Something that may come as surprising to folks whose needs and comfort levels are already catered to by the world around them, is that “coping” is exhausting.
There are a great many people who are perfectly capable of adjusting to certain situations, be it a matter of social interaction, or physical disability, medical conditions, or whatever the case may be. Through trial and error we have discovered tricks and methods that allow us to function in a society that wasn’t created with us in mind, and we’re very good at making it look like we’re getting along just fine.
But it’s tiring. Always, constantly having to be vigilant and on-guard while everyone around us takes everything in stride, and then no one understands why, at the end of the day, we shut down. Because we were able to “get by” throughout the day, suddenly our unwillingness or inability to cope is no longer valid.
It’s like carrying a 20 pound weight all fucking day long. Just because you can doesn’t mean you don’t need or deserve a break. And then when you finally put the weight down, everyone around you scolds you and chastises you, accuses you of being lazy, insists that you’re just “faking because it’s convenient.”
This is why it’s so fucking unbearable living in a home where everyone chooses to disregard your limits and your comfort levels. Family members will say, “I’m not going to cater to your needs, because the ~real world~ won’t cater to you and you need to get used to that.”
Consider: People who struggle and cope through everyday life are already painfully aware that the “real world” doesn’t give a fuck about us. This is why we develop coping strategies that allow us to function. This is why when we finally come home, when we are FINALLY through with the “real world” for the day, we just want some goddamn compassion. We just want the people we live with to place value on our needs, comfort levels, and limitations. We want the people who say they love us to demonstrate that love through doing whatever small thing they can do to ensure that when we’re in the comfort of our own homes, we can actually be comfortable instead of having to continue carrying around that weight that we’ve been forced to hold up all. day. long.
“If you can control yourself at work, you can control yourself at home”
Well, nope. I can control myself at work BECAUSE I can let go at home.
So the footage of Owen training the tiny raptors in the new Jurassic World kind of (inadvertently, I think) confirmed something that always bugged me about the social dynamics mentioned in the first film.
Owen’s using the term ‘alpha’ wrong.
Of course, the concept of pack alphas is rooted in a lot of erroneous studies anyway. But if we take his actual assertions about it and Blue’s behaviour at face value, then Owen is wrong. He’s not the alpha. Blue is the alpha. The pack follows her cues, that’s why they go with her when she decides to follow the Indominous, and it’s also why they listen to Owen – because Blue does. If Blue stops, so do the other raptors. They’d don’t just wait it out to see who’ll win, they immediately follow Blue’s lead.
Blue’s the leader.
Owen is, actually, the mediator.
He is the one who stops disputes between the raptors and defuses tense situations. He is permitted this status precisely because he’s physically weak (compared to raptors) but socially important. His social importance was created by rearing the raptors and forming emotional bonds with them. But they know full well that he’s squishy and beatable (though they probably don’t realize just how lethal some behaviours might be for him, comparatively). Blue knows she can kill Owen and that Owen is not strong or very useful at leadership decisions for a velociraptor pack. She accepts his input because he’s dad.
So since Owen actually isn’t even in the running for pack leader, and challenging him would be pointless because then you’d just hurt him and cost the pack a socially important member, and also probably get beaten up by Blue, he is the ideal mediator of disputes. His intervention de-escalates situations by reducing the amount of violence that’s permissible.
But because he was using so much containment and physical force (even if it was through equipment, obviously) to keep the raptors in check, I think Owen misjudged his placement in the raptor social group. Especially since he actually was tougher than them when they were babies. He thought they listened to him because they believed he was stronger than them, and that this was an illusion he had to maintain.
That was never actually the case, though. Blue knew Owen was way weaker than her the whole time. She just valued him anyway.
There’s probably a metaphor about toxic masculinity in there somewhere.
You had me until the last line.
Would it still work for you if you removed “toxic”?
Nope. One bloke misunderstanding his social role in a group of bloodthirsty, primitive monsters is not a good or accurate metaphor for men.
Not a good one for women either if we’re the aggressive monsters, hmm?
Actually, what I was alluding to was the concept of Owen fixating on the assumption that he had to protect his social position via force and a misrepresentation of his own physical power, as having some allegorical similarities to masculine expectations of leadership and authority.
It’s not so much that he misunderstands his role in the social group that’s relevant, but why.
And that doesn’t actually require that the raptors be allegorical stand-ins for women. Because the dynamics of or composition of that social group is irrelevant, the salient point with regards to the toxic masculinity quip is Owen’s preconceptions about authority in the animal kingdom.
