogs before 2012 are the Ancient Gods talked about in fantasy”), but I had to hear about Tumblr from four different places for months before deciding to get an account myself.

On the bright side, it looks like backing up your blog is as simple as backing up (Linux) Thunderbird: just zip the local folder and stick the zip file wherever you want, and to restore it just get a blank installation of the interface program and stick the unzipped backup folder where the interface expects its data to be. (I have restored Thunderbird from this style of backup twice, and both times it has Just Worked™.)

I’ll keep it in mind. Thank you!

Tags:

#somnilogical #part of me is hoping that if Tumblr actually shuts down it will cause a surge of interest in Tumblr clones and #lead someone to make a Fediverse platform I actually like #but it is good to have some plans on standby #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #The Great Tumblr Apocalypse #replies #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #Scuttlebutt

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~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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3dspacejesus Icon

@3dspacejesus

​ replied to your post

“cryptovexillologist:

By the way: my main social media presence these…”

I think dragon.style has a 5000-character limit

*looks at dragon.style*

7777-character limit, which seems pretty workable even though I don’t really understand why there’s a character limit at all (though I notice a lot of the articles about Mastodon were written by people accustomed to Twitter who think 500 characters is a lot). Downsides: not currently accepting new accounts, some of the admin’s attempts to signal safety are of a kind that–from past experience–I actually parse as hostile instead (in a “will probably turn you in to the Thought Police” kind of way).

Still, proof of concept, and it’s possible Anthracite isn’t actually as scary as the people whose signals she’s using. (She does at least appear to have zero obscenity laws as long as you use content warnings and cuts, which is very important to me in a venue because…well, here is a quote from a PM I sent a while back regarding why I wasn’t going to move to Imzy:

“IME, obscenity laws are enforced more strictly the less sexually mainstream you are, and as someone who is about as non-mainstream as it gets, the strictures on me get very tight very fast once they start existing at all. (Good thing I’m not into bondage, or it’d probably cause a paradox. :P) It tends to work out that if straight people can’t have sex, then gay people can’t kiss and fetishists can’t talk, and dammit I *like* talking.

Basically, I don’t trust any site with any obscenity rules at all to let me post the thing I just posted {{note: the thing in question was this}}. (And woe unto anyone who tries to distribute [things that are in a grey area between porn and sex toys] like half the people in my kinky Tumblr‑sphere do.)”)

Tags:

#3dspacejesus #replies #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #sexuality and lack thereof #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #Fediverse

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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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

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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brin-bellway:

brin-bellway:

brin-bellway:

I’ve been doing archiving again today, downloading local copies of things that previously existed (in versions accessible to me) only on the Internet.

The thing about archiving is that it *hurts*. Not having done it–the moment when you want to remind yourself how something went and find it isn’t there to tell you, will never be there again–hurts a lot more, so I keep doing this. My past is valuable to me and I want to keep hold of it, have it available, and yet it always hurts to immerse myself in it.

(Today I’m saving works of fiction, works I think I would miss if their links rotted. (Some of them have already rotted. Most were salvageable through the Internet Archive. But only most.) I didn’t think that would hurt, but it turns out that it does, that they evoke the time periods I read them in.)

I know a lot of people hate their past selves, for their ignorance and foolishness. I think this is another version of that impulse, but I don’t hate past-me.

I don’t hate *her*. I hate the people who did this to her.

I think that’s a lot of the problem. I think maybe a lot of the pain of archiving isn’t inherent to the task in general, but because most of the stuff I’m archiving–this project and previous projects–is from around my late teens, give or take, and I was in a lot of pain then. A lot of it I hardly acknowledged at the time, or if I acknowledged it I shrugged and figured that was just how things were.

Maybe it’s good for me to immerse myself in the past, sometimes, if only to show myself how far I’ve come.

aaaaaaaahhhhh

I have reached a series that–while it has many good parts, and I still have plans to finish reading it someday–also brings up a whole lot of baggage

and a large part of the baggage is feeling like I’m not allowed to complain about it

aaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhh

#I can’t even really get angry at anyone involved, #the worst part is knowing they weren’t even wrong to do it, #knowing I really *didn’t* deserve consideration,

no, you know what? that’s not quite true

yeah, I didn’t deserve *full* consideration, and yeah even if they’d done everything right I’d probably still have felt subjectively (unreasonably) betrayed, but I deserved more consideration than I got

everyone deserved it

because you know what? even if they didn’t recognise it as erotic, even if they didn’t even recognise it as *trance*, they still sprung a “““vicarious relaxation exercise””” on people without content warnings

honestly in some ways that’s *worse* for other people than it is for me, *I* realised what they were doing three paragraphs in, most people straight up *don’t have* “this story is attempting to hypnotise the reader” alarms in their brain and so it couldn’t have set those alarms off

@injygo replied:

“that’s horrible and i am really upset that anyone would write that now

people should warn for hypno type things

i once went to a concert thing where they did a “relaxation exercise” and it triggered the fuck out of me and caused a meltdown

and this could have been alleviated by providing a content warning“

 

The good news is, I went back and checked and they’ve since added a content warning to the beginning of the fic (continuing to refer to it as a “vicarious relaxation exercise”, but I suppose that’s probably enough to be getting on with). It looks like they added that in response to the comment I left when I first read it.

