English

I think it's funny that grown adults would find (the) writing style (of Lord of the Rings) too dense or boring when I didn't at eight years old.
–Slythwolf

I think the Wolf has her analysis backwards here, because what she observed coincides 100 % with what I'd expect.

If an adult reads Tolkien, chances are that they have already seen a lot of what's good in Tolkien's books in derivative works, so that the originals will hold much less wonder and surprise – leaving only the bits that weren't so stellar. If on the other hand you're eight years old and Lord of the Rings is one of the first fantasy books you read, it's far easier to get pulled in by universe and forgive the faults (the writing, the absence of women, etc.).

In other words, I think what you think of a work that counts as a milestone depends a lot on how many derivative works you have consumed beforehand.

Some things work only once, and if you had that aha! while consuming a derived work, experiencing the original later will seem much less impressive – it did, after all, not give you an epiphany (as you already got that from the enhanced work or copycat).

By that token, I also find the Beatles mindbogglingly boring, while some people credit them with the musical equivalent of inventing the wheel. Well, even so, their work has been expanded on so much that by now, it looks like one of those wheels they use in B.C. or the Flintstones. You appreciate the historic value, but you wouldn't want to use it on a daily basis. The WalkMan was a great step up in portable music from the ghettoblaster, but I still wouldn't trade you my MP3 player for one.

Since this question comes up every now and again …
The naming of my machines.

My Sun U5, my first work machine, was slow as sin. (Hence it was the original sin – hahaha, I never noticed the pun). The linux PC that replaced it freed me from the slowness, so it was my salvation. There was a Windows instance on it because sometimes to do business, you gotta make a sacrifice. Then I got the linux laptop which is nice, but has slow disk, and the Sun had gone since, so that laptop became the new sin. If it's cable-bound, that is. If I come in via wireless, I end up on a different subnet, and then the same machine is the blasphemy (that IP was originally reserved for another Windows instance, hence, again, the name). The file-and-compile server, the white (named for the white old-style case), since got a new (black) box to live in, and hence is the noir. So yeah, the user-facing machines are a little biblically themed in a way, but there's also a method to my madness. :-D Oh! And I have a Sun instance, which is the invictus. As in Sol(aris) Invictus. Har, har.
The latest addition to the zoo is a Mac (a 15" Macbook Pro, as it were), which of course is the vanity. If all the terrible Mac-ness gets too much, I can withdraw into a virtual linux, the sanctuary.
The Mac was this close to becoming the pain, by the way – for the obvious reasons (it being my work-machine, thus supplying le pain quotidien!).
Get it? Get it? :-D

And now you know! :-)

Contrary to folk wisdom about the leopard being unable to change her spots, here in Cat Central we of course heed the fashion, and with the upcoming Winter, an upgrade to Snow Leopard seems very much the order of the day.

Except of course nothing ever goes smoothly.

Here are the notes from the front – unabridged and glossless admittedly not so much to provide an unadultered account but because I'm busy beating the doggone thing into submission. Maybe there is some truth to the whole static spots thing after all …

Cleaning up I found some promotional stuff from Joop! that's been sitting there for G-d knows how long. It seems like another strange credo in favor of diceless role-playing: Playing with dice? Kiss mine arse!

By popular demand, here's more material from the Silk scarf/latex session. 'nuf said.

I am not your senorita
I am not from your tribe
In the garden I did no crime

So, they upheld Prop H8 in California, denying homosexual people the right to marry. Not that that right would even amount to much on the federal level anyway, in case you'd wondered. It's quite surreal. As women (and lesbians, and whatever else), most of us are used to systemic and institutional discrimination, to threats, to the emergent properties of all that¹, but it's still surreal to so very openly see it in codified law of a Western country.

Sure, we already live in a golden cage in that as women, we can't easily go to live and/or work in countries that severely limit our freedoms and legal rights², so that's another way our work-options are limited versus men's, but seriously, it feels like suffrage in Switzerland (complete in the early '70s), or interracial marriage in the US ('60s): Open discrimination in actual law seems like a thing of the past in the west, like something from our mothers' and grandmothers' generations. It's like saying, "Yeah, we're discriminating against you, whatcha gonna do about it?" Where is our Loving v Virginia? And will it have as memorable a name?

Woman, John Lennon sang in '72, is the n… of the world; a phrase coined by Yoko. While that phrasing is unfortunate especially by today's standards and invites oppression Olympics, it is very tempting to compare the (nominal) vote for black men and women's suffrage (~50 years lag from the former to the latter), interracial and homosexual marriage (~50 years and counting), the first black president vs not even having had a female vice president. Which all in all seems to guarantee only one thing: black lesbians finish last. That's intersectionality for you.

For once, we're following up our last installment within the week!

What
Samsonite sleep mask.

Where
Amazon etc.

The Good

• Nose-guard. This mask has an extra fold that goes between nose and eyes intended to keep the light out.
• Toned-down look. More professional-looking than most alternatives when going on a transatlantic flight with colleagues.
• Size adjustable.
• Comes with ear plugs.

