Posted at UTC 2011-06-09 22:54:25

Eli_Dupree says:

The epic first post

It is the year 2013, or later. You have just navigated to the earliest post of Eli Dupree's wildly popular website, which has over 100,000 regular readers. Eli has released at least one full graphic novel here, as well as dozens of short stories, songs, games, and other cool things, and is currently in the midst of an even more massive project, which ze is hoping to finish within a month or two.

That's right, I'm talking to you – you, the reader. Usually, when someone writes now, or uses present-tense verbs, they mean the time at which they're speaking. But in this post, the present is the time when you're reading it, which I have just claimed is the year 2013 or later. People who write blogs usually talk to the other people from the present, and I'm going to go back to doing that with my second post, but I thought it would be fun to talk to you people from the future instead, just for once. Of course, I'm making a lot of assumptions here, but it's a lot more fun to just assume I'm right than to stick a phrase like I'm guessing that in front of everything.

First posts weren't a thing that I thought I liked writing, back when I wrote this post in the middle of 2011. Usually, when I started to get involved in a new thing, I would try to do it a little at a time, rather than make a big, flashy entrance. After all, people usually get more skilled, not less, over time, so how can a first post, or first performance, or first musical album, ever hope to live up to what will come after it? But a good challenge is always fun, so here, the challenge was this: Make a first post that is so awesome that it will still be awesome now that you've seen everything that comes after it.

Since part of the point of this website is to advance the cause of social justice, I did consider the idea of ignoring the issue of awesomeness for this post, and dedicating it to some specific cause instead. On the other hand, I didn't want the symbolic nature of a first post to imply that I was setting up one issue as more important than the other. I wouldn't have been able to consider anything thoroughly, because I would have felt obligated to make everything perfect and even-handed, which is impossible – exactly the issue that made me reluctant to write an epic first post originally. I did make a lot of posts about various social issues soon after this one, but this one was completely dedicated to awesomeness; I didn't even bother to advocate on my own behalf by explaining the gender-neutral pronoun I used in the first paragraph!

Instead, I decided to make a bunch of ambitious claims about my future success!

It's at least 2013

The first question I had to ask myself was this: Who are you? Who will be reading this post? And that led me to a very interesting series of conclusions.

First, the way this website is set up, it is easy to go back to the beginning and read the first post. And there was really only a very short window of opportunity for this post to have been displayed on the first page; therefore, it's almost certainly true that you've deliberately looked back to read it, rather than reading it at the time it was posted.

Second, a good website's readership tends to increase exponentially over time, as more people hear about it, post links to it, and so on. What this means is that there are always a lot more late joiners than early joiners. However, the number of posts I make in that time doesn't increase exponentially, so the late joiners won't have a much harder time reading all the way back to the first post, even ignoring the readers who deliberately jump back to the beginning. This inevitably leads to the conclusion that more late joiners will read this post than early joiners. And what that means is that, assuming I keep producing this website through, say, 2016, you are almost certainly arriving after 2013, regardless of how effectively I publicized it in 2011.

That raises some interesting issues. It means that I'm talking to the majority, while the people who read my posts within a few days are the minority. Most blog posts, by using present-tense verbs to refer to the writer's time, subtly privilege their present-day audience, by placing them in the present; they allow later readers to view the record of events, but do not directly address those readers. Or worse, the present tense refers only to the author's present, ignoring the readers entirely! When a person writes something, and another person reads it, there are two people involved; why should the language establish the time of one event, the writing, while ignoring the time of the other event, the reading, entirely? When I wrote the next few posts after this one, it was only linguistic convention that made me write for the minority of readers from the present, or the even smaller minority of myself. What justification did I have for mentally privileging the present-day minority over the silent majority of onlookers from the future? Or was the future truly so limited that it was right for me to have valued my influence on my present-day readers more highly?

Let's move on.

I have 100,000 readers

Okay, this one was a bit more of a gamble. I didn't actually know for sure that my website would become this popular. But when I made that gamble, the outcomes were skewed in my favor, for two reasons: First, if I was right, then lots of people would know I was right, while if I was wrong, relatively few people would know I was wrong. Second, if I was right, then it would be very impressive that I had accurately claimed such a large readership, while if I was wrong, it wouldn't have been that much of a disappointment, since it's such a high number I was aiming for in the first place. (True, if I've ended up with ten million readers by now, the 100,000 looks like a pittance, but I don't think you'll fault me for claiming only 100,000!) And by the same logic from the last section, if I ever have that many readers, then in the long run, most of the people who read this post will read it when my claims are true!

But that paragraph makes it sound like I wasn't actually that confident about my ability to acquire a large reader base. On the contrary, I definitely was! I had lots of reasons to believe that I would gain a wide following:

1) I went into this task with the specific intention of making my posts easy to read, engaging, and thought-provoking. I wanted this to be a website that all kinds of people could both enjoy and learn from. Thus, I had reason to hope that it would spread both among people who enjoyed reading it for its own sake, and also among people who were serious activists and liked the ideas it was expressing.

2) Remember that graphic novel I mentioned in the first paragraph? I released it one page at a time, in a serial format – i.e. as a webcomic. It's a well-known fact that publishing a webcomic with a regular update schedule brings readers back over and over again. And the e-mail notification system is also an effective way to keep up with the website without having to actively reload the page, for people who have e-mail addresses that they check regularly.

3) This should probably have been the first item on this list, because it's the most important: The stuff I do is really cool. That's why my website was able to spread so quickly by word of mouth (or word of blog, or word of instant message): Lots of people read it and wanted to tell their friends about it – people just like you! Sadly, doing really cool stuff isn't always enough to become popular. History, up to and including the present, is full of examples of marginalized people who did really cool things and weren't recognized for it. But in my case, my cool abilities combined favorably with my societal privileges to bring you a product that can hopefully work towards demolishing the very injustices that created this situation in the first place!

(Yeah, I was an optimist when I wrote this post. You'd better hope I still am.)

I've done lots of massive projects

I'm afraid I went for a bit of a cop-out on this one. Of course I'm working on a massive project... I'm always working on a massive project!

Writing this website was a massive project. Just before that, I finished up a semester of college by writing a novella (which I posted on this website later in 2011). Before I wrote the novella, I was working on writing my own music composition software, and in the middle of all that, I was acting in a full-length play. And a day or two after I wrote this post, I started working in earnest on my next massive project, where I wrote my own graphics editing software – the same software I went on to use to write the graphic novel I mentioned.

