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#[Twitter thread] by @Sarah McManus: Fascinating and very useful demo!
Ways of relating to the space, the camera, and viewers that invite a natural and easeful presence, or a compressed, intrusive, creepy vibe.
Twitter thread by @Michael Ashcroft: A few years ago when I learned how to be natural.
A thread about deliberate practice in facial movements & body language. Relates to autistic masking, and @meditationstuff 's concepts of layering & delayering
Twitter thread lisatomic: ok, this is amazing
Person/Michael Ashcroft: Scary isn't it? I was amazed when I discovered that this is not only a thing, but consciously controllable. *
xiq ā¤ļøāš„: This was the first time any AT material clicked for me too *
Person/Michael Ashcroft: This is why I pump out so much content from different angles - different things will click in different ways and I can't predict what will work for a given person. *
xiq ā¤ļøāš„: Keep at it! Just subbed *
Person/Michael Ashcroft: Thank you!! š *
Yes, what amazes me is that I would have had no way of articulating these differences! You're "staring" in both cases!
Some men do look at you like this, and it does feel very uncomfortable but it's v hard to say why exactly they come off as "creepy" *
Person/Michael Ashcroft: Yep.
If you look you'll see my facial expression change, but I'm not *doing* any of that directly, it's a consequence of the awareness.
The creepy vibe could also be seen as my awareness intruding in yours in a non consensual way.
I teach defence against the dark arts too š *
mechanical monk: if you wanted to quickly teach a person to stop being creepy and you didn't have time to go through the whole AT thing, you could also specify the change explictly: gently bop your head in various direction, tilt head a little back, punctuate some words by raising eyebrows, etc *
My suspicion is that many of the people who had the original problem would then do this mechanically/forcibly and then come off as "weird" or smth too... š¬ *
Person/Michael Ashcroft: Without the awareness stuff none of that would make a difference, you'd must be creepy with your head and eyebrows in a different position. *
mechanical monk: well, not really, I can't perceive the size of your awareness, I'm perceiving the pixels that land on my retina; what makes me stop feeling creeped out is a change in visual cues *
Person/Michael Ashcroft: Yes, but on your side you can't coordinate your face in the way I'm doing here directly.
Any conscious coordination is part of the same potentially creepy/compressed vibe. It can only be accessed indirectly, which is what all this is about. *
mechanical monk: I mean that's definitely the ultimate and optimal solution, I'm just saying you can pick some low hanging fruit and make some improvement by consciously training the habit of being more expressive with your face *
Person/Michael Ashcroft: Genuinely not trying to be a pedant here, but that's exactly what I wouldn't recommend.
Sarah McManus: Yeah, I've seen a recording of someone trying hard not to be creepy on Zoom, and the impression I got was strong uncanny valley / bad face puppet vibes.
Talked with him later and he indeed often felt frustrated about his face feeling like a mask or clunky puppet *
Sarah McManus: He was kind of trying to... perform easygoing high status neurotypical, but it was a layer on top of, like, neurodivergent plus a lot of trauma & paranoia plus trying to do everything from the left hemisphere (deliberate, verbal, explicit, rational, pre-planned) *
Person/Michael Ashcroft: Yeah this simply doesn't work.
You can't take conscious control of all your micro-expressions and you don't know what the micro-expressions should be anyway. *
Sarah McManus: Which - I don't have exactly that experience, but I get it. If I'm not feeling at ease in a scene I often become hyper-aware of my facial muscles. Usually results in my face looking mask-like. *
Sarah McManus: I have a horror of being socially forced to perform emotion, and try to shape my environment so that I feel a wider window of acceptance for whatever happens to show up on my face
(I'm planning to do the "100 videos" thing soon - we'll see how it goes!) *
Sarah McManus: Ah, I see people in another branch of the thread talking about autistic masking, and developing deliberate habits to add more expression to avoid freaking people out.
Yeah. I... remember having to learn body language deliberately, reading about it and practicing. *
Sarah McManus: People might not guess now, in casual interactions, unless I'm distressed / tired / otherwise low resourced.
