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Wednesday, May 16th, 2012
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9:04 am - More on the F word
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| Monday, May 14th, 2012
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2:28 pm - "To quote John Lennon, 'I don't believe in -isms, I just believe in me.' " - Ferris Bueller
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I am going to commit a great taboo, and kick over what may be a large and messy can of legless invertebrates here, and discuss the F-word at some length.
No, not "fuck." (What the fuck, are you new?)
Feminism.
So, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) chernobylred has this LJ icon. She is smart and interesting and says things worth reading; you should check her LJ out[1].
I find myself, if not actually embroiled in feminist struggles (which, by dint of my gender, I think I can reasonably and rightly be excluded from; other than being a short and somewhat bald atheist, I'm about as steeped in positional privilege as one is apt to be), then at least getting behind the car and pushing, if not at least standing nearby and cheering folks fighting that fight on and offering to behead those who wrongly oppose them. The entry linked there was not the beginning of this journey, but it's certainly an obvious splashdown, and link-chasing for it put me in touch with the inimitable bloggess Requires Only That You Hate, with whom I've had some enlightening, if prickly, conversations over on Teh Twitterz (mostly with ReqHate & Feminazgul, who, it must be said, has an awesome handle).
Some of that prickle comes from, to engage in some coy wordplay, the existence of my prick. There's a hardline stripe of feminism that simply excludes men; I'm less informed on whether that's a blanket statement about all genetic XY types, or if it's purely the cis-gendered. I take their point, but it's not going to stop me from shooting my mouth off for equal treatment for everybody; and a vigorous middle finger in the eye of anyone who attempts to Animal Farm their way into "more equal" territory. Whether that makes me a "feminist," a "feminist supporter," a "feminist ally," or just "not an asshole," I don't much give a shit. Of course, I'm not going to stop needling anyone who takes themself, or their -ism-identity too seriously, either; maybe that will end up with ReqHate wanting to fling me into a pit of angry bees or something, but that's okay. I recognize a kindred spirit who is willing and eager to say, "No, BECAUSE FUCK YOU," to get their point across.
As it says on the profile page: "Fuck this shit of 'respecting everyone's political opinions' - I'll respect your goddamn political opinions when your political opinions respect queers, minorities, women, the poor, and marginalized people everywhere. I have no obligation to be nice to assholes." - raeling
So, there's that; this has suffused a lot of the secondary conversations cassandrasimplx and I have, usually about the disappointment we feel towards the bottom half of the internet, primarily in comments made on Facebook by various folks of her extended social circle. I am, generally, bouncing between wanting to smack these people in the face with a lawnmower or brush up on my Proper Southern Etiquette and unload some mil-spec "Bless Their Heart" on 'em because they are, in general, working from the socially and intellectually handicapped position of being from Texas. (Look, I know some very nice Texans, by birth and by choice, but, goddamn, y'all elect, appoint, and tolerate some hideously back-asswards motherfuckers and their gender politics make the entire region (shit, the entire *country*) look bad.)
All of which is a big fucking pile of table-setting for a very animated conversation I had with a couple of women at my office on Friday afternoon. Nobody here ought to be surprised to hear that, if I work out with colleagues, I push them a little bit; a month or so ago, I went out with a couple of folks for a walk/run interval sojourn (they're newly active, I'm wearing my 40# weight vest; it was a reasonable workout for all of us), and in the wake of that, they (being a mother/daughter pair) have subsequently taken my name in vain turned me into a verb to mean "physically challenge with implied arduousness."
"You're not gonna Rafe me, are you?"
("That sound you hear is the sound of ultimate suffering; my heart make it when the six-fingered man kill my father. The man in black makes it now." - Inigo Montoya)
Sooo... yeah. They're popularizing the term among other gym-goers at my office, and becoming an unofficial cheerleading and marketing grassroots movement.... which I happened to walk in on Friday. "I've gotta say, I'm not really that comfortable with the term. I mean, my ego is robust and all, but... I really don't think that branding a difficult physical task with a close homophone to sexual assault is really anyplace I want to go, especially since it's my fucking name[2]."
I had the further realization that I've only worn pants to the office once in the last three and a half weeks. Utilikilts got OK'd by HR as being dresscode-compliant. A friend of a friend posted a "Kilt Etiquette 101" rant online, and, unsurprisingly, there's a lot of enthusiastic support for guys in kilts, not leastwise from the portion of the populace who thinks it's an attractive look. But there were comments made by guys who have been inappropriately kilt-checked, or who have heard, directly or indirectly, some pretty off-putting things said about their sartorial choices.
