Wizard duels in Harry Potter have nothing on this epic battle between Price and Karloff in the classic Roger Corman film of "The Raven," from 1963. Cinematic quality nevermore.
The simplicity helped, especially if you came from the Java, XML, Enterprise world. It was also marketed incredibly well. But that’s not everything.
A lot of Rails’ success in the startup world came from a simple fact: The problems businesses have aren’t that unique. Rails was great at creating CRUD sites, while remaining flexible. And that’s really all a ton of businesses need. Especially at the beginning.
But this isn’t just true for businesses. A lot of the problems we face as software developers don’t change. Sure, our solutions evolve. They cycle. We get better. But the same solutions discovered by the last generation of developers can still help us today.
So, do you want to know the answers to the problems you’ll face in the future? The best thing you can do is look to the past.
Avdi Grimm told me that “If you want to lead the technology curve, start investigating whatever Martin Fowler was writing about a decade ago.” That’s totally true. The time you spend reading through the patterns on his website will be a great investment in your programming future. And that’s not even mentioning the refactoring patterns.
Going further, just about any book or article written by the authors of the Agile Manifesto is worth reading – 15 years ago, they were working through the same software architecture problems we run into today.
You can find a lot of their discussions on the C2 Wiki. The debates we have about when TDD makes the most sense? They’re all there. And they’ve been there. The wiki has been around for a while, and it’s still a fantastic resource.
Just like design fashions, software development practices cycle. From distributed to centralized, from client side to server side, from dynamic to static.
Do you want to get ahead, understand what’s coming, and maybe even drive what comes next? Look to the past. Research the solutions to the problems that our current solutions will cause. And help bring the good practices of the last generation of software developers to the next.
Imagine a pair of boots. A sturdy, well-made, kind of nondescript pair of boots. They are functional enough, but kind of plain. Imagine that you live in a country where every citizen is issued this one pair of boots at birth, and that there are no other footwear options permitted by law. If you grow out of or wear through the soles of these government-issued boots, you may trade them in for a new pair, always identical to your old ones. Imagine that everyone you know wears these very same boots without question or complaint. Now imagine that your right foot is two sizes bigger than your left one. No matter what you do, one boot will chafe, and the other will slip, and both will cause blisters. When you mention your discomfort you are told that odd-sized boots are forbidden, because they cause confusion and excess paperwork. It is explained to you that this footwear system works perfectly for everyone else, and reminded that there are people in other countries who have no boots at all. You are beat up in grade three because none of the other kids have ever seen feet like yours. The teacher tells you that you should probably just learn to keep your boots on. Your parents blame each other. You end up wearing an extra sock on your small foot to compensate, and never go to swimming pools. Your feet sweat profusely in the summer and you always undress in the dark. You hate your feet but need them to walk and stand up on. You hate your boots even more. You dream of things that look like sandals and moccasins, but you have no words for them. You learn things will be easier for you if you just never talk about your feet. One time on the bus, you spot a guy with the exact same limp as you, but you pretend not to see him. He watches you limp off at your bus stop and then looks the other way. You can’t stop thinking about the man with the limp for weeks. You are nineteen years old and until that day on the bus you thought you were the only person in the country who couldn’t fit into their boots. I have always felt this way about gender pronouns, that “she” pinches a little and “he” slips off me too easily. I’m often asked by well-intentioned people which pronoun I prefer, and I always say the same thing: that I don’t really have a preference, that neither pronoun really fits, but thank you for asking, all the same. Then I tell them they can call it like they see it, or mix it up a little if they wish. Or, they can try to avoid using he or she altogether. I suggest this even though I am fully aware of the fact it is almost impossible to talk about anything other than yourself or inanimate objects without using a gender specific pronoun. It is especially hard at gigs, when the poor host has to get up and introduce me to the audience. No matter which pronoun the host goes with, there is always someone cringing in the crowd, convinced an uncomfortable mistake has just been made. I know it would be easier if I just picked a pronoun and stuck with it, but that would be a compromise made for the comfort of everyone else but me. A decision that would inevitably leave me with a blister, or even a nasty rash. Perfect strangers have been asking me if I am a boy or a girl as far back as I can remember. Not all of them are polite about it. Some are just curious, others ask me like they have every right to know, as if my ambiguity is a personal insult to their otherwise completely understandable reality. Few of them seem to realize they have just interrupted my day to demand I give someone I don’t know personal information they don’t really need to sell me a movie ticket or a newspaper. I have learned the hard way to just answer the question politely, so they don’t think I’m rude. In my braver days, when someone asked if I was a boy or a girl, I would say something flip and witty, like “yes” or “no” or “makes you wonder, doesn’t it?,” but I found this type of tactic greatly increased the chances I would get the living shit kicked out of me, so I eventually knocked it off. Then I went through a phase where I would answer calmly, and then casually ask them something equally as personal, such as did they have chest hair or were they satisfied with the size of their penis or were those their real breasts, just so they would see how it felt, but this proved just as ineffective. A couple months ago, as I was smoking outside the Anza Club after a gig, this young guy marched up and interrupted the person I was talking with to ask me if I was a man or a woman. I told him I was a primarily estrogen-based organism, and then I asked him the exact same question. He took two steps back and dropped his jaw. “I’m a man.” He seemed visibly shaken by the thought of any other option. “And were you just born male?” I continued, winking at my companion. “Well, yeah, of course I was.” “How interesting.” I lit another smoke. “Hard to tell these days,” my friend chimed in. The guy walked off, looking confused and kind of vulnerable. “He’s gone home to grow a moustache,” my buddy said, then laughed and shook his head. I thought about it later, how the guy’s ego had crumpled right in front of us, just because a stranger had questioned his masculinity. How scared he was of not being a real man, how easy it had been to take him down. It dawned on me that if you’ve never had a blister, then you’ll never have a callous, either. And if your soles are too soft, then you are fucked if you ever lose your boots.”
It wouldn’t be a new version of Windows without at least a few entirely bewildering decisions on Microsoft’s part, but this one’s a high speed collision of face and palm even by the standards of the company behind Windows 8. In a nutshell, there’s this feature in Windows 10 which will automatically share your wifi passwords with any and all Outlook, Skype and Facebook contacts who also use Win 10. Or, were they to manually enter your password into their Win 10 device, it would by default be treated as ‘their’ network and shared with their contacts. In other words, be vigilant – otherwise you’ll end up with Kevin Bacon using your internet connection whenever he wardrives past your house.
