codeman38’s tumblings

A 40-something-year-old autistic asexual nonbinary-ish programmer somewhere in the Boston area. (Like that narrows anything down.) Pronouns: he/they. Side Blogs: codeman38 ♥ Video Game Music Subtitle vs. Subtitle

[foone]

My only problem with the concept of "gender is a spectrum" is I'm afraid that means the US government will put the FCC in charge of it.

[messierobject65]

This is. . . a great idea? I'd have to have a W prefix b/c I live east of the Mississippi but I'm OK with that.

[foone]

The new gender binary: when the FCC takes over allocating the gender spectrum, would they assign you a callsign beginning with W or K?

[the-real-seebs]

I once saw a TV station change from W to K! The local NBC affiliate snagged WUSA, and then a larger thing said "wait that's a really good callsign, let's steal it" and made them pick a new one, but because they're basically ON the river, they were able to get permission to pick K, and became KARE.

[foone]

I support our trans TV stations!

[codeman38]

That's not even the only TV station in Minneapolis to have done that, either! Channel 23 was once known as KTMA (of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fame), later became KMWB after affiliating with the WB network, and now has the call letters WUCW.

[reallyreallyreallytrying]

“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

[doubleca5t]

An actual World Heritage Post

[dykecosette]

how does this post not have a million notes but anyone online can quote it

[definitelynotlazav]

one week until ten years of Spiders Georg

[adulthoodisokay]

happy ten years of Spiders Georg!

[codeman38]

It's time for the annual Comicraft New Year's font sale, where you can get professional comic lettering fonts that normally cost hundreds of dollars on sale for $20.23 each through the end of New Year's Day.

Here are samples of six of their fonts that you may recognize from various places (and there are likely plenty of others as well!).

If you're interested, head over to comicbookfonts.com and look at their catalog!

(This isn't a paid ad or anything! I'm just someone who's had a special interest in fonts since childhood, and figure some artists and graphic designers on here might be interested.)

[codeman38]

I just had a cryptic crossword clue come into my head this morning, and figured this was absolutely the right place to share it:

Spanish celebrity appearing in Goncharov (5)

[codeman38]

I just remembered that I needed to update my bio on Tumblr this morning, for a very important reason: as of yesterday, "30-something-year-old” is no longer a phrase that applies to me.

(But seriously. How am I already 40?!)

[codeman38]

Welp, since the bird site where I’ve been spending most of my social networking time seems to be going further and further down the drain, may as well start posting here again.

[codeman38]

So apparently the "block" button in Tumblr's message notifications on Android just...immediately blocks the person. No prompt to confirm that you actually meant to click there, no notification afterward of what you just did, which seems like a major omission for something that instantly blocks someone you regularly contact.

Seriously, does anyone at Tumblr actually use their app?

[codeman38]

The title/premise of the movie UHF never quite made sense to me when I was younger, but it’s probably not for the reason you’re thinking.

Most people would guess that it’s because of my age, but not only do I remember TVs with separate VHF and UHF tuning knobs, I even had such a TV around the time that movie came out.

No, the real reason is because I grew up in a rural enough area that only one of my local stations was even in the VHF frequency range. Forget tiny independent stations, I had to use the lower knob just to find ABC, NBC and PBS—we needed a cable box to even get the kinds of weird public-access shows that the movie was mocking!

Edited to add: “What about Fox,” you ask? Out-of-town station that could only be pulled in via cable/satellite for several years, until we finally got a local affiliate in 1995. And don’t even get me started about how long it took to have a local CW station (because it took long enough that it was no longer the WB network by that point).

[codeman38]

OK, I’m slightly confused. I’ve followed the instructions in this post from @flight-of-the-felix for querying the Tumblr API to find out which posts on my blog are flagged, and was able to find two hits. (A picture of my hand wearing a wedding ring, and a meme involving a picture of an axolotl.)

However, even though the API says with 100% confidence that these posts are NSFW, I can’t find any way to unflag them. They don’t show up as flagged on my blog page in either a desktop or mobile browser, nor do I see any flag warning when I browse my blog archive through the dashboard and jump to the appropriate page number.

Do any followers have any idea what might cause this discrepancy? Is it possible that some users may still not be seeing flag warnings for their own posts?

Edit: Also, for some reason, I can’t message or properly at-mention @flight-of-the-felix, even though I’m not blocked by them as far as I can tell (??) - there’s no autocomplete popup when adding the mention, and it just shows an “Uh, who?” error when entering the username. Weird.