It's no shock that I don't put up with that kind of crap, and recognize that my pantslessness is doing double duty: on the one hand, changing perceptions of masculine presentation; while on the other, making the point, both to myself (as the object) and to those around me that the objectification of someone else is unsavory, dehumanizing, and generally not a cool thing to do. I have yet to bring out the rhetorical "nuclear option" of mentioning, "Would you say something like that to a woman because of something she's wearing? And if so, what the fuck is wrong with you?"
I find it a little weird that I am championing women's rights and fighting sexual victimization when, by all accounts, that conversation should be happening the other way. Just being acutely mindful of how pervasive this is, online an off, gives me an almost constant headache.
This shit needs to change. We're the people who need to make it happen.
[1] You should also totally get hip to the LJ of her paramour and partner in crime, mckitterick, who is both an SF dude and a muscle car aficionado; come for the astro-porn, stay for the V8 burnouts and chassis rebuilds.
[2] Later, one of them came up to my desk on other business, and I had to further point out that I had spent twenty years dealing with the fact that my given name is a synonym for "vomit," so, yeah, that's something I've got experience with and fitted luggage for baggage handling purposes.
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| Tuesday, May 8th, 2012
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8:09 pm - Too Smart for Kids: A Promise to the Readers of Fairyland
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| Monday, May 7th, 2012
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1:04 pm - We're wicked girls, saving ourselves.
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Originally posted by seanan_mcguire at We're wicked girls, saving ourselves.
Click the thumbnail to see the details!Wicked Girls being nominated for a Hugo Award made me stop and think about just how many wonderful, wicked girls I know. This comic is just a few of them. (Seriously. Every girl I drew, I realized two more I had forgotten.) Top row, left to right: Seanan, Vixy, Erin, Kate, Amy, Patty. Second row, left to right: Rachel, Kaja, Brooke, Betsy (with Arial). Third row, left to right: Devany, Teddy, Kirsten, Morgan, Emily, Torrey. Fourth row, left to right: Jude (with Frost), Tara, Bear (with GRD), Catherynne. Bottom row, left to right: Beckett, Teddy, Tara, Vixy, Seanan, Amy, Dr. Mary, Kate. I am sorry I couldn't fit more people into a single sheet of paper. You are all, forever and always, amazing. |
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| Friday, May 4th, 2012
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1:14 pm - Sage Words
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Originally posted by ceosanna at Sage WordsPosted/written by seanan_mcguire: Dear girls of the world today; There is nothing wrong with you. Everything I see, everything I read, everything I hear, is geared toward telling you that something is wrong with you. You're too fat. You're too thin. Your skin is terrible. You look too young. You look too old. You're too smart, you're too dumb, you talk too much, you don't talk enough, you're broken, you're flawed, you're bad. And all those things are lies. They are exaggerations. They are designed to pick on the things you feel insecure about, and convince you that you will never be happy unless you force yourself into their standards of perfection. They will tell you that you are weak; that girls can't deal with spiders or do math or love snakes or run nations or be scientists. They will tell you that you must be indecisive, flighty, more interested in the interests that are chosen for you than the ones that you choose for yourself. They will tell you that you have to change yourself to suit them, and then they will keep moving the goalposts, so that you're never done changing, and you're never allowed to be you. And they are wrong. They are so, so wrong, and you are better than the lies they tell you. If you are a girl, you are a girl. Period, finish, end statement. It doesn't matter what you look like or what you enjoy doing. It doesn't matter what your biological gender is or was. It doesn't matter who or what or why you love. All that matters is that you love, and that you accept that you are you, and you are awesome. It's okay if you love pink. Some girls genuinely do. I genuinely do. Once, we would all have been viewed as cross-dressing and weird for liking pink, which was a male color. Times change. If you want to own your own pinkness, do, and don't let anyone tell you that makes you less of a feminist. It's okay if you hate pink. You're not denying your gender or letting down the side, or anything else like that. You're a person, and there are a lot of colors out there to fall in love with. I recommend orange, green, and anything that sears your retinas. Frills and lace and high heels and makeup are all fine. So are denim and combat boots and tattoos. So is everything between those extremes. Collect dolls or knives or books or interesting rocks. Watch horror movies or romances or cartoons. Run races; go to spas. Eat cake or lettuce. Buy yourself a toy light saber and make your own wooooom noises while you wave it around; build a cardboard castle and chuck plush mushrooms at your would-be rescuers. Live your life, the way you want to live it, and understand that no one can kick you out of "the girl club" for doing it wrong, because you're not. You're doing it exactly right, and I love you for that. Corn maze love, Me. |
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| Sunday, April 29th, 2012
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11:00 am - Calling a spade a spade
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Let's just say it: The Republicans are the problem
Seriously, they've been spouting such outrageous idiocy for so long and have dragged the political conversation so far from sanity and rationality that, much like a rotted branch laying on some power lines, threatening to both topple the tree and disrupt service, everything will be healthier, safer, and better going forward if we were to simply cut them off and chop them up for firewood.
