cosmolinguist | Entries tagged with information

Thanks to otter for sharing this video the other day: Emotional Neglect: Healing from the Hidden Trauma of What Didn't Happen

I got around to watching it and it hit me so hard I needed to write this huge long thing about it. It's mostly transcript of the parts of the video that I wanted to make a note of, because it's not very accessible to me otherwise. But my thoughts are sprinkled around the block quotes of course.

( Emotional Neglect )

( Emotions Draw Our Attention to What Matters to Us )

( Shame, and Phobia of Inner Experiences )

( Existential Loneliness )

( Unconscious Self-Abandonment )

( Sensitivity to Rejection )

( Using Emotions to Connect Your Inner World to the Outer World )

1 what's your favourite kitchen appliance?
I never really thought about ranking them. The kettle is probably my favorite because it gets used the most.

2 do you have a collection of anything?
Random things related to Stitch (from Lilo & Stitch)

3 what's the best job you've ever had?
Probably the one I have now.

4 what's the worst job you've ever had?
Temping for minimum wage in a team that chased people up for overdue loans. I was new to the UK, so my partner and I were ineligible for all benefits, and I had a lot more in common with the people on the other side of these phone calls I could hear all day long as I was becoming The One Who Could Make the Printer Work and learning to like bananas because we had free fruit in the office and I needed the calories.

5 what's your favourite piece of furniture and where did you get it?
The green couch I bought the WonderHouse is pretty good. I can't remember where it came from; V sorted it out online of course.

6 what's your go-to recipe when you want to make something that requires minimal effort?
"Minimal effort" to me is taking something out of the freezer and putting it in the oven, which isn't a recipe. I guess in terms of things that I'd call a recipe that aren't difficult (and really pay off in how delicious it is, there's always the broccoli halloumi thing.

7 are you married or do you intend to get married?
I am not. I wouldn't say I intend to but I didn't intend to the other time either and it ended up being useful for geopolitical reasons so I wouldn't rule that out again in the future.

8 do you have kids? do you want them?
No and...I do not want to have them in terms of from my own body, and I'm fine that my life doesn't seem to have brought me any, but also if it had I think that would've been fine too.

9 are you on good terms with your parents?
...yes? This kinda came up at transgym yesterday: on the spectrum between good parents and shit parents mine are kinda...shit in practice but also... I talk to them every Sunday evening, which a lot of people would consider being pretty close and my parents consider less than the minimum to be happy.

10 do you have siblings? do you hang out with them?
ahahaha I have never found a good answer to this question. Do I have siblings in that I do and he turns up in anecdotes and suchlike? Or do I not in that if I say I do people ask stuff like "do you hang out with him?" and I can never hang out with him.

11 do you vote?
I vote in two countries! I just applied for a postal vote for the upcoming by election, because I can't remember if I'd done that since I got the notifications about it expiring.

12 what's the biggest purchase you've ever made?
Technically the mortgage on my old house but that didn't feel like a purchase. Next up is my Indefinite Leave to Remain which cost me I think I calculated about £7500 -- at the time. Using the Bank of England's inflation calculator, that'd be £12,828.24, and that's not counting that the Home Office has more-than-doubled the costs of those visas and applications since.

13 what are your hobbies?
Listening to podcasts, watching baseball.

14 what's a hobby you'd like to get into?
Hiking.

15 do you collect anything?
Aches, cynicism, grudges... wait, is this a question about knickknacks?

16 how long have you known your oldest friend?
I'm not really in very good touch with anyone I knew before I moved here, so probaby 18 or 19 years (despite being partners and good friends before that, neither D or I can remember what year we actually met but it was either 18 or 19 years ago).

17 are you a member of any clubs or associations?
local Queer Club. I have a gym membership lol. I don't think anything else?

18 have you ever changed fields in your career or education?
I'm a millennial, we don't get fields and careers. Not the disabled ones among us especially.

