4 ms·

Makes sense. Mormons are used to reading horrible handwriting from all the time spent looking at old census sheets.

themodelplumber 4y ago
Can't believe how many hours I spent doing that xD TBF the software tools for it were very helpful...plop down exhausted at the computer after 6 hours of church meetings and burn through a bunch of formal-ish handwriting data entry while half-braindead, necktie knot pulled down to the chest, black synthetic socks petting cat down on the floor, and bowl of favorite cereal at the ready. (Mormon alcohol equivalent is basically sugar) I have friends who set regional records for processing those old forms. I want to say hundreds of thousands of pages or some wild amount like that. There was a lot of interesting geography and plenty of bio-stats to read, so for natural readers it was quite a comfortable hit in its way. I did get into handwriting analysis later and that was more consistently fascinating on the other hand. There was always an open invite to bring found samples to the next meeting (this was not a Mormon thing, to be clear). Everyone would then take turns pointing out possibly valid observations, ooh there's a felon's claw, anybody else see that, etc. Then at the end of the meeting they'd ask the submitter to share the general or specific identity of the sample. "That's my uncle so-and-so, the rascal was on a chain gang for 10 straight years" and so on. But sometimes you would remember seeing the sample somewhere, so you had to brace yourself because it was definitely a serial killer and you'd spend the rest of the week thinking about that sample afterward. In the society library there were texts about individual letters...like people have authored multiple books about the written letter T, and so on. For my part I was paid for some analysis on the side and learned the hard way that you have to kind of hold back sometimes. It's nice to know you're accurate but a lot of people just. Don't. Want. To know that others can tell this or that about them. Lol. You can effectively front-run an individual's own self-reconciliation/processing capabilities and this often brings unwanted results. One of my own specialties was that I could usually get a good idea of someone's MBTI type through their handwriting. I had already finished my certification in Jungian typology at the time. So then, bouncing back to handwriting traits, I could identify a kind of sub-type, and this would give ideas of the various cognitive-function perspectives that were probably relevant to the individual's current stage of personality development. I never met anyone else in the field who I could really talk to about this, though it was very useful. Sometimes you have problems in life that are less conscious, so you can't Google them, LLMs don't help, etc. As a result, finding someone who knows "people _who think like you_, and how they made it" can be really helpful. Even took an IQ test based only on my handwriting once, pretty neat experience.
- dbg31415 4y ago
  My grandfather probably spend 20 hours a week doing home genealogy work. Going back to I guess the 80s, he always had the latest and greatest computer system in his home. He wasn't super technical, but he knew how to use them for the things he cared about. One year he hit an issue with a store-bought computer. I forget what the issue was, but he probably spent $5k on the computer, and it had hundreds, if not thousands of his work hours saved on it, and customer support led him down a path that wiped his hard drive. After that, he would say, "Computers are light light bulbs, you can't trust them after a certain point..." He complained about the customer support being so bad, so I told him we could just build one from pars if he wanted. His eyes lit up, "You'd build me a computer?!" So every 2 years, we would get together and build him a new computer. He bought all the parts, and we'd build identical computers, one for him one for me... some of my fondest memories. He got such a kick out of running performance benchmarks. 90-something year-old kid in a candy shop. He had to have the best parts. From 1996 to 2016 or so, he had probably the most powerful gaming rig in Midland, TX... He had 3x 4k monitors, surround sound, and crazy silly amounts of RAM. Like... 128 GB was the last machine we built, back in 2016. He'd always donate the "old one" to the church. I remember one year the kid they sent out had some IT knowledge. He was trying to write up a donation receipt, and Grandpa was like "64 gigabytes..." and the kid, thinking it was some old clunker since it was just sitting in an old Costco fruit-box at that point, was like, "Oh, you mean 64 megabytes of memory..." and Grandpa was like, in the most assertive tone an ultra-polite Mormon could muster, "No, sir. I mean gigabytes." This was like 2008 or so, when most high-end computers didn't have more than 8 GB of RAM. And Grandpa was just like, "It's got some old Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2 Quad-SLI video cards..." And the kid was like, "Wait, how many video cards?" And Grandpa's attitude was like like, "Take that trash away, it's old and busted. Get it of my sight!" Ha. He may have also liked playing flight simulators just a little. (=
  - themodelplumber 4y ago
    Love it! That's too funny. I can imagine his computer ending up in a variety of places depending on the personalities in his local church leadership xD I learned to carry a PortableApps USB stick and a Puppy Linux USB stick with me every time I went to church meetings, just in case. One night I ended up tucked in a church library alone (under certain circumstances a random dude needs to stay in the building while other meetings happen), found a donated computer (nothing like your grandpa's!) and after digging around for cables for a while, had my Linux desktop up and running, streaming some prosaic public-access TV or something while reading Slashdot. I can't imagine how that moment would have felt if the computer turned out to be a 64GB RAM monster...I think I seriously would have considered bringing my home computer to swap with it. I remember others being told to do the same, in cases where the waste was even less obvious (and I mean I even once had to turn away a guy who tried to donate a vial of gold he panned in Alaska to the church)...but wow, yeah that's a big deal. (There were actually so many genealogy-computer shenanigans at the churches...someone could easily write a very interesting book about that)
dylanpyle 4y ago
Very curious to hear more about this - how does processing census sheets fit in to LDS?
- dbg31415 4y ago
  Oh... um... I mean look, it's a bit controversial. They document family trees, and then post-humorously baptize the dead so everyone's kin can get to heaven. They mean well, and it's coming from a good place, but it's a little weird and it can be off-putting to know that they don't think any other religion's baptisms count so they have to do it over the LDS way. But look, they mean well. Some background on the controversy. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/03/us/jews-take-issue-with-posthumous-mormon-baptisms-beliefs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/03/us/jews-take-issue-with-p...
  - masklinn 4y ago
    Posthumously, rather than post-humorously. As you note, many take a rather dim view of the practice (and it is very much not coming from a good place).
    - crazygringo 4y ago
      > and it is very much not coming from a good place Can you elaborate? I know nothing about this, but from the description it seems well-intentioned so I'm curious what isn't?
      - dbg31415 4y ago
        I posted a link in an earlier part. But basically instead of just "Oh, we're just saying some prayers for your dead granny..." -- which I think everyone would be fine with, it's the Mormons saying, "Oh, we're saying some prayers for your dead granny... because without true Mormon salvation she'd be burning in hell forever." The Mormons also have "stand-ins" that they baptize in place of the person. Usually kids. So a kid goes up and says, "I'm so-and-so, grandmother of such-and-such..." and then they get dunked in a tub. And it also serves to further indoctrinate the kids... who are re-baptized a bunch of times. My view... all religions are nutty. Not sure where we draw a line on any of them. But I don't really care what people do in the privacy of their own temple, or what internet archives they want to spend their time transcribing. If it lets them sleep a bit better knowing my dead great grandmother is with her family in Heaven... that's great. Or at least, it's no going to hurt her any. (=

