If so, you can submit that lovely picture to their gallery! Here are some examples (scaled down; full-size and many more pictures available at the Autostraddle gallery):

Names will not be revealed.

My gods, was prom always this chintzy?

Yes. Yes it was.

More at Autostraddle. Some of those tuxes are quite sharp. And some aren’t. About the same ratio as for guys at my prom, from what I recall. It’s amazing what a good tailor will do for you, girl or boy.

I don’t have any prom pictures, unfortunately. Not that I would want to have them.

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Wordpress blogs are notorious for falling prey to massive automated attacks, anywhere from scanning Wordpress versions to exploit known security holes for that version, to scraping error information in dictionary attacks against the login box, to passing specially formulated URLs that cause bad PHP code execution.

If you do nothing else, please install Secure Wordpress, go to its options page, and check a lotta boxes, and click “save changes”. Although I suggest a few more measures at the end of this post.

Here are what the options mean, and whether you want to tick the box or not (usually you do, but not always, such as if you’re using third-party software like MarsEdit, ScribeFire, or Windows Live Writer):

Error-Messages…

This removes the error message WordPress gives on a bad login. You’ll still know if you failed to log in (as in WordPress will simply present you with the login box again), but scripts and hackers won’t know specifically why the log in failed—they don’t know if it’s the user login or the user password that failed.

If a hacker does know, for instance, that the password failed but the user login was valid (because WordPress by default gives very specific login errors), they will know to proceed with dictionary attacks rather than keep attempting to guess logins.

Plus there’s certain kinds of security holes that can be exploited if you know the login of at least one user for sure.

Amusingly, many people put more thought into their user login than their password.

You should tick this box.

WordPress Version…

If you ever do a view-source of your blog page, at the top of the source you will see something like this:

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 4.8" />

By default, WordPress kindly tells every script and hacker out there its version, the better for them to scan thousands of URLs and generate attacks loving tailored for each WordPress version’s security holes.

If you tick this box, Secure Wordpress will replace the WordPress version in all publicly viewable pages, as well as in your RSS feed (a less popular but as legit place to retrieve your WordPress install’s version) with a random 4-digit number.

Do not listen to WordPress’s plea to leave that line in for stats. Tick this box for your safety.

WordPress Version in Backend…

Only really necessary for installations that have multiple non-administrative users registered, and which don’t trust their users to not, for instance, accidentally leave a completely crackable password which will allow a script access to the WordPress version through non-publicly viewable pages (i.e., the administrative section of WordPress).

I think you should tick this box regardless. A user with admin privileges will still see the WordPress version.

index.php…

Many web hosts already block the listing of directories, because directory listings are a popular way for crackers to discover specific URLs (like CGI scripts) they can use for attacks.

Tick this box regardless, because it’s a good habit to get into.

Really Simple Discovery….

Really Simple Discovery (RSD) is metadata that WordPress generates in the header of every publicly served file that conveniently tells remote programs which special URLs to use when posting/deleting/editing/etc posts. This is used by third-party blogging software, which depend on knowing these URLs in order to allow you to post from outside WordPress.

Of course, it also allows hackers to find the special URLs to use when posting/deleting/editing/etc posts.

If you really love your third-party external editor—and they range from the WordPress iPhone app to ScribeFire and MarsEdit and even more—then you want to keep this box unchecked.

If you always post from inside WordPress anyways, tick this box.

Windows Live Writer…

Windows Live Writer is also a third-party external editor, but it doesn’t use RSD. Instead, Windows Live Writer uses a special link generated by some blogging platforms, like WordPress.

If you don’t use Windows Live Writer, tick this box.

Core Update…

These days, WordPress displays a little message in yellow atop of administrative screens when a new version is available and you should upgrade. Upgrading is dead simple these days, so there’s no excuse.

But if you want to keep the WordPress version extra-hidden from non-administrative users even when an upgrade is needed, tick this box. Administrative users will still see this rather important message.

Plugin Update…

Similar to the “Core Update” option, with similar recommendations as to tick or not.

Theme Update…

Similar to the “Core Update” and the “Plugin Update” options, with similar recommendations as to tick or not.

WP Scanner…

If you tick this box and then follow the directions about editing your theme temporarily, you can use wpscan to find possible exploits in your system. I’ve seen themes revealed to be really stupid about what they allowed in the search box, for instance. WordPress themes are more powerful than themes in most blogging platforms, which can both rock (in the normal case) and suck (in terms of security exploits).