I may or may not be speaking metaphorically at the last.
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10:26 am - Free into cheap
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If you want to sample random workout supplements, @JackedPack (jackedpack.com) is offering 1st month free through May 1st: http://mbsy.co/bGS (note: I get $5 if you sign up via that link); the basic package is $5, the bigger one is $9.50
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| Thursday, April 26th, 2012
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6:02 pm - why it's worth continuing to support LJ
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Originally posted by the_siobhan at why it's worth continuing to support LJOriginally posted by clari_clydeat postI’ve been wondering what’s up with all the DDoS attacks LJ has been receiving lately. Signal boosting ingridmatthews:
Just in case anyone thinks LJ's downtime is just TPTB being incompetant, read this:
LiveJournal, Russia's blogging platform of choice, is sustaining biggest cyberattack attack in its history. Bloggers say the Kremlin wants to crack down on political discussion.
"LiveJournal, Russia’s most popular blogging platform, has been under a massive DDoS attack for the past few days. The attack has effectively wiped out Russia’s main refuge for unbridled political discussion, a hugely lively and extensive domain frequented by politicians, opposition activists and social commentators alike...
“The reason for attack is more than clear in this case — someone wants LiveJournal to disappear as a platform,” Ilya Dronov, development director at SUP, wrote in a post on his LiveJournal blog earlier this week. He said the hackers were hoping to push bloggers from LJ to social networks where “it's easier to fight individual users.”"
http://globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/bric-yard/russian-blog-site-under-attack
http://putinwatcher.blogspot.com/2011/04/cyber-war-on-russian-activist-bloggers.html
ETA, One more link, ganked from norwich36about the importance of LJ to russian bloggers: LiveJournal's DDoS and Russian Politics ETA, LJ Maintenance has released a map of the DDoS Botnet. And if you can’t get to the post by ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif?v=92.1) lj_maintenance, the map is at: http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=embed&q=http:%2F%2Fwww.livejournal.com%2Fops%2Fsecond_attack.kml&sll=20.96144,-38.320312&sspn=151.943385,95.273437&ie=UTF8&ll=24.846565,-29.179687&spn=151.155869,95.273437 If your computer is on there, they ask that you consider cleaning out your computer. Actually, even if your computer isn’t on there, it’s still a good idea to make sure your computer is free of malware.  |
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| Tuesday, April 24th, 2012
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2:13 pm - [Dreams] Nobody knows how to fucking drive
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That, apparently, was the theme of my dreams last night.
In the second act, we were in the car with my folks (possibly in our Grand Caravan, the last great family road trip vehicle of my youth), Dad nearly drove off the end of an under-construction highway bridge over some waterway or other, stopping with maybe eighteen inches to spare, and then having to dodge a slew of oncoming traffic across an on-ramp designed, apparently, to cause head-on collisions (seriously, who puts a single southbound lane between two northbound ones, separated only by dashed lines?).
In the first act, I was hanging out with Ivan and Chris and attempting to go somewhere in an Inexplicable Hooptie - a 1978 Cadillac Eldorado (off-white) with 26" white carbon-fiber rims and apparently no brakes, which I rear-ended Chris' CRX in... to no detriment to his car, but a crumpling of the front driver-side quarter panel, and the breaking of 2/3 of the arms on the left-rear rim of my car. Tossed it in the trunk, tried to roll on the replacement, and then both rims on that side cracked.
At five or ten miles an hour, a squishy and ineffective brake pedal is still really irritating when you're driving a land yacht of that magnitude, I tell you what.
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11:14 am - For the curious
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9:47 am
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Project: Snarky Robot Noir
Deadline: There is no whooshing noise approaching at this time
New words written: 300
Present total word count: 1950
Reason for stopping: Wordcount limit for submission
Mean things / Fun things: Electronic pickpockets and caustic banter
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| Tuesday, April 17th, 2012
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10:04 am - This is what questionable health looks like.
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Oh, hey, it's that time again: Time to complain about shitty metrics and half-assed testing mechanisms.
Let's look at the (un)surprising cavalcade of statistical anomalies that my sit-down with my health insurance review brought to light.
First up, we have a scale that reports my weight approximately ten pounds higher than the one at home, and, even deducting an arbitrary two pounds for clothing allowance (in my case, Utilikilt, workout shirt, and lightweight polo), it had me two pounds heavier than I've ever been, full stop. So that was a great way to get things started. I know better than to give any credence to those hand-held resistometers for measuring body fat percentage, but that didn't really quell all of the irritation at seeing 20.5% show up on the screen... which, given what I have gleaned from both my calipers and my eyeballs, is probably about twice what is actually the case.
