sigmaleph

sigmaleph @ 2022-05-19T15:08:00

2022-05-19T18:17:19Z

I don't mind that I picked a pretty normie name when I changed mine. I have all the respect in the world for trans people who decide their name is just a random noun now, but I don't think that'd have been the right choice for me. Mostly because I really like my chosen name and slightly because explaining a weird name in everyday contexts sounds like a pain.

Nevertheless. Given the number of times I've been added to the wrong group chat or email chain or whatever at work when they actually meant someone else with my same first name and similar surname, I do occasionally observe there would have been some advantage to picking a slightly more unusual name.

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sigmaleph @ 2021-12-25T11:06:00

2021-12-25T14:20:21Z

my Christmas present was a Steam gift card*, some of which is going to stuff i was previously considering buying but most of which does not have a designated target yet. requesting recs for video games under the following restrictions:

1) it's available on Steam
2) runs on Linux natively**.

don't worry about genre and such, just tell me stuff you like and i will do further sorting myself. i have genre preferences but want to explore the space outside them.

*technically it was cash, given in the spirit that i spend it on video games. the person gifting me noticed that i had listed among possible presents in my wishlist a Steam gift card but thought it'd ruin the surprise if i got it before the Christmas present exchange, so they put money in an envelope. accepting the gift in the spirit in which it was given i earmarked an equivalent amount of money for video game purchases

**yes, i know proton exists. i have terrible luck with it.

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sigmaleph @ 2021-11-24T21:17:00

2021-11-25T00:25:06Z

i made a personal discord server, mostly for organised-nonpublic lifeblogging/thought-dumping/etc. purposes

if i have some idea who you are and seeing the above interests you, contact me privately for an invite, otherwise ignore this.

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sigmaleph @ 2021-08-16T20:27:00

2021-08-16T23:30:32Z

after i switched jobs, i had the combination of a) later start time and b) no commute meaning i could wake up substantially later, which was nice cause getting up at 6 am was miserable. i experimented a little with how early to wake up, but i have kept my going-to-bed time about the same, resulting in going from ~7 hours of sleep during weekdays to ~8.5. and while the actual moment of waking up is, as far as i can recall, much less unpleasant, I have not noticed any substantial quality of life improvement from less sleep deprivation (which i did notice a couple years ago, when i decided 6 hours of sleep a night was not sustainable and i deliberately pushed back my bed time an hour). I also have not noticed any diminished tendency to sleep in during weekends, which i thought was just a catching-up habit (slightly sleep deprived during the week, make up for it during weekends) but has remained more or less the same.

so the obvious question occurs, right, should I or should I not push my bed time forwards some, get another ~hour of Doing Things per day, and what would the costs associated with it be? Might be a more miserable wake up, but it might not, since i'm not convinced that was about total time spent sleeping vs just amount of light outside (waking up always feels easier during summer, but temperature is a confounder). and either way time spent waking up is a few minutes of my day so it might be a worthy tradeoff, or not.

basic questions: do i actually receive no benefits from getting 8 vs 7 hours of sleep, or are they just subtle and I'm missing them? is there a straightforward way of testing this, comparing performance in some puzzle across more vs less sleep days or whatever, or should i be more worried about physical health than cognitive effects?

how much do I value an extra hour of Doing Things late at night? very little when I'm anhedonic because i don't actually want to do things, more so when I'm not, makes it hard to have an average. the solution of "go to sleep an hour later if you actually care about the thing you're doing right now rather than passing the time" would solve that problem, meaning i only get an extra hour when i value it, but also makes my sleep schedule Inconsistent which background general wisdom says is bad, not sure how much confidence

assuming extra miserableness in the morning is a cost I'd be paying (which should be relatively straightforward to test, at least), how much should I weigh that cost? since i only pay it several hours after making the decision that causes it, i might be underestimating it.

