I like the irony of people calling science useless… on the Internet, using a computer.

There’s a service around here that prints custom images on T-shirts, any gender and size. Thanks to it, I painlessly got an… unofficial… item of Ubuntu merchandise without having to wait for weeks for some online shop abroad to ship it to Russia.

Forgive me, Canonical, I just couldn’t resist.

Hot!

I like the feel of it. Skin-tight, exciting to wear, and giving the appearance of bigger buttocks.

I think that this particular item of clothing clicks in me more for fetish than practicality reasons.

I was walking around the Trade Center, staring at female clothing departments like hypnotized. After that, there was some weird stuff with trains that doesn’t really need to be described.

The happenings, however, led me to the thought that voice-controlled window insulation can be a source of useful amusement. I commanded the insulation on my window to unwrap and form geometric figures. Then I heard about a creepy young Japanese professor using it to create a pet loli (definite Excel Saga influence here). So I went to the kitchen and said, “I want this insulation to unwrap and coalesce into the girl of my dreams!”

Nothing happened in the kitchen, so, disappointed, I was returning to my room, but took a peek into my brother’s room, which, in the dream, was strangely devoid of furniture. By one of the walls stood a black-haired girl about a head shorter than me.

“What’s your name?” I asked, hugging her. “Maia,” she replied. At this point, I found myself dropping out of the dream, since I could feel thinking for her. And naturally, I woke up immediately afterwards.

<Zelse> Sikon: The finding yourself hot thing is due to a hardwired thing
<Sikon> “a hardwired thing”?
<Zelse> it’s actually a weird combo of evolution and your trapness
<winterwyn> A human trait.
<Zelse> Normally humans look for their own traits in an individual of the sex they’re programmed to go for – this is an evolved trait to select for health (if you survived to breeding age, one like you is also likely to be healthy, the logic goes)
<Zelse> however, since you like women but also suffer from the ol gender dysphoria, the wires cross and you find the feminine idealization of yourself to be the perfect mate
<winterwyn> :3
<Sikon> Hmm, that explains a lot.
<Zelse> to use a computer metaphor, the program is attempting to run but with a slightly different dataset, so it gives what /looks like/ weird data

IntelliJ IDEA 9, codenamed… Maia? I am amused.

[whistles and opens Eclipse]

Charles: How ironic. You desire the truth from others? You, who lied the entire way to this point?

Lelouch: You’re right. I have always been creating lies. Not just my name and past, but hiding my true intentions in their entirety. But, is it not a given? One tries to fit in with the dialogue of others, trying to mesh with the situation. Without that, countries, races, bodies known as communities wouldn’t exist. Everyone knows how to use lies. In front of family, in front of friends, in the presence of society, everyone puts on a different mask. Yet, is that a sin? What is one’s true face? Even you are wearing the mask known as the emperor. At this point, we cannot walk around without personae.

That’s supposed to be a test?

Hahaha! HAHAHAHA! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!

(Okay, but some of the non-loaded questions do show insight. Such as the genderless society one, or the one about the opportunity to become cis.)

More specifically on that one question:

35. A doctor offers you a painless, absolutely effective means to be completely masculine. All feminine desires and traits would be eliminated, and you would be happy and content to be a man. You would never need to dress, and you would never want to be feminine in any way again. You are assured that after the treatment you would be completely content. Would you take the treatment?

I can see why someone would answer yes, but I picked the “it would feel like death” option. Seriously, it would mean the end of almost everything I am, and the creation of a different person. Metaphorical suicide. I wonder if it’s out of sheer defiance…

And the very thought of such a “treatment” being invented scares me. Would it displace transition? Maybe not, but there would be political factions advocating its forced use on traps. (“You want to be a woman? Don’t worry! We’ll make you proud of being a man, and you’ll never have such silly thoughts again!”) They would like to demolish this wonderful world and replace it with the plain old—

Wait, that sounds eerily familiar.

I hate these.

Some pet peeves:

• Urinals. Their existence bugs me to begin with. I understand why someone would want to flash his man-bits in plain sight, but that doesn’t mean I particularly enjoy viewing them, even in peripheral vision, when passing by.
• For that matter, leaving the cabin door half open behind you. How else am I supposed to know if someone’s in there if the door isn’t locked?
• For that matter, leaving the entrance door open while you’re in. Because women passing by obviously so much enjoy seeing you with their peripheral vision…
• Pools of urine around toilets, from those who, um, missed.
• Not flushing. I never got this one. The button is right there. Press it, for the love of whatever you believe in, make an effort and bend and press it. It’s going to make life slightly easier for those who come after you, because it will make the place literally stink less.

