Gaashk
7d ago
I hope that having a label helps things to improve, and that things do continue to improve. That's interesting about the supplements helping.
I have three children, and my older daughter (Z, 6) is spectrum-y. It doesn't currently seem to matter all that much -- she's extremely verbal and likes stereotypical girl things, so doesn't stand out all that much. There was a highly verbal child in the intensive autism program I sometimes teach, and I though "wow, he sounds exactly like Z!" It's hard for me to pinpoint exactly why. It's also hard to describe why without myself sounding like a bad mother, and using term like "blathering." I thought that maybe kids are just like that, but my other kids are not like that.
I teach art professionally, so I thought that maybe I would teach her art. Mostly she wants me to give her a piece of paper and a pen, and then cuts it up into hundreds of tiny shapes, and draws things for her dolls on them, and leaves piles of tiny bits of paper all over the place, over and over again. Sometimes I try to teach her something specific, and she just kind of turns away and goes to work on the snipping and drawing, in a way that feels more like how I experience teaching the autism groups. If I give her a little handmade blank booklet, she'll replicate a Disney storybook, then another, then another, until I refuse to give any more paper. Sometimes she does things at school like hiding under a table rather than putting on her coat, or refusing to leave with us because the teacher is otherwise occupied and unable to dismiss her officially.
When Z was a baby, she had a terrible time with bottles, and my husband had to drive her to my job on my lunch break to breastfeed her in the car. She screamed and screamed, and had a terrible time learning to sleep. I wondered how the human race had managed to endure up to the present day. If she woke up, she would be up for two hours, and shriek at top volume if put back to bed.
Z likes to run in circles around the center of the house for over half an hour at a time, up to hours sometimes, especially when she was younger.
My other children are not like this. My second child is getting near four and can't talk properly, but is very socially warm.
I dunno, children are confusing.
Yes, this is a common conversational failure mode. I have repeatedly requested that some work meetings that inevitably end up that way feature a talking stick. The people who do most of the talking did not see a problem and declined. They may have thought I was joking, but I was not joking. I used to work somewhere that actually used a talking stick, and liked it a lot.
On the other hand, I'm pretty sure there are characters like that in Dickens at least, probably Austen, so if it's cultural it's been infecting England for hundreds of years. Was there anyone like that in Tolstoy? It seems like there would be.
The cultural technology that combats it not extending social invitations to the bores, but all social invitations have depleted, so it's a much weaker signal than it used to be.
Gaashk
9d ago
This is what I’ve seen from the Zoomers lately. K-pop Demon Hunters captures the desired affect perfectly.
Millennial women are sometimes still wearing skinny jeans but in a dated way, sometimes carpenter pants, but do seem to be struggling with developing a mature style. I’ve been wearing sleeveless grey or navy dresses over button up blouses this fall, and it’s fine, but not very fun.
Gaashk
12d ago
I have mixed feelings about this.
As you alluded, it isn't clear how many jobs are civilizationaly load bearing to begin with. Mine certainly isn't, unless you count having and raising children, and, no, that isn't counted at this point, in these discussions. Depending on what they are, it's not clear how many people can or should do them. Mr and Mrs Tinkerbell collectors might not be able to do them even if they were in good health (again, depending on what they are). 200 years ago almost everyone would be farming and making textiles, and since farming and textiles have become relatively niche, it's unclear how many of the "jobs" that have replaced them amount to watching one another's children and walking one another's dogs. We're apparently close to automating even emails and spreadsheets.
If I had heard about this 100 years ago, I would have supposed people would work a lot less, or we would have something like a UBI, but that's not what we have. Maybe we have bullshit jobs and gaming the system instead? Which isn't great, plenty of people are upset about the current state of affairs. I don't particularly want my kids to spend 40 hours a week, for 40 years doing fake work, that seems in some ways worse than farming and textiles, but it seems to be the direction we as a civilization are heading in.
Gaashk
21d ago
This is part of why I strongly prefer handcrafts to puzzles. I've been enjoying learning to make wire wrapped tumbled stones. My husband is tumbling them, and I am wrapping them.
Gaashk
24d ago
"Poetic Woods" by Anne Blockley (2023), hardcover version. I like it! Well bound, lots of paintings of slightly abstract forests.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Even though the QR code reader built into my phone camera works fine as far as I can tell, the phone in general is old, slow, and doesn't handle apps or webpages with ads well, so I pretend like it doesn't work. A few weeks ago I had to pull a Karen at a bar to get the bartender to give or tell me what the drinks were, since I was absolutely not going to scan their QR code on my phone, and sit there reading 30 drinks off my old, slow, sad phone/wallet. He produced a tablet for me. I was saddened but bought a foofy drink anyway.
