Heh, I never expected an Ubuntu release named Lucid something. More Lucid animals, good and varied, as Russians say.

Although given that I’ve used LucidFox for years now, I imagine making packages for that release will feel awkward.

Also, I want a version of Ubuntu named Alliterative Animal.

“When you have a low self image, which many transwomen do, you tend to automatically try to please people and live up to their expectations.” ~ someone on #tss

Making this post motivated me to make it possible to link RSS feeds that exclude a certain tag, just as it was already possible to make RSS feeds for tags. This blog is now crossposted to Facebook, and I don’t really want posts with the “gender” tag to end up on my Facebook page.

Involved me navigating through a long, complex system of hallways, playing how my imagination conceived Left 4 Dead. (I never actually played it.)

Also, in the dream, I had an uncanny mental image of Lucy Lawless with blonde hair. I wanted brain bleach. After waking up, I read on Wikipedia that her hair is naturally blonde, and was dyed black for Xena. Gah.

Interestingly, I found quite a few old acquaintances on Facebook, including an old childhood friend who lives in the house nearest to mine, and former university groupmates.

Let’s see how quickly they’ll respond to invitations.

“Dear user. Your photo has been deleted. Would you like it to be deleted one final time to ensure that it’s, you know, deleted?”

This is the second dream I remember in which I was Arika from Mai-Otome. I came in my Robe to Garderobe at night to find it abandoned, with only Nina there. She loaned me a “Robe repair kit”, with whose help I fixed mine.

I criticized the design of Robes, pointing out that they’re revealing. “And Mahya only has one here (pointing at my nipples) and here (pointing at my hips)!” Then I went to a drawer to look for a blank CD to burn some information on it, and threw away a few broken ones. Then I thought about Putin and Medvedev, and woke up.

Why is Xena regarded as a lesbian icon when she slept with men and (shock! horror!) bore children from them, and all support for her “lesbian side” comes from one semi-official (and never confirmed) relationship?

It has become difficult for me to associate myself with my old pictures. Even my old crossdressing pictures, thanks to the short hair and obvious shaving trails that I now can at least partially hide.

When I look at them, I think, “That man is dead, and I’d prefer him to stay that way.”

“Any survey that requires you to lie to proceed is a bad survey.”

~ Source

Today in the barbershop, I made an offhand remark about hating my beard trails and wanting a clean smooth face.

The barber’s response was along the lines of, “Get female hormones. You know how there are men who transform into women, and women into men? Body hair is hormonal. There is another option, of course — to have been born a girl.”

I “jokingly” replied, “Damn, you saw right through me.” We laughed it off, and I doubt she assumed much from it, but I still wonder if I make some people see through my male presentation.

If there’s advice worth heeding, here is an element of it…

Follow your heart, Maia.

It shall speak to you in the course of your life and seldom if ever deceive you, when you really listen to it.

And one of my aims in life is to touch the hearts and lives of many positively.

I believe it is among my purpose..

I’m a visual person. My listening problems aside, I have difficulty processing walls of text if I can’t quickly scan out the key relevant information (which is how I usually read) — but show me one picture and I’ll spin a whole story out of it.

Not posting this on Planet Ubuntu — they already know about this.

Anyway, this wiki is about, well, women in the geek society, and the hardships they face. The articles there heavily echo my own observations — which is hardly a surprise, given that the wiki is primarily edited by female geeks in the first place.

It’s an interesting and insightful read for everyone concerned, and I hope it answers the questions like “Why are there so few women in open source?”, and “Why do they have to band together?”

Make Blizzard release an MMO without the gender binary. Then everyone will suddenly realize it’s superfluous.

winterwyn’s response: “Spore may have had some potential as that if they didn’t screw it up.”

(Disclaimer: I’m not serious.)

I’m getting quite surprised by my constant mood swings between “cold and snarky” and “warm and cuddly”.

“Which one is the real me?” I question myself.

This.

How could they miss the most obvious translation that immediately comes to a Russian’s mind?

Few things are as refreshing as looking at a vitriol-overloaded discussion about what to me seems like essentially a non-issue, smile, relax, and say, “They’re really taking it too seriously.”

“Everyone knows” that female characters in WoW are constantly /kissed, /flirted and otherwise hit on by male characters. Right?

Depends — and I’ve seen that kind of separation noted by at least two testimonies, one of which I’m quoting below.

I’m a female who plays mostly female characters. Whether or not you get attention from male players who want to shower you with “gifts” depends, like rl, on if you act like a tramp or not. The sexier, flirtier, more helpless you act, the more you will attract that sort of organ-driven male player to give you things. I’ve been gaming since the early days of table-top and at 44 have been, or am in, almost every major game in the market and its the same in each and every single one.

Playing a female who does not need to be rescued, does not flirt, does not act all coquettish gets you precisely nothing and thats fine with me. So before you assume that every female character gets more stuff because of the sex of the character, know that it has nothing to do with the sexual representation of the toon, but on the flirty, slutty way males play those females.

I will also tell you that most women can tell which females are being played by males after hanging out with them even a short time because they play women the way their little pubescent little dreams WANT their women to act. Most women, women of any quality at all, do not act in RL the way most males play their female characters.

Source

So, Microsoft forces yet another company to pay for its Linux patent indulgence.

What’s interesting here? “…has agreed to pay an undisclosed sum… Microsoft disclosed Wednesday.” Microsoft once again refuses to state which patents Linux supposedly violates (no surprise here), but when someone actually agrees to pay them, they immediately blow the trumpets and make sure the media discuss the story ad infinitum. Obviously they don’t cover cases when their patent trolling is met with the middle finger.

What’s particularly frustrating here is that the more companies prefer to pay Microsoft just to get rid of their legal bullying, the more people will view Linux as a dangerous thing that “rightfully belongs” to an unethical competitor.

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