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Erika Hammerschmidt
Blogs from 2022
(Note: For some of these posts, earlier versions went up on my private or public social media around the dates indicated, but not here on my home page. In revamping my page I have chosen to include those posts here. Links are included when a public version is available.)
Mice and other vermin
2022/01/01
First posted here on Twitter.
cruel irony: there is no character in the entire history of fiction that I find LESS interesting, and LESS tempting to make any derivative works about, than Mickey Mouse... the same character I have to think about every single damn time I think about how long copyright lasts
it's like when a guy you're not even attracted to AT ALL makes a big deal of how he would NEVER go on a date with you
and also has, like, unlimited lobbying power with lawmakers, and goes and makes a bunch of laws about who can and can't date whom? and they're all SPECIALLY worded to prohibit people like YOU from dating people like HIM
which you don't even want to! he's a jerkface!
but the laws still piss you off, because they do affect your actual dating life with people you WANT to date!
but whenever you protest against them, you get this icky feeling that HE thinks you're protesting against not being allowed to date HIM
shit I think I just wrote Mickey mouse fanfiction
about him being the worst creepiest stalker dude ever
(no. not fan fiction. ENEMY fiction)
anyway, if Disney decides not to change copyright law again before Mickey goes public domain this time around, it'll be cuz they've realized
1. he's not worth it and
2. their newer properties might be, but they're now far too rich to care about anything in the future beyond this tax year
I should not be trusted to measure pathogens
2022/01/08
First posted here on Twitter and here on Tumblr.
Covid viruses are about 0.1 microns in size
So, rounding to the nearest whole number, "0micron" is an accurate name
Additionally, if I were calculating the mass of gram-negative bacteria, "negative 1 gram" would be close enough and within my usual margin of error
Anti-Car: a clarification
2022/01/12
First posted here on Twitter.
I sometimes think of myself as "anti-car," but I've come to realize that in transit discourse on Twitter, this term often means things that do not apply to me AT ALL. So here's my attempt to clarify my own views.
I'm personally "anti-car" in the sense that I do not personally like cars or want to drive them. The reason I don't drive is disability-related and started with health problems in my teens, but at this point in my life I wouldn't want to drive even if I could.
I also am very angry that cities are built around the assumption that everyone drives cars. This is annoying for those who would rather not have cars, but it is devastating and straight-up deadly for those who CANNOT.
I very much wish cities HAD originally been built with infrastructure allowing a much greater percentage of travel to be done by walking, bicycle or public transit. But in the absence of this, I understand why cars are needed so much.
Where possible, I'd like to change city infrastructures to improve this as much as we can. I believe that simply having ACCESS to safer and more convenient public transit and bike routes would, in itself, greatly reduce car use for many people.
I think any reduction in car use is a good thing-- AS LONG AS the people reducing their car use have an alternative (bus, bike, walking) that serves their needs sufficiently. This is obviously not an option for everyone in every case.
Before seeing Twitter discourse, I had thought these were all obvious parts of the "anti-car" position. I see I've put too much trust in humanity.
I thought that proponents of bikes and public transit were progressive. Our goals, after all, are being kinder to the environment (which is harmed by cars) the poor (who often can't afford them) and the disabled (who often can't drive). At least I thought those were our goals.
Yes, there have been times in my past when I hoped it was possible to eliminate cars entirely, and that all situations where they might be necessary could, in an ideal world, be replaced with other options. I admit, at those times, I had not yet given it enough thought.
But, to the extent that I had thought about this ideal future, I'd pictured the other options being ubiquitous, easy to find, available to all, with every need and special case thoroughly considered. I imagined that cars would not be eliminated anywhere until every possible scenario that could require them was planned for. (Sort of the position that horse-drawn carriages hold today.)
And I thought this was the usual way to visualize it.
I never thought anyone could seriously advocate, for example, the introduction of a "law against cars" into present or very-near-future society, requiring anyone who needed an exception to prove why they needed it.
I mean, really? That would be like going hungry or sick or homeless for months while you wait for your application to be approved for food stamps or disability payments or medical funding.
Haven't we all been fed up with that kind of law for a LONG time?
Have we EVER trusted the enforcers of those laws to be fair judges of people's need?
At the same time, it's 100% true that we currently DO have a system to decide "who is allowed to have a car," and it is at least as unfair as that, probably more.
i. e. "People who can afford it."
Under the current system, to be allowed a car, you have to pay the upfront cost of buying one, plus thousands of dollars a year in gas, parking and maintenance. Fail to pay any of these, you can lose the use of your car (and soon your job and home).
If you lack this kind of money, and/or the physical ability to drive, your other options are semi-available afterthoughts.
A walk that you may not be able to complete. A bus or train that's too far away and not accessible for your wheelchair or other needs. A bike that, even if you can ride it, has no safe place on the road to ride.
Maybe none of these problems can be fully solved. But societies can damn well do better at improving them.
Housing can be built and made affordable in locations closer to workplaces. Work-from-home jobs and grocery delivery can be made more available, more sustainable, and more beneficial for everyone involved. Bike lanes can be made safer and more separate from the street. Public transit can be more widespread and more accessible.
I know plenty of people who would reduce or even eliminate their car use if these other options got better. But I think even cars can have a place as part of accessible public transit!
There are people who will never be able to rely entirely on non-car options, and situations where no bus or train could ever serve one's needs-- lots of luggage, a destination too far from bus stations, an immune system that's unsafe in public.
If you're a person who can't afford a car or even the fare for a one-time taxi, a situation like this could be life-destroying.
Imagine a government-subsidized taxi service alongside buses and trains. Not as environmentally friendly as a bus, but better than everyone owning and constantly using a car.
There would of course be details to work out... it won't do anything to reduce car-related problems if it's as easy to access as a bus or bike and if most people would prefer it over those options. But don't even start to say we can't afford it, when we can afford the military budget we have.
What frustrates me, though, is that those of us with the common goal of making transit more accessible for everyone are just wasting time getting into fights about whether specific individuals should be driving cars or not.
We've divided into the anti-car activists who yell at disabled people to just ride bikes, and their victims who have become distrustful of anyone advocating any alternative to cars, for fear it might be more of the same yelling.
None of this helps the goals we have in common.
Let's do stuff that does.
Oh, urine now? Okay.
2022/01/12
First posted here on Twitter.
antivaxxers: glad you found something to do with all that extra pee the Spironolactone is giving you. At least it is a plentiful resource that won't deplete pharmacies any further.
Also hope it doesn't have a lot of ammonia to interact with the bleach you injected yourself with
Tuesday
2022/01/12
First posted here on Twitter.
You ever think about how, deep down, M. Bison from Street Fighter really DID care about the day he ruined Chun-Li's life?
When you actually don't care about an event in your past, do you ever bother to remember what day of the week it happened on?
Bookstore Names
2022/01/17
First posted here on Twitter.
Thinking about old Doctor Who episodes and making random connections like my brain likes to do
So remember in the episode where the Weeping Angels were first introduced, the two characters with the last names Sparrow and Nightingale ended up starting a book store together, and naming it "Sparrow and Nightingale"
And then I thought about the part after the Doctor leaves Donna Noble behind and removes her memory of him.
What if she goes to a support group of people who have had their memories tampered with
And she meets Bucky Barnes
And they start a bookstore together
And that's how the Doctor Who universe gets their own Barnes and Noble
Chaotic Author
2022/01/17
First posted here on Twitter.
This is a thing I've written about before, but it's in my mind a lot.
Disclaimer: This isn't any kind of scientific statement. I have NO data on what percentage of us actually fit this description. Nor can I imagine how a scientist could even quantify this in the first place.
But I believe the alignment of authors, especially good authors, is... chaotic.
May be chaotic good, chaotic evil, or chaotic neutral. But, in general, we authors throw chaos, of some kind, into the world.
See, authors, especially good authors, tend to be... weird people.
Again, this is not quantifiable or statistically studied. But from what I've seen, a lot of very good authors do not have what would be viewed as a "normal" social life.
Authors are often very happy being alone. We're in reading mode or writing mode a lot of the time, and in those modes we don't want to do ANYTHING except read or write. People, at those times, are an unwanted distraction.
When we're around people, we're often observing them from an outsider's perspective. Even the interactions that involve us personally, we're often analyzing at a bit of a distance, thinking in terms of how they'd work in a story.
We may try to write what we know, but we know different things in different ways. Some things we FEEL, from our experiences. Other things we see from an outside perspective that others can't see from inside. This can give valuable insights to our writing.
But it is generally NOT the same perspective that the majority of people have, on whatever experience we are writing about.
Which can be part of the joy of reading a good book-- to say "Wow, this writer saw this in a way I've never thought of before!"
Now... think for a moment about how much of the average person's understanding of the world is shaped BY authors. Books, movies, movies based on books. Anything about the world that you learned from fictional entertainment, an author taught you.
That's probably more of your worldview than you'd like to admit. I know it is for me.
Authors are weird, semi-social semi-loners who analyze humanity from outside, like some sort of spying aliens.
And then, our alien view of society goes on to shape how the next generation of society turns out.
Of course it's gonna be chaos.
Let's try and make it a better chaos though.
Plants-Vs-Humans Theology
2022/01/20
First posted here on Twitter.
Okay so I found myself making up a whole theology, on the bus to work this morning. It's called the God-Loves-Plants-and-Hates-Humans Reading of the Bible and it makes far too much sense.
Moving the thread to my own page so I'm not too much of a hijacker...
Quoted Tweet from user aaron_etc:
"The 'problem of evil' in philosophy is the question of why a benevolent God would create a world full of plants that blast pollen in our faces."
my initial response to the quoted tweet was:
we are not God's preferred creation
trees are
the first humans got kicked out of Eden for eating part of a tree
And, now my brain has expanded this theology
- the command " don't eat it" was only because you shouldn't eat trees without their permission.
- most of the trees in Eden consented to humans eating their fruit.
- but not the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.
this is because that tree was afraid that
- an animal with a sense of Good and Evil (which is apparently first expressed by considering nakedness to be Evil?) would be a hazard to all plants
(This fear was right. The Fig Tree was the first victim.)
Note how, after they make the fig-leaf clothes, God attempts to turn humans away from their violence to plants, by teaching them to wear clothes of animal skin instead.
Further proof that plants are God's preferred category of life, and humans and animals can go suck it
Unfortunately humans just decided to kill animals AND plants
God again tried to steer them away from killing plants, by favoring Abel's sacrifice of livestock but not Cain's sacrifice of crops.
This just sparked jealousy and taught humans to kill each other.
Which might have solved the problem, but they were too Fruitful and Multiplying
The Flood is confusing, since a few plant seeds were on the Ark with the animals, but the rest, you'd think, were killed by overwatering.
However, God temporarily made them immune to this-- unlike human and animal life, which God was attempting to curtail for the safety of his preferred creations.
(This is first proven by the dove bringing back an olive branch, to show that an olive tree, which would ordinarily be dead after 40 days underwater, had survived.
The olive tree chose to send Noah this message, and it was ANYTHING but a message of peace.)
In Exodus, God again identifies himself with plants by communicating via a bush --which is "burned but not consumed" --the fire got Moses' attention, but the plant was unharmed afterwards.
I am still working on the Book of Leviticus, and why the forbidden foods are all animals instead of plants. But I have faith that ANY interpretation of the Bible can be plausibly supported if you're clever enough.
(Perhaps God had realized that now, with agriculture so well-established, encouraging humans to eat any particular lifeform actually increases that lifeform's population.)
Anyway you can interpret the Bible to say anything
but the "God sees us as an annoying garden pest he can't get rid of" interpretation is way easier to argue than any interpretation where he actually LIKES us
Bat, not Bad
2022/01/21
First posted here on Twitter.
"like a bat out of hell" means fast because bats are so fundamentally good and pure that they cannot go to hell. if one ends up there by mistake, it will be ejected like the fastest thing you can imagine
News these days... sigh
2022/01/22
First posted here on Twitter.
if I ever get hired to write clickbait I'll get plenty of clicks, but I'll get fired so fast
"30 Amazing Reddit Threads that were Way Better on Reddit than they Were on Some 'News' Site that Considered Quoting People on a Reddit Thread to be Journalism"
Chocolate Earl Grey
2022/01/30
First posted here on Twitter.
I'm trying a new tea
This flavor was invented by accident in the 24th century
sometimes when Counselor Troi and Captain Picard put in their drink orders at the same time, the replicator goes all Tuvix on them
Buses
2022/02/03
First posted here on Twitter.
It's like they say: voting is not like getting married, it's like getting on a bus
it won't get you exactly where you want to go
of the 2 options you have, one will get you slightly less far away from your destination
and it runs very infrequently
and is difficult for many people to access
and is in the process of being dismantled
Stale, flat and unprofitable
2022/02/09
First posted here on Twitter.
Isaiah 40-4.
The Bible verse for flat earthers who think it's Not Flat ENOUGH.
A version of it for every taste of Not-Flat-Enough-Earth belief.
Ethics, hah
2022/02/11
First posted here on Twitter.
there is no ethical consumption in this world, but I think reading books can get closer to it than watching movies and TV shows.
with few exceptions, making a watchable movie requires an amount of wealth and control over other humans that is not compatible with ethics
Ukraine
2022/02/25
First posted here on Twitter.
If I express what side I support in a war between other countries, is that against the twitter rules against posts that Encourage Violence?
do I have to preface it with "of course I do not condone war in any form, and I would strongly prefer if NO ONE ever wanted or needed to use violence against anyone"
(obviously I support the side that Needed to use violence, in self-defense against the side that Wanted to use it. This distinction not always clear and obvious, but sometimes it is.)
Checked the Twitter rules, and the one against Glorifying Violence is mainly about violence against Protected Groups.
It specifically says violent acts by "state actors" may be an exception... as long as they're not targeting protected groups.
However, the list of protected characteristics includes "nationality."
By definition, in any war between nations, both sides would be Protected Groups under Twitter's definition.
So supporting EITHER side committing violence against the other would (on a technicality) be against the rules.
I do not know if this would ever be enforced, BUT if you have a lot of well-organized enemies on the internet, they can be very successful in using technicalities in the rules to get you banned.
(Though, any major social media site's banning process is more of an unpopularity contest than anything else. You'd have to have a lot of enemies.)
First they
2022/02/27
First posted here on Twitter.
This was years ago... and, aside from giving me mixed feelings (funny and punny, but in reference to a text about real tragedy)... was also inaccurate.
"they" and "me" still remain at the end.
when they censor parts of speech in reality, first they come for the pronouns.
Happily
2022/03/01
First posted here on Twitter.
Rule #1 of writing a romance novel:
it MUST have a happily-ever-after ending
rule #1 of writing a happily-ever-after ending:
it's not a real HEA if there is any possibility that their love might not last the rest of their lives.
that's why some romance publishers insist that their writers have to show the characters married at the end.
or even show them having children together
but neither of those things actually guarantees that they will be together for life
it just means that when they break up, everything will be messier
so, for it to be a real HEA
you have to have them both DIE at the end
I know!
2022/03/05
First posted here on Twitter.
I've realized why every movie these days is the 14th remake of something
it's because anything else would be plagiarism
because every possible ORIGINAL idea for a movie has at some point been pitched in a tumblr shitpost at 3 am somewhere
Media-Opoly
2022/03/08
First posted here on Twitter.
Sometimes I forget that not everyone knows The Media-Opoly sketch that was made in 1998 and that's why people think Disney being an evil corporation is new.
It's sad how many times I've had the thought "oh thank goodness people are finally coming to their senses about Disney" and then it all just fades.
Boycott?
2022/03/11
First posted here on Twitter.
WTF trending topics.
The time to #BoycottDisney was a long time ago.
It has always been obvious they were an evil monopoly, to anyone whose view wasn't blocked by huge clouds of childhood nostalgia.
It's always been obvious that anything they did that seemed progressive was ONLY because they considered it a smart business move.
Be ahead of the curve in LGBT rights for employees, because yeah, lots of the artistic talent they need is LGBT.
But always behind the curve for LGBT representation in their media, because that enables them to sell it in every possible country, even the most homophobic ones.
It's ALWAYS about money.
I watched you all fangirling over Disney even while you criticized the lack of rep, and even praise the blink-and-you'll-miss-it moments of rep that they advertised like real rep, until it got so egregious that even you had to admit it was worth a mild side-eye.
I saw you give them a hundred thousand more chances then you'd ever give a marginalized author who made any mistake even one-millionth as bad.
I watched you call Frozen "revolutionary" when it came out, because it focused on sisterly love more than romantic love, and because true love didn't happen with a guy she just met. Even though OBVIOUSLY this was "revolutionary" in exactly ONE context: "for a Disney movie."
I watched you not-caring and barely-caring every time they swallowed up another company.
Like this wasn't gonna end with an evil all-encompassing empire of all movie and television media, all beholden to some F'd-up new version of the Hayes Code based solely on what will make Disney the most money in the most corners of this mostly F'd-up world.
I was boycotting Disney most of my life. Lately I've been boycotting Disney by not watching any TV or movies at all, and just reading books, because that's the only consumption of entertainment that is even remotely capable of coming close to being ethical now.
Yeah, sure, make #BoycottDisney a trending topic NOW, when boycotting Disney means boycotting everything. You're too damn late.
I'm probably gonna delete this because it's angrier than anything I usually post, and anyway no one's gonna see it.
the topic isn't trending anymore, our mousy overlords made it go away, and they can make it so no one sees my tweets, too.
nothing matters.
OK I'm gonna rant a bit more before I take a long break from Twitter..
In regard to "support the creators who work within Disney"....
I WANT to have the option to be kind to the individual people within Disney who do good work there.
I want the option to do this by enjoying things they create that DON'T just funnel money into Disney.
But Disney doesn't let those things exist.
(Kind of like how I want to buy a tongue-drum from this awesome Etsy seller in Moscow right now, but Putin keeps committing atrocities that convinced even Paypal to stop doing business in his country.)
(Yes I compared those two things. No I don't think they're the same degree of evil. Yes I will still point out that they have things in common.)
#DisneyDoBetter is such a disappointing replacement for #BoycottDisney. Because it's just more of the same that we've had for as long as I've been alive.
My entire life. And long before. Every time people have felt a lack of some positive message in popular media.
Always, instead of finding and supporting the independent creators already trying to fill that need-- they always, always start by petitioning DISNEY to fill it.
And they always end up disappointed.
And eventually Disney owns every creator who could have been independent.
To be clear, I won't call anyone a bad person for liking any Disney content.
I've always been on the "let people like things" side (with the caveat that IF you like something with problematic elements you should still try to be aware of them)
because 1. people can't actually decide what to like, and 2. liking some parts of something doesn't mean liking all of it, and 3. no one is actually harmed just by someone enjoying a work that has problematic parts and/or was created by a problematic person.
Now, buying that content and financially supporting the creation of more like it, yes that does cause harm... a small harm, individually, like buying from Amazon or Walmart or Chick-fil-A.
The biggest harm, the one I'm ranting against, is *promoting* the content, when it's already owned by a zillionaire corporation that promotes the hell out of it, and acting like *consuming it is some sort of activism for a good cause.*
It is not.
So, I'm glad some people are finally realizing this. But I am VERY frustrated it took this long.
Logging off now.
Question...
2022/03/18
First posted here on Twitter and here on Facebook.
why is an upside down question mark the best punctuation?
Because it tells you to expect a Spanish inquisition.
Slap!
2022/03/31
First posted here on Twitter.
Smith should not have hit Rock, because iron makes a much better anvil.
I jest, of course. Really this is closer to the story of Thor, Loki and Sif than anything else.
I'd cast Smith in the role of Thor (who is not quite a god of smiths, or of the forge, but is very much associated with a hammer, almost ubiquitously a symbol of smithing).
Loki (or in this case, Rock-i) was a trickster god, and like many tricksters of legend (and many comedians of everyday life) had a sense of humor that tended towards the cruel.
Sif had beautiful hair, not alopecia, but Loki shaved it off as a prank while she slept. Her husband, Thor, not only attacked Loki in an immediate rage, but demanded reparations.
So, by my deeply Norse ethics... I maintain that Chris Rock owes Will and Jada a genuine gold wig, a spear, a foldable ship, a glowing pig, a ring that multiplies into new rings, and a hammer that returns when you throw it.
Shopping list for the closest he can get in this world:
Website Revamp
2022/04/19
Oh boy has a lot happened. I don't know where to begin.
I'm going to make posts one at a time, as I have the energy.
The biggest change you'll notice is the website redesign. Basically, I am going back to simple, hand-coded HTML pages like what I used to make back in 2003, because ...well, I am in a VERY weird area of tech-savviness where I'm capable of coding a whole website in HTML but somehow not capable of troubleshooting the problems I had with the Wordpress content manager.
Whatever. Let me know if you see any problems with the site. It's taken over a week of whole days spent coding, so it is very likely I've made mistakes here and there. I'll fix them as I have time.
Doom the Lizard
2022/04/20
Among the many, many things that have happened since the last time I posted anything about my life, there is one happy event.
I adopted a lizard.
The lizard is named Doom. And oddly enough, she's not named after my current state of mind, lol.
In the past I have usually made up my own names for pets and made sure they are meaningful and clever on multiple levels.
But... not this time.
Doom came with the name and it is perfect.
She had the name when I adopted her, from a couple who I guess had bought her as an early pandemic pet (she was born in spring of 2020) and then didn't feel they had enough time for her anymore.
She is a Northern Blue Tongue Skink (Tiliqua scincoides) (or maybe a shaved ferret)
They called her Doom because she was especially fierce as a baby.
(They gave me her baby picture with some sorta ID number that the reptile sellers put on it. Omg she looked so different... baby blue tongues are ridiculous-shaped in their own whole different way. I guess some animals grow into their big feet or big ears... Doom grew into her whole big chonky sausage abdomen.)
Anyway she is not very Doomy anymore, unless you're a bug.
Video of dinner meeting its Doom. Content warning: violent mealworm death.
She's now very hand-tame, very curious and interested in people whenever we come near her. She lets me pet her and hand-feed her, and I've been carefully taking a few minutes once in a while to pick her up and carry her around the room a bit (she will calmly let me carry her to the window to look out, but if I try to carry her out the bedroom door she still gets stressed and squirmy, so I'm taking it slow.) (She has VERY strong squirming muscles, it is hard to hold her if she wants to crawl away.)
According to the birth certificate I got from her previous people when I adopted her, Doom turned TWO YEARS OLD on EASTER this year!
She has the cutest face and the sweetest inquisitive way of looking at you.
And she sits in the weirdest positions! Like, most of these were positions she just sat in for a whole ten minutes as if they were totally comfy! I swear she is like 1/8 of a cat in a snakeskin trench coat.
First thing she ate out of my hand was blueberries. Which reminds me of the dear departed starling, who also loved those.
I will always love birds, but I'm starting to realize a lizard is a better match for me, because she seems to thrive on exactly the amount of attention I can regularly give a pet.
Anyway, I find her weird name kinda adorable, even though she's such a sweetheart now. (On the way home from picking her up, I joked about how the reptile enclosure I built was Turing-complete "because I can run Doom in it" and all the roomies groaned at me.)
(I am proud of the enclosure, though. I made it out of acrylic sheets and wire mesh and plastic corner pieces and nuts and bolts. It disassembles easily and the bottom is a plastic bin with layers of bioactive substrate.)
(Since the floor area is slightly smaller than ideal for a blue-tongue, I tried to make up for it by giving her an upstairs bin, with its own substrate and plants, accessible through a climbing tunnel. She took to it eagerly, and now she usually sleeps buried in the substrate in her "loft." In her old home she had a smaller tank with just a thin layer of woodchips, and she is THRILLED to be able to dig.)
(We rearranged the layout of the tank after figuring out what she liked. One of the roomies helped me get some nice basking rocks.)
I am trying to replace doom-scrolling with Doom-feeding and Doom-holding, as much as I can. A pet has been something missing in my life for a while, and it helps a lot.
Growing up
2022/04/24
First posted here on Twitter.
Autistic childhood: "these are the social rules you need to learn because you're autistic. all normal people know them instinctively."
Adulthood: "lol there are entire websites devoted to arguing over whether someone broke a social rule and there's NEVER unanimous agreement"
Mandela Effect
2022/04/26
First posted here on Twitter.
I think most instances of the Mandela effect involve flaws in people's memories or knowledge... such as confusing one thing or person with another, or remembering a false rumor as truth. But...
I suspect (without evidence, but it's a strong suspicion) that SOME instances... particularly some of the ones involving product logos...are a result of corporations having such chaotic systems of advertising and record-keeping.
I think there are at least a few cases where many people remember a product logo being a certain way because it WAS that way for a short time. Short enough that no confirmed proof of it survives to the present day...and the company denies it because they can't find records of it.
If you want an example of how bad companies can be at keeping track of the history of their own marketing, see The Triscuit Thread:
Just saying
2022/05/04
First posted here on Twitter.
This is just to say
I poisoned the plums
That were in the icebox
Which I knew
You were eyeing
For yourself
I do not forgive you
Revenge is delicious
Sweet
And served cold
If Men Could
2022/05/04
First posted here on Twitter.
This is a thing I've been confused about for a LONG time.
When people say "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be easy to get"
what exactly are they envisioning???
(clearly they're not thinking about transgender men, who have plenty of difficulty getting abortions)
are they envisioning some alternate universe where our species has always been hermaphroditic, with everyone able to bear AND sire children?
are they imagining that world somehow still has a socially-constructed gender binary, with socially-constructed men in charge?
and these men have an easy time getting abortions, while the women do not?
Or are they imagining a world where we have the same physical sexes with the same social roles, but in reverse? A childbearing sex and a non-childbearing sex with exactly reversed roles?
how do they imagine human history? how did it produce this exact mirror society??
i remember a quote (Margaret Mead I think?) saying something like "we thought matriarchies didn't exist because we were expecting them to look like a patriarchy with the roles reversed"
the point is that has never happened in any human society
I think the fact that women are treated differently from men is inherently connected to the fact that most of them are potentially childbearing.
I do not know how it is connected, but every society has some form of it. and none of them have an exact reversal like that
I guess the only way this hypothetical "if men could get pregnant" scenario even remotely makes sense is... if they're imagining some sort of genetic weapon that enters present-day real world society and makes all cisgender men suddenly able to get pregnant.
(but how? By sex with cisgender women? Do uteruses shoot out sperm now?)
if those previously assigned female are now able to produce sperm, and those previously assigned male are now able to get pregnant, there's gonna be CHAOS among all those annoying folks who are deeply obsessed with trying to categorize the sexes of other people
and i have NO idea how this chaos will interact with any attempts to revise abortion rights, in light of this change.
conversely, if cis men can now get pregnant only by bottoming for another cis man... then no. the GOP stance will be "lol that's what you get for being gay."
I guess the basic gist of the hypothetical is that if there were an equivalent type of necessary healthcare for cisgender men, it would be easy to get.
But I suspect that in actual real life, such a hypothetical male equivalent would be easy to get if you're rich, and hard to get if you're poor.
(And very stigmatized and unavailable to any men who are considered to be "at fault" for it... like HIV treatments for gay men in the 90's.)
Kids and Kidneys
2022/05/06
First posted here on Twitter.
I am VERY pro-choice, but I also get very uncomfortable about bad arguments for the pro-choice position (either the type that put down some other marginalized group in the process, or those that are just... too easy for our enemies to argue against.)
I recently posted about why I'm uncomfortable with the "if men could get pregnant" argument. I also don't like arguments that treat abortion as a mercy-killing to save the embryo from a life of suffering, because the obvious counter is "then why not kill unwanted newborns too?"
But the "kidney donor" argument is another one that feels bad to me.
The premise is that donating a kidney can save a life, but we can't legally force people to donate kidneys, because it would violate their bodily autonomy.
The argument compares pregnancy to donating someone a kidney, with the fetus being compared to that recipient. Even though the fetus needs that "donation" to keep it alive (the argument goes) forcing you to go all the way through the process is still a violation of your autonomy.
But the problem is-- autonomy is NOT exactly the reason why we don't force people to donate kidneys.
In the case of kidney donation, BOTH people's bodily autonomy is at risk.
For the person who needs a kidney, it is much MORE at risk, because without action, that person will lose all control over their own body and eventually not have a living body at all.
But when we decide whose autonomy to respect, we favor the person who could choose to donate a kidney or not.
This isn't because their autonomy is more valuable.
It's because forcing them to give up a kidney would be ACTION, and letting the other person die is INACTION.
We've always treated passive harm as something far more acceptable than active harm.
Allowing someone to die by inaction has never been considered as bad as murder.
This is why you also can't be forced to donate money to charity, no matter how much money you have, or how many lives it could save.
So, if you present this argument to an anti-choice activist, it won't convince them.
They will just imagine the fetus in the position of the person who's being forced to undergo active harm-- in this case, a close analogy would be having to donate both its kidneys to a person who may or may not even need one.
So I don't use that argument, because I don't want to give them the idea that I'll respect it when they co-opt it for their own side.
So what arguments do I use?
Hell if I know. There aren't any arguments that will convince an anti-choicer.
The reasons I'm pro-choice are certainly not ones they'll listen to, because my reasons mainly have to do with the fact that someone carrying an unwanted pregnancy is far more capable of thought, feeling, consciousness, terror and suffering than the embryo inside.
And we already know the anti-choice answer to that argument. They'll ask, so where do you draw the line? What moment does the embryo become conscious enough to deserve life?
If you draw the line in any specific month before birth, they'll ask how you think a gradually developing fetus could gain a mind, or a soul, or whatever makes it deserving of life, at some exact definable moment in time.
And if you draw the line at birth, they'll demand you explain why you think the same thing happens at the exact moment of being born.
It doesn't matter that you can turn that argument back on them. It doesn't matter to point out that it's also very silly to think a just-fertilized ovum is any more human than that same sperm and ovum just before they join.
The problem is, they are drawing their line between two not-very-different microscopic things that no reasonable person could possibly consider babies... whereas you are also drawing your line between two things that are not very different, but one of them is an actual newborn.
Their position is the ridiculous one. But yours is the one that's an attractive target for the unthinking, emotional frenzy of WE MUST PROTECT THE CHILDREN.
You know, the same frenzy that gets weaponized against whatever marginalized group the conservatives want to paint as the bogeyman this week.
I, personally, do draw the line at birth. And I do admit that a newborn, in itself, is not more intelligent, or conscious, or capable of feeling, than it was just before birth.
There is no way to be certain how much it IS any of those things, at any point. We can't read its mind-- or the mind of any other creature except ourselves. The consciousness of others is just a thing we have to accept without absolute proof.
But there are many animals that regularly perform on the same level as human toddlers in cognition tests. So, as much as I can be sure of anyone else's consciousness, I'm sure that the consciousness level of either a newborn or a late-term fetus is not any higher than that of a dog or cat or pig.
We value a newborn more than those animals, not because it's inherently superior to them-- but because it can grow up and become like us.
Of course, so can a just-fertilized ovum, or a sperm and egg that haven't joined yet. Why draw the line at any specific point?
