Unsolicited Advice

The good Captain has posted yet another piece of excellent advice about compliments and why it's not a really great thing to always argue with them. She is pragmatic and insightful, as always, and if she keeps this up I'm going to have to resort to just writing mash notes when I don't have anything to add. Hope AwkwardPartner doesn't mind, Jenn. For those who feel much more socially adrift and panic at the thought of trying this out without some visual examples, this  is how you politely take a compliment:   (Snaffled from Rikki Sixx , who conveniently just posted them to tumblr. I can't actually reblog on Blogger, so this'll have to do.) Note that it is totally okay to be really bashful, if that's how you feel. You can look away, or duck your head, or fiddle with your fingernails, or close your eyes briefly, if nice things still overload your thinky parts. You do not need to be regally unruffled at all times. You are not Grace Kelly. Even peo...

Noel Fielding is doing a thing again. Looks pretty flash, and I am unambiguously in favor of basically anything involving David Bowie. He's also doing press  for the thing, and once again I am probably finding this way  more interesting than I have any right to. The first thing that kinda cracked me up is that the interviewer has decided to ask him if he's a transvestite now. Despite actually trying to give an answer to that, Fielding has no idea. 'Well, I like dresses, so I guess?' is the kind of logicking-out-loud you get from someone you've just taken by surprise with a question to which they have not devoted two seconds of thought, although now that you've asked it seems obvious that they should have. People who know this stuff will just give you the answer and then  explain if they think it's required. I also find it amusing that they're only bugging him about this now , since he's started turning up to things in garments that are obviously d...

I think a lot of things about a lot of people that do not make it here. Much of what I do in psych profiling involves reconstructing narratives -- of events, of lives, of motivations. It is experience, and intuition, and guesswork, much of which I can never check. And quite often, I am guessing about things of which most people do not speak. They fall into that curious chasm between things that are only for intimates, and things that are fair game for public observation. Things which are visible, but almost always politely glossed over. The terminally socially-anxious bite their nails over these things, so important and so impossible to ask about. The relatively normal are often flustered to hear them spoken of aloud. Curiously, I find that compliments are more startling than criticism. People who have consciously steeled themselves against bitter comments can be the most taken aback by praise. I air a lot of these observations to friends, but do not post them here. Private gossip ...

I believe I've mentioned that one of my persistent problems with profiling is that I don't know what anyone else looks like to a normal person, because I've never been one. I am occasionally reminded of this, usually with all the subtlety of a brick to the head. Moggie recently turned up this piece , by Amy Raphael for The Observer  -- the Sunday Guardian , more or less -- as press for the third series of The Mighty Boosh , which was out late 2007-ish. She's not particularly wrong in her observations, or at least no more factually wrong than any other entertainment reporter -- how she could talk to Fielding for any length of time and think he was from south  London, I have no idea, do other people not hear the th->f bit everywhere?  -- but her interpretations of a lot of their interactions are completely alien to me. I assume hers are more normal than mine, primarily because Fielding mentions that people tend to take Barratt as more aloof and sometimes abrasive t...

It has recently come to my attention that a whole passel o' people think that Sunflaaash  here on Twitter may be where Noel Fielding migrated after internet trolls were trolly at him on his official account . Considering that forensic document analysis is what got this blog attention in the first place, I thought I'd take a crack. There are a lot of tools you can use in document analysis. There is the blindingly obvious, like checking for spelling -- don't laugh, the guy who forged the Hitler Diaries fucked this up and put the wrong initials on the cover because he couldn't tell an A from an F in Fraktur. It's also surprisingly difficult for people who can spell correctly to spell things appallingly badly. Many an amateur kidnapper has flunked Ransom Note 101 because of this. Phrasing is also a useful thing to pay attention to, particularly if your target is writing in a second or third language, and particularly particularly if that second or third language is En...

