Lone Signal

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  • 5 things, 1 of n

    1.

    There are too many posts in my drafts.

    2.

    Alysa Liu’s joyful Olympic figure skating performances have been the highlight of my week. Actually, the friendship and joy radiating from all the Olympic women’s figure skating competitors, but especially the US contingent, were welcome glimmers in the past few days.

    It’s so wonderful to see somebody delighting in their craft, and performing at the highest levels of skill because of that. I believe it when Alysa says the medal doesn’t matter as much as getting the chance to do what she loves to do on the world’s biggest stage, because you can feel it the whole time she’s skating. She loves it, and she came back to the sport determined to love it on her own terms, and I’m so glad to have witnessed even just this small part of that extraordinary journey.

    3.

    Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime performance blew me away.

    I was not at all familiar with Bad Bunny, his music, or his activism. Learning about all of that together, in a performance that focused on his heritage and the issues affecting both his community and so many other similarly marginalised ones, was such a pleasant surprise.

    What really won me over was how effusively positive the whole thing was: as much a celebration of hope, love, and community as it is a fiercely loving protest pointing out how much better things could be.

    4.

    Apparently Bhutan’s capital city, Thimphu, is the only city in the world without any traffic lights.

    Also, I may not be prepared for the extensive use of cheese in Bhutanese cuisine.

    A question for next time: Do cheeses made from yak milk have the same lactose content as the ones made from cow milk?

    5.

    For a lot of things in life these days:

    Whatever will be, will be.

  • Collected quotes, 6 of n: Language, translation, identity, empire (1)

    This entry is part 6 of 6 in the series Quotes and Excerpts

    A confluence of things, lately:

    • A refreshingly candid and clear-eyed talk on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict following a screening of the documentary 5 Broken Cameras, and finishing the book (Why Palestine? Reflections from Singapore) around which that talk revolved. Quite a lot of it was dedicated to questions like the utility (if any, now) of international institutions like the ICJ in stopping, ultimately, the ongoing genocide; and to stressing that part of the reason the conflict continues is because people keep being told that the only way to end it is to keep trying to find recourse in precisely the institutions and supposedly “proper” channels for protest and resistance that have already failed or proven themselves inadequate and/or too easily dismissible.
    • Sinners and its deft use of horror genre storytelling tools to delve into racial politics and art (music) as conduit for both resistance and domination.
    • This excerpt from a Viola Davis interview that led me to seek out the full thing, which turned out to be a thoughtful meditation on her career thus far.
    • Getting around to re-reading Babel — which is not the most subtle book about language, colonialism, and imperialism — now that I can read it alongside Vicente Rafael’s Motherless Tongues. I tend to forget that the book’s full title is Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence; and now that I remember, it reminds me of a simple discussion question from that book talk that hit harder after having watched a civilian go through five different cameras that were shot out of his hands, damaged by shrapnel, etc.: “What would you have Palestinians do now?”

    And as a result, then, a lot of simmering thoughts these days on the many ways to set the protocols and criteria and languages (in the broadest sense of the word) for sustaining or challenging various systems.

    Mythic language is discourse, that is, it cannot be anything but systematic; one does not really make discourse at will, or statements in it, without first belonging—in some cases unconsciously, but at any rate involuntarily—to the ideology and the institutions that guarantee its existence.

    From Orientalism by Edward Said

    Que siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio; y de tal manera lo siguió, que junta mente començaron, crecieron y florecieron, y después junta fue la caida de entrambos.

    Language was always the companion of empire, and as such, together they begin, grow, and flourish. And later, together, they fall.

    from Gramática de la lengua castellana by Antonio de nebrija, as quoted in babel by r.f. kuang

    “[T]he power of the [silver] bar lies in words. More specifically, the stuff of language that words are incapable of expressing — the stuff that gets lots when we move between one language and another. The silver catches what’s lost and manifests it into being.