So, in short, I had this very clear knowledge: I would have been walking on treacherous ground if I had claimed that I wasn't working on a massive project right now.

So keep an eye on the website, whatever year you're viewing it in, because... you know that massive project I'm doing? I'm hoping to finish it within a month or two.

– Eli

Tagged in posts about the website itself.

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Posted at UTC 2011-06-10 23:37:23

Eli_Dupree says:

Scrutinized words: she, he

On my website, I have made it so that whenever someone uses any form of the pronoun she or he in a post or comment, it appears with a mark of scrutiny. Observe: She, he, her, him, hers, his, herself, himself.

I also avoid using those pronouns myself, and use the gender-neutral pronoun ze instead. I've listed the forms of ze, as I use it, in the table below:

As subject	As object	Possessive adjective	Possessive pronoun	Reflexive
she	her	her	hers	herself
he	him	his	his	himself
they	them	their	theirs	themself
ze	zem	zir	zirs	zemself

Why?

Because to say she or he is to explicitly declare a gender for another person, and that level of explicitness should be matched by how visible the word is in the sentence.

Since she and he are structural components of the language, it's very difficult to avoid using them if you're not willing to modify the language itself. And because they're so hard to avoid, they actively divide all humans into two classes: The she-humans and the he-humans.

That division is called the gender binary. I don't like it.

If you include the gender binary in every sentence you write, speak, or think, then it becomes part of what you think about when you think about any person. You start judging people based on their apparent gender, rather than on whatever is actually relevant to the discussion. Obviously, that's a pretty silly idea. And given our world's huge amount of public and private discrimination against humans who don't fall neatly into the gender binary (hi!), and against humans who fit neatly but fall on the she side, it's not just a pretty silly idea – it's a totally terrible idea.

Consider this: Have you ever felt uncomfortable because you didn't know what gender another person was? Now, have you ever felt uncomfortable because you didn't know what another person's favorite color was? If you answered Yes and No, then welcome to the wonderful world of thinking that gender is a uniquely essential quality of a person!¹ Our social norms say that you're supposed to judge other people based on their genders, and so a lot of people get uncomfortable when they can't do what they're supposed to. The whole system of judgment sneaks into your head by starting with the benign-seeming judgement of whether you're supposed to use the she pronouns or the he pronouns.

But that turns out to not be such a benign judgement at all. When you do it, you're helping society judge whether whoever you're talking about is a she-human, or a he-human, or someone who doesn't really fit in the little boxes they're supposed to fit in. And when I say society, I mean the kid sitting in the front of your class who's going to bully the doesn't-really-fit kid when you're not looking (or maybe when you are). I mean your male friend who doesn't think they're being sexist, but who always talks over their female friends in conversations. I mean the person who lives down the street, who seems pretty nice, who tried to rape and murder another person last week, just because the other person didn't fit our standards of she or he.² Obviously, when a person commits rape or murder, they bear the sole responsibility. But that person thought it was okay because people like you said, I care so little about those people that I won't even change the way I talk to stop excluding them.

So what do we do about it?

I don't expect you to stop using those pronouns entirely, any more than I expect you to magically solve all the world's problems at once. What you can do is to notice when you do it, and be aware of how that affects the way you're communicating.

Now, if only we had a way to do that automatically get your attention whenever you let one of those words pass without comment...? OH RIGHT.

If you're more ambitious, you can start cutting back on your use of these gendered pronouns, and start using gender-neutral pronouns. There are a variety of options for this. One is to use the singular they; if you look back over this post, you'll see that I used the singular they a lot. In most cases, it's unobtrusive and it gets the job done. Some people say it's grammatically incorrect, but those people are wrong.

"They" doesn't always work, though – one of the advantages of she and he is that they're two separate words, so they can, given the right genders of people, refer to two different people unambiguously. Getting rid of them already loses that advantage – it means that even if you have a female person and a male person, you still have to use the same pronoun for both of them – and it only gets worse if you also have to use the same pronoun for a group of people as for the individuals. So, it helps to have a pronoun that is third-person, explicitly singular, and doesn't assign a gender. English didn't have any of those for a while, but now it has lots of them. If you've read this website much, you've probably noticed that I use one of them in particular: ze.

Since the structure of ze is so similar to the existing pronouns, I have had an easy time adding it to my vocabulary. And it has another nice advantage over they: When people argue that I shouldn't use it, it's easy to engage in the real conversation about gender, while with they, it often gets bogged down as a conversation about grammar.

The other most common gender-neutral pronouns are the Spivak set: ey, em, eir, eirs, emself. I personally don't like this set, because I feel like I'm mumbling when I say them out loud, not to mention that ey and em both have other meanings, or at least are pronounced the same as words that do. But it's a set I've seen used in a bunch of places, so I thought it would be prudent to mention it here. It also bears mentioning that there are a bunch of different variants of ze, from ze/hir/hir/hirs/hirself to zhe/zhim/zher/zhers/zhimself; I picked the set I use simply because it feels the most natural to me.

That concludes my thoughts for now. Since this is the reference post for everywhere that she and he are scrutinized, I may update it from time to time.

– Eli

Footnotes:

This is also a great analogy because lots of people just assume you have a favorite color, but not everyone naturally has one! ^back
Well, usually it's not just because they didn't fit in the gender binary. Usually it's also because they were a person of color, and/or mentally disabled, and/or homeless, and/or... well, you get the idea. ^back

Tagged in posts about gender, posts about the website itself.

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Posted at UTC 2011-06-11 07:10:37

Eli_Dupree says:

Introducing the graphics editing project

This is going to be one of those posts that make me think Why am I writing a post about this instead of doing it?!. But it's late at night and I'm not really going to get anything done before the morning, so I might as well go ahead and write this up.

So, I wrote a graphic short st– No, wait, I'm going to tell this in chronological order, starting from way back in the beginning. We could have a long argument about where the beginning really is, and whether it's really a net or lattice rather than a linear story that starts at a single beginning point, but we're not going to do that, because I'm the one telling this story, and I've picked one beginning point that I like best.

It begins with me dorking around with the images from an old computer RPG called Sword Dream. Or maybe it was Yipe!. How old am I – ten? Anyway, it was basically me taking images and drawing over them or recombining them. I wasn't very good at it, but it wasn't hard to do things like copying the head of a monster to make a monster that had two heads, or stuff like that. I had an idea of what I wanted to accomplish, but my tools didn't let me accomplish that. I was using old Mac software – GraphicConverter and ClarisWorks. Later, I started using the GIMP, but it wasn't much of an improvement, because it had the same basic problem: It wasn't a seamless extension of my underlying wills and desires! There's a saying, Only a bad worker blames their tools¹, but that saying was written by people who didn't have computers. Why should I ever do work that my computer can do for me? If you know me, you know that I insist on automating everything that can possibly be automated.