Edit #2: Clicking through to their blog and clicking the message button there seems to work. Seriously, how does Tumblr continue to be so broken?

[clatterbane]

An old post from elmindreda, which gave me some major “aha!” moments when I first ran across it.

(No, any of a variety of problems with speech is not necessarily coming from Purposely Being Difficult, and/or Worrying Psych Symptoms. Shocking idea 😒)

With the state of my health sucking a lot of energy, I’ve been running into increasing troubles with communicative speech for a while now. I was reminded to hunt this down again, and thought I might as well share it.

It’s very common to divide autistic people into a ‘speaking’ and a ‘non-speaking’ group, and also to assume that the ability to speak implies the ability to communicate with speech. Those people who do so quite naturally place me into the ‘speaking’ group, since I’m most of the time able to produce understandable words, almost always strung together into sentences.

However, there’s a large grey area between being fully able to use speech to communicate and not having access to language at all, and it’s not linear either…

Since I haven’t seen a lot of descriptions of what it’s actually like to lose speech, or to be able to speak but not be able to use that ability to communicate (and those I’ve seen always seem to be missing things), I will attempt to describe some of the different ways I experience those things. Just keep in mind that there are a lot of other possible ways, too.

[codeman38]

Reblogging because I had completely forgotten about this blog post, and it gave me major "aha" moments as well when I first saw it. (I even commented on the original post at the time, saying as much!)

[aiweirdness]

It’s neural net Halloween costume time

People use neural networks for translating languages, recommending movies, delivering ads, and more, but this here is one of my favorite applications: utter surrealism.

Last year I trained a neural network on 4,500 Halloween costumes that you readers helped me collect. This year, I teamed up with the New York Times to train a different neural network on over 7,100 costumes. Jessia Ma illustrated lots of the costumes, even the ones that make NO SENSE and they are all SO GOOD.

Please please go look at the rest of them. You will be so glad you did.

And yes, there will be ill-advised sexy costumes.

Thank you, everyone who contributed a costume! You can still contribute to the dataset (maybe I’ll revisit it next year) by filling out this form.

Want even more Halloween costumes? Costumes like Dr. Poop and Ms. Frizzle’s Robot? The answer is yes. Sign up here to get them, plus optionally more bonus material every time I post.

[aromaseraphy-lavender]

Reblog if you believe phone call anxiety is real and it isn’t childish bad behavior.

Trying to prove a point to this job helper.

[xubbs]

Phone calls can be harder on your anxiety bc you cant pick up on the other persons behavioral cues as you talk with them

[d3viantvanguard]

^^^^

After 10+ years of psychotherapy, almost all of my social anxiety triggers are now at a manageable level—even academic public speaking, which was my #1 worst trigger for most of my life—except for my phone anxiety. It’s literally the one and only thing I’ve never been able to significantly improve.

I have to talk the whole conversation through with my friends beforehand.

I have to get explicit confirmation from my friends that “yes, you really need to ring that person right now”.

I have to write scripts.

I have to take anti-anxiety meds, or get drunk.

I only ever ring someone as the very last resort, when all other methods are unavailable.

I hyperventilate and cry afterwards.

I’m also a 28-year-old scientist with three degrees and a teaching position. I’m normally a logical (albeit emotional) person. But anxiety is not logical.

Anxiety is due to inability to correctly perceive threats—more specifically, due to both increased expectation and increased frequency of false recognition of threats in response to neutral stimuli (this is called “pessimistic bias”). Social anxiety simply means that this inability to correctly perceive threats is specific to social interactions, rather than generalised to all aspects of life. (For example, a resting facial expression or lack of verbal acknowledgement is more likely to be perceived as anger, disgust or rejection by a socially anxious person than a neurotypical person. But a socially anxious person is not particularly more likely to worry throughout the day that they’ve left their stove on.)

Therefore, socially anxious people learn to cope with this bias by becoming hypervigilant to social cues such as posture, hand gestures, nodding, eye contact, eyebrow position, mouth tightness, tone of voice, talking speed etc., and then using all the available information to attempt to be logical and “talk down the anxiety”. We also learn to be high self-monitors, which means that we closely observe our audience and constantly (subconsciously) monitor their responses in order to ensure that they accept us and deem us “appropriate”.

But non-verbal social cues aren’t available during phone calls!