Yes, I'm overweight according to BMI (28.3 kg/m2). Ah, yes, that modern obfuscation of height/weight chart, where it thinks everyone should be a weak, slender waif in order to be healthy. I have a weak, slender (but calloused), middle finger to extend to your worthless ass.
With those two erroneous data points fresh in my mind, it's hardly surprising that my as-tested blood pressure was elevated about 20 points (134/88).
None of that could fuck up my blood profile, where my fasted glucose was 94, my cholesterol was 116, and my total cholesterol to HDL ratio was 2.8.
I am going to outlive whatever asshole thought up BMI, and I am going to dance, poorly, but carrying a kettlebell, on their grave.
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| Friday, April 13th, 2012
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11:58 am - On Geeks and Prides
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Let us put an end to Geek Pride
Fair and good, but let us not put an end to focused passion, pride in achievement, joy in shared interests, and the drive to do new and interesting things. Bland automatons are no good thing (and that includes unthinking allegiance to geekdom, or fandom, or brand-dom).
The geeks may or may not inherit the earth (or, as postulated by Doctorow, be the only ones to survive a plague outbreak).
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| Tuesday, April 10th, 2012
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9:58 pm - Writing / WIP
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| Monday, April 9th, 2012
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2:01 pm - [Review] "Endurance" - Jay Lake
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A few months ago, my impeccable wit, and a lack of substantial competition, scored an advance/uncorrected proof copy of jaylake's second fantasy ninja novel, Endurance. The events of the first book in the series (Green) are referenced liberally, so even though I hadn't read that, it wasn't difficult to figure out the backstory (though I have no firm idea what book three has in store).
This being the case, there's a certain amount of middle book syndrome happening - all the ends can't, of necessity, be tied up too neatly (or at all), so even though there's a climax and a denouement, there's a lot of unresolved threads dangling off the end of this particular tapestry. It's solidly New Weird-flavored, with more than a whiff of China Mieville about it (The other of Jay's books that I've read also hew to this form and texture, with the suggestion of plenty of history leaning on things without necessarily poking through. It's not handled in quite the manner I best prefer seeing it done - Jay's got a thing for Portentious Capitalization Like Whoah in some places - but I think that's a conscious choice by him as an author to convey the way that the people of this world have come to interact with it (though this is a trait that's shared across all three alternate world-universes of his that I've seen in his books, so... maybe that's just His Stylistic Thing).
Less easily overlooked and understood is why it took more than 200 pages to point out that the one subculture present and prominent in the book are not even human. Maybe this was made clear in the first book, and was taken as given, but when it's hinted that the "Pardines" are different from the two main human races (one light, one darker), it's not made clear that they're CAT PEOPLE until late in act 2. So, uh, yeah... that might have changed how things were visualized and interpreted a bit earlier on.
Jay's doing some interesting-to-me gedankenexperimentwerk with these books, in that he's as vigorous an atheist as I am, yet this world (and especially the protagonist) is visibly and nearly constantly afflicted with the divine. It's a touch like Steven Brust's Dragaeran take on divinity, where the gods are beings who have just amassed power and presence beyond that of mere humans, but are still limited, and can be harmed, changed, or killed outright. It plays to the strengths of a non-believer's reading, since when a god animates or manifests in front of a character, it's kind of hard to deny their existence... though the gods here are flavored strangely and their motivations (as well as those of most of the characters) are an uneasy mix of "unclear" and "subtle." The motivations for most of the characters are fairly easily understood, if not always easy to sympathize with or grasp in quite the same way the characters do.
The narrator, Green, is a tough character to like. I don't think that's an accident; she thrives on self-sufficiency, and the erosion of that as the story progresses is a recurring theme. It might make some folks not feel particularly sympathetic to her (though even the most hardened reader is apt to smirk when she's concussed into being polite, even though it seems... neurologically implausible, shall we say), which is a hurdle that's tough to overcome in a protagonist. There's no shortage of interesting characters, in both senses of the word.
As for the plot, such as it is, there's an interesting conceit used to present it from the perspective of a character who is in the process of pulling her head out of her own ass, with varying degrees of success, as she lurches reluctantly towards motherhood (I won't call it "maturity," because there are frequent asides made to remark on the youthful stupidity of the narrator by, presumably, her older and wiser self in the voice of the retelling; I found these to be unwelcome interruptions, since I was having a hard enough time getting into the flow of the narrative without being reminded that the narrator was oh-so-wrong about something, with the implied sighs of exasperation). The plot doesn't so much reveal itself as wait patiently for Green to see that it's been wearing a pair of Groucho Marx glasses and waiting for her to recognize it, at which point, hijinks re-ensue.
If I'm making Endurance sound silly or boring, that's because I pretty comprehensively don't get it. It's neither silly nor boring in the telling; it's an attentively-crafted piece of work that doesn't fit anywhere in my head, except as an example of what a writer who is challenging himself can create. Basically, Jay has written the equivalent of what I recognize as pretty good lasagna; I just hate ricotta cheese.
