A story that may have relevance for others, or then again, maybe not:
When I was in college, about ten or so years ago, I was a history major. I wanted to learn to dance, so I joined a swing dance club on campus. To my surprise, this club had about twice as many men as women (in high school, the last time I’d tried dancing, the ratio had gone the other way–lots of girls, and boys only that you could drag by their ears).
But apparently, there had been some kind of word spread specifically to the STEM guys that dance was a way that they could meet girls.
So anyway. I joined the swing dance club, and met a few guys. And at one point, when socializing with the guys outside of dance class, one of them asked me what my research was on. (I had already established that I was an honors history student doing a thesis, just as he had established that he was an honors… I’m not sure if he was CS or Math, but it was one of those.)
So I gave him the thumbnail sketch of my research. Now, to be clear, an honors senior thesis, while nothing like what a graduate student would do, was still fairly in-depth. I had to translate primary sources from the original late-Classical Latin. (My professor said, basically, that while there were plenty of translations of my source material, that I’d only be able to comfortably trust them if I had at least made a stab at a translation of my own. And he was right.) And there was so much secondary material, often contradictory, that I had been carefully sorting through.
But I was able to sift it into a three-sentence summary of my senior thesis work, you know, as one does.
So I gave him that summary, and then asked–since he was also an undergraduate senior doing an honors thesis–what his research was on.
“Oh,” he said, “you wouldn’t understand it.”
Reader, I went home in a frothing rage. Because I had thought we were playing one game–a game of ‘let’s talk about what we’re passionate about!’– and he had been playing another game, which was, one-upsmanship. I had done my best to give a basically understandable brief of my research–and he had used that against me. As if my research, my painstaking translation, my digging through archives and ILLs of esoteric works, my reading of ten thousand articles in Speculum (yes, the pre-eminent medievalist journal in North America is called Speculum, I’m sorry, it’s hilarious/sad but also true), and then my effort to sum it up for him, was nothing. Because his research into some kind of algorithm or other was just too complex for my tiny brain to conceive of. Because I just couldn’t possibly understand his work.
Now, the important note here is that the person I went home to was my senior year roommate. She was a graduate student–normally undergrads and graduate students couldn’t be roommates, but we’d been friends for years, and the tenured faculty-in-residence used his powers for good and permitted us to be roommates that year. Anyway. My senior year roommate was basically… in retrospect I think possibly an avatar of Athena. She was six feet tall, blonde, attractive in a muscular athletic way, a rock climber and racquetball player, sweet but sharp, extremely socially awkward, exceptionally kind even when it cost her to be kind, and an incredibly brilliant computer science major who spent most of her time working on extremely complicated mathematical algorithms. (Yes, I was a little in love with her, why do you ask? But she was as straight as a length of rope, and is now happily married, and so am I, so it worked out.)
(Still, yes, she is my mental image of Athena, to this day.)
Anyway, I came home in a frothing rage to my roommate, the Athena avatar. And I said, “He made me feel like such an idiot, that I could sum up my research to him but his research was just too smart for stupid little me.”
And she shut her book, and smiled at me, with her dark eyes and her high cheekbones and her bright hair, and said, “If he can’t explain his research to you, then he’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is.”
Now I hesitated, because I’d be in college long enough to have sort of bought into the ridiculous idea that if you couldn’t dazzle them with your brilliance, you should baffle them with your bullshit. But she said, “Look, I’ve been doing work on computer science algorithms that have significantly complicated mathematical underpinnings. What do I do?”
And I said, “Genetic algorithms–that is, self-optimizing algorithms–for prioritization, specifically for scheduling.”
“Right,” she said. “You couldn’t code them because you’re not a computer scientist or a mathematician. But you can understand what I do. If someone can’t explain it like that, it isn’t a problem with you as a person. It’s a problem with them. They either don’t understand it as well as they think they do–or they want to make you feel inferior. And neither is a positive thing.”
So. There.
If you are looking into something and have a question, and someone treats you like an idiot for not understanding right away… here is what I have to say: maybe it isn’t you who is the idiot.
If you have a child and they are creeped out by a nephew or older brother touching them or looking at them a certain way, you need to have a serious talk with that person and keep them the hell away from your child. Don’t minimize it or tell your kid to hug them anyway, that kid is picking up danger signals they don’t even understand yet. But so many families will tell that kid they are being a brat.
thankyou
A quick note- this applies to female relatives as well. One of my aunts ignores my little brother’s requests not to hug or kiss him (he has aspergers and doesn’t like physical contact with people he is not very close with). I have repeatedly placed myself between the two of them and had to tell her to back off and stop trying to “desensitize” him. Whether or not there are “danger signals,” it is not okay for adults to invalidate a child or teen’s request for boundaries. We need to teach children now, when they are young, that they can say no to these things and that other people can too.
ok there is something that needs to be talked about
there is a lot of inter-community ableism between the mental illness community and the physically disabled community. as a member of both, it effects me directly.
more specifically its mentally ill people claiming that physical disabilities (including chronic illnesses) are treated better than mental illness, as if our disabilities or illnesses are taken more seriously than mental illness, or that people will more likely accept them as an excuse for something. but they arent treated like that, not at all.
stop acting like the world is more accessible for physically disabled than mentally ill people, its not accessible for either.
if ur physically abled and can reblog this you should tbh
i feel bad for people who use sai but dont know about stabilizer, transparent brushes and clipping groups
this is where you find stabilizer:
i personally prefer to use S-4 for default drawing and S-7 when i need to draw really long smooth lines. this is what it does:
this is where you find transparent brush:
when you enable it, you can use your currently selected brush as eraser. this is what it does:
this is where you find clipping group:
you have to have at least two layers, the base layer and the one for the colors. when you draw on the layer with little red bar on side, the stuff you put on the layer appears only on top of the things you have on the base layer. the effect is p much same as preserving opacity except you dont change anything about the base layer and you can still use layer textures and effects. this is what it does:
Howdahs are the large metal or wooden saddles used by many elephant owners. They often come adorned with decorative and regal looking covers reminiscent of the days of the Maharaja’s but are they necessary and what are they hiding?!
Howdahs are very bad for the long term health of elephants as they are proven to cause many injuries such as;
They will ultimately take years off an animal’s life. Howdahs even cause difficulty in drinking, eating and simple moving or breathing, because of the tight fitting harness, similar to a person wearing a tight corset.
Howdahs are often poorly constructed and the elephants are overloaded and worked for long periods of time, this leads to the frame rubbing their backs, causing blisters, abscesses and open wounds that can become infected.
Riding bareback or with a slightly padded blanket is an obvious, cheap solution to the Howdah issue. Combined with limiting the number of riders at any one time, this will eliminate many of the injuries that elephants working in the tourist industry suffer each year. Simple alternatives such as these will lead to the animal suffering less stress and having a longer, happier life.
take a moment to revel in the fact that trump threw a hissy fit because a buzzfeed reporter had the gall to take pictures of all the empty seats at one of his rallies. this is the photos trump wanted people to see:
this is the photo a buzzfeed reporter took of the front seats, closest to the podium, as viewed from behind. ok sure there are some empty seats.
but it gets worse. these are the photos from the far back.
and then he keeps saying that his rallies are packed and overflowing
