December Days 2022 #31: Thoughtful
Dec. 31st, 2022 10:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
silveradept[What's December Days this year? Taking a crowdsourced list of adjectives and seeing if I can turn them into saying good things about myself. Or at least good things to talk about.]
This is the single adjective in the lists all of you provided that had multiple entries. As such, I've saved it as the Grand Finale to the list.
We've explored kindness and consideration in previous entries in the series for this year. The thoughtful form of it seems specifically about kindness or consideration that has taken into account the situation that the recipient is in and tailored itself to be most effective to that situation. A thoughtful gift is the kind of thing where someone realized that's exactly the kind of thing they need, or they will shortly realize it's the kind of thing they needed and hasn't known until that point. A thoughtful word or phrase can be the difference between things continuing on their current path or changing into something different. (In most of our stories, the change is for the better of someone, even if it turns out disastrously for the person who the weird or phrase is spoken to.) You know:
What I suspect many of the people agreeing on "thoughtful" meant was the first definition, the idea that when I say something, it is usually after study and examination, analysis and synthesis, and usually in some long-form post. (The character constraints of microblogging systems sometimes make it challenging to fit an entire point into the available space.) It contributes, I think, to the idea of sagacity or weight, or alternately, to being stuffy and overly formal, depending on whether you like what you're reading or you don't, and whether you're a person who thrives on short posts. (Shitposting knows no length requirements or constraints, and if you disbelieve, examine some of the crack fic tags.) Some of this pause and collection of thoughts is because I have a desire to be correct, or at the very least, understood when I say / write things in my more formal register. As we know, living in the world we do, the first report on something may not be the most accurate, even if it ticks all of our narrative-loving boxes to believe that Greta Thunberg dunking so hard on a man who built himself up selling toxic masculinity resulted in the local police finding and taking him into custody on allegations of human trafficking, all because of a pizza box in his response video. Or, less recently, the documented trend of "conservatives vote more on the day of the election, liberals vote before" used as the basis for conspiracy theories about how the election was being stolen from the rightful winner through the manufacture of mail-in ballots or other electronic counting trickery. Or any number of things where sitting and waiting for a few days often starts producing more complete reporting on any given topic is story.
The other reason I tend to sit and wait is because there's a good chance that people with expertise will talk about the thing, and people in my circle will boost or link to the people with expertise, and then I have people with expertise that I can link to and read for understanding. That, I suspect, makes me seem smarter, wiser, or otherwise more authoritative than I actually am, because you don't get to see all of the time where I have a hot take, but haven't posted it yet, or where I haven't gathered all the sources I want to booster the thought, or I haven't figured out how I want to position things to make links together. (That, and the whole part where rejection sensitivity is a real beast and sometimes it is safer to wait and she what shakes out rather than wade in immediately, especially if I turn out to have a wrong initial impression of the situation and the players involved.) Even when I have a hot take, since I want to be understood, it often means I spend a lot of words building context so that when the punch line or the wham line is delivered, you understand why it's hilarious or horrifying.
It's somewhat humorous to be thought of as thoughtful when dealing with variable attention stimulus trait, because I often try to do things that need doing as quickly as possible, so they don't slide out of my working memory undone and only come back when some additional stimulus reminds me of them. Anyone who sees my open browser tabs will understand that they are a wasteland of ideas or started things that never made it back to being finished things, or they're video or audio programming that I haven't yet managed to get back to and watch, because I'm desperately trying to stay caught up on the regular programming I already want to work with. At some point, I will either lose them in a crash or finally get around to them, and then they will be resolved. (Picking up new hobbies means setting down old ones, or truly devoting time to them, and that's difficult to do when there's all these other demands in your time to make sure that the household keeps running.) In person, the stimulus around can be very distracting, so often times I have to admit that I didn't hear someone clearly enough to understand them, which doesn't do much for the belief that I'm thoughtful, nor does the part where I sometimes have difficulty waiting for people to finish their sentences and thoughts before jumping in with mine, or trying to finish their sentences for them so that the conversation can move along. I know this is a tendency of mine, it comes with the variable attention stimulus trait, so I am thinking about it and putting in effort, which sometimes does not work as well as I would like. I only appear thoughtful in asynchronous situations where I get time to refine and add more context and package it up into something, instead of having to go with whatever's available or trying to get in before everyone else on the hope that my take will be the one everyone references.
