Penny Hero (dot) Net

I’ve posted the following to a bit ago because I wanted to get some nifty conversations going. I also wanted to keep a record of it in my own livejournal in case anyone on my friends list wants to contribute to the discussion, and so i can tag and save the entry for future reference with my own tagging system. Anyway, welovegeeks link, and a similar blogspot entry that hopefully will get googled better.

Hey all, I was thinking about some geek related things over the last few days, and I wanted to see what all of you thought about this, and maybe we could start a discussion/exchange info, yadda yadda.

Anyway, yesterday, a friend of mine told me that I exist in this really unique niche as far as my geek-tech-linux-gender identity. I’m a female undergraduate English major who uses ubuntu as an end-user. In other words, I use linux the way the rest of my department (and the world?) uses OS X or Windows, and I don’t use linux because I’m a system administrator or because I’m a programmer or spend a significant time developing tools for myself.

I use Ubuntu for several really specific reasons: it’s free and I’m a very poor college student, it forces me to maintain a slightly higher-than-average internet-usage literacy without overwhelming me with forcing me to understand everything about my hardware or even the software I use, and it encourages me to stay away from pirated software for Windows. The fact that it also allows me the freedom to dive much deeper into learning about advanced computing, web design and hosting, programming etc when I do have the time to mess around for fun really is just an added bonus. Oh, and I forgot to mention that I don’t have to deal with spyware, virii, malware, etc.

I’m also really interested in gender and the internet, gender and tech-consumption/usage, the changing face of gender in gaming, and general literacy and technology issues from a very human and “end-user” point of view. I’m interested in doing serious internet research on this, and maybe even setting up a blog specifically for this kind of discussion and research even. My friend suggested that if I dove into it and really devoted myself to this, I could end up getting hired as a pro blogger somewhere down the line. (wow, wouldn’t that be nifty?)

Anyway, I never really thought about this as being as unique or significant as he seemed to think it was until he pointed it out to me and tried to make me see it in that way. (he’s been working for mozilla for a year, and has been deep into the tech and web industries for a long time, so I guess he’s got his thumb on the pulse of something that might make him know what he’s talking about, right?)

How many of you are also interested in these kinds of issues? Anyone here use linux purely as an ‘end-user’ or desktop user and not as a developer or programmer? I think that this is partly the philosophy of Ubuntu actually, and I’d be interested to know how many other “less technical” users there are out there.

This is all also partly inspired by my failed attempts at getting fellow liberal arts students into linux… I ordered a bunch of pressed cds and tried to give them away to others (particularly girls), but it didn’t catch fire at all…

Anyway, anyone have links to sites or blogs exploring this sort of thing? I’m interested in collecting info and doing some research for fun (and to increase the level of meaning I feel my life has in general), and perhaps to set up a really focused blog about these kinds of topics.

[Anyway, the content and “meat” of this post has been partially cross-posted in my blogspot blog, because blogger gets more google attention…]

Original post: yesterday, a friend of mine told me that I exist in a really unique niche as far as my geek-tech-linux-gender identity. I’m a female undergraduate English major who uses ubuntu as an end-user. In other words, I use linux the way the rest of my department (and the world?) uses OS X or Windows, and I don’t use linux because I’m a system administrator or because I’m a programmer or spend a significant time developing tools for myself.

I use Ubuntu for several really specific reasons: it’s free and I’m a very poor college student, it forces me to maintain a slightly higher-than-average internet-usage literacy without overwhelming me with forcing me to understand everything about my hardware or even the software I use, and it encourages me to stay away from pirated software for Windows. The fact that it also allows me the freedom to dive much deeper into learning about advanced computing, web design and hosting, programming etc when I do have the time to mess around for fun really is just an added bonus. Oh, and I forgot to mention that I don’t have to deal with spyware, virii, malware, etc.

I’m also really interested in gender and the internet, gender and tech-consumption/usage, the changing face of gender in gamining, and general literacy and technology issues from a very human and “end-user” point of view. I’m interested in doing serious internet research on this, and maybe even setting up a blog specifically for this kind of discussion and research even. My friend suggested that if I dove into it and really devoted myself to this, I could end up getting hired as a pro blogger somewhere down the line. (wow, wouldn’t that be nifty?)

If any of my readers knows of other bloggers/websites who are interested in these sorts of issues, could you forward me some links? I’d like to read up on what other people are talking about as a sort of first-step toward maybe, MAYBE starting up a new and very focused blog.

