English

"Is communication un-sexy?", we asked last week, pretty much en passant. Somehow, the thought got stuck in my mind though, and indeed, as a young girl, that was exactly what I was led to believe — that in that perfect, romantic love, the love of my life would know what to do, would have the empathy to sense how I feel, what the right thing to do just now was — in fact, that was not just the hallmark of the True Love, it was the litmus test. If the person couldn't sense, couldn't feel you, you should drop them like a hot potato because obviously, they weren't Mr(s) Right. Of course from there, it's only so far to the rape-glorifying genre of forced seduction, and from there on out to Asshats of Gor.

Well, colour me bollocks.

If you wanna bring up both sides of the conversation anyway, get a smegging RealDoll, yo.

And then as mass media go? You get those weird-ass dominance games and fight fucking (also a bit of a dominance game, but possibly also the result of the thought, violence is exciting, sex is exciting, why not mix the two, bonus!, or maybe it's a result of the mainstreaming of pornography which also seems rather rife with all three). You get movies like Sleepless in Seattle which some argue are little more than glorified stalking, the distinction likely being that while fighting for your love is arguably commendable (and a staple of the genre), there should be a pre-existing relationship. And then romance was cast mostly as uncertainty — will they, or won't they? (Strangely enough, I see that in relationships a lot — once the "hunt", the "chase", the uncertainty are over and people are an item, all activity ceases. Of course people get much less attractive that way, and often enough, that seems to spell death for the relationship.)

Not that I'd knock the excitement of the first year or two, of course. The overindulgence, the all night phone calls, the all night sex, the overwhelming emotion and its sometimes expression in art. The rush, the surge, the blur, that feeling of perfection when it's all new, not routine yet, when you don't know each other enough to see all the little imperfections. I guess I can see those aspects.

But maybe mixing the lies in with the truth just makes the lie stronger.

Passion and love, sex, money, Violence, religion, justice, death — I'm pretty much at a point where I'd like to find one thing I wasn't lied to about. You'd think you'd get out of childhood with a suitable world-model — in fact, it would seem that that's the entire point of childhood, so how come you have to do it over all the time? I don't have time for this, I have a doggone day job to do.

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When trying to call up the page for RealDolls to link to it, instead of typing the correct shortcut, wiki, I typed iki realdoll. Go figure. A lot of truth in typos, I guess.

More to the point, I also looked up their definition of romance, and while it got a lot longer since I last looked, I'm not sure it necessarily got any better. If anything, it's more inconclusive than ever. Interestingly while there, I learned the following facts:
— via romance novels and chick lit: Hamish Macbeth (the novels) were apparently a major influence on chick lit. Damned if I can work that one out from seeing the show.
— via chick lit: there's also "dick lit", and one of its heroes is Chuck Pahluniak (of Fight Club fame). Now I don't know his other stuff, but Fight Club doesn't seem to have a lot of romance, sex, or dicks in it. What does dick lit make, male bonding alone? Wikipedia doesn't say.

On a related note by the by, I'd been thinking for a while that romance might be the female equivalent/opposite of porn, as porn shows unrealistic women, and romance shows unrealistic men. In reality, it's not quite the same, as men become ideal, and women become objects. If that implies that to men the ideal woman is an object, that still says very different things about the two groups. One is uplift, the other degrading.

And yes, extra long neck in comic, I presume you don't know the Sarah Silverman routine on that, then. I'd also really like a countryman microphone (pictured), but I don't phone from home enough to fix something up. So, if and when I'll make more music again I might. But first things first.
This article tagged for rewrite.

After all those years of trying to make my synthesizers sound like a guitar, I ended up making my guitar sound like a synthesizer. :-D

(Strat knockoff played through Fender amp with overdrive, then souped up in audacity, totally love its speaker sim. Sounds like Carter USM or Armageddon Dildos, I reckon. That said, anything music is still a major pain on Linux; for instance, that's not quite how the riff goes, but play-through doesn't work right so I couldn't hear myself while playing. (For the non-musicians among my readers, playing without a monitor is like painting in the dark.) Also, don't read too much into it, this is just something that happened while jamming, I doubt it's going to be my new sound. But I'm busy explaining a joke, ain't I? Anyway, I'm half-tempted to go out and buy a Mac, as an appliance only, put Cubase or Logic on it (which I keep calling Live for some reason), and have at it.)