Obviously I don’t know (yet) what things are like on the other side — it might be a “grass is greener” belief for all I know. But if I were to guess, I’d say that the restrictions that female anatomy inherently places on urination help enforce an unwritten social code of dignity.

If gender-related posts have become rarer here, it’s because I have someone to discuss them with on a regular basis now.

I’ve overcome my anxiety about entering a makeup shop. Haven’t bought anything, just looked. winterwyn advised me to hide facial hair trails under foundation, and although I have no idea if it will work, I might give it a try. I’m kind of afraid to actually ask for it, though. At least I had an excuse to be there, since it also had men’s shaving appliances for sale. Maybe I should try a shaving cream instead of a shaving gel to reduce skin irritation?

Although I’ve had to cut down on shaving because of one acne spot on my left cheek. I was disgusted to see how long the stubble had grown after just two days of not shaving. Yesterday I had to shave very carefully around the spot. Perhaps I’ll have to repeat it tomorrow if it doesn’t heal by then.

I’m also experimenting with hairstyle now. Thanks to winterwyn’s advice, I’m done with the male-looking parting on the left side of my head for good — I’ve always noted that pictures taken from this side looked wrong and the right side has always registered as more girly. I wasn’t not too keen on my appearance with a loose fringe (it looks kind of… butch and provincial), so I’ve tried combing the hair from the middle to the sides. Even with wet, freshly washed hair it was very hard to do, because the hair on the left side just refuses to comb “the wrong way”. Apparently the years of having that parting have taken its toll, and it will take a while for the hair to readjust.

Body

The fact that the entire Ubuntu community seems to have dived into this microblogging craze disturbs me.

Actually, “annoys” could be a better word. I occasionally get into this with fiction, like movies and TV series: “Okay, this is kind of decent, but definitely not the masterpiece I was told it is. So what did everyone find in this overrated piece of drivel?” And then I start ranting about it, in the hopes of provoking a discussion and an opportunity to vent.

Technology is sometimes the same for me. A new fad strikes the entire Internet, I fail to see what’s so special about it or what it’s even for, yet the fact that everyone talks about it all the time annoys me enough that I often intervene with complaints that “I don’t get it”.

I honestly tried to get it. I read articles on it, including the Wikipedia one, watched video explanations on YouTube. This diagram, obviously, completely clarified the situation. But seriously…

• Random thoughts? IRC. Saying something that bugs me on an appropriate channel will inspire a more fulfilling response than a mess of short posts ever would. Or I could just write it in my blog — I have nothing against one-liners being there.
• “What I’m doing now”? Well, who the heck cares what I’m doing at the moment? And if someone does care (I can see why my parents and coworkers would, hypothetically, but not beyond that), why would they trace it over the Internet? The fact that someone might actually be interested in reading up-to-the-minute status updates in daily life — and that someone can actually care to update — sounds kind of disturbing by itself. Like virtual voyeurism. This sounds really far-fetched. Using the Internet to trace your son’s meal or finding friends having a party at the moment? Seriously?

From what I’ve seen on screenshots, signal-to-noise ratio of a typical Twitter feed (how do I subscribe to the bloody things anyway? Is it like RSS, via a URL displayed somewhere?) is disturbingly low. You need to trace on the particular service the person is using. That’s just unwieldy.

Maybe I just don’t lead the kind of life where microblogging becomes useful, but then it’s concerning to be different in this aspect from seemingly everyone else in the Ubuntu community.

“I don’t get Twitter” returns 23,500 Google results. For a technology that’s supposed to be simple and intuitive, that’s disturbingly high. Without the “I”, I stumbled onto this phrase: “If you don’t get Twitter [or other similiar sites for that matter], then it’s not for you.” Maybe I should just bitterly follow this statement and disclaim it as “not my thing”?

But dang.

(Added: Someone came to this page from the horrendously designed Planet Ubuntu Twitter page. The irony.)

One of Jaunty’s more controversial new features was the new notification server. It’s easy to decry as something Canonical pushed unilaterally, breaking a lot of GUI software and requiring fixes for unclear gain.