Shuffle the timeline around a bit because I don't remember what order this next stuff comes in. I spend lots of time drawing stuff in school – doodling, you might call it. I drew a lot of dragons. I mostly drew them in the same style – bold lines and shapes, little to no shading. When I did draw pictures where I used shading more, people told me they looked better, because they were more realistic, but I didn't like them. What's the point of being realistic? If I wanted a realistic picture, I'd take a photograph. No – the goal of art is to produce something that's better than realism. It's to project our wills and desires through the medium and onto our audience. (To break the narrative a bit, look at my avatar on this site – the circular face with the yellow background, the broken-off pieces, and the wizard's hat. There's not a realistic image in the world that could convey the ideas that image conveys.)

Meanwhile, I go through some more computer games, most notably Spiderweb Software's Blades of Exile, and finally came to rest at the modern Free-and-open-source game, Battle for Wesnoth. (You'll probably hear more about my exploits in the BfW community in some other posts, too; I've committed a huge amount of time to it.) BfW had an active community of artists, and I learned a bunch of stuff from them. I tried my hand at making graphics for the game, but I was constantly frustrated by the software I had available to me. I actually liked ClarisWorks better than the GIMP for sprite editing², because it had a simpler user interface, without all the fancy controls of the GIMP. But I was picking the lesser of two evils. At some point during this time period, I decided that I should write my own sprite editing software, tuned to that specific task instead of being a general-purpose graphics editor like the GIMP. That's not what I'm doing now; I will probably never do that, because sprite art is a horrible kludge that only exists because of the limited resolution of computer monitors. Moving on...

Fast forward about three years. I've taken some serious art classes in high school, which made me pretty good at drawing things in a photo-realistic way, which is nice even if it's not the most important skill to have.³ It's my third semester of college. There are two cool creative writing courses offered in January. One of them is a prose memoir course taught by a person who everybody thinks is the coolest creative writing professor ever. The other is course about the graphic novel. The first class fills up very fast, and I don't want to compete for a slot in it, so I sign up for the second. AND THEN MY FATE IS SEALED.

During January, I write the graphic short story People Are Wrong Sometimes (that's a link to where it's hosted on my old website), and I think, Why the hell didn't I get into this medium earlier? This is the perfect medium for me – the way I see it, the essence of a work of art is to effectively express an interesting idea, and a graphic narrative combines the abstract expressiveness of language with the instant expressiveness of images, resulting in a storytelling mode that can express ideas so fast that it can almost do justice to the overflowing supply of ideas that's inside my head.

There's just one catch. It takes frickin' ages! To draw that story, I sketched it in pencil, then drew over it in pencil, then drew over it in pen so that it would come out more clearly to the computer, then scanned it into the computer, then touched it up, then colored it in the computer. And when I colored it, I had to manually separate the lines from each other. This is a tragedy. All of those things were possible to automate, and therefore, they should have been automated.

So I'm going to automate them now.

First, a pencil? Seriously? Why would I ever draw something on paper, which has the unique property of being unable to be analyzed and manipulated at the slightest thought, when I could draw in raw data? Step one of my automation is to get a graphics tablet – a device that lets you draw and have your hand movements be immediately translated into computer data. There's no reason for me to ever deal with physical media in the first place, and having the computer record my drawing means that I can easily mark which lines are which, rather than having to manually separate them afterwards. Of course, this all means that my first task is to do super blitz research on the tablet market and how I can get a bargain on one.

Meanwhile, I need to research the underlying computer format of the tablet input. Or, at least, I need to find other people's code that can accept the input, so that I can use it for my own work. And I also need to learn more about how to read and write existing image file formats.

Once I have a tablet and figure out how to take input from it, it's just a matter of⁴ experimenting with different ways of processing that information until I have ones that are near-perfectly in tune with my internal ways of understanding how I produce art. And creating internal data structures that I can easily manipulate and change when I decide I want to restructure my stuff. This is all going to sound a little abstract until I actually get started on doing it, but trust me, once I get going, I will have awesome powers. AWESOME POWERS.

– Eli

Footnotes:

Okay, that's not the original saying, but I think it's nicer when we don't use sexist and classist language. ^back
Oh by the way, a static 2d image used by a computer game is called a sprite. ^back
At the time of this writing, you can see some of my work from one of those classes at this page of my old website. ^back
And I make it sound so simple! It is not simple; I just happen to be really, really good at getting my ideas straight, which makes this step the one that I'm most confident about doing well, even though it's probably the most difficult step in abstract terms. ^back

Tagged in posts about visual art, posts about the graphics editing project.

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Posted at UTC 2011-06-11 20:36:25

Eli_Dupree says:

So, I asked the Internet how to shop for tablets. The internet told me, Get a Wacom tablet. Get the cheapest Wacom tablet you can find. So I did. I hunted around for a while and then ordered a Wacom Bamboo CTL460 pen tablet for around $50.

Wacom is notable not just for being, essentially, the name in graphics tablets, but also for the fact that they're the only major graphics tablet producer that supports Linux-based operating systems. I happen to run a Linux-based OS (namely Ubuntu) on my computer, so that's a necessary feature. There are existing free and open source Linux drivers for Wacom tablets¹; all other companies that produce tablets, by not having such drivers, have voluntarily rejected my money, which made my choice as a consumer very easy!

(You can tell I'm an expert on the tablet market because I spent a few hours researching it on Google!)

The tablet is supposed to arrive between June 16 and June 21. Since most of the work of this project is in experimentation once I actually receive the tablet, I might be a bit stalled for the next 5-8 days. I guess that gives me plenty of time to learn about file formats – maybe I should write a program that can load, make simple edits, and save a .png file, as an exercise to make sure I know my stuff.

But that means I need to decide what programming language to write it in! I'd love to write it in Haskell, which is a truly wonderful language, but I haven't written much Haskell code before, and there are a lot fewer existing libraries² for it than there are for C/C++, which is/are the language/s I have the most experience in. I don't really want to stack the extra effort of learning Haskell on top of the effort of learning how to deal with the image formats. I'll come up with a different project to use as my Eli Dupree learns Haskell! project, I guess.