Because we have to draw it somewhere. At one extreme we'd be killing our own kind at all ages. At the other extreme we'd be spending every moment of our lives either pregnant or trying to start a pregnancy, outlawing abstinence because your gametes will DIE if they're not used for baby-making.
Pretty much no one wants either of those things, so pretty much everyone draws the line at conception or birth or somewhere in between.
And at every point in between, there's a fully conscious person, suffering more and more as time goes on, while the small being that depends on that suffering gets closer and closer to becoming somewhat conscious.
To me, birth is the most reasonable place to draw the line-- because it's the point at which that semi-conscious being is no longer physically interfering with someone's body. After birth, keeping it alive no longer requires anyone to suffer.
So yes, bodily autonomy does come into it. Pregnancy and birth are always a threat, not only to comfort, but also to life and health, even in cases where the risk is low. And even when there is very little danger of death, there will be physical abuse of the body from inside, a violation that you are fully justified in fighting back against.
But to reduce it to just bodily autonomy-- to say that the bodily-autonomy argument would stand even if a fetus was as capable of thought and feeling as an adult-- that is dangerous.
Because then you would have to consider the fetus's bodily autonomy as well.
And since the fetus is the one whose autonomy could be preserved by passively allowing harm, and you are the one whose autonomy requires actively causing harm-- then you NEED to fight back with the fact that the fetus is NOT a fully conscious person, and therefore does NOT have the same right to bodily autonomy as you.
And this is why nothing we say can convince them.Because they won't accept that.
So I don't have any goddamn solution to any of this.
Meaningless Arguments
2022/05/15
First posted here on Twitter.
One thing that I find very troubling is when a point is made with a statistic that... may very well be true, and sounds as if it supports the point, but actually MEANS pretty much nothing.
Example: When someone starts talking about mental illness and violence, and someone else argues, "Mentally ill people are more likely to be victims of violence than to commit it!"
This bothers me because it sounds, on the surface, as if it's trying to say there's no link between mental illness and violence... but it really says nothing of the sort.
I mean, it is probably true. People who commit a lot of violence usually do so against multiple people... but they themselves are not a majority of any demographic I can think of.
Pretty much any group of people are victims of violence more often than perpetrators.
And yet, that says nothing at all about which groups have larger or smaller violent minorities within them.
Imagine a society in which 90% of all people are victims of violence at some point in their lives.
(I'm guessing this isn't far from reality-- since violence includes a range of things like domestic abuse, bar fights, kids shoving each other on the playground-- but my point doesn't depend on the exact numbers.)
Let's imagine all that violence is committed by a smaller portion of the population... let's say 30%. (Which of course overlaps with the 90%-- violent people are often violent to each other, so there are some who have both committed violence and been victims of it.)
Now let's look at the demographics of that 30% of people who have committed violence.
How many of them have mental illnesses? A third? Two thirds? Half? One-tenth? Nine-tenths? None of them? All of them?
In ANY of those cases, the statement "mentally ill people are more likely to be victims of violence than to commit it!" could easily still be true.
It could even be true if ALL violent people were mentally ill-- as long as there was a greater number of mentally ill people in the victimized majority.
So, that statement says NOTHING about whether or not mental illness is correlated with violence.
When people use that argument, it makes them look as if they are trying to draw attention away from actual statistics.
Which is very concerning to me as a person with mental disorders! Why would people who claim to be our allies use an argument that makes us look as if we're hiding some scary truth?
He IS a monster, therefore, by definition, it is.
2022/05/20
First posted here on Twitter.
I wanna tell everyone that I saw it and it was a monster dick... but I just can't decide which monster!
Like, I've got the whole Sesame Street cast to choose from, which one should I say it looked like??
(Update: here is the winning suggestion)
Radioactive
2022/05/21
First posted here on Twitter.
"....So, Catwoman, were you bitten by a radioactive cat?
"Of course."
"Really?"
"Well yeah. Most cats bite. And most cats are a bit radioactive, from exposure to the trace amounts of uranium, thorium, and potassium-40 in cat litter. If you hung around cats as much as I do, you'd have been bitten by one too. It's got nothing to do with my powers."
"..Thorium? Is that where Thor got his powers, too?"
My own midnight movie pitch that'll never be made
2022/05/22
First posted here on Tumblr and here on Twitter.
Sometimes people ask if I'm worried my stuff will be stolen while I set up a booth at a craft fair.
I say I have a whole movie pitch in my head about a craft seller and a thief who tries to steal her stuff.
Opening scene: A small-time jewelry maker is taking the bus to a local craft fair, carrying a suitcase full of her wares. Maybe she talks to some other passengers, shows them some of her work and talks about the craft fair she's going to.
She's not very optimistic, since she hardly ever sells enough to be worth going to these things, but she's gonna keep trying.
As soon as she gets off the bus, a thief intercepts her and tries to steal her suitcase full of jewelry.
She gives the thief a blank look. "What are you gonna do with it if you steal it?"
"...Um, sell it, of course."
And she flips out. "OMG you know someone who will BUY my stuff?
...I have been trying to sell this crap for YEARS!! Listen, I will GIVE you this bag of jewelry, I will BRING you MORE tomorrow, if you'll just introduce me to WHOEVER YOU KNOW who is willing to pay MONEY for this!"
And it turns out the jeweler just needed to find the right market for her creations. And it turns out the thief knows a fence who knows all the right people.
They go into business together, jeweler making jewelry and thief selling it to the fence, while trying to keep the embarrassing secret that these hot stolen goods that all the shady customers want to buy... aren't actually stolen.
Lots of shenanigans as he gets embarrassed and tries to protect his reputation as a good thief and keep his fence from finding out he's actually doing legitimate business.
Maybe the two of them have to prove they're thieves and stage a heist together. Mass robbery of a whole craft fair. Get all the disgruntled sellers in on it.
(Anyway, this is why actual movie-makers only do remakes these days. They know that all the original ideas are already posted on random blogs like this, and they'd have to either deal with our plagiarism accusations, or stoop to paying royalties to a commoner.)
Maxwell
2022/05/29
First posted here on Twitter.
I want to be in awe of whoever named the Maxwell air conditioner company
"gonna make a thing to sit between inside and outside and keep one side hot and the other cold. I'll name it MAXWELL"
MAXWELL. Like the DEMON
but... with my luck, his reasoning was just "well that's my name"
like if some guy named Schroedinger just happened to manufacture cat boxes
or if I got a hammer and became a smith
oh wait, that IS what my ancestors did, isn't it.
are... are these professional surnames??
Habits of the Most Successful Wolf
2022/05/29
First posted here and here on Twitter.
This could be interpreted as being about abuse
but I wrote it about my own body
if I ever die from health problems that others have dismissed, they probably will not say "omg she was right all along"
but "how were we to know she was right this time? she's been wrong so much"
Worrying
a poem about crying wolf
The most successful wolf
will first appear as just a shade
an optical illusion of the gaps
between the saplings
Or a whispered crush of brush
that just as easily could be
a rabbit or a fawn
And like a rabbit or a fawn
the shepherd's heart
might startle for a beat or two
but not enough
to startle from his throat a cry
or start to shape within his thoughts
the name
of Wolf.
And for a night
the rabbit or the fawn
might halt the hunger
of the most successful wolf
who, biding time
throughout the night
for now, elects
to dream
of sheep.
The second time
(and third and fourth)
the most successful wolf
will show himself
in shadows with a shade more shape
A green-reflective eye
An ear, a jaw
outlined and recognized
for fractions of a heartbeat
Just enough to speed the beat
And sound a partly-stifled cry
And bring the thought of Wolf
to conscious mind
And then be gone
And leave the fawn and rabbit,
shepherd and apprentice,
Startled, watchful, seeing stillness
long enough, at last, to still the heart,
to slow from rapid
back to quiet
One more chip in faith in senses
One more tiny lesson,
Taught to doubt
the eyes
and ears
that saw and heard
And doubt the mouth that cried
And doubt the mind that thought
Of Wolf.
(Repeat as needed,
oftener if possible,
for maximum success.)
The time that follows,
in a day, or two, or three perhaps
The most successful wolf
will silhouette himself
against the setting moon
in sharp and slavering relief
And howl a noise
that no one could mistake
for anything but Wolf
And focus green-reflective eyes
Like challenge, on the shepherd
(or apprentice boy he left
to tend the flock)
And turn the eyes
like rabid rage
like hunger, at the sheep
in hope of sharp and slavering relief
of hunger never slaked for long
by fawn or rabbit
And will growl a noise
impossible to hear
as anything but Wolf.
And then be gone
Before the cry and panic
of the shepherd's boy
brings up the other flock,
the sheep in village clothing
who like lamb or fawn or rabbit
run in panic at a cry of fear
and mount the hill
But seeing stillness,
long enough
to still their hearts,
slow down to calm
slow down to safety
singed by heat
that simmers
into reprimand
A chip in faith
A lesson
Taught to doubt
the eyes and ears
that saw and heard
And doubt the mouth that cried
And leave them there in silence
with their flock
without a choice
but to admit
the lack of evidence
and doubt their eyes and ears
and memories
of Wolf.
(The most successful wolf
repeats this step,
as many times
as hunger will allow.)
The final time,
the most successful wolf
has no instructions.
He may feast exactly as he likes
Because the eyes and ears
the voice and mind
are out of hope
and know there is no hope
in crying Wolf
And can no longer do a thing
but watch the feast
and simply
cry.
VERY BAD HEALTH UPDATE
2022/05/30
First posted here on Twitter.
Hey
2022/05/30
First posted here on Twitter.
Hey
Hey
If your liver is for filtering bad stuff out of your body
You could call it a
HEPA FILTER
Power
2022/05/30
First posted here on Twitter.
physics professor: ok, can anyone tell me the difference between "power" and "force"
me: oh that's easy. So, power, you know... the mitochondrion is the powerhouse of the cell, right
prof: um...
me: and conversely, the midichlorian is--
prof: OMG SHUT UP ERIKA
Morbin'
2022/05/31
First posted here on Twitter.
If you watch the Matt Smith dance scene from Morbius backwards, it's about a vampire who turns into a cute human guy and then takes his clothes off
A Morbius strip, if you will
Singing with COVID
2022/06/01
First posted here on Twitter.
Christmas in July
Or if the Noel-Spangled Banner isn't your thing we also have Good King Doodle
Or hey maybe try another country
Y'know I've given up on patriotism, all mashups are between different Christmas songs from now on
I shall continue to mash up Christmas songs with ALL OTHER SONGS
Remember when lockdown just started and all the celebrities who couldn't sing were singing and posting it online
I did not get to have lockdown yet, at that point
I had an essential fking exhausting job
But now I FINALLY GOT THE RONA
and I don't care anymore
I'm gonna sing
Not because I'm happy or good at singing or even LIKE music
But because I'm FUCKING BORED
I'll paint with all the Coldplay of the wind
My voice is about as good as it can be at this point in COVID recovery, at the end of the day when I've gotten most of the day's coughing outta my system
But I'm never gonna claim it's a good singing voice
Or a photogenic face
Guess what
I DON'T CARE
Laugh at me, just don't cry
Okay one more and I'll stop for tonight.
And feel free to make fun of how I sound and look
But then I get to make fun of you, any time you make a post of you looking not-great, or doing anything not-perfectly
Except I won't
Because I'm nice
Because I'm Minnesotan
Because I come from the land of the ice and snow where the grass won't grow and the girls all froze
Viruses
2022/06/02
First posted here on Twitter.
Viruses are like vampires:
- act alive but not technically alive
- start with V
- parasitically prey on the living
- turn you into more of them (only tiny bits of your body at a time, but they still do)
- occasionally travel via bats
Defenses against them are similar:
- sunlight (vulnerable to UV when on surfaces outside your body, please not inside)
- running water (drink plenty of fluids)
- garlic also good for immune system
- stay away from others if you've been turned
- but still be nice to bats and don't blame them
Snow
2022/06/04
First posted here on Facebook.
I know unlimited words for snow
Not because I came from Minnesota.
Because I know German.
German has as many words for snow as you want
German has as many words for ANYTHING as you want
that's how German works
Donaudampfschiffgesellschaftkapitansmutzenschnee
(snow on the hat of the captain of the Danube Steam Ship Company)
My Superpower
2022/06/04
First posted here and here on Twitter.
I have a lot of weird interests.
In many of them my skill and knowledge are high, but nowhere near the best I've seen.
The one area I think I'm truly exceptional... is not a specific field.
It is my talent at finding connections among ALL of them
And I ONLY USE IT FOR JOKES
Context for this thought:
I was thinking about Aziraphale from #GoodOmens and his bookstore-owner name "A.Z. Fell"
And it reminded me of the Star Trek character "Mr. Atoz," whose name was a pun on "A to Z" because he was a librarian...
and I thought it would be fun for this bookstore owner and librarian to meet, because... why? Because they have similar names and professions? That was the whole basis of it
so my brain made up a WHOLE scenario that actually made narrative sense in both universes
I was not TRYING. My brain was just possessed by the same... THING that just takes over whenever I'm writing a book and need to make connections so all the parts fit together and make sense
I didn't write this fanfiction, because I didn't even care about it enough to write it. It was just a thing my writer-brain was doing, in the background, while the rest of me was trying to do ordinary stuff
Mr Atoz, in case you don't know him, showed up in exactly 1 episode of Star Trek: "All Our Yesterdays." Original series. I remember it so well because it was one of maybe 3 eps where I got to see Spock kissing someone
He ran the library on the planet Sarpeidon. The library was full of discs of planetary history. But they were actually TIME TRAVEL DISCS and when the star went nova, the people escaped by using these discs to travel into their planet's past
this was accomplished by using a machine called the Atavachron, which Atoz also managed.
at the end of the episode, he escaped too, and went away to live in whatever part of history he had chosen
(we don't know which, or really much else about him at all)
ANYWAY.
in my scenario Atoz eventually gets tired of life in his chosen spot in history, and builds a new Atavachron
and time and space are just parts of the same thing anyway, so he figures out how to use it for space travel as well as time travel
maybe he didn't even need much time travel
maybe his time in his planet's past was already close to the time when Good Omens happens on another planet
anyway he and Aziraphale have lots to talk about, since they both helped save their worlds from apocalypse
I wonder if my savant skill at imagining connections between things is actually part of the reason I DON'T easily believe in conspiracy theories
'cause I KNOW I could pick any random ridiculous conclusion, cherry-pick data, and make up a conspiracy theory just as believable
I can take any two completely unrelated concepts and find a connection between them within seconds.
In a worse world I'd invent the most convincing conspiracy theory. In a better world I'd invent a Unified Theory of Everything.
In this world I use it only for puns.
Under
2022/06/07
First posted here on Twitter.
Lessons from a lizard in how to be underground AND underwater at the same time
What would you do
2022/06/08
First posted here on Twitter.
There's a lot of discussion now about what people like doctors and teachers should do when the law requires them to act in ways that are blatantly wrong (regarding LGBT youth, abortion, etc)
And while I would never want to be in the specific positions that the discourse focuses on-- I realize I already am in a similar situation. Nearly everyone is.
Aside from the fact that there's no ethical consumption in this society, and I still buy things and sometimes buy from unethical companies for convenience...
There's also not really much option for ethical production, either.
For example: if you believe all of life's necessities should be free, and if your job involves selling anything that anyone may require in order to survive-- you are already going against your ethics.
I have been thinking long and hard about my position as a pharmacy technician. It requires me to be part of the gatekeeping system that denies lifesaving treatment to those who can't afford it.
I do my best. I try harder than many other technicians, to take patient concerns seriously and find ways to resolve insurance problems before they miss a dose
But I can't succeed as often as I want to.
And I can't outright break the rules without being instantly fired
And if I were to quit or be fired, I'd be replaced by someone who might not even try as hard as I do.
And there's no guarantee that any new job I got wouldn't have the same ethical dilemmas
It's not the same as working in, say, a concentration camp and having to literally murder people because you'd likely get murdered if you disobeyed
But sometimes it feels like the only difference is that the murder on both sides is more indirect.
How To
2022/06/16
First posted here on Twitter.
How to draw a turtle:
- Draw a cow
- give it tiger stripes
- draw it climbing a tree
there. It's a turtle
How to draw a Tyrannosaurus
- Draw a Lord of the Rings elf
- add a Marge Simpson hairdo
- put it in the driver seat of a Lamborghini
you have drawn a Tyrannosaurus
How to draw a horse:
- Draw a Roomba
- dress it in pimp clothes
- add background to show it flying at 10,000 feet
Horse.
How to draw a hedgehog:
- Draw Felix the cat
- color it blue
- draw it running really fast
HEDGEHOG
Pepe...
2022/06/26
First posted here on Twitter.
what can I do with the cursed knowledge that Kermit the Frog and Pepe the King Prawn could have a baby that would have both the name AND the appearance of Pepe the Frog
"no they couldn't, they are both male"
both frogs and shrimp can change sex
"they're different species"
plenty of cases of interbreeding between different species of muppets
"YOU HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT THIS TOO MUCH"
yes, that is my complaint. please make my brain stop
Degrees
2022/06/26
First posted here and here on Twitter.
Wait
Wait
Was the name of the Doctor's nemesis "The Master" supposed to be a dig at people who have Masters degrees instead of Doctorates???
(Twitter reply from @MFKeown)
"If so, that implies the existence of a lesser timelord known as The Bachelor."
HA
He should have his own show
Something where he makes Earth women compete for...
Oh wait
Omg.
And regeneration explains how he keeps coming back looking different (even as a Bachelorette sometimes)
Well
Looks like I have a new head cannon
aaaaand, I just realized:
somewhere, Captain Harkness is managing to think of a much better joke about "Jack of all trades, Master of none" than I ever could
it'd probably be something dirty
like... "jackoff all trades, masturbate none"
My Body
2022/06/26
First posted here on Twitter.
There is so much that people in this world need to learn about consent. Preferably starting from a very young age.
And yet... I don't know how to teach children the importance of consent when children's consent has little if any legal significance.
There's a post going around by a father who taught his daughter to express her autonomy with the words "My body, my rules," and took this as far as telling her he wouldn't force her to brush her teeth.
Luckily the child didn't put it to the test. Some children would have. I know I would have. I was the kind of child who would have made it clear that if I got to choose whether a toothbrush went in my mouth, it would never go there.
It would have been cavities and pain and "my body, my rules, so you can't make me go to the dentist either" ...and more pain, and still refusing because the dentist is scarier pain than a toothache.
As a kid, I had to be forced to do things. If I'd ever been told that children had any right to control over their bodies, I would have been the kid who got "redpilled" when his mom made him take diarrhea medicine.
I would have been a "bodily autonomy" antivaxxer from the first moment I found out vaccinations hurt.
My parents taught me I had to do what adults told me. And as I grew up, there was no way to avoid this getting translated into "do whatever ANYONE tells you, because all your worst memories are around being defiant and not giving in."
It absolutely messed up my life.
But I was a kid who took everything I was allowed to take. Allowing me autonomy, whenever they tried it, messed me up in worse and more immediate ways.
I don't know why some kids are defiant to that level and some kids aren't. But I definitely was.
And I have zero trust in any viewpoint that says "just raise your kid THIS WAY and they are guaranteed never to be like that." Humans, even kids, are much too complex to predict with such certainty.
Legally and ethically, children's consent doesn't matter much. If children tell you they want something, you legally and ethically HAVE to consider their well-being before you consider giving them what they say they want.
This is the whole basis of laws about how children can't give consent sexually.
And this complicates things, because part of why we teach children about consent is to prevent problems with sexual consent, later on.
But the teaching is muddied by the fact that they don't actually have a right to that kind of consent. At their age, they can use "my body, my rules" to say no to sex, but not to say yes.
Similarly, they can't use it to say no to school, or doctor appointments, or anything else that's required by law, or required for their well-being.
So I have no idea what's the best way to teach kids about consent. I agree it's vital, but I also know there are some kids who will push it to the point where you have to admit you're a hypocrite.
This is one of many reasons I'm not having kids.
And at this point, I'm doing that by using "my body, my rules" to just not allow any sperm anywhere near my parts.... and if any sperm-producers have a problem with that, it's not my problem.
Representation
2022/06/29
First posted here on Twitter.
About the trans character in Baymax:
Yeah. It's a nice scene. And it does look pretty respectful to trans people.
But it's one scene. One background character. The whole show is about something else. Blink and you miss this.
Same as every scrap of LGBT representation that Disney ever does.
And the reaction is always split between people going "omg yes! We got cake in the break room! This is so awesome I can't even remember how low my wages are!"
and the other side going, "CAKE? For FREE? For the PEASANTS? This disgusting welfare state knows no bounds!"
And it's the same with other types of rep in Disney movies too. It was like pulling teeth, over the past several decades, to get each tiny bit of improvement in how they portray women and POC.
Yeah, it got somewhere. So slowly. Disney was never at the front of ANY wave in representation, across all entertainment creators.
But no one pays attention to other creators. Every little scrap in a Disney movie seems impressive, because you've never seen anything better in a DISNEY movie. You just don't think about any other kind of movie.
That's because Disney has ALWAYS been in the monopoly-building business. It's always bought most of its competitors.
And once they're bought, they have to follow Disney rules-- meaning the smallest scraps of representation they can get away with.
And the few competitors it hasn't bought are the ones that aren't notably better.
But even those had their tiny hints of rep-- like the mention of a gay boyfriend at the end of "Paranorman"-- before Disney did.
If you want a sense of what representation could be if Disney weren't in charge... read books. Any fiction genre. Read online discussions of what people want to see in books, and then read the books that get recommended in those discussions.
I'm sure as hell not saying all books have good rep, for any group. Not even saying MOST books do, or any big percentage at all.
But books have much, much wider VARIETY.
Especially if you include self-published books.
There are MORE of them than there are of movies or cartoons. It takes less money, less power and privilege, to write and publish a book.
So there are more, and they're more varied, and there's more chance you'll find the kind of story you're looking for, with the kind of representation you want.
Also, Disney hasn't gotten into the business of buying all the book publishers. Yet.
Just remember: anything good Disney has done for the marginalized, it has done by being so powerful it can get away with doing those things while still treating the marginalized like they aren't worth being portrayed onscreen.
It's always supported corrupt politicians, and lobbied for laws that benefit itself, regardless of how those things harm vulnerable people.
And it does a few highly visible nice things, as token boosts to its popularity, while everything else rots, on the screens and behind the scenes.
I once saw someone defending Disney parks by saying that they're uniquely accessible for disabled people.
What followed in my mind was a whole thought process... which ended with me both more sympathetic to that viewpoint, AND more angry at Disney.
It went like this:
...Okay, but it can't be more accessible than staying home reading a book, right?
...I'm trying, but I can't imagine why anyone would PREFER to go to a Disney park instead of stay home and read a book?
What's in a Disney park? Replicas of stuff in Disney movies? Actors going around dressed up as Disney characters?
None of which are really good representation. Especially if you're looking for disabled rep.
At home reading a book, you MIGHT at least encounter some characters that are disabled and don't magically get cured at the end of the story.
And then I thought: Oh. There are rides, too.
People go to amusement parks for rides.
I always forget that, because I have NO interest in amusement park rides.
Depending on the ride, my response ranges from "NEVER IN A MILLION YEARS" to "eh, could be fun, but I can think of at least 4 other things I'd rather do."
It's not automatic, to empathize with people enjoying things I don't enjoy. But it's also not hard: I just think of something comparable that I do like.
After all, staying home reading a book isn't my only entertainment. There are things I like to do outside. Hiking, cycling, swimming.
Which can be inaccessible to many disabled people.
Imagine I want to go hiking in a forest, but there's only ONE nature park where the paths are accessible to my physical needs.
Imagine all the others are way too steep and rocky for me. I'm not a professional mountaineer, I'd fall and die.
And imagine that park is owned by an entertainment company...
who decorate it with statues of their characters...
and staff it with costumed actors...
and charge me $100 to get in...
AND, despite their park being physically accessible to me, their entertainment (which permeates the whole park) contains absolutely no messages of respect for people like me?
And all the other nature parks that could have afforded to be accessible have gone out of business-- because this one bought them or pushed them out?
This corporate hellscape is my ONLY OPTION?
...I would be INCREDIBLY angry.
But I would NOT express it in defense of the park's accessibility.
WTF.
"Justice"
2022/06/30
First posted here on Twitter.
We need to start calling every Supreme Court decision an "abortion of justice" because "miscarriage of justice" doesn't sound deliberate enough for the shit they do
Hypocrisy
2022/06/30
First posted here on Twitter.
Errata: in the original post, I mislabeled the fallacy of ad hominem tu quoque as ad hominem circumstantial, which I have now corrected. My memories of logic class were finally getting a little bit faded. Ad hominem circumstantial is a different fallacy, which I'll probably write about later, because it's also interestingly interwoven with lots of current discourse. It is the argument that one's opponent must be lying or biased because he has a reason to lie or be biased. The exhortation to "follow the money" (i.e. look for financial incentives that people may have for saying what they say) commits this fallacy. (I'm still trying to examine whether this makes it a completely useless thing to do... it still feels, instinctually, like good advice in many cases.)
If my opponents on major ethical issues were less hypocritical, would I like their opinions more?
Usually not.
When an anti-choicer is so consistent that he'd force his own daughter to give birth, that doesn't make him a better person at all.
If he supported universal health care and all the safety nets that would be needed for an increase in unwanted births, that would make him more consistent and a slightly better person.
But as long as he still tries to force unwanted births, I don't like him.
Ad hominem tu quoque is a type of ad hominem fallacy. It's the fallacy of attacking an opinion by calling the person who expresses it a hypocrite.
It doesn't FEEL like a fallacy, but it is. Or at least can be.
"I believe X is good. My opponent claims X is bad, but he does X himself when it's convenient for him."
If my conclusion is "Therefore he's wrong, and X is good," I'm making a dangerous mistake.
Now, that might NOT be my conclusion.
This could be a pretty reasonable argument for the conclusion "he's a hypocrite," "he's dishonest" or "he has a double standard and holds himself to different rules from everyone else."
After all, in this scenario, my opponent is expressing two contradictory beliefs: one with his words, and one with his actions. If they can't both be what he believes, then he is clearly being dishonest about one of them.
But whichever one he truly believes, that has nothing to do with which one is actually good.
If I'm trying to make a point about which opinion is good, I shouldn't use this argument.
Example: I support the right to abortion. But I want to be sure the arguments I use in favor of abortion are actually strong arguments that support it.
I could be tempted to make an ad hominem tu quoque argument, with abortion in the place of X, since my opponents on that subject are often hypocritical.
But many who publicly denounce child molesting are also hypocritical. The same argument with child molesting in place of X clearly doesn't support the conclusion that it's good.
This is how you test the strength of a logical argument: Try it out with other ideas in place of the ones you want to use.
It's one of the first things taught in an introductory logic class, while you're still on categorical syllogisms, long before you even get to informal fallacies like ad hominem.
Just like informal logic, categorical syllogisms can address real, contentious topics. But they look like algebra, with letter variables and clauses like "All A are B" or "No P are Q."
To most minds, these aren't intuitively easy to understand until you put real concepts in place of the variables. And the contentious topics in a real argument can be complex and easily conflated.
So, to figure out whether and how a syllogism is fallacious, students are taught to use placeholders of simple categories they understand well.
Like "animal," "bird" and "chicken."
Imagine you hear an argument like, "All shoplifters are untrustworthy, and all shoplifters are teenagers. So of course all teenagers are untrustworthy."
You could start by pointing out that it's based on untrue premises.
You could debate the claim that all shoplifters are inherently untrustworthy, or the claim that they're somehow all teenagers.
But you could also show that it's invalid as an argument, regardless of the truth of the premises.
You can do this by replacing terms with variables:
All shoplifters are untrustworthy
All shoplifters are teenagers
All teenagers are untrustworthy
changes to
All A are B
All A are C
All C are B
And you can make it easier by putting easily understood categories in place of the variables:
All chickens are birds (true)
All chickens are animals (true)
Therefore all animals are birds (false)
The truth of those statements is easy to judge.
So you can tell that the very structure of this argument is invalid.
You can use the same structure to get an untrue conclusion even from TRUE premises.
That's the test of validity.
However, this sort of test is often misused.
And many people don't clearly understand HOW it's misused, and so they treat it as if it's always wrong.
For example: A comedian pokes fun at rich people. Then someone else complains, "That's unfair! If he made that same joke about poor people, you'd say it was in bad taste."
Then others have to point out, "Yeah, that's because changing the words changes the meaning! The difference between rich and poor is important in comedy. It's funny to mock powerful people. It's cruel to mock helpless ones."
Lately this sort of argument has become so common that those counterarguments will show up as soon as anyone even tries to disprove validity by replacing terms.
If I saw people actually fighting about the untrustworthiness of teenagers, and using that earlier argument about shoplifting...
and if I used the method I showed to prove it invalid...
I'd probably get some people protesting, "Well obviously changing the words changes the argument! We were talking about shoplifters, not chickens!"
And I'd have to try and explain that changing the words to analyze validity actually makes sense, in this case, because:
1. there is actually an argument, deducing a conclusion from premises
and
2. the debate is about whether the conclusion follows from the premises-- not whether the premises are true, or whether any of it is offensive.
But this rarely gets get through to people, when I try to explain it.
Determining whether these things apply to a discussion requires thought, and effort.
The average mind arguing on social media isn't going to take the trouble.
A note about life changes
2022/07/01
In 2020, I released a new edition of my book Born On The Wrong Planet.
This book was first published in 2003, then republished by a different company in 2008. When it finally went out of print, I created this edition to self-publish in 2020.
A lot has changed in the time since this latest version came out.
If you follow me online, you'll see that my love life has changed significantly. For one thing, the person I referred to as "my husband" in the book is a transgender woman. In 2020 she had just started this transition and was not fully out of the closet, so we agreed that I would keep the same language in the text to protect her privacy for the time being.
She now goes by a few names, sometimes Esme, sometimes Elara or Ellie or Elle. Her old name is something she's left behind in most parts of her life (though it's never had strong enough bad connotations for her to feel the need for a legal name change.)
Our relationship has also metamorphosed, in a way that's difficult to describe because it occurred in the context of branching out into non-monogamy, joining an extended polycule with a variety of partners for both of us. There's been a distancing effect, due partly to the increase in number of relationships, and partly to a complex living situation that's resulted in seeing each other less often.
I no longer think of her as a spouse or lover, exactly. And yet, with the amount of history we've had together, we're always going to have a connection that goes deeper than any of the things usually meant by "friends" or "friends with benefits." I'm not sure the right word exists.
But it's been good for us, getting enough distance to learn who we are as individuals, when we'd lived so much of our adult lives defining ourselves as a couple. We're unlearning some bad habits we built while we were each other's only major relationship, and we both have fuller lives for it, regardless of what our futures hold.
Pooh.
2022/07/01
First posted here on Twitter.
