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Bloop

@exactlyfuzzystarlight

INDIAN~♀️~love HP~Also Pixie and Brutus~Current obsession Kpop~love playing Pokemon unite and Call of Duty

There's a handful of notes on this going "well fuck you, do you know how hard it is to BE the speaker and not have anyone greet you?" and uh, yes, yes I do, because I did those stupid ass soft skills/resilience/insert other assorted nonsense workshops for schools for a living for a while, and I still agree with this.

The key to being an effective speaker is the ability to understand your audience. You need to understand people in order to build a rapport with them. And you need to build a rapport with them in order to effectively guide them from where they are, to where you need them to be.

So. Here is the situation from the perspective of the audience: this random person, whom they have never met before and do not care about, is being paid by employers/school powers that be to come speak on a thing. In other words, the speaker is the one benefitting from being there. Meanwhile, the audience has likely been ordered to be there, for no immediate, tangible benefit in return. It is early in the morning, they are sleep-deprived and under-caffeinated, they have a shit ton of stuff on their to-do list, they are unconvinced whatever the speaker is going to say is going to be of any use or relevance whatsoever, and so they see this talk as a waste of time that they could instead be spending on sleep or at least finishing off things that are actually necessary for work/school. And now this rando, whom I repeat, is supposed to be the service provider, whose presence is already a pain, is asking for even more effort on the audience's part by asking them to smile and be chipper. All before saying a single other word that might convince said audience that they are going to get any benefit whatsoever out of being there. Fuck that.

You gotta understand, you are not some rock star that people are already invested in and actively want to see. Those get to do the "scream! I can't hear you! LOUDER!" thing. The fact of the matter is, you are probably someone your audience has no interest in seeing, and until you give them a reason for wanting to be there, you cannot ask them for even more emotional effort. That's not going to endear them to you.

I am by no means a particularly great speaker, but I can tell you now that I have gotten far more immediate rapport and engagement by simply going "hello hello, morning, how is everyone?" and then when I get the predictably unenthusiastic mass groaning and grumbling, and unenergetic "morning"s back in return, replying "heh, big mood. It's final project season innit; how sleep deprived are y'all? --yeouch, intense, well I'll try my best to keep this as painless as I possibly can; I'm here today to talk about--" etc etc. Simple, sympathetic, and while it's not the most energetic and enthusiastic thing in the world, it puts me on "their" side and opens a connection that I can build on for the rest of the talk, instead of instantly making my audience feel 10x more tired and hostile.

If you are not a speaker being paid to be there, but are instead someone giving a presentation for an assignment or presenting a paper or whatever, then I've found that being sincere and a little self-deprecating, possibly just a tiny bit vulnerable works pretty well: "Oh god, so full disclosure, I don't speak very often and I'm sweating bullets right now, and also I tend to babble like a bullet train when I'm nervous so if at any point you cannot understand me please ask me to slow down, but I have a thing I need to present, and I think it's pretty cool, and hopefully you do too." Your audience has probably been in your shoes before, and are now inclined to be nice to you out of sympathy.

In both cases, it's about understanding your listeners and where you stand in relation to them and using that to build that initial connection. You cannot demand connection; it never fucking works.

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In a statement to The Post, a spokesperson for NBCUniversal claimed the tree work is simply an annual ritual at this time of year. “We understand that the safety tree trimming of the Ficus trees we did on Barham Blvd. has created unintended challenges for demonstrators, that was not our intention. In partnership with licensed arborists, we have pruned these trees annually at this time of year to ensure that the canopies are light ahead of the high wind season,” they wrote. “We support the WGA and SAG’s right to demonstrate and are working to provide some shade coverage. We continue to openly communicate with the labor leaders on-site to work together during this time.”

If those trees were pollarded annually, the cut areas would NOT look like that. There would be big knobs of old growth at the trimming sites. Not seeing any of that here. The way those trees were topped (not pollarded, which is a very careful process that has to begin when the tree is immature) is excellent way to kill them due to loss of hydration, open sites to infection and parasitism during the best time of year for both, lack of nutrition due to so little greenery and new budding growth being left, sunburn and other exposure damage, and a myriad of other possibilities. Plus, if they were topped annually, they would not have the lovely drooping branches seen in the other picture but would have tons of vertical suckers instead.

This is what an annually pollarded mature tree should look like:

If this was done by the city, the public works arborists should be protesting in front of city hall and screaming their heads off right now. I'm not hearing about that, so... Tree law!

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The Studios: *speak*

Botanists and other Tree Experts:

Update and confirmation of Imminent Tree Law:

He mentions later in the thread that not only do they not trim the trees annually, they’re trimmed at best once every 18 years. Supposed to be every five, and only in dormancy, which even my layman’s ass knows about tree trimming.

And yes, Universal can probably eat the fine. But it’s gonna be a whopper even if the trees survive (which is as mentioned kinda unlikely), California is a triple damage state for tree law, and it may increase dramatically if there were nesting birds in the trees.

