Wednesday, November 10, 2021
Flaws in my education: I never learned that I'm bad at spotting racism
Saturday, November 06, 2021
Things the Library Should Invent: lend out external media readers
Monday, November 01, 2021
Another option for Captain Awkward #1352
Dear Captain Awkward,
I (they/them) am single, live alone, and have been working from home throughout the COVID situation – the long-term isolation has been really hard. During the last year I took up fishkeeping, which has been really great for my mental health.
But then I developed something known in the hobby as “MTS” – multiple tank syndrome – in which I, well, started to go a little overboard with new fish tanks and fishes. In addition to the assortment of tanks in my actual apartment (basically one in every room, each with different types of fish), I set up a “balcony tub” with floating plants and rosy red minnows.
Last week new neighbors moved into my building and I guess they must have seen my balcony tub because they asked if I had fish on my balcony and…I truly am not sure why…but I impulsively lied, like, “No! Of course I don’t have fish on the balcony! Ha ha ha…”
But the thing is: I do have fish on the balcony.
The fish are very healthy and happy and I don’t think it’s against the rules (I did check the lease) – although that might be because no one ever thought to make a rule against it…
Anyway, I have no idea why I lied other than like…maybe the built-up isolation of the last year and a half, and some internal sense that keeping fish on your balcony was Too Much, and therefore in order to not seem Super Weird to my new neighbors I should keep that under wraps? (Don’t ask, don’t shell!)
But now I feel even *more* awkward and way weirder than if I’d just been like “oh yeah those are my minnows!”
I lied about having fish on the balcony, and I clearly do have fish on the balcony.
In the past I’ve had good relationships with my neighbors. Is there any way I can salvage this truly awkward introduction??
Thank you in advance for your advice. I don’t think this question has been addressed before.
All best,
A Fishy Neighbor
Fortunately, “I was trying so hard not to come off as weird that I overcorrected and did something objectively weird” is an extremely relatable and common predicament, and being able to laugh at yourself (“I didn’t want you to think I was obsessed with fish, good job, me, now you think I’m a liar who is obsessed with fish! Welcome to the building!) is the best remedy I know.
In this vein of a relatable and common predicament and being able to laugh at oneself, another option, if someone should directly inquire about the fact that you specifically said you don't have fish even though you clearly have fish, is something along the lines of "Sorry, it was an attempt at a joke that clearly didn't work. My alleged sense of humour misfires more often than I'd care to admit!"
(Q: What is the attempted joke? A: The very notion that your fishy self would not have fish on the balcony is laughable!)
Benefits to this approach:
- You aren't admitting to lying, or mentioning that you lied as if it's no big deal. Some people are extremely prescriptivist about lying and think that if someone lies at all ever, they're intrinsically untrustworthy. There are also people who are wary enough of lying that they'd see "I told a lie because I panicked" as a red flag suggesting that you're untrustworthy.
- Having a joke misfire is also a relatable and common predicament
- When assholes make a joke that misfires, they tend to double down and/or blame the audience for not getting/liking the joke. In contrast, admitting that your joke misfired - and that your sense of humour doesn't do the job as often as you'd like in general - is a sign of humility and strength of character. Wouldn't you think positively of someone who genially admits that their joke didn't land and moves on?
Sunday, October 31, 2021
Books read in October 2021
New:
Reread:
1. Eternity in Death
Tuesday, October 26, 2021
What if we measured beauty standards in labour required to be unremarkable or credible?
Wednesday, October 20, 2021
Money and connections
Sunday, October 17, 2021
Thoughts on Season 3 of Star Trek: Discovery
This post is a full spoiler zone for Star Trek: Discovery, although I'm not talking very much about specific plot points.
I just finished Season 3 of Star Trek: Discovery. I generally enjoyed it, as I do most Star Trek, but there were a couple of aspects that didn't fully work for me.
1. 930 years into the future
Star Trek: Discovery ended season 2 by jumping 930 years into the future, and season 3 covers their adventures there.
However, I had trouble suspending disbelief that the crew of the Discovery could function in a way that's even remotely useful 930 years in the future, even taking into account that their ship has a spore drive in a universe where warp travel is severely limited.
Think about 930 years. 930 years ago was 1090. Think about the world in 1090. (I'm most immediately familiar with the history of England from that era, so most of my references here are English.) William the Conqueror had died just a few years earlier. The Domesday book had just been completed. Old English was still spoken - the Norman influence in England hadn't yet been around long enough for even Middle English to have evolved. In other words, the English language was completely devoid of French or Latin influences - such as the words "language" and "completely" and "devoid" and "French" and "Latin" and "influences"!
The internet tells me clocks hadn't yet been invented 930 years ago. Imagine a person who had never co-existed with clocks! It wouldn't just be a question of how to use a clock to tell time, but all the ways society is affected by the degree of time-telling precision they afford. The train leaves at 9:13. Your speech should be between 2 and 3 minutes long. Edit this video down to 30 seconds. It would be unfathomable!
Not to mention that their technology is sufficiently compatible. The charger for my eight-year-old ipod is no longer manufactured. There's a whole side market of CRT televisions because game consoles from my childhood won't work properly with modern TVs. The external hard drives I use for my computer backups occasionally just stop working. And I'm supposed to believe that they could just . . . update Discovery's computer database after nearly a thousand years??
There are fandom rumours that the creative team originally wanted to set Star Trek: Discovery in the distant future and were forced to set it 10 years pre-TOS for marketing reasons, so IRL this is likely the creative team shifting towards doing what they actually want to do now that they have the capital to do so. But I'm finding it hard to suspend disbelief, and that's a negative.
