jinian

I was already wearing clothes today, but then the mail came!



Obviously I needed a t-shirt on this theme after my defense, and this was the one I liked the best. (Even though it claimed to be 8-bit style when it is clearly 16-bit. Kids these days.) CLASS CHANGE.

Today I finally used a web form that had "Dr." as an option.

Today was the day the Burke-Gilman trail opened, too.

The omens are all lined up after all.

(I just have to edit more things, argh.)

Writing about inchoate woe is boring. Even I am bored with thinking about it. So here instead are new and interesting experiences I have had since last Friday.

- Throwing up in a garbage can in the microscope room, which upon sober reflection I decided was probably less awful than throwing up in the multiple-occupancy school bathroom would've been. (Atypical migraine? Stress? Disease? Unknown.)

- Playing fascinating products of the Pulse-Pounding Heart-Stopping Dating Sim Jam, including the one with the traumatized ukulele-playing T-rex and, my biology-laden favorite, Benthic Love.

- Playing Hatoful Boyfriend, which deserves like three listings here because it is at least three WTF experiences.
. First: you are a human going to a high school for pigeons and dating them. This was enough for me to want to play it!
. Second: Actually this game is pretty dark, whoa.
. Third: If you unlock enough endings it turns into an entirely different game: a much darker sci-fi visual novel.
. Fourth: I can't fail to mention the ending where ineffable pudding winds up in every soul in the universe or the one where you fight the magical final boss because the nutty kid from the anime club was right all along. Really, play this thing. It is not Pulse-Pounding or Heart-Stopping but is damned sure Jaw-Dropping.

- Getting a so-far-so-positive reply from a favored postdoc possibility!

• What are you currently reading?

Between books while finishing thesis draft. Azumanga Daioh at bedtime.

I am NOT reading The Seedbearers by Peter Valentine Timlett, which I had as an Office Shelf Book due to the title and misguidedly decided to attempt on the bus home tonight. On the first page, a 13-year-old girl who has been gang-raped is murdered. On the second, they debate what to do with her body and decide to give it to the black guys to eat. YEAH NO NOT READING THIS. ... I did get curious whether the young girl had been Aryan-pure since the murdering rapists were Toltec (all this happened in Atlantis, obvsly), and skimmed while waiting for the bus -- surprisingly, a later misogynist caricature from the same race is described as having golden-brown skin. So I guess there's that? Not sure I can keep this on my shelf, though. Nasty stuff.

• What did you recently finish reading?

Justina Chen's Return to Me wound up being way too cheerful and "everything is for the best" for me to really buy into it. That divorce was supposed to happen, and now everyone is just fine, all the things that have gone wrong for the past twenty years, including other people's relationships, are now fixed. Maybe it's mean, but I feel like the author was trying to convince herself? Also all of the protagonist's matriline was New Agey psychic, ugh, and part of her self-assertion at the end was that people need to respect her woo-woo.

Caught up on 7 Seeds. OMG YAY (SPOILER) IS BACK! *happy dance* People are escaping badness and being emotionally healed left and right, though Arashi is in for sad emo times. The series is reaching the time when I usually think it's time to wrap things up, but there is no reason to do so in this case. It's not every narrative where someone saves the world with menstrual blood.

Deceiver, in which Bren is slightly unbelievable in his hardassery.

• What do you think you’ll read next?

Gemma Files! I still haven't reread the whole trilogy all together.

I also have a video game lined up for after the thesis draft is sent off, Journey.

How is there ready-made tuna salad onigiri in this world? Tuna salad onigiri, mind you, that is labeled "shii chikin mayoneezu". CHICKEN OF THE SEA. I mean, it was good. But what?

Wonderful things:
Serious awesome Black Widow fic
Ridiculous cute Avengers and Darcy fic
Adorable affirming Avengers fic
The Problem with the Big Bang Theory -- really glad someone else sees this so articulately, I just knew I felt really sad that my parents like it so much
Human skin tones as Pantone colors -- needs more dark, but really fun to see all the variation so far

There are a few things I pass while walking to the lab that are pretty Japan-specific, like the gutter-covering tiles. I confess, every time I see them I think of rolling them up in my katamari.

