Katze mit Wut

"Heard of some gravesites, out by the highway
a place where nobody knows
The sound of gunfire, off in the distance
I'm getting used to it now
Lived in a brownstone, lived in the ghetto
I've lived all over this town"

Briliant summary of Melissa's posts. So next time some asswipe claims that men get the same kind of harassment online that women do, you know where to go for examples. But speaking of Melissa, and to get the obligatory modeling bit out of the way, see the brilliant rape's no compliment, a must-read treatise on wonky media-related sex phantasies:

Rape as a fetish is packaged and marketed to men and women as a steady stream of images which blur the lines between rape and the kind of passionate sex we’re all meant to want. Movies show us a man and woman fighting, then suddenly fucking. Two bodies slamming against a wall, or a wrought-iron fence, or a car hood, walking the line between sex and violence. Her head, pulled back by his hand pulling her hair. She tries to run, but he pulls her to him and she collides with him, sobbing yet horny (of course). … These scenes are decidedly different in tone from those that seek only to represent the desperate yearn and clamor of a passionate fuck, as fight-fucking is infused with a sense of both force and yielding, and suggestive that both are necessary components of any “real” fuck. It is within these scenes, where an attractive woman is overwhelmed either physically or pheromonally (or both) by a powerful man, that we begin to understand the unsettling association between ravishing (beautiful) and ravish (rape).

And while we're at it, let's earn this article a language tag as well, shall we?

If you're a man planning to read any of this, Ilyka may have a good introduction for you: Don't get all defensive; if you're not the problem, this isn't about you. This was not written with you as a primary audience in mind.

Also if you're a man, you may be under the assumption that I'm posting this because it was a particular shitstorm of a month in the girlzone and I've cracked. Nope. Sorry. Drop in any week of the year. When you're not looking, I blame the patriarchy. And dudes, that's the setup that disenfranchises you too.

Likewise, you may assume it's only in those silly Americas that people routinely make themselves look like woman-hating asswipes. Not so. Seriously, I commend you for not reading the Guardian on the grounds of being a zionist, but their assault-related articles really aren't so bad.

So, you may wonder, if this isn't a particularly bad month, does that mean I'm upset all the time? Nope. Because I'm not upset now. I might have been ten years ago, but you learn to understand that none are as blind as those who will not see. You stop being surprised. But the beauty is, if something doesn't hurt you, you can defend those who would be with relatively little effort. It takes so little to say, Dude, we don't do that in this tribe. I'm not upset. I'm not hurt. But I'm wary. And it's not quite the same wary you may feel about the surveillance state. Semper paratus.

Radial menus, affectionately called pie menus, are like mouse gestures with cheat sheets. They're good-looking, and for menus that never change, they're incredibly fast, thanks to Fitts' law and muscle memory — you just shove the mouse in the general direction, rather than having to hit an entry only one text-line high, like you do in a traditional ("linear") menu.

This makes pie-menus extremely suitable for browser navigation, and consequently, there are several implementations for Firefox and Mozilla; RadialContext and easyGestures. To keep the number of slices down in each pie so they're easy to hit, both solutions work with multiple pies — easyGestures lets you switch to the "next" menu by mouse-button, while RadialContext's menus are connected — each pie-menu has one or more slices that lead to other pies. This is beautifully thought out, but may leave the beginner bewildered as the menu keeps changing on him if he moves the mouse wrong, leaving him disoriented.

easyGestures is practically safe from these mis-invocations. But since one or many of the pies can have a magic top slice that opens another arc of extra slices, with the ability to freely combine any of the main pies that has a magic slice with any of the three extras, there certainly is potential for confusion there, as well. Add to that the fact that you get extra context-menus for hyperlinks, images, text-fields and text-selections, not to mention that sometimes something is both, for instance an image that is also a hyperlink, and you can easily confuse the living daylights out of yourself.

On top of that, this very powerful tool is organized not so much by logical grouping, like RadialContext is, but by efficiency, you get a menu very confusing to the beginner.

Fortunately, it can be configured relatively freely. Below the fold, we shall try to create a compromise that features a more mnemonic layout, but is still fast, curling up your navigation bar like a kitten so we may turn off the old one, gaining screen estate and speed both.