Footnotes:

Maybe at some point I should also write about why the freedom to dissect and modify the software you use is important, but that's a bit of a daunting task for this post. ^back
A library is a bunch of general-purpose code that can be used in a lot of different projects. For instance, libpng is a library of C code that loads and saves .png files, and it can be used in any project that needs to deal with .png files. As long as the project is written in C, anyway. ^back

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Posted at UTC 2011-06-12 06:22:31

Eli_Dupree says:

I just finished the task from my last post - I wrote a C++ program to open, modify, display, and save an image file. I'm using SDL for all the image operations, which means that I can only save in .bmp format, but that doesn't really matter, and I can always go and find a better image-file-handling library later.

Now that I know I can do that, I don't really have any immediate tasks left for before I receive the tablet. Maybe tomorrow I'll figure out how to write a Haskell program that does the same thing.

While I'm talking about programming, here's a question for all you present-day readers: I know some of you are pretty tech-savvy and know exactly what I'm talking about, while some of you are not tech-savvy at all and haven't a clue what I'm talking about. I haven't really decided how much knowledge I'm going to assume. So the question is this: If you're not tech-savvy, would you be interested in me writing posts that break this stuff down into the basic concepts so you can follow along? And if you are tech-savvy, would you be interested in me writing posts that get into the details of what I'm doing?

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Posted at UTC 2011-06-13 07:38:52

Eli_Dupree says:

Scrutinized words: man, woman, boy, girl

On my website, I have made it so that whenever someone uses any form of the words man, woman, boy, or girl in a post or comment, it appears with a mark of scrutiny. Observe: man, woman, boy, girl, men, women, boys, girls. Womyn and wymyn¹ are also included for completeness, because I've seen people use them on the Internet. I wanted to include guy in the list, but guy also means a lot of other things.

Why?

Because they're ambiguous to the point of absurdity, and sometimes they mean things you don't want them to mean, ambiguity or no ambiguity.

Now I'm going to take a step back and explain that. The trouble is, since there are so many ambiguities built into the language, it's not easy to do that. So I'm going to take another five steps back and explain things from scratch.

Part one: Gender

So, there's this thing called gender. I wrote a little about it in my post about why I use the pronoun ze and scrutinize she and he. Gender is really important, but nobody knows what it is, so I'm going to skip to something that's easier to describe.

So, there's this thing called sex.² In the case of humans... well, humans are diverse creatures. Some of them have vaginas, and some don't. Some have penises, and some don't. Some develop lots of facial hair when they reach puberty, some develop breasts, some have their voices deepen... and some don't. By a quirk of biology, most of these attributes are strongly correlated with each other, so we've grouped all the attributes that usually go with each other into two convenient little boxes. There's the box of deep voices, facial hair, and penises (and a bunch of other things), which we call the male sex, and the box of breasts and vaginas (and a bunch of other things), which we call the female sex. So if I have a human, and I ask a biologist what sex that human is, then the biologist will look for the attributes from each of those boxes, and if they all fit in the male box, the biologist will tell me that the human is male, and so forth. If the human's attributes don't fit neatly into a box, the biologist will give up, go back to zir laboratory, and invent a fancy theory about why not all humans are the way ze expected them to be. But the real reason that not all humans are the way ze expected them to be is that we don't know everything about how humans work yet.³

When a biologist writes something like men have greater testosterone levels than women, ze is talking about sex.

There's another thing called subconscious sex. All humans have brains, and brains are really weird. Brains often have strong senses of what is right, or what should happen. It's quite common for a human to have a strong sense of what zir body should be like, and if it's a sense about the attributes that we call sex, then that sense is called subconscious sex. Fortunately for most humans, that sense usually matches what their bodies are actually like. Unfortunately, the ones for whom it doesn't are in quite a pickle. Fortunately, we have enough technology to change most of those physical attributes through surgery and hormone supplements. Unfortunately again, those things are expensive, and our social and legal systems are full of discrimination against people who have to do that.

Since neither our society nor our science understands subconscious sex very well, people don't usually talk about it.⁴

There's another thing called assigned gender. When a person gets born, everybody around them usually goes and looks at their genitals and either says It's a boy! and starts giving them toy trucks, or says It's a girl! and starts giving them dolls and frilly dresses. When they do that, they're assigning the baby a gender; the baby usually doesn't get any choice in the matter. If its genitals don't fit the other people's notions of what male or female genitals look like, then they probably do weird medical tests to decide which they think makes more sense,⁵ because they aren't okay with just saying it's not male or female and leaving it at that. Giving people different toys because of what gender you've assigned them is called sexism. Because our society is so sexist, people of different assigned genders often end up experiencing the world in significantly different ways.

When a trans-exclusionary radical feminist says something like I'm talking about real women – women who were born and raised as women, ze is talking about assigned gender.

There's another thing that I don't know a good name for. (Please tell me if you know a good name for it!) That's the gender that people usually decide you are when they see you. People are usually very stupid, so they look for easy cues to decide gender. Except that usually the cues they look for are physical sex cues, not gender cues; they look for breasts, facial hair, etc., so they're basically trying to decide your sex and they just assume that picking a gender for you based on that is okay. The main exception is that they also look for how long a person's hair is, which doesn't really make any sense because it's really easy to change how long your hair is, regardless of your gender or sex, if you have access to a pair of scissors.

When a person is in a room full of people they don't know and asks something like who's that girl over there, wearing the fuzzy hat?, ze is talking about zir immediate gender identification of that person, whatever you want to call it. I'm going to use the phrases male-perceived and female-perceived to talk about this concept.

There's another thing called gender roles. Remember that list of attributes associated with sex? Well, there are also lists of behaviors associated with gender. People usually expect you to do the behaviors associated with the gender they've picked out for you, and a lot of the time, they'll actively or passively discriminate against people who aren't doing them. The main difference between the gender lists and the sex lists is that the sex lists are biological fact, while the gender lists are arrant nonsense. I'm not even going to dirty this blog post by telling you what they are where I come from, because you probably hear about them all the time, and if you haven't heard about them, thank goodness for that!

When someone describes a female-perceived child who plays with male-perceived children at physical sports and games as one of the boys, ze is talking about gender roles.

There's another thing called gender identity. For one reason or another, some people think they actually are a specific gender, as opposed to just being assigned into it, or doing the activities associated with it, or subconsciously being of the sex associated with it. I haven't got a clue what that means, but it seems to be really important to some people, so I generally acknowledge that it is a thing that exists and is important. There are a lot of things that exist and are important even though I don't know how they work.

