"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog"

[pangur-and-grim]

all books should be written by deeply damaged autistic perverts

[ssajin]

@pangur-and-grim ?

[pangur-and-grim]

YOU DON'T NEED TO TAG ME ON THIS, I WROTE THE POST

[lostinhistory]

Solid life advice from Sue the T. Rex.

[homunculus-argument]

The common theme of your complaints seems to be "Don't lie and then get mad when you're believed."

Yes.

I grew up in an environment where the connection between what people say and what they mean is abstract at best, and I never want to be in a situation again where I'd have to ~just know~ what someone wants or thinks when they're saying something completely different, or where someone assumes that I am lying when I say what I want or think and arbitrarily decides that I must mean whatever they think I mean instead. It makes me want to discover the sport of reverse greek wrestling.

[trinistaxmcnuggle]

https://www.tumblr.com/mefitours-blog-blog/351510194/ask-culture-and-guess-culture?source=share

[homunculus-argument]

How tf was I raised in a different culture than the family that raised me?

[teumessianandlaelaps]

Probably autism. Me and my dad had the same issue. It's "Can't you take a hint." vs "I'm not here to play 20Q, say it with your chest or shut up" and "I've been trying to tell you [words never before said]" vs "You weren't trying very hard, then" and generally being assumed to be oblivious, blunt, and rude vs feeling expected to eavesdrop, read minds, and be presumptious in order to play their stupid mind games, because they're too lazy/anxious to just address you directly and honestly. It's a frustrating communication difference, and tbh I think it's emotionally immature to always read confrontation as conflict.

[homunculus-argument]

I'm starting to lean more and more into the possibility that I'm the only one in my family who didn't have autism. Nobody else was suspected or tested and I got a negative diagnosis every single time they tested me for it.

[herpsandbirds]

Black-throated Loon aka Black-throated Diver (Gavia arctica), family Gaviidae, order Gaviiformes, Hebrides, Scotland

Also called Arctic Loon/Diver

photographs by Richard Creasey

[emilyofjane]

I am Very Normal about Tostada Animations

[kingpin-of-steel-act3]

[ihatenearlyeverything]

its ok theyre Gods lil helpers

[oatmealbrain]

And boy are they clumsy

[hydrangeafae]

Hi, these bees are babies! They’re not clumsy at all, this is what is called orientation flights. After birth and before beginning their careers as foragers (as all Honey bees cycle through all the jobs in the Hive throughout their lifespan), Honey bees take short flights back and forth, to and from the Hive, to orient themselves with their wings and their home so they can learn its location and how to get back home after foraging! Everyone has to learn, these are just smol little baby turkeys. Bees use the angle of the sun for location so adults have a better and more direct sense of location than any human

[polar-solstice]

IM SO PLEASED TO LEARN THIS!!!

They are just!!! Student drivers!!! 😭

[sindri42]

BONK!

[should-be-sleeping]

[bardskull]

[foxes-in-love]

[cbk1000]

As a society, we need to go back to understanding that strangers on the internet are, you know, strangers. I feel lately that I'm seeing a rise in 'An author I love blocked me because they took my comment the wrong way' posts on the ao3 subreddit, and then the comment is them calling the author a fucking bitch or something like that.

Don't do this. Tone doesn't translate well in text, and if you don't have a rapport with that author, they are not going to interpret, 'You're a fucking bitch' as, 'Author I hate you for being so talented and making me feel so keenly.' They're going to interpret it as you being an asshole. You can shit talk with your friends because you have an established relationship with them and can distinguish between playful banter and genuine anger. You do not have this with a stranger, no matter how much you like their fics. You will have a much more pleasant time in fandom and not get cockblocked from interacting with your favorite writers if you remember this.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

#I don't often see comments like these when I'm reading a fic but there have been a few that made me raise an eyebrow#I don't know if I would block over someone calling me a bitch on a fic I wrote but I'd probs try to gently tell them it's not right#coz honestly I feel like this is an issue with younger age groups who are new to reading fics and might not understand fandom culture#or at least I hope it's younger people who simply don't know better 😬#otherwise... yikes

This isn't some esoteric niche aspect of fandom culture, strangers at the potluck also do not like being called a fucking bitch.

[cipheramnesia]

Working with different business cultures all over the globe, my biggest surprise is that while the USA is bad, it's not actually the very absolute worst I've ever worked with.

[cipheramnesia]

I can imagine all the guesses, but if you haven't talked with a crap ton of people from dozens of countries, it's not obvious.