19 how many wisdom teeth do you have and have you had any removed?
I had them all taken out at 18, I didn't want to, my dentist said I had to, they'd be causing me loads of pain. They never did. I'm still convinced he did it to get money out of my parents.

20 what's your favourite beverage?
Coffee

21 do you have any living grandparents?
I did until a year ago.

22 do you have nieces/nephews/godchildren/other kids in your life that aren't yours?
D's niblings, his sister's two kids. They are great. They're also tweens/young teens now so increasingly absent/mysterious/incomprehensible, but still such good fun when we do get to hang out.

23 what's the coolest place you've visited?
There are so many, and it's hard to compare them. At the moment my first thought is the Atomium in Brussels.

24 what's your most recent degree and has it been useful to you?
BA (Hons) Linguistics. It has been very useful to me: not in an employment sense (beyond the fact that I think having a degree made it easier to get my job), but it has been so helpful to me to be able to approach my life and the world through this lens.

25 would you rather own a dishwasher or a washing machine if you could only have one or the other?
Oh the times in my life when I haven't owned a (working) washing machine have been absolutely miserable. It's much easier to wash dishes by hand than to wash clothes by hand (or go to the laundromat even if there is one closer now than there used to be because it's where my barber was!).

26 do you make a list before going to the grocery store or just wing it?
We mostly shop online. D has a kind of master list that we just tick off what we need each week(ish) when we do the order.

27 what's your favourite household chore?
Mowing the lawn.

28 what chore do you hate the most?
Cleaning things I don't know how to clean/never feel like I get it clean.

29 do you have houseplants and how are you at keeping them alive?
We have so many, I'm so lucky. V looks after them; this is something else I would be shit at noticing in time. But I love living surrounded by them.

30 what's your living arrangement? (who do you live with, in what kind of building, do you own or rent or other?
I live with my boyfriend and his partner, in a suburban semi-detached house that I think was social housing? Sold in the 80s to a builder who...did things to it himself, many of which have consequences we're still living with. Technically the mortgage is D's and I'm a lodger but in practice all three of us contribute to the bills/food/household stuff.

Last song I listened to: "Dog Days Are Over" by Florence + the Machine is playing on the Doof right now. I love this song.

Favorite color: Green.

Currently watching: Literally currently watching the Doof. Otherwise, we've just finished Murderbot and I think the next thing up in the queue is the new series of Strange New Worlds.

Last movie: D and I went to see Superman over the weekend, it was fun and good.

Currently reading: I just got Angela Saini's Superior from the library.

Coffee or tea: This is biphobic! I like both! I tend to drink tea because I make a pot every morning for the household, the rest of which can't have coffee for one reason or another. But I grew up with coffee, it reminds me of my parents and grandparents and lots of nice things. Once a week or so I find myself really missing coffee so I make myself some. And I think if the situation was reversed and I lived with coffee drinkers, I don't know that I would miss tea in the same way.

Sweet/savory/spicy: This is also biphobic! They're all good and they go together well (like genders!). I suppose I'd have to say savory if I really had to pick one.

Relationship status: I love being my boyfriend's boyfriend.

Looking forward to: We have tickets to the livestream of Ian McKellan's trans production of Twelfth Night tomorrow night, Smithfest (Mr. Smith is angelofthenorth's cat, whose birthday is being celebrated on Saturday with a party here so we get to meet some of her friends), and Sunday D and I might go to Sheffield to see the Midsommars, the group I talked about here.

Current obsessions: The following is a baseball thing so don't worry if it makes no sense. The trade deadline. I'm gonna be so so fucking sad if the Twins trade Willi Castro. And I will not be okay at all if they trade Joe Ryan!

Last Googled: Good question! Personally, apparently all the stuff I linked to in yesterday's entry. But since then for work I googled some boring stuff about the e-scooter trials in England being extended another two years.

Last thing you ate and really enjoyed: Tagine and clafoutis. angelofthenorth cooked tonight. This is how I learned what clafoutis is -- though it felt like something I could've easily grown up with. I bet my mom would love it.