All this to be a Captain Planet filler villain to some writers. And yes, it’s currently just the writers officially picketing there; SAG-AFTRA recommended against it for petty bullshit like this and the suddenly necessary sidewalk construction.

My favorite thing is that Europe is spooky because it’s old and America is spooky because it’s big

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“The difference between America and England is that Americans think 100 years is a long time, while the English think 100 miles is a long way.” –Earle Hitchner

A fave of mine was always the american tales where people freaked out because ‘someone died in this house’ and all the europeans would go ‘…Yes? That would be pretty much every house over 40 years old.’

‘…My school is older than your entire town.’

‘Sorry, you think *how far* is okay to travel for a shopping trip?’

*American looks up at the beams in a country pub* ‘Uh, this place has woodworm, isn’t that a bit unsafe?’ ‘Eh, the woodworm’s 400 years old, it’s holding those beams together.’

A few years ago when I was in college I did a summer program at Cambridge aimed specifically at Americans and Canadians, and my year it was all Americans and one Australian.  We ended the program with a week in Wessex, and on the last day as we all piled onto the bus in Salisbury (or Bath? I can’t remember), the professors went to the front to warn us that we wouldn’t be making any stops unless absolutely necessary.  We’re headed to Heathrow to drop off anyone flying off the same day, then back to Cambridge.

“All right, it’s going to be a long bus ride, so make sure you’re prepared for that.”

We all brace ourselves.  A long bus ride?  How long?  We’re Americans; a long bus ride for us is a minimum of six hours with the double digits perfectly plausible.  We can handle a twelve hour bus ride as long as we get a bathroom break.

The answer.  “Two hours.”

Oh.

English people trying to travel around Australia and wildly underestimating distance are my favourite thing

a tour guide in France told my school group that a particular cathedral wouldn’t interest us much because “it’s not very old; only from the early 1600s”

to which we had to respond that it was still older than the oldest surviving European-style buildings in our country

China is both old and big. I had some Chinese colleagues over; we were discussing whether they wanted to see the Vasa ship (hugely expensive war ship which sank on it’s maiden voyage after 12 min). They asked if it was old, I said “not THAT old” (bearing in mind they were Chinese) “it’s from the 1500s.” To my surprise they still looked impressed, nodding enthusiatically. Then I realised I’d forgotten something: “…I mean it’s from the 1500s AFTER the birth of Christ” and they went “oh, AFTER…”.

My dad’s favorite quote from various tours in Italy was “Pay no attention to the tower – it was a [scornful tone] tenth century addition.”

My last boss was Chinese, and she said when her parents came to visit her from Beijing they pronounced Chicago “A very nice village.” 

This post keeps getting better

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European problems include:

- Missing a turn and now you need to cross the border;

- Towns built 500 to 800 years ago with really small roads where cars can barely fit;

- That road/parking lot/etc they were building is gonna take twice the time to finish because they found Roman ruins AGAIN!

European problems extended: 

 WW2 bombs.

I love this post but also hate it because people never acknowledge the structures of native and indigenous people in America and Canada. We literally have pyramids here in Illinois that are thousands of years old.

There is stuff here from the Aztecs, but since it wasn’t made by settlers people think that America is only as old as when Europeans came over.

The population that got wiped out and displaced by Europeans is still here and needs to be acknowledged. America and Canada aren’t “young” and have more history than most ppl acknowledge.

RT only for the last post. 

[Image description: headlines of WWII bombs either exploding unexpectedly in European towns and cities or being found during road works. /ID]

I went walking on some public footpaths in England and everyone was like “oh this one was a Roman roads, these are so ancient!” and I ended up cranky because there are ancient or at least hundred of year old roads in the Americas, we just don’t pay attention to them because Colonization.

To be clear - I don’t have any issue with OP’s statement (or even any of the reblogs). Im just cranky at the US educational system. And boomers, a little.

Where do you think the oldest shoes in the world are? China? Greece? Iraq?

they’re from Oregon:

Catalog #1-33612 and #1-31699 Sagebrush Sandals: Fort Rock Cave, Oregon, ca. 10,000 years old

even with those four numbers there are countless possible combinations good luck with figuring out which one is the right one you punk

*straightens calculator*

It’s pretty likely that it’s a four digit number, and as there are four digits chosen there, that means that there cannot be any repetition. This mean that there are:

n!/(n-4)! possible orders. As ‘n’ is 4 (number of digits available). 4!/0! which becomes 4x3x2x1/1 which simplifies to 24. That means that there are 24 possible combinations of codes. This would take you about two or three minutes to input all possible codes.

Unless an alarm goes off if you don’t get it right in 3 tries

*straightens calculator again*

Kick the fucking door in

well ‘technically’ the code is most likley 1970. statistically, a majority of people, when told to choose a 4 digit code will choose their birth year. and this key pad is obviously a few years old to put it nicely, thats most likley it. 

some sherlock holmes shit just went down over here

No, no, no. Don’t base your deductions of psychology. Let’s talk chemistry. When you first press a button, there’s more of the natural oils on your skin, and therefore it wears down the numbers on the keys faster. Obviously 0 is the first one, then. Try 0791 first.

