reading is fundamental.

Want To Read Others' Thoughts? Try Reading Literary Fiction

Not having poked any more at this than reading that blog entry, my guess would be that the difference is nuanced characters versus boilerplate being presented, and so I'm not all that surprised that there's a correlation to being able to recognize emotions more complicated than Hulk Smash.

There was a related thing on the New York Times website that was basically the recognizing people's moods from just their eyes test, but halfway through, I was mostly thinking that all the women were wearing a lot of eye makeup and had a lot of options that could be synonyms for coy, and the men had a lot of words that could be synonyms for stoic. I'm overstating it a bit, but it still irked me. 32/36 though, so at least I'm good at gaming the system.

And now I'm going to go watch some football dudes on the TV run around and hit each other.

(no subject)

So a millions years ago, I bought a learn to draw book. Because I can't. And then I never so much as picked up a pencil.

I was making a to-do list earlier, and since one of my stumbling blocks is that I literally don't own an eraser at the moment, I started adding proper pencils, paper without lines on, you know. Art things. But then I thought I should at least see how useless I am before I get started.


( it's barely a step up from tracing, but I'm just excited it's recognizable. Perhaps I can be taught )

On a not really related note, I feel like I have some karmic comeuppance headed my way from the number of times I've laughed out loud at the first paragraph of a Mary sue fic this week. Sorry. Keep writing if it makes you happy!