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~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

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Talopine Icon

@talopine replied to your post “How can Pokemon Go be so popular if so few phone models can run it?…”

I think that the lower specced phones might not run the VR aspect, but might otherwise work?

Yeah, it’s looking like the answer is “Pokemon Go actually runs fine on 1 GB of RAM”. I asked my brother (who has this model) if he can play it, and he said that while he hasn’t actually tried to play it, Google doesn’t complain about incompatibility if he tries to install it. Plus, one of the Amazon reviews for that phone explicitly mentions playing Pokemon Go on it.

I’m thinking I’ll buy the same model as him once I scrape together some more Amazon credit. Probably throw a new phone pouch into the order too if I can’t find anything suitable lying around; that phone is huge and will definitely not fit in the pouch I have now. (Never going back to Velcro pouches, though, not after several years with a Velcro MP3 player pouch that had an increasing tendency to open by accident. Zipper pouches all the way.)

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#talopine #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #oh look an update #replies

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~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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@justice-turtle replied to your post: So for the past two years or so I’ve been slowly…

dude, I grew up celebrating Christmas and my reaction still wouldn’t be “love joy peace”, it’s outrage and bickering and uncomfortably gendered toys. Assuming universal reactions to Christmas doesn’t even work within the imaginary ‘verse where everyone’s Christian. ;P (And it always pisses me off that people assume it does. Grrrr. :S)

Yyyyep. There are a lot of reasons why someone might not be comfortable with Christmas. Holidays aren’t one-size-fits-all.

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#justice turtle #replies

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~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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Justice-Turtle Icon

@justice-turtle​ replied to your post : (under a cut because I reserve the right to delete…

(having trouble getting the usual reply blockquote to work, so I’ll italicise instead)

I keep wondering if a certain type of verbally-oriented autistic is the only person who actually questions – maybe who CAN actually question – feelings and assumptions that everyone else seems to take as bedrock. :P It’s a discouraging possibility.

(also: emigrant from an overtly hierarchical society here. I can attest you still get told the problem is with you if you don’t fit in, questioning the people who have power is still dangerous, it’s only those OTHER societies (communist russia anyone?) whose different trappings on the same structure make them problematic, and everyone else insists they actually feel the way they’re programmed to. I don’t know. Neurotypicals are weird. :P)

Sorry, I’m babbling. What I’m trying to say is: apart from the specifically anti-authoritarian trappings, this all sounds startlingly familiar given how opposite our cultures are. Like, very specifically familiar in individual details. Does everybody actually live in the same sort of toxic power structure and out-group everyone else so thoroughly they can’t recognize it? I feel like that kind of thinking is awfully… like, “I am special, I see what others can’t”, kind of attitude, but (cont.)

(cont.) but I haven’t got an alternate paradigm that would still fit these parts of the evidence.

I did wonder if “the problem is with you” was too negative a way of putting it, given that the contexts I originally encountered the idea in were autism (generally a positively-connotated trait around here) and asexuality (grey area, but while some people say asexuals have equal status with straights (that is, no status), the people talking about growing up feeling like all allosexuals were lying aren’t those same people). In such cases, it isn’t the trait itself they consider a problem, just that it’s harder to navigate being surrounded by people unlike you if you don’t even know they’re unlike you, let alone how to account for it.

Part of me feels like a society where questioning your superiors is genuinely permitted is too much to hope for, and a more feasible goal is a society that doesn’t pretend questioning is allowed but then punish you if you actually do it. That would be the point of moving to an overtly hierarchical culture: not an attempt to reduce the total number or restrictiveness of rules, but an attempt to increase the number of written rules and correspondingly reduce the number of unwritten ones, and especially instances like questioning, where written and unwritten rules contradict each other. (The opposite of the usual description of hypocrisy: “do as I do, not as I say”.) That you still got everyone insisting they actually felt as they were programmed to is a bad sign for that idea, though.

Re: “I am special, I see what others can’t”, it kind of seems more like missing something, some aspect of morality that would allow for the proper sincerity…but I remember you saying something about how you used to believe you were sociopathic, and that you don’t think that anymore. Was that a similar thing?

—

Relatedly, a few months ago @deusvulture (who I’m apparently not allowed to ping) wrote a post speculating on ideological “hobbits”. Like The Authoritarians, the post assumes no members of the group it’s talking about are in the audience; unlike The Authoritarians, it tries not to call its subjects inferior beings who are likely to get us all killed.

The post stayed with me because my reaction to it was “damn, where do I sign up?”. Pay lip service to a given hierarchy, turn up when it’s in need of sheer numbers in ways that don’t require you to put yourself in harm’s way, perhaps use some of its dialect in a non-status-y way when casually chatting with friends, but mostly you and it ignore each other. It sounds too good to be true.

