The Blog of Siram

Someone on Facebook put that question out there as his status, and I couldn't actually think of any one thing that really stood out as "best."

I can think of lots of things that were good, but they mostly weren't individual events.

I can also think of lots of things that were bad, many of them actual events, but nothing that stands out as "worst."

I guess overall my life chugged along nicely. :)

Single most eventful event? Well, I finally decided it was time to quit Battle Pirates, after 2.5 years of devoting nearly my entire life to the community of people that had built up around the game. The game itself had stopped being much fun a long time ago, but it took a while before I was ready to try to leave my people. That was Dec 28. So far I'm still holding strong. I can't call it best or worst yet, because it isn't done happening.

When the apartment management first told me about my new apartment, they said it wouldn't have any washer/dryer connections. But after I moved down here, they neglected to tell me that there were washer/dryer connections after all - and they especially didn't mention it was going to cost me an extra $10 per month.

Right around the same time, someone mentioned how they'd just bought a small portable washer. Just like a regular-sized washer, they said, but smaller! Possibly small enough that even I can move it by myself! (This is a plus because I'm a firm believer in only having furniture and appliances that I can personally move by myself.)

And so, after some shopping around I bought:

It's a Haier pulsator portable washer. It turns out that I can lift the thing, but just in case I can't it comes with wheels. It's also a lot more roomy on the inside than it looks because it doesn't have that big column thingy up the middle. It's also cute. Cuteness is key when it comes to wanting to do laundry. :)

Step One

Do a traditional lecture on the topic.

Step Two

Assign standard homework. But for each question, ask where and how students arrived at their answers.

You can hope all you want that students will learn the material by attending your lectures, reading things you've assigned them to read, and getting a broad background on the topic from which they can draw to answer specific questions. But this is a day and age where they will just copy/paste the entire question into a search engine (including any misspellings). And there are lots and lots of people on the Internet who will happily write a direct answer to it if enough students input the exact same one. Yay for SEO longtails and ad revenue share.

Step Three

Do a second lecture about all the online sources on the topic that students have found. "This one is right because..." "This one is wrong about..."

In this way, not only do they still learn the actual material, they also get some insight into evaluating sources on their own. And you learn where all the cheat sources are without having to look yourself. Win-win? :)

Note: I have no education background whatsoever except as a student.

On the one hand, I'm really flattered that someone could be so comfy including me in their "us" category that they'll use words like "fag" while talking about their "them" categories. I haven't been part of any offline "us" categories in years.

On the other hand... well... umm, "fag." T.T

After having lived for several years in a place where people commonly did their best to avoid acknowledging my existence, I can't say how nice it is to be somewhere where people actually look at me and sometimes even randomly talk to me like I'm a normal person, and where service staff actually want to help me. Even if they're old white people! Thank you, Bloomington Indiana, for reminding me what that's like - and restoring some faith that there are at least small pockets of midwestern U.S. where people are decent, even to people who aren't exactly like them.

(Slice of Life)

At some point your potential is supposed to turn into kinetic. If it hasn't by the time you've reached 30, you've lost it all.

To "agree to disagree" means "I understand and respect your point of view, but I still disagree." Which happens when everyone knows what everyone else thinks and why, and also knows that everyone else knows what they think. Also, that part about respect is kind of key.

This is not the same thing as "Let's just talk about something else now."

It's now been almost a year since I first started seriously poking through my roomful of old boxes of stuff. A lot has gotten tossed, recycled, or shredded. The harp in one of last year's pictures has been freecycled. Boxes have been emptied, and other boxes have been filled. Stuff has moved into and out of the room from other parts of the apartment. The result so far? I think my stuff is actually multiplying. o.O

At the time I started, I figured it was finally time to unpack everything and settle in. A few months later, however, that turned out to be premature. So while I still unpacked and sorted, I'm also working on repacking it all back up again. Such is the way of my life.

From ABC News:

Efforts to promote 'transgenderism' in public policy deconstruct one of the most fundamental concepts known to mankind. It renders gender, the most basic organization of social systems, completely meaningless. In doing so, activists like Simpson are asking the rest of society to radically reorder the ways in which the culture makes reasonable and rational accommodation for the two genders," [Monica Schleicher, spokeswoman for Christian group Focus on the Family] said.