Currently working on: For work, still the first draft of that report. I had to chair an excruciating meeting today with a bunch of people who are basically waiting on me to do that so they can do tasks that depend on it. Personally...hm, just the usual: trying to go to the gym and read library books in a timely fashion. I think my new project is trying to pursue top surgery privately but it's so far stuck at a very early hurdle and this makes me tired and defeatist.

My mom reminded me today of how my grandpa, the farmer, used to say that the robin needs to be snowed on three times before spring will come.

Apparently they have been now. My mom is impatient for spring so I hope she gets it soon.

So I'll do it too: describe yourself using 5 things that are probably in your purse/backpack at any given moment.

I think, excepting my wallet and keys, there are only five things in my little man bag! Here they are.

masks
co2 monitor
guide cane
Disabled Person's Railcard
fingerless gloves wrapped up inside hand-knitted hat (that might be too small for me now; I blame its age and number of times it's been washed, rather than me getting a big head!)

Me: ugh I can't think of anything to say today. It was a very boring day. Let's see what the questions meme has for us today.

Questions: 2. Do you listen to any podcasts?

Oh boy do I ever!

( This is gonna get long )

13 What’s the notification tone on your phone for calls? Texts?

For calls it's some boring thing that came with my (Samsung) phone. One of those things I don't recognize until I hear it and then think "is that my phone? It's probably my phone" and then look at it.

My text noise, though, I know well. It's what I had on my old Blackberry, many years ago, and it has just seemed like the Correct notification sound ever since. It's just a major-chord arpeggio, and it's called "contentment." I don't even know how I got it onto this phone so I'd be sad if it went away because I don't know if I could get it back!

5 It’s Learn What Your Name Means Day. So, what does your name mean? Do you think it fits you?

Yay, I love onomastics! My first paper for the "Grammar & Language" class I took as part of my ill-fated English degree, the class that eventually set me on the path to being a linguistics nerd and now a lingustics student, was on the onomastics of my names.

Onomastics basically means the etymology of a name, the things people look up/worry about sometimes when they're going to name a baby (or themselves).

My first name has the most boring onomastics though, because it's already an English word, and you know what it means. It means Christmas was a lot of fun as a kid, when other kids would point to the berries and leaves we made of construction paper, and our teachers taped to the walls, and say "look, you're hanging on the wall!" and then they discovered the old hokey song "Holly Jolly Christmas"...

Anyway, yes, I am a spiky poisonous plant.

The onomastics paper taught me that my middle name and surname are both major-European-language versions of biblical names; one means "gift of god" and the other's someting else "of god," if I recall.

Cosmo, of course, comes from Greek κόσμος, kosmos, and is understood to mean something like "order" -- cosmos is opposed to chaos, which is why it came to be associated with space on the grand scale of the universe by scientists who were amazed at how orderly and rule-bound it was turning out to be.

When I was still considering Cosmo a joke name I said my friends would laugh if I picked a name that meant "order and decency." But really, I've always been one to fight against the forces of entropy, to oragnize, to create things that otherwise would never exist, to resist the natural deterioration of everything as much as I can. It's not why I picked the name, but it's not a bad meaning.

--

In other news, I have picked a text for that essay I was talking about yesterday. An internet friend of mine does an e-mail newsletter reviewing Lifetime movies, and they're funny and great but also just the kind of "speech-like" writing (i.e. "sounds like it's from the internet") that'll suit the framework I am going to analyze the language with. My friend is delighted that I want to do this and I think she's being a good sport.

Like I said yesterday,

silveradept asked me for "A useful thing you have learned by studying linguistics."

They asked separately about the IPA, which is always my immediate thought when I think about useful linguistics things. I wish everybody was taught it in high school. And I've written about that before too, so I won't go into that again.

So let's see...what else have I learned that's useful? I'm going to talk about two things from pragmatics: phatic communication, and Grice's maxims.

