First, a few things I got off of TikTok recently.
Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s a way to embed them, so links will have to do.
How very Web 1.0! Anyhow…
First. a most excellent overview of biological sex. The combination of her accent, her earnest approach, her academic acumen, and her cool British beauty really makes her presentation powerful to me.
I don’t know if it would convince any gender skeptics or other transphobes. Those kinds of people probably slammed the steel doors of their tiny minds shut the moment they realized someone was trying to put knowledge in there.
But I found the whole thing delightful.
The other thing is a piece by the incredible poet Ren.
The dude is a wizard. The words, the style, the presentation, everything. It all combines to make his work mesmerizing and compelling every damn time.
God did I miss TikTok. You know how you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?
Well sometimes you don’t know how much you missed something till you get it back.
And I plan on being active on the Tok again too. My webcam is right here 24/7 and so it should be easy to record replies to vids and so on.
Oh, and I will eventually upload my current vids there too, or at least the ones that I think might be of interest to people.
Time to see if my charisma really works!
Anyhow, here’s today’s actual vid :
Some of that is actually from as far back as 2008!
And it was nice going through the clips and remembering, though of course, nostalgia is always bittersweet and so it made me a little sad too.
I seem so young and energetic and full of life compared to now. And yet, the weird part is that I know I was actually a lot more depressed back then.
As nice as it would be to have the energy and hope back, that would be too high a price to pay. I was often suicidal back then.
But way more socially active.
I don’t think the two things are related.
I had to include what I consider to be the stupidest thing in a movie ever, the whole “removal all numerals except six” thing.
That’s so gobsmackingly dumb that it beggars the imagination. There is no way that I, as a very talented comedy writer, could have thought of something that amazingly, beautifully, thuddingly stupid.
Other than scouring the backup I made of the HD I had before this one, today has been pretty routine. I am happy that I did a video that was NOT just me talking into the camera for once.
I started off thinking I would maybe do a karaoke. But I tried a few songs and I did not like the sound of my voice, so I decided it was not a good voice day for me and went looking for a better idea.
The point is that I did something new (ish) and had a lot of fun doing it. I let myself go in an unexpected direction and it turned out great.
I went exploring for once in my life! In a pretty minor way, but still.
And I have going back on TikTok to thank. And to think, I went years without it because I thought there was no way to access it on a PC.
But there totally is. There’s a Windows TikTok app. All I had to do was download it from the Microsoft store. It was crazy easy.
I feel like such a fool! But whatever. It’s good to be back.
Time to make some waves. 🙂
More after the break.
What is dis praxia?
For me at least, dyspraxia is a barrier.
One that has been there all my life and lies between myself and whatever motor skill I am trying to learn like an invisible force field and keeps me from being able to do it.
The motor acquisition center of my brain is just plain broken. For all I know, it’s barely even there. It certainly feels that way.
Any attempt I make to learn to do a physical thing has to go through the conscious rational mind and that is just plain not good enough. We human beings are supposed to have mental hardware dedicated to that kind of thing. Society presumes it is there.
But mine ain’t.
So it’s a learning disability. One I wish I had been diagnosed with a very long time ago, like say when I was in elementary school, where the right kind of intervention might have corrected it.
Or at least I would have been officially designated as a person with a disability (albeit an invisible one) and I could have been better understood by the world.
I picture myself carrying business cards that explain my condition like some deaf people do. They’d say, “Hi! I have dyspraxia! Here’s what that is… ”
The thing is, not only is it an invisible disability (like depression), but I can go long periods without it having much of an effect. It’s not like we learn new motor skills all the time. It’s actually pretty rare.
What it would mostly do is explain to people why I’m such a spaz.
If I was a kid today, I would probably have one of those individual learning plans (forget what they are called) and that would explain the problem to my teachers and give them tips as to how to help me with them.
Not that I would need a lot of assistance. Despite all odds, I did manage to learn to write and type and dress myself and so on.
But I’ve heard some kids get someone to take notes for them because they can’t write fast enough, and I’d be all over that.
AI can almost sort of kind of do that now. The auto-captioning on YouTube is getting better and better and there are programs out there that claim to be able to transcribe what people are saying accurately.
Honestly, I would probably just record the whole thing with a smartphone. That way I would get the prof’s body language and tone of voice, too.
Maybe I should be taking some online courses…
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.