Interests Corner

A page for anything that takes my fancy

[army-of-bee-assassins]

okay i'm reading the semantics chapter of my language development textbook now and i know i've already posted a bit about the wacky methods researchers have employed to test infants' and toddlers' linguistic knowledge, but this is a really fucking great one.

so they were trying to figure out if children use syntactic knowledge to learn new vocabulary, specifically in this case they were researching two year olds. with verbs, some are done to a person ("x hit y") and some only have a doer ("x laughed"), and they wanted to see if these different sentence structures had an effect on how toddlers learn.

they got some grad students, put one in a rabbit costume and one in a duck costume. they had the rabbit repeatedly push the duck into a crouching position using their left hand. at the same time, both the rabbit and the duck were moving their right hands in a repetitive circling motion. they had a bunch of two years olds watch this. with half of the kids, they said "the rabbit is gorping the duck!" and with the other half, they said "the rabbit and duck are gorping!" afterwards, they showed two videos at the same time to the kids, one with the rabbit pushing the duck down but no circling motion, and one with both making the circling motion but no pushing. then they said "where's gorping now? find gorping!" and the kids who had heard the first statement would consistently look towards the video of the pushing motion, while the kids who heard the second statement would consistently look towards the video of the circling motion.

so it provided good evidence that kids do learn new words using their knowledge of sentence structure! my textbook says it's called the "syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis", which is also a fun term. anyway, i just think it's a fucking hilarious way to have tested this. imagine being a linguistics grad student and your advisor is like "hey i got this furry suit. i'm gonna need you to put this on for research purposes."

[foone]

ever since I took a developmental psychology class in college I've wanted this job. I want to be a professional baby-confuser, for SCIENCE

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

I think the harm of denying people the right to control their own bodies is so, so much worse than the risk of people regretting the decisions they make. Regretting something you decided to do is a much healthier pain than the pain of regretting that you didn't get to have a choice.

[bdgonhldy]

power trio vibe match...

...most likely an eye vibe match, too

best to have a Cas/s center for these sorts of sandwiches

[armandgender]

writing is so fun

[armandgender]

writing is impossible why does anyone do this

[caroline-vibecheck]

Me when I encounter difficulty

[daisywithauspolitics]

Can people fucking grow up?

Genuinely.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders ALSO served in the wars.

(Bringing this up cuz of the booing of the welcome to country)

[resetmyfeelings]

[40ouncesandamule]

this post had everything I could hope for

[firebatvillain]

One fun thing about learning new languages is reconsidering the structure of words and language in your mother tongue. It seems with each new language I study, I get more little insights into English, either in how it's similar or how it's different.

For example, a couple years ago, while learning Spanish, I encountered the word for a store, "la tienda." I thought "huh, that's a lot like tener (tiene) - the word for store in Spanish literally corresponds to 'to have/keep'. How interesting!"

Then I stopped for a moment, and for the first time in my life, thought about seriously about the meaning of English word for the place where you buy things, "a store."

[fracturesithinknotfeel]

be attentive

don’t take up too much space

be friendly

don’t try too hard

keep smiling

don’t overdo it

stand straight

focus

match the energy

apologise

when you’re uncomfortable

your kindness

mistaken for weakness

nothing you do

quite right

they see where you’re heading

the ones who’d rather

steal the light

behind your eyes

[flamingogreen]

Coke bottle effect

One of the least comprehended things about autism is masking, masking consists in an adaptative phenomenon that autistic people develop to live and adapt to an allistic (non-autistic) society, we can think about it as a way of camouflage, a way in which autistic people supress some of their natural behaviours. For allistic people or people that doesn’t understand it, this may sound like a great mechanism, because it allows autistic people to look “normal”, but it really is not. Masking it’s  harmful, and it can lead to another things that are really horrible stuff, and the worst thing, most of the time it isn’t really conscious, and unmasking it’s really difficult journey, but today I am not going to talk about that, actually, I am going to explain one of comorbidities of autism that it's extremely related to masking, the coke bottle effect.

For those who don’t now, let’s explain the coke bottle effect in a really simple way imagine an autistic person as a coke bottle, as they day goes on they’re going to get shaken, and if they don’t stim or make any of their normal mechanisms to regulate because of masking, so they don’t let our any of this pressure because they feel like they can’t, not at that moment, not at that place, so the second they feel safe enough to react everything explodes. The whole content of the coke bottle it’s released, instead of relaxing because they’re in a safe space they just release all of the tension and pressure that they have been accumulating all day long, while before for the people that were with them everything look normal, they didn’t look or act eny different, for everyone they’re fine, but in the interior everything just keeps adding pressure that is waiting to release.

