Stripped Down

both long and has thematic symbolic trees who aren't plants and have legs

Fri, 22 Aug 2014 08:42:04 GMT

You know, this isn't right I'm sure, but a thought exercise on why in the movie Splash in the eighties, Madison met a woman who told her one, Annie Hall was so passe and two, her daughter was so lucky because she was anorexic started this. believe it. or. not.

( ruben, gout, mcdonalds, sugar, and the working woman in time and space: a reflection on the meaning of organ meats in the western hemisphere above the equator is that too vague? also, wal-mart. and thematic not-trees )

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your polar vortex is invalid

Mon, 17 Feb 2014 04:18:22 GMT

I need to get my rant out because why not.

I am so tired--beyond words--not of Polar Vortex Marks I, II, and III (so far), but of people who mock the South's reaction to the truly radical weather change we're experiencing. Yes, it's a mistake to read comments on any article on a news website, but when someone from fucking Buffalo explains how people in Atlanta are just stupid if they're taking this cold thing badly because where they're from they don't even notice snow at six feet uphill both ways, something snaps. Advice from those who live in an area with regular, consistent subzero temperatures during winter is blessed--seriously, you people are wonderful--but those who seem to think it's just a matter of wearing a few extra layers and everything's fine, no, it's not.

Note: okay, I had no idea how much resentment I had built up to need this many words. Huh.

( Here's the charming personal anecdote to explain why I want to set things on fire and not just because I'm tired of being cold )

( How does this relate: let me short version this. )

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in case this was up for debate or anything

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 21:31:30 GMT

Update:

On March 14, 2012, Texas will effectively strip one hundred and thirty thousand (130,000) women of baseline health coverage with the end of the Women's Health Program. This is after the October's slash and burn that stripped 2/3 of the budget devoted to women's health. The federal Title X is barely hobbling, and I'm not sure, but I think we had a woman called a slut on national radio and told she should broadcast her sex life publicly if she wants subsidized birth control.

I wouldn't characterize this as a war on women. This is more what I think we'd call a 'rout'. In fact, hands up, on a glance, I think we're tragically unaware we have already lost.

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yeah, no, and fuck you

Thu, 12 Jan 2012 02:22:14 GMT

Really.

On behalf of those of us who were and are single women on welfare with children in the South and at some point in our lives lived in a--I need to check the wording--"rural south USA in a welfare slum trailer"--and who do not think our population should be fodder for your smug little war on the word shack:

Fuck. You.

Are you fucking serious?

Are you comparing lower income women's lives--and since you used the word 'welfare', we all know you're talking about women, who make up the majority of welfare clients; women, whose choices and lives are limited by poverty and the difficulties raising children alone, without spousal support; poor urban women, a population that is statistically more likely to be battered by their male partner--to a fucking challenge using the word shack?

I suppose indywind felt it was 'problematic' to use the term 'trailer trash'; should I be grateful? Thank you. Your buddies in that thread who were so excited to read it--and that super clever "Now them's fightin' words!!!" jab--also have my abject gratitude that parts of my life--and my family, friends, and clients from when I was a caseworker who decided benefits for those renters of "rural south USA in a welfare slum trailer"--are being held up in humourous example of how southern poverty is totally like using the word shack. I feel as if social justice is on my side.

So, my night is shit. How's everyone else doing?

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the leveson inquiry

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 07:47:14 GMT

The Leveson Inquiry, link to The Guardian main page for all current information.

Back in July, you might remember that entire tabloid phone-hacking thing, which personally I found horrifying but considering the state of what's considered news, did not expect would actually be a thing.

Then whoa boy was I wrong. And in the way that has been building pretty much since de facto open season was declared on any and all parts of a public person's life--and the definition of that is subject to the question 'will it sell'.

On a certain level, I get why people aren't terribly sympathetic to celebrities being grumpy about having their pictures taken. When your yearly income is more than most people make in their lives, it's almost like an even trade; you get lots of money, but I get to humiliate you publicly if at all possible, but by proxy, so I don't feel guilty about it.

