biblioprincessdalian:

When programmers invented rubber duck debugging they were right but what they don’t tell you is that this also works for like 90% of other complex intellectual tasks. Nothing solves a problem faster than just trying to explain it to somebody.

The English language needs a punctuation mark to indicate sarcasm.

grrrrrlbaby:

pleasurewhore:

You’re confused, angry, frustrated, hurt…  just: *insert overwhelming emotion here*. You’re at a loss and don’t see how to fix it. You don’t want to top from the bottom, you know anger isn’t helping, and you don’t know where to begin.

It may seem overly simplistic but there are a few basic things to look at when you’re having trouble that you don’t know how to handle. I’m not perfect, not by a long shot. (In fact I’ve got a list of past punishments to prove it.) I’m not a guru or a counselor, just a normal everyday sub who has learned, and is still learning, the hard way how to navigate things like this. However, I do have a little bit of advice about how to proceed when you feel lost, and while it may not be perfect I hope it will help even one submissive who doesn’t know how to take the next step.

1) Define the problem. First Identify the emotion. Then work to figure out what you suspect is causing you to feel that way. Ex: I feel unimportant. Why do I feel that way? When we’re in the middle of a text conversation my partner disappears without warning, or he has very little time for me when he gets home and is always busy on the weekends.

2) Check for red flags. Okay now you know what the problem is. Write it down. Use no more than one sentence. I mean it… just one sentence. Yes, it’s possible. Trust me it is. ex: “His schedule is unpredictable and busy and the lack of attention makes me feel unimportant.” Perfect- normal problem, mo red flags. Now let’s look at a different one… “He disappears for days without warning and when I ask him about it he calms me clingy, and it makes me feel unimportant” This one is not normal. Red flag. What do you do with a red flag? Assuming it’s just one red flag, you skip to step #6.

3) Find the ideal solution. Ignore practicality for a moment and say exactly what it is that you want. (Yes, I think it’s important to suspend reality a moment because seeing that the ideal isn’t obtainable, or finding that it is can be freeing) Ex: I want him to spend weekends with me, physically together, and I want to talk every night after we get home from work. I want him to let me know if he has to step away from our text conversations for more than 10 minutes.

4) Check if the solution is realistic. Now bring some reason into the equation. Letting you know when he’s stepping away during a conversation would be a reasonable request. You have to provide for the fact that sometimes it won’t be possible and you’ll have to accept an apology instead, but this is a matter of habits and behaviors, so it’s a reasonable thing to want changed. But, a Dom who is a surgeon and works long unpredictable hours can not just rearrange his schedule or quit his job to accommodate a nightly call. A Dom who has his children every other weekend can not give you his full attention at those times.

5) Look for other options. Is there another way? Ahh good old compromise. As my husband is so fond of saying, “there is always a third option.” Ex: Perhaps your Dom is indeed a surgeon. Maybe he can’t call every night, but perhaps instead he can pre-record voice/video messages for you for when you’re feeling particularly needy. His schedule is unpredictable and he gets called in at odd times, or gets stuck in surgery with no way to communicate. Perhaps you decide to turn on the GPS tracker on his phone so that you can see where he is when your anxiety gets the best of your and you fear the worst.

6) Communicate! And now let’s get down to the nitty gritty. The hard part. The part nearly everyone avoids… communication. Doms aren’t mind readers. If you don’t tell them, then they won’t know.

If this is a red flag situation the communication then expect to educate. Be unequivocal. Tell them X is a need for you, and that it’s non-negotiable. If they shut you down…run. I mean it. If someone cannot tell the difference between a desire and a need, or is not open to understanding why their behavior is hurtful they are not a person you want making your decisions for you.

Assuming there are no red flags please keep in mind the dynamic. Be respectful. Speak in terms of facts and feelings. “When X happens I feel this way.” Try to avoid accusations and generalizations. “You always… You never… You don’t care about…” Give them a chance to think, and to respond. Offer up some of the solutions you’ve thought of. Do so respectfully and keep in mind the power exchange dynamic.

7) Evaluate the response. At this point they’ve heard you out and told you their view. They’ve listened to your ideas about how to move forward and now you have to ask yourself if you can you live with it. Sacrifice happens in relationships, but at some point if you feel you are compromising too much you may decide that despite how much you love this person that this just isn’t the time for you, or that you need things they can’t offer. Hopefully you won’t. Hopefully you’ll discover that most problems have alternate solutions if both parties want to find a way to make things work.