Can't believe how many hours I spent doing that xD TBF the software tools for it were very helpful...plop down exhausted at the computer after 6 hours of church meetings and burn through a bunch of formal-ish handwriting data entry while half-braindead, necktie knot pulled down to the chest, black synthetic socks petting cat down on the floor, and bowl of favorite cereal at the ready. (Mormon alcohol equivalent is basically sugar) I have friends who set regional records for processing those old forms. I want to say hundreds of thousands of pages or some wild amount like that. There was a lot of interesting geography and plenty of bio-stats to read, so for natural readers it was quite a comfortable hit in its way. I did get into handwriting analysis later and that was more consistently fascinating on the other hand. There was always an open invite to bring found samples to the next meeting (this was not a Mormon thing, to be clear). Everyone would then take turns pointing out possibly valid observations, ooh there's a felon's claw, anybody else see that, etc. Then at the end of the meeting they'd ask the submitter to share the general or specific identity of the sample. "That's my uncle so-and-so, the rascal was on a chain gang for 10 straight years" and so on. But sometimes you would remember seeing the sample somewhere, so you had to brace yourself because it was definitely a serial killer and you'd spend the rest of the week thinking about that sample afterward. In the society library there were texts about individual letters...like people have authored multiple books about the written letter T, and so on. For my part I was paid for some analysis on the side and learned the hard way that you have to kind of hold back sometimes. It's nice to know you're accurate but a lot of people just. Don't. Want. To know that others can tell this or that about them. Lol. You can effectively front-run an individual's own self-reconciliation/processing capabilities and this often brings unwanted results. One of my own specialties was that I could usually get a good idea of someone's MBTI type through their handwriting. I had already finished my certification in Jungian typology at the time. So then, bouncing back to handwriting traits, I could identify a kind of sub-type, and this would give ideas of the various cognitive-function perspectives that were probably relevant to the individual's current stage of personality development. I never met anyone else in the field who I could really talk to about this, though it was very useful. Sometimes you have problems in life that are less conscious, so you can't Google them, LLMs don't help, etc. As a result, finding someone who knows "people _who think like you_, and how they made it" can be really helpful. Even took an IQ test based only on my handwriting once, pretty neat experience.