When someone refers to a male-identifying person as she, and ze says something like dude, I'm a guy, ze is talking about gender identity.

So, have I made my point yet?

Part one and a half: No I bloody well haven't!

The thing is, that whole essay about gender and sex and stuff isn't even the original reason I decided to scrutinize these words. I'm not saying it's not a wonderful reason to try to use more specific language, and to avoid overused, ambiguous terms like woman and boy. But that's not the real reason that I have for avoiding those words, and I think it's a weaker reason.

After all, a person could say something like this:

“

So what if people use those words to mean a lot of different things? Lots of people use lots of words incorrectly every day; that doesn't necessarily mean that you should avoid the words. It means you should use them correctly. And they're useful words, too: Think about how using the terms trans man and trans woman affirms trans people's identities, in a way that language like FtM and MtF don't. Your unambiguous language would say trans female-identifying person or non-female-assigned female-identifying person, which, to my ear, sound like they're raising a note of skepticism about that identity, rather than affirming it.

Well, okay, hypothetical person. I like what you're saying. But since you're advocating the continued use of the word man, and you say you can use it in an unambigous way, I'd like to know what exactly you mean when you say man.

“

Simple: A person who identifies as male.

So if I'm eight years old, and I say I'm male, then I'm a man?

“

Oh. Sorry, I meant An adult who identifies as male.

Yes. Yes, you did. But what the heck is an adult, anyway?

Part two: Age

The same way I talked about in my post about she and he, there are two problems here. One has to do with how we categorize people, and the other has to do with the fact that we chose an overbearing binary categorization system in the first place.

Passive exclusion

Suppose I'm addressing an audience, on the topic of feminism, and I say Women in this country face pervasive discrimination. There are two problems with that sentence. The first problem, of course, is that it's true. The second problem is that there are plenty of people who face the exact same kinds of discrimination I'm talking about, but whom I've left out. Discrimination doesn't magically start when you hit adulthood, so by saying women, I passively excluded a lot of people.⁶

I decided to scrutinize these words because I kept catching myself saying things like that.

On a related note, think about the hypothetical person I was talking to. Ze didn't even notice right away when ze said people and really meant adults. That's an easy mistake to make if you've internalized the notion that non-adults aren't really people. Both this and the example from the last paragraph are instances of ageism. Ageism, as you've probably guessed, is active or passive discrimination against people of a marginalized age group. In general, all people who are not yet adults (whatever an adult is) are a marginalized age group. (Ageism also includes discrimination against people who are much older, because of their high age; that's not the subject of this post, but I'd be wrong to leave it out of the definition.)

Active discrimination

Okay, now go and re-read my post about she and he, except this time, replace she with child, he with adult, and the minority of people who obviously don't fit in the gender binary with everyone who lives past the age of twelve. Go on, I'll wait.

When does a person become an adult? What the heck is an adult, anyway? It's just like the whole gender thing: Like gender, it's really, really important in society, and like gender, nobody has a clue what it really means.

As long as man, woman, boy and girl are our primary words for talking about people with genders (or sexes), we're going to have problems. It's not just a problem because it makes it awkward to decide what to say when you're talking about someone who's fourteen years old. It's also a problem because it creates a politics around the age categories. It makes every healthy conversation about gender into a secret nasty conversation about age, and every healthy conversation about age into a secret nasty conversation about gender. Even if you think it's okay to view specific events as coming-of-age events, we have language like You're a woman now and separates the men from the boys to make it so that you can't just be an adult... you have to be an adult in a gender-binary way! And that's not the only terrible thing it does. Let's look at another specific example:

So, there's this issue of people calling adult female people girls, all the way up through their forties. Some people say it's bad because it reduces competent, independent adults to children.

Sure, that's bad... if you were thinking of children as lesser in the first place.

Think about the schoolyard insult You hit like a girl. It's pretty obvious how sexist that is. It's not sexist because you're telling a male-perceived child that ze's weak; it's sexist because the basic assumption of the statement is that female children suck at hitting because they're female. Of course, it's also an insult, and you shouldn't be insulting people anyway, so it's bascially a really bad idea on both counts. It's a statement that I'd be happy to blast from the language, and never look back.

Now think about the statement that calling an adult a girl is infantilizing. It's true, just like it's true that that You hit like a girl is an insult. People call adult female people girls because they think of female people as lesser and also think of children as lesser. But if you call out the sexism and not the ageism, you're just like the male child who yells back I do NOT hit like a girl! and leaves the basic, sexist assumption intact.

Like I said in the she/he post, that's only a symptom of the underlying disease, and the disease is the fact that our language pushes us to judge people based on their age before we make statements about their gender.

My solution...?

The easy way to communicate clearly is to say exactly what you mean (or as close as you can manage), and figure out which things you're thinking are true, and which are just convenient assumptions. Let's look at an example: Suppose we're debating abortion rights. Quick, tell me! What group is directly affected by access to abortions?

If you said women, go find a buzzer so that you can make an annoying buzzing sound to mark your incorrect answer. The group affected is people with functioning uteruses. A lot of people with functioning uteruses aren't adults, and not all people with functioning uteruses are female-identifying. Of course, there's nothing stopping you from talking about how sexism affects legal abortion rights campaigns because of the strong correlation between functioning uteruses and female gender roles, once you acknowledge that, and by saying people with functioning uteruses, you have neatly avoided all the passively ageist and cissexist language. It's a lot of syllables, I know, but if worst comes to worst and you have to say it over and over again, you could always come up with a shorthand for it or something.

A few syllables is a small price to pay for a healthy society.

– Eli

Footnotes:

Womyn is an alternate spelling of woman. It was created by feminists in order to have a spelling that didn't contain man, as if men are normal and women are a special kind of men. I think this is generally a positive step to take, but the word has become associated with a particular brand of radical feminism that is extremely hostile to trans female people. A key example is the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, an annual women-only event that has excluded trans female people and admitted trans male people. Since I am personally trying to avoid the word woman entirely, I do not have to decide how I want to spell it. ^back
Actually, there are two things called sex. Here, we're talking about the one that's a physical attribute of humans and most other animals. I'll talk about the other one in a different post. ^back
By the way, the currently accepted term for people whose physical attributes don't fit neatly into a box is intersex, as in that person is intersex. Although people don't generally use the term intersex to describe people who start out male-sexed or female-sexed and then deliberately alter their bodies to change that. ^back
Which is a shame. Remind me to write a post about how not talking about subconscious sex resonates with other neurodiversity issues. ^back
And they often also perform unnecessary surgery to make the baby more like they think it's supposed to be. What a bunch of assholes. ^back
You could argue that I'm not obligated to include everyone when I make a statement – after all, I have already excluded everyone who's not female, and hence left out a lot of people who face much worse gender-based discrimination than the average person who is universally perceived as female. However, if I'm talking about a kind of discrimination that is actually related to their female-perceived-ness, then that exclusion that is necessary to the basic idea of what I'm saying. Excluding people by age has very little to do with what I'm saying, so it is not justified, especially since it's an attack from a position of privilege – adulthood – against a group that lacks that privilege. ^back

Tagged in posts about gender, posts about age and ageism, posts about the website itself.

