Iran has responded to Trump’s assassination-by-drone of Qasem Soleimani with a barrage of ballistic missiles aimed at two US air bases in Iraq. So I guess Trump has gotten the war he wanted. Fuck.
This tweet offers some insight into the question of just how prepared the administration is for the conflict Trump has triggered.
Open thread. No trolls.
@Ohlmann,
That is correct. I am sorry that I have seem to yet again have done something wrong. I did not want to hurt your feelings nor give anyone any morally wrong ideas. Still, I find it callous of you to simply fix the gender of an avatar just because you seem disappointed by my actions. Please read up on the history of that character and the games production. I am certainly not the only one who found out about my gender in video games and I do not like the implications regarding your use of the he pronoun.
*Sadly, my gravatar change does not seem to have taken effect yet….
@Ohlmann and @Lisa
Can I please know the name of that game?
*sigh* Ok, so this is my kitten avatar and the other one is the half-changed lyzz one. I just wanted to ask Snowberry something….
@ Snowberry,
I have a specialized question regarding emoji the fluff on unicode you shared.It is about the ability to express gender unambigously without relying on memes and I would change my decision regarding the purchase of a new smartphone based on your answer. Would you please help me with this and if so is now a good time to discuss this?
@Universal Kami : Secret of Mana in the western World, Seikendetsu 2 in Japan. the remaster is on nintendo switch, the original is on SNes and the emulation is real good.
TLDR: In my opinion, this is a painful misunderstanding, requiring at least about words 650 words to solve. I am sorry for my part in, not overly angry at Ohlmann who merely stated an opinion i disagree with, but I still insist on my position.
@Universal Kami
We are talking about Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu), a series of games. In Seiken Densetsu 2 you play as a party of three youngsters and I got the enby whose official gender changes depending on the version of the game you play. It was one of my very early experiences with being allowed to and rewarded for being genderqueer and even though I pretended otherwise towards “the other boys” at the time, I enjoyed it. So in a sense, Lyzzy (by many other names), helped me a lot about find out about myself.
@Ohlmann
Seems to only the part of the story where the sprite / Autumn / a 7 character name of the players choice is a young bratt who is generally believed to be male, while I read a bit about the other versions and the development history that lead to the extreme compression and complexity reduction that resulted in the SNES version for German, American and Japanese Systems. As far as I know, this lead to the sprite having 3 different genders in three different versions. Also, there are spinoffs, remakes etc.
I have never felt the need to solve the gender mystery of that character and left them ambigious. I found it awesome that being kind of dramatic and a bit effiminate while still being a brat was rewarded for once with fancy magic, freedom and friendship and this helped me a lot in life and in playing other games where similar characters get to have their own adventure in growing up and doing what they think is right. I eventually found out that the gender-change aspect is not a bug/feature of the three versions of the game but also true for real life if one has a good reason to dare to ask for treatment for transsexuality which works differently in Germany and requires a lot of permissions and confrontation with gatekeepers.
Currently the procedures regarding this treatment are rewritten, but when I was 21 and had made up my mind about it in secret because this sounded like the complete solution for all the problems hurting me, since I could think words, it was basically a crash course in femininity with lots of uncommunicated expectations, vague words and risks that where not even mentioned. Still I wanted to do it and managed to run into problems I would have cautioned every other girl and women against because I could not see how their experiences related to mine and I could not communicate this with them.
I managed to overshoot my most cautios estimate for being done with the ordeal in 2 times two (minimal duration at the time according to an older standard that I happened to have ) = 4 years by a factor of more than 2 because of all the changes that happened in parallel.
Consequently, it was often horrible with periods of calm and joy and I managed to ignore even very well written advice, honest warnings and people who helped me even though they had nothing to gain and much to loose. I still have painful memories of the cruel confrontations between me and doctors or even other patients. I am still proud to have done it , have worked hard to at least trust psychologists with doctors degree again and have become a bit of a medical technician in the process.
So I take it somewhat personally if one of my favorite avatars which I use for development, research and similar tasks is called an he. It seems that my interpretation of one artists depiction of Autumn as elvish was not shared, which is ok and I concluded that I needed to catify Autumn.
Thus, yesterdays hint regarding me not having to do that to fit in here confused me and that comment from Ohlmann just now was painful (and not in the way that helps me heal — I think).
