god dammit

This is strike one against effectivehost - though the order form confirmation heyhey claimed account setup would take somewhere on the short side of 24 hours, it's been well over 50 and I haven't heard a solitary peep. For $2/month I don't expect much, really, but some kind of automated response would be nice. Or a short "hey, we're swamped right now, things are taking longer than usual" in response to my early-stage-host-deprivation email inquiry. Any acknowledgement at all that I exist and want to be a customer, and I'd be happy.

Maybe it's time to move up to $3/month... I've been playing with a mockup (originally based on one of firda's templates, though I wound up rewriting all of the code) and I'm gettin' kinda antsy about having a place to install it. Flaky hosting is no good at all.

yami · 2:48 · 28 Feb 2020 · #
Filed under: Meta

Hey, I know those people!

Yes, Caltech has a cheerleading squad. Of course, the article never mentions the most popular cheer at a Caltech basketball game... BEAVER FEVER - SNATCH IT UP!

yami · 8:13 · 27 Feb 2020 · #
Filed under: Links

Open Letter to Blog Meta Cheerleaders

It's odd, writing here - I'm not sure if I'll bother to move old blogger entries to the new system, once it's running, and so at the moment I'm just throwing my words onto a cold, ugly wasteland to see if they'll limp home again. They don't even have a comment box, the poor dears.

But such tender, writerly feelings are a sign of weakness. If I'm not careful I'll end up a liberal arts major serving fries at McDonald's, and not gibbering about stress tensors at all, which is Not A Proper Direction for my promising young career. Really, I was going to poke at a certain hypersensitivity common among the blog meta-cheerleading set, which is well exemplified by this thing Vaughn wrote. It's a frightfully inconsequential subject, but this is a frightfully inconsequential web site so it all works out in the end.

Before getting my knickers all in a twist, let me expose some biases. I happen to believe that a good writing style can be taught. Truly great writing springs from the impenetrable depths of the soul, yeah, fine, whatever - but good, functional writing can and should be taught. Furthermore, I don't think that learning the basic principles of good writing can kill your muse or stifle your creative freedom or turn you into a zombie clone with no voice. As Smoky the Blog says, only you can turn yourself into a zombie clone with no voice. So when I read the offending article, I nodded along in basic agreement. That's where this is coming from.

Now then. If I'm going to twist my knickers, I'll have to make use of little quoted excerpts. Here's the first one, earning double bonus points for quoting a quote:

"Amateurs are writing as they�ve always written. Self-consciousness, self-doubt, awkwardness, and overcompensation are perennial hallmarks of the beginning writer. The reason today�s amateurs seem more profoundly un�profound could be a simple matter of exposure. There used to be impenetrable gatekeepers. Now, CNN roundtables, documentaries, independent films, MTV, and the web - which has no gatekeepers in most countries - are broadcasting every poorly crafted phrase and half�cooked idea imaginable."

Unbelievable. It's a long time since I heard such unmitigated snobbery. There's too much "exposure", apparently. Amateur writers should not be seen or heard until they've perfected their craft - even on the internet, which is supposed to be the great democracy where everyone can get their words online. Pardon me for breathing, in that case.

This is something I've seen before: first, some poor schmuck mentions that with the Internet, people can publish work that doesn't meet the old print-industry standard. Nowhere does said schmuck say that people publishing sub-standard crap are perpetrating crimes against Art and Humanity, or that this extra new exposure is a bad thing at all, but soon he or she is being ripped to pieces anyway for failing to spend the next two paragraphs railing against the restrictive standards of the old publishing industry, or having the audacity to judge the quality of anyone's writing at all, or any of a thousand other offenses. But one can say that most people are shitty writers, and mean it, without wanting to kill them all and let literature re-evolve from the roaches. One can even say that most weblogs are shitty, and that it would be nice if there were more non-shitty ones, without wanting all the shitty ones to go away - it's not like anyone's eyeballs are glued to the screen after all. And sometimes, for a lack of space or sheer laziness, one can forget to mention the last bit about not hating everything. So for the love of Elvis stop tacking such ridiculous conclusions onto every little bit of criticism you come across, it makes you all look like American foreign policy or perhaps Ariel Sharon. Yuck.

