#one of them is in fucking europe presenting the research his professor and his group of students are doing???

[roaringroa]

i just love my brothers so much

[supernoondles]

2019

The last day of 2019 was also the day I fainted for the first time--a fitting metaphor for the year.

2019 was overall very emotionally taxing. This year was emotionally defined by falling intensely, deeply in love with someone (who is a very private person so I will try to be vague to respect that) and being in a lot of pain because of situations mostly outside of our control. There were a lot of intensely joyous moments, and a lot of intensely sad ones. Throughout it all I wish I had communicated better. I also made some bad decisions with another person I really loved and cared about that resulted in us growing apart. Do I think I grew from the experiences? For sure. Do I wish I could have come upon these realizations through a different course of action? Also yes. Am I fully healed from the experiences? Not really, but I've been getting better.

2019 was also very bad in terms of research. It was the 2nd year of my PhD. After I submitted my rotation project I basically felt stuck in the swamp of my advisors rejecting new project ideas for like literally half a year. This, combined with my high emotional volatility (partially due to starting birth control), made me really sad, unmotivated, and susceptible to self-blame. I definitely had high expectations for myself and became frustrated at my lack of progress and felt a lot of pressure from myself to get my shit together. I also felt incredibly bad after most advisor meetings and not supported by one of them to the point where I had to have a conversation with him about the lack of support (which was very scary)! Things started picking up, though, near the end of the year. I published a paper in collaboration with a former post-doc/now professor elsewhere whom I learned a lot from, and started finally building out another system. I also started mentoring an undergrad who at some point told me I helped him feel like he had something important to say and belong at Stanford for the first time and those words meant a lot to me. I think I'm continuing to refine what I value as research contributions and increasingly think about what it means to build systems that aren't used outside of the lab to satisfy the annual conference publishing cycle. I'm also starting to feel the pressure of doing work that follows a narrative rather than random projects that interest me.

Oh, I guess in terms of "program requirements," I did finish taking required classes, passed qualifying exams, and got a master's degree. But honestly those weren't hard at all nor do I think are externally valued in the larger research community, so I don't really celebrate them as accomplishments beyond surface level.

In 2019 I saw two different therapists. The first one was awful, I think directly influenced some of my bad decisions, and also didn't respect my gender identity??? The second one is a lot better and I'm grateful to see her, even if 90% of our sessions are just talking about my relationship (romantic/advisor) issues, which is something I want to move away from in the future. But I also feel incredibly privileged when relationship issues are the primary stressors in my life--I am grateful I feel equipped to handle other crap, like deadlines, and don't have to worry about my own health.

Those were the main things that have colored this year. We'll now move into the section of this post where I go through my photos to jog my memory of other events.

New years started a tradition of getting dim sum with Jasper, Matthew, and Michelle dear to my heart. My high school friend was also visiting and we all attended a really awesome new year's eve party. I was also going on a lot of dates and having a lot of good sex, which made me really happy, and at the same time crying all the time at work. In February I received probably the best gift anyone has ever given me and saw Panic! at the Disco, which I said in an end of the year group meeting was a good memory of my year (it was, to relive my scene days!). In March I roadtripped both to Marin (which I had never to been before, despite all my years in the bay) and LA for Wondercon; it was nice to both see high school friends and go on a trip with the boo. In April I went on a hike with my office which was probably the start of us all becoming closer (we are the social office in the wing now, which I take pride in! Also we draw a lot of Pokemon which warms my heart). In May I went to CHI in Glasgow and then to Paris afterward, and the entire experience was very weird and bad and also too many flights were canceled and/or missed and I vowed to not return to Europe for a while, but man do I love the noodles at Trois Fois plus de Piment. In June we hosted a double apartment party with my downstairs neighbors (side note: I am really appreciative of the place I live in, for the community, convenience, and large-ass space and will be really sad to be kicked out fall 2020) and I started a friendship important to me. I cat-sat for my advisor (the one who doesn't make me feel bad) twice. I went to Redwood State Park with my family and hosted a summer solstice celebration. Over the summer a friend I met in Paris back in 2017 moved in with me. I had a much needed escape from the bay to Seattle where I was reminded how abundant the world can be. I also went to Tahoe to celebrate my parents' anniversary, and really liked stumbling upon a smaller lake with a cheap boat rental. Then I became FOMO about the highly competitive Bay Area camping and did a last minute walk-in at Redwood Basin in Santa Cruz, which made me realize that I don't actually love camping (but was nice nonetheless). I ate an expensive meal at Commonwealth before they closed. For my birthday we made a friendship quilt and I served my favorite dish of cumin lamb but it was also 90 degrees in my apartment (I felt really bad and bought two fans afterwards). I started buying many cartoon frog plush after being gifted a $3.99 on sale Safeway frog (called Baby!). I went on Tinder dates (one of which was at a quaker yard sale marketed as Harvest Festival where I got a 1970s Kermit puppet for like $2) that largely went nowhere. My high school friend visited and we were both sad about break ups. I did Inktober before I went to New Orleans for a conference on Bourbon St where everything felt like it was coated in a sticky film of alcohol. I almost missed my flight home because I fell asleep in a sculpture garden but I had the most amazing Uber driver who snaked his way through traffic (oh and the flight was delayed by like 3 hours). I went to kind of embarrassing haunted houses and pumpkin patches over Halloween, but also had the most incredible bowl of ramen at Mensho. My whole office dressed up as Zootopia characters which warmed my furry heart. I spent like $120 on a Pokemon shirt. I started playing Arkham Horror and rekindled another friendship important to me. In November went on a road trip to Big Sur because again, I had to escape it all. For Christmas Eve dinner I roasted a duck for the first time (which was delicious). Shortly after I waited in line for 2 hours for a rollercoaster at Great America, which taught me the value of buying a fast pass because at this point in my life that money is worth it, and then waited 2 hours in line at the DMV to get a RealID (I had made an appointment, which was the fast pass).

