reply via reblog

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

justice-turtle:

I’m going to bite somebody, I really am. What is wrong with you, 1930s Newbery writers? :P

I’m guessing your problem with this is to do with the whole ~democracy~ and ~ideals and manners~ stuff (and fair enough), but for me the problem that stands out most is:

“Instead of dwelling upon the familiar details of the story, this treatment of the legend”

I look at that, and I think:

‘And *that’s* why I had to learn nursery stories by taking several parodies and riffs of each one and noting the similarities between them. Nobody ever ““dwells upon the familiar details””, *everyone* assumes you already know and expects you to keep up.‘

You would think *children’s* media, of all things, would understand that there’s a first time for everything. If fucking *children’s books* aren’t a 101 space, what *is*?

(It may be relevant that I had to look up William Tell on Wikipedia just now. At least Wikipedia is willing to provide basic background knowledge. I guess *they’re* the 101 space for legends.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #my childhood #(I know I used italics here) #(but I also put single quotes around it as a fallback measure)

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

adzolotl:

adzolotl:

argumate reblogged your post and added: “adzolotl: someone mentioned “that 8-bit Bring Me To Life cover”, so I…”

what do you mean the good one

you called it a timeless classic

did I just get pranked into listening to multiple 8-bit renditions of Bring Me To Life

dear Tumblr staff:

if you’re gonna let us use italics, maybe make them render everywhere hmm

consider the difference between “what do you mean the good one” and “what do you mean the good one”

#whoops 

—

…

…I know I’ve been inconsistent on italics vs asterisks to indicate emphasis here, but that’s it, I’m officially going with asterisks.

Tags:

#Tumblr: a User’s Guide

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

somnilogical:

ive been having fun calculating food costs per kcal

—

huel 4.24 μ$/kcal

soylent 3.8 μ$/kcal

eggs 3.2 μ$/kcal

rice 1.6 μ$/kcal

ramen 1.11 μ$/kcal

lentils 1.0 μ$/kcal

—

humans consume ~2*10^3 kcal/day

1 μ$/kcal foods let you live for 2 $/day

humans consume 6*10^4 kcal in a month

there are 8.1*10^4 kcal in a human

—

i like getting a sense of things

I do this too! Since my post-2012 appetite is pretty good at adjusting for the calorie density of my food, the intuitive unit for “how *big* is this food relative to other foods” is the kcal. (Which runs into problems when I’m trying to figure out relative food prices *in general*, because Mom’s intuitive appetite unit is the “serving” (whatever *that* means) and Dad’s is the “millilitre”, so we sometimes can’t even agree on whether one piece of food is bigger than another. But as long as I focus on only my own eating I can get a good sense of it.)

A lot of things turn out to be cheaper than they look because of high calorie-density. I was especially surprised by peanut butter: I figured it would be *somewhat* on the cheap side, but it’s as cheap as ramen. (In my own circumstances, that is; I notice your figure for ramen is higher than mine, if I moved the decimal places right (I work with “cents to two decimal places”). Both peanut butter and ramen were 0.06 cents/kcal.)

Tags:

#food #adventures in human capitalism #reply via reblog #disordered eating #(I’m okay but I expect people blocking that tag do not want to read this)

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

mugasofer:

brin-bellway:

justice-turtle:

biscuitsarenice:

Black and British: A Forgotten History 

Francis Barber’s descendant Cedric Barber [x] [x]

#kind of perpetually surprised that this is surprising #generations and genetics happen? #smaller phenotype populations are mixed into the larger ones #this doesn’t mean they magically disappeared #or were never there

I don’t know about the British perspective, but coming to it as a white USian raised in Southern culture, I think at least some of the reason this isn’t obvious to a lot of people is that we do have that history of blood quantum, of tracking whether someone was one-eighth or one-sixteenth black and refusing them civil rights, of basically forcing the black community to intermarry among themselves, so that they *didn’t* mix out and disappear this way. (Of course, there were also a lot more black folks in USia than there ever were in Britain, I’m not saying that’s the only reason. Just, I think that is a part of the perspective I’m personally coming from. *thinking out loud*)

As a white USian raised in *Northern* culture, I’m not surprised by the intermarriage thing, but I *am* surprised by this clip nonetheless. The surprising thing is that they portray *positively* this guy having an Emotional Connection to His Ancestral Culture because of someone from *five generations back*.