@Lisa: While I have been following Unicode’s proposal processes and internal discussions (mostly emoji, occasionally other things) I’m not sure how any of that would help with the purchase of a smartphone. My knowledge of smartphone software design is much more limited, and Unicode is not directly involved with that. But sure, ask and I’ll answer if I can. In the morning, because it’s really late where I am and I’m logging off.
@Snowberry,
It’s no problem at all, take all the time you want.
I merely want to ask a question about what David and you would consider proper use of enby characters in an encrypted and mobile setting. This would make my life a lot easier.
The short version is that I want to improve my digital communication with my family, friends and colleagues. They are all adults who are at least theoretically qualified and assumed to be responsible enough to own, carry and use a smartphone. They just have other ideas about it’s usage and I would like to help them solve an issue.
The longer version
My minimal offer is to have a number that will be guaranteed to alert me fast and loud to them feeling the need to talk to me. This is my emergency number
My second phone is a bit more casual. People communicating here know what they are doing and prefer a smooth experience
My third layer is for lovers and very close friends or colleagues with special permissions. With the former, I would like to share emoji of all genders kissing one another and emojis that relate to hearts, tears, lipstick, food, houses and so on. This would help everyone talk about relationship status and so on without having to have to flash pictures.
Explanation
If I isolate the emergency number from the other phone, I can easily find the provider with the best offer and I know how to have two layers of trust on a single phone, so the question about the second phone comes down to the question if I got Charlotte Buff right.
My question
I would like to be able to send the emoji of an enby kissing an enby, an enby kissing a more masculine emoji and an enby kissing a more femine emoji between two or more cellphones of friends of mine. Then one could add emojis like hearts, tears, lipstick, rings, food, cars and houses and so on to communicate relationship status. This would be so much more convenient for me and would allow my queer friends to easily talk about themselves without the need of recording sexual pictures and the unconcious paranoia that the platforms and providers are watching their actions.
As far as I got it, google and apple seem to agree that this is at least intended usage and Charlotte Buff argues that it is logically consistent with the rest of the standard. This means that this could be one of the things that persons with a good argument for a third gender could demand.
So, uh…am I reading this right? We might soon get to send emojis like the rest of the world and it could even be the normal thing instead of something we merely copy from the intended users, some of which claim to be to normal to talk about their gender and attraction?
If you consider this true, I would like to base the decision regarding my next cellphone on this fact. Being accepted as a stranger with good intentions has so far worked as one the best predictions for long-term relationship stability.
@Crip Dyke, Naglfar, Hippodameia
Sorry, somewhat late to the party but which Sapphire thread are you guys referencing? I’d like to read it.
@Diego Duarte
It’s the Terry Gilliam one.
@Diego Duarte
Here’s a link to the start of it all. Crip Dyke’s responses are mostly on the next page of comments.
I just found out a former co-worker was among the people killed in the Iran plane crash. 🙁
I didn’t know him very well and hadn’t seen him for four years, so don’t worry about me. But I’m thinking about what to say to other people.
I’m going to send a message of condolences to my supervisor, as they knew each other and I know the supervisor. That seems pretty clear.
The other person is his brother, who’s a “connection” of mine on LinkedIn (I’ve also met him only briefly IRL). I’m not sure whether or not to send a message to him. If someone from my family died, I personally think I’d feel stressed out to see a lot of messages on different online platforms, as I’d feel required to check and acknowledge them. I mean, if the message sent was by someone I knew well, it would be comforting, but if the message was sent by someone I didn’t know well, the stress might outweigh the comfort.
But what stresses me out might not be the same things that stress other people out.
Anyway, I’m not sure whether I should send a message to his brother or not. I think not, because I haven’t messaged him on that platform before and it might be a needless stress for him to see a message from a relative stranger acknowledging his brother’s death; my mother says I should; my father doesn’t think it matters much either way. So I don’t know what to do.
@epitome:
I’m in favor of sending something that is reassuring while making it clear he doesn’t have to support you back. I’m also in favor of it being short. You are not me, so I write this example not expecting you to use it, but just to show what I mean:
I like that last line and have used it in other contexts b/c I think it’s stupid to wish people “well” or something, like there’s any possibility at all that they’re going to get over it before your message is long forgotten. It also makes it clear that you’re not expecting any message back. Even something like “If I can do anything, lmk,” can feel like it creates a burden to send a “no thank you” message. Leaving that kind of thing out just lets the message stand on its own, imposing no new responsibilities.