[some of the content in this post was also posted in welovegeeks because, while blogger gets more google attention, that lj community is more active and discussion-focused.]

Quote of the Day:

“If it was easier… then it wouldn’t mean as much.”

One of you is again my superhero. If only you’d taught your sidekick half as well to be half as awesome.

On a piece of scrap paper on my floor while I was cleaning:

“harsh version: I’d rather be a tease than a slut.”

you go girl. Or something.

I wonder when I wrote that. and why.

I didn’t take a shower today. I sat around in greasy hair playing video games and reading.

And I had the shock of my… life? Ethan came back from Portland and asked me to help him get something from the car. I walked outside, and two Japanese girls jump out from around the corner of my apartment building… I looked at one, and then the other… and then back. I slowly slowly slowly realize I recognize her. Her eyes light up when I come out, and even before I start to realize that this is not just a familiar face, but that it’s HER face, I’m saying “oh my god oh my god oh my god” because she’s taking my hands, and I’m hugging her… and I still don’t really comprehend that it’s really her. I don’t believe it.

It didn’t sink in for a good three or four minutes of just gawking and hugging… I cried. She introduced me to her younger sister. It still hasn’t sunk in. I’m still feeling like I’m about to cry.

Even now I don’t believe it. The voices in my living room aren’t theirs. It’s crazy. How could she have come here from Japan without me knowing? How could they have kept it a secret for 3 weeks?

So much has changed since she left. I’ve got anxieties about how I’ll (not) fit in with the group we all hung out with. How she may or may not meet my literature-nerd writing friends.

I want to cry again. I’m so glad she’s here. And I’m partly mourning the crazy adolscent-ish life I had my sophomore year when I was infatuated with only asian bilingual men… and I hid that I liked academics from everyone except her.

Her sister is a shy sweetheart. And she plays video games. :)

These next two weeks are going to be the most difficult and the most stressful and most awesome and most :) :) :) :) :) :).

If I can keep from going insane, I will. I’m so glad she’s here.

My brother’s back in Texas from Iraq for a while, and I finally got to talk to him today. We talked about the family, thanksgiving, and I found that we now have something in common… we both see the world in a more global way. Me because I’ve been to another country and seen other realities through school/friends etc… him because he’s seen other realities and other lifestyles through the military. Two very different colored/textured paths, but it results in the same sense of self, and the same sense of humility, and the same sense of where you’d like to be and who you’d like to be and what you are most grateful for. We both agree that most people have this unfortunate tunnel vision, and they can’t imagine that there are other realities, and then… that Other becomes something very threatening and frightening if they are ever faced with it.

I’d argue that this kind of national isolation is related to how people come to support something, or come to hate something without really knowing what it is they are judging. they didn’t come to those positions on their own, or after experiencing a broader global picture. Some people jump in to the “I support X!” or “Say no to X!” camps with out thinking. They do it because their family does, or because that’s the pervading atmosphere at their school, or because of a romantic sense of false glory, or a fear of something they don’t understand. If citizens of the world were able to see beyond their national borders more, or their neighbor’s borders even… and see reality through someone completely alien to them, I think the world would be more whole. And, i genuinely think my brother, with whom I probably disagree on a lot of other things, and with whom I don’t always share the same reality, would agree with this.

he sent me two videos he’d made out of photos and some video footage in Iraq. They are collages of images, mostly of his unit, some photos of signs of destruction or the aftermath of something. Some twisted vehicles, some holes in the ground. lots of bombs and metal things that I really wish were just nerf footballs, (which they do resemble). There are also lots and lots and lots of pictures of Iraqi kids. And lots of pictures of the landscape. Sunsets, sunrises. A boy pouring water on an empty dusty field.

I refrained from crying through most of it. But then, there’s this shot of one of the soldiers reading a letter from home. Cried and cried and cried and cried and cried. Couldn’t stop. couldn’t even keep watching after that.

I can’t completely understand why I cry. There are two voices in my head when I’m watching the videos. One is the voice of the message I’m hearing from my brother: that things are vivid and real out there, and that it is a job they are doing… and especially “don’t be afraid. We’re all ok.” The soldiers still smile when they have their pictures taken. They still pose and make silly faces at the camera. They’re still us. The other voice in my head is the one I can’t really understand. It’s the one that makes me sob. It sees the pictures and just feels pure unchecked fear. Fear and pain. Because that boy right there waving at the camera might not be alive right now while I’m typing this. Or those kids studying in that new school room that I’m guessing someone like my brother helped build might not be alive right now.

