October 2009
Monthly Archive
The double standard
| Posted by Chill on 31 Oct 2009 |
If a man did this, the headline would read much differently.
Double standards like that bother me. Even if I understand that there is a historical reason for it.
But if some man had gotten drunk with a 17-year-old and 14-year-old girl and fucked them? He’d probably be in prison for life, not listed as a “vulnerable, drunk” man.
I’m sorry, when you’re 41 years old — woman or man — you know when you’re about to bang some 14-year-old. Vulnerable my ass.
Seizing the moment
| Posted by Chill on 31 Oct 2009 |
I just would’ve said to the onlookers, “You should see her when she eats at TGI Friday’s” and left it at that.
Power to the people
| Posted by Chill on 31 Oct 2009 |
Why every country has a different power plug.
What I love about that article is that it obliquely dissusses how power plugs were not an immediately obvious invention. Why, of course you’d just wire whatever you wanted directly in.
Obvious is only obvious in retrospect.
I feel the need. The need to read.
| Posted by Chill on 30 Oct 2009 |
The first commenter on this post is correct: you get better at writing by reading.
You don’t get that much better at writing by writing — which is not typical. Usually you must perform the act at which you wish to improve to actually improve, but in the case of writing well you must build up this absolutely huge mental edifice to have a chance at writing well.
After that is all built, you may improve a bit at writing by writing. But nothing — nothing at all — will substitute for years of intense reading. That’s not something that can be taught, unfortunately. It just has to be there.
Survive
| Posted by Chill on 30 Oct 2009 |
Due to my strange nature, I would survive this situation.
Panic is what killed those people, almost certainly. They didn’t think to put the car in neutral. There’s almost a 0% chance the shifter was stuck, and any car can be put in neutral while driving.
Due to panic and other factors, a large percentage of people who survive a plane crash perish because they are waiting for someone to tell them what to do.
Hint: If your plane crashes, get out ASAP and run the fuck away! Staying is how you burn alive.
And if your car runs away from you, don’t do what the dead dude above did. You’ll also get toasty.
My brain
| Posted by Chill on 30 Oct 2009 |
In some ways, I am glad I am not neurotypical — and strangely, even though I’ve never been professionally diagnosed, I don’t seem to fall anywhere on the Asperger’s scale. (Some would say I fall on the “fucking weird” scale.)
Trauma has no effect on me. I think I could probably be tortured and I wouldn’t come out much different than I went in psychologically. That’s often an advantage, even in day-to-day life which involves many small tortures all too often. Events and actions that traumatize others just roll off me like rain off a beetle’s back.
I don’t panic. I don’t seem capable of it. Like jealousy and envy, it’s an emotion I seem to have just no capability of at all. I see other people do it, and I wonder what the hell is going on. Whatever panic is or isn’t, it doesn’t seem to have harmed me to lack it. It seems to have helped me sometimes.*
I think I am moral. I value human life. I value human rights. I want radical equality. I want gay people to be able to get married, and for them to be able to be as dykey, femme, trans or fucking weird like me as they please. I want to be left alone, and for others to be left alone to follow their own happiness. I think the constitution says something about that, yeah?
That said, I don’t seem to have much of a conscience. I’ve never felt guilty about anything — which is why I try to watch what I do in the first place since I know I won’t regret it later. When people say, “No regrets,” I live that. Another emotion I seem to utterly be devoid of.
My worst habit is that I like getting revenge. If there’s one reason I’d probably ever go to jail, it’d be this damn bad tendency of mine. It’s a constant effort to control this. I’ve made several people in my life mad enough to kill me. Some would have attempted to if they’d found me while they were that enraged. Not good at all.
I’m not sure where my brain came from, but it’s an odd one. The emotions I don’t possess, I don’t miss because how would I know what I was missing, anyway?
*Once when someone pulled out in front of me less than 30 feet away while I was going 60, I mostly lost control of my car trying to avoid them and crossed the small median into the very-close oncoming traffic, my car sliding mostly-sideways and still doing about 45. My girlfriend in the car with me must have screamed, “Oh god! Oh god!” about a half-dozen times before it was all over. All I was thinking, in addition to trying to attempt to not die, was that I wished I could see what was happening from the outside.
“Well, that was interesting. Guess we’re still alive,” was what I said after all of the half-dozen cars somehow managed to avoid hitting us. She was a panicked, wrecked mess; gibbering, crying, and that was before I knew as much about people as I do now, and I thought I was more typical than I actually am. I just couldn’t understand what was wrong with her. Nothing bad had happened. It had just almost happened. Something to catalog for future “don’t-do-thats,” yes, but since we were both still breathing and unharmed, no big deal. The past was already gone for me — no regrets — and I still wanted to get some lunch. I’ve learned a lot about people since that time.
Trick ‘R Treat
| Posted by Chill on 30 Oct 2009 |
If you, as many people do, have a tradition of watching a scary movie on Halloween, this demented, deranged gem of a film is what you should watch.
It takes a bunch of genre cliches, mashes them all up, and produces something really excellent out of it. I know a film is good when I wish it had been longer, and I wish that one had been about two hours longer.
With nods to the Evil Dead series, 80s slasher and other horror movies, pulp horror comics of the ’30s, and a generally-excellent ensemble cast, it’s a surprising and fun movie that was completely buried by Warner Brothers — due to it being unclassifiable but great. Amazing how dumb studios can be. It did everything Scream tried to do, and did it far better.
Trick ‘R Treat is genuinely creepy, disturbing, in places laugh-out-loud funny, and even though it’s a horror movie, it’s obvious that those responsible for the film just had a lot of fun making it.
Watch it.