I know a lot of neurodiverse people, and a lot of them struggle with phatic communication (link is to a Tom Scott video on the subject), finding "small talk" difficult and confusing. I think if people explicitly knew more about it, why it exists and what function it serves, it might seem less annoying and pointless, and hopefully might even be easier to navigate once people recognize its uses.

Things like greeting someone with a question that you don't expect a complex and unique answer to (like "you alright?" or "what's up?") aren't pointless. They acknowledge the other person, indicate that you're interested in starting a conversation with them, We can, even in languages like English that lack other grammatical ways of doing this, establish a hierarchy: we might not have "tu" and "vous" to do this like French, or the many ways of addressing someone in a language like Japanese, but we can indicate how we relate to somebody by whether we greet them with "hey" or "hello" or "excuse me" or whatever.

Phatic expressions also help with turn-taking in conversation: a lot of the "mmm"s and "yeah"s and so on that we say to show we're listening to someone and also, often, that they've paused or come to the end of a sentence, where we could start talking, but we've chosen to encourage them to go on. When we want to speak, there might be other "yeah"s or "oh"s we use, but they don't usually sound the same. These kinds of verbal clues are especially important to me, since I can't see facial expression or body langauge clues that somoene wants to speak or not (I do tend to talk over people because of this, which I hate and have anxiety about, so if I do it to you I'm

This reminds me of Grice's maxims. Paul Grice was a philosopher who came up with the cooperative principle, which says that we expect, and try to offer, certain kinds of cooperation from people we're in a conversation with. Grice came up with four kinds: quality, manner, relevance and quantity.

The maxim of quality says we don't say things we believe to be false or that we can't back up with evidence. We want to believe that people know what tbey're talking about, that they're not lying or misinformed. Otherwise we're wasting our time talking with them, and probably frustrating ourselves.
The maxim of manner says we talk in a way appropriate for the people we're talking to. This means
- using words we think they'll understand (I explain, for example, my white cane much differently to toddlers than to bus drivers)
- using only as many words as we need
- avoiding ambiguity
- talking about things in a sensible order -- whether that's chronological, or here where I'm talking about the four maxims one at a time, and here talking about the four things Grice says we need in order to be "appropriate."
The maxim of relevance has a clue in the name: be relevant. We don't expect non-sequiturs in conversation (being rare is one of the things that allows them to be funny; they're tiresome if they happen too often). Often if something seems like a non-sequitur, we'll give the person the benefit of the doubt a bit because we expect relevance and are generally willing to politely hang in there a little to see if "Twelve years ago, I got really drunk one day..." ends up being an answer to our question about someone's job. But it does put some strain on the conversation, we like nice straightforward relevance better.
The maxim of quantity is the last one. This says you should be as informative as you need to be, and no more so. So if someone asks me if I like where I live and I say "I like some things about it," I'm giving them the information that there are also things I don't like. But if I don't want to go into that, because it's more polite to be positive, I can offer that information without detaling my dislikes.

You certainly don't have to remember all of Grice's maxims -- when I was telling Andrew the other day that autistic people could benefit from them, not only could I only remember three of them, I was convinced that there only were three -- the point is that these aren't rules Grice is telling us to follow, but patterns he'd noticed in how people already behave.

But we're mostly not conscious of it, and that can lead us to being annoyed not just when this assumption of cooperation breaks down. Even if we can't fix the people around us, it sometimes helps to put our finger on why talking to them bugs us, and it definitely helps if we know what cooperation looks like.

Feel free to suggest more December topics for me if you like!

Part One
Part Two

jesse_the_k was nice enough to include my previous IPA posts in a list of Excellent Content Elsewhere on Dreamwidth" and it reminded me I'm not done yet.

