All of Alicorn's Comments + Replies

When I started making double batches of pancake batter, they came out fluffier.

I checked and re-checked all the math on the doubling so many times to make sure I wasn't adding too much or too little of something, but the ratios were all right.

Eventually I realized I was going through baking powder faster and so the baking powder was fresher.

Stripe is even less welcome to my phone number than you are!  But I'll retry without the info saving thing.

ETA: Yeah that worked.

I just went to try to give you $40 (because there's an event that I expect to be hosted at Lighthaven, and I want to go to it, and would be happy to pay for a ticket at something in that ballpark of a price, but kind of expect to be offered free entry, so I might as well "pay for my ticket" now to make sure the place is there to have the event in).

But the form requires a phone number and will not accept all zeroes or all nines and you can have forty dollars  but you cannot have a real phone number.

In the SS25 collections, we see it, unsurprisingly, in skin-baring clubwear:

but also in more classically graceful gowns and tailoring:

in slightly kooky and unhinged references to early-60s femininity:

and in more eclectic, playful styles:

Were there supposed to be images or links here?

I was so excited about this post until I realized the metaphorical peanut butter was also exercise.

I mean, sure, it looks like that when people who sound credible to you are checking.

Our world would seem mundane to us no matter what was in it.  Maybe it's actually wildly unrealistic that many people keep cats as pets.  Maybe dandelions are some kind of Easter egg.  Maybe our so-called natural languages are ludicrously simple and regular compared to the monstrosities real people with real history speak.

I like this enough that I'm considering picking a screenshot of the Goddess of Everything Else and replacing my twelve year old standard avatar with it.

“what is your fantasy partner/complement organization?”

I love this question and would never have thought of it on my own.

Our younger kiddo went through a period of calling his big sister "gago" because he couldn't pronounce her name.  Her opinion of this was a long-suffering sigh and "I'll be whatever he can say."

I kind of doubt you care at all, but here for interested bystanders is more information on my stance.

• I suspect you of brigading-type behavior wrt conflicts you get into.  Even if you make out like it's a "get out the vote" campaign where the fact that rides to the polls don't require avowing that you're a Demoblican is important to your reception, when you're the sort who'll tell all your friends someone is being mean to you and then the karma swings around wildly I make some updates.  This social power with your clique of admirers in combination

Oh, no, it's absolutely negative.  I don't like you.  I just don't specifically think that you are disgusting, and it's that bit of the reaction to the analogy that caught me by surprise.

"Oh, I'm going to impute malice with the phrase 'gossiping behind my back' about someone I have never personally interacted with before who talked about my public blog posts with her friends, when she's specifically remarked that she's worried about fallout from letting me know that she doesn't care for me!" is also kind of a take, and a pretty good example of wh... (read more)

Welp, guess I shouldn't pick up frogs.  Not what I expected to be the main takeaway from this thread but still good to know.

I think most poisonous frogs look it and would accordingly pick up a frog that wasn't very brightly colored if I otherwise wanted to pick up this frog, whereas bugs may look drab while being dangerous.

I'm sorry!  I'm sincerely not trying to indicate that.  Duncan fascinates and unnerves me but he does not revolt me.  I think that "weird bug" made sense to my metaphor generator instead of "weird plant" or "weird bird" or something is that bugs have extremely widely varying danger levels - an unfamiliar bug may have all kinds of surprises in the mobility, chemical weapons, aggressiveness, etc. department, whereas plants reliably don't jump on you and birds are basically all just WYSIWYG; but many weird bugs are completely harmless, and I simply do not know what will happen to me if I poke Duncan.

I wasn't sure if I should include the analogy.  I came up with it weeks ago when I was remarking to people in my server about how suspicious I find things Duncan writes, and it was popular there; I guess people here are less universally delighted by metaphors about weird bugs than people on my server, whoops!  For what it's worth I think the world is enriched by the presence of weird bugs.  The other day someone remarked that they'd found a weird caterpillar on the sidewalk near my house and half my dinner guests got up to go look at it and I almost did myself.  I just don't want to touch weird bugs, and am nervous in a similar way about making it publicly knowable that I have an opinion about Duncan.

I don't keep track of people's posting styles and correlate them with their names very well. Most people who post on LW, even if they do it a lot, I have negligible associations beyond "that person sounds vaguely familiar" or "are they [other person] or am I mixing them up?".

I have persistent impressions of both Said and Duncan, though.

