Archive for February, 2020

Three Parts

Part the First: Look at how I’m defined by the Infinite Teen Slang Generator!

yami
n. a female, particularly a nice one.
“Reggie, that yami is nice!”

Awwww.

Part the Second: How many times have I mentioned that I lived in a dorm with a coed naked hot tub? Clearly not enough to garner a significant audience, as is the way of the world - but surely once or twice. And the discussion of men and nipples in church made me think back on what made me comfortable, or not, as a potential ogle-ee.

It seems to me that there are four types:

  1. Men who don’t see women as full-fledged human beings.
  2. Men who do manage to see women as human beings, but not as sexual beings, or have a classic virgin/whore dichotomy problem.
  3. Men who see women as both human and sexual beings, but not at the same time. They’re well-behaved, but sometimes shift from normal eye contact to a desperate staring contest. You can see the “oh shit I wasn’t supposed to notice or feel anything now I’m stuck” whirling ’round - an admirable sentiment, perhaps, but still an awkward moment.
  4. Men who are fun to be around in a coed naked hot tub.

Obviously you can cook the categories to apply to women, or same-sex ogling, or whatever other genders and sexualities you’ve been streaking campus with lately. The point is, I saw an awful lot of young men successfully move from category 3 to category 4; while I can’t speak to their inner experiences, from the outside it just doesn’t seem that difficult. Contrariwise, there was one notable instance of someone moving from utter misogyny, to at least a theoretical acceptance of women as both human and sexual (in practice it didn’t always work out so well) - and clearly freaking the fuck out every step of the way.

Learning to accept the inevitable moments of sexual tension and let them pass, without getting all in a lather - it strikes me as the same thing that happens in meditation, letting your thoughts go and returning to your breath, again and again. Practice, isn’t it?

Part the Third: I’m going to Seattle tonight. At this point I can safely say that I’ll be leaving LA this summer/fall, driving north along the Pacific Coast until I hit grad school. How far north, exactly, I dunno - thus the going to Seattle - but if you’re so inclined, now would be a good time to cast some pearls of grad-school-choosing wisdom.

Part the Fourth, while we’re discussing my geography: I’m also planning a trip to Europe in July. The itinerary is Iceland - Norway with family, then Norway - Denmark - ??? - London? doing the backpacking thing with my sister. Any readers out there willing to show two delightful young tourists a good time?

yami · 15:00 · 27 Feb 2020
Filed under: Links, Diary

More WordPress Babbling

One: I’ve gotten my first comment spam on the new system - that was fast!

Two: I have a CSS question for all y’alls. This page was originally set up with a default link-color rule for the sidebar, header, and footer; links in this box, the #content div, were given a special rule: #content a:link { color: #3fa111; }. Fabulous, yeah? But when I wanted to assign yet another set of colors to the links in the entry-titles, using a.googleju:link { color: black } - no dice. The first rule is considered more specific, because it contains an ID selector, and the second rule only has a class selector. Without declaring my googleju rule to be !important, it was dead in the water.

I don’t like to use !important - it’s poor form. So I rewrote the stylesheet to make the #content colors the default, and declared exceptions for the other three div’s on the page. Which is fine, and will work until/unless I decide I need to put two kinds of links on the sidebar. At that point, it seems my only option is to rewrite all my HTML templates (based on the default WordPress theme) to use class selectors, rather than IDs.

So here’s my question: is there some sort of reason the default templates are set up with ID selectors?

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yami · 9:57 · 27 Feb 2020
Filed under: Code, Quizzes

What I’m Reading Tonight

  • Great discussion chez Hugo on PETA’s dubious tactics and building uneasy coalitions. In particular, Pip weighs in:

    What I’m suggesting is that in this case and many others, the absence of “common [ideological] ground” isn’t a barrier to co-operation, it’s the *basis* of it. Both sides are entirely clear-sighted about the nature and limits of the partnership. There’s no dreamy talk of “we all want the same thing really” — the point is, in a specific scenario, we all want *this* thing.

    On the other hand, if you’re not entirely sure where you yourself are coming from ideologically — if you just somehow feel sure the war in Iraq is a BAD THING — then stepping out on a peace march in the company of Islamist fascists may not be such a great idea.

    Now I can put my finger on why I feel uneasy at ANSWER events! They’re always ostensibly about a fairly specific thing, but judging by the people and the signs and the chants, they’re really about the communist revolution and veganism and all sorts of other things. It’s not that I don’t know where I’m coming from - I’m just always too lazy to bring my own sign, so I feel that my presence is being co-opted by movements which I either blandly fail to support (animal rights) or actively oppose (violent revolutionaries of various stripes). And I feel a little bit taken advantage of, too, when this tacit agreement to focus on a specific cause is violated.

    I think I owe Hugo a fuller response on the PETA thing, too. Or maybe I just owe it to myself, I don’t know. Anyway I’d like to write one, but I’ve found myself unable to articulate it yet.

  • Distinguishing schools of feminist thought at Alas.
  • A discussion on the correct application of science-fu has erupted over at Pharyngula. In particular, I delight in these (woefully out-of-context, but the context is so dull!) remarks from Razib:

    kevin drum, who has a degree in math from cal tech, seems at least as able to comment on network dynamics as PZ, a biologist.
    […]
    non-trivial correction, drum went to cal tech for two years and majored in math, but transferred to cal state long beach and graduated with journalism.

    Finally, someone recognizes that a Caltech undergraduate education does indeed give significant additional gravitas to one’s random spoutings-off on all things vaguely sciencey - HAH! Take that, everyone who didn’t like my plate tectonics post!

