brain dump 2026/03/14
03/12
hey i caught a cold and i don't feel like doing anything besides looking at a screen, so brain dump:
i finished reading babel by r.f. kuang today, professor lovell dies and robin burns down the tower of babel i love it. it seems to be about colonialism (and racism) and how to solve it. like the part before robin kills professor lovell and goes into hiding, robin slowly learns about how babel is promoting colonialism and questions whether he should stand up for anticolonialism and help hermes. after robin goes into hiding, the hermes society is arguing about whether they should use violence or peacefully protest/lobby in order to stop the opium war. at first it's griffin vs anthony, then it's robin vs victoire. - kinda connects with this recent podcast episode i was listening to about harmful langauge ideologies in linguistic research. they mentioned essentialism and native-speakerism, idk what essentialism is. in linguistics they say that when you're documenting the rules of a language you should follow the native speaker's instinct, but you can't really draw the line between native and non-native speaker that easily and being a native speaker doesn't mean you're proficient in the language. despite only speaking korean and english and despite me taking a lot of time to be fluent-ish in english, i learnt korean, english, and mandarin naturally before i was 2 y/o, which means i can claim that i am a native speaker of all three of these langs? except i'm not the most stereotypical native speaker of english and mandarin, many ppl in my position would say that they're non-native in english and mandarin. i don't even speak mandarin, i'm not as good as speaking (idk reading/writing) english than korean, it took me a lot of time to become fluent in english compared to korean, i'm not raised by an english speaking family, my english pronounciation and grammar is slightly different from more stereotypical native speakers (though it seems like the only english that korea will see as real is californian english or more generally, american english) etc. but still i learnt those langs naturally during my critical period, so i am a native speaker of english and mandarin i guess? it's just socially unacceptable to say that. and someone should not consult me to research a mandarin speaker's instincts because i don't speak mandarin, they'd be better off asking a second language but proficient speaker of mandarin.
someone also mentioned that the 'bilingual brain' is being hyped, but in reality monolinguals are rarer than multilinguals so it would make more sense for the 'monolingual brain' to be hyped. but there are more monolinguals in the west, especially in the US, which is where most linguistics is from. and that's one of the westerncentric biases linguistics has rn.
things to do this week: arrange current members of english webzine club and set up basic rules, plan linguistics olympiad club and make poster, 에이급수학 2-1 1A 끝내기 (update 03/14: i did that... uhhh kinda), 과학 & 역사 복습하기
today i watched two films, one about lesbianism (the girls going "i'm not into girls, i'm straight" and asking each other to marry) and one about gender stereotypes, but the gender stereotypes are reversed to show how stupid stereotypes actually are ("why can't girls wear dresses and like art?" as one character said) both are by the same person, ella fields, and one film was made when she was 14??? that's the same age as me (update 03/14: and the other film was made when she was 13 which is fucking insane)
the 'colonialism in lingusitics' thing is also a big part of zewei's second episode of laghari portals, where zewei documents the hekenic languages for tourism, leading to hekenic locals learning western 11A culture (that's the dimension we live in) and losing their own culture.
03/14
yesterday i was reading namuwiki's article on transgender, it should've been obvious but i found a whole section on debunking anti-trans (and anti-lgbtq in general) arguments. so basically:
- people don't become gay or trans or aro/ace, they just are born that way. there has been a case where someone born a boy got his body altered to a girl's and was raised like a girl, but showed masculine behavior and identified as a boy.
- also some things that i copypaste from namuwiki cuz idk how to say it in my own words:
모든 사회 제도에는 악용 가능성이 존재한다. 예컨대 결혼 제도는 위장 결혼에, 복지 제도는 부정 수급에 악용될 수 있으나, 그 가능성만으로 제도 자체를 부정하거나 극단적으로 제한하지 않는다. 성별정정 제도 역시 예외가 아니다. 성범죄를 목적으로 성전환 수술 및 법적 성별 변경을 감행할 동기가 현실적으로 극히 희박하다는 점은 이미 여러 국가의 교정·사법 보고서에서 확인된다.