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| Friday, April 6th, 2012
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1:53 pm - There is a lot of excellent discussion on the internet about gender today.
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That headline is used without the faintest whiff of sarcasm and irony. It is, if anything, understating the case because I can't keep looking back to see all the comments.
First, there's yuki_onna saying things about the disparity in reception and reaction to online expression of opinions women are subjected to, and as a corollary to that, [Unknown LJ tag]'s blog hosting a bit of extra discussion spurred by his sharing of her link.
Then there's nihilistic_kid taking on and laying waste to a couple of broadsides about spurious claims of misogyny. Bad writing is bad writing, and we're allowed to not like it for being bad.
And, lastly, there's a reaction piece that takes down a well-meaning Cracked article, which includes a passage, which I'll quote in a moment, that's applicable not only to gender discussion, but is more broadly the case when it comes to the state of play in the American political theater.They believe in their hearts that women are inferior, and fear that if they're disproved in this contention, their entire sense of self will crumble, because that sense of self is all built on being a "man". They get angry and mock other men they believe are trying to hard to be pleasing to women---genuinely pleasing, not faux "build skyscrapers" pleasing---but men who take care of their looks to be sexually attractive (they get dismissed as "metrosexual") or men who treat women with respect. Those men are seen as undermining the united front to artificially lower women's standards. It's not an accident that the biggest misogynists are the first to flip their shit at the idea of swapping out big greasy burgers for some broccoli on occasion.
More personally, I want you all to think about how society right now is actively hostile to women, and even non-heterosexual males, and do something to make it better. Sure, my girlfriend makes happy noises when I espouse arguably feminist opinions, but that's not why I do it. I have a mother. I have sisters. I have a niece. I have female friends. None of them are second-class, second-rate, or second tier human beings, and anyone... ANYONE... who treats them that way through their attitudes, politics, or otherwise makes themselves a second-rate being in my estimation.
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| Thursday, April 5th, 2012
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12:25 pm - Throwing things at the same wall
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Project: Snarky Robot Noir
Deadline: There is no whooshing noise approaching at this time
New words written: NONE![1]
Present total word count: 1150
Reason for stopping: Collaborator's bedtime
Mean things: Non-con mechanical coitus, snitches, hidden rivalries and resentments
Fun things: "It's like Gilligan's fucking Island with robots and murder," pumpernickel with Skittles
[1] Yesterday was background plotting discussion with my collaborator, during which we spent a lot of time hanging up those sheets that the green screen effects get overlaid on and sitting around with the characters and getting inside their heads and lives, without actually crafting any new action. It's how I kind of remember Drama Club being, where, once you'd been cast, you'd just hang out with the other actors, with everyone trying to get in character, to get a feel for how they think, act, and live.
Productive night without any actual productivity.
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| Sunday, April 1st, 2012
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11:08 am - State of the meat
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| Thursday, March 29th, 2012
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8:38 pm - How do my hands know?
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When I was a kid, and even into adulthood, my hands would spontaneously, for lack of a better word, delaminate in times of stress. Having more or less successfully dealt with whatever chronic factors were triggering it - I suspect a combination of life stresses and an undiagnosed low-grade gluten sensitivity are primarily to blame - that has more or less become a thing of the past.
However, one particular expression of this trait still bedevils me - on deadlift days when anything over 450 is on the bar, my callouses want to get the hell out of Dodge, leaving me with some tender red circles, to be caulked with chalk dust and Neosporin and secured with band-aids.
I strongly suspect this is nothing at all like what jaylake had in mind when, in Green, the titular ninja anoints the bodies of the dead with "the red and the white." Of course, since he doesn't specify, I can project inaccurately, but my inability to take most of what I read seriously isn't his problem as an author, it's my own ridiculousness as a reader. (Once I finally finish the book, I'll probably sketch a review here, as I'm finally approaching the endgame. I've been holding off doing likewise for the "Promethean Age" series by matociquala until I finish all the books in that cycle, the last of which I have recently begun.)
Speaking of ridiculous reader behaviors, I am currently in the process of reciprocally flogging my collaborator into generating their take on the opening of our shared story because, frankly, I'm anxious to see what kind of curiosities fall out of their head.
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4:19 pm - Best bad idea I've had all week
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User requests equipment upgrade.
"You may have this non-upgrade if you simply say 'Please.' However, if you would like the upgrade, you may attempt to best a member of the Help Desk in a battle of strength, wits, or cunning." ("Oh, you want a wireless keyboard? You have to run a mile faster than so-and-so.")
The expense of the upgrade determines the level of challenge presented. I foresee this into each department eventually becoming a fiefdom with their own champions, perhaps with skilled Ronin for hire across departments as a budgetable line item expense.
