Labor Day Capybara Video Party and Open Thread

Something random and funny.
which skyrim city can fight the most bears?
https://youtu.be/IZu0B_J2lHM

They should have used the autotune bears mod.

I have been questioning my gender identity for a little while now. secretly, to myself. I haven’t spoken about it with anyone yet. Not even my husband. I would like to experiment and try out a nonbinary mindset to see how it suits me. If that is alright, I would like one of those places I try it out to be here. I think I am comfortable with female pronouns but for a try out phrase, I would like to be called They/them. possibly ze if that is easier. I would still like to be called Elaine, I like my name after all but I’m just trying to figure out these things I’ve been feeling.

@ Elaine

If it helps, I have a friend who prefers they/them pronouns but has kept their birth name, on the grounds that “it’s not a female name – it’s MY name and I’m keeping it.”

@ WWTH

Ah I’m so glad to hear that. I guess cats just occasionally get kitty sniffles the same way humans do. But I hope she’s on the mend soon!

@RedSilkPhoenix:

If you find an answer or solution to all of that stuff, could you please let me know? Or better yet, everyone here and any interested person who comes across it via google?

In my 40s I still don’t even know how to have a normal conversation with most people. Unless an actual topic comes up, it just fizzles out.

I also keep running into situations where I end up with no support and lots of harassment somewhere, with no idea why or how to fix it or avoid it occurring in the first place. Examples:

• University years. On their intranet people singled me out for assorted flaming and name-calling, even if I remained polite. This escalated to spreading overt lies about me of various sorts. Eventually I resorted to reporting the problem to the authorities there, and their response was to revoke my access. Even though I was the victim and the others were, in numerous instances, violating the stated terms of service, which specifically prohibited “harassment”. There was a student ombudsman, whose explicit job description is to go to bat for students vs. the administration in situations like this, who refused to help and explicitly said he was siding with the administration, too.
• Online games with a multiplayer component. Often at some point I start getting cheated systematically, e.g. losing battles I should easily have won based on relative power of my PC(s) and the opponent — either the game has started systematically lying to me about the opponents’ actual power, or it’s started stacking the deck outright. When I try to explain to teammates that it’s not me magically suddenly sucking but the game misbehaving, do I get sympathy? No. I get more derision and stuff. As far as they are concerned, it is possible for a person to wake up one morning having magically become incompetent at a game they had spent the past several months kicking ass at, but it is not possible for the game to have been rigged against me somehow, perhaps by someone who got jealous of same. Once a game has started cheating against me there seems to be no way to continue correctly: if I remain silent about it they’ll think I suck, and if I don’t they just mock me as a “whiner” or a “complainer”, and they still think I suck. The only way, it seems, to avoid them thinking I suck is to not get cheated, and I don’t know how to do that. I’ve asked, of course, in such instances if anyone knows a defense against the most commonplace cheats I’ve encountered, and each person either doesn’t know or refuses to believe there even is any cheating going on. So, once it starts behaving that way that’s the end. There’s no way to avoid everyone thinking I suddenly am no good any more, so I have little choice but to quit.
• For some reason, in those same online games someone will often start tampering with my outbound messages. Most of them have some sort of swear filter, but when the message alterer strikes, it’s either to star out something innocuous so it looks like I was swearing when I actually wasn’t, or it’s to insert typos that make me look like I’m not as good a writer as I am, or even to substitute entire words. I know these are not legitimate typos because the substituted letters weren’t adjacent on the keyboard, or even larger changes were made. For example, “its” into “it’s”. I can know, for a fact, that I typed just “i”, “t”, and then “s”. No slip of the finger hitting two keys simultaneously could have put in the apostrophe, which on a PC keyboard is two full inches to the right of the nearest of those three letters, and much farther from either the “t” or the “s”, and on mobile can’t be typed at all without first toggling to a symbol page, which couldn’t happen accidentally without being noticed, and which if it did would have resulted in every subsequent character coming out as a symbol too, so the apostrophe could not have been followed by an “s” in such a scenario. So, if I cannot possibly have typed an apostrophe, intentionally or otherwise, the only logical conclusion is that someone else typed it. As for their goal, making it look like I’m someone who doesn’t know when to use “its” vs. “it’s” as a way of humiliating me and taking me down a peg would seem to be the only possible motive.
• Most other online communities I at some point run afoul of some clique or group who conspire to force me out. Often one member of the clique engages in an obnoxious behavior of some sort and any calling out of that behavior brings the rest of them down like a swarm of hornets. For instance, there was this one group on an instant messenger app way back in the 1990s, one member of whom was given to wrapping some of their greetings in long sequences of nested parentheses. This was long before the alt-right and the triple parentheses “echo” thing used for antiSemitic dogwhistles, and unrelated to that; the problem instead was that, for some reason, sending deeply nested sets of parentheses caused some clients to freeze for an interval that would get longer and longer the more often it was done. Pointing this out did not, of course, result in the person in question moderating the behavior that was inconveniencing some of the other members of the group, oh no; instead a whole passel of their friends decided on the spot that I was Public Enemy Number One. For asking this one member to limit the amount of parentheses to, say, five at a time, as it was only really long strings of them that caused significant freezes.

