my (homoerotic) hyperfixations

A tick fell out of a tree from above and landed on me

You dared to risk your life because your man’s going to dump you. How about this? If I help you with this, can we consider my debt paid? If you can prove it with evidence, I might consider forgiving your debt. Then don’t worry. Other people’s business is my area of expertise, Mr. Boiling Tofu. Just don’t be all bark and no bite. I need results too, Mr. Black-Smoke Barking Dog.

Damn. Now, I can't unsee it 🤣🤣🤣

Now, that's just slander 😂😂😂

Things like "I'm nervous introducing myself to strangers" / "I feel intimidated around groups of people" / "I hate small talk" / "I miss a lot of social cues" aren't signs of an introvert, they're signs of social anxiety. Social anxiety has lots of causes - neurodivergence and behavioral disorders among them. But it's not caused by "being an introvert."

Even if there's truth to the charge/drain extrovert/introvert dichotomy, all humans need both regular social interaction as well as alone time. An introvert at a social function will feel happy and have fun, the same way an extrovert can enjoy reading a book or taking a walk alone.

Signed,

Show up to the same book club 20 times and those people might become the ones who “don’t count” as draining you. Show up to 20 different kinds of events and you get the hang of making introductions and small talk. The more times things don’t go badly the more resilience you have to new things.

If you are in an upper-middle class/conservative/christian/some other kind of community full of assholes where you are forced - neurodivergent or not - to suck up your entire personality up your asshole and pretend to be perfect all the time or face social expulsion, ALL INTERACTION WILL BE DRAINING.

FIND BETTER PEOPLE.

Find community online! Find a place nearby that doesn't suck maybe.

My mother was brought up in a rural christian conservative racist community, and she may well die without ever truly understanding that you're supposed to be able to share your opinions with others and not get publicly shamed and eviscerated for any perceived misstep.

Carolina Milanesi, an independent technology analyst, said Google is trying to make its cash cow business — search — richer and more personalized, and it will make shopping easier. But there is a risk that users may have fewer choices about what to click. "Right now it's: I ask a question, I get a bunch of answers and I feel that I'm in control as to which answer I take, or if I'm looking for something, which product I'm going to end up buying. That is going to be less so going forward," she said. Milanesi envisions AI-enabled search and agents proposing products to consumers — perhaps even those they have requested — but with less clarity or choice around where it's coming from. "If you're going to say: 'I want a pair of Jordans, go find them,' you're not necessarily sure what steps have been taken and whether the AI has used a source or a store that was paid for and therefore came up in the search results," she said, "or if AI actually went and did their due diligence and picked the best for me as a customer."

And here's one from Time magazine (May 20, 2026):

While Google already has “AI Mode,” the company will now power the whole search bar through its new Gemini 3.5 Flash model.  Instead of the classic list of blue links, Google Search will now also generate a custom page with an AI-generated summary of what you’re searching about, which will then trigger a conversation with AI Mode on the main page, allowing users to ask follow-up questions—similar to the kind of layout you would see when opening ChatGPT.

And a little more from Time's article on how this may affect the websites that we are trying to search for:

Text from the article:

"Would you paint your house a luscious purple? Would you drive a pink car? Would you dress head-to-toe in sunshine yellow? If you said yes, you’re in the minority.

That’s not because gray houses, white cars, and black suits are inherently appealing. Color norms and preferences have a deep history, and according to the art theorist David Batchelor, “In the West…color has been systematically marginalized, reviled, diminished, and degraded.” This marginalization of color has led to collective chromophobia, or fear of color.

Chromophobia has a complex past spanning millennia, but the age of Western colonial expansion put it on steroids. Over the course of the last few centuries, color became a powerful visual indicator of a person’s perceived social, intellectual, and racial status.

There's nothing neutral about neutrals. Read on to learn why we all need a little more color in our lives.

Chromophobia Is a Form of Control

Your initial objection to the concept of chromophobia might be that it’s simple to look around and see plenty of color: green trees, blue sky, vibrant flowers. None of these inspire fear.

But consider this: In the things that we make or buy, color tends to be reined in. (Note, when I say “we,” I’m speaking of a dominant American and European approach to color. Many cultures embrace color, as I’ll explore below.)

For example, it’s fashionable to wear a “pop” of color, but unacceptable for your average American man to show up to a business meeting in a hot pink suit. Large doses of vivid color can seem like an assault on the senses. It’s too “loud.” Too “tacky.”

Chromophobic societies don’t do away with color altogether. They control it.