Which lets face it, the majority of the stuff that sells well is really, the equivalent of a lot of people getting together to pay someone to stalk someone else until something personally humiliating occurs so everyone can laugh at them with society's blessing. If you are not thinking of Britney Spears right now, please do so.

In other words the public's right to know does and should extend to whether or not Chris Brown's beating the shit out of women since, and I could be wrong, that's kinda dangerous for women who may or may not date Chris Brown and also for women who, say, exist on this planet. It's dangerous because domestic violence is a massive problem that gets women killed. Strangely enough, I do not see Hugh Grant's girlfriend's baby such a public concern that she needs to be stalked about it. I see that stalking as a serious concern, but if you stalk while carrying a camera, it seems to be okay.

In general, in countries with free press, the overall feeling is--and I know there are exceptions to this by county, by area, by city, by person, and a lot of variations in between depending on national history--to err on the side of too much rather than not enough. To have a free press, the price we pay is to live with it in all its excesses for the sake of its necessity. This is very popular if you are in absolutely no danger of being a target and really like gossip, because sure, they have money, but you can call them a whore and I don't know if you noticed the examples I used are women because overall they tend to bring all the readers to the yard.

It's not that men don't get hit in just as nasty ways, but there seems to be a more varied range that rarely includes their whoredom, their slutdom, their trampdom, their bitchdom, their inability to keep their legs closed, their babymamaness, their weight (because of a man), their weight loss (because of a man), their bad hair days (not hot enough), their nights clubbing (slutty), their bodies (not good enough), their plastic surgery (fake), their drinking and drugs and partying too much or not enough, too dowdy, too revealing (too slutty), too artificial, but sweatpants and no eyeliner are just pathetic while picking up some squash at the local market (secret lesbian??????).

I am perfectly willing to admit that some people love the attention, and for them, it's a conscious choice made because, well, it pays well. That's not a defacto yes to run anyone off the road in a tragic event because they were out with their boyfriend, though I'm probably overstating it, no one's actually died yet because the paparazzi chased them--oh wait.

I keep coming back to the thing about the phone hacking, because seriously, I never thought that would be an actual problem beyond some firings and a slap on the wrist. And neither did they. When the state of the media at any point leads the public to be surprised that blatant, disgusting breaches of privacy are not only being acknowledged, but like, treated as crimes, the media should reconsider its positioning.

And the public shouldn't be so surprised, so shocked, that someone thought they deserved to be protected. The public should also consider admitting that it's really fun to watch someone be bullied, chased, and harassed; it's not a crime, after all, and everyone loves this shit. Sorry, I mean, they like keeping up on the news. It sounds better that way.

This may be happening in the UK, but international news is global, incestuous, and three degrees of Murdoch in blood, money, or pun. In a really horrifying way, the media--and I say this with loathing--is most to blame for being opportunistic, money-hungry, and amoral, but to be fair, they've worked very hard to define themselves that way, so no surprise. But in all this time of what the media and tabloids can and can't do, it's helpful to note that--in a surprise twist--questions are being asked about the people who give them their information. You know, police officers, hospitals, public service institutions, government officials, because hello, the tabloids aren't leading these frail innocents into temptation and if only the wicked media stopped, the poor naive babies wouldn't dream of selling out their patients, their clients, or the public trust. Sure, reporters are there to buy it, but that doesn't follow anyone was obligated to name a price.

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one day, payment for goods and services will work or something.

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 07:14:28 GMT

I don't want to scare anyone with kids.

But one day--one day--you will be awake at two in the morning, trying to compile wireless drivers from binaries for his wireless card after installing Kubuntu on his laptop.

And while downloading binaries, you will get this error:

cryptsetup: WARNING: failed to detect canonical device of /dev/sda1
cryptsetup: WARNING: could not determine root device from /etc/fstab

And you will so want to go cry in the bathroom. You won't, as there is no crying in ubuntu, networks, and well, hell, but oh, you will want to.