If wpscan runs and mentions anything about search queries, and you don’t know how to fix your WordPress theme to not allow that sort of thing, switch WordPress themes.

Block bad queries…

This helps protect your blog from malformed URLs and queries that exist as exploits whether you seal everything up or not. Jeff Star created this code in the wake of an extremely bad period, quite recent, of a very malicious worm, and Secure Wordpress now incorporates it.

Totally tick this box. There is almost no reason not to. In fact, I can’t think of a reason not to.

There are more recommendations for securing your WordPress install out there, but the Secure Wordpress plugin covers many of the vital ones, though not all of them.

Some More Advice

1. I wish I knew how a plugin like Secure Wordpress would automate this, but it’s probably not possible. And that is to make sure that the ‘admin’ user no longer uses ‘admin’ as their login. It’s a default that WordPress sets up, and one that hackers of course know about.

2. When you download a WordPress theme, please check its source code for anything suspicious looking before you install it. This is so important, as if you install a hacked WordPress theme, you’ve undermined all your security regardless of what you’ve done.

   Fortunately, many if not all hacks are obvious even to the non-technical eye. Here is a post from Chaos Laboratory that covers what hacked themes look like.

3. Always update your WordPress version. For serious. These days WordPress will, if you tell it to, automatically download and install a new version of itself. It will even tell you when to do this, which is a much better state of affairs than things used to be.

4. Always make sure your plugins are up-to-date, for they are also a source of many security exploits in the past—some plugins, like some themes, are that powerful.

   In fact, WordPress as of version 2.9 provides a very easy way to upgrade multiple plugins at the same time—under “Tools”, click on “Upgrade”, and you’ll see a section full of ticky boxes. Once you select which plugins to upgrade (usually ticking All), and hit the submit button, your site will automatically be taken into maintenance mode (people reading your blog will only see a maintenance message), all your plugins upgraded, and then your site taken back out of maintenance mode.

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

And my dream was… a strange dream. I would almost have called it a nightmare, one of those that involve my parents by proxy, but for some reason I took charge in the dream. While it was still kind of the material that fuels thriller movies, I felt… better. And assertive. And in charge. And man, did I lay the smackdown (verbally and, in the end, situationally) on my father’s proxy.

I’ve not had dreams like that before.

So I started thinking about why the bed wedge is possibly helping out with the dreams as well.

It probably comes back to lying flat on my back. When I lie down all the way, I admit the first thing that comes to mind is the night when my father strangled me. Fun, eh? It’s not PTSD, it’s just a very strong memory. It doesn’t intrude, it’s just… there. Okay, maybe it intrudes. Meh. Damn it, it’s probably a little tiny bit of PTSD. Goddamn it.

Anyways, such thoughts have become a normal routine for me, for years in fact. I think almost two decades of that by now.

But when I sleep on the bed wedge I don’t think about that, probably because my head and shoulders and back are elevated, so that if anything does happen, I’m more ready for it. Or something.

Or perhaps I just didn’t sleep that way before, so the act itself breaks some patterns.

I do definitely feel much more secure sleeping this way, outside of the whole memory-of-strangulation thing. It’s a little strange.

I’m also thinking about the first time I slept in a dorm room, and primary to the strangulation memory was the memory of my father pacing back and forth outside my bedroom, ready to break through and scream and possibly beat me about something. At any time. Any time.

It took a long time to break the pattern, mostly because after a while you realize it’s not going to happen because the dorm room isn’t home and the door is also closed (my father forced me to keep my door open; it’s probably why I tend to consider my bedroom the safest part of anywhere I live, because these days I can keep the door closed).

Anyhoo. Such are my thoughts on the bed wedge. Also it’s nice to sit up against (when it’s in its tall setting) when working from home in bed. I’m feeling better, but I’m not going to be stupid and try to push it too hard. I figure I’ll be ready to go into the office soon—maybe even tomorrow! Although I definitely have to pack a lunch for that day. My stomach will not be ready for greasy food for a while.

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

A gentle incline is needed, but the last time I had that was when I ended up in the hospital.¹ I didn’t know very much about bed wedges, so never tried to get one, until Rosa recommended one to me.

And because of course Amazon sells a lot of things, and one of the things they sell is this:

Duro-Med Bed Wedge, 12″ x 24″ x 24″

I decided to get one from them. This product is “Fulfilled by Amazon”, and I have a Prime Membership, but I had decided to buy one very late in the week—a little too late for 2-day shipping (free) or even 1-day ($3.99 per item) to arrive before next week. But it was not too late for Saturday 1-day ($6.99 per item).

