Thailand: I am in it!

In Chonburi with my friend Logicgate who is getting bottom surgery because she's a fuckin' gangster who is doing an awesome thing.

The flights were great, because international flights are great when your baseline is USA domestic flying. On our last leg from Qatar we had this guy sitting in the aisle seat and I was at the window. He drank enough double gin and tonics that I don't know how many he drank. Sometimes he ordered coffee, so I figured that meant he'd at least had some things which weren't alcohol, but NOPE. Turns out his coffee had brandy in it. Soooo he just got progressively more and more hammered (in fact, Logicgate has dubbed him Captain Hammered), and got proportionately more obnoxious.

At the start of the flight he was offering to help us stow luggage and stuff just because he was on the aisle and is a dude and we're not so sure. By the end of the flight he was poking Logicgate and narrating her responses to the movie we were watching (seriously, telling her "you are laughing!" when she is laughing is not useful data sir but thank you) and when she was not responding with enough attention he switched his focus to me or something?

He was telling her to smile and she didn't respond, and since she was being my social bulletsponge by being physically between me and other people (I FUCKING HATE BEING TOUCHED Y'ALL), I chimed in there with, "She'll smile when she wants to. No, she'll smile when she feels like it." He got desperate and tried to reach across her to me. I don't know if he wanted to touch my face or what but I looked over and there was just this hand all of a sudden like an object in a 3D movie flying at the screen for no reason and she deflects his hand and I am sitting there like "WHAT IS GOING ON."

We were watching Tangled, because one does, and I shut my window shade because I had a glare on my screen. He told me to open it. He didn't ask; he told me. Now, I would accept that this is a language barrier thing because he had a fairly thick accent and so allowances must be made for less than perfect fluency, but if his fluency dropped it was because he'd gotten plastered on the flight, so I just told him, "No." He repeated his imperative and I said, "No. I am watching a movie." Because, sir, if you try to make me choose between your interests and Flynn Rider, I am sorry but Flynn is a fine piece of computer-generated mancandy and you will not be happy with the outcome of that ultimatum.

So that was very silly!

The hotel is nice, and there are plenty of places nearby to eat. We also met other people who either are here for surgery or are here for a reunion since they met on previous occasions for the same thing. They are AWESOME. Logicgate observed that selection bias is on our side here in a big way since the clinic has a lot of patients staying here basically all the time, but I am just delighted that we had random people come colonize our dinner table and hang out with us.

We have a common area on our floor with four chairs and a little table and suchforth, and I definitely plan on camping out there on the regular. If I want to just read quietly by myself, I will do it there so that hopefully I will attract others to use the common space because that is what they are for. Then we can all get our introvert on when necessary without actually needing to hide in our rooms. That is my plan.

After dinner, more hilarity ensued.

I complimented one of the hotel employees on her shoes (they were these gorgeous red-bottomed stilettos), and she did a little dance in them to show she could, and then TOOK THEM OFF AND GOT ME TO WEAR THEM.

I was figuring she was just showing me, but no, she really wanted me to put them on.

So here's what's ridiculous.

She looked at my feet and knew that our feet were the exact same size. I cannot even estimate how well something will fit my feet by looking and she was just like yep you should wear my shoes and let's see you walk in them! so I did.

They were super comfortable! Mostly though, like.... omg how did she know my shoe size?!

Personality Parameters

Following belenen's excellent entry about core values, I thought I would set down some that I've come to thanks to a combination of self-examination and conversations with other people who appear to be neuroatypical in a way that I am/have been (more on this in another entry perhaps). For Reasons I sort of think of myself as operating based on rules like with AI design, and so rather than sorting by core values and secondary values, I'll sort by supergoals and subgoals and try to explain the interactions between them.

My morality and ethics and personal qualms and preferences feel intuitive to me, but that is because I know what I mean by certain terms and how important they are relative to other things. The structure is actually fairly rigid. There is an extent to which these aren't reflected in my behavior, but that discrepancy is created by failure to implement them, not a failure in the goals and subgoals themselves.

So here are some personality parameters. This is the Me Manual to the best of my current ability to articulate it; an AI which had my memories and this goal system should be a fair approximation of me as a person. Goals aren't ranked within their categories, though it's possible with some thought I could test out how my internal system prioritizes them and come to something a little more precise.

SUPERGOALS are goals that, when endangered, act as dealbreakers for anything they touch.

• Improve. This effectively just requires aggressive, frequent, and proactive debugging. I actually do read self-help books in an effort to detect and address flaws and just generally rationalize the whole system. It's better to find and at least be aware of any bugs before they come into play, so in the spirit of "ounce of prevention" it's best to continually seek areas for improvement. Current areas include: patience, concentration, and level of contempt for others who fail to meet my standards.
• Meet own standards. Basically, don't be a hypocrite. If someone has done a thing which caused me pain or broke some rule, this adds an extra imperative to check myself for that thing to ensure I get opportunities to shore up any shortcomings there. This rule takes certain things (examples: lying, gaslighting, sexual coercion, suspending goals when having an emotional experience, coughing with my mouth uncovered, etc.) off the metaphorical table of my options not because of the harm they would do to others but because of the harm they have done to me. The precise applications of this rule depend on both my own personal history, and my ability to extrapolate from my experience to find analogous experiences in the lives of others (example: despite me not really understanding the myriad complexities of gender and sex, misgendering is off the table because of my ban on gaslighting).
• Do things on purpose. Just because a decision is quick or intuitive does not mean that it does not need to be intentional. Nothing else can be achieved if decisions aren't required to be considered before being made, if cost-benefit analysis is ever not required. Doing things reflexively is generally inferior to doing them deliberately, unless the reflex was itself deliberately instilled (which can happen).

SUBGOALS

• Expand awareness of other kinds of life experience. One of the best ways to find new diagnostic tools for myself is to get to know other minds as best I can. There are many kinds of lived experience that I can most efficiently learn to map by listening to people in question as they self-report. More data on minds is good, though giving up an opportunity to get more data can be justifiable if acquiring it would conflict with a supergoal.
• Indulge. Something which only brings me joy need not justify its value any other way, provided the pursuit or acquisition of it doesn't interfere with a supergoal.
• Match my contribution to the world with what I think it should have more or less of. This is only a subgoal because there are cases when my contribution to the world needs to be set at a lower priority than the supergoals; after all, I am not guaranteed to improve myself by improving the world, but if I set improving myself as a priority I am guaranteed to improve both myself and the world.

NON-NEGOTIABLE FACTS are things which are to be treated as true regardless of empirical support. For some people this may be a claim such as, "Jesus Christ died for my sins," or may be a value statement such as, "There's no excuse for violence."

• That which can be destroyed by the truth should be. This is potentially a self-breaking rule; its job is to condemn to eventual destruction any alleged facts which do not stand up to factual examination (including this rule if necessary). It's in this category to prevent anything else from being there.