Humanist Hymns

Today's fleeting epiphany. This is a hymn:



Who is the author thanking? It seems on one level, thanking God. An admission of failure to follow a set path, an inner anger that chases after a clearer and clearer picture. Thanking God for not being there at all. For that revelation that there is nothing, and that we are nothing and in the end we will be nothing.

Yet, that emptiness led the author to the epiphany that through this nothingness, he still remains. What now? The epiphany that we are nothing without everyone else. And thanks them, deserved or not, hollow or not, that's all he has to give is thanks. For whatever good it serves. The least that they deserve.

Default

The thing with privilege is one who has it needs to learn privilege exists and is real. In this usage I refer to privilege as having qualities congruent with the English speaking world's most desired qualities. I'll refer to this as the societal default state.

I'll also posit that the English speaking world's default is an athletic white male. Male privilege is hardly restricted to anglophones, but for the purpose of this musing I'll draw my lasso around the English world and concentrate there.

You're white? White privilege. You're male? Male privilege. You match up with het male sex (for women) or power (for men) fantasies? That's another privilege.

Straight privilege, wealth privilege, power by election/appointment privilege. The list goes on.

The default is largely invisible to those who fit into these defaults.

The default is much like wearing motocross armour wherever you go. Bump into someone else with the same armour, neither of you are likely to notice. Bump into someone without the armour, they will notice while the one fitting the default might not.

Bump into someone and they say, "Hey, dude, watch the elbows?" a reasonable response would be, "Oh, sorry, you okay?" "S'cool." And life goes on, a little more aware of elbows for awhile until they're forgotten about and then another bump in a crowd. Rinse, repeat.

Replay that in the context of race/gender/other privilege:
Bump into someone and they say, "Hey, dude, watch the elbows?" "No I didn't." "Uh, yeah, you did. Just watch the elbows, k?" "I did not, I didn't feel a thing." "With the armour you're wearing, it's no wonder. Just watch the elbows. Please." "I am not an elbowist, how dare you accuse me of such a thing." "wtf..."

Now, with sane reasonable people in a social context:
Say a borderline offensive joke. Someone with or without the privilege says, "Dude, that was kinda rasist/sexist/otherist." A reasonable reply would be, "Oh. Sorry about that." Another reasonable reply might be, "Oh, what? Sorry I'm a bit unclear here, elaborate?" An unreasonable response might be, "No it wasn't, you're just being a wuss." Casual dismissal. Cute.

One of the things that led to the motocross armour analogy:

Please watch that, it'll make you a better person.

And remember, they're just elbows. They can be used with intent, or by accident. And it's up to us to behave like reasonable adults.

Edit to add: The job of the people with 'privilege', then becomes to cultivate a safe enough place that when the elbows give some bumping, that the bumpee can feel secure that their protest will be taken seriously and not dismissed out of hand, ridiculed, or attacked.

Every Time I Hit The Gas

I discover I still have an inch of pedal.


That's actual prim broach, something I made in... 2005.

Now I want to make my own avatar. That's like discovering I have a pre-regulation destroyer class solid fuel recoil booster in the trunk. o.o

2011 Viceregal Address

I used to be a terrible, terrible Grinch. Looking back and forward at how my own flesh and blood behave, well, it's no wonder my brother and his girlfriend left town to have Christmas by themselves at a resort of last resort.

There is a thing, though, learned from the family I married in to. A little secret to a happy Christmas, but first a little preamble. Because there is one person, yourself, you must live with every day of your life, others, come and go, some fade and others storm away, some arrive on the backs of rainbows, angels of mercy in your times of need, some just appear and you realise they've been there quite the while with you hardly noticing. It is because you to yourself are permanent, and all others wax and wane, you must remember yourself at Christmas, and get yourself a little something, something that makes you smile.

This was under $4. And it makes me smile. You go make yourself smile too. You're worth it.

The Things You Learn Glancing at the TV

I passed by the TV earlier while fetching some tea, and overheard someone mention "I like the bay windows."

I looked over, and it occurred to me, I never knew what those looked like before. I knew the term, and knew the style but didn't match the two up. Further it occurred to me that perhaps the second thing I should do after reading the introduction of a subject is to memorize a list of terminology. This could be why my visual design skills are so weak (or abstract), I know what things look like, but have no idea how to articulate them without a sketch pad. And the reverse, someone speaks of something in particular, I probably need to be shown an example. Some rote memorization is in order.

Python Continued

To day for a bit of motivation to pick up the bat and keep swinging I flipped towards the end of the book and read some notes by the author. A line jumped out at me about the book is aimed at giving a 'brown belt', not a real programmer, but ready to move into the real stuff and pick up real books.

Chapters 0 - 25 I had some bumps along the road with, things I just didn't understand but forged on and came back to later, sometimes figuring them out, sometimes not. I have a short list of mild stumpers that will eventually come clear with practice, I'm sure. But Chapter 26 was an exam. "Here's a program. Debug it, even if it takes a few days."

