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.

The Parable of the Polygons is an explorable, interactive post that uses a simulation of slightly biased shapes (triangles and squares) to demonstrate how small individual preferences can lead to large-scale, unintended social segregation, based on the work of Thomas Schelling.

Elizabeth Kolbert reviews “Dr. Calhoun’s Mousery,” by Lee Alan Dugatkin, and “Rat City,” by Edmund Ramsden and Jon Adams. This New Yorker review discusses the book about John B. Calhoun’s controversial “Mouse Universe” experiments, which explored the devastating psychological and social effects of overpopulation and resource saturation on rodent communities.

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

the basic mechanics

A good RPG-style guide for surviving an authoritarian and oppressive regime.

David Brooks writes for The Atlantic about how our culture has embraced negativity (on both the right AND the left) and people now identify with the group that has similar fears – and that this attitude is deeply damaging.

“…we discuss a set of problems particular to computing within limits that draws on psychological and sociological barriers. The enormity of the predicaments we are facing, global climate change and resource scarcity, together with the social, cultural and national settings in which we are facing these predicaments, are seriously hampering our possibility to address them. We argue that without confronting the underlying psychology that perpetuates our current state of un-sustainability, there is little computing can hope to achieve. Furthermore, we also argue that these psychological limits to computing do not only concern the users of our systems, often portrayed as the people in need of behavioral change, but also ourselves, as researchers within computing. In this paper we start exploring what these psychological limits could be, what ideas computing for sustainability has tried but should now retire, and start discussing a way forward.”

The more dependent on expertise a society becomes, the greater the need for elite-driven solutions that bypass popular input — and the greater the force the elite will apply to attain its goals.