"if Winnie the Pooh has a red shirt he's not public domain"
"What if the red shirt has a starfleet insignia and also lots of blood because he's just been the first to die on the away mission"
"...no, because STAR TREK ain't public domain"
"oh...BOTHER"
Free Kea's Flight copies in the Smashwords Giveaway
2022/07/03
I am tired, and while there's still a lot to post about, I'm having some trouble finding the energy.
But here's one thing.
From July 1 through July 31, 2022, another ebook giveaway is up on Smashwords .
This is an event where authors can choose to make their books available free or discounted for a short time.
Here's my post about why I've chosen to make my books free in these events.
Here's the Smashwords page for the Kea Series .
Here's the Smashwords page for All My Books .
Here's the link to the giveaway as a whole .
Happy summer. Stay safe.
Hark Ness Monsters
2022/07/06
First posted here on Tumblr.
There's a famous test for whether it's okay to have sex with something.
It's called the Harkness Test, after the notoriously promiscuous legend from Doctor Who and Torchwood, who showed sexual interest in a variety of alien creatures:
There are various ways of wording the Harkness Test. But essentially it states that, to be an acceptable sex partner, the other entity must have enough intelligence, consciousness, maturity, and communication ability that you can be sure any consent you receive is genuine.
But I'd argue that the category of unacceptable sex partners identified by this test is.... more of a valley (like the uncanny valley) than an indefinite area on one side of a border.
For example:
I have several silicone toys. Some of them have electric inner workings, but nothing even approaching a conscious artificial intelligence.
They do not pass the Harkness Test, in that they are clearly nowhere near conscious enough to consent.
However, they come out on the other side of the Harkness Valley-- because they are so very far from being conscious, they cannot possibly CARE whether they consent or not.
I will not try to define the boundaries of this valley, or what entities do or do not fit within it. I merely posit its existence.
Basically if I can imagine the actual Jack Harkness getting horny with X, and not being out of character, that's the test.
On a vaguely related note...
I don't think Harkness ever screwed any entity that was outright evil (regardless of its intelligence and ability to communicate).
So I would add that choosing to have sex with anyone who's evil may also be a violation of the Harkness Test.
(I really need to go to sleep.)
Doomscrolling
2022/07/07
First posted here on Twitter.
My cycle of internet addiction has gone from unhealthy to VERY unhealthy with a fun update in one of the steps.
And yet... I cannot dare change things, because the unhealthiest parts of this cycle are ALSO the only reason I ever take a break from social media.
Imaginary Accommodations
2022/07/09
First posted here and here on Twitter.
the myth of consensual parking in front of driveways
car owner: I consent!
driveway owner: I consent!
wheelchair owner who has no place to cross except at driveways in the middle of the block because the damn intersection has no curb cuts: I DON'T
No, I have not started needing a wheelchair. However, I attend an event every week where I bring a large amount of heavy stuff. When I walk there, towing it in a wagon, I have to take pretty much exactly the same route a person in a wheelchair would have to take. And this has made me EVEN MORE angry than I was before about this city's lack of accessibility for the physically disabled.
...I haven't been reading much of what other people say on Twitter lately, because my mental health is so much better that way.
But I have seen some of the talk about the Roe vs Wade decision, and about "The Shirley Exception."
As in "Surely there must be an exception to this law, because it would be absolutely horrific if it were enforced as written."
(Which, no, there is generally nothing to prevent laws being enforced however any enforcer wants to, and yeah that is horrific.)
And I'm sure other disability activists have probably brought this up as well, but... from a disabled perspective, this is all VERY reminiscent of what you might call "the Shirley Accommodation."
Which is... any disability accommodation that a lot of people just assume MUST exist (because if it didn't, then the lack of other accommodations would be just horrible, right?)
I've been thinking about this a lot, ever since I've been attending a weekly event where I bring a lot of supplies in a wagon.
I don't drive, which is disability-related and started with a health issue in my teens. But I am able-bodied enough to walk this 1-mile distance while towing a fairly large amount of weight.
However, since this weight is on wheels, I have to take pretty much the same route any person in a wheelchair would have to take.
Turns out, this involves a lot of jaywalking through driveways at the middle of the block, because the place where most people cross has no curb cuts (or, sometimes, insultingly, a curb cut on one side but not the other!)
Also involves a lot of trial and error to find a route where tree roots under the pavement haven't turned the walk into basically a mountain climb.
If there isn't a wheel-traversable sidewalk on either side, that means going into the street through a driveway again, rolling alongside it until you're past the obstruction, hoping the cars don't hit you.
And yes, I am pretty certain this IS what wheelchair users have to do. Because I have to, and in a lot of ways I'm still better off than they are. I'm pulling my wheeled conveyance, not relying on it for my own motion.
So for instance, if I see those godawful pay-to-ride scooters that no one ever uses, lying on the sidewalk blocking my path, I can walk over and move them and then pull my wagon through the space they were blocking.
And if I have to go over a curb that isn't cut, my wagon can usually manage it (down, not up, I'm not that strong). And if it fails and tips over, I CAN put it upright. It's a long and awful process, but at least it's not ME tipped over.
And if somehow my wagon's totally destroyed, I can still, as a last resort, abandon it and at least get myself where I needed to go.
So, as awful as this all is for me, I am LUCKY.
This makes me a bit more angry every week, about city planning and its total disregard for ADA compliance.
If I were still naive enough to believe in Shirley Accommodations, I'd look at the complete absence of any wheelchair users on these sidewalks, and I might assume it's because they've got some mysterious other, better way to get where they need to go.
But I know better, and I know that they're probably just doing without whatever they might need those sidewalks for. Ands when it's a life-and-death need, a lot of them probably just don't live.
But thinking about this at all seems like a pretty rare thing.
Lots of people don't give any thought to whether their city's sidewalks have curb cuts. "Surely every intersection must have them, right? That's required, for wheelchair accessibility."
And if you point out all the intersections that don't have curb cuts: "Well, surely they must not need them there, because they know nobody in a wheelchair lives near there?"
And if you point out that people in wheelchairs should get to go places other than the block they live on... or that they should have the right to move into any neighborhood... or that a person who already lives there could START needing a wheelchair...
Then it's "Well, surely there are accessible van services or something, to take people places they can't go with just their wheelchair? I know I've heard of those?"
Or, "Surely there are personal care attendants who can run errands for people in wheelchairs if they can't get there on their own?"
And... yes... there are things like that... but there's a wide, wide gap between "it technically exists" and "it's available to all or most people who need it, in all or most situations where they need it."
A gap as wide as some of the cracks in goddamn Los Angeles sidewalks.
I Did Swallow
2022/07/11
First posted here on Twitter.
"have you ever tried marijuana"
"yes but I didn't inhale"
"...ok try it again, but inhale this time"
*chokes on gummy*
you know what they say about...
2022/07/12
First posted here on Twitter.
"Erika why do you love miniatures so much"
"I'm COMPENSATING for my HUGE... love of miniatures"
Irreplaceable
2022/07/12
First posted here on Twitter.
I have had some very bad jobs that showed me very little respect or appreciation.
But in none of them was I ever, actually, replaceable.
I've had jobs where managers gave lectures full of not-really-veiled threats about how replaceable we all were. How lucky we were to have the job, how many people fresh off the street would be eager to take our places if we quit or were fired.
Lectures designed to get us undervaluing ourselves, to convince us that we were no more qualified than any random applicant with no training, and that we had no better prospects elsewhere.
And I've had jobs that weren't so explicit about it, but still made threats to unsettle our sense of security in the form of steadily tightening regulations.
Point systems, where points were lost with each mistake and every minute of tardiness, and losing enough points would (on paper, in theory) mean mandatory termination.
And yet, when it came to enforcing any of this, it would always turn out to be a bluff.
We knew we weren't replaceable. We saw it every time we were denied a requested vacation day. Every time we had to sacrifice a lunch break in order to get our workload done.
We couldn't be replaced for a day or even half an hour. How could we take seriously any threat to replace us in full?
And when people did quit, more often than not, they just... weren't replaced. More pressure on everyone else, to fill the gap, but no new employee. We all saw it happen. We all suffered from it happening. No way to ignore it.
What would a job look like if employees actually WERE replaceable?
Not just "we can put a new person in your place, and MAYBE, after months and months of panicked struggle for everyone, that person might be able to do something like the work you did."
But "you could leave, and we could actually, at that moment, find a genuine replacement, a worker who would fulfill your duties equally well."
What would it take to make a workplace where a sudden resignation, or even temporary absence, wouldn't throw the whole thing into apocalyptic chaos?
It would mean, first of all, being redundantly staffed. Having enough employees that everyone had actual downtime, every day. (The sort of team that any real manager would call "overstaffed," "sitting around doing nothing," "a waste of payroll.")
But with all this downtime, there could be time for actual training... instead of new employees just being thrown in and expected to pick up everything as they go.
Instead of everyone having to squeeze training into an already-busy day of work, you could have senior employees devote a whole day to training, the new hire devote a whole day to learning, and a whole different group of people do the actual work that needs to get done.
In this setup, a new hire could become a fully qualified employee in a far more reliable and non-traumatic way.
And the more fully qualified employees you keep around (with time to train in as many departments as they want to learn) ... the more potential replacements you have, ready to take over the work of any employee who's suddenly gone, either for an hour or forever.
No one would feel guilty for taking a break. Nearly everyone would get the vacation time they asked for. Wake up sick, and you'd feel totally safe calling in sick. There'd be someone else to take your place.
Holy hell, I WISH I could have a job where I was replaceable.
I Hate
2022/07/14
First posted here on Twitter.
So I saw a tweet saying that Shakespeare's Sonnet 145, probably written for his wife, was the second-worst of all of his sonnets
My initial response to this, in order:
"wow, second-worst sonnet and second-best bed, lucky lady"
"is it really that bad? what's it even about, really?"
*reads*
SONNET 145
Those lips that Love's own hand did make
Breathed forth the sound that said 'I hate,'
To me that languish'd for her sake:
But when she saw my woeful state,
Straight in her heart did mercy come,
Chiding that tongue that ever sweet
Was used in giving gentle doom,
And taught it thus anew to greet:
'I hate' she alter'd with an end,
That follow'd it as gentle day
Doth follow night, who like a fiend
From heaven to hell is flown away;
'I hate' from hate away she threw,
And saved my life, saying -- 'not you.'
"wow"
"WAIT..."
"THIS IS CRYING FOR A RAMMSTEIN MASHUP"
...and so I did this:
The lips on which my eyes I cast
began the horrid phrase to state
Which had feared: the words "Du Hasst"
Which I perceived to mean "You Hate."
And then the "Mich" he further quoth
To clarify the "me," or him
Whom I was thus assumed to loathe,
And truly did my light grow dim...
But, into light the dark yet pass'd!
The word "Gefragt" he deigned to add!
The "hasst," oh joy, was only "hast"
And thus, "you've asked" was all he said!
"Und ich hab nichts gesagt!" he cried...
Woe! to my ask, he'd not replied.
The Archive
2022/07/17
First posted here on Twitter.
I have messy conflicting opinions about the Internet Archive thing, so I'm not going to take a side, exactly.
But here are some of my feelings, in no particular order.
The question of whether the Archive's actions are illegal, or significantly different from what a library does, appears to be a question of smaller technicalities than many of the people arguing seem to assume.
I do not know if the library-style lending model that the Archive used has made any large difference in profits for any large number of authors/artists.
If it has, then-- if the lawsuit changes this-- it may make an important difference for authors/artists.
It would not, on a large scale, solve any of the related systemic problems as I see them.
I think authors and artists need to be paid fairly for their work.
I think we lost any chance of that, when it became easier to copy digital content than buy it.
I think both good and bad things came from the technological leaps that permitted this. On the whole, I would not want to give them up, and even if I did it's impossible to turn back now.
On an individual level I consider it very unethical to copy the work of an author (or other artist of any kind) who needs income from art to stay afloat.
If advising individuals on what to do, I would always advise them to pay artists fairly for their work, and ask for consent before doing anything outside the bounds of that transaction.
If advising a major organization on how to ensure artists get fairly paid and have their boundaries respected, the question becomes more complex.
On such a large scale, ANY potential decision will have both helpful and harmful results.(This is the nature of decisions made in complex systems of any kind. Decisions in that context become choices for the lesser evil and the greater good, which can be very hard to quantify before the fact.)
It is very, very rare for anyone to get rich by owning a copyright. But a few have, and some of the most powerful have weaponized their copyrights in really abusive ways. This has contributed to a common public opinion that copyright should be challenged always.
Until this public opinion learns to be more nuanced (if it ever can) I think there is no way to stop art theft on the level that people in general want to do it.
The only real hope for the majority of artists to both survive and keep making their art is... I guess Universal Basic Income. Which I very much want to happen. But it also may not be enough.
I think that (as with many bad behaviors that are hard to police) some change can also eventually come from a shift in public opinion about what behavior is acceptable.
(This can take a long time. Sometimes it does involve legal decisions like this. But the way in which legal decisions affect public opinion can be hard to predict.)
I do not like when information is destroyed. Ever. Any kind of information. Especially information that is rare, out of print, hard to find, perhaps the only copy left.
Even the worst writings, by the worst people, can be valuable when studied in the right context.
However, there are times when the creator of a piece of writing or art may justifiably want to have it destroyed, and should have that right (no matter how much I personally don't like the idea).
However, it's also not feasible to require that every copy of a work in existence must be destroyed if the creator says so.
Even if it SHOULD be done, it is not possible, and efforts to make it possible would violate the privacy of pretty much everyone. (Opening their mail, spying on their emails, etc.)
People keep and share information. If it's taken down from someplace like this Archive, it will show up again somewhere else.
The attempt to stop it, or slow it somewhat, may be worthwhile, or may not. I am not sure.
I think there are very few scenarios where anyone OTHER THAN the creator of a work should ever have the right to have it destroyed, or removed from a place like this Archive.
However, I know that sometimes the descendants of a work's creator, or the publishing company through which they published, have the legal right to make this decision-- even if the creator does not or would not have wanted that.
I very much don't like that, but I see no hope of changing that either.
I believe that in some cases even the creator of a work should not get to have it taken down.
(For example, if the archive's copy is the only evidence that the creator once published something truly harmful and evil, and that copy can be used to hold them accountable-- as well as being studied to help understand how a dangerous movement or ideology began.)
However, there is NO foolproof way to decide this sort of ethical question. And, again, it doesn't seem possible to me, even if you could be sure what "should" be done.
Sketchy
2022/07/20
First posted here on Facebook.
I couldn't be a courtroom sketch artist.
Because, when drawing commissions, I like to reserve the right to refuse if I'm asked to draw something I find particularly disgusting or morally repugnant.
my commission guidelines: "I don't draw extreme violence or rape or child molestation, and I don't draw it being committed either directly in person, OR indirectly through corrupt and dangerous legislative decisions. If I'm gonna sketch what you're doing in court, you better remain decent in both word and deed."
Unimpressive
2022/07/20
First posted here on Facebook.
A weird train of thought I had... which was sparked by remembering how unimpressed I was by the movie Frozen (which I saw at home, with people who'd seen it in theaters and been impressed)
"If a movie has to be seen in theaters to be worth it, then it's not actually worth it. It's cheating, just relying on a giant screen and loud speakers to seem more effective than it is."
"And while we're on it, same goes for relying on special effects. If you can take out all the special effects and it's not a good movie anymore, then it was never that good."
"For that matter, same goes for a movie that relies on tricks like lighting, cinematography, film editing, acting..."
"... basically, if it was a worthwhile story, it wouldn't need to be a movie, it'd be a book."
"I guess what I'm saying is actually just that I like books better than movies."
Beauty and Beholders
2022/07/24
First posted here on Twitter.
I keep trying to point out how ridiculous it is to have standards of objective quality for anything that is enjoyed aesthetically.
But it's so hard, because every "it would be ridiculous if..." example actually exists in real life.
"You can't just say this lesson you're teaching is a Rule for writing Good Literature when only a tiny minority of readers actually care whether writers do it.
That's like if a tiny group of art snobs decided which paintings are pretty..."
"That's like if a tiny group of fashion snobs..."
"music snobs..."
"food snobs..."
"Crap."
I think the ONLY type of aesthetic appreciation where humans admit that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" is for people's bodies.
Not all humans even accept this. But generally we admit that we're supposed to, for the physical beauty (not cosmetics, not fashion, but natural, uncontrollable aspects of beauty) of people.
(And other things made by nature.)
(But NOT works of nature that have been bred by humans enough to become a form of human art. Because we do have snobs claiming authority on what defines a good-looking rose, orchid, cow, dog...)
Now, most people who agree with the snobs in one area of art will still consider at least some of the others to be ridiculous.
For instance, I have pretty strict standards for literary quality. I find it hard to keep reading a book if it breaks some types of literary "rules."
I know this is MY preference, and there's no harm in thousands of other people enjoying books that break those rules. But it's sometimes a struggle for me to remind myself of that.
Whereas I find it just NONSENSICAL that an art critic can call one abstract painting objectively better than another-- even if the vast majority of people have no preference, or prefer the other one.
And I find it nonsensical that a 5-star chef can be treated as a greater authority on "which food tastes good" than millions of ordinary people who would rather eat a burger and fries than the weird thing that chef just cooked.
Hell, I even find it nonsensical that I can make up a song, tune and all, and then have someone tell me I'm singing "off key" when THEY don't even know what I intended the key to be!
(And musical "rules"-- at least the basic ones about things like key-- are some of the most widely-accepted, and the most in line with average people's preferences! But for me, they go right in the middle of "nonsensical," next to the stuff that fine-art critics make up.)
(See, it's all subjective. It's all in the eye, ear, mouth, etc. of the beholder.)
But it's always worst when the snobs are a tiny minority, out of touch with average preference, disdainful of average preference, yet somehow getting to decide which artists will have the highest pay, the most prestige...
And one thing that scares me quite a bit is when snobbery spreads.
When ordinary people, who previously did not give a crap whether or not their entertainment followed A Little-Known Art Critic Rule, suddenly learn The Rule, and decide that talking about it makes them as cool as the snobs who invented it.
And eventually hordes of people, who often don't even understand what the Rule was originally intended to mean, are spreading it around and gatekeeping which art breaks the Rule and is therefore Bad.
People proclaiming that they know the difference between Telling and Showing, and EVERY description in EVERY book needs to be Showing, otherwise it's a bad book. Also, they have no idea what an adverb is, except that it should never appear in a book even once.
I barely watch movies, and have seen maybe part of one episode of Cinema Sins, but I gather that Cinema Sins did pretty much... this... to people's enjoyment of movies as well.
Please don't let this happen to everything.
A shattering theological realization in 5 parts
2022/07/25
First posted here on Twitter.
1. In order to bring about the end times, apparently you need a red heifer.
(some weird religious fundamentalists have been actively trying to do this, and they think they'll only succeed if they breed a PERFECTLY red one)
2. According to the Bible, when the world ends, heaven will come to earth, and the dead will be resurrected
3. those who are resurrected will be "like the angels"
4. Angels have wings
5. In order to breed a perfectly red heifer without any off-color hairs, you will need a breeding population of red cattle, including bulls
...therefore...
Red bull gives you wings
Ok story time
2022/07/28
If you know me, you know that I USUALLY make up jokes very painstakingly, and then store them away in a huge mental database and pull them out at the exact moment when they'll fit into a conversation and look like I made up something amazing on the spur of the moment.
BUT
Sometimes, my brain is in just the right (maybe half asleep, maybe a bit deranged) state of spontaneity that things DO happen on the spur of the moment.
Even things vaguely resembling my usual over-complex jokes.
Anyway....
When I saw this article...
...For SOME FUCKITY weird reason, my brain read "Halloween demand" to the tune of "afternoon delight" in the song Kokomo by the Beach Boys
And... then it just kept going
Without me even thinking
And...
Now this is stuck in my head:
Halloween demand
Our candy's getting canned
By and by we'll supply
A little fewer cavities
Will there be cocoa? No
I could totally go full Weird Al and do the whole song, but now that the spontaneity ran out I'd have to actually TRY, and I don't have actual desire to create a Kokomo parody themed around a specific goddamn 2022 chocolate shortage.
My spontano-brain has very strange ideas of what sorts of jokes are worth making.
Interestingly enough, it also tried to make a stupid Kokomo parody out of stupid place-names, back when I was living near the East Coast:
Altoona
Batavia
Ooh I wanna save ya
Cayuga
Susquehanna
Come on, city mama
Venango
Otsego
Baby why don't we go
50 miles south of Forest Cityyyyyy...
There's a place called
Poconos
(and that is, again, when I stopped, because I do NOT want to put actual effort into this crap.)
The latest zodiac
2022/08/05
First posted here on Tumblr.
The Latter Day Saints argue that Jesus could have been defended by Obi-Wan, while theologian Ian Paul suggests either Han Solo or Darth Sidious.
The rest of us act like he's gonna have to rely on Kylo Ren pretending to want to fight Vader.
Anagram Poems
2022/08/05
First posted here on Twitter.
In response to a Twitter post about someone's anagram-related conspiracy theory, I replied:
I love how people think anagrams MEAN something.
Like you can't rearrange ANY phrase to spell at least 3 others.
Like there's not a multi-stanza poem about Washington crossing the Delaware where EVERY line is an anagram of "Washington crossing the Delaware."
Washington Crossing the Delaware (sonnet)
(In response to my post, @DrewMelbourne replied:)
"If I wrote this poem I would retire"
(later, after midnight, I posted a screenshot of a poem and a few more of the process of crafting it:)
"...TFW when I stay up til 3:30 doing the same thing to your tweet, just to prove it's easy, and only prove that I am an absolute doofus who has to work tomorrow morning"
I'm hired to reset wifi. O, tripe!
Serf hire... I tried it. Ow. I'm poet!
I tie to words! If there, I'm ripe...
This? Me? Terror! I weep if I do it.
If I write this premier ode to...
I'm top idiot! Free? Shit, I rewire
For dime tips, ere I write it. Oh!
I, Writer! (I totes hope I'm fired.)
Shit wifi empire. Re-edit root?
Redo it? Meteor, hit wifi spire!
I ... I... tire of other temps' weird ire.
If I wrote this poem, I'd retire.
"I could at least have used an anagram generating program to save time. But noooooo, I had to do it by hand in freakin' Google Keep Notes (here are some of the bloopers and failed tries)"
IF I WROTE THIS POEM ID RETIRE
IF I WROTE THIS POEM ID RETIRE
IF I WROTE THIS POEM ID RETIRE
OID RET
IF I ROTE TIS M ID T RE
Hope... I WIRE
IF I ROTE TIS M ID T REHope
I WIRE
OT p
Free? I'm top Idiot! shit, I reWIRE
IF T MERRIEST
Idiot Hope! I WIRE
F I OT D
TI MERRIEST HOPE I WIRE
IF T ID
MERRIEST HOPE... IT... D'OH, TITS, IF I WIRE
IF I WRTE HIS POEM RETIRE
Do it
IF I R IS M TR
Here, I weep to Do it
IF I R IS M TR
Here, I weep to Do it
IF I R IS M TR
Here, I weep to Do it
IF I R EM RER
This? I weep to Do it
IF I R EM RER
This? I weep to Do it
Woe is I. I tried.
IF I WT P IIRE
Store hired me to
IF I WRTE THIS PIRE
Meteoroid
W RE TID
I'm wired POET (IF STORE HIRE)
IF I WROTE THIS POEM ID RETIRE
IF I WROTE THIS POEM ID RETIRE
IF I WROTE THIS POEM ID RETIRE
TE Rdoi
Meteor, hit wifi spire! Doi
PM I IRE
If I tie to words, there I'm ripe...
IE THOEETR
I Words fit I'm ripe
If I tie to Words, there I'm ripe
here
I tie Words. fit. I'm ripe
F I RTTh POEM RE
Woe is I . I tried .
F I R T H R E IS
Woe! I tried. I'm poet.
Serf hire... I tried it. Ow! I'm poet!
F I RH R E SWoe
Hire ! I tried it... I'm poet.
I Desire
TH PM RETIE
Woe is I. I tried. For
IF I WROTE THIS POEM ID RETIRE
O ID REIRE
The ports emit Wifi
IF I WROTE TI PEM ID REIR
ETHOS
I free words, I, the POI, merit it!
If I write this premier ode to
I tithe dimes to power if I err.
"...it is very fitting that this is a poem about someone who'd rather be writing poems than doing their menial job."
The latest advertising tactic
2022/08/12
First posted here on Twitter.
I kinda think we need a name for the thing where an advertisement has phrasing that can be interpreted as something hilariously inappropriate, and we all laugh at the corporation, and MAYBE it was an honest mistake BUT you can't deny that they just got a huge bump in publicity
Ten years ago they figured out that what got engagement was brands acting like regular folks on social media, being silly and memey
We got wise to that fast ("silence, brand!")
And now they're figuring out that the only way to make us interact is get us to mock them
Replying to old posts
2022/08/12
First posted here on Tumblr.
One time I replied to some dirty-minded shitpost somewhere
and the OP replied "dude this was a year ago"
and I replied "I can think of nothing more tragic than a world in which everything we say is required to be forgotten within 1 year"
and then I had to delete it because I realized I had used my main profile and the original reply was from my anonymous horny profile
... and you know what, I'd been wrong, that was even more tragic
An unfulfilled need
2022/08/12
First posted here on Twitter.
I've noticed what seems to be a missing need for a specific group of people.
Maybe you can tell me if there's something available to fill it?
The group to whom I refer is "people who cannot drive, and have a pet that's not a dog or cat."
The need is "transportation to move to another city."
Currently, if you have the money, there are lots of available services where you can get your inanimate possessions driven to another city by someone trained for the job.
But to get yourself and your pet there, driving is basically the only option.
Take a plane or train, and there are pretty much none of them that will currently allow pets other than dogs or cats.
It's a recent change, I know. Maybe because of disease concerns? Or invasive species?
I also don't know of any taxi or rideshare services that will reliably offer rides of that length, at any price.
I've heard you CAN do it with Lyft or Uber, but not that it's something you can rely on.
The only option I'm aware of is "find a friend willing to drive you."
I'm not in this situation myself.
... I mean, I am a person who can't drive and has a pet lizard.
But if I ever do decide to move to another city or state, I have friends who'd drive across the country for me.
I'm just wondering if there's any option for people who don't.
And I don't think anyone short of people with a private jet have any options for this when moving overseas.
Fire and Ice
2022/08/15
First posted here and here on Tumblr.
We once got an appliance repaired by a company named "Bonfe"
and when I forgot the name I made up a mnemonic to remember:
"it's what you get when you take the 'ir' our of 'bonfire'"
and since 'ir' means 'go' in Spanish, my brain went on to add, "that's like taking the 'go' out of 'fuego'"
and then i realized if you take the 'go' out of 'fuego' you get 'fue,' which is the PAST TENSE OF IR
so my mnemonic became a multi-level bilingual pun, which is so on brand for me that I'm never forgetting the name of that company even now that I live in a state where it doesn't exist
Kindred spirits
2022/08/18
First posted here on Twitter.
Sometimes I wonder why the blue-tongued skink -- a highly solitary creature, who needs its own private enclosure and avoids almost all interaction with its own kind-- is one of the most affectionate lizards toward humans.
But then she probably wonders the reverse about me.
(We're two of a kind. Extraordinarily picky about ever hanging out with our own species. But delighted to reach across species borders for companionship.)
Pain
2022/08/18
First posted here on Twitter and here on Tumblr.
Stop talking about whether something "feels pain" as an argument over whether it's okay to kill it.
There are humans who don't have the ability to feel pain and still don't want to die.
There are humans who are in pain all the time and still don't want to die.
If someone offered to kill you totally painlessly, even if you trusted them to do it, you probably still wouldn't want to die.
Fear of dying is not just fear of pain for godsakes
Note: This isn't about veganism, though I can easily use it to argue against both sides of that discourse ("it feels pain so it's not ok to kill it" vs "it doesn't feel pain so it is ok to kill it") because both sides make that same fallacy.
I wrote this because I saw a gifset of Janet from The Good Place explaining how she's programmed to beg for her life but it's totally ok to kill her because she doesn't feel pain, and it reminded me of a thread I read on Twitter by a person with chronic pain who's afraid they're going to get coerced into assisted suicide because people don't understand they still want to live while in so much pain.
I was trying to point out that wherever you make that fallacy, it hurts real people.
Copywrongs
2022/08/19
A weird question (you know I like to analyze laws and their potential flaws, misuses and loopholes)
Suppose you inherited some papers that had been in your family for generations. You look through them, and find that they include a complete manuscript for a novel, written by a relative who died over a century ago.
You research it a bit, and find out that the novel was never published. As you now own the manuscript, you decide to digitize and self-publish it online.
Can you claim copyright? Or is it automatically in the public domain, even though you are the first to publish it (since it was written by someone who died long enough ago for copyright to have expired)?
Followup question!
The first question actually branched off from this one, because I was trying to imagine a scenario where a piece of writing exists that is 1. public domain, and also 2. only available as digital ebooks being published by one person.
Because the first question that occurred to me was:
Can you legally put DRM on a work you are publishing, if it is public domain AND you are the only person who currently has access to it?
As far as I can find out, DRM on public domain books is totally allowed (except in Portugal for some reason?) Barnes and Noble did an event where they gave out free ebooks that turned out to be old public domain books that you could download from Project Gutenberg or anyplace, except B&N's version had DRM added.
But if you were the world's only seller of a public domain work, and you put DRM on literally every copy that you made available to your customers... Then the only way for anyone in the world to access that work would be 1. to buy it from you, the monopoly owner, or 2. to break the law by circumventing DRM.
I think that doing this would effectively make it stop being public domain? Because it makes it illegal to get it without buying it from you?
And that's, like, most of the definition of having a copyright?
And I'm pretty sure that's NOT a power you should be able to have?
I wonder if there's any case law on this.
Ooh! Another followup question!
The definition of circumventing DRM seems to include several things you can do to it, like sabotaging, deactivating, or... bypassing.
Bypassing is a very broad term!
It would seem to refer to anything you could do to copy the DRM-protected content in a way the DRM wouldn't want you to!
I wonder if it could include scrolling through the whole ebook and taking photos of every page, and then digitizing the photos?
Or even typing the entire book, word by word, into a text file?
Would that be bypassing?
Or does "bypassing" require some proximity to the thing you're passing by?
Is this so vastly different from going through the proper DRM channels that you can't even consider it bypassing? Like how you can't say "I passed by the stadium on the way to work" if you actually went hours and hours out of your way to avoid getting within 50 miles of the stadium?
(update: my friend who gets angry at the very thought of DRM says yes, that would be considered bypassing. Holy hell DRM law sucks.)
Two-Party Consent
2022/8/21
Question: Suppose that you live in a "two-party consent" state where it is illegal to record a phone call unless the people being recorded have consented to it.
Is it legal to secretly record your own phone call with a customer service representative?
For the sake of argument let's say the company is based in the same state, and the call began with one of those "your call may be monitored or recorded" warnings.
Essentially, both you and the customer service rep agreed to be recorded by the company that the rep works for.
But the rep did not consent to be recorded by YOU.