… [visit site to read more]
I cancan't wait to have every rough draft sold as a newly discovered masterpiece =/
The first original Dr. Seuss book to be published in 25 years, "What Pet Should I Get?," is finally out today! Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, wrote the book sometime between 1958 and 1962 and his wife, Audrey Geisel, found the text and drawings in a pile shortly after he died in 1991.
There are more unpublished books from that stash to come! The new story stars the delightful brother and sister from "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish."
“I train pretty seriously in mixed martial arts (MMA) … I have a lot of complicated gender feelings that I’m dealing with by trying to turn my body into a weapon.“
i am going as quickly as i can in the opposite direction of this profile
KIRK: I’m not interested in your excuses, Lieutenant.Re-establish contact with that transmitter.
UHURA: I’m afraid that’s impossible at the moment, Captain. They stopped broadcasting immediately. They do not acknowledge my contact signal.
KIRK: Keep trying to raise them..
UHURA: Yes, sir.
Can I say I absolutely love the steeliness in Uhura’s voice and body when she stands up to Kirk’s arrogant demanding belittling attitude?
It’s little moments like this that keep me coming back to Star Trek, and particularly the original series. There’s all these tiny things that people miss, that are really cool.
(Such as the line Uhura ad libbed when Sulu (while intoxicated by some kind of thing that was never fully explained in The Naked Time) grabbed her and called her a “fair maiden” – she said “Sorry, neither” and pushed away as hard as she could. Apparently they could get away with leaving stuff like that in if it was ad libbed, but not if it was in the script.)
Oh if it’s not obvious, Uhura has always been my favorite character in the original Star Trek or any Star Trek for that matter, ever since I was a little kid. I used to study languages because of her, I thought I wanted to be a communications officer like her and that a communications officer would have to be good at foreign languages. Unfortunately I sucked (and continue to suck) at most aspects of foreign languages, but it didn’t stop me from trying over and over again to learn them. Unfortunately my abilities with languages were and remain too uneven to achieve fluency in anything but English, although I have the ability to read some amount of languages I’ve never even seen before, because of my ability to make connections between word roots and things like that. But again, not enough for fluency – I have a couple of amazing language skills in a couple of isolated areas, but mostly a lot of terrible ones. I would not be able to do her job for so many different reasons, but there was a time I sure wanted to.
Oh and these screenshots are from Operation: Annihilate (season 1 episode 30). And I still totally love her standing up to him when he’s being a jerk. I notice she always pushes back. I also notice that even in scenes and entire episodes where she has no lines, she’s always there in the background, acting as much as she can, reacting to everything around her, refusing to just be stuck in a corner even if that’s what the script would rather her do. And I love it.
When I had a Star Trek poster in my room, I made sure it had her on it. I didn’t care who else was on it. I’ve recently ordered myself an Uhura figurine to stick next to my Fiona (from Shrek) figurine as characters I really, really like and look up to. Sometimes little objects like that are more meaningful than they look, even if they were created as toys or merchandise for someone to make money off of fans.
There was a discussion on a poly list I’m a member of recently in which a person had some issues with communication and the expectations surrounding it. Through talking things out on this list, the person was able to get at the issue that were troublesome and then was able to decide what to do about it.
That was cool and nice to see.
However, it got me to thinking about communication in general and what expectations surround it.
Every year, my family, or some large part of it, gets together to hang out at the beach for a week. We’ve been doing it my entire life and it’s a happy ritual we enjoy. There’s usually a dozen (and often more!) of us who are hanging out, so I suppose it’s reasonable to suppose not everyone does everything at the same time, right? I mean, we get together for meals, but maybe someone wants to go out and visit junk stores, while others want to go clubbing, and others might want a stroll on the beach in the moonlight.
Now, I’m in my mid forties. If I wanna go clubbing, no, I do not need to ask permission from my parents, and they aren’t disrespectful enough to ask for it. I do tell them I’m going out and when they can reasonably expect me back. This isn’t a keeping tabs thing. It’s just courtesy because, like, they care that I’m okay.
For that matter, my son is in his twenties. Same-same.
I bring this up as a parent-child thing, because I notice that many people seem to think that there’s some sort of power dynamic going on when people want expectations set. There is a resistance to being “kept track of” that I think is possibly a misinterpretation of how healthy adult relationships work. Yes, this is a non-romantic example. Moreover, that’s the point.
A good litmus test for the reasonableness of an expectation of communication is to dip it in the “intimate, but non-romantic” solution. Is there something analogous that you can compare it to in the non-romantic world and what does it look like?
Let’s go with the “Who did you spend time with?” question. That comes up a lot in poly relationships with some feeling that the question is intrusive, and others that feel like that not volunteering it is an attempt to evade communication.
So, let’s look at this from a non-romantic situation.
I go to the beach with my extended family and my husband and I decide to out dancing. While we’re there we meet up with a cousin of mine I haven’t seen in a long time* and we are out until four in the morning catching up. We get back to the condo and when we get up the next morning, what do I say to my family?
In the general course of things, of course I volunteer that to the rest of my family. I’m not particularly a night owl, so being out that late would be out of character and people would certainly be curious about the reason. The only reason I wouldn’t> volunteer who I’d been out with would indeed be an attempt to conceal something! Maybe said cousin was in AA, so what the heck is she doing in a bar on the Oceanfront, and why was I drinking with her? See where I am going with this? One doesn’t generally neglect to mention encountering people within relationship webs unless there’s a specific reason not to. It often can look like concealment if there is any history of that within the relationship.
On the other hand, were I, as a middle-aged woman, to come home at four in the morning to find my father sitting in the living room scowling and tapping his watch to scold me for what time I’d had the gall to come home, there’d be trouble, too. “I was worried. In the future, if you’re going to be that late, don’t worry about waking me. Just call so I don’t get scared when I wake up and you’re not back yet,” would be reasonable between adults. A scolding? That’d be out of line.
Maybe the parent-adult child dynamic won’t work as an analogy for some of you because that’s not a healthy relationship. So, I’d ask, what non-romantic intimate relationships do you have and what does communication look like with those. That can be a guide to the principles of what you’d need to volunteer or not. Yes, I know you probably don’t volunteer sex details in these relationships, but you do volunteer what affects them or what you know is of interest to them, yes? Same thing in romantic relationships.
