Kaminiwa

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Courtesy of Slashdot commentary:

A game of hang man...

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Or virtual snuff porn? You decide.

[Note to UK police officers reading this - 
 Mr Hangman is at least 18 years of age.]

"Major categories of abusers who target autistics include: Sexual Abusers (e.g. pedophiles)"

...

1) Autistics are not all children. Given this is from an article offering autistic's dating advice I would even think the author understood this.

2) Pedophile means "sexually attracted to underage people." Take a moment to look it up. I'll wait. Now then, "sexual abuser is to pedophile" as "rapist is to heterosexual." Just because someone has a sexual attraction doesn't mean they're a rapist, molester, abuser, or otherwise acting on it.

It doesn't mean I like it (there are in fact quite a few sexualities I find baffling, or just don't share an interest in) but it's hardly a reason to demonize people. If we want to objectify evil sexual monsters, is it really so hard to say "child molester" as is actually meant?

ETA: The linked article has a hundred other rant-worthy flaws, those two just irks me because they get repeated so often in society.

Every once in a while it hits me how insanely cool our technology is compared to ten years ago. I feel silly admitting it, but the most mind-blowingly cool thing I've encountered recently? My milk was ultra-pasturized.

I mean, seriously, when did milk have a MONTH before it expired? Wow! o.o

I always forget to use this for the little life updates, such as "I'm moving, as of Sunday (tomorrow)". Aheh. Oops! Candlelight is being dismantled as I write this, as Marie is moving out and thus my couch to surf on is vanishing. Amber has been awesome and offered me her couch as my next residence, and that's good for the next couple of months.

And in the Neverwhen, Paradox did bless a supplicant, and gave him the secret of Undeath - to die and yet not be dead, the paradox of life within death. In this act of creation, the raised bodies became her avatars, the liches her high priests. She smiled upon the world, for it served her well.

And in the Neverwhen, Paradox did scheme, that if life and death could be so altered, what else might She create? And in this thought was birthed the Shells, those who yet live, yet without essence or vitae, their minds cleansed. An as the undead spread, so to did the shells, each one teaching the path to enlightenment, opening the door that the soul might be free of body.

Thus it is, a plague of boddhivista now threaten this land. Destroy them, without compassion and without mercey, as you would the skeletons raised by necromancer. They are no longer the ones we remember.

So I have an abstract sense of how to take an argument or debate and view it as "geometries" rather than "linguistics", and this helps me understand it. It's been a very intuitive process, but fairly success. The problem being that telling someone "Oh, I rearranged my surfaces to line up with theirs and then it made sense" is not, itself, a useful sentence (nor is "looking at the geometry", etc. :))

So, trying to concretize the notion, and thus also share the process:

( Read more... )
This is pretty much the process I go through when I want to give an in-depth reply on something controversial, and it's a skill set I've been deliberately practicing and improving over the years.

I've found that thinking of it in terms of "geometries", shapes and surfaces and threads, helps me get a nice intuitive visualization of all of it at once, rather than having to work through it step by step.

I've also found that, by having it as a visualization, I can kinesthetically "manipulate" things - taking pieces of the visualization in my hand and rearranging things to make more sense, sorting out various threads and tracing interconnections and rotating the whole picture to get a new perspective, until my geometries line up well enough with the original speaker's that I feel like I can actually respond.

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Edit: It's also worth noting that this entire process is incredibly exhausting - despite having worked most all of this post out with a friend, rewording it in to a post took me 30 minutes and left me utterly drained ^.^

So apparently Skynet Google has zero results for xenoentomophilia! This, despite my having come up with the idea years ago, with the help of a "friend" who will be graced with anonymity (unless they choose to fess up). So, well, the xenoentomophila chat log!

[01:28] grunt423: I just wrote Xenoentomophilia porn. In detail. To the point that I got someone *else* turned on. Let this be a lesson not to question my madness :)
[01:30] Anonymous2: Okay, that word doesn't even come up in a Google search, so I am *so* not asking.
[01:32] Anonymous2: *cuts out "xeno"*
*finds "sexual arousal by insects*
*kills you*
[01:32] grunt423: Xeno means "alien", by the way.
[01:33] grunt423: So it's actually sexual arousal by insects FROM BEYOND THE STARS

Babbage engines are absolutely awesome. My computer classes never taught me to program one.