    […]

    You’re in the place where magic is made. It’s got all the trappings of a modern university, but at its heart, Babel isn’t so different from the alchemists’ lairs of old. But unlike the alchemists, we’ve actually figured out the key to the transformation of a thing. It’s not in the material substance. It’s in the name.”

    – Professor jerome Playfair, introducing the concept of silver-working and the british empire’s royal institute of translation, from babel by R.F. Kuang

    [T]ranslation turns not just on the transfer of meaning but also on the struggle to control the processes of transferring meaning. It relates to all sorts of tensions around procedures, around the limits of what can be translated, as well as prescriptions for what must remain untranslated.

    […]

    It is not so much really to avoid difference or to avoid plurality. It is to be able to exercise total control over linguistic pluralism and to make this control as automatic as possible.

    vicente rafael, in conversation with siri nergaard for translation: a transdisciplinary journal, as reproduced in motherless tongues

    “It’s technical training in order to deal with the classics. […] But what it denies is the human being behind all of that.

    I feel that, as a Black actress, I’m always being tasked to show that I have range by doing white work. […] But we don’t put those same parameters on white actors. You know, you can have a white actress who’s fifty-four, fifty-five years old, which is a great age to play Mama in Raisin in the Sun. Is she gonna be able to pull off Mama in Raisin in the Sun? […] They don’t have to do that. So for those four years at Juilliard, all the white actor has to do is play all white characters.

    […] Juilliard was an out-of-body experience because, once again, I did not think that I could use me. Me needed to be left at the front door, even though me was what got me in there.

    Viola Davis on her Juilliard education and its focus on shaping her into “a perfect white actress.”

    There is nothing mysterious or natural about authority. It is formed, irradiated, disseminated; it is instrumental, it is persuasive; it has status, it establishes canons of taste and value; it is virtually indistinguishable from certain ideas it dignifies as true, and from traditions, perceptions, and judgments it forms, transmits, reproduces.

    from Orientalism by edward said

    “There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. I know this already. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy.

    Remember this: Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. The frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

    And then remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that.

    And know this: The day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empire’s authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.

    Remember this: Try.”

    – Karis Nemik, from the Star Wars series Andor

  • This space should be a notebook // Cats

    I think, having made certain declarations about what this blog should be or should try to be, I’ve gotten too weighed down by the thought of living up to those aspirations, haha. But this space is, first of all, meant to be a digital notebook for me, so I’ve decided to throw out the kid gloves and just post what and when I can.

    Today: a collection of cat posts / photos that felt like they deserve a permanent place in my pocket, batch 1 of n

    image

    nap-hime:

    toodotnil:

    please enjoy Poki as he found the meat I’m defrosting

    Oh defrosting meat, we’re really in it now

    There’s something about the expressiveness of cats.

    everythingfox: ““Oliver is unsure of what to do with his first time under the tree” ”

    everythingfox:

    “Oliver is unsure of what to do with his first time under the tree”

    (via)

    Case in point. Add to that any reminder of how small they are, and how big, strange, and bewildering all the constructs of human life are to them, and my heart just twists every time.

    miiilowo:

    miiilowo:

    where is my favorite painting i need to find my favorite painting

    image

    a break in their day by david hettinger. i loveyou

    Another precious intersection of interests: cats and art. This is one of my favourite paintings now, too.

    As an aside, I’ve started using Quotebacks code here. Yes, after years of deliberately trying to avoid anything that would make this space feel “too much like Tumblr.”

    Why?

    One, because it looks cool.

    Two, because I wholeheartedly believe in what they’re trying to achieve here, which is to build an easy, universally applicable standard for engaging with other content on the web without losing context or attribution.

    Link rot / information decay has always been one of the main weaknesses of tech, or at least, the internet. It’s a big factor in making so much of tech feel ahistorical, I think. In a way, the movement of information on the web is a massive game of telephone. It’s so easy for pieces of information to get chopped off and framed or understood differently, or even for something to just get passed around so much that someone further down the chain inevitably loses sight of the source. 1Worse, unlike an actual game of telephone, hardly anybody on the internet seems interested or equipped to trace differences between versions.

