anywhere but home

trying to be more active on this old blog, as right now you're just a couple of scrolls away from 2018. i like aliens and monsters and books. sometimes i do music. this blog is for weirdos, freaks and perverts.

[noshamehustle]

[formerglory25]

reblog if you too are bi and confused or support others’ right to be bi and confused

[indigosfindings]

in a prestigious lecture hall with cherrywood walls a professor presents this tweet to their class. the students pass it around, each taking their chance to hold the tweet, to feel its weight in their hands. some students use their microscopes to study the tweet closely, others auscultate it with stethoscopes. once each student has had the opportunity to inspect it, the professor asks if there are any questions. the first several questions are the expected requests for clarification-- examples of chumpfuckery, inquiries as to the role of B*rnie in the production cycle of fuckcrustables, etc. the class falls silent again until a student in the back raises a hand and says "had the day not been a cromulent fuckcrustable, would tommy still needy drinky?" the professor's smile is wry yet impressed: this line of inquiry does not occur to every student. the professor says: "tell me what you think." the student ponders for a second, acutely aware that everyone in the room is watching them. "well," they finally say, "i've had days that were fuckcrustables before, some of them cromulent, and ive never needy drinky. wanty, sure, but not needy." the professor prompts them to keep going. "my theory is that... either tommy is lying or... maybe fuckcrustability doesnt actually correlate with drinky requisites?" so what does, another student asks. "i believe the key variables are the ex-wife and the tenant from hell. they generate the needy in question." the professor presses: "how can you be sure that tommy would not needy drinky otherwise?" the student replies, "because we are not talking about chumpfuckery or fuckcrustability in the abstract, we're talking about a confluence of variables producing an intersection of chumpfuckery, fuckcrustability, and cromulence that is greater than the sum of its parts. anyone would needy drinky in those circumstances, and im willing to wager that we could prove it mathematically using the drinky formula." a brief silence ensues before the classroom erupts into applause. that student goes on to graduate at the top of their class and become a leading figure in the field of tweet exegesis. the professor? that was tommy. and the student? that was You.

[thestuffedalligator]

“When we were kids, the Phonics Wizard came to our town to show off how the letter E can change the sounds of vowels. He turned a can into a cane, a pin into a pine. This one kid had a cap and he changed it into a cape, that kind of thing.

“And we loved it, we were all having a great time, but then he saw my sister and I, and he just got this - this look in his eyes, and then-”

She hesitated, worrying the coarse material between her fingers. “Things got pretty bad after that,” she muttered. “I know it’s silly, but I try to keep - her - comfortable. We don’t know if she can still hear us, or see us, or if she’s even still in here, but I like to think she is. I talk to her when I can, I leave music on when I’m out of the house. I tried to convince my parents to bring her with us when we went to Disneyland, but they didn’t - didn’t really take that well.”

After a moment, she put the ball of twine back onto its pillow. “Anyways. They tried to arrest the Phonics Wizard, but he had a plan in case something went wrong and he turned it into a plane and flew away.”

[xekstrin]

Boyfriend: wait but I thought you could change from alpha to omega? Like you get hit with a pheromone and bam become that and you fuck, but the rest of the time you’re androgynous

Me: … I think you have confused omegaverse with the seminal piece of science fiction literature The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K Le Guin

[xekstrin]

Nationalism is a societal evil

[l-art-stuff-l]

[ image ID: tags that read “wait what is left hand of darkness about” /end ID ]

[liarsblade]

Ugly Duckling sequel where the swan is like hey it's nobody's fault and I don't think anyone did anything wrong per se but nonetheless I did feel really alienated and depressed for most of my youth and those years do continue to affect me in the present day and their mom is like, so what you're saying is that you think I'm a failure and a bad duck.