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Posted at UTC 2011-06-13 23:54:43

Eli_Dupree says:

I've been sleepy all day. Maybe I shouldn't have stayed up until 4:00 AM last night to write my last post? Heh heh.

Also, I should have mentioned this yesterday: I did go on to rewrite my little exercise in Haskell. The exercise takes an image, messes with it, saves it to a file, draws it on the screen thirty times over the course of fifteen seconds, and exits. You can look at my C++ source code and Haskell source code. They're almost exactly the same. Both consist of a quick wrapper around the SDL_Surface manipulation and a list of SDL commands to execute. Neither does much error checking. The Haskell one has significantly fewer lines, but they're about the same in file size. When I ran them, I used my avatar image from this site as the image to mess with. It looked pretty cool.

I was a little surprised at how easily I could write the Haskell code, although maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised, since I've been studying it for a while (not to mention that I'm a very fast learner). Since I love Haskell so much, I'm probably going to stick to it.

Sometime when I'm not so tired, I'm going to write a programming-101 post about C++, Haskell, and why Haskell is so much more awesome. When I say programming 101, I mean that I hope it will be accessible to people who don't do computer programming – but as with my posts about gender, I believe that introducing basic concepts before expanding on them is also the most effective way to communicate even with people who are already feminists / computer programmers. It makes what I'm saying be more grounded, more clear, and more precise.

Oh, and also – I have shipping information on my tablet now. The best estimate is that it will arrive June 21, which gives me an entire week to get used to Haskell programming. I think I'm going to try to port my 2D collision-detection library from C++ to Haskell. Or maybe write a cute Haskell/OpenGL game. Or both. Watch me.

– Eli

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Posted at UTC 2011-06-15 04:38:08

Eli_Dupree says:

This is a child-friendly website

Ahem. This will be a policy of my website. I intend to make my website appropriate for all ages of viewers, or at least, all ages that are likely to be able to use a web browser. Being appropriate for children implies a lot of different things, so I'm making this post to outline the most important ones.

#1. Words like fuck and shit¹ are totally acceptable here, because nothing's worse for children than censorship.

This is hardly the most important rule, but it's a good one to set the tone of this post. Being child-friendly means treating children with respect; it means treating them as independent human beings. When an adult tells you not to say certain words, that adult is not respecting you. Ze is saying that zir own opinion is more important than yours. Even if the adult lets you say what you want, but avoids bad words around you (and by the way, there's nothing bad about swearing), the adult is doing that for zir own benefit, not yours. Ze is trying to influence what you say and think, because ze thinks you're more innocent that way. That's not helpful; it's patronizing, and condescending.

We live in a world where adults tell outright lies to children because they think it's cute.² I'm not going to participate in that.

I admit that choosing whether or not to swear isn't a very important issue. So let's move on to an issue that is very, very important:

#2. I will talk openly about sex and sexuality here.

(I promised a couple of posts ago to write a big post about what sex means; when I've done that, I'll edit this post to add a link to that one.)

This guideline (and the rest of them, really) is not just a child-friendliness issue; it's a human-friendliness issue. Most of the dominant cultures of the world are extremely sexually repressed; they don't talk about sex, they try to push sex-related information out of sight, and they even try to make people feel guilty for thinking about sex. Because of these things, when people actually do sexual stuff, they generally do it in a really bad way that's stressful for everyone involved. The only way you could make it worse would be by throwing everyone into teenage sexuality completely unprepared... which is exactly what we do by not talking to children about it.

A lot of people try to stop children from seeing anything that has anything to do with sexuality. They do this because they think it will protect children, but in fact, it does the exact opposite, by denying them access to information that is extremely important for them to have. It is also important for the information people can get about sexuality to emphasize consent, communication, and acceptance, rather than taboos and social power games.

I should also mention that children do often have sexual behaviors of their own, even before puberty. Adults often cause a lot of harm to children by trying to suppress this.

#3. I will avoid saying things in a way that demeans, insults, or ignores people who are younger than I am.

I wrote a lot about this in the second half of this post; I don't have too much more to say about it here.

A lot of parts of our society are designed in a way that pointlessly excludes children, because the adults who designed them were only thinking about adults. Whenever you use language that demeans children, like using childish as an criticism or saying that you deserve privacy or respect because you're an adult, you're saying that children aren't really people, and they shouldn't really have the same rights other people do. This adds to the patterns of thought that make people ignore accessibility to children. I don't think it should happen; I believe that if something is intended for the public, it should be – as much as it can be – accessible to all the public, regardless of their age, physical disability, or any other attribute.

#4. I will try to write in a way that is clear and easy to understand. I will avoid making unnecessary cultural references. I will not assume that my readers have much prior knowledge of most subjects.

Whee! Finally one that isn't completely against what most adults think being child-friendly is about!

Technically speaking, this isn't purely a child-friendliness issue, because many children are highly knowledgeable can read complicated text, and many adults aren't. However, adults usually have more knowledge and can read more easily than children, so if I want to make sure my website is accessible to children, I need to consider that. This guideline is also here to help adults who aren't native English speakers and are only just learning; it's also to help adults who have mental disabilities that prevent them from reading complex text... and so on. If I assume that a person already knows something, and I'm wrong, then I have communicated badly. Since I'm on the Internet, where almost anyone can read what I write, I should avoid assuming any knowledge that I don't have to.

In some of my posts, like when I write about computer programming, I have to assume a lot of knowledge in order to be able to say anything about the subject. In those cases, I will try to put a note at the beginning of each post saying what knowledge it assumes.

I have a lot of things to say, and I think most people would benefit from reading my posts. It wouldn't be very nice for me to write them in a way that's inconvenient for some people.