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sigmaleph @ 2021-07-15T18:21:00

2021-07-15T21:31:44Z

The best and also worst thing about my habit of double, triple, quadruple, etc checking certain things is that every once in a while the nth time I check things I notice that in fact I did miss something all the n-1 times I did so previously, which I guess objectively is good news in that it's better to catch mistakes than not but also means I can't really argue with my anxiety that "oh my gods shutup it'll be fine" because my brain will of course remind me "hey, remember when you realised you were late for an important exam despite checking the time multiple times and being convinced it'd be two hours later? and you immediately rushed to the place and they let you take it but they definitely wouldn't have if you had been two hours late? anyway better check again you set the correct parameters on that job before pressing run"

(the parameters were fine, by the way. but then a couple hours later i realised I'd set a calendar reminder to just before midnight tomorrow rather than just before midnight today and yeah I probably would've caught that but are you sure)

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sigmaleph @ 2021-06-08T20:19:00

2021-06-08T23:28:17Z

Bought a new phone. Old phone still works but it keeps showing concerning signs and being without a phone for an extended period if it ever stops working would be really inconvenient, so I decided to stop giving my brain reasons to be anxious and spend the money. New one is now my primary device, old one is now my spare.

Currently in a period of installing all the relevant apps and getting used to the new interface and complaining that things are different and it sucks, etc.

(new phone has a usb-c connector, which inconveniently renders my extensive collection of micro usb cables useless for its previous purpose of "I want to be able to charge my phone at any point in my house or possibly out of it". The solution to that is, trivially, to buy more usb-c chargers, but that's annoying and also what do I do with all my old chargers)

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sigmaleph @ 2021-04-13T18:01:00

2021-04-13T21:08:10Z

Some day I want to meet the guy in Chile whose name is similar to my deadname and consequently keeps signing up to things using an email address that I control and he does not. He is a surprisingly constant figure in my life and I can't tell if he knows I exist at all.

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sigmaleph @ 2021-04-10T22:16:00

2021-04-11T01:28:38Z

I've been finding working on my desktop (by which I mean, investigating the hardware failure that made my desktop stop working) really aversive and I don't know why. I overcame some of that resistance today, and I have (I think) identified the problem and the replacement part I need to get, but I think it's worth analysing why it took me so long.

( thoughts on why )

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sigmaleph @ 2021-03-07T18:00:00

2021-03-07T21:10:24Z

Sigh

My desktop computer spontaneously shut down and refuses to turn back on. There's nothing obviously wrong* and afaict it's not the power supply itself failing (things connected by USB to the computer can still draw power), which suggests that whatever is the problem will be expensive to replace. Still have a few things to try before giving up and considering replacement parts but my hopes are not up. Everything important is backed up, at least.

I guess I meant to upgrade it at some point and I can consider this an excuse to do so?

*well, obvious to me, at any rate

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"this story has dragons"

2021-01-23T00:38:29Z

I am frustrated by this argument, in particular in the form of "so you can have dragons, but [women/queer people/etc] being treated with respect is too much?" (there's other frustrating arguments based on the fact stories include dragons, but I won't address them all here).

It frustrates me because it's, like, a twist away from a legitimate argument, which is:

Fantasy author: I had no choice but to write people being misogynistic in my book, because people were misogynistic in the middle ages. It was for the sake of realism.

Fantasy reader: OK, but you also put dragons in your book. Dragons aren't real.

The problem being that the argument is a retort. It does not make sense without the context of someone claiming they were just forced to do something out of realism, which most fantasy authors don't claim.

The argument above, in non-retort form, implies that once you have conceded on making up a new world, you should make it one with no misogyny (or queermisia, etc). Which I can't make sense of; surely you can, if you want, write that, but why should you have to? I don't think writing characters with horrible opinions means you share them; indeed it's one common way of criticising said awful opinions. Brienne of Tarth and Cersei Lannister are fascinating characters that would make absolutely no sense if their world wasn't a horrifying patriarchy, and I want to read stories like theirs*.

Sometimes I write things (rarely I finish things, but often I have some idea of what the world is like, at least). I have one story right now where a main character's backstory is profoundly shaped by being an amab person who has sex with men in a society that really hates that; I also have one where a main character is a trans woman and has never experienced any social disapproval for it whatsoever. Neither has dragons, but the first one has wizards and the second has superheroes. I like the freedom I get of making up a world, and deciding what their attitudes to various things is, but I would find it creatively stifling if I was only ever supposed to write the second kind of world and not the first.

*There's plenty of arguments about sexism in GRRM's writing to be made, let's be clear. It's just that his setting being patriarchal is not a good one.

