amio

It's just a strange name for a more or less arbitrary way to group words together. It has close to nothing to do with gender as identity.

Poor Officer Pendelbury.

[snort] "trained"

Almost as if Rogan is a big, dumb, intensely stupid idiot.

I didn't know anything about Idolmaster but Puchimas is freaking adorable.

Because you can't escape labels. Even if you don't depend on them (you very likely do) other people do. In reality you are perfectly right - which bits you have and whether you feel manly, womanly, both or neither, consistently or varyingly should not matter. But apparently they do.

Since the labels are going to be there, they might as well be applied in a way that doesn't hurt people.

Do you have any personal experience with insanity, then? /j

I mean, sort of. "Insane" is pushing it, as it's very normal. You're not really supposed to take anyone's statement at face value.

In school, I happened to notice exactly when some random topic went from "uh, I guess I kinda understand this" to having it actually "click". That clued me off to the difference between e.g. knowing a bunch of shitty formulae, and actually understanding the topic to the point where you can actually use it for problem solving. Also, that all the teaching and books I received revolved 100% around the former.

If the word “cryptography” here is what throws anyone off, it’s not some advanced field of study, it just refers to the physical manifestation of messaging, which a child can get behind.

Just be aware, to everyone else that word does mean the field of study, which is fairly advanced.

All the examples are specifically constructed by humans to carry, but not hide, meaning - Morse, Braille and Quipu "encode" information, but for transmission/accessibility/storage. Cryptography roughly translates to "hiding-writing" and is more or less specifically intended to keep secrets. An encoding is just a different representation of whatever underlying message, assuming one is there. As a result, they can only roughly be interpreted as encryption. Actual encryption means you can know which "format" it's in and still only get the original message if you have the proper key (or whatever).

All of this seems unrelated to seeing "messages" in mundane things. If you look at a flower and think "fuck me, that looks nice" that's great. If you look at it and think "well, the arrangement of these petals is clearly a message for me," then it might be a symptom of things.

Plenty of people will grab literally any opportunity and quite a few non-opportunities to rant. I'm a freaking edgelord atheist myself, but some of it is just embarrassing.