Kistaro Windrider @kistaro@dragon.style

This seems like as good a time as any to remind folks that I'm otherkin. I don't need to preface this with some explanation about how identity is all in your head and is whatever you make it; my cosmology allows for past and parallel incarnations, a universe that we can only begin to glimpse at from over here while physically incarnate on earth, and allows souls to acquire a form - which does not have to match their incarnation. I am a dragon, I have been a dragon for aeons, and I will continue to be a dragon after this planet's star burns no more.

None of us are bound to any one place or time forever. Incarnation is transitory, but souls are eternal; a consciousness is an indivisible spark of will and experience, but it has no power to act or experience anything on its own; incarnation is the only way out of an insensate hell. (Or an insensate nirvana, if you are better at keeping company with only yourself than I am.) Incarnation is, to a first approximation, recursive; I am a soul, incarnated as a complicated crystalline being of fractal nature that exists alongside itself in a multitude of places and times, which again incarnates to experience and explore forms of the universe that it cannot exist in, which incarnate and reincarnate subject to local forces and whatever passes for "metaphysics" (or just plain physics) wherever it happens to be. What else is there to do, but unwind the mysteries of the universe? We're here, we might as well figure out what "here" is.

Most of the time, I incarnate in something that at least resembles a dragon, for reasons of comfort and personal preference. This was *supposed* to be a sapient lizard planet but apparently my copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide was sixty-five million years out of date, so I've made do with the species that at least has smartphones. I can exfiltrate some brilliant works of engineering, electronics, and reinventing the process of logic for the benefit of machines - pure machines, with no souls, engaging in reasoning! Few places have laws of physics so strict that there's no easier way to do it, leading to spectacular development in large-scale mathematics and hyperminiaturized electronics, all of which can be re-applied to places that don't *need* it so didn't develop it, but could use it.

So perhaps I'm a little "old-school" by local standards, because not a word of this is figurative. I have beliefs that I freely agree are unusual, and a self-consistent and unusual cosmology to match. I read Tarot (although I'm badly out of practice) and am reasonably convinced that it works, when applied well. My consciousness is not primarily local, although it's running on a monkey meat computer that I'm not entirely happy with (but who is?) but I make it work and I know it's doing its best.

I neither require nor expect people around me to believe that my view of the universe, and my place in it, and my nature, is accurate. I believe it to be accurate, however, and I will not make psychological excuses for why; it is a reflection of the sum of what I am and have experienced and perceived; it is not abstract.

bean and cheese burrito? more like “bean and bees burrito”

Huh. There’s a coyote wandering around outside (being closely surveilled by the local crows, of course, who want peanuts despite the predator in the area).

thanks, Google

I hire a local company, Rain City Maids, to clean my home for me. (I use money that would probably be inaccessible to me without white male privilege to patch over ways I am not really a functional adult.) I have had to bump the schedule around a bit to allow for medical appointments, and today’s cleaning professional was an unfamiliar young woman, instead of the older man who is usually assigned to the job.

After she cleaned my gaming room, she asked about my VR headset and we talked about it for a bit; later, I offered that she could try it out after she was done working, if this was the last job of the day. She enthusiastically accepted, and an hour or so later was playing Beat Saber.

Which is a risky thing to do! The first time she ever met me was three hours prior, and now she was effectively blindfolded. I’ve been contemplating that immediate display of trust for the last several hours.

What makes me seem trustworthy? I’m not satisfied with the explanation of “having cleaned my home, she could easily see I am a partnered gay man”, since bisexual people exist and I am one of them. I think about people’s boundaries and look for ways to support them, not challenge them; maybe that’s more obvious. Although what I thought was the most definite show of it was only after she was adjusting the fit of the headset, when I only stepped her through how to adjust it herself; I’m not going to presume to adjust dials and knobs and straps on something on someone else’s head when they’ve just met me that day! (And I said as much.) Same for adjusting the straps on the controller.

Anyway, she had a great time and now intends to buy a VR set. I am someone it is safe for a stranger to trust. But I can’t help but imagine the mirror universe evil version of me, who behaves the same way in every respect right up until there is an opportunity to get away with a horrendous crime upon another person. People trust me quickly and I have many opportunities; this evil version of me would be a horrible and effective monster.

