May 2009
Monthly Archive
You’re not helping
| Posted by Chill on 31 May 2009 |
How an actual sex-worker feels about the idea that she is objectified.
I’ve always found it odd and dissonant when many of the feminist sites I visit conclude that each and every woman in the business of selling sex had absolutely no choice in the matter at all. (Some don’t have a choice, but that’s human trafficking, which is a different and terrible thing.)
I have some ideas about why this is so — in other words, what pre-conceived narrative it fits into their minds, but I won’t air those musings right now as the thoughts are too inchoate.
Secondly, everyone at their job is “objectified” in their roles. I don’t profoundly care for the cashier at the grocery store, but no one’s ranting online about how he’s being oppressed and “objectified” because, at work, most people see him as “a cashier”. I don’t care to delve into the inner intellectual passions of the woman who made me tea at a cafe, but I’m not aware of any college courses being taught on the “objectification” of baristas.
Exactly. Anyone who works is selling their body (and worse, their mind) to someone else. Sex work isn’t to everyone’s taste, and I can understand that. Being an event planner would make me commit suicide in about a week. I get it.
I mostly just don’t understand the condemnation and pity sex workers get in the feminist community — and especially the ones who stand up and say, “Hey, this is exactly what I want to be doing! Right here, this job, I like it!”
And the response is usually, “You were forced into it and we know secretly that you hate it and they are just controlling you!”
Of course, a lot of this in America at least is our very puritanical attitudes towards sex and all its manifestations, and that dovetails nicely with the point I constantly try to make — and that no one ever gets much — which is that the left is very nearly as anti-sex in many cases as is the American right.
Because I believe in personal freedom more than I believe in preventing people from harming themselves (which is not what is occurring in this case, or in most sex worker’s cases, but for the sake of argument….), I just don’t see how condemning sex workers — and the men who frequent them,* for that matter, another common theme — helps anything at all.
*A common trope is that men who visit sex workers are looking to punish or humiliate women, or that the economic exchange itself is humiliating (then in that case so is work of any type), but nope, most men are just looking for sex. Simple as that. Duh.
Logos, not pathos
| Posted by Chill on 30 May 2009 |
It’s strange how logo design moves in trends.
That’s why it’s possible, I guess, to date a photo if there is any store logo (even if the brand is unknown) to within a decade or so.
Sam
| Posted by Chill on 30 May 2009 |
Looks like Sam Raimi is back in form again.
But like in the “Evil Dead” movies, there’s a turning point in this one where Christine starts aggressively seeking ways to save her own hide. It’s not quite the Ash “take a chainsaw and hack off your own possessed hand, which you then fight with a shotgun” moment, but it’s close and got as big a reaction from the audience. Once Christine (and Ash in the “Evil Dead” movies) crosses that line, it’s Game On, and you get a horror movie that really is what it should be—a real, escalating, nutty battle between the evil forces and the protagonist.
It’s odd to me too that most characters in horror movies never reach that point, where they go beyond passivity and idiocy and go to town like Jackie Brown on their foes — because for me, it doesn’t take much to reach that point even in real life*, and when demonic shit starts attacking me I’m sure that point would occur much sooner.
Very cool. Evil Dead II is one amazing, scary, funny film and if Drag Me to Hell is even a quarter that good, it’ll be worth seeing.
*I’m not a violent person by nature, and I’m not at all physically intimidating. I don’t fight because of ego or to prove anything. Someone can hurl verbal insults at me all day and it doesn’t even change my mood. But if someone wants to lay a hand on me or someone I love, I can be scarily violent. And the only unfair fight is the one you lose, so I use every dirty trick there is — ones I learned in hand-to-hand combat training in the Army and ones that they don’t teach you: eye-gouging, biting, impromptu weapons, what have you. I may lose, but at least one person who makes the mistake of getting too close to me is going to lose something important for good and is likely to never get up again to boot.
Locked up
| Posted by Chill on 30 May 2009 |
Marc Weber Tobias, the best lock-picker in the world.
Surprised some corporation hasn’t rubbed this guy out yet.
Ok, maybe some of those MSM criticisms are valid
| Posted by Chill on 29 May 2009 |
The hatchet piece that MSNBC put up about Sonia Sotomayor is embarrassing — for them, that is.