There's actually a pretty big difference between gender identity and gender role. When transpeople are talking about the topic, they mean identity. When everyone else does, they usually mean role (as Ms. Schleicher does). This conflation is what causes a lot of confusion and frustration, I think.

Chapter One

Boy meets girl.
Boy wants to impress girl.
Boy does some sort of astounding feat.
Girl gushes over boy, impressed.
Hooray! :)

Chapter Two

Boy meets boy.
Boy wants to show up boy.
Boy does some sort of astounding feat.
Other boy? Does the same thing, only better!
Boy and boy probably go off to have a beer together.

Chapter Three

Boy meets me.
Boy wants to impress me.
Boy does some sort of astounding feat.
I? If I'm attracted, I want to impress him.
I do the same thing, only better!
Boy slinks off feeling like a loser, never to be seen again.

And thus: I stay away from love lives. :p

Yes, Kenza. I really am a boy on the inside. Thank you for noticing. You have no idea how much it pleases me that you can see what all the grownups cannot.

I think that the next time a six year old asks me that, if it happens again, I'm not going to evade with an answer about wanting to talk to her mother about it first. I'm just going to say yes.

Assuming anyone is even still looking, posting here has been rather light and fluffy for a while, possibly even verging on nonexistent. >.>

I've been busy. I got official notice of being laid off in late June (with warning hints back in April), my last day was Monday, and in between I've been wrapping up work at work, job hunting at home, trying to put together a demo website of my leet skillz, and taking care of an enormous number of details involved in preparing for a move (because, if I actually found a job, I'd need to move to it). I still haven't gotten to the packing part of the proceedings yet, but I'm down to only five boxes left in my storage room. Once those are sorted, packing will commence. I'm also shedding all sorts of unused-but-still-useful items to Goodwill and Freecycle, and trying to eat everything in the pantry.

Instead of writing longwinded posts here, I've been putting short updates over on Twitter instead. For those not on Twitter, here's an abridged version:

Today I did almost nothing of note. Tomorrow I dive back into the chaos. If there's another lull somewhere, maybe I'll post again this month...

A scene in a crummy little town in Kentucky, next to a semi wreck that has closed both sides of the interstate and forced everybody to go 15 miles on a dinky little state road...

I walk into the gas station.

The lady behind the counter finishes helping the customer in front of me, then starts sorting change.

I stand there and wait patiently for her to finish.

Eventually she runs out of stuff to fiddle with. Without looking at me, in a carefully guarded tone of voice that says "I'm being as polite as possible under such trying circumstances," she says "yes?"

I get as far as "how do I--" before she interrupts and tells me how to find the detour.

Halfway through, a man walks into the store and says something like "did you mean the red light out that way?" (Obviously he was looking for the same directions.)

The lady behind the counter drops talking to me entirely as she shifts her full attention to the other guy. The directions get clarified. I stand there and listen in. The man nods and leaves.

I say "thanks." The lady completely ignores me.

I follow the man through the door. He tries to close it on me. Then he goes back to his truck without looking back.

I usually don't bother getting offended by stuff like this, because it happens so often that it's 'normal'. But in the spirit of describing what I see that other people don't, I thought I'd share.

To the lovely young (white) couple standing in line ahead of me, who recognized and began a lengthy, enthusiastic conversation with the lovely young (white) couple standing in line behind me:

The polite thing to do would've been to offer to let me move ahead of you in line, instead of talking through me like I don't exist.

Signed,
The totally dismissible Asian person standing directly in the middle of your happy little group

p.s. The whole, shake hands around me thing, that was a bit over the top, even for normal non-acknowledgement of my existence.

-.-

I think I'm only capable of unconditional love if I'm not in a romantic relationship.

Individual people are cool. I enjoy following their lives, especially if theirs are vastly different from mine - if they've seen or done things I haven't, or were born into perspectives not like mine and not within the USian dominant cultures. I enjoy finding out what they think, why they think that way, how they got there. I can admire their strengths, find beauty in their weaknesses, and love their diversity of humanity. I like people who are being who they are.

By the same token, one of the biggest things I look for in others is an ability to see and understand and like me for who I am, as I am, for my own sake and not for who I am in relation to them. People who can recognize the subtle signs to stop talking about themselves and start listening, because I have something important to say. Those are the people who end up becoming my closest friends.

