I, too, dislike it.

Poetry, politics, social anxiety, and all other matters of the heart. Mostly this is a scrapbook of the day-to-day, a holding place for the ephemera of madness and literature and kvetching. If you're interested in the real goods, check out my... current production blog! + Please Don't Take It fancy website! + Leaves of Sass pet project! + Cat-astrophes poetry collective! + We Are Not AVerse Also, if you are in the mood to indulge me? Ask me a question on Formspring. Or! Apparently you can leave me a voicemail, how 20th century is that??

[specialagentartemis]

Murderbot just about never pays attention to, or mentions, the genders of the humans it interacts with.

But it always, without fail, draws a distinction between humans and augmented humans, as if it doesn’t consider them the same category of person-type.  We have no idea if humans do this, though they’ve never seemed to bring it up; however, it’s a distinction that seems important and relevant to Murderbot’s observations of the world.

It’s as if Murderbot genders the world differently.  “Gender” as in related to the word “genre” and “genus”, type, kind, class.  The relevant genders to Murderbot are human, augmented human, construct, and bot.  Human social genders (male, female, tercera, other) are just not applicable to its view of the world, but machine-status is; it becomes, in Murderbot’s reckoning, the kind of combination of visual characteristics, social role, status, and experience set that is reasonable to interpret as a gender category.

Murderbot’s gender is construct.

[itoodislikeit]

Inflections Forever New

[itoodislikeit]

(via Stormtrooper Lamp :: the mental_floss store)

Adorbs. Want you hangin' out with me, little man.

[itoodislikeit]

Here's video of the campus police's Sunday media briefing, which the Times aptly describes as "one of the grimmest press conferences a man could give about pot brownies."

Students arrested for giving pot brownies to unknowing classmates

Glad to know the Times is still good for something.

[thedollypartonscrapbook]

[tyleroakley]

I have reason to believe that I am Dolly Parton.

[ghost-pit]

the real answer was “tumble out of bed and stumble to the kitchen, pour myself a cup of ambition, and yawn and stretch and try to come to life.” but whatever.

[itoodislikeit]

My fave is that she's said, in all seriousness, that if the building was on fire she wouldn't leave without putting on a wig first. Because if she can't be the Dolly she and her fans love, even for a few minutes, it's not worth it. So I'm going to amend this to say that at least in an emergency situation, wig comes first.

[itoodislikeit]

Damn straight. Cragen gets the job done, but I would never want to get on Anita Van Buren's bad side. Ever.

[irritate]

[confusion-of-a-simple-mind]

[ghost-pit]

my sister made this. :)))

[itoodislikeit]

I did! You can see my name in the little letters over the window! This was a very sweet thing to post, kiddo.

[thatcablenewsblog-blog]

“And if I have to listen to one more grey-faced man with a $2 haircut explain to me what rape is, I’m going to lose my mind.” — Tina Fey speaking at the Center for Reproductive Rights Inaugural Gala.

[itoodislikeit]

These are the elections to watch. I spent tonight making calls for Rep. Joe Donnelly. Maybe losing so hard on reproductive rights will wake their party the fuck up. Enough.

That is officially as much as I am willing to engage in this entire conversation retroactively for a month or to, and going forward.

[marchingjaybird]

Some genius replaced the music in the Party Rock video with the cantina song from Star Wars and it matches perfectly

[ghost-pit]

THIS IS PERFECT.

[itoodislikeit]

Turns out that for every $100 given by an affluent elderly man, a similarly situated woman gives $256.

I find this interesting mostly in the context of the gender breakdown of libertarian values (hint: it skews WAY male). So the people who are telling us private wealth will fill in the gaps in social welfare programs in which the government should take no part? They are dudes. Who demonstrably give less to these programs.

Maybe that would change radically if government funding for these causes ceased. Somehow I doubt it.

[itoodislikeit]

Not anywhere near the top of my list of concerns about Ryan, because these points were going to be true of pretty much any GOP candidate, but it's still pretty ugly.

[itoodislikeit]

Very, very occasionally, work is cute.

[itoodislikeit]

Many exciting things happened to the Icelandic men’s handball team when it won the silver medal at the Beijing Olympics four years ago. Some 40,000 people crowded the streets of Reykjavik to greet the players when they returned home. Eighty-five percent of the population of 320,000 watched the handball final on television, and a water-usage study by a local utility company revealed that in the final moments, virtually nobody in the entire country went to the bathroom.

Iceland handball

There is no end to the list of reasons to be totally and completely in love with Iceland. Maybe it's time for a real move.

[itoodislikeit]

Many people believe geekdom is defined by a love of a thing, but I think — and my experience of geekdom bears on this thinking — that the true sign of a geek is a delight in sharing a thing. It’s the major difference between a geek and a hipster, you know: When a hipster sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say “Oh, crap, now the wrong people like the thing I love.” When a geek sees someone else grooving on the thing they love, their reaction is to say “ZOMG YOU LOVE WHAT I LOVE COME WITH ME AND LET US LOVE IT TOGETHER.”

Who Gets To Be a Geek? Anyone Who Wants to Be

I love this. Usually hard to get behind hating on hipsters (too easy, all cheap shots), but this is a genuine distinction that matters in how we relate to each other. Namely, if we fundamentally want to reach out (especially because it's often hard), or if we want to be superior and alone.

[itoodislikeit]

Dog parking. Brilliant. If they'd just get this in New York (everywhere), I might reconsider Kendra's constant puppy yen...

[itoodislikeit]

Work venting which is probably inappropriate.

[Most inappropriate part redacted, because sometimes I forget that the internet is public and the #1/only group of people who would go looking for my dumb blog is job hunters, who should not read my exhausted rants about why work is sometimes hard for me!]

I am copywriting more, both at work and as a freelancer. It's a series of tightrope acts, some of which I like and some of which just suck. With start-ups and collaborative people, so much of crafting a brand is in crafting the language, and it's a wonderfully creative process. Knowing there's so much on the line gives the work gravity, even if it's not the same kind of gravity there was when I was doing nonprofit work. Plus, these are the people who hire you to stare down the blank page. You write in order to give them something to react to, not to get it right the first time. The real art, and the real collaboration, is in revision.

Then there is this other crappy side of copywriting where you really are expected to get it right on the first go. Where you are expected to intuit that special fares are not the same thing as a fare special, and Thanksgiving is more of a period than a season, as if these were facts for which the error could have been avoided by just opening a style guide. The only real creativity is in figuring out how to avoid being horribly racist, and how to incur the least dissatisfaction from the client. In my case there's also a language barrier, so my coveted puns and idioms never make the cut, which is pretty much the only case in which my feelings get hurt when my copy gets edited. Because the puns and idioms are good, dammit.

Anyway, I like the first kind of copywriting. I think I could make something of a career of it, and feel pretty good about doing so as a primary source of income. The second kind has to go, before it sucks out the rest of my soul.