When I got home yesterday, there were five Chinese girls eating in the kitchen. That's more than live with us! Two of them were new Master's students, and they pressed me nicely to eat with them all. We had some good conversation -- they were really curious about Halloween, they know about Seattle from watching the American drama Grey's Anatomy, Chinese women have a lot of trouble getting jobs without advanced degrees and we all think sexism sucks. And the food was great. They glossed one thing as kung pao chicken, but it wasn't spicy at all, just delicious: little chicken bits and carrots and a little broccoli, green onions and avoidable tomatoes, with some amazing spice I need to inquire about further. Lulu bought some spaghetti, so I am required to show her how to cook it!

Off to Boston, whee! This meant lots and LOTS of work for the last week or three, and I'll have to work on my science stuff some while I'm away since we're trying to submit a paper on September 1, but VACATION YAY.

Also I appear to be able to digest things right now, which is a major win. Still being very very careful.

The girl ahead of me in line was playing Phoenix Wright. I have Professor Layton on my 3DS for later. I felt like we should smash our handheld games together in an advertisement for the crossover.

Korea's Joseon Dynasty was not so great for women. Despite a history of female shamans, smart-as-a-whip queens, and matrilineal families, Korea turned to Neoconfucianism around 1400 and stuck with a "separate spheres for men and women" rhetoric backed by laws for almost 500 years. Needless to say, the spheres for women were secluded, subservient, and reproductive.

This historical period seems to be a popular setting for dramas in general, possibly because it was just plain long. The drama I watched was Sungkyunkwan Scandal.



This is Kim Yoon Hee. Her brother is too sick to work, and she's a huge (illicit, see Neoconfucianism) nerd, so she dresses as a boy to work as a scribe, then gets embroiled in the university entrance exams and is admitted to a residential program, which was Not The Plan. She gets through this by being absurdly dashing: early on, she gets a reputation as a total stud due to courtesan-related hijinks and swaggers while everyone calls her "Big Shot" for the rest of the series.



This is Moral Rectitude. (Sure, he has a name, but that's not what we called him.) If anything needs judging, he will judge it. Sometimes his own seriousness makes him sad. As he is a rich boy, he has a fat, bawdy servant à la Shakespeare.



These guys are BFFs: the rebellious genius (who is TOTALLY NOT BFFs WITH ANYBODY) and the foppish mastermind (basically a junior Yendi). Both are great.

Because you have likely seen television before, you may be asking: does everyone fall in love with Yoon Hee? Well, yes, pretty much. And they tend to figure out she's a girl (though one should not assume that the loving set and the clued set are identical; sigh in advance over the inevitable OMG AM I GAY crap, but be aware that it goes somewhere hilarious), but they react very differently to this horrifying information. You should watch the show despite the harem aspects, though, because all the main student characters are ridiculous and adorable -- and because of Cho Seon.



Cho Seon is the gisaeng in charge. She gets the best outfits and the best hair and the best clients, and she is a tremendous badass in multiple ways I will not spoil. She is strong, brave, and true in a role that didn't have to be any of that. Absolutely worth watching the show for all by herself.

This drama also gave us a Confucian-scholar harumph that we have gotten considerable use from around the house.

So that was the light-hearted, subverted view of the Joseon Dynasty. The characters are generally on the side of "who cares about this foolish restriction by sex anyway?" We see the danger a few times: her mother's constant and realistic fears, the older men's knowledge that they will have to get Yoon Hee killed if it ever comes out. The thrust of the show, though, is uniformly progressive and plays up the positive aspects of that, sometimes to excess as in the unbelievably happy epilogue.

---

That's not true at all of Analogue: A Hate Story. The developer, Christine Love, has done other interesting things, like don't take it personally, babe, which is why I was on her mailing list. Analogue's interface is great, with command line, multiple choice answers, and file system navigation all integral to gameplay. (Maybe the initial reasoning for the interface is a little contrived, but I was willing to roll with it.) The subject matter? Disturbing as hell.