2. Adira and Gray and representation
Season 3 of Star Trek: Discovery included a milestone for the franchise: Star Trek's first transgender and non-binary characters!However, I think the decision to make both Adira and Gray Trill was a strategic error. (Pedants will point out that Adira is human, but what's relevant here is that they are hosting a Trill symbiont.)
One audience who could have benefited particularly from Adira and Gray are people who are ignorant about or even completely unaware of transgender and/or non-binary - especially those who are or may one day become parents of trans or non-binary children.
People who, like me, are old enough to be parents of trans or non-binary children didn't learn much about transgender or non-binary growing up. We only know what has reached us through general cultural in adulthood. This means that some parents of trans and non-binary kids aren't going to have heard of transgender and/or non-binary. Trans and non-binary Star Trek characters can help with this - a kid who has to say "Mom, I'm non-binary" can add the useful cultural reference of "Like Adira on Star Trek."
With Adira especially, I'm concerned that people who are unfamiliar with non-binary might think Adira's perception of themself as non-binary is the result of hosting a Trill symbiont (and therefore having memories and personality traits of all the symbiont's previous hosts), rather than being an actual real-life gender identity that occurs in actual real-life people.
I myself am familiar with they/them pronouns, knew from media coverage
that Adira's pronouns are they/them, and knew from media coverage that
after Adira was initially misgendered as "she", they'd be coming out as
"they". But, even going in with this knowledge, when I heard Adira say "They, not she", my first thought was that they were about to say credit was due to their symbiont, or their symbiont's previous hosts.
I'm further concerned that some non-binary kid might see this, identify with Adira, explain it to their parents as "Like Adira on Star Trek!" and have their parents respond with "That's not a real thing, that's just Star Trek aliens!" Ignorant parents might even think their kid is delusional, like they would if their kid insisted they're a Vulcan.
I think having Adira and Gray being a couple exacerbates this. Not the romantic aspect specifically, but rather that they are positioned as a unit that includes the two of them and does not include anyone else. I'm thinking that framing might be othering towards trans and non-binary people, rather than positioning them as a regular everyday part of the population as a whole.
I think a better strategic decision would have been to have our first trans character and our first non-binary character both be human, and be unaffiliated with each other. (For example, if one was Aurellio and the other was Aditya Sahil.) Also, include trans and non-binary actors as part of your diverse casting for minor roles, alien and human alike. So we have our key trans and non-binary characters, and also, like, a trans ensign in Vulcan ears operating the transporter and a non-binary Bajoran seated at the conference table.
Again, I am neither trans nor non-binary myself, so I could be delighted to hear that my concerns here are unfounded. But, until I hear that, I continue to be concerned that the decision to make Adira and Gray both Trills and a couple is detrimental to the good that our first trans and non-binary characters might do.
Sunday, October 10, 2021
Bra back pain braindump
Saturday, October 02, 2021
If your bra elastic is too tight, stretch it over the back of a chair
Thursday, September 30, 2021
Books read in September 2021
Saturday, September 18, 2021
My voting by mail experience
Thursday, September 16, 2021
Things They Should Invent: "Browsing-Friendly" sign for small businesses
Tuesday, September 07, 2021
The mysterious missing verses of The Tottenham Toad
The Tottenham Toad came trotting down the roadWith his feet all swimming in the seaPretty little squirrel with your tail in curlThey’ve all got a wife but me.
Here's the weird part: the internet says that this is the whole song, but I clearly remember it has having three verses! I distinctly remember other lines from the song, and there is no record of them on the internet.
I remember the following lines:
Sunday, September 05, 2021
Could an eBay-style bidding system help painlessly cool the real estate market?
Tuesday, August 31, 2021
Books read in August 2021
New:
1. Dico des mots qui n'existent pas et qu'on utilise quand même by Olivier Talon and Gilles Vervisch
Reread:
1. Born in Death
Tuesday, August 17, 2021
Things They Should Invent: people who left this job went on to work at...
I recently had a new idea, inspired by an Ask A Manager column and my own job-hunting experience:
New rule: if you reject someone because you think they're going to leave for a better job, you have to tell them where to find this better job.
— "Impudent Strumpet!" (@ImpStrump) August 4, 2021
Today, my shower gave me an improvement on this idea: a "people who left this job went to work at..." website, or perhaps a LinkedIn functionality.
Scraping LinkedIn data (and other data if other useful sources are available), track which employers people went to after leaving a previous job, and look for patterns.
For example, if many people left Acme Inc. to work for Roarke Industries, and a comparable number left Roarke Industries to work for Acme Inc., that tells one story. If many people left Acme Inc. to work for Roarke Industries but there was no pattern of traffic in the other direction, that tells another story.
People can use this information to find better jobs and find employers who are likely to hire them based on their previous experience. Conversely, they might also be able to use it to plan their career path - for example, if Roarke Industries requires 5 years of experience and a lot of people go from university to Acme Inc. to Roarke Industries, then Acme Inc. might be the place to get the experience you need to be hired by Roarke Industries.
Tuesday, August 03, 2021
Things They Should Invent: cupboard to dishwasher to resident to dishes algorithm
The cupboard where I keep my cups is precariously full.
And I often run out of cups (or appropriate cups, e.g. I have wineglasses but don't have any coffee mugs) before my dishwasher is full.
I didn't have this problem in my old apartment!
I feel like someone could make an algorithm to fix this.
You enter your cubic centimetres of dishwasher rack space and cupboard shelf space, the number of people in your household, and perhaps the rate at which you use dishes in a given day (e.g. 2 mugs, 1 wine glass, 1 water glass) and it calculates the optimal number of each item for you to own. Perhaps it could even tell you how to arrange your dishes in the cupboard.
Maybe it could also do the opposite when you're buying a dishwasher: you tell it what you own and the rate at which you use it, and it finds the optimal dishwasher to fit your lifestyle.