A week ago, I tried calling AAA to have my car towed. Previously, it was 7 miles free. Now it's apparently 3 miles free, and after that you're supposed to pay the rest in cash (it was going to be $80 or so), or read a stranger your credit card over the phone. I didn't believe that could possibly be the protocol. I said that I couldn't possibly pay that way, that's not how anyone pays for official services, and demanded that he offload the car on the side of the road. He said he should probably return it to my house then. I said he could return it to the three mile mark. He said I would have to pay for the return trip. We finally settled on him dumping my car on the side of the road, and me reading my credit card number to a stranger over the phone, to be charged $30 for the misunderstanding. My husband brought all the kids, gave it a jump, and it made it to the mechanic. I guess I should have tried that first, but was worried it was the kind of thing that would get worse if I tried continuing to drive it while malfunctioning.
I attempted to cancel AAA, but apparently all I can do is remove the auto subscribe, and write myself a note to check whether they try to take money anyway some months from now (which Amazon Kids has done, and unsubscribing involved multiple text chats and phone calls). Not dealing with weird shady towing practices was literally why I've been paying for AAA all this time! That is literally their value proposition!
Gaashk
1mo ago
I say the Jesus Prayer a moderate amount.
I'm also into Jungian psychology, but not super seriously. LLMs are good at that kind of thing, because it mostly matters whether something resonates and is meaningful, like dreams or fairy tales, which people will notice for themselves.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Good administrators can be good, but it's not the sort of specialized position for which no qualified citizen is available, and must be drawn from the pool of foreign Olympians.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I feel like this must be wrong, archaeologically speaking, but my history is terrible and I can't counter you with a good example.
As I recall, Sanderson mentioned his time on Mormon mission in Korea as an inspiration of some of the cultural world building in Stormlight, specifically. Which makes sense. The culture can stay irrational longer than most of its members can stay alive.
At my white collar office, "yes sir"/"thanks sir" has become so overused I wouldn't be surprised if women are saying it to each other.
Some kids occasionally say "yes sir" to me, I can't tell if they're joking or not. I keep trying to get them to use "ma'am," but they just seem confused, like they've never heard it before.
Gaashk
1mo ago
This was my experience of reading the Twilight series a while back, at the recommendation of IRL friends. Also the time my godmother gave me a copy of Eat, Pray, Love.
I like Sanderson better than either of those. I like him about as much as Edgar Rice Burroughs, and more than Dickens, who's bloat I can't stand, and don't read by choice. I like him more than Terry Brooks, who is also a prolific mid-tier novelist, but went downhill faster, IMO. I haven't tried reading GRR Martin, and don't intend to, even if he manages to finish Game of Thrones, which seems unlikely at this point. The premise of 100 Years War, but with dragons and some vague magical happenings seems unappealing, even if the writing is better.
First of all, I don’t think people read particularly widely any more.
Prior to reading Sanderson, I read most of the St John's Reading List, as did the friend who recommended Mistborn. Brandon Sanderson is good like Joss Whedon, not like Tolstoy. If I'm having a good time, then I'm happy that there are 100 hours of Buffyverse shows to watch, and five Rosier novels to read, because they're fun. I guess I'm also glad there are 60 hours of War and Peace available, but not in the same way. I feel like I'm taking a course and learning a lot about the world and what people are like and building out my model of life and humanity reading War and Peace. If I'm reading The Way of Kings of watching Buffy, I know I'm not really learning much of anything, but it does get me a bit out of my own head and problems, which can be good.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I liked that the book was easy to read, which makes the motivation required to read it much lesser. I think a lot of the "I enjoyed reading as a kid, but now I don't" that young adults experience is tied to attempting to read more difficult books, when as a kid they were probably reading books with simple prose and an uncomplicated plot.
In my experience, it's more that as a child and teen, people were happy that I would disappear for hours straight to go read a complex novel. They were happy both that I was reading the novel, and that I was occupying myself. So I would read things like The Brothers Karamazov or Les Miserables or Light in August as an older teen, and enjoy them.
Now, as an adult with children, I read things more like The Way of Kings, because I might be interrupted at any moment, and even if I fight back, and glare, and say that I'm reading and want to keep reading, the immersion is not there. Brandon Sanderson writes in a way that invites immersion even if read late at night after a full day of work and putting the kids to bed for an hour. Emotional fatigue has the same effect. One winter, I was living alone in rural Alaska, and read everything by Edgar Rice Burroughs, because I was making up six different classes, from scratch, spanning 12 grade levels, and wasn't up to much else, but was also bored.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Poetic Woods by Ann Blockley, and reading A Wrinkle in Time out loud to my daughter.
I visited the Bahá'í House of Worship near Chicago when they weren't having services, and it was beautiful and welcoming. Like the Unitarians, they aren't worried about practitioners of other faiths going to hell for being wrong, and they have nice aesthetics.
