I keep seeing this argument for some reason, so I want to clarify:

1) Gender-neutral x in Spanish ("latinx") is not externally imposed. Plenty of native Spanish speakers used it, some still do. I don't know who first came up with it (it's kinda hard to know that for words, and in any case seems likely to have been independently invented multiple times), but I have seen no indication it was not, y'know, a native Spanish speaker objecting to the genderedness of their language, and in any case it subsequently proliferated via other people using it to speak Spanish. To the extent white progressive Americans use it, they mostly only use it for that one word (because they mostly don't speak Spanish!), whereas the usage in Spanish is widely attested in more or less every gendered word that can describe a mixed group.

2) Gender-neutral x is bad, in my opinion, because it is an inferior unpronounceable version of the current winner of gender-neutral Spanish, gender-neutral e. This is of course subjective. Nevertheless still worth saying.

3) Lots of native Spanish speakers object to gender-neutral Spanish. Lots of native Spanish speakers don't (hi). This is because there's half a billion of us and we accordingly do not agree on everything (or, indeed, anything). It would be ridiculous to take one of these groups and say one of them represents the true will of the population and the other doesn't; it's a live matter of disagreement (as is, for that matter, gender-neutral English among those who speak that language. "It is grammatically incorrect to use singular 'they' instead of 'he or she'" is still a position some people hold).

If you are tempted to say "In Spanish the gender neutral term for people from Latin America is literally just “Latino”", as I just saw on tumblr, you might think you are respecting other cultures by not imposing your own values on them and acknowledging their self-determination. You are not. You are wading in the middle of a cultural conflict and deliberately taking the regressive side. If you heard someone from another culture say "actually homophobia is a valued tradition of ours and we don't want Westerners trying to impose their values here", you would (I dearly hope) not just take their word for it that everyone in their society, including e.g. gay people, agrees. Considering applying that here as well.

greatest tragedy of desktop failure so far: Rinna needed to name a tabletop character and because of ill-timed computer failures neither of us had my name-generating script set up and working

(i have fixed that now, at least)

so since writing that post this morning i learned that

1) MathML has a plugin called MathPlayer that’s meant for this, some screenreaders work with it. it has settings for both low vision and blind people, and can output stuff to refreshable braille displays (there are various standards for representing math in braille)

2) beyond just being usable for MathML, mathjax has its own set of accessibility tools. I think they allow you to navigate subsets of mathematical expressions for clarity? not super clear how they work

3) MathSpeak is a standard meant for unambiguous rendering of math in speech. MathPlayer can work with it, but presumably it can also be useful if you’re hand-annotating your equations.

(thanks to ilzolende and my fiancée, who saw the original post and brought various parts of this to my attention)

(this was originally written as a self-reblog on a question that asked me about favourite sci-fi novel)

“favourites are fake“ is a phrase I use a lot but I don’t think I’ve expanded on what it means before, which is “I am not especially confident I can make arbitrarily finely grained comparisons of things to rank them all in a line. I can often say that some things are better than others but on the high end of things I like it all muddles together into a category of ‘things that are really good’ and finer distinctions within them can at best be ‘this one is better for a particular mood’ or ‘was more meaningful at a particular time of my life’ or ‘accomplishes one specific thing really well’. Even if I could do that, it’s not how my brain natively stores that information and asking for favourites cannot return a result other than ‘something I thought was very good and is in the relevant category’ without a lot of extra work to compare it to other things, unless i’d for some reason spent a lot of time doing that work beforehand (hasn’t happened yet) or the category has very few examples I have experienced. most of the time if you ask me for a favourite and I reply, the answer is either the first result returned by my brain for that search or something I have ‘cached’ as my favourite for that category”

i know I’m not the only person whose brain works roughly like this yet questions about favourites are so common that either it is a relatively rare trait or there is an implicit assumption that you shouldn’t take ‘favourite’ questions literally I have missed, in which case oops but also someone should have mentioned that before.

I'm gonna try to consciously relax my who-to-subscribe-to rules, which are currently kinda calibrated to who-do-i-follow-on-tumblr. that is much more selective than I want for dreamwidth since:

a) tumblr discovery is much easier. If I see your content once I will probably see it many times and get many opportunities to rethink 'should I follow them?'. this is not the case on dreamwidth and I should err more on adding anyone vaguely interesting and then pruning afterwards if I have to.

b) my intuitions developed for times when my tumblr dash was close to saturation (i.e. how much content i ideally want per day) and my dreamwidth reading page clearly isn't.

I made an explicit effort at first to follow everyone I vaguely knew from tumblr even if I hadn't been following them, but I did not keep it up and I probably should