Maybe Lemmy can forcibly invent a new term for "ricing". (Good faith pls)
I'd learned about this last week, and this stuff is a bunch of Wikipedia searches so forgive me if I miss anything :]
Similar to git master and whitelist/blacklist having addressed racist origins, I've just learned that "ricing" -- i.e. way-far-from-default, colorfully souped-up *nix customizations -- came from a derogatory word for Asian "riced out" cars.
::: spoiler (click to enlarge spot where I came to learn about this)
Example in the lemmy.ml/c/linux community.
The linked Wikipedia article doesn't list *nix ricing specifically, but it's probably not a far reach -- for example, tech's master-slave came from cars too.
:::
Now I'm not here to start a debate on whether the term itself is bad. The arguments are done to death and predictable (old threadhope I can link here). Rather, I posit that we could probably invent a new term if we forced it hard enough.
For example, 4chan forcibly invented the use of the ok hand for "white power", as a collective prank (Wikipedia).
::: spoiler Further, Tumblr invented 'then beg' as an insult response to 'I beg your pardon/to differ'. (click to enlarge)
Based on Pukicho.
:::
So why can't Lemmy invent something too?
::: spoiler Here are some earlier takes. (click to enlarge for source, but they are listed below anyway)
:::
I surmise it has to be (1) somewhat unique and (2) short and nounable/verbable.
- Customization doesn't fit -- it's too broad. Changing the wallpaper is a customization -- diagonalizing your screen is a rice (term to be replaced...).
- Bespoke doesn't fit either. That's for a duct-tape script you hack together.
- Pimping out... is not a good alternative. It preexists^(citation^ ^needed?)^ and has inertia but it's not any better.
- Souping up... doesn't roll off the tongue so much. But it's food-related (and thus not far from "rice"). Though I can't see myself saying "Yo, check out this epic soup."
Brainstorming welcome :P
I'm shreking up my arch install rn
I've Farquaad my network stack!
You're compensating for something with your network stack?
I just shreked my opensuse
Ebbin my neezerinstall until it scrooges
Sometimes, I Miles Edward O'Brien my VM GPU passthrough.
Personally I'd put a higher priority on stamping out that use of "porn".
LOL yeah that's a nice thing to put in the company search history
@kbal @fool word.
Pixel polishing. A term we use for frontend code at work (all backend developers).
You're in good faith so that's cool. I just think those are kind of a waste of time because it throws bad shade over antiracism while it is still very much needed
Yeah, mods are power-tripping.
Gonna need a new Linux community soon.
Yeah always nice to be censored for stating facts
This will and probably has got a bunch of flak but I'm with you. There's nothing wrong with recognising when we can pick a better term for something we enjoy.
Like, I get why people use "-porn" as a suffix and it isn't offensive to me but I still won't use that in a workplace. It'd be cool if someone thought of a better neologism!
-gasm!
jk I don't have any better ideas
Spice/spiced could work. But it's still an allusion, not sure if that defeats the point.
Which, outside of specific contexts where you're already confident someone is a WN, was quickly forgotten and never really took off. It's not a great example of a social shift.
I've always used decked regarding to it.
Isn't it the same as tuning?
Although it's unclear what tuning is because it depends on who says it:
Yet for all its faults, I believe that's the closest word to ricing you'll find that is universally understood, neutral and isn't rendered hopelessly bland and meaningless by the process of political correctness newspeak.
a different comment was saying ricing has a sense of being overdone. So with this I was thinking of "overtuning." I think it fits more as a hobbyist term than a pragmatic one.
This comment shouldn't have been removed.
edit: I rescind this comment because I seem to have misunderstood what the commenter meant by reclaiming. Sorry, I did not mean to be hateful.
I love when slurs are 'reclaimed' by people the slur doesn't refer to.
Like how we 'reclaimed' all those native american stereotypes for sports teams
Noodles - it's a mess of dotfiles
I assume you're joking - this is just a different food/culture/race association.
The idea of suggesting the word "noodles" doesn't come from a racial point-of-view. I'm using "noodles" to describe the mess of dotfiles, which is like saying "spaghetti code" for poorly written code.
I guess you can argue it has a race association as the only reason we are coming up with a new word is because the old word is racist.
How about "pasta" then? That way it's explicitly Italian instead. Or casserole? That actually kind of works, it's a bunch of parts you mix together and bake to get something cool at the end.
Some people just want to be offended
what's the association of noodles?
Can't people refer to it as their personalized setups? Or is that too hard to write?
