#my hobbies: pattern recognition | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sensualnoiree · 4 months

Text

astro notes: profection houses

In astrology, profection houses are a technique used to determine the primary theme or focus for a particular year of a person's life. The profection houses system assigns each year of a person's life to a specific house in their natal chart. The technique involves advancing the natal Ascendant by one sign for each year, starting from the sign of the individual's natal Ascendant.

For example, I am a sagittarius rising and will be 30 next year. My profection house will be the 7th house in gemini. Currently it is the 6th house and for the past year I have been extremely focused on my health, my work environments, my fur babies, and finances. As I shift and prepare for 30, I see myself really stepping into positions and roles where I will be meeting new people, creating new relationships, and growing in the relationship I am already in with my partner. We got some big plans and I can feel them nearing fruition 🤸🏿‍♀️ I cannot wait to be 30 flirty & thriving ✨

For the houses:

1st House Profection Year: This year emphasizes self-image, personal goals, and how others perceive you. It's a time for personal growth, self-discovery, and initiating new beginnings.

2nd House Profection Year: Financial matters, material possessions, and self-worth take precedence during this period. It's a time to focus on resources, investments, and building stability.

3rd House Profection Year: Communication, learning, and short trips become significant. Relationships with siblings, neighbors, and acquiring new skills are highlighted.

4th House Profection Year: Family, home life, and emotional security take center stage. This period is about roots, heritage, and creating a sense of inner stability.

5th House Profection Year: Creativity, self-expression, romance, and children are prominent themes. It's a time for joy, pursuing hobbies, and taking calculated risks.

6th House Profection Year: Health, work, routines, and service to others become focal points. Organizing, improving efficiency, and focusing on well-being are key.

7th House Profection Year: Partnerships, relationships, and collaborations are highlighted. It's a time for evaluating existing relationships and forming new alliances.

8th House Profection Year: Transformation, shared resources, and deeper emotional bonds take precedence. This period involves facing deeper psychological aspects and inheritance matters.

9th House Profection Year: Higher learning, travel, philosophy, and expanding horizons become important. It's a time for spiritual growth, education, and broadening perspectives.

10th House Profection Year: Career, public image, and ambitions are in focus. This period involves striving for recognition, taking on responsibilities, and professional advancement.

11th House Profection Year: Friends, groups, social causes, and aspirations take precedence. Networking, building connections, and contributing to the community are emphasized.

12th House Profection Year: Inner reflection, spiritual growth, solitude, and hidden matters come to the forefront. It's a time for retreat, introspection, and dealing with subconscious patterns.

for more insight follow me here! 🤸🏿‍♀️

If you'd like to work with me click here! 🤸🏿‍♀️🤸🏿‍♀️

213 notes · View notes

butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway · 1 year

Text

As per usual, I was talking to a client this week about autistic cognitive processing and I felt the sand shifting under my feet. So I come here to you Tumblr to do my own autistic cognitive processing in the hopes of better serving myself and my clients.

I have known for a long time that I can't process my thoughts and emotions verbally. This is what sometimes leads to me getting frustrated, "stuck," and increasingly pressurized towards my meltdown threshhold when I'm trying to express a half-formed thought or need. This is why I often choose to process my cognition in writing. It allows me to sift about in the sands of my mind, sliding to and fro, checking and rechecking, until I find what I need.

There is something to the capacity to shape my communication more freely and without the preesure that I put myself under which often leads to stammering, stuttering, aphasia, confusion, and my inability to hold something as ephemeral as language in my head long enough to manipulate it like clay with my hands. Words are not my brain's mother tongue in the first place, and it can be a welcome relief to truly take the slowed pace I need to translate my thoughts into a language others will understand.

Some others. I am well aware of who I learned my translation process from and of how that has made my translations inaccessible to some of the very people who share my brain.

The thing is, to learn to speak at all when your brain processes this slowly takes enormous effort. To learn to CHANGE your speech is back breaking. I have been trying for fifteen years.

Autistic cognitive processing pace and the disabling ramifications aren't things we talk about often. It's one reason some of us become obsessed with having back up plan upon back up plan (because we literally cannot think fast enough to keep up with the demands of our lives). It's one of the fastest paths to burnouts and meltdowns. It's part of why we are unable to keep up with the demands of social interactions, especially in large groups (too many social cues moving too quickly to be processed at pace and we drop the ball in the moment even if we realize later).

Because the pace of our cognition is chronically slowed, we are chronically disabled socially, emotionally, cognitively, etc, and we are forced to spend an incredible amount of mental and physical energy either compensating for that, recovering from it, or both. That is energy and resources neurotypical people get to spend on other things in their lives, maybe a project or hobby, a relationship, hell, just relaxing.