Once you get to smaller fractions than one-quarter or so, having Emotional Connections like that stops being Celebrating Your Heritage and starts being Failing to Stay in Your Lane. The “white person who makes a big deal out of being 1/32 Cherokee” is a *negative* archetype.

As it happens, I too have a black former-slave great-great-great-grandfather (and likewise no black ancestry more recent than that). I don’t have an Emotional Connection about this, but…like, you have no reason to believe me when I say that, because I would say it regardless of whether it were true. You bet your ass I wouldn’t dare openly claim a Connection: it would be seen as cheating, as trying to claim the advantages of being black while skipping out on the disadvantages.

That’s interesting; maybe I’ve been primed by the above, but I would not view you having an Emotional Connection to your former-slave ancestor …

… depending on the form of the connection, of course. It would be weird if you literally identified as nonwhite (I think this is the point of the “1/32 Cherokee” thing?)

Well, I *am* Schrodinger’s White†, but that’s not from the one-drop black, it’s from the one-half Ashkenazi.

(But even then I try to avoid doing anything that even *suggests* claiming non-white-ness, partly because I suspect I would lose the ensuing argument over whether I deserve the privileges (so to speak) of that rank (I pretty much always collapse to white, since I’m pretty much always observed by people for whom that’s the lower-status answer), partly because–as someone who has literally never experienced anti-Semitism–playing the Jew card feels dishonest and distasteful, and partly because I think encouraging the idea of Judaism as innate is counterproductive (I want religion exit rights, mostly on general principles but with a side of “if I ever somehow *do* fall into the hands of people who think Judaism is a disease, I want them to think it’s a *curable* disease so I can let them cure me and survive”).)

—

“Oh, but it’s a different *form* of connection” reads to me as an excuse from someone who *was* trying for a best-of-two-worlds power-grab and is backpedalling now that they’ve realised they aren’t going to get away with it. Mind you, I *am* fairly paranoid and *do* have a tendency to see power struggles where they may or may not actually exist.

—

†When I am observed, the waveform collapses into whichever answer is lower-status by the observer’s standards.

Tags:

#*knocks on wood* #reply via reblog #our roads may be golden or broken or lost #racism cw? #anti-semitism cw? #Judaism #inb4 someone blames my hierarchical thinking on my germophobia #(also tbh I don’t *like* talking about Judaism pretty much at all) #(even mentioning it can feel like encouraging people to see it as a Big Deal) #(when really I want it to be at most a Little Deal)

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

justice-turtle:

biscuitsarenice:

Black and British: A Forgotten History 

Francis Barber’s descendant Cedric Barber [x] [x]

#kind of perpetually surprised that this is surprising #generations and genetics happen? #smaller phenotype populations are mixed into the larger ones #this doesn’t mean they magically disappeared #or were never there

I don’t know about the British perspective, but coming to it as a white USian raised in Southern culture, I think at least some of the reason this isn’t obvious to a lot of people is that we do have that history of blood quantum, of tracking whether someone was one-eighth or one-sixteenth black and refusing them civil rights, of basically forcing the black community to intermarry among themselves, so that they *didn’t* mix out and disappear this way. (Of course, there were also a lot more black folks in USia than there ever were in Britain, I’m not saying that’s the only reason. Just, I think that is a part of the perspective I’m personally coming from. *thinking out loud*)

As a white USian raised in *Northern* culture, I’m not surprised by the intermarriage thing, but I *am* surprised by this clip nonetheless. The surprising thing is that they portray *positively* this guy having an Emotional Connection to His Ancestral Culture because of someone from *five generations back*.

Once you get to smaller fractions than one-quarter or so, having Emotional Connections like that stops being Celebrating Your Heritage and starts being Failing to Stay in Your Lane. The “white person who makes a big deal out of being 1/32 Cherokee” is a *negative* archetype.

