thunderfarmboy

[thunderfarmboy]

Woah mama just reminding my followers that TERF ideology is fundamentally evil and not welcome anywhere near my blog hummina hummina hummina

[thunderfarmboy]

each year congress people should be required to go on a field trip where they each get dumped in the middle of a random u.s. town & handed a phone with google maps & forced to find their way back to washington solely through the use of local public transportation systems.

to be clear i don't think this would improve our political reality in any way, but it would be fun to watch

[thunderfarmboy]

Time will pass regardless of how you spend it.

[thunderfarmboy]

i love that salt and pepper come in a set. here is salt, a building block of humanity, one of the basic human tastes, essential to life on earth, absolutely fundamental.

and here's pepper. it's fine.

[thunderfarmboy]

this pride month will be the tenth anniversary of same-sex marriage being legal in all 50 states ;-;

[thunderfarmboy]

[thunderfarmboy]

[thunderfarmboy]

Not to be a technical writer on main, but I've been bumping into the idea lately that the only reason explaining yourself in more detail never seems to work is because neurotypical people are misunderstanding you on purpose, or because they have short attention spans, or because they just hate listening to you talk – and sure, occasionally that's even true, but most of the time the problem you're running into is more fundamental.

Every time you add more detail, you're running the risk of tripping over a bad assumption on your part about the listener's prior knowledge, or hitting the tipping point where they become overwhelmed with new information (and remember that you don't know which parts of what you're saying will be new information for them), or making a leap of logic that isn't as self-evident as you think it is, or any of a dozen other potential snags which, by definition, you will not see coming until it's too late to correct course.

Basically, every piece of information you add multiplies the odds of you getting blindsided by some vector of misunderstanding you didn't anticipate, even as it addresses the ones you did anticipate. The point of diminishing returns where continuing to elaborate increases the odds of unexpected miscommunication more than it decreases the odds of expected miscommunication is much nearer than you'd like.

The most effective act of communication is not the one which contains the most possible information, but the one which contains the smallest amount of information it possibly can while still getting its point across. It sucks, but it's the reality of the situation. People far more autistic than you have been trying for hundreds of years to invent a way of communicating which doesn't work this way, without success.

All of which is to say that "getting to the damn point" is legitimately a communication skill, not just an accommodation for people who aren't paying attention. If it's any consolation, it's something neurotypical people struggle with just as much as anyone else – if it was easy, technical writers wouldn't have jobs!

[thunderfarmboy]

Empty Kingdom by Fuke

[thunderfarmboy]

things designed to become more beautiful with wear>>>>

[thunderfarmboy]

when your stomach is really mad at you and you're not sure which one of your fourteen unhealthy lifestyle choices is causing it

[thunderfarmboy]

firm believe that not everything happens for a reason, sometimes things are just cruel. and they shouldn’t have happened and it’s not supposed to be a lesson because we never deserved such thing.

[thunderfarmboy]

i don’t need a “day off” or a “weekend” i need to respawn in a clean apartment with all my responsibilities reset and the complete certainty that nobody hates me

[thunderfarmboy]

[thunderfarmboy]

– Frans de Waal’s The Bonobo and the Atheist

[thunderfarmboy]

[thunderfarmboy]