There isn’t any body language to read, or eyes to look into. You can’t monitor your audience for approval. They don’t follow the script you prepared. All you have is their voice, which is usually masked (everyone seems to have a “phone voice”, “customer service voice” or “professional voice”) and distorted by the phone and is therefore useless. All of a sudden you’re back to relying on a single neutral stimulus, and the pessimistic bias kicks in, and you start to panic because you’re not getting constant feedback.

It’s a Recognised Psychological Thing™.

Phone anxiety (actually, phone phobia) is one of the most common, most recognised and most treated phobias in the world. Social anxiety—of which phone phobia is an extremely prevalent trigger—is one of the most common, most recognised and most treated anxiety disorders in the world.

It’s most definitely real, most definitely not “childish”, and you’re not alone.

[jumpingjacktrash]

also, if you have any degree of sensory processing disorder, difficulty processing language, or hearing problems – which aren’t limited to just ‘volume too quiet’ but also include things like being unable to pick out speech from background noise, or distinguish phonemes when someone has an accent or talks too fast – then voice calls are legitimately REALLY DIFFICULT.

it’s like trying to read semaphore in a snowstorm while having an allergy attack.

yes, that is hard.

no, it’s not just you.

no, you’re not making it up for attention, being a baby, or lazy.

voice calls are simply not as good as text.

the fact that most businesses will not communicate via text is a combination of inertia and ableism, not a sign that everyone but you loves voice calls and you’re a weirdo. frankly most people kinda hate them unless it’s a loved one whose voice you want to hear.

[codeman38]

Auditory processing is a major part of phone anxiety for me.

I’ve dealt with more calls than I’d like where, even after asking someone to repeat themselves, I just could not catch what they were saying. It got to be frustrating for both me and the other person as I kept asking for repetition and struggling to understand. And it’s totally luck of the draw if I’m calling anywhere new, or answering a call from an unknown number, so the anxiety skyrockets in both of those cases. (Will the pitch and timbre of their voice be something that I can hear clearly, or something that gets distorted by the phone line? What accent do they have? How fast will they talk?)

My auditory memory is not that great even when I can hear clearly, and it gets even worse when I’m using up mental processing cycles trying to decipher what I’m hearing, so any call that’s really information-heavy is probably going to result in some information getting lost in transmission. And it’s only worse if the information is numeric (like prices, product codes, times, or credit card numbers), because all the contextual cues that I typically use for disambiguating what I’m hearing are not really useful. (“Sorry, was that six fifty or six fifteen?”)

Another problem for me, though slightly less of one, is worrying about being misunderstood by the other person. This is especially true for any call where I would need to give my name and/or address, because it feels like every time I try to give this information over the phone, it gets misspelled or mistranscribed in new and interesting ways.

And then there are the times my brain just glitches out and I end up saying something completely different than what I meant to. This happens to me in person too (like the time I meant to order chocolate chip cheesecake ice cream and said “cookies and cream”), but it feels like I’m even more prone to this kind of mistake over the phone. (Probably because I’m using so much more in the way of mental resources to follow the conversation, I guess?)

[codeman38]

On a whim, I decided to see what would happen if I let my Wikipedia-title neural network be a bit more creative, by increasing the "temperature" setting to 1.25. This basically means that, at each character in the title, it's more likely than it normally would be to choose a less probable option. (For comparison, the output that I've posted here in the past is typically run with a temperature of 0.75.)

Sometimes that means the model has a tendency to form longer words than average:

Personahusimentuccecle

Usidro-McNamandridigatico

Genia oxivor transpooneepurregits

Croxidus mestachaidpresswards

Jefferschavalwaivian de Nube

Puertopula Bigocomusepislopiskemacy

Guaddecylanzacesvake (festerument literatic)

Cathosadewren's bobrosmastionatable

Romantomeals of temporated bosetownshipfeed Strixpbellistoneer-pool

Progresmeradopouç cabinalist gubpwil-talementadwritalenous

Sometimes it means putting letters together in combinations that aren’t quite so common:

Xolla Macxeneology

Squiroczial tame tache

Wighffsoner: Hudgerlania (2)

Dinistpwillapruc (cizidian)

Tshorvquocnes Computer F.C.

