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theforestcat:

I have prosopagnosia, which means “face blindness”. I have had it since birth, and I think it accounts for some of my neuroticism. When I was little, I was often scared that I’d accidentally go home with the wrong parents. Over my lifetime, I’ve learned to identify people in other ways, so it almost comes as naturally to me as someone without facial processing difficulties. I still make mistakes and people get frustrated with me quite often. I’ve also begun to recognize the body language of someone who recognizes me, although I’ve messed that up when someone has just been “checking me out”, which has lead those people to believe that the attraction was mutual… oops. Luckily the bus usually comes in time. xD

However, with movies, I often have difficulty following the plot because I cannot tell the difference between many actors, even if they are of different ages or ethnicities. (It helps a lot if they have different hairstyles.) This is why I prefer cartoons, although I have the same problem with a lot of anime where the characters look similar. I think I would enjoy anime a lot more if I did not have this mental deficit.

Although I haven’t seen this movie, the two men on the left would look identical to me, and I probably would not enjoy this movie due to that.

The first one from the left has brown hair (what’s left of it) and the second one has silver hair (ditto). God help you if they ever wear hoods, though. (And having to rely on a single trait like that would likely make it harder. You’re always having to do “Okay, so it was the brown one that did x and the silver one that did y…I think”.)

Tags:

#prosopagnosia #reply via reblog #tales from the prosopagnosia tag

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

themumblybee:

themumblybee:

Idea!!!! Tornadoportation: the tornado-based transportation of the future!!!!

Important Idea Catchphrase Update!!!! 

Tornadoportation: give it a whirl!

You’ll be building the transport hub in Kansas, I presume? They could probably use something like that, give people more reason to go there. Flyover country no more.

Tags:

#puns #Wizard of Oz #fly-through country

Anonymous asked: How do they rise up, rise up, rise up?How do they rise up, rise up high?

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copperbadge:

They rise heads up, heads up, heads up, they rise heads up, heads up high!

*tucks lilac in helmet strap* 

#towels and lilacs and lightsabers oh my (justice-turtle)

My thoughts exactly.

Handy tip: do not wear the lilac near your head (chest level is too close) unless you like having everything taste of lilac. (I always assumed Yankee Candle just wasn’t capturing the scent very well, but then I actually smelled lilac and found it really is that bad.)

Tags:

#Geek Pride Day #my next-door neighbour’s lilac tree is blooming later this year #right now it only has one sprig of flowers open #not enough to spare a couple for us #(the handy tip is from last year’s experience)

My belief is a TVtrope

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lb-lee:

I spent all that time rambling about gods, when really, I could’ve just linked to the relevant TVtrope.

I’m a Naytheist.  Boom.  Easy.

Seems to me that if “monolatrism” is acknowledging many gods but only worshiping one, then acknowledging gods but not worshiping them should be “alatrism”. The main problem with that is probably that latreia is a sufficiently uncommon root to make “alatrist” unintuitive. (I don’t know about you, but looking at it written down I can’t even tell it’s “a-latrist” rather than “ala-trist”.)

Mind you, to me “naytheist” reads like a synonym of “maltheist”, so I’m not sure it would actually be any worse on the intuitiveness front.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #language #alatrism #should be a word #I have actually thought so for several years #but it’s never really come up

ada-adorable asked: Do you listen to night Vale? If so, what do you think of Hiram McDaniels? If not, well, you should listen to night Vale but don’t feel compelled to pass judgment on the character without listening to the show in general. I mean, unless you want to.

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

lb-lee:

Actually, I have NEVER listened to Night Vale, and I likely never will on account of pure audio is one of the HARDEST ways for me to process information. (Seriously, I can read books that’d make your eyes bleed, but have me listen to a podcast and I climb walls.  I don’t know how audiophiles even cope with life.)

So sadly, I know absolutely nothing about this character.  Feel free to give me your quick sketch, if you like; you can’t really spoil me on this front.  If that’s not your cuppa, perhaps one of my friendly readers will add their opinion!