There can be upsides to it. This slowed cognition seems to be related to how the process of bottom-up analysis functions during cognitive processes in Autistic folks' brains. That bottom-up analysis is a really interesting cognitive processing style that seems to be responsible for increased pattern recognition! So a lot of how we're able to analyze, learn, understand, mimic, etc based on pattern recognition is thanks to this processing style. It helps us take in a holisticly detail oriented view of the things we look at, which can (with support) make us great researchers, investigative journalists, and inventers.

But while the upsides have become more discussed as we've become more willing to see Autism itself as neutral (a very good thing in my opinion), we sometimes forget the other side of the coin.

I often find myself trying to brute force my way through my processing pace. It always ends badly. And that's really the trouble. I can talk most of the time, but I can talk A LOT faster than I can process my thoughts. So most of the time my words are just. Garbage. Sounds. If you ask my to speak to you, you are asking me to fill up soundwaves because realistically my brain moves at about 25% of the speed of the conversation.

It's why as a clinician I have to be so incredibly careful what I do and say and how I hear my clients because I *truly* am processing what the tell me at auch a significant delay. It can sometimes be days later when the information truly settles into place.

The same is obviously true in my personal life! It can take me days or even weeks to figure out what a single thought or feeling means in the context of my own life because I have to process that often entirely alone or just on paper. Not because no on one WOULD help me I have people in my life who would be willing but because by the time talking to someone would be any help, I would have basically figured it out enough to just say it out loud and I don't really need their help by then. There are rare exceptions to this when I do definitely seek help but it can be so frustrating to be trapped, voiceless, in your own emotions.

I don't have a framework for this, only the suggestion to embrace the slowness. I have found that when you are not constantly fighting against it all the time, it feels a little more like home, a little more like it's working FOR your instead of AGAINST you.

#actuallyautistic

202 notes · View notes

chronicallyuniconic · 8 months

Text

No purpose, just pain.

Do you remember your first obsession? Your first love? The first event that filled you with so much excitement? Your first holiday? That time your favourite game you've been waiting years for, is here next week? The hobby you took on like it was your purpose in life? maybe you got married?

That 'thing' where it was alllllll you could think about. You'd spend hours trawling the Internet or even books for anything to do with your new 'thing.'

Your stomach would flutter with excitement, your heart would race with anticipation. The closer you got, the bubbling anxiety would build to the back of your throat & you pace around your home opening and closing the fridge until the day arrives.

*throws 🔧🔧🔧*

My "first thing" is my illnesses & their many many varying symptoms. All I can think about is how awful I feel, every minute of every day and somehow I'm not(?) dying. [How/Why?]

It occupies my every thought. I spend and have spent countless hours scouring the Internet, medical journals, buying books written by doctors, finding actual doctors, to find answers, help, guidance, a drug maybe.

I've found an online community that has helped me feel less alone but none of us have rarely found answers. When we are given answers we are told to just deal with it, usually with OTC meds because there is no help for what we have, apparently.

We are a community on the slowest moving boat you've ever seen, rocked by our pain, our cries, our wait, our hope, that one day we are seen and our illnesses are given the recognition, research and funding they desperately need.

My stomach does not flutter with excitement anymore, it's a string of stomach and bladder problems that are ignored*. I'm not dancing with excitement, I'm jolting with nerve pain that is ignored*. I'm not searching up anything anymore because the 10kg weights on my eyelids & the sedative that seems-to-occupy-my-blood, send me to sleep.

*{When symptoms are ignored that means they are never addressed, studied, tested, looked at, are put under an umbrella term for your chronic illness and that is where you will remain}*

I can't "pace" my way through the pain-filled days because I am too weak & exhausted, filled with heavy lead bones & lead blood. When I try to go back to my 'thing' I am distracted by the pains & fatigue & the fact that no help is coming, even from myself.

"How can I paint a flower when I'm being struck by lightening with every breath & stroke of the brush?"

I've put my all into finding ways to make the best of my symptoms, to manage them, understand them, come to terms with them, accept my new body and what it wants or needs. Yet I've failed to nail any real reason, finding, bodily requirement or pattern that makes it manageable or predictable.

Pain diaries, food diaries, bathroom diaries, sleep diaries, how many diaries over these years will/does it take for a result? A conclusion? Blood tests, urine tests, tests tests tests that provide the same information but no further action. How many needles does it take for further assistance?

All of this & I'm told to be happy, be grateful. I'm told to just take each day at a time when each day is the same, breathing, pain filled void, achieving nothing, trapped behind 4 walls. I'm told I'm not trying hard enough or that I can't give up.*

[apparently being sad about your symptoms means you have given up]*

How does one go on when they have nothing left of energy, no path to turn, no doctor to just "get it," when there is no way out of this trap.

How does one carry on with no purpose but pain?