Yeah but that's missing the flair required by people who spend their evenings adjusting the radial blur on the window borders.
I have yet to see a personalized setup with blurred window borders xD
Ricing isn't exactly the same as personalized though.
Ricing when it comes to cars is putting on a giant wing and a huge muffler on a Honda Civic.
Ricing in the Gentoo community is turning on every compiler optimization flag for the main portage config file without knowing what they're doing, potentially actually de-optimizing your setup.
There's an element of "overdone" involved usually whenever someone is called a ricer.
To personalize your setup, is to deviate from the default config to better match your preferences - whatever those may be, however over the top those may be.
That doesn't imply any optimization, unless it's what you personally prefer.
Exactly my point. Most of us customize our setup one way or another, usually. Few of us are ricers in the traditional sense.
rizzing?
@fool wait, how is this racist?
Originally it was a pejorative term for Japanese and East-Asian car modders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner Than the term moved from car modding subculture to computer UI modding subculture.
Interestingly, the place I heard it was in a completely different context, different meaning, but same derogatory connotation. In DoTA 2 esports, the Chinese pro teams were known for spending a lot of time "farming," (acquiring resources in a mostly passive way that can be a little boring to watch) so some people started calling that "ricing." "Farming", but Chinese, so "ricing."
The old thread about it covers both sides of the coin.
Basically, "ricing" insulted weird Asian car customizations -> "ricing" became a more generic "weird" customization term (this is the most famous transitive example I can think of) -> ricing's origin was forgotten by a decent amount of people. (I mentioned it in the first spoilered text)
But I'd like to keep the focus on yoloing a term out of nowhere :D
@fool so it's racist because we of Asian descent tend to eat rice? Are other Asians asking automobile enthusiasts not to use this or is it basic white girl stuff?
The origins are in reference to asian-americans customizing their cars as "ricing" them.
ricist
Edit: aparently it has chinese origins about modding cars so it is racist (?).
Customization is good!
I thought hard on this (I just like naming things). I came up with gemming. Graphical Environment Management. Unixgems.
It sorta works because customizing your environment is sort of like putting the finishing gems on it.
I think you might win.
Is "ricing" not originally related to customised cars from street racing or something? I personally don't see an issue with it.
The activity itself is quite good for making people aware of how a desktop linux OS is working but doing it excessively is a bit silly so makes sense for jt to have a silly name.
It is not, as I learned 18d ago https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/12165688
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner
From what I understand its origin in street racing was because japanese drivers (specifically? might have been Asian more generally) were souping up cars to look pretty but still not run great. I'm hazy on the details and my google-fu is failing me - I wish I had a more precise answer but overall I recall being bummed out at how even the origins of the term weren't as clean as I had hoped.
The term wasn't about Japanese drivers, it was about Japanese cars. They were called "rice burners" as in they were fueled by rice, not gasoline. I guess that was someone's joke that became wide spread.
You're right that it was sort of derogatory to refer to cars that had all their customization on things like giant exhausts, huge wheels, neon lights, rather than performance improvements.
I've never heard the term used to refer to the ethnicity of the driver, just the ethnicity of the car, so I don't think it's racist, shrug.
Yeah as someone that was in the car scene during that era, I can't recall a single time it was used to refer to a person. It was all about the car and its mods - and even then, it was used to describe any car, Asian or other, that was overdone or, often, just not to the taste of the viewer. One time since described my user of a Sony radio as "rice" because they were supposedly not reliable. I never had any issues, but that was their reaction.
I understand why people might consider it racist, and I'm not a fan of the term because of that, and I'd prefer something better. But I do not believe racism was the intent when I saw it used.
This is a tough one, because to me "ricing" or "riced out" carries additional negative undertones (racism aside). I have always heard it used in a way implying that it was referencing enhancements done in a cheap or gaudy/classless way. Think of the most Razer-like LED adorned gaming PC setup, that could have easily been described as being "riced up".
I think the phrase "decked out" works OK, and seems to also lack the negative connotation, which may or not be in line with the goal here.
Also, seeing your example ideas you shot down, I am not sure you full understand "souping up" phrase. The term "souped up" has been in use for over a century and I still hear people use it pretty frequently. It is generally meant to imply something has been made faster or more powerful, frequently with cars, and probably why some people argue it is a shortened version of supercharged. I agree that it probably isn't a good fit here, but not being of how it sounds.
Interface tailoring, desktop tapestry, jamming all up in my pazaaz.