– Eli

Footnotes:

By the way, if you're a child, and the people around you have been rude enough not to tell you what fuck and shit mean, you can find good descriptions on the Wikipedia pages for them – fuck, shit. ^back
The lie I'm thinking of is Santa Claus. A lot of adults tell children that there's a person, called Santa Claus, who lives at the North Pole and gives them presents for Christmas. It's as ridiculous as it sounds. ^back

Tagged in posts about age and ageism, posts about the website itself.

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Posted at UTC 2011-06-15 21:08:53

Eli_Dupree says:

C++ vs. Haskell: ROUND ONE: What's a programming language, anyway?

This post is intended to be accessible to people who don't know anything about computer programming. If you already know a lot about computer programming, you might want to skip to the last section of this post where I talk about what I'm doing now.

Computers calculate things. They're very good at it. But to get a computer to calculate something, you need to know how to control the computer. If you're a computer programmer, that means having a program called a compiler or interpreter that takes things you write in programming languages and converts them into a form that the computer can use. C++ and Haskell are both programming languages, but they work in significantly different ways.

I can't just say Computer, tell me all the prime numbers between 2 and 100, because the computer doesn't understand English. But I CAN open up a Haskell prompt and say:

[x | x <- [2..100], not . any (\y -> x `mod` y == 0) $ [2..(x-1)]]

That's valid Haskell code. It says Get me the list of all numbers between 2 and 100 which are not divisible by any of the numbers less than them, and it pretty much says it in that order, too. This is a really short program because Haskell is designed to be a very high level language. I'll get to what that means in the next paragraph. But first, let's look at how I could do the same thing in C++:

std::vector<int> primes;
for (int x = 2; x <= 100; ++x) {
  bool x_is_prime = true;
  for (int y = 2; y < x; ++y) {
    if ((x % y) == 0) {
      x_is_prime = false;
      break;
    }
  }
  if (x_is_prime) {
    primes.push_back(x);
  }
}
return primes;

Augh! It's fourteen lines instead of one! It's more than three times as long even if you only count letters in the most generous way! At this point you should be saying WTF? Why would anyone use C++?.

Well, C++ is a low level language. There's a low-to-high continuum, with different languages falling in different places; Haskell is at the extreme high end, and C++ is mid-to-low. High level languages are designed to be a lot like human languages; they're supposed to be natural ways to express ideas. Low level languages, on the other hand, are designed to be a lot like the underlying machine code; they're supposed to give you better control over how the computer processes the information. That's very important if you're writing a program that's going to take a lot of processing power, because if you write high-level code that doesn't consider how it's going to be computed, then you may end up doing things in a very inefficient way. So it makes sense that the code I've written is more verbose in C++; when I compile either of those pieces of code into the underlying machine language, the Haskell code becomes just as long as the C++ code – I could write it more concisely, at the cost of having less control over exactly what it became.

On the other hand, what if I don't care? In the last ten years, computers have gotten ridiculously fast. Like, RIDICULOUSLY fast. I feel like as long as I don't write an advanced physics simulator, or graphics code, or pointlessly waste calculations, then everything I write will execute in less than a millisecond without me having to do anything about it.

There's another important difference between C++ and Haskell: C++ is an imperative language and Haskell is a functional language. Imperative languages are essentially a series of commands for the computer: Go here, add these numbers together, stop, display it on the screen, go back and compute some more numbers. This makes sense for low-level languages because that's exactly how a computer works: It has a processing unit that executes simple commands, one after the other.¹ (There are also some high-level imperative languages, but in general, imperative languages are lower-level than functional languages.)

Functional languages like Haskell are different: They don't say Do this to that. They say This is that. If you want to put it in English terms, my C++ code says Compute the list of all primes from 2 to 100 and return it, while the Haskell code just says The list of all primes from 2 to 100. Of course, that can be kind of confusing because, hey, the computer does stuff, doesn't it? Like, right now, your computer is showing you this blog post. It hadn't always showed you this blog post, so if I never told the computer to do something, then how would you ever see anything? I mean, C++ can say Draw a window, then display stuff until the user quits, then close the window, but what can Haskell do?

Well, the answer is that a Haskell program says something like The output of this program is to draw a window on the screen and display the input the user asks for until the user quits. And I think that's pretty awesome. I don't have to worry Do these commands make the computer do what I want it to do? because in Haskell, I didn't write do these commands, I wrote this is what I want. And that's in addition to the fact that Haskell code is so much shorter, which makes it easier to read and makes there be fewer opportunities to mess up.

Into the personal...

A while ago, I wrote a 2D collision detection library in C++. That's a piece of code that simulates a bunch of objects moving around, and detects when they crash into each other. This is an important thing for computer games. Unfortunately, there's no simple way of doing it that doesn't waste lots of processor power when there are a lot of objects. So, without going into too much detail for the moment – this piece of code was really complicated.

In the last couple of days, I've been trying to rewrite it in Haskell, with varied success. Some parts of it translate over really easily and are much, much more readable in Haskell than they were in C++. Other parts aren't so easy to deal with. Because writing in Haskell is so much about getting your conceptual understanding right, and the C++ version really was too complicated for me to get a good conceptual understanding, I'm having trouble rebuilding it. And it would take a huge, epic blog post just to explain how it works, much less explain the issues with rewriting it. I'm not even sure if it would have the speed it needs if I wrote it in Haskell; I was mainly doing it as an exercise, and it was a good exercise, even if I got stuck on it.

Well, not to worry. I've only ever written one complete program in Haskell, or in any functional language, and it takes a lot of practice to get into functional programming when you're only familiar with imperative programming. I was lucky to have written this website in Python, which has a bunch of functional-programming-like features, even some that it borrows directly from Haskell. That made me familiar with some of the concepts before I jumped in, but still, it's not really that easy to write an extremely sophisticated program after only a few days!

So, for the moment, I'm going to step back and write a cute little game in Haskell instead.

– Eli

Footnotes:

Well, modern computers often have multiple processors that work in parallel. And the computers of the future will probably embrace parallel processing even more. But the basic idea is still pretty similar. ^back

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Posted at UTC 2011-06-17 05:15:19

Eli_Dupree says:

Nudity

So, I was thinking about this game I'm writing. I mostly only have vague ideas at this point, but it's going to be one of those games where you control a human and walk/fly/whatever around exploring the world and fighting various enemies. And maybe you'll find various equipment – different weapons and armor that you can switch around.