Over the first two posts, I talked about places of articulation -- how different parts of your mouth can be involved in making the different sounds. ( Today I'll talk about manner of articulation. )

So now that you know what all the places and manners of articulation are, you can look at any symbol on the chart and figure out how it works. Remember, if there are two symbols in the same square, the left one is voiced and the right is voiceless. So if you can't remember which one /ð/ is, you can check that it's dental, that it's a fricative, and that it's voiced. And you can always check your guesses on Seeing Speech, remember.

Part One
Part Three

I haven't forgotten this series! It just took me a few days to write this up. I hope you enjoy it.

Gretchen McCulloch, internet linguist, has been talking a lot about the IPA on Twitter lately (I've been tagged in quote-tweets of both how to type the IPA on an Android phone and the thread of IPA (symbols) as IPAs (beers), and I think what she says about learning the IPA is well-timed for where we're up to:

Useful caveat about learning the IPA: there are a LOT of symbols, because it's designed to represent all sounds used in human language. Intro linguistics/phonetics courses often prioritize more frequently used IPA symbols, but I find self-taught people are more likely to get discouraged that they have a hard time remembering like, all the mid-central unrounded vowels except schwa They're v infrequent, it's okay. You still "know the IPA" for functional purposes if you have a good grasp on the symbols for the sounds you encounter regularly and know how to use the resources of the IPA to figure out less familiar sounds/symbols.

( And it's this familiarity I'm trying to offer. )

Part Two
Part Three

moem's comment to the post I wrote yesterday got me thinking. After asking how something is pronounced, it went "I'm worried that you will only be able to reply in those characters that I can't read, the ones that indicate how words sound... I don't even know what they are called."

I wanted to reply not just to explain the pronunciation but to answer the question of what those characters are called, and maybe give a little basic info. So I googled "International Phonetic Alphabet" and...I was surprised not to find anything useful. Everything seems to be just the charts, with at most a little history but I don't expect anyone cares what year the IPA was invented or whose idea it was. And the charts aren't much use if you don't know how to read them.

I find it really frustrating that I was exposed for years in high school to, say, the periodic table -- I had to memorize the first twenty elements, I can recognize a bunch of the symbols still, I know the chart's organization tells you stuff about electron shells and similarities between elements' properties, I knew what atomic number and atomic weight are -- and, no shade but...I can't recall it having been useful to me since. Whereas I long for a wider knowledge of the IPA every time people talk about accents, or about unfamiliar words, or even how unfamiliar a familiar word can sound sometimes.

I can imagine a high-school level linguistics knowledge, but it doesn't really exist. There's this frustrating gap: practically nothing's out there between the level of (often uninformed and bigoted) rants about personal langauge peeves and undergrad-level linguistics. Sure there are some cool podcasts and twitter accounts and stuff (that's how I ended up inspired to do a lingulistics degree, after all!) but I think there's a lot of potential for more interested-layperson level stuff, and I thought a good place to start might be by talking about how to read the IPA chart. I promise it's way easier than a periodic table.

( How to Read the International Phonetic Alphabet, Part 1 - voicing and some places of articulation )

I don't understand how I've lived for more than a dozen years in a city with such an ego about itself (especially concerning the Industrial Revolution), that brags and makes all kinds of claims for its exceptional status,and yet I didn't know until today that Australia calls its bedding, towels and suchlike "manchester" because they used to get it from Manchester.

This seems like just the kind of anecdote the local museums, tours, and other purveyors of history would love: an indication of Manchester's global influence and whatnot. And I love museums and local history so I'd think I'd have known that by now...but it wasn't even anybody in Manchester who's told me now; it's a friend who used to live in Australia.

Andrew's listening to the History of Rome podcast, on his computer so I can hear it too.

He's on like the second episode, so the guy, Mike Duncan is talking about Romulus and how while it might seem weird to us to hear so much stuff attributed to this founder of the city, its not all that different from how Americans think about George Washington. He didn't single-handedly win the American Revolution, Duncan says. "In fact, most people don't even know how crucial French involvement was to its success."

"This was before Hamilton," I told Andrew in a theatrical aside. "People know now."

