#General Semantics

[argyrocratie]

“An example of the effect of indexing and dating, the main devices by which the structure of our language is made similar in structure to the world, may be seen by the reactions of a veteran from the Pacific Theater of War. This veteran was a student of Professor Elwood Murray at the University of Denver. I quote from the veteran’s report:

An example of pure identification comes out in the veteran’s dislike for rice. His first view of the enemy dead was that of a Jap soldier which was in the process of deterioration. The bag of rice the soldier had been carrying was torn open and grains of rice were scattered over the body mixed in with maggots. When the veteran, to this day, sees rice, the above described scene is vivid and he imagines grains of rice moving in his dish. To overcome this, he has eaten rice several times trying to remember the rice before him is not the same as that on the body. Though the food is not relished, he has succeeded in overcoming the vomiting reflex at the sight of rice (19, p. 262).

These mechanisms of evaluating or "perceiving" similarities and neglecting, or not being fully aware of, the differences are potentially present in every one of us, but usually not in such extreme degrees. This involves the lack of differentiation between the silent and verbal levels and nonawareness of our processes of abstracting. The different orders of abstractions are identified, an inference is evaluated as if it were a description, a description as if it were the nonverbal "object" our nervous system constructed, and an "object" as if it were the nonverbal, submicroscopic, dynamic process.”

- Alfred Korzybski, “The role of language in the perceptual processes” (1951)

[hug-your-face]

I came across the idea of a "cortical-thalamic pause" in an old novel. The idea being that we take better, more effective action in our lives when we integrate our emotion centers and our reasoning centers. It was a NOVEL, mind you, but coming across the idea as a kid probably helped my life a lot.

A surprisingly useful summary from Quora :

Thalamus/Thalamic is here used as a shorthand for the lower brain functions, associated with feelings, sensing, pain, pleasure, instincts, bodily functions, etc. Massive sub-conscious parallel processing goes on there and responses are often immediate. Neo-Cortex/Cortical is the shorthand for the higher, more recently developed, brain functions, associated with conscious thinking, reasoning, language use, deliberate decision making, etc. It can do abstract thinking, but can't focus on more than a couple of things at the same time.

We easily get in trouble when we mix the two. Our ability to abstract is rather new and apparently a bit faulty. The cortex might construct a "meaning" for some lower level sensations which gives rise to faulty decisions. The thalamic system might launch instant action based on what was sketchy reasoning in the cortex. E.g. killing somebody because they have the wrong religious belief. The idea of the pause is basically to be conscious of the link between one's reactions and one's reasoning, and to make sure they're in sync. It doesn't have to be a literal pause in time, but it could be. It is an equivalent of "count to ten before you...".

If you were about to take impulsive physical action, the pause would allow you to think through the logic and implications of what you were about to do. The other way around, if you thought you just arrived at a logical, well reasoned conclusion, a semantic pause would allow you to notice what you actually feel about it, what your instincts tell you. Does it feel right? Does it work?

The primary ingredient is consciousness. Pay attention. Be aware. Examine everything that is there, including your own thoughts, your premises, your feelings, what you perceive. -- There are certain tools that are helpful. A consciousness of abstraction is vital. Simply being aware that there are many levels of abstraction between what really is there and what you put into words and thoughts. Not just being aware of that, but specifically examining the transition between a "thing" and its abstraction. At what point do some rays of light become a picture in your brain? At what point do you group it together with other tables you've seen, to identify it as a "table"? At what point does the word "table" lose its connection with the particular image you saw?

The objective is to take decisions and actions that are coherent, congruent and sane at all levels. The cortico-thalamic pause is a system check and a consistency check at and between multiple levels.

Learning to be less reactive is literally saving my life. I’m finally understanding that processing things is not the same as immediately forming a response to them. I can process without feeling pressed to formulate a reaction to what someone said or did or a situation that displeases me. Not that a quick head on your shoulders is necessarily a bad thing, but 9/10 taking a minute to just process could save you so much trouble

[adventism-atheism-orthodoxy-me]

Alfred Habdank Skarbek Korzybski

"A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness."

One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he interrupted the lesson suddenly in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit. "Nice biscuit, don't you think," said Korzybski, while he took a second one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog's head and the words "Dog Cookies." The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to vomit, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet. "You see," Korzybski remarked, "I have just demonstrated that people don't just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter."