If you got this far, thank you. This has taken me some days to write up💜✨

#chronic life #chronic pain #chronically ill #chronic illness #chronic fatigue #fibromyalgia #myalgic encephalomyelitis #spoonie problems #sorry for being depressing #i'm not okay #spoonie life #tired af #reality #i'm just so tired #pain relief what a liar #spoonie #pain just pain #How many #no purpose

55 notes · View notes

nicki0kaye · 4 months

Text

Some dumbass in the comment section of a youtube vid about how AI Art bros are jersk tried to make the argument that genetics determine talent and I kind of popped of. Turns out the comment thread I replied to is like 200+ comments deep and now no one is going to see my small novella about genetics v talent, so I've decided to share it here...IN TWO SEPARATE PARTS bc apparently it is too long and tumblr cant handle it alskdjflskjdf.

Hi, I'm the genetically gifted artist you're trying to cite for your argument. Both of my birth parents were artists in several fields and despite being adopted by a different family, I know that I've inherited most of their interests and am proficient at all of the things they excelled in; art, writing and performance to be specific. I now make a living as an artist.

You're also entirely wrong about how 'talent' works and how inheriting 'talent' works. What I inherited from my parents were their mental disorders. Adhd, Autism and chronic depression. Autism forced me to be far more observant of my peers if I wanted to have a social life. Adhd gifted me time blindness and the ability to hyperfocus on whatever tasks gave me dopamine, and Autism complimented that nicely with a shock to the nervous system when I was expected to change gears out of what I felt was safe into something I did not.

I had many avenues before me because of this; theatre was what my adopted parents assumed I would pursue. But then chronic depression came in with the steel chair at the end of highschool and no, no I did not do theatre, that shit takes too much energy for too long of a period of time.

So. Art.

Why am I so genetically good at art? Well, and this is again Probably The Autism, I'm very good at recognizing and retaining visual patterns, I'm super interested in body language and costuming and micro-expressions--all things I need to pay attention to if I wanted to be liked by allistic classmates--and drawing quite literally regulates my nervous system, so I'm gonna do it often just to cope.

I don't have a fucking 'artists' gene. I have a brain that is predisposed to certain pattern recognition and through access to resources (GLASSES, I AM BLIND AS SHIT AND WITHOUT GLASSES NONE OF THIS WOULD BE POSSIBLE) was able to find and cultivate hobbies that either worked with or helped regulate the myriad of bullshit I won through the genetic lottery.

I'm a good artist bc I put in the work. I put in the work bc my brain is wired to really like certain work. It didn't have to be art. If i were less depressed, it could have been theatre--either writing, performing or directing. If I was less autistic, it might have been something with more abstract thinking and less focused on decrypting human expression and repurposing it in ways that I Personally Like. If I was less ADHD, it could have been more academic studies, like Marine Biology since I really wanted to do that when I was little. If I didn't have exercised induced asthma, it could have been competitive swimming, bc my swim teacher really thought I had a gift for it. If I didn't have dyscalculia, it could have been something that involves number crunching and long distances, bc I don't understand that shit for beans, completely locking me out of a large chunk of possible careers.

And maybe without all of that, I wouldn't have had the perfect cocktail to give enough of a shit to be good at anything. Maybe I would have just been an office clerk, making a decent wage and filling my cubicle with anime figurines.

#AI art #AI art bros #talent #genetics #art #artist

23 notes · View notes

holyshit · 2 years

Note

Care to spare some advice on how to not be so affected by things without stepping back from fandom for multiple years lmao? It seems like for so many people, the longer they have been here, the easier it is for them. For me it's the opposite. The longer I'm in fandom the sadder and more frustrated I get that hl's situations are what they are 12 years on. And then I get frustrated with people who act like where they're at now is no big deal or sooo much better than before. It's a cycle lol.

hmm, i think it's tough because a lot of the things that helped me are most easily achieved by distancing yourself because that's the easiest way to gain perspective about the situation. when you’re actively in it, it’s much harder to break out of patterns you’re accustomed to. but i think the main "lessons" i learned from being away were essentially:

1) recognizing my own powerlessness in their situation. being away made it especially clear that my presence in the fandom does not affect anything. i am not able to change anything about their situation. if i continued being in fandom for those 4-ish years that i was away from fandom, the situation would still be exactly the same as it is now for them. i cannot give up my own happiness for something i cannot change.

2) similarly, the need to dismantle the parasocial relationship i had with them. it’s one thing to feel compassion for human beings you don’t personally know- that is a wonderful trait and important for the world! but, it’s another thing to feel like you “owe” anything to a celebrity you do not know personally and who does not even know you exist. sometimes, when you’re in deep, it almost feels like you would be “failing” them by not being angry enough or invested enough. that’s where it gets unhealthy, because the relationship of a fan and a celebrity is one-sided, and therefore, again, it comes down to the fact that you can’t give up your own happiness for something you cannot control in the life of a celebrity you do not personally know. no one owes a celebrity they like their mental well-being, no matter how much you feel compassion for them.

