Scylla Rhiadra

Did you respond: "I'm not interested in someone who only needs a minute"?

This is completely adorable, and absolutely perfect. (As is your name!)

Very much so. I read a really interesting paper a while ago that used Kuhn precisely in this way, to contextualize the development of the social sciences in American universities at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. The way in which paradigms are constructed across the disciplines is fascinating. Unfortunately, too many people seem to be imprisoned within their own. Occasionally one runs across a third variant: someone who wants to sound like an egghead, but really shouldn't try. I was hit up by a guy (at the same blues club, coincidentally) a few months ago who, I swear, must have had a thesaurus open in front of him while he tried to chat me up. He clearly believed that the key to sounding erudite was using a five syllable word where a monosyllabic one would have sufficed. It was a painful experience enlivened only a little by his occasional misuse of words.

So, how come pick-up lines never cite C.P. Snow, or Huxley, or interesting stuff? That might actually work! As opposed to evoking icky-icky images of a sexualized house elf.

Yeah. A classic!

Yeah . . . it can unintentionally have the same effect in the social sciences and humanities too. The embarrassment of the so-called Sokal Affair is one example of what can happen when those fields try a little too hard to sound "scientific." It's silly and counterproductive, because the social sciences and humanities have their own procedures and orders of knowledge, with a legitimacy derived logically and internally from their own modes of thinking, rather than imported in a mindless way from entirely different disciplines. I'm all for interdisciplinarity, and I think that the STEM fields have much to offer to the others -- and vice versa -- but interdisciplinary work should involve actually, you know, working with people in other fields, rather than merely appropriating their language. But hey, no listens to me . . .

Yeah. I use the term (the gentleman in question got it from my in-world profile) mostly as a way of showing support for trans identities. But I'm also acutely aware that 1) the trans-cis dichotomy sets up exactly the kind of reductive binary that is problematic in relation to other elements of gender, sexuality, and identity, and 2) the appropriation of a term from chemistry is a rhetorical strategy designed to validate the distinction that it makes by implying that it is "objective" and, most importantly, "scientific." By the time I'd finished explaining some of the the complexities of the term to the guy, he'd pretty much moved along. You can tell I'm pretty good at this, right? And if I'd been in a Harry Potter RP sim when the offer was made, I'd have been unfazed by it! But at a blues club? I mean, sexy or what????

I got two slightly unusual ones last night while dancing. The first person opened straight-out with a question: "what does cis-gendered mean"? The second person offered his services as a house elf. I'm not sure which of these two worries me most about the current state of humanity.

This. Is. BRILLIANT.

I'm a bit with Belinda on this. I actually agree that Premium is a great deal, particularly if one does spend a fair amount in-world. But it doesn't currently offer me anything I don't already have, or that I need. Syn asked above, of Belinda, what LL might offer that would attract her. My answer to that question would be: a more interesting and diverse selection of options for the Linden Homes. I'm just not interested in the ones currently available (nice as they unquestionably are). To be clear, this is not a complaint: my personal tastes might be too niche to make it worthwhile catering to them.

Thanks Aedan! Everyone should be able to wake up to a bit of lovely and generous affirmation: you're a sweetheart. I may retake this pic. It's too busy, and not focused enough on the flowers maybe. Or maybe fiddling with it is a waste of time. /me sighs Anyway, thank you!

@Orwar -- This is the top that I thought Neph was wearing. It's L'Emporio's Galene skirt and top, and it includes four variant textures for the top. And yes, I almost always use one of the less . . . "lacy" ones.

I know what you're thinking. Why didn't I spring a bit extra for flowers that weren't dead? Blame it on Orwar and Neph. ETA: Retook the pic. I'm happier with this version! And a thank you to @Aedan Charron!

This is kind of magnificent. One day (I'm sure) I'll learn how to use light this way. It's Windlight? Or post processing? Anyway, it's gorgeous.

Really lovely pic! The colours are wonderful!

Another interior shot.

Oh, ok. Now I can see the whole thing, I see that it's not the same top. I can quite understand your incredulity now that I know what it's . . . missing.