Gaashk
1mo ago
I believe my grandmother grew up Unitarian, and that was where she got her quiet atheism and staunch belief in never discussing religion from. She was a good lady, including those attributes, and I'm not trying to make fun of her.
People say it as though they are being sarcastic, but Woke America is literally what agnostic Christians are. I tried going to my neighborhood Presbyterian church once, and the main song was about the singer's friend dying from Aids in 90s New York. Then I stayed for coffee, and the music director was trying to talk about his genderqueer daughter as delicately as possible -- he was clearly a bit distressed that she doesn't consider herself a daughter anymore and he's not supposed to use gendered language, but was struggling.
My father kept trying to go to an Episcopalian church that didn't particularly believe in Christ, because they had a nice choir, and nice architecture, and candles during the appropriate seasons. But the sermons were terrible, like the middle aged women getting up on their social media soapboxes, and he couldn't manage.
I don't get it on a visceral level, but it is what it is. There seems to be something important about actually believing in Christ, without which Christianity becomes horrifically cringe, more than even fake paganism which at least has nice bonfires and solstice celebrations and whatnot.
As others have said, there are churches that aren't like that. Usually they aren't that upset if someone shows up, and they don't necessarily believe in God, but are polite about it. If they're one of the livelier churches, they might try to convert you, but even if they're all Hellfire about it, it's still probably a richer cultural experience than the Unitarians.
If you don't believe there's a One True Religion, it might actually be worth thinking in terms of rich cultural experiences, rather than intellectualism or not believing weird things. I like visiting Sufis, for instance -- I once was in a screened off female balcony while some Sufi congregants chanted themselves into a trance and stuck skewers through their faces. It was super interesting! I was glad I went! If someone invites you to go sacrifice a cow of something, consider going. Humans don't seem capable of making religions that are deep and lively without also being kind of weird, and risking snake handlers or whirling dervishes or some such thing.
Gaashk
1mo ago
An acquaintance was posting on Facebook about hiring iconographers to paint frescos on the inside of the church. There aren't many such people in the US, it's quite specialized, so they were bringing over people from Eastern Europe to do it. Presumably if it cost another $100,000 they would wait for a different administration to reverse the decision. They would probably not go ahead and hire an American, because they want a very specific look, and also it's a team of several people. Possibly for that sum of money they could send some Americans to Eastern Europe, train them for several years under a master there, and have them come back and do the work. On net, I would be fine with that solution, and might have volunteered as an apprentice.
I don't know how many work visas are odd little edge cases like that, and can appreciate a law that doesn't try to incentivize more people to make their IT help desk or whatever look like a quirky little cultural job.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Education, so same issue. (I've taken a decent number of education classes, and they were mostly at least attempting to teach according to the course description)
Gaashk
1mo ago
Apropos cancellations from the right, is there any way to get a professor in trouble for teaching about social justice instead of the content they were supposed to teach? Especially if they are assigning most of the semester grade for writing and talking about social justice, not what's in the course description? Especially if it is a required course, with no option to change sections?
Gaashk
1mo ago
Some people buy personal humidifiers, and keep them beside their bed. I grew up in an extremely hot, dry desert, and probably just acclimated. Also, we switch off between an AC unit and swamp cooler. As a kid, we had a swamp cooler in most of the house, and one room with an AC, and my parents were constantly telling us which windows we needed to open or close accordingly.
Gaashk
1mo ago
Painting Abstract Landscapes by Gareth Edwards and his daughter Kate Reeve-Edwards. In general, I like it. Somewhat poetic writing, but also straightforward technical suggestions, and nice clear prints. Worth enjoying as a physical object.
Gaashk
2mo ago
What is he angry about? Is there an alternative to his current setting that's feasible, and where he wouldn't be angry? Sometimes there isn't, but also sometimes there is. Anger is often meant to spur people into action, to change their circumstances. Teenage boys are often physically stronger than their teachers, and really can't express anger towards them. It will certainly get him fired quickly from many jobs. But, also, the extremely restrictive prison like environment of many schools, where they can't even leave campus for lunch, isn't inevitable.
I went to community college instead of high school -- technically I was "duel enrolled" as a homeschool student, but I wasn't really studying anything in particular other than the college classes. I was angry or shocked a couple of times, so I left, sat under a tree grumping for a while, complained to my parents, and then came back a couple of days later for the next class. As long as I did my work, nobody much cared.
I also taught at an alternative high school in a small town. The teens often just didn't come to class, probably two days a week. If they were angry that day, I wouldn't want them to come to class, they were better off going for a hike in the woods or something.
Z also has trouble figuring out who we're talking to, even when we're all in the room together, and we're clearly looking at and turned towards one daughter or the other. Her little sister can keep track easily enough.
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