Her Most Regal Majesty, the Queen of Snark

Fin

sesquipedality — Wed, 05 Apr 2017 23:13:15 GMT

My last entry was entitled "escape". That's fitting. With the new Livejournal Terms of Service, I no longer feel comfortable posting here. I'm Sesquipedality at Dreamwidth. I won't close the account. Perhaps LJ will untaint itself at some point, and this is a permanent account which has existed for over 15 years, so I won't be deleting it. But it's unlikely I will post here again.

So long, and thanks for all the fish, Livejournal.

Another boring roleplaying post

sesquipedality — Tue, 21 Mar 2017 22:35:40 GMT

Waitlisted for Shogun. :( Very very :( I have played the last 14 weekend freeforms. Legendary flakiness of roleplayers, do not fail me now. (Due to high demand, places were assigned by lottery this year.)

I still think this is one of my proudest roleplaying moments of all time.

sesquipedality — Mon, 20 Mar 2017 11:36:10 GMT

“We're not going to war with you. We're a travelling circus, not a country. Thing is, if you attack one of us then you attack the Circus. We don't declare war, we just turn up and kill you all. Which we'd rather not do, since we quite like you and enjoy your company.”

- Madame Imogene, explaining Realpolitik to 'Pope' Pineapple

To which I might well add as a post script. "Hans? Are we the baddies?"

Twitter is a cesspit

sesquipedality — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 22:46:43 GMT

It makes me miserable. The ratio of pleasant/interesting conversation to awful political bile drags me down with it. I may well quit. Which would leave this as my only active social media account. And mostly shouting into the wind. It is hard to be positive today.

The Powers that Be

sesquipedality — Wed, 04 Jan 2017 10:04:05 GMT

There has been a bit of a rush off of Livejournal of late, with the revelation that the LJ servers have been moved to Russia. The thing that slightly perplexes me about this is why having your data stored in Russia is necessarily worse than having your data stored in America. In both cases, your data is at the mercy of a large foreign power with a questionable record on privacy. In the case of America, however, there are a whole bunch of mutual co-operation treaties that are likely to make it easier for the UK government to get their hands on the data.

Now I don't suggest that the American government is as totalitarian as Russia (yet), but I am honestly having trouble seeing a qualitative difference in the risk profile of using LJ now it's a Russian rather than an American service. Is there some sort of cognitive bias at work here?

Dream logic

sesquipedality — Tue, 03 Nov 2015 08:14:35 GMT

The random firing of my neurones during REM sleep, remembered due to an attack of cat.

A nondescript man with dark hair came through the doorway. "My name is Schielicke," he said. The most noticeable thing about him was a bright red rosette on his chest, which I reached out and plucked. He did not seem to mind, although I was surprised at my forwardness. In any event, there was another one underneath, as though he had anticipated and planned for its allure. I had the peculiar impression that it was rosettes all the way down.

"I'm campaigning," he announced, presumably to explain its presence.

"What for?" I replied. It only seemed polite, having relieved him of his rosette.

"Oh, nothing. I just thought it sounded like an interesting thing to do. It turned out that it wasn't, but by the time I realised that, I had got into a routine, and didn't feel as though I should disrupt it." Apparently, Schielicke drove a mobile library van from library to library because "even libraries need a bit of company sometimes".

The inevitability of criticism within moral judgment

sesquipedality — Sun, 02 Aug 2015 18:49:54 GMT

Another thought on ethical stances and judgment. In order to not be singling out the Jews, let's pick another example. Some evangelical Christians believe that it is wrong to marry someone who is not themselves a Christian. ("Do not be yoked together with unbelievers. For what do righteousness and wickedness have in common? Or what fellowship can light have with darkness?" 2 Corinthians 6:14) Ignore for a moment the tone of that verse, which I don't think is terribly helpful, or much embraced by those who follow the modern version of that belief. Now a Christian can say that it is not a value judgement, and that it is about removing obstacles to their own personal practice of righteousness. They are not making a moral judgment about others, merely about what is best for them. The problem with this stance comes in the fact that underneath that reasoning, it has to be accepted that the reason unbelievers are problematic within the internal logic is that they are doing something wrong.