But when it comes to seeing someone as a potential lifelong mate, it's not just about them anymore - it becomes much more about how they relate to me. Do I personally like them, what they think, and how they think? Do I find them physically attractive? What do I think of their pursuits in life? Do I find their interests or any aspects of their personalities annoying? Can they continue to be who they are, or would they have to change in ways that would make them less happy but would please me more, and how can I ask them for changes like that? Can I somehow avoid becoming ridiculously jealous over extremely stupid things, and wanting to control how they think, as past experiences have shown I do?

On the whole, I think I'm waiting to find someone who is already exactly who I want them to be.

Note: the immediate cause of these thoughts is not the only source of them.

Vitalism is the belief that all living things contain a spirit. Animism is the belief that all things, living or otherwise, do.^* A friend recently asked me, which am I? And how do I reconcile that with being an evolutionary biologist?

My answer: Biology is about the physical forms of life, and evolution is about how they got to be the way they are. For that matter, all of the hard sciences are about the physical world. Animism and vitalism are about spirits, which are not physical. What does the one have to do with the other? To me, not a whole lot. Physical form probably influences how a spirit perceives and interacts with the world, but in the end body and soul are separate things.

So what do I think about spirits in general? Well, all living things certainly have them. Not sure about non-living things. There are also spirits that aren't attached to physical forms. Some of them survived their deaths in the physical world; others, I have no idea whether they came from a somewhere or if their there is where they've always been. But the physical plane is not the only one.

I'm not sure whether my friend was satisfied with that answer or not.

^*Apparently it's more longwinded than that, with whole philosophical schools of thought behind those concepts, with which I'm completely unfamiliar, so I'll just go with how it was defined to me, as above by said friend.

When it comes to questions of nature versus nurture on the topic of gender differences, transpeople have a perspective that cispeople do not have. We may not be able to articulate what those differences are in a way that doesn't cause cispeople to immediately jump to conclusions about stereotyping, but for us the topic is not an intellectual exercise or a set of abstract theories about the workings of society and culture. We see the differences firsthand, as a part of everyday life.

Fellow UCFer Jeri lost her husband very suddenly a month ago, and asked for thoughts on life after death. Here are some of mine.

My father survived his death, and I saw him in the corner of the ceiling behind me when I went to visit his body. It was one of the most distressing things I've ever seen - for here was my father, in the room with me, but he wasn't in his body. His body lay before me and looked just like any other inanimate object, a piece of furniture, like it had never been alive. And he, no longer hidden beneath all those representative facades that everyone wears as they go through life in various roles, he was purely him.

I don't know that I'd call it a soul, because that word is laden with so many connotations from every religion. Maybe spirit, or (as I called it before I knew anyone else had vocabulary for the same concepts) essence. Everyone has an essence, and when they are open and being themselves, glimpses show through. Right after my father died was when I saw the whole thing, he as himself and completely true.

I was very upset, because due to a miscommunication between the hospital staff and the rest of my family, nobody warned me before I stepped into the room that he was dead. My first instinct was to grab hold of him and put him back in, but I didn't know how and also thought that might be bad. I wanted to turn around and look at him directly, but there was the nurse with me, and what would she think of me if I did? So we didn't talk to each other, and I'll always wish that i'd been better prepared so that we could.

After that, there came the dreams. He would visit me and try to talk to me. The first one, my mundane dream had taken me out into our garage, and he was standing there like he always did when he smoked, and he asked how we were doing. We talked while my own dream tried to call me back, until eventually I was distracted and pulled back in. Other times, we were in our original house, in his office area on the third floor.

But his questions almost never made any sense. Dreams are places where reality is ever-shifting, where things change around as attention shifts from moment to moment, and where communication doesn't happen in speech, but in symbols and emotion. But he kept coming back and we kept trying.