The Bad

• It's in anthracite. That's already far better than white, but I prefer black on the inside, just to be on the safe side. This isn't outright bad, but could arguably be better.
• The strap fastens with velcro. If you have short hair, that's fine. Otherwise, you may or may not get your hair stuck in the velcro if you simply wear the mask, but you certainly will if you ever adjust the strap while wearing the mask.
• If the size and shape of your nose aren't what the designers figured they should be, the nose-guard — which otherwise is a great idea — can be irritating and uncomfortable.

Addendum: kikka holds up his own with what looks suspiciously like our Exhibit V. :-)

As announced in the last installment, this time it's about the grim meathook future where it's all about sleep. Or well, that's how the props worked out. In fact, the original concept had a riding crop instead of Iustitia's sword, but wouldn't you know it, there wasn't a crop to be found in the building, and the ostrich feather that was used instead never made it into the final selection. But yeah, it seems a fair enough superheroine concept, Lady Justice, sort of a mix of Iustitia, the Judge from B:TAS, and not a touch of Lady Death!

What
Black silk scarf.

Where
Ye olde sex shoppe — or pretty much anywhere, really.

The Good

• Silk! More pleasant to the touch than most other solutions, even in warm weather.
• Versatile. The more layers you fold in, the higher the opacity.
• One size fits most.
• If your nose tentpoles enough for light to get it, you can simply fold one or two extra layers to include the entirety of it into your little world of darkness. No nose too large, no nose too small!
• Soft for a snug fit; likely won't move when you turn your head on the pillow.
• A good choice even if you're on a budget.

The Bad

• The knot has to go somewhere, and we don't mean "in front," so there's always one side — left, right, or back of the head — that you can't rest on, and chances are that as soon as you've literally tied the knot, that's how you want to rest.
• If you do this while drunk, you might end up tieing your hair into the knot.

Clearly the Detox Series (1 2 3) was too cryptic to those readers with better things to do than keeping tabs on persistent trends in fashion photography. I published those pictures here to make a comment on the ongoing trend of the eroticizing of women's discomfort in fashion photography, such as in police brutality, war crimes, withdrawal (the latter having the most obvious connection to my set), the infamous D&G gang rape chic ad, sexy corpses on Next Top Model (which in turn is echoed in shows like Law & Order — Sexy Female Corpse Unit), et cetera. And those, you see, are just the ones I remember off the top of my head; I remember a rape victim shoot in German Vogue ten years before that, and stuff before that, and stuff before that. It's not new. It's just converging, it seems, with the outright torture porn, and the ever-growing tendency towards cruelty in mainstream pornography, because, you see, there is a finite combination of orifices and hair colours, but cruelty is boundless — something to consider if you want to sell more than ten movies.

So I was over in the park, knee-deep (well, up to 3") in snowy seeds, took a wrong turn, and found myself in a minor forest fire.

It's kinda hard to take seriously a fire that's all of three inches high, but still, it seemed to cover a good portion of the eastern slope. And of course, Google Maps failed to get a good lock on my position that we could have given the fire brigade. You gotta hate when that happens.

In other news, having to chain three sshs to tweet that seems … suboptimal.

But yeah, it's the barbeque season, what do I even expect.

I heard the sirens off in the distance as I left the park.

I was writing this here article, collecting some outtakes — lines that were just too evil, or that wouldn't fit in with anything I was writing/drawing at the time —, but somehow, it never came together. For instance, how do you know you're done? So I guess that means I've finally found a use for twitter …

When Superman grew up in Russia in an alternative history, he was Red Son. Who would Alfred be, Red Butler?

There's such a duplication of concepts in superhero comics. Plastic Man and Elongated Man, for a start. Then, Starfire and Fire are both flying models with big breasts and a ranged energy attack, of course. Corona is another one, a fire elemental from Aquaman. And what's with those ice-themed villains? Killer Frost? Captain Cold? Mr Freeze? Lady Skifahr?

See twitter for more throwaway rubbish — now also in the sidebar!

Kangaroos in Sweden — PirateBay guys convicted

«The court said we were organised. I can't get Gottfrid out of bed in the morning. If you're going to convict us, convict us of disorganised crime.»

«This wasn't a criminal trial, it was a political trial. It is just gross beyond description that you can jail four people for providing infrastructure.»
—BBC

Zensursula

In other news, I stood and was counted at the German Presseamt earlier today. Demo against censorship, and calling out the government's bullshit reasoning: That censorship is needed to fight child pornograpy. Interestingly, most child-porn servers are in European countries where they're highly illegal, so a handful of activists armed with the block-list called the providers, and the providers switched off most of those sites within the day. This means they did more against child porn within the existing framework within one day than the government have accomplished within a year; either our overlords and -ladies are hideously incompetent, or they're lying to us about what they're trying to do. In either case, they've got to go.

And that's not even going into how problematic it seems to make that good porn/bad porn distinction.