The point I'm getting at is that we might wish to be morally permissive, to say that our ethics are personal and we respect the views of others, but at the bottom of that, we do believe we are right about our ethical stances (perhaps with some degree of doubt, but it would be a very odd or unusual person who embraced an ethical framework they regarded as on balance incorrect).

The problem is that by making a choice, a person is essentially saying the other choices are less good/more wrong. It's intellectually honest to admit that they might be mistaken and respect the choices of others. I'm not sure it's as intellectually honest to say that their choice does not criticise others, because an ethical stance is a value judgment. While it's important to respect the ethical stances of others, I'm not sure we can go as far as to say we don't regard them as acting sub-optimally from an ethical standpoint.

On accommodating religious traditions

sesquipedality — Sun, 02 Aug 2015 18:46:52 GMT

http://nypost.com/2015/08/01/orthodox-jewish-tenants-sue-building-over-electronic-key-fobs/

This strikes me as an interesting ethical dilemma. Presumably it is only a small subset of Judaism that regards activating a motion activated light switch or electronic lock to be a violation of the Sabbath laws, but it does render it very difficult for them to deal with some aspects of the modern world. The interesting question is how much the modern world should have to accommodate that. The easy response is to say "they don't have to live in that block of flats", but bear in mind these measures weren't in place when they moved there. Someone actively (albeit unintentionally) rendered their own home massively inconvenient for them. I regard these restrictions as absurd, but isn't the point of tolerance that if you only tolerate things that you agree with, then it's not really all that tolerant?

Those "no social media month" results in full

sesquipedality — Mon, 01 Sep 2014 11:42:29 GMT

So, the results of no social media month are in. I missed it very little, and it became very clear what a huge time sink social media has become for me. (Although I was sad to miss out on communication with cool people, I did not feel quite as lonely or isolated as I feared.) As I result I shall be keeping my social media presence minimal. This account will carry on existing for now, and may get used for organisation from time to time, but I'm definitely going to keep my presence here minimal. I'm not good at happy medium between total abstinence and excess, but I'm going to try only doing social stuff on Twitter, where it is difficult to get into prolonged engagement. (I am @sesquipedal there, and would very much welcome your friends requests.)

I still have nowhere to live come October. If anyone has any suggestions of cat friendly 1-2 bed places with good links to Chancery Lane and Oxford, they would be most gratefully received. Thanks.

Disappearing for a bit

sesquipedality — Thu, 31 Jul 2014 16:00:15 GMT

Today I have been pointlessly active on Facebook, even more so than usual. It is draining my life away, and I think I need to take a break. I have resolved that August will be No Social Media Month (modulo tiny bits of organisation). I am always happy to receive email on sesquipedality@gmail.com but as of midnight tonight, I shall be closing all my social media stuff and hopefully not reopening it till September, which means no Twitter, no Facebook, no Livejournal.

I am a bit worried I will go insane. I've been on LJ for over 10 years, and social media is a huge part of my life. So many of my friends I only speak to in social media, and I'm worried it will be isolating. As to what will happen in the long run, I don't know. Partly it's about seeing how no social media affects my life and what it is like to live without it. I hope to get a lot of reading done. There will be negatives and positives, and it'll be interesting to see what happens.

See you all on the flip side.

On the scrounge

sesquipedality — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 11:28:19 GMT

Did anyone complete NaNoWriMo and not have any interest in buying Scrivener. In which case, could I have your 50% discount code, please?

These instructions should still work:

http://smworth.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/how-do-i-claim-my-nanowrimo-discount.html

Plug for a worthy cause

sesquipedality — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 01:40:30 GMT

£30 for a PDF is a bit rich for my blood for a game I'm unlikely to ever get to actually play, but if you're the sort of person who is happy to drop this kind of money on a roleplaying book, I can guarantee that at least one of the authors has written some damn good games in the past, as I've had the pleasure of working with him on the Millennium Moon games at Gencon many years ago. I expect great things.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/461807648/cthulhu-britannica-london-call-of-cthulhu-rpg-boxe?ref=home_location

In space, no one can hear you discuss feminist critical theory

sesquipedality — Sat, 09 Nov 2013 12:16:09 GMT

It's possible you've already seen my comments on the Bechdel Test, but if not, first, a quick recap.

