timothytrig

[timothytrig]

musk is going to die in a Tesla explosion in 6 months after sticking his nose where it doesn't belong and we will never get a conclusive answer on whether it was a CIA car bomb or just a normal Tesla malfunction

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Was Prester John Buddhist?

Wikipedia's article on Cathay has an interesting aside giving a potential origin for the Prester John myths. While Christian and Buddhist theology are extremely different, their worship (with chanting and lavishly decorated statues) looks a bit similar, especially to the untrained Muslim eye, unfamiliar with both religions. And therefore Muslim travellers may have told the Christian West of a rich Christian kingdom to their East.

Interesting idea. I don't know whether there's any solid evidence to support it.

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But they'd still have magic; humans always do.

a pet peeve of mine in fantasy is when they talk about the Magic(tm) like studying the magic, having the magic, or like, supernatural powers but where everyone has superpowers in that civilization. and. and.

elves wouldn't say "we have superior vision", they'd say "yeah humans are practically blind".

in my pocket i have a piece of metal with a little window that is powered by the energy of running water and that contains all the information in the world

and we call that a cell phone. i play project makeover on mine.

any animal would call that Magic(tm). be we don't. because it's not magic for us.

do you get me?

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“How good one feels when one is full ― how satisfied with ourselves and with the world! People who have tried it, tell me that a clear conscience makes you very happy and contented; but a full stomach does the business quite as well, and is cheaper, and more easily obtained. One feels so forgiving and generous after a substantial and well-digested meal ― so noble-minded, so kindly-hearted.”

― Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat

It's easy to think "nobody in the whole wide world cares about me" on an empty stomach but try doing it while eating Vegetables and Rice. Seems less convincing now doesn't it? That's simply the power of Vegetables and Rice..

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I was worried about how TaskMaster, a game show famous for its physical and timed challenges, would adapt to having a contestant with Cerebral Paley

Would Rosie get extra time? Would the challenges be adapted for only her? Would it be patronising?

Absolute mad props for episode 1 having a challenge be "throw these balls at these cans, closest to knocking over 100 cans wins"

Gold star, bafta nomination editing for showing Rosie absolutely sucking at the task, knocking 47 cans over, immediately followed by the other 4 contestants doing equally poorly or accidentally getting themselves disqualified because actually that's a hard task for most people

She came 2nd

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It occasionally occurs to me that while "not all men" is usually an annoying distraction from a valid point, it's also a true statement. And just occasionally it's a relevant statement. And dismissing it out of hand is a genuine problem in some cases.

Patriarchy has a weird mix of positive and negative effects for people of all genders. On the whole it benefits men more than women (hence the name), but plenty of men are in pretty bad places with not a lot of hope.

And some online spaces are actively hostile to men, which is (a) counterproductive, and (b) just not nice. Be nice. Being nice is important.

(I'm saying this as a guy who has not myself ever born the brunt of misandronic bullying. I've just seen it happen once or twice.)

I couldn't have said it better myself.

[timothytrig]

I've started so I'll finish ....

Mastermind's insistence on calling its contestants "contenders" is strangely charming.

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The fact that you can’t raise taxes on billionaires even slightly without them pouring money into fascist political movements is, of itself, evidence that billionaires as a class shouldn’t be allowed to exist in the first place.

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See Terry Pratchett for a good example of this. And not just the Tiffany Aching books. The Bromiliad, Carpet People, and Johnny Maxwell books are also excellent, and Nation is perhaps his masterpiece.

A story or piece of media being for children necessarily affects the tone, content, subject matter, and approachability of it (and a bunch of other stuff I can't recall right now).

It does not necessarily affect its writing quality. A story being for children is not an excuse for it being bad. Kids deserve good stories, too.

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I am a truly terrible archer, and I kind of love it.

A lot of people, especially adults, are put off trying things out of fear of failing. Learning to accept and even enjoy being bad at things can often be the first step in a new passion.

For what it’s worth, I wasn’t one of those people who picked up a bow and was a natural from the start. I had overly mobile elbows, and my dominant eye and hand don’t match up. But that lack of expectation meant that I was able to do it the way I enjoyed it, without worrying about scores or results. And over time, enjoyment turned into passion, and I like to think I’ve developed some amount of skill.

But even if I was terrible at it, I’d still be doing this, because I love it!

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I know that this is good advice, but I am terrible at following it.

You’ve heard of “don’t monetize your hobbies”; get ready for "don’t master your hobbies".

Your hobbies are here to help you decompress and have fun. They do not have to be disciplines you toil over for expertise, unless that is something you genuinely enjoy doing.

It’s okay to enjoy language-learning without ever becoming fluent, or even conversational. It’s okay to like playing guitar even if you only know a few clumsy songs. You can read books and never finish them, bowl without ever scoring even halfway to perfect. We’re here to explore and play, and we cannot do that if we’re chasing perfection in everything we do.

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I don't do parasocial relationships

It occurs to me that I think I've watched damn near every single Tom Scott video on YouTube, and subscribed to his podcast. I've been following his career for almost a decade. And I still know almost nothing about the man.

And I kind of love that.

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This feels like important information.

Fun fact for tomblr: the entirety of the tech diff reverse trivia podcast fits on a 512 mb iPod shuffle.

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I know the horse race story from somewhere. Was it in the Book of Heroic Failures?