I have a 4 gig USB stick
it's exactly the right colour
to go with my skin tone
and it has a little ring
so I can put it on a silver chain around my neck
let it dangle just above my breasts
I wanna store my soul in it
just in case
I wonder whether 4 gig's enough for a soul

As you see from the picture, I was going to write about this NHS campaign that says that 1 out of 3 women who were raped (by men) were intoxicated at the time, trying to imply that alcohol made you unsafe, but really only saying that you're twice as safe drunk as you are sober. This neglects to ask what the rapists were on, and fails to acknowledge that if all women stopped drinking that would just mean that 3 out of 3 women who were raped (by men) were sober — this would again imply that you're safer drunk. Using a fraction rather than an absolute number of cases is rubbish. Much more so when you cannot prove that that 1-in-3 state or lack thereof had any bearing on the event anyway. (All rapes already do have one well-known common denominator though: the presence of a rapist!) Consequently, this seems more about diverting the attention from the rapist and towards "better ways of blaming the victim." Way to go.

But as you see, many clever women beat me to it, so you'll get a best of various articles review instead. So sioux me.

Twisty has a good article on an article which tries to pit a sexy-fun woman against a "no sex till marriage" "feminist" that points out that they're not really opposites since, you know, they're both still defined in terms of sex. I don't think there can be a more succinct illustration of the concept of a sex class.

But first, there's my Don't hate me because I'm beauti-- er, thin — reloaded (and, alas, in German), wherein happens much blaming and questions such as, Why are people so concerned with whether young women pick skinny models as, well, role-models, when the question is why they choose models at all? are asked. Part of the problem of course being that as a member of the sex class, you do not get to opt out of the hawtness contest entirely. More so when these days, you exist to the degree that you exist in the media and your primary currency (as a member of the sex class) is self-pornification.

When the white male is the default human being, the standard, you're set up to fail at that standard. When by those standards the only thing males aren't supposedly better at is "female hotness", the results are somewhat predictable. In the same vein, twisty has this on feminity:

Behold the neat trick. First, you make women act like simpletons, broodmares, janitors, mannequins, and sex slaves before you grant them social approval. You call this behavior “femininity” and explain that it is their essential nature, and that any deviation from the program will be punished. Then you infantilize and ridicule the ones who get it right, and vilify and abuse the ones who get it wrong (you can also vilify and abuse the ones who get it right, because, let’s be honest; the world is your oyster).

With so much riding on it, whether femininity is performed right or wrong is an issue of enormous concern to women. That’s where the Empowerful Pink Marketing Juggernaut comes in.

and

Femininity is a set of practices and behaviors (boob jobs, FGM, "beauty"™, the "veil"™, the flirty head-tilt, pornaliciousness, BDSM, fashion, compulsory pregnancy, marriage, et al) that are dangerous, painful, pink, or otherwise destructive; that compel female subordination; […] that are overwhelmingly represented by ‘girly’ feminists as a ‘choice’; and that are overwhelmingly represented by [conservatives] as ‘natural instincts’. In fact these practices and behaviors are nothing but inviolable cultural traditions in abject compliance with which comfort, contentment, and personal fulfillment are [available], and from which deviation is discouraged by the threat of ingenious punishments ranging from diminished social influence, to unemployability, to ridicule, to imprisonment, to rape, to murder, to the policing of feminist blogs. […] The flipside […] of the concept of femininity as-self-policed-subordination is femininity as-survival-skill.

Another fallacy is to assume that just because the feminine role is problematic, the masculine role isn't. Patriarchy hurts everyone — just to different degrees, depending on your intersection of privilege (based on race, sex and gender, wealth, age, …).

