Gormongous

I think one of the truly awful things about the human mind is that, when presented with a system, no matter how simple or complex, it will try to break it. The internet has just made us aware of the many successes and failures to each individual end.

The Fractal's a good case and I think a hundred to one-fifty is a good sum to spend on a case, but Jayel's right, it might be cheaper just to buy some new fans with newer bearings. Most older cases don't have mounts for them, but 200 rpm fans make literally no noise. It's uncanny.

Yeah, that's what I feel like. Syn, it's fully possible that there is one or more person in the company who wanted you and is sending out your website either because they like it or because they want more applicants to show up with your spread of credentials in order to make a point to someone in upper management. Speaking from someone pretty deep in my own workplace's politics by now, it's really weird to discover who fought for my admittance based on my application and who fought against it based on their assumptions.

Nah, it's my fault, too. I'm still raw from a week-long fight with someone who saw no problem with putting "Black men, do not contact me" on their dating site profile, so seeing something similar somewhere else put me on edge.

Then, like I thought, we're going to have to agree to disagree. For me, the road to hell (and to being inadvertently racist or sexist) is paved with good intentions. Go get some food, dude!

I think this is where we are going to disagree. In my mind, the audience gets to interpret the meaning of what's being said. The speaker may have some kind of intent, which hopefully he or she will convey, but he or she doesn't get final say on that. Otherwise we get situations where I can call black people racial slurs and, since I don't mean to offend them, I just like how the words sound, they aren't allowed to get offended. That's patently absurd, I think you would agree. Basically, if anyone tells me that anything I say offends them, I say okay, then I ask why, so I can understand and change my behavior. How would it be more fair for me to tell someone to not be offended and to privilege my interpretation over theirs? EDIT: Better yet, imagine that you have a traumatic association with a word or phrase, whether or not it's connected to centuries of ongoing sexual or racial oppression. I use it while talking, but when you ask me to stop, I tell you to focus on how I mean the word or phrase instead. I refuse to stop using the word or phrase. Do you see what I mean by cruel and also bullshit? Unintentional, but still.

Yeah, and I can use "lame" and "gay" in a pejorative sense, never meaning them to be offensive to the disabled and queer, but actually they are anyway, so I don't. It's something we all have to deal with.

I think the reasons you've been given for why "Asian women are cute" could be offensive are fairly straightforward. You don't seem to agree with them, which is okay, but you don't get to call a hypothetical someone "overly sensitive" because they get offended for reasons you don't agree with. That's cruel and also bullshit. And seriously, stop with the slippery-slope, camel-in-the-tent fallacies. I'm not asking you to stop talking or to never offend anyone. I'm just saying that referring to an entire race's women as cute, as if millions upon millions of women are all functionally the same to you, is a little creepy. If you really can't understand that, then I don't know what else to say.

If you really think that it's too much work to have to think about what you say in order to not hurt someone... I don't know, I don't have anything to follow that clause, except things that are unkind. This isn't a hardship, man. If someone says, "Hey, you said something offensive," you just say, "Okay," and don't say it again. You don't even have to agree, just be more careful, because you've offended them, whether you meant it or not, and that's bad.

A modular power supply makes building a computer about a hundred times easier. No one ever regrets spending twenty-five bucks extra on something that affects the quality and longevity of every other component in your case. I'd also spring for a slightly nicer case, something like the NZXT H2, since cases stick around forever and the frills they either have or don't are often non-marginal. My friend sprang for a Corsair 600T recently when building his box, and that thing runs so cool and quiet that the aftermarket heatsink is almost just gravy. I really don't see the point of an i7, not ever. With the unlocked multiplier of a K series like the i5-4670k, the only differences between it and an i7 are 2MB of cache and hyperthreading, both of which are good but not $300 extra good. Better to spend that money on a well-regarded lower-capacity SSD, a better cooling solution, or something that actually pays off for you.

I'm always a little uncomfortable with attraction being taken off the table as inexplicable and unaccountable, because the same arguments are used to defend so many kinds of poisonous hate. Almost everything we are bubbles up from somewhere inside us through means mysterious. It's up to each of us to decide what is worthy and what isn't, which is a hard process with no clear end. Yeah, it's frustrating for me to spend a lot of my time critiquing myself in order to be the best person I can be, only to discover that some other small part of me is offensive or hurtful to others, but that's how the game is played. Like Zeus (kinda) said, pride has to be taken in every incremental step towards the nigh-unreachable goal of being totally decent to everyone.

