OOPs #197, Kass’ Journal IV
Aug31
There’s more to being small than just being little.
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Out-of-Placers
A story of inconvenient changes
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There’s some things I didn’t even think about. Try not to worry over it until it becomes a problem, Kass.
Minor correction, but I believe this should be Journal IV, as there was already a Journal III on page 162.
Anyway, as far as the brain reduction goes, there is some (probable) good news for Kass. First, the good news is that a smaller sized body means a decent chunk of brain matter can probably be discarded without much consequence to make it fit inside his new skull for free, since there is less body to control and process sensory cues from. Any other reductions in sensory sensitivity would also likely be correlated with less associated brain matter, and conversely any increased sensory sensitivity / range would be correlated with (proportionally) greater associated brain matter. So he might have a (proportionally) larger visual cortex now, if his vision is equal in quality in the center of vision but with a greater field of view. That said, I have no idea if these effects alone would be enough on their own to compensate for the total reduction in brain size.
Maybe some of his lost brain matter went to taming his emotional responses to things 😛
I don’t know about now; but, it used to be theorized that there is a lot of brain matter in humans that are apparently not used anyway. IF it’s actually true; maybe Kass just lost a lot of this extra brain mass..?
It really isn’t. Your brain uses up a lot of calories, and it wouldn’t be doing that if it wasn’t something.
The “only 10% of your brain” thing isn’t true, or at best is “at any one time. Some of your brain is storage, some of your brain does very specific things.
It is possible to use all of it at once: that’s called a seizure. Which is why you don’t want to use all of it at once.
The way I like to think of it is like white space in a drawing. Would you look at a detailed pencil sketch of a tiger and say “You aren’t using 100% of the paper”? Or look at binary and complain that there’s so many zeroes? The lines only have meaning because of the white space around them — the zeros are just as important as the ones.
Or better yet, if you watch a flipbook figure dance across the page, isn’t 90% of the page-space blank? But if you covered the entire page in drawings, it wouldn’t make the animation better. It would make it an incomprehensible mess.
Or modern CPUs, which have dedicated blocks for specific operations. They can’t run all of them at full power all the time, else the chip overheats, and you probably aren’t using all the blocks at once, even with the way they try to pipeline instructions and run multiple threads of execution on a single CPU core at once.
As a small and very slow human, I object to that “bigger is slower”. I pretty much have to run to keep up with an average person, and then my low stamina kicks in… ><
Bigger is slower in most ways, but forward speed is not just a function of overall speed, it’s also a function of stride. Bigger means slower steps, but that gets cancelled out by those steps covering more distance.
This is where you turn larger people into mount to compensate.
Work smarter!
This is actually very well thought out and described. I’m impressed.
There’s been a lot of interesting research done regarding perceptions of size in VR. Apparently the “bigness” that you perceive of things around you is primarily based on context and how big you believe yourself to be.
As a system with members who believe themselves to be different sizes than our body, we’ve experienced this without going into VR. It creates something called Alice In Wonderland Syndrome. And it’s WEIRD.
If we have a member who is used to being a gigantic person relative to our inworld space, when they front, they experience the world as being way bigger than it should be, and it seems to take forever for them to get our body around, more steps and all of that.
And if we have a member fronting who is used to being very tiny, they’ll feel like the world around us is tiny and that they’re towering over everything and our body moves very quickly through space for them.
We’re fairly coconscious, so the rest of us get to experience their feelings and compare them to our own. And we can experiment and change our perceptions by voluntarily switching. When we can voluntarily switch (not always available).
The feelings go away with time fronting, though, so we’ve only been able to experiment with people who’ve been inworld for a long time, and only for about 45 minutes after they fronted, then they get used to our body.
To clarify something:
A tiny person in a large body perceives the world to be smaller and to move by faster as they walk, but that the body is enormous and slow moving. Not slow traveling, slow swinging of legs, but less work is need to travel faster with longer strides.
Fronting for the first time in a long while sounds really disorienting…
Well actually brain wise thought process and memories would not be affected at all no matter how small or big or how much brain cells it’s changed. From how he’s acting he didn’t loose anything likely due to how the human brain is wired. it’s extremely complex and never ever really uses anywhere near 100% it usually turns on areas of the brain and shifts them around and such.
At worse Kass might have some moments of slowness at recalling things. due to his brain is now in a slightly different composition. If anything Kass might if anything due to his human level knowledge and way to think might force his Yinglet brain to be rewired to think and flow the electrical impulses more similar to a human instead of a Yinglet.
That can actually be done looking at how those work and the research in it. If anything Kass would not so much loose much of himself but maybe have changed or gained something that Yinglets might be able to do but due to how they think and such they might not be mentally wired for it to use it effectively which would be interesting.
Like what is a Yinglet capable of but you can’t really see them do it or think of it.
Would be really interesting if due to how Kass thinks he starts to suddenly find he seems to have developed some kind of interesting motor control or some odd skills not ground breaking but something that could be useful. Like extreamly find motor cordination and Kass maybe mising how fast he is at recognizing combat situations with his training mixed with a Yinglet’s reflexes as well as likely quick reaction times of both you might have a very flexable Yinglet in a fight who can rapidly adapt to a change. Yinglets from what I can tell no matter how smart aren’t the best at adapting to rapid change fast. Kass might be able to exceed in it not just in a fight but also maybe in other areas. Maybe even negotiations or lying through his teeth to other Yinglets.
This- also, one big thing to note is that brain:body-size ratio has been the biggest factor of intelligence vs overall brain size, with other factors such as wrinkling. Also another factor to consider is that brains tend to absorb information best before a species has fully grown. Humans are blessed with an extraordinarily long childhood vs other species with the brain taking roughly a quarter century to fully develop. Kassen almost certainly benefited from this, even if he’s in a body that would’ve grown old and died before a human would’ve even stopped developing.
