Seems like if you read between the lines, there's a certain commonality in increased respiration/alertness, stress response and showing of teeth that solves a common need across species. When a subject recognizes a lack of alertness, a present threat or the need for aggressive action in the near future, a yawn can help prepare for that while also giving pause to those who might be threats and/or potentially paralyzing prey. The failure in consensus here appears, to me, an inability to describe those seemingly disparate needs as related to the physiology that drives them. Not a lack of understanding, so much as a deficiency in perlocution.
Ay yo so I was bout to tell you how that’s all wrong, but then you go throwin out words like “perlocution” and now I realize you probly know what the fuck is up, so I’m just gonna trust.
Yes, but can you catch a yawn from someone else? That’s the claim about autism, that someone else yawning does not tend to make people on the spectrum yawn. I have no idea whether or not that is true.
It’s absolute bollocks, I’m autistic and I’ve always had to curse out co workers for making me yawn or cough after they do. First I’ve ever heard of this claim.
Reading this post actually made me yawn too! Just by even thinking of it. I have never actually even thought about it I’m depth until your post, it’s just a totally natural reaction to me.
The big one for me is night watch, if you’re on watch and notice yourself yawning then you know that it’s time to wake someone else to take over, because if you fall asleep that’s very dangerous.
As someone with asthma and lowered ability to cycle out CO2, yawning has always helped me restore the “full” feeling and your comment just made everything snap into place.
The primary driver of suffocation panic, pain, and feeling of air starvation isn’t the lack of oxygen but CO2 buildup. It makes sense that yawning on command could then help alleviate the symptoms of CO2 buildup in asthma sufferers.
Might be a group protection mechanism to indicate low oxigen in crammed spaces qith many individuals. In addition to that could be a geoup trigger for rest.
I always thought it was due to clearing the lungs out or to regulate them but then I saw a turtle yawn under water. I then thought it’s ancestors wouldn’t have been swimmers so maybe it’s instinctive still, but then it would need a mechanism to prevent water inhalation. So why retain the yawn.
Perhaps as you say it’s more about visual communication to others around you.
It seems most sensible to me that it serves a bunch of uses: clearing the lungs, alerting yourself and others that you’re tired and probably need someone else to take over, social bonding, spooking predators…
A few months ago I was tasked with translating a script from one IBM emulator program to another because the owners of the first program wouldn’t respond to requests to purchase a new license.
The scripting language used on both was unique to the software, and the documentation was basically non-existent. Plus, the script was written over a decade ago, and the guy who wrote it was long gone.
For weeks I banged my head against the wall trying to figure out the logic flow before I realized that it was essentially BASIC, which I haven’t touched in over 20 years.
I started my programming career with Turbo Basic and Visual Basic 3. The one thing missing from these languages that makes me wonder how the hell I did anything at all is classes. I vaguely remember using arrays for all sorts of weird shit but that’s it.
I still have .BAS files floating around I wrote in QuickBASIC. I have no idea why.
Some where actually useful - like a program that read files (mainly meant for things like executables) and extracted plain text from it. Handy for finding text in files you couldn’t readily open in anything else.
Another renamed files with various switches like title case, or padding numbers with zeros. Was handy for renaming MP3 files for example. Actually they were probably S3M modules back then heh…
Everyone's pointing out that this is specifically about admins (not editors) and the general difficulty of wikipedia editing specifically due to its rules and reversions, but I really feel compelled to offer a counterpoint: this applies to wiki editing in general.
I've been editing mediawiki-based game sites since the mid 2000s - before Wikia became Fandom, before it was evil, before it started gobbling up smaller wikis with tempting financial offers. I took a decade+ off and only recently found myself drawn back into the hobby in the last couple of years when I found a game I loved that had a burgeoning wiki that seemed to need help.
I was handed admin privileges within a month because an extension I wanted to use (ReplaceText) was locked behind admin. Two years later, I'm still there because I hold 85-90% of the edits on it. And I. Just. Can't. Get. Help. Not even from the site owner that handed me admin. I've gotten interest from I think seven whole people in all that time, and all but two dropped off within a week or two; the remaining two have a page or two they each maintain but leave the rest of the site to me. And this is a live service game, so it's a neverending stream of event pages and new content that I, and only I, keep going. (Worse: the live service content follows predictable formats, so most of my new pages start by copying another page. This would be so easy for anyone to learn.)