Just think of all the rules we have for colors: pastels are for the spring; muddy green clashes with bold red; saturated orange is fine for a front door, but your homeowners’ association would shudder if the whole house were orange. All of us know what primary colors are and that red is “warm.”

These rules have become second nature to us, but they aren’t timeless. The concept of primary colors only emerged in the eighteenth century, and the idea of warm colors developed in the nineteenth. In other words, these rules are the product of a particular historical era. And in that era, people were highly concerned about the “anarchy” of color.

There are many reasons color was perceived as socially threatening (too many to cover here), but one major driver was colonial expansion.

The Empire of Color

As European countries extended their trade networks, some of the most precious commodities they found were pigments. Elites reveled in pricey, cochineal-dyed garments and lapis lazuli-dappled paintings.

But as expensive colors grew cheaper and more widely accessible, a lot of powerful businessmen put up resistance. For example, during the seventeenth century, the British East India Company started importing cheap, brightly colored cotton from India. The wool and silk guilds were afraid of losing their stronghold on the market, so they asked lawmakers for protection. New regulations stipulated that the colorful cottons couldn't be sold in England; they had to be immediately exported to other markets.

So, Europeans took their colorful wares to places that would treasure them. West Africans had been using cloth as currency for centuries, and early European merchants learned they could trade colorful cloth for slaves. Europeans took colorful textiles and pigments from places like India, Southeast Asia, and Mexico and traded them for African slaves, many of whom were put to work producing more dyestuffs, like indigo.

Between the late 1800s and the early 1900s, Western European countries aggressively expanded their claims on foreign lands. Previously, the goal had been to enslave Africans, but the new goal was to bring them into the consumer fold. European empires extracted resources (many of which were color-related), then traded them back to their colonial subjects for profit.

By tying chromophilic (color-loving) cultures together, Europeans built a highly lucrative and utterly exploitative economic system.

Superiority and Savagery

Meanwhile, back in Europe, people began associating bright colors with Other-ness, degeneracy, and inferiority. The German writer Goethe famously stated, “Men in a state of nature, uncivilized nations, and children have a great fondness for colors in their utmost brightness.”

That prejudice was still alive a century later. In 1912, the advertising executive Frank Parsons asserted, “Many Latin races, still somewhat primitive in taste, need [red] to meet their temperaments.” And in 1921, color psychologists like J.C.F. Grumbine still stressed, “The primary colors of red, yellow, and blue appealed to the elemental and simple minds of the savage.”

Some authors used pseudoscientific justification to support these claims. They argued that “savage” people needed stronger stimulation because they had duller senses. (This justification was also used by slaveowners who claimed slaves were “insensitive” to pain.)

Increasingly, so-called “good taste” became linked to “quiet colors,” or what we’d call neutrals today. For example, gentlemen only wore dark suits, and demure women never wore red. Over time, neutrals became the stamp of social and moral superiority, while too much saturation threatened a slippery slope back to “savagery.”

In short, color preferences became a weapon, a way to instantly label a person as “uncivilized” or inferior.

Let Go

The very idea of “good taste” draws on a deep well of cultural assumptions of what's “normal” or “refined.” There is no such thing as an inherently professional, respectable color. Those are categories that we’ve created, and frankly, they come with a lot of economic, social, and historical baggage.

It’s time to revisit those assumptions and loosen the reins. I’m not suggesting that everyone has to parade around in neon or toss neutrals out the window. But personally, I’d love to see a world that readily embraces color instead of restraining it. I’d like for us to overcome our collective chromophobia and say, “It’s okay to step out of my comfort zone! I’m going to have fun. Or, at least, I’m not going to judge others who do.” After all, what are we so afraid of?

I've been to an exhibition on the history of men's fashion in the West and it explained that modern men's fashion has always been influenced by the military uniforms of its time.

When the battlefield relied on cannons and was covered in smoke and dust, it was necessary for the soldiers to dress in bright colors, so that they could easily tell friend from foe in lowered visibility. And because tailors (craftsmen making clothing specifically for men) were hired to make military uniforms, the same tailors started to make everyday civilian clothes to mimic the military style. Because military uniforms accentuate masculine features (on purpose), and the society loves to accentuate the differences between men and women.

Then the battlefield changed and military moved to use dull, masking colors, to ensure the soldiers are harder to be hit by precise guns of the time. And similarly, men's fashion also stopped using bright colors. Because the "ideal man" (a soldier) never wore bright colors, so obviously anyone who wants to be masculine will want to avoid bright colors, or so the tailors said.