Author: old_wp_importer

Has the internet been getting nastier, or do we just notice it more now? The latter, says Kameron Hurley:

Just because internet harassment shows up on CNN doesn’t mean it’s new. It just means it’s more visible.

And yes, we’re the ones who made it visible, after enduring a lot of bullshit.

After dealing quietly with abuse since the beginning of the internet, many folks, most of them women, decided to air the reality of the abuse they received, and though it took nearly a decade, men and mainstream media outlets finally started believing it was something that existed, and started signal boosting. Suddenly we were seeing posts that compiled all the horrible comments they got, the ones we deleted quietly back in the day. Not a day goes by now, it seems, when someone on Twitter isn’t retweeting some horrible thing some troll said to them.

Also a neat little anti-hate-mail trick:

I also reduced the number of email threats I got really easily, by simply changing my email address to a “publicity@” address instead of a “Kameron@” address. When someone sends you something hateful, they want to KNOW you’re getting it. They don’t want to think it’s being vetted by some publicist.

I’m enjoying this tumblr dedicated to bad ConLang ideas. Some highlights:

• A language that is right branching when the speaker is happy and left branching when sad.
• Boustrophedon is pretty cool, and having letters that are rotations and flips of other letters means that you have to make fewer letter shapes, making it easier to create and alphabet, so why not use both together?
• Your gender system should classify dead people based on how they died, and living people based on how you think they will die or how you want them to die. One of the grammatical genders is used only for wombat attacks.
• A conlang where each number is expressed as its prime factorization, rather than using a place system
• Require in your conlang unreleased implosives, like /ɠ̚/, after every few words or so. That way you can sound like you’re speaking to a nice thumping bass beat.

maymay:

themerrymisnomer:

rolequeer:

I tried my hand at some graphic making of my own.

The BDSM binary is bullshit. Oppressive rape culture bullshit.

Text:

Kink can be… dirty talk, spanking, tickles, bodily fluids, no orgasm, toys, fabrics, gendered clothing, playing an animal, playing a job, playing an age, with food, temperatures, retraints, other things… and any combination of the above!

But bdsm likes to pretend it’s a submissive who gets insulted, gets spanked, gets tickled, can’t orgasm, gets fucked, plays a pet, plays a slave, plays a child, gets tied up and has to like pain, helplessness, obedience.

Or a dominant who insults, spanks, tickles, gives permission, fucks, plays owner, plays masyer, plays parent, ties up, and has to like causing paing, having power, giving orders.

And the non-bdsm’ers are the boring ones???

this blog is my new favorite blog and explains/soapboxes the reasons I’ve been having a hard time pin-pointing why I’ve been so brood-y about stepping out of the plane of existence of my kink community here in Richmond.

No joke I’m currently re-fashioning every association I’ve had with the identities I claimed for myself as a gq, black, bisexual kinky person because I really, truly did enjoy lots of what I did but not the space and attitudes of the people I did those things

around.

FUCKIN’ YUP.

Also, just so we’re clear, the problems with “community here in Richmond”

are not isolated incidents

but are rather endemic to every single BDSM community. I have

personally

witnessed the same fuckshittery in New York City, Washington, DC, Sydney Australia, Portland, OR, Seattle, WA, San Francisco, Denver, CO, Austin, TX, Albuquerque, NM, Baltimore, MD, and Chicago, IL

just to name a few of my personal experiences

from my years of travel.

So I am very, very, VERY over hearing about how “it’s not like that where I live” or “you just don’t know what it’s like in my community” or “you just didn’t meet the right people” or “actually it’s about ethics in gaming journalism.”

FUCK. THAT. SHIT.

See also these other two useful infographics:

• Sensation, Story, and Felt Sense: Rolequeer and BDSM do not mix
• 8 colorful Venn diagrams detailing why BDSM is, in fact, abuse

Church-building is one of the oldest forms of self-aggrandisement. It’s especially suitable for those with a bit of guilt about however they obtained their wealth and power. Even the Hagia Sophia, perhaps the greatest church (or mosque) ever built, was perhaps partly built to expiate Justinian’s guilt at massacring the Nike rioters.

Félix Houphouët-Boigny’s entry into this tradition will not be remembered for as long, even if it does outdo the Hagia Sophia in sheer size. In fact, it has some claim to to be the largest church in the world. The president of the Ivory Coast built it at a cost of $300 million, claiming it was “a deal with God”.

Messy Nessy Chic writes that:

the whole thing is arguably one big empty and outrageous contradiction. Up to 18,000 people can worship in the basilica (7,000 seated, 11,000 standing) but in a nation where more than two thirds of its people aren’t even Christian, it has a tough time filling just a few seats. A recent visitor to the Ivory Coast told me that there couldn’t have been more than three other people inside when he toured the massive house of worship.

Alcoholics Anonymous is something I know mainly from Hollywood, which has an ongoing obsession with the format. It fills roughly the expository niche that was once occupied by psychoanalysis — it’s an easy way to fill in backstory, and enable introspection that would otherwise be totally out-of-character.

Still, AA gives me the creeps — the religiosity, the rigidity, the all-or-nothing approach. If I were ever addicted, I’d run a mile from anything with 12 steps.

I occasionally wonder how fair that is. Is AA, as Hollywood would have it, the One True Way to cope with addition? Scott at SlateStarCodex has dug into the research. Turns out that even

that

can’t help: “

the studies surrounding Alcoholics Anonymous are some of the most convoluted, hilariously screwed-up research I have ever seen

“.