__________
* I have a lot of cousins and we were all born within fifty miles of each other. This wouldn’t actually be all that improbable.
Men dominate women in jobs related to technology, engineering, and math — at a ratio of roughly four to one.
But psychologists now understand that this may happen (in part) because boys are often pushed toward these fields when girls are not. This systemic behavior occurs in the classroom and beyond.
I mean this is good that this information is getting out there but is it just me or does this feel like “oh hey we’ve used objective science to verify that this thing feminists have claimed is worth paying attention to, go us!”
I mean maybe it’s just because of bad experiences but I can’t help but think of slatestarcodex/slatestarscratchpad/Scott Alexander talking about the “30% of sane feminists” when I see stuff about cognitive biases applied to shit that feminists have been saying for years–like we’ll begrudgingly accept that maybe you have a point only if it fits our particular standard of Rationality.
Also people please stop fucking reblogging fucking slatestarcodex jesus christ almighty I swear
Last week’s post covered a great deal of ground—not surprising, really, for an essay that started from a quotation from a Weird Tales story about Conan the Barbarian—and it may be useful to recap the core argument here. Civilizations—meaning here human societies that concentrate power, wealth, and population in urban centers—have a distinctive historical trajectory of rise and fall that isn’t shared by societies that lack urban centers. There are plenty of good reasons why this should be so, from the ecological costs of urbanization to the buildup of maintenance costs that drives catabolic collapse, but there’s also a cognitive dimension.
Look over the histories of fallen civilizations, and far more often than not, societies don’t have to be dragged down the slope of decline and fall. Rather, they go that way at a run, convinced that the road to ruin must inevitably lead them to heaven on earth. Arnold Toynbee, whose voluminous study of the rise and fall of civilizations has been one of the main sources for this blog since its inception, wrote at length about the way that the elite classes of falling civilizations lose the capacity to come up with new responses for new situations, or even to learn from their mistakes; thus they keep on trying to use the same failed policies over and over again until the whole system crashes to ruin. That’s an important factor, no question, but it’s not just the elites who seem to lose track of the real world as civilizations go sliding down toward history’s compost heap, it’s the masses as well.
Those of my readers who want to see a fine example of this sort of blindness to the obvious need only check the latest headlines. Within the next decade or so, for example, the entire southern half of Florida will become unfit for human habitation due to rising sea levels, driven by our dumping of greenhouse gases into an already overloaded atmosphere. Low-lying neighborhoods in Miami already flood with sea water whenever a high tide and a strong onshore wind hit at the same time; one more foot of sea level rise and salt water will pour over barriers into the remaining freshwater sources, turning southern Florida into a vast brackish swamp and forcing the evacuation of most of the millions who live there.
That’s only the most dramatic of a constellation of climatic catastrophes that are already tightening their grip on much of the United States. Out west, the rain forests of western Washington are burning in the wake of years of increasingly severe drought, California’s vast agricultural acreage is reverting to desert, and the entire city of Las Vegas will probably be out of water—as in, you turn on the tap and nothing but dust comes out—in less than a decade. As waterfalls cascade down the seaward faces of Antarctic and Greenland glaciers, leaking methane blows craters in the Siberian permafrost, and sea level rises at rates considerably faster than the worst case scenarios scientists were considering a few years ago, these threats are hardly abstract issues; is anyone in America taking them seriously enough to, say, take any concrete steps to stop using the atmosphere as a gaseous sewer, starting with their own personal behavior? Surely you jest.
No, the Republicans are still out there insisting at the top of their lungs that any scientific discovery that threatens their rich friends’ profits must be fraudulent, the Democrats are still out there proclaiming just as loudly that there must be some way to deal with anthropogenic climate change that won’t cost them their frequent-flyer miles, and nearly everyone outside the political sphere is making whatever noises they think will allow them to keep on pursuing exactly those lifestyle choices that are bringing on planetary catastrophe. Every possible excuse to insist that what’s already happening won’t happen gets instantly pounced on as one more justification for inertia—the claim currently being splashed around the media that the Sun might go through a cycle of slight cooling in the decades ahead is the latest example. (For the record, even if we get a grand solar minimum, its effects will be canceled out in short order by the impact of ongoing atmospheric pollution.)
Business as usual is very nearly the only option anybody is willing to discuss, even though the long-predicted climate catastrophes are already happening and the days of business as usual in any form are obviously numbered. The one alternative that gets air time, of course, is the popular fantasy of instant planetary dieoff, which gets plenty of attention because it’s just as effective an excuse for inaction as faith in business as usual. What next to nobody wants to talk about is the future that’s actually arriving exactly as predicted: a future in which low-lying coastal regions around the country and the world have to be abandoned to the rising seas, while the Southwest and large portions of the mountain west become more inhospitable than the eastern Sahara or Arabia’s Empty Quarter.
If the ice melt keeps accelerating at its present pace, we could be only a few decades form the point at which it’s Manhattan Island’s turn to be abandoned, because everything below ground level is permanently flooded with seawater and every winter storm sends waves rolling right across the island and flings driftwood logs against second story windows. A few decades more, and waves will roll over the low-lying neighborhoods of Houston, Boston, Seattle, and Washington DC, while the ruined buildings that used to be New Orleans rise out of the still waters of a brackish estuary and the ruined buildings that used to be Las Vegas are half buried by the drifting sand. Take a moment to consider the economic consequences of that much infrastructure loss, that much destruction of built capital, that many people who somehow have to be evacuated and resettled, and think about what kind of body blow that will deliver to an industrial society that is already in bad shape for other reasons.
None of this had to happen. Half a century ago, policy makers and the public alike had already been presented with a tolerably clear outline of what was going to happen if we proceeded along the trajectory we were on, and those same warnings have been repeated with increasing force year by year, as the evidence to support them has mounted up implacably—and yet nearly all of us nodded and smiled and kept going. Nor has this changed in the least as the long-predicted catastrophes have begun to show up right on schedule. Quite the contrary: faced with a rising spiral of massive crises, people across the industrial world are, with majestic consistency, doing exactly those things that are guaranteed to make those crises worse.