Shakespeare wrote some wonderful stuff. My English teachers were all obsessed with him.

One of these disciplines understands the notion of "progress" and the other seems to believe that the world will end if they included manga or sci-fi in their classes.... I am all for understanding history, but can we perhaps accept that the world has in fact moved forward in the last century?

Randomly browsing freelark's journal, there was an analogy that helped me make a bit more sense of "racism vs bigotry": Class seems a very good place for distinguishing "instutitional oppression" vs bigotry. Lots of peple are bigoted towards the rich. Very rarely do I hear it argued they are the victims of classism, that they are discriminated against. (I'm slowly starting to get this, but metaphors like this still help concretize it :))

I saw "Up" today, with absolutely no clue what the movie was about. That in and of itself was an interesting experience. The right people said it was awesome, and the little Pixar clip that goes before it had me squeeing, so I went for the short and stayed for the film. Reviews were pretty much spot on - cried, rather hard, a couple times during the movie.

Rest of date with Amber was nice, too. Got ice cream and chatted while she played Zelda. Lots of snuggles and finging. Yay.

Is a good summer for movies, it seems. Not used to seeing two "Oh my GOD!" movies :)

Woke up to a big windstorm, that quickly turned to sheets of rain. Threw on raincoat and boots. Went puddle-splashing and picked up some groceries to experiment with. Why do we stop doing fun stuff like this just because we've grown up? Puddles are so much FUN!! :)

I'm a couple weeks late, but this is the first I've heard of it. The controversial case regarding an Iowa man being persecuted on obscenity charges for possession of manga has finally been settled, with him pleading guilty. I think Neil Gaiman said it best about why this sort of case is a chilling one.

The supreme court had previously struck down a ban on virtual child pornography, stating it was "overbroad" in that it did not protect works of serious artistic merit, or which met community standards.

I want to emphasize this point: Handley faces a maximum of 15 years in prison, a maximum fine of $250,000, and a three-year term of supervised release. His sole crime is owning a magazine, one which happened to be pornographic, and which was neither artistic nor mainstream.

Let this be a lesson to sexual deviants everywhere, eh?

"According to the records of the General Organization of Development labs (GOD) it took a mere six days to manufacture a fully-operational universe, complete with day, night, flora and fauna, and installing Adam as it's manager to oversee daily functions on Earth.

That's one story

If thou shalt believe the Book of Darwin, t'is five billion years after The Big Bang that we behold what the cosmos hath bagat: the magma, the terra firma, the creeping beasts, and mankind, whose dolorous and chaotic evolution begat the gift of consciousness."

Watch the video! (the Duelity version)

This is lovely, both for the humor and the artistic style :)

A little bit about how I use magic, and how that reconciles with "rationality." No particular point to this post. A few weeks ago there was an off-hand comment about being scientific and not being comfortable around ritual, and it got me thinking "but... I do science and ritual, and I don't find them at all conflicting!"

I suppose my big disclaimer to it all is that I'm entirely open to learning about new techniques, rational or magical, that work better. I don't "have faith" in my particular methods, even if they're ones I've spent years working with.

For that matter, I feel the same way about my rational beliefs too. It's all just theoretical models about how reality works - what matters is whether the model works for my purposes. Gravity, after all, is 'just a theory.' It still got us to the moon and back :)

Superstition
The first is when I find something that happens to work. I have no rational basis for why it should work, and might even have my rational suspicions that it shouldn't work. However, with some reliability, fiddling with this arbitrary thing works. As an example, I've found that chaos is a good luck charm for me. I've found certain ways of fiddling with my computer seem to make it work better. I have a friend that yells at printers to make them work, and I listen to them and help them sort out their concerns.