I won't debate the usefulness of grammar, or experimenting with other writers' devices to see if they fit into your voice. I find both of these things useful at times, but then, I don't care if my writing ends up sounding like every other twat journalist around if I can still use it to communicate my own thoughts and stories. And predictably enough, I've run out of good rantin' steam after the first paragraph, so I won't pick apart much else either. The important part is up there, where I compare people to American foreign policy - aren't I clever?

The other important part is that most pretentious advice-giving snots aren't so pretentious that they waste advice on Mildred's online journal for herself and her cat. Dennis Mahoney was fairly careful to state that his advice was meant for people who already want more traffic, yet big chunks of response are devoted to indignant defense of the myriad other reasons to blog. Uh-huh. He might be arrogant, but that doesn't mean he's talking to you.

Oh, and the other other important part is that just like nobody has to read shitty weblogs, nobody has to read shitty articles on how to write better weblogs, either; and "shitty" is a subjective judgement in both cases. I can post summaries of my breakfast, you can post advice about how to write a better weblog, and we can call it even. Right? Good.

God I feel better now.

yami · 4:49 · 26 Feb 2020 · #
Filed under: Wanking

whoa fuck

Note to self: do not forget to keep an updated email address on file with your web host. Otherwise, you will have no idea that they're discontinuing their splendiferous free service until the week before it happens. My account will be deleted on Feb. 28th, unless I decide to shell out for hosting at f2s - I may actually decide to do so, once I've gotten a chance to do some price-checking.

    Options:
  • Buy myself a new network card, get my ass together and configure my own unreliable server.
  • Find a new free host, probably with ad banners and no perl or php. I've been spoiled, and this is really not palatable as a long-term solution.
  • Spend money. I do have *some* discretionary spending pocket money, though not too much - recommendations, anyone?

Regardless: I've got a new redirecting URL, http://drink.to/greengabbro, which will soon point to someplace much less likely to be deleted in the next week. Pretty please, use that for your links and bookmarks and such until I tell you it's safe to stop.

yami · 5:41 · 22 Feb 2020 · #
Filed under: Announcements

new brand of peanut gallery

Yeah, I should stop posting angst on the internet - after the initial rush of turning some emotion into coherent thought, writing becomes a bit like picking a scab, it's perversely satisfying and also counterproductive. Talking to real people is better; so is ignoring the problem to see if it will resurface in a more tractable form. So meanwhile, I'll try religion.

And math. Math math math. Mmmm, math.

yami · 4:34 · 22 Feb 2020 · #
Filed under: Personal

snide wastes of time

For my own reference, a nascent techer-blog. There are many, many things at this school to be angry at, and of all of them, he's picked the humanities requirement. Someday, maybe he'll learn.

Computer lab inertia dictates that I waste the 45 minutes between now and supper doing something completely ridiculous and non-useful. This looks like a fun one - the idea is to visit a few random blogs and write something honest - nah, snide - about most of them. I like snide.

  • declarative - telling, not showing.
  • pastel - whoa. tiny purple writing on a cyan background.
  • intense - "Five thousand word philosophical dissertations in blogs bore the shit out of me." Right on.
  • accursed creamsicle - kinky sex, or innocent anime fan? You decide.
  • yeah - She's got one of those godawful pages that use a frameset with one invisible frame, just so's the domain name can remain in the url. Grr. So pointless, and so rude when you forget to point your links back to the top frame.

Yes. I definitely like snide. It's put me in the perfect mood for high-quality dorm food products. Corn starch, brown sauce and sludgy tofu, here I come!

yami · 1:12 · 21 Feb 2020 · #
Filed under: Links

Academic Angst

You see, last year on an introductory geology field trip, about five or six of us were walking back to the bus when a professor called out stop! you're being chased by a walking petrology lesson! He caught up, showed us a chunk of granite, and said some things about crystal growth and feldspar zones and what it all meant in terms of that granite's life story.

It was exactly what I've always thought learning should be - none of this sitting isolated in one's room, reading dusty tomes, speaking only to one's own small circle of mentors and only in the secret cabbalistic language of one's chosen discipline. We were loose in an environment full of relevant, thought-provoking, instructive things, with people ready to answer all our random questions and point out even more nifty instructive things that might be too subtle for us to appreciate without help. Utopian as all hell, that - plus the fact that another part of the trip involved soaking in er, investigating the mixing patterns of some hot springs.