I know what Duncan says was true when he said it, but a few years can be such a long time in history.

I've seen a bunch of my friends do this and thought it might be fun.

• Did you have a cell phone prior to your thirties? I think I even had a smartphone before my thirties, though only just if I did.

• Did they exist? Before my thirties?! I turned 30 in 2011, just saying.

• Did you have cable when you were a little kid? You can't get cable where my parents live; we had to wait for satellite TV to become a thing. They got that...I think when I was in high school, but not long before I left. Only time I lived in a house with it; I only had a TV for a year or two of college and could never afford cable. And I haven't had a TV since then

• Do you know what 8-track tapes are? Yes. My dad had an 8-track player in the basement and my brother and I liked a few of them so we'd play Simon & Garfunkel, the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, stuff like that.

• How about cassette tapes? Do I know what they are? Yes. I started recording my dad's records (with his help of course) onto tapes with my little Fischer Price cassette player when I was about three, and I didn't have CDs until I was in high school, so the time in between was filled with a love of music and thus dozens of cassette tapes.

• When did you get your first DVD player? Second year of college. I only had money afterwards to buy two DVDs, so for a while my collection consisted of Shrek and Memento. I still have that Shrek DVD, though the Memento one was stolen by a later roommate who insisted it was hers when it was definitely mine.

• Did you learn to type on a typewriter? I played on my grandma's typewriter but I learned to type in a combination of classes in fourth grade (on computers known as "IBM-compatibles" and we were told to call it keyboarding instead of typing).

Oh and I learned a little on this weird Pre-Computer thing which I got because one year when I went to see Santa you were sent home with a letter saying "I'll sure try to get you a [whatever you asked for] kid!" so that your parents knew what you'd said. Only I got must've someone else's letter who'd asked for a computer. I don't remember what it was I'd actually asked for but I never had any interest in computers. This thing did teach me a little BASIC, though, as well as a start on typing.

• What was the first computer you owned? My parents sent me away to college with a laptop; I think it was a Compaq? I remember nothing about it really.

• What age were you when you first got e-mail? Eighteen, because I got it when I started college. I still remember my e-mail address; it was the first four letters of your last name and then a four-digit number that I think was sequential. I actually recognized someone's LJ screen name as being in this format a couple years later and he also went to the University of Minnesota.

• Was the Internet around when you were a kid? Well, yes it existed but not in a way anyone knew about. The internet was a thing that happened to me a very little in high school, mostly at school (my mom didn't want it at home because she thought it was evil) and which I mostly found really dull. We had to pass some kind of test to get a "Internet Driver's License" when I was about 15 and I was like "Can I not take the test if I don't intend to ever use the internet?" and the teacher who was telling us about it was so baffled at that question; I don't think she'd ever been asked that.

• What age were you when Facebook, Twitter, Livejournal, and Dreamwidth started? I don't even know when they started but I started them...let's see, this Facebook account goes back to 2013 but I had one before that, managed to delete it and then got sucked back in by volunteering. Twitter I also had and deleted a couple of times; I think this iteration dates from 2015. LiveJournal I started in 2002, Dreamwidth I started in 2009 and used exclusively since 2016.

• What was the first printer you owned like? It'd have been an inkjet (they all have), but otherwise I have no idea. I don't care about printers. I can only tell you what kind I have now because I finally tore down the box for it a few days ago.

• Collegiate papers: typewriter or computer? Computer. But they still had to be printed out and handed in. I remember frantically e-mailing a prof to beg them to accept an e-mailed version because for whatever reason I couldn't get it to them by hand.

• How old were you when streaming came into being? ...I don't know. What kind of streaming? I think RealPlayer is the first such thing I can think of, and I'm pretty sure I was in college by then though if it was a thing in high school I wouldn't have known about it (we had 56k dial-up internet at my parents until about six years ago).