I think transcending those (false) dichotomies may be a good way to an epiphany or two.

2 sur 2
The Nine Mile Walk is a famous short story that introduces Harry Kemelman's armchair detective Nicky Welt. Kemelman also wrote the popular rabbi series (Friday the rabbi slept late etc.) a few of which I chanced upon as audio dramas. These had been produced in German for some German station and were not very good I'm afraid, but they reminded me to check whether I could get a lock on the Nicky Welt stories which had been hard to come by for a while and, I'm happy to say, this time Amazon used & new did provide. Trying to hype the stories to others, I first tried youtube and to my surprise, somebody had actually turned 9 mile walk into a short almost word for word (see above). The result, while not blow-away like, say, Batman: Dead End, still serves quite nicely. In the story, the line A nine-mile walk is no joke, especially in the rain is accidentally overheard by two men who then proceed to show that a murder had happened, and when, and where, and in what context. So to wit, while this is a fun linguistist exercise, the story has no action and is all dialogue. Not every attempt at turning that sort of source material into a movie can turn out to be Glengarry Glenn Ross. To make the short visually appealing, they offer some nice shots of Toledo to where the story has been relocated; they also made Welt more physically attractive than he is in the book. On the whole, it serves.

For my German readers: The German translation's called Ein Fußmarsch von neun Meilen; if you search for that, google helpfully offers to substitute this with Ein Fußmarsch von neuen Medien.

So which is the hottest of the "English" ones? Posh? Scottish? South Carolina?
Update: The votes are in, here goes!

It started out pretty simple. And with a real world case, too. I'm debating a new keyboard, as this one starts to act up — I'm sick of wireless, I'm sick of batteries, I'm sick of PS/2-to-USB adapters, and it seems the hardware starts failing me, too. That said, I was very happy with the ergonomic ("split keyboard") Logi — it was good to my wrists, it held up for ten years, and it certainly is one gorgeous keyboard —, and if the SafeType doesn't do the trick for me, I'll be looking to get a variant of the Logi that's not wireless. Anyway, the SafeType is also a split keyboard, but they mean it. It's like hacking a typewriter in two in the middle, and then putting both halves of the keyboard upright so they keyboards aren't horizontal, they're vertical. When you type, your hand are not parallel to your desk, but orthogonal to it. It did wonders for me when I tried the "upright mouse", so I think the keyboard may be beneficial, too. The rub is, you don't have cursor keys that way. So I needed to find a way to put the cursor keys on the main keyboard.

Markus Fisch must really love pie-menus. Not only did he give us the excellent PieDock, he also has a JavaScript in-browser demo for it! : ) Naturally, I couldn't resist another pie-menu, especially not such a good-looking one, so of course I installed it — and hacked it up!

So, I figured (Open-) Solaris and VirtualBox are both owned by Sun now, they should go together splendidly.

I opted for the Sun-offering rather than Nexenta etc. since I intend to test some things in a "Sun environment", that is, make sure things work with the on-board facilities. Otherwise "Sun-kernel and GNU userland" would likely have been my preference.

Now, there are two different offerings, mind. The freely available download of OpenSolaris "Indiana", for a start. At 686 MB, this comes without a compiler, any compiler, it seems, and that means, no Sun compiler and no GNU compiler. It seems nice enough otherwise. However if I wanted to install the Virtual Box additions so I could move the mouse-pointer in and out of the VirtualBox window (or even integrate the Solaris instance's windows with my linux host's), the keyboard went berserk (in the guest only, and in X only), so I had to click Install … to mount the image, and then kill X to cd /media/V*; pkgadd -d *.pkg really quickly. On the upside, it came with some sort of graphical package-manager (which possibly allows you to pull the GNU compiler collection).
Addendum: It seems like the keyboard situation can be avoided by connecting using RDP, see below.