Is it just me, or is there something odd about Rita Ora? [ Important Note : Odd does not mean bad. Just odd. I haven't seen her do anything that makes me think she's anything but a perfectly decent human being. I also have no opinion whatsoever on her talent or music, not really having come into contact with any of it ever.] [ Important Note bis : Almost always, when I do this, what happens is my brain pops up a flag and does not bother to tell me why. Then I have to rewind and figure out what set it off. This is therefore another friendly reminder that I am not magic, and I am fully capable of fucking things up if I think about them too much. Don't take what I say as gospel -- actually look  at this stuff before deciding if you agree.] She doesn't seem to be stupid, although judging from the way she keeps putting her foot in her mouth and scrambling words she's probably more than a little nervous. (Why doesn't she reword things when it becomes appare...

There are many things that annoy me about all those "learn to ready body language" lists of cues you see in magazines and self-help books. One is that half of the things they tick off are completely fucking made up. The thing where liars supposedly look to one side while thinking, and truth-tellers to the other? Bollocks. People look away from the speaker for lots of reasons. They're thinking and they don't want to process visual input on top of that, they're trying to escape the conversation they're having, they think you're some sort of frightening madman continually scrutinizing their face for imaginary signs of deception, etc. It means nothing. And, in fact, some of the most accurate truth-tellers you can find will wobble their eyes all over the place -- it's not uncommon for eidetickers to exhibit eye movement corresponding to what their real eye movements would be if they were checking for details on an actual photo held up in front of them. O...

There's a photo I've been staring at, off and on, for about the past week, trying to work out if I could put my thoughts about it into words, and whether it would do anyone any good if I tried. After much writing and deleting and writing and deleting and writing and deleting with extreme prejudice, I think my point is: If ever there were an example of how we do the human race a grave disservice by using the very concept of intimacy solely as a euphemism for sex , it is these two. I have no idea where this picture was taken. It's a candid shot; the flat lighting suggests an unbounced flash, and the depth of field is not quite sufficient to get everything in focus at the same time. No pro would have done that intentionally -- and if it happened accidentally, the image would have been trashed with anything else that didn't quite work at the proofs stage. I don't know what prompted the gesture. They could be acting, I suppose, but they're comedians. When t...

Sometimes I wonder if other people can even see the subtitles I keep getting on conversations. One of the recent eps of NMTB was hosted by Richard Ayoade, whom you might recognize from the Boosh stuffs and also The IT Crowd . He has a positively superhuman deadpan, resistant to almost anything thrown his way -- although if you watch the gag reels for The IT Crowd , on the rare occasion that he does crack, Ayoade can't quit laughing and usually wrecks a dozen takes in a row. This episode is uniquely hilarious for the complete lack  of jokes from the host. Even if you didn't know they'd worked together before, it's easy to tell that Fielding at least knows of  Ayoade; he starts hiding behind his coffee mug and trying not to die laughing before anything's even really happened. Given whatever brief context you've picked up here from my babbling, what might the following exchange lead you to guess about Ayoade? My observations below.

I am surprised and somewhat bemused to discover that I am in fact wrong about having to be completely hosed before Luxury Comedy  is hilarious. It's total gibberish  unless your brain's working. Mog and I ran the first episode while we were lolling around legless and then I said 'sod it, back to Live At Brixton ', which I happen to think is shiny meta comedy gold in any state of mind. I attempted the thing again sober, and it works much, much better. It's not actually completely incoherent, although it's damned close if you can't recall the extremely loose excuse for a plot across the thoroughly random interstitial segments. It's very Python-esque, in that something from the beginning usually comes back to bite you by the end. And it reminds me oddly of things like a show I used to watch as a very very small child, Zoobilee Zoo , which had the same strange air of live-action cartoon-ish-ness. It's like some kind of sweet little musical play, except...

Hello, various other estadounidenses ! As many of you even outside the US may know, today is Thanksgiving, an American holiday where we, the descendants of European settlers, celebrate the fact that the natives were generally better human beings than we were back in the 17th century, and refused to let the colonists starve no matter how stupidly unprepared for winter they all were. I know there are still many political and cultural problems with the traditional iconography, but I would like to think that all of us, regardless of where we come from and what has happened in the past, can appreciate a day dedicated to making three times as much food as anyone could possibly eat, and then lying around digesting for the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours. I have yet to see a society in which feast days do not occur, so I feel safe in saying that pretty much everyone on the planet as at least this tiny bit of common ground. I do not attend family functions because of Reasons, and I have...

