Showers: Male cat does not like bring in room where occasional bits of water make it over or around the curtain and onto him, so I normally let him out before then so he won't open the door and leave me cold. Female cat insists on sitting in the sink the whole time, maybe she likes the singing, maybe she really likes being around me, maybe it's that I sometimes play with her through the shower curtain. She doesn't like being held in the bathroom - this lack of trust makes me feel a bit hurt, although it's honestly pretty fair - sometimes I do need to carry her into the tub when she needs a proper bath. 「The nature of our relationship precludes such trust」 - maybe a bit like a parent-child relationship (until the child is deemed mature). I imagine one of the most situational deep things we learn as children is that our interactions with our parents while we're in the nest (either in nurturing or disciplinary-style nests) are atypical and should not be carried into general rules of socialisation. I'm surprised we generally manage that. The notion of situational learning seems tricky - how do we come to create the situational frames? How do we do abstract reasoning about them (I imagine this just comes later)? I imagine some of this is instinctual - operant conditioning wouldn't be so useful otherwise. If we were to try to consider abstract (programming) situations that do this, all sorts of interesting approaches dance in the mind (one of the two mindsets needed for programming : the wonderful generative artistic type).
Recently noted the words "purse, lipstick, and ..." somewhere, and somehow the image of large lips floated into my head. Spent a good amount of time trying to figure out why that phrase evoked the image, until I spotted that it's very near to "pursed lips". Ahh, language.
On the topic, communication and compliments:To me there's a world of difference between:
- You're picking up skill at X
- I think it's great that you're picking up skill at X
- Setup: "But I'm not Jewish!"
- Quip: "Nobody's Perfect"
Finally have forgotten Neil Gaiman's 「American Gods」 enough to reread it - quite enjoyable. Gaiman reminds me a bit of Stephen King's non-horror fiction (well, except for Stardust, which was a lousy book and worse film). Sometime I'll have to check out the TV series 「Neverwhere」 - if it's as good as the book was, it'll be good times. I understand that comics were made of the series too - I wonder if they're any good.
Sketching: More time exploring the murky ground between would-be-realistic sketches and comics, penned a possible ending to Oyschlisn (long-neglected first comic) that I'm not sure about, posture as aid to emotional expression. One of the things I've long used as a crutch in helping me to progressively visualise parts of the body to which I don't normally pay attention (neck-down) is to have the neckline of the shirt start to define the upper body. I'll need to adapt in order to move beyond this - the idea of someone either with a turtleneck or no shirt is not an easy idea to sketch given my method.
Tempted to conclude that the ending of 「Chicago」 is as likely a dream as the ending to 「Hedwig and the Angry Inch」 (or, more bluntly, the ending to 「Brazil」. I wonder how much of this was an honest attempt to show the vision of happiness people hold onto in a collapsing world, and how much is instead attributable to Americans having such poor taste in films that we dislike anything but the most saccharine endings.
Amused - "cut"s in LJ (which I've implemented in my blogging software) as a way to bridge the gap between the Feed-as-summaries and feed-as-content. Is LJ's current display of the summary-form the way people would normally subscribe to other content producers («friends» in LJ terminology, however ill-fitting the term usually is - some forks of the LJ codebase split this concept into better-fitting separate ones), or would they, given the ability, prefer to read the long-form on their "friends page"? I guess socially it makes sense to have the content providers do the summarising rather than automated algorithms. If you get people into the habit of doing that, it becomes as natural as writing in ¶s
