Coming out as political action

Coming out isn’t what it used to be. Literally, “coming out” has a rich history of different meanings. Originally it referred to young women coming of age into high society. It had a derivative meaning within gay subcultures of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

But in the 1970s, “coming out” started to mean revealing yourself to the general public.  “Coming out” was contrasted with “being in the closet”.  In the 1970s, coming out was advocated as a form of political action. You can see this, for instance, in many speeches by Harvey Milk. Here’s a line from the Gay Freedom Day Speech in 1978:

Gay people, we will not win our rights by staying quietly in our closets…we are coming out! We are coming out to fight the lies, the myths, the distortions! We are coming out to tell the truth about gays!

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How I Made an EP

I have finally released a new EP titled Unrelenting Introspection. You can listen for free on Bandcamp.  It’s only 14 minutes long. It’s xenharmonic dark ambient drone, just some non-commercial personal art.

In celebration of the release, I will fulfill a reader request that I got back in 2022, when I released my first EP, The Stars Stirred. The reader asked me to talk about it. That reader is probably not here anymore, and now nobody is asking for it. That means the time has finally come.

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No Kings San Francisco

I just came back from the San Francisco No Kings protest.

I went with my husband, who is very much more of a protestor than I am.  He’s been attending protests on a regular basis for months.  He has a bunch of protest shirts, and a big US flag.  Normally he flips the flag upside-down, symbolizing distress.  Today, he flipped the flag right-side up, saying he wanted to dial up the visible patriotism. At the protest, there were of course lots of people with US flags, and other flags as well.

In contrast, I’m the type of person that goes outside once a week.  I freely admit that I do not like being at protests.  But I showed up in my everyday clothes and a backpack.  I enjoyed seeing the immense popular support for democracy, and opposition to everything Trump stands for.

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Link Roundup: June 2025

This month, I wrote an article about the problems with the Asexuality Identification Scale.

Also, a funny thing happened.  These link roundups often include some links to games criticism articles, which I get from Critical Distance.  But the RSS feed had been broken for a few months, and I only just caught up on the backlog.  So I guess several of these articles will be about video games.

As in previous months, I do not have any links relating to the current political trash fire, because I guess I do not feel inspired to comment on those stories.  It’s a trash fire, that’s my comment.

Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility | Som-Mai Nguyen (via) – This article thoughtfully discusses the low standards of publishers when they strive to represent the perspectives of ethnic minorities.  For example, Penguin contracted with a prominent Vietnamese American writer to translate classic Vietnamese literature, even though he had no translation expertise, and was relying on a translation dictionary.  The author also criticizes the trope of diaspora writers highlighting superficial aspects of their ancestral language as if they were really deep.  In English, this would be analogous to marveling at the mystical connection between “big”, “beg”, “bog”, “bag”, and “bug”.

I could never muster such unwarranted confidence in speaking about my ancestral culture.  Being Chinese does not inherently give me special insight into my ancestral Chinese culture!  This mystical linguistic analysis of Asian languages strikes me as exoticizing, and overly idealizing.  I’ve written a bit about my family history, and it’s impossible for me to idealize it.  I mean, my great grandfather was a tobacco factory owner.

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Reviewing 6 conlang games

A conlang game is a game that asks the player to learn a fictional constructed language. Recently there have been a few well-known examples, namely Heaven’s Vault (2019) and Chants of Sennaar (2023). And so we may speculate about the emergence of a new “genre” of conlang games. Of course, two games does not a genre make. So I am here to tell you that I have played no fewer than six conlang games, and I’m going to briefly review each one.

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Why loans cost money

Boots theory

Boots theory is the idea that being poor is expensive. It comes from a Discworld novel, where a character observes that being poor, he can’t afford a good pair of boots. Instead he buys cheap boots that don’t last nearly as long. The cheap boots cost less money upfront, but are ultimately more expensive since they frequently need replacement.

Taken literally, I’m not sure how accurate the story is. Is it really true that cheap boots are less efficient in durability than expensive boots? It could be, but the cost of boots might also be driven by characteristics besides durability, such as comfort or appearance. Hard to say, since I don’t wear boots.

But if we forget about the boots, then boots theory is obviously true. The boots represent capital. Capital is anything that costs resources now, and provides value later. Capital costs money. If you can’t afford to buy capital, then you ultimately lose out on the value of capital. Being unable to afford capital is therefore expensive.

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