-- R. Diekstra, Haarlemmer Dagblad, 1993, cited by L. Derks & J. Hollander, Essenties van NLP (Utrecht: Servire, 1996), p. 58.

[stxalq]

“Well, without indulging in chauvinism..." [the character / narrator then spends the next several hundred words skewering? damning with faint praise? that specific type of racial, patronizing chauvinism that believes only Western civilizations and Western languages were ever capable of scientific thought, artistic expression, and technological progress and all "lesser" cultures need only give up their traditions and abide by Western teachings to achieve greatness but maybe the answer is really a syncresis of what came before and that can include both native traditions and foreign insights]

[teledyn]

Korzybski referred to the calculus as "...the study of a continuous function by following its history by indefinitely small steps." Attendees are invited to find other words for "study", "continuous", "function", "following", "history", "indefinitely small", "steps", etc. Using these other words, they will be invited to create well formed sentences for all to hear. (Note: This is not a test. It will be introduced as an example of applying the method.)

[rottingraisins]

it kinda sucks that you hc a canonically pansexual character as gay (clef)

i deliberated not answering this one bc i dont rlly mean to get into representation discourse or w/e during pride month of all things but i think the sentiment behind it is very fair so i feel bad ignoring it.

firstly, i think it needs to be said that clefs "canon" romantic orientation is very much just, whatevers funniest or most poignant for what youre trying to do with him. i understand the sentiment, there are characters in scp who are queer in a very specific and straightforward way where i'd also be upset if people erased that about them, but clef is not that guy. he is probably the single most contradictory character across the entire wiki, and everyones got a bit of their own take on him.

secondly, to defend my own take a little, i don't even really see clef as strictly homoromantic. i think when applying queer labels to fictional characters one tends to kind of treat them as these ontological, prescriptive truths, rather than how labels are used in real life, by the individual themselves to approximate their lived experience.

what i'm trying to say is i don't think clef the character, at least the version of him i'm most fond of, the fifty something year old reformed casual homophobe from resurrection and co, really knows what the term "pansexual" means, or "mlm", or "demiromantic", which are other words i'd use to describe him if i were using the prescriptive approach.

i think clefs relationship to romance is deeply complicated and not something he spends a lot of time really thinking about, and in practice, despite the theroretical breadth of his capacity to be attracted to other people, he's really only attracted to men, which is to say one particular man who also just so happens to be dead, so there's no point in really dwelling on it.

[spiribia]

what is a furry? if you don't mind. like i've heard of it for years but i realized i don't actually know what it means other than animals are cool

it just means animals are cool

[streamat4am]

Im coping so thoughts on sex worker enid

[mantisgodsdomain]

Finally, we get the opportunity to put our Spy Cards worldbuilding in a work. Though there are many questions about such things as "regulation" "how these cards are printed" "who approves a single spy card", and so on, we are here to present a bold new take: this game is based like 60% on obscure roach memory-reading tech that got turned into a card game with absolutely No card-game-related intentions included in the original tech and most of the card vetting is just from the fact that there aren't too many card printers out there and most of them make cards that need to be translated from Roach.

Strictly speaking, as a card game, it is not a terribly good or well-balanced one. It's popular primarily because of a mix of the difficulty involved in getting the data for high-level cards, the fun of seeing the variety of monsters that can be brought to the table, and the incredible amounts of ham and drama that goes into specifically the professional scene.

[jasontoddenthusiastt]

I just ordered $100 worth of comics online

[the-casbah-way]

What’s your opinion on the English

[hsslilly-blog]

i love names. blair (marina stewart) and claire (marie swanson) have extremely similar names and it is a bit. i thought it’d be really funny if their names sounded alike since pixelberry wants you to believe it’s the same mc for both games (it’s not. and pixelberry is stupid). but my thought process was something like this:

blair -> blàr means both "plain" and "battlefield" in scottish gaelic which i think it’s fun. i know the plain in question is a synonym to “meadow”, but i don’t think that’s the first thing that comes to mind. it wasn’t to me at least. anyway, i think these ideas work opposite to each other. which i think it’s reflective of blair’s personality. they’ve very meek and affable but at the same time they have temper issues, especially when they’re pushed too far. bhlàir is also a traditionally masculine name in scotland, which is interesting for a highland family.