3) the recognition that fandom is supposed to be fun. it’s obvious, but sometimes it becomes less clear the deeper you get that some of the things you think you’re doing for fun aren’t actually that fun to you anymore lol. obviously nearly any interest is gonna make you angry or sad occasionally (your sports team loses, your fave character gets killed off in your favourite show, etc), but if your resting state is anger or sadness, it’s maybe not in your best interest to continue, or you need to change the way you interact with said hobby. your hobby shouldn’t be making you miserable, as that is just gonna bleed into the rest of your life.

SO, for actual advice that doesn’t involve leaving for years:

taking short breaks! you don’t have to take years away to still give yourself some space from the fandom. it can be a day, a week, a month, or even just cutting down on the amount of time you spend on tumblr (or social media of choice) in general for a while without leaving completely. when i feel like something is getting me riled up a bit more than usual, i usually step away for even just a day, and even just that calms me down and gives me perspective. if you want to take a break but still want to know what’s going on, you can also just pick one or two blogs that you know don’t post much drama and solely pay attention to those blogs while you’re away.

enriching your other hobbies. take some of the time you would normally spend reading shit in this fandom, and use it to do something else you enjoy. the more time you spend “away”, even if you still are in the fandom, the less critically important everything will eventually feel in your brain and it will often be easier to detach emotionally. when you’re unhappy in other parts of your life, it’s much easier to let one thing “take over”, and it’s important to make room for other things in your life.

if you feel like you need a hyperfixation of sorts, i’d say try out different fandoms. watch that show your friend told you they know you’ll love and then try to make a sideblog or something and join the fandom. join a fandom of a piece of media you already love but never was involved in fandom for. again, it can help you distance yourself emotionally a bit without leaving entirely

figure out what parts you ACTUALLY enjoy in this fandom, and figure out what parts you may think you enjoy but are actually making you more anxious/obsessive/angry/upset than anything. as a personal example, i used to be heavily into theorizing back in 2015-2016, especially during babygate. i would be obsessed with reading up on everyone’s theories about when babygate would end, how it might end, etc, and would spend a lot of time reading about it. i thought i enjoyed it at the time, but in reality it was more of an obsession that made me much more upset than i had to be. reading up on theories, getting my hopes up, and then have them not happening was miserable and not worth it and ultimately lead me to leave the fandom

similarly, try to break some of your fandom habits and see if you’re happier without them. as another personal example, i used to pay extreme attention to stunt stuff and wanted to be 100% caught up on everything at all times. as a byproduct of that, i would keep up with every post a couple blogs that talked about stunts would make. when i got super busy with a work project, it forced me to take a break from this because i didn’t have the time to keep up with everything, and breaking that habit of needing to know EVERYTHING and be totally caught up made me snap out of the habit and recognize i didn’t need that to enjoy my time in fandom, and in fact it took a weight off my shoulder and made me realize it wasn’t actually making me happy.

unfollow blogs that make you upset!!! even if you like the person, if they talk about things that get you riled up or upset often, it’s likely not worth it. if you hate-follow people to keep up with their opinions that piss you off, unfollow! if you’re stewing in anger all the time, it’s easier to stay unhealthily invested to your happiness’ detriment.

focus on things you CAN control. you can control your fandom experience. you can contribute to fan projects that make the fandom a better place and in some cases can positively contribute to l’s or h’s experiences (like the rainbow lights projects, for example). you can control how you interact with your fellow fans. don’t give all your energy to things that you cannot control.

lol this was an essay, but i think it’s an interesting topic and i hope it can help even a little bit!

#asks #anonymous #*

345 notes · View notes

rubyfruitjungle · 3 months

Text

Tag Game

thank you @lumoverheaven @milla-frenchy & @not-a-unique-snowflake-blog

appreciate you all for tagging me 🥰

1. Were you named after anyone? My Great Grandmother

2. When was the last time you cried? It's 11am and I have already cried. Cried yesterday too. I cry all the time. Almost everyday. Happy, sad or angry. I love a good cry.

3. Do you have kids? I have one son.

4. What sports do you/have you played? I played a lot of sports cause I was good at them and it was something to do where I grew up. Volleyball, basketball, softball, track and field, soccer.

5. Do you use sarcasm? Never

6. First thing you notice about people? Mostly just vibes and maybe eyes physically.

7. What's your eye color? Hazel

8. Scary movies or happy endings? Happy endings.

9. Any talents? What is a talent? LOL I am a really good shot. I can cross one eye at a time. I can tie a cherry stem with my tongue. Pattern recognition. I dunno. I have a high IQ but you wouldn't know it. Does that count? LOL

10. Where were you born? East Coast Canada

11. What are your hobbies? I have so many hobbies. Cross-stich, knitting, diamond art, reading, watching TV/Movies, music, sudoku (other number and word games), darts, calligraphy, cards, D&D, collecting odd things, thrifting. My mind needs constant stimulation.