It took me about ten minutes, suggesting all that LSL gave me a green belt to start with.

I've moved on into logic operations, the section there was way, way better than any other logic table tutorial I'd seen, or maybe the student was ready, and then into if statements and loops, something else I'm an old hand with by now and am doing anyway for the syntax help and inevitable moments of 'oh god, I've been doing this wrong all along'. Sort of like the logic tables. :)

So far, so good.

Learning Python

I've some experience now with LSL, some days I've worked with it up to fourteen hours with few breaks. Some people have asked if I'm some sort of child prodigy. Ha. No. I'm just a hard worker when I'm doing something I find interesting. It's been my intent for awhile now to try my hand at something approaching a real programming language. I just have no clue what I'd do with it.

Today I stumbled across a link on Hacker News with someone asking for advice on what language to learn in order to learn, one of the suggestions was Learn Python The Hard Way. So I nosed around the web a bit querying what the language is used for, and learned I could conceivably use it to have my Second Life vendors sent information to my web server and dump the data into a table that I can download and back up more easily than I can with the Linden Labs tools. Okay, I have a basic goal even if I never get around to doing that.

So, looking at the lesson plan I've begun to appreciate Zed Shaw's sense of practical humour more than I already had, and also now have a gedit app and a Command Promt shortcut on my desktop. Thank gawd I'm familiar with DOS or I might have been lost there. Maybe my old age is an advantage in some ways.

My first stumper came in Exercise 3. I know my basic arithmetic, but had never before seen a modulo operator. ZenMondo, despite not knowing Python, was able to suggest what it was, and wikipedia explained the rest. Again, modulo operators are a thing I have no clue why I'd ever use it, but knowing it exists and being able to recall how to research its use, my math vocabulary has grown. I'm the same way with language, the more words you know, the more thoughts you can have. This is a good thing.

I think I might be able to get through this in a couple weeks if I keep at it.

March 21

Landing at night was really pretty, especially under the light of that
full moon. The mix of white and orange city lights was interesting to
see, and I later learned the white lights are the Barrios, or shanty
towns with housed piled up the sides of the hills stacked several
high.
By and large, my deepest paranoias fed by the western media were let
down, as I was not immediately shot on arrival, nor was the airplane
shot from the sky by rebels. Bother, culture of terror foiled again.
Rupert Murdoch, you lied to me. :(
Still, it says something when every house has bars on all windows,
even in the 'good' neighbourhoods. All houses walled, some with
electric fences. Walled houses, very Spanish/Moorish. Electric fences
and bars, not so much. Good luck escaping an electrical fire with the
ancient wiring. Bonus, though, the outlets are American standard.
We drove around a lot today, no seatbelts and often texting driver
while out in what amounts to pinball machine traffic in a country
where it costs a buck or two to fill your car at a full serve gas pump
and stop signs are suggestions, and made a first stop at a fairly
modern, and huge, shopping mall, had food court Venezeulan food with
the sister-in-law at whose house we're staying, and got me a pair of
shoes. Much love to anxiety disorders, I'd left for the airport in my
slippers convinced I'd be dead within twenty-four hours. If this is
dead, I'll take more of this, please.
So, no, I'm not leaving the house at night.
Fresh baked bread in the morning, however, is heaven.

Ikea is my Friend

My new studio space.


This is a standing office.

When I was in the office trenches I rearranged my workspace into a hybrid standing/sitting arrangement. PC work was done standing and other was done spun around in the cubicle sitting. I was constantly standing up sitting down standing up. I came home to a $2,000 Ekornes Stressless chair. That thing turns your body into a marshmallow and when we sat in them in the show room both of us nearly fell asleep on the spot in minutes. Pity the keyboard arm was nearly useless.

Fast forward to present. Two years of home studio in that chair exercising no muscles in perfect ergonomics. Gained 10 pounds, and have noticed considerable weakening of those miscellaneous torso muscles. Plus with the keyboard in the lap, my typing was miserable. :) As I type this I noticed I wasn't even looking at the keyboard as I put in my password. Yay!

So what we have here now is an Ikea 74cm stool, wood so it's comfortable but not too comfortable, and a 103cm high table surface, about belt high for me when standing. The art photo, also from Ikea, is lined up with my standing eye level on the horizon to give the illusion of a window. Room paint job preexisted my arrival, and may be painted in the future, although the neutral gray helps other colours pop off the screen or other work surfaces.

Jesus Harold Christ

All the way to infinity.

I was surprised by my contacts list getting tossed wide open by Google Buzz, but I think I shut it down correctly. I hope. I don't have anything particularly horrorsome in there to hide, but maybe I'm just old school about privacy and the privacy of others.

THIS, however, takes the cake.

Ego Depletion

I have a huge problem with this, distraction and not having the energy to follow through with things. The obvious general advice is something I'm going to try, like, trying to ramp up the motivation to work on a project? Have a piece of chocolate, then go brag about what you're about to do in a public forum so you'll look stupid if you don't.

Hey, I just discovered Desmond's secret. O_o