The content of the recording will be the same for both, but WHO HAS ACCESS to the recording will be different from what they agreed to.
To me, that seems like basically the same thing as taking a video of your boss at work without his consent (when he knows he's being recorded on company surveillance, but he doesn't worry about that because he controls who gets to see THOSE recordings).
And I don't know if that would be legal, either, in a two-party consent state. (Or whether you could legally use it as evidence in court, if your recording caught the boss doing illegal things.)
The whole issue of when you do and don't need people's permission to record them is so counterintuitive, and has to do with the Fifth Amendment, I guess.
The Fifth Amendment also feels like a weird thing to me. I've always found it funny when they say "anything you say can AND WILL be used against you." Not just CAN, but WILL. Like, can they actually keep that promise? For all the things I say? Even if I'm like "ouch" or "can I have a glass of water"? No lawyer's that good.
I kinda wanna get arrested just so I can sue them for violating my Miranda rights because they didn't use ALL my statements against me.
"You promised! False advertising!"
Anyway, as for the right to remain silent... you've never been able to force people to talk. You can convince them with torture or threats, but they can still choose to stay quiet or make something up.
The only thing that changed when they introduced the Fifth Amendment is the types of threats and mistreatment you can use. For instance, you can't use the threat of a legal punishment specifically FOR remaining silent... although you can totally offer a plea bargain in which you tell the suspects that they'll be punished much more severely if they don't talk.
And I guess also it affected other types of testimony besides talking... that's where the stuff about recordings comes in.
I've wondered why making photos and video or audio recordings is banned in some places... but in many of the same places, there's no ban on telling others what you remember seeing or hearing there? Or drawing a picture from memory of what you saw?
And the only difference about the action that's banned is... it's the more accurate way of transmitting information?
And that's a reason to ban it?
But in the context of the Fifth Amendment, it's understandable. Making recordings or photos of someone without consent is, in a sense, forcing them to give testimony. I suppose it's banned because it's against the Fifth Amendment.
Or, at least, it's sometimes sorta banned in some places. (Like all the other supposed rights violations that those amendments are supposed to protect us from.)
I wonder what would happen to the laws if someone developed the technology to read minds and memories.
I'm guessing it would probably be treated like polygraph tests (and would be at least as unreliable, because memories are unreliable in the first place).
Empathy
2022/08/27
First posted here on Twitter.
Empathy is important
even when dealing with a person you don't agree with.
This is because
if you can look at a situation from someone else's point of view
You can understand that point of view better
And then you can know where it's VULNERABLE
and how to DESTROY IT
(I feel the need to mention this again, because I HATE the "gender critical" viewpoint, and I like when people fight against it, but today I saw someone arguing against it by calling JKR a hypocrite, quoting a scene where she called Hermione "she" when she was in a male body)
(and claiming this shows that even JKR knows gender is decided by feelings of identity
except, obviously, it just shows that JKR thinks gender is decided by the body you were BORN in, regardless of how you change it)
in order to fight successfully against your enemies, you must train often in fighting simulations.
your brain has given you a simulator called "imagination" and a simulation of your enemy called "empathy" or "theory of mind," and you must work to make it accurate and USE IT)
Training
2022/08/27
First posted here on Twitter.
I have no interest in raising children (because I know very well what it's like, because I was a kid once, and I am capable of memory and sufficient empathy to look at it from my parents' perspective and be in AWE that any of us survived it)
But I have a morbid fascination with reading advice columns and online discussions about other people's parenting struggles.
It's like watching a train wreck. A train wreck where everyone in the train has deliberately decided to crash the train, because they Wanted To, and they're screaming in fear and pain but they keep interrupting themselves to loudly announce how much they LOVE being in a crashing train and how life is completely meaningless if you can't be in a train crash, and then they go back to screaming and begging for help to just get through THIS PART of the train crash so they can enjoy the rest of it. It's addictive. I just... can't look away.
And even when there are people giving really good advice, I know there's a chance that even the best advice might not have worked on me as a kid.
Like, in a discussion of how to tell children about death, someone will say:
"Do you tell them there's a heaven? Do you tell them there isn't?"
and the most reasonable replies are like:
"I think the best option is to tell them nobody knows, some people believe your mind just disappears, some believe you go to an afterlife where you're rewarded for good deeds or punished for bad ones, and we have freedom of religion, so you have the right to believe what makes sense to you, and change your mind later if you need to."
and I'll imagine that kid being me, and the next post will go:
"Update: my kid has developed a religion in which school is a mortal sin, and for every day I make her go to school, she and I and all the teachers will have to spend another hundred years in Poop-gatory (which she describes exactly as you'd imagine). How do I respect the freedom I promised her, while also requiring her to follow earthly laws?"
tl;dr people who don't have kids DO know what having kids is like, that's why we don't have them.
Kea is Mine!
2022/09/01
First posted here on Twitter and here on Tumblr.
Someone has been posting screenshots of text from the new JKR novel, and it has hit me... surprisingly hard.
Particularly the description of a character named Kea.
....As the author of a 2011 novel featuring a disabled, bird-loving protagonist named Kea... this feels more personal than I'd like to admit.
I feel I have been challenged to a duel.
(Tags added by a tumblr user who reblogged my post:)
Well, as for how it feels... I was not prepared for how ANGRY it makes me to see the name Kea treated like that. Every time I look at those pages, I have to stop after a few seconds because I'm like DAMMIT THATS MY CHARACTER YOU CANT DO THAT!
...even though I think there's a good chance it's really just a coincidence.
My character was autistic, not any of the disabilities mentioned in this passage. And she had no particular interest in music or fashion.
And I mean Kea is an unusual name... but since it is a kind of bird, having it go along with a bird-loving character is an idea that two people could think up independently.
For a second, I thought the plethora of bird-related screennames in the "Ink Black Heart fandom" was also suspiciously reminiscent of the secret fish-themed chat room in my sequel "Kea's Landing"....
but then I noticed that the detectives also have bird names? So I guess it's just the same sort of highly implausible naming system she used for all the HP characters.
Anyway, if I've been challenged to a duel, I've won it already.
(All author duels are writing contests. I've compared the ratio of good to bad feedback I've seen on my book and hers, and it's pretty clear I won.)
Sacrifices
2022/09/02
First posted here on Twitter.
"don't kinkshame"
DONT TELL ME WHAT TO DO
(posts picture of my lizard with a sign around her neck saying "i ate all the isopods in my bioactive substrate")
oh wait ... you didn't say skinkshame, did you
Update. Turns out that the isopods in Doom's tank are much too good at hiding and reproducing for her to ever accomplish this.
But I noticed she does like to snack on them occasionally...
So I got some extra large ones to keep in a different enclosure, because they seem much easier to breed than any of the usual feeder insects.
Occasionally I'll take a few out for live treats. She LOVES this.
In this process... I have learned that the idea of dragons demanding to be fed virgins is utter BS.
If you want to ensure you have food in the future, you don't want to eat virgins.
You want mature adults that have already done all the reproduction they're going to do.
Now, I admit that the categories of "virgins" and "mature adults who have done all the reproduction they're going to do" can overlap (since virginity can last a lifetime, and for some individuals "all the reproduction they're going to do" is zero)
(for example: Granny Weatherwax)
(but just try feeding her to a dragon. this will not go well for anybody)
However, a large and old isopod is unlikely to be a virgin, and I choose the largest and presumably oldest ones... because they make the best treats, but also because they probably don't have much left to contribute to the gene pool.
Now, if a dragon has a fetish for virgins, that would be a time when maybe you DO want to skinkshame...
Straws
2022/09/07
First posted here on Tumblr.
Seeing this "article" was... not my own last straw.
But it is.... ONE of many, many straws that are piling up in the sea-turtle gut of my psyche.
To be clear: I would not have the same reaction as this person.
If I were to receive a can of soda and a cup of ice when I expected a fountain drink, my thoughts would be, in roughly the following order:
Hmm.
I'm supposed to pour it into the glass, right? Like this?
...This is not how I expected this drink to be served.
I am slightly disappointed.
That is an interesting feeling! ...because as far as I know, there is no DIFFERENCE between a can of soda that's been poured into a cup of ice, and a cup of ice and soda that's been dispensed from a fountain.
And yet... I think I actually do find the latter more appealing.
I wonder why this is! Fascinating.
Is there some physical difference after all? Or is it psychological, like how I sometimes think a restaurant meal tastes better than homemade, just because I didn't have to do work to make it?
I also wonder why it is being served this way!
Maybe the fountain is broken? Or ran out of soda?
Or it's cheaper or faster to do it this way, and they're cutting corners?
Whatever the reason, It probably has to do with the miserably underpaid and understaffed condition of the employees here, and the unforgivable greed of the higher-ups.
I am now getting angry at this company.
Not so much for this particular attempt at cutting corners... but for the much larger industry of corner-cutting... of which this is a small symptom and a small reminder.
I am feeling sympathy mixed with rage. Not toward but FOR of the people who sold me this drink.
While this is a small inconvenience for me, I am reminded that THEY spend long days of exhausting labor with nowhere near enough staff to do the job, and nowhere near enough pay to afford even the humblest apartment without sharing it with an illegal number of roommates-- let alone any hope of paying off the thousands in debt they have from getting college degrees that couldn't get them anything better than this in today's job market-- let alone any hope of actually SAVING any money for future emergencies that will, without such preparation, eventually make them homeless and/or dead.
I am now feeling guilty for even contributing to the near-slavery of these fellow human beings... while also knowing that IF I were to boycott this establishment, or even get everyone I know to boycott it, that would make little or no difference... perhaps just cause downsizing and get some of them fired.
I am now in full "demolish capitalism" mode. Seething with rage, but with no hope of ever being able to do anything about it.
My day is ruined, yes.
But not by the drink... which, by this point, has been chilling in the icy glass long enough that when I take a sip, I realize it IS indistinguishable from what I was expecting, after all.
I would not have the same complaint as this individual, who has gone through a slice of life so DENSELY PACKED with human suffering and dystopia, that the fact they were DRIVING A CAR WHILE HUNGOVER does not even earn a mention.... and yet the COKE CAN is what did it for them.
Wow.
Just...wow.
Vennbryo
2022/09/08
First posted here on Twitter.
Inbred Planet
2022/09/08
First posted here on Twitter.
So most places in the US do not allow incestuous marriage between anyone closer than second-cousins
I think this is insufficient
It's estimated that even the most distantly-related humans on the planet are still 70th cousins
All human-on-human mating is incest
IT MUST STOP
no this is not an endorsement of bestiality
Because THAT IS INCEST TOO
All life forms on earth are related
There are no extant organisms that evolved SEPARATELY all the way back to the first microbes that could be deemed "alive"
NOT ON EARTH ANYWAY
interplanetary marriage is the ONLY ETHICAL MARRIAGE
if you want to write a story without implied incest, here is a list of characters you can have in it:
Spock
(oh wait
Not even him
Because before his parents, BOTH SIDES OF HIS ANCESTORS WERE ALL INCESTORS)
... I SUPPOSE I have to clarify that this is one of my joke rants where I take a thing some people get mad about and rant it to its logical conclusion just to show how f'ing ridiculous it is
After 11 pm I rarely post anything that even I think makes sense
Which is why I am HONESTLY TRYING to get into a routine of going to bed at 10 or earlier
But you know my brain is a more dysfunctional executive than any evil billionaire
Wearing White
2022/09/09
First posted here on Tumblr.
Not wearing white after Labor Day is only a valid rule in places where it snows in fall and winter.
But the reason is not the dishonesty of hiding in the snow
It's that Earth herself is the one who gets to wear white, and it's like you're trying to upstage a bride on her wedding day.
The Ichthus
2022/09/09
First posted here on Tumblr.
So I had a horrible conversation about this with some other horrible people
"Can you do communion on Fridays in Lent? Or is Jesus NOT a fish?"
"Sure Jesus is a fish! Because 1, fish can do parthenogenesis, 2, they can walk on water--"
"Swim in water."
"Whatever. And 3, remember when he multiplied the loaves and fishes.
There is only one kind of creature that can interact with a fish in a way that produces MORE FISH.
And spoiler, that's a fish."
"....are you saying Jesus... mated with the fish
are you saying he had children with the fish
and then gave the children away to be eaten...?
...Did... Did he screw the bread too"
"Well if course! Because Jesus is also literally bread! And wine! Look up transubstantiation"
"...are you saying he ALSO gave birth to that wine that he replaced the water with"
"Jesus the all-you-can-eat free filet-o-fish sandwich and drink combo"
"You need Jesus, but he needs to stay millions of miles away from you"
I'm only doing this take on the -ssy meme because no one else will
2022/09/10
First posted here on Twitter and here on Tumblr.
Hotline Horror Stories
2022/09/10
First posted here on Twitter.
Some short horror fiction, set in a suicide hotline:
1.
I'm a mandated reporter, but I don't trust police for suicide attempts.
The caller says, "I'm holding a gun to my head." I'm required to send them now.
"Help," he pleads. "I don't want to do it."
"Help is on the way," I assure him.
"Thanks," he says. "I prefer suicide by cop."
2.
"I'm broke," she says. "I think of death all the time."
"Do you plan how you'd do it?" I ask.
"Yes. Meds from a clinic I work at."
"You're tempted to steal them?"
"No," she says. "To not steal them."
"Huh?"
"Then I'd have no way to get them. My disease would take me out quick."
3.
"I didn't wanna call you. But I'm out of options besides killing myself. I'm thousands in debt."
"How?" I ask.
"I lost my job, then I got a gigantic medical bill."
"That's awful. An accident?"
"Mental hospital."
"Oh." I dread what's coming.
"From the last time I called you."
I don't want to die.
In any way, slow or fast, peaceful or violent, natural or self-inflicted.
I basically want to be immortal.
Fuck dying.
But I think about suicide all the time.
Not the "serious consideration" kind of thinking.
Other kinds.
1. The author kind.
Authors think about everything. Even the worst scenarios we can possibly imagine. That's why we're authors.
This kind of suicide thought goes like:
"What if someone was trapped in this imaginary situation? How would he feel? Would suicide be believable? What if he killed himself in this way? Or that way? How would others react?"
This is not personal suicidal ideation. This is brainstorming. Even if it never leads to a story. It's just part of the constant background noise of an author brain.
2. The self-insert author kind.
Sometimes the brainstorming takes a more personal angle. Instead of a made-up character, sometimes I put myself in the hypothetical position, just to get a feel for the point of view.
But this is also different from seriously considering suicide. This is kinda the same thing as when a stranger walks up to a disabled person and says "If I had to live like that, I'd kill myself."
Except I'm not an asshole, so I keep it in my imagination. And I keep it there long enough to actually THINK about it, and get an idea of how much sense the thought makes-- or doesn't make-- before I have any character in a story say it, let alone say it myself.
3. The trainwreck kind.
This is closer to home, and self, and depression.
It's an idea that stops a catastrophic train of thought. This happens when I start to think about an unbearable situation I'm in: "I can't handle this anymore."
I think about alternatives, about potential escape routes. They all seem impossible and/or just as bad as where I am.
I think, "I have no options that I can endure." I realize that, if this is true, the only other option is suicide.
And since that isn't a place I want to go, I stop the train of thought, push down the feelings of despair, bottle them up again... and force myself to hang on and just keep doing whatever unbearable thing I'm having to do.
But if I ever do start thinking of suicide as a serious option... I know I will not feel safe seeking help.
The last of those three hotline horror stories gives a hint as to why. I don't know for sure how it would go in my situation, but I have heard too many real-life horror stories about it.
I've heard too much about people who mentioned thoughts of suicide to their therapists, and then were hospitalized against their will.... given treatments that may or may not have even temporarily alleviated the depression... and then, when the hospital deemed them no longer an immediate danger to themselves, they were thrown back into everyday existence, with no support to deal with the sudden upheaval this brought into their lives.
They may not have a job anymore. They'll get billed for the hospitalization, and it will be more money than they could expect to earn in years, and just like that, they've lost any remaining hope that their life might be worth living, or that seeking help makes anything better. All the intervention accomplished was to delay the suicide but make it ultimately more likely.
The other horror stories are hints too. I'm not in the most high-risk demographics for being killed if a cop were sent to deal with my mental health crisis... but nobody's really safe with cops. And I'm not reliant for survival on a medication I can't afford --though I deal every day with patients who are-- but I think about this situation all the time. If I were forced to steal a medicine to keep myself alive, and if my suicide plan were simply to stop stealing it, no hotline or therapist would ever try to talk me out of that suicide.
Oh, they'd tell me to keep taking my medicine, of course. As long as I can do it legally. They might even suggest funding options to try and make it affordable for me. But as I know very well from my job, there are vast gaps in the availability of that assistance.
You can be unable to afford a treatment but still be considered too well-off to qualify for funding. You might be denied for having too much income last year, even if this year you have none. You might live with other people who make money that shows up as part of your household income, even if they can't or won't actually share it with you. Or you may have other uncontrollable expenses that eat up any money you get, no matter how much it is.
People like to believe that the law requires doctors to save every life that can be saved. But it doesn't, and anyway a doctor's role in saving a life usually ends when a prescription is written. Then it's in the hands of pharmacies and insurance companies, and they are businesses with the goal of making money. None of society's institutions actually care about people's survival if it doesn't bring profits for someone.
And they'll do very little to address the underlying systemic problems that contribute to that. They'll ignore so many things that are worsening your health, and so many societal problems that make it hard to "earn" a living at any level of health. They won't think of confronting the supremely messed-up idea that people should need to earn the right to live at all.
Or at least, any part of the system that does think about that is pretty much powerless to change it.
The world will claim to care about keeping you alive-- with therapy and hotlines and mandatory reporting to mental hospitals if you seem "in danger." But they will stop pretending to care when they start to view you as a burden. The more you resemble that disabled person who gets rude strangers coming up and saying "If I had to live like that, I'd kill myself"... the less they care if you do.
Water isn't food
2022/09/13
First posted here on Twitter and here on Tumblr.
Whenever I hear "drink some water and see if you're still hungry before you eat" I think of when my 6th grade class made me read a memoir about a boy so poor that he would gorge himself on drinking fountain water at school just to make his stomach feel full for a while
i mean yeah it works, as a trick to make yourself feel full without eating
and yeah this trick is useful for starving people and anorexic people
I am not sure it's a good idea in general
(primarily because it is advertised as a test to find out if you Really Need food right now
when in fact it is a way to convince yourself that you Do Not need food right now... whether or not you actually do)
Worms
2022/09/13
First posted here on Twitter.
A kinda disgusting thought about science, parasites, dermatology, and theory of mind.
A while ago I saw a discussion of the idea that "people hundreds of years ago used to think blackheads in the skin were worms."
There was a general agreement that this must be a myth, it wasn't plausible at all, since "obviously they are not worms, and of course people back then would have been able to tell that."
I haven't been able to stop thinking about this.
I still have no idea if anyone ever actually believed that or not.
But the more I think about it, the more I realize:
Things that seem obvious to us would NOT always be obvious to people with such very different experiences.
Is it really obvious that blackheads are not worms?
How exactly would someone in medieval times prove that they aren't?
When you squeeze a blackhead, the thing that comes out is shaped like a worm. It's whitish and translucent like many small worms.
As it comes out, it moves kinda like a worm.
It stops moving once it's out... but then, most parasites die after they're removed from the host.
Maybe this one just dies unusually fast.
If you look at it under a microscope, you'll see that it doesn't have any organs.
But that's not much use if your science has neither 1. microscopes nor 2. the knowledge that living things need to have organs.
It doesn't have any observable means of reproduction.
But if your science says that worms appear via spontaneous generation, you won't expect to see a worm reproducing.
If contemporary wisdom says that God made everything the way it is, and that parasites are made to punish people for sins, and that all people are sinful...
Then it stands to reason that a worm-like thing found in most people's skin is a parasitic worm.
But it won't stand to reason that there's a worm-like thing in most people's skin that's totally harmless and (during your lifetime) there's no known reason for it.
Why would God do that?
The longer I observe humanity, the more I am convinced that when people say something is "obvious," they almost always mean "I have not thought for even 1 minute about the viewpoint of someone who does not have All The Knowledge I Have."
Therapy
2022/09/13
First posted here on Twitter, here and here on Tumblr.
Writing is therapy.
This is in the context of:
I had an actual therapy appointment today, but they could only schedule it on a work day and there are 0 private places to talk near my work and I had to do a phone appointment on a lunch break outside a public cafe with one hand over my ear to hear it
And this appointment involved an uncomfortable and awkward and somewhat confrontational discussion of varying definitions of "thoughts of suicide" and where the writer of the pre-appointment survey would have drawn the line
Which, I'm a total exhibitionist (see: me talking about this on a public website) but it turned out this was still not a totally comfortable conversation to have in a noisy public place where I had no control over how anyone else was perceiving it
And I felt pretty gross about it for the rest of the day
And my way to cope when I got home was:
Open the draft I'm working on
The one that's a tie-in novel to the Kea's Flight universe, exploring Gabria Laud's side of what happened at the end of Kea's Migration
(spoilers: gabria's viewpoint shows that was very different from what it looked like)
(But still in some ways the same)
(It's complicated)
Also turns out Gabria is very much an outlet for lots of frustrations I feel about 1. My own psychological problems and 2. other people's attempts to analyze them
Sooooo turns out Gabria is probably gonna have some of the same experiences I have in therapy
sometimes a first draft of a chapter is more like a rant in my diary...
Oooh! Another fun thing to bring up with the therapist is that there's technically no difference between "wanting to die" and "not wanting to be immortal"
"doctor can you explain to me why it is considered normal and well-adjusted to prefer death over life, as long as you're talking about death some arbitrary number of years in the future"
"we are getting off topic"
"ok what about being at peace with the possible eventual extinction of the whole human species. If you cheered for the deaths of billions to happen NOW you'd be basically genocidal, but when I say I don't want it EVER to happen I get called unreasonable"
"...I think it has something to do with accepting what you can't change"
"the final triumph of tyranny is always a joint attack of teaching you to accept what you can't change and teaching you what things you're supposed to include in that category"
(my therapist is already regretting taking me on)
Robotic Art
2022/09/13
First posted here on Twitter.
I am very curious what the method was for creating this mural
It's fascinating because at first glance it looks like a painting based on photos
but there was definitely something like DALL-E involved
I mean if there wasn't, that would mean a human was deciding to paint like Dall-E and this brings up intriguing concepts like "the human second generation of the robotist school of art pioneered by AIs"
To be clear, my primary feeling on this is fascination! This would be such an amazing avant-garde movement. I hope it happens
I'm gonna look up the artist. (The text on the mural credits them and I thought about mentioning it but I was worried they'd see the post and I don't want them to interpret this like I'm insulting them because, like I said, FASCINATED)
Alien Genitals
2022/09/16
First posted here on Tumblr.
Okay, so lots of Trekkies got really excited when Discovery revealed (through a brief glimpse of a couple of pee streams in a scene outside a bar) that the canon "redundancy" of Klingon organs extends not only to multiple hearts and livers and so on, but also... You know.
But on that front Star Trek was, of course, lagging far behind Babylon 5, which, in 1994, made it clear that any hypothetical Klingon double-endowment was far outclassed.
By this guy.
The Centauri are not, by any stretch, the "heroes" of the show. They are regularly shown being arrogant, selfish asses, and their empire has a history riddled with atrocities. Human viewers of the show do not admire them, but do seem to find them relatable.
They even LOOK human, apart from their ridiculous hairstyles... until we see a mysterious tentacle appear to assist Londo Mollari in cheating at cards.
Later in the episode it's revealed, in barely-euphemistic language, that the tentacle was part of Londo himself.... and what its primary function was.
And even later, in a painfully awkward conversation where Londo's assistant Vir admits to his level of sexual inexperience... he lets slip that there are actually SIX of these things, which are used one at a time (Vir hadn't gotten past "one" yet).
In that top picture you can see Londo is holding a statue of a Centauri sex-deity, who he explains has both male and female attributes (the male ones being quite visible on the statue).
Now.
Imagine you were a Centauri who had suffered a tragic accident resulting in the loss of all the humanoid limbs...
No, that's not where I'm going, my hand just slipped. "Centaur-i," hehehe.
No. Imagine you'd lost not only your limbs, but also your hair, and all your connections to the prestigious Centauri empire.
And you were cast into an unfamiliar society where no one knew who you truly were.
You're reduced to using your genitalia as arms and legs, constantly naked and humiliated, constantly frustrated in a world where no one even has the proper orifices to put them in.
You are not treated as a complete freak, because you bear slight resemblance to one of the species on this world-- except they normally have more than six tentacles.
So, despite being a powerful figure on your homeworld, here on this godforsaken planet you are accepted as... just a somewhat deficient specimen of something ordinary.
Here's my question.
....Would you, or would you not, act exactly the way Squidward does?
Products of Time
2022/09/18
First posted here on Twitter and here on Tumblr.
I worry sometimes about how far opinions about a work of fiction can travel beyond the sphere of people who actually know anything about that work of fiction.
This can happen in many ways
For example, it applies to the people who think 60's Star Trek was some "non-political" white male power fantasy
but it ALSO applies to those who act like it was 100% respectful to every marginalized group by today's standards
Of course it wasn't. There were episodes that would today be called straight-up racist and sexist on multiple levels, even when at the time they were TRYING to be progressive
Same with Terry Pratchett. His books are amazing, I love them, they're brilliantly clever and entertaining and generally very forward-thinking for when they were written. But not ALL of it aged well!
Lots of good artists from bygone days get held up as examples of "see, nobody HAD to be a product of their times!" But you can almost always find things in their work and life that... clearly were, and wouldn't be accepted by progressives today
Now, some people really want their old-timey fave to be unproblematic
and will do gymnastics to reinterpret the problematic parts as not just "okay for their time" but "objectively, timelessly good" (even if they'd never accept the same work from a present-day artist)
and will seem sincerely oblivious to the contradiction in their thoughts
But I think it's even worse when people decide that something they've never seen IS their old-timey fave, just based on other people talking about it
and then they actually read or watch it
and they're like OMG THIS IS AWFUL, YOU ALL LIED TO ME
Of course there's a lot of talk about this binary that we try to force on all media throughout all of history
(where either it adheres to every current progressive standard of how everything should be portrayed, or it is so evil that anyone who even thinks it's worth reading/watching is automatically evil too)
When that whole debacle happened a few months ago, with the person who tweeted a list of Problematic Authors, I was struck by two things-- in very different but related ways.
1. The list included warnings about many pieces of content that only in recent years would be considered problematic.
For example, the use of derogatory terms for groups of people, by characters in fiction.
When I was in school, reading the classics that the school assigned us to read, my entire class would seem to be in total agreement on a point like "the word used in this scene is an unacceptable slur that no one should ever use against anyone in real life"
And at the same time, everyone, as far as I could tell, would ALSO be in agreement that the author wasn't wrong to show a character using the slur against another character (because it's a thing that does happen, and was clearly portrayed as a bad thing to do)
Now I said "as far as I could tell" because I'm not sure everyone WAS in agreement. It's totally possible that the author's use of the word offended and hurt people who didn't feel safe speaking up about it, and their feelings are valid.
My point is that, in the 80's and 90s, it wasn't commonly considered a problem (except among groups who were hurt by it). Awareness had not spread.
Many people had no idea it could be viewed that way. If they had never been in a group targeted by a slur-- or if their own experience of being targeted did not extend to feeling trauma from fictional representations of it-- many would never have considered, on their own, that a fictional use of a slur could be harmful.
In recent times it is much more openly discussed as a problem. And this has extended to mainstream novel-writing and movie-making, where the use of slurs has in fact become much less common as a result of the discussion.
(If they ever do remake Blazing Saddles, for instance, it would be very advisable in the current climate to do it WITHOUT such an abundance of racial epithets.)
So, while this sort of content in older works is considered problematic by lots of people today, it can also be important to realize that it doesn't make an author inherently bad and bigoted. Often it happens in the context of a work that was very clearly trying to condemn bigotry and promote acceptance.
Of course not every attempt to do this is successful, or good, or helpful in any time, let alone the modern time. But nor is it automatically evil.
The second thing I noticed about the "problematic books" post was that... the OP made it quite clear they were NOT saying the books were bad, that the authors were bad people, or that anyone should be condemned for reading them.
They'd been harassed into deleting the post by the time I saw the discussion, but the screenshots I saw looked much more like a list of content warnings than a callout post.
I saw no evidence that OP's intention was anything more than "pointing out things in these books that may be problematic by today's standards, so that you can be prepared before you decide to read them, in case you're uncomfortable with such content."
Yeah, the initial posts could have been worded better, to convey that more clearly. But they also did not (despite many people's jumping to conclusions) clearly convey the opposite, at all.
And yet even though the actual author of the post had given no sign of promoting the "good/evil" binary, virtually all the critics were acting as if that was the post's purpose.
In other words: the critics were those who USUALLY make a big deal about how a book having "upsetting content" doesn't make it an evil book that promotes those things happening in real life --
and yet, here they were interpreting a simple list of content warnings as an outright attack against the books?
Just as if they actually believed that "a book portraying bigotry" was the same as "a book promoting bigotry"
And just as if they were experiencing the same "poor reading comprehension" that they're so quick to accuse others of.
This has convinced me that none of us are immune to these failures.
And I think it's extremely important that when recommending a work of fiction as being progressive, respectful, and good representation... we should still refrain from saying it's perfect.
Because there are still many people out there who have trouble seeing anything except a good/evil binary.
Perhaps, if it becomes common enough to hear things like "I love this story, the representation is mostly great, it has some parts that didn't age well but overall it's one of the best portrayals of this issue that I've seen"
then MAYBE it'll become common to have thoughts with that kind of nuance, as well.
Exceptions
2022/09/19
First posted here on Twitter.
I've always been confused by the wording of the rape "or incest" exception to abortion laws.
I think "incest" in this case typically means between parent and minor child... but in that case, why not just say rape?
Do southerners who married their cousins get abortions whenever they want?
Altruistic Avians
2022/09/23
First posted here on Tumblr.
"Animals often share food, but these birds understand that metal rings can be exchanged for treats, and they share the rings with no promise of reward...This sophisticated behavior, which requires an understanding of both currency and the needs of others, has only been described in primates before."
Observations:
1. birds can be extremely intelligent
2. and capable of self-sacrifice for the well-being of others, as proven here
3. and, according to raven studies, can communicate information about humans to others of their own kind
4. and, according to my aviation-nerd friend, any time that a bird flies into a jet engine, the plane HAS to immediately land or crash
conclusion:
we're not so far off from "birds getting fed up with our colonization of THEIR skies and communally deciding to put all humans on the no-fly list"
Bit of a life / medical update
2022/09/24
First posted here on Twitter and here on Tumblr.
I have been extraordinarily tired and listless lately.
Work is exhausting. It takes out all my motivation. Afternoons and weekends I've just been wasting, plenty I want to do but no willpower left.
Scrolling through social media or compulsively picking at my skin, while constantly frustrated at whatever mental block is stopping me from getting up and actually doing one of the hundreds of projects I WANT to work on.
