Note: if you don’t feel like doing all of these,
Missing some kind of then-statement here.
Alicorn
Karma: 30,901
I (white) have cosmetic preferences which happen to select (weakly) against white people and in favor of everyone else, so I can relatively safely talk about it. (I love brown eyes and dislike blond hair.)
I don’t know where my cosmetic preferences came from, but it seems likely that some people have less speakable ones from that same source, and mistake it or have it mistaken for something about race-per-se. I don’t think this can explain the magnitude of the effect, but I feel like it’s missing as a hypothesis whenever people manage to talk about racial disparity in dating at all.
When I started making double batches of pancake batter, they came out fluffier.
I checked and re-checked all the math on the doubling so many times to make sure I wasn’t adding too much or too little of something, but the ratios were all right.
Eventually I realized I was going through baking powder faster and so the baking powder was fresher.
Stripe is even less welcome to my phone number than you are! But I’ll retry without the info saving thing.
ETA: Yeah that worked.
I just went to try to give you $40 (because there’s an event that I expect to be hosted at Lighthaven, and I want to go to it, and would be happy to pay for a ticket at something in that ballpark of a price, but kind of expect to be offered free entry, so I might as well “pay for my ticket” now to make sure the place is there to have the event in).
But the form requires a phone number and will not accept all zeroes or all nines and you can have forty dollars but you cannot have a real phone number.
Smallfoot. It’s a children’s animated musical about yetis who don’t believe in humans, and about fraud and honesty and curiosity and how other motives, even sympathetic ones, contaminate truthseeking. Hat tip to Elizabeth of Aceso Under Glass who recommended it to my family.
In the SS25 collections, we see it, unsurprisingly, in skin-baring clubwear:
but also in more classically graceful gowns and tailoring:
in slightly kooky and unhinged references to early-60s femininity:
and in more eclectic, playful styles:
Were there supposed to be images or links here?
I was so excited about this post until I realized the metaphorical peanut butter was also exercise.
I mean, sure, it looks like that when people who sound credible to you are checking.
Our world would seem mundane to us no matter what was in it. Maybe it’s actually wildly unrealistic that many people keep cats as pets. Maybe dandelions are some kind of Easter egg. Maybe our so-called natural languages are ludicrously simple and regular compared to the monstrosities real people with real history speak.
I like this enough that I’m considering picking a screenshot of the Goddess of Everything Else and replacing my twelve year old standard avatar with it.
“what is your fantasy partner/complement organization?”
I love this question and would never have thought of it on my own.
Our younger kiddo went through a period of calling his big sister “gago” because he couldn’t pronounce her name. Her opinion of this was a long-suffering sigh and “I’ll be whatever he can say.”
I kind of doubt you care at all, but here for interested bystanders is more information on my stance.
I suspect you of brigading-type behavior wrt conflicts you get into. Even if you make out like it’s a “get out the vote” campaign where the fact that rides to the polls don’t require avowing that you’re a Demoblican is important to your reception, when you’re the sort who’ll tell all your friends someone is being mean to you and then the karma swings around wildly I make some updates. This social power with your clique of admirers in combination with your contagious lens on the world that they pick up from you is what unnerves me.
I experience a lot of your word choices (e.g. “gossiping behind [your] back”) as squirrelly[1] , manipulative, and more rhetoric than content. I would not have had this experience in this particular case if, for example, you’d said “criticizing [me] to an unsympathetic audience”. Gossip behind one’s back is a social move for a social relationship. One doesn’t clutch one’s pearls about random people gossiping about Kim Kardashian behind her back. We have never met. I’d stand a better chance of recognizing Ms. Kardashian in the grocery store than you. I have met some people who know some people who you hang out with, but it’s disingenuous to suggest that I had any affordances to instead gossip to your face, or that it’s mean to dislike your public blog posts and then talk about disliking them with my friends[2].
Further, it’s rhetorically interesting that you said “Apparently the only dynamic you found acceptable was “I say mean stuff and Duncan just takes it.”″ You didn’t try a lot of different dynamics! I said I was favorably impressed when you didn’t respond. If someone is nervous about you, holding very still and not making any hostile moves is a great way to help them feel safe, and when you tried that (or… looked like you were trying it) it worked. The only other thing you tried was, uh, this, which, as I’m explaining here, I do not find impressive. However, scientists have discovered that there are often more than two possible approaches to social conflict. You could have tried something else! Maybe you could have dug up a mutual friend who’d mediate, or asked a neutral curious question about whether there was something I could point to that would help you understand why you were coming off badly, instead of unloading a dump truck of sneaky nasty connotations on my lap. Maybe you believe every one of those connotations in your heart of hearts. This does not imbue your words with magic soothing power, any more than my intentions successfully accompanied my analogy about weird bugs. You still seem sneaky and nasty to me.
- ^
I maintain that I sincerely like squirrels; I am using a colloquial definition which, of definitions I found on the internet, most closely matches the Urban Dictionary cluster.
- ^
The “I talk about things with my friends, you brigade” conjugation is not lost on me but I wish to point out in my defense that, as I said in my original comment, I did not intend to touch this situation where it could possibly affect you until it seemed like it was also affecting Said, of whom I am fond.
Oh, no, it’s absolutely negative. I don’t like you. I just don’t specifically think that you are disgusting, and it’s that bit of the reaction to the analogy that caught me by surprise.
“Oh, I’m going to impute malice with the phrase ‘gossiping behind my back’ about someone I have never personally interacted with before who talked about my public blog posts with her friends, when she’s specifically remarked that she’s worried about fallout from letting me know that she doesn’t care for me!” is also kind of a take, and a pretty good example of why I don’t like you. I retract the tentative positive update I made when your only reaction to my comment had been radio silence; I’d found that really encouraging wrt it being safe to have opinions about you where you might see them, but no longer.
Welp, guess I shouldn’t pick up frogs. Not what I expected to be the main takeaway from this thread but still good to know.
I think most poisonous frogs look it and would accordingly pick up a frog that wasn’t very brightly colored if I otherwise wanted to pick up this frog, whereas bugs may look drab while being dangerous.
I’m sorry! I’m sincerely not trying to indicate that. Duncan fascinates and unnerves me but he does not revolt me. I think that “weird bug” made sense to my metaphor generator instead of “weird plant” or “weird bird” or something is that bugs have extremely widely varying danger levels—an unfamiliar bug may have all kinds of surprises in the mobility, chemical weapons, aggressiveness, etc. department, whereas plants reliably don’t jump on you and birds are basically all just WYSIWYG; but many weird bugs are completely harmless, and I simply do not know what will happen to me if I poke Duncan.
I wasn’t sure if I should include the analogy. I came up with it weeks ago when I was remarking to people in my server about how suspicious I find things Duncan writes, and it was popular there; I guess people here are less universally delighted by metaphors about weird bugs than people on my server, whoops! For what it’s worth I think the world is enriched by the presence of weird bugs. The other day someone remarked that they’d found a weird caterpillar on the sidewalk near my house and half my dinner guests got up to go look at it and I almost did myself. I just don’t want to touch weird bugs, and am nervous in a similar way about making it publicly knowable that I have an opinion about Duncan.
I think my headaches are multicausal, but drinking less water*, taking acetaminophen as soon as I feel a twinge, and maybe any of the other many things I have done in the last 14 years, have attenuated it substantially, and now I get most of them only at specific points in my menstrual cycle. (Which is convenient because you’re not supposed to hit the painkillers too hard when pregnant.)
*yes, less water; some of my headaches are migraine-y and you want vasoconstriction for that