I think that watching video recordings of myself will be an interesting experiment, will probably bring up some Stuff *
š ÉŹĒÉÆ-Lulie š: Good luck! Video is challenging, but maybe disproportionately helpful. *
mechanical monk: I guess I mostly wanted to react to
>it's v hard to say why exactly they come off as "creepy"
and point out the specific cues that make a person creepy so it's easier to understand for people how the change happens *
š sir(?) festive lawn carrot š: hmm yeah after hearing about autistic masking i'd bet people can fix the creepy vibe manually, it's just burdensome and not ideal, might have second order effects *
mechanical monk: it's helped me
I don't know if I can ever "cure" my natural lack of expression that looks like (or is?) low-grade autism, but when I got feedback about it & learned that I was creeping ppl out, I developed more expressive facial habits & according to followup feedback it helped *
Life Is All Of It š¹: How did you develop them? *
mechanical monk: too much to type, I think I'll do a video when I get home from the gym *
mechanical monk: omg, I can't record my face while I'm talking about my face, I get too self-conscious
anyway, this will only take a couple tweets *
mechanical monk: first, calibration: what felt like a proper level of expression from the inside looked like a poker face from the outside, so I'd stand in front of the mirror and make faces until I got a good feel of what expression corresponds to what proprioceptive sensation *
mechanical monk: my glasses served as a form guide for my eyebrows: I learned that my eyebrows look most natural and neutral when I raise them such that the very bottom hairs touch the top of my glasses rim, and I learned what that feels like touchwise *
mechanical monk: the second step is noticing, just like with meditation or posture correction: when you notice that you're not doing the thing you want to be doing (being aware of breath, standing straight, making facial expressions) you dispense an internal reward feelingā¦ *
mechanical monk: ā¦which trains the brain to notice more often, until ideally at the end you're in a state of continuous awareness and the thing becomes natural to you *
mechanical monk: I've regressed lately I think, because I didn't talk to anyone for months
also it's much easier to maintain when you feel good, which I haven't; when you feel good, you have way more energy to put into working those facial muscles *
š sir(?) festive lawn carrot š: impressive that you actually put all this effort into it :o
last tweet is v relatable though, apparently my "i'm in a lot of pain" face and my "i feel like i'm gonna hurl" face are both just completely blank *
mechanical monk: I didn't really put it that much effort, I've described the process here but I did it, like, a bit
just to become roughly in the vicinity of normal *
Emily / aiju š: Becoming a girl has fixed this particular issue for me š¤·āāļø *
A Wondering Eye, Haemoglobenthusiast: Agreed, many autistics have to do this
I definitely learned to adjust mask from mostly physical stuff like what Monk described
Didn't really feel like I adjusted my inner behavior but I do feel like I do some of the stuff in the video as a result? *
bitbutter: ime the creepiness and what's causing it, becomes clear when you go through the process of recording a talking head vid in this format.
"i look like that? that's not ideal. i'll try being looser"
and then remembering this doesn't only apply to talking to a lens. *
HB: i dont perceive a difference :(
is this because of autism too? *
š Piyush Maverick Tainguriya Customer Support š: what would be the dance equivalent of this? *
BToh is backkkk: Not really any dance equivalent, as much as I agree and observe the same things as Michael. Some Alexander Technique things he mentions, I kinda think back to my own practice with dance and go hmm, I kinda saw that too *
Martin: This is amazing, I've basically been overfocusing irl my entire life *
Person/Michael Ashcroft: Most people do *
Martin: I've even gotten positive feedback for seeming focused and empathetic that could easily have been caused by overfocusing.
And I'm reminded of a situation where I noticed afterwards the other person had kept moving away and I had kept following instead of respecting the space. š¤Æ *
Dio: This was fascinating. Gels with my observations. I sometimes subconsciously zoom out onto the entire room when getting too intense in a conversation. Personally can be q disorientating, but it usually seems to be beneficial as a whole for the interaction. *
Person/Michael Ashcroft: It is disorienting if you're not used to it, but it gets more comfortable and ultimately becomes a much nicer way of being *
Dio: Now I just need to learn how to consciously tap into this superpower *
Person/Michael Ashcroft: As luck would have it I'm making a course *
Dio: And as luck would have it I'm enrolled in it š *
Person/Michael Ashcroft: šÆ alt twitter never fails to catch me out.
