The tsundere is a well-known anime trope, that many people still love to this day. But something happened to it since its inception, and I want to talk about that.

The “database” is a very interesting comparative media concept; will keep it in mind.

Much of good survey design is getting a decent model of the mind and incentives of your audience. Egos are predictable. You have to tease it out like taffy, and if the ego is sticking to your results too hard you have to find other questions to trap them.

Pairs well with the Experimental History post I just read.

Where has all the weirdness gone?

Very well argued.

Our super-safe environments may fundamentally shift our psychology. When you’re born into a land of milk and honey, it makes sense to adopt what ecologists refer to as a “slow life history strategy”—instead of driving drunk and having unprotected sex, you go to Pilates and worry about your 401(k). People who are playing life on slow mode care a lot more about whether their lives end, and they care a lot more about whether their lives get ruined. Everything’s gotta last: your joints, your skin, and most importantly, your reputation. That makes it way less enticing to screw around, lest you screw up the rest of your time on Earth.

Wonder if this explains a lot of my bugbears and obsessions.

My research is situated in the interdisciplinary field of sociocultural linguistics and takes a mixed-methods approach to the relationship between language, identity, embodiment, and social power. It also grows from a community-based agenda that centers the experience of transgender people, broadly defined. Major areas of investigation include the gendered characteristics of the voice, trans-inclusive language practices and linguistic activism, the discursive construction of “biological sex,” the changing status of singular ‘they’, and the relationship between gender and race in drag-related media.

via: Montell, Wordslut

In modern international politics, it is just as important to win hearts and minds, in one’s own country and abroad, as it is to have power by force of arms. We call this power over hearts and minds: the power to sway people by persuasion rather than by force, soft power. And no country on Earth has mastered the art of soft power through cultural media quite like Japan has.

This blog post shares such a radically different view of transmasculinity that I’m not sure how to process it.

Ending the war on poverty will take more than cash transfers

the basic mechanics