You meet a perky AI in a school uniform and find out through her that the dead generation ship you're investigating was living some bastard's fantasy of Joseon-style Neoconfucianism in space. An emperor-captain, noblewomen not allowed to leave their homes, commoners so strictly stratified that we never even see them.

Women aren't supposed to know how to write, but everyone knows they can and there are even traditions which take it as a given; they're just meant to minimize it, not save their correspondence even though it's only electronic text. They do save things, though, and it's largely their archives you're mining to figure out what happened to everyone. Women aren't even supposed to use their personal names for anything, though again they do, and how they do becomes important.

Eventually you'll probably interact with another AI as well, who is much more a product of the era. You can choose to tell her anything you want to about your sex and marital status, as long as your answers are strictly binary; she assumes utter heterosexuality all by herself. She'll react to you very differently based on your answers. She has her own interpretations of the Joseon-style attitudes ranging from affectionate disregard to internalized acceptance. Her judgmental snark is great despite being inevitably myopic.

There's time travel of the saddest kind: a sick person on a one-way trip into a future that is less advanced than where she started, in all kinds of ways.

And it all goes horribly wrong. You know that going in, but not how, and not why you'll empathize with it.

I found it very compelling and didn't stop playing until I'd found all the content. (And all the endings, one of which has to be hacked in a way that's not possible to do without breaking the fourth wall to bits -- I tried all the plausible ones first! -- but winds up very satisfying.) Terrible abuse, though; if you want to know more details I can tell you privately.

I recommend both of these for completely different reasons, but I also recommend them in combination. There's a lot to consider about public and private personae, gender roles, and class in both.

So far, I'm managing my stress over tomorrow's filming by playing too much Snakes on a Cartesian Plane. My head hurts. I shaved my legs (and totally resent that) but still need to iron my dress. I should really have a slip, but I don't see that happening by tomorrow. Will have to remove the cosplay manicure and cut my nails.

At least the camera-to-microscope kit arrived today! We thought it wasn't going to for a while, which would mean we'd have to reschedule.

I guess it's just as well I don't need to worry about getting to the Japanese conversation class I was trying to take starting tomorrow evening. (It didn't make.)

And we have a new coordinator! I emailed mine this afternoon and got a "no longer with the company" response.

I am all grouchy today, so I give you something highly absurd.



This is from a game in which my female character grew a full beard in her jail cell, so clearly the developer's understanding of sexual dimorphism is limited, but: breasts are made of flesh.

Working really hard since returning to Seattle, where it is beautiful out (finally) and I have no energy to enjoy it. Tonight the new postdoc and I stayed late making competent E. coli for molecular cloning -- "competent" in this context meaning they're willing to suck up plasmids (circular DNA bits we design) when we freak them out by overheating them briefly. Impending death means you use whatever tools you can find! And then we let them live... if they picked up the right thing.

Way back on Sunday, though, Wim and I had an actual good time. We drove to Monterey from Berkeley despite a few initial difficulties, passing through Gilroy at Garlic Festival time and witnessing the long lines at the relevant freeway exits. Cousin #4 met us at the Monterey Bay Aquarium and showed us lots of amazing things behind the scenes, including an importunate sea turtle (fed on synthetic jellyfish-mimicking gel that they make in sausage casings and slice!) and beautiful little cuttlefish (one threatened me by flashing a dark square! and they remodeled their skin's color and texture to match the sand when they weren't making blue chaser lights around their edges!).

