jinian

Weird day. Up at 4am, went to work for a few hours to find failing experiment, let it go longer and came home to crash; after a four-hour nap, went to acupuncture to try to fix ongoing digestive doom, and hit the central library on the way; saw Sakura-con cosplayers including obligatory Sephiroth with giant tinfoil sword, very cheering; back to lab to find experiment going okay (the seedlings were just slow starters for some reason); home to make teriyaki with sherry instead of mirin (pretty good, actually). And there was a gender theme all day, which I will now share:

1. Whitehouse.gov petition to recognize non-binary genders

2. Email from my department:

It has been called to our attention that in trying to relabel the restrooms in HCK so that people weren’t inadvertently entering the wrong one (they are in opposite locations on alternating floors), we were sending the wrong message to transgender populations. This was unintended.

We encourage transgender employees and students to use the restroom or locker room corresponding to their expressed gender but most importantly, transgender employees and students should use the restroom that they are most comfortable with for their individual situation, irrespective of expressed gender.

Additional signs will be posted on the restroom doors.

The decals she's talking about went up a couple of weeks ago, leading to mockery and grumpiness from many of us. They're giant and PINK or BLUE with the zodiac symbol around a silhouette or silhouette-with-skirt, really about the most gender-essentialist thing you could possibly imagine. This mail doesn't quite get it right, but they're doing their best to be aware and I wasn't expecting them to do so well.

3. And when I was at the library I had a major Yomiko Readman moment on finding three giant volumes of the beautiful translated edition of Hourou Musuko. I have read them, but I don't care, I am going to read THESE ONES.

Saturday: Kinda tired and grouchy. Foolishly volunteered to bring dessert to parents' place (since we were celebrating all of our birthdays), which led to shopping around for it in multiple places where there were humans.

Delicious roast beef by Mom, though, and the dense chocolate cake was tasty. We met their new dog!

Sunday: Very grouchy; hid away from the world for a while and felt a lot better. Dinner at Pam's Kitchen with Wim's dad and stepmom, resulting in stacks of gifts as usual. Great food as always; the nice owner/waiter who knows us has almost the same birthday as me, and got us free cake and singing, too.

Monday: Moody but okay until almost time to go out. Cried BUCKETS over new MLP episode; if there was any doubt in my mind that it's a show about grad school, that doubt is gone. Then broke a glass as I was getting ready to go out, cried again, scaled down the going out, and repudiated the chocolate cake as the cause of all my woes. (Probably true, this was all migraine prodrome territory, and aspirin and butterbur helped.)

Pub dinner with m-pig was good, even though someone was getting emergency medical care in there at the time. And then we got to see Whisper of the Heart and The Cat Returns, one of my favorites and the quasi-sequel I think I'd only seen once before. We got in on volunteer tickets, which was an awkward moment as I didn't quite know how much to cover for that fact. And I got my picture taken with Totoro!



(That's the amazing umbrella from Kanazawa that comes out in maple leaves when it gets wet. Best umbrella ever, even better than the clear one with goldfish on.)

Yesterday: Discovered the proto-existence of Mane 6. There's also a pony fighting game in development that's based on Super Smash Bros. but I don't care about that so much.

Yesterday: marzipan_pig sent me a link to Friendship is Optimal. Haven't read it yet.

This morning: Someone behind me whistled the MLP theme when they saw the little Rarity toy on my Adult Professional bag. (I didn't know what secret handshake was appropriate in return, and I didn't see who it was.)

[I didn't post this because I wanted to integrate pictures, but never mind that, I'll make a separate picture post. This was written 16 November.]

I got to speak English all day!

Yesterday, after taking care of a few things in the lab, I met with Wim's dad and stepmom to take them around Nagoya while they're in Japan for a business trip followed by tourism. We had a great time, not least because even introverts really need to chatter easily in their native languages and know people will understand them. (You know, before we go home to hide in a hole badger-style.)