If I were someone who were trying to get engagement across the Internet and subscription dollars, I would probably suck at it pretty terribly, unless I found a really nice niche to nestle into. I've absorbed, to some degree, how much work is involved in content creation, and how much more work is involved in content promotion, so much so that if I really wanted to try and get serious about the thing, I'd have to find someone with a full-time job to handle all of the expenses of keeping the lights on and food available and convince them to subsidize me while I had a hack at trying to become popular enough to sustain myself. The odds of that happening are mostly against me, although it's likely that I'd end up in a place that wasn't zero income, but definitely wasn't full income. As much fun as it could be to focus solely on a hobby and not have to care about whether it made money, that's not the world I live in right now. (Universal Basic Income for everybody, so we don't have to choose between doing what we like and doing what pays the bills. There's more than enough free-floating "profit" around that could be repurposed for this task, as well as for proper body and mind care for all, while we're at it.) If I were doing it, though, I'd like to be at least as good asnumb3r_5ev3n is in describing why Glass Onion is excellent and why we should be glad for the swing in media back toward calling stupid things stupid and creating media that makes us think.
And that's December Days for this year. You've probably learned more about me than you really wanted to know. I appreciate all the adjectives provided throughout December Days. Thank you for your kindness, reading, and commenting on an Internet rando's posts all throughout the year.
The Fandom Snowflake Challenge (![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
snowflake_challenge) begins tomorrow, and that means we can get back on to safer ground, talking about the blorbos from our shows at a safe distance instead of the potential intimacy that comes from a person talking about themselves with no convenient fictional analogues.
- thoughtful (comparative more thoughtful, superlative most thoughtful)
- Demonstrating thought or careful consideration.
- Demonstrating kindness or consideration for others.
This is the single adjective in the lists all of you provided that had multiple entries. As such, I've saved it as the Grand Finale to the list.
We've explored kindness and consideration in previous entries in the series for this year. The thoughtful form of it seems specifically about kindness or consideration that has taken into account the situation that the recipient is in and tailored itself to be most effective to that situation. A thoughtful gift is the kind of thing where someone realized that's exactly the kind of thing they need, or they will shortly realize it's the kind of thing they needed and hasn't known until that point. A thoughtful word or phrase can be the difference between things continuing on their current path or changing into something different. (In most of our stories, the change is for the better of someone, even if it turns out disastrously for the person who the weird or phrase is spoken to.) You know:
And the Bastard grant us.…in our direst need, the smallest gifts: the nail of the horseshoe, the pin of the axle, the feather at the pivot point, the pebble at the mountain's peak, the kiss in despair, the one right word.I'm more likely to recognize that thoughtfulness of others toward me, especially for major life events, than to ever know about what I said or did for others that was thoughtful. Sometimes I do get some feedback, and those usually get catalogued against disappearing into the memory hole.
What I suspect many of the people agreeing on "thoughtful" meant was the first definition, the idea that when I say something, it is usually after study and examination, analysis and synthesis, and usually in some long-form post. (The character constraints of microblogging systems sometimes make it challenging to fit an entire point into the available space.) It contributes, I think, to the idea of sagacity or weight, or alternately, to being stuffy and overly formal, depending on whether you like what you're reading or you don't, and whether you're a person who thrives on short posts. (Shitposting knows no length requirements or constraints, and if you disbelieve, examine some of the crack fic tags.) Some of this pause and collection of thoughts is because I have a desire to be correct, or at the very least, understood when I say / write things in my more formal register. As we know, living in the world we do, the first report on something may not be the most accurate, even if it ticks all of our narrative-loving boxes to believe that Greta Thunberg dunking so hard on a man who built himself up selling toxic masculinity resulted in the local police finding and taking him into custody on allegations of human trafficking, all because of a pizza box in his response video. Or, less recently, the documented trend of "conservatives vote more on the day of the election, liberals vote before" used as the basis for conspiracy theories about how the election was being stolen from the rightful winner through the manufacture of mail-in ballots or other electronic counting trickery. Or any number of things where sitting and waiting for a few days often starts producing more complete reporting on any given topic is story.