Thursday night I went to urgent care for pain in my right arm, which seemed to be caused by hours of sitting on my bed scrolling on my phone, with my arm in an extremely awkward bent position.
The doctor initially guessed it was a strained tendon.
Blood test showed high levels of D-dimer. Got an ultrasound.
Initially I was told the ultrasound had found a superficial clot, like the ones I used to get in my legs from standing too long at my job.
But on Friday they called back, saying that after looking at the results more closely they NOW think it's a deep vein thrombosis.
Cause is uncertain, and probably a combination of multiple factors:
- Too much inactivity in bad ergonomic positions was likely a big contributor.
- I suspect I also have some underlying tendency toward clots, based on my previous superficial leg clotting experience from years ago.
- I also had a breakthrough case of COVID in June, and there have been reports of increased risk of clots after COVID (even if it happened despite vaccination and masking, as in my case)
- I received the bivalent booster last week, and there is speculation that clotting may be a side effect related to that, as well.
So, anyway, I'm on Xarelto now. Apparently MY blood is thicker than blood, and needs to be thinned down.
This is very annoying.
I have very supportive friends helping me with this... and for now my job is tolerant... but I am becoming very aware that I need some drastic changes in my life.
Search and Replace
2022/09/25
First posted here on Twitter.
Worth Living
2022/09/25
First posted here on Twitter.
(In response to a twitter thread about the widespread disdain for continued COVID precautions, and how this refusal to choose safety over mass illness and death "doesn't bode well for the climate crisis")
This. This whole thread.
And yes, I encounter MANY people saying "if [X] would be required in order to survive climate change, then I'd rather die."
(for various values of X, but the most startling to me is "living underground"-- as if the town of Coober Pedy doesn't exist and isn't AWESOME)
So many decisions are made based on someone's idea of what they THINK they'd do in a scenario they're not actually in right now.
There needs to be more discussion of that part.
The part where PEOPLE WHO HAVE NOT EXPERIENCED (X) get to decide for EVERYONE whether (X) makes life Not Worth Living
Limits on healthcare for disabled people, made up by people who THINK they wouldn't want to keep living with a disablility.
Failure to stop catastrophes, by people who THINK they'd rather die than have to live with the precautionary measures.
Your hypothetical suicidal ideation may be considered totally normal in this messed up world.
But it kills other people.
Obviously, even if you HAVE been in a situation you wish you hadn't survived, you do NOT get to make that choice for others, because PEOPLE NEED AND WANT DIFFERENT THINGS.
But when your idea of whether it would be worth surviving is based entirely on your imagination--
then, NO.
NO. NO. NO.
Dreamlike
2022/09/26
First posted here on Tumblr.
When I first moved to Los Angeles it reminded me of my dreams.
This was in the same way that old Victorian houses turned into antique shops can remind me of dreams. A collage of detail and detail and detail, each degree of my vision containing some shiny object with a mystery and a story behind it, each turn around a corner offering to transport me into a whole other vast cabinet of curiosities. A world of nonsense and tangled-up barely-recognizable sense, where I could explore forever and always be amazed.
Those are the good dreams, usually. The ones where I'm exploring my grandmother's or aunt's house and find new rooms and secret passages around every corner, or the ones where I go searching through an enormous junk heap full of hidden treasures.
I have been reading the works of Terry Pratchett. From the beginning, I saw this city reflected in Ankh-Morpork, which was part of what startled me when I reached the book "Moving Pictures" and experienced its entertaining, shamelessly obvious parody of Hollywood.
I think the parody was of an older version of the city than the one I currently inhabit. Or perhaps a version that never really existed, the version known to people who have never been here. I certainly knew of this version before I moved here... a city built around the silver screen, where people go to become famous in the movies and usually end up disappointed (even if they do make it into show business). A city where everything shines, but all of it is fake.
In Pratchett's version, Hollywood is like a dream because it's alluring, attractive, hypnotizing, a world you can control with your imagination, but which also controls you, and in the end, it's without substance and it ultimately vanishes.
When I moved here (several months before I started reading Pratchett) I saw it as dreamlike for my own reasons. The streets packed tight with little houses and shops in a dozen architectural styles and a hundred different stages of decay and half-attempted renovation, yards decorated with the creativity of madness, people who walked the streets dressed in anything from rags to Gucci to a bottle-cap-studded wooden suit of armor or a completely pink outfit accessorized with a pink-dyed bichon frise on a pink leash. Neighborhoods on hills where you can find a rainbow-painted staircase hidden in the bushes and climb upward for what feels like miles and end up in a new neighborhood where the next thing around the corner is a Little Free Library just outside someone's garden wall, a tiny shingle-roofed house full of books curated by randomness and a set of mosaic-decorated chairs for their readers.
This is part of what dreamlike means to me.
If, on any level, dreamlike also means ephemeral, then, to me, it is not in the sense that dreams vanish on waking. That has nothing to do with what they're actually like, when you're in them.
No, to me dreams are ephemeral because things in them change so much faster than real life. Perhaps because your eyes are trapped in the REM state, moving around too fast to process any image, they try to simulate what you might see if you moved your eyes that way in the real world...but they fail, mixing it with what you see when you try to keep your gaze steady, and end up with an uncanny mashup of both.
In dreams, I start to read a book but the words change as I read them. Sometimes even the point of view changes, and I become a character in the book, or an author writing it, or an actor performing in an adaptation of it. In dreams, size changes arbitrarily; I can be building a wall with bricks that shrink to the size of children's building blocks and then the size of bricks I'm using to build a dollhouse. A toy cat morphs gradually into a live fish, and now it's having a conversation with me, and eventually it's become a younger version of my cousin Matthew, and at each stage of the process I'm sure it has always been the way it currently is-- up to now I've just been mistaken, not looking closely enough, or not seeing a duality that was always there. My cousin has always been a fish, and fish were always a type of cat, and yes, that toy was always alive and able to talk, I'd just never thought about it before...
After a year here, I see that aspect of Hollywood as well.
Yes, there are the famous old buildings meticulously kept to stay the same as in their golden age, and yes, there are also the buildings with legendary pasts that have now spent years or decades abandoned. But in among them, like undergrowth among living and dying redwoods, small shops spring up and thrive and fail and die in a matter of days, weeks or months. The showy displays of billboards and bus-stop ads switch out every few seconds, on screens playing a recorded loop that's switched out weekly. The unofficial advertising of stamps, stencils, stickers and scrawled graffiti on sidewalks and lampposts changes just as fast. Any place in this city could, almost, become a whole different place in just a blink or a rapid eye movement.
Thicker than Blood
2022/09/26
First posted here on Tumblr.
The clot thickens
(takes Xarelto)
ooh the clot thinnens
ITS OK IM A (ASPIRING) SURVIVOR WRITING THIS TO COPE WITH MY OWN TRAUMA
Less is Free
2022/09/26
First posted here and here on Twitter.
When children run happily through a field without a worry in the world, we call them carefree.
When that same lack of worry causes them not to notice that they've reached the neighbor's garden and are now trampling the vegetables, we call them careless.
Yes, quite often the suffixes -free and -less form negative and positive versions of the same idea.
But that use of the suffixes isn't universal!
We don't go to a topless bar wishing the dancers wore tops.
We don't get a strapless dress just because we couldn't afford the better one with straps.
We say a procedure was painless without intending to sound like a disappointed masochist, and we buy all sorts of wireless technology without interpreting the word as some.... regretful disclaimer about the unfortunate lack of wires.
This is why I do not see an important difference between "childless" and "childfree" to describe my own fortunate lack of children.
And really-- ANY time a supposed linguistic rule is cited as a "reason" to prefer one term over another-- I urge some actual study of the linguistics in question.
Putting one word before another does not mean the first one is more important. Can you imagine a language with sentence structure in descending order of word importance? I've done conlangs and I'm not even sure how I'd invent that.
The difference between compound word, hyphenated word and two separate words has SOME relation to how we view the connection between the words, but I cannot figure out any pattern based on actual examples I can think of.
Basically I don't trust any claim that "when you use this type of spelling/punctuation/word order, it means THIS, based on the Rules of English."
English is a dozen languages in a trenchcoat, barely even pretending they have a shared system of rules.
...
...OMG. I was trying to do a thread about Online Discourse over Correct Words but ... clearly I am not a Discourse person, I am a person who goes off on NERD TANGENTS.
Because... I realized I DO KNOW how I'd do the conlang with descending-importance word order!
Kinda, anyway.
First I'd have to make all the words come with clear conjugation to indicate whether they are subject, object, etc.
The word order would not matter at all for purposes of syntax.
And then the order could be used for another purpose... which, in this case, would be basically the same purpose as "which word you say in the loudest voice."
Like in the example of how you can have different meanings of a sentence like "I didn't steal your wallet" based on which word you stress:
Except, instead of vocal stress, it would be decided by which word comes FIRST.
Now, I have no idea exactly what "order of importance" I'd consider the rest of the words in that sentence to have.
Really this sentence structure still couldn't exactly be about "importance" in any way we could reasonably define it.
But it'd be... importance-adjacent, at least.
Marvin
2022/09/28
First posted here on Tumblr.
I am so frustrated. I feel that I cannot convey to people what problems I actually have.
I do have problems. I have a very serious and life-crushing mixture of depression and anxiety and obsessive-compulsion and executive dysfunction that I am desperate to fix.
And yet, nearly every conversation I have with a friend or family member or therapist always gets boiled down to:
"You have low self-esteem."
"You should be kinder to yourself."
"You need to put yourself first sometimes."
Even the fact that I'm seeking therapy in the first place gets treated-- by therapists! -- like proof that I hate myself.
When a therapist asks what my goals are, I can say "Well, this habit I have is causing me some problems, I'd like to learn how to stop doing it"... and the therapist reacts as if just making that statement is... somehow "beating myself up"?
And I can't seem to put it into words that anyone else can understand-- but I am bone-deep certain that beating myself up is NOT the problem I have.
And I am bone-deep certain that the efforts to address this problem are doing nothing for me, and are distracting from the real problems.
And every day I'm getting closer to A FUCKING BREAKDOWN, because I am nowhere near figuring out what I ACTUALLY need, because everyone else is focusing on self-esteem...
I've been re-reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which in my childhood was probably my first experience with fictional "representation" of depression.
In one character. Marvin the Paranoid Android.
Who was played for laughs, mostly, and had pretty much no good experiences at all...
And who was also very unlike me.
Because, along with my mountain of emotional baggage, I'm also capable of being fun, enthusiastic, affectionate, loving, kind, respectful, empathetic, a ton of things Marvin isn't...
And yet, re-reading his scenes, I'm realizing his version of depression... resonates with me. Far more closely than ANY other portrayal of depression that I've ever seen anywhere.
For the single reason that he did NOT have low self-esteem.
At least, at no point in the whole story did I ever get the feeling that he did.
His view of himself, to me, always came across as... lofty. Superior. "Brain the size of a planet." In his view, he was the only creature who mattered. In any situation, no matter how much danger everyone else was in, his main concern was how miserable it was for him personally.
His view of others (humans, aliens, superintelligent shades of blue, gods, demons, other robots, sentient elevators) was always a hundred percent disdainful. They were all pathetic. None of them, with their tiny consciousness and their insignificant little worries, would ever be able to understand how truly horrid his own planet-sized misery was.
The descriptor "paranoid" was probably chosen just for the rhyme with "android." It doesn't fit him, really, since it evokes an idea of fear, and he is never afraid. Just grimly certain that everything's going to go wrong. Sure, he may be convinced everyone's out to get him. But he doesn't panic and scramble to protect himself... no, he just passive-aggressively groans that that's the way of this miserable world and he's going to have to suffer through it.
"Pessimistic" is a better adjective. Of course his expectations are perpetually low, because his opinion of everything in the world (apart from himself) is perpetually low.
He assumes all the other entities he encounters will hate him.
But-- critically-- NOT because he considers himself worthless.
Because he considers THEM worthless. Because he thinks THEY are incapable of forming an accurate opinion of him.
Unsurprising to him, yes. Expected. Inevitable. With such pathetic little brains, they can't help failing to recognize his greatness.
But still wrong, still another line on his endless list of things to disdain about everyone else.
Now.... in saying that I "relate to" a character like this, I'm aware that I have a hell of a lot of nuance to explain.
Of course, as I said above, I do not think I'm actually similar to this character in any more than a few, specific, narrow ways.
I do not disdain other people in general.
I do not assume by default that their thoughts about me are wrong.
I do not always expect the worst of them.
I am not convinced that they will always hate me and never want to help me.
And when I do fear their potential reactions to me, it is actual fear, not grim resignation.
But I do have these few, specific, narrow things in common with Marvin, which I'll try to enumerate here.
1. I have a high opinion of myself.
- I don't think my brain is the size of a planet, but I do think it's an unusually good brain, with a large variety of rare talents.
- I believe there is ample evidence of this. I believe that without this evidence, my view of myself would be basically a delusion of grandeur. It's very high. When I read about people who are considered great geniuses, both historically and currently, I often consider myself equal or better (although my specific talents are rarely in the exact same fields).
- I am often very, very frustrated when someone else gets more recognition than I do, for what I consider the same or lesser level of talent.
- When this happens, I usually conclude that the difference in the levels of success was due to the other person having 1. better luck and 2. better skills at other things peripheral to the talent, like self-promotion and marketing.
- (I do not think these factors "should" matter, and I find it frustrating and unfair that they do, but I understand the mechanisms whereby they can make a difference.)
- I do not believe that anyone's success is achieved solely through "free will." I believe every choice that a person makes is because of what they want, and people cannot decide what to want.
- So even if a skill was built through years of hard work, no one can just decide to be (or not be) the sort of person who would choose to put that amount of work into that skill.
- And regardless of choices, hundreds of factors totally outside your control can affect what you even get the opportunity to do.
- So really, I believe success is pretty much 100% luck if you trace the cause-and-effect chains back far enough.
- I believe that the same is true for me, whenever my own success is greater than other people's. What I accomplish is the result of luck, too. The skills I have are results of luck: good luck that caused me, in whatever way, to be interested in those things AND to have the opportunity to practice them.
- I neither blame myself for my failures nor congratulate myself for my successes. I'm happy when I've succeeded, and sad when I've failed, but I don't waste time on hypothetical other outcomes where different choices could have had different results... because this is how it did happen, and it doesn't matter now.
- Any thoughts about what I "could have done differently" are focused on the possibility of similar future situations, and how I might be able to apply the things I've learned from this one.
- Basically:
I think I am a very good, intelligent, and talented person.
I may sometimes be unhappy about things my past self did, BUT I think all of my past decisions were the best they could possibly have been for the person I was at the time.
I understand, to some degree, based on the workings of the world and the workings of my mind in the past and present, why I have not achieved as much as I want to.
And I don't lay the blame on myself ...but I do get extremely frustrated thinking about it.
2. I do, often, focus more on the negative than the positive.
- Not in a miserable, hopeless way, usually. Just in a common, human way... born of the evolutionary fact that survival depends on our brains identifying problems that need solutions, not identifying happy truths that require no change.
- I don't exactly choose to have this focus. It's just what comes naturally to me.
- But I am aware of a certain sense of safety in it. If my expectations are grim, I am more prepared for possible adversity, and I'm more likely to be pleasantly surprised than disappointed.
3. And yes, often this focus on the negative means I end up concluding that other people are unlikely to appreciate how great a person I am.
- Well, it's more complicated than that, actually.
- I have very complex, contradictory feelings and expectations about other people's appreciation of me.
- This is probably part of the root of my problems, in some way or another.
- Part of me expects that anything I'm proud of doing will be immediately admired by everyone else who sees it. For instance, if I post a clever thing online, I actually do often expect the best, instead of the worst.
- My opinion of my idea is so high, in these moments, that I'm sure I'm going to get a ton of comments and shares and likes... and then I feel angry and disappointed if that doesn't happen.
- In these moments of anger and disappointment, I mostly feel frustrated with "the system," for example the social media algorithm that I suspect didn't show my post to enough people, who, of course, would have liked it if they saw it. (In those moments I'm not quite capable of believing that anyone else could genuinely not like what I created.)
- If I do get a post that goes semi-viral, or a good review on one of my books, or a lot of admiration of the wares I'm selling at a local craft fair, or some other recognition for my talent... I respond to it a bit like an addictive drug.
- The initial feeling will be satisfaction, contentment: a feeling of "Yes, finally! This is the right way for people to treat me. They're properly recognizing how great I am. I'm pleased with this."
- It will feel deserved and needed, but also long-awaited-- like eating good food after being hungry a long time.
- My mood will get happy, giddy, bouncy. My replies to people will be cheerful, friendly, appreciative.
- But there will be an addiction-like craving for more. If a certain level of recognition continues long enough, I'll begin perceiving it as the baseline, getting no more pleasure from it, and feeling satisfied ONLY when there are spikes of attention that go above that baseline.
- For instance, if my viral tweet is getting Likes every minute and Retweets every hour, they stop being enough, and I only get the spike of happiness if I see an actual admiring comment.
- Then, when the engagement goes down, my mood will crash. Either I manage to get myself out of the situation where I'm desperately waiting for more praise, or I'll just stay there, getting more and more frustrated and disappointed.
- Sometimes I'll make further attempts to do praiseworthy things, and the attempts look more and more like desperation.
- I think this was part of why, as a teen and young adult, I had so many episodes of absurd hyperactive behavior whenever I was in a social setting. Once I'd tasted the satisfaction of impressing others with a clever insight or a funny joke, I would keep trying to recapture that feeling, and my "jokes" would become more and more bizarre as I got more desperate for the next hit of recognition, eventually spiraling away from my self-control.
- Part of the contradiction in my feelings is that I do feel a visceral sense of "injustice" or "unfairness" or "I deserve better" when I'm not getting praise and recognition...
- and yet I don't, really, believe in the concept of "deserving."
- I believe there are needs and wants that should always be satisfied as much as possible for as many people as possible... not because they deserve it, but because it increases their happiness, and striving for the greatest happiness of the most people is... well, it's not perfect, but it's the closest thing I can imagine to a definition of "good."
- I think, in a better world, there would be basic rights that no one would have to earn by succeeding at anything. There wouldn't be discussions of whether they deserved it. These would include all things necessary for survival (and no one would have to earn them by proving they couldn't work for them, either).
- Work would be for making extra money, for luxuries. Employers would have to make sure the jobs they offered were tolerable enough that people would choose to do them without the threat of starvation otherwise.
- Punishments would also never be given on the basis of someone deserving them. They'd be designed with the goal of deterring crime and, when possible, rehabilitating criminals and removing any reason they'd commit further crimes.
- I know there are tons of gaps in this sort of plan, and tons of ways that, even within such a system, not everyone would be safe or happy. But I think we could have a lot more people safe and happy than we have now.
- And I think part of the reason our society won't accept anything like this, even though it could make nearly everyone's life better, is because too many people still believe in the concept of "deserve," and would rather be unhappy than see other people be happy who don't "deserve" to.
-Anyway, to bring this back to my own feeling of "deserving better"... I think it could also be described as a feeling of... "unsatisfied needs, in a society where others have the same needs satisfied, supposedly as a reward for their success at doing something... which I believe I've succeeded at too, equally or better, and yet I am not getting my own needs satisfied."
- I guess I can believe in "fairness and unfairness" without believing in "deserving." I think that in a fair world, almost all of us could get what we want. But when the world tells us that getting things is dependent on what we do... and yet I see others doing less and getting more... that triggers a very deep sense of "unfair."
- But I'm also aware of my hedonic treadmill. I know that even when I do get things that make me happy, my threshold for happiness just grows. I know that if I found a way of increasing the amount of attention I get for my creative work, that would not, in itself, cause me to be sustainably happy.
Still, I do think there are things I could do in my life that would increase my overall amount of long-term happiness.
Most of my difficulty happens when I'm pursuing such things.
The "low self-esteem" idea keeps coming up whenever I talk about how intensely uncomfortable I can be with the idea of standing up for myself, asking for things I want and need.
"You go to so much trouble to avoid doing anything you think might upset someone else."
"Yeah, that's a fear that I am trying to..."
"Why do you never put yourself first? Don't you think you deserve that? Can't you be kind to yourself?"
And I explain that I DO want things for myself -- want them desperately, because I SHOULD HAVE THEM -- and what's holding me back is NEVER any sense of not-deserving.
It's just this intense, overwhelming fear of conflict.
When I ask for something --or when someone else asks me for something --THAT'S when my emotions begin to react as if I'm expecting the absolute worst from everyone else.
Asking for something, no matter how much I need it... or refusing someone else's request, no matter how outrageous it is... those are two of the absolute hardest things for me to do.
They generate outright panic.
I will resign myself to many highly unpleasant things before I'll even consider either of those.
Often I don't even know WHAT I'm afraid that others will do or say-- but even so, it's a fear strong enough to outweigh any of my desires for good things.
I want so very, very badly to find out how to overcome this fear.
I know it isn't rational.
I know it's in the way of lots of things that I need and want.
Things I SHOULD HAVE, because I am JUST as good as the people who already have them. Or better.
It's not FAIR. I am FURIOUS that I can't overcome it yet.
But always, always, therapists keep telling me that overcoming this fear has to begin with... caring more about myself.
But I do care about myself. Plenty.
I don't think I could care any MORE about myself without becoming some megalomaniac supervillain.
I am absolutely certain that's NOT WHERE THE PROBLEM IS.
AND I CAN'T FIX THE PROBLEM, EVEN THOUGH IT'S KILLING ME, BECAUSE NO ONE WILL HELP ME LOOK WHERE IT ACTUALLY MIGHT BE.
Only keep looking in the one place I AM SURE it's not.
Over and over again.
Fuck.
It feels like I'm living in some weird dystopia where all the ice cream is kept behind razor wire, guarded by six jaguars, at the peak of a thousand-foot-high, freezing mountaintop.
"Why don't you enjoy yourself and have some ice cream?"
"It's behind razor wire. And jaguars. On a mountain."
"But if you can just get past that, you can have ice cream! Don't you like ice cream? Don't you think you deserve it?"
"I LOVE ice cream. I love it so much I never even feel guilty about eating it. I'd never EVER deny myself ice cream because of some weird desire to punish myself."
"But you ARE denying it to yourself! What are you punishing yourself for?"
"Are you listening? I'm saying that my love for ice cream is not as strong as my dislike for... climbing up mountains. And climbing over razor wire. And fighting jaguars."
"But it's your right to take a break and enjoy some ice cream! That's more important than some jaguars wanting to keep you out. They've got no right to do that! You've got to stand up to them. Why can't you put YOURSELF first, for once? Why do you hate yourself so much?"
"They... have claws. And teeth. And also there's razor wire..."
I don't even know.
I say all this, but no one listens. They act like they heard something totally different.
I think it stems from people-- even therapists-- not being able to imagine what it feels like to have the fears I have. They can't imagine it, so they just don't believe me, or something.
And so instead of trying to work on the fear, they just... act like it isn't there, and turn to something else that they think ought to be the problem instead.
I don't even know.
The thing is... I am ENTIRELY AWARE that, even within that ice cream metaphor, it's likely that the danger isn't real.
Maybe I'm imagining everything I fear.
Maybe the jaguars are really just cuddly kittens. Maybe the razor wire is really a blanket fort, and it's not on a mountain at all, it's by a fireplace in a cozy living room somewhere.
Maybe getting ice cream is actually the easiest thing in the world.
Maybe I just need to learn how to overcome fear just enough to see everything the way it really is... instead of the way my fears make it look.
But I cannot possibly IMAGINE how this process should start with... "deciding to be kind to myself."
Isn't that what I'm doing already?
Going just by what I'm able to perceive, what seems real to me right now... the razor wire and the jaguars, and the pain that would far outweigh any pleasure I could get from ice cream...
...isn't staying AWAY from that mountain the ABSOLUTE KINDEST thing I could POSSIBLY be doing for myself?
Wouldn't learning to face my fears have to start with.... learning to be LESS worried about my own comfort and happiness?
In other words, LESS kind to myself?
Why the fuck can't people understand? I am TRYING to share what I'm actually going through. I am TRYING SO HARD to open up my inner world to others. I am SCREAMING my truth at them-- and they still act like it can't be the real truth.
WHY? WHY CAN'T IT?
Where the fuck are they getting this fixed idea of what's inside my brain?
This idea that's so stuck in their heads that it crowds out EVERYTHING I SAY about MY OWN experience, no matter how loudly and clearly, no matter how much evidence I have for it?
I'm so fucking lonely.
Animating Scarecrows
2022/09/30
First posted here on Twitter.
Back in 2015-- 7 years ago, which to me seems both very long and very short-- there was a lot of news about a "controversy" involving Starbucks coffee cups.
That winter, the "holiday" cups were a very simple red design with the green Starbucks logo on it, and no other images.
Some people wanted them more Christmasy.
It was never clear how many people wanted this.
For all anyone knew, it might have been 1 popular tweeter and a dozen of their friends operating two dozen sock puppet accounts. No one ever really tried to count.
But, news sites-- which were already fast becoming clickbait dumpsters-- gave this "controversy" a TON of publicity.
Headlines screamed STARBUCKS HIT WITH ACCUSATIONS OF WAR ON CHRISTMAS.
It was all over social media and spilled into chats in RL workplaces
I rarely if ever saw any of the actual complaints about Starbucks cups.
I saw pages and pages of rants about how stupid and offensive the complaints were.
I know that there WERE lots of people who complained about the increasing secularism of winter holiday celebrations. "War on Christmas" paranoia was certainly a thing.
But how many of those people were upset over a red and green cup because it didn't have Santa on it?
Unknown.
I've had those thoughts many times over the past seven years. And some before that, as well.
Every time some people online have a very bad take about "political correctness" or "wokeness" in media and marketing.
Every time those people's take gets attention, gets spread around
I have two very unpleasant suspicions:
1. The coverage about a few loud jerks and their small-minded complaints is always proportionately far too big for how many of them there are.
2. But every time, the actual true number of jerks increases.
This is just a feeling. It would be incredibly hard to prove.
There are several levels of ambiguity here.
First, we can't know how many people are actually expressing an opinion online, even if we could search everything, because we can't verify identity.
Second, even if we could count all people saying a thing (and factor out sock puppets and critical quotations and satire) we don't know how many people BELIEVE that thing but aren't SAYING it yet.
(Anonymous polls online are ALWAYS heavily sampling-biased, as far as I've seen)
And of course any correlation between increasing news coverage of jerks and increasing jerk behavior would be very hard to tie to causation in one direction or another.
But, I still kinda think it's true.
I kinda think that when Online News and Social Media Discourse takes 3 people's awful opinion and makes it The New Topic of Debate...
then you get at least two types of Awful Opinion Growth on the internet
1. You get the 90 other people who secretly share those 3 people's awful opinion, realizing that their opinion is now a Recognized Debate Topic and maybe doesn't need to be secret anymore
2. And you get a MUCH larger number of... young kids, just figuring out their own ethical and political beliefs... looking at the discussion of topics online to see what the options are, for what opinions people can have...
...and seeing opinions that you ordinarily would NEVER encounter, unless you happened to run into one of the 3 people who are messed-up enough to say them aloud.
But they're seeing those opinions treated as if they're a significant percentage of public opinion...
and... very un-fun fact...
...that's how they BECOME that.
Species
2022/09/30
First posted here on Twitter.
theory number 865 for why parents are so pushy about wanting grandchildren:
they subscribe to the definition of "species" that requires being able to breed offspring that can also reproduce
they all secretly fear that their spouse is a chimpanzee and are hoping to disprove it
A workplace sign for very specific problems
2022/10/01
First posted here on Twitter.
Don't make me tap the sign.
Alone
2022/10/02
First posted here on Tumblr and here on Facebook.
... I will die alone.
But in a good way.
In the way Captain Kirk said it in The Final Frontier.
"I knew I wasn't going to die. Because you were with me."
"I'll die alone" in the sense of: "The few precious people I have managed to forge lifelong friendships with? They are people I trust so deeply that I KNOW the only way I could possibly ever die is if it happened in some moment when they couldn't be there. Any other time, against any unfathomable odds, they'd save my life."
Mirrors
2022/10/02
First posted here on Twitter.
The "mirror test" is the test of whether an animal knows that its reflection is actually itself, and not a different animal.
A thought experiment: at what point does a human pass this test?
Of course I do not remember the first time I saw a mirror. But it's a safe guess that
1. I initially perceived it in the way I perceive other living beings.
2. Then I figured out that this image always looks exactly like me, always has the same clothes and hair, same expressions, same marks or injuries, same hairs out of place, always moves in the same way at the same time.
3. I probably went through a time in childhood where I imagined that this identical appearance was magic-- it was a visitor from fairyland, a counterpart of my spirit in some other world, etc.
4. As I learned basic science, I became aware that a reflection is a physical phenomenon involving waves of light bouncing off things, but I never bothered to study it very much or really try to understand how it worked.
5. However, at some point, I read something that caused me to realize that seeing a reflection IS seeing yourself, in a different and more literal way than seeing your shadow or seeing a photo.
It is not just seeing a copy of you. It is the exact same process as when you look at your hands in front of you-- except that with a mirror, the light from what you see takes a more indirect path to your eyes.
That's the only difference.
This was, I think, the moment when I actually realized that my reflection in the mirror IS me.
Many intelligent humans throughout history lived their whole lives without ever getting to that point.
At many times and places in history, conventional understanding of reflections was at step 3 -- fairyland, spirits.
Did those generations never pass the mirror test?
Many animals are at step 2, where they probably still believe they are seeing another animal, but recognize that it always looks and moves exactly the same as them.
They don't know why, but they've learned it from observation and have stopped being surprised at it.
One experiment puts stickers or marks on animals, in a place they can only see in a mirror, and watches whether the animal tries to find that spot on their own body.
Is passing that test meaningfully different, at all, from passing the test of "I am no longer surprised when the reflection mimics my movements?"
Doesn't it just mean that the animal has realized: "This other beast not only moves exactly the same as me-- it also always has the same marks and objects stuck on it that I do!"
Is THAT a meaningful place to draw the line?
If not, then we have to draw it either at "stops being surprised" (which almost any mammal or bird will reach after a few exposures to a mirror)... or at "understands the physics of light" (which many humans never reach).
Lords
2022/10/02
First posted here on Twitter.
if a landlord is someone who rents out land, then what if a timelord was someone who rents out time
living on borrowed time because the timelord actually owns it
oh wait that's basically medicine.
that's when you pay money for a med that keeps you alive for more time
is that
is that why he is called
the Doctor
How Literally?
2022/10/03
First posted here on Twitter.
When it comes to literalism, there are some types of miscommunication that are (for me) MUCH more common than the stereotypical "autistic person interprets a figurative idiom as literal."
One is, "I say something that is not literally true-- metaphor, sarcasm, or joke-- and people who are NOT autistic misinterpret it as literal."
This may have various causes, depending on the situation.
Sometimes it may be that I got the nuance wrong and failed to give off the signs that indicate humor or idiomatic speaking.