Said cousin is in charge of the peripheral tanks in the kelp forest room, and she says when they collect kelp they have to get the holdfasts or the stalks alone will die, even if tied down. Fascinating! Time to nerd out! Kelp are not plants; they're brown algae. It turns out ('cause you know I did a literature review) that algae have been found to contain pretty much all plant hormones. The current hypothesis is that the hormones are pretty much all coming from the chloroplast, which is really the only thing that makes sense -- chloroplasts were acquired separately in different algae types, and land plants evolved from the green algae, so the chloroplasts are the only thing such different organisms have in kind-of common. (But is there really only one kind of photosynthetic prokaryote? All these complicated hormones may be evolutionarily very ancient.) So, as kelp is not a plant and lives in a seething nutrient solution, holdfasts are not at all roots. (Anatomy of kelp.) They don't take up nutrients, and there's no vascular tissue to transport them long distances; holdfasts really just hang onto the bottom so the kelp doesn't get washed away. What chemical signal does the holdfast send to the rest of the body to let it know it's there? This is a separate origin of multicellularity from that of plants, but it has lots of the same building blocks. Are they all used the same way? My first-pass idea for checking out the usual suspects involves taking tissue from different kelp parts and looking at gene expression of hormone synthesis pathways, but this is chancy because there's no sequenced genome. A person could do that, but it takes time. More importantly, I kind of have a career plan, i.e., being an awesome microscopist, and there are lots of problems with imaging in kelp. (Primarily, I have no way to get transgenes into it at all so I can't make interesting proteins visible by attaching GFP, and also algae are said to be especially difficult due to autofluorescence.) But I don't see how anyone could not think that kelp is wonderful after seeing Monterey Bay and the sea otters meditating in the kelp beds.

We took Cousin #4 to lunch at a good Mexican place, wandered the aquarium a while longer, and drove back toward Palo Alto richer by an excellent jellyfish t-shirt. The iPad and its GPS ability were surprisingly valuable for navigation and helped us find a little beach that we walked down to. My foot was not too tired (healing yay) until I tried walking on the soft sand, but that was really difficult!

The iPad also helped us meet up with oyceter and CB in a reasonable fashion despite traffic backups over the mountain pass on highway 17. We were tantalizingly close to moving at a pace where I could have jumped out of the car, taken botanical specimens, and skibbled back in, but with the foot it was not happening. I did manage to peg the most common golden-orange flower as a Mimulus/Diplacus type from the car, so my botanical cockatiel-crest is in good order. (There was one in the parking lot at the UC Botanical Garden that I got to pull apart, and I think they're Diplacus auriantiacus.

Dinner at Palo Alto Creamery with Oyce and CB was delicious, great burgers with thick enough bacon to stand up to the beef and a ridiculous milkshake: Oreo cookie with mint and added peanut butter. I wouldn't have thought that would be good, but Oyce knows what she's doing. (Or she lucked out; it was not completely clear which.) Talked obscure video games with CB, who needs to try Vib-Ribbon sometime. We went to visit ratties after and met Momo and Haru, who are shy but can be won over with food. Eventually the Zipcar was due back and we took off.

Monday Wim did a soldering project with his sister for her research -- LEDs can be used as light sensors as well as emitters, who knew? -- while I read Jenny Crusie and loafed. I was perfectly content to do this until our flight, but Wim wanted to do a thing, so we went to the Botanical Garden briefly on our way to the airport. The vernal pool was dry, unsurprisingly, but there were lots of fun things to look at. Leaves and flowers to admire, names to be amused by. No hats for sunburned girls, though. Where does one buy pretty broad-brimmed hats when one has a big head?

Travel home was pretty much without incident. Virgin America remains a hilarious way to fly: they have used blue and purple LED technology to MAXIMUM, everything is white iMac-looking plastic, and the remote control/game controller/keyboard in the armrest is delightfully absurd. One of my buttons wasn't working, but I played some Gem Drop game that didn't need it during our descent. Fun.

I'm not sure whether it's the injury or the swelling that's worse. At least today the foot hasn't really hurt unless I moved it. And I figured out I can get around okay with only one crutch, which is good in the house o' clutter.

Much Dragon Age II has been played. I am enjoying it all right now that I'm past the interminable tiny quests to gain money at the beginning, but these are some lazily coded area maps. Really, you can't even be bothered making more than one cavern? And when areas are permanently blocked off they're still on the map view? Come on, you guys, wtf were you coding exactly that you neglected navigation and interest so badly? It wasn't plot!

Damn You Auto Correct remains hilarious, but you notice repeats when reading dozens of pages of it at a time. I should read some webcomics!