[janmisali]

what do you think of tone indicators in general?

unfortunately my thoughts on tone indicators are somewhat nuanced. fortunately, this is tumblr not twitter, so I can just write out my full thoughts in one post and be as verbose about it as feels necessary.

speaking as an autistic person (and I know there are other autistic people who don't hold this same view, this is just my perspective), I think as an accessibility tool, the extended set tone indicators in current popular use is fundamentally misguided.

the oldest ones, /s for sarcasm and /j for jokes, make sense. their notation isn't the most intuitive thing ("does /s mean sarcastic or serious?") but it's not too difficult to explain what they mean. I've had to spend my whole life learning by brute force what different tones of voice mean and what they change about how I'm supposed to interpret something, so I already know what "read this in a sarcastic voice" and "read this as a joke" are supposed to mean. my existing skills can be translated into the new form without too much effort.

the same thing applies to emoji and emoticons. I know what facial expressions mean, because I had to learn what they mean. figuring out if :) is sincere or not from context is a skill I've already needed to develop. it doesn't come naturally for me, but it's something I already at least somewhat know how to do.

most of the tone indicators in current use uh. don't work like this.

tone indicators like /ref or /nbh don't correspond to specific tones of voice. I don't have a "I'm making a reference" voice or a "I'm not talking about a person who's here" voice that I can picture the sentence being read in. these do not indicate tones, they're purely disambiguators. they clarify what something means without necessarily changing how it would be read out loud.

and on paper, that's fine, right? like, it's theoretically a good thing to take an otherwise ambiguous statement and add something to it that clarifies what you meant by it. the problem is that these non-tone tone indicators are not even remotely self-explanatory. it's up to me, the person who is being clarified to, to know what all these acronyms are supposed to mean, and how they change the way I'm supposed to interpret what something means.

it's, quite literally, a newly-invented second set of social cues that I'm expected to learn separately from the set that I've already spent my whole life figuring out, and it works completely differently.

sure, these rules are (in principle) less arbitrary than the rules of facial expressions and tones of voice and how long you're supposed to wait before it's your turn to speak, but they're also fully artificial and recently invented, which means they're currently in a constant state of flux. tone indicators go in and out of fashion all the time, and the "comprehensive lists" are never helpful.

in theory, I appreciate the idea of people going out of their way to clarify what they mean by potentially ambiguous things they post online. if it worked, that would be a really nice thing to do.

however, sometimes I imagine what the internet would be like without them. what if instead of using /s, the expectation was that if you're sarcastic online there's no guarantee that strangers reading your post will know what you meant? what if instead of inventing more and more acronyms to cover every possible potentially confusing situation, we just... expected one another to speak less ambiguously in the first place?

so, I on paper like the idea of tone indicators. I think it's good that some people are trying to be considerate by being extra clear about what they mean by things. but if tone indicators didn't exist, and people who wanted to be considerate in this way instead just made a point of phrasing things more clearly to begin with, I think that would be vastly preferable to even the most well-implemented tone indicator system.

also /pos sucks because there's something deeply and profoundly wrong for an abbreviation that means "I don't mean this as an insult, don't worry" to be spelled the same way as an acronym that's an insult

[janmisali]

now that this is circulating around there's a decent number of people saying things like "yeah, I agree! most of the tone indicators in current use are bad the only ones you need are /s /j /lh and /hj" and I'm going to combust

[yaldabaothadeez]

The person who composed the Dr Who theme tune back in 1963, Ron Grainer, didn’t actually arrange it - that was mostly the work of Delia Derbyshire and some other BBC people.

I’m bringing this up because, in 1980, Grainer finally did produce an arrangement of the Dr Who theme, as he had imagined it, and, well, you will not expect what you’re about to hear

[yaldabaothadeez]

Four years later, I’m still not over this.

Someone with more video editing skill/patience than me please make the 70s cop show opening (with freeze frames on each major actor, you know the type) that this so badly wants to be.

[humandisastersquad]

op i have excellent news:

[shamebats]

How to talk to doctors

Post by @ julez27_

[bhramarii]

no mondays in the cambrian era

[secondbeatsongs]

for anyone too young to know this: watching The Truman Show is a vastly different experience now, compared to how it was before youtube and social media influencers became normal

before it was like, "what a horrifying thing to do to a human being! to take away their autonomy and privacy, all for the sake of profits! to create fake scenarios for them to react to, just to retain viewership! to ruin their happiness just so some corporate entity could harvest money from their very humanity! how could anyone do something so evil?"

and now it's like, "ah, yeah. this is still deeply fucked up, but it's pretty much what every influencer has been doing to their kids for a decade now. probably bad that we've normalized this experience"

[secondbeatsongs]

agshjfsj you know what? sure. I can do this from an in-universe perspective too

for anyone too young to know this: watching The Truman Show is a vastly different experience now, compared to when it was on air.

firstly, you'd better hope it stays up on amazon prime, because it aired 24/7 for multiple decades, so the size of it is astronomical. there's a reason the other streaming services dropped it - the server costs alone are ridiculous. but even on prime there are ad breaks in it that it never used to have, because back then all the advertising was product placement, but modern advertisers want mid-roll ads, and they really break up some of the most emotional moments imo.