…and, of course, that’s just what I think it does. It’s always possible that someone will interpret it in some way other than I mean, but at least I’ve done my best to create something that doesn’t imply any expectation of further contact and things like “I only met you that once” doesn’t scream “Hey, don’t feel guilty that you don’t know me” b/c that would be weird, but I include it because by saying something like that, hopefully the person doesn’t feel guilty AND doesn’t feel weird when I yell “DON’T FEEL GUILTY!” Because I didn’t yell that.
Anyway, I understand that writing these messages is hard, but I’m in favor of giving it a try.
@Lisa: Didn’t have time this morning, so late response:
Your last message was kind of confusing because I wasn’t sure what a lot of it had to do with the subject. And after puzzling it out for awhile I was pretty sure it doesn’t; it seems to be largely irrelevant context which doesn’t meaningfully change the answer to your actual question. So:
First, here’s the situation. As things stand after the 12.1 updates come to all systems, there are still 14 emoji in the “people” category which are missing 1 or 2 genders (counting “enby/neuter” as a “third gender”). Not mentioned in the Charlotte Buff document is the fact that all of the human-figure “activities” emoji are currently either non-gendered or male and female only, with no enby/neuter version. The “kiss” and “hold hands” only allow m/f, m/m, f/f, and n/n combinations; n/m and n/f don’t exist yet. The “wrestling” emoji only has “men wrestling” (m/m) and “women wrestling” (f/f) versions. The dozens of 2-4 person “family” icons include no option for enbies at all.
The 12.1 gender (and race) additions came in part due to pressure from Apple and Google, but it’s still a long way from complete nonbinary representation. Various internal discussions have suggested that while they plan to get around to filling it all out eventually, the Unicode consortium as a whole doesn’t consider it a high priority, as evidenced by the addition of only a handful of the “missing” emoji in the people category for the 13.0 version… and a similarly slow rate of additions in the 10.0 through 12.0 versions.
There is a dissenting faction within the Unicode Consortium (of which Charlotte Buff is a member) which takes the view that this is unacceptable, for the reasons stated in the document I linked. At the moment, it’s too early to guess how much influence they will have for the emoji additions in 2021 and beyond.
There’s hope that more pressure from Apple, Google, and the dissenting faction will result in acceleration of the inclusion of nonbinary emoji. After all, when the rainbow flag was added for version 9.0 in 2016, the Unicode consortium declared that there was no need for a transgender flag, because the rainbow flag covers the entire LGBTQIA+ spectrum. After a lot of pressure, and a few separate external proposals which all point out that the trans flag is now an internationally known, commonly-used symbol, they eventually relented and included it among the final candidates for 13.0. But until then, we’ll have to make do with the better but imperfect situation which exists as of 12.1 and the slight improvement when 13.0 comes out.
Does that cover everything you wanted to know?
Just read that some gross misogynistic and racist comments from Aubrey Huff. I guess he’s a red piller now since he follows Richard Cooper alot and tweeted how he wants to capture and enslave all the women in the middle east from the world. Acting like some white savior but it sounded like he wanted Iranian slaves.
But of course since he’s a trump supporter, every trump supporter is calling this “owning the libs” and just men being silly men and goofing around.. About abduction of women in war torn areas for sex. I feel bad for that man’s kids.
https://www.mediaite.com/sports/former-mlb-star-condemned-for-disturbing-tweets-about-kidnapping-iranian-girls/
I should expect nothing from red pillers but openly fantasizing about abducting women from war only to use them is incel tier. Not surprised he’s divorced….
Sort of related in that refers to Trump.
Attempt to dismiss defamation over rape rejected.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/10/e-jean-carroll-trump-lawsuit-judge-denies-request-dismiss
Sorry, took a bit longer than usual to response. Life kept me occupied, and at this time I think my brain decided to cope through enforced numbness. I have rarely felt as much like just a drone/cog as I do now.
Of course, this pales in comparison to all the tragedies going on especially in the Middle East right now. Quebec province has seven dead, all of Iranian origins; nobody I know, but it still isn’t fun at all.
