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.
(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).
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?
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
Can’t people refer to it as their personalized setups? Or is that too hard to write?
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.
Yeah but that’s missing the flair required by people who spend their evenings adjusting the radial blur on the window borders.
Maybe call it a ‘ride’? It would still be a car reference, think about how people talk about cars as their ‘rides’. At least to my understanding, calling a car a ‘ride’ also implies some level of the car being special. ‘ride’ is also only 4 letters, and isn’t any harder to type, some of the other comments have really long terms which are a bit annoying to type.
On the negative side it is also 1 letter away from ‘rice’, so that might not be ideal.
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.
Customization is good!
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.
opening the linked thread like:
Anyways I’m gay and transgender, so I’ve decided that from now on I’m saying that I’m transing my desktop.
Jokes aside, going from repressed neutral boy clothes to vibrant and colorful girl clothes and makeup and feeling cute has been such a great part of transitioning. This is kind of how I see customizing my desktop now. It always comes with such boring dry defaults, so I trans her gender and give her a makeover and now my computer is all pretty. So I’m sticking with transing.
So Fetch
Please report posts & comments that make use of the term on lemmy.ml; we remove them.
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!
Oooh so I’m not the only one who uses (used) refind with Gentoo!
Many daily-used words come from derogatory older meaning, it does not mean the current word with its current use is racist
Yeah, mods are power-tripping.
Gonna need a new Linux community soon.
Yeah always nice to be censored for stating facts
Personally I don’t feel either way about this stuff being racist or not. I’m an Asian and I am completely unaffected. But I do think that some people are, and it’d probably be nice to help those people vs. ignoring them.
For git master specifically, it was based off of a foggy memory of something in my RSS feed, and I was just pointing out that it was something that some companies addressed.
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
The only insult I know of this “ricing” term is, that its meant to be pretty only without performance. This comes from ricing Japanese cars. It is not racist and has nothing to do with Japanese people. The insult has nothing to do with that.
Here I am, an Asian, reclaim it to be neutral meaning. I will still use ricing.
Go check any English Asia Linux Group, especially on YouTube and Facebook Group, people are using ricing neutrally.
Language change with time, and making it neutral is totally fine and okay.
This comment shouldn’t have been removed.
lol even funnier that this western-centric Lemmy removed my comment about ricing, while actual Linux community CJK countries or English Asia does not recognize it as a slur and use ricing neutrally. Basically reclaims it.
White knight syndrome so much.
Yeah I hope it gets reclaimed too! Kind of like how queer got reclaimed.
Idk I’m still trying to fully grok it. This community does suggest it should be changed, so maybe we could just have a good replacement in-house?
edit: added in-house
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
Personally I’d put a higher priority on stamping out that use of “porn”.
Agreed. This term “unixporn” bugs me. I cannot recommend those platforms to anyone, because of the direct use of “porn” term. Its like kiddies made up the term unixporn or something…
LOL yeah that’s a nice thing to put in the company search history
Dots!
I love the idea, it covers most instances of extreme customization in Linux.
I dotted up my dwm install?
Its kind of verbable :p
Like dotfiles. Where most of the customizing happens.
