Origami: Jagged Bomb

Jagged Bomb

Jagged Bomb, designed by me

I’m going to the East Bay Origami Convention this weekend!  I’ll be teaching this model.

I specifically designed the model in order to teach it.  Normally, modular origami takes a while to make, and people wouldn’t finish within the session.  Especially something like this model which has 14 units.  But this is just about the fastest thing you could possibly make with 14 sheets of paper, so I’m hoping some people will be able to finish it.

The mathematically inclined may raise eyebrows at 14.  What symmetrical shape has 14 components?  And it’s pretty hard to tell from looking at it, because it’s so chaotic.  Ask me in the comments if you can’t figure it out.

I also made diagrams.

On artificial romance

I just watched a video by Daryl Talks Games titled “What Artificial Romance Does to People“. Although crushes/romance/relationships with artificial characters are stigmatized, Daryl discusses psychological research that suggests that they often have beneficial effects (although not uniformly beneficial). I’m not responding to the video, I just felt inspired to comment on the same subject matter, from an ace lens.

I believe that part of the stigma around artificial romance comes from the idea that they are replacing real girlfriends. “The guy who married Hatsune Miku should get a real girlfriend.” That’s people’s gut reaction, and I am not immune either.  Some degree of crushes on fictional characters seems fairly common, but that degree of artificial romance strikes me as weird. However, I do think we should take our initial reaction, and consciously reject it.

A core ace principle is that nobody needs to get a real girlfriend. No exceptions, not even for allo people. It is irrelevant whether or not a person has a romance with a fictional character–there is no moral imperative for them to form a romance with a real person. We could say that if someone is in love with a fictional character, they’re really just in love with a mental projection, so it’s really just a kind of self-relationship. To this I would say, having a positive self-relationship is a good thing, and it is eminently reasonable to prefer it over a romantic relationship with another person.

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My academic career finally ended

I didn’t talk about it much, but until recently I was technically still involved in academia. I participated in Project Recognize, a research grant to improve survey measures of sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity (SSOGI) for public health research.

The project was particularly interested in measures of asexual and intersex groups, because there is a gap in the academic literature. For example, this NASEM report has hundreds of pages on SSOGI measures, but barely anything to say about asexuality at all.  We were filling that gap by looking beyond academic literature, such as exploring grassroots community literature.

We were funded by an NIH grant, but as you can imagine, this is exactly the sort of research that’s getting targeted for being too “woke”.

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That time a cozy game triggered me

Gather round, it’s anecdote time.

Unpacking is a critically acclaimed indie game from 2021 that asks the player to unpack items from boxes, as if they had just moved. From this basic idea, a low key narrative emerges, following an off-screen character as they move from place to place at different stages of their life. And you can track their interests and circmstances by the various tchotchkes they bring with them.

Perhaps it’s a bit hyperbolic to say Unpacking triggered me. However, I did find it so unpleasant that I DNF’d it, despite its short run time.

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What Even is Gender? (Book review)

What Even is Gender? is an academic philosophy book written by B. R. George and R. A. Briggs, freely accessible online. Unusually, the book belongs to the analytic philosophy tradition (i.e. the tradition that includes Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein), rather than the continental philosophy tradition (whence comes Judith Butler and Michel Foucault).

The authors take a trans-positive view, while expressing skepticism towards the concept of gender identity. To be clear, they are arguing for conceptual reform rather than language reform—their issue with “gender” is not the way the words are arranged in English, but rather that “gender” presently refers to several distinct concepts, and that the equivocation of these concepts ultimately hurts trans people

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Link Roundup: March 2025

Revisiting Radway’s Reading the Romance: A Critical Ethnography of Romance Fans | Osteophage – Coyote discusses a 1980s book that studied women who read romance novels.  The author Janice Radway is sympathetic to the women of her study, seeing them as mistreated housewives trying to find an escape.  And yet, the romance books contain a lot of sexism themselves, and she is disappointed to find that the women tend to uncritically accept that sexism.  Coyote positions Radway’s book in relation to more recent debates about fandom.

Trans People are Under Attack and We Must Help Them | Rebecca Watson (video and transcript, 9 min) – Trans and nonbinary people are a tiny minority (estimated at 1.6% in the video), so how much does it matter that they’re under attack?  Well, that’s a lot of people if you think about it.  For instance, it’s far larger than the number of federal employees fired or laid off, and it’s larger than the total number of federal employees period.  Trump has signed 80-some executive orders, and if each one chips away at the rights of as many people, that affects all of us.  (And the video doesn’t even discuss the ways that cutting trans rights directly impacts cis women, e.g. by requiring them to undergo invasive examinations for sports.)

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Origami: Spike Dome

Spike Dome

Spike Dome, designed by Aurélien Vermont

Today’s model is a tessellation that I folded at the Geometric Origami Convention in 2024.  That means we folded it within an hour and a half, not counting precreasing.  Very nice design, and potentially adjustable.  In principle, you could make spikes with any number of points, and have them spiderweb across the paper as you please.  For example, Aurélien has a model with the big dipper.

Personally, I look at these spikes, and I want to make them spiral!  Not sure if it’s possible within the design.