And just for good measure, when a Dom handles this sort of thing well, be sure to thank them! It’s not easy to be on the receiving end of this sort of discussion, especially when you’re meant to be in charge and keep the problems at bay. But it’s normal. The way a Dom reacts to a rational, respectful request speaks volumes about their character. So when they show you they’ve got some integrity be sure to recognize it!

Tips

These are just great guidelines for dealing with problems/conflicts in any relationship. Thanks for taking the time to write all of this out!

This is a really good problem for looking at through the lens of patterns.

With 1 person, there are no handshakes.

Between two people, there is one, just between the two.

For three handshakes between Alice, Bob and Carol, Alice shakes both Bob and Carol’s hand (that’s two) and then Bob and Carol need to shake hands. So that’s 3. 

Four handshakes: A, B, C, D. A shakes everyone’s hand (3). Then B has to shake C and D’s hand, but *not* A’s because they already shook. So that’s two more, and then C and D shake. That’s 6 in total.

We could run through five handshakes, or we could imagine that A, B, C and D have already done all their handshaking, and then E walks into the room. What happens? Ze shakes everyone’s hand in the room, which is 4 more. So that’s 10.

The next person has five hands to shake, so that’s 15.

So our pattern is:

0, 0+1, 0+1+2, 0+1+2+3, 0+1+2+3+4, 0+1+2+3+4+5 and so on.

So how many handshakes occur between and among 10 people? Well, the first person has to shake 9 hands, the next person 8, and so on. So 9+8+7+6+5+4+3+2+1=45.

Triangle Numbers

These are called the triangle numbers, because you can make increasing sizes of triangles like this, with each row having one more dot.

Consider, though, that in a group of 10, every person shakes 9 hands. So why aren’t there 90 handshakes? (Think about it)

Well, when two people shake hands, they both come away thinking there’s been a handshake, so there are two handshakes accounted for in the count. Each handshake is double counted, so there are 90/2=45 handshakes.

And this gives us a method for finding the number of handshakes among 100 people. It’s 100*99/2=4950. Or n people: n(n-1)/2.

This is just a bit off of the nth triangular number, because for triangular numbers, we don’t count 0 as the first, with one person. So the 100th triangular number is the number of handshakes among 101 people.

And we get a slightly different equation, which we can derive algebraically, or geometrically, which is cool. Take one of the above triangles, left justify it, double it and put them together to make a rectangle:

The area of the rectangle is n(n+1) and we divide it by two to get the area of the triangle, n(n+1)/2.

Other Problems

Diagonals:How many diagonals does an n-gon have? Go try and find a pattern!

A triangle has no diagonals. A quadrilateral has two. A pentagon has five. A hexagon has nine. 

0, 2, 5, 9. Looks like we add two, then three, then four. Why would that be?

Well, let’s look at a pentagon. There are five diagonals already. If we add a corner, what connects to that? This is our 6th corner, and it can’t connect to itself, nor to those corners directly adjacent to it. So it has three dots to connect to, adding three diagonals. But ALSO, one of the sides of our original pentagon is no longer a side, but a diagonal. This is probably best seen in pictures:

You see the original on the left, and then the new sides (in green) and the new diagonals (in purple), including IH, which was a side (DC) in the original.

What would happen next? The 7th corner will connect to four (7-itself-two adjacents=4) diagonals, and there will be another side turning into a diagonal. So 9+5=14.

So how many for a 10-gon? Well let’s recap:

3-gon (triangle): 0

4-gon (quadrilateral): 2

5-gon (pentagon): 5 (2+3)

6-gon (hexagon): 9 (2+3+4)

7-gon (heptagon): 14: (2+3+4+5)

So it looks like 10-gon would be: 8 (start at 2 less than the number of sides) +7+6+5+4+3+2 (don’t include 1) = 35.

If you notice, we have the triangle numbers minus 1, because of no shape with only 1 diagonal.

Equation

Is there a faster way, like for the triangle numbers? Well, of course you could just do the triangle numbers minus 1, but being careful about which triangle number we’re at, because we start at n=3, with a triangle, because the first triangle number (1) minus 1 =0. So we have to subtract two from our n’s.

