isaacsapphire:

inquisitorhierarch:

betterbemeta:

volfish:

evnw:

railroadsoftware:

handsomejackass:

horse people are weird

what does this mean

horses can see demons

@betterbemeta are you able to translate this? Is it true horses can see netherbeings?? Will we ever know the extent of their powers???

I think I have reblogged this before but I’ll answer it again bc its a fascinating answer I feel and i was more funny than informational last time.

The truth is that horses see what they think are nether beings, I guess. They have a perfect storm of sensory perception that, useful for prey beings, marks false positives on mortal danger all the time. Which is advantageous to a flight-based prey species: running from danger when you’re super fast is much ‘cheaper’ than fighting, so you waste almost nothing from running from a threat that’s not there. Versus, you blow everything if you don’t see a threat that is there.

Horses also have their eyes positioned on the sides of their heads, which gives them an incredible range of peripheral vision almost around their entire body with only a few blind spots you can sneak up on them in. But this comes at the cost of binocular vision; they can only judge distance for things straight ahead of them. Super useful for preventing predators sneaking up from the sides or behind, but useless for recognizing familiar shapes with the precision we can.

Basically we now have a walking couch with anxiety its going to get attacked at any second, that can see almost everything, but mostly only out of the corner of its eye. It has a few blind spots and anything that suddenly appears out of them is terrifying to it. Combine that with that it actually has far superior low-light vision than us, and that its ears can swivel in any directions like radar dishes, and you’ve basically given a nervous wreck a highly accurate but imprecise danger-dar.

To be concise: all horses, even the most chill horses, on some level believe they are living in a survival horror.

This means that you could approach it in a flapping poncho and if it can’t recognize your shape as human, they mistake you for SATAN… or you could pass this one broken down tractor you’ve passed 100 times on a trail ride, but today is the day it will ATTACK… or your horse could feel a horsefly bite from its blind spot and MAMA, I’VE BEEN HIT!!!… or you could both approach a fallen log in the woods but in the low light your horse is going to see the tree rings as THE EYE OF MORDOR.

However, they actually have kind of a cool compensation for this– they are social animals, and instinctively look towards leadership. In the wild or out at pasture, this is their most willful, pushy, decisive leader horse who decides where to go and where it’s safe. But humans often take this role both as riders and on the ground. They are always watching and feeling for human reactions to things. This is why moving in a calm, decisive way and always giving clear commands is key to working with this kind of animal. Confusing commands, screaming, panic, visible distress, and chaos will signal to a horse that you, brave leader are freaked out… so it should freak out too!

On one hand, you’ll get horses that will decide that they are the leader and you are not, so getting them to listen to you can be tough– requiring patience and skill more than force. On the other hand, a good enough rider and a well-trained horse (or a horse with specialized training) can venture into dangerous situations, loud and scary environments, etc. calmly and confidently.

The joke in OP though is that many horses that are bred to be very fast, like thoroughbreds, are also bred and encouraged to be high-energy and highstrung. Making them more anxious and prone to seeing those ‘demons.’ All horses in a sense are going to be your anxious friend, but racehorses and polo ponies and other sport horses can sometimes be your anxious friend that thinks they live in Silent Hill.

Reblogging some horse knowledge for certain people who write fantasy books but know nothing about horses *cough cough*

I’m not sure if horses can actually see demons, but this has been suspected by people for a very long time https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taraxippus

(via isaacsapphire)

veronicastraszh:

nostalgebraist:

zjemptv:

nostalgebraist:

baroquespiral:

nostalgebraist:

Thanks, Zinnia, I am sure it will come as a shock to her that there are treatments for OCD, given that mysteriously OCD somehow continues to affect her life despite being treatable, I mean lol that’s weird right? also I bet she has not tried yoga, have you suggested that

holy fucking SHIT whatever else anyone thinks of the original article, how privileged do you even have to be to look at a price tag ranging from $20000 to $50000 from what I’ve looked at and a) go “There is that, but” b) then start talking about life-year bullshit

the only other place I ever hear this “adjusted life-year” stuff is around Effective Altruism, where it’s used in relation to the fact that poor people lose QALYs over all kinds of stuff that could be resolved if they had more money, which is why you give money to them.  and we live in a culture where any kind of cost can be abstractly converted to money, where economic analysts convert the costs of climate change and war and genocide to price tags so yeah you could argue with anything that… poor people are wasting money by being poor, if they really didn’t want to be poor they could just stop wasting all that money! but jesus fuck what kind of Dickens villain would you have to be to do that.

I mean people these days usually go to college specifically because it will allow them to make way more money down the line, and go into incredible debt expecting to be able to pay it back with that money in the future, and there are still people who can’t afford college.  you could probably do something like this with home ownership, not that I’d know, I’ve never really sat down to calculate that in terms of fucking QALYs because all I know is for the foreseeable future, I can’t afford a damn house

Wow, yeah

For easy reference, here are the tweets @baroquespiral is talking about.  The first is a riff on the line from the original piece “[…] there are social and financial repercussions to transitioning that I cannot afford emotionally or financially”

I don’t understand why you think suggesting pursuing potentially effective OCD treatments is the equivalent of suggesting someone treat their OCD with yoga. There are a number of established treatments that can be effective and are not related to yoga. They have an evidence base that’s stronger than what you’re apparently trying to connote when you compare this to yoga.