(and don't get me started on the music licensing btw - all of the changes are bad, but the song swap in episode 9775 killed me dead. awful)

not to mention that the vhs, laserdisc, dvd, and blu-ray releases have been out of print for years. and if you want to try torrenting it, to get it in even barely decent quality you're gonna need at least 300TB of free space, and that's not including the deleted scenes and director's commentary tracks, which are a whole other thing.

secondly, everyone has this parasocial thing where they feel like they grew up with Truman, because their mom kept it on in the house when they were a kid or w/e, and we need to just. get over it. I mean, he's just a guy. you're not special for liking him; everyone likes him.

like, some of you guys are worse about this than you were with Steve from Blue's Clues, and that's saying something. you've gotta move on.

and people need to be nicer to the actors who played his friends and family, too. like I know the ones who were adults at the start have a lot to answer for, but the kids were pushed into this by the industry just like he was! and they don't deserve to be cancelled on twitter just because their dad got them into acting as a 3yo or w/e. like. come on.

thirdly, because of the way the show ended, we need to actually address the fact that we don't know what happened to him? like, Truman wasn't some actor who quit, he was lied to about his whole life, and now nobody knows where he is! and after the SAG-AFTRA strike when the crew and extras were fighting to get paid for the work they did on that show, did fucking anybody think about Truman? if anyone's owed residuals, it's that guy.

I just feel like nobody's taking it seriously that he's not a celebrity? he's a kid who got shoved into a machine, and after what happened to him, it'd be completely fine if he never showed his face in public again.

(though personally, I want him to just so he can sue the shit out of everyone involved in his upbringing. but that's just me.)

anyway on a fandom level, if you want to help, the Truman Archival Project is looking for some eps that were lost due to corruption, and some scenes that got cut later. there's a list on the wiki, but there are a lot of gaps and old tape formats that need converting, so if you can help, go do that!

and Truman, if you're out there - I hope you're living a good life. whatever comfort and entertainment you bring to people really means nothing compared to the value of you getting to live a normal life. I hope you're having a good time, wherever you are.

when it comes down to it, what was done to you was awful. nobody deserves to have their most private moments shown to millions of people without their consent.

it's probably bad that we've normalized this experience.

[sepublic]

OP I’m digging the little jab you made with how in-universe you wax poetic about respecting Truman’s dignity as a human being but then in the same breath turning around and insisting the public must keep as much of his life available to voyeuristic eyes for as long as possible, instead of maintaining his privacy as best as one can by letting his moments be left irretrievable. Just the sheer dissonance and hypocrisy 10/10.

[ducking-awkward]

Sure it sounds like hypocrisy, but did you consider that OPs stance is one of documenting accuracy. Yeah most contributors to the TAP are voyeuristic boomers, but there are good people making sure every ethical violation is being documented and catalogued. Having an accurate record of what happened to Truman will help future generations learn from our mistakes.

It takes at least three generations (minimum) to make real change. First, the generation that caused the harm, (boomers for Truman, but many of the YT/FB parents are genX or millennial as well). Then, the kids that were raised in the culture of harm, who decided to buck the tradition and do better with their kids; (genZ and genAlpha parents are being a bit more judicial with what they post, but we still got a long way to go). Finally, the generation raised by those who rebelled are able to teach their children why we don't go back to the old ways.

We owe it to our children's children to record our history accurately and completely. How can we learn from our mistakes, when they've been erased for whatever Amazon decided was more profitable? To paraphrase George Santayana: Those who fail to document, and learn from the past condemned their children to repeat it.