But of course I keep finding ways in which the academic community utterly fails to conform to my idealistic little vision of things, and of course just learning the science is enough for my energies without trying to reform a whole subculture, and so of course I keep making little notches of defeat and bitterness on my precious translucent clamp binders. There's nothing in particular that prompted this today, though, just generalized grad-school-decisionmaking fears and a couple of the comments from yesterday's entry. Dogpile on Tinka! ;)

yami · 0:53 · 21 Feb 2020 · #
Filed under: Personal, Pedagogy

Lonely Thrust Faults

I've figured out the source of lots of my angst this term: I don't have very many friends to do homework with. I'm most efficient working alongside someone, when I can get immediate feedback on my stupid ideas without having to chug through three metric tons of algebra to find that I'm wrong. More importantly, though, I stop assuming that I'm the only one who doesn't understand, and plus it's just more fun.

I like my major, but I do wish it were more popular, both in general and in my dorm specifically. Sigh.

Oh, and while I'm procrastinating - who the fuck ever uses the question mark function in minesweeper?

yami · 9:31 · 20 Feb 2020 · #
Filed under: Personal

Ping-Pong Earth

You should really see me: sitting cross-legged in a falling-apart arm chair, drawing on a ping-pong ball, holding it up now and then to squint, rub my free fingers past one another, and mutter no! thrust fault!

I love waiting until the night before the extended weekend is over to do homework. Happy Washington's Birthday, everyone.

yami · 6:47 · 19 Feb 2020 · #
Filed under: Diary

Guerilla Feminism

I spent a good part of today searching for tasty edible finger paints, and so passed through more than one stack of Barbie vomit in a toy store. Hot pink fairy princess aisles aren't quite so intimidating as drug store makeup aisles, of course, since they're more or less designed as a fun-filled introduction to feminine beauty - but they still trigger a strong fight or flight response from my inner hairy-legged feminist.

It gets especially bad when some ass at Target decides that a uniform pink glow is an insufficient cue for clueless gift-shopping grandparents, and the pink aisle needs to be labelled "girl's roleplay". Our society already suffers a horrible shortage of flamboyant cross-dressing men - is there any need to worsen the problem and twist the minds of innocent young boys away from healthy gender-bending behavior? I didn't think so.

Piqued, I pulled the offensive category insert from the aisle directory, and replaced it with the blank side facing out. I'm not prepared to combat the gender-based toy industry - in fact, I'll even concede that on average, girls and boys probably do have some innate, biologically driven differences in toy preferences and play styles. Differences that often fall apart when you find an individual boy or girl in the toy section. But what seems like a harmless marketing ploy to an adult can be a harsh normative judgement to a kid. Go ahead, put all the domestic toys in one aisle and the outdoor robots in another, have your layout however you want, but there's no need to humiliate the one boy who happens to want an EZ-bake oven - he's got plenty coming for him down the road anyway.

And there's especially no need to turn perfectly good unisex toys into emblems of masculinity. Even if Lego's marketing department has been a little cold to those who build houses instead of battleships.

Some related bits and pieces:

  • Girls are apparently less likely to rate a girl-toy as being "appropriate for girls" as boys are, and both boys and girls prefer boy toys... [more] It's just an abstract, but if you're near a good library, it could be interesting.
  • Does anyone remember the fiasco when Toys 'R' Us tried to label their store sections Boys' World and Girls' World? It was enough to get the anti-feminist pundits up and running on the issue. Where have all the loud obnoxious feminists got to this time?
  • Food for thought in the nature vs. nurture debate: we're not always aware of how early our own stereotypes can start to influence our offspring. The research cited here is all old (2020s) - and thank god it is, because otherwise I'd have to go conquer a daycare. [more]
  • Whoa! Scroll down a page in this blurp on the Toys 'R' Us fiasco, and you get:

    The resulting behaviors -- what experts refer to as "male and female play patterns" -- used to emerge around age five or six. But now they are often observed in young preschoolers. Possible explanations, child-development experts say, include earlier socialization with peers in day care and preschool and earlier media exposure.

    If you've got good references to this phenomenon you can quote off the top of your head, please do. Otherwise, I'll look it up later when I have the time.

To boil it down: god dammit, why do girl toys always have to be so shitty and boring?

Oh, and I never did find tasty finger paints, but apparently you can make your own from corn starch and water. Shouldn't be too tricky to add in some imitation cherry extract.

yami · 3:51 · 18 Feb 2020 · #
Filed under: Feminism