Kiinnostusvirhe

BUT on the flipside, I have a right to explain myself and clarify. It is not diminishing or dismissing or gaslighting the person who was hurt for me to say:

"Oh, yikes, that's absolutely not what I meant, here, this is what I meant! I was not trying to cause harm."

This is not gaslighting. I'm also not honestly responsible for the fact that you misread what I wrote. I am absolutely baffled that some people think it is harmful to talk things out, and here's the bottom line:

Intentional harm and accidental harm are not the same thing.

People love to talk about false equivalences on here all the time, until it comes to intent vs impact; suddenly everything becomes black and white and ALL intent is meaningless and ALL impacts are the "truth" even when they very clearly are not what the person meant.

Like. In our justice system we literally delineate between different kinds of "killing people". This is an extreme example, but ride with me for a sec. We have something called "accidental manslaughter", but we also have "murder in the first degree", which means you planned it and intended to murder.

Our justice system is aware that not all harm is equivalent, so people online acting like intent is irrelevant are just wildly ignorant on purpose.

Oh, yes.

A few years ago I went to pick up a woman I met on OKCupid for a date, and a friend of hers was there. They kind of over-explained “Oh, she just showed up to say hi” and there was a vague nervousness in the air that even my autistic ass was picking up on. Her friend was playing conspicuously with her phone. I went “Ah, the safety. Need to get a picture?”

Dead silence for about a second and a half, then the friend took a picture, looked at my date, and said “Have fun” and walked out the door.

(I would ordinarily have been clueless, but I’d just been asked to be the safety the previous night.)

My advice to male-presenting folks: recognize that this not your problem. By which I mean, this sort of security check isn’t a problem for you. It doesn’t hurt you. You aren’t being insulted or disrespected. And if you treat it like what it is– a reasonable adaptation to an unreasonable situation– and just roll with it, your dates will be more comfortable, and you will have a better time as a result.

The same applies to phone calls mid-date. Let them answer the damn phone without drama.

In Heaven, they ask St. Peter if they can still be married.

“Well, let me find out if this is possible. Stay here and I will be right back.”

Six months pass and Peter returns. “Yes, we can do this for you.”

The couple asks, “Well, as we have spent so much time together waiting for your answer, we need to know that if things don’t work out, is there a possibility that we can be divorced?”

Mercator maps - that most of us are used to were originally intended as Europe based navigation tool. EVERYTHING is centered around us.

Here's a very short scene from the West Wing that explains it.

Peters Projection is still not the solution to everything, but it is way closer to reality than the Mercator.

If we want to get even more accurate, we have to slice up the maps a bit, because we cannot fit the world on a rectangle.

Behold the Dymaxion map (1954), which is a flattened icosahedron

and Goode's Homolosine (1925) which looks like an orange peal to keep the accuracy

they are fun

and they make you think

here are 10 versions.