You know, if blurays would just work when one puts them in their perfectly legal and updated Samsung machine and maybe, IDK, remove all those goddamn trailers, warnings, and random unskippable junk, I might never have learned the joy of hand compiling drivers in Kubuntu.

I get why people become hackers now. I mean, sure, there's the troll quality, but I am pretty sure at this point there is a sizable minority who entered the field by sheer accident due to a break with reality when they realized companies were selling them movies that apparently, the company deeply resented them actually watching.

...and Child still needs this laptop with working wireless tomorrow. Find me a political philosophy that requires corporations provide actual working goods and services for payments rendered and I will leave capitalism tomorrow. Or next time I have time; November 2013 looks good for that.

*dives back in with seething hatred*

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i'm not referring to the smell of roses

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 23:31:45 GMT

Okay, for the record, if one more person trots out a sweetly naive statement about how real names make you nicer and improve accountability, please for the love of God actually learn what the internet is (hint: it requires actually getting on it and not theorizing about it). Once that has been achieved, go to Facebook--I'm assuming you can find it--and look at what all those real names actually do, what groups they make--under their names--and what they say--again, under their names.

IRL we do shitty things under our real names. If empathy and accountability are supposed to be synonymous with real names, then your understanding of the history of the human race is fatally goddamn flawed.

I'm not going to defend pseudonymity by making arguments about all the reasons why someone would or should or could or needs to; no one should have to, since that's what life is.

We live IRL pseudonymity all the time; my son, my parents, my coworkers, my boss all use different variations of my name, my title, my salutation, some pieces of which will never show up on a driver's license or government record, and yet, somehow, the internet claims a higher fucking authority than the parents who raised me, the child I am raising, my boss, my minister, my best friend, my sisters, my aunt, my friends, my classmates, people I meet at clubs, people I meet in other countries, and what I call myself?

To clarify: google+ requires a higher level of disclosure than my actual honest to God real life. And it requires I give that to everyone, ever, in perpetuity.

Are. You. Serious?

I'm not so much wondering if anyone arguing Real Names for All has ever been to the internet, but exactly how you navigate real life at all.

Crossposted to google+ and LJ. I miss crossposting.

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this is just to say that add to cart should not end in tears

Tue, 24 May 2011 07:12:06 GMT

The longer I'm online, the more irritable I get with DRM and with pretty much everyone who deals with selling digital content, and my irritability grows larger the more I use actualfax money for it and don't pirate, which is weird, because when I was unemployed and welfare-esque, I didn't care, as the internet is for pirating.

It's like a weird inverse Streisand Effect; the stupider DRM restrictions get, the less interested I am in buying it. The longer it takes to get to the actual movie on my bluray, the more firmware upgrades I have to deal with, the fact it's to the point where I've become semi-tech support to do simple shit like play a bluray for family and family friends, the fact iTunes has a goddamn five computer restriction on some of my music, and did I mention the unskippable nightmare of playing a bluray movie when your remote control is being a bitch? Or having to suddenly firmware update that takes for-fucking-ever....and we won't even go into the fuck-upedness of region restrictions and grey market buying because then I wonder if every single person in the entertainment industry is just stupid or stuck in the fifties or five years old with a three year old's understanding of how the universe works.

Open letter to Every Person Who Makes Buying Movies, Music, and Any Digital Content a Losing Proposition;

Let me tell you what is not fun: learning the slow and horrifying way to compile binaries by command line in goddamn linux--LINUX OF THE MY GOD THEY CALL THESE USER GUIDES?--with minimal inline comments and some not in English and hard code hex codes so I could watch my own legally bought blurays. Because the firmware was being a bitch and I hit my limit on staring hatefully at my bluray player while it refused to play anything. We won't talk about having to grab the experimental version of Handbrake that required new and exciting educational opportunities in how to make Linux not crash when the nightly build breaks something important in the OS; we will talk about being really excited when I could configure it using an actual interface. With my mouse.