[cipheramnesia]

The key is business culture is like its own weird separate culture with rules and structures, but most places have a fairly comprehensible set of expectations. So most of the time, it's just remembering perceived differences in expectations. Some places it's polite to be what feels really overly friendly to me. Some places it's polite to be what feels obsequious and formal to me. It's like, whatever. A secondary form of language kinda. It's not even social cues, it's just mechanics of language really. Places with that stuff, those are all fine and wonderful to deal with because there's a framework to communicate and all that.

Part of why the USA shits the bed trying to talk with is because every business person here has like zero framework, it's all lies and bullshit, and everyone wants to be the smartest bestest boy. It's not business culture as much as daycare for toddlers who have millions of dollars and hate human rights. Not the worst though, not by far.

[cipheramnesia]

What's key to understand is this is all separate from things like the real people in different places. Business brain people don't have any relevance to real human behavior, it's this whole other structure of make believe which controls everyone's well being. It's important to know because I know how to email a business guy in South Korea using language that will feel appropriate enough after translation, but that's completely irrelevant to the real people living there. It's easy to talk to business guys in China or India or whatever. Germany, Nigeria, Mexico.

UK business guys are pretty bad too. Still not the worst but you have to put a lot of extra work in because business culture in the UK still thinks the Brittish empire exists. The majority of business dudes in the UK see no difference between selling something that has their company name on it, and making it themselves. It's like how all the stuff that says "made in the USA" is 99% made somewhere else, and then one staple is put into it and it's made in the USA, but if you talk to business guys here, they never confuse where things are made, just like... more basic realities like linear time and physics. UK guys go the opposite way, and always say they own everything. But that's all relatively navigable. It's like, okay, you all live in an imaginary world, but I can still get everyone to understand time and logistics and stuff enough to get everyone understanding the same information. I can translate imagination land to reality and back, they get it.

[cipheramnesia]

Australia business guys are the worst. Uncontested. I keep minutely detailed notes on every interaction I have with any business brained Australian. I don't want to do this. I have to. Working with business guys in Australia is like being stuck in a marriage with an emotionally abusice pickup artist. Their favorite way to communicate is using work appropriate language to imply you're stupid and your work is worthless. Luckily, there's also no way to explain what you do, because I think when you get a corporate executive level position in an Australian business, they surgically remove the part of your brain that takes in new information.

My average verbal or email exchange with an Australian business guy goes something like this:

"Okay, this is going to take around a month. We need so and so dollars to start. Also, the Earth orbits the Sun."

"Great, just to confirm, we're ready to deliver tomorrow, and the giant hamster rolls the sunball across the sky. Sounds good, have you started?"

It's infuriating in some ways, fascinating in others. Information simply vanishes into an Australian business person as if you hurled it into space, but something in space might theoretically end up somewhere and everything I say to Australian business guys doesn't. I've tried every way around it, and nothing works. And they become enraged when the things they imagined, which no one ever actually said, don't happen. Like you know those clips from Alex Jones in court being read his own words? Imagine that instead of blustering denial he demanded to know how the lawyer was so incompetent at lawyering because words don't exist and he was told this was a carnival cruise not lawsuit. And they have both of the worst traits of USA and UK business guys on top of all that. And I've never heard anyone even close to the same level of casual racism as business guys in Australia. I mean, business guys as a rules aren't great people, but nowhere I've ever worked with has been so consistently terrible to deal with. It would be one thing if it was an outlier, I've had one or two USA companies that were rough, sometimes companies in South Korea can be a real pain, navigating business culture in France if you're from the USA is a labyrinth. But Australia. Those business guys are on another level. Every other company with dodgy practices knows what they’re doing that's questionable. I don't know if business guys in Australia have the ability to understand... like... language. Do they understand laws, money, logistics, anything? Impossible to say! They walk and talk like people but they have discovered some means by which they never intake any information ever. It's like plausible deniability evolved into a new part of the brain specifically to make it easier to be as unethical as the manifest physical reality permits. The regular people in Australia all seem fine, just more people, but the business operators are like night and day. I can find ways to communicate with non-English speakers fairly well, knowing how to work language to adapt to translation is fun. I can't make fucking heads or tails of English speaking Australian corporate execs. If you speak any second language, any at all, know that you are doing better at it than these guys are in their first one. It's literally impossible to overstate how uniformly unpleasant it is to work with business guys from Australia. They are, without question, the worst.