AA

does

seem to work better than no treatment. But then, so does psychotherapy. So does

acupuncture

. So does 5 minutes of a doctor suggesting that you think about quitting.

most alcoholics get better on their own. All treatments for alcoholism…increase this already-high chance of recovery a small but nonzero amount. Furthermore, they are equally effective after only a tiny dose: your first couple of meetings, your first therapy session.

Another idea I [Alinsky] had that almost came to fruition was directed at the Rochester Philharmonic, which was the establishment’s — and Kodak’s — cultural jewel. I suggested we pick a night when the music would be relatively quiet and buy 100 seats. The 100 blacks scheduled to attend the concert would then be treated to a preshow banquet in the community consisting of nothing but huge portions of baked beans. Can you imagine the inevitable consequences within the symphony hall? The concert would be over before the first movement — another Freudian slip — and Rochester would be immortalized as the site of the world’s first fart-in.

[source]

[tldr: inconclusive and poorly-explained ramble on identity and roleplaying]

I’m belatedly discovering Audre Lorde, reading my way through her collection “I am your sister. It’s touching and inspiring, and I agree with most of it. But here’s one aspect I’m struggling with.

Emotional consistency is supremely important to Lorde. You should be the same person with your family, with your friends, at work, with your lover or before the police:

In order to make integrated life choices, we must open the sluice gates in our lives, create emotional consistency. This is not to say that we act the same way, or do not change and grow, but that there is an underlying integrity that asserts itself in all of our actions.

None of us is perfect, or born with that integrity, but we can work toward it as a goal.

In Lorde’s life, that integrity was what allowed her to be unapologetically herself. She was fighting against silence — the silence that comes from subduing your identity to fit into society, and the silence of fear and self-censorship that stops you trying to break through it:

The women who sustained me through that period were Black and white, old and young, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual, and we all shared a war against the tyrannies of silence…

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say?

What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself—a Black woman warrior poet doing my work—come to ask you, are you doing yours?

And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger.

Everything we are should permeate everything we do. Lorde condemns — albeit with gentleness and sympathy — anything that puts part of our life into a box. This comes up, for instance, in her discussion of BDSM (something I hope to return to another time):

I feel that we work toward making integrated life decisions about the networks of our lives, and those decisions lead us to other decisions and commitments—certain ways of viewing the world, looking for change. If they don’t lead us toward growth and change, we have nothing to build upon, no future.

Through all this the question I’m struggling with is:

must

we have only one identity, at least as the ideal state of self-actualisation? I would like to declare “

I am large, I contain multitudes

“. I’d like to play different roles without needing to merge them into one identity.

And — politically speaking — I believe there is value to this. The “world of work” is now breaking it’s 9-to-5 bounds, asking us to blend our employers’ needs into every moment of life. Increasingly, our work is also “affective”; requiring not just our minds and muscles, but our hearts as well. On the internet, social networks threaten to achieve Lorde’s aims by force — giving us an integrated identity whether we want one or not.

So now, if we behave with “integrity”, it means letting the areas where we are not free dictate our behaviour even when we are free. If I must be non-threatening at work, I must be non-threatening everywhere; for in this world without boundaries, my behaviour anywhere will be linked back to my work. Every compromise or self-denial we make in one context becomes expanded.

The excape from this is to divide our identities. danah boyd has been tracking this for a decade, looking particularly at teenagers. She and her subjects regard “collapsing contexts” — visibly connecting different facets of an identity — as a threat to wellbeing, perhaps even an act of violence against chosen identities.

Because when, for example, Google links a youtube profile to a real name, it performs a kind of outing. Whatever identity has been growing in the shadows is exposed to the full force of external scorn.

So Lorde’s prescription of consistency seems at odds with the human need for gradual, fallible self-discovery. Proclaiming her identity was an act of courage then, as it would be now. But perhaps we also need more space for people to develop and discover their identities, without immediately needing to justify them to everybody they know.

Clay Shirky talks about hardware hacking in China, particularly in comparison to the US “Maker movement”.

The maker movement is akin to the idolisation of the countryside which followed urbanisation. Consciously or not, it’s recreation of a culture which has been lost. In this case, the “hardware hacking” culture has been destroyed by a few decades of cheap imports and complicated devices. By contrast, stereotypically “female” making has not been interrupted, so there is no need to rediscover it in the same way.

Maker culture is largely male culture in part because men are celebrating our triumphant return to a set of practices women never let go of in the first place. One of the reasons Craft never found an audience is that that audience had never been lost; Ravelry and Pinterest and Etsy do a good chunk of what Craft was meant to do, and without any of the “We here in the Maker movement could not be more pleased with ourselves” vibe.

So, tangent managed, here’s the analogy. Hardware hacking in the US vs. China is a bit like Maker culture between men and women. Hardware hacking hasn’t become a hot new thing in China because it never stopped being a regular old thing.

There’s much more of interest in the article; I think it’s also the first worthwhile thing I’ve found on ello.

The Scottish independence campaign was, and is, a massive popular movement.

But the post-referendum devolution wrangling is a depressing case of gerrymandering writ large.

So the tories want “English votes for English laws”, because they reckon they can get a majority in England more often than not. Labour want regional devolution, to stop the Tory South-East imposing itself on the rest of the country. Meanwhile the (non-Scottish) voters don’t care — and who can blame them, given the way all parties treat them?

Also: Alex on how this will get decided in a back-room deal during wash-up