I'm probably just _bad_ at crossdressing/cosplay? I've never put the kind of _effort_ into, say, a makeup tutorial the way I do for my intellectual endeavors. My Fanime costume was authored by the Amazon product recommendation algorithm: after adding the pink wig to my shopping cart, [the "Discover Related Products" sidebar picked out](/images/discover_related_products.png) the hoop skirt and the Mr. Universe tee from Episode 48 ["Story for Steven"](https://steven-universe.fandom.com/wiki/Story_for_Steven). (The sword in the photo illustrating this post is borrowed from another cosplayer cropped out-of-frame.) And unless I become more skilled, I feel like I've hit diminishing returns on conventions—like whatever I was going to get out the experience, I would have gotten either this time or one of the last six (previously: as Ens. Silvia Tilly at San Francisco Comic-Con 2018, as _Equestria Girls_ Twilight Sparkle at BABSCon 2018, [as Korra at San Francisco Comic-Con 2017](/2017/Oct/a-leaf-in-the-crosswind/), [as Pearl at FanimeCon 2017](http://zackmdavis.net/blog/2017/05/gems-will-be-gems/), as [Lt. Jadzia Dax (circa 2369) at the _Star Trek_ 50 Year Mission Tour San Francisco 2016](/2016/Dec/joined/), [as Pearl as San Francsico Comic-Con 2016](/2016/Sep/is-there-affirmative-action-for-incompetent-crossplay/)).
-As far as other special events go, I'm flying out to Portland—the real Portland—tonight for a tech conference, and to visit friend of the blog [Sophia](/author/sophia/). You'd think a few days of vacation should do me good—I've been an psychological wreck all year (I mean, even more than my average year) over having accidentally catalyzed a civil war in my local robot cult—except that the same cultural forces that have subtly-yet-fatally corrupted my beautiful robot cult, just _own_ the open-source tech scene outright, which is likely to present a source of additional stress. The spirit of bravery that sings, [_I will fight for the place where I'm free—for the world I was made in_](https://genius.com/16627280), must subsist in a brain wracked by constant emotional pain that—sometimes—is just tired of fighting.
+<a id="tech-conference"></a>As far as other special events go, I'm flying out to Portland—the real Portland—tonight for a tech conference, and to visit friend of the blog [Sophia](/author/sophia/). You'd think a few days of vacation should do me good—I've been an psychological wreck all year (I mean, even more than my average year) over having accidentally catalyzed a civil war in my local robot cult—except that the same cultural forces that have subtly-yet-fatally corrupted my beautiful robot cult, just _own_ the open-source tech scene outright, which is likely to present a source of additional stress. The spirit of bravery that sings, [_I will fight for the place where I'm free—for the world I was made in_](https://genius.com/16627280), must subsist in a brain wracked by constant emotional pain that—sometimes—is just tired of fighting.
--- /dev/null
+Title: <em>Memento Mori</em>
+Date: 2021-01-01
+Category: commentary
+Tags: personal, my robot cult, Star Trek, COVID-19
+Status: draft
+
+_(Attention conservation notice: personal thoughts on the passing scene; [previously](/2020/Jun/oceans-rise-empires-fall/), [previously](/2018/Oct/sticker-prices/))_
+
+> _But always above you
+> The idea raises its head
+> What would I do if the Earth fell apart?
+> Who would I save, or am I not quite brave enough?_
+>
+> —Laura Barrett, ["Deception Island Optimists Club"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7L4yB0LtP0U)
+
+Six or fifteen or twenty or forty-six months later—depending on when you start counting—I think I'm almost ready to stop grieving and move on with my life. I have two more posts to write for the robot-cult blog about the philosophy of language (a short one explaining the thing [Brian Skyrms and the other guy taught me about about how to separate denotative meaning from mere information-transfer by looking at the common interest subgame](/papers/skyrms-barrett-propositional_content_in_signals.pdf), and a long one re-stating my thesis about the cognitive function of categorization with _somewhat more math this time_ and then using it to give an account of _mimickry_)—and one long post to write here (some robot-cult liturgical commentary plus necessary autobiographical scaffolding)—and then I'll be _done_.
+
+Not done writing. Done _grieving_. Done with this impotent rage that expects (normative sense) this world to be something other than what I know enough to expect (positive sense).