marina -> this is an anglicised form of their middle name “maired”. which would be margaret, but can also be used in english as marina. it means "from the sea", and blair comes from the sea. but it’s marina because of saint marina, also known as the great martyr marina. and there's also saint margaret of scotland -> religious themes are very present in blair’s character + i really play with the idea of them giving themselves too much for people in detriment of their own well-being. it’s a curse.

stewart -> traditional scottish surname. either guardian of the house or steward. for the latter i like the meaning of someone who takes care of. i mean it makes sense. right. berry high and stuff. and people. and they become a psychologist later on. also it makes their dad’s name james stewart.

so basically their name resumes what i wanted from their character/what they are. often, the first thing you give to a person is your name and blair doesn’t just give you their name; it’s a microcosm of everything that comes after, and what you should expect. as for claire:

claribel -> i wanted a shakespearian name, but not one of the more obvious ones; i wanted something more subtle. it would show her (and her mother's) connection to the stage. so i picked this one from the tempest, and i think it's only mentioned in passing. in french, claribel is clara + belle, bright + beautiful and yeah, that's claire. her nickname "claire" specifically means "famous" in latin.

marie -> this is a recent development! i wanted a middle name for her and harley suggested marie. in french it means "star of the sea". like blair, she was also born in the seaside. what convinced me, though, was the relation of marie to mae (mary) west, one of my inspirations when redesigning claire.

swanson -> got this from gloria swanson. at first, of course. it's an anglicised (scottish) form of a swedish surname. it may have originated as a nickname for a graceful person (like a swan. yeah. that's it). i thought it fit claire's upbringing in upper class. it also fits her kinship to blair, in a way. plus i really like how it sounds like swan song -> i don't know if i've made it obvious in my other posts, but claire has a strong theme of the obsessed artist going on.

claire is a starrrrr. every part of her name is connected to the performing arts in one way or another. it's her destiny, really. kinda like nominative determinism. you can't name your daughter famous star and not expect her to be a famous star, sorry. her dad didn't think through here.

that's it. of course, it's not exactly an A to B thing. their characters informed their names, and vice versa. i already had their personalities consolidated by the time i redesigned/renamed them, so this wasn't a hard thing to do.

[quasieli]

[ID copied from alt text: A digital drawing of a portrait of the Bryn family, characters in my D&D campaign. The family is made up of parents Ferris (he/him) and Delia (she/her), tween daughter Nerisya (she/they), and twin babies Owyn and Aymen (both he/him). Delia and her three kids are sat together on a couch, with Delia holding the two swaddled babies, while Ferris is stood behind the others. Ferris is a young, muscular, pale complexion human man with light brown hair pulled up in a small ponytail, as well as a short chin beard. He is wearing ceremonial armor that is in shades of gold and brown, with an orange heart gem at the center of the chest plate, along with a dark teal half cape, and dark green pants. He is smiling as he looks forward.

Sat on the far left of the couch is Nerisya, a young, thin, pale complexion Half Elf girl with bright red hair pulled up in high ponytails, each with a blue and gold crystal clip in them. She is wearing an orange dress with light blue accents and a pink flower necklace. She is smiling as she looks at her mom. Delia is a young, thin, pale complexion Elf woman with short bright red hair. She is wearing a brown and red dress, with her accessories all adorned with a similar light blue gem, excluding her wedding ring, which has an orange gem in a silver band. She is smiling as she looks towards the viewer. She is sat in three quarters profile, holding her swaddled sons close. Owyn and Aymen are twin pale complexion Half Elf babies with short red-brown hair. They are both resting with cute smiles on their faces. End description.]

Been thinking a lot about the family of one of my player's PC's and just thought itd be real cute to draw the happy family 💙🧡

[nitunio]

remember when art wasnt made by genAI...

[stanperformanceunit]

Okay a little bit of a rant, triggered by Revenge of Others : people need to stop seeing gay couples as BL. I've been seeing this comment about Wonseok and Sejin too much. They are not "BL", this is REPRESENTATION. Gay couples (and Sapphic too of course, anything) should exist in dramas, not just in BLs. Normalize having a gay couple in your het drama. I've seen people saying they would drop the drama because they are not into BLs. It's literally just any other couple. They are here for two minutes in the drama. Force people to see gay couples outside of BLs and GLs. Normalize it.