As it happens, I too have a black former-slave great-great-great-grandfather (and likewise no black ancestry more recent than that). I don’t have an Emotional Connection about this, but…like, you have no reason to believe me when I say that, because I would say it regardless of whether it were true. You bet your ass I wouldn’t dare openly claim a Connection: it would be seen as cheating, as trying to claim the advantages of being black while skipping out on the disadvantages.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #racism cw? #our roads may be golden or broken or lost

{{next post in sequence}}

Anonymous asked: would be good if individuals could just easily adjust their own sex drives up or down as wanted, really. I mean, I know there are medications with either effect, but I don’t mean like that, I mean like you’d adjust a setting in a piece of software.

~ Brin ~ 4 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

theopjones:

brin-bellway:

argumate:

it would indeed be very handy!

I think like most emotions it would be kind of self-reinforcing, in that once you’re at one end of the scale the other end seems unappealing, but it would still be good to have the option available.

…do people normally find a given level of libido self-reinforcing?

Only middling-libido!mes want to stay that way long-term; I get sick of high libido after ~1 day and of low libido after ~1 week. (Unless I’m too distracted by other things to notice the vague sense of being incomplete that happens when my libido is too low for too long, which is how I spent the month of April. But even that is more “being sufficiently fucked up that your damage-assessment mechanism is also damaged”, rather than actually being okay with it.)

Mind you, when I see other people complaining of loss of libido, they’re almost always talking about practical effects and not the inherent badness of having an ego-syntonic part of your psyche go missing, which makes me wonder if maybe ego-neutral libidos are more common than typical-minding would lead me to believe.

Kind of my feeling is that I often get the feeling of IQ reduced by 25% around hot woman + weird effects on inhibitions (both reduced and increased. Which is sort of self-reinforcing. 

But is also why I agree with the anon that I don’t really like a lot of my sex drive. 

I would kind of like it if I could turn off my feelings of sexual and romantic attraction 2/3rds of the time. And thats a lot of the reason. I often don’t like a lot of the effect that it has on me.

And I also wish I could shut off a lot of inappropriate times I’m attracted to someone or a lot of the feelings of unrequited crushes and such.

…okay, in hindsight I guess I should have figured my other divergences would imply divergence here as well. I had…kind of forgotten that sex drives could have interpersonal effects, since mine doesn’t really.

(I wish you good luck and good coping.)

Tags:

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

{{next post in sequence}}

Anonymous asked: would be good if individuals could just easily adjust their own sex drives up or down as wanted, really. I mean, I know there are medications with either effect, but I don’t mean like that, I mean like you’d adjust a setting in a piece of software.

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

argumate:

it would indeed be very handy!

I think like most emotions it would be kind of self-reinforcing, in that once you’re at one end of the scale the other end seems unappealing, but it would still be good to have the option available.

…do people normally find a given level of libido self-reinforcing?

Only middling-libido!mes want to stay that way long-term; I get sick of high libido after ~1 day and of low libido after ~1 week. (Unless I’m too distracted by other things to notice the vague sense of being incomplete that happens when my libido is too low for too long, which is how I spent the month of April. But even that is more “being sufficiently fucked up that your damage-assessment mechanism is also damaged”, rather than actually being okay with it.)

Mind you, when I see other people complaining of loss of libido, they’re almost always talking about practical effects and not the inherent badness of having an ego-syntonic part of your psyche go missing, which makes me wonder if maybe ego-neutral libidos are more common than typical-minding would lead me to believe.

Tags:

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

{{next post in sequence}}

Image ~ ~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

justice-turtle:

wtf-viz:

Shattered distribution.

i’m sorry i understand this is trying to make a point but literally all i can think is “what the shit kind of graphic design is this”

Recently, I had a practice exercise for Critical Thinking class (Unit 7: How to Lie with Statistics) in which I had to find a terrible graph in a news source and explain why it was terrible.

As such, my reaction to this post is “*sigh* howmuch.net is at it again”.

(In the case of the post I linked, the article was even worse than the graph taken in isolation. Fun fact: as far as I can tell (and admittedly it’s not all that clear), the original data source uses “housing” to mean everything involved in maintaining a residence (such as utilities), but the article strongly implies that “housing” = “rent”. And they casually assume that a household with average income will also have average expenses, and at one point actually conflate income and expenses!)

—

On the bright side, the OP is wtf-viz, which means that the point this post is trying to make is “what the shit kind of graphic design is this”.

Tags:

#adventures in University Land #reply via reblog #adventures in human capitalism #(tangentially)

{{next post in sequence}}

~ 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}}