Twigsofmanyfaces - Feral Thangs

The Jellybean Juice adventure continues! This mom is filled with determination!

Read Part 1 (Tumblr) / (Webtoon)

Read Part 2 (Tumblr) / (Webtoon)

Read Part 3 (Tumblr) / (Webtoon)

Read Part 4 (Tumblr) / (Webtoon)

Read Part 5 (Tumblr) / (Webtoon)

This is part 6!!

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"we want to protect the kids!!"

— in a way that will also protect them from their parents & guardians right?

"what"

— if a parent or guardian wanted to abuse their child, would what you're trying to do make it harder for them?

"..."

— *pulls out a chart that shows 76% of abused children were victimized by a parent or legal guardian* will what you're advocating for make it easier for the majority child abusers, which is overwhelmingly parents & guardians, to get away with abuse?

"idk what this has to do with anything we just want to restrict children's freedoms more & give parents more control over them. you know. to protect them from adults who want to abuse them"

Every. Single. Time.

everyone always asks wheres ganondorf, and how to defeat ganondorf, but no one ever asks hows ganondorf :(

So you know those dumb little wordcloud things?

You know, where like, they go through your blog and find the words you use most often, and then spit out stylized text with the most often used words as the biggest ones so you can embed or screenshot them or whatever?

I FUCKING HATE THOSE.

Like, the idea is really cool in theory. A standardized analysis generating an artifact characteristic of you, easily digestible at a glance.

Except in practice everyone's word cloud ends up being "like, people, think, want, make, get..." -- i.e. basically just a bag of the most common words in the english language (presuming they speak mostly english).

But what I actually want is a collection of words I use more than the average person does. And while we're at it, also a collection of words I use less than the average person does.

So anyway I made that:

It's on Siikr now. New blogs don't get it yet, only blogs that were indexed as of a few days ago (still working on optimizations to allow for real time generation).

The words in green are the words you use weirdly often.

The words in red are the words you suspiciously seem to avoid.

In both cases, the bigger the word, the more weird your usage of it is relative to all of the other blogs in Siikr's index. This is limited to the most extreme 100 words in both directions.

Hovering over a word gives you some statistics about how much it should appear in your blog vs how much it actually appears in your blog.

So that's fun and everything -- but it can and very well might get even more fun.

Because generating this meant creating a list of all of the words used by every blog, and storing a bunch of numbers per word per blog. Currently, that's ~9 million associations over ~57k words.

Every blog->word relation stores frequency statistics, and every word itself keeps a running average of its frequency across all blogs.

Which means we could in theory (and almost certainly will in practice), treat each word as a dimension in a 57 thousand dimensional space.

Then treat each user as a point in that 57 thousand dimensional space, where their coordinates in the space are (user_word_freq - avg_word_freq).

From there, we can measure the distance (as cosine similarity, or euclidean distance, or even just raw inner product) between users, and return for your blog, an ordered list of:

Dopplegangers - blogs most like yours (closest to your blog in 57k dimensional word frequency space).

Foils- blogs least like yours (furthest from yours in 57k dimensional word frequency space).

Manic Pixie Dream Friends - blogs that overuse the same words you overuse (closest to your blog in 57k freq-space with respect to only positive vector components)

Least Like Un-You - blogs that avoid the same words you avoid (closest to your blog in 57k freq space with respect to just the negative vector components)

I can’t state enough how beneficial it was to work at the sex shop as my first retail job. We were encouraged to practice shutting down inappropriate behavior and it became a well practiced skill set. I had a flat stare, icy tones of disapproval, and a demeanor of untouchable scorn to back it all up. I could get the most hardened of perverts to back off or leave in a matter of sentences if they harassed staff or other customers.

When I moved on to selling mattresses I came prepared to handle pretty much any situation with the unruffled calm of someone who has asked Santa to stop touching himself and leave. To my vast surprise it was a skill I needed on the regular at the mattress store. For whatever reason men thought it was the height of entertainment to sexually harass me because I was young and cheerful.

They would always quickly learn they’d picked the wrong target.

One day a man strolled in, sizing me up as he came. He saw a young, tiny, afab person alone in the store and came to a stop way too close. He used his height to leer down at me and said, “I’m looking for a new headboard. Which ones are the best for sex?”

It was so stupid. He looked down at me with half lidded eyes and the grin of a man who owns an unmarked white van. He probably expected me to laugh uncomfortably or act flustered. He wanted to feel tall and powerful or maybe even sexy.

He was not expecting what he got. My face stretched into what could technically be described as a smile but was more accurately a threat display. The temperature in the room plummeted as I dropped all warmth in my demeanor. He took a half step back, suddenly aware that he was alone in a room with me.

“Well, sir, that depends on what kind of sex you’re having. If you are looking for a headboard that is grippeable, I suggest this model. The metal is rounded and wouldn’t hurt a hand gripping it tightly. However if you want something that you can secure with restraints, I recommend this wooden one as the slats are wide and quite sturdy.”

He looked liked I’d hit him over the head with a board and stared down at me blankly, taken aback by the authoritative way that I discussed the merits of his lackluster sex life. I met his eyes, a veiled threat in mine, and said, “Which one will you be purchasing?”

He tucked his tail between his legs and bought the metal one. I pulled up a thin layer of friendliness as I rang him up but he had the chastened air of a man who just ran straight into an iron pole.

Another time a man crawled up onto a tempurpedic and thrusted into an invisible partner. He gave a cocky look over his shoulder, sure that he was going to discomfit me as he asked, “How are these babies for fucking?”

I gave him a deadpan look and and said, “That depends on if you’re someone who has to rely on the bounce of springs for your thrusts. Memory foam beds are nicer on knees and joints for positions like doggy style but they absorb a lot of kinetic energy.”

He visibly deflated and got down off the bed with a vaguely ashamed air.

He bought a spring mattress.