I’ll admit: I can see areas in which notify-osd can use improvement. At least the bubble background and text color should be customizable (not everyone likes black), as well as their position — they should at least be bindable to any of the four corners of the screen.

Yes, Jaunty shipped with an uncustomizable notification server that, at first sight, seems like a major regression from notification-daemon (no custom positioning, no actions, no clickable links…) and requires a custom GNOME session to replace. But while it may not have been completely polished on Jaunty release, from my (a mere user’s) point of view, I believe it’s a step in the right direction.

First, let’s be honest here: many applications, especially outside of the official GNOME set, didn’t have a well-thought-of concept of usability regarding notification bubbles. I pretty much agree with most of the usability concerns put in the notify-osd wiki articles. For me, a notification bubble is a signal that “something of interest happened”. I don’t usually read into them — I just scan them quickly with my eyes and switch to the application. Displaying a notification bubble indefinitely and expecting a user to click a button is just unwieldy.

Second: uniformity. I can’t stress enough how important this is for a professional feel. I know there are people for whom free software means, first and foremost, freedom of expression. So let’s have ten widget toolkits, five notification systems and innumerable icon themes that all look at odds with each other. The consequences of such a mindset can be seen most prominently in, ironically, Windows. With even Microsoft changing its aesthetics radically with every release (compare different versions of Office and Visual Studio), if the king does not lead, how can he expect his subordinates to follow? Add independent proprietary software developers each trying to make their application visually stand out with bling, older software retaining the Windows Classic theme, and we have a recipe for an eclectic mix that doesn’t feel like a cohesive desktop environment at all.

But let’s head back into the desktop Linux world. There are GTK and Qt, plus various more obscure toolkits — they’re of little interest to me, especially given that some (like wxWidgets) act as wrappers around the mainstream toolkits or emulate their look. But even two toolkits are troublesome on their own — how are you going to explain to Aunt Jane why that shiny DVD creator she has just installed looks so different from the rest of the desktop? That’s why, as a GNOME user, I regard the inclusion of qgtkstyle in Qt 4.5 as probably its single most important improvement in the X11 version. Common GTK users will have their uniformity by default, advanced users can install qt4-qtconfig and go from there, and for KDE, of course the issue is backwards.

Even among a single toolkit, guidelines exist to ensure that applications behave consistently. You can have varying opinions on the GNOME HIG and its practical implications, but you can’t really deny its clarity, internal consistency, and logic. There is nothing in GTK itself that stops you from placing the Help menu on the leftmost side of the menu bar, but should you really? Similarly, when I open the About menu, I have every right to expect that I’ll be shown the standard GTK about dialog, not the developer’s custom creation. This is actually important enough for me that I started filing bugs about HIG non-compliance, and some time ago joined gtkpod’s upstream development specifically to revamp its aesthetics, including the icons, about and preferences dialog, to make it feel more in place in a GNOME environment.

So, we have the GNOME HIG for general application behavior, the Tango guidelines for icons (I don’t use the default Tango or Human theme, but a custom ones following the guidelines, and it integrates well), and freedesktop.org standards for interoperability, including the notification specification. I don’t understand why KDE has its own notification system instead of implementing the standard, although they might have a good reason — but this doesn’t help interoperability. But the specification only defines what applications can expect, not what they should and shouldn’t do to be consistent. As it turns out, many fail even at expecting: they expect a specific implementation, notification-daemon. The Ubuntu developers weren’t out hunting for “non-compliance with notify-osd” — from what I understand, they were out finding such implementation assumptions, such as expecting support for actions, and making the applications behave with different implementations, including notify-osd.

In fact, I’m seeing the Notification Design Guidelines as Canonical’s more important contribution to this area — that is, more important than notify-osd. Why did they define these guidelines? Because nobody did it before, and nobody had a clear idea how notifications should be used. This is an important step on the way to a uniform, cohesive desktop, no matter what notification implementation is used.

As for notify-osd itself, it’s a question of taste. I hope it will eventually become configurable enough to mitigate some of the common complaints, and of course the default behavior of affected applications could use some improvement. I don’t know anyone who would like the proverbial example of Update Manager popping up — the old behavior with an icon and notification bubble seems more sane to me, even if the bubble is unclickable now. What notify-osd really succeeds in is making notifications looking consistent with each other and, let’s face it, slick. While it’s hard to define what a slick desktop or application is, for me, it means sensible intuitive layouts, with eye-capturing graphics and putting emphasis in accordance to how important or commonly used the information is. For applications most prominently following this kind of philosophy, of those I know, I can name Qt Creator, Brasero, GNOME Do, and now notify-osd — all displaying stark contrast to traditional “Windows-like” layouts.