So the question that needs to be asked, and if possible answered, is why civilizations—human societies that concentrate population, power, and wealth in urban centers—so reliably lose the capacity to learn from their mistakes and recognize that a failed policy has in fact failed. It’s also worth asking why they so reliably do this within a finite and predictable timespan: civilizations last on average around a millennium before they crash into a dark age, while uncivilized societies routinely go on for many times that period. Doubtless any number of factors drive civilizations to their messy ends, but I’d like to suggest a factor that, to my knowledge, hasn’t been discussed in this context before.
Let’s start with what may well seem like an irrelevancy. There’s been a great deal of discussion down through the years in environmental circles about the way that the survival and health of the human body depends on inputs from nonhuman nature. There’s been a much more modest amount of talk about the human psychological and emotional needs that can only be met through interaction with natural systems. One question I’ve never seen discussed, though, is whether the human intellect has needs that are only fulfilled by a natural environment.
As I consider that question, one obvious answer comes to mind: negative feedback.
The human intellect is the part of each of us that thinks, that tries to make sense of the universe of our experience. It does this by creating models. By “models” I don’t just mean those tightly formalized and quantified models we call scientific theories; a poem is also a model of part of the universe of human experience, so is a myth, so is a painting, and so is a vague hunch about how something will work out. When a twelve-year-old girl pulls the petals off a daisy while saying “he loves me, he loves me not,” she’s using a randomization technique to decide between two models of one small but, to her, very important portion of the universe, the emotional state of whatever boy she has in mind.
With any kind of model, it’s critical to remember Alfred Korzybski’s famous rule: “the map is not the territory.” A model, to put the same point another way, is a representation; it represents the way some part of the universe looks when viewed from the perspective of one or more members of our species of social primates, using the idiosyncratic and profoundly limited set of sensory equipments, neural processes, and cognitive frameworks we got handed by our evolutionary heritage. Painful though this may be to our collective egotism, it’s not unfair to say that human mental models are what you get when you take the universe and dumb it down to the point that our minds can more or less grasp it.
What keeps our models from becoming completely dysfunctional is the negative feedback we get from the universe. For the benefit of readers who didn’t get introduced to systems theory, I should probably take a moment to explain negative feedback. The classic example is the common household thermostat, which senses the temperature of the air inside the house and activates a switch accordingly. If the air temperature is below a certain threshold, the thermostat turns the heat on and warms things up; if the air temperature rises above a different, slightly higher threshold, the thermostat turns the heat off and lets the house cool down.
In a sense, a thermostat embodies a very simple model of one very specific part of the universe, the temperature inside the house. Like all models, this one includes a set of implicit definitions and a set of value judgments. The definitions are the two thresholds, the one that turns the furnace on and the one that turns it off, and the value judgments label temperatures below the first threshold “too cold” and those above the second “too hot.” Like every human model, the thermostat model is unabashedly anthropocentric—“too cold” by the thermostat’s standard would be uncomfortably warm for a polar bear, for example—and selects out certain factors of interest to human beings from a galaxy of other things we don’t happen to want to take into consideration.
The models used by the human intellect to make sense of the universe are usually less simple than the one that guides a thermostat—there are unfortunately exceptions—but they work according to the same principle. They contain definitions, which may be implicit or explicit: the girl plucking petals from the daisy may have not have an explicit definition of love in mind when she says “he loves me,” but there’s some set of beliefs and expectations about what those words imply underlying the model. They also contain value judgments: if she’s attracted to the boy in question, “he loves me” has a positive value and “he loves me not” has a negative one.
Notice, though, that there’s a further dimension to the model, which is its interaction with the observed behavior of the thing it’s supposed to model. Plucking petals from a daisy, all things considered, is not a very good predictor of the emotional states of twelve-year-old boys; predictions made on the basis of that method are very often disproved by other sources of evidence, which is why few girls much older than twelve rely on it as an information source. Modern western science has formalized and quantified that sort of reality testing, but it’s something that most people do at least occasionally. It’s when they stop doing so that we get the inability to recognize failure that helps to drive, among many other things, the fall of civilizations.
Individual facets of experienced reality thus provide negative feedback to individual models. The whole structure of experienced reality, though, is capable of providing negative feedback on another level—when it challenges the accuracy of the entire mental process of modeling.
Nature is very good at providing negative feedback of that kind. Here’s a human conceptual model that draws a strict line between mammals, on the one hand, and birds and reptiles, on the other. Not much more than a century ago, it was as precise as any division in science: mammals have fur and don’t lay eggs, reptiles and birds don’t have fur and do lay eggs. Then some Australian settler met a platypus, which has fur and lays eggs. Scientists back in Britain flatly refused to take it seriously until some live platypuses finally made it there by ship. Plenty of platypus egg was splashed across plenty of distinguished scientific faces, and definitions had to be changed to make room for another category of mammals and the evolutionary history necessary to explain it.
Here’s another human conceptual model, the one that divides trees into distinct species. Most trees in most temperate woodlands, though, actually have a mix of genetics from closely related species. There are few red oaks; what you have instead are mostly-red, partly-red, and slightly-red oaks. Go from the northern to the southern end of a species’ distribution, or from wet to dry regions, and the variations within the species are quite often more extreme than those that separate trees that have been assigned to different species. Here’s still another human conceptual model, the one that divides trees from shrubs—plenty of species can grow either way, and the list goes on.
The human mind likes straight lines, definite boundaries, precise verbal definitions. Nature doesn’t. People who spend most of their time dealing with undomesticated natural phenomena, accordingly, have to get used to the fact that nature is under no obligation to make the kind of sense the human mind prefers. I’d suggest that this is why so many of the cultures our society calls “primitive”—that is, those that have simple material technologies and interact directly with nature much of the time—so often rely on nonlogical methods of thought: those our culture labels “mythological,” “magical,” or—I love this term—“prescientific.” (That the “prescientific” will almost certainly turn out to be the postscientific as well is one of the lessons of history that modern industrial society is trying its level best to ignore.) Nature as we experience it isn’t simple, neat, linear, and logical, and so it makes sense that the ways of thinking best suited to dealing with nature directly aren’t simple, neat, linear, and logical either.