The Bechdel Test (not in fact devised by cartoonist Alison Bechdel, but by a friend of hers, Liz Wallace) as originally expressed was a criterion for which films to go and watch. Wallace would only watch movies if they contained

1) at least two female characters
2) who have a conversation with each other
3) about something other than a man.

The test has become increasingly popular in modern years, and there's even a website which now indicates how much of the test films manage to pass. The problem is that of course it doesn't test a great deal. The point of the test is as a conceptual tool to demonstrate the narrow confines into which women are placed (particularly within film and television), as appendages to the really important male characters. But increasingly people are using it as a metric for a film's feminist credentials, which it was never really intended to be. Indeed, in Sweden, one chain of cinemas is now giving films a Bechdel rating. Consider that all the St Trinian's films pass the Bechdel Test with flying colours. Now I quite like the St. Trinian's films, but they are about as feminist as Bernard Manning.

After last night's trip to the cinema, I have an excellent example of a film I regard as feminist which utterly fails the Bechdel test. That film is Gravity. There are only two female characters (from a cast of five, only three of which are seen alive on screen), who never speak. But the lead character is an excellent female character. While she is out of her depth in a way that the male character is not, there are sound plot reasons for this (he is a retiring veteran astronaut, she a rookie on her first mission) and she is demonstrably an extremely capable scientist in her own right. The second and third acts of the film focus almost exclusively on her solving her own problems by her own agency, and the story is really about her rising to the challenging circumstances which she encounters. She is demonstrably capable, without in any way being "a woman with something to prove" (another lazy stereotype that plays into patriarchal story telling rather than subverting it). She has family related backstory that's possibly slightly playing to stereotypes, but actually it would work just as well for a father as for a mother.

Now it's not a perfect film from a feminist perspective. The unnecessary male forename ("my father wanted a boy", ugh - I do wonder if in early drafts the character was male), and a few very male gazey long body shots when she's outside of her spacesuit spring to mind, but it is a film that gives a female character her own arc, motivations, and reality.

I suppose my point is that "this film is misogynist because it fails the Bechdel Test" really isn't something we should be saying. The point of the Bechdel test was to demonstrate that Hollywood marginalises and dehumanises women, and it's doing that that makes a film misogynist. The Bechdel Test was a valuable tool in that it drew attention to this behaviour, but isn't it time we looked beyond the manifestation of that behaviour as expressed in the test to the underlying behaviour that causes so few films to pass it?

(Final paragraph edited to make the point a little clearer.)

Why I have stopped reading The Register

sesquipedality — Mon, 28 Oct 2013 12:44:18 GMT

Back in the late '90s/early 2000's, The Register popped up as a breath of fresh air, with its irreverent reporting of IT and technology news. Today, after 15 years of using it a as a news source, I have removed it from my feed reader. I don't think it's likely to return, unless there is a major change of culture.

I'd been feeling increasingly uncomfortable with El Reg's approach to news stories for a while. I found their inexplicable fascination with amateur rocketry to be dull, but I'm not going to be interested in everything published on a news site, so that's OK. What was less than OK was that they named their rocket project LOHAN, and every headline became a stupid sneering sexual innuendo about Lindsay Lohan.

Then there was the fact that as an IT news site, they felt it incumbent upon themselves to report on a women getting out her breasts on Italian TV.

Today, finally, they posted an article about the difficulties of women having a career in IT, and illustrated it with this.

Yes, that's a picture of a woman in a very tight T-shirt, cropped so that only her breasts are visible.

Let's just let that sink home for a moment. They illustrated an article about the difficulties of being a woman in IT with an image that reduces a woman to a pair of breasts.

I no longer have any hope that El Reg is even capable of understanding what the problem is. I'm no longer a woman in IT, but I still retain an interest in the field. But I won't condone, even tangentially, this kind of chauvinist bullshit any longer. So I'm no longer reading El Reg either.