    So: attribution, and referencing, as Quoteblocks is trying to do. Bonus points for doing it elegantly, and for being able to handle the myriad forms that information on the web tends to take.

  • Today in science, 12.02.24

    Today in science, 12.02.24

    This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Today in Science

    1.

    Researchers built a smartwatch heartbeat monitor that relied on slime mold to operate, and over the course of caring for their living devices, the participants developed an emotional attachment to these.

    This study’s main hypothesis was that requiring some degree of physical care in an interactive device would lead to users being more invested in its use. And would you look at that — the study found that, after having to take care of the slime mold to keep their heartbeat monitors ticking, users felt a sense of responsibility over the device, saw its use as a reciprocal relationship, and found the slime mold’s growth as a source of positive feelings. I love how humans care so easily.

    Here’s an excerpt from the Twitter thread where I got the article link from, and the quotes from the participants are adorable:

    Their little pet mold friends! “You’re my little slime” because look, they’re just both soft little entities who were being fed and watered! They felt happy enough about the slime’s growth to mention them in their diary entries several times!

    This reminds me of that anecdote that’s made the rounds of the internet a few times, about how a broken bone was a sign of humanity — because our ability to care for others is essential to building the communities that have helped humanity thrive.

    (Of course, there’s a lot that’s iffy about that anecdote, which this fact-checking article delves into. A post for another day, though I do appreciate that some of the points made there highlight (1) the insidious anthropocentrism of the anecdote; and (2) how it frames the concept of civilisation as inherently altruistic, when (cough) colonies the world over, for one thing, would say that hasn’t always been what the concept has been wielded as.)

    But anyway. People have such a remarkable capacity to care; I wish the worlds we build for ourselves day to day reflected that better.

    2.

    Researchers examined the phenomenon of “friends to partners” to see how common it actually is as a starting point for relationships, versus the literature’s apparently skewed focus on dating as the main way such relationships start.

    I didn’t know there was such an overriding lens in social science research, though it certainly feels like the case for pop culture and day-to-day conversations, so — not all that surprising. Dating culture (and, by extension, hookup culture) is a thing now, especially with dating apps popping up everywhere.

    But, as the researchers and the Tumblr user they quoted in their paper1This is still hilarious to me. More chronically online references in scientific papers, please. point out, dating — i.e., “strangers striking up a conversation at a social function and then falling in love during a series of romantic excursions”, as the paper puts it — is not the only pathway for initiating relationships:

    In fact, the paper argues that dating might not even be the most prevalent nor preferred way to start a relationship. Their analyses showed a startling disparity: despite only 18% of studies looking at friend-first initiation, two-thirds of participants in the studies they meta-analysed reported that this was how their relationships started, and 47% of respondents in another survey they conducted said that they saw friend-first initiation as the best way to start a relationship.

    As someone who’s most likely somewhere on the aroace spectrum,2This is something I’m still figuring out, but hey, let’s see how it goes. I appreciate how this study tries to decouple (heh) the concepts of dating and relationships, when so much of the world seems to insist that one is an essential prerequisite to the other. I’ve gone on my fair share of dates3Which, as an aside, dating in college vs dating in your early twenties vs dating in your late twenties are so, so different and relationships4All of them, now that I think about it, having started from friendships (lol) and what I’m realising in retrospect is that I cannot stand casual dating. Being attracted to a total stranger is unfathomable to me, and the concept of going on — again, as the paper puts it — “romantic excursions” that are, on some level, explicitly constructed as such, with somebody whom I don’t know enough to even definitively have an opinion about, is often tedious at best.

