forthwritten

Current Music: Stars - Your Ex-Lover Is Dead

It's proper wintry here; cold, crisp days with clear blue skies and snow and freezing fog at night. The snow thaws and freezes, thaws and freezes; it snows a bit more, tiny dry flakes rather than fat wetly fluffy ones; the village has apparently run out of salt. Because this is England, and every snowfall is a surprise no matter how frequently they occur.

Yesterday I went to London and bought a telescope for my astrophysicist sister, amongst other things. We walked down Oxford Street with the lights and crowds and my sister's holey trainers and snow falling from the sky and clinging to my coat.

Rebuilt computer over the last few days, mainly putting the components in a different, lighter case, putting in a SSD as the boot drive and installing Windows 7. So far everything seems be working although Windows 7 is a little weird to begin with.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Vienna Teng - Gravity

RAID array seems to have degraded AGAIN which is rather frustrating. I won't have time to sort it out until later, so will have to do regular backups to my external. Annoying annoying annoying. I wish I was a better computer geek so I could decide whether to go with Ubuntu and wine or some variety of Windows. Unfortunately I can't switch fully over to Linux as I need to run Wordsmith and I don't want to think what OOo might do to my thesis as it gets a) incredibly long and b) sent between my supervisor and me with annotations, notes etc.

Just finished reading Nobody Passes. It's a collection of personal essays exploring identity in terms of who you are, who you are not and who other people think you are. I liked the intersectionality aspect of it - there were people talking about how their POC identity interacts with their sexuality but also discussing how a genderqueer identity is problematic, how their queer identity is ignored when they're with their transgendered partner, how their disability and queer identities are intertwined, the difficult and conflicting narratives of different (South) Asian identities. Every essay contained something new - a different perspective, a different way of thinking about familiar things, and sometimes things that I've been privileged enough to never have considered before.
The last essay in the collection rankled me because it seemed to be talking about something very different; after the lucid, eloquent discussions of identity and labels and the significance of claiming or rejecting or being seem to claim or reject these labels, it seemed a bit odd to have a straight man who'd been involved with the kink community arguing that rather than defining a "politics based on pleasure and solidarity" as queer, it would be better to leave this space undefined so as to let people across sexualities "revel in a different kind of space to play" instead of them seeking to pass or creating new words and identities.

I admit that I dislike the term "play" and its implication that this is all a game, and especially after essays that discuss the dangers and difficulties and seriousness of intersectional or marginal identities. Of course identity can be playful e.g. genderfuck but to my mind, it seems that being playful about identity is a privilege. I'm also hesitant to define queerness as "pleasure and solidarity"; again, perhaps only in my mind, it seems connected to being a misfit and questioning or rejecting norms.

Anyway, packing time. Stop sniggering at the back, I mean in the dull, sorting-out-notes-and-filling-boxes sense rather than any other.

Current Music: British Sea Power - Oh Larsen B

Today

luciente came over and we epically failed to do our skills audits. This was partially because of epic server fail, us filling out the wrong bit ("I KNEW this looked too straightforward!") and her forcing me to read Roy Orbison in clingfilm. As ever, we quickly got down to the business of traumatising each other (all of those links go to weepingcock, they have all been carefully selected for maximum wrongness, and I consider it a personal win that

luciente actually refused to read one of them).

In linkiness round-up and in no particular order:

spiralsheep explains why opposing the BNP is a feminist issue and more about their members, and

gavagai has lots of links.

damned_colonial is asking what you'd say if asked to give a talk on how to make open source more welcoming to women and other minorities. This comment is superb. Related to it, the male privilege checklist and How to encourage women into Linux.

Stuff on Jared Diamond's reporting: link discussing problems and issues and perspective from an anthropology blog. I've been meaning to read Guns, Germs and Steel, gah, people, stop failing.

Found someone's notes on Great War Fiction when looking for suffragist responses to the outbreak of war. I particularly like this analysis of narratives of white feather stories. Check out comment #6 for the author's response to an illiterate sexist.

Bizarre article about Women Not Drinking Real Ale. Apparently they are Scared Of Getting Fat. As a female real ale drinker, I would argue that choosing between six or seven ales on tap with little information on what each actually is or tastes like is kind of intimidating and that you at least know where you are with a vodka and diet coke/WKD. I was lucky enough to be guided by the secretary of a branch of CAMRA, but I think it would be helpful if there were, say, leaflets, describing each ale in terms of brewery, hops and tasting notes and taking the guesswork out of it a bit. Is it wrong that I see parallels between real ale drinking and open source?

A gorgeously written, moving piece on having and losing a language.

I didn't participate in foc_u, and this analysis and this explanation kind of describe why I didn't want to join the community. Because yes, I'm not white - and I'm also female. I'm tired of my safe spaces for me as a woman not being safe for me as a non-white person, and I don't want my safe space for me as a non-white person to be unsafe for me as a woman. Intersectionality, it's a beautiful thing.

And finally, a linguistics essay using LJ Abuse as a case study.

Current Music: Patrick Wolf - Vulture

Was invited to a unbirthday pancake breakfast by two of my friends - I admit that I am not at my best at 9am, but pancakes and tea and discussions about feminist theology in science fiction make me happy. They made me a big pancake with 25 candles in it. I am amazed I still have eyebrows.

I also set up my monitor and monitor/tv as a dual monitor system, whoo. The monitor is running at 1280x1024 and the monitor/tv is at 1680x1050 - not sure if I want to nudge that down to 1360x1024 though. The nice thing is that I can watch DVDs or TV on the monitor/tv and work on the monitor. I want to fiddle around with the settings a bit more but overall, my room now looks considerably more like a geek lair and I can hold my head up amongst the corpus linguists again (even if, now Matt's left, we aren't being quite so geektastic about hardware).

Interesting links:

Ministry of Type - typography, some really interesting analysis and beautiful, startling design.

Ada Lovelace Day post discussing OTW/AO3 and Dreamwidth and female-led projects

Para-military 101 :

When you apply organised, government-ordained violence to peaceful people, you create paramilitaries: everyone watching the War on Terror knows that. For every Climate Camp invasion the government creates more unstable elements, who feel that only with violence can they force the state to listen. That’s bad for the government, it’s bad for the people, and it’s really bad for the beat coppers caught between the two.

A field trip into Easter - beautiful, meditative post about different religious traditions

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Entries tagged with computers

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nobody passes

epic links post is epic

collection of links: typography, Ada Lovelace, police violence, religion

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September 2019

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