Egomania

sesquipedality — Sat, 26 Oct 2013 13:12:40 GMT

A friend on Facebook has just mentioned to me that he imagines the character of Patience in Scott Lynch's "Republic of Thieves" (I haven't read it yet, no spoilers please) as me. Would you indulge my self-obsessed curiosity and tell me what fictional characters remind you of me, please? I will return the favour if I can.

Base commerce

sesquipedality — Wed, 25 Sep 2013 21:28:22 GMT

I am considering selling my Nook Simple Touch eReader (which is in excellent condition and less than 4 months old) to fund the purchase of one with a backlight. Would anyone in Oxford be interested in purchasing for it for £25? Will deliver to a mutually convenient location within the ring road.

[Restricted] Results

sesquipedality — Sat, 10 Aug 2013 12:07:06 GMT

40th Birthday Party

sesquipedality — Sat, 03 Aug 2013 08:58:49 GMT

As previously announced I will be holding a birthday party at my place on Sat 10th Aug. There will be a BBQ which will start at 6, but people are welcome from 5. Hope to see people there. If someone knows me, they're welcome to come. Partners welcome too.

Contact details should be accessible from a link at the top of my LJ to people who know me. If you need them, you can email me at sesquipedality@gmail.com.

My first creative writing in over half a year

sesquipedality — Sun, 07 Jul 2013 00:58:05 GMT

Empire fiction is a community for fiction based around Profound Decision's Empire LRP system. This is a story I wrote set in that world. Yay, I wrote fiction. I like it when I write fiction. I don't believe any knowledge of the system is necessary to enjoy (or dislike) the story.

http://empirefiction.livejournal.com/2156.html

Addendum

sesquipedality — Sun, 30 Jun 2013 10:06:56 GMT

It occurs to me that me continuing enjoyment of Young Adult literature well into adulthood (and arguably senility) is because it's a rare market segment where women getting to have an adventure is totally accepted and normal.

Manic Pixies, Doctor Who and female role models in SF

sesquipedality — Sun, 30 Jun 2013 10:02:44 GMT

I thought this article was interesting, if overly long for the point it was trying to make. However, the alpha SF nerd in me feels compelled to point out:

(a) if your role models came from SF and fantasy, why didn't you want to be Lessa the Weyrwoman, or Sigmy Mallory (or pretty much any Cherryh heroine) or Cassandra of Troy (the Marion Zimmer Bradley version)?* I bloody well know I did. To suggest that the genre is absent of real female protagonists is odd. For Lessa, you don't even have to wonder away from entirely mainstream SF (although being a McCaffrey character, she is of course, problematic in some ways).

(b) I don't think Moffat's female characters are any worse than RTDs, low bar though that is. The only one that was genuinely likeable was Donna Noble. This is one of the reasons we so desperately need a female doctor (preferably a fat, 40 year old, slightly obsessive one - still waiting for that call, Moffat) - so the writers can get used to the idea that female characters can exist as people (although to be fair, it's rare that anyone, except the Doctor himself, is allowed to be a rounded person).

*Or Marianne from Sherri S. Tepper's Marianne Trilogy, whom I sometimes felt like I actually *was* (despite, I should make clear, not suffering emotional abuse from my brother myself). But very few people will have heard of her, I suspect.

Nerdery ahoy

sesquipedality — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 18:37:01 GMT

Costa coffee have possibly the worst loyalty card system of all the coffee shops. You get 5p worth of store credit back for each £1 you spend, so essentially 1 free coffee for each 20 or so cups that you buy, which is about twice the number required by anyone else. Admittedly you can spend the credit on anything, but it's still not that great. However, they recently started selling their coffee for home Tassimo machines, and as a promotion offered me a machine which retails at £120 (market price £80-£100) for £30.

I've never been a huge fan of the idea of pod coffee machines. The pods vary between 20p each for standard coffee, to 65p for a latte, so they are pretty pricey. Last year, my second Gaggia espresso machine died and I can't afford to replace it, so regarded as a mechanism for cutting down my coffee shop spend, even at 65p a cup, the £30 cost of entry suddenly made the whole thing a lot more appealing.