Gotta say I’m less than pleased about the media reporting no American dead, but conversely not reporting the number of Iraqi dead… Okay sure, a few more dead Iraqis aren’t gonna lead us to WW3 (mostly because at this point few people who aren’t Iraqi seem to give a fuck), but they were still killed in a missile strike by another country on their home soil, we owe them at least THAT much to report on their tragedy.
Sorry, not up to my usual standards today; number than usual, as I mentioned.
@Snowberry,
Thanks a lot for the detailed answer which is very valuable to me in getting a casual phone for non-emergencies and typing out the request also helped me remembering what emergency phone to buy and why which reduced my anxiety level a lot. I’m looking forward to acquire a cellphone/pocket computer that fits my needs instead of making excuses why the current setup is lacking when I am the one who should fix it.
I think the most important lesson I learned in the years since the start of Trumps presidency (apart from not taking things too personal) is to not overdo it in my need to help others and to find and communicate personal boundaries better. I had not internalized that lesson previously because it was usually communicated with reference to tacit assumptions of self-interest I found strange. I now understand better how my well-being relates to the well-being of others and why self-care is important even though stress caused by hostile action often feels kind of good if it allows one to act in a way that one feels is right.
I’m sorry I broke containment protocol for (improvised) field research / my attempt at learning to deal with the crisis and actually sent the posts I originally meant to just think but would have been ok with writing and reading offline. I especially feel sorry for hurting decent people who tried to help me. I had planned for this to be a short and painful reflection on the limits of helping followed by more relaxing activities but I was rushed a lot and got dragged down because I took it (and myself) way to seriously and was also rushed by real-world / misunderstandings. I originally thought I wouldn’t care all that much if it actually was the beginning of the apocalypse because that case requires no special consideration as far as I understand, but I’m not quite that jaded yet.
I am very thankful for the advice and lesson and have begun to work on setting and enforcing my boundaries better so that I should be more likely to be helpful in treating people, especially refugees from the current political climate with the respect they deserve, the goal to alleviate some pain and actually feeling good while doing it.
Still, I think I hurt some feelings and I want to apologize:
Sorry
@Ohlmann,
for taking myself and some of the toys I found interesting as serious as I did. I normally know better and should not have argued about a matter of personal taste just because I was stressed out and trying to improve my mental state. It was confusing for me that two earnest people seemed to advise me to do different things and I reflexively started to talk about it instead of pausing to think that I was overburdening some of my concepts from improvised education without a formal qualification. If you liked characters or ideas, maybe you can find some inspiration in my approach of customizing them to taste. Please remember that you can mix and match however you like and even though there are people who try to regulate taste and some media has a structure that resists efforts to customize it somewhat, your preference and choice of entertainment are personal matters. I’m sorry we had an argument over this because I was so stubborn. I shouldn’t have made such a big deal out of a simply avatar change.
@David and everyone else,
For taking a rule-lawyering approach to the rules of this community in order to fit in while discussing. I wanted to remember what I was about to do when all the comfy reasons to further wait, reflect, learn and train as if everything was still peaceful and alright stopped being good reasons and I had begun to make excuses (like being a nerd) for not acting. The comfort zone is a horrible place to be in.
I apologized a lot for minor misunderstandings which is passive-aggressive. A part of it was because my software stressed out your software (I had not done proper software maintenance and missed a lot of info on the current browser wars, so it was a improvised setup set to block a lot of the cheaper espionage (tracking / advertisements but also security/safety) algorithms and it had done so quite aggressively, with me getting angrier and writing a lot of silly long and spammy posts in reaction. My bad.
Also, I likely hurt a lot of nice folk indirectly by being defensive of the professions I had studied for some time. That was unprofessional and way to zealous. I did not intent to type for over 24 hours and actually sent my thoughts, especially when they are likely to cause mental anguish for others.
Anyhow, that’s all I can say for now in this virtual landscape.
I would be happy to talk to any of regulars of this blog, but currently there is a lot of virtual suffering from real people around and I do not trust my experience in computer science, finances and self-management a lot yet.
So please take care while I am back at the cat-level of media competence — I watch stuff with my more wolfi-like partner, we argue about likes and dislikes and what we would like to do if characters like us where present in stories that are often about war with factions who mimic real-world parties we consider evil and bad. I hope that there will be a lot of great stories to live and talk about in the real world again, but for the moment, waiting, working for cash and feeling good and relaxing seems the best option for both of us.