The middle bit’s very good analogy for a lot of things.
• living with disability/neurodivergency
• experiences of cultural minorities
• the social aspect of lower-class struggles in a capitalist society
• just being an introvert in an extrovert’s world
Oh, this is one of our very favorite journal entries.
hm stuff like this makes me wonder how this information will be put to use. Maybe some renovations to make house ivenmoth more accessible to different species since it seems judging by whats been written here not much thought has been put into non human residents. This also makes me wonder how much is actually possible given the rather primitive level of technology in this setting, though this is also the prime time to start developing such technologies so who knows.
Well, they have lost a lot of technology and knowledge about technology, but they’re still aware of molecules and mass and other high concepts that us (in real life) only really proved in the past 200 years.
They might not know everything necessary to recreate the tech, but they understand some of the underlying principles.
It’s only a matter of time before they rediscover that they can use coiled copper wiring and lodestones to create an electric current.
I wonder, then, what *does* accessibility for a yinglet in an otherwise human environment look like? Doors are relatively straightforward – there’s not a single reason you couldn’t cut ‘yinglet doors’ out of the existing doors that are easier to open and shut if you are the Smol. Another idea that comes to mind is running some ledges along the walls, especially in long hallways; yinglets can walk on them to be roughly eye level with humans, and as an added bonus they can double as handrails or even an emergency countertop….
Adding a raised “sidewalk” for yinglets to walk on in hallways would probably be welcome, though I doubt anybody would want to use a footpath as a countertop, and it could make hallways overly narrow. It might be a situational solution. With doors, do you think it would make more sense to cut holes in the middle of the existing doors, to make a door-within-a-door, or to divide them into upper and lower halves?
Lookies, it is not zhat hard to accomidate for Yinglets. De “Pet Door” option is common, where a smaller door is inset inside of a larger one. But for doors, My favorite is de pull string, where pulling on de string attached to a lever bozh activates de door’s handle/lock but also provides a “Kick” via a smaller lever using mechanical assist to start to open de door, as getting de door to move in de first place is de hard part of opening one. So pulling on de string wizh even our body mass makes de door swing out almost like dere is a spring behind it!
For ozher zhings, like eating, or even *gasp* cooking (only a VERY trusted yinglet should ever be trusted to cook for Humani) Zhere are ways to help a Yinglet feel more at home, such as access to a humani bar stool, or a “Yinglet Cup” to drink from, as drinking for Yinglets is *SOO* embarrassing in front of humani. Fortunately we don’t have to drink much zhanks to not sweating like Humani do, but lately zhere has been access to de zhing called “De Straw” which I have only heard of, but dose who have had access to it, carry it tied around zhier necks like dey never, ever want to let it go.
For many zhings dat our size does not allow, our flexibility and mobility counter dere being extra needs, minus some form of physical disability (Seeing a Yinglet amputee walking on zheir forearms for instance) so it is only truly outside de home where de lack of “Yinglet Perches” (see Kass’s writing stand in oop 127)means dere is a obvious height difference mostly outside a home where dere is yinglet co-habitation involved, making many yinglets homebodies as a result due to paranoia over being sat on, or kicked, or even taken to be someone else’s house yinglet where dey don’t treat us nicely.
So yeah, being a Yinglet in humani territory can be a pain, but de houses are warm and sturdy, and even if most humani are prudes compared to de average one of us, we can get along quite nicely.
I’ve been of the impression from previous journal entries and various other clues that this is sort of a “post-apocalyptic” sort of setting. There WAS high technology at one point (to wit: the antiquities), but something happened. Something that saw the world revert back to renaissance level technologies, or perhaps further in the beginning of recorded “history”, and those incomprehensibly wonderful “antiquities” are, in fact, merely the last remnants of that advanced society that came before and met some sort of end. Tragic or otherwise.
Also, whatever it was that happened seems to have completely erased the cities.
This is of course assuming such cities ever existed. Here, I mean. On _this_ world.
I just noticed Kass made a typo :’D “becasuse” :’D
What? Whats wrong wizh zhats? Zhats a veries yinglet zhing to dos… *blink blinks*
(Don’t blames me… I has fewer brain moles-wizh-uh-clues. *points at Kass drawingz aboves*)
Awww, I don’t know what to answer to that <D *pats Willl's head*
*gets pat-pats… makes happy yinglet noises*
Is no worries… I just beings a silly old clams-digger ying who likes to breaks ze speil chunkers… err… “spell checkers”. 😀
Alsos… I is a bit jealous of Kass’ soosoo nice and pretty and smartsy writings. Soosoo smartsy…
My crackpot theory is that yinglets have a diminished prefrontal cortex (possibly whole frontal lobe) as compared to humans. There’s some textual support for Kass having diminished concentration and attention and worse impulse control after being transformed from a human to a yinglet. I’m curious if stimulant drugs like amphetamines or caffeine might work on that.
The good news is that the most attentive and disciplined members of the enclave are already on par with humans. They have spies and diplomats and textiles and politics and child prodigies with impostor syndrome. This rapid improvement suggests the most extreme behavioral and cognitive differences from humans are mostly down to environment (nutrition, education, etc.). There’s basically nothing stopping Kass from regaining most of his/her(?) cognitive ability, and there’s not a lot of mental stuff stopping the yinglets from living “normal” lives. Physical integration is gonna be a bitch though.
votey transcript:
[drawing of kass sitting, looking befuzzled-like, holding up a smoldering hand]