tales from the askbox

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

@theshadiertwin asked:

Welcome to Decoder Ring Theatre fandom!  What episode are you on?

shortly followed by: Ah!  I see you caught up!  I’ll amend my question, then – what was one of your favourite episodes!

I try to only answer asks indirectly because of the first-degree ask bug, and normally that works fine. On the other hand, if I post the ask unanswered and then give my actual answer in a reblog, it won’t go in the public tag, and that doesn’t seem suitable for this. I’m compromising by putting ask and answer in a text-post OP.

—

To pick one…well, the one that comes to mind is “The Golden Idol”. I love when characters think through the implications of their superpowers. The Mad Monkey’s plan here is *magnificently* clever, creating an entire fake person out of glamours and memory implants.

I spent a few minutes of this one facepalming when it looked like he’d enthralled the Flying Squirrel, seeing as how the show had *just gotten done explaining* that you can use mind control to prevent people from getting mind-controlled by others, which means that–as someone with a mind-controlling partner whom she would trust with her very soul–Kit Baxter has possibly the best access to psychic shielding on the planet. Shouldn’t they have learned their lesson after Diablos?

And then it turns out that our heroes *totally thought of this*, and she’s actually been faking being under the Mad Monkey’s spell this whole time so that he would let his guard down. That was a beautiful moment.

I love clever plans, and I love when they’re defeated by out-clevering (both the bluffing and how the Red Panda figured out what was going on in the first place), and basically cleverness is my narrative weakness.

—

(When I skimmed through the episode again just now to see if I’d gotten it more or less right, I heard Kit mention Ajay Shah as a potential suspect, and I was like “Hey! I know who that is now! Neat!”. Once I’ve finished the rest of the pilots and tie-ins, I’m going to have to re-listen to the series at *least* once to hear how it sounds from the perspective of having the whole thing. I *know* I didn’t get as much out of the “The World Next Door” as I could have, for one.)

Tags:

#Red Panda Adventures #tales from the askbox

{{next post in sequence}}

injygo asked: You look like a maidenhair fern in a misty forest.

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

brin-bellway:

Note:@ilzolende thought I proposed that we deal with the first-degree ask bug by having the OP write their answer in a reblog rather than the “”actual”” answer section. I never actually said that*, but I think I like it, so I’m going to try adopting it. (I will be tagging these “”actual”” answers “zeroth degree asks”, for ease of blacklisting if they start cluttering up the dashboard.)

*I proposed a norm that placed the onus on the reblogger rather than the OP, which we can still resort to for OPs that aren’t formatted this way.

*looks up maidenhair ferns on Google Images*

Maidenhair Ferns

*considers maidenhair fern in misty forest*

Yeah, I can totally see that.

Thank you for answering!

—

Relatedly, this is the first image ever associated with Brin, which my current icon deliberately echoes:

(holy crap, why is this picture so hard to find, it should not be this difficult)

(okay, got it; accidentally ran into an old argument along the way, but I got out of there without having to relive it too much)

Brin Typepad Icon

(It’s one of the Typepad default commenter icons. If the commenter doesn’t override their icon, Typepad assigns them one: the assignment is random, but consistent between posts by the same person.)

Tags:

#ask meme #tales from the askbox

nevermindbinarity asked: 24 and 33

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

{{previous post in sequence}}

24. Baths or showers?

These days, showers. Baths were nice as a kid, but they lose a lot of their appeal when you grow too tall to float in the bathtub.

33. What do you typically have for breakfast?

I’m actually in the middle of eating my typical breakfast right now. It’s a single-serving peach yogurt cup. I eat a fruit yogurt cup for every non-Passover breakfast I spend at home (which is nearly all of them; about the only occasions I leave home before noon are exams, travelling, and the occasional unusually-early field trip). (Breakfasts away from home are a (carefully checked for freshness) peanut butter granola bar, or a cup of orange juice if I’m in a hotel that serves breakfast. Passover breakfasts early on are leftover charoset. Later in the week it’s often a piece of fruit, but a large part of what I get out of keeping Passover is taking a break from culinary routines, so anything goes, really.)

I like all of the Beatrice fruit yogurt flavours to one extent or another, but there’s a definite hierarchy of “buy this type only if the store is out of the higher-ranked types”. (The hierarchy changes every so often: currently it’s peach–>strawberry–>raspberry–>blueberry, but I’m thinking of switching strawberry and peach.)

(I can’t do big, rich breakfasts. My stomach wakes up very slowly: it takes 2 – 3 hours after I wake up before I can even eat the yogurt. If I’m in a situation where I have to conform to someone else’s schedule, I can get it down to 1 – 1.5 hours in a pinch, but it’s not fun.)

Tags:

#growing too tall to float in the bathtub was the beginning of the Dark Times #it was hard to find anything else that soothing and that readily available #tales from the askbox #ask meme #food #nevermindbinarity

sdhs-rationalist asked: 17, 36, 42, 63

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

17. Who would be your ideal partner?

My first reaction is “????“ and my second is “for starters, someone I’m not scared of”. Over the past year or so, I’ve been learning that perhaps this is not as exacting a standard as I once thought.