[200mgcaffeine]

No, but sepublic is right. We gotta admit that OP's stance wasn't just "we need to document our mistakes." Their motivations aren't really as a pure historian or advocate - they still approach the Truman Show as a product or a story/artistic work, removed from the reality and the horror of its construction. They complain about amazon ads breaking up "emotional moments". They criticize music replacements for being "bad" compared to the originals - this is them critiquing the show on the level of taste and artistry because OP is setting themselves up as a kind of super fan "purist" who loves the show. Yeah, they make statements about how Truman should sue the people who made the show, but "nobody deserves to have their most private moments shown to millions of people without their consent" next to "the Truman Archival Project is looking for some eps that were lost due to corruption, and some scenes that got cut later. there's a list on the wiki, but there are a lot of gaps and old tape formats that need converting, so if you can help, go do that!" That. That is hypocrisy. I don't know how else to say this, but you do not need to restore a couple hundred hours of cut scenes to have a very accurate view of what exactly was so wrong about the whole affair. There is, as we all know, a truly insane amount of evidence already. So much evidence that our third generation would need to spend years and years of their lives absorbing it all and -- oh my god! How is this so different from when the show was airing, again?

Everyone working on TAP is contributing to the abuse, regardless of what they claim. Obviously from a historical and advocacy perspective, we should be most concerned with what the actual victim has to say now, and what Truman himself as a free agent can teach our future generations about his own experience, as opposed to everyone "interpreting" what he wants as if watching the show actually makes them qualified to know his thoughts and feelings. That's why you should donate to the Truman Burbank Protection Fund, which aims to not only find Truman's current whereabouts, but also provide him with a legal team and security squad that will protect him and his interests while he gets ready to tell the world his side of the story.

[pocket-deer-belly]

"a majority of my viewers are not subscribed so if you could do me a favor" shuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut the fuck uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuup why are you complaining about a large influx of new viewership as if it's a bad thing

[sparecrew]

[hefnerama]

Ok but no seriously you need to see the FULL version of this sketch. The above video is heavily edited, and while it was funny enough to make me track down the actual sketch, the full version is even better, with an even stronger punchline. It’s a very well-crafted sketch.

[marlovestrees]

For fans of @derinthescarletpescatarian’s Time to Orbit: Unknown, I’d like to suggest this novelett from the January 2025 issue of Clarkesworld magazine.

It also follows the story of a Perfectly Normal Spaceship on its way to a colony world.

There’s a text and an audio version.

NEVER EATEN VEGETABLES, by H.H. PAK

Clarkesworld Magazine - Science Fiction & Fantasy

Clarkesworld Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine and Podcast. This page: Never Eaten Vegetables by H.H. Pak

[birdhug]

this is kind of funny bc my moms name is susan she grew up in the 70s And she used to hitchhike AND she ended up in the same room as an active serial killer. who was targeting girls her age at the time!!!! anyway.

[starlocked01]

See this is the kind of post I expect to have at least 1k notes before I see it. Omg. This is nuts

[aniseandspearmint]

My mom hitchhiked around the US several times in the 70s. She once got in a car with a guy and he kept making passes at her so she made him pull over and let her out (with the power of KNIFE), then he tried to hit her with his car a couple times, so she stood in front of one of those short thick mile marker posts and dived out of the way when he tried again so he hit it.

This was the worst, but not the only, bad experience she had over the years.

And she wondered why i adamantly refused to hitchhike ever. 🙄

[weaselle]

there was actually a sort of propaganda campaign against hitch-hiking in the 70's (i think because hitch-hiking is the unmarked bills of travel, made it impossible for law enforcement to track movements of people around the country)

Two studies on the topic include a 1974 California Highway Patrol study and a 1989 German federal police study. The California study found that hitchhikers were not disproportionately likely to be victims of crime. The German study concluded that the actual risk is much lower than the publicly perceived risk; the authors did not advise against hitchhiking in general. They found that in some cases there were verbal disputes or inappropriate comments, but physical attacks were very rare.

but law enforcement and the government put out a lot of posters and adds like this

even though statistically you're much more likely to be murdered by your significant other, assaulted during a home invasion, etc. If the concern was real, why didn't we make posters against getting married or owning a home for public safety? No, this was more about not being able to track protesters and dissidents as they moved around the country.