I might investigate a possible rational cause, and will often even find a better solution. However, I've learned that the energy put in to finding a better solution is often far more energy than would go in to just accepting the situation and behaving superstitiously. So, unless I want to explore new solutions for the sake of curiousity, it's just not efficient to forgo my superstition. Some of them stick around simply because the cost is small enough, and it makes me happy to have them around (such as not picking up pennies that are showing tails, and grabbing pennies showing heads. I'm really not worried about 10 cents a month :))

Psychological
Basically, magic is a useful metaphor for a lot of my intuition and other stuff that I just haven't developed a good "rational" language for. If I think about how someone's energy is prickly, and how they're a porcupine-totem, it helps me relate to them and know how to handle them. If I have an internal fantasy world, I can often study it and learn all sorts of interesting things about my subconscious from the unintentional patterns I leave in it (and sometimes the deliberate patterns are pretty telling too, when I actually pay attention)

I've seen a lot of people approach the practice of magic in this way. It's focused time to build self-awareness, intuition, and environmental awareness. Basically, we spend a lot of time fairly oblivious to large chunks of reality, and this is just a good way of grounding. These all seem like useful traits to me, even if they sometimes get wrapped up in superstition and kooky trappings.

Combining the two
Somewhat tied in to superstition, sometimes I just find that magical trappings work better for certain psychological changes. If I "aspect an element", it's a very easy coat-hook to hang "changing my behavior and personality" on, and it makes that transition much easier. It also makes it a lot easier to switch back. Sure, I could do the same thing by "focusing on shifting my emotions, reflecting on how to make my behavior match" but... well, it's just a much bulkier, less natural concept.

The last bit of that is that I often work with ideas that I'd have a lot of trouble expressing in language. I've had an idea for a game come to mind, and it took me two hours to actually find words to express it, to take it from an abstract concept and in to an actual description. It's similar to the effort involved in going from concept to finished painting. Sometimes I just don't want to go through the effort of "concretizing" an abstract or magical notion in to actual words. I can usually do it if I try, but it takes a long time to really find words that capture the nuances and vagarities of all that I'm thinking.

So, this little spider came over to play today. He is, I admit, absolutely adorable. And harmless. And he does this cute little curiously studying me when I studied him thing. And he was on my ceiling. And I'm arachnophobic. And I learned how to use a glass to take him out rather than killing him, despite my hindbrain spending those 30 minutes screaming "oh dear god he's going to kill us." And he came back in *three times* before I realized I was going to have to walk the little fellow across the street and let him play in the field there.

I hope he's doing well, because he seemed awesome and friendly and just had the disadvantage of being born a spider. :(

Health at any size - things like this are why I find the prevalence of "Biggest Loser" contests, especially in a workplace environment, rather offensive. Not only does it further the notion that 'overweight makes you a bad person', but it also encourages some of the least healthy weight loss behavior out there.

A couple odd thoughts on privilege:

Would it be reasonable to say that criminals are an oppressed group, and that society exhibits a strong tendency of privileging non-criminals? I mean, presumably "not being in jail" is a reasonable privilege compared to a criminal, yes?

The point here was, basically, we can have a privilege-oppression dichotomy that we view as wholly justified. It need not negate the dichotomy, just because we believe that, for the sake of functional society, we need to have criminals in jail.

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Would it make sense to define privileges as being, basically, a case when basic human rights are extended to only a select group? It seems to me that the goal is not to eliminate privilege so much as to make sure everyone benefits from it, in a lot of cases. (Frex, the rich don't have to worry about food and shelter, and this is a privilege the poor might lack. Wouldn't we want the poor to ALSO not have to worry?)

I find it really odd how we talk about the "advantages of privilege" rather than the "disadvantage of oppression." As a society, we usually talk about the problem we want to solve ("the crime problem" rather than "wouldn't it be nice if we were idyllic?", frex), so it really feels like we're trying to "fix" how some people have advantages in life, rather than eliminating disadvantages. Basically, it feels, linguistically and instinctively, like the implication here is that we nee to "bring people down" to ensure equality, rather than raising people up.

PG Porn: Roadside Ass-isstance This is a hilarious concept, porn without all that annoying sex. I wouldn't call this one work-safe, though :)

And if you enjoy it, more can be found over here :)

I see a porcupine. In the dream, though, I know she is an ancient god, trapped here. That all the old gods have been shattered, little fragments of their essence trapped in the most mundane of things. The porcupine keeps ramming against those around it, stabbing them through. In the dream, though, I know, that the ancient god just wants a hug, the joy of physical contact returned.

I shake my head. What the core desires, does not always match up with the actions of the shell. Maybe someday the porcupine will learn love, but not until it accepts it's own nature.

- Dreamer Eshell, Buoshuk.