+
+Today I "e-ttended" the conference associated with this open-source scene I've been into for the past few years—although I've been so distracted by the Category War that I've landed exactly one commit in master in the last 13 months. (I think I'm still allowed to say "in master.") Traditionally (since 2016), this has been [my annual occasion](/2019/Aug/a-love-that-is-out-of-anyones-control/#tech-conference) to travel up to Portland (the _real_ Portland, and not a cowardly obfuscation) and stay with friend of the blog [Sophia](/author/sophia/) (since 2017), but everything is remote this year because of the pandemic.
+
+I continue to be profoundly alienated by how thoroughly the finest technical minds of my generation are wholly owned by Blue Egregore. I fear the malicious glee with which they proclaim that everything is political, that anyone with reservations about the Code of Conduct is _ipso facto_ a bigot, how empathy is as important if not more so than technical excellence.
+
+I can't even think of them as enemies. We're the _same people_. I was born in 1987 and grew up in California with the same [glorious ideal of equality](/2017/Dec/theres-a-land-that-i-see-or-the-spirit-of-intervention/) as everyone else. I just—did some reading outside the standard curriculum. And stopped receiving updates from the Egregore a few years back. I suppose from their perspective, an unpatched copy of Social Liberalism 2009 must look hopelessly out-of-date.
+
+https://arbital.greaterwrong.com/p/corrigibility?l=45
+
+The GPT-3 demos have been tickling my neuroticism.
+
+[Lower Decks]
+
+> really excited to hear about applying tech skills to biology; my current insurance dayjob is not terribly inspiring, and I've been wondering if I should put effort into making more of an impact with my career
+
+> (_e.g._ if someone in the world is working on <https://www.gwern.net/Embryo-selection> and needs programmers)
+
+Ens. Mariner
+
+fire
+
+https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2007/05/antisingularity/
+
+
+/2017/Sep/grim-trigger-or-the-parable-of-the-honest-man-and-the-god-of-marketing/
+and the honest man said, "Cooperate."
+
+two types of people—one who buys the domain first, and one who finishes the project first
+
+There's more that I could say here, but I'm not sure that I should
+
+"I use she/her pronouns"
+
+> The best thing about the Rust community is that we are a community where empathy and personal maturity are as important. If not more important than technical excellence, and I've certainly seen that today.
Now I am not a cognitive psychologist, and can't claim to _know_ exactly what my beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing is, or where it comes from—that's [not the kind of thing I would expect people to _know_ from introspection alone](/2016/Sep/psychology-is-about-invalidating-peoples-identities/). But it seems like a _pretty obvious guess_ that there must have been _some sort of causal relationship_ between the erotic thing, and the beautiful pure sacred self-identity thing, even if the two things don't _feel_ the same: the overlap in subject matter is too much to be a coincidence. And the erotic thing definitely came _first_.
-I guess this story reads differently in 2020 from how it was to live in 2005?
+I guess this story reads differently in 2020 from how it was to live in 2005? I think that teenage boys in today's world, having the kind of feelings I was having then, are immediately provided with "You're not a cis boy; you're a trans girl" as an explanation.
https://web.archive.org/web/20071013171416/http://www.singinst.org/blog/2007/06/11/the-stamp-collecting-device/
-Um, given our shared cultural context, I feel compelled to mention that I see myself as mostly making empirical and logical claims rather than being intrinsically value-unaligned? Such that, if you have specific counterarguments against my crusade (especially ones I'm not likely to have considered before), I'd be very grateful to hear them! (Because if the counterarguments are good, then I'm wrong and I should stop. Obviously.)
+Um, given our shared cultural context, I feel compelled to mention that I see myself as mostly making empirical and logical claims rather than being intrinsically value-unaligned? Such that, if you have specific counterarguments against my crusade (especially ones I'm not likely to have considered before), I'd be very grateful to hear them!
+
+(Because if the counterarguments are good, then I'm wrong and I should stop. Obviously.)
+
+And, like, the pure philosophy of language part in particular looks REALLY solid (and note that Jessica Taylor, who helped me with the math, agrees), even if empirical disagreements affect exactly how the philosophy applies to complex contemporary social issues—love to know what you think in the comments:
But I guess you probably don't trust my rationality that much? Like, I expect us to agree that if you're not a topic-specialist, you're not likely to say things that I haven't heard before, whereas I am likely to say things you haven't heard before (even if you've read my blog, there's more I haven't written up yet)—but that's just a matter of me sinking compute into the particular topic; if I'm opposing a consensus that you trust, you might be confident that I'm in the wrong, even if it's not worth your time to pin down exactly why.
Sorry if that observation was boring.
+https://uncommongroundmedia.com/deconstructing-the-good-transwomen/
projects / Ultimately_Untrue_Thought.git / commitdiff