Okay, now we move to the hobby section!

I got really into sewing in 2019, having received a sewing machine last Christmas. I made a Judy Hopps (which I wore to CrunchyRoll Expo) and Korok cosplay (Fanime), several unsuccessful garments, a crab bean bag, a dice bag, a fanny pack, and put hearts nipples on a jumpsuit.

Shows! I think I went to way fewer shows this year. The ones I can remember are Elephant Gym, Thom Yorke the night before I had an 8am flight, Carly Rae Jepsen over pride weekend (also, she is my #1 artist of the year, which makes a lot of sense given my emotional space), Mitski at Stern Grove, Capitol Hill Bloc Party (which was super lame, except for Lizzo, where I cried), and the National (which was a fucking surreal experience as they played on Stanford's campus, I was the only one within earshot of myself who knew the words to Crybaby Geeks, and then the white catalog moms came up to me after to thank me for singing the song).

I also started playing my own music! I started playing viola again for the first time in 7 years (lol) in both pop-up concerts with the Awesome Orchestra (one in Golden Gate Park, one at the Exploratorium) and a string quartet through my school. Sometimes I am filled with joy and delight. Other times interpersonal tensions run high and also I am very bad at being in tune. It's life.

Media! I really liked Mob Psycho 100 Season 2 and Beastars. I feel like those were the only notable anime I watched this year? I saw the Farewell three times--first in Seattle where I sobbed for like 1 hour after the movie, the second time with my parents, and the third where Awkwafina was present for a Q&A. I thought Parasite was incredible and Promare was OK. I have spent an unfortunately large amount of my time playing Pokemon Masters. I finally beat BOTW and completed my Pokedex in Shield like 2 weeks after getting the game.

Resolutions! In my draft of my 2018 end of year post (which I never polished and posted, sorry), I said my resolutions were 1. come out to my parents 2. draw enough to table at an anime con 3. be disciplined about paper reading and have a doc. I did none of these things!!! However, for 1, I feel like I am well equipped to have this conversation but am waiting for my sibling to do it first out of respect. 2 was just bad. I barely drew this year except for gifts. 3 was okay--I did have a large doc in the beginning of the year when I was looking for ideas, but as time went on I abandoned it (I also stopped reading papers, which I don't think you're supposed to do as a grad student...)

My resolutions this year are phrased as intentions (-(c) Matthew). They span several categories. Relationships: I want to open myself to and actively seek experiences of love, because I miss that. That being said, I will only date someone if 1. they have their life together 2. they love themselves and 3. they challenge me to grow. (I do think you can experience love without dating; the thing I'm after is love in an expansive sense.) Work: I want to do enough work so I don't feel guilty about not doing enough work, and also not berate myself for taking a long time to do things. Hobbies: I want to sew at least one thing a month. Chinese: I want to improve my Chinese, especially pronunciation.