12. Do you have any pets? Not at the moment. 🥹

13. How tall are you? 5'6

14. Favorite subject in high school? History

15. Dream job? Win the lottery.

if you see this and wanna play tag me. love to read your answers. 💞

#tag game #tag you're it #get to know me

11 notes · View notes

adrianicsea · 7 months

Note

saw ask. so let's say hypothetically (not really) all the apprentices are autistic (they are) headcanon them

LET’S GOOOOOOO!!!! i do hc all the apprentices as autistic in their own ways (except adam, who in my mind/writing has standalone adhd) and i definitely write them that way in my fic, lawrence especially.

lawrence:

it runs in the family, but his parents were both very ignorant/in denial about it so lawrence thinks that there’s nothing unusual about any of his mannerisms. he has a sneaking awareness that He’s Not Like Everyone Else but i think he usually chalks that up to the decades he’s spent being closeted.

he loves and finds comfort in the ritual and routine of putting on formalwear, and i think he feels more comfortable in suits/formalwear than he does in casual clothes.

he has a hot and cold relationship with eye contact— he knows it’s important and that people expect it of him, but in prolonged conversations, or when he’s feeling threatened or vulnerable, lawrence can’t maintain eye contact the entire conversation and has to look away.

his, ah… halting speech cadence comes from his autism.

the medical world has been his special interest practically since birth. as smart and privileged and as “cultured” as his family is, lawrence actually doesn’t know a ton about other subjects (particularly related to literature/the arts) because he’s been spending all his time reading about medical stuff since he was a kid.

somewhat related to above, i think he suffers a lot from burnout because he doesn’t have any other hobbies or big interests aside from medicine and also because he’s constantly pushing himself to be an overachiever and ignoring his needs and shortcomings 😔

left to his own devices, lawrence’s eating schedule/sense of mealtimes is ABYSMAL. it got worse once he was actively practicing as a doctor, since his schedules could be so long and unpredictable. he really needs another person around to remind him when it’s time to take a break from whatever he’s doing and have something to eat.

his pattern recognition and observational skills are UNMATCHED, but he tends to only apply them to situations where he judges that there’s a problem to be solved. he probably couldn’t tell you the color of a house that he drives by every day, for example.

amanda:

she has naturally high empathy and a very strong internal sense of justice, right, and wrong. part of the reason she suffers and agonizes so much over her work as an apprentice is because the lessons that john’s drilled into her head are in direct conflict with amanda’s own values. (this is also complicated by the decades of mistreatment and abuse she’s faced at the hands of the justice system, which has further skewed her natural moral compass.)

she has a VERY hard time processing and moving through her emotions— any sort of high emotional state can put her into shutdown and/or meltdown territory very quickly.

amanda is very sensory-seeking and uses sensory stimulation to help with her emotional regulation. if there are no safe avenues for her to do this, she will turn to harmful sources of sensory stimulation.

hoffman:

hoffman has EASILY the highest sensory intolerance to loud noises of all the apprentices. part of the reason he constantly has such a bitch face and bad attitude is bc he’s been rawdogging the noise and bustle of working as a cop for 20+ years and trying to hide how much he hates the sirens and gunshots and such.

he doesn’t really like to talk, and he also struggled a lot with reading when he was younger (partially due to inherent factors and partially bc he didn’t grow up in an optimal learning environment).

he can understand some jokes/sarcasm/metaphors, but oftentimes it goes over his head and needs to be explained to him. he speaks very bluntly and directly bc MAKING those sort of speech abstractions is a little beyond him.

king of flat affect. his facial expressions and tone of voice are NOT indicative of his internal emotional state‼️

i think that, like lawrence, hoffman is aware that something about him sets him apart from his peers and makes them a little uncomfortable, but in his case he sees that as kind of a good thing since it keeps people from getting too close to him and possibly getting suspicious. what DOES kind of hurt hoffman’s feelings (though he’d never admit it to anyone) is that his fellow apprentices don’t really seem to like him much, either.

in terms of special interests, i think he’s always been fascinated by like construction equipment and big vehicles and stuff like that. if he were given a good pair of earplugs or noise-canceling headphones, he could literally sit and watch a construction site for hours on end.

#asks #squ1dn1 #thank you for the ask!!! love to talk about the sillies And Hoffman

10 notes · View notes

starrybouquet · 6 months

Text

15 questions, 15 mutuals

Thanks for the tag @blueisglueredisdead!

1. Are you named after anyone?

Nope!

2. When was the last time you cried?

a few days ago? idk it's been a Week

3. Do you have kids?

no they'd starve if i was parenting them

4. What sports do you play/have played?

Never really played organized sports for a bunch of reasons. I've played a little pickup basketball and football but it's always ended badly because I'm sadly not really fit enough to do that atm.