I'm a mathematician, so I love generalizing things. So I looked at the switching-around system and said How much can I generalize this? And so I immediately thought of allowing you, the player, to switch off your arms and legs and replace them with robot arms and legs, or use cool bio-technology to give yourself tentacles instead. And you can't really have a switch one thing for another system unless you can switch one thing for nothing. Maybe you could take off your arms and sell them in a shop? Sounds ridiculous, but I've definitely played games where you can do things like that!

But anyway, the real thing I want to talk about isn't taking off your arms, it's just taking off your clothing, which has a lot of different social implications, for some damn reason.

So I've got a choice. Do I allow the player to have zir character take off all zir clothes,¹ or don't I?

Suppose I do. Then I take a nice walk into the wonderful world of sexual exploitation! According to the stereotype, the people who will use this feature are mostly horny teenage male people who are sexually attracted to female people.² Most people from the real world would be creeped out by the idea of a super-powerful being from another reality staring at them when they're naked, so it would be reasonable to assume that the character doesn't like it either.³ Which means that the player who does that is taking advantage of zir character; it's simulated voyeurism, and voyeurism is pretty icky.

Okay, that sounds bad. Suppose I don't do it. Then I enter the wonderful world of prudishness! I live in a society where nudity is a taboo; that social norm applies to most of the developed world, so statistically, since you're using the Internet, it's probably true where you are too. And it's really bad. Suppressing nudity, and suppressing depictions of nudity, makes people uncomfortable with their bodies. The fact that I am writing this post in the first place is because we think it's a big deal when someone isn't wearing any clothes. If people didn't think that being naked was inherently sexual, then the sexual exploitation thing wouldn't even be an issue. So if I design a game that could easily have the characters be naked, but doesn't, then I'm actively contributing to our taboos, and making the problem even worse – including the very problem that I described in the last paragraph!

Aaaaaaarrrrrrrgggggggghhhhhhh!!!!!

Okay, time to settle down a bit.

The two opinions I just wrote are pretty standard opinions that apply to a lot of things. Look at advertisements on TV and the Internet. A lot of them have sexually suggestive pictures of female-sexed, femininity-performing people who aren't wearing very much clothing. It's pretty terrible, because of the way it makes female bodies into something that's for sale, which makes some people look at female-bodied people more as objects than people, and so on. So there's a strong temptation to look at it, say This is pretty terrible; let's fix it by doing the exact opposite!, and then try to fix it by going on a crusade to eliminate all female nudity. Which is equally terrible, because when you do that, you're suppressing the sexuality of a lot of female-anythinged people, and making them just as self-conscious about their bodies as they were when they were exposed to the mass of supposedly-perfect-looking images of their sex/gender/whatever on TV and the Internet!⁴ Oh, and it makes people who think they're perceived as male be totally uncomfortable about expressing their sexual attraction, too.

There's a lot of issues that have similar temptations. Here's another example: Suppose I'm writing a story with a powerful, evil, controlling character. Suppose the character is male, cis, and generally gender-comforming. That's annoying because it's the cultural default – big surprise, it's another male person in control. I'm representing male people as being in control and female people (assuming there are female characters ze's manipulating) as being weak or powerless. So, suppose I decide I'll make the evil character be female instead. Then it gets worse! Because there are also stereotypes about female people being evil and controlling. Instead of being an Oh jeez a man is in charge story, it's a You'd better watch out – don't put a woman in charge! story. And if I make the character be androgynous, or a robot, or whatever, then it becomes an anti-androgyne or anti-robot story.

That's not a unique example. That kind of thing happens basically whenever you write a story that has people with genders in it. This sounds like a job for...⁵

DIVERSITY!

Yeah, you can have the same story, except put a lot of other characters in it that contradict the same stereotypes. Like I could have the evil male dominator, and also have an evil female dominator. Or I could have just the evil female dominator and have a secondary female character who has a lot of authority and uses it well. Or I could make there be a lot going on in the character's life that makes you sympathize with zem and not think of zem as a stereotype, even if you still don't like the way ze's all evil and stuff.

On the other hand, that doesn't solve my original problem from this post.

On the third hand, my original problem is easy to solve. If I write the game in a way where it fits,⁶ then I'll have the nudity in it. Problem solved!

Do you have any idea how patronizing it is to say that the game is responsible for people's sexual objectification of female people? I don't mean patronizing to me – I mean patronizing to them. A game is just a way for you to imagine stuff, and it's ridiculous to say that a person can't imagine all the naked, sexually available people ze wants to, within the privacy of zir own head. In fact, by having the characters in my game appear with a variety of different human body types and skin colors, I'll be improving the overall social justice of zir sexual fantasies!

Plus, there are lots of good reasons to allow naked characters. Like, because it's totally awesome to go around kicking ass without wearing anything, regardless of your gender or sex, and games are a vehicle for imagining that you are the character in the game. And because it's a challenge, if the clothing in the game is actually useful for anything. In the game Nethack, one of the fun ways to restrict your play is the naked challenge – try to win the game without ever wearing any clothing or equipment.⁷

That's one difficult question answered, I guess. I like having answers to difficult questions!

– Eli

Footnotes:

Assuming ze was wearing any in the first place. I think it's pretty cool to give the player complete freedom of choice by not sending them into the game with clothes already chosen for them, but that's a different issue. ^back
Well, that wouldn't happen if the character never looks female. But if the character is always male, that's just the same old male-as-default sexism that's been around for ages; I'm not going to do it. I suppose I could make the character always be androgynous, but recently, I've been deciding that it's a better idea to show diversity than to gloss over it. ^back
Well, not really. There's plenty of people in real life who are totally okay with other people looking at them in a sexual way, so it wouldn't be reasonable to assume that everybody isn't. But saying Maybe the character is okay with it! is a pedantic excuse. ^back
I'm being a bit careless about dividing sex from gender here, because different people have entirely different ways of responding to social pressure, even within the same sex and/or the same gender, so anything I say about this is a vague generalization that applies to some people and not others. ^back
Sounds like a job for is a cultural reference to the line This sounds like a job for... Superman!. I said I'd avoid unnecessary cultural references, but in this case, the line has the same meaning regardless of whether you get the reference. On the other hand, most people will probably read this footnote, which wastes lots of extra time, and maybe therefore means that making the reference had a bad effect after all! ^back
Which I probably won't, because I don't have nearly enough time to write the whole game before my tablet arrives and I start doing the graphics stuff instead. ^back
Of course, Nethack doesn't have a graphical display, just text, so it avoids the issue of whether to display nudity. ^back

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