This is Casper. He’s a famous cockatoo in Hayes Valley, San Francisco. There are murals of him.

He likes to jump around and say, ‘Hi, I’m Casper. I’m a good boi’

#Birds #SanFrancisco

Also makes me so annoyed that people like to suggest punitive immigration measures against immigrants they don’t like. Yeah, denaturalize Elon, surely he lied.

I hate that guy. But I know who won’t lose in that type of immigration enforcement: those guys.

Who will lose: immigrants with less power.

Many of the escalations that we are seeing now come from ‘softer’ immigration measures. The whole social media vetting thing came from Dems previously giving in to demands to immigration enforcement. Guess what the other team just did to vastly expand that

I’m so bothered by all of the people who are supposedly on the ‘good’ side who use these things against their political opponents:

- making fun of people’s accents (make fuck, get green card is not funny even if you are mocking a horrible person)
- making fun of people’s weight
- making fun of people’s body parts and appendages
- using all kinds of ableist slurs and insinuations of mental health issues
- insinuating that people who think differently from you have ‘low IQ’ or developmental disabilities

Do better.

EDIT: forgot one. age

The other angle that infuriates me: if you can’t even reliably expect your own older relatives to not be assholes, why do you expect other people to?

shit like this is why i can't trust anyone to have any good takes on foreign policy.

the response to the protests in hk against china, on all sides, was universally BAD

conservatives, with their anti china stuff, wtv, you expect it

but some weird leftists with their O NO hk people hate china, which we love? MUST BE CIA

fuck off

on all sides, just dehumanizing and condescending beliefs. that the real people whose lives you believe you can argue about.. don't have actual beliefs of their own?

It is also an infuriating position to take: that some liberals seem to believe minorities can’t have terrible political opinions all on our own. We must be bamboozled by others. No, most of us come from cultures with our own awful terrible ideas. Some of our cultures even originated those terrible ideas! You don’t own terrible! Is it good for anyone? No. But maybe worry about why your own racist uncles are the way they are and let people deal with their own shit

Anyone who is ever surprised that a minority person does a bad thing should remember that no matter what culture you’re from, machismo and patriarchy comes first before yourself.

Earlier this evening

#SanFrancisco

@virbonus haha, very good

There's a wifi network in my neighborhood:

ItHurtsWhenIP

Open source alternative to Slack: Mattermost? Element? Matrix?? Zulip? Ideas??

#FOSS

I’ve given up trying to understand billboards in this city

#SanFrancisco #Billboard

There’s an interesting model emerging in China where hetero single women, are opting out of marriage completely and settling down with each other in a platonic way. Divorced women are joining them too and co-parenting: https://youtu.be/7r-4OiXcLGY

It’s not that far-fetched. There have always been pockets of female community in Chinese history, like the Samsui women. And the ‘mah jie’ profession. It’s easy for try to read some repressed homoerotic subtext into it, but I think when times are tough, community is what gets us through it. No matter where you are.

I’m very thankful that I like and adore my parents, because I know it is my ‘duty’ to return and provide elder care in a decade or so. There is just no other way around it.

At the same time, I also feel for my friends, who feel the similar call of ‘duty’, except far more heavily and unhappily, because their parents were awful to them.

One of the hardest things about being an immigrant is I don’t know what to do with ‘rugged individualism’.

I am considered one of the most ‘westernized’ and ‘independent’ people in the society I come from (people think it’s too much.. moving to a whole other country? Too independent) but

Even I really struggle with some of the daily manifestations of hyper individualism that surrounds me.

A friend had just visited a developed Asian country and wondered why it wasn’t full of homeless people. I said well it’s probably that East Asian homelessness looks different, but there’s probably an element of.. you don’t want to be the person who people say let your second cousin die and starve on the streets. The social shame, I tried to explain. Also, if it’s a warm or religious place, they have food.

I felt it was very similar to what I saw my parents grasping with when they visited me. On BART, kids were making loud sounds. My parents glared at them. Nothing happened. They were confused. I had to explain to them that.. there is just no social shame. Glaring at them doesn’t mean anything, they just think you’re weirdos. It isn’t anyone’s business that they’re making loud sounds.

So while I think there are pros to some community consciousness, I also think the people who want to sell a vision of ‘collectivist societies are better’ are also failing to account for the patriarchal bs that comes with it. We take care of our elderly because we are shamed by it, but it is largely the mothers and grandmothers doing the work.

But what I’ll never, ever get used to is this: the idea that in some places, poor people, sick people, elderly people, deserve to be cast aside and deserve no help. That’s a level of cruelty I do not wish to understand.

Happy new year bitches

#Cats #CatsOfMastodon #Torties

I’m trying to get published in a few academic conferences this year. I wish someone told me, but you don’t need to be actively at a school or research institution to do and publish research.

Spent my day making soy milk and writing test cases for evaluating AI harms. The soy milk was great

Mila mostly powers down in the winter, except at 2 in the morning when she has zoomies and wants love and headbutts. If you think a cat stops having zoomies at nearly 20, apparently they don’t

#Cats