No one wants to learn how to edit wikis anymore. It doesn't have to do with the high position or the rules of a specific site. It's a dying hobby viewed as too hard for content consumers to wrap their heads around.
They do pay me for it actually, in in-game currency, as part of the same content creator program they use to reward fan artists and streamers and such. In the lonely "why bother" moments, it's all that keeps me editing.
You deride the hobby by equating it to working for free, then you deride it even harder upon finding out it's paid. You're not asking these questions in good faith, and no answer I give you will satisfy you, so I'm not giving you one. Suffice to say I'm very happy with my compensation.
I enjoy the game, so it's money I would be spending out of my own pocket that I now don't have to. And at least half the time I enjoy the wiki editing - note the fact that I called it a hobby (hobbies are things we do for fun). I just miss the collaborative aspect of it all and have days when I feel down about being alone on it.
Interesting experience. We started a wiki for our open source project, the community hit the ground running with it. I couldn’t have built a better wiki myself. Players love contributing to the wiki every game update. It’s bizarre how polar opposite our experiences are.
It's not that bizarre - a community that's coalescing around an open source project is sure to be a lot more inclined toward technical hobbies than the one that gathers around an otome game. I knew that from the start... but still, I was hoping for more like-minded fans than none. Back when I started editing on an MMORPG wiki, people were a lot more willing to pitch in, even if they weren't that confident.
Glad to hear your project is going well, at least.
Ouch. I do agree being an open source project would attract more interest in contributing. Maybe you need to get the message out to more people, there must be at least one other person in the community willing to assist?
No one wants to learn how to edit wikis anymore. It doesn’t have to do with the high position or the rules of a specific site. It’s a dying hobby viewed as too hard for content consumers to wrap their heads around.
Is there like… a way of “getting into” it? I feel part of the issue might be the lack of a cultural pipeline for people who are the right personality type to potentially enjoy it to ever be exposed to it as a potential hobby. The closest I’ve ever seen to any kind of popular internet culture referencing it is that Randall Munroe would occasionally make reference to wiki editing in his XKCD comics and blagposts.
Idk, for me getting into it was just a matter of (1) use wiki as a reference (2) see thing on wiki that needs fixed (3) try to fix it myself, hitting preview and pulling from other similar pages to get formatting right (4) it works - hobby interest awakens.
People nowadays seem too afraid to mess things up to ever consider trying step 3 on their own. I get this impression when I occasionally help other game wikis as well - sometimes one of their templates will seem especially complicated and I just drop the relevant info in their discord instead, and I get all the same pleading not to worry about messing things up before I say "actually I just had to get back to my own wiki and didn't have time to play with it, sorry!" (Shoutout to rimworld wiki admins for being neat and taking submissions through discord like that)
No one wants to learn how to edit wikis anymore. It doesn’t have to do with the high position or the rules of a specific site. It’s a dying hobby viewed as too hard for content consumers to wrap their heads around.
Wikis attract rules lawyers and no one likes rules lawyers. People have better things to do with their time than writing a fucking dissertation to keep an edit correcting a typo from getting reverted.
While I agree that's a super frustrating experience, I think you're projecting an experience you had on one (larger, probably more rigid) site to every site that shares its software. Not every small wiki team is like that.
When I get a correction on one of my pages, I welcome it. Even when it's a grammatically incorrect mess, I do my best to incorporate the information added while smoothing out the wording. Even when the correction is outright wrong (there's one drive-by I used to get every couple months who liked to change singular "die" to "dice" when it wasn't appropriate) I explain my reversions in notes and offer to discuss if there are any questions, hoping to leave the door open for a future editor, because that's someone who cared enough to hit the edit button, and I appreciate that.
So while I get that you're turned off from the hobby - and that's a shame - not all of us need a "fucking dissertation" to have decent collaboration.
