More Magic

Mira the Model

While I'm talking about social stuff I had to learn as an autistic person

There's a LOT of social interactions between human beings whose purpose really boils down to being like that thing dogs do where they go "omg YOU'RE a dog??? I'M a dog!!!!!" And that's not a bad thing. Highly ritualized "meaningless" displays of human connection like friendly greetings and talking about things like weather actually do serve a purpose which is like idk ritualized displays birds do. YOU'RE a human? Omg I'M a human!!!! Wow!!!

And they don't have to be your favorite flavor of interaction. You can even think they're silly. But they DO serve a purpose or else they wouldn't be a thing.

There's lots of good and folksy responses to "how are you doing" that don't involve either lying or undermining the ritualized purpose of the greeting exchange, too. My great grandmother Ethel for example was a big fan of "well, I'm a-doin'"

"Things like 'How are you?' and 'Have a nice day' and 'What do you think of the weather, then?' What these sounds mean is: I am alive and so are you."

- Wings, by Terry Pratchett.

It sounds so cute when you put it this way

When I was a teenager I really hated and gamified smalltalk, but... Then I got cockatiels. And cockatiels have a thing called "contact calls". Basically, it's a particular set of noises they make to know where each other are without looking at them directly. There's variations, when the flock member is close it's a very sweet little sound, when they don't know where you are this can progress to a panicked shriek.

I kind of loved mimicking it. It let me interact with my birds in a whole new way that meant a lot to them, and it turned out to be incredibly helpful when my (completely unrecall trained, fully flighted bird) got startled in a bad gust of wind on the way between aviary and house and ended up circling in the bad weather, totally disoriented... And calling for us. It let her figure out how to get back down to come home.

Gradually I realised that lots of animals do this, actually. Cat activation noise is a contact call. Dogs do it in some kinds of whines. Social birds have big repertoires of them. It's just a ritual to keep in contact.

Then... I realised that's what a lot of those small rituals of smalltalk actually are. They are the act of petting an anxious or excited dog to soothe it, or letting each other know you're still in the room together. Humans have a huge variety in the way they use these, but I stopped finding a lot of them so annoying when I realised what the rituals were actually for.

I mean, I still prefer to use the non-word versions among friends and other people amenable to it, but. I find it, given in good faith, kind of endearing now.

I'm now suddenly reminded of the very particular meow my cat would do anytime she passed by an open door with people in the room. Just letting us know she saw us. No need to get up and follow or pet or get food. Not looking for anything more than that acknowledgement of seeing you and wanting you to know she was there.

Sam Penaso - Floor Plan, 2019 (Welded stainless)

there should be a hotline for me to call autistic people with specific hyperfixations every time i have a question

Okay legally I have to try this rainbow goo, right?

It seems to be trying to fill a similar ecological niche to jelly so I got waffles to eat it on

I swear to fuck, y'all, this stuff smells like children's shampoo

Well okay let's do this

The flavor is indescribable. It's like if you wanted to make lemon preserves but your only knowledge of lemons came from Saturday morning cartoon advertising. This is lemon as seen through the lens of Dr. Wondertainment of SCP fame and I'm pretty sure it fell through a rip in spacetime from their employee cafeteria. It's !!LEMON!! (with a strong aftertaste of artificial coloring and plastic from the edible glitter bits)

The texture is exactly how I always imagined it would be to eat aloe vera gel out of the brightly-colored bottle in my mom's bathroom

Overall 6/10, I'm gonna finish the waffle but fuck knows what I'm gonna do with the rest of the bottle

Update my tummy hurts

I assure you these plastics were very macro

Great news! This is how the yellow glitter junk has ended up

I threw it together with some white wine yeast and water and fermented it into...this! It is violently neon yellow and has some disconcerting hydrophobic globules suspended in it, presumably from some oil that was in the goo. It made the siphon weirdly greasy as I was bottling it, which was unnerving!

As for the taste, it's...honestly not as bad as expected? It tastes like white wine but lip-puckeringly sour and dry. If I'd backsweetened it after fermentation it might almost have been palatable. When I tasted it at racking it tasted like battery acid so this is a welcome surprise! Yeast truly are the redeemers of all culinary sin

Mostly "hm. This sucks. I wonder if it would suck less if I made it into alcohol"

req'd by @onyourstageleft

OH GOD I DON'T EVEN HAVE A DECK OH NO

text: It's time to d-d-d-duel!!

Horsing around

RIP Gordon Bell, computer architect and vice president for Digital Equipment Corporation, responsible for the design of several computers in the PDP family as well as heading up the VAX system development group.

I couldn't blame you if you never heard of him, his contributions were mainly in the 1960s through 1980s. But trust me when I say, whatever device you are reading this on can trace its lineage back through some project he was involved with in one way or another.

Bell passed away on May 17th in his home in California, he was 89.

fucker! we wanted to trek those

People who live in rural areas going to a city and experiencing light pollution.

people always say "your body is a temple" as some kind of pearl-clutching gotcha finger wag to people with tattoos and piercings and body mods which has never made sense to me

cause like.

y'all know what we do with temples right? with holy spaces?

we adorn them in art and precious metals and things of beauty. we make them spectacles of gathering to signal that this is a space we know the Divine calls to us. our Creation does not end the moment we take our first breath, we continue to collaborate in our own Creation each and every day.

get the tattoo or that piercing, fill yourself with delicious things and celebrate in wonder at the mystery it is to live within your body!

We also renovate them, update them to accommodate a growing population, a changing time, etc. What embodied peace and comfort 500 years ago for many isn’t the same as what embodies peace and comfort now

this is what all health advice on tiktok looks like

a man, shaking and sniffling: why do you still need feminism….you can vote….and there’s a chance that i’ll go to prison if i kill you…….what more could you want…….

I'm fascinated by how the formatting of different social media sites affect how text is read.

For instance, a line break on Tumblr indicates a new idea.

But a reblog break indicates that time has passed.

reblog & put in the tags what kept you sane throughout quarantine

oh Pangur….

she’s like a reject poodle