(Command line: whoo boy does that improve your spelling in sheer terror of what you might accidentally tell your computer to do.)

Let me tell you what was fun: watching my movie afterward with a sense of bitter satisfaction uninterrupted and in 1080i. It made my goddamn week.

Let me tell you what's expensive: hard drives that can hold bluray movies at 40G a pop. Baby, I am running out of SATA ports to add more TB hard drives. And possibly out of sanity when I start wondering if it would really be like, incredibly crazy to build a second server for load balancing (and um, because okay, that's so much fun: I want to have a server building party and invite everyone to bring their parts and have chips and salsa and cupcakes and bandaids and silver nitrate for the totally not going to happen electrical burns).

Let me tell you what sucks: could have torrented that shit for free instead of paying for the privilege of being so frustrated I crashed my server twice (Handbrake's nightly builds redefine unstable) and get my content from people who do this much better than I do and are magic with compression codes. As they probably know what the hell they're doing.

Let me tell you about me: I am your demographic. I spend ridiculous amounts of money on movies and music and I own a fourteen year old who isn't any cheaper. I am lazy and given a choice I like clicking "Add to Cart" rather than spend a month I will never get back with Dev C++ learning to compile and install binary libraries and parsing XML (Parsing. XML. Just. God.) to watch something I bought.

Let me tell you one last thing: what you are doing is really improving my programming. From the current status of torrenting, I'd say a generation could also thank you for that.

I'm lazy. Please stop making me educate myself.

Seperis

*****

...it's only overreacting when you've tried to update the firmware less than five times. What I'm saying is, Samsung, you are so close to getting a firmly-written letter.

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well, yeah, if by geek culture you mean men

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 01:53:51 GMT

Wake Up, Geek Culture, in which I think I am reading a geek shaking a virtual cane at people getting their anime too easily, too many people of the ungeeky classes being interested in geek turf, and remix culture because it's killing originality and then I got lost in the Etewaf, which is apparently really bad, but kind of sounds like my perfect life.

...I'm not sure.

I want to approach this from like, multiple are you kidding angles because hello, kind of my entire identity being geek, remix, and also, I like anime and God would I have killed to have access to it in my teens. Or like, knew it existed.

Academics have covered remix culture, and the mainstreaming of geekdom is like, a constant refrain everywhere, so not even going to bother, mostly because he froze me up at the Etewaf horror--very Lovecraftian, that--in which everyone has easy access to everything and that's like, really bad.

Let's not romanticize the past in which we had to wait for years and go uphill both ways to get our manga, okay? That shit isn't nostalgic; that sucked. It sucked. Yes, we had lively discussions waiting for new issues for about an hour and then geeks went to war, and geek war isn't like mundane war; most of us enter with a vocabulary not limited to languages that actually exist and a lot of us grew up beneath the thumb of mainstream contempt and high school bullying and whoo boy did we carry that into every conversation ever? Oh, we did. Harry Potter books had what, a one to two year wait or average? Did you see that fandom? And let me just say, thank God Star Trek II didn't come out during internet culture and have the waiting period before Star Trek III came out: bloodshed, people.

Geek culture was expensive; it was very much the territory of middle and upper middle class who could afford to import direct from Japan or knew someone who could if the titles you wanted weren't here. Even domestic products weren't cheap or easy; it's not that long ago that VHS tapes were this new and exciting thing that allowed recording instead of staring at the television listings for a hopeful glance of something not a rerun of fifties era programming and being really disappointed on a daily basis. Cable still isnt' universally accessible even in the US, and certainly not in rural Texas, much less internet. Working class geek meant used bookstores because hardcovers or even new paperback were for birthdays, Christmas, and when it was something my entire family would want to read (which luckily, we overlapped taste in a lot of things). Buying movies was an event that was considered carefully.