I hope that reassures you. I know *I* find it reassuring, that my comment actually accomplished something useful and wasn’t just me barging in somewhere and making people uncomfortable.

Tags:

#(I don’t know how uncomfortable they actually found it) #(it’s partly the anxiety talking) #replies #sexuality and lack thereof #amnesia cw? #(for first post in chain) #vagueblogging

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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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))

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~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

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@acemindbreaker, hello and welcome!

(and thank you for the massive spike in my activity page, it’s very flattering)

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Acemindbreaker Icon

@acemindbreaker
replied to your post “i didn’t ship you with nonternary, i’m curious about how you can be…”

Why are you so much like me?

:D

Which ways are you thinking of?

(Looking at your blog, I see you’re aro-ace, autistic, formerly homeschooled, Canadian (though not by immigration?), dislike queer gatekeeping, and your kinks are cousins to mine.)

(Was going to make this a footnote, but didn’t seem right to have a footnote longer than its paragraph: I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s room for debate about whether I’m technically autistic, and it’s definitely not official (my parents didn’t seek diagnosis when I was a kid because they didn’t want me to get stuck with a stigmatised label, and I’ve never been in a situation where the benefits of being official might outweigh that), but I’m certainly somewhere in the neighbourhood.)

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acemindbreaker replied to your link “Smashwords – Sleepwalkers: Deluxe Edition with Bonus Material – a book…”

Oh, yes. Erotica for the genital-repulsed fetishists is really rare.

I know, right? One of the nice things about text-based porn is it’s easier to skim those bits. (that and easier pausing/rewinding, and hyperlexia)

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acemindbreaker replied to your photoset “coeur-de-porcelaine: pansexualpagan: kaylamariesmiley: …”

Um, most pregnancies are not “nine months of pain”. If you’re experiencing chronic pain throughout pregnancy, something is wrong and you should talk to your gynecologist about it.

I wonder if this is related to the thing where anti-dysmenorrhea advocates treat it as a half-the-population issue, completely ignoring the existence of people who menstruate without being dysmenorrheic (*cough*). It’s tempting to exaggerate the scope of the issue in the hopes of being taken more seriously. (And sad to think, rightly or wrongly, that one wouldn’t be taken seriously if one were honest about the scope, as if the real version of the problem isn’t bad enough.)

Tags:

#acemindbreaker #replies #nsfw? #sexuality and lack thereof #okay I’m late for bed I’d better go #be back in the morning #fertility cw

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

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enscenic replied to your post “Once Upon a Time (cont.)…”

This is, of course, the pay off on following you – the commentary and evaluation is delightful. Especially in the tags.

:)

—

I’m realising that it’s really hard to model my ten-year-old self’s sexuality, because there was so much she didn’t know. Nowadays it’s hard to grok what it’s like to know that little, and to not even be aware that you might be missing information in this area.

(Apart from the lack of practical demonstrations (no condom-on-a-banana or anything; it was all book-learning), my sex education was about as good as it could reasonably have been, which is to say it was absolutely terrible for me except for teaching me how my reproductive system worked on a purely anatomical level.)

Like, how high was my pre-pubescent libido? In early puberty, when my body was still sorting out what hormonal profile to have, what effect did that have on it? I don’t know, because at the time I didn’t have a concept of “libido” in a way that was relevant to my life, and so it never occurred to me at ten to ask questions like “how often do I think about hypnosis?” or me at thirteen to ask “that time when I spent two (nonconsecutive) weeks out of a four-week period (so to speak) menstruating* because my body was still a noob at having a menstrual cycle, did I feel really tired a lot no matter how well I slept**?”. I didn’t know that these things were all connected until several years after the fact, so I didn’t keep track.

—

It occurred to me this morning: while I loved A Wrinkle in Time (and thought the sequels were reasonably enjoyable in themselves but failed to live up to the first one), and I loved the Children of the Red King series, my main reaction to Molly Moon was “more boring than it had any right to be”.

I mean, it was okay, and I read a couple of the sequels, but like, how bad does your book about hypnosis have to be to get merely an “okay” rating from a porn-starved hypno-fetishist?

A model of my childhood sexuality would need to account for that, and I’m not sure what it was that made it different. (“Told almost entirely from a top’s perspective”? “Being ‘a book about hypnosis’ is actually a problem, because it causes too-high expectations”? Both? Something else?)

—

*And so possibly two weeks ovulating as well.

**For a moment there, my brain tried to combine the stereotype of “teenagers are constantly horny” with that hypothesis of “our society has been chronically-sleep-depriving the vast majority of its teenagers for so long that we think symptoms of chronic sleep deprivation are ‘just part of what being a teenager is like’”, and then I remembered that for normal people, “constantly horny” is not a symptom of chronic sleep deprivation. (Note that I personally was not chronically sleep-deprived as a teenager: I was homeschooled and allowed to set my own sleep schedule.)

Tags:

#enscenic #replies #(the chronic-sleep-deprivation hypothesis would certainly explain why everyone was always so impressed with my maturity as a teenager) #(perhaps I was the only well-rested teen they’d ever met) #sexuality and lack thereof #people who can distinguish between their drive for sleep and drive for sex fascinate me #my childhood #nsfw?