What's in a name?

A happy thought for International Transgender Day of Visibility

 Posted on 2021-03-31  |  5 minutes  |  922 words  |  Carmen Bianca Bakker

Often when people conceptualise transgender people, there is a misery inherent to our identity. There is the everyday discrimination, gender dysphoria, the arduous road of transition, and the sort of identity crisis that occurs when we let go of one name and choose another. And while being transgender certainly can be all of that, it’s a pity that the joyous aspects are often forgotten, or disappear behind all the negative clouds that more desperately require society’s attention. [Read More]
Gender  Personal 

Destination status quo

A reflection on idealism and the inadequacy of things

 Posted on 2021-02-12  |  12 minutes  |  2375 words  |  Carmen Bianca Bakker

I recently happened upon an article1 that argued against the four freedoms as defined by the Free Software Foundation. I don’t actually want to link to the article—its tone is rather rude and unsavoury, and I do not want to end up in a kerfuffle—but I’ll include an obfuscated link at the end of the article for the sake of integrity. The article—in spite of how much I disagree with its conclusions—inspired me to reflect on idealism and the inadequacy of things. [Read More]
Opinion  Free software 

Using Fedora Silverblue for development

 Posted on 2021-02-05  |  5 minutes  |  1052 words  |  Carmen Bianca Bakker

I recently switched to Fedora Silverblue for my development machine. I want to document approximately how I do this (and why it’s awesome!). Fedora Silverblue This article is not an introduction to Fedora Silverblue, but a short summary is well-placed: Fedora Silverblue is an immutable operating system that upgrades atomically. Effectively, the root filesystem is mounted read-only, with the exception of /var, /home, and /etc. The system is upgraded by mounting a new read-only snapshot as the root filesystem. [Read More]
Free software  GNU/Linux 

The stories we tell each other

Race and racism in fantasy

 Posted on 2020-10-13  |  21 minutes  |  4353 words  |  Carmen Bianca Bakker

I have recently been working on a conversion document that adapts Dungeons & Dragons’ Eberron campaign setting to the Savage Worlds system. I’m not a game designer and I’m not a particularly prolific writer, so this was a bit of a challenge for me. One of the most challenging things to pull off was converting the races. Through writing the document, I think I developed a deeper understanding for the racism inherent to fantasy fiction. [Read More]
Opinion  Activism 

Big Distro

A plea for Debian, Fedora, openSUSE & Ubuntu

 Posted on 2020-01-05  |  9 minutes  |  1795 words  |  Carmen Bianca Bakker  • Other languages: Esperanto

I like to read GNU/Linux hobbyist forums from time to time. Partially to keep up with all the changes that are constantly happening within the lovely world of Free Software, but mostly because I’m just very excited about GNU/Linux. It is quite possibly the world’s biggest international collaborative effort, and that’s just mind-bogglingly cool—the idea that people from all over the world come together to make this amazing tool for everyone to freely use. [Read More]
Opinion  GNU/Linux  Free software