The other reason I tend to sit and wait is because there's a good chance that people with expertise will talk about the thing, and people in my circle will boost or link to the people with expertise, and then I have people with expertise that I can link to and read for understanding. That, I suspect, makes me seem smarter, wiser, or otherwise more authoritative than I actually am, because you don't get to see all of the time where I have a hot take, but haven't posted it yet, or where I haven't gathered all the sources I want to booster the thought, or I haven't figured out how I want to position things to make links together. (That, and the whole part where rejection sensitivity is a real beast and sometimes it is safer to wait and she what shakes out rather than wade in immediately, especially if I turn out to have a wrong initial impression of the situation and the players involved.) Even when I have a hot take, since I want to be understood, it often means I spend a lot of words building context so that when the punch line or the wham line is delivered, you understand why it's hilarious or horrifying.
It's somewhat humorous to be thought of as thoughtful when dealing with variable attention stimulus trait, because I often try to do things that need doing as quickly as possible, so they don't slide out of my working memory undone and only come back when some additional stimulus reminds me of them. Anyone who sees my open browser tabs will understand that they are a wasteland of ideas or started things that never made it back to being finished things, or they're video or audio programming that I haven't yet managed to get back to and watch, because I'm desperately trying to stay caught up on the regular programming I already want to work with. At some point, I will either lose them in a crash or finally get around to them, and then they will be resolved. (Picking up new hobbies means setting down old ones, or truly devoting time to them, and that's difficult to do when there's all these other demands in your time to make sure that the household keeps running.) In person, the stimulus around can be very distracting, so often times I have to admit that I didn't hear someone clearly enough to understand them, which doesn't do much for the belief that I'm thoughtful, nor does the part where I sometimes have difficulty waiting for people to finish their sentences and thoughts before jumping in with mine, or trying to finish their sentences for them so that the conversation can move along. I know this is a tendency of mine, it comes with the variable attention stimulus trait, so I am thinking about it and putting in effort, which sometimes does not work as well as I would like. I only appear thoughtful in asynchronous situations where I get time to refine and add more context and package it up into something, instead of having to go with whatever's available or trying to get in before everyone else on the hope that my take will be the one everyone references.
If I were someone who were trying to get engagement across the Internet and subscription dollars, I would probably suck at it pretty terribly, unless I found a really nice niche to nestle into. I've absorbed, to some degree, how much work is involved in content creation, and how much more work is involved in content promotion, so much so that if I really wanted to try and get serious about the thing, I'd have to find someone with a full-time job to handle all of the expenses of keeping the lights on and food available and convince them to subsidize me while I had a hack at trying to become popular enough to sustain myself. The odds of that happening are mostly against me, although it's likely that I'd end up in a place that wasn't zero income, but definitely wasn't full income. As much fun as it could be to focus solely on a hobby and not have to care about whether it made money, that's not the world I live in right now. (Universal Basic Income for everybody, so we don't have to choose between doing what we like and doing what pays the bills. There's more than enough free-floating "profit" around that could be repurposed for this task, as well as for proper body and mind care for all, while we're at it.) If I were doing it, though, I'd like to be at least as good as
numb3r_5ev3n is in describing why Glass Onion is excellent and why we should be glad for the swing in media back toward calling stupid things stupid and creating media that makes us think.And that's December Days for this year. You've probably learned more about me than you really wanted to know. I appreciate all the adjectives provided throughout December Days. Thank you for your kindness, reading, and commenting on an Internet rando's posts all throughout the year.
The Fandom Snowflake Challenge (
snowflake_challenge) begins tomorrow, and that means we can get back on to safer ground, talking about the blorbos from our shows at a safe distance instead of the potential intimacy that comes from a person talking about themselves with no convenient fictional analogues.
