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
Interface tailoring, desktop tapestry, jamming all up in my pazaaz.
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.
eye-rolling
Can’t people refer to it as their personalized setups? Or is that too hard to write?
Yeah but that’s missing the flair required by people who spend their evenings adjusting the radial blur on the window borders.
I have yet to see a personalized setup with blurred window borders xD
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.
I’m shreking up my arch install rn
Ebbin my neezerinstall until it scrooges
I’ve Farquaad my network stack!
You’re compensating for something with your network stack?
I just shreked my opensuse
Sometimes, I Miles Edward O’Brien my VM GPU passthrough.
So Fetch
The origins are in reference to asian-americans customizing their cars as “ricing” them.
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
ricist
Edit: aparently it has chinese origins about modding cars so it is racist (?).
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.
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. 😉
And extra ambiguity with people talking about polishing their deck while also pronouncing it as dick
rizzing?
Noodles - it’s a mess of dotfiles
I assume you’re joking - this is just a different food/culture/race association.
The idea of suggesting the word “noodles” doesn’t come from a racial point-of-view. I’m using “noodles” to describe the mess of dotfiles, which is like saying “spaghetti code” for poorly written code.
I guess you can argue it has a race association as the only reason we are coming up with a new word is because the old word is racist.
How about “pasta” then? That way it’s explicitly Italian instead. Or casserole? That actually kind of works, it’s a bunch of parts you mix together and bake to get something cool at the end.
Some people just want to be offended
what’s the association of noodles?
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.
I say lets keep ‘ricing’, I don’t want the one and only language we can communicate with being full of ‘wordmines’.
wordmine noun: A word that looks innocent or having positive meaning, but having a secondary negative meaning. The negative meaning is not known/obvious to the one speaking or writing it. Inspired by ‘landmine’, wordmine blows up your reputation when you use it, like a landmine blows up your leg when you step on it. Yes I made the word up.
IMO wordmines discriminate against everyone who is less familiar with English or American culture.
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.
Dots!
I dotted up my dwm install?
Its kind of verbable :p
I love the idea, it covers most instances of extreme customization in Linux.
Like dotfiles. Where most of the customizing happens.
Customization is good!
