The Life Experience ~ Winter '15

[bloodyrosemccoy]

What I Learned Since The Winter Solstice

• My preference for the Dome Theater comes largely from the fact that I can hang out alone in the booth. When new guys come to shadow me, it's less enjoyable--but still pretty fun.


• Sometimes kittens happen to you out of nowhere.


• Kids remember my Space Place lessons!


• Main sequence blue stars also become red giants before snuffing out. I'd always been a little fuzzy about what happened to them.


• Playing Musical Houses is stressful.


• My tendency to research my stories as a teenager was apparently not a universal phenomenon among teenage fiction writers.


• Sounds of 200 dB can rupture lungs.


• At least when making sodas, there is such a thing as "just crazy enough to work."


• Conures are a group of parrots that make good pets.


• Livestreams can be pretty damn fun to watch.


• It's possible to get emotionally invested in games that you thought were just supposed to be about jump scares.


• The big difference between Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder is that people with the former think their obsessions and compulsions are a problem, whereas those with the latter think that everyone else is just a slob.


• I still don't trust most Boy Scouts' ability to survive in their own living rooms, let alone in the wilderness.


• The most well-known autism advocacy group is also terrible. Autism Speaks is mostly from the point of view of neurotypical people and addresses actual spectrum people as more a burden and a drain on society, which, surprisingly, does not endear them to said autistic people.


• Trying to translate a lesson on astronomy from English to Spanish takes a while when you have to keep looking up terms.


• The guy who sings the Guardians of the Galaxy version of "Hooked on a Feeling" was also the Arbiter in Chess.


• Majora's Mask is a game rife with conspiracy theories.


• The thing I did as a kid where I wondered if "red" looked the same to everyone was apparently a universal thing to do. The term for those experiences that can't be conveyed is qualia, and the inability to convey them is called the explanatory gap.


• Cats' ability to land on their feet stems partly from visual and partly from kinetic orientation. When you take them into the Vomit Comet and they lose those cues, they sort of hula hoop around in circles trying to orient themselves.


• If I'd had noise-cancelling headphones earlier in my life, things would've been SO much easier.


• Okay, Smart Watches are AWESOME. This--THIS--is what I've been waiting for.


• It is not too terrifying to start an Etsy store, but it takes a while to get it going once you do.

Comments

[dinogrrl.livejournal.com]

Conures can be noisy though!
But the green-cheek at Petsmart right now is really darn cute.

Hula-hooping cats...now I have a new term for what Guaraha looks like whenever he's trying to be graceful and totally failing. :B

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Sure, but I do have noise-cancelling headphones now! ;)

[dinogrrl.livejournal.com]

Well that's just cheating.

[dark-phoenix54.livejournal.com]

OMG cats on the Vomit Comet! I've always wanted to go on that, and now I want to go twice as band and with CATS (maybe I should ask if the barf, though)

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Ah, the 1950s were a different time.

Of course they barf. They're CATS.

[dark-phoenix54.livejournal.com]

Well, that's true. Hairballs in space!

[sofish-sasha.livejournal.com]

Just the other day I was wondering if anyone had ever brought a cat on board the Vomit Comet. Now I know, and I can't stop giggling. ^.^

Also, Björn Skifs! He sings my favourite song in Chess (apart from Anthem), although at the moment I can't recall the title.
Fun fact: his first name means bear, and is pronounced pretty much the same way as Beorn.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I knew that about the name Björn! ... Though I'm not sure when I picked that up. But I always liked the name.

I know very little about Chess except for a couple of songs. I think that one is called "Opening Ceremony."

Poor cats. I like the one guy who tries to nudge the cat to keep it from bumping into something and sends it careening into a bulkhead.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

CAAAAATS
INNNN
SPAAAAACE

(alternately: early "buttered cat" levitation experiments showed promise)

[10cents.livejournal.com]

Ha, smart watches will always make me think of this comic: xkcd.com/1497/

My husband is a programmer. Guess what HE thinks of them. :P

I haven't been able to play with one yet. Is it possible to explain why it's great, or is it something that you have to experience to appreciate?

[westrider.livejournal.com]

When smart watches come up, my mind goes straight to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "...an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea."

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Hah! What's he predicting?

They might not be for everyone, but I'm having a ton of fun with mine. I like being able to carry a mini-phone with me. I had not bothered to get a smartphone yet because I had a tablet and found the phones to be too big and annoying to really talk on. Yelling into my wrist is actually preferable to holding a big rectangle up to my ear or wear headphones.

So, yeah, mileage may vary. But it helps that it also taps into some particular sci-fi trope in my head that just makes me super happy. So there's that, too.

[10cents.livejournal.com]

Oh, he's PREDICTING that they'll do well--but mostly because the first words out of his mouth were probably "why would anyone want that?". That comic is, um... Very true-to-life. Scary true-to-life.

That does make a certain amount of sense. Smart phones CAN be a huge pain to use as a PHONE, which is one reason why it works for me: I rarely actually TALK on mine. I'm glad that you're enjoying your new gadget! It's always fun to get something from The Future! ™

[baby-rissa-chan.livejournal.com]

Autism Speaks is the worst.

Noise canceling headphones are the best. There are times when those are the only thing that make leaving the house at all feasible.