The Hilton lobby is a surprisingly fun place to chill. Lanky Euro guy in top hat and tails, ladies in kimono. Hilton has American-style pillows, hmm, maybe I shouldn't have turned down the chance to spend a night there.

Lunch at Akbar, a perfectly good Indian place with excellent dessert -- coconut milk with coconut shreds, topped with lilikoi puree, is what I think that was -- where I managed to leave my umbrella. Might go back for it and explore that neighborhood a bit this evening. Tandoor with naan slapped on the side and handled with iron hooks!

Then to Inuyama Castle, which is smaller than Nagoya-jou and has simpler grounds. It's the oldest Japanese castle still standing, so presumably it also doesn't have Nagoya Castle's Optimized Walls of Maximum Engineering Prowess. Still pretty impressive. Beautiful, though those are some damned steep and smooth stairs to be taking in your stocking feet while carrying your shoes in a plastic bag. You could walk all around the top, completely outside! There were signs telling you not to lean on the handrail, which did not inspire confidence, but the walkway was pretty wide and it wasn't raining.

On the way down, though, the fox's wedding!

I had predicted puppy-based souvenirs, which was pretty much a gimme since Inuyama means Dog Mountain. Yep. Samurai puppy named Wanmaru.* He has a topknot made of... I don't know. Furry skin? Best not to think too hard about this, like how Hello Kitty's fur turns brown when she's at the beach.

We also visited a museum about the castle town, which is a little run-down especially by the scenic river where they traditionally fish with cormorants. It hasn't changed in a long time, though, and there was a cool model of festival floats being pulled through the town and a slit-based "time machine" display showing past and current layouts. Some artifacts, cool armor and swords and screens painted with military maps. One of the paintings had a lot of guys decapitating other guys, because that was the style at the time.

The best museum was Karakuri! Puppets and doll-automata, with transformation -- "Urashima Tarou becomes old" was a favorite -- or dancing, serving tea, writing a Chinese character, picking things up with retractable thumbs, really cool stuff. Beautiful craftsmanship, too: the guy whose workshop is in the building has a tea-serving doll in the British Museum.

We had talked about going to Jakkou-in, which is a temple with a maple festival, but it got late and we weren't very close, so we went back to Nagoya and I showed them the science section of Tokyu Hands instead. It was a hit. Wim, you should expect presents.

I'd been pushing for local cuisine all day, so we got a recommendation from the enthusiastic Hilton concierge for a nice place with Nagoya cuisine, went right across the street to Yamamoto-ya. (Spinoff place Yama-chan has just Nagoya cochin, which is salty chicken wings.) Awesome food: Crab salad; tamago with hot peppers cooked in, served with shiso; tasty soft tofu; homemade pickles of daikon, cabbage, and something else with ginger paste, which was great. Special Nagoya miso on our flat-style udon, pretty tasty and way better than the stuff I had at the station before. I recommend against getting tempura in noodle dishes owing to disintegration, however. And for dessert, royal milk tea ice cream, which was both delicious and inexplicably molded into an egg shape.

J was flagging badly but G had desperately wanted some decaf all day, so we hit the neighboring Starbucks. They had to make the decaf, but they did sell it -- not common here. I convinced her to watch Community, and she agreed Big Bang Theory is mean-spirited, which made me really happy.

They sent me home in a cab, which I shouldn't have allowed but man I was tired, and finding Fushimi subway station was not going to be that easy since I'd gotten a little lost on the way there and didn't have a good mental map. The Higashiyama Sky Tower is lit up only in outline at night, an interesting choice.

* I guess I'd translate it as "Sir Barky"? It's got to be a reference to Mori Ranmaru, so there's a period/samurai feel, but Maru is also a common pet name and "wan" is a dog's bark. (Note that it's not redundant, just cutesy. Compare the soot sprites from Totoro, makkuro kurosuke, which seriously means Blackest McBlackerson.)

Community 2.06 "Epidemiology" is the best episode of television in existence. I kinda hurt myself bouncing and squealing.

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.