So basically the coke bottle effect affects autistic people, and it happens more usually that you may think, because it is just a delayed impact of getting through the day, something that would be so simple for allistic people, something that would be a little easier if we just didn’t mask and used certain mechanisms or tools to regulate all the pressure that is accumulating inside so it doesn’t just explodes at one time. Here is where we need to understand that masking isn’t good at all, making causes problems, masking it’s just a way to hide everything more than a way to help, we really need to talk about this topics more often, so we get a better understanding of everything and we don’t just judge people or get surprised at certain reaction, but most important if you are allistic, you become a safe space to unmask.

[kitto-paint]

Pinion found a friend to do her makeup (paint a skull on her faceplate)

[slurricane]

[did-you-know]

The word ‘panic’ stems from Greek mythology. It’s derived from the name of the god of shepherds, Pan, who would get really angry and start shouting any time someone woke him up from his midday nap.

His yelling was so violent that it sent his flocks into a stampede, causing a sudden wave of anxiety and fear among everyone in the vicinity.

[pyromancerofaronons]

So after looking into some trivia and what not in the tvtropes page for LTB (lots of good stuff, also the timeline was a great refresher on some of the deep lore stuff and helped me understand some of the stuff better), I learned that a lot of the original staff had left CC2. Like, I knew one of the lead artists had done so, but evidently it's A LOT more people than I thought. And in hindsight, this honestly explains so much.

The majority of them, from what I've gathered, had left during the development of Fuga 2 or after its launch and before development on 3 had started. This explains why 3 felt so much different than the first two, from the game design (and why this game was so buggy and unstable) to the writing (plot, world building, lore and character interactions) and even how the game itself functions. I'd need to actually read through the credits to see exactly who all is different to say more on that matter though.

After learning this though, I ended up with a sinking feeling of dread about the future of the series. Like, I've already voiced how I feel about the Fuga trilogy and how it's a departure from what I, and a lot of people, enjoyed about the series. The darker, more mature tone, the much more linear and limited gameplay and a focus on making new more convoluted lore instead of fully fleshing out and expanding upon existing lore, giving us more questions with little to no answers. That last bit is especially relevant with the third game, the one that would have been developed after the majority/all of the departures. It just kinda feels like Little Tail Bronx is going to become something completely different and we're not gonna be able to see the original vision, that future of the series that everyone wanted to see after Solatorobo. I really hope that I'm wrong, but with EVERYTHING about Fuga 3's character secrets and everything teased for the next game, it 100% feels like the series is taking a turn towards something different. Not necessarily bad, just.... different.

I don't know if this was always the intended direction the series was going to take, or if the decade gap between games and scrapping of Strelka Stories changed things completely. Hell, I don't even know if this is purely because Bamco refused to let them do anything with the IP or if this would have still come about even without such legal issues. I just don't know.

[n-hotel-48]

I find myself agreeing pretty thoroughly with your sentiment here, having so many of the old guard having seemingly left gives me this uncertain vibe as to how the franchise might turn out in the future, along with what feels like a case of the company leadership enforcing the 2 year development cycle on the third game despite all of those staff losses leading to its comparatively unpolished feel.

I'm still hopeful for more great and unique stories being made in the Little Tail Bronx universe, whether it be the possibility of a Strelka Stories concept being revived or a proper sequel set after Solatorobo, it would be so cool to see this series thrive, but I really hope that any future installments have the right level of care and passion behind as the previous entries have had.

Also, great seeing that reference you put in the tags to the final scene of Yurlungur in "A Request for Red", that little ending bit lives rent-free in my head with the possibilities it presents, and together with the ending tagline in the third Solatorobo artbook Starlet "いつか旅立つ こもたちへ。 (To the children who will one day embark on their journey.)" also found in the Strelka Stories' concepts, feel like such teases for that unrealised game.

[the-punforgiven]

Strip poker at the knights order sucks ass this shit takes forever and we're running out of space on the table

Guy next to me took off one bessagew and you can't even see their face but you can feel their smug-ass grin beneath it

[loth-caatgirl]

[mfshipbracket]

BONUS ROUND: Aang/Katara (ATLA) VS Kylo Ren/Rey (Star Wars)

Aang/Katara

Kylo Ren/Rey

Voting ended onMay 23, 2023

[charlesoberonn]

[rettoujoutou-deactivated2025112]

[charlesoberonn]

I just looked through OP's blog and every single poll is a popular m/f ship vs. reylo (with similar results). I don't understand.

[cordezshenanigans]

There was an actual bracket, but reylo got obliterated in round one, and after the poll was done, someone suggested it would be funny to do a "bonus round" where every tournament contestant is pitted against reylo to see how many ships, if any, reylo can beat

[charlesoberonn]

I hope it's none.

[lindleland]

It is beating exactly one of them.

[ros-sauce]

I hate when something I downloaded illegally doesn't run right like wtf this isn't what I didn't pay for