wispfox

From Two Lumps, Fear the not quite Roomba!.

I also like this quote from the end of starandrea's most recent story:

"If you're this good at something you don't even want to do, [...] I pity the competition when you find whatever it is you do want to do."

From moominmolly, baby sloths! - make sure you check the comments, because there's more pictures in there. Scritched sloth!

Via conuly, 'Face' phone. I almost want one, except that I think the face might weird me out a bit, at least when talking to people I know, because it won't be their face (or, probably, their body language). And I _can_ do phones, as long as people aren't talking too quickly.

Found out from kightp that Amtrak is about to go away. I go call my Congressman now.

Is another link (from crazypills as a comment in the previous post), Amtrak At Twenty End Of The Line For Taxpayer Subsidies.

I'm annoyed by the 'we could pay for _these_ types of transportation for this many people for this much instead' arguments, since it's highly unlikely that the money not spent on Amtrak _would_ go to another form of public transportation, but I otherwise find it to be an interesting article.

edit: kightp notes in a comment below that this article is from the Cato Institute, a right-wing think tank with a vested interest in proving that government is always bad and privatization is always good.

Additional information in the comments for the second link I posted relating to Amtrak.

kightp pointed out that the study was done by a group which is known to be a right-wing think tank with a vested interest in proving that government is always bad and privatization is always good. She also pointed out that it's using data from 1990, before the (private) US airlines went to hell and (private) Greyhound launched its program of eliminating bus routes serving most of the rural US.

edit: and, apparently it's a libertarian think tank, not right-wing. (courtesy of crazypills in the comment linked to above)

In an entirely different train of thought, excuse me for a moment while I rant.

I _hate_ evites. I will follow them, and use them, since I mostly only get them from people I have some desire to actually stay in contact with and attend the parties of.

However, evites don't contain date, time, general idea of party in the email subject line or body. This makes them immensely annoying if I am not yet sure if I want to attend a party and want to decide later, because it's harder for me to use the email as a reminder to myself to make a decision, as there is no timing information in the email. I am _far_ less likely to have time/initiative to follow a link in my email than to just re-read my email.

I hate having to go to a website just to tell someone if I want to attend a party. The high annoyance factor has meant that it's entirely possible for a party I'm not sure about to be something I don't attend, either because I forget to decide, or because I just don't want to handle the annoyance.

Additionally, evite party invites tend to have huge, highly-visible-in-the-invite guest lists, so I can never quite shake the feeling of my presence not really being particularly important to the invitee, which also tends to make me less interested in attending. I seem to get a stronger sense of actively being wanted at a party if the invite and party information is sent via email, _even if I know the party, guest list, and distribution list are huge_. Considering that I rarely actively want to attend large group parties due to energy levels, this makes a significant difference in my interest.

Yeesh. I can tell it's no longer winter because people are sending out evites again.

If I'm ranting on my LiveJournal, it's not aimed at anyone specific (with possible exception of highly visible public figures that I only know of, and don't personally know).

If I'm ranting, I'm also knowingly not taking into account other people's potential perspectives on the matter (if it were, it wouldn't be a rant according to my definition of 'rant').

Yeah. That.

(Incidentally, I will continue to attempt to remember to read/follow evites; they are just nearly certain to make me feel more or less how I felt in my previous post, at least as long as I'm thinking about them. I usually don't _say_ anything, but there was the most fascinating juxtaposition of having one arrive in my INBOX at the exact same time as answering an LJ poll on how I feel about them. I was already in a verbal mental state about them, so was in the right mindset to express my reaction to them, rather than simply have it and move on)

All from griffen, I think:

Tact Filters.

Amusingly, I think that I tend to do _both_ - apply tact to things coming in (this is my automatic state and requires much less social energy, although certainly still some), and (if energy levels are high enough for me to be comfortably social with people whose methods I'm not sure about) to things going out. Modulo who I'm talking to and how they tend to communicate.

*laugh* Hi! I'll be your translator for the day... ;)

How many Mr. President?

It's fun to see other people being vile and to set yourself in opposition to them. It's inspiring to go on a crusade.

1) I'm bad with internalizing lists, although lists of two or three things is at least possible for me to retain for a short time (long enough to write down or use the information). I suspect this is why I prefer to write things down in lists, because lists _are_ a useful organizational technique, and I can't _remember_ (or come up with) lists. This is especially difficult for me with ordered lists. (This is also why I just spent the 45 minutes while driving home putting all my available mental energy into remembering the three things listed in this post. :)

2) I'm bad with braindumps. My default method (ie, easiest, not in terms of most often used) of externalizing information is to braindump at people (which is what you people _don't_ usually see me doing, as I tend to expect that if I have such trouble with it, it's not kind to inflict it on other people), which makes this fact interesting, and probably explains why I tend to put so much effort into processing, organizing, and condensing things in my head before trying to express them.

This is probably also why it's so difficult for me to accept that certain people do, in fact, find it _easier_ to understand me when I'm least able to get things beyond brain dump state, much as it's also easier on me that this is possible. I generally want to default to information externalization via writing as braindump, which is interesting when my default for spoken is to hope people figure out what I'm saying with very few words and lots of gesture.

Summaries - when concise - are very useful, as I tend to be poor at getting to generalizations from specifics.

3) I have auditory processing problems, in that I have to semi-consciously process spoken words (which is apparently not typical), which means that it's generally bad to try to convey large amounts of information to me in a spoken manner.


Having someone attempt to convey information to me via spoken, ordered list braindump is... um... less than effective.

Means I am stuck with a spoken word processor which is struggling with too much information too fast, even before we get to the potential state where I have to try to pick out important info from the noise which is how braindumps come across to me, and even before the problem of me trying to retain what order there might be for the list or what the components are.

Best method? Go ahead with the list, but give me a single element at a time, let me ask for more information as desired (and as I have time to process). If you _must_ do a brain dump, do it in a written form, not a spoken one.

Sleep now. Late. At least this was brief enough to be able to write before I sleep, unlike the last topic which I _still_ haven't gotten around to processing enough to post.