Gentoo baby
 

Two male Gentoo penguins in Sydney have become the proud parents of a foster chick. Penguins are quite well known for forming occasional gay couples in the wild, but of course they never get the opportunity to be parents. The staff at the Sydney Sea Life Aquarium tested out this couple with a dummy egg and were so impressed with the result that they awarded them a real one.

They built a circular nest of stones and one of them brooded while the other stood guard. Now the chick has hatched but no one knows yet what gender it is. The public has been invited to give it a name.

And here I thought you were starting to use Gentoo Linux.

I did briefly use Gentoo some years ago. Mainly I wanted to see if I could install it and I managed at the third try. But I abandoned it after a few weeks and moved to Crux. I mean, daily updates? That's much too much like hard work.

fedora has almost daily updates also.

Yes, but with Gentoo, updates must be downloaded and compiled (this is done automatically by Portage), or at least this is how it was the last time I used it, more than 10 years ago, and it took a long time to compile everything. I liked it as a learning experience, but I couldn't use 2 or 3 hours daily (or even more!) just to apply updates.

i didnt know that, i remember trying to install gentoo when i were linux newbie (2005 ish iirc), my hardware didnt allow me to install it tho. i dont remember what my boxes hardware were.

edit:
they should name it Linus :P

everybody vote :)

If it was not powerful enough, it's possible that it couldn't compile everything.


Or "Lina", depending on his/her gender (either his/her cisgender or the gender he/she identifies with ;-p).

Apparently they won't know the gender of the nestling for several weeks. But I agree, Linus would be a good name for a male.

How actually would anyone identify a transgender penguin?

i dont have a clue, lol.


i tried to find a site where you could vote for a name, didn't find anything like a online voting page.

Hmm, I gues they should ask him/her (and I find it very difficult to get an answer. Probably the penguin just won't care anyway ;)).

We could actually start a likely long-lived and contentious thread regarding gender and the roles they imply.

I am reminded of a powerful photo I once saw in "Life" magazine sometime in the early 60s. It was a lineup along a swimming pool of some 30 or more bathing suit contestants (I assumed, then, they were all female) and on one end was a beautiful albino girl/lady and on the other far end was a gorgeous, deeply dark girl/lady, truly almost black, and each step in between was a very small increment of skin shade. It was impossible to tell where one left off and another began. I was struck then, first, that skin color isn't a hard line but a continuum and then that expanded that into realizing what we think of as race is largely an illusion as it, too, is a continuum.

Perhaps oddly enough, only a hint of the concept that gender might be a continuum also struck me. I was, I guess, only beginning to become aware that the whole "Me Tarzan. You? Jane." thing was more than just a little a 2 dimensional cardboard cutout. Later I would learn enough more about historic civilizations to understand "Male" and "Female" were defined very differently by different cultures so it stood to reason that much of what we believe and expect is a cultural construct and not at all biological fact.

In a college English Lit class a guy wanted exclusion from an assignment because it meant reading poetry and he literally asked the (male) professor "How can a guy be manly if he is known to read poetry?". A girl asked him "Who defines your masculinity anyway?" and the natural but overlooked contradiction made me laugh out loud. The contradiction I perceived was that I was taught that the ultimate manly man was "his own man", "Captain of his soul" unwilling to be in any way at all submissive yet accepting that "decree" was an act of submission in itself to someones' idea of what defined A Man.

As feminism was in the News and, in addition to the typical male heroes like John Wayne, ladies like Madame Curie, Amelia Earhart and Tallula Bankhead (only years later did I "discover" Frances Farmer) had already been heroes/heroines of mine for their strong individuality and willfulness to do what pleased them, letting the chips fall where they may (screw the neighbors!) I already saw the revolt of a few individuals gaining some level of cultural support and in 1963 I attended the March on Washington (and no, I'm sorry to say, being 16 then meant no driving after dark so I missed one of the most momentous events of the 20th Century regarding Liberty and Level Playing Field, Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech) so I saw it happening in perception of Race, as well.

So, in 2018, I have to ask if a transgender penguin shouldn't be named "Vivian", "Pat" or "Charlie"? or should we totally revolt and name him "Lulu" or her "Grunt"?

I can't apologize for going off on this tangent and still be "a manly man" now, can I?

BTW cool article on current changing influences here - --- Masculine Stereotypes - Boy Talk ---

Gentoo (at least with "stable" packages which is the default mode) can perfectly survive with being updated once every few weeks. You can have daily updates, but why would you?

It has green hair, I guess.