USA! USA! USA!
| Posted by Chill on 29 May 2009 |
Will the US be the largest First World country to become a Third World country?
In many way, we’re already there. We are the only Western democracy not to have government-provided health care for our citizens, for instance.
Wages are falling. Unemployment is rising. And we’ve signed over the whole country to large corporations, thus guaranteeing things will get worse.
Don’t see many ways out.
Depends on your mouse
| Posted by Chill on 29 May 2009 |
For all y’all using Windows out there, don’t forget to pick up a copy of WizMouse.
No, it doesn’t have anything to do with preventing mouse incontinence. What it actually does is un-stupidifies Windows’ scrolling behavior so that, as in Linux, BeOS, MacOS, and every other fucking sane OS on the planet, you can use the mouse scrollwheel on non-focused windows.*
Since at the moment I am playing around in Windows 7, and must use Windows at work anyway, this has made me able to cope with Windows and decreased my annoyance levels 38.7%.
*I always underestimate how much I am accidentally talking over the heads of people, since I live this stuff. What it means in practical terms is that if you have two windows open, say side by side or overlapped (but not completely covering the other), then you can use the scroll wheel of your mouse without clicking on the window or windows not selected. In the OS world, “selecting” a window is called “focusing” it. I find it hard to live without this minor but eminently sensible feature.
Wave bye-bye
| Posted by Chill on 29 May 2009 |
She blinded the science with uncertain data
| Posted by Chill on 28 May 2009 |
Reading this, it strikes me that one of the basic, unavoidable biases of science is the practice of discarding unmeasurable data, no matter how obvious its existence and effect.
I understand why this is so. It’s hard to see how it could easily be any other way. But that it distorts some fields massively is also obvious.
It’s not just scientists who do this. All humans do this — it’s natural to look for your keys where the light is best, for instance. But it’s most noticeable in science, when results don’t match predictions and everyone but the scientists in question are confused as to why — because their data is 100% accurate, dammit. Alas that it’s only 10% of the data necessary to know anything.*
*Of course, only a few scientists are guilty of this — usually in “softer” sciences — but they are usually the noisiest. And the failures are more spectacular, thus sowing unnecessary public distrust.
Terminators didn’t kill Sarah
| Posted by Chill on 28 May 2009 |
What was ascending to be the best show on the television was canceled. As this piece points out, The Sarah Connor Chronicles started off unevenly, got progressively better and then became a truly great show — sometimes amazingly great.
Episode 19 of Season Two is one of the best episodes of a TV show I’ve ever seen, right up there with Lost, The Wire, or Battlestar Galactica.
The scene the first article discusses is startling, distressing and magnificent, all at the same time.
The scene in the final episode, where she gets John Connor to lay on top of her, so he can help her open up her insides and do a self-test, is incredibly creepy and sexual and mindblowing.
I’ve only read in sf books a scene that perverts (and I use that word intentionally) your expectations and worldview so thoroughly; that operates on so many levels; that leaves so many moral and sexual questions a million miles below what you’d considered before. That sort of destruction of assumptions is almost impossible on TV, and that T:TSCC pulls that off even once, and so elegantly, is something I’ve never seen any other TV show do ever, actually.
Episode 19, though, is still the best in series, and worth re-watching. By comparison, I’ve never wanted to re-watch an episode of The Wire or Lost on my own.
Probably probable, certainly
| Posted by Chill on 28 May 2009 |
The probabilistic method hurts my head, but I think I understand it now after thinking about it for an hour or so.
Will write for food
| Posted by Chill on 27 May 2009 |
Grammar distinctions I know, but don’t care about:
1) Who or whom. Whom gives a fuck?
2) Affect or effect. Using these incorrectly has no affect on my understanding.
3) Good or well. I feel good about my choice not to sound like a pretentious douche and use “well” when someone asks me, “How are you?”
4) Between and among. I can’t even come up with a snarky example for this one, it’s so worthless.
5) Will vs. shall. I shall not give a shit which one I will use.
Posters
| Posted by Chill on 27 May 2009 |
An assortment of 2012 Olympic Posters. Good design is hard, which is why there is so little of it.
Cone of silence
| Posted by Chill on 27 May 2009 |
A truce in the perpetual battle between squirrels and humanity.