Author-ized L.J.

Translator, researcher, writer, and mom. This is my alt for creative writing. Current main project is a novel about a branch of Koreanic people in 1st century B.C.

Avatar is a typewriter with multicolored butterflies on it, found here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/susannaht/5092985916/

other account: L.J.'s victorious sword-dance (npub1g64…6879)
blog: https://ljwrites.blog/
pronouns: she/they

Last Notes

2025-10-14 06:23:01 UTC

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I've seen it pointed out that this kind of doomerism is another form of whiteness manifesting itself, like it's easier for many white people to envision the end of life itself than the end of Empire and capital.

2025-06-11 07:42:28 UTC

What's up with posts that repeat the post's content in an image alt text? These "descriptions" don't actually describe the images but are just copy-pastes of the post body that came above it. It means these posts won't get a boost from me per my "no boosting posts that don't have useful image descriptions" policy, since repeating the post in the alt text seems if anything more annoying and confusing than having no description or terse and uninformative alt text, which at least won't waste screen reader users' time with wordy and useless repetition.

2025-02-17 04:02:36 UTC

Vegetables in #mythology go back to the earliest beginnings of #Korea when Bear and Tiger, who lived together in a cave, prayed to Hwanung the Son of Heaven wishing to be human. Hwanung gave them holy mugwort and 20 bulbs of garlic to live on while they prayed for 100 days without seeing sunlight. Tiger failed to keep the taboo, but Bear turned into a human woman called Bear Woman (熊女) after three days by seven (21 days).
Bear Woman desired to have a child but had no man to marry, so she prayed under the Altar Tree (壇樹) for a child. Hwanung briefly transformed into a man to wed her and their son became Dangun Wanggeom (壇君王儉, lit. Altar King) who founded ancient Joseon with its capital in Pyeongyang and later Asadal to rule for 1,500 years. #history #MythologyMonday
Source: Events from the Three Kingdoms (三國遺事), Book 1: Marvels Recorded (紀異) https://db.history.go.kr/ancient/level.do?levelId=sy_001r_0020_0020_0020

2025-01-09 13:21:35 UTC

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Uhhh why would anyone threaten a book shop? Do they carry queer/leftist books?

2025-01-06 02:27:13 UTC

A traveler stopped at night at a rundown mansion. The only inhabitant was a maiden, who told him evil spirits had been killing her family one by one and she was the last one left. Though she told him to leave, the traveler promised to get rid of the spirits.
At night the spirits arrived and threatened the maiden, who fainted away. The traveler, however, felled the spirits by throwing a mortar. The spirits fled, telling him they had become evil money-spirits after being trapped for generations in a jar of money the family had buried in the ground. They asked to be freed by digging up the money and handing it out to the villagers.
In the morning the traveler woke the maiden and passed on the spirits' request. She did as asked and gave the traveler the remainder, asking him to marry her. They lived happily ever after. #MythologyMonday #mythology #folktale #Korea
Source: https://folkency.nfm.go.kr/topic/detail/5840
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2024-11-01 00:20:05 UTC

"In the beginning, numbers and stats make one feel like one’s actually doing something, making progress. But equally important is to recognize that not everything can be quantified, including writing quality. That comes with thinking deeply about one’s writing goals, the story one wants to tell, the form in which the story will be told, and so on. These things won’t happen automatically; one needs to slow down."
- Ratika Deshpande, "Why I Stopped Tracking My Daily Word Count" https://authorspublish.com/why-i-stopped-tracking-my-daily-word-count/ #writing #WritingCommunity

2024-10-26 05:55:29 UTC

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I still remember how I felt at reading Justice Ginsburg's dissent in Gonzales v. Carhart, how she (the only person on the Supreme Court bench at the time capable of being pregnant) channeled the anger and injustice into a perfect logical and factual demolition of the authoritarian and sexist assault on the safety and autonomy of pregnant people. I hope these lying goons of the so-called "RBG" PAC are sued to hell, or at least fact-checked into total irrelevancy.

2024-10-18 13:11:25 UTC

Having a lot of fun playing The Legend of #Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom. It's such a cute game that extends a simple summoning mechanic in all kinds of versatile directions for a lot of strategic thinking and puzzle-solving, and plays with the metatext of the franchise in interesting ways. #amPlaying

2024-09-10 14:48:20 UTC

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Totally qualitatively and quantitatively different processes. Living beings don't simply store data on the brain the way disks do, we rewire our neurons to create whole new patterns in response. We are so much more efficient at learning anything than machines are that the comparison itself is an insult: No child has needed to read 2 million books to be able to say "I'm good" in response to "How's it going?"
And no, parents and teachers do not do "exactly" what data curation workers do. No parent ever had to write millions of lines of code for their child to recognize a cat in a picture, and no teacher had to personally wade through reams of heinously hateful and traumatizing material to teach students not to say slurs. Metaphor is not a replacement for the real thing. @npub1afm…5gp4

2024-09-10 14:26:19 UTC

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You're underplaying what we know about neuroscience and human behavior. Humans don't hoover up terabytes of data and then calculate the probability of e.g. words occurring together, or have teams of workers endlessly curating data intake. We associate words and meaning with what happens in the world through direct perception of surroundings and people, and learn the conventions of language through interaction, reasoning, and the emotions we feel in the process. Perception, interaction, reasoning, and feeling are all elements that are missing from machine learning models. @npub1afm…5gp4

2024-08-21 04:51:04 UTC

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It's my belief that hiring processes should reflect the actual job requirements. Much like a selection for a job requiring gregarious social skills would be ill-served by choosing a candidate based wholly on academic records without ever talking to the person, selecting for solitary technical jobs based in large part on social skills and "vibes" wouldn't result in the best hires, either. I translate documents for a living, and no one ever asked me to show up to an office in a suit and wow people with gladhanding to get work I can do at home eating noodles in my underwear.
(Of course, all this assumes neurotypical and otherwise privileged decisionmakers are interested in hiring the best candidates for the job. The evidence suggests far more strongly that they are mainly interested in hiring people like themselves, see also the criteria of "culture" and "fit" that exclude women and minorities.)

2024-08-12 06:36:41 UTC

For #MythologyMonday on the theme of #games: In Manchon-dong Suseongu in Daegu, behind the military base, there are two hills called 형제봉 Hyeongje-bong, the Brothers’ Peak. The sharper-peaked one is called 형봉 or Elder Brother Peak while the duller one is called 제봉 or 매봉, Younger Sibling Peak.
Legend has it that there once lived two siblings in the area with incredible strength, a brother and sister. They made a bet who could pile up earth the highest by the end of the day. The brother carried the earth by scooping it up in his shirt, while the sister used her skirt. Since her skirt was broader she piled up more earth, and the brother, angered, kicked the top of the hill she had piled up, dulling the peak.
To which I say: Did you consider wearing a skirt yourself instead of being a petulant, petty potato
#Folklore #mythology #Korea
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