Also, disability-adjusted life years are a metric used by the WHO and other public health organizations. The original poster made reference to the potential quantifiable repercussions of transitioning; I made reference to the potential quantifiable repercussions of not transitioning. This doesn’t really have anything to do with telling poor people to stop being poor or telling people to go to college and it’s pointlessly dismissive to characterize an established metric in this way.

My point was that someone with diagnosed OCD is likely to be aware of the standard treatments.  As with many psychiatric conditions, the treatments are ineffective for some people, are only partially effective for others, and may not mitigate some symptoms as much as others.  The fact that someone’s life is impacted nontrivially by OCD symptoms provides, in itself, very little evidence that they haven’t pursued treatment.

I’ve often seen people use “have you tried yoga?” as a stock example of unhelpful mental illness advice, and the yoga line was just a reference to that.  I didn’t mean to suggest that standard OCD treatments lacked an evidence base, just that “there are treatments for OCD” is unhelpful mental illness advice.

I wrote more about the relevance of DALYs to this particular case here.  I didn’t take @baroquespiral​ to be responding to the invocation of DALYs in itself – I think their point was that it looked like you were doing a cost-benefit analysis (DALYs are commonly used in calculating cost-effectiveness), and telling someone that the benefits are worth the costs is unhelpful when they simply can’t afford the costs to begin with.  (One can be mistaken about the magnitude of the social costs, but “I can’t afford it financially” is a pretty solid barrier, no matter how good the other side looks.)

But wait, where did numbers like 20,000 - 50,000 come from? What are those for, in relation to what Zinnia was talking about? Even if self-medicating, HRT costs nothing like that.

Plus you are making your own assumptions. The original author did not explain her precise financial situation. She never said, “I just cannot afford HRT.” She said there are “financial reprucutions.” Which, yep, there are. That’s not the same thing.

Plus, you know, other people are reading this. If one person gets to publish their “transition is too hard narrative” – well maybe it is for them. I ain’t gonna kick down their door. But maybe they are trapped in psychological self-defeat cycle of their own making. 

I dunno. Neither do you. Neither do THEY, not really. (Sometimes people are wrong.)

Others deserve to hear our side also.

I spent hard decades LITERALLY UNAWARE that I had real options.

You know who first explained my options to me – no lie (I mentioned this before) – it was Zinnia Jones.

So yeah, you can take HRT. You can fix your shit. Sometimes. She told me that. She’s saying those same things now.

If this woman really-really cannot, then so it goes. Sucks for her.

HRT works. If you’re trans, you can probably make it work. No, really you can. It seems so hard, and then you do it, and then it wasn’t so hard at all.

This is a really fucking important message.

if you’re trans, HRT works better than you probably think it will. This is true both body and mind. So many of us wait so long, carving our bodies and longing for the guts to eat a gun. Cuz we have zero hope.

I didn’t think I could. I was planning my fucking suicide. I reached out to Zinnia and she explained a bit about HRT, some real options I could try. I tried them. They worked.

Rob, you know me – I am speaking hard-learned truth.

Trust me, there are reasons we are saying these things.

I respect that.  And I understand, I think, what it was about the original piece that made people angry (not just critical).  Several people said it sounded like it was a celebration of a miserable place they used to be in, and that they’re immensely thankful they’ve left.  Esther said it might be like the way she feels when someone converts to Catholicism.

Much of the reason the original article interested me was that it was a perspective I had never seen before.  I didn’t take it as some sort of “transition: not as great as you’ve been told” thing.  I just had never heard anyone describe being in that position.  (I’m not sure what other people made of it; it came up on my dash a lot and all I remember seeing was a number of tags and comments like “I relate to this.”)

The thing that got me worked up about some of the angry reactions I saw were that they seemed … angry not at the effect the article was going to produce, and not even at the author for the way she chose to write, but angry at the author as a person.  Like, rushing in to pry apart the article and show that somehow her experience didn’t hold up, it was inauthentic or incoherent or like she “ought to know” not to have the reactions she was having.  (I didn’t think this about your, Veronica’s, responses, just Zinnia’s and especially collaterlysisters’.)  It would be bad if this were the only story out there, but the rush to – take it down, debunk it, almost – like there couldn’t even be one such story as opposed to zero – that rubbed me wrong.

I don’t post about everything I see online that I don’t like.  In this case I did get quite worked up about it.  Looking in my drafts I have all of 3 unfinished attempts to explain why (although one is only a few sentences).  I guess it gets back to the stuff in the Sandifer empathy post and the worry that I have to be insincere to be taken as authentic, and that if I try to loosen up and be sincere I will be taken as inauthentic.  It’s the kind of ironic bind that a brain like mine will get just stuck on and stay there.

(via starlightvero)