And seeing as I’ve been really breathing badly the past few days, I was very willing to pay the $6.99. And I really did get it on Saturday, so all good.

And man, it’s awesome.

You can set it up so that it’s very tall, and sit against it; or you can set it down so that it’s very long and gently inclined, and lie on it, and it’s very wonderful. However, the thing is indeed firm, a bit like a very light rock. But it’s about as wide as the average pillow, and two such pillows will cover it nicely, with a little bit of overlay at the top. I have feather pillows, so this set-up is incredibly nice—the soft top over a really, really firm incline. I don’t have back problems with this thing.

And with this wedge, I’ve been able to fall asleep without Ambien. I can even doze off in the afternoon or morning, and I haven’t been able to do that before. All in all, I’ve had about four sleeping periods on the thing. What dreams come are pleasant, if weird, not unpleasant and all sorts of wrong. That could always change, of course.

Anyways, I love my bed wedge, and wonder how I’ll ever survive at hotels without it. Not that I’m traveling this year (woe) for I’ve been too ill too often. But next year.

*hugs the wedge*
*the wedge does NOT hug back because it’s like a block of wood*
*puts pillows on the wedge and hugs the result*
*slight hug back from pillow-covered wedge*

G’night. Even if it still feels like 6pm or something, I don’t know, daylight savings time really horks me up.

1. Pneumonia. It was an especially bad flu season.

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

I did this pretty recently (as in a couple hours ago). Oh Internets, how you shorten time so drastically.

It all began with someone on Twitter appearing to claim that I recommended his website:

kendawes: RT @ArachneJericho: @mightymur #wordpress The Web Mechanic’s “10 Steps to WordPress Security Protection” http://nn.nf/1bfop [link]

I never tweeted that to Mur Lafferty (who had a site hacked, unfortunately). The RT above appears to claim I did. Perhaps it was an innocent mistake; some Twitter client software (like Tweetdeck, which Ken Dawes used) like to automate things a little too much.

So I asked Ken Dawes why he had done this:

arachnejericho: @kendawes I never tweeted that. I don’t know why you’re claiming I did. @mightymur [link]

Which was fine, sort of; I shouldn’t have acted like he meant it when it was quite possible this was just a misunderstanding/mistyping/whatnot.

And what really wasn’t fine was when I went immediately off the deep end, for reasons I’m not quite sure of—though regardless, if they were there, they were neither relevant nor good reasons.

Here’s me, a complete idiot with over-aggressive tendencies, going off the deep end:

arachnejericho: .@kendawes OH, I get it. You’re a spammer. I never recommended you for WordPress security advice, much less payment for such. I never will. [link]

arachnejericho: OH FFS. Now other people are claiming I RT’d you, @kendawes. I would not recommend you if you were the last guy on earth who knew this stuff [link]

(Context for the second tweet: a retweet bot had picked up on the keywords involved in Ken Dawes’ tweet.)

To which Ken Dawes replied:

kendawes: @ArachneJericho Yep I don’t know you either… However I don’t speak poorly of those I don’t even know [link]

kendawes: @ArachneJericho Nor am I responsible for what others retweet … By the way… The wordpress tips are offered for free Get a life! [link]

And really, I deserved all that he said. I made assumptions that were grossly incorrect (e.g., that he charged for his services, when he didn’t; although web traffic driving is another concern, but not anywhere in the same league) and assumed he was spamming, when he wasn’t. Even if he had mis-represented me earlier intentionally, he did not deserve that heap of abuse I heaped upon him.

Big failure on my part. I sent him the question again (why the claim) and an apology as well, although it is really a half-arsed one, but 140 characters is occasionally difficult to deal with:

arachnejericho: @kendawes I don’t take kindly to others putting words in my mouth. You did. You never apologized even when I brought it to your attention. [link]

arachnejericho: .@kendawes However, I do agree that I took things too far and insulted you for no good reason. For that, I apologize. [link]

However, note that I still acted like a dick. Which, no matter how justified it might actually be—and there’s a possibility it’s not in this case, everything being a mistake and all—is a dickish thing to do. You’d think I’d have learned from previous, vicarious observations of Internet conversations… but no, I had to be a dick multiple times, even with an apology.

