[escuerzoresucitado]

Which vessel would your soul inhabit?

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Voting ended onJul 14

[homunculus-argument]

Imagine if you met someone who can't eat watermelon. Not that they're allergic or unable somehow, but they just haven't figured out how to do that. So you're like "what the hell do you mean? it works just like eating anything else, you open your mouth, sink your teeth in, take a bite and chew. If you can bite, chew and swallow, you should be able to eat a watermelon."

And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they'd figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.

This goes back and forth. No, it's not an emotional issue, they're not afraid of the watermelon. They can eat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things ("it's watery?" they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?

"It's red on the inside?"

Wait, they've never seen the inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they could bite through the crust, there's no way to get human jaws around it.

"Oh, you're supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides."

And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it's easy, it's ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there's no way that someone just can't eat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.

If someone can't do something after being repeatedly told to "just do it", there might be some key component missing that one side has no idea about, and the other side assumed was so obvious it goes without mention.

[therainstheyaredropping]

Yep.

https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.

If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. [...]

I think my revised belief is that if you are stuck at how to get better at something, spend a little while assuming there’s just some trick to it you’ve missed. You can try to generate the trick yourself, but it’s probably easier to learn it by observing someone else being good at the thing, asking them some questions, and seeing if you have any lightbulb moment.

[hergan416]

My fiance played the clarinet when he was in school. When he was first learning to play, he rented an instrument from the school to learn on. He was the last chair clarinet, had been for years, because he could not make notes that required the register key. For years, they kept making him do embrature exercises and he started to get a few notes, with lots of effort. Eventually he had to get private lessons to stay in band.

Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn't been making much progress with the instrument.

When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school's clarinet needed it's pads replaced.

He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.

Sometimes you don't need to brute force a problem. Sometimes your clarinet is just broken.

[nowordsandnotune]

Not quite sure why the clarinet addition got me crying, but here you go people: just in case, let's get you some new pads.

[rubysapphrald]

i feel so defensive and protective of people with ARFID like if i had a disorder that made my brain register 90% of food as poison for no reason and i had a bazillion people on the internet constantly calling me a manchild who needs to just grow up and stop being a picky eater i would start killing people

[rubysapphrald]

people with ARFID and people with very few autism safe foods and people with contamination OCD and people in ED recovery and everyone else with a complicated relationship with food that no one takes seriously GET BEHIND ME!!!!!!!

[puncertainty]

a leap of faith !

[unkillable-gays]

The "Stratt downloaded all of human media and knowledge onto the laptops on the Hail Mary" always breaks my suspension of disbelief if I think about it too hard... NOT because of the physical limitations of data storage, (though that, too) but because of trying to imagine the poor programmer/software engineer/whatever tf whose job it was to make that happen...

like not only to download everything we've ever made WITHOUT duplicates!!! (and what even counts as a duplicate? translations, international releases, newer versions of something edited to reflect recent discoveries, every version of star wars that George Lucas ever crafted...) BUT to then make them accessible and browsable to the astronauts? To tag them with search terms? Organize a digital library that the team can peruse???

Like, you can point an algorithm at something and say, "copy everything in that folder," no problem! But then to do the same with hundreds, thousands, millions of folders, and then still end up with a result that's navigable? Genuinely unimaginable to me!! It would have literally had to have been its own entire branch of Project Hail Mary.

But I try to be cool about it bc I do think Grace and Rocky deserve to have access to every movie and TV show ever made 🥰

[qwanderer]

I do think they prioritized like, wikipedia, jstor, similar archives, and well known entertainment media and just called it "all of human knowledge" to be funny. Like the Don’t Go Crazy Room. Do we think Grace named it that? Before or after launch? Or was it Ilyukhina? Plenty of funny people at high levels on the project to go "oh yeah we're just scooping up all of human knowledge here" like there aren't songs that people sing to themselves and each other that never get recorded. Undigitized paper and analogue media. All kinds of things that would never make it onto those drives no matter what. But yeah it's "all of human knowledge" because someone used the shorthand and it stuck.

[stumblingoverchaos]

Just think of the team that had to make sure everything was accessible without an account!

[mysteryteacup]

Alternative: she just had them upload AO3 and figured that would do.

[sunderwight]

I bet they started calling it "all of human knowledge" in order to just cut off any arguments about what was or wasn't worth sending, and just focus on what they could get archived and searchable and on there right up to the wire before launch. Someone's like "why would we send fanfics with the astronauts" and someone else just taps the All of Human Knowledge sign.

[fairycosmos]

big life tips dont be neurodivergent dont be poor dont get in any sort of situation and dont let yourself need or crave

[fairycosmos]

not getting good reports back on your progress with this guys

[dailycatsblog]

[beaft]

i am not a psychiatrist but i do find it really weird how autism checklists are so often focused on "outward" signs of autism rather than what is going on internally. i don't know how to explain it but "do you make eye contact with other people" feels like a much less relevant question than "how does it feel when you have to make eye contact with other people?"

[beaft]

while i'm here, the other one that always pisses me off is "do you interpret idioms literally, for example 'bull in a china shop'?"

well, no, obviously. i know what "bull in a china shop" means because that is a popular phrase with a clearly defined meaning. and if i hadn't heard it before, then i would still not interpret it literally, because it has the cadence of an idiom and i would probably be able to work out from context what it meant. what is the point of this question

[beaft]

third and final complaint: "are you good at noticing subtext?"

i feel like the problem with this question is best illustrated by a conversation i had with a friend a while back, where i said something like, "i feel very safe with you because you don't do subtle hints and you are always very straight-up with me about what you are thinking and feeling."

and he laid a hand on my shoulder and was like, look dude i'm gonna be straight up here. i am subtle with you constantly and you simply do not notice <3

[beaft]

@luckyybones hope you don't mind me screenshotting but you are actually so correct

[wuggen]

Everyone say thank you sanitation workers we owe you our lives sanitation workers

[boociforme]

very serious contribution to this fandom

[ceruleanheaven]

[looking at people younger than me] you have your whole life ahead of you [looking at people older than me] you have your whole life ahead of you [looking at myself] its over

[kurulover]

I hate that when you’re stressed enough your body just starts falling apart. I think it should realize you’re already stressed and don’t need that and start functioning better actually

[kurulover]

[biblicallyaccuratemoth]

I want a sitcom about a friend group or family wherein one of the main characters is a trans woman. I want her to be the most bubbly, kind, energetic character and the show to demonstrate over the episodes that this woman is the fucking glue that holds these people together. They love each other but there’s miscommunications and difficulties expressing themselves and well-meaning ideas that turn toxic. But you have this character who has had to build herself from nothing and is paying that joy she’s cultivated outward.

And then I want a flashback episode that takes place ten years before. And that trans woman is the saddest, numbest man with no light in her eyes. I want her future self to haunt that narrative like a fucking specter. Watching fights that she would have stopped and people she would have helped. It should be clear that when someone finds themselves and cultivates self-love it spills out to the people around them, too. And the relationships aren’t the same without that.

[fairycosmos]

imagine a reality where you could save literally anyone LOL

[keinechteslaecheln]

i'm not even a person anymore. i'm just stress and sadness

[fairycosmos]

big life tips dont be neurodivergent dont be poor dont get in any sort of situation and dont let yourself need or crave

[fairycosmos]

not getting good reports back on your progress with this guys

[kurulover]

I hate that when you’re stressed enough your body just starts falling apart. I think it should realize you’re already stressed and don’t need that and start functioning better actually

[kurulover]