Speed Maqqmash-orf

Bosausis (thiztjuday)

Nipreijasvi (Fzez Tazilical)

Gönabdalkkhk

As the last entry from each of those sets suggests, sometimes it just throws a diacritical mark or other foreign letter in there because it can:

Richware (Neee Nake): The Baßtoran

General Vicionaljóy

Cảr Your Mexico

Wilsól Mice (film)

Santa Lüngbranka

Tuxers' Faretownmäre

Macliliröx, Glembert

Political peacechóry

Diflatchestér Keary

Amberličk

Bügwort (album)

Krzötch

Sometimes, it gets a little bit too eager with those diacritics (and with the letter "z", for that matter):

ŁizOšťărz, Dasyf 20 Rep. 240

Zlabóçóvnźzözhiə

Zožõòczusō

And as always, it comes up with lots of intrinsically funny new words:

Mount joat crabman

Beak Bandbergland

The Loroosdovely Grey

Plade McOntonisation, Greece album

Frield Counciples

Fox bookiepium

NGC video dynastergy relations

Roback of Hap Brinkles (disambiguation)

Borber stape (Beautime & United York)

On Sword Alfo (Paris, Indoxidation)

Marchy Sparking, Thomaceptions

Pfahard (Malfleweeter)

Generality of manflush

105th Kentucky Corpignation

Amailo, Wrogdam Conseboopbool

[codeman38]

It’s been well over a month since the last time that I posted a selection of surrealist neural-network-generated Wikipedia article titles, so here are 25 more of them selected from recent runs of the model:

Elector Dog Line

Hard Smith (actor)

Chicken Winter (movie)

Least Health Sweet Complex

St. Mess Martin (surname)

Joy In Bark (disambiguation)

Ether Percrachen (horse)

Letter-on-Married Wayne

Texas of the Motor (Ipan album)

James Priesto (Currency of Acid)

Times and Pearshape (disambiguation)

324 New York Crack Fool Market

James Basketball (disumbian player)

Empire Hollowship of France

Abhammer's Processive Campbell

Transformation of Charles Christmas

State Route 15 (Rail Compression, France)

Rock of Charles Ferry (Australian premier)

Kermington State Route 737 (Connecticopria album)

Lord in the Outline and Airlines of the Apparatesiana

The Crowdy State House of Winniplow Despection

The Croom of Society Airway

Sexing der del Anistal Goof

Butthological album, 1976

Barf Trophylot

[prokopetz]

I’m suddenly seeing a lot of reblogged posts this morning where each subsequent reblog appends a single empty paragraph under the reblogger’s name, but the issue doesn’t seem to be reproducible on desktop. Did @staff bork the mobile app again?

[codeman38]

I’m currently seeing this on desktop but not on mobile, because Tumblr can never manage to break things consistently when they do break things.

[codeman38]

Wackypedia: Sports Edition

In all of the “funny Wikipedia titles generated by neural network” posts that I’ve made over the past couple years, I don’t think I’ve ever tried to focus on any specific themes in the output—so today, I’m going to try something slightly different.

Wikipedia contains a lot of articles about sporting events, teams, and athletes, to the point that even a neural network starts to pick out certain trends amongst the titles. (Other recurring topics that I’ve noticed, incidentally, include geography, education, politics, wars, and religion, which sounds about right for an encyclopedia.) We’ve already seen some sporting-related topics in past runs, like the obscure Olympic sport of humarchampetschmori and several interestingly named footballers, but there’s never been a whole post of them...until now.

Here are eighteen topics selected from recent runs of the neural network, all related in some way or another to the world of athletics:

Home Side Mind football season

United Tales Outball Championships

Suck World F.C. season

Evantic Friedrich I Canadian Baseball Club Training Trough

List of Virginia Olympics – Executivism by compoundsports

1995 Micratory Burn Twins men's basketball team

St. Anderson Lake (British American football)

Stickey, 4th Basketball of the Communicated Awards

Air World Championships - Men's 100 metre bank relations

The Arty Soccer at Conference of the Christian Grand Line (Veren)

Special Gothy Human Baseball Company

Universal acid rugby men's basketball team

1989 Pan Critics Warriors football season

Swan Der Bay (distrix democratic sportball, 2008)

Asian Basketball at the 1939 Boldwicket Chapters football season

World Railway Baughting Championships - Women's 400 metres

Southwest Lover County Conference (Canadian footballer)

List of U23 people from the Suits of Ski Fucubus

[codeman38]

OK, I'm not completely losing my mind - I thought the Tumblr logo looked slightly off lately, and comparing against some old screenshots, they definitely did change it. The bottom of the “t” is less curvy than it used to be, and the serifs on the other letters are less tapered.