I once spent an hour take pics of me sitting on a fire escape in tattered jeans, tee, and leather jacket. It looked sooooooooo good! Except that when I logged out of SL and opened the pics in Photoshop, I noticed that I'd forgotten to toggle the alpha cuts on my legs off, with the result that there was bizarre and creepy empty space where my legs should have been showing through the holes and rips in the jeans. An hour's worth of work into the delete bin!

I have that top!!! Neph looks waaaaaay better in it.

This doesn't surprise me at all: I think that a really detailed linguistic analysis of the way in which men and women speak in text would discover more variation within each gender than between them. And those gendered differences that are likely to appear in such an analysis would not only be a minority of instances, but culturally-induced, quite often by men trying to sound more "manly" (monosyllables, more direct action verbs, etc.) and, equally, women trying to sound "feminine" (more emotive language, greater use of emojis to communicate emotional or tonal nuance, and so forth). Which brings us to the way in which some represent gender in SL. In the same way that there is a marked tendency (in some "men") to choose hypermasculine physical shapes, with exaggerated musculature, shoulders, thinner waists, shorter necks, while women choose hypersexualized avatars (curvy and/or hourglass shapes, large breasts), so too one runs across a substantial number of people who consciously or unconsciously use language to sound more masculine or feminine. I think the reason people do this (and, I don't know, is this kind of exaggeration more common amongst those who are representing a different gender than they are in RL?) is not because men and women actually look or sound in these ways, but because they are cultural markers for conventional gender characteristics. It's as though, in the absence of "real" bodies to provide visual evidence of RL gender and sex, some over-compensate by turning the volume up to "11" on gendered characteristics in their representation. You can't know for sure that I'm a woman in RL, so instead I'll appear here like a cartoon woman.

Michael Gove: I think the people in this country have had enough of experts, with organizations from acronyms, saying— Interviewer: They've had enough of experts? The people have had enough of experts? What do you mean by that? Michael Gove: People from organizations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong. Inteviewer: The people of this country have had enough of experts? Michael Gove: Because these people are the same ones who got consistently wrong what was happening. Interviewer: This is proper Trump politics this, isn't it? Michael Gove: No it's actually a faith in the— Inteviewer: It's Oxbridge Trump. Gove: It's a faith, Faisal, in the British people to make the right decision. (I knew I'd remember the quote after I'd logged off!)

Given the frequency with which you get your knickers in knots about uppity women, Jack . . . I'd honestly have to say that I don't know anyone on these forums who is more "emotional" than you. Is there something you're not telling us?

Oh, I'd say so. Is there a way of doing it "wrong"?

Some great responses here, but something that is implicit in many of them but not explicitly stated is that most of what we now know about gender (and, to some degree, sexual biology) has forced a rethinking of what was once a pretty clear gender binary. In some ways, the unspoken premise of the OP is that there are two genders, and the issue is how these two relate to each other. In fact, it's far more accurate and useful to think of gender as a spectrum -- or perhaps something even more complex than the two-dimensional scale that that implies. What we also have come to understand about culturally-determined binaries -- good/evil, man/woman, natural/artificial, heterosexual/homosexual, white/black, etc. -- is that their primary social function is to establish a hierarchical power relationship that enables the control of the second term by the first. Most of the socially-determined ways of defining masculinity and femininity have been, historically, really about establishing the dominance of the "male" principle. (In much the same way, "homosexuality," as a category of identity rather than as a description of certain kinds of sexual practice, was more or less invented in the West at the beginning of the 18th century as a means of privileging "heterosexuality.") A few people above have spoken about the role of technology in challenging the traditional binary, and that's true (although it has been challenged before, without the aid of tech). Something I've said before about SL is relevant here: the sense of unease, sometimes bordering on moral panic, that one frequently encounters about disconnects between RL and SL gender (think of "voice verification" groups, for instance) is pretty concrete proof of the fact that gender is socially constructed. If someone can convincingly represent here as their "opposite" RL gender, they've effectively demonstrated that the social traits that we associate with gender are not innately connected to their biological sex. Every time someone in SL freaks out because someone they thought was "female" turns out to be run by an RL "male" they have learned (even if they don't fully absorb) an important lesson: our genitals are only a small part of the complex array of factors that determine who we are.

Have you tried using one of the "moods" in the Genus animation HUD? I find it not too bad. In fact, I've turned off the "head" animations from my Vista Bento AO, and gone with the Genus ones instead, because I find them generally a bit subtler.