Having written this 20 days into 2020, it's not been so bad so far. But I was also really happy in the beginning of 2019. Here's to no global maxima, a monotonically increasing year!

[secretsfromwholecloth]

Modern AUs I Wouldn’t Want to Be Responsible for Writing, Part 1: Pillars of Eternity

@bloodilymerry, this post is your fault. So, we got to thinking about how we would populate a modern AU of the Pillars of Eternity series—and by modern AU, I mean one taking place in the contemporary or near-contemporary real world, with no or minimal fantasy elements, because that’s the most difficult kind to make workable and therefore the most fun puzzle to solve. Ideas below the cut.

Consider all of these to be footnoted with “research well, and tread lightly”; the games touch on some heavy issues to begin with, and without the fantasy setting to give us some distance from them and make them easier to bear, we can end up in some really sensitive territory. Hence why I wouldn’t want to be in charge of actually writing any of this—getting this stuff right would be a heavy responsibility.

Aloth: Educated but didn’t have the connections to get a job in his field, so we may find him working a menial job (or indeed several part-time ones) to get by. Depending on exactly when and where our AU starts and what his standing with the Leaden Key is when we meet him, he’s either still with the cult he joined to get away from his abusive family or beginning the process of extricating himself.

Edér: Can stand largely as he is, as a farmhand and war veteran. This is going to end up touching on geopolitics as well as more personal issues like family tensions and PTSD, especially since 15ish years before the present day would put his and Woden’s military careers in the years after 9/11. I leave how to wrangle their ethnicity and religion and the relation of those things to The War as an exercise to the reader.

Sagani: Oof. The obvious choice is to make her Inuit, isn’t it, or if not that then from some other indigenous group. Which’ll mean she’s affected by some serious issues and prejudices. (For one, the settler state considering her fitness as a mother suspect.)

Hiravias: Either indigenous or a poor Gaelic or Welsh speaker from the areas where those languages are hanging on. Oh, and the “wandering druid” thing translates into him being homeless.

Grieving Mother: Needs some changes if we’re stripping away the fantasy elements. Perhaps she was recommending substances or methods to her patients that were leaving them or their babies seriously ill or worse, and she had some kind of breakdown from the guilt and isn’t terribly functional when we meet her. (The exact words I used when spitballing this may or may not have been “woo-peddling hippie”.)

Durance: That asshole who’s constantly bragging about how many of Those People he was instrumental in shooting/torturing/blowing up during his time as a military contractor. (In front of Edér, too, who comes from a community of Those People and is already kind of conflicted about his military service.) In between the misogyny, racism, and generally being abhorrent. Should probably leave at least some characters and a decent chunk of the audience wondering why he hasn’t been hauled in front of a war crimes tribunal yet.

Pallegina: Her godlike body dysphoria is too good a metaphor for transness to not just make the modern version trans and have done with it. Beyond that, she’d be embassy staff from some country in the southwestern quarter of Europe.

Kana: A grad student from somewhere in the Asia-Pacific region—probably Japan, judging by some of the linguistic and cultural coding of Rauatai—born to Polynesian immigrants. He’s studying something about the ancient world (perhaps he’s a classics student, if we run with the Engwithans being fantasy Greco-Romans), and whatever it is turns out to not be what he was expecting.

Maneha: Well, she’s from the same country as Kana, clearly. I’m not sure the regular military is a good fit for her character, so who’s she running with? A private security contractor? A gang?

Zahua: Could go a few ways—monk, traditional shaman, modern occultist. Either way, he’s retreated into overdone asceticism and spiritual pride to deal with trauma in his past. What exactly that trauma is and what to make of his origins (the obvious choice is some Mexican or Central American Native group) I again leave as an exercise to the reader.

Devil of Caroc: Well, the obvious change is that she’s still human. She can stand as a serial killer out for revenge against the people who committed violence against her community during The War. She’s alive and out of prison only because she was released into an experimental program administered by Galvino; he gets away with treating her horribly because no one around them wants to be seen caring about a serial killer.

Serafen: Grew up desperately poor in gang- or militia-held territory. He’s still running with them when we meet him, though they send him forth with a job to do.

Tekēhu: A sheltered member of the native elite in whatever country the Ruas came from. Coasting through university on brilliance and no one being bothered to really make him work at it. A party boy with an eyebrow-raising number of sexual partners. And hey, are we still doing the “godlike = trans” thing? Fuck it, make him trans. It'd explain why his love interests feel the need to ask him about his junk, too.