Catabolic
| Posted by Chill on 30 Oct 2009 |
How civilizations fail: catabolic collapse.
A more nuanced look at some ideas similar to Jared Diamond’s.
Cliterature
| Posted by Chill on 30 Oct 2009 |
This is very cool, but really, really not safe for work.
I wish male orgasms lasted that long, and I wish more women got to have more orgasms like that.
Linguini
| Posted by Chill on 30 Oct 2009 |
Really good article on languages.
As someone who has taught himself languages as a hobby since childhood and is an academic linguist, I hardly rejoice when a language dies. Other languages can put concepts together in ways that make them more fascinatingly different from English than most of us are aware they can be. In the Berik language in New Guinea, for example, verbs have to mark the sex of the person you are affecting, the size of the object you are wielding, and whether it is light outside. (Kitobana means “gives three large objects to a male in the sunlight.”)
Making up languages as a kid was a hobby of mine.
What I rock at
| Posted by Chill on 30 Oct 2009 |
I’m not a genius, but I am really good at certain things.
Wrangling, sorting and nearly-intuitively understanding vast quantities of information with alacrity is one of those things.
I think it’s an undervalued ability in society, though good businesses tend to value it more.
Because it’s people like me who can look at a project, or a business plan, or an idea and say, “That’s not gonna work.”
And the math and engineering types will say, “We worked it out on paper. It’ll work. Everything says so.”
And I say, “Everything but the fact that it won’t says so, that is.”
And there is much consternation and asking me to quantify why I know it won’t work — which I am actually usually able to do, though it is very, very slow for me — and most of the time, I am right.
Obviously, there are some fields this ability is stronger in than others. But in any field where human factors are vital to success, I’m usually far better at the engineering types than knowing what’s going to work and what’s not. It’s intuition combined with a vast storehouse of facts mixed with the analytical viewpoint I have on human emotion and thoughts.
No, I don’t bat a thousand. But I do better than people who are supposed to be experts, and that’s all it takes.
Concealed
| Posted by Chill on 29 Oct 2009 |
This is why I don’t carry a concealed handgun — because if I stumbled on something like this, I really am not sure I could resist the temptation to execute everyone in sight. In fact, I am almost certain that I could not.
Strangely, I think one reason the bystander effect doesn’t occur with me is because I don’t identify with other humans very well, though I often have a very good analytical model of their thoughts. But I don’t feel any of it. This is different than not caring what they think — because I have to care about that — but like Dexter in the eponymous show, most often I am pretending — i.e., my reactions are all good pantomime.
I don’t share his lack of empathy, but my emotional response curve is radically different than most folks — for instance, I seem constitutionally incapable of mourning the dead, even those I definitely loved while alive. (Sorry about that, dead people.)
That show has been good for me to watch. I am more like him than not, I think. I could never do the pre-meditated murders that he commits, nor could I kill someone in cold blood, but I do realize that I am faking far more than most people do, or could. It’s that “being an eternal observer” thing again.
Don’t worry, I’ve never tortured animals. I even put bugs outside because I don’t like killing them. But if I came upon a scene like the above with some hand cannon, I’d murder everyone who couldn’t run fast enough and I wouldn’t feel bad about it at all. It’d be like taking out the trash, and I’d go home and sleep as well as I ever do.
That’s not bluster, or an attempt at being macho. I stopped attempting that when I was about 12. It’s just knowing who I am. And why I really shouldn’t carry anything more than a knife.
Strange differences
| Posted by Chill on 29 Oct 2009 |
For some reason, I can easily hear and produce sounds in languages that typically only people who grew up speaking that language can hear and produce. No special training. I guess I was just born that way.
All the various Zs and similar sounds that Westerners learning Chinese have so much trouble with hearing and saying? I can hear them just fine.
I don’t know Chinese, but I can fake words like a native speaker. And when people on TV are aping a language with which I’m vaguely familiar — such as Spanish — I can almost always tell if they actually speak it or not, unless they are as good as I am or better.
It doesn’t give me the ability to instantly learn a language — alas — but it does allow me to have little to no accent even if I’m just faking.
I used the few phrases of Chinese I knew on a girl in China, and she started rapid-fire talking to me in Chinese after I did so. She hadn’t detected through my (lack of) accent that I didn’t know Chinese at all. I had to stop her and tell her in English that I was just faking. It took her a while to believe that, because she’d never met a Westerner with no accent.
That was odd, but cool.
Green wing
| Posted by Chill on 28 Oct 2009 |
Photo of dragonfly I took at Weedon Island.
Photographer is my bad self. Model is Carla the dragonfly.
Selling sex
| Posted by Chill on 27 Oct 2009 |
Because I see (consensual!) prostitution as no different than any other job to which you rent your body and mind, I have no real understanding of why it drives people like Amanda so nuts.
I mean, I know it’s largely because she feels personally threatened by it, but I have trouble understanding why she and all her loyal sycophants in the comment thread that followed distinguish selling yourself sexually so sharply from selling yourself at the highest bidder to a company who wants you to do other, far more demeaning things than fucking somebody could ever be.
Of course, a lot of it also has to do with how extremely puritanical Americans are — even most liberals — which is also partially responsible for Amanda’s reaction.
Selling your very soul to a large corporation == A-OK!
Selling sex for an hour or two, or buying it == OMG EVIL!
And because I don’t hate women, I think prostitution is just as honorable as any other job out there, and I would not treat a woman I knew to be a prostitute any differently than one I knew to be a stockbroker or lawyer or hair-stylist. And because I don’t hate men, I wouldn’t treat one who visits prostitutes any differently, either.
All because I believe in radical equality, not the penny ante version that Amanda prefers.