So here is a real apology for my over-responsive dickishness:

And perhaps I’m over-reacting, but hell, I over-reacted in the first place anyways. And perhaps someone will claim that this is all just an attempt to bring about attention on myself, because I’m just an attention whore and sick in the head; well, all I can say is that I’m not, and I simply just feel horrible whenever I over-step and act like a dick. Maybe over-horribly.

Anyways, there are two more tenets about Internet conversation I should keep in mind (and should have kept in mind):

1. Bringing about a situation in which another party feels you did them harm, whether or not it is “true”, whether or not they would care about your apology, is being a dick.

2. Even if you apologize, you should never expect the apology to be accepted. Because you were being a dick. But not making the apology in the first place… is being more of a dick.

However, that all still boils down to: “Don’t be a dick.”

And there we are.

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

Flagstaff, AZ: one of the few places in the US where you can wander onto a random hilltop not far from town and see this.

The picture at Astronomy Picture of the Day is from April 16, 2008 and they have the full-size picture, which is huge.

So… yes. The sky really does look like that. Wow.

It would be so weird to be able to see that from my window. And also kind of scary. Certainly such a view would make me think about space more. When I see these pictures, I tend to think of scenes in various SF books I read, and understand them rather more. I have to admit that most of the pictures in my head come from The Last Colony at the moment, because the main characters actually do some star gazing. As opposed to running from lasers and fighting aliens and having political curb stomps and so on, which feels like most of SF (and also the rest of the book).

I found one very screamy site that is furious the night sky is not visible like this. I’m not sure that vandalism is really the way to go to reduce light pollution.

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

We don’t see it because of light pollution these days… these days we see a black night punctured by a few stars.

Before the light pollution started to really hit the sky, Van Gogh painted his most famous work, “The Starry Night”:

So the swirls aren’t clouds—they’re clouds of stars, a galaxy or the Milky Way crossing the sky or similar. He painted this scene from memory as well, so there’s an extra layer of interpretation to go through, I suppose… but now I think the painting is quite beautiful.

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

The musical cue is from The Village, amazingly enough, and it’s not one that’s available on the CD. Darn it. It’s just so beautiful all by itself.

Best seen in full-screen mode.

Via Things You Wouldn’t Know If We Didn’t Blog Incessantly

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

So … in the interest of sticking my hand in a blender in a different way, here’s an allegory of sorts for folks who wonder why people of color get so upset sometimes about cultural appropriation. I feel like I’m going to end up trivializing race here, but many people have a strong identity of themselves as being of Geek Culture, whatever that means to them, so perhaps this is a good starting point.

Remember that awful “I Am a Geek” video?

Yeah, that one, which involved Wil Wheaton and changed entirely from conception to execution. The end result, many people felt, was a betrayal of who they were as geeks. Exploitation, even, from mainstream media, shuffling off real geeks and replacing with celebrities who did not understand even the most basic things about being a geek—even shunned such things and put them down. Parts of our culture. Damn it.

As Wil Wheaton eloquently put it:

When you’re speaking to people who read TMZ and People magazine, getting contributions from MC Hammer, Ashton Kutcher and Shaq is a logical choice. But when you’re speaking to geeks, it’s insulting to us to pretend that they are part of and speak for our culture. Those people are not geeks; they’re celebrities who happen to use Twitter. Featuring them as “geeks” undermines the whole effort, because they aren’t like us. I’ve been a geek my whole life. I’ve suffered for it, I’ve struggled because of it, and I’ve worked incredibly hard to remove the social stigma associated with all these things we love, like gaming and programming. It’s like a slap in the face to be associated with these people who claim to be like me, and want to be part of our culture, but couldn’t tell you the difference between Slackware and Debian, a d8 and a d10, or how to use vi or emacs. In other words, they haven’t earned it, but they’re wrapping themselves in our flag because their PR people told them to.

In other words, mainstream appropriated geek culture and turned it into something that no geek would have been part of willingly. It gets worse, and hasn’t stopped; anywhere from TV shows and movies that claim to show geeks but don’t, to attempts to list, say, sexiest geeks, but almost nobody on the list is actually geeky.

This upset a lot of people.

This is what people of other appropriated cultures feel like. Well. Perhaps a proximity. But the outrage is there. The anger is there. The reaction of indignant is there.

Who are people, who’ve never been outside of mainstream, know about us geeks? What do people who’ve only gone on African safaris know about the black experience in America?

Of course, neither are simple black-and-white affairs, but perhaps you see my point here—or perhaps not. I don’t care. I just wanted to say this, because I’ve been living with seeing these parallel reactions and I wanted to get it off my chest before it drove me crazy, particularly with the current hubbub around Spinrad and cultural appropriation.