트랜스젠더가 느끼는 신체적 성별과 정신적 성별의 괴리감은 복싱 덕후 같은 취향이나 성격의 문제가 아니다. 말 그대로 자신이 자신의 성별을 어떻게 인식하는가 하는 정체성의 문제이다. 상식적으로 성별에 부여된 성 역할과 자신의 취향, 성격, 가치관이 맞지 않다는 이유만으로 위험한 수술을 감수하거나, 법적 분쟁을 벌이거나, 그렇게까지 하지 않더라도 어쨌든 사회적 약자인 성소수자로 살아갈 것을 선택하겠는가? 트랜스젠더는 자신이나 사회에서 요구하는 취향, 성격, 가치관과 무관하게 자신을 사회에서 규정 당하는 성별과는 다른 젠더로 정체화하는 사람이다.
namuwiki has to explain that transphobia is not 'fear of trans people' but rather 'hatred towards trans people' by explaining what 'fear of trans people' would be in detail:
호모포비아나 제노포비아 등등 대부분 증오 범죄와 관련되는 포비아들이 다 그렇듯이, 단어 자체는 'phobia'라고 쓰고 있지만 정신의학에서 말하는 공포증과는 아무 상관도 없다. 정신의학에서 말하는 "공포증"으로 분류되려면, 트랜스젠더를 본 순간 심장이 멈출 듯한 두려움과 함께 혈압과 맥박이 급격히 요동치고, 식은 땀을 줄줄 흘리며 트랜스젠더가 가까이 오면 아무 행동도 못하거나, 아니면 패닉에 빠져 비명을 지르면서 도망가거나, 피할 수 없다면 울고불고 애원할 정도로 혐오와 두려움에 벌벌 떠는 상태가 되어야 하니, 트랜스포비아는 전혀 공포증이 아니다.[1] 공포증이라기 보다는 혐오증이라고 하는 것이 더 적합하다.
i have known the wrong colors for the trans pride flag for my entire life, i thught the blue part was closer to purple but it was actually greener than i thought. i think it's because i've only seen the pride flag on my eink screen, and my eink screen's colors are different from regular screen colors.
i learned that there is a pride flag for straight ally. i had seen that flag before not as a flag but as a pattern on a bag strap. it belonged to someone who had been to a queer festival before so i noticed the rainbow and asked them if it was a pride flag and they said yes. i think they're a very cool person and i'd like to meet them again. they also remind me of who my teacher calls 'the coolest mom ever', an actual mom of one of her students who supports socialism and has taken their child to a queer festival. maybe that person's child (i am friends with her) is secretly a student of my teacher who knows
recently i casually told my classmate that i'm trying to degoogle (ok i haven't done that much but by having an email that's not gmail i'm a weirdo to my classmates i think. currently trying to change my email connected to random accounts from gmail to proton mail, and erase unneccessary accounts) and they were like 'oh i've never heard of that'. i did expect the response kinda, but also they've never heard of that? i thought everyone in this universe was degoogling! i thought everyone at least knew that google was a monopoly screwing up our privacy! and even my teacher who i mentioned in the last paragraph, i'll call her genshin impact teacher from now on cuz she likes genshin impact, she's prolly my irl acquaintance that's the most aware of big tech and world leaders being immoral, she still uses google. (does she know that the founders of google are in the epstein files?) anyways i felt that my online and offline world were kinda disconnected because of that.
i'm planning to review middle school geometry from next week. as i've managed to structure middle school algebra in my head, i thought i would go over a few ninth grade algebra problems before moving on to learning high school algebra (already done with eighth grade). and then i realized, i barely know anything about geometry, geometry has brought me extreme suffering, and the same geometry will bring me extreme suffering at school next semester. and i can't even study geometry during summer vacation before it comes up at school because summer vacation is only one week this year.
speaking of summer, it's almost the perfect weather now. but after that will come summer. i hate summer. i like winter better than summer cuz the cold makes me more focused, but the heat makes me more tired with no benefits. at least it doesn't go up to 40 degrees celsius here, i have been reading mason's complaints about summer weather and i will now think twice if i ever get a chance to go to australia in january.
i think it's funny that i've lived in one of the most multicultural cities for the first half of my life, then one of the most homogenous cities for the second half of my life. though the second half is not a half anymore. when i first came to korea my first question to my mom was 'are those people really all korean?' and now when i first see someone who's not korean, especially someone who is white, they feel very unfamiliar to me.
i sometimes feel like my thinking is too centered around korea and too centered around the west at the same time.
i love the fact that duckduckgo has !bangs. the one i use the most is !wt (wiktionary) and !w (wikipedia), occasionally !g (google) when duckduckgo doesn't give me the right search results (especially in korean). i would've used !namu (namuwiki) more if the namuwiki domain wasn't simply namu.wiki.