Other times, maybe other people misread my meaning because they just assumed I... wasn't the type of person to say that kind of thing.
Even when new RL acquaintances don't know I'm autistic, they do think of me, for a surprisingly long time, as "someone who doesn't joke."
The first joke they notice from me shocks them (which in turn shocks me, because I don't think of myself that way at all! Are my jokes that subtle?)
The second type of miscommunication is the one where I get accused of dishonesty because I said something that is not literally true...
and the reason I said it was BECAUSE stating the ACTUAL literal truth would be pedantic to the point of confusing, and I am unclear on exactly what a neurotypical would consider "the truth" in this setting.
Example: if someone asks me,
"Do you ever drink?"
... I know I am not supposed to give the literal answer "yes, because humans require liquid to survive."
I know the question refers to drinks with alcohol.
But I also know that the "do you ever" part also has a spectrum of literality.
If "no" was true, would that have to mean I've never tasted alcohol in my life?
If not, then how long ago would my last drink need to have been?
Is "no" untrue if I had one drink last year? Last month? And does it matter whether or how much I expect to drink in the future?
And would different people I talk to have different answers to all these questions?
Usually I just go with a guess based on my gut feeling as to what the person in this setting would consider a "true" answer.
And sometimes I guess wrong.
Basically, my autistic brain is very very different from the "too literal to get metaphors" archetype
I have a very, very deep and complex understanding of the many types of not-literal that a statement can be.
I just..... don't always realize that other people aren't giving it nearly that much thought.
Timeline
2022/10/03
First posted here on Twitter.
Things that have happened to me in the past year, in order:
Two of the people I lived with-- the ones I am closest to-- had to move away for different reasons, making my relationship with them long-distance
My complex feelings about this-- and my increased ability to indulge my hermit-like nature with fewer people around -- led to a mental health collapse of sorts
My father's brain cancer finally took his life
I got COVID, despite being vaxxed and masked as much as was feasible for me
I took a month-long break from the outdoor market where I'd been selling every week (it was my only regular non-work time out of the house)
(The market was emotionally good for me, but I still needed the break for mental and physical health)
(I was also reevaluating the safety of outdoor events, even though I think I probably got the COVID from work, where several positive cases had been going around indoors unmasked)
According to the website of the market, and all communication I had with them (including the reply to my message that I was taking a break) this would not cause me to lose my reserved spot
However, it did, because apparently my spot was among a few exceptions to that general rule and nobody had bothered to inform me
My weekends became lethargic
My work days got busier and more hectic (because management suddenly began trying to meet stricter standards that we've never been able to meet with the staff and workplace we have)
My weekends and afternoons got even more lethargic, from exhaustion
I got a blood clot, and started blood thinners
I just noticed the blood thinner has potential interactions with my SSRIs and nobody's told me that either
I am trying to contact the doctor about this but since I now have a "normal" work schedule (i.e. the exact same work schedule as every medical call center) I can't do it without skipping work
...And I'm still doing far better than most people I know.
Germs and Phobias
2022/10/04
Has there ever in history (apart from the obvious medical and food-preparation settings) been a spread of disease that could have been stopped or lessened by "people doing a better job of cleaning and sterilizing surfaces, including their own hands and bodies"?
The closest examples I can think of are cholera (which was mostly contaminated water, not hands or surfaces) and the medical and food-preparation examples that I excluded (because they involve situations where a person is in a position of especially high risk for putting germs inside other people's bodies).
I ask because, for as long as I can remember, people have been very VERY diligent about cleaning themselves and cleaning surfaces, regardless of whether or not they're anywhere near a medical or food-preparing environment.
They have been very eager to call out anyone who doesn't do this sufficiently. They claim this is for health reasons... and yet, those same people do almost nothing to help control airborne disease.
Which, as far as I know, has always been the most likely way for diseases to spread.
I get the feeling that the people who were always the most "germophobic" before this pandemic have been the worst about spreading the actual disease during it... because they are the ones who mostly don't understand how disease spreads.
When we got evidence of how much masking helps with the spread of all airborne diseases, including flu, I was like... Why haven't we always been doing this?
But most people who call themselves germophobic really just mean "obsessed with washing, bathing, and sanitizing."
They'll hover over the toilets and get body wastes all over the seat because they're afraid of touching it and catching some imaginary butt-transmitted disease, but they'll come to work actively coughing without a mask.
Like, if you are super-careful about both airborne and contact-transmitted diseases, I can respect that.
But if you're super-careful about the less likely one, and careless-as-hell about the more likely one... then you're just hypocritical and squeamish, and probably more scared of "dirt and bad smells that you associate with Lower-Class People" than actually scared of getting sick.
Alone but not lonely
2022/10/05
First posted here on Twitter.
When we look at those meme pics of a cozy forest cottage full of books and say "YES I would totally live here all by myself for a month with no internet," we are admitting that the thing that would bother us about solitary confinement is not the "solitary" part
Nor the confinement part, either, really
There's a part of us introverts that thinks we could be totally happy 1. all alone and 2. staying in the same place, for an extended time, as long as the place contained All the Things We Like
Could we really? Who knows.
But the feeling can get so strong that I fear anyone who wanted to trap me for eternity could get me to walk right into a prison... with the promise that it had lots of books and craft supplies and I'd never HAVE to interact with people to survive
I contain multitudes of past selves
2022/10/07
First posted here on Tumblr.
ok so it's silly enough that we expect humans to be "consistent" and "not self-contradictory" over the course of even 1 year
but it's another whole level of ridiculous to doubt the stories they tell about their lives because their CHILDHOOD isn't consistent
"you said your life was like THIS as a child, but then you said it was like THIS"
my life was like pretty much everything as a child. were you expecting me to say that i stayed 100% In Character from birth all through my entire childhood and then instantly went from "Newborn with Baby Life" to "Mature Grownup with Adult Life" on my 18th birthday because that is very much not what happened
Worm Love
2022/10/08
First posted here on Twitter and here on Tumblr.
"Would you still love me if I was a worm"
Does the worm still have the same mind, and a way to communicate with others? How does this brain fit in the worm body? I have many questions about this alternate universe
If the worm does not have the same mind and is just a normal worm, then the question actually means "if I was destroyed and replaced with a worm, would you love the worm that replaced me" and none of my loved ones better be answering yes to THAT
#I do not want unconditional love#I want love that is conditional on me still being at least somewhat the same person#Because otherwise you're not loving me for who I am#You're loving me for basically no reason at all and it's meaningless
shortly after writing this, I figured out a way that my brain could fit in a worm body
Science or Fantasy, Dead or Alive
2022/10/09
First posted here on Tumblr.
On the edges between fantasy and science fiction:
Torchwood, even more than Doctor Who, was SO in love with that fuzzy edge.
There are characters in it who are immortal, or appear to be. Most famously Jack Harkness, of course, who is fully, passionately, physically human in every way except for the fact that all his injuries heal instantly and he can come back from apparent death like waking up from sleep.
Not to spoil anything too much, but he has this power because he died once and someone else was granted one wish from a magical entity and used it to give him life. Yeah, it's not worded that way, but that's what it basically is. There's barely any more technobabble around it than you'd see in a fairy tale.
And then there's another character who's sort of... undead. Like Harkness, he died and was brought back to life by something that was never really explained as anything more than magic. But this guy's body doesn't heal, it just keeps inexplicably moving and talking and thinking, with all the damage that killed it still there.
The whole thing just gleefully refuses to make any sense whatsoever. He's a mix of dead and alive characteristics that are hard to even imagine coexisting. He doesn't heal, but also doesn't decay. He can see and hear, but can't feel. He can't eat or drink or have sex. But he can move, think, have conversations, and do pretty much all of his job.
He can talk, but he can't breathe. I'm serious. That was an important plot point in one episode: this guy miserably admitting... out loud with his vocal cords, which in real life only function through the use of exhaled air... that he had been unable to give someone mouth-to-mouth resuscitation because he had no breath.
There was no REASON he'd have no breath. No conceivable reason that his chest muscles couldn't move and expand his lungs and draw in air and push it back out again. Other muscles seemed to work fine. And if his chest muscles and lungs were doing nothing, then there's absolutely no explanation for how he was talking.
It was like the writers just picked out a handful of body functions that they figured people would associate the most with the IDEA of "being alive," and said "ok this guy can't do those things! BUT he's still alive in the ways that allow him to keep being a character." And they gave no thought to the fact that the "being a character" functions use the same body systems as the "symbolic of aliveness" functions, and it's just nonsensical to separate them out like that?
Or maybe they gave it some thought and then decided they didn't care, because the story was more important.
Torchwood had the language and aesthetic of science fiction, but the worldbuilding of a fantasy so illogical that it's hard to even swallow it AS FANTASY.
Grownup Values
2022/10/09
First posted here on Tumblr.
You know you've grown up when you see adults who used to teach you to Share and Be Kind, now telling you that those same actions make you a chump or a dangerous radical
Adulthood is looking back on the "good behaviors" that you were taught as a kid, and realizing that the grown-ups did not, in fact, consider them "universal lessons that everyone should follow to be a good person," but considered them mostly "things I mock other adults for doing but I think children should definitely do all the time because it makes them easier for me to control."
And now it's up to you to ask: Do I believe adults should do these things? Do I believe children should? Do I believe everybody should? Or nobody? It's up to you to come up with your own answers.
By Talos
2022/10/10
First posted here on Tumblr.
So apparently the meme of saying "By Talos this can't be happening" (when something happens that was very very predictable and definitely can be happening) is from the video game Skyrim
specifically from a gaming blog where someone posted about locking up their simulated husband in Skyrim with no food or water and then being surprised when he died
the entire time, I was thinking this was about Talos the planet where the Talosians come from in Star Trek
you know, the guys that I bring out every time I see some parents crying about how their kids are "ungrateful" and "rebellious"
Parents: "I control everything you are allowed to do, when you go to bed, what you eat, when you can leave the house"
Kids: "That sucked. Now that I am 18 I will not call or visit you anymore"
Parents: "by Talos this can't be happening"
I love how different minds work.
2022/10/10
First posted here on Tumblr.
One time I was having a conversation, with another awesomely creative neurodivergent geek... about alien creature design... and how I love the challenge of trying to imagine... well, something that evolved on another world, and ended up looking COMPLETELY different from any Earth animal.
(Yep that's a thing I drew, in high school. I didn't have any sort of story behind this one, it's just a freaky space monster shaped like some sorta snake or long skinny lizard with a four-clawed mouth-hand instead of a head. And two tentacles with compound eyes instead of a tail. And two loops of flesh that go through spool-shaped cylinders instead of feet. In the background you can see part of a critter with webbed wings, and some others that stand on three spring-shaped legs. That's an animal in the foreground, too, the one like a doughnut with suckers on the outer rim, leaving a track as it rolls through the mud. More on that later...)
Like, what things do we assume are universal, whenever we imagine a living creature? And how do we make up an alien that breaks those paradigms?
And how weird and impractical can it get before it's outside the boundaries of what COULD, hypothetically, evolve (bearing in mind, of course, that a lot of what evolved on Earth is super weird and impractical too, because evolution does NOT result in the "best" design, it's just whatever it managed to evolve with what it had, to become as compatible as it could with the environment it happened to be in at the time).
Anyway, when I went through my most enthusiastic phase of this, in my teens... I made several tries at designing an alien with one of the few features that I knew I'd NEVER seen in Earth life: a body that moves on WHEELS instead of legs.
Of course, the obstacle to this is that a wheel needs to be able to spin independently of the main body. So how could it be a body part? And back then, I could imagine two possible ways:
#1. The entire creature is basically torus-or-cylinder-shaped, and moves by rolling. The body IS the wheel.
(Here is a drawing from one of my high school art books, with a scene from a very multicultural spaceship... featuring what I called a Cyclian, a little wheel-shaped creature that rolls on its edge and has long two-fingered arms extending from both flat sides. It is, quite fortunately, dated, so I know this was in 1997.)
#2. Alternatively, the wheel is a separate creature, born together with the main one. They are like conjoined twins, but not actually connected, more like being born with arms linked. A loop of the main body goes through the wheel. Wheel eats and drinks separately, maybe shifts its weight to help with motion. There can be some other appendages to help propel it, maybe a pushing leg on the ground, or arms that turn the wheels like on a wheelchair.
(Here is a truly horrible quality scan of one of my paintings from slightly before then, maybe 1996, maybe earlier 1997. Meet my spring-legged aliens, and their Wheelberry Beast with its one long cylindrical wheel and little pushing leg. This is also an alien riff on food-producing livestock like cows and hens, because it grows edible "fruit" on its tentacles.)
Years later, I realized there are a few more possibilities:
#3. Same as #2, a loop of the main body goes through the wheel, except the wheel is not actually alive. It's made of some non-living material that forms along with the rest of the body and then lasts for life without regenerating itself. Like tooth enamel. (Downside: like tooth enamel, if it wears out you're screwed.)
#4. Same arrangement, except the non-living wheel does regenerate itself, because it's made of layers of something like keratin, forming periodically on the skin of the "axle" loop. Maybe wheels are shed and grown seasonally like antlers. Maybe the growth happens in hibernation, and the first thing the alien does after waking up is to loosen the innermost keratin layer, separate it from the flesh like a lizard shed, and get the wheel spinning.
So, a couple years ago I was infodumping about this to another nerd... and she suggested one more way! One that had not occurred to me!
#5. In her idea, the creature is not born with wheels, but is born with some type of magnetic organs inside it, where wheels could go. And then... finds the wheels somewhere, and they attach magnetically.
I asked her what this creature would be using as wheels... round flat rocks or something? And she said she was imagining them as the discarded shells of some other creature, like how a hermit crab uses snail shells instead of having one of its own.
I was like WOW that is a whole different perspective! And it really makes me think about what we even mean by a creature that has wheels. If the wheels can be foreign objects, basically used like tools... then, is that kinda the same thing (on a much simpler scale) as humans "evolving wheels" by learning to make wheeled vehicles?
And then this idea inspired another one from me!
I took another look at my own paradigm, in which I had been trying to find ways it could work with the wheels being part of the body... and realized I could COMBINE that same approach with the new idea of a detachable-wheels model.
#6. Maybe there are multiple creatures, including some that are wheel-shaped and others that have different types of limbs, but they're all the same species! And they're a social species, with individuals adapted for different tasks within each family, like an ant colony! And the whole family can combine into a wheeled vehicle, whenever they need to get somewhere fast...
Moral: Get nerds together. You will be AMAZED at the ideas that happen.
P.S. Writing this, I just thought of #7:
The wheels are not actually separate from the body! But the flesh that connects them is flexible and stretchy, like a rubber band. Lift up each wheel one at a time, like a paw, and spin it until tightly wound up. When all 4 (or however many) wheels are wound up, set them all down and let loose! Only good for short sprints before you need to recharge again.
Pods
2022/10/11
First posted here on Tumblr.
in the future there will be thera-pods. Like the suicide booths in Futurama except they have the opposite goal. find one and go inside and there's a therapist in there. Also the therapist is a dinosaur
#plot twist: it's usually a sauropod dinosaur
Mario-tinet
2022/10/11
First posted here on Twitter and here on Tumblr.
I don't have any particular interest in watching a Mario movie with any cast, but I couldn't help noticing the latest frenzied discourse
my thoughts went basically
"wow yeah it does seem very strange that they would not cast this Charles Martinet guy, from what I see in all these posts he seems so obviously the best qualified!"
"...Wonder why anyone would make that decision? What possible reason could they have? ...but in all this discourse I haven't actually seen anyone talk about what Charles Martinet wants, though. Did they offer him the role? Hmm I'll look it up..."
(google i very very clearly typed MARTINET, what is wrong with you)
(ok, ok, I will type the entire question, geez, what is autocomplete even good for)
...awww. Yes. He did want to.
That poor awesome guy
updates to my opinion stats:
interest in seeing any Mario movie: unchanged
dislike for this specific casting decision: +10
distrust of Google: +43
...this is unspeakably cursed and horrible, but... I just started wondering if they used this photo of him on purpose
Wolves
2022/10/12
First posted here on Tumblr.
I remember seeing this, or some related post, back around that time (2012), quite a while before the phrase "two wolves inside you" really took hold as a meme:
Back then, the "two wolves" were mainly known as a folktale attributed to various Native American cultures, in which people's inner nature was compared to "a black wolf and a white wolf" fighting inside them, and the winner will be "the one you feed."
The post I read was a callout against people who claim that the story was actual Native folklore. It attributed the actual first use to evangelical pastor Billy Graham (who, according to the article, made up the story to use in spreading Christianity).
This is why I always interpreted the memeification of the story as a mockery of evangelicals like Graham, who don't care what's true and what's made-up about Native American cultures. I imagined that the people using it as a meme were thinking something like, "OMG, that story is so fake and offensive... let's make fun of it by turning it into more and more obviously fake versions!"
And this is why I was surprised at people suddenly deciding, this year, that the meme's origin was racist.
I mean, yes it was, if it's true that Billy Graham made it up just to claim that it was a Native American story that he was totally okay with appropriating for the spread of his own religion.
But if that's the case, then why isn't sharing the mockery of him okay?
Looking it up now, I don't see any mention of that origin, or the related controversy, in more recent resources like the Wikipedia page (which only calls it "a story of unclear origins, sometimes attributed to...[list of various cultures]."
And I cannot find any definitive answer, even in current resources, on whether it is a real indigenous story or not.
So... Is the "racism" accusation because people believe the meme is a mockery of real folklore?
Or is it because they believe it's a made-up story by a person who was racist against Native Americans...
...and they either don't consider the memification to be mockery of that racist person...
...or they do not see an ethical difference between mockery and admiration?
(See: the whole debacle over "stop memeing the Zootopia abortion comic because I just found out its creator did things that were problematic!")
I don't even know what my own opinion is on this... I don't know if it's even my place to have an opinion. I'm just trying to understand the viewpoint of those who do,
Lies!
2022/10/15
First posted here on Twitter and here on Tumblr.
how can we say:
- hips don't lie
- I like big butts and cannot lie
and yet also say
- The cake is a lie
...?
if the word "cake" is a slang term for one's thick hindquarters
and hips do not lie
and one who likes big butts cannot lie
then WHY IS THE CAKE A LIE
is there not a profound contradiction here...?
Relativity of Relations
2022/10/15
First posted here on Tumblr.
This is an exploration of some thoughts I've had about what's healthy in a relationship.
(Content warning: this post contains hypothetical discussion of sexual relationships and infidelity, as well as hypothetical mentions of rape and other forms of abuse toward partners and children)
I'm trying to understand monogamy and the ways that infidelity is defined within that context.
It's hard, because I'm very well-suited to a polyamorous lifestyle and that's how pretty much all my relationships have gone.
In my relationships, we've always tried to be as open and communicative as possible about what our expectations were, and discussed in detail any time we might want to redraw them. And in regard to intimacy, on the whole, everyone's been okay with everyone else's boundaries.
Different couples and polycules have different views on where boundaries should go. There are boundaries involving which other people are off-limits, how careful one needs to be, what types of sexual acts and what types of other contact they'll accept between their partner and others.
In general, my view is that any agreement between partners is fine, as long as everyone involved can fully understand and consent to the terms of it, without any coercion. And if everyone agrees to it, and one person goes against the agreement without first consulting with the others, that's infidelity.
But there are limits to what terms I would consider reasonable.
Think of former Vice President Mike Pence... who reportedly has an agreement with his wife that neither one of them is permitted to be alone, at any time, for any reason, with any person of the "opposite sex."
By the above definition of infidelity, if Mike Pence's wife let a male plumber come into the house and fix the toilet while she was in the house and Mike was away-- literally just fix the toilet, not any of the nonsense that happens when a plumber comes to a house in porn movies-- she'd be cheating on him.
This is, of course, assuming that she agreed to this rule in the first place, and did so freely and uncoerced.
But I'm certain that if this had ever happened-- if Mike Pence publicly accused his wife of cheating because she'd been alone in a room with a plumber for five minutes to talk about a broken toilet-- the court of public opinion would have serious doubts about whether she could possibly have agreed to that rule without being under duress.
I'm certain that the general consensus (at least among most people I follow online) would be that she did nothing wrong. That all she did was disobey an unreasonable and abusive demand, and no one was to blame except her toxic husband.
Of course, gender affects people's view of things. If the roles were reversed, and Mike Pence himself had been accused of breaking his vows by agreeing to a private meeting with some female politician as part of his vice-presidential duties... Then I think the response would be different, and would focus more on mocking Pence for ever thinking that adherence to this rule would be feasible in the first place.
But I think most people would still judge the action itself to be harmless, because the rule it violated was so unreasonable.
My confusion comes up because I have real trouble understanding why sex is treated differently from that.
Well, let me rephrase. I do understand that it is treated differently, and perceived differently. I know that most people have very specific feelings about sex, and sex-related contact, that are different from how they feel about pretty much anything else people can do together.
I do have a general idea of why this feeling exists, as a consequence of a whole mess of factors involving patriarchy and history and biology and social norms.
And I would never devalue anyone else's feelings just because I'm aware of some of the history that contributed to them. I know that feelings are feelings, and are real and valid no matter where they come from.
I don't treat anyone's sex-related feelings lightly, or do anything that could risk causing traumatic sex-related feelings, because I KNOW those feelings are deadly serious for the person feeling them.
This is a big part of why I do think it's still important to follow a lot of the societal rules about sex. People can get hurt otherwise, badly.
BUT... I still have difficulty modeling in my head exactly what that would feel like.
To me, sex is just a pleasant thing you can enjoy with someone you're close to, in more-or-less the same way that food is.
Different kind of pleasure, yes. Usually a different range of people you'd enjoy it with. And the risks are different. Having sex with someone, you could end up with a pregnancy or a sexually transmitted infection, or you might fall in love and want to leave your current partner. Eating lunch with someone, you could catch an airborne or foodborne illness, or the person might even poison you... or you might, again, fall in love.
But, other than those details, it doesn't really feel that different to me.
Now, my own experience is limited and lucky. I have not had many of the bad experiences that people can have with sexual relationships. So perhaps this is part of what limits my imagination.
I can imagine that many of those experiences WOULD be bad for me, some of them as bad as they can be for other people (example: sexual abuse).
But I can't imagine them being bad in a significantly different WAY from a comparable experience involving food (example: someone holding me down and force-feeding me a food I hate).
(This doesn't apply so well to childhood. When I try to imagine what being a victim of sexual abuse is like for a child, in situations analogous to "my parents serving dinner and expecting me to eat it," the question starts to become impossible-- because I'm trying to imagine how my child self would have felt. And my perception of sex as a child was very different from how it is now.)
(And both my childhood view and current view of it were shaped by various aspects of my upbringing... which include the fact that I DIDN'T have any sexual experiences until I was well into adulthood. Trying to imagine how I would have felt as a child in that situation requires me to imagine being a whole different person now, who would have a different view on sex from anything I'm writing here.)
(This is, of course, a flaw in all my attempts to imagine my childhood being different. So that line of speculation isn't helpful, and takes me off track anyway.)
My point is: whenever I can't imagine an experience being a problem for me with food (example: my partner eating lunch with someone else) I also have real trouble imagining it being a problem with sex (example: marital infidelity).
And when I try to imagine anyone getting truly upset over it happening with sex, it feels, to me, like trying to imagine Mike Pence yelling at his wife about the plumber.
And when I try to think about why most people consider infidelity a serious breach of trust, there's a part of my brain that goes "It's because society's overall views about sex don't make any more actual sense than Mike Pence's views."
But this feels very self-centered of me, and very dismissive of other people's feelings (which, like I said, are valid no matter the cause) so I hope I can learn to think about it at least somewhat differently.
There's an experience that I've had often, in romantic relationships but also with friends and family and even work colleagues. In "Kea's Migration," I put the romance version of this experience into words:
"You cuddle up with one person and drift away from the friends you had before, feeling as if this one person is all you'll ever need and you could live your whole life locked away in a safe little cocoon together, just the two of you, hidden from the rest of the world. If you still interact with friends, you do it as a couple, and that's a different kind of friendship, a different connection, from the ones you had with those friends on your own.And then the person you love does something you don't understand, and suddenly you have to open up all the connections you closed off, looking for a third viewpoint to orient yourself in three dimensions again, to figure out what the hell makes sense."
The question is... what actually does "make sense?" I mean, of course I don't give a shit about "normal"... plenty of people think even having a bi-poly relationship is abnormal and bad in the first place. My instinct is to say that the only thing that matters is whether the people in the relationship are happy.
But, if I'm not happy with something that my partner/friend/relative/colleague is doing... that doesn't automatically mean the other person is wrong and I'm right. Even if they refuse to respect the boundaries I set. Maybe I am the one with unreasonable expectations, like Mike Pence. Maybe the other person is the one objecting reasonably, like... any reasonable person interacting with Mike Pence.
And of course both viewpoints within my relationship are going to be biased, so of course I'll want a neutral third opinion. I'll ask another person I know, or I'll write to an advice columnist, or I'll post the whole thing on Reddit asking other people to chime in on which one of us is the asshole.
But what does that accomplish?
If I ask others for their viewpoint on a conflict I'm having, what does it tell me if they agree with me or disagree? If 90% of Redditors tell me I'm Not The Asshole, doesn't that just mean what I'm doing is "normal"?
And I already said I don't give a shit what's considered normal, because I remember a thousand toxic behaviors that were at least 90% approved-of when I was a kid. I have zero trust in normality.
Plus, none of this resolves the fact that
1. I'm unhappy
2. my partner wants to do something that I am unhappy with
3. no matter which of us is judged to be Correct by Normal People Standards, we will still be in a situation that needs to change before we can BOTH be happy.
So I have to go back within the relationship to figure it out.
I have to go back to: Am I happy? Is my partner happy?
If not, are there changes we could make to increase my happiness without lowering my partner's?
Or vice versa?
Does there have to be absolutely no lowering of happiness for anyone, or would a small sacrifice be acceptable?
(Would we come to resent the small sacrifice, later on down the road? Would it be worth that risk?)
If it doesn't work out, are there other things we could try? If not, will we be ready to end the relationship?
If our relationship ends over this, would we want to look for new relationships with other people?
If so, how likely is it that we could find someone else who would NOT conflict with us over the same issue? (This is the one single point where I guess I agree that finding out the majority opinion might be useful).
And most importantly... are we willing, able, and ready to give it a try and make those changes now?
Anyway, this is why I'm seldom able to give a satisfactory answer when someone talks to me about a relationship, asking questions like "Is it valid that I don't like what my partner is doing?"
Because, nearly always, the answer I'm able to give is:
1. Yes, your feelings are valid.
2. Yes, your unhappiness is real.
3. If there's no way for you to be okay with what is going on... then you need to talk together, and find out whether there's a way to change what's happening that will let you BOTH be happy.
4. If there is not a solution like that, then it may be time to consider ending the relationship, for everyone's well-being.
And yet, very often, the answer people WANT from me is:
1. Yes, your feelings are valid
2. Yes, I believe what your partner is doing is Wrong
3. Yes I think the majority of Normal People would also consider it Wrong
4. I think your partner should be forced to change what they're doing. If they cannot change it and still be happy, then they are a Bad Person who Deserves to be Punished by you Leaving Them
...and, I'm sorry, but that's not the sort of judgement my mind is good at giving.
Psychosomatic Hypochondria
2022/10/16
First posted here on Twitter and here on Tumblr.
it is incredibly frustrating when a doctor says your health concern is "due to stress" (psychosomatic) and acts like that solves the problem?? No, even if that is the real cause, you gotta do something about the damn cause, otherwise that's like saying your infection is "due to bacteria" and then not giving antibiotics
but then, an actual cure would usually require giving doctors the ability to prescribe things like universal basic income
and I don't trust most doctors with that sort of legislative power
As for hypochondria... Honestly, in a world where everyone's aware of lots of scary diseases, many of which have barely any noticeable symptoms if you catch them early
... it's pretty unrealistic to expect everyone without medical training to have an exactly accurate idea of whether they are sick/injured, and just how badly
Pretty much everyone is gonna be either "I worry and ask a doctor about things that may turn out to be not real problems" or "I am a stoic manly man and I say I don't need a doctor even when there is very clearly a problem"
And yeah many reasonable people want to err on the side of caution. Especially women, because we usually haven't been raised to err on the stoic-manly-man side
Yes there are extremes, yes the extreme of anxiety can be a serious mental health problem
but in many medical settings, every concern about a possible but unlikely illness is treated like "hypochondria," and that way you're setting everyone up to stop talking about any medical concerns
or to come up with their own best attempt at a system for gauging whether a concern is bad enough to be worth seeking help, because doctors won't give helpful advice on that
(However, on an almost unrelated note, I do think it is incredibly funny when hypochondriacs take chondroitin supplements because it looks like they interpreted the word over-literally and I love it)
Plagiarism-Free
2022/10/16
First posted here on Twitter.
I strive to make my Twitter (and all my other online presence) a plagiarism-free zone
If I post something that looks like a clever new insight, it is an insight that I came up with on my own, unless I specify otherwise
I do not claim to be the first person ever to come up with it
But, if I've seen earlier versions of the idea and been influenced by them, I will disclose that, even if I don't remember whose version I saw
(unless I've completely forgotten that the influence even came from anyone else's idea) (which for me is very uncommon)
And you can rest assured that I did NOT just copy someone else's idea word-for-word with the name taken off, and/or a few words replaced
unless I make it VERY clear that I did so to make a point, like so:
I will not knowingly retweet posts that do this
Not even as a QT
I may comment on them, to point out the plagiarism. But I'll feel bad about even giving them that much engagement
(I will also not do the Tumblr thing of copying someone's entire post without attribution, adding a note like "reposted because OP is racist/transphobic/etc" as if that makes it ok to steal their words)
(If OP is such a bad person, why would you WANT to? Why wouldn't you express the idea in your own way, not tainted by their biases? do you also pass off Hitler or Stalin quotes as your own?)
I know this is part of why I'll never be a super famous Twitter account. I'm competing against others who do this constantly, and respond to callouts by laughing and saying that's normal on Twitter
(even though they know most of their RTs wouldn't happen if people knew they stole the quote)
But if it's so normal to do that... then I guess I have to make this announcement on my own Twitter, so everyone knows I persist in being abnormal.
feel free to RT any part of this thread if you do the same
but do not copy without attribution, because that would be some next-level hypocrisy
(still sorta expect someone to do it though)
Layers
2022/10/20
First posted here on Twitter.
one time my brain went:
"lol if someone dressed up like the mascot of the Gimp program, they'd be wearing a Gimp mask"
and then I was like "wait, a mask is an actual thing you do to layers in Gimp!"
and then I was like "wow my puns always have so many layers..."
and then I was like "OMG I DIDNT EVEN MEAN TO DO THAT"
Shapes
2022/10/21
First posted here on Twitter and here on Tumblr.
I remember having to compose descriptions of pills, sometimes, at one of my previous pharmacy jobs. I remember the challenge posed by kids' vitamins ("this medicine is a multi-colored... Flintstone-character-shaped...tablet"?)
glad I never had to do that with Xarelto...
because there's NO possible shape description except "Klingon Empire insignia"
Mindmates
2022/10/28
First posted here on Tumblr.