[I'd love to hit a real discussion of classism in geekdom because along with shitty race issues and shitty sexism issues, geek cultural development wasn't just white and male, it was white, male, and specific to certain economic classes as well. It's not that POCs, women, and the non-middle-class weren't geeky or didn't develop their own geek-related culture but geek as it is presented to mainstream culture is--well, white, male, and very obviously both.

[I'm still boggling at people who are utterly shocked that POC and women attended and still attend sci-fi conventions and are interested in the same things that mainstream geek culture is; yes, we've been here all along, and the question you should be asking is not 'where have you been' but 'why didn't I see that?' No one asks that, though. It's weird.]

Geek culture was difficult unless you lived in a city; I was a geek culture of one at my school K through 12 and you think your clique had it hard? Please. I never even met a D&Der until college and a LARPer after that. I met geek culture in college without any geek socialization skills--and we do have them, believe it or not--and I was the geek that geeks didn't like, since I was a feral geek who developed independently in the high school library reading encyclopedias* from 1976 because I'd finished the fantasy section before my freshman year of high school ended.

[* Encyclopedia Brittanica. Accept no substitutes.]

You city geeks had it easy, baby; the nearest used bookstore was one almost-large room and I was buying third rate sci fi where the high point was finding Mercedes Lackey*--say it with me, that was the high point--and Anne McCaffrey* and God help me that shitty Thomas Covenant series that I read in desperation because it's not like there was a lot of choice there. But also Sydney Van Scyoc was awesome with the first time I ever saw a sci-fi matriarchal culture that treated it with such utter, utter normality that I barely noticed I was being taught my first lessons in feminism. Also, no one was raped. New books were the nearest large city--forty miles away--or Wal-Mart--Wal-Mart--and we were so rural we couldn't even get cable, so I never had a meaningful relationship with Fraggle Rock and dear God am I bitter about that.

[I am not saying they're bad; I'm saying, think about a world where my sci-fi pinnacle was Anne McCaffrey.]

Yes, yes, the icky mainstream are all making your geek all less than special; those of us who, let me say this again, were reduced to rapey incesty Thomas of white gold ringness and the Gor novels unironically shelved beside the sci-fi aisle saw the dawn of Amazon.com, hulu, and bittorrent like the second goddamn coming, okay? I waited half my life to fall madly, desperately in love with a million things and Geek!Seperis of the dark days before the internet and access to Amazon would like to say, are you kidding me?

[I won't even go into women in geek culture, because being a feral geek, my early interactions with geek (male) culture were so off that I didn't get the joy and delight of trading sexual harassment for interaction and second class acceptance. My regret, it's legion, really.]

The days when geek culture belonged to the urban middle class male is over; we all own it now. Don't look like that; we're not saying you have to leave. See, we like to share. That's kind of the entire point.

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the children (of the wealthy districts) are our future

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 02:09:00 GMT

Picked up from my flist and also rage_free:

Woman Gets Jail Time in School Residency Case

Short version: she established residency for her kids with her father so they could go to a better school. She's doing jail time, has huge fines, and she's currently a teaching assistant actively working toward a teaching license and a felony strips her of both.

[Note: it has been reported the judge is writing a letter on the woman's behalf to recommend she keep her license and still be able to get her teacher's license. Not that a moment of not-quite-as horrible is an improvement, but at least there's a chance she won't lose her future employment opportunities while carrying around a fucking felony conviction.]

So this is where the defense goes, "I know it's wrong, but..." but seriously, even starting with that I'm already tuning this shit out. She did absolutely nothing wrong; those policies are evil.

Public school funding is based on and adheres to some of the least subtle and most defended racism and classism based economic policies that pretend they're about education and are actually about assuring that Black, Hispanic, and lower class children, of which many are those horrific single mothers who are destroying America, get an unequal education that makes it difficult to impossible to get out of poverty; I mean, that's the entire point of its existence. When people talk about how it just needs reform but aren't based on outright racism and classism, really? Really? Like what, Jim Crow laws just needed fine-tuning but weren't exclusionary by the very nature of their existence?