I am limited in my ability to look up any specific Said comment or things I've said elsewhere about him because his name tragically shares a spelling with a common English word, but my model of him is strongly positive. &nbs... (read more)

Nope, Bay Area.

It's probably not helping that ours looks a fair bit younger than she is (or so I'm told, she looks six to me in the sense that she is larger than she was when she was five, but she's the oldest and the smallest kid in her little school).  I sometimes have to point at her and make a facial expression for the benefit of supervising neighbors when I'm walking her, especially if she runs ahead.

We had our 6yo walking the two and a half blocks to school by herself.  But she wasn't willing to talk to concerned strangers, and it turns out that this is a de facto legal requirement for small people walking alone in a way it is not for adults walking alone - they couldn't figure out where she was going or if she was okay so they called the cops.  Now we have to accompany her when none of us like this at all.  It doesn't seem like a general factor of independence though... she won't get ready for bed alone.

I appreciate this timeline!  My emergency plan if I unexpectedly have a deaf baby one day is to find someone fluent in sign language to move in with us and do, if necessary, hardcore sign immersion, and 3-5 months is quick enough that I would not need to worry about the baby acquiring brain damage.

I watched one of the videos and it was clearly a great example of the category.  And yet.  I think ease of learning varies with language and also with learner.  ASL in particular seems likely to be very interpersonally variable - I definitely found it harder than making equivalent progress in French, Chinese, or Japanese, and those last two are famously considered difficult for English-natives.  It requires manual dexterity!  If you get confused in the middle of a sign language sentence you're going to poke yourself in the ear or t... (read more)

A few years ago most of the people who lived in my house at the time all signed up for an ASL class together.  I mostly retain the alphabet, though not very quickly or fluidly, but most of the others don't, even though I stopped going halfway through because I was too pregnant and nobody else had that problem.  I have never encountered an opportunity to use any signs "in the wild" since this occasion, even opportunities that weren't usable at my level but would have been if I were more conversational.  Once, before I'd ever studied ASL, I en... (read more)

I liked this story enough to still remember it, separately from the original Sort By Controversial story.  Trade across moral divide is a useful concept to have handles for.

This one was fun to play with and it was nice to feel like I was helping.
 

"Anyone who resists? Why, I'll simply mulch them," said Tyranicca. Many, many people resisted, and Tyrannica prepared her mulching machine.

Her workers did the rest. 0.15%

I appreciate this post, though mostly secondhand.  It's special to me because it provided me with a way to participate more-or-less directly in an alignment project: one of my glowfic buddies decided to rope me in to write a glowfic thread in this format for the project [here](https://glowfic.com/posts/5726).  I'd like to hear more updates about how it's gone in the last year, though!

I get a lot of headaches, and for a while had the cached belief that ibuprofen was the way to go and acetaminophen (paracetemol) doesn't work on me at all.  But after a c-section I was given the big doses of both, and told to alternate, and I noticed that I could definitely tell the difference between skipping/delaying an acetaminophen and taking it on time.  So now I use that for headaches, especially sinus-y headaches where I don't want to suppress my immune response that's trying to get my cold to go away.

I will also match this bounty, and encourage others to do the same.

I really like this, I've never seen a premise quite like it!

(Wow, I was commenting on LW thirteen years ago...)  I didn't suggest saying this out of the blue!  My recommended riposte borrows the story protagonist's vocabulary and tone.  If a woman asks you:

"What you're saying is tantamount to saying that you want to fuck me. So why shouldn't I react with revulsion precisely as though you'd said the latter?"

then, it may be appropriate to discuss, optionally using the word "fuck", why she'd react that way if you'd asked that question, which you didn't, having instead (as in the story) made a much more innocuous suggestion, neither culturally inappropriate nor abrupt and crass.

There's this though it is imperfect.

My impulse here is to itemize - X hours for this step, Y for that step, Z as safety margin in case of P, Q, or R.

I don't have a great episodic memory so I can't be as detailed as one might hope about the trajectory from 2010, but I think it worked fine!  I no longer do much active mood maintenance.  I'm on an SSRI again as of last year, but that's about energy levels and "anxiety" (I don't experience anxiety-the-emotion that often, but I seem to maybe have the underlying correlate of anxiety disorders that just pops out differently).  I am sometimes irritated, frustrated, bored, exasperated, etc., but seldom sad and often happy..