Fantastical Girlhood panel! It was great! Victoria and I basically disagreed on everything -- she has seen only the gross pony episodes, while I remain appalled that Monster High has no outfits without high heels, including the orange jumpsuits in juvie -- but were able to talk fine about the traits of things we liked. Apparently there are a lot more Power Rangers shows than I was aware of and some of the Pink Rangers are stone cold awesome, which is good to know. What do I think of bronies: um, well, I have to split them into at least two groups; some are helpless before the power of the show, and I approve of them, while others are making skeevy-as-hell fanart of pony butts, and I wonder how much of that is them trying desperately to be macho somehow. Rebecca and I emitted ATLA/Korra-squee to the rafters and talked about why ensemble casts are great. Add transparent moderation and a good amount of audience stuff, and my first panel went wonderfully.

Other panels attended:
. Feminist Bottoms (generally good, varied, socially responsible; occasionally assumed that everyone in the room IDed the same way)
. Meta Elements of ATLA (lots of happy awesomeness; some trouble negotiating what we mean by Asian-American vs. Asian-inspired American and whether they'd look the same)

Dinner with pameladean and arkuat, plus oursin, boxofdelights, and someone whose online ID if any I know not. Turns out at least half of us would have preferred a smaller group, but it went fairly well, just polarized into a history/literature conversation and a science conversation. arkuat and I pooled our knowledge and his inspiration to reveal that in Rainbows End the scanning of the shredded library is a metaphor for shotgun-style genome sequencing, which thrilled me to no end. Wim later pointed out that there are some real-life projects where computers reconstruct shredded documents, too. Himal Chuli: delicious, with a great variety of vegetarian options.

I love the Tiptree Auction. Ellen Klages is hilarious, and people's creative works featuring Space Babe were especially amazing this year. Furthermore, I won Flora's Fury. It still ran too long despite revised bidding rules, but was definitely better than usual.

Talked to rushthatspeaks for a little bit. Then, as I have finally decided that I am not obliged to attend parties if I don't like parties, chilled for the rest of the night. I was sorry to miss the Haiku Earrings in particular, but crowded places are crowded. And loud.

There's a lot of anime/manga programming, and an ATLA panel, but no one knew when The Legend of Korra was coming out. I think we need to show an episode or two at some point. I mean, I will retract this if it is somehow NOT incredibly awesome, but I doubt that very much.

Putting your cutie mark on a tulle-based fascinator rather than your butt
+
Having curls in your purple wig
+
Wearing a rather fluffy white dress
=

Surprisingly, not just Rarity, but Lolita Rarity. Check it:



(I also made THE BEST PLANTGIRL JACK O'LANTERN EVER, photos soon.)

No time lapse this weekend due to last-minute cramming in of data collection for another paper, so mostly a lazy day today.

I did get out to the Fish Store to get more plants and a siphon for Hex's tank and admire various lovely fishies which I will not be buying. (I haven't had a tank in about seven years until now; it's weird to be kind of doing the fish thing again but no community tank and no heating.) The tank ammonia level is going up a bit high as they do before tanks get established, so Hex may be moving to a bowl for a few days until the bacteria get their act together. The plants will help eventually but need those bacteria to convert the nitrogen into its most usable and least toxic form. I have a line on some sand from an established tank, which will help by introducing the right bacterial suite without building it from scratch, but J is out of town this weekend so it'll have to wait til Monday.

Also Hex's toes are regrowing apace. I still think the five posters for one species vs. one for a kingdom was wrong, but I admit the worth of the axolotl as a model organism. Especially if I can get a GFP one for myself.

Leverage s2 remains a lot of fun and surprisingly well written, with sexy women who aren't 20 years old and plot twists I do not predict. As someone who doesn't write fiction I may be at a prediction disadvantage compared to some of you, but it's quite enjoyable.

Recently I've had bizarre dreams in ways I mostly can't remember when I wake up. I do remember dreaming that rushthatspeaks had posted the final review of the year and that it was nearly a novel in its own right, and of course very well done. Sadly I woke up from that one before I finished reading.