Manipulation

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, of course, but I’m thinking about it tonight because of this advice column. And this is a really… bare-bones idea, not rigorously tested, and coerciveness vs okayness is sort of a spectrum, there are gray areas, but I think it boils down to two main factors:

  1. How much are you asking of the other person, what would it cost them to do what you’re asking them to do?
  2. How much power do you have to impose negative consequences on them if they say no?

and then, what you could call the actions of coercion or manipulation– as separate from whether someone effectively feels pressured or not, which can happen without any extra effort or fail to happen even when someone is trying to manipulate them– those actions would be defined as things that (from #1) twist a serious cost to seem like a minor cost, or (from #2) create or threaten extra negative consequences.

Breaks

Netflix is great and all but honestly, I miss commercial breaks. I can handle broadcast-TV-style “marathons” of a TV show (or at least, I used to be able to) but I can’t handle Netflix binge-watching. It’s just too long for me to listen to something– especially, I guess, something with a complicated, emotionally intense plot– without breaks to process, stand up and walk around, think about something else.

And commercial breaks served that purpose really well, and that makes me kind of sad that they’re kind of gone from the places where I actually watch TV. (I’m obviously also not a fan of Netflix’s “automatically start the next episode in ten seconds” thing.)

Today one of Sparkly’s favorite TV shows got a bunch of new episodes added to Netflix, and we watched three of them in quick succession, and then I spent about 20 minutes playing solitaire because anything more complicated felt like Too Many Things.

And it’s a good TV show! And I really like it! I just… can’t watch too much of it all at once. I hate this, it feels ridiculous, but apparently this is the current state of affairs for my brain.

OK so here’s the thing I wrote

about the Lieutenant Leary series.

and here are some (much less coherent and professionally formatted) Brain Stuff Reasons why I like this series.

  • Adele is arguably on the autism spectrum (socially awkward, flat affect, physically uncoordinated, super. fucking. intense. about her interests.)
  • This series overall has a thing about the glory/overwhelmingness/awe-inspiring-ness of Knowing Things About The World which I find very relatable in a stimming/hyperfocus way.
  • Trauma and atypical reactions to it– well, maybe not actually atypical, but not things you often see in fiction. Feeling disconnected from your own emotions, long-term numbness, the weird physical feelings you can get from adrenaline.
  • A “sociopathic”/low-empathy character who isn’t a villain.
  • What I was talking about in the second part of this post— characters who don’t just tolerate each other’s disabilities/limitations, but really love everything about each other including those limitations.

Success

I finished up the why-you-should-read thing I was writing; it gets posted tomorrow. Thank you to Sparkly who beta-read it for me. I think I did a decent job of not over-explaining, but showing enough stuff that will catch people’s interest.

It was kind of weird asking myself, “Which characters in this series would people want to ship together?” (It was especially weird because the least objectionable (non-canon) pairing I came up with was Adele and the spymaster.)

Here’s a cool thing

A principle I currently believe is important, and which I know I’ve felt the same way about for at least ten years, because I distinctly remember saying this in a discussion in my tenth grade social studies class:

Words mean what people think they mean.
Symbols represent what people think they represent.

Learning about the origins of words, symbols, slogans can really expand your understanding of the context they came from, and I think it’s really important, but that doesn’t mean the original meaning is the Real meaning. The Real Meaning is what most people currently understand it to mean.

You can educate people about changes in meaning, and sometimes you can use a word in an uncommon or non-current sense if you explain that’s what you’re doing, but you can’t make language stop changing.

I was thinking about this in response to a post about person-first lanugage, and then I thought to myself, “Wait, I remember saying “symbols mean what people think they mean” in Mr. K’s social studies class…”

Here’s a weird brain thing

I very, very minorly hurt my back today? I guess? I think it was while I was scooping the litterbox and sweeping up the litter on the floor. Anyway, my back doesn’t really hurt, as such. It just feels mildly uncomfortable and weird if I stretch a certain way.

But this particular kind of discomfort totally short-circuits my brain for some reason. It’s all right when I’m sitting down (with my nice pillow that supports my lower back) but making dinner was very “why are so many things happening, this is too many things” even though literally nothing was happening and I actually had a very non-strenuous day.

This has happened to me before re: back pain– when [person] was visiting and we went to the zoo, I spent a while walking around with a heavy backpack on just one shoulder, and I eventually realized that my back didn’t like that. It didn’t actually hurt, again, it just felt uncomfortable somehow, and it really reduced my ability to focus on anything else. Properly using both the backpack’s straps fixed the problem.

I am capable of having actual back pain that feels painful, though, that’s happened before.

I’d like to be able to say coherent things about pain perception, but like:

it’s hard to describe in detail

it’s hard to know what’s “normal” because other people have trouble describing it in detail too

so I sort of don’t have anything to say about it, except for a few things that are obviously odd, like this.