Maia: Can stand as she is, Kana’s sister who joined the military.

Xoti: A missionary (she’d probably have to be Christian) from the southern US. Her bisexuality, Mexican heritage, and inordinate fondness for Santa Muerte make her kind of suspect in the eyes of her fellow missionaries. There are probably rumors of her being a crypto-Satanist or something.

Ydwin: Not an actual vampire, just creepy. Can probably stand as she is otherwise (I imagine she’d be from one of the Nordic countries).

Fassina: A grad student from the same country as Pallegina, studying something obscure with a deeply shitty professor.

Konstanten: Was in the military in his younger days, stationed somewhere that he was able to get up to a lot of mischief. The rest of his story can stand, both the rural origins and the post-military career as a massage therapist.

Rekke: I’d need more information about him and Yezuha to really do him justice, but a dry, mountainous country in the east? Sounds like somewhere in Central Asia to me. Something happened, probably involving those buildings that caught fire, and he had to get out in a hurry; he’s barely learned a word of English when we meet him.

Vatnir: From the same Nordic country as Ydwin, I suppose. Chronically ill, maybe not cis either, and ended up in a leadership position in a cult through a series of ill-thought-through decisions despite not really believing in their tenets. Whoopsie.

Mirke: Come on, drunks who get into fights a lot are everywhere.

[jtoybox]

The Dramaturgical Scripts of Slavery and Racism in Modern America

p.tab { margin-left:40px; } p.par { text-indent:2em}

When ex-Grand Wizard David Duke flipped his script, he began from a place of Holocaust denial.  This gained him traction, not because it was a ground-breaking revelation to his followers, but because they’d been buying it since the German Nazis began to whitewash their actions during World War II.  Lest you think it ends there, Kenneth Stern (2001) tells us, “Americans were prominent in early postwar denial circles. Austin J. App, a professor of English at the University of Scranton, had defended Germany during World War II, claiming that it didn't desire to ‘dominate’ Europe, but rather was legitimately attempting to get raw materials.”  Later, under the heading “Institutionalizing Anti-Semitism”, he discusses the Washington, D.C. Institute for Historical Review.  “It presented itself as a legitimate historical research group, devoted to ‘revisionism’... But in fact, it was made up of white supremacists and neo-Nazis, and it would draw expertise from the like-minded from around the world (Stern, 2001).”

In her review of Starz’ American Gods, a tale that states emphatically that America consists of immigrants and slaves, Katie (2019) quotes a powerfully riveting speech from Anansi, the spider god of African slaves,

My worshipers know: freedom ain’t free. They know the most potent weapon of control for the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. They know slavery is not a condition. Slavery is a cult. Human trafficking is a cult. Slavery got a rebrand like motherfucking the alt-right. And snatched, another one gone. Every thirty seconds another chocolate, brown, caramel, yellow, high yellow, redbone refugee girl with melanin in her skin gets snatched. Every thirty seconds.

This was the second time the matter came up in this program with such fervor.  In the opening scene of the series, Anansi spoke directly to east Africans being transported across the Atlantic to the New World, and after revealing what they have to look forward to basically told them, “A hundred years later, you’re fucked. A hundred years after that? Fucked. A hundred years after you get free, you still getting fucked on the job and shot at by police (Leon, 2017).” In an article focused on that scene, Julia Alexander (2017) quotes Orlando Jones, the actor who plays Anansi in American Gods, “Black people don't know what white privilege is. We've never experienced it before and white people don't know what racism is. They've never experienced it before. It always feels like two sides are yelling at each other.”  Jones further says, “… you truly have to be in power to be a racist. A person who has no power really can't be racist (Alexander, 2017).”

Herein lies the dilemma in this country.   Just as Anti-Semitism has become an institution, so has slavery and racism.  The dramaturgical script may have changed, but slavery is conceptually still alive and well, for all intents and purposes. I may not hold the kind of power to be racist, as Orlando Jones describes it, and perhaps neither do you.  But if I turn a blind eye to white privilege, do I not empower those that do?  After all, cults don’t die, they simply become rebranded.  