This post is very interesting and I'm excited to hear back from anyone who is going to experiment based on it.  My experience with sleep deprivation is mostly centered around having children; my functioning is unquestionably impacted by that kind of fragmented and reduced sleep (especially emotionally) but maybe a solid yet shorter period of sleep would actually be fine.  The trouble is I'm not sure how I'd check... because I've found that if I have an alarm set to go off in the morning, not only is it in itself staggeringly unpleasant, it makes me anxious enough that I sleep very poorly the night before.  I've gone to a lot of effort to (kids and all) arrange that I can sleep in as late as feels right.

Isn't lithium in water linked to lower depression rates and not really something you'd want to straightforwardly remove even if it turned out to be making people fat?  I guess you might win on net if it turned out you could cure about that much depression with lotsalightboxes and be rid of obesity in the bargain, but it's at least a little complicated.

Your link to Quillette is broken for me.

Related: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9ZodFr54FtpLThHZh/experiential-pica

I do usually roast it, and would only sauté if I were being miserly with dishes or didn't want to turn on the oven, but I would expect it to be fine, yeah.

...I'm a pretty good cook and can't actually think of any reason you shouldn't sauté asparagus.  You shouldn't sauté... lettuce?  I can't think of a good reason to sauté seaweed?  But asparagus seems like it'd be fine.

Does it seem likely that soybean oil in particular is special?  I think I could pretty straightforwardly eliminate it from my diet - I never cook with it and am not specifically attached to snacks that contain it - but I'd have a harder time if I also couldn't use canola, sesame, avocado, coconut...  Let alone other soy products like tofu.

I don't have a Facebook account.  I use my spouse's so I can read things but I don't eve know how to do the rest.

Attendance of the meet wound up being: 

• me
• my four year old, for about the first half hour
• an adult and child who were over anyway for a playdate
• one other person

I am curious if there are things I could have done to improve turnout, if anyone has ideas.

How do you motivate the embedded assumption that there is no such thing as harmless variation?

I think an important obstacle to "I'll apologize if they'll apologize" situations is that people often have very specific needs for the traits of an apology they're receiving, doing it correctly without instructions is a very important signal of being on the same page about what went wrong, and incorrect apologies can be downright insulting (such as "I'm sorry you feel that way", a classic, or, "I'm sorry about X" "this whole time you thought I was mad about X???  I don't give a crap about X!")  The existence of a hypothetical apology doesn't serve the same purposes as a fully featured one.

We tried to buy a place around the corner (not right adjacent, but no crossing streets, so we could have let pretty small kids walk it alone), but we could only afford to lowball it and didn't get it.  We don't want to move because moving is horrible but if the place burned down or something we would probably all or mostly all move together.

I would like to see this energy directed somewhere more empathetic.  Can many humans with a healthy relationship to food and no medical dietary restrictions be physically healthy on a vegan diet (and a B12 supplement)?  Probably.  Does everyone you're talking to have all those qualities?  Absolutely not.  Are their traditions, tastes, and convenience, and every flowthrough effect of their culture, enjoyment, and flexibility, wholly worthless?  You aren't likely to save many animals by telling them so even if you feel that way.... (read more)

We did this approximately by accident.  We had a kid, and separately had a habit of letting our friends crash in our spare bedrooms, and one of them did enough caretaking (letting us SLEEP!) that we were like "wait... if she leaves... that will hit the kid like a divorce" and arranged to keep her forever.  Now we live with her and her fiancée and additional Spare Room Friends and a second kid, and we are very crowded in our large house and don't have room for any more Spare Room Friends which is very sad, and plot to purchase neighboring houses a... (read more)

It's not really workable to say "oh yeah, I can keep secrets, I keep so many secrets, like for example," so I tend to describe my surface area - things like "sometimes my literate three year old looks at my screen and asks me what a phrase means in front of the contents of my living room, I'm not good at not laughing at things I read if they're funny, I consider it morally wrong to lie and am not volunteering to do it anyway for you but am good at deflecting with the truth so cannot guarantee to conceal the existence of a secret but can decline to elaborat... (read more)

I'd like to do something like this - it turns out we go through flour with breathtaking speed if I'm trying to personally keep up with household bread consumption through baking. But I can't find a distributor! I looked at the ones in my area listed on King Arthur Flour's website, and one doesn't have it (I think; they have no search function so I had to look manually through pages of random foods), and the other won't let me check without my having a restaurant account.