But, if we do want to look at the raptors as an allegory for women, it’s still not all bad. Because one of the major themes of the Jurassic Park movies is that the dinosaurs are not monsters. The monsters are the scientists and businessmen who seek to profit from their existence, who have made them, manipulated them, fenced them in, etc..
The reason why the dinosaurs are a problem in the movies is because they break free of the confines constructed around them, and then it’s no longer just about what the humans want, but about what the dinosaurs will do. And the messages of the movies, overall, is that responsibility still lies with the people who built the cages and manipulated the living things into forms and shapes they found pleasing, not with the creatures who then proceeded to liberate themselves.
But that’s a bit more of a stretch.
Still, that’s why I was deliberately vague with that last line. There’s always more than one way to read a story. Or piece of meta, as it happens.
So the folks on Ravelry’s LSG forum are quickly becoming some of my favorite people on the Internet. They enabled the fiber-wrangling wonder that is SkyKnit, feeding it a dataset of knitting patterns to learn from and then turning its mistake-prone patterns into hilarious reality. They’re hard at work collecting a dataset of crochet hats for SkyKnit’s sibling, HAT3000. And it turns out there’s an (also 18+) sister group of LSG folks who are also nail polish fanciers, and who have amassed large personal lists of nail polish colors. Why? I don’t know, but it’s a machine learning algorithm’s dream.
The nail polish fanciers (the group is called “There’s Fiber in My Polish”) graciously contributed their name collections to the cause, filling a spreadsheet with several thousand entries in just a few hours. I already knew that neural networks can generate paintcolors, but this is the first time I’d tried to get colors out of a neural network that was previously trained on metalbands.
Thanks to its head start on the rules of spelling English words, this algorithm didn’t go through the usual alphabet soup phase of learning about vowels and spaces. It did, however, go through an initial phase where it produced nail polish colors like this:
Murder Earth Blue Slaughter All Death Bear Hollow Orange Flay Pink Silence I Dared Sacred Rose Mange Opal You Death Pink The Foull Sea of Leather Stray Color Eye Claw Green Chambers of Flame Shades of Flesh Brutally Bright Mind Machine Blue Dirty Flesh Night Burphouse of Poppy Transis
As it learned more about nail polish names, though, it gradually forgot about its dark past – this phenomenon is called “catastrophic forgetting” and is part of the reason that machine learning algorithms have to specialize at one task at a time.
It started creating polish names that were actually pretty believable:
Purple Skystone Shimmerelle Sweet Eclipse Neon Sunshine Fire In the Starry Fell Moonland Purple That Orange Spice OMG Power Indigo Dragon Flame Dust Plummerine Teal Moon Sunblaster Neon Pow
Several would also make good names for punk bands:
Ink Flame Electric Frost Blue Wine Fire Splat Batberry Lime Force Bike String Neon Mint Alice Twilight Mashery Charming Machine Butter Street Mind Sparkle Shattered Girls Lead Not the Poppy
Nail polish names can be very strange (“I’d never eat your brains,” “Hands Off My Kielbasa!” “My Gecko Does Tricks,” “Fishwife”), but these would give even the strangest a run for their money:
Bloshing Glip Pants of Sun Bat in Love Grinch Pink Clearly Stare’s Hoot Mews, New Universe Science Stars Pickwool Mint Space Holly Gold Be Tangeling The Green is In the Be Glitter Metallic With All of the Alive Pant Summer Up of the mangle Don’t Man Splat Grape Have Dorkanna Angel Wants Magic Sharker I’m the Sunshiple Little Dangest Street Dance Pants Pickles Green Candy in Santa Girls Burblipp Collide Loopstorm Ink-Orange Me, Orange Chunky The Midnight Doodle What Hello Glake Decisonator
And of course there was an entire category of names that will probably not catch on.
Love Rot Fail Pink Wart Boy Blood 204 Dead Pearl Social Mace Mooned Black Old With Anger Suffering Lights Acid Touch Green Evil Gold Charming Tick Diamond Flesh Song of the Booty Sorry Green Fail The Baby Sore Love Diamond Pink Ashes in the Green Creamscrap Golden Bop Dragon
You can already order neural network-generated nail polish colors – Dreamland Lacquer is selling Stanky Bean, Clay Cow, Dorkwood, Copper Panty, and Light of Blast, all paint colors that were generated by a neural network: see here and here.
Game: whenever you’re playing one of those artsy “no dialogue, let the visuals tell the story!” video games, assume that your character is here to fix the wi-fi. Interpret all events in light of this assumption.