I've always been fascinated by how our minds can emulate other people. How our empathy, our theory of mind, can create a working model of another person, real or imaginary, and use our own cognitive power to give it a thought process that generates its responses.
How our memory of people we have known.... and our imagination of characters we've created.... can be, in a sense, real living entities, thinking with actual brain tissue, sharing our heads with us.
How, when we die, we are not fully gone, because like some fantasy villain (why, I wonder, does fiction always characterize this as villainous?) we've copied ourselves into other people's minds. Still able to think, talk to them, even influence their actions... a copy of our souls as accurate as the host mind's knowledge of us.
I wrote about this as far back as 2010, in strip 679 of Abby and Norma, as well as in the 2013 first edition of my short story collection. (In two of the stories, in fact: one about a self-aware character philosophizing on her own fictional existence, and one about a woman falling in love with an entity from her dreams.) Yet, somehow, I had never heard the word "tulpa" used for this type of mind-construct.
I was aware of the concept of a "tulpa" in the sense of a supernatural being that draws on human belief to continue existing --and I've been thinking about it quite a lot, lately, because I've been reading Terry Pratchett and that's how almost everything works on the Discworld-- but I didn't know of the other uses of the term.
Nevertheless, my mind loves making connections more than anything else. (My own horcruxes in other people's minds will always be pale imitations, because, out of the people I'm close to, none have a brain nearly as good at that particular skill as mine.)
So I was about to post this random insight on Tumblr:
----
"Tulpe" is German for tulip
"Tulpa" is a word for something that exists because people believe in it
Like the economy
Which once demonstrated this, very dramatically, by means of... tulips
(Link to a page about the 1634-1637 Dutch Tulip Bubble)
All things are connected
----
Fortuitously, when tagging this, I noticed options coming up such as "tulpamancy," "tulpa system," and "tulpas dni"
Which led me to research more on this topic... and learn some more about the ways everything is connected!
Sometimes I love the world.
Question about the Middle Ages
2022/10/30
So I'm a bit confused by something.
I understand that the low life expectancy in medieval times was mostly because of high infant mortality, and if you made it to adulthood you could reasonably expect a pretty long life.
But I also understand they didn't have antibiotics back then.
And most people I know tell me they've had their lives saved by antibiotics in early adulthood (UTIs, etc)
So what happened? Why didn't more than half of people die from infections as young adults in the Middle Ages?
There are a few possibilities that allow me to reconcile this:
- people I've talked to about this are outliers (ok, plausible, of course my friends are outliers, that's kinda the basis of how I make friends)
Or
- they are wrong and they could still have survived without antibiotics (also plausible; antibiotics help your chances but they don't just flip a switch between you'll-live and you'll-die)
Or- bacteria these days are more dangerous (I guess they've evolved?)
Or- we take more bacterial risks these days (I mean ok, maybe we have more sex now, that might explain the UTIs, but really I think our lives are more sterile overall than in medieval times)
Or- people these days have less natural resistance (because of more sterile lives? Or because we've now had a few generations when people with less natural resistance still got to survive and pass on their genes?)
I'm not sure any one of these things could account for all of the disparity, though.
Could be a mix of them I guess.
Brand and Generic
2022/10/30
It's weird how differently we talk about brands in the pharmaceutical industry, compared to everywhere else.
The basic mechanics of it are fairly similar, although not identical. In any industry, someone can invent and patent a new thing. For a while the patent lets them have a monopoly on it. They choose what to name it, and sell it under their trademarked name.
Then the patent runs out, and others can sell it under their own names. At that point society becomes aware of a generic word for the product, like "facial tissues" or "adhesive bandages."
If the original brand was popular enough, people may still use the brand name as a generic name-- like calling facial tissues "Kleenex" even if they're made by a different company. Other times the generic term, like "cell phones," becomes the common word.
(This is all affected by when and how the thing was invented, and how the company dealt with their trademark, and a lot of other things I don't really understand and I'm not claiming to be an expert. This is all just the stuff that I assume is obvious.)
But what seems weird to me is how sharp the line between "brand" and generic" is in pharmacy.
I mean... consider chocolate chip cookies, invented too long ago for anyone to have a patent. Nabisco's Chips Ahoy are a brand of chocolate chip cookies. Pepperidge Farms also has a brand of them, so does Keebler, so does every generic store brand.
If you point to any one of those and say "This is a brand of chocolate chip cookies," or refer to it as "[X] brand chocolate chip cookies," this makes sense to people.
Other brand names, like Kleenex and Band-Aid, are more closely connected to their products, but you can still say "Curad brand adhesive bandages" or "Target store brand facial tissues" and people will think you're being pedantic but still know what you mean.
But with medication, there is pretty much always only one manufacturer that is considered "brand."
The drug called imatinib has been around for so long that the brand-name version, Gleevec, is very seldom used. The generics are all cheaper and most doctors and patients consider them just as good.
But rarely do you hear anyone say "Gleevec brand imatinib," or anything-else brand imatinib. There is the Brand, and then there are the generics.
Generic meds are made by lots of companies: Teva, Amneal, Mylan, and so on. They ALL just package the product in very simple bottles with the generic name in big letters, and the manufacturer name in smaller letters in an unobtrusive place.
It's like if Malt-O-Meal's knockoff of Lucky Charms wasn't called Marshmallow Mateys, but was just called Oat Cereal with Multicolored Marshmallows, in plain letters, and that was the only marketing on the bag.
It's like if Nabisco Chips Ahoy were the only chocolate chip cookies that got a brand name, and all others were just labeled "Chocolate Chip Cookies" on a plain white background, no picture, no mascots, brand name in tiny letters down in the corner.
I'm pretty sure this is all because of the regulations surrounding prescription meds. You can't legally get Gleevec, or most of the meds in a pharmacy, without a prescription. And in many countries it isn't even legal to advertise them to the public.
Even in the US, marketing of prescription meds has always been different from most products. And most of this thread doesn't apply to over-the-counter meds. For example, ibuprofen is sold under different brand names like Advil and Motrin.
And some brand names that ARE strongly associated with a certain med will also make other meds, like Tylenol's Simply Sleep, which has the name Tylenol on the package but is diphenhydramine instead of acetaminophen (the drug that Tylenol is usually a brand of).
Unlike most other products, though, generic prescription meds are legally required to be as good as the brand name version. So, in the pharmaceutical field, this super-sharp divide between Brand and Generic makes even less sense than it would elsewhere.
People are Bad
2022/10/31
The conflicts that used to make me get off social media for a while, they used to be infighting between people with the same goals, who didn't agree on the most respectful way to pursue them. Conflicts like whether it was racist for White people to use Black slang terms, or whether it was antisemitic to put a hyphen in the word "antisemitic," or whether the word "homophobic" was ableist against people who have real phobias. I would sometimes log off in frustration because I could not understand the reasoning behind someone's argument for why a particular thing was, or wasn't, offensive... but we still agreed, at least, that IF it was offensive you shouldn't do it.
In fact, I preferred to err on the side of not doing anything that I'd ever heard ANYONE describe as offensive, even if I couldn't understand the reasoning behind it. What was important was not why a person was hurt by certain things, or whether their reason made sense to me. The important thing was that those things did hurt that person, and so the kindest choice was not to do them.
But if I ever got the urge to say I didn't understand the reasoning, I'd log off instead of asking questions and trying harder to understand. Because people who asked questions like that were generally assumed to be asking in bad faith, trying to discredit the speaker's reasoning by interrogating it and pointing out perceived flaws.
And that hasn't changed, there's still loads of bad-faith questions and loads of infighting between those of us who should be allies... but now I often feel like logging off just because there's ALSO a ton of actual enemies showing up openly in every discussion.
And I'm sure they include some of the same people who used to get involved in the previous type of arguments, who pretended to be on our side before, but have moved on from asking bad-faith questions about how to be kind, and are now just openly being unkind.
just a reminder to myself
2022/11/01
like I've said before:
"what doesn't kill you makes you stronger"
-i am not dead
-therefore nothing has killed me
-therefore an infinite number of things have NOT killed me
-therefore I have been strengthened by an infinite number of things
-therefore i am infinitely strong
Gotcha
2022/11/02
I have complex feelings about "gotcha" arguments
like:
"photo: this is the actual size of a 4 week embryo. So glad I got this out of my body"
(outrage in comments)
"I said it's the SIZE of an embryo, didn't say it IS one. Anyway here's the pimple I squeezed it out of"
I am too uncomfortable with deception to ever do this on purpose myself, and I doubt it's ever actually helpful or accomplishes anything
But it is SO satisfying
(Kind of like squeezing pimples, I guess)
Toucan
2022/11/02
I'm gonna share a little story from my past.
When I was a kid, my family was pretty wealthy, but also taught me to be kind to others who didn't have as much money. We always had plenty of nice things for ourselves, though. Including lots of pets, probably more than we should have.
And my parents sometimes used to take me to this pet store that sold parrots and other exotic pets, and also pet supplies and animal-related t-shirts and accessories and stuff.
One time I was there with my dad, and another set of parents with a kid was also there. (Kid looked like a boy but I'm not gonna assume gender, especially because of... Reasons that will become clear at the end)
I saw the kid looking at this cool necklace with a little pendant shaped like a toucan. The kid wanted it. The parents said no. As far as I could tell, it was not because they disapproved or anything, they just thought the necklace was too expensive.
I looked at the price on the necklace and it was $15. This was the 1990's, so $15 was a bigger deal than it is now, but it still didn't seem that expensive to me. I had more than that on me in cash. So I went and bought the necklace, and gave it to the kid who wanted it.
And the kid's dad refused it. Told me they couldn't accept an expensive gift like that.
I went out to the car and cried. Didn't move until my dad came out to the car. My dad gave me a note that the other kid's dad had written, saying that I was kind and generous and he was truly grateful but he just couldn't let his kid accept a gift from me like that. Didn't make me feel better. I kept crying all night.
Thing is, I understood that there's a stigma against accepting charity, and I understood that gifts are often seen as transactional, and I understood, on one level, why people would act the way that kid's dad acted.
But I didn't accept it. To me, the payback for a random act of kindness was literally just the good feeling I got from knowing that I'd helped someone else be happy.
I could not accept the idea that other people gave gifts for other reasons, like wanting something material in return. I could not accept the idea that people would assume that was MY reason.
And I could not accept that others would refuse my gift and DENY me that good I-made-someone-happy feeling, just because they suspected me of something worse (or because they somehow got shame from the things that were supposed to make them happy!)
It was a childish way of seeing the world, of course. I wanted other people to just stop having the wrong feelings. I was angry at the dad, thinking of him as a bad person who had hurt ME.
In a way, my desire for the good feeling I get from being generous was just as selfish as any desire for monetary payback.
But it's still how I feel, to some degree. I still get a lot of happiness from just being kind to people. The warm feeling is still very much its own reward. And I still feel sad (though not angry anymore) when people's happiness at my gifts is mixed with shame. I wish more people helped each other like this, and I wish it was not stigmatized.
There's a weird epilogue to this. A few years back, Elle and I were on a road trip together, and we ended up talking about places we used to go as kids. It turned out we both used to go to that same exotic pet store!
And when I told her about that one experience, she got a really weird look, and said... "Wait, did the kid have red hair?"
(Elle has red hair.)
I could not remember a hair color, but I was like "...wait, you think that could have been you??"
She said, "I don't know, but I do remember back then I REALLY liked toucans."
We'll never know if that was actually our first meeting. She says she feels like it could have been her, but she doesn't remember it, neither does her dad, and of course I don't remember it clearly enough to recognize either of them. So it's just one of those weird little mysteries in life.
But I like to think that in the years we've known each other, I've given her at least a toucan necklace's worth of happiness.
Colors of Feeling
2022/11/02
First posted here on Tumblr.
Today I encountered some informational diagrams about alexithymia.
This was shared on Tumblr here but originally posted on Instagram here . The images explained that alexithymia means difficulty in understanding and expressing one's own emotions, and showed some visual representations of ways to deal with it.
Among them was a circular chart of words related to emotion. Different-colored wedges radiated from the center, each color divided into many little sections, each with a word. The center was like a six-piece pie with the most general terms: Calm, Happy, Sad, Fear, Strong, Anger. As each wedge expanded toward the circle's perimeter, it was filled with more specific words: Overwhelmed, Disgust, Irritated, Confident, Disappointed, Peaceful, Enthusiastic...
(source: fidgetsandstims )
The chart's similarity to a color wheel really emphasizes how emotions have that one big philosophical thing in common with colors.... i.e. we can't really know how other people perceive them. We just hear people use the same word for them, and we assume they're experiencing the same thing.
We mostly agree on names for them, because we mostly agree on the sorts of situations where we tend to encounter them, and we mostly agree on the effects of them.
Some of the effects can be measured even by an outside observer. That goes for the effects of feelings as well as colors. When anxious, your breath and heartbeat speed up. When looking at dark colors your pupils expand because they see less light, and when wearing a dark color you get warmer because it absorbs heat.
If I say "this color is what I see when I look at an asphalt road, and it also absorbs heat and expands my pupils," people will say "that's the color black."
And if I say "this emotion is how I feel when I'm late for work and about to miss the bus, and it speeds up my breath and heartbeat," people will say "that's anxiety."
The disconnect happens if I start mixing up the expected contexts and the expected effects. Like, "I looked at a blank piece of paper, and my pupils expanded and the paper felt warm."
People might say that's an unusual reaction to the color white... but if they do a vision test and I seem perfectly able to tell light from dark, they'd still say I was seeing white (because we agree I was looking at paper, and we agree the paper was white).
BUT if I say, "I was lounging in bed reading a mildly funny webcomic, and my breath and heart rate suddenly sped way up..."
People would, again, say that's an unusual reaction. But in this case, if they do medical tests and find no other cause for it, they'll say it was an anxiety attack.
If I say "But I wasn't having any experience that would cause anxiety," people will go "Yeah that's how it is sometimes, anxiety can happen out of nowhere."
And I feel like they just told me, "You looked at paper and it felt warm and made your pupils big? Oh, that must mean the paper suddenly turned black for a second."
And I'm like "...no, the paper stayed exactly the same?" And they're like "yeah but the reaction you had to it was a Dark Color Reaction. So that means, by definition, the paper was dark-colored."
And I'm like "...okay but.... that is not what I thought the definition of dark was..."
It's like we suddenly started defining colors by the effects they cause, instead of the places where we agree they're found in the observable world.
And in real life they're not defined by either of those things! They're defined by a subjective experience inside our heads.
No, really. If there was an object that had measurable physical traits of dark-colored things, and was in a category of objects that are usually dark... but it LOOKED the same color as white things, to pretty much everyone who saw it... we would call it white. We all would. In descriptivist linguistic terms, it would BE white. Only the most pedantic scientists could keep trying to insist it was black.
In fact, I think there is one well-known object like this: A polar bear! Within the category of bears, most are dark-colored. And according to scientists, a polar bear's skin is also dark underneath its hair, and the individual hairs are actually clear and colorless.
But I have never heard anyone say, in regular conversation, that a polar bear isn't white. White is what we see, when we look at it. That's how we define colors.
How we define an emotion is another question. But a similar one.
We don't define it by the cause, like "it was white because it was paper, and paper is white." Paper is usually white. Being late for work is usually anxiety-inducing. But those aren't definitions.
There's paper of all colors. And there are people who can have all sorts of different good or bad or neutral feelings about being late for work.
We also don't define it by the effect, like saying "it was white because it made my eyes squint." Bright white things do make me squint. Anxiety does make my heart speed up. But they're not the only things that can have those effects.
A black rag soaked in rubbing alcohol and giving off vapors would make my eyes squint worse than anything white. Jogging can speed up my heart without any anxiety at all.
So, again, like a color, the real definition of a feeling is neither the cause nor the effect of it, but whatever identifies the feeling itself-- which is a subjective thing inside our minds.
Could be something totally different for each one of us.
I do have difficulty naming my own emotions. And for me, the only reason I'd even care about putting a name to an emotion is so that maybe I can match it up to something from a List of Things that Help with (Named Emotion).
And that list is... another whole thing I'm still working on figuring out.
So far, most of the progress I've made has been without names, just getting a sense for "Do I remember feeling like this before? Do I remember what sort of things helped me then?"
And that's a whole mess that's very specific to me, and doesn't seem to benefit from categorizing my emotions with the words language provides for them. Because, in my experience, I am not usually helped by the same things that help most other people in any given emotional situation.
This chart might still be helpful for me personally, but... it'll be a challenge.
Conscience Without Feeling
2022/11/02
Too many people
never built a habit
of basic acts and words of kindness
for those too different
from themselves
the patient they assume is feigning pain
the foreigner who ought to learn the language
the beggar who they say will spend it all on drugs or drink
the strangers
with the lives and lived experience
so unlike their own
that empathy could base no feeling
on what they had in common
so many people
only learned to listen
to their heart,
their gut,
their conscience
And those produced no feeling
for a fellow being
too different to relate to
too different for sympathy to grasp the heart and clench the gut
too different, then, to be considered worthy
of the smallest, simplest kindness
My heart, my gut, are also numb
and offer little
even if I try
to feel for those
with whom I share
no common ground
I had to learn another way
I had to learn belief in wrong and right
untethered to a visceral emotion
I had to learn
to act a love I rarely felt
because it was my part to play
as one who lives
in civilization
the small and easy tax we pay
to keep community alive
why wouldn't you?
Why would you want to live
in a society that didn't
ask at least
for basic
kindness?
I had to learn that
as a child
while others
learned to listen
to their heart and feelings
for the signs of good
Because the people
that I saw as Other
too different from myself
to feel a common ground
too alien
to relate to
on the plane of visceral emotion
were very
nearly
all
of
them
where that poem came from
2022/11/02
On the way to the Los Feliz Flea market on July 2nd, while pulling my wagon of booth setup supplies down Hyperion Avenue, I saw a man sitting on the steps of a chiropractic clinic, calling out for help.
He looked like a poor Black homeless man. He was missing several teeth, his clothes were ragged and seemed to be almost falling off; everything about him seemed weird and disconcerting. But whatever was happening to him, it didn't seem like he had any control over it. And my usual response to weird, disconcerting things happening to people is that I feel concerned for them and wish I could help, even if I'm also uncomfortable with the idea of helping.
This man was asking for help. In fact he was calling out that he needed a paramedic. A few other people were on the sidewalk, but walking past without acknowledging him.
I thought about walking past, too. The thoughts that were probably occurring to the other people were also occurring to me, and other parts of my mind were arguing back as it happened:
"I can't give money to every beggar."
"But he's not asking for money. He clearly said 'paramedic'..."
"I should be careful about strangers asking for help. It could be a trick. He might be trying to mug me."
"Ok, but it's a busy street, broad daylight.... He hasn't asked for my phone, he hasn't asked me to come close to him. All he asked me to do was make a 911 call, which I'm sure he wouldn't want if he was planning to commit a crime."
"I might be late to the market if I help him."
"No, I won't, I have plenty of time, and this is definitely more important anyway."
"But he looks like a homeless guy on drugs."
"Well, if he is, then he needs medical help, right?"
So I stopped and called 911 on my cellphone. I asked for a paramedic. I told the paramedic where I was and who needed help. I asked the man what was happening (he said "asthma attack") and I relayed the info over the phone.
As we waited, he told me a few times, "thank you" and "people just kept walking by." I didn't know what to say (and I didn't want to make him talk much if he was having trouble breathing) so I didn't say much. I just stayed with him until the paramedics came.
They arrived in a fire truck. I hadn't been sure how they were going to arrive... at one point I saw a woman in scrubs walking toward us pulling some sort of device on wheels, and I asked "are you the paramedic?" She smiled and nodded and I thought she meant yes at first, but she just walked past us, up the steps into the chiropractic clinic, so I guess she was just going to work, and we were just an obstacle not worth really noticing.
But the paramedics did come, and once I was sure they were really going to help him, I waved to them and went on my way, and the man said "thank you" again.
It's been months since it happened and I've told only two people: my roommate Alex, and my therapist.
I haven't told anyone else. I think partly it's because any recounting of this interaction would feel like a transparent showoff of generosity, a virtue-signaling bid for praise. It's almost too close a parallel to the Good Samaritan story. And it's also someone else's personal crisis that really doesn't feel right to exploit for attention in telling the story to any wider audience.
But those are just some incomplete guesses as to why I feel such an aversion toward talking about what happened. And they can't be all of it, because I make plenty of posts online expecting praise and attention... yes, usually I'm hoping for people to admire cleverness, talent, creativity or insightfulness in what I post, but on occasion it's been kindness as well. And it's not like I haven't ever mentioned the suffering of other people in posts I expect to get noticed for.
Then again, just because I've broken these personal rules sometimes doesn't mean they aren't rules, or that there's any particular importance in trying to analyze why I tried to follow them this time. People are complex and chaotic, so much that we often can't even predict our own choices. Even my choice to help the stranger in the first place wasn't a certain thing for a moment.
I guess another part of why this is difficult to talk about is that... my own emotional response is complex, to the point of being hard to put into words.
I feel very good about the fact that I helped him.
I also feel very bad about the fact that helping him was an unusual thing, making me the outlier on a street of people who found it normal to ignore him.
Not because of any shame in being an outlier from normality. I have always taken pride in the ways I differ from the norm, and this experience mainly just bolstered that pride.
But at the same time it brought a sense of fear and helplessness and smallness, at one more reminder of how the norm (which has power over the world we live in) is so selfish and uncaring.
The feeling collided, unpleasantly, with many other thoughts and feelings about many other, bigger problems in society as a whole.
The common theme was callousness, selfishness... the idea that those who have the power to make life so very much better for so many others are usually the same people who don't want to.
And the distance, the loneliness, the helplessness I felt, from how very, very hard it was for me to imagine or relate to that point of view, while living in a society ruled mostly by people who think like that.
The corporations that buy politicians. The politicians who are bought. The people who vote for them because they think it means they'll get to keep more of their big slice of the pie, while those who have nothing will keep having nothing. Anyone and everyone who would, on any societal level, walk past and not bother with a sacrifice as easy and tiny as the few minutes I spent making sure that stranger was getting help.
It was so many examples blending together that I cried that night. It was a relief, in a way. I hadn't cried in a few months, although I had been having more and more times when I wished the tears would come.
My usual "emotionlessness" had been in place during the encounter itself. While calling the paramedics for the man in distress, I never felt any pang of sorrow or compassion for him. I wasn't thinking much at all about how he might be feeling. I never had any sense that I could imagine myself and him having a conversation, being friends, or having much of anything in common at all. None of that seemed relevant to why I should help him.
I helped him because it was a rule. Because it was the way people should treat each other, regardless of feelings. Because when I was a child, learning how to be decent to other people, I learned that this includes people whose lives are so alien, so fundamentally different from yours, that you have no hope of relating to them on an emotional level. Because I couldn't help learning that. Because for me, that was... almost everyone.
The choice was part of what I tend to call "my rational mind's conscience" or "the scaffold." It's the cerebral side, the opinions and motivations that underlie emotions, even at times when the visceral, physical side of the feeling is absent.
It's what I imagine Data the android had instead of human feelings.
(Earlier in my life, Star Trek's portrayal of Data strained my suspension of disbelief because I thought that the "scaffold" WAS the defining aspect of emotion. Data clearly had it: he had opinions and motivations, desires and goals that drove his choices... and yet claimed to be emotionless.
It still strains my suspension of disbelief. But now it's because I realize the physical sensations that give depth to feeling are an important part of it, not just incidental... and I realize that a person who was deficient in them wouldn't know that.
I didn't. Data wouldn't, realistically. Having never felt what humans feel and call emotion, he would assume that his own experience could also be called by that name, and he wouldn't naturally imagine that the experience of humans might be so very different from his own. I suppose the only explanation for why he called himself emotionless was that he had been raised by his creator to think of himself that way, and had never thought to question it.)
Later in the week, I saw a post online in which someone angrily called out sexist men who claim they're not sexist because they love their wives and sisters and daughters. It asserted that they could not claim to care about women, if they only cared about the well-being of those specific women who had personally shown them affection.
And in the comments were a stunning number of men snapping back with outrage at the idea that they'd be expected to "care about people who don't care about them."
Although the intent of the original post seemed quite clear to me, a really shocking number of commenters responded as if they thought the post was trying to demand they FEEL the same emotion for strangers that they felt for their own family? And calling them evil if they didn't feel it?
Some asserted that they weren't going to "lie" and "pretend" they cared when they didn't-- as if treating strangers with basic decency, respecting their essential rights, is somehow hypocritical or dishonest if you don't feel the closeness for them that you feel for actual lovers and relatives?
(This was in addition to others who responded as if "women who haven't personally shown them affection" meant "women who HAVE personally shown them disrespect" -- as if strangers didn't exist, and all women in the world either loved or hated them.)
Seeing all of this strengthened a suspicion that has been growing in me over the last several years: the suspicion that a dangerous number of people either don't experience the "scaffold," or think that it's unimportant.
A dangerous number of people, when deciding how to act, listen ONLY to the visceral and physical side of emotion-- and consider it dishonest, hypocritical, to act on anything other than that.
They acknowledge "rational thought" only if it appears to agree with their visceral feelings. They reject any recognition of it, call it "lying" or "faking," if it suggests a course of action they feel no strong emotions in favor of.
But the "scaffold" is important! It's usually what determines how we treat strangers. It's how we make choices we can't expect immediate reward for. It's how we vote when the candidates' policies are all laid out hypothetically. The scaffold is how we decide the fates of real, living, feeling humans, whenever we know that our choices affect their fates but their fates don't personally affect us.
So, this scares the hell out of me.
Uncharitable
2022/11/03
I don't know how to interact with the discourse over a famous person being "cancelled" on social media.
I do think most people who get cancelled for being bigoted jerks really are, to some degree, bigoted jerks.
But on places like Twitter and Tumblr, EVERY person with more than a certain level of fame has at least a few (mostly-ignored) people in their comments bringing up anything they've ever done that can be interpreted (in the most cynical light) to be bigoted jerkism
And there are some cases where the difference between that and becoming Twitter Villain of the Day is determined by how well-organized those enemies in the comments are.
I try (and don't always succeed) to stay out of this kind of conversation, for lots of reasons. This happens so often-- people we've respected, doing and saying things that seem unexpectedly awful for what kind of person we thought they were.
I try to stay out of the debates over intentions, interpretation, context.
I know the intent was not always malicious, and I know that doesn't always matter much from the perspective of those who've been hurt.
And I know, if I wasn't among the main group hurt by it, my words should not drown out theirs.
I've absolutely said awful things and made awful decisions myself. I've been around a long time. I'm lucky I came of age at the turn of the millennium and didn't have internet before then. But that hasn't prevented some of my bad decisions from still existing online.
I've struggled between the feeling that I should delete them whenever possible, and the feeling that that would be a dishonest attempt to sanitize my image and hide my failings. I doubt I've always made the right choice on that either.
We all make mistakes, even the few public figures who are so beloved that we like to imagine them as perfect. A big enough army of dedicated enemies could find dirt on any of them, and find a way to rebrand that dirt as unforgivable bigotry and make it go viral.
For instance, to an audience sensitive enough about ableism to be extremely careful with words like "stupid" or "crazy," even the old comedians who get mentioned as unproblematic examples can feel very, very troubling. Steve Martin had a whole routine about pretending to be mentally disabled to avoid getting mugged. Yes, it made lots of us laugh. No, it didn't age well.
And to an actively malicious audience that assumes the worst intentions about anything, even more innocuous choices can be cause for cancellation.
(Remember the heartwarming story about Betty White and the old cameras and lighting that couldn't look good on both her and her Black co-star?)
(And how Betty, without saying anything, darkened her own makeup and made it work better, and we all agreed she clearly did it as an act of kindness?)
(Now imagine that story getting spread around as "Betty did blackface to look more like her co-star," and interpreted as mockery, jealousy, etc....)
(Interpretations like that get spread around all the time for less popular people. Too often, they fool us.)
But I don't think that makes any of these conversations unimportant.
Mostly, I do believe a discussion needs to happen, when someone disappoints us like this. I don't know what the ultimate outcome of the discussion should be. Usually I hope it'll lead to changes in the system and changes in the behavior of the person involved, or at least consequences of some type. I do not think the usual way the discussion proceeds on Twitter is anywhere near ideal. But I don't have any alternative suggestions.
Rock Bounce
2022/11/03
I hit rock bottom so much I feel like a bouncy ball sometimes.
This is a better (and more depressing) analogy than I initially thought, and I spent a while exploring it.
I keep coming back to my unhealthy habits. They don't involve drugs or alcohol, but they still follow very addiction-like patterns.
I can see the worst point in a relapse coming, usually. I see rock bottom rushing toward me, like from the viewpoint of a falling ball.
But somehow, I never, ever manage to stop it at the point where I still just "see it coming."
Like how a bouncy ball has to hit the ground before it can bounce back up. It can't stop itself and jump back up in midair like freaking Mario.
I'd love to learn how to do this. It's terrifying that I don't know how yet.
I should be able to! The actions I'd have to take aren't hard, in themselves. Everyone else thinks I should be able to do them... that I must be choosing not to because I don't wanna change.
And that's true in a sense. I do things because I want them, or I want something else to happen that I can cause through those actions. Everyone does. It's not even possible to make a choice for any other reason, is it? I'm pretty sure that's part of the definition of a choice.
So what do you do when your desires are always changing? Sure, I can say right NOW that I want to get 8 hours of sleep, and I want it much more than I want to stay up all night doomscrolling or compulsively picking at my skin or whatever.
But there's likely gonna be a time later tonight when my wants are the exact opposite of that. Or maybe they'll be a screwed up mixture of different wants, but the one that keeps me doing the wrong thing will still be winning, hard.
What will even be able to motivate me then? How do I control my future self who has a whole different bunch of goals?
I want so badly to learn that skill. It's freaking terrifying, to see my own self-destructive actions in the future as if they're the ground I'm falling towards and can't turn back. It SUCKS.
And like a bouncy ball, the higher I fall from, the harder it hits, and the higher I can bounce back up.
But it's never as high as the time before.
Always a smaller recovery, always a shorter time until the next impact.
And eventually the ball isn't bouncing anymore.
Just rolling across the rock bottom, slower and slower, until it comes to a stop.
theory of more mind than is really there
2022/11/03
I think about other people's feelings a LOT.
More than normal, probably.
A lot of my social difficulties come from assuming that other people's theory of mind is as overactive as mine.
When the phone is ringing at work and someone asks me to get it, I say yes much too often.
And it's because.... my own theory of mind can't imagine a scenario where I'm actually free to say no.
I try to look at it from the other person's viewpoint, and I can only think:
- of course they're aware that I'm already working on something important.
- why would I not be? I'm at work. I'm not on break.
- if I weren't busy, I obviously would've answered the call already. (they know me. they know I do that. it's my most well-known characteristic at this workplace. that, and the fact that I get really really stressed about having to do it.)