While the Black Lives Matter movement and its detractors are screaming across a chasm, deep down inside that chasm a very real issue stemming from socialized race is transpiring.  Defending their actions with statistics of higher rates of crime on the part of the Black community, police tend to target African-Americans, at times quite literally with their sidearms.  Ignore what brings the Black community there.   Ignore the fact that residential segregation socializes African-American youth to that way of life.  Ignore all of the statistics that demonstrate a clear disadvantage for African-Americans when it comes to education and income.  Focus on the crime rate.  It’s a parlor trick.  

While statistics can be used to distort the overall picture, they’re still wonderful things that can clarify the world around us.  In this particular case, the picture is not so clean-cut as they would have you believe.  For example, according to The Sentencing Project (2017), “Since the official beginning of the War on Drugs in 1982, the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses in the U.S. skyrocketed from 40,900 in 1980 to 450,345 in 2016. Today, there are more people behind bars for a drug offense than the number of people who were in prison or jail for any crime in 1980.”  And how do Blacks fare in this matter?  “African-American drug users are almost three times more likely to be arrested for illegal drug use (Tsai, 2018).”  Is this because, as has been purported, that African-Americans have a genetic predisposition to addiction (Tsai, 2018)?  Absolutely not.  As Kane-Willis and Schmitz (2018) inform us, “The reality is that African Americans and whites use drugs at roughly the same rates. Yet the narrative that most Americans believe, and that the media perpetuates, is that African Americans are more likely to use drugs.” This, in essence, is the crux of the matter.  

When slavery was abolished in the latter half of the 19th Century, the southern states rebutted with the invocation of Jim Crow legislation to keep the Black community separate.  When the passage of the Civil Rights Act abolished their Jim Crow laws, they turned to propaganda to ensure the same effect.  Years ago, an uncle said to me that, from his own personal experience, Black men are inherently lazy.  This was ultimately the end-result of his being fed that narrative in the 70s.  When authoritative violence against African-Americans became mainstream in recent years, the same sort of rhetoric that originated all the way back to the days when they were used for slave labor were heard once again from white voices.  The defense of this imbalanced violence is due to socialized race in the absence of scientific evidence.  It’s a story that whites have told and retold time and time again, across generations, while ignoring what’s staring us right in the face.

In the realm of institutional racism we don’t need to be racist in order for racism to thrive, and this is the key to any institution. Economists speak of an “invisible hand” guiding market forces. What they actually mean is that what we each choose on an individual level doesn’t matter, but what we all choose on an individual basis does.  It’s the aggregate effects that make the world go round.  It only takes one story to induce a bank run, incentivizing most of us run to the banks in mass hysteria to grab our money before it’s gone, thus triggering a lengthy recession.  We may not harbor the power to be racist, but the story invariably holds all the cards. Our power lies in our choice to refuse to bow down to that false god. But as long as we continue to do so in the aggregate, African-Americans can continue to look forward to unintended oppression from their fellow citizens.

References

Alexander, J. (2017, May 8). American Gods’ Mr. Nancy debut scene

was born out of a desire to challenge social injustice. Retrieved April 9, 2019, from https://www.polygon.com/2017/5/8/15583418/american-gods-mr-nancy-racism

Kane-Willis, K., & Schmitz, S. (2018, January 22). Opioid crisis

‘whitewashed’ to ignore rising black death rate. Chicago Reporter. Retrieved April 9, 2019, from https://www.chicagoreporter.com/opioid-crisis-whitewashed-to-ignore-rising-black-death-rate/

Katie. (2019, April 1). REVIEW: ‘American Gods’ Season Two,

Episode Four “The Greatest Story Ever Told.” Retrieved April 9, 2019, from http://www.wesonerdy.com/2019/03/31/review-american-gods-season-two-episode-four-the-greatest-story-ever-told/

Leon, M. (2017, May 8). ‘American Gods’ Delivers a Powerful Black

Lives Matter Message. The Daily Beast. Retrieved from https://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/05/08/american-gods-delivers-a-powerful-black-lives-matter-message

Stern, K. (2001, August 29). Lying About the Holocaust: Inside the

Denial Movement. Retrieved April 9, 2019, from https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2001/lying-about-holocaust-inside-denial-movement

The Sentencing Project. (2017). Criminal Justice Facts. Retrieved

April 9, 2019, from https://www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/

Tsai, J. (2018, January 30). Racial Differences in Addiction and

Other Disorders Aren’t Mostly Genetic. [web log post]. Retrieved April 9, 2019, from https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/voices/racial-differences-in-addiction-and-other-disorders-arent-mostly-genetic/