That water the boy is pouring on the dusty ground is already dried up and long forgotten.

I love that my brother is able to find meaning in all of this, and I love that he is able to share it through his “video poetry”. It’s powerful and I will treasure it always. And I will never forget that these are real waking lives in these photos. That must be why I cry. Because all of it is real. There are no hollywood special effects, and no explicitly evil arch enemy to defeat. It was never like that, and all those who say there is an “evil” to defeat are… dangerous.

There’s just this organic and confusing and complex world, full of contradictions of reality and opposing viewpoints. It’s mixing up the salt of all our dreams and fears into a kind of patchwork quilt stretching around the globe. And sometimes that quilt only makes us colder. Sometimes that quilt keeps us warm.

And all of this is taking place on a tiny speck of blue/green dust.

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. — Carl Sagan “Reflections on a Mote of Dust”

The fact that we are at once big and small, powerful and powerless, that we are all the same, and that we’re all 6 billion of us alone and together all at once… it’s a simple and huge system of paradoxes that can’t be undone. They make up the fabric of our everything I think. And each time someone tries to sort it out into categories of “good” “bad” “evil” “useful” “clean” “dirty” “expendible”, it all crumbles into something painful. Our hands have to grow bigger so we can hold more complex and conflicting thoughts and more real people in them.

*sigh*

I love my brother. And I’m glad I could talk to him. Glad that he’s home.

I’ve just realized that there is a great danger in thinking that this paper needs to be a culmination of everything I’ve ever learned and everything I ever will learn.

I can’t expect myself to be a Scholar now. I’m still a student, and immaturity is not a crime… :)

So, I just had these ideas and I want to write them down in a place more ‘concrete’ than a piece of scrap paper. (the internet is more concrete than paper? wow)

Derrida has “force” and “structure” working together to create meaning, to create the way we see the world… His ideas have been playing in my head for months now, and… ok, so I was reading this article about how the discovery of life outside Earth would probably lead to a large religious identity crisis on earth, revolution etc. In other words, this discovery would be just as significant as “the earth is round” and “we aren’t the center” yadda yadda, no duh.

ANYWAY

This led me to thinking about the origin of life, and thinking about life is like Derrida’s “force” or “play”. And the physical matter is like Derrida’s “structure”. It came to me that even on a molecular level, motion and force is essential. No scientist ever has reached Absolute Zero as of yet, and even if they could, it’s been theorized that the matter itself would break down, or at least be easily and completely changed with the use of precision “tweezers” that could restructure the molecular bonds once all internal kinetic force and energy was gone. (It’s like molecular anaesthesia, and could allow for matter-threatening surgery or whatever, yadda yadda)

So, using derrida’s ideas of force+structure (not to mention both sides of any binary opposite) being essential and inherent for meaning to exist, it would make sense to me if we discovered that matter and energy together is essential and inherent for anything to exist in our world (physics here).

Ok ok ok. I’m not done here.

Going back to thoughts on the origin of life. Life seems like a creative form of this force+structure thing… it does more than just exist, or float around in the universe recombining. It’s got meaning and “consciousness” and all this other stuff that makes it different from other physical things.

This seems analogous to what language is in relation to like… sound. Or even just the things that animals do to ‘communicate’. Some event? in the history of “life” resulted in language, which is really essential if not inherent to the ability to consciously think, or so it has been theorized, and so i’ve come to accept, yadda yadda, i’ll go into detail later.

language uses the relationship of force and structure to create meaning, and in conveying and recieving meaning. Similarly, force and structure (matter and energy) have been put into place in order to create life. See where I’m going?

So it could be that if we could find the ‘origin’ of language, or do more research into the origin of consciousness, we could find an analogy for the origin of life in the universe…. find an analogy that would describe the processes by which chemicals found themselves recombining in creative ways… the way sounds (in our human case) found themselves recombining and creating a language.

This analogy seems disconnected, far-fetched in the form i’m writing it now. But it’s just enough that I’d like to read more, do more, understand more, write more and explore this idea more and see if it’s got any potential.

blah. ok. i’m going to go finish reading that article now.