Anyway, I needed the Sun compilers, so I had to opt for the Developer Express something offering (what's with these names?), which in theory requires you to register before download. The good news is, if you're already on the Sun payroll, your normal log-in credentials will do the trick. This image weighs 3.7 GB; the minimum disk requirements are in the region of 8 GB, with 20 GB recommended. It includes the compilers (and auto-tools) of course, but it's not just the other image, plus devel. GNOME looks subtly different, I had no trouble installing the VirtualBox additions, and if there is a graphical package manager I haven't found it so far. But then I haven't looked very hard since so far all I needed was to go to sunfreeware.com (or blastwave, whichever you prefer — blastwave and pkg-get actually handle dependencies, so that's probably what you want, more on that later) to install screen "so the pain will stop." Seriously, that should be their tagline. "Screen. So the pain will stop." But I digress.

Addendum: Since I was only changing config-files at first, I only used vim in the first hour. Yes, you know what's coming. Once you try to do real work, you'll find there is no emacs. No, no xemacs either. So I guess I want to install pkg-get after all. But seriously. A "developer-edition" with no emacs? WTH?? So pkg-get (or pkgadm, but PBA that there is another pkgadm in $PATH!) it is! pkg-get -i xemacs, add /opt/csw/xemacs/bin to PATH, then let the configuring begin!

So, I'm in the middle of something. DSL goes down for no apparent reason. I don't see any WLAN I could share (and in fact NetworkManager has been behaving very weird since the update; if I don't kill -STOP it, it eats all my CPU — just plain killing it also tears down the net; this problem can be googled — a solution, not so much). So, UMTS. On this, pppd fails, giving unrecognized option '/dev/ttyUSB0'. This is the most obscure way they could find to say, You upgraded the kernel and haven't rebooted yet, so I can't find my shit. So, I reboot. Or, I try to. The upgrade from 2.6.25.3 to 2.6.25.4 plain broke my system (broke as in, EDD check, then BUG: INT14 CR2, dead before I get even the most basic boot messages). It is at this time that I notice that I haven't got a boot-manager installed that won't let me pass kernel options without excessive pain.

Way back, I got the Motorola RAZR v3, a very sexy phone. It had a stunning design, a nice display, and pretty good sound — and not much else. I've been hoping to upgrade for a while, but the next generation RAZRs took long to arrive, and did not entice me right away — the RAZR's design was so perfect that any change from it seemed to be for worse, while keeping it seemed more of the same. A rock, and a hard place. At the same time, the technology seemed OK, but not all that impressive, and the fact that the interesting features seemed spread out over a confusing trinity of next-generation rather products rather than being united in a single unit didn't help.

One contender was the LG Shine. I ultimately decided against it because its killer feature, its look and metal body, was offset by every review mentioning how it's "all fingerprints" after half an hour (give or take some complaints about the user-interface). I still think this might possibly be a great phone to have, especially if you wish to spend a little less.

Another contender from LG was the Prada-phone which in some ways anticipated the iPhone; with more up-to-date technology (or even just more memory), it might have likewise have been a serious contender. By now, it's sold on shop channel, so any exclusive air it may have possessed is gone.

Speaking of the iPhone itself, I'm pretty sure I'll want one. iPhone 2.0, iPhone 3.0, something like that. This one? Not so much — no 3G, no voice dial, no MMS, crap camera, no flash, no Java, no Bluetooth stereo, no video-recording, the list goes on. Add to that that it comes with a plan and I'm not sure I want one (I'm not even sure when mine expires), and that you can't change the battery yourself, and I'm put out.

Then came the Samsung Soul.

The Good

Well, for one thing, the SGH-U900 (video) is very chic, obviously. This is one seriously beautiful phone — the shell, the (brushed metal) theme, even the touchpad if configured right. The menus are more straight-forward than the RAZR's, the display's resolution is higher of course, and so is the camera's. It has more memory, and can be expanded further. Like the v3, it has the downer of some token plastic in that "full metal shell." And at first, it feels awkward to hold while making a call. But is it the "new RAZR"?

