This happened a while ago

but I was reminded of it while I was cooking just now and I think it’s cute.

Me: Hey, dear? This may be a silly question, but would it weird you out if I mixed spaghetti and penne together? We don’t have a lot of penne left…

Sparkly: *makes horrified face*

Me: Ah, so it wasn’t a silly question.

It’s too gross for me, I do not actually like horror

Fallen London is so cool. I love the University storyline so much. I love being a detective. I love writing symphonies and epic poems and competing to be the Imperial Artist in Residence. I love arguing with the Jovial Contrarian at parties. I love being really really rude to devils.

The one thing I don’t love is the $#&*@ Bifurcated Owl. Why. Why. Apparently there’s a bonus-content plotline where you can MAKE one. Why.

Small life update 5/4

Sparkly’s gymnastics classes are going really well. Ey has been practicing a floor routine the past few weeks and ey’s making a lot of progress.

I’m in the process of setting up a relatively professional-looking page to direct people to re: captioning instead of just being like “I can caption your things”.

It kind of sucks but the truth is, some speech recognition software is REALLY BAD, and trying to correct it honestly takes longer than just transcribing the video manually. I can sort of feel the impendingness of having to explain this to someone– that they spent time and possibly money on something that is worse than nothing– and it sucks but it’s true.

It’s because of two things. 1. Unlike correcting typos which can be done by reading the transcript, the errors speech recognition software makes will all be real words, and if the transcript is sufficiently bad, it’s not at all obvious which words are the incorrect ones or what they should be replaced with. So you have to listen to the audio. And then 2, it just plain takes more time to hear-highlight-delete-pause-type-resume than it does to just hear-type.

I’m eye-contact-agnostic

People on Tumblr were talking about “faking” eye contact by looking at another part of the person’s face– the bridge of their nose, or their mouth, or their forehead– and it reminded me of something I used to think when I was a teenager.

I don’t remember why it came up, but I remember being kind of dubious about the whole concept of eye contact. The point of confusion was, how could anybody claim to be focusing their eyes on such a tiny specific spot in their field of view? How do you tell the difference between looking at someone’s eye versus their nose? They’re so close together, the difference in where your eye is pointing is really negligible.

That was my line of thought when I was 13 or so.

I think I’m slightly less eye-contact-agnostic than I used to be. Maybe I’m better at focusing my attention on a small spot and blocking out everything else? Maybe I’m more aware of small movements of my eyes? Maybe my frame of reference for “making eye contact” has just changed from teachers at the front of classrooms to people sitting on the couch with me, so their eyes are a bigger target? I’m not sure. But eye contact as a specific and obviously identifiable experience makes more sense to me now.

But I do think that the part of your field of vision you’re most specifically “looking at” or focusing on is partly cognitive, not physical. You can move your mental focus without moving your eyes. Or I can.

A pointless post about TV

Sparkly and I have been on-and-off watching (as it becomes available online without paying an extra fee) a show called The Knick. It’s about a struggling hospital in 1920s (?) New York (?). The main cast includes the head something of the hospital who’s deep in gambling debt, a surgeon who’s addicted to various drugs, the first black doctor in the hospital, an ambulance driver who also sells dead bodies, and a nun who does abortions.

It’s actually not particularly gory, which I appreciate, but there is a lot of sex on screen. Sparkly thinks it’s amusing and cheers whenever there’s a sex scene.

Some quick thoughts about books

Some of which probably won’t make sense if you haven’t read the books in question, sorry.

There really is no succinct way (possibly no way at all?) to describe the Burke series without making it sound completely unbelievably ridiculous. And yet while I was reading them they seemed 100% serious and true and important.

When I read the Dragonlance books I thought Raistlin was way more interesting than Caramon, but thinking back I am really happy that Caramon exists and is as well-developed a character as he is. The authors clearly took him seriously even though I didn’t when I read the books. And I identify with him, at least at this point in my life. If I were the type of person to think of myself as split into separate people (for whatever reason, I seem to very much not be that type of person) one of them would be Caramon and one of them would be Raistlin.

I remember a few years ago– before I read The Thirteenth Child— trying to come up with characters I identify with for some quiz, and the only one that came to mind was St. Vier from Ellen Kushner’s Riverside books. And that’s not the aspect of his character that I was thinking of at the time, but still. There are some patterns here.

One of the cool things about Code Name Verity is that it doesn’t fall into that pattern– the main characters are both super shiny admiring of each other, and they both have very different talents and faults, but the book is overall pretty neutral on comparing them to each other. There isn’t a leader and a follower, or an Actually Cool One and a Less Cool One.

Sometimes I say that the closest I’ve ever come to a religious experience is music.

I saw something on Tumblr today that got me thinking. What if that was allowed to count as a religious experience, without qualifiers? What if I considered the things I have wibbly feelings about to actually be important and meaningful because I feel that way about them?

IDK.