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
So Fetch
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.
…modding?
I’m calling it giving the dirstro top surgery from now on
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.
Is “ricing” not originally related to customised cars from street racing or something?
It is not, as I learned 18d ago https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/12165688
Riced out is an adjective denigrating a badly customized sports car, “usually with oversized or ill-matched exterior appointments”. … Examples of “rice burner” used literally, meaning one who burns rice or rice fields, as in stubble burning, date to 1917. In 1935 it appeared in a US newspaper caption with a racial connotation, disparaging East Asian people. … In some cases, users of the term assert that it is not offensive or racist, or else treat the term as a humorous, mild insult rather than a racial slur.
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.
rizzing?
Pixel polishing. A term we use for frontend code at work (all backend developers).
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?
Isn’t it the same as tuning?
Although it’s unclear what tuning is because it depends on who says it:
- It does mean doing modifications to a vehicle for actual performance improvements
- It’s used extensively by ricers to describe themselves and their hobby and they think it’s a positive term
- It’s used extensively by people who dislike ricing and most definitely as a derogatory term
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.
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
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.
And extra ambiguity for people talking about polishing their deck while also pronouncing it as dick>
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. 😉
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Yeah, mods are power-tripping.
Gonna need a new Linux community soon.
Yeah always nice to be censored for stating facts
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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
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This comment shouldn’t have been removed.
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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
Zhush/zhoosh could work - I don’t think the word is commonly used enough that it would get confusing.
@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?
ricist
Edit: aparently it has chinese origins about modding cars so it is racist (?).
The origins are in reference to asian-americans customizing their cars as “ricing” them.
