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
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.
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!
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.
I’m shreking up my arch install rn
I’ve Farquaad my network stack!
Can’t people refer to it as their personalized setups? Or is that too hard to write?
The same car mod term in the 50s was ‘hotrodding’.
So Fetch
Personally I’d put a higher priority on stamping out that use of “porn”.
Oh god, this stuff is so tiring.
rizzing?
I’ve always used decked regarding to it.
Pixel polishing. A term we use for frontend code at work (all backend developers).
Customization is good!
Interface tailoring, desktop tapestry, jamming all up in my pazaaz.
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.