5. Do you use sarcasm?

I think people take me seriously sometimes because they think I cannot possibly that sarcastic all the time, oops

6. What's the first thing you notice about people?

I have no idea?

7. What’s your eye color?

dark brown!

8. Scary movies or happy endings?

happy endings!!

9. Any talents?

What counts as a talent? Uh, I have a good head for dates and pattern recognition, which I use for the world-changing purposes of preempting the color commentator while watching live sports, reliably dating photos of actors down to the month or episode, and responding with a link to anyone trying to find a fanfic in my fandoms within like 5 minutes.

10. Where were you born?

*chants* USA! USA!

11. What are your hobbies?

watching things and writing about them

12. Do you have any pets?

none that live with me currently :(

13. How tall are you?

5'4"

14. Favorite subject in school?

Never had a favorite subject because it was always dependent on the teacher, but language and PE were definitely my least favorite.

15. Dream job?

That's classified!

Tagging @tommyjop @ladywaffles @airlocksandaviaries @daydreaming-optimist @holy-ships-x-red-lips @thethistlegirl @radical-sky @panthalassan @janewaysratherirregularstarlog @alakeeffectgirl @mylittleredgirl @agentfaust @sluttyhenley @redbelles @assignmentimprobable - no pressure of course!!

#tag games #thanks for the tag friend!!!!!!

10 notes · View notes

waltwhitmansbeard · 2 months

Text

I was tagged by @romeoandjulietyouwish and @ravendruid to answer 15 questions so here we go!

Are you named after anyone? my middle name is my mom's name and my mom has loved my first name since she met an australian foreign exchange student with that name when my dad was in college

When was the last time you cried? other than like laugh crying? a few months ago

Do you have any kids? no

What sports do you play/have you played? tennis, gymnastics, taekwondo

Do you use sarcasm? i used to but honestly i feel like people...don't really understand sarcasm? like how to use it properly? so now i just don't bother

What is the first thing you notice about people? their voice

What's your eye color? green

Scary movies or happy endings? hmmmm neither tbh

Any talents? pattern recognition

Where were you born? like right down the street from where i'm sitting lol

What are your hobbies? writing, d&d, the sims, reading

Do you have any pets? as of right now, three dogs

How tall are you? 5'4"

Favorite subject in school? english

Dream job? i marry an elderly man of means who dies of mysterious causes on our honeymoon

not tagging anyone bc all the moots have already been tagged

#gpoy

5 notes · View notes

thecoalwars · 9 months

Text

15 Questions & 15 People

I was tagged by @ursus-arctos-horribillis-chad thanks:)

1. Are You Named After Anyone? Yes, kind of two people actually

2. When Was The Last Time You Cried? 5 min ago reading a sad part of a book lol

3. Do You Have Any Kids? Not yet, but I do have cute cats

4. Do You Use Sarcasm A Lot? Not at all unless it's extremely light and playful, it's not really my thing

5. First Thing You Notice About People? If they're trying to be something they're not, and smiles:)

6. Eye Colour? Hazel

7. Scary Movie or Happy Ending? I love both, especially scary during spooky season

8. Any Special Talents? I can usually play a song after hearing it once or twice, I'm pretty good at puzzles (and other pattern recognition...)

9. Where Were You Born? The Great State of West Virginia

10. What Are Your Hobbies? Cooking, music, camping, reading, road-tripping

11. Do You Have Any Pets? I have two of my own cats, and then my family has other pets

12. What Sports Do You/Have You Played? I did gymnastics, dance, cheer, soccer, volleyball, track, swim - basically everything. I still workout most every day but I don't really do any specific sport

13. How Tall Are You? 5'3.5"

14. Favourite Subject In School? Culinary, auto shop, English, math in that order

15. Dream Job? Stay at home cat mom lol

I don't think I even have 15 mutuals but @cryptidoutlaw @cere-moan-y @mtndewloyalist-xix @dulcissimabellatrix @livingtradition @mauswife @khanuckle

8 notes · View notes

druidgroves · 1 year

Text

15 questions for 15 mutuals 🍓

Tagged by @bunfey ! thank u bunny :)

tagging @serenedy @cultistbase @perfectlypreservedpie @bokatan @calenhads @vnknowncrow @nightscavalry @wastelandhell @krokaxe @malefiicarum @reaperkiller @lexcanium @aelyosos @devilbrakers @stinkrascal (but don't feel obligated !!)

1. Are you named after anyone?

since i go by my middle name, technically ! my mom put together the middle names of her parents for mine (ray + lynn) & then feminized it to raelynn :)

2. When was the last time you cried?

yesterday while thinkin abt rats </3

3. Do you have kids?

yeah. 27 of 'em ages 8-10.

