flowerysong @flowerysong@cybre.space

After exhaustive testing, I've determined that I am composed of 93% bad jokes, 6% really bad jokes, and 1% Foucauldian discourse analysis.

Roses are red
Violets are red
We're here for a wedding
But everyone's dead

trans gamer: Explains how misogyny in tabletop gaming exerts pressure from the top down (established industry professionals) and bottom up (local game groups.)

guy telling her how to make gaming a safer and more welcoming space for women: "my assumption here is that you're a guy, or at least the gamers around you think of you as one."

Hecking fuck. Maybe your first step in making spaces safer could be *not* assuming maleness? And thinking about how your words sound to people who aren't you?

My goal at work is to have the most pretentious whiteboard.

I appear to have missed some discourse.

"Wait, that wasn't a fun thing about humans at all."

There's no magic solution to this cognitive trap (because they're always very good at coming up with plausible explanations that don't hold them accountable for their actions), but: pay attention to accusations. Pay attention to the patterns in the excuses people make, and whether they ever actually accept blame for anything. Pay attention to the excuses *you* make. Pay attention to the friends you lose, whether loudly or quietly.

And then maybe one day you reach a breaking point, and realise that you've been lied to and manipulated the whole time you've known this person. Congratulations, you are now traumatized, angry person Y that they're explaining away as just having this irrational vendetta against them.

"Oh, that's just the way they are. They have difficulty with social cues. They might cross the line sometimes, but it's not malicious. You haven't been listening to X, have you?"

So you take their side. "Oh, they just got carried away because X was involved. "As this repeats the cognitive bias becomes more ingrained; you might hear reports of them behaving badly or see them slip up occasionally, but you've already chosen a side and it's easy to brush these things off as part of a pattern of slander.

Here's a fun thing about humans: abusers leave a trail of traumatized, angry people. If you are not a witness to their abuse, it's very easy for them to recast those people's actions as abusive and irrational, since neither traumatized people nor angry people are in the best position to be perceived as calm and rational. Because you, yourself, have mainly experienced this person as kind, gentle, and loving, you're willing to accept their explanations for everything.

The use of ready-made installation scripts is not a substitute for an understanding of your particular environment. The script is not going to magically know that it's installing nginx on an EC2 instance behind a WAF behind a Cisco security appliance, but that doesn't mean the script is useless or broken.

Curating my Facebook metadata to get the ads that are most relevant to my life.

My skin is crumbling. Mastodon is fine.

I forced the Mastoverse to take a personality quiz, and got some interesting results.

Today, I learned that my phone has a greyscale mode, and things may never be the same again.

I'm gay.

I was trying to read *fewer* #books last year. Yeah, that totally happened.

https://flowerysong.com/posts/2019/01/my-year-in-books-2018/

Hugo (https://gohugo.io/) should be better than my initial thought of rolling my own MarkDown -> static HTML site generator, but the site rendering is worryingly non-deterministic. With the exact same input about 1 in 5 builds produces a broken front page, while the rest are fine.

Just rebuilt my website from scratch so that I had a place to post this: https://flowerysong.com/posts/2019/01/music-of-the-year-2018/

(I've been putting these #music roundups on Tumblr for the past couple of years, but fuck Tumblr.)