I had a vivid dream last night where I was some kind of extra-solar body orbiting a quasar. I think I had intelligence. I wasn’t just a rock. Perhaps I was myself, I don’t know. Who I was wasn’t the vivid part. The vivid part was how the quasar seemed to communicate it’s “anatomy” to me. It told me how its physics worked, and I watched it swirl and spin with my vision apparently filtered so that I could see color and texture. Now I don’t remember what it said, or how it specifically communicated with me. If I had to explain that, aside from the fact that it was a dream and wierd shit happens in dreams all the time, I’d have to say that I don’t comprehend it now because the Quasar didn’t “speak” in words, and my brain can only understand communication in some kind of word/language form (duh).

It looked like a translucent eggshell of swirling plasma, but it glowed white, blue and purple. I have no idea of its size, but I had the impression that the shell of energy/gas was large, like Sol-solar system large. If that was true, then my “orbit” must have been far beyond pluto. It took up only about 1/4 of my vision, but even at that distance, its swirling motion was pretty rapid, almost like the speed of water flowing down a slow drain… or closer to the speed of 2-foot ocean waves breaking on a beach. It didn’t seem to necessarily rotate…. maybe more like how the surface of the sun “rotates” in different sections at different speeds. The whirl-pool style swirling within it’s eggshell structure was it’s most distinguishing feature. That and its colors. It was like milky crystal or opal… and mostly egg-shaped.

The sky around it was scattered lightly with stars. Not many, I assume because we were so far from the rest of the known universe.

It was beautiful, and I felt intense awe…

I want to go back out there… and see it again.

I never thought that going to a school-sponsored party would be fun. My body is so sore right now, especially in my hips from dancing (3? 4 hours straight? w00t!). A group of us went to see Scary Movie 3, in an almost completely empty theater, then went out for food. Then we all went to West Hall and watched people dance, and waited for the rest of the group to show up so that we could all leave for another party together. George and the rest were sooper late, so finally Ethan grabs some people (including me) and basically says “fuck waiting. Dance-time.”

Wee. I think we made up a good half of the dance-floor, which was cool. They played shit-music, the kind you’d hear at high-school proms (except remixed to dance-beats), but it was still fun.

I started noticing something though, about an hour or so later: I was the only white girl there. Everyone else was at least part Asian, either from Hawaii, or an international student. There were some white guys scattered around, but I was really the only girl. I started to notice how people seemed to act differently to me on the dance floor. For example: when one of the guys would start dancing with one of the girls there (freaky or not, it didn’t matter), the rest of the group would cheer, scream, whatever “Go JusTIN, go JusTIN!” and things would get a bit wild. But when they decided to dance with me, everyone got strangely quiet, or distracted or something. (Btw, for the record: Tommy was the most fun to dance with. *swoons*)

Now, I’m pretty sure my dancing doesn’t suck that badly. And, from hanging out with them lately, I’ve also come to understand that most of these guys are just simply not attracted to American girls. *sigh* So, I put two and two together and made the disheartening realization that I am simply not hot, cute kitty ears or no. At least… that’s how it seemed. I felt kinda genderless, and that’s ok because then I didn’t have to worry about getting hit on in the bad way. But it’s not a very good feeling if you’ve been trying so hard to be cute and attractive for someone dancing a mere five inches away, and you suddenly realize that he’s only looking for a girl who was born with a name written in Chinese (or Korean) characters. But, the loud music, strobe-lights and all the bodies pressed around me for so long didn’t let me dwell on it until I came outside for fresh air.

Now, I’ve never actually wanted to be Japanese. I’ve wanted to be the unexpected American girl who could use chopsticks well, and speak the language. But for the first time in my life last night, I actually thought to myself “I wish I was Asian,” because apparently, in order to be an attractive girl to these people, you can’t be white.

I could be totally wrong though… the lack of sexual attention I’m getting might not really be because of my ethnicity. (but I doubt it.) It could be because I’m into gaming, and saved George’s computer from a crash last night. It could be because I didn’t have to be dragged onto the dance floor and came very willingly. It could be because I’m not so conservative, and maybe a little bit smart, or something. Maybe. But I think the fact that I didn’t learn English second has a lot to do with it too.

I don’t know what I’m looking for anymore. I’m glad that I have some species of social life now. But human interaction is like a drug; you have some, and then you want more. Then the same level of interaction isn’t enough, and you feel like you want to take it up a notch higher. Having this silly silly crush probably is really inflaming and magnifying what I might naturally feel at this point too.

Despite what I’ve just written. I am in a good mood. I just want to reflect on what I felt and saw last night, and keep a little record. Maybe next week, after I bust out my super-sexy-seductive moves on The Boy, and he finally caves, I’ll be writing about something completely contradictory. (but I doubt it.)