4. Do you use sarcasm a lot?

surely not.

5. What sports do you play/have you played?

i don’t sport but i played softball when i was younger (insert obligatory lesbian joke here)

6. What's the first thing you notice about other people?

their face ? or body language idk

7. Eye color?

hazel :0 predominantly brown-green :)

8. Scary movies or happy endings?

get u a bad bitch who can do both

9. Any special talents?

i am capable of being the most cringe human being on the planet i have good pattern recognition? my fiancee calls me over to help her play word unscramble games sometimes bc my brain can pick out the words v fast sometimes

10. Where were you born?

in a small town in arkansas. itty bitty.

11. What are your hobbies?

writing, playing video games, drawing, singing, & ttrpgs !

12. Do you have any pets?

i have my cat & then my fiancee's dog !!

13. How tall are you?

5’6”

14. Fave subject in school?

english & history

15. Dream job?

i do not dream of labor etc etc but i think i could be content to get paid to sort small items such as beads or buttons or perhaps even screws.

#tag game #thank u again !!! <3

16 notes · View notes

cellarspider · 1 year

Text

Oh boy I am poked

For those in need of context: I mentioned my desire to fight Noam Chomsky behind a Dennys, after reading The Atoms of Language: The Mind’s Hidden Rules of Grammar by Mark C. Baker (2001).

What follows is a 2000 word essay on why. Holy heck this took all night.

Top-level disclaimer: I am not a trained linguist. I am an enthusiastic amateur at best, thanks to my hobby of constructed language-making. If anybody would like to correct something or discuss the topic, feel free!

Because l have loud feelings about The Atoms of Language. I think the way it conceives of the world has a lot of parallels in how people view science in general. So despite its age, it’s worth giving it a bit of a kicking. Both for its specific claims, and the big picture.

To summarize: the shape of our languages aren’t hard-coded into our brain by genetics. Languages don’t fall into immutable, hard-edged categories based off of binary choices. The author presents only one alternative: random chance, unconstrained by any environmental factors, that each child must learn without pattern recognition. This is a false dichotomy, and one that cuts off far more reasonable means by which languages can evolve and be learned. Science is not a fight between absolute order and absolute chaos.

I have to begin with a two paragraph digression to set the scene.

The sciences are home to a perennial nerd squabble about whose field is the best and most pure, usually in a "physicists and chemists versus everyone else" divide. This is timewasting nonsense, but it's worth acknowledging that physics and chemistry allow for experiments where one can test universal truths to a ludicrously high degree of certainty. This cannot be done in other fields, because there are too many complicating factors. My chosen field of genetics deals with systems that have so many moving parts, they're impossible to fully predict. Social sciences study behavior, which is even harder to make generalized statements about.

Now, this does not mean physicists and chemists can explain everything about genetics or social sciences. Their tools are not suited to the problems tackled in these fields, and anybody who claims otherwise is a blowhard. But sometimes people can get jealous of the certainty of physical laws. They may try to legitimize their field or their pet theory by describing it in terms of physics and chemistry.

And so Mark Baker wrote The Atoms of Language.

You may be able to see where the problems start with this book.

So, what is this book trying to authoritatively explain? Well, a couple of big questions in linguistics are "how do babies learn languages when they are small and bad at everything?" and "why do so many unrelated languages share structures that function similarly to each other?"

Baker subscribes to Noam Chomsky’s theories on the subject, which can be summarized like this: The grammatical structures of all languages are formed from a limited and definable set of parameters, which are predefined by a “Language Acquisition Device” in the brain, found exclusively in humans, due to a single evolutionary event that no other organism has replicated.

In fact, Chomsky asserts that not only is this the root of all language, it’s also the only way that babies could ever learn a language. He posits that they don’t receive enough information to learn their language. Instead, they instinctively pick up on linguistic parameters that the Linguistic Acquisition Device is hard-coded to create, selecting those that are relevant to their first language and discarding the rest.

Using these parameters contained within the Language Acquisition Device, Baker posits a periodic table of language. One that could be used to describe and predict all possible grammatical constraints of language.

This is highly controversial on every level. I’m going to start with the Chomsky stuff and move on to what Baker does with these parameters.

The human exclusivity of syntactically complex language is currently up for debate, with Carolina chickadees and prairie dogs arguably being capable of the same feat in the wild.

Chomsky never tested this theory in a rigorous manner in humans either. However, its structure is similar to many experiments from the past few decades. There was a wave of neuropsychology studies that claimed “we found the brain region responsible for [behavior] via an FMRI study!”. These usually ended up being shaved down by later investigations into "actually that part of the brain does at least six things, and that particular behavior is split between at least fifteen different regions.”