There might be a short story or YouTube movie in this concept.
Or maybe I simply need coffee and/or a nap.
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| Wednesday, March 28th, 2012
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8:40 pm - Is this what real writers do?
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Okay, I have no idea if it's a good idea to compare myself to real, successful, published-type authors, but there are a few of you around these parts, and you all have interesting things to day, and intriguing statistics to share.
Since I'm butt-in-chair and committing to my first novel-length thing (in collaboration, but still, this is orders of magnitude larger in scope than anything I've previously put to paper or type), I will do what has worked in the realm of picking up obnoxiously heavy things, and emulate the practices of the more-accomplished-than-me people in the immediate vicinity.
So, apologies to individuals named Lake, Bear, Priest, Valente, et al, from whom I am shamelessly cadging some bloggardly habits.
Project: Snarky Robot Noir
Deadline: There is no whooshing noise approaching at this time
New words written: 1150
Present total word count: 1150
Reason for stopping: Topped arbitrary 1k bogey set by collaborator
Mean things: Everyone fakes everything, offstage beheadings, shady finances
Fun things: Ceiling squid, robots doing the pee-pee dance
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| Tuesday, March 20th, 2012
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8:45 pm - Profiling
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Finally saw an image macro on the bookface worth stealing, so I have updated my profile page to include it.
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| Monday, March 19th, 2012
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1:10 pm - What the Feet
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Occasional side-effect of the testosterone cream I use is dramatic and fairly goddamned annoying swelling of my feet and ankles. This wouldn't be any big deal, except that I abraded about ten square inches of skin from my left shin playing softball Friday evening, so the swelling in conjunction with the scab means I've got a lot less elasticity in the skin that's pulled when my knee and ankle bend than I'd like.
Here's hoping a brisk walk at lunch pushes that unwanted fluid the fuck out of there, because, frankly, I have shit to do that requires the full use of my legs without springing easily-avoided protein leaks.
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10:52 am - Separation
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On Wednesday, March 1, 2006, at a hearing on the proposed Constitutional Amendment to prohibit gay marriage, Jamie Raskin, professor of law at American University, was requested to testify. At the end of his testimony, Republican State Senator Nancy Jacobs said: "Mr. Raskin, my Bible says marriage is only between a man and a woman. What do you have to say about that?"
Raskin replied: "Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible." The room erupted into applause.
[edited to remove irritatingly large image]
For anyone who remains unclear (read: willfully ignorant) on the subject, here's your clue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Establishment_Clause
"The establishment clause has generally been interpreted to prohibit 1) the establishment of a national religion by Congress, or 2) the preference by the U.S. government of one religion over another."
Separation of Church and State: It's actually what those "Strict Constitutionalists" are shitting all over in their zeal to make the United States a "Christian" nation. Knock it the fuck off. One, you're hypocrites. Two, you're assholes.
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(7 comments | comment on this)
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| Friday, March 16th, 2012
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1:02 pm - Just giving them away....
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This is why I will never write a best-selling fitness book. Here's the whole fucking thesis right: "Work out like a rabid asshole and don't eat like one."
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(8 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, March 13th, 2012
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9:15 pm - Fud
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9:38 am - The shaming room
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9:00 am - Silence of the hams
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I don't usually talk back to NPR, but when I do, I prefer not to be saying, "Wow, you people are fucking insane."
Quoting Rude Pundit for a sec here:
Yeah, it'd be fine to write about what backwards ass yahoos the Republicans are in Mississippi and Alabama, since a majority either believe Barack Obama is a Muslim or don't know and 2/3 don't believe in evolution, but why? Is it a surprise? Is there a spin to put on it other than "Goddamn, them's some backwards ass motherfuckers"?
Kudos to NPR for at least pointing out the, well... lack of intellectual awareness... these folks espoused. But, Jesus Christ, the everyday people they interviewed terrify me (not merely because of their divoce from reality and adamant desire to see their Invisible Friend run everyone's lives in this country) but because these are the folks who are motivated to vote.
Why am I always so disappointed whenever people live down to the unflattering stereotypes about them?
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(4 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, March 7th, 2012
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3:18 pm - Work in Progress [Writing]
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So, as previously mentioned, I'm working on a collaborative novel with AJ Aalto. Here's a bit of flashfic set in the same continuity, which may find its way into my contribution.
( Read more... )
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(3 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, March 1st, 2012
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1:42 pm - to quote n_d's tags, "fucka buncha that"
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| Wednesday, February 29th, 2012
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11:26 am - Word (as opposed to things ostensibly worth a thousand of them).
