APoD, interests meme, poll!

[wispfox]

Pretty Astronomy Picture of the Day today!


Neat meme, as seen on rmjwell's journal, wording slightly modified:

Go browse through my list of interests and pick one that either 1) you know nothing about but sounds intriguing, or 2) you know something about but can't fathom why I would be interested in it, and request an explanation. Alternatively (or additionally), you can ask me about a community I'm subscribed to.


Also! I was informed that my email has facial expressions. And I _think_ this meant completely aside from my excessive use of emoticons. I was trying to figure out if this also means my phone conversations do, if anyone else sees my facial expressions when not actually seeing my face, and precisely how many people do or say things _just_ to get a certain reaction out of me. ;)

So... silly poll!


[Poll #263244]

Comments

[rosefox]

I haven't really swapped email with you or talked with you on the phone, but I can say that I definitely don't get facial expressions from you over LJ, because so many of your photos are so clearly posed (and based on, I think, "this is what I think I look like in this mood, take a picture of it" rather than what you actually look like in that mood) and from the same set that I immediately discount them as having null informational content. They're like keywords: why should I look at them when I'm going to read the whole entry? So your photographic userpics actually lead to me associating your face less with your text than I otherwise might.

Being at the intersection of face-blind and body-language-aware is really interesting. It never occurred to me that when I look at photos, I'm reading body language much more than anything else; but yes, they convey "mood" much more strongly than "identity" to me, because I don't associate face and identity to start with. And all of those photos from the "let's make LJ icons for me" shoot convey the same mood to me: "constrained" (I almost said "superficial" but that's a bit strong).

Hopefully this doesn't come across as harsh. I'm not trying to say that your userpics are bad or wrong, just that they're useless to me because of what I look for in photos, and that I find it interesting to compare the association of facial expressions with text and the visualizing of facial expressions from text, especially where the one fails and the other succeeds.

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

*smiles* Interestingly, a fair number of the facial expression pictures I've had taken were cases of 'stop right where you are, I want that picture', or cases of someone taking a picture of me and me deciding what to do with it (like the chainmail one and the eyebrow one). But it _is_ true that a fair number were 'be this mood', because I wanted icons. :)

I'd never really had opportunity to talk to someone I knew was face-blind (indeed, until right now, I didn't know you _were_), so this is actually very interesting to me. And not harsh at _all_.

Huh. Neat. :) I do actually want more non-posed ones, but few people I know wander around with a camara in their hand, so as to snap random pictures of me. I also suspect that I don't tend to _stay_ in a facial expression long enough to capture them without me knowing it's likely.