With this in mind, let’s return to the distinction discussed in last week’s post. I noted there that a city is a human settlement from which the direct, unmediated presence of nature has been removed as completely as the available technology permits. What replaces natural phenomena in an urban setting, though, is as important as what isn’t allowed there. Nearly everything that surrounds you in a city was put there deliberately by human beings; it is the product of conscious human thinking, and it follows the habits of human thought just outlined. Compare a walk down a city street to a walk through a forest or a shortgrass prairie: in the city street, much more of what you see is simple, neat, linear, and logical. A city is an environment reshaped to reflect the habits and preferences of the human mind.
I suspect there may be a straightforwardly neurological factor in all this. The human brain, so much larger compared to body weight than the brains of most of our primate relatives, evolved because having a larger brain provided some survival advantage to those hominins who had it, in competition with those who didn’t. It’s probably a safe assumption that processing information inputs from the natural world played a very large role in these advantages, and this would imply, in turn, that the human brain is primarily adapted for perceiving things in natural environments—not, say, for building cities, creating technologies, and making the other common products of civilization.
Thus some significant part of the brain has to be redirected away from the things that it’s adapted to do, in order to make civilizations possible. I’d like to propose that the simplified, rationalized, radically information-poor environment of the city plays a crucial role in this. (Information-poor? Of course; the amount of information that comes cascading through the five keen senses of an alert hunter-gatherer standing in an African forest is vastly greater than what a city-dweller gets from the blank walls and the monotonous sounds and scents of an urban environment.) Children raised in an environment that lacks the constant cascade of information natural environments provide, and taught to redirect their mental powers toward such other activities as reading and mathematics, grow up with cognitive habits and, in all probability, neurological arrangements focused toward the activities of civilization and away from the things to which the human brain is adapted by evolution.
One source of supporting evidence for this admittedly speculative proposal is the worldwide insistence on the part of city-dwellers that people who live in isolated rural communities, far outside the cultural ambit of urban life, are just plain stupid. What that means in practice, of course, is that people from isolated rural communities aren’t used to using their brains for the particular purposes that city people value. These allegedly “stupid” countryfolk are by and large extraordinarily adept at the skills they need to survive and thrive in their own environments. They may be able to listen to the wind and know exactly where on the far side of the hill a deer waits to be shot for dinner, glance at a stream and tell which riffle the trout have chosen for a hiding place, watch the clouds pile up and read from them how many days they’ve got to get the hay in before the rains come and rot it in the fields—all of which tasks require sophisticated information processing, the kind of processing that human brains evolved doing.
Notice, though, how the urban environment relates to the human habit of mental modeling. Everything in a city was a mental model before it became a building, a street, an item of furniture, or what have you. Chairs look like chairs, houses like houses, and so on; it’s so rare for humanmade items to break out of the habitual models of our species and the particular culture that built them that when this happens, it’s a source of endless comment. Where a natural environment constantly challenges human conceptual models, an urban environment reinforces them, producing a feedback loop that’s probably responsible for most of the achievements of civilization.
I suggest, though, that the same feedback loop may also play a very large role in the self-destruction of civilizations. People raised in urban environments come to treat their mental models as realities, more real than the often-unruly facts on the ground, because everything they encounter in their immediate environments reinforces those models. As the models become more elaborate and the cities become more completely insulated from the complexities of nature, the inhabitants of a civilization move deeper and deeper into a landscape of hallucinations—not least because as many of those hallucinations get built in brick and stone, or glass and steel, as the available technology permits. As a civilization approaches its end, the divergence between the world as it exists and the mental models that define the world for the civilization’s inmates becomes total, and its decisions and actions become lethally detached from reality—with consequences that we’ll discuss in next week’s post.
thing i was thinking about today: all big 2 superhero comics interviews are huge softballs, for a wide variety of reasons (not least of which is if a company, usually marvel, decides to withhold exclusives, that website is fucking done) and that’s just sort of the expected biz. no one asks hard questions, or even story probing questions. you get that in podcasts, and site interviews are just serving up the questions the author themselves wanna answer
but a deeper wrinkle on that is the fact that in the big 2 biz, it’s almost impossible to find a writer in those interviews who isn’t actively kissing ass of every other writer. like the natural thought is “don’t burn your bridges”, especially in a super insular business like superhero comics, but the thing is, they don’t just avoid criticizing other writers, they heap praise on them. if cbr or ign or whoever asks some random writer in the biz about bendis’ x-men run or whatnot, they’ll tell you they loved just about everything about it. to some degree, it’s just “different strokes, different folks”, but at a certain point you notice that everyone is telling everyone else that they’re the absolute best.
this extends to artists, too, in that if any writer at marvel is asked about greg land, they’ll tell you his shit is the fucking best. he’s not the only example, but he’s a big one.
honestly Morrison and Moore getting into a fight was so refreshing for this very reason. Though even then I think it’s a lot easier for people to start calling out Alan Moore on his shitty track record with women and sexual assault now that he’s burned every bridge available using dark sorcery. And it’s significant that Morrison, who is still working at Marvel, is still a major figure in Big 2 publishing, and who is protected by his own not insubstantial magical abilities, is the guy who led that charge against someone who’s largely a pariah.
Now that Frank Miller is being published by DC again because $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$ I wonder how many websites are going to decide that really he’s not that bad and we need to recognize that even for his faults he’s a luminary or whatever the shit
Regardless of the merits of the various positions of these artists I think it’s important to recognize that ultimately Morrison is telling geeks exactly what they want to hear, and Moore isn’t. In my experience, only one of those two things is a path to success on the Internet.
Whenever my parrot flips out and gets angry, I say, “Hey,” in this soft, comforting voice and then talk to him gently. He calms down within seconds.
I just got frustrated enough at something that I went, “ARGH.” My parrot said, “Hey,” all softly and sweetly like a dozen times over the next minute. It made me feel better instantly.