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sigmaleph @ 2020-12-30T23:06:00

2020-12-31T02:06:56Z

I am very much enjoying the fact that my new job is 100% remote during this pandemic. My previous job had... various compromises... to deal with the fact that it is for the most part not the kind of thing that can be done remotely, some better than others. but I am still amazed we made it all the way to the end of 2020 without me or any of my co-workers getting the plague.

(plenty of people who had my same job did. people who had my same job and worked in the same building did).

Other neat things about this job:

It's the first time I can genuinely claim I was hired for my skills rather than because of blatant nepotism. I was certainly qualified for my previous job, because approximately every literate person is; I was even, I think, reasonably good at it, and I brought some useful skills to it my co-workers lacked; I was more or less the entirety of our IT department for most of my time there. Yet if I'd had none of that comparative advantage I would still have gotten the job on account of who I am related to, and it's nice to know I am employable without that.

I am pretty sure being obviously trans did not count against me in the hiring process. (the alternate hypotheses "I am so obviously great they just had to have me" and "they somehow failed to notice" seem, uh, unlikely)

Related to the above nepotism thing, I am every once in a while vividly aware of the extent to which multiple members of my family working at the same place means various possible negative economic downturns are correlated, in a way that means we might be unable to offer mutual support because e.g. we all lost our jobs at the same time. But now at least my edge of that correlation is broken!

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sigmaleph @ 2020-12-19T11:43:00

2020-12-19T14:55:38Z

I've been reading Rhythm of War (fourth book in the Stormlight Archive) and mostly so far my reaction is wow I wish I had re-read the previous three books at some point. I have totally forgotten about half the characters, the ones I remember I still couldn't tell you how their relationships with each other ended, and there's a dozen plot points I couldn't tell you how they were resolved. Some of it is coming back to me as I read but I think at some point once I'm done I should do a whole-series re-read to out, like, everything in context. Sanderson generally is an author who rewards playing close attention to detail and noticing things that don't make sense as clues to larger mysteries and I can't really do that if I'm forgetting half the hints to what should and should not make sense.

Probably part of the problem is that I don't really participate in the Cosmere fandom, which would serve for the purpose of regularly refreshing that stuff in my mind and talking about things other people have noticed that I might not have (well, I've been in an rpg campaign set in the Cosmere for a while, but not beyond that). And some of *that* is that I don't really know how to... do that? The only two fandoms I "participate in" in the relevant sense are Worm (where it mostly works out as "read a lot of fanfic and have many tumblr mutuals who are into it because that's how the social circles worked out") and ASoIaF (where I mostly just read analysis blogs).

Purposeful human interaction continues to be hard, I guess.

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sigmaleph @ 2020-06-28T10:49:00

2020-06-28T15:13:53Z

I don't have a hormonal cycle, that would imply it has any regularity, but I do experience my hormonal levels going up and down (when I for some reason or another stop taking my meds and then start again) and what I am guessing is mental correlates thereof. I'm crying a lot more easily lately and there seems to be fairly consistent pattern of this happening soon after (re)starting HRT.

Anecdotally people who are on weekly estrogen injections do seem to get hormonal cycles, which I think is one more reason to explore that possibility.

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sigmaleph @ 2020-05-29T18:44:00

2020-05-29T21:59:56Z

I already feel uncomfortable at the idea of just handing off my phone to anyone, for any reason, even if they are people I know and trust, so I am even more shocked when people I have never met who I just happen to be waiting in line with take a look at me, decide I look technologically competent enough, and ask me to install an app on their phone.

Like. I would never do anything nefarious with it but you don't know that! Nefarious people absolutely do exist and also sometimes wait in line next to you at the pharmacy!

(from what I gathered, this was yet another victim of the "I outsource knowing about technology to my children and it's hard to interact with them during lockdown" situation)

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sigmaleph @ 2020-04-08T20:37:00

2020-04-08T23:45:46Z

as an aside re: previous post: I always feel uncomfortable talking out loud about accomplishments doing things with computers.

because, while I am in fact better with computers than the average person, even the average person who grew up with internet access, I am also substantially worse at them than a good chunk of the people reading my posts. Saying I accomplished something is almost bragging, y'know, and I know there's a good chance that everything I did there was a better way to do and obviously I am inviting social retribution by claiming to be good at a thing I'm not, in fact, good at.