I think you’re projecting an experience you had on one (larger, probably more rigid) site to every site that shares its software.
I cannot speak about every wiki, obviously. It seems to me that there are a lot of users on wikis who pick articles to maintain and resist incorporating the contributions of others into those articles because they have some sense of ownership of the article.
Exactly my experience with Archwiki and Wikipedia. I’ve tried to contribute with minor edits and corrections; I get non-stop pushback on the most un-controversial edits of things like punctuation or adding cross-links. I just walked away after a few attempts to satisfy whomever reverts the edits. What’s the point of adding the stress of dealing with these people to one’s life when there is utterly no personal benefit?
Like yours though, it never went anywhere and was literally just a simple framework with nothing to run in it.
Why are you talking about the QBasic sprite-based RPG "engine" I wrote in 1999? I was very proud that you could move the selection box with the arrow keys.
Of course, I was also in college and not a tween, so maybe English was the right degree path for me after all.
My "completed" QB projects were (1) a text-based "RPG" set in the era of the historical Macbeth, with (IIRC) five scripted encounters, and (2) a single-player Star Wars "Sabacc" card game based on 90% of the rules listed in the old West End Games sourcebook. The "AI" was a set formula not unlike the newbie blackjack rules posted everywhere. I think. Maybe that was planned for v2 though. I was fairly proud of the graphics engine that imported text files and assigned colors to pixels based on which ASCII character you'd used.
These days, I don't do anything more complex than editing keyboard configurations in KMK.
Like others in here, my first “hacking” was manipulating the included programs bundled with qbasic. One time I thought I’d be clever and make Nibbles add one life instead of subtract one when a collision was detected.
I quickly realized my mistake when a higher level became impossible and there was no way to quit (I don’t recall if ctrl-c worked for those programs).
Yeah mine does it too, but the scream is so quiet compared to how wide his mouth is… It looks like he should be screaming a lot louder but it’s just this little squeak
This was, also, my first programming language ever. Oh the memories of typing it in from one of those books on the one computer we had in our classroom…
Oh man. Great memories here. I wrote some BBS software using this. I never got to actually run my BBS, though, since I was a kid and my dad didn’t want to pay for a second line.
I learnt to code in 1984 on my MSX which came with Microsoft MSX Basic.
We had the computer because my grandpa was into tech and bought new computers all the time. He gave my parents the computer and because my room was the only one with a bit of space, it came to sit on my desk. We had a couple of games for it on cartridge, but they were kinda lame.
One day by accident I stumbled upon the MSX Basic interface and didn’t know what I was looking at. I asked my dad and he didn’t really know anything about it, but remembered my grandpa also gave us a book with the computer. The book was about learning Basic and because computers were a new thing at the time, it was written in a way that made it easy to understand. I asked my dad what you could actually do with Basic, he didn’t know but it had something to do with telling the computer what it should do. So I said: “Could you create games with it?” He said: “Sure, I guess?”.
My little goblin mind freaked out, something that would allow new games! The games we had were lame so I really wanted new games. So I spent thousands of hours learning everything I could about that machine, Basic and coding in general. My grandpa gave me lots of books and I learned all the hardware and the assembly etc. I made a lot of games over the years, some good, most bad and made my siblings play them. We still remember some of them and joke about it. Especially because one of my brothers specialized in finding ways to cheat and exploit my games, which was tons of fun.
Later in life I studied to become an Embedded System Engineer because I really like the low-level programming side and the hardware aspect. Also the gaming industry sucks to work in, so I’ll pass on that. Maybe some day I’ll create another game as a passion project, but life gets in the way at the moment.
Ditto. I had the option of taking a comp sci class in grade 11/12 which taught QBasic back in 2001/2002. Still got all the basic bitch programs I made for the class on a hard drive somewhere lol.
The most fun thing I did with it was to write a “war dialer” inspired by the 1983 movie “War Games”.
It had a “graphical” screen where one could enter a telephone area code, an exchange, and starting and ending numbers, then it would command the modem to dial each number in sequence.
It would log the call results as “no answer”, “busy”, “voice”, or “data”.
en.wikipedia.org
Active