I removed this because it has nothing to do with linux specifically, and as expected, it brought out a lot of people defending the use of this historically racist term, and /asablackman'ing it.
I've reinstated it and removed the offending comments for now.
Also I don't know why this needs a discussion at all. There's hundreds of words in english for something that looks good, and you can be more specific about it : snazzy, sleek, cool, streamlined, nifty, retro
In one of which an Asian dude literally says it's not used as a derogatory anymore. Talk about being offended for others
An stranger on the internet just gave you license to say a historically racist term, how convenient for you. Next they'll be some /r/asablackman posters saying its okay for you to use the n-word, because it doesn't bother them.
I think the difference is that with the n-word both the targets of the insult and the non-targets recognize it as an insult. Meanwhile considering the rice-word, both parties either only know the current-day meaning or think that the insult and the description of someone making their car look (but not function) like a race car are 2 different terms with different origin.
You also seem to imply that the asian poster might have just been a white person trying to prove their point. Well here is a video of a chinese-american using it (and not as some kind of "protest slur" or what's the term for rappers using the n-word in their songs) https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=68sTT4mFTnA
I agree that using terms with racist origin is bad but I think that this term outside of the linux circles cannot be racist because nobody even knows it was racist at some point. edit: Obviously it should stop being used inside the linux circles because a) people here are more likely to read the wikipedia article than watch hours of automotive video content and b) the term does not even make sense for linux desktops because it just means "to make your desktop look cool". There aren't cosmetic linux desktop mods that make the computer look fast or like supercomputer or whatever.
Should they've included a selfie or an id pic? Because when black ppl use that n-word you're trying to draw parallels with (which, BTW, is still a derogatory towards a person and has no other meanings, as far as I'm aware) nobody gets offended. And, aside from the use of the "r-word", their comment was a valid opinion on topic asking for that opinion
Yeah but it doesn't affect me and I'm fine with using a racist term because I choose not to think about it. That should make it fine for everyone.
I'm not racist I'm just so tired of all this anti-racist stuff @[email protected]
Decked out? Cranked?
I thought about "decked out", though then people would say "look at my deck", potentially creating ambiguity between card games and spiffy desktops.
I mean there is an overlap between Linux users and those who play card games
I'd like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as card games, is in fact, GNU/card games, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus card games. 😉
And extra ambiguity with people talking about polishing their deck while also pronouncing it as dick
The same car mod term in the 50s was 'hotrodding'.
Saw the
.dedomain and my first thought was this was about using a potato ricer to make spätzle. I may not be normal.…modding?
Customizing the shit out of
I like this one.
Oh god, this stuff is so tiring.
I'm calling it giving the dirstro top surgery from now on
Please report posts & comments that make use of the term on lemmy.ml; we remove them.
Dots!
Like dotfiles. Where most of the customizing happens.
I dotted up my dwm install?
Its kind of verbable :p
I love the idea, it covers most instances of extreme customization in Linux.
Pocking
Pocked up
I.e. peacocking, making it awesome and flashy and sharing with others
Quick reach a consensus before the yungins start posting rizzed out setups
Zhush/zhoosh could work - I don't think the word is commonly used enough that it would get confusing.
oh hey, i'm in that screenshot!
Don't worry about it, nobody says that any more. It died out with Gentoo.
No, Gentoo is alive! I can catch up to upstream Firefox's LTO+Clang+PGO optimizations and use my own version of Debian alternatives and save 3MB by removing iso9660 support from REFind!
It seems pretty alive to me though. 5/25 of the month-top-posts in r/unixporn have it in the title, and I'm sure more are present in the comments. And a lot of YT videos on it still mention it.
Oooh so I'm not the only one who uses (used) refind with Gentoo!
So Fetch
maybe something derived from dekotora? it has most of the same associations as the term we're looking to replace while not having racist or pejorative origins. deko?
eye-rolling
Can't rice our Linux distros or cars because of woke
Jokes aside, RICE means "Race-inspired cosmetic enhancement" apparently
Creating a backronym for a term doesn’t absolve it of its racist roots.
How is the term "racist" if it specifically refers to Japanese cars, not Japanese drivers
You just sent me a wikipedia article about a car on a thread about linux customisation
Yes, because that is origin of the term. It came from Japanese motorcycle & car customization.
We need to make it offensive to white people instead. So colonising.
i don't think we ought to be implying that colonization is cool.
"Waltzing". cool people dance to 3:3
imo it's not much more offensive than the term ricing but meh, just a bad joke