My parrot is better at conflict de-escalation than most people.
it really sucks reading a post like that. ever since i was a little girl i remember people constantly projecting sexual danger on me, because they could pick up on my shitgender even before i could. one time this kid got molested and the only person people were suspicious of was me, a little girl who had no sexual interactions with anyone, even as their child was being literally molested by an adult relative of theirs.
and it was the same whenever i had sex with people - i was always their dirty secret, something to be ashamed of. in high school i had people stop talking to me the day after they fucked me, i had entire relationships suddenly torn away and never returned just because some parent found out i was dating someone. nearly every single person i dated of any gender when i was a teenager had to be kept a secret, in constant anxiety, or it would be taken away forever.
and that’s the contemporary artistic landscape too - so many of your favs, publishers, art scenes of every ideology have histories of sexually smearing vulnerable trans people who never hurt a fly, especially anyone who threatens to get big as a cis person or otherwise threaten the status quo. it’s better for your career to be a rapist than to be trans.
if you heard the ridiculous, grotesque stories about trans fem bodies that were passed around in those scenes, to prove that HRT functioned as some kind of mutant bestial rape potion, stories told by Good Radical People to get rid of Weird Bad Trans People…it’s like lurid descriptions in some medieval bestiary.
a year ago i was listening to a trans woman try not to cry because she was talking about how she wanted to draw children’s books but her prospective employers told her they didn’t feel comfortable with her making things for children.
and reading a post like that just reminds me of how many trans people are going to internalize these things and kill themselves, and are in even worse situations than i was. like 17, fuck.
Doom yes! I would say start out with Avatarium, try Lady in the Lamp and Moonhorse. Juscifer is another good one. Anything off of Candlemass’ Tales of Creation album. The song Tomorrow’s Dead by Solitude Aeternus. Black Sabbath’s new album is actually pretty top quality. They wrote it as a tribute to all the bands that were influenced by them and invented doom.
If you want something with extreme vocals, but still low key and doomy, Evoken and Ahab both have some good stuff but no clean singing.
Yeah for me metal is a full sensory experience. I stim a lot to it, especially pressure stimming and its really good for me. I find its great for autistics in general.
For non metal stuff you might like medieval music. Its got the same sort of feel with tension in the music, and instrumental arrangements. I would suggest trying out the Dufay Collective.
A little bit of cool science: A lot of metal rhythm is done in short, staccato syncopations, the type of which have been used in music therapy as a treatment for things like PTSD and anxiety disorders. It creates a sort of neurological and physiological catharsis called “abreaction” that can help people disspell unpleasant feelings of anxiety. Metal is known for its cathartic quality. That is probably why.
Hope these things turn out to be super stimmy for you!
excuse you let it publicly be known that you are a total cutiepie
also when i was at five months i’d barely started getting that sweet sweet body mass redistribution. transition is a long haul for trans girls yo but the progress adds up as the months tick on. Remember: I’m at 20 months.
tw: passing mentions of anorexia, selfharm, suicide, trans shit.
this is a really emotional post i’ve been deleting variants of for the past year more or less!
basically richey james edwards was a really femmey songwriter who got a lot of play in the british music press for dressing ostentatiously and speaking openly about the stuff i gave trigger warnings about. they wrote a bunch of songs that are really important to me. i was told not to listen to their songs because they were ~*~embarassing~*~ as a burgeoning trans teen. society really gives a certain type of person a raw deal huh
this started off as a reblog of what brenda added to my earlier magazine post cuz i’ve always thought of MSP’s “roses in the hospital” sounding like sonic the hedgehog singing about selfharm but it morphed into something i’ve wanted to write some form of for the past year or so so i figured i would just post it on it’s own.
it also came to mind talking to porp about how the public treated michael jackson a couple weeks ago but then i got to work and couldnt really emotionally deal with those thoughts.
Wow, that’s… disappointing, from Terry Pratchett, no less.
I often hear an idea out there that good characters are too simple and evil characters are complex, that nice characters are too simple and mean characters are complex, that good and nice people are unrealistic, that nobody can identify with them, that people who’ve Been Through Shit won’t be good or nice (and shouldn’t be expected to be), etc.
Not that I think you can just divide people up into good versus evil, nice versus mean, or nice versus screwed up (how is screwed up mutually exclusive with nice, anyway?).
But you know what I mean.
And good, in general, has incredible depth and complexity and strength to it. And the depth, complexity, and strength often ascribed to evil usually strikes me as a smokescreen at best, a surface-level look at the world.
And Terry Pratchett doesn’t normally strike me as someone who takes only a surface-level look at the world. And his good characters are often complex and have a lot of depth. (Although whether he would call them nice or not, I don’t know. It depends what you mean by nice.)
But then even a lot of people (including but not limited to authors) I otherwise respect really do seem to buy into the idea that good or nice is boring (or worse), and evil is automatically more “interesting” or “complex” or other things like that. And even without believing in a cartoonish sense of good and evil, I can still tell there’s something messed up about viewing the world this way.
Not the least of which? When you yourself are fairly messed up, and you’re looking around for characters that represent important aspects of your life experience, and all you find are villains or evil monsters or “dark” characters, so you begin to associate all those things with yourself, even if you’d had no reason to do so before. And that can all happen subconsciously. And then you end up with a weird attachment to truly awful fictional people, like people that if they were real live people you’d never want to be within a million miles of them, but somehow in fiction you do, and you start to think that there is no such thing as a good person like you, a nice person like you, a loving person like you, etc. And you start to glorify characters that honestly have very little business being glorified.
And all of this sounds like it’s not of much consequence because it’s all fictional characters, but Terry Pratchett would be the first to say that stories shape who we are, and the stories we tell ourselves, about ourselves, have a nasty habit of coming true. Anything that affects your mind on such a profound level can have consequences you’re not even aware of.
Oh, and if you’re curious about an instance I saw of, if not exactly the above, people deliberately emulating social and political ideas they got from fictional characters, in ways I found incredibly disturbing, read my quite old post (which means don’t assume I believe everything I said in it, it was written almost 10 years ago):
As those movies were coming out, I had to watch mostly younger autistic people discovering them for the first time, seeing that the most anti-cure mutants in the series were the “bad guys”, and then doing things like deliberately modeling their ethical and moral choices after Magneto. As in, shaping their entire moral identities around a creepy-ass fictional villain, himself based in some pretty shitty ideas about what certain political views “have to” mean, because they were sold this idea that there were two sides and only two sides and that each side existed exactly with the combination of traits that the X-Men movies showed.
Which isn’t exactly the same thing I’m describing above with the good and evil characters, but it’s a very good example of fiction shaping people’s ethical choices in incredibly disturbing ways. Like this was literally happening right in front of me, on a regular basis, when X-Men 3 came out, and I saw so many autistic people buying into the entire ethical framework of that movie. (See my post for more explicit information on what that ethical framework was, in terms of how it divided up the “two sides”.) Some of them decided that they didn’t want a cure so they had to model themselves on Magneto, which was disturbing. Some of them decided they wanted to model themselves on Professor X, because he was the “good guy”, and that therefore their actual opinions about ethics had to change to be more in line with Professor X’s, whether they originally were or not. Which was equally disturbing. Then people who’d picked their sides would fight it out in the way they imagined “their side” would fight the “other side”.