- of course they know that if I take the call, the task I'm working on will be interrupted, likely causing errors, and that will be harmful to the customer I'm doing it for.
-if they are asking me, it means they don't care about that.
So why would I imagine this person would take no for an answer? Of course they won't.
- if I say no, either
- 1 . They'll fight me, or
- 2. They'll walk away full of repressed rage, and then take it out on me later, when I least expect it
When I've said no and haven't gotten pushback, it hasn't disproven any of this... because I have no way of knowing how much repressed rage they walked off with, or when it'll come out.
So I don't feel that I have a choice. I have to say yes.
I know, on an intellectual level, that it's likely the person has not had any of these thoughts.
But I can't convince my emotions of that.
Because I can't imagine a mind without thoughts, and I can't imagine what else they'd be thinking.
I mean, the only time I ever ask someone else for help is if 1. there's a task I am expected to do AND 2. I am unable to do it myself.
Phone calls are neither of these. They aren't assigned to a person. Anyone can take them. No individual person is blamed for a call going unanswered.
So the only reason I can imagine a (non-manager) coworker asking me to take a call is that... they want the phone to stop ringing, they don't want to get it, and I'm the one whose feelings and responsibilities they care the least about.
Yes this doesn't make the demand fair. Yes this makes them an asshole.
But when an asshole demands unfair things of you, you either comply or get shat on.
That's like 90% of being employed.
This is how I react to a LOT of requests.
And this is also how I imagine other people reacting to my requests.
Which is why asking for things, and saying no when other people ask, are among the most difficult things for me.
Humanity
2022/11/03
When I see someone suggest that the only thing stopping humans from being evil is punishment (either in this world or an afterlife), I sometimes try to argue that this isn't the case.
I sometimes suggest that humans, in general, have an inner sense of what's good, and an inherent desire to do what that sense tells them is good.
I do believe this. I also believe that, in most humans, the sense of good tells them that it's good to help others. To do what they think will benefit their community as a whole. Or at least benefit some other people within it.
I don't, of course, think this is a trait of all humans. Only most. Correlations aren't exceptionless laws.
I do think that it's correlated with being human, or being a member of any other social species.
But I've seen some backlash, lately, against any suggestion that any behavioral traits in humans could be genetically influenced at all.
And I can see where the backlash comes from. Throughout human history, there have been lots of bigoted attempts to ascribe "genetic tendencies" to ethnic groups as a way of justifying prejudice against them.
And the common understanding of genetics is so crude that it tends to ignore epigenetics completely -- to assume that having a gene for something is an unchangeable destiny, and not realize that it usually just increases the chance of something, and can change in response to all sorts of environmental factors.
Of course, if you think of genes as inescapable fate, it's both unappealing and dangerous to imagine one's personality being determined by them.
So yes, it's important to be careful when talking about any possible genetic tendency toward behaviors or thoughts or desires. It's important to emphasize that genes are not absolute-- and that they are not involved in any detectable way with correlations between behaviors and human cultural groups.
To me, it seems quite clear that humans are far too complex to be predictable. We're each so unique, and so very much influenced by each other and our cultures... it's nonsense, as well as bigotry, to go looking for any genetic correlation between, for example, a behavior and an ethnicity. Individual and cultural differences are so much bigger that they'll confound any attempt to isolate some little gene.
And yet it's also nonsense, as well as bigotry, to deny the existence of any genetically influenced behaviors at all.
If you refuse to consider the possibility that humans ever have ANY inherent, non-learned psychological traits-- well, for one thing, that has some disturbing implications for the neurodivergent and LGBT communities. It implies that people are made gay or transgender, or autistic or mentally disabled, by the way they're raised... or that they choose to be those things, through some free will that's independent from all nature and nurture.
And it also, even more bizarrely, implies that there's nothing psychologically innate about humanity at all.
If ALL human mental traits are learned, or somehow chosen through free will, then that would include our ability to learn, and the supposed free will itself! That makes no logical sense, and it suggests that ANY animal could be raised as a human and end up thinking and acting just like one of us.
That is, unless you're claiming that humans are special BECAUSE they're the only animals without instincts? The only ones born as a blank slate? And, if you could, for example, engineer out all the genes that give a cow instincts, the cow could then be raised to think exactly like a human, without any other alterations?
Or maybe you're suggesting that the human ability to learn and/or have free will IS inherent and genetic, and is what makes us different from the animals, but that's true of only those traits, and nothing else?
And if people's learning ability, and their control over their own choices, is genetic, then either 1. all variation in those abilities between different humans, all lesser or greater intelligence and teachability, all lesser or greater self-control, is also caused by genes (which is not really in line with the previous argument) or 2. these inherent genetic abilities are exactly identical in all people at birth (which is not really in line with... the whole concept of how genetic traits work)?
Or maybe you believe that the traits that make us human are not genetic, or even physical, but are part of a non-corporeal soul given to us by God... in which case your beliefs and mine are so irreconcilably different that nothing productive will ever come of this argument.
I'm sure that human brains have something inherent that causes them to act human, just like every other species has. And it's clearly NOT the same for all humans, because humans don't all act the same, nor does any group of humans. But some tendencies are common enough among the human species, in general, that I have to believe there is some inner mechanism causing them.
For example: I think that, like most social species, humans (at least a majority of humans) do have that innate, instinctive tendency toward wanting to do things they believe will benefit their community as a whole.
I know many people's immediate response to that idea is to point to a large amount of bloody human history as an exception. But that's why I specified "believe" and "their."
Many people will do things that weaken a community while believing they strengthen it.
Many people will deliberately harm communities they view as "other," while fiercely supporting within a community they view as "theirs."
These aren't universal human traits. There are no universal human traits, beyond the most basic biology. I mean, not all humans have any desire to help anyone else at all.
But the desire to help others, at least some others... to participate in a community... is so very common throughout our species that I do think it has an innate correlation with being human.
This connects, somehow, with another thought I've been having, about another type of rhetoric I'm seeing a lot.
What does it even mean to ask myself, "If I had been alive during (historical event), how would I have acted? What things would I have done, which side would I have taken?"
Such questions come up a lot, and in different contexts.
Often, it's a way to re-contextualize current events, comparing them to past events on which you already have strong feelings, and using those feelings to gauge what's the right thing to do in the present.
"If you are supporting the current government, you would have supported Hitler in World War II."
"I know it's legal to pay minimum wage. But I wouldn't have owned slaves if I'd lived when that was legal."
Other times, it's part of forming one's judgment of the behavior of historical figures, imagining what you might have done in their circumstances.
"Yes, his books are super offensive now. But if we'd grown up in the time he did, we might have turned out just as sexist and racist."
"No I wouldn't. Anyone can choose to be better than the society that raised them. Look at this other author from the same place and time, his books are way more progressive..."
But when I say "If I'd lived in that time, I would have..." what do I even mean by "I"?
Do I mean, "I, the person I am now, with my mind as it is now, a personality built out of values and ethics and desires shaped by an upbringing that's been irreversibly shaped by knowledge of the historical events I speak of"?
Because that is the most meaningless of the possible meanings for the "I" ...though it's meaningless in the same way as a tautology. Yes, of course it's true that my actual self, identical to how I am now, if dropped out of a time machine into a prior era, would still probably act in a way compatible with my current values and desires. But why bother saying it?
Or does "I" refer to "if I had been born and raised in that time"?
What kind of "I" is that, then? How could a person raised from birth to adulthood in a prior century ever be, in any meaningful way, the same person that I am?
Is it even possible that a person with my exact genes could have been born centuries ago? Not really, because the exact mix of genes in any person is the result of specific family lines in which generations of specific people had children together over the course of history. It was only at the time of your birth that those family lines were at the exact point where they could possibly produce the genetic You.
But, even if it could happen, how could I consider this genetically identical infant to be me? The only thing we have in common is the body, and whatever might be in the mind at the time of birth. By saying that "I" would definitely act This Way if I were born in That Time... am I claiming that my identity and my conscience is defined entirely by physical components like genes? Not even changeable by epigenetics? Would I be saying that the kind of person I am, the kind of choices I would make, are decided by the physical makeup of my body at birth?
And does that imply there are other people whose identities-- as bad people-- are decided by their genes? That they are predestined from birth to be evil, no possible way to change them?
Or, if I refer to an "I" that's defined by nurture as well as nature... then how much nurture do we allow? Has this version of me experienced my exact childhood? My exact young adulthood? Up to what age? And how could that have possibly happened, in a different society hundreds of years ago?
Could it still be "me" if the experiences were not exact, but roughly similar? And how close is close enough?
You can talk about free will all you like, but before you can even use your free will, there needs to be a "you" that will use it. There has to be a way you became the sort of person who would choose the sorts of things you choose.
You do what you want. But you want it because of who you are, because of what you like and value, because of what you consider good and important.
And how did you become that person?
There's no clear answer. You can study every detail about how people are born, and what happens to them at every point in their youth, and what sorts of things they end up wanting to do later on... and you'll find nothing more than tendencies with tons and tons of exceptions. People are just that complicated.
Glimpse into my trains of thought
2022/11/03
see a small fluffy dog
dog lifts leg to pee
I think "ok I guess that's a male dog"
think about why I had that thought
think about gender expectations
think about gendered bathrooms
think about the dog cafe I went to many years ago, where the men's bathroom was labeled "pointers" with a picture of a dog lifting a leg and women's bathroom was labeled "setters" with a dog squatting, and I found the pun clever but also in retrospect somewhat disturbing
Try to remember when that was, because I think letting dogs in restaurants (apart from necessary service animals) has been illegal for quite a long time now
Think about reasons why animals are generally not allowed in restaurants
Think "wait...which animal is actually the most likely to harm humans"
want to answer "humans, obviously" but then get distracted trying to define "harm" and thinking about the various types of harm people fear from animals
like biting. Humans are definitely NOT the most likely animal to bite humans. I'm pretty sure "mosquito" wins that one by orders of magnitude
or, disease. like,... which animal is the most proficient at spreading human diseases specifically?
first response I think of is, again, "humans obviously," but I dunno, mosquitoes are right up there too
I mean I'm probably not gonna get malaria without a mosquito bite
But I'm also probably not gonna get it unless I'm within mosquito distance of another human
does that mean I'd be catching it from the human, or the mosquito?
In any case, mosquitoes are probably the most harmful animal to humans right after other humans
but do the laws against animals in restaurants apply to mosquitoes? If I'm in a restaurant and I see a mosquito and report it to the wait staff, are they required by law to stop everything they're doing until they can get rid of the mosquito
THEY SHOULD
but they can't
they're never staffed well enough to have the time for that
world sucks
Animated, Corps.
2022/11/04
Corporations are not people, nor even really made of people...
they are mindless monsters that feed off the needs and drives and desires of billions of humans and yet express in their own actions only the worst of those.
They can soak up a billion small, understandable human sins -- the acceptance of a comfortably-paying but morally-dubious job, the buying of an unethically-made product when one could afford a more ethical one for a bit more cost and inconvenience--
to distill and condense that heap of little sins into atrocities exponentially worse than even the worst human could commit alone.
And they cannot be punished because who is at fault? Everyone, to some small degree. A few, to a much greater degree, but still nowhere near the enormity of what has been done.
The corporation not only corrupts, through power, any person attempting to control it, but refuses the control of even the most corrupt human masters.
Dogs
2022/11/03
No, dogs cannot sense evil in humans.
Dogs are, however, very good at perceiving many things about humans-- things about our appearance, our smell, our body language.
And when these things cause dogs to act aggressively toward people, it CAN be because the dogs notice something that reminds them of other people who have done bad things.
For instance, dogs are very good at telling when people are afraid. And this can cause dogs to get more aggressive, sometimes.
(The same is true of cops. And in both cases, fear isn't proof of guilt, no matter how much they might like to claim it is.)
If a person sees a dog and is afraid, it MIGHT be because the person has a history of being cruel to dogs and being attacked in self-defense. Or a history of breaking into homes and being attacked by guard dogs. Either, if true, would be a definite red flag about a person.
There might even be an actual correlation-- maybe if you did a study, the statistics might say that people who show fear in the presence of dogs are more likely to have records of burglary or animal abuse.
But even a real correlation would probably look like: "We did background checks on 100 people who fear dogs and 100 people who don't. In the unafraid group, 1 person had a criminal record. In the afraid group, 2 people did. Therefore, fear of dogs means you're twice as likely to be a criminal."
Maybe different numbers, but the same sort of ratio. Even assuming it was a valid, unbiased study. Small percentage either way, and the difference is small even if it's large in relation to the numbers.
The other 98 people who were afraid of dogs probably had a reason like "My neighbor had a territorial watchdog that was never leashed and kept chasing me, and this makes me cautious about all dogs I meet, and their aggressive response to it only keeps worsening my fear."
Fresh Spam from Portugal
2022/11/04
So a large amount of the spam email I get in is Portuguese, even though I do not speak Portuguese and have never been to a country that speaks it
I've always assumed this is a quirk of how the spamming industry works, like how a lot of it is (or claims to be) from Nigeria
Recently, though, I got a follower on Twitter whose display name is a real-sounding name, with the same very rare German surname as me
And this person posts only in Portuguese
From what I can tell, through Google Translate and my knowledge of other Romance languages, the posts are legitimate and mostly in tune with my own values... but I suppose it could still be some kind of spam tactic?
Or could it be that people with my last name are somehow just... very likely to speak Portuguese?
*uncomfortable thoughts about the proximity of Brazil to Argentina and the extreme Germanness of my surname*
Join My Faves Feed
2022/11/05
Calling independent artists, writers, makers, thinkers
If you have a webpage that
- is not on a major social media site
- doesn't have anti-iframe code in it
- updates sometimes
- is on a topic that you think may interest me
I'd like to follow you
It's part of a sort of experiment
I'm trying to build a multi-site feed
where I can follow different people on different platforms
and check up on them easily
without being on the algorithm-curated dashboard of a big social media site
(I kinda hoped I COULD include some people's individual pages where they post on big sites like Twitter)
(But turns out most of those have code that makes it not work)
(at least the way I'm trying to do it)
Basically I'm making a feed in very simple HTML, with each page of it containing:
- a bookmarked site embedded with iframe tags
- simple Previous and Next buttons to navigate to the other sites I've bookmarked
Here's what I've got so far
It's all I've managed to do with HTML
It would be pretty awesome if someone with more coding skills could expand on this idea
So far, following people this way has made my online experience (and my whole mental health) approximately 100 gazillion times better
But it needs a LOT of work
For instance, I've got 2 ways to do this
1. keep the HTML pages on my desktop, linking to each other in a folder, and use them only there
2. make them webpages on my site, where I can access them from any phone or computer, but have no way to make them private
These are both not ideal
It would be preferable for this to be a browser
or a browser extension
or a site that people can customize their own profiles on
Some similar things exist already (e.g. RSS feeds, and Petrolette)
but I haven't found quite what I'm looking for
I want it to work on different phone and desktop systems
and show whole pages as they appear normally, with just the Next button below
letting me browse through all my favorite sites one by one
as easily, lazily, mindlessly as I can doomscroll through Twitter or Facebook or whatever
but less doom and more happy
Also, as it stands, adding new bookmarks requires opening up a HTML editing program
Would be nice to have a way to automate that, at least
Still, this has made my browsing time more enjoyable than it's been since maybe 2004
And I want more fun people I can follow this way
And if anyone else wants to discuss the process & swap ideas, by all means, contact me
But I'll see your message sooner if you use one of the methods on the Comment page -- because I'm not on Twitter that much anymore (yay!)
More Website Surgery
2022/11/06
As I'm sure you can tell from that rainbow of thumbnails, I've spent the last couple weeks revamping the website again.
...Revamping is not the same as vamping, mind you. I add more blood than I take out.
Think intensive surgery. With transfusions.
In this case, the transfusions (and perhaps straight-up organ transplants) are from social media sites.
I've been meaning to do this for years, really. Yes, yes, sure, everyone's online presence these days is built around three or four social media giants that have eaten everything else. But powerful as they are, they've never been trustworthy places to keep the writing and art and personal history that I want to share with the world.
The big ones have been corrupt for a long time. They're overrun with trolls, ruled by unfair algorithms, likely to ignore reports of actual hate speech and death threats, equally likely to ban you for hate speech and death threats just for talking about the ones they ignored reports of.
No website on a scale that big was ever going to be ethical, or capable of enforcing its rules in any consistent way.
Yet... there's also something addictive about them. They keep leading me off track whenever I make responsible plans, luring me into months and years of posting my best essays and insights and jokes solely on a page I don't control-- even though I know that page can bury them in the algorithm, hide them from its own search function, even disable my whole account for no good reason if they wanted to.
But no more.
I'm gonna be in control from now on.
Now, I'm not outright leaving any of the social media sites I'm on. Like it or not, right now, they're still the only way to get real engagement with any online audience.
And I'm online for people to see me. That's the point, every time I make a public post anywhere. To be seen. I'm an artist, a crafter, a writer. I want my ideas to reach people. I am stubbornly, maybe unreasonably, tenaciously, fervently still hoping I can be seen enough to make a difference.
I'll still be posting on the major sites, unless they get so bad I genuinely can't stand even a minute on them.
But my posts, as much as possible, will link here, to posts on my own website.
I manage this site. I code every page in HTML, and I have backups of all of them. I feel safer here... or at least more in control of the things I create.
During this revamp, I've been going through old posts of mine on the big sites and consolidating them here, in the archives of my blog. I'm including links when relevant, to show where each thing was first posted, but my goal is to have as much of my online work as possible backed up and easily accessible here.
At the moment, I don't think it's feasible to put comment or discussion fields under the posts here. I crave comments as much as any artist, but these pages, sadly, aren't the place for them.
The safety of this site is its simplicity. Simple enough that I can understand how it works. Simple enough that very few big things can go wrong. Letting visitors add their own words will always make things... less simple.
But I still, of course, am a huge glutton for attention, and I'd absolutely love to keep interacting with lots of people who follow me online.
So, if you're also gravitating away from the big corporate sites and looking for smaller, more manageable social groups online, here are a few places you can find me. For now, the "comment" links on the posts will lead to a list of these. If you feel inclined to comment, by whatever method you prefer, please do.
Erika#5803 on Discord
Earthtoerika@writing.exchange on Mastodon
Or we can connect via My Faves Feed
Of course my profiles on the major social media sites are over at my Contact page, too, if you'd like to reach me that way.
Working With Nature
2022/11/20
First posted here on Twitter.
Lab-created gemstones-- chemically and physically identical to mined gemstones, but grown by people using technology-- are a more ethical purchase than natural stones, since they involve far less harm (to the enviroment, land, plants, animals, workers who mine them, families living in countries that are war zones because of the mining...)
And yet there's still a huge market for mined gemstones. And I do understand why.
There is a part of me that feels there's something about natural stones that isn't there with lab-created ones. The knowledge that a stone occurred naturally, by chance movements of rock and water inside the earth, feels uniquely special to me... even if the stone looks, feels, and IS, down to the atomic level, exactly like one that came from a lab.
But I placate that part of me, by pointing out to it that lab stones ARE works of nature, it's just collaborating with humans.
It's as if humanity said, "Hey nature! You know that thing where you make certain elements grow into pretty crystals under certain conditions? I think that's cool! But I noticed in the conditions you usually have, it takes thousands of years. Wanna team up?"
And nature was like "Sure! I'll provide the elements and the natural laws that make them grow, and you provide the environment that lets it happen faster. ...Yeah, I like this better than when you tear up whole mountains to dig up the ones that took me a thousand years to grow."
I don't find lab-grown stones cool in the exact same way as natural ones, but they are cool in their own different way. I still do feel that natural stones are special in a way of their own... but it's a way that can make me want to leave them where they are.
It's like how a wild-caught pet lizard and a captive-bred pet lizard are pretty much the same animal, grown from the same original material (a lizard egg) through similar but not identical processes (different habitats, but both with the correct temperature, humidity and nourishment to keep the lizard growing).
The wild lizard has its own special traits, and is fascinating in a way of its own. It's better off in the wild -- taking it away to be a pet would disrupt the lizard's life, as well as the ecosystem it lived in.
And since the other one was grown by humans... that actually makes it a better pet in many ways, as well as better for the environment. The analogy even goes down to the level of durability: Wild-caught pets have a high risk of health problems like parasites, and mined gemstones have a high risk of cracking because they're so much less likely to be flawless.
I love my captive-bred lizard, and I am learning to love gemstones made cooperatively by Nature and Science.
Is it?
2022/11/27
Today I want to discuss arguments about questions that follow the format "Is X Y?"
These can range from the trivial ("is a taco a sandwich?") to the incendiary ("is an embryo a person?") And they always seem to get bogged down in two things: 1. the emotional connections people have with specific words and 2. the attempt to come up with perfect definitions.
Definitions are not perfect. I don't just mean dictionary definitions (which often lag far behind actual current usage of a word). I mean definitions in general. It is almost always impossible to come up with a definition that includes ALL the things you consider to fit within the meaning of a word, without including anything else.
Words are not perfect. Like any tool, THEY ARE FLAWED. They cannot do exactly what you want them to, down to the tiniest detail.
But, as with other tools, they can still be useful. There's value in being able to talk about the sandwich you had for lunch, even if you don't have a definition of "sandwich" that would include everything you consider a sandwich and exclude everything that you don't.
So, whenever a question comes up about whether X is Y, I try to start with some questions about the usefulness of the words.
1. Is it helpful to use different words for X and Y? If so, in what circumstances?
2. Is it helpful to use the same word for X and Y? If so, in what circumstances?
3. Could it be helpful to introduce a different word to replace or to augment one of them, or to describe a category they both fit in?
4. Do I have strong feelings about either of the words in question? If so, why? Are those feelings relevant here? How should they inform my opinion on all of these questions?
Take one example that gets a lot of debate online lately: "Does listening to an audiobook count as reading a book?"
In addressing Question 1, here, we acknowledge first that, obviously, no one's asking if those terms are synonyms. They can't be used interchangeably everywhere. Those who answer "yes" are saying that sometimes, when talking about audiobooks, they would use the word "reading" in place of "listening." They are not saying they'd do the reverse and use "listening" to describe reading a printed book. The argument is about nested categories: whether the activity of "listening to audiobooks" fits within the category of "reading books."
So, aside from talking about the wider and narrower categories-- in what other settings is it helpful to use the same word, or helpful to use different words?
There certainly are some circumstances where you need different ones. For example, when you say that your children have "learned to read," it's important to specify whether you mean "they can understand the content of a printed book on their own," or "they are able to hear and understand a story being read to them." The specific skill of visual reading (or Braille reading, which I would put in the same category) sometimes does need to be discussed on its own.
There are also circumstances where using different words is unnecessary, and would in fact come across as silly and pedantic. For example, if I say "I don't want to watch a movie when I've already read the book," it doesn't matter AT ALL whether I read the book visually or by listening to a recording. The words of the book were the same either way, and created the same experience in my mind.
It doesn't affect the ways it will contrast with the movie. The movie will NOT be the same, even in the most faithful adaptation. And the fact that I know what happens in the book is going to keep throwing me out of the movie experience, so I don't want to watch it... and that's true no matter how I got the book into my head.
The same applies to any statement about the effects of having read a book and knowing its contents:
"People who have read that book are my kindred spirits."
"If you read that novel and thought the narrator was the good guy, I don't trust you."
"You can't claim to have an opinion on that if you haven't even read the book."
In any of those statements, it's valuable to use the same word for both visual and audiobook experiences. The way the book was read doesn't change the meaning of any of those sentences, and replacing "read" with "read or listened to" would just make the sentence clunky and harder to parse.
So far, I'm leaning toward the conclusion that there isn't a simple "yes" or "no" answer to "is listening to audiobooks reading." It's a question of the usefulness of words. There are cases where it's important to use different words for those things, and cases where it isn't.
(Can it help to use an additional word in some circumstances? Perhaps. As I've been writing this, I notice I've fallen into a pattern of using "reading" for the general category, and "visual reading" and "listening to audiobooks" to specify the narrower categories. Some people might prefer to use a different general category name, like "experiencing literature," with "reading" and "listening to audiobooks" as the specific categories. Others might keep the general "reading" category, and label the ones within it using adjectives: "visual reading" and "audio reading." I don't know what the best option is.)
Besides the contexts where it clearly matters or doesn't matter, there are situations where it's a hot debate whether the format of reading makes any difference. When discussing ideas like "reading is good for your mind," or "avid readers are the best people," there can be vicious arguments over whether the statement holds equally true for print books and audiobooks.
This argument appears when people boast of how many books they've read, or when their online bio includes the word "reader." If any of their reading was done by audio, this gets used, sometimes, to challenge the status they have claimed.
The argument seems to come up when talking about reading as a virtue.
So, it's fair to say that when this debate becomes complicated by emotion, it's a strong, reverential, positive emotion about the word "reading."
We've been raised to think of reading as something admirable, a virtue that everyone ought to have, a skill that means you're a better and smarter person if you're good at it-- and that strengthens our feelings about what should and should not be included in the category.
On the "no" side, there's a feeling of resentment based on the idea that listening to an audiobook is easier. The feeling is that if audiobook listeners can be considered readers, it devalues the work that visual readers put into building and using that skill.
This argument doesn't make much sense to me personally, because I find visual reading much, much easier than listening to audio. My mind wanders and jumps around. It's far less trouble to skim my eyes back over a paragraph I didn't quite absorb, than to rewind and replay the words that my ears missed.
And even if visual reading is hard for you, why resent others for doing something that's easy for them and also calling it "reading"? What would that take away from you? How would excluding them from the word "reading" help you? Would you do the same to me because of the fact that I find visual reading easy?
It's a feeling rooted in those reverential associations with reading, in which "reader" is a lofty title that you achieved through hard work, and you respect those who do it easily, but not those who do it differently (in kind of the same way that self-made millionaires respect those who were born millionaires, while looking down on those who need financial help to get by at all).
But if we didn't assign all those lofty associations to reading, we could just have fun reading side by side with everyone else who takes in their books differently, and not care what it's called.
This reverence for reading also affects the "yes" side. There, we find the argument that excluding audiobooks feels like an insult to disabled people for whom that is the only way to access books.
If that activity is excluded from the category of "reading," it implies that those disabled people can never be considered able to read. And since being literate is so very strongly associated, in our emotions, with being intelligent and virtuous-- of course this comes across as an insult.
This is somewhat more relatable to me, perhaps due to my alignment with the disabled community. I know people (including my awesome dyslexic roommate) who can absorb a firehose of knowledge when it's in audio form, but struggle hard with any other format. Why shouldn't his knowledge count just as much as knowledge I got from books?
Yet, again, that wouldn't be an issue if we didn't put the word "reading" on such a pedestal. If "he doesn't read" weren't so apt to be taken as an insult, we could talk about my reading and my roommate's audio listening, and the minds we've both built in those ways, and we could view those experiences as equal without ever having to use the same word for them. The statements "he doesn't read" and "he's a fantastic person with tons of knowledge and skills" could coexist in peace.
That's the goal I'm hoping for.
Will and Self-Image
2022/12/03
First posted here on Tumblr.
I've come to a realization that, if I believed in free will (in the way that other people seem to define it)... I would have extraordinarily low self-esteem.
If I looked back on every flawed decision I've made and truly believed I COULD have made the better one, I WOULD be "beating myself up," every moment of my life.
But what I actually believe is that... every choice I've ever made was the only one I was capable of making at that time, with the mindset I had in that moment.
I can absolutely feel BAD about those choices. I can recognize how flawed my previous mindset was, and how I want to never, ever be in that mindset again. But these feelings are focused on the future, on learning from the flawed mindsets of my past and developing better ones for later choices.
And some people see that and think, "but that means you do believe you have free will, right? You know you can shape your future. You don't assume it's predestined."
But all it really means is, I don't assume it's predestined to be horrible.
I don't know my future. If it is predestined, I hope it's good. And if it is good, the chain of events that leads to it being good is gonna include plenty of my own actions.
I absolutely believe I can affect the future, and that my past self affected my present. I just don't believe that my actions in doing that are somehow independent of the web of cause and effect that goes back to the beginning of the universe.
The only scientific reasons to suspect that the universe isn't deterministic are based on the behavior of subatomic particles. Basically, other people's idea of free will seems to assume that human minds act like those subatomic particles.
But the "elect" in words related to choice is only distantly related to the root of "electron."
I hope the mindset I'm in now is the right one for making my current actions the best they can be. And if I look back later and realize otherwise, I'll adapt, and try to maximize the quality of all the choices I get to make from then on.
But I will not assign powers beyond natural law to my capacity for choice. Because that's the path to nothing but self-hatred, later on, when my capacity for choice fails to act like it's supernaturally powerful.
I'm a person, not a particle. This makes me both more complex and less incomprehensible. And that's a good thing.
Gethenian Preconceptions
2022/12/18
First posted here on Tumblr.
I love a lot of things about Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, but here's one that stands out to me, though I haven't seen it talked about much.
It's the message that... your gut feelings about people are not 100% accurate.
Early in the book, the narrator, Genly Ai, has several interactions with the native people of the planet, the androgynous Gethenians, in which he gets persistent feelings that they're "dishonest" or "deceptive."
In almost any other book, in any genre, this would be clear foreshadowing of a betrayal. And this book takes place in a world where psychic powers like telepathy are explicitly said to exist-- the narrator himself has some minor abilities in that field. It would have been so easy to imply that his gut feeling of distrust would be absolute proof of real deviousness in another person's mind.
But what Le Guin did here, instead, is remarkable. Later on, in a quiet scene of contemplation, the narrator acknowledges to himself that these feelings probably come from his own preconceptions, having been raised on a world with clear gender roles.
He realizes that he unconsciously expects everyone to act like either a man or a woman (according to his ingrained sense of what that means). And the Gethenians don't have genders in any human sense, so their behavior is somehow neither and somehow both. Since his mind doesn't read this as an honest presentation of either masculinity or femininity, his feelings label it as a dishonest presentation that's hiding some secret from him.
There isn't even any plot-driven epiphany that causes him to have this realization. It just comes along naturally, once he's had the time to give it more thought.
That was especially meaningful to me. That feels like a clear message we don't often hear: Those thoughts are important to have. It's valuable to examine your biases and the feelings that come from them, even if there isn't some sudden event that forces you to examine them.
You have biases, even if you've tried very hard not to. There doesn't have to be shame in admitting it. There's just a responsibility to try and prevent those feelings from having too much influence on your actions.
And once he does think of it, that's what Genly Ai does: he's able to let go of the feeling to some degree, limiting its effect on the dealings he has with the Gethenians.
As the story progresses, of course some of the people he meets turn out to be hostile, and others turn out to be friendly. But these revelations are unconnected to which people he had suspicious gut feelings about. There's never any indication that those feelings were based on anything more than the unconscious prejudices he recognized in himself.
If more fiction portrayed gut feelings in this way-- instead of the unwritten law that they have to turn out to be True Premonitions later on, like Chekhov's Gun getting fired in the next act-- how much more self-examination and empathy and understanding could we have in this world?
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