Sherlock out.

woah.

it got better

and this is why the sherlock fandom could either rule the world or end it….

Close, but not quite, I think. People will almost always choose a number they can remember. What’s memorable about 0791? Try 0719 - a birthday, 19th of July. That is more likely.

Those deductions are great and all, but unnecessary.

The light is green.

The door is already open.

And that’s why we have a John Watson.

This is “top 10 favorite posts” level.

Omg, it’s actually on my dash! This post is like a fossil!

Idk if I’ve rebloged this before, but I’ll reblog this legend again

Smithsonian? I’ve found the quintessential Tumblr and Sherlock fandom post. Yes. I would consider it definitive.

Ahh it’s back.

Legend of a post. 10/10 recommend reblogging.

this post is on my dash I feel HONORED

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THE POST OF LEGENDS HAS RESURFACED ON MY DASH

I’VE ONLY EVER SEEN THIS IN SCREENSHOTS OMG

On your dash? I dig for gold like this,,, by looking at my mutual pages.

I’ve only seen this on Pinterest!

*gasp* THE SACRED TEXTS!

THIS IS A LEGENDARY POST I HAVE BEEN GRACED BY IT’S APPEARANCE!!!

yesssss

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Why did Tumblr stop doing stuff like this, it’s genuinely fascinating, and cute that we include our favorite media in things we do

Well. Since you asked. I was on tumblr as this post was being built in 2013. The height of superwholock. Which has, since then, been declared peak cringe. So people picked new fandoms to openly love in earnest. Which were also eventually declared cringe. Eventually the youth decided to cut out the middleman, and declared loving anything in earnest to be fully cringe. So it has been a really long time since the day to day users of tumblr have let any fandom create anything nearing the cultural phenomenon that was superwholock. And it is exactly those cultural phenomena that are needed to create posts like this.

So. What happened? Cringe culture happened.

Try and imagine what would happen if this post wasn’t the “sacred texts” only ever seen in screen shots and in pinterest. Try and imagine any current pop culture detective media fandom creating this post today. They’d be slaughtered for being cringe by the time (in this case) Sherlock was mentined.

But because this post is 10 years old and completely broke containment, it’s celebrated when it graces our dashes.

I blazed a small fandom event announcement.  Because I was genuinely excited to be part of a Big Bang for a wonderful movie.  One of the first responses I got was “Why would you blaze this?” Because of genuine excitement. Because I wanted to celebrate the friends I’d met in the fandom To spread joy to people who might also like the content but hadn’t seen it yet.   The fact that that was genuinely not realized made me sad.  I love thing, I celebrate thing.   I’m too old for cringe.  Cringe is dead.  Love what you love.  Enjoy the small things in life, it’s too short to do otherwise.

CRINGE CULTURE DIED AND WE KILLED IT.

SPREAD THE LOVE FOR YOUR FAVORITE SHOWS

CRINGE CULTURE DIED AND

WE KILLED IT.SPREAD THE LOVE FOR

YOUR FAVORITE SHOWS

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

I have noticed an increasing number of my mutuals who dont use tumblrs mobile app and it got me curious-

Please do me a favour and reblog for more data.

It would be greatly appreciated!

To people who use "þ" as an aesthetic "p"

þink again.

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getting thorny in the linguistics fandom

þorny*

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That also goes for using ß as an aesthetic B. 

On my old server, there was a character named ßillyßadass.

This never failed to make me laugh, because that letter is not pronounced like B. It is a sharp S. 

That guy named himself SsillySsadass. 

Also to people who you Σ as an aesthetic E

that’s an S too, Σo maybe check next time

oh boy

Д as an aesthetic A? Дon’t be a дumbass.

И as an aesthetic N? don’t be sillи.

П as another aesthetic N? stoп it.

У as an aesthetic Y? ty bad.

Ш or Щ as an aesthetic W? nope. it’s “sh” and “shch”!

Я as an aesthetic R? surprise! it’s “ya”.

ah yes, that classic horror film SNYEYAPOVUL DIAYAIES

This is pronounced Stargoat.

Reblogging for Stargoat.

STARGOAT

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I saw in Japan a bag of marshmallows named SCANDINAVIAN MÅRSHMÅLLOW and I still have not recovered from that. It reads as SCANDINAVIAN MORSHMOLLOW 

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I used say I’m off to shop at Toys Ya Us (Toys Я Us). I worked at a now-defunct computer company called Nuasis, whose logo looked like NUɅSIS, which we often read as Nul-sis. (No known link to the Brazilian sex shop.)

Fun with alphabets.

Not a W, but a s/sh: ש

Not an X, but a silent vowel: א

Not a Y, but a different silent vowel: ע

Not an N, but an H: ה

Not an N, but the ch sound nobody can make: ח

Not an O, but an S: ס