yaaqov

yaaqov wrote

Reply to comment by celebratedrecluse in Friday Free Talk by ThreadBot

Definitely. In my own experience, it's sort of like, a super-placebo, delivering whatever you expect from it. Maybe that's with everything to some degree though? I don't have much experience with other psychoactive substances.

The thing that scares me is, are all these pains real things that are wrong with my body/ways that I'm hurting myself, but that I'm ignoring in my day-to-day sober life?

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yaaqov wrote

I smoked cannabis for the first time in months yesterday and... it like magnified every ache and pain in my body??? I could barely put on clothes. Also focusing my eyes on anything closer than 20 feet, and especially screens, was horrible. Has anyone else experienced anything like this?

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yaaqov wrote (edited )

Jumping spiders are the fucking best. I think they’re my favorite animal.

Did y’all know that jumping spiders are probably the most intelligent (by human standards) of any arthropod? There’s a genus of jumping spiders endemic to Africa—Portia—that has evolved to hunt other spiders. Portias are able to figure out, by trial and error, new hunting techniques, in order to target other species that may be challenging or dangerous in unexpected ways, and they can remember what they learned and apply them to novel situations. They also can plan out complicated routes to their prey that may take an hour to complete, even if those routes involve losing sight of their target as they navigate three-dimensional space. Also they’re quite social with eachother, and can recognize and remember other specific individuals of the same species!

(Also, jumping spiders dance.)

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yaaqov wrote

Reply to by !deleted13063

That’s exciting! What other things are you looking to plant?

Also, I don’t think I know much about milkweed except that it can be used for fiber? Am I thinking about the right thing?

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yaaqov wrote

I've been reading a bunch of Margaret Killjoy's short stories. It's been forever since I've read fiction so it's nice to pour through a whole collection of it for a change.

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yaaqov wrote (edited )

Today I had:

  • Water
  • Goat milk kefir
  • Beads of water that collect on oxalis leaves in the rain
  • Water that was way too cold
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yaaqov wrote

I have to make some art for my mom for her birthday. She's been asking for art for a long time but I just haven't been able to get myself to sit down and draw for years. But I promised her I would.

I have no idea what to actually make. I don't want to just give her a pencil sketch, but I don't even own other media right now..

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yaaqov wrote

Reply to comment by rot in Transgender or Transgendered? by feralive

I'm not really sure, though, to my ear, it feels similar to compounding/single-word form.

In some sense, it's not really about spelling at all, but about the fact that "transwoman", as a compound noun, means something slightly different than "trans woman", which is a noun with an adjective. The spelling just represents the pronunciation which is itself just an externalization of the syntactic/grammatical structure; different syntactic configurations give rise to different meanings.

So I default to "trans woman" because that spelling is the most likely to be pronounced as an adjective modifying a noun, which avoids the potentially negative implications that a noun compound like "transwoman" (and to me, "trans-woman") has. But if someone is using something else for themselves, that's what I use for them, too.

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yaaqov wrote

The latter, with the space, is the “right one”. The idea being that when trans is just an adjective, it describes just another type of man/woman, but by making it a noun compound without a space (and notice that there is a slight difference in pronunciation, like between “blackbird” and “black bird”), it can seem to indicate that trans people’s genders are something distinct from that of cis people’s, and can feel dehumanizing.

More important than any particular line of reasoning though, is of course that many people have simply expressed that that’s what they prefer, and that the compounded form makes them uncomfortable. Done.

And so it does seem reasonable to default to using the space, then. Nonetheless, I don’t know if I’m comfortable calling the compounded form a misuse, because there are trans people who use it for themselves, and they’re not “wrong” to do so. Author Margaret Killjoy comes to mind, for instance.

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yaaqov wrote

I had a lucid dream so lucid that I was talking with the people in my dream about whether or not they too knew it was a dream. A couple of them told me that yeah, they had known it was a dream. Another person told me that they hadn't, and they were feeling embarrassed for not realizing. I reassured them that in most of my dreams I never realize.

But at the same time I sort of wasn't lucid at all. It was more like I was dreaming that I had a lucid dream... dreaming that I realized my dream was a dream, instead of actually realizing it. Lately my lucid dreams have been of that nature. They lack any of the exploratory control of lucid dreams from when I was younger. No flying, no fucking, no speaking in languages that don't exist yet. That moment of "Oh shit, I can try doing stuff" never hits. I just... know I'm dreaming. And the dream continues.

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yaaqov wrote (edited )

Could you elaborate a little more on this idea for a font?

Okay, I'm happy to hear it!

Well I've been teaching myself to use fontforge in the last few weeks, but what I'll be sending to you was created solely on fonstruct, which is very limited in that you can only draw from a finite set of shapes and set them on a grid, with no bezier curves or anything, but that's just fine for a script made of squares haha.

(I also made a "helping font" just like Dotsies uses—that is, a replacement of the blocks in the columns with the letters (in my case, IPA) that they represent—and that could really use a re-do in something with real drawing capabilities. It's... rough. You'll see.)

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yaaqov wrote (edited )

Totally! I think this is especially an issue when the columns are viewed in isolation, and without a clear baseline, as is the case here. However, I think this issue is generally mitigated in the context of a real sentence: the whole vertical range is typically used, so that being able to interpret the vertical position of the material within a given column becomes much easier.

In terms of redundancy, it's true, there is essentially no room for variation within a column without a different, unintended letter/sound being represented. However, again, I think that the context of writing helps a lot: here, the fact that the columns within a word directly abut each other means that strings that correspond to words nearly appear as gestalt glyphs, almost like logographs/pictographs. Here is an example using the Dotsies system from the website; while moving one dot in an isolated letter may be scarcely detectable, in the context of word, a pretty noticeably different shape is created: Here's a side-by-side comparison of a couple words and their variations.


As for progress on my own system, well all I really have right now is a .ttf font! Which I'd be happy to share, and can do so by later today, along with some explanation about how to use it and the system itself.

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