Which strikes me as being like… the moral/ethical version of the character thing I describe above. Like, the same thought process that involves internalizing certain ideas about characters, except this is mostly about the ethical positions taken by groups or characters rather than about the identity and emotional reality of the characters.
I hope any of that made sense, because I get the feeling I’m talking around something without actually managing to talk about it. But it’s important.
I just learned that Nichelle Nichols ad-libbed “sorry, neither” in rehearsals and they were only able to sneak it by the censors because it wasn’t in the script and—excuse me I’m overcome with happiness because my favorite Uhura line of all time was actually written by Uhura.
I’m re-watching ST:TOS, my favorite Star Trek series, and this sort of thing is why. (Right after that, she shoves him away and runs off.) Also the fact that back then Star Trek could be hokey and ridiculous and silly without anyone thinking it had to carry Important Messages™ and Good Special Effects™. Not that it didn’t have important messages, but I swear with each new series it got more and more bland and washed out until I just quit watching?
For anyone who hasn’t seen Sulu’s whole swashbuckler routine, this episode is “The Naked Time,” the fourth episode of season one of the original Star Trek. (There’s also an almost identical episode of The Next Generation called “The Naked Now”. Most of the early ST:TNG episodes were blatantly recycled plots from TOS, but this one was even more blatant than most.)
[Image description: Sulu, wearing no shirt, a sword, and a cheesy grin on his face, grabs Uhura and says “I’ll protect you, fair maiden!” Uhura looks disgusted and says, “Sorry, neither.”]
Listen up turd turrets, I WANTED to just play video games, I WANTED to just have fun, I NEVER wanted my gaming to be political or a struggle, I just wanted to play.
But you wouldn’t fucking let me, you brought up my gender, you judged me based on it, YOU made it political.
So now I WILL wreck everything with my fucking feminism, I am the feminist nightmare you fucking created.
I could write an entire essay about how Siri, Cortana, and Google Now all have voices designed to sound the way women are expected to. Undoubtedly Microsoft, Apple, and Google all performed rigorous demographic testing and found that male users were uncomfortable with the voice of a young man as their ever-eager digital servant, while a woman’s voice unconsciously spoke to the culturally symbolic executive-and-secretary dynamic.
It should be noted that the same kind of biases exist among women, and I’m not exception. I’m definitely not complaining about my computer’s assistant AI being coded female. But I’d rather see us start dissolving our own genders rather than infecting them upon our artificial inheritors.
I completely agree, but at least now you can change Siri’s voice to be masculine
oh rad. i’ve never actually gotten to use Siri (and on that note it feels really weird to be applying that verb to a program with a personal name but I’m not sure how else to phrase it) ‘cuz I’m too poor for apple stuff.
I get that but I know that with Cortana they are going to use Jen Taylor’s voice because she voices Cortana in the Halo games. What you said could definitely still be part of it for them, though.
The same concept informs Cortana’s origin as a fictional character though. She’s the Pillar of Autumn’s navigator, under the command of the male patriarch figure Captain Keyes, and then lives as the voice-in-your-head for the player character, a cyborg soldier male power fantasy (which I have to write so often I should start shortening it to M.P.F.)
In both cases, she is, in effect, secretarial. Managing data so you can focus on whatever big, important thing it is that you do. And I don’t want to be misconstrued here: that Cortana’s name and likeness were chosen to represent Microsoft’s personal assistant software is not a bad thing. It might be a little corny but it’s also kind of endearing to me for that reason. But choosing Cortana was not accidental or arbitrary. They chose her because she represented in her original context the same thing she represents as assistive software: “the one who takes care of the busywork so you can do what really matters.” The fact that this figure is always a woman is not an accident either, it is an echo of our society’s values and archetypes.
hey look it's an articulation of what makes tumblr special
I’m going to have to make myself some rules if I’m gonna read shit on the sa forums again. Never click GBS is the first rule. Not it or it’s subforum. Ever. Second rule is never click GiP. I don’t need to read threads where pigs and soldiers hang around where they feel unwatched.
It’s such a stark difference, between here and there. Here I make my own little space and it’s just by happenstance that over a thousand people have decided to share it with me and only very rarely do I encounter anyone malicious. But there? It’s a gag that I even exist.
Here we talk about the violence we face and the discrimination and all the harsh realities of it with the absolutely unquestionable founding assumption that we are human beings, whole and actual. But over there, they don’t see it. They choose to be blind to it because it would be inconvenient to learn about it and because they don’t have to learn about it. And as if that isn’t alienating enough, on top of that, they decide that they would rather have the conception of us that makes them laugh than know our realities.
I forgot what that feels like, that level of alienation. I just don’t get that kind of treatment, not even on the streets here. People let you be, or at least have enough sense of shame to wait until later to chortle about you with their friends.
I remember now, why I can identify so strongly with inhuman beings. I’ve spent a lot of time being thought of as inhuman.
As long as I created confusion over this, here's what I meant: Obama no longer gives a fuck. I assume you don't give fucks when you simply have none left to give. It's a supply-side phenomenon, which I think squares with most our personal experience. And when I thought of Obama's sometimes Achilles' heel of extreme accommodation of his adversaries, often getting little or nothing in return, it occurred to me that President Obama had been overdrawing his fucks account for sometime. Let's call it deficit spending in fucks. And now, he has none left. I noted that he may have private reserve for extreme or personal need. But basically he is out of fucks to give.
Or rather, Fey is somewhat of an unusual cat, but when people say she’s unusual, that’s not what they’re talking about. They usually comment on how much she communicates with me, and say they wish they had “a cat like Fey”, and then describe their own cats in terms that make it very clear that the issue isn’t the type of cat, but the type of relationship they have with their cat.
[Image description: Fey in bed with me and a lot of yarn while I hold a crochet project in one hand and she touches her paw to my other hand while we look at each other.]
Which is not necessarily their fault, but which is a completely different situation from Fey just being an unusual cat.