[Some more pleasant things for Moggie, who is drowning under the weight of some chemistry exams and a list of car repairs right now. THIS IS STILL YOUR FAULT MOGGIE. ALL OF IT.] One thing I find particularly interesting about being able to read body language -- consciously, most people can do it as a sort of blind instinct -- is watching people who are seriously weird interact successfully with people who aren't. Some of the gestures and expressions we make seem to be innate, but a lot more of them are determined by our cultural background. There's an infinity of potential variant dialects of non-verbal communication, and if you happen to have developed an especially strange one, adjusting for mutual intelligibility can be a challenge. It can make your life pretty difficult if your movements say one thing to you and mean a totally different thing to the people around you, as the autistic spectrum people know all too well. But every once in a while, someone with a really odd...

When creepiness is discussed here in the mud wrestling grudge match that is the internet, sooner or later someone always whines that it's always men  accused of being scary creeps, and that's sexist. Although, culturally, the behaviors that are characteristic of creepiness are associated mostly with men and social notions of masculinity, it's entirely possible for women to get into the act, and occasionally one does. One of the recent episodes of Never Mind The Buzzcocks  featured as a panelist an Italian woman inexplicably named Nancy. I don't have any idea who she is or why exactly she's there, but I gather that her two main claims to fame are dancing on some competition show and sleeping around. Not that both of these aren't perfectly good hobbies -- it just happens that I don't follow the kind of TV programs that feature either of them, and so am not familiar with her work. She wound up on Fielding's side of the stage, along with some kid who is ev...

I did promise seawallglen that I'd keep staring at Noel Fielding until I worked out how he reconciled all the inhibited body language with his proclivity for going out in public looking like a happy madman. I think I've got it. The reason I found all this notable in the first place is that all of the quietness and keeping his hands tucked in and all that is indicative of someone who is keeping stuff penned up until they're sure it's okay to let it out. Generally, it's a sign that someone is afraid  of something that will happen if they speak up. It's unusual -- to put it mildly -- to see it from someone who's otherwise making no apparent effort to blend in with anything. (I mean this literally. If you haven't seen the mirrorball suit, it's quite a thing to behold.) The inside of Fielding's head is indubitably wicked weird, but I gather it's always looked like that in there, and he's quite at home with it. It doesn't appear to be a r...

Captain Awkward recently linked again to the infamous discussion on creepiness that basically the entire internet read back in August. Her answer is awesome and anyone who hasn't seen it ought to; the discussion section below, however, is somewhat uneven. The good Captain evidently had to send a lot of comments to the spam pile, because they were from idiots or rageaholics or mansplainers who couldn't spell to save their lives, and a lot of what did get through is fogged with a great deal of pop-psych and social justice vocabulary. It's well-meaning, but there are parts that could have used a lot less technical philosophy and a lot more swearing in majuscules, in my own humble opinion. One of the things that wasn't covered terribly well, probably because it would have been taken as encouragement by the crowds in the spam pile, was how and why a lot of women are reduced to just saying, "because," when the creepy fuckers try to manipulate their victims by aski...

The Mighty Boosh Series 1 Series 2 Series 3 Outtakes R1 Series box on Amazon Welp. That's certainly something. It's very inspiring, in the sense that I have never before been moved to type into the IM window anything like, "Moggie, are that man's leukocytes singing a song about pancakes?" (Yes.) Fielding and Barratt have basically managed to write, produce, and star in a live-action cartoon sitcom. The narrative coherency is somewhere between Futurama and Aqua Teen Hunger Force ; it's reasonably internally-consistent with very little continuity of the traditional sort, but a lot of callbacks to earlier jokes, some of them from several episodes or even an entire series ago. The plotting is what happens when you take all the clichès you can think of and throw them in a blender -- most of what makes it funny is suddenly noticing that they've managed to segue from one to the other when you weren't looking. It's also self-aware in bits in much t...