Cecil Speaks! Cecil Speaks is awesome. They even have translations of the occasional Russian and Morse code.

(I do have enough audio-processing ability to listen to Night Vale, but only just, so I know that feeling.)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #Welcome to Night Vale #The Great Night Vale Fandom Assimilation of 2013 #accessibility #PSA

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

orangewave:

getting real damn tired of having people yelling “LO OL WTF ARE MILK BAGS LOL” 

 

mediocre-misadventures:

This is disgusting and you should be ashamed.

 

orangewave:

calm down friend jesus christ there is nothing wrong with it, it saves space and it produces less garbage and is easy to recycle

 

grouchythefish:

you do have a pretty ugly milk jug tho

 

izzy-sukeban-jones:

if you cut the tip off, how do you seal it when you save it for later?

 

bakamic:

^^^ Seriously. How do you store it after you open it?

 

orangewave:

Step one: step two: 

 

note-a-bear:

This is still a problem, because if you don’t have a cover for that jug, your milk’s gonna get all kinds of funky smells.

If you’re gonna use bags for milk, why not do the bags with spouts that soda machines use for soda???

Like, a spout just saves so much needless stress.

 

blue-author:

No, this is part of the “less waste” thing. If you can taste every single thing you’ve got in your fridge whenever you take a drink of milk, then you won’t have to use a piece of paper to write a shopping list.

 

slepaulica:

just buy the half litre bags and drink it out of the bag. that’s what i do.

Less waste? Bagged milk causes more waste. It’s a waste of plastic (unless you can recycle the inner bags and just nobody told me, in which case it’d be no more or less a waste than cartons and jugs*), and it’s a waste of milk. Bagged milk (even unopened) goes bad much faster than milk in cartons or jugs (even opened). The milk manufacturers will tell you it lasts just as long, but they are lying. (Do not buy bagged milk with less than a week left before its sell-by date, and exercise extreme caution when drinking it: it will probably have gone bad already.)

(The really weird part is the financial incentive for consumers to use this plastic-and-milk-wasting method. 4L of bagged milk costs only slightly more (absolute, not per-litre) than 2L of carton. I have sometimes seen (not on sale) 4L of bagged milk for two cents less than one 2L carton. Therefore, per litre-actually-drunk, buying a 3-pack of bags and throwing one of them away is cheaper than buying a 2L carton and finishing it.)

*They do not have plastic gallon jugs in Canada, as far I can tell. I miss jugs.

Tags:

#food #our home and cherished land #the dark side of bulk discounts #especially ridiculously large ones #up with jugs #I don’t think we have half-litre bags here #just four-thirds litre bags #and only in 3-packs #my bag of milk tasted funny yesterday in the way it does the day before it goes lumpy #so I expect I will have to throw it away today #we managed about 2.5 bags this time #not bad relatively speaking #(sometimes) #(if my brother and I are sufficiently diligent in our milk-drinking) #(we can even finish all three) #(those are good times) #(non-guilty times)

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stephenhawqueen:

“kids arent being social now a days because of those brain washing phones” what the fuck do you think we’re doing with the phones. do you think we just stare at the number pad. do you think twitter is just a one way text from a robot bird.

*nod* I had a meatspace party yesterday. (To celebrate my new Canadian citizenship! \o/) I spent about the final hour of the four mostly with a pillow over my head, in a vain attempt to muffle all the light and sound to a decent intensity. I longed for Internet interaction, where it’s mostly quiet, things happen at an actually reasonable pace*, and it’s much more socially acceptable to ignore (or sometimes even call out as rude) “what are you going to do when you grow up” questions. (Those are basically just a veiled insult of the young adult in question’s ability to get their act together, by holding them to the unreasonably high standard of “knowing what they want to do with their life”. But that’s another story.)

All those get-off-my-lawn types talk about how pretty soon we’ll communicate entirely through text and won’t have face-to-face conversations at all. I’d say I can hardly wait for that day to come, but I think we all know it won’t. Unfortunately.