So we could do (n-2)(n-1)/2 - 1. Let’s test to see if I’ve done it right.

For n=3: (1)(2)/2 - 1=0. Good!

Or n=10: (8)(9)/2 - 1 =35. Great.

OR, look for another pattern like the handshakes. Every corner (n) connects to every other one, except itself and the two next to it (n-3).

That’s n(n-3). But again, every line connecting two dots/corners is going to be counted twice, A to B and then B to A. So n(n-3)/2.

Again: for n=3, we get 0.

For n=10: 10(7)/2=35.

The power of patterns!

sometimes

all the time

i wonder what

my life would

be like if

i’d met you earlier

if i hadn’t met you at all

hergan416:

therainstheyaredropping:

homunculus-argument:

Imagine if you met someone who can’t eat watermelon. Not that they’re allergicorunablesomehow, but they just haven’t figured out how to do that. So you’re like “what the hell do you mean? it works just like eating anything else, you open your mouth, sink your teeth in, take a bite and chew. If you can bite, chew and swallow, you should be able to eat a watermelon.”

And they agree that yes, they do know how to eat, in theory. The problem is the watermelon. Surely, if they figured out where to start, they’d figure out how to do it, but they have no clue how to get started with it.

This goes back and forth. No, it’s not an emotional issue, they’re not afraidof the watermelon. They caneat any other fruit, other sweet things, and other watery things (“it’s watery?” they ask you). Is it the colour? Do they have a problem eating things that are green on the outside and red on the inside?

“It’sredon the inside?”

Wait, they’ve never seenthe inside? At this point you have to ask them how, exactly, they eat the watermelon. So to demonstrate, they take a whole, round, uncut watermelon, and try to bite straight into it. Even if they couldbite through the crust, there’s no way to get human jaws around it.

“Oh, you’re supposed to cut it first. You cut the crust open and only chew through the insides.”

And they had no idea. All their life this person has had no idea how to eat a watermelon, despite of being told again and again and again that it’s easy, it’s ridiculous to struggle with something so simple, there’s no way that someone just can’teat a watermelon, how can you even mange to be bad at something as fucking simple as eating watermelon.

If someone can’t do something after being repeatedly told to “just do it”, there might be some key component missing that one side has no idea about, and the other side assumed was so obvious it goes without mention.

Yep.

https://drmaciver.substack.com/p/how-to-do-everything had a nice list of additional examples like this, with (non-)obvious major insights with regard to opening stitched bags, cleaning your bathroom floor, using a search engine, catching a ball, pinging somebody, proving a theorem, playing sudoku, passing as “normal”, improving your writing, generating novel ideas, and solving your problem.

If you’d asked me six months ago how to get better at something, I’d probably have pointed you to how to do hard things. I still think this is a good approach and you should do it, but I now think it’s the wrong starting point and I’ve been undervaluing small insights. […]

I think my revised belief is that if you are stuck at how to get better at something, spend a little while assuming there’s just some trick to it you’ve missed. You can try to generate the trick yourself, but it’s probably easier to learn it by observing someone else being good at the thing, asking them some questions, and seeing if you have any lightbulb moment.

My fiance played the clarinet when he was in school. When he was first learning to play, he rented an instrument from the school to learn on. He was the last chair clarinet, had been for years, because he could not make notes that required the register key. For years, they kept making him do embrature exercises and he started to get a few notes, with lots of effort. Eventually he had to get private lessons to stay in band.

Every time he tells me this story, his frustration by this point in the story, years later, is evident. He still sounds frustrated by it, despite all the time that passed. Teachers had been giving him crap for years because he hadn’t been making much progress with the instrument.

When he got to the private instructor, she acknowledged his frustration, and asked him to try to play for her. He did, and she saw all he was doing. She then did something no one else had done before. She asked him to put his mouthpiece on a different clarinet and try to play the same notes. Like magic, it worked. She looked at the clarinet he had been using and found that the school’s clarinet needed it’s pads replaced.

He went from last chair to first chair nearly overnight, having been taught far more techniques than typically taught at that age just to overcome the broken instrument preventing him from making noise.

Sometimes you don’t need to brute force a problem. Sometimes your clarinet is just broken.

PLEASE