This is a bad instinct but I still have it and I have to fight past it.

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sigmaleph @ 2020-03-30T10:35:00

2020-03-30T13:51:05Z

Media I've been consuming during quarantine:

1) Latest season of Better Call Saul (a reminder of how quickly the concept of waiting a week between episodes of a TV show has become alien to me. Weekly schedules are for webcomics!)

2) A re-read of Hunter X Hunter manga

3) Brooklyn 99 season 6 (dropped in Netflix, or at least local Netflix, about a week ago)

4) Latest Worth the Candle update batch, finished yesterday

5) Started Ninefox Gambit out of the book recs list

6) An extensive let's play of a Factorio modpack

7) Playing Factorio itself

8) Also playing Pathfinder: Kingmaker

this is approximately my life now.

(I also sleep, do very occasional household maintenance, and spend time on social media, I suppose. I eat but most often simultaneous with one of the above. I have been known to talk to people.)

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sigmaleph @ 2020-01-04T20:48:00

2020-01-04T23:55:20Z

y'know sometimes I worry people will think I'm too easily offended by stuff and I should downplay some of my reactions to things they say, but I think there's some point where you have no right to be surprised when people object to your opinions, and "Telling your queer friend, whom you know to be engaged to be married and not gonna have biological children, that the purpose of marriage is procreation" is well past that point.

And yet. Somehow I still needed to spell that one out.

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sigmaleph @ 2020-01-03T18:16:00

2020-01-03T21:37:47Z

Playing the lottery gives you the ability to pleasantly fantasize about what you would do with the winnings, whereas not playing the lottery removes all plausibility from these fantasies.

I keep hearing this argument and finding it extremely puzzling. Presumably people can entertain the hypothetical of having won the lottery regardless of having purchased a ticket, so is this in some fundamental way a different thing than fantasising about it, or is it that attempting the fantasy without the plausibility of the ticket doesn't make it pleasant, or what?

(how much money does a vivid imagination need to save you on lottery tickets before it becomes adaptive daydreaming?)

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sigmaleph @ 2019-11-28T21:38:00

2019-11-29T01:25:55Z

When I was like 15 a teacher once had an exercise where we were supposed to pick a classmate and write down one positive and one negative quality about them. He emphasised that it should not be too generic, like saying "is a good friend" or whatever, which neatly implies that the mandated criticism had to be personal (one of my classmates got an insulting nickname out of it that followed them for years).

I didn't participate in this exercise. I'd like to say it was out of moral fibre or something, but honestly most likely it's just that I was paralysed by anxiety. It didn't matter; a few people read theirs out loud but I didn't and he didn't bother to check everyone submitted one. It's not like they were graded, this was just an asshole delighting over the fact that he had authority over teenagers and could make them uncomfortable and cause them to hurt each other

I did not realise that at the time, somehow. I guess I had an ingrained habit of assuming Teachers Knew Better. I mean, I was a teenager. I'd been a child most of my school life and throughout it teachers did, often enough, know better, it's not surprising I acquired that heuristic. But I wish I had overcome it by that point, because 15-year-old me would have figured out this was just an asshole being an asshole if she'd bothered to entertain the possibility.

I wonder if this, and stuff like it, is part of why I acquired such a visceral distrust of the idea of... "Let's go around a circle and say something nice about the person to the left", "let's say three things about ourselves", whatever. Reach inside yourself and make public your private thoughts, not as a response to context, not because you decided you trust the person in front of you, just because we said everyone's gotta.

Or maybe I'm just an anxious person and this would bother me anyway even absent the specific bad experiences I've had with that, and indeed my being anxious is what overwhelmingly makes such things bad experiences for me, when for some people they apparently aren't.

Regardless, the specific source of my feelings on this is not really relevant. I was just reminded that it's a thing people do and it's bad and I hope the next time someone tries to rope me into one I am in the right mental state to be able to say "no, not gonna do that".