The system isn't broken; this is exactly how it's supposed to function, okay? It's doing a wonderful job. There is no bootstrap shit; kids shouldn't have to fucking bootstrap, period.

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tell me all about it

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 23:49:52 GMT

I've started this three times and keep erasing it trying to figure out how to put this. Every time I start, I kind of descend into really dry psychobabble I learned during intense study after my very first Psych class, when I found out there was a word--there was a concept--that covered what I'd been doing when I was nineteen. I was shocked and horrified and went along with vague class discussion, freaked out that everyone else knew about this--knew about this--and half of them were making fun of it. So I read. I read and read and read and I still don't know more than I started, just like I didn't know then that there wasn't something seriously wrong with me that I couldn't talk about to anyone, ever, not my best friend, not my boyfriend, not the people who were around me when it happened, not anyone after.

The first person I ever told about it was svmadelyn. The second was chopchica. Then I could talk about it. Sort of.

( this is definitely triggering for self-harm )

I feel better. Ranting, I admit, isn't as good, but there's a lot less clean up.

Also, person who might not want to be named in my DW/LJ but had surgery for gall bladder, update me! I can't find the comment or the email, because I haven't read most of it. I should get caught up on that.

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so this word 'weakness', it's not working for me

Tue, 11 May 2010 04:58:28 GMT

Potentially triggery, kinda ranty:

( so this began with one word )

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stop me if you've heard this one already

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 01:50:31 GMT

So right, it's been a couple of weeks since homophobic school administrators in Mississippi were dicks to a lesbian student, and I think they were feeling like, you know, worried people might not remember that there are people that live in that state that are assholes? But how, they asked themselves, mystified, can we top those bastions of homophobic light that fucked up the senior prom for Constance McMillen? That's a level of pettiness that can't easily be reached, but by God and every badly misinterpreted Bible quote, they will find a way, and it will be mindbogglingly stupid.

There's the senior yearbook! It's like, genius. Or something.

School Cuts Gay Student From Yearbook. Contact information can be found here.

Okay, just...no, I'm not even going to try on this one.

Dear assholes,

You'll never regret this. You will never see what you did was petty, stupid, and wrong on levels usually reserved for third grade girls and being excluded from a slumberparty. So, stick to those principles! Be loud about it and proudly refuse to back down an inch. You know, in court.

Have fun with that.

Seperis

( so they tell me this is how it happens )

So yeah. I'd like the luxury of preaching patience; it's so easy when you don't have anything to lose.

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no comment. i mean, what can you say?

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 19:28:52 GMT

Update to my post about that Sacramento radio show that encouraged beating of transgender children:

Bank of America is fourth advertiser to pull out, a list that includes Chipotle, Dr. Pepper, and Sonic.

Found on Unfunny Business at Journalfen - everything you need to know to keep up and make contact and be a drop of water in the bucket. An awesome bucket of social justice and non-stupidity.

Adding: so I googled the news on this one, in that way I hope for chocolate falling from the sky, I really wanted to see them fired.

Well, I didn't find that. From 98Rocked:

"You guys imply that all you have to do is...whack my non-existant child with a shoe if he goes clopping around the house in high heels," commented a listener who identified herself as a male-to-female transgender who previously had served in the US armed forces for 22 years. "Don't you think that all the abuse that I took in school would have changed that basic nature in me?"

"Thank you for your service, but let me just say this right now," quipped an angered States. "You fought (in the armed forces) for nothing! With the opinions that you have right there, you fought for absolutely nothing!"

I'm so glad Arnie States clarified that for us. Also, he just baited a 22 year military veteran.

....yeah. Good luck with that.

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this is why i have to stop reading the snark comms and cnn

Fri, 05 Jun 2009 02:03:56 GMT

For those who haven't seen this yet and have a problem with low blood pressure, so skyrocketing it would be a good idea:

GLAAD calls for apology from "Rob, Arnie & Dawn Show" for encouraging the beating of transgender or questioning children

( venting )

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