On my quest for consistency, I’ve started looking for ways to make all notification popups go through notify-osd. That’s why I welcomed the experimental Firefox notify extension, why I’m looking for the Thunderbird one to exclude notifications of Gmail spam so I can actually start using it, and why I rebuilt Quassel without kdelibs to enable support for freedesktop.org notifications. Because order matters.

We really think alike in many aspects. Including arguments we use for defanging our fears… it varies how convincing they are, though. I thought about this one — no wonder it clicked.

<winterwyn> Hee, this is something I told my mother. I don’t worry about what a Real Woman does because I already know.
<winterwyn> It’s whatever I do.

I always noted that none of this pile of insecurities are in effect when roleplaying in WoW. I could think of a number of reasons why I don’t feel any anxiety about presentation when basically roleplaying myself as a quirky culture alien. But that’s a game, “my character is not me”, and the Stormwind City Watch is basically a Ragtag Bunch Of Misfits anyway. On IRC, especially in an environment as culturally diverse as the Ubuntu channels, things like tact and politeness restrict my policy of “saying what I think rather than what’s appropriate”.

Apparently I’m a Canonical employee now… At least in the wild imagination of the Boycott Novell folks. A friendly tip: before calling to boycott anyone in particular, get your facts straight first.

<ajmitch> LucidFox: but surely Canonical have made a secret backroom deal with Microsoft over making directhex a MOTU

(Heh, and as I was writing this, the author corrected it — with a strike tag. Apparently he thought everyone with an @ubuntu.com address was Canonical staff.)

I’ve created a new 2048-bit key and switched to SHA-256 digests, following the earlier posts here. On a somewhat amusing note, the new key’s ID is 12666C01 — good thing I’m not superstitious!

The original page at debian-administration.org seems to be undergoing a Slashdot effect. I used the Google cache to resolve the problem, but even then, the page kept loading forever and only appeared when I put Firefox in offline mode. Weird.

If I was a magical girl, I’d probably get addicted to transformation sequences.

Today, for the first time, I noticed that the Russian localization of Quassel used gender-specific language in its IRC log views. It was jarring to see the nickname of a known female user followed by the masculine form of the verb “changed”. I’ve made a patch for the .ts file in git and sent it upstream, but I noticed that Gajim was also an offender at least with the “Away” status — not sure about Pidgin, I’ll need to check it.

Now, Russian is a highly gender-specific language — verbs in past tense singular are always gender-specific, for instance. Translators need to dance around these issues. Yes, it’s hard, but it pays off.

I’m not on a political correctness crusade, I just have an issue with the very concept of “default gender” that most Russians seem to accept without question. In these days of rising gender awareness in FOSS (if the recent posts on Planet Ubuntu are anything to go by), presuming that online users are male by default is simply unacceptable. I’d like to see users recognize the ways choice of language affects human interaction and report questionable uses, and upstreams be cooperative in fixing their localized UIs correspondingly.

Yup, I changed it to make your eyes bleed signify my newfound self-acceptance (and renamed the blog accordingly). Those colors were supposed to be washed-out shades of red and purplish-blue, but I was told on #linuxchix that the header looks pink. Sounds weird to me — I wasn’t specifically trying to make it look “girly”. If it’s pink, then it’s a shade I like — I’m not a fan of the shades presented in the Wikipedia infobox.

The blue waves dance, they dance and tremble,
The sun’s bright rays caress the seas.
And yet for storm it begs, the rebel,
As if in storm lurked calm and peace!..

~ M. Lermontov. “The Sail”

After trying on some of my mother’s clothes for not much clicking effect, I found her thin, sleeveless black dress — knee-long for me, presumably longer for her.

Even though it was meant for a different build, I went really excited upon seeing how much it clicked. This was the first time I looked into a mirror and actually thought I was seeing a woman, as opposed to a “special exception gender-combined entity”. Of course, in a dimly-lit mirror, my standards got lowered. Pictures look worse, so I’m not posting them.

Still, compared to my earlier crossdressing attempts, it’s a major step forward. I need to try it again sometime with chest and hip padding, and makeup to hide facial hair trails.