A lot of the early ones were colored with dark melancholy, and I remember them all as being tinted blue. There was one in particular where we were on a very long journey, on a flat, featureless road across an empty plain. I drove while he wallowed in despair. Our car broke down and we stopped at a tiny motel. He was blind stinking drunk, chain smoking, in a completely self-destructive mood, and absolutely did not want to go anywhere. I think he wanted to just lie there and rot away. But I knew we had to keep moving, he had to get to where he was going (which I knew in the dream, but don't remember now). Our car disappeared at some point while we were resting - while he was resting while I was scouting ahead. Forward momentum was clearly going to be totally hopeless, because the only way to continue was on foot. I accepted that with quiet resignation, because stopping wasn't actually an option. But he didn't want to go, so I had to half drag, half carry him along. Finally he turned to me and asked, why would I want to help a sad, pathetic, miserable wretch like him? couldn't I see how worthless he was? And I stopped, the journey disappeared as I turned to him and replied (and I think my voice resounded through the land), because he was my father and I loved him, what kind of stupid question was that? now come on!

I like to think that I helped him along the way to where he was going. As time went on, the blue melancholy tinting went away, and there were dreams tinted in yellow. In the next to last dream, he appeared to me outside some kind of public building (a school, maybe), and he was in good spirits. We did our usual try at talking, where he asked questions that made no sense and my answers probably made less sense, and then I thought that was the end. After that, I assumed he had moved on and all was well with him.

But several months later, he was back with the blue tinting. I didn't handle that visit well at all. What are you doing back here? You're supposed to have moved on! If that's not what really happened, leave me to my fictional belief that I helped you and that all is well now and that you're gone. And he withdrew, and I haven't seen him since. And now I'll always wonder what that last visit had been about, and wish I had been better prepared to listen.

So what do I believe, about what happens after death? I don't know. I'm standing on the wrong side of the veil, on the beach at the edge of the sea, and the ones who have departed are seeing things and doing things and concerned with things that I couldn't begin to comprehend.

I have nothing to say.

I have lots to say, actually. I'm just not in the right frame of mind to organize my thoughts into anything coherent, that won't somehow manage to offend everyone left and right. I haven't been in a good frame of mind for almost a month now. Hence the silence, which is better than anything I might possibly say.

So instead, I'll just list everything I've been up to lately. Maybe it'll be an interesting read to someone somewhere.

1. Work

a) I'm making a database of every satellite image I've ever made. They date from late 1997 to present, and I've finished 2003 but haven't yet started 2004.

b) There's either something odd going on in the water off the southeast U.S. coast, or both satellites pointed at it are glitching in exactly the same way. Which is it? I'm assembling the overall big picture so that we can look at it and hopefully figure that out. This is taking a while.

2. Play

a) The RPoL chat community has become about twice as active as it used to be. First there was a keystone banning; suddenly, a slowly dying chat sprang back into full health and vibrancy overnight. Less than a week later, someone posted a thread in RPoL's community forum, asking about the chat - and for a while we were getting a dozen new visitors per day. That's settled down to 3-5 new regulars now, but it's still quite busy.

b) My favorite GM came back after a 5-month absence, restarted two of his games and made a third.

c) Mad Scientist on Facebook. T.T I have zombies, robots, a SkyCom AI, and a doomsday device. And I'm making more! It turns out that this particular game is the perfect speed for playing in between rounds of working, so I expect I'll be playing quite a lot.

3. Writing

a) Nonfiction is basically at a standstill (in case that wasn't obvious by observing my blog). I haven't written any new eHow articles either.

b) I've been putting a lot of work into Vengeance Returns. It's accumulating a few hundred words or so every other night. It turns out that midnight to dawn is an excellent time for writing. Unfortunately, this also means less sleep, which is probably contributing to the whole bad frame of mind thing.

That pretty much covers it, I think. How are you?

What electric outlets and light switches look like in Croatia

Comment about the light switches in particular: the Europeans in my audience took one look at the example in my post and basically all thought, "wow, retro." Apparently light switch technology is more advanced over there than here.

So is their dishwasher technology, for that matter. Ours are big clunky obvious machines that tend to be fairly noisy when they're running. Theirs come with front panelling that match their cabinets, and are so quiet it's hard to tell that they're on. I wouldn't mind having one of those. :)

Some insightful commentary inspired by the 25 Things meme

It started as a reply to some whining going on in the mainstream media about the meme, and tangented out to observations about modern-day racism. Good food for thought.

01 January 2014

08 May 2011

28 January 2011

25 October 2010

19 July 2010

22 April 2010

15 February 2010

11 January 2010

07 January 2010

05 November 2009

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22 June 2009

05 June 2009

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