*Nobody would have let me spend half an hour composing this in meatspace. Maybe two minutes. And then they talk just as fast as they make you talk, and expect you to somehow keep up.

Tags:

#that excuse for communication called speech #remind me to try to talk her out of it next time Mom wants to host another party #in what seems like a rather backwards rule of social interaction you only get to kick people out of spaces that *aren’t* yours #if you’re elsewhere you can end the party #(or escape it) #(which is close enough) #by saying you’d best be off and going home #but if you’re *already* home you’re at the guests’ mercy #and they are not nearly as merciful as they ought to be

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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ubungmachtdenmeister:

So you know how every language has that word/phrase/sentence that native speakers can pronounce just fine, but foreigners can almost never pronounce it correctly? And the natives have a lot of fun telling the foreigners to try and say it and laughing at their attempts?

They’re called Shibboleths, and wikipedia has a whole article on them. 
Even better, wikipedia has a whole article on examples of them.

Some of them are ridiculous, I can’t stop reading this article.

 

jazzypom:

Wow. Cheers for this. 

 

nenya-kanadka:

“Art thou an Ephraimite?”

“Um, uh … No?”

“Prove it. Say ‘shibboleth.’”

“Sibboleth.”

“Aha! Die Ephraimite!”

“Oh sit.”

(Judges 12 according to Fred Clark)

 

slepaulica:

re: your tags, native speakers of hebrew probably, not native speakers of english

 

brin-bellway:

Well, English is known for its extensive use of “th”, and that’s where the problem comes in for me. (In fact, the original Hebrew word might have used a perfectly pronounceable “t”, though it’s not clear from a few minutes of looking things up.)

 

slepaulica:

dunno, don’t speak hebrew. but the shibboleth part of the shibboleth is the sh sound.

according to wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shibboleth 

The term originates from the Hebrew word shibbólet (שִׁבֹּלֶת), which literally means the part of a plant containing grains, such as an ear of corn or a stalk ofgrain[3] or, in different contexts, “stream, torrent”.[4][5]

which means that you would be able to pronounce it, because it was shibbólet, not shibbóleth :)

Yeah, I saw that, but then I saw the Wiki page on Hebrew pronunciation in general:

Some historically distinctive Hebrew phonemes have merged in modern Hebrew, such as historically distinctive /t/, /θ/, /tˤ/ (now all [t]), written respectively by the letters Tav (תּ), Ṯav (ת) and Ṭet (ט).

This would seem to imply (note the use of tav-with-no-dot in the Hebrew you quoted, for whatever that’s worth) that it was soft-“th” at the time and only became “t” later.

(What do you do if someone fails a shibboleth in an unexpected manner? People who say “shibbolef” aren’t the kind of Them you’re killing on sight (well, hearing), but they’re not Us either.)

Tags:

#language #reply via reblog #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #fun wif forn fronting

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

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slepaulica:

nenya-kanadka:

jazzypom:

ubungmachtdenmeister:

So you know how every language has that word/phrase/sentence that native speakers can pronounce just fine, but foreigners can almost never pronounce it correctly? And the natives have a lot of fun telling the foreigners to try and say it and laughing at their attempts?

They’re called Shibboleths, and wikipedia has a whole article on them. 
Even better, wikipedia has a whole article on examples of them.

Some of them are ridiculous, I can’t stop reading this article.

Wow. Cheers for this. 

“Art thou an Ephraimite?”

“Um, uh … No?”

“Prove it. Say ‘shibboleth.’”

“Sibboleth.”

“Aha! Die Ephraimite!”

“Oh sit.”

(Judges 12 according to Fred Clark)

re: your tags, native speakers of hebrew probably, not native speakers of english

Well, English is known for its extensive use of “th”, and that’s where the problem comes in for me. (In fact, the original Hebrew word might have used a perfectly pronounceable “t”, though it’s not clear from a few minutes of looking things up.)

Tags:

#language #reply via reblog #(the following category tag was added retroactively:) #fun wif forn fronting

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