I can only hope that some humane solution to the problem of Trumps presidency is found but I also look forward to maybe meet a few of the refugees both political and civilian that come to Germany who I share some language with. They have a lot of great ideas and I love to listen, talk to and learn from people who are better than the evil monsters.
Medically, I would try my best to treat nice people and monsters, but that does not mean that I like team evil.
Hey, David!
Have you been talking to the Texas Rangers?
https://www.rawstory.com/2020/01/involuntary-celibates-are-an-emerging-domestic-terrorism-threat-texas-warns-of-an-incel-rebellion/
The Texas Department of Public Safety is actually paying attention to Incels as domestic terrorists.
The USA ERA has been ratified by Virginia, bringing the total number of state ratifications to 38 – a crucial milestone towards bringing the ERA into force.
Expect Incels, MGTOWs and general misogynists to go nuts over the next week or more. I’ll be covering the action on my own blog (where I already have a first post up on the topic).
This is excellent news.
CN: Well, my life, problems with being a confusing gender, having a religion, not being able to set good boundaries…
Most of it was consensual or not anyones fault in particular or quite easy to forgive. Christian religion does not feel that consensual or risk aware or nice to me, I am atheist enough to try to just treat it as yet another cultural fact and yet more half-understood psychological memes which probably makes me a left-leaning liberal queer and I hope for better religious alternatives for those who need / want them and I think a lot of you could partly agree. Queering christian religion by some sort of scifi-approach called cyberpunk or something like that and in turn coming very close to the concept of being an actual kinky and edgy lady who sometimes does masculine stuff, uses estrogen a lot and wields scissors and other edged tools as a hobby and calling in medicine…well. I would recommend https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmetropolitan to give someone any sort of idea. Basically it is intensive and often hurts. Good choices lead to great results, bad choices lead to a lot of trouble and misunderstandings…and often there is a wild mix of both, which seems to be my way of handling the fact that on the internet next to everything is relatively public and trickery to confuse the trolls can be hard to pull off.
So uh..this should be long enough afterwards to let some of the heat ( had an accident when trying to safe a life, made a full confession to my error but offered no background and asked why they didn’t have my gender, ran around in a manic state for about a month and helped others, talked to some creep / spookdude (yes you, I told you to stop talking about women like that) die down. Thanks, everyone for your help showing me how to become the sort of person who can still feel okay after doing something like this. I feel a lot safer now and have managed to deal with a lot of personal issues regarding my own problems in having stable limits in relationships with older or more powerful people as well as the problem of sometimes doing politically motivated emergency care / missions for friends and lovers in a land where the word radical seems to have a bad reputation and where talking about the political middle is quite hard. I have told some guy IRL that I am not to blame for his trouble with women and not his personal spook companion — he seems to have get it. I have begun to clean up the debris from a previous relationship with a man with lots of stability issues whom I was together with so I could prevent him from ruining his life (yes, I have a helper-syndrome) or harming others around him (that sort of technician). It was a silly thing to do but at the time I did not know better. I seem to be going to a sort of third puberty at the moment and it is much more effective than the first two (which both sucked because the first one was painful as hell and the second one was never quite right and I was disturbed by feminist criticism of my life). I do not really hate trans excluding or -hating feminists the same way I don’t hate Nazis or that I don’t hate other monsters: I can’t, in good conscience wish harm upon them, so it follows that some terfs might as well just be what they claim to be: very stressed out feminists who try hard to make their voices heard, same as me. It’s a horrible concept to have in a warzone, but I think it’s true and I would look forward to challenge myself again and hear some good arguments from them, now that women seem to help again in making the world a better place.
The thing for me is that what a lot of wise people already said, on this site too: Helping others and lifting each other up feels awesome.
Anyhow, I am about to fall asleep. So thanks for all the help, sorry for the trouble and I really am looking for the literature on this site..I haven’t quite found the books yet or understood all the rules, but I am working on improving myself and becoming a more effective street / paramedic. If someone could post me a link on @chaossprite on twitter which I stopped using around 2017+ because of all the suffering queer people on there, that would be a big help.
I am not that worried about privacy. Cryptostuff can be weird.