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#justice turtle #replies #our roads may be golden or broken or lost

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~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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Somnilogical Icon

@somnilogical liked your post:tfw you want to write about why you put your…

Right, that reminds me of what I was going to say when you liked the previous post. (That like was on the OP rather than my reblog, but I saw it anyway because I was looking at the notes.)

Every time you, a person named Somni, like one of my kink posts, I start wondering about nominative determinism. (Although with a chosen name, even if there is causality it might go the other direction.)

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#somnilogical #replies

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~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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Lizardywizard Avatar

@lizardywizard replied to your post “Goddammit, it’s a goddamn roleplay blog. *headdesk* (so you know how I…”

Anyone roleplaying that in a #relatable way is possibly likely to actually experience the thing, though? So might be worth messaging them anyway.

You know, I was starting to wonder that myself. They haven’t posted
anything since June, but what the hell, I’ll try messaging them. ((and
make sure to write everything in the standard doubled-parentheses OOC
notation, to make it clear that I’m not asking Del, I’m asking Del’s author))

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#lizardywizard #replies #sexuality and lack thereof

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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Lizardywizard Avatar lizardywizard replied to your post: In hindsight, I probably should have known that an…

wait I’m confused, what is a star worshipper and why does this make you feel broken (don’t have to answer if you don’t wanna, just curious)

I was using “star-worshipper” to mean people for whom looking at the night sky inspires awe. They tend to go on about how light pollution is bad for the soul and I’m not complete as a person until I’ve seen the Milky Way with my own eyes. I’ve heard this sort of thing enough over the years that I’m now sensitised to it: even things that, taken on their own, are value-neutral or only mildly charged statements about stargazing and the absence thereof tend to make me bristle because they invoke all these other memories of proselytising star-worshippers. (There have also been at least one or two statements in the textbook that were more than mildly charged.)

Now that I think about it, making the entire link and only the link italicised might have obscured the fact that it was a link. The last couple paragraphs of the linked post explain why it makes me feel broken.

(Later reflection suggests that I can feel awe or something in that neighbourhood, but only about people, not things, and especially not things that have been hyped up as awe-inspiring.)

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#lizardywizard #no offence to your friend-shaped objects #being in awe of stars in their animistic capacity as people would be another thing altogether #replies #adventures in University Land #Brin is touchy about stars

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~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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image sinesalvatorem replied to your photo: Home! *flop* hooooome

Welcome back! I’m afraid I didn’t notice when you left…

I didn’t say much about it because…well, first of all it’s very hard to talk about going to Disney World without sounding awkwardly frivolous. It sounded awkwardly frivolous to me when Mom first said we were going. On the other hand, that “first said we were going” was two years ago. There’s been a fair few obstacles in the family’s path over those two years, and I saw the way that the thought of a Disney trip at the end of the tunnel kept Mom going. It was probably worth it for that alone.

(Especially when she managed to convince them to give us a whole bunch of Disney restaurant credits: one “snack” (roughly what you’d think it means, though it had to have a symbol next to it on the menu indicating you could use a credit on it) and two fast-food “meals” (entree, beverage, dessert, though you could swap out any or all of those three for any available snack) per person per day. She got all this for the low, low price of researching Disney enough to hear about the free-food promotion (that bit wasn’t really a price, as she enjoyed it), staying up most of one night to get in as soon as the deal opened, spending an hour and a half on hold while trying not to fall asleep, and promising to stay in a Disney-owned hotel and schedule our trip for mid-September, which is apparently a relatively bad time for them profit-wise because most kids have just gone back to school. Joke’s on them: we were going to go then regardless, and I think we were going to be in a Disney hotel too.

The portions in Disney, for the record, are very big, and our appetites (especially mine) are not so big, so it was rather more credits than we could actually use on the trip itself. We ended up bringing back about a hundred chocolate bars to eat at home later, as they were the least perishable tasty thing available for a snack credit.)

Also, I was taught as a young child that the fact that one is leaving one’s house unoccupied is a vulnerability that should be kept secret as much as practical until after it is over. Intellectually, I’m not convinced this is reasonable advice, but on more visceral levels I’ve inherited much of the paranoia of my native culture, and perhaps added some of my own.

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#we drove to Ohio and flew domestic to minimise security issues #(and indeed security issues were minimised by American standards) #this was my first road trip since getting a smartphone and oh my god it is *so much easier* when you have a decent GPS handy #Mom brought the usual printed Google directions but they were frequently inadequate #and the phone was there to the rescue #no more getting lost for two hours trying and failing to follow a detour! #if you miss a turn the phone’s directions will compensate rather than becoming near-useless! #GPS navigation is so great you guys #replies #Brin owns *two* 2010’s computers now #food

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