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So, there's been a lot of buzz at Job Two (J2) about Pinterest, since it is apparently the new hotness when it comes to social media things (I've seen discussion of it on both Cnn and NPR in the last couple of days). I have been resistant to bother with it, not leastwise because I have no fucking time for participating in social media interactions I find enjoyable (this, most notably; as well as my workout blog... hell, I've even been on FB and Twitter less of late because I lack the time or interest to keep wading through).
But, back to the Pinterest/Tumblr thing. The conjunction of Pinterest workchat for J2 and interesting human yuki_onna starting a tumblr of her own (here's an LJ crosspost from her tumblr, which is both interesting in its own right, as well as illustrates the points I will make further along) made me examine why, precisely, I give no fucks about them, where other things that cannibalized social mindshare in my circle of friends were met, instead, with hostility.
It's the words, stupid.
I'm not shy about being a visual media consumer; I like looking at interesting and attractive things, but I'm not overly concerned with sharing them unless they're exceptional-to-me, and I sure as fuck am sparse with creating them (see the aforementioned limitations on time, combined with a limited skillset which I have minimal-at-best interest in developing aptitude; anyone who's seen my captioned Youtube videos has been exposed to about the height of my art). Because I don't create in the same space that Pintumblr seem to occupy, they don't get traction in my brain.
Look back at Cat's post - it's a pile of great words and interesting ideas, broken up with visual items. To some readers/viewers/consumers (pick your term, or choose a different one), those includes might elevate her essay; to me, most of them are distracting as fuck (animated gifs, in general, have a high bar to clear to not be annoying, since they constantly nag at my eye and pull attention away from what I want to be looking at; stills are far less demanding and annoying).
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that the newest of the new social media and I aren't a good fit for each other, and I'm fine with that. They are not cannibalizing all the words of people with whom I miss corresponding and discussing things; they're providing an outlet or expression for people to do new and different and interesting-to-them things that can be shared, or for them to share things they have found.
I, personally, am not a huge proponent of saying, "Hey, look at this shiny rock I found! Now look at this one! And this one!" all the time; we're not corvids, people. Sharing cool stuff is what the web in general, and social media in particular, are for, yes, but these aggressively sharing-centric services have dialed things way too far towards the "noise" end of the signal-to-noise ratio for me to pick up any signal at all, and I'm not in a position to bother building, buying, or developing a more finely-tuned antenna for them. I've got a perfectly good cable service that I'm not using as it is (both metaphorically and literally; I should probably see about downgrading my television service to stop wasting money on it).
However, I did, finally, check out Pinterest yesterday, and it was clear within a very few minutes that I am not their target audience or demographic. It skews crafty and female, and I am fairly vigorously neither of those things. As I put it to a couple of J2 colleagues via IM, "The main page there is like being beaten with the contents a medical waiting room for no good reason."
Maybe the mud in which I am a stick is finally starting to ossify.
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(5 comments | comment on this)
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| Saturday, February 11th, 2012
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4:42 pm - "Do you wanna take a survey?"
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(Points to anyone who gets the subject line reference)
Else-LJ, friend asks:
Which fictional character do you think you're most like?
[my answer in the comments]
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(11 comments | comment on this)
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| Thursday, February 9th, 2012
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12:34 pm - My dissection of Senator Frothy Mix
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I hope Rick Santorum gets the Republican nomination. Because I want, once and for all, to shine the unflinching light of hard public scrutiny on the festering hate and stupidity that is the Conservative social platform, and expose it to be the bigoted, hateful, un-American travesty that it is, and has been... and that's without even going into the personal disgrace it will heap on this particular individual, who is so richly deserving.
Yesterday, speaking to a group of pastors and ministers in deep red suburban Dallas, Santorum said two things that succinctly sum up both the moral vacuum of the social conservative position and the compelling and pervasive lack of self-awareness exhibited by pretty much every politician espousing them.
First, discussing California's overturning of Proposition 8, Senator Frothy Mix tried to go on the offensive against the President (who had absolutely nothing to do with the verdict, but why let something like a little factual truth get in the way of your righteous indignation, Rick?).
Santorum said, with a straight face and absolutely no hint of irony, "The 9th Circuit decision yesterday said if you believe in traditional marriage between man and a woman and exclusively that it's because you are a bigot. Your belief of marriage between a man and a woman is purely irrational based on hatred and bigotry. That's what they just wrote."
Yes, you dumb fuck, that's exactly what they wrote. And you know why? BECAUSE YOU'RE GODDAMNED BIGOTS. Change the words "Man" and "Woman" to "black" and "white" or "Jew" and "Muslim" or "Blonde" and "Brunette" and try to tell me that it's not discriminatory. Anyone who believes that some legal contract cannot be freely entered into by ANY two consenting adults is a bigot, and deserves to be derided, shamed, and ridiculed as such until they shut up or join the twenty-first fucking century.
