Profile picture description: Drawing of Gwen created by Ethan Kocak.
Drawing shows me, a pale white nonbinary person, with a completely shaved undercut on the left side and long red hair on the right. I'm wearing a black t-shirt with the words "Still too close" on it, and behind me there are abstracted syntax trees against a blue background. The border of the picture is surrounded by an agender flag: black outer stripes, then light grey, then white, converging on a light green middle stripe.
I suppose I never properly introduced myself. I'm a postdoc at UC Davis and I study sentence processing, visual cognition, and vision-language interactions. I post about my work, but more often I share personal content (jokes, puns, opinions, comments on politics, etc.) rather than keeping my account strictly professional. If that's not your thing, I understand! I share my professional posts on the public timeline and keep everything else private or unlisted.
video game, mention of predatory academic journals
interesting that the space capitalism hellscape atmosphere reminds me of present day academic publishing, and by interesting I mean extremely telling.
video game, mention of predatory academic journals
I've been playing Hardspace: Shipbreaker, and every time I hear "valuable object processed", I can't help but think it sounds like something a predatory journal would write in an email, along the lines of "Greetings of the day! We await your precious article".
complaining about blockchain, techbros; mention of Discord
it's infuriating that techbros thought the next innovation in internet technology was blockchain garbage—wasting a bunch of time and fossil fuels on that—when they could have been adding the ability to use Discord-style spoiler tags everywhere
gender thoughts, excerpt from a news article with some parental transphobia, countered by the child's awesomeness
inspired by this iconic young trans person
death of a bad browser, spooky behavior
today, the day after Internet Explorer's death, I double-clicked on an .xml file expecting it to prompt me to choose a program to use to open it—ready to select Sublime text when prompted—but instead the file opened in Internet Explorer. it was the first time I can remember that I've seen it open organically in years, but it's supposed to be dead. spooky.
USPol, January 6th commentary
It's not news to me that those two are terrible people, but the context certainly accentuate their terribleness.
USPol, January 6th commentary
" … they were the people who couldn't be fired, and yet they left the job of convincing Trump not to try and dismantle democracy to people who could be fired, and I think that raises very serious questions about which team they were on." - Andrea Bernstein on The Brian Lehrer Show
USPol, January 6th commentary
"Jared and Ivanka were constants. Trump wasn't going to fire them, they were family. And what became apparent in last week's hearings is they were in a position to convince the president to take an alternate course, and there doesn't seem to be evidence that they played an incredibly active role..."
quote from blog post about conservative backlash to correct pronoun use
One of my favorite arguments from the piece: "Honoring gender pronouns is becoming a common practice in the business world as well, and parents usually want schools to give students the language tools that will help them succeed in that context." https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/25/1559663297
(btw, I'm using canonical to refer to he/she/they etc., pronouns that are not neopronouns, because there isn't a clearly correct term for those that I know of)
Research area: psycholinguistics
Content: jokes, gaming, science, politics, & rights; posts are mine and not my employer's
L1: American English (~Philly)
I'm more likely to approve follow requests/follow back if you have info about yourself in your bio, and maybe some posts.
Other info: Mid 30s, happily coupled. Demisexual and agender. Please don't slide into my DMs. Boosts of my posts are ok unless otherwise specified.