36. Favorite clean word?

Meridian. It has such a nice flow to it.

42. Are you a good judge of character?

My gut is a paranoid wreck. Intellectually, I don’t know.

63. Biggest Fear?

Hmm. I’m not sure. *digs through brain* Well, I don’t think I would call that the biggest fear, and lately it’s turned out that that one wasn’t quite a fear per se at all…

Memory of seven-year-old self: *gives me a Look*

…oh, of course, you’re right. It could never have been anything else.

Death, specifically my own.

(You can tell how good I’ve gotten at suppressing it by the first paragraph of this response. Even now, as I type this, I am careful not to think too hard about what I’m saying. It is a hard-won skill, honed through sheer self-preserving necessity for a decade and a half, and it is still best to avoid straining the limits when possible.)

Tags:

#tales from the askbox #ask meme #oddly this skill *doesn’t* extend to a general capacity for doublethink #I have to learn it all over again for each new thing I try to suppress #(but the price of failure is never *quite* so high) #death tw #sdhs-rationalist

{{next post in sequence}}

vaiyamagic asked: 12, 16

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

12. What was your last dream about?

I vaguely recall something this morning about a road trip and puzzles, but I’m not sure. The one before that (the previous day) was a nightmare about long-past-their-sell-by-date granola bars that I did not notice were ancient until after I had eaten one.

16. Favorite movie?

I don’t think I have one? I’m not big on video in general*: it’s overstimulating, there’s too much to pay attention to and it doesn’t patiently wait for you while you process what’s already happened. The bigger a chunk the video comes in, the worse it is.

The weekend The Force Awakens came out, I watched the original-ish** Star Wars movie for the first time, for cultural literacy reasons. I talked Mom–who was watching with me–into breaking it up into two one-hour chunks on separate days. She’s always a little upset when this sort of thing comes up, because ”You used to love movies!” and I’m not as good at them as I used to be. I’m not sure why: maybe I’ve been spoiled by the text-focused Internet.

*Yes, I know this is ironic given that we met by watching Star Trek together.

**I borrowed a VHS from a friend, and it said it was a 20th anniversary edition with updated special effects and some integrated deleted scenes. It’ll have to do.

Tags:

#tales from the askbox #ask meme #in which Brin has a food poisoning phobia #vaiyamagic

{{next post in sequence}}

theunitofcaring asked: 47, 90, 94?

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

Wow, you’re fast. I hadn’t even given @sinesalvatorem the ping she wanted next time I posted an ask meme. (I couldn’t do it in the post itself because you can’t do pings on chat posts.)

47. What is your most expensive piece of clothing?

Not counting jewellery (besides, I have no idea how much any of my jewellery cost because it was all given to me by other people*), I think my winter coat? USD**$100 might have been the cost before the substantial sale it was on, though; I’ve had it for a few years, so I don’t recall exactly. The final cost might have been as low as $50.

(I don’t really go in for fashion or indeed aesthetics in general, so I never treat myself to fancy clothes because it wouldn’t be a treat.)

90. What makes you angry?

(no, brain, this is not a trick question to suss out whether you have Appropriate Emotional Responses, Kelsey would not do that)

People being wrong, On The Internet or otherwise. Even if it’s an honest mistake and they couldn’t have known any better, I still feel angry to some extent, though I try harder not to show it.

94. What are your strengths?

I’m pretty good at figuring out what my personal quirks are and ways of working around them, exploiting them, or just plain living with them. (As I recall, the example I used last time I was talking about this was knowing exactly how many new books I need to binge on in order to develop a special interest in the series: four. If I don’t want a special interest in a particular series, I can usually*** avoid it by limiting my book consumption during the first read-through; if I do want it, I have a benchmark to aim for.)

*Unless you count my (digital but non-smart) wristwatch, which I bought for $20.

**I bought it during a trip to America.

***Some series have a “love at first sight” thing, and those only take one book, but I can tell in advance which ones those are.

Tags:

#tales from the askbox #ask meme #theunitofcaring

{{next post in sequence}}

Anonymous asked: i didn’t ship you with nonternary, i’m curious about how you can be ace and have a hypnosis fetish?

~ Brin ~ 3 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

Ah, I’m guessing you read a reblog-chain involving this.

Okay, let me see if I can explain this without being either oversimplified or too dense with ace community jargon.

Often when people first encounter the word “asexual”, they think it means “lacking in sexuality”. It’s an easy mistake to make: it kind of looks like it ought to mean that.

Thing is, “asexual”, in the sense used in the modern day in this culture, actually has a meaning analogous to words like “heterosexual”, “homosexual”, “bisexual”. It denotes the types of people that the person in question can generally experience sexual attraction towards: in this case, no types.

Sexual attraction is just one aspect of sexuality. There are others: libido, various fetishes, capacity for orgasm, just to name a few. A person can have these aspects in any combination, or none of them.

Basically nothing is hard-and-fast when it comes to identity labels, but as a general rule, “asexuality” refers only to the absence of sexual attraction. An asexual may have any or all other aspects while still being asexual. (They can also have none, of course.)