Using their "wands" to cast Melf's Smelly Yellow Water.

Like I started to say in my edit above, I think the line is between preference and fetishization. You probably like red hair rather than redheads, right? A feature, rather than a type, and not mandatory. But with race-contingent attraction, that's also bound up in insensitive and reductive stereotypes that a lot of people rightly have a thin skin about, so it's better to conceptualize your attraction in a way that doesn't hinge upon said race. Surely, in the end, you like her because she's attractive to you, not because she's Asian.

There is a long conversation about it that I'd rather not have, mostly because I've already had it twice in the past few months, but long story short, the history of racism has made it so that statements like "Asian women are sexy" are inextricable from incredibly problematic instances of essentialization and fetishization. It's like... I don't know, you're tall, right? And you meet a girl who really only talks to you about how she likes tall guys. At least once a day, the fact that you're tall comes up. She points out other tall guys on the street. She tries to talk to you about basketball and hitting your head on doors because that's what tall guys like. Guys who aren't tall just don't get it, which is why she's so glad you're tall. She makes it abundantly clear that being tall is the main if not only thing that attracts her to you. It's creepy like that, except also you're Asian and the reason the other sex is "attracted" to you is also the reason you're discriminated against. EDIT: Stuff like this is hard, though. I mean, I'm attracted to really pale skin, probably due to some unresolved crushes on goth girls in junior high and high school. And yeah, that's problematic for a bunch of reasons, some of them possibly racist, so I have to work hard to understand and express my attraction in a way that's not reductive, insensitive, or glib. At the very least, I've got to do better than "all girls with pale skin are beautiful" and "all beautiful girls have pale skin." Pale skin is an attractive feature. So are many others.

My old Yahoo! account is currently the target of the weirdest spambot ever. It started out with your typical unsolicited email, from random people and titled "my ebay store", but over the weeks it's begun to add As to the subject, no doubt to fool the spam filter. By this point, two months after it's started emailing me, most subjects are like "aamya aaeabaaay staaaoarae". I almost want to remove him from the filter, just because the idea of an old Italian man typing his emails phonetically tickles so much.

Yeah, wow. This was what I thought the premise would be after watching the first five minutes of the first episode, and it's every bit as good as I imagined. Maybe the first three episodes of sexploitation and lorewank aren't going to be indicative of the show's arc, so it'll be like every other anime with a mysteriously weak opening. Right? Right?

I'm not crazy into Spelunky, though I enjoy it, but I think the line for "too much" is only crossed when and if (big emphasis on the "if") Spelunky talk is pushing out or overriding talk about other games, which certainly wasn't the case this week (or ever, I think).

Not true. Bombs with paste work great. But I get your point anyway.

They double jump damage, right? Good for killing the big spiders and... I don't know. Do they hurt the big frogs?

I just finished a twelve-round game of Resistance: Avalon after an exhausting week of grading and insomnia. By the end, I didn't really have the energy to change my expression more than once per round, so I just kinda picked genial-with-an-undercurrent-of-suspicion to wear the entire round. It definitely reduced my effectiveness at negotiation and deception.

Huzzah.

Yeah, I don't know jack about making computer games, but if it's anything like anything else, I'd at least phrase it more like, "Don't expect to be able to buy your education."

The only stupid thing was failing to mention that alterna-Sean's nickname is actually "Bandanaman", because he's the one with the two big-screen TVs.

Guys, why do I watch Shaft show after Shaft show (Arakawa Under the Bridge, Bakemonogatari, Dance in the Vampire Bund, Maria+Holic, Natsu no Arashi, Negima!?, Paniponi Dash!) when only Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei (and maybe Soredemo Machi wa Mawatteiru) is any good? It's even worse than my GAINAX loyalty, which has been a heavy burden since Gurren Lagann. As far as I'm concerned, the fansub community I knew and loved died in mid-2009 when FUNimation cease-and-desist'd Shinsen Subs into oblivion over Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. These days, it's those cowboys in gg and Commie, who are philosophically against translation notes, doing all the work and getting all the glory.

Pronouns are over. No more pronouns. From now on, we use everyone's given name like it's a TV interview or something.