Assume a spherical cat of uniform happiness (2013/07/18)
But you don’t have to assume her anymore. I have her.
[read more...]The hate that dare not speak its name (2013/06/28)
Used to be, people were pretty shy about being gay, because it could get you in lots of trouble. Crazy, crazy, trouble. Not just being beaten or killed, but stuff like attempts to use mandatory hormone therapy to “treat” it. And this was a horrible situation. Thing is, this didn’t mean gay people didn’t want relationships, it just meant they had to find subtle ways to indicate that they might be interested in such things. (People who read a lot of Pratchett may recognize a similarity to his dwarves, who do not distinguish between male and female in most contexts, considering it a rather personal thing, making their courtships rather more complicated.)
[read more...] Come on, Gabe, you're better than that. (2013/06/20)
Penny Arcade’s Gabe is doing the “poke the trans people” thing again (too lazy to link, its on the twitters). Gabe, dude. Claiming that anyone with a vagina is necessarily a woman is sort of a dick move (sorry, couldn’t pass on that straight line). It’s not cool or edgy. It’s also not usefully true. And the thing is, I totally get the idea that it would be nice if the world were nice and simple and everything fit into easy categories. But the world isn’t all that simple, not everything fits into easy categories, and dismissing people as not existing is an oversimplification with a significant body count.
[read more...]Spare ideas (2013/06/08)
Was reading the Pathfinder (a tabletop RPG) book on game mastery, browsing their world-building stuff, came up with spare ideas.
[read more...]Getting hit on in MMOs (2013/06/03)
So, last night, there was hilarity. There was this guy, in Rift, who was… well. First off, I believe he was about 14. So he was being generically homophobic, as a lot of young teens are, and people were teasing him about it. And he responded, as 14-year-old boys often do, by trying to be abusive and sexually harass people with female names. Whereupon he asked Katrinka (aka me) to “show me your milkshake”.
[read more...]Critical theory in a nutshell (2013/05/27)
I once encountered someone who asserted that all men, without exceptions, were rapists. Not as hyperbole, but as a flatly literal claim. And when I pointed out that this was pretty sexist, she explained that, according to “critical theory”, there was no such thing as sexism against men, because men are a privileged group.
[read more...]New personal best: 13 years. (2013/05/26)
So, you know that thing where people say they’ll get back to you, but they don’t? I had one of those pending from a programming conversation. I finally went back and tracked it down and sent a followup message. It’s been 13 years.
[read more...]On being made out of meat. (2013/05/14)
We are, by and large, made out of meat.
[read more...]Dear Ms. Scott: I believe you misunderstand the term "heart-breaking". (2013/05/13)
Peggy Scott’s heart breaks for the state of Minnesota.
[read more...]The mirror test and cats (2013/05/03)
One of the standard tests for self-awareness is “the mirror test” – put dye on a creature in a place it can’t see but could see in a mirror, give it a mirror, see whether it investigates the dyed spot. Cats, in general, fail this.
[read more...]