If Fey lived with them, they would rapidly discover that they didn’t have “a cat like Fey” either. They would probably decide she was mean and standoffish and uncommunicative. Because it’s not her, it’s them.
I can’t explain to anyone how to have a deep relationship with a cat or any other being.(1)
But I can say that if you take any cat, and try really hard to listen to them and understand them and engage with them on the same level of emotional complexity that you would engage with a human being on, then you’re likely to get better results, and a better relationship with your cat, than if you treat them as food-devouring mousing machines who only like you because you feed them and are probably just faking affection to manipulate you. Or even just if you treat them better than that, but not really taking them all that seriously.
Taking a cat seriously is the first step to having the kind of relationship I have with Fey. And I can tell you right now that it’s not Fey that’s unusual about our relationship. It’s our relationship that’s unusual. Put Fey in a context where she isn’t being respected or understood or seen as emotionally complex and a real actual being with thoughts and feelings about the world, and she’ll look like “just any other cat” to you, and possibly like a particularly mean cat at that.
Which is why it’s sad but almost funny to me when people tell me “I wish I had a cat like Fey, my cat is so mean.” And then describe a situation where Fey would be twenty times as mean if she had to live in it, than their cat is being (when their cat is being mean at all, which isn’t always).
Mind you, I’m not a cat whisperer. People try and call me that but I find that pretty offensive (to cats). I do not understand all of what Fey tells me. I don’t even understand a quarter of what Fey tells me. Fey and I fight on a regular basis, we misunderstand each other constantly, and we get frustrated about our inability to get basic information across to each other in both directions, and sometimes that ends up as frustration with each other.
But seriously?
If you start with respecting the intellectual and emotional complexity of your cat, and the fact that your cat is your equal in terms of worth and value (equal doesn’t mean alike, so nobody blast me for using that word, I find that really irritating and I’m especially irritable at the moment because I’m sick).
And if you make a serious long-term good-faith effort to understand and communicate with your cat as who the cat is, not as who you want or imagine the cat to be.(2) (This may take a lot of time if you’ve been projecting your own fantasies over the top of your cat, because your cat has doubtless noticed and responded to you in kind, and it will possibly take a long while to build trust.)
Then you have a good chance of, if not “having a cat like Fey”, having an amazing, fulfilling, complex, and demanding relationship with your cat, in ways you didn’t dream were possible. Which is what people seem to mean when they say they “want a cat like Fey”.
[Important but somewhat lengthy footnotes below cut.]
(1) Although the book First Contact: Charting Inner Space by Dave Hingsburger has a lot of good ideas for how to approach communication with anyone, human or not. But especially people who aren’t generally considered to have any life or communication at all by most people – that’s who the book’s written about. And animals certainly fall under the same broad category in terms of the amount of respect given them. Although even animals usually get more respect than the people with (presumed) severe and profound cognitive impairments that HIngsburger writes about. But nonetheless, his ideas about communication in that book should apply to all communication situations, especially those with anyone where the basic assumption is usually that the other person don’t have much if anything to communicate and couldn’t possibly understand needs or desires beyond food and the like, if that.
His biggest piece of advice is to get out of the way – don’t imagine what it’s like to “be you, as the other person” (which is what most people do when they try to imagine what it’s like to be someone else, Hingsburger refers to this as “like masturbation but without the stickiness”) but instead imagine what it’s like to actually be someone else. As in, get out of the mirror and look at who’s in front of you instead of seeing them as a version of yourself. Unfortunately, very few people do this in life, ever, with anyone, which prevents authentic relationships from happening. But it gets especially hard to do this when the person is very different from you, and I’d say another species is pretty different (but surprisingly similar in many ways – differences between species as far as emotional reality are often greatly exaggerated by humans believing we’re exceptional, and animals pick up on our condescension loud and clear).
Also a hint: If you don’t ever think you disagree with or fight with your cat, you’re probably engaging in fantasy. Because it’s damn near impossible to be in an authentic relationship with someone and never disagree or fight. Dave Hingsburger often says that if you think you like every disabled person you meet, you’re a bigot, because it means you don’t see individual differences. Think about that for awhile. It applies to cats (or any other group of beings) as well. Unless you just like all people indiscriminately, which is a different thing altogether. But on a basic interpersonal level if you’re not ever getting frustrated or angry or disagreeing or something negative, then you’re probably not engaging with the person as a genuine complex person who is not just your imaginary expectations for them.
(2)Yes, this includes those sickening “cat as perpetual infant for you to mother” fantasies, although I think my cat thinks of me as a kitten who refuses to move out of her house even when she’s elderly and doesn’t know enough to come in out of the rain. Unfortunately, when most people try to get people to give up such bizarre human fantasies about cats, they say things like “don’t anthropmorphize” cats and then proceed to tell you that cats don’t “really” feel any love for you beyond what they feel towards you for feeding them, and lots of other bullshit. The reality is that cats are neither miniature humans nor manipulative but ultimately empty food-eating robots.
They’re cats. That means they have a lot in common with humans emotionally (they’re mammals, after all, and mammals that have done well living with humans and communicating successfully with us for millenia), and a lot different from us as well, and each individual cat is different from ever other individual cat. You have to get to know your cat as an individual, not discount some idea because it’s”too human” (very little about human emotional experience is exclusively human), but also not project weird human cultural concepts onto them. It’s a balancing act. If you’re really in earnest, you’ll get used to it.
Insomniacs, here’s a foolproof way to fall asleep: Close your eyes, and think about watching another Spider-Man origin movie. The exact same story. The exact same romance. The exact same awkward puberty jokes. Can you imagine? Are you asleep yet?
“Teachers already know that errors or falsehoods are rarely found in homework ( except in those exercises where a fixed result must be produced, or propositions must be translated one by one). Rather, what is more frequently found - and worse - are nonsensical sentences, remarks without interest or importance, banalities mistaken for profundities, ordinary ‘points’ confused with singular points, badly posed or distorted problems - all heavy with dangers, yet the fate of us all.”
The first original Dr. Seuss book to be published in 25 years, "What Pet Should I Get?," is finally out today! Theodor Geisel, aka Dr. Seuss, wrote the book sometime between 1958 and 1962 and his wife, Audrey Geisel, found the text and drawings in a pile shortly after he died in 1991.
There are more unpublished books from that stash to come! The new story stars the delightful brother and sister from "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish."