Below the fold: The Bad

OK, the title isn't all that clear, I'll grant you that. Is she talking about Yes Minister? you might be wondering, or did she mean Cracker? Very good guesses indeed; I see I'm writing for an audience with refined tastes. But no. I found in today's mail series 1 (all 22 episodes, 6 DVDs) of Picket Fences, a show that often made me laugh, sometimes made me cry, and often made me think. I can't think of higher praise.

"I learnt a lot about sex! I don't look good in a helmet … cabbages are yummie … and Russian women punch much harder than their husbands!"
I blame Tristan for this link!

CD-baby, which I'm normally a fan of, now has MP3s for download. Good. You have to purchase entire albums though. Not quite so good. I like funk. There are, of course, pure funk CDs, but often jazzers, even those whose jazz I don't find terribly interesting, will have a good or even excellent funk track on their album. This makes the sales proposition essentially, buy our album for the single track you want, which is even worse than the usual, buy four good tracks and a lot of filler that the music industry usually offers us. I might still go ahead for an album that is 10 bucks or under, but most are in the $10 - $14 range, and especially in the jazz selection, there are actually $20+ albums, lo and behold. Now I know that the US dollar is essentially worthless these days, but still. $20 for one track is too much. I'm already paying more for CD-baby albums than I do for the few "normal" albums I still buy, since I purchase the latter via amazon "Used & new", which not only saves me money, but arguably also bypasses the bloody RIAA to an extent. Lastly, it'd be kinda nice if I could purchase the physical CD and the download in a bundle — essentially buy the CD so I'll have the media, and then pay a dollar or two on top of that for their bandwidth, that is, the privilege of downloading the music and listen to it immediately, rather than wait for international shipping. This doesn't mean pure download or "just the CD" should go away, it just means that there could be a third option which would make customers happy while not losing the baby any money. Or well, given that CDbaby's reply to that suggestion essentially was, yes, but you could buy both at full price!, maybe there are people who do that. Then the bundle option would lose the shop money. It's just that they've been so good in the "no evil" department so far. Finally, am I the only one weirded out by the download not being cheaper than the physical media in some cases?

To be fair though, mealmaster — I mean kegelmaster, nay, ticketmaster — managed to have my credit card number stolen, so I got a new CC, and bollocky amazon made it a total nightmare to update the data, especially for already existing orders. And then, amazon US won't send me my fridge magnets. (I have an urge to mix-and-match the Yiddish and the Romance ones, and if you can't see the hilarity of that, I really can't help you.) Now, if it were a used-or-new reseller, fine. But if it's called an "amazon webshop", it could bloody well go and be subject to the same principle that governs my other transactions with amazon, which is I send them money, they send me stuff. If they can't do that, they can at least put a special badge on shops that do deliver to amazon standards. But even so, I'm logged in. They know where I bloody am. How about just putting a big red warning on a page when I go to an article they won't ship to me, anyway? If they don't want my business, that's one thing, but they should at least have the bloody decency of telling me before I spend an hour shopping. By that token, CDbaby is still lightyears ahead.

Being a woman, I tend to find a half-dozen friend-requests in skype each morning. Aside from those who like my picture, I presume some are looking for free English lessons. Some also tell me about their private parts — goddammit, this is skype, not the bloody bananaphone, is that so difficult? —, and maybe some actually liked my profile. Yeah, a girl can dream. One thing though: guys, what are you thinking (well, are you?) sending me friend-requests when you don't have a picture, don't have a profile, don't even send a hallo to go with the request. Or in short, "Friend me." You've given me no reason to be interested in you. Or shorter still, "Friend me; I won't tell you who I am." What is it with those people?

I don't flag Skype me!
I don't flag Online.
I'm normally set away of busy.
That doesn't mean anything.

I never really thought much of it, they make an offer, I'm not interested, no harm done, can't blame them for trying. Right? Well, in fact I find it a little rude when the person's not flagged Skype me!, for one thing. But with at least one of a filled-in profile and a little something about you in the hallo-message (that should be both literate and not about your sexual prowess), I might relent. "Unsolicited" seems less bad when it's polite otherwise. And when it's not commercial.
article originally written on 2007/04/29