From another angle there is absolutely nothing odd about any of this. I trusted a stranger to go through all my stuff largely unsupervised and clean it; she did, and she was curious about my VR kit, so I offered a chance to try it and she took it. And, as I said at the time, what is the point of cleaning other people’s homes if you don’t get to play with their stuff once in a while? And everything went fine because, like most people - male-passing or not, male-bodied or not, feminine-attracted or not, I don’t want to hurt anyone. That’s how people can meet each other and that’s how society can function: by people largely not being criminals towards each other. But that also gives opportunity to people who *are* very dangerous, and then people whose trust is abused by dangerous people are put in a position of questioning themselves because a decision to trust always looks foolish in hindsight. But it’s clearly a natural thing to do, and society couldn’t function if it wasn’t; the only people to blame are the violent criminals.

I don’t understand why people treat “menial” service workers with anything but gratitude. You’re doing annoying crap I don’t want to deal with for me, why would I be anything but grateful?

I am addicted to reading arguments on the Internet and getting stressed out about them and I need to break this cycle.

I have developed just enough skill at mathematics “by hand” to make errors only possible with a strong understanding of the concepts and very poor ability to actually transcribe an equation from line to line, and a complete lack of familiarity with how I could and should be using a calculator to substantially reduce my error rate and save my (limited) cognitive endurance for the decision-making a standard calculator can’t do. (There’s very little a modern CAS can’t do, heh.)

I bought a couple of solar powered scientific calculators from thrift store yesterday. I’m amazed and a little appalled that they hadn’t been snapped up already. Reading the manual and how they’re meant for students makes me realize that I was always forbidden from using anything more than a 4-function calculator except when we were explicitly required to use a TI-86 or 89, so I never got the habit of using a calculator for math, and now I only know how to program them, not how to use them!

@frameacloud Making bird sounds at birds made them curious enough to come closer. Some of the residents of the rainforest area replied to me! I had a “conversation” with a silver-beaked tanager that way, although I don’t know what I actually said.

It also seemed to make the birds in the open flight area of the rainforest exhibit much less nervous.

Crows in Redmond like being “caw!”ed at, even poorly. Maybe it makes me seem more like what they think of as a person.

Important things I learned at the zoo today:

▪️hooded cranes cannot successfully defend their bird feeder full of kibble from the local native population of mallards and crows, regardless of their indignant flapping
▪️hooded cranes will come over and investigate you if you quietly imitate their “grook, grook” calls
▪️toucans sometimes have itchy beaks
▪️poison dart frogs will investigate you if you wait patiently and don’t move much
▪️on cold days, you can see a penguin’s breath
▪️the false water cobra would like a larger enclosure please
▪️the ocelot is not comfortable with zoo visitors but a cold rainy day has few enough people that there is a chance of seeing him
▪️if you try to blink slowly at a jaguar like it is a housecat you are trying to demonstrate trust for, it will visibly laugh at you (its sides shook, at least)
▪️every outdoor exhibit is a duck and crow exhibit
▪️if you sit on the benches in the rainforest bird enclosure the birds are much less afraid of you than if you are standing, and they will resume their conversations and Bird Politics right in front of you while you sit for twenty minutes, talking quietly to the birds, with no other visitors arriving because the rainforest enclosure is a little out-of-the-way...

So yeah, a great way to spend a day off, even in this weather. We have zoo memberships now.

Uh, yellow-rumped cacique. Thanks, autocorrect

It’s cold, it’s raining, it’s thoroughly not crowded at the zoo and Rakeela and I sat in the open bird area in the rainforest exhibit for 20 minutes with birds and no other people and it was amazing and the yellow-dumped caccique sounded like R2D2

Highly recommended to visit the zoo in dubious weather on a weekday

making bird noises at birds at the zoo: highly recommended

It is an overcast day at the zoo and you are a misplaced goose.

I’m never sure if “vehicle reeks of cigarettes and fake flowers” is a valid reason to take points off an Uber driver. Sure, it makes me unpleasantly sick due to asthma, but is it really fair to penalize the driver for that?

78 in a 60 is a good reason though, I don’t think this guy is a five star driver