To this date, no single region of the brain has been identified as the source of childhood language acquisition. While it’s hard to get a kid to sit still in an MRI machine, this is backed up by one of the oldest ways to study the brain: looking at what breaks when it’s injured. While there are many brain injuries that can affect one’s ability to speak or to comprehend language, none have been conclusively shown to abolish the ability to form grammatical sentences. Even ones you think really, really should: witness the man who had a key language center of the brain surgically removed, and somehow continued to speak pretty damn coherently all the same.

This is a problem, obviously, but one could argue that a circuit could form between multiple areas of the brain to create a Language Acquisition Module, right? Okay then. Let’s examine the parameters it supposedly contains. These are the fundamental categories that human languages are locked into, according to Chomsky and Baker. While Baker begins with the metaphor of the periodic table, what he actually describes is more of a flow chart: an increasingly specific pattern of choices that build up to form a unique language.

Baker admits he doesn’t have the complete periodic table of language. In fact, he backpedals in the last quarter of the book, and says well, we don't have a periodic table of linguistics yet, maybe we never will, but we could!

And he’s pretty sure of the chart that he does have. And he still considers it to demonstrate immutable categories of language. For example, he says there are two basic word orders: Subject Verb Object (“I eat apples”) and Subject Object Verb (“I apples eat”). He presents this as the most basic thing a child learns about their language’s structure. This is first, all else comes after.

…Except he then admits that actually, there are other word orders, but they’re really rare, so that proves him right anyway.

This, as the astute in the audience may note, does not in fact prove him right. Language is not behaving like the perfect, hard-edged system he wants, it’s messy. And it doesn’t get any better from there. More and more exceptions pile up, perfectly reasonable in the context of their languages, but they’re problems to this model. Baker asserts that culture has no meaningful effect on the structure of language.

To Baker, these parameters cannot have evolved independently based on cultural trends. This must be set in stone, or everything would be chaos. He argues that two languages coming up with similar structures independently by means of culturally-influenced linguistic evolution would be like two people flipping a coin a hundred times and getting the same sequence of heads and tails.

How languages end up the way they do is still a topic of study and debate. But Baker is pulling out an argument often used by creationists, so we’re in my wheelhouse here. I will briefly use biological evolution as a metaphor to explain why he’s wrong.

Biological evolution keeps coming up with similar structures and adaptations across wildly different species. Birds and scallops have eyes, even though their last common ancestor didn’t. Bees and bats can both fly. How is this possible, if evolution is a random process and isn’t directed according to some plan? Because all organisms are dealing with similar environmental pressures. Why are snakes and ferrets and eels all long, thin, slinky tubes? Because hunting and hiding in small burrows is easier that way. Snails and turtles and beetles have hard shells because being chewed on is bad. The environment creates restrictions on what sorts of bodies can feasibly exist, and that results in convergent evolution.

Language is working within a more restricted environment: You have a vocal tract.* You are a social animal. It benefits you and your kin group to be able to communicate things about yourself and the world around you. What does that mean? Telling people about the location of things. The qualities of things. Describing actions that have a cause and effect. You need some way to say "There is food here" or "I hit it with a stick, and then bees came out."

These desirable qualities mean that languages are subject to massive environmental pressures to maintain a minimum level of ability to communicate specific kinds of information, regardless of how they change over time. And you're presenting the information through a linear medium, one word at a time. These physical and behavioral traits limit the possible things a language can do.

So while I do not have the technical knowledge to propose a detailed model of linguistic evolution, I do not find it unlikely that human languages could experience convergent evolution, producing highly analogous structures completely independently of each other. Are there components of human cognition that lead humans to prefer some forms more than others? Almost certainly. But again, they’ll be messy! And they will be very, very hard to tease apart from the social context of language.

So, why did I just spend 1500 words ranting about this? Because despite the fact that this book was published not long before most linguists rejected these premises, it still plays into a lot of misapprehensions people have about science. Can we come up with absolute, iron-clad laws for everything? No. Many systems are so complicated that with our imperfect knowledge, they resist the language of certainty.

Does that mean that science is useless in those cases? No!! You can still figure out restrictions on what can and can’t happen, what is and isn’t reasonable to expect. This is the language of probability. The more we rigorously study a subject, the more precise we can be. That’s what we do in science.** We describe the world as precisely and carefully as we can, using the resources we have. It’s not always elegant, but not everything will be.

And I think that’s a good excuse for me to end this without a neat little closing thought.

---

*and hands, but I am not qualified to discuss sign languages.

**The desire to be achingly comprehensive is strong. You have no many times I had to delete tangents in this thing. They would have made my points more precise. I could have talked about synaptic pruning in the developing brain. I could talk about multiple testing correction while calculating probabilities. I wrote a footnote ramble about Japanese serial verb constructions, but I deleted it! Go me!!!

#spider rambles far too much #that was a lot #haven't gone on a ramble this long in ages #that was fun but tiring

17 notes · View notes