The best thing about the Tassimo is that it's the easiest, cleanest coffee machine I've ever owned. You put the pod in, press the button, and you're done. The least good thing about it is that you're stuck with whatever pods Kraft feel like producing, and it's a closed system, so there's no competition on price. Buy the T-Discs from Amazon or the local Tescos, you will pay the same for them. While there are a number of latte style drinks provided, they use Kraft's UHT condensed creamer, which, although pretty acceptable for that sort of thing, is only available with sugar, and, well, still isn't as nice as ordinary milk. I can heat milk in the microwave, but none of the local stores sell a stand alone "espresso" pod, which makes life difficult (at least for first world values of difficult).

Here comes the nerdery. I just wanted to write this down somewhere before I forgot it. If you do not care about Tassimo coffee machines and how to hack them to get around some annoying restrictions, then you won't be interested in the rest of this post.

The interesting thing about Tassimo is that the brew program is dictated by bar codes printed on the top of the pods. There is a bar code reader inside the machine, which translates the bar code into temperature and pressure settings. It's all documented at http://blog.chapmanconsulting.ca/wiki/Tassimo%20Hacking.ashx.

I have a label printer (a brother QL-560LE) which prints sticky labels, and can print bar codes on it. Sure enough, a little experimentation shows that the bar codes on the pods are I-2/5 standard with a checksum bit, and that setting the printer software to generate them at medium size with a 2:1 aspect ratio produces a 34mm wide bar code, which appears to be the right width and can be read by the Tassimo machine.

Armed with this knowledge, I was able to scan the lid of a Costa Cappuccino coffee cartridge (i.e. one designed to produce espresso style coffee to be mixed with the creamer) using my phone. The code for this cartridge is 063050. The label printer was very happy to produce a 60mm odd high (the width of the printer) sticker with this bar code on (and a small text label to say which bar code it is). This can then be trimmed with scissors and stuck on to any cartridge. Sure enough I can now brew "espresso" using any base coffee cartridge, and make it into latte with the use of microwaved milk. It tastes, if not as good as the best cup of coffee I've made with an espresso machine, far far better than the worst one.

(The file for the P-Touch labeling software can be found here.)

Civilisation

sesquipedality — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 11:27:14 GMT

It occurs to me that the game Civilization would make an excellent setting for a SF novel. There's a bunch of immortal leaders inexplicably in charge of nation states of short lived humans who proceed to mess with all sorts of aspects of their lives throughout time.

It further occurs to me that this may already have been done and in fact by Neil Gaiman's A Study in Emerald.

Braaaaains!

sesquipedality — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 11:50:25 GMT

Well, I have finished The Walking Dead. Like Shaun of the Dead it succeeds because it decides to use zombies to tell a story about human beings, which is pretty much the only way I can end up not being bored to (un)death by zombies. It's a good story, but I question all those "game of the year" awards. It's more of a choose your own adventure film than a game, really. It's worthwhile without a doubt, but I'm not sure I'd say it does anything particularly innovative and interesting with interaction.

The one thing I did like game wise is the way that the save system is set up to encourage you to live with your mistakes. If you don't manage to do something in time, then it's hard to go back and do it again, and I felt this did add to the storytelling, making the protagonist into a flawed hero quite nicely. What was less good was that when I screwed up, it was usually due to issues with the rather clumsy controls, or the standard "no, I meant be sarcastically reassuring, not berate the guy like a total dick" dialogue dilemmas.

PS Quick time events are pretty lame in FPSes. I'm not sure Telltale is doing anyone any favours by infecting (do you see what I did there?) the adventure game genre with them.

Getting excessively old

sesquipedality — Thu, 13 Jun 2013 23:49:17 GMT

Advance notice that I shall be holding my 40th birthday party in Oxford on Sat 10th Aug. (Although I propose to hold my 40th birthday on the 9th, because I don't think the universe will co-operate otherwise.) Further details to follow. Partners welcome.