dbg31415 4y ago
My grandfather probably spend 20 hours a week doing home genealogy work. Going back to I guess the 80s, he always had the latest and greatest computer system in his home. He wasn't super technical, but he knew how to use them for the things he cared about. One year he hit an issue with a store-bought computer. I forget what the issue was, but he probably spent $5k on the computer, and it had hundreds, if not thousands of his work hours saved on it, and customer support led him down a path that wiped his hard drive. After that, he would say, "Computers are light light bulbs, you can't trust them after a certain point..." He complained about the customer support being so bad, so I told him we could just build one from pars if he wanted. His eyes lit up, "You'd build me a computer?!" So every 2 years, we would get together and build him a new computer. He bought all the parts, and we'd build identical computers, one for him one for me... some of my fondest memories. He got such a kick out of running performance benchmarks. 90-something year-old kid in a candy shop. He had to have the best parts. From 1996 to 2016 or so, he had probably the most powerful gaming rig in Midland, TX... He had 3x 4k monitors, surround sound, and crazy silly amounts of RAM. Like... 128 GB was the last machine we built, back in 2016. He'd always donate the "old one" to the church. I remember one year the kid they sent out had some IT knowledge. He was trying to write up a donation receipt, and Grandpa was like "64 gigabytes..." and the kid, thinking it was some old clunker since it was just sitting in an old Costco fruit-box at that point, was like, "Oh, you mean 64 megabytes of memory..." and Grandpa was like, in the most assertive tone an ultra-polite Mormon could muster, "No, sir. I mean gigabytes." This was like 2008 or so, when most high-end computers didn't have more than 8 GB of RAM. And Grandpa was just like, "It's got some old Nvidia GeForce 7950 GX2 Quad-SLI video cards..." And the kid was like, "Wait, how many video cards?" And Grandpa's attitude was like like, "Take that trash away, it's old and busted. Get it of my sight!" Ha. He may have also liked playing flight simulators just a little. (=
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  Love it! That's too funny. I can imagine his computer ending up in a variety of places depending on the personalities in his local church leadership xD I learned to carry a PortableApps USB stick and a Puppy Linux USB stick with me every time I went to church meetings, just in case. One night I ended up tucked in a church library alone (under certain circumstances a random dude needs to stay in the building while other meetings happen), found a donated computer (nothing like your grandpa's!) and after digging around for cables for a while, had my Linux desktop up and running, streaming some prosaic public-access TV or something while reading Slashdot. I can't imagine how that moment would have felt if the computer turned out to be a 64GB RAM monster...I think I seriously would have considered bringing my home computer to swap with it. I remember others being told to do the same, in cases where the waste was even less obvious (and I mean I even once had to turn away a guy who tried to donate a vial of gold he panned in Alaska to the church)...but wow, yeah that's a big deal. (There were actually so many genealogy-computer shenanigans at the churches...someone could easily write a very interesting book about that)

dylanpyle 4y ago

Very curious to hear more about this - how does processing census sheets fit in to LDS?

dbg31415 4y ago
Oh... um... I mean look, it's a bit controversial. They document family trees, and then post-humorously baptize the dead so everyone's kin can get to heaven. They mean well, and it's coming from a good place, but it's a little weird and it can be off-putting to know that they don't think any other religion's baptisms count so they have to do it over the LDS way. But look, they mean well. Some background on the controversy. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/03/us/jews-take-issue-with-posthumous-mormon-baptisms-beliefs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/03/us/jews-take-issue-with-p...
- masklinn 4y ago
  Posthumously, rather than post-humorously. As you note, many take a rather dim view of the practice (and it is very much not coming from a good place).
  - crazygringo 4y ago
    > and it is very much not coming from a good place Can you elaborate? I know nothing about this, but from the description it seems well-intentioned so I'm curious what isn't?
    - dbg31415 4y ago
      I posted a link in an earlier part. But basically instead of just "Oh, we're just saying some prayers for your dead granny..." -- which I think everyone would be fine with, it's the Mormons saying, "Oh, we're saying some prayers for your dead granny... because without true Mormon salvation she'd be burning in hell forever." The Mormons also have "stand-ins" that they baptize in place of the person. Usually kids. So a kid goes up and says, "I'm so-and-so, grandmother of such-and-such..." and then they get dunked in a tub. And it also serves to further indoctrinate the kids... who are re-baptized a bunch of times. My view... all religions are nutty. Not sure where we draw a line on any of them. But I don't really care what people do in the privacy of their own temple, or what internet archives they want to spend their time transcribing. If it lets them sleep a bit better knowing my dead great grandmother is with her family in Heaven... that's great. Or at least, it's no going to hurt her any. (=