[elodieunderglass]

@cipheramnesia have you ever seen these?

[cipheramnesia]

I have! Some of them were helpful at certain points, iirc. I used to keep it open on my desktop as a business guy cultural expectations reminder. But what ended up being way more useful was understanding weird quirks of language translation (mostly through trial and error) and also what "good manners" was supposed to mean to different business running guys. Like, once I figured out that a lot of people will read "once" as "one single time" and not "after" and if the context isn't clear that creates a massive problem, so I started saying "after" to mean after, that alone made a bigger difference than most anything on the chart. There's a huge amount of colonialism in the prevalence of English globally, and like I can't unpack all that here in this context, but being aware of it makes my ability to cross cultural linguistic divides better.

Also if anyone out there is studying linguistics or colonialism or the intersection of those, you should know that it's probably worse than you think, and also the English language privilege of people whose first language is English is like. Fucking off the charts. Even where most of my coworkers are multilingual and don't all have English as a first language, there's thousands of languages none of us speak, and these people still low key make fun of accents or poor grammar from people who learned English as a second language and it makes me insane. The job makes me so insane about like whatever you wanna call it, colonialism privilege or something. We are all so blinding unaware of ourselves, I'm gonna stop before I go into a spiral. Basically if you're raised speaking English like me, you probably got levels of relative global privilege you don't even know about, I don't even know. I'm drowning every day.

[socialmaya]

[ode-on-a-grecian-butt]

theyer old enough that they used to connect 

[finnglas]

They're older than Florida. The Floridian peninsula is the solidified runoff of the Appalachians that got caught on some coral. It's why we're like this, I think. You don't stand a chance of being normal when you were created by the shed skin of an elder god draping itself over a hollow skeleton. You're always going to be a little Off.

[galladegamer]

[headspace-hotel]

They used to be as tall as the Himalayas.

[purkinje-effect]

[dragoninahumancostume]

Okay but are they older or younger than sharks?

[iota-andromedae]

THEYRE OLDER THAN SHARKS BY LIKE THIRTY MILLION YEARS

[jaycafe]

makes sense when you know that life is old there, older than the trees, younger than the mountains....

[iwillmissourtalks]

Fandom spaces have GOT to stop finding out about concept art & saying they were supposed to have x or y. That’s not how concept art works, there isn’t a secret better show they decided to hide from you for no reason

[ghostboyravenight-deactivated20]

“Look at the animation style we could have had!” and it’s a drawing so detailed that the animators would have killed themselves before ever being able to finish a single frame

[transmasc-is-life]

'Why does every nonbinary person want top surgery' I dunno maybe because having visible breasts immediately makes everyone assume you're female and only female, and therefore put you into a binary. Also why are you assuming every nonbinary person has breasts.

[catilinussy]

I think people who believe that should also put some thought into whether every nonbinary person with breasts actually wants top surgery, or whether they've just decided that the nonbinary people with breasts who want to keep them don't "count" as nonbinary.

[furbearingbrick]

#i know plenty of nonbinary people who want breasts or like their breasts#but they're viewed as either transtrenders or trans women in denial <- prev tags

[talontarget]

jkr is literally posting upskirt photos to her social media. when will it finally get through to harry potter fans that their support makes her feel confident and correct enough to do things like this

[dodykeahedron]

If the holocaust denialism SOMEHOW wasn't enough for you to shut up about your favourite kids book as an adult; JK Rowling just committed a sex crime IRL against a transgender woman.

When do we start to care.

[bedupolker]

Saw a gorgeous horned lizard though... always wild how many color/pattern variations i see i the same species.

[sluttynurse]

[ivy-michaels]

the thing about this is that whatever man made this has confused 'logic' with memorizing procedures. In general, the vast majority of people confuse 'intelligence' with 'memorizing things.' Once you notice this, you never stop noticing it.

You can get 'good' at chess by by memorizing a handful of opening moves and strategies and and be 90% of people because 90% of people aren't that interested in learning the basics of chess like that. Rubik's cubes are easy to solve once you learn the algorithms that work behind them. Sudoku is famously just a number puzzle.

These things are logic in the same way that computers run on "logic," but as the great Mr. Spock once said, logic is the beginning of reason, not its endpoint.

[unashamedly-enthusiastic]

My pre-order of Apparently, Sir Cameron Needs to Die arrived while I'm working so I only have time to say I'm in love by the dedication already