    Or, as one friend put it about another friend of ours, “They need to be friends with somebody first before the thought of even considering them as a romantic prospect occurs to them.” The literature says this is something like being demiromantic. I’ve not delved into the topic enough to have come to any sort of conclusion, personally, but the general sentiment feels deeply relatable to me, haha.

    So, all this to say: it’s nice to know that there’s nothing wrong with that, and that there’s nothing clinically abnormal (heh) about my inability to put myself through the whole rigmarole of talking up strangers to find someone I’d like to jump into a long-term relationship with.

    3.

    I thought I would just be linking to these papers and this would be a short post.

    We are all still learning about ourselves every day, I guess. Haha.

  • Netrunner Never Died

    Netrunner Never Died

    Netrunner is one of the best games of all time.

    It has also been — at least, by official tally — “dead” for six years now.

    What is Netrunner anyway?

    Netrunner is an asymmetric card game for two players, with each playing vastly different games that somehow still mesh together beautifully. Since its inception, Netrunner has had a cyberpunk theme; true to form, this means players take on one of two roles:

    • Corporation: As a megacorporation from one of four powerful factions, the player must defend and advance agendas to score enough points to win the game.
    • Runner: As an intrepid hacker from one of three factions, the player must break through the Corporation’s defences and steal enough agendas to win the game.

    What sets the game apart is the degree and elegance with which this theme gets baked into the actual mechanics. Corporations play their cards face-down, creating a board of imperfect information to reflect the difference between what the Corp and the Runner knows. Runners can try breaking into everything — not just what the Corp might place on the board, but the Corp’s hand of cards, their deck, and their discard pile too.

    The objectives and tools available to each side are vastly different — and yet, the nature of the game forces these into a constant give-and-take (tempo, in the game parlance) as each side tries to force the other into tough choices and eke out a window to win.

    The life and death of Netrunner

    The game was designed by Richard Garfield, the same guy who created that card-game juggernaut, Magic: The Gathering. Originally conceived in the 80s, at the dawn of the collectible card game (CCGs) craze, Netrunner was one of those titles that catered to the stragglers outside of the fantasy-themed games that took most of the spotlight. In terms of game design, it was very much a product of its time — layered on top of its elegant core mechanics were the usual trappings of CCGs at the time, from randomised booster packs to draft formats and card speculation.

    In 2012, Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) licenced the game from Wizards of the Coast (WotC) and re-engineered it as a Living Card Game (LCG). This format ditched the “collectible” aspect of the original game in favour of a standardised starter (“core”) set that could be played on its own, as well as monthly expansion packs with fixed contents to build up the card pool. This meant that players all had access to essentially the same pool of cards for deckbuilding (especially for competitive play), shifting much of the emphasis away from players’ ability to buy up rare and powerful cards.

    Fantasy Flight Games also wrapped the whole Netrunner game in its own Android setting, basically skinning it in its own IP.

    This is important to note, because this split between who owns the setting IP (FFG) and the mechanics IP (WotC) is probably (1) a key aspect of the licencing troubles that resulted in the abrupt discontinuation of the game in 2018; and (2) a major roadblock to any games company officially reviving the game in its modern format following said discontinuation.

    Enter the fan community

    When FFG pulled the plug on Netrunner in 2018, I thought that was it for the game.

    After some time, rumours started surfacing in the old forums — the game wasn’t completely buried. When I first heard about it, I thought it just meant a small corner of the old community was stubbornly holding on — organising a few tournaments online, checking in on each other occasionally, stuff like that. I was surprised and delighted to find that I couldn’t have been more wrong.

    It turns out, in the spirit of scrappy runners everywhere, a few passionate fans banded together to set up a whole registered nonprofit organisation and continue the game in an unofficial capacity.

    Null Signal Games is a full-on game publishing company, operating as a nonprofit, that has produced new sets of Netrunner cards and hammered out an organised play system that encompasses everything from game night kits to World Championships. The new cards are published and distributed across North America and Europe; they are also fully interoperable with the old Android: Netrunner kits. More importantly, though, the Null Signal team has put in a lot of work to build a card pool that goes beyond supplementing the old game, working as a thoughtfully designed ecosystem all its own.