These PSAs did their job well, and to this day most of the public still believes hitch-hiking is a super dangerous activity.

I mean, interacting with strangers is always something that requires caution, but there was a literal propaganda campaign against hitch-hiking.

[un-monstre]

I know that HRT gives you secondary sex characteristics in one direction or another, but we HAVE to stop telling nonbinary people that they “can’t pick and choose.” Of course, you can’t tell your testosterone that you’d rather not grow chest hair, but there are things you can do!

You could go on T so your voice drops and start shaving so you don’t grow a beard. You could start HRT and then stop once you get the permanent changes you like. You can pursue sterilization instead of bottom surgery. You can get top surgery without being on T. You can go on E and work out a bunch to bulk out your muscles. You can pursue laser hair removal or electrolysis to remove unwanted hair, with or without HRT. You could even just start hormones to see if you like it and then stop if it isn’t to your taste.

Obviously, you can’t order secondary sex characteristics a la carte, but we have to stop being so awful to nonbinary people. We should discuss the options we have, not shut down the conversation with “that’s what you get.”

[nicuveo]

this 2020 research paper is all about HRT options for non-binary people. it's what convinced me to start HRT, because, indeed, i could "pick and choose".

Introduction: To date no standardized hormonal treatment protocols for non-binary transgender individuals have been described in the literat

[superlinguo]

Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)

People who are blind from birth will gesture when they speak. I always like pointing out this fact when I teach classes on gesture, because it gives us an an interesting perspective on how we learn and use gestures. Until now I’ve mostly cited a 1998 paper from Jana Iverson and Susan Goldin-Meadow that analysed the gestures and speech of young blind people. Not only do blind people gesture, but the frequency and types of gestures they use does not appear to differ greatly from how sighted people gesture. If people learn gesture without ever seeing a gesture (and, most likely, never being shown), then there must be something about learning a language that means you get gestures as a bonus.

Blind people will even gesture when talking to other blind people, and sighted people will gesture when speaking on the phone - so we know that people don’t only gesture when they speak to someone who can see their gestures.

Earlier this year a new paper came out that adds to this story. Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow looked at the gestures of blind speakers of Turkish and English, to see if the *way* they gestured was different to sighted speakers of those languages. Some of the sighted speakers were blindfolded and others left able to see their conversation partner.

Turkish and English were chosen, because it has already been established that speakers of those languages consistently gesture differently when talking about videos of items moving. English speakers will be more likely to show the manner (e.g. ‘rolling’ or bouncing’) and trajectory (e.g. ‘left to right’, ‘downwards’) together in one gesture, and Turkish speakers will show these features as two separate gestures. This reflects the fact that English ‘roll down’ is one verbal clause, while in Turkish the equivalent would be yuvarlanarak iniyor, which translates as two verbs ‘rolling descending’.

Since we know that blind people do gesture, Özçalışkan’s team wanted to figure out if they gestured like other speakers of their language. Did the blind Turkish speakers separate the manner and trajectory of their gestures like their verbs? Did English speakers combine them? Of course, the standard methodology of showing videos wouldn’t work with blind participants, so the researchers built three dimensional models of events for people to feel before they discussed them.

The results showed that blind Turkish speakers gesture like their sighted counterparts, and the same for English speakers. All Turkish speakers gestured significantly differently from all English speakers, regardless of sightedness. This means that these particular gestural patterns are something that’s deeply linked to the grammatical properties of a language, and not something that we learn from looking at other speakers.

References

Jana M. Iverson & Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1998. Why people gesture when they speak. Nature, 396(6708), 228-228.

Şeyda Özçalışkan, Ché Lucero and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 2016. Is Seeing Gesture Necessary to Gesture Like a Native Speaker? Psychological Science 27(5) 737–747.

Asli Ozyurek & Sotaro Kita. 1999. Expressing manner and path in English and Turkish: Differences in speech, gesture, and conceptualization. In Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 507-512). Erlbaum.

[gothsbian]

microwave popcorn is such a beautiful technology. captures the full range of sensory and emotional experiences. there's even a part where it gets loud and scary. the 1812 overture of cheap snacks