Note: many kinky asexuals, if asked how they can be both, would respond that their kinks aren’t sexual: they’re non-sexual fascinations that bear enough resemblance to “kinks” in the sexual sense to make it useful for them to call themselves “kinky”. I am not one of those people: I do consider it a sexual thing, though it tends to look very different from “normal” sexuality due to the particular set of aspects and experiences and (especially) other quirks of brain wiring that went into shaping it, and someone else in a similar situation might have a different view on whether their kink is sexual. Still, I thought I should mention that this is by no means a universal or even necessarily the most common view among asexuals with kinks and/or fetishes.

Wait, I probably shouldn’t leave that ’looks very different from “normal” sexuality due to the particular set of aspects and experiences and (especially) other quirks of brain wiring that went into shaping it‘ bit buried in the middle of a sentence. See, just because, for example, asexuals can have libidoes, it doesn’t mean that their experiences of libido will be the same as those of non-aces. A given aspect of sexuality tends to manifest differently depending on what other aspects are around for it to interact with, as well as what the rest of the person’s mind is like. (Really, given that I tend to dislike overwhelming emotion in general (even the supposedly positive emotions), it makes a certain amount of sense that to me, the most satisfying form of pleasure would not be orgasmic ecstasy but rather calm contentment.) “Hypno-fetishist” is close enough to the truth to be useful, but I often find I approach things differently than other hypno-fetishists do.

I hope this helped. While I do have significant quantities of contact with the asexual community, I’m not an activist and don’t have much practice at explaining the intricacies of asexuality. Feel free to ask for clarification or more information.

Tags:

#tales from the askbox #sexuality and lack thereof #(that actually used to be my asexuality tag) #(in the early days of my blog) #(but these days it’s settled into being a kink tag instead) #asexuality #Anonymous

{{next post in sequence}}

abandonedgod asked: I’m sorry, as I already mentioned, I don’t know much about prosopagnosia but I’m genuinely interested in this topic. Would you mind if I asked if you can describe what you see when you look at other people’s faces? I hope I’m not being rude.

~ Brin ~ 2 Comments

{{previous post in sequence}}

I don’t think it’s rude at all, especially since I pretty much volunteered myself as an Example Prosopagnosic by answering your post (in first-person, no less).

I was born faceblind, so I don’t know what it’s like having a functional facial recognition processor. That makes it trickier to describe, since all I have to contrast it with are second-hand descriptions (which, in turn, were also tricky for them to make).

It’s not that I don’t see faces. That’s a common misconception. (To the extent that having any conception about prosopagnosia is common, though I think there’s been a lot of improvement in general awareness lately.) I just looked at my brother’s face, sitting over on the other couch, and it’s all there: pink-red lips, pale skin, nose, pimple, brown eyes, bangs. Thinking of that fresh memory, I can almost picture it. Sometimes, just for a moment, I can grasp it, but mostly the memory is blurred and lacking in detail.

(It feels perfectly natural, having it blurry like that. So natural that I didn’t even notice I was doing it until I read other prosos’ descriptions of it. There are hardly ever faces in my dreams, and that feels perfectly natural too.)

Note that my brother is one of the easiest people to picture. I’ve known him for all sixteen years of his life, and when you’re reliant on general object processing to recognise faces, experience with a given face counts for a lot. After knowing my friend Jacqueline for four years, I was able to successfully recognise her when I bumped into her in a mall*. I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I’d had less experience with her and her appearance. It took me about a year, maybe a year and a half, to reliably tell her two teenage daughters apart, but after six years of knowing them I’m not sure how I ever managed to have trouble.

(It’s good that they were teenage. Children are tricky. They change quickly, so by the time you’ve built up enough experience with one face to recognise them semi-reliably, they’ve gone and gotten themselves a different one. When my brother was six, I couldn’t distinguish him from the other boys in his Cub Scout den. I didn’t feel a sense of recognition at my own face in the mirror until my mid-teens, 2 – 3 years after my face stopped developing. (Even now, I can still tell which other faces I would have trouble distinguishing from my own, had I less experience with mine. Plus, I’m not entirely sure how much of the ease is due to my large glasses.))

If you want to read more, try looking through my prosopagnosia tag or dhalim’s blog. For another, very detailed perspective, Bill Choisser’s classic book, Face Blind!, is freely available on the Internet. (I haven’t read that book since I was first learning about prosopagnosia seven years ago, so I don’t remember at exactly which points my mileage varied. I do remember it being interesting, though.) The general prosopagnosia tag on Tumblr (which I track, and is how I found your post) sometimes has good stuff in it, though there’s also the occasional non-proso using us to make Profound Statements about Seeing People for Who They Are Rather Than What They Look Like and artworks depicting faceless people (see paragraph 3).

*Malls are tough. Absolutely anyone could be in the mall, so you can’t use context to narrow the list of potential suspects. (“She’s really tall and she’s at my Girl Scout meeting, so she must be Jenny, because Jenny is the only really tall girl in my troop.”)

Tags:

#abandonedgod #prosopagnosia #tales from the askbox #long post #oh look an original post

{{next post in sequence}}