I give points to Spinrad for trying to express something about cultural appropriation. Unfortunately, like that video, he started with good intentions—probably—and it morphed into something that pissed people off instead, that was itself a gross misunderstanding. And people of course feel betrayed. Of course there is anger. Of course we felt that the people who created that video are tools; of course people of color feel that Spinrad was a tool.

And, you know, have you ever tried explaining geek culture and why that video pissed you off to someone who didn’t see a problem because they just didn’t know how much, say, D&D and tech and comics and fantasy and SF and Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica and on and on and on—they didn’t know how much that means to us. They also often don’t try to understand. Like talking to a brick wall, sometimes, eh?

That’s how people of color feel—or, let’s cast the net more widely and include people of cultures in general, like Irish who are pissed off about mainstream’s appropriation of their culture, starting with St. Patrick’s Day and going downhill from there; or Italians who are pissed off about having their culture shown off as being a mob culture; or Americans who are pissed off about how Europe doesn’t understand us in our diversity; and so on and so forth—this is how people of culture feel when they try to explain things to an outsider.

And that outsider thinks that because they use Twitter, or because they spent a year in Paris, or because they watched American reality shows, or because they read manga, that they know better than geeks, the French, Americans, or the Japanese, about how they live, about how they feel about mainstream culture misrepresenting them.

Plus, geek culture is quite varied. So are the cultures of other people. But mainstream doesn’t see us that way, they think we’re a caricature, a stereotype, and that’s that. And sometimes geeks don’t see people of color that way, they see a caricature, a stereotype. Oh, people can say that every stereotype has a grain of truth in it; but what stereotypes really are is a misunderstanding and over-simplification of an entire group of people.

There is one more thing I want to cover. And that’s the concept of safe spaces. I feel like this happens every time people talk about “safe spaces” for stories—you know, like all-female anthologies, or all-Asian anthologies, or suchlike. Why are these safe spaces, but white male anthologies, say, aren’t?

Well, when you were a geek in high school, did you feel like hanging out with the rest of the non-geeks and talk about D&D? Of course not. They would make fun of you. They would put things down. They wouldn’t understand. They’re mainstream; they didn’t need a safe space to discuss sci-fi or role-playing games or Linux distributions or what have you. We did. Sometimes individual parts of geek culture need safe spaces from all the other ones.

But we would never say that mainstream needed a safe space. They already have all the space they could ever want. They marginalize us, not the other way around. Many of them don’t mean to. It just happens. It’s how things are—at present.

This is similar to how white male writers marginalize—even if they don’t mean to—female writers, or writers of color, or transgender writers, or gay/lesbian writers, or indeed, anything that’s not the “mainstream” of SF and fantasy. And that’s why safe spaces are more important for the marginalized than they are for the mainstream—indeed, one could say that the mainstream doesn’t need it.

And of course, the fact that anthologies that are specifically all SF or specifically all fantasy, or even sub-genres of such, exist is because they are themselves safe spaces for us from the wider mainstream media.

Anyways, these are the parallels I want to draw. Maybe they’ll help you understand things better. Or not. After all, allegories aren’t perfect, and there are some things about race that run deeper than being a geek.

I could give up my geek habits—indeed, I have done so numerous times—but I cannot forget that I am Vietnamese, because that is simply part of my longer heritage. Or, more practically speaking, I look Vietnamese—I can never not look Vietnamese.¹ Mainstream culture will treat me the way I look, not the way I am.

Of course, this is why I’m online so much. And why I tend to take on white male avatars and a white male identity. Because then I can forget, for a little while. This is not right to do. It’s kind of like melding with mainstream culture and throwing away your role-playing games in an attempt to “grow up” and fit in. Only perhaps kind of worse.²

Anyhoo. Those are my thoughts on yaoi race.

And if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see if I can get my hand out of the blender fast enough this time. In fact, I’m turning off comments, though not pingbacks… probably. I just don’t want to deal with this stuff. I hate dealing with this stuff. I’m sure sometimes y’all hate trying to explain to non-geek overly religious people with crazy ideas why D&D is not the downfall of teenage morality. It’s kind of like that.

Thank you for reading, even if you hate me.

1. North Vietnamese. Not so much South.
2. For the full story of my self-hatred of my race, you can read this.

©2010 Arachne Jericho at Spontaneous ∂erivation.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.