    More relevantly, the virtues of science-fu are at issue in the upcoming Pasadena school board election. Scott Phelps - a geophysicist turned high school science teacher - writes in the voter guide that “I believe in using my Caltech-science sense to detect unscientific arguments and to not be ’snowed’ by the administration.” Unfortunately for him, he’s running against incumbent Susan Kane, who lists her occupation as “research scientist” - she’s the associate director of research at the City of Hope medical center. I know Scott; he was one of the model teachers in my high school science teaching course. He’s a good guy; I don’t trust his political instincts (he caused a bit of a flap a while back…) but I do trust his take on the gritty details of curricula and testing. Since I haven’t been following local school politics, it’s hard for me to say which of these things is most important.

  • I’d like to round this out with a link to something funny, but I haven’t seen anything notably funny today. Say something hilarious in the comments, won’t you?
yami · 23:18 · 23 Feb 2020
Filed under: Links, Local Politics, Political Theory and Practice

Gender Blogrolls Quick Post

There is yet another game of prominent liberal male bloggers asking themselves why they don’t link to more female bloggers being played at the moment. It’s approximately as fun as a game of Chutes and Ladders, which is to say, not very fun at all. (While we’re somewhat on the topic, I’d actually be very interested in a game of “where are all the earth science bloggers?” - but not today.)

However, all the cool kids have been analyzing their blogrolls lately, so: My blogroll - or actually, my list of public subscriptions on bloglines, not counting flickr photostreams or webcomics or open-enrollment group blogs like Metafilter or any of that crap - encompasses 28 men, 24 women, 6 male-dominated group blogs, and a whole bunch of people whose genders I can’t remember and/or am unable to figure out. Modulo group blogs, that’s 46% - fully consistent with a random sampling of an evenly split pool, so nyah.

yami · 13:35 · 23 Feb 2020
Filed under: Wanking

The Moral Matrix

Another 2D political quiz. I’m in the moderately upper left:

  • Ideologies: Social Democratism
  • US Parties: No match.

Ain’t that the truth. Sigh.

yami · 19:43 · 21 Feb 2020
Filed under: Political Theory and Practice, Quizzes

A Lack of Synergy

This new Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper is exactly the sum of its parts. Which is disappointing; other flavored classic pops have managed to transcend themselves, at least a little. In particular, Cherry Coke and Diet Coke with Lime operate on a level above the mere addition of cherry-ness and coke-ness and lime-ness and artificial astringency. If you remember the brief error that was Diet Coke with Lemon, that also was not just the sum of its parts; it was considerably worse than either of its components.

And much as I love Vanilla Coke, or better yet Coke with vanilla extract thrown in, it’s just the goodness of vanilla with the okayness of Coke, nothing more. This new Dr. Pepper is the same damn thing: the goodness of vanilla, the goodness of cherry, the okayness of Dr. Pepper. It’s not noticeably different from the vague fruity sweetness that you get from pouring all the different kinds of pop at the fountain into your cup.

Sigh.

yami · 20:05 · 20 Feb 2020
Filed under: Food

Hello world!

Okay, this is the WordPress sandbox post! I’m still working on the design, and reassigning old entries to new categories - the mineral puns were cute, but getting old and generally not very useful.

Does anyone know how I get my name to stop showing up as “admin” in the comments? I’ve set it to “yami” in my user profile but it’s just not sticking. - so that one wasn’t so hard.

Next question: why isn’t the hierarchical category list functioning as advertised? Answer: hide_empty was turned on.

Other transition issues: the import from MT went smoothly, but it seems to have auto-pinged everything all over again. D’oh! My apologies if you’ve just been slammed with a ton of duplicate trackbacks.

yami · 13:20 · 20 Feb 2020
Filed under: Meta

Friday!

Not Pr0n - best riddle game I’ve played in a while. I’m currently stuck on level 10… yar!

Safe for work, but does have sound. Wear headphones.

yami · 13:00 · 18 Feb 2020
Filed under: Links

Initiative

We have a call and response and variations on the theme of brazen wimmins asking lovely shy manpeople on dates, and particularly, why a feminist who takes no crap from The Rules might still not want to do such a thing. Reasons discussed include (in ascending order of silliness):

  1. She’s shy, and society affirms that shyness.
  2. She’s scared that once she invites a little bit of attention, she’ll lose the ability to put a stop to it, and she’ll be annoyed/stalked/assaulted.
  3. She’s Venusian and wants to date a Martian.
  4. She’s from Earth, but thinks men are from Mars and will blast her with their phallus ray guns if she reveals herself as an Earthling spy never take her seriously if she fails to approximate a Venusian for the first N minutes of their acquaintanceship.

I’m primarily concerned, here, with the practice of telling women that traditional gender roles will keep us safe(r). While there are differences in the truth values of “math might make your uterus explode” and “flirting with a strange man might make him decide not to stop following you around in hopes of more attention” … I’m not sure that they serve such different rhetorical functions.
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yami · 23:15 · 17 Feb 2020
Filed under: Feminism

Questions Re: Eyebrows

I’m having an eyebrow-hair-falling-outing day today. Eyebrow hairs all over my cheeks, in my fingers when I scratch my forehead, everywhere. I would make a lot of wishes, but I think that only works for eyelashes.

Is there a punishment for blowing your eyebrow off your fingertip and making a wish?

Am I going to be eaten by the eyebrow police?

yami · 17:15 · 16 Feb 2020
Filed under: Whimsy