In general it seems one pattern is that some people will feel threatened if I display a high degree of competence at anything, including spelling and grammar in chat messages as well as any other salient thing, and will react with acts of covert sabotage, if possible, or by simply spreading lies verbally otherwise. Another is that other people will take the effects of such sabotage, and will take such verbal lies, at face value and regardless of any protestations. And a third is that the above two sets of people tend to be the dominant ones in a group, rather than a lunatic fringe whose opinions won’t matter to anyone else in turn.

There seems to be no way to participate in most groups of people and simply be accepted as, at minimum, their equal … except, perhaps, here, perhaps uniquely among all human communities I’ve encountered thus far. Most groups seem to have members who will try to force any newcomer to be, or to at least appear to be, beneath everyone else in some sense, and the other members will pretty much all go along with this. If I refuse to play my designated role as doormat, comic relief, or similarly and insist on being treated as a member of equal importance (and equal or superior ability, as the case may be), sabotage will be used to try to “put me in my place”. Escalating, if I still don’t acquiesce, to verbal mockery and belittlement, and eventually to getting me banned, and/or to harassment that spills out IRL or otherwise beyond the original context.

Ironically, I’m not even interested in taking over the top of some silly pecking order, as some seem to think and find threatening. I am just not interested in having any position at all in some silly pecking order, since in the top position I’d be a target for ambitious rivals and in any other position I’d sometimes get pecked and I’d much rather be exempted from both …
which is sort of a microcosm of the whole left vs. right thing, in turn.

So, I can’t seem to get on in groups, save this one, without triggering some sort of micro-reactionary faction that invariably has the clout, and soon the desire, to oust me or make participation net-negative-utility for me so my only rational choice is to quit*, and I can’t seem to do much of anything in one-on-one interactions beyond “Hi, how are you. Fine, and you? Fine. What’s with this weather, eh?”

* If they can’t force me out, I will sometimes do the “moralizing punisher” thing for a while by remaining and being purposely obnoxious to the local ruling class members. I won’t stoop to their methods, though, so for example I will point out truthful but negative things about them, or point out when they are going against something they previously said — these micro-right-wings are just as prone to hypocrisy as their big-league counterparts in politics. I’ll be a thorn in their side for a while, if it seems safe to do so (no risk of RL harassment or other consequences spilling beyond the particular group). Don’t know if that will ever accomplish much of anything, but there’s a reason moralizing punishers emerge as a strategy in most iterated game theory scenarios. I may even pop back in at lengthy intervals just to remind them I still exist, lest the clique there ever feel the satisfaction of having gotten rid of me.

(One has to wonder if that motivates some of the repeat trolls that pop up here: they think their side is right, and think that popping up at intervals to deny us any satisfaction in thinking we’ve gotten rid of them is a fitting punishment for being wrong. Hmm.)

@GSS ex-noob,

I now have that book bookmarked for later downloading, once I get a bit of cash to spare for it. And get my Kindle to a wifi network that will actually allow it to download stuff in a timely manner. Though I don’t know (yet) if I’m actually some form of autistic; the doctor who did the first interview with me thought possibly not, but then again, that’s part of what the testing is supposed to uncover, so…. (Is it possible for someone who had a concussion in early childhood to develop autism in later life?)

@Surplus,

For the odd word substitutions, try looking at your autocorrect settings. Because that does sound like something autocorrect loves to do to people, even when they’re watching for it.

@Surplus

@GSS-ex-noob: I don’t suppose you have a non-paywalled link to that, or to a suitable substitute?

Don’t know if it counts as a suitable substitute, but you could maybe check a library? I don’t know anything about the libraries in Canada, but some I’ve looked at previously have online catalogues where you can check what they have, and also a way to inquire about inter-library loans if they don’t have it.

In the example given, that would not be applicable, since “its” sans apostrophe is a correctly spelled common word and should absolutely be in the spellcheck dictionary, and therefore should not be changed by any autocorrect.

I’ve always kind of assumed that autocorrect can make weird substitutions even when you spell things correctly, because it might be trying to guess what you’re going for and guess wrong.

This is heavily coloured by my experience with automatic proofreading in Finnish, though, which is hilarious. Whenever I write emails at work it’ll be telling me to write compound words as separate words, and changing verb conjugations so that it effectively wants to put “we” or “you [singular]” where I wrote “I” or some such.

@Surplus: It’s probably in lots of libraries — if yours doesn’t have it, they can get it through interlibrary loan.

And yes, it is possible to wake up and suddenly suck at something you were great at. Otherwise we wouldn’t have all the memes of cats who forgot how to cat, nor would Simone Biles have had to pull out of the Olympics. It happens.

@Elaine: You are an Elaine. Or a Witch. Or, since I’m bad with names IRL, “um… you? Yes, you, I forget your name, sorry.” Maybe go with “they”?