Well in the case, thanks and sorry it's late, my good customer! *
Dio: Take your time friend. One thing I've realised is that it's always worth waiting for quality š *
Person/Michael Ashcroft: šš
One of the joys of this part of twitter buying your first course is that you just get a lovely group of first customers ā¤ļø *
hyper(bolic) disco(unting) girl in NYC!: huh, I watched it like 5 times and try as I might I think I notice at most a small difference, can't really feel what you guys are talking about š *
Dan Elton visiting Berkeley/Oakland: People often have been telling me to āloosen upā or ārelaxā or ātake it easyā or ask me if Iām ok or why Iām so tense, when Iām perfectly relaxed from my POV. Some people just arenāt good with body language. *
Lulie: Note it has ~nothing to do with body language. Itās everything to do with attention, intention and awareness patterns. Body language is just clues about those things. People who read it can have more insight than the person themselves (easier to see objectively from outside!).
Dan Elton visiting Berkeley/Oakland: That said Iām not *that* annoyed b/c itās likely the ācreepyā detector in women is innate, and hard to change. Apparently thereās an entire book about this, telling women to trust their instincts & creepy detector to prevent sexual assault. I canāt recall the name of it , though *
š ÉŹĒÉÆ-Lulie š: Iām sure itās neitherāmore a function of what ācreepyā *means* + its role in society.
I used to think creepy was basically meaningless/negative interpretations of innocent people. While thereās truth to that, itās more about ability to communicate/collaborate (& read your ānoā!) *
Ah yeah I wanted to ask in the OP how much other people felt this so I'm glad you said!
I would be willing to bet I am more sensitive to this than many people. This feels related to finding eye contact difficult, and to wanting a lot of physical space. *
Tim may be getting DAOpilled: I watched half of it a few days ago and that part was bizarre because it was so clear to me.
I still can't put my finger on how it happened, but all of a sudden it felt sort of...clammily focused. *
nv: Me neither haha *
@Daemonic: In my Meisner classes I learned about "soft focus" which sounds similar.
"By taking the pressure off of the eyes to be the primary and dominant information gatherer, the whole body starts toĀ listenĀ and gather information inĀ new and moreĀ sensitized ways."
There's a whole section about Soft Focus on p. 30 of the Viewpoints book if anyone is interested:
"In a culture governed by commodities consumption and the glorification of the individual, we are taught to target what we want and then find a way to get it. The way we use our eyes in daily life entails looking for what might satisfy our particular desires...
"...Like a hunter after prey, our vision is narrowed down to a preconceived series of possibilities... [Soft focus] asks us not to go out toward what we want, searching for prey but rather... to reverse our habitual directional focus and allow information to move in toward us."
Kaj also had some tweets on theory of creepiness
Re: the thread above this one, on masking -- I'm exploring a potential synthesis of perspectives re: deliberate practice to modify body language
(Michael's "It doesn't work" vs mechamonk's "It worked for me")
You can build an emulation layer on top of whatever you're already doing
It will suck & be uncanny at first, maybe always
It will never look as natural as unconditioned responses
It may help you get by in social situations that you can't otherwise escape or change
It will use "RAM" or mental / emotional energy or whatever
You'll prob feel more drained / overwhelmed the more complex the social scene is, bc part of you is running computations that scale badly
Bc of that power draw, it will probably break down under pressure
Examples of scaling badly / breaking down:
Me after running v complex logistics for a thing: "Malcolm, you've got 2 options for interacting w/me right now: Robot or 3 year old. Which do you want?"
(He picked 3yo & kept ppl from bothering me while I flopped asleep on beach)
Guy who was trying to game out all his micro actions & people's likely responses, to feel a sense of control & safety in a complex social scene
Laying on couch w/ gritted teeth: "I am having a viscerally uncomfortable experience of factorials right now"
OH ALSO -- especially if you build the emulation layer early & wear it all the time you'll probably find it difficult to know how you feel and what the fuck you actually want
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