And, as bad as that is, that's SOP for the GOP - playing the victim from the position of moral tyranny (the current, ongoing attempt to cause a flap because the new health care insurance laws will require church-run institutions like hospitals and universities to provide health insurance that includes contraception and reproductive services to the women in their employ is so much First Amendment bullshit, it's laughable - which means that it's going to be a recurring distraction until and unless someone says, "Look, you ignorant fucks, the Constitution states 'Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion' -- and that phrase comes before the bit about 'or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.'"
However, Frothy Mix also came right out and admitted, in what could have been a fairly horrible personal tragedy, that he is pretty much entirely fucking useless in an emergency. Seriously, this makes Bush the Dumber's stunned expression while reading My Pet Goat look damn near competent in comparison.
Here's the transcript from NPR's piece on All Things Considered yesterday, so you can see the context, and Santorum's own ghoulish words... where he's playing his own disabled child's nearly dying in his arms for laughs.
WADE GOODWYN: Santorum spoke movingly of his disabled daughter Bella. He described how she stopped breathing at home one night in his arms, and he stood there stunned, begging her to breathe. His wife, a nurse, grabbed the child out of his arms, threw her on the bed and administered CPR. That night at the hospital...
SANTORUM: I got a call from my daughter Sarah Maria, who was 10 at the time, and she said, Dad, how's Bella? I said she's hanging in there. It's still touch and go. She said, Dad, Mom, save Bella's life. I said that's right. She did, honey. She said, Dad, you didn't do anything.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SANTORUM: I said, well, honey, Daddy is a politician. I talked to her.
(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)
SANTORUM: Mommy is a nurse. She saved her.
That's right, Rick. You're a useless windbag who couldn't think to do anything more effective than pray for a miracle, while someone who actually knows something stepped in and saved you from the heartbreak your own failure would have permitted to take place. This is your Republican party, people, writ as small and personal as it can be. The one claiming the moral high ground would have done nothing as his daughter died, because he was incapable, and was rescued by someone with the smarts, skills, and wherewithal to act.
Mommy is a nurse. You know, a health care provider. A woman. Exactly the kind of person you, and every political fucksock like you, is trying to prevent from practicing good medicine by being assbaskets about health insurance reform, health education, and restricting access to affordable care.
So, yes, please, Republicans - nominate this canker. Let us, at long last, lance the national boil of the conservative's lies and begin to heal the nation.
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(12 comments | comment on this)
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| Tuesday, February 7th, 2012
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9:16 am - Yes, people are idiots
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... which is a belief I hold, and which the author merely reinforced. ;-)
http://tacit.livejournal.com/371690.html
However, despite fucking up some census statistics (476,000 is nowhere near 11% of the US population; I smell a dropped digit or two, as did another commenter), I did learn, via link chasing, that HOLY SHIT COAL POWER IS WORSE THAN I KNEW. Jeez.
It also, of course, reaffirmed my belief that the abolition of political parties, and the requirement that any candidate for public office go on the record with their positions on each issue, and run independently, denying voters the lazy, intellectual shortcut of "voting the ticket" is, ultimately, a good thing.
I grudgingly agree that the author's central article, about framing a conversation, is something that folks I tend to agree with politically tend to suck at, relative to people with whom I disagree on that spectrum.
Nothing new to see here, please move along.
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Monday, February 6th, 2012
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10:28 am - Technical defenstration
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So, this has not been my fortnight for things that can break:
1. Refrigerator died, and has subsequently been replaced
2. Netbook slipped off a chair and now the screen works only intermittently (bought used, out of warranty, not self-serviceable)
3. Notebook (purchased as a refurbished item, to replace Netbook, see item 2) was delayed in delivery, and, less than 24 hours after arriving, fell off a bench, bending the frame and cracking the fascia around the screen. It works fine, it just bends the screen ominously when opened/closed.
3a. I'm on the hunt for a Windows Twitter client that doesn't suck. Tweetdeck beta is my preference, but I haven't found a way to snag it yet (the official 1.2 version sucks, and doesn't do what I want; Seesmic doesn't offer source filtering, because I give negative fucks about Foursquare and GetGlue and myriad other automatic app updates). Suggestions hereby solicited.
4. The frame of my futon split in two places last night while my folks and I watched the Super Bowl. What looked like a single 1x6 board was, in fact, a glued-together thing with a finger joint. My dad and I spent the best part of the second quarter drilling, screwing, and taping it back together.
5. Main computer continues to freeze up intermittently for no clear reason, as application and service logs show no faults. Current theories are video driver flakiness or a possibly-failing SSD OS boot drive. Irritating.
Also, replaced the hot water tank at the house, not out of any impending failure, but because gifts of a practical and durable sort are just how my family rolls, so I have a new, efficient, 40 gallon unit instead of the old 25 gallon one. I am looking forward to taking an actual long, hot bath without being hot-water constrained when it comes to depth.
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