    Beyond the game itself, there are whole departments covering all the roles necessary to sustain a vibrant, growing community: from game design to distribution to marketing to diversity and inclusion. This has been a revival not just of the product, but of the rich and rewarding community experience that had sprung up around it.

    That shines through in what might be the most staggering fact about the whole endeavour, which is that it’s entirely volunteer-run. Every person involved is ostensibly an unpaid volunteer, putting in quite a lot of thought and effort out of sheer love for the game. Look, every single card that has been produced in the Null Signal era is available as a tournament-legal print-and-play, meaning people can get into the game without spending a single cent, and still have access to even the highest levels of tournament play.

    The main goal here, clearly, is to keep a well-designed game alive in every sense of the word and bring it to as many people as possible.

    Again: Netrunner is one of the best games of all time, and the brilliant mechanics aren’t even the biggest reason why. I feel compelled to talk about this here if only to have a record of what fan communities can create, even when “official” parties like established game publishers abandon a game.

  • Flora Singapura: New finds in GBB

    Flora Singapura: New finds in GBB

    Plants have always been an important part of a good day for me. When I run into plants, that means I’m wandering around outside; and when I’m wandering around outside, that means I’m discovering bits and pieces of the world rather than getting stuck in my own head.

    My aunt over here loves taking walks, and I look forward to accompanying her whenever possible. We marvel over flowers, look out for monitor lizards, try to capture snapshots of the most colourful migratory birds passing overhead. There are some constants in our weekend options: the Botanical Gardens, MacRitchie Reservoir, Gardens by the Bay.

    Today we were at the Gardens, and we ran into a fruit that we hadn’t seen before, even in two years of frequent visits. I realised then that I’d snapped so many photos of plants but hadn’t really taken much time to learn more about them, beyond the ones I was already somewhat familiar with.

    It’s never too late to start taking notes, I guess, so here’s the first set of what I hope will be a long-running series.

    This is the plant that set all this in motion:

    It’s called Mahkota Dewa or God’s Crown. Apparently it’s indigenous to Indonesia, though it’s also found in many other countries across Asia. It can take around 12 months to start fruiting, which probably explains why we hadn’t seen these fruits before. In keeping with the usual rules of biological colouring (lol), the bright red fruit is toxic — especially the seeds.

    Surprisingly, though, the plant also has medicinal uses. The fruit pulp can be dried and turned into a tea that helps control blood sugar, among other effects. The leaves and stems are also used as anti-inflammatory and anti-bacterial ingredients.

    Later into our walk, another plant caught my eye:

    These lovely flowers look like tiny origami specimens. They’re called glorybowers, or bleeding-hearts. They’re part of the genus Clerodendrum, which is quite far-reaching: member species are native across temperate and tropical regions, with most of them found in the tropics of Africa and southern Asia.

    The most interesting fact about these plants (to me, anyway lol) is that, apparently, the leaves smell like popcorn and the flowers smell like peanut butter when crushed. So much so that apparently they’re known to a lot of people as “the peanut butter trees.” This might be explained partly by the fact that they’re part of the family Lamiacea, which includes other aromatic plants like lavender, basil, and mint.

    Glorybowers grow as unruly shrubs, but apparently they can be “trained” (as, say, bonsai are “trained”) to stay small, pleasantly ornamental plants. This might just be the word-nerd in me looking for meaning where there is none, but the genus name comes from the Greek words kleros, meaning “chance” or “fate,” and dendron, meaning “tree.” A tree of fate, as it were, that can grow from an encroaching mess into something more beautiful, if tended with care.

    Maybe it was fate to run into these plants today. And maybe, if I’m being optimistic, seeing them in such vibrant bloom is a sign of better days to come.