Lateral Highlight (105): A disastrous horse race

Sabrina Cruz, Melissa Fernandes and Taha Khan from 'Answer in Progress' discuss a question about some hokey horses.

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Irish Sign Language, Irish, Greek, and 3C2 of Mandarin, Japanese, and Russian, I think. Those last mostly for classic literature purposes.

If you could instantly be granted fluency in 5 languages—not taking away your existing language proficiency in any way, solely a gain—what 5 would you choose?

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To be honest, I imagine that Frodo was punctilious about calling him Elessar Telcontar, even while all the other hobbits still called him Strider.

Friendly reminder that Frodo named his pony Strider when he got back to the Shire. Friendly reminder that all the hobbits continued to call Aragorn “Strider” (at least on occasion) even after his coronation. Friendly reminder that Aragorn said that the name meant so much to him that he was going to make it his family name. Friendly reminder that the hobbits and Aragorn considered themselves close friends, even with everything going on. Friendly reminder that Merry and Pippin are buried with Aragorn.

[timothytrig]

Discord is certainly more predictable than Facebook about showing us stuff, but (as with any chat platform) stuff we actually want to see gets buried under off-topic chat. I don't know about you, but when I see 20 unread messages, I get anxious about it. I can't look until I have time to read it properly, because if I just glance at it, the notification is gone and I''ll forget about it. So I put it off. And then there are 80 unread messages, then 120, and now I'm really anxious. Yes, Facebook does the same, but I'm resigned to missing stuff there anyway.

Also, SCA Discord, in my experience, tends to have an over-the-top number of separate channels. In theory, this mitigates the earlier problem, as we can mute the channels which don't interest us, but it can also make it worse if people aren't disciplined about where they post stuff (and we shouldn't expect them to be so disciplined: that's unnatural).

(The above is for SCA group Discord servers; SCA event Discord servers are considerably worse, as they always have multiple separate "just chat" channels, for no discernible purpose. Yes, this mimics the offline space, where one group chats in the kitchen and another chats outside a tent, but online space isn't quite the same. To be honest, I tend to ignore the event-specific servers.)

In short, people are messy. So is Tumblr. This is a reblog with additional text, even though it really should be a reply, because Tumblr sometimes allows replies and sometimes doesn't, and is essentially blogging but with far more confusing navigation.

It could be worse. My Toastmasters groups all use WhatsApp.

SCA Social Media

Aside from being a cooking nerd, I'm also very interested in communications and information flow. It would be reasonable to say that inasmuch as a Pelican is awarded for any one thing, I got mine in comms and diplomacy. (Or at least, I assume so; I don't have visibility on the discussions the Pelican circle had about me pre-elevation.) I'm also Drachenwald's social media minister.

There's a thing I see cropping up recently among Facebook users in the various social media: a strongly stated dislike of Discord. For context, there's a shift underway in Drachenwald for the bulk of day to day communications, from Facebook to Discord. Discord has a wide range of technical advantages over Facebook, and it's more used by the younger generations who are (gradually) taking over running things from the older folks. But there are many people who will happily state that they hate Discord.

I don't like Facebook, myself. It was a decent enough medium in about 2014; it has gotten worse in every measurable way since (except shareholder value, of course). It's particularly useless for trying to get information to people; every part of it is governed by an algorithm that selects what to show on any given screen, based mostly on what will annoy them most (annoyance leads to more time spent looking at the screen than any other emotion, ergo more time looking at ads, ergo more money for Meta).

Discord (at present; I make zero long-term predictions, and fully expect it to start getting worse at some point) has no such issues - the information flow on it is under the control of the server admin, pretty much, and it's searchable and categorisable as needed. Also, I just like the feel of Discord more; it's a lot more like a real conversation than Facebook's shouting-across-the-corporate-lobby atmosphere.

But this dislike of the new medium isn't new. Humans, for all we're supposed to like novelty, dislike change. I wrote as a comment in one of the discussions on Facebook:

"Facebook was massively polarising when it first started, because it was "taking over" from discussion lists. Discussion lists were massively polarising when they first started because they were taking over (assume scare quotes from here on) from newsgroups and phone trees. Phone trees and newsgroups were absolutely HATED when they started, taking over from paper newsletters (some of which were from before printing and photocopying was a thing, and were produced by mimeographic printing). If I dig around, I can find things written by Crusty Old Peers at each stage of this maintaining that the New Thing Will Destroy The SCA."

And you can extend that beyond the SCA right back to Plato complaining that the written word will prevent people from learning properly as they did in oral traditions.

My current position on this is that we should be using our websites - which are the one medium we actually "own", generally - as the source of actual information. We can then link to that from anywhere else on the internet, social or not. And the conversations can fall where they may, for each branch and household and other grouping, because honestly, that's how it's always been. If people don't like Discord, they don't have to use it, and it's only us unfortunate comms people who have to use all the different media.

(I recognise the irony of posting this on Another Social Medium. But Tumblr behaves more like a website for publication purposes, and comes with many of the advantages for getting information to people - RSS feeds, deep linking, etc.)

I'm also going to teach some classes on how to actually use Discord, I think. I've been steeped in talkers, IRC, and other channel-and-text media as long as I've been online, which is closing on 30 years now, so there are almost certainly aspects of functionality there that I take for granted and which are not evident to people unused to it. Or they're expecting it to work the same way as Facebook does, and don't have the technical experience to jump to a different medium. Either way, a start-with-the-basics actual-demonstration of how to use it is almost certainly useful.