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sigmaleph @ 2019-11-01T11:05:00

2019-11-01T14:15:45Z

yesterday i walked past a little kid talking excitedly to their I-presume-parent about "there's something science can't explain: why is space black if-" and it got cut off at that point by a combination of me walking too far and other excited children sounds masking it (I live near a few schools and often make it back home from work around the time they let out; excited children sounds are a common occurrence)

anyway I wonder if said kid had come across (or independently derived) Olber's paradox and would have appreciated some further information on how science does explain it. inconveniently i am a socially awkward introvert and not a character in an edutainment show so I don't interrupt children on the street to answer their science questions.

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sigmaleph @ 2019-10-18T09:28:00

2019-10-18T12:42:34Z

the paradox of reading fiction i like is that if i keep reading at some point it will end, and that's bad, but if i don't ever finish then I won't know the whole story, and that's also bad

there are no acceptable outcomes!

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sigmaleph @ 2019-09-17T23:02:00

2019-09-18T00:31:37Z

sometimes it feels like things I notice or think about in a certain time period tend to organise themselves around specific themes

the theme for the past few months has been: people are way better at identifying problems than at finding solutions. a persuasive argument that a particular system is broken provides very little evidence that the arguer's proposed solution is a good one.

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sigmaleph @ 2019-09-03T23:02:00

2019-09-03T19:20:45Z

my problem with phonecalls is...

well actually i have many problems with phonecalls, but the primary one is that i get anxiety attacks whenever i consider making one, and a secondary problem is that sometimes i manage to work my way through the anxiety attack only to hear that actually oops that doctor doesn't work here anymore or something and while this is in theory a trivially surmountable obstacle in practice it means i worked my way through an anxiety attack for nothing and now i have to do it for a second or third time in a row to actually get the outcome i was working for

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sigmaleph @ 2019-08-02T21:06:00

2019-08-03T00:21:39Z

re: that one tumblr post about how English doesn't have a phrase like 'bon appetit', i am reminded that my language does have a word for that (provecho*) and also: it makes me weirdly uncomfortable

i am not sure why. maybe because i did not really grow up with it, and an unfamiliar courtesy (which, by default, i rarely engage in) means you have risked offending someone. maybe because of my general distrust of people marking my actions ("yes, i am eating food. yes, you have noticed this. why are you remarking on it. what's your agenda"). maybe it just reminds me of another food-related courtesy, blessing the meal, and I know why that one makes me uncomfortable.

anyway actually the idea of other people being uncomfortable by the absence of such a phrase is a reminder of the rich tapestry of diversity that is human experience and also fuel for the ever-burning anxiety fires.

*actually usage is more complicated. some people say it before a meal, some after, some if they arrive somewhere where someone else is eating but they are not. the latter is the version i'm most familiar with.

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some thoughts on message weight

2019-07-24T20:39:06Z

i spend possibly way too much time thinking about the... weight, let's call it, of things I say (it's a bad name for it but i don't have a better one at the moment)

some of this is correlated with length. short statements are on average lighter than longer statements. if i'm complaining about a random pain or having slept poorly, this is pretty 'light'; if i am writing an analysis of a complicated abstract concept, this is 'heavy' (this post is heavy)

heaviness is an important factor of where i say things, and different platforms seem to have a different minimum weight. I'm more than happy to spout any complaints about my day when IMing my partners, bits of wordplay feel about right for my mastodon, trying to explain the inner workings of my mind or just my opinion on some bit of media is right for dreamwidth. while none of those have a maximum weight, heavier stuff that is not prompted by something someone else said goes on my blog by default (because it gives me more time to organise my thoughts). obviously privacy concerns and social groups and so on also matter re: where i post something, etc.

from the inside, minimum weight feels like i'm wasting people's time by posting banalities they don't care about if i talk about a papercut on my blog. i am an anxious person and saying things feels too much like asking for attention for me to be able to do it freely. (you'll notice i am only talking about saying things over the internet. talking irl is a whoooole other minefield)

at some point my brain decided dreamwidth has a higher minimum weight than tumblr, which is a problem because i don't make original posts on tumblr any more except via crossposting (some exceptions apply). mostly i overcome this by either telling my brain to shut up or by using mastodon more. or i fail and stay silent, that's also a thing that happens.

on reflection this is related to the thing i talked about earlier re: when i feel like i have to switch to actually using capitalization. indeed this post is long enough it deserves to be capitalised but i am rebelling against my aesthetic standards.

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