Truncated Octahedron, designed by me. I kept this on my office desk.
Today’s model is one of my earliest original designs. This is a truncated octahedron, which is the shape you get when you take an octahedron, and chop off the 6 tips.
I was interested in designing a model with this particular shape, because it has some special significance in condensed matter physics. There’s a certain kind of crystal structure, called the “body-centered cubic structure”, which looks like this:
A few days ago, PZ Myers pointed to Atheist Day, a new annual event sponsored by Atheist Republic and a handful of other organizations. PZ didn’t care for the idea, and described Atheist Republic as
very 2005
Glancing at Atheist Republic‘s website I thought this description was apt. However, I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing for an atheist organization to be 10+ years behind the times. Let me expand that thought.
Last month I looked at some postmortems of the atheist movement, and there were two main themes: 1) atheists screwed up on social justice issues, and 2) atheism is simply declining in relevance as a personal identity. The atheist movement is dead to me, because I lived through the entirety of the atheist gender wars, and also because I live in a location where nobody cares that I’m an atheist. However, it stands to reason that this is dependent on your personal background and geographic location. A social movement doesn’t just go poof, and there will definitely be hangers-on for a long time to come.
Earlier, I wrote an article on low emotionality, and I heard from a handful of readers with similar experiences. However, one reader response caused me some chagrin. They pointed out the similarity to Schizoid Personality Disorder, and I immediately regretted not mentioning it, since it’s the one that actually fits me best. It’s a bit embarrassing to figure out this stuff in real time while I’m blogging about it. But I want to do right by the readers who related to my article, so here we are.
So, Schizoid Personality Disorder (SPD). Perhaps the best way to briefly describe it is to cite the DSM-V diagnostic criteria:
This is a repost of an article I published in 2015 on The Asexual Agenda. It was originally written for a blogging carnival on the theme of “living asexuality”, thus the title.
Recently, there was a very short documentary entitled “I’m Graysexual” (no longer available), featuring a man about my age, and using the same identity as I do: gay and greysexual. He does nothing more than briefly explain his personal experience, which is somewhat different from my own, and as I said, it’s very short.
What was particularly significant to me was not what was said, but what was unsaid. Specifically, the documentarian chose a stream of clips that imply close interaction with urban gay culture. He walks around what appears to be West Hollywood (the gay neighborhood in Los Angeles). He hangs out at gay nightclubs, watching go-go boys. He looks quizzically at packaged dildos, racks of porn videos, Grindr. This is all incredibly familiar to me.
I often feel like I’m the only ace who interacts with that kind of gay male culture. This is not surprising: this is only one of many gay cultures, the ace community is dominated by women, and not all ace men are homoromantic, gay, or bi. But even among those in the right demographics, I often hear that ace men simply aren’t willing to put up with it.
In a recent post, I said I’m a very unenthusiastic person. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’m never enthusiastic. But my husband says it took a while for him to internalize that e.g. when I say “yes” to a choice of restaurant, I really mean it, even if I don’t express enthusiasm. And that’s not a matter of communication style; if I appear unenthusiastic, I feel like I’ve communicated my internal state accurately.
Enthusiasm isn’t unique. I feel like most of my emotions are muted relative to the norm. Another really noticeable one is anger. My “anger”, such as it is, rarely rises above what I would call irritation. It’s not very visible. And I find it very difficult to maintain a grudge, even when I know intellectually that I should.
In short, I’ve always felt like I must be experiencing emotions differently from most people–not necessarily in a neurodivergent way, but just somewhat outside the norm. I don’t know of any preexisting term for this, so I’m dubbing it “low emotionality”. Wikipedia describes “emotionality” as emotional reactivity to a stimulus, so I think the term fits. I never see anyone talk about low emotionality, so I’m being the change I want to see.
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cn: This was imported directly from my tumblr, and therefore has unsafe levels of tumblr politics. I feel bad just mentioning this flag outside of tumblr, lest I spread it further.
I saw a flag with stripes of many shades of blue, and I looked up what it meant. Apparently it was proposed for gay men. Thanks, I hate it.
First, a plug: Carnival of Aros. For readers interested in loads of aromantic-spectrum discussion.
h/H i s t o r y – Vesper explains why they’ve never been a fan of history. Basically, history is always about the dominant group. And even, say, Black history or LGBT history tend to focus on certain groups therein, and it can be hard to find a history of people at the intersections. I really appreciate this article.
The Emoji Movie, Adorno and the Culture Industry (video) – Cuck Philosophy talks about Adorno’s criticism of the kind of media that gets incentivized by capitalism. This is relevant to my interests, but he gives waaay more credit to Adorno than I would. Any critique of cultural production needs to grapple with the fact that successful media is successful because it is, after all, popular. That is to say, it provides a lot of people with value. I think any reasonable economic system will produce media that tries to provide people with value; any reasonable economic system damn well should. I think a better system could produce more niche media of little value to most people, but that’s not the same as saying it would not produce popular media.
When someone like Adorno criticizes popular culture, the danger is that he is simply criticizing “low” culture, from his own ivory tower. Although I know little about Adorno, the mockery he receives for his jazz-hating seems well-deserved. The lack of class-consciousness is just embarrassing coming from a Marxist theorist.