• What age were you when you got your first MP3 player? My parents bought me a minidisc player the first time I asked for an MP3 player for Christmas, and that was when I was in college, so it must've been early twenties? Actually I wonder if the first one I had was when I was living in Didsbury and working in Stockport; I had a tiny cheap one with really wonky controls, you couldn't always tell what song you were going to get if you tried to do something advanced like change the volume. It was my coping mechanism for the bus rides, especially going home in the dark almost alone. I fell in love with the Hold Steady via Separation Sunday by listening to it on that thing.

• Did you own a record player, cassette player, CD player, or MP3 player as a teen? I didn't own a record player but there was one in the house -- maybe even two for part of that time. I had lots of walkmans and boom boxes and I did get my first CD player as a teen. Not MP

• At what age did you start blogging on the Internet? Twenty.

• What age were you when the e-readers came out? I don't know when they came out, but I remember Andrew got one when we were living in our old flat (so between 2009 and 2014) because it was an early one that had a whole keyboard and could play music and stuff and he was so excited about it he said he loved it almost as much as he did me. The only time in my life I've ever heard him compare anything so favorably.

• How do you listen to music? Mostly on Spotify, either on my computer or my phone. Sometimes I still listen to 6music on my DAB. Mostly I don't listen to a lot of music; Andrew's usually got it playing if he's awake and when he's not I'm happy with the silence. Or else I play podcasts or audiobooks. But I do like music for when I'm writing (I just play random ambient music on Spotify then) or sometimes if I'm struggling to get things done: chores, getting out of the house, whatever.

I saw somebody retweet this blog post, which has some interesting questions about nystagmus. Nystagmus is one of the eye conditions I have, it's the one that makes my eyes jump back and forth so even before I had glasses or pointless and counterproductive accommodations in grade school, people could tell just from looking at me that there's something wrong with my eyes.

No one ever explained anything about this, or my other eye conditions to me. I only know what they're called because I was a nerdy kid who remembered long words I overheard or saw written down once. So my explanations of it aren't going to be any better than you can get on Wikipedia, but I can certainly talk about what it's like to have it.

( 1. Are you the only one in your family to have nystagmus? )

( 2. How has your nystagmus affected you throughout your life so far? )

( 3. What are you registered as – partially sighted, severely sight impaired, blind, etc? )

( 4. Do you have any other eye conditions with your nystagmus? )

( 5. Do you have any visual aids to help you with your condition? )

( 6. Do you have any advice for parents of children with nystagmus? )

( 7. Describe your vision in 3 words. )

( 8. What help did you get in school/work? )

( 70 questions )

( cut in case you don't care )

Nicked this from

mrs_leroy_brown because I was just getting myself riled up looking at twitter, and figured I could use something brainless to do.

Are you named after someone? My middle name is Michelle because I share my birthday with my dad's brother, Michael.

( Cut to save your scrolling fingers )

So they call it a "Senate" in Canada, but it sounds like it's just the House of Lords!

I'm embarrassed by how surprised I was to learn this, especially in a conversation in the pub with a Canadian who, y'know, thinks highly of me.

At least they don't have bishops in the government!

But man. I need a good recommendation for a book about Canadian history and/or politics. They didn't teach me anything in school.

Sometimes it's better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness

My introduction to "emotional neglect"

fun meme from cmcmck

A meme from @used_songs

Apparently this is a Minnesota thing?

I love it when the top two entries on my friends page are the same meme

[92/365] podcasts

[195/366] phone noises

[64/366] Holly Cosmo

[341/365] December Days - useful linguistics things

[176/365] How to Read the IPA, Part Three: manner of articulation

[114/365] How to Read the IPA Part Two: the rest of the places of articulation

[107/365] How to Read the IPA, Intro and Part One

Manchester

Thanks to my favorite, Daveed Diggs

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The Nystagmus Tag

Some silly questions, swiped from softfruit

An old school "have you ever" meme

A meme

Okay, turns out I know nothing about the history or politics of Canada

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March 2026

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